The Verge

Samsung’s recent foldable, the Z Flip 3, is more hamburger than hotdog. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Google appears to be internally testing a second foldable Pixel smartphone, according to 9to5Google’s sources. The device is said to be under development with the codename “Jumbojack,” that’s referenced in a future version of Android 12 which 9to5Google identifies as “Android 12.1.” This is the latest foldable codename we’ve heard about at Google, following reports of another device called “Passport.”Not much is known about what form Jumbojack could take, but 9to5Google has a couple of key details. It seems to have two screens, with one that deactivates when the device is folded. That suggests we’re looking at a similar design to Samsung’s foldables, which combine a small external screen with a larger internal folding display. There’s... Continue reading…

Ikea’s Sjömärke fits under a table to make it a charger. | GIF: Ikea Ikea got in relatively early on selling furniture embedded with wireless charging coils, but what if you don’t have one of its powered-up desks or shelving units? If you want seamless Wireless Qi charging without redecorating, then next month, there will be a solution. Meet the Sjömärke, a $39.99 wireless charging pad made to work with furniture you already own.This device isn’t like most Qi charging pads, where you’d put your phone or earbuds directly on the mat. Instead, the seven-inch by three-inch aluminum and plastic charger works through plastic or wood, so you can use its double-sided tape (or screws, not included) to put it on the underside of a table or shelf. Image: Ikea Image: Ikea ... Continue reading…

Kendall Roy, smiling because he is happy Succession is returning soon (probably) | HBO OK so the latest Ted Lasso spends almost the entire episode on Coach Beard in its most unusual, dream-like episode ever. I didn’t hate it (and I know it’s one of the two episodes added to the mix after Apple said it wanted 12 episodes instead of the 10 the writers had already sketched out. The Christmas episode was the other), but I wish we had actually gotten to know Beard a little better. “I listen more than I talk” seems like a line that could be his mantra.The Morning Show is back and honestly the first episode seemed rushed to get certain characters to do specific things we as the audience know they must do in order to have a show at all. I’ll stick with it for a bit, remembering that this was a show that took a little while to... Continue reading…

The 73rd Emmy Awards will be held on September 19th. | Getty Images The 73rd annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony is tonight at 8PM ET (5PM PT), and streaming platforms like Apple TV Plus, Netflix and HBO Max are poised to win big. Cedric the Entertainer will host the show, which will be broadcast live from outside the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, to accommodate social distancing, which also means the audience will be limited to nominees and their guests.Where DO I WATCH THE EMMYS?This year, CBS will broadcast the Emmys, so you can watch on your local CBS affiliate. The show will also stream live on CBS’ Paramount Plus streaming app. You can sign up for a free trial of Paramount Plus to check it out if you’re not already a subscriber.HOW DO I WATCH THE EMMYS ONLINEThere are plenty of options... Continue reading…

NTSB chair says Tesla should address safety issues before expanding its so-called “full self-driving” mode. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Wall Street Journal that Tesla should address “basic safety issues” before the carmaker expands its so-called “full self-driving” (FSD) mode.Tesla CEO Elon Musk said earlier this month that the company was aiming for a wider release of FSD by the end of September, making a “public beta button” available to more Tesla customers. As the WSJ reports, an upgrade to the software— which was designed primarily for driving on highways— is expected, in order to make the vehicles ready for driving on city streets.Homendy had harsh words for Tesla’s use of the term “full self-driving,” which she called “misleading and irresponsible,” adding that Tesla “has clearly... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge General Motors plans to launch 30 new electric vehicles around the world by 2025, and aspires to sell only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. But over the last few years, the United States’ biggest automaker has once again squandered the advantages it held in the still-burgeoning field of electric vehicles through bad politics, bad investments, and now most notably, a massive recall of the Bolt — currently its only all-electric vehicle — thanks to around a dozen reported fires.On Thursday, GM announced that it is extending the Bolt’s production shutdown until mid-October, as it apparently hasn’t been able to get supplier LG to produce replacement batteries that are up to snuff. It will need a lot of them, too, as GM has recalled all... Continue reading…

