As of yesterday, it’s been 20 years since “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” was uploaded to Newgrounds. Let that sink in. And while you’re doing that, feel free to watch the video in its entirety there, too. It’s been kept safe in a Flash-emulating container, so even now, it’s safe from the inconvenient fact that Flash has been discontinued.
As Ars Technica reports, the history of the “All Your Base” video is longer than just a single upload. Much of it is taken from a tiny GIF of the Mega Drive game Zero Wing, which had been circulating widely online because of its disastrous English translation (and the GIF itself existed because of early emulation culture). “Early Internet communities poked fun at the sequence by creating and sharing gag images that had the silly text inserted in various ways,” writes Ars author Sam Machkovech. The meme didn’t really take off until the video, uploaded on February 16th, 2001, was posted to Newgrounds. “The video presents the original Sega Genesis graphics, dubbed over with monotone, machine-generated speech reading each phrase,” Machkovech writes. “‘You are on your way to destruction’ in this voice is delightfully silly stuff.”
Machkovech’s piece gets into more of the history and the context around the video itself, which is fascinating. He also correctly identifies the video as a bridge between early internet meme culture — which was mostly text-based and how we got things like ROFL — and the multimedia memes we have today.
Watching it now, 20 years later, the thing that stands out to me most is how culturally dated the video feels. It’s from the era of internet culture when the whole joke was getting the reference; back then, the internet was much harder to access and not the kind of culture-defining trend machine it eventually became. Knowing the reference — and sneaking it in places it didn’t belong — was funny because not everyone could figure out what it meant, unless, of course, you were part of the tribe. That kind of humor felt like the dominant mode of internet discourse up until Dashcon; even now, you can make people’s eyes twitch by typing something like “the narwhal bacons at midnight,” or “I like your shoelaces.” (Though “superwholock” would probably work, too.)
When social media became massively multiplayer, to borrow a phrase, that sense of in-group belonging became cringe. Now, you have to advance the meme to participate.
If you’re into gaming, you’ll want to know that Nintendo is hosting a 50-minute live stream today that it calls Nintendo Direct, and the company will focus on games coming to the Switch in 2021. This is the first time the company has hosted a full-fledged Nintendo Direct live stream since September 2019.
Nintendo already confirmed on Twitter that it would be announcing information on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but it did not offer any hints, though there’s a good chance we’ll be hearing about a new character for the game’s second Fighter Pass. Outside of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the live stream will focus on games coming to Nintendo Switch “in the first half of 2021,” leaving fans to speculate what could be shown during the presentation.
When does the Nintendo Direct start?
The live stream starts today, February 17th, at 2PM PT / 5PM ET / 10PM GMT.
Where can I watch the Nintendo Direct?
We have embedded the live stream at the top of this post, so you can stay here to watch it when it begins. Otherwise, today’s Nintendo Direct will be available on Nintendo’s official website, Twitch, and YouTube.
Of course, if you miss the stream, you can find coverage of all the Nintendo news here on The Verge.
Post Malone is joining Pokémon’s 25th anniversary celebration with a virtual concert. The rapper will perform on February 27th in a digital event kicking off at 7PM ET. On YouTube, the company released a teaser video alongside the news, which includes a look at a very Pixar-ish, animated version of the artist ahead of the performance.
The Pokémon Company International announced P25, a series of musical events, last month with news that pop star Katy Perry will headline. Post Malone’s concert will be a free event fans can tune into over on the event’s official website, YouTube, or Twitch. The event is also expected to include more news on upcoming musical acts.
In the absence of live events, more games are turning to virtual concerts these days, with artists like Lil Nas X in Roblox, and last year, Travis Scott’s Fortnite performance turned the entire game into one big stage.
Intel kicked off 2021 with a fresh lineup of mobile processors with a unique twist. The 11th Gen Tiger Lake H35-series processors aren’t just for any ol’ laptop. They target what Intel calls “ultraportable gaming laptops.” And at 3 p.m. ET today on The Tom’s Hardware Show, we’re sitting down with the chipmaker to learn more about what that means.
