News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 11

General Motors this week began pushing Google Gemini AI to roughly 4 million eligible U.S. vehicles, upgrading the Google Assistant experience across 2022 model year and newer Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC models equipped with Google built-in. The update rolls out in phases over the air. No dealer visit required.

Motorola's first book-style foldable goes on sale May 21 at $1,900 with 512GB of base storage. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 has been on shelves since last July at $1,999.99 for 256GB at the entry tier, per CNET and the Samsung Newsroom. That $100 price gap and doubled base storage is the opening move in a clear attempt to undercut Samsung's most documented weaknesses in this category: battery capacity, charging speed, and out-of-box value.

Google I/O 2026 runs May 19-20 at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, with all keynotes and sessions streaming live at io.google. A week earlier, on May 12, Google streams The Android Show | I/O Edition, a separate consumer-focused event where Android announcements are expected to land before the developer conference begins. If you're trying to figure out what to expect from Google I/O 2026, the short answer is: AI infrastructure, Android 17, and a developer toolchain that...

The Fire TV Stick 4K Plus and 4K Max are the last Amazon streaming sticks that let you install apps from outside the official store. Starting with the Fire TV Stick 4K Select, all future Fire TV Sticks run Amazon Fire TV Vega OS, a Linux-based system built entirely in-house, and the shift comes with a smaller app library, no practical sideloading, and a platform engineered around Amazon's priorities rather than yours. AFTVnews confirmed two weeks ago that Amazon still describes Vega as the...

Apple is reportedly adding a Siri-branded mode directly to the iPhone camera app's mode strip in iOS 27, moving Visual Intelligence out of a hidden hardware gesture and into plain view. According to people familiar with the plans, the iOS 27 Siri camera mode would appear alongside Photo, Video, and Portrait as a named, selectable option, The Star, citing Bloomberg reported today. That shift turns a capability most users have never encountered into one they'll see every time they open the camera.

YouTube is rolling out picture-in-picture to free mobile users around the world, ending a long-standing gap that kept the floating video player locked behind a Premium subscription for users outside the United States. The catch: music content stays off-limits on the free tier, and that restriction applies even to paid subscribers on the cheaper Premium Lite plan.

Jack Dorsey's grant-funded, anti-AI, decentralized Vine reboot is now publicly listed on iOS and Android. Whether its philosophy survives mainstream pressure is what gets tested from here.

Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai this week launched a China-specific Apple Watch campaign built around accounts from three users whose watches triggered emergency responses during a car crash, a fall, and a cardiac event. The campaign, titled "Thankfully, I Was Wearing It" and live across digital and social channels since April 22, arrives two months after Apple said AFib History became available on Apple Watch in mainland China, adding a clinical monitoring tool to the emergency-response...

Two supply-chain-based reports now point the same direction on the next MacBook Neo RAM upgrade, and the overlap is hard to ignore. Tim Culpan, a Taiwan-based tech columnist and former Bloomberg reporter, wrote in his Culpium newsletter earlier this month that the second-generation Neo will use a version of the A19 Pro chip from the iPhone 17 Pro line, which carries 12GB of unified memory (MacRumors). That lines up with a March report from supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who called an A19...

The Android Auto alarm dismiss issue still has no native in-car fix. When an alarm fires mid-drive, the head unit offers no dedicated dismiss button drivers are left choosing between a voice command and reaching for their phone. For a platform built around minimizing driver distraction, that gap is hard to overlook.

The March 2026 Gemini update adds sports briefs, deep dives, and photo-to-video generation. The most useful feature is the quiet one. That gap explains the problem.

YouTube's most effective move against ad blockers isn't the warning banner millions of users have learned to dismiss. It's a mechanism embedded in the platform's own video delivery stack, one that makes ad-blocked playback feel sluggish and unreliable, without displaying any message explaining why. For casual users, it reads as a bad connection. The ambiguity is the point.

