Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Someone Designed India’s Humble Tuk-Tuk As A Modern-day Renault-style Mini EV

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The Tuk-tuk, also called the ‘Auto Rickshaw’ in South Asia, actually comes from Italy! The original three-wheeled vehicle was manufactured by Piaggio and popularized in the continent under the model name Apé before other brands caught on. The vehicular category is now an unshakeable part of Indian automotive culture. In its regular form, the Auto Rickshaw (as opposed to the hand-pulled carts called Rickshaws) is a mode of public transport, seating up to three people at the back. Swap the back seat out for a truck bed and the Auto Rickshaw becomes a transport vehicle for all sorts of cargo, from furniture to fresh produce. The only problem with the Auto Rickshaw is that it hasn’t fundamentally changed in its aesthetic in decades. Carbon Noir proposes an alternative.

Dubbed the ‘Cyberpunk 2077 Auto Rickshaw’, this concept vehicle has a few changes on and under the hood. For starters, it comes with an electric powertrain, making it way more energy efficient than the fuel and CNG guzzling autos you see on Indian roads. Secondly, the exterior gets an absolute makeover, which I have mixed feelings on.

Designer: Carbon Noir

There’s a lot to appreciate about the makeover – you’ve got modernized headlights and taillights, an actual hardbody design that isn’t a metal armature roof with fabric pulled over it, and an aesthetic that feels very Renault Twizy but dialed back. The only real problem (and this is entirely in my head) is the dual-tone design, which gives the E-tuk (electric tuk-tuk) the stature and vibe of the Fisher Price toy car, but with a green base. That’s quite literally the only gripe I have. Ditch the two-tone and you have a winner on your hands.

The E-tuk sports a few interesting design details. It contains a usable boot, which most auto rickshaws don’t have. The conventional auto rickshaw packs the engine in the back, but one can assume that an electrified platform frees the boot up, letting people store luggage inside. Speaking of inside, the interiors see a pretty remarkable change too. The original auto rickshaw seats one in the cockpit, and 2-3 at the back. This revised model opts for a traditional 2×2 seating structure, while retaining the handlebar controls instead of swapping it for a steering wheel. Spiritually, this still feels like an auto rickshaw.

Like most auto rickshaws in India, the E-tuk sports doors on the left side of the vehicle, leaving the right bare. A mere bar on the right side blocks passengers in the back from falling off (or jumping out of a moving ride), but the front still lets the driver enter and exit freely. For riders, entry and exit happens purely through the left, using the doors on both the front as well as the back.

Like I said, spiritually, this is still the quintessential Auto Rickshaw. That two-tone design is iconic, although it serves no purpose here since the green-bottom Auto Rickshaws are painted to denote that they run on Compressed Natural Gas and not petrol. The handlebars for the auto-rider are iconic too, and an open-side design means accepting the weather the city gives you – sun on hot days, wind on good days, and dust or rain on bad days. That’s the non-verbal contract you sign when you sit in an ‘auto’. Yeah, and sure the thing is powered by an electric drivetrain, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting in-vehicle air-conditioning anytime soon!

The post Someone Designed India’s Humble Tuk-Tuk As A Modern-day Renault-style Mini EV first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Designed India’s Humble Tuk-Tuk As A Modern-day Renault-style Mini EV

Posted on by

The Tuk-tuk, also called the ‘Auto Rickshaw’ in South Asia, actually comes from Italy! The original three-wheeled vehicle was manufactured by Piaggio and popularized in the continent under the model name Apé before other brands caught on. The vehicular category is now an unshakeable part of Indian automotive culture. In its regular form, the Auto Rickshaw (as opposed to the hand-pulled carts called Rickshaws) is a mode of public transport, seating up to three people at the back. Swap the back seat out for a truck bed and the Auto Rickshaw becomes a transport vehicle for all sorts of cargo, from furniture to fresh produce. The only problem with the Auto Rickshaw is that it hasn’t fundamentally changed in its aesthetic in decades. Carbon Noir proposes an alternative.

Dubbed the ‘Cyberpunk 2077 Auto Rickshaw’, this concept vehicle has a few changes on and under the hood. For starters, it comes with an electric powertrain, making it way more energy efficient than the fuel and CNG guzzling autos you see on Indian roads. Secondly, the exterior gets an absolute makeover, which I have mixed feelings on.

Designer: Carbon Noir

There’s a lot to appreciate about the makeover – you’ve got modernized headlights and taillights, an actual hardbody design that isn’t a metal armature roof with fabric pulled over it, and an aesthetic that feels very Renault Twizy but dialed back. The only real problem (and this is entirely in my head) is the dual-tone design, which gives the E-tuk (electric tuk-tuk) the stature and vibe of the Fisher Price toy car, but with a green base. That’s quite literally the only gripe I have. Ditch the two-tone and you have a winner on your hands.

