Motorola's Moto X is everything the Nexus wanted to be. Moto X Features: Explained! http://youtu.be/3ZX8graseUQ Speaker test song: http://youtu.be/fGksXB6a6s...
Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm is already leading to a new trilogy of Star Wars films and an animated series, and it appears a live-action television show could be next. Reuters reports that the president of ABC Entertainment Group, Paul Lee, stated that ABC is in early discussions with Lucasfilm about bringing such a project to life. "We've started conversations with them," Lee said Sunday during the Television Critics Association press tour.
Disney has moved quickly to capitalize on the seminal property, first announcing Star Wars Episode VII — which JJ Abrams has since signed on to direct — and then halting further production on the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The strategy appears to be to first clear the palette for...
Summertime is the best time for fruit but don’t limit that shit to only dessert. Grill up whateverthefuck looks good and throw it in a salad or on some grains. I tossed peaches in with some soy sauce and noodles because I just don’t give a fuck. That shit was delicious and I had leftovers for days. FUCK SHARING.
GRILLED CHINESE FIVE SPICE PEACHES WITH COLD NOODLES
12 ounces of dried thin noodles (You can use whatever you can find: Chinese egg noodles, spaghetti, or even udon)
¼ cup water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 ½ tablespoons soy sauce or tamari
1 ½ tablespoons toasted sesame oil
1 inch piece of fresh ginger (scrap the skin off with a spoon)
FOR THE PEACHES:
2 fist sized peaches, ripe but not super soft
1 tablespoon neutral tasting oil (I used grape seed)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons Chinese Five Spice powder (Most grocery stores carry this shit. If you can’t find it or too fucking busy to look, just substitute with a little bit cinnamon and pepper on the peaches. It ain’t the same but it will do)
a pinch of salt
½ - ¾ cup chopped watercress (If your store doesn’t have it, don’t fucking waste your time running around town. Just grab arugula, spinach, or even green onions would work)
I don’t know what the fuck noodles you chose, so just cook that shit according the package directions. While that’s going, chop up the ginger into really small pieces so that you end up with 2 ½ tablespoons. Add the water, lemon juice, vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger to a small glass and mix that shit up. When the noodles are done cooking, drain them and rinse with cold water.
Chop up the peaches into slices no bigger than an inch. You can leave the skin on because everybody needs more fiber in their fucking diet. I got about 12 slices out of each of my peaches. In a large bowl, mix together the oil, lemon juice, Chinese Five Spice powder, and salt. Throw the sliced peaches in there and make sure they get covered in that spice blend shit.
Bring your grill to a medium-high heat and spray it with a little oil so the peaches don’t stick. Place the peaches on there for 45 seconds or so on each side. You don’t need to cook them, you just want some char marks on there because that looks pro. Grilling them also caramelizes the natural sugars in those motherfuckers making them slightly sweeter. Toss the noodles with the sauce you already made and add the watercress. Pile the grilled peaches on top and serve.
Serves 4-6 or 1 with some enviable leftovers
We made this dish for our friends over at Frank151
Sorry But their is no way that runs well on a dual core.
Sony Online Entertainment has released a sextet of videos showing off various gameplay elements and features in its next-gen MMORPG EverQuest Next.
The "Characters and Environments" video shown above introduces us to the wizard Jalena and the warrior Keeshar, and shows off the game's expressive character models. The two characters traverse the arid desert of Ashfang before making their way into a forested environment called Feerrott. The end of the video demonstrates the game's day/night cycle, showing how the lighting and atmosphere changes with time.
The three videos seen below demonstrate the game's destructibility. The environment in EverQuest Next is designed with little building blocks called Voxels, and much of it can be...
Boston-based Northeastern University recently launched a graduate-level game design program with a game analytics track, the school announced this week.
The new program is designed to meet the growing demand for experts in the nascent field, according to Northeastern University professors and administrators.
"Analytics has spread through the game industry like wildfire and has profoundly affected game development at the global scale," said Anders Drachen, an associate professor in Northeastern's College of Arts, Media and Design and lead analyst at the firm Game Analytics.
The Xbox One we saw at E3 isn't quite the Xbox One the team at Microsoft has in their hands right now. They've been making a few tweaks to the system, Xbox exec Marc Whitten shared on Major Nelson's podcast today.
