Author: News Room

We’ve been working on a new show for the last few months, called Version History, and the first episode is now live! It’s called “Hoverboards: so hot right now,” and it’s an hour-long tour of the biggest rideable gadget of the 2010s. Hidden inside the history of this weird two-wheeled scooter is a crucial inflection point in Chinese tech manufacturing, some hugely influential social media stars, a referendum on self-driving cars, and so much more. This episode is hosted by David Pierce, Andy Hawkins, and Sean O’Kane. We had a blast making it, and we think you’ll enjoy it too.Now…

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days may bring some great Kindle deals, but if you can’t wait, you don’t have to. Right now, the Kindle Kids (Amazon, Best Buy, and Target) and Kindle Colorsoft Kids (Amazon, Best Buy, and Target) are down to their lowest prices ever, but my favorite deal is on the Kindle Paperwhite Kids, which sits nicely between the two. Normally $179.99, right now it’s on sale for $134.99 ($45 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target.Although marketed as a kid-friendly e-reader, the Paperwhite Kids is actually a great value for adults, too. The 7-inch slate is nearly…

Robot vacuums that mop well rarely come cheap, but thankfully, some of our favorite models are receiving a significant discount ahead of Amazon’s next Prime Day event next week. Right now, the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni and the newer Deebot X9 Pro Omni are on sale at Amazon for Prime members for $799.99 ($300 off) and $899.99 ($400 off), respectively, which is the lowest price we’ve seen on either model.The Deebot X8 Pro Omni is an excellent robot vacuum and mop hybrid, with an extendable roller mop that can apply up to 4,000Pa of pressure and reach into tricky…

Have you tried simply uploading a photo to Instagram lately? It’s a minefield. Is that a Story, a Post, or a Reel? Do you want to add music? A caption? A prompt, which is… different than a caption, somehow? How about a poll? A fundraiser? More text, but this time on top of the image? Share it to Facebook? On and on and on. I have a simple request to anyone at Meta who is listening: please, just give us our photo sharing app back.The current Instagram app is more like three or four apps in a trenchcoat. There’s the…

Breaking up Google’s ad tech monopoly is, apparently, like going to Mars or trying to replace Michael Jordan — dubiously possible and a huge amount of work.Those were some of the analogies witnesses testifying in Google’s defense told a federal judge this week as the company mounts its second attempt to stave off a break up. After successfully beating that fate in the Justice Department’s Search case, Google made its case to Virginia-based District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema to let it keep its ad tech business intact too. Along the way, Google witnesses argued it need not give up monopoly…

I was cautiously optimistic about Acer’s Chromebook Plus Spin 514 when I tested a preproduction model last month, but the final unit is here now and it sticks the landing. Well, mostly.Acer’s latest convertible Chromebook has zippy performance and oodles of battery life, along with a good touchscreen with stylus support. But crappy speakers and no fingerprint sensor make its $700 price tougher to swallow, and prevents it from dethroning the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, our current favorite Chromebook.$699The GoodExcellent battery lifeSpeedy performanceStylus supportThe BadCrummy, muffled-sounding speakersNo biometric loginFeels slightly pricey at $700 when a Lenovo with OLED and more…

Earlier this week, I went to one of those tech-show-in-a-basement affairs, where journalists are herded into a confined space with no natural light, no mobile signal, and lots of companies eager to show off shiny gadgets. These events always have a strange vibe as you shuffle around, try to snag the attention of reps, and occasionally lock eyes with someone you’ve definitely met before but whose name instantly escapes you. By far the busiest spot of the evening was the Fairphone display, a large chunk of which comprised an artistically dismantled Fairphone 6. It took the better part of an hour before I got…

After getting off the phone with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek on Saturday, the president mused over something that had baffled him about the call. Kotek had been “very nice,” said Trump in an interview the next day. But she was trying hard to convince him not to send in the National Guard, and that just didn’t make any sense to him. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?’”Hours later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum federalizing 200 members of Oregon’s National Guard to deploy to Portland, and…

One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers was compromised by an “unauthorized party,” the company says. The unauthorized party gained access to “information from a limited number of users who had contacted Discord through our Customer Support and/or Trust & Safety teams” and aimed to “extort a financial ransom from Discord.” The unauthorized party “did not gain access to Discord directly.”Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, usernames, emails, and the last four digits of credit card numbers. The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed an…

In August 2002, I was probably back-to-school shopping with my mom at our local mall, bouncing from store to store for backpacks, socks, and a first-day-of-school outfit. Gap was no doubt one of our stops — and thanks to Michael Bise, I now know what music was playing as we browsed.When Bise first started working at a Gap store in Dallas in 1992, the first thing that struck him was the store’s music.“Just right away, it was so different from what I was expecting,” Bise says. It wasn’t the classic soft instrumentals of a chain department store, nor was it…

Amazon announced a bunch of new hardware earlier in the week, but the Echo Show 21 wasn’t updated and remains its biggest smart display. You can get a bundle that includes the Echo Show 21 and its Premium Adjustable Stand for $439.99 ($84.99 off) at Amazon. If you don’t have a stand, the Echo Show 21 must be mounted onto a wall using the included mount, which isn’t always feasible.The Echo Show 21’s namesake feature is its 21-inch 1080p display, which offers plenty of digital space for widgets, including a calendar, shopping list, and multi-day weather forecast. The big screen…

The physical media renaissance is powered in part by the growing popularity of film cameras, and now one of the more iconic photography brands of yesteryear is providing a fillip for those looking beyond the best mirrorless cameras. Eastman Kodak, the company behind the legendary Kodak brand, will begin selling 35mm film directly to distributors in the United States and Canada for the first time in a decade. That’s to help the brand keep up with the demand for film, which it says has doubled in the last five years. The increase in popularity seems to have travelled beyond the…