The Verge - Hands-ons

HP Envy Rove 20 is the company's stab at a giant all-in-one Windows 8 tablet

2013-05-23T04:01:07Z

It's hard to say if there's a market yet for an all-in-one touchscreen PC that you can just pick up and carry around, but it seems that no Windows PC maker wants to be left out. Hot on the heels of Dell's XPS 18, Sony's VAIO Tap 20, and the Asus Transformer AIO, Hewlett-Packard has announced the Envy Rove 20. It's a tabletop PC with a 20-inch touchscreen, a four-hour battery, and a spring-loaded kickstand that folds flat into the frame.

We got to check out the Rove 20 briefly at an HP event in San Francisco late last month, and we're not yet sure what to think. The 10-point capacitive touchscreen felt responsive, and the kickstand has a very satisfying action (you squeeze a button around back to release the lever as you set it down) but the machine still felt fairly thick and heavy for a machine designed to be carried around. It's quite a bit thicker than the Dell XPS 18, for instance, and the 1600 x 900 IPS touchscreen also isn't as crisp, clear or pixel-dense as the one we saw demonstrated on that unit.

It does, however, have quite a bit going on inside. HP includes Intel's latest Haswell processors, next-gen 802.11ac Wi-Fi, three USB ports, a 1TB hybrid hard drive, Intel's Wireless Display tech for connecting to a TV, as well as Beats Audio processing for specially tuned speakers that didn't sound half-bad to me. HP tells us it's aiming for a competitive price somewhere below $1,000, including a mouse and keyboard, when the Rove 20 arrives this July.

HP redesigns Envy and Pavilion laptops for 2013, including one with a 3200 x 1800 screen

2013-05-23T04:01:06Z

Last year, Hewlett-Packard decided to unify the design of every thin and light laptop it sold, applying the same basic curves across every keyboard, touchpad, hinge, lid, and frame. This year, it's not just thin-and-light laptops getting the treatment: according to company representatives, CEO Meg Whitman has now mandated a unified design language across HP's entire portfolio of consumer machines. "She took a look at our portfolio and said, ''I don't know what's HP.'" Now, recessed hinges, revamped touchpads, and slim wedge designs — or at least the illusion of a slim wedge design — will be more or less standard across the company's lineup.

Don't call it a netbook

Of course, that means it's harder than ever for any individual HP computer to stand out, but two manage it anyhow. First, the $399 HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11 uses AMD's new low-power Temash processors to power a classy little 11.6-inch touchscreen machine, which still manages to house a full keyboard, a two-button touchpad, and a full array of ports, including three USB sockets, an HDMI port, VGA, Ethernet, and a SD card slot into its fairly minuscule frame. HP expects it to ship on June 26th.

Second and perhaps more exciting is the HP Envy 14 TouchSmart Ultrabook (pictured first in the gallery above) which appears to be trying to ape the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. It starts at $699 with a low-res 14-inch, 1366 x 768 screen, mind you, but it can be optionally upgraded to 1600 x 900, or an unprecedented 3200 x 1800 resolution screen which should be available sometime later this summer. Edge-to-edge glass touchscreens come standard on the Envy 14 TouchSmart, and its bigger brother the HP Envy 15 TouchSmart Notebook as well. Why "notebook" instead of "ultrabook"? The 15-inch model has a cheaper $529 starting price because it comes with AMD processors and no solid state storage by default. They both have fingerprint readers though, a feature that's now going to be standard across all of HP's Envy laptops. The Envy 14 TouchSmart is also coming June 26th, while the 15-inch model is due June 5th as of now.

If you're looking for a little more power under the hood, HP will also ship heftier Envy 15 and Envy 17 laptops without the "TouchSmart" or "Ultrabook" monikers, trading the touchscreen for faster processors, more storage, more speakers, and discrete Nvidia graphics options. We don't have all the details yet, but the Envy 17 will start at $699 on June 5th.

