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Sonos sues Google for infringing on five more speaker patents
Sonos is suing Google for allegedly infringing five more of its speaker patents.
Windows 10 now includes anti-cheat protection for games
Windows 10's Fall Creators Update is full of changes, but one of the understated additions could make a big difference if you're a gamer. Microsoft has switched on its previously teased TruePlay feature, which promises to protect against "common" cheats in Universal Windows Platform games. Titles that take advantage of the safeguard will both run in a protected mode and trigger a background service that watches for typical cheating behavior. If they find anything amiss, they'll send data to the developer. You can switch off TruePlay if you're nervous about Windows transmitting your data, but companies can limit what you're allowed to do (playing online, for example) if you don't have it enabled.
Sonos' automatic speaker tuning feature is available today
Sonos' new automatic tuning feature Trueplay is rolling out to the masses. The software addition adjusts the strength of various frequencies in order to compensate for a room's poor acoustics or an ill-placed speaker. The idea is that Sonos speakers should output undistorted music no matter where you put your them. Trueplay has been in private beta since October, but today is the day that it's widely available to anyone with a compatible Sonos speaker.
A software trick will make your Sonos sound better than ever
If you're feeling envious of Sonos' new flagship speaker, the company has some good news in the form of Trueplay. It's a new feature coming to the Sonos iOS app that will make your old speakers sound better through calibration, and it works really well. When the update comes to the app, you'll be asked to run through the setup in order to better tune your speakers. The process is simple. You'll be asked to wander around your room keeping your iPhone or iPad vertical while waving it slowly up and down. At the same time, all the speakers in your room will be outputting some odd sounds, perhaps best described as what I thought a space battle would sound like when I was 5. The microphones in your device will pick up all these pew pews, and then the software analyzes what frequencies are being distorted by your furniture.
Why Sonos thinks you're ready for a $500 speaker in your home
Sonos faces a unique challenge on the eve of launching the most important products it has developed in years. The company's mission statement is simple to sum up: It wants to make it easy to listen to high-quality music anywhere in your home. And it believes its new products, the flagship Play:5 speaker and new software called Trueplay, move that goal forward. But there's one part of that mission -- "in the home" -- that speaks to perhaps the toughest problem facing the company: How do you convince people who've grown up listening to music with their iconic iPod headphones to spend hundreds of dollars on an expensive home audio setup?
