Epic Games to host #FreeFortnite Cup on Aug. 23

With Fortnite currently banned from the Apple App Store and Epic Games on the verge of losing access to its Apple developer accounts, the developer is holding a special #FreeFortnite Cup on Sunday, August 23, for "one more Victory Royale with friends across all platforms."

Epic will be offering a host of prizes during the event ranging from an in-game outfit, physical "Free Fortnite" hat, to non-Apple hardware, including Alienware laptops, Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 tablets, OnePlus 8 phones, and Xbox One X and Nintendo Switch gaming systems.

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Fossil Gen 5 smartwatches get new sleep tracking, fitness features

Fossil updates its Gen 5 Wear OS smartwatches with many new features, even without Google's help. The wearables get new functions that aren't part of standard Wear OS, including sleep and VO2 max tracking. The latter helps with tracking your overall cardio fitness level. 

The update improves activity tracking, promising better real-time fitness tracking (like heart rate, pace, distance, steps, and calories) at half the power consumption. Fossil achieves this by offloading the tasks to the QCC1110 co-processor.

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Zoom to support Facebook, Amazon, Google smart displays this year

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Zoom is bringing its video conferencing app to smart displays this year. The company will start rolling it out to Facebook Portal first in September, with Amazon Echo Show and Google Nest Hub Max getting support before the year ends. 

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Apple 'won't make an exception' for Epic Games as legal dispute rages on

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Apple responds to Epic's latest claims in its ongoing dispute, saying it "won't make an exception" for the company because "we don't think it's right to put their business interests ahead of the guidelines that protect our customers." Epic filed a preliminary injunction against Apple, asking the courts to stop the company from taking it off its developer program. The developer says Apple has given them until August 28 to take out the rule-violating payment processing option Epic snuck into Fortnite. 

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