The Future TV tech you need to know about
Future TV tech
You know the deal, you turn the TV on at the end of a long day and you think "I've had this TV nearly a year now, must be time to get a new one". Of course, for most people this doesn't progress much further than that initial thought, happily there are usually other people sharing our houses that can talk some sense into us.But, eventually you will want to upgrade your TV, so what technologies should we all be on the lookout for?
Here's a list of some of the thanks that are going to change, get better or come on the market in the near future that you're going to want to have on your next TV set.
HDR and wide colour
Without doubt one of the biggest changes, and most needed, is an increase in the transmission colour space.For a long time broadcast cameras have been capturing far more colour than could ever be sent over the air. TVs too have, for years, been able to display much more colour detail than they were ever asked to.
Expect to see more vivid colours in the future though, as TVs evolve to show us more, thanks to improved broadcast and 4K disc formats, like Ultra HD Blu-ray.
Somewhat related to wide colour is HDR. This, again, is going to be one of the most significant changes to broadcast TV we're ever going to see. If you look at TV now, you will notice that a typical shot will have light areas and dark areas. Imagine a window with a bright summer day outside, but a darker scene inside.
Traditional TVs - along with disc formats, downloads and streams - only allow us to see detail in one or the other. So you can have either loads of detail inside the dark area, with the window blown out and very white or you can reverse that, and see loads of detail outside, and just black inside.
The human eye and brain handle this for you in reality, so looking out of the window doesn't usually work like this. But with HDR a movie or TV show can be shot in a way that all the detail can be recovered.
Directors will still get to chose what you see, but they will also be able to give you mind-blowing visuals too. An HDR photograph gives you some idea of what's possible, so have a look to see what's coming.
Netflix will stream wide colour and HDR video this year to TVs which are able to support that format, like the glorious Samsung UE65JS9500 and some of LG's OLED range.
High framerate
Remember when The Hobbit was released on HFR and everyone bitched and moaned about how it looked like a video? Well, ignore those idiots because HFR has a great deal to offer, and has potentially more benefit than yet another resolution increase from 1080p to 4K.HFR has a lot of benefits for things that aren't movies. For one thing, reality shows and news don't need to be shot in a low framerate any more.
Historically, in the analogue world 50i or 25p were ways to save bandwidth. Essentially, you save capacity by sending half the total picture twice as often as the frame rate. So 25p was sent in two fields, each contained 50% of the picture.
While the total amount of data sent doesn't change, you're achieving twice as much resolution as you would normally be able to "afford".
But look, we can send 4K over the internet now. We have much better compression and we just don't need to send crappy 25FPS video. TVs too can easily handle frame rates of 120fps, and 60fps has been a reality for years too.
Of course "drama" productions rely on low frame rates to make us think they are high-quality productions. In reality the motion blur and general crappiness offered by 25p is used to conceal a load of mistakes.
A lot of TV would look a lot better in 60p though, especially sport. So expect this to make up some of what a 4K broadcast standard eventually becomes.
Wideband reception
One of Qualcomm's upcoming ideas is that your next phone be able to stream a lot of data to a device very close to it.If you owned one of those TVs that was "wireless" and allowed you to mount it on a wall with nothing but a power socket then you've seen this in action. Basically, it's like any wireless tech but operates in the very high gigahertz range of frequencies. It works over very short distances, but allows you to send 1080p or even 4K video from your phone to your TV.
This means your phone can become even more of an entertainment hub than ever before.
It would work well with TVs that are actually very simple and have few inputs. Just send a signal from any device in your lounge to the TV without the need to plug it in with HDMI.
A magical see-through mirror TV
To those of us who are nuts about picture quality, actual TV design can make up some of the less interesting stuff. But when you look at what's coming in the next few years it's hard not to get a bit excited.
One of the things that OLEDs can do quite simply is transparency. OLED panels are transparent anyway, just because of how they are produced with an organic compound is sandwiched between two electrode layers. One of these is transparent - so you can see a picture - while the other isn't in a normal TV, but making both transparent isn't a problem.
Practically speaking, having a transparent OLED means you can put them on things that need to be seen through. Perhaps this is a window, a mirror in your bathroom or just a TV that's able to become part of the furniture when you switch it off, making for a much less obvious piece of technology.
A TV you stick to the wall
This is another triumph for OLED, and LG has already shown off a demo of an TV that's so thin you can just stick it to a wall. The panel itself is less than 1mm thick, and weighs a bit less than 2kg.
To stick it to the wall you just use a magnetic mat, and Bob's your uncle, a TV that looks like a poster.
Clever stuff.
Quantum LED and Crystal LED
These are two technologies we've recently covered in depth, so we'll not do it again now. But let's just say that TVs which use self-emitting pixels (ones which produce their own light) are the way forward.LCD should die out, hopefully, and QLED, CLED and OLED should be the panels which lead the charge into the next decade.
Although with all that said, LCDs have remains incredibly adaptable, so perhaps we shouldn't write them off just yet...
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Buying Guide: 10 best Android keyboard apps reviewed and rated
Best Android keyboard apps to download
When it comes to movies, the first in a series is almost always the best. The same also applies to Android, which had customizable, third-party keyboards long before Apple ever dreamed of adding this feature to iOS 8.Over the years, developers have knocked out some impressive wares for text entry on smartphones and tablets, meaning there are more choices than ever before - literally hundreds of them are on Google Play alone!
Thankfully, TechRadar is here to whittle this enormous list down to only 10 of the best options, and there's something here for every kind of typist. We've even tossed in a few eccentric and off-the-beaten path options you may not be aware of.
Google Keyboard
Call us crazy, but we've always been partial to Google's own flavor of keyboard, and thankfully it's no longer only limited to devices running stock Android. Best of all, it's absolutely free, so there's no reason not to at least try it out.Aside from good looks, Google Keyboard (free) also offers a responsive, silky smooth typing experience with predictive voice dictation that gets smarter over time. Naturally, this keyboard will also autocorrect and predict words as they're typed, and there's even a handy Gesture Typing option that allows you to just glide right through.
Download this if… You hate the custom keyboard on your device!
Avoid this if… Wait, scratch that. Download immediately!
Verdict: 5/5
Swype
The granddaddy of gesture-based keyboards, Swype ($0.99, free trial available) is so good Samsung pre-installed it on some of its early flagship handsets before the app was finally unleased on Google Play. It may cost you a buck, but this is one of the most fluid and accurate "swyping" experiences you're likely to find on Android.Featuring a customizable personal dictionary, multiple keyboard layouts and themes, lots and lots of possible languages and now support for emoji in the most popular dialects, one of the best keeps only getting better.
Download this if… You've forgotten how to type.
Avoid this if… You still can't get used to this whole swiping business.
Verdict: 5/5
Adaptxt
A holdover from our previous list of nine best Android keyboards, Adaptxt (free) still gets our nod as one of the most beautiful available. We've previously described it as having a "spacious and airy layout" with translucent graphics that give off a premium laptop vibe, and those words still apply nearly three years later.With support for more than 90 languages - the most of any keyboard we could find - Adaptxt includes location-based suggestions, corrections and predictions with a unique 12-key layout, plenty of great themes and loads of personality.
Download this if… You appreciate good looks and functionality.
Avoid this if… It's just too damned sexy for your device.
Verdict: 5/5
SwiftKey
Imagine Google's awesome keyboard, but infused with the power of all the typing you've ever done in Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, or text messages to help predict the next thing you've going to write. That's the power of SwiftKey (free), the award-winning keyboard that nearly rivals the stock Android board.If you love most everything about Google Keyboard, SwiftKey offers one thing that one doesn't: Lots and lots of themes, and even more available via in-app purchase. Shiny veneer aside, it's equally fast and accurate as well.
Download this if… You like shiny-looking themes.
Avoid this if… You're paranoid about data privacy.
Verdict: 4.5/5
Smart Keyboard
Some might consider it bold to name your app Smart Keyboard ($2.50, free trial available), but the Google Play ratings don't lie. There's support for multiple languages, voice input, a Smart dictionary (of course), custom auto-text and yes, the kind of predictive typing we've all become accustomed to.So what makes Smart so smart? For starters, this is one of the few keyboards we've run across that actually lets users adjust the height of the keys, making them smaller or larger depending on the size of your digits. And hey, if you miss the T9 input from your old feature phone, this is the keyboard for you.
Download this if… You want to control the size of your keyboard.
Avoid this if… You have an aversion to paying for keyboard apps.
Verdict: 4/5
Even more great Android keyboards
Fleksy
Any app billing itself as "the fastest keyboard in the world" certainly warrants a closer look, especially when it holds a Guinness World Record for that accomplishment. Fleksy ($1.99, free trial available) goes beyond the predictive typing hoopla, jumping the shark with support for GIFs, licensed themes from the likes of Frozen, Peanuts and The Hunger Game, and a Rainbow Pop effect you'll have to see to believe.Okay, so it's great fun to use and efficient enough that you can practically take your eyes off the screen while typing, but is it any good (and more importantly, worth paying for)? If you can adapt to the flat, square keys, it's certainly worth a look.
Download this if… You're a speed demon at typing.
Avoid this if… GIFs, themes and Rainbow Pop make you break out in hives.
Verdict: 4/5
Thumb Keyboard
Forget about emoji and all the other gimmicks - we just want a clean keyboard that doesn't require thumb gymnastics to use. Look no further than Thumb Keyboard ($2.49), which is the perfect companion for your phablet or tablet thanks to the insane number of available layouts.Users can switch between standard or patent-pending split portrait or landscape view, each with custom themes and background combinations for a seemingly endless variety. There are even special layouts designed strictly for larger displays, and a slick one-handed mode for banging out text on your phablet screen. Best selling point? It's all emoji-free.
Download this if… You own larger devices or hate emoji.
Avoid this if… You're still rocking a device with smaller screens.
Verdict: 4/5
GO Keyboard
Literally packed to the gills with themes, emoji, emoticons and more, GO Keyboard (free) has some of the highest Google Play user ratings of any keyboard app. Supporting more than 60 languages, over 1,000 themes with weekly new arrivals and QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards, this is one of the few apps capable of adding special characters and sounds to messages without missing a beat.Clearly geared toward teens and younger Android users, our only real grievance is how much valuable screen space GO takes up above the keyboard to make sure you'll shop for custom themes and more in its online market. Otherwise, this is a solid choice with a lot to offer.
Download this if… You can't get enough choices.
Avoid this if… You're not a teenager or young at heart.
Verdict: 3.5/5
Minuum
Designed for users with larger fingers, Minuum ($3.20, free trial available) is great if you have a device conducive to typing with one hand or just want to be able to mash those virtual keys and have the software figure out what the heck you're trying to get across.The developer promises you'll be up to speed with Minuum after a mere 15-second tutorial, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that was a pretty accurate claim. If you have an Android Wear smartwatch, this will also be money well spent - just sign up for the mailing list and you'll be ready to tap those tiny keys on more than 10 different wearables.
Download this if… You're a sloppy typist with obese fingers.
Avoid this if… You don't trust those tiny keys to do all the work for you.
Verdict: 3.5/5
TouchPal
We may be more than a little disappointed that TouchPal (free) has rebranded as an "emoji keyboard," but that doesn't mean it's still not a perfectly great keyboard for the rest of us as well. This one is all about creating the perfect customized board for each user, so it features a dizzying array of ways to do just that.For example, users can turn personal photos into emoticons (which is pretty neat!), and there are more than 800 emoji, emoticons, smileys and text faces available across 100-plus themes, all of which can be constructed to your liking. Despite the big push toward emoji, this is still a darned fine keyboard with contextual prediction and all the usual tricks (swipe typing, et al) to improve your mobile typing experience.
Download this if… You love to customize everything you own.
Avoid this if… You're not a fan of emoji. (But please try it first!)
Verdict: 3.5/5
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A new S6 Edge Plus rendering leaks onto the web
This week in Galaxy S6 Plus rumours we have a new rendering released by reliable tipster @OnLeaks. It looks like the super-sized S6 Edge Plus isn't going to stray too far from Samsung's usual design principles.
The tweeted image also carries dimension details: 154.45mm x 75.80mm x 6.85mm, which points towards a diagonal display size of 5.5 inches (some rumours had it pegged at 5.7 inches).
As for the USB Type-C revolution, it doesn't look like it's going to arrive for Samsung with this particular device, so we'll have to keep waiting.
Edging closer
If you have no idea what we're going on about, this is a phone that hasn't been confirmed by Samsung yet, but we're expecting it to be a super-sized version of the Galaxy S6 Edge when it finally does break cover.Apparently the Plus version is going to get a less powerful CPU (in the form of the Snapdragon 808) but will keep the 16MP camera of the S6 Edge. Word on the Samsung street is that the device will be running Android 5.1.1.
The renderings seem to match the leaked pictures we saw a couple of weeks ago, and with a release date of July, August or September on the cards, we shouldn't have much longer to wait to get the official story.
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Running Man of Tech: Triathlon done: the worst - and best - experience of my life
It's over
That's it. It's done. The stupid triathlon, the bane of my life for past two months, has been completed, and I never have to put on a wetsuit again.It all began at 4.25AM, when the alarm went off and I had to roll out of bed with just two hours' sleep in my body, the worry of not waking up doing that wonderful thing where you just can't drop off.
I'd thankfully laid out every single step of putting on clothes the night before, so I didn't make any mistakes and leave without any trousers on - but even still, the simple act of filling up two water bottles, making some porridge and remembering to pick up my bag was nearly too much for me.
