Pokémon Go Launches in Japan, Apple on Course for $3 Billion Revenue
Pokémon Go finally launched in Japan this morning after the game’s release was delayed following an email leak about the developer’s sponsored retail partnerships.
Social media excitement reached a peak on Niantic’s announcement that it was “finally broadcasting” in the game’s birthplace, over two weeks after it was released in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Pokémon Go is now available in over 30 countries.
The McDonalds sponsorship deal leaked earlier this week is expected to usher in a flurry of business at fast food restaurants around the country as players queue up to capture monsters and train characters at official “gyms”.
Wary of the game’s popularity, McDonalds has warned players “not to become a bother to customers who are eating”, while Japanese authorities have issued safety guidelines in cartoon form for young Pokémon Go players.
The country’s National Centre of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity called on users to bring spare batteries with their smartphones to prepare for emergency communications and to refrain from using their phones while walking.
In the U.S., Pokémon Go had 21 million active users less than two weeks after the game was launched. According to brokerage Needham & Co, Apple is set to make $3 billion in revenue from the game’s in-app purchases in the next one or two years.
Pokémon Go’s ratio of paid users to total users is said to be 10 times that of Candy Crush, which generated over $1 billion of revenue in both 2013 and 2014. Apple’s shares have gained 5 percent market value – about $25 billion – since the launch of Pokémon Go on July 6.
Tag: Pokémon GO
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Police Ask 3D Print Lab to Replicate Dead Man’s Finger to Unlock Phone
Police in Michigan are reportedly attempting to use a 3D model of a fingerprint to unlock a murder victim’s phone and reveal clues that could help solve an open case.
Fusion reports that the investigation is still ongoing, therefore details remain murky, but essentially instead of requesting that the phone manufacturer unlocks the murder victim’s handset, officers have asked computer scientists at Michigan State University to create a 3D printed replica of the victim’s fingers so they can do it themselves.
The victim’s body was apparently too decayed for a fingerprint to be directly applied to the phone, but the police already had a scan of the victim’s prints from when the man was arrested in a previous case.
Most fingerprint readers like Apple’s Touch ID are capacitive, meaning they use electric circuits that close when human skin comes into contact with them, which generates the image of the print.
However, a 3D printed finger doesn’t possess the conductivity that human skin does. So, to circumvent the problem, engineers coated the printed fingers in a thin layer of metallic particles so that the fingerprint scanner can read them.
Currently it’s unclear whether the method works, as the designers haven’t yet delivered the printed fingers to the police to attempt to unlock the victim’s phone.
Another potential stumbling block is that if the phone in question is an iPhone, then police may come up against a passcode screen, since newer Apple handsets request a passcode if the fingerprint unlock hasn’t been used within eight hours and the code hasn’t been entered in six days.
But if the technology is a success, then theoretically the authorities could use it on cases involving living suspects by applying for a court order.
Fusion notes that the courts draw a distinction between a fingerprint password and a memorized one. “Courts generally draw a line between the ‘contents of the mind’ (which is protected) and ‘tangible’ bodily evidence like blood, DNA, and fingerprints (which is not),” said Bryan Choi, a security, law and technology researcher.
So while a memorized password might be protected by the Fifth Amendment which protects against self-incrimination, a fingerprint isn’t. Indeed, in 2014, a court in Virginia ruled that a suspect can be required to unlock their phone using their fingerprint.
Therefore if a suspect is at large but the police have their phone in hand and their fingerprints on record, there’s nothing to say that the method could be used to unlock the device in the owner’s absence.
Choi argues that in this day and age, phones should be considered extensions of the mind and therefore protected under the Fifth Amendment and not just the Fourth Amendment (protection against illegal search and seizure).
“We offload so many of our personal thoughts, moments, tics, and habits to our cellphones,” Choi told Fusion. “Having those contents aired in court feels like having your innermost thoughts extracted and spilled unwillingly in public.”
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BlackBerry’s next flagship, Argon: What’s the story so far?
Blackberry is expected to launch three phones over the next year. One of them is the Argon, and by the sounds of it, this will be the company’s 2016 flagship phone. It’s a big, all touchscreen device with a powerful processor, support for the latest Quick Charge and Type-C connectivity.
