Author Archives: Saqib Shah

‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ is coming to Blu-ray in the US for the first time

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If streaming the Neon Genesis Evangelion saga on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video has made you an acolyte of the hit anime, then we have good news. The original series is coming to Blu-Ray for the first time in North America. 

But, this isn't just a regular physical release. Billed as "Neon Genesis Evangelion: Ultimate Edition," the box set is spread across 11 discs, contains over 7 hours of bonus features, along with extras that span a 156 page book, art boards and limited edition artwork, a Sachiel resin paperweight and a NERV ID Card with lanyard. 

The release includes the official and classic dubs and subtitled versions, plus the follow-up films, Evangelion: Death (True)² and The End of Evangelion. All of that will cost you $275 during the current pre-order period, which ends December 7th. Afterwards, you'll have to fork out $350 for the special release. As of now, the Blu-Ray is listed as sold out in the US, probably because fans quickly snapped up the 5,000 copies that were available. Though it still appears to be in stock in the UK, where it's limited to just 2,500 copies.

GKIDS Films
GKIDS Films

Despite all the riches on offer, what you won't get here is the series' "Fly me to the Moon" ending theme, likely due to licensing issues. As fans will know, the song was also missing from Neon Genesis Evangelion on Netflix. The streamer opted to replace it with "Hostility Restrained" from the show's score. Those feeling wistful can listen to it in the video below. 

Hackers steal $97 million from Japan’s Liquid crypto exchange

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Just days after a hacker pulled off an audacious crypto heist, another major public breach has occured. Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid is the latest victim of a cyberattack that has seen hackers make off with an estimated $97 million in stolen assets. The funds include $45 million in Ethereum tokens, which the culprit is converting into Ether using decentralised exchanges to avoid them being frozen, according to Elliptic, a crypto tracking firm that is assisting Liquid in its investigation. 

Liquid revealed on Thursday morning, Singapore time, that it had detected unauthorized access of some customers' crypto wallets. The breach prompted it to halt all crypto withdrawals, though other services including fiat withdrawals and deposits were kept open. In its most recent update on Twitter, the company said it was tracking the movement of the stolen assets and working with other exchanges to freeze and recover the funds. 

The incident is the second major crypto heist to take place this month. Earlier, a hacker stole — and quickly returned — about $611 million in in Ethereum, Shiba Inu and other digital currencies from the decentralized Poly Network finance platform. The company later offered the as-yet unidentified perpetrator a bug bounty of $500,000 for helping to identify security vulnerabilities in its systems. However, it's unclear whether the reward was used as a bargaining tool or just a means of putting a positive spin on an otherwise damaging series of events. 

Neither is this the first time a Japanese exchange has been targeted. Back in 2018, Tokyo-based Coincheck lost roughly $534 million worth of lesser-known crypto tokens in a hack. Earlier still, in 2014, its Japanese peer Mt. Gox lost between $400 million and $480 million in a crypto heist, which resulted in Japan's legislators passing a law to regulate bitcoin exchanges.

Apple employees likely won’t return to the office until 2022

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Apple has again pushed back its planned return to the office for US workers due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. Bloomberg reports that the company has shifted its October date to January, though the schedule remains tentative for now. 

Apple reportedly told employees in a memo that it would confirm the re-opening deadline one month before staff are expected to return to corporate workplaces. Like many employers, the iPhone maker is also preparing for a hybrid work routine. Apple apparently expects staff to attend the office at least three days a week — Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays — with the option to work remotely on Wednesday and Friday.

The delay is the latest bout of disruption to Apple's business. Its previous return to work deadline of September was met with resistance by some employees, who claimed their voices were being ignored. The same subset of workers also demanded a full-time remote work option. 

On the retail side, Apple has repeatedly been forced to shutter its stores alongside the rise and fall of the virus. Just this week, it closed its store in Charleston, South Carolina, after more than 20 staff members were exposed to COVID-19. The decision reflected the risks Apple is facing in resuming normal operations. 

