The 2020 Nissan Versa has more safety features, a better ride, and 40 mpg highway fuel efficiency in the just-shipped third generation of this subcompact sedan. The Versa feels more substantial and polished. It’s adequate on the interstate. The car has been lowered, widened, and lengthened, which makes it look sleeker (think baby Altima) at the expense of rear-seat room. The trunk, however, is huge. Nissan is banking on the apparent trend of millennials away from what their parents drove, meaning SUVs, toward sedans. The changes make the 2020 Versa a reasonable contender. It’s no longer just a car shopped on price against subcompacts from Chevrolet, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and Toyota.
We’re less than a week out from Google’s annual hardware event, but there’s still time for leaks, and this is a big one. Google is expected to announce a new Chromebook called the Pixelbook Go, and 9to5Google has . This device looks more like a conventional laptop than the 2017 Pixelbook, but it still has some Google weirdness built-in. The device obtained by 9to5Google has a two-tone pink body. It’s light pink on the top like the “Not Pink” Google Pixel 3 and a darker shade of pink (or coral) on the underside. The bottom of the laptop is also covered with ridges that give it a distinctive look and a bit more grip when placed on a flat surface.
The small, standardized satellites known as “Cubesats” have increased access to space — many launches include caches of Cubesats along with the main payload. Those tiny satellites are all hanging out around Earth, but that could change soon. Virgin Orbit, the rocket-based spinoff of Virgin Galactic, has signed a deal with Polish satellite company SatRevolution to . Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to send people into space for a few minutes at a time using an unusual rocket-powered spaceplane. The company has been testing its designs for years, and it hasn’t always gone as planned. Virgin Orbit takes a similarly unusual approach to reach space.
Valve has added a new capability to Steam that should make it much easier to find other people to play local cooperative multiplayer games with. If it works, it might encourage more developers to invest in this capability in the first place. The new feature, dubbed Remote Play Together, allows non-local players to play games that typically require two or more players in the same physical location. Local multiplayer has become a rare capability in many titles. It’s a little odd when you think about it. In the early days of gaming, local multiplayer was just called “multiplayer.” Dividing a CRT into two or four panels might leave everyone playing on a postage stamp, but we managed to have fun anyway.
Today you can get a high-performance gaming desktop capable of running the latest games with maxed-out settings all for just $999.00. Marked down from $2,099.00 to $999.00 at Walmart, this desktop offers exceptional power and performance relative to its price point. The system is known to have problems with insufficient ventilation and you may want to move the parts to a new case or install some additional case fans, but for what you get for the price few systems can match this one. This compact Dell notebook comes clad in aluminum and weighs just 2.67 pounds, making it exceptionally durable and easy to travel with.
If you’ve been in the market for a quality mid-range gaming desktop then Dell has a special treat for you. For a limited time, you can get with a big discount that knocks $400 off its price tag by using promo code XPSDTAFF01at checkout to drop its price to $699.99. Dell equipped this model of its XPS Tower with a 9th Gen Intel Core i5-9400 processor with six CPU cores clocked at up to 4.1GHz. The system also sports an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics processor with 6GB of GDDR5 RAM. This hardware offers plenty of performance for gaming and can run most modern games with high settings.
One of the problems facing Google Stadia — beyond Google’s habit of slaughtering every project that doesn’t become an instant, industry-dominating hit — is that there’s an intrinsic latency baked-in to using it. There’s simply no way to send data over hundreds to thousands of miles and not have intrinsic latency attached. This may not be a problem if you live near a Google Stadia datacenter, but it’ll definitely impact the experience to some degree for everyone who doesn’t. According to Google, it has a plan to beat this problem, an approach that will allow it to actually make games faster remotely than they can be locally.
Microsoft once saved all the best Windows integrations for its in-house mobile platform, but the sun has set on Windows Phone. Android is Microsoft’s new mobile platform of choice — it’s even making its own dual-screen Android phone . That won’t launch for another year, but in the meantime, users of other Android phones can . Although, you’ll have to be on the latest Insider build if you want to give that a go right now. The new phone call feature is part of Microsoft’s Your Phone app, which also includes a suite of other features. Users of almost all Android phones should be able to use Your Phone for notification sync, photo upload, and messaging replies on a computer.
Earlier this week, Blizzard Entertainment suspended a Hearthstone player for comments the individual made in support of pro-democracy protests that have been roiling Hong Kong for months. It also suspended the two streamers hosting the interview. The streamer in question, Chung “blitzchung” Ng Wai, has forfeited all of his prize money for the season and is banned from competition for a year. On October 4, Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey caused an uproar by tweeting in support of Hong Kong, writing “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” In response, as of this writing, 11 of the 13 companies that partner with the NBA have pulled their sponsorships.
