The Echo Show 5 smart display has dropped to $40 as part of Amazon’s Black Friday sale. That’s 56 percent off the MSRP, representing a savings of $50. This matches a record-low price for the device. It’s worth noting that this deal is for the latest and greatest 3rd-generation of the display that was originally released earlier this year.

The Echo Show 5 made our list of the best smart displays you can buy, and for good reason. This device is only 5.5 inches wide, thus the name, which could be too small for some people, but actually serves a useful purpose. The Echo Show 5 makes for a fantastic bedside device, as it fits snugly on a nightstand or even a small desk.

This also allows it to double as a stellar smart alarm clock, a feature Amazon has encouraged with regular software updates. The screen’s brightness adjusts automatically, thanks to an integrated ambient light sensor, and there’s a nice tap-to-snooze function. There’s even a sunrise alarm that slowly brightens the screen so you can wake up gently instead of being yelled at by a loud beeping noise. It does boast a camera, which might make you feel weird being as how it’ll likely be in the bedroom. Luckily, it also ships with a camera cover.

Amazon’s sale goes beyond the Echo Show 5, if you’re looking for a larger smart display. The latest Echo Show 8 is discounted to $105 from $150 and the large-and-in-charge Echo Show 10 is on sale for $160 instead of $250.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

The Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K streaming stick has dropped to a record low price of $38 as part of a larger Black Friday deal on Amazon. That’s 24 percent off the MSRP of $50. This is the latest and greatest Chromecast stick and, as the name suggests, can be used to watch live TV with resolutions up to 4K HDR.

We appreciated the streaming stick in our official review, calling out the comfortable remote control that ships with the product and the excellent Google Assistant integration, which lets you skip that remote entirely and use your voice for controls. The stick also offers support for Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and good ‘ole HDR10. We also loved that this is a nearly lag-free device, especially when compared to rival products in the same price range. There's a reason, after all, that this stick easily made our list of the best streaming devices in 2023. 

It’s also extremely easy to use, and the integrated dongle makes for a simple installation process. Just plug and play. Once installed, you’ll be able to watch content from just about every major streaming platform out there, including a diverse array of free ad-supported stuff, with one major caveat. The system doesn’t allow access to Apple TV+, so you’ll have to find another way to watch that Kurt Russell Godzilla show.

We are in the middle of Black Friday festivities, so that’s not the only streaming stick on sale. Amazon is also offering the HD version of Google’s Chromecast streaming stick for just $20. That's a savings of 33 percent from the MSRP of $30. This is basically the same product as above, but without 4K.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

A YouTuber named RwanLink recreated Castle Town from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a Studio Ghibli film and released a digital short to show off their efforts. This is to celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary and the YouTuber made the environment and characters in Unreal Engine 5, putting in over 600 hours of work to complete the project. It was a one person job, aside from the music, as reported by Eurogamer.

It’s got a gorgeous opening cinematic in the style of, you guessed it, Studio Ghibli, which is followed up by gameplay in Castle Town. The gameplay recalls Wind Waker, obviously, and even newer cel-shaded Zelda titles like Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. There are Gorons, Gerudo, Hylians aplenty and, oddly, some ladies who look pulled straight from the Renaissance. The big bad himself, Ganondorf, also shows up.

The gameplay looks a bit choppy, but it’s still extremely impressive. There are dozens upon dozens of NPCs just about everywhere, many more than would be present in an actual Zelda game. The music is on-point and it just looks, well, cute and fun to explore, like a Zelda title should.

This project comes just a couple of weeks after the official announcement of a live action Zelda movie. Some fans were a bit displeased with the whole idea of a live action film at all, as animation seems to be the best way to do the story and characters justice, particularly something that draws from Studio Ghibli. Still, we’ll see when the film releases if director Wes Ball, from the Maze Runner films, can pull a cucco out of a hat.

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max is on sale for just $40 as part of a larger Black Friday event. That’s 40 percent off and the lowest price we’ve ever seen for the streaming stick. This deal is for the latest and greatest model, with support for Wi-Fi 6E and enough juice to stream live TV without cable.

