Month: August 2024

The new Atom controller from CRKD seems like the perfect compact accessory.

Gaming accessory brand CRKD has unveiled the Atom, an incredibly compact controller that would fit perfectly on a keychain. Yesterday I went hands-on with some early production samples at Gamescom and I think that it might just be one of the best mini controllers that I’ve ever tried.

The Atom is available to purchase now and is expected to ship later this month. It comes in a wide range of seriously eye-catching colors. There’s the retro inspired Pal Grey with brightly colored buttons, the CRKD Grey which features cute pink highlights, plus Leaf Green, Hot Pink, Sky Blue, and Yuzu Yellow which are all bright primary colors with delightfully contrasting black elements.

There are also two editions that make use of semi-transparent plastic: Atom Purple and, my personal favorite, Glacier Blue. Each Atom controller costs $19.99 / £19.99 and is compatible with Nintendo Switch, PC, and mobile in addition to other Bluetooth devices such as Smart TVs. It features a ten hour battery life and USB-C charging, though I was most impressed by the sheer minuteness of the controller. 

They are just 2.7in / 6.8cm long with a width of 1.4in / 3.5cm and a depth of 0.5 / 1.2cm. Pictures don’t really do the controller justice and they would be seriously easy to store in pocket or even keep attached to your keys. Every controller comes packaged with a small removable wrist strap too, which should help prevent it from getting lost when you’re out and about, or from flying out of your hands in high octane gsminggaming moments. 

I spent some time playing with the Atom, using it for a round of Disney Speedstorm on mobile and a couple of races in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch. Though obviously a little affected by its size, the playing experience was still incredibly smooth. 

This might not be a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller replacement, but it seems absolutely perfect if you’re after something relatively affordable that looks great and is highly portable while still offering plenty of functionality. Like other CRKD products, the Atom is also fully compatible with the CRKD true Collection System app, which allows owners to register their controllers as collectibles and reveal their unique product numbers and rarity ranks.

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I watched Apple TV Plus’ hidden gem Drops of God and I can’t believe more people haven’t seen it.

I never knew wine tasting could be so intense when I watched Drops of God on Apple TV Plus – although, I should have known from the dramatic title. After guzzling through this show, I’m still amazed at how Drops of God took an activity stereotyped for rich millionaires and transformed it into an intoxicating thriller that anyone can watch – whether you’re an inexperienced wine drinker like me, or don’t like wine in general.

I know I’m a bit late to the party given that Drops of God was released back in April 2023, but despite becoming one of the Apple TV Plus dramas to earn a flawless 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, I had never heard of it until recently – and I think more people need to have a taste of this hidden gem.

Drops of God proves to be thirsty work, so you’ll definitely need to pour a glass of something when you tuck in to this stylish French-Japanese drama. Based on the hit manga series of the same name by Tadashi Agi (which actually sparked a wine boom in Japan and South Korea), Drops of God starts with Camille Léger (Fleur Geffrier), the estranged daughter of famous wine aficionado Alexandre Léger (Stanley Weber) who learns that her father has passed away.

He leaves behind his extensive wine cellar thought to be the most important private collection in the world and worth over $100 million. However, instead of doing the normal thing of just giving it away to his daughter, he concocts an intense competition to determine who will inherit the wine. Before Camille can claim her huge inheritance, she must compete against talented young oenologist and her father’s protégé Issei (Tomohisa Yamashita) in a series of tests which involves identifying a number of wines through sight, smell and taste.

The drama is as addictive as the wine

You think Camille has an advantage since she was trained from a young age to have a refined palate from the “God of wine” himself, but there’s just one issue holding her back – she doesn’t drink. Not only that, but she has developed a physical aversion to alcohol, so much so that all it takes is one sip and she will pass out or her nose bleeds uncontrollably. It soon becomes apparent that she’s in for tough competition when it comes to her gifted opponent and father’s “spiritual son” Issei.