Hands-on with the new Xbox One controller and its crazy vibrations

2013-05-21T22:47:33Z

The Xbox One console is nice, but what really matters is the controller: after all, it's the thing you hold in your hands the whole time you're using the console, and if Microsoft has its way that's going to happen a lot. We had a chance to spend a few minutes using the new controller, and while we can't say our minds are blown, Microsoft's definitely thinking in new ways about the new Xbox.

The controller's design is mostly the same as the Xbox 360. It's a little smaller, since the company was able to retract the removable battery into the device itself, so there's no bump on the back. It's also a little more refined, with black buttons instead of colored ones, and Microsoft says it's also improved the analog sticks and triggers. (Reps made a big deal out of saying they tested the buttons at least two million times.) Those are hard to test without really digging into a game over time, though the analog sticks are certainly grippier and more textured. But one thing was immediately apparent: the new "impulse triggers" on the back of the controller.

Instead of having two vibration motors, one in the base of each grip, there are four inside the Xbox One's controller: two in the grips and one in each trigger. The pads of your fingers are incredibly sensitive, Microsoft told us, and the vibration in the triggers adds to the immersion of the whole experience. To prove it the company showed us six demos, involving things like a car revving its engine and firing a laser gun. With each came unique, applicable vibrations, and the extra motors really do add to the effect: you feel the recoil on the gunshot more, and the whirring engine made my whole body start to shiver as if I were really in a rumbling car. At points it was almost too much, jarring the controller and my hands so much that it became hard to use the controller normally, but for now we'll chalk that up to proving the point in the demo.

Microsoft says there are forty improvements to the controller with the Xbox One — we're not sure all forty are exactly game-changing, but they might not need to be. Microsoft did it pretty well last time.

Dieter Bohn contributed to this report.

The all-seeing Kinect: tracking my face, arms, body, and heart on the Xbox One

2013-05-21T22:11:55Z

"It's what's on the inside that counts" is something of an unofficial mantra of Microsoft's new Xbox One. The Kinect is perhaps the best example: externally, it's more or less unchanged from its predecessor, but it's actually a very different device. It's been upgraded in a huge way, but the end result is simple: the Kinect just sees more. (And hears more, but that's another matter.)

It has an ultra-wide 1080p camera (which should mean the Xbox One doesn't require such a large room), which easily picked up all of the dozen or so people sitting in the "living room" testing lab on Microsoft's campus. Kinect can even see in the dark, thanks to an infrared sensor that engages when the primary camera can't see anything. Along with higher-end processing power and a host of new software, Kinect feels a bit like it's gone from usable prototype to real, legitimate product.

Kinect has always been able to tell that you're moving. But now it can tell if you're moving your thumb, and which way your thumb is facing. It can tell which muscles you're engaging at any given time, and how much — it knows the difference between a jab and an uppercut, and registers them differently. If you're playing with a friend, it can tell when the two of you switch places, or even when the two of you switch controllers. Kinect knows if you're smiling or frowning, or if you're talking or not. It knows if you're looking at the screen or not, and will only register your commands if you're looking. It knows, by either remarkable science or sorcery, your heart rate just by looking at your face.

Kinect knows when you're talking, flexing, or smiling

We spent a few minutes in a crowded room using a prototype of the new Kinect, and we left reeling. There's almost no latency, things are astonishingly accurate — the muscle sensors knew even the slightest shift in my posture, and try as I might I couldn't make it think I was smiling when I wasn't. We heard it discern commands from a noise-filled room, and track our movements in the dark when we couldn't see them ourselves. It was a fairly controlled situation, though, and we're curious to see how it holds up in the real world.

The real world applications are really the whole game here. Kinect's raw capability is absolutely remarkable, but how developers will build them into games remains to be seen. Could a boxing game know the difference in how hard I punch? Could it know how tired I am based on my heart rate, and knock me out more easily? Could a shooter recognize that I'm too relaxed, and ratchet up the intensity to get me back in?

More than anything, that's what we're excited to see about Kinect and the Xbox One: how the immense amount of data turns into a more fun, more immersive gameplay experience. But at least at first blush, the data part seems to have been pretty much solved.

