Pixel 2: A Google phone for the post-bezel generation?

The first round of Pixel 2 rumors claim an entirely predictable array of upgrades. What’s going to make the next-gen Googlephones exciting?

Google’s first Pixel phones are barely 3 months old, but already we’re starting to hear the first rumors of what the next generation of Pixels will bring. Reports from 9to5 point to (entirely unsurprising) improvements to the camera and CPU, along with a slight price bump and possible water resistance.

That’s all well and good, but those are things I could’ve taken a guess at at any point after the Pixel’s release. Obvious feature omissions (water resistance) will be addressed. The usual parts will get a yearly refresh. And further progress will be made in the areas where the current Pixels excel, like camera performance.

Here’s the more interesting question: What’s coming in these next-gen Pixels to bring the fight to phones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and iPhone 8? And what’ll be Google’s take on the major smartphone trends of 2017, like AI, minimal bezels, and the looming possibility of 4K displays?

Dem bezels.

The current Pixels are at odds with the coming wave of handsets, like the Galaxy S8 and LG G6, with the tiniest sliver of a border around the display. The iPhone is said to be going that same way — one of many rumored upgrades for that phone’s tenth anniversary. Google had a relatively easy time against a relatively boring iPhone upgrade cycle in 2016, but the iPhone 8 is going to be another matter altogether.

The obvious path for Google to take is the one now being worn by Samsung and LG — keep the phone roughly the same size, bump up the display dimensions significantly, and in the process switch to a weird new (taller) aspect ratio. (The other, less likely option, is to lop the top and bottom bezels off and have less space for things like the battery and camera.)

Google’s gotta do something with an extra-tall phone, right?

So then the question becomes: What will Google do with an extra-tall Android phone? The company has often used its own handsets to show what’s next for the ecosystem as a whole — features like NFC and USB Type-C made their debut in Nexus devices. So there’s a possibility that Google may choose to do something extra with a new, taller aspect ratio and code it in at the OS level so other manufacturers can build upon it. We’ve already seen some possibilities in LG V20’s “second screen”, although none of these approached killer app status. Equally, a taller screen might simply serve to make multi-window more palatable on a phone-sized device. Things can become a little claustrophobic, even on the 5.5-inch Pixel XL.

With a new (and sure to be heavily hyped) iPhone on the way, a new, hungrier Samsung fielding a Note 8 in the third quarter, and leaner upstarts like OnePlus becoming stronger, it’ll be fascinating to see how Google reacts.

Will it run into a sophomore slump? Or will the second-gen Pixels retain the crown? Stick with us in the coming months to find out!

Google Pixel + Pixel XL

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
• Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
• Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
• Pixel + Pixel XL specs
• Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
• Join the discussion in the forums!

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Nintendo delays Android version of Animal Crossing to focus on Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes

Animal Crossing Mobile is coming to Android, but you may have to wait a bit longer than expected.

Nintendo is poised to release its third mobile game after Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes, but it will be slightly later than anticipated.

While Android users can expect the former in early March and the latter on February 2, a mobile version of the beloved Animal Crossing series will have to wait up to a year from now. The intensive upkeep of Super Mario Run and the anticipated maintenance of Fire Emblem forced the company to push back Animal Crossing’s release.

Nintendo mentioned this during its Fiscal Q3 earnings call, noting that the company’s $569 million (equivalent) net profit stemmed from successes in Pokemon Sun and Moon, Super Mario Maker on the Nintendo 3DS, and Super Mario Run, where it was downloaded “tens of millions of times” on iOS.

While Fire Emblem: Heroes, which marries a blend of tactical role-playing with more modern free-to-play elements, Animal Crossing a
a far more relaxed, exploratory game where you create a village full of cute animals and companionable human friends. It’s unclear when in the company’s new fiscal year, which begins in April 2017, Animal Crossing will be released, but we do know that it will be a freemium title.

Super Mario Run for Android: What we know so far

Plex has acquired newscast aggregator Watchup because people are watching news again

Plex has acquired a new app that helps people stream traditional news broadcasts.

