Best Battle Royale games for PlayStation 4

In the market for some fast-paced battle royale action? Check these PS4 titles out!

For many years running first-person shooters were the reigning champs of gaming. Games like Call of Duty and Halo dominated the release cycle and for a while, it seemed that no other style of game could stand a hope of taking the crown. However, in the last year, there has been a slight shift and it seems there may be a new champ.

Arguably the trail was blazed by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. With an early access release in March of 2017, PUBG as it is colloquially known captured the hearts, minds, and imagination of the gaming public. While it was not a completely seismic shift away from first-person shooters, PUBG’s battle royale style represented a clear step away from straight the straight FPS.

As is the case when an overwhelmingly popular game is released, other developers jump at the chance to create games in the same vein. As PlayStation 4 owners wait patiently for PUBG to come to their consoles, some have turned to games that offer a similar experience. Here are a few of the best battle royale style games available on the PS4 right now.

Ark: Survival Evolved

Ark: Survival Evolved is not perfect by any means and it does tread a bit close to a survival game but it does tick some of the boxes essential to a battle royale gaming experience. Survival is job one as you are dropped into a prehistoric style open world. Collect resources, craft items, and while you are at it you can make friends with massive dinosaurs.

There is a single player experience but if you want to get close to the battle royale feel you will definitely want to jump into some multiplayer. You can pick up a copy for $42.

See at Amazon

Grand Theft Auto Online: Smuggler’s Run

If you’ve got a copy of Grand Theft Auto V then you already the proud owner of a game which might scratch some of your battle royale itch. GTA online is an experience that runs parallel and separate to the main story of GTA V. The online world is open and evolving and you are sharing this world with up to 30 other players which can lead to some pretty extensive and serious deathmatches.

While it’s not quite PUBG it gets closer than some for $46.

See at Amazon

Tom Clancy’s The Division: Survival

Ok, now we are getting a little closer to the mark. Survival is an expansion to The Division which was released in 2016. It is a totally separate mode to the core game which drops you and 23 other players into Manhattan. The whys and wherefores that lead to your being there are somewhat irrelevant. What’s important is that you have to survive in the face of extreme weather and other players gunning for you and your gear. It is incredibly tough but it can be a heck of a lot of fun.

You can pick up the core game at Amazon for $26 and you can get the expansion for $15

See at Amazon

Fortnite Battle Royale

Currently, this is as good as it gets on PS4. There is a reason that this game is so popular. It’s free to play and it also happens to be really fun. There, of course, is a full paid version of Fornite but if you want to get your battle royale on you don’t have to drop one red cent. If you are familiar with this style then you know what to expect. You are airdropped onto the map and it’s your job to collect items and survive.

The addition of being able to build structures and traps also adds a little something different to the gameplay. Not only is it the cheapest offering on this list, it’s also the closest option if you’re looking for a pure battle royale experience.

See at PlayStation

As it stands, the popularity of battle royale games show no signs of waning. I would have to imagine that we will be seeing more games in this style released in coming years. Many players have been waiting to see PUBG push over to the PS4 but if they don’t get it together soon they may see that Fornite is armed to the teeth inside a well-protected base when they get there.

What are your favorite battle royale style games on PS4?

Why are we reviewing PlayStation 4 games on Android Central? Let us explain.

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Delta, Sprint, and others team up to offer better in-flight internet access

The Seamless Air Alliance wants to offer 5G speeds via satellites.

Being able to access your emails, social media sites, and more while traveling at 30,000 feet in the air is pretty amazing, but as anyone that’s used in-flight Wi-Fi knows, getting everything working with your devices can sometimes be a pain in the butt. Speeds are often slow, devices often don’t want to connect at all, and this can create a less than enjoyable experience.

In an attempt to iron out these quirks, a few companies are joining forces to create the “Seamless Air Alliance.” The goal of the Seamless Air Alliance is to deliver 5G data speeds to users via satellite technology, and this transition would eliminate the need to authenticate devices for in-flight access, log into special accounts, and pay for service via a credit/debit card before being able to use it.

Delta and Airbus SE are the first two airlines leading the new initiative, and they’re joined by U.S. wireless service carrier Sprint, OneWeb (a satellite startup that’s backed by SoftBank in Japan), and Bharti Airtel out of India

Each airline currently uses its own specialized cabin system for offering internet access to its planes, but the Seamless Air Alliance wants to cut down on costs and extra use of resources by creating a single standard to be used by all.

It remains to be seen if these companies can deliver on the goals they’re setting for themselves, but I’m personally all about anything that makes in-flight internet faster and more user-friendly. What about you?

O2 will begin testing its 5G network at The O2 in 2018

Keep your drinks cool and your soups warm with this Thermos tumbler sale today only

Keep your coffee safe from spilling, whether you’re at your computer or on the go.

