Month: May 2019

Sony suggested it’s exploring PlayStation 5 cross-gen play with PlayStation 4 thanks to backward compatibility in its next-generation console. During a Sony Investor Relations Day 2019 Q&A session, PlayStation heads indicated PS5 could include cross-gen play with PS4 players through the PS5’s backward compatibility features, suggesting people playing PS4 games on their PS5 would still be able to play online with others who are using a PS4, or potentially even play cross-gen titles across these systems.

Deputy president of Sony Interactive Entertainment John Kodera said through a translator, “Having compatibility is a positive thing. Not only can a game be played on the next-generation console, cross-generation – the community can enjoy the games together… bridging that compatibility has a very important role to play.”

Prior to this quote, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Jim Ryan commented on PS5’s backward compatibility, saying “Backwards compatibility in a networked era is something that’s incredibly powerful. The gaming community is somewhat tribal in its nature, backwards compatibility gives us the opportunity to migrate that community from PlayStation 4 to next-gen, using the ability to play the PS4 games that they have on their next-generation console [with] groups of 10, 20, 50 gamers. We see this, given the size of the community that we’ve been able to accumulate over all these years on PS4, as a really critical success factor for us – we think it’s really important.”

Prior to this Q&A, a video of Sony’s next-gen console performance was demonstrated, showing its loading times in comparison to the PS4’s. This video spurred a lot of fan questions about the PS5, including price, its utilization of an SSD, and more.

Steam has mainly been a gaming marketplace for PC games over the years, but Valve appears to be doubling down on the platform’s social aspects with its newly launched Steam Chat messaging app for Android and iOS.

While Steam Mobile has let users manage their accounts and send messages from their smartphones for years, Steam Chat splits the platform’s messaging service off into its own dedicated app. Steam Mobile isn’t going away, though; both apps will exist simultaneously, with Steam Chat dedicated to communication and Steam Mobile covering other parts of the service—such as purchasing games, initiating remote downloads, and Steam Guard account security.

Here’s the full list of Steam Chat’s features at launch, according to Valve’s official blog post announcing the app:

Friends List: See who’s in-game or online at a glance. Never miss an opportunity to play.

Rich Chat: Your chats get even better with higher fidelity links, videos, tweets, GIFs, Giphy, Steam emoticons, and more.

Invite Links: Add new friends on Steam with a link. Generate an invite link you can text or email.

Customizable Notifications: Mobile notifications mean you’ll never miss a message or game invite. You can customize your notifications per friend, group chat, and chat channel.

Group Chats: Get everyone on the same page. Groups make it easier to do things like stay in touch with your communities and organize game night with your best friends.

Some of Steam’s desktop features for chatting aren’t present on Steam Chat at launch, like voice chat, but Valve confirmed in its blog post these will be added soon.

Steam Chat seems to be aimed primarily at existing Steam users—and PC gamers more broadly—but the app’s features are reminiscent of many other messaging services on smartphones. Not surprisingly, Steam Chat includes similar capabilities as the mobile app for one of Steam’s upstart competitors, Discord. By splitting Steam’s messaging features into its own app, Valve appears to be looking to widen the service’s appeal. After all, you can create a Discord server for any topic right now; why not a Steam group?

After downloading and installing the app, you’ll need to sign in with your Steam account (or create a new one) and verify the device via a confirmation code sent to your email. Once you’re signed in, you’ll be able to message your Steam friends while not at your PC, and without needing the core Steam app installed.

If you wind up giving the new app a shot, Valve is interested in getting user feedback through the Steam Chat app’s official Steam community page. So far, feedback from Steam users appears… well, “mixed” would be putting it nicely. Here are a few snippets from the comments of Steam’s announcement:

Manatee-Nyan! ♥ Lamppost: “Please merge this with the regular Steam app, there’s no reason to have 2 separate apps. It’s annoying an inconvenient.”

Mairo 🐻🎧: “Could you please then at least update Steam guard to use some goddamn regular 2FA system so I can just use something like authy, delete all steam apps from my phone. The proper steam app has been broken for years with zero updates and nobody even uses chat anymore, because every time I get chat message I have to find who messaged me first as app doesn’t tell me.”

Voldiemert: “Discord wins with group chat, especially on mobile. I have no idea why time was put into this. I’d much prefer to see the Steam App updated. It’s a pain in the♥♥♥♥♥browsing the store, buying a game, and trying to install the game remotely.”

m4x7us: “FINALLY”

Hallo ich bin Grünspan: “How about some END TO END ENCRYPTION ALREADY instead of letting Steam read and analyze all our texts? Also how hard can it be to add some sort of chat history function that saves the entirety of all your chats to a text file or whatever?”

It’ll kick off its annual developer conference with a presentation by CEO Tim Cook and other execs at 10 a.m. PT.

Apple on Wednesday sent invitations to members of the media for its annual keynote address at its Worldwide Developers Conference. The WWDC 2019 presentation will take place at 10 a.m. PT on Monday, June 3 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California.

The confab is in its 30th year, and this will mark the third year for Apple to hold its developer conference in San Jose. The city — the third biggest in California and 10th largest in the US — is about 50 miles south of San Francisco and only about 10 miles from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.`

WWDC is known as the event at which Apple details the newest software that will hit its devices later in the year. The company may be best known for its hardware, but the seamless integration of its hardware with its software is what sets Apple apart from rivals. Apple’s ability to control every aspect of its products — something that began when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the company in 1976 — has been key in making it the most powerful company in tech.

