Technology news

BlackBerry announced today that the number of BlackBerry-branded gadgets might soon expand. Although the company doesn’t release much of its own hardware anymore, its name still appears on new smartphones, and now, its licensing practice will apply outside of mobile devices. This could mean the eventual release of branded tablets, wearables, medical devices, appliances, and point-of-sale terminals, all of which will have a touch of BlackBerry DNA. A spokeswoman confirmed to The Verge that

 April Fools’ Day falls on a Saturday this year. Seemingly worried that the internet goes away on weekends, a bunch of companies rolled out their April Fools’ jokes a few days early.
Some of them are really, really good. Some of them… are not.
Here’s our round-up of the ones worth a laugh, chuckle or, at the very least, a mildly amused puff of air through your… Read More

DDR5, the next generation of RAM, will double the speeds of current DDR4 RAM when it’s released, according to JEDEC, the organization in charge of computer memory standards, as first noted by Ars Technica.JEDEC announced it will be finalizing the DDR5 standard sometime in 2018, and says DDR5 will “double the bandwidth and density over DDR4,” and come with greater power efficiency. Despite the fact that the standard will become official next year, DDR5 likely won’t be read

After last year’s lackluster G5, I was really hoping LG would hit it out of the park this year. It’s one of the few brands that’s continued to cater to people who care about durability and power-user features. And for a while, I thought it might just succeed: I marveled at the miniscule bezels on the LG G6, allowing a huge screen to fit in a small body. And then Samsung announced the S8. Don’t get me wrong: The G6 is probably LG’s best ever phone, with a metal and

I’ve borrowed a 2017 Volvo V90 Cross Country for an entire month, and will document my experience every week. This week I drove the V90 from my home in Durango, Colorado, up over Coal Bank Pass and Molas Pass to the tiny mountain hamlet of Silverton. It was a great test of both the heated seats and steering wheel, as well as the Volvo’s small, but powerful, engine.
I live in Colorado at 6,800 feet, or a bit more than 2,000 meters, above sea level. Living at this altitude means a few

As the internet gets flooded with April Fools’ Day jokes — good or lame — it can be hard to keep track of the ones that are worthy of your attention. Google, in particular, is known for rolling out a ton of different pranks. Most of them are actually pretty fun since they are localized to each Google product or regional team.
Here’s a look at what we’ve found out there this year.
Pac-MapsThe ability to play Pac-Man on Google Maps isn’t exactly new — the

Here's to the crazy ones. Mad Catz just filed for bankruptcy, after decades of serving the gaming peripheral market. The company bet big on Rock Band 4, which didn't pan out as well as it had hoped, and now the company has been shut down, with its assets up for auction. Mad Catz might be best known for its "little brother controllers." You know, the cheap third-party controller you give to your little brother to play Mario Kart which inevitably fails in his hour of need while you drift your way

Even hunting virtual animals can get you a following online.
Twitch today released the trailer for Ironsights, the company’s first in-house mini-documentary. Twitch is a live-streaming site that attracts over 100 million users a month. Now it is creating these documentaries to showcase its community. The full film will debut on Twitch on April 7.
“There are a lot of amazing stories to tell about the Twitch community which rarely get the attention they deserve,” said Marcus &ldq

April 1st — a day colloquially known as “April Fools’ Day” or “the worst holiday ever” — isn’t even until tomorrow, but because the month of April starts on a Saturday this year, all the #brands are already out in force to pollute the internet celebrate the occasion with a bunch of tiresome fun pranks meant to thirstily self-promote their products bring some levity into our day-to-day lives.So, as is tradition, we’ve rounded up the best goofs

Hearthstone’s dinosaurs are just a few stomps away.
Blizzard announced today that the next expansion for its digital card game behemoth, Journey to Un’Goro, is launching on April 6 for PC and mobile. The set will add 135 cards with a primeval theme, unleashing dinosaur-like creatures to Hearthstone.
In 2016, Hearthstone earned $394.6 million earned in revenue, according to research firm SuperData. Expansions give players a reason to buy new card packs, and they have a huge impac

Virtual reality is getting even more realistic: ads are going to be everywhere. HTC is opening its Viveport to advertisers, offering the chance to put elaborate ads directly inside the VR world. The ads come in 2D and 3D flavors, as well as loading scenes, end scenes, or “app recommended.” The language used on the developer page is a little bizarre and comes very close to acknowledging that users might not appreciate this: Therefore, VR Advertising is not simply an interruption

