If you were planning to play Stadia games on your computer or phone while using its official controller, you'll have to get used to being tethered to your device with a USB-C cable. The Google Stadia controller's wireless capability will only work on TV with a Chromecast Ultra at launch, the tech giant has revealed in a fine print on a Stadia video. A Google Community Manager handling the Stadia subreddit has confirmed the information and also clarified that you'll need the official controller to play games through Chromecast Ultra.
Since the Stadia controller only uses Bluetooth for setup and connects via WiFi for gameplay, you truly can't use it without a cable at first. It's still not clear when wireless play will be available for the other Stadia-compatible devices, but the tech giant told The Verge that it's focusing on getting wireless right on TV first to make the big screen gaming experience as good as possible.
Google's Stadia game streaming service will debut on November 19th in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The Stadia Founder's Edition will set you back $130 and will come a controller, a Chromecast Ultra and two three-month Stadia Pro subscriptions.
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If you wanted to pre-order one of Google's Pixel 4 phones and haven't already, you might be in for a treat. Amazon is offering a $100 gift card to anyone who buys the Pixel 4 (starting at $799) or Pixel 4 XL (starting at $899) ahead of launch. You're not saving money on the Android flagship phone itself, but this could get you the case, wireless charger or other accessories you want for free -- the hidden costs of a new phone might go away. Google also offers $100 when you pre-order from its store, but this might be better if you'd rather have a wider range of accessories or want to buy something else entirely.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
If you wanted to pre-order one of Google's Pixel 4 phones and haven't already, you might be in for a treat. Amazon is offering a $100 gift card to anyone who buys the Pixel 4 (starting at $799) or Pixel 4 XL (starting at $899) ahead of launch. You're not saving money on the Android flagship phone itself, but this could get you the case, wireless charger or other accessories you want for free -- the hidden costs of a new phone might go away. Google also offers $100 when you pre-order from its store, but this might be better if you'd rather have a wider range of accessories or want to buy something else entirely.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Normally the forehead is jet black, but if you blast it with light, you can see all the sensors inside. In this picture, the top is the Soli sensor.
Ron Amadeo
The bottom has one of the stereo speakers.
Ron Amadeo
Here you can see the camera bump.
Ron Amadeo
The side.
Ron Amadeo
The other side has this colorful power button.
Ron Amadeo
The new Google Assistant has this multi-colored design at the bottom.
Ron Amadeo
The G logo.
Ron Amadeo
NEW YORK—Google's big hardware event wrapped up yesterday, and, after a brief session with the Pixel 4, I'm back to report my initial findings. It's a phone.
The feel of the Pixel 4 varies greatly based on which color you get. The black version is the most boring, with a regular glossy, greasy, glass back. The orange and white versions are where things get interesting, though. These have the whole back covered in a soft-touch material (which is still glass) that looks and feels great. It's reminiscent of the soft-touch back that was on the Pixel 3 but with a number of improvements. First, you can't dent it with a fingernail. It feels a lot stronger and tougher than the Pixel 3 back, while still being soft and grippy to the touch. Second, it doesn't seem to absorb and show fingerprint grease at the rate of the Pixel 3 back. It's interesting that the orange and white versions get this soft-touch treatment, while the black version gets a glossy back. The black version is what had so many problems with the soft-touch coating last year.
I think the white version, in particular, looks great from the back. You get an alternating white-and-black color scheme: the sides get a grippy black soft-touch coating, the back is a brilliant white, and the square camera bump is black. It's a lovely color scheme. The Google "G" on the back is the only thing that doesn't get a soft-touch coating. There is actual depth to the G, making it seem like it was masked off when the soft-touch coating was applied, leaving it inset on the phone back, exposing the colored white glass.
The front is... not as elegant as the back. The Pixel 4 has a lopsided front design with a big top bezel and a smaller (but still there) bottom bezel. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's still a bit awkward looking. Google's design still can't compete with the better-looking phones out there, like the OnePlus 7 Pro or Galaxy S10, which is a shame, since Google charges just as much, if not more, than the competition while also offering lower specs.