The event comes as software and services are taking on even greater importance for Apple. The company still sells millions of iPhones every quarter, but sales aren’t soaring like they used to. People are holding onto their devices for longer, which makes it important to give them services that get them paying monthly. Apple has made augmented reality, mobile payments, streaming music and other areas key focuses over the past couple of years.

Smart home assistants need smarter timers. Today, you can use Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri to set timers. You can use all three smart assistants to control your smart home gadgets. But frustratingly, you cannot use the two features together: setting your lights to arbitrarily turn off in 30 minutes is impossible with today’s most sophisticated, cutting-edge smart home technology.

Now, you could use a pre-programmed routine, but that’s not the same thing. You can set your lights to go on when a motion detector goes off, have your motorized shades close at sunset, or have your air conditioner turn on at exactly 12:53PM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But with all three smart home platforms, you need to set up those routines in advance — they’re not the sort of thing you can just attach to a timer.

More importantly, they’re not the sort of thing you can actually do with voice commands — you have to go into a companion app and configure them, which means knowing beforehand exactly what you want to turn on and off and when you want it to happen. And if you have to go into an app to use a voice assistant properly, something in that process isn’t working right.

As far as I can tell, there’s no technical reason that all of these systems don’t allow this, and yet, you just can’t do it. And yes, natural language processing is incredibly complicated, but I don’t think that’s the issue: the smart assistants themselves explicitly say that the software doesn’t allow it. Siri, for example, gives a response letting you know that it can’t schedule commands. That means that someone at Apple was aware that a user might want to do this, and then specifically coded in a response to say that you can’t. The issue doesn’t seem to be one of comprehension.

Furthermore, you can set a timer like this for part of one function: all three companies offer a sleep timer specifically for listening to music, ostensibly for when you’re falling asleep. But the net result is that you can ask Alexa or Siri to play music or audio playback to a timer, and shut it off when that timer ends. It’s great! I wish I could do it with my lights, my TV, my fan, my air conditioner, and every other gadget plugged into my smart home setup, too.

Sleep timers aren’t new technology, either. Home appliances like TVs and air conditioners have had them for decades, which leads to some weird setups. For example, at home, I have an AC unit hooked up to a smart plug. The Wi-Fi-connected plug can turn the AC on or off from anywhere in the world, but it’s not smart enough to understand the idea of “run for two hours and then turn off.” The IR remote that came with the unit does it just fine, though, assuming I can find it.

None of this is the end of the world: I can remember most of the time to turn off my lights, or deal with the occasional annoyance of waking up to realize that the AC is still running and that my room is an ice box. But it’s yet another example of how for all their intelligence, smart assistants still can often fall short in the small ways when it comes to actually fitting into our lives.

Apple this week began stocking a new 4K 23.7-inch LG UltraFine Display, which replaces the original 21.5-inch 4K LG UltraFine Display that was pulled from retail stores and the online Apple Store earlier this year.

We picked up one of the new 23.7-inch UltraFine Displays and thought we’d check it out to see if it’s worth the $700 price point.

The new 4K display looks quite similar to the prior-generation 4K and 5K UltraFine displays with a black plastic body with relatively thick bezels and a black aluminum stand. Like prior models, it can be VESA mounted if you prefer.

It’s larger than the original 4K UltraFine display as it measures in at 23.7 inches instead of 21.5 inches, but it features a 3840 x 2160 resolution rather than a 4096 x 2304 resolution like the first model. That’s still considered Ultra HD, though, and qualifies as 4K.

Though this display has a 4K resolution, it’s not meant to be used at the full 3840 x 1260 resolution given its 23.7-inch display size because everything on the display would be super small. Instead, it’s meant to provide retina clarity when downscaled to a more reasonable resolution like 1920 x 1080 or 2560 x 1440, which is what we have it set to.

Along with the larger display size, the new UltraFine Display features two Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of a single Thunderbolt 3 port, which means you can daisy chain two of these monitors together. We didn’t have a second on hand, but used daisy chaining with a different 4K LG display, which worked well.

You can also connect other Thunderbolt 3-enabled accessories directly to the display if preferred, and there are also three additional USB-C ports. Both a Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C cable are included. There’s no webcam, but there are built-in stereo speakers available, much like the prior version of the LG UltraFine displays available from Apple.

The display is crisp and vivid, rivaling the Retina display on Apple’s Macs, and we liked the high gloss finish despite the fact that it tends to add more glare. With 500 nits brightness, it’s fairly bright, and because it has P3 wide color support, all the colors are rich and true to life.

All in all, we came away with a positive impression of this display. Since you can daisy chain two of them together, it might be nice to have two of them if you can given the smaller size and the $700 price point, which is half of the price of the 5K UltraFine display.

With the 4K LG UltraFine Display having been replaced, Apple may also have a replacement for the 5K UltraFine monitor on the horizon. The 5K monitor is sold out on Apple’s site right now, though the listing for it hasn’t been removed entirely.

Apple is also planning to get back into displays with rumors suggesting a 31.6-inch 6K display is in the works and set to be released alongside a new Mac Pro that’s coming this year. Unfortunately, Apple’s 6K display is rumored to be super pricey, so it may be out of range for a lot of Mac users who will instead need to rely on other options like the UltraFine displays from LG.