The bear and bird are the favourites.
Conker’s creator, Chris Seaver, recently shared his thoughts about Banjo-Kazooie being announced as a playable DLC fighter for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Switch.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
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Third and long.
What’s wrong with me? I’ve been planning for a while to clear out my cupboards from the countless PlayStation discs I’ve accumulated over the years, but just as I’ve started making progress on that process, I’ve been unable to resist the temptation of adding new cases to my collection. There’s a twist, though: I’m only purchasing American football games. Weird, right?
I’ve always enjoyed sports games, but I have a particular fondness for NFL titles because it’s through them that I learned to appreciate the real-world game. You see, I was guilty of being a gridiron sceptic up until a few years ago, when I watched Tom Brady decimate the Atlanta Falcons against impossible odds to add yet another Super Bowl ring to his collection. I didn’t understand a second of it, but I was smitten.
Read the full article on pushsquare.com
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Teaser website goes live.
SEGA will be announcing a brand new AAA title during Monday’s Gamescom Opening Night Live event, but a new teaser website from the publisher that went live earlier today appears to have all but confirmed the name of the game in question.
Viewable via this link, the page features nothing more than a heart-rate monitor and a tab that allows you to sign up to the mysterious title’s mailing list. However, the clue can be found in the website address – the abbreviation HMKD. This may look like four random letters put together for most, but it actually lines up with a recent SEGA trademark for the name Humankind. Unless the publisher has a trick up its sleeve, this is most likely the game that SEGA plans to unveil at Gamescom 2019.
Read the full article on pushsquare.com
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We have to say, this broadband deal has us somewhat stumped. Vodafone has taken both of its fibre broadband deals and priced them at the same monthly cost. Confusing? Yes. A great time to seize a bargain on some superfast fibre internet? An even bigger yes.
It means for just £23 a month (or only £20 for existing Vodafone phone customers) you can get Vodafone’s Superfast fibre 2 package – the exact same price as its Superfast 1 package, can you imagine which one we would recommend?
The Superfast fibre 2 package boasts speeds of 63Mb, which makes the £23 a month you’re paying for it astounding and the £20 existing Vodafone customers pay almost unbelievable.
As if that affordable pricing wasn’t enough, Vodafone doesn’t even charge any upfront fees and even more importantly (sorry, we’re really excited about this one) it’s also throwing in a FREE Amazon Echo Plus with all of its broadband deals. It really is an astonishing offer.
It feels like nobody told Vodafone they only had to pip the competition by a little bit because no other broadband deals come close to this. Vodafone’s sale will be coming to an end on 10 September so you still have plenty of time to grab it.
While this is one of the best, affordable fibre broadband deals around, you can get even cheaper bills. You may not have heard of the ISP, but Onestream’s Jetstream Lite Fibre costs a mere £18.99 per month. You do have to pay a tenner upfront though, so it works out as roughly the same as Vodafone in the long run. Plus, this deal does also offer the lowest average fibre speeds on the market at 17Mb.
While for those who want an added extra with their internet, BT could be the way to go. It costs £31.99 a month but comes with a £100 BT Reward Card on top of its faster 50Mb fibre speeds.
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The World Health Organisation now officially recognizes workplace ‘burnout’ as an occupational phenomenon, this is the first time it’s being directly linked in its classification of diseases as a work hazard. Why has it become such a prominent issue?
If you look at the last ten years of the global economy, you’ll see it’s been a pretty wild ride. The economy had nearly collapsed by 2009, and since then it’s been rebuilt to new heights. That was the same year when smartphone and social media adoption began accelerating rapidly, and these technologies put enormous pressure on brands to move far more quickly than ever before.
Brands were expected to deliver amazing customer experiences and drive revenue from new, digital channels. In fact, some people call our current era the “Post-Digital Era” because consumer expectations have reached a point where a rapid digital experience is a barrier to entry into any market, meaning brands that can’t deliver, likely one won’t survive. These new forces have put pressure on workers to stay connected to their employers via their devices from anywhere.
Unfortunately, technology has developed faster than etiquette. There’s still a perception that because we can connect with our work 24/7, that we must. Even when you’re not actively working, notifications and vibrations from phones are a constant reminder that there’s work to be done. After a decade, all this stress has proven to be unsustainable to the point that countries, like France and Japan, have instituted right-to-disconnect legislation and other reforms to help employees find balance.
There has been a proliferation of tools that were designed to improve employee flexibility, but they’ve since reached a point of diminishing returns where instead of consolidating communications, they are overwhelming us with messages and notifications. Business leaders need to think proactively about the role technology plays in the stress of their employees and try to streamline their stacks to make sure technology is supporting your team, and it’s not just another distraction or burden.
Rather than enabling your team to work 24/7, your technology should encourage flexibility and allow employees to disconnect. Leaders need to lead by example on this front as well, and support boundaries for their teams. In a survey we conducted about stress in the workplace, over a quarter (28 percent) of UK workers said receiving texts or emails from their boss outside of work hours has a high impact on their stress levels. Of course, this also means organizations need to adopt better practices for planning projects, so there’s less need for last-minute scrambling to hit goals.
