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PAX introduces the Era Pro, a smarter vape for cannabis nerds
Vape "mods" are pretty straightforward; they're mostly just batteries. That said, the original PAX Era was actually pretty smart. It can dial in a specific temperature via a companion app (or you can choose a preset temperature without it). There's also control for your dosing so you don't get too high, and there's even a handful of games built-in. With the newly announced Era Pro, things get even smarter. And at $70, it's also a little pricier.
We won't see a 'universal' vape oil cartridge anytime soon
Preloaded cartridges of cannabis concentrate are among the most popular means of consumption, and for good reason. They're discreet to use and easy to handle, a far cry from the dark days of 2016 when we had to dribble hash oil or load wax into narrow-mouthed vape pens by hand. But, frustratingly, an ever-increasing number of oil cartridge manufacturers employ one-off design standards so that their products won't work with those of their competitors, thereby locking customers into proprietary ecosystems.
PAX’s ‘Session Control’ helps you control your vape high
If you partake in cannabis, you've probably overdone it at some point and felt like the walls are closing in. Or instantly forgot what you just said and were suddenly paranoid everyone in the room thinks you're weird? Or put your vape pen down so you can look for your vape pen? If you have puffed your way over that blurry line between pleasantly stoned and low-level anxiety, you'll appreciate the importance of knowing when to stop.
Cannabis is having its 'smartphone' moment
"It's very similar to having a phone; you wouldn't want just one or two apps on it. You'd want to be able to have a wide selection," Bharat Vasan, CEO of PAX, told me in his company's downtown San Francisco office. He's referring to the range of "pods" available for the PAX Era weed vaporizer, likening fewer weed options to only having Instagram or Twitter on a phone.
Brits are paying more for music streaming than ever before
The UK economy might be slowing, but a new report shows that Brits aren't averse to paying for the things they love. The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) revealed today that sales of music, movies and video games reached a record high in 2017, helped mostly by digital services like Spotify, Valve, Netflix, Amazon Sky, Apple and Google.
The UK is getting a combined physical and digital games chart
A combined physical and digital games chart is finally coming to the UK. At the moment, the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) supplies GfK with exclusive data on boxed game sales. GfK's charts are considered the gold standard because of its relationship with the ERA, which counts GAME, Amazon and the nation's top supermarkets among its members. Now, the ERA has announced that its exclusivity deal with GfK will end in January 2019. Around the same time, it will start working with the Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) and data services provider B2Boost on charts that include both physical and digital sales.
The Pax Era aims to be the Keurig of vaporizers
Out of all the ways to ingest THC, oil concentrates are far and away the messiest, stickiest and most irritating method. Unlike shatter, crumble or even wax, all of which maintain their shape and texture to some degree, oils have a knack for getting everywhere. It's especially tricky when you're trying to dribble minuscule amounts of oil into teensy Smurf-size cartridges used by mixed-media vapes (I'm looking at you, DaVinci Ascent). The new Era pen vape from Pax, however, solves that issue by taking a page out of the Keurig playbook and operating on a pod-based system.
Jawbone's second-gen Era headset is 42 percent smaller, comes with its own charging case
Wearables may have been the talk of the town at CES, but given that Jawbone just released the Up24 a month ago, chances were slim it was going to announce another fitness tracker so soon. Instead, then, the company is going back to its roots: It just announced a new version of its Era Bluetooth headset, with a markedly smaller design, a 10-hour battery and a bundled charging case. In particular, the new Era is 42 percent more compact than the last-gen model (see the comparison pic after the break), with a new earpiece that's said to fit more securely. On the audio front, Jawbone moved to tiny MEMS microphones and also overhauled its Noise Assassin noise cancellation technology with support for wider-band audio. You can also use voice commands to order Siri around, assuming you have an iDevice. It's on sale today in four colors starting at $100, though if you want that charging case, you'll need to shell out $130 for the bundle.
