The Galaxy S7 and Gear VR make virtual reality incredible and affordable

Samsung and Oculus think they have successfully transformed the Galaxy S7 into an portable entertainment platform for your face.

The jump from niche techy gadget to consumer-ready product isn’t an easy one to make, but that’s exactly what Samsung is trying to do with the Samsung Gear VR.

Asking someone who has never used a VR headset before — which is most people — to shell out $99 for a plastic accessory that makes them look funny isn’t going to happen. Giving hundreds of thousands of them away to people who are pre-ordering the best phone to use with that headset is a little different. It’s an attempt to get as many people as possible past the look of the strange plastic thing on the shelf and into the experiences contained within. It’s also working, though to what degree is anyone’s guess for now.

If Samsung and Oculus are going to succeed in pushing the Gear VR out of techy nerd hell and onto the faces of people who would otherwise never consider something like this, a combination of capable hardware and feature complete software needs to exist. Previous combinations of Samsung phones and the Gear VR headset have shown that smartphone-based VR can be fun and engaging, but not exactly easy for everyone. With the Galaxy S7 and a fully stocked Oculus Store, the Gear VR gets a new chance to pull people in.

This is our Samsung Gear VR review, Galaxy S7 edition.

About this review

We’ve been using the Samsung Gear VR for quite a while now, back as far as the Galaxy Note 4, but have only been using it with the Galaxy S7 for ten days. This phone is running Oculus Store version 1.91 (Build 25307937), which is also available on the Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy Note 5, and the Samsung Galaxy S6 variants.

Read: How the Galaxy S7 edge compares to the GS7 in the Gear VR

Please insert your phone to continue

Samsung Gear VR initial setup

Samsung and Oculus have built the Gear VR experience to be something isolated from the rest of the experience on the Galaxy S7. The user isn’t aware that any of the Oculus services even exist on the phone until the first time they connect the phone to a Gear VR. This can be a little confusing if you’re already familiar with the interface and want to download games ahead of putting the headset on your face, but as far as set up systems go Oculus has done a lot of good here. You connect the phone to the headset, and the phone immediately knows what to do.

For a system that isn’t dedicated to this experience, the initial set up process for the Gear VR is as good as it can be.

What happens next is not so smooth. The thing the phone does next is tell you to disconnect the phone from the Gear VR in order to install the Oculus app and set up your account. There’s no way to do this setup in VR, and there’s no way to set up the Oculus experience before the phone is connected, so users are stuck with this back and forth in order to get set up the first time. The good news is you only ever have to do this once, but it’s still an unusual hurdle to jump for someone who has never used VR before.

After you’ve created your Oculus account, it’s time to actually use the Gear VR. Putting the phone back into the headset launches a tutorial on how to navigate the interface. Oculus has created a series of short tasks for users to solve by moving across the touch pad on the side of the headset, and when those tasks are complete users are taken to the main system environment. From this point, connecting the phone to the Gear VR launches the Oculus VR environment.

As initial setup experiences go, the Gear VR is a mixed bag right now. The Oculus Store can’t exist in the Google Play Store due to Google’s policies on running a competing app store, and having the app live on every Samsung phone would take up a lot of unnecessary space, so this compromise is understandable. Once you actually get into the Oculus environment, the tutorials to familiarize the user with what’s happening are perfect. The execution is visually appealing and there’s no doubt the user understands how the interface works when the tutorial is over. For a system that isn’t dedicated to this experience, the initial set up process for the Gear VR is as good as it can be.

Your house will never be this nice

Samsung Gear VR interface

Using a VR headset breaks down into two key components: being comfortable enough on your face to use for the duration of the app you’re using, and being easy to navigate the interface. The Gear VR is more comfortable than most VR headsets you’ll find out there today, but its real strength is the interface. Putting on a Gear VR transports you to an incredible outdoor pavilion with floating menu options fixed to the position you started in. You can look around and take in the sights, but the position you started in is where you’ll be when navigating menus.

Before you get into any of the apps and explore those experiences, the Oculus menus and environments are genuinely enjoyable to use.

Oculus has paid special attention to the design of their menu system. In a VR environment frequently described as having a “screen door” effect in white spaces due to the ability to see pixels on the screen, text is sharp and images are clear everywhere. When you go to buy an app, there’s plenty of information about the game that is easy to read and easier to scroll through. Purchasing an app offers a similar experience, with a convenient pin system for authorizing a payment. It’s an interface that has slowly evolved over time, and has reached a point where you can easily navigate through existing apps to select something to do or install a new experience with a couple of taps. There are no menu options asking you to aim a pointer at a specific place for a few seconds to register a click, it’s all straightforward and clear.