When information is structured and accessible to people who need it to do their jobs, enterprise technology can reduce stress and accelerate work at the same time. People like to be productive, and they get frustrated when they feel technology isn’t enabling it. But when technology gets in the way of productivity, it’s going to add to stress – and there are a few common ways that technology prevents productivity.
I can’t emphasize enough the importance of reducing stress and frustration around execution. We recently conducted a survey that found that Collaborative Work Management (CWM) software users in the UK were 61 percent more likely than non-users to say they have a “very good” relationship with their managers. They were also 152 percent more likely than non-users to say their company’s mission resonated with them “very strongly,” which goes to show that if you can enable people to work smoothly, they’re going to find happiness in the workplace.
A decade ago, bottom-up adoption of technology was a fast-growing trend, and as a result, companies went through a period with a vast array of overlapping and redundant technology that varied from team to team. It was a good trend at the time in that it re-engaged workers when enterprise technology was woefully outdated, but it led to problems with privacy, security, and information fragmentation.
CIOs need to audit their systems and see how many apps are in use within their teams and examine the gaps created by those systems. It’s in those gaps that painful, manual processes exist for workers who need to ensure information is synced between them.
In an ideal world, the various teams in a company will plan projects and collaborate in a single, unified solution. Realistically, it may take multiple systems, but they should be integrated in a way that effortlessly allows work and updates to move from team to team and from system to system to support cross-functional collaboration, and use automation to break down silos and eliminate routine tasks.
There are some psychological forces behind burnout, and one of them is the concept of perceived control, which means people experience less stress when they feel they have some ability to control their situation. CWM software actually does give people control over their work, giving them the ability to intake work in the way that works for them, design workflows, and also view projects and assignments in a customized way.
Another major cause of stress is the frustration of waiting for people to do what you need them to do to move projects forward. The challenge is that people often don’t know the priority of work, or have the context they need to get started. And CWM provides clarity to priorities and can keep all relevant conversations, documents, and schedules in one place.
There’s the issue of what I call hidden work – or tasks that are work but aren’t necessarily tracked in a project plan. Scheduling meetings, responding to emails, versioning documents – these are all tasks that take up a lot of our work time, whether we realize it or not. CWM can automate or reduce a lot of these functions, giving people more time to focus on the work that drives results.
Unrealistic expectations are also a struggle, and the challenge is that management doesn’t have visibility into their team’s workload. CWM platforms can provide a clear picture of an employees capacity for delegating tasks, setting deadlines, and prioritizing work. Fifty-one percent of UK workers say that receiving assignments with unrealistic deadlines has a high impact on their stress, and resource management can help keep tasks balanced across a team.
Since realistic deadlines are achievable deadlines, resource management can actually increase team capacity. They also track work further down the pike, so teams can begin planning further out and reduce last-minute panics about unseen deadlines – which should help reduce those late night emails and messages.
Most workers have lived through at least one failed technology deployment in their careers, so when you introduce a new tool, there’s going to be some eye-rolling. Change management is vital in any transformational program, and especially in one that requires a daily habit change from a large number of people. You can spend a lot of money on technology and have it fall flat because no one adopts it, so you need to have a plan. Context and clarity in communicating with your workforce about why you’re implementing a change are critical.
Start with “why” and look at it through the lens of “what’s in it for me,” to help sell the idea to your workforce. The better you can define the connection between the application and outcomes (business and personal), the more supportive and enthusiastic your users will be in adopting it. We always encourage our users to start with critical use-cases – solving an immediate need first and then build upon that success to broaden the use through other use-cases.
It’s also critical that a solution is flexible enough to accommodate the diverse preferences of your workforce. You probably aren’t going to have much luck forcing people to use a tool that makes people work the way it works, you need a tool that works the way they work, but with optimizations.
Putting the work in upfront to select the right tool and deploy it effectively will pay dividends in the long term.
Andrew Filev is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a cloud-based work management platform.
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A new Bluetooth vulnerability has been disclosed that would allow an attacker to more easily brute force the encryption key used by devices during pairing to monitor or even manipulate the data transferred between two paired devices.
The vulnerability has been given the name “Key Negotiation of Bluetooth attack” or “KNOB” for short and it affects Bluetooth BR/EDR devices using specification versions 1.0 to 5.1.
News of the KNOB vulnerability was revealed in a coordinated disclosure between the Center for IT-Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA), ICASI and ICASI members including Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Cisco and Amazon.
The flaw itself allows an attacker to reduce the length of the encryption key used for establishing a connection and in some cases, the length of the encryption key could be reduced to just a single octet making Bluetooth devices much easier to access.
A security advisory on Bluetooth.com, provided further insight on how the KNOB vulnerability functions, saying:
“The researchers identified that it is possible for an attacking device to interfere with the procedure used to set up encryption on a BR/EDR connection between two devices in such a way as to reduce the length of the encryption key used. In addition, since not all Bluetooth specifications mandate a minimum encryption key length, it is possible that some vendors may have developed Bluetooth products where the length of the encryption key used on a BR/EDR connection could be set by an attacking device down to a single octet.”
