Save $30 on a Daydream View at Verizon right now!

Right now you can pick up a Daydream View for just $50 at Verizon, a savings of $30 from its regular price. The carrier is offering all three colors at the discount, so you can pick between slate, snow, and crimson. The Daydream View allows you to experience tons of great VR content right from your phone wherever you are, and doesn’t have a huge initial startup cost. If you’re looking to dabble into the world of Virtual Reality, this is a great way to get started!

Verizon is also offering free shipping on all orders right now, so be sure to get your order in before the price jumps back up again. Which color will you be picking up? Let us know in the comments!

See at Verizon

Google Home vs Amazon Echo: Which has the better speaker for music?

Which sounds better, Google Home or Amazon Echo?

For those of us without dedicated stereo systems in the house, smaller connected speakers are great. Some of them are portable enough to follow you around the house with its own battery, while others connect to the wall and focus on delivering the best possible audio you can get from a Bluetooth or Chromecast Audio connection (which isn’t super great, but that’s a story for another time).

Connected Home speakers, like Amazon Echo and Google Home, aim to improve that home audio experience while offering a ton of other tech inside. For the most part they do a good job replacing your average $100 Bluetooth speaker, but if your goal is to get the best possible sound for your space there’s going to be some clear differences between these systems.

Here’s everything you need to know about choosing between Amazon Echo and Google Home, assuming all you are looking for is a decent speaker to play music with.

Amazon Echo

Where most speakers have been designed to be set up somewhere and pointed in the direction you want to hear sound, Amazon Echo has been built to push sound in every direction. The speaker grille on this cylinder wraps all the way around, because the speakers in this system are actually pointed down at the surface it is resting on. You can basically set this speaker anywhere and ensure you get the same audio quality everywhere, but because the speaker needs to be connected to power you’re likely to position it near a wall.

Amazon claims Echo includes a 2.5-inch woofer for bass response and a 2-inch tweeter for higher notes, and combined they deliver great sound. What this means in the real world is Echo is fantastic at spoken word podcasts (and Alexa, obviously) as well as most instrumental music. You aren’t going to get a deep bass feel from this speaker, even if you’re up close, but for a speaker its size the woofer/tweeter layout means Echo can get very loud before audio sounds distorted. This is great for larger spaces, but less useful for your average bedroom or kitchen.

See at Amazon

Google Home

It may look like Home and Echo are built similarly with a wraparound speaker grille, but in fact Google’s speaker is designed to be tucked away against a wall or in a corner. If you lift Home out of its bottom shell you’ll see what looks like three speakers, with a Micro-USB port in the back for diagnostics. Standing behind Google Home clearly sounds different as a result, but if you’re sticking this on a shelf or on a corner end table that’s not going to matter to you.

According to Google, Home includes a 2-inch driver with a pair of 2-inch passive radiators, which allows for clear highs and rich bass. What this means in the real world is a speaker that can deliver solid mids and a little more bass than you’d expect. Google Home isn’t the most crisp speaker ever when it comes to spoken word podcasts, but music from these speakers has a healthy amount of body as long as you keep the volume under 75%. Trying to crank Google Home up to 11 will quickly introduce distortion, which makes this speaker less ideal for larger spaces but is better than average in most other spaces.

See at Best Buy

Which is better?

There’s a few things to keep in mind when deciding “best” in this situation. Amazon Echo is able to get much louder than Google Home without distortion, and handles spoken word and most instrumental music better. As a single speaker it is perfectly capable, but the speaker placement makes everything sound farther away (insert echo joke here). Google Home will fill a room with music that sounds like it is coming from a more expensive speaker, but if you’re trying to fill a large space with music or you’re big into podcasts, this isn’t the best experience.

Each problem with the design of these two speaker systems has a solution offered by the manufacturer. Amazon realizes not everyone’s speaker tastes are identical, so the Echo Dot can connect to whatever speaker you want. Google Home is built on the Google Cast framework, which means you can connect multiple Google Home or Chromecast audio speakers together and create a whole-home stereo system you control with your phone.

Either solution would be a functional workaround for whatever your personal needs are, but if we’re looking at the capabilities of a single speaker it’s clear Google Home is the best speaker for music and Amazon Echo is the best speaker for just about everything else.

Amazon Echo

• Amazon Echo review
• Echo Dot review
• Top Echo Tips & Tricks
• Tap, Echo or Dot: The ultimate Alexa question
• Amazon Echo vs. Google Home
• Get the latest Alexa news

Amazon

Google Home

• Google Home review
• These services work with Google Home
• Google Home vs. Amazon Echo
• Join our Google Home forums!

Google Store Best Buy Target

Should we get our hopes up again for cloud gaming?

“We, in no way, take credit for the idea.”

LiquidSky CEO Ian McLoughlin knows video game streaming isn’t a new concept. For years, various companies have promised players they’d be able to load up any game on any device via cloud streaming. Play the latest Fallout on an Android tablet or boot up the new Witcher at max settings on a four-year-old MacBook Air. It sounds too good to be true, and since the early 2010s, it has been.

LiquidSky is the latest company to promise low-latency game streaming. The premise is simple: Play any game you own on any Windows, Mac, Android or Linux device, no matter how outdated or powerless it may be. Every LiquidSky user gets access to a unique SkyComputer, where he or she can install new games, including titles like Overwatch and League of Legends, on a virtual high-end PC, or access their existing libraries from Steam, Battle.net, Origin and others. Play any of these games on any device at any time.

Once again, it all sounds too good to be true. McLoughlin is well aware of this fact. As a programmer and creator of LiquidSky, he’s studied the turbulent, cash-sucking history of video game streaming services.

The most famous example is OnLive, a cloud gaming service that ended up $40 million in debt before finally disappearing in 2015. However, LiquidSky isn’t just copying OnLive’s model in a new technological era. McLoughlin thinks he knows where OnLive went wrong structurally — and how to fix it.

“Those guys are pioneers,” he says. “But there comes a time when you are pushing a rock up a hill, so to speak.”

OnLive and other streaming services, such as Gaikai or Nvidia’s GeForce Now, have traditionally used custom servers to handle each user’s heavy lifting. This means the companies install physical servers at crucial locations around the world, and as demand increases, the number of servers also has to increase. It’s a scalability problem, McLoughlin says.

Just look at what happened to OnLive: The company employed a 1:1 concurrency model, which essentially meant there was a series of desktop PCs in a warehouse each hosting one user at a time. Eventually, the company was able to host two or three players at a time, but it was an unsustainable system from the beginning.

“You have a million users flood in, you buy all these servers with massive capital up front, and those users are in different locations. There’s too much latency, and the only games you can play are Lego Batman and Lego Star Wars,” McLoughlin explains. “So you’re left with this massive data center that you can’t do anything with, so they started essentially giving things away for free. Even then, they couldn’t get the users to enjoy the catalog. It was too soon before its time.”

McLoughlin attempts to solve this problem with software rather than more hardware. LiquidSky has partnered with IBM to take advantage of the growing public-cloud ecosystem. All of the data center sites listed on LiquidSky’s website are actually IBM locations, allowing the company to scale in real time at a relatively low cost.

For example, 40,000 people in Turkey recently attempted to access LiquidSky at the same time, and the nearest IBM bare metal server cloud automatically responded to handle the demand, McLoughlin says.

“We knew we weren’t going to be able to take custom hardware and scale it around the world to get close to our users,” he says. “But this big shift happened in the past 10 years in terms of public clouds, and now you can actually use public clouds like Amazon and IBM and the Microsoft Azure Cloud to do high-performance computing, which is enough to get to the point of running a game. That’s sort of where we started building this technology.”

