Essential Phone gets 360-degree Tiny Planet mode and selfie flash

Oh, look, another camera update.

Essential Phone owners have likely grown accustomed to frequent updates for the Essential Camera app, and lo and behold, yet another one is rolling out now. After updating to v0.1.097.006 on the Play Store, you’ll be able to check out two new features – a 360-degree Tiny Planet mode and a flash for the front-facing camera.

Tiny Planet is the most exciting of the two features, and it works similarly to what we’ve seen from other OEMs. Assuming you have the Essential 360 Camera accessory, Tiny Planet allows you to capture an image that turns your surroundings into, well, a tiny planet.

You can edit your Tiny Planet creations right within the Essential Camera app, and after you’ve got everything just the way you like, you can share it on the social media platform of your choice.

Get your selfie look ready. We just released an update to Essential Camera app that adds flash for the selfie camera, Tiny Planet mode (beta) for 360° photos and videos, and stability fixes. Download it now: https://t.co/zXoZ765GHF pic.twitter.com/TJpTMUtFVv

— Essential (@essential) February 26, 2018

As for the flash for the front-facing camera, this simply illuminates the front of the Essential Phone’s screen with a bright white background when enabled. It’s not as powerful as a dedicated hardware flash system, but it can still be useful for lighting up a dark environment in a pinch.

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Fitbit Ionic: Adidas Edition now available for $329

If you’re a runner, this is the Fitbit for you.

The Fitbit Ionic was met with a mostly positive reception following its debut last October, and while it may not be perfect, it’s currently my go-to smartwatch/fitness tracker of choice.

The Fitbit Ionic: Adidas Edition was announced at the same time as the regular Ionic, but now during MWC 2018, Fitbit’s shed more light on what it’ll bring to the table.

At first glance, the most notable part of the Adidas Edition is its unique look. This version of the Ionic comes with the same Silver Gray aluminum case that’s already available, but it’s paired with an exclusive two-tone Ink Blue sports band that you won’t be able to get anywhere else.

There’s also an exclusive watch face that’s meant to resemble a racing bib, and this is paired with six special on-screen workouts thanks to the Adidas Train app – including Dynamic Warmup, Power Race, Metabolic, Run Activation, Strong Strides, and Post Run Stretch.

Aside from those few goodies, this is the same Fitbit Ionic we’ve had since October. It tracks your steps, heart-rate, and sleep, supports a variety of apps, alerts you of any notifications on your phone, lets you make payments at stores with Fitbit Pay, and more.

The Fitbit Ionic: Adidas Edition is available for pre-order now and costs $329.95 ($30 more than the regular Ionic). It’ll officially go on sale March 19 and be available at Amazon, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Kohl’s, Macy’s, and Nordstrom.

See at Fitbit

Latest MIUI 9.2 build brings stable Oreo update to the Xiaomi Mi 6

Xiaomi has started rolling out the stable Oreo update, with the Mi 6 becoming the first device to receive the OTA build.

Xiaomi hasn’t detailed its Oreo plans until this point, but that’s changing today. The Mi 6 was the first Xiaomi device to pick up the MIUI 9 update last year, and the phone is now the first to receive the stable Oreo update. The latest MIUI 9.2 build (9.2.3.0) introduces Android 8.0 Oreo to the device, along with a ton of bug fixes.

Here’s the full changelog for the MIUI 9.2.3.0 update, as detailed on the MIUI forum:

• Highlights

  • Optimization – Android 8.0 update (02-12)
  • Optimization – Protection from unintentional tapping for Dial pad (02-12)

• System

  • Optimization – Android 8.0 update (02-12)
  • Fix – Apps changed Wi-Fi connection status without the user’s permission (02-12)
  • Fix – Apps stopped working in the background (02-12)
  • Fix – WhatsApp force closed in Split screen (02-12)

• Phone

  • Fix – DTMF issues after pausing VoLTE video calls (02-12)

