The case for heating homes with hydrogen rather than natural gas appears to be dead. In the UK, hydrogen has become an important part of the debate around decarbonizing home heating. 85 percent of all homes use natural gas to heat space and water, with the oil and gas industry pushing hydrogen as something that can leverage the existing gas pipelines. And lawmakers with close ties to the industry have claimed that hydrogen is a “silver bullet” to help the UK reach its climate targets.

According to a new study from the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO, such claims are a big pile of old nonsense. The project ran an extensive meta-analysis of research into hydrogen technology overall, finding that the promises of easy retrofit don’t add up. It said that it wasn’t clear if the existing infrastructure was actually suitable to take hydrogen without major adaptation. That was, after all, one of the major selling points of using hydrogen over switching to heat pumps and other low-carbon methods.

It’s something that Engadget already covered in its extensive report on the UK’s home heating situation back in 2021. The suitability of infrastructure is only one part of the problem, however, since many experts also asked where all of this hydrogen was coming from. Supplying the UK with enough hydrogen to heat 85 percent of its homes, without any work to reduce demand, would require around 10 million tons of hydrogen.

In that report, Tim Lord, who was previously responsible for the UK’s decarbonization strategy, said that to generate that much hydrogen cleanly, you would need around 75 gigawatts of offshore wind. The UK Government’s most recent figures say that the country’s total installed offshore wind capacity is just 10 gigawatts. It’s hard to see the economic case for installing seven-and-a-half times the total offshore wind capacity just to generate hydrogen.

The Regulatory Assistance Project’s report also found that trying to use hydrogen for space and hot water heating is a waste of a vital material. Green hydrogen could be put to better use in agricultural processes, like making fertilizer or in heavy industry. And we’ve already seen that green hydrogen has a part to play in decarbonizing industrial transport, like shipping, and in the railways where mass-electrification isn’t viable.

In its conclusions, the report adds that greater emphasis on hydrogen will only serve to delay the take up of better technologies, like heat pumps. There’s a political dimension to this, too, with The Guardian reporting that hydrogen lobbyists were out in force at the recent Labour Party conference, and are expected to attend next week’s Conservative Party conference as well.

Another study, from the MCS Charitable Foundation in partnership with energy analysts Cornwall Insight, found that hydrogen’s cost to consumers would be nightmarish. It found that switching from natural gas to hydrogen would likely see the cost increase by between 70 to 90 percent on average. It also warned that, unlike electricity, hydrogen would be subject to the same market volatility as other fossil fuels.

As before, this study raises the question about how much we can rely upon hydrogen given that many of its key needs are still untested. For instance, steam reformation of methane would still require carbon capture and storage at a vastly larger scale than present. (Not to mention the fact that methane is a far deadlier climate gas than carbon dioxide, so any leaks or accidents would be significantly more damaging for the planet.)

Fundamentally, on this and all of the other evidence, it would seem like legislators should avoid the expensive distraction of hydrogen in favor of full-scale electrification. That, as we’ve already covered, would provide a significant, and swift, reduction in emissions (and a timely boost to the economy).

Blink, Amazon’s other home security company, primarily focuses on small, affordable and mostly battery-powered devices. Today, however, it’s launching a Floodlight Camera that, unlike the existing model, can be wired in to your home’s external power supply. The Blink Wired Floodlight Camera offers a beefy 2600-lumen LED light, a 1080p live view and two-way audio, as well as enhanced motion detection. That latter feature is aided by Amazon’s AZ2 Neural Edge Processor, which enables the processing to be handled locally, rather than in the cloud.

Blink / Amazon

At the same time, Blink is also trotting out a pan-and-tilt mount to its indoor Mini security camera. The Blink Mini Pan Tilt (the lack of an and in that name should bother you as much as it bothers me) attaches to the base of your mini to offer 360-degree coverage of a room. You can also attach it to a tripod or, for an extra fee, a wall mount if your needs are more specific. In terms of pricing, the Floodlight Camera will arrive shortly for $100 while the Pan Tilt (yup, still bothers me) is up for pre-order today for $30, or bundled with a Mini camera for $60.