On top of advances in cloud computing, the streaming industry itself has ballooned in recent years; services like Netflix and YouTube have fundamentally changed the way everyday people consume content. Streaming is now commonplace, which means service providers have had to improve their own systems to keep up with demand.

“Them having so many users accessing video content just forced the networking companies to upgrade their routers to stop all the loss from happening,” McLoughlin says.

These factors — the availability of public clouds and vastly improved upload speeds in homes — provide fertile ground for a service such as LiquidSky to take root. Plus, McLoughlin has figured out a way to make LiquidSky free to access, something that existing services like PlayStation Now or GeForce Now don’t offer.

McLoughlin is banking on 2017 to be the year of cloud gaming. It looks like the global technological infrastructure is finally ready to support high-quality, low-latency video game streaming, and major names like Samsung and Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy are throwing their money behind LiquidSky. McLoughlin courted these investors, in part, by proving LiquidSky can work in the real world.

Over the past two years he’s tested out his streaming infrastructure on roughly 1.2 million devices, covering everything from Android smartphones to gaming desktops. That’s another big issue facing streaming service providers — within the PC space, the sheer number of unique devices (and related bugs) is staggering.

When developers build games for the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, they know the precise specs of each console and can focus on tailoring their games to the hardware. This isn’t the case with PC development. There are countless custom PC configurations in the world, and they can each produce unique glitches. Even McLoughlin’s own MSI gaming laptop crashes when he attempts to boot up Battlefield 1 through his SkyComputer, even though his rig can definitely play that game easily on its own.

Device fragmentation is one reason LiquidSky has been in beta testing for two years. In late February, the service will finally start rolling out to the public and the true cloud-streaming trial will begin.

If all goes well, LiquidSky won’t stay contained in the gaming world. McLoughlin dreams of unifying the technology industry through cloud computing. Just like he’s attempting to make every Windows, Mac, Linux and Android device run the same games in the same way, he eventually wants to make cross-platform functionality standard across all industries.

“We want to build a place where you can go in and just click something and it opens,” McLoughlin says. “It doesn’t matter whether it was designed for Android or Windows or Linux or a smart TV; you just click it and it opens. And then you go to a different device, you log into the Sky or it’s already logged in, and you’re right where you left off in that application. That’s sort of how we see this evolving.”

But, for now, the future starts with gaming.

Baidu hires former Microsoft executive VP as it focuses on AI

China’s most popular internet search company has picked up a new group president and COO. Previously at Microsoft and Yahoo (and an authority in artificial intelligence), Dr. Qi Lu might be just what the company needs. Baidu’s profits have slipped from parts of its internet business and Lu will help lead Baidu’s efforts in AI, which already include a smartphone assistant and self-driving cars. The company is already using AI to match advertisers with customers online, but has find new ways to grow after new advertising regulations in China hit its ad business hard.

It still dominates China’s internet search, where it holds an 80 percent market share. In comparison, Google claims just 64% of the US’ web searches. Tech giant Alibaba is also starting to tap into search and ads. Dr. Lu will join Andrew Ng, a former Google executive who founded the company’s artificial-intelligence unit. In a press release, Baidu said that AI was a “key strategic focus for the next decade”. Last year, the company launched a $200 million fund to focus on AI, augmented reality and deep learning.

Baidu has also announced that it will work with mapping company Here to expand its maps into Europe and further. It also opened an augmented reality research lab in Beijing, and is already working with the likes of BMW, KFC and L’Oreal. Including Lu’s hiring announcement, all three announcements were made in the last 24 hours.

The company has already forecasted a 4.5 percent dip in revenue for the last quarter — its full-year earnings report should land next month. In the release, founder and CEO Robin Li said that: “With Dr. Lu on board, we are confident that our strategy will be executed smoothly and Baidu will become a world-class technology company and global leader in AI.”

