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Corning's Gorilla Glass Victus 2 can better survive drops on sidewalks and roads
Corning's Gorilla Glass is used in a lot of high-end smartphones, and now the company is promising even tougher displays with its latest version, Victus 2
Surface Duo may let you 'peek' at notifications
When it comes to the next generation of folding phones, Microsoft was right to choose dual displays over folding screens. But one thing some other foldable phones have that Microsoft lacks is a screen on the outside of the device. To make up for that, Microsoft appears to have a software feature that will let you preview calls and notifications by opening the Surface Duo just a crack.
iOS 11.3 may break aftermarket iPhone 8 displays
iOS 11.3 brought with it some improvements for your iPhone, including ARKit updates, new battery features, and a new message that informs you when it wants access to personal data. Unfortunately, if you had your iPhone 8 display replaced by an aftermarket part, iOS 11.3 might also stop it from working. According to a post at Motherboard, several users who have third-party displays are reporting that their iPhones are unresponsive to touch after updating to the latest mobile operating system.
Vizio's XLED TVs might make you forget its tracking software
Vizio's pushed a wider range of affordable HDR screens with its recent E-series, which follows the trend of high-resolution 4K televisions getting cheaper and cheaper. So follows the company's SmartCast P- and M-series lines for this year, which offer upper and mid-level TVs at reasonable cost.
Toddlers who use touchscreens sleep less, study says
Toddlers really need their sleep. It's crucial when our brains are first developing, so early problems can ripple across your lifetime. That makes a report by Birbeck University of London researchers somewhat disturbing -- they found that toddlers between six and 11 months who play with smartphones or tablets get slightly less sleep than those who don't. According to the study of 715 parents, every hour of touchscreen use results in 15.6 minutes less sleep, or 26.4 minutes less total per night and 10.8 minutes more during the day, on average.
The Skreens app puts all of your HDMI signals on one display
Skreens showed off its newly patented media device at CES Showstoppers. The self-titled gadget allows users to spread the video content from up to four HDMI inputs across a single display. The system utilizes a hardware component, shown above, that sits between the HDMI devices and the monitor, and an associated mobile app that controls how the inputs are displayed. Users can resize, reorder and rearrange the incoming signals as they see fit—even run a single input in full-screen with the other inputs overlaid semi-transparently. SImilarly, users can pick and choose which audio input they want to pay attention to.
LG's TV future is filled with weird shapes and big screens
I really, really wanted to roll an OLED TV up and carry it under my arm. But while LG Display has teased the idea of a very flexible OLED display for a few years, it's never really let the public get close. This year, I got to see it. But not roll it or bend it, or even touch a working one. Which ruined my CES (a little). (Update: we saw it!) After shrugging at a static "no touching" rolled-up screen, LG Display (note: a separate company from LG Electronics) ushered me into a room filled with brightly colored surfaces and gentle curves. Oh, and forests, dew-splashed flowers, long-haired European women and time-lapse city landscapes. (It's a TV showroom—and that's the scintillating content continually repeated on them.) I did see giant TVs the thickness of a few dimes, double-sided OLED HDTVs and a wraparound 65-inch UHD TV running a gaming demo that would give me post-traumatic stress disorder after prolonged exposure. Let's tour the (maybe) future:
LG unveils next year's monitors and laptops ahead of CES
LG announced three classes of products on Tuesday that it will be showcasing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. First up, LG announced a trio of new models for its 21:9 UltraWide line of monitors. They'll all sport 3440- x 1440-pixel screens and ThunderBolt 2 connectors. The The UC98 and UC88 models both feature curved screens, while the UM88 will not.
