Technology

Seattle gaming convention PAX West will not be happening this Labor Day weekend. Instead, it will shift into a nine-day online conference that takes place in the middle of September, the conference’s organizers announced today. The new PAX Online will take place virtually from September 12th through the 20th. There will be three channels hosting content “non-stop each and every day,” including panels, concerts, competitions, and esports events. PAX Online plans to offer downloadable demos to replicate the experience of trying games out on the show floor, and if you want to get PAX merch, you’ll be able to buy it online. PAX West’s organizers said in April that the event was still on for Labor Day weekend PAX West’s organizers had said in April that they planned to host the conference as sc...

You don’t need Google’s own gamepad or dongle to try its Stadia cloud gaming service, particularly now that it works on practically any Android phone — but if you want to fire up Stadia on your 4K TV with a wireless gamepad, you can do that for cheaper now. Today, Google is offering a new Stadia Premiere Edition starter kit for $99, which comes with the company’s Chromecast Ultra HDMI dongle and the Stadia Controller you’ll need to control it from your couch, and which also works plugged into a phone or wirelessly with a computer. Previously, Google sold both devices in a $129 bundle that also came with a free three-month subscription to the Stadia Pro service, which offers 4K-ish streaming, surround sound, and access to free games each month. The new bundle no longer comes with three free...

Sonos has announced a new color option for its portable $399 Move speaker: it now comes in a “lunar white” design in addition to the grayish-black color the company already offers. It makes sense since every other Sonos speaker (from the $799 Arc soundbar to the cheapest $179 One SL) already comes in both black and white color options. The new design allows the Move to match the rest of the Sonos speaker lineup. Image: Sonos The Move is different from Sonos’ other products in one key respect: while it’s still a home speaker that’s designed to stream music over Wi-Fi and in conjunction with other Sonos products, it also has an integrated battery and Bluetooth support, allowing it to be moved around (or even outside) your house. Additionally, Sonos has managed to eke out an extra hour of bat...

A few weeks ago, I highlighted a $100 deal on a refurbished set of Jabra Elite 75t headphones. That price remains unbeatable, though if you aren’t wanting to go down the refurbished route, a brand-new set is more affordable than ever at Amazon and Best Buy. These normally cost $180, but you can get them now for $150. While the Elite 75t lack noise cancellation or a wireless charging case, they make up that with excellent sound quality, a comfortable fit, and USB-C charging. Compared to AirPods, they have better noise isolation and better compatibility with Android devices. These earned one of the top spots in our buying guide to the best truly wireless headphones. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon’s Echo Spot smart display hasn’t been easy to come by recently, but today, A...

DC Comics is preparing to host a 24-hour event this August that will include teasers and announcements for upcoming comics, games, TV shows, and films, including The Batman, Shazam!, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman 1984. The event, called FanDome, will kick off on August 22nd at 1PM ET. Alongside announcements and general news, DC Comics and WarnerMedia are wrangling an assortment of talent for interviews and discussions across some of the company’s most anticipated titles, including Aquaman, The Batman, Batwoman, Black Adam, Black Lightning, DC Super Hero Girls , Legends of Tomorrow, Stargirl, Doom Patrol, The Flash, Harley Quinn, the Snyder Cut of Justice League, Lucifer, Pennyworth, Shazam!, The Suicide Squad, Supergirl, Superman & Lois, Teen Titans Go!, Titans, Watchmen, Young Justice: O...

Seth Meyers has taken on some new jobs over the past few months. Since he started hosting Late Night at home during the coronavirus pandemic, he’s also been in charge of recording his own video and audio, running a teleprompter, and uploading the files to his production staff to make the show look, feel, and sound enough like the one he’s been making in 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the past six years. A late-night talk show is a pretty well-oiled machine at NBC — the format has been around since at least the 1950s — but according to Eric Leiderman, one of the producers for Late Night with Seth Meyers, a lot of the production workflows from Studio 8G couldn’t carry over to a show that’s done completely remotely. “We felt very vulnerable from a production standpoint for sure,” Leiderman says. “W...

The Tesla Model S Long Range Plus now has an EPA-rated range of 402 miles, making it the first electric vehicle to receive a rating of over 400 miles from the agency. The new rating applies to all North American Model S vehicles with the “Long Range Plus” name, which Tesla introduced back in February to replace the “Long Range” version of the car. “All Model S cars made since late Jan have 402 mile range,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. “This is just making it official.” The Model S Long Range Plus has a starting price of $74,990 following a price reduction last month. Until recently, the EPA-rated range of the Model S Long Range Plus was 391 miles, but this had been a source of contention between Tesla and the EPA. Last month, Tesla’s CEO claimed that the rating was a result of a mi...

Microsoft is launching a new Money in Excel feature that’s designed to help the millions of people who use Excel to track budgets and personal finances. Money in Excel is a template and add-in for Excel that allows Microsoft 365 subscribers to securely connect to bank, credit card, investment, or loan accounts and import transactions and account information directly into a spreadsheet. You’ll need to be a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber in the US to get access to Money in Excel, and you can simply download the template to begin connecting bank accounts through the Plaid connector. Most major US financial institutions are supported, and the template will automatically import transactions from accounts into a single workbook. Money in Excel.Microsoft Transactions are categorized ...

Last week I wrote about a set of predictions that I got spectacularly wrong. Today, to soothe my fragile ego, let’s talk about a case where I was a closer to the mark. In April, after talking with public health experts, I wrote about why Bluetooth-based approaches to finding new cases of COVID-19 seemed likely to fall short. A combination of human behaviors and technical challenges seemed likely to limit the effectiveness of a pandemic response scheme that relied on our phones passively pinging each other wherever we went. At the same time, I wrote, a more old-fashioned approach — using human beings to make phone calls and identify people who may have been exposed to the disease — seemed much more promising. Somewhat hilariously, at least to me, the very next day Apple and Google announced...

The European Commission is opening two antitrust investigations into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices today. The first investigation will probe whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies, following complaints by Spotify and Rakuten over Apple’s 30-percent cut on subscriptions and sales of ebooks through its App Store. “We need to ensure that Apple’s rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers, for example with its music streaming service Apple Music or with Apple Books,” says Margrethe Vestager, the head of the EU’s antitrust division. “I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple’s App Store rules and their compliance with EU competition rules.” Spotify led the complaints into Apple’s App ...

T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T customers were mystified on Monday when their calls stopped going through, in what turned out to be a nationwide outage for T-Mobile’s network, specifically, that lasted most of the day. Around 1AM Tuesday, the company tweeted that voice calls and text messaging services had been fully restored. According to reports on Downdetector and on social media, reports spiking around 2:20 PM ET Monday. While AT&T told The Verge that its network was “operating normally” and Verizon said its network was “performing well,” T-Mobile confirmed that it’ was working to fix “a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country.” Verizon also said it was not to blame: “We’re aware that another carrier is having network issues. Calls to and from that ...

Google is opening up its Google Maps Platform to everyone so developers can incorporate Maps data into their games, the company announced on Monday. Its tools let developers use Maps data to build games that let you explore a modified version of the real world, similar to Niantic’s Pokémon Go. (Niantic, once a startup within Google, has its own developer toolset for making AR games that use live camera and 3D mapping data, called the Niantic Real World Platform.) Google first announced the tools in March 2018, but they were only available to a “limited group” of studios and only 10 games have been built with them so far, according to a Google blog post. The company says indie studios and other developers expressed interest in using the platform, so the company has been working to scale up ...