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CTIA Wireless 2012 wrap-up
Oh, how we will miss New Orleans. It's been a long and busy week in the Big Easy as tens of thousands of calories were sacrificed in the name of bringing you the most comprehensive coverage of CTIA's annual spring show. Not that we mind -- we love doing it, and it's easy justification for the dozens of beignets we downed during our stay. The event was a tad on the quiet side this year (no companies announced any buyouts, for starters) we still kept ourselves more than adequately busy sticking our noses in every nook and cranny of the show floor. After the break, feast upon our entire scope of coverage, in case you missed it the first time around.
E3 2011 wrap-up: Wii U, PS Vita, and a whole lot of motion gaming
This year's Electronics Entertainment Expo was pretty amazing, featuring plenty of fresh new hardware and some... innovative titles for serious consoles. Sony renamed its NGP to PlayStation Vita, while Nintendo unveiled its Wii successor, designated only by an extra vowel: U. Despite the (now even more) goofy name, the Wii U stole the show, its 6.2-inch touchscreen controller opening the door to a world of potentially awesome games -- and to what will surely be a whole new generation of shovelware. The show may be over, but the our coverage still burns -- just like our hearts after one last night at Daikokuya. Liveblogs Microsoft Sony Nintendo Major announcements Microsoft's new Xbox 360 UI has Bing voice search across Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and live TV Sony introduces PlayStation-brand 3D monitor and 3D glasses, bundle available for $499 Sony's PlayStation Vita official: $249 for WiFi, $299 for 3G The Wii U, Nintendo's next console The Wii U controller, revealed! Impressions Sony's PlayStation Vita: first hands-on impressions Nintendo Wii U controller, first hands-on! Kinect Star Wars hands-on: Engadget and Joystiq get in touch with the Force Hyperkin SupaBoy portable SNES console hands-on Minecraft Pocket Edition on Xperia Play hands-on Forza Motorsport CSR and CSR Elite wheel and pedals hands-on Xbox 360 Wireless Speed Wheel hands-on But that's only the beginning! Be sure to check out our E3 2011 event page for the full suite of news.
Sony S1 and S2 dual-screen Honeycomb tablets get official (video)
Sony's hosting a press event in Tokyo today where it just made the first announcement: a pair of Android 3.0 tablets -- yes, the very two Honeycomb slabs we told you about exclusively back in February. The first is the Qriocity-focused 9.4-inch S1 media tablet with both front- and rear-facing cameras and a curved wrap design that resembles a folded magazine. The S1 features a Tegra 2 SoC and customized "Quick and Smooth" touch panel UI with "Swift" web browser. It can also be used as a remote control for Sony gear thanks to integrated infrared. The second tablet is the dual-screen S2 clamshell with its pair of 5.5-inch 1,024 x 480 pixel displays, Tegra 2 SoC, and camera. While it sounds bulky, Kunimasa Suzuki just pulled the hinged tablet from his jacket pocket on stage. Sony takes advantage of the two screens with a custom book-style UI layout for its e-reader app, split keyboard and messaging displays for email, and split display and game controllers for PS One gaming. Both the S1 and S2 are PlayStation Certified, support DLNA, and are WiFi and 3G/4G "compatible" according to Sony. See the Sony tablets codenamed "S1" and "S2" in action after the break on their way to a global release in the fall -- possibly sooner in the US. P.S. While the company isn't ready to talk prices yet, our sources told us back in February that Sony was considering a $599 MSRP on the S1 while the S2 would likely come in at $699. Still no word on the Windows 7 slider but with the other two leaks official, it's now only a matter of time. %Gallery-122248% %Gallery-122251% %Gallery-122257%
Vuzix Wrap 920AR dev bundle available 'nowish' with clear AR glasses 18 months away
When we got our hands on the Vuzix Wrap 920AR at CES we saw a promising piece of gear without too many practical applications. And where do things stand, nearly a year later? Available now (aside from a "30 to 45 day delay" on all orders) the headset is strictly developers only. According to Pocket-lint, the company is only eighteen months away from clear AR glasses with heads-up displays -- and, believe us, we'd love to see that -- but in the meantime, your hard earned $2,000 will get you the glasses, a Vuzix VR Manager license, and access to the Vuzix SDK. So, who's going to be the first to pitch us a system for Augmented Reality comment moderation? We'd love to some new and novel ways to "downrank" a few of our favorite commenters, if you get our drift.
Vuzix Wrap Fashion Shades, now in four colors
Let's just say that things are really starting to heat up in the video eyewear arena. Vuzix, makers of the well-known Wrap line of video display eyewear, have busted out snap on colors -- red, blue, amber, and mirror - to make the Wraps you already have even more awesome looking. You can grab them up for $19.99 each or get the whole set for $49.95. Full press release is below.
