Paid surveys may seem like easy money, as you can complete them anywhere, at any time, to earn gift cards or points that can be redeemed for cash. Naturally, scammers are using this model to collect your personal data and promising huge rewards that never materialize. According to a report from Malwarebytes Labs, bad actors are luring users into taking surveys through malvertising ads claiming you’ve won a Walmart voucher for hundreds of dollars. All you have to do is answer a few questions—easy enough—but you’re actually handing over information that can be used to target you even further.

Surveys promising big rewards are a scam

These scams start with malvertising (malicious advertising) like website pop-ups and banners, spam emails, and social media ads stating that you’ve been selected to receive a “free” gift card worth hundreds of dollars. The fake ads use official logos from recognizable brands, which build trust, along with countdown timers, which promote urgency. You may think you’ve gotten lucky, and all you have to do is take a short survey to earn a big payout.

When you click through, though, you’re redirected to a fake rewards page, which may also look credible thanks to stolen branding. You’ll be prompted to provide personal information, such as your name, phone number, email, and address, as well as indicate interest in topics like home repair and insurance. You may be redirected again based on your answers—to a spoofed home improvement site for FindMyWindowPro or Renewal By Anderson, for example—where you’re prompted to provide even more data.

This endless loop of surveys doesn’t end with a gift card payout, and along the way, you’ve handed scammers a lot of information that can be sold and used to target you with much more personalized scams in the future based on interests you’ve handed them.

Survey scams may seem like simply a waste of time rather than a real threat, since you don’t lose any money right away. But you may see more spam calls and believable phishing emails as a result.

Avoid fake survey scams

Like all scams, this one plays on emotion: notably, the excitement of getting lucky and winning big. You’re lured in with a sense of urgency and the illusion of low effort. Scammers also use real branding to make the scheme seem more credible.

As always, these elements should raise suspicion. Retailers are almost never offering promotions that are too good to be true, and you should never provide personal information in exchange for a “free” prize. If you do click through one of these ads, look carefully at the URL, which is almost certainly not the retailer’s official domain.

How to actually get paid for taking surveys

You can get paid to take surveys or test apps and games, though you certainly won’t earn the hundreds of dollars promised in survey scams. The pay is low for the time invested (in most cases, a few dollars per hour) and some survey platforms require you to hit a minimum amount earned to request a payout. You typically have to engage consistently and across multiple platforms to make it worthwhile.

NerdWallet compiled a list of popular survey-for-money apps, including Make Money, Eureka, InboxDollars Surveys, Google Opinion Rewards, and Swagbucks. Reddit users also suggest Survey Junkie and Branded Surveys. Prolific is a relatively high-paying platform, though you have to join a waitlist to gain access.

Of course, you should know that even legitimate survey sites collect a lot of personal information, such as your birth date, zip code, phone number, and health history. All of this may be sold to data brokers, and there’s always a risk of a data breach that could lead to identity theft. Be sure to weigh the risks and rewards of signing up for these platforms.

The end of the year is usually a busy time in the quantum computing arena, as companies often try to announce that they’ve reached major milestones before the year wraps up. This year has been no exception. And while not all of these announcements involve interesting new architectures like the one we looked at recently, they’re a good way to mark progress in the field, and they often involve the sort of smaller, incremental steps needed to push the field forward.

What follows is a quick look at a handful of announcements from the past few weeks that struck us as potentially interesting.

IBM follows through

IBM is one of the companies announcing a brand-new architecture this year. That’s not at all a surprise, given that the company promised to do so back in June; this week sees the company confirming that it has built the two processors it said it would earlier in the year. These include one called Loon, which is focused on the architecture that IBM will use to host error-corrected logical qubits. Loon represents two major changes for the company: a shift to nearest-neighbor connections and the addition of long-distance connections.

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Valve made a triumphant return to the hardware market with the Steam Deck and its OLED-toting counterpart, and now it’s having another crack at virtual reality with the Steam Frame. The Steam Frame is the long-rumored headset from Valve that had previously been codenamed “Deckard.” The company also announced a new Steam controller and PC called the Steam Machine. All three devices are coming in early 2026.