BlackBerry Argon: Design
Very little is known about the design, but it’s likely to be an all-touch device, rather than a portrait slider hiding a physical keyboard underneath. That could mean that the Priv form factor is short-lived and that the only keyboard-equipped device in BlackBerry’s lineup for 2016/17 is the mid-range Mecury.
Looking at the hardware specifications, and seeing as thought the “Hamburg” or Neon is basically a rebranded Alcatel Idol 4, it could be assumed that the Argon is akin to the Alcatel Idol 4S. But that would be completely speculative to say so. The short answer is: we don’t really know.
BlackBerry Argon: Display
Just like the BlackBerry Priv, the Argon is expected to feature a large 5.5-inch AMOLED display boasting Quad HD resolution. It’s likely that it will be coated in Corning Gorilla Glass, and be curved on both edges.
BlackBerry Argon: Camera
Blackberry is upping the ante on its camera this year, at least when it comes to the number of pixels packed in to the sensor. The Argon is rumoured to have a 21-megapixel sensor in its rear camera, and an 8-megapixel sensor on the front camera.
BlackBerry Argon: Hardware specs
The hardware spec-list, at the moment, reads like the spec sheet of almost every other flagship out there. That means we’re looking forward to seeing 4GB of RAM, 32GB storage and a 3,000mAh battery all built in to a device featuring a fingerprint scanner, Quick Charge 3.0 support and a Type-C connector.
The processor is rumoured to be a slightly under-clocked version of the Snapdragon 820 chip. That means it should be fast and fluid.
BlackBerry Argon: Release date and price
According to a member of Howard Forums, the BlackBerry Argon will have a price to match its flagship specifications, although it may still be slightly cheaper than the Priv was when it launched.
In the US, it’s rumoured to cost between $600-$700 USD, which means it will more than likely cost between £500-£600 in the UK. We’re expecting it to land in October, just before the holiday season kicks off in earnest.
Want to know more?
We’ll be keeping an eye on all the rumours surrounding the BlackBerryMercury/Vienna/Rome (whatever you want to call it) and updating as we learn more. You can follow all the news and reviews on the BlackBerry hub!
Edward Snowden Designed an iPhone Case to Guard Against Radio Snitching
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has helped to design an iPhone 6 case that detects if a handset is transmitting data when it’s in airplane mode.
The project was announced yesterday by design collaborator and American hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, the founder of Bunnie Studios and best known for being the first person to hack the Xbox and for legally challenging the DCMA act.
Mockup of Edward Snowden and Andrew Huang’s iPhone case (Image: Huang & Snowden)
The concept for the case is described in a paper titled Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance, which explains that the design is to protect journalists, activists, and rights workers from being tracked by governments.
The case features probe wires that access the phone’s antennae through the SIM slot to monitor signal transmission, while audible alarms and a display on the outside of the case inform users of their phone’s status.
Snowden and Huang write that using Airplane mode is “no defense” against radio transmission, which makes such a case necessary:
For example, on iPhones since iOS 8.2, GPS is active in airplane mode. Furthermore, airplane mode is a “soft switch” – the graphics on the screen have no essential correlation with the hardware state. Malware packages, peddled by hackers at a price accessible by private individuals, can activate radios without any indication from the user interface; trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive.
Concept design for the iPhone case (Image: Huang & Snowden)
The paper cites the case of American reporter Marie Colvin, who is reputed to have been tracked by the Assad regime in Syria and killed for covering stories about civilian casualties.
According to a lawsuit filed by Colvin’s family this year, the Sunday Times journalist’s location was discovered in part through the use of intercept devices that monitored satellite-dish and cellphone communications.
You can find out more about the project by reading the white paper at Pubpub.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
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Here’s our best look yet at the Galaxy Note 7
We’re less than two weeks away from the launch of the Galaxy Note 7, with Samsung all set to unveil its next flagship in New York on August 2. Following several leaks of the phone over the course of the month, we’re now treated to official renders of the phone in gold, blue, and silver.
