Gadgets

Meta keeps saying VR is the future, but everything it shows us is an inferior rehash of the things we already have. Its event today was, between assurances that everything is great in the Metaverse, a collection of tacit admissions that the best they can hope to do is ape a reality we are all

It’s been barely a few weeks since Google announced that it is shutting down its cloud gaming service Stadia next year. And now, the company has a new cloud gaming announcement: it is launching Chromebooks tuned for cloud gaming made by different manufacturers. The search giant has also partnered with cloud gaming services like Nvidia

Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia. Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary

Square Off charmed us at CES 2019, when the startup showed off its robotic chess board at our Hardware Battlefield event. Watching the pieces move on their own, courtesy of underlying AI, grabbed the attention of a jaded crowd of showgoers. This morning, it takes the next step in the startup lifecycle, as Bay Area-based

Google gets into the smartwatch game for real with the $350 Wear OS device Brian Heater @bheater / 3 days 2021 was the Pixel’s year. The Pixel 6 saw Google finally getting its act together and introducing a flagship that could rival the likes of Samsung and Apple. But while the line is getting a

The Pixel 6 represented a rebirth for Google. After several generations of trying — and mostly failing — to distinguish itself as a late-comer to the smartphone game, the device finally had a breakout season. Under a new guard, Google’s longstanding attempts to cut corners were out, and the company had finally delivered a premium

We’ve known that the Pixel Tablet has been coming since I/O. It was one of a trio of upcoming hardware devices the company previewed. The other two — Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch — are arriving soon. Those who have been holding out for the company’s next swing at a tablet, on the other hand,

What constitutes a big phone in 2022? It’s been a moving target for a number of years now — albeit a target that has been steadily moving in a single direction. It’s tough to determine the exact average display size, but most flagship smartphone screens generally fall somewhere between six and seven inches. In 2010,

Google today announced its new Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro smartphones at a hardware event in Brooklyn. While the company focused a lot on the security, voice and camera features of the phone, it also briefly showed a new health feature in a slide: coughing and snoring detection. On a daily bedtime summary

Pixel devices are adored for their punchy images and AI-powered photo features, and today, we get treated to a pair of new phones: The Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro. Both phones have a 50-megapixel main sensor and a 12-megapixel ultrawide sensor. The Pixel 7 Pro has an additional 48-megapixel telephoto lens. With these new

The standard disclaimer here: Look for a full review in the not-too-distant future. But now, let’s get a better look at the Pixel Watch in real life, through some quick photos and a hands-on squeezed in the press scrum at the Williamsburg Google Store, following today’s event. Image Credits: Brian Heater I had a few

Google went all out today with a wall of launches of new hardware and tech. Here’s a collection of all the cool stuff Google launched, and you can watch the full event yourself if you have 90 minutes and a particularly deep curiosity streak for all things Google. Here is everything announced at the Made by

Hardware season is in full force, and now is Google’s time to shine. The company got in the habit of showing its hand months in advance, and we’ve already gotten a reasonably good look at the two headliners. First up is the latest addition to the Pixel smartwatch line. Look for the Pixel 7 and

The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to back EU legislation that will standardize mobile chargers on USB Type-C — paving the way for the law to start being applied by the end of 2024. MEPs have been pushing for the e-waste measure for over a decade so today’s massively affirmative plenary vote — of 602

Xiaomi just launched the 12T Pro, a flagship with a 200-megapixel main camera. The company is using Samsung’s HP1 sensor with a base pixel size of 0.64μm and f/1.69 aperture. The sensor, which was launched last year, uses pixel binning in different ways: it can combine 16 pixels to produce a 12.5-megapixel image (2.56μm pixel

The consortium behind the Matter standard for the Internet of Things has officially approved the long-awaited standard. The open-source connectivity standard was built around a shared belief that smart home devices should seamlessly integrate with other systems and be secure and reliable. Smart home device makers understand that people will integrate lots of products from