Those awkward bezels surround a great-looking OLED display, and this year Google has upgraded to a 90Hz panel. The demo units were running early software and maybe needed a bit more tuning, but you could see the smoother animations start to kick in. Google mentioned that the display only hits 90Hz when it's actually being used, and for stationary pictures it drops to 60Hz to save battery.
The top bezel is full of sensors, at least, allowing Google to do a full, iPhone X-style face unlock system with 3D sensing. This is something I'll have to wait for a review unit to try out, but it's a bit alarming not having a fingerprint reader of any kind. We have to unlock our devices dozens of times a day—why not have both fingerprint and Face ID?
Also in the top bezel is the Project Soli sensor. About that...
Motion Sense with Project Soil—Not looking great
A very big deal was made about the Pixel 4 incorporating Project Soli, a miniaturized radar chip cooked up by Google's "Advanced Technology and Projects" (ATAP) division. ATAP has an absolutely horrible track record when it comes to commercialization, but Soli is one of the few projects to have actually made it to market.
In the lead-up to Soli, Google demoed a technology that would discern extremely precise hand movements. Years ago, Google said Soli could detect "sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy" and could detect things like tapping your thumb and index finger together for a virtual button press or rubbing the two fingers together to scroll or turn a virtual dial.
At this presentation, Google said the original Soli chip, while it was a breakthrough miniaturization of radar technology, was still not small enough to fit inside a smartphone and needed to be shrunk further. It seems like this extra shrink took a lot of Soli's accuracy—and a lot of Soli's appeal—away, and now it seems to be only capable of detecting big, hand-waving gestures instead of the fine "sub-millimeter" motions that were originally promised.
I'll have to play with Motion Sense some more to get a better beat on it, but so far, the first impressions are not good. Take the skipping music or dismissing an alarm gesture, where Soli has you wave your hand across the sensor: Soli needs a BIG gesture to work. It's not a flick of the wrist; it's a bend of the elbow. You need to wave your whole hand across the phone in a very big gesture. I've yet to find a way to skip songs using Soli that feels quick or effortless. The gesture is so big that it's a cumbersome, tiring, annoying thing to do.
Enlarge/ Hey you, Pikachu. Respond to my frantic flailing.
Maybe I haven't gotten the hang of it yet, but I also have a very high miss rate. I'd say my gestures work about 50% of the time. At the very least, I can say Motion Sense is either not accurate or not very intuitive, given how many times I've already failed it. I feel I need to seek out more detailed instructions somewhere on how I am supposed to use it.
There isn't a public SDK yet for Motion Sense, but there are some third-party apps that work with it through a limited partner program. It seems like this is the beginnings of an SDK for Soli—work with some select developers now and get feedback before locking down APIs in a formal SDK release.
The two apps available were quick, extremely limited demos. One featured app was Pokemon Wave Hello where you... wave "hello" to a Pokemon? This was extremely simple: opening the app would display Pikachu and several other Pokemon on a plain background, and when you waved hello to them or did some other extremely simple gesture (many using the touch screen instead of the Soli sensor) they would respond with a simple animation. The "wave hello" gesture was, again, a big, arm swinging gesture. Many event attendees failed the hand-wave gesture more than once. I can't imagine ever doing the kind of big, arm flailing motion this requires in public.
Another third-party demo app had you fly across a landscape, and an air gesture left or right would make you move left or right. It's the exact same gesture as Pokemon and skipping music.
So far, Soli reminds me a lot of "Wii Waggle," the old penchant for bad Nintendo Wii games to use a swinging motion input in places where a button press would have been more appropriate. All of these inputs seem silly when the touchscreen is right there, and so far I haven't seen a reason for this technology to exist. Again, I'll have to spend more time with it, but so far I'm unconvinced.
