Technology

Gigabyte has announced the Aorus 15P, a portable laptop tailored to professional gaming. It’s available now on Gigabyte’s online store, starting at $1,599.99. The company says it worked with esports teams, including G2 Esports, to design the new laptop. It weighs 4.4 pounds (2kg) — which is portable so far as gaming laptops go — and it’s 0.9 inches thick. Gigabyte says the chassis passed “a series of pressure tests” for durability. Gigabyte is promising up to eight hours of battery life, which is certainly an optimistic prediction for a gaming rig (and this one has a per-key RGB keyboard, which might draw some extra power). The Aorus 15P under the Prime95 and Furmark stress tests. Gigabyte says the unit’s temperature is 32 degrees Celsius.Image: Gigabyte Specs-wise, the 15P comes with a 14...

In 2011, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became an unstoppable box office and cultural force, THQ Studio Australia was hard at work on a video game tie-in for an upcoming movie called The Avengers. Not the Destiny-esque Marvel’s Avengers game that’s being released tomorrow — an Avengers game that never saw the light of day. A first-person superhero brawler, instead of the traditional behind-the-character perspective. A game on a deadline so stressful that one developer beat up his filing cabinet with an umbrella, and another decided to repeatedly stab his desk with a giant kitchen knife. Today I am featured in an article about a game I worked on that never came out. It includes dev quotes like: “Just put the knife down. We’ll go outside and figure this out.”https://t...

Vivo is developing one of the coolest looking phones I’ve ever seen. In a video posted to Weibo (and spotted by Android Authority), the company confirms that its new phone, which doesn’t yet have a name or release date, can change its rear case’s color with the press of a button. The company claims to be using electrochromic glass to achieve this dazzling effect, the same tech that OnePlus employed in its Concept One phone to obscure its rear camera from view when it wasn’t being used. In OnePlus’ proof of concept, shown at CES 2020, an electric signal caused the glass to switch between being tinted or transparent. Vivo’s implementation takes it further by using the tech to change the color of the phone’s glass rear, which is an even more fun party trick. A mobile phone brand is developing...

A man yells in a bus full of people that he browsed eight sites for divorce lawyers. A woman blithely tells her log in information to strangers in a movie house. A pair of coworkers has an unflattering conversation out loud about a nearby colleague (including verbal descriptions of “puke emoji”) and a woman uses a megaphone to broadcast her credit card information to anyone within earshot. Some of them are embarrassing, some are potential privacy violations, but they’re among the examples in Apple’s new Over Sharing ad, which re-emphasizes the company’s focus — or at least its image — of being a protector of online privacy. The ad’s tagline, shown at the end, reads “Some things shouldn’t be shared. iPhone helps keep it that way.” It doesn’t mention any of its tech rivals who have made head...

Production of Warner Bros.’ The Batman has been delayed yet again, this time because star Robert Pattison has tested positive for COVID-19, Vanity Fair reported. The highly-anticipated retelling of the story of the caped crusader with the Twilight star in the title role had just resumed shooting a few days ago in London. “A member of The Batman production has tested positive for Covid-19, and is isolating in accordance with established protocols. Filming is temporarily paused,” Warner Bros. told VF in a statement. The studio did not confirm who the infected person was. The film already had been delayed several months back in March, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the studio reshuffled its lineup of upcoming movies. It was to hit theaters in June 2021, but was pushed back to October 20...

Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab says it has successfully flown one of its own satellites, demonstrating that the spacecraft’s design holds up in Earth orbit. It’s the first time the company has flown its in-house cylindrical spacecraft, known as the Photon, which Rocket Lab hopes to sell to customers for use in ambitious deep-space missions. The satellite was secretly a part of Rocket Lab’s most recent launch. On August 30th, the company’s Electron rocket took off from Rocket Lab’s primary launch site in New Zealand, lofting a single satellite for the company Capella Space. But once the satellite had separated from the rocket, part of the Electron actually turned into a satellite and remained in orbit around Earth. The satellite was Electron’s kick stage — a small platform that sits on...

MSI is best known for its gaming laptops, but today, it’s announcing a new business line for remote professionals. The line includes the Summit E series and the Summit B series, each with 14- and 15-inch models, along with the 13-inch convertible E13 Flip. There’s no word on pricing or availability for the Summit line yet, but they certainly look like high-end models. The chassis are aluminum, with thin bezels and what MSI calls “military-grade durability.” Image: MSI Both series have some other nice features as well. The big news is that they’re powered by Intel’s new 11th Gen “Tiger Lake” processors and support the company’s new Thunderbolt 4 standard as well. The E series looks to be geared more toward creative work. Its models include discrete graphics up to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650Ti...

During the launch of its latest batch of internet-beaming Starlink satellites, SpaceX revealed key details about the planned constellation’s abilities, claiming that the satellites have shown “super low latency and download speeds greater than 100 mbps.” The speeds are still not as fast as what SpaceX originally claimed for the constellation, but they are slightly faster than what early user testing has shown. Starlink is SpaceX’s ambitious plan to launch nearly 12,000 satellites into low orbits around Earth in order to provide broadband coverage to the ground below. Users of the system are meant to tap into the constellation using personal antennas on the ground, what SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has described as looking like a “UFO on a stick.” Early photos of the device have been revealed in th...

Amazon on Thursday announced Alexa for Residential, a new program designed to make it easier for landlords and property managers to add Alexa devices to rental units to create smart apartments (smarpartments? smartments?). The company is billing it as a service “that makes having an Alexa-enabled home accessible for anyone, regardless of whether they rent or own their home.” Property managers can provide “custom voice experiences for their residents,” and no account or device setup is required. You don’t even need an Amazon account. But if you do have one, you can “easily link it to access the full range of Alexa features, including the ability to call friends and family” and link to your music playlists. “It will all just work,” the company says, listing off a slew of convenient-sounding ...

About to buy the latest Samsung phone or save a bit of money on a Google Pixel 4A? Whether you plan to trade in your old Android phone for a discount on your new phone, sell it on eBay, give it away to a friend, or drop it off for recycling, you’re going to want to wipe it of all your data first by resetting it to factory conditions. Luckily, that’s pretty easy to do. Before you start, be aware that these instructions were originally meant for a Pixel 3 XL running Android 9, and were recently checked on an original Pixel running Android 10. But the process for most current Android phones should be pretty much the same. Needless to say, first make sure that all of your data is transferred to your new phone, backed up, or both. Once your old phone has reset, there’s no going back. Grid View ...

Apple will soon let developers offer discounted or free subscriptions via new offer codes, the company has announced. Developers will be able to distribute these one-time use codes physically or electronically, which Apple says could help them acquire new subscribers, retain existing ones, or “win back” lapsed customers. Apple says the feature is coming “later this year,” and will be available to customers using iOS 14 or iPadOS 14. App developers have previously been able to offer discounted pricing or introductory offers for subscriptions on Apple devices, but the new codes should give developers more granular control. Acquire new subscribers, retain existing ones, or “win back” lapsed customers According to a new section added to Apple’s developer documentation, developers will be able ...

Facebook will stop taking new political advertising in the United States in the seven days leading up to the election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today as part of a series of steps the company is taking to protect against election interference. “The US elections are just two months away, and with COVID-19 affecting communities across the country, I’m concerned about the challenges people could face when voting,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post announcing the move. “I’m also worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country.” Candidates and political action committees will continue to be able to buy ads that have already received at least one impression by O...