Apple re-opened its retail stores earlier this year and has not indicated whether it plans to close them again, despite the spread of COVID-19 fueled by the Delta variant. Though, it quickly backtracked on its plan to restore in-store educational classes. Apple also recently reinstated its mask mandate for staff and store visitors in July after dropping the requirement in June for vaccinated customers. While its hardware business is facing the same chip shortage problem that has entangled the rest of the tech industry.

Dell’s new monitor lineup includes a $350 portable second screen

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Dell is back with a variety of new monitors that range from its first 14-inch portable to a trio of 27-inch displays. At its thinnest, the former is just 4.95mm thick — making it slimmer than an iPad Air, but slightly heavier at 1.3 pounds. The portable display is essentially a second screen that you can slot in your bag or purse when you leave your home office to go to work. In terms of design, the $350 monitor is attached to a tilt stand that beefs up its overall dimensions and weight. But, it also allows you to bend the display up to 90 degrees. It will be available worldwide on August 31st.

Dell
Dell

The 27-inch monitors include a 4K model with a 60Hz refresh rate that is the priciest of the lot at $620. There's also AMD FreeSync for tear-free, low-latency gaming. Like several of the other newcomers, the S2722QC comes with a USB-C port that can receive a display and data signal plus deliver enough power (up to 65W) to charge your laptop. 

Dell
Dell

If you're on a tighter budget, there's also a $500 27-inch display dubbed the S2722DC, which essentially swaps 4K for QHD visuals with a higher 75Hz refresh rate. Both screens arrive August 19th. For $100 more, you can grab some neat extras for video calls on the 27-inch S2722DZ, including a pop-up 5-megapixel camera, noise-cancelling mics and dual 5W speakers. If you don't mind settling with full HD instead of QHD, then the 24-inch S2422HZ offers similar specs for $440. The two displays will come to North America first on September 7th followed by the rest of the world from October 12th.

Dell
Dell

Amazon is reportedly planning to open mini department stores

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Amazon is preparing to increase its brick and mortar footprint in a big way. The retailer plans to open several large physical locations in the US akin to department stores, according to anonymous sources cited by The Wall Street Journal. The new stores — the first of which will come to Ohio and California — will sell clothing, household items and electronics from "top consumer brands." Obviously, shoppers can also expect to run into Amazon's own-brand products, too.

While the sites are tipped to be around the third of the size of a typical department store at 30,000 square feet, they'll still be much larger than Amazon's other physical locations. The move sees the company expanding into an area it originally disrupted as it grew into an all-in-one online shopping destination. 

With their sales already plummeting, the pandemic sealed the fate of several high-profile department stores. The likes of J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus Group have filed for bankruptcy along with other big names in the sector. Though some were thrown a lifeline when they managed to attract new owners. 

Amazon, on the other hand, has seen its fortunes skyrocket during the pandemic as it profited from an increasing shift toward e-commerce. Its booming business even helping to bankroll founder Jeff Bezos' trip into space.

Amazon's move into physical retail predates the virus, however. The company started with brick and mortar bookstores back in 2015, later acquiring Whole Foods for $13.4 billion in 2017. More recently, it opened cashierless Amazon Go stores in the US and UK. Not to mention its highly-curated Amazon 4-star stores and Amazon Pop-Ups inside malls.

The larger stores are apparently viewed as a way of letting shoppers try before they buy, which is particularly useful for things like apparel. That's an area where Amazon has historically struggled. As the WSJ notes, the only high-fashion label on its online store is Oscar de la Renta. It also lost a major seller in Nike in 2019, which decided to go it alone in e-commerce — a move that has paid off for the sneaker company.

Amazon's department stores would also allow it to showcase its range of electronics, from its Fire TVs and tablets to Echo speakers to its Ring home security range, and even its Luna cloud gaming service. Notably, big box retailers have shown that emboldened shoppers are returning to stores. Both Walmart and Target recently smashed estimates in their respective second quarters as sales rose across most categories.

