The Verge - Editorials

Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4: the next console war pits living room against cloud

2013-05-21T21:17:57Z

We think of video game consoles as being principally about, well, the games. But when the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 went head-to-head in 2006, it wasn't games that truly determined the victor. What eventually drove the Xbox 360 to first place was the underlying vision — a place where your friends could connect, chat, and compete — as well as additions that no one saw coming, including Microsoft's Kinect and Netflix.

Based on what we now know about the next Xbox and PlayStation, we can expect a fairly similar scenario this time around. As far as games are concerned, the hardware sounds quite similar out of the box. Both consoles promise to track your motions, power on instantly, and seamlessly update themselves in the background, among many other common features.

Xbox and PlayStation fans could find themselves in very different places down the road

But if we look at that long-term vision, new Xbox and PlayStation fans could find themselves in very different places down the road. Microsoft wants its box to be the center of your living room in every way, while Sony is promising a future where you theoretically might not even need a powerful box in your home.

Here's 10 minutes in the life of a future PlayStation 4 owner, should Sony's vision pan out: press a button to instantly wake your console, sign into your account, and go channel surfing through a catalogue of games. Not browsing pictures and descriptions of games, mind you, but clicking through channel after TV channel filled with video footage, both live and pre-recorded, of your friends actually playing. When you hit upon a game you like, you press another button to start playing it instantly too: Sony promises to let you play games as they download, and stream others outright to the game console.

Then, say you need to get up and walk somewhere. With many games, you'll be able to take it right with you, continuing your progress on a PlayStation Vita handheld as you walk around the house, or more likely, continue to play (or at least watch others play) from an internet-connected tablet or smartphone wherever you go. While the box itself will be a requirement in the short term (while Sony figures streaming out) future PlayStations could theoretically just be any controller and screen connected to the cloud.

In Microsoft's vision, by contrast, that future Xbox owner will have a rather different experience. Microsoft wants its new Xbox One to erase the boundary between set-top box and TV, to become the one device in your living room. You'll simply say "Xbox On" to instantly turn on your entire immersive living room entertainment system. Just say "Xbox On" to fire up your living room The voice command will fire up the console, your receiver, and your TV simultaneously, and the new Kinect camera will recognize your body and face, automatically signing you into your profile and preparing you to consume several kinds of content at a moment's notice. Where you'll be channel surfing games on the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One will let you literally channel surf live TV, assuming the infrared holds up. You'll issue rapid-fire voice commands to switch between games, web, apps, and television, or use the multitasking chops of the underlying Windows 8 operating system to take a Skype voice call and play your game simultaneously. And when it is time to game, you won't have to swap discs: you'll have already stored them on the Xbox One's hard drive.

While the power of the cloud will also contribute to the games that Microsoft's envisioning, allowing you to play downloadable titles as they install, the future goal is rather that computational power gets piped into your console to make those games more immersive. After all, in Microsoft's visions, all roads lead to your living room hub. All information goes there. And should Microsoft's Illumiroom dreams come true, that might be a fantastic decision, because the Xbox One could use that information to turn your living room into the long-awaited holodeck.

Assuming that neither Sony nor Microsoft manage an outright coup with a better price, a better release date, or sufficiently compelling exclusive games, this is the choice you'll make: do you bet on the company who wants to let you take a traditional gaming experience anywhere you'd care to be, or the one that demands you stand still in exchange for increased immersion and functionality?

Live TV on the Xbox One: Microsoft learns nothing from Google TV's mistakes

2013-05-21T21:06:37Z

"For the first time, you and your TV will have a relationship."

That's how Microsoft began the introduction of its new Xbox One today — a presentation that focused less on games and more on the new console as a complete living room device. "The ultimate all-in-one entertainment system," said Microsoft's Don Mattrick. And since no ultimate entertainment system is complete without television, the event segued neatly into a demonstration of the new Xbox's Live TV feature. Just say the name of a channel and it'll switch; say the name of a show and the Xbox will find it. Jumping from TV to game to the built-in Internet Explorer browser is instant, we were told. Watching an NBA basketball game? Say "fantasy" and you'll see stats and highlights instantly appear.

The message was clear: the Xbox One features seamlessly integrated television. People on Twitter began asking me about built in tuners, how big the DVR was, and whether it would support antennas as well as cable. For one glorious moment, it looked like Microsoft had achieved the dream.

The Xbox One's TV integration is a familiar nightmare

The problem is that the demoes weren't real — the Xbox One's TV integration is the same familiar nightmare we've known for nearly 20 years now. Instead of actually integrating with your TV service, the One sits on top of it: you plug your cable box's HDMI cable into the Xbox, which overlays the signal with its own interface. If you're lucky enough to own a newer cable box, you'll get to change channels directly through the HDMI connection, but most people will find themselves using the One's included IR blaster to control their cable or satellite boxes — a failure-prone one-way communication system that stubbornly refuses to die.

