Technology - Google News

Sony confirms the PlayStation 5 is coming in 2020, reveals new hardware details - Ars Technica
Netflix confirms it won’t port its iPad app to macOS - The Verge
Andromeda returns: A detailed history of Microsoft's foldable phone project - Windows Central

Sony confirms the PlayStation 5 is coming in 2020, reveals new hardware details - Ars Technica

Posted: 08 Oct 2019 10:05 AM PDT

Enlarge / Sony's DualShock 4 controller for the current-generation PlayStation. The report says the new controller looks similar but has major new haptic features.
Mark Walton

Sony representatives have revealed substantial new details about the company's upcoming PlayStation 5 console in an interview with Wired. New features and improvements will include sophisticated haptics in the controller, hardware ray tracing, and a UI that lets users see in-game information before launching a game. Additionally, Sony confirmed that the console will be called the PlayStation 5 and that it will launch before the holidays in 2020.

Mark Cerny, the architect of the PlayStation 4, is returning as chief architect for the PlayStation 5. Earlier this year, he sat down with Wired to demonstrate Sony's work to eliminate load times with extremely fast solid-state drives and improved software stacks and I/O to accompany them. In that demonstration, a fast-travel load in Spider-Man went from 19 seconds on current PS4 hardware to less than one second on new hardware.

Today's interview touched on SSDs again, expanding upon the previous discussion to highlight additional benefits of the next-generation SSD—something that Microsoft has said it will include in its own next-generation console as well, also due in late 2020.

Cerny pointed out that game developers often duplicate data at multiple points on a disc or in a hard drive installation in order to make it easily accessible on traditional drives. For example, an art asset that occurs repeatedly throughout an open-world city might be stored hundreds of times on the hard drive so it can quickly be loaded from any point in the game. Cerny says this new storage solution could allow developers to end that practice, either making room for more assets in the same installation size or freeing that space up on users' drives.

And since games are getting quite large (Red Dead Redemption 2 took up nearly 100GB; The Elder Scrolls Online is even larger), the PlayStation 5 will use 100GB optical discs. It will support the 4K Blu-ray disc format.

The above-mentioned SSD implementation means that players will be able to jump into specific points in a game very quickly, either from another part of the game or from the PS5's home screen. And that home screen is seeing some changes that synergize with that capability. According to the interview, the home screen will be able to show in-game data from a game even if that game is not running and will facilitate the player opening the game directly to any part of it based on what data is presented.

To invent some examples that demonstrate how this could work: in a multiplayer shooter like Call of Duty, the player may see that there's a double-XP event for the Nuketown map and launch right into a Nuketown match from the home screen rather than having to go through all the introductory menus. Or the player could see a list of their available quests in an open-world RPG like Fallout 4 and opt to launch the game directly into a conversation with the in-game quest-giver.

Sony will also make it possible for developers to identify specific chunks of a game that can be installed or removed as needed. For example, you could delete just the single-player mode from your drive to free up space after you're done playing it but you want to continue with multiplayer.

A substantial portion of the Wired article focuses on the controller, though it does not go into too much detail about its design or layout other than to say it closely resembles the existing DualShock 4 controller that is packaged with the PlayStation 4. The emphasis of all this controller talk is on haptic feedback, a more sophisticated relative of rumble technology. This is the same technology that provides realistic feedback on a Mac trackpad click and that Nintendo offers a version of in the Nintendo Switch's joycons—a feature that players and critics have shared a lot of appreciation for since the Switch launch.

The article's author describes several simulated surfaces and experiences that use haptic feedback, such as a car driving with one wheel on the dirt and the other on pavement—he writes that he can feel both surfaces through the controller's haptics. He also notes that the controller's triggers (dubbed L2 and R2 on the DualShock 4) can provide variable resistance to simulate, for example, the drawing of a bow-string.

As is often the case with proprietary technologies in consoles, developer adoption may depend on whether both major competing consoles—Microsoft's Project Scarlett and Sony's PlayStation 5— support them. For example, the PlayStation 4's DualShock 4 controller has a touchpad that provided some interesting gameplay and input possibilities in some first-party Sony games and other early releases on the console, but over the years it has been used less, in part because most games are developed cross-platform, and Microsoft's controller does not have the same feature.

The SSD improvements, too, require active planning by the developers in terms of how data is stored and delivered from the disk in their games. That one is more likely to see widespread use, though, because the player and developer benefits are clear, and both consoles will include them.

Sony skipped E3 this year, so these articles have been our main source of information about the upcoming console. But expect to learn a whole lot more about both Sony and Microsoft's new consoles sometime next spring or summer.

