The Latest from Gadget Hacks: Page 17

The Google Store is now selling a Samsung smartwatch. Yesterday, a "Devices from the Google Store" carousel surfaced in the US Play Store app, offering the Galaxy Watch 8 through the standard Google Store checkout flow, financing included, according to 9to5Google. The device sits alongside Google's own Pixel Watch 4 and Fitbit Air all three processed through the same checkout infrastructure Google uses for its Pixel lineup.

Id Software issued a statement this week to address the alarm spreading through the gaming community: the studio is still operational, cuts were distributed across teams, and the remaining staff is "about the same size" as when it made Doom (2016). The studio pointed to QuakeCon in August as a continuity signal. The id Software Xbox layoffs statement did not address the harder question: whether the studio can maintain its technical edge after losing, by multiple accounts, roughly half its...

Disney is internally discussing making some Disney+ content available without a subscription, according to two people familiar with the matter. Adam Smith, Disney's product and tech chief, raised the idea at a company streaming town hall this week, offering no timeline and no defined scope.

Samsung has raised its Galaxy S26 production target for July from 1 million units to 1.5 million, a 50% mid-cycle increase, Android Authority reported today, citing ET News. The revision covers both domestic and global allocations, suggesting the demand signal is broader than any single market or promotion. Two things appear to be driving the Galaxy S26 sales surge: an aggressive promotional campaign that reportedly tripled sales during its active window, and growing consumer conviction that...

Bigme announced the Hibreak Dual 2 in late June 2026, roughly two months after its predecessor failed to reach customers. The original HiBreak Dual was listed for preorder starting at $359, per The Verge, but available reporting shows no retail release followed. Bigme subsequently issued a public "reflection and apology" acknowledging the design's shortcomings, according to Heyup. The Bigme Hibreak Dual 2 is the company's answer to those criticisms and the core hardware change is significant...

The July 2026 Pixel update began rolling out Tuesday, marking Google's first monthly patch since Android 17 launched last month. The headline fix addresses a bug that could leave devices stuck in a restart loop, unable to load Android at all. A separate fix covers apps unexpectedly closing or refusing to launch across every supported device.

The Android Auto media player redesign that spent months in limited testing is now rolling out to the platform's most popular apps. At the same time, a separate beta feature lets drivers swipe between active media sessions directly from the dashboard. The two changes are distinct, but Google's latest developer documentation points in the same direction: a media layer where the platform controls more of the experience.

Samsung is pitching the Galaxy S26 Ultra as more than a faster flagship. Its biggest selling point is Galaxy AI: tools that can suggest actions, summarize context, edit images, screen calls, and hand off limited tasks across apps. Some of those features are useful now. Others still need the right apps, accounts, permissions, and real-world reliability to be worth the Ultra price.

Strings pulled from Android Canary build 2607 suggest Google is planning a toggle to turn off the Android Halo status bar icon, buried inside a new "Status bar" section in Android Settings, according to a teardown published by Android Authority this week. Neither the section nor the toggle is live. No working UI exists, and Google has not confirmed any of this.

Some market watchers expect a sharp decline in sub-$400 shipments this year, according to Omdia data reported by Android Authority. The cause is a memory supply crunch driven by AI infrastructure demand, and the segment taking the worst of it is precisely the one with the least room to absorb it.

The Samsung Odyssey OLED G5 (G50SF) has dropped to roughly $340 in the US, a street price that simply didn't exist for QD-OLED gaming monitors until this year. That matters most for PC gamers running DisplayPort, who get the full spec sheet. Console users and anyone locked to HDMI run into a bandwidth ceiling the panel can't clear over that connection. The deal is real; it's just not for everyone.

The Strava Events tab went live yesterday, letting users search for nearby races, group runs, rides, and club meetups inside the app, then move toward a training plan through the app's Runna integration. Strava says the tab connects race discovery with Runna-powered training plans, per the company's press release, timed to what it calls peak running season.

