Sony only recently launched its $200 LinkBuds S wireless earphones with active noise cancellation, and we're now seeing the first serious discount. Amazon is selling both the white and black models for $178, for a savings of $22 or 11 percent — a nice drop if you've been pondering a pair.
Sony unveiled the open wear LinkBuds earlier this year, but the LinkBuds S offer a more traditional in-ear "closed" design. They resemble Sony's WF-1000XM4 earbuds, but are smaller and therefore more comfortable to wear for longer periods. Sony in-fact calls them "the world's smallest and lightest, noise-canceling, hi-res" true wireless earbuds. In addition, they're IPX4 rated so you can use them for workouts or in bad weather.
With 5mm drivers, they promise "powerful bass and stunningly clear vocals," Sony says. They also use the new Integrated Processor V1 found on the new WH-1000XM5 headphones to ensure high sound quality, reduce distortion and augment noise cancellation. They support high-resolution listening via Sony's LDAC codec and DSEE Extreme upscaling.
The ANC isn't as powerful as that found on the WF-1000XM4, but it can still reduce background clamor. It also has a transparency mode so you can hear what's going on around you and it can adjust that based on your activity or location. Meanwhile, a new feature called Auto Play can automatically play or resume audio based on your activity when you put the earbuds in or complete a call — letting you have a select playlist when you go for a walk, for instance.
In other words, they're ideal wireless earphones for everyday use and can adapt to a wide variety of activities. Considering they just launched last month, though, the deal may not last long.
Apple’s next update to its iPhone operating system might just help you avoid the CAPTCHA anti-bot systems that stand between you and some web sign-ins. Apple teased a Private Access Token system in iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura that skips CAPTCHAs altogether for some apps and websites. Enable an Automatic Verification feature and supporting sites will use iCloud to verify both your Apple ID and your device, presenting a token that proves you're trustworthy.
Apparently, owning an iOS device (and Apple ID) may be enough to prove you’re a sentient, possibly lazy, being.
While we all wait for a slimmer PS5 from Sony, YouTuber DIY Perks already built one for himself. He took apart a standard PlayStation 5 and replaced everything he could to get rid of in the console's bulk. He substituted components with similar parts and his own homemade creations and built his own water-cooling system, which he put in a separate case with the power source.
The pandemic slowed or paused the development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. With all this going on, there aren’t a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022.
There won’t be many AAA blockbusters out of Microsoft or Sony and, whether we like it or not, these studios set the pace of the industry. What makes it worse is Microsoft and Sony have announced and then abandoned multiple huge projects over the past few years. Jessica Conditt lays out how this year’s big games event, in lieu of E3, didn’t really deliver the blockbuster games we usually expect.
The app will also alert you when someone joins a call.
You can now both mute and message specific people in your group calls on WhatsApp. The former should be particularly helpful when someone might not be aware everyone else can hear what’s going on in the background of their home or office. The company has also added a banner to notify you when someone joins a group call.
Canada is banning companies from producing and importing a handful of single-use plastics by the end of the year. Banned items will include plastic shopping bags, takeout containers and six-pack rings for holding cans and bottles together. Over the next ten years, the Canadian government estimates the new regulation will cut approximately 1.3 million tonnes of plastic waste.
Signify has introduced a bunch of new Philips Hue smart lighting products, including its first portable, rechargeable lamp that was designed for use both indoors and outdoors. The Philips Hue Go portable table lamp has a silicone grip so you can take it with you wherever you go. It can last for up to 48 hours on a single charge, and you can plug it in using its charging base if it runs out of power. Since you can use the lamp in various environments and scenarios, it comes with a button that lets you cycle through all the preset scenes to find the right lighting. The portable Philips Hue Go lamp will be available by the end of summer for $160 in the US and £130 in the UK.
Signify is also rolling out a new Sunrise wake-up style. The Hue light you use it on will go through a colorful transition from blue to soft orange to mimic the sun rising over the horizon. It will launch alongside the new Philips Hue Signe gradient lamp in oak by mid-July in the US. The gradient floor lamp with its natural wood-toned base was designed to be a subtle accent for the bedroom and will set you back $350. In the UK, however, it will be available for purchase today for £300. A smaller gradient table lamp is also coming out in the UK for £200.
