Instagram will be able to display HDR photographs taken with Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 phones, the two companies have announced. “Every photo and video you take, or view, will be shown in its full range of color and contrast, from the moment you snap the content, to the moment you post,” said Samsung’s VP of Intelligent Imaging, Dr. Hamid Sheikh, onstage at the S24 launch event. “In fact the Galaxy S24 series will be the first ever to have HDR enabled for photos on Instagram.” The app already supports HDR videos.HDR support was one of a handful of social media photography-focused features Samsung announced for its new phones, the Galaxy S24, S24 Plus, and S24 Ultra. The smartphone manufacturer also announced that Instagram, as well as... Continue reading…

Pitchfork Pitchfork, the acerbic music site that defined album reviews in the early blogging era, is being hollowed out. Owner Condé Nast has decided to merge the music magazine with GQ, the men’s interest publication, according to a staff memo circulated by Max Tani of Semafor. Launched back when CDs were a thing, Pitchfork outlasted the age of music piracy and mp3s and through the rise of digital streaming. Its future as a brand post-merge is now uncertain. Multiple employees were also laid off on Wednesday, including editor-in-chief Puja Patel. One laid off writer, Matthew Ismael Ruiz, estimated that “half the staff” was laid off.“Today we are evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization. This decision... Continue reading…

The iPad Pro M2 is undoubtedly Apple's best tablet to date. Not only does it pack the mighty M2 chipset, but it also supports some advanced software features and apps, such as Stage Manager and Final Cut Pro. This makes it a precious investment that could last you for years to come. That's, of course, assuming you take good care of it, and investing in an iPad Pro case can extend its life. There are countless 11-inch iPad Pro cases vying for attention, but many of them aren't worth your time. We've narrowed things down, making it easy to get the perfect case for your needs.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Facebook gets data on individual users from many thousands of companies, and a new study (PDF) from Consumer Reports tried to put more exact numbers on it. Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers. One extreme example showed that “nearly 48,000 different companies were found in the data of a single volunteer.” In total, Facebook data archives showed that 186,892 companies had provided data on all of the study’s participants. Volunteers recruited with help from The Markup pulled their personal data from Facebook using its Download Your Information tool and shared it with the researchers. Image: Consumer Reports Companies using Meta’s... Continue reading…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. | Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge Google has laid off over a thousand employees across various departments since January 10th. CEO Sundar Pichai’s message is to brace for more cuts.“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo that was shared with me. “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”So far, those “tough choices” have included layoffs and reorganizations in Google’s hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams. “These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team,” Pichai wrote in his memo — a reference to when G... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Game Studios A few years after it was first announced, we finally have a glimpse at the Indiana Jones game from Bethesda studio and Wolfenstein developer MachineGames. It’s called Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and the gameplay reveal was shown during Microsoft’s Developer Direct event. It’s an action-adventure game that takes place in both first and third person, depending on the scenario, and it’s set between the films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with Bethesda boss Todd Howard serving as executive producer. It doesn’t have a release date, but Microsoft says it’s coming later in 2024 to Xbox and PC.And yes, there’s a lot of whip-based action.Indy's got hands | #IndianaJones #DeveloperDirect p... Continue reading…

This premium model originally debuted for $699, and now it’s cheaper than a base model Series 9. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re shopping for a new Apple Watch, you shouldn’t take action without considering this opportunity to slap a cellular-equipped Series 8 onto your wrist for a substantial discount. You can pick up the 41mm Apple Watch Series 8 in graphite stainless steel for $314.99 at Best Buy, which is about $175 off today’s going price and more than half off the original MSRP. You’ll get that price whether you go for the small / medium or medium / large sport band. The Series 8 in all styles is increasingly hard to find brand new, so this is a rare clearance sale.The Apple Watch Series 8 is a previous-generation smartwatch, but no less useful than the newest model. You’re only missing out on the latest S9 processor, precision finding (only... Continue reading…

Image: Nintendo For a while there, the Nintendo DS was the place to go for mystery games. Leading the way were the courtroom antics of the Ace Attorney series and the puzzle book detective stories in Professor Layton. But helping round out the space was a small studio called Cing that has since shut down, which released a pair of excellent mysteries for the DS with Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and Trace Memory (known outside of North America as Another Code). They’ve since become cult classics, and now the latter is getting a second chance with a remastered edition for the Switch that keeps all the good parts (namely the story), while sprucing things up for modern players.The new release — called Another Code: Recollection — is actually a bundle of two... Continue reading…

Nvidia’s cyberpunk ramen shop is back. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge What if you could just... speak... to video game characters? Ask your own questions, with your own voice, instead of picking from preset phrases? Last May, Nvidia and its partner Convai showed off a fairly unconvincing canned demo of such a system — but this January, I got to try a fully interactive version for myself at CES 2024. I walked away convinced we’ll inevitably see something like this in future games.Let me be clear: the characters I spoke to were effectively generative AI chatbots. They didn’t feel like real people — we’ve got a ways to go before voices, facial expressions, and body language catch up to what’s expected of a real-life interaction. There was sometimes a little robotic stutter and often a short delay before... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple’s new platform is going to have some new — and maybe weird — apps. Continue reading…

The latest Apple Watches are highly-capable smartwatches that operate almost independently. They enable you to track your health, listen to music, take screenshots, and do much more without having to rely on your iPhone. However, while you can take screenshots on iOS by default, watchOS 10 requires you to unlock the feature first. To learn how to do so, read on.

Image: EA It’s been almost five years since EA announced the third installment of the popular Plants vs. Zombie mobile game, and now it’s nearly here. EA has revealed that Plants vs. Zombies 3: Welcome to Zomburbia (PvZ3) has soft-launched in select countries, including the UK, Netherlands, Australia, Philippines, and Ireland.Just like previous installments, PvZ3 is a tower defense game that tasks you with using animated plants to fend off a horde of zombies. EA says the game features “new and returning characters,” along with gameplay that reflects the “classic combat of the first game.” PvZ3 will be free to play, but it will still have microtransactions.The original Plants vs. Zombies was released on PC and Mac in 2009 before making its way... Continue reading…