The pioneering CityAirbus quadcopter takes big step toward production

Why it matters to you

Airbus will revolutionize intracity mobility if it manages to turn the futuristic CityAirbus into a reality.

Our skies could become a lot more crowded in the coming years to reduce traffic jams on the ground. Aircraft manufacturer Airbus successfully tested the propulsion system of a small, city-friendly quadcopter named CityAirbus it plans on bringing to production in the not-too-distant future.

The CityAirbus quadcopter is similar to the Pop.Up unveiled earlier this year at the Geneva Auto Show, but it’s much simpler in design because it ditches the three-module configuration. It instead takes the form of a small, futuristic-looking helicopter developed exclusively for short-range air travel. It’s capable of taking off and landing vertically, whisking up to four passengers (including the pilot) right over traffic jams to important public destinations like trains stations and airports. It’s one way to solve the problem of urban mobility.

Power comes from an electric drivetrain made up of eight separate motors that draw electricity from four 140-kilowatt battery packs to power the eight propellers driving the CityBus. It has a top speed of about 75 mph, and its batteries store enough electricity for roughly 15 minutes of operation. That’s not much, even for a vehicle designed for short intracity trips, so Airbus will need to develop a clever way to recharge the batteries in record time.

The CityAirbus is on track to make its maiden flight in late 2018. Early prototypes will be remote-controlled for safety reasons until Airbus engineers gather enough data on the powertrain to ensure it works as planned in a wide variety of conditions. Intrepid test pilots will hop on board later in the testing phase to complete the process.

If everything goes according to plan (and nothing ends in an expensive ball of fire), company officials predict the first examples of the CityAirbus will begin crisscrossing the skies in 2023. They will be initially be controlled by professional pilots, a solution which will facilitate the certification process and help the general public warm up to the idea of traveling in an electric pod. Airbus plans on making the CityAirbus entirely autonomous later in the production run.

The lack of regulations applicable to a mode of transportation which blurs the line between a drone and a personal aircraft could turn our skies into the Wild West. The company realistically notes urban air traffic management will need to be upgraded before machines like the CityAirbus are deployed en masse across the nation. Don’t be surprised if you find a control tower in the Whole Foods parking lot in the future.

Comcast’s low-cost wireless service might be a success

The wireless carrier battles have been heating up recently, as reports of a Sprint and T-Mobile merger intensify, which would allow the third and fourth largest cellular carriers in the US to better compete with the likes of giants AT&T and Verizon. But it turns out that there’s another carrier to keep an eye on. Unnamed sources told Bloomberg that Comcast’s wireless service, called Xfinity Mobile, has gained around 200,000 subscribers in under five months.

It’s not a huge number of subscribers in and of itself. An analyst with Recon Analytics LLC named Roger Entner pointed out that the numbers are small (though solid growth, considering the service launched in May). “What’s interesting is that Comcast might be making a profit at this,” Entner said to Bloomberg.

Comcast uses Verizon’s wireless network and pays the company wholesale prices. Customers can only subscribe to the Xfinity Mobile plan if they already pay for Xfinity TV and Internet. Entner estimated to Bloomberg that Xfinity is paying $3–$4 per gigabyte of data usage to Verizon. They’re turning around and charging their customers $12 per gigabyte for that same data. Unlimited plans cost $65 per month, discounted to $45 if you subscribe to Xfinity’s top-tier services. Their prices are extremely low compared to other wireless carriers, and yet it still appears they will be profitable when they reach a critical mass of customers.

It’s certainly interesting news for the competitive cellular market in the US. Comcast can use low cell plan pricing to keep its subscribers locked into their Xfinity ecosystem, boosting profits on multiple levels. It will be interesting to see how many more subscribers they attract going forward.

Source: Bloomberg

Cribitt app wants to help New Yorkers find an apartment fast

Why it matters to you

With Cribitt, you can select an apartment, book an appointment, and get a new home in New York with a tap of a button.