Rejoice, humans of the Earth, for the ugly off-center 1 in Apple iOS 7's Calendar app icon has been at last, FIXED! It took almost two entire years of design rants after every update, butsomeone in Cupertino has at last listened and corrected what was a horrible design decision made by someone else who is no longer in Cupertino. iOS 7 beta 4 has a perfectly centered 1.
Director Bryan Singer tweeted the above pic of him with one of the Sentinels from Days of Future Past. My reaction? “Jeeeeee[cranes head up]eeeeeeeez.”
One more pic is behind the jump, this one a shot from the film itself of Mystique…’s leg. It’s showing that random dude who’s boss, huh? Jennifer Lawrence is an Oscar-winning actress now, and that means her leg can have its own promo pic. I don’t make the rules.
I think we’re all pretty clear on the whole porn-is-not-an-accurate-depiction-of-sex thing. But have you wondered what the facts and figures are for the differences? And desperately wanted to see those statistics explained via some intriguing images of food, which is only occasionally abused? Yeah, me neither, but it turns out the result is pretty great.
It’s also worth noting that a calm, British accent can make anything sound scientific and informative. The only real problem with the video is that I can no longer look at Nutella the same way and may need to hesitate before chopping any vegetables. Without further ado, enjoy.
Angry Birds is a feathered phenomenon. Rovio’s series serves as an envoy for the game industry, an app that people who don’t play games will happily while away their commuting hours with, but one that has also found a home on the phones of thousands of console gamers.
While it must credit its core design to the countless similar physics-based Flash games that preceded it, Rovio’s unprecedented success was far from simply a case of being in the App Store at the right time. The secret to its success is hard to pin down, but intuitive controls, satisfyingly bouncy physics and a level of polish far beyond many of its peers certainly helped. Of all its ingredients, perhaps it owes most to designer Jaakko Iisalo’s crisp designs, which proved appealing enough not only to inspire an entire game, but also move beyond the small screen to the big one, adorn lunchboxes, and even earn the trust of the famously protective LucasArts.
“Yeah, Angry Birds Star Wars was a huge stepping stone,” says co-founder Niklas Hed, pausing just a beat before delivering his punchline, “for LucasFilm.” From any other company, a comment like that might seem a touch bullish, but the Angry Birds series has sold 1.7 billion copies across its lifetime, which earns Rovio the right to puff out its chest feathers now and again. When Iisalo sketched those first infuriated birds, however, Rovio was far from the success story that it is today.
In early 2009, the studio was still doing subcontracting work for other companies and had downsized from 50 people to just 12. Having spent more than a year on a big contract, only to have it cancelled through no fault of its own, Rovio was in desperate need of a hit. This was an opportunity, those remaining 12 reasoned, to create something all their own.
“For me, that time was sort of a hibernation,” says Hed. “We took only selected projects and aimed to learn from them. We did a lot of prototyping, such as using the electronic compass of phones in games. That time taught us how technology is combined with games in a natural way, and how it isn’t.”
Rovio co-founder Niklas Hed.
And with over 50 games already under its belt, the studio hardly lacked experience. But this time, the team decided to approach the creative process differently, aiming to create a brand that could span more than just a single game. It knew it wanted to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and to take advantage of the growing popularity of touchscreen-enabled smartphones, but exactly how wasn’t yet clear.
“We had already created several games, but because of the business and the environment back then, we really couldn’t see what we were able to do,” says Hed. “We’d been thinking about a ballistic tank game in the vein of Scorched Earth.”
Rovio had recognised the growing popularity of physics-based puzzlers in the casual space, but at the time decided military equipment didn’t have the mass appeal it was looking for.
“I started creating game concepts and pitching them to the management. Angry Birds was one of these concepts,” Iisalo says. “People didn’t really get the early game mechanics I suggested, but the character design was something that everybody liked: an angry flock of birds smashing through structures. After dozens of different ideas, we found the right style of game and started production. Of course, that’s when we realised the birds needed an opponent…”
Sickly green pigs wouldn’t have been an obvious choice to an outsider, but Iisalo had been sketching swine since childhood. And so through his own internal logic, the birds found their nemeses. Other elements of the game couldn’t get away with such abstraction, however. That intuitive catapult, for example, wasn’t always the mechanism through which the birds were granted flight: the initial version simply had players flick them in the direction they wanted to launch. It sounds simple enough, but the team quickly realised that the casual audience it was attempting to court didn’t share their natural gaming instincts. It needed something more.