The E-tuk sports a few interesting design details. It contains a usable boot, which most auto rickshaws don’t have. The conventional auto rickshaw packs the engine in the back, but one can assume that an electrified platform frees the boot up, letting people store luggage inside. Speaking of inside, the interiors see a pretty remarkable change too. The original auto rickshaw seats one in the cockpit, and 2-3 at the back. This revised model opts for a traditional 2×2 seating structure, while retaining the handlebar controls instead of swapping it for a steering wheel. Spiritually, this still feels like an auto rickshaw.

Like most auto rickshaws in India, the E-tuk sports doors on the left side of the vehicle, leaving the right bare. A mere bar on the right side blocks passengers in the back from falling off (or jumping out of a moving ride), but the front still lets the driver enter and exit freely. For riders, entry and exit happens purely through the left, using the doors on both the front as well as the back.

Like I said, spiritually, this is still the quintessential Auto Rickshaw. That two-tone design is iconic, although it serves no purpose here since the green-bottom Auto Rickshaws are painted to denote that they run on Compressed Natural Gas and not petrol. The handlebars for the auto-rider are iconic too, and an open-side design means accepting the weather the city gives you – sun on hot days, wind on good days, and dust or rain on bad days. That’s the non-verbal contract you sign when you sit in an ‘auto’. Yeah, and sure the thing is powered by an electric drivetrain, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting in-vehicle air-conditioning anytime soon!

The post Someone Designed India’s Humble Tuk-Tuk As A Modern-day Renault-style Mini EV first appeared on Yanko Design.

Flashlights Usually Don’t Have Personalities, Olight’s Oclip 2 Ultra Kind of Does

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Flashlights do not usually have personalities. They turn on, they turn off, and that is the extent of the relationship. Olight’s Oclip line has spent a couple of generations building a reputation as the clip light people actually reach for, but even loyal users had one recurring complaint. Olight surveyed over 5,200 existing Oclip owners and found that nearly 30 percent of all feedback came down to the same frustration: the light points the wrong way, and there is no fix short of unclipping everything and starting over. Clip it to a hat brim, it shines in your eyes. Clip it to a pocket, it lights up the ceiling. The beam went where the clip decided, not where you needed it.

That single fix is what the Oclip 2 Ultra is built around. A 360 degree rotating clip pairs with a 115 degree pivoting head, letting you attach the clip anywhere and aim the beam exactly where the work is, without repositioning. Both axes are rated for 10,000 test cycles, so the mechanism is built to hold rather than loosen over time. The Ultra adds an OAL aluminum body, an in-house R/UV dual emitter combining red and 365nm UV, and OclipBeat, a breathing indicator that shifts color the more the light gets used. Output lands at 580 lumens with a 130 meter throw, IP66 rated, and 2 meter drop rated. It starts at $69.99, with the Premium edition adding a 1,000 mAh charging dock for $94.99.

Designer: Olight

Click Here to Buy Now: $94.99

Elbow-deep in an engine bay with the beam pointing at a hose instead of the bolt you actually need, the old Oclip left you two options: tilt your body or unclip and start over. The Oclip 2’s dual-axis mechanism takes that off the table. The 360 degree rotating clip and 115 degree pivoting head work as independent adjustments, so you can attach the light, rotate the body upright, and tilt the head directly onto the target, all while the clip stays put. The mechanism went through hundreds of light-head optimization iterations, and the result is a head that holds its angle under consistent rotational resistance. A head that drifts after positioning defeats the whole purpose of an articulating system, and Olight clearly thought about that.

Four light sources in one body: flood, spot, or red. For even greater versatility, Oclip 2 Ultra features Olight’s industry-first, in-house-developed R/UV emitter, combining red and UV light in one compact design.. Traditional compact clip lights force a trade-off between red warning signals and UV detection, so Olight’s decision to build both into one emitter is the real technical flex here. UV output lands at up to 800 mW for quick inspections. The floodlight uses a specially designed curved light cup to produce diffuse reflection and a clean flood beam, rather than just a wide hotspot, and the spotlight throws to 130 meters at 450 lumens (the floodlight lets you hit 580 lumens). OclipBeat is the Ultra’s odd personality feature, a breathing indicator that activates when the light head rotates and shifts color based on cumulative use, delivering a unique sense of partnership on every mission; frankly not something you’d expect to find endearing in a flashlight, and yet here we are.

The clip grips objects up to 14mm thick, including collars, backpack straps, and MOLLE webbing. Magnets at the MCC tail and on the clip snap onto steel surfaces like a car hood or toolbox, making them instant mounting points without any adapter. The light can also hang overhead from a tent loop or hook, for situations where bouncing light off a ceiling works better than directing a beam. The whole system is built on the assumption that both hands should stay free, and the dual-axis head makes that viable because you can redirect the beam from wherever the light is already clipped. Three attachment modes, one articulating head, and a rotating body add up to a meaningful amount of placement flexibility in a 79.5 gram package.

