Android Pay is now live in Belgium

Android Pay is slowly becoming available in more markets around the world.

Google has rolled out Android Pay in Belgium, making it the tenth country in the world to receive the digital payments service. Belgian users will be able to pay at over 85,000 retail locations with Android Pay, including Carrefour, McDonald’s, Media Markt, H&M, and more. The service also allows customers to checkout within apps, and is supported by Fancy, Uber, Deliveroo, TransferWise, Hotel Tonight, Vueling, and more.

To get started, you’ll need to add a Visa or MasterCard credit card from BNP Paribas Fortis, Fintro, or Hello bank!, with Google stating that debit cards will be supported shortly along with CBC/KBC cards. Android Pay is available on all phones running Android 4.4 KitKat and above, and relies on NFC for payments. If you have a qualifying credit card, you can get started with Android Pay by downloading the app from the Play Store.

Sonos Debuts New ‘PLAYBASE’ Home Theater Speaker

Sonos today announced the PLAYBASE, its newest speaker designed for home theater sound systems. According to Sonos, the PLAYBASE is a thin, powerful speaker that sits under a television set to offer enhanced sound for TV shows, music, and movies.

The PLAYBASE measures in at just 58mm tall, but it includes 10 drivers (six mid-range, three tweeters, and one woofer) for what Sonos says is great sound. Design wise, it’s meant to meld into a home’s decor, with a polycarbonate body that features clean lines, no visible seams, and 43,000 holes for a transparent grill.

“We have built a product that can not only handle the complexities of home theater – delivering open and natural sound, clear dialogue, and immersive bass that fills the room – but also fits perfectly in any home environment,” said Giles Martin, Sound Experience Leader at Sonos. “The challenge with PLAYBASE was upholding the desire for it to be beautiful from all angles without compromising any of our design, acoustics or engineering principles. We were obsessive in our approach and decisions, resisting every urge to pack anything in here that wasn’t needed, and custom built everything else to find the perfect fit – it’s our thinnest, most beautiful speaker yet.”

PLAYBASE is specifically meant to be used with TVs that sit on furniture rather than those that are wall mounted. It includes two cords and connects to other Sonos speakers for a whole house sound solution. Like all Sonos products, it can be used with more than 80 music services.

Sonos will begin selling the PLAYBASE on April 4, 2017. It will be priced at $699 and it will be available in black or white to match any home decor. Existing Sonos owners will be able to pre-order the PLAYBASE starting today.
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Sonos PlayBase preview: Super-slim sound

Sonos doesn’t launch a new product every month, or even every year, but when it does, they always seem to be worth the wait. Enter its latest speaker, the PlayBase, which joins the PlayBar in the home theatre line-up.

The PlayBase is designed to slide underneath your TV rather than mount on the wall like the PlayBar and it’s a beautiful looking device. Here are our first impressions.

Sonos PlayBase preview: Design

Sonos has some fabulous speakers in its portfolio, especially the newer ones, but the new PlayBase is by far the sleekest of the lot.

The PlayBase measures 720 x 380mm and it is just 58mm high, making it the slimmest speaker offered by Sonos. The company said the aim was to allow it to “disappear into the home” and the new device certainly achieves this with no unnecessary details.

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The top of the PlayBase is smooth to touch, and super flat, allowing for a TV and its stand to sit firmly on top, while the rounded corners of the PlayBase give an overall softer and consequently lovely finish.

There are no apparent joins anywhere on the PlayBase, delivering a seamless look with clean lines that makes the speaker seem as though it has been created from a single sheet of material.

All the internals are wrapped within a glass-filled polycarbonate exterior to ensure vibrations are kept to a minimum and the speaker can withstand the weight of TVs up to 34kgs, but despite being plastic, it really doesn’t look it. Instead, the PlayBase has a premium and considered finish that would fit in most homes.

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Like the redesigned Play:5, the PlayBase has capacitive touch controls at the top and the Sonos tag is positioned at the front of the speaker in the centre within the acoustically transparent grille. This grille is made up of over 43,000 holes (apparently, we didn’t count) and like the Play:5, the Sonos tag also has very small holes drilled into it to ensure the sound isn’t compromised.

The grille also features a staggered pattern in order to hide the internals of the PlayBase better, while the holes of the grille are five different sizes from the front to the sides of the PlayBase to allow for better ventilation of the woofer.

