Microsoft appears to have been developing a new Lumia device with a camera bump that’s bigger or equal in size to the 41-megapixel Lumia 1020. Leaked photos from a Chinese auction site show a device identified only as "Nokia RM-1052" running Windows Phone 8.1 alongside 2GB of RAM and what appears to be a 5-inch 1080p display. The camera bump is the obvious addition here, dominating the rear of this device with its aluminum body.
While it’s possible this device could be an elaborate fake, there are signs that suggest it’s simply a Windows Phone prototype. At the rear of the mysterious handset there is Nokia prototype text, and the device looks unfinished in places. The body seems to be aluminum, but there’s a plastic strip at the bottom...
Good morning, and welcome back to The Weekender. Our weekend journey is just now starting, so thank you for choosing us for your travels. As you may recall, this was the 48th week of the year 2014 on the planet known colloquially as Earth, otherwise known as Terra in other inhabited star systems. It was not a quiet week, as you might imagine. Below you'll find your itinerary, carefully crafted for your pleasure; stories from the week passed and recommendations for the days ahead. Now. Please...
Whether or not you were in a theater, we all got our first glimpse of Star Wars: The Force Awakens today. The long-awaited teaser showed off some familiar settings, briefly introduced us to a few new characters, and debuted a cross-shaped lightsaber that has already become both a meme and a source of heated debate. There's just a handful of scenes, and it's been online for less than 12 hours, but that's apparently enough time for the creative hive-mind of the internet to start churning out some stellar fan art.
(Source: Phil Noto via Tumblr)
ICYMI Little poster art done after watching the new #StarWars trailer this morning. Might do bigger version for print http://ift.tt/124uiax
— FrancescoFrancavilla...If you were to place a bet on the future of wearables, odds are good that your cash would not go toward a line of ordinary wristwatches. Yes, wristwatches: the things that tell the time and little else, often operating on centuries-old technology. The very objects that were disrupted by cellphones over the last decade. Dinosaurs.
Don’t tell that to Astro Studios, though. The prolific San Francisco-based branding and design firm has helped meld a variety of high-tech products ranging from...
Say hello to Cyber Saturday. Amazon's not waiting for Monday to kick off its "Cyber Monday" sales. The leading online retailer has said its limited-time deals will begin tomorrow — Saturday — and span eight days. As usual with Amazon, everything will come and go very quickly, so you'll want to check ahead to see when the item you want will go on sale. Discounts will be offered "as often" as every 10 minutes, according to Amazon.
The company is saving a few major sales for Cyber Monday itself, promising three "coveted" deals. And mobile users will see exclusive savings with Amazon's app on iOS and Android, so you'll have to check back there occasionally if you absolutely don't want to miss anything. We've rounded up some of the better...
Let’s talk about this new lightsaber. About a minute into the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, a cloaked figure is tromping through a snowy forest and ignites a weird-looking lightsaber: it’s big, sort of flickery, and it has a crossbar.
What the European Parliament is proposing sounds like Ayn Rand’s worst nightmare. Let’s take Google, one of the best and most cohesive set of web services we have, and fragment it into smaller businesses. Let’s introduce friction and bureaucracy between the various parts so that lesser companies with worse products can have a chance to compete. It feels like a classic case of over-regulation — penalizing a successful company for the crime of being better than everyone else — however its fundamental premise is not wrong: Google is too powerful.
There’s no denying that Google has merited its current dominance in web search. The service that has grown into a verb is used all around the globe because it’s reliably accurate, up to date, and...
Jakub Rebelka's work is like a cross between a stained-glass window and a colorful manga — it's timeless, in a way, with a flat, intricately detailed style, but it also blurs the line between science fiction and fantasy in a way that's absolutely gorgeous. Drawing is about the only thing he ever imagined doing; Rebelka's illustrations have been featured in comic books and video games, but he says his favorite piece is whatever he's working on at the moment.
"I am experiencing my...
If you imagined Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animation director behind movies as enchanting as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, as a lovable grandfather all eyes wide with wonder, you might be disappointed. In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness , a compelling documentary by Mami Sunada that sees release in New York this week, Miyazaki largely comes off well as a polite, diligent worker blessed with a stroke of genius. But the man is also marked by moments of...
Two days ago, we heard of Sony's plans to build a watch made entirely of e-paper — one where the band and the watch face would both change in response to the user's wrist gestures. It sounded wild and provocatively different, but what we really wanted to know was what it looked like. As it turns out, that watch is already in the public eye, though Sony's involvement had until now been kept clandestine so as to judge the product on its own merits. Say hello to the FES Watch.
The Wall Street...
To reach the brick-and-mortar world, eBay is turning to interactive mirrors. Because shopping wasn't stressful enough before the mirrors started talking to you.
The Charles Darwin Foundation, a 50-year-old conservation organization on Galápagos Islands faces an uncertain future. Though the Ecuadorean government call the foundation "essential," the government hasn't provided the organization with the money it needs to survive to 2015, and it hasn't re-opened a souvenir shop that brought the CDF badly-needed revenue. The foundation must raise $1 million before the end of 2014 or it will be bankrupt.
Selfies are the new celebrity signatures, this is known. Liam Payne is a member of One Direction and therefore in very high demand for selfies with fans. This is also known. What's less known, perhaps, is how he feels about the confluence of these facts. Let the following Vine of Payne taking a series of selfies at the Aria awards change that:
Netflix no longer has every movie you can dream of: instead, it offers a curated selection, with new movies usually being added by the month. The trouble is, it isn't always obvious what good films have made their way onto the service just by browsing around. We've taken a look through the past few months' additions to pick out 12 movies — some new, some classics — that are worth watching if you haven't gotten around to them yet.
There's a good chance you're headed to the movies this weekend. Thanksgiving and the days following it are supposed to be among the busiest each year for theaters, with plenty of families heading out to spend some time together. The good news this year is that there are some pretty great movies to see right now. Here are our recommendations for what you should check out, most of which should make for a fun couple of hours:
While millions of Americans are about to gather around a table topped with turkey, stuffing, and all other sorts of Thanksgiving fare, two in particular are preparing for a much different meal. Almost 300 miles above the Earth's surface, NASA Astronauts Terry Virts and Barry Wilmore are building a "feast" with their four weightless international colleagues aboard the International Space Station. NASA breaks it down on YouTube:
The orbiting astronauts didn't have a special meal delivered to them, rather they've compiled one with some of the core menu foods that the ISS is stocked with: irradiated smoked turkey, thermo-stabilized candied yams, freeze-dried cornbread dressing, and a cranapple desert. Crew members are allowed to fill...
GoPro, the maker of the popular action cam, is reportedly working on its own line of consumer drones with plans to launch sometime next year. The unit will be priced somewhere between $500 and $1,000, putting it into competition with drones from DJI, Parrot, and 3D Robotics.
Prolific documentary filmmaker James Cameron has only directed three feature-length films in the last 20 years: True Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). Before that, he made The Abyss, Aliens, and the first two Terminator films. And every single one of those films was a huge box office success for its time — the last two films each crossed the $2 billion mark worldwide.
Here are domestic grosses (adjusted for inflation):
Point is, Cameron knows how to makes a successful movie — and in the case of Avatar, he likes to push the limits of...
Steam is getting in on the Black Friday fun with a huge collection of great deals dubbed the "Steam Exploration Sale." It includes a pretty massive selection of games — Valve says there are "thousands of titles" on sale — and features some big-name new releases for cheap. You can grab Watch Dogs for only $29.99, for example, or Civilization: Beyond Earth for $34.99. Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami's new game, The Evil Within, might just be the best deal, at only $22.60. And if you have just a few bucks, there are some great deals at the lower end as well, including Goat MMO Simulator for $5.49 and Battleblock Theater for $1.69. Valve says new deals will be added daily, so be sure to check back regularly — the sale lasts from now...
Healthcare.gov has come along way since its disastrous rollout last year. The first week of open enrollment for 2015 healthcare plans began on November 15, and Healthcare.gov seems to have handled the rush without breaking. The Obama Administration is reporting that 462,125 people signed up for plans through the site in the first week of open enrollment, and nearly half of them had not purchased plans through the site before. The numbers are a marked improvement over last year's famously buggy launch, which signed up just over 100,000 customers in the first month.
