LG creates new OLED division

by Jon Mundy 08 December 2014 |

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LG has formed a new division dedicated to developing OLED screen technology.

The South Korean company is essentially the only company working with OLED technology right now, and it looks set to drive home that advantage by forming a new department dedicated to it.

"We've created the new division to create synergy by gathering all the hitherto scattered OLED-related departments into one," said an LG spokesperson.

LG's new OLED division will be headed by company CTO Yeo Sang-deog, whose work securing LG's OLED advantage recently saw him promoted to president.

The company will reportedly quadruple OLED panel production this month in a bid to bring down the prohibitive price of OLED TV sets. It is also said to be hard at work on one of the technology's lingering problems - burn-in. This is where some images stick when left on screen for long periods.

Back at the start of November, Samsung revealed that it wouldn't be releasing any OLED TV sets in 2015, and would turn its attention instead to Quantum Dot LCD technology. The company, like most others, is struggling to find a way to produce OLED panels cost-effectively.

Prior to this, LG claimed that it could be two to three years ahead of its rivals in OLED development terms. This is thanks to a breakthrough that came via the acquisition of Kodak's white OLED technology back in 2009, which has led to LG developing superior OLED panel yield rates.

The creation of an LG OLED division shows that the company is ready to fill its role as the sole OLED TV manufacturer for 2015 - and possibly beyond.



Read More: Best TVs 2014

Via: Cnet

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Q Acoustics Q-TV2 Audio Review

What is the Q Acoustics Q-TV2?

The Q Acoustics Q-TV2 is an ingenious audio upgrade for flatscreen TVs that attaches to the back of the set and delivers sound from two speakers poking out of the sides. This virtually invisible solution is equipped with 100W of amplification, eight speaker drivers and a slim subwoofer, all designed to dramatically improve sound quality when watching TV shows and movies.

The Q-TV2 has been around for a few years now and cost £330 when it was first introduced, but because Q Acoustics has recently slashed the price to a ridiculously low £150, we thought it was high time we had a listen.



SEE ALSO: Best Soundbars Round-up

Q Acoustics Q-TV2 – Design, Setup and Connections

You can’t see the Q-TV2 when it’s clamped to the back of your TV, so understandably Q hasn’t bothered to make it look pretty. The industrial design has more in common with a wall mount than a soundbar, using robust metal components to give it the requisite sturdiness.



The main body, which measures 50mm deep, has metal bars coming out of the sides that hold the satellite speakers. It’s designed to fit LCD TVs between 32-inch and 42-inch, while the Q-TV2X is designed for 42-inch to 50-inch screens.

To fit the Q-TV2, you attach two rails to the threaded fixing points on the back of your TV – a wide range of screws is provided to cater for different TVs. If these rails cover up your TV’s connections, use the supplied spacers to create a gap to feed the cables through. The Q-TV2 then simply clips onto the rails.

Having this contraption strapped to the back will obviously bulk up your TV considerably, and therefore you can’t attach it to newer, slimmer LED TVs that can’t support the weight. In that instance, Q Acoustics offers a free tabletop stand that lets you place the speakers behind the set. Standard and cantilever wall brackets are also available that hold both the TV and Q-TV2.

The width of the speakers can be adjusted for your TV by loosening the bolts and pulling the bars out. You can also move the speakers up and down the bars or swivel them to the optimum angle.



Along the top of the unit is a row of sockets and controls. The easiest way to feed sound into the Q-TV2 is through the optical digital input – that way, anything connected to your TV will be heard through the speakers, be it Blu-ray, Sky TV or games console. Make sure your TV's optical output is set to PCM or you'll only hear noise.

Alternatively you can connect your TV to the analogue RCA inputs or 3.5mm minijack. Using the latter you can connect your TV’s headphone output and control volume using your existing TV remote – though we don’t recommend it. A second 3.5mm jack lets you hook up portable audio devices.

