Technology

Developer Remedy Entertainment announced that it’s making a new game, codenamed “Condor,” a multiplayer spinoff of Control. No release date, price, or story beats have been shared for Project Condor, but all we know so far is that Remedy’s press release says it will be a four-player cooperative PvE (player vs. environment) game. It’ll be built with Northlight, the same engine used for Control. It will release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S consoles. The game will be published by 505 Games. “As a multiplayer game, Project Condor has the potential to engage the gaming community in the long run, contributing to 505 Games’ product revenue stream longer than traditional games,” shared the co-CEOs of Digital Bros Group, the company that operates the publisher, in a statement. Contro...

Instagram has always limited who can post swipe-up links to their stories, but today, the company is starting a new test that could widen that ability. In this case, however, it isn’t a swipe up that people will be able to offer, but instead a linking sticker. These stickers will operate the same way a swipe-up link does, except with a tap instead of a swipe. People will also be able to respond to stories that include a sticker, which they can’t currently do with stories that have a swipe up. For now, the test is small, and Vishal Shah, Instagram’s head of product, tells The Verge it’s mostly to learn how people might take advantage of links. They’ll be watching for the types of links people post while keeping a particular eye on misinformation and spam. Plus, stickers, he says, fit more i...

Amazon has announced a new feature for its Kids Plus service on Fire tablets and Echo smart speakers called Reading Sidekick. Designed to help kids improve their reading skills and ability, the Reading Sidekick allows kids to read either physical or digital books along with Alexa by taking turns at reading the books aloud with the digital assistant. The Reading Assistant is included in the Kids Plus service that comes with the Kids edition Fire tablets and Echo speakers or as a $2.99 per month ($4.99 without Amazon Prime) or $69 per year ($99 without Prime) subscription plan and is available starting June 29th. The Reading Sidekick works with most Alexa-enabled devices, including the Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Dot Kids, Echo Plus, and Echo Show. Once the Amazon Kids mode is enabled on the smart ...

The Zenfone 8, Asus’ well-specced and compact competitor to the iPhone 12 mini, has launched in the US. The company is currently selling two versions of the phone on its website. There’s a model with 128GB of storage which will eventually sell for $629 once its early bird pricing of $599 expires on July 13th, while the other has 256GB of storage and costs $699. Both are equipped with 8GB of RAM and are compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks, but not Verizon. We liked the Zenfone 8 when we reviewed it last month. Its 5.9-inch display makes it a relatively compact device in comparison to the rest of the Android market, and its 120Hz refresh rate and Snapdragon 888 processor mean it feels snappy and responsive to use. Its smaller size means its battery life is only okay, and its cam...

Hyundai has officially completed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics, the creator of the internet’s favorite dancing Spot and Atlas robots (which only occasionally look like dystopian nightmare machines). And to celebrate, the company is collaborating with K-pop sensation BTS on a new video that shows seven Spot robots grooving to the band’s 2020 song “IONIQ: I’m On It.” And while Spot’s smooth dance moves might bring a frisson of worry to any K-pop fans thinking that K-pop boy-bands might be the next industry that Boston Dynamics is targeting for its robots to replace human workers in, right now it seems that BTS isn’t too worried about the competition. A second video shows off the band celebrating the Hyundai acquisition alongside a Spot robot, and both boy band and bot come together for ...

Google is working to enhance the integrity of the Play Store by adding new restrictions and safeguards to developer accounts. Google Play Store developers will soon have to verify their email address and phone number and provide extra details like a physical address in an attempt to increase security and ensure that accounts are being created by ‘real people,’ the company has announced. Developers will also be required to use two-step verification. The search giant says it’s making the changes “to keep Google Play safe and secure and to better serve our developer community,” and to “make sure that every account is created by a real person with real contact details.” The Record reports that the announcement coincides with the emergence of a cottage industry of sellers who’ll create large am...

