Samsung made a virtual appearance at Mobile World Congress with an event centered around Wear OS. The company has been working with Google on the smartwatch operating system over the last several months, and it showed off the latest One UI Watch experience during the stream.

One UI for Wear OS is designed to create a more seamless integration between smartwatches and phones, with apps and settings mirrored between Galaxy devices. Samsung didn't reveal a new Wear OS watch that takes advantage of the interface, unfortunately. You'll need to wait until an Unpacked event later this summer for that. That said, you can get caught up on the highlights from Samsung's MWC event with our four-minute supercut.

Vape pen maker Juul has agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit in North Carolina, which alleged that the company marketed and sold its products to young people. The state will use the money to fund programs that prevent e-cigarette addition and to help people quit e-cigarettes. The cash will also finance research into e-cigarettes.

As part of the consent order, Juul denied any liability or wrongdoing. However, it agreed to a number of changes to its business practices in the state. Most social media and influencer advertising are off limits, and the company can't have ads near schools or sponsor concerts or sporting events. Juul and retailers that sell its products online will need to use an independent verification system to make sure customers are of legal age.

Juul will need to run a secret shopper program to make sure retailers aren't selling its vape pens to anyone under the age of 21. Retailers will need to keep Juul products behind their counter too. In addition, the company can't introduce new flavors or change nicotine content levels without approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

“For years, Juul targeted young people, including teens, with its highly addictive e-cigarette. It lit the spark and fanned the flames of a vaping epidemic among our children – one that you can see in any high school in North Carolina," North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement. “This win will go a long way in keeping Juul products out of kids’ hands, keeping its chemical vapor out of their lungs, and keeping its nicotine from poisoning and addicting their brains."

A Juul spokesperson sent the following statement to Engadget:

This settlement is consistent with our ongoing effort to reset our company and its relationship with our stakeholders, as we continue to combat underage usage and advance the opportunity for harm reduction for adult smokers. Importantly, we look forward to working with Attorney General Stein and other manufacturers on the development of potential industry-wide marketing practices based on science and evidence. In addition, we support the Attorney General’s desire to deploy funds to generate appropriate science to support North Carolina’s public health interventions to reduce underage use.

We seek to continue to earn trust through action. Over the past two years, for example, we ceased the distribution of our non-tobacco, non-menthol flavored products in advance of FDA guidance and halted all mass market product advertising. This settlement is another step in that direction.

Stein started investigating Juul in 2018 and sued the company the following year for "designing, marketing, and selling its e-cigarettes to attract young people and for misrepresenting the potency and danger of nicotine in its products." More than a dozen other states have sued Juul for similar reasons, though the North Carolina case is the first to reach a resolution. 

The Federal Trade Commission also filed a lawsuit against Juul, Marlboro owner Altria and others with the aim of undoing a 2018 investment that gave Altria a 35 percent stake in the vape pen maker. The agency argues that agreements between the two companies stifled competition and violated antitrust laws. Meanwhile, the FDA opened a criminal investigation into vaping in 2019.

Apple has revealed when you'll get to watch Foundation, its adaptation of Issac Asimov’s series of sci-fi novels. The show will debut on Apple TV+ on September 24th, with additional installments of the first ten-episode season dropping each week.

The company also revealed another teaser trailer for Foundation, which stars Jared Harris as the leader of a group of exiles who predicts the end of the Galactic Empire. The group embarks on a journey to restore civilization by establishing The Foundation. Lee Pace also stars in the show, whose showrunner is David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight, Man of Steel).

Apple is reducing the free TV+ trial it offers to customers who buy its devices from a year to three months. It's hoping the slate of shows andmovies will be enough to entice people to stick around as paid subscribers.

The company is lining up a number of major shows for the remainder of this year, as 9to5 Mac notes. Along with Foundation, The Morning Show and Ted Lasso will return for their second seasons in the coming months. Invasion, another large-scale sci-fi series is dropping in October.

Amazon is targeting newbie record collectors with its latest subscription. If you sign up to the Vinyl of the Month Club, you’ll receive a new record for your collection every 30 days or so.