Alongside the sockets are three switches, one of which lets you select from three EQ modes based on where it’s installed – freestanding, wall or corner. Another switch lets you choose whether to use the Q-TV2’s own volume controls or the volume controls of an external device connected directly to the RCA inputs, such as a TV receiver. The third switch lets you apply an audio delay (up to 180ms) to marry up sound and pictures if there are lip sync problems.

SEE ALSO: Best TVs Round-up

Q Acoustics Q-TV2 – Drivers

The Q-TV2 boasts eight Balanced Mode Radiator (BMR) drivers, two in each speaker and four in the slim subwoofer. BMR drivers are known for their ability to disperse sound over a wider axis than traditional drivers, which means everyone in the room theoretically shares the same listening experience.

The subwoofer is fully ‘force cancelling’, which means it keeps vibrations and resonances to a minimum and therefore prevents any damage to the TV or blurring of the picture.

Q Acoustics Q-TV2 – Operation

In the box is a compact remote bearing just three buttons – volume up, down and mute. The volume keys also let you adjust the audio delay when the switch is in the ‘Set Delay’ position. It’s an excessively well-made zapper given its limited jurisdiction, but we’re not complaining.

Q Acoustics Q-TV2 – Performance

Despite its unorthodox design, the Q-TV2 does a terrific job of adding power and depth to TV shows and movies. We don’t think there’s a flatscreen TV on the planet that can match the sheer muscle and clarity offered by this impressive speaker.

The onboard amp goes impressively loud and the BMR drivers easily fill the room. There’s no virtual surround processing but the unit musters a surprisingly enveloping sound that makes you feel involved. The dynamic, attacking tone is effortlessly exciting without stepping into harshness.

But even more impressive is its bass output, demonstrated by the first beach-drop scene in Edge of Tomorrow on Blu-ray. As the troops wait in the hold before the drop, the plane’s engine has a low, solid hum, and when Cage is dropped into the battle zone the room swells with weighty explosions and thumping machine gun fire.

This beefy bass brings the sort of scale and drama you simply don’t get from TV speakers, which is no mean feat given that the unit is barely thicker than the TV it’s trying to improve.

But on the downside bass isn’t particularly well defined. Much of the time the sub just rumbles loudly, struggling to convey differing velocities and nuances. It could be tighter, too – there’s some overhang on quick bass hits – but it seems churlish to complain given the sub’s slim frame.

The sound is remarkably detailed, evidenced by the crisp clank of metal robo-suits during battle scenes and the subtle background chatter in the Army barracks. Dialogue comes through loud and clear – Tom Cruise’s nasal tones are unusually audible – and in general there’s a terrific sense of cohesion and openness that makes for an entertaining listen no matter what you’re playing.

Should I buy the Q Acoustics Q-TV2?

In the words of David Brent, a good idea is a good idea forever, which is why the Q-TV2 is still a remarkably clever and compelling audio solution, despite its age. It’s virtually invisible when clamped onto the back of a TV, but makes its presence known with an exciting, enveloping and weighty sound, imbued with many of the qualities that make Q’s Media 4 soundbar so special.

Sure, the subwoofer is the weak link, but it still works wonders considering its slim dimensions, and its deficiencies are easy to overlook at this price. Overall performance is good enough to compete with more recent soundbars and soundbases, although the Media 4 is far superior if you have the space and budget for it.

At its original price of £330 we’d probably award the Q-TV2 8/10, but at £150 it’s a nailed on 9/10 for sheer value. Snap one up today.

Verdict

Q’s terrific rear-mounted TV speaker delivers an impossibly big sound from a slender frame, making it a steal at its new knock-down price.

Next, read more Soundbar & Surround Sound System Reviews

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The Order: 1886 Game Review

Platforms: PS4 exclusive

The Order: 1886 release date: 20/02/2015

There’s a lot to admire in The Order: 1886, but players may end up wanting to like it more than the actually do

It’s tough not to feel more than a little worried about The Order: 1886. Ready At Dawn’s steampunk shooter was unveiled to much fanfare at Sony’s E3 keynote in 2013, but in the time since, all we’ve been shown of it was a rather ropy demo at this year’s E3 and a new trailer cut for Sony’s conference. The presentation, style and story of The Order: 1886 look undeniably intriguing. But once one is placed behind its controls, issues start to pop up at a pace.

The Order: 1886 is set in an alternate version of Victorian London and revolves around a titular military organization that’s apparently descendent from the Knights Of The Round Table. The basic premise is that trouble is afoot in Ye Olde London Towne; rebels from impoverished areas of the city are causing havoc in the streets and it appears a plague is turning some poor citizens into blood-crazed monsters. It’s up to the four Order Knights – Percival, Galahad, Isobel and Lafayette – to get to the bottom of what’s causing these shenanigans.

For Sony’s 20th Anniversary reveal, Ready At Dawn had a new level for the media to try out. It begins with The Order Knights rappelling down the side of a zeppelin on its way to Portsmouth with a rather important dignitary aboard. Rebel insurgents have infiltrated the crew and security guards and are intent on assassinating this Lord before he reaches his destination. It’s up to The Order to stop them.

It’s hard not to marvel at the game’s presentation, to be honest. The Order Knights cut a fine figure, decked up in Victorian dusters, sporting immaculately manicured whiskers – apart from Isobel, of course – and their belts and bandoliers gleam with weapons that look both archaic and futuristic at the same time. Their surroundings once they’ve entered the zeppelin are a mish-mash of steel girders and copper-wired gizmos. The level even begins with a fantastic shot over London, it clouds and smog obscuring the maze below, with the Thames glistening between the North and South banks.

The voice acting is top notch and the dialogue is better written and delivered than your average shooter. In no short amount of time players become intrigued with these austere agents and we immediately want to know more about both them and their world. It’s the sort of setting that’s likely to inspire a ton of fanfic, if players can just get past the ham-fisted level design and stunted mechanics.

Playing The Order: 1886 makes one want to weep. How could a game that looks so stunning and is clearly a labour of love boast such shonky mechanics? Things start badly with The Order entering the zeppelin as all the player is required to do is push one of the thumbsticks in the direction of the airship’s door. Once inside, they’re forced into a stealthy crouch and tasked with taking out a series of guards on their way to securing the cockpit.

Characters move like they’re floating on air; there’s no weight or immediacy to their movements and latching onto cover seems to be something of a craps shoot – sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It also feels incredibly strange to begin a shooter demo with a stealth section in which players are unable to engage in gunplay. Instead, we were made to creep up behind guards, wait for a control prompt and then stab them in the back. Mistime the button hit and it’s game over.

Crashing into the cockpit also presented problems. Rather than being able to whip out Galahad’s guns and shoot our way clear, we instead had to endure a series of tedious quicktime events (QTEs), one of which wasn’t really clear on what was expected from us. The game’s QTEs aren’t all bad – there was a section where Galahad had to hack a couple of electro-magnetic locks with a bulb-powered gizmo – but to shove timed button mashing into a shooter feels weird.

Once The Order had taken control of the cockpit, Percival told Galahad to secure the Lord and The Order’s nominal ranking officer who was apparently along for the ride in the airship. This meant another stretch of stealth in which the knight’s guns were off-limits and then a set-piece in which Galahad used a sniper rifle to identify which guards in an atrium were genuine and which were rebels in disguise. Once this was accomplished, the gunfight we’d been longing to get into took place… and it’s here The Order: 1886 threw another spanner into the works.

Once we’d taken out the rebels in the atrium with Galahad and his sniper rifle we stood in the balcony waiting for more enemies while Percival yelled instructions over the radio about securing the area. When no more enemies arrived, we nipped down stairs only to see enemies begin pouring into the area in a steady stream. Since the action had switched to close quarters, we started using a machine pistol until blasting a nearby rebel yielded up a shotgun capable of dumping three shells into an enemy at once.