The renders come by way of South Korea’s Seeko (via SamMobile), revealing dual curved edge displays.
What color are you guys most interested in?
Pokémon Go launches in Japan with sponsored gyms
Pokémon Go has made its debut in Japan, and the game is seeing its first commercial tie-in. Over 3,000 McDonald’s outlets spread across the country have been turned into gyms, allowing players to battle and take control of the real-world locations for their teams.
The game should make its way to other markets in Asia in due course of time. In the meantime, check out our extensive coverage of Pokémon Go.
Download Pokémon Go from the Play Store
Pokémon Go
- Join our Pokémon Go forums!
- How to deal with GPS errors in-game
- Which team should you choose?
- How to play without killing your battery
- The Ultimate Pokémon Go Game Guide!
- Listen to the Pokémon Go podcast!
The Galaxy Note 7 is already up for pre-order in Dubai
We’re still two weeks out from the official unveil of the Galaxy Note 7, but the phone is already up for pre-order in Dubai. Customers interested in getting their hands on Samsung’s upcoming flagship can deposit AED 500 ($130) to book the phone.
No information as of now regarding the launch date, but all customers pre-ordering the Note 7 will receive a 128GB microSD slot for free. According to SamMobile, T-Mobile will begin taking pre-orders from next week.
As a reminder, Samsung will officially unveil the Galaxy Note 7 on August 2. Check out our preview for more:
Galaxy Note 7 preview
Panasonic Viera DX902 4K TV review: Honeycomb-sweet picture quality
The big sell with the Panasonic DX902 (or DX900 in other regions) is that this 4K TV is about as close as you’ll get to a professional reference monitor in the home.
That’s a fairly lofty comparison, as reference monitors are incredibly expensive, designed to show movie directors what the action looks like in their Hollywood studios. And with HDR (high dynamic range) being the talk of 2016, the message of this year’s flagship TVs is that you’ll be watching what the director intended.
It’s a message you’ll hear from all sides, but in Panasonic’s flagship 2016 television that isn’t just talk. In many ways, it actually delivers on this promise, balancing wonderful performance with a tempting price, but there are a few shortcomings too.
Panasonic Viera DX900 review: Design
Where the Panasonic DX902 – or Viera TX-58DX902B to use its full name in this 58-inch guise (there’s also a 65-inch model) – perhaps struggles to match its rivals is in design. Not the entire design – this is a premium-looking television, with minimal bezel and screen that’s edged in a very tidy textured aluminium band – but in thickness. It’s just a bit chunkier than some of the competition.
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Where rivals are talking about the almost impossibly thin displays that they have produced, the DX902’s design is governed in part by its technology. This is a thick TV (64mm at its thickest part) because it offers direct illumination of the panel through Panasonic’s Honeycomb filter, rather than relying on being edge-lit, like many flagship rivals. The advantage is enhanced local dimming with 512 separate dimming zones.
For those interested in design that could be a barrier, because it’s easy to say that the Samsung KS9500 is a better looking TV with its seamless 360-degree design, or that the LG G6 OLED’s “picture-on-glass” design is like something from the future. However, if you’re putting the DX902 on its substantial stand, with its slight rearward tilt, and sitting across the room, you probably won’t care a jot about the depth – especially once it’s switched on.
Speaking of the stand – which connects simply with just four screws – it expends the full depth to 334mm. It’s also practically the width of the TV, so you’ll need a large space to accommodate this television – there’s no perching it in the centre of a smaller TV cabinet, which is an issue we’ve had with all Panasonic TV designs of late.
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It can be wall-mounted if you prefer, but all the connections remain on the rear of the set, unlike some of those skinny rivals, such as Samsung with a separate One Connect box. The Panasonic has a large clip-on plastic cover to hide all the cables you attach, with handy cable tidies and so on, to keep things together.
Panasonic Viera DX900 review: Plentiful connections and controls
The DX902 comes fully stocked with connectivity. There are four HDMI, all HDCP2.2 compliant, offering 4K HDR support and future-proofing for accepting broadcast content. One is ARC (audio return channel, useful for soundbars and separates). Two of the ports face down, while the other two are oriented for left-hand access, so if you’re wall-mounting then these side-facing ones might just about be accessible.