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We've already seen Ring add Bird's Eye View — its fancy 3D motion detection — to its flagship security camera and its flagship outdoor light camera. Consequently, you get no prizes for guessing that the feature is now coming to the new Ring Spotlight Cam Pro. The new Pro Spotlight Cam is joined by a Spotlight Cam Plus, which offers a slightly nicer design than its predecessor.

For the uninitiated, Birds Eye View is a system that offers users a top-down map of their area, showing the path a person took to your front door. It’s designed to let you know if someone’s been peering into your windows, or anywhere else, while on your porch.

Both of Ring’s Spotlight Cams will be available in Battery, Plug-In, Solar and Wired variations, although not all of them are ready right now. The Spotlight Cam Pro Battery and Plug-In can be bought for $230, while the Solar model will set you back $250. The Plus, meanwhile, is available for pre-order today, with prices starting at $200, with no word (yet) on a release date.

Ring / Amazon

At the same time, Ring is also launching a more business-focused way of using Amazon’s Astro, its (terrifying) home security robot as a security guard. Astro can already patrol the ground floor of your home at night, and new buyers get a free six-month trial of Ring Protect Pro thrown in for good measure. Now, however, the company is integrating Virtual Security Guard to Astro for small businesses who don’t need (or can't afford the cost of) a living and breathing security patrol.

Much like the home-friendly version, Astro will patrol your office (or other stair-free facility) keeping watch. Should the Ring Alarm or one of the sensors spot a disturbance, the system will connect to a local monitoring and security company. From there, an operator can take control of Astro and go investigate if there’s something worrying going on in the back office.

Like many of Ring’s newest products, this will be first tested by a small group of business customers in the following months.

Follow all of the news from Amazon's event right here!

Oura has, after many years of trying, finally managed to sand out the hard edge from its body tracking smart ring. The company is updating the third-generation of its ring, originally released at the end of 2021, but this time with a perfectly round body. The Oura (Gen3) Horizon keeps the same suite of advanced sensors found in the existing model, but looks far nicer on the finger.

Most wearables, even the elegant ones, have a hard edge or two in their designs since common batteries and components are built in rectangles. While the Oura 3 wasn’t ugly, the hard side did knock a point or two from its style stats, especially at certain, unflattering, angles. And if the ring slid around, it’d dig into your knuckles while you were working out, which wasn’t ideal.

The ring itself is mostly unchanged from the Gen3, unsurprising since it was loaded with a boatload of features Oura itself is still trying to harness. The company has drip-fed new features out across the year, including daytime and workout heart rate, period prediction and blood oxygenation sensing. 

Our Ring (Gen3) Horizon is available to order right now, and is priced at $349, with the existing ring remaining at $299. Would-be buyers can also pick it up in Silver, Black, Stealth and Gold, with the Horizon getting an exclusive Rose Gold colorway, which looks pretty tasty. Not to mention you’ll still need to pay $5.99 per month to unlock all of the goodies the company keeps tucked away for power users.

Logitech is today announcing a quartet of products in its Designed for Mac series of wireless accessories. The first headline item is the MX Mechanical Mini (for Mac), an Apple-favoring variation on the existing MX Mini which launched earlier this year. Fundamentally, it’s the same product as before, offering a refined twist on the mechanical tenkeyless keyboards currently en vogue. Naturally, you’ll get macOS-specific keycaps, and it’s available in a pair of more Mac-friendly colors: Space Gray or Pale Gray.

Next up is a Mac-specific version of the company’s flagship MX Master 3S mouse, again in Space Gray or Pale Gray. That carries over all of the same features as the existing 3S, and if we’re being honest, there’s little reason for this to exist as a separate model. After all, the standard 3S is a universal model, and it can already be customized with Mac-specific shortcuts in the macOS version of Options+, Logitech’s app for accessory tweaking. But if you’re looking for consistency in your color choices, then if the prices are the same, then there’s also little option not to choose this one.