Valve says the Steam Frame is a wireless, “streaming-first” headset and you can hop into your games as soon as you pop it on. It supports both VR and flatscreen games. The company made a plug-and-play 6GHz wireless adapter that you slot into your PC (or Steam Machine). It has a dual-radio setup to help minimize interference, with one radio dedicated to streaming audio and visuals to the headset, and the other for Wi-Fi.

But you don’t need a PC to play games on the Steam Frame. As with Meta Quest headsets, it can run games as a standalone device. The headset has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of built-in UFS storage. There’s a microSD card slot too.

The Steam Frame runs on a rechargeable 21.6 Wh Li-ion battery. There’s one USB-C 2.0 port at the back that you’ll use for both charging and data transfers. You can recharge the battery at a rate of up to 45W. It’s unclear how long the Steam Frame’s battery will run on a charge.

The battery is positioned on the rear of the headstrap. So you won’t necessarily need to have an external battery pack that’s attached to the system by an annoying cable. It’ll be possible to swap the standard headstrap (into which the audio drivers are integrated) for a different option, perhaps one with a larger battery. 

Even with the battery built into the headstrap, Valve says the Steam Frame weighs just under a pound at 440 grams. The core module — the front part — is 185 grams (6.5oz) and the headstrap weighs 245 grams (8.6 ounces).

The Steam Frame has an optimization feature called Foveated Streaming. Valve says this uses low-latency eye-tracking (powered by two internal cameras) to optimize the detail in the image wherever your eyes are looking. The company claims it can offer a “10x improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth.” Foveated Streaming is said to work for every game in your Steam library.

The headset has dual 2160 x 2160 LCD panels with refresh rates of up to 144Hz, a field of view of up to 110 degrees and an IPD target range of 60mm to 70mm. Valve added that “thin and light custom pancake lenses provide edge-to-edge sharpness and a large eye box.” The company says the maximum width for eye glasses is 140mm. 

As for audio, the Steam Frame has dual stereo speakers on each side with support for high-fidelity audio. Valve says the speakers on each side are “oriented in opposite directions to cancel out vibrations,” which can impact the tracking system.

Speaking of which, the headset has four high-res monochrome cameras for controller and headset tracking — the Steam Frame uses inside-out tracking. Valve says there are infrared LEDs on the outside of the device that can help support tracking in dark environments.

The Steam Frame is far from Valve’s first VR headset. It released the Valve Index in 2019, and previously worked with HTC on its Vive headsets, which were initially consumer VR products before HTC shifted its focus to business and enterprise.

While none of Valve’s previous PC-focused headsets had the mainstream impact of Meta’s Quest lineup or arguably even PlayStation VR (which by all accounts is still an active platform, not that Sony’s release calendar backs it up), the company is responsible for what is probably the medium’s greatest-ever game in Half-Life: Alyx. And with SteamOS on the Steam Deck being such a hit that other companies are practically begging Valve to let them put it in their own rival handhelds, it’s easy to imagine the Steam Frame becoming a serious rival to the Meta Quest.

This story is developing, refresh for updates…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/valves-steam-frame-vr-headset-is-finally-official-and-its-coming-in-2026-181909387.html?src=rss

The University of California, San Diego has documented a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering freshmen over the past five years, according to a report [PDF] released this month by the campus’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold, from roughly 30 to 921 students. These students now represent one in eight members of the entering cohort.

The Mathematics Department redesigned its remedial program this year to focus entirely on elementary and middle school content after discovering students struggled with basic fractions and could not perform arithmetic operations taught in grades one through eight. The deterioration extends beyond mathematics. Nearly one in five domestic freshmen required remedial writing instruction in 2024, returning to pre-pandemic levels after a brief decline.

Faculty across disciplines report students increasingly struggle to engage with longer and complex texts. The decline coincided with multiple disrupting factors. The COVID-19 pandemic forced remote learning starting in spring 2020. The UC system eliminated SAT and ACT requirements in 2021. High school grade inflation accelerated during this period, leaving transcripts unreliable as indicators of actual preparation. UC San Diego simultaneously doubled its enrollment from under-resourced high schools designated LCFF+, admitting more such students than any other UC campus between 2022 and 2024.

