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RIP, 'Pro Evolution Soccer'
I have a mild obsession with FIFA video games, largely because I like playing with official teams and players rather than fictional ones. But, I always gave Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) a chance. Two years ago, I even wrote that Konami's title was actually better than EA Sports', much to the the disbelief of many of my football friends. A big reason I always kept coming back to PES (aside from its more realistic gameplay) was the fact it had licensing rights for the UEFA Champions League (UCL), Europe's most prestigious club tournament. Since 2008, FIFA players have had to make do with a generic version that EA Sports created, which simply wasn't good enough. You need that UCL orchestral theme song and the original trophy to make the competition feel real. But thing will be changing soon, and Pro Evolution Soccer is going to suffer as a result.
Microsoft was right in 2013: This is the always-on generation
Microsoft lost its goddamn mind in 2013. It revealed the Xbox One on May 21st in a livestreamed press conference dedicated to its goals for gaming's long-awaited eighth generation. A lineup of executives in blazers hit the stage, punctuated by Microsoft Studios head Phil Spencer in a professorial sweater set, to extol the virtues of the company's first new console in seven years. With practiced smiles, they broke it down: The Xbox One and the new Kinect would be an all-in-one system providing television, sports and, of course, video games via an improved online ecosystem. The console was more powerful than ever and it would be constantly listening, waiting for the keyword that would turn it on without users having to touch a controller. They didn't address the rumors swirling about the Xbox One's inability to play used games, its strict digital rights management (DRM), or the console's need to be constantly connected to the internet. Players were left wondering if they'd have to upgrade their internet plans, if they'd be able to play games brought over by friends, or whether they would actually own anything they purchased on the Xbox One. Instead of providing answers, Microsoft seemed content to bombard the audience with all of the shiny new TV and sports apps (and, yeah, some video games) coming to the Xbox One.
After Math: It's trade show season
Ah June, the January of summer. With Computex winding down and E3 getting started, the weeks are just going to be packed with new gadgets and forward-looking announcements. Oh yeah, Apple had a keynote this past week as well but since there weren't any hardware announcements, most folks just sorta tuned that one out. Numbers, because it's only 6 months until CES!
Some questions for the guy selling more than 20,000 films for $1 million
Who does this, who has the time? How did eBay seller Adam "kilamad" Malik manage the stunning feat of collecting some 21,000 rare, out of print, 4K, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, DVD, Laserdisc, VHS and Beta films? Is this really all from desperate sods hawking titles to the pawn shop he worked at for 25 years? Did Han shoot first?
The rise of 'Fortnite' means gaming phones might make sense
When ASUS announced the ROG Phone this week, I thought it was ridiculous. A gaming smartphone with a vapor-chamber cooling system? An external fan just in case the phone runs extra hot? As my colleague Dan Cooper said to me following the announcement, how far do you go before you give up and just buy a Switch? But the more I learned about the phone, the more I became enthralled by it. I realized that the very fact that it was so over-the-top is what made it weirdly appealing, especially to an ever-growing niche of hardcore mobile gamers. As strange as it may be, the ROG phone could be the latest sign that gaming phones are finally finding their audience.
Withings returns at a dark time for wearables
Withings, which briefly became Nokia Health, is now Withings again. Nokia bought the health-tracking business in 2016 and rebranded it, hoping to compete with Fitbit and even Apple. Amid a bad wearable-market slump, though, the division foundered. To make things worse for Nokia, it was also having other problems elsewhere, like with its costly Ozo camera. Withings co-founder Eric Carreel just bought the company back (for undisclosed terms) with plans to revive the original name and develop new products. But wearables have struggled to become the must-have gadgets they were once framed as, and without Nokia's resources, Withings will have a tough time.
Alexa’s recording snafu was improbable, but inevitable
Amazon's Alexa recently made headlines for one of the strangest consumer AI mistakes we've ever heard of: A family in Portland, Oregon, claims that the company's virtual assistant recorded a conversation and sent it to a seemingly random person in the husband's contact list. Alexa didn't just make one slip-up -- it made several that, when combined, led to a pretty remarkable breach of privacy. The company's explanation, provided to news outlets yesterday, makes clear just how unlikely this whole situation was:
Google will always do evil
One day in late April or early May, Google removed the phrase "don't be evil" from its code of conduct. After 18 years as the company's motto, those three words and chunks of their accompanying corporate clauses were unceremoniously deleted from the record, save for a solitary, uncontextualized mention in the document's final sentence. Google didn't advertise this change. In fact, the code of conduct states it was last updated April 5th. The "don't be evil" exorcism clearly took place well after that date. Google has chosen to actively distance itself from the uncontroversial, totally accepted tenet of not being evil, and it's doing so in a shady (and therefore completely fitting) way. After nearly two decades of trying to live up to its motto, it looks like Google is ready to face reality. In order for Google to be Google, it has to do evil.
