Battery boom: Acer Zest Plus phone crams in 5,000mAh for two-day life

It’s not often we see an Acer phone – as most of them don’t end up in the UK – but the just-announced Acer Zest Plus has got one really big thing going for it: a massive 5,000mAh battery capacity.

That’s more capacious than even the likes of the Huawei Mate 8’s 4,000mAh. Expect a day and a half of use from that beast, so this Acer could potentially power through to two full days’ use. There’s also fast charging for quick top-ups.

Thing is, at 9.75mm thick, the Zest Plus isn’t exactly dinky in order to hold the battery within. Nor is it the most exciting or well-specified phone on the planet, with only an “HD” resolution 5.5-inch screen packed into its 154 x 77mm body. 

It does go all-out on the camera front, though, with a tri-focus approach to autofocus. There’s laser focusing, phase-detection AF and contrast-detection AF all working together for the 13-megapixel rear camera.

It feels like a solid wedge in the hand, similar to some of the budget Motorola handsets as near examples. No snazzy fingerprint scanner or top-tier features to be found here, though, unlike the upcoming (rumoured) Moto G 2016.

We suspect that’s all by the by, though, as we doubt the Zest Plus will ever show face in the UK. So battery fiends, you may just have to keep wishing.

Amazon’s Fire tablet gets a 16GB option and three new colors

At $50, we called Amazon’s Fire tablet “incredible value” and a device “that sets a benchmark for budget slates.” It was so cheap, in fact, that Amazon tried to sell them like a six-pack of beer. Now, the company is back with some new colors — magenta, blue and tangerine — and a 16GB option for those that want to download more than a handful of apps. To get the double storage, however, you’ll need to pay an extra $20 over the regular asking price. There’s also a new 16GB Kids Edition that costs $120.

Otherwise, you’re getting the same device as before. That means the same 7-inch IPS display (1,024 x 600), the same customized version of Android (Fire OS 5) and the same quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek processor. It’s nothing fancy, but for the absolute basics — browsing the web, checking emails and some video streaming — it should do the job just fine.

Source: Amazon (Press Release)

New York City schools tap Amazon for e-books

The New York City Department of Education has awarded Amazon a $30 million contract to provide digital textbooks to its 1.1 million students over the next three years, the Wall Street Journal reports.

With the new contract, New York City schools will invest in electronic formats (and save precious locker space) by accessing materials through a private marketplace similar to what Amazon has rolled out to colleges and universities in the past. While this deal only covers the content, and not the hardware to read it on, the texts will be available on a range of devices from laptops and tablets to e-readers and smartphones.

In the 2016-2017 school year alone, New York has committed to spend about $4.3 million on Amazon materials. That number will double every year throughout the contract, with the option to extend for another two years and $34.5 million. Amazon will reportedly receive a healthy 10 to 15 percent cut of sales.

Stepping into the classrooms of the country’s largest school district is a big win for Amazon, which has been making strides to keep up with competition from Apple and Google in the education space. Last month, the online retail giant also quietly announced a “revolutionary” platform that promised “free and unlimited access to first-class course materials.”

Play ‘EVE: Valkyrie’ with friends on any VR platform

The rise of VR inspired devs to build an offshoot to the venerable intergalactic MMO EVE Online, one that deals less with politics and economy and more just…blowing stuff up. EVE: Valkyrie is out now on Oculus Rift and will be released on PlayStation VR and HTC Vive later in 2016 — but CCP games just announced that gamers can play with anyone regardless of their VR platform.

#EVEValkyrie will support cross-platform play between the #OculusRift #PlayStationVR and #HTCVive pic.twitter.com/XQBcJuwg8s

— EVE: Valkyrie (@EVEValkyrie) April 21, 2016

Gaming giants behind consoles are still unsure whether letting players mingle outside their siloed multiplayer networks is a good thing. But, Rocket League broke ground enabling inter-platform play on current-gen consoles last month, so CCP is exploring very new territory. While Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both PC platforms, expanding play between PC and PlayStation sets a precedent.

Piling on the goodwill is the announcement of EVE: Valkyrie’s first free content expansion, an objective-based arena mode called Carrier Assault. Gameplay is short and sweet: Launch fighters, whittle down the enemy carrier while protecting yours, make a Death Star trench run to sink their ship, repeat.

Source: CCP Games

NASA wants the industry’s ideas for deep space habitats

NASA announced on Thursday that it is seeking development proposals for deep space habitats — the kind that astronauts will call home on trips to Mars and beyond. This call is the second part of NASA’s public-private partnership, Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP), which requested initial concept proposals last October.

These habitats are the third component of NASA’s plans for interplanetary discovery, the first two being the new Space Launch System and the Orion Crew Capsule. And with the scheduled maiden flights of both of those vehicles coming up in 2018, NASA’s now working on the next phase of the trip — keeping astronauts alive until they reach their destination. To that end, US companies, universities and nonprofits will have until June 15th to submit their ideas, though there is no word yet on when NASA will declare a winner.

