John Routledge - Technoshia

29 Jan

Amazon terminates $1.4 billion iRobot acquisition after EU veto threat

John RoutledgeLatest News

Amazon and iRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum line, just announced that they would be dropping their proposed merger. The potential acquisition was announced back in August of 2022 and was immediately the target of antitrust watchdogs, particularly in the EU. The European Commission (the EU's executive branch) officially announced it was looking into the $1.4 billion dollar deal last…

29 Jan

The first PlayStation State of Play of 2024 will stream this Wednesday at 5PM ET

John RoutledgeLatest News

Sony’s PlayStation division has cooked up its first State of Play event for 2024, which will stream this Wednesday at 5PM ET. The company promises a runtime of 40 minutes and coverage of more than 15 upcoming titles.To that end, Sony says two of the games profiled will be Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin. Stellar Blade, formerly called…

29 Jan

Former Call of Duty chief Johanna Faries is Blizzard’s new president

John RoutledgeLatest News

Microsoft didn't have to look too far to find the new president of Blizzard. Former Call of Duty general manager Johanna Faries is replacing Mike Ybarra, who stood down from the role amid last week's sweeping layoffs in Microsoft's gaming division. Blizzard was said to be particularly hard hit as Microsoft fired around 1,900 people.Faries, a former National Football League…

29 Jan

A new Deus Ex game was reportedly canceled amid Embracer’s crisis

John RoutledgeLatest News

Embracer Group, the Swedish holding company undergoing restructuring, has reportedly canceled a Deus Ex game. Bloomberg says developers had been working on the unannounced title for two years. Neither Embracer nor developer Eidos addressed the reported cancellation specifically, but they confirmed they were laying off 97 employees at Deus Ex developer Eidos Montreal.Eidos will reportedly focus instead on “an original…

29 Jan

Zoom’s Apple Vision Pro app will let people see your facial expressions via an avatar

John RoutledgeLatest News

The Apple Vision Pro will be missing some major native apps at the outset, including Netflix, Spotify and YouTube. One notable app to which users of the mixed-reality headset will have access when it debuts later this week is Zoom, which will support the Vision Pro's Persona feature.Vision Pro users will be able to create digital versions of themselves. If…

29 Jan

Galaxy S24 Ultra review:: Samsung’s AI reinforcements have arrived

John RoutledgeLatest News

For nearly a decade the Galaxy Note was the undisputed king of Android phones. But when the OG phablet line was retired in 2020, that title passed on to the Ultra. While the hardware inside the most expensive Galaxy S model is as dominant as ever, over the past few years, the software in Google phones has begun to outshine…

29 Jan

Arzette, a love letter to the CD-i Zelda games, will also revive an awful controller

John RoutledgeLatest News

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is getting a controller worthy of its inspiration — for better or worse. The upcoming game, a spiritual successor to the infamous 1993 Zelda titles for the Philips CD-i, will launch with a limited edition controller that resembles one of the largely forgotten system’s original remotes.Developer Seedy Eye Software (a homophone for “CD-i software”) says…

29 Jan

Meta will offer some of its data to third-party researchers through Center for Open Science partnership

John RoutledgeLatest News

Meta is teaming up with the Center for Open Science (COS) to start a pilot program that studies “topics related to well-being.” It looks like the program will dive into our social media data, but on a voluntary basis, as COS says it will use a “privacy-preserving” dataset provided by Meta for the study. The agency says the study should…

29 Jan

Our favorite microSD card is on sale for only $11 right now

John RoutledgeLatest News

There’s never a bad reason to have extra storage on hand. One of the easiest ways to expand your device’s storage or to back up important data is with an SD or microSD card. Most of the time, these are plug-and-play doohickeys, though it shouldn't take long for your device to reformat an SD card if need be. Some models…

29 Jan

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League pulled offline after a bizarre game-beating bug

John RoutledgeLatest News

Rocksteady’s new third-person action shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been pulled offline just one hour after launch when players encountered a bizarre bug that immediately beats the game. We’ve all heard of game-breaking bugs, but this may be the first game-beating bug. Obviously, players want more than three minutes of playtime out of their $70 purchase.The issue…