Living in New York City is difficult enough, and that doesn’t even take into consideration how hard it is to just find a place to live. Not only are apartments in New York among the most expensive in the U.S., but they are also some of the fastest moving as well. But now, there’s an app that could help you snag that great deal with great speed. It’s called Cribitt and it is heralded as the “only on-demand rental app,” allowing renters to summon an agent and view apartments with the tap of a button.

Using Cribitt, your smartphone is all you need to discover available apartments, coordinate instant viewings, and even apply for a new residence. Simply select an apartment that catches your eye, summon a broker, and keep tabs on said broker’s location in real time to avoid unexpected delays or the dreaded no-show. While other apps and websites require users to call agents to book their appointments up to days in advance, Cribitt wants to make everything fully responsive to the renter’s schedule.

“The real estate industry is at least a decade behind when it comes to incorporating technology and the process of renting an apartment has hardly changed in the last 10 years,” Cribitt founder and CEO Stephen Steiner said in a statement. “Renters still have to mine through listings — many of which are often no longer available, call to schedule a viewing and take a gamble on whether or not the agent shows up. Cribitt eliminates that uncertainty for both the renter and the agent.”

Cribitt not only wants to benefit apartment hunters, but purveyors as well. The app promises to pay the licensing fee of any new agents, giving them the opportunity to show apartments and earn commissions on their own time. And that commission is said to be quite hefty — the app is said to offer agents a commission split of up to 90 percent of the broker fee.

As it stands, Cribitt is available in the Midtown West neighborhood of Manhattan and has plans to expand to other areas in the city later in 2017.

Home Max hands-on: Google takes on Apple’s HomePod and Sonos

Sonos and Apple have some unexpected competition in the voice-activated speaker market this holiday season. Google’s somewhat unexpected Home Max is built with high quality music playback in mind, first and foremost. At $399 ($50 more than the HomePod and $100 less than the Sonos Play:5), it’s priced accordingly — but at first listen, it has the chops to match up with those other speakers. And Google says that its machine learning capabilities will give the company a leg up other players in the market.

In a controlled listening environment, Google gave the press a demo of how the Home Max sounds, as both a single speaker and in a stereo configuration. I’m no audiophile, but my first impression of the Home Max is definitely positive. It’s extremely loud, well balanced and crystal clear, with well-defined bass that isn’t overwhelming. In short, the sound quality is what I’d expect from a speaker in this price range — in a vacuum, it’s not cheap, but it’s also significantly better than the speakers most people probably have in their homes.

The Home Max speaker itself is exceedingly minimal. It’s a large white or black slab with the same fabric covering that you’ll find on the Home Mini, which Google says it designed to be transparent to audio that passes through. Like the rest of Google’s home products, it should blend into most environments — though a speaker this large isn’t going to be nearly as invisible as the standard Home or Amazon’s new Echo.

That’s doubly true if you get two Max speakers and pair them up. It’s not a subtle setup, but it sounds simply wonderful. Of course, you’ll need to be pretty serious about your home audio setup to drop $800 on a pair of these speakers. The good news is that you can hook up other devices like a turntable; they’re not just limited to what you can stream. You can send songs to it via Bluetooth or Chromecast, as well.

Other thoughtful touches include a touch strip that runs along the length of the Home’s top surface. It’ll mostly be used for turning volume up or down, but you can also tap to pause. The speaker is also designed to be set up horizontally or vertically, with a magnetic plastic bottom that you can move to whatever side of the speaker you need to, depending on how you set it up. (If it’s in vertical mode, it only works in mono.)

Obviously, the Home Max does everything the standard Google Home does, but it also has some audio-specific features we weren’t able to test out yet. Chief among those is Google’s claim that the “Smart Sound” tech will automatically optimize audio for where you place the speaker (something that Apple says the HomePod will do, as well). We’ll need to test that out, but Google says that its machine learning background will help the speaker learn exactly how it “should” sound in various situation, with the quality expected to improve over time.

Regardless, it’s clear Google is taking its place in the smart speaker market seriously. Whether you want multi-room audio or just one really good speaker, Google is now a legit contender.

Follow all the latest news from Google’s Pixel 2 event here!

