Month: November 2017

Enlarge (credit: Flickr / Dazzied)

On the PC, games distributed on discs in physical boxes have been a practical market rounding error for years now. Destiny 2's sales distribution highlights how the console game market may finally (and inexorably) be heading toward that point as well.

In an earnings call this week, Activision revealed that more than 50 percent of Destiny 2's sales on consoles came via download rather than on a retail disc. That's "a new highwater mark" for the company, and it's way higher than the "20 to 25 percent" of Call of Duty's console sales usually represented by digital copies, according to Activision (though Call of Duty World War II is seeing "higher digital preorders... relative to any prior Call of Duty title.") Even for online-focused games like the Overwatch and the original Destiny, only 30 to 40 percent of console sales usually come from downloads, the company said.

More importantly, Activision doesn't see Destiny 2's digital console majority as an outlier. As Activision CFO Spencer Neumann said in the earnings call, "historically, we've been seeing that digital mix increase at about five points a year." With Destiny 2's console digital majority, Neumann says, "we believe we're seeing some acceleration in that digital shift."

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

With the launch of every new iPhone comes an accompanying teardown from iFixit uncovering exactly what’s inside of Apple’s latest device. The iPhone X is no exception, as the popular gadget repair site pried open the much-anticipated handset shortly after it went on sale on Friday.

The teardown reveals a phone that has been overhauled on the inside nearly as much as it has on the outside. The most immediately noticeable quirk is how Apple has laid out the iPhone X’s batteries, which continue to dominate how the rest of the internals are constructed. Namely, the company has planted two cells into the device—a first for any iPhone—in an “L-shaped” configuration.

As iFixit notes, though, Apple seems to have doubled up in order to be flexible with how it could allocate space for the rest of the device’s components, not to explicitly beef up the iPhone X’s overall battery power. The battery capacity here is 2,716mAh, which is slightly larger than the 2,691mAh unit in the iPhone 8 Plus despite the former being about a half-inch shorter. Still, the X’s 5.8-inch display appears to have taken its toll on overall battery life—our iPhone X review found the device to fall well short of the 8 Plus in terms of longevity, albeit it's still decent on the whole.

HP Elite x3 (credit: HP)

Early in 2016, HP announced the Elite X3, a high-end Windows 10 Mobile phone that was, well, actually really nice. A then-current Snapdragon 820, 4GB RAM, dual SIM, 6 inch 2560×1400 AMOLED screen, iris and fingerprint recognition, Qi and PMA wireless charging, waterproof, 16MP rear and 8MP front cameras: it was the kind of thing flagships are made of.

HP was aiming the phone at corporate customers, but there was a sticking point; it didn't support CDMA, which meant it wasn't compatible with Verizon's legacy 3G network (though LTE service areas would have been fine). With Verizon having an estimated 50 percent of the corporate phone market, this was a big problem. While Windows Phone 8 had CDMA support, its successor, Windows 10 Mobile, did not—part of the fallout of the Nokia layoffs. This meant that even though phones like the X3 and Lumia 950 and 950 XL had the right radio hardware in their Qualcomm processors to work on Verizon's network, they were in practice restricted to T-Mobile and AT&T, the US's GSM carriers.

But even though Microsoft is no longer developing new features for Windows 10 Mobile, it turns out that for whatever reason, someone at Redmond has been busying themselves with writing CDMA support. And lo, it's actually shipped: the Microsoft Store now has a Verizon version of the x3.

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Comcast could lose a significant amount of revenue in cities that build their own municipal broadband networks, a new analysis suggests.

Comcast and trade groups that Comcast belongs to made some well-placed political donations as elections next week in Seattle, Washington, and Fort Collins, Colorado, could determine whether the cities pursue municipal broadband projects. With that in mind, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Networks Initiative analyzed how much revenue Comcast stands to lose if both cities build their own broadband networks.

"Evidence from other cities suggests that a real choice in broadband services could reduce Comcast's revenues by millions of dollars per month," the group, which advocates for municipal broadband projects, wrote in a policy brief. "Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year. In Seattle, robust competition would cost between $20 million and $84 million per year."

Enlarge / I'm in ur tower, nommin ur Internets (credit: Tim Graham/Getty Images)

Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), the effort to bring high-speed Internet to the masses down under, has encountered many speed bumps. The plan to bring fiber-optic broadband Internet to every Australian has been pared back in its ambitions, with a shift to a fiber backbone between "nodes" and distribution over copper wire or cable networks to the majority of users. That cost-saving move, which puts ISPs and cable providers in charge of managing customers' access, has caused some consternation. But now the operators of the NBN have discovered another problem that affects the cost of delivering the backbone. And it's for the birds.

The BBC reports that NBN technicians have discovered cockatoos have been damaging the ends of spare fiber cables left in place on communications towers for future network expansion by chomping on them, wearing through the steel braiding that protects the fiber. Active cables haven't been affected, so there has been no loss of service (as of yet) due to cockatoo attacks; the ends of cables carrying active traffic are protected by a plastic cages. But cables left with their ends exposed have become a favorite of the birds, who use them to help wear down their ever-growing beaks. And the cables cost AUS$10,000 (about US$7,700) to replace.

NBN's Chedryian Bresland told the BBC, "That's Australia for you. If the spiders and snakes don't get you, the cockies will."