Secondary to the main Oculus menu is the system menu that can be accessed from anywhere by holding down the back button on the Gear VR. In the past, this menu system was a series of small floating buttons that required you to either memorize the icons or hover a pointer over the icon to know what your options were. Now that menu is a set of large blocks with clear text that explains what you need to do. This includes brightness controls camera passthrough, and of course returning to the main menu if you’re done with whatever it is you are doing right now. This menu has been greatly improved recently, and the end result is significantly more user friendly.

The most interesting pair of features in this system menu are the camera passthrough and notification settings, mostly because you’ll either use them all the time or not at all. Camera passthrough is exactly what is sounds like, a way to access the camera on the back of your phone so you can see the real world without taking the headset off.

There’s less lag in this mode than previous Samsung phones using this mode, but walking around with this mode on is still a bad idea. Notification controls in the Oculus UI allow you to bring notifications from your phone into the virtual environment. This Do Not Disturb mode is off by default, but it’s not entirely clear why since users aren’t able to interact with notifications when they appear in the Gear VR. All you really get is a rectangle that interrupts whatever it is you are doing with a truncated version of the notification you’d normally get on your phone.

Finally, Oculus has made it easy to share your virtual experiences with others. The system menu now includes the ability to take screenshots and record video, both of which are available to share once you’re out of the Gear VR and back on your phone like usual. These screenshots and video shots are a 1024×1024 sample from one eye, so they’re square and ready for sharing without any additional cropping. This looks a whole lot nicer than recording on your own with a third-party app, and on the Galaxy S7 the video is more than smooth enough to share with friends.

Oculus has done a lot to grow this interface over time, and now it feels more like a complete thought. Before you get into any of the apps and explore those experiences, the Oculus menus and environments are genuinely enjoyable to use.

At long last, a search button

Samsung Gear VR app

Once you’ve set up your Gear VR, you’ll find an Oculus icon on your home screen. The Oculus app on your phone is designed to make it easy to manage your VR apps before you get to the virtual environment. When you consider the size of your average VR game and the time required to install it, the app is a much better way to browse for things you haven’t tried yet. This interface is set up more like a traditional app store, which means you can search for apps, browse categories, and take a look at detailed explanations of what the apps are about before installing.

Oculus apps are all vetted before they reach the store, so they include things like content ratings and hardware requirements at the top of the description. If a game requires a gamepad to use instead of just the touchpad, this is where you’ll see it. Similar descriptions exist when browsing these apps in the virtual environment, but in the app they’re all available at a glance. Once you’ve installed an app you’re interested in, you can launch that app from the Oculus app, making it so when you put the phone in the VR headset you’re taken right to that app.

The Oculus app is the gateway to a virtual environment that happens to live on your phone, but it doesn’t play nice with the rest of your phone or its features.

The Oculus Store uses a separate payment mechanism than the Google Play Store, so you enter your credit card information here and the transactions are separate from your Google Account. In doing so, Oculus allows you to create a pin for quick authentication in and out of the virtual environment, as well as emails for transactions when you’ve completed a purchase. It’s a simple enough system once you get it set up, and is simple enough to adjust as needed.

Social experiences are going to be a big part of the Gear VR in the future, but it’ll be a while before this is a truly social platform. As part of your account creation in the Oculus app, you now have the ability to find friends and add them to your account. This makes it easier to jump into apps together to do things like watch videos together, but it’s not yet widely adopted across all of the games you can play on the Gear VR. Long term, it’s clear Oculus wants this to be almost like Xbox Live, where users can jump in a game together and play together. All of the pieces are there now, and over time we’ll see this social tab become more important to Oculus.

More than anything, the Oculus app is a reminder that this experience is not a part of your usual phone experience. The Oculus app is the gateway to a virtual environment that happens to live on your phone, but it doesn’t play nice with the rest of your phone or its features. Some of that is on Oculus, but most of the limitations are in place because Google says so, and at the end of the day this is still an Android phone being used to do the heavy lifting for this platform.

