It’s Google I/O time, which means the company is about to host a keynote that will likely be packed with announcements and updates. We’ll be covering all the news on our liveblog and Google I/O 2023 hub, but you can watch the event in full below. The livestream starts at 1PM ET.

In terms of what to expect from the keynote, one thing that's for certain is we'll get more official details on Google's first foldable phone. The company finally announced the Pixel Fold last week after months of leaks and rumors. More information on Android 14 is also a dead cert. Get ready to hear the term "AI" a lot too, as Google is widely expected to make a ton of announcements on that front, perhaps including updates on its Bard AI chatbot.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2023 right here.

If your charging gear is in need of a refresh, now might be a decent time to upgrade, as Anker has once again discounted a range of wall chargers, cables and power banks on Amazon. For more heavy-duty needs, a number of the company's portable power stations are also on sale.

Among the noteworthy deals here, the Anker 735 Charger is down to $38.41, which is within a dollar of its all-time low. We've seen this discount a few times before, but normally, the wall charger retails closer to $50. This is a slightly older version of the "best 65-watt charger" pick in our guide to the best fast chargers. The newer device is also called the 735 Charger, confusingly, and features smarter temperature monitoring and power distribution, but the old model delivers the same 65W of power in a similarly travel-friendly frame. Generally speaking, that's enough power to charge many smartphones and tablets around full speed and refill some smaller laptops. 

Both of the charger's USB-C ports can reach that max charging rate, plus there's a USB-A port for topping up lower-power devices. Just note that the each port will output less power if you use multiple ports at once. The updated model is also on sale for $48 with an on-page coupon. 

A couple of hybrid chargers are discounted as well, with the 45W, 5,000 mAh Anker 521 Power Bank down to $42 and the 65W, 10,000 mAh Anker 733 Power Bank down to $70. (Clip the on-page coupon in both cases to see the discount.) These devices are on the larger side, but they can serve as both a portable power bank and a wall charger with fold-up plugs. The 733's discount matches the lowest price we've seen, while the 521 is about $18 below its usual street price.

Beyond that, the company's six-foot PowerLine II USB-C to Lightning cable is down to a low of $9, while the ultracompact 20W Anker 511 Charger is within a dollar of its best price $12. Anker runs these kind of discounts fairly often, but we've found their charging gear to provide good value in severalbuyingguides, so this is a good chance to save. 

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I routinely state that the Arturia MicroFreak is one of my favorite budget synths. But honestly, I’m doing it a disservice. I think the MicroFreak is one of the best synths out there at any price. That has as much to do with the versatility of its sound engine as it does with Arturia’s relentless updates. Since being introduced in 2019 this little synth has seen countless updates, most of them adding fairly significant new features.

The forthcoming update to firmware version 5.0 is arguably one of the biggest. It adds a sample playback engine and three different granular engines. That brings the total number of synth engines on the MicroFreak to a frankly absurd 22. Sure, not all of the engines are as usable as the others, and some are relatively similar to each other. But still, it’s a lot of versatility in a small $350 package.

When the new firmware drops around May 30th (unfortunately there are still some kinks being ironed out) there will also be an update to MIDI Control Center that will enable users to upload their own samples (up to 24 seconds in length) for playback through the four new engines. The total number of preset slots on the MicroFreak will expand to 512, and there will be two new modulation options added to the utility menu – random per-key and snap.

Since the MicroFreak had a wavetable engine to start, and in 2021 Arturia added support for custom user wavetables, sample playback should be simple enough since the wavetables are just .wav files. And if there’s sample playback and wavetable support, then granular isn’t too much of a stretch since that’s just chopping up a .wav file and playing it back in little rearranged bits. Still, granular synthesis is pretty hard to come by in a hardware instrument so it’s worth celebrating here. (Side note: I would expect to see more in the near future as granular seems to be gaining popularity and processors are powerful enough now to make building them trivial.)

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

The sample engine is relatively rudimentary. You can change the start and end point and set a loop point, but that’s it. There’s no time stretching or anything (that I’m aware of), pitch changes are achieved simply by speeding up and slowing down playback. But there’s something about the way that is handled on the MicroFreak that sounds incredible. It’s got an almost late ‘70s, early ‘80s digital vibe that speaks to my love of grit. And many of the included samples at least remain usable over a wide number of octaves. In fact, I’d say that at the lower extreme’s they’re not just usable, but fantastic sounding – especially that PGTS Keys sample. And then, obviously, you’ve got the rest of the synth at your disposal to add filtering and modulation.

