Year

A rather interesting report was shared by Allstate Protection Plans. The company says that a ton of Americans damaged their smartphones in the last year (both Android & iOS), 78 million of them, to be exact. This survey was conducted in May and December 2023, and it gathered 1,004 responses. Just to be fully transparent. A lot of Americans damaged their smartphones in the last year While this number is quite high, it’s lower than in 2020. Back then, 87 million Americans damaged their smartphones. Since then, however,…

LPDDR6 RAM (Low Power Double Data Rate 6 Random Access Memory) — the next iteration of RAM could make an appearance later this year. It is expected to be announced in the third quarter of this year and could be used on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset. The LPDDR6 memory that will be replacing the existing LPDDR5 memory is expected to offer improved data transfer speeds and increased bandwidth compared to its predecessor. Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S25 series is said to come with LPDDR6 memory and…

Ubisoft Nvidia revealed in a blog post that Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws will be on GeForce Now and use some of its proprietary technology when it launches sometime this year. Specifically, Star Wars Outlaws will support DLSS 3 and RTX Direct Illumination to improve the game’s visuals with ray traced global illumination lighting and effects. The announcement of these visual enhancements for PC and GeForce Now players is the first official update we’ve gotten on Star Wars Outlaws in a while. Ubisoft unveiled the game…

Volkswagen delivered some 9.2 million cars to customers in 2023. German auto giant Volkswagen on Wednesday reported a forecast-beating rise in profits for 2023, boosted by higher vehicle deliveries, but gave a cautious outlook for this year.…

I'm a big fan of compact smartphones with powerful internals and cameras. However, it's very rare to see such phones these days. Cue the Samsung Galaxy S24, which keeps the tradition alive among other similarly sized phones such as the iPhone 15 and the Google Pixel 8. My first tryst with a compact smartphone was when I purchased the Sony Xperia Z Compact, and what a wonderful phone that was. The Galaxy S24 offers the same chipset and rear camera setup as the Galaxy S24+ but comes in a smaller package that can be used…

Ben Mullinkosson is a film-maker and skateboarder from Chicago who brings an effortless, freewheeling intimacy to this immersive and sensual study of the underground club scene in Chengdu in central China. The title is enigmatic, but it seems to refer to the imminent closure of a club called Funky Town where his subjects have been hanging out; the darkness is the club’s darkness, which is enfolding and welcoming and reassuring, a neon-detailed night in which nothing matters but youth, beauty and the pleasure of the…

Michael Ondaatje has always been a poet – it is how he began his career 50 years ago – although he is more famous as a novelist and especially for his 1992 Booker prize-winning The English Patient (which also won the Golden Man Booker in 2018). In A Year of Last Things, he is writing about last – and lost – things. He is not interested in the known quantity, has always been more at home with the unknown, and is extraordinarily attuned to hauntings, to the idea that missing pieces are likely to inform whatever remains. The…

Hearthstone is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, and the weeks-long birthday blowout is well underway. The celebration includes free giveaways of special "gift spell" cards for each class, a new Harth Stonebrew card as a login card that grants iconic hands from Hearthstone history, and an upcoming nostalgia-tinged expansion that brings a new twist on some fan favorite cards and mechanics. GameSpot spoke with senior game designer Cora Georgiou and executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith about how…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeAs the 2024 Oscars ceremony concluded, viewers were adamant that they knew who should host the next Academy Awards.The 96th annual Academy Awards took place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday (10 March) and was presented by comedian and late night host Jimmy Kimmel, marking his fourth consecutive stint as host.The presenter had a number of awkward moments, including…

If your AirPods are looking old and out of date or you’ve just flushed yours down the toilet like my partner did, 2024 may be the year you get that replacement. As reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, “2024 is going to be a massive year for Apple’s smallest product”. In the Q&A for his latest newsletter, he says that there will be a “low-end and mid-tier” version of the AirPods launching this year to replace the second and third-generation AirPods respectively. We aren’t sure exactly what this means just yet but,…