Dave Limp, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, has announced his pending retirement from the company. Limp has been with the company for nearly 14 years and, as his title suggests, oversaw Amazon’s transition into dedicated hardware devices like Kindle e-readers, Alexa-enabled Echo speakers and the various Fire-branded products, among many others. Amazon makes a lot of stuff.

As for the reasoning behind the decision, Limp simply says that “it’s time,” noting that while he’s been at Amazon since 2010, he’s been doing the same basic job at various entities, like Apple and Palm, for 30 years. He’s not exactly retiring in the conventional “cocktail on the beach” sense, as Limp suggests in a blog post that he'll likely continue to work, just not in the consumer electronics space. As for Amazon, he’ll stay on for the next few months until naming a successor.

Of course, Amazon’s Devices and Services division experienced some serious layoffs last year and it’s been reported that the division operates at a staggering annual loss of around $5 billion, according to TechCrunch. It’s easy to blame either of these facts for Limp’s departure, but many Amazon departments experienced layoffs throughout the past year, not just hardware, and the rest of the industry followed suit. The hardware division operates at a loss, but there are certainly a lot of Amazon devices in people’s homes, with the company recently touting the sale of 500 million Alexa-enabled gadgets. Each of these cute lil Alexas are constantly asking people to buy things, so who knows how deeply these hardware sales funnel down into other revenue streams.

However, he’s not the first high-level executive to leave the company under CEO Andy Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos two years ago. Other departures have included Worldwide Consumer CEO Dave Clark, media and entertainment leader Jeff Blackburn, longtime Amazon Web Services executive Charlie Bell, global customer fulfillment leader Alicia Boler Davis and global corporate affairs chief/former Obama staffer Jay Carney.

Warner Bros. Games revealed back in June that Batman: Arkham Trilogy would arrive on Nintendo Switch sometime this fall, and now we have an exact date. The bundle of Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight — along with the expansions for all three games — will land on Switch on October 13th.

Turn Me Up Games (which helped bring Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 and It Takes Two to the Switch) handled the ports of the well-regarded series. Batman: Arkham Asylum kicked off the trilogy in 2009 with an original story that pits the Caped Crusader against many of his most formidable foes. The Joker orchestrates a plot to take over Arkham Asylum and Batman also has to deal with Harley Quinn, Bane, Killer Croc, Poison Ivy and Scarecrow.

Batman: Arkham City, the 2011 sequel, expands the scope to a broader area of Gotham and brings in some more classic villains including Mr. Freeze, Two-Face and The Penguin. Rocksteady followed up its previous two games in 2015 with Batman: Arkham Knight, which has a transformable Batmobile you can drive through the open world.

The beefy, brawling combat is a highlight of three games, while the stealth and puzzle mechanics helped provide some variety. If you haven't played these games before and you're a fan of the Dark Knight, they're worth checking out, though it's worth noting that you'll probably find them at a lower price on other platforms, at least for the next few months.

In any case, Batman: Arkham Trilogy (whether you're a newcomer or revisiting the three games) could help you pass the time until Rocksteady's next game, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, finally arrives. Following a poor reception to an extended look at gameplay, Rocksteady and WB Games pushed back that title from May to next February. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was originally supposed to arrive in 2022.

Live streamers or anyone who just wants to look a little better on camera can now grab our recommended light for $10 off. Logitech's Litra Glow is back down to its all-time low price of $50, which is 17 percent off the list price of $60. We've seen it drop to this price a few times before, and when it does, it's a good time to buy. This is the light we recommend in our guide to game-streaming gear, in which Engadget's Jessica Conditt calls good lighting "one of the best things you can do for your live-streaming setup."   

The Litra Glow is USB-powered and grips on your monitor, right next to your webcam, with an extendable, three-way-adjustable mount so you can dial in the right position. Once set, the full-spectrum LED lights deliver a soft glow that gets rid of harsh shadows and hard edges which make you look better and more natural on camera. You can adjust the light temperature and brightness using the on-board manual controls or through Logitech's free companion app. 

In the same guide, Jessica also recommends Elegato's Stream Deck, which lets you quickly program effects, lights, audio and app control in one cute, retro/space-age package. The new 15-key MK.2 edition is currently on sale at Amazon for $130, instead of the usual $150. That's not an all-time low, but still a decent deal for anyone who wants to upgrade their streaming setup right now. 

