‘Ghost Recon: Wildlands’ $40 season pass packs two big expansions

Ghost Recon: Wildlands comes out next week. I know, I almost forgot about it too. But if an open world filled with guns, high-speed chases and sniping over huge distances in Bolivia is more your speed than robotic dinosaurs or some random game with a princess, you might be interested to know what Wildlands has in store after launch. You know, for when you’ve long since finished its campaign and dominated the competition on the packed-in multiplayer maps.

First up: there’s a season pass because this is a modern video game being released by a major publisher. Included with that $40 purchase is access to two expansion packs (“Narco Road” and “Fallen Ghosts”) a week ahead of everyone else, some other missions, cosmetic gear and consumables like XP boosts.

But, everyone will gain a 4-on-4 player-versus-player mode for free. Need something to hold you over until next Tuesday? That’s what the trailer embedded below is for. One scene shown from the “Narco Road” expansion looks an awful lot like Rust Cohle’s journey back into the underworld from True Detective season one, if you ask me.

Source: UbiBlog

Google will release a new Pixel phone this year

The Pixel represents Google’s first proper foray into the smartphone market, allowing the search giant to directly compete with Apple and cement Android’s reputation as a premium platform. While sales have been steady, it’s been particularly hard to get a hold of one due to component shortages. That hasn’t dampened the company’s plans to continue investing in its own smartphones, though: according to Rick Osterloh, VP of Hardware at Google, there will be a successor to the Pixel this year and will continue to carry a high price tag.

“There is an annual rhythm in the industry. So, you can count on us to follow it,” Osterloh told Android Pit in a briefing at Mobile World Congress. “You can count on a successor this year, even if you don’t hear a date from me now.” In response to questions regarding a low cost Pixel, the Google executive simply told reporters: “the Pixel stays premium.”

Although Google is keeping information to a premium, its typical development cycle suggests a Pixel 2 will go on sale in the fourth quarter. The current Pixel launched in October 2016 and Google has held launch events at around the same time for Nexus phones in the past.

Earlier this week, Osterloh indicated that while the Pixel brand remained reserved for its handsets, it may not make any more of high-end Pixel Chromebooks. Google’s hardware chief quickly moved to reassure consumers that “Google’s own Chromebooks aren’t ‘dead” but the statement still leaves things in the air. Google may still continue to make its own Chromebooks, but they might be released under a new name.

Hey all, Google’s own Chromebooks aren’t “dead” as has been reported. They will live on, we just have *no plans to share at this time* 😉

— Rick Osterloh (@rosterloh) March 2, 2017

Source: Android Pit

Toyota unveils its next-gen autonomous test vehicle

Way back in 2013, Toyota showed off its self-driving testbed for autonomous vehicle features like safety braking and automatic lane control. Now, the company is pulling the dust sheets off the second-generation of the ride, which is designed to do a whole lot more. The Toyota Research Institute 2.0 Advanced Safety Research is the first that the company can say was built entirely in-house.

The technology has been built on top of a current-generation Lexus LS600hL, kitted out with layered and overlapping LIDAR, Radar and camera sensors. This, paired with machine vision and machine learning, should reduce the car’s dependency on high-definition maps that may not yet exist. In addition, the system will learn from your, and other commutes made by Toyota vehicles, to get a better understanding of driving.

Toyota is hoping that the new testbed will help its researchers develop both of its visions for the future of self-driving cars: Chauffeur and Guardian. Chauffeur, as the name implies, is a fully-autonomous ride that operates at level five of the SAE standards for autonomous vehicles. Guardian, meanwhile, is a proactive driver-assist system that’ll just step in where necessary to avoid crashes.

In 2015, the company boasted that it thought it could do away with human input from its cars by the year 2020. That’s less than three years away, so the company’s going to need to log a lot of miles on its new test mule.