Train as I might have, there was very little chance of me making it around through the 750m swim, 30km cycle ride and 5km run without my cycling shoes or wetsuit.
I made it to the transition area, where I'd racked my bike the day before, at 5.45AM (following an unexpected traffic jam on the way into the car park) with my swim beginning at 6.04AM. And it was about 10 minutes walk away.
I hastily pulled everything out of the bag, placed it in order (no chance of me trying to put a t-shirt on over a helmet THIS time, pals) and then began to chuck on my wetsuit. "It's now two minutes to six - if you're in the 6.04 or 6.08 wave, you really need to get to the water" came the voice over the tannoy.
I looked down at my watch. It said 5.53. Not wanting to dispute the time with, well, nobody around, I shoved my bottom half into the wetsuit and began to run. In bare feet. Over gravel down to the water.
While racing down, I put my googles on. I realised that was a bit soon. I took them off. I put my hat on, then realised my race number wasn't on, so tried to trot, look for roots or other things to trip over while sticking a number on my head and praying it was the right way around. All the while lubing up my neck with the Body Glide anti-chafe stick I'd been recommended so I didn't rub half the skin off my head with my wetsuit.
I made it to the water just as the safety briefing began then jumped in with all the other orange-hatted fellows and was instantly glad of the A:1 wetsuit from 2XU.
Having never tried a 'normal' wetsuit (ie one without the front flotation zone) I can't vouch for the buoyancy of others, but any regular readers will remember: I can't tread water and I was going to need to for about two minutes.
It didn't matter. It was like being in a warm armband. The klaxon eventually went, I hit go on the Garmin 920 XT on my wrist, and we were off swimming. Not only that, but even being in the middle of the pack I didn't get kicked, swum over or all the worrying things that people had told me. This was going to be great!
Except… that feeling lasted about 2 and a half minutes, the point at which I approached the first buoy, probably marking about 100 metres in and I was already struggling. I hadn't managed to put my wetsuit on properly in my haste and I was convinced it was making me dizzy. I was going to drown. There was no way out. I couldn't get out the river.
In one of the genuinely worst moments of my life, I began to really panic. I was stuck. I wouldn't be able to finish. I'd have to be rescued three minutes in. This was terrible. I wasn't even swimming with my head in the water already and I was in trouble.
I tried to calm down, remember it was the open water, the adrenaline and the early start, but it was no use. I started doggy paddling. In a triathlon. With grown-ups watching.
The dizziness would abate, I'd feel OK, and I'd start front crawling again, heading past those people smartly breast stroking. Then I'd crash again and go back to labrador mode.
This continued on for 15 minutes, until I mercifully reached the red buoy, signalling the end of the swim. I turned around it, ready to head for shore, praising the thought that I'd never have to swim EVER AGAIN… and saw there was another 100 metres to go.
The panic set in once more. I couldn't make it. I HAD to get out. I moved closer to a nearby boat, wondering if I could pull myself up that way… then I felt it. The floor beneath my feet! I could walk and pretend to swim!
However, one stroke of that and it was clear NOBODY would believe I was swimming. I looked ludicrous. So, back to the doggy flopping through the water, and somehow I reached the dock (by this time the group which started 10 minutes later had begun to overtake me, looking all professional with their lack of fear and high swimming ability).
Then came the transition, a lot of sopping wet men trying to get undressed while running to a cage full of bikes.
It's hard enough finding your bike in the park after work, let alone a bit dizzy, sleep-deprived and at speed. I managed to locate it though (mostly because my Laser helmet was Union Jack-coloured) and even managed to put on my clothes in the right order before grabbing my bike and heading off to the mount line.
I decided to put on a t-shirt, even though it would slow me down and it was warm enough to not need it - I had a trick up my sleeve. Well, it was THE Trick, from X Bionic, which has a special strip to heat up my spine, make me sweat quicker and thus peak faster. Genius.
If I hadn't put it on backwards.
The cycle itself was rather nice - the Pearl Izumi shoes and Tri Suit I was wearing worked nicely in tandem to keep everything sensitive from getting squished on the hard saddle, and being clipped into the Shimano cleats really makes it easier to cycle.
The shame was my bike was just my boring old Giant Rapid 400. It's not fair to call it boring, but there were loads of units shooting past me that cost more than my car - and I was supposed to be trying one out for this triathlon, to write about how much better the experience was with top end bike tech.
But that fell through at the last minute, so here I was with the daily commute bike, one of the few without racing handlebars and DEFINITELY one of the only ones not to have taken off his mudguards and creating massive drag to slow him down. I didn't think, at the speeds I'd be travelling, it would matter - but it really does after 54 minutes of pedalling.
The cycle was actually better than I was expecting, with my Garmin set to bleep should I fall below my desired average speed. The Wahoo Tickr X heart rate monitor - which doesn't work in the water - was now back pumping out my heart rate too, and even with the added speed I was finding my heart rate was staying nice and low.
All that remained was to follow the advice of the Maxinutrition specialists of taking my gels at the start and the end (pro tip: cut an elastic band open and use that to tie them onto your handlebars as an easy way to grab them on the go) and keep drinking my electrolyte drink every 15 minutes.
I quickly started deciding on people I should be beating and those I shouldn't: man with his name on his back? He's mine. Man who looks a bit like a mix of Ming the Merciless and David Gandy? He's probably faster than me. Man who has a similar bike to mine but with better handlebars? He's going down.
This continued for three quarters of an hour through beautiful Windsor countryside (which ended with me watching all the aforementioned characters shoot off into the distance while my leg started to hurt) before the town rolled back into view.
And, get this: I even managed to remember that you need to unclip from your bike before you can dismount when wearing pedal cleats!
Easy way to train yourself to remember to do this: go training with your bike, complete with shoes and cleats, forget ALL ABOUT THEM at the traffic lights, and fall over sideways when you realise you're locked in, in front of a lot of stationary cars with the windows open so you can hear the drivers crying with laughter.
Not this time. This time I'm smartly running my bike back to my spot, flipping off my velcro shoes like a confident 5 year old. Bike racked, helmet off and then to the best bit: slipping on the Adidas Ultra Boost trainers.
It feels glorious. Not only because these trainers have a tongueless design (so it's more like wearing cushioned slippers) but because I'm running - this is the bit I can do, and it's the only thing standing in the way of me having to never triathlon again.
Except my legs aren't working properly. I try and do some fancy limb flipping to get them going again, but they seem out for the count. I shrug. It's still better than swimming. Then again, so is jabbing a pencil into your arm over and over again.
I set off on the run, trying to get some motion going, only to be faced with a massively steep hill. I employ a technique I learned reading 'The Art of Running Faster': imagine you're a bike.
If you were pedalling up an incline, you'd drop down a gear and spin faster. The same applies: smaller steps, quicker pace, and soon I'm flying past the competition, descending back down again before I know it.
And there's the finish line! My word, that was fast. I haven't even had time to look down at the Garmin to see how fast my kilometres have been. Wait, why are there two signs? What do they say?
'Finish line'. 'Turn around for lap'.
I breathlessly ask the girl next to me: 'How many laps is this?' 'Three' she replies nonchalantly, before legging it off to the finish.
Balls.
However, it's still only 15 more minutes and two more attempts at that increasingly stupid hill and I'm back here for real, haring down the straight with abandon of a man coming home for war and seeing his darling in the distance.
Only it's not that. It's the end of having to do triathlons forever, and it's the best feeling in the world.
I actually tear up as I cross the line in a time of 1hr 43 mins. No more wetsuits. No more cycling. No more anything to do with open water swimming ever again.
Even though... I definitely could go faster with a better bike (or even fewer mudguards), and if I was a little braver with the swim I could have easily knocked off 4 minutes by just, you know, actually swimming and I could have structured that run better if I'd looked at how many laps….
Oh, crap. This isn't the end.
- Huge thanks to Madison and 2XU for supplying me with the triathlon kit, and to Windsor Triathlon organisers Human Race for stopping me from drowning by letting me change distance at the last minute.
- If you've got any tips, tech you want tested out or just want to mock me, I'm @superbeav on Twitter, and you can see my stumblings on Strava too.
- Read the rest of the Running Man of Tech story here
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The smartphone that could last a week thanks to a 10,000mAh battery
Would you trade in a bit of your smartphone's lightness and thinness in return for some extra battery life? Oukitel thinks you will if prototype images spotted on the web are anything to go by.
The Chinese manufacturer is said to be working on a phone that sports a whopping 10,000mAh battery. The indications are that you could go a whole week between charges with this beast.
These leaked pictures are all we have to go on for now - included in the title of the post is "Android 5.1" so it sounds like Google's most recent mobile OS is going to be part of the picture.
Slab test
Judging by these pictures the new Oukitel phone is very much a work in progress and there's no official confirmation from the company yet. It would be nice to at least have the option of a bulkier, longer-lasting handset.The chunky black slab is slightly reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Active but it's difficult to make out any distinctive features. Chinese outfits ZTE and Gionee have also been experimenting with bulkier battery packs.
Even if the phone does exist, it's unlikely to ever make it out of Asia - but if it sells in decent quantities then the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google and the rest are sure to sit up and take notice.
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Week in Gaming: The best-looking game at E3 was barely in colour, let alone 3D
Right now I'm sat here trying to think of an E3 that was as exciting as 2015's has turned out to be - and I'm struggling. This week has seen some incredible showcases, a lot of promising footage, and totally allayed fears that the biggest surprises had been outed the week prior.
But the dust is now settling and everyone is picking out their highlights from the show. Yes, the new Doom looks suitably brutal, and, sure, I'm ecstatic that The Last Guardian is happening for real this time. And isn't the idea of a new Shenmue exciting? Can't wait to play that in 2027 after the developers raise their fifteenth Kickstarter campaign to squeeze in a few extra quick-time events.
But if you asked me which one looked the best, then Cuphead was my E3 darling.
Cuphead is a 2D action game that harks back to animations of yesteryear in more than the "charmingly retro" way which is oh-so-in with the indie community; this sory of animation was more than the product of its technical constraints.
Studio MDHR's old-timey platformer will arrive on the Xbox One and PC some time this year, but amidst an armada of other titles shown off during Microsoft's press conference, you might have missed it.
The gameplay footage we saw looked less likely gameplay and more like somebody had messed up and stuck in an old VHS by mistake. Each animation has been hand-drawn and hand-inked, those watercolour backgrounds are actually real.
It reminds me of the first time I saw screens of The Wind Waker - or if you're looking for a better cultural touchstone, the first time Steamboat Willie was shown to the public in 1928.
It's a bit ironic that after so much mud-slinging over the graphical strengths of the PS4 and Xbox One, there'll be a lot of people praising how good Cuphead looks on console in 2015. You'll have single player and co-op modes to choose from, and so far it looks like the game will be compromised mostly of boss fights.
Cuphead, I don't know if you'll be any fun to play - but you'll be a damn sight for sore eyes.
Missed anything from this week? Fear not - here are some of the other highlights:
- Fallout 4 will ship with the coolest 'special edition' gadget ever
- Xbox One is now backwards compatible with all your old 360 games
- Rare Replay puts the original Perfect Dark on your Xbox One, but not Goldeneye
- First Star Wars Battlefront gameplay trailer brings the battle to Hoth
- No Man's Sky shows gameplay in a gorgeous pulp sci-fi universe
- First Star Fox Zero footage finally justifies the Wii U Gamepad
- Here's the Kingdom Hearts 3 gameplay trailer from E3 2015
- No Man's Sky will launch on the PS4 AND PC at the same time
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Is the internet drowning in photos?
Introduction and automated identification
Photos are the life-blood of the digital age – we used smartphones and cameras to take 880 billion photos in 2014, but how do we find what we need? With 670 million photos uploaded to Flickr in 2014 and with Instagram receiving 70 million per day, what sorts the wheat from the chaff? Software, that's what – there are algorithms emerging that can categorise, sort and even find beauty hidden within zettabytes of data, with all kinds of image recognition and time-lapse tech now emerging, too.Are there now simply too many photos online? "There's no such thing as too many in my opinion, but we're definitely reaching the point where we won't be able to see most of them," says Appu Shaji, head of R&D at startup online community photo market EyeEm, who adds that the total number of photos taken is roughly doubling each year.
Capturing patterns
Cue a new algorithm from EyeEm that distinguishes beauty in a photo purely from a pixel level. "We have a huge repertoire of photos that are taken by great and talented professional level photographers [and] we also have instances of photos taken by photographers like you and me," says Shaji. "The algorithm we have captures the patterns that are unique to the passionate and great photographers, and also tries to understand the patterns that separate these two genres of photographers."Shaji pulled together Berlin's best photographers and artists and asked them to judge the same images. By building his code based on their input, he's slowly made the software good enough to match the taste of a person instead of a machine.
But isn't a truly great photo one that breaks all of the usual rules? "What we are looking for is what is unique among the great photographers, and the photography they produce," says Shaji. "The patterns that break the rules in a creative way is what we are trying to capture."
Automated identification
Identifying what's in a photo without involving any human eyes has long been a goal for computer scientists. Stephen Wolfram, Founder & CEO of Wolfram Research and creator of WolframAlpha, thinks he's done it."I'm excited to be able to say that we've reached a milestone: there's finally a function called ImageIdentify built into the Wolfram Language that lets you ask, 'What is this a picture of?' – and get an answer," he writes on his blog.