One of Jaakko Iisalo’s Angry Birds sketches.
A catapult seemed intuitive, backed by the punchy physics that power the game. But while the physics has even inspired the likes of Wired to have a go at analysing the maths behind it, accurate modelling isn’t Rovio’s biggest concern. “There is basic maths behind it, and we couldn’t have ice breaking rock, because that wouldn’t make sense,” Tuomo Lehtinen, VP of games, tells us of a title that has flightless birds and green pigs, ”but the feel is the most important thing.” Angry Birds respects the laws of physics, then, if not the laws of nature.
“Angry Birds ended up being the pet project of the whole studio,” says Hed. “The core team was small, but everyone was working on it to a degree. We loved doing it. It really kicked our confidence to a whole new level – we loved playing the game ourselves, and there was a definite feeling of things being on a roll again and the beginning of a new era.”
But polishing that early prototype took a long time, and work was hampered by a lack of resources. The skeletal team was working on several projects at once, and so had to divide its attention across them all. “At certain points it was causing delays [to Angry Birds],” says Lehtinen. “It’s really hard for a designer to create levels when the programmer is too busy on another project to finish the engine!” And the initial budget that Rovio had set aside was rapidly depleted, almost causing the development to be cancelled.
“The early results weren’t quite what we wanted,” says Hed. “It was surprisingly challenging to make the game world feel real, make all the blocks feel like glass, stone, ice, and so forth – organic. The birds kept bouncing in an unnatural way and the materials just didn’t feel right.”
All the hold-ups proved beneficial, though, giving the team time to iterate its gameplay and the tech behind it.
“If you play something long enough you start to notice what irritates you,” Lehtinen explains. “I was iterating camera controls almost until the last day of production. That was something that had to be perfect; it had to feel really, really nice. And I think one of the big reasons the game has proved so popular is because it doesn’t annoy you at all. We were able to iron out all of the quirks.”
Well, almost all the quirks. Play Angry Birds today and the experience is markedly different to the one that first launched in 2009. The iterative process on which the game was built has continued throughout its lifetime, resulting in the few clunky elements that did manage to slip by being smoothed off via regular updates. The core of the gameplay, though, remains unchanged.
When that first version launched, though, Rovio was apprehensive. “When we published the game, frankly it felt like was it was just one game among many,” admits Hed. “I definitely felt that Angry Birds was the best game we had ever done, but there was this nagging feeling that it wasn’t enough. We had done some research half a year earlier, and it always seemed to come down to the marketing – or lack of it.
“We had been working through mobile operators without a direct contact to the consumers up until then, and now we were entering the App Store, where the competition was really hard. Getting the critical mass of fans was really difficult, and if you can’t manage to do that, it doesn’t matter how good the game is. But in the end, we managed to catch the wave and it became one of the reasons why you should get a smartphone.”
Over the years, Rovio has toyed with the format. Its first major deviation was Seasons, a release Rovio had been planning for a long time. Originally released as Angry Birds Halloween in October 2010, and closely followed by a selection of Christmas levels, Seasons now includes all manner of holiday-themed stages, even one based on the relatively obscure Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Such wide-reaching cultural references are demonstrative of the broad appeal of Rovio’s games, but underneath its inoffensive exterior lies a much harder game. It’s easy to dismiss Rovio as a kind of one-hit wonder, trading on multiple variations of the same game, but Seasons was a brand-new challenge presented in a familiar skin.
And Angry Birds Rio, which followed in March 2011, was further evidence of a company unwilling to rely on simply rehashing past successes. Being a tie-in with 20th Century Fox’s animated film about exotic bird smuggling helped the game introduce new enemies, animated backgrounds, new birds, an ally in the form of bulldog Luiz, and even boss fights. It featured a new physics engine as well and, according to Rovio’s figures, is unique among the series in having a large following who only play that version. As marketing for the film, it didn’t do badly either: exit polls in the US revealed that the majority of moviegoers heard about it through the game.
But it was Angry Birds Space that deviated furthest from that initial template, gifting the birds prolonged flying time as gravity was dialled down. And, just like the first game, it almost didn’t happen.
“We felt that the first prototype was way too hard, and decided not to continue with it,” admits Hed. “But Jaakko [Iisalo] kept polishing it, and I remember one session we saw the redesigned gameplay and all of a sudden it made sense.”