Exactly the same way Google TV works

If this sounds familiar to you, it's because it's exactly the same way Google's flailing Google TV platform works. (Google TV even had an NBA demo when it launched in 2011.) If you're a little older it should be even more familiar: it's exactly how Microsoft's own doomed webTV platform worked. We've been overlaying fancy interfaces on top of cable signals and praying for IR blasters to adequately control the boxes for years now, and it's never worked — the content and information on your cable box is too valuable to relegate it to second place, and jumping back and forth between interfaces is irritating and stupid.

What's more, these systems only really work for live television, which you probably aren't watching. Want to watch a show recorded on your DVR? There's no way for the Xbox One to know about it, so you have to use the DVR interface. Found a great show using the One's search and discovery tools and want to record the season? Time to switch to the DVR interface again. IR blaster miss a channel change? The One's guide and channel bar will show different information than the cable box. The cable box is the canonical interface for television, and every attempt to usurp or overlay it has failed.

Xbox One won't free you from your cable box — it'll stay firmly chained to it

Microsoft seems to know that it has a challenge ahead of it and that the Xbox One's TV functionality needs to evolve quickly — the official press release for the Xbox One promises that the company is "committed to bringing Live TV through various solutions to all the markets where Xbox One will be available," and the company's FAQ simply states that "the delivery of TV is complex." And indeed, in European markets where the Xbox 360 is already able to serve as an IPTV cable box, there's a chance the One could achieve the sort of seamless integration we all hoped for as Microsoft began its demo today.

But Microsoft is launching the Xbox One in the United States, where the hyper-fragmented television market will keep that IR Out port firmly in play until broadband TV services like Aereo take off or the cable companies themselves build streaming services. And that's years away. Until then, the Xbox One won't free you from your cable box — it'll stay firmly chained to it.

A month after launch, have we forgotten about Twitter #Music?

2013-05-21T14:30:04Z

A little over a month ago, Twitter launched #Music, its take on what a truly social music discovery service might look like. It was strategic, leveraging Twitter's enormous user base and vast amount of data, and thanks to a well-timed acquisition, saw some of the best product design the company has ever produced. When it launched, the press flocked to it as the second coming of Vine, a polished way for Twitter to shake up a new space and create an extra source for ad revenue in the bargain. If nothing else, this was bound to shake up the world of mobile music-streaming.

Can #Music survive in one of the hottest spaces in the industry?

By now, that buzz is a distant memory. Last week #Music fell out of iOS's top 100 free music apps; it currently sits at #113, shoulder-to-shoulder with Last.fm. (Twitter, for their part, did not respond to requests for comment.) Even worse, for a natively social company like Twitter, is the deafening silence. If people are using it, they're staying very quiet about it. Failure is hardly a taboo in the startup world, but coming this soon after a much-feted launch, it raises the obvious question: can #Music survive in one of the hottest, most competitive spaces in the industry?

If the outlook seems worse in recent weeks, it's largely because of All Access, Google's play for the same space, but All Access is just the latest entry in an already-crowded field of streaming music services, each one with their own secret weapon. Spotify has the strongest social game, Rdio has the best design, Vevo has video, MySpace has Timberlake — the list goes on and on. And that's without mentioning actual radio up-and-comers like Sirius, or Apple’s iTunes and Amazon's chokehold on music downloads. Facing all that, what can #Music do that no one else can do better?

It's especially problematic because #Music is doing so much less than those services. #Music relies on Spotify and Rdio to provide anything longer than a preview snippet — they're the ones with the label deals, after all — so it's often competing on interface. It's a good interface, a zero-negative-space wall of sound that feels genuinely new, but it's not enough on its own. If it catches on, there'll be nothing to stop Spotify from lifting the look for its own product.

The recommendations come from a faceless algorithm

What's left is the data, and the recommendations it powers. That puts #Music in an editorial space, competing more with Pitchfork and Rolling Stone than Google. That's not a bad place to be, potentially. Spotify proved a good recommendation could be built on top of Facebook's network, so why not build one on top of Twitter's? But paradoxically, #Music cares more about data than it does about people. The most promising element, which allows users to track what a particular artist is listening to, is buried under so many menus that most users never found it. Instead, the recommendations mostly come from faceless algorithms, so there's no sense of who's recommending anything — whether it's my friend Dave, People Who Follow @Horse_ebooks, or that one Vice writer I follow. In the case of music recommendations, that's the whole game, and hiding the human element behind a recommendation engine only clouds the issue.

