The Latest from Gadget Hacks: Page 12

The Apple smart home display release date has already slipped past two internal targets, and the latest word from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman only widens the window rather than narrowing it. Apple's first screen-equipped home device remains on track for a launch before the end of 2026, Gurman reported last week, per MacRumors. That's a looser timeframe than the September target cited in earlier coverage, and it lands in a different window than the October-to-early-2027 range Cult of Mac reported...

Scroll through enough short-form video, and it starts to look like a documented cultural pivot: teenagers ditching smartphones for flip phones, treating a five-minute conversation without checking a screen like a personal achievement, filming themselves making prolonged eye contact as if it were a rediscovered skill.

The most common mistake people make when a phone breaks is comparing the repair quote to the price of a brand-new phone instead of a realistic used or refurbished replacement. That comparison almost always makes replacing look better than it actually is, according to The Repair Plus. Once that comparison is fixed, the answer to "should I repair or replace my phone" usually comes down to three things: whether the fault is isolated, whether the phone still has real software-support life left, and...

How to Charge Your Phone Without a Charger: Full Guide

watchOS 27's new Siri app can save and continue chats for the first time, but Apple Watch doesn't hand you an obvious way to pick a thread back up. There's no button, no swipe prompt, nothing that mirrors how the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions handle it, according to 9to5Mac. A workaround exists and it works, but whether any of it applies to your Watch and iPhone pairing depends on a stack of eligibility rules Apple has only partly documented.

Open Google Clock on two different phones and you might not recognize it as the same app. The redesign rolled out across Android last year, but the new timer UI that actually changes how a running timer behaves, not just how it looks, has reached only Pixel owners running Android 16 (9to5Google; 9to5Google).

Your Galaxy Watch can estimate body fat, skeletal muscle, and other body composition metrics in seconds. That sounds useful, especially if you're trying to lose fat or track changes in your fitness, but the number on your wrist isn't the same thing as a clinical measurement.

Waze points are mainly a visible score: something to check on a profile and compare against other Wazers, not something to spend. Open a Waze profile and progress information shows up in two different places: a point total below the username, and a level plus a set of badges filed under a separate tab called Achievements. It's tempting to assume a formula ties all of it together, so many points per report, a badge every few hundred miles, but the Help pages reviewed for this article don't...

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).

YouTube is testing a visual tweak to its double-tap skip gesture on Android that shows, in red, exactly how much time a viewer just jumped, according to Android Authority, which spotted the change recently. The gesture itself, double-tapping either edge of the video to skip forward or back, isn't new. What's changed is that it now surfaces the scrub bar and marks the skipped span on the timeline, instead of leaving viewers to guess where they landed.

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.

Galaxy Z Fold 8 owners are posting screenshots on Samsung's community forum of a home screen gone sideways: icons overlapping, apps sliding past their assigned grid spots, some landing in the gap between the inner display's two panes. One owner said an icon got stuck there entirely, impossible to select or drag back (Android Authority, today). If you're trying to figure out how to fix Galaxy Z Fold 8 app icon misalignment, there's a specific software update worth checking before you waste time...

Google says Gemini for Home can now handle combined voice commands that pack a media action and a smart-home action into one sentence, including requests such as 'turn off the lights and stop the music.

Microsoft will begin switching on Memory Integrity, along with Virtualization-based Security where it isn't already running, on eligible Windows 11 machines through next month's Patch Tuesday update. That's according to Peter Waxman, a group program manager at Microsoft, whose comments on the rollout were reported by The Verge yesterday, with the October timing confirmed by OC3D yesterday.

Two reviews of the same phone landed within a day of each other this week, and they read like they're describing different products. MakeUseOf calls the Pixel 11 Pro Fold "the Google foldable I've always wanted", while The Verge says it "feels like the end of an era." Both verdicts hold up. They're just answering different questions, and untangling why is the point of this Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold review.

Xbox Insiders testing the platform's new disc-to-digital feature have reported that it also issues digital licences for games long removed from the Xbox Store. Testers cite successful claims for Deadpool, delisted in 2017, and Minecraft: Story Mode, delisted in 2019, within days of the feature going live. The supplied reporting does not identify an official Microsoft compatibility list, so the Xbox disc-to-digital compatible games list circulating among fans right now is built entirely from...

Mozilla added three new features to Firefox Smart Window on Tuesday, its AI-powered browsing mode, aimed at cutting down the friction of juggling tabs, searches and browsing history. The update brings live web answers with cited sources through a new partnership with Exa, smarter tab organization that groups related tabs and kills duplicates, and visual previews of browsing history, according to Mozilla's launch post.

The Pixel 11 Tensor G6 TPU upgrade matters most in the moments when a feature can run locally instead of waiting on Google's servers. Google says the chip delivers 50% more compute power and runs up to 3.5x faster in certain workloads, a figure that's easy to overlook next to the phone's 120x zoom lens and its Gemini-powered camera tricks (Android Authority, published today). The TPU is one of the factors behind both of those flashier features, working alongside a new image processor and...

Google Messages RCS issues have repeatedly shown up in two well-documented shapes: a "Setting up" screen that never finishes verifying a phone number, or a "carrier not supported" label that replaces RCS chat features outright.

iOS 27's Shared Albums update fixes a problem baked into the feature for years: shared photos and videos will no longer get compressed the moment they leave a personal library. The tradeoff is that new Shared Albums now count against the owner's iCloud storage, according to MacRumors and Trusted Reviews, reversing a setup that let people share thousands of images without touching their plan. The change is rolling out now, with iOS 27 in public beta ahead of a full release expected alongside new...

