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Google Inc’s new Android Wear features allow smartwatches to receive notifications via Wi-Fi

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 04/20/2015 - 13:52

As the Apple Watch lands in consumers hands this Friday, Google Inc.’s Android Wear smartwatch operating system is going on the offensive in an effort to compete with the upcoming device by adding a number of much-needed features.

Google has added Wi-Fi support to Android wear, allowing watches that take advantage of the company’s Wear operating system such as the Samsung Gear S, Moto 360 and LG G watch R to receive notifications via a home or public Wi-Fi connection, rather than only via a Bluetooth connection to a smartphone. In the same way a smartphone or laptop can connect to Wi-Fi, Android Wear devices can now be directly connected to the Internet as well. The company also announced a selection of other additional features.

One of the Apple Watch’s significant advantages over Android Wear, at least in terms of practical features, is the smartwatch’s Wi-Fi capabilities, untethering the device from the restrictive confines of Bluetooth’s approximately 50-foot range, when it comes to receiving notifications.

GoogleGoogle is adding a variety of new features to its Android Wear operating system.

Now, as long as your smartphone is turned on and connected to the Internet via data or WiFi, Android Wear allows your device to receive notifications over any Wi-Fi connection, even if your smartphone isn’t nearby. Google has set up the new system to ensure Wear’s OS will switch between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when necessary. If your smartphone is near your Wear Watch, the device’s Bluetooth connection is active. If you’re on-the-go and don’t have your smartphone on you, but are still connected to WiFi, Wear notifications will be pushed to your smartwatch.

What seems like a simple addition to Android Wear is really an important feature the operating system has been missing since it launched a little over a year ago. However, support for the latest update to Android Gear could end up being limited since Android smartwatch manufacturers are able to decide if they want to push it out to their devices.

Additionally, with this new update, popular applications like Google Maps now support a new low-power, always-on mode ensuring the app stays open on the user’s wrist the entire time they have a specific app open, removing the need to constantly wake up the smartwatch in order to follow Maps’ directions.

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Google is also experimenting with various gestures to launch apps and now allows users to flick their wrist to move through Google Now’s card system. The ability to send simple on-screen drawings to your friends via Android Wear devices — a feature Apple heavily touted during the company’s most recent Apple Watch press conference — was also touted in the company’s most recent blog post about Wear’s latest update.

The rollout for this update will reportedly occur gradually over the next few weeks and will depend on Wear device manufacturers. The LG Watch Urbane is set to be the first smartwatch to support the new features right out of the box.

Whether or not additional features are enough to stop the Apple Watch from eclipsing Google’s versatile and very popular smartphone operating system remains to be seen, but if the majority of already released Android smartwatches receive this update, their functionality will at least be similar to what Apple is offering consumers.

With files from Business Insider

Rogers Communications Inc profit drops 17% as CRTC decisions bite

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 04/20/2015 - 13:52

TORONTO — Rogers Communications Inc. says profits dropped 17 per cent in the first quarter as the company blamed two recent CRTC decisions for some if its financial setbacks.

The Toronto-based telecommunications provider reported net income fell to $255 million from $307 million in the same period a year ago.

On an adjusted basis, the earnings were equal to 53 cents per share, falling 10 cents short of analyst estimates, according to Thomson Reuters.

Operating revenue rose to $3.18 billion from $3.02 billion.

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Rogers says part of the profit decline was caused by the defection of some customers to competitors after a CRTC rule change under which customers are no longer required to give telecom companies 30 days notice before they cancel their services.

Rogers says that left a $3-million dent in cable revenue for the quarter and contributed an estimated loss of 40,000 subscribers to its overall decline in customers.

The company also says a separate CRTC rule change which has shortened the span of wireless contracts to two years caused operating expenses to rise 32 per cent, as it worked to retain customers with subsidized smartphone upgrades.

On Tuesday, Rogers will also hold its annual meeting in Toronto.