The Tom’s Hardware Show livestream is every Thursday at 3 p.m. ET. Today, Intel’s general manager of premium and gaming notebook segments, Fredrik Hamberger, will join Tom’s Hardware editors to give us an inside look at Intel’s H35 chips.
You can watch today’s Tom’s Hardware show below at 3 p.m. ET:
You can also catch the show on Facebook and the Tom’s Hardware Twitch channel. Every episode is also available to download as a podcast.
And like with any episode of The Tom’s Hardware Show, we’ll be taking questions from the audience. Join the livestream at 3 p.m. ET to submit your questions via chat YouTube or Facebook, and we may discuss them on air.
Announced during CES 2021 in January, Intel’s H35 CPUs go up to four CPU cores, eight threads and a 35W TDP. The flagship Core i7-11375H Special Edition can hit a 5.0 single-core turbo frequency and has a standard base clock speed of 3.3 GHz at 35W (it drops to 3.0 GHz at 28W).
Intel is positioning the H35 series as an option for the growing number of machines looking to compete with the best gaming laptops by including a discrete graphics cards while remaining portable. Our Asus TUF Dash F15 review showed what the quad-core Core i7-1130H can do alongside a mobile RTX 3070 graphics card in a 0.78-inch thick clamshell.
Join Tom’s Hardware this afternoon to learn more and ask Intel your H35 queries.
The brains behind smartphone brand OnePlus has created a new London-based consumer tech outfit. Nothing – for that is the name of his company – is expected to launch a slew of devices this summer including a pair of wireless earbuds.
“We’re building an ecosystem of smart devices,” Carl Pei said in an interview with Bloomberg. “We’ll start with simpler products, wireless earbuds. We’re going to have multiple products throughout the year, not just audio products, and eventually, we want to build it so these devices talk to each other.”
Despite its embryonic state, Nothing has already attracted investment from the likes Alphabet Inc (Google’s venture capital arm), Kevin Lin (founder of Twitch), Steve Huffman (CEO of Reddit) and Tony Fadell (inventor of the iPod).
The tech guru hasn’t dropped any hints as to the design or spec of Nothing’s wireless earbuds, but the company’s website does offer some clues. Nothing says it’s determined to hit a “giant reset button”, “start from scratch” and “rethink everything” to reach its goals.
Meanwhile, OnePlus unveiled its first wireless earbuds last Summer. The budget OnePlus Buds offer noise-cancelling, 10 hours playback and Dolby Atmos support for £79 ($79, €89). Pei left OnePlus shortly after in what’s been called an “amicable” departure.
One thing’s for sure: Nothing won’t be short of competitors. From the Apple AirPods (2019) to the Sony WF-1000XM3 and the newly-unveiled KEF Mu3 buds, those who want wireless earbuds are spoilt for choice.
MORE:
Buddy up with the the best wireless earbuds: budget and premium
Our pick of the best AirPods alternatives
Need some peace and quiet? Check out the best wireless noise-cancelling headphones
The same people who originally brought Android to the Nintendo Switch, the Switchroot team, are back with an Android 10 update, according to XDA-Developers. While the mod is only available for certain Switch models, it allows users who install it to run apps from the Google Play Store, like games, emulators, and streaming services like Netflix and Twitch.
The update also brings some more polish to the mod, letting the Joy-Con sticks work as proper analog sticks instead of eight-way D-pads, deep sleep support that the devs say “can last for weeks,” over-the-air updates, and better Wi-Fi support that promises fewer disconnections.
Of course, the real reason for adding Android to a Switch is so you can play games that aren’t Switch games, likes the ones made playable by the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP emulators on the Play Store. You can see how those perform on the Switch in the video below. Of course, you can also get other Play Store games like Genshin Impact or apps like Spotify. But you’re also not giving up the ability to play Switch games, as Android is installed on a microSD card instead of being flashed to the console itself.
