What can I do with PlayStation VR besides gaming?
Gaming is great, but it isn’t everything!
PlayStation VR has been selling like crazy, partly thanks to a great collection of games. Do your best Batman impression, see what it’s like to live an eagle’s life, survive the zombie apocalypse, and race hundreds of high-performance cars — these are just scratching the surface.
While you’re taking a break from gaming, you might be wondering what else your glowing headset can do. Here are a few non-gaming things you can try out to get the most out of your PlayStation VR.
Read more at VR Heads
Riding inside the Lucid Air luxury EV
Exposed wires and metal beams are typically not what you want to see in a car. But as a Lucid engineer punched the accelerator (only Lucid employees are allowed behind the wheel), the preproduction Air I sat in tore down the road of the Fremont industrial park. The vehicle was only operating at half power.
That’s about where Lucid Motors is at too. It has unveiled its luxury electric vehicle and started taking preorders, but the factory it needs to build those cars doesn’t exist yet and it’ll be 2018 before production begins on the Air, its debut vehicle. Actually, the company is operating at about 30 percent of power. Maybe 20 percent.
What it showed off at its event was impressive, though. The Air is a bona fide luxury vehicle, with leather trim and wood accents throughout the interior. The metal exterior gives way to a swooped-back glass roof, creating the feeling of more space to the already roomy passenger cabin.
I’m six foot, three inches, and finding a car with ample room in the front is difficult. The Air’s front and back seats accommodated my long legs and rather large head with no problem. That’s not surprising, since the car is aimed squarely at the BMW 7 Series, which also has a spacious interior. What was a surprising addition was the back seat that reclined, similar to the seats in first-class aircraft.
It’s an odd feeling lying in the back of a vehicle, staring up through its glass roof. But I could get used to it. In fact, who could be bothered to ride shotgun when you can nap your way to your destination? But the Air isn’t just about going fast and being comfortable (both of which are an integral part of the American dream). There’s a lot of technology inside of these cars.
While I was sitting behind the driver’s seat (but not actually driving), three displays filled the dashboard. It’s a touchscreen experience except for the climate controls (but those can be moved to the touchscreen as well). If that’s not enough, an additional iPad-sized fourth display will emerge from the center dash at the push of a button. The controls on all of these screens are easy to reach and self explanatory. Yes, it’s fancy, but it’s not overdesigned. That feeling permeates throughout the whole car.
Everything has its place. Even the touchscreen between the rear seats that controls how far you recline — while a bit over the top — makes sense. Clearly the company has taken cues from Tesla to help determine how much whizbang it should add without being ostentatious (even going as far as grabbing former Model S lead engineer Peter Rawlinson and making him CTO).
That’s not all it’s borrowing from Tesla. Its strategy for autonomous driving is to ship the car with the sensors, cameras, radar and LIDAR needed for semi-autonomy. But when it goes on sale, only a few of those features will be live. Additional self-driving services will be added via over-the-air updates. If you weren’t already aware, the future of car ownership is filled with DLC.
Back in the preproduction Air, the Lucid engineer was showing us how the car can drive itself down the road, around the corner and into the parking lot. It would have been more impressive if it wasn’t a predetermined path. Still, it was good to see a company with actual working prototypes of vehicles it’s unveiling. In the back seat, if you ignored the wires, chunks of metal and lack of carpet, it felt like a car. But it’ll be a long road from building a few cars to drive journalists down closed streets to spinning up a factory and producing automobiles at scale.
It’ll be a while before the Air is in the hands of drivers and their napping passengers. The factory should start building the cars, which cost more than $100,000 in late 2018. If it can get those cars on the road in a timely fashion, the luxury EV market will be a lot more exciting.
Source: Lucid Motors
Super Mario Run review: Is Mario on iPhone worth £8?
When Nintendo announced that it was to move into the smartphone app arena this was the game that we wanted the most. We didn’t expect Super Mario Run specifically, but the Japanese gaming giant was always going to bring its biggest franchise to mobile sooner or later.
More of a surprise came when Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto appeared at the launch of the iPhone 7, to announce and demonstrate his lovable plumber’s first gaming appearance on a phone. And that it would, initially at least, be exclusive to iOS.
An Android version will emerge eventually, but only Apple device owners will be able to guide Mario through all-new adventures for now. There are going to be some green-eyed gamers out there for a while, that’s for sure, those who don’t have the right kind of device to play it on. Maybe there’s still a market for the iPod touch after all?