USB-C, MCC magnetic charging, and the Mobile Charging Dock bundled with Premium editions give the Oclip 2 Ultra three paths to a full battery. The 1,000 mAh Mobile Charging Dock automatically tops up the light on the go, delivers up to twice the total runtime, and displays the battery levels of both the light and the dock at a glance. MCC is Olight’s proprietary magnetic connector, which snaps on without needing to locate a port in the dark. That runtime extension directly targets the 13 percent of first-gen Oclip users who flagged short battery life as their main complaint. The dock rates IPX6 while the light body holds IP66, and the combined Ultra Premium package weighs 141.5 grams with dock attached.

OAL aluminum is Olight’s proprietary alloy, high-strength and scratch-resistant, and the Ultra’s body is built from it while the clip components stay in standard AL6061. The visual difference between the two isn’t dramatic, but OAL’s scratch resistance should matter over months of daily carry where pocket wear shows up first on softer finishes. The body measures 60.2 x 28 x 35mm, and the design is 4mm smaller than the pilot-production version. IP66 protection and a 2-meter drop rating give it a durability profile that matches the automotive, outdoor, and patrol use cases Olight is targeting. The angular design language gives the Ultra a more deliberate everyday-carry presence than the utilitarian clip-light category tends to produce, and OclipBeat adds a visual layer that builds character the longer the thing stays in rotation.

The Oclip 2 series runs four SKUs: Pro ($49.99), Pro Premium ($74.99), Ultra ($69.99), and Ultra Premium ($94.99), all available now at olight.com. Premium editions at both tiers include the 1,000 mAh Mobile Charging Dock. Olight backs the lights with a lifetime warranty in Australia, China, France, Germany, and the United States, five years everywhere else, and the Mobile Charging Dock carries a separate two-year warranty.

Click Here to Buy Now: $94.99

The post Flashlights Usually Don’t Have Personalities, Olight’s Oclip 2 Ultra Kind of Does first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Oakley x Spiderman unofficial sunglasses are cooler than any smart wearable ever made

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There is a piece of Spider-Man trivia that has floated around fan forums for years, the kind of claim that gets repeated so often it starts to feel like fact. The story goes that the mask eyepieces worn by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were built using actual Oakley lens material, sourced by the prop houses that made the suits. I cannot verify that, and neither, as far as I can tell, can anyone who has posted it online. It lives mostly in old Oakley collector threads, secondhand and uncredited, more urban legend than documented history. But myth or not, it is the exact reason a new pair of unofficial Spider-Man sunglasses from designer Ivan Vanacore make immediate, satisfying sense.

Vanacore’s concept takes the raised red webbing off Andrew Garfield’s suit in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and wraps it around an Oakley silhouette, ellipse logo included at the temple. The web lines run outward from the nose bridge in the exact pattern the mask uses across the face, and the lens shape borrows the exaggerated, teardrop eye cutouts that made that particular suit stand out from Raimi’s earlier, more restrained design. There is no confirmation this is an actual product, a licensed collaboration, or anything beyond a designer’s personal project. Vanacore has not said whether these exist as more than renders, and neither Oakley nor Sony has commented. For now, treat it as a very convincing what if.

Designer: Ivan Vanacore

Vanacore did not default to the Maguire suit or even the more famous Tom Holland suit with the shapeshifting eyes, he went straight for ASM2’s version, the eyes pulled wide at the temples, the webbing raised enough to read as sculptural rather than printed. Garfield’s Spiderman never really got its due, it got swept under the rug while Sony just decided to put enough effort into the series to retain rights, promptly canceling it after 2 movies to focus on a Venom series. It’s only after Garfield made an appearance in No Way Home that people really objectively appreciated how well he embodied the role of Peter Parker.

Now the honest part. Would these actually be wearable? Eh. Those narrow lens openings look amazing in a photo and would be a nightmare for peripheral vision the second you tried to drive in them. And all that raised texture is basically a dust and grime trap waiting to happen. Cool concept, rough real life.

But none of that matters because the internet already wants a pair, and honestly, same. We’ve seen a ton of fan concepts that invent an entire new universe from scratch just to justify existing. This one barely has to try that hard. It just points at two things that already looked like they belonged together and goes “well?”

Whether Oakley ever picks this up is anyone’s guess, corporate legal teams have killed way cooler ideas than this and I’m sure Marvel and Oakley’s lawyers are definitely going to butt heads instead of collaborating earnestly to give the fans what they want. Until then it just lives as a really good What If, and somewhere a costume designer from 2014 is getting way more attention than they ever expected for a movie most people forgot.

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Apple may launch a “Watch Air” screen-less health tracker to compete with Whoop and Fitbit Air

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For anyone who thinks Apple would never launch a screenless Watch, let me remind you of two, nay, three things. First, the iPod Shuffle – a product that baffled many, but delighted even more. For anyone who couldn’t afford an iPod Classic or Nano, the screenless Shuffle was the instant next pick. You couldn’t do much, play-pause, move across a randomized roster of tracks, and adjust volume. As limiting as this experience was, it still a smash success, selling 10 million units in just its first year.

