The Latest from Gadget Hacks: Page 7

To find a lost Android phone with Google Find Hub, open the Find Hub app on another device or go to android.com/find, then sign in with the Google Account used on the missing phone. That's the fast version. Google's Find My Device service is now called Find Hub. The rebrand expanded the service beyond device finding, with features for locating people and a growing range of compatible accessories.

"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...

At roughly $1,300 apiece, the iPhone 18 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra make price almost irrelevant at the starting line. The real choice comes down to how differently the two phones approach cameras, battery life, software, design, and the features you'll use long after the novelty wears off.

Google is rolling out a Gemini feature that saves where people stash things they rarely use, so they can ask for the spot back months later. The company's own example: tell Gemini where you put your passport, and Gemini will save the location.

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...

Starting tomorrow, Thursday, August 6, T-Mobile customers will be able to spread the cost of a new phone, including taxes and activation fees, across 36 months instead of the previously available 24-month term, with well-qualified buyers paying nothing at checkout, according to WebProNews. The T-Mobile 36-month phone financing plan actually comes in two distinct versions, and the gap between them decides whether a customer walks out paying $0 or simply pays less than before.

A trial-production leak claims the OnePlus 16 packs a dual-cell battery described as having roughly 9,000mAh-equivalent capacity alongside a 200MP camera, but the picture is messier than the headline numbers suggest. Android Authority and My Mobile India both published details on the OnePlus 16 200MP camera and 9000mAh battery leak within a day of each other. The two reports describe the same trial-production claims, so treat them as one leak chain repeated twice, not independent confirmation.

This guide walks through how to update GPU drivers in Windows 11: when to let Windows Update handle it, when to install a manufacturer's package instead, and when Device Manager is actually the right tool for the job rather than the default one.

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...

Flagship launches often foregrounded the processor: bigger cores, faster benchmarks, a new chip name printed across the marketing slide. In 2026, the component actually straining a flagship's budget isn't the chip doing the thinking. It's the chip doing the remembering.

MapQuest, a mapping service some people had assumed was defunct, according to PCMag, is now the No. 1 free app on Apple's US App Store and the top free navigation app on Google Play in the US, per BGR and PCMag. The surge traces back to a dispute over a lake's name: after President Trump signed an August 27 executive order directing federal agencies to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" amid a breakdown in trade talks with Canada, MapQuest publicly refused to make the change, according to BGR.

Google's two launch posts for the Pixel 11 lineup repeat the same unadorned line: Pixel Search on the Pixel 11 devices is "way more powerful than it used to be." Neither post explains why. The phones carrying that claim went on sale Thursday, so buyers now encounter a Google-documented search claim the company has not explained.

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.

Several Pixel owners say Recorder has captured audio normally but then failed to show the saved recording afterward, and Google still hasn't explained why.

If you need to know how to clear cache on Roku TV, the fastest method is a restart triggered by a hidden remote sequence: Home × 5, Up × 1, Rewind × 2, Fast Forward × 2. Your screen goes dark for 15 to 30 seconds, then comes back. Done.

TechCrunch's hands-on verdict on the rebuilt Siri AI is blunt: the assistant finally works the way Apple promised, though the review reads more like relief than excitement, closer to a bug fix than a breakthrough (TechCrunch's hands-on review). Scientific American frames the wait differently, noting that Apple has promised, and repeatedly delayed, this more proactive Siri for two years (Scientific American). Whichever framing feels right comes down to something more basic than opinion: can you...

Trading in an old phone with Google Store can turn a drawer relic into real money toward a new Pixel. At the Pixel 11 launch, Google's trade-in program offered $150 for a Pixel 4a and $200 for a 2019 iPhone 11, numbers that catch owners off guard who figured those phones weren't worth listing anywhere. The U.S. trade-in ceiling also climbed from about $800 at the Pixel 10 launch to $1,000 this year, with top-tier phones like a Galaxy Z Fold 7 or iPhone 17 Pro Max eligible for $900 to $1,000.

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.

Google Drive now supports timestamped comments on videos, letting reviewers pin feedback to the exact frame it applies to instead of writing a note and hoping the recipient finds the right spot in the timeline, according to Digital Trends and The Verge. The feature is live now for Google Workspace accounts, Workspace Individual subscriptions, and personal Google accounts, and it arrives switched on by default, according to ThreeVector.

The instinctive fix everyone reaches for is "just use the Roku app." That works, but only for one specific situation, and if you're trying to connect Roku to Wi-Fi without a remote right now, it's probably not the one you're in. Roku's own support documentation is blunt about this: the mobile app cannot detect a Roku that's offline after a reset or during first-time setup.

Most people assume a TV without Bluetooth means a trip to the electronics store. It doesn't. Bluetooth has become mainstream in most televisions now, but that's only half the picture: plenty of older or specialty sets, like a favorite pair of wired headphones or a plasma TV still hanging on in the den, never got the feature and won't get it through a software update either, according to Wirecutter/NYT reporting from last month. Figuring out how to add Bluetooth to a TV without Bluetooth usually...

Oppo is reportedly testing two 200MP rear cameras for the Find X10 Pro, including a 200MP main camera and a 200MP telephoto. A June 2026 leak attributed to Chinese tipster Digital Chat Station identifies the main camera as an unannounced Samsung ISOCELL HPC with a 1/1.3-inch optical format, alongside a 3MP multispectral sensor.

Spotify expanded its Playlist Notes feature yesterday so listeners can attach short written context to podcast episodes and audiobooks, not just songs, inside playlists they own or collaborate on (Spotify Newsroom, yesterday). The update also introduces a separate, more exclusive layer: Editor Notes, where Spotify's own curators explain why a track made the cut on flagship playlists (Spotify Newsroom, yesterday).