Source: NASA

Stop nuclear devastation at the heart of a neverending Cold War

One of the most famous works of graffiti on the Berlin Wall is a depiction of former Soviet Union General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev kissing the ex-leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, full on the mouth. In the painting, called “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love,” Brezhnev’s profile commands a majority of the frame, as if he’s sucking the life out of Honecker. It’s based on a 1979 photo of the two statesmen locked in a fraternal kiss, a common form of greeting among socialist leaders at the time.

Fast forward to 2016 and artist Rafal Fedro of inbetweengames has updated this iconic painting to feature US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin sharing a fraternal kiss. In the studio’s’ latest project, a spy tactics game called All Walls Must Fall, the new painting represents a wide range of scenarios: heightened tensions between two countries that were once at the heart of the Cold War, fraying international relationships, or the subconscious desire to love our enemies, to name a few interpretations.

“We didn’t want to declare who is a bad guy and who is the good one, who is stronger and who is weaker,” Fedro says. “We want you to make your own opinion. And here we are with Obama and Putin embracing and kissing, each taking roughly half of our graffiti painting. At the same time we wanted to make them both look calmer, at ease.”

All Walls Must Fall takes place in Berlin in 2089, in an alternate reality where the Cold War never ended. It’s a “techno-noir” game where players control secret agents as they fight to prevent an imminent nuclear attack that will turn the world to ash. Both sides use time travel to predict and thwart their enemies’ every move, but this rogue nuclear strike sends both the East and West into a tailspin.

The entire game plays out over the course of one night — just before the bomb is deployed — though players travel back and forth through timelines in an attempt to stop nuclear annihilation. For example, an “undo” function allows players to reverse actions like entering a room, getting shot or starting a fight with an overwhelming number of foes. Or, they can jump back in time to give their past selves information that they actually learned hours later. All Walls Must Fall plays with the idea of a paradox as a game mechanic.

“The undo ability is just one,” programmer Isaac Ashdown says. “We aim to start simply but add more mindfuck as you progress.”

Considering how much thought inbetweengames put into a single image of Obama and Putin kissing, it’s no surprise the developers have a broader story to tell with All Walls Must Fall. When it hits Steam Early Access for PC and Mac in the fall, players will choose between warring factions and ultimately decide whether the cycle of war continues or the Wall finally falls. The developers present the game as a parable on the nature of free will, morality and freedom itself, though they’re careful not to be too heavy-handed.

“I wouldn’t say that there’s any specific message that we’re looking to be the takeaway,” Ashdown says. “I think any discussion of these concepts can only ever serve to widen our understanding of them, but trying to push one viewport too hard can backfire.”

The creators — Ashdown, Fedro and designer Jan David Hassel — had rich personal histories to pull from when creating this new old world and all of its moral ambiguities. Ashdown was born in the UK but lived in the US, Hassel hails from the former Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and Fedro grew up in the former Polish People’s Republic. These final two locations are relics of the Cold War era and were major players in the international struggle for peace.

“We all gathered different experiences which shaped our various views, which we want to put to use, share them with you and hopefully create an interesting narrative,” Fedro says.

That narrative is rooted in a retro-futuristic version of Berlin, the same city that inbetweengames calls home.

“We have a really great resource here in that there’s a unique, fascinating and under-used city right outside the window, so it would be crazy not to use that,” Ashdown says.

Using the city means soaking up everything about its people, architecture and history, and translating that into the game. The developers focused on filling their version of Berlin with people of diverse cultural, sexual and gender-identity backgrounds, just like their city is today.

“We want to embrace Berlin with its all diversity, roughness, beauty, ugliness — a unique and amazing setting,” he says. “I am quite tired of stereotypical video game protagonists. Like any other bigger city, Berlin is multicultural and multinational, after all.”

Fedro, Ashdown and Hassel previously worked at a large studio, Yager, where they built Dead Island 2 before it was handed over to another developer and Yager was shuttered. Fedro and Hassel also made Spec Ops: The Line, a AAA shooter with a serious message about the horrors of war, and these experiences helped the team get organized when they went independent in 2015. Fedro says he learned how games get made, from pre-production to shipping, and he picked up a variety of tools in an environment with more than 100 coworkers.

However, big-budget development is often slow, inflexible and can force people to focus on a narrow aspect game creation, such as “foliage artist,” “glass destruction guy,” or “superhero cape animator,” Fedro says.

“It is like a vicious circle — the more time you invest into something, the better and more specialised you become and more unlikely you will be able to work on things out of your speciality,” he says. “I personally love to take care of different types of challenges. …Co-founding an indie development studio gives me creative freedom I crave and cross-disciplinary professional development.”