The resulting Wolfram Language Image Identification Project can be used by anyone; simply drag any image into the browser, or select a photo on a phone's camera roll, and it will be identified. It's absolutely not perfect – it identified an image of Stephen Wolfram himself as 'instrumentation', and the Moon as Pluto – but it correctly recognised a cat, a flower and a church.
AI and contextualised search
Artificial intelligence at work?
"It's a nice practical example of artificial intelligence," says Wolfram, whose computer language is based upon symbolic pattern matching. "What's more important is that we've reached the point where we can integrate this kind of AI operation right into the Wolfram Language to use as a new, powerful building block for knowledge-based programming."
Crucially, this kind of programming can also help with sorting through petabytes of photos that would otherwise be forgotten. "If one had lots of photographs, one could immediately write a Wolfram Language program that, for example, gave statistics on the different kinds of animals, or planes, or devices, or whatever, that appear in the photographs," says Wolfram.
Time-lapse mining
From Instagram to Flickr to Dropbox and many more, photo vaults are everywhere. Most have metadata within, which got a group of researchers from the University of Washington thinking about automated 'time-lapse mining'. They put 86 million timestamped and geotagged photos taken around the world into a computer system that automatically discovered all locations in the world represented within that collection, warped each photo to a common viewpoint, and generated a short time-lapse video for each one.
Considering the rough data is from average quality tourist snaps, the results are incredible. You can watch the Goldman Sachs Tower skyscraper slowly taking shape over several months in Manhattan, Norway's Briksdalsbreen glacier gradually retreating over several years, and waterfalls slowly changing course. You can watch history unfold… and all from a bunch of photos that would have been mostly ignored and forgotten, left in the cloud to digitally decay.
Contextualised search
As with photos, image recognition tech only really means something if it's mobile. A visual search industry is now on the rise, which depends not only on the volume of photos online, but also people's love of visual sites like Pinterest.
"The vast amount of user generated images being uploaded to the web is a major opportunity," says Mark Elfenbein, CEO of Canadian visual search company Slyce. "Rather than just being marketed to via branded advertising, consumers are now becoming inspired by products they see in images from all over the web, from those their friends are posting on Facebook and Instagram to the huge socially shared collections on sites such as Pinterest."
Enabling products within these images to be automatically discoverable – and available to buy via a tap or two – is a major new opportunity for retailers thanks to image recognition.
Slyce can take a 3D or 2D image snapped by a smartphone and use its attributes to provide either a direct or a close matching product from a retailer's product line, which can then be purchased. Expect to see it, and similar tech, within branded apps from retailers shortly.
Photo recognition software might not seem all that exciting, but it's a powerful force for democracy online. "What we love about this is that everybody has the chance to be a professional photographer," says Shaji. "You don't have to be well known, have the most likes or followers; this is purely based on talent alone."
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Review: Finlux 55UT3EC320S
Introduction
Decided to upgrade that Full HD fat TV for a trendy 4K job? Looking for something that won't break the bank? Then you're the buyer Finlux wants to bag.The brand has made a name for itself serving cut-price Full HD to check-list shoppers, and now it's offering curved 4K UHD in the shape of the snappily monikered 55UT3EC320S.
This 55-inch 2160p set has a sibling flatmate, the 55UT3E242S, priced some £300 cheaper. These are the first UHD resolution sets sold by the brand, better known for its budget 1080p offerings.
Finlux has no qualms about marketing the EC320 as a cheap curved 4K telly, so just how much of a bargain is this set?
The cosmetics are nice enough. The screen has a fashionably thin bezel and seamless metallic trim. It glints appealing. However, this edge doesn't appear to be fully bonded to the rear of the set and as a result can be rather sharp to the touch in places.
The set comes with a heavyweight curved stand. This is a substantial chromed affair with the edges neatly matching the side of the panel. The stand's bow is both practical and artistic – to the rear, bolted plastic feet keep everything stable.
Connections and setup
Connectivity includes four HDMIs, three of which are side-facing. Only one of the four is HDCP 2.2 4K compliant, and that's Input One.The remaining three failed to display an image from an HDCP 2.2 content source.
Other inputs include Ethernet LAN, an AV input for old-fashioned SCART (adaptor supplied), component video and phono stereo, a digital optical audio output for use with the obligatory soundbar, as well as a trio of USBs, one of which is a fast 3.0 variant.
Unusually there's also a PC VGA input – a bit of a rarity in this day and age.
The set has a single DVB Freeview HD tuner. There's also a subwoofer output, should you want to get a little more bass from your gogglebox.
The set ships with a standard IR zapper. There's no voice interaction or gesture control here.
It's a large-buttoned affair that offers one touch access to the Finlux Smart portal, as well as perennial favourites Netflix and YouTube. There's also a shortcut to any connected USB hard drive that might be attached to the set.
The remote control itself is actually curved, obviously to ape the screen. This may be overly cute, but there is some practical benefit: your thumb is in closer proximity to all the keys. That said, the remote does rather roll around in the hand.
The main navigation buttons also creak like stairs in a haunted house. If this controller has been intentionally designed to sound ultra-clicky the effect gets real old real fast.
Connected sources are fast to access, thanks to a simple full-screen input list provided via the uppermost button on the remote.
While top tier TV makers have invested heavily in their user interfaces - from the brilliant simplicity of LG's webOS to the one-size-fits-all app-led approach of Android - Finlux keeps things fairly utilitarian and not a little fusty.
You're guided through the tuning process and network connection with prim efficiency. The onboard Wi-Fi is dual band, so you can get connected either at 2.4GHz or 5GHz.
Navigation is straightforward. A Q.Menu mode throws up an oddball selection of settings, from a power saving Eco mode and scheduled power off, to 3D, assorted picture presets, and your channel favourites.
The main menu is distinguished by vertical graphics. System calls up the Picture and Sound settings, as well as less-used stuff like Network Settings and Parental Controls. You can also dive into the main installation menu, scan and edit the channel list or fire-up a media browser.
File support is good enough. The set will find and stream from any DLNA connected device, be it a NAS media server or PC, as well as local USB.
The set found my networked Plex and Twonky Media servers without a hitch, playing VOB files, AVIs, MKVs, MOVs, WMV, WMA, AAC and MP3s. If you've been building up a collection of FLAC music files though, you're out of luck.
Most of the picture settings offer routine adjustment, such as Contrast, Brightness, Sharpness and Colour via sliders, but the Advanced Picture menu offers some more intriguing tweaks. These include Film Mode and Movie Sense, as well as Dynamic Contrast.
The latter really boosts the picture, although not necessarily in a good way. To avoid unintentional overscan, ensure that the aspect ratio is set to Full, which is selectable from the remote handset.
No place for catch-up TV
Finlux's Smart portal grade is more Primary School rather than Secondary. There's an embedded Twitter widget, but to use this you need to log in via a separate account required by the TV.Is it worth the effort? Probably not.
Having a Twitter feed on a TV feels a bit old school to me. Throwing social media onto a communal device isn't really reflective of the way people use social media. And yes, Facebook is here too.
It's a bit naff.
The Finlux Smart portal GUI divides between a large live TV window and an app control panel. Here you'll find BBC News and Sport, Flickr, TuneIn Radio, Viewster and DailyMotion. BBC iPlayer, Netflix and YouTube have been segregated below the main selection.
Opt to search for more apps and the live TV window is overlaid with an app store. There's quite a few packages to browse, but I seriously doubt you'll want to install any of them. The set lacks any other key catch-up TV services, so no Channel 4, Demand 5 or ITV Player.
It should be noted that the Netflix client is not 4K capable, not least because the set doesn't have an HEVC decoder. The version of Netflix here is the SDK 3.1.4 release from April 2014.
Navigation feels a little sluggish at times. Often the screen doesn't quite seem able to keep up with your remote controlling, lagging just slightly behind.
It's also curiously impatient, throwing up large No Signal dialogue boxes at the drop of a hat. Watching a Blu-ray, these would pop up even as the disc branched between menu items.
Picture quality and usability
Picture quality is best described as a mixed bag.The set looks distinctly unhappy with standard def Freeview channels. Images are blotchy and ill-defined. This is not so much a dig at Finlux, more that it's increasingly a problem for viewers of next gen large-screen panels.
As the trend toward bigger TVs continues, the tolerance we have for SD falls as its flaws become more readily apparent. It's something that commercial broadcasters should be concerned about.
Thankfully if you want to cherry-pick your viewing you can filter out the SD uglies using the Finlux's Favourites list. That way you'll only get the hi-def channels.
While SD looks hideous, HD is much more acceptable. The set delivers crisp 1080p nibbles on a smooth 2160p platter. Picture modes include Dynamic, Cinema, Game, Sports and Natural. The latter is probably the best option for most content.
Colour vibrancy is high. The set handles neon green and electric blue with all the ease of a Soho sign fitter. There's real pizzazz to its pictures. When Pyro engulfs the attacking Sentinel in flame at the start of X-Men Days Of Future Past (Blu-ray), the fiery conflagration is spectacular. The metallic sheen of Colossus also looks believably chromed.
Just like that metal X-Man's noggin though, the curved screen does throw some strange reflections.
Every so often you'll see yourself reflected, with the kind of distortion more commonly associated with a fairground hall of mirrors.
The curve itself warrants further debate. The technology's most vociferous supporters, Korean brands Samsung and LG, have tried hard to convince us that a little curve somehow offers a more naturalistic and immersive viewing experience.
This is, of course, bunkum.
Arguably, a curved screen becomes less objectionable on super-sized screens – 77-inch and above. However here, on what seems a rather diddy 55-incher, it has very few obvious benefits.
Sit square on and you'll probably not really notice the warp, move to the side and it becomes a good deal more obvious. Off angle viewing is actually pretty good though, with no huge loss of contrast or colour if you park up left or right.
Ultimately, going curved is a fashion statement. Whether you want a TV with a bend in it should be down to just how cool you think it looks, not because you think it'll somehow enhance Game of Thrones.
While colour luminosity is good, the set struggles with deep blacks. The display itself can't pass Below Black, as evidenced by a simple Pluge test pattern. The HDMI True Black mode should be kept Off, as it really washes out the image.
The movie 300: Rise Of An Empire (Blu-ray) suffers somewhat from this lack of contrast. When war boats collide, there's scant shadow detail to be found in the timbers of the ramming vessels – however the spray and clouds of bubbles are finely delineated.
The picture rings slightly around fine detail on HD content. Normally you can tone this effect down, but even when the Sharpness is taken to zero, there's still some evidence of edge enhancement.
With everyday content viewed from a typical viewing distance this isn't noticeable. Indeed, it's a common processing trick to give images greater definition, however it's not something you'd think you'd need on a UHD TV.
Things improve considerably with native 4K content though.
To access the TV's UHD chops I hooked up a Sony FMP-X5 media player. This HEVC STB has 4K Netflix on board. Suddenly Daredevil is a mass of delicious fine detail. From skin tones to fabrics, the world of superhero attorney Matt Murdoch is done great justice here.
Similarly, the impressive costume design that characterises period epic Marco Polo looks quite beautiful.
Overall I'd rate this a classy 4K performance. You can feel confident that when you hook up a 4K Blu-ray player, image quality will blow your socks off.
There are caveats though. At times you do see some uneven edge-lighting effects behind the panel, probably emphasised by tricks that the light guide is playing to illuminate the curved panel.
Motion resolution is reasonably good. Movie Sense transpires to be Finlux's image interpolation mode. When set on High, motion resolution is maximised. Images retain detail, although as a consequence films have that video-esque quality. While there are some motion artefacts around some moving objects, they are not intrusive.
With Movie Sense set Low, motion artefacts are minimal and panning remains smooth. This is a good everyday mode. On the Medium setting artefacts around certain moving objects become a little more noticeable, but are still not overly intrusive.
If you turn Movie Sense off altogether, moving resolution suffers but horizontal pans judder. Despite this, the set can look occasionally a little smeary.
Sound quality and 3D
Sonically, this curvy Finlux does a solid job. The TV employs a pair of downward firing speakers which counter a lack of finesse with volume. If audio sounds a little on the thin side, there's always that optional subwoofer output on the rear.The set supports Active Shutter 3D, with two pairs of shuttering specs provided in the box. While there is some double-imaging crosstalk evident in its three dimensional images, this is not particularly intrusive.
The increased brightness of the 3D mode dilutes some of the image intensity, but overall the result is a fun diversion. The kids will get a kick out of it when the Penguins Of Madagascar 3D Blu-ray is on hard rotation.
Verdict
European TV giant Vestel, parent of Finlux, know how to make cost effective TVs.They specialise in high volume, low cost panels, many of which appear under big brand names. So there's no question that this curved debutant doesn't deliver what's expected of it.
The design is ostensibly stylish (although viewed from the wrong angle it doesn't look quite so flattering, thanks to a deep back panel), it offers a fair amount of content via its Finlux Smart portal, and it won't break the bank.
While the screen really doesn't deliver any 4K upscaling magic for Full HD - HD sources look much like HD sources – it looks suitably terrific with native 4K. That said, the lack of HEVC support will obviously limit your UHD viewing options when it comes to OTT services - and given that the TV majors are aggressively driving down the costs of their own 4K offerings, this set doesn't really seem as cheap as it should be either.
We Liked
The 55UT3EC320's colour performance is Skittles good, images are lush and inviting.With native 4K content, it also looks the business. The TV is also surprisingly able when it comes to motion resolution, keeping a lid on artefacts when interpolation is high. The design may be a curate's egg, but the audio implementation is quite effective.
