Winners and Losers: Sony reveals a new controller as Apple is expected to trash the iPhone SE - TrustedReviews

OPINION: It’s Sunday, which means its clip for america to recount our picks for the victor and loser of this week’s headlines. 

It’s been a comparatively quiescent week, with galore companies having exhausted immoderate large January announcements astatine CES 2023. Highlights from this week see Intel showing disconnected its fastest CPU yet, a caller hi-res Sony Walkman and a day for what we anticipation volition beryllium the Spotify HiFi motorboat we’ve been waiting for. 

Keep speechmaking to find retired who our victor and loser are this week.

Winner: Sony 

Our victor this week is Sony aft the institution announced a caller controller designed to marque gaming connected the PS5 much accessible. 

The controller – codenamed Project Leonardo – was unveiled astatine CES this month, and is designed to marque the PlayStation console much accessible for players with constricted centrifugal control, specified arsenic trouble holding a controller for agelong periods of time, pressing tiny groups of buttons oregon positioning fingers connected a modular controller. 

The controller kit features a circular plan that tin beryllium modified with swappable components, including analogue instrumentality caps and buttons successful antithetic shapes and sizes. Gamers tin power up the buttons, layout and the region of the analogue instrumentality to the gamepad. 

As acold arsenic bundle customisation goes, players tin besides marque changes to fastener mapping, including utilizing aggregate buttons for the aforesaid relation oregon assigning 2 functions to the aforesaid button. 

There’s besides the enactment to store programmed fastener settings arsenic power profiles and power betwixt them by pressing the illustration button, with up to 3 power profiles supported connected immoderate 1 console. 

Project Leonardo lays flat, meaning it tin beryllium placed connected a tabletop oregon wheelchair tray and tin beryllium secured to AMPS mounts and tripods. The controller tin adjacent beryllium paired with a DualSense wireless controller oregon a 2nd Project Leonardo truthful players tin determination betwixt the controllers and play collaboratively. 

Unfortunately, Project Leonardo is inactive successful development, meaning we’ll request to hold a spot longer to spot the controller deed store shelves. However, this does mean that Sony has much clip to fine-tune it with feedback from gamers truthful we’re excited to spot the last product. 

Loser: Apple 

This week’s loser is Apple arsenic rumours dispersed that the institution has decided to cancel the iPhone SE 4. 

The latest leak comes from respected Apple expert Ming-Chi Kuo (via MacRumors).

According to Kuo, Apple had initially planned to usage the iPhone SE 4 announcement arsenic an accidental to showcase its new, in-house 5G modem. However, that program appears to person been scrapped arsenic the modem reportedly won’t beryllium acceptable until 2025. This leaves Apple apt to proceed utilizing Qualcomm modems into 2024. 

So, wherever precisely does that permission the iPhone SE 4? Kuo doesn’t spell into item arsenic to wherefore precisely Apple would ditch the SE, but helium does accidental that the proviso concatenation has been fixed instructions to cancel the accumulation and shipment plans for the phone, which seems beauteous damning if true. 

It’s a shame that Apple seems to beryllium abandoning its cheapest iPhone. We were fans of the iPhone SE 3 and the accelerated show and large camera it delivered (not to notation iOS astatine an affordable price). 

Of course, it hasn’t officially been confirmed that Apple volition cancel the phone. If it does however, we anticipation the institution volition travel retired with different affordable exemplary – oregon adjacent better, trim the terms of the flagship iPhone to marque up for this loss.