The TechCrunch newsroom fears only one thing: the coming of April 1. Because, I’m just going to say it, the tech industry isn’t very funny. But Google Japan’s ongoing series of ridiculous keyboards, where they completely commit to the joke, suggests we may have found the first known exception. The latest is the “Gboard Bar

Seems Google couldn’t wait until Thursday to announce all of its upcoming hardware. In a pair of blog posts this morning, the company announced two additions to its Nest line of smart home products: a new Nest Doorbell and the Nest WiFi Pro. The latter amps up the company’s dead-simple mesh Wi-Fi offering. The top-line

An antitrust win for Amazon and Apple in Italy where an appeals court has cancelled a multimillion dollar penalty the pair were hit with last year for alleged collusion following an investigation into the reselling of Apple and (Apple-owned) Beats kit on Amazon’s Italian e-commerce marketplace. The original €203M (total) penalty had already been reduced

There’s been a standing question surrounding how seriously we should ultimately take Astro. The product was launched exactly one year ago, in limited quantities as a Day One offering for $999 a pop. My interaction with the robot was (at the time) limited to a few pre-launch demos. I came away from the experience thinking

Amazon released Wednesday the second-generation version of Echo Auto, a smaller and slicker device aimed to broaden the e-commerce giant’s reach by bringing its Alexa voice assistant into more vehicles. Echo Auto, which first came to market in 2018, connects to a vehicle’s infotainment system to bring the Alexa assistant into the vehicle. A driver

Amazon is launching two new designs for its Echo Dot Kids devices, the company announced at its virtual event today. The Echo Dot Kids devices now come in new Owl and Dragon designs. The two new designs join Amazon’s current Echo Dot Kids devices: the Tiger and the Panda. The new designs will be available

You already know whether you’re an Amazon Echo type person. If so, you’re probably looking at one right now, thinking “should I upgrade that thing or is it pointless?” Probably the latter — unless you also have Amazon’s Eero mesh Wi-Fi product, in which case: it’s probably still pointless, unless it’s pretty old. In which

Amazon showed its Eero Wi-Fi lineup some love this morning during a hardware event, announcing the Eero PoE 6, a Wi-Fi 6 Power over Ethernet (PoE) access point that can provide up to 2,000 square feet of coverage and support up to 100 devices. A complementary new product, the Eero PoE Gateway, delivers up to

Away from the premium smartphone feature-utility hyperbole swirling around dynamic islands, mobile devices remain much of a muchness. But ethical mobile brand Fairphone has always done innovation differently — applying attention to supply chain conditions and novel modularity to support repairability and lifespan longevity, with a dual mission to make consumer electronics more ethical and

Two and a half years after unveiling Stadia on stage at GDC, the game streaming service is officially done. Subscribers will have access to the games library through January 18 of next year, after which point, it will shut down for good. Google adds in a blog post that it expects to have all refunds

A new letter penned by Senate and House Democrats accuses Amazon of “anticompetitive” practices in its bid to purchase Roomba-maker, iRobot, for $1.7 billion. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge to convince the Federal Trade Commission to reject the deal, according to a report from Axios. “Rather than compete in a fair marketplace

Weighing in at $100, Amazon’s new Blink Floodlight camera brings more brightness and smarts to its camera line. The company also launched a brand-new $30 Blink Mini Pan Tilt mount, giving security-conscious customers the ability to look around a bit more than before. The two new additions to the Blink family were launched at Amazon’s

Amazon Alexa will be the foundation of BMW’s next-generation voice assistant, the companies announced Wednesday at Amazon’s annual Devices and Services launch event. The German automaker and Amazon are have had a relationship for years now. BMW started offering the Alexa assistant in select cars starting in 2018 and the partnership has grown from there.

Apple’s new iPhone 14 lineup isn’t proving to be as popular as the company would have hoped for. So it is readjusting its production targets by cutting down additional orders for the device. A report from Bloomberg notes that the Cupertino-based tech company produced around 90 million units in the second half of the last