!Shownotes:
This business card-sized Japanese phone bucks the giant-phone trend
With Apple and most Android OEMs making increasingly larger phones while Apple discontinues the small iPhone SE, it’s pretty clear where the smartphone market is going—at least for the near term. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some companies bucking the trend by going smaller, not bigger. Earlier this week, we heard that Palm’s brand is rebooting with a very small phone that’s not meant to be your main portable computing device. But this phone from Kyocera is even smaller.
YouTube video embeds now include a ‘Subscribe’ button
Up until now, if you saw a YouTube video you liked embedded in a website, you had to click through the video to YouTube’s page in order to subscribe to that channel. Now, YouTube is making it a little easier for viewers to see the videos they want (and for channel operators to grab those subscribers). Going forward, YouTube embeds will feature a “Subscribe” button.
Intel Core i9 9900K review: the fastest gaming CPU money can buy
Intel has been marketing the new Core i9 9900K as the fastest gaming CPU money can buy – and while a massive amount of controversy has surrounded the accuracy of pre-release benchmarks, the logic is sound. After all, the existing Core i7 8700K holds the title, ahead of its Ryzen 7 2700X competition. The new 9900K adds two additional cores and four threads, while boosting frequencies and increasing cache – improving on the 8700K in every way. Going into this review, my only question was this: to what extent do games actually make use of the additional resources? After all, the 8700K was already a performance monster, and arguably under-utilised. Do we actually need more gaming power?
Everything you need to know about the 2018 MacBook
While Apple’s higher-range MacBook Pros received an update earlier this year, the entry-level MacBook options are in desperate need of an overhaul. Rumors have been swirling as to what exactly that device will be, but we know the company has something up its sleeve for a cheaper MacBook in 2018.
HTC Plans to Bring Hand & Finger Tracking to Vive Pro
Today at the the World Conference on VR Industry in China, HTC announced plans to bring hand & finger tracking to Vive Pro via the headset’s front-facing cameras. Back in April HTC launched new tools to help developers take advantage of the Vive Pro’s largely unused front-facing cameras. Now it seems the company plans to double down on that by adding hand and finger tracking that works “natively” on the headset.
Have Black Ops 4’s servers been downgraded?
The Black Ops 4 beta was as smooth as a pre-release game can get, with multiple tests confirming the game was running on dedicated servers with a 60Hz send rate from both client and server sides. Even when the game launched on October 17, Black Ops 4’s multiplayer performance was relatively smooth. However, the following days revealed increased reports of kill-trading, unbalanced corner peeking and poor hit registration. According to a new study by reddit user Smcro, Black Ops 4’s multiplayer is currently running at only 20Hz from the server side, a significant downgrade from the 60Hz the game was using earlier.