The Latest from Gadget Hacks

A December 2025 Chromium commit adds support for chrome.tabGroups.get(), an extension method that lets developers query tab-group data, on a surface the commit itself calls "desktop Android." That term doesn't appear defined anywhere else in the supplied commit, so every claim in this piece about where it applies stays tied to that exact phrase (Chromium commit). It's a narrow addition to the list of Chrome for Android features extension developers might want, and it's worth being precise about...

"My webcam mic has background noise" sounds like one problem. It rarely is. Treat it instead as a troubleshooting question with several possible answers: is Windows processing the signal too aggressively, is the app running on top of that doing its own processing, is the device itself missing or misconfigured, or, in rarer cases, has something gone wrong with the whole system's audio and the webcam just happens to be where it showed up first? Working through how to fix webcam microphone...

Google has confirmed the Made by Google 2026 keynote for Wednesday, August 12, six days from now, kicking off at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT, notably later in the day than usual (9to5Google, last month). This is a practical guide to how to watch the Google Pixel 11 event: exactly when it starts, where the stream is expected to show up, and what Google and outside reporting expect to land on stage.

A viral claim swept through social media this year: starting in February 2027, EU law will force Apple, Samsung, and every other smartphone maker to bring back pop-off battery covers. It's not true, but the real story is more interesting than the myth (Annie Lab, 2 months ago).

Samsung set August 7, 2026, as the general availability date for the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, but some customers have seen estimated arrival dates extend well beyond launch day.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8? The honest answer depends on what you actually want from a foldable, because Samsung's most eye-catching phone in years is also its most opinionated. It's the first globally available phone to ship with a passport-shaped, ultra-wide design, and several reviewers who've spent real time with it sound won over. Being won over isn't the same as being sold, and at $1,899 the phone asks a lot of buyers before it gives much back.

Preliminary settings text and pre-launch reporting describe a narrow trigger for HiLight, the rumored back-of-phone light feature headed to Google's Pixel 11 Pro: calls from favorite contacts, not notifications in general. That distinction separates a revival of the old blinking-LED notification light from something built directly on top of how Google Contacts already organizes your people, specifically its Favorites designation (9to5Google, 5 days ago).

New code inside the Android Canary 2608 build suggests Google is considering a narrower set of Android lock screen Quick Settings restrictions than what its earlier work pointed toward. Rather than locking down nearly every tile, the strings now single out four: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Mobile Data, and Airplane Mode, according to an Android Authority code teardown. Flashlight and auto-rotate would stay usable without unlocking the phone, based on the same code.

Spotify closed the second quarter of 2026 with 300 million Premium subscribers, a first for any audio-streaming service, according to the company's Q2 2026 earnings release, published Tuesday. The same report showed gross margin climbing to an all-time high of 33.4%, up 193 basis points from 31.5% a year earlier (TechTimes). Spotify added 7 million net Premium subscribers during the quarter, a million ahead of its own guidance, pushing the total up 9% year over year, while operating income...

Apple released macOS Tahoe 26.6.1 on August 6, 2026, with a security advisory covering one Screen Sharing vulnerability. Apple identifies the flaw as CVE-2026-65400 and says an attacker on the network may be able to authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials. The company addressed the authentication issue with improved state management.

Samsung Galaxy S26 FE leaked images posted this week give the public a new unofficial look at the company's next Fan Edition phone. A Telegram account called "The Cipher Project" shared three photos showing the device in black, light green, and dark purple, according to 9to5Google.

Samsung has confirmed that Beta 5 of One UI 9 for the Galaxy S26 series is running behind schedule, with a company representative now targeting "next week" for release. The Galaxy S26 One UI 9 Beta 5 release date still has no specific day attached to it, but Samsung has at least explained the holdup.

Some Pixel owners are reporting laggy, stuttering gameplay in lightweight titles like Clash Royale and Brawl Stars after installing Android 17, with the slowdowns seemingly tied to restricted GPU performance (9to5Google, last month). It's a small story on its own, and the report doesn't pin the blame on any specific Pixel generation. But it's a useful reminder that Pixel 10 GPU performance issues never fully went away, despite months of driver updates aimed at fixing them.

The Google Pixel 11 hasn't launched yet, and leaked details about it are already complicating the case for buying one. Google has confirmed that portions of the lineup will cost more, and says the increase comes from higher memory costs, not tariffs (TechRepublic, last week). At the same time, leaked battery figures suggest the Pro and Pro XL models may actually pack smaller batteries than the Pixel 10 phones they replace (PhoneArena, last week). That's the real tension behind the question of...

Can MS Paint run Doom? Yes, technically, though the honest answer takes some unpacking. Doom is fully playable inside Microsoft Paint right now, complete with sound, music, and a frame rate that hits 35 fps at the game's native resolution (The Verge, today). The project is called DoomPaint, built by Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's CTO and a Technical Fellow (Windows Central, today). It loads the genuine shareware DOOM1.WAD file and sustains Doom's classic 35 tics-per-second cadence at...

TikTok videos on Disney Plus are becoming real, and Disney+ subscribers will start seeing that content inside the app within the next few months. The rollout stems from a global Disney Plus TikTok partnership the two companies announced yesterday, according to The Walt Disney Company's announcement and USA Today. Opt-in creators will have their short-form videos appear on both TikTok and Verts, the vertical-video feed built into the Disney+ mobile app.

