Moto Z2 Play goes up for pre-order in the UK for £379

Motorola’s latest smartphone has just been released in the U.S. and Canada, and it’s now up for pre-order in the UK. The Moto Z2 Play, one of my favorite devices of the year so far, has a lot going for it, including an unassailable combination of build quality, performance, battery life and Moto Mods support.

The Lenovo subsidiary has announced that as of July 6 the Moto Z2 Play is now up for pre-order in the UK for £379, though you can get £10 off your order on motorola.co.uk with the code UKWELCOME10.

Available in black-and-gray or white-and-gold, the Moto Z2 Play is also going up for pre-order at various retailers around the country, including John Lewis, Amazon, Argos. It’s not clear when the phone will ship — the announcement just centers on pre-orders — but it shouldn’t be long now.

See at Motorola

Pro ‘Street Fighter’ player immortalized in manga biography

In Japan, Pro gamers can be a bit of a big deal. Yet, despite their celebrity status, there’s only one gamer who’s managed to get their own manga series. Daigo Umehara is the man with that honor. Considered to be one of the best Street Fighter players on the planet, he currently holds a Guinness World Record for being the game’s most successful pro fighter. Now, thanks to his huge popularity, UDON Entertainment has opted to bring that manga series over to the west.

The series chronicles Umehara’s rise to the top of the arcade fighting scene and is entitled Daigo The Beast. Exploring the real-world events that built the fighting game community, the series also looks to shed light on his strategies and the “near psychic ability” that allows Daigo to predict his opponent’s attacks so accurately.

In case you were wondering what makes Daigo so special, you can see a classic clip of him absolutely destroying his opponent below.

The manga is officially released in December priced at $19.99, but early copies of Daigo The Beast Volume 1 will be available at the annual fighting game tournament Evolution Champion Series (or EVO) later this month. EVO takes place in Vegas from July 14th-16th.

Source: The Verge

AR glasses will quench your ride-stat thirst

The bike I was riding to test a new set of AR glasses was probably a bit too small for me. Also, it was a typical San Francisco summer day, so it was cold and windy, and, like an idiot, I left my jacket upstairs. But none of that mattered, because I was peering into the future of biking. The best part was that the Everysight Raptor AR glasses I was wearing didn’t feel bulky and didn’t require me to strain my eye socket to look into a tiny screen — all the information was being projected right in front of me.

The promise of an AR future has stalled a bit. Google Glass appeared with much fanfare, then slowly disappeared from the limelight. But not before so-called glassholes grabbed headlines for being mugged and banned from bars because no one likes the idea of being secretly recorded.

Epson’s Moverio specs continue to be outstanding for industrial uses but not much else, and most everything else feels a bit like a gimmick targeting early adopters. But the Everysight Raptor is ready for folks beyond the super nerds. In my short time with it, I realized that if I rode a bike more than eight times a month, I’d want these.

Essentially, the Raptor AR glasses are a smartphone shoved into a pair of specs with a quad-core CPU, 2GB RAM, 16 to 32 GB of storage, GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, Bluetooth, WiFi, speaker and a mic for voice commands.

The glasses project information directly onto the lens of your right eye. You’re not looking at a tiny screen. It’s right there in front of you, floating off in the distance. The Raptor I was using was set to show current speed, mapping, and — via a wearable — my heart rate. The information was crisp and easy to read and was set to appear as if about 20 feet in front of me. After a few blocks, I got used to switching focus from the display to the road. Fortunately, the display can be switched off via a button on the left-hand side of the specs in case you really need to pay attention to the road ahead.

The rest of the controls are available on the right-hand side of the glasses. A series of swipes and taps brings up other settings, like access to media, camera and brightness controls. A handlebar-mounted controller is also available, and the whole system can be managed by a companion Android and iOS app.

During my short ride around Fisherman’s Wharf, it never felt like the OLED projection on the display was too dim. It was overcast, though, so the light was diffused. I was assured that the Raptor worked just as well on sunny days.