“It took a lot of time to make it as simple as we wanted,” explains Lehtinen. “At first, it felt really hardcore: space and sci-fi are dark themes, and the player could shoot essentially anywhere. It was the hardest game to make right.”
But that sci-fi excursion got the studio thinking: what if there was a tie-in opportunity to be found along the lines of Rio? Rovio approached a number of companies, including LucasArts, with its idea, trying to get a feel for what would be required to make it happen. LucasArts was interested – it lacked a high-profile mobile presence, and the concept sketches Rovio’s artists had put together made it clear that this tie-in would be far from a half-hearted parody. Rovio and the notoriously protective LucasArts found a mutual respect in the careful way each handled its creations.
“To be honest, I had my worries about how rigid [LucasArt’s] approval process and brand guidelines would be, but in the end everything went much smoother than expected,” says Angry Birds Star Wars producer Mikko Häkkinen. “We worked with some great people who understood how important the Angry Birds IP is for us, and were willing to respect our wishes and viewpoints.
“It ended up being more of a collaboration where they offered us guidance on lore and things, and came up with some great ideas for matching different characters and story points.”
And unlike the original game, Star Wars suffered from an excess of interest, with so many Star Wars fans in the company that almost everyone wanted to work on it – even in their spare time. “We ended up with such a vast amount of graphics assets that it was really hard to choose the best ones and settle on one style,” laughs Häkkinen.
It created new fans, too, both within Rovio and among its players, and just maybe convinced some of those last few hold-outs to give Angry Birds a go – after all, there are few things in life that can’t be made more appealing with the familiar scream of a TIE fighter’s engines. Yet Angry Birds Star Wars only scratches the surface of the licence’s potential and, Hed teases, how far that relationship gets taken is between Rovio and LucasArts. And likely subject to some tight non-disclosure agreements. But whatever happens next, the Angry Birds series has never been in ruder health – it’s already found its way to PC, social networks and even PS3/360, and looks to be in no danger of losing its momentum anytime soon, either. But could Rovio really ever top Star Wars when it comes to tie-ins?
“There is an old joke in Rovio of combining the birds and pigs with the He-Man universe,” Häkkinen teases. “You really don’t want to see the concept art [we] made for those muscular bird heroes in thongs, though.”
Some devs like to keep it simple: no in-app purchases or microtransactions—hell, no app at all; no forcing you to rope your friends to play. Just, you know: player gives dev money, player gets entire game. That game is probably priced at more than 99 cents to boot.
Failure is an integral and unpleasant part of playing video games, but "good" games give players a "fair chance" to succeed that they might not have in the real world, assistant professor at the New York University Game Center Jesper Juul argues in an essay printed in Salon.
In an excerpt from "The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games," Juul begins with anecdotes about frustration of failing in Patapon and succeeding too easily in Meteos.
"I dislike failing in games, but I dislike not failing even more," Juul wrote. "There are numerous ways to explain this contradiction, and I will discuss many of them in this book. But let us first consider the strangeness of the situation: Every day, hundreds of millions of...
Wearable technology is a hot topic lately, with smartwatches being primed for a more general audience, and Google Glass finding its way onto more eyes. Those are two topics that can be polarizing, but would a ring appeal to more consumers?
John McLear thinks so, and his Kickstarter campaign has already garnered over £23,000. Considering his goal is £30,000, and he has 27 days to go, we’re going to go ahead and call this one a winner. Utilizing NFC technology, the ring can be programmed at will and needs no dedicated source of power.
The concept is really unique, in that the ring has one side that is “public” and the other “private”. As you can see in the video below, the ring can be programmed to accomplish two varied sets of tasks. Perhaps the public is best suited for exchanging information, while the private is used to unlock your phone or other tasks you don’t want to do accidentally.
Of course, there are downsides as well. Rings must be sized properly, and may not be readily replaced, so depending on the technology is a tentative bargain. The project is well thought out, and the Kickstarter page has a myriad of topics to soothe the worried mind.
If you’re interested, get in quick. A few of their backer options are for a limited audience, and are disappearing fast!
The movie Inception is getting closer to reality. By planting false memories into the minds of mice, neuroscientists at MIT have created the first artificially implanted memories. And they've brought us closer to understanding the fallibility of human recollection.