The working group concluded that admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students while straining limited instructional resources. The report recommends developing predictive models to identify at-risk applicants and calls for the UC system to reconsider standardized testing requirements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie dominated the box office in 2023, racking up $1.36 billion and snagging several Oscar nominations for good measure. So naturally there’s a sequel, and Nintendo just dropped the official trailer for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, due out next spring.

(Spoilers for the 2023 film below.)

The first attempt at a Super Mario movie adaptation in 1993 was notoriously a dismal failure, although it still has its ’90s-nostalgic fans. But 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie won over gaming fans who were skeptical about another adaption—including Ars Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland. “This film version captures all the fun and vibrancy of the Mario games, with enough references to familiar characters, items, and locations to make even a die-hard Mario fan’s head spin,” he wrote in his 2023 review, adding that, despite a few flaws, the film was “everything that a 10-year-old version of me could ever have dreamed a Mario movie could be.”

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Windows 10 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft, but that doesn’t mean the company has actually stopped supporting it. It’s not as confusing as it sounds: As of Oct. 14, Microsoft has stopped issuing security updates for Windows 10 users by default. However, Windows 10 users can continue receiving security updates if they enroll in Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates program. The ESU gives these users an extra year of security support, so they can continue using an internet-connected Windows 10 device safely.

Or, at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. As reported by How-To Geek, Microsoft’s first ESU update crashed upon release on Tuesday. When users try to sign up with the ESU enrollment wizard, a bug within Windows causes the process to fail. While Windows 11 users were having no trouble installing the company’s Patch Tuesday update (which fixes a nasty zero-day vulnerability), Windows 10 users were unable to install the security patches they need to continue safely and securely using the OS.

There’s good news already, however: Not only is Microsoft aware of the issue, the company already has a patch out for Windows 10 users. That’s a good response time, especially for an issue this critical. According to How-To Geek, the update, KB5071959, also contains security fixes from the company’s Oct. 14 update, KB5066791. Once the update is installed and running on your PC, you should be able to enroll in the ESU program without issue.

How to fix the ESU bug and enroll in security updates

If you’re running Windows 10 on your PC, you’ll want to ensure you install this emergency patch ASAP in order to get your computer enrolled in extended security updates. To start, head to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update, then choose “Check for updates.” Install the latest update (KB5071959). Once your PC starts back up, head back to Windows Update, and you should be able to run the ESU enrollment wizard to enroll.

For anyone unaware, there are three ways to enroll in the ESU program. First, you can pay a flat $30 to receive the updates. However, if you don’t want to pay, you can also opt into Windows Backup to sync your PC’s settings to the cloud, or redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points.

Even if you do enroll in the ESU program, you won’t receive updates forever. This program expires on Oct. 13, 2026. After that date, Microsoft will really be done with Windows 10 for good. That gives the OS’ hundreds of millions of users about 11 months to figure out a new computing plan. However, for the time being, you can still take advantage of security updates—so long as you install this patch.

OpenAI wants a court to reverse a ruling forcing the ChatGPT maker to give 20 million user chats to The New York Times and other news plaintiffs that sued it over alleged copyright infringement. Although OpenAI previously offered 20 million user chats as a counter to the NYT’s demand for 120 million, the AI company says a court order requiring production of the chats is too broad.

“The logs at issue here are complete conversations: each log in the 20 million sample represents a complete exchange of multiple prompt-output pairs between a user and ChatGPT,” OpenAI said today in a filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Disclosure of those logs is thus much more likely to expose private information [than individual prompt-output pairs], in the same way that eavesdropping on an entire conversation reveals more private information than a 5-second conversation fragment.”

OpenAI’s filing said that “more than 99.99%” of the chats “have nothing to do with this case.” It asked the district court to “vacate the order and order News Plaintiffs to respond to OpenAI’s proposal for identifying relevant logs.” OpenAI could also seek review in a federal court of appeals.

