Gadgets

Two and a half years after unveiling Stadia on stage at GDC, the game streaming service is officially done. Subscribers will have access to the games library through January 18 of next year, after which point, it will shut down for good. Google adds in a blog post that it expects to have all refunds

Amazon Alexa will be the foundation of BMW’s next-generation voice assistant, the companies announced Wednesday at Amazon’s annual Devices and Services launch event. The German automaker and Amazon are have had a relationship for years now. BMW started offering the Alexa assistant in select cars starting in 2018 and the partnership has grown from there.

If you’re reading this, you almost certainly have a complicated relationship with screens. Every year that passes, they become larger and increasingly present in our lives. Meanwhile, we continue to embrace the technology all while complaining about the hold it has on our lives. Astrohaus’ products have long occupied the strange nexus of technologies designed

Market share analyses aren’t an exact science, exactly. Different firms take different factors into account, though more often than not, the numbers more or less line up among the bigger players. We discussed these figures in our recent review of the Apple Watch Series 8, noting that the line had captured roughly one-third of the

Google announced a new Chromecast with HD streaming support today that costs just $30 and has a remote control with it. The company is launching the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) — yes, that’s the official name — in 19 countries, including the U.S. This comes two years after Google launched a $49 Chromecast with

Anyone who has to use a wheelchair regularly runs the risk of incurring injury from poor circulation. Kalogon believes it can mitigate this common but potentially life-threatening condition with a smart cushion that prevents any one part of the body from being compressed for too long — and it has already caught the eye of

When Nothing was unveiled early last year, founder Carl Pei promised that the hardware startup had a full road map. Early stories about the London-based firm alluded to a pitch deck full of Pokémon characters, each representing a different product in the pipeline. Roughly a year and a half later, Nothing has delivered two major

We posted a pair of Apple Watch reviews this time last week. Both the Series 8 and second-gen SE received high marks for their categories — flagship and budget, respectively. Were Apple to stick to those two products, it’s easy to imagine the company maintaining roughly a third of the smartwatch market share it currently

The competition to create ever smaller, ever better robots is a fierce one, and Cornell University is out front now with a set of bots small enough to sit on a human hair, but that can move on their own using nothing but light as a power source. Now, you may remember a similarly small

Its 2015 acquisition of Aldebaran didn’t go as smoothly as SoftBank hoped. At the time, the French robotics startup was best known for its Nao, which had become a fairly ubiquitous presence in research facilities across the globe. The small humanoid robot formed the foundation for the rebranded SoftBank Robotics’ best-known creation, Pepper. Nao mostly

Apple has had support for eSIM since the iPhone Xs/XR, but this year it is going all in by ditching the physical SIM card slot for all iPhone 14 versions sold in the U.S. While models sold in other countries will have support for both physical and virtual SIM, Apple could eventually remove the SIM

SpaceX and T-Mobile may have hogged the headlines with their flashy pre-announcement about Starlink connectivity last month, and Apple last week, but Lynk has been putting in the work and may very well steal their lunch with a satellite-to-phone connection that already works — with any device out there. In fact, they just got FCC

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Like a number of attendees, I was taken with ClicBot when I first saw it a few CESes ago. We’re all up to our ears in “educational” robotics kits. STEM learning is important, of course, but the last several years have seen a veritable explosion in these sorts of toys, and your mileage is going

Escend is a U.K.-based startup that must have figured that scooters were too big, instead deciding to shrink micromobility even further (what are we calling this — picomobility?), adding a battery pack and motors to rollerblades. The company started selling its ‘blades today. The blades use regenerative braking, and have been designed to last; between

Amazon wants Alexa owners to buy more things. That’s the clear impetus behind the new Alexa feature announced today at Amazon’s Accelerate conference, called Customers Ask Alexa, which lets brands submit answers to common questions like “How can I remove pet hair from my carpet?” and “How to eliminate odor from soil stains?” Previously, Alexa

French startup Devialet has raised a new $50 million (€50 million) funding round from two existing investors — Crédit Mutuel Equity and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund — and a new mysterious Asian investor. Devialet doesn’t want to share the name of this new investor. All I know is that it’s an industrial company based in

I bear bad news if you’d rather not walk around feeling like you have a brick in your pocket: Apple seems to be bailing on its smallest smartphone … again. That’s right: The $2.5 trillion company’s big fall event came and went today with no mention of a new iPhone Mini. Instead, Apple is “going

Yes, I missed Bose’s big news this morning. I was busy with…other stuff. You, too, would be forgiven for missing the QuietComfort Earbuds II launch, under the deluge of Apple news (including its own new buds), but Bose makes very good headphones, and any new version of its flagship products deserves a mention. The new

This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Natasha about the Y Combinator Demo Day for the Summer 2022 cohort; the highs, the lows, the new management and whether the accelerator moving to be more in-person-focused is a help or a hindrance to its further-flung participants. Then, ever a crypto-sceptic at heart, I was

Earlier today I wrote a piece about Apple Watch Ultra’s new scuba-diving feature, and a lot of folks came out of the woodwork to tell me they wouldn’t trust a “dive toy” to keep them safe under water. I respect their opinion, but I figured I’d share why I feel fully comfortable trusting Apple on

GPS in its many regional flavors has become a ubiquitous feature in phones, smart watches, cars and other connected devices, but for all the location-based features that it helps enable (mapping being the most obvious) it has a lot of shortcomings: it can be slow and inaccurate, it can contribute to faster battery drain and,

As part of the Hardware team here at TechCrunch, I love me a good Apple event, and this one was, er, eventful. I’m an active human who loves Scuba diving, so the Apple Watch Ultra seems like an underwater match made in heaven. The new iPhone Pro’s cameras and the fact that Apple has been

As we’re sitting here, getting ready for Apple’s big show, Google went ahead and sent out invites for the next big Pixel event. The big reveal is happening in Brooklyn, on October 6, starting at 10AM PT. What do we expect? Well, the company already gave us a preview of the Pixel 7 when it announced

Tired: JBL announced the Tour PRO 2 earbuds with active noise cancellation (ANC). Wired: The case has a touchscreen. That’s right. In the off-chance you didn’t have enough screens in your life, the new earbuds’ case adds another 1.4-inch LED touch display. Users can flick through multiple screens like different watch faces that allow them

Don’t you hate it when they give everything away in the headline? So, a belated spoiler warning that, indeed, the iPhone 14 is almost certainly going to be the big headline announcement at Apple’s September event. A few other things seem close to certain, as well, including the Apple Watch Series 8. As ever, there

India is planning to speed up testing and safety approvals of electronic devices, including smartphones and earbuds, to reduce their time to market. Currently, it can take as long as 20 weeks to for consumer electronics to pass safety tests — but the new approvals could bring that down to as little as three days.

Amazon today announced the addition of Ring Intercom to its list of smartphone offerings. The product is designed to be an add-on to existing apartment intercom systems. The company has created a quick online questionnaire to determine whether your existing system will work with the new product. It’s a rare addition targeted specifically at apartment

Firewalla, maybe the only company that can say that its hardware firewalls have something of a cult following, today announced the latest addition to its portfolio: the $569 Firewalla Gold Plus. The Gold Plus will feature four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and its deep packet inspection hardware can handle up to 5 Gigabits at a

Don’t you hate it when, after going just five or 10 meters underwater, you lose signal completely? Now this vexing limitation of modern technology is being addressed by researchers at the University of Washington, who have made an underwater communication app that uses sonic signals to pass messages to your other submerged friends. It may