Technology news

Apple is all about simplicity, right? Well, maybe not if you want to shuffle your music. iOS 10 redesigned the Music app, and in the process relocated the shuffle button. It seems to be giving people quite some trouble; just watch this video from YouTuber lystroid: Apparently, Apple deemed simply keeping the button on your ‘now-playing’ screen as archaic as the headphone jack. If you want to access the button, you just need to swipe up on your screen. Obviously, once you find t

A week after issuing a statement "strongly advising" airline passengers not to use or charge Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 — which has been formally recalled over a series of explosions due to battery malfunctions — the Federal Aviation Administration has officially banned use of the device during flight.
"Passengers may not turn on or charge the devices when they carry them on board a plane."
"Passengers may not turn on or charge the devices when they carry them on board a

Update 3: Apple seems to have finally resolved the issue. iTunes is back up. Join the club. Numerous users are reporting iTunes is currently unavailable. So in case you can’t turn on your Apple TV, update your apps or buy your favorite album – you’re not the only one. Apple hasn’t confirmed the outage on the official iTunes Twitter account, but the Twitterverse has taken notice. Weird. Apple Status page says iTunes Store is fine. But I get “service unavai

Epson announced its new LS10500 laser projector this week, as the successor to its LS10000 from last year. It still has the same $8,000 price tag, but this time around it comes with support for High Dynamic Range (HDR), which means it can play content from Blu-ray DVD players and other 4K streaming services. Its light output reaches 1,500 lumens, its bulb lasts for 30,000 hours, and it supposedly covers the entire DCI color space.
Also, just like its predecessor, the LS10500 relies on what Epson

Razer is for gamers, by gamers. The maker of gaming hardware is all about providing products for hardcore gamers, and it believes that the larger mainstream public will like those products as well. It’s just like Apple targeted creative professionals in its early years, and then grew into serving everyone, said Min-Liang Tan, CEO of Razer, in an interview with GamesBeat this week.
And Razer will also serve gamers by widening the ecosystem around them through its new zVentures project, a $3

Dell’s XPS 13 is my favorite traditional laptop, and now it’s getting a mild refresh with some new internals and – wait for it – a rose gold color option. The most important change is the new set of Kaby Lake processors; Gizmodo has an easy-to-digest write-up on the processor’s benefits here. To summarize, it’s a a slight performance boost – mostly for gaming and 4K video, thanks to the HD 620 chip – but also offers better battery life. Aided by a

As data starts to trickle in for the iPhone 7’s launch, the iPhone 7 Plus and its dual-camera system seem to be swaying buyers away from its smaller counterpart. If true, this would be the first time the larger, phablet-sized phone outsold the smaller version. If, it’s true. For now, all of the data comes from market research firms, and Apple has been rather tight-lipped about its initial sales numbers. Data from Slice Intelligence, however, seems to suggest that after a 65 per

The Xbox One lineup got a complete overhaul in August, and this led to some big sales for Microsoft’s products.
Xbox One was the top-selling console thanks to the launch of the Xbox One S redesign, but that revamp also led to the Xbox One S Controller outselling all other gamepads in the United States, according to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group. The new gamepad, which I reviewed, sold 79,000 units. That was enough to overtake Sony’s DualShock 4, which NPD analyst Sam Naji

GUEST: Bots may lack the initiative that true, fully realized AI promises, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t useful to us right now.
Day-to-day bots are taking over simpler functions and receiving plenty of press for it. Travel bots are cropping up on many of the major travel booking sites. News and shopping bots are available now from a wide source of outlets to augment, assist, and engage the customer experience.
When it comes to mundane activities, bots are the new

Everyone knows that the real hero in that galaxy far, far away is a stout droid with the designation R2-D2. Now, Electronic Arts is giving players the chance to accurately portray that irrefutable fact.
The publisher released a trailer for the new Death Star expansion that is available now in developer DICE’s Star Wars: Battlefront shooter on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC for anyone who has the game’s Season Pass add-on. This extra content introduces five maps including i

The Pokémon Company has launched the first two videos in the new Pokémon Generations series of short cartoons on YouTube. It’s part of a celebration of the $45 billion franchise’s 20-year history.
The Japanese company, which is part-owned by Nintendo, is wasting no time in taking advantage of the popularity of Pokémon Go, which has been downloaded more than 500 million times in two months and has generated an estimated $500 million in revenue. The company re

Yesterday, The Verge fell in love with a fairly incredible report that Donald Trump was considering PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel for a Supreme Court appointment, should he become president. For anyone who isn’t raptly following one of the weirdest sagas in tech news, Peter Thiel is a canny entrepreneur with a side interest in libertarian sea colonies, radical life extension through vampiric blood transfusions, and unsettling comments about women’s suffrage. He he

Right now, Facebook, Microsoft, and more than 170 companies across the bot landscape are trying to put software inside chat platforms. As bots become part of the biggest platforms on the planet, there’s wide speculation about how they will change tech and business
That’s why three enthusiastic early-stage venture capitalists were invited to the Intelligent Assistants Conference in San Francisco this week to talk about what’s next for bots and intelligent ass

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we look at an action role-playing game about burning books, Star Trek Online lets players 3D print their ships, and Sony updates the PlayStation 4’s user interface.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: The intersection of sci-fi, video games, and real-world tech
Hearthstone’s Summer Championships: How journalism and ultimate Frisbee drove two players
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2

