Author: News Room

Introduction Google’s Pixel A-series has long been the benchmark for brilliant mid-range phones. These phones pack loads of premium Pixel features – like clever AI tricks and best-in-class cameras – while quietly trimming away the bits you won’t miss. The Pixel 9a keeps that winning formula, but adds more than ever before. This time, Google’s taken the best bits from the Pixel 9 and squeezed them into a cheaper body, without making it feel like a cut-price option. You get a sleek redesign, upgraded camera tech, and a healthy dose of Google AI — all powered by the new Tensor…

Today, I’m talking to Rohit Chopra. He was the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) until the end of January, when President Donald Trump fired him and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began trying to dismantle the agency.The CFPB has been around for just under 15 years now. Congress created the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from various kinds of lending and credit schemes that led to that crash. Broadly speaking, the CFPB has been pretty popular! This is the agency that keeps consumers safe from predatory lending practices,…

While the top smartphones of the year have been impressive, I’m looking forward to Samsung’s ultra-slim Galaxy S25 Edge. After weeks of speculation and premature leaks, we finally know when the Galaxy S25 Edge will come out. The good news is that it’s soon. According to an exclusive report from SamMobile, the Galaxy S25 Edge is set to launch on Tuesday, 13 May 2025. Initially slated for an April 15 debut, the handset then got delayed. The reason for this delay? Apparently not hardware issues or last-minute design disasters, but internal upheaval. Following the unfortunate death of Jong-Hee Han, Samsung’s…

Around 2009, Dweezil Zappa ran into a space problem. He was busy touring the US, performing some songs written by his father, Frank. Recreating those signature “peculiar sounds,” as Zappa calls them, required lugging around a massive rig — roughly the size of two large refrigerators — held together by more than 200 connections and cables. “The challenge for me on tour was how can I recreate some of these sounds and not use the actual equipment that [Frank] used because some of it didn’t exist anymore,” Zappa says. “It was a pretty extensive system.”Zappa began seriously exploring a still…

Usually, when you get an “Ultra” version of a top smartphone, it’s an absolute unit – bigger, badder, but better. But this new camera-focused flagship from Oppo manages to squeeze a bunch of extras into a phone that’s not much bigger. At 8.78mm thick, the Oppo Find X8 Ultra is a Slim Jim compared to Xiaomi’s and Vivo’s beefier offerings. There’s a new camera module on the back for better photo capabilities and a bigger battery, but that doesn’t result in a heftier handset. The camera setup is the start of the show here. We’re talking four 50MP lenses tuned…

The creators of the Flipper Zero, a sort of electronic Swiss army knife for communicating with other devices, have come up with another tool that’s designed to boost productivity and reduce distractions. The Busy Bar is a customizable app-connected pixelated display that lets others know when you need to be left alone to focus, but it can also be used to help with self-motivation and sticking to a schedule or routine.At its most basic functionality, the Busy Bar is an oversized timer with an eight-hour battery and a prominent 72 x 16 LED pixelated screen on the front that can…

The A-series Pixels have been very good over the past few years. And in the Pixel 9A, Google has taken a good midrange phone and made it great.It’s $499, which feels just right for what you get in the 9A. Spend a bit more for the Pixel 9, and you’ll get some upgrades like a better ultrawide camera and more RAM, as well as little touches like Wi-Fi 7 rather than Wi-Fi 6E. But every time I wished for something on the 9A that it doesn’t offer, I kept coming back to that price. At $499, it’s easier to let…

A man’s recent attempt to use an AI-generated avatar in his legal appeal made an immediate impression on a New York courtroom, but probably not the one he was hoping for. Jerome Dewald — a 74-year-old that The Register notes is behind a startup that says it’s “revolutionizing legal self-representation with AI” — was chewed out during an employment dispute hearing on March 26th for failing to inform judges that he had artificially generated the man presenting his oral argument. While the court had approved Dewald to submit a video for his case, Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels became confused when the…

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 chip already powers some of this year’s top smartphones, including the Oppo Find X9 Pro. But, the freshly unveiled Dimensity 9400+ is here to stir the pot with some much-loved upgrades. This new silicon focuses on adding extra power for AI smarts, performance, and gaming chops. Let’s start with the obvious headline-grabber: AI. The Dimensity 9400+ is kitted out to handle everything from Mixture-of-Experts to something called Multi-Head Latent Attention. There’s also FP8 inferencing, Multi-Token Prediction, and faster reasoning speeds. I appreciate that these are as many buzzwords as you could expect to find on a Silicon…

I’ll admit, I’ve been pretty sceptical of the whole slim phone hype we’re going through. Are they impressive? Sure. But I didn’t get the main pull. Who’s out here struggling with the iPhone 16’s 7.8mm frame – or any other top smartphone for that matter? But then Infinix sent me the Hot 50 Pro+. And I think I finally get the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge hype after living with this slim phone. At 6.8mm, it’s not as slim as the upcoming Galaxy S25 Edge or Tecno Spark Slim. Both are rumoured to come in at around 5.8mm, which is frankly…

President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs — including a now 125 percent levy on Chinese imports — will hit the smart home industry hard.Many smart home device makers are already struggling, thanks, in part, to Trump’s first round of tariffs. Increased competition from budget smart home companies largely based in China has also played a part, and so has slower takeup from homeowners than the industry expected.Smart home control panel maker Brilliant cited tariffs and supply chain issues along with weaker-than-expected demand when it was close to shutting down last year. This year, robot vacuum maker iRobot announced it…

Were you clamoring for two AI-generated podcast hosts to talk through the key points of your document before you send it to your boss? No? Well, you’re getting it anyway. Google has announced new Gemini features coming to Workspace apps, including NotebookLM-style AI podcasts integrated right into Google Docs. There’s a wide spread of new features in this announcement, from an editor that can make suggestions in your documents to a tool that will help make sense of your spreadsheets, all with Gemini at the center.Maybe the most uncanny of them all is the podcast feature, which exists in a…