After figuring out the Bluetooth keys of two devices, attackers could then monitor and manipulate the data being sent between them. This would even allow them to inject commands, monitor key strokes and carry out other types of malicious behavior. Fortunately, ICASI has not yet seen this attack method used maliciously nor have any devices been created to initiate this type of attack.
Exploiting the KNOB vulnerability would also be difficult because both devices need to be Bluetooth BR/EDR, the attacker would need to be within range of the devices while they establish a connection and the attack would also need to be repeated every time the devices paired. The Bluetooth specification has also been updated to recommend a minimum encryption key length of seven octets for BR/EDR connections to resolve this vulnerability.
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These days, a small data plan just doesn’t hack it. You want to stream Netflix on the go and scroll through Twitter to your heart’s content and you should be able to! Luckily, a recent promotion from retailer Mobiles.co.uk is offering double data on a range of flagship phones, taking away the worries of a tiny data cap.
With offers on the likes of the Huawei P30 Pro, Google Pixel 3a, Samsung Galaxy S10e and the iPhone XR, this promotion has offers for everyone. Heck, even brand new Samsung Galaxy Note 10 deals are included. And, with data caps ranging from 4GB all the way up to 70GB, you can rest assured in the knowledge you won’t be running out of data anytime soon.
We’ve selected the best offers from this deal and listed them down below for you to compare. Or, if you can’t see your dream phone contract in there, check our guide to best mobile phone deals for all of the options on the market.
With the exclusion of the Galaxy S10e, you can apply the code 10OFF at the checkout with any of these offers to save an additional £10 on the upfront spend:
Not sure if Mobiles.co.uk is the right retailer to buy from? Having won Best Online Retailer at the Mobile Choice Awards last autumn, you can rest easy knowing Mobiles.co.uk is a safe bet.
With some of the market’s best pricing, fast delivery and excellent reviews – you can see how they managed to bag that title.
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Disney Plus is on its way. As if we didn’t have enough TV already to keep us busy, the Disney Plus streaming service coming this November (to the US, at least) looks set to drain our bank balances that little bit further.
With a portfolio of studios and catalogues ranging from the Star Wars franchise, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pixar, and even the Simpsons – from a recent acquisition of 21st Century Fox – there’s plenty of big-name content to draw users to the service, and some fear it could even halt the massive growth of Netflix’s user base.
With a set launch date of November 12, 2019, we know how long we have left to wait until the platform lands, and Disney has shared enough about the kind and quantity of content on offer – as well as how much it’ll cost – to give us a vague picture of what we’re getting. We even know that Disney Plus is joining Hulu on the Nintendo Switch, a console famously picky over its third-party apps.
It’s also likely to come to Apple TV according to Disney CEO Bob Iger, in spite of speculation that it would come into conflict with Apple’s new streaming service, Apple TV Plus.
Read on for all the latest news on Disney Plus pricing, subscriptions, and what movies and shows will be available on the service when it launches later this year.
UPDATE: Disney has announced a new streaming bundle in the US that will lump Hulu, ESPN+ and Disney+ into a single package for the same price as Netflix ($12.99 per month).
Inside Out (Image Credit: Pixar)
Disney Plus will be an all-in-one video destination for movies, TV series, and cartoons spread across the Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel brands – packing plenty of existing movies and TV shows along with a stack of brand-new content. With Disney’s acquisition of Fox now complete, we could also be seeing a host of other franchises – like X-Men or Avatar – come along to the service.
Disney has been working on the plan for some time now, acquiring a controlling stake in streaming technology provider BAMTech in 2017 following a first investment the previous year. BAMTech spun out from Major League Baseball’s streaming efforts and now powers platforms like HBO Now and ESPN+, so it knows a little something about on-demand video traffic.
Disney makes serious money (an estimated $300 million) putting its films and properties on Netflix and other services, but if Disney Plus is attractive enough to pull in millions of paying subscribers, then it could yield potentially much more income. And it gives Disney a new, exclusive platform for developing new content, whether it’s with existing brands or original properties.
(Image Credit: Netflix)
The Disney Plus streaming service will launch in the US on November 12, 2019 with an expected (but not yet officially confirmed) UK launch date around the same time or a few months afterwards. This still gives Disney plenty of time to court creators and develop and produce new shows – or at least get the ball rolling.
If you’re in Australia, it looks like you’ll be getting Disney movies and shows on Stan for the time being.
Right now, Disney has only released details about US pricing, where the streaming service will cost $6.99 (around £6 / AU$10) a month. We’ll update you as soon as news lands about pricing in other regions. This means it looks like Disney has kept its promise about undercutting Netflix – at least for now.
“I can say that our plan on the Disney side is to price this substantially below where Netflix is. That is in part reflective of the fact that it will have substantially less volume,” said Robert Iger, The Walt Disney Company’s chairman and CEO. “It’ll have a lot of high quality [content], because of the brands and the franchises that will be on it that we’ve talked about. But it’ll simply launch with less volume, and the price will reflect that.”