Logitech

The other major launch is for the Lift for Mac which, like the above, is a Mac-hued version of its existing vertical mouse. Logitech says that the 57-degree angle of attack places your mitt in a natural handshake position for better comfort. At the same time, the company is rolling out a new color for its K380 wireless keyboard, this time in Blueberry. You can also pick up the accompanying mouse in that same hue, should you wish to go all matchy matchy with your purple M1 iMac.

All four products are available to buy this month from Logitech’s official website and, most likely, your retailer of choice. The MX Mechanical Mini will set you back $150, while the MX Master 3S is marked up at $100, with the Lift costing $70, and the blueberry K380 is $40.

There are plenty of robots that say they can vacuum and mop your floors, but never to anyone’s satisfaction. With some, you have to futz with the system to add the mop halfway through, others it’ll drag the dirty pad across your clean carpets and rugs. It’s a problem that iRobot has spent plenty of engineering resources trying to solve, saying that the new Combo j7+ is the solution. Co-founder and CEO Colin Angle describes it as the “first legitimate 2-in-1 vacuuming and mopping robot ever created.”

Instead of requiring a user to make changes partway through a mission, the j7+ has a standard vacuum body up top. When it’s finished, however, a pair of recessed arms pull down a mop pad that’s housed in the top of the chassis down to the floor. From there, it’ll drag the pad along your hard floors, before pushing it back away if and when it has to cross carpet. All a user has to do is change the bag and refill the water, which could take up to 60 days at a time.

iRobot

Angle and iRobot’s product manager Praj Shyamkant said that the plan was to ensure that the mop would never, ever, come into contact with your soft surfaces. And that users could expect the device to do what you should expect from its description without any micromanagement. Given that the unit sits on the same footprint as the standard (poop-detecting) j7, it required a lot of engineering nous to shrink all of the fancy new gear into its body, too.

At the same time, iRobot wanted to show off the power of its new iRobot OS 5.0, its latest and greatest operating system. This is includes better integration with home and phone assistants like Siri and Alexa, the ability to denote more clean zones for extra attention and better hazard avoidance. You can also amend mission plans on the fly, banishing your Roomba from a room where you’re about to take a Zoom call, for instance. iRobot also wanted to affirm its pledge to protect user data, never to sell it on to third parties, and that it’s secured a TÜV SÜD Cyber Security certification for its data hygiene.

The Roomba Combo j7+ is available for pre-order today, and will cost $1,099 in the US, with shipments due to begin October 4th. It’ll be available in the UK for £999, but you can also pick up a version without the Clean Base for £799, while other countries can expect it to appear through the rest of Q4, 2022.

Framework, the company spearheading a new generation of modular, repairable products, has made a Chromebook. It teamed up with Google to produce a ChromeOS-friendly version of the standard Framework machine with the same promise of modularity and repairability.

Internally, the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition comes with a 3:2, 2,256 x 1,504 display, a 12th-generation Core i5-1240, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. You can order up to 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD, although you’re also at liberty to upgrade those components yourself at a later date.

You’ll also, as before, be able to spec the machine how you want, including USB-C, USB-A, MicroSD, HDMI, DisplayPort and Ethernet. Plus, if you're looking to bolster the storage beyond the SSD, you can buy dedicated storage expansion cards, blanked-out port modules that can hold a 250GB or 1TB of additional solid-state storage.

The one major change really is the fact that this model comes with the Titan C security chip baked into its chassis. It’s not clear yet if that’ll have any noticeable impact upon your ability to swap out the mainboard when it’s time to upgrade.

The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition is available to pre-order in the US and Canada from today, with the base model priced at $999. Would-be buyers can expect their shipment in late November or early December, and folks are required to put down a $100 refundable deposit to hold their place in the shipment line.

British micromobility startup Bo has already realized that its e-scooter of the future needs an equally futuristic charging dock. The company has today announced bo E, a parking spot that combines a small solar panel and battery to help you re-juice your ride for free. Bo E is a dock measuring 1.5 meters (4.9ft) tall by 0.5 meters (1.6ft) wide, and is designed to be anchored to the sunny corner of your home.