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Netflix confirms it won’t port its iPad app to macOS - The Verge

Posted: 08 Oct 2019 08:41 AM PDT

Ever since Apple first announced that it would let developers port iPad apps to macOS, anticipation for popular apps debuting on the Mac has been high. But today, any hopes that Netflix would show up on the Mac as a native app were crushed, with Bloomberg reporting that the streaming service won't be launching a Catalyst app for macOS.

Netflix is one of the most popular free iPad apps on the entire platform. And while it's true that it's already available on Mac computers through any web browser, there are advantages to a native app that a ported iPad version could bring, including downloadable movies and TV shows to enjoy offline or full integration for Apple's picture-in-picture mode.

There's a precedent, too: Netflix makes a native Windows 10 app for its streaming service on PCs that, while likely intended for tablets, works great on desktop and laptop devices.

It's the latest blow for Apple's Catalyst app initiative, which appears to be off to a slow start, despite the fact that Catalina is now publicly available. As Bloomberg points out, at Catalina's launch on October 7th, there were roughly 20 ported iPad apps available on the Mac App Store. That's not exactly the revolution Apple likely hoped for. DC Universe and Asphalt 9, two of the biggest Catalyst apps that Apple showcased, missed the launch and have been removed from Apple's Catalina website.

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Andromeda returns: A detailed history of Microsoft's foldable phone project - Windows Central

Posted: 08 Oct 2019 09:00 AM PDT

Last week, Microsoft unveiled Surface Duo, a pocketable dual-screen mobile device that's coming at the end of next year. This is a project we at Windows Central have been following for almost three years under the internal codename "Andromeda." Initially positioned as a Windows Core OS device, Surface Duo will now be shipping as an Android device instead, a move that few of us were expecting, but is absolutely the right call.

Although a foldable phone by Microsoft came as a surprise to many, this is actually project we've known about for a very long time. It's something Microsoft has been working on since 2016, and has gone through many iterations and changes internally. As such, I thought it would be a cool idea to gather all the important historic points in the journey that has led us to Surface Duo, once codenamed Andromeda.

2016

Microsoft began working on its secret Andromeda project at some point throughout 2016, not too long after the company had decided to give up on Windows 10 Mobile internally. It wasn't until November 2016 where I first started hearing about the Andromeda project from sources, and to mark the occasion, I teased the Andromeda codename in a tweet alongside a number of unrelated things that I was looking forward to in the future.

At the time, I didn't know too much. My job is to dig around for information, and back then, information about the project was scarce. I knew it was a phone, and I knew it would be running a new OS from Microsoft called Andromeda OS. But that was it for the time being. Over the next two years, I would slowly but surely find out more information about this secret mobile project.

2017

In January 2017, I started hearing about more details around Andromeda. I had been told that the device was a dual-screen phone with a focus on pen and digital inking. What I mostly heard about, however, is the software side of things. Known as Andromeda OS internally, this was a flavor of Windows Core OS designed specifically for foldable devices, and its UX was a mix of both Windows 10 desktop and Windows 10 Mobile.

This UX layer was a sticking point for me, as it was being described as an integral part of the Andromeda project. This UX layer was called CShell and was a universal shell designed to adapt and be modularized so that it can run on many kinds of form factor. This would be a key component for a device with two screens that can fold into different orientations.

CShell was the first component of Andromeda that I took a keen focus on, and after talking with several sources on the subject, wrote up my first piece towards the Andromeda puzzle on January 16. Two days before this, a patent revealing a device with two screens appeared online, and it was at this moment that I started to understand the device Microsoft was trying to build.

Satya Nadella was later quoted saying that Microsoft's future phones would not look like normal phones. Not too long after, references to this "Andromeda" device started showing up in code, and leaksters like WalkingCat had begun to dig up these references online. On May 20, Cassim Ketfi fired all cylinders and wrote the first report on his findings around the Andromeda project as a whole. At the time, I still hadn't written about Andromeda itself, as I still had lingering questions around its OS.

Andromeda OS

Andromeda's OS was an interesting topic of conversation with sources, as, at the time, not everyone I was speaking to seemed to fully understand what it was. It wasn't immediately clear to me that Andromeda OS (as it was known at the time) was part of a much larger effort known as Windows Core OS. When Andromeda OS was being described to me, many were calling it a modular platform designed to scale to any form factor.