Don't blame your phone for a poor sleep schedule, study finds
You've probably read an article or two about the negative effects of staring at a screen before going to bed (hell, you've probably read one of them while in bed). But, a study recently published in Current Biology finds that we may be blaming our illuminated robots for no reason. Poor robots. Many "screens are bad for sleep" stories carry the assumption that before electricity, smartphones and laptops, people slept longer -- but it's difficult to pin down how long our ancestors spent in dream-land, The Economist says. To tackle this issue, two researchers observed three groups living pre-industrial lives: the Hadza of northern Tanzania, the Ju/'hoansi San of South Africa's Kalahari Desert and the Tsimané in Bolivia. After 1,165 days collecting data, researchers found the average sleep time among these groups was 6.5 hours a night. In industrial societies, the average is 7.5 hours per night, The Economist writes. So, scroll away, sleepy readers. Until the next study, at least. [Image credit: Alamy]
Tale of Tales' Sunset rises with first screens
Tale of Tales' upcoming narrative-driven game Sunset received its first official set of screenshots today. Announced in March 2014, the exploration game stars Angela Burnes, a housekeeper of a secluded philanthropist, set in a lone 1970's apartment. The Path and Fatale developer noted that the screens are "still work in progress and even though they do not represent the final beauty of the game, they say a lot about what is going to make the penthouse a spectacular environment to explore." Players will scope out the apartment to learn more about Burnes' employer when the game arrives this spring on PC, Mac and Linux. As seen in the gallery below, Tale of Tales said it "pushed the colour scheme to its saturation point with the tones of the evening sky, chic lighting from designer lamps and dramatic shadows" to make the game "feel real," yet stylized. Sunset earned $67,636 on Kickstarter in July and will feature a soundtrack from Journey's Grammy-nominated composer, Austin Wintory. The developer discussed the ways it is "trying something different" with Joystiq following its funding campaign. [Image: Tale of Tales]
Sapphire phone displays are tough, but the realities are even tougher
Sapphire is the birthstone of September, the traditional gift on your 45th wedding anniversary and a material associated with both luxury and ruggedness. It can be found in opulent products like jewelry, camera lenses and fancy watches. Given that, it's also one of the toughest materials in the world, which makes it ideal for military-grade items like aviation displays and even missiles. So when rumors emerged that a sapphire display may be featured on the next iPhone, a chorus of excitement followed. However, many phone manufacturers don't share the same sense of optimism that Apple might hold toward this different kind of next-gen display.
The Daily Grind: Are you a screenshot hoarder?
I hoard screenshots. Not just MMO screenshots, but single-player screenshots, alpha and beta screenshots, hell I have screenshot folders for things that aren't games. Some time ago I even spent a couple hundred bucks on a console capture device. Not for the 1080p video capture or streaming possibilities, although those are neat too. Oh no, I bought this thing solely because I wanted to get screenshots from all my console games. This obsession is especially bizarre because outside of the need for a particular image on a Massively article, I hardly ever look at all these screenshots. Anyway, what about you, Massively readers? Do you hoard MMO screenshots, video, or other mementos from your virtual travels? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
N++ PS4 screens are fit to print
Metanet Co-Founder Mare Sheppard discussed N++'s visual inspirations on the PlayStation Blog recently. Sheppard said the game drew its clean, bold look from print-based graphic design, as seen in new next-gen screenshots of the twitchy platformer. N++ is due to launch on PS4 this year.
Tales from the Borderlands gets first screens, debuts this summer
Tales from the Borderlands is dressed to kill in its first screens, which aptly showcase Telltale's dialog choices alongside Gearbox's penchant for violence. The upcoming collaboration stars data-miner Rhys and con-artist Fiona as the two playable characters, Of course, some familiar faces from the Borderlands series show up, including mysterious Borderlands 2 assassin Zer0. Telltale says its wasteland adventure is "premiering" in the summer, although we're still waiting to find out which systems are on the red carpet. There's a clue that some form of Xbox is on the guest list, and we're guessing it's most likely the original Xbox. [Image: Telltale Games]
Latest Batman: Arkham Knight screens show the dark knight's new villain
Batman and Commissioner Gordon were recently on display in these totally-not-brooding screens for Batman: Arkham Knight. One of the characters showcased in the screens is Rocksteady's new arch-villain, appropriately dubbed "Arkham Knight." The PS4, Xbox One and PC game will arrive later this year.
