Sky Q goes on sale in the UK
Sky TV’s long overdue revamp has finally arrived. The new Sky Q service is available to order starting today, ushering in fresh hardware and a vastly improved UI. The basic box costs £42 per month and can record three shows simultaneously in 1080p — you can watch a fourth one live — on a 1TB hard drive. The Sky Q Silver box, meanwhile, is 4K ready and can capture up to four shows at once onto a 2TB drive, with the option to watch a fifth channel live. It costs £54 per month and supports up to four Sky Q Mini boxes, which cost £99 each, for multi-room viewing.
The upgraded boxes are welcome, but the real attraction here is the revamped software. The old Sky TV experience is terribly outdated — moving around the guide is slow, clunky and often confusing. Sky Q is a much-needed refresh that changes almost every aspect of the navigation — it no longer looks like a spreadsheet, with a vertical list for switching between sections and a heavy emphasis on bright, large images.
Sky Q can be bought online and over the phone right now. If you would rather walk into a store and talk to an expert, however, you’ll have to wait until February 12th before making the all-important upgrade.
Via: Sky (Press Release)
Source: Sky Q
Popular PSP game Lumines coming to Android this year
Mobile games are all the hype. No longer do you need expensive consoles in order to spend some great time playing. You can install the most addictive and fun games on almost any smartphone. Let that sink in… we all have one. How much things have changed, right?
But even if technology evolves, plenty of us seem to be stuck looking for archaic titles or retro style games. The point is that whether you want a high-resolution FPS or 8-bit style graphics, you will have a hell of a time with plenty of apps. Mobile games are estimated to earn $3.31 billion in revenue, only in the USA, this year. It’s obvious the veteran developers will try to cash in on it!
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Today we are here to talk about Lumines, a game that was very popular during the PSP days. Enhance Games and publisher Mobcast aim to bring it to smartphones around the world. And it’s not only one title – there will be two versions, both coming this year. They are named Lumines 2016 and Lumines VS (temporary monickers).
See also: 15 best free Android games of 2016!
Lumines 2016 is said to come to Android (and iOS) this summer, while the VS iteration will be released in the winter. But sadly we don’t know much else about these games. The original Lumines was a Tetris spin-off, so you can expect the new games to follow a similar format.
With that in mind, let’s just sit tight and enjoy other games until Lumines makes its epic comeback. Are any of you looking forward to these launches?
Sundar Pichai just became the highest paid CEO in the U.S.
Talk about a bonus – Google CEO Sundar Pichai just got a friendly slap on the back to the tune of a $199 million Alphabet stock grant, making him the highest paid CEO in America. A recent SEC filing revealed the record grant, the highest ever paid to a Google executive officer.
Pichai was awarded the stock just six months after accepting the role of Google CEO as Larry Page moved onto to run its newly-formed parent company Alphabet Inc. The stock grant, which will vest in quarterly increments until 2019 if Pichai remains at Google, reportedly brings Pichai’s holdings in the company to around the $650 million mark.
See also: Alphabet is now the world’s most valuable company, toppling Apple
Other high-value stock grants listed at the SEC included $42.8 million for Diane Greene, Google’s cloud business chief and $38.3 million for Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s CFO. Google reportedly only offers stock grants once every two years, to encourage executives to take a long-term view of the business. Former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, who held the CEO position for a decade, walked away with over $3 billion in shares.
What’s the best bonus you’ve ever received from your boss?
Diatoms are a biological wonder material, new study says
Caltech professor Julia Greer and her team have taken a really close look at diatoms and found them to be tougher and more resilient than previously thought. Diatoms are single-celled, mostly microscopic algae encased in hard shells made of silica called “frustules.” To figure out just how durable they really are, Greer and her team made beams out of frustules and conducted three-point bending experiments on them. According to their tests, it has the highest specific strength among all known biological materials. In other words, it has higher strength-to-weight ratio than bones, teeth and even antlers, all of which are known for being sturdy.
While silica is an inherently resilient material, it’s also brittle. It’s like glass that will break when you drop it. Frustules, however, are dotted with honeycomb-like holes, and the team believes that their porous surface is the feature that prevents them from cracking and breaking. As Greer says, “[t]he presence of the holes delocalizes the concentrations of stress on the structure.” That’s why while other groups of scientists are building things out of graphene — another wonder material — this Caltech team plans to create bio-inspired artificial structures using diatoms.
