Gadgets

That Nintendo gadget that showed up on the FCC’s site last month is sadly not the Switch 2. While the gaming giant confirmed in May that a Switch successor is, indeed, in the works, fans are going to have to settle for Alarmo. The $100 motion controlled alarm clock brings sounds from titles like Breath

Learning an instrument is difficult for most people. That’s doubly the case when attempting to learn on your own. It’s the reason so many of us have dusty guitars and keyboards jammed up in our attic rafters amid the croquet mallets and badminton birdies of days past. The latest product from London-based Roli offers a

Smartphones have long been the dominant device for communicating on the move, outselling their pared-down feature phone counterparts for more than a decade. However, if recent reports are to be believed, a Luddite revival is driving demand for mobile devices capable of, well, not very much. So-called dumbphones can help people with their digital detox

Oura on Thursday unveiled the fourth generation of its popular smart ring. The Oura Ring 4 arrives just under three years after its predecessor’s debut. Despite the gap, the new wearable largely refines — rather than reinvents — the experience. The most notable hardware change is the slimmer profile, an odd thing to say about

Wearing a camera on your face will invariably evoke privacy concerns. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses have addressed the issue to a certain extent with the inclusion of features like a recording light. But any piece of popular consumer electronics will eventually be hacked, often to prove a point. I-XRAY is a project from a pair

Google is announcing new Chromebook models today with Samsung and Lenovo. With Samsung’s Galaxy Chromebook Plus model in particular, the company is also introducing a new multifunctional quick insert key. But Google doesn’t want to leave existing Chromebook users behind as it added new AI-powered features for existing devices. The quick insert key, which also

The consumerization of medtech marches on: Amsterdam-based startup Lapsi Health has just clinched FDA approval for its first clinical support tool, a digital stethoscope. The U.S. medical devices regulator, the Food & Drug Administration, has cleared it as a Class IIA (medium risk) medical device. The startup’s debut sensing gadget is called Keikku, which means

All credit goes to Samsung for inventing and popularizing the foldable. The form factor had plenty of doubters — I admit I was skeptical — when the first Galaxy Fold hit the market in 2019. It was the first Galaxy Flip, which arrived a year later, that taught me to truly appreciate foldables. When the

Hidden among the Meta Connect 2024 hardware announcements comes word that the social media giant is sunsetting two key members of its Quest VR headset line. With the budget Quest 3S now up for preorder, Meta will no longer sell the Quest 2 and Quest Pro once back stock is deleted. The end of the

At its annual Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company has rebuilt its social apps for mixed reality. “We’ve got all new Instagram and Facebook experiences to bring your feeds and your Reels with you into mixed reality,” Zuckerberg said. “A really nice interface so you can lean back

The original Insta360 Link entered the world fully formed. $299 price tag aside, I had no major complaints about the webcam in my 2022 review. Two years later, the Shenzhen-based consumer optics company has debuted its successor — two of them, in fact. In my review, I noted that the Link’s steep price tag was

Few hardware startups have ramped up to a full product line as quickly as Nothing. The London-based firm announced on Tuesday yet another take on earbuds with the Ear Open. As the name suggestions, these are open-ear devices, designed to maintain a sense of situational awareness, rather than the drown-out-the-world approach of active noise cancelation.

Jony Ive, the legendary designer who left his full-time role at Apple five years ago, is working on a new startup with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. The collaboration was first reported last year, and Ive confirmed it in a New York Times profile about what he’s been up to since leaving Apple. If

Moksha’s meditation tool aims to kick traditional breath work exercises to the curb.  As most breathing tools on the market are designed to do, Moksha aims to help train you to breathe longer and deeper, which studies have shown naturally calm you down, relax your muscles, slow your heart rate, and stabilize your blood pressure. The

Apple’s iPhone 16 is out, but the company hasn’t made its iOS 18 Apple Intelligence features available to users just yet. In July, Apple rolled out these features to users on the iOS 18 developer beta and added the AI features for public beta users earlier this week. However, if you are not using this