Since Soli is radar, it needs to be approved by various government regulatory bodies around the world in order to be used in a country. In the US that's the FCC. A Google support page lists the countries where the Soil sensor has approval: "Currently, Motion Sense will work in the US, Canada, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, and most European countries." This has nothing to do with where you bought the phone, either. Google's support page notes that "If you travel to a country where [Motion Sense is] not approved, it won’t work," meaning the feature is geo-fenced based on your current location.
Can you actually buy a Pixel 4?
Google aspires to become a real hardware company, and while maybe you could make opinionated arguments for the company's devices against Samsung or Apple, the one place Google is indisputably, woefully behind the competition is when it comes to device distribution.
First we'll start with country availability, which has actually gotten worse with the Pixel 4. While Apple sells the iPhone in 70 countries, and Samsung sells the Galaxy S flagship in 110 countries, Google only sells the Pixel 4 in 12 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This is one less than last year, as Google has pulled its flagships Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 from the Indian market, the world's second-largest country by population. The company hasn't completely quit the Indian smartphone market, though—the cheaper Pixel 3a is still sold there. Shipping physical things is a lot harder than Google's usual offerings of bits and bytes, and until Google fixes its country distribution, it is just pretending to be a hardware company.
In the US, one big improvement is that Google dumped the misleading "Verizon exclusive" marketing. The Pixel 4 will be sold by the big four carriers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. I asked around on the show floor and got a few responses indicating that the Pixel 4 would actually be in the big four carriers' stores, too, not just "compatible" or an online-only option.
After Apple’s iPhone 11 event, I noted that while the company was catching up on features like ultrawide and night mode, it was unclear whether it’d be able to get on the Pixel’s level in terms of basic image quality. Over the course of our review process, it became clear that Apple had indeed achieved that. Apple says it has a class-leading camera every year, but this time it actually does.
The next question, then, is how big a leap will come with Google’s new Pixel 4. We still can’t answer that yet, just as we didn’t know how good the iPhone 11 was the day after its announcement. (You can see some quick comparisons here, but stay tuned for the full review.) We can, however, take a lot from what Google did — and didn’t — have to say on stage yesterday.
“We didn’t forget about the camera,” Google’s Sabrina Ellis said near the end of the presentation. “With Pixel 4 we’re raising the bar yet again, and it all starts with this little square.” “Little” is perhaps a charitable description of the Pixel 4’s conspicuous camera bump, but that bump does of course house what should amount to the biggest change to the Pixel camera.
Let’s just get this out of the way: it’s weird that Google went for a telephoto lens as its second option. “Wide angle can be fun, but we think telephoto is more important,” computational photography lead Marc Levoy said on stage. That’s not an unreasonable position — Apple certainly agreed during the last three years it put out dual-camera phones before switching to ultrawide with the iPhone 11. But Google spent a lot of time last year touting its Super Res Zoom feature that uses multi-frame algorithms to improve the quality of traditional digital zoom. It wasn’t better than an optical telephoto lens, of course, but it was better than nothing, and Google is continuing to use it for the Pixel 4’s extended zoom range.
An ultrawide lens, on the other hand, can’t be faked in software. The reason to include one is because it’s the only way to achieve that perspective. Why, when finally deciding to add a second lens after years of insisting it wasn’t necessary, would Google choose glass that solves a problem it already had a passable solution for, instead of something that makes entirely new types of photos possible?
Or, and hear me out here, why not just add an ultrawide and a telephoto? These are expensive phones. That is a big camera bump. Every single one of Google’s competitors in the premium market now sells phones with triple-camera setups — it’s not that exotic a feature any more. I’m sure we’ll see it on the Pixel 5.
Overall, Google had almost nothing to say about the Pixel 4’s camera hardware on stage beyond the acknowledgement of the second lens. It turns out the main lens has received a slight aperture increase, going to f/1.7 from f/1.8, while the sensor remains 12 megapixels and is presumably the same size as before.
“But the hardware isn’t what makes our camera so much better,” Ellis went on. “The special sauce that makes our pixel camera unique is computational photography.” That is certainly true, and what followed was an engaging presentation from Levoy on how the Pixel works its magic. Or, as he described it in a wry swipe at Apple: “It’s not mad science, it’s just simple physics.”