We Disliked
The inability to deliver a convincingly deep black level, more a consistent grey, rather undermines overall dynamics and shadow detail.The set's lack of a Netflix 4K client also reduces options when it comes to watching UHD.
While the cosmetics of the screen are OK, and there's no doubting the cleverness of the engineering behind this screen, we suspect the curve will ultimately prove divisive.
The final verdict
Finlux is shilling the 55UT3EC320S as a cheap 4K curved telly, so the first and probably most important question you need to have is: does the ticket price go low enough to gloss over any shortcomings?If you want a curved UHD panel for the corner of your room that's not obviously cut-price, it's certainly worth a look.
With native 4K content, images look wondrously sharp and detailed. However the lack of 4K Netflix is a significant demerit, and both LG and Panasonic have comparatively priced low cost UHD models that have a significantly more appealing Smart solutions.
Get an audition certainly, but expect punters to be fighting in the aisles for this come Black Friday.
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Intel turns your Android phone into a keyboard for your Windows PC
If you own Intel's mini NUC PC or Compute Stick and find yourself in need of a keyboard and touchpad to interact with your diminutive Windows computer, Intel has a solution. In an odd marriage between Windows and Android, the Intel software, available in the Google Play Store, allows Android users to use their phone's touchscreen as a keyboard or touchpad for their PC.
You will need a Windows 8.1 PC, and pairing your phone to your computer is as easy as scanning a QR code once the free Intel Remote Keyboard app is downloaded to an Android smartphone or tablet.
The best part is that the software brings gestures to the computing experience. For example, when in mouse mode, users can perform a left click with one finger, a right click with two fingers and a finger slide across the touchscreen to emulate a scrolling motion.
Intel Compute Stick
The Intel Compute Stick is about the same size of Google's Chromecast. Essentially the size of an HDMI dongle, the Compute Stick plugs into the HDMI port on a monitor, projector or HDTV and brings the full Windows experience to a form factor that's much smaller than a mini PC or traditional desktop.The downside is that if you plug the Compute Stick into your living room TV, for example, you may not always have a keyboard and mouse or trackpad nearby when you need to do computing tasks. The Intel Remote Keyboard Android app makes it easy as most users will always have their phones nearby.
Intel's Compute Stick costs $170 (£107, AU$218).
In addition to Intel, other manufacturers, including Foxconn and Lenovo, are exploring smaller PC form factors.
- Read our Intel Compute Stick review
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Analysis: The Xbox One's dashboard is getting a facelift ... and it's not pretty
Microsoft had a decent E3 2015. Between Xbox One backwards compatibility, a pirate-themed game from Rare and an incredibly cool demo that uses HoloLens to teach people how to play the new Warzone mode in Halo 5, it easily trumped last year's slew of ho-hum announcements.
The deluge of good news, however, meant that one announcement didn't get all the attention it deserved. The Xbox One interface is getting a do-over, and it will be even worse than it is now.
So how is something that most people tolerate, but don't really enjoy, going to get worse?
The interface is going to try and streamline the process of getting to your most-played games by burying everything else on a hidden menu on a tiny, one-quarter-of-the-screen window. Oh, and like Windows 8, it's still going to heavily rely on pins. Bad move, Microsoft.
There's no place like home, thankfully
The current Xbox One home screen isn't anyone's favorite interface, but it serves a purpose: it shows what's in the disc tray, allows you to get to your media library without making too many extraneous movements and, with one flick of the control stick, show you which of your friends are online .The new Xbox One home screen (which looks awfully similar to Windows 10's Xbox app) is a list of the most played games on your console with each title having three options, one of which will be used to direct you to paid DLC or add-on content. The other two will be used for the game hub - a feature introduced in the last big software update - and sharing media like game clips and screenshots.
Press down on the right trigger and you're taken to the pins section, a carry-over from the current setup. One possible interpretation is that the new layout, due to its more minimalistic nature, may be enhanced by pins instead of having them feel like a band-aid to a convoluted system interface. Pressing left trigger will bring you back up to the top.
From there you can flick the left stick to the right to go into the Xbox One Community Feed, which has statuses, videos and pictures from your online pals, or flick to the left to pull up the ultra-minimalistic menu that has everything else, including Microsoft's personal assistant, Cortana.
The left-hand menu is essentially the new Xbox guide. It's where you'll find a Friends list, general settings, messages and a cursory look at who's in your party, and it's accessible from anywhere at anytime by simply pressing the center jewel on the controller twice.
Unfortunately, though, the new guide will only be useful to some users. Using Cortana, the top option on the new guide, requires you to have a Kinect plugged in and turned on at all times, something that many have felt hesitant about doing in the past.
Xbox, go home
Change is hard. The Xbox 360 had an almost universally loved interface that incorporated both fun and playful elements like the avatars, as well as paid content and gamerscore onto the same screen. Microsoft hasn't found the same success with its current interface for Xbox One, and probably won't fare much better with the pared down new look coming in the fall.It's not for a lack of communication, though. The Xbox One has the most frequent updates of any next-gen system other than your PC. But myriad changes like the spot on the homepage for DLC and continuously pushing pins on an unresponsive audience shows that, at the end of the day, Microsoft is going to do what it wants, even if it's not right for everyone else.
Microsoft's latest software update isn't DOA, but it's one bad decision away from a game-over.
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E3 2015: E3 2015: top 10 moments from gaming's biggest show
Top 10 E3 2015 moments
We here at TechRadar sure felt that way - instead of five best moments, we had to round up to 10 best moments of E3 because there were so many great parts of the show this year.
Heck, it was even hard to decide who had the best press conference. Between the big name veterans like Microsoft and Sony to the newbies - Bethesda and the PC Gaming Show, all eight conferences had amazing and weird highlights that were both memorable and fun to watch.
Then there was the showcase of fantastic hardware. Despite no new consoles, we still got to play with the brand new Oculus Rift and observe the world of Halo 5 in augmented reality with HoloLens. Both are convincing us more and more that the future of gaming - along with countless other applications - will be changed forever.
Oh and the games. Can we take a moment and say wow because E3 has us excited to turn on our PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and PCs again? Our love for games never died, but seeing new titles like Recore and Horizon Zero Dawn to old classics from Rare and Starfox were enough to make our jaws drop.
The new trailers and info on Fallout 4, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Doom, Uncharted 4, Star Wars Battlefront and so many more games also only increased our impatience for this fall and next year to arrive faster.
Here's hoping E3 2016 will blow our minds again, but in the meantime, read on to see our top 10 moments from E3 2015.
10. Nintendo's adorably weird puppets
Nintendo didn't give us much this year (as usual) but at least provided extremely amusing and weird puppets during its press conference.
Starfox was announced which is great - but was a little underwhelming when we played it on the show floor.
Maybe next year we'll see more new games from Nintendo? We're starting to sound like a broken record though ...
9. New Xbox One Elite gamepad is cool but pricey
A new Xbox One Elite controller is set to come out later this year but it'll be pretty dang expensive. We're not sure who's going to drop $149 (likely £99, AU$199) but someone definitely will.
The Elite is a well-made gamepad that feels and looks premium thanks to the new trigger buttons and magnetic, swappable parts. It's essentially the console gadget equivalent of a PC keyboard/mouse/rig.
We liked it well enough during our hands on time and wished we could play a few hours of an RPG to see it holds up.
8. HoloLens + Halo = HaloLens?
The Microsoft HoloLens was on the show floor giving people tutorials of Halo 5: Guardians - but we didn't actually get to play the game with the augmented reality device on.
A lucky few were able to test out Minecraft with the headset, however be warned, it looks nothing like the demos from the stream - at least in terms of your field of view. Instead of seeing a whole screen of Minecraft, you're all privy to a small screen.
Aside from that, the actual experience is pretty incredible and the best AR device we've seen yet.
7. No Man's Sky zooms onto another platform
Fans of the unreleased, massive sandbox game No Man's Sky were treated to a nice surprise during the first PC Gaming conference. The game will come out on the PS4 AND the PC at the same time.
This delightful bit of news was met with cheers and much applause because it's the perfect game for PC gamers to spend countless hours exploring space.
Now, if only it will come out with Project Morpheus support ...
6. Bethesda gives world real life Pip-Boy
Bethesda broke the internet by announcing the release of a real life Pip-Boy at its inaugural E3 conference.
Selling for $120 (£99, about AU$155), the wearable is already (sadly) sold out everywhere.
We're crossing our fingers that it gets restocked so every TechRadar staff member can communicate via Pip-Boy forever.
5. Oculus Touch will be worth the wait
The Oculus Touch and the accompanying experience was something we didn't expect to be so well-made, since it's only a prototype. We were delighted to find out that the new Oculus Rift controllers open up even greater possibilities for virtual reality than before.
The Rift headset itself it is a thing of beauty. Lightweight, comfortable with a nice little roster of games, the consumer version is sure to sell out within minutes.
The Touch controllers are shipping after the headset's Q1 2016 release, and while we were peeved about the later date, after trying out the controllers we're now content to wait.
4. Microsoft unleashes backwards compatibility
This was definitely something we didn't see coming.
Microsoft announced that the Xbox One will soon be compatible with both your old Xbox 360 game discs and Xbox 360 digital downloads.
It will however, take up some space and require a 100MB emulator for every game. Still, the team told us that it will be as simple as plopping the disc into the next-gen console.
This was something even Sony was shocked to hear about, and the company doesn't have any plans to copy Microsoft's backward compatibility plans for the PS4.
3. Visibility of women in games
With women in gaming such a controversial topic - especially when it shouldn't be at all - this year's E3 was a certainly a breath of fresh air.
From Horizon Zero Dawn to Dishonored 2, there were so many female protagonists and characters in practically every single conference, for almost half the games including triple-A's, that we were excited to include this as a top three moment.
There's still a ways to go because we shouldn't even be surprised anymore at the inclusion of women in games - it should just be a thing that happens without a fuss - but we're happy that the industry is moving in such a positive direction.
2. Bethesda reveals Fallout 4 release date
Bethesda released a trailer for Fallout 4 before the Expo even started to build hype for the game - and it worked.
Then the press conference exploded everyone's minds even more with the aforementioned Pip-Boy and of course, the November 10 launch date for the game.
We can now officially look forward to more adventures in the lovely wasteland this fall.
1. Sony's announcements made the crowd go crazy
Yes, we said earlier it would be hard to decide between press conferences, and it was indeed difficult. But being in the crowd as they were going bonkers during Sony's press conference made it pretty clear that the games announced would be hot topics the rest of the show.
Shenmue broke Kickstarter records, the Final Fantasy VII remake was a huge surprise and of course, The Last Guardian is a myth no longer.
Oh yeah, that incredible Uncharted 4 demo at the end - complete with hilarious snafu - should be the icing on the E3 cake.
Need we say more?
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Here's one absurdly efficient way to get ready for Star Wars 7
Well, this takes binge-watching to a whole new level.
Marcus Rosentrater, animator for the acclaimed TV series Archer, has seen fit to stack all six of the Star Wars films on top of each other and make them viewable all at once, because why not?
Whether he's doing this to offer a unique refresher before Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes out, or just giving us a taste of what LSD can do to the brain, the result is surprisingly, well, beautiful.
Yes, it's a cluttered mess of bright lightsabers juxtaposed with dull ones and Sand People shouting at Senators in the chamber of Coruscant, but you also get a look at how the filmmaking changed over the years. The opening titles are different sizes, John Williams' score sounds a hair different from scene to scene and ILM's special effects take on a new life in every frame.
Whether this was meant to be a sensory overload or just a new way to digest George Lucas' creations, I found this is by far the easiest way to re-watch The Phantom Menace.
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In Depth: Google Photos: The pros and cons of Google's new photo service
Ups and downs of the new Google Photos
Unlimited and free photo storage. The prospect of image searching and automated organization, powered by Google's search engine machine learning smarts. Two things you can't get with competing services.On the surface, Google Photos sounds not just good, but great. But what's the catch? And does it stand up to the test of thousands of images? That's what I set out to find over the past two weeks. And my results were, surprisingly, decidedly mixed. Google Photos does a lot really well, but it's not even close to the slam-dunk it sounded like when we first heard about it at Google IO 2015.
Why Google Photos
The ubiquity of good cell phone cameras and the rise of the selfie have led to an explosion in how many images all of us take. The stakes are high in this image gold rush: What's the point of taking all of these pictures if we can't find them? Finding those images again remains a challenge, given the arduous drudgery of manual tagging. Whether you're tagging baby pictures or the Olympics, it's a sentiment shared by both casual users and pros alike. Just ask any professional who uses IPTC metadata to manually embed image tags and captions for the massive stock image databases, and you'll get a universal look of chagrin over the necessary evil of tagging.This is why Google, and others, are pursuing ways to make it easier for us to find, share and enjoy the images we take. And it's why the idea of Google Photos - with the potential of all of my photos in one place, with an automated tagging system - seemed so appealing. (Appealing so long as one is comfortable committing all of their memories to the Googleverse, but that debate is a conversation unto itself).
Other services have offered bits here and there, but I still refrained from going all-in. I'm a shutterbug both personally and professionally. I go through 2TB hard drive as often as some people change social media cover photos. For this reason (and others), services like Flickr, with its cap on 1TB of free storage, never appealed to me.
Likewise, while Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Camera Bits Photo Mechanic each have their merits for assisting with labeling, neither assist with what you're looking for across disparate mobile, desktop and cloud.