You won’t know what records you’ll receive as part of the $25 plan until they show up at your door, but they’ll be classics from the “Golden Era of Vinyl” — the 1960s and ‘70s — chosen by curators at Amazon Music. You’ll receive vinyls from the likes of Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin and ABBA, so if you’ve been collecting records for a while or your tastes fall outside of the mainstream, this might not be for you.

Still, as Rolling Stone points out, the subscription can be decent value for money. Amazon quietly rolled out the Vinyl of the Month Club plan over the last few months. In that time, subscribers have received the likes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and The Clash’s London Calling. Those cost $47 and $32.56 on Amazon respectively, so you’d save a bit. But given the mystery bag format, there’s no telling in advance whether you’ll get an album you actually want.

You can return a vinyl as long as it’s sealed and unused. If you’re unfamiliar with the artist or album, it’s maybe worth checking it out on a streaming service before tearing the plastic wrapping off. You can also skip a month or cancel at any time. Shipping’s included in the $25/month fee and you don’t need to be a Prime member to sign up.

Vinyl has steadily grown in popularity again in recent years as more people embrace the classic format. Streaming accounts for the biggest slice of the music industry pie by far, but in 2020, vinyl sales grew 29 percent from the previous year to $619.6 million in the US.

Amazon offers a number of subscriptions, such as Prime Video (which is included with Prime), Amazon Music Unlimited and Audible Plus. Given the upswing in interest in vinyl, this seems like a smart way for Amazon to expand its media-centric plans.

Microsoft will switch to a four-week release cycle for stable builds of Edge later this year. It plans to move to that schedule starting with Edge 94, which should arrive in September.

Earlier this month, Google announced that Chrome would move to that cycle with Chrome 94 (which should drop in the third quarter) as part of an effort to release new features faster. At the moment, stable Chrome builds emerge every six weeks or so. Chrome and Edge are both based on Chromium, so it makes sense for Microsoft to adopt the same schedule.

Microsoft noted that the four-week cycle might not be ideal for everyone. Enterprise customers will have an Extended Stable option, through which Microsoft will roll out major Edge updates every eight weeks. It will still provide bi-weekly security updates to those who choose that option. Google will offer a similar Extended Stable option to its enterprise customers.

The upcoming schedule change will bring Edge and Chrome in line with Firefox. That browser adopted a four-week release cycle in early 2020.

Facebook has taken the wraps off a project called Learning from Videos. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and learn audio, textual, and visual representations in public user videos on the social network.

Learning from Videos has a number of aims, such as improving Facebook AI systems related to content recommendations and policy enforcement. The project is in its early stages, but it's already bearing fruit. Facebook says it has already harnessed the tech to enhance Instagram Reels recommendations, such as surfacing videos of people doing the same dance to the same music. The system is showing improved results in speech recognition errors as well, which could bolster auto-captioning features and make it easier to detect hate speech in videos.

Facebook says the project will help AI researchers avoid having to rely on labeled data and it's part of efforts to build systems that learn in a similar way to humans. As such, Learning from Videos will "enable entirely new experiences." The company didn't go into much detail about those except for a possible feature that would allow AI to find digital memories, including ones captured by augmented reality glasses. You could, for instance, ask such a system to show you "every time we sang to grandma," and it could surface those clips. Facebook, notably, is working on its own smart glasses.

The company says the project is looking at videos in hundreds of languages and from almost every country. This aspect of the project will make AI systems more accurate and allow them to "adapt to our fast moving world and recognize the nuances and visual cues across different cultures and regions."

Facebook says that it's keeping privacy in mind when it comes to Learning from Videos. "We’re building and maintaining a strong privacy foundation that uses automated solutions to enforce privacy at scale," it wrote in a blog post. "By embedding this work at the infrastructure level, we can consistently apply privacy requirements across our systems and support efforts like AI. This includes implementing technical safeguards throughout the data lifecycle."

Understanding what's happening in videos can be an immensely difficult task for AI systems. They can include hurdles like background noise that makes it difficult to understand speech and language switching. Yet less than a year after starting the Learning from Videos project, Facebook is taking what the system has learned and putting it to practical use in other areas.

