A new subscription service from Google Photos will print and mail you a selection of your photos each month, 9to5Google reports. The service’s $7.99 monthly fee gets you 10 automatically-selected 4 x 6-inch prints, which are picked from the photos you’ve taken over the last 30 days. Google is currently trialing the service in the US, and you can sign up from a promotional banner that’s appearing for some Google Photos users.
Google has been offering physical photo prints for a little while now, but the interesting thing here is that its algorithms will pick which of your photos get printed, rather than relying on you placing individual orders. 9to5Google reports that you have the option of prioritizing photos with “people and pets,” “landscapes,” or “a little bit of everything.” You also have the option of editing your selection before they’re printed each month.
This curation comes at a cost. At this price the photos work out at $0.79 per print, which is more than double the starting price of $0.25 Google charges for photos printed using its Walmart or CVS partnerships. However, the subscription service is definitely less effort than picking individual photos to print yourself.
Physical photos are one of those things that it’s easy to miss out on entirely if you take most of your photos on a smartphone or digital camera and forget to ever get them printed. Personally, the struggle for me is remembering to take photos in the first place, but knowing that I’m going to get charged at the end of each month could be exactly the kind of incentive I need to get snapping.
That's actually not the most surprising part of the story, although compared to some of Samsung's Android Pie deliveries last year, the turnaround is definitely pretty impressive. What never happens, however, and is in fact happening here is a major OS promotion making its way over-the-air to a US unlocked Galaxy flagship before carriers can take care of the same device.
Technically, the Galaxy Note 9 has scored Android 10 goodies with One UI 2.0 tweaks on top on a few US carriers already, but we're not talking about any of the nation's "big four" industry players. Instead, US Cellular, Xfinity Mobile, Spectrum Mobile, and Comcast apparently managed to beat Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile to the punch, and now the same can be said about unlocked models purchased directly from Samsung, as well as authorized retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and B&H Photo Video.
Let's just hope this change of pace for the Galaxy Note 9 doesn't mean mobile network operators have bumped into any serious glitches while "optimizing" their Android 10 updates. The Galaxy S9 and S9+ are also yet to make the jump as far as both US unlocked and major carrier-locked models are concerned, but if everything goes according to Samsung's latest plans, all that should change very soon.
Microsoft is no longer planning to release its special Surface Hub 2X processor upgrade cartridge this year. The software giant was planning to allow Surface Hub 2S owners to upgrade to this cartridge, improving the processor and GPU inside. It was also part of how Microsoft would enable tiling and rotation support on the Surface Hub 2, a big feature the company originally unveiled last year.
In a leaked webinar to Surface Hub 2 sellers, Microsoft says it’s still committed to developing tiling and rotation but it’s not clear when these features will arrive. “They might not require an upgrade for Surface Hub 2S customers, or they might not require a paid compute cartridge swap,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in the webinar. “We don’t have plans to release a compute cartridge in 2020, because the best way to release those capabilities — tiling and rotation — may not require us to take that path.”
Instead, Microsoft is now planning to release a “major software update” for Surface Hub and Surface Hub 2 customers and its larger 85-inch device. It will be based on the first 2020 release of Windows 10, and include more IT-friendly integration, deployment, and manageability features. Microsoft is releasing this update free of charge for all Surface Hub v1 and Surface Hub 2S devices, whereas the 2X processor cartridge upgrade would have only been available for Surface Hub 2S devices.
While this update will be based on the latest Windows 10 release, it will not be based on the company’s modern Windows Core OS platform that will power Windows 10X devices like the Surface Neo. The compute cartridge (2X) was supposed to update the Surface Hub 2S to this more modern OS, but it’s not entirely clear whether that will ever arrive now. Microsoft’s plans to turn the Surface Hub 2S display into a monitor for other devices to connect to is still planned for 2020, though.
We reached out to Microsoft for clarification around its Surface Hub 2X plans, but the company would only confirm its plans for a software update this year. “We have an ongoing dialogue with our customers on Hub and are working to align the roadmap to best meet their needs,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “The top two priorities for Hub in 2020 are deploying the 85” device and rolling out an OS update that includes many top features customers have been requesting since Surface Hub 2S launched, including improving IT integration, deployment and management capabilities at no cost for all version 1 Hubs and Hub 2S devices. We’ll have more to share in the coming months.”