This trifecta of challenges - storage, search and organization - are what Google set out to solve with its revamped Google Photos. And knowing these challenges first hand, I was eager to apply Google Photo's image search and categorization technology to a random selection of my own images. With unlimited photo storage, it meant I didn't need to be selective or cherry-pick the files I sent to the cloud; nor would I reach a point where the service would warn me I'm running out of space and I'd need to delete items to make room for new ones.
The immediate hook of the service that resonated when it was introduced at IO was its unlimited, free storage for images up to 16 megapixels. If your image is larger than 16 megapixels, it will be downsized to meet the filter; likewise, even 16 megapixel images will go through some optimization for storage on Google's servers (which means it will be a smaller file size when you export it from the cloud).
If you want to store RAW files, your original images, or images larger than 16 megapixels, you'll need to opt for the paid version of the account, at $9.99 (about £6.29/AU$12.89) a month for 1TB of Google Drive storage. That 1TB is shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos. If you start with the free account and decide to upgrade, you need to reload your images to get the full benefits of the full copy stored.
Ready, set, upload
To get 31,041 - approximately, and at last count - of my images uploaded was a surprisingly arduous affair, one that required multiple overnight sessions of my laptop feeding photos up to Google's servers via a 12Mbps upstream Comcast cable modem. Two-thirds of those images came from my laptop's SSD, but the final 10,000 came from other sources. Most were JPEGs, but some folders had both the JPEG and RAW files (and in those cases, both got uploaded according to Google, not that I noticed this from my image library), and still others had videos mixed in with the still images. Photos will display videos as well, captured at up to 1080p.
The images I chose very purposely represented a large mix of sources. I shot the pictures over the years using various point-and-shoot cameras and digital SLRs. Only the images captured on my cell phones had geotagging. And the folders represented a variety of workflows: Some were images meticulously filed into subfolders by event, some were simply in generically labeled folders that represented the entire 64GB card's worth of pictures, which could have represented images from the same hour or images from multiple months. In still other cases, I had images grouped together as best shots, organized in a way where I may not know the date or the event, but just had them in a folder that I knew why they were organized together that way.
For my tests, I used a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and Note 4 phone, a Google Nexus 9 tablet, and a Toshiba touchscreen Ultrabook. I started out using the desktop app first, and simultaneously began uploading phone images, too, via the phone app.
In demos, Google Photos looks streamlined and convenient. Pinch-and-zoom to sort the images by month, date and year. And scroll, scroll, scroll to find what you're looking for.
While I like the design conceptually, in practice I found it less useful to navigate with a large set of real-world images. The experience was superior on mobile vs desktop. On the phone or tablet, if I knew something happened in a given month and year, great. I'd pinch and zoom out to the year view, and then scroll, scroll, scroll, and wait for the thumbnails to redraw on the device, as they're fed from the cloud.
Find the right year and month, then pinch-and-zoom into that month, and then I'd keep scrolling through the hundreds of images there to find the specific shot or series shots I was looking for. Pinch-and-zoom further into the month to get images separated by day. When your library is packed with thousands of images shot on the same day, or cluster of days, this visual approach is not the most efficient way of finding images, but at least it gives you a starting point.
It's worth noting that while the initial thumbnail draws can be painfully slow, this redraw process did get faster the more often I rapidly scrolled through eight years of images over a Wi-Fi connection. I was impressed with how quickly and smoothly images opened on the phone, and how I could zoom into an image without waiting for it to redraw.
On the desktop, I was much less impressed. You'll access Google Photos via your web browser, at photos.google.com. Access is simple if you're already logged into Gmail - just type the URL and your most recently uploaded photos appear, with a search bar at the top. No additional log-in required. That's the good part.
The not-so-good: On the desktop, you lose that much discussed ability to visually browse images with pinch-and-zoom. According to Google, it was a choice to launch without browser-based touch touchscreen support for pinch-and-zoom, but it is possible we'll see that at an undetermined point in the future.
I'd go so far as to say it's not practical to visually browse for images on the desktop, not in the way you can by month, year or date on mobile. If a date or month is recent, and has a few hundred images, that's somewhat manageable. But up the game to thousands of images on a given date two years ago, and the repetitive and tiresome scrolling makes this interface infinitely less efficient. Or pleasant, for that matter.
It helps if you know the specific date to browse by. This can be useful in some instances, but rare is the occasion you remember the precise date you took a shot (weddings, birthdays, anniversaries are perhaps the common exceptions). For example, I knew that I'd taken some pictures outside of Bangkok, images that weren't being recognized as from Thailand, back in October 2014; but I didn't remember the specific date. By searching on the month of Oct 2014, I could scroll and eventually find the image.
Another circumstance this approach worked for: Finding related images that weren't being tagged or picked up in other searches. For example, I did a search on Temple of Heaven, to find a series of old slide images I'd scanned back in September 2014, using an external scanner.
The search successfully found the three scan attempts of that image; however, not the other two images I remembered scanning at the same time. I searched on the date - oddly showing up as Jan 1, 2011, likely because of a setting in the scanner I hadn't changed at the time - and found the remaining photos. For one, a closeup, isn't hard to understand why Google missed the proper tag. The other, a distant view of the Temple, is harder to explain away. In other examples, Photos has shown it can detect and recognize objects, regardless of whether they're in the foreground or background. But it didn't in this case, and there was no way for me tag them as such without creating an Album, which isn't the same as tagging.
Another thing to note: Photos is fluid, and the presentation of which images are shown in the thumbnails for People, Places, and Things can change over time, without you necessarily realizing it. This is a mixed bag: it's good in that it seems like Google is learning and evolving in background, but it means if you were looking for something where it was before, it can be weird and jolting to have one image replaced with another as thumbnail seemingly out of the blue.
Identification headaches
This leads to one of the big potential benefits of Google Photos: Google's machine learning and neural net engines applied to automatically tag and group images. Aside from the unlimited storage, this was the one thing that I looked forward to most after Google Photos' introduction. But after using it for two weeks, my Google Photos experience has been decidedly mixed.The default Google Photos view is a reverse chronological representation of images, by date. If you want to search for something specific, or you want to see Google's automatic groupings, you'll need to tap in the search bar (in the browser view) or tap on the floating search button on mobile.
Google groups images for you, based on three basic tenets: people, places and things. Given the sheer volume of images I uploaded, though, I was surprised that Google didn't identify more categories. For example, it found 60 people, and generated thumbnails for those clusters. For things, it was only at 42.
I've seen plenty of instances being written about how easily Google can match progressions of a child, or find a man's face in the background of a picture. But my data set, and experience, is different than that: Of the 31,000+ images in Google Photos, I'd guess easily half of those were of gymnasts. A Holy Grail for any photographer is for the software to find and group all of the images of a particular person, regardless of the event, group or how many other people are in the group. This is where I expected Google Photos to excel, but instead it stumbled on my large and varied data set. In fact, the accurate groupings were so few and far between they felt like happy mistakes more than the intended result.
Often people in the images under the thumbnails were not the person represented in the thumbnail itself. While there were often shared characteristics - for example, blonde, pony-tailed young women in leotards - the reality was they were indeed different people.
That I saw certain physical similarities in images clustered as a single person was pure coincidence, based on what Google tells me. According to Dave Lieb, product lead at Google, the face grouping only uses attributes of the faces, not any details of the hair style or clothing. That said, I looked at the image clusters that perplexed me, and the reality was in many instances, the facial structures that were mistakenly grouped together looked nothing alike. Another reality, and more worrisome: The algorithm found some images, but nowhere close to all of the images uploaded of the same athlete. In one case, the algorithm found images of the same young woman, and gave her two different thumbnails - with no duplication of the images between the two. And the much talked about age-progression facial recognition? In one instance where I uploaded images of an athlete from both junior and senior competitions, the algorithm didn't pick up on that.
Google Photos' search and retrieval, and tagging, tries to mimic how humans perceive photos. But, the service lacks the more random finesse that humans add to the equation. Once uploaded into the Google cloud, the folder structure is flattened out and disappears. In addition to identifying images based on the content, Photos also uses geotags, timestamp, existing metadata that the service can read (some of my images had IPTC captions), and data from the folder something was filed in (but, if there are nested folders, it doesn't capture the info at the top-level).
Google says Photos will learn from your efforts to manually weed out false positives. However, doing so is a chore, and can only be done on the smaller mobile screens for now - which makes doing so across large volumes of images even more difficult. I appreciate that Photos gets us as far as it does in finding people. It's frankly better than any other free solution today. But the lack of consistent identification is a concern, particularly when coupled with entries that just aren't finding all relevant images.
I had similar experiences with the images classified under Places and Things. If an image lacked a geotag, Google Photos was inconsistent recognizing where images were from, and what they represented. Gymnasts were identified correctly as "Gymnastics." And I could almost understand the images that ended up classified as "Dancing" and "Circus." But the same types of images were also identified as "Basketball," "Wrestling," "Ice Skating," "Table Tennis," and "Volleyball." And there was no way to reclassify those images back to "Gymnastics."
It wasn't just the gymnasts that ended up all over the map. Photos rightly identified a stuffed puppy as "Dog" (along with live dogs), but a teddy bear ended up under "Sheep" and "Bear." And only as "Bear" five days after the first images were uploaded. Google says the indexing is not instantaneous, and that matches my experience. Lieb notes that sorting begins within 24 hours of backup, and continues on a 24-48 hour basis. This explains why searching by some data points (i.e., the original folder name or the location) didn't work until four or five days passed.
Another interesting point is how the recognition works, period. The beginnings of the recognition engine lay in what we saw introduced a couple of years ago with Google+. The root here is machine learning technology, and that base technology is similar to what powers Google Image Search, but Lieb says "the clustering and search quality technologies are specifically tuned to personal photo libraries." So, perhaps, that explains why the teddy bear photos were identified as "Bears," while Google Image Search saves "Bears" for the live, breathing variety of bears, and identified the stuffed animal as a "Teddy Bear".
Sometimes, I had luck with typing in more abstract search terms. Typing "river" yielded results that included the Chao Praya river in Bangkok, and other waterways like Victoria Bay in Hong Kong. But the only way I could find a river scene from Bourton-on-the-Water was to search on the date of the one photo that Google Photos successfully identified as Bourton-on-the Water. "Sidewalk" turned up shots that included a sidewalk. "Tablet" turned up photos of tablets ... and phones, too.
Other times, I had no luck at all. Typing "child" yielded images of college-age gymnasts that don't look like children and of people of all ages, ranging from a woman holding a baby to an elderly relative posed alone. So much for narrowing the search.
Searching by criteria like the camera or device used, or other shooting metadata, might be useful in such cases, but that feature doesn't exist. A competing service, Eyefi Cloud, will be offering this feature for its $49-a-year unlimited storage service (which includes storing the full-resolution originals).
It's not all bad
I've spent a lot of time discussing the foibles and pleasures of search, because that's such a critical component of what Google Photos offers. However, I've found one of the best parts of Google Photos to be the easy, and automatic, generation of creative collections involving your creative stuff. While the image search and retrieval gave me fits and starts, the creative collections and the random sense of photo rediscovery via the automated Assistant is a trip, and well worth the time investment of uploading my images.Collections can mix both photos and videos together. You have a choice of three types of things to create: Albums, which is as you'd expect - an album of photos and videos; Stories, a more visual timeline approach to showing photos and videos; and Movies, a video montage photos and videos. On phones and tablets, you can also create animations and collages, but this is not on the browser version.
The Assistant is something you can choose to enable, and having it on is both amazing and terrifying in terms of what it comes up with. Long-buried images suddenly get resurfaced, and Photos does so in fun ways. It's not so much that what Photos does is unique - other apps can create GIFs, for example - but it's how Google Photos automates the process.
I found some of Photos' pairings for stories odd: the two cities it grouped together didn't make any sense to be together, even though the dates were near one another. But I loved how Google Photos found clusters of burst-shot images - something I commonly shoot on my digital SLR. It's like an instamatic GIF creator, without you having to do the digging through your archives to find a random series of images. And it's super easy to share these creations out to friends and social media.
Mind you, the saving process itself needs an overhaul. Once you save one of the Assistant creations, it saves the image back into your "library," by the original date. Which means you have to know how to find that image - one that was resurfaced by Photos, and you may have no idea when it was taken, or if/how it was tagged. See the above discussion for the problem with that. A search by "animations" will find those files, but that's going to get unwieldy fast, and that trick only works for animations.
I also liked the auto backup feature, for both mobile and desktop. A light desktop app provides a system-tray app for simplifying backups. Auto backup alone isn't the draw for Google Photos, but it was fun to see images populate quickly in Photos after shooting it on my smartphone.
Life with Photos
With all that I've talked about, I could get into so much more with Photos. I didn't even touch the conversation of how the image quality compares with an original image. Nor did I get into editing images (imaging is not destructive, but you do have to be aware of how you save images depending upon platform, and whether you want your new creation synced back to your device, overwriting the view of your original image).That said, my time with my 31,000-plus images in Google Photos taught me a lot about how the service can be best used. Since this is your personal cloud, and not something you have to worry about privacy permissions for, the choice to use the free Photos is an easy bet - especially for images captured on mobile devices. If you're already invested in the Googleverse, it's especially easy to acclimate to and integrate with.
Mobile users will get the most out of Photos, for a number of reasons. For one, the app on mobile is far more full-featured than the browser-based service. Photo's search capabilities will benefit from the fact that images captured on mobile already have geotag data; that coupled with the auto-creativity means Photos will make it easy to share content, too. Finally, since our mobile devices have finite capacity, and your images are more likely to get lost when your phone ends up in the back seat of a cab or at the bottom of a pool, the cloud storage and backup components are compelling. And did I mention it's free?
