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Samsung tries to lure iPhone users with a web-based demo of Android
"If you owned one of our phones, you'd be playing Fortnite right now!"
The very first time I ever used Android, it was loaded up as a live bootable partition on a MicroSD card shoved into my HTC Fuze. I'm sure the Windows Mobile installation on the phone's internal storage felt very jealous, because the rest is history. Samsung is hoping for something similar with its latest project: an interactive, web-based demonstration of Android made specifically for iPhone users.
This speaker privately beams sound to your ears, like you're wearing invisible headphones
But it'll spend another year or so in R&D before you'll be able to buy it
Sound beaming isn't a new concept, but it's an appealing one for people who don't want to put on headphones to hear audio from highly targeted speakers. It's been implemented in extremely limited commercial and industrial scenarios, but has yet to make any meaningful consumer impact. Israeli tech firm Noveto is ready to pounce, though, beginning a tour of demonstrations before sending its SoundBeamer 1.0 to market next year.
Stadia offers a free Humankind demo and announces ARK: Survival Evolved support
Additionally, Orcs Must Die! 3 gains Stream Connect support and gets its first expansion
Stadia is on a three-day roll right now: Following yesterday's free Pac-Man demo announcement, the game streaming service today has shared information on the next free demo coming to anyone with a Google account — Humankind. It has also announced that the first Orcs Must Die! 3 expansion pack and ARK: Survival Evolved are coming to the platform.
Pokémon will soon be able to hide behind real-world objects in Pokémon GO
The feature will be tested with a random selection of gamers in June
Pokémon GO might not be as popular as it used to be, especially amid a pandemic that has many of us staying home as much as we can, but the company behind it is nevertheless working on improving the game. As such, Niantic has announced that it will start testing reality blending next month, which will allow Pokémon to hide behind real-world objects that block your view, just as though they were real.
Stadia launched in what what most would consider a very unfinished state, missing many plenty of the announced features like family sharing and broadcasting, or with very rushed and incomplete features like screenshots or a game store. Shopping for games initially required the smartphone app, but the store launched on the web last week, opening the door to a more convenient shopping experience. It also reveals a bit more about some of the marketing and categorization we'll see as the Stadia catalog fills out.
With Pixel 4 units in hundreds of hands, we've seen divisive reports about its new Soli radar technology and Motion Sense. Our own Ryne and Scott say it works more or less for them, but they fail to see its utility just yet, while Marques Brownlee showed how unreliable it is for him (YouTube). Here's an unexpected opinion though: Artem loves it and it works very well for him.
An annoying but understandable quirk about the current state of most augmented reality applications is that virtual items imposed on an AR view don't relate to the world in a believable way: they just sit on top of a scene, regardless of whether or not real-world objects should appear in front of them. "Pokémon Go" developer Niantic showed off its impressive solution to this problem today in what it's calling Codename: Niantic Occlusion — using of course, Pokémon.
The yearly E3 expo is always a major event for video games, but smartphone games are rarely showcased. Even Fortnite, one of the most popular smartphone games in existence at the moment, only had playable demos of the home console versions. Earlier this week, Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls: Blades for iPhone and Android, and it showed off the game to E3 attendees.
For anyone tempted by the Samsung Galaxy S9 or S9+ who wants to learn more about what it can do, there's an app for that. The Experience app for Galaxy S9/S9+ does exactly what the name suggests. It can be downloaded on most Android phones (Marshmallow 6.0 and up) and it gives you a sense of what it would be like to own Samsung's latest flagship.
When you think of the US Postal Service, I doubt that the first thing to spring to your mind is "whitewater kayaking." They're more known for shipping (and losing) mail and packages in the US. Well, for whatever reason, the USPS has an app titled "USPS® VR," and instead of an immersive mail-tracking experience (or even a tech demo for, say, the exciting technology behind mail sorting), you get a kayaking trip.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got a complex battleship defense game, a mobile runner tie-in for a Steam title, an adventure game in the Warhammer 40K universe, a unique twitch game, and a demo for a stylish puzzler. Without further ado:
Last year, Google released an open-source web project called Topeka. The project demoed the power of Polymer and material design on the web, and aimed to give developers some direction on how to execute material design in their own projects.
Google Search is a really handy feature, but are you using its voice features to the fullest? Probably not, unless you're Jean-Louis Nguyen. This YouTube user posted a video last year showing off everything Google Voice Search was capable of, but that was early on. Google Search has evolved a lot in the past year, and Nguyen got in touch to let us know there's a new demo video. It's over 10 minutes of voice search queries, many of which you probably didn't know were possible.
Most Android keyboards have gotten pretty good at figuring out what word you're trying to type. Anyone that lives with SwiftKey day-to-day can certainly attest to that. But is the suggestion bar really putting that data to use? The folks behind Dynamic Keyboard have a different approach. This keyboard, set to launch on September 14th, alters the size of keys it believes you are more likely to tap.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got an unfashionably late Batman game, a giddy throwback to beat-em-ups of yore, a 2D top-down shooter (minus the shooting), and a couple of free demos for Kairosoft's pixelated favorites. Without further ado:
The hype surrounding the concept of Google's much-talked-about Project Glass may have hit its first peak during last year's Google I/O conference when stuntmen jumped out of a plane wearing the device, but the demonstration left many people wanting an explanation of what else Glass can do besides first-person photo/video recording.
Yesterday, we got an eyeful of NVIDIA's new Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i, along with the Phoenix, NVIDIA's nifty reference device. The benchmarks were quite impressive compared to current-generation processors, but all we got to see in terms of gaming performance was a brief demo of Real Boxing.
I've been waiting for an Android game that gets touchscreen real-time strategy right for a long time. And I think I may have found it in Desert Stormfront, just posted to the Google Play Store by "Age of Conquest" developer Noble Master Games. It's an old-school, sprite-based strategy game in the vein of Command & Conquer or Age of Empires.