The NBA made an original show for Google’s Daydream VR platform

As part of its 2017 All-Star Weekend festivities, the NBA is launching a virtual reality app for Google’s Daydream platform. The main piece of NBA VR is a new series called House of Legends, which the league created specifically for viewing in 360-degree video. It’s a talk show hosted by former NBA players like Bruce Bowen, Chauncey Billups and Robert Horry, where they’ll discuss stories from their careers, pop culture and things happening around the league. NBA VR will also feature other on-demand, 360-degree video content, including highlights and tours of teams’ arenas.

The application is exclusive to Daydream and available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. If you have one of Google’s new headsets, you can check out NBA VR starting today for free. An NBA spokesperson tells Engadget that additional episodes of House of Legends, as well as more (undisclosed) 360-degree video content, will continue to hit the app over the coming months.

Visitors with e-visas will get activated SIM cards in India

In a push to make travel easier, tourists on e-visas will now be greeted with SIM cards in India. The move will allow visitors to connect with locals on arrival without having to wait for hours to get their phones activated. They will also be able to call a 24-hour helpline that will be accessible in 12 languages like Russian, German, Japanese and more. The SIM cards issued by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, a government-owned telecommunications company, will be pre-loaded with about 70 cents (50 rupees) worth of talk time along with 50MB data.

According to the union tourism minister Mahesh Sharma, the initiative is restricted to e-visa tourists for now because their information is available to the authorities in advance. On arrival, visitors will simply need to show up at one of the India Tourism Development Corporation counters at the airport. The service will be introduced at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi for now, but will eventually roll out across 15 other airports in the country.

Here’s the ‘Stealth’ Case Apple Uses to Conceal iPhone Prototypes During Transport

Long before Apple takes the wraps off a new iPhone, the smartphone goes through months of design work, testing, and production between Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino and its manufacturing partners in China.

It is during this time that iPhone parts usually begin to leak, despite Apple’s best efforts to double down on secrecy. Nevertheless, noted leaker Sonny Dickson has provided MacRumors with a closer look at a few known measures the company takes to hide iPhone prototypes and prevent potential leaks.

Foremost, Dickson said an iPhone prototype travels across the world in a “stealth” case designed to prevent onlookers from seeing how it looks. The case conceals most of the iPhone, while it has yellow “security” tape along the sides that would show any tampering by somebody trying to get it open.

The prototype is accompanied by a “passport” at all times for quality assurance/control testing, according to Dickson.

“Each component or product that is tested they document in the page,” said Dickson. “The person writes their initials next to it and any notes about it passing or failing or any other comments. It makes its way through each test/person. It then is finally sent with its ‘passport’ from China to Apple.”

As known, the prototype itself, such as the iPhone 6 Plus pictured below, is engraved with a QR code for Apple to keep track of the product.

As mentioned, these efforts have not entirely prevented iPhone prototypes from leaking. A mostly accurate picture of the iPhone 7 Plus with a dual-lens camera leaked in March 2016, six months before Apple unveiled the device, while an Apple engineer infamously left a disguised iPhone 4 at a bar near Cupertino in 2010.

Apple will reportedly begin production of a trio of new iPhones, including a 5.8-inch model with an edge-to-edge OLED display, as early as next quarter, so part leaks should begin to surface around that time if history repeats itself. Read our iPhone 8 roundup to keep track of the latest rumors in the meantime.

Tag: Sonny Dickson
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YouTube Will Stop Placing Unskippable 30-Second Ads in Front of Videos in 2018

YouTube will stop supporting unskippable 30-second ads on the popular streaming video platform beginning sometime in 2018, according to an official statement from Google given to Campaign. The move is said to be a way to provide a better experience and format that works well for YouTube users, as well as the company’s advertisers.

The advertising focus for YouTube will switch over to a 6-second unskippable “bumper ad” format in the coming year, which the company introduced in 2016 and is said to be a way to convince more impatient users to stick around when an ad pops up before a video.