As of today, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (with free upgrades from PS4 and Xbox One), as well as Nintendo Switch. Although Activision Blizzard said the game would arrive on PC later this year, you actually won't have to wait long at all for that.

According to a launch trailer for the new console versions, Crash 4 will land on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher on March 26th. The game costs $40 on PC, the same price as on Switch. It's more expensive on PS5 and Series X/S ($60), but you can expect native 4K and 60 FPS gameplay on PS5 and Xbox Series X, and upscaled 4K/60 FPS on Series S. The PS5 version also offers haptic feedback through the DualSense controller.

Meanwhile, King recently revealed the release date for the Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! mobile game. It's coming to iOS and Android on March 25th.

AT&T previously noted that it would expand HBO Max to more countries in June. As it turns out, that’ll be an eventful month for the streaming service in the US as well. The company plans to roll out an ad-supported version in the country in June. 

Reports in 2019 suggested a cheaper tier of HBO Max with ads would arrive sometime this year. It's safe to assume the ad-supported version will be less expensive than the current plan, though it's not yet clear how much it'll cost. A standard HBO Max subscription is $15/month.

Meanwhile, AT&T has revised its subscriber goals for HBO and HBO Max. It expects to have between 120 and 150 million by the end of 2025. In October 2019, it predicted having between 75 and 90 million subscribers by the same timeframe. Expanding HBO Max to more regions and adding another tier in the US should certainly help AT&T reach that target.

The ideal way to watch Tenet, according to director Christopher Nolan (and many others), is in a cinema. "This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen," he said last year amid the throes of a pandemic. That inspired YouTuber Bob Wulff, who runs the WulffDen channel, to stuff the time-bending blockbuster onto Game Boy Advance Video cartridges.

Wulff freely admits this is "quite possibly the worst way to view Tenet." He split the movie across five cartridges because it's two and a half hours long. According to Wulff, "30 minutes is the maximum time you can have for a Game Boy Advance Video [cartridge] and still have it in somewhat of a watchable state." He even made custom labels.

There are tradeoffs, of course. Wullf had to crush the video down to six frames per second with a resolution of 192x128 and a whopping 8 KB/s bitrate. The software Wulff used also speeds up video by a third by default. The result is not exactly the pristine IMAX cinema experience Nolan would have hoped for. Many viewers already found it hard to hear much of the dialogue in Tenet due to the questionable sound mix, so can you imagine trying to watch the film with a GBA speaker?

Most Game Boy Advance Video cartridges had a few episodes of a show like Pokémon or SpongeBob SquarePants, but there were a few full-length movies such as Shrekand Shark Tale. With the 20th anniversary of the GBA fast approaching, it seems like the perfect time to order some GBA Video cartridges, a device to flash them with and ruin your favorite movie by watching it in a terrible format.

During a roundtable discussion about Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media joining Microsoft, Xbox chief Phil Spencer touched on what the $7.5 billion deal would mean for game exclusivity. "If you're an Xbox customer, the thing I want you to know is this about delivering great exclusive games for you that ship on platforms where Game Pass exists," he said. "The creative capability we will be able to bring to market for Xbox customers is gonna be the best it's ever been for Xbox."

Not all Bethesda games will be exclusive to PC, Xbox and/or xCloud. Some will be multiplatform. Others, such as Deathloopand GhostWire: Tokyo, will initially be PS5 console exclusives. "There [are] contractual obligations that we're gonna see through, as we always do in every one of these instances," Spencer said. "We have games that exist on other platforms and we're gonna go support those games on the platforms they're on."

He noted that Xbox will continue to invest in existing "communities of players" and added that there might be cases down the line where there are contractual obligations with other platforms. "Even in the future, there might be things that have either contractual things or legacy on different platforms that we'll go do," he said. Spencer previously said that Xbox will decide whether to release future Bethesda games on non-Xbox or PC platforms on a "case-by-case basis."

It also emerged during the stream that more than 20 Bethesda games will be available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers as of Friday. A dozen more titles from the publisher will join the service, including Fallout 4.