‘Splitgate’, the FPS with portals, has shot past 10 million downloads

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Splitgate, a frenetic free-to-play arena shooter with portals, has become a word of mouth hit with 10 million downloads in under 30 days. Developer 1047 Games has announced that the game will remain in open beta indefinitely as it works on managing the sudden influx of players. As a result, Splitgate is no longer slated to fully launch this month. Instead, 1047 will continue to roll out updates and fixes to the game complete with new content and improvements to the backend that can facilitate the uptick in players. Queue times are now less than 10 minutes and a new Ranked Duos mode recently went live.

Splitgate injected the tired arena shooter with a much needed blast of vitality by adding portals to the mix. Players can cast these wormholes around the map and even shoot opponents through them. It helps that it's free-to-play, contains a variety of guns and plenty of game modes (like Team deathmatch, Team Shotty Snipers and Team SWAT). 

While the game has been in early access since 2019, it exploded in popularity in the wake of its open beta launch in early July, which brought with it cross-play with Xbox and PlayStation consoles. According to 1047, the shooter went from an initial 4,000 concurrent players to more than 175,000 in a few weeks. Naturally, the massive increase caused backend issues. Splitgate was taken offline twice in recent weeks as the small 1047 team worked on server optimizations. 

In late July, the developer announced that it had raised $10 million in a recent funding round led by Human Capital on top of the $6.5 million it snagged earlier in the year. 1047 said it would put the money toward expanding its engineering team. The company also has a major announcement in store for Gamescom later this month as it looks to build on Splitgate's breakout success. In a recent Q&A session on Twitch, the developer reportedly mentioned that a Switch and mobile port of the game was "part of the vision."

“This has been the most surreal time of my life,” said Ian Proulx, CEO and co-founder of 1047 Games. “The fan support has been incredible as we work to improve the player experience. We never dreamed of having to scale this big this quickly, and as a result we have had to overcome challenges to keep up with player demand. We met several major milestones in a short time, creating a stable platform where fans can expect to find a server to play on relatively quickly, and I’m proud of what our team has accomplished - but there’s a lot more to come!”

Proulx continued, “In looking at the issues facing the scalability of the game’s backend, the process includes far more than simply dealing with server capacity. We are focused on keeping the game stable for fans, and iterating on the game’s concurrent capacity in order to minimize player wait times. We want to do this the right way, and we want to be prepared for massive scale when we officially launch, all the while continuing to improve the beta with frequent updates, additional features, and improvements to server capacity.”

Samsung is removing ads from its One UI Android apps

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Samsung's insistence on shoving ads into its stock apps has detracted from its otherwise stellar phones. If the pop-ups inside Samsung Pay and Music irked you, we have good news: They'll soon be axed for good. “Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme,” the company confirmed in a statement. “The update will be ready by later this year.”

The move to cull in-app ads was first reported by Korean media who attributed it to TM Roh, president and head of mobile communications business, Samsung Electronics. In response to a question by an employee at the company's online town hall, the exec said that ads would go away in future versions of apps like Samsung Pay, Samsung Themes and Samsung Weather. Roh hinted that the reversal was made in response to user and staff feedback.

We were never fans of the in-app ads here at Engadget. In our recent reviews of the flagship S21 Ultra and mid-range A52 5G, we noted that the "lousy" ads in Samsung's Weather and Daily news apps felt "unpleasant and weird." It seems Samsung finally took heed of the criticism, especially from irritated users, and decided to ditch them altogether.

Samsung is removing ads from its One UI Android apps

Posted on by

Samsung's insistence on shoving ads into its stock apps has detracted from its otherwise stellar phones. If the pop-ups inside Samsung Pay and Music irked you, we have good news: They'll soon be axed for good. “Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme,” the company confirmed in a statement. “The update will be ready by later this year.”

