NVIDIA GeForce NOW loses games from Warner Bros, XBOX Game Studios, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment but gains 36 Ubisoft titles

NVIDIA’s first foray into portable gaming on the Android platform was the SHIELD Portable, which failed to gain enough momentum for a successor. The company eventually decided to jump on the cloud gaming bandwagon by opening up its GeForce NOW service to Android. After conducting a limited beta, NVIDIA has started to allow anyone to enjoy hassle-free cloud gaming since February. Unlike competitors such as Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud, GeForce NOW allows end-users to stream games that they already purchased on Steam, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay, but there is a catch! Digital game stores, as well as publishers, have the authority to revoke the games to be streamed, and it looks like GeForce NOW is going to lose access to a bunch of titles starting today (April 24).

Despite NVIDIA’s endeavor to bring in new content to the streaming service every week, it will lose games from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, XBOX Game Studios, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment. No official explanations have been offered for every single instance of why publishers are leaving GeForce NOW, but it could be related to the revenue generation policy and/or exclusive deals with other cloud gaming platforms. While game publishers have had to explicitly work with Google to port their games onto Stadia, GeForce NOW basically runs the games from Steam from a remote PC, thus blocking the publishers to demand extra fees for having their games be playable on other platforms, e.g. PC games are playable on Android. Some of the existing collaborations might be intended for the beta period and the expirations are basically inevitable after the service’s public launch, recasting the idea as merely a theory – just one of many unknowns.

Not all of today’s news is bad, though, as Ubisoft is reportedly advancing on their cloud strategy with NVIDIA GeForce NOW. Chris Early, senior vice president of partnerships at Ubisoft, commented:

“Ubisoft fully supports NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW with complete access to our PC games from the Ubisoft Store or any supported game stores. We believe it’s a leading-edge service that gives current and new PC players a high-end experience with more choice in how and where they play their favorite games.”

Expand the list below to see all the Ubisoft games that have been added to GeForce NOW library till date:

List of Ubisoft games on GeForce NOW

• Assassin’s Creed II Deluxe Edition (Uplay version)
• Assassin’s Creed III Remastered (Steam)
• Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (Steam)
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (Uplay)
• Heroes of Might & Magic III – HD Edition (Steam)
• Heroes of Might & Magic V (Uplay and Steam)
• Heroes of Might & Magic V: Tribes of the East (Uplay and Steam)
• Might & Magic: Heroes VI (Uplay)
• Might & Magic Heroes VII (Uplay and Steam)
• TrackMania² Stadium (Uplay and Steam)
• The Shattering (released day-and-date on Tuesday)
• Call to Arms
• Conan Unconquered
• Creative Destruction
• Darksiders: Warmastered Edition
• Dead Age
• Divinity: Original Sin (Classic)
• Dungeon Defenders
• Enclave
• Gothic 3
• Hitman: Absolution
• Iron Sky: Invasion
• King’s Bounty: The Legend
• Magicka
• Overcooked!
• Pro Cycling Manager 2017
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
• Stoneshard
• Streets of Rogue
• Sudden Strike 4
• Superhot
• This Is the Police
• Trailmakers
• Trine 2: Complete Story
• Tropico 4
• Wurm Unlimited

NVIDIA GeForce NOW (Free, Google Play) →

Source: NVIDIA

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[Update: May 7th] LG will reportedly unveil its new premium smartphone series on May 15th

Update (4/24/20 @ 10:50 AM ET): LG has announced that the LG Velvet will be unveiled on May 7th.

Rumors about LG dropping its flagship G series first popped up late last month, with a report from a renowned Korean publication claiming that the brand would launch a Snapdragon 7xx-powered smartphone series instead. The publication revealed that the upcoming smartphone series would feature support for LG’s Dual Screen attachment, offer 5G connectivity, have a screen size between 6.7 to 6.9-inches, pack in a 48MP primary camera, and feature a 4,000mAh battery. While LG issued a statement shortly thereafter, the company neither confirmed nor denied the rumors. Now, the Naver News Agency has released another report which claims that the new LG smartphone series will be revealed on May 15th.

The report claims that at a recent product briefing with a few Korean telecom operators LG confirmed that it will be dropping the G series in favor of a new series. The company also revealed that the new series will be unveiled on May 15th, with one of the attendees quoted saying, “At present, 15 days is definite.” (translated) During the briefing, the company also revealed that the upcoming series will offer 5G support using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 series chip. Since the Snapdragon 765 and 765G are the only 7-series chip from Qualcomm to feature a 5G modem, we can safely assume that either one of these will be powering the upcoming LG smartphone.