Bring on the competition

Samsung Gear VR: the bottom line

As VR headsets go, the Gear VR is in a fascinating position. It exists as an infinitely more capable system compared to the only other smartphone-based system — Google Cardboard — yet it makes no real sense to compare it to the desktop-class VR experiences. The closest thing you could compare the Samsung Gear VR to and have it make any sense is Sony’s PlayStation VR, but even then it’s nowhere near an apples to apples compare.

In a way, standing out in the crowd is what has created the opportunity for Samsung to push their hardware to as many new users as possible. Oculus and Samsung have refined this experience over the last two years, and what they’ve come up with by combining the raw performance of the Galaxy S7 with the Gear VR headset is unique and fantastic. It’s polished, capable, and full of interesting things to explore and play with. Gone are the days of overheating warnings or batteries that only last 45 minutes, due in no small part to the work Samsung has put into their latest smartphone. This combination is without equal, and it’s unlikely we’ll see real competition for this experience this year.

All of that having been said, there’s still a lot about this experience that still feels geared to the early adopter. Samsung is introducing users to this platform in droves right now, and the initial setup is still confusing. It’s still not immediately clear that you need to have the phone awake and unlocked before you put it in the Gear VR, and the spoken warning to do so doesn’t appear until you’ve already got the headset on your face. Once you get into the virtual environment, the experience is exceptional. The journey there needs to match that, and right now it doesn’t. Oculus and Samsung need to work together to create simple solutions to these pain points, both of which can be addressed with relative ease.

Should you buy it? Absolutely.

If you’re interested in VR, but aren’t planning to build a powerful gaming desktop or a PlayStation 4, the Gear VR is the way to go. If you’re interested in the best possible experience for the Gear VR, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is the way to go. Combining these two ensures you have a great phone and a great VR experience, one that is picking up new video and gaming experiences every day.

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Sony PlayStation games and characters are coming to Android and iOS

Sony PlayStation seems to be undergoing some changes, not only is the newly formed Sony Interactive Entertainment coming into being on Friday 1 April, but there’s also another company being formed and that’s ForwardWorks. 

ForwardWorks is detailed by Sony as a company that is going to “deploy new services towards the ever-expanding smart device market.” If that wasn’t explicit enough, Sony goes on to clarify that it means Android and iOS specifically. 

It seems that ForwardWorks is going to be responsible for the development, sales and operation of software on these platforms, while the subject matter it has to work with includes PlayStation titles and characters.

There’s a catch at the moment, however, in that this might not be for global deployment, with Sony’s press release stating that it’s going to be targeting users in Japan and Asia. Whether this is a case of starting at home before expanding, we just don’t know yet.

Sony appears to be following Nintendo’s lead, although to be fair, this isn’t really new territory for PlayStation. Sony has had PlayStation titles on Xperia devices for some time, and even went as far to launch the Xperia Play in 2011. There’s been a PlayStation app, some games and degrees of PlayStation connectivity, culminating in PS4 Remote Play in the most recent devices.

There’s never been a convincing push however, to bring dedicated content using PlayStation characters to mobile devices. The same could be said of Nintendo, who appears to be undergoing the same sort of process, of looking to the world of mobile gaming to make more of its wide range of gaming assets.

For now it’s a case of watching and waiting.

Gadget Show Live 2016: Jason Bradbury talks VR, GamesMaster and why YouTubers will inherit the Earth

For the last 12 years, Jason Bradbury has been the face of gadgets and technology, at least where television is concerned. He has been the main host of Channel 5’s The Gadget Show throughout its entire 25 series run, and shows no sign of stopping.

He’s a self-confessed games and gadget geek, who loves the gizmos as much as he loves talking about them. His unbounded enthusiasm is there to see each week on the show, and he has since taken his love of tech to new grounds, lecturing in the University of Lincoln just one of his extracurricular pursuits.

Fans of the programme and of entertainment technology in general can also get to see him discuss all things gadgetry at The Gadget Show Live 2016 in Birmingham’s NEC convention centre. It runs from 31 March to 3 April, but before the huge, live event we got some private time with him ourselves to natter about the wonderful world of gadgets he so adores.

First though, we wanted to know why he thinks The Gadget Show Live has been so successful over the years.

Could he, former GamesMaster runner and the original comedy double act partner of David Walliams, have ever imagined it would endure?

The Gadget Show Live

When Gadget Show Live started, did you ever imagine it would get so big and stand the test of time?