The move to cull in-app ads was first reported by Korean media who attributed it to TM Roh, president and head of mobile communications business, Samsung Electronics. In response to a question by an employee at the company's online town hall, the exec said that ads would go away in future versions of apps like Samsung Pay, Samsung Themes and Samsung Weather. Roh hinted that the reversal was made in response to user and staff feedback.

We were never fans of the in-app ads here at Engadget. In our recent reviews of the flagship S21 Ultra and mid-range A52 5G, we noted that the "lousy" ads in Samsung's Weather and Daily news apps felt "unpleasant and weird." It seems Samsung finally took heed of the criticism, especially from irritated users, and decided to ditch them altogether.

ASUS updates its ROG Phone series with Qualcomm’s newest mobile processor

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ASUS is updating its range of ROG gaming phones at a fast clip to keep up with the latest processor advancements. The new ROG Phone 5S and 5S Pro, the fifth and latest additions to the high-end lineup, pack Qualcomm's fresh Snapdragon 888+ 5G chipset, a beefed-up version of the base 888 found inside predecessor, the ROG Phone 5. It's not the first phone to get the processor, though. That accolade went to the Xiaomi Mi Mix 4. In fact, we knew the 888+ was coming to the ROG phone: Qualcomm listed ASUS' gaming handset as a partner earlier this summer, along with devices from Vivo, Honor and Motorola.

The processor itself promises a clock speed boost from a peak 2.86GHz to nearly 3GHz courtesy of its Kryo 680 CPU architecture. It also boasts a 20 percent AI improvement with up to 32 TOPS AI performance. All of which is to say it's a natural fit for a premium gaming phone.

ASUS ROG Phone 5S
ASUS

Beyond the upgraded chipset, the new ROG phones sport the same 6.78-inch 144Hz display, 6,000 mAh battery and triple rear cameras with a 64-megapixel main sensor as their predecessor. Additional updates include a more responsive 360Hz touch-sampling rate (which still doesn't match the 720Hz responsiveness of Lenovo's Legion Phone Duel 2) and a max 18GB and 512GB storage on the 5S Pro. You can also expect ultrasonic sensors for the AirTrigger 5 buttons and grip press detection.

According to Gizmochina, the two phones are currently only available to pre-order in ASUS' native Taiwan ahead of an August 24th shipping date. The 5S costs $1,077/$1,221 based on RAM and storage and the 5S Pro costs $1,365.

T-Mobile confirms data breach affects over 47 million people

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As part of its ongoing data breach investigation, T-Mobile has confirmed the enormity of the stolen information. Roughly 47.8 million current and former or prospective customers have been affected by the cyberattack on its systems, the carrier confirmed on Wednesday. Of that number, about 7.8 million are current T-Mobile postpaid accounts and the rest are prior or potential users who had applied for credit, the company added in a press release. 

Worryingly, the data includes some personal information including the first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for a "subset of customers." So far, T-Mobile said it does not have any indication that the stolen files contain phone numbers, account numbers, passwords or financial information.

What's more, the company said about 850,000 active T-Mobile prepaid customers also had their names, phone numbers and account PINs exposed. The affected users do not include Metro by T-Mobile, former Sprint prepaid, or Boost users and T-Mobile said it has reset the PINs on these accounts. In addition, it claimed that "some additional information" from inactive prepaid accounts was accessed through prepaid billing files.

The findings from the carrier's preliminary analysis come just days after it was notified of a data breach. Initially, it was reported that a member of an underground forum claimed to have obtained the data for over 100 million T-Mobile customers. The culprit was reportedly selling information of about 30 million T-Mobile customers for about $270,000 in Bitcoin. 

As part of its compensation and mitigation efforts, T-Mobile is offering affected customers two years of McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service; recommending all postpaid users change their PIN; and setting up an online resource page. T-Mobile said that it began coordination with law enforcement on Tuesday as its investigation into the data breach — the third such attack it has suffered in the past two years — continues.