Month: February 2018

Enlarge / The LG Watch Sport. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Ars Technica would like to wish a very special second birthday to the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC. While most flagship SoCs have a life cycle of about one year on the top of the market, over the weekend the Wear 2100 will celebrate two years as the least awful smartwatch SoC you can use in an Android Wear device. It's positively ancient at this point.

Seriously though, Qualcomm has seemingly abandoned the smartwatch market. The Wear 2100 SoC was announced in February 2016, Qualcomm skipped out on an upgrade for February 2017, and it doesn't seem like we're getting a new smartwatch chip any time soon.

In a healthy SoC market, this would be fine. Qualcomm would ignore the smartwatch SoC market, make very little money, and all the Android Wear OEMs would buy their SoCs from a chip vendor that was addressing smartwatch demand with a quality chip. The problem is, the SoC market isn't healthy at all. Qualcomm has a monopoly on smartwatch chips and doesn't seem interested in making any smartwatch chips. For companies like Google, LG, Huawei, Motorola, and Asus, it is absolutely crippling. There are literally zero other options in a reasonable price range (although we'd like to give a shoutout to the $1,600 Intel Atom-equipped Tag Heuer Connected Modular 45), so companies either keep shipping two-year-old Qualcomm chips or stop building smartwatches.

Enlarge / They know... (credit: Aurich / Getty)

Cheating in online games is an ever-present problem that infects the likes of shooters, MMOs, and open-world crime simulators—and just about everything else. Now a rising tide of cheaters seems poised to threaten mobile general knowledge tester HQ Trivia as it continues to explode in popularity.

The daily trivia game attracts millions of players to battle for real money 12 times a week by answering 12 multiple-choice questions sent via live video stream. In recent days, though, the app makers have been locked in their own battle with sites like HQuack. These bot sites use optical character recognition and Google to try to figure out the answers to the game's questions and feed them to players before the game's ten-second timer is up.

Bots like these are still imperfect—HQuack advertises only "up to 82 percent accuracy," which is often not enough in a game where a single wrong answer leads to elimination. But if and when they work, they have the potential to ruin a game that's becoming a bona-fide phenomenon.

Enlarge / Autodesk VRED Design 2017. (credit: Waymo)

In a stunning turn, Waymo and Uber have settled their trade secrets lawsuit on the fifth day of the trial.

Ars has learned that Uber has agreed to pay out 0.34 percent of Uber's equity, with a $72 billion valuation, resulting in a payout of over $244 million.

In a statement, Waymo said, “We have reached an agreement with Uber that we believe will protect Waymo’s intellectual property now and into the future. We are committed to working with Uber to make sure that each company develops its own technology. This includes an agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software. We have always believed competition should be fueled by innovation in the labs and on the roads and we look forward to bringing fully self-driving cars to the world.”

Enlarge / McLaren testing in Barcelona in the run up to the 2017 F1 season. The test did not go well... (credit: Sam Bloxham/LAT Images)

Amazon Prime has returned to things four-wheeled with its latest original production. It's not another Jeremy Clarkson spinoff, though; it's a rare look at the inner workings of a Formula 1 team. Grand Prix Driver is a four-part documentary—available from today—that gives the viewer an access-all-pass into the workings off the McLaren team as it gets ready for the 2017 Formula 1 season.

Access to teams in this highly competitive and highly secretive sport is unusual, particularly a team as image-conscious as McLaren. So it's a little surprising just how much we get to see, as what's meant to be a turnaround season instead plumbs new depths of despair for the organization.

It's a simple concept: camera crews wander about the breathtaking McLaren Technology Center, the white-and-gray technopalace from which the cars are birthed. They film in meeting rooms, workshop bays, and at the test track, as the 2017 car comes together and the team's two drivers—superstar Fernando Alonso and rookie Stoffel Vandoorne—in the run-up to the first race of the year. But the cameras are visiting MTC at an eventful time.