Photos' proposition for your legacy image collection is a much harder sell. Whether it's worth the time and effort will depend in part on your existing approach to image organization, and on how much value you put on the free backup, even if it's of slightly downsized images.
Google Photos' image search and recognition technology is promising, and even mind-blowing in some ways, but it's not quite there yet. I'd guess it's only about 50% of the way towards the ideal, based on my experience across tens of thousands of images. Perhaps I'd have had a different experience if I'd had fewer nested folders, which would have meant more images would get an extra tag automatically applied.
Ultimately, I look at Photos as a good free choice that supplements, but doesn't replace other cloud or physical backup options. Regardless of the slight image size and quality compromise, uploading to Google Photos gives you an extra backup, and it does so at no extra cost to you beyond the time to upload your collection.
The easy creativity and random image reveals by the Assistant are great fun, and help you enjoy your photos in a whole new way (and, sometimes, you'll find images you wish stayed hidden and forgotten). When the search works as you'd expect, it does help you root through your digital image shoebox in a satisfying way. And when it doesn't, you'll get frustrated as I did, especially since it feels like Photos is so close, yet so far. Is Photos 2.0 ready yet?
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Review: HP Pro Tablet 608
As we march on closer to the Windows 10 launch this July 29, more devices are popping up left and right. One of the latest is the HP Pro Tablet 608, and what a tablet it is. HP's pro slate comes outfitted with quite a bit of kit, including a 2,048 x 1,536 display (which technically measures 7.9-inches) and quad-core Intel Core Atom processor.
This is by far the highest-resolution 8-inch Windows tablet to come out yet, putting it on an equal playing field with slates like the iPad Mini 3 and Nexus 9. With the full functionality of Windows 8.1 under its belt, the HP Pro Tablet 608 should give the leading mobile devices a run for their money.
Design
Externally, the HP Pro Tablet 608 actually has a lot in common with the Nvidia Shield Tablet, as far as looks go. The two share a similar trait of having forward-facing stereo speakers at the top and bottom of the screen. Likewise, the two slates share chamfered edges that run around the top edge of the machine.Of course, there are plenty of outward differences too. While the back and sides of the Shield Tablet is coated with a soft touch material, the 608's body is made primarily of bare plastic. The HP pro slate is also a bit wider, thanks to its 4:3 aspect ratio.
Typically going with a squarer screen creates some unsightly black bars while watching media, but the 608 was designed to be more of a productivity device. With this in mind, the wider screen makes it easier to read full page documents at a glance while offering more horizontal space to scroll through webpages.
Lighter and tougher than ever
Despite being a bit wider than most tablet, feels very still a fairly thin device, measuring 5.39 x 8.14 x 0.33 inches (137 x 207 x 8.35 mm). It also weighs almost nothing in your hand, as it tips the scales at only 0.79 pounds (360g).Don't think the light weight means this tablet is chintzy, though. It comes with a metal reinforced chassis along with. The screen is also covered with a scratch resistant sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass 4, which a HP representative was happy to rap her knuckles against.
High-res
What's even more impressive is the screen that's behind this protective sheet of glass. With a resolution of 2,048 x 1,536, the 608's panel looks unbelievably sharp whether you're looking at images or text. Windows 8.1 looks a bit tiny, so you'll want to tweak your scaling options.When Windows 10 rolls around, the newly added tablet mode should make things a little easier to navigate. Still, nothing on the current version of Windows looks painfully tiny, but you'll have to carefully tap and peck at the screen, especially while typing with the virtual keyboard.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test the tablet's speakers, as the unit didn't have any audio or video media on it nor was connected to the Internet at the time. However, front facing speakers usually help to make a device sound better, as seen with the Nexus 9.
HP Pro Tablet 608 also comes packing a 1.44GHz Intel Core Atom Quad Core Z8500 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and a 32GB eMMC SSD for $479 (about £301, AU$616). You will also be able to bump up the specs with 4GB or RAM as well as either a 64GB or 128GB SSD upgrade.
Business class
While this tablet might seem tantalizing for just media consumption and regular usage, the 608 also has a ton of features aimed at business and enterprise applications.The Pro Tablet, for example, is equipped with dual microphones to better record your voice for video-conferencing as well as Cortana – Microsoft's voice-operated personal assistant. On the security front, the 8-inch slate comes loaded with a HP Client Security and Touchpoint Manager to provide advanced security features built on top of the OS.
The Pro Tablet 608 can even be easily converted for retail use. HP offers a Pro Tablet Mobile Retail Solution, which serves as both a durable case for the 8-inch diagonal tablet with a credit card reader on the back that doubles as a handle of sorts. The Pro Tablet also supports a wide range of third-party mobile payment methods, including EMV, NFC, MSR, and most digital wallets.
As for the other accessories, users can also opt for a keyboard case or digital pen. There's also a portable dock that you can actually fold up and put in your pocket. The only problem with the dock is that, while it has HDMI, the HP product manager behind the device informed me that the device needs to be paired with a display wirelessly using Miracast.
Early verdict
From my early impressions with the device, the HP Pro Tablet 608 feels and looks like an amazing piece of kit for the price. Compared to the Nexus 9 or iPad Mini 3, this tablet offers the same screen resolution, but with more storage and the full software functionality of Windows 8.1.At the same time, this device marks a big step up for Windows-based slates with plenty of business-oriented features that stores and small companies will appreciate.
The HP Pro Tablet 608 will be out by July (with Windows 10 in August), and you can be sure TechRadar will get its hands on this device for a full review. Until then stay tuned to this space.
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Microsoft prepares Insiders for Windows 10 upgrade
If you're on a Technical Preview build of Windows 10, how will you upgrade to a licensed, unwatermarked copy of Windows 10 once the software is commercially available?
Windows 10 Insiders will be able to transition to the final Home and Pro builds of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating starting starting July 29, the same day that consumers will have access, according to Gabe Aul, General Manager of the Operating Systems Group at Microsoft.
The final release will be available to Insiders similar to how preview "flights" are currently delivered. Once installed and activated, Insiders who want to install a clean build on their PCs can do so with an ISO.
Enterprise users
Aul didn't give a date as to when Windows 10 Enterprise will be available, except to say that this edition of the OS will be available to download and activate from the Volume Licensing Center.There has been speculation in the past that Windows 10 Enterprise may not be ready until the fall.
"As a reminder, the Enterprise edition of the Windows 10 Insider Preview is not eligible for the free upgrade offer and can be upgraded to the final release of Windows 10 through an active Software Assurance agreement," Aul said.
The enterprise edition will give IT managers more control on when to deploy new features and updates to corporate users to ensure they have a stable experience.
An Insider-only requirement
In a blog post, Aul said that in the next build released to Insiders, a Microsoft Account must be connected to your PC, but this requirement will not extend to consumers on July 29 when the OS launches."You'll need to connect the MSA that you registered for the Windows Insider Program with (and accepted the "Microsoft Windows Insider Program Agreement") in order to continue receiving new Windows 10 Insider Preview builds (both Fast and Slow rings) from Windows Update," Aul said. "We're introducing new infrastructure in Windows Update to help us deliver new builds more effectively to Windows Insiders, and ensure that we're flighting builds to people who have registered and opted in to the program."
This next Insider Preview build will finally come with Microsoft Edge. The new Windows 10 browser is currently available to Insiders, but under its codename of Project Spartan. Aul did not give a date on when the next build is expected to arrive.
Microsoft previously announced that future builds for the Insider program will not come with many new features. Instead, Microsoft is working on bugfixes and fine-tuning the performance as the launch date for Windows 10 comes closer.
Aul said that even though the OS will be released on July 29, Insiders can still remain part of the program after Windows 10 debuts to gain early access to features, fixes and updates in exchange for their feedback.
Windows 10
Windows 10 will come with new features, including a new Start menu, a Halo-inspired digital assistant named Cortana and the new Microsoft Edge browser.Owners of hybrid notebooks will also gain a better user experience with Windows 10 as the OS brings better tablet and desktop support. Through a feature called Continuum, Windows will automatically optimize the experience for slate or notebook mode, depending on how you use your device.
- Read our Windows 10 coverage and get ready for the launch
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Hands-on review: Updated: Microsoft HoloLens
Microsoft HoloLens E3 2015 and Build 2015
Update from E3 2015: We spent more time with HoloLens at the biggest gaming show of the year, E3 2015.We got a glimpse at its potential in gaming with an immersive - though impractical -briefing for the upcoming Halo 5: Guardians for Xbox One. From the voice of Jennifer Hale to a model of a UNSC Leviathan Supercarrier and Spartan Captain Sarah Palmer, the demo helped prep Home Entertainment Editor Nick Pino for a 12-on-12 battle that, it should be noted, his team won by a landslide.
One negative to come out of the show was the knowledge that the viewer's limited field of view isn't likely to get much better anytime soon. While the hardware isn't final, said HoloLens head Kudo Tsunoda, the field of view, which feels like looking through a mobile computer monitor, won't be "hugely noticeably different either."
Hands on from April's Build 2015 below...
Note: Microsoft didn't allow any technology, including cameras, inside the Build 2015 HoloLens demo room. The images below were taken of a HoloLens inside a glass case located outside the demo room.
HoloLens, Microsoft's AR viewer, feels like the future of computing.
The headgear I tried at Build 2015 is still described as "early development hardware," and it definitely felt like it. But the potential and how close HoloLens is to achieving it is remarkable.
The moment I tried on HoloLens during a "Holographic Academy" session with other journalists, I thought, "This is like having a PC on my face." It's not that fully functional yet, but that's how the headgear and what you see and can do with it make you feel.
There were no Mars missions or Minecraft-inspired games in the HoloLens session I attended. Instead, I became a developer for 90 minutes, crafting an application in Unity and adding layers of HoloLens functionality as I went. Every time a new function was added, like gesture controls and spatial sound, I got to see how it translated into the HoloLens experience. The session was intended to show how easy it is to develop for HoloLens, but it also demonstrated what users will experience once it's available.
How HoloLens fits
HoloLens is essentially made of two rings, a thicker one along the outside that contains all the important innards and a slimmer one on the inside that wraps around your head. The inner ring has a roller in the back to tighten and loosen it, and it slides forward and backward so you can adjust how close HoloLens is to your head. HoloLens isn't supposed to sit on your nose, but I found the rubber nose guard that comes with it inevitably fell on my nose no matter how many times I pried HoloLens forward. Thankfully, it's optional and comes off easily. HoloLens felt a lot better for me with it off.I also had a hard time getting HoloLens to fit just right every time I put it on. I had to regularly re-tighten, re-situate, and realign the headgear. When everything was synced up and it fit nicely, the holograms were in full view and it felt right. But if it was too tight, too high up or too far forward, it hindered the experience. Standing in one spot and not moving too much created the best overall viewing experience. The adjustment issues cropped up especially when I was moving around, which is part of the fun when wearing HoloLens.
If you have short hair or it's pulled back, you might not have a much of a problem as someone with long, loose hair, like myself. It may have been my unskilled adjusting abilities, but I had a slight headache whenever I took HoloLens off, like I had been wearing a baseball cap that was two sizes too small.
The headgear I used was untethered and I didn't need to use my hands for anything other than selecting my hologram to move it. It wasn't wired up for battery life like the first early prototypes shown to press.
Fitting issues aside, when HoloLens fits right, it's comfortable. But like all VR and AR headgear, it's weight is front loaded. You can't help but feel like there's a noticeable amount of weight hanging off your forehead. It wasn't uncomfortably heavy, but it was significant enough. If Microsoft can balance out the design and somehow put more weight on the sides or back, it would likely help alleviate the front-heavy sensation.
There's a soft cushion lining the inner ring that touches that I appreciated. It's a small touch, but one that makes it easier to forget you're wearing the viewer and focus on the holograms in front of you.
I wear glasses, and I used HoloLens with them on. My glasses didn't get pressed into my face or feel tight around my head, which has happened when I've worn VR headsets. I also didn't get nauseous, a frequent occurance when I wear Oculus Rift. It helps that I could still see the world around me while wearing HoloLens, so I didn't get disoriented or feel claustrophobic. It would be nice if the HoloLens see-through screen wasn't so dark, but the room was also dimly lit so it may be the right amount of shading in a brighter room or outdoors. I felt most uneasy walking backward as I couldn't quickly swivel my head to see if something was behind me. The headgear also obstruction your upper peripheral view, so some of your vision is obscured.
HoloLens looks and feels like a premium peripheral. Nothing about it screams "cheap" in materials or design, and that will likely be reflected in the price. HoloLens looks like it belongs in the office and would blend well in any living room. As is, it felt too flimsy to stay clean and unscathed in someplace like a construction zone. I found myself handling it gently, so unless Microsoft does some strengthening, you'll probably want to keep HoloLens out of the reach of children.
Holographic viewing
The hologram that was part of my HoloLens experience consisted of two floating spheres, two yellow slides and some stacked blocks situated on a pad of paper. It was called Project Origami, so the materials were meant to look and sound like folded paper.As I went along adding functions to the hologram (which turned into a holographic game), I added controls (gaze, gesture and voice), spatial sound, spatial mapping, and the ability to pick up, move and place the hologram around the room. Finally, an underworld was added to the hologram so that when the spheres rolled off, there was an explosion and they fell into a gaping hole that appeared in the floor. Inside the hole was an underworld, complete with rolling hills and cranes soaring underneath my feet.
