Latest News - Page 2592

Seemingly not too interested in carrying its own project on any longer, messaging app startup company Talko has dropped its plans and headed over to Microsoft, in a buyout announced just recently.

This company purchase by Microsoft is in order to improve Skype and Skype for Business products, programs known to often deliver issues based around hefty battery drainage and poor optimisation for many users. This also marks the death of Talko's own project as we know it, with users being given the opportunity to say good-bye and download past conversations, voice files, text and photos before they are deleted completely.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has bought out a company like this and it's the second purchase in under seven days for this tech giant, here's hoping that the Talko team can work some Skype miracles and give us a stellar program.

Sometimes the indie community has some very innovative stuff to show the world, but not all the time. In this case, a small indie studio comprised of two fine gentlemen in Poland have released the most splendid game ever: Oh...Sir!

This superb example of gaming mastery was devised as part of a game creation event called amJam and was put together in a mere 42 hours. They took the theme they were given, "this parrot is no more" from Monty Python, and ran with it. The result is a game that delights the senses in a most delicate way.

Oh...Sir! pits players in 1v1 combat against each other, letting you construct and hurl cleverly concocted insults using the choices given to you during the round. You take turns and have a limited time to come up with the most adroit insults possible.

While we reported that Toshiba are looking at a hefty $60m fine thanks to some 'creative' accounting mishaps, the aftermath of this massive blowout has resulted in 6800 staff being let go.

The cuts are happening within the consumer electronics division only and are set to be part of a Toshiba HQ reconstruction. In addition to this, reports claim that Toshiba is also looking to offload its television and washing machine manufacturing facilities in Indonesia, while this tech giant is also looking at investors to assist with healthcare ventures.

With Sony purchasing Toshiba's sensory fab for $155m and board resignations happening due to this accounting scandal, there's no saying what the next step will be.

Statista has published a report recently that is quite interesting to some and nothing new to others. Showcasing global smartphone profits from January to September 2015, this chart tells the story that Apple dominated smartp[hone profits, owning 92% of this global figure.

While many users complain that Apple devices are overpriced and under performing, charts like this help drive home the fact it's all business, with companies existing with the main purpose to turn a profit of its own. Coming in second on this list is Samsung sitting at 14%, with 'everything else' thrown right down into the basement, including ( in order) the likes of LG, BlackBerry, HTC, Sony and Lenovo/Motorola, with Microsoft bringing up the very rear.

We reported that Android co-founder, Andy Rubin, is even looking into making handsets of his own, drawing us to curiosity as to why he would want to enter such a turbulent market. Rumors claim that he will be looking at premium handsets only, likely in an attempt to jack up profits on phones in order to operate a viable business.

Utilizing ATSC 3.0 sent thanks to a Sinclair broadcasting station near the Consumer Electronics Show 2016 in Las Vegas, witnesses will be able to see the first rendition of a live 4K television broadcast. Described by PC World as being the next-generation broadcasting standard in the US, ATSC 3.0 signifies the future of live TV.

Encoded by a scalable medium called high-efficiency video encoding (SVHC), this technology is based on H.265 compression, further allowing these new 4K TV signals to include HDR. This HDR addition means that vibrant colors on consumer televisions will be displayed, resulting in deeper blacks and bright whites. These features are a first for broadcasting, marking the first time that technologies such as HDR and 4K will be beamed to anyone within reach.

Sinclair tested this technology in December 2015 to an audience of South Korean TV executives, with this Las Vegas testing set to be the first public launching platform. Other cities in the US will have the chance of viewing these demonstrations at a later date.

LG has just unveiled its new robotic vacuum, the Hom-Bot Turbo+, which has some nifty features.

First off, it's a normal robotic vacuum, so you can schedule your cleaning duties to be done while you're out of the house, or asleep. The Turbo+ has three cameras that, with the assistance of the Robonavi software, allow the robotic vacuum to navigate your house, apartment or wherever you call home, and keep it clean.

LG has used these cameras in a unique way, as you can view the Turbo+ in real-time, and remotely control it through the Home-View function. The Home-View function has the cameras working as a mobile security system, which lets owners of the Turbo+ receive still images to their devices if it detects movement in a home that should be empty.

While all eyes are glued to Star Wars: The Force Awakens this week - which just had the biggest opening ever, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is getting some TV spot lovin' in Germany.

The new German TV spot teases a few seconds of new footage, even in its short 30-second runtime. In the middle of the clip, Batman is flying the Batplane towards Superman, firing rounds of bullets at him - while Superman doesn't even take a scratch.

We also see Superman in some flames at the 0:19 mark, Batman knocked to the ground at 0:20, and Superman flying forwards along the ground in a cloud of dust and smoke at 0:24. I still think we're not receiving the full picture here, and that the pissed off Superman we're seeing is actually Bizarro - the first creation from Lex before we see Doomsday unveiled later in the movie - but that's just me.