On September 20, I wrote up the second piece of the puzzle towards Andromeda. This article detailed the OS, and how Microsoft was building a modular and universal version of Windows that would run across all kinds of different devices, including Andromeda. At the time of publishing, I was still calling this effort Andromeda OS, and over the next week, several sources would clarify that Andromeda OS is just one part of this modular project known as Windows Core OS.

Finally, on October 26, I published my findings around Microsoft's secret Andromeda project, tying together the CShell and Windows Core OS articles before it to paint a picture around how enormous this effort was internally. I was told that Microsoft wouldn't be positioning this device as just a phone. At this point, I was hearing that Andromeda was on track for a late 2018 launch, with the possibility of a developer kit being released at Microsoft's Build developer conference in May 2018.

Andromeda, a dual-screen foldable phone by Microsoft that runs a new version of Windows, was really happening. And it was super exciting.

2018

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As 2018 rolled around, I had started to learn about some cool camera tech that would slot the device neatly into the Mixed Reality category with capabilities such as 3D scanning and more, but new details around the project had slowed significantly outside of patents which seemingly revealed new ideas every week. Many of those ideas were not actually part of the Andromeda project, of course.

As Build 2018 approached, it became clear that Microsoft would not be shipping an Andromeda developer kit, as the project itself had slipped behind schedule. In May, I had heard from sources that the company was looking at many different ways to combat the "app-gap" problem that Andromeda would ultimately face, and one solution the company was considering was running Android apps on Andromeda via emulation, similar to Project Astoria.

The problem with Project Astoria is that it worked too well, and there were licensing and political issues around using similar tech in Andromeda. Would Google even allow it? Would it kill off any developer need to build native Windows apps? There were many questions around doing this internally.

In June 2018, The Verge reported on an internal email sent out to employees that detailed its plans around the Andromeda project. Microsoft called the device "new and disruptive" as, at the time, no foldable phones existed. However, a week later ZDNet reported that Microsoft had shelved the Andromeda project entirely. It was no longer happening anytime soon.

Andromeda is dead, or is it?

The report echoed similar concerns I was hearing from sources in May, around Andromeda's problem with not having any apps. This really was a big problem for the Andromeda project as a whole. No matter how amazing Windows was on Andromeda, if it had no apps, it might as well not ship. A pocketable mobile device, of any kind, needs apps.

Interestingly, even with this report claiming the device to be dead, I heard from some sources that Andromeda was still being worked on. Confusingly, however, I also had sources telling me that the project was indeed dead. This was further confirmed when I learned that Andromeda OS had been deprecated. If there's no OS for Andromeda, how can the project still be alive? It was at this point that I gave in and assumed the project really was dead.

Later in 2018, now and then, I'd receive tidbits of information detailing small changes to the Andromeda hardware. It was apparent that the Andromeda hardware was still being worked on, even though the project itself had been deemed dead by so many others. Why would Microsoft continue to work on Andromeda if it was dead? This was a question that I couldn't figure out an answer to.

2019

As 2019 rolled around, my focus had moved over from Andromeda to Centaurus. I had heard about Centaurus in late 2018, and it was described to me as a larger Andromeda running a version of Windows Core OS known as Windows Lite. The general consensus here was that Microsoft had shifted gears from Andromeda to Centaurus, as Centaurus was larger and, as such, could be positioned as a PC with PC apps.

In May 2019, whispers around Microsoft doing an Android phone started making its way through the Microsoft bloggersphere. Mary-Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott were the first to detail such plans on Windows Weekly, however the idea seemed so ludicrous that no one wanted to write it up. Why would Microsoft want to make an Android phone?

It appears that in the fall of 2018, Microsoft decided to swap out Windows in favor of Android on Andromeda. This was a move very few of us saw coming. It's obvious now, but at the time we all assumed an Android smartphone by Microsoft would be a traditional slab of glass. Even though I continued to hear that Andromeda was being worked on, I never once made the connection between the Android rumor and Andromeda.

In October, those two things would finally come together spectacularly as the most surprising Microsoft announcement ever. Microsoft had decided to take the Andromeda hardware and slap Android on it, solving the app gap problem in one fell swoop. Known as the Surface Duo, this is the first pocketable Surface, that's also a phone, and it's finally official.

Thoughts?

So that's a not-so-brief look into the journey we've taken together with Andromeda. It's been a rollercoaster for sure, a device that started out as the future of Windows on mobile became a device with Android instead. I think this is an excellent choice for Microsoft, as it's the only realistic way Microsoft can make a phone in 2020. Windows has no ecosystem on phones, and as such, Android is the only way forward in this department.

What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

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