A leaked image of the Surface Pro 8. | Image: Shadow_Leak (Twitter) Microsoft is preparing to launch a new Surface Pro 8 model next week, and a leak appears to have revealed exactly what to expect. Twitter account Shadow_Leak has published a photo of the Surface Pro 8 from what appears to be a retail listing. The account claims the Surface Pro 8 will ship with a new 13-inch 120Hz display with narrow bezels and two Thunderbolt ports.The Verge reported last week that the Surface Pro 8 would ship without USB-A ports, in favor of USB-C and Thunderbolt. We also reported that Microsoft has been testing 120Hz displays for the Surface Pro lineup. The leaked image and specs line up with what we’ve heard from sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans.

TikTok is branded under the name Douyin in China | Getty Images The Chinese version of the popular short video app TikTok, known as Douyin, will limit users in China who are under 14 years old to 40 minutes a day, parent company ByteDance said in a blog post Saturday.The app’s youth mode keeps it in line with the Chinese government’s new restrictions on access to video games for younger children. Teens under 14 will be able to access Douyin between 6AM and 10PM, but won’t be able to use the app outside of that window, the company said. The rules will apply to “real-name authenticated users” under 14, and the company encouraged parents to help their children complete the real-name authentication process, or activate youth mode when prompted by the app.The Chinese government has been focused on... Continue reading…

Inspiration4 SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule carrying four private citizens plunged through Earth’s atmosphere Saturday night and splashed down off the east coast of Florida, closing out the company’s first all-civilian mission in space. The Inspiration4 crew — the mission’s billionaire funder Jared Isaacman, geoscientist Sian Proctor, physician assistant Haley Arceneaux, and data engineer Chris Sembroski — became the first crew to hang out in Earth orbit without any professionally trained astronauts.“it was a heck of a ride”The crew’s splashdown zone in the Atlantic Ocean was roughly 30 miles east of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where they launched to space atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday. Beginning at about 7:02PM ET, Crew Dragon deployed... Continue reading…

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that the company’s Starlink satellite internet network would come out of its open beta phase next month. That’s two months later than the August date Musk gave at Mobile World Congress, when he also said he expected the service to have “possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months.”The Starlink system calls for a constellation of nearly 12,000 satellites in low-Earth orbits that will beam continuous broadband internet service. A terminal costs $499 and there’s a $99 monthly fee for service. It opened its public beta test in October 2020, and Musk said in August that SpaceX had shipped 100,000 Starlink terminals, which includes a satellite dish and a Wi-Fi router, to users in 14 countries. As the beta... Continue reading…

Nearly a year after announcing plans to spin out its own electric bike company called Serial 1, Harley-Davidson said it will sell a “limited” number of the gorgeous, vintage-inspired models that it originally said was just a “styling exercise.”The S1 Mosh/Tribute is an homage to “Serial Number One,” the nickname for Harley-Davidson’s oldest known motorcycle built in 1903. The bike’s design, with its white tires, leather saddle and handgrips, and sleek black frame with gold lettering, harken back to that first prototype.But under the glossy black paint and honey-colored leather accents, the bike is identical to Serial 1’s entry-level Mosh/Cty model. The S1 Mosh/Tribute (props to Harley for keeping all the vowels this time ) has many of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s vice president of global affairs criticized a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal that reported the social network is aware of numerous problems across its platforms that cause harm to users, but does little to fix them.In a post on Facebook’s blog, Nick Clegg wrote that while it was “absolutely legitimate for us to be held to account for how we deal with” some of the issues outlined in the Journal reporting, the stories “contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.”This week, the Journal published a sweeping series of deeply reported stories on Facebook, based on its review of internal documents, concluding... Continue reading…

