'Pokémon Go' banned in China over public safety concerns

The world's most populous country will not be getting Pokémon Go. 
Apparently, China thinks the game is just too dangerous to allow due to public safety concerns, according to Reuters.
SEE ALSO: 'Pokémon Go' will serve up free goodies on Christmas Day
China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television cites "a high level of responsibility to national security and the safety of people's lives and property" and a "threat to geographical information se

I think this tease is it, but I can’t quite tell. | Image: Asus On June 2nd, Asus will formally announce the ROG Ally X, a semi-sequel to its handheld gaming PC with a way bigger battery. We exclusively revealed the broad strokes last Thursday, but I’ve now touched an early engineering sample, too — and I’m pleased to say it’s far more comfortable to hold.
Asus has made a whole bunch of ergonomic changes that make it practically melt into my hands, in the exact way

The X-T50 kit comes with Fujifilm’s also-new 16-50mm lens. | Image: Fujifilm Fujifilm has just announced a pair of new cameras at the company’s X Summit Sydney event. There’s the medium format GFX100S II, which frankly falls outside my scope of interest (and budget). The more mainstream of the two is the X-T50, which is a followup to — but not a replacement for — the X-T30 II, which will remain in Fujifilm’s lineup moving forward.
The X-T50 is a hodgepodge of

Image: Samsung Samsung heard that Apple managed to upset a lot of people with the “Crush” ad revealed last week that smushed instruments, arcade games, and sculptures into a shiny new OLED-screened iPad Pro, and apparently just had to get into the conversation. Apple eventually apologized, with an exec saying it “missed the mark.”On one side, responses included creatives like Hugh Grant and anyone who spotted a slightly-too-on-the-nose representation of Big Tech’s s

Like its Frame TVs, Samsung’s art-inspired speaker is designed to complement your home decor more naturally. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s art-inspired Frame TV has been a runaway hit over the last several years — so much so that everyone from Amazon to Hisense has begun cribbing some of its more popular features for their latest sets. It came as no surprise, then, that Samsung announced a speaker version during CES 2024. Enter the Samsung Music Frame, which is on sale at Amazon f

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has now added a way to create easily formatted tables in Sheets with one click, something Excel has had for years. Now, if you have a block of data that you’d like to quickly turn into its own little island of filters and sorting rules, that’s fully possible (or will be soon, depending on where you are in Google’s rollout queue). Hooray!
As a person who’s maintained a shared budget spreadsheet in Google Sheets for about a dec

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed two new lawsuits against Amazon on Wednesday, bringing similar complaints to those the company is already facing from the Federal Trade Commission.
Both of the lawsuits are brought under Arizona’s own state statutes in the Superior Court of Arizona. One of the lawsuits accuses Amazon of engaging in deceptive business practices that violate the state’s Consumer Fraud Act by allegedly using design tricks

Image: Google Alongside Google’s ongoing developer-focused I/O conference comes the latest release of Android 15, which is now in its second beta. It’s got some cool new features, like the ability to now hide a collection of apps inside a “private space,” customizable vibrations so you can notice different types of notifications just by feeling, and also richer widget previews.
The new private space function is the most interesting of the bunch: it can hide apps you don&r

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers a speech during an event called Microsoft Build: AI Day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 2nd, 2024. | Photo by MOHD RASFAN / AFP via Getty Images Microsoft’s producing a lot more planet-heating pollution now than it did when it made a bold climate pledge back in 2020. Its greenhouse gas emissions were actually around 30 percent higher in fiscal year 2023, showing how hard it could be for the company to meet climate goals as it simultaneously races to b

Illustration: The Verge AST SpaceMobile has ramped up demonstrations of voice calls, texts, and video calls via satellite over the last year, using 4G LTE and 5G connections with download bandwidth reaching 14Mbps. Now the company says that a previous memorandum of understanding with AT&T to work on a space-based broadband network for phones has become a “definitive commercial agreement,” just in time for AST’s first five commercial satellites to launch this summer.
The FCC

Image: ByoWave On Wednesday, Microsoft announced the Proteus Controller, a $299 modular video game controller kit that lets Xbox gamers with disabilities customize their controllers.Created by peripheral company ByoWave as part of the Designed for Xbox program, the wireless controller consists of small cubes with interchangeable faceplates that include controller buttons, a directional pad, and analog sticks.The “snap and play” parts connect together so gamers can build more than 100

