Hardware

Google’s Pixel Watch delivers nice hardware, but fails to answer the ‘why’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Google, Google Fall Event 2022, Hardware, pixel watch, wear osNo Comments

It took some evasive maneuvering to get us here — the building out of a small-scale hardware ecosystem, coupled with a couple big-ticket acquisitions and a partnership with one of its largest potential competitors. But suddenly, Google emerging as competitive in the smartwatch space doesn’t seem an altogether outlandish proposition. One can make a compelling argument that the software giant learned some hard lessons from past smartwatch and earbud struggles. Entering an already mature hardware category isn’t easy for anyone; spending in excess of $2 billion is a pretty good shortcut if your pockets are deep enough. While devices are reasonably far along in this world, things aren’t that cut and dry. For one thing, Google’s partnership with Samsung meant an overnight increase in Wear OS market share. Both companies were staring at Apple’s first place lead from a distance, so why not join forces? At the very least, it’s been a swift kick in the pants for a wearable operating system that has languished for the better part of a decade. Image Credits: Brian Heater Even more central to the deal are a pair of big purchases. The $2.1 billion Fitbit deal was obviously the highest-profile move there — and understandably so. It’s not every day a household name gets acquired. Like the Samsung move, that deal immediately buys Google more market share, and from the looks of things, it will work out similarly to the Apple/Beats deal: Google gets immediately built-in sales and keeps the brand name around, as it uses Fitbit’s software as a foundation for its first-party play. The bit that gets lost in a lot of this is the company’s 2019 purchase of $40 million in Fossil IP. The deal mostly revolved around an unseen prototype that may well have served as the architecture for the new Pixel Watch hardware. Certainly the product looks like nothing Fitbit has ever given us before. It’s worth noting that Google didn’t just buy Fitbit and a piece of Fossil. There’s a sense in which it acquired the many companies they themselves acquired. It’s difficult to point to, but there are likely pieces of OG wearable Pebble, Vector, Twine and Coin (Fitbit), along with Misfit (Fossil) living in this small device currently sitting on my wrist. Add in the company’s work with Samsung, and you’ve got a kind of secret history of the smartwatch universe sitting in front of you. Image Credits: Brian Heater That’s an incredible cocktail of smartwatch DNA. Is it enough to catapult the Pixel Watch to the top of the rankings? Well, no. Obviously not. But it’s enough to compete. Apple remains the insurmountable mountain for the moment — and let’s be honest, the company effectively sits alone in the world of iPhone compatibility. Google’s competition sits much closer to home. Specifically, the company is up against Samsung, Fitbit and a number of companies like Xiaomi, which are duking it out for the lower end of the market. Garmin, meanwhile, is off in its own outdoor world with little competition outside the likes of the Apple Watch Ultra. So, really, that leaves Samsung as the Pixel Watch’s one immediate competitor. The Galaxy Watch has maintained the No. 2 spot for some time, so that’s still some stiff competition. Image Credits: Brian Heater The Pixel Watch is a looker. I really dig the design here. It’s about as minimal as one can get — a big change from the Apple Watch Ultra I’d been wearing previously. It’s a watch distilled down to its essence — glossy curved glass, with a haptic crown on the side. It’s also quite small. The case is 41mm, the smaller of the two standard Apple Watch models. The display is even smaller, at 1.2 inches, to the 41mm Series 8’s 1.53 inches. We’re very much dealing with screen sizes where a fraction of an inch can make a world of difference. Google’s device isn’t helped much by some sizable bezels on the sides. You mostly won’t notice them, due to all of the watch faces being black. With a lighter-colored face, the space would be much more noticeable. Ultimately what that means, however, is that there’s less surface area for a touch display. When it comes to wearables, I’ve long been of the opinion that the more size options, the better. Human bodies are like that, you know? Given the option, however, I’d say smaller is ultimately better. It’s a lot easier to wear a watch case that’s too small, instead of one that’s too large. The 41mm case felt and looked small on my wrist, but the screen size is enough for most things, assuming you’re not planning to do a lot of typing. Still, I would be shocked if the Pixel Watch 2 doesn’t arrive in at least two sizes next year. Image Credits: Brian Heater The bands snap on and off with a press of a button and a slide. It’s a little tricky the first time, so much so the company guides you through taking it on and off during setup. The connector is proprietary, and at present only Google makes compatible bands. There’s a decent selection of both materials and price points, and the company has plans to open it up to third parties. The Pixel Watch launches with an always-on display, though it was off by default. When enabled, it effectively presents a lower res and slightly dimmed version of your watch face. The battery was a bit disappointing in my trials, so you may want to keep it off, depending on how long you’re looking to eke out. With it on, getting to a full 24 hours can be tricky. So if you’re planning to do some sleep tracking, maybe budget in some quick charging time. One thing Google managed to avoid by way of its late entry was the years’ long search for meaning among smartwatch makers. Notifications were pitched as the thing in those early days. Eventually, however, health tracking became

