Starting at 2:00 p.m. PST today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta Ring will begin receiving the latest 1904 Xbox One system update (19h1_release_xbox_dev_1904.190221-2147). Read on for more about the new features, fixes and known issues in the latest 1904 system update.

New Features:

A complete feature list for 1904 is published here https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/02/21/new-features-rolling-out-to-xbox-insiders-this-spring/

This build contains the new Storage uninstall feature to please test.

Improved uninstall

When you try to install a new game or app today with a full HDD we send you to your collection to choose what to remove. The new suggested uninstall feature will instead send you to a page that has titles suggested for removal that will free up enough space for your install and to make things even easier it will auto-kickoff the install once the space is freed up!

You can also get to the new drive manager page via Settings > System > Storage (then select the storage device and Uninstall items) to easily manage your existing content and uninstall multiple titles at once.

Fixes:

My Games and Apps

• We have resolved a system memory leak that will address the following issues with games and apps:
  
  • Apps such as Netflix unable to launch or crashing on launch.
  • Various games simply fail to launch with a generic error message after playing a 4k title for a period of time.
  • If playing a 4k title and taking a series of screenshots or game DVR clips you would find the system slow or lock up.

System

• We have resolved a system memory leak that will address the following issue on home:
  
  • When playing a game and returning to the guide you would see corrupt text or missing graphics on home.

• The system clock is now displaying on home for various locales.
• Localization fixes.

Known Issues:

Achievements

• Achievements list not being displayed while in a game.

Audio

• We are aware of issues of No Audio heard from Non-Spatial Audio games when using Dolby Atmos for Home Theater with the LG SJ9 soundbar.

 Disney Adventures

• We are tracking an issue that this title is crashing on launch.

 Game Pass Mobile App

• Issue/Impact – After pushing a remote installation of a game from the Game Pass mobile app, customers will not see progress of the installation on in the mobile app and may not receive install notifications.  The game will still successfully install if there is sufficient available space on the console.
• Affected audience – must be in 1904 preview, must be a GP subscriber, must be using the GP mobile app, must be pushing game installations from the app.
• Workarounds – None.  A fix is coming in the next version of the mobile app in March.  Customers interested in getting early access to the fix can download the Game Pass Beta app.

Messaging

• We are tracking that some users are report unable to send/receive messages with latest update.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

System

• We are tracking an issue in which the Console locks up when accessing guide after playing a title or app.

Japan often plays hosts to incredible Legend of Zelda concerts featuring fully orchestrated performances of beautiful pieces from the series’ history. Naturally, it’d be pretty expensive to fly over there and experience one first hand, but this new CD and blu-ray release might just do the trick.

Available with international shipping via Amazon Japan, this release comes in two variants. You can either grab a CD featuring a full soundtrack recording from the 2018 concert, or a fancy limited edition which also comes with a blu-ray of the performance and other goodies shown in the image below.

The standalone CD costs ￥3,240 before shipping (approx. £22 / $29), whereas the limited edition costs ￥4,972 (approx. £34 / $44.50).

You can get a sense of the audiovisual delights contained in the release with this video below. That Breath of the Wild intro… *shivers*.

Thinking of picking one up? Let us know which edition you might get in the comments.

Today’s Deal: Save up to 90% on select titles during the GameChanger Charity Event!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time

It’s that time of year again… You know the one, it happens every year in December and brings a tear to everybody’s eye… That’s right, it’s the last major snapshot of the year! Todays snapshot brings us a lot of cool Village related features, and we’re happy to finally get these out to you all before the year’s up. We weren’t able to finish everything we wanted, however, so we’ll see you again soon in January with even more Village & Pillage features to help test! Have a great new year, everybody!

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

• Added Barrel functionality
• Added Blast Furnace functionality
• Added Smoker functionality
• Added Bell sound
• Added Jellie
• New villages
• Updated Villager
• Changes to raids
• Updated some textures
• Fixed bugs

BARREL

• Acts as a storage unit for all your things
• Works in tight spaces

BLAST FURNACE

• New furnace upgrade that allows for the smelting of ores and melting of metals faster than the traditional Furnace.
• Can be crafted via 3 Smooth Stone, 1 Furnace, and 5 Iron Ingots.

SMOKER

• New furnace upgrade that allows for the smelting of foods faster than the traditional Furnace.
• Can be crafted via 4 Logs, and 1 Furnace.

VILLAGES

• Added Taiga villages
• Updated Desert villages

VILLAGERS

• Villagers and Zombie Villagers now have new fancy skins
• Added Mason profession (trades will come later)
• Cured Zombie Villagers retain their trades

RAID CHANGES

• Patrol captains now give 1-3 bad omen levels when killed. Outpost captains always give 1 only
• Captains now spawn at outposts
• Beasts start at wave 2, witches at wave 4, evoker wave 10

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!

This week at Bungie, we prepare for Crimson Days.

Rewards from last year’s event will be returning, with the added fire of The Vow, a new solar bow for players to earn during this event. All players of Destiny 2 are invited to join in on the festivities.

We’ll also be hosting a Bungie Bounty to celebrate the event. Come watch as Cozmo and I dive in to the Crimson Days playlist on PlayStation 4.