If you’re looking to use the Component connections, then these face the rear, so your plugs will stick out a long way. Whether you’ll find these connections necessary, of course, is debatable, and we suspect that many will just be using HDMI these days.
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There are three USB connections, too, one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0, plus optical, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, as well as an SD card slot. Panasonic has long been about supporting the rest of its system, the SD card making it easy to move from Lumix camera to TV – although it’s a stretch if this TV is wall-mounted. We found the Wi-Fi connection to be stable enough to stream Netflix in 4K HDR, although we’d advise using the Ethernet for a wired connection in the long term.
In terms of tuners there are satellite and regular aerial connections on the rear, the latter mating with the Freeview Play electronic programme guide (EPG) in the UK – more details on that later.
There are also two remotes in the box. The standard one is a weighty piece with brushed metal finish, giving full control over everything and offering backlit buttons for those watching in the dark. It’s precise and simple to use, with a clicky action, and large enough to make it difficult to lose. It even comes with a Netflix button, which seems to be de rigueur these days.
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The second remote is the Touch Pad Controller. This is a smaller, slightly curved, remote that’s designed to fit in the hand and let you swipe your way through various functions, rather than click-scrolling. It also supports voice searching to you can talk to your TV. Sadly, the touch pad itself seems to be finished in a sort of textured rubber – so it feels horrible – while the rear is too slippery to grip properly. After initial exploration, we returned it to the box, which is probably where it’s best left.
Panasonic Viera DX900 review: Stunning visual performance
Jumping out of the box with THX certification, the Ultra HD Premium badge and shouting about a having a Professional Cinema Display, the DX902 certainly has a lot to live up to. It’s a full firecracker of excitement too when you power it up.
The DX902 is a very capable TV and it’s the colour performance that really shines. It’s rich and detailed, especially when mated with Ultra HD Blu-ray. Hooked up to Panasonic’s excellent (but expensive) UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray player and you’ll find some of the richest and most detailed visuals you can get in the home.
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You will have to head into the menus to ensure that you’ve turned on support for HDMI HDR, though, with a choice of two different modes for attached 4K accessories: one designed to support everything, and a second more precise mode. There’s still very much the feeling that 4K HDR is a bit like the Wild West, which is the case with all Ultra HD devices in 2016. You can also change the display settings from each of the sources, which means you can have the TV behave in different ways to deal with what you’re watching.
The DX902 is capable of some very powerful bright points, hitting those HDR highs with amazing intensity. Watching sparks from a fire fly into the night sky in The Revenant is wonderfully immersive. Flip to those bright winter scenes, with that low sun aided by all the lens flare, and it’s stunningly presented; a veritable feast for the eyes that drags you into movie.
Then you have the hyper-realism that HDR brings, with the incredible detail available on this TV. Stick with The Revenant, the reflections dancing off the surface the running water, or the shine off the skin of silver birch trees all helps to transport you to another place.
It’s those sorts of bright, vibrant scenes that the DX902 looks its best – perhaps better than any of its rivals out there. That’s true with other sources too, with Blu-ray and streaming content also benefiting from the great rich visuals this TV can offer, as well as a richness to HD TV channels. Although at 58-inches, those SD channels are spread a little thin across this huge display.
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The DX902 is capable of producing some very deep blacks, too, deeper than you’ll often see from LCD TVs, as part of the parcel in offering the great contrast that HDR demands. Controlling the dark, and especially the transition from dark to light, can present some processing and delivery problems, however, which is about the only real weakness of this TV.
The Adaptive Backlight Control is a powerful tool, deepening blacks to add more contrast, but also potentially confusing the TV. It works hand-in-hand with the Dynamic Range Remaster and advanced contrast controls, which present some great options and can really bring a boost to Blu-ray content that now looks a bit flatter than you might want it to – The Dark Knight gets a lift, with wonderful clarity and colour that we’ve never really experienced before in this movie.