Plex, the well-known U.S.-based consolidator of all things media, has acquired newscast aggregator Watchup, which brings together video from news channels around the world in an Android (and iOS) app, for an undisclosed amount.

Watchup was launched in 2012 on the iPad but later spread to Android and various set-top boxes, including Amazon Fire TV, Xbox and PS4, as Americans cut cords and began to find most of their news online. The company has aggregation deals with many of the top U.S. media companies, including CBS, PBS, CNN, Fox News and WSJ, as well as international sources like Euronews, Sky, Financial Times and others.

Plex plans to make Watchup part of its media portal, which is increasingly relying on external streaming sources rather than its more traditional focus on local media consolidation. Plex says that the Watchup deal is perfectly timed given the resurgence of video news as part of people’s daily routines.

Watchup makes watching news easy by using suggested categories and themes to learn what people want to watch and, like Stitcher in the audio space, creates a continuous playlist of content that people can peruse during a commute, meal or workout.

Download Watchup (free)

Best Cases for Huawei Mate 9

What are the best cases you can buy for the Huawei Mate 9?

The Huawei Mate 9 is a big phone, but just because it’s well-made — full of precisely-machined metal and Gorilla Glass — doesn’t mean it is unbreakable. If you’re concerned about damaging this new-to-the-U.S. smartphone, here are some picks for the best cases you can buy right now.

• Ringke Fusion Bumper Case
• Vinve Ultra Slim Hard Cover
• Feitenn Huawei Mate 9 case
• Abacus24-7 wallet with flip cover

Ringke Fusion Bumper Case

Get that brand new flagship into some covering — stat! If you’re buying the Huawei Mate 9 from Amazon, add the Ringke Fusion Bumper Case to your cart. This particular case adds a bit of thickness to the Mate 9 so that there’s ample space between the phone and what it’s laying on. It also features a couple of elements that other cheap cases don’t typically include, like covering for the headphone jack and charging port. It comes in four color varieties.

See at Amazon

Vinve Ultra Slim Hard Cover

I am obsessed with cases sporting a built-in phone stand like the one featured on the Vinve Ultra Slim Hard Cover case. Not only is it shaped like a bear, but you can hook your fingers through it so that the Huawei Mate 9 doesn’t slip out of your hand and fall to the floor. The case is available in chic black or rosy pink.

See at Amazon

Feitenn Huawei Mate 9 case

Don’t like showing off your screen to the world? The Feitenn flip case shields offers a window for notifications and a spot on the back for the Huawei Mate 9’s 20-megapixel rear-facing camera and fingerprint sensor. This case lets you prop up the device for video watching, too, and it comes in five different colors.

See at Amazon

Spigen Rugged Armor Case

Give the Huawei Mate 9 that carbon fiber appeal with the rugged armor case from Spigen. The case is made of flexible plastic and features an interior spider-web pattern for a neat design effect. It also comes with a raised lip that keeps the screen from touching the ground when it’s laying down. At present, the rugged armor case is only available in black.

See at Amazon

Your pick?

Is your Mate 9 sporting a case not mentioned here? Want it represented? Leave a comment below and we’ll check it out!

Huawei Mate 9

• Huawei Mate 9 review
• Huawei Mate 9 specs
• Where to buy the Mate 9 in the U.S.
• Porsche Design Mate 9 unboxing
• All Huawei Mate 9 news
• Join the discussion in the forums

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Old Nvidia Shield TV will also get Google Assistant in update

When Nvidia announced its new version of the Shield TV media streamer in December, it revealed the device would get Google Assistant and SmartThings smart home support in a future update. However, it was thought that the older version wouldn’t – that it wasn’t able to, technically.

Pocket-lint has since learned otherwise.

The 2015 Nvidia Shield will also get Google Assistant when the update arrives. It will also be able to run as a SmartThings hub.

The older device has already been updated to Android 7.0, just like the latest model, and its feature set will continue to be same going forward.

The only catch for old Shield TV owners is that they will need to purchase the new game controller to get it to work.

Google Assistant requires an always-on microphone for voice control and the latest game controller is the only one with that feature.