Microsoft is introducing a new Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR) feature in Windows 11 that’s designed to save laptop battery life and boost refresh rates when they’re really needed. A number of laptops now ship with 120Hz and beyond displays, which make Windows feel a lot smoother across scrolling, animations, and inking. While the added smoothness feels great, running at higher refresh rates takes its toll on battery life. In Windows 10 you have to decide between 60Hz and 120Hz on a laptop, and it’s a static choice. Microsoft is now building DRR into Windows 11, which will allow a laptop to dynamically adjust its refresh rate. “This means that Windows 11 will seamlessly switch between a lower refresh rate and a higher refresh rate based on what you’re doing on your PC,” explains Ana Marta, a pr...

Google announced a new website designed to be a “one-stop shop” for people with food insecurity. The “Find Food Support” site includes a food locator tool powered by Google Maps which people can use to search for their nearest food bank, food pantry, or school lunch program pickup site in their community. Google is working with non-profit groups like No Kid Hungry and FoodFinder, as well as the US Department of Agriculture, to aggregate 90,000 locations with free food support across all 50 states — with more locations to come. The new site is a product of Google’s newly formed Food for Good team, formerly known as Project Delta when it was headquartered at Alphabet’s X moonshot division. Project Delta’s mission is to “create a smarter food system,” which includes standardizing data to impr...

Google is updating its Messages app in India to allow it to delete one-time passwords (OTPs) automatically, to stop the single-use codes from clogging up your inbox, the company has announced. Alongside it, Google also says the app will be able to sort messages into categories, keeping your personal correspondence away from notifications about bank transactions and special offers. As someone that almost exclusively uses WhatsApp for personal communication, my phone’s default texting app is typically a graveyard of six-digit codes, which by design become useless mere minutes after they’re received. Having the ability to automatically delete them after 24 hours should make Messages less cluttered and more usable. The new Gmail-style categories.Source: Google It’s a similar story when it come...

Microsoft is announcing that the next version of Office for Windows 11 will have a native 64-bit Arm version, for improved performance on large or picture-filled documents, and support for 64-bit add-ins. The new version of Office is currently in beta, available to Office Insiders. Microsoft also announced a redesign of Office, which you can see above and below. While it uses a similar design to Windows 11, it’ll be available whether you’re running the Windows 11 Preview or Windows 10. In addition to the new design, Office will also adapt to your Windows light / dark mode, so you should be able to avoid the experience of opening a document and having it blast light into your eyes at night. The newly-designed Excel and PowerPoint.Image: Microsoft Microsoft hasn’t shied away from talki...

Nikon is going all-in on the retro aesthetic with its latest Z-series mirrorless camera. The company says the new Z FC, officially styled “Z fc,” is designed specifically to evoke its FM2 film SLR from the ‘80s, with dedicated dials for settings like shutter speed, exposure compensation, and ISO. The approach is similar to the Nikon DF, a retro-style full-frame DSLR that Nikon released in 2013. But the DF was much larger than the film cameras it was inspired by. The Z FC has a 20.9-megapixel APS-C sensor (and of course no SLR mirror and prism), which means the resulting camera is far more compact and looks a lot closer to something like an FM2. Beyond the exterior, the Z FC is a modern camera with broadly similar specs to the Z50. There’s a vari-angle touchscreen, an OLED electronic viewfi...

If you’ve been experiencing the bug where the iOS version of Snapchat crashes at launch, it seems that there’s now an update to fix it available in the App Store. The bug that’s been fixed by the update didn’t appear to have affected the Android version of the app. Before updating to the latest version, 11.34.1.35, the app would give me a message that something went wrong, before crashing to Springboard on my iPhone 12 Mini. Now, I’m no longer getting the error, and have successfully been able to send a Snap. This is what the bug looked like when it was present: The Snapchat Support Twitter account hasn’t yet tweeted about the fix (despite having a pinned tweet talking about the bug), but Snap’s SVP of Product has tweeted about the issue being fixed. Both myself and one of my co-workers te...