It’s worth noting that Android on the Switch is extraordinarily unofficial. The LineageOS team isn’t officially supporting the port, and it’s more or less a modified build of the OS that was meant for Nvidia’s Shield TV. The exploit to get Android running also only works on Switches that came out before Nintendo’s chipset and battery upgrades, which completely excludes the Switch Lite. Even if you own one of the moddable Switches, which you can check with an online tool, some of the guides on how to get into the Android bootloader say it’s possible to brick your Switch if you make a mistake. Extreme caution is advised.
There are also caveats, like the fact that the games built for the Nvidia Shield don’t work, according to the XDA forum post that acts as a guide on how to install the mod. However, the list of bummers is way smaller than it was last time when the version of Android was LineageOS 15.1, which was based on Android 8.1 Oreo. The new version is based on LineageOS 17.1, which is a build of Android 10.
It’s nice to see this Switch mod get some love and become improved over the years. The changelog below includes a solid number of updates, so it’s worth checking out if you’re running a previous version.
* Android 10 based on Lineage 17.1 * OTA updates. * Full Joy-Con and Pro Controller support with analog sticks and rails. * Hori Joy-Con support. * Deep sleep that can last for weeks. * An Android TV based build. * Reworked fan profiles for quieter operation. * Optimised dock support with resolution scaling. * A rewritten charger driver supporting USB-PD and third party docks. * Optimised touch screen driver. * Easier install via hekate partition tool. * Reworked, simpler, power profiles. * Much improved WiFi driver with less dropouts. * Shield TV remote app support for easy docked control. * Reboot to payload support. * Improved Bluetooth accessory support. * Auto rotation support.
Nothing, the new venture from ex-OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, plans to release a pair of wireless earbuds this summer, with other products following later in the year, Bloomberg reports. In an interview, Pei said Nothing plans to eventually produce an ecosystem of devices that can connect to one another. The product details were revealed with the announcement that Nothing has completed a new $15 million funding round led by Alphabet’s venture capital unit, GV (formerly Google Ventures).
Manufacturing wireless headphones would bring Nothing into competition with some of the world’s biggest tech companies including Apple, Samsung, and Sony. Notably, Nothing would also be competing with Pei’s old company, OnePlus, which released its first pair of true wireless earbuds last year. Pei left OnePlus in late 2020.
Carl Pei formally announced Nothing late last month. Describing itself as a “London based consumer technology company,” Nothing has already attracted investment from iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and YouTuber Casey Neistat. For more about Pei’s vision for Nothing, check out our interview from last month.
The revival of G4, a network focusing on video games with programs like X-Play and Attack of the Show!, is underway. The company announced today that it’s launching weekly series B4G4 on Friday, January 29th. The series will air on Twitch and YouTube.
B4G4 is part of the lead-up to the network’s return this summer. It will feature original sketches, music parodies, game reviews, and more. Viewers will also be able to provide feedback on that content via the network’s Reddit community.
Twitter accounts for Attack of the Show! and X-Play teased G4’s revival last year during the digital version of San Diego Comic-Con; both shows are expected to return. The network has been hunting for talent via a Twitter campaign.
The revival of G4, a network focusing on video games with programs like X-Play and Attack of the Show!, is underway. The company announced today that it’s launching weekly series B4G4 on Friday, January 29th. The series will air on Twitch and YouTube.
B4G4 is part of the lead-up to the network’s return this summer. It will feature original sketches, music parodies, game reviews, and more. Viewers will also be able to provide feedback on that content via the network’s Reddit community.
Twitter accounts for Attack of the Show! and X-Play teased G4’s revival last year during the digital version of San Diego Comic-Con; both shows are expected to return. The network has been hunting for talent via a Twitter campaign.
YouTube is introducing clipping — the ability to make short clips of live streams or videos — starting today with a small group of creators. Those clips can be anywhere between five and 60 seconds in length and will have a new URL associated with them. Creators and viewers will be able to create clips by clicking on the clip icon, though the feature is currently limited to desktop and Android devices.