Inventor and entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair has died at age 81. | Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Clive Sinclair, who invented the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an early personal computer, died of cancer Thursday at age 81, his family confirmed. Sinclair was an inventor with an impressive list of electronic products to his name, some, like his pocket calculator, were quite successful, while others, like his Sinclair C5 “electric trike” vehicle, were decidedly not.Born in England in 1940, Sinclair had a knack for creating gadgets. The Sinclair Executive “slimline” pocket calculator, released in 1972, sold well (likely in large part due to its low price ), and at one point was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.Sinclair’s ZX personal computers were priced lower than the then-popular Commodore 64, and well-liked by consumers in the UK.... Continue reading…

Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls isn’t just the long-awaited return of the vampire-whipping series. It also marks the return of some big names, including character designer Ayami Kojima and composer Michiru Yamane, who left Konami in 2008. Yamane previously worked on seminal Castlevania games like Symphony of the Night and Dawn of Sorrow, and after going freelance she teamed up with longtime Castlevania director Koji Igarashi on Bloodstained. Her credits also include Skullgirls, a few Suikoden games, and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, though she calls her work on Castlevania her “masterpiece.”Ahead of the launch of Grimoire of Souls, which is out now on Apple Arcade, I had the chance to ask Yamane a few questions over email about her... Continue reading…

Steam Next Fest is coming October 1st | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Valve announced Friday that its latest Steam Next Fest is coming the first week of October, giving access to playable demos of hundreds of upcoming PC games.A video teaser showed glimpses of a few games to expect to see in demo, including Airhead from Octato Games, Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer’s Legacy from Ludomotion, ANNO:Mutationem from Thinking Stars, Mahokenshi from Game Source Studio, Starship Troopers— Terran Command from The Artistocrats, Life of Delta from Airo Games, and more. And IGN reported that The Last Campfire, from Hello Games, the creators of No Man’s Sky, will also have a playable demo available as part of Next Fest.Gamers can “explore the latest from veteran devs and first-timers alike,” according to the promotional... Continue reading…

Yep, if my employer gave me a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, I’d want to use it all the time too. Don’t do it! | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It’s a decision that may seem like a no-brainer. You’ve got a new job, and they’ve just given you a brand-new ThinkPad. Perfect, you think to yourself. It’s about time I got rid of that 10-year-old MacBook Air.I’ve been there. Surveys have shown that over half of workers use work-issued devices for personal tasks — whether sending personal messages, shopping online, accessing social media, or reading the news. The prospect of using your work laptop as your only laptop — not just for work, but also for Netflixing, group chat messaging, reading fanfiction, paying bills, and emailing recipes to your mom — is understandably tempting, especially for folks who work from home. Keeping work tasks and personal tasks in one place may feel like... Continue reading…

Image: Apple With new iPhones come new features. And starting next week, Apple HomeKit users will get plenty courtesy of iOS 15, HomePod 15, tvOS 15, and watchOS 8 software updates. Apple has confirmed that these will all be available on the same day, September 20th.So, if you’ve been excited about unlimited HomeKit Secure Video cameras, the HomePod Mini as a speaker for your Apple TV 4K, or the chance to see your doorbell on your Apple Watch, you’re in luck.Here’s a look at all the new HomeKit and HomeKit-related features that will be dropping on Monday. Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge A new software update will let you pair a single or pair of HomePod Minis to your Apple TV 4K. Control your Apple TV with Siri on... Continue reading…

Image: Nextorage Sony subsidiary Nextorage has released an SSD that’s perfect for the PS5 (via Tom’s Hardware): it has a heatsink (which Sony says is a requirement), is fast enough to well surpass Sony’s recommendations, and comes in 1TB and 2TB varieties, which gives you plenty of storage for your games. The catch? It’s kinda expensive, isn’t available in the US, and doesn’t seem to have an official “PlayStation approved” stamp despite its maker’s affiliation with Sony.Nextorage describes itself as a “Sony group company specializing in the memory storage solutions business,” and its NEM-PA SSD ticks all the boxes for PlayStation 5 compatibility. When news of the drive first broke, it seemed like the solution to the confusion that can currently come... Continue reading…