What else is new with Amazon’s latest streaming stick? The Fire TV Stick 4K Max boasts twice the storage of the previous version, 16GB compared to 8GB, for holding onto downloaded content. It also accesses free live TV streams, which is nice, and includes a fairly powerful 2.0 GHz quad-core processor, which should make for snappy controls.

The streaming stick was first unveiled at Amazon’s September hardware event, and it offers support for HDR, HDR10+, Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision and more. It goes without saying that this thing also streams in 4K, as it’s right there in the name. You also get access to the company’s new Fire TV Ambient Experience, which displays useful information like family calendars, reminders, local weather forecasts and more.

It’s the week of Black Friday, so this isn’t the only streaming stick Amazon’s selling at a discount. You can snag the standard Fire TV Stick for just $20, a savings of 50 percent. Despite being a relatively bare-bones product when compared to the Max, it still offers FHD streaming and ships with an Alexa voice remote.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Teenage Engineering is a company that follows its own path. It’ll release a $250 toy car one day and a full-featured groovebox/sampler for $300 on the very next day. That’s what happened this week. Teenage Engineering just surprise-launched the EP-133 K.O. II, a portable sampler/groovebox that's feature-rich, looks absolutely stunning and costs just $300. You read that cost right. 

The only musical instruments in TE’s lineup that approach this price point is its catalog of Pocket Operator portable synthesizers, so it’s no surprise that this is a direct followup to the best one, the PO-33 KO sampler. The original Pocket Operators were marketed as something of a toy, despite being surprisingly robust, but the EP-133 K.O. II is being advertised as a workstation. This is a fairly large, but still portable, device that more closely resembles an Akai standalone machine. It won’t fit in your pocket, but will fit in your bag.

Let’s go over some specs. The K.O. II boasts 64MB of memory, which isn’t a lot, but TE products typically come with some tradeoff. It’ll be enough for a bunch of samples and a few projects, though, which the company says was intentional. Teenage Engineering co-founder and hardware lead David Eriksson told The Verge that if the sampler had too much storage it would “give the user the option to finish later” instead of completing a song in one-go. Will nobody think of the poor musicians out there who love starting things and hate finishing things? Asking for a friend.

Teenage Engineering

There are 999 slots for samples, as a matter of fact, and an internal microphone for making your own. Though this is, first and foremost, a sampler, it ships pre-filled with drum hits, synths and other sounds so you can get straight to work. It connects via USB-C for loading samples from a computer or MIDI devices. The K.O. II is also portable, running off of four AAA batteries. In other words, there’s no internal rechargeable battery, but that $300 price tag had to come about somehow.

The unit features a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack and the most important buttons and knobs are orange, to help musicians find them during live sets in dark, smoky clubs. That’s a nice touch. The device itself is gorgeous, with a handsome panel of buttons, knobs and connectors. The keys are clicky and, more importantly, velocity sensitive. There’s a rectangular LED screen up top that boasts similar design language to the OP-1 and OP-1 Field portable synthesizers.

Teenage Engineering hopes this product will attract newbies to the world of music-making, so the workflow is designed for simplicity, a trait shared with its forebear. Despite that caveat, this is a powerful instrument that should lure in professionals and amateurs alike. It features 12 mono and 6 stereo voice polyphony, stereo/mono sampling at 46.875 kHz/16-bit, 12 pressure-sensitive pads, 6 built-in FX sends with a punch-in mode, a master compressor and both manual and automatic sample slicing tools. It also looks really cool, like an accounting calculator from the future.

The EP-133 K.O. II is available today and, again, costs $300. The day before Thanksgiving is an odd time to release a new piece of hardware, but Teenage Engineering is based in Sweden, so what does it care? It’s worth noting that this is the first dedicated music-making machine the company has released since last year's OP-1 Field.

Teenage Engineering just revealed a, uh, toy car/doodad that costs $250. Yes, it’s $250 for a little piece of metal with wheels that you can roll around a desk for a bit before getting bored. The company tends to releases two kinds of products. There are the extremely expensive, yet pretty darn cool, audio devices and, well, everything else. Today’s surprise release falls squarely in the latter camp.