But why should jealousy rear its ugly head? Is Mario’s mobile debut really worth all the fuss? And more importantly, is it worth a penny shy of £8 to unlock the full game?
Super Mario Run review: Price
The latter question is the hardest to answer as that kind of price is almost unheard of with smartphone games. In a market when people frown at having to spend 79p on a game, £7.99 is tantamount to business suicide. For anyone other than Nintendo, that is.
It made the bold decision that, instead of requiring in-game purchases for items, coins and the like, it would charge a one-off fee if you want the entire experience. At the same time, the company still adopts a form of freemium model in that the base game doesn’t cost a bean to buy. You get plenty of action for nothing, but with the confidence that you’ll be hooked enough that you’ll happily part with eight squids.
It’s a bold strategy and one that is bound to work as Super Mario Run is as addictive as chocolate coated crack cocaine.
Super Mario Run review: Gameplay
The game itself is staggeringly simple to play. You tap the screen. That’s it. Short taps and longer taps are the only controls you need. They make Mario jump while everything else is handled automatically. It is, in essence, an endless runner, except it’s not endless and Mario doesn’t always run.
Each level in the World Tour is recognisably Mario, with layouts, platforms and even graphics that could have been lifted straight from any of the New Super Mario Bros games. But the screen is portrait rather than landscape, and there are no direction controls – you have to keep moving forward.
There are also a hell of a lot more coins to be collected, because that’s the real aim of the game. Instead of simply getting from A to B in a set time, you are encouraged to nab as many coins on the way. There are also special coins to be found and secured, which reward you with in-game swag if you manage to get all five on a level. They come in three different colours and difficulties, starting with pink, then purple and finally black, so give you plenty of excuse to return and play through the same level many times.
Indeed, you’ll find you need to as collecting all five special coins is tricky, especially as Mario doesn’t stop to enjoy the view. You’ll need a couple of run throughs to learn the layout and locations. But there’s another mechanism that helps too. Like with the more recent 2D Mario titles, you get bubbles that can either be manually activated or spent when you lose a life.
These take you backwards through the level, floating in the sky. Pop the bubble where you want to revert to and you have a chance to take another run at a special coin or tricky jump, without having to do the entire level again. You have to be conscious that there are only a couple of bubbles to be used per level, and the timer doesn’t replenish so you might not give yourself enough time to finish, but it’s a handy extra feature to have in an emergency.
Super Mario Run review: Levels
At launch, the single-player World Tour mode has six worlds, each with four levels, including at least one boss level per world. And only three of the levels in world one are available for free – everything else unlocks after you pay the £7.99 entrance fee.
There is another mode that you can play for free though: Toad Rally. In this, the gameplay itself is similar – you travel across a level collecting coins – but this time you are competing with the ghost character of another real-world player. And style is rewarded as much as coin collection.
Perform cool manoeuvres and you’ll earn the adulation of toads – a crowd of them will expand at the bottom of the screen as you play and their support will be added to your coin score. The winner is the one with the biggest score.
You are limited to how many times you can play a Rally, with in-game tickets paying for each go. But these replenish over time and Nintendo makes good on its promise that there is no encouragement to buy more with real money.
There are further rewards for playing either of the modes. The coins you collect in the game can be spent on buildings and scenery for your kingdom – a little area that doubles as a personalised screen and menu. And some of the objects you place can give you additional levels and bonuses, such as a Bonus Game House you’ll get near the beginning which sends you to a bonus coin-gathering level that is available a few times every day.
You can also link the game to your Nintendo account and purchase further in-game items through completing achievements – we quickly found we could afford a new character – Toad – to play with instead of Mario himself. Again none of these ask for real money to be spent, which will come as a godsend for parents.
Super Mario Run review: No offline mode
Bar the price to unlock the rest of the game, there is one other caveat that cannot be left unsaid. Miyamoto and Nintendo decided that, to combat piracy and bake the social aspects of the game into every mode, Super Mario Run will only work when your device is connected to the internet, either via Wi-Fi or mobile broadband. It doesn’t need an especially fast connection, but needs one nonetheless.
That means you cannot even play the single-player mode when offline – when on a Tube train or plane, for example. And you might want to reconsider if you’re thinking of playing it abroad in a country with astronomical data roaming fees. It basically means that you cannot play the game in many circumstances where you’d want to most. And when you’ve coughed up £7.99 for the privilege you’d like to be able to play it whenever you want.
