Category: GADGET

Ever since the open world hacker adventure game Watch Dogs captured the attention of 2012’s E3, there were rumors circulating of a movie remake before the game even got a release date. Now more than 10 years later, the film version is finally happening. Ubisoft announced today on X that filming has begun on the Watch Dogs movie with a picture of a clapboard and the caption “Lights_Camera_Action.exe.”

The Watch Dogs movie was first announced in 2016 at Sony’s GamesCon press conference, according to IGN. Sony announced that Ubisoft Partners teamed up with New Regency to make a film adaptation of Aiden Pearce’s data-hacking adventure in a metropolis overseen by an intrusive server.

Since then, drips and hints of the movie’s status came and went for years until last month, when Ubisoft posted a press release announcing that production on Watch Dogs would start sometime this summer. The press release also announced that actor Tom Blyth from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sophie Wilde from the sleeper horror hit Talk to Me will star in the Watch Dogs film. The movie is being directed by Mathieu Turi based on a script written by Christie LeBlanc (who wrote the 2021 Netflix sci-fi film Oxygen) with rewrites by Victoria Bata.

A few years ago, there was also talk of turning Watch Dogs and Far Cry, another big Ubisoft franchise, into an animated TV series following a run of the Rabbids Invasion cartoons. However, there’s been nothing but radio silence from those projects ever since then. Maybe if the Watch Dogs movie becomes a hit, the animated series will follow it into production.

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is coming soon, so you still have time to sign up for a free trial of Prime before the shopping event begins. However, in typical Amazon fashion, we’re already starting to see early Prime Day deals pop up. The online retailer has gotten into the habit of teasing early Prime Day deals leading up to the big event, with most of them being available exclusively to Prime members. However, there are always some good tech deals on Amazon available to everyone at the same time. We’ve collected the best early Prime Day deals here so you don’t have to go searching for them. We’ll be updating this post regularly, so check back to see the latest discounts.

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We’re still waiting for the perfect hybrid PC that can work as well as a tablet as it does as a laptop. In 2024, it seems like many companies have also given up on that ideal — but Microsoft, Apple and Samsung still have some options to consider. And we’re still seeing OS tweaks to make iOS and Android more usable for larger displays. If you’re on the hunt for your next computer and are dead-set on it being a 2-in-1, we’ve collected our current top picks here plus all of the things you should know before making a purchase.

Factors to consider before buying a 2-in-1 laptop

When you’re shopping for a 2-in-1, there are some basic criteria to keep in mind. First, look at the spec sheet to see how heavy the tablet is (alone, and with the keyboard). Most modern hybrids weigh less than 2 pounds. If the overall weight of the tablet and its keyboard come close to 3 pounds, you may be better off getting an ultraportable laptop.

Also, while some 2-in-1s offer built-in LTE or 5G connectivity, not everyone will want to pay the premium for it. An integrated cellular radio makes checking emails or replying to messages on the go far more convenient. But it also often costs more, and that’s not counting what you’ll pay for data. And, as for 5G — you can hold off on it unless you live within range of a mmWave beacon. Coverage is still spotty and existing nationwide networks use the slower sub-6 technology that’s barely faster than LTE. For now, tethering a PC to your phone is still the best way to get online.

These machines still have their limits, of course. Since they’re smaller than proper laptops, they tend to have less-powerful processors. Keyboards are often less sturdy, with condensed layouts and shallower travel. Plus, they’re almost always tablets first, leaving you to buy a keyboard case separately. (And those ain’t cheap!) So, you can’t always assume the advertised price is what you’ll actually spend on the 2-in-1 you want.

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Sometimes, getting a third-party keyboard might be just as good, and they’re often cheaper than first-party offerings. If you’re looking to save some money, Logitech’s Slim Folio is an affordable option, and if you don’t need your keyboard to attach to your tablet, Logitech’s K780 Multi-Device wireless keyboard is also a good pick.

While we’ve typically made sure to include a budget 2-in-1 in previous years, this time there isn’t a great choice. We would usually pick a Surface Go, but the latest model is still too expensive. Other alternatives, like cheaper Android tablets, are underpowered and don’t offer a great multitasking interface. If you want something around $500 that’s thin, lightweight and long-lasting, you’re better off this year looking at a conventional laptop (like those on our best budget PCs list).

Recent updates

June 2024: We updated our top picks to include the Microsoft Surface Pro Copilot+ edition.

Nathan Ingraham contributed to this report.

