Given the sustained support of all With interest in playing games on their phones, companies are eager to offer an experience that works better than simply touching a touchscreen with your fingers. Razer, the maker of flashy, rugged gaming devices, has a new offering that does just that.
The new Razer Kishi Ultra is an upgraded controller that adds pro-grade joysticks, buttons, and triggers to almost any mobile device. It’s the latest in Razer’s Kishi line of portable gaming devices, which released in 2020. The two handles come apart, allowing you to slide your phone between them. Let the spring-loaded clamp hold your phone and you’ve got something like a DIY Nintendo Switch. It uses a USB-C port to connect to the phone. Additionally, it can support an iPad Mini and any Android tablet up to 8 inches diagonal as long as it has a USB-C port. The Kishi Ultra only works with USB-C iPhones, so you’re limited to the iPhone 15 and later. (It can even support some flip phones.) The Kishi Ultra can also be connected to your PC via a USB-C cable. Like almost everything Razer makes, the Kishi Ultra is packed with RGB lighting options that you can change through the associated app, so you can enjoy customizable brightness.
The Kishi is different from the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, which are complete portable gaming machines on their own. But gaming devices with more specific use cases are gaining popularity, such as Playstation’s Portal device, which only allows you to stream games from your existing PS5. Razer has been making portable gaming devices since 2013 and has its own Steam Deck-style Razer Edge portable device. But more and more companies are eager to make devices that work with the screen you already have in your pocket. Devices like the latest from Razer and those from gaming company Backbone are intended to strap controllers to the side of your device and improve your mobile gaming time.
Here’s some other consumer tech news from this week.
Meta adds AI images to WhatsApp
goal has added AI image generation capabilities to your WhatsApp messaging platform. As part of the launch of its Llama 3 big language model that arrived this week, the company has improved its offerings in the Meta AI app.
He AI image generation option In WhatsApp it works like sending a text message. You can enter a private chat with Meta AI and write a message. The keyword in the input field is “imagine,” so if you type that and a description of the image you want to create, the AI assistant will generate a visual representation of your message. And it happens almost instantly. The image appears on the screen as you type, and you can watch it change and build in real time as you add more words to your message. This can get… quite strange as you add more parameters to your request, but the more descriptive you are, the more detail the generator can include in an image. The resulting images are pretty much what you’d expect from any source of AI art these days: weird proportions, humans with too many fingers, eyeballs out of place. Still, it is interesting and very strange to see how an AI generates your description of something as you write it.
Meet GMC’s Huge New Denali EV Pickup
Photography: GMC
There is a flood of new electric vehicles coming out this year, ranging from small three-wheeled smart cars like the Nimbus one to revved-up supercars like the upcoming electric Dodge Charger. Pickups are a slightly more specialized space in the electric vehicle market, in addition to popular models like the Ford F-150 Lightningofferings from Rivian and Tesla’s floundering Cybertruck (all of which were just recalled).