Grand Theft Auto 5 tops 2013 entertainment charts in UK
Grand Theft Auto 5 is the top-selling entertainment product in the UK for 2013, driving off with a score of 3.67 million unit sales from retail. Video games held 25 percent of the top 20, with FIFA 14 running third behind the Bond film Skyfall, and Call of Duty: Ghosts in fifth behind The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. FIFA 14 and CoD: Ghosts had 2.65 million and 1.99 million sales, respectively. The other two games that made the UK sales list were Battlefield 4 at spot 15 with 838,869 sales and Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag sailing away with 776,888 sales in the final spot of the Top 20. The list was compiled by UK trade association ERA. MCV points out CoD: Ghosts sales are significantly down from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's 2.7 million UK sales in 2012. FIFA 14's sales in 2013 were actually up by 40,000. It should be reiterated that these are retail sales in the UK, meaning digital distribution sales that would include a behemoth like Minecraft aren't in the mix.
UK game sales down 17% in 2012, digital crosses £1 billion for first time
The UK's Entertainment Retailers' Association has released its final report for 2012, and video game sales in that country are down more than 17 percent. Total entertainment sales, including music and movie sales, are down by about 12 percent. The culprit seems to be physical sales, with video game shares of that category dropping from 73 percent to 65.4 percent, and physical sales overall dropping by about 5 percent.ERA Director General Kim Bayley actually cited the drops as a success for physical media, in that "despite digital's seemingly inexorable growth, the CD, the DVD and the physical games disc show incredible resilience." Bayley added that despite the shrinking numbers, "physical formats still account for three quarters of the entertainment market."On the digital side, sales crossed a record of £1 billion for the first time ever. Digital video game sales rose by 7.7 percent, just slightly less than the overall growth trend in digital. For now, however, digital growth isn't enough to keep the industry at large growing. The ERA says the lack of growth was largely due to a "dearth of attractive releases" last summer, and the organization hopes to "offer the public a much better release slate in 2013."
ZTE's quad-core Era hands-on (updated with video)
ZTE showed up to Barcelona and Mobile World Congress with briefcases overflowing with handsets, we stopped to have a peek at its newest which features a quad-core CPU: the Era. Running the Tegra 3 quad-core processor at 1.3Ghz with an Icera i450 HSPA+ modem, 4.3-inch qHD display, an 8-megapixel camera that'll shoot 1080p video and all that stuffed into a 7.8mm-thin metallic housing. We'd already gotten our mitts on a couple other ZTE sets by the time we ran into the Era, and as far as build quality goes it's head and shoulders above the others. The feel in hand is sort of reminiscent of the Nexus One: outstanding balance and weight. The display quality is bright and crisp and in the short demo we saw, the 3D effects on the home screen are absolutely fluid. We're looking forward to this set, or at least a chance for a little more time to get acquainted. Mat Smith contributed to this report.
ZTE Era flagship phone brings Tegra 3, 4.3-inch qHD display, 7.8mm chassis
We're just about to get hands-on with ZTE's latest high-spec ICS phone, the Era, but in the meantime here's a heads-up on the main credentials. The guts are all NVIDIA, with a Tegra 3 quad-core processor and an Icera HSPA+ modem. The display has 960 x 540 pixels spread over 4.3-inches of real estate, housed in a razor-like 7.8mm-thick (0.31-inch) slab. The 8GB of onboard memory is expandable via microSD, while there's also HD Voice and Dolby sound processing. ZTE will be looking to release the Era in the second half of this year, and says it's counting on the handset to help it become a "top three handset provider by 2015." More big words in the PR after the break.
EVE Evolved: Music to watch the stars by
EVE Online received some big graphical overhauls with the recent Crucible expansion, and every ship will have its graphics iterated on in future patches as part of with the ongoing V3 project. A great deal of time and money is poured into keeping EVE's graphics at the bleeding edge of the industry, and yet the game's music has barely changed since launch in 2003. Warped ambient compositions like Red Glowing Dust gave a feeling of depth and scale to early EVE's empty universe, and the electronic beats of tracks like Below the Asteroids and Merchants, Looters and Ghosts have become iconic sounds of EVE. The music still manages to impress new players, but with so much of EVE being overhauled, I think it's time to give the music another look. Very few game studios pay as much attention to music as to graphics, the user interface, or gameplay, but the right music has the power to completely transform a player's experience. Just like in a movie, music can evoke an emotional response and so alter a person's perception of events. Fighting monsters in a fantasy MMO or shooting down pirates in EVE might not be a terribly epic activity, but throw in some epic music and suddenly it feels a lot more real. I wrote about the psychological effect of music in MMOs several years ago, and the topic is as relevant today as it was then. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at three different types of music that could improve EVE and suggest how CCP could take advantage of each type to give EVE the soundtrack it deserves.
