Monthly Archives: December 2023

Anker chargers are up to 30 percent off, plus the rest of this week’s best tech deals

Posted on by

This is the last weekly deal roundup we'll do this year, but unlike other end-of-year posts, we won't be looking back wistfully at the 2023 deals that once were — all that matters are the ones you can get right now. This week, we're seeing a few sale prices that are still live from Black Friday; snag those before they inevitably go back up. A few new discounts have popped up that actually beat lows from November's shopping holiday, including a Prime-only deal on Amazon's Echo Show 8, all-time lows on Anker charging accessories, and discounts on Apple AirTags and Tile Pro trackers. Until next year, these are the best tech deals that you can still get today.  

Anker charging accessories sale

As part of a larger Anker charging accessories sale at Amazon, the Anker 511 Nano 3 wall charger is down to $16 which is a 30 percent discount and close to an all-time low. It's our top pick for a 30-watt option in our fast charger buying guide. And if you want two USB-C ports instead of just one, you can get the 47W Nano 3 for $21, which is within a dollar of its best price so far. Other notable deals include our top pick for a 65 watt charger from the same guide, the Anker GaNPrime 65W, which is 37 percent off putting it at a new all-time low of $38.

Amazon Echo Show 8

The latest generation of Amazon's Echo Show 8 smart display is now 40 percent off, bringing it to a new all-time low of $90. That's about $15 cheaper than it sold for during Black Friday, but this deal is only for Prime members. The Echo 8 is our favorite Alexa display and Amazon debuted the third-generation of the device at a company event in September. We took time to appreciate the edge-to-edge front glass and new, more refined look — along with the new features. The most notable of the bunch is Adaptive Content, which knows how far you are from the device and displays different content accordingly, such as large format weather when you're across the room and personalized info like calendars and news when you step closer. 

Amazon Echo

If you have a Prime membership, you can use it to get the company's flagship smart speaker, the 4th generation Echo, for $50, which is half price and matches the lowest it's ever sold for, and comes in a full $10 less than it went for during Cyber Week. The latest Echo is our top pick for a smart speaker under $100 because it churns out a good amount of volume for its size and packs in all of Alexa's helpful smart home management and other skills. 

ZOIA Euroburo

Empress Effects is selling its two ZOIA modular synthesizers at a discount. The original ZOIA guitar effects pedal typically sells for $549, but is now 20 percent off and down to $439. The modular synth ZOIA Euroburo mini modular synth is 15 percent off, bringing it down to $607 instead of the $714 MSRP. 

We called the ZOIA "a complex and rewarding modular effects pedal" in our review and gave it a score of 86. While it's likely overkill for someone looking for a standard effects pedal, the ZOIA will give you almost limitless combinations of effects and modules, along with customization capabilities that other models can't match. 

The ZOIA Euroburo is pretty similar to the original ZOIA, but is instead configured into a Eurorack format which you could easily add to a larger modular synth setup. There's a powerful audio processor inside, plus 80 modules and 20 dedicated effects modules. These can be combined to create anything from basic reverbs to complicated microloopers or even full-fledged synthesizers.

Bose QuietComfort Ultra earbuds

We named the Bose QuietComfort Ultra wireless earbuds our top pick for noise cancellation in our updated guide to the best earbuds. Right now Amazon, Walmart and Bose are selling them for $249 or $50 off, which is the sale price the buds hit for Black Friday. The standout feature is the active noise cancellation, but we also appreciated the sound quality bump from the new Immersive Audio tech, which we tested out in our full review. 

Hatch Restore 2

The Hatch Restore 2 is seeing a rare discount at Amazon. It's down to $140 instead of the $200 list price. We recommend the device, which is a combination of a sunrise alarm clock and sleep-sounds speaker, in our guide to sleep gear. The design is attractive and the large, tactile buttons are easy to find and use in the dark or when you're groggy. Hatch offers a vast library of original content with bedtime stories, meditations, music and white noise to help you fall and stay asleep, and a big selection of wake-up pep talks and stretches to get you energized in the AM. Only catch is most of the content isn't free. You'll need to pay $5 per month for full access, the value of which we discuss in our review. 

iRobot Roomba 694

The iRobot Roomba 694 is down to $160 directly from iRobot and at Amazon. That's within a dollar of its Black Friday price and $90 off the $275 list price, though it's been regularly on sale over the past few months. This is our top pick for a budget robot vacuum because it combines an easy-to-use app with good cleaning power. It doesn't have the smart obstacle avoidance or self-emptying features of pricier robot vacs, but at $160, you won't likely get a better deal on a reliable machine.  

Google Pixel Tablet

Google's Android tablet, the Pixel is still down to $399 — a $100 discount that matches what it sold for on Black Friday. It popped back up to full price after the sale, but then at Amazon and Target, it dropped back down in early December and hasn't gone back up. The version with 256GB of storage is also $100 off. The Google Pixel Tablet gets a mention in our guide to tablets. Though we don't think it's more compelling than the Samsung that nabs the top Android spot, it's a good pick for someone who wants a tablet that can handle casual browsing and streaming, but can also act as a smart home display. The included speaker and charging dock prop it up so you can use Google Home or manufacturer apps to control compatible smart lights, speakers, plugs and cameras.   

Blink security camera bundle

A Blink sale at Amazon includes a number of security camera bundles, with discounts of up to 53 percent off. The company often sells bundles of its home security cameras at deep discounts and the combinations and sale percentages vary. Whether these are compelling deals or not depend on what you need for your home right now. If you're in the market for a Blink Mini camera to keep an eye on your home's interior, and would like to pair that up with the latest generation of Blink Outdoor camera, this bundle will save you $83 over buying the two separately and at full price. Both cameras offer 1080p video, two way audio and allow for local storage of clips with the included Sync Module 2. 

Apple AirTag

A bundle of four Apple AirTags is currently on sale at Amazon for $79, which is a dollar less than it sold for on Black Friday. These Bluetooth trackers are our pick for iPhone users to keep tabs on your stuff. You'll need some sort of accessory to attach them to your stuff as the smooth round discs lack any sort of hole or attachment point. But AirTags tap into the largest finding network of any tracker, calling on the passive locating power of nearby iOS devices to find a lost tag in real time. It's not as loud, nor as quick with the left behind alerts as our overall top pick, the Chipolo One. A four-pack of those tags is currently $60.  

Tile Pro 1-pack

A single Tile Pro is down to $22 at Amazon, which is cheaper than it went for on Black Friday and matches the all-time low it hit for July's Prime day. We named it the best Bluetooth tracker for Android users, though it'll work with iPhones too. It's louder than an AirTag, and while the Tile finding network is nowhere near as vast as Apple's it worked well enough in our tests to get us to the approximate location of a misplaced item. The Pro model is also the only Tile with a replaceable battery.   

KitchenAid stand mixer attachments

If you took advantage of KitchenAid mixer sales over Cyber Week or were lucky enough to get one as a gift, you may want to look into snagging a few attachments to make your new kitchen appliance even more versatile. Right now a big assortment of attachments is on sale at Amazon. The pasta roller is down to $75 from $100, the spiralizer is $70 instead of $130, and the ice cream maker set is $70 as opposed to the $100 MSRP. The Classic series stand mixer itself is down to $240, which is about $10 more than it went for on Black Friday. 

Tribit Stormbox Micro 2

The super portable Tribit StormBox Micro 2 puts out decent volume and right now it’s down to $46 instead of the full-price $60 after you click the 5 percent coupon. That puts very close to its all-time low and even beats its Black Friday price last month. We named it one of the best small Bluetooth speakers you can buy in our guide to those devices. There’s a strap in the back that works well on belts, backpacks — or even bike handlebars, so it’s easy to take with you. And on-the-go is where this speaker performs best, as it’s more about portable volume than pure fidelity.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/anker-chargers-are-up-to-30-percent-off-plus-the-rest-of-this-weeks-best-tech-deals-173037120.html?src=rss

Anker chargers are up to 30 percent off, plus the rest of this week’s best tech deals

Posted on by

This is the last weekly deal roundup we'll do this year, but unlike other end-of-year posts, we won't be looking back wistfully at the 2023 deals that once were — all that matters are the ones you can get right now. This week, we're seeing a few sale prices that are still live from Black Friday; snag those before they inevitably go back up. A few new discounts have popped up that actually beat lows from November's shopping holiday, including a Prime-only deal on Amazon's Echo Show 8, all-time lows on Anker charging accessories, and discounts on Apple AirTags and Tile Pro trackers. Until next year, these are the best tech deals that you can still get today.  

