Updates on the new Star Wars saga, Fallout 4 DLC announcements and Rocket League for XBone are just a few of the great events that happened this week. Read more to hear Agent Hall's top picks for this week in February.
Monday 15th February
Star Wars Episode VIII and a new LEGO Star Wars mini series!
Monday saw Disney releasing a trailer for their new Star Wars animated prequel series, LEGO Star Wars: The Resistance Rises. Set before the events of Episode VII, The Resistance Rises is going to detail the adventures of new characters and old, from Han Solo to Maz Kanata, as it leads into what will become the story of Episode VII.
The animated LEGO Star Wars series is already available to stream in the US, but there is no confirmed date for a UK release just yet.
Monday was also the day that filming started on Star Wars: Episode VIII and the studio released a quick behind the scenes video, along with some new casting information, to mark the occasion.
The video itself doesn’t give much away. It shows the last scene of Episode VII followed by Rian Johnson, the new director, shouting cut and welcoming the crew to Episode VIII. However, the press release that came along with it does give us a bit more information.
As well as confirming that most of the key characters from Episode VII will be returning, Disney’s press release revealed a few new actors who will be flying off to a galaxy far, far away. First off is Oscar winner Benicio del Toro who has long been the subject of rumours suggesting he will be playing a new villain in this film. Whether he will be yet another First Order bad guy or a side villain like Jabba or Boba Fett, we don’t know.
Another new cast member is Oscar nominee Laura Dern who has been one of my favourite actresses ever since Jurassic Park. Unlike Benicio del Toro, there have been no rumours at all about her being in Star Wars so we have absolutely no idea what sort of role she will play. Being an Oscar nominee though it's unlikely to be a small part. The final new name is Kelly Marie Tran who is a little bit of a mystery. She has been in several TV shows and small films but this will be her first roll in a major blockbuster.
You can take a look at the video snippet above and, as usual, we’ll bring you the latest Star Wars news as and when it becomes available.
Tuesday 16th February
Smartphone Bugs and Fallout DLC announcements
If you thought Apple’s recent 1970 bug was bad then you’re really not going to like Tuesday’s announcement that there is Android phone-wiping malware making the rounds.
The news comes from Danish security firm Heimdal who have detected a piece of malware called Mazar which spreads via text message. They think it has already been sent to over 100,000 phones in Denmark but cannot confirm if it has spread outside the country or not.
Heimdal says that the first sign of Mazar is an innocent looking text message containing a web link that supposedly takes the user to view a picture message. If the user clicks on the link, the phone downloads the Tor browser onto the phone followed by the the malware itself. As the malware is downloaded through Tor, tracing the source of the malware is made significantly more difficult.
Once Mazar gets onto the handset, it has admin privileges giving it access to do pretty much anything on the phone up to and including completely wiping all data from it.
So how can you protect yourself from Mazar? Well first of all, DO NOT click on any random links you receive via text message especially if it is from a number you don’t recognise. There is one other way of protecting your phone and that is to set the language on your handset to Russian. For some reason, Mazar will not run on handsets that has Russian set as the OS language. However, unless you are fluent in Russian, I’d probably just stick with the not clicking on links advice instead.
Also on Tuesday, there was good news for Fallout 4 fans as developer Bethesda announced the first batch of DLC for the hugely popular RPG.
First up, is Automatron which is arriving in March and is priced at £7.99 (although there will be more news on the price later). This update unleashes a horde of robotic mini-bosses into the Commonwealth and tasks you with hunting them down and collecting their parts. Once you have harvested enough pieces, you can use them to build and customise your own robotic companion to travel the world with you.
Next we have Wasteland Workshop arriving in April for £3.99. As well as adding loads of new design options for your settlements, Wasteland Workshop allows you to set traps to capture live creatures. Once caught, these creatures can be tamed or made to battle each other or your fellow settlers.
Finally, we have Far Harbour which is released in May for £19.99. As you can probably guess from the price, this is the big one. Far Harbour adds a huge new island off the coast of Maine for you to explore. A new case for the Valentine Detective Agency takes you on a search for a colony of synths and a missing woman. Far Harbour has higher levels of radiation which has led to much more fearsome enemies to take on although there will also be a batch of higher-level weapons and armour to help.
All three add ons are available individually for the prices already mentioned but they can also be downloaded as part of the Fallout 4 Season Pass which is currently available for £24.99. There is more good news as Bethesda announced that they are currently working on even more DLC which will also be included in the Season Pass. However, to compensate for the extra work, they are putting the price of it up to £39.99 on the 1st March. So if you want all the DLC Fallout 4 has to offer, make sure you buy the Season Pass ASAP!
Wednesday 17th February
Rocket League for Xbox One and a fully flexible phone
On Wednesday, car/soccer game Rocket League was finally released on Xbox One - a release that Xbox owners have been clamouring for since it came out on PS4 and PC back in July.
Rocket League, developed by a relatively small company called Psyonix, has become a huge hit on PC and PS4. The concept is simple, you control a small rocket-powered car on an enclosed pitch with a goal at each end. Like a simple version of football, you have to use your car to knock the huge ball into the opponent's goal. Your car can jump in order to hit the ball in mid-air and there are various speed boosting areas on the pitch. If you hit them hard enough, you can destroy your opponent's car taking them out of the game for a few seconds before they respawn! You can either play one-on-one or in teams of up to 4 and the game supports both split-screen and online multiplayer.