Apple will release its first premium podcast with early access available to Apple TV+ subscribers. The company made the announcement in a today that its first dual-language podcast, My Divo, will be the first podcast tied to an Apple TV+ subscription.

All eight episodes of My Divo will be available in English and Spanish for Apple TV+ subscribers when they connect their subscriptions to Apple Podcasts starting July 1. Non-subscribers will listen to new episodes every week. However, they will get access to the first two episodes on launch day. Apple indicated that My Divo will serve as an example of its new business model for podcast distribution going forward, saying that “all upcoming Apple TV+ podcasts will also be made available in full to subscribers.”

My Divo is a podcast about Mexican singer , also known as El Divo de Juárez (hence the title), hosted by award-winning journalist Maria Garcia as she tries to reconcile her identity with the legacy of the flamboyant Latino performer. She reexamines similarities within their Mexican heritage, including their sexualities and their upbringing in Ciudad Juárez.

Apple releasing a podcast behind an Apple TV+ paywall is similar to its plan of , which happened shortly after the launch of the streaming service four years ago. My Divo is the first Apple podcast not tied to an Apple TV+ show of the same name.

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X will soon be moving the ability to live stream behind its premium paywall, the company announced. The change will make X the only major social platform to charge for the feature, which is currently free on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and TikTok.

“Starting soon, only Premium subscribers will be able to livestream (create live video streams) on X,” the company said. “This includes going live from an encoder with X integration,” an apparent reference to X’s game streaming capabilities.

X didn’t offer an explanation for the change. The company has used additional features, like post editing, longform writing, and ad-free feeds to lure users to its paid subscriptions, but hasn’t typically moved existing, widely available, features behind its paywall. X Premium subscriptions start at $3/month for the “basic” tier, and rise to $8/month for Premium and $16/month for Premium+.

There are, however, other signs that the Elon Musk-owned platform wants to charge for other simple features. The company introduced a $1 annual charge for new accounts to have posting privileges in New Zealand and the Philippines. Though the company still describes the scheme as a test, Musk has suggested he wants to expand the fees to all new users.

Quicken Simplifi, one of Engadget’s favorite budgeting apps, is on sale for half off right now. The user-friendly money management service is on sale for $2 per month, billed annually at $24.

The financial planning and tracking service is one of our top picks for replacing Mint. Its clean and simple interface recalls memories of its now-defunct competitor. Simplifi has a scrolling landing page with a detailed overview, including balances, net worth, spending, upcoming payments and other financial stats.

The service makes it easy to connect with your financial institution (optionally) for easier tracking. You can also invite a partner or financial advisor to co-manage the account.

It has a few limitations. Unlike some of its competitors, it doesn’t offer Zillow integration for home value tracking. (You can still do that manually.) In addition, it doesn’t offer free trials, and we ran into a few minor errors in miscategorizing expenses, although they were in line with the small flubs the competition also makes. It also doesn’t allow Apple or Google sign-ins, so you’ll have to create or log into a Quicken account to get started.

We already consider Simplifi’s standard $48 annual pricing to be a solid deal that aligns with market expectations. But for $24 for the whole year, you can try it for much less. Just remember to cancel before it renews if you aren’t enjoying it enough to renew for a second year at full price.

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Some Cybertruck buyers who were scheduled to receive their new trucks this week have been told they’ll have to wait a little while longer as the company addresses a safety issue with the windshield wiper motor. Tesla hasn’t publicly confirmed any such problems or issued an official recall, but numerous commenters on the Cybertruck Owners Club forum and Reddit said they were notified that deliveries have been halted and their pickup dates were pushed back a week.

This follows reports from Cybertruck owners who have said that the windshield wiper failed on them, in some cases almost immediately after the truck was picked up. Tesla previously had to pause Cybertruck deliveries this spring, when it issued a recall over faulty accelerator pedals that could get stuck. The problem affected around 3,878 Cybertruck vehicles. In this case, the fix was fairly simple (installing a rivet) and deliveries resumed soon after.

Astro Bot is as precise as it is ridiculous, and this is exactly what makes it so damn delightful. During my 30-minute demo at Summer Game Fest, I crashed into spiky obstacles, flew off the side of sky-high platforms, bounced into deadly projectiles and popped my little robot protagonist like an overinflated balloon — and I could not keep the smile off my face the entire time. The art style, sound effects and animations in Astro Bot are infused with childlike joy, taking the sting out of each failure. Simultaneously, each death felt avoidable with a little more practice, each leap landable with just one more try. Resets were quick and generous, encouraging trial-and-error while maintaining a superb platforming flow.