• App Lock

  • New – Added the App lock step before unlocking using a new fingerprint for the first time (02-12)

• Contacts

  • New – Improved layout and readability for search results in Contacts (02-12)
  • Optimization – Protection from unintentional tapping for Dial pad (02-12)
  • Fix – Contact search didn’t work properly for Russian and Ukranian (02-12)

• Messaging

  • Fix – OTP messages were grouped with notification SMS (02-12)
  • Fix – Time in Messaging didn’t change when the system was switched to 12-hour format (02-12)
  • Fix – Messages with one-time passwords disappeared (02-12)
  • Delete – Adjustments for Messaging: service and promo SMS, scheduled SMS, and group messages. (02-12)

• Lockscreen, Status Bar, Notification Bar

  • Optimization – Vibration for notifications during calls (02-12)
  • Optimization – Notification shade response (02-12)
  • Fix – Brightness bar wasn’t displayed in its position (02-12)
  • Fix – A white bar appeared in the Notification shade (02-12)
  • Fix – Lock screen wallpaper wasn’t shown in some cases (02-12)
  • Fix – Notification shade issues (02-12)
  • Fix – The search bar in the Notification shade wasn’t displayed correctly (02-12)
  • Fix – Wallpaper Carousel couldn’t load online resources (a Play Store update was required) (02-12)

• Home screen

  • New – Animated icons for selected apps in the default theme (02-12)
  • Optimization – RAM info isn’t shown in Recents by default. Go to Settings > Home screen & Recents to turn it on. (02-12)
  • Optimization – Animation for clearing cache (02-12)
  • Optimization – Adjusted the button for clearing memory in Recents (02-12)
  • Optimization – Swipe response (02-12)
  • Optimization – Folders open faster (02-12)
  • Optimization – Users can set their main Home screen in the editing mode (02-12)
  • Optimization – New animation for launching and closing apps (02-12)
  • Fix – Couldn’t close Recents in some cases (02-12)
  • Fix – Issues with icon size for Clock, Calendar, and Weather (02-12)
  • Fix – Home screen icons weren’t displayed properly (02-12)

• Themes

  • Optimization – Redesigned home page (02-12)
  • Optimization – Updated Peach blossom and Asphalt themes (02-1)

With the Mi 6 now on a stable Oreo build, it shouldn’t be long before we see other phones in Xiaomi’s portfolio receiving the update. If you haven’t picked up the OTA update on your Mi 6 yet, you can manually flash the build via the fastboot or recovery files.

Sony reinvented its design language and nobody will notice

The new Xperia XZ2 looks like the best phone that nobody is going to buy in 2018.

Sony has never been a major player when it comes to smartphone sales. That’s not to say it doesn’t make great stuff; ask anyone who has a Sony phone or has had a Sony phone and you’ll hear the same things — built tough, unique camera features (even though the camera isn’t the greatest), and amazingly sharp LCD displays are the norms from both the high-end and the low. It’s just difficult for any company to compete when it comes to selling phones and it’s not at all like selling televisions or game consoles. Sony had to adapt to stay relevant on even a tiny scale. And it did. And nobody will notice or care.

I’m talking about the new Xperia XZ2 family. Sony has ditched some of the things that don’t sound new on a spec sheet and come up with a new design style for its flagship series of phones. It kept a few things like fancy camera tricks and a laser-sharp HDR LCD panel, but it’s edging closer to the plain black slab model that seems to be the key to success: 18:9 screens, no side bezels to speak of, a fingerprint sensor on the back, and front-facing speakers. It’s a smart move to emulate the phones we love to buy, but it’s probably too little too late because Sony isn’t going to be the company that can scratch Samsung’s armor and takes a chunk of its sales.

Sony’s changes are the right move to increase sales, but it’s not finishing it up and making us love the product.

