Gadget Hacks: Page 4

Code strings buried inside the latest Google Maps beta suggest Google is preparing to connect the app directly to Gmail, Google Photos, Calendar, and other Google services so Maps could show reservation or flight details drawn from connected Google apps.

LG introduced a picture setting that lets movie studios influence how individual streaming titles appear on compatible televisions. Creator Original Picture Mode can apply title-specific parameters for shadow detail, color balance, noise reduction, and motion handling instead of relying on one general cinema preset.

Apple released App Store Connect for iOS version 3.2 earlier this year, but the exact scope of the update is unclear. 9to5Mac reported that it added streamlined TestFlight feedback filtering, revised sorting, and VoiceOver and Voice Control improvements. Apple's current App Store version history, however, lists different changes for version 3.2, including filtering for Ratings and Reviews, age-rating visibility, and a refreshed design.

A new Google Pixel 11a leak claims the budget Pixel will run Tensor G6, the same chip debuting in the flagship Pixel 11 on August 12. That's a meaningful claim: the Pixel 10a shipped with a recycled Tensor G4 because the G5 was reportedly too expensive for the A-series price point. Leaker Mystic Leaks now says the Pixel 11a, codenamed "Formosan," would run that same G6 platform from launch.

Leaked specifications circulating this week indicate Samsung is splitting its Galaxy Z Fold 8 lineup into two distinct display tiers. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra screen size is reported at 8 inches for the main panel and 6.5 inches for the cover screen, matching the current Fold 7's dimensions. The standard Fold 8, by contrast, drops to a 7.6-inch inner display and a 5.5-inch cover screen. Android Authority, Notebookcheck, SamMobile, The Verge, and Trusted Reviews have all reported on the...

A forged email header can make Apple's Mail app on Mac send a reply from the email address associated with your Apple Account, even when the message arrived through another account and you have never used Hide My Email.

Google released Android 17 QPR 2 Beta 1 on July 20, 2026, build CP41.260701.005, and the entire release is structured around repairs. The three headline fixes address Bluetooth accessories silently failing to reconnect after a disconnect, Pixel devices rebooting when invoking Gemini, and notifications randomly going invisible, per Google's official release notes. One notable gap: the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are absent from the supported device list, despite both receiving the stable July...

Samsung unveiled its biggest foldable lineup change in seven years at Galaxy Unpacked in London on July 22. The Galaxy Z Fold8 adopts a shorter, wider design built around a 4:3 internal display, while the larger format associated with recent Fold models moves into the premium Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra.

The European Commission today fined Google roughly $1 billion for manipulating search results to disadvantage rivals and blocking app developers from steering users toward cheaper deals outside its Play Store, then ordered the company to overhaul both products within 60 days, according to Axios.

The Galaxy Z Flip 8 last Samsung foldable rumor is unconfirmed. Samsung hasn't said a word about ending the line. What it has done is allocate 2.8 million display panels to its new Wide Fold, 2 million to the Fold 8 Ultra, and 1.5 million to the Flip 8, dead last in its own lineup, according to industry sources cited by TrendForce this week. Reports from Android Police and SamMobile from earlier this month suggest the Flip 8 could be Samsung's final clamshell. Neither has confirmed it.

Chrome on Android has added a new layer between websites and your notification tray: an on-device machine learning model that screens incoming notifications for spam and deception after you've already granted permission. When the model flags something, Chrome holds the notification back and presents a choice. This isn't a redesigned permission dialog. It's a content filter operating inside a channel you voluntarily opened, and it represents a meaningful shift in how Chrome thinks about...

Samsung launched the Samsung Health Assistant beta Tuesday, opening its first fully integrated AI-powered health tool inside Samsung Health to eligible U.S. users. Rather than presenting biometric data as graphs to decode, the assistant lets users ask questions about their health, check their daily Energy Score, and receive personalized health guidance across five wellness pillars: sleep, activity, nutrition, mindfulness, and vitals. The shift Samsung is positioning here is from a dashboard you...

This guide walks you through preordering any of the three new Galaxy foldables in a way that minimizes total cost or preserves flexibility, depending on which matters more to you. By the end, you'll know which channel fits your situation, how to run a real cost comparison, and what to verify before submitting your order.

Apple confirmed this month that macOS 28 will no longer mount encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes. Unencrypted HFS+ drives are explicitly preserved and need no changes. The group with a real problem is smaller but specific: anyone running Time Machine to an encrypted HFS+ drive has no in-place migration path and will need to start a fresh backup chain before macOS 28 ships, according to Apple's support document.

