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Garmin hasn't touched its mid-tier Forerunner 200-series GPS running watches since 2019, but it's ready to catch up with a major update — plus another for the most demanding athletes. The company has introduced the Forerunner 255, a follow-up to the 245 that adds full triathlon support as well as more accurate multi-band GPS, Garmin Pay and race prep tools that include a multi-function widget and a "morning report" with sleep data and workout suggestions. You can also expect heart rate variability tracking and power stats from Garmin's HRM-Pro or Running Dynamics Pod add-ons.

Battery life is healthy, too. You can anticipate up to 14 days of use in full smartwatch mode, and 30 hours in GPS mode.

The Forerunner 255 line is available now, with prices dictated by media support rather than case size. The series starts at $350 for the 41mm Forerunner 255S as well as the larger, 46mm 255. If you want on-device music from Amazon, Deezer or Spotify, you'll need to spend $400 for the 255S Music or 255 Music. Those still aren't casual purchases, but they're now easier to justify if you're committed to improving your runs.

Garmin

You now have a better incentive to spend more, however. Garmin is also launching the Forerunner 955 Solar (pictured at middle), its first solar-powered watch dedicated to running. The in-glass panel gives you up to 20 days of smartwatch use and 49 hours with active GPS — helpful for long-distance runners or anyone who simply hates plugging in. You'll also get a touchscreen for easier navigation when the five-button controls won't do. You can likewise expect the 255's multi-band GPS, heart rate variability and software improvements, while 'extras' like music and Garmin Pay are built-in.

The 955 Solar is available now for $600, while a more conventional Forerunner 955 is selling for $500. As with earlier 900 models, you'll likely already know if you want one. They're aimed squarely at pro athletes and serious enthusiasts determined to improve their pace.

Texas's HB20 was put on hold Tuesday by the Supreme Court, five-to-four. As is typical for emergency for emergency requests, the majority did not define its reasoning; Justice Alito wrote a six page dissent joined by fellow conservatives Gorsuch and Thomas, while Kagan, a moderate, wrote she would "would deny the application to vacate stay" without signing onto the dissent.

The bill — which has been tied up in court since it was passed by the state's Congress and signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott last September — targets "censorship" by online platforms, insofar as conservatives have in recent years been wont to conflate any form of content moderation with censorship. It reframes large social platforms as "common carriers" similar to telecom companies, but uses that logic to restrict the ability of platforms to limit the spread of, ban or demonetize content based on “the viewpoint of the user," whether or not that view is expressed on the platform. 

Unsurprisingly, the content, users and viewpoints the law's supporters believe are being unfairly targeted hew rightward: as the Texas Tribunereported last year, Governor Abbott said he believed social platforms were working to "silence conservative ideas [and] religious beliefs." The aggrievement of the interested parties and their desired outcomes weren't lost on Judge Robert Pitman of West Texas's District Court, who wrote that "the record in this case confirms that the Legislature intended to target large social media platforms perceived as being biased against conservative views." 

An emergency application to the Supreme Court to suspend HB20 was filed earlier this month by two tech industry groups — NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) — after a Fifth Circuit court had lifted an injunction on the law, doing so in a startling 2-1 decision for which no explanation was provided. Netchoice's members include Airbnb, TikTok, Amazon and Lyft among many other; Apple, Google, eBay, Meta and others count themselves among those associated with CCIA. Counsel for NetChoice at the time told Protocol that the Texas law was "unconstitutional" and would compel "online platforms to host and promote foreign propaganda, pornography, pro-Nazi speech, and spam.”

These same concerns were given new urgency after the Buffalo, New York shooting, in which a gunman with white supremacist beliefs killed 10 people and injured three others in a majority-black neighborhood while live-streaming the carnage. Social media companies worked to remove copies of the footage from their services. Even as they did so, the question remained unsettled as to whether those removals would result in Texas dragging these platforms into court. Confusion as to the law's application was not limited to interested observers, either: in a Twitter exchange with Techdirt's Mike Masnick, the sponsor of the bill seemed unsure on how such situations would play out. 

A related law in Florida, using a similar common carrier approach, had most of its major provisions deemed unconstitutional by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month. The question of constitutionality for HB20 will continue to move forward in the Fifth Circuit Court. 

No, your eyes don't deceive you — Ubisoft is upgrading an older Assassin's Creed game for modern consoles. The developer has revealed that a 60 frames per second update for 2017's Assassin's Creed Origins is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on June 2nd. The boost doesn't appear to include 4K support or other visual embellishments, but this could still breathe new life into the game if you haven't touched it in a while.

It's not clear what prompted a 60FPS boost for a game released three years before PS5 and Xbox Series consoles existed. Ubisoft did release a similar upgrade for Assassin's Creed Odyssey in 2021, but that was a year earlier and for a more recent title. Origins was one of the better-received recent games in the franchise, though, and Ubi has a strong incentive to rejuvenate interest in the series ahead of Infinity. If nothing else, this is a good excuse to return to an alternate reality take on ancient Egypt.