A new leak suggests the cheapest Pixel 11 in Europe will cost €100 more than last year's cheapest Pixel 10, and the Google Pixel 11 price increase story may have less to do with a new MSRP than with the quiet removal of the 128GB model.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

A dataset collected from 147 Deaf signers using smartphone cameras has produced the largest ASL fingerspelling recognition dataset ever assembled, and the results carry real implications for what Gboard sign language recognition could eventually look like. No such feature has been announced. Nothing in the available evidence connects the research to a Google product plan.

No July Android Canary build has been confirmed yet, but the program has shipped on a monthly cadence since Google launched it last summer, Android Authority noted. If that rhythm holds, Android Canary 2607 is imminent. The three builds documented in detail since March already tell a coherent story about where Google is taking Pixel's system UI and that story is worth understanding before the next one lands.

A documented bug in the Google TV Streamer causes the device to pair itself to a different remote than the one it shipped with, leaving the original unresponsive for no obvious reason. Google acknowledged this specific failure and committed to a software fix, per Android Police. That acknowledgment is now more than a year old, and no public confirmation of a shipped fix has appeared.

Apple's free iCloud tier has sat at 5GB for years. As Macworld put it, that limit "felt stingy a decade ago and certainly isn't enough now." For most iPhone owners with any real photo library, hitting that ceiling isn't a surprise. It's a subscription prompt dressed up as a warning.

Spotify is rolling out new listening filters for Release Radar, the weekly discovery playlist that reaches nearly 9 million listeners every Friday. The controls let users steer their recommendations by genre or toward unfamiliar artists, giving them a new way to influence a playlist that has largely been algorithm-controlled.

If you're trying to watch The Open 2026 without missing a shot, here's the short version: USA Network carries live coverage every round, NBC joins on the weekend, and Peacock is the streaming layer that connects all of it. No single cable channel covers the whole event, but the rights structure is more logical than it first appears once you understand which platform owns which window.

Samsung is reportedly considering cutting its free double-storage pre-order benefit by half for the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold8, Z Fold8 Ultra, and Z Flip8, according to industry sources cited by Chosun. Buyers who would previously have received the 512GB model at no extra cost when ordering the 256GB variant will now pay roughly half the normal storage premium. If confirmed, it would mark a broader reduction than Samsung's recent region-specific changes to the promotion.

Samsung has pushed the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Flip 6 July 2026 security update to devices across Africa, Asia, and Europe, closing 57 vulnerabilities in a patch that carries no new features and no UI changes. Five of those flaws are rated critical. According to Android Headlines, the rollout is staged, so availability varies by model, region, and carrier.

Samsung's rumored open-ear earbuds won't be sharing a stage with the Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Watch 9. ETNews, citing industry sources, reports that the Samsung Galaxy Buds Able launch timeline has shifted to Q4 2026, with October the most probable window, as the company continues to fine-tune the product, per Android Headlines. That rules out Galaxy Unpacked, which had looked like a plausible debut just weeks ago. Samsung has not publicly confirmed any of this.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Google launched Magic Cue as a headline feature of the Pixel 10 last August, describing it as "proactive support, tightly woven across your phone," per the launch announcement. Two months ago, the company introduced Gemini Intelligence as its new label for proactive AI across Android devices, using language that maps closely onto what Magic Cue already does. Google has not announced a rename. But taken together, the product descriptions, the rollout roadmap, and Google's track record with AI...

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Run powercfg /hibernate on in an elevated terminal, then go to Control Panel and check the Hibernate box under power button settings. That's it. Many guides stop after the command or the Control Panel step this one covers both, in order, with the gotchas called out where they matter.

Netflix ended 2025 with 325 million global subscribers, $45 billion in revenue, and a 29.5% operating margin, per its annual filing with the SEC. Those are numbers most traditional media companies would trade their entire legacy for. Yet the idea of Netflix becoming cable is no longer just a metaphor. It is visible in the product roadmap, in the acquisition pipeline, and in the engagement metrics that have been keeping executives up at night.