Xbox One: our first look at the new console, controller, and Kinect

2013-05-21T18:12:07Z

After Microsoft's big reveal, we've finally had time to get a closer look at the new Xbox One, the Kinect 2, and the new controller for the new console. For the most part, they're more tweaks on the existing devices than huge changes to what already exists – the console is a big, wide, flat rectangle that looks more than a little bit like a VCR, though we have to say the two-tone look comes off better in person than it did during the keynote.

The all-black motif is refined and sleek, giving the Xbox One a slightly more serious vibe than the 360 — it's harkening back to the original Xbox, in a way. The back is lousy with ports, from HDMI to an IR out jack — which may be the One's hacky solution to controlling the various parts of your home theater system — plus the two prongs for what we can only assume is yet a pretty massive power brick. There are vents everywhere, too, making it clear that there's an awful lot of power under the hood of the Xbox One. Instead of going smaller or thinner or lighter, Microsoft clearly went more.

The controller has been redesigned, though it looks like it'll feel familiar to 360 owners. (We tried to pick it up, but got a fast and George Bluth-y "No touching!" warning.) The colored A, B, X, and Y buttons on black backgrounds look great, and nicely accent the otherwise mostly monochrome controller. The Kinect was a bit surprising, simply because it's so big — from the 1080p camera to the many sensory recognition inputs, there's a lot to fit in, but the Kinect is big and blocky and may even take up more space in front of your TV than its predecessor. Those hoping for the Wii-like sensor are out of luck here.

Of course, we should caveat that it's all about the gameplay and the software, and while we were wowed at the event we've obviously not had a chance to go and really play with the One — though we're hoping that's coming up soon. For now, we're going back for more details and lots more pictures, so stay tuned!

Dieter Bohn contributed to this report.

Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on)

2013-05-20T23:00:51Z

Yahoo has just taken the wraps off a major update to Flickr, it's long-suffering photo service, and we just sat down to put the revamped service through its paces to see how it has improved — and whether or not it'll be enough to keep up with the likes of Facebook and Google+. While it's a massive visual improvement, it's still works much like the Flickr of old, for better or for worse. But for a visual site like Flickr, those changes make for a huge upgrade over what users experienced before.

For starters, Flickr made it a priority to remove the massive amounts of whitespace, text, and links that covered up its page, and it makes all the difference. You're now presented with a stream of photos from your contacts with minimal navigation chrome, plus a simplified menu bar at the top of the screen. On the right of the screen, Flickr lists off your groups, a link to the Flickr blog and contact suggestions. It's a bit cluttered compared to the spartan and frankly beautiful stream of photos that takes up the majority of the page, but having quick access to groups is a nice feature that should encourage users to find more to participate in.

Tiny thumbnails and an overabundance of text have been replaced with large, beautiful images

That emphasis on content from your contacts should spur users to trim their lists and make sure they're following friends or people who publish great images — it'll make a big difference when you open the site. Looking at individual albums (or sets, as Flickr calls them) is a much-improved experience, as well — instead of tiny thumbnails, there's a dynamically loading view of large, high-resolution images. There's really no comparison — the default view for sets is a major step forward. Search results are similarly improved, with big images instead of tiny thumbnails.

Clicking through to images is a similar improvement — photos now take up as much space in your browser as possible, with comments, metadata, tags, related sets, and the photostream all banished "below the fold." Photos now display automatically on a black background, eliminating the step of needing to click into the old "lightbox" view. However, you can click on the photo again to launch the lightbox and quickly navigate back and forth through a user's photostream or start a slideshow. The overall experience will be familiar enough to longtime Flickr users not to throw them off, and it's just a much, much better way to experience photos.