The resolution of the holograms projected onto the real world around me was very good. They were vibrant, sharp and realistic, though a little jittery. When I moved around them, the holographic shapes behaved like real world objects would, so I could see their backsides or not see them at all if they became obstructed by other holograms. When the paper spheres rolled onto the floor, they rolled around just like real balls would, bouncing around objects and looking real enough to pick up. When I peered into the underworld that opened up on the floor, it was like I was looking into, as my Microsoft HoloLens "mentor" put it, a world I didn't even know was there the whole time.
But looking at holograms overlain onto the real world is only part of the HoloLens equation. Controlling the holograms is the other.
The HoloLens gaze controls were responsive and should be easy for any user to get the hang of almost immediately. It's the other kinds of input where HoloLens has slightly more trouble.
While voice controls worked, there was a lag between giving them and the hologram executing them. I had to say, "Let it roll!" to roll my spheres down the slides, and there was a one second or so pause before they took a tumble. It wasn't major, but was enough to make me feel like I should repeat the command.
Gesture control was the hardest to get right, even though my gesture control was limited to a one-fingered downward swipe. It took some time to figure out the best distance to hold my hand away from HoloLens and where I needed to place my finger in order for my swipe to register (just imagine someone repeatedly swiping their finger down in mid-air - that was me). Once I finally found the sweet spot though, the control worked better than expected. Instead of reaching out like I was going to touch the hologram, the swipe worked best when I held my hand comfortably in front of me.
With the gesture control, I was able to select the Project Origami diagram, use my gaze to move it around the room, and then use another pinch to get the hologram to stay in a new spot (I moved it from in front of me to a couch to a coffee tablet to a desk.). This wasn't Minority Report-level selecting and swiping, but it was impressive nonetheless.
The HoloLens has spatial sound, which takes the experience to a whole new level. Ambient music played while the hologram was running, and when a sphere rolled, HoloLens added the sound of crumbling paper to go along with it. The sound got louder as I got closer to the hologram and faded as I moved away. It added another dimension to the HoloLens experience that made it that much more immersive.
Of course, as I was viewing the holograms, I was still able to see the real people and objects around me. The holograms weren't disrupted if someone happened to walk through my projection. My favorite part of this HoloLens demo was a wire frame mesh that appeared on real-world objects to show how HoloLens perceives them. The mesh changed as HoloLens registered the objects and I moved my head to look at a new spot. It also went over people around me, though I could still make out their features from behind the digital framework. It was an awesome AR moment: the people around me became part of the hologram themselves.
As cool as it all was, it would have been less distracting if the holographic images disappeared when I started talking to someone. From speaking with Microsoft personnel, it sounded like this would be possible with other applications, but wasn't a feature of this particular Project Origami demonstration. It also felt weird to talk to someone with HoloLens on; I felt a little rude, like I was wearing sunglasses inside.
The biggest issue with HoloLens' holographic viewing is the holograph is limited to what amounts to the size of a large monitor in front of you. You can see the edges of the virtual space where the hologram lives (which are basically the edges of the inner HoloLens frames), and looking outside that space, or moving too close into it, cuts the the hologram off or makes it disappear completely. The wire mesh effect created a more immersive experience and the edges weren't visible then, but viewing the origami hologram on its own felt like I was looking at something that existed on a limited image plane.
The hologram looked best when I was standing about four or five feet away from it and when there was more going on, like the wire frame mesh. There were glitches in the software, and it didn't work perfectly every time. That being said, the problems didn't take away from my enjoyment of HoloLens.
It's important to note that while Microsoft's on-stage HoloLens demonstrations have featured polished and seemingly advanced holograms, at least what I saw wasn't in the same league in terms of quality, complexity or functionality. It may be that Microsoft is saving all the really good stuff for its keynotes, but my demonstration was a less refined and less capable version of what we've been shown in on-stage demos. My demo, while advanced in its own way, sort of felt like child's play AR compared to what we've been shown in Microsoft's keynote demos.
That's not to say that HoloLens can't project these advanced holograms down the road, and as Microsoft said at the beginning of my Holographic Academy session, I was wearing "early development" hardware. But it has some work to do to before the reality it's projecting onstage aligns with the reality of what users like me really see.
Early verdict
HoloLens isn't perfect, either in software or hardware. But it's getting there, and if Microsoft can fix its issues, HoloLens is going to be an immersive entertainment device that could easily find a place in the work world, too.Despite its faults, using HoloLens was, in a word, delightful. With more robust applications, more reliable functionality and an improved viewing experience, HoloLens could become the AR viewer to own. It may also transform the everyday technology we use and how we interact with the world. These are lofty ideals and HoloLens as-is won't accomplish any of that yet, but the possibilities are there.
HoloLens is the most fascinating hardware I've tried in a long time. While we still don't know how long its battery lasts nor how much it costs, HoloLens seems like it has unlimited potential. Not only that, it feels like it can live up to its potential. And that's exciting.
GDC and first hands on review
Update March 2015: Looks like gaming is definitely a go for the HoloLens. During GDC 2015, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer led a panel discussing the importance of games on the augmented reality device:"We see this as a full Windows 10 device with holographic capability,"
Spencer also mentioned that the HoloLens APIs will be made available with Windows 10 gaming SDK.
Original review by Mary Branscombe continued below ...
The HoloLens that Microsoft will ship will be a Star Trek-style visor that wraps around your head but doesn't isolate you from the world, with the Intel SoC and custom Holographic Processing Unit built in. What I tried out in the labs hidden (rather cheekily) under the Microsoft visitor centre didn't look like that, but the engineers and developers who built it say the experience I had with the developer rig is essentially the same.
The HoloLens developer rig is built into a frame that slips onto your head and gets strapped into the right position; there's a sensor array over your eyes to track where you're looking and sensors on the frame to track how your head moves and the Holographic Processing Unit hangs around your neck on a strap (it's about the size and weight of a car radio). Someone needs to help you fit it and before you do that you have to get the distance between your pupils measured. And when you have it set, there's a power cord coming down from the ceiling rigged to move with you as you walk.
All of that will vanish into the final product, so what I tried is very obviously early hardware - like the custom developer kits Microsoft makes for early Xbox developers. Microsoft didn't let us photograph the developer rig, and you need a special camera to capture the HoloLens view so our images were supplied by Microsoft; they're a rather idealised version of the slightly grainier view I saw.
The HPU, as Microsoft calls it, isn't that much of a misnomer (less so than suggesting that a retina screen has the same resolution as the human retina, say). What you see isn't a holograph or a hologram; it's a projection - but it's being projected onto holographically printed lenses, which lets Microsoft produce very cheaply the extremely complex lenses that turn the projection into the 3D image you see.
The HPU turns the graphics into the right signal to project onto those lenses as well as processing information from the sensors that tell it where you're looking and how you're moving your head. It will speed up voice recognition and spatial sound processing, too.
That doesn't just let you see the digital world projected around you; it lets you see it on top of the real world. You can see the person standing next to you and talk to them, avoid walking into walls and chairs and even look at a computer screen, because HoloLens detects the edge and doesn't project over it so you don't need to keep taking it on and off as you work. You can take notes or answer email on a computer with a keyboard or a pen instead of trying to force that kind of close up work into the world of gestures and gaze.
If you wear glasses, this close-fitting headset isn't ideal. It's hard to make it fit comfortably - I found it either pushed my glasses down onto my nose or pressed them hard into my face, and I much preferred using it without my glasses on. As I'm short sighted, that made it harder to see detail. Talking to people outside Microsoft who've tried the actual HoloLens headset, it's light and comfortable to wear but the first version will probably still press on your glasses more than you'd like. And if you wear varifocals, you move your eyes automatically to look through the right part of your glasses for what you're focusing on; that can mean you look down at things that aren't in view for HoloLens (or for someone on a Skype call to your HoloLens) or look up and lose the HoloLens image.
The good news is that even if you're very sensitive to motion and prone to get VR sickness, or if you get headaches wearing 3D glasses, HoloLens is comfortable to use. I'm very prone to both of those and have problems with many other systems; after a brief moment the first two times I put it on when I could tell I was adjusting to what I was seeing, I had no problems at all with nausea, headaches or the other discomfort that can come when you trick your brain into thinking it's seeing something real.
The HoloLens projected screen moves as you move your head and you control apps either with voice commands or by using the equivalent of a mouse click - the air tap. You just hold your fist out in front of you where you can see it then raise and lower your finger. I didn't have to worry about getting it in the right place or moving it at the right speed; as long as I made sure my other fingers and thumb were out of the way, HoloLens got the gesture every time.
Digital reality
I tried three different applications with the HoloLens. I also got to watch several people using the Holo Studio 3D building tool, which has the most sophisticated controls, using a combination of gaze, gesture and voice commands to let you design objects you can see in the real world, so you know they're the size you want before you spend time and money 3D-printing them.The most engaging was playing HoloBuilder; inspired by Minecraft and built with the help of the Minecraft team, this is a game that lets you build a digital landscape that exists in your physical space. Think the giant LEGO setup in the basement of Will Ferrell's house in The LEGO Movie, only invisible until you put HoloLens on, and built both on top of and underneath your furniture - and even extending under the floor and into the walls.
Using voice commands and the air tap gesture and my own real feet, I walked around a village, tickled a sheep to stop it falling off the table, dug through a (real) bench to make a hole, blew up some TNT to drop zombies into the lava pool that was in the chamber I'd dug through to, then blew a hole in the wall and lit a lamp to see the bats flying through the caverns in the wall.
Like Minecraft, half the fun is that your creations are obviously digital, but seeing them perched on real tables and benches was even more fun. This combination of virtual and physical worlds was delightful and immersive and shows the obvious gaming and entertainment potential here.
But the other two apps I tried were actually more impressive and certainly more useful. Making a Skype call from HoloLens is a good way to try out voice and gesture commands; you can look at the person you want to call in the address book - which is a grid of faces - then air tap to call them. The video call doesn't jump around the room if you move; it sits in one place unless you look too far away and then it moves back into view, or you can pin it in place.
The person you're calling doesn't need a HoloLens; they see in Skype what you're looking at and they can draw diagrams on the video that appear in your view. So if you're helping someone change a tyre or fix their dishwasher or fit a new light switch, you don't have to explain what they need to look for or pull out or unscrew - you can take a pen and show them.
This would fantastic for teaching and training, for remote support or for getting an expert opinion; imagine a remote handyman who could give customers advice (and charge them for it) or a repair service that always turns up with the right part because you've shown them what they're fixing in advance. It would also be a really interesting way to have a meeting where you're collaborating remotely on physical objects, not just the usual documents and presentations.
Remote working is something NASA has to do, but the OnSight system the Jet Propulsion Lab is building with Microsoft made me feel like I was walking on Mars. Some years ago I visited the Supervisualisation Lab at the university of San Diego, where they have a wall of screens that can show a life-size image of Mars using the photos sent back by the Mars Rover and I could look out at Mars like looking out of a window. HoloLens meant I could step out onto the surface of Mars and walk around, bending over to look at rocks, turning round to see the view and looking up to see the sky. This is where I most wanted to have peripheral vision because with HoloLens you only see what you're looking at; as you turn your head, the Rover suddenly comes into view and it's a rather large surprise.
OnSight isn't for digital tourism, delightful as that is; there are tools to tell the Rover where to go next to take photographs and samples - and the terrain that looks flat and easy to drive over on a PC screen is revealed as a treacherous series of slopes and ditches the Rover can easily fall down when you see it in 3D, so JPL scientists can look for an easy route before they air tap to give the Rover a target to photograph or burn with its laser.
They can also collaborate; other people in the landscape show up as stylised avatars, and a handy dotted line shows you where they're looking (HoloLens knows that, so it can show you), which avoids all the creepy 'uncanny valley' problems of realistic avatars. This is something we're going to have to work out social conventions for; when you say goodbye to someone miles away on the telephone it's easy to hang up, but when you can still see their avatar just turning away and ignoring them feels slightly rude. (Equally, watching someone use HoloLens is disturbing because they're turning and crouching and reaching out for things you can't see, and it's hard not to think they look strange.)
Walking around Mars with another scientist, or walking around an unfinished building and seeing where the walls will be, or being able to pull a virtual engine out of a physical car to see how it fits together so you can work out which screws to undo - there's a huge range of possibilities here, because this is far more than just a gaming system. And Microsoft is sensitive enough to privacy issues to have avoided the creepy feeling of using augmented reality to spy on the public world that Google Glass is so prone to. HoloLens doesn't just tag the physical world with information you can get other ways; it adds a realistic 3D digital world on top of (and underneath) it in a way that feels like magic and is delightful to use.
Early verdict
It's far too early to tell whether the HoloLens will be a success; only a select few have used the final design - instead of the early developer rig we tried out - so I can't comment first hand on how comfortable it is (with or without glasses).I saw only four apps, one of which is more of a proof of concept (sorry Minecraft fans, HoloBuilder may not even ship). Price and battery life are both things I can only guess at. It's entirely possible that HoloLens may be more of a curiosity than a mainstream success. But if it takes off, and later models get smaller and lighter and less obtrusive, then Microsoft has just changed the world of computing again the way it did with Windows. HoloLens quickly feels natural and it's easy to see how useful it will be - and how much fun too.
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New Xbox One interface borrows Windows 10's coolest trick
After two long years, the Xbox One is going to get a desperately needed touch-up.
Microsoft announced at its E3 2015 press event that it will release a new update for the home screen that includes its virtual assistant, Cortana, as well as gamers' avatars from their Xbox 360s, enhancements to the community section and faster loading times.