Iger also suggested that the price could rise gradually over time as the service expands, which is hardly surprising—Netflix’s prices have risen alongside its pivot towards original content.
However, Disney then turned heads with its plans for subscription bundle that will certainly rival Netflix in terms of price – while possibly offering closer to the site’s volume of content. The US-focused bundle will include Hulu (with ads), ESPN+ and Disney Plus for $12.99 per month – the same price as Netflix’s Standard subscription. It’s a good deal if you want all three services or if you live in a home with multiple age ranges who could enjoy the full range of content on offer.
If you’re in the UK, journalist Tom Butler pointed out on Twitter that you can already get some of the content that’s planned for Disney Plus on the Disney Life app for £5 (around $6 / AU$9). But that doesn’t include some of the biggest draws of the new streaming platform, like Marvel and Star Wars properties – although it does currently have past seasons of The Clone Wars.
The Clone Wars is still on the Disney Life app, but will it stay there?
Loki (Image Credit: Walt Disney Studios)
Marvel fans, rejoice: not only will you get a huge back catalogue of MCU movies on Disney Plus, but you’ll also get a number of original TV series and spin-offs with some of your favorite characters.
The first will be Falcon and The Winter Soldier (starring Anthony Mackie), coming in Q3 / Fall 2020, around a year after the platform goes live – so we’ll have some time to wait before exclusive content really gets going.
Hiddleston-lovers will be happy to hear that next in the new Marvel line-up will be all about Loki, coming in Q2 / Spring 2021 – as will WandaVision, a spin-off following Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) that will tie into the events of the Doctor Strange sequel. Q3 / Fall 2021 will then bring a Hawkeye TV show with Jeremy Renner reprising the role.
Marvel’s head of television, Jeph Loeb, has said there’ll be more “street-level heroes” coming to the Disney Plus service too, with Marvel TV shows set to replace or expand on the likes of Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Iron Fist, and The Defenders – all of which were axed from their home on Netflix (via Deadline).
Interestingly, there’s also going to be a Marvel TV show that puts a different spin on the MCU. Called Marvel’s What If…?, the animated series is based on a comics series and will give fans a glimpse into what might have happened if some of the universe’s biggest stories went a little differently. Like how would Agent Peggy Carter have fared if she’d taken the super soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers?
When it comes to old Marvel movie properties, we can expect those to be pulled from Netflix as soon as contracts run out before being moved across to Disney Plus when it launches. In an earnings call with investors, Disney CEO Bob Iger clarified that 2019’s Captain Marvel would be the first Disney movie exclusive to the service – and we know Endgame will follow the month after launch.
One of most exciting original announcement so far is that of a brand new live-action Star Wars TV series from Jon Favreau (Iron Man, The Jungle Book) who will both write and executive produce the show. We’ve been waiting for details about it for what feels like years, but the title has finally been revealed as The Mandalorian.
For those not in the know, Mandalorians are a race of jetpack-toting warriors with a lot of political baggage. Now unless you’ve watched Star Wars Rebels, the only Mandalorian you’re likely to have met before is Boba Fett.
But the new series will introduce us to a Mandalorian we’ve never met before and will follow his (or her?) adventures throughout the Star Wars universe.
The first image from the Star Wars live action show The Mandalorian (Image Credit: Lucasfilm)
Favreau will also be joined by other great directors, including Star Wars alum Dave Filoni, who’ll direct the first episode, as well as Bryce Dallas Howard, Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) and Deborad Chow (Jessica Jones).
It’s not the only new Star Wars episodic content that’ll be on the service early on, either. Rogue One’s Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna) will also get his own prequel TV series exploring his life before the events of the 2016 film.
We also now have word of a Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series, with Ewan McGregor in talks to reprise his role from the prequel movies (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith).
At San Diego Comic-Con 2018, Disney announced that a new, concluding season of animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars will also be on the service. We have to imagine that the existing episodes, currently on Netflix, will also join the fray.
Image Credit: Disney
Disney’s acquisition of Fox was a very, very big deal – especially for Disney Plus.
Fox own the rights to a huge amount of classic television, including The Simpsons, which will see every episode in its 30-year history come to the Disney Plus streaming service.
Fox also oversees the X-Men IP, which was made for some very strict stipends about what can and can’t be shown in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (such as the word ‘mutant’ never being used onscreen). The merger could pave the way for mutants appearing in the MCU, or at the very least having some form of reboot for the Disney Plus service. Given the disappointing box office returns of the last couple of X-Men movies, it may be just what the franchise needs.
Keep in mind that Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man and a number of associated characters like Venom and Black Cat (with some of the above being somewhat lent to Marvel). What you waiting for, Disney?
It won’t all be superhero and space flicks, though. Many additional new shows and TV series have been rumored or reported on, including a new Monsters Inc. project and a fresh take on the once-popular High School Musical franchise.