The Snapdragon 765 series are mid-range chips from Qualcomm, which are significantly cheaper than its flagship Snapdragon 865 SoC. Using the Snapdragon 765/765G will help LG significantly reduce the costs of the upcoming smartphone series, which falls in line with the company’s recent shift in strategy. According to LG’s 2019 financial report, the company aims to invest heavily in mass-premium and mass-tier 5G products in order to renew public interest in its devices.

Source: Naver News Agency

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Update: May 7th

LG Korea has posted a “digital invitation” on YouTube that reveals they will be announcing the LG Velvet on May 7th. Like all the recent smartphone launches, this will be a “virtual” event.

Since the original article above was published, a number of other stories have been posted. We got our first look at the Velvet device when LG shared some sketches. These sketches revealed the very thin bezels and the “raindrop” camera design, which puts the 3 cameras and the flash in a vertical stack in descending order.

Later, the company teased the device in a video, showcasing the color option and confirming some specifications. LG says the device will come in 3 colors (though they showed 4): Aurora White, Aurora Grey, and Aurora Green. The video also revealed the device will have a headphone jack, a Google Assistant button, USB-C, and the Snapdragon 765 SoC.

The most recent news about the LG Velvet concerns accessories. A report claims the device will support LG’s Dual Screen accessory, just like the LG V60. Another report claims the Velvet will have active pen support, which is also a feature on the V60, but LG has never mentioned it. All will be revealed next month.

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Huawei Music is offering 3-months of free trial for new subscribers in Europe

The music streaming industry has been on a steady rise, as more and more users pledge their allegiance and money to the streaming service that serves them the best. But there is always room for improvement, and always room for a competitor to shake things up. If the existing options of music services are not up to your taste and you want to switch things up and try something new, check out Huawei Music — Huawei’s music streaming app and platform.

Huawei Music was recently launched in Europe as a means of providing a reliable streaming option to EMUI users. The app is available to download from the Huawei AppGallery. Prior to its European launch, the service was already being used by 16 Million users every month, who are enjoying the wide repertoire of advertisement-free music available on the app. There are more than 50 Million tracks and 1.2 Million albums available through the app, which is equivalent to 300 years of non-stop music, so needless to say there is something in there for every user.

Now, Huawei Music is available in 16 European countries, and there are plans to expand in further regions of Europe. The current list of supported regions includes:

• UK
• Ireland
• Germany
• France
• Italy
• Spain
• Belgium
• Switzerland
• Netherlands
• Portugal
• Finland
• Sweden
• Norway
• Denmark
• Austria
• Greece

Music selection includes offerings from Warner Music, Sony Music, and Universal Music, so the latest, greatest and most popular hits are always at your fingertips. The app has been designed to work seamlessly with all Huawei products, including smartphones, tablets, audio products, and even some watch products, so you get the convenience of one app across the entire product ecosystem, instead of paying for and familiarizing yourself with different apps for different product ecosystems.

The focus within Huawei Music isn’t just about providing content, but also surfacing it well and increasing its consumption value to the end-users. There are personalized playlists to take away from the effort of creating a playlist from users who dislike doing so, as well as themed playlists that are attuned to their contextual mood. There are also daily recommendations, allowing users to discover new releases every day. Further, users can also use the in-built Party Mode to pair up other Huawei smartphones and play the same track simultaneously to increase volume and to experience a richer surround sound system.

Huawei Music also offers five sound effects that users can choose from:

• Kirin: The Kirin effect is made especially to complement audio accessories that have the Huawei Kirin audio chip in them. This sound effect uses digital algorithms to deliver a standard audio quality of 24 bits. Compared to lossless formats, the common mp3 format loses both, the details of the song and the sense of stereo. The Kirin sound effect can thus simulate more details in digital mode, and let you take full advantage of the software-hardware harmony within the Huawei ecosystem.
• 3D surround: This effect restores the space and orientation sense of the 3D sound field, creating a feeling of immersion.
• HiFi: This sound effect uses a restoration algorithm, to allow the user to experience a virtual sound reality experience.
• Mega Bass: This sound effect increases the bass effect on the music, emulating a subwoofer experience through your smartphone.
• Choral: This sound effect intelligently analyzes human voices and highlights them to present ethereal higher-pitched voices.

Huawei Music also comes built-in with Huawei Histen 3D equalizer, which allows users to experience virtual surround sound in three different modes via their earphones. Histen uses advanced audio processing algorithms, psychoacoustic models and auditory perceptions to maximize the performance of audio devices connected to the phone. Within Huawei Music, Histen adds what is best described as an “audio dimension” to already dynamic experience. The idea is to immerse the user in the soundscape with rich, moving sounds and object noises that are perceivable in three-dimensional space.

