Technology - Google News |
- Apple fires back in court, says Epic Games CEO asked for special treatment - CNBC
- The 5G BlackBerry could be 'the most American-made phone out there' - Engadget
- Maybe your PC can run Crysis Remastered... but Steam can't - Destructoid
| Apple fires back in court, says Epic Games CEO asked for special treatment - CNBC Posted: 21 Aug 2020 12:00 PM PDT  Apple responded to Epic Games' lawsuit accusing it of anticompetitive behavior in how it controls the App Store, telling the court that the Fortnite maker violated Apple's rules and shouldn't be placed back into the store temporarily while the legal battle rages. In its filing, Apple alleges that Epic Games asked for an individual arrangement with Apple, producing three emails from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney that bolster its claim. This is Apple's first significant legal response to Epic Games after the dispute between the two companies spilled into the courts. It comes the week after Epic Games released a direct payment mechanism inside Fortnite designed to bypass the App Store's payment system, from which Apple takes a 30% cut. Apple subsequently removed Fortnite from its store for violating its policies. People who already have Fortnite installed on their iPhones can continue to play, but cannot update or download the app for the first time. Epic sued it Apple in an attempt to force it to change its business practices and launched a "free Fortnite" marketing campaign portraying Apple as the villain. Special deal?Sweeney said earlier this month that Epic is not seeking a "special deal" with Apple that other iOS app makers don't get. But in Friday's filing, Apple disputed that point. "On June 30, 2020, Epic's CEO Tim Sweeney wrote my colleagues and me an email asking for a 'side letter' from Apple that would create a special deal for only Epic that would fundamentally change the way in which Epic offers apps on Apple's iOS platform," former Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller wrote in a declaration. Schiller, whose title is now Fellow, runs Apple's App Store. Apple said Sweeney was asking permission for Epic to bypass in-app purchases and allow Fortnite players to pay it directly, as well as permission to launch a third-party app store for iPhones. Schiller said that Sweeney emailed him the morning that Fortnite changed its payment mechanism saying that it "will no longer adhere to Apple's payment processing restrictions." "Because of restrictions imposed by Apple, Epic is unable to provide consumers with certain features in our iOS apps," Sweeney wrote in the June 30 email titled "Consumer Choice & Competition" produced by Apple. It was sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook as well as Schiller and other top Apple executives. "Apple would need to provide a side letter or alter its contracts and standards documents to remove such restrictions to allow Epic to provide a competing app store and competing payment processing option to iOS customers," it continued, although the letter did note that "we hope that Apple will also make these options equally available to all iOS developers." Sweeney tweeted on Friday in response that Apple's characterization is misleading, saying that he wrote in the letter that he "hopes that Apple will also make these options equally available to all iOS developers." Epic has asked for a temporary restraining order that would place Fortnite back on the App Store. A hearing on that order is scheduled for Monday in the Northern District of California. "In the wake of its own voluntary actions, Epic now seeks emergency relief. But the 'emergency' is entirely of Epic's own making," Apple's lawyers said in the filing. Apple says that if Epic were to remove the payment mechanism it introduced, it would allow Fortnite to return to the App Store, and would not disable Epic's developer account. If Epic were to lose its Apple developer accounts, it would not only be unable to publish Fortnite for iPhones, but it would also hamper the development of the Unreal Engine, software that helps programmers make games, and is used in hundreds of apps from many other companies. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| The 5G BlackBerry could be 'the most American-made phone out there' - Engadget Posted: 21 Aug 2020 11:26 AM PDT BlackBerry faithful were dealt a harsh blow earlier this year when TCL, the biggest company to build phones for the brand, said it would stop. That left enthusiasts clinging to their KEY2s, wondering about would-be replacements, and raising glasses to the good old days — at least until an upstart Texas outfit announced plans to pick up where TCL left off. OnwardMobility was incorporated in Austin as Onward88 in late 2018 by CEO Peter Franklin, and the startup has spent the years since piecing together an executive team and a strategy for making BlackBerry phones relevant in a 5G age. The announcement of its licensing deal with BlackBerry and Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile this week was very much the company's coming-out party, but it also raised a handful of big questions: Who are these people? Is this a B2B play? What's the new BlackBerry going to cost? And perhaps biggest of all, is this going to be the BlackBerry that fans have longed for? In a conversation with Engadget, Franklin was eager to address some of these questions. And even when he declined to provide specifics, he laid out an ambitious — and in some ways surprising — vision for the BlackBerry of the near future. The original plan, according to Franklin, was to build the "the most secure phone out there." That's the sort of angle that opens doors, but doesn't usually translate to mass-market success. Over time, however, the team's priorities came to include productivity, as evidenced by the number of times the word plastered on the OnwardMobility website. For now, the specifics are still shrouded in secrecy; Franklin wouldn't elaborate on the new BlackBerry's features apart from noting that the phone will pack "tons of unique experiences" and "security propositions." Still, that newfound focus on getting things done helped widen the project's scope considerably. While OnwardMobility is eager to push new hardware at business and government customers, Franklin has committed to building this new phone with normal consumers in mind. "The only way to be successful with government and enterprise is if consumers want to use it too," he said. "If your company makes you use this phone and you don't like it, that's not where we want to be."  