Samsung Galaxy Gear Available for Pre-orders on Best Buy

Best Buy announced that Samsung Galaxy Gear will be up for pre-orders starting Friday and it will be the only retailer to carry the watch in all six colors including Jet Black, Mocha Gray, Wild Orange, Oatmeal Beige, Rose Gold, and Lime Green.

Samsung announced Galaxy Gear smartwatch at IFA 2013 in Berlin alongside Samsung Galaxy Note 3. The smartwatch is available in various parts of the world including UK and is now available from several retailers for £299. Samsung Galaxy Gear is also expected to hit various carriers in the US including Sprint, Verizon and AT&T early next month.
Users who want to get their hands-on Samsung Galaxy Gear can pre-order it from any Samsung Experience Shop in all Best Buy or Best Buy Mobile stores. The customers who will pre-order the device will get them shipped to their homes when the smartwatch launches, which is expected to be in October.
At launch, Galaxy Gear will only work with Samsung Galaxy Note 3, but the functionality will be available on Samsung Galaxy S4 next month, followed by Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy S3 by the end of December. .

Valve introduces Steam Controller

Earlier this week, Valve took the wraps off its SteamOS and Steam Box Hardware and announced that the company is working with multiple vendors to launch several SteamOS powered gaming machines, which will be launched in 2014. Now, Valve has announced another product that would be a good fit for your living-room gaming needs, Steam Controller

Steam Controller features a fresh new design with many excellent features that may make you dump your old gaming controller. In case you are wondering about the compatibility of the controller, the company mentions that it will work with all the games on steam, no matter how old they are.

The Steam Controller is designed to work with all the games on Steam: past, present, and future. Even the older titles in the catalog and the ones which were not built with controller support. (We’ve fooled those older games into thinking they’re being played with a keyboard and mouse, but we’ve designed a gamepad that’s nothing like either one of those devices.)

The new Steam Controller features dual trackpads instead of the classical analog keys, which are quicker and provide users with more speed and accuracy compared to a gaming mouse. The trackpads are also clickable and provide users with haptic feedback which is described by Valve as “a vital channel of information to the player – delivering in-game information about speed, boundaries, thresholds, textures, action confirmations, or any other events about which game designers want players to be aware. It is a higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of. As a parlour trick they can even play audio waveforms and function as speakers.”
In the center of the controller, there is a touchscreen that can display information related to the game. According to Valve,

In the center of the controller is another touch-enabled surface, this one backed by a high-resolution screen. This surface, too, is critical to achieving the controller’s primary goal – supporting all games in the Steam catalog. The screen allows an infinite number of discrete actions to be made available to the player, without requiring an infinite number of physical buttons.

Lastly, the Steam Controller is hackable, which means that users can open it and customize it according to their own needs.