Last season, one of the more curious additions to Fortnite was Guggimon, a terrifying-looking rabbit creature that also happened to be a virtual influencer with millions of followers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Guggimon was created by a company called Superplastic — which has previously worked with the likes of the Gorillaz — and now it’s bringing another one of its characters to the battle royale: Janky, a streetwear cat (I think?) that’s available in the Fortnite item shop starting tonight.It may seem like an odd fit, but Fortnite’s ever-growing metaverse has steadily been spreading to just about every facet of pop culture, from sports to music to superheroes. With all that going on, some CG characters that partner with... Continue reading…

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Enough for workers to secretly save them Continue reading…

It was a brief orbital talent show.“Hayley is a champ at spinning,” Sian Proctor, one of the four private citizens currently orbiting Earth inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, said of her crew mate Hayley Arceneaux, who was somersaulting in the weightlessness of space on camera. “She’s been spinning ever since we got on orbit.” SpaceX Hayley Arceneaux spinning inside Crew Dragon. Christopher Sembroski, another crew mate, whipped out a ukulele and threatened to play it live on camera to over 55,000 viewers on SpaceX’s live YouTube stream — “You can turn your volume down if you wish, but I’ll give it a shot.” He did a little riff while Arceneaux was holding the mic, and it wasn’t half bad. “It’s still before... Continue reading…

Image: Niantic Pokémon Go developer Niantic is shutting down its augmented reality game Catan: World Explorers, the company announced on Friday (via Protocol). An AR adaptation of the popular board game Catan announced in 2019, World Explorers was the company’s latest attempt to recreate the magic of Pokémon Go, but soon it’s all coming to an end.After a year of early access, the game will not be playable after November 18th and Niantic says later today it “will be taking the game down from the App Store and removing real-money purchases from the Shop.” For the players that stick around, the company says it will increase in-game bonuses for the remaining weeks the game is live.Surely something other than Pokémon can catch onIt’s not entirely clear... Continue reading…

The iPad Mini (2021) is the latest in Apple’s line of smaller tablets. | Image: Apple With the announcement and impending release of the new iPad Mini and its revamped design, it might be all too easy to stan the new model and completely write off its predecessor. While the new model has a lot to offer — namely a larger screen, faster processor, refined design akin to the 2020 iPad Air, and a USB-C port — it also has a quality that is not so desirable: a higher introductory price.The iPad Mini line has been notoriously discount-immune over the years, possibly because of its specialized position in the market and lack of competition. The outgoing iPad Mini only recently started receiving significant discounts, falling to $300 soon before the new model was announced, but it started at $399 from the get-go. The new iPad... Continue reading…

Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images There are tons of books and blogs telling you how to have a magical Disney World experience, but one Florida man discovered the ultimate travel hack: using an app that lets you skip lines running on a possibly stolen employee iPad (via Gizmodo). According to central Florida’s WESH2 news, 30 year-old Rennan Carletto allegedly did just that in June, by giving himself and a group traveling through the park with him an unauthorized jump to the front of the line.According to a WPTV report, Carletto was leading an unauthorized tour of Hollywood Studios (Disney World’s worst park, no offense) and using the iPad to skip lines for the park’s rides by making reservation overrides. One Disney World fan site theorizes that he may have been taking... Continue reading…

Image: Clubhouse Clubhouse appears to be working on a new way to invite people to audio rooms in its app, based on screenshots shared by researcher Jane Manchum Wong. The invite feature, called “Waves,” is focused on the more casual, social side of Clubhouse, rather than the creator-focused live shows that have had the company’s attention.Based off the screenshots Wong shared, Waves lets you wave at friends —with a button identical to the hand in Clubhouse’s logo — to invite them to chat. If they reply, they automatically get added to an audio room so you can talk. A spokesperson declined to comment on Wong’s discovery, but it seems likely that the feature is intended for Clubhouse’s social rooms (one of several audio room types the company offers).

The Biden administration is preparing to issue a series of actions, including sanctions, to make it more difficult for hackers to profit off of ransomware attacks through the use of digital currency, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday.According to the Journal, the Treasury Department plans to impose these new sanctions as soon as next week. The sanctions would reportedly target specific traders and cryptocurrency exchanges, in the hope of deterring exchanges from processing these transactions when they’re made. The department will also issue new guidance for businesses regarding the risks they take on by complying with ransomware payment requests. The Treasury Department declined to comment.These proposed measures... Continue reading…

A dream for workers and IT departments alike Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple released a seven-and-a-half-minute video to act as a guided tour of the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro’s features, and to make the differences in the lineup clearer. In the clip, Apple also goes through some of the phone’s new video and camera features like cinematic mode, photographic styles, and macro photography, and emphasizes the phones’ increased battery life.The video doesn’t really give us any new info, but it does give us more (obviously very carefully crafted) footage of the iPhone 13 outside of a blank black or white background. Image: Apple Here’s a good idea of what your fancy iPhone 13 Pros will look like covered in iced tea. Also, the video has a particularly funny scene, meant to show off the... Continue reading…

Let’s discuss Continue reading…

Image: Zynga Zynga is bringing a social deception game called ReVamp to Snapchat’s games platform “soon,” the developer announced on Friday. ReVamp, clearly inspired by the popularity of games like Among Us, is a real-time multiplayer game where players try to find the vampire among... them.Players in ReVamp “aim to reveal who the vampire player is among their group of friends while they renovate the rooms of an old mansion,” Zynga’s description says. The game also features the frequently contentious voting round, where players decide to remove people they suspect are imposters, except with ReVamp they’re finding a vampire in a group of humans, as opposed to an alien in a group of “spacebeans.” This is only the third game Zynga has released for Snap... Continue reading…

Apple CEO Tim Cook told employees that he was “looking forward to moving forward” after a verdict in the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. In an all-hands meeting with employees, Cook echoed the line Apple has taken publicly on the case, celebrating the company’s legal wins and downplaying its loss on an unfair competition claim.“If you sort of back up and remember what the App Store is about, the App Store was built to be a trusted place for users so they could go explore and discover apps. It was meant to be a great business opportunity for developers,” Cook told employees, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “Epic came along and wanted basically to be handled in a special way. Our rules are that we treat... Continue reading…

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images Starting next month, Apple will “infrequently” test employees who come into its offices and stores for COVID-19, if they’re vaccinated. Unvaccinated employees will have to get frequent testing. Apple CEO Tim Cook and senior vice president of retail and people Deirdre O’Brien announced the new policy during an all-hands meeting today, according to an audio recording obtained by The Verge.The company’s updated guidelines appear to line up with the OSHA standards that will be established as a result of the Biden administration’s push to increase vaccination rates. Those standards say companies of 100 people or more must require either immunization or weekly testing.Apple recently pushed back the date when it expects employees to return to... Continue reading…

Image: Apple We’ve just gotten our first look at the iPhone 13s’ battery sizes, thanks to a product information sheet posted on Apple’s behalf to hazardous material information and response company Chemtrec’s website (via 9to5Mac). The document shows that the batteries in iPhones have gotten significantly bigger since last year — 13 percent larger, on average — and the 13 Pro Max’s battery is getting comparable to devices like the Nintendo Switch.In the document, battery sizes are reported in watt-hours instead of the more traditional milliamp hours. Even though most phone manufacturers give battery sizes in milliamp hours, they’re often less accurate and harder to compare devices, so we prefer watt-hours. Here are the battery sizes of Apple’s new... Continue reading…

