Earlier this year, investment bank Piper Sandler published results from an annual survey showing that 87 percent of teens own an iPhone, leaving precious little market for Android device makers to carve up. But Samsung has a new plan to break the kids of their Apple addiction: Get YouTuber and restauranteur Jimmie Donaldson, aka MrBeast, to make content with its phones. Starting with a video where he drives expensive cars around. Samsung writes in its announcement that this will showcase “what’s possible with a Galaxy smartphone for aspiring and professional creators.” The company’s phones get some screen time in the…
Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images Intel has wrapped up its annual Innovation event in San Jose, where the chipmaker gave us a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipeline over the next few years. In case you don’t have a spare hour and a half to sit down and watch CEO Pat Gelsinger’s keynote, here are some important things we learned. Meteor Lake will launch on December 14th If you haven’t guessed, AI was kind of a theme here. The company officially introduced its “Meteor Lake” generation (known officially as the Intel Core Ultra) to the world at the Innovation…
You can limit the battery charge to 80 percent on the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro. This is apparently in response to complaints about the iPhone 14 Pro’s battery capacity issues. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Apple has detailed how the iPhone 15’s new 80 percent charging limit setting works in an update to a support document. Here’s Apple’s explanation of what you can expect if you enable the setting: When you choose 80% Limit, your iPhone will charge up to about 80 percent and then stop charging. If the battery charge level gets down to 75…
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge TikTok will try to boost its new online marketplace, TikTok Shop, by funding heavy discounts for the holiday shopping season, starting on October 27th, reports Bloomberg. The social video site reportedly hopes that by subsidizing up-to-50 percent discounts, it can gain a foothold with US holiday shoppers, who turn out in droves for big sales at retailers like Amazon and Walmart every year in November. Bloomberg says a TikTok spokesperson confirmed the plans, with official Black Friday deals starting at 8PM on November 23rd and deals for Cyber Monday running from November 28th…
Illustration: The Verge A WhatsApp for Android beta update (version 2.23.19.8) that came out today contains a new screen called Third-party chats, reports WABetaInfo. For now, the screen is neither functional nor accessible by users, according to WABetaInfo. But its title is a strong clue that this is likely the first step to opening Meta’s encrypted messages app to cross-platform compatibility. The beta comes just days after the European Commission confirmed that WhatsApp owner Meta meets the definition of a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires communication software like WhatsApp to interoperate with third-party messaging apps…
The SwitchBot S10 robot vacuum and mop costs $1,199.99 and comes with an auto-empty / charging dock plus a battery-powered water refill dock. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge After previewing its latest robotic invention earlier this month, SwitchBot officially launched the S10 robot vacuum and mop at IFA 2023 in Berlin last week. The $1,199.99 bot, coming to Kickstarter in October, features an automatic water refill station that does away with the bulky water tanks housed in giant auto-empty docks that have become the hallmark of top-of-the-line floor cleaners from Roborock, Ecovacs, etc. Unlike those models…
Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is no longer updating WordPad and plans to remove the word processor from a future release of Windows. The software giant will instead recommend Microsoft Word, its paid word processor that has always been far more feature rich than the basic WordPad app that has shipped as part of Windows since Windows 95. “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” reads a support note published by Microsoft on Friday. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text…
Urbanista’s Malibu. After releasing two solar-powered pairs of headphones, you would have thought that it’d be simple for Urbanista to apply the same technology to a Bluetooth speaker. But with the Malibu, which is being shown off at IFA in Berlin ahead of its release later this month, Urbanista says it had a whole new set of challenges to overcome. That’s because the company’s approach to its solar powered products hasn’t just been to put some solar-absorbing material on an existing device and call it a day. Instead, Urbanista product director Marten Sahlen and the company’s brand and marketing director…
Image: Dolby Dolby Atmos is about to get a whole lot more adaptable. Today, Dolby is announcing Dolby Atmos FlexConnect, which it describes as “a new feature that seamlessly pairs together a TV’s sound system with accessory wireless speakers to deliver a more extensive and immersive Dolby Atmos sound experience.” Since it factors your TV speakers into the equation, FlexConnect doesn’t require a soundbar at the center of everything. TCL will become the first TV manufacturer to offer FlexConnect with its upcoming 2024 TV lineup, and it also plans to release a line of wireless speakers optimized to support the…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created. Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s owner, but he…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple Music has a new station that’s designed to help you find songs you might like. The app’s Discovery Station will play a curated selection of music based on what you’ve been listening to lately but haven’t added to your library or heard before, as spotted earlier by Apple Insider and 9to5Mac. While Apple hasn’t officially announced the Discovery Station, it’s currently live on Apple Music’s mobile, desktop, and web apps for most users. You can find the option by heading to Listen Now and then looking beneath the Stations for You section….
Image: EA Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will be released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, EA CEO Andrew Wilson announced during the company’s Q1 earnings call on Tuesday. The game launched in April on PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC but skipped Sony and Microsoft’s older hardware, so with this new release, people who haven’t upgraded to the newer consoles will eventually be able to check out the game. However, we don’t know exactly when Jedi: Survivor will be coming to older consoles. Here’s Wilson’s quote about the release: “Thanks to the strength of this legendary franchise and…
I don’t see much of a point in a second-gen Apple Watch Ultra if there isn’t a noticeably better experience. | Photograph by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The next Apple Watch Ultra may come in a darker titanium color. Supposedly. The rumor comes courtesy of Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter — but even Gurman himself doesn’t seem entirely sure about it. Besides that, the second-gen Ultra might be a little lighter and feature a faster processor. I hate to say it, but if that’s all we can expect to change, perhaps Apple shouldn’t release a second-gen…
Google robot choosing a ball. | Image: Google Google wants to make its robots smarter with the release of the AI learning model Robotic Transformer (RT-2). RT-2 is the new version of what the company calls its vision-language-action (VLA) model. The model teaches robots to better recognize visual and language patterns to interpret instructions and infer what objects work best for the request. Researchers tested RT-2 with a robotic arm in a kitchen office setting, asking its robotic arm to decide what makes a good improvised hammer (it was a rock) and to choose a drink to give an exhausted…
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Earlier this week, a reader contacted me with a dilemma: his wife has always had super sharp hearing when it comes to environmental / ambient noise. She can “hear a gnat blink at 1,000 yards. Forty years ago, she could hear electronic clocks running,” he said. And so they’ve been in search of a solution that would help eliminate some of that background clamor while still helping her clearly hear conversations happening directly in front of her. I’m no doctor, nor am I any kind of hearing health expert. Consulting an audiologist would…
Image: Google Google is delaying the broad expansion of its Find My Device feature, and it says it’s doing so with personal safety in mind since the industry spec proposed by itself and Apple isn’t quite ready yet. “User safety and the prevention of unwanted location tracking is a top priority for Android,” Google’s Erik Kay announced in a blog post today. “At this time we’ve made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS.” Need to catch up? Back at its I/O 2023 keynote, Google revealed plans to…
Capcom Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is 2023’s perfect summer video game. Now, you might be wondering how I could call a Switch port of a Nintendo DS game from 2010 “perfect” (the game’s also available on PS4, Xbox One, and Steam) over any of the games actually released this year, like Diablo IV or Final Fantasy XVI. But while I enjoyed both of those games, I actually don’t think either are ideal summer games for two reasons. They’re way too involved, requiring a bit too much mental commitment to play. Their hardware requirements force you to play them indoors. Therefore,…