All of which is to say, it doesn't quite work — but it may be more interesting for what it says about Twitter than what it says about music. Even if #Music was a disappointment, it was a cheap one — a one-inch punch that Twitter could toss into the world and let succeed or fail on its own terms. It's the kind of thing giants like Google and Facebook do all the time, but Twitter has only recently come around to. Coming on the heels of Vine, it could be a sign of a new, more product-oriented Twitter. Sometimes, that will mean cracking open a hard problem like shareable web video. Other times, it'll mean a swing and a miss.

Forget sex: how the idea behind Bang with Friends could revolutionize social interaction

2013-05-11T17:02:06Z

Apple's Find My Friends, a mostly-unrelated concept.

Perhaps you've heard of Bang With Friends. It's a rather controversial thing. Simply put, it's a Facebook and mobile app that lets you pick which of your friends you'd like to "bang." Oh, but it's more clever than that: the app won't reveal your intentions until that friend picks you back. Then, theoretically, you can clandestinely meet for a night of sex without any fear of rejection, or the need for awkward dates, and none of your other friends will be the wiser. Needless to say, some people aren't so happy about the idea. They're worried that it objectifies people, that it could promote infidelity, and other things of the sort.

It's a shame everyone is so fixated on the titillating aspects of Bang With Friends, because there's a genius idea lurking just underneath the surface. When the creators of Bang With Friends went looking for a fling, they stumbled upon a formula that could bring people closer together, period.

What if you could talk about any embarrassing or obscure thing, knowing that another person already shares your interest?

You probably have a number of interests that you wouldn't bring up in casual conversation, and don't display proudly on your Pinterest board. Things you don't ‘like' on Facebook, that you don't share to any but your closest Google+ circles, and that you certainly wouldn't tweet about. Your true tastes in music. Your Pokemon addiction. Perhaps even your favorite kind of porn. Your political stance, if it's controversial. They aren't necessarily deep secrets, but perhaps just mildly embarrassing things that you wouldn't want to broadcast to the world.

Fear of being judged

And broadcast is indeed what you'd be doing in the modern era. None of these communication channels are really secure, and all of them are places where exposing your tastes could potentially cost you a job. So today, we build up collections of "safe" interests in public, and save our true feelings for anonymous chatrooms... except for the few of us brave or foolhardy enough to not give a damn. And when you do find people on IRC or 4Chan who share your interests, do you take them out to lunch? No, not if you might be worried that their friendly emoji could conceal a murderous plot.

But the double-blind Bang With Friends formula could bridge that lonely anonymity with real, human interaction.

Imagine this: Instead of secretly telling one person that you'd like to bang them, you secretly tell everyone that you love Barry Manilow... but just like Bang With Friends, only the people who also admit that they love Barry Manilow will be allowed to know. Now, perhaps you wouldn't want to trust a company with that kind of information, with all the security breaches and hacks as of late.

But if there was one you could trust...

You walk into a party, and instead of treading water in casual conversation for hours on end, you simply look down at your phone. Right there are pictures of the people who share embarrassing interests with you, so you can clandestinely meet up and talk about them. You can chat the night away about Magic: The Gathering if that's your cup of tea, and perhaps you'll move on to other topics you hadn't even thought to share. Perhaps, enamored by all the secret silly and private meaningful things you have in common, you'll even hook up later that week.

In that context, banging with friends doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Back from the dead: why do 2013's best smartphones have IR blasters?

2013-04-24T22:00:05Z

Remember when you couldn’t buy a high-end phone without an infrared (IR) port? If your exposure to smartphones only starts with the iPhone’s appearance in 2007, you might not. But if you've been using smartphones for longer, you may recall that many of the Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices that once comprised the market were equipped with infrared transmitters and receivers. (Nokia even put IR blasters on its dumbphones years before smartphones were in the picture.) These were used for very basic — and slow — file transfers between devices, but some enterprising developers did write apps to let you control your television and entertainment consoles.

While IR transmitters were by no means absolute necessities on a mobile device, they did offer cool functionality if you wanted to take advantage of it. Then, when the IR-less iPhone hit shelves in 2007, other device manufacturers swiftly dropped the feature from their list of included specs as they raced to create thinner devices with larger displays and throw in other, newer technologies like NFC.

This year, both HTC and Samsung have embraced the IR blaster

But this year, the IR blaster has made a surprising return — at least for high-end Android smartphones. Flagship devices from Samsung and HTC now include transmitters and apps that let you control your entertainment center (kudos to HTC for neatly building the IR blaster into the power button on the One). While the infrared port has been missing from phones' spec sheets for a good five years or more, it seems to be a "must have" feature for high-end Android devices in 2013. The irony is hard to miss: while smartphone hardware has gotten simpler in design (with a few exceptions, most phones don't have removable batteries or expandable storage), one of the nerdiest features from yesterday has made a bit of a resurgence.

