Earlier in April, Nintendo announced that it had experienced a security breach when it came to user Nintendo Accounts. The breach was initially pinpointed to those who had used their legacy Nintendo Network ID (NNID) to sign in to their Nintendo Switch. In their initial announcement, the company noted that there were about 160,000 accounts that were affected, but, now, weeks later, the number of accounts has nearly doubled to 300,000 accounts. Nintendo attributes this increase to the investigation that it has undertaken in light of the initial detection.
The issue came to light when an increasing number of users on the switch reported that their accounts were being used to make purchases that owners were not aware of. If you have a credit card or Paypal account linked to your Nintendo account, it would be prudent to check the transactions that have been done on the account in the past weeks. Users who have been compromised are also getting sign-in notifications from unknown devices via email.
You can help secure your Nintendo Account by enabling 2-Step Verification.
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) April 9, 2020
Nintendo of America tweeted for users to activate their two factor authentication (2FA) for logins out of the blue prior to the initial announcement. However, with the increase in the number of accounts being compromised, it is increasingly more evident that if you have a Nintendo Account, you’d best reset your password and activate 2FA. Otherwise, you’re risking unauthorised purchases via your linked credit card or Paypal account. In addition to unauthorised purchases, sensitive data such as date of birth and more can be viewed by bad actors.
Nintendo’s latest console, the Nintendo Switch, has put the company on the map again as a serious contender in the gaming console market with over 5 million consoles sold to date. The company is sticking to its guns saying that less than 1% of its users are affected. However, with investigations ongoing, users are advised to take precautions.
Not too long ago, we covered a call to arms by a few governments across the world to develop and produce ventilator devices to help with the current shortage across many countries due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Health and wearables company, Fitbit, was one of the companies that rose to the task and are announcing the fruits of their labour – the Fitbit Flow.
The Fitbit Flow builds upon the automatic resuscitator design of the MIT E-Vent Design Toolbox and complies with the specifications for Rapidly Manufactured Ventilation Systems put forth by the government of the United Kingdom. The Flow was developed in close consultation with Oregon Health & Scince University (OHSU) emergency medicine clinicians who were caring for COVID-19 patients at OHSU Hospital and the MassGeneralBrigham Center for COVID Innovation workgroup to meet the needs of medical practitioners.
The design of the Fitbit Flow builds on the standard resuscitator bags similar to the ones used by paramedics. However, the company has equipped the Flow with an array of sensors, sophisticated instruments and alarms that work together to automate compressions and regulate the flow of air into the patients lungs to help with respiration and blood oxygenation. It is also touted to be designed to be user friendly to reduce the strain on specialised staff typically needed to perform and operate other ventilators. Fitbit is also touting that the Flow is priced lower than other ventilators on the market.
“Fitbit Flow is a great example of the incredible innovation that emerges when academia and industry employ problem-based innovation to respond quickly to an important need. COVID-19 is a new illness and we still have much to learn about the progression, treatment, and potential recurrence of this disease. It’s critical that we develop solutions that can help ensure our health systems have the equipment they need now, and in the future if we do see a resurgence of COVID-19.”
David Sheridan, MD, MCR, Assistant Professor of Pediatric Emergency Medicine and Co-Director of Emergency Clinical Innovation Oregon Health & Science University
The Flow is the latest in a series of efforts and collaborations by Fitbit with academia to help advance the health industry. With the announcement of the Charge 4, the company also announced a collaboration to help increase the accuracy of sleep data to help make wearables more impactful. The company is aiming to use its facilities to help mass produce the Flow to be supplied to hospitals in dire need of ventilators.
Video games are a big part of our lives. The industry continues to grow and fascinate anyone who cares to look at its stats. In Asia, the industry grows at a pace that is quite unprecedented.
The only thing missing in the grander scheme of things in Malaysia is a big gaming convention that we can liken to E3 in the United States, or Comic Con, or PAX East, or even Gamescom. Well, that was about to change later in the year with Gamescom Asia happening in Singapore from the 16th to 18th of October 2020.
So far, they have been adamant about holding the event in 2020. The mounting pressure that surrounds COVID-19 situations globally though is not encouraging. That is why they have made the decision to postpone the event instead to 2021.
