This week, Apple hopes for some new growth for spring with smaller iPhones and iPads, Twitter celebrates a birthday, Facebook Messenger game lets you play virtual basketball with friends, Sony completes the PS VR picture with pre-order details, and how to create fake news videos.

Apple welcomes spring with some new product announcements

Spring arrived on Sunday, and on Monday, Apple gathered media at its campus in Cupertino, California, to show off some new products. And while the past few announcements for the company have been about getting big, this time it was all about being small.

On Monday, Drex and I talked about the smaller iPhone SE, which is a return to the four-inch size that made the smartphone popular in the first place.

But also revealed that day was a smaller version of the iPad Pro. With a diagonal screen size of 9.7 inches, the new tablet is all of the functionality of the larger Pro, with the size of the iPad Air 2.

So you can use the Apple Pencil peripheral and there is a keyboard case for it.

You can take advantage of the higher resolution Retina display, which is arguably better than the larger Pro because of new technology called “True Tone,” which adjusts the white balance of the colour on the screen based on the light where you are.

The new iPad Pro becomes available for pre-order on March 31. It will be available in four colour: gold, rose gold, silver, and space grey.

It will be priced starting at Cdn$799 for the 32GB with Wi-Fi model and $979 for the 32GB Wi-Fi + Cellular model. (If you really want to feel bad about the state of the Canadian dollar, the intro model in the U.S. is US$599.)

The smaller iPad Pro also comes with 128 GB and 256 GB of storage space.

Twitter turns 10

Great article in the Verge recapping the social service’s ten-year history.

Did you know that many of the most usable features – @ replies, hashtags, retweets – were suggested by users. Think it will still be around in another 10 years?

Facebook Messenger game celebrates March Madness

March is when the college basketball season – both in the U.S. and Canada – wraps up with championship games and tournaments.

Facebook, perhaps in celebration, has created a basketball mini-game within mobile apps for its Messenger service.

To play, you need to upgrade to the latest version of Messenger. Then, send the basketball emoji to a friend. After doing that, you can tap on the basketball to open up the mini-game.

You’re presented with a basketball, which you can get into the hoop by flicking up on your phone’s screen. Score 10 baskets in a row, and things get more difficult: the hoop starts moving.

After you’re done, your cumulative basket score is noted, and your friend can try and beat your score.

You can also play chess through Messsenger, by typing “@fbchess play” into a message with a friend. You move pieces basic chess notation to move pieces. @fbchess Ngf6 moves the knight in the G column into space F6, for example.

Pre-order details announced for PS VR

Last week, Sony announced the price of its virtual reality headset, PS VR. Now we know a bit more.

The headset, which requires a PlayStation Camera to work, and, depending on the game, might also require PlayStation Move controllers, is being sold on its own for Cdn$550.

But it’s also being sold in a Launch Bundle for $700, which includes the headset and headphones, the camera, two Move controllers, and PlayStation VR Worlds, which includes five experiences:

• The London Heist puts you in the middle of a robbery
• Into the Deep puts you into the ocean
• VR Luge sends you down a Californian highway in a street luge
• Danger Ball is a VR version of Pong
• Scavenger’s Odyssey is a sci-fi themed driving and shooting sim

You can’t pre-order the PS VR on its own, but if you’re interested in the Launch Bundle, pre-orders began on Tuesday.

Sony says it will have another round of pre-orders this summer, probably soon after the big E3 expo in Los Angeles.

Programmers demonstrate how they can modify video in real time

The next time you watch a video of a politician being interviewed, you might want to question whether they are actually saying what you’re hearing.

Last week, a submission to this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) expo in Las Vegas ended up being circulated through social media channels. It demonstrates how a live video can be hijacked, and the facial expressions and mouth movements of a “target”, say Donald Trump, can be overwritten by an actor.

So the live video becomes a reenactment, with an actor actually providing the performance that seems like it’s coming from the original person.

The demonstration doesn’t deal with the audio issues of truly faking news, but just consider the implications when that part of the puzzle gets solved. Will we ever know what’s real?