Granted, not everyone is a fan of the IR blaster and the clunky, cumbersome receivers that usually go along with it (The Verge's own Nilay Patel is a notorious hater). However, the functionality offered by today's smartphones doesn't require a clumsy receiver to talk to your TV or cable box — and setup with the vast majority of entertainment systems is a painless process that takes less than five minutes to complete. I've been using HTC's bundled TV app on the One smartphone and I've really liked it for basic things like changing channels and adjusting volume. Likewise, David found the remote app on the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 and Galaxy S4 to have similarly useful functions. I'm the type of television viewer that constantly has his smartphone or tablet in hand while watching shows, so having quick access to remote control functions is great. None of these apps will replace a proper remote — there are always extra functions that set-top box and TV manufacturers include on their own remotes, and the tactile feel of real buttons is not something to be ignored — but as a secondary device for quick changes, they work well.

IR blasters are more useful now because entertainment is more social

And that really speaks to why these IR blasters and remote apps are so much more useful today than they were five or six years ago, at the cusp of the smartphone boom. Television watching is frequently becoming a more and more social experience, especially for live events like the Super Bowl or awards shows. I can't recall the last live event or major TV show premiere I watched where I didn't have my smartphone in hand to keep up with all of the colorful commentary coming from my Twitter timeline (and to add a few quips myself). Bundling my television control scheme into the same device that I use for my social interactions just makes sense, even if it feels like a superfluous feature at first glance.

That isn't to say everything is great with today's setups. Both HTC and Samsung have included apps (built by Peel) designed to recommend television shows and movies on their devices, and in Samsung's case, even push that content to your TV — provided you have a compatible Samsung television, of course. These apps don't quite live up to that promise just yet — while they can provide reminders of when your favorite shows are on and even tell you the name of the episode and what channel it's on, they don't have all of the features of my cable service's proprietary app such as proper DVR management or live streaming. What's more, Samsung's ambitious feature to "push" video content to your TV from your device doesn't work nearly as well in practice as it does in Samsung's demonstrations.

It's likely we'll continue to see devices with IR ports hit shelves

Of course, the IR blaster likely won't gain a lot of traction or mindshare with average consumers unless Apple decides to include one on the iPhone or iPad, and chances are that won’t happen any time soon. But chances are pretty good that we will continue to see the lowly IR transmitter listed in the ever-expanding spec sheets of high-end Android devices going forward. While its purpose has changed from what was intended ten years ago — these days we have a plethora of better technologies for transferring data and content between devices — the core technology is essentially the same. What long-forgotten feature will be resurrected for next year's top-shelf devices? Let's just say that I won't complain if the camera shutter key makes a triumphant return.

HTC does what Google wouldn't: sell an LTE phone that sidesteps AT&T

2013-04-23T15:30:03Z

You won't see it advertised on billboards or television, you won't hear it mentioned in a carrier store, and your less technologically-savvy friends most certainly won't know about it — but quietly, HTC's done something extraordinarily important this month: it's broken AT&T's stranglehold on its nationwide LTE network.

I can't underscore enough what a big deal this is. It's a move that even Google, for all its money, power, and influence, didn't make with the Nexus 4.

Like T-Mobile and essentially every other carrier in the world that relies exclusively on a SIM to identify your phone on the network, AT&T will happily let a customer bring their own hardware — you don't need to buy an AT&T-branded phone to use the service. But since AT&T's LTE airwaves launched in 2011, the only flagship phones and tablets capable of actually using it have been AT&T-branded, meaning that you're subject to all the typical heartache that comes with owning carrier-branded equipment: pre-installed crapware, glacial firmware update schedules that are at the mercy of carrier testing and approval, ugly carrier logos, the list goes on. If you've wanted to avoid the mess, you've typically had to import a gray-market phone from Europe or Asia that only supports HSPA or HSPA+, not LTE. That's no good, particularly on a congested network where you need as many technological advantages as you can get.

I did a double-take when I saw it

Apple took the first legitimate swipe at that LTE lock-in last November with the US launch of the unlocked iPhone 5. But there's Apple ... and there's everyone else. Of course, the locked iPhone 5 lacks crapware, so it's not as big of a deal. And what if you don't want an iPhone? What if you prefer Android?

That brings us back to HTC, which has started shipping both 32 and 64GB versions of the superlative One — an early contender for the best phone of 2013, and arguably the best Android phone ever made — in a carrier- and bootloader-unlocked version that supports both T-Mobile and AT&T LTE. No strings attached. Go ahead, check it out. I did a double-take myself. And even more remarkably, it's sold for $574.99, $25 less than AT&T's full price for the locked, crapware-laden version of the same phone. I've confirmed with HTC that this unlocked version will get firmware updates according to its own schedule, not AT&T's; if history is any indication, that means you're likely to get Android 4.2 (and beyond) much faster. Sony is starting to offer the Xperia ZL as well, but it's nearly $200 more and — as our review of the very similar Xperia Z shows — the hardware and software simply aren't as good.