Android apps that ship with home screen widgets do not always make that feature easy to discover. No signal on the Play Store listing page, no prompt after install. For apps that do not promote widgets elsewhere, the launcher's widget picker may be the only obvious confirmation, and that requires you to already own the app and know to check.

When Samsung brought back the flip phone in 2020, the product practically marketed itself. The clamshell form factor carried decades of cultural memory, and Samsung packaged that nostalgia into a premium device that felt genuinely different. For a few years, the Flip was the clear winner in Samsung's foldable lineup, according to SamMobile, a remarkable result for what was, structurally speaking, a phone that folded the wrong way for productivity.

A Samsung Galaxy S27 camera specs leak circulating this week describes a flagship lineup split into two distinct tiers. The base S27 and S27+ are reportedly being tested with a Sony-made primary sensor, ending a four-year run of exclusive ISOCELL hardware on mainline S-series phones. The Pro and Ultra are where the more meaningful imaging upgrades appear to be landing, though the Ultra's final rear camera count remains a live dispute between two credible outlets.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 is the world's lightest book-style foldable, at 201g, and among the thinnest, measuring 4.5mm unfolded, which Android Authority confirmed is slimmer than the Galaxy S25 Edge at 5.8mm. Those numbers reflect genuine engineering progress. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 thinner and wider design trade-offs, though, deserve closer examination than the spec sheet provides: the redesign that produced a lighter, more pocketable phone also created an opening for Samsung to move key features up...

Amazon has added Luna game streaming directly to the Prime Video app, giving Prime members access to a rotating catalog of streamable games through a new Games tab on Fire TV devices. No console required, no separate download. On geography, the two outlets that confirmed today's rollout don't agree: Engadget says the launch covers the US and UK, while VGC specifies the UK only. Both confirm Fire TV as the starting point, with additional devices and countries to follow in the coming months....

A writer at Eurogamer traded in a PS2 and more than 100 games the day after a single session with Halo 3 at a colleague's apartment. Not gradually. Overnight. That is what a system-seller looks like: not a game that rewards console ownership, but one that creates it from nothing.

Samsung didn't announce it at Unpacked. A Reddit user found it first, and Android Authority confirmed it today on a review unit: One UI 9 now supports a 90:10 three-app split-screen layout on the Galaxy Z Fold 8 series, an arrangement that closely resembles the Open Canvas multitasking system OnePlus and OPPO have used to differentiate their foldables for years. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 multitasking features also surface a meaningful difference between the standard model and the Ultra that comes...

A poll of 6,310 Pixel readers published earlier this year found that 62.7% say Google Tensor's performance gap doesn't affect their purchase decision. That sounds like a comfortable majority. It isn't a mandate and more importantly, it's the wrong number to focus on.

By the end of this guide, your Mac will be running macOS Tahoe. What you recover beyond the operating system depends on one thing: whether you have a Time Machine backup made before the Golden Gate beta was installed. This guide covers all three realistic scenarios for getting back to stable ground.

Airline apps will tell you when your flight is delayed. They won't tell you whether that delay means you'll miss your connection. The Flighty Connection Assistant is built to close that gap, tracking both legs of a connecting itinerary simultaneously and pushing an alert while travelers still have time to act, according to Flighty's help documentation.

Razer Axon Wallpaper Engine Mobile is scheduled to hit Google Play on July 15, 2026, and Razer has built a two-phase hardware giveaway around the release that runs from July 3 through July 29. Nine prizes total, split across pre-registration and social entry windows, with the first draw already open, PR TIMES reported this week. What the app actually does remains largely undescribed in pre-launch materials but the campaign mechanics are concrete, and that's what most readers need to act on...

This guide is for local administrators and technically capable users on unmanaged or lightly managed Windows 11 Pro systems whose executable, batch, or PowerShell script files have stopped running after installation or a feature update. Corporate devices enrolled in Intune or joined to a domain with Group Policy are a different situation those paths are called out explicitly below.

A federal judge dismissed rapper RBX's Spotify streaming-fraud lawsuit last month, finding that the complaint did not plausibly support its negligence and unfair-competition claims. The case can be refiled within 21 days, so it isn't over. But the dismissal laid bare a structural problem that no ruling can fix: the same enforcement systems Spotify built to fight bot streams are removing legitimate artists from the platform, and those artists have almost no recourse when it happens.