Vuzix Wrap 920AR face-on: reality just got weird
CES 2010 is awash in a sea of ridiculous 3D glasses, but that's nothing compared to the insanity of the Vuzix 920AR, an $800 set of augmented reality specs with cameras built into the lenses. Sadly, the 1504 x 480 display just isn't very impressive: we certainly saw a stereo 3D image, but it was grainy, dark, and generally unusable for anything apart from the augmented reality maze game on demo. Walking down the street with these things on your face would be incredibly dangerous, as far as we can tell. That said, the maze game did work seamlessly -- you hold a pre-printed cardboard sheet in front of you, and in the glasses you see a 3D maze with a ball and puzzle elements that respond to "gravity." That's it, though -- there's no other software involved here, and unless you're deep into developing augmented reality applications or extremely interested in looking like a killer robot from the planet Nerdotron, your $800 is better spent elsewhere. Check a Joanna Stern Video Event after the break. %Gallery-82519%
Vuzix Wrap 920AR augmented reality video eyewear: can you afford to look like this?
CES 2010 might go down in history as the show of silly glasses, and Vuzix isn't going to cede any ground to 3D: it's launching a new augmented reality headset called the Wrap 920AR, which features a built-in stereoscopic camera that allows reality and computer-generated imagery to blend in front of your eyes. To be clear, that means you'll actually be looking at reality on a 1,504 x 480 screen while you wear these glasses, but what's one layer of virtualized abstraction between friends who don't mock each other for wearing ridiculous $800 video glasses?
Tuesday morning at WoW Insider
It's Tuesday morning and the hamsters that run the servers are being fed by Blizzard, which means all the realms are down for extended maintenance until at least 11:00 a.m. PDT. There is no patch 2.4.2 to look forward to when the servers go back up this afternoon, but that might not be that bad of a thing. Usually patch days mean add-on trouble and serious server stability issues. Those spell disaster for anyone expecting to enjoy the evening.While the servers are offline, go ahead and get your WoW fix from us! We've got a few dandy articles to entice you and keep your WoW addiction in full swing. Take a look at the official and unofficial patch notes for patch 2.4.2. Highlights include reduced cooldown timers, changes in the hand specifications of some weapons, and new polymorphing mechanics. A talented rogue was able to tank the seventh boss in the Black Temple, Mother Shahraz, by stacking insane amounts of avoidance and agility. Take a look at the video of the encounter, definitely worth watching if you have a minute. SK-Gaming killed M'uru (the next-to-last boss in the Sunwell Plateau) over the weekend. M'uru dropped some nice loot for them. Check out what they got in their world first kill. Did you know Blizzard launched a new and improved online store? The best part about it is that if you buy something, you can click a little check box that gives you a chance to be selected to participate in a beta. I ordered a tee-shirt over the weekend, and have my fingers crossed that I'll get in a certain beta test pretty soon (I could care less about the tee-shirt, naturally). Sean Forsgren recently profiled one of my favorite add-ons, Dr. Damage. It's a great tool that gives you very useful statistics about all your spells in the form of extended tooltips. Take a minute to look into it now, and get it all downloaded and setup for when the servers come back online later today. When the severs do come back online, WoW Insider will let you know. Hopefully there won't be any major stability issues tonight, but if there are, we'll be covering that too. Enjoy your downtime!
Tuesday morning maintenance
Sometimes I feel like Blizzard chooses a handful of random servers to Ice Block every few days – not letting players on, and giving a (hopefully) short window when the servers will be offline.If you're on the unlucky servers of Agamaggan, Azshara, Baelgun, Dark Iron, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Greymane, Kalecgos, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Sargeras, Staghelm, Twisting Nether, Ursin, WildHammer, or either of the Tournamenet Servers, you're going to have at least two hours of downtime from 5:00 a.m. PDT until 7:00 a.m. PDT. Blizzard will also be doing rolling restarts across all realms this morning.For those of you waiting to get your morning fix of WoW, fear not. There are several pieces of news and entertaining reads to catch up on.New WotLK alpha screenshots – Did you know that WotLK is in alpha, and the first batch of new screenshots has been leaked? We've got them confirmed from an inside source and mirrored here for your enjoyment.As a tank, I hate to pug. Our Warrior columnist Matthew Rossi agrees with me. Check out his enlightening piece for One reason tanks won't pug. And I hope the subject of his piece, Primula, enjoys his or her new found fame as one lowly ninja-looter.Do you have a life outside of WoW? Not that I do, but if I did I would be a casual player and appreciate Robin Torres' advice from WoW, Casually: Finding groups fast. Just remember that they don't always have to be random pug groups.Two pieces of Season 4 gear have been accidently enabled by a GM on the live realms. You can check out the new stats and have look at them. They remind me a bit of the Ori from Stargate, so I have to ask: Hallowed are the Ori, anyone? Hopefully the bosses at Blizzard are a bit more understand than the Ori and will let the GM that made this mistake keep his job.And finally you can check out my new favorite column of the week, [1. Local] by Lisa Poisso. Lisa takes a look at all the comments posted on WoW Insider and rounds up the best of them for us to marvel over. I know that I've sent her a few lately.Happy Tuesday everyone!%Gallery-21057%
