Sony’s new e-paper watch actually looks like a timepiece
Earlier this week, Sony introduced its FES Watch U, an e-paper timepiece that it is crowdfunding in Japan. And today, at IFA 2016, we had the chance to see it in person for the first time. As we pointed out before, the FES Watch U is a much more polished version of Sony’s original e-ink watch, which was revealed in 2014. The new wearable features a steel frame, instantly giving it that premium look and feel, as well as sapphire glass on the higher-end model.
It also comes with up to three weeks of battery life and a customizable, always-on face and band. When you combine the fresh design with said functionality, the FES Watch U is undeniably a better product than its predecessor — at least on paper. We say “at least on paper” because Sony didn’t let us try it, so we’ll have to wait to make any final judgements until we do so.
But, if you’re still interested in the Watch U and happen to live in Japan, you have until October 7th to pledge between ¥44,710 and ¥59,940 to try to get one for yourself. That’s between $438 and $587, which may be more than people are willing to pay for this type of watch. Chances are no one will judge you if you do, though.
Play Overwatch for free next weekend
If for whatever reason you still aren’t sold on Overwatch, Blizzard’s popular team-based shooter, you’ll want to clear your schedule for next weekend. Sony announced on Thursday that it will host an Overwatch Free Weekend from September 9th to 12th.
The weekend technically starts September 9 at 11am Pacific. Anybody with a PS4 (and Xbox One) will be able to download and play the 15GB game for free, no login required. You’ll have access to all 22 playable characters and a variety of game styles, be able to level up, grab loot and troll your opponents. If you want to keep the spoils of your online battles once the weekend concludes at 4pm Pacific on the 12th, you’ll need to pick up a copy of Overwatch: Origins Edition.
Source: Playstation Blog
Sony sold me on Xperia Agent in one cup of coffee
I like coffee. I like robots. So, when Sony’s cutesy Xperia Agent offered to serve me up a cup of Arabica at IFA, how could I refuse? Of course I didn’t, and it was probably the best cup of show-floor joe that I had this week. We first saw the Xperia Agent at MWC, but we’ve barely heard anything from the bot since, so free coffee or not, it was good to check in with the little guy and see it doing its connected thing.
The “Agent” half of the equation appears to be part of Sony’s plans to rival assistant Alexa in Amazon’s Echo. When I ordered my espresso (well, when the booth staff ordered it for me via a microphone to cut out the show floor noise), the Agent gave me a rundown of some of the other tasks it could do for me. Call mom, that kinda thing. But Agent is also present in Sony’s wearable “Ear,” and is the intelligent assistant that will let you respond to calls and reply to messages. This makes Xperia Agent a kind of in-house physical mascot for what’s likely to be a technology we see creeping into even more gadgets from the company.
The problem, right now, is what if you want some of Sony’s Agent devices, but are already invested in Amazon’s Echo? Or any of the other similar products? This has been an issue long before the smarthome. Any new technology always goes through a “jostling” stage, like Blu-ray fighting off HD DVD. Everyone wants their idea to dominate, until a winner pulls ahead, and (ideally) others concede and make them compatible, or bow out. Xperia Agent technically can’t bow though, so it wins by default? Or it might, whenever Sony commits and releases the darned thing.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Sony’s Future Lab needs your help testing a wearable prototype
Normally, gadget and consumer electronics prototypes will go through multiple stages of rigorous vetting and testing before they even get close to being seen by the public. But Sony is taking a different approach with its new early adopter Future Lab Program. The company announced at IFA in Berlin today that it is actively recruiting testers to play with a new hands-free, open-ear audio device called concept prototype “N”.
The program is invite-only and will be exclusively offered to people living in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. What’s more, applicants will first have to agree to the program’s terms and conditions, then actually attend the Future Lab Program event, which is itself invite-only as well. Plus, applicants will have to pay $100 to participate. So, yeah, pretty darn exclusive. Throughout the course of the program, testers will be expected to provide feedback in the form of questionnaires, phone and in-person interviews and other communications. They’ll also be required to speak English in order to put the voice recognition feature through its paces and own either an Android 5.0 or iPhone 5S phone (or higher).