In addition to the lamps, Signify is releasing new downlights with increased lumen output, enabling them to provide sufficient lighting to fill bigger rooms. The new white and color lights will be available in 4-inch and 5/6-inch cans starting today in the US for prices starting at $50. Finally, there's the new Philips Hue Tap dial switch with four buttons that can control smart lights in up to three separate rooms in your home. It will also be available starting today for $50 in the US and £45 in the UK. If you want to see these new products in action first, you can watch the Philips Hue media event on the brand's official website.
Canada is banning companies from producing and importing a handful of single-use plastics by the end of the year, Reuters reports. Among the items the country won’t allow the production of include plastic shopping bags, takeout containers and six-pack rings for holding cans and bottles together.
We promised to ban harmful single-use plastics, and we’re keeping that promise. The ban on the making and importing of plastic bags, cutlery, straws and other items comes into effect in December 2022 – and selling these items is prohibited as of December 2023.
The federal government will subsequently prohibit the sale of those same items in 2023, with an export ban to follow in 2025. The one-year gap between the initial ban and the one that follows is designed to give businesses in Canada enough time to transition their stock of the listed items. Over the next ten years, the federal government estimates the new regulation will eliminate approximately 1.3 tonnes of plastic waste, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter.
Not targeted by Canada’s new regulations are plastic fishing nets and lines, which can be far more problematic than single-use plastics like straws and shopping bags. Discarded fishing gear leads to ghost fishing, a phenomenon where those tools continue to trap and kill marine life. With more than 640,000 tons worth of fishing nets discarded every year, it’s a problem that’s only getting worse and one Canada’s plastics ban doesn’t address.
"It's a drop in the bucket," Sarah King, the head of Greenpeace Canada's oceans and plastics campaign, told the CBC. "Until the government gets serious about overall reductions of plastic production, we're not going to see the impact we need to see in the environment or in our waste streams."
The ban follows a similar one enacted by France last year and is part of a broader move by governments across the world to curb the production of single-use plastics. In March, the United Nations agreed to begin work on a first-ever global plastic pollution treaty. While the agreement won’t be complete until 2024 at the earliest, it could be among the most significant efforts to curb climate change since the Paris agreement in 2015.
Ever since we got our first look at Dune: Spice Wars during the 2021 Game Awards, it has looked like one of the most promising videogame adaptions of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi series in a long time. If you’ve been playing the game in Steam early access, you can now look forward to fighting over Arrakis with your friends.
On Monday, developer Shiro Games announced the release of Spice Wars' multiplayer update, allowing you and up to three other players to participate in 2v2 or free-for-all matches. If you can’t find enough friends or strangers to play with, the game will fill your match with computer opponents. As with the Spice Wars' single-player component, you can tweak the difficulty of your AI foes and factors like map size, sandworm activity, and more.
Multiplayer support is the headline feature, but today’s update includes several other enhancements. Shiro has introduced additional in-game events and Landsraad resolutions that can change the course of your games. It has also added new regions to increase map diversity, and reworked building graphics, among other changes.
If you haven’t checked out Spice Wars yet, it’s currently 20 percent off on Steam. I’ve sunk about 30 hours into the game since it came out in early access back in April. So far, I can say Shiro has done a great job of creating an experience that feels authentic to the novels.
Plastic food wraps might not be a bane to the environment for much longer. Rutgers University and Harvard University researchers have developed a plant-based coating that would be greener and safer than plastic packaging. The approach "sprays" fibers based on biopolymer and polysaccharide (the most common carbohydrate in food) that wrap around your food. The resulting protection is strong enough to protect against bruising, and includes natural antimicrobial agents (citric acid, nisin and thyme oil) that can fight harmful bacteria and viruses in addition to preventing spoilage.
In tests, the coating extended the shelf life of avocados about 50 percent. It takes just three days to biodegrade, and you can rinse the coating off with water. Scientists even envision turning the fibers into sensors that could activate to kill bacteria.
There's no mention of near-term plans to put this spray-on wrap replacement into production. It could be a long while before you're picking up bread or fruit with eco-friendly protection. Still, it may be just a matter of time before this technology reaches your grocery store. The coating could reduce the load on landfills, limit the spread of microplastics and minimize food waste.
It’s a weird year for video games. We’re 19 months into a fresh console cycle and support for the PS4 and Xbox One is finally tapering off as developers shift focus to the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC cloud gaming platforms. The pandemic slowed or paused development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. The industry is in flux and the rest of the year reflects this instability. Put simply, there aren’t a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022.