Despite its kid-friendly appearance, Astro Bot feels like a mature — and super tricky! — platformer.

This competency makes sense, considering Sony has had more than 10 years to perfect the Astro Bot recipe. The first official Astro Bot title was Rescue Mission, a 2018 PlayStation VR game and a semi-sequel to 2013’s The Playroom demo on PS4. Next, Astro’s Playroom came pre-installed on the PS5 at launch in 2020, offering a short but memorable tour through the features of the DualSense controller. All of these experiences were cute and well-executed, but as it turns out, they were long-tail teasers for the full Astro Bot game coming out on September 6.

The SGF 2024 Astro Bot demo was on PlayStation 5 and showcased a few different worlds, each with a distinct gadget and map style. I tried out a dog jetpack that let me dash forward and a pair of frog-face gloves with spring-loaded punching abilities. The frog gloves were my favorite weapon of the day: the left glove was activated by the LT button and the right was attached to RT, and I spent most of this level rhythmically punching the air, just because it felt cool to do so. Throughout this stage there were also red sticky points to punch into, allowing me to hold the gloves in place and stretch out the springs, turning Astro into a robot-sized slingshot. You have to hold the triggers in place and pull Astro back before flinging its little body in the proper direction, which is sometimes directly into the face of a giant red octopus. Obviously.

Astro makes the most adorable wah wah wah wah sound when it dies, diffusing the disappointment of each failure. I heard this sound most often while attempting to clear a section of spinning, spiked balls and pink-glass platforms that shattered as soon as Astro skated over them. The fragile nature of the glass forced me to react with twitchy adjustments, ramping up the tension and encouraging replays. There were so many clever mechanics, tools and obstacles on display in the Astro Bot demo, including a throwable time-freezing item, a powerful magnet that picked up anything metal nearby, a line of flaming spheres that snaked rapidly across a platform, and even just the standard jump, which propelled Astro into the air and shot lasers out of its feet, injuring the blobs and other enemies below.

The full game will feature more than 50 unique planets of platforming proficiency, more than 300 bots to rescue (more than half of which are classic PlayStation characters), and dozens of weird and satisfying tools to use. It’ll take about 15 hours to complete, and according to Team ASOBI head Nicolas Doucet, that length was chosen purposefully.

“Usually games use like one or two mechanics really well, and they build up on top of that, but this is really more about us rebooting everything for every planet, and just keeping Astro and the crew as the center point,” Doucet told Engadget at SGF. “But it’s something we decided from the beginning, that maybe as a result, it won’t be like a 50 hour game — but that’s okay. It’s better to have 15 hours of constant renewal than 30 hours where you feel like, sometimes, it drags a bit.”

Team ASOBI’s goal with Astro Bot is to offer a fresh experience at every turn.

“We want people to think, ‘What surprise are they going to throw next?’” Doucet said. “And if we can maintain that all the way to the end — even like, final boss, game ending, we are trying to keep that alive to the very, very, very last second of the game. If we succeed with that, I think people will have a good time.”

As in Astro’s Playroom, the DualSense controller has a starring role in Astro Bot. The game’s bots regularly fly around on a jet-sized DualSense and Astro is on a mission to collect friends and store them inside the controller itself. When new bots are picked up they appear inside an on-screen DualSense, and when players shake the controller in real life, it’s mirrored in the game. The little characters sway and knock into each other, and they can even pop out of the gamepad if it’s rattled in the proper way, and it’s all just pretty adorable.

It’s refreshing to see Sony leaning into silliness.

“The design of Astro has a little bit of a tummy, and actually, the bots originally were supposed to look a little bit like toddlers,” Doucet said. “They look a little bit clumsy on their legs and, you know, their butts sticking out as if they were wearing nappies and stuff. The design came from that, so that the silhouette would be endearing and also a little bit silly. But that was separated from the tightness [of the mechanics]. It’s almost like there’s two mindsets, because the silliness can be there and we kind of laugh about it, but when it comes to clearing a challenge, it’s good to be tight. It’s only pixel perfect.”

The balance between acuity and absurdity is what makes Astro Bot so compelling, even just in its demo form. It feels like a solid platformer first, providing a mechanically sound foundation where all of the nonsense can thrive.