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Google Photos just got a major update that adds generative AI to its popular Memories view. This toolset already creates scrapbook montages using your photos and videos, but now these montages will be even more personalized, with collections that make sense according to your life. AI-enhanced algorithms will collect the images into relevant categories, a recent vacation as an example, and create a catchy title to accompany the montage. The app already does this, more or less, but the update should be something of a radical improvement. Of course, this is AI so it won’t always get things right. In other words, you can rename collections or edit montages if necessary. 

All of these scrapbook montages are now collected in a dedicated view, called Memories, so you only interact with them when you want to. Before this, Google Photos users received a push notification every time a new scrapbook was available for perusal. Just click on the Memories tab and get going. The new tab also provides access to previously-released features, like adding music to scrapbook montages and sharing memories via the app.

The update even allows these scrapbook entries to be co-created by friends and family. Invite anyone to collaborate and they can contribute their own photos and videos. Everyone involved can delete any photos that don’t match the theme or make simple edits, and the system itself will recommend photos based on geotagging and the like. As for more robust sharing options, Google says you’ll soon be able to save these collections as popular video formats to send via messaging and social media apps.

The new Google Photos update begins rolling out today in the United States, but the company says it’ll be a few months before a true global launch. This isn’t the first time this year the company has squeezed generative AI into Google Photos. Back in May, Google used the technology to improve its Magic Editor toolset, which leverages AI to remove unwanted artifacts from photos.

In the last few years, basically every platform of consequence has made its own take on TikTok's signature scrolling feed of vertical videos. YouTube Music is the latest. Today, the app will get a vertical video feed called Samples that YouTube describes as a one-tap way to quickly sample and find new music. 

Samples lives in a new tab at the bottom of the app, alongside the home feed, your library and the explore section. Tapping Samples automatically starts a short vertical video clip of a song that YouTube Music thinks you'll like. Naturally, it's pulling songs based on your taste profile, with an emphasis on artists that you like, and related ones who you might not have heard before. 

The app already has multiple playlists that are tuned to your listening habits, including a Supermix that pulls songs and artists together across all your listening habits. There's also a Discover playlist that, naturally, focuses on things you're not familiar with but might enjoy based on your history. YouTube Music product manager Gregor Dodson told Engadget that the algorithm for the Samples feed is a little different from both of those — it's trying to site in between the two playlists, highlighting artists that you may be familiar with but pulling clips you haven't watched before.

The clips you'll see in Samples are only 30 seconds long, but that's about enough to give you a sense of the song. If it's not what you're looking for, just swipe up and you'll jump to another song, and you can do this as much as you want. Spotify added its own vertical video feed recently, but that's less for discovery and more to offer a way to quickly scroll through previews of songs in its playlists. But with both Spotify and YouTube Music implementing such a new, it seems likely that we'll see more apps do the same soon.

I got to try Samples for a few days before it launched, and the thing I found most interesting was to use it as a jumping off point for a longer listening session, something Dodson confirmed was by design. "Short form video [and] the infinite scroll have really interesting applications in music discovery," he said. "It's a simple way to discover new music, but it's not the end of the journey — it's just the start of finding a new artist or song." 

YouTube

To that end, the Samples video view is overlaid with a number of controls. From any Sample, you can tap the thumbs-up to save the song to your "liked songs" playlist. You can also save the song to any playlist you've created. Between these two options, it's pretty easy to quickly scan through Samples and save a bunch of songs to check out further. And if you hear something you want to immediately play in full, just tap the big old play button in the corner of the screen.

Since this is YouTube we're talking about, there's also a "Shorts" button that pops you into the main YouTube app. It'll show you other Shorts clips created with the audio you picked and let you jump into making your own clip with the song. Finally, the share button does just what you'd think — you get a link that can drop into a host of other apps like Messages, Reddit, Facebook and whatever else you might have installed. 

In the overflow menu, you can find a lot of other options, like starting a continuous radio station from the song, jumping into the artist's page to find more music, saving the track to your library and so forth. I with the "start radio" button was featured more prominently in the Samples video, because I found that to be a great way to jump into a auto-generated set of tunes with the same vibe as the Sample that initially caught my eye (and ear). 

My main issue with Samples is one of UI. Specifically, it's not always clear where exactly you'll end up in the app when you switch views. Tapping the Samples tab starts the video scroll, and to exit it you can tap one of the other bottom navigation tabs; tapping the "play" button opens up the familiar YouTube Music player controls. Finally, swiping back down to hide the player interface returns you to Samples. Seems pretty clear. But at one point, I had hit the play button to hear a song and then rotated my phone to landscape to see the video in full screen. When the next song started, I rotated my phone back to landscape, and the app threw me immediately back into the Samples view, with the clip of the song I had already heard still playing.