“No. Even the show itself, we thought we’d run out of stuff to talk about. It sounds hilarious when you say that now but we genuinely questioned whether there would be enough content to keep us going. Gadget Show Live is the same.

“It’s a big endeavour. To get all those people under one roof every year for four or five days, I think it’s amazing it keeps going. And I definitely couldn’t have predicted it.

“It’s a bit like being a pop star when you do Gadget Show Live. It’s a bit West End-y. Gadgets meet the West End. The theatrical elements of it are so large scale. Fitting 3,000 people into the super-theatre. It’s bonkers isn’t it?”

It’s changed quite a lot over the years, hasn’t it? There now seems to be entertainment everywhere.

“Because stands exist it doesn’t mean we should use them. For me it’s about play.

“My life is about play and I’m unapologetic about that – my kids call me “man-child”. My love of technology comes in part that I play with it and mess about. I put a VR helmet on and pretend that I’m special forces, and I try to inspire myself to get out and cycle, so I put my bike on a turbo trainer and use Rift to cycle in a virtual world. For me, that’s what’s at the heart of my love of technology and I think that should translate at Gadget Show Live a bit.

“Why have a stand full of scooters when you can actually get on them and ride them around a test track?”

The Gadget Show Live

Do you think that it helps that consumers have changed their opinions about gadgets and tech?

“I came from a family of salesmen and there’s this thing called the ‘wonderful paradox’. The wonderful paradox affects a number of things, mainly that in order to sell something to someone, you need to make them happy. Although that’s a bit of an abstract answer.

“The other aspect of it, which is pertinent to this, is to give them the product, let them feel and experience it. So however you want to come to this, whether you want to give people a good experience or whether you want to actually sell stuff it makes sense to get them involved in the product. Get them flying a remote controlled plane and sacrifice five or ten planes in the course of a Gadget Show Live, if it means that your audience, the people you are putting your business together for, can actually get hands-on and have an experience.

“That’s what I’ll say to someone who’s not actually been to Gadget Show Live, it isn’t just a shop window. It’s like a playground for geeks.”

You also hand out the honours to the British Inventors Project winners at the show; are you pleased with the diversity of products entered each year?

“It never ceases to amaze me each year. The diversity and also the focus of the projects I get to adjudicate on. This year’s is no exception, although I can’t talk about any of the products individually.

“I can tell you what I’m looking for though. All of them have to answer a question. So whatever it is, it has to solve a problem, answer a question. And often, in the fickle world of apps and Kickstarter projects, that’s not always the case. Sometimes there are interesting innovations that do not solve a problem and will therefore never really gain inertia.

“So if there’s a real problem that’s being solved then that’s a good thing.

“Also, if there’s a new market. If a gadget finds or defines a new market, in the way that VR or 360-degree video have, or cheap quality video cameras that give young people a voice on YouTube, I find that really exciting.”

The Gadget Show Live

We can’t help but have a little hatred and resentment for YouTubers, purely because they saw it happening and we didn’t. The buggers.

“I’m so glad you said that. Listen, I had it all laid out in front of me. All I had to do is do a bloody video once a week. But now we’re just catching up. They’ve been doing it for six years and doing it every single day.

“And what’s even more annoying is that, as well as being stupidly talented and genuinely engaging, they are really motivated by their audience – their followers. That’s something television often fails to do. It often fails to be truly relevant.

“They also have the freedom to do it every day because most of them don’t have kids or conventional job structure that keeps them rooted in having to commute every day. So with the same hand where I hugely admire them, I’m also hugely jealous of them.

“But I’m willing to forego my own petty grievances to stand in awe and respect at the most significant communication medium of my generation.

“Obviously, television already existed when I grew up as a kid, although my first TV was black and white. And I’m old enough to remember television before you could record it. Nevertheless, YouTube is a more significant happening than television was for me.

“I did witness the advent of videogames, which is pretty damn important – after all, if you took away games from the YouTube roster, what would you be left with?”

You originally started as a runner on GamesMaster, why do you feel there aren’t big videogames shows like that on TV anymore?

“It’s crazy. If you look at gaming and the immense global love of the shared experience, and at how genuinely interactive it is and what a tribe it represents, and even at the marketing opportunity it represents for a TV channel to connect to one of the most attractive demographics in all of retail, you have to wonder why they don’t do it?

