Gadgets

I’m thrilled to announce TechCrunch Live is filming live and in real life at CES 2023. We’re filming on the first day of the show at 11:00. If you’re not attending CES, that’s fine. Just like every TechCrunch Live, the show will be streamed live on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter Spaces — basically anywhere

Slowly but surely, state by state, the U.S. is becoming more cannabis-friendly. As the number of states where weed is legalized (or at least decriminalized) grows, so too does the number of companies building amazing products for cannabis users. Got a friend who partokes and lives somewhere cool about it? Why not upgrade their experience

Keeping fit doesn’t need a lot of technology. A decent pair of running shoes and an exercise mat might just do it. But of course sometimes a little extra tech can give an inspiring boost — so long as whatever it is is useful, accessible and can move with you. The smart spot for fitness

You know what I miss about working in an office? Literally nothing, apart from having access to a fancy coffee machine. It turns out that the magic of the liquid black gold is within reach even for work-from-home keyboard warriors. You don’t even need to spend ridiculous amounts of money for a tasty hot beverage

Apple has announced that its Self Service Repair store for iPhones and MacBooks is now open for business in Europe. First announced last November, the repair program essentially enables anyone to purchase genuine Apple components to repair their damaged devices, while the Cupertino company also provides online manuals to guide consumers through the self-service repair

All aboard the learn-to-code train! As another holiday season looms and kids everywhere start clamouring for shiny stuff, we’ve got you covered with a bumper edition of our annual STEM gift guide. This year’s guide is packed with more than 20 ideas to engage toddlers, excite tweens and inspire teens to get under the hood

Back in my day, Apple gave us one iPad, and we had to use it, otherwise we’d go to bed iPad-less. Kids today have all the iPads. There’s an iPad for every mood and every day of the week. Big iPads, small iPads, expensive iPads, slightly less expensive iPads. If you’re looking for an iPad,

Lora DiCarlo, a sex tech startup that made headlines in 2019 after being blacklisted from the Consumer Electronics Show, seems to have shut down. The company’s website is offline and reportedly orders have gone unfulfilled for months. TechCrunch has reached out to the eponymous founder for confirmation, but it sure looks like the end of

Apple iPhone users with iOS 16.1 software can now share car keys in their Wallet with non-iPhone users, starting with Google Pixel devices. In the future, that capability will extend to other devices with Android 12+, according to Apple. Apple says it has been working with the Internet Engineering Task Force and other industry players

Menstrual cups (sometimes known as “moon cups”) have been around since the 1930s, and it’s been a bloody long period since we’ve seen much innovation in that category. Emm just closed a $1 million round of funding to add some smarts. The company adds an applicator and an app tracking feature to help keep an

Boundary Layer, which was gunning for local air freight, and announced a slew of launch partners earlier this year, today announced a shift in strategy, with some high-performance foiling personal watercraft. Think low-flying SeaDoo, and you’ve got the right idea. The new product is called Valo, and will be able to carry a couple of

According to Corning in-house research, “84% of consumers across three of the largest smartphone markets – China, India, and the United States — cite durability as the number one purchasing consideration behind brand itself.” I suspect that things like battery life and camera rank pretty highly, as well, but at the very least, it’s safe

Once upon a time, I used to write TechCrunch’s travel gifts roundup. It was a fun story to piece together, and I was more than happy to do the honors — and play around with some fun gadgets in the process. We hit the big red pause button on the roundup during the 2020 holiday

The Kindle turned 15 this month. It’s been a strange ride for Amazon’s first hardware device. CEO Andy Jassy gave the e-reader a rare bit of love in last year’s shareholder letter, noting: Our first foray into devices was the Kindle, released in 2007. It was not the most sophisticated industrial design (it was creamy

This time two years ago, I changed up my annual gift guide feature’s focus from travel to working from home. After all, very few of us were doing much traveling at the time. I planned to switch back as the world reopened; it’s clear now, however, that for many of us, there is no going

Abby started its journey selling 120 or so of its “All-In-One Smart Hydroponic Grow Box” on Kickstarter, with a relatively modest $100,000 raised on the crowdfunding platform. The device promises to help you make growing your favorite plants more or less foolproof, especially if your “favorite plants” are marijuana. In its marketing, the company is

In September, Apple launched the Apple Watch Ultra, which is not only waterproof to 100 meters (330 feet) in depth, but can also be used as a dive computer with the help of a companion app developed by Huish Outdoors. The app launched officially today, but we took a pre-release version of it into the

Oceanic+, developed by Huish Outdoors, made a splash at this year’s Apple Fall Event in September, when Apple pulled a surprise new watch out of its proverbial hat, the Apple Watch Ultra. One of the surprises was that the $800 watch is rated for recreational scuba diving, enabling owners to take it underwater to 40

Back in August, the FDA announced it was making a big change in the world of hearing aids: From October onwards, hearing aids would be available without a prescription, over the counter. In a world where getting fitted for a hearing aid could be very expensive, and the hearing aids themselves were wrapped up in

Smartphone shipments have been declining in what has been a rough year for mobile handsets, and that’s meant even more pressure on an already-precarious sliver of the mobile market: feature phones. Today, one of the players in that space, the feature phone operating system startup KaiOS, is getting a small financial injection that both speaks

Aura, a startup founded by early Twitter employees that makes digital frames and photo sharing apps that can also be used to update those frames, has pulled in some funding to expand its business as it closes in on three million users of its app and 1 million frames sold (it’s now at 997k). The

It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win Haje Jan Kamps 13 hours If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell

The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting —

Maybe you’ve heard of Keyo. Perhaps you saw the initial round of press the firm did in 2017 — roughly two years after its founding. Or maybe you saw it pop back in 2020, riding the wave of news around Amazon’s lukewarmly received hand-scanner tech. You may have wondered precisely what’s been going on with

When the pandemic slammed into our shores a couple of years ago, many of us were shoo-ed inside, doomed to endless Zoom meetings. At the time, Canon released a beta of its EOS Webcam Utility, and then seemed to pretty much forget about it. Until today. In a ‘geez, Canon, this would have been helpful

Amazon is now offering to replace customers’ discontinued Cloud Cam smart cameras with a new Blink Mini following its decision earlier this year to shut down its Cloud Cam line of products and end support for the device’s associated mobile apps. At the time of the retailer’s May 2022 announcement, Amazon said it would email

When you say portable speakers, most people think about cheap Bluetooth speakers that you can easily put in your backpack when you’re going to the park. But Devialet has something different in mind with the Devialet Mania. The French high-end speaker maker wants to make the most luxurious and best sounding portable speaker around. The

Apple warned investors and customers on Sunday that it expects to ship fewer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max units as the world’s most valuable tech firm grapples with the ongoing Covid-19 lockdown in China. The company said it continues to see strong demand for the pro models of the new iPhone 14

Apple’s new and improved Apple TV 4K launches this week, going on sale online and in stores on Friday, November 4. After spending just under a week with the Wi-Fi + Ethernet version, I can say that it’s definitely a nice improvement over the existing version, delivering a couple of clutch forward-looking features that will