Going indie lets the developers at inbetweengames make something like All Walls Must Fall, a project that resonates with them emotionally and as players. Sure, it’s an isometric action tactics game, but it’s also a work of art.

“Most games are also works of art,” Ashdown says. “It would be pretty disappointing if we made one that wasn’t.”

Billboard’s music charts now feature Spotify song clips

Billboard has long been the authority on what’s popular in music. The company tallies weekly rankings across charts like the Billboard 200 and Hot 100. With a hand from Spotify, you’ll now have a way to listen to clips of songs on those charts without having to hunt for them elsewhere. Billboard announced the partnership today, and the snippets of tracks are already live on the weekly lists of what’s popular in terms of audio entertainment.

The charts now offer 30-second clips from Spotify, and as you might expect, there’s the option to listen to the full song inside the app. Of course, the excerpts don’t require a subscription, so you’re free to browse the lists as much as you’d like. The music-streaming service is also working with Billboard on three new charts.

Viral 50 will compile the most popular songs in terms of sharing and social activity, while the Velocity Chart will track what’s trending on Spotify. There’s also a Spotify Rewind chart that will gather five songs from each decade, spanning the 1960s through the 2000s, ranked based on popularity. What’s more, you’ll be able to listen to Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist on Billboard’s site while you read up on the latest music news.

Source: Billboard

Microsoft’s phone business is in free fall

To no one’s surprise, Microsoft isn’t turning much of a profit from its phone business. According to its latest quarterly report, the company saw a dip of mobile revenue by as much as 46 percent. It sold 2.3 million Lumias over the past three months, which is a 73 percent drop from this time last year. Sadly, this is an ongoing trend; last quarter, it reported a phone sales drop by as much as 54 percent.

Still, the company is making money. Revenue was $20.5 billion while net profit was $3.8 billion. Microsoft also saw growth from its Surface segment, which grew by $1.1 billion over the past three months. That’s up 61 percent year-over-year. The company credited the surge in Surface sales to the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book, but there’s no word in its report exactly how many of those tablet computers it sold.

Microsoft is also seeing some gains in its non-Windows related businesses, like Office, Azure and other cloud-based endeavors. Office revenue went up by 7 percent in the commercial sector and 6 percent in the consumer sector, thanks in part to growth in Office 365 adoption. Indeed, Office 365 itself experienced a huge growth, with a jump of 22.2 million consumer subscribers.

In fact, CEO Satya Nadella’s decision to push Microsoft’s ambitions in the cloud may have saved the company from trouble ahead as it should be able to eke out a living for itself while other PC businesses flounder. For instance, Intel, which makes the bulk of its money with chips for PCs, is having to cut 11 percent of its workforce since the PC market is dying so rapidly.

Developing…

Source: Microsoft

Google’s ad business continues to prop up its experimental ventures

Google’s parent company Alphabet just released its financial results for the first quarter of 2016, and unsurprisingly the company continues to rake in huge amounts of cash. Revenue in Q1 of 2016 was $20.3 billion, up 17 percent year-over-year. Net income of $4.2 billion was also up a healthy 20 percent over Q1 of 2015, though unsurprisingly Alphabet’s “other bets” companies continue to lose quite a bit of cash — $802 million in the quarter, if we’re being exact.

That’s a lot more than those parts of Alphabet lost a year ago, when other bets posted an operating loss of $633 million. But the good news for other bets is that they’re at least bringing in more cash than they did a year ago — revenues of $166 million in the quarter was more than double the $80 million in revenue Google reported a year ago.

This is the first time Alphabet has reported quarterly numbers for its other bets companies. Last quarter, the company revealed just how much money the companies lost throughout 2015 as a whole ($3.6 billion, if you’re keeping track). As a refresher, companies under the other bets umbrella include Verily, Google Fiber, Google X, the company’s self-driving cars team, the Ventures investment group, Nest, Calico and a number of others.

As usual, Google’s advertising business accounts for the vast majority of Alphabet’s revenue: this quarter, advertising revenues of $18 billion were up 16 percent compared to a year ago. However, Google’s “other revenues” segment (which covers things like hardware sales and Google Play) also grew well this quarter. Revenue of nearly $2.1 billion was a 24 percent increase over Q1 in 2015. Hopefully Google CEO Sundar Pichai will break down where that growth is coming from, but it’s possible the powerful duo of the Nexus 5X and 6P are proving to be more successful with consumers than the Nexus 6 that preceded them.

As is usually the case, Google’s financial report is a pretty dry affair — the fun stuff usually comes up on the call with investors, which is scheduled to kick off at 4:30PM ET. We’ll be listening in and will update this post with anything else we learn.

Source: Alphabet

On the Brink of Greatness: Startup Pitches to 1st Graders

How do you know if a good idea really is a good idea? You pitch it to an auditorium full of string cheese eating 1st graders. Steve takes a group of entrepreneurs to an elementary school to put their startup ideas to the ultimate test. And there are a lot of questions.