Nintendo to Launch New Game Console in March 2017

Japan's Nintendo said on Wednesday it expects operating profit to rise 36.9 per cent in the year through March 2017, as the videogame maker plans to release more smartphone games as well as its next-generation game console.

Nintendo estimates operating profit to grow to 45 billion yen ($404.9 million) from 32.9 billion yen a year prior, when earnings were roughly in line with a forecast announced in February.

Nintendo last year said it would enter the rapidly growing mobile gaming segment after years of resisting investor calls for the move, with consumers starting to shift from dedicated consoles to simple and often free-to-download smartphone games.

Its first mobile title launched in March, Miitomo, was more of a social networking application, leaving investors and fans awaiting games based on bestselling franchises such as Super Mario Bros.

The company has promised four more smartphone games this business year. At an earnings briefing on Wednesday, President Tatsumi Kimishima said it will release two "by this autumn".

To boost its struggling game console business, Kimishima also said Nintendo would release its next console globally in March 2017. The company has disclosed few details of the console beyond its codename, NX.

Sales of its current Wii U console have lagged those of Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360.

Nintendo forecasts Wii U sales at 800,000 units this business year, from 3.26 million units in the previous year.

Kimishima said the company could cease production of the Wii U by March 2018.

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Flexible Camera Developed That Can Be Wrapped Around Objects

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) Leaked in Press Images

The anticipated successor to the popular Samsung Galaxy J1, tipped to be called the Galaxy J1 (2016), has once again been leaked in images on the Web. While in the previous leaks we have seen the unannounced smartphone in its Black colour variant, the new leaked image shows the handset in two additional colour variants. The image tweeted by @evleaks on Monday shows the Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) smartphone in Gold and White colour variants. The design of the handset also fall in line with the models leaked in images previously. It is worth mentioning that the screen bezel seen in the image stay black in all the three colour variants. The smartphone is seen featuring a physical home button, along with a multi-window, and a back capacitive button on either side. At the back, the smartphone sports a camera at the centre with a LED flash and a speaker on either sides. Samsung is yet to announce the smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016)leaked in images last month as well...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog