As such, the fast ring will become the Dev Channel, the slow ring will become the Beta Channel and release preview will be called the Release Preview Channel. The new Dev Channel isn’t all that different from the fast ring — users will get access to new features as early as possible — however it won’t be tied to a specific release. Features will become available as soon as they’re ready. This obviously means things are liable to be a bit more unstable, so Microsoft says this channel is best suited to more advanced users.
The Beta Channel, meanwhile, gives access to the true beta version of a release and is meant for early adopters, while the Release Preview Channel remains essentially the same as the release preview ring — users can test reasonably stable builds before they get shipped. The changes are set to launch later this month, and will happen automatically if you’re already part of the Windows Insider program. You can change your channel, or start flighting, by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Insider Program, and choosing the channel that best fits your needs.
Politicians announced the policy and simultaneously launched a consultation last October. The document included a few alternative plate designs — a completely green licence plate, for instance, and one that included a small green dot — but these were ultimately rejected. The proposal was inspired by a similar scheme in Ontario, Canada. The city allowed EV drivers to use toll roads without being charged, which led to an increase in eligible car purchases.
The reaction to the scheme has been mixed, though. Nicholas Lyes, head of roads policy for breakdown company RAC, is worried that the ‘badge of honour’ will cause resentment among owners of fossil fuel-powered cars. David Bailey, professor of business economics at the University of Birmingham, told Wired that drivers could slap “a big sticker” on their car if they wanted to advertise its green credentials to other road users.
In its response to the initial consultation, the UK’s Surveillance Camera Commissioner warned that the scheme could encourage cloned plates. Obtaining such a plate would, therefore, need to be tightly controlled, the organization added.
Lyes believes that any financial discounts will be short-lived because local authorities desperately need the revenue associated with parking and zero-emission zones. And, “given their relatively high upfront costs, only those drivers that could afford to make the switch to an electric vehicle would benefit – leaving the vast majority who still rely on a petrol and diesel cars losing out,” he said back in October. Instead, he argued that the government should focus on providing better financial incentives at the point of purchase.
Alongside the green plates, the UK government announced a £12 million (roughly $15.2 million) fund for eco-friendly vehicle research. Roughly £10 million will be offered through a Zero Emission Vehicle Innovation Competition, organised by quango Innovate UK, for advancements in electric and hydrogen vehicles, as well as charging infrastructure. The remaining £2 million (roughly $2.5 million) will be given to small and medium-sized businesses researching batteries and other zero-emission technology that could be used by larger car manufacturers.
Once you’ve built a course, the Lego team hopes you’ll play through it. Place Mario on the Start Pipe and a 60-second timer will appear on his abdomen. You also hear the classic Mario theme tune through the minifigure’s speaker, emphasizing a new run has begun. Your goal is to get through the level and collect as many coins as possible before reaching the iconic flag pole at the end.
It’s a familiar setup, though the ‘play’ experience is dramatically different to Nintendo’s beloved platformers. In the real world, Mario’s movement is effectively limitless. That’s because it’s on you — the human player — to pick up and move his chunky body around the level. I’m sure some will try to replicate Mario’s run and triple-jump perfectly. Others, though, will want to wave their hand around like a maniac, leaping over trees, lava pits and triple-Goomba-stacks in a single bound. Beyond the protests of a potentially miffed sibling, there’s nothing to stop you from giving Mario the strength, speed and flight of Superman.
Nintendo’s classic side scrollers, meanwhile, are more restrictive. Mario’s pace and jumping power are carefully tuned to make each level a challenge to overcome. The joy of each Mario game is learning and mastering the control scheme so the plumber moves through each level like a ballerina.
Lego’s designers did consider trying to replicate Nintendo’s ‘pixel-perfect’ platforming. It was difficult to communicate what the player could and should do in any given moment, though. A video game-inspired ruleset also suggested there was a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to play with the sets. “If you make hard boundaries for players, or hard criteria, then a lot of people are just going to fail,” Jonathan Bennink, the lead designer on Lego Super Mario said. “And it’s us telling you exactly what to do.”
That’s why it’s impossible to die in Lego Super Mario. The only way to ‘fail,’ in fact, is to run out of time. Takashi Tezuka, a veteran game designer who directed Super Mario World, was adamant the brick-based character shouldn’t have any health or lives. “He said that Lego Mario needs to be a toy that makes kids happy,” Bennink explained. “If Mario dies, he’s not happy, and kids aren’t going to be happy.”