Stranger Things pixelated mobile game is a great intro to season 2

Why it matters to you

Stranger Things was a surprise success when it debuted in 2016. The second season has much more of a promotional lead-in and this game seems to have done a good job of hyping it.

You don’t need to worry about hidden microtransactions or pay-to-win mechanics in the new Stranger Things mobile game, as its free label is entirely accurate. Released to promote the impending second season of the hit Netflix show, the Stranger Things game is now available on iOS and Android and doesn’t have a price tag for any aspects of it.

One of the most endearing and beloved parts of the first series of the Stranger Things TV show was how it harked back to the 1980’s. Movie references, Dungeons and Dragons and the fashions of that era were all on display, and the Stranger Things game takes that principle and runs with it. The art style, audio, and even elements of the gameplay are all reminiscent of classic adventure titles from that era.

Stranger Things is a pixelated, top-down adventure game that sees you taking control of various characters from the show, including Hopper, Nancy, and the group of kids that so enraptured audiences after its surprise 2016 release. The perspective is top-down, the graphics are pixelated and you’ll have a few metrics like health, items, and money to keep track of.

In fact if you watched the 8-Bit Cinema production of Stranger things from last year, it looks very familiar.

During the game, you’ll visit some of the most iconic locations from the show, including Mirkwood Forest and Hawkins Lab. There are also said to be hidden and “exciting areas” that you’ve never seen before. It’s not clear as of yet whether those areas will feature in the second season of Stranger Things, but considering the promotional nature of this game, it’s a distinct possibility.

Reviews so far on both the App Store and Google Play stores are very strong. Four and five stars all around, with no big complaints about bugs or disliked design choices. If players want to keep playing there should be plenty to keep them occupied, too. Along with the core story, Stranger Things is said to feature a number of collectibles, specifically VHS tapes, “Eggos” and “Gnomes,” so completionists can have something to work toward.

Stranger Things the game is out now on Android and iOS, while Stranger Things the show will have its second season debut on Netflix on October 27. That date will also see an update made to the game (thanks IGN), though what that is remains to be seen.

Maybe it will be something to do with the planned third season?

Google Clips hands-on: Not just a camera, but a photographer too

I’m not trying to gush too much, but I’m far, far more excited for the Pixel 2’s camera than I thought I’d be. What’s really bonkers to me, though, is that Google saw fit to squeeze its AI-powered photography tech into a cutesy 2-inch square it calls Clips. I don’t think I’m alone, either: most of the people I chatted with at the event seemed at least a little perplexed by Google’s ambitions here. Curiosity piqued, I had no choice but to track the thing down and have a closer look for myself.

First off, I’m impressed by how much intelligence Google packed into such a petite body. By now, you probably know that Clips is capable of recognizing the people in front of it, and focuses its recording on the people (and animals) it suspects you’ll be most interested in. Almost more impressive is that all of that digital legwork happens on the tiny camera itself — it’ll never tap into your phone’s horsepower to fuel its computations. Years ago, that would’ve been impossible on anything smaller than a laptop. Now, it’s all running in a package that’s small enough to be unobtrusive, yet big enough to avoid being swallowed by a toddler or a cat. (Dogs might be a different story.)

After twisting the lens to turn Clips on, a 12-megapixel sensor with a 130-degree field of view does handles all the imaging. interestingly, I’m told it’s optimized to play to our perceptions — Google has worked to optimize the quality of the resulting visuals, because not everything it captures shorts bursts of video, and not all of them will be recorded at the same resolution. Even so, the images I saw captured live on a Googler’s phone were more impressive than I would’ve thought. They’re definitely not as good as the photos you’d get out of a Pixel 2, but more than good enough for blasting around your social networks.

Those clips move around with decent speed too, since the camera maintains a connection to your phone via Wi-Fi Direct. Being in a slammed demo area with lots of interference definitely isn’t ideal for connection quality, but — after a few hiccups — the tiny videos started showing up on the connected device pretty quickly. As such, I don’t foresee too many issues when toting Clips around and trying to nab photos of loved ones on the fly.

So yes, on a technical level, Clips easily impresses. It’s not just a camera, it’s a live-in photographer (and a clever one, too). Those concerned with privacy can rest a little easier knowing none of the media Clips records will end up in the cloud somewhere unless you specifically want it to. Given that the camera is geared toward parents and pet owners, having this kind of structural silo is hugely important. What’s less clear is whether this thing actually has a future — it still very much feels like an experiment that’s just helpful enough that Google decided to kick it onto the market. Only time — and maybe a review unit — will tell.

Follow all the latest news from Google’s Pixel 2 event here!

Look out, Alexa — Google Assistant is new and improved and ready to go

Why it matters to you

Google Assistant is doing what it can to keep up with Alexa with a slew of new features including hands-free calling and improved personalization.

All hail the ongoing battle of the virtual assistants. After all, the more that Amazon, Google, and Apple compete with their respective artificial intelligence tools, the easier your life becomes. Now, Google debuted the latest and greatest iteration of Google Assistant, which is built into the entire Google Home family. Thanks to a few new features, you will be better equipped to find answers to your most pressing questions, tackle the most challenging of days, enjoy the best of entertainment, and take full control of your smart home.

As Google reminded us at its hardware event on Wednesday, October 4, Assistant is the only smart assistant that recognizes not only your voice but the voice of up to five folks in your home. That means that each and every one of you can receive personalized treatment from the digital helper. Part of that personalized treatment includes more help with your everyday routine. While you can already say, “Hey Google, good morning,” to access reminders about your schedule, commute time, weather, and news, you will soon be able to control a series of smart home devices as well with a single command. If you say “Hey Google, goodnight!” you will be able to dim the lights, adjust the temperature to your preferred bedtime levels, and be reminded of your first task the next morning.

Assistant is also allowing for further integrations with other Google speakers around the house. For example, if you say, “Hey Google, broadcast it’s time to go,” it will send this message around to other Google Home devices within your home, telling everyone to get a move on without you having to raise your voice.

Google is also now allowing users to control more than 1,000 connected devices from over 100 brands. There are also new ways to control Google-owned Nest products, as well as your Chromecast.

Outside of your smart home, Google Assistant is now able to answer more than 100 million new questions and is also capable of hands-free calling. Following in Amazon’s footsteps, Google lets you call anyone in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada from your own phone number, all from Google Home.

Assistant is now available in five additional countries, including Japan, so if you have yet to experience the benefits of this smart assistant, now’s a grand time to begin.

Self-driving train successfully completes a 60-mile run in Australia

Why it matters to you

An autonomous train journey with no human on board to act as a fail-safe shows just how close this technology is to becoming mainstream.

It’s not just self-driving cars that are taking over the world (not literally!) — trains are getting in on the action, too. In Australia, the mining company Rio Tinto has just successfully completed the first fully autonomous rail journey, with no human on board to act as a failsafe in case something goes wrong.

The 60-mile AutoHaul autonomous train ride journey took place at Rio Tinto’s iron ore operations in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. It was completed safely, and was observed by company officials and representatives from the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator.

“This successful pilot run puts us firmly on track to meet our goal of operating the world’s first fully autonomous heavy-haul, long-distance rail network, which will unlock significant safety and productivity benefits for the business,” Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury said in a statement.

“Gains from AutoHaul are already being realized including reduced variability and increased speed across the network, helping to reduce average cycle times. Rio Tinto is proud to be a leader in innovation and autonomous technology in the global mining industry, which is delivering long-term competitive advantages as we build the mines of the future.”

Rio Tinto operates in the region of 200 trains on more than 1,700 kilometers of track in the Pilbara, which are used to transport ore from 16 mines to four port terminals. The company first started running autonomous trains in the first quarter of this year, although up until now there has always been a human driver traveling on board to take control of the locomotive should they be required to do so.