Right now, the video game space is made up of delays, big promises and more delays. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to — between indie and AA developers, cloud libraries and mobile games from Netflix of all companies, this period of transition will still be packed with plenty of things to play.
The 2022 holiday release calendar definitely looks thinner than it did a few months ago, but the first half of the year was fairly busy with games like Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Gran Turismo 7, Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. And those are just the well-funded releases with big, shiny ads — the year has also been good for indie and AA titles like Neon White, The Quarry, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, Sifu, Tunic, OlliOlli World and Salt and Sacrifice already available. The summer’s peppered with even more small but fantastic-looking games, like the cyberpunk cat simulator Stray, Sam Barlow’s Immortality and the wildly anticipated Cuphead DLC, all due out by the end of July.
Studio MDHR
Weirdly enough, Netflix is also helping to fill in the gaps with a new push into mobile gaming, and its latest titles are a treat. Poinpy, the new game from the creator of Downwell, is particularly addictive. Netflix is also publishing the next titles from the studios behind Monument Valley and Alto’s Odyssey, and all of them are free, without ads or microtransactions, as long as you have an active Netflix subscription.
On top of all that, mid-tier publishers like Devolver and Annapurna have a steady stream of strange, high-quality games coming out at all times. And, of course, there’s Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus Premium, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and even Google Stadia — cloud-gaming services that bring hundreds of classic and new titles to essentially any device with a screen.
ustwo
So, yeah, there are plenty of fresh games heading our way this year; it’s just that there won’t be many AAA blockbusters out of Microsoft or Sony. Whether we like it or not, these studios set the pace of the industry, and gaps in their release schedules can make it feel like development has stagnated across the board. And right now, there are a lot of AAA gaps. What makes it worse is the fact that Microsoft and Sony have announced and then abandoned multiple huge projects over the past few years, giving all of us something concrete to miss in every showcase.
In late 2019 and 2020, Microsoft announced massive games including Fable, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Everwild, Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, and it hasn’t said much more about these projects since. On top of that, there’s everything going on at Bethesda, the largest brand under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Bethesda’s shiny new sci-fi RPG, Starfield, was delayed out of 2022 earlier this year alongside Arkane’s online vampire shooter, Redfall. Meanwhile, it looks like Elder Scrolls 6 has at least five more years left in development, and Fallout 5 may not come out until the next console generation. The biggest Xbox exclusives still landing this year are High on Life, As Dusk Falls and Pentiment, three mid-sized games, two of which were literally announced this month.
Sony is in a similar situation. It has more AAA exclusives hitting the market in the second half of this year than Microsoft, with Forspoken, God of War Ragnarok and The Last of Us remake on the calendar, but there are still plenty of unknowns in the PlayStation lineup. Final Fantasy XVI was a highlight of the PS5 announcement stream in 2020, but we just got a release window of summer 2023 for that one. There’s been zero to little information about other games Sony’s had in the works for years, including Wolverine, the Knights of the Old Republic remake and Spider-Man 2. A standalone multiplayer mode for The Last of Us is still MIA, and we’ve yet to get details on the “multiple game projects” that Naughty Dog is also working on.
There are a couple of big cross-platform games due to come out this holiday season, including Hogwarts Legacy and The Callisto Protocol, but fanfare for these titles has been fairly muted so far.
As for Nintendo, it’s playing by its own rules, as always, and it has Splatoon 3 and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on the roster this year, plus whatever it announces during its next Direct showcase. It has its own troubles of course — Breath of the Wild 2 was pushed back to 2023, and then there’s Metroid Prime 4, which was announced in 2017 and… yeah.
Nintendo
The sense of insufficiency in the industry this year is the result of the console makers announcing things too early, with too much fanfare and too many impossible release windows. Of course the pandemic didn’t help, but as it stands, these studios promised the world and then went quiet on multiple massive franchises, and the silence is particularly deafening as we enter an anemic six months of AAA releases. Thankfully, there are so many amazing indie games available right now and coming later in 2022, and between cloud, mobile and PC services, there are more ways to play these titles than ever.
As Jonathan Blow would say, time is a construct anyway, and thinking of life in terms of weeks, months and years is a futile effort to logically contain chaos. Long story short, there’s a lot to look forward to in the video game universe. It may not all be coming this year — or the next, or the next — but with more games to play on more platforms than ever, we should all be plenty entertained.
