Author: News Room
WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.The status feature lives within WhatsApp’s “Updates” tab and allows users to share disappearing text, photo, voice notes, or video messages. But now, you might see sponsored content in addition to the updates shared by friends or family members.Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your…
OnePlus has announced five new products, including a new phone from its popular Nord lineup, which will launch in Europe and India next month. The company will release two phones, a tablet, a smartwatch, and a pair of earbuds, and has already shared a handful of details for each device, though full specs and prices will have to wait until the launch event on July 8th.The Nord 5 is the latest in the company’s mid-range smartphone line, and is the first Nord to feature a flagship Qualcomm chip — in this case the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, which was designed…
If you’ve been having flashbacks to 2007 while using your PC over the past few days, you’re not alone. Microsoft has mistakenly replaced Windows 11’s boot sound — in test versions of the OS — with the startup chime from Windows Vista.Windows testers started noticing the issue shortly after Microsoft released its latest Dev Channel build of Windows 11 on Friday afternoon. The .WAV file for the bootup sound, which is stored inside imageres.dll, had been randomly replaced with the Windows Vista startup sound in preview build 26200.5651.Microsoft quickly acknowledged the mistake, and added a line to its release notes…
Donald Trump might be planning to launch a mobile network and a Trump-branded phone. DTTM Operations LLC, the company Trump uses to manage his trademarks, has applied to use both “Trump” and “T1” for telecoms, mobile accessories, and even phones themselves.The applications, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office last Thursday, cover wireless phone services, mobile phones, cases, and chargers, plus retail stores to sell them all.A trademark application doesn’t guarantee that a Trump mobile network is about to launch, but it does signal intent. “The specificity of the applications points to serious consideration,” patent attorney Josh Gerben wrote…
Social media is filled with an endless supply of people selling things, from Shein try-on hauls to health supplement and gadget product placements. Influencer marketing disrupted traditional advertising, creating an army of living room salespeople pumping out content meant to entice strangers at scale — and tech companies’ vision for the future includes more automation. TikTok announced today it was adding new capabilities to Symphony, the company’s AI ads platform it launched in 2024. The features go beyond generating basic videos and images — instead, the system’s new output mimics what audiences are used to seeing from human influencers. The…
Universally nifty peripherals for your USB-C smartphone USB is dead! Long live… USB-C! Yes, having been around in some form or other since the ’90s, the humble Universal Serial Bus has undergone a transformation in the past few years. Even the models on our best cheap phones list all have it. Here’s our guide to the best USB-C phone accessories. Where once you had microUSB and Mini USB and Pixie USB (OK, not the last one), we now increasingly have one type of connector – USB-C. It’s in most smartphones and laptops. Great! But what else can you do with USB-C beyond…
As with previous versions, Anker is making its new Soundcore Sleep A30 available for preorder through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that’s launching today, while full availability of the earbuds is expected sometime in August 2025 through Amazon and Soundcore’s online store. At $229.99, the Sleep A30 are quite a bit more expensive than last year’s $149.99 Sleep A20, but the earliest Kickstarter backers can get the A30 discounted to $139.The Sleep A30 earbuds are now 7 percent slimmer and feature a smaller design that ensures they don’t protrude from your ears so there’s reduced pressure while wearing them and laying…
The best iPhone and iPad photography apps Photon Library In iOS 18, Apple unleashed a Photos redesign. People either love it or hate it. If you fall into the latter camp, Photon Library lets you turn the clock back. Sort of. Fire up the app, give it access to your photos, and you get an old-school tab bar that lets you quickly switch between recent photos, albums, and a browsable calendar. In any view, repeatedly tapping the tab button toggles you between the oldest and newest photo. Unlike Cs Music Pro, which comes across like a full-featured old-school Music app, Photon Library…
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 87, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy It’s Officially Too Hot Now Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sabrina Carpenter and Khaby Lame and intimacy coordinators, finally making a dent in Barbarians at the Gate, watching all the Ben Schwartz and Friends I can find on YouTube, planning my days with the new Finalist beta, recklessly installing all the Apple developer betas after WWDC, thoroughly enjoying Dakota Johnson’s current…
Some people can tell great wine from okay wine. They go on wine tastings, take wine tours. They tend to spend more money on wine than most. I am not one of those people. I can tell wine from vinegar if you show me the bottle. I am just a little bit obsessed with keyboards, though.I have spent the past couple of months typing on the Seneca, a fully custom capacitive keyboard that starts at $3,600 and might be the best computer keyboard ever built. I’ve also made a bunch of other people type on it — folks whose attitude…
The term “endgame,” among keyboard enthusiasts, is sort of a running gag. Endgame is when you finally dial in your perfect layout, case, features, switches, and keycaps, so you can stop noodling around with parts and get on with whatever it is you actually use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a few months later you see something shiny and start over.In the search for endgame, most of us have to compromise somewhere — usually time or money. Sometimes the thing you’re looking for just doesn’t exist. But what if you didn’t have to compromise? What if you had…
Introduction Renault is clearly on a roll at the moment, with the Renault 5 and Renault 4 EVs looking like they’re going to be in big demand. Elsewhere, the French car makers has quite a lot of models that seemingly look quite similar, like the Rafale, the very good Scenic, the low-key Symbioz and less popular Arkana. The latter car looks like its days are numbered, whereas the Austral has been given a whole new lease of life.Some three years later after I first drove one, the facelifted Austral has kept the same name but has plenty to differentiate it…