The Latest from Gadget Hacks: Page 8

Samsung has reportedly ordered motherboards for a Galaxy S27 Ultra Exynos 2700 variant, according to MoneyToday. If that plan survives to launch, it would mark the first time an Exynos chip has powered Samsung's Ultra flagship since the Galaxy S22 Ultra in 2022, a stretch covering four straight years of Snapdragon-only Ultra models (SamMobile).

Apple's long-rumored Home Hub display is shaping up to be less a single shared screen and more a device that can serve personal content depending on who's using it.

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.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2026 shipped fixes for 973 vulnerabilities, including 113 rated Critical, making it the largest Patch Tuesday on record, according to Automox. Cisco Talos counts the same 973 CVEs and 113 Critical bugs. Rapid7 puts Microsoft's own tally slightly higher, at 974, and counted 999 vulnerabilities total once it added 25 non-Microsoft CVEs reviewed in the same release. None of the three publications explain the small gap between their counts.

Samsung's One UI 9 rollout is moving beyond its newest Galaxy phones, giving owners of last year's flagships a better idea of where they stand. The stable update began expanding to the Galaxy S26 series on Sept. 16 after debuting on the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Z Fold8, and Z Flip8.

A Google Play Store listing for an app called Desktop Camera now describes a finished interface built for tablets, laptops, and desktop-style screens, naming touch, mouse, and keyboard input directly, Squaredtech reported this week. That update is the latest development in the Googlebook Desktop Camera app leak, and it marks a real shift from the placeholder version of the app that surfaced earlier this year. It's evidence that Google is preparing a camera app for larger, desktop-style screens,...

Ask readers interested in Pixel foldables whether Google's hardware still measures up, and the results are divided. In a poll of 2,825 voters, 39% named hardware as the thing that "doesn't keep up," the single largest response, while 24% still credited software as Google's advantage, 28% said they'd wait for the Pixel 11 Pro Fold before deciding, and a smaller 9% said they're waiting for Apple's foldable instead. That's not a verdict on whether Google Pixel foldable phones are worth buying....

Ask three different people what "Microsoft Copilot" does, and there's a good chance you'll get three different answers, and all of them will be partially right. That's the problem. Microsoft Copilot isn't one product. It's a family of surfaces, and each one sees a different slice of your data. Mixing up Copilot Chat with Microsoft 365 Copilot, or a Teams meeting assistant with the standalone Researcher agent, is a common reason people asking how to use Microsoft Copilot for research end up with...

Since the October 29, 2025 closing, Disney has controlled a subsidiary that used to be a scrappy sports-streaming challenger: FuboTV. The Fubo Hulu Live TV deal folded Disney's Hulu + Live TV service into Fubo's corporate structure, creating a combined company with nearly 6 million subscribers overnight and, by UBS estimates cited in Disney's own announcement, the sixth-largest pay-TV provider in the country (Disney investor relations). It also handed Disney 70% of the combined entity's...

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold cracked along both antenna lines next to its hinge during a bend test, and its outer display popped clean off the frame, Trusted Reviews and Android Authority reported. The test comes from Zack Nelson, who runs the YouTube channel JerryRigEverything and put the phone through a series of scratch, flame, dust and bend tests, according to Trusted Reviews.

Samsung's latest 200MP image sensor offers an early look at where its smartphone camera technology is headed, but it is not yet the Galaxy S27 Ultra's confirmed camera sensor.

A developer known as busung has released an open-source tool called the Root My Galaxy app, which claims to grant temporary root access to select Snapdragon-powered Galaxy flagships without unlocking the bootloader or tripping Samsung's Knox e-fuse, according to an Android Authority report published today. The developer describes the process as one-click and says it leaves user data untouched, per the same report. The conventional route to persistent Samsung root involves bootloader changes,...

Samsung has found a Tim Cook willing to endorse the Galaxy Z Fold 8 — just not the one formerly in charge of Apple. The company's New Zealand campaign stars Tim Cook of Palmerston North, a man who shares the former Apple CEO's name and bears a striking resemblance to him.