The US Environmental Protection Agency released a proposal for new ground-level ozone emission standards today. The new standards will cut smog-causing ozone pollution levels from 75 parts per billion down to between 65 and 70 parts per billion. This change, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy writes in CNN Money today, could lead to healthcare benefits of up to $38 million by 2025.
I used to think myself a grinch who hated the very act of gift-giving, but it turns out what's put me off all this time has been the rote and impersonal way we've been doing it. Most people seem to approach the holiday season in a manner that Henry Ford would be proud of: packaging up every gift in the same cheery wrapping paper and accessorizing it with a prewritten greeting card. That's perfectly fine if the point of the gift is the thing itself, but I already have many things — what I'm missing is the warm feeling of knowing someone far away is thinking of me.
Today I received my first Christmas present of the year, a full month ahead of the designated date, and I thought I'd make the unwrapping more interesting by asking the sender...
The best Xbox 360 game isn't actually BioShock or Halo or Mass Effect 2 — it's something a whole lot simpler. Geometry Wars, and its excellent sequel, were pure, amazing arcade games that turned high-score-chasing into something wonderful. It was like the whole 3D game thing was just a fad, and these simple, ridiculously fast shooters were what games were meant to be. With Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, the series has lost some of that purity, thanks to two significant additions: three-dimensional levels and a challenging campaign, which make the game simultaneously refreshing and frustrating.
The basics of the game remain unchanged. You pilot a tiny ship that looks like a claw, and you need to blow up everything in sight. The Geometry...
On December 1st, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Elonis v. United States , the first case about online threats to reach the highest level of judicial review. It’s a timely case, coinciding with increased attention around the online harassment of women—from Caroline Criado-Perez to Zoë Quinn and the other women targeted by Gamergate. The case has the potential to broadly change what kind of online speech can be prosecuted.
The case centers on Anthony Elonis, who was convicted after writing graphic, gory fantasies about mutilating and killing his wife and other women and posting them to Facebook. The issue before the Supreme Court is whether "a true threat" requires finding that the threatener subjectively intended to be...
Action cameras are about more than just capturing crazy stunts these days — they’ve become a way to make anything you do look cool. You’ve probably seen people wave a selfie stick around while riding a bike, or strap a camera to their chest at a sporting event. Or maybe they’re even using them to see what their pet sees. Sure, a lot can be done with your camera’s phone these days, thanks to burst-shooting modes and slow-motion options, but having a camera that’s more durable and more...
Maybe you're waiting for the turkey to finish cooking. Maybe the meal's over and you're all together in the living room staring silently at a wall. Whatever the case, if you're looking to spend quality time with your friends and family this Thanksgiving and you want to beat them in a friendly competition, here are seven games we'd recommend — no consoles required.
Thanksgiving is a wonderful time of year, a chance to spend a few days with family and friends and enjoy an amazing meal. But there's also a lot of downtime, whether it's due to travelling across the country or hiding to avoid your uncle droning on about how the Bears are terrible this year. Luckily, there's an easy way to enjoy yourself, even when you're not stuffing your face with turkey — and it's right there in your pocket. Mobile games are a great way to kill time, and no matter if you only have a few minutes or a few hours, there's something out there to keep you occupied. Here are six ways to make your Thanksgiving a little more awesome.
If you only have a few quick moments to sneak in a game, say while you're...
Halo doesn’t look as good as you remember.
I know this because I’ve been playing Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Xbox One, which includes lavish remakes of the over-a-decade-old first two Halo games. It has an amazing feature that lets you flip back to the originals with the touch of a button; one button press to wash away two generations of console hardware in an instant, leaving stark low-polygon models and blurry textures in their wake.
“The switch feature was important to us...
Chromecast users are going to be spoiled for choice with the addition of seven new apps. Fans of humor both coarse and sophisticated will be able to find entertainment with Comedy Central, which features programs like The Daily Show and South Park. Meanwhile younger audiences can select between Sesame Street Go and Nickelodeon. For a more age-agnostic experience, there is Epix, ENCORE Play, and the South Asian-centric YuppTV to choose from. Finally, TuneIn will be providing access to over 100,000 radio stations.
The news comes less than two weeks after Google announced the inclusion of entertainment channels Showtime Anytime and Starz, along with family-friendly video games like Scrabble Blitz and Wheel of Fortune.