“This is why I can’t hate YouTube, because these kids are doing what mainstream media refused to do for years, which is give young people what they want – their fair share of game related content on the medium that they love: television.”

The Gadget Show Live

Do you think VR and AR will be big mediums this year or are they overpriced?

“They are definitely overpriced. The HoloLens devkit costs $3,000!

“But saying that, I think that everything is cheap now in relative terms. Even $3,000 to get a devkit is a very different proposition to, say, what it cost to get the original PlayStation development hardware. So I don’t think the barrier is cost. I think the barriers are applications and uses.

“I’ve got two Oculus headsets, including a DK2, but I don’t use it because there’s nothing to play with it. I can go on Steam and get a few interesting titles, but generally the likes of Elite: Dangerous is a rarity in terms of providing a really immersive narrative in a VR experience. That’s very much the exception.

“I think PlayStation VR promises, for me, the nearest we’ll get to the potential of mass market VR this side of 2017.”

So what will the main tech trend and story be this year?

“It’s still definitely VR. It doesn’t need to be mass consumer to be the biggest story.

“Technology always has a way of surprising us. We all think we’re really clever and we can predict this that and the other, but it’s often the thing that no one saw coming. I had one of those Segways – whatever they call them these days, they mistakenly call them ‘hoverboards’ – for two years before the insanity that was last year’s craze. Would you have ever thought anybody would give a toss about those flimsy devices that made you stand in an awkward way and are almost useless outside?

“I’m gobsmacked that became a massive trend. I couldn’t see that coming at all.

“So much like I pretend I can predict, what will happen in the next 12 months is always tough.”

Tickets are still available for The Gadget Show Live apart from for Saturday 2 April, which is now sold out. You can find out more gadgetshowlive.net.

Best iPhone SE deals: Pre-orders are now open

The new Apple iPhone SE is now available for pre-order, before arriving in stores on 31 March. 

The new handset refreshes the design of the iPhone 5S, sticking to a smaller 4-inch form factor, but is packed with powerful internals to match the iPhone 6S. It’s small, but powerful, and importantly, it’s the cheapest iPhone in the family. 

It comes in 16 and 64GB versions and in a choice of silver, gold, space grey or rose gold. Pre-orders have opened, so it’s available to buy from a number of retailers. Not all have opened up their deals yet, but we will update as more details are announced.

Unlike other smartphones, there are no free gifts handed out with the iPhone, so it’s all about the cash and what you get for your money. 

Apple

You can buy the iPhone SE direct from Apple SIM free, leaving you free to choose your own talk plan direct with the network of your choice. 

The 16GB iPhone SE will cost you £359. The 64GB iPhone SE will cost you £439.

Click here to pre-order direct from Apple.

EE

The cheapest month plan on EE is £27.48, but you’re asked for £49.99 upfront for a 16GB iPhone SE, and you only get 500MB of data. The total cost of this option is £709.51. 

However, it’s better to opt for the £29.99 a month tariff on a 16GB iPhone SE, getting you 1GB of data. It will cost you £719.76 over 24-months, so only £10 more than EE’s cheapest option, for double the data. 

If you’re after the larger capacity iPhone SE, you can get the 6GB model with no upfront payment, for £39.99, with 2GB data, however, you’re paying £959.76 over 2 years for this. 

Click here to pre-order from EE.

Vodafone

With £9 upfront for the 16GB iPhone SE and £34 a month, you get 2GB of data. That’s a total of £825 over 24 months. 

If you’re after more data, the with £9 upfront on the 16GB model, a £39 a month plan will get you 6GB of data, for £945 over 24 months. 

For the 64GB model and £9 upfront you can pay £40 a month for 2GB data, paying £969 over 2 years.

Click here to pre-order from Vodafone.

Carphone Warehouse

Carphone Warehouse has lots of deals in lots of combinations. If you’re after a really cheap iPhone SE deal, then for nothing upfront and £26 a month you can get a 500MB plan with a 16GB handset on Vodafone. 

That’s a little limited, however, so you’d probably prefer to pay £59.99 upfront for the 16GB iPhone SE and keep monthly payments to £26. Over the course of 2 years you’ll pay £683.99, but with 3GB of data on Vodafone, which looks like a hot deal. 

For the 64GB model, take a look at paying £69 upfront and taking a reasonable £31 a month plan on Vodafone. This bags you 7GB of data, for £813 over 24 months. 