Everyone has a favorite company when it comes to companies that make phones. Mine’s HTC (unfortunately) and I’m not quite in the mindless fanboy section but I will favor their products if I have the choice. Part of what made a company our favorite is an influence from somewhere besides our head. That could be a commercial or billboard ad, or word of mouth from our friends, or even a blog post. Something, somewhere made each and every one of us decide to take a hard look at our favorite brand. Sony’s problem is that there is nobody or nothing influencing any of us in a positive way, at least not enough to get people to buy their phones in any numbers.

Sony as a company knows all of this and seemingly knows it better than a lot of other companies. You can come up with plenty of reasons why the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4 were wildly successful and sold more than other consoles which had better specs and a more robust online network, but they’re all circular (e.g., they get “better” exclusives because they are wildly successful, they are wildly successful because they get better exclusives). Once you finish running in that circle you come to the realization that the PlayStation 3 and 4 were so successful because we wanted them more than we wanted a Microsoft console. Sony did what they could do to make us want it and buy it and then buy an updated version that was smaller and worse a second time.

Turns out that selling phones is different than selling PlayStations.

The company isn’t doing any of that with their smartphone division, and I have no idea why. I used to think it was because they were satisfied with a strong market presence in Europe and Japan, but numbers there are declining thanks to companies like Huawei and efforts from Samsung and Apple to move in and gobble everything up like they’ve done in the Americas. Now I just shrug and come out with an “I dunno” because I don’t have any internal and unqualified justification I can project on a multi-billion dollar company’s management style. I am qualified, however, to notice it and to mention it and I am: Sony either does not care about selling phones or they don’t understand how to compete with Samsung on even a small level. I can say this with complete confidence because it’s not difficult to spot.

Which brings us back to a new design language for the Xperia line. I’m the first to admit that tiny bezels, tall gangly screens, and no headphone jacks are not things I love, but I’m in the minority. Sony is moving forward with the market, even if they are a year late. This is a good thing and I’m going to bet that most people who do buy Sony phones are going to approve of the changes. I also love the way Sony resisted and stuck with a lower-resolution LCD so the company’s excellent HDR can provide the same amazing look Sony owners are used to seeing. Never give up a thing you do better than everyone else just so you can be like everyone else, and Sony is never going to do high-resolution AMOLED as good as Samsung does it. But the changes just aren’t going to make a difference and Sony is not going to make a profit from the phone division because of these changes unless they can make us want a new Xperia.

Maybe Sony is happy with the smartphone division’s performance and this is enough. We’ll have to wait and see.

I’m not a marketing genius, so I’ll make no claims about knowing what Sony can do here. It’s my job to react to things phone makers do, not come up with ideas about what they should do next. I’ll happily eat my hat should Sony make a breakthrough and sell 50 million Xperia XZ2 phones, though, and would love to see it happen. We need more companies making products and fighting for our money, not fewer, especially companies like Sony who do bring great things to the market.

Google’s mobile UI framework ‘Flutter’ is now in beta

Another step towards better mobile apps.

Our phones are only as good as the apps they run, and over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile apps get faster, prettier, and more powerful.

Flutter is a new tool from Google that wants to keep this trend going, and during MWC 2018, Flutter received its first official beta.

Flutter launched in an alpha stage last year, and the release of its new beta signifies a big step in its continuous development cycle. It’s a mobile UI framework that’s designed to make it easy for developers to create high-quality apps that run fast and look great, and it’s targeted at app development for both Android and iOS.

Per Google’s announcement post, some of Flutter’s highlights include:

• High-velocity development with features like stateful Hot Reload, a new reactive framework, rich widget set, and integrated tooling.
• Expressive and flexible designs with composable widget sets, rich animation libraries, and a layered extensible architecture.
• High-quality experiences across devices and platforms with our portable, GPU-accelerated renderer and high-performance, native ARM code runtime, and platform interop.

Apps made using Flutter.

Since its alpha launch, Google’s worked with its development community to add new features to Flutter, such as support for screen readers, development for the iPhone X and iOS 11, more image formatting, inline videos, etc.