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At the left of the PlayBase is the pairing button, while the rear has the connection ports in an inset moulded section, hiding the power cables as much as possible. There is an Ethernet port, optical audio input and a power supply at the rear, with the PlayBase requiring a broadband connection, power and a TV with optical audio output in order to work. Yes, like the Playbar there is no HDMI which some might not be overly thrilled about.

The PlayBase is available in black and white colour options, like the Play:5, Play:1 and the SUB, but our favourite is definitely the white as the PlayBase’s design details are more apparent on the lighter option and therefore more striking, presenting the attention to detail put into the design of this new device.

• Sonos PlayBar review

Sonos PlayBase preview: Features

The Sonos PlayBase connects to the Sonos platform wirelessly, like the rest of the Sonos line up. This means you’ll be able to control it via the Sonos app, or select partner apps, like Spotify, and you’ll have access to over 80 music services.

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It also means that you’ll also be able to control PlayBase using your voice later in 2017 when Amazon Alexa compatibility appears, though Sonos has yet to detail an exact date for this feature.

As the PlayBase is a TV speaker as well as another Sonos multi-room speaker though, you’ll also be able to control volume via your TV remote and it will send TV sound to other Sonos speakers in your setup. For example, you could group your Play:5 in the kitchen to the PlayBase in your living room in order to hear the football or Strictly Come Dancing while cooking.

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The Sonos PlayBase also has the same features as the PlayBar, including Dialogue Enhancement, which enhances vocal clarity and Night Mode, which tones down the bass during loud action scenes. The PlayBase is also compatible with Trueplay, which is a software feature that adjusts the sound of the speaker to the specifics of the room.

• What is Sonos Trueplay and how does it work?

Sonos PlayBase preview: Sound quality 

The Sonos PlayBase features ten class-D digital amplifiers, along with a ten-driver speaker system comprising six mid-range drivers, three tweeters and one woofer, all of which have been custom designed for the PlayBase.

Sonos claims the result is a sound stage that is much wider than the speaker itself, which our experience suggested was indeed the case. We heard the PlayBase on its own, as well as in a 5:1 setup with a SUB and two Play:1’s and both were very impressive.

Pocket-lint

Naturally, there is more significant bass when the SUB is involved but the PlayBase is more than capable on its own, filling the room with sound. We listened to a Beyonce track, a Radiohead track and an unproduced track and the ranges were clear on all three, with excellent sound and good bass.

We also watched the Jungle Book to test the home theatre capabilities rather than just the speaker functionality and the dialogue was very natural and crisp. A clear distinction between the crickets and the child in one particular scene could also be heard, despite them having a very similar frequency.

Pocket-lint

We will of course test the PlayBase in a less controlled environment when we have it in for review, but based on our first experience with it, we were impressed with it in both music speaker terms and as a home theatre speaker.

• Sonos tips and tricks: Get the most out of your multi-room system

First Impressions

The Sonos PlayBase is a beautifully designed speaker that offers an option for those that don’t have the luxury of a wall-mounted TV, or for those that would rather have their TV on furniture.

It delivers excellent sound quality from our initial experience with it and it looks fabulous thanks to its super-slim body and seamless finish.

It isn’t the cheapest sound base on the market and the decision to use optical instead of HDMI is certainly questionable, but the PlayBase has the advantage of being part of the Sonos system, allowing those who already have speakers to gain the full package.

The PlayBase is a have your cake and eat it kind of speaker, being both a music speaker and a TV speaker and in terms of design, it blows the Playbar away. In fact, we might consider taking our TV back off the wall. We will bring you our full review in the next couple of months.

• Which Sonos speaker is best for you?

Sonos launches PlayBase to boost your TV sound

Sonos has added to its home theatre portfolio with the launch of the PlayBase, a new super-slim speaker designed to slide underneath your TV rather than wall-mount like the PlayBar.

The PlayBase measures 720 x 380mm, with a height of just 58mm, making it the company’s slimmest speaker to date. The glass-filled polycarbonate shell, said to minimise vibrations and withstand the weight of TVs up to 34kgs, surrounds a ten-driver speaker system and ten class-D digital amplifiers, while an acoustically-transparent grille sits at the front.