It's upsetting that we've become so accustomed to carrier politicking that the notion of a great unlocked LTE phone from a top-tier manufacturer sounds absurd and improbable, but that's where we are.

Do yourself a favor: don't buy it from a carrier store

Of course, AT&T would prefer you not buy the unlocked version of this phone for obvious reasons: it can't get its own software in front of your face, it can't conform the phone to its own firmware update schedule, and it can't use hardware as leverage to sign you into another contract extension. And that's likely just one of a host of reasons that you won't see HTC heavily promoting this model's existence — HTC's relationship with AT&T, unfortunately, is still far more important than its relationship with end users. But the mere fact that this unlocked phone exists, and is being sold directly by HTC to customers in the United States, is an extraordinarily encouraging sign.

So if you're on AT&T, you're in the market for an HTC One, and you're not up for a deeply-discounted upgrade, do yourself a favor: don't buy it from a carrier store, buy it straight from the source. You'll end up with a far better phone, and you'll help send a message that this is how it should be.

Update: We've added a mention of the Xperia ZL, which is now on sale directly from Sony for $759.99.

Missing in action: why doesn't Google help consumers find their lost Android phones?

2013-04-10T13:00:03Z

Google is respected for its prowess in the cloud. Android phones that connect up to Google's services enjoy a wide array of features — from email to apps to notes — that offer seamless sync between the web and your device. Yet there's one enormously important feature that Google does not extend to consumers: the ability to find or remotely wipe an Android phone if it's lost. Instead, the company has kept its solution limited to enterprise and paid Google Apps customers. The rest of us are forced to discover and rely on third-party solutions. For a company that is otherwise so strong at cloud services, why hasn't it found a way to offer this essential feature to everyone?

Android users do have options for remotely wiping their phone. If you're using Google Apps or are attached to an Exchange server that supports it, you (or your administrator) can go to your a device management page to find, lock, wipe, or ring / message your phone. It's a set of four core "lost phone" features that ought to be standard and available to every user on any modern smartphone.

Lost phone features that ought to be standard

Consumers who don't use Google's enterprise apps or Microsoft Exchange also have options, but they have to go out looking for them in the Play store themselves. Probably the most popular option right now is Lookout Security, a full-featured security app that offers both missing phone functionality and a slew of anti-malware features — although it requires a paid subscription for the most important capabilities. Lookout boasts upwards of 35 million users, which is significant not just for the company's bottom line but also as an indicator of just how many Android users crave these services.

To get to that number, Lookout gets customers both organically and through carrier and OEM partnerships, including deals with T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, and others. Abheek Gupta, Lead Android Product Manager at Lookout, claims that when a user loses his or her Android phone, on average only 30 percent get it back — but a product like Lookout boosts that number to 70 percent. The company helped recover nine million phones in 2011, and since that time it's doubled its employee count to nearly 200 people. Clearly, there is a market for these kinds of services on Android.

The Google Play store is littered with lost phone apps and services

The market isn't limited to (relatively) large companies like Lookout, either. The Google Play store is littered with lost phone apps and services, ranging from from tiny and untrustworthy to bloated and well-known. One relatively popular option is Cerberus anti theft. Like Lookout, it also has some advanced features like taking a photo when the wrong PIN code is entered and can even let you perform actions via SMS if you're stuck without a computer and need to wipe your device. Luca Sagaria, the founder of Cerberus maker LSDroid, says he has sold around 150,000 licenses to-date, enough to make the app a viable business (and a fan favorite amongst the nerdier set of Android users).

Cerberus, Lookout, and our own common sense show us that there is a real need for lost phone features on Android. If the market is there, it seems like Google ought to want to fill it.

Why isn't it built into Android?

Which leads once again to the question — why isn't it built in to Android? The first and most obvious answer is that "Android" is a broad and open ecosystem and that, at its core, technically it doesn't have any Google services built-in. The Android most of us use, however, has Google's services added on top, and there are precious few reasons for not offering missing phone functions alongside the Google Play Store, Gmail, and the rest.

Perhaps it's that there's something uniquely difficult about offering lost phone features on Android — but that argument doesn't hold water. Google already does a remarkably good job tracking a phone's location using Latitude (just check your device's location history, if you have that feature turned on). In fact, Sagaria says that he coded up the first version of Cerberus in just three or so months back in 2011 and currently supports it with only two engineers and one customer service representative. And we can’t lose sight of the fact that Google does offer some of these capabilities as a paid service to its enterprise customers. But saying that Google is looking to make a buck on lost phone features doesn't really make sense — they are a small part of the Google Apps offering.