After just a single day of Chromecast devices flying off of the shelves, Google has decided to end the sweet three months of free Netflix deal. Google reported to the LA Times that the deal was too sweet and couldn’t keep up with demand. So in essence, was Google losing too much money on the promotion? Not that they can’t afford it, but the Chromecast was costing just $11 when factoring in the promo.
Again, certain retailers still have units available with the Netflix deal, so make some calls and get yourself a Chromecast before they are all gone.
The Next Web points to a comment on a TechCrunch article taking credit for last week's unauthorized access of Apple's Developer Center last week. The comment comes from independent security researcher Ibrahim Balic, who claims that his effort was not intended to be malicious and that he reported his findings to Apple just hours before the developer site was taken down by the company.
In total I have found 13 bugs and have reported through http://bugreport.apple.com. The bugs are all reported one by one and Apple was informed. I gave details to Apple as much as I can and I’ve also added screenshots.
One of those bugs have provided me access to users details etc. I immediately reported this to Apple. I have taken 73 users details (all apple inc workers only) and prove them as an example.
Balic claims to have accessed details on over 100,000 users, but only released to Apple details on 73 of its own employees in order to prove the seriousness of the issue.
I have emailed and asked if I am putting them in any difficulty so that I can give a break to my research. I have not gotten any respond to this… I have been waiting since then for them to contact me, and today I’m reading news saying that they have been attacked and hacked. In some of the media news I watch/read that whether legal authorities were involved in its investigation of the hack. I’m not feeling very happy with what I read and a bit irritated, as I did not done this research to harm or damage. I didn’t attempt to publish or have not shared this situation with anybody else.
Balic's tactics and motives have, however, been questioned by some, with scattered reports suggesting an unusually high level of password reset requests on Apple developers' accounts over the past few days.
Apple's Developer Center remains down today, some four days after the company took it down in order to investigate the breach, update its software, and rebuild its developer database.
A new report suggests that Google's next-generation Nexus 7 tablet will be released at the end of July. According to an image of an upcoming Best Buy flier published by Phone Arena, the second-generation Nexus 7 tablet will be available at Best Buy stores starting on July 30th. The leak also seemingly confirms the device's 1920 x 1200-pixel display, 16GB of internal storage and $229 price tag. The latest rumors claim the Nexus 7 2 will also be equipped with a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, support for both wireless charging and 1080p output, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, a 5-megapixel camera and Android 4.3 Jelly Bean.T he second-generation Nexus 7 will be available in both 16GB and 32GB sizes, with the latter expected to cost $269. The leaked image follows below.
Apple is reportedly testing a redesigned iPhone with a larger display as well as a new iPad model with a 13-inch screen, according to a new report. The Wall Street Journal on Monday cited multiple anonymous officials at Apple's supply chain partners in reporting that Apple has requested "prototype smartphone screens larger than 4 inches" in recent months as it tests new display sizes for future iPhone models. Earlier rumors suggested Apple may be prepping a redesigned iPhone 6 with a larger edge-to-edge display. The report also claims Apple has "asked for screen designs for a new tablet device measuring slightly less than 13 inches diagonally," mirroring earlier rumors that Apple is testing a new 12.9-inch iPad. WSJ notes that the new designs being tested may never be released.
There’s a likable trend brewing. Affordable home automation used to be complicated and the equipment was generally ugly. Nest made the humble thermostat both smart and beautiful, Jawbone made door locks smart and iPhone-controlled, and now a new Indiegogo project Canary aims to do the same for home security .
Like Nest, Canary aims to learn from your living patterns. For example, it learns what time people leave and enter your house, then alerts you on your iPhone if someone enters at a different time. There’s a built-in HD cam and microphone to enable you to see for yourself what’s happening.
Canary will retail for $199, with a $149 Early Bird Special currently available for early backers.
Apple has added some additional information to the Developer Portal’s maintenance page stating that memberships that were supposed to expire during the unexpectedly-long downtime have been extended to accommodate for the issue and apps will remain on the store until the portal is available again and developers can properly renew their accounts:
We apologize that maintenance is taking longer than expected.
If your program membership was set to expire during this period, it has been extended and your app will remain on the App Store. If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us.
Thank you for your patience.
Update: Developers with memberships set to expire while the portal is down have received emails stating they have received a one week extension. This may indicate that the downtime could drag on for a few more days…
Team Pixel Pi's first-person survival game, Pulse, will feature Oculus Rift headset support, the developers announced on the game's Kickstarter page.