The Thermos Stainless King 16-Ounce travel tumbler is down to $17.99 as part of an Amazon Gold Box sale. Before today it was selling for as much as $25 and regularly sells around $22. This price is the lowest it has gone since Black Friday and only the second time in the last year it has dropped below $20. Only the Midnight Blue color is on sale, but Smoke is also down to $19.99 from $25. That version drops in price a lot less than the others, so that’s also a good deal.

The Stainless King uses vacuum insulation technology to retain temperatures, whether what’s inside is hot or cold. It can keep liquid hot for 7 hours or cold for 18, and the double walls prevent your hands from feeling it either way. There’s a built-in tea hook for tea bags, and it’s designed to fit most car cup holders. It has more than 7,400 user reviews giving it 4.4 stars.

Gold Box sales on Amazon are temporary and only last through the end of the day. This one includes a variety of Thermos tumblers all down to low prices. Here’s a couple of our favorites:

• Stainless King 24-ounce Food Jar – $18.23 (from $25)
• Vacuum-insulated 24-ounce Hydration Bottle – $18.10 (from $25)
• Sipp 16-ounce Drink Bottle – $16.34 (from $21)

See the full sale on Amazon

Vivo’s Apex concept phone has tiny bezels, pop-up camera and in-display fingerprint sensor

A glimpse into the (near) future of smartphones.

It’s no secret that smartphone screen bezels are getting smaller. With curved displays and miniaturization of common smartphone components, the idea of a “bezel-free” phone is getting closer than ever.

Vivo has a new concept phone, dubbed Apex, that shows off the company’s vision for a smartphone with tiny screen bezels — and all of the crazy technology involved with achieving the goal. It’s wild to see in person and amazing when you think about everything at play here.

The Apex uses a 6-inch 18:9 flexible OLED display, and that’s key for multiple reasons. Vivo doesn’t use the flexibility of the panel to curve the usable surface, but rather to bend the components and connectors along the edges to reduce the bezels. On the top and sides, the bezels are tiny at 1.8 mm. The bottom bezel is currently set at 4.3 mm, but Vivo is confident it can get that one down to the same 1.8 mm in time — but even still, the Apex has a screen-to-body ratio over 90%.

This is an amazing combination of technologies to enable a future of bezel-free smartphones.

Using an OLED display also lets Vivo place fingerprint sensor technology underneath the panel, which in this case isn’t a single point but instead a large swath of the screen — about one-third of the area, right where your thumbs land when holding the phone. When activated, you can place your registered finger anywhere in the area, at any angle, and have it recognized. Because this is an optical sensor it takes a beat longer to recognize than we’re used to with modern capacitive-style sensors, but I think it’s worth it to get this style of device.

But there’s more to a smartphone that gets in the way of a bezel-free display. The new notch-style displays we’ve seen crop up in the last year attempt to make room for sensors, speakers and cameras — well, Vivo has solutions for those. The earpiece speaker is replaced by a vibration-based bone conduction-style speaker, which is a proven technology that works just fine. It has placed the proximity sensor underneath the display, and the ambient light sensor (for automatic screen brightness) on the top of the phone. Then there’s the front-facing camera, which somewhat hilariously pops up from the top edge of the phone when you switch to the selfie mode in the camera. (Watch the video above to see it in action!) Not only does it look awesome and work flawlessly, but it’s also a little privacy feature.

Many of these technologies come with compromises in terms of phone thickness and things of that sort, but not as much as you’d think. This concept phone didn’t feel out of the normal realm of thickness, size or weight, and this model had a glass back, dual rear cameras, a loudspeaker, USB-C and a headphone jack. I could easily see all of these solutions designed to fit into the types of form factors we expect in smartphones today.

Unlike the phone Vivo showed off back at CES with an in-display fingerprint sensor, this Apex phone is a concept built to show off the company’s new technologies and what it envisions for the future. So the final devices using these technologies, whenever that may be, won’t necessarily look like this — but it really didn’t feel all that unfinished to me.

Sure the Apex itself is a little thick and heavy, but the fact that all of this technology came together into a single device without massive compromises is extremely exciting. You can bet that Vivo, and other companies, will be releasing phones that look a whole lot like the Apex concept phone in the near future.

Essential Phone 2 — How Essential can have a much more successful year two

Essential’s biggest task is to learn from the mistakes of the PH-1.

One of 2017’s most polarizing devices was the Essential Phone. There was a lot of hype for the startup headed by Android father Andy Rubin, and while the Essential Phone’s hardware is still some of the best money can buy, continued software bugs and lackluster camera performance continues to put a damper on what should have been one of last year’s best handsets.