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Netflix’s expansion into an ad-supported model seems to be a hit. Today, at its 2024 upfront presentation, the streamer said that it now has 40 million monthly users on its ad-supported tier globally. That’s up from 23 million earlier in the year; it took six months for the option to hit 5 million users after it launched in 2022. As of April, the service had a total of 270 million subscribers across all tiers. Netflix also said that, in region

Image: Netflix 3 Body Problem is getting a second season. Netflix announced the news that its adaptation of Cixin Liu’s award-winning sci-fi trilogy is getting more episodes, with David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo returning as executive producers and writers.
3 Body Problem follows a group of scientists as they struggle with the realization that humanity isn’t the only species in the universe and that its nearest neighbors are far more technologically advanced and very mea

Screenshot: PPSSPP It’s the PlayStation Portable’s turn to get an emulator on the iOS App Store thanks to PPSSPP, which just went live today. This emulator, from developer Henrik Rydgård, has been in development for more than a decade, and it’s free to download for the iPhone and iPad.
Rydgård says in a blog post that the version approved this morning has some limitations versus previous builds of the app that were available through various exploits and workarounds.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Another emulator with tons of history and development, RetroArch, is now freely available on the iOS App Store today. This is great news for retro gaming fans with iPhones because it can emulate a truly eye-crossing number of retro consoles once installed.
In fact, there are too many to list here. But some notable emulation cores — the actual separately developed emulation software — included in this version of RetroArch are the NEC PC Engine, Nintend

Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images The Senate Rules Committee passed three bills that aim to safeguard elections from deception by artificial intelligence, with just months to go before Election Day. The bills would still need to advance in the House and pass the full Senate to become law, creating a time crunch for rules around election-related deepfakes to take effect before polls open across the country in November.
The vote happened on the same day that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schume

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images For years, autonomous vehicles have operated in relative obscurity. With few vehicles on the road and a laissez-faire attitude among government regulators, automakers and big tech firms have been free to test — and even commercially deploy — with little oversight.Well, those days are done. In rapid succession, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened investigations into almost all the maj

Airbus taking its “Racer” aircraft for a test flight. | Image: Airbus Airbus has a new aircraft that’s half helicopter and half airplane, designed to speed up flight times for emergency responders. The company calls it the Racer: it has wings like a plane, forward-facing rotors, plus top helicopter blades that seriously make it look like a baby of two aircraft.
Today, Airbus is sharing its one-off working demonstration model of the Racer in France’s southern port city of

Wear OS 5 is on the way. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Wear OS 5 is on its way, and with it, Google says Android smartwatch users ought to see even better battery life. Running a marathon, for example, will purportedly consume 20 percent less battery than on Wear OS 4.
This emphasis on battery life is similar to last year’s Wear OS 4 announcement — and for good reason. Wear OS 4 helped the Pixel Watch 2 last an entire day, something the original struggled to do. That improved b

Quilt uses ductless heat pump-powered mini-split units combined with touchscreen remote controls to heat and cool your home. | Image: Quilt (Cayce Clifford) A new company founded by three former Googlers is looking to disrupt the somewhat staid mini-split industry. Quilt is a new “home climate system” — a ductless HVAC system that uses heat pump-powered mini-split units to heat and cool your home.Two things make Quilt stand out from the start: it’s smart and pretty. The s

Image: Ford Google is adding several new apps to its in-car infotainment platforms, while also making it easier for developers to get their apps approved faster and with fewer complications.Google said that two new streaming services, Max and Peacock, are coming to cars with Google built-in. These include models from companies like Nissan, Ford, Acura, Renault, Honda, Polestar, and Volvo.In addition, cars with Google built-in are getting the Angry Birds game, so you can enjoy all the brick smash

Image: Daniel Golson Google is lowering the barriers for new apps to be added to Android Auto and cars with Google software built-in, making it easier for developers of gaming and streaming apps to get them added to those platforms. It is also releasing new guidelines for developing apps for various screen sizes and shapes.Google is launching a new program for car-ready apps, essentially expediting the process for developers to get their apps approved for in-car platforms. As part of this progra