Camille goes on a journey to tackle this problem by going to a vineyard in France owned by a friend of her father’s and tasting different wines to correctly determine which wine is which in the competition. While all this wine sniffing and swirling may seem boring, Drops of God keeps you invested with a visual spectacle of Camille’s internal experience. As she smells and tastes the wine, Camille is transported to a memory palace where she sorts through cabinets and heaps of disarray to find the right tasting notes. Before being hit with bursts of color as a note of liquorice or celery root bombards her brain. Sometimes it’s just as bizarre in the real world as Camille goes on a clandestine mission to get a sniff of a rare wine on a millionaire’s table that costs $10,000 a bottle. 

Infused with the notes of drama is complicated family dynamics and fractured personal lives from the main characters. Of course at first I believed that Camille was the rightful owner of the wine, since she is his daughter after all, but my heart was torn when their true motivations and troubles came to light as to why they wanted to claim the wine collection. For Camille, it’s to prove herself in the world after a troubled life and for Issei, he wants to pursue his passion while his family threaten to disown him.

Their heartbreaking personal reasons made an impact on me and I even found myself saying to my partner: “I don’t know who I want to win.” This predicament only gets trickier when shocking secrets come to light that make the characters so much more fascinating and complex.

(Image credit: Apple TV Plus)

Tastes as good as it looks

Following the likes of one of the best Apple TV Plus shows Pachinko, Drops of God is another multilingual series to add to its already stellar library. But not only does Drops of God taste good, it also looks sublime.

Drops of God jumps from Camille and Issei’s homelands of France and Japan, but both countries are shown in stunningly different ways. French vineyards lavish in glorious golden sunshine, while Tokyo is awash with modern cool tones like blue and gray. The contrasting colors are much like the two characters personalities, with Camille being fiery and spritely, while Issei is reserved and composed.

As someone whose wine knowledge is very limited and couldn’t tell you the difference between a Pinot Grigio or a Sauvignon Blanc, I felt as if I was being injected with expertise as they listed off whether the wine had notes of moss or chalk. While I don’t think I’ll be an expert sommelier anytime soon, I can’t wait to pop the cork and see what’s to come now that Drops of God has been renewed for season two.

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The Rings of Power’s showrunners explain how one scene in season 2 directly ties to The Fellowship of the Ring’s opening sequence.

The Rings of Power season 2 contains a very precise reference to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring‘s movie adaptation, according to its creators.

Speaking to TechRadar ahead of the hit Prime Video show’s return, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay confirmed that there’s a very subtle but faithful call back to the first of six Middle-earth-set films directed by Peter Jackson. In fact, it’s such an understated homage that I suspect many people – Tolkien fanatics or otherwise – won’t have even picked up on it.

The scene in question can be seen at the 0:34 mark in The Rings of Power season 2’s official trailer. It’s the briefest of clips from a much longer sequence in season 2 episode 1, which ends with Elven High-king Gil-galad, the hot-headed Galadriel, and Cirdan – the latter being one of Middle-earth’s oldest and wisest elves – wearing three of the titular rings. The trio was forged in The Rings of Power season 1 finale, but this is the first time they’ll be worn in Amazon’s non-canonical TV series.

Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky… (Image credit: Amazon MGM Studios)

So, what’s so special about the aforementioned elves wearing said magical artifacts? As you can see in the image above, the three rings – Nenya, Narya, and Nilya – sit on one of each character’s middle fingers. That’s significant because, in The Fellowship of the Rings movie adaptation, Galadriel, Gil-galad, and Cirdan are seen wearing the rings on their middle fingers, too. You can compare The Rings of Power‘s interpretation of this key moment with The Fellowship of the Ring’s scene via the above and below images.

The Rings of Power season 2 pays tribute to this early scene in The Fellowship of the Ring movie adaptation (Image credit: New Line Cinema/Warner Bros. Pictures)

Okay, there’s a minor continuity error with Galadriel, who’s seen wearing Nenya on her left hand’s middle finger in The Rings of Power season 2 as opposed to her right hand in The Fellowship of the Ring. Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that McKay and Payne, who are diehard Lord of the Rings fans, performed due diligence to ensure some artistic consistency between the two live-action projects.

Responding to my question about whether this was an intentional creative decision or just blind luck, McKay said: “How did we decide on what finger? Yeah, we did look at the beginning of The Fellowship [of the Ring]”, before Payne interjected: “Yeah, we wanted to be absolutely sure we knew where the elves wore their rings.”