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Xbox hardware revenue fell 25% in Microsoft's fiscal year 2025 on lower console sales volume, the second consecutive annual decline after a 13% drop the prior year, according to the Microsoft Annual Report 2025. Those figures, published last October, cover Microsoft's fiscal year ending June 2025. The back-to-back declines point to something more persistent than a single rough year, though whether that reflects a hardware cycle trough or a structural shift is a question the filings leave open....

Apple shipped nearly three out of every four satellite-enabled smartphones in 2025. That single statistic from Counterpoint Research tells you something important about where Apple satellite smartphone market share stands today. What it doesn't tell you is which market Apple actually dominates, or how durable that position becomes once the larger market matures.

Apple shipped Adaptive Temperature, its most ambitious Apple Home new features addition in years, back in September 2025. For months, it worked on exactly zero thermostats. The first compatible device only launched earlier this month. That gap between software ambition and hardware reality defines where Apple Home stands right now: genuinely improving, but only accessible if you own the right gear, most of which comes from a single manufacturer.

Google has spent the past several months quietly remaking the Pixel Launcher's home screen search bar, turning it from a device-native utility into a launchpad for Google app services. The change is already significant for Pixel owners. Whether Google Photos search in Pixel Launcher is next is a reasonable question, given the architecture now in place. But to be clear: Google has not announced it, and no beta feature or code reference in current reporting points to it.

YouTube is rolling out free picture-in-picture to non-paying users on Android and iOS worldwide, ending a policy that had kept the feature either U.S.-only or locked behind a Premium subscription in every other market. The rollout is live now, with full global availability expected over the coming months, 9to5Google reported today.

Motorola has entered the book-style foldable market with the Motorola Razr Fold, its first device in the book-style format competing alongside the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold line and Google Pixel Fold. The device makes a specific, testable argument: that foldables don't have to sacrifice battery life or thinness to deliver flagship specs.

Apple's supply chain has begun manufacturing components for a variable-aperture main camera expected in the iPhone 18 Pro, with three named suppliers now in active production, Cult of Mac reported two weeks ago, citing ETNews. The development adds hard supply-chain evidence to a rumor that analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station had already flagged separately. Apple has never implemented a variable aperture on an iPhone, MacRumors noted last week, making the iPhone 18 Pro...

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman now says the long-rumored Apple foldable iPad may "end up being a wacky experiment that doesn't see the light of day," per The Verge this past Sunday. The rumored launch window has slipped from 2024 to 2026 to 2028 to 2029, and now carries no date at all. Whether the Apple foldable iPad is cancelled outright or stuck in indefinite limbo, the distinction is mostly semantic at this point.

Google rolled out a pronunciation practice feature for Android users this week, giving people in the U.S. and India a structured way to speak translated phrases aloud and receive AI-powered feedback on specific sounds, stress patterns, and enunciation. The timing tracks with a pattern Google has documented internally: about a third of live conversation sessions in Translate already run longer than five minutes, according to CNET, which suggests a meaningful share of the app's one billion...

Google announced today that a new AI-powered wardrobe feature is coming to Google Photos this summer, one that automatically scans a user's photo library, catalogs clothing seen in photos into a dedicated digital collection, and lets users virtually try on outfit combinations before getting dressed. Android gets it first, with iOS to follow, according to Google's announcement.

Google is bringing YouTube Shorts to the Google TV home screen this summer with a dedicated "Short videos for you" row that plays videos without opening the YouTube app, 9to5Google and The Verge reported today. The rollout is limited to US devices, with no exact date beyond "by the end of the summer."

Starting next month, the Microsoft Xbox employee email address appearing in developers' inboxes, press contacts' threads, and partner correspondence will read @xbox.com, not @microsoft.com. It's a routine-sounding IT rollout. It's also the most concrete step yet in a deliberate push to make Xbox present itself as a brand in its own right rather than a subdivision of its parent company.

Google has updated Quick Share for Windows with a visual overhaul that brings the desktop app's interface in line with the Android version. The redesign is cosmetic. The underlying transfer functionality is unchanged.

