It's been quite some time coming, but Activision has at long last revealed when Call of Duty fans can drop into a mobile version of its battle royale spin-off Warzone. The publisher previously said the game would arrive properly this spring after a period of limited release in certain territories. In fact, Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile will land on the third day of spring, March 21. That's just over two years after Activision announced the free-to-play mobile title.

Two battle royale maps will be available at the outset: original Warzone locale Verdansk and Rebirth Island. Verdansk supports up to 120 players across iOS and Android. If you get eliminated, you'll get another chance to rejoin the fray if you win a duel in the gulag. Rebirth Island is a smaller map that hosts a maximum of 48 players. Instead of heading to the gulag after dying, you'll respawn as long as one of your teammates is still alive. 

Several classic CoD multiplayer modes will be available in Warzone Mobile too. You'll be able to hop into the likes of Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed and Search & Destroy in maps including Shipment, Shoot House and Scrapyard.

Shorter multiplayer rounds could help you level up a weapon or increase your overall level when you have a few minutes to spare. Progress is shared between Warzone Mobile and the console and PC versions of Modern Warfare III and Warzone, as long as you're logged into the same Activision ID. XP you earn in Warzone Mobile will be reflected in Warzone and Modern Warfare III and vice versa. The same goes for weapon leveling and battle pass progression.

Except for a small number of exclusive bundles, most of your unlocked cosmetics and equipment will be available across all three games. If you see a Connected tag on a bundle in the Warzone Mobile store, that means those items will also be available in Modern Warfare III and Warzone should you buy them.

You'll have access to a shared friends list and chat channels so you can play with your friends and stay in contact with them. Warzone Mobile supports proximity voice chat, so you can hear noisy nearby enemies. After you score an elimination, you'll be able to hear their last words through the death chat feature too.

Activision says Warzone Mobile is deeply customizable. You'll be able to move controller inputs around the screen and tweak other parts of the user interface to your liking. You can choose from several graphics modes to focus on performance, fidelity or a mix of the two. There's controller support as well.

There's clearly a ton of interest in Warzone Mobile. Activision says the game has more than 50 million pre-registrations. If you pre-register, you'll get a few bonuses, such as a Ghost operator skin, weapon blueprints and a vinyl and emblem.

It’s that time of the month again. Sony just revealed the PlayStation Plus games lineup for March. There are some decent gets here, including the Destiny 2: Witch Queen expansion and the well-reviewed action brawler Sifu. All four titles are available for both PS4 and PS5 users.

Let’s start with Sifu. The game has been heralded as a modern take on old-school beat-em-ups, with a major emphasis on actual kung fu fighting styles. You play as a young martial arts student hunting down the people who murdered your family. Who doesn’t like a good revenge tale? The game feels great, with satisfying and visceral combat. The only downside for some is that, at launch, it was extremely difficult. Developer Sloclap, however, eventually added difficulty settings for new players.

The Destiny 2: Witch Queen expansion experienced plenty of delays before finally hitting digital store shelves back in 2022. The expansion pleased MMO fans with a brand-new story to work through, complete with plenty of new missions. There’s also new PvP maps, gear, weapons, dungeons and raids.

EA Sports F1 23 is the Formula 1 sim to beat, as it was the official game of the 2023 FIA Formula One World Championship. There are plenty of circuits placed throughout the world, including Qatar and Las Vegas. You can race as any of the top 20 drivers and top ten teams. There’s a robust career mode, cross-platform multiplayer and, of course, all kinds of blazingly-fast vehicles to choose from. You can play this and get hyped for the 2024 racing season, which officially begins on March 2.

Finally, there’s the stealth horror game Hello Neighbors 2. Just like the original, the title has you investigating creepy neighbors to unearth their dirty secrets. Though advertised as a horror title, the cartoony visuals make it appropriate for gamers of all ages. Reviews have praised the large open world, when compared to the original, and the improved physics engine.

Multiplayer shooter The Finals is also getting a cosmetic bundle as part of this drop, with 12 new weapon skins and two outfits. All four of the aforementioned games will be available to PlayStation Plus members on March 5 until April 1. As always, some titles are leaving the platform this month. You only have until March 4 to add Foamstars, Rollerdrome and Steelrising to your catalog.

If you work over public Wi-Fi, need to access geo-restricted content or just want to add an extra layer of privacy to your internet connection, you may want to use a VPN service. NordVPN is one of the most popular providers out there and right now, a digital code giving you a year of access to NordVPN Plus is going for $55 at Amazon. The plan also throws in one of our top password managers, NordPass. For comparison, right now a year of the Plus service is $72 directly from Nord. Of course, the best deals the company offers is on its two-year plans. Right now two years of the Plus service is $60 from Nord — so you're still saving $5 with Amazon's deal, plus you're not locked into a full two-year commitment. 