Netflix's July shareholder letter contained a number that cuts against a decade of streaming-industry assumptions: revenue grew 13% year over year to $12.6 billion, while member viewing hours for the first half of 2026 grew just 2%. The two figures don't cover identical periods, but the gap is wide enough to raise a real question at the heart of any credible Netflix monetization strategy: if people aren't watching dramatically more, what's actually driving the revenue?

A Samsung Galaxy S27 charging speed leak suggests Samsung's next standard flagships won't charge any faster than the ones sold today. Two unannounced Samsung model numbers have appeared in China's 3C certification database with charging profiles that top out at approximately 25W and 45W.

Samsung has already confirmed that its next flagship tablet generation is coming in 2026. What it has not confirmed is the date now appearing across Galaxy Tab S12 leaks: October 7.

Google calls the Tensor G6 its "fastest, most powerful chip yet" (Google Blog, last week). A leaked Geekbench listing for the Pixel 11 Pro XL tells a less flattering story, showing the chip trailing Samsung's Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S26 Ultra on the same test (Notebookcheck, today). Neither claim is wrong. The benchmark doesn't validate or refute Google's broader pitch; it measures one narrow slice of what the chip does.

Disney sues FCC over ABC broadcast licenses in a fight that boils down to one contested question: is an early license review ordinary oversight, or retaliation wearing a bureaucrat's hat?

Google's Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL launched Wednesday at $1,099 and $1,299, prices Android Authority describes as higher than last year's models (Android Authority, this week). Pre-launch reporting had pegged that increase at $100 over the Pixel 10 Pro line (The Verge, nearly two weeks ago), and the confirmed launch prices match that figure exactly. The base RAM also dropped: 12GB on the entry Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL, down from 16GB across every Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL configuration last...

Google raised the price of its standard Pixel by $100 this year, and Engadget still recommends it without hesitation. In its Google Pixel 11 review, Engadget called the phone "a lot of phone for a little more money" and handed it a 9.2 out of 10, noting it "didn't change a ton, but is still one of the best smartphones on the market."

Samsung has reportedly started development on two wide-format foldables targeting the Galaxy Z9 generation, reportedly planned for 2027, a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 successor story that's already getting oversimplified in the retelling. The claim traces to South Korean outlet ETNews, relayed by Android Central and Android Authority. "Fold8" is Samsung's own shorthand for the phone most reviewers call the Galaxy Z Fold 8. Of the two devices described, only one carries a specific defining trait: an...

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 reached store shelves on Friday, September 18, but the feature drawing the most scrutiny didn't arrive with them. Siri Recap, the new opt-in conversation summarizer, arrives in beta later this year with no confirmed date attached, The Next Web reported. Once enabled, it's designed to listen to conversations throughout the day and quietly summarize them, and Apple says the raw audio behind those summaries is inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user,...

Microsoft announced its new Xbox disc-to-digital program on August 26, with testing opening to Xbox Insiders on August 31. The feature lets owners of "most" Xbox One and Xbox Series X discs unlock a digital copy of a game simply by inserting the disc and launching it.

Titanium sounds like the obvious upgrade when a phone maker puts it on a spec sheet, but the metal running around your phone's edge does less than the marketing implies. In the titanium vs aluminum phone frame debate, titanium generally gives the frame more resistance to bending and permanent denting, though the finish still decides how scratches show up day to day. Aluminum tends to win on heat, manufacturing cost, and repair pricing. Neither metal by itself decides whether your phone survives...

Samsung's new Galaxy Z8 lineup set a preorder record in South Korea, and the standard Fold8, not the pricier Ultra, carried most of it. That's the story behind the Samsung Galaxy Z8 preorder record set this week: Samsung said the lineup drew more than 1.44 million preorders in South Korea during the seven-day window that ended Monday, Aug. 3, the highest preorder total for any Galaxy phone the company has ever released, foldable or not, according to The Korea Times.

Press a thumb against the back of a Galaxy Watch 8 for five seconds, and the watch hands back a number between 0 and 100. Samsung calls it the Antioxidant Index, and knowing how Galaxy Watch 8 measures antioxidant levels changes how you should read that score (Engadget reported this week).

Search "how to get Duolingo hearts back and remove ads" and you'll find posts promising a hidden switch or workaround. There isn't one documented in Duolingo's own materials. Duolingo has been phasing out Hearts in favor of a resource system called Energy, and ad-free access shows up in the company's public consumer materials as a subscription benefit.

Samsung has completed multiyear supply agreements with five major data-center customers, including Amazon and Meta, and is nearing deals with five more, according to the Seoul Economic Daily and the Korea Herald.

A red dotted line on Google Maps combines two separate visual characteristics that may have different explanations, and none of the sources reviewed for this piece document what happens when both appear together on the same stretch of road. If red shows up while Google Maps traffic information is active, it usually means heavy traffic. The dotted pattern is less certain: the evidence here documents dashed styling on at least one hiking and biking path, but it doesn't add up to a universal...

Most of the coverage around Google's new flagship is fixated on the Tensor G6 chip. That's fair; it's a real chip with real upgrades.

Galaxy S26 owners testing One UI 9 finally have a new build to install after nearly a month without a major beta release. Reports of One UI 9 Beta 5 began appearing on August 12, with the update reaching Galaxy S26-series testers in India.

Is Disney Plus putting ads on ad-free plans? Not in the way most subscribers are picturing.

Samsung's latest foldable lineup has broken a Galaxy preorder record in South Korea that had stood since 2019. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold8, and Galaxy Z Flip8 drew more than 1.44 million preorders during a seven-day reservation period, surpassing the roughly 1.38 million recorded by the Galaxy Note10 series seven years earlier.