The Raptor also ships with a camera, so I was able to capture photos and video via the HD sensor placed between the rider’s eyes. It won’t replace your DSLR or even your new smartphone camera, but it’s good enough for a few snapshots of what you’re looking at while riding without having to pull over and dig your phone out of your pocket.

Destination riding was simple enough, and the routing was easy to understand and follow. Although, when we veered off-track, instead of rerouting, it just pointed me back to my original route. If you have a set path for your ride, I’m sure that’s helpful, but if you’re a bit lost, it would be nice to see exactly how to get to your destination from your current location.

Fortunately, the company is launching an SDK for the Android-powered glasses. So if another developer wants to take on that rerouting issue, they can with their own app.

While what Everysight has accomplished is impressive, it’s not too far from what its parent company, Elbit, has done for decades. It provides heads-up displays for military and commercial flight and combat applications. But getting the Raptor down to its current iteration still took a few years (15, to be exact) and about five generations of the glasses.

The result is an AR experience that makes sense and doesn’t feel gimmicky. Everysight says the glasses will have an eight-hour battery life, which is good for those long weekend rides, and the Raptors have an insert for prescription lenses too. The company says the Raptor will be ready for shipping by the end of the year, but there’s no word on pricing yet. So if you’re a hardcore cyclist looking for some new specs that also share real-time information about your ride, you might want to start saving up your nickels, dimes and probably hundred-dollar bills.

Source: Everysight

Recreate the thrills of ’90s PC admin in this browser game

Video games can be hard work. With all the grinding, stat chasing and repetition that defines many modern games, sometimes toiling away in a virtual world can feel like a second job. Well, it seems like for design professor Pippin Barr this hasn’t gone unnoticed, as he’s taken the concept of digital busy work one step further. In his latest game It Is As If You Were Doing Work, players find themselves logging in to a brilliantly realized Windows 95 backdrop as they’re tasked with clicking boxes and doing completely pointless ‘work’.

It’s wonderfully inane, seeing you promoted to positions like ‘Senior Administrator’ simply for clicking boxes and writing gibberish. After a while you’re even rewarded with a little break, allowing you to treat yourself to playing a Pong rip-off or listening to some brilliantly rubbish MIDI tunes.

Speaking to The Verge, Barr explains that the idea for the game came about when he was thinking about a future where automation has eliminated the need for most current jobs. “The game poses as an application that humans who have been put out of work by robots and AI can play as a way to recapture the sense they once had of doing work and being productive,” writes Barr. “It’s a kind of semi-condescending service offered by this new world to those of us who can’t deal with it.”

If that concept sounds at all familiar, that’s because Job Simulator is based on something very similar. Set in a future run by robots, the motion-controlled VR games sees players hilariously try and recreate working life as completely clueless robots.

This bizarre little browser game is free and can be played here. Be careful though, as playing it for too long might put you behind on your very real (and hopefully more meaningful) work. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have fake dialogue boxes to click.

Via: The Verge

Source: Pippin Barr

Facebook is quietly testing its own group video chat app

Facebook has been working on cloning Snapchat’s features for awhile now, but that’s not the only service the social media giant is looking to duplicate. The Verge reports that Facebook recently showed a Houseparty-style live group video chat app, called Bonfire, to its employees.

Houseparty is incredibly popular with teenagers, and Facebook wanted to find out why. Earlier this year, Facebook sent out a survey asking teens for their thoughts on why they enjoy using group video chat apps such as Houseparty and Fam. At the time, Facebook declined to comment to Recode about why they were interested in this information, but now it seems clear.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has tried to clone an app from the company Life on Air. The popular Facebook Live feature contributed to the decline of Life on Air’s previous app, Meerkat. Houseparty was built after founder Ben Rubin noted that regardless of platform, most users only broadcasted a few times using live streaming video. While Houseparty is also focused on live video, it notifies teens when their friends are using the app, allowing them to easily enter and exit online video “parties.”

