Technology

Nintendo Switch sales were up 34 percent year-on-year last quarter as the company moved 3.29 million units, despite acknowledging that production has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a big sales driver, with 11.77 million units sold as of the end of March 31st. That’s enough to make it the seventh-best-selling Switch title yet even with only ten days worth of sales data accounted for. Nintendo adds that New Horizons actually sold 13.41 million copies in its first six weeks, though, which likely takes it past Pokémon Let’s Go! into sixth place. Japanese sales figures had already revealed that New Horizons was a big hit. The game sold more in its first three days than any other Animal Crossing or Nintendo Switch title to date, also pushing Switch con...

The LG Velvet has finally officially launched in South Korea, following weeks of teases and announcements. As expected, the phone features a “raindrop” triple rear camera array, is powered by a Snapdragon 765, and has a 6.8-inch OLED display with a small central notch. Details about its global launch are expected to come later this month. LG has taken such a gradual approach with the reveal that we knew practically everything about the Velvet already. The South Korean electronics giant showed off its name and design in sketch form back in April, then announced its processor along with additional details the following week. We also knew the specs of its cameras, display, and battery thanks to a blog post published late last month. The main camera has a 48 megapixel sensor, and it’s joined b...

Countless iOS apps experienced problems launching Wednesday evening, according to multiple reports on Twitter and crowdsourced user reports on Downdetector. The issues seem to have started around 6:30PM ET, and Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Tinder, and more were affected, according to Downdetector. I personally experienced problems with Spotify and GrubHub, but they are both working for me now, so it seems apps are starting to starting work as normal again. The issue was caused by an apparent problem with a Facebook software development kit (SDK) tool that’s used to power sign-in features for many of the apps. Many developers have reported problems with the SDK in this thread on GitHub. You didn’t need to be logging into the apps via Facebook to be affected by the crashes — I wasn’t able to ...

Smart home platform Wink will require customers to pay a $4.99 per month subscription fee starting May 13th, the company announced today. That gives Wink users just seven days to decide if they want to pay a monthly fee for a service that was previously offered for free as part of owning a Wink product. If you opt not to sign up for Wink’s subscription, “you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app, with voice control or through the API, and your automations will be disabled on May 13,” according to Wink’s announcement blog. That seems to mean that you’ll lose the ability to use non-Wink-made smart home products connected to a Wink-managed setup. Though if you decide to subscribe later, your device connections, settings, and automations can be reactivated. “This fee ...

Lyft’s ride-hailing business is down 70 percent, year over year, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s chief executives said in an earnings call with investors Wednesday. The company’s ride volume hit a bottom in the second week of April, plummeting 75 percent year-over-year, and has since gradually risen in the final weeks of the month. As the COVID-19 related shutdown continues with no clear end in sight, Lyft is projecting continued pain for its business. “We cannot predict the trajectory or timing of the eventual recovery,” CEO Logan Green said, “but it is clear that macro trends will continue to negatively impact our business.” But Lyft’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2020 was slightly less grim than it’s ride-hailing business. The company brought in $955.7 mi...

Etsy began pushing homemade masks in early April, and the results panned out in a big way: total sales on the platform doubled last month, by and large thanks to a surge in face mask sales. For comparison, Etsy’s marketplace sales figures between January and March were up only 16 percent. More than 12 million face masks were sold during April, totaling around $133 million in sales. Etsy says they represented the second largest category of product sales across the entire site during the month of April. “It was like waking up and discovering it was Cyber Monday.” “It was like waking up and discovering it was Cyber Monday, except everyone in the world just wanted one product and that product was in extremely limited supply,” Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said on a call with investors this afternoon...

Movie theaters across the country are closed, but some drive-ins are seeing a resurgence in the wake of social distancing practices. Now, Tribeca Enterprises (the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival), IMAX, and AT&T are partnering to bring a summer movie series to as many drive-in theaters as possible in the US. Tribeca Drive-In will feature a curated selection of movies both old and new, alongside special music and sporting events, according to a press release. The series kicks off on June 25th, although programming information — including dates for specific cities and what films will be shown — isn’t available yet. More info will be available in the coming weeks, the companies say. The series will use IMAX’s digital remastering process to enhance both the image and sound quality...

Today, as America faces a difficult debate about “reopening” state economies during the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times seemingly offered a helpful piece of guidance. The paper’s opinion section published a visualization of how people engage with different businesses like bars and gyms, estimating their risk of infection at each. Alarmingly, it dubbed some of these places dangerous “super-spreader businesses” — warning that “through the lens of contagion, a yoga class, a busy corner store, or a crowded neighborhood bar may look a lot like a wet market in China.” But at least in this story, the real worry isn’t contagion. It’s the sweeping assumptions being trained on some very limited data. And it doesn’t say much about whether your local bar can avoid serving coronavirus with its...

The new app that Sonos announced in March will be released on June 8th, and with it will come the launch of the S2 platform that exclusively powers the new Sonos Arc, Five, and Sub. That new underlying operating system will soon make its way to other Sonos products — pretty much everything except for those very old legacy devices that we keep writing about. When the revamped Sonos app arrives, the current version will be renamed “Sonos S1 Controller” in the Apple App Store and Google Play. The new one will simply be “Sonos” and, while its design will look familiar, Sonos says S2 opens up a lot of possibilities: This next generation of the app features support for higher resolution audio technologies, evident with the Dolby Atmos experience on Arc, as well as increased security and improved...

Sonos is finally making its long-awaited push into Dolby Atmos home theater audio. That effort starts with the new $799 Arc, a premium soundbar that replaces the Playbar in Sonos’ product lineup. The oddball Playbase speaker, designed to fit underneath some TVs, is also being discontinued today as Sonos simplifies your options to just the Arc and Beam. It isn’t cheap at $800, and it’s $100 more expensive than the Playbar, but Sonos claims that the Arc sets a new standard for the soundbar category. It’ll be released on June 10th and will only work with the new Sonos S2 app when that launches on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac early next month. The Arc, third-generation Sub, and Sonos Five are the first products built on the company’s S2 platform, which will allow for higher-fidelity audio (a...

Sonos is refreshing its best-sounding music speaker today, but the new product is so similar to its predecessor that there’s zero reason for anyone with a Play:5 to consider an upgrade. That new speaker is called the Sonos Five. And though it now shares branding with the Sonos One, which was the company’s first product with built-in voice assistant capabilities, the Sonos Five oddly does not include a built-in microphone for use with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. Sonos told me that it’s fully focused on sound performance with this product and points to that as the reasoning for why it didn’t add mics to the design. The company also says that customers tend to put the Play:5 (and now Sonos Five) in spots where a voice assistant would be inconsequential and of limited use. I’m not really...

The NFC Forum has announced an update for the short-range wireless technology that adds a form of wireless charging to the standard. Future NFC devices could offer wireless charging functionality, albeit in a way that’s far more limited than the popular Qi standard used by almost every other device (via 9to5Google). The new NFC standard is far slower than Qi charging, offering up to 1W speeds compared to base Qi speeds of 5W. (Qi fast charging can reach speeds of 10W or more on standard hardware.) And it’ll require new hardware — you won’t be able to just get a firmware update and suddenly be able to have NFC-based wireless charging on your current device. It’s not meant to replace Qi charging Considering that the speeds are so slow compared to Qi, one might wonder why anyone would bother ...