Features introduced through Histen includes:

• Headphone 3D surround t0 provide a 360° surround sound experience with sound field control.
• Virtual bass boost that analyzes low-frequency components and creates corresponding higher harmonics.
• Loudspeaker distortion correction that utilizes targeted frequency and phase compensation to eliminate noise and broken sound distortions through loudspeakers.
• Transient response optimization that attempts to follow rapid fluctuations of sound signal changes, such as those from percussive sounds, and reflect those accurately to stay true to the original music.
• Adaptive loudness boost that makes use of auditory perception model and nonlinear algorithms to dynamically control the amplitude of the speaker and increase its perceivable loudness without increasing the speaker output power and causing distortion

If you would like to try out Huawei Music, Huawei is offering 3-months of free trial to all new subscribers who join in before April 26, 2020/May 15, 2020.

Huawei Music on Huawei devices

Post this trial, the service will be available as a monthly subscription for €9.99/month. This cost is on par with other popular services but comes with all the benefits that we mentioned above. The subscription can be canceled at any time, so you can try out the service without any worries. The app is available to download via Huawei AppGallery on Huawei devices.

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The ProtonMail Android app goes open source

ProtonMail is an email service that’s known for being privacy-conscious, which makes it popular among users who seek more secure alternatives to Gmail. Thanks to the success of its email service, Proton has since branched out into different verticals, including encrypted contacts, a VPN service, and, most recently, an end-to-end encrypted calendar called ProtonCalendar. In a bid to give users more confidence in its services, Proton has now announced that its ProtonMail app on Android has gone open source and has passed an independent security audit.

In a recent blog post, the company explained why it took the open source route for its ProtonMail apps and wrote, “One of our guiding principles is transparency. You deserve to know who we are, how our products can and cannot protect you, and how we keep your data private. We believe this level of transparency is the only way to earn the trust of our community…To that end, open source has long been a priority at Proton.” However, it’s worth noting that the ProtonMail Android app isn’t the first app from the company to take the open source route.

The ProtonMail web app has been open source since 2015, which was followed by the iOS app last year and the Bridge app last week. The ProtonMail app on Android is the latest to join the list, which means that now all of its ProtonMail apps are out of beta and open source. The company further adds that as part of making its Android app open source, it commissioned an independent security audit from SEC Consult which found no outstanding vulnerabilities in the app. While ProtonMail’s decision to go open source won’t have any direct effect on users, it will allow third-party security researchers to analyze the code and report any vulnerabilities they might find. You can access the code on ProtonMail’s GitHub page and submit your feedback if you happen to find any issues.

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Source: ProtonMail blog

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HERE WeGo maps and navigation is now available on the Huawei AppGallery

It’s almost a year since the U.S. Government placed specific restrictions on Huawei, preventing it from engaging commercially with any U.S.-based company. A grave and perhaps the most damaging consequence of this was that Google had to revoke Huawei’s license to use Android. Therefore, new Huawei and Honor phones or tablets are shipped without GMS (Google Mobile Services) and cannot run Google apps like Search, Maps, Gmail, etc. and most importantly – the Google Play Store. Huawei now offers AppGallery as an alternative to the Google Play Store and although the number of apps on the former is relatively much smaller, new vendors are joining at a steady and assuring rate. Now, Huawei has added HERE WeGo maps to the AppGallery as a viable alternative to Google Maps.

If the name “HERE WeGo” rings a bell but you can’t really recall, here’s a refresher. HERE Maps was released on the Windows Phone platform back in 2012 after a rebranding from Nokia Maps, which itself was a rebranding of OVI Maps. Nokia first introduced the OVI Maps service as a beta for Symbian S60v3 and Windows Mobile 5 platforms in 2007 while the first stable version was launched in May 2008 as a service bundled with Nokia phones. The same year, Google also released the first commercial Android device along with Google Maps as an included service.

However, HERE has a much older legacy than Google Maps. Owned by Nokia since 2007, HERE was the amalgamation of 1985-born GIS provider NAVTEQ and a German start-up Gate5, which originally developed a navigation software called “smart2go.” HERE Technologies was born at Nokia as Nokia HERE.

The past decade was very eventful for Nokia and other major events sidetracked its focus on HERE. In the meantime, the dwindling share of Windows Mobile inspired the company to launch mobile apps for both Android and iOS. And that’s how the HERE WeGo app for Android came into existence in 2014. In 2015, HERE was sold off to a consortium of carmakers including Audi, Daimler, BMW for in-car navigation and others joined the clique of investors in the years to come.

So, it’s clear that HERE WeGo isn’t really a new app and has a large number of years of experience up its sleeve. With NAVTEQ’s acumen in GIS and the years of experience at Nokia and with several automakers allowed the company to forge a collection of “three-dimensional maps that grow upwards, breathing with layers of information and insights.” It has also devoted a great share of its energy to autonomous driving.

