Sunday
Jan242016

Samsung set to open a VR movie studio in New York

Samsung wants more content for its Gear VR headset. And hoping to help push that goal further is a new movie studio the company plans to open up in New York. The virtual reality studio will be located inside an existing Samsung office in the city. The South Korean brand revealed its plans at the Sundance Film Festival. They didn’t go into much detail yet but we’re sure to hear more about it when more concrete plans are made.

The festival also became grounds where Samsung showed off not just its VR material but also a place where they announced a one-year partnership with the Sundance Institute. The collaboration hopes to foster movie makers and other creative to explore the medium. And who knows maybe the 2017 would have VR play a much bigger role in the film festival.

Source: CNET | Via: Engadget

Sunday
Jan242016

You soon won’t need a Google+ account to use Google Play Games

In an ongoing move by Google to slowly let its Google+ social network rest, one more app will be losing the requirement to use Google+ for use. Google Play Games will soon no longer require you to have a Google+ account to access the app. This means you’ll get fewer permission requests to access games and you just need to sign into Play Games once per account instead of having to do so with every game, unless you don’t leave auto sign-in turned on.

For developers, there would hardly be any changes to games except those games that ask for Google+ “scope” unnecessarily will need to be changed to remove pop-up consent windows and those that use Google Play Games player ID for other APIs won’t return any valid data anymore. Google won’t say yet when the changes will take into effect but it should happen soon.

Source: Android Developers Blog | Via: The Next Web

Saturday
Jan232016

Canadian Reviewer Weekly Roundup 01/17-01/23

Saturday
Jan232016

Samsung Galaxy S7 tipped for a March 11th release in the US

A new leak by Evan Blass (@evleaks on Twitter) says the US will be seeing the new Galaxy flagship device on March 11th. Blass, who has a mixed track record when it comes to releasing accurate leaks, didn’t provide any additional details. There isn’t any word yet from Samsung either if there will be a press launch anytime soon. But Samsung’s known to release a new Galaxy flagship around this time. We’ll keep you posted for any updates.

Some of the previously rumoured information include the release of a Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, which will have 5.1-inch and 5.5-inch screens, respectively. There will be Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 processors, 4GB of RAM, 32/64GB of storage with microSD support, a 12-megapixel rear camera alongside a 5-megapixel front camera, and Android 6.0 Marshmallow will power the new Galaxy devices.

Source: Evan Blass (@evleaks) | Via: Android Central