Technology

When NASA debuts its new massive deep-space rocket for the first time in the coming months, a familiar voice assistant and video teleconferencing tool will be going along for the ride. A version of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and Cisco’s Webex videoconferencing platform will be included on the flight to space, part of a technology demonstration to see if these tools might benefit future astronauts flying to distant destinations like the Moon and Mars. The upcoming flight is known as Artemis I, and it’s the first test mission in a series of flights planned for NASA’s Artemis program — an initiative to send the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the Moon. Tentatively set for March, Artemis I will mark the inaugural flight of NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Spac...

You know what kind of video game movie Uncharted will be. You know it in your heart. But just in case you don’t know that you know it, you can now watch PlayStation Pictures’ entire live-action recreation of the infamous scene from that one Uncharted video game where Nathan Drake gets dragged out of an airplane by a rope ladder consisting of gigantic pieces of cargo and somehow manages to survive, without any cuts or annoying plot to get in the way. There is a lot of green screen. Lots of baddies go down. Very young actors appear to do acrobatic things. Action abounds, just as Sony promised it would in the company’s CES 2022 presentation this evening, where it also revealed it’s pivoting into electric cars. I am now adequately prepared… Continue reading…

The Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000. | Image: Asus Asus’ latest router is the ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000, and it says it’s the “world’s first quad-band Wi-Fi 6E gaming router.” That doesn’t quite make it the world’s first quad-band Wi-Fi 6E router overall (Netgear announced a quad-band Orbi system last October which you can already buy), but this is the first such system to specifically target gamers, and as a standalone router its starting price is cheaper than comparable mesh systems. Quad-band routers, as their name suggests, broadcast a total of four wireless bands for connectivity. Asus’ latest router has a 2.4GHz band, two 5GHz bands, and a fancy new 6GHz band. The three highest frequency bands each offer a theoretical maximum speed of 4,804Mbps, which drops to 1,148Mbps for the… Con...

NVIDIA has just announced a new flagship graphics card during CES 2022: the RTX 3090 Ti. Designed to take your already-premium gaming experience to a whole new level, the new GPU builds on the standard RTX 3090 but will be capable of 12.5% more flops across the board, peaking at 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops and 320 tensor teraflops. Though it retains the same 24GB of GDDR6X memory, it’ll now be running at 21Gbps instead of the regular version’s 19.5Gbps. As Engadget points out, the RTX 3090 has 82 out of 84 GA102 streaming multiprocessors activated, and it’s likely that the new RTX 3090 Ti will have all access to all of them at the same time on top of an increased clock speed of approximately 1,850MHz. Other details remain scarce at the moment, but NVIDIA says it’ll be reveali...

OpenSea, the top NFT marketplace in the world, has just announced that it raised $300 million USD in its Series C funding round led by Paradigm and Coatue, valuing the marketplace at $13.3 billion USD. The company was previously valued at $1.5 billion just last year in its 2020 Series B round, bringing in $100 million USD. The new sky-high figure is a direct reflection of the rapidly-rising global appeal of NFTs. OpenSea currently houses the most popular collections in the space led by projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Clone X by Takashi Murakami, Decentraland, and The Sandbox. It recently had its second-largest month of trading ever hitting $3 billion USD in the month of December, and had its third-best trading day ever on January 2, recording $243 million USD in daily E...

Joining the likes of Razer, Alienware and a whole host of other tech companies, Taiwanese firm Acer has now updated its own gaming laptop line as well, giving both the Predator Helios 300 and Triton 500 SE welcome upgrades to reach the most up-to-date gaming experience. On the Helios front, the revamped machine will now utilize Intel‘s 12th-generation Core i7 chip as its CPU, with graphics options including either the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti or RTX 3080 pushing out visuals out through a 1440p display with a 165Hz refresh rate. Rounding out its premium performance is 32GB of DDR5 RAM, an improved cooling system, 2.5Gbps Ethernet connection, WiFi 6e, and a whole host of ports including Thunderbolt and HDMI 2.1. The model’s 16-inch version will start at $1,650 USD and the 17-inch variant starts at...