Microsoft today announced that it’s shutting down CodePlex, its service for hosting repositories of open source software. The service launched in 2006, and now it will be going away on December 15.
While people will be able to download an archive of their data, Microsoft is teaming up with GitHub, which provides similar functionality for hosting code that people can collaborate on, to give users “a streamlined import experience” to migrate code and related content there, Micros

One of Sega’s best games from last year is getting a sequel, but it still doesn’t plan on giving it the name it deserves
Total War: Warhammer II (yes, it’s still not Total Warhammer) will hit PC this year, according to Sega and developer Creative Assembly. Like the original, which debuted in May, the sequel will feature the setting and creatures of Games Workshop’s Warhammer table-top games. Like the other Total Wars, Warhammer and Warhammer II are about microma

Google’s annual offering of April Fools’ Day jokes has begun, and the latest is the somewhat clever idea of “Google Gnome,” a Google Home customized for the outdoors that is a little more existentially dour than your average smart assistant.
I say “somewhat clever” because “Google Gnome” is primarily just a bad pun. In fact, it’s a bad pun I made just over two weeks ago on Twitter as part of my ongoing series “Let’s see how many p

Ghost in the Shell isn’t the most VR-heavy cyberpunk franchise — it’s more known for its examination of synthetic bodies. Nonetheless, if you have a Gear VR or Oculus Rift (or just want to visit the Ghost in the Shell Facebook page) you can now watch the virtual reality accompaniment to the live-action adaptation, which premieres today.
The experience was created by Here be Dragons (formerly known as studio Vrse.works), which previously worked on the Mr. Robot virtual reality e

As people begin to think about how they feel about ads on intelligent assistants, voice analytics company Mattersight is planning to use unique voice signatures to deliver personalized advertisements and bots. Using artificial intelligence to recognize your personality within 30 seconds, Mattersight wants to deliver personalized ads and bots to Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other voice-controlled devices.
Advertising and biometrics for intelligent assistants have been in the news recently. Earli

THQ Nordic has once again expanded its portfolio.
The publisher announced today that it has purchased the assets of Slipgate Studios, which developed the action-platformer Rad Rodgers for PC. THQ Nordic now owns the series.
THQ Nordic specializes in acquiring gaming IP, including franchises from its namesake, THQ (which the former Nordic Games GmbH bought in 2013). That added franchises like Darksiders and Destroy All Humans to its catalog of IP.
Rad Rodgers received crowdfun

April Fools’ Day is a time reporters have come to dread. As we sift through our inbox while drinking that morning cup of coffee we’re met with excitement, disbelief, and even dread as we try to discern what’s real and what’s not. It’s a day that has us questioning everything. And since April 1 falls on a Saturday this year, we now have an extra day of increased skepticism to look forward to. These are the companies and products that make us

Big data software company Cloudera today submitted its S-1 filing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CLDR.
Joint underwriters on the deal include Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Allen & Co., BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank Securities, Stifel, JMP Securities, and Raymond James.
For the year ended January 31, the company lost $187 million on $261 million in revenue, according to the filing. The year before, Cloudera turned up a $203 million loss on $166 millio

I live my Rocket League matches a quarter mile at a time, and if you’re a cop, you have to tell me.
Developer Psyonix is adding the Ice Charger vehicle that Vin Diesel’s character Dom Toretto drives in the upcoming film The Fate of the Furious. For $2, you can grab the car along with a variety of custom items as part of the The Fate of the Furious downloadable content pack that hits the megapopular car-soccer game April 4. This is the latest brand tie-in add-on for Rocket League

After being mercilessly ripped off by Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat is leveling the playing field by adding a feature its competitors don’t have: Story search. Snapchatters can now search specific locations, events, and words in order to find Snaps of those things. For example, if you search for a specific concert, you’ll be able to see Snaps others have taken there. If you search for “puppies,” you’ll find all the public Stories about puppies (okay, I&rsqu

Twitter has changed the default profile picture for new accounts from an egg on one of seven different background colors to what they described to Fast Company as a “gumdrop-headed human.” They claim the human is genderless, and that is technically true, but society insists that the default gender is male and for my purposes right now in this blog (and at no other time) — so do I.Twitter product designer Jeremy Reiss told Fast Company that the goal of the design was to reflect