Deadline suggests that projects based on Lady and the Tramp, Don Quixote, Sword and the Stone, and 3 Men and a Baby are in the works, along with other projects titled The Paper Magician, Stargirl, Togo, and Timmy Failure.
Deadline also suggests that two films for the service were already in post-production as of February 2018: Magic Camp from director Mark Waters (starring Adam DeVine and Jeffrey Tambor), and Christmas-themed comedy Noelle from Marc Lawrence (featuring Anna Kendrick and Bill Hader).
Little’s been said on older content, though we assume there’ll be a good share of remastered classics and selected titles from Disney’s extensive 95-year history. There’ll also be plenty of television programming from the Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD.
Disney Plus will also be a home for DisneyNature documentaries, including Dolphin Reef – which will be narrated by none other than actress Natalie Portman (Jackie, Black Swan). Disney Nature works both in documentary films and animation, and will also be bringing animated feature Penguins to the Disney Plus service.
All told, you can expect “thousands of hours” of Disney TV shows and films on the service, including existing content, and that new Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars films will be available to stream at some point following their theatrical releases.
Oh yes. We have word that every Disney film ever made will be coming to the service, so everything from the original Lion King to… er… the new CGI Lion King should be available on the service soon after launch.
The Disney streaming service won’t have content from outside of the Disney ecosystem, as far as we know. That might seem obvious enough, but services like Netflix and Hulu have such diverse offerings because of their wide partnerships and licensing deals.
But, of course, Disney has plenty of content to draw from, especially if all Fox content comes onboard as well, but this will still be a very Disney-centric offering. On top of that, there won’t be any R-rated or adult-oriented content on the service. That stuff will go to Hulu instead, according to a report from Deadline.
Though Disney has now closed its acquisition of Fox, it’s unlikely then that the R-rated Deadpool will come to Disney Plus.
R-rated titles like Deadpool should head to Hulu rather than Disney Plus, which will be somewhat family friendly (Image Credit: 21st Century Fox)
Also, the Marvel TV original series on Netflix won’t be crossing over to the new Disney Plus service – as far as we know. That means the likes of Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones won’t be rebooted on Disney Plus in their current iterations. They’ve all been cancelled from further seasons, but we’re assuming previous seasons will continue to stay on the Netflix platform.
That’s not to say Hulu might not pick up these series and run with them, or maybe they’ll get a more family-friendly re-imagining for Disney Plus?
We haven’t tried the platform ourselves yet, so even though more information is revealed every day, it’s hard to make a solid recommendation. But now details have been revealed about pricing, the early signs are certainly promising.
Disney plans to tap into its estimable vault of franchises to create exclusive and potentially compelling new content, along with creating a single streaming service for watching all of the latest and greatest movies and TV shows from across the Disney creative ecosystem.
Disney Plus will have less content than Netflix, but the price is lower – and Disney Plus may prove more appealing as an add-on to your current subscriptions, rather than a full-on replacement for Netflix or Hulu.
The Disney streaming service won’t be as comprehensive or wide-ranging as some rivals, but Disney, Star Wars, and Marvel fans might have trouble resisting some of the original shows and movies coming down the pipeline. We’re certainly excited to see what Disney Plus has in mind for the live-action Star Wars series, above all, but other projects sound compelling as well.
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iOS 13 will soon be here to fundamentally change up how you use your iPhone every day, and we have been testing the public beta since late June.
We have a complete list of iOS 13’s features below so you can decide whether you want to get the iOS 13 public beta now or wait for the final version. That’s likely to arrive in September.
Latest leak: Beta 7 for iOS 13 has now arrived, and someone found mention of a potential new iPhone release date in the software’s code. It says ‘HoldForRelease’ with the date September 10 mentioned, so that may be when we hear when iOS 13 will land.
Dark Mode is our favorite new iOS 13 beta feature and it inverts those bright white-screen backgrounds to make the display easier to read at night. To see all of the changes that matter, check out our iOS 13 vs iOS 12 comparison.
The new QuickPath swipe keyboard is a big highlight, and the new to edit photos has made us open Lightroom less. Plus, as we explain below, iPadOS has been spun off from iOS as a separate operating system for iPads, which aims to make better use of the tablet’s screen real estate.
We’re here to explain all of the updates in full, and we’ll start with the many-fanged release date schedule and all-important compatibility list.
The iOS 13’s public beta was released on June 24, even though Apple said it wouldn’t come out until July. It launched earlier than promised, but it’s not a giant surprise for us. iOS 12’s beta arrived early as well on June 25, 2018.
Here’s the iOS 13 timeline as we see it:
1. iOS 13 developer beta: The iOS 13 beta 2 is available today but restricted to paid Apple developers. Good news: unlike iOS 13 beta 1, iOS 12 beta 2 can be installed over the air (OTA), whereas beta 1 required Xcode or macOS 10.15 to be installed first. It’s a bit easier to install, but you should probably wait for the public beta, which is always more stable, or upgrade to the dev beta on a non-primary device.
