XAMI

The Galaxy Note 7 saga appears to have reached its inevitable conclusion. After yesterday’sreport that Samsung was “temporarily pausing” production of the smartphone while it investigated why replacement handsets were still catching fire, the company has now announced it has permanently stopped selling and manufacturing the device. "We recently readjusted the production volume for thorough investigation and quality control, but putting consumer safety as top priority, we have reached a final decision to halt production of Galaxy Note 7s," the company said. The news signals the death of the flagship smartphone that had initially received glowing reviews. Even if Samsung had managed to fix the overheating battery problem and offered to replace the replacements, you have to wonder how many consumers would trust using one of the handsets. Samsung has urged anyone who has a Note 7 to power it down and return the phone to wherever they purchased it, where they can exchange them for a different handset, either from Samsung or a different manufacturer. The fallout from the news is being felt everywhere. Facebook-owned Oculus has issued an update for its Galaxy-powered VR headset that removes support for the Note 7. The company is naturally worried about the dangers of having a potentially explosive device sat one inch from users’ eyes. As for Samsung, it’s predicted that the Note 7 debacle will cost it around 19 million lost unit sales, or around $17 billion dollars. The firm’s shares fell 8 percent today, the biggest daily percentage decline since 2008, wiping $18.8 billion off Samsung’s market value. Rubbing salt in the wound is the fact that Apple’s shares have increased 1.9 percent – the highest this year - on the back of its rival’s misfortunes. A company as large as Samsung, which has many different business units and products, won’t be brought to its knees by the Note 7 saga, but it will take a long time to recuperate and regain the public’s trust. With the Galaxy S8 reportedly set to be unveiled at next year’s MWC, we’ll find out then if the current fiasco has a long term effect on the po[CENSORED]rity of Samsung’s smartphones.

Interested in owning a PC modeled after Apple’s Mac Pro but don’t care for MacOS? Perhaps Samsung’s upcoming ArtPC Pulse desktop computer may suit your needs. Measuring 10.7 inches tall and tipping the scales at 11.9 pounds, Samsung’s ArtPC Pulse comes in two configurations. The cheaper of the two includes a sixth generation Intel Core i5 processor (sorry, no Kaby Lake here), 8GB of DDR4 RAM, AMD Radeon RX 460 graphics and 256GB of NVMe storage. The high-end configuration packs an Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, the same AMD Radeon RX 460 graphics and a 256GB NVMe solid state drive. It also includes a 1TB SATA hard drive for additional storage. Interestingly enough, both systems feature a Harmon Kardon 360-degree omni-directional speaker on top that presumably will serve double duty as a Alexa-like personal assistant and the PC’s own speaker for listening to music, watching videos and so on. Samsung teased the ArtPC on YouTube last week, promising to announce it today. As of writing, however, Samsung hasn’t officially revealed its new system (all of the information in this article was pulled from Amazon product pages). The cheaper Core i5 variant will set you back $1,199.99 while the faster Core i7 system can be yours in exchange for $1,599.99. Amazon’s listings reference an October 28 launch date. If neither machine tickles your fancy, there's always MSI's Vortex PC or Cryorig's Ola chassisto choose from.

Microsoft and HP at Mobile World Congress this past February announced the HP Elite x3, a large-screen smartphone that many label as the first truly compelling Windows 10 Mobile device. After months of waiting, the handset is now available for purchase both online and at Microsoft’s more than 100 retail locations. The phablet consists of a 5.96-inch, edge-to-edge WQHD (2,560 x 1,440) AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 4 that’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC, Adreno 530 graphics and 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. The 64GB of local storage is expandable via microSD card slot up to 2TB (it shares the same slot as the secondary SIM). Other noteworthy specs include a 16-megapixel rear camera, an 8-megapixel front-facing camera with Iris recognition, a fingerprint reader (both the camera and fingerprint reader work with Windows Hello), 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2x2) Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0 LE that supports Miracast, NFC, a USB 3.0 Type-C connector and stereo speakers. It also carries an IP67 rating for protection against dirt and liquids. A sizable 4,150mAh battery is said to be good for up to 33 hours of talk time, 14 hours of web browsing or 13 hours of video playback. What really sets the HP Elite x3 apart is the fact that it’s essentially three devices in one, using Microsoft’s Continuum and HP’s two docking accessories. Using the included Desk Dock, you can essentially transform the Elite x3 into a full-fledged desktop computer. The dock features a DisplayPort, an Ethernet jack, a power port, two USB Type-A ports (for a wired mouse, keyboard, storage drive, etc.) and a USB Type-C port as well as a Kensington lock slot. The optional HP Elite Lap Dock, meanwhile, is essentially a shell of a laptop with a keyboard, screen and so on (similar to the Kangaroo Notebook bundle) that lets you use the Elite x3 as a laptop. The handset pairs with the laptop shell wirelessly, thus eliminating the need to haul around extra cables while on the go. We’ve seen multi-purpose smartphones in the past such as the Motorola Atrix and the Asus PadFone but nothing has struck a chord with consumers thus far. It would seem that Microsoft and HP’s play would have the best chance for success because, as Bob O’Donnellpoints out, the Elite x3 is positioned and designed primarily as a computer with smartphone capabilities built in versus the other way around. Whether or not the HP Elite x3 is successful or not is largely irrelevant as Microsoft has all but thrown in the towel with regard to Windows 10 Mobile. That’d be a real shame should the device actually prove po[CENSORED]r with buyers. I suppose Microsoft could change its mind but that’s asking a lot of a single smartphone. The HP Elite x3 bundle that includes the Desk Dock is available as of writing priced at $799. The optional HP Elite x3 Lap Dock will set you back an additional $599, nearly as much as the phone and the Desk Dock.

Chrome has received several updates ever the past year to cut down on memory usage, but the ubiquitous browser is still notorious for being somewhat of a resource hog. Well, more enhancements are on the way, with Google Chrome 55 bringing new changes that dramatically reduce the amount of RAM used by up to 50%. The claimed improvements come courtesy of an updated JavaScript V8 engine, which reduces the heap size and zone memory. The improvements are said to benefit not only low-memory devices but beefier mobile and desktop machines too — although the impact of the update will be less noticeable if you already have loads of RAM available. The company also made improvements to Chrome’s 'garbage collector' feature that cleans out unused memory. The reported improvements are in comparison to the current version of Chrome (33) and were measured by visiting websites like Imgur, Reddit, Twitter, The New York Times and YouTube. The Chromium team is hoping to release more memory-saving updates in the future, specifically focusing on low-end devices with less than 1 GB of memory. The stable build of Chrome 55 is scheduled to go live on December 6th, there’s always the Chrome Beta channel if you want access to the improvements a few weeks earlier. Be sure to also check out our recommendations for keeping Chrome’s memory usage under control, which cover things like manually closing processes, going on an extension diet, and switching on a handful of Chrome’s experimental features.

Microsoft Paint, the rudimentary graphics application that made its debut in the first version of Windows more than 30 years ago, may actually be useful in the near future. That’s because Microsoft is currently working on a modern version of the iconic app for Windows 10. An early test build of the upcoming software, designed as a Universal Windows app that’s pen- and touch-friendly, leaked online over the weekend for anyone to download. The Verge’s Tom Warren took the early app for a spin and offers a first-hand account of what to expect. The app, which looks to have been distributed to Microsoft testers in May, is surprisingly speedy, Warren notes. He adds that it’s now much easier to use the app with your fingers but unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to include layering support which will no doubt limit its usefulness. The app also doesn’t have many helpful shortcuts like you’d find in Photoshop nor does it allow for multiple files to be open simultaneously. Then again, given its early alpha status, it’s entirely plausible that Microsoft may have added in some missing features since May. If not, then it’s safe to assume that Paint will continue to be little more than a basic editing tool. No word yet on when Microsoft plans to unveil the new Paint app. Considering the Redmond-based company has a big press event planned for October 26, however, this seems like as solid a date as any to showcase an app like Paint to complement new Surface All-in-One hardware.

Turkey blocked access to several cloud storage sites and online services, including Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Github, as it attempted to stop the spread of almost 60,000 stolen government emails, according to Turkeyblocks.org. Hacker group RedHack leaked 17GB worth of personal emails belonging to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak, who is Erdoğan’s son-in-law. In an order related to the investigation of RedHack members, an Ankara court confirmed that the emails are authentic. The Daily Dot reports that RedHack said it wouldn’t leak the emails if Turkey agreed to its demands and released leftist dissidents from pre-trial detention. But the government refused; instead, it banned news coverage of the hack and requested that Twitter suspend the group’s account, which it did. RedHack then began leaking the emails, which date from April 2000 to today. They show, among other things, how Erdoğan uses his position to control the media and even suggest which stories should be published in pro-government newspapers. As a way of preventing the circulation of the damning emails, Turkey put a block on Github, Dropbox, and several other websites. They were issuing SSL errors, indicating blocking at a national level. The Register notes that while the major ISPs upheld the blocks, some of the smaller companies apparently allowed access to the sites. Turkey Blocks reports that the government restored access to Google Drive on Sunday after the company complied with a takedown order. Access to Dropbox is also said to have now been restored. Blocking off parts of the internet to control how its government is portrayed online isn’t a new practice for Turkey. Following a car bomb explosion in Ankara, citizens found they couldn’t access Facebook or Twitter. Wikileaks was also blocked back in July after emails from the ruling AKP party were leaked.

It was starting to look as if things were turning around for Samsung. Restructuring proposals from activist investor Elliott Management and the expectation that it would beat Q3 profit estimates saw shares in the company jump 5 percent last week. But today the Note 7 debacle reached its lowest point: following reports that several of the replacement handsets have caught fire, Samsung is “temporarily pausing” production of the smartphone. Early last month, Samsung said it would replace all Note 7s after it was discovered a faulty battery was causing the device to overheat and burst into flames. 90 percent of those who returned their handsets chose to receive a new Note 7, rather than a refund or similar smartphone. On October 5, Brian Green was onboard Southwest Airlines flight 944 with his replacement Galaxy Note 7. With the battery at 80 percent capacity, he powered down the phone and placed it in his pocket when it began smoking. The aircraft was evacuated and the flight canceled. More reports of replacement Note 7s catching fire have arrived recently, including incidents in Virginia and Kentucky, the latter of which Samsung knew about but didn’t say anything, according to The Verge. In response to the defective replacement phones, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Australian carrier Telstra said they would suspend all sales and exchanges of Note 7s. Sources say Verizon has joined the other carriers in scrapping sales and replacements until Samsung and the Consumer Product Safety Commission carry out their investigations. According to CNN and Telstra (via The Verge), Samsung has now decided to temporarily stop production of the Note 7 while it attempts to discover why the replacement devices have the same dangerous faults as the originals. The news is a disaster for Samsung, and could ultimately result in a worst-case scenario where the Galaxy Note 7 is pulled from the market altogether. Not surprisingly, the company’s shares have fallen almost 5 percent. Last week it looked as if the Korean firm would be able to weather the storm caused by the Note 7 saga, now it seems the handset could be more of a disaster than initially thought for Samsung.