Another time, I started playing a song, and the hit the toggle at the top of the Now Playing screen to switch the video off and just hear the song. I listened to a few more songs from the auto-generated station of similar music, and then swiped down to hide the Now Playing UI and browse around the app. I was again tossed back into the Samples view. That does make some logical sense, as that's where the whole listening experience started. But I'm to used to being able to hide the Now Playing screen and browse around the app while still playing music that it was a bit jarring. That said, I could then hit the "Home" tab at the bottom and resume what I was playing. It works, but the addition of Samples does change a few of the app's expected behaviors.

These quibbles aside, Samples seems like a pretty handy addition to the YouTube Music app. In the few days I had to test it, it consistently served up music from artists I liked, and the song selections were indeed things I was usually less familiar with. The video clip aspect of it doesn't really matter to me, but given how many artists are making excellent videos these days, it's fun to remember that these visuals are worth checking out sometimes. (Thanks, YouTube Music, for surfacing the wild video for "I Know the End" by Phoebe Bridgers.) More importantly, it did work well as a jumping-off point for digging into some artists I had forgotten about or finding a tune to set the mood for a playlist or station.

YouTube says that the Samples feature is rolling out globally starting today for both Android and iOS users. As with most new features, it might not hit your app immediately, so you might need to be a little patient.

Google is testing a new capability for its generative AI in search that will make it a more veritable rival to Microsoft's AI Copilot in Edge. The tech giant has launched an early experiment for its generative AI-powered Search experience (SGE) that breaks out of Search itself. Called "SGE while browsing," the feature can quickly generate the most salient points of long-form content found on the web. The tech giant positions it as a tool you can use to more easily digest complex topics that might require extensive research. However, the tool will not be able to provide key points for paywalled articles, only for some web pages that you can view free of charge. 

Whenever Google's AI can generate key points for the page you're visiting, you'll see an option that says "Get AI-generated key points" at the bottom of the screen on mobile or in the sidebar on desktop. Each key point links straight to the part of the page it's referencing, so you can jump to it right away. There's also an "Explore on page" section that shows the questions the article answers. At the moment, the feature is only available within the Google app on Android and iOS, but it is coming to Chrome on desktop in the next few days. The tool is automatically switched on if you've already opted in to try out SGE, but you can also switch it on as a standalone experiment in Search Labs. Like any other experiment, it could evolve over time, depending on testers' feedback. 

Google

Google will also soon roll out a new feature that could help you get better acquainted with new concepts and terms related to STEM, economics, history and other topics. To be more precise, it's improving its AI-generated responses to those topics, so that when you hover over certain words, you'll see previews of definitions and related diagrams or images. It could provide a quick way for you to understand its AI's answers to your questions without having to do a deep-dive for all the concepts you aren't familiar with. 

Finally, if you're a programmer who's not opposed to using AI tools for coding, Google has also added new capabilities to SGE that could help you better understand and debug the codes it generates. Starting today, elements like keywords, comments and strings will be color-coded and highlighted in segments of codes in overviews, so that you can quickly parse the AI's output and determine if it will work as intended. 

If you've been looking to pick up Samsung's new Galaxy Z Flip 5, the foldable phone is now down to $900 at Amazon for a 256GB model. That's a $100 discount for a device that only officially went on sale last week. You'll just need to clip an on-page coupon to see the deal at checkout. 

Previously, Amazon ran a pre-order deal that bundled the 512GB version of the Z Flip 5 with a $150 Amazon gift card for $1,000. This new offer isn't quite as strong of a value, but it's the first cash discount we've seen for the device. If you shop at Amazon regularly, you can still get the 256GB model with that $150 gift card, but you have to pay $1,000 upfront. 

In any event, we gave the Galaxy Z Flip 5 a review score of 88 earlier this month, and we currently list it as the "best foldable for selfies" in our guide to the best smartphones. As our Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low notes in her review, the big upgrade this year is a roomier cover display; at 3.4 inches, it's much more useful for replying to texts, checking notifications, using apps, and yes, taking selfies without having to physically unfold the phone. You have to jump through a few hoops to get any app to work in full on the outer display, but once you do, it becomes a bit more versatile. 