It wasn’t confirmed whether the removal of unskippable 30-second ads would hit both the web and mobile YouTube apps, but Google’s wording appears to support the format’s removal across all platforms.

“As part of that, we’ve decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers,” said a Google spokesman.

A few industry analysts speaking with Campaign agreed that YouTube’s decision makes sense, particularly within the context of a growing rivalry with Facebook and its ramping up of video content. YouTube Red, the company’s premium subscription service, lets users avoid ads altogether for $9.99/month, which places it alongside other video streaming platforms like Netflix ($9.99/month) and Hulu ($11.99/month for commercial-free videos).

While this move will not please advertisers, Callum McCahon, strategy director for Born Social, said it is the price YouTube is willing to pay to keep people watching.

“I’m reading this as a signal that YouTube is very worried about Facebook,” he added. “We know that video is right at the very core of Facebook’s roadmap. Their video offering is becoming ever more attractive to brands by the day, and YouTube is panicking.”

For Netflix, the company has remained adamant that it will never introduce advertisements into its streaming video content. A recent report ran the numbers and discovered that Netflix forgoes about $2.3 billion in potential advertising revenue each year by keeping to its no-commercial strategy.

Tag: YouTube
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The Growth Of The Autonomous Car Market

The autonomous car market is currently growing at an existential rate and many driverless vehicles are expected to be on our roads this year, and in large numbers.

Critics have publically stated how they feel about these types of vehicles hitting our roads but many fail to realise that this development started over 80 years ago – and the experts feel these initial plans (and the public testing in 2016 along with huge investment inbetween) will be put into practice before we know it.

There have been many financial, practical and scientific challenges involved in the development of these vehicles that we decided to explore further.

In our infographic, you will discover:

• The history of autonomous cars
• The challenges involved in engineering the coveted autonomous car
• How DARPA have been involved in testing driverless cars
• The advent of Google X
• The science behind autonomous vehicles
• What the future holds for the autonomous car market
• Which car brands have driving patents for autonomous vehicles
• The projected launch date for driverless card (for test or commercial purpose)
• Projected market penetration of autonomous cars in the UK
• SAE levels explained

HTC plans to exit the low-end smartphone market in 2017

Why it matters to you

HTC’s canning most, if not all, of its affordable smartphone line. If your heart’s set on an HTC phone this year, you’ll have to spend big bucks.

HTC has apparently had it with low-cost, low-margin smartphones. That’s according to company boss Chia-Lin Chang, who revealed during the company fourth-quarter earnings call that the company would focus most of its future efforts on pricier flagships like the U Ultra and U Play.

Chang described the market as “ultra-competitive,” a factor she blamed on the company’s failure to turn a profit this quarter. In the final quarter of last year, HTC took in $722 million and recorded an operating loss of $117 million, a minor improvement from Q3 2016’s loss of $133 million.

More: HTC smartphone VR headset coming by end of the year

HTC says it’s going to drop cheap phones from its 2017 lineup. In their place, it plans to release six to seven high-margin smartphones.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time the company’s pledged to refocus its manufacturing efforts on high-end devices. In 2012, the firm announced that it would only focus on “top-tier phones,” a strategy which it subsequently relaxed.

Generally speaking, it’s a well-founded approach. Take Chinese smartphone maker Huawei’s recent earnings, for example: According to analysts at the International Data Corporation (IDC), high-end phones accounted for around 57.2 percent of its smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2016.

More: HTC wants U! Everything you need to know about the HTC U Ultra and U Play

But for HTC in particular, it’s a risky move. The Taiwanese smartphone maker will release its first 2017 flagship, the U Ultra, in Europe with a global release to follow soon after. But it has yet to secure a launch partnership with a U.S. carrier, meaning that it’ll retail at the carrier-unlocked priced of $750 and up.

And the competition won’t sit around waiting. Late last year, new estimates showed that Apple took 103.6 percent of the profits from all smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2016. By comparison, Samsung captured just .09 percent.