Google’s monopoly over the smartphone operating system segment has allowed it to ship Google Maps as the default navigation app on Android devices. More importantly, HERE is a company that specializes in navigation services. Hence, the new venture between Huawei and HERE WeGO could translate to good fortune for not just the two companies but also users who want to buy Huawei phones but cannot due to the uncertainty about reliable services like Google Maps.

Download HERE WeGo Maps on AppGallery

HERE WeGo – City Navigation (Free, Google Play) →

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FCC opens up 1200MHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band, paving the way for Wi-Fi 6E

Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 802.11ax is the latest Wi-Fi standard from the Wi-Fi Alliance. The new standard supports transfer speeds of up to 9.6Gbps, which is more than double the maximum speed supported by Wi-Fi 5 (3.5Gbps). But since Wi-Fi 6 still broadcasts over the 2.4Ghz and 5GHz bands, it suffers from some of the same spectrum congestion issues that plagued older generations. In a bid to address this issue, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently voted to open up 1200MHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use. As a result, upcoming Wi-Fi 6 devices that support 6GHz operation will be labeled as Wi-Fi 6E certified, according to a recent report from the Wi-Fi Alliance.

As reported by The Verge, the new Wi-Fi 6E standard marks the biggest spectrum addition since the FCC first cleared the way for Wi-Fi back in 1989. It quadruples the amount of space available for Wi-Fi devices, which is expected to significantly improve performance due to the increased bandwidth and lesser interference with other devices. The report further adds that the new spectrum has enough room for seven max-capacity Wi-Fi streams to broadcast simultaneously and not interfere with each other. In contrast, Wi-Fi currently operations with approximately 400MHz of spectrum with all available channels split in the limited space.

While Wi-Fi 6E still has the same theoretical top speed as Wi-Fi 6, the additional spectrum allocation is expected to improve real-world performance when compared to 5GHz Wi-Fi. This is due to the fact that Wi-Fi signals at 5GHz are often not as large as they could be because of the limited spectrum availability. With Wi-Fi 6E, it’s assumed that routers will be able to broadcast at the current maximum allowable channel size, resulting in a faster connection. This could also help Wi-Fi connections to smartphones achieve speeds of up to 2Gbps, which is as fast as millimeter-wave 5G.

According to Kevin Robinson, marketing leader for the Wi-Fi Alliance, the first wave of Wi-Fi 6E devices will hit the market towards the end of 2020. However, large scale deployment will kick off in early 2021 after the Wi-Fi Alliance begins offering certification programs for Wi-Fi 6E devices. Several chip manufacturers, including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Intel have already started working towards adopting the new standard, with major router manufacturers like Linksys and Netgear also on board.

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Source: FCC

Via: The Verge

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Snapdragon 865-powered iQOO 3 price slashed by up to ₹4,000 in India

Vivo’s sub-brand made its debut in the Indian market in February with the launch of the iQOO 3. We recently concluded our review of the device, crowning it one of the fastest phones out there. The iQOO 3 is a gaming-oriented smartphone and offers a very powerful hardware package for its price, ranging from top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC to the ultrafast LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 flash storage. One of the complaints we had with the phone was its lack of a high refresh panel which in our opinion was a big mistake on a flagship phone launching in 2020.

To address this, the company recently launched a brand new flagship in the form of the iQOO Neo 3 which packs a 144Hz panel with essentially the same hardware as the iQOO 3. While there’s no word on when this new phone will arrive in the Indian market, the company has just announced a big price cut on the existing 4G and 5G models of the iQOO 3 in the country.

iQOO 3 XDA Forums

As per the new pricing, the 4G models see a reduction of ₹4,000 from their original prices while the 5G variant receives a ₹2,000 price slash. iQOO 3’s new price will be applicable in the India market on Flipkart and iqoo.com and would be available as soon as e-commerce commences delivery of smartphones.

Model	Old Pricing	New Pricing
8GB + 128GB (4G)	₹38,990	₹34,990
8GB + 256GB (4G)	₹41,990	₹37,990
12GB + 256GB (5G)	₹46,990	₹44,990

This price reduction effectively makes it the cheapest Snapdragon 865-powered smartphone on the Indian market right now, making the lack of high refresh rate panel much more palatable. With this price cut, the iQOO 3 is now ₹5,000 cheaper than the base model of the Realme X50 Pro and ₹7,000 cheaper than the newly released OnePlus 8.

Buy on Flipkart

Alongside the announcement of price discounts, iQOO also reinforced their commitment to providing timely software support to the device. The company promised that the iQOO 3 will be among the first smartphones to receive the Android 11 update when it becomes official, adding that that the device will continue to receive security and OTA updates for 3 years since the date of availability.

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