The update will roll out to Xbox One preview members in the coming weeks, before coming to every user's system in the fall.
Before you get too excited, Cortana will require a Kinect to use, and the revamp itself should be met with a healthy bit of skepticism - Microsoft isn't exactly known for coming up with the best interface designs.
Other changes include moving pins to a different location and a greater emphasis on community engagement - i.e. making game hubs an integral part of the home screen.
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Hands-on review: Sony Xperia Z4v
Introduction and design
Sony's latest flagship smartphone, the Z4v, is an offshoot of the Xperia Z4 and Xperia Z3+ that's making its way to US shores by way of Verizon Wireless. The new release aims to provide the best traits of each of those phones, while also offering enough aesthetic and internal boosts to trump last year's Xperia Z3v, which was also available through Verizon Wireless.While the build I got my hands on was only a working prototype and didn't feature final software, the presentation was complete enough for me to make some snap judgment calls before its tentative summer release.
The Z4v has what it takes to hang with the sharpest and most powerful smartphones available in the US. But if you were hoping for a direct translation of the Xperia Z4 or Z3+, you might be a little disappointed.
Design
Sony's line of smartphones rarely receive a massive design overhaul and the new Xperia Z4v is no exception. While it does bring along some minor, appreciated tweaks in its design, the somewhat boxy, yet sleek physique that it's known for remains in full form.
Its rounded edges are comprised of matte-textured plastic, smoothed over to make the phone a pleasure to grip and hold. It's not nearly as flashy as the aluminum-detailed Z3+, but it'll do.
The camera shutter button, as well as the volume rocker and silver power controls occupy the handset's right edge, as usual. On the left side, one flap covers a slot that you can stuff a nano SIM, as well as a microSD card into.
Moving down to the bottom, Sony re-engineered its micro USB charging port so that it no longer needs to be covered by a flap guard during splashy adventures, as it retains the strong IP68 weatherproof properties that protect the rest of phone. Finally, on the top, there's a 3.5mm jack for listening to media through headphones our outputting through a larger, more capable set of speakers.
The Z4v measures in at 144 x 72 x 8.6mm (L X W X H) and rocks a lightweight body weighing 160g. Those who have been keeping track of the Xperia Z3+ will notice that the Z4v gained a bit of heft, not just in weight (a 16g increase) but also in terms of thickness, where Sony stuck on almost an extra two millimeters. This might not seem like much, but it's quite a remarkable sizing change-up from recent phones in the Xperia line.
The front and back of the Xperia Z4v are each covered in a sheet of tempered glass that looks and feels premium. On the downside, you'd better be in the habit of carrying a cloth with you, as it makes this unit a total fingerprint magnet.
The front-facing panel features the signature carved-out spots for the speaker placement on the top and bottom edges. Also similar to the Z3+ is the bezel, which is slim and appealing here. The only other change in front-facing design is the Sony logo, which now appears beneath the screen in favor of a large Verizon logo taking its place on top.
Flipping the phone over reveals an equally smooth surface, only obstructed by the new 20.7MP camera, which juts out less than the camera housing on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The NFC logo occupies its usual space, about a third of the way down the back of the phone. Right beneath it is yet another Verizon logo.
The Sony Xperia Z4v we got some time with was black throughout, but will also be available in white upon its Summer release in the US.
Performance, camera and early verdict
As stated earlier, the software running isn't final, nor is the product I got hands-on time with either. In this state, I'll avoid coming to a complete conclusion on performance, but what I saw looks promising.Running on Android Lollipop 5.0.2, the Xperia Z4v is a snappy device, operating on a balanced mix of stock features with a few touches of custom overlay. I was pleased that it never got bogged down while I swiped away and accessed the limited set of apps and features available to me.
Internal storage out of the box with the Z4v rings in at a generous 32GB, with support for additional storage through the microSD slot. The 3GB of RAM, working in tandem with the octa-core, 64-bit Snapdragon 810 seems to be doing the right tricks to make this phone tick at a good measure. You can rely on some fairly extensive testing being done once we get the final hardware in our hands.
Despite being limited during my hands-on time to an aggressively lit convention room, the phone's 5.2-inch IPS panel features pretty good viewing angles. It gives off a warm, vibrant picture and is full of detail, thanks to its WQHD (2560 x 1440) resolution. This is a step up from both the Xperia Z3+ and last year's Xperia Z3v, which both feature only FHD screens.
With a meatier screen, the battery inside better be good enough to power it for a long time. Unfortunately, while we won't know just how long it will last until we get a review unit, we do know that Sony has increased the battery capacity to 3,000mAh.
It's a slight, but appreciated improvement over the 2,900mAh-toting Z3+, but compared to the Z3v's 3,200mAh, we're left puzzled. For how much larger the Z4v is physically than its relative counterparts, why not include a battery with more juice in it?
Moving onto the cameras, which is the deciding feature in a smartphone for many, I had mixed results. It's hard to expect much from a decent DSLR camera in such a harshly lit room, let alone a smartphone camera.
That said, the samples that I snapped with the 20.7MP sensor on the back, which offers improved ISO versatility in low-light situations, were pretty good. The colors are accurate, the white balance did a serviceable job of painting the scene without harsh highlights or grainy dark spots.
On the other hand, the 5MP front-facing captured shots that were a little less than favorable. Again, it's tough to be harsh when you shoot in a room with unforgiving lighting conditions, but I found the results to be lackluster. I absolutely loathed the blur effect that I couldn't avoid during my hands-on, making each photo look like my face was caked with a pound of makeup. We'll test the cameras much more extensively for the final review.
Another deciding feature for some is gaming, which is where the Sony Xperia Z4v beats out the competition with its PS4 Remote Play feature. Through an app, it's easy to hook up a DualShock 4 controller and get going with Android games built into the phone, or to connect to a nearby Sony PS4 and continue where you left off on a blockbuster title.
Early verdict
From my time with Sony's US-bound Xperia Z4v, it seems to check a lot of the necessary boxes. It's comfortable to hold, responsive and easy to use and it looks stunning.At the time of writing, I don't know how much the phone will go for. Whereas most Xperia phones have the tendency to be prohibitively expensive, it's likely that the Xperia Z4v will be more affordably priced (relative to the competition), since it's tied to Verizon Wireless contracts. Full pricing details will be available closer to the phone's release.
Additions like the WQHD panel are appreciated, as are features that some might not even use, like wireless Qi charging support. But some of the changes come at a cost. Namely, the size of the phone and the battery inside. I'm not sure why these feats couldn't have been accomplished in the same slim and lighter build of Xperia Z3+, but hey, I don't make phones.
We'll see if and how these design choices impact the Z4v's performance once we get our hands on a review unit. Until then, what's here provides more than enough reason to be excited for the Xperia's return to the US.
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Sony doesn't plan to follow up on Xbox One's biggest upgrade
Xbox fans were shocked and elated to hear that their Xbox 360 games were about to start working on their Xbox One. As it turns out, Sony was pretty shocked, too.
Microsoft is bringing backwards compatibility to the Xbox One via an emulator that can read Xbox 360 titles, and will be adding games from Xbox 360’s over 1,000-game library regularly. The best part of all? It’s a free patch.
Upon hearing this announcement, many Sony loyals hoped that the PS4 would follow suit and find a better solution to playing their old games. Unfortunately for PS4 users, Sony’s head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida said in an interview with Eurogamer that the announcement “was surprising” and that PS4 doesn’t plan on adding backward compatibility anytime soon.
“PS3 is such a unique architecture, and some games made use of SPUs very well,” Yoshida says, “It's going to be super challenging to do so. I never say never, but we have no plans.”
PS Now and later
Currently, PS4 owners can pay $20 (or £12.60, AU$25.78) per month for PS Now, allowing them to play a library of 100+ games. However there’s no price break for those who already owned the games for PS3. Not exactly a perfect way to play your old games.Yoshida was also surprised by the engineering feat, saying “I didn't think it was possible. There must be lots of engineering effort.” Though, it’s no secret that Microsoft isn’t short on software developers.
According to Microsoft head of Xbox Phil Spencer, backward compatibility was one of the chief requests to bring to the Xbox One, with good reason. Millions of fans paid out hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for their Xbox 360 games. Frankly, it’s likely that the backwards compatibility issue has kept both the Xbox One and the PS4 from soaring more than they have already.
Whether Xbox One’s backward compatibility upgrade will affect sales in a big way has yet to be seen, but Microsoft has definitely made waves amongst its competitors. However, with The Last Guardian, a new Shenmue and Final Fantasy 7 coming to the PS4, Sony is boasting a strong enough games lineup.
Via CNet
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Keitai: How to transfer SIM contacts to Google on Android
How to transfer SIM contacts to Google
Phone contacts can be a tricky beast to master, but one of the best ways to keep all your buddies in check is have everyone's numbers saved to the cloud.This week in Keitai we show you how to move your contacts to the cloud, Winston gets rebuilt...again, a zombie apocalypse takes over a phone network's advert and a singing cherry gets stuck in your head.
How to save Android contacts to Google
Saving contacts to your Google account is a quick and easy process that can save you a lot of time and frustration later on. It means when you move to a new Android device and log in, all of your friends and family's details will be ready and waiting for you.Plus if you switch to an iOS, Windows Phone or BlackBerry handset you can still pull your chum's details in from Google.
1. Import your contacts
Open up the Contacts app, click the menu icon (often three dots at the top right-hand corner) and select "Import/export".
Next you need to select "Import from SIM card", which will allow you to take the names and numbers that you have saved on your smartphone's SIM card.
2. Save your contacts to Google
A new screen will appear, letting you choose a Google account to save the contacts to. If you've signed in a number of Google accounts on your device, then you will have several options.
Just choose the account you want to store all your contacts with. A screen will now appear saying "Reading from SIM card", and your contacts will be imported.
3. Import your contacts from Google
When you need to import your contacts from your Google account, you can do so by opening up the Contacts app, clicking the menu icon and selecting 'Accounts'. Tap "Google" on the following screen, then tap on the Google account that you saved your contacts to, and make sure that "Contacts" is turned on.
- Come back next week to find out how you can import your iPhone contacts to Google – which makes changing from iOS to Android quick and easy.
Bring me the Storm
"Why do my eyes hurt?" asked Winston, blinking against the bright light shining directly at him.The tall panther bent down towards his face and said, in an oddly gruff voice, "That's because you've never used them before."
Then a cough came from somewhere else in the room, and the panther paused before turning back to Winston. "Oh, no, wait, that's somebody else. No, your eyes hurt because you've been asleep for days and we were shining this bright light at you."
Winston shuddered again, trying to regain his thoughts. What happened to him back there? What was that explosion all about? And why was someone trying to suck him so hard in the forest?
"You must have many questions," said the panther calmly. "Which we will answer in due course. But first, you must rest - there is a lot of rebuilding to be done upon you."
Winston tried to look down, but the light created a prison wall his eyes could not penetrate. The effort of lifting his head exhausted him, and he quickly succumbed to greasy slumber.
Hours passed. The panther continued working on the shattered unicorn's frame, pulling out wires, screeching into broken limbs with a metal cutting saw and connecting various things up to oddly monochrome monitors littering the laboratory.
Above the team working on the troubled Winston floated a vast holographic schematic of the horse-like creature… well, what was left of him. His hind legs were gone, his chest a mix of red and blue flashing zones, his mane a forgotten memory where a charred set of lumps now lived.
A small parrot mopped the panther's brow as he toiled into the fifth hour of the operation - when suddenly alarms started shrieking all around.
"He's coding!" yelled a giraffe that was hunched horrendously over a monitor.
"Get me the kit!" shouted the panther, shoving aside his work station. A crocodile lumbered quickly in with a box on his back, which the panther grabbed (despite lacking opposable thumbs - just go with it) and tipped onto the floor.
He scrabbled through the contents, grabbing a Nokia 8210, a Phillips C1 and an original Motorola Dynatac. He threw them onto the table and began fusing them quickly onto the chassis that surrounded what was left of Winston's equine body.
"It's not working!" he screamed. "I need more power!"
"There's nothing left, sir," said the giraffe quietly.
The panther dropped to the floor, panting. "You know there is," he said, after a moment.
The room gasped collectively. "Sir, surely you can't mean…?"
"Yes," said the panther gravely. "Bring me the Storm".
Careful, you'll Elop it
This week we saw ex-Nokia boss Stephen Elop part ways with new employer Microsoft, so to celebrate we've dug out an interview he did a few years ago on Finnish TV.
Still boss of Nokia at the time, Elop wastes no time in chucking the host's iPhone to the floor, and then promising to replace it - WITH A NOKIA OF COURSE.
Oh Stephen, never change.
Scary press shot of the week
The zombie apocalypse has begun. One of the infected is stumbling around an abandoned school, having just torn the head off its latest victim. You can still see the terror in this poor lady's face as she came to terms with her inevitable fate.
And for some reason T-Mobile thought this gruesome scene would be perfect for an advert on video calling. Disgusting.
Retro video of the week
We've had the Dancing Pony, Singing Kitty and even a boyband Muppet - but five years ago Three UK was already making annoyingly catchy adverts which had little relevance to anything, let alone phones.
Just as you start feeling sorry for the leading lady in this advert and the blatant bullying she's having to endure, the plot twists and she becomes a cold-blooded killer.
Catchy song, though.
Proper stuff from the site
- Nokia phones may be making a comeback
- How to make Google Hangouts your default text message app
- We learn more about the OnePlus 2
- And Huawei is making the next Nexus handset
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