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Apple said Wednesday that European Union developers pocketed the savings from mandated commission reductions rather than lowering prices for consumers. The iPhone maker commissioned Analysis Group to study pricing behavior [PDF] after the Digital Markets Act forced Apple to cut its App Store fees from up to 30% to an average of 20%. The research examined 41 million transactions across 21,000 products between March and September 2024, generating 403 million euros in sales. Developers maintained or raised prices on nine out of 10 products. Non-EU developers captured 86% of the 20.1 million euros in reduced commissions. Price cuts occurred on 9% of products, but the study attributed these to normal pricing patterns unrelated to the fee reduction.

Apple argued the regulation creates barriers for innovators and exposes consumers to risks without delivering promised benefits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Six years ago, Valve made its second big virtual reality push, launching the Valve Index headset alongside VR blockbuster Half-Life Alyx. Since then, the company seems to have lost interest in virtual reality gaming, letting competitors like Meta release regular standalone hardware updates as the PC-tethered Index continued to age.

Now, after years of rumors, Valve is finally ready to officially rejoin the VR hardware race. The Steam Frame, set to launch in early 2026, will run both VR and traditional Steam games locally through SteamOS or stream them wirelessly from a local PC.

Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an “up to 110 degrees” field-of-view and up to 144 Hz. That’s all roughly in line with 2023’s Meta Quest 3, which runs on the slightly less performant Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. Valve’s new headset will be available in models sporting 256GB and 1TB or internal storage, both with the option for expansion via a microSD card slot. Pricing details have not yet been revealed publicly.

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Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply named Steam Machine and Steam Controller, both planned to ship in early 2026, are “optimized for gaming on Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam Library,” Valve said in a press release.

A Steam Machine spec sheet shared by Valve lists a “semi-custom” six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at up to 4.8 Ghz alongside an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units. The motherboard will include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM for the GPU. The new hardware will come in two configurations with 512GB or 2TB of unspecified “SSD storage,” though Valve isn’t sharing pricing for either just yet.

Those chips and numbers suggest the Steam Machine will have roughly the same horsepower as a mid-range desktop gaming PC from a few years back. But Valve says its “Machine”—which it ranks as “over 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck”—is powerful enough to support ray-tracing and/or 4K, 60 fps gaming using FSR upscaling.

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Apple is rolling out a new feature that lets users store US passports in the official Wallet app. This will allow travelers to present this digital ID as a valid form of identification at TSA checkout lines at airports.

In other words, folks with a passport who have yet to upgrade a driver’s license to a Real ID will be able to board a plane without bringing a physical copy of that passport to the airport. This whole Real ID thing has been a source of frustration to many, so I appreciate any effort to make traveling a bit easier.

This ID will be visible on both iPhones and the Apple Watch and Apple says the service is being implemented at TSA checkpoints across more than 250 US-based airports. It’s only used for ID on domestic flights; if you’re planning to travel internationally you’ll still need a physical passport.

Also, not all TSA readers have been implemented with the technology to scan these digital IDs just yet, according to TechCrunch. You might want to bring along a paper passport for the time being to let the TSA and Apple get their ducks in a row.

Apple

The company has plans to expand this feature beyond air travel. Apple says businesses will eventually be able to accept these IDs for the purposes of age verification. This Digital ID feature was first announced as part of iOS 26 and also adds passports to the list of existing government IDs supported in Apple Wallet.

Adding a passport seems simple enough. Just head to the Wallet app and follow the prompts. Users will have to pose for a selfie and complete a series of facial and head movements for security.

The wallet platform also accepts driver’s licences and state IDs, but only in 12 states and Puerto Rico. These won’t be valid for flying, however, as neither is a Real ID or passport.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-introduces-a-new-digital-id-feature-to-make-boarding-flights-easier-175130213.html?src=rss

Scientists have found that the 2023 marine heat wave caused “functional extinction” of two Acropora reef-building coral species living in the Florida Reef, which stretches from the Dry Tortugas National Park to Miami.

“At this point, we do not think there’s much of a chance for natural recovery—their numbers are so low that successful reproduction is incredibly unlikely,” said Ross Cunning, a coral biologist at the John G. Shedd Aquarium.

