‘Halo 5’ gets cooperative Firefight game mode this summer

Apart from the odd silly weekend playlist, Halo 5 doesn’t really cater for your more casual gaming moods. You’ve got Arena matches for classic competition, and Warzone games when you’re up for grand-scale carnage. A more chilled (or not) cooperative mode is coming, though, in the form of Warzone Firefight. It’ll pit you and chums against increasingly overwhelming waves of alien enemies, similar to cooperative multiplayer modes you may have played in previous Halo titles. Over the weekend, Microsoft revealed a few more details about the new game type, as well as a trailer to get you nice and hype.

Up to eight players will work together to complete five rounds of “increasingly difficult, dynamic objectives set against a timer.” These changing objectives should make every single game a bit different, too, so you won’t just be going through the motions of slaughtering wave after wave of AI enemies. Firefight scenarios will also have the “most on-screen enemies in the history of the franchise,” from swarms of those pesky Covenant grunts right up to new, “Mythic” bosses (gulp!). And because it’s a Warzone game type, you can use your REQ Cards to summon vehicles, weapons and power-ups if/when things get a little hairy. One of the only details we’re still lacking at this point is when we’ll be let loose on the Covenant scum, though the new mode is down for release sometime “this summer.”

Source: Microsoft

Netflix raises the standard for its latest ‘Recommended’ TVs

Last year, Netflix launched its “Recommended TV” label to coax manufacturers to improve speeds on Smart TVs and, of course, push its service. This year, it’s asking for more by making them meet five out of seven criteria, including instant on, TV resume, an up-to-date Netflix version, fast app launch, fast app resume and a Netflix button and icon. Only two manufacturers have earned the logo so far: Sony models like the SD85 and XD85 from the Android 4K series, and LG TVs with webOS 3.0, including the UH8500 and UH9500. Other manufacturers, most notably Samsung, have yet to make the cut.

Netflix says TVs carrying the label perform better, since they “passed a rigorous evaluation process that we established based on the factors our members tell us matter most.” The Netflix button and easy access icon have nothing to do with speed and everything to do with Netflix self-promotion, though. Nevertheless, addicts to the streaming service may appreciate the label, and for everyone else, the instant on and fast app launch criteria should signal decent smart TV performance.

Via: Variety

Source: Netflix

Google plans to bring internet to Cuba, Obama says

Google will be one of the first American companies to help open up Cuba to the internet, President Obama announced this morning during his historic visit. “One of the things that we’ll be announcing here is that Google has a deal to start setting up more WiFi and broadband access on the island,” he said in an interview with ABC News. It’s still unclear what, exactly, Google plans to launch, but we’ve reached out for additional comment. The news comes more than a year after the US announced warmer relations with Cuba, which brought with it the possibility for American companies to do business in the country.

Early last year, Cuba also launched its first public Wi-Fi hotspots in its second largest city, but its $4.50 hourly fee was too expensive for most of its citizens. And this year, the country’s state-owned ISP also announced that it would be bringing home broadband connections to a few neighborhoods in Old Havana. Even if Cubans can afford to get online with those offerings, they’ll still have to deal with internet censorship.

Google might not be able to do much about content restrictions from Cuba, but given its infrastructure expertise, I wouldn’t be surprised if it delivers a much cheaper way for people to get online.

Via: Reuters

Source: ABC

Lenovo K3 Note picks up Marshmallow update in India

Lenovo’s K3 Note is now picking up the Marshmallow update in India. The update — weighing in at 1.65GB — brings Doze, advanced app permissions, Google Now on Tap, and March’s security updates. Also included is TheaterMax support for VR, which makes the K3 Note compatible with Lenovo’s AntVR viewer.

Lenovo’s official update tracker is yet to confirm the update for more recent launches like the K4 Note and the Vibe X3, but we’ll let you know once it becomes available. If you’re unable to download the OTA update for the K3 Note, you can grab the files from here and manually flash using recovery.

Sprint and Verizon will also give you a second Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge for free

Sprint and Verizon are now both offering a buy-one-get-one-free promotion on the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge. Purchasing either smartphone will enable you to take advantage of a prepaid card for the price of the second handset. As spotted by Android Police, you’ll need to have both smartphones on payment plans in order to be eligible for the promotion, but once that’s squared away you’ll be able to activate the offer and save on a second flagship investment.

