Author: News Room

When Apple introduced the iPhone 15 Pro, Greg Joswiak, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said the device’s three rear cameras would give consumers “the equivalent of seven camera lenses in their pocket.”We could spend multiple podcasts debating the technical validity of that statement, but what Joswiak was trying to imply was that the iPhone now had sensors with a resolution that was big and high enough that it could crop in to emulate various focal lengths.Now, Fujifilm is trying the same thing.With a 35mm lens stuck to a body shockingly similar to the super-popular X100VI, it would…

Forget the sleek, sterile sheen of an Apple Watch. For those of us who spent our formative years waggling joysticks while gawping at chunky pixels on flickering screens, the Atari 2600 My Play is a glorious, blocky anachronism. It’s a wrist-based time capsule that screams 1977 louder than a roll of beige wallpaper glued to a VHS copy of The Only Game in Town. But this isn’t yet another retro-themed trinket. Unlike many other watches based on classic games – Casio’s Pac-Man collab; Nubeo’s Space Invaders line – this one attempts to jam an entire 1970s console inside a wearable brick. Natch, you don’t quite get…

“Perplexity is singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly, combining world-class technical capabilities with Little Tech independence,” the company wrote.They claim they’re uniquely positioned to do this “without creating a monopoly,” unlike potential acquisitions by competitors or investor consortiums that might maintain ByteDance’s influence. The plan includes: Read the full article here

The new souped-up Alexa voice assistant, Alexa Plus, is scheduled to arrive in the next few weeks in an early access preview. The good news is that as long as you have (or buy) an Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21 smart display, you’ll be able to use the generative-AI powered Alexa across any compatible Echo device you own. It will also work on Fire TV devices, Fire tablets, on the web at Alexa.com, and in the Alexa app. Sadly, a few Echo devices will be left out of the party. Several early models, including the first-gen Echo Dot,…

Meta has aggressively pushed to discredit and silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of Careless People, her memoir about working at the company as a policy director. Now, she’s fighting back. Attorneys for Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion seeking to dismiss the gag order that Meta won via an arbitrator. A copy of her motion, which I’ve seen, argues that the nondisparagement agreement she signed when she left the company isn’t enforceable, while Meta has used it as the legal basis for banning her from talking about the book. Naturally, the Streisand effect is on full display. Careless People…

Someone has responded to YouTuber Mark Rober’s Tesla fake wall test with a video that also tries to address the question of whether the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features would detect a Wile E. Coyote-style road obstruction in the real world. Creator Kyle Paul posted his video Thursday and included two Teslas with FSD: a Model Y equipped with a HW3 computer and a Cybertruck that comes with the latest HW4 / AI4 system and cameras, Not a Tesla App reports.In the original video, Rober, an engineer who went viral after his package thief glitter bombs videos, tested whether Tesla’s…

Aside from cutscenes, most of Mythic Quest takes place in the real world. But Apple’s upcoming spinoff series Side Quest will give us a much better look at what the game looks like from within.While some of Side Quest’s four episodes focus on people’s lives outside of and away from Mythic Quest, the final episode, titled “The Last Raid,” takes place within the fictional MMORPG and follows high schoolers Devon (Van Crosby), Kelly (Melanie Brook), Rory (Alice Wen), Seth (David Andrew Calvillo), and Freddie (Justin Jarzombek) setting out to fight powerful bosses. In this exclusive clip from the episode, the…

On March 18th, Chetan Nayak, a physicist leading Microsoft’s quantum team, presented new data on the company’s quantum computing chip at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. It was meant to calm a raging debate among physicists, but researchers remain skeptical of the results. “I never felt like there would be one moment when everyone is fully convinced,” Nayak told Nature in a March 18th article. The controversy centers on Microsoft’s February claim that it had built a new type of quantum hardware — a topological qubit, made from a pattern of electrons on a tiny…

Google’s Gemini app now lets you generate Audio Overviews based on Deep Research. That means you can turn the in-depth reports generated by Gemini into a conversational podcast featuring two AI “hosts.”The feature should be even more helpful for Deep Research, Google’s “agentic” AI feature that lets you call upon Gemini to explore a specific topic by scanning the web and generating a detailed report based on its findings. When Gemini finishes generating a report, you can select a new “Generate Audio Overview” option to listen to an Audio Overview based on the research. Read the full article here

Introduction Samsung’s Galaxy Watch series has long been one of the best smartwatch choices for mainstream gadget fans, but serious athletes and adventurers had to look elsewhere. The Galaxy Watch Ultra aims to bring them back into the fold, just as the Watch Ultra 2 has done for Apple. The two have an awful lot in common, but this is no mere copycat. It’s a wearable without compromise, built to withstand the elements and track triathlons as well as all the usual smartwatch hallmarks. Landing at $650/£599, it’s also a heck of a lot cheaper than Apple’s Ultra watch, and…

Samsung has confirmed to The Verge that a “software update error” is what broke “certain 2024 soundbar devices,” per a statement from Jim Kiczek, head of audio at Samsung Electronics America. Kiczek says that Samsung is “offering free repairs for all affected units – regardless of warranty status.”Last week, many owners of Samsung soundbars, including its flagship HW-Q990D, reported that their devices were unresponsive and inaccessible from Samsung SmartThings after getting the update. Users also weren’t able to factory reset their soundbars. People reported problems with Samsung’s HW-Q800D and HW-S801D soundbars as well.This error seems particularly bad, as it appears…