Source: Caltech, CaltechAuthors
Twitter is setting up a safety council to tackle abuse
If there’s one thing that’s hampering Twitter’s adoption in the wider world, it’s that it’s become a pretty toxic place for some people. The firm has decided to tackle this problem by announcing the formation of the Twitter Trust and Safety Council, a group tasked with reforming the service. The council’s stated intention is to ensure the social network is a platform where “anyone, anywhere can express themselves safely and confidently.” The site’s head of global policy, Patricia Cartes, revealed that the body has recruited advocates from a wide network of advocacy groups. There are more than 40 listed contributors, many of which are legitimate anti-abuse organizations like GLAAD, the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Samaritans.
Twitter has also sought out representatives from child protection agencies, anti-racism / anti-semitism groups and one of the service’s biggest targets: Feminist Frequency. Frequency, led by critic Anita Sarkeesian, is more experienced than most at seeing what Twitter’s ugly side looks like. Her series, Tropes vs. Women — an examination on how women are treated in video games — led to a series of threats ranging from assassination through to acts of domestic terrorism.
The site’s abuse problem has been growing for a while, with the site seemingly incapable of taking positive steps to mitigate it. Recently, Canadian journalist Veerender Jubbal was advised by law enforcement to stay off Twitter after an anonymous figure turned up at his former home with a gun. Jubbal, another games journalist, has been previously targeted by gamergaters who objected to his call for greater ethical standards in the industry. Those with long memories will recall that a picture of him was photoshopped to make him appear to be a terrorist, accused of perpetrating the Paris attacks.
I’d like to clear that up really quick. On Christmas Eve of 2015, an abuser posted Veerender’s old home address with a picture of a gun.
— Little Fat Girl (@KivaBay) January 26, 2016
Twitter has often been accused of not doing enough to deal with online abuse, with former CEO Dick Costolo admitting that “we suck at dealing with trolls.” It’s a state of affairs that may have only now reached the site’s rank-and-file staff after developer Brandon Carpenter felt the full full force of the site’s ire. He tweeted a message in response to the #RIPTwitter meme and was met with a hurricane of piss and vinegar and led him to the following conclusion:
Wow people on Twitter are mean
— Brandon Carpenter (@bhcarpenter) February 6, 2016
Yup, they are.
The formation of the safety board does seem like a strong, positive step to remedying one of Twitter’s least-desirable facets. But, an advisory panel can only suggest so many things and there’s no guarantee that their advice will be heard. Much like Uber’s safety panel — formed to tackle the company’s dwindling reputation — it remains to be seen if any action will actually come out of the move.
Source: Twitter
Kickstarter lists 100 facts from 100,000 funded campaigns
After almost seven years online, Kickstarter can now boast that it has 100,000 successfully funded campaigns under its belt. A photography project called Falklands/Malvinas: One War, all Wars by a Nat Geo photographer helped it get to that number when it reached its goal on February 8th. To celebrate the occasion, the crowdfunding portal has listed 100 pieces of trivia about those projects and the website in general. For instance, it apparently took Kickstarter 121 days to get its first 100 fully funded campaigns and but only 3 days to get its latest 100. The most successful creator on the website managed to reach the funding goal for 94 different projects.
Did you know that eleven films that came out of Kickstarter were nominated for an Oscar, while four creators won a Grammy? Not really that surprising, since Music is the category with the largest share of campaigns (22,133). When the website reported that it reached $2 billion in total pledges last year, it also revealed that it has 9.5 million users — 9,088,422 of those users pledged money to fund 100,000 successful projects.
Clearly, a lot of people aren’t deterred by reports that a good number of campaigns fail to deliver and continue to back those that look interesting to them. Number lovers can read all 100 bits of information on Kickstarter’s website. It has loads of other amusing trivia besides the website’s statistics, including the fact that someone reached his goal for a Shakespeare vs. Cthulhu anthology.
Source: Kickstarter
USB Type-Combustion | Podcast 051
Host Joshua Vergara returns as host this week and is joined by Jonathan Feist, Joe Hindy, and Nirave Gondhia to focus upon a few of the best topics from the week’s news. On the docket this week, we have Microsoft buying (and potentially dooming) Swiftkey, the USB Type-C debacle, and a wistful discussion about users’ needs versus actual smartphone progress. It’s another fun-filled podcast episode, so hit that play button!