One trick I quickly fell in love with was using the new per-key random setting to slightly alter the pitch. Combining that with the lo-fi piano sample gets you something that’s never quite in tune, but never so far out that it sounds bad. It does require some minor menu diving, but it’s worth it. And then the key/arp row in the mod matrix becomes another source of randomization. And honestly, I didn’t really think I needed more randomization on a synth that has both sample-and-hold and random options for the LFO, plus the Spice and Dice parameters for injecting chaos into your arps and sequences, but here we are.

I assume that instead of one granular engine, it’s broken down into three separate engines in part because of the limited controls on the front. Scan plays a sample from start to finish (mostly), but it allows you to control the speed at which the grain moves through the file so you can get really lo-fi time stretching effects. But if you modulate the speed at which it scans and set the density (number of grains) reasonably low and the chaos reasonably high, you get this sort of warped vinyl tremolo sound. I especially love the way it sounds on the Braam brass sample. The biggest con here is that samples won’t loop in the scan engine, so you can't get good drones out of it.

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

Cloud, on the other hand, is built for drones. It plays back multiple overlapping grains, looping around the file to create alien textures perfect for scoring a retro sci-fi point and click adventure. This is the sort of thing that people immediately associate with granular synthesis. It has a strange character that can’t be mistaken for anything else.

Lastly, the Hit engine is all about percussion. This is where you go to create clicky sound effects and stuttering glitchy rhythm tracks, even if the source material isn’t a drum sample. In fact, I’d say the results are often more interesting when working with what was originally a melodic sample. Though, I won’t pretend it’s not loads of fun to pop an 808 kick in there and just let it create relentless, skull-crushing avalanches of bass.

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

It’s rare to see a company continue to add this many features to a product years after its release. Whether we’re talking about a synth, a phone or a camera. But Arturia deserves credit (Novation too, just for the record) for continuing to devote time and resources to even its entry level products. Perhaps the most shocking thing about the MicroFreak 5.0 update is that we haven’t seen its big brother, the MiniFreak, receive a single significant update. Despite costing nearly twice the price, it now has six fewer synth engine options, at least by my count.

While you wait for the free update to drop on May 30th, take a few moments to ogle the new MicroFreak Stellar limited edition pictured at the top of this post. It swaps the original's birds and floral flourishes for a space themed design and swaps out the white keys for a monochromatic all black deck. The MicroFreak Stellar is available now for $399.

Nikon has announced the 45.7-megapixel Z8, a powerful full-frame mirrorless camera with up to 8K60p RAW video, 20fps RAW burst speeds and more. It's effectively a slimmed-down version of Nikon's Z9, and shares the latter's stacked, backside-illuminated (BSI) sensor and complete lack of a mechanical shutter. The main thing the Z8 lacks next to the Z9 is unlimited video recording, but it's also $1,500 cheaper.

Nikon is best known for photography, but the Z8's headline feature is the 8K60p N-RAW video. There's an interesting story there, as the cinema camera company RED has used its patents to stop other camera companies from using RAW video in the past. However, RED's lawsuit against Nikon was dismissed late last month, allowing Nikon to use N-RAW (a compressed 12-bit RAW codec developed in conjunction with a company called intoPIX) in any of its cameras. It can also capture 12-bit ProRes RAW video. 

Nikon

Along with 8K60p, the Z8 supports 4K capture at up to 120fps and 10-bit ProRes, H.264 and H.265 formats. It also offers exposure tools like waveforms, customizable autofocus and more. As mentioned, the smaller body means it can't record all video formats for an unlimited time like the Z9. Rather, you're limited to 90 minutes for 8K30p and two hours for 4K60p without overheating. With the stacked sensor, rolling shutter should be very well controlled, just like on the Z9.

In terms of photography, the Z9's burst speeds aren't restrained by a mechanical shutter, because there isn't one. As such, you can capture 14-bit RAW+JPEG images at up to 20 fps, mighty impressive for such a high-resolution camera. It comes with settings designed for portrait photographers like skin softening and human-friendly white balance. 