What, then, is Google's hold up? The reason we've heard most often is that classic Android bugbear: fragmentation. Until recently, creating software that digs deep into the bones of an OS (as remote wipe needs to) required significant effort across multiple devices. "With Froyo and Gingerbread you really had to customize based on OEM, based on the carrier's skin on top of it," Gupta says.

With ICS and Jelly Bean, though, "we see that there's stuff that we can do that holds fairly largely across OEMs and their skins," Gupta adds. Sagaria notes that fragmentation mainly becomes an issue with advanced features like taking a photo, but in large part it's not a major issue. Indeed, Google may feel that it needs to leave some services and features on the table for its partners to provide — it will happily point out that the open nature of Android allows for many third party solutions. Indeed, OEMs and carriers offer solutions to users — often for an added fee — and would likely be none-too-happy to see yet another revenue stream obviated by a built-in Google offering (with Play, for instance, carrier music and app stores have largely become a thing of the past).

But most importantly, lost phone feature have become "table stakes" in the smartphone ecosystem: Apple offers them, BlackBerry offers them, Microsoft offers them, and heck, even the lowly and wildly underfunded Palm offered remote wipe functionality in 2009. Regardless of Google's reasoning, leaving essential lost phone features to third parties isn't a tenable long-term solution. Consumers are made to find their own solution and do their own research about which product to choose, to pay for, and most of all, to trust. The lack of a built-in offering that surfaces itself on phone setup means that many users will simply forget to do so, as evidenced by the large number of questions in Google's own forums.

The solution is as obvious as it is simple

The solution is as obvious as it is simple: Google already "blesses" Android phones with its official apps and services, and remote wipe should simply be part of that package going forward. "It should start with Google on any Android phone with Google Play services," says Phil Nickinson of Android Central. "It should be as easy to remove your life from your phone as it is to sync it there in the first place. It's that simple, and it's that important."

Google I/O is a little more than a month away. The perfect time to introduce lost phone features for regular consumers is long past, but Google's biggest developer conference is at the very least an opportunity to make up for lost time. And, maybe, to make up for all the lost phones that regular Android users never had a chance to track down.

Google declined to comment on this story.

What North Korea's threats sound like to a South Korean college student

2013-04-08T13:27:53Z

Threats from North Korea are meaningless to me.

What If Kim Jong-un decides to push the button tomorrow? What can I do about that? Most likely, I'll learn that the missiles fell into the Pacific Ocean. Or if the rockets do make it into the air, maybe the US will shoot them down with its THAAD missile defense system. Most likely, nothing will happen.

Thanks to the substantial coverage of North Korea, Westerners aren't as calm as I am. Some Americans seem to feel genuinely threatened by North Korea, primarily because the media in the West is dramatically overplaying the events surrounding the Korean peninsula. Meanwhile, South Korea is underplaying them — as usual.

I've personally never felt any real danger from the North

Yes, South Koreans have become somewhat immune to North Korea's provocations. I've personally never felt any real danger from the North. Not once. Since the ceasefire between our countries in 1953, South Korea has endured countless "invasions" or threats of invasion involving North Korean troop movements, spies, or military maneuvers. We naturally grew accustomed to these kind of provocations, and with the presence of the US military in the South, it's become easy to ignore the North's actions.

When there's a big storm coming in, people usually rush to the closest store to buy whatever they need. Water, food, household supplies. I've witnessed queuing, and yesterday even joined in. But I wasn't shopping for extra food or water. I was in line waiting for an art exhibition near Hongdae: an area known for clubs and indie music. Almost a hundred people showed up and no one seemed to be bothered by the fact that North Korea was preparing for a missile launch. They seemed relaxed — normal even — while looking at the art.

I don't watch television, but I do pay attention to our major newspapers. North Korea's threats don't even make their way into the top headlines every day. Needless to say, I'm not taking the threats seriously, but I wanted the opinions of other people I know, just to make sure I'm not crazy.

No one seemed to be bothered by the fact that North Korea was preparing for a missile launch

A friend who recently completed his national military service after two years dismissed the signs of danger almost completely. He told me that he thinks the recent threats are nothing to worry about. My grandfather — a man who fought in the Korean War (he's on the left in the picture above) — doesn't think the North will engage in military action against the South. My father concurs.

Seoul National Cemetry, for those who died in the Korean War

They agree with me that North Korea's recent boasts, threats, and troop movements are better described as irritations rather than actual provocations. But that doesn't mean that our family hasn't discussed the possibility of war.

How would South Koreans react to an attack? My mother argued that unlike the war in the 1950s, trying to flee further from the border of our two countries would be pointless — weapons have evolved. Those legitimately concerned for their safety would have to simply leave the country if they really felt they were in danger. But the working class here don't have enough disposable income to get their entire family out of the country and set up a life somewhere else. The idea of evacuating families from their homes is unrealistic. So what do you do? You stay put.