Samsung and Google partner to speed up Matter-enable smart home setups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Google, Hardware, IoT, matter, Samsung, smart homeNo Comments

Samsung and Google announced a new partnership today that will allow easier setup for Matter-enabled devices on both Samsung SmartThings and Google Home systems. At the Samsung Developer Conference held in San Fransisco, the Korean tech giant said that it will update its SmartThings app in the coming months so that users can onboard Matter-enabled devices even if they are set up in Google’s ecosystem and vice versa. For the uninitiated, Matter is an Internet of Things standard that’s being developed by companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung to ensure smart home devices from different companies work across ecosystems. Last week the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the consortium behind Matter, officially approved the first set of specifications so developers can apply for certification for their solutions. Samsung said it’s using Matter’s multi-admin capabilities to make compatible devices easy to find and control across different apps. Once the company updates the SmartThings apps, users can see Matter-enabled devices that were set up under Google’s ecosystem and then import them into Samsung’s ecosystem and vice versa. This way, users will be able to control these devices from either the Samsung SmartThings app or the Google Home app. “As the largest Android developer, Samsung values its strong partnership with Google. Providing users with greater flexibility through this new multi-admin feature is a natural progression in our evolution as partners, allowing us to better support our massive existing and potential user base with both Samsung and Google products,” Jaeyeon Jung, Corporate VP and Head of SmartThings at Samsung said in a statement.

Refinements are perfectly fine • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Google, Google Fall Event 2022, Hardware, PIXEL, pixel 7, Pixel 7 ProNo Comments