There are a whole bunch of hoops to jump through if you want to participate, sure, but there’s a big payoff. The Concept Prototype N is a hands-free wearable that wraps around your neck. But unlike other neckband headphones, the N doesn’t require earbuds. Instead, it beams localized audio right at your head using Virtualphones Technology. If you want a bit more privacy — or just don’t want to blast your music for everyone on the streetcar to hear — the N also uses bone conducting open-ear headphones.
Additionally, the N packs four microphones and relies on both local and cloud-based speech recognition so that you’ll be able use Siri or Google Now without fishing your phone from your pocket. It even has a small, voice-activated camera. And it’s not as if the N simply acts as a microphone for your mobile device. It uses GPS and location data to deliver timely audio notifications — updates to your schedule, weather reports, personalized news or notable nearby attractions — while the user moves around town.
The Future Lab Program is expected to run until next August. You can find more information and sign up for the demo event at the Future Lab website.
Sony would love you to buy its $3,200 gold-plated Walkman
At IFA 2016 in Berlin today, Sony CEO Kaz Hirai reminded rich audiophiles not to forget about Sony. He unveiled the new “Signature Series” reference devices, including the NWM1Z and NWM1A Walkman, MDR-Z1R headphones and TA-ZH1ES headphone amp. The $3,200 (£2,500) NWM1Z Walkman is literally gold-plated, which not only makes it bling, but supposedly reduces “contact resistance and oxidation,” according to Sony.
Realistically, most people probably won’t hear the difference between that model and the nearly identical-looking $1,200 (£1,000) NW-WM1A Walkman. Both support the 384kHZ/32-bit “Hi-Res” music format, which has separate digital and analog circuitry and technology that upscales low bit-rate files to “near high resolution audio quality,” according to Sony. It also supports balanced connections if you have the right set of headphones.
Speaking of, there’s Sony’s $2,300 (£1,700) Signature Series MDR-Z1R headphones. They feature a 70mm magnesium dome driver, aluminum-coated diaphragm, and a neodymium magnet. All of that, along with the balanced cable and gold “non-magnetic plated Corson alloy jack,” allow for less signal loss and natural sound, the company says.
Finally, any audiophile worth their salt needs a headphone amp, so Sony unveiled the $2,200 (£1,600) Signature Series TA-ZH1ES. The body has a “shaved extruded aluminum wall with a ridged body” to reduce unnecessary vibration, and supports a wide variety of both balanced and unbalanced headphone connectors. If you’re keeping score at home, all three devices, including the high-end Walkman, will set you back $7,700 (£5,800). That’s quite a chunk, but not a stretch at all for the Audeze or Orpheus crowd. We’ll try to get a listen and report if they’re worth it or not.
Source: Sony
Sony’s Xperia Ear voice assistant arrives in November
When Sony announced its Xperia X family of smartphones earlier this year, it also snuck in a quick mention of a curious device called the Xperia Ear. When paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth, the wireless earpiece is said to let you tackle all manner of tasks by issuing verbal commands. We’re talking dictating messages, searching the web, getting directions, checking your schedule, the weather, the news — all that stuff. Sony hasn’t really talked about the thing since, but today at IFA it revealed the accessory will launch this November “starting in select markets,” though its price is still a mystery.
Rather than being a simple conduit for Google Now, the earpiece employs what Sony calls its “Agent” to be your personal, in-ear assistant. Otherwise, all we know about the device is the claim it has a full-day battery life, and that it’s light enough to wear comfortably for that long. Oh, and that it’s probably not the best thing to listen to your tunes on, since it only fills up one earhole.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Source: Sony
Sony’s new noise-cancelling headphones block out the world
Sony unveiled its newest flagship set of high-end, noise-cancelling wireless headphones at IFA in Berlin today. They’re called the MDR-1000X and aim to block all outside sounds until you’re ready to let them in.
The headphones boast an upgraded filtering process that relies on a pair of noise sensors and sound deadening ear pads. What’s more, these headphones offer a noise cancelling optimizer that “tunes” the sound to your specific head. So if you’ve got long hair, wear glasses or have a lumpy noggin that prevents normal over-ear cups from sitting properly against your skull, this NC optimizer will account for that.
As conventional headphones, the MDR-1000Xs deliver high-resolution audio — assuming you’ve got them hardwired to a high-fidelity source. When using Bluetooth to wirelessly connect them to your source device, these headphones use LDAC technology to transmit high-resolution audio. And even when listening to compressed music formats, the 1000Xs use Sony’s Digital Sound Enhancement Engine to upscale the audio quality to near high-res quality.