Yelp will help you find a gender-neutral bathroom

Yelp has announced that it will enable people to find gender-neutral restrooms when they’re out and about. The company will add a feature to its desktop and mobile versions highlighting which businesses offer them. In addition, users will soon be able to directly search for businesses that offer gender-neutral bathrooms. The definition of which is a lavatory that’s available to anyone, regardless of gender, and has a locking, single stall.

We’ve said this before, and I guess we’ve got to say it again. We don’t care which bathroom you use, so long as you wash your hands.

— Philly Public Health (@PHLPublicHealth) February 23, 2017

Like so many features of Yelp, the company will ask businesses to update their data to include such information and ask users to review those facilities. The issue of bathroom use by members of the LGBT community has become a hot topic after the White House rolled back protections for transgender people. Yelp has also co-signed an amicus brief in support of student Gavin Grimm’s pending Supreme Court case, who was blocked from using the male bathrooms in his high school.

Two Dave Chappelle stand-up specials hit Netflix March 21st

Ever since Dave Chappelle left his show on Comedy Central in 2005 his fans have been asking for more, and on March 21st they will get it. The debut date was revealed in this brief teaser trailer, which gave just a hint of what’s to come. While he’s continued to perform, the comedian has been mostly absent from TV since 2005, other than hosting Saturday Night Live last year. Netflix signed up for three specials last year, while also cutting deals for comedy specials due in 2017 from Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld — a major challenge to HBO and Showtime’s dominance of comedy broadcasting.

The two specials Netflix will start streaming in March are from Chappelle’s “personal comedy vault,” with one from 2015 at a performance in Austin, and the other taped last March in Hollywood. If you’ve seen one of his shows already and are hoping for new material, an all-new special is also part of the arrangement, which will arrive at some point later this year.

Source: Netflix (YouTube)

Facebook ‘City Guides’ Will Help You Plan Your Next Trip Thanks to Recommendations From Friends

After a period of testing earlier in the year, Facebook recently began rolling out a new tourism feature called “City Guides” to its iOS app for a number of users (via The Next Web). Located in the Explore tab of the app — similar to the recently expanded Weather feature — City Guides presents users with a list of cities visited by their friends and provides recommendations on places to eat, visit, and stay on a future trip.

After tapping on a city, the app provides a list of friends who have been to the location along with the places they checked into while they were there. So if you’re looking for restaurant or hotel suggestions, it’s easy to bookmark the hotspots right in the app and message a friend to see what they think about it. Further down the page is a “Places The Locals Go” section that lists popular spots based on each location’s Facebook page rating.

City Guides also provide insight into upcoming events in each city to help plan a trip, as well as giving tourists a scrollable list of popular attractions to stop by when they arrive. Users will be able to jump into City Guides directly from the home screen as well, thanks to a redirection prompt placed under city check-in posts of their friends and family.

While Facebook is dedicated to bolstering its video content across many devices, the company is consistently adding minor updates like City Guides to its mobile app, even introducing a way for users to apply for a job without leaving Facebook.

The City Guides feature is said to be available for a small group of users at first before a wider rollout. Facebook is available on the iOS App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Tag: Facebook
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MWC 2017 Trends: Waterproof phones are in, wearables are out, and nostalgia is king

Every year, Mobile World Congress sets the stage for the year to come in mobile. We already know that bezel-free phones and artificial intelligence are going to be huge in 2017, but what about other trends? At the show, we’ve come across a number of interesting developments in the world of mobile, which encompasses phones, wearables, and so much more. Here are the five main trends we’ve seen at MWC 2017.

Waterproof phones are now the standard

Water resistance is fast becoming a fixture on the flagship spec sheet — and it’s about time. Ever since Sony launched the Xperia Z line with water resistance as a heavily marketed, prominent feature, we’ve been wanting to see it in every phone. Its place in the public eye was really cemented by Apple’s iPhone 7 and Samsung’s Galaxy S7 last year.