If you just want the VPN coverage without the password manager, you can get the standard service. It's $45 for a year of access, a savings of $15 over buying from Nord directly. And if you're just interested in the password manager, two-years of NordPass is down to $35, which is $5 less than going through Nord's site. 

We named Nord's password manager one of the best for cross-platform use in our guide to those services. The service keeps your credentials safe while making it easy to access your vault from whichever device or operating system you happen to be on. It also allows for biometric sign ins, making it even easier to get at your saved passwords. 

As for Nord's VPN, like all such services, it masks your IP address and encrypts your data to and from its destination. It also blocks your ISP from seeing data about your browsing. Just keep in mind that VPNs can't protect against other security risks like phishing and identity theft. Nord's VPN service didn't make the cut in our testing of such services, partly because we thought the price was a bit too high for the features provided. This deal removes some of the hesitation and we did find the service to be speedy and like that it's based on WireGuard, one of the more secure protocols. But the lack of open source software for most of its products and a less-than-stellar record of customer data privacy prevents it from being the best we can recommend. The service that did top our list was ProtonVPN. It's currently $72 for one year of the service alone. A bundle that includes a password manager, email and other services is currently $120 for the year. 

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s recent issues with its AI-powered Gemini image generation tool after it started overcorrecting for diversity in historical images. He called the turn of events “unacceptable” and said that the company’s “working around the clock” on a fix, according to an internal employee memo published by Semafor.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai wrote to staffers. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

Pichai remains optimistic regarding the future of the Gemini chatbot, formerly called Bard, noting that the team has already “seen substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.” The image generation aspect of Gemini will remain paused until a fix is fully worked out.

This started when Gemini users began noticing that the generator began cranking out historically inaccurate images, like pictures of Nazis and America’s Founding Fathers as people of color. This quickly became a big thing on social media, with the word “woke” being thrown around a whole lot.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for knowledge and information, did not lay the blame on wokeness, but rather a series of tuning errors. Basically, the model was fine-tuned to allow for diverse groups of people in pictures, but “failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.” This led to controversial images like people of color showing up as Vikings and Native American Catholic Popes.

Raghavan also said that the model became more cautious over time, occasionally refusing to answer certain prompts after wrongly interpreting them as sensitive. This accounts for reports that the model refused to generate images of white people.

It sounds like the company was trying to both please a global audience and ensure the model didn’t fall into some of the traps of rival products, like creating sexually explicit images or depictions of real people. Tuning these AI models is extremely delicate work and the software can easily be led to make ridiculous errors. It’s what they do. In any event, I’d prefer a historically inaccurate Catholic Pope over unexpected violent imagery any day of the week. Chalk this up as yet another reminder that AI still has a long way to go. 

As for Gemini, the company promises the image generator will return in the near future, but it still requires a suite of fixes and tests to make sure this never happens again, including “structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming and technical recommendations.”

Apple has reportedly pulled down the shutters on Project Titan, its initiative to build the future of transportation. If the reports are accurate, the project chewed through billions of dollars and several high-profile leaders as its mission shifted and shifted again. What may have started as a control-free autonomous vehicle was eventually scaled down to a generic EV but, ya know, made by Apple. But, I’ll be honest, I never believed we’d see an Apple Car in the real world, because it seemed so impossibly far-fetched as to be fictional.

I'm not saying Titan itself didn't exist, because every company has speculative projects, and I'm sure the reporting around what it achieved is accurate — Tim Cook definitely wrote "Car?" on a whiteboard at some point. If any company could walk in, learn the skills needed to build and launch a car and do it well (and profitably), it would be Apple. Other tech companies, like Sony, are making a real noise about entering the field, albeit in partnership with Honda. But, from a lot of logical angles, the idea that Apple would start making cars was impossible to fathom.

There’s a line in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where kitsch – a German word for bad or tacky art – is defined as a denial of the realities of life. Apple fits that description because while it’s wildly successful, it’s often despite decisions made that fly in the face of common sense. A watch that lasts for less than a day on a charge. A slippery, easily-dropped phone with a glass front and back that’s nightmarishly difficult to repair. A mouse that is still being sold with the charging port on its underside so you can only charge it when it’s not in use.

Even the most environmentally-friendly car still needs oil and grease to lubricate its workings, wheels that leave rubber on the road, brake pads that wear down. Seats that have to deal with spilled coffee and toddler vomit when you’re on a long road trip, the grime you only seem to find when you’re loading IKEA boxes into your trunk. Can you imagine Apple’s design team, who were behind the FineWoven case, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming toward bigger batteries, USB-C and waterproofing, thinking about such considerations?