Welcome Omar

The Windows Version of Lenovo's Hybrid Tablet Ever since Lenovo unveiled the Yoga Book in late August, I’ve been extremely excited to get my hands on it. This folding tablet-laptop hybrid is unlike any other product on the market, as it takes the concept of the 10-inch tablet with a keyboard and replaces the cumbersome docking mechanism with the Yoga series’ signature 360-degree hinge. The resulting hardware is a beautifully slim tablet that folds apart like a book, transforming it into a lightweight, portable laptop. Lenovo is aiming for the best of both worlds here: a compact tablet that’s easy to hold and transport; and an on-the-go laptop that isn’t hindered by an awkward dock, mediocre keyboard case, or confusing tablet stand. To achieve this goal, naturally there are some trade-offs. There is a keyboard attached to this tablet, however there are no physical keys; you’re typing on a touchscreen slate. It’s not particularly powerful either, packing an Intel Atom x5-Z8550 processor and 4 GB of RAM. To make up for these, Lenovo has packed in a range of compelling stylus features. The touchscreen keyboard slate can be used as an accurate graphics tablet with the included pen, or you can slap a piece of paper on the slate and write physical notes while they are simultaneously digitized. Lenovo also claims the Yoga Book is good for 13 hours of battery life, which sounds impressive considering its size. The Yoga Book ($550 running Windows, $500 on Android) is one of the most attractive pieces of hardware I’ve used this year. The magnesium-aluminium alloy shell is sleek and gives this product a premium aesthetic, especially combined with Lenovo’s watchband hinge. The frosted glass touchpad complements the design well, as does the glossy glass protecting the display. There are very few distracting elements as well, aside from some removable stickers from Intel and Microsoft, which helps deliver the minimalist look this tablet deserves. The most impressive aspect to the Yoga Book is how compact the entire device is. It’s a 10-inch tablet, so we were always getting a portable footprint, however the slimness is the key to this design’s success. The Yoga Book is just 9.6mm thick when closed, which is unbelievable for a device that opens into two sections. The base, which includes the touch slate, is a slight wedge that maxes out at just over 6mm thick, while the display lid is a slender 3.5mm. When open, the Yoga Book looks astonishing. Of course a 9.6mm thick 10-inch tablet isn’t hugely impressive, so if the Yoga Book were merely a standard tablet I wouldn’t be raving about the thickness. The impressive feat here is getting the Yoga Book in its closed tablet mode to match typical 10-inch tablets, while still featuring a hinge that allows it to open into a laptop. There is no product on the market that achieves this, and that’s what makes the Yoga Book stand out from such uninteresting competition. The Yoga Book is one of the most attractive pieces of hardware I’ve used this year. In its tablet mode, the 690-gram device is quite usable, but don’t expect an experience that rivals the Apple iPad Air 2. Not only is the iPad several hundred grams lighter, but it also features a more comfortable 4:3 screen aspect ratio. The 16:10 display on the Yoga Book makes it a little awkward to use as an entertainment device like the iPad, but it’s clear that the strengths of this tablet lie in productivity and creativity instead. The watchband hinge that connects the two halves of the Yoga Book is as beautiful as it has been on past Lenovo convertibles. The hinge allows 36-degrees of fluid movement, yet it’s strong enough that any position you choose will be maintained in a reasonably stable fashion. I say “reasonably” because there is some wobble in the display half when using the touchscreen in laptop mode, however, despite this, the angle of the hinge is maintained. The touch slate section is interesting as it serves two functions. When typing, the backlit keys appear from nowhere to provide a full keyboard with function keys and a trackpad. But when you hit the pen button, the keyboard disappears and the slate can be used as a graphics tablet within the printed bounds that match the size of the Yoga Book’s display. You can still see the outline of the keyboard under light, but the dual-function design is effective. Around the edges of the touch slate is where you’ll find all the key ports and buttons. The right side includes a 3.5mm audio jack, the power button, and the volume rocker, as well as one speaker grill for the stereo side-firing speakers. I did find myself accidentally hitting the power button a few times while I was using the Yoga Book as a laptop due to its awkward position, and I’d rather the power and volume buttons were switched. On the left side is a rather odd combination of ports: microUSB for charging and accessories, along with micro-HDMI. The Yoga Book is a device crying out for USB-C, so the inclusion of microUSB instead is baffling. And it’s not a size issue: there’s enough thickness in the Yoga Book to comfortably slot in USB-C, which would have provided greater compatibility with upcoming accessories and removed the need for the HDMI port (USB-C can be easily adapted to full-sized HDMI or DisplayPort). The inclusion of microUSB over USB-C indicates to me that the Yoga Book has been in development for a long time, and near-final hardware was locked in before USB-C began its surge in late 2015. USB-C is a really disappointing omission from the Yoga Book, but at least with a microUSB to USB adapter you can still attach regular accessories. The Yoga Book also includes a nano-SIM tray for integrated 4G LTE functionality, and two cameras: one for selfies above the display, in the Book’s large bezels; and another above the backspace key in the touchscreen slate. This seems like a weird position for a secondary camera, but when you fold the device into tablet mode, this camera becomes rear facing. Both cameras are pretty average in terms of quality, so I wouldn’t want to take any holiday photos on this tablet. Display, Keyboard and Trackpad The display included with the Yoga Book is a 10.1-inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 1920 x 1200, which is pretty standard for a tablet of this size. At 224 PPI, the display is sharp and provides a good viewing experience for both text and imagery. This IPS panel features excellent viewing angles that make it easy to see at nearly all reasonable positions. Testing the color performance of the Yoga Book is tricky because Lenovo has implemented dynamic contrast that cannot be disabled. This is not good news for creatives who demand perfect color accuracy, as the Yoga Book will change its color output depending on the image it’s trying to display. The dynamic contrast effect is particularly noticeable in dark scenes, where each contrast step is noticeable as the Yoga Book adjusts to its steady state value. Lenovo claims the Yoga Book’s display can output 400 nits of brightness, however I only recorded 320 nits at the maximum for a full white screen (note that this could be affected by dynamic contrast). Color temperature is cool in general, falling somewhere around 7100K, while the contrast ratio seems to fluctuate between around 730:1 to 1600:1. When the Yoga Book isn’t adjusting color output, its display is reasonably accurate, boasting an overall gamut of 95% sRGB and better-than-average accuracy for blues and greens in particular. Again, dynamic contrast has an effect here, which hurts grayscale accuracy and gamma in almost all situations, though in general the Yoga Book isn’t the worst for creative uses. The keyboard included with the Yoga Book takes a while to get used to. Given that it is a touchscreen and has no physical keys, there is no feedback when you press a key aside from a brief buzz of the vibration motor and an audible sound (which, frustratingly, you can’t disable). As you might expect, this is no substitute for physical keys, and typing on the Yoga Book feels like you’re tapping a hard surface rather than activating a key. Feedback isn’t the only issue with a touch keyboard like the Yoga Book: there are no guides that indicate whether you’re hitting the center of the key, or the edge, or even another key altogether. After a week of typing I did get used to where my fingers need to be positioned to accurately hit the main letter keys, which are laid out like any other keyboard, and my typing speed increased to about 80% of a regular keyboard, but the experience is still several steps behind an actual laptop. The best analogy for how the Yoga Book’s keyboard performs is this: it’s like typing on a tablet’s virtual, touchscreen keyboard. If you’ve used a tablet’s on-screen keyboard before, you’ll know what typing on the Yoga Book is like. Aside from issues with feedback, Lenovo has used a weird layout for the Yoga Book’s keyboard that hampers its usability. The backspace key is enormous, but the enter and left shift keys are much smaller and harder to hit. Bizarrely, there’s a backslash key slotted between the left shift and Z keys that does nothing but negatively affect how easy it is to hit left shift. Surely that backslash key could have been relocated to give left shift more space, while reducing the space taken by backspace. Most of these layout quirks are due to the United Kingdom keyboard layout that Lenovo has used on my UK review unit. Hopefully these issues are non-existent on the models destined for other regions, because the United States keyboard layout is superior for a space-limited design like the Yoga Book. The trackpad on the Yoga Book isn’t particularly great either. I had to crank the sensitivity up to its maximum value just to get a reasonable tracking speed, and occasionally I would start using the trackpad, only for it not to respond immediately. Combined with odd placement of the touch left- and right-click buttons, the trackpad experience is similar to the keyboard: not as good as you’d get from a legitimate laptop trackpad. Stylus Input and Software Issues Aside from the form factor, one of the best aspects to the Lenovo Yoga Book is the stylus input. Press the pen icon above the keyboard, and the touch slate is transformed into a graphics tablet that accepts inputs from the included stylus. The stylus itself is comfortable to hold and battery free thanks to Wacom’s electro-magnetic resonance (EMR) technology. The stylus delivers the most amazing writing experience I’ve ever seen from a stylus-equipped device. Unlike with most other solutions, there is absolutely no noticeable lag between writing on the slate and drawings appearing on the display. I’m used to seeing a very slightly delay between stylus input and on-screen feedback, but with the Yoga Book, it feels like I am literally transferring ink to the screen. Plus, with 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, how you write on paper is how drawings appear on screen. It will become quickly apparent to users that the included stylus does not work on the display itself: it only works on the touch slate. The screen uses Lenovo AnyPen technology, so users can draw on the display with basically any suitable object, like a traditional pen or pencil, or even a carrot. You’ll probably want to steer clear of this, though, as the touch slate is a far more responsive solution for writing. I originally thought that not having full stylus support on the screen itself would be a downside to the Yoga Book, but in my time with the device I formed the opposite opinion. By writing on the touch slate, the entire display is free from my palms and fingers blocking my view, which is an issue when you write directly on the screen. You’re then free to mani[CENSORED]te content using your fingers on the touchscreen while you write using the stylus, or you can take your hands away from the screen and get an unobstructed view while you write. In general, I had no issues translating the position of the pen on the slate to the position of the digital pen on the screen, thanks mostly due to a pointer that appears when you hover over the touch pad. Without this feature, I suspect using the slate would be difficult. The Yoga Book’s touch slate (Lenovo calls it the Create Pad) also supports another feature: digitizing physical notes as you write them. All you have to do is place a piece of A5 paper over the touch slate, use the included stylus (Real Pen) with its ballpoint tip, and write on the paper while a notepad app that supports inking is open. As you physically ink the piece of paper on the slate, your writing is stored digitally in the app. It’s a neat feature if you want to easily create both a digital and hard copy of a note or drawing, although I didn’t find myself using this functionality as often as the slate by itself. The main reason for this is that swapping the stylus tip from the standard tip to the ballpoint tip is awkward. You can just write on the slate with the ballpoint tip, however it leaves traces of ink on the surface. Although these ink marks can be wiped away, I wouldn’t want to risk permanently writing on the slate, so ideally you’d switch between tips whenever you wanted to write physical notes or just digital notes. A better solution would be to include two pens in the box of different colors: one for writing on the slate, and one with a ballpoint tip for creating physical notes. What Lenovo includes in the box instead are three ballpoint tips and a Book Pad, which is a magnetic notepad loaded with appropriately-sized paper than can be attached to the Yoga Book’s slate. It’s great to see Lenovo really embracing their stylus features by including in the box something that would normally be an optional accessory. Refills of both tips and paper are available through Lenovo for an unknown price at the time of writing this review. While I loved the Yoga Book’s stylus features, it’s worth talking about something on the other end of the scale: software issues. I specifically requested the Windows 10 model to review (there’s also an Android variant available for $50 less) because I find Windows a much more versatile platform for productivity. This was a good idea in principle, however in practice, the software on this tablet feels more like a beta release than something for the general public. For starters, while the keyboard does disable when you flip the device into tablet mode, the button that enables the stylus slate does not. There were countless times when I was using the Yoga Book as a tablet and I would accidentally hit the stylus button, bringing up a small tray of shortcuts to inking apps on the screen. I’m not sure why this button isn’t disabled like the rest of the keyboard, because it’s not useful in tablet mode. The product page for the Yoga Book on Lenovo’s website lists the device as coming with Lenovo NoteSaver, an application for writing notes using the touch slate. My review unit did not come with this software installed, and I couldn’t find any links to download it. OneNote works perfectly fine with the stylus, although it’s odd that Lenovo would advertise a software feature that’s not actually included. I also had several issues getting the Yoga Book to properly resume from sleep. Hitting the power button would do nothing, even when the Book was plugged into the charger, and even when holding the button down. The only solution was to hold down power + volume up to enter the Yoga Book’s BIOS and initiating a normal boot from there, which is something no regular user should ever have to do. On top of that, I experienced a rare issue where the touch keyboard wouldn’t work at all, which was resolved via a restart. The battery life indicator seemed to fluctuate significantly after a restart as well, sometimes jumping upwards by as much as 20 percent. If Lenovo can resolve these software issues, the Yoga Book could be transformed into a rather buggy piece of hardware, to something that runs Windows 10 just like any other tablet on the market. Hardware Overview and System Performance The Lenovo Yoga Book’s main source of performance is the Intel Atom x5-Z8550, which is an entry-level SoC from the company’s Cherry Trail line. Built using a 14nm process, the Z8550 features four Airmont CPU cores and four threads, 2 MB of L2 cache, and a “scenario design power” of 2W. This is essentially Intel’s competitor to tablet processors from ARM vendors, although, of course, the entire Atom catalogue supports x86 instructions. The x5-Z8550 is clocked at 1.44 GHz with a burst frequency of 2.40 GHz, while the Intel HD Graphics 400 GPU inside is clocked up to 600 MHz. This processor only supports dual-channel LPDDR3 memory, so we’re limited to 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth, and the Yoga Book tops out at 4 GB of RAM. While Cherry Trail processors do support USB 3.0, we’re not getting it on the Yoga Book due to the choice of a micro-USB port. The Yoga Book also supports Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac on 2.4 and 5.0 GHz bands thanks to a Broadcom chip, plus Bluetooth 4.0 support. As for 4G LTE support, the Yoga Book is split into two models: one that supports most EMEA regions, while the other supports the Americas. In either case there is a good smattering of bands for cellular connectivity on the go. The main issue with the Yoga Book’s performance is that the Intel Atom processor is not really fast enough to run Windows 10 applications that you’d normally use on a laptop or desktop. The Yoga Book is fine for running UWP apps like OneNote, Edge, and the UWP Office suite, but it suffers under the weight of more intensive applications like full desktop Chrome, Photoshop, and large Excel spreadsheets. To me, it seems like the Yoga Book was designed primarily as an Android device, with Lenovo opting to use an Intel Atom SoC so they could also produce a Windows 10 variant. I have no doubts that the x5-Z8550 with 4GB of RAM is plenty for Android apps, but on a Windows machine with clear aims of being a productivity and creativity device, I’d prefer to see faster internals In the usual range of benchmarks we run on Windows devices, the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S, which uses Intel’s Core m3-6Y30, offers almost twice the CPU performance of the Atom x5-Z8550. We’re not even looking at a fully-fledged 15W Core processor, but Intel’s entry-level Skylake Core M CPU which some people feel is a ‘slow’. I don’t believe Core M is too slow for everyday tasks, but the x5-Z8550 certainly struggles. The Microsoft Surface 3, which I reviewed last year with the higher-clocked Atom x7-Z8700, recorded seven percent better performance. A current-generation laptop with an Intel Core i5-6200U clocks in at 140% faster in general. Graphics and Storage Performance Don’t expect the Yoga Book to provide a good gaming experience, as Intel’s Core M CPU is once again in the order of twice as fast as the Atom x5-Z8550. The Yoga Book is capable of playing lightweight Windows Store games and the occasional low intensity title from Steam, but anything more intense, including 3D games from 10 years ago, will struggle to run at 1080p. The good news is that the Atom’s HD Graphics 400 GPU is more than capable of rendering Windows 10 and its animations, so the operating system didn’t seem to lag, and if there were slowdowns, it was often while loading applications. The Yoga Book comes with a fairly limited 64 GB of storage, of which just over half is available to users out of the box. There is a microSD card slot included for expanding upon this, but I would ideally prefer 128 GB of storage in the Yoga Book as standard, at least for the Windows model. Storage performance is weak, which leads to uninspiring app loading times. Having faster storage performance, particularly increased random reads and writes, would have helped the Yoga Book feel faster to use in everyday tasks. Battery Life Inside the Lenovo Yoga Book is an 8,500 mAh lithium-polymer battery, which equates to around 32 Wh. Lenovo claims the device is good for 13 hours of “general use” and over 70 days of standby; claims that actually seem reasonable now that I’ve used the device. When I first received the Yoga Book, I assumed that the slim, folding design wouldn’t allow a large battery to fit inside. As it turns out, the combination of a low-power Intel Atom SoC and a battery of reasonable size delivers excellent battery life that should suffice for at least 10 hours of continuous use, if not more. I managed to get 12 hours out of the Yoga Book with a combination of web browsing (using Chrome) and document editing. The battery tests back up claims of excellent battery life, thanks mostly due to the lower power requirements of Intel's Atom SoC. I guess if you're sacrificing performance you should definitely expect to see better-than-average battery life, which is what the Yoga Book provides. Beautiful and Innovative, But Flawed The Lenovo Yoga Book is an innovative, compelling concept product with a great feature set and an attractive price tag. However, while I like what the Yoga Book brings to the table in a first-generation product, it’s worth waiting for a next-generation model that addresses some niggling issues with the hybrid design. The size and portability of the Yoga Book is my favorite aspect of this device. When opened into its laptop mode, the Yoga Book is astonishingly thin; and when flipped into tablet mode, the 9.6mm-thin device is just as usable as other 10-inch tablets. Lenovo’s signature watchband hinge and a seriously beautiful design remove the need for clunky keyboard docks, confusing keyboard cases, and other substandard convertible solutions. In short, the Yoga Book offers the best mix of tablet and laptop functionality in a light, portable body. On the other hand, like with most hybrid devices, there are compromises in the design. The biggest one is the keyboard, which is basically just a touchscreen that performs no better than an on-screen keyboard. Getting a keyboard with actual keys in a design this thin is practically impossible, but I believe there are some changes that Lenovo could make to improve the typing experience. An improved layout with bigger shift and enter keys would help, as would better haptic feedback (think Apple’s Taptic Engine) and a more responsive trackpad. There are also a few puzzling design choices that, if addressed in a second-generation model, would greatly improve the Yoga Book. Lenovo has opted for micro-USB over USB Type-C for the Yoga Book’s main port, which is a bad choice in 2016, especially for a Windows device. The power button should also be relocated to avoid accidental presses in laptop mode. The Yoga Book’s stylus functionality is something I thought would disappoint, as the stylus can’t be used directly on the display. However, the touch pad transforms into an excellent graphics tablet that blew me away with its responsiveness, and even though you can’t write directly to the display, I had no issues annotating documents and drawing diagrams. In some ways this solution is better, as your palm doesn’t block the display while you annotate with the stylus. The ability to write physical notes while they are simultaneously digitized using the touch pad is neat, although I didn’t find myself using this feature often. That’s partly because you have to switch stylus pen tips to avoid inking the touch pad itself; something that could be resolved through the inclusion of two stylus pens. I did appreciate that both the stylus and a magnetic notepad are included in the box, which normally would be expensive optional extras. Performance is an issue with the Yoga Book, and although the Intel Atom x5-Z8550 should suffice for the Android version, I’d like to see a more powerful chip in the Windows equivalent. The relative slowness of the Atom SoC limits the Yoga Book to lightweight Universal applications for the most part, as it’s simply not powerful enough to run Photoshop or even desktop Chrome with many tabs open. If Lenovo can cram Core M into this design, a second-gen model would be more compelling for productivity on the go. The upside to packing an Atom SoC is excellent battery life. You should expect to get at least 10 hours of continuous usage from the Yoga Book’s battery, which is enough for a solid day’s worth of use, and in my time with the device I pushed closer to 12 and 13 hours. Using Microsoft Edge over Chrome is also a good idea, not just for performance, but also battery life. At $549 (or $499 for the Android version), the Yoga Book is appropriately priced, although there’s not a lot of competition in the 10-inch Windows hybrid market. Lenovo resisted the urge to price this innovative product well above its hardware bracket, instead falling in line with the launch price of last year’s Microsoft Surface 3 and Google Pixel C. I’d still wait for the second generation of the Yoga Book, but right now it does present value to consumers after a tablet-laptop hybrid with stylus support. Review By: TechSpot

