Technology

The next Alien video game will be cooperative. Today, developer Cold Iron Studios revealed Aliens: Fireteam, a multiplayer third-person shooter about surviving an onslaught of Xenomorphs set a few decades after the original Alien films. Fireteam is a class-based shooter — where players take on roles like gunner, demolisher, or technician — and Cold Iron says there will be a huge range of enemies to take on, including 11 types of Xenomorphs, as well as some of those pesky Weyland-Yutani synthetics. Here’s the basic premise: Set 23 years after the original Alien trilogy, Aliens: Fireteam drops players into the role of a Colonial Marine aboard the USS Endeavor, recently tasked with answering a distress call from the outer colonies. Deploy to overrun facilities, abandoned ruins, and strange al...

You could now line up five years’ worth of Surface Pro devices next to each other and it would be all but impossible to tell them apart. Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 7 Plus keeps the same familiar design, which is likely just to satisfy corporate customers who want to standardize their hardware for years at a time. That might be good news for business customers, but for the rest of us who want slimmer display bezels and a more modern design like the Surface Pro X, then the wait continues. It’s no surprise then that Microsoft is limiting sales of the Surface Pro 7 Plus exclusively to businesses and schools. Consumers won’t be able to purchase this from a store, and it’s really for businesses and schools looking to upgrade older machines. While I’ve bemoaned the current design of the Surface ...

At $329, Apple’s eighth-generation iPad is the most affordable tablet offered by the tech giant. But if you want to save some additional cash, you can buy the base model, which includes 32GB of storage, for only $299 at Amazon in space gray only (in stock March 28th). Walmart is price-matching the e-commerce giant, but you have the option to buy it for $299 in space gray or rose gold. This iPad includes a 10.2-inch display and features an A12 Bionic processor. The tablet also includes a Touch ID fingerprint sensor and a Smart Connector, allowing you to connect it to a Smart Keyboard. Apple iPad (2020, 32GB, Wi-Fi only) $299 $329 10% off Prices taken at time of publishing. Apple’s new eighth-generation iPad with 32GB of storage looks exactly like the previous iteration, but it has a faster ...

Swedish automaker Volvo says it will only sell electric cars by 2030, phasing out all diesel, petrol, and hybrid options in an effort to reduce global carbon emissions. The company previously aimed for half of its cars sales to be electric by 2025, but says the new strategy is an “acceleration” of this goal driven by “strong demand” for its electric options. The company also says future sales of its electric cars in “coming years” will be online-only. Volvo, which is owned by Chinese conglomerate Geely, launched its first fully-electric car, the XC40 Recharge, last year. The SUV has a roughly 200 mile range and can charge its batteries to 80 percent capacity in 40 minutes. In our time with the car we found it to be an “impressive blend of Swedish ingenuity, crossover utility, and electric ...

Accessory manufacturer Gomi is launching a limited edition Bluetooth speaker powered by batteries from old Lime e-bikes. In its announcement of the partnership, Lime says Gomi will use 50,000 battery cells from over 1,000 old e-bikes. The result is a Bluetooth speaker priced starting at £99 (around $138) that has 20 hours of battery life and will be available for 30 days as part of a Kickstarter launching later today. It’s an interesting initiative that Lime hopes will further decrease the environmental impact of its shareable e-bikes, which are touted as a way of reducing reliance on cars for short journeys. In the past, other shared micromobility options like e-scooters have been criticized for their short lifespans, with one 2019 report estimating their average lifespan at around four m...

Vizio today filed its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as the TV and soundbar maker heads toward an initial public offering. “We envision the Vizio smart TV as the center of the connected home — where families play games together, where friends watch movies together, where work and learning happen, and where all things in between take place,” Vizio founder, chairman, and CEO William Wang wrote in a letter that opens the S-1. “Going public is an important milestone for us as we continue to grow and execute our goals.” The filing reveals that Vizio has sold over 80 million TVs and 11 million soundbars since the company’s founding. It sold 7.1 million TVs in 2020. Vizio’s TVs have long delivered performance and picture quality far above their price, though in recent years co...

Google is updating its augmented reality SDK so that phones with dual cameras can capture better depth information. As noted by Android Police, the most recent update to the Google Play Services for AR app, which is how Google distributes ARCore features, now notes “Dual camera stereo depth on supported devices” in its changelog. For now, it appears that the support will be limited to Google’s own Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, which were both released in 2019. The list of compatible ARCore devices on Google’s developer site says that dual camera support will roll out in the coming weeks. Notably, this means that the Pixel 5 and 4a 5G, both of which are 2020 Pixel phones with dual cameras, won’t see the benefits for now. That may be because their secondary cameras are ultrawides rather than the P...

Clue, best known for its period tracking app, announced that it received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for a digital birth control function, which it says can help users prevent pregnancy based only on the start date of a user’s period. It calculates the window where someone could get pregnant based on statistical modeling. “It personalizes over time. So as the individual puts in their cycle day one then we’re able to personalize the window of their high risk days vs their low risk days,” Clue’s chief medical officer Lynae Brayboy told TechCrunch. The company plans to launch its digital birth control some time this year. Clue says that its digital birth control is 92 percent effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy when it’s used the way most people do (accounting for s...

Grimes is the latest artist to get in on the NFT gold rush, selling around $6 million worth of digital artworks after putting them up for auction yesterday. A series of 10 pieces — some one of a kind, others with thousands of copies — went up for sale on Nifty Gateway on November 28th. The highest-selling piece was a one-of-a-kind video called “Death of the Old” that involves flying cherubs, a cross, a sword, and glowing light that’s set to an original song by Grimes. The winning bidder took it for nearly $389,000. The bulk of the sales came from two pieces with thousands of copies available that sold for $7,500 each. The works, titled “Earth” and “Mars,” are both short videos featuring their titular planet with a giant cherub over it holding a weapon, also set to original music. Nearly 70...

Roku, one of the most popular streaming platforms in US homes, is acquiring Nielsen’s video advertisement business as it tries to become a central hub for TV advertising. Specifically, Roku is acquiring Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising unit. The acquisition means that Roku will also acquire Nielsen’s automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technology. DAI technology simply means that advertisers will be able to receive “better targeting and measurement” capabilities so they can hyper-target a specific audience instead of more broad demographics like age and gender. Think of ads for products people might actually want playing before a YouTube video compared to seemingly random ads playing on CNN. It’s often referred to as addressable TV advertising because of ...

YouTube has suspended Rudy Giuliani’s YouTube channel for the second time this year for making false claims of fraud in the 2020 US presidential election and has issued a strike against his channel. It’s Giulani’s second strike within 90 days, according to Bloomberg, meaning that Giuliani cannot upload videos for two weeks. In a statement, YouTube also cited Giulani’s promotion of nicotine, which is against the company’s rules. “We have clear Community Guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube, which we enforce consistently, regardless of speaker,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “We removed content from the Rudy W. Giuliani channel for violating our sale of regulated goods policy, which prohibits content facilitating the use of nicotine, and our presi...

Rumors about a folding iPhone are nothing new, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (who has a very strong track record) is weighing in with information of his own: he says that Apple could be looking at a 2023 launch, and that the phone could have a screen between 7.5 and eight inches (via MacRumors). Previous rumors have suggested that the screen would be smaller, closer to the size of an iPhone 12 Pro Max. There have been numerous reports about Apple prototyping a folding iPhone, but according to MacRumors, Kuo says that the product has “not yet officially kicked off.” Meanwhile, competitors like Samsung, Motorola, and Royole have all released multiple foldable phones (though they’re mostly expensive and clearly early implementations of the tech). According to Kuo, the screen will be iPad Mini-size...