It’s a smart move from YouTube, because clipping is something of a live-streaming industry standard. You can more easily share live video content via a short video clip that can be passed around social media, rather than requiring viewers to skim through a potentially hourslong stream. Every platform from Twitch to the dearly departed site Mixer has decided that it’s something their creators need.
Today we are launching an experimental version of Clips on YouTube. Check out videos on the Creator Insider channel and test it out yourself!
Clips are 5-60 sec, shareable, segments of content (Live/VOD) that live on top of the original video.
More info: https://t.co/5fJyorxjrj pic.twitter.com/DVWNQ2BoEx
— Lester (@Chen) January 28, 2021
YouTube adding the feature is just another signal that the online video titan intends to beef up its live-streaming operation. As is the conventional wisdom in streamer spaces, clips help channels grow. A good clip that goes viral can bring in a huge influx of new viewers — and in streaming, where visibility is a big part of creating a sustainable income, that’s half the battle.
A real-life trading floor is noisy. You can find traders shouting at each other, especially when the markets are volatile and stock is moving fast. That same environment has been replicated online this week, thanks to Discord.
Getting inside offers a surreal look at an emerging virtual trade floor where people are yelling at each other to invest into GameStop or AMC stocks. Dozens of people join the server every second, and one channel has a stream of memes that looks like pure chaos.
Welcome to the world of r/WallStreetBets.
The r/WallStreetBets Discord server.
Discord is usually the tool of choice for gamers to communicate with friends, Twitch streamers to grow a community, or just small groups of people to share similar interests. It’s a hugely popular app, with more than 100 million monthly active users. The Reddit community r/WallStreetBets has turned to Discord in recent weeks to organize and communicate in real time, as it seeks to force hedge funds into losing millions of dollars on their bets against struggling retail companies like GameStop and AMC.
Amateur traders are flocking to the Discord server to discuss stock movements, share memes, and participate in what feels like an online game. Every post is littered with emoji reactions that fly off the page within seconds, and the calls are full of people shouting “buy GameStop” or “hold GMC” as stock prices go up and down throughout the day.
At times it feels like it only takes one person to shout something on a call or spam a meme enough times for it to catch on and everyone to run with it. I witnessed hundreds of people hit Twitch yesterday to spam “save AMC” in a variety of live streams. Rapper Soulja Boy’s Twitch stream was swarmed with the messages, after calls to visit his stream. But the group failed to convince him to tweet about the struggling theater chain.
The Discord calls and many of the memes are often full of profanity or racial slurs, leading Discord to ban the r/WallStreetBets server last night. It quickly came back to life a few hours later, though, and has already amassed 200,000 members.
“Can we just get one minute of therapeutic silence,” asked someone on the main Discord call yesterday. A few seconds of silence passed before the ask was met with fart sounds, high-pitched music, and sound boards. The members often joke about the FBI or SEC listening in, which prompts many to spam the “FBI, open up!” audio meme.
After last night’s Discord server ban, r/WallStreetBets is rebuilding its Discord community, but a split has emerged. There are now two Discord servers, with an unofficial one at 88,000 members.
Misinformation is common throughout these Discord servers. In the official one, a discussion broke out about the potential for a US-led war to impact stock markets. “There is going to be a war, 100 percent,” claimed one Discord user. “I’m going to bring my gaming chair into the war,” joked another. Fake Elon Musk memes are also as popular as the man himself among this group. “The only thing I want in life is for Elon Musk to tell me I’m beautiful,” said one Discord user praising the Tesla CEO.
Among all the chaos and fake Elon Musk memes, there is some relative organization on the server with calmer heads providing tips to amateur traders. “Only put money in that you can afford to lose,” is a common piece of advice. New members often join and want to know what stock to invest in, but are quickly met with “we are not financial advisors” or “buy what you feel like buying” responses.
I’ve also witnessed what sound like day traders teaching people the basics of options, market retracements, and how to create charts with technical indicators and overlays. Robinhood has made buying and selling stocks as easy as posting a photo to Instagram, and those new to this experiment are eager to learn more.
Others, who have clearly been part of the r/WallStreetBets community for more than a few days, are also quick to advise new members not to try trial broker accounts with fake money for too long. “You need to get used to the emotional reality of a market open,” said one Discord member.