Verdict
Issues aside, Super Mario Run is a fine example of Nintendo and Miyamoto’s mastery in level design and gameplay. It is so simple a concept that a young child could pick up and play it, while the structure is clever enough that you’ll be studying levels for every nuance and routes to earn the maximum amount of wonga.
Yes, it is very expensive for an iPhone, iPad app, but it’s actually cheap in comparison to Mario games on Nintendo’s own consoles. We wish you’d got more for the free version – at least the boss level at the end of world one – but there’s still plenty to do and see. And there’s more than enough of a tease for you to consider loosening your purse strings.
Indeed, it will be an enormous hit no doubt, maybe even on a par with Pokemon Go. And let’s hope that Nintendo updates it with additional content as regularly as Niantic does its megastar mobile game. An offline mode certainly wouldn’t go amiss.
Until then, we’ll be thoroughly absorbed and addicted like everyone else.
It took a while for Mario to arrive on mobile, but now he is, we feel he’s here to stay.
ASUS’ ROG Strix GL502VS is a mid-range (and VR-ready) gaming laptop
The idea of a “gaming laptop” usually brings to mind one of two images: an oversize laptop with enough power to rival a desktop machine, or a shockingly thin (and expensive) notebook that punches above its weight. Somewhere in between you’ll find 15-inch systems like the ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS, a gaming laptop small and light enough to lug around, yet thick enough to house the sort of powerful internals you’d need to play just about any game you want. Though it’s not a premium machine by any means, the Strix strikes a nice balance between power and portability.
Design
Spotting a gaming laptop in a crowded coffee shop is easy — just look for the loudest, most garish machine in the room. Indeed, ASUS’ Strix wouldn’t take long to find: The laptop’s otherwise subdued chassis is adorned with glowing neon orange highlights. Colorful touches against a dark frame are a common design trope in gaming notebooks, but the Strix’s obnoxiously bright shade of orange is the ultimate “look at me” color, with accents everywhere from the speaker grilles, logos, WASD keycaps, and keyboard lettering to the touchpad. It’s also the machine’s only visual flair; apart from the dim red hue of the Strix’s air vent, the rest of the chassis is a study in black plastic and straight lines.
The Strix lacks the premium feel of an aluminum milled machine, but the trade-off is worth it: The plastic chassis makes this relatively light for a midsize gaming laptop, weighing in at just over five pounds. It doesn’t feel cheap for the sake of the material either — a brushed plastic palm rest mimics the look and feel of the single aluminum plate adorning the lid. It’s a handsome machine, and a fairly portable one too. All told, its 1.18-inch-thick frame is just thin enough to comfortably fit my backpack’s laptop sleeve.
Those thick edges leave plenty of room for connectivity too, including three USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card reader, Ethernet and outputs for HDMI and Mini DisplayPort. Worried the next generation of peripherals will leave you in the dust? Don’t. The Strix also has a single USB Type-C connector. Not bad.
Keyboard and trackpad
You could use the Strix’s keyboard to write home, but you wouldn’t. It’s nothing special. That isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with it; the Strix’s well-spaced keys offer 1.6mm of travel and land with a firm but not hard stop. It’s a perfectly serviceable keyboard with little to add to the experience apart from a dark red backlight. In fact, the only thing that sets it apart from any other is an ASUS standard: The company has replaced the ten-key pad’s Num Lock toggle with a dedicated button for calling up its ROG Gaming Center software (more on that later).
It’s mostly a harmless change, but vigorous typists may accidentally find themselves launching ASUS’ gaming suite when they mean to strike the backspace key. Well, I did anyway. The keyboard at least has standard “gaming keyboard” features, including a set of colored WASD keycaps (draped in the same obnoxious orange as the rest of the laptop’s highlights) and anti-ghosting support for up to 30 simultaneous key presses.
The trackpad, on the other hand, can be a bit flighty. The large, smooth mousing surface works fine for basic cursor manipulation, but I found it unreliable when it came to multi-touch gestures. On more than one occasion, the surface misread two-finger scrolling as a zoom pinch. At least once, too, it misinterpreted my attempt to pinch the zoom back to normal as a scroll. Most of the time, it reads either gesture just fine, but these are the kind of issues that have long given Windows touchpads a bad reputation. Combined with the pad’s stiff buttons, this trackpad feels like a step backward.
