Sennheiser announced a new pair of mid-ranged headphones today that carry over some features from its latest flagship model. The Accentum Wireless offers “a similar sound” to the $380 Momentum 4, along with hybrid active noise cancellation (ANC), 50-hour battery life and a $180 price tag.

The company suggests you’ll hear “breathtaking Sennheiser sound” from Accentum Wireless. They use 37mm dynamic transducers (slightly smaller than the 42mm ones in the Momentum 4) and Bluetooth 5.2 with multipoint connectivity. The headphones support aptX HD, which can output up to a 576 kbps bitrate for those with supported devices. It’s also compatible with AAC (the maximum for iPhone users) and SBC codecs.

The headphones’ battery can last an estimated 50 hours on a single charge, not terribly far from the Momentum 4’s absurd 60 hours. (By comparison, Sony’s latest flagship headphones are only rated for 30 hours.) Sennheiser says the Accentum can quick-charge for up to five extra hours of playtime in only 10 minutes. In addition, the included USB-C cable also enables wired listening mode for environments where Bluetooth doesn’t make sense.

Sennheiser

On the voice side, the Accentum Wireless has two mics with a wind-reduction mode and adjustable sidetone, which lets you control how much you hear your voice during calls. The headphones also pair with the Sennheiser Smart Control app, which gives you a five-band equalizer, user presets, software updates and management of multipoint connections.

Sennheiser claims the Accentum’s battery life is matched by its long-term comfort. “The earcup and headband padding contact points effortlessly conform to the wearer’s shape, with a gentle touch that always feels secure and natural,” the company wrote in a press release. The fold-out cans also appear to borrow design cues from the Momentum 4, which (somewhat controversially) dropped previous Momentum headphones’ iconic / vintage look.

The black version of the Accentum Wireless will begin shipping on October 4, with pre-orders starting tomorrow (September 26). Meanwhile, the white colorway arrives in “late November.” The headphones cost $180 and will be available from select retailers and Sennheiser’s website.

Meta’s planning on unleashing a swarm of personality-driven AI chatbots to attract young users to its various platforms, as originally reported by The Wall Street Journal. The first of these bots could launch as early as this week, with rumors persisting that one will get announced during Meta’s Connect conference on Wednesday.

It looks like these bots won’t be tied to a particular platform under Meta’s umbrella and should launch on a variety of social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp. WSJ says that Meta employees have been testing the generative bots for a while. The bots are being released to increase chat engagement, but some may offer productivity tools like coding and the like.

These AI chatbots are stuffed with personality to keep the young (and young at heart) entertained. Specifics remain vague, but WSJ got a look at some internal documents that detail an AI called “Bob the Robot” that’s loosely based on Bender from Futurama. This bot is a self-described “sassmaster general” with the internal documents referring to it as a “sassy robot that taps into the type of farcical humor that is resonating with young people.” As a note, Futurama premiered almost 25 years ago, long before many of those farcical humor-loving young people were even born.

There’s also a bot called “Alvin the Alien” that reportedly pries users for personal information in its quest to understand humans. “Your species holds fascination for me,” an internal report has it saying. “Share your experiences, thoughts and emotions! I hunger for understanding.” One employee noted in the memo that users “might fear this character” as it seems like it’s “purposefully designed to collect personal information.” The company has been famously squeaky-clean regarding privacy violations in the past, so this should cause no concern.

Meta’s been trying to court younger users for a while now, particularly since the meteoric rise of TikTok. The app has overtaken Instagram in recent years and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants that marketshare back, telling investors during a conference call in 2021 that the company would retool its “teams to make serving young adults their North Star rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people.” So it looks like there won’t be a chatbot that complains about participation trophies or Bud Light or whatever.

WSJ suggests that dozens of these chatbots are on the way, referred to internally as Gen AI Personas. They’ll also pop up in metaverse applications in addition to standard social media services. Reports also indicate that Meta’s prepping a toolset for celebrities to allow them to create their own AI chatbots to interact with fans.