Photo by Frank Molter/picture alliance via Getty Images Doctors say they’re overwhelmed by the volume of digital messages they receive from patients during the pandemic, and new data backs up their experience. The number of messages increased by over 150 percent at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the levels stayed high over the course of 2020, according to an early look at data from the electronic health record company Epic.“They want to be responsive to the patient needs,” says A Jay Holmgren, an assistant professor in the Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research at the University of California San Francisco, who collected the data and posted it on Twitter this week. But there aren’t good systems in place to help doctors to manage the influx.There are few reasons... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Android 11’s auto-resetting permissions, where the operating system will restrict an app’s permission to access sensitive phone features like its storage or cameras if it hasn’t been opened for several months, are coming to older devices, Google has announced. The feature originally launched with Android 11 last year, but soon it’ll be available on any phones running Android 6 and above with Google Play services, which Google says should cover “billions” of Android phones released since 2015.The feature is designed to help protect your privacy by preventing older apps from having unfettered access to your phone if you haven’t used them in months. You might be happy to give a novelty camera app access to your storage while it’s all the... Continue reading…

A sample photo captured using the Hasselblad XPlan Mode, on the OnePlus 9 Pro. | OnePlus OnePlus is finally putting its camera partnership with Hasselblad to good use — by bringing the look and feel of Hasselblad’s cinematic XPan camera to the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro, via a software update.This is a happy surprise because the 9 Series’ cameras did not initially live up to the hype surrounding OnePlus’ multiyear collaboration with the historic camera brand. Although Hasselblad’s contribution to these phones was limited to helping OnePlus tune its camera colors and providing input on its interface earlier this year, as Allison Johnson noted in her OnePlus 9 review, “the Hasselblad color tuning is fine but nothing remarkable.”This update adds an XPan Mode for the OnePlus 9 Series camera, alongside some much needed practical... Continue reading…

The new photos app for Windows 11. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft has started testing a new photos app for Windows 11. Like many other parts of Windows, the photos app has been redesigned to match the new operating system, with subtle improvements that help when you’re flicking through a collection of photos or videos.The biggest addition is a new filmstip at the bottom of the photo viewer that shows small thumbnails of all the photos in a particular folder, collection, or album. It makes it easier to jump between them, or select multiple photos to enter the new “multi-view” UI. Image: Microsoft The new filmstrip UI in the Windows 11 photos app. Multi-view is the best addition for me personally, as you can compare a bunch of photos in a single window. This is great... Continue reading…

Ikea’s gaming range consists of over 30 products. | Image: Ikea Ikea’s lineup of gaming-themed furniture and accessories now has official pricing and a global release date: October. The lineup first came to China earlier this year as a collaboration with Asus and its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand.Pricing for the lineup ranges from cheap desk accessories like a $10 cup holder or $12.99 mouse bungee, all the way up to gaming chairs costing between $69 and $349, and a $599 standing desk. Oh, and that wooden hand designed to gently cradle your headphones and other accessories? That’ll set you back $24.99. Image: Ikea A mouse bungee to tidy away your mouse’s cabling. Image: Ikea A ring light to keep you lit, plus a phone holder to keep you in frame. T... Continue reading…

Oppo has announced ColorOS 12, the latest version of its Android-based operating system. The update will come to OnePlus phones as well as Oppo’s own phones in China, where OnePlus has used ColorOS since early this year. OnePlus recently announced that it would be combining the codebase of its OxygenOS with ColorOS due to the two companies merging several operations.ColorOS 12 doesn’t look hugely different to 11, but it makes more use of contrasting colors and white space, with lower information density across many screens. Icons have been subtly redesigned to make more use of depth and texture. Oppo says it’s improved more than 300 animations throughout the UI while also making use of an AI engine to reduce lag and stuttering. ... Continue reading…