Welcome marius

Sharp at the CEATECH 2016 trade show in Japan this week unveiled an intriguing smartphone it’s calling the Corner R. The handset’s internal hardware specs are irrelevant – it’s the display that has the Internet talking today. The Corner R features a 5.2-inch full HD IGZO LCD that utilizes Free-Form Display technology meaning it can be cut into various shapes. Besides the fact that it’s nearly bezel-less, what really makes the display pop is its truly rounded corners and button-free design (the buttons on the bottom are virtual). I suspect a device with a display like this would have people lining up in droves but there are a few issues with it. For starters, it’s just a concept at this point. As best I can tell from the images courtesy of The Verge, there doesn’t appear to be a cutout for an earpiece speaker. That’s kind of important for a phone although there are ways to get around this, like using a digital wave receiver, for example. But perhaps the bigger issue I see with a nearly bezel-less design is usability. A display that stretches to the far edges would almost certainly need to somehow deactivate touch input around its perimeter. Otherwise, your fingers / hands are likely going to accidentally touch the display, resulting in all sorts of erratic behavior. This isn’t the first time Sharp, which was acquired by Foxconn earlier this year for $3.5 billion, has impressed with its mobile display technology. A couple of years ago, the company introduced the Aquos Crystal, a smartphone with a near bezel-less, 5-inch display that got loads of attention despite its mid-range hardware.