Of course, Meta’s not the first social media company to court youngsters with personality-filled chatbots. Amazon's prepping an Alexa-powered voice chat service for kids. Snap also launched the My AI service back in February and it has been used by over 150 million people since that release. Despite the success, My AI has run into some troubling issues for a product intended for children. For instance, it has chatted about alcohol and sex with users and even randomly started posting photos without consent. We’ll have to wait and see if “Bob the Robot” and his cohorts start behaving badly when they launch.

Repairability website iFixit has published its teardown of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the results are a mixed bag. Local repair shops still have to deal with the company's software-restricted “parts pairing” requirement, which means they need to order official components directly from Apple and get on the phone with a company employee before iOS will accept individual part replacements.

On the positive side, iFixit praised Apple for returning to a “dual-entry” removable glass back cover with the iPhone 15 Pro models — a feature that debuted with the standard iPhone 14 line last year. “This is a win for consumers as back glass repairs have been outrageously expensive on the high-end models until now, costing as much as $550,” iFixit said in its teardown video.

iFixit also examined the phone’s titanium frame and came away less than impressed. While noting that titanium is dirtier to produce than stainless steel and aluminum (mocking Apple’s “Mother Nature” skit in its launch event), the site also said the material scratches easily. “Unfortunately for the cool factor, we found that the color on the titanium shell scratches easily, a process that is only satisfying under the magnificent magnification of the microscope,” the teardown video said. “I could scratch this thing up all day.”

Elsewhere, iFixit found that the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s logic board appears to be the same as the one in the iPhone 15 Pro, and you have to remove the speaker and Taptic Engine to access the battery-removal tabs. Interestingly, the website also noted that the main and wide camera sensors on the iPhone 15 Pro Max appear identical to those on the iPhone 14 Pro Max, suggesting the “Tetraprism” periscope lens, which enables 5x optical zoom, is the only hardware-based camera update this year. “Any improvement in image quality has more to do with a new A17 SoC than the camera hardware itself,” iFixit said.

Dinging Apple for parts pairing appears primed to stand as a primary focus of iFixit’s Apple teardowns from now on. The repair advocacy website views it as significant enough of a problem to have lowered the iPhone 14’s repairability score from 7 out of 10 to 4 out of 10 nearly a year after launch because of it. “And as we’ve now come to expect, each year brings new parts pairing issues and bugs,” the video said. “This year’s edition is the LiDAR sensor, which now crashes if the sensor is swapped out. Calibration issue or not, these bugs need to be fixed, or else they might as well be paired with the logic board with a tiny Apple warning saying, ‘Hey, this phone is property of Apple.’”

Due to the parts pairing requirement, iFixit gave the iPhone 15 Pro Max a mere 4 out of 10 repairability score. “This phone won't accept salvaged parts, it complicates at-home repair, and it won't be any fun for your local repair tech,” the website said.

Resident Evil Village is a haunting horror romp starring a very tall and elegant vampire lady (and some other monsters, sure), and it's heading to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max on October 30. It'll hit the M1 and M2 models of the iPad Pro and iPad Air on the same day. The base game will cost $40 and its Winters’ Expansion DLC will be an additional $20.

Resident Evil Village originally came to PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in 2021, and it became a cultural touchstone for its monster-mashing storyline. The game includes werewolf creatures, a mutant fish man, a murderous cult leader and festering, zombie-like enemies, though its breakout star was Countess Alcina Dimitrescu. She's an exceptionally tall, undead, razor-fingered villain who leads a trio of vampiric daughters, and she's simply fantastic.

Village landed on Mac in 2022. Apple revealed the iPhone and iPad versions during its annual iPhone event on September 12, 2023, but it didn't share a release date at the time. Capcom provided the date on its site this week. The Resident Evil 4 remake, which landed on PC and consoles this year, is also due to hit Apple's mobile devices in 2023, but no date has been confirmed just yet.

Other games coming to the iPhone 15 Pro — thanks to the new A17 Pro chipset — include Death Stranding and Assassin's Creed Mirage. Death Stranding is due out this year, while Mirage is scheduled to hit in early 2024.

ChatGPT is getting some significant updates that will enable the chatbot to deal with voice commands and image-based queries. Users will be able to have a voice conversation with ChatGPT on Android and iOS and to feed images into it on all platforms. OpenAI is rolling out the features now. They'll be available to Plus and Enterprise users at first, with other folks gaining access to the image-based features later.