Word wrapper's delight
We go nuts over puzzle games that put our near-limitless lexicon to good use, so we take every opportunity to highlight releases like Bob Fossil's Word Wrap. His homebrew project digitizes the word hunt games found in daily newspapers where you have to form as many words as possible with a restricted set of letters. The end result is not only fun, but it manages to improve on the traditional pencil/paper experience. You spell out your text by tapping the characters on the touchscreen, sending them to the top screen's list of completed words. Jumbling the letters to get a new perspective of your selection has also been simplified with a "wrap" button. Call us lazy if you want, but this setup beats the pants out of having to write everything out by hand!There are two Time Attack styles where you can work against the clock by either finding the longest word or collecting a specified amount of words. There's also an Endless option where you can sift through the shuffled letters at your own pace. Each mode comes with three difficulty levels, but being the word geniuses we are, it's "go hard or go home" for us. [Via Drunken Coders]
NetNewsWire styles: Reflex and Spotlight+wrap
It's been a couple of months since I switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader, but I am happy to announce that I saw the light and have returned to greener pastures. While Google Reader is still roughly 3000 times as functional as NewsGator Online, I simply could no longer resist the torture of no search (in a Google product, no less), and no support for authenticated feeds. Aside from those two setbacks, however, I still recommend gReader as the best web-based reader that is easily head and shoulders above the rest.Since I'm back to NetNewsWire though, I have once again gone kookoo for styles and have come across two that impressed me quite a bit. First up is Reflex for NetNewsWire from Oliver Boermans (pictured above), which is the most functional and optimized style I have ever seen, and has quite possibly usurped my previous favorite: Tiger style by Jon Hicks (sorry Jon!).First, Reflex offers a two column design by default (which can be slimmed to one if/when you prefer) that places metadata (author, blog, date, categories, etc.) in a non-scrolling column on the right of the post body. This is really handy if you don't want to keep scrolling up and down posts just to snag all the info you might need to, say, write about the post or the site you're referencing. Speaking of scrolling, Reflex will fade in a slick overlay headline at the top of the post if - and only if - you wind up having to scroll down so far as to knock the post's headline above the fold. Last but not least, Reflex offers two color styles (white/black) and layouts (single or double column) via a button at the top right of the reading pane.This most excellent Reflex style can be had from Oliver's blog, and I'd like to tip my hat to the man himself for his fantastic work.The second style hails from Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch, of Mac OS X development and C4 fame. Jon's Spotlight+wrap style is a modification of NetNewsWire 2.0's built-in Spotlight style in the name of functionality. First, and most noticeably, he added a wrap to the headline so long'uns will display in their entirety. The other big change is that he borrowed from Takaaki Kato's Samurai Style and eliminated the Feedburner footer that's catching on with so many bloggers these days (the ugly 'digg this, del.icio.us that' standard links appearing in many RSS feeds). Jon also mentions some stylistic battles he had to wage, but at the end of it all is a very functional improvement to a beloved default NNW style. You can grab Spotlight+wrap from Jon Rentzsch's blog.[via Ranchero's blog]
News wrap-up from E3!
The industry's biggest event is now over, and while posting on the Joystiq mothership maybe have taken up all of our time, we can't forget about our Fanboys. We've got some post-E3 reflections on the way, so get ready. Here's an aggregate of the show coverage: Engadget & Joystiq's live coverage of Sony's PlayStation 3 E3 event PS3 impressions: Resistance Fall of Man PS3 impressions: Sonic the Hedgehog PS3 Impressions: Heavenly Sword PS3 impressions: Virtua Tennis Joystiq hands-on: new PS3 controller Joystiq Video: Resistance Fall of Man E3 Vox Populi: What are your thoughts on the PS3 prices? E3 Vox Populi: Will lack of rumble hurt the PS3? E3 Vox Populi: Who had the best press conference? E3 booth tours: Sony A look at EA's new realism tools The PS3 controller that might have been Sony's PS3 is still $600 Microsoft befriends Nintendo in fight vs Sony First look: The Club (Xbox 360 & PS3) The jacket that says "I can afford a PS3" Sony's Play Beyond campaign played up at E3 Extended 15-minute MGS4 trailer on the hour PS3 worth its weight in Uranium Dual Shake functionality tacked on at last minute Anatomy of shame: Dual Shake vs. Wiimote Sony steals motion idea, but not from Nintendo New PS3 controller loses DualShock vibration PS3 investing in tangible user interfaces PS3: A tale of 2 SKUs Clash of the Consoles: a sneak peek! PlayStation 3 in its final form The real PlayStation 3 controller revealed Final Fantasy XIII announced for PS3