More: We tried (and ranked) every smartphone at MWC, the largest mobile show of the year

There hasn’t been much talk about it at MWC, and that tells us that it has graduated from feature to expectation. Our show winner at MWC 2017 was the LG G6, and it’s an IP68-rated smartphone, which means that it can survive a dunk in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes without sustaining any damage. Sony’s XZ Premium is also an IP68 phone, and the Huawei P10 has an IPX2 rating, which means it can handle rain and spills. None of this was advertised during the unveiling of these phones.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

A full 95 percent of all phones that cost more than $600 now have some form of water protection. Even cheaper devices are getting in on the water-resistance act. The Moto G5 Plus, in keeping with all Moto phones for the last few years, has an IPX2 rating.

Water damage is still the second-biggest cause of smartphone failure. According to IDC, nearly 900,000 smartphones get damaged by liquids every single day at an annual cost of more than $96.7 billion, and most of that cost is borne by regular people. No wonder that water resistance came in third in a recent YouGov poll of most-wanted features in the U.S. market. If this year’s MWC is anything to go by, it looks like manufacturers are listening, and water resistance is a trend that’s going to stick.

– Simon Hill

TV display tech is coming to phones

If you watch video on your phone, then you’re one of the growing number of people who do so. Statistics show video makes up more than half of all mobile device data traffic, and will reach nearly 80 percent by 2021, so it makes sense for smartphone makers to provide the best viewing experience possible. However, rather than just giving us a colorful AMOLED display and plenty of pixels, the same tech that’s being introduced on the latest televisions is now being used to enhance the image on our phones even further.

Malarie Gokey/Digital Trends

LG has made the largest effort in this area so far. The LG G6 uses DolbyVision and HDR 10 technology to impressive effect. Playing compatible video showed considerably more detail in the shaded areas, clearer lighting effects, and brighter, higher-contrast colors. That, along with the 5.7-inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel, 18:9 aspect ratio display, makes the G6 surprisingly cinematic. Sony is also using HDR technology on the Xperia XZ Premium. When watching the same movie played back on it and the older Z5 Premium, the difference between the two was striking. Both played 4K video, but the XZ Premium’s HDR image was brighter, more colorful, and had wider viewing angles.

Both LG and Sony also produce television screens, so they have greater access to this new technology than some other manufacturers — but we’d expect Samsung to follow soon, and to see more examples from companies that get their screens from Sharp, Japan Display, and other dedicated panel makers in the future.

– Andy Boxall

No more wearables (especially for women)

It seems like just yesterday that everyone was saying wearables were the next big thing. Tech shows were once crowded full of “Me, too!” fitness bands and Android Wear smartwatches. But this year, we’ve only seen one company launch a respectable wearable at MWC 2017. As wearables flounder about, looking for a purpose and a price point that works, one trend has dominated the wearable world: sporty smartwatches for men.

Huawei’s Watch 2 Classic and Sport models both follow in the footsteps of the sporty masculine style we’ve seen on the LG Watch Sport, the Samsung Gear S3, and more. The only somewhat feminine smartwatch we’ve seen this year is the LG Watch Style, but it’s a dumbed-down Android Wear device that’s missing basic essentials that have been on the Apple Watch for a year or so: NFC for payments and GPS tracking.

Malarie Gokey/Digital Trends

No woman who’s looking for a smartwatch wants either of the two alternatives. Bulky sporty watches are uncomfortable to wear and look completely absurd, while the vaguely pretty, dumbed-down versions don’t serve up the tech we expect from a smartwatch.

The lack of attractive, useful wearables for both men and women is a concern. It’s a negative trend that we hope doesn’t continue.

– Malarie Gokey

Nostalgic tech is king

Nokia/HMD Global and BlackBerry’s press conferences seem to have overshadowed many other smartphone announcements at Mobile World Congress this year. That’s weird because it’s 2017, not 2007. Both of these brands are supposed to be well past their peak popularity.

