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The Final Fantasy VI pixel remaster is set to arrive soon
Square Enix just needs a little more time to polish the game
Square Enix has spent the last five months trickling out its pixel remasters for the first six Final Fantasy titles. The first three of these repolished classics arrived in July, with the fourth title landing in September, and the fifth was recently launched in November. Well, the only one missing is, of course, the most important title, VI. Up until this week, there was no date for release, but Square Enix recently announced that the fan-favorite RPG needs a little more polish, and it has been kind enough to throw out February as the release date.
Soon you'll be able to add delays to your Google Home routines
A 'Time adjustments' menu has started appearing for some users
Google Assistant's Routines are one of the best ways to automate the smallest tasks in your daily life. Whether it's waking up to a fully illuminated room with the news playing in the background or detailing your list of reminders as soon as you walk through the door at night, Routines can do it all. It seems like Google has some new time controls in the works, as options for adding delays to each command have recently been spotted.
T-Mobile's 3G shutdown is back on schedule for October
Also, Sprint's LTE network now has an end date
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In its bid to keep on the forefront of the 5G race in the United States, T-Mobile hasn't made its plans to kill off its and Sprint's 3G networks exactly loud and clear, but we had a good idea of when the ball would start rolling and when it would finish. Well, that was until the plans apparently changed, before shifting again just a few months later.
Just Cause: Mobile delayed until 2022, possibly to add more crazy explosions
Polish, in a mobile game? Well, I never
Square Enix has announced that it will bring the Just Cause series to Android with the release of a free-to-play shooter titled Just Cause: Mobile. The game is slated for a 2021 release, though it will not be handled by Avalanche Studios (the devs behind the console and PC games) but will instead be developed by a new team led by Square Enix.
Google Play app approvals are suffering severe delays, jeopardizing security and customer retention
Some devs are waiting a month or more
Around this time last year, Google began imposing a more strenuous review process on new apps and updates submitted to the Play Store. For many developers, this was only a minor inconvenience that slowed down publishing by a few hours or days. However, in the months since the COVID-19 pandemic began, a growing number of people have detailed delays of several weeks for new apps and even simple bug fixes.
OnePlus Watch reportedly delayed indefinitely, adding to company's struggles
Carl Pei's gone, CBP is seizing one of its products, now what?
OnePlus has been managing a series of crises in recent times — it has split from Carl Pei, arguably its most influential co-founder, and is facing stiff, price-competitive adversaries against its newest flagship devices. Now, we can add another one to the pile: the OnePlus Watch.
Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed again, now coming December 10
And the developer is offering its humblest of apologies
Well, it's official, Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to Stadia on the same day it will release on every other platform, November 19th. Up until today CD Projekt's official stance was that the game would arrive on Stadia before the year was out even through the studio offered a release date for every other platform, calling into question whether or not the game would arrive on Stadia on the same launch day as PC and consoles. Thankfully CD Projekt has tweeted that the game will arrive on Stadia on the 19th of November, and if you're eager to get your hands on the title, pre-ordering is now available on the Stadia store.
Baldur's Gate 3 lands on Stadia in early access, but you'll have to pay $60 to play
Why pay professional testers when fans will pay you
Larian Studios has revealed during a recent livestream that its upcoming RPG Baldur's Gate III will enter into early access on September 30th on both Stadia and PC (Steam). This livestream was called Panel From Hell and is about an hour and a half long, so goes into excruciating detail of what's to be expected in the first chapter of the planned early access release. So we now know that there will be five playable Origin characters to choose from during early access, such as Astarion (Elf/Vampire Rogue), Gale (Human Wizard), Lae’zel (Githyanki Warrior), Shadowheart (Half-Elf Cleric), and Wyll (Human Warlock).
Google is delaying its mobile-first mandate for search indexing by 6 months in order accommodate webmasters working on other priorities during the coronavirus pandemic. Sites that have not been optimized for browsing on phones and tablets should be revamped by March 2021 lest Google's smartphone bots not include them in results.