Facebook has been targeting younger users for a long time; it’s basically copied everything that Snapchat does into its main Facebook app. Only time will tell whether Bonfire will attract more younger users to the social network.

Source: The Verge, Recode

Niantic CEO Discusses For-Profit Cheating and Production Delays in Pokémon Go’s First Year

One year ago this week, Pokémon Go began appearing on the App Store in the United States and around the world. Following the announcement of various in-game and real life events celebrating the anniversary, Niantic CEO John Hanke recently sat down with The Verge to talk about the game’s first year, including for-profit cheaters, a six-month development delay due to the huge success of the game, and more.

Concerning the current state of certain fan-requested updates (player-versus-player battles and Pokémon trading), Hanke said that those features have been delayed because of Pokémon Go’s unpredictably huge launch. In total, Niantic lost as much as six months on its production schedule due to the team needing to shift to “rebuilding and rewiring infrastructure” to keep the game running, taking precedence over substantial new updates.

Pokémon Go when it launched July 2016

We lost probably six months on our schedule because of the success of the game. Really all the way through November and December, from launch onward we were rebuilding and rewiring infrastructure just to keep the game running at the scale that we were running at.

We were fortunate to have a massive launch, a massive success, and many, many more users than we had planned for. But we had to redirect a substantial portion of the engineering team to [work on] infrastructure versus new features. That switched off things like extending gyms, it pushed out things we still want to have, like player-versus-player and trading. I’d say we’re about six months behind where we thought we would be.

Hanke admitted that if the team had known it would face such huge delays on its schedule, “maybe we wouldn’t have talked so much about” PvP and trading updates so early on. The CEO went on to explain that Niantic’s communication with fans has “become much more open over time,” following an initial lack of consensus with the developer’s partners (The Pokémon Company and Nintendo) over how to handle vocal communities on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media sites.

In terms of cheating, Hanke talked about how there are now “actual commercial entities” that advertise ways to level up players’ profiles and advance in the game, which received enough interest and revenue from Pokémon Go players to become “real businesses.” Hanke said that Niantic faced similar experiences, albeit on a smaller scale, with its previous game Ingress.

To keep the game fair for everyone, there are now dedicated resources inside Niantic cracking down on these cheating businesses.

Because of the scale [of Pokémon Go], there are actual commercial entities that sprung up that were offering services to level up your account or do various other things, and were real businesses. Therefore they’re able to invest significant resources in these things. We didn’t really anticipate that scale of commercial-funded cheating, which is a challenge to keep the game fair for everyone.

We dedicate resources to it for sure. There are people working on that that could be working on features, but they’re not. It’s a fraction of the team. It’s not as if half of the team is working on that. It’s significantly less than that. But there is a chunk of resources that we devote to that.

Hanke still doesn’t make it clear when exactly PvP and Pokémon trading will be making it to Pokémon Go. Recently, Niantic updated the game with a revamped Gym system and announced co-op raid battles, while Hanke talked about his excitement for Apple’s ARKit developer platform and what it will do for Pokémon Go, stating, “I don’t think anyone should bet against Apple.”

Check out The Verge’s full interview with John Hanke here.

Tag: Pokémon GO
Discuss this article in our forums

Apple Pay Expanding to Additional Banks in France, Italy, and Spain

Apple has updated its regional websites to indicate that Apple Pay is expanding to additional banks in France, Italy, and Spain.

In France, Apple Pay will be available later this year at Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne, Crédit Mutuel du Sud-Ouest, and Crédit Mutuel Massif Central, which are the three regional federations of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa. Apple Pay is also coming to Crédit Mutuel Arkéa’s online banking subsidiary Fortuneo, and Max.

In Italy, Apple Pay is now available at Banca Mediolanum for Mediolanum Card debit cards, which are based on Mastercard’s Maestro network.