Every enemy has been scaled up to match Mario’s size.
Nick Summmers
Instead, the two companies adopted a ‘right and more right’ philosophy. Mario will gain a coin multiplier, for instance, if you keep his body balanced inside a minecart on the Piranha Plant Power Slide. Hitting the toothy enemies on either side will cancel the multiplier, but you won’t lose any of your previously collected coins. If you want to ignore the slide entirely and accrue coins another way on the course, that’s fine too. “It comes from a place of rewarding right behavior and not necessarily punishing the wrong one,” Bennink said.
Mario’s final score will appear on his chest once you’ve landed on the flag pole Action Brick, giving you a chance to jot it down or, more likely, wave it triumphantly in your best friend’s face.
If you’ve connected Mario to the app over Bluetooth, you’ll also see a screen that shows your total and everything that you did to accrue coins. It’s a useful tool if you want to know how someone beat your previously held record or triple-check that all of your Action Brick stomps registered correctly. If you’re hurrying through a long and complicated course, you might not have time to check whether you landed squarely on a Goomba’s head or waited long enough to accumulate coins on a floating cloud.
Once you grow tired of Lego’s official designs, you’re free to break them down and create something new. Every set is modular — large, squarish base pieces connect with long and thin bricks — so it’s easy to move the environmental set pieces around and create something that feels fresh. If you’re feeling extra creative, it’s also possible to build a course from scratch and mix in bricks that you’ve accumulated from other Lego product lines. All that matters, really, is that you have a Start Pipe and Flag Pole. There’s nothing to stop you from placing Bowser’s Castle on a shoebox, for instance, or using a generic spaceship set to create a Galaxy-themed course.
It’s easy to move the environmental set pieces around and create something that feels fresh.
To get you started, Lego has made an inspiration-focused star section in the app. It includes a Weekly Challenge and the option to share your own creation using the camera on your smartphone or tablet. You can also view other people’s submissions and, provided they’re well photographed, attempt to replicate them with your own kits. (Or build something close to them, if the original creator has used a bunch of bricks you don’t have.)
The rest of the specs are relatively standard for a mid-range phone: 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, dual nano SIM slots, microSD expansion (up to 2TB), 5,000mAh battery, NFC and a quad-camera module on the back (48-megapixel main, 8-megapixel ultra-wide, 2-megapixel macro and 2-megapixel bokeh). These are all packaged into either a quartz green or crystal white body, and to be honest, we’ve seen better designs from the once mobile giant.
One interesting thing about the U20 5G is that it will still be manufactured in-house in Taoyuan, Taiwan, thus quashing earlier rumours of HTC abandoning all of its production lines. Still, the phone looks rather generic in today’s market.
Engadget
The Desire 20 Pro, not made in Taiwan, is a 4G phone powered by the lesser Snapdragon 665 platform. It features a smaller 6.5-inch LCD with a 25-megapixel punch-hold front camera, but the same FHD+ resolution remains. With the exception of the lesser 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, the remaining specs are literally identical to the U20’s. This model will be launching in Taiwan on June 18th for NT$8,990 or about US$300, with color options including crystal black and clear blue.
“As businesses open back up and Americans venture outdoors, technology can be an invaluable tool in helping us battle the coronavirus… But some companies may seek to take advantage of consumers and use personal information to advertise, mine data, and unethically profit off this pandemic. Both Apple and Google can be invaluable partners in weeding out these bad actors and ensuring consumers are not taken advantage of by those seeking to capitalize on the fear around this public health crisis.”
The Attorney General points out that while the companies’ own contact tracing technology was designed to protect consumer privacy, the same can’t be said for third-party programs. As such, she’s asking the companies to commit to greater oversight by allowing only apps affiliated with federal or state public health agencies to collect personal health information, such as COVID—19 test results. She also wants them to prohibit third-party contact tracing apps from using consumer data for targeted advertising and for identifying anonymous users. James wants them to require third-party contact tracing apps to delete consumer information on a rolling, 14-day basis, as well.
In addition, the Attorney General is asking the tech giants to make it clearer to users which apps were launched by the government and which were rolled out by random developers. According to Business Insider, the companies now have until June 19th to acknowledge James’ letter. For now, the Attorney General is asking users to “remain vigilant” and to “check with the Apple App Store or Android Play Store for information on what entity operates the app and whether the app collects geolocation information or other data.”