Image: Searchlight Pictures Guillermo Del Toro’s next film Nightmare Alley is a bit of departure for the director. The new teaser trailer released by Searchlight Pictures on Thursday sees the Oscar award-winning filmmaker trading in his fascination with the supernatural for an R-rated noir set in and around a carnival.Nightmare Alley stars Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle, a nightclub mind reader who becomes tangled up with Cate Blanchett as Dr. Lilith Ritter, a psychiatrist out to debunk him as a fraud. The teaser trailer itself manages to be plenty tense without Del Toro’s usual monsters, featuring carnival sideshows, Willem Dafoe as some kind of ringleader, Blanchett as an obvious femme fatale, and what looks like a live electrocution. You can see for... Continue reading…

Cameo is adding a new live calls feature into its app. Cameo is perhaps most well-known for letting you pay for pre-recorded video messages from celebrities, but the new feature, called Cameo Calls, will let you have short video conversations that are designed to be like meet-and-greets. (The app even sets up a photo op at the end of the call.)The Cameo Calls page has a full list of whose available for conversations and how much it costs for a certain amount of their time. Cameo says that calls can last up to 15 minutes and that the average price for a call is $31. When I looked, I saw that most people offer two or three minutes per call, and prices ranged dramatically. (The highest fee I saw was $225 for a 10-minute call with Vanessa... Continue reading…

Things looked bad for Locast before, and they just got even worse. A judge this week permanently prohibited streamer Locast from continuing operations of its business, a decision that follows a yearslong legal standoff between major broadcasters and the scrappy streaming provider.A permanent injunction order signed by Judge Louis L. Stanton this week stated that Locast founder David Goodfriend and his nonprofit Sports Fans Coalition NY, which operates the Locast service, “are permanently restrained and enjoined from operating” the free TV streaming service.The injunction follows a series of rapid-succession developments that have led to Locast’s apparent demise, after the big four broadcasters suing the company — ABC, CBS, Fox, and... Continue reading…

Yes, Apple really did type “copy” into its own keyboard during the event. Apple allegedly offered to buy his app; instead, it’s being Sherlocked Continue reading…

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images T-Mobile announced that 500 of its retail stores would start offering repair services starting on November 1st. The company says technicians will provide same-day fixes using manufacturer-approved parts to customers who subscribe to its Protection<360> service, which also includes device replacement in case of loss or theft.T-Mobile is also improving that device protection plan by letting customers make five claims in a 12-month period, up from the previous limit of three. The claims are handled by Assurant and come with a deductible based on what kind of phone you have and what kind of claim you’re making. Still, it’s likely to be cheaper than buying five new phones if you wind up having an 18-karat run of bad luck.Assurant... Continue reading…

A traditional blood pressure meter lies on a doctor’s desk. | Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images Cardiologists are looking forward to the future of blood pressure tech — but the field still needs to catch up Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the shadow of the iPhone 13, and an aggressive new “Forever Upgrade” plan to sell them, T-Mobile executives are complaining about Samsung’s phones, Fierce Wireless reports. Specifically, the lack of them.“Samsung has really fallen behind the eight ball relative to other OEMs on the global supply chain issue,” T-Mobile chief financial officer and executive vice president Peter Osvaldik said at an BofA Securities investor event on Tuesday. The issue seems to be that a majority of T-Mobile’s customers are “very significant Samsung lovers,” according Osvaldik, and that Samsung “discontinuing” the Galaxy Note — which “customers just loved” — and a shorter supply of S-series phones have had an impact on the carrier.T-Mobile customers... Continue reading…

A screenshot from Battlefield 2042. | Image: EA Battlefield 2042, Dice’s upcoming entry in the Battlefield series, has been delayed by nearly a month, Dice parent company EA announced Wednesday. The game’s release date has been pushed from October 22nd to November 19th.“Building the next generation of Battlefield during a global pandemic has created unforeseen challenges for our development teams,” Oskar Gabrielson, studio GM at Dice said in a statement on behalf of the Battlefield 2042 team. “Given the scale and scope of the game, we had hoped our teams would be back in our studios together as we move towards launch. With the ongoing conditions not allowing that to happen safely, and with all the hard work the teams are doing from home, we feel it is important to take the extra... Continue reading…