Google staked a claim in one of the most ad-saturated neighborhoods in the world this week with a billboard the width of a city block. After signing a long-term deal with Vornado Realty Trust reportedly worth millions, the company began advertising on the biggest billboard in New York City's Times Square — over 20 million pixels big.
Electronic Arts is celebrating Black Friday early, offering some of its best PC games for cheap through its Origin digital store. You can grab select titles for as much as 75 percent off, and there's a pretty sizeable selection of titles to choose from, including relatively new releases like Titanfall, Need for Speed: Rivals, and The Sims 4. But if you really want a great deal, you can snag classics like Mirror's Edge and Dead Space for $4.99, or Bejeweled 3 and Alpha Centauri for just $2.49 each. Check out Origin for the complete list.
Sony has agreed to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission after being charged with making misleading claims about the capabilities of the PS Vita. Those claims — which Sony described as "game changing" features in ads around the time of the Vita's launch — pertain primarily to how the handheld would be able to interact with the PlayStation 3.
"Sony claimed, for example, that PS Vita users could pause any PS3 game at any time and continue to play the game on their PS Vita from where they left off," the FTC explains. "This feature, however, was only available for a few PS3 games, and the pause-and-save capability described in the ads varied significantly from game to game." Similarly, the FTC says that Sony greatly exaggerated the...
It's here. The Jurassic World trailer has dropped, ahead of Thanksgiving.
For reasons that a unclear at the moment, some of Prince's social media accounts have vanished from the internet. Writer Anil Dash noticed the change earlier this morning:
First-person shooters are notorious for the paper-thin motivations of their heroes — typically, muscular bald men who will execute an entire continent if someone puts their country in danger or stuffs their female colleague in a fridge. To step around the moral glue trap of a genre that relies on casual murder, many game developers quickly bury their excuse in a compact expository monologue, or they just make the villains Nazis or zombies. Because those, culturally speaking, are equally...
It’s November and aspiring writers are plugging away at their novels for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, an annual event that encourages people to churn out a 50,000-word book on deadline. But a hundred or so people are taking a very different approach to the challenge, writing computer programs that will write their texts for them. It’s called NaNoGenMo, for National Novel Generation Month, and the results are a strange, often funny look at what automatic text generation can do.
The developer and artist Darius Kazemi started NaNoGenMo last year, when he tweeted out an off-the-cuff idea.
Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the...
The Verge 2014 Holiday Gift Guide is here, filled with the best gift ideas for Christmas, Hannukah, or year-end shopping lists. From coffee subscriptions to camping gear to the best bluetooth speaker, we have a little something for everyone.
What can you do in 30 seconds? If it’s an advertisement for the Surface, the answer is: a lot. For the past two years, Microsoft has been showing the tablet running the full version of Office, editing photos in Adobe Photoshop, and converting into either a tablet or a notebook on the fly. But one thing Microsoft hasn’t been able to do very well in 30 seconds is explain why the Surface needs a stylus, which in an era of stroking our screens has long seemed antiquated.
The US Food and Drug Administration will announce new rules today that will oblige movie theaters, pizza parlors, and chain restaurants across the US to post calorie counts next to food items on their menus, reports The New York Times . The rules, which will take effect in a year, will also require that restaurants display the caloric content of pre-packaged alcoholic beverages like beer and wine.
For the past three years, State of Play, a small studio in London, has been building a 10-foot-tall miniature city out of paper, cardboard, and lots of little lights. There are houses and gardens, and at the center there's an 8-foot-tall water wheel, powered by a custom set of motors and built using cardboard cut by lasers. It's a huge, intricate world, and starting next week it's one you'll be able to explore in a video game with the launch of Lumino City .
"I was enjoying the process so...
Shaken up by a recent downturn in phone sales and profitability, Samsung is now reassessing all aspects of its operations and "streamlining its business units." That's turning out to be bad news for the company's cross-platform messaging app ChatOn, which, it has been determined, "isn't a business that can show improvement in the future." Multiple Samsung officials are cited by The Korea Times in a report that says ChatOn will be gradually phased out on a region-by-region basis as Samsung looks to cut its losses and focus on more profitable ventures.
How do we want to communicate with each other? This week's Big Future looks at chat tools, from WhatsApp to the Star Trek communicator. If we could get past the tangle of carriers and spectrum rights, what kind of communicator would we actually want to use? It turns out, science fiction may have this particular gadget all wrong.