Anything to keep their audiences entertained

Writing and thinking about the danger (or lack thereof) posed by a North Korean attack has not only been a sanity check for me, but has also reaffirmed the reality of living in South Korea. In an effort to bolster Kim Jong-un's leadership and power within North Korea, his military came up with a plan to point missiles at the US and then tell the world about it. The global media immediately latched onto the news and began to cover the story non-stop. The next Arab Spring or Cyprus financial crisis or World War III: anything to keep their audiences entertained.

But despite what mainstream press might say about the tensions leading up to a military confrontation, I'll continue to live my life primarily as a college student. I imagine others will also carry on with their lives as usual, too.

Hyunhu Jang attends college at the School of Communication at Kookmin University Seoul in South Korea, and is a part-time intern for The Verge. The above thoughts are his take on life in South Korea during threats of North Korean violence.

Facebook Home is beautiful, but what if your friends aren't?

2013-04-05T17:05:03Z

Facebook Home, a lock screen and launcher replacement for Android, looks very good. In fact, maybe it looks too good.

In the social network’s promo trailer for Home, you first witness a woman picking bright orange pumpkins in a field. A white digital clock typeface contrasts beautifully against the blue sky behind her. An image on Facebook’s Home website shows a woman donning a bright blue life vest paddling through crystal clear waters. Another shows a group of friends climbing a glorious green hilltop. These images are meant to represent stories you might find in your News Feed, which becomes your lock screen if you’re using Facebook Home. You can swipe through them while you’re waiting in line, boarding an airplane, or sitting on the couch. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg estimates we see our lock screen more than 100 times each day.

How does your lock screen look when it’s a stream of oversaturated Instagram photos and out-of-focus baby pictures?

Facebook’s images are stunning, but how does your lock screen look when it’s actually a stream of oversaturated Instagram photos and out-of-focus baby pictures? Or worse? As of this writing, the first thing in my News Feed is an image of a friend who used AMC’s "Dead Yourself" app to mutilate her face — a grotesque sight. The next photo is a group of friends in bikinis on spring break. The third is a friend’s selfie. When you install Facebook Home (or buy an HTC First), your homescreen will be whatever your friends are posting, no matter how good, bad, or downright terrible. When you press the sleep button to unlock your device, these are the kinds of images that will come to life on-screen.

"What if our phones were designed around people, not apps?" Zuckerberg asked, but what if those people are ugly? What if you haven’t seen some of those people in five years? Yes, the News Feed you browse every day is filled with these same things, but your lock screen is the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see before you fall asleep.

Home is undeniably beautiful in its minimalist user interface, but the content it displays cannot ever be held to the same standards, since your friends are producing this content. Some of these friends you may have had since 2004 when Facebook first launched, and some you might not even actually be friends with anymore. That's going to make it hard to be confident handing your phone over to a friend (a real friend, that is) so they can make a quick call. Who knows what they’ll find when they see your homescreen — perhaps they’ll see a wonderful photo of a friend visiting Machu Picchu, or they’ll see the bikini photos from Punta Cana. What if it’s your girlfriend asking to borrow your phone, and your homescreen is somebody else’s cleavage? Halloween-time Home users, beware.

Halloween-time Home users, beware

Just about anything in your Facebook News Feed can become your homescreen, from statuses to photos to links. And "Yep," Zuckerberg said, ads are coming too. While Facebook Home means to put your face (the "bobble," as its called colloquially) front and center, it’s ironic — and, in some situations, troubling — that the rest of your screen is reserved for the photos and statuses of others. Like with Graph Search, Facebook’s issue with Home isn’t in its design, but is in the social graph data that fills it up. Nilay Patel mentioned on The Vergecast yesterday that Home made him want to cut his friends list in half.

As with Graph Search, Facebook says that it plans to constantly tweak the algorithms that populate the pages you’re seeing, and these results will get better over time. "Cover Feed" items are ranked, says Product Manager Adam Mosseri, which means you’re less likely to see photos that don’t have any likes or statuses without comments. Facebook has for years used these metrics to determine what posts are the most interesting, and it has more work to do. If Facebook wants Home to really take off, it needs to realize that we don’t live in a world as beautiful as its marketing campaigns. It could limit "Cover Feed" posts to those only from your closest friends, or it could selectively analyze photos for quality content tagged to popular locations. Until then, I foresee many jokes that start something like this: "Dude, why do you have a salad on your lock screen?"