The advice is often interrupted by excitement as GameStop or AMC shares reach new highs. At one point this morning GameStop hit $420 a share in premarket trading, which was met by cheers and surprise on the Discord call.
I personally spend large parts of my day on Discord, but I’ve still never seen anything quite like the r/WallStreetBets server — even in groups with 300,000 members. Dozens of people join every second, and at times it has forced Discord to crash on my high-end gaming PC or take up lots of CPU resources. Even on my iPhone it kills my battery and makes my phone hot to touch.
The question now is how long this mass organized movement can continue on Discord, and the amount of time left in the grand GameStop stock price game. After a ban for “hateful and discriminatory content,” the official r/WallStreetBets Discord server seems less chaotic. But r/WallStreetBets describes itself as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” and a lot of the Reddit comments contain offensive language.
r/WallStreetBets feels like The Button, an online meta-game that first appeared on Reddit for April Fools’ Day in 2015. Redditors rushed to push a button on a 60-second timer that would reset every time it was clicked. It inspired devotion and obsession much like this GameStop stock rally, and even spawned religions and cults.
The Button ended more than two months after its introduction when the timer finally hit zero with no attempts to reset it. There’s no timer here on this Discord and Reddit trade floor experiment, and nobody really knows exactly how and when it’s going to end.
In retrospect, stock memes were inevitable. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of brokerages weren’t ready.
Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity Investments, among others, have been experiencing outages, The Wall Street Journal reports. None of the brokerages would tell the WSJ specifically why the outages were happening. Also, Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade are restricting trading around GameStop and AMC, as individual investors pile into these companies, MarketWatch reports.
See, GameStop stock rose an astounding 1,600 percent in January alone, MarketWatch points out. What happened is a little complex, but basically boils down to traders gathering on Reddit, Discord, and elsewhere to encourage others to buy call options on the stock. The internet’s exuberance over GameStop has also affected AMC, Bed Bath and Beyond, BlackBerry, Tootsie Roll, and other companies. The trading action has further enriched some of the world’s richest people. It has also caught the attention of Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary.
Over the last decade, most of us have seen the power that social networks can bring to bear on politics, for instance, and media. Now, social networks are disrupting finance. The pandemic has more people day trading — 2020 was a record high in the volume of individual trading, Devin Ryan, an analyst with JMP Securities, told The Wall Street Journal. And collectives of retail traders can use platforms such as Discord, Twitch, and Reddit to coordinate their actions in real time.
Until recently, it was hard to imagine that doing a trade would be as easy as posting to Instagram, but here we are. And what’s more, trading is cheaper than ever — free at many brokerages — reducing further the amount of confidence an investor might need in a stock to buy options on it. Right now, Robinhood, a broker that allows free trades on stocks and options, is the most popular free app in Apple’s App Store.
The result of this frenzy is what appears to be a massive casino, but investors beware: at a casino, the house always wins.
Reddit traders who have successfully profited off GameStop (GME) stock are now turning their attention to struggling movie theater chain AMC. Reddit board r/wallstreetbets has helped push GameStop stock to record levels in recent days, with the stock closing up 92 percent yesterday alone. It’s part of a chaotic, meme-fueled effort to create an organized short squeeze, and force traditional hedge funds into losing millions of dollars on their bets against struggling companies.
AMC appears to be next on the list. Overnight, online traders at r/wallstreetbets’ Discord server spent hours creating memes and spamming AMC emoji in an effort to convince thousands of people to buy AMC stock. Hundreds swarmed rapper Soulja Boy’s live Twitch stream in a failed endeavor to get him to tweet about AMC. At one point in an ongoing Discord call — with dozens of participants shouting profanity and racial slurs — traders thought Elon Musk was on the call. After many called for quiet and to “let Elon speak,” everyone soon realized it was just a prankster using a fake Elon Musk sound board.
It was a surreal moment in what has become the hottest online game.
AMC stock up more than 400 percent in pre-market trading.