BlackBerry’s whole show was about its KeyOne smartphone that features a QWERTY keyboard — and it generated a lot of attention on social media. HMD only spent the last five minutes of its conference on the reintroduction of Nokia’s 3310 feature phone. It clearly wasn’t its most important announcement, yet it seemed to make the biggest waves. Forget bezel-less screens — Snake seemed to have captured more interest.

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

Both devices are hardly going to mount a challenge in the smartphone market as they fill a niche market, though the Nokia 3310 may be a popular gadget gift (if it’s ever available in the U.S.), as it only costs 49 euros ($52). But the 3310 in particular has quite a number of features people would kill to have in a phone — a monthlong battery on standby mode, a light weight and compact size, and a durability that means nothing will happen if you drop it.

Who knows if these popular announcements will lead other companies to reintroduce old devices to market (Palm Pilot, anyone?), but we hope it inspires smartphone manufacturers to fix some of the existing issues with our phones today.

– Julian Chokkattu

The home button is dead, but the headphone jack is here to stay (for now)

Last year, the audio jack-free iPhone 7 seemed certain to be the harbinger of a wireless future. That to an extent has been true — Lenovo opted to omit a jack from its Moto Z series, and HTC’s Bolt and U Ultra shipped with USB Type-C headphones instead of 3.5mm models. But whether spurred by consumer backlash or  simple economics, jack-free smartphones aren’t a trend that’s caught on.

At MWC, every major manufacturer’s new phones include a 3.5mm port. HMD Global’s BlackBerry KeyOne has a headphone jack, as does the new Nokia 8, Nokia 5, Nokia 3, and even the low-tech Nokia 3310. Huawei’s new P10 has one, and so do LG’s G6, Motorola’s G5 and G5 Plus, and ZTE’s Blade V8 Pro. Even Sony’s forward-looking Xperia XZ Premium, which boasts a 4K screen and HDR, features a headphone port prominently in the upper-left corner.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

If the iPhone 7’s lack of a headphone jack’s prompted anything, it was growth in the wireless headphone market. But when it comes to smartphones, manufacturers by and large aren’t picking up what Apple’s putting down.

Interestingly, that reluctance to let go hasn’t extended to a longtime smartphone hallmark: The physical home button. This year, all of the major smartphones announced at MWC have soft keys, or navigational buttons that take up a slice of the screen. With the Galaxy S8 and next iPhone on the horizon, both of which are rumored to ditch the physical home button in favor of digital equivalents, the timing couldn’t be more conspicuous.

– Kyle Wiggers

LeEco slashes over 75% of its Indian workforce, denies claims of exit

LeEco’s woes continue in India.

LeEco announced at the end of last year that it would downsize its operations in all markets, and the company has followed through on its word today by letting go of over 75% of its Indian workforce. In a statement to Gadgets360, LeEco said that it reduced its headcount from 350 to just over 80, with the company calling the team size “in line with industry benchmarks.”

However, a report out of Economic Times suggested LeEco is looking to exit the market altogether, but the company has refuted those claims, stating that India is a strategic market for the manufacturer:

Contrary to reports in certain sections of the media, LeEco has a healthy product pipeline for India this year. In fact, the company is gearing up for the launch of its next-generation TV scheduled in the coming week. Premium models of smartphones too are to follow. LeEco television and smartphone business continues in India and has gained significant market recognition. All this certainly does not signal a company in wind-up mode.

The company’s recent moves were well thought out and planned as part of a longer-term strategy for the Indian market, and not triggered by the purported slump in sales due to demonetisation.

The resource head count in India is well aligned to the scale of operations envisioned and in line with industry benchmarks. Moreover, LeEco India has a robust R&D team working for India as well as LeEco globally, as the company values the R&D function, as it is integral to long-term business.

The company’s phones have been well-received in India, and its foray into the TV market has also yielded results. But the company’s decision to sell devices at manufacturing cost and spend vast sums of money on advertising — contrary to Chinese rivals Xiaomi and OnePlus — have led to a cash crunch, which was alleviated with a recent $2.4 billion investment.