It's not just events and product releases being delayed due to the impact of coronavirus. Clearly, human lives are at stake too, but almost as importantly, the emoji are also being affected. The Unicode Consortium has just decided to postpone the release of v14.0 of the Unicode standard for six months, upon which a future round of Emoji is set to be based.
Google Play Store app submission reviews may take 7 days or longer (Update: Google's statement)
Developers should plan accordingly
Google is warning developers that app reviews may take seven days or more as a result of work schedule adjustments at the company. That means new app submissions will see delays, and even some updates might take longer to go through if they happen to trigger a manual review.
Google is delaying the shutdown of its longtime internet protocol chat and call app, Hangouts. G Suite users were originally told that Hangouts would be retired starting in October. Now, the deadline for G Suite customers to move has now been pushed back to "no sooner than June 2020."
The Galaxy Home was announced alongside the Galaxy Note9 back in August of last year, but it's been radio silence for the Bixby smart speaker since then. Samsung's Consumer Electronics CEO now says that the Galaxy Home will be released in the third quarter of this year, meaning it'll have been around a year since its initial debut.
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- It probably only goes to reason that if the manufacturer behind a troubled new product is canceling its own pre-orders, then third-party retailers are likely to follow along. And while it's taken a few weeks to happen, that seems to be exactly what's going on with the Galaxy Fold, as Best Buy has alerted its users that all existing pre-orders have been canceled.
The Galaxy Fold faces an ill-fated start: First praised as the future of mobile computing, test devices sent out to reviewers failed left and right and led the company to postpone the official launch to an unspecified date. Now, Samsung is sending out emails to customers who pre-ordered the phone, telling them there's still no shipping date and that orders are automatically canceled if they don't opt-in to keep their order.
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Bethesda has announced that The Elder Scrolls: Blades will now be released in early 2019. Back in June our own Corbin Davenport went hands-on with the title on the show floor of E3, which is where Todd Howard had teased the original release date of fall 2018. With the current kerfuffle surrounding Bethesda's Fallout 76, it would appear that it's probably not in the best interest of the company to publish a free-to-play game that takes advantage of the fan-favorite Elder Scrolls license, potentially explaining this unexpected delay.
Telltale Games released The Wolf Among Us in 2013, with a handful of ports (including an Android version) arriving the following year. It received positive reviews from critics, and remains one of the company's most beloved titles. Telltale announced a sequel in July of 2017, initially aiming for a late 2018 release date.
[Update: New info on device] Facebook delays smart speaker reveal due to heightened privacy concerns
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- We've learned new details about one of Facebook's forthcoming devices. According to The Information, the device is called Facebook Portal, and it is indeed similar to Amazon's Echo Show and Spot, with a camera for video chat. The Portal uses facial recognition; it was originally planned for the associated data to be stored on Facebook's servers, but after the company's recent troubles, it'll be stored locally. That might be cold comfort to users, since, as senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Jennifer Lynch points out, "they (Facebook) already have one of the largest facial recognition databases in the world."
Facebook has decided to delay the unveiling of a new line of smart speakers "in part because the public is currently so outraged about the social network’s data-privacy practices," sources tell Bloomberg. The home devices were apparently planned to debut at Facebook's developer conference in May, well ahead of their scheduled fall release date.
We've been hearing about Samsung's smartphone with a foldable screen for what seems like an eternity, but it looks like we'll have to wait a little longer to finally see the thing. Flexible screens have been demoed at trade shows for years, but getting them into a production-ready phone is another matter entirely. Samsung had seemed the most likely to make this dream a reality, but it must be as hard to do as it sounds — the project keeps getting put back.
Android co-founder Andy Rubin finally revealed the Essential phone at the end of May, after months of rumors and teasers. The main selling point is the near-bezeless display, but it also has all the other features you would expect from a 2017 flagship. There's a Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage, and a 3,040mAh battery. It also supports modular accessories (much like Moto Mods), starting with a tiny 360-degree camera.