Following last week’s Google event, a colleague commented to me that the Pixel 7 wasn’t as big an upgrade as the Pixel 6. This is an objectively true statement. But also, it’s fine. Whatever you think about the yearly refresh cycle hardware makers are locked into, we’ve all come to accept that some upgrades are going to be more incremental than others. In fact, most years are going to be iterative. That’s how this works. The contrast is strong here, because last year was anything but. The Pixel 6 was Google’s breakout phone. Last year was the year Google finally answered the “why,” marrying excellent hardware and software with an affordable price point. It’s a question the Pixel Watch may spend another generation or two addressing. But last year the Pixel smartphone line broke out of the cycle, and all it took was a massive restructuring of Google’s hardware division. The Pixel 6 changed the conversation around Google’s smartphone efforts. The Pixel 7 is, by and large, an iteration on last year’s model. And that’s totally fine. In 2021, the company worked to catch up with the rest of the flagship market, and now it’s about keeping that pace. The truth about the way the category is structured currently is that it seems likely that any one will change the conversation completely. Image Credits: Brian Heater So many of these devices revolve around same or similar components powering the same operating system. At present, Google’s biggest differentiator is software. The Pixel may have been developed as a method for showcasing new Android features, but these days, those features are precisely what distinguishes the product from the pack. The other big (and related tentpole) are the company’s advances in machine learning. Those are present in a number of spots, but most primarily imaging, where this thing really shines. I opted to review the 7 Pro instead of the 7 this time out because we’re finally getting some nice fall weather here and I really wanted to take some good photos. Is that selfish? I mean, yeah, for sure, but photography is the battlefield on which the smartphone wars are currently waged. There’s a third potential plank for some differentiation: processing. Like Apple, Google has broken out of the Qualcomm mold that powers a majority of flagships these days, instead opting to build its own chips in-house. Unfortunately, there’s really not a big leap from original Tensor chip to the G2 — certainly nothing worth dwelling on here. The benchmarks do get a small uptick, but for day-to-day use, it seems unlikely you’ll notice much there. Image Credits: Brian Heater The hardware is refined over last year’s model. It’s a nice looking phone (the camera bar has proven somewhat polarizing, but I like it). It’s slim, slick and shiny, and the phone doesn’t feel as outsized as its 6.7-inch screen (though single-handed use is largely a no-go for me). The 1,000 nit display is nice and bright, and the 1440 x 3120 512 ppi resolution looks great coupled with the smooth 120Hz refresh rate. Like the new Pixel Watch, it’s got an always-on option, though again, that’s going to have an impact on battery life. Also like the Pixel Watch, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the on-board battery. Rated at 5,000 mAh (a slight downgrade from the 6 Pro’s 5,003), I’m looking at around 25% capacity nine hours in. Once again, imaging is where this thing really shines. One of the earliest hard-learned lessons for the line is that computational photography alone isn’t enough. Google felt it had something to prove in those early days, with a single camera sensor, but it ultimately came up short. Computational photography, coupled with good camera hardware, on the other hand, is a force to be reckoned with. The standard 7 sports a 50-megapixel wide camera and 12-megapixel ultrawide, while the Pro adds a 48-megapixel telephoto into the camera bar. I’m not permanently packing up my SLR any time soon, but as far as a frictionless, out of the box experience goes, it’s tough to beat the Pixel 7 Pro. Generations of camera software updates have made taking a good photo dead simple, and recent upgrades have brought dramatic improvements to things like zoom. [Insert: Full zoom]The phone will only get you up to 5x with optical zoom, but it does an impressive job beyond that, all things considered. When you really push things to 20-30x, you’re going to see clear noise on the image, but the result is still impressive, particularly when shooting in direct sunlight. Image stabilization also does a good job minimizing some of the unavoidable handshaking that comes with telephoto shots. Light also makes a world of difference for macro shots. Holding the camera around one to two inches from a subject will surface the setting automatically. There’s no specific macro lens built in (as we’ve seen on a smattering of other models). Instead, the feature relies on the ultrawide, and the results are impressive, nonetheless. Coupled with upgrades to features like Real Tone for more authentic skin tones and Night Sight and you’ve got an extremely well-rounded and impressive little camera in your pocket. Image Credits: Brian Heater The biggest exclusive (for now, at least) software updates arrive on the Speech side of things. These have long been top of the list of Pixel standout features, so it’s no surprise to see that they’re still a focus this time around. Voice Recorder adds Canadian English, American Spanish and Hindi English to a list that also includes German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. Google’s longstanding quest to make automated phone menus less annoying continues in earnest with the addition of pressable menu options that populate even before the robot voice speaks them. Much like the phone itself nothing there is a true breakthrough, so much as a refinement on an already good thing. With a starting price of $599 for the 7 and $899 for the 7 Pro, Google is more

Microsoft refreshes the Surface Laptop, Pro and Studio • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Hardware, Microsoft, microsoft surface, Surface, surface laptop, surface pro, surface studioNo Comments

Microsoft introduced a deluge of upgraded Surface products during a virtual keynote this morning. Detailed in a blog post penned by Chief Product Officer, Panos Panay, the Laptop 5 gets top billing here. The devoted touchscreen notebook arrives in 13.5- and 15-inch models, powered by Intel Evo, which the company claims will make it “50% more powerful than their predecessor.” Image Credits: Microsoft The 13-inch model arrives with a 12th Gen Core i5, upgradable to i7, while the larger version is available with the latter. This time out, AMD won’t be available for the system. Both models do, however, not have Thunderbolt 4 support built in. The 13- and 15-inch models start at $1,000 and $1,300, respectively. Not a huge update this time out, unfortunately. The company devotes more words to the Surface Pro 9, which is available in both Intel and Arm flavors. The convertible, which celebrates a decade of life this year, has a 13-inch touchscreen, with support for Vision IQ (Intel only, apparently), Dolby’s feature that adjust display settings based on ambient light. That system also starts at $1,000 for the Intel model and $1,300 for the Arm. The Laptop and Pro arrive October 25. Lastly, but certainly not leastly is the Surface Studio 2+. As the name suggests, it’s less of a full upgrade to the convertible all-in-one, but instead something more akin to a souped-up version of its predecessor. The design remains the same, with a 28-inch touchscreen display that’s adjustable via the Gravity Hinge. When lowered, artists can interact with it more along the lines of a Wacom Cintiq drawing tablet. Says Panay. we’ve rearchitected our Surface Studio processing engine utilizing an updated Intel Core H-35 processor, with up to 50% faster CPU performance. We’ve designed NVIDIA Ge Force RTX 3060 discrete graphics to double the graphics performance, achieving the most realistic ray-traced graphics when you craft 3D design or render models. We’ve enhanced and modernized the display, cameras, Studio Mics, and ports –including USB-C with Thunderbolt 4. With Windows 11, Surface Studio 2+also meets Secured-core PC standards. Image Credits: Microsoft Powered by the Intel Core u7, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, the Studio runs $4,300. The company will toss in a mouse, keyboard and stylus for another $200.

