Huawei is once again showing its aggressive side in the consumer space, this time by way of its 6.1-inch Ascend Mate which debuted at CES (with a little help from Huawei Device chairman Richard Yu, pictured above). What’s new is that earlier today the company announced a price for this Android 4.1 tabletphone in China: ¥2,688 (about $430) unsubsidized, which is pretty competitive given the specs. Need a quick recap? The Mate comes with a 1.5GHz quad-core HiSilicon K3V2, 2GB of RAM, IPS display (but only with 720p resolution) with Gorilla Glass 2 and glove-friendly “Magic Touch” technology, up to 64GB of microSD expansion (on top of the native 4GB available space), 8-megapixel camera and a 4,050mAh battery. Better yet, this particular model comes with WCDMA 850/900/1700/1900/2100 pentaband radio, so it’ll work nicely for frequent travelers. Interested buyers can hit the order button on Huawei’s Vmall online store on the 26th next week.
Samsung tonight revealed the much-anticipated follow up to its insanely popular Galaxy S3 smartphone, the Galaxy S4, which will ship with the latest build of Android Jelly Bean, 4.2.2.
The Galaxy S4 has a more-than-ample 5-inch 1920 x 1080 Super AMOLED 441ppi display, that fills out almost the entire face of the phone. While the phone is a skinch larger than the Galaxy S3, it weighs virtually the same, at just 130g. Dimensions are appx. 5.3″ long by 2.7″ wide, and just 7.9mm thin – just a fraction of a millimeter thicker than the svelte iPhone 5.
The phone offers an upgraded 13-megapixel rear camera, with nifty features like a “Drama Shot” which can capture numerous photos in rapid succession and superimpose them, to create a composite motion image.
It can also shoot images from both the front and rear 2-megapixel cameras simultaneously so you can see a front and rear view on a single image, or can also be used for three-way chats. You can also annotate still images along with sound snippets that you can play back along with them – though I think that idea seems sort of silly when you could just shoot video.
Some of the whiz-bang features of the phone which may or may not prove useful in the real world are the ability to scroll up and down the screen by just tilting up or down, as well as the being able to interact with content by hovering your finger over relevant locations on the screen. Samsung also added a “Smart Pause” feature which uses the front-facing camera to automatically stops playing video when you look away from the screen, and resumes when you start looking again.
Other cool features include the S Translator, which provides voice-based translation service, S Voice Drive – hands-free driving mode, and Group Play, which lets you share music and sync it to up to eight other phones by simply bumping phones together.
The S4 has 2GB of system memory, and storage is available in 16, 32 and 64GB flavors, along with a microSD slot for up to 64GB additional storage. Plus, the phone also has a removable battery – thank goodness. Of course, it’ll offer both 3G and 4G LTE versions with global support, as well as 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. The 4G LTE is supposed to offer data download speeds up to 100Mbps and upload speeds up to 50Mbps on supported networks. I also like how they built in an infrared transmitter so you can use the phone as a remote for your TV and other media equipment without extra hardware.
The phone will sport a large 2,600 mAh battery – 500 mAh more than the S3 came with. In order to enable some of the new features, the Galaxy S4 has a new front infrared sensor and a temperature and humidity sensor.
CPU specs haven’t officially been announced, but it’s been said that the Galaxy S4 is powered by a ridiculously spec’d Samsung Exynos 5 Octa-Core CPU, with Quad Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.6GHz AND Quad Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz or a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 CPU clocked at 1.9GHz (depending on market), and a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU running at up to 533MHz or the Adreno 320 GPU (depending on market.)
Numerous accessories are planned for the launch, including a wireless fitness band called the S Band, which can measure sleep and exercise data and transmit it the S-Health app running on the phone.
There’s also a game pad in the works which provides dual analog sticks shoulder buttons, D-Pad and everything else you need to enjoy tactile gameplay on the phone’s lovely full HD screen.
