Microsoft on Tuesday released the Windows 8.1 August 12th update, just like it promised a few days ago, but users shouldn’t expect any interesting new features in this software update. After all, the company did say the Windows 8.1 August update will be a minor one, hinting that it will not include the highly anticipated return of the Start menu, in spite of what it said back at Build 2014.
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If you’re waiting until the holiday season to pick up an Xbox One, you’re going to have a wealth of options to choose from. The most appealing offer might be the long-awaited white Xbox One included in the Sunset Overdrive bundle, but Call of Duty fans have their own exclusive bundle to look forward to. Microsoft announced at Gamescom on Tuesday that it was teaming up with Activision to release a Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare-skinned Xbox One with a 1TB hard drive for $499.99 this fall.
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Microsoft announced a huge new update to the Xbox One on Tuesday and it included a full-scale video player capable of supporting just about any kind of file you can think of, including including .avi, .jpg, .gif, .mov, .mp3, .mpeg, .wma and .wmv files. Ars Technica’s Peter Bright was particularly struck by one codec mentioned that he says could be of great use to people who like watching pirated movies and TV shows: MKV containers.
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So you’ve watched our 10 favorite trailers from Microsoft’s Gamescom event, but you’re thirst for new games still hasn’t been quenched. Thankfully, Sony just finished its own PlayStation 4 media briefing and a slew of new trailers have made their way online. Unlike Microsoft, Sony had several brand new games to show off, some of which had been hinted at in weeks prior and others of which came completely out of left field.
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So we’re now pretty certain that Apple will release its iWatch… well, sometime before the end of the year. In the buildup to its release, many analysts have been predicting some absurdly high sales numbers in the iWatch’s first year — remember Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty’s bold projection that Apple could sell as many as 60 million (!) iWatches in its first 12 months on the market. It goes without saying that there are good reasons to be skeptical of such sales projections, especially when you consider that the iWatch actually looks like a pretty risky endeavor from Apple’s perspective.
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Google on Tuesday announced a new interesting update for its email service, which will hopefully help thwart scammers’ phishing email plans in the future and stop some spamming campaigns. Gmail will henceforward reject suspicious combinations of Unicode characters that could be misleading for regular users and fool them into clicking on links to sites they think they know, only to end up on a malicious page.
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Microsoft took Gamescom by storm on Tuesday morning with a huge showing of games coming this fall and early next year. Most, if not all of the games had been announced at previous events, but many of the attendees in Cologne, Germany will be the first to go hands-on with some of the biggest Xbox One games of the year, including Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
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Even though rumors detailing an HTC One (M8) Prime phablet were quickly shot down earlier this year, HTC may have such a device in the works after all, TKTechNews has learned. Unsurprisingly, the device will be part of the One Max phablet family, although, unlike its predecessor, the handset should come with high-end specs on board.
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Om One is the name of a new speaker that offers an amazing and rather unexpected feature: Levitation. The Om One is an orb that plays music while floating atop of its base. The device is currently seeking funding on its own website, hoping to raise $100,000. With 49 days left in this self-hosted crowd-funding campaign, the Om One has already convinced 213 backers to pledge almost $37,000 . The Om One speaker costs $179 during this fundraising campaign, or $20 off its future commercial price, and it should ship to backers by Christmas.
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Congratulations, OnePlus: You’ve managed to create a marketing stunt for your phone that’s even worse than HTC’s ill-advised $1 billion Robert Downey, Jr. campaign and your own “smash your phone” campaign. OnePlus on Tuesday took the wraps off of a new promotional contest called “Ladies First” that invites female OnePlus fans to “draw a OnePlus logo on a piece of paper or your hand/face/wherever” and then to post it to a thread on OnePlus’s website.
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