This might not be quite as egregious as the company’s $1,600 desk that you have to assemble yourself or those little wooden dolls that cost $2,000, but it’s still a doodad that should cost around $2.50, and not $250. Teenage Engineering says its Grip Car is made from aluminum and features smooth ball bearing rubber wheels. The use case scenarios here seem endless, with the company suggesting folks “move it in any direction” or put it on their shelf. Wait, those are the only two.

Teenage Engineering

The Grip Car is available in three colors, to those curious, so you’ll have your pick of red, black or aluminum. It was created by Danish designer Anders Hermansen, who has previously worked with companies like Bang & Olufsen to help make some of its in-wall speakers, among other products.

Incidentally, the official Teenage Engineering website has been acting peculiarly lately, with an abundance of symbols that seem to advertise some kind of announcement for tomorrow. The company confirmed to Engadget that the Grip Car isn’t part of this forthcoming announcement and to keep an eye out for a press release tomorrow afternoon. The announcement looks to be audio-related, due to the floating icons on the site, but it remains unknown if it’ll be hardware or software.

Spotify has officially unveiled its new streaming payment policy for artists and labels, and the details are pretty much exactly what has been reported for weeks. In other words, smaller artists are getting something of a shaft here, as songs that don’t meet the minimum threshold of 1,000 streams per year will not be eligible for any payment whatsoever.

Spotify was already notorious for underpaying artists, but now many will get nothing at all, aside from the opportunity and privilege to exist on its servers. Spotify says this is to eliminate fraud, and indicates that the money that used to go to these smaller artists and alleged fraudsters will be redistributed to those above that 1,000 play per year threshold. 

Also, the company’s nixing many payments for so-called “noise” content, like recordings of rain falling on a rooftop and other items intended for relaxation and to provide white noise. The cuts won’t impact all noise recordings, just those under two minutes in length. Additionally, Spotify’s currently looking to adjust the royalty model for noise recordings, keeping the payouts lower than actual songs. However, the company hasn’t provided any concrete details.

Spotify’s crowing that these combined cuts will provide an additional $1 billion toward artists in the next five years, but hasn’t offered details as to how the funds would be redistributed, only saying that the streamer itself would “not make additional money under this model.”

It did note that 99.5 percent of all streams meet the above thresholds, but also stated that the remaining 0.5 percent account for just $40 million per year, which is much lower than the advertised $1 billion of new funds being pumped into the system for established artists, even if you account for $200 million over five years. Spotify also claims that songs with less than 1,000 annual streams generate an average of $3 per year, which isn’t a lot. If those numbers hold, this whole thing could be much ado about, well, $3. Still, there’s something of a precedent being set here.

Spotify says fraudulent content creators often try to “game the system” by posting a high volume of tracks, generating pennies for each that add up to real money over time. This is something the company refers to as artificial streaming, as there’s an AI component at play, so the 1,000 play threshold hopes to stop this activity dead in its tracks. Smaller artists are just collateral damage here.

As a matter of fact, artists with under 1,000 streams in the last 28 days cannot even participate in Spotify’s recently-launched marketing toolset that lets artists pay the streamer for placement on home feeds.

In a completely unrelated note, Spotify is shutting down in Uruguay after the country passed a bill that requires fair pay to artists, as reported by MixMag. The company made threats to shut down when the bill was first suggested back in July and now it has followed through. A spokesperson for Spotify actually wrote Uruguay's Minister of Education, Pablo Da Silveira, to say that the country’s bill would force it to “pay twice” the amount of royalties to artists. It went on to say that complying with Uruguay’s fair pay law would make its business model “unfeasible.”

Amazon’s Echo Buds just got a spate of new features via a software update, though most of these tools are only available for the recently-released 2023 lineup of earbuds. First up, you can now tap the earbuds to start a recommended playlist, so you don’t need to fumble with your phone to launch a playlist or even speak out loud to ask Alexa for help. It’s all in the tap.

You can launch playlists via one triple tap or a single long press, which is adjusted via the settings in the associated Alexa app. It looks like this feature works with all of the major streaming platforms, as Amazon says it accesses “your preferred audio provider” to find the playlist. Just look for “Tap Controls” in the Echo Buds device settings to get started. 

