Новости за 16.10.2018

Earlier this month, Facebook announced Portal, a camera-equipped smart device that’s meant to compete with Amazon’s Echo Show. But the company’s hardware ambitions apparently go far beyond that: Cheddar is reporting that Facebook is working on a TV camera that would offer Portal-like video chatting on a bigger screen and allow users to stream content from Facebook Watch.

Self-proclaimed rap god Eminem and visionary director Terrence Malick officially have more in common than people may have thought: both partnered with Google for over-the-top Pixel 3 commercials. But whereas Malick’s commercial captured the Pixel 3 camera’s best qualities, Eminem’s gaudy performance failed the entire concept.

Pokémon Go players will be able to considerably expand their pokédexes this week, as Niantic has confirmed the arrival of the fourth generation of pokémon. This generation first appeared in the Nintendo DS games Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, and hail from the Hokkaido-influenced Sinnoh region.

Analogue is known for providing high-end consoles designed to play classic Nintendo games, and now, the company is turning its attention to Sega. Today, Analogue is announcing the Mega Sg, a retro console that can play Sega Genesis, Mega Drive, and Master System cartridges, and it works seamlessly with modern TVs. “I’ve wanted to do the end all, be all Sega system for a long time,” says Analogue’s Christopher Taber. “There is zero proper way to explore Sega’s history, and it’s time to give Sega... Читать дальше...

As per tradition with every new flagship smartphone, iFixit carried out its teardown of the Google Pixel 3 XL. The teardown revealed several new additions to the Pixel 3 that are in line with the phone’s spec sheet. The iFixit team came across the new Google Titan M Security chip, the same Pixel Visual Core as the Pixel 2 XL’s, and the most interesting find: a Samsung AMOLED display.

Boston Dynamics continues to get the most out if its AdSense dollars with a new YouTube video of its four-legged robot SpotMini. This time, it’s dancing to a cover of “Uptown Funk,” complete with the best robotic rendition of the Running Man dance we’ve ever seen.

At the end of an event where two devices were already announced — the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro — Huawei had another surprise up its sleeve. The Huawei Mate 20 X is the largest in the lineup with its 7.2-inch OLED display, which already consists of three phablet devices. The device is equipped with a massive 5,000mAh battery, and it’s compatible with styluses.

Fortnite’s latest weekly update introduces a souped-up vehicle that seems to wreak havoc wherever it goes. The quadcrasher, as it’s called, does more than navigate terrain quickly. It can destroy any player-built surface and boost through the air.

On January 12th, 2018, an Indian PSLV rocket took off en route to space carrying a cluster of 31 satellites into orbit. It was a successful mission: every probe deployed where it needed to be. The only problem? Four of those satellites didn’t have permission to fly from the US government.

Discord’s digital game store, which first launched to just 50,000 users in Canada back in August, is now available globally in a public beta capacity, the chat company announced today. The marketplace, simply called Discord Store, is launching with 22 titles, including Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight and other indie gems like Dead Cells and Into The Breach. Five of those 21 titles are labeled “First on Discord” titles, meaning Discord is the primary distribution for those titles at launch.

Elon Musk has announced that Tesla’s new custom AI chip is about six months away from being installed in new production cars. The CEO said that the chip, which was confirmed as being in development last December, will offer “somewhere between [a] 500% & 2000%” increase in its vehicle’s autonomous driving performance. Existing Tesla owners who have already paid for full self-driving will be offered this “hardware 3” update for Autopilot free of charge.

Last week, I traveled to Dumbo, Brooklyn, to see some interactive, aluminum, mirrored bricks. A company called Breakfast designed a massive “display” called Brixel Mirror that reacts to movement to change what it shows. (You might have seen one of the company’s prior projects: Flip-Discs.) The demo unit I was shown, and the only complete machine right now, features 540 bricks (or “brixels,” as the company refers to them) and measures 19 by 6 feet. At the bottom of each brick column is a Linux... Читать дальше...

At a grand event in London today, Huawei is unveiling the latest members of its Mate smartphone series: the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. The Mate 20 is the larger device, featuring a 6.5-inch, 2244 x 1080 LCD display with a peculiar 18.7:9 aspect ratio. It also has one of the smallest screen notches we’ve seen, accommodating only the selfie camera, with the earpiece positioned at the very edge of the phone. With 820 nits of brightness, Huawei claims this is an extremely power-efficient display, so... Читать дальше...

How does two weeks’ battery life sound?

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The Kindle Paperwhite has been the best Kindle for most people since 2015 when Amazon last updated it with a screen that was nearly on par with the high-end Voyage and Oasis models at just a fraction of the price. Today, Amazon is updating the Paperwhite again, adding new features that were introduced with the second-generation Oasis, including water resistance and support for Audible audiobooks in a lighter and thinner package.

Hinge is launching a new feature today called We Met, which will let users rate their dates. We Met will pop up a few days after a match exchanges phone numbers. It’ll ask each person individually if they ended up going out with that match and whether that person is the “type of person they’d like to see again.” That response is then used to further hone Hinge’s matching algorithm. (It also remains confidential.) The feature works similarly to Hinge’s “Most Compatible” feature by relying on other... Читать дальше...

Machine learning is enabling some brilliant things in art and music. The latest example, from Google’s creative research team Magenta, is the Piano Genie — an AI program that lets you improvise fluently on the piano by simply bashing away at eight buttons.

It’s easy to think of Microsoft and immediately think of Bill Gates. While Gates led Microsoft to where it stands today, co-founder Paul Allen played an early instrumental role in creating the software giant. Originally named “Micro-soft,” Gates and Allen founded their software company in 1976 after meeting as students at Lakeside School in Seattle. It was this unique friendship at the right time and the right place that ultimately changed the world of computing.

The Mighty, a music player that behaves a lot like a Spotify-connected iPod Shuffle, has been updated for 2018. The new Mighty Vibe bumps the battery life from four to five hours if you’re using wireless headphones, has an improved Bluetooth antenna for better range, and a redesigned companion app.

Lyft’s monthly subscription experiment is going national. The ride-hailing company has been tinkering with subscriptions since earlier this year, and it’s now ready to roll it out to a much wider market. Ultimately, Lyft has high hopes of being grouped together with subscription powerhouses like Netflix or Amazon, especially as it gears up for an initial public offering in 2019.

When the original Pixel was unveiled by Google in October 2016, many questioned why the Mountain View company was entering the business of designing, building, and selling phones. Two years on, that sentiment still lingers, as expressed by Andreessen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evans when he asks, “What purpose do Google’s Pixel phones serve?”

Sony has announced that it’s fixed a bug that was causing PlayStation 4 consoles to crash if they received a specific message. Writing on Twitter in response to a comment pointing out the bug, an official PlayStation support account said, “We’ve since fixed the issue” before offering a solution to anyone who’s been affected by the issue.

Qualcomm is launching a family of chips that can add incredibly high-speed Wi-Fi — at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second — to phones, laptops, routers, and so on. It’s the start of a new generation of this super-fast Wi-Fi standard, but it isn’t going to be used to speed up your typical web browsing. And whether it catches on at all remains an open question.

Surface Pro is still the 2-in-1 to beat

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Microsoft opts for internal upgrades over external changes for its second laptop