Gadgets

This time two years ago, I changed up my annual gift guide feature’s focus from travel to working from home. After all, very few of us were doing much traveling at the time. I planned to switch back as the world reopened; it’s clear now, however, that for many of us, there is no going

Oceanic+, developed by Huish Outdoors, made a splash at this year’s Apple Fall Event in September, when Apple pulled a surprise new watch out of its proverbial hat, the Apple Watch Ultra. One of the surprises was that the $800 watch is rated for recreational scuba diving, enabling owners to take it underwater to 40

Smartphone shipments have been declining in what has been a rough year for mobile handsets, and that’s meant even more pressure on an already-precarious sliver of the mobile market: feature phones. Today, one of the players in that space, the feature phone operating system startup KaiOS, is getting a small financial injection that both speaks

Back in August, the FDA announced it was making a big change in the world of hearing aids: From October onwards, hearing aids would be available without a prescription, over the counter. In a world where getting fitted for a hearing aid could be very expensive, and the hearing aids themselves were wrapped up in

Aura, a startup founded by early Twitter employees that makes digital frames and photo sharing apps that can also be used to update those frames, has pulled in some funding to expand its business as it closes in on three million users of its app and 1 million frames sold (it’s now at 997,000). The

It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win Haje Jan Kamps 15 hours If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell

When the pandemic slammed into our shores a couple of years ago, many of us were shoo-ed inside, doomed to endless Zoom meetings. At the time, Canon released a beta of its EOS Webcam Utility, and then seemed to pretty much forget about it. Until today. In a “geez, Canon, this would have been helpful

The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting —

Maybe you’ve heard of Keyo. Perhaps you saw the initial round of press the firm did in 2017 — roughly two years after its founding. Or maybe you saw it pop back in 2020, riding the wave of news around Amazon’s lukewarmly received hand-scanner tech. You may have wondered precisely what’s been going on with

New computing paradigms are never not going to be weird, but such uncomfortability dramatically intensifies when the human body enters into the picture. There’s a sense in which the smart contact lens feels like something of an inevitability (whether it’s produced by Mojo Vision or someone is another question altogether), but that doesn’t mean each

When you say portable speakers, most people think about cheap Bluetooth speakers that you can easily put in your backpack when you’re going to the park. But Devialet has something different in mind with the Devialet Mania. The French high-end speaker maker wants to make the most luxurious and best-sounding portable speaker around. The Devialet

Amazon is now offering to replace customers’ discontinued Cloud Cam smart cameras with a new Blink Mini following its decision earlier this year to shut down its Cloud Cam line of products and end support for the device’s associated mobile apps. At the time of the retailer’s May 2022 announcement, Amazon said it would email

Apple warned investors and customers on Sunday that it expects to ship fewer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max units as the world’s most valuable tech firm grapples with the ongoing Covid-19 lockdown in China. The company said it continues to see strong demand for the pro models of the new iPhone 14

Following last year’s $205 million acquisition of AirTag competitor Tile by family locator service Life360, the two companies today will now integrate their products and services. With an update arriving soon to Life360’s app, members will be able to see the location of the Tile Bluetooth trackers on the same in-app map where they also

We’re still in the very early stages, but thus far Matter has proven to be a fairly peaceful collaboration between the biggest competitors in consumer electronics. Apple, Samsung and Google are among those that have detailed their plans to embrace the universal smart home standard following its recent launch. Today Amazon is offering some insight

It’s been around for a hot minute, but Darkroom just got a pretty major update that makes it a lot more interesting for photo enthusiasts who don’t want, or can’t afford, to use more specialist tools. The fast and intuitive photo editor gives you access to your photo library, essentially giving you a Lightroom-like experience

Affordability is fairly malleable concept when it comes to consumer drones. We’ve seen plenty of systems positioned as affordable — or even cheap — over the years, but lowering the price point generally comes with its share of tradeoffs. It’s something DJI itself has flirted with a bit itself, with some more basic and entry-level

Yeah, yeah. I know. Buying a record player isn’t going to fix everything that’s broken. But it was a nice thought, however fleeting. Long before the iPod, this strange mutant existed. Too weird to live, too strange to die, as someone once famously put it. The Audio-Technica Sound Burger — as it has affectionately come

It’s time to accept that cloud gaming is the future of gaming. At least for some people — and even though Stadia failed. But that group of people is becoming larger every year. For the past few weeks I have been playing video games on a brand new device — the Logitech G Cloud. But

Smart lock startup Level has a new version of its lock available, and this one includes Apple Home Key out of the box. The new Level Lock+ is almost identical to its predecessor, the Level Lock Touch, in every other way — but the addition of Home Key takes what was already a super strong

A quick caveat up top. This isn’t a review. TechCrunch does reviews. This isn’t one. There are several reasons for this. First, last week was Disrupt — I was busy on the other side of the country. Second, this week is my COVID week (third round, otherwise self-explanatory w/r/t a limited output). Third, we very

Smartphone shipment is often seen as the bellwether of China’s consumer spending, and right now, the picture isn’t very rosy. The world’s largest market for smartphones shipped 175.1 million handsets between January and August, marking a sharp 22.9% decline year-over-year, according to research from a state-backed institution. In August alone, shipments dropped 21.9% year-over-year. The

The original Orba was a curious little baseball-sized device that invited people who couldn’t play a triangle if they tried to somehow create beats, bops and bass lines. The success of the original — and the adoption of it as a tool for more serious musicians — inspired the Artiphon team to release an updated

Nothing today announced the upcoming launch of a brick-and-mortar retail store in London’s Soho district. The store will, of course, carry Nothing. In a less literal sense, one wonders precisely what the store will carry, given that the hardware startup has officially launched two products, with a third being revealed soon. GM Ryan Latham says

Apple has released iOS 16.1, iPad OS 16.1 and macOS 13, as it announced it would last week. The updates include a number of new features for iPhone, iPad and Mac devices, including the introduction of Continuity Camera, which allows iPhone owners to use their device as a webcam for their Macs. The iPad and

Seems we may not be getting a surprise October Apple event, after all. The company just dropped what will, no doubt, be one of its last major hardware updates for the calendar year. The iPad Pro is getting a spec refresh revolving around an upgrade for the M1 to M2 chip. The new chip sports

Apple released a new version of its entry-level iPad that Apple simply calls “the iPad.” It’s a dramatic refresh as Apple is swapping the familiar design with rounded edges and a home button. Instead, the iPad now looks more like the iPad Air and iPad Pro. But there are some compromises. The new iPad starts

Amazon says over half a dozen hardware vendors have indicated that they cannot enter into a TV manufacturing relationship with the e-commerce group over fear of retaliation from Google, escalating tension with the search giant with whom it competes on several businesses. The revelation, officially shared by Amazon for the first time, was made by

Jio Platforms has quietly launched its first laptop, entering into a new product category as the Indian telecom giant aggressively expands its offerings. The laptop, called JioBook, runs JioOS, a custom Android-based OS that has been “optimized for superior performance” and local languages support. The laptop, manufactured in India, is selling at 15,799 Indian rupees,