Trending on Gadget Hacks: Page 5

The debate over Galaxy S26 Ultra design identity is really a debate over what Samsung thinks the Ultra should be. A halo product for power users who want the most purposeful Android device on the market, or the premium size tier in a mainstream lineup? The commercial data and the enthusiast data currently give different answers, and both are worth taking seriously.

Reports from late April and early May 2026 describe an internal reorganization combining OnePlus and Realme's back-end operations, but Oppo has not issued a detailed global statement explaining the full scope.

Google's late-April 2026 Google Home app update brings a modernized camera interface, consolidated notification controls, redesigned casting controls more broadly, and speed improvements to Gemini voice commands, 9to5Google reported. The changes are unglamorous but cumulative — another round of friction removal from a platform that has been getting meaningfully less annoying to use since October 2025.

Spotify announced today that Spotify for Creators and Megaphone will adopt Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, the same technology Apple introduced for video podcasts in iOS 26.4. Once that rollout completes, Spotify-hosted shows will be able to distribute and monetize video on Apple Podcasts without any changes to existing setups, TechCrunch reported. Separately, creators on five supported third-party hosting platforms can already publish video directly to Spotify now.

Google introduced Google Private AI Compute in November 2025, three months after the Pixel 10 launched with on-device AI features built around a simple premise: the phone should surface what you need before you ask. That gap between launch and the cloud architecture announcement is worth understanding. It defines what the Pixel 10's proactive AI actually is, how it works, and why the privacy question it raises has not yet been answered by anyone other than Google.

Government-brokered talks between Samsung Electronics and its largest union collapsed last week without agreement, leaving an 18-day strike scheduled for May 21 effectively on track, Seoul Economic Daily reported. The National Labor Relations Commission plans to issue a formal mediation proposal, but both sides must accept it for a settlement to take effect. With roughly one week until the deadline, the question for memory markets is not just whether a strike happens it's how much disruption is...

Discussions about rising Android phone prices have centered on what Qualcomm's next Snapdragon chip phone price increase might look like. Qualcomm's own disclosures point somewhere else first. The company's Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings presentation identified AI-driven memory costs as a documented pressure already embedded in its forward guidance, with Chinese OEMs visibly adjusting their build plans in response. Whether that reaches buyers as higher prices, reduced specs, or constrained launches is...

OpenAI published its most detailed technical account yet of how the Codex coding agent runs inside a Windows 11 sandbox this week, following months of documented complaints about the earlier implementation. The redesigned OpenAI Codex Windows sandbox uses separate execution identities, OS-level network isolation, and DPAPI-scoped credentials, according to WinBuzzer's coverage of OpenAI's safety post published six days ago. Whether the redesign resolves the original complaints is a separate...

Microsoft is adding a Windows 11 automatic driver rollback feature that can replace a bad driver update without any action from the user or the hardware vendor. Called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, it works through the existing Windows Update pipeline and is currently being tested with hardware partners, with broad rollout targeted for September 2026 (The Verge, today; Digital Trends, today).

Apple is offering developers something that would have seemed implausible two years ago: offline AI inference with no per-token fee, accessible from existing Swift code in as few as three lines. The Foundation Models framework ships across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, and apps like Stoic, VLLO, and CellWalk are already using it. The Apple App Store model for AI is live not a roadmap item, not a beta and the terms of the deal are visible enough to evaluate now.

Netflix told advertisers Wednesday that its ad business is entering a new phase and for most subscribers on the ad-supported plan, the changes are not what the headlines imply. More ads on Netflix does not mean longer commercial breaks in the middle of Bridgerton. It means more countries, more live-event inventory, new ad surfaces, and smarter targeting. Whether Netflix ads are increasing next year depends almost entirely on what you watch.

Windows 11 gives you three built-in ways to find your IP address, and none of them will show you what you might actually need. That's not a bug it's a distinction worth understanding before you start clicking around. The methods built into the OS return the local (private) address your router assigns to your device. The public address, which belongs to the router itself and is what the outside internet sees, lives somewhere else entirely. This guide covers how to find IP address on Windows 11...

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority has today opened a formal investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem, examining whether Microsoft holds strategic market status in that sector and whether it can use that position to limit customer choice. The probe will also consider whether Microsoft's software licensing practices are reducing competition in cloud services and how AI competitors are able to integrate with Microsoft's business software, according to the CMA's...

Microsoft this week pushed a significant update to Edge: the Microsoft Edge Copilot tabs update gives Copilot permission to read every tab you have open and pull answers from across all of them at once. Ask it to compare five product pages, surface a spec from an article you opened an hour ago, or condense a stack of research tabs it draws from your full open set without requiring you to paste or switch. That puts it in a different category than a sidebar chatbot waiting to be addressed.

Exceeding the Google account 15GB storage limit locks your Gmail, freezes Drive uploads, and stops photo backups all at once. What it does not do, at least not right away, is delete anything. That distinction is worth understanding, because Google's own warning system tends to blur the two.

Google now lets Search users across supported languages favor specific outlets and sites in Top Stories. The feature, called Preferred Sources in Search, expanded worldwide for English-language users in December 2025. Google then expanded the feature to all Search languages it supports on April 30, 2026, per Google's announcement, per Google's announcement.

Two new CarPlay audio apps arrived this week, and they solve entirely different problems. Suno lets you play back music you've already generated with AI on your iPhone. Zeno Radio streams radio from around the world and lets you browse by genre, country, and region. Update either app to the latest version and it appears on your CarPlay dashboard automatically, per 9to5Mac.