In Spain, Apple Pay is now supported by Boon, a mobile wallet solution based on a prepaid account with a digital Mastercard. Boon users top-up their accounts with a debit or credit card, or via wire transfer. Boon also supports Apple Pay in the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Ireland, and Italy.

In Spain, Apple Pay will also be available through mobile-only bank N26 later this year. The service has a partnership with Mastercard.

Apple maintains a list of Apple Pay participating banks in Europe, although it has yet to be updated to reflect today’s additions.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tags: Italy, Spain, France, boon
Discuss this article in our forums

Fender Play doesn’t judge — it just teaches you guitar

If you ask Ethan Kaplan, chief product officer of digital at Fender, about the death of the electric guitar, he gets a bit incredulous. And it’s easy to understand why. As he’s quick to point out, “for some reason, there’s still a guitar on every stage.” But while he’s adamant his company and the industry is perfectly healthy, it’s clear some of the cultural cachet of the guitar has dried up. Fender is hoping to turn the tides.

The latest effort is Fender Play, a digital lesson platform designed to keep younger would-be guitarists coming back day after day, year after year. The company’s research suggests it’s not hard to attract new players, but it’s extremely difficult to keep them tied to the instrument for the rest of their lives. In fact, Kaplan says 95 percent of players give up in the first year. Most don’t even make it past the first three months. Play has been designed, then, not only to be simple, but to cater do an increasingly diverse playerbase, delivering relatively quick gratification.

Unlike other music instructional standbys like Mel Bay, Play doesn’t spend a ton of time early on teaching theory or how to read notation. Instead, once you’ve got the bare essentials down (how to tune your guitar, identify and strum the strings, etc.), it immediately starts teaching you a song. And we’re not talking about “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Play focuses on hits from the likes of Bon Iver, the Rolling Stones, Brad Paisley, Sean Mendes, the National and — yes — even Disney. Fender pairs lessons on technique and theory with each track, but the explicit goal is to learn the song of your choice, not to master the pentatonic scale.

Instead of funneling every student down the same path, Fender tries to personalize the experience as best as it can. When you first fire it up, you’re asked to choose a path — rock, pop, country, blues or folk. (Don’t worry—you can pursue multiple paths or change paths at any time.) You’re also asked if you’re playing acoustic or electric, and based on these choices you’ll get different instructional videos, different song choices and learn different techniques. If you’re learning country on an acoustic, you might get early lessons on finger-picking. If you go with rock, you’ll focus on power chords and learn a Foo Fighters song.

This flexible approach is core to Play’s mission. Kaplan says it’s not Fender’s place to judge anyone’s musical taste, and goes out of his way to make it clear that the company doesn’t believe everyone has “to be a rock-guitar god. “It doesn’t matter if you’re playing it with a pick, a bow, an Ebow, a hammer. … We don’t just represent virtuosity,” he says.

It’s refreshing to see a guitar company not just acknowledge, but embrace the idea that the goal for every player isn’t Yngwie Malmsteen or Steven Vai. Plenty of people are perfectly happy to strum the chords to “Let It Go” or bang out a couple of Taylor Swift tunes.

Fender has also focused a lot of energy on really nailing the production value, and it shows. It’s not the first company to invest in high-quality guitar-lesson videos, but it’s clear this isn’t some half-assed entry into the arena. Audio quality is top-notch, and there are clear 4K closeups on the instructors’ picking and fretting hands at the appropriate moments. Even tiny details like the set lighting are consistent across all the clips. That being said, at the end of the day, these are still just instructional videos. And, while they’re well-produced, they don’t deliver anything truly revolutionary.

Fender’s research says the 5 percent of people who start playing guitar stick with it for their entire lives. The ambitious goal of Play is to double that number. The company has a clear and admirable set of principles and theories in place. The song-oriented curriculum that respects restrained strumming as much as it does blistering solos is a welcome change of pace. But right now, Play is also very limited. It’s launching with a decent selection of songs, but lessons are focused entirely on the most novice of students. And while Fender has floated the idea of adding more interactive elements, like pop-out chord charts and tablature, right now it’s mostly just a collection of instructional videos.