Crimson Days Bungie Bounty

Date: Thursday, February 14

Time: 11 AM–1 PM PST

Watch: Twitch.tv/Bungie

Find us, beat us, and claim a Sign of Mutual Combat Emblem. Until then, we have some news to cover. Let’s dive in.

Skating at the Speed of Light

When Destiny 2 launched on PC, some Titans among you were quick to realize that they could break the sound barrier through tricky input methods. The Sandbox team has been hard at work, looking at ways to address this issue without impacting general movement for the Titan class. We are currently planning for changes to be implemented in Destiny 2 Update 2.2.0, coming in March, to address Titan Skating. Here are the details:

Sandbox: Later this month, we are fixing an issue with the Titan Lift ability that currently allows players, with the use of unconventional inputs (keybinding to mouse scrollwheel, macros, etc.), to reach extremely excessive movement speeds. It will still be possible to maximize your Lift speed by skillfully timing your Lift activation inputs to boost your overall momentum. In other words, “Titan Skating” is still possible, just less excessive.

Some of you may be asking why this is being addressed. Players utilizing these unconventional methods are effectively able to exceed the bounds of expected Guardian movement speed so drastically that it creates an unfair advantage when it comes to the fundamentals of combat gameplay like aiming, positioning, and even networking to some degree. We understand that many players value and enjoy this behavior as a core part of the overall skillset and identity of the Titan class. However, we’d rather continue to build on the Titan identity and fantasy of being a fast-moving, aggressive, jetpack warrior by continuing to build new, fully supported abilities. Our goal is to create abilities that are fun, effective, and skillful without requiring special hardware or macros to access them.

Players who do not use macros should not feel any difference once this change is deployed. This strictly addresses Lift acceleration issues on PC; players who don’t utilize unconventional input methods should feel no difference.

We encourage you to keep an eye out for any inconsistencies and to let us know if this change does not meet your expectations for how Lift should work.

Reading Material

For those looking to dive deeper into the story and lore of the Destiny universe, we are very happy to announce Destiny Comic Collection Vol. One and Destiny Grimoire Anthology Vol. Two are coming soon.

Available this Summer, the Destiny Comic Collection Vol. One is an essential collection of comic stories for Destiny fans. This 144-page volume includes Bungie’s comic collection plus never before seen stories, behind the scenes galleries, and exclusive content from featured artists!

Destiny Grimoire Anthology Vol. Two is coming this Fall as the next edition of the popular Grimoire series.

These titles will be available at the Bungie Store and other booksellers. Stay tuned for more details. Be sure to visit the Bungie Store product pages linked above and click “Email When Available” to be among the first to know when the books are open for pre-order. 

Live Investigations

Week in and week out, the Player Support team is at the ready to lend a hand when things go sideways. This week, we deployed a fix to address issues impacting weapon frames, and we have some information to get you ready for the incoming Crimson Days event.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.1.4.1

Yesterday, to resolve issues blocking players from completing certain weapon frames from Ada-1, we deployed Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.1.4.1. Patch notes can be found here.

The Iron Price

In the pursuit of an even playing field for all players, we are updating Iron Banner bounties so that they will expire following the launch of each new season in Destiny 2.

For example, completed Iron Banner bounties retained from Season of the Forge will be removed entirely from player inventories once Season of the Drifter begins. To avoid losing any potential rewards, we recommend that players redeem powerful rewards from all sources before Season of the Forge ends.

For more information on when Season of the Drifter begins, please stay tuned to our News page.

Un-breaking the Mold

Since mid-January, Destiny Player Support has monitored an issue where the Black Armory Key Mold is available from Ada-1 only on a player’s first character. This pursuit item is required to earn Izanagi’s Burden, and some players have become blocked from unlocking this weapon on their character of choice.

With the upcoming release of Destiny 2 Update 2.2.0, tentatively scheduled for early March, we expect this issue to be resolved. As always, Destiny Player Support will monitor for player reports in the #Help forum once Update 2.2.0 goes live.

Return of Crimson Days

Next Tuesday, February 12, Crimson Days will return in Destiny 2. While all players are invited to experience this event, some Triumphs and rewards may not be available on characters who do not meet the following requirements:

Warming Up

Monday, the majority of Seattle residents were stuck in their homes, hiding from the weather. What better way to pass the time than 90 minutes of Destiny Lore? Seriously, this week’s winner packs a punch. If you’ve ever wanted to know the story behind Last Word, check this out.

Movie of the Week: The Last Word and Thorn. The Complete Story.

Runner Up: Wait, what? I’m sorry. You did WHAT with six swords? Against a giant robot floating above an abyss? I can’t even give this a witty title. It’s pure insanity. Why would you do this?!

Community Artist Alley 

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week for Crimson Days! Until then, you’ll find me in the Crucible practicing for the Bounty next Thursday…

Cheers,

Dmg04

Do you want to know when a new version of your favorite project is released? Do you want to make your job as packager easier? If so, this article is for you. It introduces you to the world of release-monitoring.org. You’ll see how it can help you catch up with upstream releases.

What is release-monitoring.org?

The release-monitoring.org is a combination of two applications: Anitya and the-new-hotness.

Anitya is what you can see when visiting release-monitoring.org. You can use it to add and manage your projects. Anitya also checks for new releases periodically.

The-new-hotness is an application that catches the messages emitted by Anitya. It creates a Bugzilla issue if the project is mapped to a Fedora package.