At $400, the 1000Xs are a bit more expensive than other noise-cancelling headphones with similar specs but they do offer a novel means of interacting with the world around you without having to ever take them off. The “Quick Attention” mode enables the wearer to instantly cut the audio and noise cancelling functions simply by placing their hand over the right ear cup. This way you can take part in short interactions — such as ordering coffee or listening to an announcement over the PA — without actually removing the cans.
Conversely, “Ambient Sound Mode” allows you to hear the ambient conversations around you but not enough to impede the enjoyment of your music. What’s more, these headphones use a touchpad on the right ear, allowing you to tap to play/pause tracks, swipe up and down to adjust volume or left and right to skip or repeat tracks.
I recently had an opportunity to listen to the 1000Xs at a demo and was very impressed by their performance. They dutifully shut out all conversation in the room, even when I wasn’t listening to music. They nixed the low level drone of a white noise machine in the room and even quieted the traffic noise from San Francisco’s financial district while I stood seven stories above the street on an open-air balcony. The headphones themselves were surprisingly light and fit snugly over my ears. Even without the noise cancellation, they managed to drastically reduce outside sounds. After customizing the noise-cancelling system to my ears, you could hear a veritable pin drop inside my head, it was so quiet.
$400 is pretty pricey for a pair of headphones, even for those as capable as these. But if you travel a lot, have extra-noisy neighbors, or just really, really like your auditory privacy, I can see the value in them. The MDR-1000Xs will be available in October, though they’re up right now for pre-order on Sony’s website. The headphones will come in standard black and grey-beige and include an airplane adapter, carrying case and various cables.
The Xperia XZ is the 2016 flagship phone Sony should’ve made first
Let’s not mince words: Sony’s smartphone might be on the upswing, but the company still needs a hit. With any luck, the new, unlocked Xperia XZ can change all that. It runs with the same Snapdragon 820 and 3GB of RAM as the earlier Xperia X Performance, but Sony squeezed that horsepower into a new beautiful new body and added a few tricks for good measure.
I have to hand it to Sony — the XZ feels incredible. It retains the sort of monolithic look and water resistance of other Xperia smartphones, but the edges of its metal-and-glass body are much rounder. The design is almost reminiscent of Nokia’s old Lumias, which is one of the highest compliments for a phone’s design I’ve got. If nothing else, I hope this take on the Xperia design language sticks around for a long time. The rest of the XZ is a little more prosaic: familiar chipset aside, it has a 5.2-inch 1080p display that looks just as good as Sony’s screens usually do, along with a 2,900mAh battery that Sony says is “optimized for all day use”. Throw in 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot and a USB Type-C port and you’ve got the Xperia XZ in a nutshell.
Exactly how interesting people will find that nutshell is the big question. If there’s a standout feature here, Sony is convinced it’s the camera. The XZ is fitted with a 23-megapixel Exmor RS sensor, not unlike the one in the X Performance. Rather than just transplant that camera from one device to another, though, Sony added a laser autofocus system to help the XZ find its targets faster and a sensor that simultaneously captures RGB and infrared images to make sure we’re getting consistently accurate colors and white balance. Meanwhile, there’s a 13-megapixel camera sitting above the display, which captured frankly great-looking selfies even in a room with bad lighting.
The improvements don’t end there, either. The camera now shoots 4K video, a feature that was conspicuously absent from the X Performance. Sony’s mobile team also worked with the people behind the company’s Alpha SLRs to improve the image stabilization here too, though we’ll see how well those claims bear out soon.
At the end of it all, I’m still pretty skeptical. Sony basically made the phone the X Performance should have been, and there’s really nothing wrong with that. This new industrial design is amazing. The camera is shaping up to be pretty impressive. Sony’s software is… well, that hasn’t changed much, but it has its fans. There’s a lot to like here, but whether or not lots will like the XZ is up in the air. (Hopefully its price tag isn’t quite as absurd — the X Performance was a fine phone but a terrible deal.)
