Gadget Hacks: Page 12

Google has confirmed the Made by Google 2026 keynote for Wednesday, August 12, six days from now, kicking off at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT, notably later in the day than usual (9to5Google, last month). This is a practical guide to how to watch the Google Pixel 11 event: exactly when it starts, where the stream is expected to show up, and what Google and outside reporting expect to land on stage.

Samsung set August 7, 2026, as the general availability date for the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, but some customers have seen estimated arrival dates extend well beyond launch day.

Apple began offering new and qualifying returning subscribers three free months of Apple One with the purchase of an eligible device on September 17, 2026. If you're trying to figure out how to get the Apple One 3-month free trial after buying a new device, the first question isn't which iPhone you bought. It's whether your Apple Account qualifies at all.

Apple is reportedly building a new smart home hub: a HomePod-style speaker paired with a roughly 7-inch display, running a new operating system built on tvOS, alongside refreshed Apple TV and HomePod hardware.

Ask "what is Microsoft Copilot" and you'll still get several different correct answers, because Microsoft uses the Copilot name across a unified chat app, AI features inside Word and Excel, a class of Windows PCs, work-account licenses, and tools for building custom agents.

iOS 27 lets an iPhone tap into GymKit-equipped gym machines for the first time, with AirPods Pro 3 supplying the heart-rate data an Apple Watch would normally provide (Engadget, yesterday). That's the shift behind iOS 27 GymKit iPhone and AirPods compatibility: the phone becomes a second way to connect to equipment that could already talk to a Watch. It doesn't add GymKit to treadmills that never had it, and as of this testing, iOS 27 remains in beta; Apple hasn't said when GymKit on iPhone...

Google Meet's web homepage now displays conference room and physical meeting location details directly on upcoming meeting cards, so in-office workers can see where they're headed without opening a Calendar invite first. Google confirmed the change, saying it lets in-office users see where they need to go directly from the Meet landing page.

This guide walks through how to use Visual Intelligence on macOS Golden Gate: what your Mac needs before turning it on, the keyboard shortcuts that trigger it, the in-app option built into Siri's systemwide context menus, and which questions are actually worth asking it.

If you mostly use Apple Podcasts to press play and nothing else, there's a handful of useful controls sitting untouched: a library that actually surfaces what you want to hear, playback settings you won't have to hunt for every session, chapter and timestamp navigation for long episodes, and syncing that's supposed to carry your spot across every Apple device you own.

Xbox's disc-to-digital program is no longer just a leaked roadmap item. Microsoft officially announced the feature on August 26, and Xbox Insiders began testing it on August 31.

Anyone searching for whether Pixel 11 voice typing is coming to Google Play Books needs to separate two different claims. Google has now confirmed a Pixel 11-specific Gboard feature called Rambler, but it has not announced a Google Play Books-specific voice typing update.

Motorola is scheduled to unveil the Signature 27 on September 22, timed to Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, according to Tech Advisor. The phone follows Motorola's slimline Signature flagship.

Some PCs upgrading from Windows 11 23H2 or 24H2 to 25H2 have run into a confusing failure: "We couldn't update the system reserved partition," sometimes accompanied by error code 0x800F0922 or 0xC1900104.

Motorola posted a short teaser video from its official X account this week, timed to land alongside Apple's iPhone Duo launch. The clip ends with a brief silhouette of an unnamed foldable phone that looks shorter and wider than Motorola's current Razr Fold, according to GSMArena and ChannelNews. The phone appears on screen for about five seconds, near the end of the clip, per Android Police. The Motorola wide Razr Fold teaser confirms one thing: the company is building a new form factor. The...

The iPhone 18 Pro Max and Galaxy S26 Ultra have now been through the same controlled drop test, giving buyers a much cleaner comparison than the separate durability tests available immediately after Apple's phone launched.

Leave a phone on the dashboard of a parked car on an 80°F day, and the cabin around it will hit 114°F within 30 minutes. Give it an hour, and that number climbs past 130°F, according to Meqtor. Most phones are rated to operate only up to 95°F (Meqtor). Past that point, a phone isn't just uncomfortable, it's running well outside the range it was built for.

Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Copilot app now goes by a different name: Microsoft Copilot. That's not just cosmetic. As part of the same round of Microsoft 365 Copilot app updates, Microsoft is merging existing Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot installations into one client on Windows and Mac devices.

New hands-on footage from China shows the OnePlus 16's rear lighting system in action. OnePlus calls the feature the Interstellar Lighting Effect, while OnePlus China President Li Jie Louis has also referred to it as the "Interstellar Light Effect." Both names refer to the same rear-lighting system.

Apple's new foldable, iPhone Duo, ships without any Face ID hardware. In its place, Apple built Touch ID into a side button and says a paired Apple Watch can unlock iPhone Duo as well, according to Apple's announcement ten days ago.

Reviewers largely agree that the Google Pixel 11 undercuts the Pixel 11 Pro by $200 while matching its RAM, storage, and chip, according to The Verge. Whether that's worth it depends almost entirely on what phone is already in your pocket.

Google has spent several generations narrowing the gap between its base and Pro Pixels, and this year the two phones sit closer together than ever. The Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro share the same Tensor G6 processor, and the Pro's starting RAM dropped from 16GB to 12GB, landing at the same figure as the base model, according to Android Authority.