Display and audio
The display here has everything you could ask for from a gaming laptop: a non-reflective screen with wide viewing angles, deep contrast and bright, beautiful colors. In fact, ASUS says the Strix’s panel covers 98 percent of Adobe’s RGB color space and 100 percent of the sRGB standard. That’s great for gamers, but even better for folks using the machine to do video editing or Photoshop work.
Laptop audio is almost never remarkable, but the Strix’s speakers are somewhat notable. Instead of flanking the keyboard, like on most laptops, the Strix’s speakers live on either side of the touchpad. It’s sort of clever: The speakers’ already clear sound pops just a little more by dint of being closer to the user. It’s nice. Beyond that trick, however, the audio seems to be on par with that of other gaming laptops: clear, but not particularly deep. As always, a good equalizer goes a long way; turning off the ROG Gaming Center’s audio enhancements leaves the machine sounding a bit dull.
The Strix also comes equipped with a trio of microphones designed to filter out ambient sounds, but the array failed in my recording tests to remove noise from a fan on the other end of my house or even the sound of passing traffic. There may be three laptop microphones in this gaming rig, but at the end of the day they’re still just laptop microphones.
Performance and battery life
| ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS (2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ , NVIDIA GTX 1070 620) | 5,132 | 6,757 | E15,335 / P13,985 | 25,976 | 2.14 GB/s / 1.2 GB/s |
| HP Spectre x360 (2016, 2.7GHz Core i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,515 | 4,354 | E2,656 / P1,720 / X444 | 3,743 | 1.76 GB/s / 579 MB/s |
| Lenovo Yoga 910 (2.7GHz Core i7-7500U, 8GB, Intel HD 620) | 5,822 | 4,108 |
E2,927 / P1,651 / X438 |
3,869 | 1.59 GB/s / 313 MB/s |
| Razer Blade (Fall 2016) (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,462 | 3,889 | E3,022 / P1,768 | 4,008 | 1.05 GB/s / 281 MB/s |
| Razer Blade (Fall 2016) + Razer Core (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, NVIDIA GTX 1080) | 5,415 | 4,335 | E11,513 / P11,490 | 16,763 | 1.05 GB/s / 281 MB/s |
| ASUS ZenBook 3 (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,448 | 3,911 | E2,791 / P1,560 | 3,013 | 1.67 GB/s / 1.44 GB/s |
| HP Spectre 13 (2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, Intel HD 520) | 5,046 | 3,747 | E2,790 / P1,630 / X375 | 3,810 | 1.61 GB/s / 307 MB/s |
| Dell XPS 13 (2.3GHz Core i5-6200U, Intel Graphics 520) | 4,954 | 3,499 | E2,610 / P1,531 | 3,335 | 1.6GB/s / 307 MB/s |
| Razer Blade Stealth (2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, Intel HD 520) | 5,131 | 3,445 | E2,788 / P1,599 / X426 | 3,442 | 1.5 GB/s / 307 MB/s |
So how do you make up for a gaming laptop’s gaudy orange highlights and the disappointment of a mediocre touchpad? By overshadowing them with high-end internals and excellent gaming performance. With a 2.6GHz Intel i7-6700HQ CPU (3.5GHz with Turbo boost), 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage on top of a 256GB SSD boot drive, the Strix handled my workload with aplomb. Still, we don’t buy gaming laptops to manage cloud documents, chat applications, music players and Photoshop; we buy them to play games. So how’d ASUS’ kit do? Just fine, thank you.
The Strix’s NVIDIA GeForce 1070 GPU didn’t completely shrug off my PC game library, but it certainly kept pace with it. Games like TitanFall 2, Just Cause 3, Hitman and Battlefield 1 all maintained solid frame rates of 60 to 90 fps on their highest graphic settings, though Battlefield 1 could occasionally drop into the high 40s on busier multiplayer maps. More demanding titles like The Witcher 3 and Watch Dogs 2 dipped just below the 60-fps threshold on “Ultra” settings, but could be coaxed above it with a few tweaks. All told, there wasn’t a single game in my library the Strix couldn’t comfortably play at its highest settings. Well, at least not until you put those games in virtual reality.