How to use release-monitoring.org

Now that you know how it works, let’s focus on how you can use it.

First think you need to do is to log in. Anitya provides a few options you can use to log in, including the Fedora Account System (FAS), Yahoo!, or a custom OpenID server.

When you’re logged in, you’ll see new options in the top panel.

Add a new project

Now you can add a new project. It’s always good to check whether the project is already added.

Next, fill in the information about the project:

• Project name – Use the upstream project name
• Homepage – Homepage of the project
• Backend – Backend is simply the web hosting where the project is hosted. Anitya offers many backends you can chose from. If you can’t find a backend for your project, you can use the custom backend. Every backend has its own additional fields. For example, BitBucket has you specify owner/project.
• Version scheme – This is used to sort received versions. Right now, Anitya only supports RPM version scheme.
• Version prefix – This is the prefix that is stripped from any received version. For example, if the tag on GitHub is version_1.2.3, you would use version_ as version prefix. The version will then be presented as 1.2.3. The version prefix v is stripped automatically.
• Check latest release on submit – If you check this, Anitya will do an initial check on the project when submitted.
• Distro – The distribution in which this project is used. This could be also added later.
• Package – The project’s packaged name in the distribution. This is required when the Distro field is filled in.

When you’re happy with the project, submit it. Below you can see how your project may look after you submit.

Add a new distribution mapping

If you want to map the project to a package on a specific distribution, open up the project page first and then click on Add new distribution mapping.

Here you can chose any distribution already available in Anitya, fill in the package name, and submit it. The new mapping will show up on the project page.

Automatic filing of Bugzilla issues

Now you created a new project and created a mapping for it. This is nice, but how does this help you as a packager? This is where the-new-hotness comes into play.

Every time the-new-hotness sees a new update or new mapping message emitted by Anitya, it checks whether this project is mapped to a package in Fedora. For this to work, the project must have a mapping to Fedora added in Anitya.

If the package is known, the-new-hotness checks the notification setting for this package. That setting can be changed here. The last check the-new-hotness does is whether the version reported by Anitya is newer than the current version of this package in Fedora Rawhide.

If all those checks are positive, the new Bugzilla issue is filed and a Koji scratch build started. After the Koji build is finished, the Bugzilla is updated with output.

Future plans for release-monitoring.org

The release-monitoring.org system is pretty amazing, isn’t it? But this isn’t all. There are plenty of things planned for both Anitya and the-new-hotness. Here’s a short list of future plans:

Anitya

• Add libraries.io consumer – automatically check for new releases on libraries.io, create projects in Anitya and emit messages about updates
• Use Fedora package database to automatically guess the package name in Fedora based on the project name and backend
• Add semantic and calendar version scheme
• Change current cron job to service: Anitya checks for new versions periodically using a cron job. The plan is to change this to a service that checks projects using queues.
• Support for more than one version prefix

the-new-hotness

• File Github issues for Flathub projects when a new version comes out
• Create pull requests in Pagure instead of filing a Bugzilla issue
• Move to OpenShift – this should make deployment much easier than how it is now
• Convert to Python 3 (mostly done)

Both

• Conversion to fedora-messaging – This is already in progress and should make communication between Anitya and the-new-hotness more reliable.

Photo by Alexandre Debiève on Unsplash.

October 28, 2019

Lyon Convention Centre

69463 Lyon

France

Open Source Summit Europe (OSSEU) is the leading conference for developers, architects, and other technologists – as well as open source community and industry leaders – to collaborate, share information, learn about the latest technologies and gain a competitive advantage by using innovative open solutions. Over 2,000 will gather for OSSEU in 2019. Learn More

Click Here!

Media coverage from the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona has worked to establish a narrative that Apple is dangerously behind other companies in releasing support for 5G mobile networks and the foldable screens that enable a phone to convert into a tablet. Yet, the last decade of MWC shows that vendor announcements aren’t really worth very much.

Media fawning over concepts, yet consumers unmoved

MWC could be viewed as the mobile industry’s equivalent to the Consumer Technology Association’s CES trade show. Just as Apple solidly upstaged the announcements at CES for fifteen years, the iPhone maker has done the same to MWC over the last decade, despite Apple’s initial position as a fledgling mobile maker among solidly entrenched incumbents.

While competitors have consistently announced ideas first, Apple is unique in being able to correctly envision what its customers will want, and then actually develop working, finished ideas it is then able to ship and, most importantly, sell to buyers in significant volumes.

Other companies, notably Samsung, had demonstrated promising ideas of grand visions of their own, but haven’t had much success in actually selling those concepts. Overall, MWC vendors have outlined a broad range of ideas reaching into the premium space, but have largely only been able to perpetuate their miserable, unprofitable cycles of selling lower-end, largely unimaginative commodity products.

To clarify how likely it is that today’s MWC announcements are going to have any real impact on Apple’s operations or market position, take a look at the last ten years of Apple simply clobbering the entire gamut of the mobile industry. This is all despite year after year of MWC announcements that excited the media but failed to have much commercial or cultural impact at all.

MWC 2010: Lots of promising ideas crushed by iOS

In 2010, MWC officially honored Steve Jobs as its “mobile industry personality of the year.” Apple was nowhere to be seen at the February trade show. Instead, Jobs had introduced Apple’s then-new iPad at its own event in January.