EXCLUSIVE: Mode.ai is making bots that use your photos to identify an item of clothing, then show you where to buy it (or a visually similar item of clothing) online. The bot can also recognize photos of home decor products and share trending topics from online retailers as varied as Amazon and Louis Vuitton.
The Mode.ai Facebook Messenger bot launched today. Send the bot a picture and it will give you three options: More Like This, Buy, and Who Wore It.
Well, if not who

The battle over Stories continues with Snap releasing an update for its ephemeral messaging app that now lets you search across stories. Rolling out city by city, the company claims it has built a way to “understand what’s happening in Snaps that are submitted to Our Story, and to create new Stories using advanced machine learning.” To date, more than 1 million stories have been created.
When enabled, you can query based on keyword, such as game, concert, or party. Previously,

The Teletubbies have been around for 20 years now. I was a little too old to care about them at the height of their popularity, but now, with my mind dedicated to the consumer-tech news world, I stopped to think about them for a brief moment. Teletubbies have TV screens implanted into their abdomens. How did those get there? What mad scientist performed this insane experiment in a land only known as Teletubbyland? Actually, I’m not really worried about that part. I work for a gadget-review

If Apple had “courage” last September to announce the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus without a headphone jack, then Samsung this week was brave to unveil the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ with a headphone jack. In short, Samsung didn’t copy Apple just for the sake of copying Apple.
By removing the headphone jack, Samsung could have kept its phones the same thickness as Apple did or even shaved off a few precious millimeters. Instead, the company made the S8 and the S8+ slightly thicker

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On this week’s episode of the GamesBeat Decides podcast — a show where we determine what all of the biggest news in gaming means so you don’t have to — host Jeffre

Netflix is bringing Final Fantasy 14: Daddy of Light to a worldwide audience this fall. The show is about the father-son bond formed over a mutual love of Final Fantasy 14, Square Enix’s massively multiplayer role-playing take on the Final Fantasy series. News was spotted today by The Verge’s sister site and daddy enthusiast Polygon.
We’ve seen various Final Fantasy stories in animated film and TV forms several times over the years, but Daddy of Light is something different &md

Snapchat Stories are now searchable. The company announced today that users can use the search bar at the top of the app’s main page to find whatever they want in a story. That means you can type “puppy,” and stories featuring puppies will be available to watch, or if you want to watch a Chicago Cubs game, you could type that, too, and story footage from the game will come up. The stories just have to be added to Snapchat’s Our Story group montage to be searchable.
Snapch

Twitter is getting rid of one of the most well-known bits of its visual identity: your default profile photo will no longer be an egg. Instead, it’s now an incredibly drab silhouette, like pretty much every other social network. But there’s a reason for the downgrade. Most notably, Twitter says some people kept the egg because they thought it was fun or cute, instead of uploading a photo that actually showed off something about their identity. Basically, the new photo is so boring p

Twitter users who have resisted uploading a profile picture will start to see a change today as the company is ditching its default egg image in place of something less creative. After seven years, Twitter wants you to be more expressive in your profile, while perhaps subtly reducing the number of people who troll the service anonymously. Long gone is “Larry the Bird,” and in place of the egg is something that appears to be a silhouette of a non-gender specific individual.
Above

If you’ve ever wanted to see Instagram selfies placed on equal footing with Van Gogh, London’s Saatchi Gallery has you covered. The Saatchi Gallery is hosting an exhibit called “From Selfie to Self-Expression” which compares form of self-portraiture across history. Standout names on display are Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Kardashian. Visitors will be able to “like” the old artwork on digital screens in the way they’d like a pic on social media. I’m p

For almost forty years, the default way people interacted with computers was by clicking or selecting a pre-defined input, using either a keyboard or a mouse. But now, in 2017, things are changing. There’s been a renaissance in chatbots, which have evolved from being a ‘toy’, to being used for serious things – like applying for asylum, or appealing parking tickets. At the same time, it’s increasingly common to control computers and mobile devices through voice comm

Twitter announced today that the company is changing the default avatar for new accounts from the infamous multicolored eggs to a new default profile photo that depicted a gray, genderless image of a person with a vaguely gumdrop-shaped head.The change from the colorful eggs to the blander silhouette is an intentional one by Twitter, which noted that the new image is specifically meant to be less interesting and feel more like a placeholder, in an effort to encourage users to customize their pro