This isn’t the first time corals have faced the borderline of extinction over the last 460 million years, and they have always managed to bounce back and recolonize habitats lost during severe climate changes. The problem is that we won’t live long enough to see them doing that again.

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I keep a lot of valuable things in my garage. Having the peace of mind that my garage is safe (to some extent) is huge for my sanity. That’s why I love the myQ Smart Garage Door Video Keypad, which keeps an eye on who’s lurking around your garage door, while letting you grant access remotely to guests or for deliveries. And it’s surprisingly cheap right now—discounted 50% on Amazon, to $39.99. This is the lowest price it has ever been, according to price tracking tools.

myQ Smart Garage Door Video Keypad

Wide-Angle Camera,Customizable PIN Codes,and Smartphone Control–Take Charge of Your Garage Access Works with Chamberlain, LiftMaster and Craftsman openers

$39.99
at Amazon

$79.99
Save $40.00

$39.99
at Amazon

$79.99
Save $40.00

To be able to control the keypad remotely, you’ll also need a hub, which goes for $28.83 on Amazon. You can also buy the keypad and hub in a bundle for the same price as picking them up individually. If you want any video history of what the camera records, as well as features like people detection and downloading, you’ll need a mY Q subscription, which starts at $24.99 per year. (Higher subscription tiers offer more advanced detection features.)

The battery for the keypad lasts one to three months, but it’s rechargeable. You can buy a bundle with a spare battery, or get the bundle that lets you wire your keypad so you never have to worry about it dying. The keypad integrates with Ring, Vivint smart home environments, Amazon Key, and IFTTT. It’s also compatible with LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Craftsman, Raynor, and AccessMaster garage door openers manufactured after 1993.

The camera records a 1080p video feed with a 160-degree viewing angle and a two-way audio system. The keypad lets you set multiple codes to open the garage manually or you can give temporary or permanent codes to guests through the companion app (up to 16). You’ll need to connect it via 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network. And yes, the keypad screws into a wall, so nobody can just walk away with it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Synopsys will lay off about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 2,000 employees, as the chip-design software maker looks to redirect investment towards growth opportunities, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The move comes after the company completed its $35 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of engineering design firm Ansys earlier this year and missed analysts’ estimates for third-quarter revenue in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s been four years since the wonderful Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and, especially given the rate at which developer Insomniac churns out great games, I had hoped we wouldn’t have to wait too much longer for another installment of the long-running action platformer series. As it turns out, there is a new Ratchet & Clank game coming soon, just not on PS5.

Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble is a “fast-paced” multiplayer arena shooter that’s coming to iOS and Android soon. In fact, according to the game’s website, it’s already available in select countries. Folks in other locales who are interested can pre-register.

Mobile developer Oh BiBi took the reins from Insomniac for this one. There are still platforming elements in Ranger Rumble. It looks quite colorful and you’ll have a variety of weapons, abilities and characters at your disposal. There are several game modes, including a soccer-style one. Ranger Rumble is free-to-play, though it will likely have microtransactions. For what it’s worth, you’ll be able to customize your characters.

This isn’t the first time that the Ratchet & Clank series has made its way to mobile. Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile debuted in 2005, before the arrival of iPhone and Android devices. Endless runner Before the Nexus arrived eight years later.

A sequel to Going Mobile called Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home was originally slated to hit Java phones in 2006 before it was canceled. However, dedicated fans found a phone that had a copy of the game on it, then cracked the device’s encryption and last month made Clone Home available for anyone to download.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/a-ratchet-and-clank-multiplayer-game-is-coming-to-ios-and-android-soon-172634125.html?src=rss

Waymo is bringing its driverless cars to freeways in three major US cities and the surrounding environs. These areas include San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The platform didn’t say how many of these vehicles have been greenlit to take to the freeway, other than noting that “a growing number of public riders” will be given access. At the very least, families will be able to play a new road trip game in which they point out cars with weird spinning LiDAR units on the roof.