For not much more you can get the 64GB iPhone SE with nothing upfront, on a £36 a month deal for 11GB of data. It costs £864 over 2 years.

Click here to pre-order from Carphone Warehouse.

Giff Gaff

Giff Gaff hasn’t revealed its pay monthly plans yet, but we have worked out how much you would pay across two years with its SIM-only deals if you bought the smartphone outright. 

The iPhone SE costs £359 for the 16GB model. For 1GB of data, 500 minutes and unlimited texts, it will cost you £10 a month with Giff Gaff, for a combined total of £599. 

For 6GB of data, 2000 minutes and unlimited texts, it will cost you £18 a month meaning a total of £791. 

If you’re after the 64GB model, and you pay £439 for the handset, you’ll then be looking at a total of £679 for the 1GB data deal.

Alternatively, if you’re after 6GB of data, you’d pay a total of £871 for an iPhone SE 64GB over 2 years.

Click here to buy Giff Gaff SIM only plans.

Microsoft grounds its AI chat bot after it learns racism

Microsoft’s Tay AI is youthful beyond just its vaguely hip-sounding dialogue — it’s overly impressionable, too. The company has grounded its Twitter chat bot (that is, temporarily shutting it down) after people taught it to repeat conspiracy theories, racist views and sexist remarks. We won’t echo them here, but they involved 9/11, GamerGate, Hitler, Jews, Trump and less-than-respectful portrayals of President Obama. Yeah, it was that bad. The account is visible as we write this, but the offending tweets are gone; Tay has gone to “sleep” for now.

It’s not certain how Microsoft will teach Tay better manners, although it seems like word filters would be a good start. The company tells Business Insider that it’s making “adjustments” to curb the AI’s “inappropriate” remarks, so it’s clearly aware that something has to change in its machine learning algorithms. Frankly, though, this kind of incident isn’t a shock — if we’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s that leaving something completely open to input from the internet is guaranteed to invite abuse.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has provided the statement that BI received. You can read the whole thing below.

“The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments.”

Source: Guardian, Independent

Razer’s gaming keyboards now sport a more pared-down design

Razer debuted an expansion to its popular line of BlackWidow gaming keyboards, dubbed the BlackWidow X. These are nearly identical to the original BWs, save that they’ve been stripped of their plastic cover plates — leaving the milled aluminum frame exposed — and they incorporate a new style of switch that has been developed in-house, rather than the Cherry brand switches the original line employs.

Both of these revisions mark significant improvements over the predecessors. The stripped down aesthetic of the BWX no only partially exposes the lower sections of the keys (which makes the Chroma lighting system underneath really pop), it also shaves $10 off the price of each keyboard. So while the BlackWidow Chroma will set you back $170, the corresponding BlackWidow X will cost $160. The same applies to the BWX Tournament edition ($130 for Chroma capabilities, $70 without) and the BWX Ultimate ($100) — they’re all $10 less than their original BlackWidow counterparts. All of these come with a 2-year warranty.

What’s more, Razer has transitioned to a new kind of switch — you know, the actual computery bits that activate a key when you press it. Yes, “computery bits” is the technical term for it. These new Razer Mechanical Switches are rated for 80 million clicks — that’s 4-5 year under normal use, 2-3 years if you’re gaming with it regularly — 20 million more clicks than the originals.

Now, this might be a bit overkill for some folks. That’s why Razer isn’t doing away with those Cherry MX blue switches altogether. Instead, the the company is building them into a select series of keyboards that are even less expensive than the BWX line, starting at just $60. Head over to the Razer store for complete listings and price points.

Apple offering Office 365 as an iPad Pro ‘accessory’

At its recent “Loop You In” event, Apple said that its iPad Pro can replace your “sad’ old PC for productivity chores, and it’s now selling Office 365 directly to back that up. A Steven Sinofsky tweet spotted by the Verge notes that the “order flow for the iPad Pro includes option to add Office 365 subscription” when you check out, starting at $70 a year. The unusual move means that Microsoft joins Logitech as the only non-Apple accessories available when you order an iPad Pro.

Since Apple is positioning the device as a Surface competitor, it’s actually using a Microsoft product to compete against Microsoft to win business users. To make matters weirder, users have to pay for the Office 365 suite on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but can get the same product for free with the new 9.7-inch model. That’s because Microsoft’s mobile Office products are free, provided the screen size is less than 10.1 inches. Owners of the larger device who don’t want to pay can still get productivity software in the form of Apple’s iWork suite or use Google’s Office-like apps on a browser.

