Author: News Room

For many years, if someone asked for a TV recommendation, there was an easy answer: choose an OLED TV. That’s been the status quo for about the past five years. But I’ve now seen what’s coming next from Sony and it could rip up the rulebook. There’s been a quiet battle raging between OLED and other LED-based TV technologies over the past decade. OLED’s advantage has been in illumination, with each pixel producing its own light. That means that turning it off means absolute black, while colour control and accuracy is easier to achieve. Competition has come from QLED (LED…

Google is adding Veo 3 software capabilities to its video generation feature for Google Photos. US-based users can turn static images into four-second videos by clicking either the “Subtle movements” or, for the more adventurous, the “I’m feeling lucky” options under the Create tab in Google Photos. According to Google spokesperson Michael Marconi, you can get your photo subjects to dance or shower them with confetti.Veo 3 replaces Veo 2 in Photos, which was rolled out beginning in July. The upgrade to the video generation software will improve the resolution and fidelity of the clips made from static images, Marconi…

A federal jury in California has ordered Google to pay $425 million for violating user privacy by collecting the data of millions of people even after they disabled tracking, as reported earlier by Reuters.The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed in July 2020, which accused Google of unlawfully accessing app activity data on users’ mobile phones from July 2016 to September 2024. The lawsuit alleged that during this period, Google continued to collect user data across third-party apps even if they had the “Web & App Activity” setting turned off.The Web & App Activity setting is supposed to…

Fitness trackers have come a long way from the simple bands that tracked steps and little else. Modern trackers can monitor everything from your heart health to how well you’ve recovered from a hard bout of training. Even flagship smartwatches, which used to be lackluster trackers, have become pretty adept workout companions. Whatever your fitness goals are, there’s probably a fitness tracker that can help you achieve them.Compared to some other gadgets, wearables are incredibly personal, which means there are a few extra considerations you’ll have to take into account before reaching for your wallet. It makes it hard to…

TAG Heuer has just unveiled something I didn’t expect to see from a brand more often tied to stopwatches, racing legends, and speed: a bold, thoroughly modern moonphase watch. The new Carrera Astronomer may take its name from the stars, but it’s still every inch a TAG Heuer. Moonphase watches often lean into romanticism, with delicate crescent cutouts and painted moons drifting across dials. TAG Heuer’s approach couldn’t be more different. At 6 o’clock sits a rotating disc that shows seven illustrated lunar stages, tracked with pinpoint accuracy by a pair of slender arrows. Powered by the Calibre 7 movement…

If your plan to combat the post-summer blues is binge-watching TV shows, movies, and sports, Paramount Plus is offering a great deal. New and returning subscribers can save 50 percent on an annual subscription to its Paramount Plus Essential and Paramount Plus Premium plans until September 18th. The deal knocks the annual price of an Essential plan to $29.99 (from $59.99) and the cost of a Premium plan to $59.99 (from $119.99). These plans will renew at its full price next year if you continue your subscription.Both plans include access to a library of over 40,000 episodes of TV and…

Making the jump from real-world cycling to Zwift is about to get a whole lot easier – and leave a smaller sting on your wallet. The online virtual cycling platform has just unveilled a newer, sleeker set of Click controllers and expanded its Zwift Ready programme, ahead of some big software updates due before the new year. The new Click controllers are essentially a smaller, more universally compatible take on the Zwift Play controllers that debuted in 2023, and which have now effectively been retired. The two puck-like add-ons can be strapped to any handlebar type, and placed pretty much…

Nvidia announced last month that it’s planning to upgrade its GeForce Now cloud gaming service to RTX 5080 GPUs. Now, we have a date for that upgrade: September 10th. The upgrade will allow GeForce Now subscribers to rent what’s effectively an RTX 5080 in the cloud, with a huge 48GB of memory and DLSS 4 support.Nvidia’s RTX 5080 upgrade for GeForce Now will include support for 5K resolutions at 60fps and 120fps, or 1440p at 240fps and 1080p at 360fps. You’ll also be able to enable full ray-tracing support in games with Neural Rendering and Multi Frame Generation, all at…

In case you missed it last week among other big news items, Google shipped a phone camera with a zoom feature that uses generative AI. That’s right: the Pixel 10 Pro comes with AI right inside the camera app that cleans up otherwise crappy digital zoom images all the way up to 100x. It’s a what-is-a-photo nightmare, but it’s also pretty good — at least it seems to be. But it’s hard to be completely sure what the thing you’re photographing is supposed to look like when it’s miles away. So I brought in a ringer for some side-by-side comparisons:…

Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York-based startup that makes both Arc and the new AI-focused Dia browser. Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent entity.The conversations that led to the deal started about a year ago, says Josh Miller, The Browser Company’s CEO. Lots of Atlassian…

Samsung’s ‘Fan Edition’ concept makes a lot of sense: take a flagship handset, dilute down the hardware, and price it to see off the mid-range smartphone competition while you work on the next generation hero. Only the last few tries arrived just a little late, coming too close to the next year’s Galaxy headliner to truly stand out. The Galaxy S25 FE looks set to address that, arriving a month earlier than the outgoing Galaxy S24 FE and putting some much-needed breathing room between it and the inevitable Galaxy S26 in February next year. Officially revealed at IFA – the…

After years of unofficial copies of Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC floating around on the internet, the software giant has released the code under an open-source license. 6502 BASIC was one of Microsoft’s first pieces of software, adapted in 1976 by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and early employee Ric Weiland to run on the 6502 CPU that powered the Apple II, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Commodore 8-bit series.Microsoft’s open-source release of 6502 BASIC is a throwback to the initial days of coding, as the software helped standardize programming language implementations and allowed some of the first developers to use a…