That’s right, we’re living in a new era of gaming laptops — an age when any machine worth its salt will bear a “VR Ready” sticker. The Strix is the first of this breed to land on Engadget’s review desk. With a score of 6,135 in VRMark’s “Orange Room” benchmark (and 1,640 in the more intensive “Blue Room” experience), the GL502VS is indeed a VR-capable gaming PC. It can run pretty much everything available in today’s consumer virtual reality market. It can’t, however, play all those VR games at their highest fidelity.
The laptop can run most virtual reality titles at their default settings, but configuring games like Raw Data and Serious Sam VR on Ultra can give the Strix serious pause. Pushing these games to the max turned their virtual landscapes into laggy, stuttering realities, resulting in the kind of head-tracking delays and low frame rates that can lead to nausea and VR headaches.
Fortunately, you’d really have to go out of your way to get a bad experience: Few VR games offer configurable graphics for this very reason, and everything I ran on the Strix played beautifully on default settings. That’s more than good enough for the first generation of PC VR games, but you also shouldn’t consider the machine future-proof by any means. Still, it’s good enough for now. Keep your virtual worlds tuned for performance, and not visual fidelity, and you’ll be happy.
Battery life
ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS
3:03
Surface Book with Performance Base (2016)
16:15
Surface Book (Core i5, integrated graphics)
13:54 / 3:20 (tablet only)
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, no Touch Bar)
11:42
HP Spectre x360 (13-inch, 2015)
11:34
Surface Book (Core i7, discrete graphics)
11:31 / 3:02 (tablet only)
Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, 2015)
11:23
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (15-inch)
11:00
iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 2015)
10:47
HP Spectre x360 15t
10:17
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, Touch Bar)
9:55
ASUS ZenBook 3
9:45
Apple MacBook (2016)
8:45
Samsung Notebook 9
8:16
Microsoft Surface Pro 4
7:15
HP Spectre 13
7:07
Razer Blade Stealth (Spring 2016)
5:48
Razer Blade Stealth (Fall 2016)
5:36
Dell XPS 15 (2016)
5:25 (7:40 with the mobile charger)
Gaming laptops rarely get good battery life, and the GL502VS is no exception. In Engadget’s standard battery test (where we loop an HD video at fixed brightness until exhaustion), the Strix barely lasted three hours. Sadly, that’s barely below par for the majority of larger gaming laptops, but still: It’s disappointing. When competitors like Alienware, Razer and HP can make high-performance rigs that last between six and eight hours, three is just underwhelming. ASUS can, and probably should, do better.
Software
As the years go on, manufacturer pack-in software has become less and less necessary. Most laptop builders have done away with branded update tools, display managers and audio filters. ASUS hasn’t, but its software suites get slimmer year by year. In the past, ASUS’ ROG Gaming Center application served as a hub for half a dozen purpose-built programs for adjusting the audio equalizer, tweaking screen settings and configuring keyboard macros. Now all of that is simply integrated into the main application. Unfortunately, that app is unintuitive and messy and doesn’t even do much.
The ROG Gaming Center will let you adjust the color temperature of your screen (including normal, vivid, manual and “eye care” modes); choose from five audio presets; and disable the Windows key. But that’s about it. There’s an “advanced tuning” button as well as a system resource monitor, but these features just replicate the functions of the built-in Windows Task Manager. Being able to tweak screen and audio presets in one place is nice, but it’s not useful enough to warrant a dedicated keyboard button. If only the software suite included a key mapper — at least then the laptop’s ROG button might be able to do something useful.
The Strix does pack in one more standard ASUS gaming application: the Gamefirst network manager. This program isn’t necessary, but it is sort of neat, offering users an overview of their PC’s internet activity. Want to know what programs are using the most bandwidth, or prioritize Steam over Chrome for downloads? You can do that here.
Configuration options and the competition
My $1,700 review unit came with the maximum specifications ASUS offers for its Strix laptops: an Intel Core i7-6700HQ 2.6GHz CPU (3.6GHz with Turbo Boost), 16GB of RAM, 1TB of onboard storage with a 256GB SSD boot drive, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics chip. Downgrading the GPU on that machine to NVIDIA’s GTX 1060M will save you $200.
To cut the price by another $120 and change, be prepared to give up the “VR Ready” sticker, cut the solid-state storage in half and settle for last year’s GTX 970M GPU. Finally, bottom-dollar buyers can find a $1,200 model with the same CPU and RAM as our review unit, sans solid-state drive and paired with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX970M graphics card. ASUS says additional configurations exist too, but they vary from one country to another.