Mortal Kombat X review: If you can get past the gore, MKX reveals itself as a brilliant game

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 04/20/2015 - 13:44

The lead-up to the release of Mortal Kombat X demonstrated how a venerable gaming franchise relied – almost too much – on its trademark feature to the exclusion of all else.

Nearly everything we had seen from the trailers and previews over the past few months focused on the hallowed Fatality – the end-of-match flourishes that usually feature an eruption of gore and grisly dismemberments.

Defeat your opponent in one-on-one combat, and you’re allowed to put an exclamation mark on the victory with a final hit. Input the correct combination of buttons, and your character plays out a grisly execution designed for maximum humiliation.

NetherRealm Studios’ first foray into the current generation of consoles meant that they’ve been able to make their wildest and most disturbing dreams a reality, to the point where the gruesome violence has made even decades-old MK fans wince.

The first time I saw Scorpion use his sword to slice off a victim’s face, making it slide off and prompting the brain to flop out of a bisected skull, I had to take a deep breath and recollect my composure.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4faAvsMMpFg&w=640&h=390]

It makes sense from a marketing perspective – Mortal Kombat, after all, has been so known for its Mature-rated violence that the original in 1992 was actually one of the games that spurred horrified parents and lawmakers to demand a video games ratings system in North America.

But fighting games are about throwing down with another human opponent You choose your fighter, and face off in a battle of wits and psychology as much as button mashing and dexterity tests. What attack will your opponent use next? Can mix up your rush downs to confuse his or her defences? Are your nerves calm enough to chain together a series of moves to make the perfect combo the split-second he or she becomes open to attack?

At its highest level, MKX is an entrancing ballet of brutality. For all the pomp and circumstance of the Fatality, it’s almost a disservice to the rest of the game’s components, most of which have grown in complexity and intrigue that far outpaces the series’ trademark.

WB/NetherealmGoro was only available to players who preordered the game or payed $5.

Take the Story Mode, probably the first stop for new players. It’s a full narrative arc lasting about five to six hours, that lets you play from the perspective of several characters in the latest chapter of the ludicrous wars between Earth Realm (Earth), Outworld (where the weirdos live) and the NetherRealm (Hell).

It plays out like a truncated season of television, and is genuinely entertaining when it isn’t bogged down by its juvenile and stilted script. Characters’ deaths are surprisingly rare over the course of the story: most of the fighters who were murdered in MK 2011’s expansive story mode have been resurrected as zombies, and end-of-match Fatalities are disabled because naturally you’ll want (almost) everyone alive to reach the end of the plot.

Once we’ve seen the relationships between the characters, especially the hardened veterans and their now-grown-up children, I found it difficult to end a match with a Fatality when the characters involved would clearly never act that way.

Yet performing Fatalities is encouraged by the game’s systems. All of your matches are rated by a points system. Bonuses are awarded for things like how quickly you defeated the opponent, flawless victories (taking no damage in a round), and performing finishers.

It’s important because the more points you get, the more Koins you’re awarded. Koins are used in the Krypt, a giant Legend of Grimrock-like maze filled with unlockable items such as alternate costumes, concept art, and yes, more Fatalities.

Storywise, I could buy Sonya Blade using a weaponized drone on the criminal Kano, firing machine guns at his face until it’s been reduced to a pile of chewed-up Swedish Berries. But when the target is Cassie Cage, her vivacious daughter from her frayed marriage with Johnny Cage, it becomes far more uncomfortable.

This is a comic book, not a snuff film. The game’s systems are incentivizing me to ignore its lore — but the lore is centralized (well) across almost all aspects of the game — and that baked-in contradiction strikes me as a failure in design.

WB/NetherealmShinnok is the big evil in MKX.

It’s taken me far too long to get to the meat and potatoes of Mortal Kombat X – the fighting itself – because for a game like this, one week is an awfully difficult amount of time to properly judge it. Fighting games have an excruciatingly long life, as players create new combos or approaches with characters long “figured out,” and invert tier lists on a regular basis.