Pundits had crapped all over iPad at its 2010 unveiling. Back then, I was interviewed by tech outlets who never published my interview because it didn’t fit the narrative they were working to create —they only wanted to hear opinions of why iPad would fail.

Yet, just weeks later the same media sources were breathlessly excited to fantasize about the prospects of a series of things being shown at MWC 2010 that today are remembered as hilariously doomed failures.

These included Microsoft’s finally-shipping Windows Phone 7, an attempt at rivaling Apple’s iPhone, albeit three years late. “Every Windows Phone 7 Device is a Zune,” PC World noted at the time, with no apparent awareness of the irony.

To the world outside of Apple, Microsoft’s MP3 playing Zune wasn’t yet officially a failure, and Windows Phone 7 was definitely going to be big. That same logic was never used to explain that Apple’s iPod sales weren’t shrinking, but actually growing as iPhones became a new more premium tier of “Widescreen iPods.”

Pundits painted success as failure, and failure as success.

Beyond Microsoft, Google’s Android was finally becoming a mass market option for phone makers. Yet as with the short and tortured existence of WP7, Apple’s iOS was about to kill off the remains of Android’s original originality.

At the time, Android was still a weird experiment stuck between its initial design created by Google—a button phone with a trackball for navigation—and its ultimate destiny as being little more than a means to knockoff the surface design of Apple’s iPhones.

After iPhone, Google’s Android did try to launch original ideas—like the HTC G1’s trackball—each of which was later incrementally stripped away to look more like an iPhone

At WMC 2010, HTC was showing off its Android Legend phone using an optical trackpad spot instead of the physical trackball that Google had come up with for its own PC-like alternative to multitouch navigation on the earlier HTC-built Dream (aka Tmobile G1). That later was stripped away as well.

A few years later, Google fans would be saying that Androids looked just like iPhones simply because there is really only one way to make a phone, until iPhone X changed that one design dramatically and Androids all jumped in line to copy it, too, notch and all.

Another dead-end trend visible at MWC 2010: mini smartphones, seen in HTC’s HD mini and the Palm Pixi Plus, as well as tiny phones attempted earlier by Nokia and Samsung. All of this sent pundits into an excited clamoring for more tiny phones. Why wasn’t Apple making an iPhone mini? This was later answered when mini phones failed to sell.

Another big, exciting trend from MWC 2010 that is now forgotten history: the idea that Android licensees had the “freedom” to fashion their own innovative, proprietary UI appearances and behaviors on top of the Android foundation. Google once touted this as a feature of the platform before switching gears to advertise its own Nexus phones as “pure,” stripped of the obnoxious crap licensees were ruining their products with.

Motorola showed phones with MotoBlur UI, while HTC showed the Desire, effectively a Google One with HTC’s own Sense UI applied to it. This was supposed to make Android interesting and foster innovation, but really just confused users and fragmented their experience.

Sony Ericsson launched new Android and Symbian phones at MWC 2010, both with slide-out physical keyboards that nobody thinks of using anymore. At the time these were considered to be a feature Apple was missing. Were Android licensees too weak or incompetent to make their ideas stick, or was Apple just always right about its design decisions? It’s hard to say.

Another notable idea from a decade ago: just as Android was beginning to take off, Samsung used MWC 2010 to make a “splashy” launch of Bada OS on its Wave handset. Bada was Samsung’s new Linux-based OS that has since gone nowhere, but was intended to free Samsung from Google’s control over Android. Why was Samsung already itching to leave Android?

“Highly confidential” internal documents revealed during Samsung’s iPhone copycatting trial showed Samsung was worried about competitive threats in Google’s partnership with HTC and its acquisition of Motorola.

In parallel, mobile giant Nokia and chipzilla Intel presented MeeGo at MWC 2010, their own Mobile Linux project to rival Android and iPhones.

Samsung’s Bada initiative ultimately failed, as did Google’s partnership with HTC and its acquisition of Motorola, and Intel and Nokia’s MeeGo. Yet all along, pundits were desperately concerned with how Apple could possibly stay in business when facing the coordinated alliance of Android partners that were all marching in lockstep to kill the iPhone.

The reality was that Google and its Android licensees were all desperately paranoid and incompetent, plotting against each other and working at cross purposes. Did members of the media have no idea this was occurring, or did they cover this all up to create the illusion of Android being a world-leading, united competitor to Apple? Again, it’s really hard to say whether they were ignorant or stupid.

One last idea from 2010 that sounds like a modern-day fantasy: think of a light, thin notebook running on a Snapdragon ARM chip, with integrated mobile data and an OLED touch display. That’s what HP Compaq debuted in 2010 under the AirLife brand, which it called a smartbook.

HP’s Android-based AirLife was suffocated in part by Google’s opposition

Attendees sounded excited about this Android netbook, but it wasn’t yet shipping and there was no price set yet. Nobody is using AirLife smartbooks today, and HP didn’t weather the introduction of Apple’s iPad very well.

In fact, within a few months, HP would buy Palm for its webOS and launch its own attempt at beating iPad using that new platform. That step cast doubt on the future of HP’s Android phones and tablets, including the AirLife.

Interestingly, Davide Dicenso, a member of HP’s Emerging Platforms Group that created the AirLife, noted that it was contention between HP and Google over its design that prompted HP to attempt to develop webOS as its own platform, independent from Google.