Anker charging accessories sale

As part of a larger Anker charging accessories sale at Amazon, the Anker 511 Nano 3 wall charger is down to $16 which is a 30 percent discount and close to an all-time low. It's our top pick for a 30-watt option in our fast charger buying guide. And if you want two USB-C ports instead of just one, you can get the 47W Nano 3 for $21, which is within a dollar of its best price so far. Other notable deals include our top pick for a 65 watt charger from the same guide, the Anker GaNPrime 65W, which is 37 percent off putting it at a new all-time low of $38.

Amazon Echo Show 8

The latest generation of Amazon's Echo Show 8 smart display is now 40 percent off, bringing it to a new all-time low of $90. That's about $15 cheaper than it sold for during Black Friday, but this deal is only for Prime members. The Echo 8 is our favorite Alexa display and Amazon debuted the third-generation of the device at a company event in September. We took time to appreciate the edge-to-edge front glass and new, more refined look — along with the new features. The most notable of the bunch is Adaptive Content, which knows how far you are from the device and displays different content accordingly, such as large format weather when you're across the room and personalized info like calendars and news when you step closer. 

Amazon Echo

If you have a Prime membership, you can use it to get the company's flagship smart speaker, the 4th generation Echo, for $50, which is half price and matches the lowest it's ever sold for, and comes in a full $10 less than it went for during Cyber Week. The latest Echo is our top pick for a smart speaker under $100 because it churns out a good amount of volume for its size and packs in all of Alexa's helpful smart home management and other skills. 

ZOIA Euroburo

Empress Effects is selling its two ZOIA modular synthesizers at a discount. The original ZOIA guitar effects pedal typically sells for $549, but is now 20 percent off and down to $439. The modular synth ZOIA Euroburo mini modular synth is 15 percent off, bringing it down to $607 instead of the $714 MSRP. 

We called the ZOIA "a complex and rewarding modular effects pedal" in our review and gave it a score of 86. While it's likely overkill for someone looking for a standard effects pedal, the ZOIA will give you almost limitless combinations of effects and modules, along with customization capabilities that other models can't match. 

The ZOIA Euroburo is pretty similar to the original ZOIA, but is instead configured into a Eurorack format which you could easily add to a larger modular synth setup. There's a powerful audio processor inside, plus 80 modules and 20 dedicated effects modules. These can be combined to create anything from basic reverbs to complicated microloopers or even full-fledged synthesizers.

Bose QuietComfort Ultra earbuds

We named the Bose QuietComfort Ultra wireless earbuds our top pick for noise cancellation in our updated guide to the best earbuds. Right now Amazon, Walmart and Bose are selling them for $249 or $50 off, which is the sale price the buds hit for Black Friday. The standout feature is the active noise cancellation, but we also appreciated the sound quality bump from the new Immersive Audio tech, which we tested out in our full review. 

Hatch Restore 2

The Hatch Restore 2 is seeing a rare discount at Amazon. It's down to $140 instead of the $200 list price. We recommend the device, which is a combination of a sunrise alarm clock and sleep-sounds speaker, in our guide to sleep gear. The design is attractive and the large, tactile buttons are easy to find and use in the dark or when you're groggy. Hatch offers a vast library of original content with bedtime stories, meditations, music and white noise to help you fall and stay asleep, and a big selection of wake-up pep talks and stretches to get you energized in the AM. Only catch is most of the content isn't free. You'll need to pay $5 per month for full access, the value of which we discuss in our review. 

iRobot Roomba 694

The iRobot Roomba 694 is down to $160 directly from iRobot and at Amazon. That's within a dollar of its Black Friday price and $90 off the $275 list price, though it's been regularly on sale over the past few months. This is our top pick for a budget robot vacuum because it combines an easy-to-use app with good cleaning power. It doesn't have the smart obstacle avoidance or self-emptying features of pricier robot vacs, but at $160, you won't likely get a better deal on a reliable machine.  

Google Pixel Tablet

Google's Android tablet, the Pixel is still down to $399 — a $100 discount that matches what it sold for on Black Friday. It popped back up to full price after the sale, but then at Amazon and Target, it dropped back down in early December and hasn't gone back up. The version with 256GB of storage is also $100 off. The Google Pixel Tablet gets a mention in our guide to tablets. Though we don't think it's more compelling than the Samsung that nabs the top Android spot, it's a good pick for someone who wants a tablet that can handle casual browsing and streaming, but can also act as a smart home display. The included speaker and charging dock prop it up so you can use Google Home or manufacturer apps to control compatible smart lights, speakers, plugs and cameras.   

Blink security camera bundle

A Blink sale at Amazon includes a number of security camera bundles, with discounts of up to 53 percent off. The company often sells bundles of its home security cameras at deep discounts and the combinations and sale percentages vary. Whether these are compelling deals or not depend on what you need for your home right now. If you're in the market for a Blink Mini camera to keep an eye on your home's interior, and would like to pair that up with the latest generation of Blink Outdoor camera, this bundle will save you $83 over buying the two separately and at full price. Both cameras offer 1080p video, two way audio and allow for local storage of clips with the included Sync Module 2. 

Apple AirTag

A bundle of four Apple AirTags is currently on sale at Amazon for $79, which is a dollar less than it sold for on Black Friday. These Bluetooth trackers are our pick for iPhone users to keep tabs on your stuff. You'll need some sort of accessory to attach them to your stuff as the smooth round discs lack any sort of hole or attachment point. But AirTags tap into the largest finding network of any tracker, calling on the passive locating power of nearby iOS devices to find a lost tag in real time. It's not as loud, nor as quick with the left behind alerts as our overall top pick, the Chipolo One. A four-pack of those tags is currently $60.  

Tile Pro 1-pack

A single Tile Pro is down to $22 at Amazon, which is cheaper than it went for on Black Friday and matches the all-time low it hit for July's Prime day. We named it the best Bluetooth tracker for Android users, though it'll work with iPhones too. It's louder than an AirTag, and while the Tile finding network is nowhere near as vast as Apple's it worked well enough in our tests to get us to the approximate location of a misplaced item. The Pro model is also the only Tile with a replaceable battery.   

KitchenAid stand mixer attachments

If you took advantage of KitchenAid mixer sales over Cyber Week or were lucky enough to get one as a gift, you may want to look into snagging a few attachments to make your new kitchen appliance even more versatile. Right now a big assortment of attachments is on sale at Amazon. The pasta roller is down to $75 from $100, the spiralizer is $70 instead of $130, and the ice cream maker set is $70 as opposed to the $100 MSRP. The Classic series stand mixer itself is down to $240, which is about $10 more than it went for on Black Friday. 

Tribit Stormbox Micro 2

The super portable Tribit StormBox Micro 2 puts out decent volume and right now it’s down to $46 instead of the full-price $60 after you click the 5 percent coupon. That puts very close to its all-time low and even beats its Black Friday price last month. We named it one of the best small Bluetooth speakers you can buy in our guide to those devices. There’s a strap in the back that works well on belts, backpacks — or even bike handlebars, so it’s easy to take with you. And on-the-go is where this speaker performs best, as it’s more about portable volume than pure fidelity.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/anker-chargers-are-up-to-30-percent-off-plus-the-rest-of-this-weeks-best-tech-deals-173037120.html?src=rss

Federal judge rejects X’s claim that California’s content moderation law violates free speech

Posted on by

A federal judge in California has shot down Elon Musk’s attempt to invalidate a state social media law, first reported by The Verge. The state’s AB 587 requires social companies to publish their content moderation policies, something Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) claimed violated the First Amendment. US District Judge William Shubb wrote on Thursday, “It does not appear that the requirement is unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law.”