Podcast listeners, no matter the app they use, were unable to access shows hosted on Spotify's Megaphone platform Monday night and early Tuesday. Those include The Joe Rogan Experience and podcasts from The Ringer and Gimlet Media. Worst of all, it seems the problem was entirely avoidable — it was due to a lapsed security certificate. 

“Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate,” Spotify spokesperson Erin Styles told The Verge. “During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers."

A valid SSL certificate is required to create a secure connection between a server and a browser or app. It seems Megaphone's certificate expired at around 8PM ET on Monday and the service didn't come back online until just before 6AM this morning. It took a few more hours before the problems were fully resolved.

Megaphone, which dynamically inserts ads into podcasts, is a key component of Spotify's podcast ambitions. It bought the company for $235 million in 2020. Spotify bolstered the service when it bought Whooshkaa, which can turn radio shows into podcasts, last December. It also acquired two other ad tech companies, Chartable and Podsights, earlier this year.

Neglecting to renew the certificate is a bad look for Spotify, which as a technology company, ought to know better. While listeners might not have been able to download episodes of their favorite shows overnight, they should have access again now. 

Spotify is not the only major tech company to have dealt with such a snafu, though. In 2020, Microsoft Teams was down for a few hours after someone seemingly forgot to renew the SSL certificate.

Retro console maker Evercade has just announced its latest device, a new handheld called the EXP. If you’re not familiar with Evercade, its products are a bit different from your standard retro fare. Instead of purchasing a device like the SNES Classic Edition that comes with a limited library of preloaded games or one like the Analogue Pocket that can play games from their original cartridges, Evercade sells cartridges that come with a selection of games. The company says this approach has a few benefits, one of which is that it enables license holders to be paid more fairly. It also means games load instantly.

Blaze Entertainment

The EXP builds on the company’s original handheld with a new, more mature design. Gone are the red “go faster” stripes of its predecessor. Additionally, the EXP features a new 4.3-inch IPS panel with a denser 800 by 480 resolution. It also comes with a 1.5GHz processor and 4GB of built-in memory, putting it on par with the company’s VS console. New to the EXP is a “Tate” mode that makes the handheld a better fit for playing games that were designed around vertical scrolling like classic shmups. The EXP features two buttons on its left-hand side to aid with playing games this way. Evercade has also added WiFi and USB-C connectivity to the device and redesigned the mini-HDMI port to make it more stable.

In the US, the EXP will cost $150. Evercade will begin accepting pre-orders for the console starting in September, with general availability to follow later this winter. Retail units will ship with the IREM Arcade 1 collection, which comes with six games from the Japanese publisher, including Moon Patrol and 10 Yard Fight. Evercade has promised to share more details about the device, including information on bonus content, in September.

Earlier this year, New York City started testing a gun detection system from Evolv Technologies at City Hall and Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. Mayor Eric Adams, who has said he came across the system on the internet, has been talking up the tech for months as a way to help combat gun violence. Now, it has emerged that two people who donated $1 million to support Adams' mayoral run work at companies with investments in Evolv, as the New York Daily News first reported.

The CEO of the investment firm Citadel, Kenneth Griffin, last year donated $750,000 to Strong Leadership NYC, a political action committee (PAC) that supported Adams. Jane Street Financial Services founder Robert Granieri gave $250,000, according to records.

As of May 16th, Citadel held 12,975 shares in Evolv, a publicly traded company. It holds another 89,900 for other investors as call options. Jane Street held 76,570 shares as of May 17th. The stock held by all shareholders totals 143.4 million, so both firms own a relatively small chunk of Evolv.

A spokesperson for Adams told the Daily News that the mayor didn't recognize the names of Griffin and Granieri and wasn't sure whether he'd met with them. The spokesperson said that before a pilot of Evolv's system started at Jacobi Medical Center in February, the tech was being used at other city hospitals.

NYC has considered using the AI weapon detection technology in transit systems, particularly following a mass shooting on a subway train in Brooklyn last month. As Fast Company notes, Evolv charges between $2,000 and $3,000 per scanner per month for a subscription. Installing one at every subway entrance and paying staff to operate them would cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Given the costs, it's unlikely that the scanners would be ubiquitous. 

The effectiveness of Evolv's system has been brought into question too. While the company has not publicly disclosed its false positive rates, it has acknowledged the issue in promotional materials. 

Screenshots in brochures obtained by New York Focus indicated that in one three-month stretch, the system scanned 2.2 million people and there were more than 190,000 alerts. The vast majority of those were for harmless objects like umbrellas, strollers, eyeglass cases and laptops. In that scenario, only 0.8 percent of the alerts were for actual weapons and just 0.1 percent were for non-law enforcement guns. However, Evolv has claimed that the data in the screenshots is "fictitious" and is “from a demonstration account.”

A report by surveillance tech trade publication IPVM earlier this year noted that Evolv's full-body scanners were misidentifying other objects as potential weapons, such as Chromebooks. IPVM director of operations Donald Maye told the Daily News that Evolv's system has a false alert rate of between five and ten percent at settings such as sports stadiums (which lines up with data shown in the disputed screenshot). Maye suggested that the false positive rate would actually be higher at subway system scanners and lead to "secondary screenings" with cops searching commuters.

Engadget has contacted Evolv for comment.