While Google appeared to be open to licensees using Android in new ways, Dicenso noted that Google was “not pleased with the form factor, [which was] too different from a phone for which Android OS was conceived. The result? We still shipped but without Google’s app store, G Suite and any support to Google’s services.”

Are you picking up what I’m putting down

Over the next decade, these themes of adversarial contention, poorly conceived failed concepts, and ideological dogma kept resurfacing at MWC. It bamboozled attendees with products that would never matter while making grand claims about the future that weren’t going to pan out.

Oddly enough, at the same time, Apple kept introducing incredibly successful new products at a regular clip. Within 2010, rather than just dumping out a failed OS strategy, more bad navigation experiments, a mini phone, or a smartbook, Apple launched the world changing iPad even as it increased Mac sales by 30 percent. It then introduced the all-new design of iPhone 4 and its new iOS-based Apple TV.

And yet tech industry pundits kept repeating the idea that Apple was suffering from a lack of innovation while its products were being sold at prices that were just too high to make any meaningful difference in the market. This has solidly continued every year for ten years.

MWC 2011: Android Everywhere, Albeit On Fire

In 2011, Apple again launched iPad 2 in January, prior to MWC, which was increasingly being taken over by Google. Motorola, which Google would later acquire, was showing off a series of products including the Xoom, Motorola’s official Android 3.0 Honeycomb answer to Apple’s iPad.

Motorola’s pretentious ad for Xoom portrayed it as a joyful device that made the world better, rather than arrogantly overpriced and sloppily unfinished

A recap written by the Telegraph noted that Google’s then Chief Executive Eric Schmidt delivered a MWC keynote speech where he showed off the Xoom’s new movie editor,

The Xoom was priced higher than Apple’s iPad but Motorola was confident it would sell because it had more features, including the ability to connect to 4G networks.

Beyond Xoom—which would go down as one of the worst tablet failures ever hyped into the stratosphere with an incredible level of arrogance—Motorola was also showing off its new Atrix phone, which boasted 4G, a fingerprint sensor, and a dock connector that turned it into the brains of a netbook-like device running a Ubuntu Linux-based desktop—all features that Apple’s iPhone lacked.

Motorola Atrix 4G, docked to display a Linux desktop

Only years later did iPhones get 4G support and Touch ID, which ended up major features that drove high volumes sales. Why didn’t Atrix sell better? In part, its fingerprint sensor wasn’t secure or reliable and ended up unsupported within the year, in part because Google acquired Motorola and dropped support for it. 4G mobile service, while very fast, initially only had limited coverage and early chipsets incurred significant drawbacks including battery life and a larger case.

Despite being commercial failures, the “features” of Xoom and Atrix bellowed huge clouds of distraction, including media narratives that included the important ability to run Adobe Flash content under Android Froyo, another thing iPhones couldn’t do.

Continuing its coverage of Schmidt’s MWC keynote, the Telegraph stated, “but more than that he talked almost poetically of a world, enabled by computers, where people are ‘Not lost, never lonely, never bored.’ Little wonder expert consultants Accenture talk about a new phenomenon: ‘Android everywhere.'”

That wasn’t so much “new phenomenon:” as it was a regurgitation of Microsoft’s “Windows Everywhere” marketing of the 1990s. And notably, the idea that Windows code would someday power everyone’s office equipment and home appliances had already failed miserably in a sea of incompatibilities, competitive contention, and security lapses. Accenture was begging the question of how Android was about to do the same thing, somehow with different consequences.

Ten years later, Android isn’t “everywhere.” It’s really only on smartphones. On netbooks, TV appliances, game consoles, tablets and elsewhere, even Google is using code that isn’t Android. And Google’s top licensees, despite being unable to establish strong platforms of their own, are still trying to do so, from Samsung’s Tizen SmartTVs and Gear watches and elsewhere.

Also in 2011, LG was showing off a 3D tablet and HP launched its TouchPad, based on the webOS platform it acquired via Palm. When you look at the combined accomplishments of the entire consumer tech industry outside of Apple, it is really quite hard to understand how pundits kept wagging their innovation finger at the Mac maker while praising the vaporware and dud factories around it.

MWC 2012: Samsung ascendent

The settled narrative that Samsung invented the phablet is a little less than accurate. Back then (as today), Samsung was throwing out everything it could prototype: big tablets, little tablets, big phones and little phones like the Galaxy Mini 2.

MWC 2012 awarded its “best smartphone” award to Samsung’s Galaxy SII, the closest copy of an iPhone anyone had dared to make. The best tablet went to Apple’s iPad 2, which remained a no-show at the event.

Samsung really had no idea what people wanted. It told attendees it was also planning (in addition to last year’s Bada and continuing efforts with Android) to roll out Windows Phone 8 models, and Windows 8 tablets. That’s a lot of platforms to support.

Two years after taking on iPad, Dan Grabham noted for TechRadar that at MWC 2012, “a Samsung spokesman also got into a bit of a pickle as he said that the company wasn’t doing that well in tablets, something the company later looked to dispel.”

LG was still pushing a 3D smartphone with the Optimus 3D. Nokia was showing off its Windows Phone with a PureView camera touting a 41MP sensor. Those features got media attention but never resulted in market traction.

