Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week’s tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages.

It was a week where Engadget somehow managed dueling liveblogs. Apple revealed its new mobile operating system, while Microsoft revealed more of its plans for the Xbox One, kicking off a week of gaming news from E3 2013 in LA. Sony soon followed, showing off its console for real, and pricing it a hundred dollars less than Microsoft’s next-gen console. Sure, the war isn’t over yet, but Sony can arguably claim victory at this year’s Los Angeles battle. So let’s talk numbers, right after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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It was a big week in gadgets, and thus, a big TC Gadgets podcast it shall be. This week, we discuss developments at E3, including Xbox One and PS4 pricing, the death of Nokia’s Symbian OS, and of course, WWDC.

Will you buy a PS4 or an Xbox One? Does despair fill you from nose to navel when you remember the good old days of Symbian? Is the new iOS 7 design repelling, attractive, or some bizarre combination of the two? John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, and Natasha Lomas touch on all of this and more.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

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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It looks like the world of next generation gaming is about to take off pretty soon – at the end of this year actually, where the two behemoths of Sony and Microsoft have showed their respective hands at the recently concluded E3 2013 in Los Angeles, California. Microsoft has their Xbox One, while Sony’s latest release is a logical progression from where the PS3 left off, where the upcoming console would obviously continue with the PlayStation line, and they have dubbed it the PS4. The Sony PS4 would also be known as the CUH-1000A series, where it will initially arrive in a jet black color, and will be out later this holiday season. Folks living in the USA will be able to get one for $399, while those in Canada, Europe and the UK will have to pay the equivalent numerical figure, except in their local currencies.

The new PS4 boasts of a totally new look, where its internal design architecture has been trimmed down drastically, ranging from the optical drive to the power supply unit as well as cooling mechanism, in an effort to ensure that the body remains as slim and light as possible, all the while helping to enhance the flexibility of the design in a dramatic fashion.

With its simple and yet modern design that has been accentuated by its linear flat form factors, the PS4′s body willbe subdivided into four different sections, as though there were four blocks which have been stacked together in order to make up a single figure, complete with a disc slot, buttons, power indicator and vent that has been placed within the slim interspace which was created between the sections. There will be the usual slew of PS4 peripherals to choose from as well, where they include the stand-alone Wireless Controller for PlayStation 4 (DUALSHOCK 4) and PlayStation Camera, and either one will arrive in jet black at $59 a pop. Any takers for the new Sony PS4?

Press Release
[ Sony PS4 revealed at E3 2013 copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]