Nikon

It offers face, eye, vehicle and animal detection autofocus, promising AF speeds at the same level as the (excellent) Z9. It can recognize nine types of subjects automatically, including eyes, faces, heads and upper bodies for both animals and people, along with vehicles and more. 

The Z8's magnesium-allow body may be smaller than the Z9, but it's equally as dust- and weather-resistant. It's also much the same in terms of controls, with a generous array of dials and buttons to change settings. Battery life is good at 700 shots max (CIPA) and two-plus hours of 4K video shooting, but if you need more, you can get the optional MB-N12 battery grip ($350). 

Other features include 6.0 stops of in-body stabilization with compatible lenses, which is good but not as good as recent Sony, Canon and Panasonic models. The electronic viewfinder (EVF) has a relatively low 3.69 million dots of resolution, but also very low lag and a high 120Hz refresh rate. Unfortunately, the 3.2-inch, 2,100K dot rear display only tilts up and doesn't flip out, so the camera won't be suitable for many vloggers — a poor decision on Nikon's part, in my opinion. 

It has one SD UHS-II and one CFexpress card slot that supports speeds up to 1,500 MB/s required for internal 8K RAW recording. That differs from the Z9, which has two CFexpress card slots. On top of the usual USB-C charging port, it has a super-speed USB communication terminal for rapid data transfers. It also comes with a full-sized HDMI connector for external video recording and monitoring, along with 3.5mm headphone and microphone parts. 

The Nikon Z8 goes on sale on May 25th, 2023 for $4,000. That's $1,500 less than the $5,500 Z9, $2,500 less than the Sony A1 and $700 more than Canon's R5 — with far less serious overheating issues. 

Nikon

Another company is racing to launch the first commercial space station. Vast is partnering with SpaceX to launch its Haven-1 station as soon as August 2025. A Falcon 9 rocket will carry the platform to low Earth orbit, with a follow-up Vast-1 mission using Crew Dragon to bring four people to Haven-1 for up to 30 days. Vast is taking bookings for crew aiming to participate in scientific or philanthropic work. The company has the option of a second crewed SpaceX mission.

Haven-1 is relatively small. It isn't much larger than SpaceX's capsule, and is mainly intended for science and small-scale orbital manufacturing for the four people who dock. Vast hopes to make Haven-1 just one module in a larger station, though, and it can simulate the Moon's gravity by spinning.

As TechCrunchnotes, the 2025 target is ambitious and might see Vast beat well-known rivals to deploying a private space station. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin doesn't expect to launch its Orbital Reef until the second half of the decade. Voyager, Lockheed Martin and Nanoracks don't expect to operate their Starlab facility before 2027. Axiom stands the best chance of upstaging Vast with a planned late 2025 liftoff.

There's no guarantee any of these timelines will hold given the challenges and costs of building an orbital habitat — this has to be a safe vehicle that comfortably supports humans for extended periods, not just the duration of a rocket launch. However, this suggests that stations represent the next major phase of private spaceflight after tourism and lunar missions.

Roku is diving further into smart home equipment, and the price is once again a major draw. The company has unveiled a Home Monitoring System SE kit that includes two entry sensors, a motion sensor, a hub (with siren) and a keypad for $99. You might pay less for a whole monitor setup than you do individual parts from rival bundles.

As with earlier products, Wyze co-developed the hardware. You can monitor activity on your phone, but Roku unsurprisingly touts integration with its media players and compatible TVs. You can get an entry alert while you're watching a show. You can expand the system as needed, and an optional $100 per year professional monitoring option uses Noonlight to provide immediate help from agents.

The Home Monitoring System SE is available today through Roku and Walmart, and will reach Walmart stores in the US on May 19th alongside a currently-unpriced light strip and outdoor-oriented solar panel. A Roku OS update enabling TV monitoring notifications (plus camera history and voice control) is due in the "coming weeks."

The expansion may seem odd for a company that's closely associated with streaming devices, but it comes at a critical moment for the company. It's still laying off workers as it grapples with a rough economy, and is concentrating on projects that it believes are more likely to pay off. Smart home products could help Roku supplement its core business while competing against Amazon and others that already have a wide range of home-oriented gear.