Warcraft 3: Reforged is an unmitigated disaster. A bug ridden, incomplete cash grab that not only fails to deliver on its original promise, but scorches its own legacy like a burning legion invasion. The final nail in a gold-plated coffin for a morally bankrupt, creatively anemic company.
As far as I can tell, Warcraft 3: Reforged is fine.
The original cinematics have been scaled badly, and look choppy and low-res as a result. The new in-engine cutscenes are generally an improvement – sometimes excellent – but the lip syncing is way off. Sometimes, the animations are off too, like when I watched Arthas kill Mal’Ganis by stabbing Frostmourne through his left bollock.
The UI changes shown off in the original trailers have been abandoned, replaced by some minor changes to size and visual clarity. Some in-engine cutscenes use the dynamic camera angles shown off at Blizzcon 2018, but many don’t. The model redesigns are excellent, and each new one brings me untold joy, but taken as a whole, the game is missing the post-processing that ties it all together into a cohesive aesthetic. Blizzard did stealth-announce these changes, but failed to pull the original video from the store page. For that, they’re absolutely at fault.
Competitive ladders have been removed from multiplayer. Custom campaigns are not currently accessible. Even players that haven’t purchased Reforged have been forced to download a huge update, and now have to face some of the same server problems.
These are all notable issues, some more serious than others. I don’t mean to downplay the community’s complaints.
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But I’m still having a blast.
In my review-in-progress, I hoped that after I’d spent more time with Reforged, I’d be able to separate my own nostalgia and history from what I was experiencing.
As It turns out, I can’t. So I’m not even going to try. I can’t tell you what returning to this version of Azeroth should mean to you. Here’s what it means to me.
On the right side of my chest, I have the words “I’ll make it to the moon if I have to crawl” tattooed in simple, black script. I got it just at the tail end of my first year at uni.
I dropped out of school at fifteen years old, didn’t finish my exams. I had no qualifications. No real ambitions aside from playing bass and getting stoned every day. By the time I turned 21, I’d completed community college, and due to the bursaries and loans from being from a low income family, I’d been able to start a three year creative writing course at university. I came close to dropping out several times from depression, but eventually got through the first year.
If I managed that, I decided, I could manage anything.
I’ll make it to the moon if I have to crawl. My first tat, and still the only one I have.
You might recognise the line. It’s from the song Scar Tissue by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. It’s still one of my favourite lines. But I also felt comfortable getting it inked because I figured – and still do – that if I ever fell out of love with the band’s music, it was good enough poetry to stand on its own terms.
I really loved the band then, and had for a while. I bring this all up because I want to emphasise what a difficult choice it was when, the week Warcraft 3 released back in 2002, my mum – who had just separated from my dad, and was making up for lost time – decided she wanted to take me and my two brothers and sister to see RHCP live. If any of us didn’t want to go, we could have the money instead.
50 quid. Exactly how much Warcraft 3 cost. I could go see a band I loved with my family, or I could have the house – and the PC – to myself for a few days.
It was a great few days.
I’m not sure I’d have ever started writing if it wasn’t for Warcraft 2. At least, I wouldn’t have had my imagination captured by epic fantasy in the same way. Watching old footage back, it seems like a stretch to square up those two concepts. There’s not much epic, in hindsight, about Warcraft 2’s tiny skirmishes. It didn’t feel like that then, though. It felt huge, exciting. Six years before The Fellowship of the Ring awed me in the cinema, commanding these bands of green skinned warriors was the closest thing to watching a full scale battle between elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, and trolls I’d ever seen. I figured Warcraft had invented orcs for quite a while.
Warcraft 2 was even more special because I’d watched my dad playing it first. There was something sophisticated and adult about the concept of a strategy game. Drawing green boxes around bands of units, upgrading weapons and armour, building settlements.
When my Dad, Roy, passed, he had the same long silver hair he’d had for most of his life. He’d let his beard, usually trimmed short, grow out to wizardly proportions. When I spoke to the coroner over the phone to confirm some details, he said to me:
“He looked awesome, your dad. Looked like Gandalf the Grey.”
I tend towards gallows humour on a good day. In times of tragedy, it’s instinctual.
“I don’t think he’ll be back as Roy the White somehow” I responded.
He didn’t know what to say to that.
Thing is, growing up, my dad was Gandalf. A long haired, intimidating, but tender guardian that introduced me and my siblings to mythical creatures and magical worlds. Warhammer. Godzilla films. Comic books. Action figures. And PC games. Like Warcraft.