MicroLED tech could soon be improving AR/VR headsets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Display technology, Hardware, StartupsNo Comments

Small displays like smartwatches and AR/VR applications are about to get a lot better, at least if Porotech has anything to do with it. Whereas regular LED displays have their red, green, and blue pixels side-by-side, in separate pixels, Porotech’s DynamicPixelTuning (DPT) tech promises to make every pixel capable of outputting all colors. The theory is that this gives displays four times the resolution in the same package; great in situations where the screens are very close to the human eye, such as in the head-mounted displays used for AR/VR. The image at the top of this story shows the difference; on the left, how Porotech’s microLEDs would render the top of an ‘O’ character on a display. On the right, is how a traditional display has to render a white arc. In theory, at least, the difference means much crisper visuals. The company says it is using a new class of Gallium Nitride materials, which enables its chips to produce any color visible to the human eyes. It explains that the DPT tech uses a modulated current to emit visible light covering the entire color spectrum on a single microLED chip, including pure white, which traditionally has been created by blasting the same amount of red, green and blue at your eye-holes all at once. “Mass-produced microLEDs will be pivotal for the future of displays, particularly the emerging AR and VR spaces. Our technology has solved a fundamental technical and engineering problem facing microLED display quality, manufacturability, and—most importantly—system integration,” says Porotech’s CEO and Co-Founder Dr Tongtong Zhu. “This doesn’t just herald widespread adoption of consumer-grade MR, VR, and AR. In fact, DPT also offers radical improvements in TV, signage, and smart wearables in both consumer and professional contexts. By allowing pixels to move beyond RGB and quadrupling the resolution of any given display, DPT is set to unlock new uses for displays in every segment of society.” The company shared a video of a prototype of the technology in action, although why it chose to do so is a little beyond me, because showing off how microLED technology works would probably be best done in person. Anyway; may the below further slake your curiosity: The company will be showing off the technology to the public for the first time at CES next year, so we’re planning to go take a look with our own eyes then.

Dedrone’s counter-drone jammer uses science to stop drones in their tracks • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Dedrone, drones, Hardware, military, SecurityNo Comments

Drones are lovely for all sorts of things, including shooting incredible 700-shot gigapixel images over Burning Man, for example. But they can also be used for nefarious purposes, carrying explosives or scaring the bejesus out of the Secret Service as they are trying to protect the prez. Dedrone has had a series of antidrone tools with more than 700 solutions already in the hands of military forces around the world. Today, the company announced it’s adding a handheld system that can jam radio frequencies, effectively preventing drone pilots from controlling their own drones. Once the connection is severed, what happens next depends on the drone, and how it is programmed to behave after it loses contact with its pilot. Some will just set down wherever they are, others will try to navigate back to the take-off location. It is unclear what would happen if a drone operates autonomously with a programmed path, or potentially some sort of self-flying algorithm taking it toward its target. The new DedroneDefender is aimed at civilian, state and local law enforcement in urban environments. Weighing in at 7.5 pounds and 22 inches long, it uses narrow-band (or “comb”) jamming to ensure as little interference with other devices as possible. Once communications are interrupted on a drone, the tool enters a preprogrammed safety mode to minimize risk to others and damage to the drone, the company claims. “DroneDefender is a valuable resource for extreme hostile environments, as proven by our federal and military customers,” said Aaditya Devarakonda, CEO of Dedrone. “DedroneDefender extends that security to law enforcement and is a vital tool in a layered defense approach. It is easy to implement and use for drone mitigation, especially when combined with the threat prioritization provided by DedroneTracker. Our solution library is continuously updated to ensure both DroneDefender and DedroneDefender are able to mitigate even the newest manufactured and DIY drones.” You won’t be able to buy them yourself, though. For one thing, US law prohibits disabling of aircraft; DoD or Homeland Security may be authorized to disable a drone they identify as a terrorist threat (let’s say at the Super Bowl) but local police or stadium security cannot legally bring the drone down under current law. Unless you have very deep pockets and some pretty special authorizations, you’re out of luck. DedroneDefender price range is in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Apple and Google to soon release 5G support software updates in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in 5g, Apple, Google, Hardware, indiaNo Comments