The new dates are 14th to 17th of October in 2021. Yes, it is happening in the final quarter of 2021, about a year after the 2020 dates. It may not be a bad thing though. We are seeing large improvements over the COVID-19 situation currently and would most likely see a large improvement in the coming year with vaccine’s produced and circulated.
While we are going to not see the world’s biggest convention coming to Asia this coming October, we remain excited for the upcoming Gamescom Asia happening next year October 2021. They have reported that the participations and requests for Gamescom Asia 2020 has been quite overwhelming. They also mentioned that there will be AAA title publishers present in the Asia leg of their convention. It will be a world class event, they say. We are hopeful that we would see it too.
Gamescom Asia 2021 will be held, as mentioned, from the 14th to 17th of October in Singapore still. The convention will be housed in Suntec Convention & Exhibition Centre; that is right in the heart of Singapore. For more information on Gamescom Asia, you can head over to their website.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most prolific web service platform in the world. In fact, it’s estimated that over half of the world’s small and medium businesses have adopted the technology platform as their platform of choice when it comes to dealing with cloud services for their needs. AWS provides one of the most diverse platforms supporting Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and even rudimentary data storage. They provide their different services as deployable modules which allow companies to deploy and terminate instances as they need to.
AMD is one of the latest additions to the platforms array of instance which can be deployed. The new AMD EPYC instances will be powering the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) C5a instances. These instances will be powered by AMD’s 2nd generation server grade EPYC processors which also power one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The AMD EPYC processors will be able to run at frequencies of up to 3.3GHz and will be able to provide users with high performance x86 processing for large compute workloads. This includes batch processing, distributed analytics, data transformations, log analytics and web applications.
The new EPYC powered C5a instance joins the increasing number of AMD powered instances available on AWS. It will be available in eight configurations with up to 96 virtual CPUs (vCPUs). The new AMD EPYC powered instance also delivers on AMD’s promise of being able to deliver high performance compute at affordable prices. On AWS, the new C5a instance is the one of the lowest cost per x86 vCPU in Amazon’s portfolio.
The C5a instance is already available in AWS U.S. East, AWS U.S. West, AWS Europe and AWS Asia Pacific regions. AMD also has five other instances already available on AWS under the EC2 catalogue: M5a, M5ad, R5a, R5ad and T3a. These instances also provide users with compute capabilities that are catered to their needs and price points.
Having an unlimited amount of something is great. Bottomless drinks in restaurants, for example, are great for us. It means we will never go thirsty for the period you sit in that restaurant. It also means value-for-money. Everyone likes to get value-for-money things. They are like a bargain for whatever.
Celcom has always been at the forefront of that for some time. Then again, they have been quite aggressive in their product offerings. Celcom’s most recent prepaid plan was a real value-for-money product. You get for what you need, technically, for not too exorbitant amount of money.
Now they come with Celcom Xpax Truly Unlimited prepaid plan. Technically it is a monthly plan still that you pay for with your prepaid credits. They also renew automatically if you have enough credits within your SIM card. You do not need that much though. You only need MYR 12 every week. That is as low as it gets for the current prepaid unlimited plan almost anywhere.
Source: Celcom
For MYR 12 a week, you get 3MBps access to the internet and other services endlessly. For MYR 35 a month, you get a whole month of unlimited internet access at the same speed cap. The weekly plan gives you 1GB of hotspot data too for free. The monthly plan gives you 3GB of hotspot data to play with. On top of that you can of course add hotspot data plans for MYR 1 (1GB valid for one day) and MYR 3 (5GB valid for 3 days).
Should you ever need more 3MBps though you still can opt for Celcom’s Xpax Ultra Hour Passes. It gives you uncapped data speeds at a limited time. Still, for at least one hour, you have access to unlimited internet use. You can download all the Netflix shows you want for your commute the next day or later starting with MYR 1 (1 hour) and all the way to MYR 8 (24 hours).
Capped data speeds not your thing? Need, full speed internet all the time? They have those too, with daily passes from MYR 2 (capped at 2GB) all the way to monthly passes at MYR 30 (capped at 5GB). These plans also come with unlimited YouTube streams from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m.
Celcom’s Xpax Truly Unlimited plan is available today onward of course. You can find out more on the Truly Unlimited Plan on their website.
