Month: November 2016

Eero

Eero—the mesh Wi-Fi router company that hit the market early last year—has announced a major update for its little white boxes. The company has come up with a new software wrinkle it calls "TrueMesh technology," which should boost the performance of its devices' mesh Wi-Fi networks. The company is also adding support for some handy Amazon Alexa voice commands.

TrueMesh is a redesign of Eero's mesh technology "from the ground up," to "understand and navigate a network’s topology in real-time." From the start, Eero has pitched itself as a "cloud-based" mesh router—"anonymized performance and diagnostic data" is collected from all Eero customers and used to make the performance of the system better. Now that the Eero has been on the market for almost two years, the company says it has compiled "the largest-ever consumer mesh network dataset" with "hundreds of millions of data points." With all this aggregate data Eero can tweak the router's settings and boost performance.

(credit: Bethesda Softworks)

PlayStation 4 owners will finally get the opportunity to try out player-created Fallout 4 mods on their console later this week, Bethesda has announced, ending a long-running feud between the publisher and console-maker Sony.

The announcement comes as something of a surprise, given a September blog post in which Bethesda squarely blamed Sony for the delayed promise of console mod support on the PlayStation 4. "Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition," the publisher wrote. "Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive."

Sony has now apparently stepped out of the way, though there is still one major limitation: Mods on the PS4 will be restricted to 1GB in file size. That's up from the 900MB imposed in an early beta but lower than the full 2GB that mod makers can use on the Xbox One.

Enlarge / On the left, Qualcomm Vice President for Product Management Keith Kressin. On the right, Samsung Senior Vice President for Foundry Marketing, Ben Suh. In their hands, the ever-so-tiny Snapdragon 835 processors. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's next flagship system-on-chip will be the Snapdragon 835, the company announced today, superseding the Snapdragon 821 and 820 found in today's hardware.

The company didn't say a lot about what makes the new chip tick, but it has confirmed a few details. It will be built on Samsung's 10nm 10LPE FinFET manufacturing process, in contrast to the 14nm process used on the 821. Samsung says that the 10nm process can enable some combination of up to a 30 percent reduction in die size, 27 percent more performance, or 40 percent lower power consumption. Qualcomm didn't offer performance or power comparisons between the 835 and 821, but we'd expect it to be somewhat faster and use somewhat less power.

The one feature that Qualcomm did confirm is the latest version of its Quick Charge technology. Until now, Quick Charge has been a proprietary tech that enables delivering high voltage and current over USB cables in order to charge the battery faster. To do this, it relied on non-standard signaling and non-standard use of the connections in a USB cable. This raised various incompatibility issues, so much so that Google strongly discouraged Quick Charge support in its latest Android Compatibility Definition Document.

Enlarge / The error message many early Pokémon pirates are receiving when they try to go online with their 3DS. (credit: 4chan)

Players that go online with early, pirated copies of Pokémon Sun & Moon on the Nintendo 3DS are reporting that their systems have been completely banned from accessing Nintendo's servers, including the system's online eShop.

Though the latest pair of portable Pokémon games doesn't officially come out until tomorrow, downloadable full versions started circulating around the Web earlier this month (playable via jailbreaking software mods stored on an SD card). In the last few days, many of the players who have used those early copies have taken to sites like GBATemp and 4chan to complain that their 3DS accounts have been banned after taking those early copies online. Early birds who played the titles strictly offline don't seem to be affected.

"As a result of a number of Nintendo 3DS users using unauthorized versions of several games, and connecting to the official game servers in violation of our terms of service, these users’ Nintendo 3DS systems that stored the unauthorized game code have been banned from Nintendo’s online network effective immediately," Nintendo said in a statement provided to the press.