While it's a big visual change, most of Flickr's old tools are all still there — the batch editor and mapping features appears unchanged, though the uploader appears to have been streamlined. All in all, Flickr clearly focused more on making its content as visually compelling as possible rather than starting from scratch with the feature set. That said, Flickr did smartly include integration with social networks Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and (of course) Tumblr, a wise move. And with the massive 1TB of storage space Flickr is offering users, it's clear the service is hoping it will be the default destination for storing and organizing your photos, which you can then share out using its new tools.

It's been a long time coming, but the new Flickr is a huge improvement

At the end of the day, Flickr focused on the core of the experience rather than integrating new features (like Google+'s "auto awesome," for example), but we think the combo of a massive visual overhaul and huge free storage space should entice a lot of the more passionate photographers out there. Plus, the excellent iOS app and new Android app should help it win some of the smartphone shooter market, as well. But for the most casual photographers who just want to push their images out to Facebook friends, Flickr might be a tougher sell — there are still significantly more features and thus a bit of a higher learning curve here. That said, there's no doubt that browsing photos on Flickr is now a significantly better experience than you'll find on sites like Facebook and Google+, and that unmatched storage space should do a good job of getting a lot of users to check out the new Flickr.

Chris Welch contributed to this report.

Cast AR hands-on preview at Maker Faire 2013

2013-05-18T19:21:01Z

Sean Hollister takes a look at Cast AR, a 3D projection and virtual reality system at Maker Faire.

How two Valve engineers walked away with the company's augmented reality glasses

2013-05-18T18:01:26Z

Three months ago, celebrated video game publisher Valve did something completely out of character: it fired up to 25 workers, in what one employee dubbed the "great cleansing." At the time, co-founder Gabe Newell quickly reassured gamers that the company wouldn't be canceling any projects, but it just so happens that one project managed to get away.

Valve was secretly working on a pair of augmented reality glasses... and those glasses are still being built by two Valve employees who lost their jobs that day.

"This is what I'm going to build come hell or high water."

Former Valve hardware engineer Jeri Ellsworth and programmer Rick Johnson spent over a year working on the project at Valve, and have been putting in six days a week, 16+ hours a day on the project ever since. "We believed in it... that this is going to change the way that people interact with computers and play games," says Ellsworth. "This is what I'm going to build come hell or high water. It was just a no-brainer that when we were not at Valve... we just had to do it." They formed a company, Technical Illusions, to commercialize the tech. This weekend, they flew down to Maker Faire to show their crazy prototype to the world for the very first time.

It's called CastAR, and it's nothing like Google Glass or the Oculus Rift. The idea here is to project a miniature virtual reality, which you can see and interact with in three dimensions, into the real world.

Four key components make it work. First, a pair of miniature projectors attached to the glasses beam images from a connected PC. A special retroreflective projector screen bounces them back to your face. There, the active shutter glasses filter out images for each of your left and right eyes, 120 times a second, so that you see those images in 3D.

Lastly — and this is the tricky part — a camera built into the glasses sees infrared LEDs positioned around the edges of that projector screen so that the glasses can optically track the exact position of your head, allowing the software to adjust the 3D perspective in real time so that you can physically look around objects that don't even exist. It's basically the famous Johnny Chung Lee demo with the Nintendo Wii remote, except the team has custom algorithms for extremely low latency. With additional pennies-on-the-dollar cameras placed around the surface, the system can track other objects as well, like the infrared wand Ellsworth handed me for my first demo.

I played a game of destructive Jenga with the wand, smashing towers of virtual blocks with a virtual wrecking ball. I craned my head over the surface, looked down, and marveled as they fell into the depths below the actual surface of the table. I flew over a Minecraft-like rough landscape, using nothing but my head to steer. I got a taste of how CastAR could work with virtual toys, a la Skylanders, by placing little RFID tokens on a surface and watching them grow into Team Fortress 2's Scout and Heavy characters.

Finally, Ellsworth showed me the best thing yet. We played a multiplayer game with two Xbox controllers where we stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing at one another's antics as we mowed down zombies (and one another) in a zany capture the flag / king of the hill shooting game. There, even though we were looking at the same surface, the glasses gave us our own unique 3D perspective.