The HUAWEI MatePad Pro was announced globally in Barcelona back in February. The new MatePad Pro was touted as a revolutionary new productivity device empowered by 5G thanks to the HiSilicon Kirin 990 processor inside. Yesterday, the new productivity centered tablet got its debut in Malaysia!
The new MatePad Pro will be available starting 3 April, 2020 for pre-order until 10 April, 2020. It will be available in Midnight Grey and Pearl White. However, Malaysia will only be getting the WiFi version of the MatePad Pro which will come with 256GB of internal storage and 8GB of RAM. The device will cost MYR2,399 and will be shipped starting 11 April, 2020.
Pre-orders of the MatePad Pro will come with about MYR1,000 worth of freebies. This includes the Smart Magnetic Keyboard (worth MYR499), the HUAWEI M-Pencil (worth MYR299), 3 months free access to WPS Office, 50GB of HUAWEI Cloud Storage and 3 months premium access to HUAWEI video.
Aside from that, the MatePad Pro comes with a 10.1-inch IPS LCD display. It has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and an aspect ratio of 16:10. It has a 13-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel camera on the front. All of this is powered by 7,250 mAh battery which supports wireless fast charging at 27W and reverse wireless charging at 7.5W. It can also be fast charged at 40W when plugged in.
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The COVID-19 situation is getting better all around the world. Thanks to the collective efforts of the World Health Organisation, global governments, and even health institutions, the pandemic is mostly under control. There is still yet a viable vaccine in sight yet though. In that sense we still must take precautions against the disease that is the COVID-19.
That is also why plenty of global sporting events are either cancelled or postponed. One such event is the Olympics that is set to happen in Japan. Another event that was postponed is Acer’s Predator League Asia Pacific Finals that is supposed to happen in the Philippines.
On that front, Acer was going to postpone their biggest eSports tournament for Asia Pacific to the end of this year 2020. The conditions are not encouraging enough for the global eSports tournament to happen this year unfortunately. They have decided that the event is going to be postponed to 2021 over health and safety concerns of both fans and participants.
To be specific the tournament will happen at Spring 2021. The location has not changed, nor the participating teams. The same teams that qualified in their respective regional Predator Leagues in 2020 will be the teams that competes in Acer’s Asia Pacific Predator League 2020/2021. The price pool remains at US$ 400,000 too.
There are no confirmed or specific dates just yet from Acer though. When they say Spring 2020, that is in the span of March until June in 2021. These dates could also be affected by changes in health procedures and other changes.
For Acer’s Predator League 2020, they have sold about 20,000 tickets to date. Ticket holders can hold on to their tickets for the postponed event and it will still be eligible for the upcoming 2020/2021 dates. Either that, or ticket holders can claim for a refund for their tickets.
Still, we do hope that the global pandemic that is the COVID-19 would have been completely eradicated by then. Of course, that is a little far-fetched of an idea. Still, we remain hopeful since every other person is focused on finding a solution to the pandemic.
The Asia Pacific Predator League 2020/2021 scheduled to run in Spring 2021 will feature 17 regions’ representatives in the Asia Pacific continent. The tournament will be held in Philippines as planned for the Predator League 2020. For more information on the Predator League 2020/2021, you can head over to Acer Predator’s social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
Our lives today are driven by data. We consume data for our daily lives, and we give out data to gain access to more data. Our data consumption rate and requirement increase everyday too and that is why every other telco in the world wants to move toward 5G speeds and latency.
The amount of data being consumed today has led some local telco in Malaysia to come up with unlimited data plans at capped speeds. This started with UMobile and their prepaid plans. Other started picking up the unlimited data packages to offer to their consumers or potential consumers at capped data speeds. Celcom has been offering differing unlimited data plans to suit different users at different times.
Source: Maxis
The only major telco in Malaysia that has not adopted the unlimited data plan for its prepaid users is Maxis. Until now that is. Maxis Hotlink Prepaid users can finally enjoy unlimited data at reasonable prices.
The largest private telco in Malaysia is offering unlimited data for Hotlink users at speeds capped to 3 Mbps. Of course, you can push the cap a little higher to 6 Mbps should you want to pay a little more.
While 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps may not sound like much, it is fast enough to stream Netflix at 1080p should you get a good signal. YouTube’s buffer screen would be at a minimal to non-existent too at 3 Mbps. If you do think that you need more speed than the capped 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps though you have the option to pay for uncapped speed quotas that will last up to 7 days with your current plans.