InFocus, the makers of the miniature $99 Windows 10-running Kangaroo PC, announced the Kangaroo Notebook earlier this week, a laptop that takes the miniature computer idea of the original Kangaroo PC and expands it to laptops.
The Notebook itself — with a 11.6-inch screen and relatively weak specs built around an Intel Atom processor — strongly brings to mind the netbook aesthetic of years past. But unlike most laptops, which are closed systems, the Kangaroo Notebook is actually

The 68th Emmy Awards are taking place this Sunday, and Jimmy Kimmel will host, which means he'll be responsible for some kind of pithy and irreverent opening monologue that will (probably clumsily) attempt to sum up the state of television. If the idea of watching that excites you, but you'd prefer to avoid the rest of the awards show (or you don't have any way to watch it), Facebook has a solution. After Kimmel's monologue streams on linear television, the whole thing will be posted as a 360-de

FEATURE: I don’t own a car. Living in New York, I don’t even have a license. But on Monday Ford’s autonomous car took me for a ten-minute ride on the calm streets of Dearborn, Michigan, where the 113-year-old motor company has spent more than a century making cars that don’t drive themselves.
In “Limo” gear, the car piloted us through bright, treelined streets two passengers at a time, coasting past brick engineering buildings and halting gently for pedestrian

Game publisher Hitcents and media site Fusion have launched Rigged, a mobile game about gerrymandering political districts in order to steal elections.
If anything, the free-to-play iOS and Android title is timely as the U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is turning out to be a close race. It draws attention to the real-life practice of gerrymandering, or redrawing the lines of a political district to increase the power of a particular party.
Players can cho

I know, you don’t even own an iPhone 7 yet (or maybe you're in line right now? If so: hey!) and you already miss the headphone jack. It's okay, I understand. I also have some hope for you. Maybe one day there will be a headphone solution for you. Maybe you won’t need the AirPods because you'll have a case that keeps the headphone jack alive. It probably won't be a reality any time soon, but at least we know one DIY fan is working to preserve the iPhone headphone jack.
A Reddit u

Taiwanese chip maker MediaTek is announcing today that it has gotten its mobile processing chips into a Sprint smartphone for the first time. It’s the first time that MediaTek’s chips have been used in a device on a major U.S. carrier network.
Hsinchu, Taiwan-based MediaTek collaborated with Sprint to create the LG X power, which features the MediaTek Helio P10 chipset, which emphasizes a combination of performance, power efficiency, and compact size. That’s a victory for Media

No Man’s Sky is an almost impossibly huge game, an entire virtual universe filled with 18 quintillion planets, each one different from the next thanks to the powers of procedural generation. Instead of a typical review, I’m going to be writing regular dispatches from No Man’s Sky, giving a firsthand account of what the experience is like, and what you can expect if you choose to dive in. You can follow along right here. Spoilers below.
I’ve been spending too much time in

Sprint is today announcing the LG X Power, a midrange Android smartphone that isn’t particularly remarkable save for one thing, the processor inside of it. It is the first phone from a Sprint to use a MediaTek processor, specifically, the Helio P10. MediaTek has been found in a handful of devices in the US — most notable ones being Amazon’s Fire tablet line —but it still lags far behind Qualcomm in North America and has not yet made significant inroads into major carrier

EXCLUSIVE: In virtual reality apps, opt-in video ads work much better than pre-roll ads, according to a report by VR ad network Immersv.
Emeryville-based Immersv said that opt-in video ads convert at a 37 percent higher rate than pre-roll video ads, according to its own data.
For the month of August, 2016, ads that were integrated as fully opt-in for users saw a conversion rate of total gazes of 27.1 percent. By contrast, ads that were integrated as a pre-roll for users drove a conversion rate o

Here’s a new twist on getting your keys copied at the hardware store. KeyMe has raised $15 million in funding to expand its key-copying kiosks, which enable you to save “digital copies” of keys in the cloud.
KeyMe promises to revolutionize costly locksmith services by enabling customers to copy their home, office, and car keys and then save copies of them in the cloud.
The third round of funding was led by QuestMark Partners, coming after a $20 million second round in Dece

Microsoft has been toying with bringing texting functionality to Windows 10 PCs for a while now, and the company is still trying to figure out the best approach. As promised, Microsoft has updated Skype Preview for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile users in the Windows Insider Program with texting support. You can download the latest version now from the Windows Store.
The texting relay feature allows users to send and receive SMS and MMS messages from a Windows 10 PC. Skype lets you view new mes

Apple touted the speaker on its Apple Watch Series 2 as the key to the watch’s swim-resistance. The speaker intentionally fills with water when submerged and then uses sound vibrations to pump liquid out of the watch body. We got an animated idea of what the speaker looked like and how it worked during Apple’s keynote presentation last week. But now we’re getting to see real photos thanks to iFixit. Here they are:iFixitiFixitThe rest of iFixit’s teardown was relatively un

Video game designer Will Wright was fond of saying that a dog-eared copy of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash was the business plan for many Silicon Valley startups. That novel’s vision of the Metaverse inspired technologies such as the Second Life virtual world and the Xbox Live online gaming service. Ken Kutaragi, father of the PlayStation, also cited The Matrix as an inspiration for the PlayStation 2 video game console.
Science fiction, video games, and real-world technology