WhatsApp's in-chat search feature for iPhone would let users jump straight into a chat's search mode with a single tap, skipping the detour through chat info the app currently requires. The feature was discovered in WhatsApp beta for iOS 26.31.10.70 on TestFlight, but WhatsApp has not enabled it for beta testers and has not announced a release date.

iOS 27 shipped September 14, 2026, as build 24A437, and Apple's support documentation lists the new Apple Intelligence capabilities by platform. Counting Siri AI separately and counting Apple's three Intelligent Accessibility subfeatures individually produces 20 entries for the purposes of this article. Updating doesn't hand every iPhone owner all 20 iOS 27 Apple Intelligence features at once, though. Hardware, storage, language, age, and region each gate access on their own, and some entries...

Google-backed researchers at the University of California, San Diego are building a 2,000-device computing cluster from retired Pixel smartphones, with the full system due to launch this fall. The target workload is narrow and specific: giving university students affordable access to compute resources for coursework in parallel programming and systems classes. A 20-device pilot has already produced benchmark results, and the architecture is set. This has moved past the whiteboard.

Android users spotted something unfamiliar in their Play Store update queues last Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026: an app called "Android Pulse," often showing up as a blank square with no icon at all. So what is the Android Pulse app doing on millions of phones? According to 9to5Google, it's a first-party Google tool built for diagnostics rather than anything malicious, and its Play Store listing shows more than 10 million downloads.

Google is expected to unveil its first Bluetooth item tracker, the Google Pixel Tag tracker, at today's Made by Google event in New York, according to TechSpot. Google has not confirmed the device as of this writing, so everything below reflects reporting published ahead of the keynote. If the tracker arrives as leaked, it closes a gap that's looked increasingly strange: Google has run a crowdsourced device-finding network since 2024 without ever selling a tag of its own (9to5Google).

Google has reportedly told suppliers it wants to move Pixel production out of China entirely by 2027, covering every phone, watch, and earbud the company sells, according to Nikkei Asia. That's a different ambition than simply adding factories elsewhere while keeping Chinese production running as a backstop.

Apple's iOS 27 update landed this week, but plenty of iPhone owners are opening Settings and finding the same old Siri staring back at them. That's not a bug. Siri AI, the overhauled assistant Apple began promising back in June, does not activate automatically with iOS 27.

If you're weighing Waze vs Google Maps on Android Auto, one detailed month-long comparison offers a useful starting point: a reviewer who ran both apps side by side on a Galaxy S25 Ultra and an 8-inch Android Auto head unit found Waze more proactive about rerouting and easier to read on a dashboard display, but still reached for Google Maps on longer or unfamiliar trips. The comparison is really about how these two apps behave once you're actually driving with them, not whether either one works...

A friend texts a Spotify track link. You tap it on your phone, and instead of the song landing where you actually listen, you get Spotify's web player, a blank page, or nothing useful at all. For a YouTube Music listener, that link hasn't gotten the song any closer to playing where it should.

A single Galaxy Z Fold 7 wearing a Temdan MagSafe Kickstand Case went through repeated pocket-height drops onto concrete, and it came away with no damage. The reviewer at Tech with Jerad reported the phone survived the drops intact and the case itself showed only minimal wear (Tech with Jerad). That's a strong result for one case built around impact and scuff resistance. It says nothing about a major durability concern with foldables: dust working its way into the hinge and scratching the inner...

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Apple now markets the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max as an intelligent personal hub, pairing AI capability with personal context and calling privacy and security core to the design. That's a confirmed claim from Apple's own announcement. It doesn't tell you which parts of that hub are working today, or whether they apply to the phone you already own.

Android phones carry a set of safety tools built for exactly this moment, but learning how to use Android Emergency SOS after a car accident really starts with setting it up long before any crash happens. The system can call for help and share a live location without anyone unlocking the phone or dialing a number, triggered by pressing the power button five or more times (Android, earlier this year). As Android Police put it last year, "these tools help only if you set them up beforehand." Even...

A Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra 360-degree leak is giving the clearest unofficial look yet at Samsung's next tablet lineup. New video and press renders, published by Android Headlines and NokiaPowerUser, show the Tab S12 Ultra and Tab S12+ from every angle, alongside a separate spec sheet claiming everything from chipset to pricing.