But you can also find that it’s a double-edged sword. Set Adaptive Backlight Control to Max for the deepest blacks and you’ll find that the transition of dark to light gets lost. Take the opening scene of The Revenant for example: it fades in from black, panning across the sleeping faces of DiCaprio et al. But with Adaptive Backlight Control on, the transition from dark to light becomes a rippling pan.
For the Blu-ray version this is noticeable, to a degree, but with the added clarity, detail and contrast of Ultra HD Blu-ray it’s a lot more prevalent. You’ll also see blooming around some bright highlights, sometimes spreading into the dark letterboxing as the panel tries to decide what should be dark and what should be light. This is also more noticeable from more extreme angles, where perhaps the Honeycomb filter doesn’t quite contain the light as tightly.
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Motion control can be boosted by using the custom settings to avoid too many artefacts appearing around edges, and we found noise reduction is best kept to a minimum to avoid losing detail and smearing in faces. Panasonic offers lots of control though: through the menus you can calibrate, test and decide what works best for what type of content, your room and viewing preferences. There are auto settings for most things, or more advanced granular controls if you want to dive deeper, which is well worth doing.
A final point worth making is that the DX902 has a glossy display. That’s mostly cut through by the brightness that it offers, but where Samsung will shout about its moth eye filter to disperse reflections, the Panasonic will suffer a little more from outside light sources. Close the curtains or switch off that hallway light to ensure the best viewing conditions.
Panasonic Viera DX900 review: Sound quality
For most people looking to buy a high-end TV, you probably have an existing sound system you’re going to connect it to. But one of the advantages that the Panasonic has in staying on the larger side is that it has more space for speakers.
It offers a 40W system based around two 10W squawkers and two 10W woofers. It offers pretty good sound quality and volume as it is without any additions. That said, to get the most out of all the high-quality content you’ll be feeding this TV, you’d be silly not to pair it with a good quality soundbar or surround system.
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Panasonic Viera DX900 review: Freeview Play and smart TV services
Panasonic uses Firefox OS as the platform for the DX902. It hasn’t had the same reception as LG’s wonderful WebOS user interface (UI), but Firefox OS is nice enough: it’s modern, smart, and easy enough to navigate.
However, some of the usefulness of Firefox OS gets a bit lost. There’s a home menu that will let you navigate to apps, but there’s also an apps button on the remote to make that redundant. The home menu also gives you access to connected devices, although that’s also easy to directly change through the source.
There are also numerous ways to access the electronic programme guide (EPG), through the preview with a press of OK, pressing the guide button on the remote, or with a long press on Home and a click to the left to open a side bar that will show live previews of channels. This final function you’ll likely never find, because it’s pretty hard to get to. Whew.
But we like that you can pin apps to the home menu, as you’ll be able to get to favourite channels or services very easily using the Home button. It’s also fast and fluid to move from one place to another – although it’s a little irritating that the sound and picture breaks momentarily as you open the EPG.
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One of the big sells of the DX902 is that it offers Freeview Play. This is the latest offering from the free-to-air organisation in the UK, meaning that in many cases you can do away with a set-top box: Freeview Play offers all the channels covered by Freeview, as well as the catch-up services to match, aiming to tie the two halves together.
It offers a route to access these catch-up services directly, so if you miss Eastenders, rather than opening BBC iPlayer to find it, you simply scroll back to the episode you just missed in the EPG and hit play. It sounds great, but in its current form it’s not quite as complete as it should be: there’s no access to Demand 5 from the EPG and there’s no access to ITV Hub or All4 if you’re in the HD channels – only BBC iPlayer. It also doesn’t offer a remind function.
That makes the experience a little less polished than YouView (as you’ll find in Sony’s TVs), which offers very much the same thing, but with better linking from EPG to app. Still, the Panasonic does offer the full suite of UK catch-up apps, and it also offers the main video services in Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.
It’s in these latter services that you’re likely to find the majority of accessible 4K content, with both having a range of titles on offer. You’ll find Netflix offering a range of Ultra HD 4K content, with some shows like Marco Polo offered in HDR. Again, this is delivered wonderfully, with deep shadows meeting lovely highlights, lots of contrast and rich colours. Ultra HD Blu-ray wins on detail and consistency, but the challenge from streaming 4K HDR content is keenly noted, and expertly delivered.