With pandemic-related lockdowns and the release of Animal Crossing, simply getting a Switch has been hard enough. Even if you obtain one, if you’d also like to play Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure for a quick at-home workout then good luck — it’s been just as tough to obtain, selling out in seconds whenever it appears online. So if you, like me, are on the outside looking in but you already have a Switch and a pair of Joy-Cons (sorry Switch Lite owners), then at least you can try the company’s newest game: Jump Rope Challenge.
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 16, 2020
It’s not nearly as full featured as Ring Fit Adventure, but it does encourage activity using the accessories you already have. It simply emulates the jump rope experience using Joy-Cons while counting your jumps on the screen, and even has support for up to two players. According to the company, this game “was created by a small group of Nintendo developers while working from home in Japan.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched a new initiative that will give you access to more information on automotive vehicle tests conducted by various companies. It’s a voluntary effort called Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing (c) Initiative, which aims to increase transparency in the industry. The program will also enable Federal, State, and local government “to coordinate and share information in a standard way.”
At the moment, the project counts nine companies and eight states as participants. Beep, Cruise, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Local Motors, Navya, Nuro, Toyota, Uber and Waymo have signed on to be part of the program. Meanwhile, the participating states are California, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah.
VR nerds may be familiar with some of these five applications. For starters, there’s Vive Sync which is HTC’s in-house remote collaboration service, and it’s currently still in open beta. Then you have Vive Sessions, which is essentially the integration of Immersive VR Education’s Engage virtual conference platform (as used by HTC today and back in March), and this lets you host up to 50 people per virtual location. Going further up the scale, there’s Vive Campus which will be powered by VirBELA, and this enables remote learning for up to a whopping 2,500 people on a virtual campus. Of course, there’s no stopping you from taking a quick break with fellow students by a virtual fountain.
Vive XR Suite isn’t all about work, either. To catch up with friends, you can tap into Vive Social which will be based on the popular social VR platform, VRChat. If you feel like getting up close to virtual art exhibits or VR videos, there’s also Vive Museum which will be run by Museum of Other Realities. But that’s as far as fun goes; you’ll need to go back to Viveport or Steam for your dose of VR gaming.
Given how the look and feel of these partner apps differ vastly from one another, it’ll be interesting to see how well HTC can integrate them into the suite, and how much flexibility will users have when it comes to hosting virtual locations in each app. Alvin Wang Graylin, HTC’s China President, admitted that it’s still early stage, but the goal is to eventually offer a consistent experience across all five apps. Until then, it’s hard to assess HTC’s foray into the cloud software business. Maybe partnering with the leaders in each of those VR sectors will be easier than building everything from ground up like Peter Chou’s XRSpace is doing, but it’s the end result that matters. We shall see.
HTC
Casual users who only need basic features will be able to grab a free version of Vive XR Suite from various VR and non-VR app stores (you may also find this suite pre-installed on an HP business PC or laptop in the future), whereas commercial users can subscribe to Vive XR Suite Pro on Viveport — pricing to be announced later — for the creator-level capabilities. The service will be launching in China first in Q3 2020, with other regions to follow afterwards, though beta versions of each app will be available ahead of time as well.
In many ways, the Google Home speaker is overdue for a refresh. Released in 2016 as a rival to Amazon’s Echo, it was the company’s first foray into smart speakers. It was soon overshadowed by the smaller Home Mini (now rebranded as the Nest Mini) and the aforementioned Home Max (which has yet to be renamed), which boasts a louder, deeper sound. Amazon has since released several more updates to its own Echo lineup, making the Google Home look relatively ancient by comparison. What’s more, ever since Sonos introduced support for Google Assistant, the Sonos One is often seen as the Google-powered smart speaker of choice. It would make sense for Google to want to offer its own take on a powerful smart speaker.
Aside from the Pixel 4a, other Google hardware plans for 2020 include a possible Pixel 5 and an Android TV dongle codenamed Sabrina. It’s not clear yet when all of these will be revealed, but if rumors are to be believed, it’ll be some time this fall.
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You might want to act quickly if you’ve been waiting for a sale on Apple’s AirPods Pro. Amazon is selling the noise-cancelling true wireless earbuds for $220 — that’s $30 off the usual sticker, and the lowest price we’ve seen on Amazon to date. That’s still more expensive than the standard AirPods with wireless charging case (they’re on sale for $170 as we write this), but the choice just got a little easier if you’re willing to pay a slight premium.
