Welcome back to Adi’s Week in Tech News. If you are new to this website, this is a roundup of the week’s technology news. It’s great to be back.
Of course, we have to kick this one off with the big story of the week. Samsung showcased their newest smartphone: the Galaxy Note 9. It’s a huge phone as expected with its 6.4″ screen and yes there is a headphone jack. The S Pen stylus comes with the phone and connects to the phone using Bluetooth Low Energy. It has a camera which uses AI to detect when you are taking a photo of a flower or scenery and tweak the photo after the fact to help improve the shots that you take. The Galaxy Note 9 will be released on the 24th of August 2018.
But that’s not the only big story this week. Our attention turns to Quakecon, the annual video games conference run by Bethesda. Of course, the main story of the show was Doom Eternal. For the first time since its announcement at E3, we got to see a brand new gameplay video showing us a lot of the mechanics that we can expect to see and some of the new monsters as well. This includes the ability to take control of one of the demons and invade another player’s game. You can check out the gameplay video above.
On a side note, Quake Champions is Bethesda’s arena shooter in a similar vein to Unreal Tournament. Bethesda Announced during QuakeCon that Quake Champions will become a free-to-play game.
Sticking with the gaming space, Discord is an app that lets gamers chat and do group voice calls with others. Well, it turns out that they want a slice of the digital game store market. That’s right, Discord will be launching their own game store.
They will be launching a curated game store which will allow you to buy games from within the Discord app. There will also be games that are released under the “First on Discord” initiative. This means that for 90 days, some indie games will be available exclusively through Discord’s game store. After that, developers of those indie games will be free to sell those games elsewhere. At this time there is no word on when the store will be live for all users. However, if you are in Canada the Discord store beta is live right now.
Are you a user of Skype? Well, there is another interesting bit of news coming your way. In a posting on the Skype Insider forum, Microsoft revealed that song preview sharing is coming to Skype. Suppose you are chatting with someone, you will be able to click on the plus button in the app on your mobile devices. You can then click on the plus button and then click on the Spotify button. From there you will be able to share the previews of the songs that you like with people or listen to music together whilst you chat. This feature will be available to those in the USA on version 8.26 right now (if you are in the Insider program for Skype). Otherwise, this feature will be rolled out as an update to Skype very soon.
Facebook has updated its policy on what can be posted on its social network. People will no longer be able to post content that would trick users into making a profit or financially put them in danger.
That wraps it up for this edition of Adi’s Week in Tech News. What were your favourite stories of the week? Let me know in the comments!