Hasta La Gadget!

Whether or not you pay for GameStop’s annual membership plan, the planet’s largest video game retailer is opening the doors of the Las Vegas Sands Expo and Convention Center to the public for its annual GameStop Expo this August, which this year features hands-on opportunities with both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. For a $35 general admission ticket, you’ll get access to both consoles on August 28th — long before their respective holiday launches — as well as a chance to play a variety of upcoming games. Should you shell out a stone cold $90, you’ll snag a copy of Madden NFL 25 for Xbox 360, gain early entry to the show (one hour) and “access to panel discussions with some of the biggest names in the industry.” Per usual, attendees must be older than 17, and the event’s a one-day affair. But then you’ll be in Vegas, so… maybe stay for a few days.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Software, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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Via: Joystiq

Source: GameStop

It’s time to rethink the way our children learn. It’s all a bit overwhelming, attempting to restructure the age-old classroom model, particularly in a system as bogged down in bureaucratic red tape as education. This month, however, we packed up our things and toured the country to find out how educational institutions are adopting new models to help reinvent the learning process — rather than sitting idly by, waiting for the system to change around them. Naturally, technology is playing a huge role in that shift, moving from models of teaching to models of learning, where students can explore, express themselves and learn at their own speed.

We kick things off in Chicago, where Jackie Moore, a former systems programmer, is teaching inner city students how to build robots in a shopping mall basement at LevelUP. Next up, we head Miami and California, to see how technologies like the iPad, Google Chromebook and One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop are being implemented in three schools, including interviews with educators, students, OLPC CEO Rodrigo Halaby and Google director of product management, Rajen Sheth. We’ll also talk to component retailers SparkFun and Adafruit about the initiatives those companies have implemented to help kids learn electronics at an early age, and then we sit down with American Museum of Natural History president, Ellen Futter, to discuss the ways the New York City institution is redefining itself for the 21st century.

We’ve also got an interview with Ali Partovi, a serial entrepreneur, who is working to make computer science an essential part of the elementary-level STEM program, through Code.org. Richard Culatta, the acting director of the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology discusses how devices can help target the learning process for individual students and LeapFrog CEO John Barbour tells us how his company is rethinking the educational toy. All that plus prognostications from John Roderick and some really sweet moose dioramas can be yours to enjoy after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Laptops, Robots, Tablets, Science, Internet, Software, HD, Mobile, Alt, Google, Acer

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We just went hands-on for the first time with Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Active a scant few hours ago, and here we are taking yet another look at it this afternoon in an AT&T variant that showed up at a New York City tech event. The specs and bullet points are identical to the model we checked out earlier today: a 5-inch (TFT LCD) 1080p display (443 ppi), a 1.9GHz quad-core processor, LTE radios and Android 4.2.2, an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash out back, and up to two-megapixel stills in front. This model, however, is the one US AT&T customers will get their hands-on tomorrow for $200 (with two-year contract, of course). How does it fare? Well, identically to the model we checked out earlier today. But hey, have a look at the model you’ll actually get in your hands stateside come tomorrow!

Update: We’ve updated the post with a video just below the break!

Edgar Alvarez and Daniel Orren contributed to this report.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Mobile, Samsung, AT&T

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Even before hitting store shelves, NVIDIA’s Shield is shedding $50 from its original $350 asking price — the little Android portable gaming console will cost $300 when it arrives at retail on June 27th. NVIDIA revealed both the new, lower price and release date today in a blog post which cited gamers asking for a lower price as the reason for the change. “We’ve heard from thousands of gamers that if the price was $299, we’d have a home run,” the post reads. As such, the company’s aiming for “a home run” with the new price point — despite $300 being $50 more than a new PlayStation Vita, and just $100 short of a new PlayStation 4.

Folks who pre-ordered aren’t out of luck, they’ll just be charged $300 when their unit ships rather than $350. As for where you can pick a Shield up outside of NVIDIA’s official website … well, we’re waiting on word from the company on supported retailers. We’ve dropped the video of our hands-on with the final Shield just below, should you wish to relive those memories with us.

Update: NVIDIA tells us that Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers will all have Shield on the 27th.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Peripherals, HD, Mobile, NVIDIA

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Source: NVIDIA

With the PlayStation 4, unlike the PlayStation 3 before it, Remote Play functionality on Vita is handled on a system level. Though Sony’s asking developers to take into account the Vita’s different button setup and additional input mechanisms that the portable console has, the actual act of enabling Remote Play is handled by the PlayStation 4 itself. “On PlayStation4 , it just happens. You just make a PS4 game, it supports Remote Play,” Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida told us in an interview at E3.

We’d asked whether Sony’s “mandating” Remote Play functionality from developers, and Yoshida first explained how it worked on the PlayStation 3 to offer some context. “The single biggest issue, why there are not many PlayStation 3 games that support Remote Play, was that it was optional — the system didn’t do much. The game has to set aside some memory or CPU to be able to do that, and usually, memory is the most precious resource that [development] teams fight amongst each other for. So when it comes down to the priorities, these are features that are very easy to drop,” he told us. The idea with PS4 is that, by offloading responsibility for Remote Play support to the console itself, developers are freed up to make the control tweaks necessary for a comfy experience playing a PS4 game remotely on Vita.

“Please make sure that when you play your games on Vita, the control is good. That’s the minimum thing we’re asking them to do,” he added. All that said, not every single PlayStation 4 game will work with Remote Play — “Maybe not Just Dance,” Yoshida offered with a laugh when we asked. That’s a pretty reasonable exception if you ask us, and it sounds like only games that require the PS4 Eye or Move (or some other such input method that’s impossible to emulate on Vita) are on that excepted list.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Peripherals, Software, HD, Sony

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