Netflix to launch six new animated films and series

With Disney gearing up to launch its own streaming service, Netflix is steadily adding its own slate of kid-friendly content. Right now, the streaming service is adding two new films and four series to its roster. The new films are My Father’s Dragon and The Willoughbys. The former tells the story of a young runaway who goes off in search of a captive dragon. It’ll be made by Oscar-nominated director Nora Twomey (The Breadwinner) and will be written by Oscar-nominated writer Meg LeFauve (Inside Out). The latter is an adaptation of a Lois Lowry novel about four children who have been abandoned by their parents. Production has already begun with big names—including Ricky Gervais, Maya Rudolph, Alessia Cara, and Jane Krakowski, to name a few—attached to the project.

As for the shows, there’s Jorge Gutierrez’s (The Book of Life) Maya and the Three, which he describes as “Mexican Lord of the Rings, but hilarious.” It’s going to feature a heroine, who’s half human and half divine. It’ll be set in a mythical Mesoamerican-inspired world. There’s also Craig McCracken’s (Powerpuff Girls) Kid Cosmic, which is about a boy who dreams of becoming a superhero but then struggles with his powers once he becomes one. There will also be Trash Truck and Go! Go! Cory Carson. Both are geared towards preschool-aged kids. All the six projects are expected to hit the service between the years 2019 and 2021.

Source: Variety

Apple iPhone XR benchmarks show near identical performance to the iPhone XS

Benchmarks are not the be-all and end-all for determining if a phone is worth your time. But it does set some expectations. And all signs point to a positive experience with the more affordable iPhone XR. Packing the same A12 Bionic chip as the iPhone XS, it’s expected the performance was going to be similar. Macworld just shared the benchmark results and it shows that it gets the same performance but from last year’s iPhone X. It even tops the GPU test, which most likely comes from the fewer pixels the phone has to push. It’s also supposedly said to have better battery performance, even when compared to the iPhone 7 Plus (which has roughly the same display size and exact same battery).

Google's Pixel Slate is now available for preorder

Google's second coming of the tablet, the Pixel Slate is starting to become available for preorder (at least for our American readers). Bringing the best of Chrome OS, Android and Linux (under the Crostini-layer that allows Linux apps to run in a container) the Pixel Slate is a powerful tablet-first 2-in-1 that can be used in laptop mode with an optional keyboard case.

Canadian pricing will start at $1,049.99 but can increase considerably for higher performance models as well as when you add the Pen and Keyboard accessories.

MSI launches new ultrabooks and workstations for creatives

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

MSI is highly regarded for its gaming laptops which bring insane processing and graphics power to aggressively styled gaming laptops. The company is now taking all the things they've learned from making gaming notebooks and applying it to their new ultrabook and creative workstation products.

The slim and elegant MSI PS42 and the beefier yet vastly more performant MSI P65 both offer the latest 8th Generation Intel Core i7 processors (in quad-core and six-core variants), large 16GB of RAM and fast SSDs. The new notebooks are designed for portability and performance.

Click to read more ...