Not sure this is the right 15-inch gaming rig for you? You have plenty of other options: Dell’s Alienware 15 comes in an array of VR-Ready configurations between $1,350 and $1,750, with plenty of RAM, fast processors and NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics chips — but you’ll need to shell out $2,150 for the top model if you want to match the Strix’s GTX 1070. MSI’s GT652VR Dominator is a close match to our review laptop as well, but it’ll cost you $100 more and leave you with half the RAM.
If you don’t mind having a slightly larger screen, the best bang-for-your-buck alternative might be HP’s 17-inch Omen, which can be configured with the same processor and GPU as the Strix for only $1,500. The trade-off: It ships with only 512GB of storage.
Wrap-up
ASUS’ Republic of Gamers brand has a strong pedigree for reasonably priced, powerful gaming laptops, and the GL502VS Strix is exactly that: a mid-range gaming rig that can handle just about anything you might throw at it, even virtual reality. Some garish flourishes, subpar battery life and a disappointing trackpad keep it from being a truly excellent machine, but for those looking to split the difference between the category’s large, overpowered gaming rigs and its expensive ultraportables, the Strix is a solid choice.
1Password update for iOS intros native Apple Watch app
1Password has released a massive update for iOS that makes it easy to sign up for a new account and to sync across devices regardless of their operating systems. For Apple Watch owners, though, it offers something bigger: a native app that’s much faster than the old one. You can import passwords from any vault into the smartwatch to be able to easily access apps and services on the wearable. Even better, you can import them en masse by pulling down on your item list to activate the “Select Items” screen.
Other great additions are the ability to pay for subscriptions in-app, to create Documents within the service, to sync those Documents across accounts and to fill text, email and password fields even if you didn’t create them within 1Password’s browser extension. You can see the full list of updates and changes on the website of the password manager’s developer. It’s pretty long, though — we hope you know how to speed read.
Source: AgileBits
Facebook Messenger gets a new camera with special effects
Facebook definitely isn’t depending solely on Instagram to take on Snapchat. It’s introducing an upgraded camera in Facebook Messenger that promises to not only be simpler, but help you spruce up your shots with Snapchat-style effects. The camera is quicker to access wherever you are in the messaging app, and shooting video is just a matter of holding down the conspicuously-placed shutter button. And the effects? You can now add 3D masks and special effects, such as turning yourself into a holiday-appropriate reindeer or adding a prop. There’s also a new picker that helps you find “thousands” of art objects and effects.
This attempt to jazz up your conversations applies to text, too. If you tap the palette icon near the shutter, you can add art and stickers to your written words.
Both Android and iOS users should see the features arrive in Messenger today, although holiday-themed effects will have to wait until December 21st.
The additions are clearly meant as hedges against Snapchat’s colorful, goofy conversations, although that doesn’t appear to be the only goal. To some extent, this is a response to Apple Messages, Google Allo and other relatively straightforward chat apps introducing some fun-oriented features. Facebook Messenger isn’t strictly boring, but it’s easy to imagine chatters drifting toward the competition if they find conversations more exciting in those rival apps.
Source: Facebook
Instagram hits 600 million users as its growth speeds up
Instagram’s growth isn’t slowing down just because it reached the half-billion user mark… if anything, it’s gathering steam. The image-centric social network reports that it now has over 600 million users, the last 100 million of which joined in the past 6 months. To put it another way, Instagram’s growth is accelerating — when it reported the 500 million figure, it had taken 9 months to garner the last 100 million. But what’s creating this momentum?
It’s not clear how many of those people are active. With its last update, Instagram noted that 300 million used its apps daily. Most of the 600 million total are likely very active, then, but there’s a chance that some of its new users only occasionally check things out.
The service doesn’t directly attribute its success to specific factors, but there are a few factors likely at work. For one, Instagram’s obsession with beating Snapchat is likely paying dividends. Why split your time between two services when you can create Stories or send disappearing photos in the same place you share many of your other shots? Twitter’s decision to effectively kill Vine may have helped, too, by drawing in people who needed a new home for their looping videos. Throw in increased media use of Instagram and ever-improving phone camera quality and it’s easy to see why Instagram would have room to grow. The question: are Snapchat-like features and live streaming enough to keep the gravy train going?