• Sonos PlayBase preview: Super-slim sound

Each of the drivers is custom-designed for the PlayBase and the system is comprised of six mid-range, three tweeters and one woofer. Capacitive touch controls like the Play:5 are positioned on the top of the speaker, allowing for pause, play, volume and track skipping control, while a pairing button is positioned on the left-hand side.

The seamless design features an inset moulded section at the rear that has an optical audio input, power supply and an Ethernet port, but no HDMI, meaning a TV with optical audio output is required, along with a broadband connection.

Sonos

Like the PlayBar, the PlayBase can be connected to the Sonos SUB and two Play:1s, Play:3s or Play:5s in order to create a 5:1 surround setup. It also features the Dialogue Enhancement feature that enhances vocal clarity and the Night Mode feature which tones down bass during loud action scenes, both accessed via the Sonos app. 

The PlayBase connects to the Sonos platform, as you would expect, offering access to 80 music services and the ability to control and group the new device with existing Sonos speakers. It also means users will be able to hear their TV sound on their other Sonos speakers when they are grouped with the PlayBase.

Additionally, the PlayBase speaker is compatible with Trueplay, meaning it can be custom- tuned to the room it is in using an iOS device, and later this year, users will also be able to control it using their voice and an Amazon Alexa-enabled device.

The Sonos PlayBase will be available in April in black or white colour options for £699 or $699.

Sonos PlayBase vs PlayBar: What’s the difference?

Sonos has announced a new speaker to its home theatre portfolio in the form of the PlayBase. The new speaker is designed for TVs that aren’t wall-mounted, sliding beneath them, while the PlayBar is primarily for wall-mounted TVs.

What are the other differences between the two TV sound enhancing Sonos speakers though? Here is how the PlayBase compares to the PlayBar to help you work out which is the most suitable for your home and setup.

Sonos PlayBase vs PlayBar: Design and connections

• PlayBase has slimmer and more refined design
• PlayBase designed for under TV, PlayBar for wall
• Both require broadband, power supply and TV with optical audio output

The Sonos PlayBase is a super-slim speaker that measures 720m wide, 380mm deep and offers a height of just 58mm. It weighs 8.6kg and it features a lovely smooth finish with no visible joins, delivering a beautiful design. At the front is the acoustically transparent grille with the Sonos tag in the centre, while the left side has the pairing button.

On the flat top, which can withstand a TV up to 34kgs, there are capacitive touch buttons for play, pause, volume and track skipping control, while the rear has the power supply port, Ethernet port and the optical audio input. The PlayBase is available in white and black colour options.

The Sonos PlayBar on the other hand has a different shape. It measures 900mm wide, 85mm deep and 140mm high, but it is a little lighter than the PlayBase at 5.4kg.

Its design is a little less refined, which is to be expected given it is four years older. It is available in a combination of black and dark silver only, and it features physical controls on the side for play, pause and volume, like the Play:1, rather than capacitive like the Play:5. On the rear of the PlayBar in the centre there are two Ethernet ports, an optical audio input and a power supply port.

Neither the PlayBase or the PlayBar have HDMI meaning both require an TV with optical audio output. They also both require a broadband connection.

• Sonos PlayBase preview

Sonos PlayBase vs PlayBar: Sound

• PlayBase has 10-driver speaker system
• PlayBar has nine-driver speaker system
• Both have Class-D digital amplifiers to match speaker drivers

The Sonos PlayBase has a ten-driver speaker system comprising six mid-range, three tweeters and one woofer. Each of which has been custom-designed to the PlayBase’s acoustic architecture. There are also ten Class-D digital amplifiers on board.

The Sonos PlayBar has a nine-driver speaker system made up of six mid-woofers and three tweeters. There are also nine Class-D digital amplifiers, which like the PlayBase’s are tuned to match the speaker drivers.

• Sonos PlayBar review

Sonos PlayBase vs PlayBar: Features

• Both can stream music and offer cinema sound for TV
• Both have same features, including Dialogue Enhancement 
• Both will get voice control later in year

The PlayBase and PlayBar both offer the same features. They both run on the Sonos platform, meaning access to over 80 music streaming services, and they can both be grouped with existing Sonos speakers. This means they can either act as another multi-room speaker streaming music, or they can deliver the sound from your TV to other Sonos speakers around the house.