'BioShock Infinite' makes great art from America's racist past and political present

2013-04-02T13:00:01Z

I find myself awake, in a mysterious rowboat, heading to a lighthouse, surrounded by the sea. Walking inside, verses from the bible tickle the back of my brain. Sin and the search for redemption. And then, with a burst of light, everything changes. I ascend to a heavenly metropolis perched among the clouds. The air is full of music and the streets ripe with bright colors. Children are laughing, frolicking in the park. I join a crowd playing at a raffle, hoping to win a prize. And suddenly I’m staring down the barrel of American history, face to face with brutal bigotry, on the run from the law, seeking some answers at the end of my gun.

I picked up a copy of BioShock Infinite this week, and it got me thinking. Are video games art? It’s a tired question with an easy answer. Ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on a pedestal, the definition of art has been rapidly expanding. From graffiti on a subway car to a beautifully crafted armchair, we have come to see fine art all around us. If you’re looking for some kind of official statement, perhaps the Museum of Modern Art’s addition of video games to its permanent design collection will suffice.

But there is a more interesting question still in play. Most video games, like novels, TV serials, and feature films, are narrative art made for mass consumption. And increasingly, video games are the most popular of the bunch. Like films, they reach tens of millions of individuals and generate billions in sales. That means studio style productions that require years of labor and hundreds of millions in investment capital to make and market. In that environment, is it possible to produce work that is simultaneously an economic and critical success, fun to play, and also an important piece of art with a deep, resonant effect?

With BioShock Infinite, my answer is yes. The game is aesthetically magnificent and a joy to play, introducing some innovative game mechanics to the well-worn genre of the first-person shooter. Its narrative is rich and subtle, a perfectly paced trail of breadcrumbs that keeps you eagerly moving forward. And the art and design, from the moment you enter the floating city of Columbia, is breathtaking.

Beyond the aesthetics, what really stood our for me was the stark and intelligent treatment of deeper themes: racism, nationalism, and religion in America. The story may be set at the turn of the 20th century, but it forces the player to ponder the same questions about immigration and tolerance that helped decide our most recent presidential election and, just this past week, vexed our nation’s highest court.

The basic storyline is a classic tale from myth and video gaming: a hero must save a princess from a tower. Luckily, BioShock Infinite complicates things quite a bit. Our hero has elements of American film noir, a jaded detective, down on his luck, with a dark past he would rather forget. In this case, the main character is a former Pinkerton, adding another wrinkle of social and historical consciousness. And the woman he's rescuing is no Princess Peach. Not only can she hold her own in combat, but more often than not, she's the one saving his hide.

'BioShock Infinite' presents a funhouse mirror of American ideological history

What made the original BioShock, released back in 2007, such a classic was the way it immersed you in a compelling world that borrowed from American history without simply aping it. In that first game, the key ingredient was the philosophy of Ayn Rand, fleshed out with anachronistic art deco design and period piece jazz. While this Randian milieu was a historical throwback, her ideology has become increasingly important in modern American life, especially our politics, giving the game a timeless quality.

In BioShock Infinite, the creators again present a funhouse mirror of American ideological history. Comstock the Prophet and the citizens of the floating city of Columbia meld strains of religious fervor, anti-government rhetoric, jingoistic nationalism, and a twisted worship of the founding fathers, all carefully lifted from historical events at the turn of the 20th century, but simultaneously satirizing the Tea Party movement that has roiled our politics for the last six years.

Venerable film critic Roger Ebert argued that video games can never be art, because like football or chess, their primary purpose is a framework for competition, not a medium for expression. While I disagree with his larger point, his logic is worth examining. A lot of video games fail as great art by falling into the trap of heavy handed morality plays, where the characters move along a fixed narrative arc, but are given the illusion of choice, usually an obvious one between good and evil.

What makes BioShock so artful is the way it undercuts this sense of control. The game upends the moral calculus of your rote choices by constantly shifting the reality under your feet. A benevolent decision one minute becomes a vile one the next. Quantum mechanics are the logic behind this fractured center, where time and space can easily unwind, much as it did for modern authors like Barthelme and Pynchon. Like a reader with his novel or a viewer of a film, the gamer playing BioShock Infinite is travelling through a carefully wrought narrative that is more powerful than the mechanics of shooting, jumping, or choosing between doorway A and hallway B.

So why bother offering players a choice at all? Because participation is one of the inherent strengths of video games as art. You may realize if you play the game a second time through that your choice doesn't impact the storyline, but when you're given the option to go along with Columbia's horrid racism or stand against it, the impact of the narrative, especially as you first experience it, is that much deeper.

BioShock infinite is the product of 200 people working for more than four years at the cost of more than $100 million. But it is also the brainchild of Ken Levine, the founder and creative director of BioShock developer Irrational Games. The story’s epic conclusion feels like the work of a single, strong voice, at once mind-bending and emotionally resonant, by far the most satisfying piece of art, in any form, that I’ve experienced in a long time.