TikTok is testing a new feature that allows users to scroll through content on the app without interface elements like usernames, captions and audio information cluttering the screen. “Clear Mode” was first spotted last week by former The Next Web editor Matt Navarra, with TikTok providing TechCrunch confirmation it was testing the feature on Tuesday.

The company didn’t say when users could expect Clear Mode to roll out more widely. As always, it’s also worth noting TikTok may ultimately decide against implementing the feature based on information the company gathers from users.

If you’ve enrolled in the test, you can access Clear Mode by long-pressing on a video and tapping the appropriate option. As TechCrunch points out, the feature, if implemented, would make the lives of creators easier since they would no longer need to re-upload clips people want to screenshot. You’ll often see TikTok users drop a “crop” comment on a video because a caption or button has obscured part of a video they want to share. TikTok has been testing more of these types of quality-of-life improvements in recent months. For instance, some users recently gained access to a watch history feature that makes it easier to rediscover videos you forgot to like.

If you use Amazon’s Kindle app on Android, you may have noticed the software doesn't offer the option to buy and rent ebooks or subscribe to the company’s Kindle Unlimited service anymore. Amazon announced the change last month and more recently began notifying customers of the move via email.

If you’re curious about what’s going on, the change puts Amazon in compliance with a policy Google will begin enforcing on June 1st. Starting next month, the company will require all developers to process payments involving “digital goods and services” through the Play Store billing system. Previously, Amazon was among a handful of developers Google allowed to use third-party alternatives to collect in-app payments. Rather than give Google a commission for every ebook it sells on Android, Amazon has decided to remove purchases altogether. It has done the same in its Audible and Music apps. In the US, Amazon doesn't offer Kindle in-app purchasing on iOS either.  

It’s worth noting Amazon isn’t the only company that has stopped sales on Android. In April, for instance, Barnes and Noble removed direct purchasing from the Android version of its Nook app. Some companies have legally challenged Google on the matter, with Tinder parent company Match Group filing a suit against the search giant in May.

There’s the possibility that direct purchasing could return to Amazon’s Android Kindle, Audible and Music apps at some point in the future. In March, Google partnered with Spotify to test third-party billing systems. However, how soon that pilot could expand to include other companies is unclear.

Razer's Barracuda X headset from last year was fine if you wanted low-latency wireless audio for your console or Android phone, but it wasn't very practical for much else. That won't be a problem this time around, though. The company has introduced new Barracuda, Barracuda X and Barracuda Pro headsets that (among other upgrades) add Bluetooth with smart device switching. You can use them with iPhones and virtually any other device, and you won't have to manually switch connections when a phone call interrupts your gaming session.

You can also expect nearly twice the battery life, at up to 50 hours for the Barracuda X and 40 hours for the other two models. You'll still have Razer's proprietary 2.4GHz wireless connection if lag is a concern.

The differences largely come down to audio quality. The Barracuda Pro (pictured above) tops the line with 50mm "TriForce Bio-Cellulose" drivers, a THX Achromatic Audio Amplifier, THX Spatial Audio and hybrid active noise cancellation. The regular Barracuda opts for 'plain' titanium 50mm drivers while shedding the amplifier and ANC. The revised Barracuda X (below), meanwhile, is now more of a conventional gaming headset. While it sticks to more modest 40mm drivers and doesn't include any THX features, you'll get a detachable cardioid microphone, a 3.5mm wired option and 7.1-channel surround audio.

Razer

All three headsets are available today. The Barracuda X starts the range at $100, while the standard Barracuda and the Pro will respectively cost you $160 and $250. Razer is clearly pivoting the line, then — these are less gaming accessories and more competition for conventional mid-range and budget headphones.

It appears Microsoft will soon reveal its next-gen Surface Laptop Go. The successor to the would-be Chromebook competitor popped up in a Korean retailer listing that appears to have gone live a little too early. It seems the page has since been taken down.

The listing, which was spotted by The Verge, indicates the Surface Laptop Go 2 will shift from a 10th-gen Intel Core CPU to an 11th-gen Intel processor. This specific configuration boasts the i5-1135G7 and Intel Iris Xe graphics.

As with the original Surface Laptop Go from 2020, this laptop will support up to 8GB of RAM and as much as 256GB of storage, according to the listing. The base model specs are unclear, however. Previous reports indicated the laptop will have a baseline of 4GB RAM and 128GB of storage. The base Surface Laptop Go has 64GB of storage.

As you might expect, the laptop is slated to ship with Windows 11. The listing promises a battery life of up to 13.5 hours as well. In addition, it suggests the system will have "improved HD camera performance," even though, like its predecessor, it's said to have a 720p webcam.

The Surface Laptop Go 2 seems to have a lot of other details in common with the original system. The listing suggests it still has a 12.4-inch display and 3:2 aspect ratio, the same ports (including a 3.5mm headphone jack and the proprietary Surface charging port) and a fingerprint sensor. There's no sign of it having a backlit keyboard as yet, unfortunately.

It seems we may not have to wait much longer for Microsoft to formally announce the latest entry-level Surface laptop. The listing suggests preorders will open on June 2nd.