You'll need to opt in to voice conversations in the ChatGPT app (go to Settings then New Features) if you'd like to try them out. By tapping the microphone button, you'll be able to choose from five different voices.

OpenAI says the back-and-forth voice conversations are powered by a new text-to-speech model that can generate "human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech." It created the five voices with the help of professional actors. Going the other way, the company's Whisper speech recognition system converts a user's spoken words into text.

The image-based functions are intriguing too. OpenAI says you can, for instance, show the chatbot a photo of your grill and ask why it won't start, get it to help plan a meal based on a snap of what's in your fridge or prompt it to solve a math problem you take a picture of. As it happens, Microsoft highlighted the Copilot AI's ability to solve math problems in Windows during its Surface event last week.

OpenAI is using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to power the image recognition features. To use ChatGPT's image-based functions, tap the photo button (you'll need to tap the plus button first on iOS or Android) to take a snap or choose an existing image on your device. You can ask ChatGPT about multiple photos and use a drawing tool to focus on a specific part of the image.

In a blog post announcing the updates, OpenAI noted the potential for harm. It's possible for bad actors to mimic the voices of public figures (and everyday folks) and perhaps commit fraud. That's why OpenAI is focusing on ChatGPT voice conversations with this technology and working with select partners on other limited use cases (more on that in a moment).

As for images, OpenAI worked with Be My Eyes, a free app that blind and low-vision people can use to help them better understand their surroundings thanks to volunteers who hop into video calls with them. "Users have told us they find it valuable to have general conversations about images that happen to contain people in the background, like if someone appears on TV while you’re trying to figure out your remote control settings," OpenAI said. The company noted that it has also limited how ChatGPT can analyze and make direct statements about people that appear in images, "since ChatGPT is not always accurate and these systems should respect individuals’ privacy." It has published a paper on the safety properties of the image-based functionality, which it calls GPT-4 with vision.

ChatGPT is more effective at understanding English text in images than other languages. OpenAI says the chatbot "performs poorly" in other languages for the time being, particularly when it comes to those that use non-Roman scripts. As such, it suggests that non-English users avoid using ChatGPT to deal with text in images for now.

Meanwhile, Spotify has teamed up with OpenAI to use the voice-based technology for an interesting purpose. The former has announced a pilot of a tool called Voice Translation for podcasters. This can translate podcasts into different languages using the voices of the folks who appear on the show. Spotify says the tool can retain the speech characteristics of the original speaker after converting their voice into other languages.

To start with, Spotify is converting select English-based shows into a few languages. Spanish versions of some Armchair Expert and The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett episodes are available now, with French and German variants to follow.

Last year, DJI showed what was possible in a small drone with the Mini 3 Pro by fitting tons of technology and a high-quality camera into a sub-250 gram drone. Following that up was never going to be easy, but now (after numerous leaks) it’s unveiled the Mini 4 Pro with a long list of new features.

Aside from one improvement, the camera is largely the same. However, it has new omnidirectional obstacle sensors that eliminate the blind spots on the Mini 3 Pro. It also comes with a new feature called ActiveTrack 360 that lets you program camera moves when tracking a subject.

Small drones are the best way to track fast-paced action, as they’re maneuverable and less prone to damage when crashing. With all the improvements, the Mini 4 Pro is better and safer at that than its predecessor — at least on paper. Now, let’s find out if it lives up to that in the real world.

Design

The Mini 4 Pro is still under 250 grams so it can be flown without a license or registration in many regions, but it has subtle design changes all around. The four forward- and rear-facing sensors are now placed so that they can see to the sides as well, and the body is a bit more streamlined. It has larger cooling vents, slightly smaller rear arms and new landing feet at the front. The camera/gimbal shield is smaller and easier to put on, and it has a new guard that protects the propellers when it’s stored.

As before, the gimbal tilts up 60 degrees and down 90, and the camera flips 90 degrees to give you full vertical resolution for social media. At the rear is a microSD port, and the Mini 4 Pro has 2GB of internal storage for emergencies.

The Mini 4 Pro comes with one of two controllers, the basic RC-N2 that requires a smartphone, and the RC2 with a built-in screen. Since it uses DJI’s new Ocusync 4 transmission, first introduced with the Air 3, it only works with the new controllers and not the older models — for now, anyway.