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Baidu

Atmospheric ‘lens’ could shield troops from laser weapons

How do you defend yourself against laser weapons when they fire at the speed of light? BAE Systems has an idea. It’s developing Laser Developed Atmopsheric Lens technology that, as the name suggests, uses lasers to temporarily ionize the atmosphere to create lens-like structures. If you’re facing a laser attack, you just have to form a lens to serve as a refractive shield. The technology could protect both aircraft and land-based forces from deadly blasts, and it could fill other roles as well.

BAE expects LDAL to be useful for reconnaissance, for instance. You could use it as a magnifying glass to get a clearer look at the enemy than you would with conventional sensors. The lensing system could also create mirages that fool enemies who are still looking for a target to strike.

The technology is very early, to put it mildly. The company imagines LDAL going into service sometime in the next 50 years, which can feel like an eternity in the military world. However, it’s scientifically feasible — the big question is simply whether or not laser weapons will dominate the battlefield to the point where atmospheric lensing is practical.

Via: Wired

Source: BAE Systems

ING Direct Surveying Customers About Apple Pay in Australia

ING Direct appears to be sending a survey about Apple Pay to its customers in Australia, according to a tipster who sent us the photo below.

While the bank has yet to officially accept Apple Pay, the survey suggests support could be imminent for its “Orange Everyday” debit and credit cards.

ING Direct Australia had nearly 420,000 customers with Orange Everyday accounts open as of December 2015. Here’s a list of Apple Pay banks in Australia.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: Australia
Discuss this article in our forums

New Data Says AirPods Have Captured Much Smaller Share of Headphone Market Than Earlier Estimates

A report last week by Slice Intelligence suggested that Apple’s AirPods captured an estimated 26 percent share of online revenue in the wireless headphone market since launching on December 13. Ben Arnold, an executive director and industry analyst at NPD Group, has today submitted a report that claims Slice Intelligence’s data “paints an incomplete picture of the wireless headphone market” (via CNET).

According to NPD’s numbers, for all of December Apple captured a 2 percent share of the market in unit sales, and a 3 percent share in overall dollar sales. The discrepancy between the two sets of data lies in the methodology used by each site to gather the information.

Slice Intelligence analyzes the email receipts from a panel of 4.2 million online shoppers, while NPD’s data accounts for both online sales as well as brick-and-mortar transactions. It should also be noted that NPD tracked sales for all of December, while Slice Intelligence accounted only for the period when the AirPods were on sale, December 13-31.

Beats still leads the market in NPD’s data as well, with a 46 percent share in total sales for its line of headphones. The rest of NPD’s December data is as follows:

• Beats had a 25 percent share (unit sales) and a 46 percent share (dollar sales)
• Apple had a 2 percent share (unit sales) and 3 percent share (dollar sales)
• Bose had 8 percent (unit sales) and 19 percent (dollar sales)
• LG had 10 percent (unit sales) and 7 percent (dollar sales) with Sony at 7 percent (unit sales) and 6 percent (dollar sales)
• Plantronics and Jaybird were at around 2 percent unit sales each but Apple is already neck-and-neck with them after only one partial month of sales

Arnold noted that Apple’s AirPods launch is still “significant,” despite the lower numbers presented by the NPD, and given how little time the AirPods have been on the market. The analyst also said that in a year where the Bluetooth headphone market grew 51 percent from the previous year, “the fact that Beats was able to maintain share and its position in the market means its sales grew as fast as the market did.”

“Apple being able to capture 2 percent of the market in units and 3 percent in dollars with one product in its debut month is significant, given how big the headphone market is,” Arnold said.

The AirPods have been mostly well-received by users since their December launch, although some have faced consistent battery issues with the device and its charging case. Apple hasn’t released sales figures of its own, but CEO Tim Cook called the AirPods “a runaway success” when asked about the first few weeks of the headphones’ launch in late December.

Tag: AirPods
Discuss this article in our forums

Apple Retail Update: Palo Alto Temporarily Closed, Fifth Avenue Relocation Underway

Apple’s retail store in Palo Alto, California remains temporarily closed today, presumably to allow construction workers to repair the glass facade after robbers drove a vehicle directly into the storefront last month. The location has been closed since January 15, and Apple has not confirmed when it will reopen.