A leak posted today on X claims Samsung will open pre-reservations for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 as soon as July 8. The tip comes from a single source, Abhishek Yadav, and Samsung has not announced it. But a separate report noted that this year's pre-registration window is reportedly compressed to just a few days before the expected July 22 Unpacked event, 9to5Google reported two weeks ago, so the compressed timing fits. What matters before acting on that is understanding which device the reservation...

Starting today, Google is counting all Android backup data toward your Google Account storage limit, but the rollout isn't instant for everyone, and the actual impact for most users is smaller than the policy change might suggest.

Google Wallet appears to be rolling out expanded transaction history for Android that includes payments made on paired Wear OS devices. For watch users, it closes a straightforward problem: the Android app previously showed only the 10 most recent tap-to-pay transactions from that specific phone, with Wear OS payments excluded entirely. Verifying a watch payment meant opening a browser, not the Wallet app.

Samsung Messages shut down on July 6, 2026. If you're a US Galaxy user on Android 12 or newer, the app can no longer send or receive messages except to emergency numbers, per Samsung's discontinuation notice. The text field is greyed out, and that's a permanent state.

Samsung's Home Up module picked up a significant update today, adding configurable multi-finger gestures to Galaxy phones. The Samsung Home Up screenshot gesture is the headline addition: users running One UI 9 can now assign a finger-based capture action to a swipe, giving them an alternative to the palm swipe method Samsung phones have relied on for years, according to Android Authority.

Google Maps cannot place a restaurant order. That distinction matters, because the conversational discovery experience Google has built over the past eight months makes the question feel closer than it did before. A sequence of Gemini-powered feature launches hands-free navigation, AI-synthesized venue tips, multi-step voice queries has moved Maps from a directions app into something that finds restaurants, answers follow-up questions about them, and routes you there by voice. Whether ordering...

In late October 2025, Niagara Launcher published a support note that was, in its quiet way, a small admission of defeat. Google Play services had started blocking the launcher from opening certain Unity-made games a Niagara Launcher Google Play services issue the team could do nothing about. Not because of a Niagara bug. There was nothing to patch, nothing to push. According to the team's help page, it appeared that Google had rolled out new firewall rules in response to a Unity engine...

Leaked renders published two weeks ago show more than a Samsung Health facelift. Buried in the imagery is what appears to be a reworked watchface picker, a component that lives inside the Galaxy Wearable app, not Samsung Health, suggesting the Samsung Wearable app redesign may extend beyond the fitness tracking side of Samsung's software stack. Samsung has not confirmed any changes to the Wearable app.

Microsoft is spinning off four Xbox game studios today and cutting roughly 3,200 jobs across its gaming division. Buried inside that restructuring is something worth separating out: Double Fine and Compulsion Games are leaving with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games, according to the Xbox Wire memo. That deal structure is unusual enough in games industry M&A to warrant a closer look at what it actually means and what the reporting hasn't confirmed yet.

A new leak suggests Samsung is preparing to give the Galaxy S27 Pro near-Ultra camera hardware and an Ultra-exclusive display feature, then power it with a Samsung-made Exynos chip across Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Latin America. The Samsung Galaxy S27 Pro Exynos leak, reported this week by Android Authority and SamMobile, would make "Pro" a materially different product depending on which continent you buy it on. Snapdragon would go to US buyers only, per Android Authority, or to all...

The UK government is drawing up legislation that would require YouTube and other video platforms to make public service broadcaster content prominently discoverable, Deadline reported two weeks ago. Under the proposed Media Bill, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Paramount-owned 5 would be named beneficiaries. In practical terms, that could mean boosting official clips from shows like Question Time in user feeds and search results, though exactly which surfaces would be covered remains publicly...

Android 17 QPR1 Beta 6 adds a customizable keyboard shortcuts system to the Linux Terminal app, giving users per-action toggles and pop-up key remapping for the first time. The update landed last Tuesday for eligible Pixel devices, and it carries a notable milestone: Android 17 QPR1 has reached Platform Stability, meaning Google has locked the API surface for developers, according to Android Authority. Beta 6 is now a stronger signal of QPR1's direction than any previous build in this cycle.

Samsung is expected to report Q2 2026 operating profit of around 86 trillion won (approximately $56 billion), roughly 18 times what it earned in the same quarter a year ago, according to an LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 30 analysts weighted by track record, The Star reported yesterday. That would mark a third consecutive record quarter, driven by what analysts describe as a prolonged shortage across the entire memory market, not just premium AI chips.