2. iOS 13 public beta: Apple’s larger-scale features test began on June 24, and is now on version 2 since July 8. Sure, Apple said July, but last year the iOS public beta launched on June 25, and sure enough, it came early in 2019. It’s the version to download if you’re curious – it’s often more refined version of the iOS developer beta, although it can still be rough, and never includes all of the features implemented in the final version of the software.
3. iOS 13 golden master: This will be the final version of the iOS 13 software, released one week before the final iOS release, meant for developers and public beta testers. At this point it’s very stable, and gives app makers seven days to adapt to the final software.
4. The official iOS 13 release date: We’ll get the new iOS 13 software in its final, stable form about one week after the next iPhone launch event, at which we expect to see what we’re calling (for now) the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Max and iPhone 11 XR. The date? Probably mid-September (last year it was September 17) and a leak in the iOS 13 beta 7 code suggested the software’s release date it may be revealed on September 10.
iOS 13 compatibility requires an iPhone or iPad from the last four years (depending on the device category). That means phones like the iPhone 6 won’t be getting iOS 13 – if you’ve got one of those devices you’ll be stuck with iOS 12 forever.
iOS 13 sheds several old devices (Image credit: Apple)
You’ll need an iPhone 6S or later, the iPad Air 2 or later, and the new iPad mini 4 or later, or the iPod touch 7th generation. No surprise, the new iPod Touch 7th gen is the only devices of its class that gets iOS 13 support.
The iPhone SE fits into an odd category, as it has iPhone 6 era specs, but came out after the iPhone 6S. Don’t worry, everyone’s favorite little iPhone will get iOS 13.
Dark Mode in iOS 13 is going to be system-wide, meaning it’ll change the hues from bright white and light grey to black and dark gray on all supported apps.
It’s a nice feature when you’re using your iPhone at night and want to avoid bright white hues shining in your face. It may also save battery life on the OLED-equipped iPhones, from the iPhone X onward. Apple didn’t talk about this at all, but we know that OLED displays essentially ‘turn off’ pixels when rendering blacks.
Turning on iOS 13 Dark Mode can be done in Control Center inside the Display slider (right next to the Night Shift and True Tone toggle), according to Apple, or you can set it automatically to turn on at night through a schedule or custom time.
The yellow-tinting Night Shift mode finally gets a bright-light dimming companion, and a lot of people couldn’t be happier.
If you were concerned about the privacy bug discovered in iOS 13 beta 3 – which lets anyone see your stored passwords if they get ahold of your device, according to BGR – go ahead and install the newly-released iOS 13 beta 4, which closes that vulnerability.
Apple is tweaking the visual interface for iOS 13. Home screen app menus are smaller, for one, but there are new changes to the ‘long press’ commands, too.
Instead of ‘long pressing’ to switch into app-deletion-and-rearranging mode, it will now show a menu with connectivity, battery-saving and a ‘Rearrange Apps’ option to manually trigger that mode, as you can see in Twitter user @filipekids’ tweet below:
This is an interesting one. There’s now an option for FaceTime Attention Correction, according to registered iOS 13 beta testing developers, and it’s wild.
What does it do exactly? It makes it so that it appears as if you’re looking straight into the front-facing camera during a FaceTime video call, when you’re actually looking at the adjacent screen. That distracted look could be a thing of the past soon.
Some of the biggest changes we expected for iOS 13 on the iPad are actually coming in an update called iPadOS. Apple is signaling that the iPad needs its own platform.
That means big improvements to your iPad workflow, starting with the home screen redesign. Pinned Widgets, as we predicted in our iOS 13 rumors roundup, lets you add widgets from the Today View screen (that left-mode screen on your iPhone and iPad). So far, it’s iPad-exclusive, and not coming to iOS13 for the iPhone.
Slide Over lets you have multiple apps open and cycle through them like rolodex. You can also fan to preview them all at once with a swipe gesture, kind of like the recents menu on many phones and tablets. It’s multi-tasking made easier.
Split View has been enhanced to let you open one app on both sides of the screen (it wasn’t possible before), and Apple demoed this by showing Notes side-by-side with Notes. You can also pair an app with more than one app – so now Safari can be paired with Pages in one space and Safari can be paired with Mail in another.
App Expose is new to the iPad software, letting you see all of the space you have open. There’s an App Expose icon on the Dock, requiring only a single press to get into the convenient overview mode.
New copy, paste and undo gestures are coming to iPadOS. Three fingers scrunched down was shown to copy text, three fingers expanding (in the opposite direction) dropped the text on the page, and sliding three fingers across the screen undid the last action. We’ll have to see how this performs when the software lands.
Apple’s keyboard can float around the screen in a smaller form, and it’s debuting a swiping gesture keyboard, which it calls QuickPath Typing. There are also more keyboard shortcuts (a lack of shortcuts was a complaint we had about previous iOS versions).
There are actually too many iPadOS changes to detail here in the iOS 13 explainer, so we’ve spun the full rundown off into a separate iPadOS release date, news and features article.