So, there you have it. The Rings of Power may not be canon within The Lord of the Rings universe that J.R.R. Tolkien created, but that doesn’t mean it eschews what’s written in the source material, nor overlooks how its largely faithful movie adaptations were filmed. Kudos, then, to the showrunners of one of the best Prime Video shows for ensuring some connective tissue between their production and Jackson’s first The Lord of the Rings venture. Stay tuned to TechRadar for even more exclusives in the run-up to The Rings of Power season 2’s debut on August 29.

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I’ve narrowed down five upgrades I think the iPhone 16 could hone in on to take on Samsung’s best phones.

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series, comprising the standard model Galaxy S24 Plus and the mighty Galaxy S24 Ultra make up some of the best phones you can buy right now. And they are true rivals of the iPhone 15 family. 

In fact, I’d argue that on pure hardware terms the Galaxy S24, especially the S24 Ultra, has Apple’s phone beat; and I say that as an iPhone 15 Pro Max user. 

So the question is what the rumored iPhone 16 range can do to keep Samsung’s Galaxy phones at bay? Well, I have some thoughts. 

Faster charging

(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

The Galaxy S24 phones don’t exactly challenge the likes of the OnePlus 12 for speedy charging, but they do outpace the iPhone 15. 

While I advocate for well-paced charging to maintain battery longevity, I think the iPhone 16 could bring in more wattage for its charging. At best the iPhone 15 Pro Max can charge at 27 watts with a compatible charger, but a Galaxy S24 Ultra can juice up with a 45W charger. So I think it’s time Apple took some inspiration from its South Korean rival and adopted some speedier charging. 

Integrated AI  

(Image credit: Apple)

An obvious one here, but with the AI features on the Galaxy S24 phones – and indeed the new clutch of Google Pixel 9 phones – Apple lags behind on having a smart smartphone. 

What’s important here is to see truly integrated AI – not nice to have features. Apple’s iOS and its ecosystem are rather seamless to use, so I’d expect any AI features to be the same. While it’s looking unlikely that we’ll see a barrage of Apple intelligence features in the next-generation iPhones, I hope we see some smart tools; say customized automatic replies to calls and texts, or the ability for Siri to come up with a clear agenda of one’s week by sucking in email and calendar data and then integrating it with Maps to come up with ideas on where to get lunch on Tuesday in between meetings and so on. 

 More pro cameras 

(Image credit: Future / Roland Moore-Colyer)

I tend to think Apple offers the best camera phones around, despite the overall TechRadar preference for the Galaxy S24 Ultra. To me, iPhone cameras offer a consistently high level of performance, in both stills and video, that makes the phones fantastic.

However, I think the options to fine-tune a shot are limited – maybe that’s on me, but I feel Apple could do more here.

And with all the Neural Engine processing touted by the Cupertino crew, I’d like to see Apple’s computational photography take a new leap forward – say better processing of highlights and shadows without compromising contrast. Or smarter shot guidance so people can better capture what they’re seeing or expect to see from a photo. 

 Push gaming more 

(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

With the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, Apple touted the ability to run proper console-quality games like Death Stranding. And the phones could do that, albeit not perfectly. 

I still feel there’s untapped potential here, especially with Apple Arcade. So I’d love to see all four predicted iPhone 16 models get powerful chips that can run games typically designed for PS5 or Xbox Series X. 

Add in Apple’s developer ecosystem and we could see a new generation of mobile games that are elevated above others and offer experiences that other devices, including even the best Android phones, can’t deliver. 

Pro potential

(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Speaking of power, the current Pro iPhones aren’t short of it, yet outside of some limited gaming, I feel it’s hard to tap into all that power. Conversely, the Galaxy S24 phones can offer Samsung DeX, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip able to power a pseudo-desktop experience; while not perfect it could double up as an acceptable work machine in a pinch. 

It’s wishful thinking, knowing Apple, but I’d love to see something similar. We’ve seen how iPads are getting closer to MacBooks, so I see no reason why an iPhone couldn’t kick out a semi-desktop take on iOS via a wired or wireless connection to a monitor — heck, Apple could even offer a dedicated hub so it has something to sell on top of this option. 