Huawei was touting what it claimed were the fastest mobile chips: a smartphone powered by its custom K3V2 and a MediaPad tablet running a custom developed K3. Yet seven years later, Huawei today is positioned by media wonks as if it is a fresh startup springing into the market with advanced new processor tech straight from the communist party labs, rather than simply being a company that’s been around forever and like every other Android licensee, couldn’t sell its high-end devices, forcing it to focus on cheap, profitless commodity.

This failure is rebranded as winning because Huawei now serves the largest number of people looking for a cheap handset. But more importantly, that volume of cheap hardware hasn’t created economies of scale capable of producing affordable, high-end processors the way Apple has.

Seven years later, Huawei’s new Kirin 980 isn’t just behind Apple’s A12 Bionic, it’s also struggling to keep up with last year’s A11

Today, Apple’s A12 Bionic in its newest iPhone and iPad Pro models are years ahead of Huawei—as well as being years ahead of Qualcomm, another company that used to have a solid lead in mobile chip technology.

MWC 2013: the exciting world of tablet-phones

In 2013, The Verge summed up MWC with the grammatically incorrect lede, “It’s a crazy world, one where 8-inch slates can take phone calls and 5-inch slates is the new home for 1080p full HD.”

The site was particularly excited about Windows Phone at Nokia, albeit sadly observing “Nokia’s Windows Phone range is complete, now it’s up to Microsoft.” It also noted that Nokia was trying to compete with Microsoft Surface in the Windows tablet market.

It also hyped up Firefox OS, the Asus Padfone, Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chip, and HP’s Slate 7 Android tablet, all of which went nowhere. HP had given up on webOS and sold it to LG, but moving back to Android didn’t turn its tablet prospects around.

MWC 2014: nascent wearables before Apple Watch

In 2014, PCMag tried to breathe some interest into MWC by observing, “if you think there’s nothing exciting left to invent in mobile tech, you haven’t seen anything yet. From online privacy and OLED displays to wearables and tactile touch displays, there’s plenty of innovation at MWC.”

Its top picks were Yotaphone, which had “a 5-inch 1080p AMOLED screen on one side, and a 4.7-inch, 960-by-540 E Ink display on the other” and Blackphone, a “handset that puts security first and foremost—including your texts, phone calls, and local storage, thanks to the custom-built PrivateOS built on top of Android.”

You couldn’t use Blackphone for email or run any Android apps though, or it would be as spyware-leaky as any other Android dripping with Google’s custom-built and freely-shared surveillance advertising architecture.

HP switched platforms again to promote its Pavilion X360, a convertible Windows 8.1 slate tablet/clamshell laptop.

But the real news of the show was wearables, including Samsung’s Tizen-powered Gear Fit, a bracelet design that “drops the rest of the Galaxy Gear’s gimmicks, like phone calls and the built-in camera.”

PCMag also noted that “Huawei’s getting into the fitness gadget game with the TalkBand B1, a combination wrist-worn activity tracker and Bluetooth headset that lets you answer phone calls,” while the “Sony SmartBand SWR10 is the company’s most compelling one yet. It combines an activity tracker, sleep tracker, and what Sony calls a life-logging companion inside.”

By the end of 2014, Apple showed off its new Apple Watch, which went on sale the next spring. Despite dogging media efforts to denigrate its prospects, Apple absolutely destroyed the market for premium wearables, leaving rivals to once again spend their time building low margin, low-end devices that didn’t really leave users satisfied, and subsequently didn’t have any real market impact.

MWC 2015: No Apple at the VR party

A report by TechRadar covering MWC 2015 depicted attendees as striving to catch up with Apple in the premium tier.

Writing about Samsung’s Galaxy 6S, the site noted, “as Apple has proved over the years, premium design can go a long way to deciding a smartphone’s success, and the Galaxy S6’s front and rear glass panels, combined with its metal unibody, has ramped up the appeal.”

Samsung also rolled out its own Samsung Pay competing with Google’s Android Pay to challenge Apple Pay. But after using various events to tout its Gear smartwatches, Samsung bowed out of smartwatches at MWC to wait for the launch of Apple Watch. Instead, it focused its attention on Gear VR, a way to experience binocular immersive images using a head-mounted smartphone.

HTC also worked to rival Apple’s iPhone premium with its One M9 featuring a metal look and feel, and launched its own HTC Vive VR headset.

Microsoft continued pushing Lumia and the new Windows 10 Mobile, which was looking increasingly unlikely to matter.

Ubuntu’s mobile Linux-based OS was picked up by Chinese makers who wanted an alternative to Android, including the Meizu MX4. TechRadar optimistically observed, “there aren’t many apps for it, there are even fewer handsets that run it and the software itself is buggy. But it’s hard to deny that it shows promise.”

LG, which had acquired webOS from HP 2013, used its new software to launch its Urbane smartwatch. Huawei launched its own Android Wear watch, and Pebble launched its own new wearable, of which TechRadar said, “the Apple Watch may have a competitor on its hands.”

When Apple Watch launched a few days later at Apple’s March 9 “Spring Forward” event, it ended up not having any competitors on its hands.