Not to mention that while Apple can exert a lot of control over its devices now, cars aren’t so neatly closed off. Imagine how hard it would be for a company obsessed with control to cede so much to the auto shops of the world. Yes, you need to take your Tesla back for major repairs but can you imagine not being able to replace your tires when you get a flat? Unless, of course, Apple is planning to build garages in every major population center to overcharge you when it comes time to get an oil change.

And that’s before you get to the idea that Apple, who is quite obsessive about its brand, would have its logo plastered on the internet every time one of its cars so much as kissed a lamppost. Car accidents are currently an unfortunate fact of life that we, as a society, are not prepared to tackle the way we should. But all it would take is one fatality in an Apple car and the company would be demonized — and opened up to a raft of lawsuits all looking to get a piece of Apple’s cash pile.

A car also would muddy the company’s stance on environmental matters, and I can already picture the internal contortions. The executives driving their convertible Mercedes into Apple Park’s rarified subterranean parking garage would, I’m sure, quite like an Apple car. But I imagine the company’s teams who have to look at figures around energy consumption, emissions and climate change don’t. If Apple’s fine words about looking after the environment mean anything, it would throw its weight and expertise behind something better like scooters or e-bikes.

I’ve also struggled to fathom out how Apple would justify charging $100,000 for a limited-run EV when its real wins have come in the mass market. EVs take enormous amounts of capital and labor to assemble and it’s nowhere near as profitable as what Apple does today. In Q3 of 2023, WV — the world’s biggest car maker — made a net profit of about $4.7 billion, or about a quarter of what Apple made in the same period. How many luxury EVs would Apple be able to get out of the door and how many would it need to sell in order to justify that initial investment?

In fact, I suspect a lot of people piled a lot of unreasonable hopes on Project Titan's shoulders despite Apple's repeated scaling back. 'We'll make a car without a wheel, it'll be great,' you can imagine them saying, 'okay, maybe it'll have a wheel...' they added, years later, 'oh okay so, how about it's just a car that's not as autonomous as a Mercedes.' It hardly screams the sort of class-leading ambitions you normally see with an Apple product, does it?

And yes, there may have been lots of pretty renders of what an Apple car would look like made by talented graphic designers looking to bulk out their portfolio. And lots of wishful chat on social media about Apple buying another EV maker like Tesla or Rivian to slap its brand on top of — despite the fact that Apple buying a name-brand company outright has only happened once or twice in a decade. But, until the NDAs lapse and we get a tell-all book with internal imagery, I’m going to say that, despite the reported billions of dollars poured into it, the Apple Car never got close to being a real thing.

At the upcoming SXSW Conference in Texas, Honda will give attendees a chance to try out a new mobility device called UNI-ONE that was specifically designed for mixed reality entertainment experiences. Users can steer the UNI-ONE without the use of their hands — they simply have to lean into one direction to move forwards, backwards, sideways or diagonally. The idea is to pair it with a mixed reality device so that passengers can enjoy a truly immersive game or activity. 

While that sounds pretty wild, Honda has been testing the UNI-ONE in for multiple use cases in Japan since last year. At the Suzuka Circuit Park in the Japanese prefecture of Mie, for instance, Honda created an activity wherein users have to control the mobility device and navigate it according to the scenes displayed on a tablet. At SXSW, people will be able to ride the UNI-ONE while wearing a virtual reality headset and play a choose-your-own VR adventure. 

Honda

The vehicle features a seat that can be raised or lowered, so users can adjust it to be able to communicate better with other people around them. It runs untethered, since it's battery-operated, has a maximum speed of 3.7 mph and can support passengers up to 242 pounds. Honda believes that the device has several potential applications in entertainment and believes it could be used to create indoor and outdoor experiences, such as racing games, in theme parks and comparable facilities.

Those on the lookout for a good deal on a new TV could do worse than to consider Samsung's The Frame lineup. The latest versions of the smart TVs are currently on sale. The 50-inch model has dropped by $400 to $898 at Amazon and Walmart. That marks a record-low price for this size.

When you aren't watching a show or movie, a Frame TV displays artwork, making it look like a hanging picture instead of an ominous black mirror. It's likely to be a classy upgrade from an older TV you've been hanging onto, and one that's a neat party trick when unassuming guests see it switch into TV mode for the first time.

You can display your own collection of images and photos on the TV. In addition, you'll have the option to subscribe to Samsung's Art Store and access more than 1,400 artworks from emerging and well-known artists alike.

The latest models have an anti-reflective matte finish to add to the illusion, while the bezel is customizable and magnetic, so you can swap it out whenever you like. Samsung also attempted to reduce cable clutter by having a single tin wire that connects to an external receiver into which you might plug game consoles and/or a cable box.