And MKX has a lot to unpack. Out of 25 characters, eight are new to the series. Most are of the “new generation” of fighters and so take inspiration from their parents or mentors, but their move sets are new and different enough to make them stand out in the crowd.

My favourite so far, though, is D’Vorah, an insectoid lady that looks like a mix between Black Arachnia from Transformers’ Beast Wars* and Thane from Mass Effect. Her insectoid appendages let her poke from afar and she has some interesting setup tools, including growing a giant ball of bug goop on the floor and setting it off like a bomb, launching the enemy into the air.

Every character now has three “Variations” that mix up the moves and attacks available to them. The changes are both cosmetic and tactical: perennial ice ninja Sub-Zero can wear his Lin Kuei Grandmaster seal allowing him to summon and throw clones of himself made of ice, or don a chilly white mask for the Unbreakable Variation that gives him a defensive bent, using shields and counter-attack moves.

I was worried that it would be a little gimmicky, but the Variations are surprisingly well-implemented. In the hands of experts, they can transform the character’s playstyles, effectively tripling the options available. You’ll see tournament players using them to shake up a match, without forcing them to use wholly unfamiliar characters, when put in a tight spot.

WB/NetherRealm

Even the gore and skull-crunching violence has progressed beyond Fatalities, and like a good fighting game they all happen during the match. X-Rays return from MK2011: super moves that can only be used sparingly, once you’ve filled out a meter from landing other attacks. The camera zooms in and shows bones crunching in slow motion with agonizing sound effects, that I feel straddle the line between delight and discomfort where most Fatalities sit squarely with the latter.

Thankfully the X-Ray bar also shares its use with Enhanced Special Moves and Kombo Breakers, meaning that a savvy player will likely use these in tight situations instead, saving the X-Rays for a last ditch desperation move rather than feel obligated to use them every match – like, say, a Fatality to earn more Koins.

New are Brutalities, context-specific finishers that take some effort to pull off but can end the match in a perfect flourish of skill and viscera. Defeat your opponent with Kitana’s Throat Slice move, where she slashes at you with her razor-sharp fans, and his or her head will be sliced off with a spurt of blood. It isn’t as over-the-top as a Fatality, rewards the in-game cunning to pull it off, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. As far as I’m concerned it’s the logical evolution of the Fatality.

Mortal Kombat’s Fatalities are baked into the series’ DNA, and I don’t expect (or want) them to ever disappear. But they’re an anachronism when the rest of the game has evolved so much. It’s a better fighter, with a richer cast of characters and an almost-bearable storyline.

If you’re a fan, the first few hours will be spent gawking at the new ways NetherRealm lets you decapitate and dismember your foes. But like any cheap date, the thrill will wear off. But if you’re willing to spend more time with it, and peel back its layers, you’ll find one of the most promising fighting games in years.

WB/NetherRealm

*Beasties in Canada

Dungeons 2 review: For better or worse, this is two games smooshed together

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 04/20/2015 - 11:44

Sometimes, combining two great things can make something transcendent, a new flavour that’s better than the sum of its parts. Other times, it’s a bit like putting hot sauce on a chocolate cake — two things that, while excellent on their own, utterly ruin each other when mixed together.

That’s the issue facing Dungeons 2. At its core, it’s a game about jamming together two different genre titans — an evil base-management game ala Dungeon Keeper mashed together with a very Warcraft-y RTS element. But instead of combining two into a delightful new flavour, it ends up coming out as something that’s a bit hard to keep down at times.

You take control of the Ultimate Evil, the towering personification of malevolence that spends the first level of the game tearing apart a peaceful storybook kingdom and gleefully slaughtering the forces of good.

But everything is all right (or rather, wrong) in the world. The forces of good regroup and a collection of a few powerful heroes succeeds in banishing your evil overlord back underground. From that point on, you’re just a phantom chained to your dungeon, ordering around your minions in an effort to rebuild your power and take revenge on the heroes that locked you away.