Source: Instagram Blog
Use Google Home’s voice controls to play Netflix
Google wants its Home speaker and virtual assistant to make you forget about Alexa. To do so, the device will need to add a bunch of new features to catch up to Amazon’s gadget. Just in time for your holiday binge watching, the company has added voice controls for Netflix. There’s one big caveat though: You’ll need to have a Chromecast connected to Home for your spoken commands to work.
If you meet that criteria, saying “OK Google, play The Crown from Netflix on my TV” or “OK Google, play White Christmas on Netflix on my TV” will begin streaming your show or movie of choice. You can also use spoken cues like “Pause this episode” to control playback when you need to grab a snack. Google says the ability to link your Netflix account to Google Home is available now in the speaker’s app for iOS and will arrive inside the Android version later this week.
Also using a connected Chromecast, Google Home can now display images from your Google Photos library on your television. Again, a simple voice command will sort out the task. Say something like “OK Google, show my photos of Joshua Tree on my TV” and you’ll be telling the stories from your vacation pictures in no time.
To keep you in the holiday spirit, Home will play Christmas music from your streaming service of choice when you give the command. “OK Google, play Christmas music” will queue up tunes from Google Play Music, Spotify, Pandora or YouTube Music. The speaker will also keep you up to date on Santa’s location next week with a little help from Google Maps. As you might expect, that info is accessible with by asking the connected device a question as well.
Source: Google
Evernote defends access to your notes in its new privacy policy
Evernote raised hackles when it revealed a new privacy policy that would let it read your notes in certain circumstances, but it’s not backing down. In a defense of the upcoming rules, Evernote’s Chris O’Neill stresses that the company will anonymize any notes it reads when checking on its machine learning system. Human observers won’t know who created the content, and the machine will automatically hide what personal info it recognizes. In other words, it’s trusting that its scrubbing process will keep your data safe. And of course, you can decline to offer your data for this purpose in the first place.
O’Neill reiterates that other forms of access to notes will only occur in “very limited cases” where there’s no other choice. Evernote may have to comply with a warrant, for example, or investigate claims of harmful content or technical issues. There’s only an “extremely limited” number of people allowed to look, and O’Neill helps vet them.
The defense is slightly clearer and more reassuring than before, but it ultimately amounts to a repetition of what the company already said: trust us, we’ll do our best to avoid reading anything you don’t want us to see. It doesn’t really address some of the outstanding questions, however. How do you know that the machine learning system will always scrub identifying data? What about confidential business info that’s unlikely to be cut? And when Evernote staffers have to read info for reports of abuse or troubleshooting, how do you know that they won’t read more than they have to? It’s doubtful that Evernote will abuse its power when the policy takes effect on January 23rd, but that won’t be completely comforting if you want a guarantee that the company won’t mishandle your sensitive material.
Via: Chris O’Neill (Twitter)
Source: Evernote Blog
‘Super Mario Run’ is now available
Finally, there’s a Mario game on smartphones. As promised, Nintendo has released Super Mario Run today, giving iPhone and iPad users a new way to run, leap and spin through the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s an auto-runner, meaning the portly plumber will jog, hop and vault over obstacles automatically. You tap the screen to jump, leaping across gaps and goombas to collect colorful coins. It sounds simple, but there’s a surprising amount of complexity to the platforming. Like Rayman Jungle Run, timing is essential to unlock contextual moves, such as rolls and wall jumps.
The game has a one-time fee of $9.99. Nintendo is keen to avoid the free-to-play mechanics that plague so many smartphone games, focusing instead on quality and traditional replayability. The levels are challenging enough, tasking players to collect coins of increasing difficulty. With plenty of stages and worlds to explore, they should keep you preoccupied for hours. There’s also Kingdom Builder, a basic village design mini-game, and Toad Rally, an aysnchronous multiplayer mode that emphasises style over brute-force level completion. The three modes feed into one another too, unlocking one-time “rally tickets,” enemy score multipliers and more.
It’s not all rosy, however. Nintendo has been criticised for demanding an always active internet connection. (The company says it’s to stop piracy.) If you’re the type of person that likes to game on their morning commute, or has to ration a modest data cap each month, this could be a deal-breaker. Regardless, it’s a landmark moment for the company and it’s beloved mustachioed mascot. Miitomo was an interesting experiment, sure, but it pales in comparison to the potential of Super Mario Run. This is a true platformer, albeit one with limited controls, that could make a ton of money and improve Nintendo’s standing in the public conscience.
Source: Super Mario Run (iOS)
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