As part of the agreement that allows Verizon to exclusively sell the Pixel and Pixel XL in the United States, Google has bizarrely relinquished control of delivering Android software updates to Verizon. In a move that truly highlights the death of the Nexus program, system updates for the Pixel phones will be managed by Verizon for models that it sells, while Google will handle updates for unlocked models purchased through the Google Store. Phones bought at Best Buy are Verizon models, so they will be subject to Verizon's update schedule too. With Nexus devices, Google controlled the delivery of software updates, whether it was sold by a carrier or not. This ensured that anyone who purchased a Nexus device was treated to fast software updates when a new version of Android was released. However, with Verizon controlling updates for its Pixel phones, the carrier will almost certainly delay the rollout of updates to ensure their bloatware is fully compatible. On a positive note, Google will still push monthly security updates to the Pixel and Pixel XL outside of Verizon's control, ensuring users have a secure device at all times. Verizon only has control over system updates, such as a potential future update to Android 8.0 when it's announced and released. For those that want a Pixel phone on Verizon and don't want to deal with the carrier's slow updates and bloatware, the models Google are selling through the Google Store are fully compatible with the Verizon network. It's possible to simply buy the handset from Google, rather than Verizon, and enjoy a Nexus-like software experience.

They sent over their GS43VR 6RE Phantom Pro, a compact 14-inch gaming laptop that packs a GeForce GTX 1060 GPU and an Intel Core i7 processor. The GTX 1060 is Nvidia’s latest upper mid-range discrete graphics chip that succeeds the aging GTX 970M. This isn’t just a minor upgrade, though: the GTX 1060 should significantly outperform the GTX 970M on paper, and narrowly beat the GTX 980M at a lower power cost and with a less beefy cooling solution. Packing a very similar spec sheet to the desktop GTX 1060, Nvidia is positioning the GPU as the perfect part for 1080p and even 1440p gaming. Aside from the graphics upgrade, the GS43VR 6RE Phantom Pro is very similar to the GS40 6QE Phantom I reviewed earlier this year. We’re still looking at a Core i7-6700HQ processor with 16GB of DDR4, the 1080p display seems largely unchanged, and there’s still a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port. Pricing, on the other hand, has decreased by $100: the GS43VR is available for $1,499. I’m glad that MSI has kept the solid design they used for the GS40. The brushed aluminium chassis is a breath of fresh air compared to most gaming laptops on the market, which typically use over-the-top ‘gamer’ style and flood the design with unnecessary angles and LEDs. The GS43VR is understated and could easily be used in public without embarrassing yourself. Part of the GS43VR’s appeal is the use of aluminium in more places than just the laptop’s lid. It's seen around the keyboard and trackpad as well, with the same black, brushed finish. The lid and base do feature some contours and angles, but the lack of anything crazy is something I greatly appreciate about this design. Perhaps my favorite aspect of this design are the subtle red highlights seen around the trackpad, power button, hinges, and on the lid. The keyboard is backlit with red LEDs as well, which adds to the overall red-and-black aesthetic. The one design element that is a bit much for me is the large Gaming G Series logo on the lid of the laptop, though even that isn’t so bad. While this 14-inch laptop is significantly more portable than most 15.6- or 17-inch gaming laptops, the GS43VR is still several levels larger than your typical ultraportable. This laptop falls right in the average size bracket for a laptop of this class: 22.8mm thick at its thickest point, and 1.8 kg heavy. Relative to the previous model in MSI’s 14-inch line, the GS43VR is the same thickness but slightly heavier, likely due to a redesigned cooling system to accommodate the slightly hungrier GPU. As MSI has used largely the same design as their previous model, some of the issues with that chassis have remained. The bezels around the display are large, which means MSI could have easily fit in a larger display into the same body with only minor modifications. The power port, located on the left side, also manages to block the Ethernet port unless you adjust the cable at an awkward angle. The rest of the GS43VR’s edges are familiar. Along with the power and Ethernet ports on the left, you’ll find a single USB 3.0 port, an SD card reader, and two 3.5mm audio jacks. On the right is a HDMI 1.4 port, another USB 3.0 port, and the USB Type-C Thunderbolt 3 port. I’d like to see a third full-sized USB port on this laptop, and it’s disappointing that MSI hasn’t upgraded the HDMI port to version 2.0, so you can’t use an external 4K 60 Hz display unless you hook it up via Thunderbolt or the mini-DisplayPort 1.2 on the rear. The GS43VR’s cooling solution comprises of some heatpipes and two fans, which intake from vents on the bottom and exhaust out the rear. The GPU, located on the right side, also comes with a second vent that exhausts air out the right, due to the higher TDP of the GPU relative to the CPU. A number of screws hold in the bottom plate, behind which is access to RAM and storage, however removing the plate will void your warranty. Display, Keyboard and Trackpad Like with the MSI GS40 Phantom, the new GS43VR uses a 14.0-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD panel with a pixel density of 157 PPI. Unfortunately, this laptop’s display does not support G-Sync or any other variable refresh technology, which is disappointing but not unusual as no laptops smaller than 15.6-inches include G-Sync at the moment. Since the GS40 was released, MSI has tweaked their display profile to more accurately conform to the sRGB spectrum. This display is still limited to 88% sRGB coverage, but the white point has been improved to near-accurate levels, with much better greyscale and gamma performance. The trade-off here is a slight reduction in maximum brightness, which now sits at 288 nits, with a contrast ratio of 1:970. Color accuracy is reasonable, but limited as the display cannot produce the entire sRGB spectrum. Calibrating the display using software like SpectraCal’s CALMAN 5 did improve performance marginally. While it may not have perfect accuracy like creative professionals would demand, this display will be more than suitable for gamers: it looks good, and the resolution isn’t ridiculously demanding, so most games will run smoothly. If I were making some tweaks to the display, I’d perhaps like to see a 1440p panel just for that added bit of sharpness around the operating system and in games. A touch more brightness would be welcome too, however these are small adjustments, and I believe most gamers will enjoy this display experience. The SteelSeries keyboard included on this laptop is the same as what I used on the GS40. There’s a small amount of flex to the keyboard itself, but each key has decent tactile feedback and travel distance, which makes for a good gaming experience. Gamers used to a mechanical desktop keyboard may find the rubber dome keycaps slightly too mushy, though I was generally fine with this keyboard’s feel during typing and gaming. All of the GS43VR’s important keys are of an adequate size; MSI hasn’t attempted to truncate the shift, tab, enter, or backspace keys, and the spacebar is decently wide. In an interesting layout decision, MSI has placed a second backslash key next to the spacebar instead of a context menu key, and I’m not sure why. My only gripe with the layout would be the half-size arrow keys, which aren’t as easy to hit as full-size equivalents. The top row of F-keys also double as function keys, which can be used to change brightness and volume with ease. Unlike with some larger laptops, there is no room for macro keys on this keyboard, and similarly there is no room for a numpad. MSI has once again opted for an ELAN trackpad, which isn’t very good. Tracking performance is poor, gestures don’t seem to work very well, and the physical click isn’t satisfying. ELAN trackpads have never impressed me and I’d really prefer if companies opted for a more reliable solution. Luckily, this is a gaming laptop, so I’d expect most users will use an external mouse during gaming sessions. Hardware Overview and Storage Performance Here’s the part you’re really interested in: the internal hardware. Like I mentioned earlier, most of the hardware in the GS43VR 6RE Phantom Pro is similar to the previous 14-inch GS40 6QE Phantom, and there’s only one model of this laptop that I could find on the market. The CPU included in this laptop is an Intel Core i7-6700HQ, which we’ve reviewed before in a wide range of gaming laptops. The i7-6700HQ is a four-core, eight-thread processor clocked at 2.6 GHz, with Turbo boost taking a single core as high as 3.5 GHz. This 14nm CPU packs 6 MB of L3 cache, a 45W TDP, and an integrated GPU that is largely unused in a gaming laptop. The GPU is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which packs the same core configuration as the equivalent desktop graphics card, but uses slightly lower clock speeds. We’re looking at a 16nm Pascal GP106 GPU with 1280 CUDA cores, 80 texture units, and 48 ROPs. The GPU is clocked at 1404 MHz and has a boost clock of 1670 MHz, which is 38 MHz lower than the desktop card at boost. Oddly, Nvidia lists the mobile part as having a TDP of 85W, while the desktop card is rated at 120W, which points to more aggressive throttling on the mobile part. The GTX 1060 in notebooks uses the same memory system as on desktop cards: 6 GB of GDDR5 clocked at 8000 MHz on a 192-bit but providing 192 GB/s of bandwidth. As for the regular system memory, there’s 16 GB of DDR4 in this laptop, clocked at 2400 MHz. Storage is split between a solid state drive for booting Windows and a small handful of applications, plus a larger 2.5-inch hard drive for storing a whole bunch of games. The model of the GS43VR that’s actually available to purchase includes a 128 GB PCIe NVMe SSD, whereas the model I received to review included a 256 GB Samsung PCIe NVMe drive. There’s also a 1 TB HGST hard drive inside, spinning at 7,200 RPM. As expected, the Samsung drive provided in my review model produces excellent performance. It should be noted that this drive, being a 256 GB model, will not necessarily provide the same performance as retail 128 GB units. The GS43VR includes Killer DoubleShot Pro networking, which includes gigabit LAN and a Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac on 2.4 and 5.0 GHz bands, and there’s also Bluetooth 4.1 support. The included speakers are found along the front edge and aren’t particularly decent, but suffice for the occasional video. While the battery capacity is the same as last year's model (61 Wh), there has been a reduction in battery life perhaps due to the inclusion of the slightly more power hungry GTX 1060. However, as we're talking about a gaming laptop and not an ultraportable, it's no surprise that the GS43VR lacks in the battery department. System Performance Let’s see how the GS43VR performs in a range of benchmarks, starting with PCMark In the accelerated version of PCMark, the extra graphics power available in the GS43VR courtesy of the GTX 1060 delivers a decent performance boost in the Home and Creative workloads. The Work benchmark, which rely as much on GPU rendering, doesn’t see a noticeable performance gain over the GS40. Performance in other benchmarks is pretty similar to what we’ve seen before from other Core i7-6700HQ laptops. The GS43VR does boast a particularly good score in the multi-threaded Cinebench workload, but outside of this test, the performance I recorded falls is no better or worse than competing laptops with this CPU. Graphics Performance Obviously the main point of interest in a gaming laptop is how the graphics performance stacks up, and I’ll be kicking things off by looking at how the GTX 1060 performs in 3DMark compared to a range of previous notebook GPUs. In the synthetic benchmarks seen above, the GTX 1060 demonstrated performance gains of 18, 34 and 50 percent in Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, and Fire Strike respectively, relative to the GTX 970M. As the level of graphical detail increased, the GTX 1060 pulled out even further ahead, which suggests the GTX 1060 should be around 40 to 50 percent faster in today’s graphically intense games. The GTX 1060 also outstrips the GTX 980M by around 27 percent in Fire Strike, although the Alienware 15 I used to test the 980M does include an older Intel Haswell processor. Gains compared to the GTX 960M are in the 80 percent range. And in case you’re wondering, the much faster GTX 1070 outstrips the GTX 1060 here by 40 percent in GPU-intense workloads, so there’s still a reason to buy a more expensive GTX 1070-based laptop. In real world games, the GTX 1060 boasts a 51% performance improvement on the GTX 970M, with gains as high as 74% in the memory-heavy Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Seeing average gains around 50 percent is very impressive for a graphics chip that doesn’t pack a significantly higher TDP than its predecessor. This allows notebook manufacturers to use a very similar laptop design with a similar cooling system: you don’t need a thicker, heavier cooler to handle the extra performance and power of the GTX 1060. For MSI in particular, they’ve been able to reuse their GS40 design for the GS43VR while delivering 50 percent better performance in games. This is a huge win for gamers who enjoy portable gaming systems, as the GTX 1060 is a very powerful GPU that’s capable of playing today’s games at 1080p with maximum or near-maximum settings while achieving frame rates above 60 FPS. There are a few exceptions to this rule, as seen in the above table of more modern titles that I tested with. Punishing the GS43VR with Rise of the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at ultra quality settings only delivered frame rates just above 30 FPS, which some gamers will not enjoy. Dialing back the settings to High in both cases produces a much better experience albeit with reduced visual quality (although Deus Ex still didn’t reach 60 FPS). In bleeding edge titles, the GTX 1060 won’t be the best choice for gamers wanting to attach an external display with a resolution above 1920 x 1080, especially if stable 60 FPS is required. Instead, I’d advise getting a more powerful (and more cumbersome) GTX 1070 system, as the GTX 1070 absolutely crushes 1080p and is more than enough for 1440p at maximum quality levels. But if you just plan on gaming on the GS43VR’s included 1080p display, the GTX 1060 poses no major performance issues. After a lengthy session of gaming, the GS43VR tops out with a GPU clock speed of exactly 1670 MHz, meeting the boost specifications listed by Nvidia. The GPU sits around 82°C under load, so there’s not much room for overclocking the GTX 1060, and the GPU seems to be power limited in any case. The fans do kick up to quite a high RPM when temperatures exceed 70°C, and they produce an annoying whine, so headphones or loud speakers are a must while gaming on this laptop. A Solid, Reasonably Compact Gaming Laptop I really like what the MSI GS43VR 6RE Phantom Pro provides as a gaming laptop. This thing is fast, it’s reasonably compact, and it doesn’t pack ridiculous amounts of gamer flare. The design is important here, because way too many gaming laptops that have been released over the past five years include horrible builds filled with complicated, ugly angles and unnecessary LEDs. MSI has pulled away from this trend with the GS43VR, which looks great thanks to a combination of brushed aluminium and subtle red highlights. I wish MSI had taken care of a few more details on this iteration, like the screen's generous bezels which could have been trimmed down in favor of a larger display on the same footprint. The SteelSeries keyboard is solid with good travel distance and an excellent layout, which makes gaming on this device a pleasure. The trackpad is still a garbage piece of ELAN hardware, although thankfully most gaming will be done with an external mouse. The 14-inch 1080p LCD won’t set the world on fire, but it’s the perfect resolution for the hardware that’s found inside this laptop. The display performs reasonably well in color accuracy tests, even if it can’t produce the full sRGB spectrum, and it looks good during gaming sessions. My main wish would be the inclusion of G-Sync and perhaps a higher refresh display, although no 14-inch laptops on the market support either of these features just yet. Performance is where MSI, with significant assistance from Nvidia, have hit a home run. The GeForce GTX 1060 is the perfect discrete graphics core for gaming at 1080p, and it doesn’t require a larger or heavier cooling solution like its more powerful brothers. Providing 40 to 50 percent more performance than the GTX 970M at a similar power and heat cost elevates gaming laptops of this class from a poor desktop substitute, to a full blown replacement. Across the variety of games I tested, the GTX 1060 more often than not delivered 60 FPS at 1080p with quality settings cranked up to the maximum. The most demanding titles of today do require some tweaks to the settings, but there’s no doubting that the GS43VR will provide a great gaming experience at a reasonable price point. The downside to the GS43VR’s performance is mostly the cooling solution, which is loud and leaves absolutely no room for overclocking any component. It suffices at stock speeds, but even then you’ll need headphones to block the whine of the fans. On the flip side, the storage performance from the included PCIe SSD is excellent, although the 128 GB of space you get is limited. Currently, the GS43VR is the only 14-inch gaming laptop on the market with a GTX 1060 inside. With an MSRP of $1,499, the laptop is actually reasonably priced. Considering the significant performance gains provided at a lower cost than before, I’d say this a big win for laptop gamers after something powerful and portable. Review By: TechSpot

