Tag Archives: google

What it’s like to wear Facebook’s $199 VR headset, Oculus Go

It was soft. It didn’t leave marks on my face. And the VR looked just fine. That’s my first-impression feel of Oculus Go, an upcoming bid by Facebook to get new people interested in VR for a sub-$200 price, no phone necessary. That $199 roughly converts to £150 or AU$255. The Oculus Go is a …

Read More »

Sony’s new A8F OLED TV isn’t any cheaper than the old one

Sony fans holding out for a cheaper OLED TV, prepare for a bit of disappointment.  The new A8F series, first shown off at CES 2018 in January, will cost $2,800 at the 55-inch size and $3,800 at the 65-inch size. Those prices are $300 more than the cost of LG’s 2018 C8 series in the same sizes.  Meanwhile the Sony …

Read More »

Send money to friends with Google Assistant

Need to send money to a friend? Now you can ask Google Assistant to handle the transaction. How the new Google Assistant capability works. Google Starting Thursday, Google’s digital assistant will be able to manage peer-to-peer money transfers using Google Pay on Android and iOS. People will be able to ask the assistant via voice or text things like “Hey …

Read More »

HTC Vive Focus standalone VR hitting US later this year

HTC Vive Focus, a mobile standalone VR headset first launched last year in China, is now going worldwide by year’s end, according to an announcement by HTC during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The headset has built-in 6 DoF (six degrees of freedom) tracking that allows movement in a room without added external sensors. It runs software compatible …

Read More »

Google reportedly explores blockchain tech in cloud computing service

It looks like the blockchain bug might have bitten Google. The tech colossus’ cloud computing group is working on a service that could let customers use the heavily hyped transaction processing technology, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Blockchain is a potentially disruptive technology to track assets and transactions in a digital record held collectively among many computers instead of a single centralized …

Read More »

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 VR headset has eye

I’m standing in front of a mirror, looking at an avatar of a woman that isn’t me. “Blink,” I’m told. But it’s not working for me. One eye is permanently shut. Maybe it’s my glasses? I try lifting the goggles away from my face a bit. Now, it tracks. I roll my eyes around, and my virtual eyes in the …

Read More »

Turns out you CAN save money on a MacBook

Editors’ note, Oct. 31: Apple has announced a new version of the MacBook Air, which starts at $1,199 and features a Retina display, Touch ID and USB-C ports. The version mentioned below remains on sale, for now, and still starts at $999. The original article, published on Mar. 21, follows. Cheapskate Jr. is headed off to college in the fall. …

Read More »

Turing Award goes to Hennessy, Patterson for inventing RISC chips

Dave Patterson and John Hennessy, two San Francisco Bay Area professors now associated with Google, have won the computing industry’s top prize for revolutionizing processors with a technology called RISC. The pair won the 2017 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a $1 million prize named after Alan Turing, the British researcher who famously helped crack German Enigma …

Read More »

Facebook, Google and Amazon face EU digital tax blow

The EU unveiled a plan on Wednesday designed to get big US tech companies, including Google, Amazon and Facebook, to pay more tax in Europe. Under current rules, digital companies only pay tax in countries where they have a physical presence, even if they’re providing services in those countries and making money there. The European Commission wants to change this …

Read More »

Oppo’s R15 features, yep, an iPhone

Here’s a basic rundown of Oppo, a company you may or may not have heard of: It’s the fourth biggest phone brand in the world and it makes some great phones — but they usually look way too much like iPhones. The Chinese giant’s newest phones, the R15 and the R15 Dream Mirror Edition, were officially unveiled on Tuesday. In …

Read More »