With iOS 13, Apple’s default QuickType keyboard will be incorporating swipe-to-type, a popular way of sliding across the keyboard to form words. We’ve used this in prior iOS keyboard extensions like Google’s Gboard and SwiftKey.
Here’s QuickPath keyboard in action (Image credit: Apple)
You can use the QuickType and QuickPath methods of typing interchangeably, and so far supported languages include English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese is now included.
Apple is combining Find My Friends and Find My iPhone in iOS 13, and the union lets you locate your friends and missing gadgets with a faster, easier-to-use interface.
Find My iPhone and Find My Friends come together in one app (Image credit: Apple)
What’s really neat is that it’ll use a crowd-sourced encrypted Bluetooth signal to help you track down devices that aren’t connected to Wi-Fi or cellular. That’s mostly a big help for Macs, but it could also help with an iPhone in rare cases, too.
Best of all, while Find My Friends didn’t always work for us, Apple may be making a bigger push to get location tracking right with this new iOS 13 app now in the limelight.
The theory that Apple is taking on the Tile tracker is backed up in the iOS 13 beta, according to a new leak regarding what’s been dubbed the ‘Apple Tag’.
Could Apple be working on something similar to this Tile Sport? (Image credit: Tile)
While the redesigned Find My app is supposed to locate your Apple devices and also your iPhone-carry friends, the Apple Tag is allegedly designed for everything else. Think: keys, bag, water bottle, or anything else a Bluetooth tracker could attach to.
The Apple Tag wasn’t a part of the iOS 13 reveal during WWDC 2019, but it could be an announced alongside the iPhone 11 in September. After all, it is mobile hardware.
More people are holding onto their iPhones for longer, and that’s something Apple seems to recognize – and the company is speeding up iOS 13 to accommodate them.
The most important iOS 13 stats: app launch speed is up to twice as fast according to Apple, and Face ID unlocking will be 30% faster than before. Apple also found a way to make app downloads smaller, up to 60% on average; iOS 12 gave us a faster update, and iOS 13 looks to build upon that.
Battery life is also something Apple is tackling this year. Its aim is to slow the rate of battery aging by reducing the time your iPhone spends fully charged. iOS 13 is supposed to learn from your daily charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use it.
Of all the built-in apps, Reminders is getting the biggest revamp in iOS 13. It appears to be better organized, and includes shortcuts that make it easier to add reminders.
Reminders appears to have gotten the freshest reimagining among iOS 13 apps (Image credit: Apple)
Big, color-coded buttons for Today, Scheduled, All and Flagged categories offer you a better oversight of your pressing tasks, while the keyboard when you’re in this app has a top-line Quick Toolbar that acts as a shortcut to easily add times, dates, locations, flags, photos and scanned documents.
Making plans in Messages? Siri will step in to suggest reminders that can be created, like a personal assistant who chimes in at all the right times.
The iOS 13 is going to offer important changes to camera features, starting with enabling you to change the intensity of light in Portrait Mode, which is something we’ve wanted for a while. Portrait mode is also getting a new monochromatic effect called High‑Key Mono.
The new Photos tab in the iOS 13 Photos app – Apple sees it as becoming your photo diary (Image credit: Apple)
The Photos gallery is becoming what Apple called “a diary of your life”, with a new tab designed to document your best photos by day, month and year. You’ll also have more pinch controls to zoom in and out of the Photos gallery.
Photo editing is refined with iOS 13, adding adjustment controls and filters, while the video editing portion mirrors this almost entirely: nearly every photo tool and effect – including filters, rotating and cropping – will make it over to video. If you’re not good at tinkering with video, there’ll even be an ‘Auto’ adjustment button.
There’s a new Siri voice debuting with iOS 13, and it sounds more natural than before – we’ve heard a sample and the tone is the same, but it sounds less robotic.
It uses advanced neural text‑to‑speech technology, according to Apple, and you’ll particularly notice this when Siri says longer phrases, like reading the Apple News aloud or answering knowledge questions.
The timing is good, because Siri can also do a lot more talking if you wear AirPods – Siri can read incoming messages and pipe them through the buds, which is convenient.
One more new Siri perk: your voice assistant on HomePod will understand the voices of the various family members in your home. This should mean, for example, that asking “What’s on my Calendar?” won’t bring up someone else’s irrelevant information.
Apple is putting more of ‘Me’ in Memoji, allowing one trillion configurations: new hairstyles, headwear, makeup, and piercings to name a few categories. Examples on the WWDC stage showed that these personalized Animoji masks allow for such granular accessory detail as eyeshadow, braces and even AirPods.
Memoji gets better in year two (Image credit: Apple)
Memoji Stickers are something entirely new – iOS 13 will bring more iPhone and iPad users into the Memoji fold, TrueDepth camera or not. You can customize a Memoji and iOS 13 will automatically create a fun-looking sticker pack that lives in a sub-menu on the keyboard, which you can use in Messages, Mail, and third‑party apps.
You’ll be able to share your personalized Memoji with contacts through iMessages, but only when you grant them access. The same applies to sharing your name and photo with contacts, so you can chose how people see your name, for example. According to Apple, you can decide whether you want your profile shared with everyone, with only your contacts, or just once.