AT&T and T-Mobile previously announced their respective deals earlier this month, but it’s good to see the other major U.S. networks offer similar promotions. There’s one thing worth noting for Sprint, which is you cannot mix the Galaxy S7 with a Galaxy S7 edge in this deal unless you don’t mind switching out the free phone for a 50% discount on the second in its place.

Hit the links below to be taken to the respective store for more details:

See at Sprint See at Verizon

Galaxy S7 sales in China, Europe and India surpass analyst expectations

Pre-orders reportedly up 250 percent compared to GS6.

Analysts have revealed they believe Samsung’s latest flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, are selling extremely well in China, Europe and India. According to reports from the Korean press, sales of the two new handsets are actually surpassing expectations. It’s also stated that combined pre-orders in Europe have shown a 250% increase compared to the Galaxy S6.

The report suggests new GS7 features like removable storage and waterproofing could be behind the bump in sales.

What’s more, it’s reported that GS7 pre-orders in China broke through the 10 million mark. Samsung has been struggling to penetrate the Chinese market amidst strong competition from local vendors.

Unfortunately, while analysts can estimate how many units Samsung have sold, the company itself hasn’t yet shared exact figures.

See where you can buy the Galaxy S7

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge

• Galaxy S7 review
• Galaxy S7 edge review
• Galaxy S7 edge with Exynos: A Canadian perspective
• Here are all four Galaxy S7 colors
• Details on the Galaxy S7’s camera
• The SD card is back on the GS7
• Join our Galaxy S7 forums

AT&T Sprint T-Mobile Verizon

36 Twitter accounts you just have to follow right now

Twitter can be a powerful and wonderful tool. While not all of us might have jumped on board straight away, the first 140 characters were actually tweeted 10 years ago. Yes really, the social platform has been around for a whole decade now!

It can educate you, help enlighten you, make you laugh, and pretty much just keep you in-the-know. But you have to follow the right people/accounts. Otherwise, your Twitter feed can easily fill up with boring, useless tweets, and then before you know it, you’re never checking Twitter and not taking advantage of its power.

In an attempt to help get you on the right track, Pocket-lint has rounded up a list of influential, famous, and entertaining accounts to follow on Twitter right now. Some of them are notable politicians, like President Obama, who also happens to be one of the most followed on Twitter, while others are celebrities, parody accounts, etc.

Keep in mind this isn’t a complete list. We’re just trying to get you started. If you follow all of these accounts, we can guarantee that you’ll be filled in on all the latest news as well as the most random news. And in between all that news, you just might giggle or be amazed or inspired. After all, that’s what Twitter is really about.

Let us know in the comments if you think someone else should totally be included, and we’ll consider adding it to the gallery above. Also, come back in the future, as we plan to update regularly with more must-follow accounts.

Play the hidden basketball game in Facebook Messenger: Here’s how to find and share

Facebook Messenger might not be your number one communication app when there’s WhatsApp to be used, but a fun easter egg could have you using it more than ever.

Hidden in plain sight on Facebook’s Messenger app is a mini game of basketball.

Once you’re suitably bored of hearing your mate drone on about their latest play through of Fallout 4, send them a basketball emoji and get gaming.

Here’s how to get it installed and share it with others.

The first step is to make sure you’re updating and running the latest version of the app. Once that’s sorted go into a contact as if you were going to have a conversation. Then send the basketball emoji on its own. Now that emoji is in the conversation window you can tap it to start playing.

Go for a high score and enjoy the emojis that make scoring and missing almost as fun as each other. When you’re done your score will be displayed in the chat window, ready for abuse from your mate who might feel scorned you’re playing instead of chatting. Of course they have the option to play too.

Sharing the game is as easy as sending the basketball emoji and telling the person at the other end to click it to play. If they have issues be sure to tell them to update the app to the latest version. You will then be alerted to how many points the person you shared it with has managed to get. So get ready to get competitive.

Let us know your high score in the comments below.

READ: No, Twitter isn’t ditching the 140-character limit

Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 review: Not a sell-out show

What are budget tablets about these days? Should they be the sort of devices you can slip into a small bag and carry around with you 24/7; light enough so you can hold them in one hand; cheap enough so you won’t fall into a month-long depression when you crack the screen? These are what most budget tablets aim to achieve. But the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 doesn’t.