If you want to test out Fender Play for yourself, it’s available starting today on desktop and iOS for $20 a month, though Fender is offering a free month of access in hopes of luring you into its six-string clutches.

Insurance group: Tesla’s Model S is safe, but not super safe

Tesla has always made a big deal about how safe its electric cars are, and frequently boast about how they have the highest ratings at the NHTSA. But the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a vehicle testing outfit run by the insurance industry, threw some shade on the company in its latest report. The body says that Tesla’s Model S falls just short of winning its top safety award, which was scooped by the Mercedes-Benz E Class, Lincoln Continental and the Toyota Avalon.

The sticking point with the Model S, and other vehicles like the Chevy Impala and Ford Taurus, is down to a specific examination the IIHS runs. Back in 2012, the body began running the Small Overlap Frontal Test, which crashes into 25 percent of the body at 40 miles per hour. The examination is the equivalent of some yahoo crossing the median strip on a highway and smashing into your front fender. It’s the sort of crash that puts far more stress on your car’s structure, and also causes plenty of serious injuries.

The agency takes great pains to stress that the Model S is by no means an unsafe car, earning second, rather than first, place in the test. The reason for the demerit is twofold: the safety belt was too loose, and the crunch encroached on the cabin too much in one of the tests. The IIHS also noted that the Model S’ headlights aren’t the best, but that it also has yet to test the higher-performance versions of that same car. So, in summary, the IIHS says that the Model S is pretty damn safe, but there are circumstances where it may not be the safest.

Of course, Tesla has a — somewhat justified — persecution complex when it comes to negative stories from the automotive industry. As a new entrant with a status-quo defying power train, it serves as a threat to the century-old establishment. It took the BBC’s Top Gear to court for saying its cars frequently ran out of charge, although it lost that defamation suit. Two years later, and the company had a public fight with The New York Times, repudiating a negative review by publishing the test vehicle’s telematics.

Tesla has already responded to the claim, pointing out that the Model S still has an unimpeachable record at the NHTSA. Elon Musk’s team also makes a snide reference to industry groups having their own “methods and motivations that suit their own subjective purposes.” It’s worth saying, too, that this isn’t the first non-Governmental body to demerit Tesla on safety — Consumer Reports did similar back in April. It looks like Tesla may have to set up a new safety commission, as well as ones to tackle its other internal problems.

Via: CNBC

Source: IIHS

Brexit is even making ‘League of Legends’ champions pricier

As if the prices of tech hardware shooting up as a result of last summer’s Brexit vote wasn’t disappointing enough, now it’s making the cost of entirely virtual items more taxing on the wallet. League of Legends developer Riot Games has announced that from July 26th, it’s adjusting the UK prices of Riot Points (RP) — which players use to unlock champions and buy skins/other in-game swag — to compensate for the decline in the value of the pound.

It’s a familiar story: Currency fluctuations following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union has meant that Riot is effectively earning less money from RP than it was before. The situation is a tad more frustrating than normal considering there’s no physical product (with significant overheads) being manufactured and distributed, but RP is Riot’s primary revenue stream from an otherwise free-to-play game, and business is business.

Instead of changing the price of the various bundles, the same amount of money will instead get you roughly 20 percent less RP from July 26th — £5 will be good for 790 RP instead of 975, for example. Riot is also doing away with the (reportedly) rarely purchased £2.50 tier and introducing a new £15 bundle to stagger the rungs a little tighter.

Browsing the comments on the announcement post, it seems players are just as frustrated with the new scaling of the RP tiers as they are with the effective price increase. There are plenty of skins available for 975 RP, you see, which currently costs £5. When the revised pricing kicks in, players will have to buy 1650 RP for £10 to get enough points for the same skin, and have plenty of potentially unwanted RP left over. The fact there’s no £2.50 tier to top up the coffers when you need only a few more points for that sweet in-game item only compounds the problem.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Riot Games