Thanks to the retroreflective surface, so much of the light gets reflected directly back to the viewer that there's very little cross-talk between players... you pretty much only see the light intended for you, which makes adding additional friends easy so long as they have their own pair of specs. There's also enough light to use the device in a moderately sunlit room, or from a reasonable distance away. While the Maker Faire demos were like interacting with small dioramas due to the fairly small projector screens, you could theoretically build a holodeck of sorts by putting retroreflective surfaces on every wall.

I should mention here that while the concept was impressive, the glasses themselves are extremely early, not anywhere close to fit for public consumption right now. Even the original Oculus Rift, virtual reality ski goggles held together with duct tape and dreams, felt a little more put-together than the CastAR prototypes that Ellsworth spent 40 hours painstakingly soldering. Hot glue and bare chips are the theme of the day, though that admittedly fits right in here at Maker Faire.

A holodeck isn't necessarily in the cards, by the way: one of the reasons they're bringing the idea to Maker Faire is to solicit ideas and figure out just what kinds of games and experiences would actually be popular. While Johnson envisions little children filling their Tonka trucks with virtual sand; family board games; and incredible sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, it's really still in the experimental phase, and the team says while some of their creations were a blast (hilarious zombie screams distracting the team from their work!) others weren't as entertaining as they thought they might be. "I suspect we're going to be very surprised about what people find fun in this space," Ellsworth said.

Hot glue and hot chips: this handmade prototype will be replaced by sleeker glasses

After Maker Faire, a Kickstarter project is the next step: in late summer or early fall, interested parties will be able to pledge money towards the system's development. Ellsworth and Johnson think they can get the cost of a basic system below $200 thanks to the commodity components they're using and their own expertise; Ellsworth has built low-cost chips ranging from video decoders to componentized video games, and is personally working on a low-cost infrared tracking chip. Meanwhile, Johnson is building the software to allow people to build games... impressively, he modified the code to change the game world while I was actually playing. Still, that's a good bit of money and a quite of setup (imagine: you have to have a special surface, glasses, and perhaps a wand or other objects) to play what might be very simple games to begin with.

While their current intent is to build a platform, get the hardware into developers' hands, and see what they build, Johnson says it won't be a dev kit for good: "It's a real product that we will commercialize." It's just too early to say how.

An artist's rendition of the final product.

So if the idea is so fantastic, why did Valve give it up? The Technical Illusions team wasn't completely comfortable talking about it. "I came on and I recruited all of my friends, and my colleagues, all the people I could find, and a lot of them are still there. I wish them the best in what they're doing, and I'd hate to do anything to hurt them or derail things they've got going," she says.

Still, before long, part of the story comes out. Valve's hardware initiative was researching both augmented reality and virtual reality... and the virtual reality supporters won out. "You can imagine that Valve is known for a certain class of game," says Johnson. Augmented reality simply isn't as suitable for the first-person shooters that Valve has built its reputation on.

Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson.

And yet, Ellsworth and Johnson didn't want to let go. "I didn't even want to do VR and AR at first, but someone else in our group was really excited about it and I played along," Ellsworth says, but after six months she decided that AR was the future and apparently wound up on the losing side of Valve's internal struggle. Johnson, working on Valve's Linux team at the time, had already been spending his free hours helping Ellsworth after bonding over a shared love of arcade machines, and decided to join her. "I've done a gazillion first-person shooters, and this is the first time where I can totally do a new type of experience. That's where my passion is," he says.

For its part, Valve has released all interest in the project, leaving the Technical Illusions team legally clear to do what they love. Says Ellsworth: "Gabe was completely behind it... I talked to Gabe, and he talked to the lawyers, and he's like, 'It's theirs, make it happen,' because he could see we were passionate about it."

