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Sony is back with a new Walkman music player for 2016: the newly announced Walkman A26.

The new device is a sequel to last year's A17, although the A26 is decidedly less high-end. The new device loses the touchscreen and has a stripped down UI (no more Android) although it can still handle hi-res audio formats like FLAC, AIFF, WAV, ALAC and standard MP3 and AAC.

Sony has also made the lineup more "colorful" adding grey, blue, red, purple, white and green.

Under the hood, Sony has left 32GB of internal storage (expandable to 128GB with microSD) and the company promises up to 30 hours of hi-res playback on a single charge.

Price and availability are currently unknown, but expect it to be cheaper than last year's touchscreen-touting A17.

Alongside the announcement of a few new powerful 4K HDR TVs, Sony also announced that their 4K TVs will allow consumers to buy and stream Sony Pictures movies in 4K quality.

The TVs have a new built-in app called Ultra that will tap into Sony Picture's catalog of around 50 titles in 4K. The first films are not great and include clunkers like After Earth and Salt, but there are some titles worth seeing in 4K like Elysium and Fury.

Reportedly, the app is built for Android TV, but it seems like it will only work on Sony Android TV sets at launch.

As of Monday, Sony has sold 35.9 million PlayStation 4 units, crushing its competition from Nintendo and Microsoft.

Notably, Sony says that figure is "sold through" and not just shipped, suggesting the console is not staying on retail shelves for long.

In addition, Sony says from November 22nd to January 2nd they sold 35 million PS4 games (digital and physical), a massive number even for the retail-heavy holiday season.

Sony has announced 40 more PlayStation 3 games are now available through the PS Now subscription service.

The service now has over 300 titles, over 100 of which are PlayStation exclusives.

Here is a full list of the new titles:

In just a few months since its release, Microsoft's latest operating system is now powering over 200 million devices.

The software giant announced today that Windows 10 installations are growing rapidly and at a far faster pace than previous iterations of Windows although that is not too hard to explain given that Windows 10 is free for most consumers and Microsoft pushes the OS to your computer even if you don't want it.

Regardless, the figures are impressive. Adds Microsoft: "In fact, Windows 10 continues to be on the fastest growth trajectory of any version of Windows – ever – outpacing Windows 7 by nearly 140% and Windows 8 by nearly 400%.

We are also seeing accelerating and unprecedented demand for Windows 10 among enterprise and education customers. As of today, more than 76% of our enterprise customers are in active pilots of Windows 10, and we now have over 22 million devices running Windows 10 across enterprise and education customers."

After successfully navigating the holidays with only minor blips, the PlayStation Network had a major outage today, with most users experiencing downtime of over 12 hours.

Sony did not offer any real response as to what happened, and a few groups were quick to take credit for the downtime but none seems credible.

For most of the day, Sony's site had the brief message: "We are currently under maintenance and you may be experiencing issues. We appreciate your patience." The maintenance was certainly not announced ahead of time (which is very unlike Sony), so the 'maintenance' was likely to fix whatever broke PSN.

Hopefully, we will know more as to what happened with an update from Sony later today or tomorrow.

Mobile superstudio Supercell has announced the follow-up to their blockbuster Clash of Clans game, and it's sure to make gamers happy.

The game, Clash Royale, will combine collectible card game aspects with real-time strategy game features. Think of it like Hearthstone meets League of Legends.

You collect cards for different characters and spells and upgrade and then you can use them to battle other gamers around the world, in real-time. Making it a "sequel" to Clash of Clans is the fact that it set in the CoC universe.

Just like Supercell's other hit games like Clash and Boom Beach, Clash Royale will be freemium, meaning free to download with the option to buy cards, characters, etc from within the app.

Check out a teaser trailer and a gameplay video here:

Major League Gaming, on the verge of bankuptcy, has sold its assets to gaming giant Activision Blizzard.

In addition to the sale, the esports company has also removed CEO Sundance DiGiovanni from his role and replaced him with former CFO Greg Chisholm.

The move is somewhat of a surprise, given that the company raised $6 million just this year in new funding. Many investors will leave with nothing.

MLG had run esports tournaments in past years for notable titles like COD and StarCraft 2, but recently lost the Call of Duty World League to rival ESL.

Microsoft has confirmed that its popular luxury Elite controller will be in low supply until at least March thanks to heavier than expected demand.

Xbox head Phil Spencer noted in November that the company expected the controller to sell out for the holiday season but great reviews and popularity within the gaming community seems to have led to a supply shortage for the near future.

The new Elite wireless controller costs $150 and the controller has swappable components meaning you can switch the D-pad for a joystick, and more. Among the new features are four interchangeable paddles on the back side, Hair Trigger Locks for precise control in shooters and a textured rolling pad. The four paddles are customizable allowing you to remap as you choose. Microsoft also released an app to help gamers remap their controllers.

