Not content with its recent announcement to increase data and lower prices for its family plans, Sprint is unveiling a new plan that gives you unlimited everything for just $60 a month. The new plan includes unlimited, talk, text and data for $20 less than T-Mobile’s unlimited plan. That adds up to a savings of $480 over two years.
It seems like that Sprint hopes to combat the Un-carrier’s latest announcement to give a year’s free unlimited LTE data for person and a friend when they both switch to T-Mobile from Sprint, Verizon or AT&T.
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While the plan will be available for both new and existing customers, customers will need to either already have a compatible phone, buy a new phone for full retail price, or enroll in Sprint’s Easy Pay program. Easy Pay allows users to purchase a phone for a small initial down payment, and pay off the phone through installments over 24 months. The initial and monthly payments vary based on the chosen phone, with a 16GB Apple iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S5 currently available for $0 down and $27 per month.
Finally, after all the paperwork is signed, users will still have to deal with Sprint’s lethargic 4G network, which is the slowest of the four major carriers. While Spark data rates are speedy when you can get it, coverage is spotty and results from our network testing has Sprint often struggling to break 3 Mbps up and down on 4G. Also, unlimited data isn’t quite bottomless as the top 5 percent of users will see their speeds throttled, a method also used by other carriers.
The biggest takeaway is that competition is heating up between carriers. In the wake of the failed purchase of T-Mobile by Sprint, there is no love lost between the third and fourth largest U.S. carriers.
Sam is a former penguin trainer and archery instructor who dabbles in esports and has lived on three different continents. If you have some comments on new tech or the best noodles spots in NYC, drop a line @SamRutherford.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch $15.00 Octodad: Deadliest Catch's unique control scheme is a great gimmick that takes itself too seriously. But at least the theme song is amazing!
Here I am: A man in a three-piece suit, attempting to use a children's slide. It's a lot harder than I remember. Impossible, really. But my daughter is goading me on from the patio, "Come on, Daddy! Try out the slide!" How could I possibly break her adorable little heart?
I lift one gelatinous leg up over my head and gingerly place it on the third step. Only three more to go! Halfway there. I lift my other leg, placing this one at the top of the ladder. I've done it! Now I just have to lift the first leg up to the top...
My first leg gets hooked on one of the ladder rungs as it ascends, pulling me off balance. I lose control, desperately flailing my arms. It's no good—I slip awkwardly over the side in a puddled mass, collapsing to the ground, a shapeless yellow blob in a striking Italian suit.
I begin to wonder how nobody realizes I'm an octopus.
Yes, you are a father who is also an octopus—thus the "Octodad" name. And, as the game's excellent theme song helpfully informs you, "nobody suspects a thing." Well, except for your archenemy, a crazed chef who is somehow the only person who sees through your incredibly poor disguise to your true nature.
Even finding a tux can be an adventure when you're an octopus in a suit.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch joins a legion of other recent games where movement is the hardest mechanic to master. Think QWOP, Surgeon Simulator, or Probably Archery. In that spirit, I do not recommend playing this game with a mouse and keyboard—plug in a gamepad if you've got one handy. I assume the developers agree, seeing as you unlock a Steam achievement for plugging in a controller.
You'll control three appendages in the game. By default, the left analog stick moves one of your arms toward and away from your body, while the right stick raises and lowers the arm. By pulling the left or right trigger, the sticks instead take control of Octodad's legs.
It's a lot harder than it sounds. And a lot sillier.
The writing is just as ludicrous. Octodad must navigate the perils of modern family life, working with his human wife to raise his two all-human kids to be model American citizens or whatever. Of course, talking to your kids about sex is quite a struggle when you can only communicate in flustered blub blub noises.
Ask your mom, kid. (Click to enlarge.)
Early levels are—as absurd as it sounds—a heartwarming peek into life as an octopus disguised as a human. It's family values soul-food, with a dash of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Pour your daughter a glass of milk. Mow the lawn. Throw some balls around the backyard. Cook some burgers. Weed the garden.
Try not to trip over your own eight feet while accomplishing the most banal of tasks.
Octodad is a gimmick. Unfortunately, it's a gimmick that all-too-quickly aspires to something more.