Google says Flutter is a great tool for beginners and advanced developers alike, and you can start using it right now on Windows, Linux, and macOS. While many of you reading this may never personally work with Flutter, its beta should hopefully signify more apps in the near future that look and run even better than what we already have.

Bixby 2.0 may launch with the Galaxy Note 9 this year

Where to find a replacement Galaxy Note 8 stylus

Technically, you’ve got options — but there’s also one clear choice.

Well, now you’ve gone and done it haven’t you? You misplaced your S Pen and now there’s literally a hole in your Note 8 that you can’t fill.

Well, that’s not exactly true. If you need a replacement S Pen you’ll find a bunch of options online — but which should you get? Are the potential savings worth going with a third-party stylus?

Be wary of cheap knockoffs

Whether you somehow managed to break your S Pen or did something stupid like leaving it on a table at a coffee shop, you might be inclined to save money by getting a cheap replacement option. Considering you can get a third-party stylus that looks just like the S Pen for just $16, this might seem like a good idea.

But you only need to look at the user reviews from the Amazon community to hear that the old adage “you get what you pay for” ringing in your head. While there are plenty of opportunities to save money buying third-party accessories for your phone, something as proprietary as the S Pen is probably not an accessory you want to cheap out on. If you frequently use the S Pen to enhance the functionality of your Note 8, don’t risk getting a defective product from a cheap Chinese distributor.

Also, if you think you can get away with using an S Pen from an older Note phone, it’s not going to fit into the S Pen slot and you’re going to lose a lot of functionality so don’t bother.

Instead…

Samsung Replacement S Pen

When in doubt, head straight to the source. Samsung offers replacement S Pens in both black and orchid gray so you can return your Note 8 to its original glory without compromising the experience with a cheap knockoff.

You can pick up your replacement S Pen straight from Samsung’s website, which it regularly sells for $50 (currently available at a 15% discount) and ships in 5-10 business days — or you could buy a legit Samsung S Pen from Amazon for just $30 and get next-day shipping with Amazon Prime.

The answer is clear. Save yourself a few bucks by getting the real deal from Samsung’s Amazon store.

See at Amazon

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‘Into the Breach’ is monsters, mechs and a reset for strategy games

Subset Games’ 2012 space command simulator FTL wasn’t the first roguelike indie game to come out during the subgenre’s renaissance, but it stood out from the rest. Players guide their single ship against a galaxy of enemies, and the challenge and high skill ceiling earned legions of fans and financial success. Last February, the studio teased its second game, Into The Breach, a grid-based strategy game where the player’s trio of mechs must fight off an invading onslaught of colossal bugs while saving as many people as possible. The game comes out today — and anyone that loved the studio’s tough-but-rewarding first game will be equally charmed by its sophomore release.

Into The Breach is a turn-based strategy game where mistakes are costly and character death is permanent. It takes cues from similarly unforgiving titles like XCOM and Fire Emblem while preserving the deceptive simplicity of Advance Wars. As in FTL, the graphics are 16-bit sprites, and musician Ben Prunty returns to score a swelling-yet-somber soundtrack. But what sets Subset’s new game apart is brilliant novelty: You know exactly how and where every enemy is going to attack. This turns the game into a puzzle, since your first priority is to preserve buildings and the people inside them, only obliterating the bug scum when possible.

Subsequently, your toolkit focuses more on shifting the battlefield to your favor, redirecting attacks away from dwindling human infrastructure and, preferably, toward another enemy. Thus, Into The Breach probably won’t please folks who just want to clobber giant monsters without consequences. But anyone who likes strategy and isn’t afraid to unlearn everything they know about the genre will find the game a refreshing challenge. And just like FTL, it will probably make you rage quit a few times.

“As with FTL, we appreciate it when your choices have consequences, and it’s not just a power fantasy entirely on its own. There are obviously elements of the power fantasy [in Into The Breach] in that you are just being a hero in giant mechs, but having a piece of the game requires you to make difficult decisions, and that there are consequences to your decisions, I think makes for interesting gameplay,” Matthew Davis, the game’s programmer and half of Subset Games, told Engadget. “If it’s just a case of you win, win, win, win, win then it gets kind of boring.”