Cracker frontman David Lowery has filed a class action lawsuit against Spotify seeking, at least, $150 million in damages over unpaid royalties.

The artist claims that the streaming service "knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully reproduces and distributes copyrighted compositions without obtaining mechanical licenses."

In the complaint, it is alleged that Spotify has unlawfully distributed music to 75 million users but "failed to identify or locate the owners of those compositions for payment." It is pretty clear that Spotify knows this is true, as they have set aside $30 million for payments, likely making this lawsuit redundant.

"We are committed to paying songwriters and publishers every penny," adds Spotify global head of communications and public policy Jonathan Prince in a statement. "Unfortunately, especially in the United States, the data necessary to confirm the appropriate rightsholders is often missing, wrong, or incomplete. When rightsholders are not immediately clear, we set aside the royalties we owe until we are able to confirm their identities. We are working closely with the National Music Publishers Association to find the best way to correctly pay the royalties we have set aside and we are investing in the resources and technical expertise to build a comprehensive publishing administration system to solve this problem for good."

Finnish startup Jolla, fresh off being saved from bankruptcy, had some bad news for backers of their Jolla Tablet project.

The company says not all backers will get a tablet, a shocking development given that it has already been delayed multiple times and that many backers paid $179 or more for the tablet.

Says Jolla: "During 2015 we also worked hard on the Jolla Tablet project, which was first introduced in November 2014. Our very talented team made a lot of progress in the project, and the first small batch of Jolla Tablets were shipped in the autumn to our Indiegogo contributors. The project altogether had some serious unexpected setbacks in the autumn, and we were forced to postpone the whole project schedule many times – these were communicated in several blog posts along the summer and autumn.

The serious financing challenge in November-December had unfortunately a bigger impact on this project than we could even anticipate. Now that our financial situation has improved and we are slowly starting to get back to the normal operations, we are actively planning the best way to finalize the project and to find a solution that fits to both all you dear Jolla Tablet contributors and to our future business plans, together with our investors.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has said this week that the average download speed for U.S. Internet connections has surged to 31 Mbps as of September 2014, up from 10 Mbps in March 2011.

Consumers have demanded faster speeds and more bandwidth as streaming services are now the norm and the size of downloadable files have increased over time. The FCC says video now accounts for 60 percent of all Internet traffic. Some reports have Netflix accounting for nearly 30 percent of all global traffic at peak hours.

Google also helped pushed the industry along after they began offering their 1 Gbps Fiber connection in nine cities. Other providers, like AT&T and Comcast, are testing out similar speeds with expansions planned for 2016.

Despite the huge boost in speeds, the U.S. was still ranked 25th out of 39 developed nations in 2013 for average speed. The tiny country of Luxembourg had the fastest average speed, at 47.32 Mbps.

Source:

AT&T is preparing to drop contracts on January 8th, making it the latest carrier to move away from two-year contracts and subsidized phone purchases.

Just like with rival carriers, you will have to pay for phones completely upfront or with no-interest installment plans over one or two years.

In June, AT&T stopped offering smartphone contracts through its local dealers and retail partners, but the deals were still available online and if you asked for a contract extension in stores.



Source:
Engadget

According to new reports, Microsoft is planning to release a digital-only "slim" Xbox One later in 2016.

If true, the new console will cost less than the current MSRP of the Xbox One, $350.

Microsoft blogger Brad Sams calls the reported console a "lightweight Xbox One," and expects it will launch in time for the holiday season.

To lose its weight and keep the price down, the new Xbox One will only allow for digital downloads and will not have a disc drive. Says the blogger: "I have heard from internal sources that the company is considering plans for a lightweight Xbox One that may only be for Windows store games and would compete with the Apple TV. But it's not clear if these plans have been scrapped."

The idea is certainly interesting, especially if the price drops significantly under that of the original Xbox One (let's say, $199) and if the new console includes some extra home entertainment features.

It has been five months since Windows 10 was released in late July and the pace at which it has been adopted surpassed that of its predecessor by quite a margin. New figures reveal that Windows 10 will soon overtake Windows 8.1.

Net Applications' figures show that Windows 10 has increased its marketshare another 1 percent since November. The pace has slightly slowed down but still hovers around one percent per month.

One in ten computers (with desktop OS) now run Windows 10 and it is expected that Windows 10 will overtake both Windows 8.1 and Windows XP within the first month in 2016. However, there's a long way still to beat the Windows 7's over 55 percent share.

All Windows operating systems still have a commanding 91.3 percent share as OS X is at 7 percents and Linux at 1.66%.