NVIDIA's damn-powered Shield Tablet K1 has just received its shiny new Android 6.0 Marshmallow update, which includes a bunch of new stuff.

The update does warn about SD cards, with a note to "please make sure it is backed up first". One great thing about Android 6.0 is that it "adopts" your SD cards, detecting them as if they were part of your internal storage. NVIDIA says that there's a revamped camera UI with a more "material"-inspired theme and some new real-time image effects.

The company has also included some NVIDIA-inspired wallpapers, with Fallout Shelter also now preloaded onto the Shield Tablet K1.

PS4 fans will be happy to hear that the first DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will drop on February 2, 2016 - thanks to an announcement from publisher Activision and developer Treyarch.

The new DLC is called Awakening, with the new Black Ops 3 DLC including four new multiplayer maps - Gauntlet, Splash, Rise and Skyjacked. There'll also be a new Zombie mode included, something that has been titled "Der Eisendrache". Awakening will cost $15, and is included as part of Black Ops 3's season pass, which costs $49.99. As for the four new multiplayer maps, here's the breakdown:

With all of the VR attention firmly sitting with HTC and the Vive right now, with headlines like HTC and Valve have made a "very, very big technological breakthrough" with the Vive - Oculus has been sitting the corner, until now.

Oculus has announced that it is shipping final Rift hardware to some developers, with the Rift SDK 1.0 and runtime features "tied to the consumer product". Oculus also notes that it's shipping "more Rift hardware out to developers every week in the run up to launch. In the meantime, DK2 and SDK 0.8 continue to be the right platform for early Rift development -- you only need SDK 1.0 if you're imminently shipping".

The web version of Outlook will be updated in the coming weeks and months with some neat features.

First up is a smarter address book that suggests contacts based on usage. It's familiar behaviour for anyone that's used other clients, except for the part where it asks you if you want to include a given person on a multi-person email, if that's something you normally do. The address book won't be picky about spelling names correctly either, so you'll be able to find Kathryn if you typed Catherine, for example. This functionality will roll out to Office 365 users in mid-January, then to everyone by early March. These features will arrive in early January for First Release users and early March for everyone else. Outlook.com will be available to everyone around then as well.

If you fly much, Outlook will prove a handy tool once this update goes live, automatically adding flight information to your calendar based on your emails, and will send you email reminders three hours before your flight. Expedia, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines and Alaska Airlines will be supported at launch; many more airlines will be supported quickly afterward. In the future, other types of events will support this functionality. All of it can be disabled if you like. The new features will go live for First Release folks in early January and everyone else sometime in March.

Razer has already entered the Android micro-console world in a big way with their Forge TV that started shipping to hungry hands in May of 2015. Their Cortex platform should help by providing an influx of popular new games and an easier way to find them.

It hasn't been the most popular option, with devices from NVIDIA and Amazon taking the crown, but now they've brought the Razer Cortex platform to the Forge TV, which should help to boost its popularity. This is much the same way that NVIDIA provides made for Tegra games through their Shield store, except the games found in Cortex won't be specifically remade for the Snapdragon found within the Forge TV.

A lot of the games that are making their debut were already available on the OUYA, which was picked up by Razer recently, but are now being made available again. The majority of titles are of the the indie variety, but there are some old school AAA gems found in there, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Bomb Squad.

A brand new game in the beloved Tales JRPG series is coming to PS4 and PC. Tales of Berseria, as it's called, will feature a tweaked battle system: think free run by default, free camera rotation, and the ability to assign multiple artes to different buttons, which can be exploited for combos.

PC players will be especially happy because it no longer features the 30 FPS lock as seen in Tales of Zestiria. As you can see from the trailer, gameplay and cinematics are much smoother for it. While Zestiria eventually saw the release of a mod that removed the lock, it's nice that no such thing will be required this time.

Berseria doesn't have a release date yet, except to say it's due to launch in Japan sometime in 2016.

It looks like AMD's next-gen GPU will be arriving in Q2 2016, which is the rough timeframe that we expected from all the rumors over the last few months.

AMD's new part will be made on the 14nm process by Samsung and GlobalFoundries, with it reaching mass production at the end of Q2 2016 - or in June. This is perfect timing for Computex 2016, as we saw the rumors - and the TweakTown exclusive during Computex 2015 that the new card would be called the Radeon R9 Fury X, and not the Radeon R9 490X that the world thought.

The new GPU will feature HBM2, which will not only increase the amount of VRAM that the new GPU will have - up from the 4GB of HBM1 found on the current Fiji cards like the Fury X and R9 Nano - but it will also see an increase in memory bandwidth. HBM1 allows for 512GB/sec, while HBM2 drives the memory bandwidth numbers through the roof to over 1TB/sec. We should expect to see cards from AMD featuring up to 18 billion transistors, and up to 16GB and even 32GB on the professional cards in 2016.