During Sony’s keynote presentation at CES 2022, the company rolled out the Vision-S EV we saw last year, along with a new concept SUV dubbed Vision-S 02. But the big surprise (this time) is the launch of Sony Mobility, a new company it’s starting that will focus on electric cars. While the tech industry has been focused for several years on whether or not Apple might produce a vehicle, Sony already showed us a working prototype packed full of its technology, and now it’s going a step further. Sony will establish an operating company “Sony Mobility Inc.” in the spring of 2022, through which the company intends to explore entry into the EV market. [embedded content] Sony posted several demo videos on YouTube featuring both Vision-S prototype EVs. Some, like the two-minute Concept Movie above...

Samsung introduced its first standalone SmartThings smart home controller at CES 2022. The Samsung Home Hub is designed to be a central place for a household to control and monitor their smart home without having to buy a $4,000 smart fridge. While there are precious few details about this new device, other than it’s not coming to the US yet and will launch in Korea in the first half of 2022, from the one picture we’ve got, it looks good. Honestly, it looks like the smart home controller we wish Apple, Amazon, or Google would make. The transition from smartphone control of the smart home to voice control has not been a seamless one. There are many times when it’s easier to tap on a screen to turn on the lights or lock the back door than it is to raise your voice, and a simple, easily acces...

Chrysler, the iconic American brand owned by Stellantis, will only sell electric vehicles by 2028, the company announced at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show. To emphasize this seismic shift, the company revealed its latest concept, the Airflow crossover SUV with a similar profile to the Tesla Model Y and Ford Mustang Mach-E. The vehicle unveiled at CES is meant to be just a concept, but it looks very close to production-ready. Chrysler says its first EV will start production in 2025. Chrysler says it will begin producing its first EVs starting in 2025 Stellantis, the multi-national conglomeration that formed last year when Fiat Chrysler merged with the French PSA Group, intends for Chrysler to serve as the tip of the spear for its electrification strategy. The company, which is the fourt...

Vivo has announced the V23 and V23 Pro, the latest phones in the company’s mainstream V series that sells a ton in India and other Asian countries. The most unusual feature is the Sunshine Gold model’s ‘color-changing’ exterior that apparently shifts colors completely when exposed to sunlight. Vivo says the material took two years to research and develop; if you leave it in the sun for about thirty seconds, the phone will turn to blue-green before gradually returning back to the original gold. Plot twist: these phones are both gold. The other standout feature is the display’s notch that houses two selfie cameras, a 50-megapixel main unit and an 8-megapixel ultrawide on both phones. The selfie camera system also supports eye-based autofocus. The V23 Pro has a 108-megapixel main camera on th...

Just as AMD is showing off its first-ever 3D V-Cache-enabled Ryzen processor over at CES 2022, its competitor Intel has also responded with some of its own new tech, unveiling the 12th-generation KS-Series of desktop CPUs. During the company’s press event, client computing head Gregory Bryant revealed that the upcoming CPU series will be able to reach 5.5GHz with a single core while on the Max Turbo setting. Of course, that means it won’t be able to run on full steam for too long, but it’s enough to give your task at hand a little boost. When fully employing its multiple cores, the CPU will be able to surpass 5GHz as well, which — as Engadget points out — will give you ample performance when rendering or gaming. There’s currently no pricing or availability information yet for the...

Samsung’s new barrel-shaped Freestyle projector was just announced at CES. The 1080p projector goes up for preorder today for $899. What matters more than its spec sheet, according to Samsung, is that this highly portable and swiveling visual lightshow with integrated speaker and voice control is coming to support your carefree “lifestyle” and nomadic “experiences.” Olds, in other words, need not apply. How can I be certain of this? Because when I, a curmudgeonly old, showed the Freestyle to my 13-year-old daughter under strict embargo, her first reaction was, and I quote: “I want that. A fake window on my wall would be so pretty.” A sampling of one teen is surely correct. Samsung Freestyle (front).Image: Samsung Samsung Freestyle (back).Image: Samsung The 1.83 pound (0.83kg) projector is ...