The second bit of evidence I’d like to offer is the rumor that Apple’s been working on a smart ring to take on Samsung, Oura, and a bunch of other players that are slowly annexing this particular domain. The third is just a follow-up to the second – While smart rings are gaining a fair bit of popularity, Apple’s true competition is coming from an absolutely unexpected source – a small upstart called Whoop that’s captured the fitness band market, with big names sporting Whoop bands. Think of Whoop as the Beats by Dre of the fitness world… and you know what happened to Beats by Dre, right?

Designer: Tech Town

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept in Cosmic Orange colorway

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in early August that Apple’s industrial design team has spent roughly the past year exploring what he called, in his own words, “something that transforms the product for a new era,” comparing the scale of the rethink to the iPhone’s jump from a slab to a foldable. A screenless band sits at the center of that exploration, alongside a round display concept Gurman says is unlikely to ship, plus new price tiers above the Ultra and Hermès range and below the SE. Nothing here is close to final. No sensors, no name, no price, no date. Apple hasn’t committed to any of it, and Gurman’s own reporting frames the screenless band as the most plausible of the bunch precisely because the rest of the wearable market has already proven the category works.

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept in Mist Blue colorway

Apple has quietly, well, not quietly, actually already built the brain this device would need, and shipped it on your wrist this month. The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 launched September 18 with a new Readiness app, a daily score from 0 to 10 built from recent activity, overnight vitals, and sleep, closing with a recommendation of Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It. Apple now samples HRV every five minutes, a figure it says is 24 times denser than what Series 11 could manage, and splits the reading into overall HRV and a Recovery HRV compared against your personal baseline rather than a population average. That is, functionally, a Whoop screen for readiness with the screen still attached to a watch. Strip the display away, keep the sensor stack and the scoring engine, and you have the pitch for a Watch Air in one sentence.

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept in Titanium colorway

The person pushing hardest for that strip down sits above Apple’s entire health division. Eddy Cue took over health and fitness oversight from outgoing COO Jeff Williams in late 2025 and has reportedly told colleagues Apple needs to move faster in the category. Cue’s personal habit gives the story its bite: he wears both Oura and Whoop, executive shorthand for admitting the Health app hasn’t caught up to the devices its own leadership prefers on their wrists. An ambitious AI coaching project internally called Mulberry was scaled back after Cue’s arrival, redirected instead toward folding more of its intelligence straight into the core Health app rather than a paid add on layer.

The market Apple would be entering has filled in fast. Google’s Fitbit Air launched in May at $99.99, a 5.2 gram pod with no screen and no buttons, just a double tap gesture and a battery LED. Garmin’s Cirqa followed at $199.99 with a single physical side button and no subscription requirement, offering roughly 10 days of battery against the Air’s 7. Whoop 5.0 anchors the premium end at 14 days of battery, but the hardware means nothing without an active membership starting around $199 a year, the one structural weakness Apple’s own retail model was built to avoid.

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept without the wristband

A round Apple Watch is, per Gurman, unlikely to happen, and the smart ring has been shelved and revived in rumor form so many times it barely qualifies as news anymore. The screenless band is different. It borrows a software system Apple has already shipped, it targets a price umbrella Apple has never fully occupied below the SE, and it answers a habit Cue is reportedly living out loud every morning. None of that guarantees a 2027 launch. But the Shuffle taught Apple that taking something away can sell just as well as adding something new, and this time, the thing it would be taking away is the one part of the Apple Watch nobody asked to keep charging every single night.

The post Apple may launch a “Watch Air” screen-less health tracker to compete with Whoop and Fitbit Air first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hisense U6SF Pro Wraps a 1,200-Nit Mini LED Panel in Glare-Free Screen and $699 Price Tag

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If you spent the World Cup squinting at a TV that turned every afternoon match into a reflection of your living room window, I have good news about your timing. The Hisense U6SF Pro is a Mini LED TV with an anti-reflection screen built for bright rooms, plus a native 144Hz panel and a built-in subwoofer. The 65-inch model listed at $1,099 when it launched in March and now sells for around $699. The NFL season kicked off on September 9, so there’s a full season of Sunday afternoon games between you and Super Bowl LXI. That game lands on February 14, 2027, which makes a big TV the easiest Valentine’s Day gift you’ll ever justify to yourself.

Hisense’s own reviewer’s guide is built around hosting, with an “Out Host With Hisense” campaign aimed at the person whose living room becomes everyone’s game-day spot. Super Bowl Sunday is the Olympics of that job, and the 55 to 100-inch size range lets you pick how many friends you’re willing to feed. The early Sunday games are where the U6SF Pro’s coating does the real work, since that 1 p.m. kickoff arrives with full sunlight pouring through the blinds. Tom’s Guide’s reviewer never had to adjust the room lights during testing, which is exactly what a crowded couch needs. That’s a TV designed around the way people actually watch football: loud, bright, and surrounded by snacks.