Both speakers can also be combined with a Sonos Sub and two of the same Sonos speakers, such as two Play:1s, for a 5:1 surround sound setup. They also both offer Dialogue Enhancement, which enhances vocal clarity, and Night Mode, which tones down bass during loud action scenes, and they can both be controlled with a TV remote control rather than just the Sonos app.

The PlayBase and PlayBar are compatible with the Sonos Trueplay feature too, which enables users to tune the speakers to the specifics of the room environment they are in. They will also both get voice control via an Amazon-Alexa enabled device when the feature launches on all existing Sonos speakers later in 2017.

• What is Sonos Trueplay and how does it work?

Sonos PlayBase vs PlayBar: Price

• Both same price
• PlayBar wall-mounting kit costs extra 

The Sonos PlayBase and PlayBar both cost £699 or $699. If you want to wall-mount your PlayBar, the kit is an extra £39.

The PlayBase will be available from April, while the PlayBar is available now.

• Which Sonos speaker is best for you?

Sonos PlayBase vs PlayBar: Conclusion

The Sonos PlayBase and PlayBar are both two-in-one speakers, streaming music while also offering cinema sound to your TV. They also both offer the same features and functions, they both have a two-cable setup, with one for power and the other for connecting to your TV and they are both the same price.

Ultimately, the PlayBase is designed for TVs that are not wall-mounted, with the idea being that the TV sits on top of the speaker. It has a more refined design and an extra driver for enhanced sound output.

The PlayBar on the other hand, can sit flat below the TV too, but it can also be wall-mounted to sit underneath a wall-hung TV. It doesn’t have quite as striking a design as the PlayBase, but it still looks great up on the wall.

• Sonos PlayBase preview
• Sonos PlayBar review

The Switch is the fastest-selling console in Nintendo history

If you’ve had a hard time finding a Nintendo Switch at the store, there may be good reason for that. The Friday through Saturday sales for Nintendo’s latest console surpassed the first two-day sales for any system “in Nintendo history,” according to tweets from the New York Times’ Nick Wingfield. The info comes from an interview with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.

What’s more, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the best-selling launch title in company history, beating out Super Mario 64 for the cartridge-based Nintendo 64. That’s not counting pack-in games like the Wii U’s Nintendo Land mini-game collection, of course.

It’s far too early to tell how the Switch will do overall, or to compare it to Nintendo’s last runaway success — the Wii — but, at this point, the future looks good for the portable home console. Especially when you consider that game consoles typically launch in November. It’s just more proof that people will buy games and consoles whenever, so long as they’re actually worth buying.

4. Zelda for Nintendo Switch the best selling standalone launch title (i.e. not a bundled game a la Wii Sports) in Nintendo history…

— Nick Wingfield (@nickwingfield) March 6, 2017

Source: Nick Wingfield (Twitter)

VW’s ‘Sedric’ self-driving car could chauffer you or strangers

Volkswagen is planning for the future. Today the automaker laid out its plans for Sedric — short for “self-driving car” — a sort of hybrid between car ownership and ride-sharing. The boxy, Level 5 autonomous vehicle (no need for a human driver) is summoned by a remote dubbed “The Button” and from there “a single touch of the button guarantees mobility for everyone, at any time and at any location,” according to a press release.

Not into sharing your car with anyone else with The Button? It sounds like you won’t have to. The Sedric concept is also being pitched as a private autonomous taxi that can handle everything from dropping the kids off at school to picking up pre-ordered groceries.

More than just a car, VW is pitching Sedric as a sort of rolling digital assistant as well. You’ll apparently be able to tell the car where to drive you, how to get there. The windshield isn’t really a windshield either, it’s an OLED display that feeds passengers data about their surroundings.

Oh and if you want an idea of how the vehicle looks on the inside, here’s how VW describes it:

“Sedric is a comfortable lounge on wheels, equipped with carefully selected materials. One example of this is the birch leather used to upholster large surfaces. It is a haptic, natural material pleasant to the touch.

“Sedric does not have a driver. The steering wheel, pedals and cockpit are therefore superflouous. This permits a completely new sense of wellbeing in the vehicle — a welcome home feeling.”

Sure!