For more details, you can check out the full product reveal by jumping to 40 minutes into the video below. It starts getting awfully cheesy around the 60 minute mark, so be prepared.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IDXILsX7_QI?t=40m
Surprisingly, Samsung didn’t reveal the pricing or an exact release date for the Galaxy S4 tonight, but word on the street is that we should start seeing the S4 in stores sometime this April.
To register your interest in the Galaxy S4 and for a chance to win one, head over to the Samsung website and fill out this form.
We’re getting closer and closer to the launch of the much-hyped OUYA console. The Android-powered gaming machine will start shipping to backers on March 28th and to celebrate the company is having a little shindig in San Francisco that will serve as a proper “unveiling.” The invite just arrived in our inbox and hopefully this will be our chance to see the final hardware ahead of the June retail launch. The startup doesn’t seem to just be pitching this as a massive media event either. The tagline on the invite reads, “there would be no OUYA without you.” And apparently simply “saying thank you isn’t enough.” Aw, shucks, you’re welcome OUYA.
The botched launch of the new SimCity game has upset many this week, however there is a little good news. EA Maxis exec Lucy Bradshaw posted that the company is working on its server issues, with capacity reportedly up 120 percent in the last 48 hours and “disrupted experiences” down 80 percent. As a way of making up for a launch that was “dumb” for not anticipating far more players and activity than seen in its beta, EA will offer all those who’ve activated a copy by March 18th a free PC game download. There’s no word on which game(s) from the EA portfolio will be available but users will be notified by email. The one thing they won’t be getting however is what many are asking for: an offline option that avoids all the server mess and entanglements of always-on DRM.
The BlackBerry Z10 is finally ready to ship out to customers in the US, as T-Mobile has officially announced that it is selling Canada’s pride and joy starting Monday for $250, but only to business customers initially. Deliveries of the device will arrive on doorsteps (or in office mailrooms, perhaps) by the end of the week. As for the rest of the T-Mobile customers anxious to get their hands on the first BB10 handset, we still haven’t received any word. News of the launch date was reported by Reuters, and we reached out to T-Mobile to confirm pricing and availability and received the following statement (update: T-Mo sent an updated statement confirming a pre-order date):
The BlackBerry Z10 will be available for pre-order for business customers starting on March 11 for $249.99 on a two-year Classic plan. Please note that pricing can be impacted by volume discounts and other factors, making the device even more cost effective. The consumer retail availability date and pricing will be shared at a later date.
After months of anticipation, Sony today announced their next-generation PlayStation console, the PS4. Despite showing off the controller (which we’ve already seen,) Sony continues to be evasive about showing off the console itself, or discussing pricing. We’re guessing they’re saving that for E3 this Summer.
Kicking off the presentation with the tagline “Playstation Wants to Win the War Against Reality,” Sony wowed a massive crowd gathered in New York and on the web to see the reveal of the new console with an epic, 2+ hour stage presentation.
The PlayStation 4 is a completely revamped gaming system and ecosystem, running on a “simplified and streamlined” platform, designed for ease of development while providing a tremendous amount of technical power. PS4 Lead System Architect Mark Cerny – producer behind Marble Madness, Crash Bandicoot,Sonic the Hedghog 2 and designer on numerous other popular games showed off the new platform’s architecture, which has more in common with high-end gaming PCs than previous consoles.
Similar to PC architecture, the PlayStation 4 will run on a high-end X86-based CPU, with a “highly-enhanced” PC GPU, and 8GB unified GDDR5 RAM, with 176GBps bandwidth. The system will have a powerful 8-core 64-bit AMD CPU and its 1.84 TFLOP Radeon GPU will reside on the same die to enhance performance. In addition, the system will use a hard drive to provide ample storage capacity. It will also sport a 6X speed Blu-ray drive, as well as USB 3.0. Here’s a quick spec chart, courtesy of Sony:
To give you an idea of just how powerful the new hardware is, here’s a face rendered using Quantic Dream’s incredible facial animation and shading technologies, running on preliminary PS4 hardware. While the still image is impressive, it’s even more incredible in motion. Could we finally be at the point where console graphics are as good as what you can see in the movies? Probably not, but I’m still excited to see the final hardware in action.