Two-button slugger RBI Baseball 14 goes retro with unlockable jerseys
In 1986, Namco launched RBI Baseball for the NES (Famcom in Japan), and it grew into a household name before Time Warner Interactive's RBI Baseball 95, the heretofore last game in the series. Now, the MLB will publish RBI Baseball 14 on April 10, and MLBAM Vice President of Games Jaime Leece expects the game will remain faithful to the treasured series. Much like those classic games, the developer created three body types and preset batting stances for those character models as opposed to painstakingly differentiating every batter. And while NES games in the late 1980s were naturally restricted to two face buttons and a d-pad, Leece's team intentionally opted for two-button controls for the modern take on the baseball game. Leece believes that these decisions immediately separate the game from other sports games in the genre. "When you take away the barrier of control, it leaves the competition pure," Leece told Joystiq. "It's you against me, it's not your dexterity versus my dexterity. Having to deal with button combinations and things like that creates an extra challenge that's, I think unnecessary and certainly gets in the way of the enjoyment of the product itself."
Get up close and personal with these new EA Sports UFC screens
EA Sports recently added a few names to the EA Sports UFC roster, joined by some in-game shots of fighters from the neck up. The fighters playable in the game and seen in the included gallery are former light heavyweight champ Forrest Griffin, "The Korean Zombie" Chan Sung Jung, Costas Philippou, Minotauro Nogueira, Demetrious Johnson, Rashad Evans and Chael Sonnen. Those fighters join the likes of co-cover athletes Jon "Bones" Jones and Alexander Gustafsson, Georges St-Pierre as well as female fighters Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate, who were confirmed for the game in September. Certainly, athletes included in the 16-person cover fighter vote that began in November will be in the game as well, such as Chris Weidman, Dominick Cruz, Junior Dos Santos and Urijah Faber. The screens are meant to show the details of each athlete's likeness, but we just can't stop staring at Griffin's puffy cauliflower ears. Don't you want to poke at them? Boy, we sure do. EA Sports UFC will head to Xbox One and PS4 this spring.
NBA Live 14 getting its own card-based Ultimate Team mode
EA recently announced that NBA Live 14 will receive an Ultimate Team mode of its own. Similar to the popular, money-making Ultimate Team modes found in other EA Sports series like Madden and FIFA, NBA Live 14 Ultimate Team has players collecting trading cards that constitute items like basketball players, jerseys and arenas by opening card packs. Card packs can be purchased with real money or coins earned by completing matches with your cobbled-together group of current and former basketball stars. The two avenues to compete with your team are online in games versus other players' teams as well as Fantasy Showdowns, or special offline challenges that will continually be added by EA Sports throughout the NBA season. Challenges include pitting your team against last season's stats leaders, the top players from NBA draft classes over the last two decades, real NBA line-ups and more. Fantasy Showdown challenges may also reward players with card packs instead of coins. NBA Live 14 is slated to launch November 19 on Xbox One and PS4.
Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures chomps North America this fall
Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures will launch this fall on PS3, Wii U and Xbox 360, with a special side-scrolling version coming to 3DS, Namco Bandai announced. The game takes inspiration from the TV show of the same name, which is slated to begin airing June 17 on Disney XD. Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures features the iconic yellow character in a 3D adventure game in which he turns into a chameleon at some point, using his tongue to reel in ghosts. In the game's announcement trailer, Pac-Man also eats entire vending machines. Healthy choices, kids! %Gallery-188309%
New Time and Eternity screens are getting married
NIS America's PS3 role-playing game Time and Eternity got some flashy new screens, which show main characters Toki and an unnamed knight from the kingdom of Kamza getting married. What the screens don't show is the interruption of the wedding by a band of assassins, setting the stage for the rest of the adventure. Don't you just hate when that happens? The game features turn-based battles that offer players the chance to control their characters to dodge attacks. Also, players can switch Toki's personality to her more aggressive counterpart, Towa, throughout the game. This knight probably should have known about that before tying the knot. Time and Eternity is coming to PS3 this summer. %Gallery-187562%