"We were looking for a way to put the player even closer to Eva's perspective," the update states. "To allow them to experience the mysterious world of the blind even closer, while harnessing the surreal ability to 'see' sound. We are happy to announce that we've found that way, and will be bringing it to you with Pulse."
Pulse centers on blind protagonist, Eva, who must venture into a forest to find her lost brother after he was sent out to undergo a rite of passage. Eva navigates world as it is revealed to her through sound, movement, touch and vibrations.
Artist Justin Currie drew a series of awesome illustrations portraying various Marvel and DC superheroes as robots. He calls his particular style “Shattered Vector Painting.” You can check ‘em all out below!
This video, courtesy of YouTuber Vaecon, offers a long look at the Oculus Rift tech demo Museum of the Microstar. It's too bad that it's not a full game, as the voice near the beginning of the demo makes us want to play it - it informs players they've been given audio implants that come with a fee for removal.
Developed by RUST LTD, the demo is freely available for download, and shows off DX11 Tessellation Shaders, GPU Simulated Particles and other things we honestly don't understand. We do know that if you cross your eyes while watching the video, it appears almost as if it's in 3D and comes with bonus headaches.
Remember that mobile app game, Deus Ex: The Fall, that nobody asked for? Well, turns out that if you bought it anyway and happen to have a jailbroken device, then you just spent $7 dollars on bupkis. Apparently you can’t fire any any guns on a jailbroken phone or tablet, including the necessary tranquilizer gun you need to complete the tutorial. Come on, Square Enix. Stop doing this to us. There’s only so many times we can make “I never asked for this” funny before we get really bummed out by how often we say and mean it.
As discovered by KipEnyan on Reddit last night, the game is effectively rendered impossible early on in the tutorial even if you were planning on a nonlethal playthrough. Several users in the App store have confirmed this as well.
While Apple claims that jailbreaking its devices leads to app piracy, the U.S. Copyright office has ruled that jailbreaking phones is not illegal. In fact, many people who jailbreak do pay full price for the apps they want. Apple, of course, will still void the warranty of any jailbroken device and refuses to offer support to jailbreakers.
“I paid good money for this game and Squeenix feels it’s okay to break my game because I prefer to customize my iPhone to my liking,” KipEnyan said in the related thread. “Jailbreaking was declared perfectly legal, so pulling shit like this shouldn’t be.”
Originally there was no warning that the game would not work under these circumstances, but Square Enix has since updated the Apple store page to alert new customers:
Please be aware, the Deus Ex: The Fall play experience is currently restricted on jail broken devices. Do not purchase if you have voided your warranty and have Jail broken your device.
As of now, it does not seem that Square Enix will do anything for those who have already purchased the game and can’t play it. According to user Ridiculosity on iMore, however, you can fix the problem by downloading XCon from Cydia, which will patch the app for you.
UPDATE: according to The Penny Arcade Report, Square Enix has reconsidered the jailbreak restriction and will be removing it in the next update, citing their regret that the restrictions were not properly mentioned in the first place:
We feel it is the right thing to do in this situation and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. No customer should be out of pocket when we were not clear from the start, so we’ll get the game updated as soon as possible so that everyone who wants to play Deus Ex: The Fall can do so regardless of whether their device is jailbroken or not.
Millions upon millions of gamers around the world are crawling out of their skin waiting for Microsoft and Sony's next-generation video game consoles to launch, but according to some plugged-in tech industry executives, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are actually a "downgrade." Forbes recently spoke with executives from fabless chip makers AMD and Nvidia about the upcoming consoles set to launch ahead of the holidays this year, and both companies seem to share a common position: The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are great machines, but they're nothing compared to PC gaming.
Square Enix and developer Eidos Montreal announced today that ‘Deus Ex: The Fall’ will be arriving in the App Store this Thursday, July 11 for $6.99. The game will come exclusively to iPhone and iPad and take place after ‘Deux Ex: The Icarus Effect’ novel, which acted as a prequel to some of the other titles previously released on consoles. To go along with the announcement we get the brand new gameplay trailer above showing off the game on iPad. Eidos Montreal is also giving away free wallpapers and ringtones to celebrate the launch later this week.
This year, the solar charging options have really improved for those who need to charge their iOS (or any) devices away from a wall outlet or car. The three products below are some of the more interesting we’ve seen.