Source: Maxis
There are some small caveats to the Hotlink Prepaid Unlimited plans though. We do suggest that you go through their FAQ page to ensure that this is the plan for you and to find out a little bit more about the plan.
Within the FAQ you will find that the “Unlimited” plan is not truly unlimited. You get up to 6MBps of data speeds to work with. That has been dusted, cleared, and covered earlier. Beyond that though, this 6MBps or 3MBps will only be until you used up 50GB in that month. That is if you go for the monthly plan. If you go for a weekly plan, they limit you to 15GB of data usage and 5GB for daily passes. This is accordance to Fair Usage Policy (FUP), according to Maxis.
After you hit the FUP ceiling, you will be knocked back down to Maxis’ free basic internet plan at 512kbps, which is still enough for basic internet browsing in our experience. This plan is only limited to smartphones by the way. If you want to tether or use your smartphone as a hotspot device, you would have to purchase additional data plans.
If you are wondering if you can stream Netflix at Full HD with the limited data speeds, we assure you that you can watch movies at up to Full HD resolution with the 6MBps plan. Technically, Netflix only requires about 5MBps for an HD and Full HD stream. If you want to go for Ultra HD streams, you need about 25MBps of data speeds, but you will not get Ultra HD streams on most smartphone devices anyway.
Source: Maxis
Still, if you want high speed data for your videos on smartphones, Hotlink also has the new Prepaid Video data plan with up to 10GB of data just for YouTube, Viu, iflix, Astro Go, and Tonton. Still, going on the Unlimited Plan (monthly plan) we mentioned earlier gives you a free premium access to Viu for 30 days with Maxis TV, all you have to do is have and active plan and go on the Maxis app to claim the access.
Maxis Hotlink’s Unlimited plan is readily available now for all Hotlink users. Of course, terms and conditions apply. We do suggest you read through the FAQ page to find out what you are getting yourselves into as well. Then again, we suggest that you should read as much as possible about a product before buying it.
Minecraft is a huge game. Say what you want about Minecraft and its weird boxy graphics that you cannot take seriously; the game is one of the most popular video games you can find today. Its online community is also one of the biggest in the gaming community. Plus, they are all very nice people and also very creative. There are people who make a living out of building things in the Minecraft game world. Someone did a measurement of the map size of Minecraft and it is multiple times the size of GTA’s game world. It is that big, it is not a child’s game.
There is more to Minecraft than meets the eye though. The sandbox platform is not just about players going in, gathering materials and then building large, mega-buildings to be shown off to the internet. There is some adventure involved around the game as well. There are elements of survival within the game. All these was always available for PC gamers, and they create their own Minecraft journey.
For beginners then, the game can be quite overwhelming. The vast map, the emptiness of the maps, the endless possibilities. While plenty of gamers enjoy that, there are some that would like more curated approaches to their game storyline. They prefer to indulge in stories rather than creating them. That is the idea behind Minecraft Dungeons, another original project from Minecraft’s developers, Mojang Studios.
We have not had any experience with the game itself, if we are being honest. So we can only comment on what we have seen so far. So far, it looks like dungeon hack-and-slash that we are plenty used to. Minecraft Dungeons can easily be mistaken for a boxier version of Diablo or Torchlight. Those are brilliant games, by the way.
This is not a completely solo experience though. You can co-op with your friends to get to the end of the Minecraft Dungeons journey. We are not entirely sure if there is cross platform playability just yet. Still, playing games online with your friends is a part of socialising these days.
Source: Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
While Minecraft was created for PC, Minecraft dungeons is made available for all platforms including Playstation 4 thanks to the co-development of the game with Double Eleven. Double Eleven is the team behind the ever so popular Goat Simulator by the way. The online aspect of Minecraft Dungeon is also worked by Double Eleven if you must know. For your information too, Double Eleven has a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia studio and they are looking for talents to join them for future projects. You can find out more from their website.
Minecraft Dungeons is available now for PC, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4. On PC, you can get your hands on the new title on Microsoft Store for MYR 78. There are at least three planned DLCs for the game to be announced on a later date.
If you are in the market for a new smartphone for the first time, you are going to get a little bit of a shock when you see the prices of mobile devices today. You are seeing devices hitting the MYR 7,000 ceiling these days and with spec sheet more complicated than the blueprints of a Death Star.