The AMC memes appear to be working, though. During pre-market trading, AMC was up more than 400 percent at one point before opening up more than 250 percent. The movie theater chain has struggled with pandemic-related losses, but it did raise more than $400 million in financing on Monday to help it stay afloat through 2021.
The mob of investors are taking part in this incredibly high-risk game in an attempt to punish hedge funds and professional financiers and make some quick cash. Thousands are buying into the idea of pummeling Wall Street professionals, and they’re using Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and Twitch to sell more people on gaming the system.
It works by targeting stocks that have a high amount of short selling attached to them, which is why GameStop and AMC are great targets after struggling through the pandemic. Short selling is a process that lets traders borrow shares for a fee and then sell them for a high price, and buy them back at a lower price to return them. Reddit is trying to force the price up so that investors, and especially hedge funds, that are short selling will lose lots of money as the stock rises. Read our full explainer on how Redditors are gaming GameStop stock.
It’s a risky game that highlights a bigger battle over the future of finance, and the idea that you can do anything online. The vast majority of Reddit investors are young and see hedge funds as the old school controlling stocks and shares and bullying companies into administration through their positions. As one poster on r/wallstreetbets put it, it’s “a tug of war between tradition and the future” that has gotten really personal. “We need to take the wealth back from these boomers,” said one member of the Discord call encouraging investment in AMC.
Investing and trading has also become incredibly easy for amateurs, thanks to apps like Robinhood. Millions have used Robinhood to make commission-free trades, and it’s a practice that has become popular during the pandemic with millions stuck at home.
This online trade game also has real life consequences. One big hedge fund, Melvin Capital, has been forced to close out of its GameStop position today with a huge loss expected, likely in the millions of dollars. It’s not clear if we’ll see the same sequence of events with AMC, but Reddit is trying to make it happen.
Carl Pei, the OnePlus co-founder who parted ways with the company last year, has announced the name of his next venture: Nothing. It describes itself as a “London based consumer technology company” and counts the likes of iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and YouTuber Casey Neistat as investors. It plans to release its first “smart devices” in the first half of this year.
“Nothing’s mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future,” says Pei, Nothing’s founder and CEO, in a press release. “We believe that the best technology is beautiful, yet natural and intuitive to use. When sufficiently advanced, it should fade into the background and feel like nothing.”
Carl Pei, who previously co-founded the smartphone brand OnePlus.Image: Nothing
What’s unclear at the moment is exactly what products Nothing plans to release. In an interview with The Verge ahead of today’s announcement, Pei declined to offer specific details on what form Nothing’s first “smart devices” will take. He also declined to say which companies Nothing plans to compete with.
Pei does confirm, however, that Nothing plans to release products across multiple categories, with the eventual aim of building up an ecosystem of devices.
“Right now… the team is being built, so we want to focus on simpler categories,” Pei says, “but as our team gains capabilities and skills we want to start moving up. The ultimate vision of having everything connected in a seamless way, that can only happen when you have multiple categories of products that are connected.”
During Pei’s tenure at OnePlus, the company released everything from smartphones to headphones and even TVs. Last year, Wired reported that Pei’s new company could focus on music and might include manufacturing headphones. When asked, Pei declined to confirm whether headphones would be among Nothing’s early products. When asked by Wired, he said the company’s plans were “so much more than that.”
While there’s been speculation that this could point toward Nothing developing an accompanying music service, Pei tells The Verge that Nothing plans to make most of its money by selling hardware rather than software subscriptions, at least initially. “We haven’t spent too much time thinking about the software portion of it,” Pei says. “It definitely needs to be a good user experience if you are to generate revenue from software.” In the long term, however, he admits that a “healthy business” requires both good hardware and good software.
Pei’s new company plans to differentiate itself by using “custom made” components in its products right from the start. Pei suggests this will stop Nothing’s products from looking too much like its competitors. “There’s a reason why a lot of products on the market look quite similar,” Pei observes. “It’s because they share a lot of the same components and the same building blocks.”