“Using shotgun on an airship? The man’s insane,” muttered Galahad as we promptly picked up said weapon and began to use it with no ill effects to anything made out of flesh.

Once we’d cleared the atrium a second time, a cutscene ensued, in which the rebel’s leader made a break for it and Percival yelled at Galahad to take off after the them.

“Don’t lose them!” he yelled.

Unfortunately, nothing cropped up on the HUD to show us which direction to head in, so we ended up running around in circles for a couple of minutes – running up to doors that proved impossible to open – until we managed to find the environment’s exit. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so frustrating.

The Order: 1886 is unwieldy and unintuitive; playing it, one begins to see that, what a mind-blowing piece of work Gears Of War was in both its mechanics and design. You were always neck-deep in the action and everything felt immediate and tense. Say what you like about GOW’s stupid its plots and neck-snapping machismo; it was and it remains one of the benchmarks in third-person-shooters.

If only we could say the same about The Order: 1886. In fact, if we could take Ready At Dawn’s shooter, strip out its plot, characters and story and bind it to the tight gameplay of Gears, we’d be on to a winner. Here’s hoping there’s going to be a lot of QA and polishing between now and launch because if The Order: 1886 lands in its current state, it’s likely that players will end up wanting to like it more than they actually do.

Next read: Best games of 2014

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Bloodborne Game Review

Exclusive to PS4

Bloodborne is Dark Souls for those who were intimidated by From Software’s dungeon crawler. That doesn’t mean it’ll go easy on you

You die a lot in Bloodborne. That’s just the way this game is wired.

You’ll get shot to pieces by a lone, lanky goon whose position you’ll misjudge for a powered-up strike. You’ll be chopped up at the hands of an axe-and-pitchfork-wielding mob that gathered in the street to watch the corpse of a monster burn in front of them. You’ll be turned into paint by a fat, bloated giant whose speed of movement belies his overweight form.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Bloodborne, after all, is the brainchild of Hidetake Miyazaki, the mastermind behind Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls – two of the hardest games ever birthed into the industry. His last two titles weren’t just a pair of superbly crafted hardcore dungeon-crawlers, they became a rallying call for old-school gaming sensibilities.

If you didn’t like Dark Souls, some said, you weren’t a real gamer.

Funnily enough, though, a lot of people didn’t like Dark Souls and that fact didn’t in any way put them off playing video games. Bloodborne may be the hardcore title that papers over that crack. It’s difficult, unforgiving and it doesn’t offer any free rides but players are more likely to be drawn to it than the games Miyazaki presided over ahead of it.

It’s easy to chalk this up to the game’s presentation. Bloodborne is set in a nightmarish city that owes as much to HP Lovecraft as it does to Victorian London in terms of visual representation. A permanent cloudy midnight hovers over the necropolis’s leering spires and bloodstained cobbles. The game’s protagonist sports a leather duster and tri-corn hat that become more and more bloodied as they carve their way through the streets. The whole environment is soaked in a Gothic pallor that never shifts, whether the player is stalking through the street or engaged in a pitched battle with myriad foes.

It’s a more popular – and by extension, one would say – easier world to get to grips with, in spite of the fact that it’s darker in tone than either Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls. A purist would argue that it’s warmer and more inviting and they’d be right. Bloodborne is more accessible. Players will want to invest in this world.

The mechanics are more inviting too. Rather than have players oscillate between attack and defence – slash away or hide behind a shield – Bloodborne offers only a powerful dodge as the primary means of evading damage. The protagonist walks into every battle with a weapon in both hands. There’s no blocking option here – at least not in the build on offer at Sony’s demo – and instead there’s just a dual attack. You can’t cower behind a shield in Bloodborne. You get out of the way or you get badly hurt.

The new attack set-up lends a new fluidity to the combat. Since players have no blocking option, they’re forced to be on the front foot, regardless of the challenge ahead of them. Bloodborne rewards this bloody minded approach; if an enemy scores a hit, the player is given a limited time to score multiple attacks in return that juice their lifebar back up to healthy levels. Here, offence isn’t just the best defence – it’s a life-saving tactic.