X’s lawyers had argued the law was unconstitutional and would lead to censorship. AB 587 “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech,” the company wrote in its lawsuit, filed in September. The company claimed the law’s “true intent” was to “pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”

Judge Shubb saw things differently. “The reports required by AB 587 are purely factual,” he wrote. “The reporting requirement merely requires social media companies to identify their existing content moderation policies, if any, related to the specified categories.”

He continued, “The required disclosures are also uncontroversial. The mere fact that the reports may be ‘tied in some way to a controversial issue’ does not make the reports themselves controversial.”

Shubb concluded that California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta met the burden of demonstrating the law was “reasonably related to a substantial government interest in requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content moderation policies and practices so that consumers can make informed decisions about where they consume and disseminate news and information.”

It’s been a rocky year for X in Musk’s first year of ownership. The company changed its name, hired a new CEO, launched a snarky AI chatbot, brought back a notorious conspiracy theorist and bled money as the ad industry got cold feet about brands sitting next to content from Nazi sympathizers. Oh, and the EU has opened formal infringement proceedings against the company formerly known as Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/federal-judge-rejects-xs-claim-that-californias-content-moderation-law-violates-free-speech-171713008.html?src=rss

Federal judge rejects X’s claim that California’s content moderation law violates free speech

Posted on by

A federal judge in California has shot down Elon Musk’s attempt to invalidate a state social media law, first reported by The Verge. The state’s AB 587 requires social companies to publish their content moderation policies, something Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) claimed violated the First Amendment. US District Judge William Shubb wrote on Thursday, “It does not appear that the requirement is unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law.”

X’s lawyers had argued the law was unconstitutional and would lead to censorship. AB 587 “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech,” the company wrote in its lawsuit, filed in September. The company claimed the law’s “true intent” was to “pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”

Judge Shubb saw things differently. “The reports required by AB 587 are purely factual,” he wrote. “The reporting requirement merely requires social media companies to identify their existing content moderation policies, if any, related to the specified categories.”

He continued, “The required disclosures are also uncontroversial. The mere fact that the reports may be ‘tied in some way to a controversial issue’ does not make the reports themselves controversial.”

Shubb concluded that California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta met the burden of demonstrating the law was “reasonably related to a substantial government interest in requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content moderation policies and practices so that consumers can make informed decisions about where they consume and disseminate news and information.”

It’s been a rocky year for X in Musk’s first year of ownership. The company changed its name, hired a new CEO, launched a snarky AI chatbot, brought back a notorious conspiracy theorist and bled money as the ad industry got cold feet about brands sitting next to content from Nazi sympathizers. Oh, and the EU has opened formal infringement proceedings against the company formerly known as Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/federal-judge-rejects-xs-claim-that-californias-content-moderation-law-violates-free-speech-171713008.html?src=rss

Tech’s biggest losers in 2023

Posted on by

The last few years have been, to put it mildly, rough. And 2023 continued to bring sad tidings. Amid the humanitarian crisis that is the Palestine-Israeli conflict, plus increased fears around the credibility and reliability of AI and Elon Musk’s ongoing meltdown, tech’s biggest players also suffered their fair share of losses. This year, we saw the demise of the E3 gaming convention, the deterioration of popular online forums and the decline of cryptocurrencies, Silicon Valley banks and financial institutions. Not to mention the poor neighbors of the Twitter office in San Francisco who had to endure obnoxious, potentially epilepsy-triggering lights flashing from the building. While we can happily say “good riddance” to many of these things, it is with some sadness that we bid farewell and condolences to some of this year’s worst developments.

The X, Twitter and Elon Musk fiasco

No “Losers in 2023” list is complete without mentioning the fiasco that is Elon Musk’s Twitter (or X). Last year, shortly after Musk acquired Twitter, some of us were asked to make predictions about how Musk’s new venture would fare. I felt that it was a high-risk, high-reward move that might work due to Musk’s combination of luck and smarts, based mainly on his previous success heading up Tesla and SpaceX.

However, I also said that Twitter might devolve into the most chaotic social media platform around, which is pretty much what happened. In hindsight, what I failed to account for was that unlike Tesla and SpaceX, Musk doesn’t seem to give a crap about running X like a business and has treated the company more as an expensive toy meant to call attention to the sins (at least in his mind) of social media. And when you combine his increasingly unhinged personality with shortsighted decisions, what you get is an organization in turmoil. So while not all of these things occurred in 2023, here are just a few of the dumbest things that Musk and X have done in the last 18 months.

A little over a year ago, Musk blew up Twitter’s verification system, which promptly led to fake accounts sporting seemingly legit handles doing things like posting an image of Mario flipping the bird, the pope spreading conspiracy theories and more. Then earlier this year in June, Musk decided to block users who weren’t logged in from seeing tweets, which caused Google and others to remove Twitter content from search results. That’s not a very smart move for a company that relies heavily on traffic to generate ad revenue, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Musk backtracked a week later.

But perhaps Musk’s biggest blunder was changing Twitter’s name to X in July, a move so silly that most people continue to pretend like the rebranding never happened. Oh and let’s not forget that the name change was commemorated with a sign that was mounted on the company’s HQ in San Francisco that blinded its neighbors and didn’t have proper permits, resulting in an installation that lasted barely more than a weekend. More recently, citing a rise in hate speech, major companies including Apple and Disney decided to pull ads from X, which later prompted Musk to tell Disney CEO Bob Iger to “Go fuck yourself.” Another clearly wise business move made by a very grounded individual. (That’s sarcasm, in case it’s not clear.)

At this point, it’s hard to imagine how much worse X can get, but given everything that’s happened in 2023, it’s plain that the company formerly known as Twitter hasn’t even hit rock bottom yet. — Sam Rutherford, Senior reporter

A person holding the Microsoft Surface Duo 2 in book mode showing the Engadget home page. Images and text are eaten up by the hinge.
David Imel for Engadget

Microsoft’s Surface tablet

No offense to the Surface Laptop Studio 2, which is a mighty powerful and uniquely convertible laptop, but this year felt like a low point for Microsoft’s iconic Surface tablets. The Surface Pro 9 hasn’t been upgraded at all since last, so it’s still running either an older 12th-gen Intel chip. There is a 5G-equipped model with a custom ARM-based Microsoft SQ3 chip, but we recommend staying far far away from that thing. And beyond the Laptop Studio 2, we only got the Surface Laptop Go 3 for consumers(the tiny Surface Go 4 tablet is now firmly targeted as business users, it doesn’t even show up on the main Surface site).

It almost seems like Microsoft’s dream of creating a true tablet/laptop hybrid is dead – or at the very least, it’s on pause as the company focuses on shoving its AI Copilot into all of its products. Let’s face it: While the Surface business has earned a bit of money for Microsoft, it’s a pittance compared to what the company sees from its Azure cloud revenue. Instead, the Surface devices proved that Microsoft could produce high-end Windows hardware that occasionally pushed the PC industry forward.

It’s been 11 years since Microsoft announced its first Surface devices, but it turns out most consumers didn’t want to replace their laptops with tablets. Simpler 2-in-1 convertible devices, like HP’s Spectre x360 16, are far less common these days (and notably, they also work best in their notebook modes). And it doesn’t help that Windows 11 is still far from tablet friendly. If you really want to get work done on a slate, it simply makes more sense to get an iPad and a keyboard case instead.

With Microsoft’s Surface visionary, Panos Panay, now at Amazon, there doesn’t seem to be much hope left for the company’s tablet concept. But who knows, maybe the Surface Neo will finally make a return as a true foldable some day. (Remember the Surface Duo, another failure?) A Windows user can only dream. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior reporter

Amazon Halo App and Band. A phone showing the home page of Amazon's Halo app on the left, and the wearable in gray on the right. Both devices are set on a light wood background.
Amazon

Amazon’s Halo hardware products

Speaking of dreams, mine were dashed by Amazon in July this year when the company pulled support for its Halo line of health-related hardware products. In fact, my sleep itself might have been affected, since I had just gotten used to checking my Halo app each morning to see the amount of rest I got the night before.