There’s also a new audio personalization tool that lets you tailor the sound to better integrate with your physical environment and the content you're consuming. For instance, you can tune the frequencies to accentuate the bass during a walk, to provide a fuller sound. The company lists other examples where this feature comes in handy, including watching movies on a laptop. This could actually be quite handy, as all sound sources are not created equal.

Again, head to the Echo Buds device settings via the Alexa app and look for the audio personalization options. You can even adjust each ear independently of one another, so your right ear can be louder or offer a different range of frequencies than the left ear. Amazon says the setup process here takes around four minutes. It’s also worth noting that this feature is available for both 2023’s model and 2021’s second-gen Echo Buds.

The Sunbird messaging app for Android has flown the solar coop. The app has completely shut down following massive privacy concerns, as reported by 9to5Google. This comes after the app received increased scrutiny when it partnered with Nothing to act as the basis of the smartphone manufacturer’s Nothing Chats app. Nothing’s app was only available for less than one day before the aforementioned privacy concerns came to light and it was pulled.

The app’s gone from Google’s Play Store, though the parent company says this shutdown is temporary, according to an announcement posted on Reddit. Long story short? Sunbird was a niche product that didn’t quite work and the Nothing collaboration turned the spotlight to that fact. It promised full end-to-end encryption but many users could exploit vulnerabilities to access private user messages. 9to5Google, for instance, found over 630,000 files using this vulnerability. Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem too secure.

The writing was on the wall for Sunbird to anyone paying attention, which wasn’t that many people until Nothing got involved. The company missed several deadlines for launch, all while making lofty promises regarding secure iMessage and Android chat interoperability. During the company’s first announcement presser back in 2022, Sunbird refused to take questions regarding the underlying technology of the app and related privacy concerns, closing the Zoom chat when things got too hot, as reported by ArsTechnica. This led reporters to suggest that Sunbird simply wasn’t a “serious company.”

There’s also the giant Apple-sized elephant in the room. The tech giant recently announced it would offer support for RCS text messaging in 2024, completely eliminating the need for workarounds like Sunbird in the first place. In other words, the green bubble-blue bubble divide is coming to an end.

Despite erasing itself from the Play Store, Sunbird’s official website makes no mention of the shutdown, still boasting about the app’s peerless end-to-end encryption. The company’s also yet to make a public statement on the matter.

The James Webb telescope is back with some more gorgeous images. This time, the telescope eyed the center of the Milky Way galaxy, shining a light on the densest part of our surrounding environs in “unprecedented detail.” Specifically, the images are sourced from a star-forming region called Sagittarius C, or Sgr C for short.

This area is about 300 light-years from the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A, and over 25,000 light-years from a little blue rock called Earth. All told, the region boasts over 500,000 stars and various clusters of protostars, which are stars that are still forming and gaining mass. The end result? A stunning cloud of chaos, especially when compared to our region of space, which is decidedly sparse in comparison.

As a matter of fact, the galactic center is “the most extreme environment” in the Milky Way, as stated by University of Virginia professor Jonathan Tan, who assisted the observation team. There has never been any data on this region with this “level of resolution and sensitivity”, until now, thanks to the power of the Webb telescope.

At the center of everything is a massive protostar that weighs more than 30 times our sun. This actually makes the area seem less populated than it actually is, as this solar object blocks light from behind it, so not even Webb can see all of the stars in the region. So what you’re looking at is a conservative estimate of just how crowded the area is. It’s like the Times Square of space, only without a Guy Fieri restaurant (for now.)

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia).

The data provided by these images will allow researchers to put current theories of star formation to “their most rigorous test.” To that end, Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument captured large-scale emission imagery from ionized hydrogen, the blue on the lower side of the image. This is likely the result of young and massive stars releasing energetic photons, but the vast size of the region came as a surprise to researchers, warranting further study.

The observation team’s principal investigator, Samuel Crowe, said that the research enabled by these and forthcoming images will allow scientists to understand the nature of massive stars which is akin to “learning the origin story of much of the universe.”

This is obviously not the first interesting image produced by the James Webb telescope. We’ve seen stars born in the Virgo constellation, water around a comet in the main asteroid belt and a fairly offputting view of the Pillars of Creation, among others. It’s seen things you people wouldn't believe and, luckily, it won’t all be gone like tears in the rain because of the internet and because Webb’s still out there.