Unlike FTL’s reliance on randomness, Into The Breach gives players all the information they need to solve every encounter. Like Advance Wars, there are no hit percentages — you hit what you aim at — and you can see how much damage an attack will cause before you strike. In practice, this prophetic knowledge is both captivating and weighty, as every mistake is preventable. When an error kills a pilot or ends the whole run, it’s all your fault. This is humbling — I’ve quit in embarrassment after realizing a dumb move many turns ago doomed my squad — but there are a few mechanics to ease the sting of failure, like a once-per-battle rewind that lets you start a turn over.

The encounters themselves are small-scale (often eight-by-eight grids) but complex, less like three-dimensional chess than a 3D puzzle where changing one part of the battle shifts others. Occasionally you’ll luck out, and a forgotten enemy will get shoved in the way of another’s attack; other times, you’ll ignore a crucial element, like terrain or a disabling status, and inadvertently cripple your chances. It’s a bit like turning over a Rubik’s cube to find you misjudged how a sequence of moves would play out, and you feel silly for essentially outsmarting yourself.

When an error kills a pilot or ends the whole run, it’s all your fault

But the other big catch-up feature ties in with the game’s conceit: If (and when) your mech squad is completely destroyed, you can choose one of your pilots to send back in time, effectively restarting the game. Narratively, all is lost and the bug-like Vex invaders have won, but you can still send one of your skilled heroes into the past to change that new timeline’s future, Terminator-style.

Starting a new run with an experienced pilot is a nice leg up (though this advantage is probably more psychological than impactful, Davis said.) But the longer you dwell on this mechanic, the more the game world’s grim tone sinks in: A tide of colossal monsters barely restrained by a handful of humans endlessly hurling themselves against the onslaught across infinite timelines.

You’ll have to read into the minimal text and flavor for Into The Breach’s world to open up, as Subset Games is a firm believer in less-is-more. The studio consists of artist Justin Ma and programmer Matthew Davis, who hammered out the game’s concept for nearly two years before bringing on more professionals to help development. Burnt out on space combat after finishing FTL: Advanced Edition, Ma and Davis decided on a tactics game. The pair noticed that movies like Man of Steel and other blockbuster films habitually disregard the human cost of combat carnage. They wanted to create the opposite — an experience where players labor to save lives as they clash with unyielding threats.

Into The Breach is an intentional rebuttal to FTL in many ways, such as ditching hit-and-evasion percentages for perfect information. And in striving to create the opposite, Ma and Davis explained, they found a way to include even more of the standard rogue-like experience — the end of one run, the beginning of another — into the game’s overall narrative using the time-travel mechanic. This brings the player completely inside the gameplay loop, enveloping the intermission between play sessions into the narrative.

“So, in FTL, the story is this lone ship on a suicide mission, and succeed or fail, it’s try your best… you bash your head against the wall 100 times, and the game story resets each time, and so it’s a sort of incompatibility with the player’s experience versus what’s supposed to be going on in the game,” Ma said. “So that’s how we came up with the time travel, sending the pilots back, and it’s sort of to build the actual game experience into the meta narrative.”

By making the strategy game Ma and Davis would want to play themselves, Into The Breach ends up being a response to the genre, too. Not just rejecting annoyances (XCOM’s ridiculous miss chance comes to mind) but also chopping out all slow and tedious gameplay. Battles can’t be won by attrition, and they shift enough to prevent a single strategy from dominating every encounter. To do this, Subset made most missions last around five turns, streamlining combat to the most exciting moments. Aside from brief introductions from each island’s reigning governor, a corporate CEO, there are no cutscenes. This brevity and minimalism reinforces the game’s scarcity — the lack of time, resources and hope.