Jawbone Era sticks an accelerometer in your noise-canceling headset, we go hands-on
With a fantastic Bluetooth headset on the market and a pumpin' portable speaker to blast out jams, how could Jawbone improve their product lineup? Well, we still think a stereo headset might be swell... but that's not what the company delivered today. No, this is the Jawbone Era, the world's first Bluetooth earpiece with a built-in accelerometer for motion-sensing apps, and plenty more improvements where that came from. There's a new version of the company's NoiseAssassin noise-canceling algorithms that adjusts inbound volume and equalization to let you hear better, an extra-large 10mm cone speaker with a larger range of frequencies, two processors, more memory, and an hour of extra battery life compared to the Jawbone Icon, to be specific. With only two motions currently recognized -- a double-tap to begin / end / switch calls and a rapid shake to pair -- the accelerometer's a bit of a gimmick for now, but Jawbone suggests more gestures are probably on the way. In the meanwhile, the other advancements might make the Era worth the price of entry -- which is $130, by the by. We've spent about five hours with the headset already, listening to music and taking calls, and while the accelerometer seems almost wasted at present, there's no discounting that new 10mm driver and the audio it can pump out. While no substitute for a set of quality dedicated earbuds, it sounded worlds better than the Jawbone Icon's tiny, tinny drum, and playing Pandora tracks we no longer felt an overpowering desire to take it out of our ear -- making a cyborg existence all the more bearable, we suppose. We'll bring you a full review soon, but if you're already sold, you'll find four different Era designs on sale at Jawbone's online store... oh, right about now. PR after the break. %Gallery-114734%
Breakfast Topic: Your biggest regrets from the Wrath era
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. Despite the fact that most of the WoW-playing population is eagerly looking forward to and enjoying the content that Cataclysm has to offer, there are still many things that one could look back upon from the previous expansion and feel sad about. Whether it was a missed opportunity or perhaps an achievement that didn't quite get accomplished, I think all of us have something that we feel sucks amid all the hubbub over Cataclysm. I myself have quite a few things I miss, now that they are no longer obtainable. While it wasn't from lack of trying, the fact that both the Swift Razzashi Raptor and the Swift Zulian Tiger are not part of my massive mount collection is saddening. Both my friend and I went to try for them on every reset, even sometimes on multiple characters, but to no avail. Hopefully, Blizzard will bring them back in some form, but like the Amani War Bear, it feels a little unrealistic. Second, and while not as tangible as missing a chance at something rare, the fact that I spent the last day before the Shattering doing a long, painful rep grind instead of getting out and enjoying the last vestiges of the old world will forever go down in my gaming career as my biggest Cataclysm regret. As a proud explorer and mystery hunter, I should have been out in the world those last couple of hours before the server reset, grabbing screenshots and visiting familiar faces before they were erased permanently from the landscape I've been enjoying for the past six years. Instead of looking forward, I ask you this: What do you look back upon from your time in Wrath and wish you could have done over? Done differently? What do you most regret now?
UK VHS sales more than double in 2009, Bill Cosby enjoys the attention
The way we see it, unless you're old enough to have taped a world premiere Smiths video off of 120 Minutes (probably "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before") you have no business hoarding VHS tapes. But maybe you are enamored with their many charms: actual tape that gets taut, stretches, or simply loses signal over time, resulting in color bleeds and ghastly images; bulky physical media; cardboard cases that stain and tear quickly and easily. Well, you probably live in the United Kingdom, then! According to a report by that nation's Entertainment Retailers' Association (ERA), while music sales dropped by 0.8 percent in 2009 (the lowest decrease in five years) and all other video fell by 10.6 percent, VHS sales more than doubled, from 44,377 in 2008 to 95,201 last year. Of course, everything is relative -- while PC games, for instance, declined nearly 25% last year, some 6.4 million titles were sold. Even so, this is no small potatoes when you realize that almost all the sales were attributed to Bill Cosby's Razzie Award-winning classic. What do you think, guys? Time for a Leonard Part 7?