• Nvidia Shield Android TV review: 4K and gaming meet in powerhouse box
• New Nvidia Shield Android TV preview: Smaller, more capable 4K HDR video streamer

The new Bluetooth Shield controller does work with the old box though, but it’ll cost you £60 on its own. You can also buy the new Shield Remote control, as that works with the old box too.

It comes with a cell battery rather than rechargeable version so lasts a lot longer – up to a year – before you need to replace the cell. The previous remote required recharging as little as two weeks a pop.

Nvidia has also announced that the new Shield TV Pro variant, with 500GB of built-in storage, is available now for £280. It comes with the older, rechargeable remote, however.

Fitbit’s CEO confirms expansion into the smartwatch scene

Fitbit is on a bit of a charge at the moment. At the end of 2016, the company acquired Kickstarter record setting smartwatch company Pebble while in May last year, it acquired Coin, a company with its fingers in mobile payments.

• Pebble is dead and your warranty expired, Fitbit finalises acquisition

The clues were all there for Fitbit to one day add smartwatches to its repertoire, alongside its rather excellent fitness trackers. Now, Fitbit’s CEO has confirmed just that in the company’s prelimiary fourth quarter financial results.

James Park, Fitbit CEO and co-founder said: “We believe the evolving wearables market continues to present growth opportunities for us that we will capitalize on by investing in our core product offerings, while expanding into the smartwatch category to diversify revenue and capture share of the over $10 billion global smartwatch market”. Need any more proof? Here you go.

“We believe we are uniquely positioned to succeed in delivering what consumers are looking for in a smartwatch: stylish, well-designed devices that combine the right general purpose functionality with a focus on health and fitness. With the recent acquisition of assets from Pebble, Vector Watch and Coin, we are taking action to position the company for long-term success.”

• Which Fitbit is right for me?
• Your future Fitbit might include mobile payments
• Fitbit steps in the real world can step up your performance in NBA 2K17

Fitbit will surely be hoping entering the smartwatch market will help its financials, as the company expects to post fourth quarter revenue of $572 – $580 million, as opposed to the predicted figure of $725 million. The company will unfortunately have to lay off around 110 employees and reassess sales and marketing expenditure in order to bring operating costs down.

ICYMI: Reptile robots in the wild

Today on In Case You Missed It: BBC One’s nature show, “Spy in the Wild,” partnered with a robotics division in order to design and produce two remote-controlled robot reptiles. Using bio-informed robotics, the team closely reproduced the creature’s movements in the robots, which were constructed with motors, aluminum, carbon fiber and latex waterproof suits. The robo-reptiles — a crocodile model and a monitor lizard version — will be used to study real life animals up-and-close.

Meanwhile, the Hyperloop One team demonstrated the technology behind its magnetically levitated train prototype via this video that shows how 105 pounds of quadcopter can hover using a quartet of independently powered magnets set atop a copper plate. When the magnets spin fast enough, the fields push hard enough against each other to create lift-off. The downside is that the system produces large amounts of waste heat, so there are still some kinks to get worked out.

And lastly, anyone who simply can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube just got a handy cheat in the form of this Raspberry-Pi robot built from Legos, which can solve the puzzle in a little under two minutes. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Libratus, the poker-playing AI, destroyed its four human rivals

The Kenny Rogers classic profoundly states that “you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,” and for the first time, an AI has out-gambled world-class players at heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold’em. Our representatives of humanity — Jason Les, Dong Kyu Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou — kept things relatively tight at the outset but a ill-fated shift in strategy wiped out their gains and forced them to chase the AI for the remaining weeks. At the end of day 20 and after 120,000 hands, Libratus claimed victory with daily total of $206,061 in theoretical chips and an overall pile of $1,766,250.

“I think the worst result for the human team here would’ve been us showing up and losing and walking away thinking we could’ve done more, having some sort of regret,” said Jason Les, who came in fourth. CMU was quick to assure the team, though, that they had indeed given Libratus the best possible run for its (virtual) money.