In celebration of everything Star Wars, CineFix has spun 8-bit gold by recreating the original trilogy as if it were an old Nintendo game.

With Star Wars: The Force Awakens utterly smashing box office records and invading our galaxy, the Force has never been stronger with gamers and ultra-geeks. Just about everyone is scouring the web looking for supplemental Star Wars entertainment, whether it be reviews, comics, books, games or super nerdy live-action battle reenactments. The clip above does just that and more: it reminds you what your childhood could have been like if this "game" had indeed been real.

Although J.J. Abrams has taken us on a new journey across the future of the franchise, CineFix takes us back to where it all began. The sci-fi adventures of our youth are re-visited with an epic excursion into the heart of Star Wars magic. A smattering of memorable scenes have been recreated in painstakingly awesome 8-bit detail, chronicling Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi in progressive stages of console history. A New Hope, for example, resembles the early NES version of The Legend of Zelda, whereas Return of the Jedi takes on a Genesis-style action side-scroller feel.

The Khronos Groups's upcoming low-level graphics API is almost finished. Today they reported that they're on the "home stretch" when it comes to development and that we should see it in early 2016.

According to their blog post, the actual specification itself has been finished but they're putting on a few extra layers of polish and an extensive legal review to ensure that there are no holes. The SDK's that developers will have access to to make their games compatible are also almost done, but rely on the specification itself before they can be finished. In the end, we'll see SDK's for Windows, Linux and Android.

The successor to the aging OpenGL standard will finally be coming to us, months after DirectX 12 has already been released. The Khronos Group has said that "Vulkan will set the foundation for graphics and compute APIs for years to come and so Khronos is taking the time needed to do this right."

Apple's portable music players have always been popular among music enthusiasts for the quality of the audio reproduction. Sure, they don't support the FLAC or Ogg Vorbis file formats that are the audiophiles preferred method of listening, but the internal audio processing components have always lent a certain cleanness to the audio quality.

At the Portable Audio Festival that took place in Tokyo over the weekend, there were some companies that were exhibiting high-res audio gear that are close enough to Apple to be able to speak to Mac Otakara about the possibility of Apple moving towards high-resolution audio for their streaming service, Apple Music.

According to those sources, which are unnamed, Apple is looking to try for a 2016 release. This would be a huge advantage to Apple because no other popular music-streaming service currently offers bit-rates quite as high as the Hi-Res standard of 24-bit/96kHz would entail. That would certainly put it into audiophile territory.

After losing his wife and job to his Fallout 4 addiction, a hopelessly hooked gamer is suing Bethesda Softworks for damages.

As any seasoned Fallout or Elder Scrolls gamer knows, Bethesda RPG's are as addicting as any drug. These massive open-world games can swallow up hundreds upon hundreds of hours of time if you're not careful, but are the creators to blame for your inability to break the immersion? A 28 year-old Siberian gamer thinks so, and is suing Bethesda Softworks for a total of 500,000 rubles (or $7,000 USD) after losing his wife and job by playing Fallout 4 for three weeks straight. The gamer wants the developers to compensate him for the "emotional distress" caused by the game.

"If I knew that this game could have become so addictive, I would have become a lot more wary of it. I would not have bought it, or I would have left it until I was on holiday or until the New Year holidays," a statement from the Fallout 4 addict reads.

GTA V is getting it's annual holiday update today that has a lot of great holiday themed stuff. And snow. What good would celebrating the holidays in this fashion be without a nice helping of snow in Southern California?

Among the cool new things you'll be able to find are new holiday themed pajamas, masks, other sweet clothing and even the ability to have your very own Christmas tree in your home and your yacht. Don't forget to head on over to Ponsonby's. You'll be able to find a costume just like the one worn by Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa.

Rockstar also plans on having special gifts make their way to all platforms for anyone that logs in. And yes, because snow is in the forecast, so too are snowball fights! The special holiday themed Los Santos will be changing back to normal on January 5th 2016.

With the successful adoption of Apple's 3D Touch display tech, an analyst firm predicts that 25% of all new handsets in 2016 will feature Force Touch screens.

With new advances like pressure-sensitive screens, beefier CPU's and RAM, and efficient batteries, the landscape of smartphones is set to evolve rather quickly throughout the next year. Apple's new innovative pressure-sensitive 3D Touch, for example, pushed the limits of display tech altogether by incorporating different functions for different types of presses. The "peek" and "pop" features redefine the way iPhone users view and interact with their devices, introducing a whole new UI scheme for smartphones. Analyst firm IHS says that manufacturers are keen on adapting their own form of Apple's Force Touch tech in new and inventive ways, meaning the smartphone market will see a surge in 3D Touch-enabled handsets in 2016.

To meet this demand, IHS projects that Force Touch sensor shipments will boost an impressive 317% to 461 million units in 2016. The pressure-sensitive screens will be major features of mid-range to flagship handsets, IHS says.