Oculus finally shipped the consumer edition of its VR headset back in March, after several years of hype, tech demos and developer kits. But without dedicated motion controllers it was an incomplete experience compared to the HTC Vive. Today the company hopes to remedy that by officially launching the long-promised Touch controllers. As rumored, they'llcost $199 and will be arriving December 6, with pre-orders going live October 10. The $199 price tag puts the combined Rift price at $798, matching the HTC Vive’s $799 price tag with its bundled motion controllers. Sony’s PlayStation VR launches next week for $400 for the headset or $500 bundled with the required camera and a pair of Move controllers. The Touch comes with a second Oculus camera sensor bar, which is needed to avoid occlusion as you move the controllers around your body, and two games: VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken. Room-scale play — which is a key selling point for the Vive — will be possible with a third sensor which will retail for $79. Aside from announcing the Touch controllers, Oculus showed a bunch of games that will be able to take advantage of them. Among them are Arktika.1, where you’ll take the role of a mercenary set in a post-apocalyptic ice age, Killing Floor: Incursion where you’ll shoot, stab and punch zombies, top-down shooter Landfall, among others.

Google finally unveiled its long-rumored Pixel smartphones earlier this week. They will be the first to launch with Android 7.1 Nougat, but many of the Pixels’ best features, such as the new Google Assistant, won’t appear on other Android devices, including Google’s own Nexus series, when the OS arrives. An Android 7.1 Nougat changelog leaked to Android Police shows which new features will appear in the upcoming operating system, as well as those that are Pixel-only. Google confirmed that the information is accurate is to TechCrunch. The absence of the AI-powered helper will come as disappointment to those who expected to see the Siri/Cortana/Alexa rival on every handset receiving Android 7.1 Nougat. Google Assistant is essentially a more advanced version of Google Now, able to engage in two-way conversations with users, perform complex tasks, and learn and recall personal information from previous conversations for context. Other Pixel exclusives include the free, unlimited photo and video (in their original quality) cloud backup service; the smart storage feature, which automatically removes old, backed up images/videos when the storage is full; and the Pixel Camera and Launcher apps. 24-hour phone/chat support and screen-share functionality will also be limited to the Pixel phones. There are some interesting new features coming to all devices that receive Android 7.1, though. There’s the Night Light blue filter, which changes the color temperature of a display at night. A Daydream VR mode is also on its way, along with support for sliding down on the fingerprint sensor to open the notification bar. Google did say that its Assistant would eventually be arriving on other Android devices, just don’t expect it soon. Ultimately, the company will likely replace Google Now with its more advanced version of the assistant. "Our goal is to make the Google Assistant widely available to users, and we’ll continue to launch new surfaces over the course of the next year," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. The developer preview of Android 7.1 arrives later this month. Google hasn’t said when it will come to phones other than the Pixel.

Samsung wants its own personal assistant to compete with Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa and Cortana, so they've bought a company that designs them. As confirmed in a Medium post, AI assistant startup Viv Labs has been acquired by Samsung for an undisclosed price. The Viv Labs team, namely Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Chris Brigham, is best known for designing and then selling its previous assistant technology, Siri, to Apple. The team gradually left Apple after the acquisition of Siri in 2012 and formed Viv Labs, who have been working on a next-gen assistant called Viv for several years. Under Samsung, Viv Labs will operate as an independent company and will continue to work on their virtual assistant. Viv is reportedly a more powerful version of Siri with better integration of data and services, with the ability to understand more complex queries and remember important context from previous questions. Viv Labs will provide services to Samsung and their various platforms, but it's not clear whether the assistant or its technology will be available outside Samsung's ecosystem. However it does give Samsung a tool to compete with heavyweights from Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and even Facebook, who are all developing their own AI assistant products. According to Kittlaus, Samsung are setting their signs on "on becoming a major player in software and services, and specifically AI." The fact that Samsung ships more than 500 million devices a year was a tasty proposition for Viv Labs, whose technology could be seen in Galaxy devices and Samsung televisions as soon as next year.