After selling 23 million Switches two years ago and 18 million in the last year, Nintendo expects demand for the aging console to continue to fall. It's forecasting sales of 15 million for next year and isn't even confident of that figure, according to its latest earnings report. "Sustaining the Switch’s sales momentum will be difficult in its seventh year," said president Shuntaro Furukawa in a call. "Our goal of selling 15 million units this fiscal year is a bit of a stretch." To achieve that, he added: "We try to not only put one system in every home but several in every home.” Well, at least the new Zelda game is just around the corner…

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Spotify has reportedly removed tens of thousands of AI-generated songs

Universal Music claimed bots inflated the number of streams.

Spotify has reportedly pulled tens of thousands of tracks from generative AI company Boomy. It's said to have removed seven percent of the songs created by the startup's systems, which underscores the swift proliferation of AI-generated content on music streaming platforms. Universal Music reportedly told Spotify and other major services that it detected suspicious streaming activity on Boomy's songs, to glean more money from Spotify, which pays out on a per-listen basis.

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VanMoof simplifies things for its new, cheaper S4 and X4 e-bikes

Pick from a typical and step-through frame.

VanMoof

VanMoof is trying to deliver premium e-bike features and build quality for substantially less money. At $2,498, that’s $1,000 less than the company’s top-of-the-range S5 and X5 bikes, but that doesn’t make them exactly cheap. VanMoof co-founder Ties Carlier said in a press release this was an attempt at a “more simple, more accessible and more reliable” e-bike. One major simplification is the transition to adaptive motor support and a two-speed gear hub. The SX5 series had a three-speed gear system, and while it had a torque sensor to assist, adaptive motor support is new for these cheaper e-bikes. The company expects the range to be equivalent to both the SA5 and older SX3 e-bikes, 37-62 miles (60-150 km), depending on conditions and rider. Both the VanMoof S4 and X4 are available to pre-order now.

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Apple Watch Series 9 may finally get a new processor

The watches have used the same one since 2020.

The Apple Watch has effectively used the same processor since 2020's Series 6, but it's poised for a long-due upgrade. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman claims the Apple Watch Series 9 will use a truly "new processor." He believes the CPU in the S9 system-on-chip will be based on the A15 chip, which first appeared in the iPhone 13 family. Apple has historically introduced new Apple Watches in September, so it shouldn’t be too long a wait.

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Twitter is going to purge and archive inactive accounts

Elon Musk says it's important to 'free up abandoned handles.'

Twitter owner Elon Musk has warned the social network’s users they may see a drop in followers because the company is purging accounts that have "had no activity at all" for several years. Musk's announcement was quite vague, so we'll have to wait for Twitter to announce more specific rules, such as how long "several years" actually is. At the moment, though, the website has yet to update its inactive account policy page, which only states users need to log in every 30 days to keep their account active.

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WhatsApp begins testing Wear OS support

The beta lets you record voice messages or chat on Google-powered wearables.

WhatsApp is now testing an app for Wear OS 3 on devices like the Galaxy Watch 5, Pixel Watch and others. It has much of the functionality of the mobile versions, showing recent chats and contacts, while allowing you to send voice and text messages. WhatsApp offers a circular complication that shows unread messages on your watch's home page. There are also two tiles for contacts and voice messages to let you quickly access people or start a voice message recording. It's a significant release for Wear OS 3, with an ultra-popular app that most people have on their phones, in turn fulfilling Google's aim of getting more developers on the platform.

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A robot puppet rolled through San Francisco singing Vanessa Carlton hits

Only 951 miles to go!

YouTube

Twenty-one years after Vanessa Carlton released her debut single, ‘A Thousand Miles,’ a team of hobbyist roboticists has brought Carlton’s music back to the public ear — this time, to the streets of San Francisco, with an animatronic performer and, thankfully, a disco ball.