You can buy it with a $55 ND filter set for sunny days, which I’d recommend if you can afford it. DJI also offers a wide-angle 18mm equivalent lens attachment ($40), but it has significant barrel distortion and can cause focus issues.

The drone also supports DJI’s Lightcut, an editing app that lets you generate quick videos for social media. As DJI says, it allows “one tap generation of captivating videos by merging ActiveTrack, MasterShots, and QuickShots footage,” while automating sound effects and more. It also works wirelessly, so there’s no need to download footage to your smartphone.

Performance

Given its small size and maneuverability (and the same sensor as DJI's Action 4), you can think of the Mini 4 Pro as a flying action camera. The light weight (and low price compared to, say, a Mavic 3 Pro) also makes crashes less consequential.

Maximum speed is a decently fast 35 MPH in sport mode, or 26 MPH in regular operation. It can handle winds up to 24 MPH, an impressive figure for a sub 250 gram drone. In operation, it can look like it’s being buffeted fairly hard by the wind, but you wouldn’t know it from the footage thanks to DJI’s gimbal and stabilization technology.

Steve Dent for Engadget

The Mini 3 Pro was effectively blind on the sides, but the Mini 4 Pro offers protection all around like the Mavic 3 Pro and Air 3 — thanks to four new omnidirectional sensors on top and two on bottom (along with a time-of-flight sensor). It also uses DJI’s APAS, which offers automatic braking and obstacle bypass for extra security.

If you’re spending $760+ on a drone, you may not want to test the obstacle detection limits. That's my job, so I had it follow me while I walked and biked among trees and other potential snags. I did have a few crashes, but here’s what I learned on how to avoid them.

The sensors are visual, so they don’t work in dim light. And dense forest with fine branches is a no go — the omni sensors can miss those, but the propellers won’t. Finally, the Mini 4 Pro detects obstacles best when traveling forward, less so when going sideways, and worst of all when flying backwards.

It did work around well-spaced trees with thick branches and plenty of leaves, near buildings and generally around well-defined obstacles. It was able to maneuver around those, choose decent routes and reacquire subjects if they disappeared. That helped me capture some nice action footage, though one should always remain wary of accidents.

Steve Dent for Engadget

ActiveTrack 360 adds camera moves to the usual subject tracking to create dramatic shots. It looks confusing at first, but the idea is pretty simple. You use the so-called steering wheel to “draw” a route on concentric circles, and the drone will follow it, ducking any obstacles it encounters.

You can change parameters including the inner and outer radius, inner and outer height, camera speed and ground proximity. That makes it possible to get a wide variety of shots. The tricky part was figuring out which side the drone considered to be forward and backward — DJI should work on this to make things clearer.

If you plan carefully you can get some gorgeous, swooping ActiveTrack shots. The usual obstacle caveats apply, though, and it also adds complexity — because you have to figure out where the drone is going to be when you arrive at your end point. With all that, it’s best to practice in an open area before trying it in a complex environment.

Of course, the Mini 4 Pro still has DJI’s automatic modes aimed at social media users, like MasterShots, QuickShots and Panorama along with Hyperlapse. It even includes the Waypoint feature from the Mavic 3 Pro, which lets you pre-program complex drone moves and repeat them — a sophisticated feature for a small drone.

Steve Dent for Engadget

For the latter feature, you launch the drone and select the Waypoint function, fly to a spot of interest and set the correct camera angle. Once there, you tap “+” on the screen (or hit the C1 button the RC2 remote) to program a waypoint. Repeat that process through all your points of interest, and once you’re done, you can play back the sequence. The drone will smoothly fly to each point the same way each time, so you use it to show a scene during the day and then later at night, for instance.

The Mini 4 Pro uses Ocusync 4 transmission first seen on the Air 3 that sends 1080/60p video up to 20 km, compared to 1080/30p over 12 km with Ocusync 3. Those distances are lower here in Europe because of transmitter power rules.

In use, it provides a noticeable improvement in connectivity, with fewer dropouts and much greater range — even if the drone goes behind obstacles. The change is very noticeable here in Europe with smoother video and dropouts now very rare. It should be even better in the US, where you could send the Mini 4 Pro on a pretty long trip.