No details were given for how much Sedric will cost, or when it will arrive, but VW says that Sedric is the “father” of concepts within the company and that it won’t be long before it has “children and “grandchildren” from within VW’s brands. If all this sounds up your alley, peep the video below and photos above for a closer look at tomorrow.

Source: Automotive World

How Sonos made the new Playbase sound a lot better than it should

Amazon upended the home speaker space with the Echo, causing other companies to start figuring out voice control systems of their own. Sonos, which has made WiFi-enabled speakers for years, has repeatedly reassured customers that it, too, would eventually offer voice connectivity. And yet, somewhat surprisingly, Sonos’ newest product has nothing to do with voice control. Instead, the company’s first device since 2015’s Play:5 speaker is its second attempt at simple, excellent home theater audio.

Sonos already sells the Playbar, a wireless three-channel speaker meant to be mounted to the wall below your HDTV, but today it launched another product that does the same job in a completely different form factor. The $699 Playbase is a massive wide and narrow speaker that looks like a Play:5 after it’s been run over by a steamroller.

Of course, that design choice was a very deliberate one. The Playbase, which will be available worldwide on April 4th, is meant to live on a media stand with your TV placed on top of it (hence the name). The wide profile means it can accommodate most TVs with screens up to 60 inches, and its thin, unembellished design keeps the Playbase from drawing attention to itself when you sit down to watch a movie.

Speaking of the sort, Sonos’ own research shows that 70 percent of TV owners don’t mount their sets to the wall. That simple fact means that lots of Playbar owners have set their systems up in a way that isn’t aesthetically pleasing or even very functional.

“We have a lot of really energetic fans and supporters out there who are very eager to give us feedback,” Sonos creative director for industrial design Dana Krieger told Engadget at a media event in the company’s Boston headquarters last month. “If we ask people to show us pictures of their products at home, they’re very happy to do it.”

Those pictures revealed a fatal flaw in the Playbar: lots of awkward setups with the large speaker perched in front of TV sets on shelves and media stands not designed for it. “That’s really what drove us to do this,” Krieger said. “We saw the sound experience is really performing for people, but the product aspect ratio and architecture could be a better fit to certain environments.”

Tackling the design challenge

Right from the start, the Sonos team imagined the solution as a large, flat speaker that a TV could stand on — but it took three years to achieve something that met the company’s exacting audio standards. “The balance we’re always working with is the acoustic experience, the WiFi performance and then the exterior product execution,” Krieger said, “and they tend to have different north stars.”

From a physical design standpoint, the challenge was to make the Playbase as thin as possible while still enabling the audio quality Sonos wanted to achieve. “Really early on, we identified the thinness of this product as being critical to its success,” Krieger said. “So in any of those [prototype] form factors, you’ll see that being a consistent element. But what do we do with the rest of the product?” The good news is that while the Playbase is slim, it’s also very wide and deep, offering a lot of overall space to work with.

So Sonos went ahead and put a full-on subwoofer in the Playbase, mounting it horizontally instead of vertically. That’s an unusual decision, but one that was necessary in order to fit a subwoofer into such a thin space. It also gives the Playbase an advantage over most other soundbars, including even the Sonos Playbar.

But the internal subwoofer led to other problems — specifically, how to move the air and sound a subwoofer creates out of the speaker without diminishing overall sound quality. To increase the amount of surface area inside the Playbase, Sonos used a curved, S-shaped port that pushed air and sound from the subwoofer out the left side of the speaker. This has the added benefit of moving air over the CPU for cooling purposes.

That idea led to another tricky design challenge. The meticulously patterned holes in the front of the Playbase were interfering with bass and air output. The pattern, which Sonos also used on the Play:5’s grille, worked great on the front, but as it wrapped around the sides, it just wasn’t right for the air displacement. “When we tried to apply that treatment around the sides, where the subwoofer is pushing all its air, there was a really undesirable impact on the sound,” Krieger said.

So the engineers gradually increased the hole size as the grille wraps around from the front to the sides, a subtle change that’s important in several ways. The bigger holes are necessary for audio performance, but they’d be a visual distraction on the front of the speaker. The gradual size change allowed Sonos to keep the look of the front face as minimal as possible without compromising audio quality.

“It’s all centered around the user experience of becoming invisible,” Krieger said. “The kinds of details we spend a lot of time talking about we expect will either never be noticed by owners, or maybe it’s in the third or fourth year of ownership. You see something [on the speaker] from a different angle, and we really want those moments to make you love the brand more.”