Beyond that, there's a new hinge that lets the whole thing fold flat when closed. The device is still capable as a "normal" phone, with a flagship-level Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and a vibrant 6.7-inch OLED interior display. Samsung also promises four years of OS updates and five years of security patches, which is more extensive than many Android manufacturers.

The Galaxy Z Flip 5 is still a foldable, so you'll have to take more care than usual when handling it. Its IPX8 water-resistance rating means it can survive a brief dunking, but it may be more susceptible to damage from dust or sand. Its camera performance isn't as impressive as the best standard phones in its price range, particularly in low-light settings, and its battery life is only so-so by comparison. There's a visible crease on the interior display as well. Nevertheless, this is the best flip-style foldable you can buy, and this deal makes it a little more affordable.  

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Microsoft is attempting to be more transparent about how it enforces the Xbox community standards. The company is moving to an eight-strike suspension policy, which comes into force today. Every enforcement action will include strikes. The number of strikes that the Xbox Safety team applies to an account will depend on the severity of the infraction. Each strike results in a suspension from Xbox's social features.

Account suspensions scale depending on the number of strikes. After two strikes, the player will be suspended for a day. When a player hits four strikes, Xbox will suspend their account for a week. Hit the full eight strikes and a player will be locked out of multiplayer, messaging, parties, party chat and other Xbox social features for one year. During a suspension, a player can still sign in, play games that don't need Xbox online services, use some apps and make purchases.

Xbox asks players to report any violations of the community standards that they see or hear someone else committing. The safety team assesses reports to figure out if a violation actually happened. If so, they'll determine how many strikes to include in the enforcement action.

Strikes will remain on players' accounts for six months. After strikes expire, they won't count toward a player's total. That said, if the safety team deems a violation of the community standards to be especially severe or egregious, it may issue a permanent ban regardless of the number of strikes on an account.

Players can view their enforcement history, where they can see how many strikes they have and exactly when a suspension will end. They can appeal against eligible enforcement actions too. Xbox will also share data on strikes and enforcement actions in its bi-annual Transparency Report.

Any enforcements applied to an account before today won't have any strikes applied to them. However, players will still have to complete any current suspensions before they regain full access to Xbox services.

Microsoft notes that in 2022, it handed out temporary suspensions to less than one percent of all players, and just a third of those had to endure a second suspension. Still, this is the latest in a string of efforts by the company to make the Xbox community safe and welcoming for everyone. Recently, it started rolling out an Xbox feature that allows users to capture and report abusive or inappropriate voice chat.

WhatsApp is testing the ability to create custom stickers using generative AI. According to WABetaInfo, the feature is available to a small number of testers through the Google Play Beta Program. Meta is said to be preparing to roll out the tool more broadly in the coming weeks.

Those who are part of the test should see a Create button when they open the keyboard in the sticker tab. As with similar tools, you can enter a description of the sticker you'd like to use. The AI will spit out a set of stickers for you to choose from and share in your chats. As WABetaInfo notes, you can report any stickers you deem to be harmful or inappropriate to Meta. 

The stickers are said to be easily recognizable and recipients may be informed when they see one that an AI model whipped up. Engadget has asked Meta for clarification.

We've been seeing generative AI creeping into more and more parts of mainstream apps this year, so it's not exactly surprising to see WhatsApp introducing AI-generated stickers. The tool could make WhatsApp chats feel more personalized and avoid people having to rely on overused stickers, GIFs and meme images without necessarily having to rely on their own design chops. Reports have suggested a similar feature is coming to Instagram and Messenger as well.

A storm often evokes a desire to feel safe inside your home and able to communicate with loved ones or emergency personnel — yet, electric and landline connections are often the first systems to go down. Comcast is attempting to solve this problem with the release of Storm-Ready WiFi, a connection backup device — one they claim is the first of its kind built by an Internet Provider. It's powered by Xfinity's 10G Network, has WiFi 6 compatibility and works as a WiFi extender during better weather.

As another reminder of the terrifying impact of climate change, Comcast cites the increase in storms nationwide as to why this extra device is necessary. Yes, you can file Storm-Ready WiFi under how to be more comfortable as the world burns — extremely dark, to say the least.

The service is designed to seamlessly transfer your connection over to Storm-Ready WiFi in the case of a power outage. Storm-Ready WiFi's battery lasts about four hours at a time (an average power outage in the US lasts about two hours). Of course, it's not much good if your phone or computer run out of battery, but otherwise, you can work (or better yet, watch all the movies you want) while the sky opens around you. Storm-Ready WiFi is available to buy now for $7 per month for 36 months, both in-store and online.