Of course, you pay for features and quality as well. You pay for being at the cutting edge, the state-of-the-art. That has become the definition of a mobile device in your pocket these days though. They are nearly buttonless slates that are very high-tech and awfully expensive, and at the same time strangely fragile. Yes, it is a strange world we live in.
When you first invest in a smartphone too, you might not want to spend more than MYR 1,000 on your smartphone. After all, feature phones did not exceed that kind of money even when they were brand new. There are a few options for you. One of them is the HUAWEI Y6P that is now available in Malaysia for MYR 559. That already ticks the ‘under MYR 1,000’ box.
Source: HUAWEI
Another thing that older feature devices have is a super long battery life. A single charge can take days to deplete while only taking an hour to charge. Premium smartphones these days can barely last a full 24 hours day before needing a plug in. The Y6P is not like that though. It comes with one of the largest battery capacities in the conventional smartphone market today. It comes with a 5,000mAh battery. No, you cannot swap it out, but it is still a large battery. That, combined with HUAWEI’s brilliant knowhow is battery life preservation means that you should easily last a day or two without ever needing a tether to your walls. ‘Long-lasting battery’, check.
Source: HUAWEI
Of course, the move to smartphones have some major benefits. One of them is that you get properly nice photos from their high-resolution camera. Premium smartphones come with the latest and greatest of camera technology to produce the best possible photos and videos. Thing is, smartphone camera technology now progresses in diminishing returns. Certain mid-range and even entry-level smartphones have cameras that rival the premium smartphones in terms of Megapixel count, camera software and algorithm, and resulting photo and video quality.
The HUAWEI Y6P comes with dual cameras at the back. One is a 13-Megapixel camera that captures high-resolution, crisp photos that you can use to share with your family or family members. The other is an ultra-wide angle camera that can capture even more than the 13-Megapixel shooter. You can capture beautiful landscapes in expanded detail and tell the world of social media that you also can be a photographer.
It even comes with an 8-Megapixel front facing camera for you to shoot selfies or profile photos with. Obviously for your friends to identify you. If not, you can use the front-facing camera to take photos of yourself in your travels, just to show off a little bit maybe. ‘Cameras’, check.
Source: HUAWEI
Of course, one of the biggest appeals in switching to a smartphone is the number of apps that you can access on a single small slate that fits in your palms and pockets. All this comes from the HUAWEI AppGallery for the HUAWEI Y6P. The AppGallery is currently the third largest app marketplace in the world. While there are some missing apps compared to Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store, the HUAWEI AppGallery ecosystem is growing every day. The essential eWallet apps are already available on the AppGallery. Even some banking apps are already available. ‘Apps’, check.
With a high-resolution camera and access to endless number of apps, you are going to need a large storage to ensure that you have access to everything you need and put into the device in its lifetime. You get 64GB in storage with the HUAEI Y6P, which is ample space to work with for both your photos and apps. You even get a whole year of access to 15 extra GB of HUAWEI’s Cloud storage to offload some of your photos and files over when you need to. Or, insert a MicroSD card into the expansion slot to get up to 512GB of extra storage. Need multiple apps running at the same time? 4GB of RAM should be able to deal with that. Oh, and the MediaTek processor running within the device is more than capable enough to run multiple apps at the same time.
Source: HUAWEI
Now you are also wondering what else you can do with the 6.3-inch display. You can watch movies with it by either loading your downloaded movies into the native storage of the device. You can also look through HUAWEI’s Video app to see what you might want to watch. Of course, that is a subscription-based service like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. You can also watch Viu contents through that 6.3-inch display though, for free no less. All you need to do to start watching endless Asian shows is claim the free membership of Viu through Member center on the HUAWEI Y6P. ‘Entertainment’, check.
Source: HUAWEI
Source: HUAWEI
Source: HUAWEI
Source: HUAWEI
The HUAWEI Y6P is now available via HUAWEI’s online store and retail partners across the nation for MYR 559. You can get your’s in three colour choices: Emerald Green, Phantom Purple and Midnight Black. The free Premium Access to Viu promotion is currently exclusive to the HUAWEI Y6P. For more information on the HUAWEI Y6P, you can visit their website.