What really concerns me is that with the XZ, Sony’s philosophy seems more focused on fixing oversights than pushing envelopes. For what it’s worth, the Sony staffers I spoke to while playing with the XZ seemed scrappy and bullish on their work — they know it’s going to be an uphill climb, but there was no indication that anyone had given up the fight. Between that and the XZ’s overall quality, Sony fans should feel (very) cautiously optimistic.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Sony’s mid-range Xperia X gets a smaller spin-off
The new Xperia XZ might be the flagship phone Sony loyalists have been waiting for, but Sony’s still hasn’t given up on making small smartphones. That’s where the Xperia X Compact comes in — it’s more enticing a package than you might think given the company’s recent batch of love-em-or-hate-em devices, and it’s set to land the United States on September 25.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll have forgotten what it was like to hold a phone this small. The X Compact packs a 4.6-inch 720p display, and the rounded body that surrounds it is, in a word, charming. Adorable, even. Holding one of these things is sort of like holding a thinner, longer iPod mini, which I’m certainly not complaining about. It even has a satisfying sort of density to it, thanks in part to the 2,700mAh battery tucked away inside. The rest of the hardware tour will sound familiar: this pint-sized device has 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a USB Type-C port and a water-resistant chassis, just like the XZ.
As it turns out, the display is a real pro in bright daylight too — it’s bright and vivid without seeming oversaturated, and I never really found myself missing the added resolution of a 1080p screen. Performance seemed just as respectable during our brief bit of playtime. The X Compact runs with one of Qualcomm’s hexa-core Snapdragon 650 chipsets, 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 510 GPU. That’s the same setup as — what else? — the original Xperia X, and for the most part, it seemed just as responsive. I was half-hoping to see even smoother performance because of Sony’s modified software and because the phone has doesn’t have to drive as many pixels on that smaller display, but we’ll see how things pan out when final hardware makes the rounds.
Around the back, you’ll find the same 23-megapixel, “triple-sensing” camera Sony built into the high-end XZ. Basically, in addition to the predictive autofocus that came as part of each Xperia X series smartphone, the XZ and Compact also have laser autofocus modules and an RGB/IR sensor for more accurate white balance. I was surprised for a moment to see that Sony didn’t skimp on the camera here, but that was silly of me. If nothing else, Sony gets credit for not dramatically watering down their more compact devices. That dedication to a very specific subset of smartphones is part of what I like about Sony’s mobile operation so much, and the Xperia X Compact leaves a great first impression.
We’re still not sure how much it’ll cost when it starts shipping later this month, but stick around — we’ll give this thing the full review treatment as soon as we can.
We’re live all week from Berlin, Germany, for IFA 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Alleged PS4 Slim leak reveals incremental changes to console
Sony has confirmed its next game system, the PlayStation Neo, and will probably formally introduce it at an event on September 7th. But the console maker was heavily rumored to have a new thinner version of their current system, the PS4 Slim, but has refused to confirm that it exists. Eurogamer seemingly got a hold of one a week ago, but took down its video review after apparent legal pressure from Sony. Today, Laura K. Dale of games site Let’s Play Video Games posted an unboxing report of what she alleges to be the new smaller console purchased from eBay. If true, it has a few improvements over the old model it’s replacing, but we’re still waiting for Sony to verify that this is indeed the final version of the system.
Judging by this report, the PS4 Slim’s largest changes are twofold: removing the optical port and allowing the new version of the PlayStation controller to transfer data via USB cable to the system. Why is that important? Because signals take additional milliseconds to travel in the air via Bluetooth than they would through a cord. If you think those lost fractions of a second will affect your online multiplayer performance, this new controller is for you (or even your old PS4, as the report claims it to be backwards-compatible). And yes, the one in this report has the previously-seen lightbar at the top.
Obviously, the Slim thinner than its predecessor, measuring 264 x 39 x 288mm compared to the original PS4’s 275 x 53 x 305mm, cutting about a third of its thickness off and a few centimenters off the sides, according to the reviewer. The rest of the changes are about convenience. The front-facing USB ports have been split apart to give room between peripherals, while a plastic-covered port in the back allows easy access to the SATA hard drive. It also has a threaded hole on one side that will likely connect to a dedicated stand for you to vertically-orient your PS4 Slim without worrying that the very thing console will get knocked over.
Dale appears to plug in the PS4 Slim into a monitor, power it up, and use it like a current PS4. According to a previous video, she’d received the new console last week but was waiting for Sony to officially claim that the system exists, and failing that, she posted this unboxing report. As of publishing time, it hasn’t been taken down.
Source: Let’s Play Video Games
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