Month: December 2015

The Galaxy S 1 through 6. (not to scale)

Samsung's mobile division is getting a new leader, as long-time division head JK Shin will be replaced by Koh Dong Jin.

Under Shin, the mobile division adopted Android and gained a dominating position in the mobile market, which culminated in five straight quarters of record profits ending in 2013. The ride ended in 2014, though, when the company saw huge drops in profits due to its inability to compete with low-cost Chinese vendors like Xiaomi and Huawei. Shin is also blamed for not producing enough handsets to meet demand for the curved-screen Galaxy S6 Edge, which proved more popular with consumers than Samsung expected.

As for the new guy, Koh Dong Jin, no one seems quite sure what direction the new mobile leader will pull the company in. One analyst tells Bloomberg that "the new leader will try to boost software power and foster new innovations." while another analyst tells Reuters, "There is no real change and Samsung appears to be continuing on the hardware-centric path."

Usually it's just PC players that get stiffed when it comes to launch day bugs—the disastrous Arkham Knight port being a prime example—but Just Cause 3 is reportedly causing problems on PC and console. Reports are coming in from multiple media outlets and Reddit users that JC3 is suffering from random frame rate drops, crashes, and disappearing oceans, to name just a few problems.

An early analysis of the the Xbox One version from NX Gamer claims that playing the game for more than hour leads to loading times of over 15 minutes, with the frame rate dropping to as low as 17FPS. NX Gamer also experienced multiple crashes—which is a particularly big problem for a console game—and other problems which could only be resolved by a full system reboot.

"This just looks like memory leakages where it's clearing out RAM," NX Gamer's video analysis says. "Some of the AI goes mad, the physics can react really oddly, and unfortunately on top of all these problems, the performance with a game that's totally designed around blowing stuff up and having this chaotic world doesn't perform very well at all."

(credit: Adam Melancon)

Even if 4K TVs were popular Black Friday and Cyber Monday steals, there continues to be a lack of 4K content to watch on them. DirecTV wants to provide a solution: the company's SVP of Video and Space Communications Phil Goswitz confirmed at New York's TranSPORT conference that DirecTV will launch a live 4K broadcasting service sometime in "early 2016."

At the conference, Goswitz explained that the company currently has the ability to transmit up to 50 new UHD channels, and live sports transmissions are already being tested as part of next year's rollout. DirecTV already has the hardware in place, and according to Goswitz, the company wants to get ahead of cable companies and provide viewers with 4K content they can't get from their cable companies. "I think the belief that there are technology challenges is a bit of a misinformed myth," he said. "I think technology throughout the entire ecosystem is ready. But I think content is king; the plane is ready to take off and there is no king on board."

Goswitz went on to say that DirecTV is "moving into working with partners" to create more 4K content. Currently Netflix and YouTube have some 4K video ready to stream, but most companies continue to focus on hardware. Roku and TiVo recently came out with updated set-top boxes ready for 4K streaming, but they still have to work with the finite amount of 4K content available.