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Do you think of the command line as an antiquated leftover from the past, or an old fashioned way of interacting with a computer? Think again. In Linux, it is the most flexible and powerful way to perform tasks. For example, searching for all .tmp files in a directory (and its sub-directories) and then deleting them can be a multi-step process when done via graphical user interface, but is a matter of few seconds when done through the command line. In this article, we'll discuss the basics of the Linux command line including directory navigation, file/directory operations, and search. Once you have mastered these, you can check out Part II of this guide that goes a layer deeper to discuss file metadata, permissions, timestamps, and more. 1. What is a home directory in Linux? Linux is a multi-user operating system, which means that more than one user can access the OS at the same time. To make things easy, each user is assigned a directory where they can store their personal files. This directory is known as a user's home directory. Home directories are found under the home directory. For example, my home directory is/home/himanshu. Please note that a user’s home directory has the same name as their login name. If you are a Windows user, you can think of a Linux home directory as a user specific directory usually present inside C:\Documents and Settings or C:\Users. Users have complete control over their home directory as well as all its sub-directories. This means that they can freely perform operations like create and delete files/directories, install programs, and more, inside their home directory. 2. How to check the present working directory? Whenever you open a command line shell in Linux, you start at your home directory. This is your present working directory, which changes as you switch to some other directory. Use the pwdcommand to check the complete path of your present working directory at any point of time. Here is an example: The pwd command output, shown in the screenshot above, indicates that the user is currently in thePictures directory, which is inside the himanshu directory, which in turn is a subdirectory of the homedirectory. In this case himanshu@ubuntu:~/Pictures$ is the command line prompt. 3. How to switch directories? Use the cd command to navigate through the Linux filesystem. This command requires either a directory name or its complete path depending upon where the directory is present. For example, if your present working directory is /home/himanshu/pictures, and you want to switch to/home/himanshu/pictures/vacations, then you can simply run the command: cd vacations. In this case, the command line shell will search for the vacations directory inside pictures. A path relative to the present working directory is also known as relative path. But in case you want to switch to /home/techspot, you’ll have to run the command: cd /home/techspot. The complete path, that begins with a forward slash (/), to a directory is also known as its absolute path. To quickly switch to the previous directory in the tree, run: cd .., or if you want to switch to the previous working directory run cd - 4. How to view directory contents? Use the ls command to list the contents of a directory. If the command is run without any argument, it displays the contents of the present working directory. Here is an example: To view the contents of any other directory, you can either specify its name (if it’s a subdirectory) or its complete path (if it’s not a subdirectory) as an argument to the ls command. If you observe closely, the output of the ls command is color coded. These different colors represent different types of files, making it easy to visually identify them. Some of the basic colors that you should know are: Blue (Directories), White (Text files), Red (Archives), Cyan (Links), Green (Executables), and Pink (Images). 5. How to view the contents of a file? Use the cat command to view the contents of a file. This command expects a filename as an argument. As you can see in the screenshot below, the cat command displayed the contents of thearg.c file. However, there is a limitation. If the file is large, the output might be too big for the command line shell screen to accommodate. In that case you can use use the less command along with the cat command: cat [filename] | less. The| symbol represents a pipe, which redirects the output of the cat command to the less command, which in turn makes it possible for you to navigate through the file's content using the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll up and down. To quit the display mode press the q key. 6. How to create a new file? Use the touch command to create a new file. The command requires a filename as argument. For example, to create a file named test.log in the present working directory, just run the command: touch test.log. To create a new file at a location other than the present working directory, use the absolute path. For example, touch /home/himanshu/practice/test.log. Tip: To write anything into a newly created file, use a command line editor like Vi or Vim. 7. How to rename/copy/delete a file? Use the mv command to rename a file. For example, to rename log.txt to new_log.txt, run the command: mv log.txt new_log.txt. As always, if the file is not present in the present working directory, use the absolute path. You can also use the mv command to move a file from one location to other. This is the equivalent of a cut-paste operation via GUI. For example, to move log.txt (present in current directory) to/home/himanshu, run the command: mv log.txt /home/himanshu. To copy a file from one directory to another, use the cp command. Like the mv command, cp also requires a source and a destination. For example, cp log.txt /home/himanshu would create a copy oflog.txt (with the same name) in the /home/himanshu directory. To remove a file, use the rm command. This command expects a filename as an argument. For example, rm log.txt will remove the text file, if present in the current directory, while rm /home/himanshu/practice/log.txt will remove the text file present inside the practice directory. To remove directories, use the -r command line option with the rm command. For example, rm -r /home/himanshu/practice/ would delete the practice directory with all its subdirectories and files. 8. How to search for files? To search for files within a given directory, use the find command. The command requires directory path and filename as argument. For example, to search for a file named inheritance.cpp in the/home/himanshu/ directory, use the find command in the following way: I used sudo in the find command above to remove certain permission errors. You can skip it. If a directory path is not specified, the find command searches in the present working directory. You can also use wildcards with the find command to get the most out of it. For example, if you want to search all .c files present in the /home/himanshu/practice directory, use the find command as shown below. The '*' character is a wildcard that can represent any number of characters. For example, tech* can represent tech, techspot, techreport, and more. 9. How to search text within files? To search text within files, use the grep command. The command expects a keyword and a filename as arguments, and outputs lines that contain the keyword. For example, to search all the lines in the file /home/himanshu/practice/wazi/gdb/test.c that contain the keyword ptr, use the grep command in the following way: Use the -n command line option in case you want grep to display line numbers in output. Tip: To search a keyword in all the files present in the current directory, use the * wildcard character as the filename. Please note that unlike the find command, the grep command doesn’t search within subdirectories by default. However, you can enable this functionality by using the -R command line option while running the grep command. 10. What is the auto-complete feature? While working on the Linux command line, typing long paths, file names, and more can feel like a burden. Use the tab key to auto complete these long names and paths easily. For example, to write/home, you can just write /ho and press tab. The command line shell will auto complete the name for you. In the example above, it was easy for the shell to guess the name home because there was no other similar candidate in the / directory. But in case the shell encounters similar names while auto completing, it will display those names and you'll have to write a few more letters for the shell to know the correct name. Here is an example: The shell displayed all the names that it can use for auto completion. If, for example, you wanted to write techspot, then you’ll have to type in at least c to resolve the ambiguity. Once done, you can hit the tab key again to autocomplete the name. 11. What is root? Root is the only user that has control over the entire Linux system. It is capable of doing what normal users can’t, such as, changing ownership of files, adding or removing files from system directories, and more. As you can guess, the root account is mostly used by system administrators only. The top level directory in a Linux system, represented by forward slash (/), is known as root directory. It is the same directory that contains the home directory, which further contains user specific directories. However, you shouldn’t confuse / with the root user’s home directory, which is located under / by the name of root. 12. What are man pages? To learn more about Linux commands, you can head over to their respective man (or Manual) pages that come preinstalled with Linux. To open a man page, just run the man command followed by the command name. For example, run man rm to open the manual page of the rm command. You can find a lot of useful information about Linux commands this way. We've barely scratched the surface here, as the Linux command line has much to offer. Practice and master each and every command discussed in this article.

AMD has released a new set of Radeon Software Crimson Edition graphics drivers, version 16.10.1, that are fully optimized two major upcoming titles: Gears of War 4, and Mafia III. The 16.10.1 drivers are another batch from AMD that include game optimizations before launch, which is something AMD struggled to achieve several years ago. While these latest drivers are available to download now, Mafia III won't be released until October 7th, while Gears of War 4 launches on October 11th. Game optimizations aren't the only changes made in the 16.10.1 drivers: Radeon owners can also enjoy a new CrossFire profile for Shadow Warrior 2, along with a number of CrossFire related fixes in games such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Overwatch, and Battlefield 1. As always, you can download the Radeon Software 16.10.1 drivers through Radeon Settings automatically.