After explaining the basic principles of HDR+, Levoy detailed four new computational additions to the Pixel 4 camera. The first was Live HDR+, which uses machine learning to calculate HDR+ in real time so you can see it in the viewfinder. This also allows you to control the camera’s exposure with sliders for brightness and shadows, which could make it a lot easier to lock in the results you want.
Elsewhere, the Pixel 4 now uses machine learning for white balance in all modes, instead of just Night Sight — the examples Levoy used included a snow scene, which trips up traditional cameras all the time. The Pixel 4 portrait mode uses the telephoto lens to create a better depth map and work with a wider range of subjects. And Night Sight now has an astrophotography function that merges images across four-minute exposures to produce pin-sharp photos of stars.
All of these features sound cool, and I could watch Marc Levoy talk about HDR algorithms for hours. But it’s hard to know whether the announcements will add up to meaningful, noticeable improvements in pure image quality for the types of photos we take every day. I’m looking forward to taking pictures of stars on my phone, but I don’t know if it’s a selling point. What matters is the extent to which Google has managed to push its core photographic results forward.
This is basically what I thought about the iPhone 11 after its launch, of course, and it turned out to be the biggest leap for Apple in several years despite what appeared to be near-identical hardware. We won’t know how good the Pixel 4 camera really is until we’ve spent more time with it. But the Pixel 3 camera is still one of the best in the world, so there’s no reason to expect anything short of greatness.
Riot Games is launching League of Legends: Wild Rift on Android, iOS and consoles in 2020 -- along with a few other new games. Reports about a mobile game meant to expand LoL's reach in Asia started surfacing earlier this year -- now the developer has confirmed that it's been in the works for quite a while. The company says it took some time to announce Wild Rift, because it's not just a port of LoL for PC. Riot Games chose to rebuild "the whole game from scratch" to create a polished version for the devices it's coming to.
The upcoming multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) for mobile enables faster matches and features a dual-stick, thumb-friendly control scheme designed for the platforms it's for. You'll find that Riot mixed familiar elements with the new, though, including the use of a 5v5 map that's based on LoL's largest map Summoner's Rift. Wild Rift will also feature 40 characters from LoL's existing roster of champions, with more to follow in the future.
Riot Games plans to launch the mobile version of the game "everywhere in the world by the end of 2020," followed by its console debut. It will be free to download and play, and the developer promises that you can earn all its champions without having to pay a cent -- you apparently never have to pay for anything if you don't want to.
The company will start rolling out alpha and beta versions of the game throughout the next few months, starting in China. You can already pre-register on Google Play if you have an Android device, and you can even get bonus rewards if you sign up at launch if you're in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Riot Games is launching League of Legends: Wild Rift on Android, iOS and consoles in 2020 -- along with a few other new games. Reports about a mobile game meant to expand LoL's reach in Asia started surfacing earlier this year -- now the developer has confirmed that it's been in the works for quite a while. The company says it took some time to announce Wild Rift, because it's not just a port of LoL for PC. Riot Games chose to rebuild "the whole game from scratch" to create a polished version for the devices it's coming to.
The upcoming multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) for mobile enables faster matches and features a dual-stick, thumb-friendly control scheme designed for the platforms it's for. You'll find that Riot mixed familiar elements with the new, though, including the use of a 5v5 map that's based on LoL's largest map Summoner's Rift. Wild Rift will also feature 40 characters from LoL's existing roster of champions, with more to follow in the future.
Riot Games plans to launch the mobile version of the game "everywhere in the world by the end of 2020," followed by its console debut. It will be free to download and play, and the developer promises that you can earn all its champions without having to pay a cent -- you apparently never have to pay for anything if you don't want to.
The company will start rolling out alpha and beta versions of the game throughout the next few months, starting in China. You can already pre-register on Google Play if you have an Android device, and you can even get bonus rewards if you sign up at launch if you're in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
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