Video by John Lagomarsino

Soundhalo for Android serves up professionally mixed videos as a concert unfolds

2013-05-17T14:02:16Z

We doubt it's going to erase the sea of smartphones you find at every concert nowadays, but Soundhalo is a new app with huge potential for music lovers. As a concert progresses, it gives fans the opportunity to download a video of each song featuring professionally mixed audio. Launched in beta on Thursday, there's only one artist on board thus far: Alt-J. But even the small sample size has us excited about how Soundhalo could change live music. No longer will you have an excuse to clumsily wield your phone throughout a show and watch the concert happening before you through a screen. Instead, you'll be able to enjoy the moment (and your company), later purchasing a better keepsake than your iPhone 5 or Lumia 920 could have ever captured.

Better than any video your phone can take

Minutes after a song's conclusion, a production team pairs video with audio pulled directly from the soundboard. Everything's properly mastered before the final product is uploaded to the cloud, so you won't have to worry about dealing with a harsh audio mix. Each song (at least from Alt-J) is $1.50. An entire, 16-song set is $9.00, though we'd expect this price to fluctuate depending on how long each individual show lasts. The Android app itself is executed extraordinarily well, with Holo design principles on full display. Songs can be downloaded to your device for offline playback, and you can even download copies to your laptop or PC through Soundhalo's website.

Unfortunately, at least for right now, if you're not a fan of Alt-J this app isn't of much use to you. But it's one of those situations where it only takes a few minutes of using it to realize, "oh, this is the way things are supposed to be." It's impossible to know what level of adoption Soundhalo will see among major acts (and whether record labels would be filling to put their live DVD / Blu-ray sales at risk), but the app is already an impressive showing out of the gate.

Limelight: an app to catalog your favorite movies, inspired by Delicious Library

2013-05-16T17:54:29Z

Remember Delicious Library? The app is a digital pack rat's best friend, a beautiful way to organize and collect movies you've seen, albums you own, and books you've read. In its heyday the app inspired a generation of design-obsessed Mac developers, but it never found a home on iPhone, so various apps have sprouted up to fill the gap. Limelight for iPhone is the latest example, created by Everyme co-founder Oliver Cameron. Everyme, a mobile social network for your family and friends, didn't take off because its focus on mobile was too narrow — and Limelight, a collection of your favorite movies, goes even narrower. It's a social network built just for your circle of movie buff friends. You can add movies to your collection, see what movies friends have added, rate movies you've just seen, watch trailers, and view a list of films Nikolaj Colster-Waldau has starred in. Pick some upcoming movies you want to see, and Limelight will push you a notification when the movie hits theatres.

The app features a very meticulous fit and finish, from its poster-flip animation to its wood shelving. Limelight is a love letter to Delicious Library, which introduced the idea of placing digital media on digital shelves. "That app was one of the main reasons I got into writing software," says Cameron. "The main goal for this app was that each tap should have a reaction. Things should bounce. It should feel satisfactory when you add things to your library." To that extent Limelight is a success, though it's only on iPhones, and is admittedly limited in scope compared to feature-rich competitors like Recall and Todo Movies.

"The main goal for this app was that each tap should have a reaction."

"One of the things really missing from the app industry right now is extra level of polish," Cameron says. "The way Apple is going to go with iOS 7 is not necessarily making the UI flat. It's going to be more about making the UI really fluid." After spending a year building Everyme, Cameron longed to rejoin Apple's lively "indie" developer community, and to give the idea of a pocket-sized social network another shot. His new company, 9:42 AM is named after the moment Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone. "The thesis we have for 9:42 AM is to make simple apps that solve clear use cases," he says. "Every app has its purpose."

Limelight is designed to "do one thing well," but it stands out more for its design than for its functionality. It's simple to add movies and share your library with friends, but it's social networking aspect is limited to following others. There's no way to share a movie with a friend inside the app — there's only the ability to tweet a link or post it to Facebook. Limelight's discovery feature is also limited, providing an awkward selection of films inside broad categories like Adventure, Crime, and Family. Yet, thanks to a a clever and polished design, the app's a pleasure to use. Limelight is at its core a to-do list mashed up with a movie database, wrapped in a beautiful package — for Cameron and iOS design nerds, that should be enough.