You might not know this, but the HomePod is part of the iOS family, and it’s getting updates too.
First, you’ll be able to transfer songs from your iPhone by simply holding your phone closer to the HomePod speaker. Previously, you had to tell Siri to do this, but now this hand-off feature is a bit easier, and you don’t have to talk to do it.
The HomePod will also introduce Live Radio – you can ask Siri to play 100,000 stations from all around the world. And HomePod will allow you to recognize who in your family is talking, and personalize the response – great with Apple Music, where selections will be based on your taste and history. It goes beyond Music, Messages, Notes, Reminders, and more.
Apple wants app developers and sites to use its sign-in feature, and there are some perks for user privacy, too (Image credit: Apple)
Apple is taking on Facebook Connect, Google and other platforms that allow you to conveniently sign in to third-party accounts. Sign-in with Apple is poised to protect your privacy more than Facebook and Google do.
What’s neat is that if you don’t want to fork over your email to an app developer or website, Apple will create a unique random email for you, and the email will be unique to that site or app.
iOS 13 Maps looks a lot better, even if everyone likes to hate on it. Will it ever be better than Google Maps? No, probably not. But for people who want Apple’s pre-loaded maps app on iOS 13, it’ll be much better.
360-degree city tours are coming to Apple Maps (Image credit: Apple)
There’s way more detail here by way of Apple rebuilding maps from the ground up. There’s more realistic detail for roads, beaches, parks, and buildings, and you can now explore cities with a 3D 360-degree experience.
Favorites were a part of Maps before, but iOS 13 makes these saved locations easier to navigate to with one tap – they appear at the very top of a search menu. Sometimes Google Maps on iOS doesn’t get this right (but does better on Android). That’s one reason to keep Apple Maps installed, even if you’re a Google Maps person.
Mail is getting some changes when it comes to writing out properly formatted email. You’ll have more control over font style, size, color, alignment, indenting and outdenting text, and numbered and bulleted lists.
What we’re really hoping to see in iOS 13 is the ability to insert a hyperlink into some text in an email. On both iOS and Android devices, that’s just not possible in their default mail clients (that we’ve seen) – you have to paste long URLs, and that’s not a computer, no matter what you call your operating system.
This is huge – and we’ve been asking for it for several years. You’ll soon be able to select Wi‑Fi networks and Bluetooth accessories right from Control Center.
Android has had this for years, and it was always convenient to connect to new Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth earbuds without having to navigate away from your current app and dive into five Settings submenus. Apple is finally coming around in iOS 13.
If you’re going to play games on your phone, you might as well do it with one of the two best controllers available (and maybe something you already own).
Enter PS4 and Xbox One game controller support for iOS 13. Apple didn’t say if all games will support this or if it’ll be limited to Apple Arcade, but whatever the case may be, we’re happy to be able to put our PS4 controller to use everywhere we roam.
Nuisance SPAM calls drive us crazy every day, and iOS 13 wants to fix the issue with the help of Siri, which scans your Contacts, Mail and Messages to see if you’ve previously been in contact with the caller.
Silence Unknown Calls sounds fairly smart, if you’re not expecting business numbers cold-calling you for work. Those that do call you and aren’t on your personal ‘VIP list’ will go straight to voicemail.
We’re testing out the iOS 13 public test, but there may be more to this update that we haven’t seen. Apple typically holds features until the next iPhone launches.
We’ll continue to update the iOS 13 news here, with our guide to what you need to know about its features and how it’ll change your iPhone. There might be a separate iPadOS now, but iOS 13 is still mighty important to millions of people.
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True wireless earbuds may seem like tech from the future, but have you ever imagined what they might look like in a few years?
Frog, the company that designed the iconic Apple Macintosh have, and its conceptual Apple AirPod alternatives are certainly out there, with a radical design that leaves your ears totally exposed.
The open-hoop true wireless earbuds – which Frog have called Unum – are placed around your ears, so your ear canal is left completely uncovered, unlike traditional earbuds, which sit against your ear canal.
When you wear in-ear headphones, they create a seal against your ear canal, preventing environmental noise from ruining your music, as creating better noise isolation.
Frog says that the conceptual wireless earbuds would use “advanced micro-drivers and acoustic design to precisely channel the sound into the ear”, without completely blocking out the world around you.
Why is this necessary? Well, Frog envisions a future where voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are so ubiquitous, that “the constant connection to our personal headphones will be too isolating of a social experience”.
As such, the company believes that we will need headphones that “support long augmented audio experiences without disrupting their real world communications”.
It’s an interesting concept, but it’s hard to say whether people will adopt such a striking design for their in-ear headphones; that being said, the Apple AirPods were widely mocked for their long stems when they were released in 2016, and are now among the most popular true wireless earbuds ever.
Could the upcoming Apple AirPods 2 look anything like this? We’ll have to wait until the imminent iPhone 11 launch at the very earliest to find out.
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