The game is at its best when the stakes are low. Trample your wife's garden and she'll reprimand you! Throw the burgers on the ground and nobody bats an eyelid! Slip on a banana peel and look ridiculous!
But without giving the plot away, Octodad's back half takes a turn for the serious. Stealth missions, puzzles that require nigh-pinpoint accuracy—these are frustrating enough in normal games, but in a game with a purposefully obfuscated control scheme?
Football season is upon us. Whether you’re tuning in to watch your favorite team or trying to keep up with the latest player stats for your fantasy league, you’re going to need quick access to the latest news and scores. We’ve scoured the Web for the best apps to keep you up-to-date on everything football, from college to the pros.
Platform: Android, iOS
If you follow sports on the Web, you know Bleacher Report. But you may not know that the outlet has its own sports app. Team Stream lets you select your favorite team or league and get a constant stream of news pumped directly to your Android or iOS device. Opening a stream will give you even more stories and updates from local newspapers, social media sites and Bleacher Report itself. See a story that might impact a friend’s fantasy team? Share it with them through Team Stream via Facebook or Twitter.
Today marks the official release of Firefox 10, which adds new developer tools and changes the design of the navigation bar to show the forward button only in instances where it can be used. Mozilla’s update gives us a perfect opportunity to reassess the browser playing field, and that’s exactly what we did, pitting Firefox 10 against Chrome 16 and Internet Explorer 9 in a series of tests. The results show that the Mozilla project still has a lot of work to do if it wants to take back the number two browser position from Google or the number spot from Microsoft.
Using a Dell Inspiron 14z with a Core i3 CPU and 4G of RAM, we ran two web-based browser benchmarks: SunSpider and Peacekeeper on Firefox 10, Chrome 16, and Internet Explorer 9. We ran each test three times and then took the average. After that, we measured browser open times and available screen real estate on an ASUS ZenBook UX31 notebook with a Core i5 CPU and a SATA 6Gb/s SSD.
The SunSpider test measures a browser’s ability to execute a series of complex JavaScript functions. Because most web pages contain a lot of JavaScript, this test effectively shows how quickly the browser can render pages or perform dynamic actions. A shorter time result is better.
Firefox 10 completed the test in 276.3 milliseconds, putting it in between the 312.4 notched by Chrome and the 247.5 we got on IE 9. It’s still not the fastest.
Peacekeeper is a synthetic benchmark where higher scores are better. On that test, Firefox 10 turned in a score of 1536, which trailed IE 9's mark of 1483 and Chrome 16's 2918.
One of the least talked about performance features of any browser is its ability to open quickly (or not). Every millisecond you spend waiting for a program to launch is a millisecond you’ll never have again. We tested all three browsers’ open times on the powerful ASUS ZenBook UX31, because it has a blazing fast Sata 6Gb/s SSD that allowed each program to open at its fastest possible time.The results confirmed that Firefox is still a slowpoke. Chrome 16 opened in an average of 1.8 seconds and IE 9 in just 1.1 seconds while Firefox 10 turned in a relatively sluggish 2.4-second average, an eternity in particle physics.
The more space its toolbars take up, the less space each browser has left for viewing web pages. So our final test entailed capturing a screen on each of the browsers and determining how many pixels of screen real estate each navigation bar takes up. Firefox has the largest navigation bar, with a height of 62 pixels, while Chrome’s and Internet Explorer 9's measure 48 and 53 pixels, respectively.
Firefox 10 by no means bombed on our tests, but it didn’t give anyone a valid performance reason to switch to it or stay with it. The Firefox 10 results are in line with our previous browser showdowns, which similarly showed IE pulling ahead of Chrome and Firefox in terms of SunSpider rendering, application open times, and screen real estate. Chrome is the leader in Peacekeeper, but Firefox only appears to be a follower in all of our tests.
Sam is a former penguin trainer and archery instructor who dabbles in esports and has lived on three different continents. If you have some comments on new tech or the best noodles spots in NYC, drop a line @SamRutherford.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch $15.00 Octodad: Deadliest Catch's unique control scheme is a great gimmick that takes itself too seriously. But at least the theme song is amazing!