The new DualShock 4 controller is exactly as we saw a few days ago, offering improved analog sticks, enhanced rumble, lower latency, a headphone jack, a small touchpad, player color illumination, and a “Share” button for instantaneous sharing of gameplay videos and other content.
In addition, the system will come with a stereo depth camera that can detect the position of controllers from across the room.
Perhaps one of the coolest features Sony revealed was the ability to suspend and immediately resume games in RAM. The PS4 hardware even has a specialized background processing chip for uploads/downloads.
In addition to background downloads, this will enable you to start playing newly-installed games as they are are being downloaded, so you won’t have to wait for massive downloads to complete before you can play. Though I doubt every PS4 title will support this technology. The new PS4 user interface seems very clean and easy to use, almost like the Microsoft Windows 8 “Metro” interface. Maybe it’s just the blue background and the fonts, but it seems very similar to me. An odd choice coming from one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors.
To support sharing and social interaction, the PS4 will have a dedicated “always-on” video compression and decompression technology, which will enable instantaneous sharing and spectating of video content directly within games. Plus the console will offer a new “Friends” interface based on real-world friends, with less emphasis on avatars, likely to incorporate relationships from existing social networks (I’m assuming there will be Facebook integration of some sort.)
Sony continued to drive home the idea that the PlayStation ecosystem will be less about being tied to your couch, and player-centered. With that in mind, they will offer companion apps for tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices, as well as an improved Remote Play capability on PS Vita. According to Sony Gaikai CEO David Perry, “Our longterm goal is to make every PS4 game playable on PS Vita using local Wi-fi.”
Gaikai’s PlayStation Cloud gaming solution will also play a big part of the PS4 experience providing features like an instant free trials of games, and also involved in some way with real-time spectating of your friend’s gameplay. You can even allow other players to take over your controller remotely to help you get through a difficult part of a game.
Unfortunately, Perry also let slip that PS4 hardware won’t support backwards compatibility with PS3 games. Boo! Hiss.
I’m guessing this is to keep the complexity and cost of the system down, but I don’t want to have to keep my old PS3 around in order to play my collection of current-gen games. That said, Sony is looking at ways to play old games from the PS1, PS2 and PS3 via the Gaikai cloud platform, which will roll out in phases over time.
While Sony steered clear of showing actual PS4 hardware, they did introduced a number of new game titles, and showed PS4 demo footage of many of them. Here are a few of the titles coming to the PlayStation 4:
Knack – an action platformer produced by Mark Cerny, the Systems Architect behind the PS4. It wasn’t really clear from the demo what the gameplay will be like, but if anyone is going to get the most out of the PS4 hardware, you’d think it was its own architect.
KillZone: Shadowfall – an incredible looking new FPS from Guerilla Games, with graphics and physics better than anything I’ve seen. One can only hope the final game looks as good as these in-game screens:
DriveClub – a new racer from Evolution Studios, focused on team-based racing. The game will feature asyncronous and real-time group play, and will work with a companion DriveClub app on mobile devices, which will allow you to initiate challenges and view stats. The game is all about an immersive first-person driving experience, and the brief demo footage didn’t disappoint.
The game will feature insanely detailed cars, every element of which are based on real-world parts and physics. Just check out the detail on this carbon fiber:
inFamous: Second Son – Developed by Sucker Punch, the PS4 exclusive game is a sequel of sorts to the popular franchise, featuring an Orwellian future in which police monitor everything, and people with superhuman powers roam the streets.
The Witness – a cool looking exploration/puzzle game from Jonathan Blow, Creator of Braid. Its challenging puzzles are designed to guide you deftly ”from confusion to understanding.” The game will first arrive on PS4 before it hits other platforms.
Media Molecule, creator of LittleBigPlanet demoed their “record your dreams” concept. By combining the PlayStation Move controller with PS4′s powerful hardware, they were able to sculpt items in 3D space with ease. These objects can then be combined to build larger sets and game levels. This wasn’t from a specific game, but still showed off some impressive interactions. I can see this showing up in the next LittleBigPlanet or a similar world-building adventure.
In addition to first-party and indie studios, Capcom showed off its new PS4-specific gaming engine, codenamed “Panta Rhei”, along with its first title, tentatively titled Deep Down.
Square Enix is also on board for the PS4, and showed off its “target quality” for the new platform using its new “Luminous” engine. Though it showed no specific games, only describing the PS4 as “a game developer’s dream,” and mentioned that an as yet unnamed Final Fantasy title was in the works.
UbiSoft showed off real-time gameplay from its hotly-anticipated Watch Dogs running on PS4 dev hardware. We’ve already seen earlier demo footage, but in case you’ve missed it, here it is again:
PC developer Blizzard Entertainment announced a strategic partnership with Sony to launch games on both the PS3 and PS4, with a console version of Diablo III currently under development. Activision is committed as well, and confirmed that Bungie’s epic new FPS Destiny will be released on the PS4 (and the PS3).
It’s clear that Sony means business with the PS4, launching not only a completely new hardware architecture, based on high-end PC gaming, but a variety of new IP and game titles to take full advantage of the enhanced hardware.
While it wasn’t actually part of the festivities, Sony revealed that the PlayStation 4 is expected to hit stores for the “2013 holiday season” on the very last slide they presented. Now that they’ve whet our appetites, I want to see the actual hardware, and find out the pricing and final release date.
Your move, Microsoft. Time to show us what you’ve got up your sleeves with the Xbox 720 – or whatever it’s called.
You can sometimes gauge a game console’s short-term success based on its launch lineup; many of us know the pain of having to choose the least terrible game of a small bunch while we’re waiting for a better selection. While we can’t vouch for how the OUYA will fare for quality, Eddie at OUYA Forum has done the legwork to prove that there won’t be any problems with the Android console’s quantity. He’s checked with both OUYA and developers to confirm that there are at least 481 games headed to the fledgling system, as of this writing. The clear majority of these are smaller indie titles that won’t dampen Sony’s enthusiasm for next week, but that’s not necessarily a problem — the abundance mostly hints that there could be a few gems for early adopters, even if there’s a lot of fluff.
Sure, Ubuntu for smartphones is slated to appear as a downloadable image for the Galaxy Nexus late this month, but you’ll have to wait until fall to get your hands on honest-to-goodness Ubuntu phone hardware. According to the Wall Street Journal, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth says Ubuntu handsets will hit two “large geographic markets” in October, and that the open source OS has struck the fancy of carriers, to boot. However, Shuttleworth remained coy regarding which regions will see the devices launch in October and which manufacturers will be serving up hardware.
Decades ago, NASA would frequently light up the night sky with chemical trails as part of its measurements of upper atmosphere behavior. While those moments are increasingly rare, we’ll get a rare chance to enjoy one of them this evening. The agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia is launching a suborbital rocket that will generate (and test) a pair of trails of red-tinted lithium as it flies above Eastern US coastline — trails bright enough that large parts of the seaboard may get a first-hand look as the rocket gains altitude. If you fall outside of that range, don’t fret. NASA will stream the whole affair starting from 4:30PM Eastern, with a hoped-for takeoff over an hour later. Catch the feed below when the launch is live, and hit the source links for more about the mission itself.
“So close, you can almost touch it.” The Ubuntu home page is currently dominated by a banner with that teaser, along with a clock counting down to 8AM ET on Wednesday, January 2nd. Our guess is that the pre-CES announcement may focus on mobile, with a touch-friendly interface possibly on the horizon. During a Slashdot Q&A in December, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth clued readers in on the company’s plans to bring the OS to mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, as part of a strategy to familiarize desktop users with the Linux-based operating system. While this week’s announcement may fall in line with that objective, it’s likely to be just one part of the equation, with 14.04 LTS not set to launch until April 2014 at the earliest. Either way, we have more than a day to go before Ubuntu’s mystery is unveiled, so tune your browser to the source link below to join in on the countdown fun.
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