There’s a rather sick logic underpinning all of this; Bloodborne is an intimidating beast, but it’s also one that pushes players to move out of their comfort zone. For example, at one point the player may find themself caught between two enemies of equal threat. On the one side, there’s a group of five goons on patrol and sneaking past them is impossible. On the other is a mutated giant – who easily qualifies as a min-boss – who will be unaware of them until they attack. Both camps pose equal threats, but which should the player pick?

It’s moments such as these that make Bloodborne such an enticing prospect, because the answer to the above question all depends on how confident the player feels, given their ability and the equipment they have stashed. That, and the fact that the truth is they’re probably capable of taking down either set of enemies provided they’ve done their homework and they’re prepared to treat each encounter in the game as potential lethal, regardless of what they’re facing.

Just like in Dark Souls.

Bloodborne is better than Dark Souls, because it makes no concessions and still provides the hardcore with the experience they need to feel challenged. It seems strange to say it, but Bloodborne may be the best gateway into the hardcore gaming experience that casual players have ever been offered.

After all, you die a lot in Bloodborne. That’s just the way this game is wired.



Read more: Best PS4 games

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Samsung confirms CES 2015 plans

by Luke Johnson 07 December 2014 |

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With CES 2015 now less than a month away, Samsung has confirmed its plans for the Las Vegas-based trade show.

An annual highlight of the tech calendar, CES 2015 is to be held in Sin City between January 5 and January 9.

Now, Korean giant Samsung has announced its plans for the show, confirming its eagerly awaited press conference will be held on Monday January 5.

With Samsung’s product showcase to run between 2pm and 2:45 pm Pacific Time (10pm – 10:45pm GMT), the company will announce its 2015 wares on the same day as bitter rivals LG and Sony.

It is expected that Samsung will use its CES press conference to introduce a range of new products, from 4K TV ranges to new tablets and a host of techy home appliances.

For those after an extra insight in to Samsung’s view on the coming year in tech, company President and CEO BK Yoon will host a separate keynote speech between 6:30 and 7:30pm PST (2:30 – 3:30am Tuesday 6th GMT).

TrustedReviews will be on location at CES 2015 to bring you all the latest breaking news and hands-on insights. Stay tuned for all the Consumer Electronics Show latest.

Read More: Galaxy Note 5 release date

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Mark Zuckerberg hits back at Tim Cook criticisms

by Luke Johnson 07 December 2014 |

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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s ad-based business model amid criticism from Tim Cook.

Earlier this year, Apple head Cook hit out at the revenue models of rivals such as Google and Facebook, stating Apple does not sell customers’ personal data to advertisers.

“When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product,” Cook said at the time.

Now, speaking with Time, Zuckerberg has slammed Cook’s comments as being a “ridiculous concept”.

Ruling out the proposition of Facebook moving to a subsciption-based, paid-for business model, the 30-year-old billionaire stated: “Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don’t do that by having a service people pay for.”

He added: “What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them?

“If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper.”

Facebook users have long hit out at the social network’s increasing advertising push, with ads now filtered out across all aspects of the site, including peoples news feeds.

Read More: Zuckerberg explains why Facebook forced the Messenger app

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Best racing games 2014

Wondering which racer is the best one to buy this year? We take a look at the best ones to buy this year.


2014 has gifted us with quite a few racers. Some have definitely exceeded our expectations, while others have left us feeling like throwing the controller through the screen in frustration.

If you're wondering which one is worth investing in this year, we've compiled a list of the best racing games of 2014 to help you.

Either click through to read about all the contenders, or use the quick jump list below:

The Crew by Ubisoft

GRID: Autosport by Codemasters

Forza Horizon 2 by PlayGround Games

Mario Kart 8 by Nintendo

MotoGP 14 by Milestone S.r.l

Trials: Fusion by RedLynx

DriveClub by Evolution Studios

GTA 5 by Rockstar Games



See also: Best games 2014

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