Essential’s confirmed that a successor to the Essential Phone (aka the PH-1) is in the works, and while the company hasn’t shed too much light on what it’ll change or when we can expect it, there are a few key areas that Essential needs to work on if it wants to avoid the various blunders it’s already experienced.

Wider availability

Before Essential starts worrying about new software features or hardware refinements, it needs to focus on expanding to more markets and carriers with the PH-2. The Essential Phone is still limited to just the United States and Canada, and when it comes to carrier support, you’ll only find it on Sprint and Telus, respectively. For a startup trying to break into a well-matured industry, this is not the right move.

If Essential wants to keep pushing its way into North America, it needs to expand to other carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, Rogers, Bell, etc. Average consumers still buy their phones in carrier stores as opposed to going online to purchase it unlocked, and because of this, having a larger presence here will make Essential much more visible to a broader audience as opposed to just Android diehards.

Essential needs to hit North America with full force, expand to other countries, or both.

Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt Essential to also set its sights on other markets entirely. Expanding operations to new countries is an expensive decision, but it’s one I think could benefit the company in the long run.

Take Nokia, for example. During just one year of being run by HMD Global, Nokia-branded Android phones have “been selling already millions of Nokia smartphones” during 2017. HMD Global was just founded in December of 2016, and those “millions of Nokia smartphones” is considerably more impressive than Essential selling less than 90,000 units of the PH-1.

The secret behind HMD Global’s success? Wider market availability. The company sells its Nokia 6 in the U.S. and Canada, but HMD Global more heavily markets its products in China, India, Australia, the UK, and more. These markets are much easier to break into than Canada and the U.S., and if Essential doesn’t have the time and/or resources to focus on North America and more global availability, it should go with the latter before worrying about the former.

Make the PH-1’s software mess a learning lesson

Essential promised a pure, stock software setup with the PH-1, and while it technically delivered on that front, the user experience was almost too barebones at launch. Essential’s slowly added new features as time’s gone on, such as fingerprint sensor gestures, UI themes that changed based on your wallpaper, and more. These have made the Essential Phone feel more complete and well thought-out, and they’re things that need to be present on the PH-2 from day one.

The PH-1’s software was too barebbones for its own good.

Another persistent issue that Essential just recently addressed is jittery scrolling. Users have been reporting laggy/slow scrolling animations on the Essential Phone pretty much since it first came out, and after shelling out $700 for a new phone, running into something like that is a major turn-off. The latest 8.1 update appears to have finally fixed this, however, so once again, Essential’s moving in the right direction.

I don’t think there are a lot of things Essential needs to change on the software side of things with the PH-2, assuming it understands where it went wrong with the PH-1 and applies those fixes/changes for its second go around. Have more software goodies and a fix for bad scrolling present on the PH-2 as soon as it ships, and it’ll make a much better first impression than the PH-1 ever did.

Go back to the drawing board with the camera

And then, of course, there’s the camera.

The camera on the Essential Phone has been bad-mouthed relentlessly since its launch, and I don’t think anyone will have a hard time agreeing with me that this is the biggest user-facing issue that Essential has to tackle for gen two.

To its credit, Essential’s released non-stop software updates to the PH-1 that have all be focused on trying to make the camera as good as can be. Some of these updates have been more successful than others, and as it stands, the Essential Phone’s camera is now fine. It’s not amazing or nearly on the same level as the Pixel 2, but it is far better compared to how it initially performed.

With that said, it’s probably best Essential goes back to the drawing board for the PH-2’s camera. If the company wants to stick with dual-cameras, it needs to find a way to make both sensors truly useful. Then again, it could drop the secondary lens and focus its time on just one that performs really, really well.

Don’t mess with the hardware

Producing a great camera is going to take a lot of time and effort, but thankfully Essential should have plenty of it since nearly everything else about the PH-1’s hardware is still impeccable.

The Essential Phone remains as one of the most attractive and well-built phones on the market, and its use of ceramic and titanium continues to be refreshing in a world of glass and aluminum. I imagine some people would still like to see wireless charging and a 3.5mm headphone jack, but these minor gripes aside, I wouldn’t change much at all with the PH-2’s hardware.

What do you want to see?

Whether you own an Essential Phone or have been viewing things from the outside in like myself, what things are you hoping for the most with the Essential Phone 2? Am I on base or is there something I missed? Sound off in the comments below!

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Huawei P20 leaks in the flesh with display notch and two cameras

Say hello to Shirley.

There are a lot of phones being announced at MWC this week, but that doesn’t stop the leak train from chugging along at full steam. Just about a month before it’s set to be unveiled in Paris, the Huawei P20 has leaked in a completely revealing hands-on photo.

Evan Blass shared the above image on Twitter on February 26, and as you can see, gives us a clear shot of the P20’s front and back.