But the Rukus isn’t just a speaker, it is also a well-built portable solar panel/battery pack that can charge its 1500mAh battery in 6 hours according to Eton. In the New York summer reality, charging from empty will take closer to 8-10 hours if positioned right on a sunny day. That’s around the same amount of time you’ll get from the speakers on a medium volume setting, meaning you can just about break even on sound on a sunny day. The 1500mAh of battery will also give your iPhone a moderately full charge (and hold it in a convenient pocket on the back side), but you’ll save more battery by turning off the Bluetooth connection between the already tethered iPhone and use an Aux cable.
As far as for camping trips, big batteries like those from HyperJuice, are probably better for the week or two camping trip. Eton has a beautiful new bigger version that promises louder speakers and more solar power but loses some portability. They also have a more portable “rugged” version. Overall, this Rukus has a good set of features for the $130 price tag but it isn’t the best sounding speaker …or the best solar panel…
The 1 lbs 6 oz Goal Zero Guide 10 Plus Small Adventure Kit is great, if not terribly quick at charging iOS devices. The idea is simple: you can keep a portable battery pack charged using the sun that in-turn charges your iOS devices when you need them. In practice, it takes awhile for the sun to charge the battery pack. Goalzero says it takes 3-4 hours to charge the battery pack but in the New York summer, I wasn’t able to completely charge the 4xAA kit completely in a full, slightly overcast day. I also wasn’t able to charge my iPhone directly from sunlight without the battery pack.
But once charged, it does come in handy for many use cases. For instance, it can sit in a sunny window and keep a set of 4 AA batteries charged that in-turn add a convenient USB plug to an area of the house or garage that doesn’t have an outlet. Also you can pop out the charged batteries for use anywhere AA batteries are accepted and even replace the GoalZero batteries with higher performance batteries like the Sanyo Enloop that Apple uses.
I suppose you could take this camping, especially longer trips, to keep an iPhone or iPod charged for a few hours a day…and it probably does wonders in third-world countries where access to power isn’t so great. Still, here, for shorter trips, I’d prefer the equivalent 1.5lbs of battery pack like the ones from Hyper or…
The 10W Sunvolt, as you can see from the image at the top is much bigger than either of the other two options above. The solar panel is substantial and it is backed by a heavy layer which makes it feel like a pane of glass in weight. It also doesn’t fold like the GoalZero so the package is the size as the surface area of the panels. The enclosure allows you to point the panels at the sun which dramatically improve charging rates.
While it is certainly less portable than the other two options above, this is the only panel that was able to reliably charge devices without a battery pack buffer. In the New York summer, I wasn’t able to charge 2 devices at the same time like the accompanying literature suggests, but you at least know you’ve got enough juice to keep devices up to the size of an iPad charged. Even overcast days yield usable charge, though expectations should be realistic here. Also, expect charging rates to diminish pretty significantly in the late afternoon as well, though some repositioning of the panel will mitigate the loss.
Wrap up:
While solar is a fantastic and green way to get power just about anywhere, the reality is that much smaller battery packs are more useful in most day to day situations. Still, however, if you want to be able to pull power from the sun, the three options above each have plenty of utility. And there is something that feels great knowing you are getting your power directly from the sun.
Apple is reportedly testing a redesigned iPhone with a larger display as well as a new iPad model with a 13-inch screen, according to a new report. The Wall Street Journal on Monday cited multiple anonymous officials at Apple's supply chain partners in reporting that Apple has requested "prototype smartphone screens larger than 4 inches" in recent months as it tests new display sizes for future iPhone models. Earlier rumors suggested Apple may be prepping a redesigned iPhone 6 with a larger edge-to-edge display. The report also claims Apple has "asked for screen designs for a new tablet device measuring slightly less than 13 inches diagonally," mirroring earlier rumors that Apple is testing a new 12.9-inch iPad. WSJ notes that the new designs being tested may never be released.
Oculus Rift tech demo Museum of the Microstar is full of particles originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Millions upon millions of gamers around the world are crawling out of their skin waiting for Microsoft and Sony's next-generation video game consoles to launch, but according to some plugged-in tech industry executives, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are actually a "downgrade." Forbes recently spoke with executives from fabless chip makers AMD and Nvidia about the upcoming consoles set to launch ahead of the holidays this year, and both companies seem to share a common position: The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are great machines, but they're nothing compared to PC gaming.
