As I'm sure you've heard, we're starting up BGR events again and last week we celebrated our eight-year anniversary in New York City with HTC. The event was a blast! Thanks again to almost a thousand of you for coming out and joining us throughout the evening. It was great meeting you in person and celebrating with you.
Now, I wanted to share the video from the event with those of you who couldn't attend, and those of you who did will definitely enjoy watching the highlights.
Fun and frenetic action from start to finish
Bayonetta 2 doesn't belong on the Wii U. It's also exactly what the Wii U needs.
Bayonetta, the character, is everything that Nintendo hasn't been for the past two console generations: brash, confident and self-aware. She has a sense of humor and she'll never turn down a challenge, no matter how insurmountable it may appear. Nintendo's willingness to take on this franchise might not be enough to restore its credibility with the core gaming crowd, but it's a confident move in the right direction.
We don't know if HTC is still even planning on releasing its hotly anticipated phablet at all, but if it ever does release we expect it will have killer specs. Android Headlines points us to a new report from Chinese website My Drivers that claims the so-called HTC One (M8) Max will feature a 5.5-inch 2K display, a Snapdragon 805 quad-core 2.7MHz processor, 3GB of RAM, a massive 3,000mAh battery, an 18-megapixel camera with optical image stabilization and Android L.
T-Mobile is hosting a press conference on Wednesday afternoon to reveal the seventh big "Un-carrier" move in the company's bid to disrupt the U.S. wireless industry and turbocharge its subscriber growth in the process. There's no telling what the scrappy nationwide carrier will announce this time around, but one thing is certain: T-Mobile CEO John Legere will be very entertaining (and very NSFW), regardless of what he's talking about.
One of the major new products Apple introduced during its Tuesday iPhone 6 event is Apple Pay, its very own NFC-based wireless payments system that’s going to be available starting in October. The iPhone and Apple Watch payment solution seems awfully easy to use, with Apple also focusing on shopping privacy and financial security in addition to stupid-simple functionality. Before you embark on your next Apple Pay wireless shopping spree though, make sure you know everything there is to know about this new Apple product.
The Microsoft-Google enmity is one of the very interesting rivalries in the tech world, and the Windows maker has just taken another hit at its archenemy. The Verge has learned that Microsoft has purposely removed the option for Nokia Lumia owners to select Google Search as their default smartphone engine on newly launched devices, including the Lumia 630 and Lumia 930. Interestingly though, some European versions of the handsets do let users select Google Search as the default search engine for online queries, and Microsoft has not commented on the matter.
Even though some say the Nexus line of devices is approaching the end of the road, Google has recently confirmed that it doesn’t plan to kill the family of devices which it uses to highlight its vision of what Android should look and feel like on smartphones and tablets. Some reports have already mentioned a high-end HTC-made Nexus 9 tablet is coming later this year, with one particular story offering plenty of details about the tablet that’s supposed to launch alongside the final Android L build this fall.
However, it’s not clear what the name of Google’s 2014 tablet will be. And now a Nexus 8 tablet, which was also mentioned in previous months, was spotted in a shipping manifest on Indian cargo tracking site Zauba.
Late summer and early fall this year are going to be huge for Apple. After months without any new products, the company is expected to launch a flurry of new devices beginning with two completely redesigned iPhone 6 models, one with a 4.7-inch display and one with an even bigger 5.5-inch screen. Also expected are a new 12-inch Retina MacBook Air, a new Apple TV, an iWatch, a refreshed iPad mini and a sixth-generation full-size iPad, currently referred to as the "iPad Air 2."
Now, a mockup believed to be an accurate representation of Apple's next-gen iPad Air has been shown on video and compared to the current iPad Air model.
Microsoft had an incredible showing at E3 2014, packing its press conference from start to finish with an exciting lineup of games for the Xbox One, but that doesn't mean the company is going to take any time off now that the show is over. Major Nelson took to the Xbox Wire late last week to share the first details of the July update for the Xbox One, an update which will expand upon the console's unique Snap functionality and bring one of Facebook's most popular actions to the Xbox One.
Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages, combined with decades of experience building Apple platforms. Named parameters brought forward from Objective-C are expressed in a clean syntax that makes APIs in Swift even easier to read and maintain. Inferred types make code cleaner and less prone to mistakes, while modules eliminate headers and provide namespaces. Memory is managed automatically, and you don’t even need to type semi-colons.
Leverage the full power of iCloud and build apps with the new CloudKit framework. Now you can easily and securely store and efficiently retrieve your app data like structured data in a database or assets right from iCloud. CloudKit also enables your users to anonymously sign in to your apps with their iCloud Apple IDs without sharing their personal information.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are powerful, exciting machines, but in many ways, they aren't much more than the latest iterations on a very familiar concept. These consoles still take the shape of large, black boxes and they still play games that come on discs, which is why the rumored gaming machines from Google and Amazon are even more exciting.
Assassin's Creed, one of the biggest multiplatform video game properties, is reportedly double dipping on the release schedule this fall, making separates appearances on the recently released Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as well as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Just because a device isn't a hot seller doesn't mean it's not worth your time. As we observed with the BlackBerry Z30's impressive capabilities as a messaging device, sometimes a mobile device simply does certain things better than the iPhone or Samsung's Galaxy devices even if it has no hope of ever matching them in terms of sales.
Here’s the video from our awesome event with HTC last week