While Rio Tinto’s self-driving trains are being used for haulage instead of transporting passengers, other companies are working toward building commercial customer-carrying locomotives. For example, a recent report coming out of France notes that the country’s government-owned railway system hopes to be transporting humans on driverless trains by 2023. Unlike Rio Tinto’s efforts, however, these trains will still have drivers on hand should the need arise.

As to what the long-term future holds for people working on trains, Rio Tonto’s Chris Salisbury said: “New roles are being created to manage our future operations, and we are preparing our current workforce for new ways of working to ensure they remain part of our industry.”

Google’s new Pixel Buds earphones are wireless, but not like Apple’s AirPods

Why it matters to you

Google’s first crack at wireless earbuds, the Google Pixel Buds, offer some intriguing features, including real-time translation of up to 40 languages. But unlike Apple’s Airpods, they aren’t fully wireless.

Following the release of its successful smart speaker, Google Home, Google has been digging increasingly deeper into the hardware space. At an event in San Francisco, the tech giant today unveiled several new products, including it new Pixel 2 phones, and a brand new pair of wireless earbuds called the Pixel Buds.

The new headphones feature a tethered wireless design, rather than a fully wireless design like Apple’s Airpods, looping a thin cable that connects the two rather bulbous earbuds. In addition to passing sound between the left and right earphones, the cable features a small loop of wire designed to help keep each of the earphones securely in your ears. Like the Pixel 2 phones, the new earbuds will be available in “clearly white”, “kinda blue”, and “just black.”

In terms of functionality, the Pixel Buds will have many of the same hardware features we’ve seen on most Bluetooth in-ear headphones on the market, including touch controls that allow users to tap the right earbud to pause music, as well as swipe forward and backward to change songs.

Google has also integrated the new headphones with other smart features via Google Assistant as soon as you pair the buds with a new Google Pixel device. The most intriguing feature shown is real-time translation via Google Translate, which claims to allow for efficient translation of 40 languages. The company showed the feature in action at the live event, presenting seamless translation between English and Swedish. That said, it’s one thing to do a canned demonstration, and another to translate languages in real-world scenarios. We’ve tried features like this before with inconsistent results, so it will be a real test for Google’s new earphones.

In terms of juice, the new headphones will offer a middling five hours of battery life per charge, but that will be supplemented by a wireless charging case that allows for 24 hours of total playback on the go, similar to Apple’s Airpods.

It’s perhaps surprising that Google didn’t leap right into the burgeoning fully wireless headphone space, which is currently dominated by the AirPods. That said, many models of fully wireless headphones still struggle with basic issues like battery life and connectivity, so Google is likely aiming to provide buyers with a more stable, longer-lasting experience. It’s also understandable that Google would take cautious first steps into the headphones space, given how competitive the marketplace is.

The Google Pixel Buds will start at an AirPod-matching $159, which will be a serious test considering that there are teems of tethered wireless earbuds currently available at a lower price point. The Pixel Buds can be pre-ordered today on the company’s website, and will ship in 6-7 weeks.

Wage war on a budget with 10 fun and free first-person shooters for PC and Mac

The landscape for free-to-play shooters is more robust and impressive than ever before, lined with an assortment of notable hits like Team Fortress 2 and the interstellar Planetside followup. They may not offer the same production values as the newest Call of Duty or Halo release, but then again, they won’t cost you upwards of $60 either. Here are our top picks for the best free first-person shooter games, so you can frag fools and save money.

Blacklight Retribution (Windows, PlayStation 4)

Blacklight Retribution offers the simple perk to every player right out of the gates. Among its novel features, the game also offers a wide variety of intense game modes, highly customizable weapons and armor, and futuristic technology that will keep you playing and upgrading for a long time. The visual and graphical interfaces are gorgeous, while the convenient weapon depots and hulking hardsuits provide additional means of playing the title’s nine maps and seven classic game modes.

Players also earn points in a variety of ways throughout matches to enable in-game perks, such as health replenishment and heavy artillery, furthering the gameplay alongside the thousands of available gun combinations and mod attachments. However, permanently earning in-game bonuses takes time, so simplicity will have to do for a good while.