When I was very young, maybe nine or ten, the record and electronics shop my dad owned was broken into, and the thieves stole dozens of Sega Megadrive games. After that, he only left empty cases in the shop, and brought a huge bag full of PlayStation 1 – and later Dreamcast – discs home with him every day. We weren’t rich, or even wealthy. Everything was second hand, and my dad did swaps for a couple of pounds far more often than he sold anything. But if my dad had it at the end of the day, I could play it.
I think Warcraft 3 was the first game I ever bought from somewhere that wasn’t my dad’s shop, and probably the first game I ever bought new, too. I didn’t love games then any less than I do now, but aside from copies of Suikoden II and Abe’s Exodus I begged for various birthdays, I was usually content to just play whatever my dad had installed, or in-stock.
Not Warcraft 3. Needed to have it. I needed to return to Azeroth, and finish the story. What I found was something far more ambitious and thoughtful than I’d dared to hope. A story that not only expanded what existed previously into a few pages of lore to an MMO-worthy world, but breathed life into two dimensional archetypes. It was inspiring, tragic, gripping, and vast. It was everything a good fantasy story should be.
As I said, without Warcraft, I’m not sure I’d be a writer. Would never have gone to university. Would never have got that tattoo.
All these moments I loved originally are still there. Arthas stopping to catch a falling petal in his gloved hands as he marches into King Terenas’ throne room and commits the act that will damn him forever. Sylvana’s death and undeath. Gromm being corrupted by demon blood, and later, fighting side by side with Thrall again. That incredible final mission, where men and orcs and elves band together to defend the world against Archimonde.
Some are so much better. The remastered cutscene where Arthas finds the cursed blade Frostmourne is stunning. Watching it side by side with the original, it’s impossible to conclude that no care or love went into Reforged. Whether through budget, neglect, or mismanagement, cutscenes like this are the exception – not the rule that was advertised. It’s a shame, because if nothing else, the artists and animators that worked on Reforged seem like they were dead set on creating something truly special.
If there are any serious bugs, I haven’t found any, save the one time I had to restart the game because I was auto-failing any mission I tried to start. I shut it down, started it back up again, and things have been fine since. That said, I get the impression I’m the outlier here, so I’d suggest seeking out some other evidence – as in pictures, videos, specific descriptions, not just vague shouting on the internet – before you make up your own mind.
Two thirds of the way through the orcish campaign in Reign of Chaos, Thrall sends Gromm Hellscream off to a northern forest to collect lumber for a new orcish settlement. What neither of them realise is that the forest is sacred to the Night Elves that reside there. The trees that the orcs cut down and repurpose are ancient beyond measure.
After fighting the Night Elves, and collecting a huge stockpile of lumber from their sacred forest, Gromm starts work on the base. Something new, built from the remains of the old.
Gromm eventually builds the base, and it’s a fine base. Maybe not exactly what was promised, but it’s…fine, you know?
It’s just a shame he has to destroy so much history to get there.
Samsung’s Galaxy S20 series is launching next week and pretty much all major details about the phones have leaked. But we’re now getting information about some new camera features that the S20 flagships might house.
Serial tipster and XDA contributor Max Weinbach says that all three Galaxy S20 phones will get a camera feature called QuickTake. This will allow users to capture three individual photos at the same time from the main, ultra-wide, and telephoto cameras.
also because you guys totally missed it in the S20 one, the S20 will take pics out of 2 or 3 of the lenses and will let you choose pictures after the fact. It’s called Quick Take
So when you hit that button to click a picture, the phones will actually take one image from each of the sensors. You will then be able to go into the image gallery and select which photo you want to keep.
Samsung’s QuickTake feature seems similar in functionality to LG’s Triple Shot feature which was introduced with the LG V40 ThinQ. LG’s triple camera phone also allowed users to take a photo with each lens via this mode.
In addition to saving three images in the photos app, the LG V40 ThinQ also created a short video by compiling the images. The Galaxy S20 trio will also do that (albeit to an even greater extent) with another rumored feature called Single Take.
According to Weinbach, this feature will basically let you pan around your S20, S20 Plus, or S20 Ultra to take pictures and videos from all three lenses. The captured media will be automatically edited, perhaps for social media sharing.
New night mode also incoming?
Samsung has apparently also filed a trademark request for the term ‘Super ISO’ with the UK Intellectual Property Office. This was first spotted by LetsGoDigital.
While we don’t know if this is a new feature for the Galaxy S20 series, it could improve night time photography on the new flagships.