Meanwhile, Apple is in the process of relocating its Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan to a nearby ground-level space in the General Motors Building. The storefront is located just steps away from Apple’s iconic cube—set to be renovated—at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, taking over the vacated FAO Schwarz toy store.

Apple’s temporary Fifth Avenue location opens on January 20.

(Thanks, Kyu Young and Patrick!)

Related Roundup: Apple Stores
Discuss this article in our forums

Wileyfox Swift 2 X preview: Cyanora custom software

The British company surprised the smartphone market in 2015, releasing two phones which boasted impressive specs and performance at a very affordable price. In many ways, the two first Wileyfox phones were essentially the Britain’s answer to the OnePlus One.

In 2016 it added a couple of new phones to its lineup, but didn’t enthral us. Can the Wileyfox Swift 2 X swing things back in the manufacturer’s favour? The Wileyfox Swift 2 X is available to pre-order on Amazon.co.uk for £219. 

Wileyfox Swift 2 X preview: Design

Credit where credit is due, the Swift X 2 feels great in the hand. That’s mostly thanks to the shaping of the metal back panel which, while mostly flat, has gentle curves towards the edges to give it a more ergonomic quality. This metal panel doesn’t extend to the very top and bottom edge though. Like many Huawei phones, the back is capped off with plastic panels.

Pocket-lint

The edges themselves are flat, but angle away from the front, making the back of the phone slightly wider and longer than the front. A power button joins a long volume rocker switch on the right edge, and both have a textured finish. The left edge plays home to the dual SIM tray which has a slot for a micro SIM and a secondary slot for either a nano SIM or microSD card.

On the bottom edge there’s a Type C port flanked by two grilles, both made up of a series of six small pill-shaped holes. The top edge has the usual 3.5mm headphone jack and a noise cancelling microphone.

As for the front panel, that features a completely round earpiece on the top, somewhat reminiscent of the LG-made Nexus 5. Despite not having any physical or capacitive buttons of any kind, the chin, or bottom part of the phone’s face is large and features only a Wileyfox logo.

On the back, there’s another Wileyfox logo in the centre, with a shiny-trimmed fingerprint sensor and camera near the top, joined by a single tone dual LED flash.

Pocket-lint

Because its bezel isn’t the slimmest, the phone isn’t especially compact for a 5.2-inch screened phone. Width-wise, it’s comparable to the skinny-framed OnePlus 3T, but it feels solid and well made overall.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X preview: Full HD goodness

Full HD 1080 x 1920 resolution may not be the most pixel-packed a phone screen can get nowadays, but in a 5.2-inch panel, it’s plenty to ensure all content looks sharp. With a pixel density of 424ppi you need to be incredibly close to the display to see any individual pixels.

The screen seems bright and the colours are nice and natural, without being overly faded or washed out. It’s definitely not unpleasant to watch, and if the colour temperature isn’t right for your preferences, there’s a screen calibration tool within the settings menu for adjusting it to suit your needs.

Because it’s not AMOLED based screen technology, the contrast isn’t super high and colours aren’t overly vivid or saturated, but still, for an affordable Android phone, it’s pretty impressive.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X preview: Not so snappy dragon

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors are some of the best out there, as long as you go with one of the more high-end 8-series chips. Sadly, the Wileyfox 2 X doesn’t have an 8-series, or even a 6-series processor commonly found in more budget-friendly phones. Instead, it’s a Snapdragon 430 octa-core processor which the company claims “allows you to multitask through fluid interfaces and stunning graphics without consuming too much power.”

Pocket-lint

Despite its eight cores and plentiful 3GB RAM, our initial experiences haven’t been quite so brilliant. There have been a few noticeable instances of stuttering on screen, when scrolling through lists or even trying to browse the web.