The Google-owned ridesharing company says that these freeway rides can be used for daily commutes, traveling to various airports or just joyriding from, say, downtown LA to Culver City. The San Francisco service area is particularly large, stretching across the entire peninsula. The newly-expanded service goes all the way down to San Jose, including the San Jose Mineta International Airport.

Waymo

This is just the beginning of this freeway expansion, assuming everything goes well in these early phases. To that end, the platform says its vehicles have already logged “millions of miles” on freeways and that they are adept at “skillfully handling highway dynamics.”

Waymo notes that it’s planning something similar for Austin, Atlanta and other unannounced regions. It’s also bringing its driverless cars to San Diego, Detroit and Las Vegas next year, but those won’t be going on freeways just yet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/waymos-driverless-cars-will-start-driving-on-freeways-in-three-us-cities-171654775.html?src=rss

Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported. The French-US scientist has reportedly told associates he will depart in the coming months and is already in early talks to raise funds for the new venture. The departure comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg radically overhauled Meta’s AI operations after deciding the company had fallen behind rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone. Unlike current large language models (such as the kind that power ChatGPT) that predict the next segment of data in a sequence, world models would ideally simulate cause-and-effect scenarios, understand physics, and enable machines to reason and plan more like animals do. LeCun has said this architecture could take a decade to fully develop.

While some AI experts believe that Transformer-based AI models—such as large language models, video synthesis models, and interactive world synthesis models—have emergently modeled physics or absorbed the structural rules of the physical world from training data examples, the evidence so far generally points to sophisticated pattern-matching rather than a base understanding of how the physical world actually works.

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Black Friday might still be a few weeks away, but there’s no need to wait if you’re in the market for a new air fryer, as one of our longtime favorite models is currently $50 off. The Ninja DZ401 is $180 right now, which is a saving of 22 percent on its usual price.

Admittedly, we have seen this model cheaper before, but if you’re on cooking duty for Thanksgiving, you might not have the option of waiting until what could be a deeper discount on Black Friday. And the DZ401 is the perfect air fryer for the holiday season, owing to its trademark dual baskets, which allow you to cook up two completely different foods simultaneously. It takes up a fair amount of space, but it’s worth it if you have a lot of hungry mouths to feed.

This 10-quart fryer includes a smart cook thermometer and six cooking modes, including air broil, roast and dehydrate alongside the default air fry mode. The spacious baskets are quick and easy to clean, and you’re safe to throw the plates into the dishwasher if they’re particularly messy after cooking up chicken wings or some brownies for dessert.

The Ninja DZ401 has had the title of best dual-zone air fryer in our buying guide for a long time for a reason. An air fryer like this isn’t for everyone, especially those with smaller kitchens, but for a Thanksgiving dinner you’ll struggle to find better.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/our-favorite-dual-zone-air-fryer-is-already-on-sale-ahead-of-black-friday-170959938.html?src=rss

Backbone just released a new Pro version of its Xbox controller. The Backbone Pro Xbox Edition looks like an improvement over the pre-existing One controller in nearly every way.

It’s still a USB-C shell that wraps around a phone or related device, but the actual controller is now more in league with an actual Xbox gamepad. It features full-size control sticks, hall effect triggers and two customizable back buttons. Most of the inputs can be remapped. This should make plowing through that Game Pass library an absolute breeze.

To that end, this controller has Bluetooth. This means you won’t have to rely on a smartphone or whatever device can physically attach to the gamepad. Game Pass has become available on all kinds of platforms in recent years, from PCs and smart TVs to Meta Quest VR headsets. This opens up all of that. The company promises a simplified “tap and play” experience.

Backbone

This Bluetooth mode does offer 40 hours of battery life per charge. The smartphone powers it when using it in a wired configuration, so it’ll last as long as the phone does. The controllers pair with a proprietary app that allows for the aforementioned remapping and other customization options.

The controller is available right now at brick and mortar locations like Best Buy and digital storefronts such as Amazon. It costs $180 and ships with a free month of Game Pass Ultimate. The only potential downside here is Game Pass itself. The price keeps going up.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/backbone-launches-pro-xbox-edition-controller-with-bluetooth-and-an-updated-design-170018809.html?src=rss