ALSO, next week marks our ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY episode! 52 whole weeks of the AA Podcast have been done for your listening pleasure and in celebration of this milestone, the guys are going to field YOUR QUESTIONS in a Mailbag episode! Make sure you visit AndroidAuthority.com and our social media pages to find where you can put your own questions in, potentially to be answered on the podcast!
The Android Authority Podcast – discussing topics in Android every single week.
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Relevant Links
Microsoft buys Swiftkey!
Bad USB Type-C cable destroys reviewers equipment
honor 5X vs Nexus 5X vs Oneplus X
University makes FitBit mandatory, tracks students’ fitness
While Andrew Grush was away from the show, he still had something to say: Huawei, I love your phones, but you have to fix your software!
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Joseph Hindy
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Andrew Grush
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Nirave Gondhia
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Recorded on February 5th, 2016 – Hosted and Produced by Joshua Vergara.
Amazon India no longer accepting mobile phone returns
Getting a smartphone? You may want to think hard about where you are buying it from; at least if you live in India and are thinking of getting your handset from Amazon. The popular carrier has just changed its return policy in this country, and not for the better.
The terms on Amazon India’s return policy page have been updated, stating that customers will no longer be able to return smartphones, shall they decide they no longer need it. This applies to all orders “fulfilled by Amazon”. So no refunds for you as of February 7th!
This means that if you are to hit that buy button, you better make sure it’s the phone you really want. But don’t worry, it’s not all bad news today. Amazon India is still making sure you get what you deserve, as a customer. You can still get phones replaced at no cost in the case that the product is defective, damaged or missing. Just make sure you get it done before the 10-day window.
Please Note: All Mobile phones that are fulfilled by Amazon, purchased on or after 7th February 2016, will have a replacement only policy. Mobile phone items that are fulfilled by Amazon will no longer be eligible for refunds. In case you have received a defective or a damaged mobile phone, you will be eligible for a free replacement.
Pretty bad news for Indian online shoppers, but there are plenty of other options. Among them is Flipkart, which still allows returns for items, even if the reason is simply that you are not satisfied with your purchase.
Surely, this will bring some big changes to consumer decisions and competition in India. Do we have any Indian phone buyers? Which online retailer are you going with for your next online purchase?
Firewatch Photos will print and ship your in-game snapshots
In-game photo modes are cool and all, but beyond sharing your Driveclub or Arkham Knight snaps via social media, there isn’t much you can do with them. Well, in the PC version of Firewatch (out this week, and on PlayStation 4) you can go a step further and have them printed and mailed to you from the folks at developer Campo Santo and publisher Panic. There’s an in-game disposable camera, you see, and photographing artist Olly Moss’s gorgeous landscapes is highly recommended; $15 nets you a set of 4″ x 6″ prints and they’ll ship free “almost anywhere.” TechnoBuffalo notes that after finishing the game you’re presented with a link to an online store to place an order for your shots; that publication’s photos are embedded below.
The reason the feature isn’t available on PlayStation 4 yet? Firewatch Photos is a network service, and Panic’s Cabel Sasser tells Polygon that consoles need to be “extra vigilant” about network access. “We are actively investigating what it would take to make this happen on the PlayStation 4,” Sasser says. “Sony wants it and so do we!”
Polygon‘s piece also explores the origins of the mode and how deep the thought process was for the feature. A line of dialogue was rewritten and re-recorded to reflect the fiction’s photo processing store after the original bits of script was already in the can, for instance. What’s more, the idea of getting physical copies of the photos came up as an off-handed idea amongst the team.”When there’s an idea that immediately excites us both — like the idea behind Firewatch in the first place — it’s hard to stop us from doing it,” says Sasser. Sounds like PS4 support is a matter of “when,” not “if,” in this case.
Via: Polygon
Source: TechnoBuffalo
Nike SNKRS app arrives for Android sneakerheads
About a year after launching its SNKRS app on iOS, Nike is finally dropping a version for Android. Designed as a streamlined shoe-buying experience, its intent is to cut out some of the cruft of the website experience, and make sure people can get access to new releases before resellers with bots snap up every pair. Just like last year, the new app is dropping around NBA All-Star Weekend, so Nike also has a few SNKRS Express locations popping up temporarily in Toronto, LA, Chicago and NYC.
Source: Nike SKRS (Google Play)
AIVAnet 