Steve Dent for Engadget

The standard 2,590 mAh Intelligent Flight Battery has a bit more capacity than the Mini 3 Pro’s 2,453 mAh cell, but range remains the same at 34 minutes. In real-world flying, we saw about 25 minutes before hearing the return-to-home warning, so plan accordingly.

If you have a Mini 3 Pro, its cells appear to be compatible with the new drone, so that’s a good thing if you already own that model. In the US, you can get the Plus batteries that provide up to 45 minutes of range, but local rules block their use in Europe.

The RC-2 first seen on the Air 3 is DJI’s third screen controller after the RC and the RC Pro. It’s significantly better than the RC, with a brighter screen, better feel and more precise controls. The other option is the non-screen RC-N2 (requiring a smartphone), which is similar to the RC-N1 model but with O4 compatibility.

Camera

Steve Dent for Engadget

The Mini 4 Pro’s camera has the same 1/1.3 dual ISO sensor as its predecessor, using an identical 24mm equivalent lens with a fixed f/1.7 aperture. That’s a pretty sizable sensor for such a small drone, just a bit smaller than the 1-inch sensor on the Mavic Air 2S.

The difference is that it now supports 4K slow-mo at up to 100 fps, or 1080p at 200 fps. The motion is embeded 30fps, but it’s still a nice feature for wildlife, crashing waves and more. That’s on top of 4K at up to 60fps and 1080p at 120fps. It has a two times digital zoom for 4K and four times at 1080p, with a slight loss in sharpness.

There’s also support for DJI’s D-LogM, which boosts dynamic range and gives you more flexibility in post. DJI has a LUT that makes it easy to convert it to regular video — but some editing is required for best results. You can also shoot in DJI’s HLG mode, which again boosts dynamic range. You can see the results right away on an HDR TV, but you’ll need to do an HLG to REC.709 color-space transform to use it with regular video. Both support 10-bit 4:2:0 capture for improved fidelity and reduced banding.

Quality is about the same as a really good smartphone — but not on par with a mirrorless camera or DJI’s pro-level Mavic 3. Video is sharp with accurate colors. The automatic mode delivers nice video, though it sometimes over- and underexposes on sunny or dark days. You can change exposure compensation, but nothing else. Luckily, a fully manual pro mode is available for better control of color balance, LOG, HLG, shutter, ISO and more

The Mini 4 Pro can shoot sharp 48-megapixel images or combine four pixels into one for 12-megapixel images with improved night sensitivity. You can easily fix over- or under-exposed photos if you use the RAW DNG format.

Low-light sensitivity is good but not great —- better than, say, a GoPro 12. Shooting at twilight, video was less clear than a similar scene shot with the Mavic 3 Pro. The drone also offers a “night” mode that effectively boosts dynamic range, making dimly-lit scenes pop better.

In all, image quality isn’t perfect, but remember that this is a $1,000 lightweight drone. It beats all other models in that category, and it’s better than many heavier drones, too.

Wrap-up

Steve Dent for Engadget

Once again, DJI’s Mini 4 Pro sets a benchmark for small drones. It has multiple new useful features, including updated obstacle detection, ActiveTrack 360, O4 transmission and Waypoints. All of those make it a solid budget choice for action sports, events, aerial photography, industrial applications and more.

Its main competition is the Autel Evo Nano Plus, currently on sale for $580. That model has a similar 50-megapixel 1/1.27-inch camera sensor, three-way obstacle avoidance, subject tracking, and more. However, it’s limited to 4K 30p and doesn’t offer a remote with a screen. If you have a bit more to spend, DJI’s Air 3 offers more stability and an extra tele camera.

All that said, the Mini 4 Pro isn’t cheap for a budget drone. It’s priced at $759 for the drone with a battery and RC-N2 controller, $959 with the RC2 controller and $1,099 for the Fly More kit with three batteries and a charger, the RC2, a carrying case and extra props. Still, if you’re in the market for a drone in that price range, nothing else can really touch it.