The Ford Fusion Energi hybrid is great but going away
A week before I took delivery of the Ford Fusion Energi (starting at $31,400), the automaker announced it would be ending the US production of all but one of its cars (the Mustang) in the next few years. The Fusion's days are numbered, and no single review would save it. So now what?
I hope Google won’t nag me about my digital wellbeing
We all know someone who could benefit from a digital time-out. You know the type: phone attached to the hand, posture permanently hunched in a looking-down-at-the-screen slouch, plagued with ailments like phantom vibrations and sleep texting. Most of the disruptions I receive each day are things like incessant notifications from Photos telling me I have new selfie collages ready, or Maps asking me to rate the 300 hotels I walk by in New York every day. Google services can be needy as fudge, but like a sucker I get dragged into looking at my phone and clearing out alerts. I can't help myself, and Google isn't helping me either.
Google is weaving itself into the fabric of our lives
This is how Google takes over the world. It won't be with the inception of an all-powerful artificial intelligence application, via the advent of self-driving cars, or through Assistant's steady creep into our everyday lives, though Google will certainly use these tools to dictate our decisions, possibly before we've even made them ourselves. No, Google's plans for world domination are much more subtle than that. It all starts with the beer emoji.
Facebook is trying to close the book on Cambridge Analytica
Mark Zuckerberg is over it. Yes, Facebook allowed the data of more than 80 million users to land in the hands of a partisan political consulting firm during an obscenely contentious presidential election, but that's all in the distant past. You know, like last month.
Ford’s decision to kill most of its cars was inevitable
American drivers have made up their minds. Bigger is most certainly better, and Ford Motor Co. has reacted. This week the automaker announced that over the next few years it would be phasing out all its cars (except for the iconic Mustang) in favor of SUVs, trucks and commercial vehicles (vans) in the United States. Don't @ me about the Focus Active -- it's a crossover, it's not a car. The surprise wasn't that it happened -- the surprise is that it took so long.
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.
Silicon Valley’s scooter scourge is coming to an end
San Francisco is a city where companies frequently like to try out new ideas. Uber had its start here many years ago, as did success stories like Twitter and Airbnb. So it's no surprise that San Francisco happens to be one of many cities experiencing a new form of transportation: sharable electric scooters. They appeared in downtown SF seemingly out of nowhere, taking over sidewalks and pedestrian paths. But what was marketed as a low-cost, eco-friendly way to get around town soon became a public nuisance.
Is Apple’s HomePod failing?
A report from Bloomberg earlier this week claimed that Apple's HomePod isn't doing so well, and that the company cut orders for new hardware from suppliers. This might not shock some of you: Apple missed the all-important holiday buying season and is competing with less expensive hardware from Google, Sonos and Amazon. But is the first smart speaker with Siri already a failure, or does the HomePod simply need time to find its place?
Facebook can’t move fast to fix the things it broke
Facebook's old motto was "move fast and break things," a sort of hacker rallying cry that put product evolution over basically everything else. Realizing that the demands placed on a massive, publicly traded company required a new outlook, Facebook officially changed that motto to "move fast with stable infrastructure" in mid-2014. For all the changes that have occurred within and around Facebook, it's particularly telling that "move fast" is the one part of the company credo that remains untouched: It speaks to the company's endless drive for growth but dodges the notion that speed and thorough thinking don't always go hand in hand. After watching Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg get grilled by committees from both chambers of Congress over the past two days, it seems that Facebook can't move fast enough.
The Zuckerberg hearings were a wasted opportunity
Over the past two days, members of Congress have peppered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with questions about how the platform manages users' privacy, what went wrong with Cambridge Analytica and what it's doing to strengthen protections going forward. These two hearings lasted more than 10 hours combined, and dozens of senators and representatives had a chance to ask questions in five- and four-minute allotments, respectively. Until this week, Congress had tried for years to get Zuckerberg to personally appear on Capitol Hill, instead of, say, dispatching another company executive. It's a shame, then, that the lawmakers ultimately squandered the time they had with him this week.
What Siri can learn from Google Assistant
It's no secret that when it comes to voice assistants, Siri is often cited as one of the worst. Even though Apple introduced it years before Amazon and Google, their digital rivals -- Alexa and Google Assistant -- have since bested Siri in both features and performance. That's mostly because Amazon and Google have spent years pouring millions of dollars worth of research into artificial intelligence, making their assistants smarter and more capable over time.
I can’t wait for laptops with Apple’s own chips
Apple might be ready to ditch Intel's x86 chips in the Mac in favor of a custom-designed piece of silicon. At least that's the story out of Bloomberg, which believes that a transition by Apple to its own CPUs could begin by 2020. It's just a single, as yet unsubstantiated story, but it's already made a dent in Intel's share price, even if Apple is hardly its biggest customer. And yet it's clear that between Intel's recent problems and Apple's successes, it's time that divorce proceedings begin.