Designer: Hisense

Click Here to Buy Now: $699.99 $1099.99 ($400 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

Hisense’s anti-reflection, glare-free coating treats the living room as the design brief, cutting reflections from windows, skylights, and floor lamps so the picture holds its punch in daylight. TV showrooms love dim lighting, while real homes are full of glass, so designing the screen around daylight feels like the smarter starting point. Behind that coating sits a Hi-QLED Mini LED backlight with full array local dimming, rated for up to 1,200 nits of peak brightness. Tom’s Guide measured 358 nits in SDR using the most accurate picture mode, outshining pricier sets like the TCL QM7L and Hisense’s own U7 in that test. The Hi-View AI Engine adjusts brightness, contrast, and clarity scene by scene, so switching from a noon kickoff to a night game takes zero fiddling.

The unibody chassis keeps things clean and minimal, with slim bezels that push the picture right out to the edges. At roughly 2.5 inches deep, it sits close to the wall on a 400 x 300 mm VESA mount, and Tom’s Guide found the dual feet sturdy with zero wobble. I like a TV that reads as pure picture when it’s on and a tidy dark panel when it’s off, and this one nails both states. The lineup tops out at a 100-inch model, which makes sense coming from the brand that shipped more 100-inch-plus TVs than anyone in the first half of 2026, according to Omdia. Hisense clearly knows how to make a giant screen look at home on a living room wall.

Sound gets the same room-first thinking, with a 2.1-channel system and a built-in subwoofer that gives explosions and stadium roars real weight. Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual:X widen the mix, and Tom’s Guide put it among the few built-in TV audio setups its reviewer wouldn’t rush to upgrade. A new AI Sports Mode boosts field and jersey colors while lifting crowd noise without burying the commentary, which feels tailor-made for game day. Color accuracy is a standout too, with Pantone Validated color and a lab-measured Delta-E of just 1.58 (lower is better), better than every similarly priced rival in the same test. Movie nights get Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive, and Filmmaker Mode, so the same screen shifts from tailgate energy to cinema mode without breaking a sweat.

The native 144Hz panel turns halftime into a gaming session, with two HDMI 2.1 ports running 4K at 144Hz alongside AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, VRR, and ALLM. Tom’s Guide measured just 9.3ms of input latency, nearly matching some of the best gaming TVs out there. Dolby Vision Gaming and HDR10+ Gaming are on board, and Hisense’s Game Bar shows frame rate and VRR status without a trip through the menus. Streaming runs on Fire TV with Alexa+, so you can press the Alexa button and ask it to find a show, check scores, or control compatible smart lights. Amazon’s refreshed interface sorts content into categories like Sports and Live TV, and WiFi 6 keeps streams steady when a full house of phones joins the network.

List prices start at $849 for the 55-inch and climb through $1,099, $1,399, and $1,999 to $3,499 for the 100-inch. The U6SF Pro sits just above the standard U6 in Hisense’s lineup, adding the brighter glare-resistant screen and 144Hz panel that make the biggest difference in a sunny room. It’s available now at Amazon and Best Buy, with full specs on Hisense’s product page. By the time the Lombardi Trophy gets handed out at SoFi Stadium on February 14, you’ll have a whole season of Sunday afternoons logged on this screen. Your friends will figure out whose couch to show up at pretty quickly.

Click Here to Buy Now: $699.99 $1099.99 ($400 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post Hisense U6SF Pro Wraps a 1,200-Nit Mini LED Panel in Glare-Free Screen and $699 Price Tag first appeared on Yanko Design.

VAIO’s Multi-Flip laptop is back after a decade, and it’s not cheap

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Count how many times you have flipped your convertible into tablet mode this year. I am guessing the number sits closer to zero than to ten, and the reason is that your palms end up resting on a live keyboard, which feels like holding a cat backwards. VAIO’s fix is a 13.3-inch laptop called the VAIO T, whose display rotates 180 degrees on a pivot in the center of the lid so the keyboard folds away inside instead of facing the world. The mechanism rides on two urethane sheet hinges with the display cable sandwiched between them, locked by VAIO’s first magnetic retention system. Prototypes got flexed by hand over 20,000 times before anyone signed off on it.

This is the Multi-Flip Mechanism, and VAIO has not built one since the Z Flip in 2016. Sony launched the idea on the VAIO Fit 13A in 2013 and lost the format war to Lenovo’s cheaper, simpler 360-degree hinge, the one every convertible still uses today. The double hinge instinct has not stayed buried either. Acer flirted with something similar at IFA 2026 through Project DualPlay Mini, a gaming handheld that splits open on a second hinge to expose a keyboard, part of our best of IFA 2026 coverage. The VAIO T is the first product co-developed since Nojima acquired VAIO in January 2025, and the first entry in a range the company calls VAIO Next. Pricing starts at 374,000 yen, about $2,400, with nothing announced for markets outside Japan.

Designer: VAIO

The three modes sound simple until you try describing them without waving your hands around. Fold the top half of the display toward you from a normal open laptop and you land in view mode, screen facing outward for a meeting or a presentation while the keyboard sits underneath doing nothing. Keep folding and the lid closes flat with the display on top, and you have a tablet, minus the part where your palm rests on a row of keys. VAIO says the urethane sheet hinges and the sandwiched display cable were the hard part to get right, since a flexible cable running through a rotating joint fails in ways a fixed one never does. The magnetic retention is new to this generation and exists to stop the whole assembly from drifting loose between shapes.