The front of the P20 appears to adopt the popular 18:9 aspect ratio and a front-facing fingerprint sensor lies beneath three on-screen navigation buttons. Bezels surrounding the display are quite thin, and just like another flagship phone from last year, the P20 has a notch at the top of its display to house its front-facing camera.

Flip the P20 over, and we’re met with a glass back, rounded corners, and two rear cameras. Previous rumors have suggested that the P20 will come equipped with three cameras on the back, but it’s entirely possible that’s a feature that’ll be reserved for the higher-end P20 Plus.

Also worth noting is the “Shirley” branding near the bottom. Huawei often uses fake brand names on its prototypes to help prevent potential leaks, but as you can see here, that hasn’t helped much at all.

Huawei will announce the P20 on March 27 in Paris, France, and now that we’ve got our first look at the phone, are you more or less excited for it?

Huawei P20: Rumors, specs, availability, and more!

Subgrid positioning is the feature that keeps me coming back to Nova Launcher

Double the options, double the home screen possibilities

There are features on most good launchers that keep you coming back. Action Launcher has Quickdrawer. Nova Launcher’s got quite a few features that keep users coming back year after year, theme after theme. Beyond the ridiculous amount of launcher customization, however, Nova has a surprisingly simple ace in the hole.

And that ace is subgrid positioning.

Say you put a 5×1 widget on the top bar of your screen, like a Google Keep widget. It’s nice, but it’s too thin to really let you see much of your notes. Then you stretch it to 5×2, and the widget is nice and readable, but it’s now covering 40% of your home screen. You want your widget to be somewhere in between.

Google Keep widget on a 5×5 grid at 5×1, 5×2, and 5×1.5 size

With subgrid positioning, you can resize and place items at .5 increments on your home screen grid, letting you split the difference and resize the widget to be 5×1.5. It seems like a simple thing, but it essentially doubles your options when resizing a widget or placing a shortcut. On a 5×5 grid, instead of having 5 width or height options, you have 10, and when scaling and placing widgets, those options can make all the difference in the world.

How do you turn on this wonderful setting?

Open Nova Settings.

Tap Desktop.

Tap Desktop grid.

Tap Subgrid Positioning to enable it.

It’s amazing the difference one toggle hidden in one setting screen can make, but subgrid positioning makes more themes and layouts possible than most other mainstream launchers, and that flexibility is hard to give up. Have you used subgrid positioning yet? If so, how hard is it to go back to anything else? If not, what are you waiting for?

Read more: Everything you need to know about Nova Launcher

Updated February 2018: This article has been cleaned, renewed, and given updated links!

Get the party started with the $60 UE Wonderboom Bluetooth Speaker

Connect wirelessly to this compact Wonderboom speaker from up to 100 feet away.

UE’s Wonderboom portable Bluetooth speaker is now on sale at Amazon for just $59.99 in your choice of six different colors. At just 50 cents above its lowest price ever, today is a perfect day to make this speaker your own. It also marks a $19 drop from its average price.

While compact, the Wonderboom speaker blasts sound out 360 degrees which helps kick up any party. It’s waterproof and can last for up to ten hours on a single charge, and its Bluetooth can connect from up to 100 feet away from your device. What’s cool about Wonderboom speakers is that two of them can be connected together for even bigger sound.

This speaker features a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon with over 430 reviews.

See at Amazon

Where to find the best Playstation Plus deals

Stock up now.

PlayStation Plus subscriptions normally start at $17.99 for a three-month membership and go up to $59.99 for a year of access. Being that you can purchase and stack multiple years of subscriptions at once, odds are that you won’t want to pay full price for each year.

With this subscription, you gain access to online gameplay, exclusive discounts, and even a selection of free games each month to download and play. Whether you want to just be able to play some games online with friends, or you want to unlock the full potential of your PlayStation 4, having PlayStation Plus is a must.

Luckily, these cards go on sale throughout the year. The discounts seem to vary, but most of the time we see discounts on the annual card. If you’re looking to pad your PlayStation Plus subscription with a few discounted months or years, here are the best deals to check out.

• Sony offers a free 14-day trial
• Best Buy has a 3-month card for $17.99
• CDKeys has a 12-month card for $57.99

These deals change regularly, so be sure to check back for future updates on cards and stock up when you find a great deal.

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Watch Samsung’s Galaxy S9 launch in under 11 minutes!

And just like that, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 has arrived. Today, at MWC 2018, the company introduced its new flagship handset with the slogan “The camera. Reimagined.” While the bulk of improvements to the Galaxy S9, over the S8, are imaging-focused, there are also new features like AR Emojis — Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Animojis. You can watch a recap of the Unpacked 2018 event here, where you’ll also learn more about the updated DeX desktop experience, which now uses the S9 as a trackpad.

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