Apple seeded tvOS 27 RC, build 24J360, to developers and public beta testers yesterday, and the update is now available through Software Update on enrolled compatible Apple TVs (MacRumors, yesterday; iClarified, yesterday). If you're trying to figure out how to install tvOS 27 RC, the requirement comes first: it runs on Apple TV 4K (2nd generation, 2021) or newer, and it does not run on the Apple TV HD (2015) or the original Apple TV 4K (2017) (iThinkDiff, 2 weeks ago; iClarified, yesterday).

Apple has finally unveiled its first foldable phone, and the shape looks strangely familiar. The book-style design, 7.6-inch inner display, and 3,000-nit peak brightness Apple announced this week land close to where Samsung already sits with the Galaxy Z Fold 8, a phone The Verge put through a week of testing. That overlap is the starting point for any iPhone Duo vs Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 comparison: Apple has arrived at a form factor Samsung has already priced and had independently reviewed.

Is Spotify shuffle actually random? That question is worth asking again because Spotify no longer runs one shuffle algorithm. Ten months ago, Spotify made Fewer Repeats the default shuffle experience for Premium subscribers, moving away from pure randomness because more randomness itself was producing more frequent repeats, Spotify's announcement explains.

iOS 27 shipped Sept. 14 with a redesigned Siri, but one of its most useful AI features lives inside the Shortcuts app. Describe a Shortcut lets you type what you want in plain language and have Apple Intelligence assemble the actions for you instead of building a workflow one step at a time.

Most Mac users assume the system language is all-or-nothing: change it, and everything from Finder to your third-party apps follows along. That's not quite right. macOS has a dedicated setting for how to change language for individual apps on Mac, letting you override one app's display language while leaving the rest of the system exactly as it was.

One UI 9.5 leaks have been surfacing this month in the form of screenshots, internal builds, and test-server activity, even as Samsung is still mid-rollout on One UI 9.

Chrome didn't kill ad blocking. It killed one specific technical approach, and took a popular extension's full functionality down with it. If ads have started slipping through since your last Chrome update, or an old uBlock Origin install stopped filtering the way it used to, the good news is that ad blockers that still work in Chrome are easy to find, once you know which one actually matches your problem.

The iPhone vs Samsung Galaxy bloatware debate usually turns into a scoreboard argument: which phone maker crams in more junk you'll never open. Apple's own support documentation and Samsung's own support page tell a more useful story than any scoreboard could.

A Seoul Economic Daily reported on Aug. 23 that Samsung's unreleased Exynos 2700 outperformed Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 in internal tests covering CPU, GPU, AI performance, and power efficiency. The results reportedly came from Samsung's own Mobile eXperience division, making them an early indicator rather than independent proof that Exynos has overtaken Snapdragon.

Open the Health app on your iPhone and there's a feature tucked inside that can hand a paramedic someone's blood type, list their allergies, and name who to call when they can't answer for themselves. It only works, though, if someone filled it in before the emergency happened. This guide walks through how to set up Medical ID and emergency contacts on iPhone: building the medical profile, adding contacts, deciding what to expose on the Lock Screen, configuring Emergency SOS without triggering...

Samsung's next Ultra phone could tackle one of the most annoying parts of going without a screen protector: the tiny scratches that build up through everyday use. A new rumor claims Samsung and Corning are developing a self-healing surface coating that may appear on the Galaxy S27 Ultra.

The Apple Health app redesign does something the app has never really done before: it tells you what to do with your numbers instead of just displaying them. A daily 0-10 readiness score arrives with a plain-language verdict like "Recover" or "Go For It," and a new "Health Age" metric compares your body's tracked stats against your actual age. Apple unveiled both as part of a broader health and fitness push tied to Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4.

The Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 both start at roughly $1,900, putting them in unusually direct competition. At that price, the more useful question isn't which is cheaper, but what each gives you for flagship-foldable money.

If you own an older Pixel, you may have noticed something Pixel owners have not generally expected to see: a promotional notification sitting in the shade next to your texts and calendar reminders. After the Pixel 11 launch, Android Authority reported this week that many users, including one of its own writers, started receiving ads for the new phone on their older Pixel devices.

Sony packs most of the useful controls for its headphones and earbuds into a phone app, and if you've ever wanted to flip noise-canceling modes or tweak EQ from a laptop instead, there hasn't been an official way to do it. A trio of open-source projects, including one called Sony Device Center, now claim to bring that control to Windows. The Sony Device Center Windows app is the newest and most talked-about of the three, but "claim" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Nothing reviewed for...

Apple Watch Series 12 doesn't wait for "Hey Siri" before it starts paying attention. Sound Recognition listens continuously for sirens, alarms, doorbells, and crying babies, flagging them with on-device intelligence even when the wearer's iPhone isn't nearby. Live Rewind goes further: a double press of the Digital Crown surfaces the previous 15 seconds of nearby conversation as a text snippet, without anyone having to ask for it in the moment.

The Pixel 11 Pro has a flashlight problem. The phone starts at $1,099 for the 12GB/256GB configuration, and independent testing and hands-on reviews have converged on the same finding: the Pixel 11 Pro's flashlight throws noticeably less light than the phone it replaced, and less than several rivals besides.

A leaked build of Samsung's One UI 9.5 software reveals a feature called App Mirroring that could let Galaxy phone owners wirelessly access their phone's apps and notifications from a laptop screen.

Peacock's Premium Plus plan, the closest thing NBCUniversal offers to ad-free streaming, jumped from $16.99 to $19.99 a month today for new subscribers (The Verge; Android Authority). Existing subscribers won't feel it until their next billing date on or after Sept. 17. It's Peacock's fourth price increase in four years (Android Authority), and it raises an obvious question: what is the actual cost of ad-free streaming services per month for someone who wants to watch the major platforms...