Amazon’s Halo division has been plagued with controversy since it launched the screenless Halo wearable in 2020. The device was a barebones activity tracker, but stood out for an opt-in feature that used onboard mics to listen to you speaking and tell if you sound stressed, upbeat or emotional. This caught a lot of attention, with people saying this was akin to Amazon trying to police your way of speaking. Many other reviewers, myself included, were more critical of the fact that, though the Tone feature did flag times when wearers sounded happy or sad, it did not present enough information for that data to be useful.

The Halo app also offered a way for you to use your phone’s camera for a body composition scan. You’d have to enter your height and weight, before stripping down to your underwear and posing for four pictures, showing your front, back and sides. The app would then tell you how much of your body is fat or muscle.

If it sounds dubious, it’s probably because it is. Though Amazon said its “Halo body fat measurement is as accurate as methods a doctor would use—and nearly twice as accurate as leading at-home smart scales.” Spoiler: It wasn’t. I used the Body feature every few months for about two years, comparing it to the bio-electrical impedance analysis (BIA) sensor on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch when that became available. Over time, as my body composition changed, I also got BIA scans at the F45 gym I go to, which uses a more sophisticated machine. Amazon’s scans were wildly off, while the Samsung watch came closer to the data gleaned from the machine at my gym.

The Amazon Halo Rise on a nightstand in the dark with a the time and a semi-circle lit up on its front.
Photo by: Cherlynn Low / Engadget

All that is to say that Amazon’s Halo products haven’t been great. But that seemed to start to change when the company launched the Halo Rise bedside sleep tracker this year. I loved it for the way it accurately detected when I fell asleep, calculated the different stages I was in (REM, Deep, Light etc) and more importantly how it did all that without requiring me to wear something to bed or install a new mattress. I finally had a feasible way to track my sleep and use that to figure out how hard or easy I should take each day’s workout, along with other activities and stresses.

Alas, that joy was short-lived. Despite Amazon acquiring healthcare companies and clearly investing more into becoming a pharmaceutical provider, it gave up on the Halo business this year. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, since one good product doesn’t an entire profitable endeavor make. Amazon not having access to my sleep, heart rate, steps and tone is probably for the best, as we contemplate a future where the online shopping giant is also our doctor and pharmacist. — Cherlynn Low, Deputy editor

E3

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reading and talking about games, but the internet expanded my horizons beyond the confines of the UK magazine industry. In the late ‘90s, at age 13, I started writing (very badly) for a popular game site, covering release dates, special editions and other unimportant things.

Within a couple of years I’d lost interest in writing, but I still hung out in the same IRC channels talking about games with likeminded people. IRC started my obsession with E3 and the Tokyo Game Show; weeks where I’d talk about these huge events with a weird milieu of fans and industry professionals.

In 2000, the fever around Metal Gear Solid 2’s E3 debut was out of this world. The first-person reports from the show were unbelievably positive. When the trailer finally became available to download a few weeks later, it quickly spread across the internet. I can still remember the mix of frustration and excitement as I downloaded it from an IRC bot at 7KB a second to finally get a glimpse of “next-gen” gaming.

MGS2 was peak E3 for me, and in hindsight it was also the moment E3 began to die: Why did I need to read a 1,000-word breakdown of a trailer when I could just download and watch it myself? Why should Konami spend big money on a booth when it could just release a trailer directly to its potential customers?

Back then, I was the only person I knew IRL who was “extremely online.” Now, everyone is. By the 2010s, when I started to attend E3 myself, the role of press and the show had shifted. Nintendo E3 Directs were in full swing, and the big shows from Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, Ubisoft and EA were all beamed live to fans. Sure, I got to play some games and interview some developers, but that’s something that happens throughout the year now.

E3 remained one of the highlights of my calendar, and there were always some memorable moments — the PS4 and Xbox One reveals were probably the highlight of my in-person years — but by 2019, my excitement was more tied to seeing farflung colleagues and old industry friends than it was the event itself. When the pandemic canceled the 2020 event, it was obviously it would never recover. We’d written about how the industry didn’t need E3 years before.

Summer Game Fest will happen again next year. It will never hit the scale of the show it’s replacing, but I hope that it becomes a strong enough brand to keep the idea of E3 going. There’s still something exciting for fans, and journalists, about a week of gaming announcements to predict and dissect. If more companies spread their events throughout the year, that last bit of E3 magic will be gone. — Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

Cryptocurrencies and finance in tech

Much as we pretend mathematics represents an immutable truth, we must remember it’s not without its loopholes. Centuries from now, historians researching crypto may assume humanity forgot that as it decided to substitute math for truth in its entirety. That the prodigies of this world sought to engineer out human fallibility between League of Legends sessions. Uncertain, wooly and hard-to-quantify concepts like “truth” and “trust” would be tossed out in favor of the certainty of pure math. That’s the PR line: The Bitcoin white paper describes the virtual currency as a “system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.” It’s ironic, then, that so many high-profile people who hitched their mast to crypto are either in prison, or are awaiting trial for fraud.

Those same historians may wonder if crypto was merely a vehicle ripe for hijack by unethical types, or if its inherent fraudiness was written into its DNA. 2023 will offer plenty of material to scrub through given the number of figures who wound up face-to-face with law enforcement. Coinbase started the year accused of leaving gaps in its systems big enough to enable fraud, money laundering and drug dealing. Former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky was sued and later arrested — alongside the company’s chief revenue officer, Roni Cohen-Pavon. Not long after, Terraform Labs was charged by the SEC for securities fraud after it wiped out $45 billion or so. Bear in mind, this is a year-in-review story, and I’ve only managed to make it as far as February.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, dominated headlines this year much as FTX had in 2022. Regulators accused it, and its founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao of deliberately undermining its own controls and processes to not-so tacitly enable users to break the law. Zhou would plead guilty, step down as CEO and pay a hefty fine which enabled the company to keep running. Oh, and we should mention the Winklevoss Twins, their exchange and its partners, who were accused of defrauding investors to the tune of $1 billion. Ironic then, that Ferrari finally decided to try to appeal to the Lambo-and-Tendies demographic by opening up crypto purchases for its cars just as things started to get tough.

Of course, the real loser in all of this has to be Michael Lewis who, with an MA in Economics and experience as a bond trader for Salomon Brothers in one hand, and a ringside seat with Sam Bankman-Fried in the other, managed to miss what was going on at FTX. Lewis has doubled down in support of his latest muse but now that SBF has been found guilty of fraud, it looks like his reputation as the most credible financial journalist of the age is in tatters. — Daniel Cooper, Senior reporter

Photo by: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx 2021 1/8/21 Reddit bans Pro-Trump forum for inciting violence in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capital in Washington D.C.. STAR MAX File Photo: Reddit logos photographed off an iphone SE 2020.
STRF/STAR MAX/IPx

Reddit

I've been a longtime Reddit lurker, occasional poster and always a first-party app user. But when the drama about the company's decision to start charging for API access started to unfold in April, my eyes were opened to the wonderful world of third-party Reddit clients. Too bad, though, that the company proceeded to then botch it all.

Because API access was no longer free, many apps like Apollo, RIF, BaconReader and Narwhal had to reconsider their pricing or shut down altogether. Reddit’s policy change didn’t just challenge these apps, which mostly offered superior browsing experiences to the company’s own. It also created problems for clients that were built for more accessible use, rendering them unusable unless their developers ponied up the fees, which could go up as much as tens of thousands of dollars (or, in Apollo’s case, an estimated $20 million a year).

While Reddit did eventually seem to concede that the API fees would shut out some users with disabilities and ended up working with some unnamed developers to give them free access, the company dug in its heels in the wake of public outrage and subreddit blackouts. In the second half of the year, subreddits all over the platform either stopped posting, changed their settings to private or NSFW or dedicated themselves to only putting up salacious images of Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.

Reddit didn’t just ignore the protests and carry on with its planned fees. It went as far as to forcibly take over some communities that went dark, while looking for volunteers to take over certain subreddits that it deemed to have violated its Moderator Code of Conduct.

