Sony has continued to struggle in many ways, yet at the same time keeps producing some amazing gear – and at MWC the trend continues. Today at MWC Sony launches new Xperia devices including the Xperia Z2, the Tablet Z2 and the mid-range M2. Each of these bring competitive prices, high-end features, slick designs and the legendary Sony build quality.
At CES last year Yota introduced their first smartphone. It was met with tremendous interest due to the dual-screen technology – full Android color display on the front, read-only e-ink screen on the rear. At MWC 2014 they just revealed the 2nd generation Yota smartphone – and it is an upgrade in every possible way!
Free-to-play games are huge money makers, but need to be based on a solid foundation. With Secret Society and Virtual City Playground, G5 set the bar high, then delivered with Letters From Nowhere: A Hidden Object Mystery. Now they’re back with Hidden City Mystery of Shadows, and this latest hidden object game keeps resources tight but delivers a fun mystery.
G5 Games is moving of their popular franchises to social platforms – from Virtual City Playground to Secret Society to Stand O’Food Empire, the games add to the original experience while extending the gameplay to many hours. Now one of my favorite franchises – is out as Letters From Nowhere: A Hidden Object Mystery social game.
Action-RPG Sacred crashed onto the scene in 2004 – literally! It was unstable and buggy, but promising enough and with great support, and it hooked an audience. Sacred 2 continued to advance the genre, but since Deep Silver took over the Sacred license in 2009 little has been heard. Now we have release info – Sacred 3 arrives this summer!
For the true fan of music, genre doesn’t matter in appreciation of an iconic and legendary artist or group. This is true for Miles Davis, Beethoven, Michael Jackson, or the Allman Brothers Band. Alan Paul’s new book One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band seeks to illuminate their history for new and old fans alike!
There are a few developers who have driven indie RPG development for the past several years – Spiderweb Software, Soldak Entertainment and Basilisk Games. Basilisk released the stunning Eschalon Book I in 2007, and followed up with Book II. Now they are back with the finale, available on GoG.com, Steam and Basilisk.
If you ask anyone involved with electronic music during the digital age to name an instrument – it would be the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer drum machine. The sounds appear on countless songs from the last 30+ years, and vintage systems sell for steep prices. Now Roland is back with the Aira line that is both classic and modern.
Last fall at the Tokyo Game Show Sony introduced the Playstation Vita Slim, featuring a thinner and lighter design, longer battery life, USB charging, 1GB internal storage, and switch from OLED to LCD screen. Released last year in Japan and early this month in Europe, the Playstation Vita Slim is coming to North America this spring in a $199 bundle.
There was controversy back in 2012 about the official sponsors of the Olympic games forcing athletes to not display logos of their sponsor brands. The Sochi Olympic games came with their own controversies, but the branding rules stand. For the athletes anyway, as the Russian President wore a fleece with several brands displayed, including Russian mobile network provider Yota.
Raoul Björkenheim is one of those artists who has been around for years, but has not seen the recognition he deserves. I first heard of him through work with Bill Laswell a few years back, and more recently with Scorch trio. Now he is back with his group ‘eCsTaSy’, and the results are powerful and engaging.
In 1998 I got Thief as a birthday present. It presented a morally ambiguous first-person world with choices and freedom, and the ability to sneak around the world in a way no game had ever done before. The sequels were excellent. Now we get a ‘reboot’ of the series – and a trailer to tell us what to expect.
Retro-gaming is alive and well in many different forms, from virtual arcades on consoles to ports on smartphones to emulators to ‘TV games’ and new compatible hardware. But old gaming systems don’t work with HDTV systems. Enter Hyperkin’s Five-in-One Retro Gaming Console the Retron 5. The Retron 5 brings classic consoles to life – and works with HDTV systems! The Retron 5 showed up at CES last month but was largely passed over for more flashy hardware. Now that the dust has settled and the Q1 release date for Retron 5 is approaching, some information has emerged. Here are some…
One of my favorite indie developers is Soldak Entertainment, and perhaps my favorite game (I actually like all four) is Depths of Peril. DoP is a game where your choices have consequences, and the rest of the world continues even if you ignore your quests. This ‘indie classic’ Depths of Peril is now available DRM-Free on GOG.com for only $9.99!
Imagine you are someplace where you need water but have none, and the only source is of questionable quality. Solving that problem is the basis of LifeStraw, a portable water filter technology used in third world countries and places with compromised water sources, that you can now buy for personal use in the form of the Lifestraw GO water bottle.
The past two years I have tried GPS watches from Nike to Garmin(s) to Magellan to Polar. Each has positive and negative attributes. Ultimately the design comes back to ‘how much can we stuff into this and keep it wearable’. Magellan Echo answers this by offloading functionality to the smartphone we carry, and acting as a display and controller. Brilliant!
Today we got confirmation that Google sold its money-losing Motorola handset business for about $3 billion to Lenovo. Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion a couple of years ago, then sold off the set-top box unit and now the handset division. With the sale Google retains many of the valuable Motorola patents it sought initially.
While reviewing the Magellan Echo, I needed a fitness app on my iPhone. There were a few supported, so I tried the popular ones. They didn’t expose much functionality, so I tried Wahoo Fitness, which was detailed in a document from Magellan. Turns out it the perfect partner for the Echo, and it’s the best fitness app I’ve ever used!
Polar built its reputation on heart rate monitoring technology starting in the late 1970s designed to let you REALLY listen to your body. I have friends who swear by their products, and with the RC3 GPS they offer up their latest hardware and software for tracking all of your workouts, and it represents some of the best technology for runners.
Apple announced its earnings yesterday, which featured loads of record-setting device sales numbers and revenue and profit figures so high they are hard to fathom. Even Mac sales saw a significant boost while the rest of the PC industry marked another double-digit declines. The one area not even mentioned? iPod sales, which continue their decline in a no-update year.
So … did you watch the Grammy Awards? My family watched most, and with expectations set suitably low it was not a bad time. Spirited performances by Kendrik Lamar and Imagine Dragons easily offset the awful Katy Perry vocals, bland Taylor Swift showing, and plainly lip-syncing Pink. But the real question is … how did Spotify do predicting winners?