HTC may have better luck in other markets. During an earnings call with investors, the company announced that it will introduce a mobile VR headset by the end of 2017 “designed to work with the U Ultra.” Last year, HTC split off its virtual reality business into a separate entity and announced Vive X Accelerator, a $100 million incubator with the mission of investing resources in promising VR games and experiences. More recently, it announced a $10 billion VR Venture Capital Alliance and launched Viveport, a VR-focused storefront, on mobile devices.

iOS 10 problems and the solutions to deal with them

The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 10, is out now and it has a lot going for it. The biggest additions change how people use their iOS devices — transforming the way they write and send texts, interact with notifications, and use Siri within apps. The new version of iOS was in beta for quite a while and was made available to the public, meaning thousands of people got to experience iOS 10 prior to its official release. People came to grips with the new features during this period, but there were some iOS 10 problems that Apple didn’t catch.

More: Handy new iOS 10 tips and tricks to try out

Fortunately, making the beta available to the public resulted in more bugs, glitches, hardware and software issues being discovered, which gave Apple a chance to fix them before the official release. That said, it’s always convenient to have one place to find any and all iOS 10 problems, which is where we come in. We’ve scoured as many forums as we could to find the biggest problems people have run into while using iOS 10, and provided workarounds and solutions for as many of them as we can.

Problem: Battery drain

Excessive battery drain is a problem for some people using iOS 10, as well as other versions before it, even when the iOS device is being used normally. The problem isn’t universal, as many people report that their batteries are performing as expected, but if you’re using iOS 10, you should be prepared to charge your phone more than usual. These threads from Apple’s own forums are filled with people saying their phones are turning off completely when the battery drops to about 30 percent, or drain rapidly from 80-90 percent to 25 percent. The battery indicator will sometimes suddenly drop to 1 percent, then shut down. In other cases, if the phone is above 30 percent and manually shut down, it may not turn on unless plugged back into a charger. The phone will come on and be back at 30 percent again.

Workaround:

• If your phone shuts down when it hits 30 percent, connect it to a charger and turn the phone back on, or reboot it before it shuts off.

Potential solutions:

• Update your phone to the latest version of iOS 10, which is currently iOS 10.2.1.
• Turning off the Raise to Wake feature has been said to help some users. To do this, go to Settings > Display & Brightness and toggle off Raise to Wake to disable the feature.
• We’ve written a few iOS guides that include tips for fixing poor battery life. Here are a few for the iPhone 6S, iPhone SE, iPad Air and Air 2, and the iPad Pro.
• You can find more tips and suggestions in our iPhone battery tips roundup.

Google’s Project Loon update lets balloons cluster for better coverage

Why it matters to you

If you live somewhere remote, Project Loon could one day give you reliable high-speed internet access via balloon.

Google’s Project Loon might sound “loony” when you first hear about it, but the idea of using balloons to provide internet access to various parts of the world is gathering traction. Utilizing air currents for essentially free transport, Google has developed a system for delivering balloons to key areas that need additional coverage.

How to affordably provide internet access to remote rural regions has been a challenge for many countries around the world, the United States included. Google’s solution uses balloons fitted with solar panels and transceivers to provide an internet broadcast station that uses natural air currents to travel around the U.S. Its latest innovation, however has allowed them to stay near stationary, using those same air currents.

Typically Google’s Project Loon required a consistent stream of balloons in order to provide internet access to an area. Once the balloons moved out of range, they stopped being useful to any one community, so another needed to come along on a regular basis to maintain that connection. That’s not the case anymore, though.

More: Google’s Project Loon runs test of balloon-based internet service over Peru

This navigational update to Loon uses the same air currents to keep balloons clustered in a certain area. This not only has the potential to offer internet access to far-flung communities, but could mean Google’s system could be used to provide wireless internet access in disaster-hit areas, or to ease load when capacity of existing networks is reached.