The 9.7-inch iPad Pro with the Pencil and keyboard accessories.

The pricey 12.9-inch iPad Pro is in tough against low- to mid-range Windows notebooks and convertibles, but the smaller model could make a dent in the market. At $599 for the cheapest model (plus $169 for the keyboard accessory) it could go up against mid-range Windows models, since users won’t need to pay for an Office 365 subscription. Apple’s Pencil option could also attract professional artists and illustrators. It remains to be seen if business users will be turned off by the smaller screen, but we should get a better idea soon as pre-orders have now kicked off.

Via: The Verge

Source: Apple

TiVo and Rovi close to merger deal, says NYT

Rovi is closing in on a deal to buy DVR maker TiVo for an unknown price, according to sources from the New York Times. The exact terms aren’t yet known, but TiVo reportedly has a market value of around $750 million. If the name “Rovi” isn’t ringing a bell, the company makes interactive TV guides that are used by 18 million or so TV subscribers. You may remember it better for its much-hated DRM copy protection, when it used to be called Macrovision. TiVo, of course, is known (and mostly liked) for ad-skipping DVR products like the 4K TiVo Bolt.

Rovi may have pursued TiVo for its large patent portfolio as much as its time-shifting DVR technology. If the merger succeeds, the combined company will boast a war-chest of 6,000 patents in total. Neither is afraid to use them, either — TiVo has earned $1.6 billion on patent litigation and recently sued Samsung over its DVR technology.

Rovi, on the other hand, lost a recent lawsuit against Netflix concerning over-the-top video streaming. During that case, five of Rovi’s patents around interactive TV guides were invalidated by a judge, who called them overly abstract. “The human mind is certainly capable of distinguishing between watched and unwatched programs, and making recommendations based on a user’s viewing history,” he said.

TiVo has been the subject of takeover rumors before, with Google, Apple and Microsoft named as potential suitors. At this point, sources say the negotiations between Rovi and TiVo are at a delicate phase, so the deal is still far from assured.

Source: New York Times

Take a 360-degree video tour of Google’s Oregon data center

Google’s latest 360-degree video provides a virtual tour of its data center in Dalles, Oregon. We’ve seen glimpses of Google’s server farms before, through Street View and other high-res photography, but this new upload offers a better sense of immersion. It’s also presented by Sandeep, one of Google’s developer advocates, who explains each room and interviews some of the data center staff. The video is highly curated, but there are some fascinating shots and tidbits, including a biometric eye scanner that every employee has to pass through. There’s also a monstrous hard drive shredder and a look at Google’s colorful mechanical equipment room.

You can watch the video on YouTube in your browser, clicking around to change the perspective, or with a VR headset like Google Cardboard.

Via: Google Cloud Platform Blog

Source: Google Data Center 360 Tour (YouTube)

Swarm turns your check-in history into a detailed lifelog

By bringing back mayorships, leaderboards and other features that make every day a new level in one big game, Swarm is now more or less what Foursquare once was. But with the release of Swarm 4.0 today, the check-in app is expanding further beyond the immediate gratification of coins and titles. The update places a greater emphasis on the lifelogging aspects of Swarm, using check-in data to build a richer history of what you and your friends have been up to. This starts with a redesigned profile tab highlighting check-ins, streaks and any photos posted while out and about.

Within the new profile tab, you can easily see the visit streaks you’ve earned, and you’ll now find numerical and graphical breakdowns of top check-in spots (such as gyms, coffee shops and bars). These show where you and your friends tend to spend the most time, with both recent and all-time records. Also, your global check-in map, which itself has been tweaked to be more informative, now sits behind your profile picture, telling everyone how much of a jet-setter you are. And because Swarm doesn’t want you to miss out on those all-important coins and stickers, it’ll remind you of any skipped check-ins.

The “Weekly Swarm” is another new feature that updates you on all the cool stuff your friends have been doing while you’ve been stuck at work. This includes what they’ve been up to over the past seven days, in particular what “popular events and trending places” they’ve visited. Best of all, though, it’ll report back any new or lost mayorships and stickers. So while you may not have earned anything to brag about that week, at least you can… console a friend that’s been ousted as the long-time mayor of their local coffee shop.

Source: Google Play, iTunes