Leave a phone on the dashboard of a parked car on an 80°F day, and the cabin around it will hit 114°F within 30 minutes. Give it an hour, and that number climbs past 130°F, according to Meqtor. Most phones are rated to operate only up to 95°F (Meqtor). Past that point, a phone isn't just uncomfortable, it's running well outside the range it was built for.

Google is testing a redesigned Android voice search button that turns the familiar mic icon into a swipeable toolbar with four modes: Search, AI Mode, Search Live, and Song Search, replacing what used to be a single-purpose transcription tool (9to5Google, reported this week; corroborated by Android Headlines).

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.

WhatsApp is rolling out a new settings panel that lets a subset of Mac beta testers set their own WhatsApp beta for Mac update schedule, picking between two release channels instead of taking whatever build the company pushes automatically, according to WABetaInfo and Hardware Upgrade this week.

Most people who see the word "Pro" attached to a piece of software assume it means faster, better, or more capable in some general sense. Run that logic on Windows 11 Home vs Pro, and it falls apart fast. The two editions are, in Engadget's words, "extremely similar," and the gap between them has nothing to do with speed, gaming performance, or day-to-day polish.

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...

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.

Xbox is reportedly preparing to launch its disc-to-digital program this month, converting physical game discs into account-bound digital licenses, according to Kotaku, which cited a leaked roadmap and publisher materials reviewed by The Verge, published yesterday. Microsoft has not confirmed the plan directly, and the reporting is built on leaked documents rather than an official statement.

Wikipedia's iOS app picked up a new Home Screen widget yesterday that does exactly one thing: open a random Wikipedia article the moment someone taps it. The Wikipedia iOS random articles widget shipped in Monday's iPhone and iPad update, joining the trending, featured, and Picture of the Day widgets the app already offers, 9to5Mac reported.

Samsung Electronics' phone business lost money in the same quarter its chip division posted the most profitable quarter in company history. The MX and Networks unit, which sells Galaxy phones, tablets, wearables and networking gear, reported an operating loss of KRW 0.7 trillion for the second quarter of 2026, even as the company's chip division posted KRW 89.2 trillion in operating profit and companywide operating profit hit an all-time high of KRW 89.5 trillion, according to Samsung's...

Should you restart your phone regularly? The honest answer is: probably less often than you think, and for different reasons than you've been told. Your phone is not a 2003 Windows PC. It doesn't need a Sunday-night reboot to stay functional. Modern smartphones are built to run for weeks at a time without issue, and the idea that routine restarts keep a phone healthy is, at best, weakly supported by the evidence.

Firefox 153 shipped last week with a security advisory that warrants immediate attention. MFSA 2026-68 rates the release's overall security impact as high, citing memory-corruption bugs in Firefox 152 that Mozilla says could, with sufficient effort, have been exploited to run arbitrary code. The update also delivers native HDR video playback on Windows 10 and 11 for qualifying hardware, QR code tab sharing, expanded PDF editing, and tighter extension permissions.

Apple CarPlay not working is rarely about a bad cable or spotty Wi-Fi, not at first anyway. The real diagnostic starting point is simpler: figure out whether the connection is wired or wireless, because the checks that follow are different for each (MacObserver, last year).

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.

As of this week, a Samsung Messages alternative app called Messages by OzarksMade is undergoing closed testing through Google Play, with a public launch set for 14 days after its testing Google Group hits 12 members and a post-launch price of $0.99. Treat that as a snapshot, not a finished product. Betas shift, thresholds get hit or missed, and pricing plans change before launch.

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.

Google's Pixel 11 series is set to be unveiled on August 12, continuing a design that looks a lot like last year's Pixel 10, according to a 9to5Google leak from three months ago. What's changing, if that leak holds up, is what's inside: a Tensor G6 chip built around a modem swap aimed at Pixel's most persistent weak spot. Pixel 11 battery life is the question hanging over this launch, and the leaked battery figures suggest Google isn't trying to answer it by simply making the cell bigger.

A console with a game disc inserted should, by most players' intuitions, be able to run that game. During Sunday night's Xbox outage, that assumption failed. The Xbox outage blocked disc games alongside digital titles for roughly 15 to 16 hours, not because the discs were unreadable, but because a backend licensing service that Xbox depends on stopped working.

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.

Galaxy devices running One UI 9 will wipe themselves after 13 failed lock screen attempts, a hard limit confirmed by a Samsung support document and reported by Android Authority today. Not a temporary lockout. Every photo, app, and setting on the device gets erased, accounts are signed out, and the phone returns to factory condition.

A Samsung device with model number SM-X848U appeared in the FCC database today, with Notebookcheck reporting that the identifier reportedly corresponds to the US 5G variant of the Galaxy Tab S12+, citing 91mobiles. That mapping comes from third-party leak reporting, not from the FCC filing itself. The listing arrived eighteen days after two related variants cleared Safety Korea certification, and together the three filings across two regulatory bodies point toward a fall 2026 release that...

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.

Warner Bros. Discovery yesterday began testing HBO Max Shorts with a limited group of U.S. iPhone users: a vertically scrollable feed of scenes, trailers, and bonus clips drawn entirely from the existing HBO Max library. The feature is not original programming. It is existing content reformatted for vertical mobile playback, designed to pull subscribers from a 30-second clip into a full episode or series. Broader availability across devices and markets is planned, with no timeline attached.

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.