Apple and Google said Wednesday they will roll out software updates to enable 5G support on their respective handsets in India, the world’s second largest wireless market, just days after local bureaucrats began pushing the phonemakers to expedite their efforts. Reliance Jio and Airtel, India’s two largest carriers, have started to offer 5G services in select Indian cities in recent weeks, but many popular handsets in the nation currently don’t support the local airwaves. These smartphones have hardware capabilities for 5G, but manufacturers need to work with local network carriers to release software updates to enable support for local airwaves. To that end, Apple today said that it will issue a software update in December to enable 5G on iPhones used in India. Apple first introduced 5G capabilities with the iPhone 12 in 2020. “We are working with our carrier partners in India to bring the best 5G experience to iPhone users as soon as network validation and testing for quality and performance are completed. 5G will be enabled via a software update and will start rolling out to iPhone users in December,” an Apple spokesperson told ZebethMedia. Google has also promised a software update for its devices — though it hasn’t provided a specific timeframe for the rollout. “Pixel 7, 7 Pro, and Pixel 6a are 5G capable devices. We are actively working with the Indian carriers to enable functionality at the earliest,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. Google launched the Pixel 6a in India in July, and the Pixel 7 series will go on sale soon. In July, India sold the license to 5G airwaves in an auction for a record sum of $19 billion. Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Jio has purchased most of the spectrum and has committed to spending $25 billion alone in rolling out and broadening its 5G services. The South Asian nation, which is one of the last major markets to adopt 5G, has high hopes about its potentials. “5G is a knock on the doors of a new era in the country. It is the beginning of an infinite sky of opportunities,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at an event last month. Both Apple and Google’s devices hold a small percentage in terms of market share in the Indian smartphone market. While Apple commands just 4% of the local smartphone market, Google’s numbers are not available because of comparatively lower sales. According to analyst firm Counterpoint, the total install base of 5G-ready smartphones in India was 50 million in July. Samsung, India’s second largest smartphone vendor, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. According to a support page by carrier Bharti Airtel, some headsets from Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, and OnePlus already support its 5G services. Notably, Airtel has enabled its 5G services in eight cities and Reliance Jio has enabled them in four cities through an invite-only program. Both these network providers aim to expand the 5G coverage across the country in the coming few years. Airtel’s chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said that the company aims to cover all parts of its eight launch cities by March 2023 and the entire country by 2023. Reliance Jio’s goals are rather ambitious as it plans to roll out its 5G services across the country by 2023.

Meta’s vision for the future of VR is a worse version of the past • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Hardware, meta, Meta Connect 2022No Comments