VAIO also used the relaunch to pull its favorite color story back out. Kachi-iro is a near black indigo made by pounding dyed cloth, worn by samurai centuries ago because the name sounds like the Japanese word for victory, and VAIO has been putting it on flagship machines since a special edition SX12 back in 2021. The T ships in fine black and fine red as standard, with a Kachi-iro Special Edition reserved for the VAIO Store and paired with the fastest chip on offer, an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H with a stronger integrated GPU. Everyone else chooses between the eight core Core Ultra 5 325 and the sixteen core Core Ultra 7 356H. It is a small flourish, but it tells you exactly which customer VAIO is chasing.

The rest of the spec sheet is competent rather than dramatic, which is fine, since the hinge is doing the talking. The 13.3-inch touchscreen runs at 2560 by 1600 in a 16:10 frame, glossy, built on VAIO’s flash surface glass, an odd choice for a machine designed around showing your screen to someone across a table, since that is exactly when glare shows up uninvited. Memory tops out at 64GB on the Core Ultra 7 configuration, storage climbs to a 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD, and an optional battery claims around 18 hours of video playback under Japan’s generous JEITA 3.0 standard.

None of it comes cheap, and none of it comes to the US. The base configuration starts at 374,000 yen, close to $2,400, for a Core Ultra 5 with 16GB of memory and a 512GB drive, before you add storage, the bigger battery or an English keyboard as paid extras. VAIO has not announced any plan to sell the T outside Japan, so this is a laptop most of us can admire through a browser window and nothing else. I would also gently point out that a glossy panel is an odd choice for a machine built around showing your screen to someone across a table, since that is exactly the moment glare tends to show up uninvited.

Still, the interesting part of this story was never really the spec sheet. It is that a company selling laptops for a living looked at its own back catalog, found the mechanism everyone else abandoned a decade ago, and decided the abandoned one was actually correct. Lenovo’s hinge won the market. VAIO’s hinge is making the argument that winning the market and solving the problem were never quite the same fight.

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The $499 Lapis One Is A Tiny Mac mini Alternative Built Just to Run Your AI Agents

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Earlier this year, people were buying Mac minis by the cartload just to give their OpenClaw agents somewhere to live, and Apple Store staff reportedly started calling it the “OpenClaw machine.” Pamir’s Lapis One looked at that trend and asked a very reasonable question: what if the agent’s computer was actually designed for the agent? The answer is a coaster-sized Linux box with a Rabbit R1 orange cap, an iMac G3 two-tone body, and a pixel robot snoozing on its little screen. Your AI assistant gets its own desk, its own internet connection, and its own battery, while your laptop finally gets some peace. Frankly, it’s a nicer setup than my first apartment.

Under that playful shell sits a Rockchip RK3576 chip with a 6 TOPS NPU, 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 64GB of storage, and room for an M.2 SSD and a microSD card. The standout feature is Agent KVM, a dedicated USB-C port that captures another computer’s display and fakes a keyboard and mouse, letting your agent operate a second machine the way you would. Tailscale comes baked in, so you can check on your agent from your phone in the grocery store checkout line. Pamir, a San Francisco startup that previously shipped the Distiller dev kit, has pre-orders open at $499, with December shipping to the US. The regular price will be $599 once pre-order pricing ends.

Designer: Pamir AI

Pick the Lapis One up and the design lineage is impossible to miss. The orange wedge housing the screen is doing a very direct Rabbit R1 impression, right down to the color and the cute pixel-art creature that lives on the display. We covered the R1 when it launched, admiring how Teenage Engineering gave it a Tamagotchi-like charm, and the comparison mostly holds here too. Where the two devices split is purpose. The R1 tried to replace your phone and got clowned for it because your phone already does everything a phone needs to do. The Lapis One doesn’t compete with anything you own. It just wants a permanent outlet and a Wi-Fi password, which is a much easier ask.

The other reference point is the iMac G3, and it shows up less in the color and more in the attitude. Apple’s original iMac made a whole generation comfortable with computers by wrapping them in candy plastic and betting the farm on USB when almost nothing supported it yet. The Lapis One runs a similar play for Linux, a platform whose default personality is a bare green board and forty tabs of forum troubleshooting. Four labeled USB-C ports on the back handle power, video out, data, and the KVM function, and the whole thing boots into a clean, readable interface instead of a terminal prompt. That is a genuinely useful decision for anyone who wants Linux without becoming a systems administrator.

The screen is a Sharp memory LCD from the same panel family as Panic’s Playdate, a device we have written about more than once for its willingness to be delightfully impractical. That low-power panel means the Lapis One can sit there all day, idle screen glowing faintly, without murdering its 3,300mAh battery, and it doubles as a desk clock when your agent isn’t busy. It is a small detail, but it is the kind of small detail that separates a product from a dev board somebody forgot to case.