Getting the right sound

Industrial design challenges weren’t the only tricky part about building the Playbase. Sonos wanted the speaker to work equally well for both movies and music, a rather unusual goal. Giles Martin, a Grammy-winning producer who works as the “sound experience leader” at Sonos, simply said that experience was “really, really hard.” The challenge was getting everything to sound natural and balanced and keep from compromising that natural sound, regardless of whether it was from an album or from a film.

“The reason why I liked Sonos speakers to begin with, before I was even involved, is there was a directness to the speakers,” Martin said. “They just sounded fully natural. The irony is, the more unnatural the shape, it’s harder to [sound] natural. You need that wide spaciousness, because that’s what gives us immersiveness, but a voice has to sound like a voice.”

Keeping dialogue front and center ended up being one of the most important and difficult parts of getting the Playbase to work. That process of getting the speaker finely tuned for movies was new territory for Martin, who joined the company after the Playbar had been released, making this his first real foray into creating a home theater product.

“The world of film is much more complex [than music], because it’s a multi-channel system,” Martin explained. “You have surrounds — what do you do with those in a three-channel system? You have dialogue, effects and music, and the balance and interplay between those elements … a home theater speaker can really damage or enhance.”

As with the Play:5, though, Martin said that the guiding principle was making everything sound the way the creators intended. In the case of movies, that meant bringing the Playbase around to people responsible for the final movie mixes. “For me, the key person is the person who had the last say, and that’s usually the mixer,” he said.

The Playbase’s odd form factor, of course, presented a challenge for getting the right audio clarity throughout the design process. “You don’t want that speaker to sound like it looks,” Martin said, owning up to the fact that flat, wide speakers are at odds with good audio performance. “But you do want it to look like it looks.”

In use

Setting up the Playbase is a simple affair: There’s only one connection cable, an optical audio input. Once it’s hooked up to a TV, you can complete setup using the iOS or Android app. There are a few different ways to set up the speaker, depending on the equipment you have. You can run it as a single speaker, with 5.1 surround sound mixed down to work on the three-channel device. You can also wirelessly connect it to a pair of Sonos’ smaller Play:1 speakers and use them for rear surround output. Naturally, it works with the existing wireless Sonos Sub as well, letting you build a full wireless 5.1 setup.

I got to hear the Playbase in all of these different configurations, and it impressed across the board. But what was most surprising was that it worked equally well as a music speaker as it did when playing movies and TV. That’s hardly a scientific impression, but when playing music, the Playbase sounded nearly as good as the flagship Play:5. Stereo separation was impressive, considering the limitations that come with using a single enclosure, while vocals were up front, clear and present. The level of detail the speaker pulled out of music made listening a delightful experience. As I wrote when trying the Play:5 for the first time, I heard aspects of familiar songs that I had never noticed before.

As for movies, the Playbase is a clear upgrade over built-in TV speakers, making the scenes I watched from films like Wall-E, The Jungle Book and The Revenant feel more impactful. Oddly, stereo separation when watching films wasn’t quite as strong as it was when listening to music, but I’m splitting hairs here. You’ll get better audio with dedicated, individual speakers, though that enhanced quality will take a lot more work and money than many (myself included) are willing to put into their home theater. The notion of a single-speaker solution that works well for both movies and music is quite appealing, even though its $699 price gave me pause. Again, as with the Play:5, you get a lot for your money — but it’s also simply a lot of cash for those who are used to playing audio through a TV.

We’ll need to put the Playbase through a full review before passing judgement, but at first listen, it seems like the quintessential Sonos product: a good mix of features, sound quality and industrial design in a somewhat unexpected package that’s just too expensive to appeal to a mass audience. It’s not so much that it’s expensive for what it is; it’s just that most people aren’t spending $699 on any home audio product.

But despite working in a rather niche space, Sonos appears to be hanging in there, after layoffs and some management shuffles made it feel as if the company was on some uneven footing. It’s no surprise that the company is putting on a positive face as it launches its first new product in 18 months, but Sonos does have a powerful “gateway drug” product in the $199 Play:1 speaker, something that gets lots of customers hooked and interested in buying more speakers.

