Gadget Hacks

Rivian's chief software officer has a blunt answer for anyone still shopping for Apple CarPlay in an electric truck: the debate itself, he argues, no longer matters. That's a striking claim from a company whose own buyers once ranked CarPlay as their single most-requested feature, according to The Verge, two months ago.

Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra is now on sale across 106 markets at $2,099.99. Within Samsung's lineup, the Ultra name is supposed to mean the company's highest performance tier, and Samsung frames this phone as bringing that standard to foldables for the first time. In its review, PCMag called it Samsung's most capable foldable yet, citing faster performance, a longer-lasting battery and sharper cameras than any other Z Fold.

Google calls Call Screen "a fan favorite" and says people have "loved" using Call Notes to keep track of what happened on a call (Google, 10 months ago). Ask which are the best Google Pixel features, though, and no independent survey or retention data actually answers that question; the sources reviewed here contain no ranking of what people stick with. What exists instead is a paper trail: a string of releases showing which features Google has kept expanding, and which ones it introduced once...

Global foldable smartphone shipments are projected to rise 20% year-over-year in 2026, and industry sources point to Apple's expected entry into the category as one factor behind that growth, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes this week. Counterpoint Research puts the figure slightly higher, forecasting 21% growth and tying the increase to Apple intensifying competition in the premium book-style foldable segment, the category of phones that open outward like a book to reveal a...

Tucked inside CarPlay's Accessibility menu are three tools: Voice Control, Sound Recognition, and a set of display adjustments covering text size, boldness, and color. These count among the hidden Apple CarPlay features that go unused simply because accessibility submenus rarely get opened without a specific reason to check them. None of them is a universal upgrade. Each solves a specific kind of friction for a specific kind of driver, and figuring out which one applies to you is the actual...

Samsung's Memory Manufacturing Technology Center stood up a task force this month to build a commodity DRAM end-fab at its Hwaseong Campus Complex 1. An industry official says the move will lift Samsung DRAM production capacity roughly 15% by December relative to the start of 2026, according to Seoul Economic Daily. The cause is a market running critically short: commodity DRAM prices climbed more than 80% in the first half of this year, a move that makes a capacity investment easy to justify...

Galaxy Watch owners are flooding Reddit with the same complaint for the third time this year: their watches are hemorrhaging battery life for no obvious reason. The latest wave of Galaxy Watch battery drain reports surfaced today, according to Android Authority, hitting Galaxy Watch 6, 7, and 8 owners just as Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. Samsung has not publicly acknowledged the problem at any point during this cycle.

Warner Bros. Discovery this week launched two new mobile features for HBO Max subscribers in the U.S.: a swipeable vertical Shorts feed and a conversational AI search tool called Ask HBO Max. Both are built around the same problem too many choices, not enough watching and neither is available to all subscribers yet.

Samsung's foldable lineup has broken the company's all-time Galaxy preorder record in South Korea, edging past a mark that had stood since 2019. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Flip8 combined for more than 1.44 million preorders in the country, topping the 1.38 million the Galaxy Note 10 series drew in 2019, according to SamMobile. Samsung is calling it the biggest Galaxy preorder result in the company's history.

The European Commission issued a €890 million EU Google antitrust fine last Wednesday, but the payment is the least of Google's problems. The twin rulings under the Digital Markets Act demand something far harder to write a check for: a structural redesign of how Google decides which results appear at the top of its search pages, and how Android's app economy distributes money between Google and the developers who build on it.

Spotify went down twice yesterday without publicly explaining why either time. Two separate disruptions on Monday, July 27 left users unable to stream music, log in, search the library, or manage their accounts before both were resolved, Engadget reported yesterday. The Spotify outage is over. The explanation hasn't come.

A writer at Eurogamer traded in a PS2 and more than 100 games the day after a single session with Halo 3 at a colleague's apartment. Not gradually. Overnight. That is what a system-seller looks like: not a game that rewards console ownership, but one that creates it from nothing.

Google has spent the past several months steadily expanding what the Gemini overlay can do, and the latest round of Gemini overlay new features makes the strategic intent hard to miss. The overlay the assistant panel you pull up from any Android screen is gaining video generation, music creation, Canvas, and Guided Learning directly on its surface. Taken together with a persistent floating bubble still in testing and a Gemini Live redesign that eliminates its own dedicated screen, the changes...

A developer known as busung has released an open-source tool called the Root My Galaxy app, which claims to grant temporary root access to select Snapdragon-powered Galaxy flagships without unlocking the bootloader or tripping Samsung's Knox e-fuse, according to an Android Authority report published today. The developer describes the process as one-click and says it leaves user data untouched, per the same report. The conventional route to persistent Samsung root involves bootloader changes,...

Some Pixel owners are still waiting for the Google Wallet fix that should have landed automatically. If your phone is showing a "Device doesn't meet security requirements" warning every time you open Google Wallet, it hasn't been compromised and your cards are fine. A stalled update rollout left a specific group of beta opt-outs stranded on a software build that Wallet's security checks no longer recognize as certified.

This guide walks you through preordering any of the three new Galaxy foldables in a way that minimizes total cost or preserves flexibility, depending on which matters more to you. By the end, you'll know which channel fits your situation, how to run a real cost comparison, and what to verify before submitting your order.

Google Photos has added a floating camera button inside its AI editing tools, letting people snap a fresh photo without leaving the app and feed it straight into an edit. The new Google Photos AI camera button shows up inside Photo Remix and Photo to Video, part of a wider push to add camera access to tools in the app's Create tab.

Battery damage from heat doesn't announce itself. It builds quietly through July and August, and by the time September's heat waves roll in, a phone that used to coast to bedtime can barely make it past lunch. Summer is the season when phones take their biggest annual hit to battery health, and most of that damage happens in ways that don't feel serious in the moment, according to CNET. Knowing how to protect your phone battery from summer heat means understanding what's actually happening...

RAM used to be a straightforward performance purchase. More meant smoother multitasking, faster app switching, fewer cold reloads when you returned to a backgrounded app. That calculus has shifted in a specific and practical way: RAM is now a feature-gating purchase. According to Android Authority last month, current flagship AI implementations on both Android and iOS require 12GB as a hard minimum the point below which those tools simply won't run. Meanwhile, the memory inside most mid-range...

Reports of a Disney Plus free tier trace back to internal talks inside Disney, not a public announcement. Two people familiar with the matter told Business Insider that the company is discussing making some Disney+ content available without a subscription.