The idea is that the dock will, while you’re at work, gently soak up all of the available solar energy and charge its internal battery. Then, when you return home, you can connect up your Bo M scooter and let the electrons flow from one to the other overnight. Bo E also has its own 4G setup, enabling you to keep an eye on your power status when you’re not guarding over the dock itself. The company says that the scooter is sufficiently energy-efficient that such a small charge will be enough to top up its 2kWh battery, but we'll wait until we can test both in the real world before making any judgment.

Naturally, the biggest concern anyone can have about leaving their $2,400 e-scooter outdoors is security. Bo says that the E lodges high-tensile steel pins into the body of the scooter, making it difficult to remove easily, and anyone who tries will set off a screamy audio alarm. There’s also talk of an insurance product that might help go some way to assuage wary buyers about the risks inherent in leaving a scooter out of doors.

The Bo M is expected to start reaching customers by the end of 2022, and there's a tentative launch date of Q3 2023 pencilled in for Bo E both in the UK and US. There is, however, no word on price, but you can imagine it'll be similarly premium 

Peloton is today announcing its long-awaited entry into the smart ergometer market with Peloton Row. Much like the firm’s other products, Row is a smart rowing machine with a 23-inch HD display onto which you can watch live classes. The company is making its usual noises about a premium piece of hardware that promises better customization than its competition.

Row is belt driven, much like its ostensible rival in this space, the Hydrow, which has a similar silhouette. That offers a fine-grain, electronically-controlled resistance — at odds with the broader resistance you’ll find on air rowers, of which Concept2 provides the gold standard. Peloton also says that Row can offer individually-calibrated on-screen feedback on your form as you row.

(This is something I’m particularly interested in exploring myself, given that my usual form issues are related to rounding over my back, rather than how I’m pulling the chain. Unless there’s some Peloton Guide-esque computer vision stuff that the company hasn’t mentioned in the Row's press release that might identify real-world issues. Speaking of which, Guide is also getting an update this week to include rep tracking.)

Peloton

You’ll also get personal pace targets to help you gauge what your instructors are bellowing at you to do through the screen. Not to mention a whole bunch of data that’ll be slapped onto you after each row, giving you performance metrics that should help you improve in future. (Rowers are, if nothing else, nerds for some good data.)

Of course, like most at-home fitness gear these days, Peloton is also making a big deal that you can stow this thing vertically. And that it’s brought on a raft of new instructors, with a series of pre-recorded classes available on-demand, while live classes will start in 2023. Plus, like other Peloton products, you can swivel the display to work out with free weights or any other class of your choice. 

As for the price, Peloton is asking $3,195, plus the cost of the monthly $44 per month membership for all of the content. The company hasn’t yet mentioned if Row will join its rental program, although it’s likely that the initial wave of devices will be needed to service the demand of folks who’ve been waiting for Peloton to join the rowing world for some time now.

It’s been a while since Amazon upgraded the entry-level version of the Kindle, but it seems like good things have come to those who wait. The 2022 edition has so many upgrades that it’ll make anyone who bought a Kindle in the last year (like me) bilious with envy. First up, there’s a new 300 ppi display, up from the 167 ppi found on its predecessors, giving it the same resolution as the last few Paperwhites, boasting “laser-quality” text and graphics.

Amazon’s generosity is matched elsewhere on the spec list, with the on-board storage doubled to 16GB. You’ll also get a longer, six-week battery life, a lighter frame, adjustable front-light and the long overdue addition of a USB-C port for charging. If that wasn’t enough, buyers will also get a four month trial to Kindle Unlimited, although that offer is only available for a limited time.

Amazon

As the Kindle gets an update, so does the junior edition of the e-reader, with the Kindle Kids getting the same specs as its parent. Each unit comes with a year’s subscription to Amazon Kids+, with a library of thousands of age-appropriate books and the usual parental control features.

Amazon is also boasting about the sustainability credentials of the new Kindles, saying that both are built from 90 percent recycled magnesium. Plus, all of the packaging is now 100 percent recyclable, made with material from responsibly-managed forests.

If there’s one downside, it’s that — at least right now — you won’t get a discounted Kindle if you opt for a version with ads. Amazon’s press release says that the new Kindle will start at $99.99 in Black or Denim, while the Kindle Kids will set you back $119.99.