News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 6

Backing up PS1 saves from DuckStation on Android to Google Drive is straightforward in theory and surprisingly fragile in practice. DuckStation, a PS1 emulator available on the Android Play Store, puts save management entirely in the user's hands. There is no automatic cloud sync, no platform-level backup, and no recovery path if a phone dies or gets reset unless the player has already moved those files somewhere else. Google Drive is a practical destination for that kind of manual backup. What...

April 11, 1985. Apple's boardroom. CEO John Sculley, the PepsiCo executive Jobs had personally recruited two years earlier, tells the board he wants Jobs gone. The board sides with him. Jobs walks out, as Vanity Fair reported last week. He will not return for eleven years.

Apple is reportedly building a version of Siri that will remember details from past conversations, read what's on your screen in real time, and pull answers from your texts, emails, and installed apps. That's not a voice assistant upgrade. It's a different product category, with a different set of privacy stakes. Which is exactly why the most telling detail in the pre-WWDC rumor cycle isn't a new AI model or a chatbot interface. It's a retention timer.

Disney announced a new round of Disney+ and Hulu integration features on May 19, 2026, bringing the two apps closer together with Hulu profile linking, Hulu access inside Disney+ for eligible Hulu subscribers, new Hulu profile avatars, and an upcoming Live Guide. Bundle subscribers who primarily watch Hulu on demand can now bring more of their Hulu activity into Disney+, though Hulu Live TV, add-ons, and non-adult profile linking are not fully folded in yet. Disney says there are "no current...

Google last week announced a feature that changes what happens after you open a link on your phone. Starting late June, Gemini in Chrome on Android will place an AI icon in the browser toolbar. Tap it, and a panel slides up over the page you're already on, ready to summarize, explain, or answer questions about that specific content, without opening a new tab or leaving the page.

Apple's chief hardware officer Johny Srouji is restructuring the company's hardware organization into a single unified group, The Verge reported today, citing Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The change folds two previously separate divisions, hardware engineering and hardware technologies, under one roof and splits the combined group into five focused teams. According to Bloomberg's framing, the goal is to help chip teams work more closely with product teams as Apple faces mounting pressure on its AI...

In November 1997, Steve Jobs stood before an audience at Cupertino's Flint Center and admitted something most executives would never say publicly: more than a thousand customers had written to tell him how bad it was to buy an Apple product. Not the product itself, but the experience of acquiring it. That candid acknowledgment, 9to5Mac reported, came as Jobs was explaining a new partnership with electronics chain CompUSA. The problem was a distribution failure dressed up as a brand problem, and...

Apple announced a broad set of new accessibility features last week, timed to Global Accessibility Awareness Day, covering iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. The headline additions include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier on Mac, a unified Braille Access experience, and a Switch Control protocol for Brain Computer Interfaces. All features are due later this year; exact OS versions and device compatibility are not yet confirmed, per Apple's announcement.

Microsoft launched its Xbox Player Voice feedback portal this week, and the top results came in fast. Within hours, the most-upvoted requests pointed in one direction: bring back console exclusives, expand backward compatibility, and drop the subscription requirement for online multiplayer. The Verge and IGN both covered the Xbox Player Voice feedback results today.

A dormant interface inside Google Password Manager on Android has been activated by researchers, exposing new settings that extend import and export options to cover passkeys alongside passwords. The discovery is the most concrete evidence yet that Google passkey transfer on Android is in active development. Android Authority reported last week that the mechanism has not been switched on for users, and Google has not confirmed the feature in public.

Google I/O 2026 kicks off this morning at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET, streaming free at io.google and on YouTube with no registration required. A pre-show starts an hour earlier at 9 a.m. PT, with reporters on the ground in Mountain View, per PCMag. Sessions are uploaded afterward to the Google for Developers YouTube channel, with registered attendees getting first access, according to PCMag. The physical event at Shoreline Amphitheatre runs through tomorrow.

Samsung's chip division went from KRW 0.4 trillion in operating profit to KRW 53.7 trillion in three quarters. That earnings swing, and what it says about Samsung's position in the AI memory market, is the reason the Samsung $1 trillion market cap conversation exists. Whether the earnings quality behind that valuation can hold is a separate question, and the answer is already taking shape.

Apple is once again rumored to be testing a solid-state haptic button system for its 20th-anniversary iPhone, which is presumed to arrive in fall 2027, and this time the feature appears to have cleared a more specific round of reliability testing. Chinese leaker Instant Digital renewed the claim in a May 5, 2026 report, saying the button system has already cleared tests covering gloves, wet hands, extreme temperatures, and phone cases, according to MacRumors.

Apple is planning to overhaul Genmoji in iOS 27 with automatic suggestions drawn from users' photo libraries and most-typed phrases, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported this week. The change would shift Genmoji toward proactive suggestions rather than fully manual prompts. A new toggle in Keyboard settings will read: "Suggested Genmoji are created from your photos and your commonly typed phrases."

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference runs June 8–12, with the keynote kicking off at 10 a.m. PDT on June 8. The WWDC 2026 announcement describes the week as spotlighting "AI advancements and exciting new software and developer tools" — language so close to what Apple used when it first announced the dates two months ago that the two press releases are nearly interchangeable. For developers waiting to understand how Apple Intelligence fits into their build decisions, that repetition tells a...

Samsung's mobile division is reportedly exploring BOE as a possible OLED supplier for the standard Galaxy S27, after ZDNet Korea reported on May 11, 2026, that Samsung had sent BOE a request for information related to the model's display. If it happens, it would be a first for Samsung's Galaxy S line: ZDNet Korea reports that BOE has received Galaxy S-series OLED RFIs before, but has not yet secured final supply. The base S27 may also stick with an older OLED material stack rather than...

Spotify confirmed last Wednesday that its app, Web Player, and support site were degraded around 8 p.m., with users reporting access problems on Downdetector. The company's response was brief: the service was "slow or not working properly," and the matter was under investigation. No mention of an external attack, a DDoS event, or any outside actor appeared in Spotify's public statement.

Apple's foldable iPhone is failing its own durability tests. The hinge, not the display, is the problem and with mass production targeted for July, the engineering calendar is getting tight.

Samsung is offering a free Withings Body Smart scale with select full-price Galaxy Watch purchases in the U.S., but the fine print matters. The promotion applies to Galaxy Watch Ultra, Galaxy Watch8 Classic, Galaxy Watch8, and Galaxy Watch7 purchases made through Samsung.com or the Shop Samsung App from May 4 through July 19, 2026, while supplies last. Samsung lists the scale at $129.95 MSRP, but the offer excludes trade-ins and cannot be combined with other Samsung, carrier, retailer, coupon,...

If you're wondering whether the Motorola Razr is waterproof, the short answer is no. That applies to every model in the lineup. The more useful question is whether your specific Razr is meaningfully water-resistant, and that depends entirely on which generation you own.