According to internet analytics company Similarweb in June, Reddit saw a 6.6 percent drop in average daily traffic. We don’t have the latest statistics on how the company is doing now, but I can tell you from personal experience that the first-party app on iOS is a complete shitshow. Like many other Redditors have pointed out before, videos will autoplay unmuted out of nowhere for no reason, while I’ve encountered numerous infuriating bugs, including one where a video on a post was repeatedly going on and off mute while I was also trying to stream Spotify to a speaker. It just sucks.

After the mass subreddit blackouts spawned a bunch of duplicate communities with different moderators, the quality of posts have noticeably fallen, as well. Not to mention the company got rid of trophies and then attempted to bring them back again in a confusing format. Throw in the fact that the community now seems to be a mix of karma-farming bots and commenters who copy and paste the same jokes over and over again, the days of enjoyable Reddit scrolling seem to have come to an end in 2023. — Cherlynn Low

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/techs-biggest-losers-in-2023-170017317.html?src=rss

Tech’s biggest losers in 2023

Posted on by

The last few years have been, to put it mildly, rough. And 2023 continued to bring sad tidings. Amid the humanitarian crisis that is the Palestine-Israeli conflict, plus increased fears around the credibility and reliability of AI and Elon Musk’s ongoing meltdown, tech’s biggest players also suffered their fair share of losses. This year, we saw the demise of the E3 gaming convention, the deterioration of popular online forums and the decline of cryptocurrencies, Silicon Valley banks and financial institutions. Not to mention the poor neighbors of the Twitter office in San Francisco who had to endure obnoxious, potentially epilepsy-triggering lights flashing from the building. While we can happily say “good riddance” to many of these things, it is with some sadness that we bid farewell and condolences to some of this year’s worst developments.

The X, Twitter and Elon Musk fiasco

No “Losers in 2023” list is complete without mentioning the fiasco that is Elon Musk’s Twitter (or X). Last year, shortly after Musk acquired Twitter, some of us were asked to make predictions about how Musk’s new venture would fare. I felt that it was a high-risk, high-reward move that might work due to Musk’s combination of luck and smarts, based mainly on his previous success heading up Tesla and SpaceX.

However, I also said that Twitter might devolve into the most chaotic social media platform around, which is pretty much what happened. In hindsight, what I failed to account for was that unlike Tesla and SpaceX, Musk doesn’t seem to give a crap about running X like a business and has treated the company more as an expensive toy meant to call attention to the sins (at least in his mind) of social media. And when you combine his increasingly unhinged personality with shortsighted decisions, what you get is an organization in turmoil. So while not all of these things occurred in 2023, here are just a few of the dumbest things that Musk and X have done in the last 18 months.

A little over a year ago, Musk blew up Twitter’s verification system, which promptly led to fake accounts sporting seemingly legit handles doing things like posting an image of Mario flipping the bird, the pope spreading conspiracy theories and more. Then earlier this year in June, Musk decided to block users who weren’t logged in from seeing tweets, which caused Google and others to remove Twitter content from search results. That’s not a very smart move for a company that relies heavily on traffic to generate ad revenue, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Musk backtracked a week later.

But perhaps Musk’s biggest blunder was changing Twitter’s name to X in July, a move so silly that most people continue to pretend like the rebranding never happened. Oh and let’s not forget that the name change was commemorated with a sign that was mounted on the company’s HQ in San Francisco that blinded its neighbors and didn’t have proper permits, resulting in an installation that lasted barely more than a weekend. More recently, citing a rise in hate speech, major companies including Apple and Disney decided to pull ads from X, which later prompted Musk to tell Disney CEO Bob Iger to “Go fuck yourself.” Another clearly wise business move made by a very grounded individual. (That’s sarcasm, in case it’s not clear.)

At this point, it’s hard to imagine how much worse X can get, but given everything that’s happened in 2023, it’s plain that the company formerly known as Twitter hasn’t even hit rock bottom yet. — Sam Rutherford, Senior reporter

A person holding the Microsoft Surface Duo 2 in book mode showing the Engadget home page. Images and text are eaten up by the hinge.
David Imel for Engadget

Microsoft’s Surface tablet

No offense to the Surface Laptop Studio 2, which is a mighty powerful and uniquely convertible laptop, but this year felt like a low point for Microsoft’s iconic Surface tablets. The Surface Pro 9 hasn’t been upgraded at all since last, so it’s still running either an older 12th-gen Intel chip. There is a 5G-equipped model with a custom ARM-based Microsoft SQ3 chip, but we recommend staying far far away from that thing. And beyond the Laptop Studio 2, we only got the Surface Laptop Go 3 for consumers(the tiny Surface Go 4 tablet is now firmly targeted as business users, it doesn’t even show up on the main Surface site).

It almost seems like Microsoft’s dream of creating a true tablet/laptop hybrid is dead – or at the very least, it’s on pause as the company focuses on shoving its AI Copilot into all of its products. Let’s face it: While the Surface business has earned a bit of money for Microsoft, it’s a pittance compared to what the company sees from its Azure cloud revenue. Instead, the Surface devices proved that Microsoft could produce high-end Windows hardware that occasionally pushed the PC industry forward.

It’s been 11 years since Microsoft announced its first Surface devices, but it turns out most consumers didn’t want to replace their laptops with tablets. Simpler 2-in-1 convertible devices, like HP’s Spectre x360 16, are far less common these days (and notably, they also work best in their notebook modes). And it doesn’t help that Windows 11 is still far from tablet friendly. If you really want to get work done on a slate, it simply makes more sense to get an iPad and a keyboard case instead.

With Microsoft’s Surface visionary, Panos Panay, now at Amazon, there doesn’t seem to be much hope left for the company’s tablet concept. But who knows, maybe the Surface Neo will finally make a return as a true foldable some day. (Remember the Surface Duo, another failure?) A Windows user can only dream. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior reporter

Amazon Halo App and Band. A phone showing the home page of Amazon's Halo app on the left, and the wearable in gray on the right. Both devices are set on a light wood background.
Amazon

Amazon’s Halo hardware products

Speaking of dreams, mine were dashed by Amazon in July this year when the company pulled support for its Halo line of health-related hardware products. In fact, my sleep itself might have been affected, since I had just gotten used to checking my Halo app each morning to see the amount of rest I got the night before.

Amazon’s Halo division has been plagued with controversy since it launched the screenless Halo wearable in 2020. The device was a barebones activity tracker, but stood out for an opt-in feature that used onboard mics to listen to you speaking and tell if you sound stressed, upbeat or emotional. This caught a lot of attention, with people saying this was akin to Amazon trying to police your way of speaking. Many other reviewers, myself included, were more critical of the fact that, though the Tone feature did flag times when wearers sounded happy or sad, it did not present enough information for that data to be useful.

The Halo app also offered a way for you to use your phone’s camera for a body composition scan. You’d have to enter your height and weight, before stripping down to your underwear and posing for four pictures, showing your front, back and sides. The app would then tell you how much of your body is fat or muscle.

If it sounds dubious, it’s probably because it is. Though Amazon said its “Halo body fat measurement is as accurate as methods a doctor would use—and nearly twice as accurate as leading at-home smart scales.” Spoiler: It wasn’t. I used the Body feature every few months for about two years, comparing it to the bio-electrical impedance analysis (BIA) sensor on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch when that became available. Over time, as my body composition changed, I also got BIA scans at the F45 gym I go to, which uses a more sophisticated machine. Amazon’s scans were wildly off, while the Samsung watch came closer to the data gleaned from the machine at my gym.

The Amazon Halo Rise on a nightstand in the dark with a the time and a semi-circle lit up on its front.
Photo by: Cherlynn Low / Engadget

All that is to say that Amazon’s Halo products haven’t been great. But that seemed to start to change when the company launched the Halo Rise bedside sleep tracker this year. I loved it for the way it accurately detected when I fell asleep, calculated the different stages I was in (REM, Deep, Light etc) and more importantly how it did all that without requiring me to wear something to bed or install a new mattress. I finally had a feasible way to track my sleep and use that to figure out how hard or easy I should take each day’s workout, along with other activities and stresses.