Less than a month after launch, Pixel 11 owners are running into a scattered set of problems: a phone that won't survive its own setup screen, videos full of static, spotty Wi-Fi, and a hit game that refuses to launch at all.

YouTube TV has topped JD Power's live TV streaming rankings for 2026, its fourth consecutive year in first place. That part isn't in dispute. The more interesting detail, buried a layer deeper in the same report, is that YouTube TV's cushion over the rest of the category is thinner than it was last year, and that live TV streaming as a whole is losing ground to cable and satellite on customer satisfaction rather than gaining it.

Apple's macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn't dramatically redesign Photos, but it delivers one of the app's broadest feature updates in years. The changes span generative AI editing, upgraded Shared Albums, new organization tools, and improvements to slideshows and search.

Search interest around "Xiaomi and Motorola phones launched at Snapdragon Summit" is pulling together three phones tied to Qualcomm's newer chips this week: Motorola's Signature, Motorola's Razr 60 Ultra, and Xiaomi's 17 Pro Max. Nothing in the material reviewed for this article backs up a shared Snapdragon Summit launch. Motorola's spec pages, the one available Xiaomi hands-on report, and Qualcomm's own chip announcement never place these three phones at the same event, in the same region, or...

Mac owners running macOS 27 "Golden Gate" are watching Apple Intelligence eat into their free storage well beyond the figures Apple lists in its own documentation, according to iThinkDiff, which compiled owner and tester storage readings last week. Reported figures range from about 14GB to over 30GB, against Apple's stated maximums of 8GB to 14GB. The gap in macOS 27 Apple Intelligence storage usage shows up in both pre-release beta and Release Candidate builds and in reports from Macs running...

Spotify's Running Mode doesn't listen to your footsteps or track your pace the way the original Spotify Running feature did. That older feature used phone hardware to detect your cadence automatically before Spotify retired it in 2018 (The Verge, 2 months ago; Engadget, yesterday). Running Mode works differently: it builds a soundtrack around the BPM, duration, and music preferences you dial in before you start moving, rather than reacting to how fast you're actually running (The Verge, 2...

Spotify launched Fresh Finds Forward on Sept. 17, turning its decade-old Fresh Finds playlist brand into a 12-month support program for independent artists. The company says the program will support around 10,000 emerging artists each year.

Every time a Surface Dial clicks under a fingertip or a Surface Slim Pen 2 pulses after a completed gesture, three things happen in sequence: something detects the input, software decides how to respond, and a small motor produces the sensation felt. That pipeline sits at the center of Microsoft Surface touch interface design, and Microsoft has now documented, at least partially, how it works at the operating system level.

Apple is testing its redesigned Health app in iOS 27.2, giving beta users an early look at the new Insights and Longevity tabs before the full experience launches later this year.

Hands-on footage of the OnePlus 16 has been circulating all week, and one detail keeps stopping people mid-scroll: a glowing pattern built into the back panel. OnePlus calls it the Interstellar Lighting Effect, a rear LED array wired into the phone's Tomorrow's Starlight colorway, and it looks striking enough on video that it's easy to miss how little is actually confirmed about how it works. Reservations for the OnePlus 16 are already open in China, T3 reports, which puts the OnePlus 16 LED...

The phrase "military-grade" shows up on phone cases that have almost nothing in common. One brand slaps it on a case without listing a single drop or impact figure. Another, Poetic, claims 20-foot drop protection, five times the 4-foot benchmark described in Android Central's testing (Android Central, last month). If you're trying to figure out what to look for in a protective phone case, the label on the box turns out to be the least useful place to start.

Google Photos is rolling out two separate updates this week: a set of vintage-style Moods filters for Android and wider availability of its AI-powered Wardrobe feature on Android and iPhone in Brazil, India, and the US.

tvOS 27 adds a Settings control that can block a household member from launching specific apps, according to release-note wording 9to5Mac reported Monday. That's the extent of what tvOS 27 Apple TV profiles app controls are confirmed to do right now. Apple's cited release notes don't specify whether the restriction is tied to a single profile, whether it applies only to child-type profiles, or whether a passcode protects the setting once it's turned on.