The Plaud.AI pin took up mercifully little space in my carry-on. It also presented an opportunity to kill two birds: I was flying across the country and knew I would be taking copious notes. If you’ve been in a meeting with me, you know I bring my laptop without fail. My dumb brain needs to

The iPhone 16 officially goes on sale Friday. But for its earliest adopters, it arrives with a fundamental compromise baked into the deal. Put simply, this is not the iPhone 16 that they were promised. Tim Cook said it would be the “first iPhone built for Apple Intelligence.” But that “for” is key: The handsets

Back Market held a press conference on Thursday morning in Paris to talk about upcoming product launches and give an update on the company’s current situation. If you’re not familiar with the French startup it operates a marketplace of refurbished electronics devices — mostly smartphones. It’s attracted a lot of investor cash in recent years

All consumer electronics are works in progress. This is the nature of the refresh cycle. Every year or so, a new one arrives with new features, bidding you to upgrade. You’ve no doubt observed how gadgets show their age after a few years. From the early adopter’s perspective, they age like a fine milk. The

In the release announcing its Watch Series 10’s availability, Apple refers to the device’s “refined” design. It’s an accurate word for the device overall. Whereas early rumors pointed to a potentially fundamental rethink for the device’s 10th edition on-par with the iPhone X, the new smartwatch prioritizes refining over redesigning. Given that roughly one in

I can’t recall another consumer electronics product category becoming a commodity as quickly as Bluetooth earbuds. Apple’s AirPods played a key role in that growth, of course, recapturing a kind of excitement not seen in consumer music tech since the original iPod. AirPods’ fundamentals haven’t changed much in the eight years since they debuted. The

It’s been three years since Life360’s $205 million acquisition of AirTag competitor Tile. The company announced Monday its new lineup of lost-item Bluetooth trackers, featuring a sleeker redesign in new colors — aqua blue, green, navy blue, and pink. The devices now have several new functionalities, such as an integrated SOS feature, an extended Bluetooth

During last week’s GlowTime event, Apple announced that iOS 18 will include a feature allowing users with mild to moderate hearing loss to use AirPods as hearing aids. But Apple was still waiting on approval from the FDA — approval that was announced just a couple days later. The FDA describing this as the first

Apple is adding a dedicated touch-sensitive camera button to the iPhone 16 series, the company announced during its “Glowtime” event. The button is covered by a smooth texture sapphire crystal and a stainless steel rim. Pressing the button for the first time will open the camera app. You press it to take a photo and

iFixit, everyone’s favorite gadget repair gadfly, is launching a portable soldering iron. The gadget is designed to make component repair more accessible for home users. The timing of the announcement isn’t lost on anyone, dropping the same week as Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event. While Apple has been more open to user repairs in recent years,

Huawei on Tuesday launched the Mate XT Ultimate Design, which is a long name for a big phone. The handset ups the ante for foldables in terms of both displays and pricing. The device starts at CNY 19,999 (roughly $2,800). Paying about a grand north of your standard foldable price gets you a unique three-screen

TechCrunch demoed an incomplete version of Apple’s forthcoming Hearing Test app following Apple’s “Glowtime” event on Monday. The test shares key similarities with its clinical predecessors, prompting people to tap the display when they first hear gradually rising tones of different frequencies. Hearing Test will be built into iOS 18, though Apple is currently awaiting

According to a recent FCC filing, the Oura Ring 4 is likely to launch any day now. In the meantime, however, the health hardware maker has another key bit of news to share. Oura announced Wednesday that it has acquired Veri, the Helsinki-based startup behind the metabolic health product of the same name. The announcement

For all of the new health features Apple talked up at Monday’s iPhone 16 event, a familiar one was M.I.A. The blood oxygen feature, introduced with the Series 6 device, will not be present on Series 10 models sold in the U.S. The rest of the world will be able to access the tech on

Beats’ expansion into iPhone 16 cases is surprising, if not entirely unexpected. After all, Apple acquired the headphone maker 10 years ago last May. The deal was — as many expected — largely centered around the transformation of the Beats Music streaming service into an Apple-branded offering. Beyond that, however, Apple seems have mostly let