Entertainment
Buying a shiny new car is an easy way to get the latest in-car technologies, but it’s not the most economical. I've had my fair share of new car purchases in the last decade – a 2008 Chevy HHR SS, 2011 Volkswagen Routan SE, 2014 Mazda 5 Sport and a 2015 Nissan Leaf – and driven hundreds of press cars featuring the latest technologies and infotainment systems. Despite new cars being technically superior on paper, the average age of vehicles on the road in 2016 was 11.6 years old, according to IHS Markit. We’ve seen substantial upgrades to the car stereo and infotainment systems in the last decade,...
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When I first heard about Nintendo's plan to build a hybrid console, I thought it was a long shot. And truthfully, it was. But I also reckoned the response to a 2-in-1 console (or 3-in-1 if you count tabletop mode, as Nintendo does) would ultimately be lukewarm. Having now spent the past couple of weeks actually playing with the Nintendo Switch, I can say I was (mostly) wrong in my original assessment, and certainly in my expectations. We'll get to my own thoughts in a little bit, but first let's talk about the Switch's reception. Despite the skepticism by myself and many others leading up to the...
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Do you love television content but are ready to cut the cord from big cable providers tapping your wallet dry? YouTube might be your answer. Google has just launched YouTube TV, their own streaming service, in select markets. According to Google, YouTube TV is the answer to the following questions: “How long do we have to wait until we can watch live TV on the go, on all our devices? When will we have DVRs big enough to handle all the things we want to record? And when will we be able to get the channels we care about, at a price we can afford, without all the commitments, equipment fees,...
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NVIDIA announced an updated SHIELD TV bundle back at the Consumer Electronics Show, which offers a host of new features thanks to some fresh hardware and an Android Nougat based OS upgrade. The updated SHIELD TV, however, isn’t totally new. Internally, the device was still packing NVIDIA’s Tegra X1 SoC like the original, which, even after a couple of years on the market, is still an exceptionally strong performer. The new SHIELD TV also has the same memory and base storage configurations, and the SHIELD Remote is similar too. However, NVIDIA significantly shrunk down the chassis by eliminating...
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The gaming community has lost a legend. Masaya Nakamura, founder of Namco and pioneer of arcade hits such as Pac-Man, one of the most iconic characters in the history of gaming, passed away at the age of 91. Namco-Bandi recorded his death as having occurred on Wednesday, January 22, though decided to wait until today before issuing a press release (PDF) on its Japanese-language website.Nakamura served as an engineer in the Japanese Navy before founding Nakamura Manufacturing in 1955. He started off with two mechanical horses that he purchased for $3,000, while renting space on the roof of a department...
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Retro gaming made a major resurgence this past holiday season, with the release of Nintendo’s ultra-hyped NES Classic, a scaled down clone of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Out of the box, the NES Classic has thirty preloaded game titles, though some recent hacks exposed a method for uploading more if you're willing to mess with it. That's all well and good, but if you weren’t able to get your hands on one this past holiday season -- like the majority of people -- getting your retro-gaming fix isn't happening any time soon, unless you fork out an unreasonable sum, paying hundreds to...
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If you have been looking for a new media streamer, now may be the time to take the plunge. The Android-based SHIELD TV is now available for pre-order and NVIDIA claims that it “delivers unmatched experiences in streaming, gaming and AI”.NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang remarked, “SHIELD TV is the world’s most advanced streamer. Its brilliant 4K HDR quality, hallmark NVIDIA gaming performance and broad access to media content will bring families hours of joy. And with SHIELD’s new AI home capability, we can control and interact with content through the magic of artificial intelligence from...
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As we’ve detailed a number of times here at HotHardware, the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV console is a powerful media streaming and gaming device that features a beefy Tegra X1 processor and an integrated 256-core Maxwell-based GPU (check out Marco’s full review here). While we’ve seen plenty of streaming devices come to the market with potent quad-core SoCs before, none of them are packing the kind of graphics hardware and Android TV polish lurking inside the SHIELD. To that end, NVIDIA thought that it could use the standard SHIELD (16GB) and the SHIELD Pro (500GB) as a centerpiece for Plex Media...
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One evening you are chatting with that cutie you swiped right on, and suddenly you remember the perfect YouTube video to share with them. How should you share the video? Should you copy and paste the link? Should you post it on their Facebook or Twitter? Should you email it to them? Now you don't have to make these tough decisions. Google recently released native sharing for a small percentage of YouTube users. These users can invite friends into conversation threads. Friends can chat about the shared video right inside YouTube’s mobile app and reply with another video. The message threads...
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Valve took a major step in growing its Steam digital distribution platform today by adding movie rentals to the mix. The addition of movies to Steam's catalog is a first, and it was made possible through a deal with Lionsgate Entertainment that immediately fleshes out the service with more than 100 flicks. This is a big deal for Valve and its Steam platform, one that hints at the company's plans of expanding Steam into an entertainment juggernaut. Steam is already the biggest digital distribution platform on the planet for games, and while it has a long way to go before it can claim the same for...
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Much to the chagrin of every major TV network out there, Netflix continues to rise at a solid rate and eat into its wary competition. According to research conducted by Michael Nathanson, of MoffettNathanson, cable TV viewing dropped 3% in 2015, and half of that is directly attributed to Netflix. It's being predicted that by 2020, 14% of household TV viewing will be through Netflix, highlighting that the service's growth isn't about to slow down. Nathanson's research hits on some rather specific stats regarding how much airtime Netflix subscribers give to network giants. During 2015, those subscribed...
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NVIDIA held a press conference last night where it unveiled its latest autonomous driving technologies, like the next-gen Tegra and Pascal-powered Drive PX 2, but representatives from the company were also setup off-site talking about updates to their SHIELD Android TV device and various VR initiatives. We’ve got video from the press conference posted here, and Paul covered the details of NVIDIA’s new VR Ready program. We can report that the SHIELD Android TV will be receiving an Android Marshmallow update in the not-too-distant future, complete with an updated and more customizable UI, better...
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One of the first times we laid eyes on a curved monitor in the flesh was back at CES 2015 where Dell was showing off this 34-inch bad boy to the masses. Since then curved monitors have been cropping up all over the place, and even a few curved all-in-ones have made a showing here in Q4. Acer recently stepped up with its Predator line of displays including the 34-inch curvaceous Predator X34 that we immediately sat-up and took note of. The Predator X34 is not only a 34-inch curved panel targeted at gamers with refresh rate overclocking up to 100Hz, but it also comes with two flavors of Adaptive...
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Not long ago, Amazon announced a revamped Fire TV with a handful of new and upgraded features including 4K Ultra HD video support and Alexa functionality. Although the original Fire TV which we reviewed last year had voice capabilities, those voice controls were limited to searching for content and applications. With Alexa built in, the second-generation Fire TV now has additional features, such as the ability to provide sports scores, weather and traffic information, or play music. As you’ll recall from our review of the Amazon Echo, we were impressed by the Alexa functionality and its utility...
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