“The silliness usually comes from animation and the visual side, whereas the tightness of the gameplay comes from the engineering and really the game design and programming,” Doucet said. “If I go back to the origins of Astro, before being a funny-to-look-at platformer, it was actually a platformer that feels good, where the jump lands exactly where you want and starts when you want. Your input lag and all of that was really the focus point.”

The PlayStation demo space at Summer Game Fest was a cool cave of happiness, featuring Lego Horizon Adventures and Astro Bot, two games that turn classic Sony characters into irreverent cartoon versions of themselves. Considering some of PlayStation’s most popular protagonists are serious, grizzled warriors like Kratos, Joel, Ellie, Wander, the Bloodborne guy and Aloy, there’s room for these interpretations to go horribly wrong. Astro Bot gets it right (and it sounds like Lego Horizon Adventures does, too).

“The writing of the games isn’t as important to us as what the character background is,” Doucet said. “In the case of The Last of Us, for example, the main characters are good characters. They have complex decisions to make, but fundamentally, they’re good people. There would be nothing wrong about questioning, ‘Who is Ellie?’ and, ‘Who is Joel?’ And then, you know, parents and kids can exchange [ideas]. You can imagine a good conversation coming out of that.”

The character I was most stoked to see in Astro Bot was the red-cloaked protagonist from Journey. While the meeting immediately triggered memories of loss, discovery and introspection, I was mostly just happy to see an old friend in an unexpected place. The fact that the character was guaranteed to be carefree and comedic here added an extra layer of mental security to the experience. A colleague who was watching me play didn’t immediately recognize the Journey character in Astro Bot and I was happy to explain it, automatically recounting some of my own experiences with the game from back in the day. It’s easy to see how Astro Bot will introduce new audiences to classic PlayStation franchises, while also reigniting those feel-good hormones in veteran players.

But I’ll be honest: I don’t really need the PlayStation characters in Astro Bot. They’re adorable and capable of generating a warm tinge of familiarity, but for me, Astro Bot’s allure doesn’t lie in its nostalgia play. Instead, I view the character appearances more like easter eggs, cute but not crucial to the actual gameplay. Which, I have to say again, is incredibly competent, replayable and fun. Stellar platforming is Astro Bot’s true joy.

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Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Xbox’s Summer Games Showcase on Sunday brought a nice little surprise amidst all the expected news: the announcement of a new Life is Strange game, Life is Strange: Double Exposure. The game, which sees the return of its original protagonist Max Caulfield, will be released on October 29 for Xbox Series X/S, PC and PlayStation 5. Anyone dying to get their hands on it a little earlier, though, can pre-order the Ultimate Edition, which will grant them access to Chapters 1 and 2 on October 15. A Nintendo Switch release appears to be coming later, as well.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure picks up years after the events of the first game. Now, Max has found her friend Safi murdered and tries to use her powers of time manipulation to go back and save her — but things go awry. It’s a “full-on murder-mystery, with a supernatural twist” in which Max will have to bounce between parallel timelines to stop the killer.

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Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Boeing’s Starliner has successfully docked with the ISS — but not without some last-minute problems. The company’s first crewed test flight to the space station linked up at 1:34 PM ET after missing its first shot due to several thrusters malfunctioning. Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams plan to spend the next eight days onboard the ISS before returning to Earth.

The capsule docked with the ISS in an orbit about 260 miles over the Indian Ocean. The pair is now circling the planet at around 17,500 mph.

“Nice to be attached to the big city in the sky,” Wilmore spoke over comms to mission control in Houston after the successful docking. The capsule carries 760 pounds of cargo, including about 300 pounds of food and other supplies requested by the four US astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts onboard.

Initially scheduled for 12:15 PM ET, the link-up was delayed after five of Starliner’s 28 reaction control thrusters went down. Several were lost due to a helium propulsion leak. NASA and Boeing concluded that the loss didn’t compromise the mission, and Wilmore and Williams restarted three of them, providing enough redundancy to move forward.

On Wednesday, a small helium leak was detected during liftoff and ascent. Later, two more leaks appeared.

The problems are emblematic of Boeing’s struggles to get its capsules certified for regular flights. Various problems and delays, including orbital flight test issues, valve problems, software glitches and a bum parachute system, have plagued Starliner. Boeing’s rival, SpaceX, reached the ISS for the first time in 2020, approximately when this Starliner mission was originally slated to launch.

Boeing is seeking NASA certification to join SpaceX as a regular ride to the ISS. The government agency wanted to have multiple private-sector ferries make routine trips to the space station. Despite Boeing’s troubles, it may get there in the end.