Chat tools are a social technology, so the etiquette of the device is often more important than the antennas and displays. We prefer talking in private — that's one of the reasons texting is so popular — so we probably wouldn't want to talk out loud. We'd also need a way of signaling whether we're available to talk at all, which might get complicated now that we're carrying these...
Fans of more literary pursuits won't be left in the cold this Black Friday. Those looking to inflate their digital stash of comic books may be pleased to learn that two major publishers will be offering major discounts for some of their most acclaimed works.
The publishing outfit will be celebrating Black Friday with the release of six MegaBundles. Priced at $99.99 each, the collections include:
Ferguson, Missouri has been the center of a broad conversation about racially biased policing, police militarization, and the US justice system since August 9th, when Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. Tonight, a grand jury responsible for investigating the evidence in the case decided to spare Wilson from criminal charges.
In response to the grand jury's decision, Michael Brown's family said "we are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions:" In their statement, the Brown family asks everyone to "join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera."
True Detective season two finally has its female leads. Actors Rachel McAdams and Kelly Reilly are both joining the cast for the show's second outing, alongside Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell. Friday Night Lights alum Taylor Kitsch will also round out the cast.
BREAKING #TrueDetective News: Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch & Kelly Reilly join Colin Farrell & Vince Vaughn in #TrueDetectiveSeason2
— HBO (@HBO) November 24, 2014 The news confirms McAdams' involvement in the new season, which has been rumored for some months. According to the HBO release, she will play Ventura County Sheriff Ani Bezzerides, a detective "whose uncompromising ethics put her at odds with others and the system she serves."
Developing...
The tell-all book about the Church of Scientology Going Clear has reportedly been made into a HBO documentary that could premiere as soon as the Sundance Film Festival in January. According to The Hollywood Reporter , Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney is directing the film, which will "feature new revelations about the controversial religion and its famous followers Tom Cruise and John Travolta."
The film will feature revelations about famous followers Tom Cruise and John Travolta
The documentary will likely live among HBO's more controversial ones, like The Case Against 8 and Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (which Gibney directed). Gibney won his Oscar for helming the critically acclaimed documentary Taxi to the Dark Side for...
Redbox has always been aggressive about pricing. Taking home a DVD or Blu-ray from one of the company's rental kiosks is cheaper than paying to watch the same movie via iTunes or Amazon. That's not changing just yet, but the cost of Redbox's 24-hour rentals is going up by at least 25 percent starting December 2nd. Currently priced at $1.20, DVD rentals will increase to $1.50. And Blu-rays, now $1.50, will go up to $2.00 — a 33 percent hike. But even with the higher prices, renting a film from Redbox is still cheaper than going the digital route, where new releases typically cost around $4.99 to download or stream in high definition.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Redbox is trying to buck stagnant financial performance it's seen in...
We're going through an exciting period in the development of consumer drones. DJI has perfected the formula for a unit that bridges the gap between something anyone can fly right out of the box, but still packs enough power to excite professional fliers and filmmakers. Parrot, which built one of the more successful among the first generation of consumer drones, is trying to take things to the next level with its new unit, the Bebop. Even better, they are building it with a simple integration to virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, opening up an amazing new way to experience flight.
I don't carry around a traditional wallet. Instead, I've got a pile of cards held together with a hair-tie. I've been carrying around this "wallet" for over three years, and it's worked really well for me.
I preordered a Coin Beta because I was intrigued by the technology, and I'm always looking for ways to simplify things and diminish clutter. I thought, "Could I slim my wallet down even further with this device?" After many months of delays, I finally got Coin in the mail. I had actually forgotten about it, and when it showed up in my mailbox I was desperate to try it out.
I was desperate to try it out
Setting up Coin involves using your phone and the company's app. You can input your cards into the app via a Square-like...
The Federal Aviation Administration's forthcoming drone rules might require all operators to have a license and limit flights to daylight hours, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal , which cites sources familiar with the rule-making process. The report says that licenses "likely to be proposed" would be comparable to traditional pilot's licenses, requiring dozens of hours in the cockpit of a manned aircraft. The Journal also expects the new rules to limit flights to under 400 feet and within sight of the person at the controls.