The next E3 showcase is now right around the corner. E3 itself opens its doors on June 11th, but we've got two days of press conferences and big game announcements before then.

E3 2019 feels like an odd one in that both EA and Sony have said they'll be abstaining from press conferences this year, but there should still be plenty to go around with Microsoft, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and the PC Gaming Show. With Sony's absence, we're also expecting the Xbox and PC Gaming Show events to be bulging at the seams with third-party announcements.

Pokemon GO is big. Like, ridiculously huge. In fact, It’s now more talked about on the internet than Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, Battlefield and E3 combined. It is, to put it bluntly, the most popular game in the world right now, absolutely stomping over the likes of Candy Crush Saga and Clash Royale. This original Pokemon Go article can be read over on Game-Debate.

Take a look at the Google Trends chart below and you can see Minecraft has been an incredible performer over the last five years or so. It’s one of the best-selling games ever, shifting over 100 million units and counting. It frankly embarrasses EA’s Battlefield, which has barely caused a blip over the last decade when compared to these other titans.

The Ivvi K1 Mini, manufactured by Chinese company 'Coolpad', is now officially the slimmest smartphone in the world. Announced back in January 2015, Ivvi k1 Mini took the title of slimmest smartphone from the previous holder Vivo X5 Max. The device is just 4.7mm thin, exactly 0.05mm less than the Vivo X5 Max.

The Ivvi K1 Mini is pitched as a mid-range device, and sports a 4.7-inch display. It'll be powered by a quad-core 64-bit Snapdragon 410 processor paired with a decent 1GB RAM. It has a 5 megapixel front-facing camera and an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera to capture higher quality photos. The manufacturer claims the primary camera will have a ‘super-pixel’ mode which will allow the users to stitch multiple photos up to 32 megapixels, making it one of the best lower-cost camera phones currently available on the market.

Nowadays we have been seeing a lot of smartphones which are being made well, with sleek metal designs and ditching the chunky rubber or plastic casing from yesteryear. Just like that, OPPO has released another premium line smartphone, breaking the slimmest smartphone record.

OPPO R5 is powered by 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 Octa-Core (MSM8939) and Adreno 405 GPU paired with a handsome 2 GB RAM. It has 5.2 inches AMOLED Full HD display and is powered by a decent 2000 mAh battery which is fairly normal today. It has a 5 megapixel front camera and 13 megapixel rear camera to capture some high quality photos. The specs certainly suggest premium but the CPU could have been better. At just 4.85 mm thick and it has beaten the record previously held by a QMobile.

Google has been steadily pushing out updates to its Android operating system as it makes the move bit by bit to Android 5.0 Lollipop. The entirety of Android is getting redesigned from the ground up for Lollipop, and the latest update sees Google’s Calendar app getting a huge overhaul.

The old calendar app was always a little on the staid side, but this new Google Calendar app integrates Google's new Gmail Inbox initiative as well as basic functionality of its Google Now service. The additional usability means that users can now do things like turn emails into events automatically, make use of an assist that can autofill event info, and of course a massively redesigned interface.

The latest figures released by consumer metric Kantar WorldPanel has revealed that the Android sector of the mobile market is continuing to grow apace. The latest US figures suggest that the Android OS now occupies a massive 61.8 percent market share, up 4.5% within the last year.

The figures bring Android alarmingly close to doubling the iOS market share, which saw a decline of 3.3% down to 32.6 per cent. Apple aren’t the only ones missing out though, because Microsoft’s struggling Windows Phone has seen its share shrink down to just 4.3 per cent in the States.

Fans of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft will have to wait a little longer than expected for the iPhone and Android phone version of the game as Blizzard has revealed that it won’t be released until 2015. However, the Android tablet version is still slated for release before the end of this year, while iOS users can grab it on iPad.

The free-to-play card battling game has already amassed over 20 million players across PC and iPad platforms, and opening it up to the mobile phone market is sure to take it to the next level. Blizzard has stated that the issues causing the delay for the smartphone versions of Hearthstone is largely due to getting it optimised for smaller screens.

It looks like the “Bendgate” issues that hampered the iPhone 6 Plus on its launch haven't proved to have any lasting damage to the devices sales, thanks in large part to the impact the phone has had since launching in the Chinese market. The market share of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus has played out as Apple had predicted in the western markets with the standard iPhone 6 shipping the majority of the units whilst the Plus model shifts at a slower pace.

However the Chinese market is currently playing out very differently to the marked trend that Apple has seen in the west. In the past few years larger screens have become increasingly popular in the Chinese market and this trend shows no sign of stopping with the launch of the new iPhone 6 Plus.

After months of waiting patiently, Google has finally put Android users out of their misery by announcing details of the new Android OS. The new version, dubbed Lollipop, will be rolled out to the Nexus 5 phone, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, and Google Play Edition devices in the coming weeks.

There is no word yet on when Lollipop will roll out across the board to other popular devices running the Android system. Android Lollipop will bring a host of changes both large and small to the Android system. For the most practical purposes Google’s Project Volta has been researching ways to extend battery life and the result of the findings has been implemented in the form of a new battery saving mode that can extend a devices battery life by up to 90 minutes when it’s on low power.

Amazon Game Studios has revealed three new games that will be exclusive to the Fire mobile range of products. The Amazon Fire phone will exclusively get Til Morning’s Light, an action adventure game from WayForward Technologies, the studio behind BloodRayne: Betrayal and Mighty Switch Force. The phone-only title will be an adventure game in which players must escape a mansion invested by demons by solving puzzles, or else get locked inside forever.

Two other titles currently set for release on the Fire Tablet range are tower defence game CreepStorm developed by Happy Tuesday, and Tales From Dead Space from Frontier Developments. The latter of the two will be a platformer with a puzzle solving emphasis and a co-op mode gameplay. CreepStorm will give a twist to the traditional tower defense format by shifting the genre to cartoon horror in which the towers are vampire hunters taking on hordes of the undead.