In fact, if you scroll fast with your thumb and let go, instead of carrying on scrolling, the content on screen stutters suddenly to a stop, making scrolling through anything a drawn out process. If you’re hoping for a fast, fluid phone that doesn’t cost the earth, this doesn’t seem to be it.

As far as storage goes, the 32GB built in to the Swift 2 X is the bare minimum expected for any smartphone these days, and the inclusion of a memory card slot in the dual SIM tray will alleviate any fears of being constrained.

While speed and performance is less than optimal, the Swift 2 X does have its plus points on the hardware side. Firstly, the 3,010 mAh battery should easily be enough to get you through a full day’s use, especially with it being a 1080p resolution screen drawing the power on the front, rather than Quad HD.

Pocket-lint

What’s more, the phone is equipped with Quick Charge 3.0 compatibility, so if you have a QC3.0 charger lying around, you can top the battery up again very quickly. On the downside, it doesn’t ship with a charger of any kind, just a USB Type-A to Type-C cable. That means it’s down to you to provide the Quick Charge 3.0 adapter.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X preview: Cyanogen’s last laugh

Wileyfox has been a partner of Cyanogen for the past couple of years, releasing phones running the custom version of software which got one of its first official retail launches on the OnePlus One. That means the Swift 2 X launches running the latest version of Cyanogen’s software based on Android Marshmallow, but sadly, it’s also the last version.

Cyanogen recently announced its decision to end its consumer software program, citing financial struggles as the primary reason to disband. That means while the Swift 2 X currently runs the Cyanogen-made software, it will be updated to a more pure version of Android in the future.

Pocket-lint

As it stands currently, the Cyanogen software provides a lot of customisation choices you might not get on a regular Android phone. That includes fine-tuning the icons you see in your status bar, choosing the colours for the notification LED based on the alert, or even adding extra buttons to the main navigation bar.

You can also choose how many rows and columns of apps you want on the home screen, choose between large or small app icons, as well as download and install custom themes to change the software’s appearance.  

Wileyfox Swift 2 X preview: Pixel power

We haven’t tested the camera fully yet, but once more Wileyfox isn’t holding back from boasting about its cameras’ capabilities.

Pocket-lint

Both the 16-megapixel rear camera and 8-megapixel front camera use a Samsung sensor, with the primary camera boasting f/2.0 aperture, large pixel size and ISOCELL technology to improve low light performance and focus speeds.

The main camera also includes PDAF (Phase Detection Auto Focus) to try and ensure no shots are overly blurry, even with lighting conditions aren’t great.

In early testing, the front camera seems to take surprisingly good photographs, without any of that heavy softening you get from so many other Android phones. Likewise, the rear camera is decent enough, but we need to test those more thoroughly to see what they’re really like.

First Impressions

On the whole, despite the concerns over the phone’s tendency to stutter and stall, the Swift 2 X seems a decent package. It has a nice design and build, the screen is bright and sharp, and the battery should be capable of getting the heaviest users through a work day.

Hopefully with the upcoming Android Nougat update, the company manages to fix its performance issues, and leave us with a phone that’s very easy to recommend to anyone looking to spend around £200 on a smartphone.

Today’s the last day to save your Vines

Vine, the six-second video service that briefly up-ended popular culture is on life support, and today’s the day Jack Dorsey pulls the plug. From today, Vine as we know it will be shut down in favor of Vine Camera, an app that shoots six second clips to be shared on your Twitter feed. As such, you’ve only got a few short hours left to download your archive and remember all that you’ve done on the service.

If you’ve yet to rescue your data from Vine, then you can head into the app and go straight to your own profile page. Beneath your avatar is a Save Videos button, from which you can either back up the clips to your phone or get a download link. The latter is probably preferable, since it also comes with a log of your likes and re-vines for every clip you shared. You can watch those while you console yourself that you were only just one decent re-vine away from becoming the next King Bach.