None of this erases the real questions. Battery life tops out around four hours, which turns the “personal UPS” pitch into more of a personal nap timer. Agent KVM hands your agent direct control of a second computer’s keyboard and mouse with zero software safety net on the target machine, so you are trusting your own judgment about what that agent is allowed to click. And $499 for what is, on paper, a mid-range ARM chip in a nice box will keep the Raspberry Pi comparisons coming, same as they did the day this thing launched.

Still, I like where Pamir landed. The industrial design does the job good industrial design is supposed to do, which is make a genuinely intimidating category of hardware feel like something you would not mind on your desk. Whether $499 buys enough agent to justify the coaster remains an open question until October’s first batch actually ships.

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Yoniq Made a $199 PlayStation Portal That Doesn’t Need a PlayStation

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Every great gadget eventually gets a knockoff cousin. The iPod had thousands of them, those chunky no-name MP3 players with a click wheel that clicked nothing and a brand name you forgot by lunch. They were a little rough around the edges, mostly forgettable, and they played your music just fine for a fraction of the price. The PlayStation Portal just got its own version of that cousin. It’s called the Yoniq Portal, it comes from a company almost nobody had heard of before Gamescom 2026, and it costs $199.

Yoniq took the shape of Sony’s DualShock 2 controller, split it down the middle, and wedged a reportedly 4.5-inch screen between the two halves. The triangle, circle, cross, and square all made the trip along with it, which is a bold move for a brand this new. Sony’s official PlayStation Portal now costs $249.99 and streams games from a PS5 or the PlayStation cloud, meaning it needs a console to do anything at all. Yoniq’s version is designed to play games locally, and a Gamescom demo running Winning Eleven 8, the Japanese cousin of Pro Evolution Soccer 4, points squarely at PS2-era emulation.

Designer: Yoniq

It costs less than Sony’s PS Portal, and it does not ask you to own a $649.99 PS5 first. But calling it the smarter buy skips over how little we actually know. Yoniq has not shared a chipset, RAM, storage, or a release date, and its own product page currently describes a completely different item, the company’s $12.99 stick-on phone controller. Retro Dodo, the outlet that got hands-on time at the booth, initially assumed Yoniq’s AI-generated marketing images meant the whole thing was fake. The prototypes turned out to be real. The pricing page did not.

Here is the part that actually bugs me a little. Photos of the Portal show a screen section that looks thick, almost like one of those quad-fold phone concepts that stack four panels of hardware behind the display. If the whole goal was cramming a phone-sized screen between two controller grips, a slim off-the-shelf smartphone chassis would have gotten there with way less bulk and probably a nicer panel too. Instead Yoniq built a chunky proprietary slab and bolted DualShock arms onto it, which reads more like an engineering default than a considered choice. The Frankenstein energy is real, and it did not have to be.

Sony designer Teiyu Goto had to fight his own management to give the original PlayStation controller its handles back in the early 90s, arguing that a flat pad belonged to a two dimensional world. Three decades later, a startup nobody tracked is borrowing that exact silhouette and gluing a thick screen into the middle of it, which is either a tribute or a very efficient shortcut, depending on how generous you are feeling. The DualShock 2 itself barely changed the shape at all when it launched in 2000. Its whole redesign lived on the inside, in buttons that could sense 256 levels of pressure. Whether Yoniq’s version kept anything like that is a real open question, not a minor one.

So no, this is not automatically the better PlayStation Portal. It is a cheaper, standalone bet from a company that is still figuring out its own website, wrapped in a controller shape that has quietly outlived three console generations. That combination can age into something genuinely good, or it can age into a $199 lesson. Right now, with a specs sheet this empty, it is simply too early to tell which one we are getting.

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This $899 golf launch monitor tracks your swing in 3D and tells you how to fix it

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A decent golf lesson can cost anywhere from $80 to $200 an hour, but the bigger issue usually kicks in after the lesson ends. You leave with a fix, spend the next two weeks practicing on your own, and somehow manage to rehearse the exact mistake you were trying to get rid of. Golf has a funny way of doing that. More practice does not always mean better practice. Launch monitors helped by giving everyday golfers access to shot data that used to live in pro fittings, but numbers alone can still feel like homework. NeoPace’s G10 Pro tries to close that gap by pairing launch monitor stats with an AI coaching layer that explains what happened and what to work on next.

NeoPace, based in Irvine, California, built the G10 Pro around a triple-camera system and a 24 GHz Doppler radar. Two cameras capture the impact zone at up to 480 frames per second, while a third records the full swing at 120fps. The setup feeds into what NeoPace calls TrainerIQ™, an AI system that traces a bad shot through a Body to Club to Ball chain, connecting ball flight to club delivery and then back to the body movement that caused it. That matters because most golfers do not need more raw data, they need help turning data into action. The G10 Pro also rebuilds each swing in 3D, so you can replay it from multiple angles instead of squinting at a flat video and pretending you know what your hips are doing.