Samsung this week launched Trips, a new feature in Samsung Wallet that pulls flights, hotel reservations, car rentals, bus and train tickets, event passes, and excursion bookings into a single chronological timeline. The rollout covers Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Samsung confirmed this week. The feature is live now on compatible Galaxy devices, with no new hardware required.

Nothing's Warp, an Android-to-computer file sharing tool that lets any Android user move photos, links, documents, and clipboard text to a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux machine, launched in mid-April, vanished from Google Play within hours, and returned two weeks ago as a manual APK download rather than a Play Store app. The company has said the temporary withdrawal was to "fine-tune" the product and that there are no security or privacy concerns. It has not explained why Warp still isn't back on...

Leaked renders of Samsung's first smart glasses surfaced this week, and the most notable feature is an absence: no display, no visual overlays, no augmented reality in any consumer-meaningful sense. Android Headlines broke the Samsung Galaxy smart glasses leak with the first images; The Verge and Android Police followed independently the same day.

The MacBook Pro is about to get its could see one of its most significant transformations in years, according to supply chain reports, and the timing couldn't be more intriguing. While Apple's laptop lineup has seen steady evolution with each generation, industry whispers suggest something much bigger is brewing behind the scenes in Cupertino. We're not talking about the usual spec bumps or minor design tweaks—this appears to be a fundamental reimagining of what a professional MacBook can be.

The alternative app store landscape just got a lot more interesting. AltStore PAL, one of the first platforms to challenge Apple's iOS monopoly in Europe, is making two major moves that could reshape how we discover and interact with mobile apps. The company recently secured $6 million in Series A funding led by Pace Capital, according to Mobile Marketing Reads, and is preparing to integrate with the fediverse—the decentralized social network that powers platforms like Mastodon and Threads,...

Picture this: you're scrolling through your phone, launching apps, switching between tasks, and everything just feels... snappier. The apps open a split second faster, transitions feel smoother, and your battery seems to last a bit longer. You might wonder if you imagined it, but there's actually something pretty clever happening behind the scenes.

The Google Pixel charging limit saga reveals a deeper truth about smartphone technology: what seems broken might actually be working exactly as intended—just not in the way users expect. Google's 80% charging limit, introduced with Android 15 QPR1, appeared to be the perfect solution for extending battery life. Enable it once, forget about it, and watch your battery stay healthier while never exceeding 80%. But here's what's actually happening behind the scenes that's driving users crazy.

You know what caught my eye recently? A purple Motorola Razr 2026 has surfaced, and honestly, it's about time we saw some personality in foldable phone colors. While Motorola just rolled out its reportedly showcased a book-style foldable concept at MWC 2026 with those traditional Pantone Blackened Blue and Pantone Lily White options, this purple variant signals something deeper than just design flair—it suggests Motorola has solved the fundamental engineering challenges and now feels confident...

The global smartphone manufacturing landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, and Apple's latest production milestone in India represents far more than just another factory coming online. When a single country begins producing one in four of the world's most coveted smartphones, it signals a fundamental reimagining of how tech giants approach supply chain resilience, geopolitical risk, and manufacturing strategy in an increasingly uncertain world.

You know that feeling when your 3DS lights up green after passing someone on the street? That little moment of discovery when you opened your system to find a new Mii waiting in StreetPass Mii Plaza made the simple act of carrying your Nintendo 3DS everywhere feel purposeful. StreetPass officially ended its run in April 2024, closing a chapter on one of Nintendo's most innovative social gaming experiments. But here's where things get interesting: developers are breathing new life into that...

Google's stepping up its mobile security game in a big way with Android 16's Advanced Protection Mode, and the latest development has some serious implications for how we browse the web on our phones. The tech giant is now testing a feature that could disable Chrome's WebGPU API when users activate this enhanced security mode, according to Android Authority. While WebGPU enables impressive high-performance graphics and computations directly in your browser, it also opens up potential attack...