Given the native skills of the DX902, you might feel you can live without a set-top box, although for those who like to record a lot of TV, you’ll find the lack of tuners limiting. Recording directly via the TV is an option – if you can find a compatible USB drive for that. We tried a wide selection of USB devices and each failed, so this might be something of a challenge.
Verdict
The Panasonic Viera DX902 is one of the most exciting televisions that we’ve seen in 2016, capable of presenting wonderful quality pictures that are dripping with colour and contrast and packed with detail.
From the fluidity of the Firefox OS interface – covering off essential services to deliver your UHD 4K content on demand, plus integrating Freeview Play – through to the variety of connections offered, it’s difficult not to love the DX902.
However, the design is a little thicker than its rivals given the arrangement of Panasonic’s Honeycomb local dimming system. And as this TV produces some heat it needs its own top cooling fans – which you’ll sometimes hear over quiet scenes. It’s not the most energy efficient, either. There’s also performance variance in dark scenes, with the Adaptive Backlight Control sometimes getting a bit confused, as is the case in many similar TV systems, such as those from Sony.
Overall, for those looking to make the most of the new era of HDR content, the Panasonic Viera DX902 is well set to fulfil your viewing pleasures. Indeed, it’s amongst the most rewarding pictures you’re likely to see in 2016.
Try passing ‘The Turing Test’ August 30th on Xbox One
Given video gaming’s reliance on artificial intelligence and penchant for sci-fi themes, it’s surprising that only now there’s a game named after Alan Turing’s famous A.I. test. Here we are though, with The Turing Test hitting Xbox One on August 30th. It’s also been promised for Steam next month. A post on Xbox Wire makes the game sound an awful lot like Portal, to be honest. It’s a first-person puzzler set in a sterile research facility on Jupiter’s moon Europa wherein you’ll use a gun of sorts to control A.I.-powered machines and “solve puzzles that only a human could solve.” That’s in addition to other tasks designed to bend your brain.
“All of this is woven into a multi-layered story based on the human struggle for power, which can only be experienced through the interactive medium of video games,” developer Bulkhead Interactive’s Howard Philpott writes. If you can’t wait until the end of next month to play but will be in Cologne, Germany for Gamescom, good news, because the game will be on the show floor.
Until then check out the trailer embedded just below. There’s an extremely hard wink at director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina at the very end — an incredible Oscar-winning movie about, you guessed it, an advanced Turing Test. Coincidence? I think not.
Source: Xbox Wire
NVIDIA’s new top-end graphics card is the $1,200 Titan X
If you recently bought a $599 NVIDIA GTX 1080 in order to have the fastest rig around, I have bad news. NVIDIA has revealed the latest Titan X, a graphics card with 12GB of GDDR5X memory and 3,584 cores running at 1.53 GHZ, yielding an absurd 11 teraflops of performance. That easily bests the 8.9 teraflops of the GTX 1080, which itself put the last-gen Titan X to shame. You probably won’t feel too bad, however, when we tell you that the new card has a price tag of $1,200, double that of its now-second-best sibling.
The Titan X, based on the company’s new Pascal P102 GPU, has 12 billion transistors and runs at 250W, meaning it burns around 40 percent more power than the GTX 1080. Style-wise, it hews closely to the triangular, faceted form of the GTX 1080, but sports darker colors. It features DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b and DL-DVI ports, though the company hasn’t yet detailed the configuration. NVIDIA has now unveiled four cards (the GTX 1060, 1070, 1080 and Titan X) in just over two months, which is a pretty frenetic launch rate.
To hammer home the point about brute horsepower, NDIVIDA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang did a surprise unveil of the Titan X at a meetup of artificial intelligence experts at Stanford University. That’s fitting, because it’s starting to blur the line between its gaming cards and Tesla GPU accelerators used for deep learning in servers and supercomputers. The card will go on sale August 2nd in North America and Europe for $1,200, but only on NVIDIA’s site and via “select system builders.”
Source: NVIDIA
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