Samsung has a new lineup of value-oriented monitors for content creators called ViewFinity S8, it announced. The 27- and 32-inch IPS LCD models offer features like 4K 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, accurate colors, a matte finish and professional factory calibration. Better still, the prices appear to be well under $1,000.
The ViewFinity name promises "pinpoint accuracy and consistency" for designers, artists and professionals, Samsung said. To that end, both models offer 98 percent DCI-P3 color gamut coverage, up to a billion colors (probably using 8-bit + FRC and not true 10-bit panels), Pantone validation for accurate colors, and factory calibration. The 32-inch model is certified to VESA's DisplayHDR 600 category so should be bright enough for some HDR work, while the 27-inch model conforms to the more limited VESA DisplayHDR 400 category.
They offer height, tilt and swivel adjustment, along with easy VESA wall mount installation. The IPS panel allows for good brightness even at acute viewing angles, while the matte finish helps reduce reflections. That means a monitor hood isn't needed, Samsung says, which also makes the ViewFinity S8 lineup more practical for vertical screen rotation (portrait mode).
The displays also function as all-in-one docks for desktops or laptops. You can power a phone, tablet or laptop with up to 90 watts of USB-C power delivery, and also get data transfers and even ethernet over USB-C. It also supports intelligent eye care, adaptive picture for optimized quality in any viewing environment, eye saver mode and flicker free technology.
The ViewFinity S8 models will arrive globally by the end of June, with specific dates depending on the region. Samsung didn't announce US prices yet, but the 32-inch model is priced at 820,000 won in Korea ($634), while the 27-inch model is 720,000 won ($557).
Epic Games has added a long-awaited feature to its store: user ratings. The company says that only those who have played a game for at least two hours will be able to rate it on a five-star scale. Not everyone will be able to rate a game either. Epic will randomly offer players the chance to score a game after they finish a play session. The company believes this approach will prevent review bombing and make sure ratings are from people who are actually playing the games.
An overall rating will be calculated based on players' scores and this will appear on a title's Epic Games Store page. The aim, of course, is to help users figure out whether a game's worth playing. Store pages already featured critics' reviews to help folks make a decision about whether to buy or download something.
Epic says it likely won't ask for ratings on every game or app and the randomization approach will help it avoid spamming players. That seems like a good call. It's a little annoying, for instance, that Microsoft asks for feedback after every Xbox Cloud Gaming session.
Epic Games
In addition, Epic may ask you to answer a poll after a game session. There's a broad range of questions, including the likes of whether a game is better to play with a team or how challenging the combat is.
Epic will use data from polls to create tags for store pages. Eventually, tags will be used on category pages and to create tag-based categories for the home page. The idea is to improve discoverability and help people gain a better understanding of what to expect from a game.
Separately, Epic is releasing a set of cross-play tools for developers. Epic Online Services now offers an overlay that can merge Steam and Epic Games friends lists and help players find their buds, send friend requests and hop into multiplayer sessions with cross-platform in-game invites.
Epic has broader ambitions for cross-play support beyond Steam. It's working to support other PC launchers, as well as macOS and Linux. It will add cross-play tools for consoles and mobile to the SDK further down the line. Several of Epic's own games — including Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout — have full cross-play support.
Roku has teamed up with Walmart to serve a new kind of advertisement that will let you shop straight from your TV. Unlike typical TV ads that only showcase a specific service or product, these shoppable ads are more similar to advertisements you see online. Viewers who do find something they want to buy from the shoppable ads can press OK on their remote to begin Walmart's checkout process. Their payment details will be automatically populated with their information from Roku Pay, so they'd only have to press OK to complete their purchase. They'll then get an email confirmation from Walmart with shipping and return information.
Since this is a pilot partnership between the companies, the shoppable ads powered Roku's ad-buying platform called OneView will only feature products fulfilled by Walmart. Of course, ads always have the potential to be annoying, but Roku's announcement suggests that it will at least show ads targeted towards its users, thanks to its advertising tech. The company also said that future iterations of this pilot program "will look for opportunities to build deeper commerce experiences that meet customers where they are."
This isn't the first time Roku and Walmart have joined forces: Last year, Roku debuted its new LE streaming player as a $15 Walmart exclusive for Black Friday. The device eventually made its way to other retailers like Amazon, where it's being sold at prices ranging from $24 to $30.