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Joseph James O'Connor has pleaded guilty to playing a role in various cybercrime activities, including the July 2020 hack that took over hundreds of high-profile Twitter accounts. O'Connor, who's known by the name PlugwalkJoe online, was originally from Liverpool, but he was extradited from Spain to the US in April. If you'll recall, the perpetrators of the 2020 Twitter hack hijacked accounts owned by popular personalities, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Elon Musk, and promoted crypto scams under their names. In 2021, Graham Ivan Clark, the supposed teenage mastermind behind the breach, pleaded guilty in return for a three-year prison sentence. 

According to the Justice Department, O'Connor communicated with his co-conspirators in that Twitter breach regarding purchasing unauthorized access to Twitter accounts. He allegedly purchased access to at least one Twitter account himself for $10,000. In addition, he was also apparently involved in the hack of a TikTok account with millions of followers, as well as a Snapchat account, via SIM swapping. In both cases, O'Connor and his co-conspirators stole sensitive personal information from the victims and then threatened to release them to the public. While the DOJ didn't identify victims in those cases, The Guardian says they were named in press reports as TikTok star Addison Rae and actor Bella Thorne.

From March 2019 until May 2019, O'Connor was also allegedly involved in the infiltration of a Manhattan-based crypto company to steal $794,000 worth of cryptocurrency. They used SIM swapping to target three of the company's executives and successfully pulled it off with one of them. Using the compromised executive's credentials, they were able to gain unauthorized access to the company's accounts and computer systems. They then laundered the stolen cryptocurrency by transferring them multiple times and using crypto exchanges. 

O'Connor has pleaded guilty to a lengthy list of charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, both of which carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. He is now scheduled for sentencing on June 23rd. 

Uber has started offering domestic and international flight bookings in the UK and will continue rolling it out across the whole region over the coming weeks, according to the Financial Times. The company's general manager for the UK, Andrew Brem, told the publication that this is "the latest and most ambitious step" it has taken to achieve its goal to become a wider travel booking platform. 

Uber first revealed its plans to add train, bus and flight bookings to its UK app in April last year and launched the first two options a few months later. Brem said train bookings have been "incredibly popular" so far and have grown 40 percent every month since they became available, though he didn't give the Times concrete ticket sales numbers. 

For its flights, the company has teamed up with travel booking agency Hopper. The Times says Uber will take a small commission from each sale and could add a booking fee on top of its offerings in the future. It's unclear how much the company's cut actually is, but it charges its partner drivers 25 percent on all fares. As the Times notes, offering flight bookings could also help grow Uber's main ride-hailing business even further, since users are likely to book rides to and from the airport through the service, as well. 

Although flight bookings are only available in the UK at the moment, the region — one of its biggest markets outside North America — only serves as a testing ground for Uber's plans. Brem told the publication that the company is hoping to expand flight offerings to more countries in the future, but it has no solid plans yet. Uber did offer $200 chopper rides in the US back in 2019, but that service was discontinued in the midst of pandemic-related lockdowns. 

MediaTek has a simple answer to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 you see in many gaming phones: deliver an uprated version of last year's high-end hardware. The brand has unveiled a Dimensity 9200+ system-on-chip with improvements that will be particularly noticeable with games. You'll find higher clock speeds for the main Cortex-X3 core (up from 3.05GHz to 3.35GHz), three Cortex-A715 cores (from 2.85GHz to 3GHz) and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores (1.8GHz to 2GHz). More importantly, the company says it has "boosted" the Immortalis-G715 graphics by 17 percent — games that were borderline playable before should be smoother.

The Dimensity 9200+ is built using TSMC's newest 4-nanometer process, potentially extending battery life and allowing for cooler, slimmer phones. The WiFi 7 support, AI processing unit and image signal processor are unchanged, although there's not much room to complain. WiFi 7 still isn't a finished standard, for example, and routers that support it are still extremely rare.

You won't have to wait long to see the first phones based on this chip. MediaTek expects the first Dimensity 9200+ phones to launch later this month, although it hasn't named customers as of this writing. The question is whether or not this refresh is enough. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has only a slight edge over the regular 9200, so a higher-clocked 9200+ might emerge victorious. However, Qualcomm doesn't usually sit still — it likes to ship mid-cycle upgrades of its own.

Nonetheless, this may be an important release if you're a mobile gamer. This gives Qualcomm fresh competition in the Android gaming world. That, in turn, could lead to both more variety in phones as well as more aggressive pricing.