Pebble’s wearable was described as “maybe” being a competitor to the upcoming Apple Watch

MWC 2016: VR blows up, burns down

The following year, TechRadar observed, “Samsung has managed to somewhat steal the MWC show for the past two years, launching the Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy S6 at the 2014 and 2015 events respectively. This year has been no different, with the smartphone giant launching both the S7 and S7 Edge (with part of the press conference done in virtual reality), and surprising us with an appearance from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

It added, “Not only did Zuck explain why VR is the next social platform, but he also announced that Facebook would be bringing many more apps to Gear VR. He also confirmed the launch of Minecraft on the platform.”

Facebook’s VR partnership with Samsung didn’t move the needle

While the partnership between Facebook and Samsung got hyped up, it didn’t deliver a promised new world of VR social networking. Instead, by the end of the year, Samsung flubbed up its Galaxy Note 7 battery fiasco so badly that its entire Gear VR headset strategy was thrown into question. And nobody apart from media personalities seemed interested in VR for more than 15 minutes anyway.

At the same show, LG announced its G5, with an internal expansion bay to make it “modular.” It was a total flop. It also connected to VR. Google, HTC, Microsoft and Sony also invested big in VR, yet despite all of their combined efforts, VR ended 2016 being described as the biggest loser of the year.

Meanwhile, as the entire industry failed to deliver on VR hardware hype, Apple singlehandedly launched its very successful Apple Watch foray into wearables, while touting augmented reality as a larger opportunity. Pundits didn’t predict either outcome.

MWC 2017: Nostalgia for the time before Apple

In 2017, CNET provided a rundown of MWC that detailed a trip “back to the drawing board” with nostalgic designs. Simple phones from “Nokia” turned the once significant mobile maker into a licensed brand slapped on existing products, the same sort of humiliation suffered by Polaroid and Atari.

Blackberry unveiled its retro-design of the KeyOne, and Lenovo relaunched the Moto brand it bought from Google. Samsung didn’t bring its Galaxy S8 to the show, instead choosing to launch it at its own event, Apple style. There were, however, protesters who interrupted Samsung’s press conference to demand Samsung’s plans for millions of recalled Note 7 batteries.

The report noted that “VR was everywhere at last year’s show, but this year saw more emphasis on content and less on hardware,” and also added that “a bunch of companies have come out and said they will push to get 5G here for mass deployment by 2019—a year ahead of schedule.”

That push was driven by Qualcomm, which needed partners selling 5G as a feature iPhones lacked, given that Apple and Qualcomm had reached an impasse in chips. Without being able to articulate why 5G is important, the media narrative has erupted that its a big problem that Apple won’t have 5G iPhones for the duration of 2019.

That hot take appears to have forgotten that iPhones lacked 4G for about three years, at a time when it faced more significant competition from Motorola and others pushing 4G connectivity. If Apple could hold out for years while 4G delivered a massive, clearly visible boost in mobile data speeds compared to saturated 3G networks, surely it can hold out on 5G in a year where nobody can really use it, and current phones aren’t anywhere close to maxing out their existing potential.

MWC 2018: cheap Androids trying to look like iPhone X

For 2018, DigitalTrends noted that Samsung was back to showing its Galaxy S9 at MWC.

“On the surface, the phone isn’t all that different from the Galaxy S8, apart from a few small design tweaks like the fingerprint sensor being placed in a slightly more convenient spot,” it noted. Galaxy S9 sales have performed poorly.

The other big event of the show was Android Go, which the site stated: “is set to play an important role in bringing ultra-low-cost phones to emerging markets, and several such phones were unveiled at MWC.”

Asus launched its new Zenfone 5 series at MWC 2018, which the site declared “takes some pretty heavy design cues from the iPhone X.”

Asus Zenfone 5 “takes some pretty heavy design cues from the iPhone X”

MWC 2018: cheap Androids trying to look like iPhone X

After a solid year of desperately trying to look like an iPhone X, Android makers are now seeking to position their cheap phones under the halo umbrella of fantastically expensive folding devices. But will the buyers of cheap Androids really feel better about the existence of super expensive concept phones from the same brand?

Appel’s iPhone X, which was belabored as too expensive for most of its launch year, wasn’t merely an aspirational halo device that sought to make Apple’s other phones seem cool. It was Apple’s most popular phone at launch. It was a mass market success that major media sources flat out lied about.

This year, despite desperate attempts to repeat that strategy of lying about Apple’s “failure” until it sounded like reality, Apple’s iPhone XS and XR models were all mass market sellers, and wildly profitable. And despite a slowdown in expected sales particularly in China, Apple still brought in massively more money than all of its competition combined, globally.

So rather than MWC headlines offering any real perspective on the industry, it really looks like a hype festival that’s desperately trying to put a happy face on a series of companies that are desperately losing in the mobile arena to Apple, in conventional smartphones, in connected tablets, and in wearables.

That could change if Huawei, Samsung, and others create a real market for their ultra expensive folding phones. But given that they couldn’t sell far more affordable phones, tablets, wearables, or VR, it’s pretty clear that 5G folding phones are a huge phony cutout trying to distract from much larger problems.

Andrew

In Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2, The Web Tools team made some changes to improve extensibility features for extension developers. To standardize interfaces, the CSS, HTML, JSON and CSHTML editors renamed their assemblies as per the following table:

To avoid potential parse issues, the JSON parse tree changed behavior. When you call JsonParserService.GetTreeAsync, you now get a snapshot of the JSON parse tree. As an extension developer, you can now request and maintain snapshots of the JSON parse tree.