“That’s the reason why each battle is a set time limit rather than until victory,” Ma said. “That keeps it short. Knowing that you don’t actually have to eliminate all the enemies, you technically just have to survive, and that sort of tone, in itself, really sort of sets up the way we want the player to feel in the entirety of the game.”

The idea to give players foresight into enemy plans came when the pair were fiddling with units, and due to some wonky code in an early game build, moving a certain foe shifted its prepared attack accordingly. “We were sort of running on a single enemy being able to show their predicted actions, and then we decided that was fun, so we pushed the whole game in that direction,” Ma said.

“Games, to be interesting to us, need to have a stronger core where you can completely ignore all the setting, and absolutely everything, and it still be an interesting game.”

What was always central to the game’s conceit was straining — and sacrificing — to save lives. Enemies alternate between targeting the player’s mechs and buildings containing civilians and power. If too many structures go down, you’ll lose. The energy grid becomes the campaign’s life gauge, and it’s prominently displayed up top. But trying to encourage players to save people became a thorny problem — grant players items or resources for every life, and they’ll rescue humans purely for the reward. So the civilian count is just a cosmetic number, a high score to count at the end of your run.

I find that disappointing — to have labored on this exquisitely balanced strategy system and then pull punches on the moralistic core — but, as Ma and Davis reminded me, the core isn’t the story or the world. It’s the thrill of the mechanics playing out in an encounter. “Games, to be interesting to us, need to have a stronger core where you can completely ignore all the setting, and absolutely everything, and it still be an interesting game,” Ma said. “We had to balance this whole giving as much theme as possible whilst still letting you play as if there is no theme whatsoever, and it’s just a board with pieces.”

Into The Breach comes out for Windows today for $15, and then will come the Mac and Linux versions down the line. Subset has no plans to port it to iPad or consoles (including the Switch); they’ll revisit that topic after they’ve seen how the game is received.

Including the time travel mechanic means your mission is never over. When you win, one pilot bravely volunteers to venture to the past anyway to give another timeline a fighting chance. There are infinite worlds to save. Whether you fail or succeed, it’s always time to jump, once more, into the breach.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 VR kit needs software to make it shine

When Qualcomm announced its new Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR platform earlier this year, it threw around terms like “6 DoF SLAM” and “foveated rendering” as highlights. While it’s easy to understand the benefits of these tracking and graphics improvements in theory, seeing them in practice is what could get you excited about upcoming headsets. At its booth in MWC 2018, the chip maker had a demo on its reference design headset to showcase some of the changes, which we checked out briefly.

Frankly the demo was quite limited. I didn’t get to check out foveated rendering, as it wasn’t live yet, and it’s not like I can tell if the battery life is indeed longer from my five to 10-minute trial. Still, I was able to experience the benefits of SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), which tracks your body with reference to the room you’re in.

This not only helps the system better integrate obstacles into the virtual environment, but also provides a more grounded experience when exploring the simulated world. But the obstruction avoidance system hasn’t been implemented yet, so I can’t evaluate how effective or smooth it is. What I can say, is that I felt noticeably less nauseated chasing and shooting extra terrestrial bugs in a spaceship’s hangar on the reference design headset than some other goggles I’ve tried. The entire experience was smooth, and the headset was lightweight and comfortable enough for me to duck and hide from swooping vermin.

I couldn’t tell if the resolution was noticeably improved from Snapdragon 835 headsets, since few of them are actually available yet, but the visuals during my experience were fluid and sharp. My mortal enemies (bugs) and little robot helpers ran around the scene without frames stuttering, and they had smooth borders. I also used the companion touch controller to shoot down the flying creatures, and didn’t notice any lag.

It would have been nice to see how well the foveated rendering can keep up with my frantic gaze as I hunted down a flurry of winged creatures, but unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to check out that demo. Qualcomm suggested that there might be more to share come Games Developers Conference in mid-March, so stay tuned to see what happens then. For now, the Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR reference headset is a sweet, if limited, preview of what upcoming standalone VR goggles can do.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

Amazon made an escape room powered by Alexa

During a glitzy Amazon showcase along Barcelona’s seafront, the company held two escape room experiences to drill home how very, very excited it is about its action series, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, coming to Prime Video later this year. Now, escape rooms are really popular. So is Amazon’s Alexa assistant and all those Echo gadgets it likes to call home. The two things make the perfect storm for 2018. So we tried to solve the (not much of a) mystery.