Since its release, Rocket League has become hugely popular on the eSport scene. This is something which the developer is keen to encourage with future updates for the game focussing on expanding further into the world of competitive eSport. However, Xbox One owners may still be at a disadvantage in this regard as Microsoft’s policies have put a stop to cross-platform play with PC and PS4 users.
To make up for the lack of cross-platform support though, the Xbox One version of Rocket League comes with all the previously released DLC as well as a couple of exclusive Halo- and Gears of War- themed vehicles. Rocket League is available now on Xbox One for £15.99.
We’ve been told that flexible smartphones are going to be the next big thing for years now but I’ve always been a bit dubious about the benefits of having a bendy phone. However, on Wednesday, we got a first look at ReFlex, a prototype flexible smartphone, and it actually looks pretty good.
ReFlex has been developed by researchers at Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab. It is a working smartphone based on Android 4.4 and features one of LG’s Flexible OLED screens. There are a couple of sensors on the back of the handset which pick up the direction and force of the screen being bent. An advanced haptic feedback motor gives the user feedback.
As you can see in the video above, the ReFlex makes scrolling through pages of an eBook much more intuitive as well as quicker. The Angry Birds demo also shows us the possibility of a much more tactile way of controlling our smartphones in the future.
Obviously, the exposed sensors and circuit boards highlight the fact that this is a very early prototype but it does give us an insight into the way future flexible gadgets might work. The director of the Human Media Lab thinks that this kind of tech could be in the hands of consumers within 5 years.
Thursday 18th February
Microsoft's Surface Book and the future of SIM cards
If you’re in the market for a premium Windows laptop and money's no object then why not take a look at the Microsoft Surface Book which went on sale in the UK on Thursday.
The Surface Book is Microsoft’s first attempt at a laptop and they’ve done a pretty good job with it. The super slim magnesium design features an innovative new type of hinge and the ability to detach the screen completely and use it as a tablet PC. This means that the majority of the workings of the laptop are built into the screen section. However, the keyboard/trackpad base also crams in additional batteries giving the Surface Book an edge of the Mac alternatives.
On the high end Surface Book model, the keyboard section also contains a discrete Nvidia GeForce 940M graphics card. This gives it graphical capabilities far better than anything that Apple can offer with their MacBook Pro range of laptops. The addition of a touch screen and included stylus also help it to stand out from the crowd.
However, there is a downside and in this case it is the price. The cheapest model of the Surface Book is £1299 making it £300 more expensive that the cheapest MacBook Pro which has a similar hardware spec. The high end model with the GeForce graphics tops out at £2249 which is a huge amount of money to spend on a laptop.
If you can stomach the price though, you are unlikely to find a better Windows 10 experience than the Microsoft Surface Book which is on sale now.
We’ve already seen a glimpse into the distant future of Smartphones this week with the ReFlex but Thursday brought news of some new tech which could start to make its way into your handset more sooner - the eSIM.
SIM cards have shrunk from the size of a credit card in 1991 to the tiny nano sim used in today's high end phones but the hardware required to insert and read a SIM card within a smartphone still takes up a large amount of space. This is where the eSIM comes in. The eSIM or Embedded SIM is a tiny chip that is built into the hardware of a device during the manufacturing process. This means there is no need for SIM card trays or any of the other hardware needed to read a traditional SIM.
This has several advantages. First, there is more room inside the phone for more important things like batteries. It also means that you can easily switch from one network provider to another without having to mess about swapping SIM cards over. Thirdly, it means that eSIMs can be built into even smaller devices. This is where Thursday’s announcement comes in as Samsung revealed a new version of their Gear S2 smartwatch with a built in eSIM.
The Gear S2 will be the first mainstream consumer device to use an eSIM and Samsung are hoping that it will encourage other mobile networks and manufacturers to support the new format. Samsung are very keen to push forward with the Internet-of-things and having an eSIM in every device is going to make this a lot easier to achieve. It’s going to be at least June before we see an actual smartphone with an eSIM but with some major smartphone manufacturers (including Apple) on board, it won’t be long before the days of the SIM card are numbered.
FRIDAY
Apple's Error 53 iPhone update
Last Friday, we reported on Apple’s controversial Error 53 'security feature' which was disabling iPhones that had had new Touch ID sensors fitted by unauthorised repairers. If you have been affected by this then you will be pleased to know that this friday, Apple released an update to fix this issue and restore all your iPhones back to full health.
Apple originally claimed their intentions with Error 53 were honourable and it was a security feature designed to protect users. However, they have now backtracked and are now saying that this was a mistake and it was supposed to be a test to check Touch ID during the manufacturing process.
In order to resolve this issue, Apple have released an iOS update that will restore your bricked iPhone to fully working condition again. Well… almost fully working. Touch ID will still not work until the third party sensor is replaced again by an Apple-authorised repairer.
By way of an apology, if you have already paid Apple for an out-of-warranty repair to fix your previously bricked iPhone then you can contact Apple’s customer services for a reimbursement. If you are anxious to get your iPhone back up and running then all you have to do is restore your device through iTunes to get the update. Take a look at Apple’s support page for more information.
That concludes another round-up of the week's wildest stories from the world of science, tech and geeky entertainment – but for more fantastic articles directly to your inbox each month, why not get your name down below for the Geek Squad newsletter?