Alas, that joy was short-lived. Despite Amazon acquiring healthcare companies and clearly investing more into becoming a pharmaceutical provider, it gave up on the Halo business this year. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, since one good product doesn’t an entire profitable endeavor make. Amazon not having access to my sleep, heart rate, steps and tone is probably for the best, as we contemplate a future where the online shopping giant is also our doctor and pharmacist. — Cherlynn Low, Deputy editor

E3

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reading and talking about games, but the internet expanded my horizons beyond the confines of the UK magazine industry. In the late ‘90s, at age 13, I started writing (very badly) for a popular game site, covering release dates, special editions and other unimportant things.

Within a couple of years I’d lost interest in writing, but I still hung out in the same IRC channels talking about games with likeminded people. IRC started my obsession with E3 and the Tokyo Game Show; weeks where I’d talk about these huge events with a weird milieu of fans and industry professionals.

In 2000, the fever around Metal Gear Solid 2’s E3 debut was out of this world. The first-person reports from the show were unbelievably positive. When the trailer finally became available to download a few weeks later, it quickly spread across the internet. I can still remember the mix of frustration and excitement as I downloaded it from an IRC bot at 7KB a second to finally get a glimpse of “next-gen” gaming.

MGS2 was peak E3 for me, and in hindsight it was also the moment E3 began to die: Why did I need to read a 1,000-word breakdown of a trailer when I could just download and watch it myself? Why should Konami spend big money on a booth when it could just release a trailer directly to its potential customers?

Back then, I was the only person I knew IRL who was “extremely online.” Now, everyone is. By the 2010s, when I started to attend E3 myself, the role of press and the show had shifted. Nintendo E3 Directs were in full swing, and the big shows from Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, Ubisoft and EA were all beamed live to fans. Sure, I got to play some games and interview some developers, but that’s something that happens throughout the year now.

E3 remained one of the highlights of my calendar, and there were always some memorable moments — the PS4 and Xbox One reveals were probably the highlight of my in-person years — but by 2019, my excitement was more tied to seeing farflung colleagues and old industry friends than it was the event itself. When the pandemic canceled the 2020 event, it was obviously it would never recover. We’d written about how the industry didn’t need E3 years before.

Summer Game Fest will happen again next year. It will never hit the scale of the show it’s replacing, but I hope that it becomes a strong enough brand to keep the idea of E3 going. There’s still something exciting for fans, and journalists, about a week of gaming announcements to predict and dissect. If more companies spread their events throughout the year, that last bit of E3 magic will be gone. — Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

Cryptocurrencies and finance in tech

Much as we pretend mathematics represents an immutable truth, we must remember it’s not without its loopholes. Centuries from now, historians researching crypto may assume humanity forgot that as it decided to substitute math for truth in its entirety. That the prodigies of this world sought to engineer out human fallibility between League of Legends sessions. Uncertain, wooly and hard-to-quantify concepts like “truth” and “trust” would be tossed out in favor of the certainty of pure math. That’s the PR line: The Bitcoin white paper describes the virtual currency as a “system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.” It’s ironic, then, that so many high-profile people who hitched their mast to crypto are either in prison, or are awaiting trial for fraud.

Those same historians may wonder if crypto was merely a vehicle ripe for hijack by unethical types, or if its inherent fraudiness was written into its DNA. 2023 will offer plenty of material to scrub through given the number of figures who wound up face-to-face with law enforcement. Coinbase started the year accused of leaving gaps in its systems big enough to enable fraud, money laundering and drug dealing. Former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky was sued and later arrested — alongside the company’s chief revenue officer, Roni Cohen-Pavon. Not long after, Terraform Labs was charged by the SEC for securities fraud after it wiped out $45 billion or so. Bear in mind, this is a year-in-review story, and I’ve only managed to make it as far as February.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, dominated headlines this year much as FTX had in 2022. Regulators accused it, and its founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao of deliberately undermining its own controls and processes to not-so tacitly enable users to break the law. Zhou would plead guilty, step down as CEO and pay a hefty fine which enabled the company to keep running. Oh, and we should mention the Winklevoss Twins, their exchange and its partners, who were accused of defrauding investors to the tune of $1 billion. Ironic then, that Ferrari finally decided to try to appeal to the Lambo-and-Tendies demographic by opening up crypto purchases for its cars just as things started to get tough.

Of course, the real loser in all of this has to be Michael Lewis who, with an MA in Economics and experience as a bond trader for Salomon Brothers in one hand, and a ringside seat with Sam Bankman-Fried in the other, managed to miss what was going on at FTX. Lewis has doubled down in support of his latest muse but now that SBF has been found guilty of fraud, it looks like his reputation as the most credible financial journalist of the age is in tatters. — Daniel Cooper, Senior reporter

Photo by: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx 2021 1/8/21 Reddit bans Pro-Trump forum for inciting violence in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capital in Washington D.C.. STAR MAX File Photo: Reddit logos photographed off an iphone SE 2020.
STRF/STAR MAX/IPx

Reddit

I've been a longtime Reddit lurker, occasional poster and always a first-party app user. But when the drama about the company's decision to start charging for API access started to unfold in April, my eyes were opened to the wonderful world of third-party Reddit clients. Too bad, though, that the company proceeded to then botch it all.

Because API access was no longer free, many apps like Apollo, RIF, BaconReader and Narwhal had to reconsider their pricing or shut down altogether. Reddit’s policy change didn’t just challenge these apps, which mostly offered superior browsing experiences to the company’s own. It also created problems for clients that were built for more accessible use, rendering them unusable unless their developers ponied up the fees, which could go up as much as tens of thousands of dollars (or, in Apollo’s case, an estimated $20 million a year).

While Reddit did eventually seem to concede that the API fees would shut out some users with disabilities and ended up working with some unnamed developers to give them free access, the company dug in its heels in the wake of public outrage and subreddit blackouts. In the second half of the year, subreddits all over the platform either stopped posting, changed their settings to private or NSFW or dedicated themselves to only putting up salacious images of Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.

Reddit didn’t just ignore the protests and carry on with its planned fees. It went as far as to forcibly take over some communities that went dark, while looking for volunteers to take over certain subreddits that it deemed to have violated its Moderator Code of Conduct.

According to internet analytics company Similarweb in June, Reddit saw a 6.6 percent drop in average daily traffic. We don’t have the latest statistics on how the company is doing now, but I can tell you from personal experience that the first-party app on iOS is a complete shitshow. Like many other Redditors have pointed out before, videos will autoplay unmuted out of nowhere for no reason, while I’ve encountered numerous infuriating bugs, including one where a video on a post was repeatedly going on and off mute while I was also trying to stream Spotify to a speaker. It just sucks.

After the mass subreddit blackouts spawned a bunch of duplicate communities with different moderators, the quality of posts have noticeably fallen, as well. Not to mention the company got rid of trophies and then attempted to bring them back again in a confusing format. Throw in the fact that the community now seems to be a mix of karma-farming bots and commenters who copy and paste the same jokes over and over again, the days of enjoyable Reddit scrolling seem to have come to an end in 2023. — Cherlynn Low

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/techs-biggest-losers-in-2023-170017317.html?src=rss

LG is bringing a 4K projector with a weird handle to CES 2024

Posted on by

LG just announced its latest 4K projector, the CineBeam Qube. It’ll officially unveil the projector at CES 2024 in early January, but the company’s giving curious consumers an early look. The CineBeam Qube has plenty of high-tech bells and whistles, but with a stylish design that LG calls “minimalist." There's also a handle that resembles a crank.

Yeah this thing has an actual handle. The CineBeam Qube is built for portability. It’s lightweight, at around three pounds, and the square form factor makes it easy to place just about anywhere. The 360-degree rotatable handle also helps with placement. LG’s calling it “one of the smallest projectors available.”

A projector on a mantle next to books and sculptures.
LG

Of course, the most important part of any projector is, well, the projection. The Qube projects 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution images that measure up to 120 inches. There’s an RGB laser light source, a 450,000:1 contrast ratio and 154 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. With these specs, that episode of Reacher will really pop.

Speaking of streaming content, the projector runs on LG webOS 6.0 and offers access to all of the big streaming services, including Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix and YouTube. However, Prime Video is about to force ads on everyone, and nothing ruins a projector-based cinema party more than ads.