During the company’s earnings a few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos noted that a lot of its recent growth was due to increased Alexa take-up (“We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa,”) and a boom in Prime membership. Amazon saw more new paid members join last year than in any previous year. That explains why it can afford to splash out on action shows — and Superbowl ads to promote them.

I’ve missed out on the escape room wave until now, so I took along seasoned escape room… escaper Cherlynn Low to ensure I didn’t screw it up. “It’s kinda small,” she scoffed. It was also kind of classy: all strip lighting and steel fittings. Oh, and filled of Amazon’s range of smart devices (Echo Spot, Echo Show and good ole original flavor Echo). Hopefully, Amazon doesn’t shoehorn quite as many product placements into the Jack Ryan show itself.

Cherlynn Low, Engadget

The mission? To crack a code, through a back-of-the-cereal box numbers to letters cipher and some interactive Alexa tricks that showcase what Amazon is capable of. Yes, the room was small, and the mystery kinda simple (it still took us twice as long as it should have), but it would be cool to see voice assistants integrated into fully-fleshed escape rooms — I might be desensitized to smart speakers for the most part, but they still add a nice touch of futurism to everything.

Amazon is making a major push with its streaming services this year: It just needs more big-budget titles to score appropriately-big viewing figures.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

Bitcoin ‘creator’ slapped with $10 billion lawsuit

Craig Wright, the Australian who has previously claimed to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is the subject of a multi billion dollar lawsuit. Wright is being sued by the estate of David Kleiman, who was thought to have co-created the cryptocurrency with the Australian. Kleiman passed away in 2013, but Kleiman’s brother Ira claims that Wright somehow appropriated his former partner’s bitcoin hoard.

According to Motherboard, either Wright and Kleiman were involved in the creation of Bitcoin, or were there moments after the platform was created. Consequently, they apparently had access to mining tools at its earliest time, enabling them to rack up a small fortune in cryptocurrency. The pair are thought to have controlled anything up to 1.1 million BTC, although it’s clear that nobody knows the figures for sure.

The case itself centers on Wright’s conduct shortly after Kleiman died in 2013, and Wright subsequently contacted Kleiman’s elderly father. Wright stands accused of fraudulently claiming that David Kleiman had signed over ownership and control of W&K, a company Kleiman ran, to Wright. He supported this with documents that, as far as Ira Kleiman is concerned, were fraudulent, and signed with a fake signature.

The lawsuit contends that the value of the contentious Bitcoin, and any associated intellectual property, is worth anything between $5 billion and $10 billion. It also claims that Wright once admitted that the signature used on the documents was computer-generated. The document also highlight’s Wright’s history of problems with the Australian Tax Authorities that included the back-dating of crucial documents.

Wright himself is a colorful figure in the Bitcoin community, who made a name for himself when he “outed” himself as Nakamoto in 2016. After inviting the BBC, The Economist and GQ to a meeting, he produced evidence that he was in fact the creator of Bitcoin, verified by the Bitcoin foundation’s Gavin Andresen. This claim was then torn to shreds by other researchers, who claimed the purported evidence was publicly-available. Days later, Wright withdrew his claim, saying that he lacked “the courage,” to prove he was Nakamoto.

In the subsequent fallout, Wright was subject to intensive scrutiny that painted the computer scientist as something of a fabulist. His Ph.D. credentials were found to be questionable, and companies he claimed to have worked with professed to having never worked with him The achievements on his LinkedIn profile were subsequently erased and questions remain as to whether he was the creator of Bitcoin, or simply had too much free time on his hands.

Via: The Guardian

Source: Motherboard