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As you may know, low-lit scenes require you to increase ISO levels thereby increasing the light sensitivity of your camera. This results in brighter images. Currently, the Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones on Android 10 allows one to set the ISO at 3200.
We’re not sure if the new feature will make the ISO range even higher. It could also just improve the existing Night Mode in the Samsung Camera app.
Guess we’ll have to wait to see what Super ISO is all about and if it’s actually headed to the Galaxy S20 series.
Are you looking forward to the above mentioned camera features on the Galaxy S20 phones? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
January came and went without Sony announcing the highly-anticipated PlayStation Meeting 2020 event that many people believe will take place in February 2020. Reports said the console would be unveiled early in the month, which isn’t feasible right now since invitations haven’t yet been sent out. With that in mind, late February seems like our best bet for the PS5 unveiling.
While Sony isn’t ready to share invites for the press event, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that seems to suggest Sony is getting ready to announce the new console, including new trademark documentation that Sony filed with regulators ahead of the console’s official launch. And we now have a brand new leak that seems to reveal more details about the most important feature of Sony’s new PlayStation 5 hardware.
Both the Xbox Series X and PS5 will feature the same core CPU and GPU components, and they’ll offer similar performance. But Sony may have an advantage over the Xbox when it comes to storage speed, even though both devices will feature fast solid-state drives.
Neither Microsoft nor Sony told fans how much built-in storage each console will have. But Sony did reveal that it is rethinking the way game installs work in order to free up as much storage space as possible — if you’re only interested in multiplayer gaming, for example, you’ll be able to install just the multiplayer part of a game. At the same time, the new consoles will allow for richer graphics and gaming experiences, and the PS5 will support 100GB disks. So don’t be surprised to see that future PS5 games may take up more storage than PS4 titles.
A leak a few days ago suggested that the PS5 dev kits being used by top developers have 1TB SSDs onboard, which could be an indication of the minimum storage of the final versions of the new PlayStation. Separately, a report said that Sony is working on offering as much as 2TB of storage.
While SSDs are becoming more affordable, they’re still far more expensive than HDDs and Sony will have to find the right balance. Gamers will want plenty of fast storage on the console, but the console can’t be too expensive or it might send gamers over to the Xbox Series X.
A while ago, we learned that Samsung may have created new SSDs for consoles and gaming computers. These are of the NVMe PCIe 4.0 variety, and Samsung just unveiled one such device, the 980 EVO Pro that was announced back at CES. It’s a device that supports lightning-fast sequential speeds of up to 6500 MB/s (read) and 5000 MB/s (write). The 980 Pro will come in capacities of up to 1TB.
Meanwhile, Dutch blog LetsGoDigital found trademarks for three SSD-related Samsung devices, including Unstoppable Speed, NVMe SSD 980 EVO, and NVMe SSD 980 QVO. Samsung’s name isn’t anywhere on the documentation that was filed with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), but the names are giveaways that we’re looking at Samsung products.
“Unstoppable Speed” seems like something Samsung would want to brag about when it comes to storage on certain devices, especially gaming rigs. The NVMe SSD 980 QVO drive sounds familiar because Samsung named it back in mid-October when it shared the SSD roadmap for QLC NAND and 96-layer 3D NAND, as AnandTech reported at the time. But Samsung provided no firm details back then:
Samsung also mentioned the 860 QVO SATA and 980 QVO NVMe client drives. Since these names don’t fit into Samsung’s OEM SSD naming scheme, we assume these are upcoming retail products, but Samsung hasn’t shared any release plans.
Without release schedules or detailed technical specifications, it’s hard to assess the state of Samsung’s QLC efforts, but the sheer number of models makes it clear that Samsung sees QLC NAND as a very important part of their storage portfolio going forward.
LetsGoDigital speculates that it’s unlikely for the PS5 to pack more expensive 980 EVO drives. Instead, Samsung’s 980 QVO models will likely equip the consoles, which could explain why Samsung postponed their introduction and it’s only trademarking them now. The 980 QVO could be significantly cheaper than the 980 EVO, which should help Sony keep the PS5’s price tag at the rumored $499.99 mark.
Image Source: Jensen/Epa/REX/Shutterstock
Chris Smith started writing about gadgets as a hobby, and before he knew it he was sharing his views on tech stuff with readers around the world. Whenever he's not writing about gadgets he miserably fails to stay away from them, although he desperately tries. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