This projector also includes the company’s image-mapping function, which maps your space and displays an image on top of everything. This is for creating a unique ambiance, like blasting the room with an image of the night sky or the deep wilderness. It even includes LG’s automatic brightness adjustment algorithm, which is found in many of the company’s high-end projectors.

The CineBeam Qube has no release date and there’s no pricing information available. However, LG’s making the projector a big part of its CES showing, so maybe we’ll find out more in January.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lg-is-bringing-a-4k-projector-with-a-weird-handle-to-ces-2024-163420538.html?src=rss

LG is bringing a 4K projector with a weird handle to CES 2024

Posted on by

LG just announced its latest 4K projector, the CineBeam Qube. It’ll officially unveil the projector at CES 2024 in early January, but the company’s giving curious consumers an early look. The CineBeam Qube has plenty of high-tech bells and whistles, but with a stylish design that LG calls “minimalist." There's also a handle that resembles a crank.

Yeah this thing has an actual handle. The CineBeam Qube is built for portability. It’s lightweight, at around three pounds, and the square form factor makes it easy to place just about anywhere. The 360-degree rotatable handle also helps with placement. LG’s calling it “one of the smallest projectors available.”

A projector on a mantle next to books and sculptures.
LG

Of course, the most important part of any projector is, well, the projection. The Qube projects 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution images that measure up to 120 inches. There’s an RGB laser light source, a 450,000:1 contrast ratio and 154 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. With these specs, that episode of Reacher will really pop.

Speaking of streaming content, the projector runs on LG webOS 6.0 and offers access to all of the big streaming services, including Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix and YouTube. However, Prime Video is about to force ads on everyone, and nothing ruins a projector-based cinema party more than ads.

This projector also includes the company’s image-mapping function, which maps your space and displays an image on top of everything. This is for creating a unique ambiance, like blasting the room with an image of the night sky or the deep wilderness. It even includes LG’s automatic brightness adjustment algorithm, which is found in many of the company’s high-end projectors.

The CineBeam Qube has no release date and there’s no pricing information available. However, LG’s making the projector a big part of its CES showing, so maybe we’ll find out more in January.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lg-is-bringing-a-4k-projector-with-a-weird-handle-to-ces-2024-163420538.html?src=rss

AYANEO Flip DS handheld PC takes inspiration from a different Nintendo star

Posted on by

The Nintendo Switch is hailed as the design that brought the handheld gaming market back to life, but it’s hardly the only notable product from the gaming giant. Almost two decades ago, Nintendo launched the evolution of its Game Boy line, the Nintendo DS with its odd yet interesting second screen. It’s still debatable whether that feature was a success or just a gimmick, but there’s little argument that it became an iconic design that few have been able to emulate successfully. One of the rising names in the handheld PC segment, however, is taking a stab at bringing that uniqueness to this fledgling market, with a micro laptop design that includes not a keyboard but a small second screen, a feature that could be even more quirky and gimmicky than it was on the Nintendo DS.

Designer: AYANEO

It’s hard not to see the Nintendo DS as a bit gimmicky. Almost all the controls you need to play handheld games are mostly covered by buttons and joysticks, so you actually need to craft specific games to take advantage of that second screen. Because of the custom design, those games won’t work on any other console without heavy changes or some special emulation. That said, a second screen might actually have more utility on a different platform like Windows, where a different display could be used for displaying information or custom controls.

That seems to be what AYANEO is aiming for with the Flip DS launching on Indiegogo next month. The handheld laptop design is nothing new and AYANEO, in fact, has a variant with that design, the AYANEO Flip KB. That squeezes a basic QWERTY keyboard in between split gamepad controls, allowing for quick text input in games or Web browsing. The AYANEO Flip DS, however, switches out the keyboard for a 3.5-inch touch screen, providing a second display that could augment the gaming experience, at least in theory.

In practice, that touch display can be used to show anything as long as the operating system or games support it. At the most basic level, it can give quick access to the most used settings, like toggling Wi-Fi, muting the mic, or even shutting down the PC. It can also display the system’s current operating conditions, for gamers who are concerned about frame rates, power draw, and temperatures. Given the more open Windows gaming ecosystem, it’s conceivable that this screen can also be used for additional in-game controls that are just a thumb tap or swipe away. It could even be used as an on-screen virtual keyboard!

That said, additional features could also mean additional burdens on the system as well as the buyer’s wallet. These are features that are not exactly critical to enjoying games on the go, as proven by the half-dozen handheld gaming PCs now on the market. It’s still an interesting exercise in design that looks to another Nintendo product for guidance, because as popular and innovative as it may be, the Switch isn’t the be-all and end-all of handheld gaming.

The post AYANEO Flip DS handheld PC takes inspiration from a different Nintendo star first appeared on Yanko Design.

The biggest winners in tech in 2023

Posted on by

Throughout 2023, it felt like the drama never let up. From Elon Musk’s nonstop shenanigans to the constant launches in the generative AI race, the last twelve months was packed with news. Thankfully, it wasn’t all bad, and this year saw more winners than before. There were clear frontrunners, like Threads and AI, but we also saw surprises like Apple’s Vision Pro headset and the iPhone maker finally embracing several open standards. Of all the things that happened this year, here’s the Engadget team’s list of tech’s biggest winners in 2023.

Threads

If you had told me a year ago that Mark Zuckerberg would use the Elon Musk-induced chaos at Twitter to his and Meta’s advantage, I wouldn't have been surprised. If, however, you had told me that Meta’s slapdash effort to build a standalone Twitter clone based on Instagram would emerge as the most viable and popular alternative, I probably would have laughed.

But, if 2023 taught us anything, it’s that Elon Musk was more adept at taking Twitter X to lower lows than we could have possibly imagined. And while we’ll likely never see an actual cage match between Zuck and Musk, it’s impossible to ignore just how much Threads has benefitted from Musk’s self-inflicted wounds.

After an initial surge and drop-off in interest, Threads is back at 100 million monthly users. It was the fourth-most downloaded app of the year, according to Apple, despite a mid-year launch and months without any EU availability. The app is also beginning its long-awaited experiment with federation, which will eventually make its content interoperable with Mastodon.

Threads has, of course, benefitted from Meta’s vast engineering resources, as well as the company’s willingness to engage in good old-fashioned growth-hacking. And there are still valid concerns about Meta’s content moderation practices and the implications for allowing the Facebook owner to control yet another major social platform.

But the fact that Threads was able to grow so quickly despite all that shows just how desperate people were for an alternative. Threads may not have been the most advanced or most interesting of the wave of alternatives, but it’s been able to use its ties to Meta and Instagram to attract the most interest. And, right now, it has something X doesn’t: a whole lot of momentum. — Karissa Bell, Senior reporter

Generative AI

We capped off 2022 with the rising popularity of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s remarkably powerful generative AI chatbot. While the idea of having a conversation with a chatbot wasn’t exactly new, ChatGPT leveraged a large language model (LLM) to achieve natural, almost human-like responses, as well as the ability to craft readable text or pull up information on demand. It was a sign that AI was going to be an important topic in 2023 — something Microsoft proved when it launched Bing’s AI Chat in February, which was powered by OpenAI’s next-generation GPT 4 model. And so the AI wars began.

A screenshot of the new Bing homepage with a big search box in the middle and a prompt in it saying
Screenshot

Google rushed to announce its Bard chatbot to pre-empt Microsoft’s Bing Chat launch, but it demonstrated the limitations of generative AI when it confidently answered a question about the James Webb telescope incorrectly. That led to an immediate 8 percent drop in Google’s stock, and it made the company seem like it was just chasing Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s accomplishments with Bing Chat and ChatGPT. (Bard was originally powered by Google’s LaMDA LLM, which had been in development since 2021.)

Bing Chat was just the start for Microsoft: It also launched AI integration in Microsoft Edge through a “Copilot” sidebar, something that also ended up arriving in Microsoft 365 apps, Windows 11 and Windows 10. Google, meanwhile, announced Bard integration for its Assistant and implemented a slew of AI-powered features into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, Chat, Slides, as well as the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. Heading into 2024, we can look forward to Google’s GPT 4 competitor, Gemini, and Microsoft also announced that its Copilots are getting upgraded with GPT-4.