Chinese vendors now account for over 46% of the smartphone market in India, and while the strategy of selling phones at manufacturing cost has paid dividends for them over the last few years, the model isn’t sustainable, as LeEco is finding out. LeEco already announced that it would no longer sell phones offline, and with today’s “optimisation exercise,” the company is now focusing on creating a sustainable and profitable business model.

LG G6 goes up for pre-order in South Korea, comes with $390 worth of freebies

LG is throwing in a lot of freebies with G6 pre-orders.

South Korean carriers have kicked off pre-orders for the LG G6 ahead of the phone’s official debut in the country on March 10. The device will retail for 899,800 won ($780), and LG is throwing in freebies worth 450,000 won ($390) with every order. Customers pre-ordering the device will receive a one-year screen replacement service, an original case, Tone Platinum HBS-1100 Bluetooth neckbuds, and a Rolly Keyboard 2 Bluetooth keyboard.

The LG G6 that will go on sale in Korea features a 5.7-inch QHD+ display with a resolution of 2880 x 1440, Snapdragon 821, 4GB of RAM, microSD slot, 64GB storage, 32-bit Quad DAC, dual 13MP cameras, 5MP front shooter, and a 3300mAh battery.

Those picking up the phone in the U.S. will get wireless charging, but lose out on the Hi-Fi DAC and 64GB storage as the U.S. model comes with 32GB of internal storage. No information as of now regarding U.S. pricing, but we should know more soon.

LG G6

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Good things are coming to VR and mobile graphics from the Khronos Group

Open XR, WebGL 2.0, and glTF 2.0 aren’t just buzzwords — they’re new specifications to help beef up graphics rendering for smartphones, virtual reality headsets, and browsers.

There were a few exciting announcements to come out this week from the Khronos Group, the consortium behind the Vulkan API that helped your Galaxy S7 and Pixel soar despite graphics-heavy gameplay. As part of GDC 2017, the group announced several initiatives that will hopefully aid in standardizing 3D image rendering across the board, and thus make games look better on your smartphone and virtual reality more accessible across varying platforms. There’s plenty of bullet points to go through, so let’s get started.

“JPEG for 3D”

A boombox rendered with glTF.

Have you heard of the specification that will help three-dimensional graphics render more seamlessly? It’s called glTF and it’s a spec that was introduced last year. It’s the sort of thing that will make gameplay easier for mobile devices. And it’s the kind of thing that could help make the Chrome browser a bonafide operating system of its own. Imagine, playing games through your browser.

The Khronos Group announced that it’s now finalizing the second iteration of that specification. glTF 2.0 will bring with it Physically Based Rendering (PBR), which will make it easier to conjure up assets. Essentially, you’re programming the shade of the texture to create the model. You can read more about it in the official blogpost. At present, BabylonJS, three.js, Cesium, xeogl and instant3Dhub engines, and Sketchfab are all in the process of migrating over to glTF 2.0.

OpenXR

Who likes open standards? Khronos is introducing a new one called OpenXR, essentially an open standard for virtual reality and augmented reality apps. This will make it so that companies Steam and Oculus can develop titles and hardware that works interchangeably with the HTC Vive’s hardware, or even the Daydream VR. It will also help lower the barrier to entry for the smaller app and device developers looking to enter the VR and AR space, in addition to easing away from any further fragmenting of the industry.

WebGL 2.0

Click here to see this live in your browser.

For the last bit of pertinent news, Khronos has revealed that WebGL 2.0 has been finalized and is shopping out to browsers everywhere. This isn’t mobile-facing news, but if you’re a Chrome or Firefox user, you’ll have access to OpenGL ES 3.0, which will essentially make it easier for either browser to render 3D graphics. It’s especially curious how this sort of functionality could work with Chrome OS in the future, considering it’ll be baked into the Chrome browser.

If you’d like to read up on the Khronos Group’s announcements this week, you can read the blog in its entirety here.