Author: News Room
Apple’s expected smart home push is expected to begin in earnest with the first gadgets coming this autumn. Now, we’ve received the clearest indication of what could be in store in the next few months, via some hardware model numbers discovered in the company’s forthcoming software releases. The macOS 27 release candidate contains references to model numbers for a slew of forthcoming products – including iPhones, AirPods and Macs. However, it’s the Home devices that are likely to bring the most intrigue. They potentially reveal the Home Hub smart display, new HomePod mini, the rumoured security camera, and the tabletop…
Without waxing nostalgic, there are some fantastic vintage watches out there, from the undiscovered to the iconic, unimpeachably timeless to painfully of their time. And while the modern watch release slate continues ever on, sometimes it’s worth taking a step back from the latest 1000m dive watch to see what older timepieces can offer. In this current climate of endless heritage throwbacks, vintage watches are more in the spotlight than ever before – and if you’ve yet to explore why, then allow me to enlighten you with five reasons vintage watches are better than new. Image credit: Everywatch 1. Unsurpassed…
Starting today, AI chats in Firefox’s Smart Window AI browsing mode can pull from current web info and show source links in chat responses through a partnership with Exa. Smart Window can also now automatically suggest tab groups and show visual previews of pages you previously visited when you search your browsing history using natural language.I saw a live demo that showed how the Smart Window AI could sort through selected links in your browsing history to pull up “running shoes I looked at last week,” and pop up images pulled from the sites browsed previously. The suggested groups of…
Did you know Apple wants more than three hundred dollars to replace a smashed iPhone screen? A new display panel for the Fairphone 6+ will set you back just $90 – plus you can swap it in yourself. No painfully long in-store wait required. The ultra-repairable midrange smartphone even ships with a screwdriver in the box. The Dutch phone brand’s earlier handsets were only available in the US with Murena’s de-Googled /e/OS software and carried a large price premium. That changes for the Fairphone 6+, which can now be had with vanilla Android 16 directly from Fairphone, for a more…
Comcast is bringing Wi-Fi motion sensing to millions of routers that are already in customers’ homes, turning the devices into activity monitors. A new update to the Xfinity Internet app, arriving today, August 18th, enables the feature on compatible Xfinity routers at no extra cost.Announced as part of its new Xfinity Shield service, WiFi Motion can monitor activity in your home and send you notifications, similar to a standalone motion sensor. It works by detecting disruptions in the Wi-Fi signal between the Xfinity gateway and any Wi-Fi-connected device, giving you some insight into what’s happening in your home without buying…
Apple’s next major product category expansion is rumoured to be the smart home. In the immediate term we’ll likely see more advanced versions of products we’re familiar with, like Siri AI-infused Apple TV and HomePod models. The first brand new product is likely to be Apple’s first ever smart display – a kitchen counter style device that’ll set the table for all that’ll follow. We’re known about all of these things for a while, and reports say they’ve been gathering dust while Apple gets its Siri ducks in a generative AI row. Moving forward is where it gets interesting. The…
Polaroid announced a new collection of cameras, instant film, and accessories all featuring limited-edition designs to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pokémon. The new collection goes a little harder than Fujifilm’s Pokémon collaboration from five years ago with the introduction of Polaroid film printed with various characters around the frames, including Pikachu and Snorlax. The entire collection will be available for preorder starting on August 25th in the US, Canada, and the UK through the Polaroid and Pokémon Center websites. A global release is expected to follow on October 5th.The three cameras are existing models with new designs. They…
For 27 years, Concorde made a mockery of time. Leave London, cross the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, and land in New York before your watch caught up with the time difference, arriving (on paper) before you’d even technically left. Then, in October 2003, its time was up. Concorde flew its last commercial route – BA002 from JFK to London – and was wheeled into retirement, done in not by a lack of ambition but by a multitude of problems. Over two decades later, three separate programmes believe they’ve identified where Concorde went wrong and are working to…
One of the best things my smart home does is help me care for my pets, and security cameras are particularly useful for keeping track of my many critters. But the barrage of notifications they send often means I miss important ones. So, when Google announced its new Pet Memory feature for Gemini for Home, I thought this could be the perfect solution.Pet Memory promises to teach your Google Home smart home who your pets are, allowing connected Nest cameras to go beyond simply telling you they saw an animal to which animal they saw. It can then use that…
If you’re the kind of person who buys an iPhone in August, congratulations, you’ve never once benefited from Apple’s pricing calendar, and this article is for you. For the past decade (with the exception of a couple of pandemic-addled years when even Apple lost track of the month), Apple has announced new iPhone models in September. Even if you don’t want the latest model, the current ones usually drop in price at this point, so August is never, ever the time to buy a new iPhone. This year, the same rule applies to the Apple TV 4K. Somewhere in Cupertino,…
On August 6th, the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center lost radar and communications for around two hours. The outage disrupted more than 1,100 flights across the center’s 330,000 square mile, nine-state airspace sector.Two days earlier, on August 4th, President Donald Trump departed the White House inside his Marine One military helicopter. As Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) protocol requires, the pilots tried to contact Reagan National Airport to tell them to halt commercial traffic during the flight. But the air traffic controllers never heard the transmission and cleared a different airplane for takeoff — which came closer than the minimum…
We may have our first glimpse of Apple’s rumored camera-equipped AirPods, thanks to a video that MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 Release Candidate. The short video clip features a man — who is wearing the new AirPods — holding up a book with the cover displayed, so that Visual Intelligence can see the book title.A Siri voice-over plays over the clip, saying “with Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has previously reported that the rumored AirPods with cameras are designed to take in…