While the Playbase has a high price, the limited time I spent with it convinced me that Sonos is solving a real problem with this hardware. For one reason or another, I’ve never mounted my TV, and so the Playbase would fit right into my current setup. Adding only one power cord and one optical audio cord to my media stand, which is already overrun with far too many cables, is doable. And it would be a huge upgrade over what I’m using now. I gave up on having true 5.1 audio years ago, sacrificing quality for convenience. But now I’m dreaming about having a wireless surround sound system, with the Playbase at the center. It will just take me a while to save up the cash to make that dream a reality.

How to stop the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con from losing sync

It seems as if your left Nintendo Switch Joy-Con hasn’t lost sync with the console yet, it’s only a matter of time before that could happen. As we saw in iFixit’s teardown of the console, the pair are almost identical save for a few things like antenna placement. And that’s where the problem resides according to YouTube user Spawn Wave.

After pulling apart the problematic paddle, he soldered a small length of wire onto the board to help the Bluetooth signal out. Turns out that the makeshift antenna was all that was needed to fix what was wrong. The YouTube user even got some extra range out of the device, putting around 40 feet between him and the console and not having any real issues.

So, if your controller keeps losing sync during marathon Breath of the Wild sessions and you wat to get adventurous in real life, you too can fix what appears to be a design flaw with Nintendo’s fastest selling console to date.

Via: Polygon

Source: Spawn Wave (YouTube)

‘iPhone 8’ Optimism is Driving Apple’s Stock Higher and Analysts Think It’s Not Done Rising Yet

While a 5.8-inch iPhone with an OLED display is likely around six months away from being announced, the stock market is always looking ahead, and several analysts think the smartphone will be a hit among customers.

Accordingly, over the past month, several financial analysts have raised their price targets for Apple’s stock to between $150 and $185, per research notes obtained by MacRumors.

Citi analyst Jim Suva, for instance, raised his Apple stock price target to $160 today. Likewise, BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long rose his target to $160 in late February.

Apple’s stock has already been on an impressive run this year so far, closing at $139.34 on Monday, just cents off its record-breaking high of $139.79 set last week for comparison.

Long in particular said he expects Apple’s trio of new iPhone models, presumably arriving this September, to drive the “biggest refresh cycle” since the iPhone 6 in 2014.

For the 2017 iPhone refresh, we expect some cannibalization by the premium model. While we expect like-for-like units to be 23 million lower, we model 34 million of unit volume from the new model. On balance, we estimate 11 million of incremental volume, the best launch since iPhone 6, though still less impactful. We believe this reflects conservatism in our estimates.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were runaway hits as Apple’s first smartphones with screen sizes as large as Samsung’s competing Galaxy smartphones, but the iPhone’s overall look and feel has gone largely unchanged since those models were introduced three years ago, and iPhone sales declined for the first time ever last year.

The so-called “iPhone 8,” or whatever Apple names its tenth-anniversary iPhone, will likely be something fresh and new, however, which Long expects could drive existing iPhone users to upgrade.

Long estimated that the number of iPhones in use was around 715 million, including 228 million second-hand devices, as of December 2016. Of the new models, he estimated 31% of the new phone installed base will be 2 years or older at the time of Apple’s presumed September launch event.

This larger than usual base of customers with older iPhone models has led analysts such as Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty and UBS’s Steven Milunovich to expect a “supercycle” of iPhone upgrades through next year.

Huberty recently raised her price target to $154, up from $150, but with an “overweight” rating. She expects the 5.8-inch iPhone’s significant form factor change, and rumored features such as wireless charging, longer battery life, 3D sensors, and more advanced AI software capabilities, to drive the accelerated upgrade cycle.

Milunovich raised his price target to $151 in late February, up from $138, and he maintained a “buy” rating.

Huberty and Milunovich are far more conservative than Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian White, who has maintained a $185 price target since last year. “We continue to believe that Apple remains one of the most underappreciated stocks in the world,” he said in a research note shared with investors in early February.

Guggenheim Securities analyst Robert Cihra reportedly raised his price target to $180, up from $150, last week.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway went on an Apple stock buying spree over the past few months, increasing his position in the iPhone maker to around 133 million shares prior to the company’s record-breaking earnings results at the end of January. His holding has likely netted him several billions.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8 (2017)
Tag: AAPL
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