Kalypso

The levels are divided into two separate parts: an underground where you carve an ever-expanding dungeon into the rock, building rooms to recruit new units and research new upgrades; and an RTS overworld where you direct those units to fight off enemy units and destroy bases.

It should work. It almost works. But there’s just too much of a contrast between the two sides of the game for it to really feel seamless. I was a bit frustrated when I was able to micromanage my smelly horde while topside, only have the game switch to being forced to make orders and hope my idiot followers would work them out while back in my dank, underground home.

Dungeons 2 is a very competently made game. There were a few graphical oddities, like a handful of wounded troops that kept squirting blood after they’d been healed, as if they were auditioning for parts in a slasher film. Most of these glitches in review copy are being worked on by Kalypso, and will likely be fixed in the finished version.

The developers have also added a few tweaks to the Dungeon Keeper formula that cuts down on the need to manage every little aspect of your base, letting you direct your evil attention on battle. And a wide variety of traps and upgrades do make it fun playing with the empty-headed heroes that occasional invade your base looking for fortune and glory.

Kalypso

But in combining Dungeon Keeper and Warcraft, Kalypso has missed the mark on what made those games great. The pacing, so important in an RTS, is way off. Due to the cost of individual units and a strict small population cap (which can be upgraded several times), you’re sending out small squads of Orcs and Naga troops instead of full armies. When they die, it’s a serious pain to get them trained back up and then pick up each individual monster to drop them at your dungeon entrance.

Couple that with the fact that later in the game some bosses cut through your armies like a hot broadsword through Orc-butter, and fights become tedious slogs that often need to be attempted two or three times. It made me feel less like the Ultimate Evil and more like an impotent one.

As for the Dungeon Keeper side of things, Dungeons 2 doesn’t quite catch the personality and flair of the old classic. It has the same light touch, full of barbs directed at pokey players and remarks how expendable your minions are. But not all the jokes land and those that do are often driven into the ground over the course of a long level.

Kalypso

The first time the excellent narrator pretends to get get confused over whether you’re playing Dungeon Keeper or Dungeons 2, it gets a chuckle. The second and third times, a groan. And a note to the writers: if I’m going to have to spend an hour on a level that’s just a thinly-veiled jab at the U.S. financial collapse, I’m don’t need a reminder every 5 minutes that ‘boy, they sure did bail out those banks, didn’t they?”

The units and spells don’t have the same flair and irreverence that the Dungeon Keeper series did. They’re amusing enough, but still feel like something is missing. The Demon faction, which you can play as in skirmish and presumably multiplayer, is a bit better. It has a few interesting ideas and quirky mechanisms that held my attention a little longer. Who would have known that so much can be done with spider eggs?

It’s not to say that Dungeons 2 is a bad game, it’s really not. It’s simply okay. But seeing as it has explicitly set itself up to compared to two fantastic games, both some of the best of their genres, it is difficult to look past how it fails to live up to both of them.

If some strangely-specific apocalyptic event wiped both Warcraft and Dungeon Keeper off the face of the earth, those brave souls with the will to continue might find something to cling to in Dungeons 2. Until that happens, the probably just best to stick with the real deal.

Kalypso

Sony Corp Xperia Z4 with 5.2-inch screen unveiled, even as future of smartphone unit in doubt

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 04/20/2015 - 08:28

TOKYO — Sony Corp on Monday unveiled a new high-end Xperia handset featuring an aluminum frame and a 5.2-inch screen, showing it is still in the smartphone race even as it scales down its struggling mobile operations.

The launch of the new flagship model comes amid a painful restructuring at the Japanese consumer electronics giant which has thrown the future of its smartphone division into doubt, with top executives saying an exit cannot be ruled out.

But as the company focuses on cutting costs rather than growing its mobile market, the division still needs investment in new products and marketing to maintain Sony’s brand and hold off a more rapid deterioration.