Let’s cut to the chase: PlayStation VR should be better. At its best, Sony’s new virtual reality headset manages to conjure the astonishing, immersive wonder of modern virtual reality. Just as often it is frustratingly held back by outdated hardware that can’t quite do what’s being asked of it. PlayStation VR is Sony’s answer to cutting-edge VR headsets like the Facebook-backed Oculus Riftand the Valve-backed HTC Vive. On paper, it offers much the same experience as its competitors at a lower price, powered not by an expensive gaming PC but by a somewhat less expensive PlayStation 4 console. I’ve been using the PSVR for the better part of a week and have played a handful of the games that will be available at launch. I’ve been impressed by some things, turned off by others, and made nauseous by a few. Throughout that time I’ve also been disappointed. Sony’s lovely, well designed headset is consistently undermined by inferior motion controllers, an underpowered console, and a lackluster camera. The Basics PSVR is out next week on October 13. If you buy one, it’ll run you $400 for the headset, or you can opt for the $500 bundle, which includes a couple of Move controllers and a PlayStation camera. The Move controllers are a known quantity. They came out in 2010 for the PlayStation 3 and work like Wii Remotes. Sony’s push for the Move came and went a long time ago, but the controllers still work with the PS4. The camera is familiar, too—it launched alongside the PS4 and has existed as an odd, underutilized peripheral ever since. The headset, of course, is new, as is the ambitious attempt to use the PS4 to tie all three pieces of technology together into a coherent VR system. Let’s talk about what this thing does well and what it does less well. It offers a cheaper, still impressive version of modern VR. We’ve got three major VR headsets at this point, with more on the way. Each one stands on its own as an entertainment device, and each also makes a particular sales pitch for VR as a new way to experience virtual worlds. While each headset puts its unique spin on that pitch, the basic trajectory remains the same. VR is fundamentally cool. Once you’ve used one of these headsets, you’ll probably want your friends to see it. At times, it makes you feel like you’re “there.” A giant shark will loom toward you out of dark water, and your adrenaline will spike. You’ll peer out over a precipitous drop and your guts will do a backflip. A cute little critter will run up to your feet and you’ll instinctively try to pet it. You’ll use a motion controller pick up an object off of a nearby table and turn it over in your hand, marveling at how part of your brain really thinks you’re holding it. PlayStation VR manages all those feats, albeit with more suspension of disbelief required than the competition. It will initially feel familiar to anyone who has tried out an Oculus Rift or an HTC Vive. If you’ve never tried either of those two headsets, you’ll probably be more immediately impressed. You won’t notice the funky head tracking. You won’t mind that your in-game hands are constantly stuttering. You won’t be as put off by the blurry graphics or frame-rate dips. In fact, there are probably people for whom that will be enough. To its credit, PSVR does convincingly convey the niftiness of modern virtual reality, and it does so powered not by an expensive gaming PC, but by a game console that millions of people already own. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s still very expensive. Most people will have to pay $500 for PSVR, which is the price of the Move + camera bundle. That bundle comes with a disc containing demos of several VR games, but no full games. You’ll have to buy those separately. At $500, PSVR is indeed a more affordable option than the competition. The Oculus Rift costs $600 and will cost even more once its Touch controllers launch later this year. The HTC Vive, which comes with its own handheld controllers, costs $800. Moreover, the Rift and Vive both require powerful gaming PCs that can cost two or three times as much as a PS4, if not more. PSVR may be the cheapest of the big three VR headsets, but that only means it’s the cheapest of three very expensive things. But let’s not kid ourselves: A relatively cheap VR headset is still awfully expensive. You could buy a new gaming console for $500 and still have enough cash left over for a few games. You could buy a cutting-edge smartphone and have enough left over for a year of online storage and streaming music. You could buy a secondhand ticket to Hamilton. One of the best launch games, Super Hypercube, will cost you $30, and most of the other games are in the $20-40 range. The multiplayer tank-wars game Battlezone costs a whopping $60, which certainly seems high for what I’ve played of it. So, some perspective. PSVR may be the cheapest of the big three VR headsets, but that only means it’s the cheapest of three very expensive things. It’s pretty easy to set up, but requires some adjusting. The PSVR isn’t all that difficult to set up. You run a passthrough HDMI cable from the small new PSVR receiver box to your TV, and another HDMI cable to your PS4. You plug a USB cable from the box into your PS4. You plug the headset into the box. You sync the two Move controllers and plug in the camera. You put the camera on top of your TV. You run a quick calibration, and that’s pretty much it. However, I’ve found that the PS4 can require an annoying amount of adjusting in between games. I’ve yet to find a sweet spot where I can play any game standing up, sitting down, or anything in between. A few times, if I’ve wanted to sit for one game and stand for another, I’ve had to adjust my camera so that my head stays set within a small box. Other games have told me I’m leaned too far back, out of the play area. You can reset the orientation by holding down the Options button mid-game, which resets the horizontal and vertical orientation of the game. Weirdly, I’ve found that some games begin to rotate ever so slightly to the left or right as I play, an annoyance that the Options button appears powerless to fix. At one point my Battlezone cockpit rotated until I was sitting at an angle on my couch, seemingly unable to make the game point me back forward. It wasn’t until I started a new game that it went back to normal. When you turn the headset on, your PS4 dashboard immediately pops up in the headset and you’re off to the races. The ease with which I can go from “not playing VR” to “playing VR” is admirable, and makes it much easier to decide on a whim to put on the headset and play some games, or show it to friends I’ve invited over. Whatever annoying calibration steps are required, PSVR does remove a lot of barriers between you and playing a game. The headset is great. The headset is a nice piece of electronics, smartly designed and comfortable for extended periods of time. It also plays well with glasses—even my big chunkers—though if given the option I’d still prefer to wear contacts. Rather than strapping to the front of your face, the PSVR eyepiece hangs down from a plastic halo-hat that goes around the crown of your head. You can easily open the halo by pressing a release button on the back. Once you’ve got it on, you can fine-tune the fit by turning a knob next to the button. You can also press a second button to independently slide the face-mask forward and backward, which makes it a cinch to fit over your glasses without smushing them into your face. The optics themselves fit comfortably and are framed by soft rubber blinders that gently block out most outside light from around your eyes and nose. It breathes well, and my face rarely feels crowded by the PSVR in the way it often does by other VR headsets. As a bonus, it’s easy to scratch your eye or nose while playing. (Seemingly a small thing, but actually very nice!) I do find that my hair frequently falls down into my eyes and obscures my vision, but I guess I need a haircut anyway. I can’t tell you exact numbers, but the headset’s field of vision feels open. In a given VR game I rarely noticed the black binocular effect happening outside of the visible area. In-headset visuals are clear, and the blurriness and frame-rate issues some games have are likely more due to underpowered graphics processing hardware than any deficiency in the headset. The PSVR headset is almost entirely made of plastic. It’s fairly light and manages screen-heat effectively, which keeps it from feeling heavy or hot over longer play sessions. (That being said, for me a “longer” session has only been an hour or so, as most of the PSVR games I’ve got to play are insubstantial.) The headset does contain a lot of interlocking, breakable plastic parts, and the fitting mechanism in particular seems like it will degrade over time. But overall: Good headset. The other hardware is much less great. Unfortunately, the headset is only part of the equation. The bulk of my issues with PlayStation VR are related to all the other stuff. From what I’ve played over the last week, the PlayStation Move controllers, camera, and even the PS4 itself do not appear to be up to the task of smoothly running modern VR games. The camera does a middling job of tracking your head’s movement, and sometimes when I’d move more than a foot or two in any direction, I would find that the whole screen would freeze and shake. There’s also the issue of what I think of as “persistent controller shudder.” In most PSVR games, you can look down and see either your DualShock controller or, if you’re playing a Move game, some sort of in-game representation of the Move controllers. In every game I’ve played, my in-game controllers are constantly moving even if I’m holding them perfectly still. It’s as though my character has the shakes. For example, one sequence in Arkham VR has the player reading clipboards in a morgue, and the shaking was so pronounced I had a hard time reading the giant text on the paper. The gif above does an okay job recreating the effect, but it’s much more noticeable and off-putting when you’re wearing the headset. This pervasive, low-level controller shudder exists in every PSVR game I’ve played. I’ve tested the layout of my living room, checked the lighting and made sure everything is clear, all to no avail. A few other people I’ve spoken with who have used a PSVR, including my colleague Stephen Totilo, have described a similar experience. It’s possible we have all failed to properly optimize some setting or other, but unlikely. It’s easier to ignore controller shudder if you’re moving around and playing a game, but any time I’d pause to pick something up and examine it, I’d find it moving forward and backward by inches. It made me feel like I was having a seizure, which, given the tendency for VR games to induce nausea, is not a good starting point. (Speaking of nausea, I did have to stop a weekend session ofBattlezone due to VR sickness, but I hesitate to draw too many conclusions from that. Stephen played more than I did and has had no issues.) In addition to the controller shake, my camera has had a hard time tracking my full range of motion. In Job Simulator and Arkham VR, I frequently found that my hands would simply vanish into thin air as they moved outside the view of the camera. This greatly limits the physical possibility space of a given game. For example: One of the pleasures of playing Job Simulator on the HTC Vive is the fact that you can really occupy the 3D space. In the Vive version of the game, you can crawl under your desk and peer into the trash can. Here’s a clip of me playing the Vive version back in April: On PSVR, I couldn’t do even crouch without losing control of my hands entirely: If you drop a key in Batman: Arkham VR and try to pick it up, your hand will simply disappear as you reach out of the frame and the key will reappear on the piano in front of you: The PlayStation camera can only see you from the front, which causes some other problems, too. In games where I was using the Move controllers, I moved around naturally but frequently found myself blocking the camera’s view of the controllers with my body. I’d turn around and try to pick something up, only to watch my hand fade and glitch out as the camera lost tracking. The PS Move came out for the PS3 in 2010. It’s now six years old. The PlayStation camera came out in 2013. I understand why Sony would use existing controllers and cameras rather than developing and releasing much more expensive new ones, but the compromise they’ve made is evident in almost every moment of every game. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that this older hardware has been conscripted into the service of a pursuit that is beyond its capacity. Some of the games are neat, but so far most aren’t that exciting. Even the most amazing gaming hardware will fail if it doesn’t have any good games. The inverse of that is also true. Lackluster hardware can be saved if the games are good enough. From what I’ve played, the PSVR’s game library fails to make up for the hardware’s shortcomings. That could change as Sony sends along more launch games, however. Super Hypercube is the most consistently enjoyable of the games I’ve played. It’s a simple, ingenious Tetris-inspired affair that conceptually places you above an ever-growing 3D tetromino and has you rotating it to make it fit through a hole in the floor before it collides. The effect of playing the game, however, is that of slamming forward through a series of tiny keyholes in a neon starscape. It’s a lot of fun, stylishly made with a fantastic feel and punchy, poppy rhythm. It’s also a very simple use of VR. There’s no walking around or exploration, you just have to peer around your shape and quickly work out how to make this three dimensional object fit through a two-dimensional hole. (No surprise that a game that so creatively reconciles 3D and 2D would come from Polytron, makers of Fez.) Other games are less exciting. Arkham VR is a brief return to Rocksteady’s gritty take on Gotham City, and mostly feels like a series of somewhat interactive cutscenes. Most of the scenes have you standing still and looking around. Amusingly, action will often take place against a black loading screen, with combat sound effects playing in your ears like an old Batman radio play. The most interesting sequence has you working through one of the Arkham games’ holographic crime scenes, rewinding and pausing playback of the action to attempt to figure out what happened. It’s the sort of thing that could make for a fascinating crime scene investigation game, were that the sole focus. Unfortunately, it’s just a small part of the game. Battlezone places you in the cockpit of a tank that feels straight out of Tron and lets you play alongside up to three friends as you take on fleets of enemy vehicles. I played this one online with a few people and it never quite gelled for me. Even on easy, we were constantly getting killed, and after about an hour I felt like I’d seen all there was to see. My tank would also frequently clip and lock into my teammates’ tanks, triggering a sort of mecha-body horror that’s difficult to put into words. A demo of Rez Infinite was nifty but often visually overwhelming and suffered from perplexing frame-rate issues that will hopefully be absent from the full game. PlayStation VR Worlds is a familiar collection of “wow look at the cool VR!” demos and mini-games, including a somewhat nauseating street luge ride and a scripted encounter with a terrifying [CENSORED] of a giant shark. Job Simulator is silly fun but as I’ve mentioned is inferior to its other versions. We still have a lot of PSVR launch games to try, so we’ll be playing and talking about more of them in the weeks and months to come. Some interesting-sounding games are inbound later in the fall, including the multiplayer Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Speaking of the weeks and months to come… It’s hard to be optimistic about the future. All last week, I kept coming back to the fact that the PSVR peripherals I’ve been using are mostly failed Sony hardware products. The Move motion controller came out six years ago and failed to catch on as an alternative to the Nintendo Wii. The PlayStation camera launched in 2013 alongside the PS4 and failed to become even as useful as the not-that-useful Xbox Kinect. The PSVR, then, starts to feel like Sony’s Island of Misfit Toys. It’s a magnet for gadgets that didn’t succeed on their own merits, and it’s hard to believe that, together, they might finally break through. Back in 2014, Sony’s Richard Marks explained to us that, in a way, the Move didn’t meet its potential because it was designed to work within a 3D space, rather than the 2D screen to which it was initially constrained. But the fact remains that Sony is not using the concept of the Move for their new VR controller. They’re using actual six-year-old Move controllers. It’s admirable that they’ve gotten the results they have, but hard to overlook how far behind the old tech is lagging. The PSVR starts to feel like Sony’s Island of Misfit Toys. The upcoming PS4 Pro will offer significantly more processing power than the current PS4, which Sony says will allow VR games to potentially run at higher, more consistent frame-rates. We’ll certainly report back on how the PS4 Pro does with the current slate of PSVR games, but all the GPU horsepower in the world can’t make the Move and the PlayStation camera any less outdated. Furthermore, if the PS4 Pro does wind up being the preferred way to play PSVR games, the extra cost of the new console puts a significant dent in the PSVR’s appeal as a lower-priced VR alternative. If you buy a PSVR, you’re locking yourself in with Sony and hoping they continue to support the headset. Ironically, both the Move in your hand and the camera on your TV are reminders that Sony frequently does not support their hardware, and for all of Sony’s assurances about their commitment to VR, I’m skeptical that the PSVR will be any different. Unlike competing PC headsets, it will be much harder for the PSVR to find an extended life though hacks and independently created software. If Sony decides to stop supporting it, it will fast become one more hunk of plastic sitting in the closet. In Conclusion The PlayStation VR narrative goes like this: While HTC and Oculus have been off making expensive, cutting-edge headsets for high-end PC gamers, Sony is swooping in with a more approachable, affordable alternative for everyday people. I have my doubts about that narrative. My sense is that VR as a whole is just not there yet, and that Sony is valiantly attempting to make the first mainstream version of a technology that is not yet mature enough to go mainstream. It’s certainly possible that I’m wrong. The PSVR could wind up being good enough, a curious designation that is difficult to predict or assign. The Nintendo Wii had lousy graphics that couldn’t compete with the Xbox 360 and the PS3, but its motion controls were good enough that it became a global phenomenon. The original N64 Goldeneye was in many ways inferior to the first-person PC games of the era, but it was good enough to get people excited about a console FPS years before Halo. PlayStation VR is inferior to the competition in several significant ways. It’s also less expensive and easier to use, and for all its flaws it still manages to communicate the goofy, surreal joy of modern virtual reality. Time will tell if that makes it good enough. Best to wait and see. Review by: TechSpot

