Dieter Bohn The Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller looks like a triumph

Hello friends. Apologies for skipping a day, and a small admission that it might happen slightly more often as work on other projects takes up more time than it otherwise would if we weren’t all working from home.

It might seem small, but the most important consumer tech news of the past couple of days is simply Sony revealing the controller for the PlayStation 5. It’s called the DualSense controller and it is absolutely beautiful. I know there have been many jokes about how it looks like a Stormtrooper or any number of other things. (Also, there have jokes directed at me because it uses USB-C, the port I am most obsessed with.) Jokes are good!

But this controller is not a joke, it’s a triumph of good design. Here’s how Chaim Gartenberg put it: Sony’s new DualSense controller is its most exciting design since the original PlayStation. 

From the first time you look at it, it’s clear that this is a new thing, one that’s wholly different (and, hopefully, better) than past PlayStation controllers. The two-tone color scheme! The sleeker, less angular design! USB-C! The glowing blue lights! Even the fancy new PS-shaped logo button. The internet lit up after the announcement with comparisons to the futuristic robot EVE from Disney’s WALL-E, to BMW’s i8, to the redesigned Enterprise from the 2009 Star Trek movie.

I love that it doesn’t look boring. I love that it’s just white and black. I love that Sony kept its iconic shapes as button identifiers instead of switching to letters. There’s something arcane about it. I even love that the three little lines on the share button are the same visual indicators used for a honk in Untitled Goose Game.

A good controller is actually very difficult to make, if you think about it. It needs to wrangle Bluetooth into providing a solid, lag-free communication channel for gameplay. Bluetooth, remember, is the technology that can’t manage to keep a steady stream of low-bitrate music going from your phone to your headphones when you cross a street.

It needs to do the same with audio — yes, there’s a headphone jack, because when lag matters, you use a headphone jack. It also needs to stand up to lots of abuse both from regular use and from inveterate controller chuckers (I have stopped but the desire is still there).

It is, in many ways, as challenging as building a smartphone, if you think about it. So while some people were taken aback by how much interest this controller garnered, I was not. It deserves it.

Elsewhere in gaming

┏ Microsoft’s Xbox Game Bar is getting custom widgets and its own store on Windows. Tom Warren has it right.

If Microsoft can convince developers like Nvidia, Discord, and many more to create custom widgets then the Xbox Game Bar could quickly become the default overlay for PC gaming

┏ Google launches free version of Stadia with a two-month Pro trial.

Meetings

┏ Google’s Hangouts Meet is now just Google Meet. Think fast: what is Google’s app for chatting with somebody via text? No, not for phones, but it still works on phones too. What is its Slack competitor? What is its video chat app? No, not the consumer one, the business one?

The answers to all those questions are almost surely a mystery to most of the population. Or worse, they probably have the “wrong” answer. Google’s follies with communicating the very names of its communications products are worse than the ever changing strategy for making them. So instead of announcing a big change here, it just quietly tried to sneak it by everybody.

Did you know that technically there was never a product called GChat? Seems like maybe, you know, Google should just do that.

┏ Google bans its employees from using Zoom over security concerns.

┏ All Microsoft events will be digital-only until July 2021.

Phones

┏ The OnePlus 8 Pro will have super fast, 30W wireless charging.

┏ Rumors of a Galaxy Fold 2 are starting to heat up. Someday I will review a folding device and instead of saying “this is interesting and promising, but don’t buy it” I’l instead be able to say “If you want to spend the small price premium, this is worth it.” The Z Flip came closest to that, but nothing has nailed it yet.

Anyway, that’s the bar Samsung. Try to clear it!

┏ Samsung is bringing 5G to its midrange phones this year. Samsung’s A series sells in absolutely massive volume, sure, but also its quality on the mid-high end of the range has improved considerably.

┏ LG reveals new design language for next phone. LG needs to do something dramatic. We’ll see if this is it, but it’ll take more than a fresh design to turn the company’s mobile phone division back around.

Phone software

┏ It’s impossible to screenshot a Quibi show, and that’s detrimental to its success. Julia Alexander makes a great point. The difficulty in making memes completely kneecaps the chances for Quibi shows to go viral. It’s a byproduct of being aggressively phone-only, but one they should try very hard to solve — and fast.

┏ How to use FaceTime for group calls. I legitimately wish I’d had this how-to from Aliya Chaudhry last week. We used Facetime for some group birthday party calls and it was genuinely difficult to get everybody on the same page on where to click, what was ringing, and how it all worked.

┏ Google Fit redesign makes step tracking much more prominent. I do wonder if this is in any way related to the Fitbit acquisition. But either way, this was the right move. I appreciate that Google is trying to present an abstracted health metric like “move minutes” because it is actually more useful than a step count, but I also suspect that Fit just doesn’t have that many users. When you have a small userbase, probably better to just stick to what people already mental models for, otherwise the switching cost is too high.

“We recognize that counting steps is a familiar activity goal and a great starting point for many of our users when on the path to getting active,” a Google representative said in a blog post about the changes. “Many users track steps daily in Google Fit and in other apps, and it’s an important goal for them. We listened closely to our users and now both Heart Points and step count will be paired together as goals at the center of our app.”

Laptops

┏ Asus Chromebook Flip C436 review: pricey, premium Chromebook. I have to say, now that more competition has emerged the Pixelbook Go looks better now than it did at release. But I think the Asus C434, which isn’t going away, is still probably the best option for most people. Monica Chin’s review is worth a read, as it sets the stakes for what’s going on with Chromebooks this year:

That’s why I’m so disappointed by the battery life, because I think it turns a Chromebook that could’ve been the best in its class to one that is just okay. Starting at $649, you can get the Pixelbook Go, which has a lower-powered processor but also performs quite well and has a much better battery life

┏ Dell accidentally leaks images of new XPS 15 and 17.