Outside of Microsoft and Google, AI ended up being the buzzword adopted by much of the tech world throughout 2023. (How quickly we forgot about Web 3.0, crypto and the metaverse.) But while the relentless hype cycle was inevitable, we also saw text-to-image generation tools like OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 become even more powerful, evolving beyond the creepy multi-fingered imagery it was famous for. AI is starting to influence the the world outside of tech as well: It was one of the most prominent concerns for WGA members during their 148-day long strike, and many people were fooled by the famous image of the Pope wearing a puffy Balenciaga coat, which was generated by Midjourney.

There’s still plenty we don’t know about how AI will influence our lives, though researchers like Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, and Margaret Mitchell are continually raising the alarm about ethical AI concerns. Much of the AI world seems to be following Facebook’s former philosophy of “move fast and break things” — expect to see more drama around artificial intelligence like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s surprise firing and re-hiring. It normally takes a few years for a founder to get ousted from their company, like Steve Jobs and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Devindra Hardawar, Senior reporter

The iPhone 15 Pro Max held up against a ceiling of lights, showing its USB-C port.
Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Apple meets RCS, USB-C and Qi 2

In 2023, it almost felt like hell froze over. Apple, notorious for its walled garden, not only introduced new phones with USB-C charging ports this year, but also announced it would support the RCS messaging standard. This happened after months of public badgering from Google (and its execs) and multiple reports calling out the green-bubble stigma. Apple appeared to relent, seemingly having come to terms with previous misgivings.

Though Apple’s declaration is a step in the right direction and brings better security and multimedia support for those on iPhones texting people on Androids, the bubble-color divide is far from dissolved. When the company does adopt the messaging standard, it may not change the way texts are presented. iMessage still has many features that RCS lacks, particularly those introduced in iOS 17 this year like Voice Memo transcripts and Check Ins.

Of course, it’s not like Apple is welcoming all these interoperable standards with open arms. Its adoption of USB-C is clearly a reaction to the EU’s mandate that all new devices sold next year charge with the same standard. And even after announcing RCS support, the company still worked hard to plug the workarounds that enabled Android platforms like Beeper and Sunbird to bring some semblance of iMessage support to non-iOS devices.

But when you consider all the changes made this year, plus the fact that iPhone 15s are among the first devices that work with the new Qi 2 wireless charging protocol, it’s hard to ignore the momentum. It doesn’t feel quite right to label Apple a winner because of all this, but with the number of people that are now better served and supported by the company’s devices, it won’t be surprising to see a fair amount of goodwill flow its way. — Cherlynn Low, Deputy editor

The Google Pixel Fold, slightly open, propped up in portrait orientation on a wooden surface with its external screen facing the camera.
Photo by: Sam Rutherford / Engadget

Foldable phones

Since 2019, Samsung has had a virtual monopoly on big fancy foldable phones. But in 2023, we got not one but two new challengers in the Pixel Fold and OnePlus Open. And while neither can claim total superiority, they’ve brought some interesting innovations to the category.

With its super thin design and wider front display, the Pixel Fold makes it easy to use all of your apps without ever needing to open the device. So when do unfold it, you appreciate its 6.7-inch flexible screen even more. And unlike its rivals, Google didn’t cut corners with its cameras, as the Pixel Fold offers better image quality than pretty much any other handset (foldable or otherwise) aside from its recent sibling, the Pixel 8 Pro.

Meanwhile with the Open, OnePlus created a clever card-based multitasking system that makes it super easy to flip between apps. The Open is also thinner and lighter than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5. And while it’s still pretty expensive, thanks to a nifty deal that brings its price down to $1,500 with the trade-in of any phone, OnePlus’ first foldable is helping lower the barrier to entry for devices even further.

So in a year when the pace of Samsung’s innovation felt like it was starting to stagnate, two new rivals brought increased competition to the category, which is a win for anyone who’s ever thought about buying a big foldable phone. — Sam Rutherford, Senior reporter

Apple Vision Pro

Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player, and it certainly didn’t make the first smartphone. But the iPod and iPhone managed to out-innovate existing products and reorient the entire technology world around their existence. The Vision Pro is a similar play, albeit one that isn’t immediately meant for everyone. Companies like Oculus (now Meta) and HTC Vive have been pursuing consumer VR for almost a decade, but the Vision Pro takes an even bolder leap forward. Imagine having your apps floating above your desk, or having a video pinned to a wall of your room, or seamlessly reliving your memories captured in 3D spatial videos. And yes, it can also deliver immersive virtual experiences when it needs to.

As is true for many VR solutions, it’s hard to convey the magnitude of Apple’s accomplishment with the Vision Pro in words, screenshots or promo trailers. If you’re not terribly excited about spending $3,499 on Apple’s unproven goggles, I can’t blame you. But after spending some time with the Vision Pro during its launch event, I’m convinced it’s something special. Its screens are far sharper than any VR headset I’ve seen, its onboard cameras deliver a better mixed reality experience and the simple gestures Apple has developed for navigating its interface are wonderfully intuitive.

While the Vision Pro has its obvious issues — it’s priced for developers and early adopters, not average consumers; it’s still a chunky device that many people won’t want to wear — it fundamentally reshapes the way we’ve been thinking of mixed reality. It’s not just a gadget for VR games, nor is it something purely geared towards business purposes like the Hololens 2 and Magic Leap 2. It’s something truly new, and it could end up paving the way towards our spatial computing future. — Devindra Hardawar

The Steam Deck OLED propped up on a white feathery surface with a games catalog on its screen.
Engadget

Gaming handhelds

Handheld gaming PCs combine everything you love about classic portables like the Gameboy Advance or the PSP with big performance (and admittedly much larger builds) plus the freedom to play practically any title you can think of. And in 2023, we saw an explosion of compelling devices with a range of designs: from big chunky units with detachable controllers like Lenovo’s Legion Go to a major revamp for the Steam Deck featuring a new OLED display. Meanwhile, systems like the ASUS ROG Ally offer top-notch specs in a sleek design. And this is before you mention smaller manufacturers like Ayaneo, GPD and others that have put their own twist on the category. But the best part is that most of these cost half the price of a typical gaming laptop, so if all you care about is being able to game from… well anywhere, 2023 has given us a wealth of options. — Sam Rutherford

Neuralink

Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain-computer interface startup came into 2023 against the figurative ropes. The FDA had denied its 2022 petition to begin human trials of its implantable prosthetic over concerns that prototypes of the device had killed a slew of porcine test subjects; rival BCI maker Synchron had already beaten it to market (having having successfully installed their device in a human patient that July) and the USDA had launched an investigation into animal cruelty claims against the company. Musk’s promise of beginning human trials “within six months,” made during a November “show-and-tell’ event appeared increasingly unlikely.

Heading into 2024, Neuralink is in a much better place. The USDA conducted a "focused" inspection of the company’s facilities but did not find any compliance breaches beyond a single issue in 2019 that Neuralink self-reported, per a report obtained by Reuters. That investigation came in response to a complaint filed by the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine, an animal welfare advocacy group, that alleged Neuralink and research partner UC Davis had caused the needless suffering and death of simian test subjects between 2017 and 2020. Neuralink may have placated that investigation, however, the USDA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has since launched its own independent investigation at the behest of federal prosecutors into the allegations as such actions might violate the Animal Welfare Act. That process remains ongoing.

In May, Neuralink received the best news of its year: the FDA had cleared the company to begin early-stage human trials, after it had satisfactorily address the agency’s previous issues. "The agency’s major safety concerns involved the device’s lithium battery; the potential for the implant’s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue," current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters in March.

In September, nearly a year after Musk’s six-month promise, the Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME if you really squint) study opened for subject volunteers. The study "aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts." Whether patients turn out to have the devices implanted won’t be revealed until the trials are complete but given Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior and irrational diatribes, embrace of antisemitism and promotion of far-right hate speech — the fact that he ran Twitter into the ground in barely a year — could make selling people on the finer points of their cranial surgery an impossible task. — Andrew Tarantola, Senior reporter

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-biggest-winners-in-tech-in-2023-143012912.html?src=rss