More futuristic technology once seen only in the movies is making its way into the real world - we’ve already got everything from advanced virtual reality systems to self-tying sneakers. Now, Panasonic has shown off an updated version of its transparent TV at Ceatec that looks as if it came straight from a sci-fi show. First unveiled at this year’s CES, the concept product's transparent pane of glass is unrecognizable as a television until you push a button or wave your hand to switch it on. Panasonic wasn’t happy with the transparency of the first model it showed off, so it has upgraded the TV to the point where it's almost indistinguishable from a standard glass panel. It now features an OLED display instead of LED, no longer requires external lighting sources to enhance the image, and offers a much brighter and clearer picture. When operating, it looks almost exactly like a regular television. The screen is created from a fine mesh and can be embedded into glass on any type of furniture - in this case, a sliding door on a large display cabinet. Panasonic also showed how the technology could be used as a door on a wine and sake cellar. The screen can display information such as the best temperature for the items, and touching a bottle via the glass door will bring up recipes that go well with beverage, based on what food is in the connected fridge. Sadly, it will be some time before these transparent TVs hit the market. A Panasonic spokesperson said they would likely be in development for at least three more years. Best start saving now.

It seems there’s no end to Yahoo’s problems. Last month, the troubled company admittedthat at least 500 million user accounts had been compromised in a breach that took place in 2014. It claimed “state-sponsored actors” were responsible for the attack, though a security firm disputes this. Now, it’s been revealed that Yahoo secretly built custom software last year that scanned all of its customers’ incoming emails for information provided by US intelligence officials. The report comes from Reuters’ Joseph Menn, citing three people familiar with the matter. Yahoo was complying with a classified US government request when it created the scanning tool that searched hundreds of millions of user emails at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI. The software was searching for a specific string of characters, though it’s unclear exactly what words or phrases it was looking for and what data, if any, Yahoo handed over to the authorities. When Yahoo’s internal security team discovered the software, they initial thought it was the work of hackers. Company CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to comply with the demand led to Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos leaving his position to join Facebook in June 2015. Stamos said a programming flaw could have allowed hackers to access the stored emails. The incident is the first known case of a company agreeing to an agency’s request to scan all arriving emails, rather than probing stored messages or a small number of accounts in real time. "Yahoo is a law-abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the firm said in a statement. The American Civil Liberties Union called the order "unprecedented and unconstitutional [...] It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court.” Last year, Yahoo became one of several companies that promised to alert users whose accounts they suspect have come under attack by state-sponsored hackers. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have also made the same promise. Other tech firms have denied that they received similar demands from government agencies. "We've never received such a request," a Google spokesperson said, "but if we did, our response would be simple: 'no way'." Microsoft was quick to damn Yahoo: "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." Stamos’ current employer said: "Facebook has never received a request like the one described in these news reports from any government, and if we did we would fight it." And Apple, which has had its fair share of troubles with the FBI, said: "We have never received a request of this type. If we were to receive one, we would oppose it in court." Whether these new revelations affect Yahoo’s $4.8 billion sale to Verizon remains to be seen.

Following a series of leaks over the past few weeks Google finally took the stage today to reveal — or confirm — several new hardware releases. As expected, a portion of the show was devoted to home devices. Specifically, a new Wi-Fi router, a new Chromecast, and a hybrid speaker/smart home assistant that’s intended to rival Amazon’s Echo. Google Wifi First up was Google Wifi, a new router that’s designed to be modular and easy to setup, so you can just hook up a single unit or multiple of them as part of a mesh network that can cover larger homes with Wi-Fi. It’s similar to kits from Luma or Eero, but significantly cheaper at $129 for one router or $299 for a three pack. By comparison, the Eero will set you back $199 for one unit or $499 for three, and the Luma is $150 and $400 respectively. Google Wifi supports AC1200 wireless speeds, as well as simultaneous dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks. It also has beamforming technology and support for Bluetooth Smart. Among its key features the company mentioned a network assist feature that will actively monitor and optimize your network, and the ability to automatically and intelligently transition devices to the best access point and the right wireless channel to avoid congestion. The router itself is shaped like a hockey puck with a glowing blue light across the middle. There’s no mention of ports on the Google Wifi product page or advanced features like DLNA, port forwarding, QoS, VPN and others. There is a companion app, however, that will let you do things like pause Wi-Fi on specific devices, view which devices are connected and how much bandwidth they’re using and prioritize bandwidth per device. Google Wifi will be available for pre-order in the U.S. in November and will ship in December. Chromecast Ultra Google also announced and update to its po[CENSORED]r, inexpensive Chromecast media streamer — which the company claims has sold more than 30 million units so far. Rather than replace its existing entry-level model, the company introduced a new premium version dubbedChromecast Ultra, that’s capable of delivering 4K and HDR content from YouTube, Netflix and Vidi — starting in November, Google Play Movies will also be releasing 4K movies. The device itself has the same 2-inch circular shape of the standard Chromecast model but packs a faster processor and includes an Ethernet port for good measure. Just like the original Chromecast, you can cast all of your favorite content from thousands of apps using your phone, tablet or laptop. Mirror any content from your Android device or from a browser tab on your laptop (using Chrome) to the TV. The Chromecast Ultra will be available starting in November for $69. Google Home Lastly, Google’s anticipated Amazon Echo rival originally announced back in May, was detailed at length at today’s event. This voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant focuses on four key functionalities: playing music, getting answers from Google, managing your everyday tasks, and controlling smart home devices. The device features a minimal design with no physical buttons and hidden LED lights on its top surface for visual feedback upon receiving a voice command. In case you do want to control it by hand, there are capacitive touch controls for music playback. Supported music services include Google Play Music, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn and YouTube Music, with additional services like iHeartRadio coming soon. Google Home lets you set your favorite service as default so you don’t need to specify which one should play your tunes every time. Google claims that its microphones are “best in class” and that the speakers will deliver a full range with rich bass sounds and clear heights. For the privacy conscious, there is a mute mic button on the Home so you can control when the device is listening and when it isn’t. Since this is Google we’re talking about there was a big focus on the Home’s ability to get contextually relevant answers from the Google Assistant. Don’t know the name of a song? Just give some additional information, like the artist and the movie it’s on, and Google will find it and play it for you. It can also give you real-time answers to things you want to know, translate phrases, do simple math calculations or convert units, fetch a recipe, get real-time info on the weather, the stock market, the traffic, or your favorite sports team. Google won’t always have the best answer so its virtual assistant will tap into other sources like Wikipedia when necessary to bring you the best match. It can also handle more personalized functions like briefing you on your day’s appointments, checking traffic conditions to work, keep track of shopping lists and more. The device is designed to be modular so if you have two or three units at home, you can interact with any and only the nearest one will respond, or you can play music on them simultaneously. Like the Echo, Google Home can interact with supported devices, allowing you to control your lights, thermostats and switches with po[CENSORED]r home automation systems like Philips Hue, Nest, Samsung SmartThings and IFTTT — with more coming soon. Google Home will be available in stores starting in November or you can pre-order yours today for $129 from the Google Store, Best Buy, Target and Walmart.

Yahoo on Tuesday launched a rebranded version of its mobile news aggregation app, now called Yahoo Newsroom. Readers of a certain age may remember a time when Yahoo was the center of the then-small Internet universe. Millions of people visited the Internet pioneer’s homepage on a daily basis to soak in the latest news headlines, stock updates, celebrity gossip, sports scores and more. These days, however, things are a bit more fragmented as you’ve got a wide variety of apps and social media platforms all vying for your attention. With Newsroom, Yahoo is looking to once again become the one-stop shop for content discovery and discussion. Available today for Android and iOS, Yahoo Newsroom lets users comb through a variety of topics – or Vibes, as Yahoo calls them – to follow. As you use the app, it learns your preferences and tailors the news feed to surface stories you’re most likely to be passionate about. The app also encourages users to submit stories from around the web that others can view and comment on. Yahoo hopes the app will empower its community to engage in healthy discussions without the pressure that social media may bring. As TechCrunch correctly highlights, this could be a recipe for disaster. In addition to having to keep out spam, trolls and malicious content, Yahoo Newsroom will no doubt have to deal with the proliferation of “fake” news sites that have already exhibited the ability to outsmartFacebook’s Trending Topics algorithm.

Late last year, Google expressed its disappointment over the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ restrictive draft proposals regarding self-driving cars. The proposed law stated that autonomous vehicles must have a steering wheel, and a licensed driver must be present to take over if the systems fail. But now, following pressure from several tech groups, California is relaxing some of these regulations and has become the first state to allow autonomous vehicles on its roads without a human passenger inside. Governor Jerry Brown signed off on the new rules, which only apply to a project at San Ramon’s Bishop Ranch business park. French company Easymile’s fully-autonomous, 12-seater buses move workers across the site, but as they cross some public roads, the updated was necessary. Easymile’s buses are already operating in Europe and Asia. They function without an operator, steering wheel, brakes, or accelerator. The revised law states that driverless vehicles must have a two-way communications link between passengers and a “remote operator.” Easymile’s shuttles must also meet federal standards and can’t travel faster than 25 miles per hour. The bill also covers the Concord Naval Weapons Station where Honda and Otto have been testing driverless vehicle technologies. Under more proposed new rules, car manufacturers will be prohibited from advertising a vehicle as “autonomous” or “self-driving” if a human is responsible for controlling it. Tesla’s autopilot feature, for example, couldn’t be described using either of those terms. Despite reportedly rebooting its long-rumored autonomous car project and laying off dozens of employees, Apple continues to test its Project Titan vehicles in a closed environment. Google, meanwhile, has been testing its self-driving cars on the roads of Texas for some time now, where there are no laws against autonomous vehicles without drivers, steering wheels or brakes. Both tech giants have reportedly shown an interest in the California Naval Station test site.