Technology

Speaking to The Washington Post in an interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Senior Art Director Yujin Morisawa revealed that had the engineering team not tell him, he would have made the console even larger than what it is at the moment. He was quoted as saying, “In the beginning, when I started drawing, it was much larger even though I didn’t know what engineering was going to do. It’s kind of funny that engineering actually told me it’s too big. So, I actually had to shrink it down a little bit from the first drawing.”

The reason why Sony made the PS5 as large as it is, is because of the powerful hardware packed inside of it. According to Morisawa, he knew at the jump that the console had to be even more powerful than its predecessor, and because of all that power, he also knew that it needed even more space to accommodate a larger heatsink and to offer better thermals.

Right now, the current standard of video game prices is set at $60 for triple-A titles, not taking into account deluxe editions or collector editions. This has been the standard for years, but with next-gen consoles, we’re starting to see some publishers move towards pricing games at around the $70 mark which is expected to become the new standard.

However, according to a report from Bloomberg, it seems that even $70 wasn’t enough for Sony, so much so that the report claimed that Sony was in discussions to possibly increase the price of games beyond the $70 mark. The report does not mention when these talks took place or if they’re still in discussion.

Game streaming is becoming more popular these days, and if you eve, for whatever reason, wanted or need to stream your PS5 games onto your PS4, you’ll be able to do that. This is because according to a report from Eurogamer, it appears that Sony has started rolling out a PlayStation Remote Play app for the PS4.

What this means is that gamers will be able to use their PS4 consoles to stream games from your PS5. This should give you a bit more usage and life out of the PS4. So why would anyone want to do that? For example, if you’re playing a game on your PS4 and you want to play a PS5 game, instead of having to switch consoles, you’ll be able to just stream those games to the PS4 instead.

Back in the early days of the console, there used to be massive gamer envy. This is because companies would release games designed for specific markets, so for example if a game was released for Japan, it would not necessarily be available for the US, and even if you bought the game, you couldn’t play it on your US console.

However, these days region-free games are becoming the norm and in case you were wondering about the PS5, Sony has confirmed on its PlayStation Blog that the PS5’s games will not be locked to any particular region. This means that games released will essentially be playable on any PS5 console.

Given how small the AirPods are and the fact that they are completely wireless, it wouldn’t be surprising if they were easily lost or dropped. In fact, over in Japan, it was reported that over the course of three months, nearly one thousand earbuds were dropped onto train tracks, accounting for a quarter of all dropped items.

While the AirPods are small enough that they probably wouldn’t interfere with the trains, they are expensive and we imagine that people would love to be able to get their dropped AirPods back, which is why according to a report from Japan Times, Panasonic has apparently developed a special vacuum cleaner that has the ability to pick up these AirPods in a safe manner.

In a statement made to The Verge, Sony told the publication that storage expansion will come at a later date. Basically what this means is that while the PS5 does have the hardware components it needs to expand on the console’s storage, it would seem that this feature will be disabled at launch and that it will be re-enabled at a later date through a software update.

This was actually revealed by PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny, who back in March spoke about the console’s ability to expand on storage through SSDs. Cerny was quoted as saying back then, “It’d be great if that happened by launch, but it’s likely to be a bit past it, so please hold off on getting that M.2 drive until you hear from us.”

(No) thanks to the pandemic, a lot of things we do on a normal day are changing in drastic ways. A lot more people are working remotely and studying remotely, and this in turn has created a need for webcams, or rather, better quality webcams, and so to address this need, many camera makers have released software that turns their cameras into webcams.

We’ve seen this offered by the likes of Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, and Olympus, but oddly enough, Nikon was not on the list, at least until now where the company has finally and officially released a software for computers that allows owners of their cameras to use it as a webcam, whether it be for work, study, or streaming.

Typically, gaming controllers for consoles work for the consoles they were designed for. However, funnily enough, it appears that Sony’s DualSense controller designed for the PS5 works with the Nintendo Switch if you’re willing to spend a bit of money to buy a third-party accessory.

This is according to a tweet by BrokenGamezHDR where they found that if you were to use the 8BitDo adapter with the Switch, you can actually pair it with the Sony DualSense controller. To be fair, the adapter pretty much allows users to use third-party controllers with the Nintendo Switch as opposed to being limited to the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which might be a bit expensive for some.

This led to opportunities from third-party companies looking to create accessories for the console, like a company calling themselves CustomizeMyPlates. Unfortunately, it seems that the company has since been forced to cancel all orders that were placed through them for custom PS5 faceplates following a legal letter from Sony that threatened a lawsuit should they proceed.

Speaking to VGC in an email, the company said, “Before we launched, we did our due diligence and were of the opinion, that because Sony only had pending patents on the faceplates there would be no problem. But after only a day of our website being live, Sony’s lawyers asked us to change our name (at the time PlateStation5), due to trademark infringements. We thought this switch would be enough to keep everyone happy, and honestly were hoping so since we were already underway with our product development.”

The Nintendo Switch’s hardware isn’t quite as powerful compared to the likes of the PS5 Pro or the Xbox One X, and as such, games do not necessarily run at the same settings compared to other consoles, and also as a result, not all games are necessarily compatible as well. This is where cloud gaming comes in handy.

If you’re a fan of IO Interactive’s Hitman franchise, you’ll be pleased to learn that the company will be bringing the game onto the Switch. However, given that the game demands some pretty high-end hardware, the game will not be playable on the Switch either through a cartridge or as a digital copy. Instead, gamers will have to stream it from the cloud.

Given that a lot of speakers these days are going wireless, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to learn that the same can be said for guitar amplifiers too. In fact, Yamaha has been doing that for a while now, and the company is back with their latest model in the form of the Yamaha THR30IIA.

However, unlike some of the company’s other THR series of wireless guitar amplifiers, this one seems to have been created for acoustic guitars in mind. This is a 30W amp with dual 3.5-inch speakers and a built-in D-PRE microphone preamp. There are three microphone modes to choose from, such as dynamic, tube, and condenser, and there are also settings for users to choose if they’re playing a guitar with either flat or nylon strings.

Sony has released its fiscal second quarter results for FY2020, which includes the performance for the three months ending 30 September 2020. Sony shipped 600,000 smartphones during this quarter, and the good news is that this is the same number of phones shipped at this point last year. Whilst in the context of other manufacturers this might be faint praise, it's great to see Sony stem the declines we've seen quarter after quarter for the last three years at least.

Image credit – Design Watch

Lens attachments for smartphones aren’t new, but oddly enough, traditional camera makers have shied away from this particular market segment. However, it seems that maybe, just maybe, Canon could be toying with the idea of creating a lens attachment accessory for smartphones.

Unfortunately unlike PCs where you can easily expand on the storage by inserting a new hard drive, it’s a different story for consoles, and this is why expansion cards are being sold for consoles. Sony’s upcoming PS5 will support SSD expansion cards and now thanks to a sighting at Walmart, it is expected to cost $115.

The version spotted at Walmart is for the 500GB model, so it is possible that if you’re looking to expand to 1TB, you could pay as much as $200 for it, if not more. To give you some context, this is roughly the same price you might pay for the Xbox Series X’s expansion card. We previously reported that a sighting for the card in Australia listed it for about $250 after conversion, so like we said, it’s going to be roughly around that price range.