OnwardMobility But here's the thing: OnwardMobility's definition of a phone consumers want to use seems totally different from TCL's, or any of BlackBerry's earlier licensing partners. Franklin describes the device the company plans to ship in the first half of 2021 as a consumer-first "global flagship" (his words, not mine) with a "world-class camera" and support for both sub-6 and mmWave 5G networks. And then there's the keyboard. OnwardMobility confirmed in its press release that the new BlackBerry would indeed have a physical keyboard, but Franklin — a fan of the classic Bold 9900 — wouldn't elaborate much on the phone's design. Of course, that might be because the design isn't set in stone. According to Franklin, the team is collaborating closely with its partner FIH Mobile and has strong opinions about the device it wants to make, but still craves feedback. "We want to hear from the users," he said. With all that said, there is at least one aspect of BlackBerry production that Franklin seems especially adamant about. Security remains the biggest priority for OnwardMobility, and a big part of fully securing a smartphone in 2020 is securing its supply chain. That's an exceptionally tough feat when you consider the lion's share of the world's hardware production happens within Chinese borders. FIH Mobile, Onward's manufacturing partner, knows that all too well. While its parent company Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan, most of its smartphone production happens across multiple factories in Shenzhen. Not so for the BlackBerry: Franklin insists that the company's forthcoming phone will be manufactured completely outside of mainland China. If that pans out, the likeliest candidates would be FIH's facilities in Vietnam or India; the company has been boosting production capacity there as trade friction between the US and China continues to build. Producing a phone outside of China is one thing, but Franklin seems to be chasing an even more ambitious goal. "We want to be the most American-made phone out there," he said. "The specifics of that and how we're enabling that are to come."  For now, it's unclear if the team intends to use more components sourced from US companies, or if OnwardMobility plans to push FIH to manufacture these phones closer to home. (The closest FIH production facility to the United States is in Chihuahua, Mexico, less than 250 miles from the US board. Parent company Foxconn also owns a massive plant in Wisconsin, though it's largely geared toward manufacturing LCD panels and components for servers.) Perhaps the final plan involves a bit of both, or neither; all Franklin will say for now is to stay tuned. The idea of a mostly "American-made" phone will help Onward curry favor with the government and businesses hardening their infrastructures, but it's difficult not to imagine some kind of impact on the BlackBerry's price tag. Franklin repeatedly stressed that, while some trade-offs had to be made, he's proud of the direction the Onward team has settled on and that the device will be priced "competitively" for the market. "We want our features in as many of our fans' hands as possible," he said. "Price is a huge part of that." It should be noted, though, that Franklin declined to clarify if he meant competitive for the market at large, or competitive by flagship standards. Either way, BlackBerry fans might be able to snag a deal through their wireless service provider. Like TCL before it, OnwardMobility plans to pitch this phone at people with the help of the nation's wireless carriers. Franklin confirmed that conversations are already in progress, but declined to say who with. We can, however, make some educated guesses. It wouldn't be a huge leap to think that Verizon — currently the only carrier in the US with a mmWave network — is one such partner. (Verizon is Engadget's parent company, but had no input into this story.) Franklin's background is largely in software and includes stints at Microsoft and Zynga, but a notable chunk of OnwardMobility's executive team previously worked at Sonim, a maker of rugged smartphones whose devices are often sold by Verizon and AT&T. And Pam Norris, who serves as Onward's SVP of product, had considerable experience working alongside AT&T. Her tenure at Huawei Device USA saw her "define product specifications and feature alignment" with AT&T's rigorous requirements until the carrier torpedoed its relationship with the Chinese phone maker just before CES 2018. While our conversation left me with as many new questions as answers, it's still early days for OnwardMobility, and Franklin plans to hash out of a lot of the details in public. (The publicity push has already started: He guested on a special episode of the CrackBerry podcast the other day.) Only one day out of the gate, and OnwardMobility has managed to pull off a major feat: It got the BlackBerry community fired up again. But now the real work starts. It needs to build a phone to impress them, wireless carriers, businesses and government, and you. |
| Maybe your PC can run Crysis Remastered... but Steam can't - Destructoid Posted: 21 Aug 2020 12:30 PM PDT Uncloaking September 18 Seventy-five percent of the Crysis Remastered platforms have not yet launched. Following a catastrophic gameplay reveal leak, Crytek pushed back the most performance-intensive platforms in hopes that some changes would keep it from getting shredded to bits. Switch launched though, and it's surprisingly good! PC, PS4, and Xbox One need another month. Crytek has announced that Crysis Remastered is coming on September 18. It'll be priced at $30. Aside from the release date, Crytek slid in some more info about the remaster. Somewhere along the line, Epic secured Crysis Remastered as an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC. Crytek, no stranger to being in dire financial straits, probably leapt at the opportunity for Crysis Remastered's development to be automatically profitable. As for technical capabilities, Crysis Remastered is said to have "high-resolution textures up to 8K, HDR support, temporal anti-aliasing, screen space directional occlusion, global illumination, state-of-the-art depth fields, new light settings, motion blur, parallax occlusion mapping, screen space reflections and shadows, new particle effects, and more." Also, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X players will get console ray tracing. PC supports Nvidia DLSS technology and ray tracing on RTX cards. It all sounds beefy enough that, yes, your PC will probably have trouble running Crysis if you crank up the settings just to struggle for the sake of nostalgia.
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