Tom's Guide walked away unimpressed with the Pixel 11 overall, but the outlet singled out one feature it called "genuinely useful": Magic Capture, a camera mode that records a short clip and lets AI pick the best still photos so users stop guessing when to hit the shutter (Tom's Guide, two weeks ago). Anyone figuring out how to use Magic Capture on Pixel 11 will find the basic setup simple, but getting the most out of it means enabling one setting in advance and thinking about your connection...

Oukitel is heading into IFA 2026 with three rugged phones that don't just carry bigger batteries. They build in a night-vision camera, a fire starter, and a gaming cooling rig, treating the phone itself as a chassis for gear you'd normally pack separately. The headline device, the Oukitel WP70 Ultra rugged phone, packs a 16,000mAh silicon-carbon battery that Oukitel calls the slimmest in its class, Gadgets 360 reports.

Google has locked in the Pixel 11 launch event for Wednesday, August 12, in New York City, with an unusually late keynote start at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT. That's six days from now. The details come from invitations sent to The Verge and 9to5Google about a month ago.

Apple's iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB, and pricing is expected to climb to roughly $3,000 at the top storage tier, according to Gurman's reporting (Apple, this week; MacRumors, this week). Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 sits close behind at a reported $1,900 (9to5Google, 6 weeks ago). At that price, "it's a foldable" stops being an excuse for missing features on either side, which raises the obvious question: which iPhone Duo features Android foldables should copy, and which Apple claims...

Google hasn't shipped the Pixel 11 yet, and a leaker has already surfaced the internal codename for the chip that comes after it. The Google Pixel 12 Tensor G7 leak traces back to a single Telegram post: the chip is reportedly called "LaJolla" (Android Authority, earlier this year). That's it. That's the leak.

Apple's iOS 27, currently moving through beta testing ahead of a fall release, brings a broad set of improvements to Messages.

Pocket Casts does not currently support Apple TV. That is the last documented position from the company, stated on its support page two and a half years ago, with a note that support may come in the future. Nothing in the app's current App Store listing changes that picture. What has changed is the platform Pocket Casts would be entering: Apple announced last month that it is rebuilding Apple Podcasts on tvOS from scratch, adding video playback, optional 4K creator support, and in-show episode...

Google began rolling out the Pixel Watch 5's first software update on September 1, moving the build from CD5A.260611.008 to CP3A.260905.002 while keeping Wear OS 7 based on Android 17. The changelog for this Pixel Watch 5 first update headlines Gemini features like offline AI, Gemini Personalization, and improved GPS route accuracy, but there's a catch worth knowing before you go hunting for something new on your wrist.

Search for how to install macOS on an iPad, and Sidecar dominates the results, Apple's feature for mirroring an actual Mac's screen onto the tablet. A project called Virtual Mac on iPad claims something different: it boots real macOS, the actual kernel and userspace, directly on the iPad's own silicon. The project's repository puts its ambition plainly. People have wanted to run macOS on an iPad for more than a decade, the maintainers write, and "today, that dream comes true."

Samsung confirmed Modern Warfare 4 32:9 support yesterday, announcing that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will officially support the 32:9 super-ultrawide aspect ratio at launch (Samsung Global Newsroom, yesterday). The confirmation arrived as part of a broader partnership naming Samsung the official TV, monitor, soundbar and Wi-Fi speaker partner for the game, which also brings Samsung's HDR10+ Gaming format into the title (Samsung Global Newsroom, yesterday; Digital Trends, yesterday).

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 crease is far less visible than on earlier Fold models, according to hands-on reviews published last week, and that alone has helped tip a head-to-head reader poll decisively in the phone's favor. In a survey of more than 1,000 readers, Android Authority found the standard Fold 8 took 59% of the vote to the pricier Fold 8 Ultra's roughly 26% (Android Authority, last week). But a redesigned hinge and a flatter screen don't automatically answer the question that has...

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...

Search for a "Samsung Galaxy S26 $200 Amazon gift card" and you'll find a description that pairs that credit with what it calls Samsung's newest midrange phone. Samsung's supplied launch materials list the Galaxy S26 at $899.99, the S26+ at $1,099.99, and the S26 Ultra at $1,299.99, according to Samsung Newsroom. Those releases don't identify the lineup as a midrange series, so that framing doesn't trace back to Samsung's own announcements.

Microsoft is moving Teams and Copilot web traffic to new addresses this month, and organizations with locked-down firewalls could lose legitimate access if network teams don't update their allowlists first, Computerworld reported on September 11.

Google has confirmed a Pixel 11 static noise video fix is on the way, addressing the crackling and static bursts that have been marring recordings on the Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL. In a statement to 9to5Google, the company said it has "identified the cause and developed a software fix that will rollout to users in the coming weeks via the Camera app."

T-Mobile and Verizon opened preorders for the Pixel 11 lineup on the same day, and both are advertising offers that sound like a free phone. Not all of them actually are. T-Mobile's top Google Pixel 11 carrier deals are device discounts tied to which plan a customer is on and whether they trade in a phone. Verizon's flagship switcher offer bundles a device credit into a specific 48-month plan structure. Read the fine print carelessly and the two "free phone" headlines start to look...

Uninstall a Microsoft Store app, wait for the progress bar to finish, then check your storage. The number barely moves. If you're wondering why Windows 11 storage does not change after uninstalling apps, the answer depends on where the app came from: MSIX-packaged apps and traditionally installed desktop software can fail to free up space for two entirely different reasons. For a Store app, that result can be normal even when removal from your account went through without a hitch.