Nope, the Venue 10 Pro is big and chunky. And starting at £349 it’s not the sort of device you’ll buy on a whim. It’s meant more as laptop-replacement than something you’ll use to read-up on soap gossip or iPhone 7 rumours while on the sofa – hence the “Pro” namesake.

But the Windows-based Dell Venue 10 Pro does have a few appeals of its own, even if it’s not your all-purpose, for-everyone device. Here’s what we have to make of it.

Dell Venue Pro 10 review: Design

If you’re just looking for a 10-inch tablet, the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 might not be the best device – which becomes obvious as soon as you get your hands on it. It’s big, heavy and thick – at 10mm – a bit like the Android tablets we used to get excited about back in 2011. This is a Windows 10 tablet, though, so don’t write it off just yet.

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It’s quite obviously heavier than the screen parts of some of the recent affordable keyboard-combo machines too, like the Asus Transformer Book and the HP Pavilion X2. It honestly doesn’t make all that much sense as a lone lifestyle tablet, which is why there’s an optional keyboard.

However, Dell could make it easier to source a keyboard. There’s no obvious bundle option on the company’s website: you just add it as an accessory, on about the fifth page of spec customisation, below a half-dozen Bluetooth keyboard alternatives. Bit odd, right? The keyboard also costs £112, making the whole package dangerously close to £500.

Dell didn’t send us a keyboard to test with this tablet either. But we can safely assume it, well, has keys and slots into the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056’s bottom edge. It doesn’t have any extra connections, though.

So this tablet may feel too heavy to use in one hand comfortably – 662g makes it around twice that of an iPad Air 2 – but the Venue 10 Pro 5056’s weight does make it feel sturdy for an all-plastic tablet. There’s a soft-touch panel on its back for a bit of bonus tactility and in a desperate situation you could probably use it to break a particularly poorly-made window.

The real benefit of the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 over its Android brothers is connectivity. It’s laptop-like, with a full-size USB, microHDMI and a USB-C port (which doubles-up as the charging port). There’s also a flap on one side that covers a microSD slot and, in our version, a hole for a SIM card. The 4G model costs £430, again without the keyboard. It could really do with an extra USB port, though, as right now you can only plug in one conventional USB device.

Pocket-lint

Dell Venue Pro 10 review: Screen

Some parts of the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 make you end up comparing it to much cheaper hybrids. After all, its size and fairly humble power mean it’s probably going to be used for light duties anyway. The £229 (with keyboard) HP Pavilion X2 will be a valid alternative for some of you.

However, the screen is a cut above the real affordable stuff. The Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 has a 10.1-inch Full HD IPS screen. That means its 1920 x 1080 resolution looks plenty sharp and that it appears just fine from an angle. The blacks just appear a touch blue in certain light though. But overall it’s a decent upper-entry-level tablet screen.

Contrast isn’t perfect, colour is a little undersaturated, but both are a bit better than what you’d get from a hybrid that costs less than £300 (including the keyboard). And there are a few of those about.

This isn’t close to what a Surface tablet offers, though. Those are sharper, punchier and even more expensive. There’s also no stylus involved with the Dell, although an active stylus accessory is available. Straight out of the box the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 relies on a plain old touchscreen.

Pocket-lint

Dell Venue Pro 10 review: Software

Here’s where we stumble upon the crux of whether the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 is any good or not. How does Windows 10 feel when it’s controlled just through a touchscreen?

Where Windows 10 on a regular laptop feels closer to Windows 7’s old-school style that Windows 8 did, the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 (without a keyboard) reverts to something closer to the old Windows Metro UI. This is where you get screens of big icon blocks, but no traditional desktop – which is hidden away.

There are also touch-friendly additional shortcut soft keys that will disappear when the Venue Pro keyboard is connected. They’re roughly the same conceptually as the soft keys of an Android device.

If anything, though, Windows 10 has sidelined this tablet side in favour of a core interface that works better with a laptop or desktop. For example, the keyboard doesn’t always pop-up when you want it to if you’re running a “desktop” app, and the apps tray takes that bit longer to pop-up than it would on a mobile-focused OS.