Digital card games can be a tough genre to get into. If you haven’t been playing Hearthstone regularly, you may feel lost within the confines of its lore-rich world. And if you’re not willing to invest hours to practice, you may find yourself left out of the fun everyone else is having. Knights of the Card Table easily subverts these issues, combining the fun of dungeon crawling with quickfire card battles with plenty of unique layers to its gameplay. Wrapped up in a fun aesthetic and playful motif, it’s one of the best card battlers to hit mobile devices in some time – though it’s not without its unique frustrations.

Knights of the Card Table has you exploring various “dungeons” at the behest of a kooky dungeon master as a plucky young adventurer of your choice. You have a male player first, and the second unlockable character is a female you can swap to, if you so choose. Exploring dungeons and completing them is done solely via selecting a stage on a map, and then taking part in card battles that span several “floors”.

You’ll find that most decks are full of enemies, like spiders, beehives, and even jerky mailmen and bullies. Typically, five cards will be drawn from the deck and displayed to you (though sometimes some will remain unflipped, leaving them a mystery). When you clear one card out, another will appear. You’re in control here, however, of the card order you play in. So if you have three enemies on the play field followed by two restorative items, you can play the restorative items as needed, rather than having to wait to get to them.

Health Dranks will restore hearts (you start out with three), while Power Milk will give you a damage bonus. You’ll want to avoid the Poison, of course. Meanwhile, Spell Tomes like Fireball and Freeze can tear through enemy cards and give you an extra edge against them. In terms of power you’re facing off against, you can check the top left and right ratings on each card. The orange shape represents the enemy’s power, while the heart is their HP. Your dungeon explorer’s card shows this information as well.

One of the most useful game mechanics that requires you to think ahead a bit and strategize is the concept of card streaks. If you use three of the same card type in a row, you’ll get some pretty decent bonuses, buffs, or a selection of additional treasure. These card streaks largely rely on luck for you to trigger them, since you can’t see every card coming up in the deck, but when you can pull them off, they can do some staggering amounts of damage.

When you run out of hearts, you can opt to bring your character back to life by spending one of your “pops” to revive them, but after that it’s game over and you’ll have to start over. You’ll typically have plenty of pops to bring you back, but you don’t earn them as readily as gold,

Enemies don’t attack in a turn-based manner, either, unless you attack them first. You don’t even have to arrange the cards on the “table,” so to speak, in the order you want to play them. You can simply tap on the one you want to activate. This doesn’t apply anymore, however, when you run across “locked” cards that have a chain around them. This means you can’t swap them out with other cards or change position with them, and tapping them to move them ahead won’t work. You’ll have to get to them when they come up, which can be frustrating, but it does add a satisfying amount of challenge to the game.

As the game wears on, there are additional elements introduced as you rank up higher. There are trap cards, such as explosive dynamite, that you must tap and activate to get out of the way, because in order to continue on to the next dungeon floor you must complete the deck, whether you use all of the Health Dranks or Power Milks or have to succumb to dynamite damage.

Unfortunately, sometimes that means each dungeon floor can become extremely repetitive. You might get four Health Dranks in a row, or perhaps you’ll get Power Milk over and over again, with four enemies right behind one another at the end. This leaves you with no health options, and no way to recover if you don’t happen to roll the dice that can knock out the enemies before you.

After you complete a dungeon, you can head out and purchase additional gear. You get gold pieces and pops as a reward for killing off enemies and stacking items you don’t need like Health Dranks, but some items need an inordinate amount of pops for you to purchase them. Considering you get only a handful when you complete dungeons, it can take quite a long time to unlock certain items. Gold takes a much shorter time to accrue, but you need gold and pops for many of the items on offer. This is one huge frustration. You get your first few weapons quickly, since they’re decently affordable, but you’ll find yourself playing for quite a while if you dare desire an additional character to play as. This will undoubtedly be a turnoff for players looking to try out some of the various personalities.

That’s annoying, because Knights of the Card Table has a fun, silly Adventure Time vibe, and wouldn’t feel out of place in terms of its visuals on a channel like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. So not being able to see everything the game has to offer in a decent period of time feels like a slight to the player. With the game already costing $5, it would have made much more sense to ditch the semi-premium currency and opt for a fairer way to hand out new characters, weapons, and shields.

If you’re not looking to jump into any sort of difficult card battler with multiple novels’ worth of lore or want to try something without the need for learning an entire rulebook, Knights of the Card Table is a fantastic place to start. It’s light, humorous, and perfect for newcomers to the genre, especially with its quirky exterior, which will no doubt attract fans looking to explore. You can play with one hand, start and stop at your leisure, and collect a wide variety of kooky characters and accessories eventually, and it’s well worth settling in to play. Just don’t expect to unlock things left and right – it will undoubtedly take patience, but it will keep a smile on your face the entire time.

Note: This is a premium game on iOS, however the Android version is free-to-play and there are IAPs for the in-game currencies.  At the time of writing, current IAP options include:

• Various ‘big’ bundles that come with varying combinations of new heroes, Ad removal, Gold and Pops (£9.49 – £10.99)
• Gold-only bundles (£4.59-£8.99)
• Pop-only Bundles (£4.59 – £37.99)
• You can also watch ads for small amounts of Gold/Pops.