With balloons able to remain airborne for up to 190 days, making them reactive to ongoing trends rather than simply requiring a massive fleet makes the technology far more useful and economically viable. If Google can have the balloons provide viable internet access to those in need for a greater proportion of the balloons’ “up time” then it’s far more useful than having them simply rotating through and helping out for only a short period of time while the wind is right.

Although the end goal for many tech organizations is to provide worldwide, satellite-based internet access, Project Loon is an effective middle ground that is far cheaper to orchestrate and maintain.

Why do new phones ship with older versions of Android?

New phones shipping with outdated versions of Android isn’t too surprising. The reasons? Release cycles, and Benjamin Franklin.

This summer, you’ll see phones sold — expensive phones — that have older versions of Android. Brand new phones that cost hundreds of dollars and are the best models available. They will be on shelves beside other brand new phones that have “old” software on them, too. And not just models that have been available for a while, but just-released devices that we have heard about and are waiting to buy. For some, that can be frustrating. But there is a reason, and it’s pretty simple.

It’s known as opportunity cost. The idea behind opportunity cost is that all resources must be used efficiently. These resources could be monetary, but they also include things like time or any other corporate benefit. We’re all more familiar with the idea the way Ben Franklin expressed it: “Remember that Time is Money.”

It’s no secret that most phones that run Android aren’t using the latest software. The main reason is that it’s not an easy task to keep phones updated because of Android’s software licensing, and nobody involved in making your phone or the software on it wants things to change. Many of those same reasons apply when we see brand new shiny phones that have old software on them, too.

Building an operating system is hard and you can’t change the platform in the middle of doing it.

Google only makes Android for the products they sell. They allow companies like Samsung or LG to build their own operating system based on Android any time they like because of a liberal software license. That’s why Android became the dominant operating system so quickly, and it’s also why your phone probably has an older version of Android, and has ever since you bought it.

It’s not cheap to build and test an operating system. Sometimes it’s comparatively easy; think of BlackBerry’s Android phone and how they are patched on time every month when Google releases a security bulletin. The new code was designed to be merged into existing code, and all a company using it needs to do is check the parts they have changed compared to the download Google provides. Actual changes to the Android core are another matter, and even a bump from 7.0 to 7.1 can prove challenging. And expensive.

Software cycles versus hardware cycles

Samsung is likely going to show us a Galaxy S8 in late March. It may run Android 7.0 or it may run 7.1. The chance that it will be running 7.1.1 (the latest official version) is very slim because that particular version wasn’t ready when Samsung was finalizing the software the way it wants it to be on the S8. And that’s not going to be a big deal. It will be running Android Nougat and have the same application support as Google’s Pixel. Phones that release near the beginning of the year are usually all like this and will only be a point or two behind.

Those point releases are nice but not critical. 7.1 is still just fine.

This becomes more of a problem for phones that come later in the year. Android gets its yearly platform update every autumn. Recent versions have had a beta testing cycle so we get to see them a few months before. But companies can’t build their software based on beta code so any phone in late stages of production before the Android platform update will be a full platform version behind. That can have major implications when it comes to security and app compatibility.

In both cases, the time it would take to stop production and update the software before selling them would directly affect the amount of money a company makes from selling them. Companies that make things like phones exist only to make money.

Nobody at Samsung or LG or anyone else wants you to have old software on your phone. But because they have to do the updating themselves, it takes time. And time equals money.

Android Nougat

• Android 7.0 Nougat: Everything you need to know
• Will my phone get Android Nougat?
• Google Pixel + Pixel XL review
• All Android Nougat news
• How to manually update your Nexus or Pixel
• Join the Discussion

Do you really need a PS4 for PlayStation VR?

Skip the PlayStation part of PlayStation VR.

PlayStation VR is a great headset and has an expanding library of games with a few standouts that really make it worth the money. Just because it has PlayStation in the name, however, doesn’t exactly mean you need a PlayStation 4 to use it.

To indulge your curiosity and to help some of you decide if you should buy a PSVR on its own, we explain how the PSVR works and how to use it without a PlayStation 4.

Read more at VR Heads!