Month: January 2021

Disney has released the official full trailer for its upcoming animated film, Raya and the Last Dragon, with Kelly Marie Tran and Awkwafina voicing the titular characters. It has the distinction of being the first Disney animated feature to be remotely developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, working with home equipment and mostly communicating via Zoom. The pandemic also caused the film's release date to be shifted multiple times. It's now slated for a March 5 release, both in theaters and on Disney+ with premier access.

Disney first announced the film during its 2019 D23 Expo and presented co-directors Don Hall (Big Hero 6, Moana) and Carlos Lopez Estrada (Frozen II, Blindspotting) at D23 the following year. The fictional fantasy land of Kumandra was inspired by several different Southeast Asian cultures—Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Laos, and the Philippines—and the production team traveled extensively to most of those countries to research the film. A Lao visual anthropologist also reviewed the final designs.

Per the official synopsis:

Enlarge (credit: Plex)

The streaming-hub app Plex has long endeared itself to a certain kind of media consumer—one who'd prefer to rip and stream their own purchased content from a home computer instead of relying on subscriptions. But while Plex has experimented with new features and media options over the past decade-plus, this week sees the service take its first-ever stab at interactive media. As in, games.

Plex Arcade is now live as a paid add-on service, and it promises to let you stream your existing, classic gaming library from a home PC to a variety of Plex-compatible devices. That means you can put your favorite classic game ROMs next to your music, TV, and film libraries, and you can beam those to compatible devices, either at home or afar. For some users, this is a dream scenario: centralize your classic games on one device, then access them everywhere, instead of having to manually set up each phone and set-top box with emulators and ROMs.

But Plex Arcade's first day is a bumpy one, and even if the service patches things up, it's a clear reminder why streaming classic games from a hub computer isn't nearly as handy as streaming other media.

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  The Sony Xperia Pro. Why is this $2,500? [credit: Sony ]

We've seen smartphones with stratospheric price tags before, but usually, something is special about them. Phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X are anywhere from $2,000-$2,600, but those were first-gen foldable smartphones with brand-new display technology. Sony's latest entry into the smartphone market, the Sony Xperia Pro, is a boring old slab phone that seems utterly forgettable until you look at the price: an astounding $2,500, or the price of three brand-new, $800 Samsung Galaxy S21s. Sony has really outdone itself.

Mostly the Xperia Pro seems a lot like the Xperia 1 II, Sony's already-overpriced $1,300 flagship smartphone from 2020. Both have 6.5-inch, almost-4K, 3840×1644, 60Hz OLED displays, the Snapdragon 865 SoC, three rear cameras, an IP65 rating, and a 4000mAh battery. This year's Xperia Pro gets a tier bump to 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, but that's only usually worth $100 extra. There's also mmWave 5G this year, two "app shortcut" buttons on the side, and a shutter button. Fancy.

None of that explains why this phone is at least $1,000 more than it should be. Sony's justification for the outrageous price is (drumroll please) an HDMI port. Yes, in addition to the USB-C port on the bottom, there is also a Micro HDMI port that can be used as a video input. Sony suggests either hooking the phone up to a Sony Alpha camera and using it as a live video monitor or pushing an external video source out to the internet for live streaming. Just this one feature and the camera-adjacentness is worth $1,000 extra by Sony's logic.

Enlarge / Starlink logo imposed on stylized image of the Earth. (credit: Starlink)

SpaceX has begun launching Starlink satellites with laser links that will help provide broadband coverage in polar regions. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday, these satellites "have laser links between the satellites, so no ground stations are needed over the poles."

The laser links are included in 10 Starlink satellites just launched into polar orbits. The launch came two weeks after SpaceX received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch the 10 satellites into polar orbits at an altitude of 560km.

"All sats launched next year will have laser links," Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday, indicating that the laser systems will become standard on Starlink satellites in 2022. For now, SpaceX is only including laser links on polar satellites. "Only our polar sats have lasers this year & are v0.9," Musk wrote.