Sony said the Xperia Z4 would be available in Japan around the middle of the year, though it did not provide a launch date, details on carrier partners or price. The handset would be available in four colours and was slightly thinner than the previous Z3.

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Hiroki Totoki, who was appointed last year to turn around the mobile unit, said Sony was targeting the upper end of the market where rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc dominate.

“There’s a broad variety in the prices of smartphones, from around $100 to $1,400 at the upper end,” he told a news conference. “We want to focus in the upper half of that.”

Sony’s mobile division has fallen far behind high-end rivals such as Samsung and Apple, while at the low end it is battling pricing pressure from Asian manufacturers such as China’s Xiaomi Inc.

The company whose Walkman and Trinitron TV once played a critical role in the global entertainment industry has struggled in recent years to come up with trend-setting gadgets.

Sony announced in February that it would scale down its weaker operations such as TVs and mobile phones to focus instead on more successful products such as video games and camera sensors.

Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai has not ruled out an exit from weak operations, amid a restructuring that has so far seen the company sell off its personal computer division and spin off the TV business.

In February, he said the Japanese consumer electronics firm would no longer pursue sales growth in smartphones.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

Xbox executive Phil Harrison officially leaves Microsoft Corp

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 04/17/2015 - 12:14

Microsoft Corp. has confirmed in a statement on Friday that Xbox executive Phil Harrison has left the company.

Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, said kind words about Harrison on Twitter, wishing him luck on the next chapter of his career outside of Microsoft.

Great time working together @MrPhilHarrison and good luck on the next chapter. You are a true professional.

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) April 17, 2015

In early March GamesIndustry International reported Harrison was planning to leave Microsoft, citing multiple sources at the 2015 Game Developers Conference (GDC). Harrison joined Microsoft in March 2012 as the company’s corporate vice president of Europe. He previously worked as the president and board member of Atari, and was also an executive at Sony Computer Entertainment between 1992 and 2008.

“Following a successful tenure as corporate vice president in Xbox in Europe, Phil Harrison has chosen to pursue business interests outside of Microsoft,” a statement from Head of Xbox Phil Spencer says.

“Phil has been a distinguished leader for our European Xbox team – overseeing production at our award-winning European studios and making a substantial contribution to the Xbox business globally,” he added. “I want to thank Phil for his creativity and leadership over the past three years. Phil is a great friend of mine and I wish him the very best with his future endeavours.”

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Industry speculation indicates Harrison was frustrated when former head of Xbox Don Mattrick left Microsoft in 2013 to join Zynga. Mattrick has since left Zynga. The current head of Xbox is Phil Spencer, who was brought in shortly after Mattrick’s departure to take the struggling console in a game-focused direction.

BlackBerry Ltd Oslo leaked images show curved body of rumoured smartphone

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 04/17/2015 - 12:03

Images of BlackBerry Oslo, a device that’s believed to be the successor to the BlackBerry Ltd.’s moderately successful Blackberry Passport handset, have leaked online.

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s latest device is expected to be a refresh of the Passport, featuring a curved body, Snapdragon 800 processor, 13 megapixel camera, 3450mAh battery and a 1440 x 1440 screen resolution. The internal components are very similar to those featured in its predecessor, leading some to speculate Oslo will target consumers outside of North America.

BlackBerry fan site BlackBerry Central, which originally reported on the Oslo’s existence, says the device’s specs could also potentially improve prior to the device’s release since it won’t hit store shelves for a few months.

The BlackBerry Oslo is expected to launch on June 30, and the device was reportedly revealed to a select audience during Mobile World Congress (MWC) last month in Barcelona, Spain.

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At MWC BlackBerry revealed that the company plans to release three new devices in 2015: an as yet unnamed product with a physical keyboard, a new smartphone with a sliding keyboard and dual-curved display, and another ultra high-end Porsche Design BlackBerry device.

The company also recently unveiled the SecuTablet, a new high-security tablet aimed at businesses and governments. BlackBerry’s next release is the BlackBerry Leap, a refreshed version of the BlackBerry Z10.

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