Designer: Neopace

Click Here to Buy Now: $899 $1499.99 (40% off). Hurry, only 875/1000 left! Raised over $286,000.

The G10 Pro tracks 22 ball and club metrics, plus 27 body-related metrics covering chest rotation, pelvis movement, wrist angles, elbow flexion, knee sway, and more. That is a pretty wild amount of information for a portable unit that costs $899, especially when most devices in this range focus mainly on ball flight and club numbers. NeoPace also made setup refreshingly simple, with auto alignment and support for both face-on and down-the-line placement. So whether you’re practicing at home, on the range, in the backyard, or sneaking in some swing diagnostics before a round, the G10 Pro feels built for golfers who want coaching-grade feedback without hauling around a tour van full of gear.

Every swing gets captured and rebuilt in full 3D, replayable from any angle, at any moment, from face-on, top-down, and down-the-line, all from a single device you placed once before you started. Most launch monitors give you flat video from a single fixed angle. The stereo camera pair locks the ball at 480 frames per second while the third follows the swing at 120fps, double the impact capture rate of most competing devices. Seeing your own swing from directly above mid-follow-through is the kind of analysis angle instructors have always wanted to show students but rarely had a clean portable way to deliver. NeoPace claims the 3D Replay™ is a first in portable consumer launch monitors at any price, and from everything visible in the current market, that claim holds up.

TrainerIQ™ analyzes your swing and body movement, identifies the likely cause of a miss, and suggests a targeted drill to help you improve. It does not just flag that the face was open at impact and leave you to figure out why. The analysis goes deeper: face 2 degrees open, heel contact, smash factor 1.35, and the root cause is that the body stopped rotating so the hands stepped in to carry the load. That kind of layered breakdown is exactly what a teaching pro walks you through after watching your swing, and the G10 Pro compresses it into automated real-time output after each shot. Golfers can also directly ask TrainerIQ™ questions about their swing and receive personalized, actionable guidance on what to work on next, which makes the system feel less like a stat engine and more like an interactive training partner. TrainerIQ™ then prescribes specific drills based on the diagnosis, closing the loop between data, understanding, and actual practice.

Twenty-seven body-related metrics track how your body moves through every swing, turning posture, timing, and rotation into data you can act on. The tracked parameters span the chest and pelvis in five axes each, lead and trail knee sway and flexion, mid-hands sway and lift, head movement, X-Factor and Sway Gap, lead and trail elbow flexion, wrist angle, shaft angle, and kinetic sequencing factors: Core Gain, Shoulder Gain, Wrist Gain, and Release Factor. Any coach reading that list will recognize it as the full biomechanical picture that motion capture setups in pro training facilities chase. Inside TrainerIQ™, it becomes the evidence base connecting a ball that lands 13 yards short and right to a chest that stopped rotating halfway through the downswing. That translation from raw biomechanics to actionable coaching is where the G10 Pro genuinely earns its price.

Getting the G10 Pro into a session takes three steps: set it down, auto align, and take your shot. That might sound like marketing language, but auto-alignment is a genuine quality-of-life upgrade over monitors that require precise manual positioning every single time. The pan-and-tilt gimbal covers a 120-degree pan range and a 40-degree tilt range, so near-correct placement is close enough. The unit itself measures 217.5 × 47.25 × 44.5 mm without the tripod, compact enough to slide into a range bag without reorganizing everything else in it. The 3,300mAh/7.2V battery runs for four hours with a 1.5-hour fast charge at 15W, which covers a full morning session with room to spare. For golfers who want to practice or play indoors, the G10 Pro is compatible with GSPro and Creative Golf, with additional major simulator platforms currently in development.

NeoPace also says there is no unlock fee or subscription required for simulator connectivity itself, though third-party simulator software fees may still apply. The companion app works with iOS (14.0 and above) and Android (10.0 and above) smartphones and tablets. NeoPace also says the core feature set does not require a subscription. D Swing Analysis and TrainerIQ™ Analysis share an allowance of up to 5 AI-analyzed shots per month, while Premium AI increases the shared allowance to up to 1,000 shots per month and adds features such as Ask TrainerIQ™, Performance Insights, Personalized Drills, Practice Goals, and Cloud Storage.

At $899, the G10 Pro goes toe to toe with the Rapsodo MLM2PRO, its most direct camera-based competitor at the same price. The MLM2PRO does solid work on ball flight data and video, but offers no body tracking, no 3D reconstruction, no AI coaching chain, and face-on-only placement. Stepping further up the market, ball/club/body motion analysis at this depth typically lives in systems costing several times more, usually requiring separate wearables or dedicated motion capture rigs. Honestly, the fact that NeoPace has packed 3D reconstruction, 27 body metrics, and an AI coaching brain into a $899 portable device feels like it should be harder to pull off than it apparently is, and that is the most compelling thing about the G10 Pro.

Click Here to Buy Now: $899 $1499.99 (40% off). Hurry, only 875/1000 left! Raised over $286,000.

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