In contrast, OnePlus’ phones have faced frequent criticism over the years for the similarities they’ve shared with Oppo’s phones. In a recent video, Marques Brownlee outlined a series of Oppo and OnePlus devices with strikingly similar hardware, like the OnePlus 5 and Oppo R11, the OnePlus 6T and Oppo R17, and the OnePlus Nord N100 and Oppo A53. The two brands even use similar fast-charging technologies. OnePlus has Dash Charge, and Oppo has VOOC.
While OnePlus and Oppo are widely reported to exist under the same Chinese corporate giant BBK Electronics, Pei says Nothing is unencumbered by such an arrangement. “[Nothing is] a completely independent company owned by our founding team and our investors,” says Pei, with its own R&D department. And despite using contract manufacturers to build its devices, Pei says Nothing won’t just “relabel somebody else’s products.”
But while Pei hopes Nothing’s early products will feature “differentiated” designs without feeling “different for the sake of being different,” the eventual hope is for them to fade into the background.
“I kind of envision a grass field with people having a picnic and there’s no screen, there’s no laptop screen, there’s no phone screen, there’s no smartwatch screen, there’s no billboard screen,” Pei muses. “That’s kind of the end state.”
Verge columnist Walt Mossberg referred this future state as ambient computing in 2017. Pei admits that it may take 20 or 30 years to arrive, but he says the future his company is aiming for is one where its technology resembles… well, nothing.
The Xperia Pro, Sony’s first smartphone with 5G in the US, is launching today for $2,499.99. Sony is targeting the device at professional users, who it hopes will use its HDMI input to turn the phone into an external camera monitor and its 5G connectivity to quickly upload or live-stream footage. Sony says it currently has no plans to release the Xperia Pro in Europe.
Outside of its HDMI input and US 5G support, the Xperia Pro’s hardware is very similar to last year’s Xperia 1 II (which shipped with 5G support in Europe but was limited to 4G LTE in the US). That means it’s powered by a Snapdragon 865 processor with a 4,000mAh battery, and around the back, there are the same 12-megapixel wide, telephoto, and ultrawide cameras. The Xperia Pro also includes a tall 6.5-inch 21:9 aspect ratio OLED display, which Sony is once again describing as 4K but actually has a sub-4K resolution of 3840 x 1644.
At $1,200, the Xperia 1 II was already an expensive smartphone, and the Xperia Pro is over double its price. But Sony argues its 5G support and HDMI input could be incredibly useful to professional users.
Let’s start with the HDMI input, which is located on the bottom of the phone where the Xperia 1 II’s USB-C port. (The Xperia Pro’s USB-C port is still on the bottom of the device, but it’s shifted to the left.) Sony says it’s capable of taking up to a 4K 60fps HDR video stream and should work with any cameras that have an HDMI output.
In practice, what this means is that you can connect the Xperia Pro to a camera’s HDMI output, for example, and use its bigger screen to get a clearer view of whatever’s being filmed or photographed. You can pinch to zoom into the image displayed on the screen or overlay gridlines to help with framing.
Where this functionality gets especially interesting is with the Xperia Pro’s 5G connectivity, which enables it to act as a live-streaming link for your camera in addition to being an external monitor. The Xperia Pro can stream footage from its HDMI input to YouTube directly, and it supports StreamLabs and StreamYard for streaming to other platforms like Twitch and Facebook Live.
The phone supports both Sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G, and Sony claims that it has a unique four-way mmWave antenna array to maximize reception. There’s also a built-in network visualizer app that can be assigned to its shortcut key to help you find the best position to get a signal. Hopefully Sony’s software and hardware are enough to mitigate mmWave’s problems with limited coverage.
Ever since it started teasing the Xperia Pro early last year, Sony has emphasized that it’s a device for professional users, and its $2,499.99 price tag makes this more obvious than ever. When I asked Sony why it hasn’t released a 5G device aimed at consumers in the US, it told me it’s waiting for the technology to be more broadly implemented by carriers. Until then, Sony says it’s focusing on professional users who it thinks can get more use out of it.
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