Download now from:

Steam

Team Fortress 2 (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Boasting beautifully-rendered graphics and a well-balanced class system, the lauded Team Fortress 2 still appeals to casual gamers and pros alike, garnering what is still one of the largest player bases on the Steam marketplace more than seven years after its initial debut. The game is a steadfast hybrid of fast-paced combat and intense strategy in which every one of the game’s nine classes exhibits its own powerful strengths and crippling weaknesses.

Game modes are straightforward, primarily pitting two teams against one another in an effort to move a cart, capture select points, or steal a briefcase. It’s highly competitive in nature, but it still caters to all skill levels. Like most multiplayer titles, it’s about exploiting the Achilles heel of your enemies while protecting your own, but it still relishes a stylized brand of humor that has become iconic for the Team Fortress brand. Few games have held up as well over the years, and to be honest, few probably will.

Download now from:

Steam

Red Trigger (Windows)

Born as Maxime Vézina’s final college assignment, Red Trigger plays like anything but a student project. A simple white, blue, and red color scheme gives players a platformer with a toned-down Portal aesthetic. You wield a lone gun used to shoot red platforms which either expand or retract. The platforms can be used for defense or to move forward. Your ultimate goal is to decimate a computer system with the self-injected eponymous virus by reaching the end of each stage. Solving puzzles is half the battle, as the platforming elements, much like Portal, become the main barrier to progress.

While it isn’t a violent shooting gallery, Red Trigger is a gunplay-driven first-person puzzler: Impressive and charming, it will scratch an itch for precision shooting and puzzle solving for the price of nothing but your time. The experience lasts for about an hour, so it’s the perfect free-to-play game to tinker with on an evening when you just can’t figure out what to play.

Download now from:

Steam

Tribes: Ascend (Windows)

In Tribes: Ascend, players maneuver using a jetpack and skis, traversing massive environments at breakneck speeds, whether by their own accord or using a variety of in-game vehicles. The game features a wide variety of modes, and nine unlockable classes, each of which offers its own distinct set of weaponry and skills obtainable through the game’s progression system.

The enormous maps are also a great fit for the objective and defense-based game modes, focusing on a breadth of aerial dogfights and mid-air explosions, instead of emphasizing cover and well-rehearsed strategy like most titles. Furthermore, the character models are finely polished, and the gameplay allows up to 32 players to compete in hallmark game modes such as capture the flag, team deathmatch, and five-on-five arena battles. The menu navigation and feature set may not define it, but the high-speed combat and Tribes: Ascend‘s consistently-expansive updates certainly do.

Download now from:

Steam

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory picked up quite a bit of steam since it was originally released as a multiplayer-only title in 2003. It garnered considerable support for its classic ranking and experience system, die-hard community, and innovative class system — even though the graphics were never quite on par with competitive offerings, even then.

Easy to play but difficult to master, the game allows players to take on the role of either Axis or Allies, pitting them in team-based combat spanning a variety of objective-based scenarios. Up to 32 players can choose from one of five distinct classes and compete on three maps, each of which is linked to an over-arching campaign. However, the title’s true lasting appeal lies within the aforementioned class system, providing a welcome set of battlefield promotions that come coupled with enhanced skills and additional weaponry such as land mines and the mobile MG-42.

Download now from:

Splash Damage

Planetside 2 (Windows, PlayStation 4)

With planet-spanning battles and three diverse factions, Planetside 2 ups the ante on everyday first-person shooters. Everything the player does affects their faction’s success in battle, from killing enemies to buying vehicles and taking enemy control points, all of which takes place on a massive scale featuring lean animation and exceptional skill trees. The diverse combat ensures no two matches are ever the same, placing players against one another in custom tank battles one minute, and urban firefights and aerial onslaughts the next. It all gives players the opportunity to unlock weapons, attachments, skills, and other components through the game’s intuitive leveling system.

The core of Planetside 2 revolves around holding crucial territories and claiming key resources, with hundreds of players fighting it out over the course of multi-day and week-long battles. Turning the tide takes teamwork — and sometimes being a cog in the machine isn’t so bad.

Download now from:

Steam