Let's not forget that The Frame is a QLED 4K TV too. Samsung says it delivers 100 percent color volume and vivid images. The display has a 60Hz refresh rate and it supports Google Assistant and Alexa. It runs a variety of apps, including the likes of Apple TV+, Samsung TV Plus, Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Xbox, NVIDIA GeForce Now, ESPN and Max — in other words, all the major streaming services and some cloud gaming options.

The Frame is available in a variety of formats, from 32 inches to a whopping 85 inches, so you're bound to find a size that fits your needs. Meanwhile, Walmart is running a broader flash sale on Samsung TVs, so if you're perhaps looking for an option with a higher refresh rate, you might be able to snap one up for a discount.

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It's no secret that Apple is slowly transitioning away from the Lightning connector and embracing USB-C after the European Union forced its hand. While many accessories, the iPad and even the iPhone now use USB-C, the AirPods Max are still mired in Lightning land. However, engineer Ken Pillonel (who previously brought USB-C to the iPhone and AirPods before Apple did) has created a USB-C connector for the headphones.

Pillonel found that it was easy to knock out the Lightning connector AND leave a perfectly sized hole for a USB-C cable. Then, he designed a custom circuit board and found the right connector to make everything work. Pillonel managed to charge the AirPods Max via USB-C on the first try.

Unfortunately, wired USB-C audio isn't feasible through this mod. Pillonel notes that doing so would require a chip from Apple's own adaptor, which costs $35. At that point, you may as well just buy a USB-C headset. So, this mod is only really worthwhile if you really want to charge your AirPods Max via USB-C, meaning there's less of a reason to carry around a Lightning cable.

The AirPods Max are three years old and they're probably due for an upgrade. Any future model is likely to have a USB-C connector to comply with EU regulations. However, if you're willing to tinker with your existing headphones (or perhaps even replace a busted Lightning connector), you can download the circuit design and buy all the other parts you need. Everything's listed in the description of Pillonel's YouTube video and directions are on his website. Alternatively, you can buy a kit directly from Pillonel's store.

It's been a bleak year so far for the gaming industry, between mass layoffs, projects getting canceled and studios shutting down. There are some specks of light in the darkness, though, thanks to a few surprise hits like Palworld and Helldivers 2, while there are still some studios opening up. One of those is BulletFarm, a nascent NetEase studio led by a former Call of Duty multiplayer designer.

Studio head David Vonderhaar will draw from his experience of working on the Call of Duty: Black Ops series for his latest project, a co-op game set in an original universe. The studio is aiming to offer "a fresh take on first-person gameplay." Vonderhaar describes the project as a "departure from the games I’ve worked on, but one that showcases my passion for rich characters, precise mechanics, more intimate storytelling and plenty of action."

BulletFarm is currently hiring workers for the project and, although it's headquartered in Los Angeles, it's a remote-first studio. That could make BulletFarm an enticing prospect for game developers who have lost their jobs over the last several months and may not be able to move to Southern California.

The game industry is said to have cut more than 16,000 jobs since the beginning of 2023, so there are a lot of talented people looking for work. One new studio isn't going to fix that massive labor problem, but it's a step in a positive direction.

LG unveiled its 2024 OLED evo TVs in January at CES 2024 promising extra brightness and other features, and we're now learning the prices for its best models. They'll start at $1,500 for the mid-range C4 models and go up to an impressive $25,000 for the 97-inch G4 flagship. 

First, here's what you're getting. The big theme this year was AI and the company's latest Alpha 11 processor is supposed to boost graphics performance by 70 percent, but it'll only be found in the high-end G4 series. The C4 models, meanwhile, will get the updated Alpha 9 Gen 7 chip. Both promise improved brightness (150 percent for the G4 compared to the G3), along with more AI features like upscaling.

Both chips, when paired with compatible LG soundbars, will be able to transmit wireless, lossless Dolby Atmos audio, letting consumers get high-quality surround sound with less hassle. 

Brightness levels on the new models are hitting nearly 1,000 nits — still not as bright as Mini LED TVs but far better than past OLED models. In addition, both the C4 and G4 and now support 144Hz refresh rates (with both G-Sync and AMD Freesync compatibility), so they'll be better options for PC gamers. 

Now that you know the lineups better, here are the models and prices. The G4 series comes in five sizes, 55, 65, 77, 83 and 97 inches priced at $2,600, $3,400, $4,600, $6,500 and $25,000. The C4 models, meanwhile, are offered in six sizes :42, 48, 55, 65, 77 and 83 inches priced at $1,500, $1,600, $2,000, $2,700, $3,700 and $5,400 respectively. 

They're certainly not the cheapest OLED TVs out there, but the extra brightness, along with other OLED benefits like inky blacks, will no doubt tempt the right buyers. The new models will ship in late March, and as a sweetener, LG is throwing in some goodies for any pre-orders made prior to March 17: a free LG Smart Cam, 5 percent back in membership rewards and free wall mounting or TV stand setup.