You cannot add an external user to a Google Chat group message. That limit is unchanged. According to Google documentation cited for this article, Google has made generally available: guest accounts that bring non-Google users into Chat spaces, shared Drive files, and Meet calls, all inside your organization's security perimeter and without a full Workspace license.

Neowin reported that Microsoft has added a registry-based policy giving IT admins direct Windows 11 SSO prompts and admin control on managed devices. When enabled, the policy automatically accepts single sign-on consent dialogs on users' behalf, turning a manual confirmation step into an automatically approved SSO action. The eligibility window is tight: Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 devices only, Entra ID-managed only, and a supported update containing the policy must already be installed.

Six Pixel 11 model numbers have appeared in FCC certification records, confirming MediaTek modem hardware across the lineup and ending the Pixel line's reliance on Samsung modems since the Tensor-powered Pixel 6 generation.

Leaked renders of what appears to be Samsung's next flagship tablet surfaced this week showing a notch cut into the top edge of the display. No Samsung Galaxy Tab S or Tab A model has previously shipped with a notch, which makes this a genuine departure from the company's established design language. The renders have not been independently verified, and Samsung has not commented.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has already launched. The Pixel 11 Pro XL is still months away, known mostly through leaks, CAD renders, and a Telegram channel. That asymmetry matters before anything else: comparing the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL vs Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra isn't a traditional head-to-head so much as a weighing of a known quantity against an ambitious pre-launch signal.

Samsung launched the Samsung Galaxy Card on Monday, its first-ever credit card in the United States, issued by Barclays US Consumer Bank on the Visa network. Public applications open July 22. A limited early-access window for select eligible customers began Monday, though Samsung has not specified what criteria determine eligibility.

A Bigme HiBreak Dual 2 competitor arrived within days of Bigme's Kickstarter launch: a new Hisense e-paper phone with a detachable color LCD. Hisense had recently debuted its own E Ink phone with a fundamentally different design choice: its secondary color LCD detaches magnetically. That single difference defines the central question worth asking right now: should an E Ink display be a permanent part of a phone, or something users can choose when they want it?

Spotify recently launched "Talk to Spotify," a conversational AI feature that lets Premium subscribers find, control, and learn about music, podcasts, and audiobooks through back-and-forth chat. The Spotify Talk to Spotify AI chatbot sets itself apart from generic music assistants by drawing on each user's actual listening history, not just catalog knowledge, when generating responses, according to Spotify's announcement.

Google confirmed this week it is pushing a patch for the Android Auto 17.2 crash fix that users have been waiting on since early July. The fix covers both the stable and beta channels, and the company has published exact build numbers so users can confirm whether their device is protected. The update is in staged rollout now, per Android Authority and Android Headlines.

Samsung Health is warning users that withdrawing consent for AI training will cut off cloud sync and trigger deletion of previously synced health data, except data Samsung is legally required to retain. The toggle began reaching users this week, and the core question the Samsung Health AI training opt-out raises is one Samsung has not publicly answered: does "deleted" refer to your entire health history, or only the copy Samsung stores through account sync?

WhatsApp has started rolling out its Liquid Glass redesign to the Mac app, making Mac the last major Apple platform to receive the update. The translucent visual overhaul is the obvious draw, but the changes with the most practical effect on daily use are structural: a privacy gap that left sensitive chats exposed on shared Macs is being closed, and navigation that required too much guesswork has been rebuilt from scratch.

Google has opened a limited Pixel Care+ enrollment window for U.S. owners of eligible Pixel 9 and Pixel 10 series phones who missed the standard 60-day signup period, Google announced on its blog this week. The window closes August 2. Android Police called it a rare second chance for owners who never enrolled and the word "rare" is doing real work there, since Google has not offered a comparable reopening on any announced schedule.