Meta keeps saying VR is the future, but everything it shows us is an inferior rehash of the things we already have. Its event today was, between assurances that everything is great in the Metaverse, a collection of tacit admissions that the best they can hope to do is ape a reality we are all desperately trying to leave behind. The silliest example of this is the new capability to enter a Meta VR environment through an embed on a website. This was described as perhaps the first way many people will experience a virtual environment. It’s hard to know where to start with this notion. With the no doubt internally depressing acceptance that $1,000 VR hardware doesn’t scale well and most people can’t be bothered to try it? With the idea that a shared 3D environment is a new experience? Or that this is something that people actually want to do? Of course people have shared virtual environments for decades. When it’s viewed on a regular monitor, it’s no different than Second Life, or World of Warcraft, or any other of the popular games and platforms that have come and gone (and come again) over the years. The difference is those had a reason to exist: being a game you can progress and share hundreds of hours of unique experiences in, for instance. Meta’s environment is just that: an environment. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to join via this web interface unless they had no other option, like if the meeting was only being held in VR. But of course Meta has had trouble even getting its own employees to do that. Meanwhile most people in the world are waiting for VR to be worth the price of a gaming console or laptop. Today’s presentation didn’t really make much progress there. In fact there was an alarming and baffling reiteration of an idea that I thought we left behind a long time ago: a virtual desk. Image Credits: Meta This concept has been cursed for decades, since the most notable failure in the domain: the infamous Microsoft Bob. Meta has very unwisely recreated Bob, a virtual desktop, in ways that have no benefits whatsoever. You can have a worse experience reading emails, or a worse video call, or play games and watch movies on a worse screen. Notably there was very little showing what working at a virtual desk would actually look like, because most of the things people take for granted — effortless multitasking, quick switching between cursor and typing, easy compatibility with apps and websites — don’t exist in VR. Sure, they’re partnering with Microsoft and Accenture and so on, but even so, would Slack or Teams be better in VR, or worse? Like nearly everything, the answer is worse. Virtual meetings with everyone around a virtual office table sound like a nightmare to me. The most telling piece was the admission that the subtleties of human expression are important to communication — someone’s unique smile or posture, a moment of eye contact when the boss flubs a line in a presentation. Their solution is, like nearly everything Meta does, technically impressive and completely misguided. The new headset tracks facial expressions and gaze, meaning it can replicate these in a decent way in a virtual environment, on your new avatars with legs and everything. But it’s so plainly a poor recreation of the real thing, and video calls — for all the issues they have — are actually quite good at catching those little expressions and moments. VR meetings with the expression-tracking tech may be better than VR meetings without, but any VR meeting is still a huge pain in the ass that no one, including the faithful at Meta, would do regularly if they had a choice. Not only that, but working long term within VR doesn’t make sense in most ways, as Meta again admitted without explicitly saying so. The new Quest Pro headset actually has removable eye cups so you can see the real world in your periphery, in order to take some notes, grab your coffee, and so on. They literally cut holes in the headset so you could do normal things that ought to be possible with their much-vaunted mixed reality. Fortunately you won’t have to worry about that because the battery life is very limited. Even if your boss wanted you to be in virtual meetings all day, the headset would conk out before lunch. Isn’t the entire world trying to think past the idea of the office, of the meeting-filled workday, of the traditional form of work that’s essentially a relic of the postwar era? Why would anyone want to cling to these paradigms, unless they had no ideas about what actually comes next? It’s funny because VR is such a powerful technology, as anyone who has used it even once can attest. But Meta, its biggest proponent, doesn’t seem to know what to do with it beyond “what you already do, but worse.” So little of what it showed today suggested the future, and so much clawed at the past to find a crack into which to inject VR — hoping someone, somewhere might agree with them that appearing as a VR avatar in Zoom is something that makes sense. “Is it this? Is this the killer app for VR?” they seem to be asking. Needless to say it isn’t. And judging from the company’s inability to innovate at a large scale over the last years, it may not be capable of finding it.

Meta announces the $1,499 Quest Pro • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in HardwareNo Comments

At Meta Connect 2022, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s latest virtual reality headset, but after years of striving to bring down the cost-of-entry to the VR world, the newly announced Quest Pro appears to be all about pushing technical boundaries. The new device shares the Quest name, but has little in common with the more mass market-geared headset, which Meta will continue to sell, albeit at the $399 starting price which it recently announced. With a much higher price point of $1500, Meta is pitching the Quest Pro as a productivity device. The Quest Pro’s headline feature is full color passthrough, which uses four cameras on the outside of the device to capture and display the space outside of the headset to users wearing the device. A black-and-white version of this is available on the Quest 2. The feature will allow for “mixed reality” experiences which overlay digital content onto the user’s real world environment. These use cases are enabled by a lot of significant hardware changes. The new “pancake” lenses mean a significantly reduced size with a 40% thinner display stack compared with the Quest 2. The headset utilizes a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ chipset and 1800 × 1920 per-eye mini-LED displays. The headset comes with 12GB of RAM onboard and 256GB of storage. The Quest Pro integrates eye-tracking as well. The headset also boasts redesigned controllers which lose the large tracking rings and instead boast onboard camera which track the controllers relative to the headset. The battery life is the biggest question mark here, Meta claims the headset will only last for 1-2 hours, which is likely a tough sell for a “Pro”. The device goes up for pre-order today and will ship October 25.

Meta’s Quest Store hits $1.5 billion in total revenue to date • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Gaming, HardwareNo Comments

While outside research data suggests that the number of VR headsets being shipped over the past couple years has surged, the release of new VR titles hasn’t always kept pace. Today at its Connect event, Meta showcased some new data on the performance of the titles in its Quest Store. Meta shared that over $1.5 billion has been spent on games and apps in the Quest Store. The company notes that more than one-third of the company’s 400 Quest titles have grossed more than $1 million in sales, with 33 titles having surpassed $10 million in gross revenue. A couple bright spots that Meta noted among individual titles include The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners surpassing $50M in revenue on Quest and Resident Evil making $2 million in its first 24 hours in the store. These are all obviously cherrypicked metrics meant to showcase how VR is doing in the best possible light. Meta has had plenty of challenges on the content front this year as regulators have taken aim at their M&A efforts and venture investment in VR content has mostly dried up.