Without the keyboard attached, the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 highlights our differing expectations of budget computers and budget mobile devices. It feels awkward and clumsy.

Pocket-lint

Dell Venue Pro 10 review: Performance

The Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 is not all that powerful given its price either, although it is totally up-to-date. It uses the Intel Atom X5 Z8500 CPU, a low-end dual-core 2.4GHz CPU. That and 4GB RAM get you slightly better than the £250 all-in hybrid alternatives from Asus and HP, but this is still a low-power tablet/sort-of-2-in-1.

General performance when you’re just browsing and writing up some documents is fine. However, apps tend to take a while to load compared with an entry-level Ultrabook like the ZenBook UX305CA.

Why? As well as having a fairly slow CPU, the storage is pretty slow too. It uses solid state memory, 64GB or 128GB, but its performance is much closer to a hard drive or fast memory card than a proper SSD. It reads at 150MB/sec and writes at 90MB/sec; even entry-level SSDs read and write at 400MB-plus these days.

We had a crack at running Skyrim, the open-world game. It runs, but we didn’t get a great result. We had to lower the resolution output to 1280 x 800 and turn down the graphics to minimum settings – and while it was just about playable like this, it’s not really how the game should be played. This is not a gaming machine.

Pocket-lint

The Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 also has fairly poor speakers. They fire outwards from each side of the tablet, getting you a bit of stereo juice, but they’re also fairly thin-sounding and don’t go particularly loud. Now that even some super-skinny phones have decent (for a phone) speakers, this is real tech water-treading. Of course, you could argue that’d be a mis-allocation of funds, but then the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 isn’t exactly budget.

There are a lot of patchy elements to the Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056, but its battery life is very solid. It’ll last for just under 10 hours of video: good for a tablet, even better for a laptop if you splash out on the keyboard base. You could get a full day’s work off this machine with the keyboard in tow.

Verdict

The Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 doesn’t really seem like a tablet of 2016. A conservative design, non-aggressive price and entry-level power mean it struggles to ignite much gadgety lust when there are much cheaper hybrids available that include the keyboard.

If you can stomach the extra £112 for the keyboard module – and you really should if you’re thinking about buying this machine – it’ll make a decent little portable laptop. Good battery life is its major plus point, and once you start thinking about this Dell as a laptop rather than a tablet, its weight and size issues melt away to a degree.

Apple fixing iMessage flaw that lets hackers steal photos

Apple has put a lot of work into making its phones hard to crack, much to the consternation of US law enforcement officials. It’s still not perfect, however, as researchers from John Hopkins University have discovered a flaw that lets attackers intercept and decrypt video and images sent on iMessage. The exploit only works on versions prior to iOS 9, because Apple partially fixed the problem in that version. However, John Hopkins professor Matthew D. Green told the Washington Post that a modified exploit could possibly be developed for iOS 9 versions, provided hackers have skills of a “nation state.”

The hack is pretty simple. The team first created software that emulates an Apple server in order to intercept files. iMessage photos and video only use 64-bit encryption and don’t lock out invaders after multiple attempts to decrypt. That allowed the researchers to “brute force” video and image files and eventually decrypt them.

The iMessage flaw has nothing to do with the current dispute between the FBI and Apple, because the feds want to decrypt the San Bernardino shooter’s entire phone, not just the messages.

The iMessage flaw has nothing to do with the current dispute between the FBI and Apple, because the feds want to decrypt the San Bernardino shooter’s entire phone, not just the messages. However, last year Baltimore prosecutors asked Apple to decrypt iMessages from a suspect’s phone. At the time, the company said that cracking them would be expensive and harmful to security, so prosecutors eventually dropped the request. However, Green told the Post that government experts could have easily found the flaw, too. “If you put resources into it, you will come across something like this.”

Luckily, a fix is coming very soon. Apple has completely closed the hole in iOS 9.3, which is due to be released as part of Apple’s big “loop you in” event later today. In a statement, Apple said “we appreciate the team of researchers that identified this bug and brought it to our attention … security requires constant dedication and we’re grateful to have a community of developers and researchers who help us stay ahead.” Suffice to say, iOS users should update as soon as possible, especially if you use iMessage a lot.

Source: Washington Post