“This is a landmark step for AI,” said Libratus creator and Carnegie Mellon University professor Tuomas Sandholm in an email. “This is the first time that AI has been able to beat the best humans at Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em. More generally, this shows that the best AI’s ability to do strategic reasoning under imperfect information has surpassed that of the best humans.”

The two key words in the good professor’s statement are “imperfect information”. Libratus wasn’t designed specifically to beat poker (and for that matter, the insanely high-powered computers Libratus actually runs on aren’t built for that either). Instead, Libratus at its core is a series of algorithms that can interpret the rules and constraints of a certain situation and figure out a strategy when it doesn’t know what the other party knows.

Consider games like chess and go: if you pay enough attention, you can relatively easily understand the world of the game and the how particular board positions came to be. You’ll never have that kind of understanding when playing a few hands of no-limit Hold’em, which has made it a big target for AI researchers. Speaking of, we have to wonder how a rival team of researchers from the University of Alberta and two Czech schools are reacting to the news — they claimed their own DeepStack AI was the first to beat high-level poker players, but the identities of the AI’s foes were never publicly disclosed.

For what’s worth, none of the humans embroiled in this defeat feel too upset about it. The amount of money spent and computing power required to beat them was impressive, to say the least, and it doesn’t hurt that the contenders get to split a $200,000 prize pot based on how well they stacked up against Libratus. While tired — they spent plenty of late nights poring over data and strategizing — none of them plans to take much of a break. Meanwhile, Professor Sandholm and his research assistant, Noam Brown, have their work cut out for them, too: they’ll spend the next weeks and months prepping all of Libratus’s data for publication.

Correction: Velazco here, I’m a dope and mixed up Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” with The Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker”. The error has been rectified, and I’m probably never going to live that one down.

Fox Sports will broadcast Super Bowl 51 in a ‘VR suite’

Sure watching boxing, basketball and tennis in VR are cool, but what about the biggest TV event of the year? Come Sunday, Fox Sports will fix that gap in its lineup by teaming with LiveLike to beam the Super Bowl into your Gear VR or Cardboard headset via the network’s app. Or, you can ditch the headsets and use the 360-degree video with your mobile device.

In addition to a half-dozen viewpoints to choose from within the virtual suite Fox will upload what it deems the 20 “most exciting” highlights in near realtime. A statement says that breaks down to four per quarter and highlights from the pre-and-post game coverage.

Unlike streaming the game via Fox Sports Go, however, you’ll need a cable subscription to watch on the Fox Sports VR app.

Source: iTunes, Google Play, Oculus

2K wins right to store your biometric facial data

Video game publisher 2K has just won a lengthy court case over the right to collect and store players’ biometric data. Using your console’s camera, the company employs face-scanning tech in its popular NBA series, with both 2K’s NBA 2K16 and 2K15 using the data to help players create more accurate avatars.

When two gamers used the service to create their own digital doppelgangers, they became concerned about how 2K would store and use their biometric data, filing a lawsuit against the publisher in October 2015. In court, however, a New York federal judge has ruled that neither games’ biometric face scanning tech had established ‘sufficient injury’ to the plaintiffs, implying that their concerns over privacy were unfounded.

In order to use the tech, players must first agree to 2K’s terms and conditions, consenting that after scanning them their face may be made visible to others. While the plaintiffs agreed to the publisher’s terms, the court case arose because the gamers claimed that 2K never made clear made clear that scans would be stored indefinitely and biometric data could be shared.

With little evidence to suggest how their privacy would be at risk, the judge gave 2K the benefit of the doubt. Still, no matter the outcome, it’s a landmark case, with biometric data sure to play an increasingly important role in identifying individuals in the future. While there is certainly nothing that suggests that 2K will use the data for nefarious means, the result of this case does raise some interesting questions about who owns the right to your digital likeness.

As — unlike a password — biometric data is not easily changeable, concerns about a corporation holding such a long-term identifier are understandable. In a time where governments are scrutinizing people’s social media in order to vet potential visitors, a bit of healthy paranoia over your privacy can’t hurt.

Still, considering how many of the results of these scans actually turned out — NBA 2K15 players don’t have much to worry about.

Source: Hollywood Reporter