If nothing else, such an option could make editing photos and video captured on a Pro iPhone a lot more finessed than trying to tap away at a screen. I live with the hope that an Apple engineer somewhere will read this…

Of course, iPhones being iPhones, regardless of whether Apple does adopt any of my wishes in the iPhone 16 models, they’re sure to be popular.

However, the competition from Android phones has arguably never been stronger. So I do think Apple could do with something a bit special for the next-gen iPhones to keep wandering smartphone eyes firmly on the house Steve Jobs built.  

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The cloud ethos of flexibility and collaboration should extend to AI usage, allowing organizations to move data between clouds as needed.

In October 2022, the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, launched an investigation into the practices of the cloud hyperscalers. Since then, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have been referred to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – the competition regulator – putting the issue of cloud vendor lock-in firmly in the spotlight.

There have been multiple acts to this story, but recently, the CMA published the findings of qualitative interviews with hyperscaler customers as the first phase of the investigation. Like many in the industry expected, interoperability was the main concern, as technical barriers were making moving data or services between cloud computing services a significant challenge. Egress fees – which are charged for moving data out of a provider’s cloud – were somewhat surprisingly seen as less of an issue, with many of the organizations interviewed describing them as negligible.

However, this indifference towards egress fees changed when asked about AI.

A look to the AI-driven future

For the last two years, AI – particularly generative AI – has dominated the tech landscape. Organizations are now starting to move from the experimental laboratory phase of AI implementation, to deploying it in production with some initial use cases.

The hyperscalers have been at the forefront of AI investment. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI last year, setting the tone for a trend that has now seen the big three hyperscalers invest heavily. It’s quickly becoming a key battleground with each now able to boast exclusivity on certain AI products.

So naturally, the CMA asked questions about how cloud providers will impact AI in the future. This has been identified as a potential issue, particularly when considering egress fees. At present, the amount of data organizations are moving from one cloud to another is relatively small, hence the negligible egress charges. However, if an enterprise had most of its data stored in one hyperscaler’s environment but was keen to use another cloud provider to access their AI tools, the egress fees for moving that volume of data would be astronomical.

Organizations may want to use or train AI models on different hyperscalers for certain tasks. This means organizations must have the ability to easily move sets of data between clouds to another. Here, the constant flow of data back and forth would result in both egress fees and interoperability issues. This means organizations are faced with the choice of either having to stay with their current provider and only use the AI tools they offer, or spend months making their data suitable for migration. One customer from the CMA interim report made this exact point:

“One of the things that is a concern currently is lock in. So for our analysis work, we’ve used AWS, their tooling, their modelling and the lock in in terms of AI feels a lot stronger than it does in other services. For example, the optimisation of certain models on certain clouds would make it very difficult from my understanding to move elsewhere. But it’s definitely something that we’re looking more into. I don’t think we understand what the answer is currently. But it is a concern of ours, and the lock in is a big concern because I think it takes us down a certain way of using AI with certain models.”

Breaking down cloud barriers

The interim report makes it clear that while cloud vendor lock-in exists today, interoperability and egress fee issues will be amplified as AI becomes more widespread.

To be clear, a more flexible cloud market won’t result in a switching frenzy where organizations move all their data regularly. Because even if the CMA does take action to address interoperability issues, moving all of an organization’s data between cloud environments would still be a mammoth task.

It’s more likely that customers will move subsets of data from one cloud to another depending on which AI tool they want to use – essentially adopting a highly flexible, multi-cloud model. Here, the hyperscalers are likely to see as much data coming into their environments as going out, with smaller data sets being moved more regularly.

This is why a modern data architecture will be vital for organizations looking to make effective use of AI moving forward.

Regardless of whether they’re changing cloud provider entirely or moving a subset of data from one hyperscaler to another to take advantage of AI, a unified data platform can help by providing a layer of abstraction that makes it easier to securely move data from cloud to cloud.

Hyperscalers shouldn’t be AI innovation gatekeepers

Choice and flexibility over which AI products to use will be vital, especially as organizations are likely looking to innovate with AI. But progress shouldn’t be unnecessarily restricted by a few companies. The ethos of cloud has always been one of flexibility and bringing people together. This should be reflected in organizations’ freedom of choice over how they use AI. It’s then up to customers to ensure they can move data between clouds as and when they need to.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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