Android Authority's Stephen Schenck visited a Best Buy this week and found no OnePlus phones on display. A store associate confirmed the devices had recently been pulled from that floor space, Android Authority reported today. Multiple Reddit users reported the same pattern at their own locations, with Nothing phones appearing in the slots where OnePlus units used to sit.

Apple's Liquid Glass design language has received an Art Directors Club award, institutional recognition that puts the most sweeping visual overhaul Apple has shipped since iOS 7 alongside work judged on craft and conceptual ambition. The Apple Liquid Glass design award confirms the redesign is being taken seriously in professional design circles. It does not resolve whether the design actually works on the devices people carry every day.

Apple is reportedly pressing developers to deepen Siri app integration ahead of iOS 27's unveiling at WWDC on June 8, Bloomberg reported last month. The mechanism at the center of that push is App Intents, an API that lets Siri execute actions inside third-party apps without the user ever opening them. Some of the world's largest app companies are hesitating to commit, not because the integration is technically demanding, but because Apple has not ruled out eventually charging for it.

Spotify made two video podcast announcements today, and they are not the same announcement. The first is live now: the company has activated its Distribution API for five third-party hosting platforms, giving creators on those platforms direct access to Spotify video distribution and Partner Program revenue without switching hosts. The second is a forward commitment: Spotify for Creators and Megaphone will add Spotify Apple HLS video podcast support later in 2026, built in coordination with...

Microsoft today announced a Windows Update automatic driver rollback feature that can replace a faulty driver installed through Windows Update on affected devices without any action from the user or the hardware vendor. The feature, called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, is currently in testing with hardware partners and is scheduled for a gradual rollout in September, The Verge reported today. It applies only to drivers delivered through Windows Update a scope boundary that defines both what...

Android users can already choose where new passkeys get stored. Moving the ones already inside Google Password Manager to another provider is a different story and that capability does not exist yet.

Google wants enterprise IT buyers to stop thinking of Chromebooks as school devices. The pitch behind Chromebook Plus enterprise adoption has become markedly more credible over the past eighteen months: ten years of automatic updates, zero reported ransomware incidents, hardware substantially better than legacy Chromebooks and positioned against Windows 11 AI PCs, and Gemini-related features increasingly tied into the platform. That is a substantive offer. It is also the front half of a...

Apple is working out how to bring agentic AI apps into the App Store without dismantling the review system that makes the platform defensible, AppleInsider reported. The internal debate, those sources say, is less about whether to open the platform than how to contain what gets in. The most capable AI agents — according to current industry reporting — the kind that write code, spawn programs, and act autonomously across a device, are exactly what App Review was designed to prevent. That tension...

Samsung is reportedly planning to unveil its first AI smart glasses at Galaxy Unpacked in London on July 22. The rumored Galaxy Glasses would run Android XR with Gemini as the built-in assistant, carry a 12MP camera, speakers, and microphones, and offload all processing to a paired phone — no display, no onboard compute.

Samsung Upgraded PDF Scanner Comes to Older Flagships With One UI 8.5

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Smaller Camera Cutout Leak: What the 2.5mm Punch Hole Means

How much is AMC+? Plans, prices, and free trials

Pixel Bluetooth Volume Bug Fix Delayed: Workaround for Now

YouTube TV Customizable Multiview: What's Changing and What's Not

Gemini Workspace Upgrades: New Features, Access, and What's Unproven

Google is pulling Groups, Community Feed, direct messages, and badges from the Fitbit app this month, replacing them with a Gemini-based AI coach available at a higher price point. The Fitbit app social features removed in this transition are not returning, according to reporting from 9to5Google and Gadgets & Wearables last week. The app itself automatically updates to Google Health starting May 19, with no new download required, Google announced last week.

A new global survey commissioned by Logitech G highlights growing recognition of esports and professional gaming as legitimate career options, with 65% of respondents worldwide calling for more formal education pathways for aspiring gaming professionals.

Spotify launched "Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s)" yesterday, giving every user, free or premium, access to lifetime listening data the platform has never surfaced before. The feature went live as part of the company's 20th anniversary campaign and is available now in the mobile app. It's a different product than Wrapped, not an extension of it, and that distinction matters before you go looking for yours.

Bartender launched a $15-per-year subscription tier yesterday, and the headline addition is Top Shelf, a utility panel built into the MacBook notch that combines persistent clipboard history, temporary file staging, and ambient widgets into a single interface. The feature activates when the cursor hovers below the camera housing, expanding it into an interactive panel organized into three tabs. Bartender 6 remains available as a $20 one-time purchase for users who only want menu bar management,...

Mystic Leaks has shared footage from an early Android build showing Google may be adding a full manual color picker to the Pixel's Wallpaper & style app, Android Authority and 9to5Google reported this week. The Pixel Material You color controls shown in the leak would let users choose any custom accent color directly, replacing a system that has generated palettes automatically from wallpaper since Android 12.

This isn't an article about whether the iPhone 18 Pro will change your life. The question worth answering is more practical: does buying a premium iPhone right now, four months before Apple's fall launch, make any financial sense? It doesn't, and the argument starts with something as simple as a calendar.

The smartphone industry's upgrade pitch for the past two years has leaned heavily on artificial intelligence and folding screens. Consumers, when surveyed directly, are largely unmoved by both. A smartphone upgrade survey covering foldables and AI features makes this gap between what gets marketed and what gets bought about as stark as data gets, and understanding it tells you more about the next upgrade cycle than any product launch keynote.

More than 15 years ago, Google introduced Chromebook, a laptop built for a cloud-first world that, as WIRED put it Tuesday, would come to dominate the US education market. Google is now making a structurally similar bet: that AI-native design and Android integration can define a new laptop category before Microsoft or Apple sets the terms.