Friday, 3 January 2025

Apple Fitness+ gets Strava integration and new workouts

Apple is kicking off 2025 with a new wave of updates to Apple Fitness+. This time, the company is not only adding new content to the service’s yoga, strength training, and meditation programs, but also offering a new integration with another popular fitness app: Strava.

If there’s any problem with Fitness+’s offerings up until this point, it’s that they primarily cater to beginners. Yoga Peak Poses could be one way that changes. Apple is adding yoga retreat-inspired workshops focused on specific, challenging yoga poses like Dancer or Crow. “For each pose, there’s a 10-minute prep flow to warm users up,” Apple says, followed by a “corresponding 10-minute practice session.” You can use the workshop to build on your skills and hopefully end up pulling off a tricky pose in the process.

If strength training is more your speed, Fitness+ is also getting a new three week-long progressive strength training program Apple has dubbed “Three Perfect Weeks of Strength.” The program is spread across a dozen 30-minute workouts, with the first week focused on "Progressive Overload," the second on "Time Under Tension," and the third on "Dynamic Power." Apple says its designed the program to be repeatable so you can run through it again with different weights as you grow stronger. Don't expect it to be as in-depth as Peloton’s new strength training app, but it’s nice to have more options.

Two different iPhones showing the Strava app and what it looks like when you share a Fitness+ workout.
Apple

One of the more interesting new additions in this update is how Fitness+ will integrate with Strava. When you share a Fitness+ workout to Strava, the app will now display things like the Fitness+ workout you performed or trainer who led it, on top of your normal health metrics. Apple is offering Strava subscribers up to three months of Fitness+ at no additional costs in a savvy bit of cross-promotion, too.

Alongside these new additions is a grab bag of other new features, like an Intro to Breath Meditation class, a selection of workouts designed around training for pickleball, a new slate of Apple's celebrity-led Time to Walk audio stories, and workout playlists focused on Janet Jackson (on January 13), Coldplay (on January 20), Bruno Mars (on January 27) and Kendrick Lamar (on February 3).

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Thursday, 2 January 2025

PS Plus Essential January 2025 Games Being Roasted by Members

Sony revealed PS Plus Essential January 2025 games lineup yesterday, and the announcement hasn’t gone down well with members. Headlining this month’s free games is none other than the widely panned Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for the PS5.

What PS Plus members are saying about January 2025 games lineup

January’s full PS Plus Essential lineup also includes Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered (PS4) and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (PS4, PS5). Suicide Squad is being handed out as a freebie in the same month that Warner Bros. will end support for the game, which turned out to be a massive flop.

While Need for Speed and The Stanley Parable are both solid entries, fans have been comparing this month’s lineup with January offerings over the last five years, and say that this year’s starting lineup is the weakest among them.

“Suicide Squad likely isn’t even worth it at $0 either,” a player wrote. “Amazon gave it away for free to Prime subscribers,” wrote another. “They really gonna start 2025 by giving us a dead live service game no one wants,” a third user added.

January’s Essential games will go live on Tuesday, January 7. Players have until the 6th to add December’s lineup to their libraries.

The post PS Plus Essential January 2025 Games Being Roasted by Members appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.



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The Morning After: Tech’s biggest losers in 2024

Welcome to 2025. Wave farewell to yesteryear with the biggest losers in tech. Picking our favorite villains in 2024 was challenging when it simply wasn’t a great time for tech. With the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won’t-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content, it’s just so noisy. Is it the internet of slop? Is it exhaustion? Is it AIs talking to AIs about AIs? In between all that, there’s the obsolescence of connectors past, Intel’s major struggles to turn around its fortunes, and, ugh, those AI assistants.

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And, because it's a new year, we'll be making some changes to the Engadget newsletter in the next few weeks. We'll still be hitting the biggest tech stories and events, but also fold in more context, more writers and editors and even some features from Engadget's past. Is there something you'd like to see in your inbox? Get in touch.

– Mat Smith

The biggest tech stories you missed

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It's the start of a new year, and a fresh crop of creative works have entered the public domain. Today, many materials copyrighted in 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 become fair game to freely adapt, reuse, copy and share. Several seminal directors debuted their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille's Dynamite. 1929 was also the year when Walt Disney directed the iconic Skeleton Dance short animated by Ub Iwerks, as well as when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie.

Continue reading.

Sony just revealed the first set of PlayStation Plus games in 2025 available for all subscribers. This month includes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Suicide Squad is a surprising addition: It went through multiple delays, got largely negative reviews and reportedly cost Warner Bros. some $200 million. Developers announced that the current season of content would be its last, though there are no plans to shut the game down yet. So play it while you… can?

Continue reading.

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Wednesday, 1 January 2025

The first PlayStation Plus games of 2025 include The Stanley Parable and Suicide Squad

Sony just revealed the first set of PlayStation Plus games in 2025 available for all subscribers, regardless of what service tier they're signed up for. Up this month are Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. I can't say it's the most exciting set of games, but at the very least The Stanley Parable is a classic, albeit an old one — the game was first released way back in 2011 as a mod for Half-Life 2. The game then got a proper full release in 2013, and the Ultra Deluxe version was released for modern consoles in 2022

Original creators Davey Wreden and William Pugh put together the Ultra Deluxe edition, with an expanded script and a number of other new changers that the developers weren't exactly forthcoming about: "Everything you remember has been recreated, yet it's different somehow. We've been here before, haven't we?" Broadly speaking, though, the game expands on the original with more choices, more dialog and more choices for the player to navigate. If you haven't given the game a shot, you now have no excuse not to check it out.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered is another oldie — released originally in 2010, but updated for the PS4 in 2020. That's the version available here, with full career modes for either a racer or cop, depending on which side of the law you feel like being on. This version also includes multiplayer modes and all the DLC that was released for the original game.

Finally, the newest game in the batch is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a live service game that went through multiple delays, got largely negative reviews and reportedly cost Warner Bros. some $200 million. Adding insult to injury, developers announced that the current season of content would be its last, though there are no plans to shut the game down yet. Given that it only came out this past February, that's a pretty short lifespan. I'm not sure that I'd want to jump onto the sinking ship at this point, but at least you can give it a shot without shelling out the $70 it still costs.

All these games are available as of January 7 to PS Plus subscribers, and you have until then to add December's games to your library

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/wFdYkge

from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/wFdYkge

13 Exciting Games Kicking Off The New Year In January

Another year is in the books and that means that backlog season is officially upon us. We used to get several months for catching up on old stuff as the new year got off to a slow start, but now the season barely lasts a couple of weeks. January might be a good time to give your wallet a rest before the February…

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