Hey big spender. Tinder Select, the dating app’s most exclusive tier, is rolling out now. It will cost love seekers $500 per month (or $6,000 annually — no bulk discounts) for features like exclusive search and matching.

The company has only offered Tinder Select to the less than one percent of users it considers “extremely active” — does anyone want that label? Tinder told Bloomberg it’ll open applications for Tinder Select on a rolling basis, but it didn’t say exactly when. Tinder’s exclusive membership was originally hinted at all the way back in 2019.

The owners of Tinder, Match Group, have dabbled in exclusive dating apps before, like The League, which it bought in 2022, so it’s not too much of a shock to see Tinder also get reframed for the lonely rich. Is this worse than paying for verification when you have less than 1,000 followers on other social media networks? Yes. Yes, it is.

— Mat Smith

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The Morning After: Microsoft’s bad week, and Alexa gets an attitude

Last week’s biggest news meets Engadget’s lens.

Engadget

Our short-but-sweet YouTube edition of this week’s news covers includes Microsoft’s rough, rough week, a sassier Alexa from Amazon and whether the iPhone 15 Pro is worth the extra bucks. Also: viewers take umbrage at my ‘fake’ glasses. Which are not fake.

Watch here.

Sony ZV-E1 camera review

The best vlogging camera, by a big margin.

Engadget

I’ve been waiting for this. Sony fully embraced amateur / semi-pro content creators back in 2020, with the launch of the ZV1 camera. It has since added no less than four models to its ZV lineup, and this is the latest: the 12-megapixel full-frame ZV-E1. It uses the same sensor as the $3,500 A7S III, a video-focused camera — and a low-light marvel. However, the ZV-E1 costs $1,300 less. While Sony has cut some minor corners, it combines outstanding video features and AI tricks, and I might have to start saving for one. 

Check out the full review.

Samsung leaks its next family of smartphones, earbuds and tablets

Don’t get too excited. It’s the Fan Edition ones.

Samsung

Eagle-eyed visitors to Samsung’s Argentinian website — I visit it weekly — have spotted something a little unexpected: a product page for new Galaxy Buds FE earbuds, along with images of a Galaxy S23 FE smartphone and Galaxy Tab S9 FE tablet. Samsung’s Fan Edition devices have proven popular, packing in solid features for a more reasonable price than Samsung’s flagship models.

The company hasn’t let slip any specs for the phone and tablet yet. However, there are some details on the Galaxy Buds FE, Samsung’s first Fan Edition earbuds. They’re slated to have a single 12mm driver, three microphones in each earbud to bolster active noise cancellation and a three-way speaker.

Continue reading.

The best foldable phones for 2023

Are flip phones back?

Foldables have come a long way since the original Galaxy Fold went on sale back in 2019. They’re smaller, they’re tougher and, while they still aren’t a great option for people on a budget, they’re now more affordable too. (Kind of?) We walk through the crucial specs, durability concerns and our favorite picks.

Continue reading.

The Engadget Podcast

iPhone 15 Pro reviews, and Microsoft picks AI over Surface.

This week, Cherlynn chats about her experience reviewing the iPhone 15 Pro and Apple Watch Series 9. Does a 5X camera zoom make much of a difference? Meanwhile, Microsoft is basically consolidating all of the Copilot products it’s already announced for Edge, MS 365 and Windows, but maybe this will be less confusing in the long run?

Continue reading.

Now that iOS 17 is out in the wild, consumers are getting hands-on time with many just-released iPhone features. One of the neater inclusions is the brand-new StandBy mode. This toolset transforms your lock screen into a myriad of useful widgets, like alarm clocks, picture frames and more.

What is StandBy?

StandBy is a new feature that shipped with iOS 17. It lets you change up your lock screen to access a number of widgets. This can be highly useful when the phone’s tethered to a charging dock or when you just want to take a quick glance at something without having to unlock your sparkly iPhone. There are a number of available widgets for this mode, including alarm clocks, picture frames, Siri, windows for incoming calls and large notification boxes. Third-party apps have been quick to offer support for StandBy, so tomorrow likely brings a host of new options.

How to use StandBy

Getting started with StandBy is extremely simple. Connect your iPhone to a charger and set it down on its side, as the widgets are designed to take advantage of this orientation. Keep the phone stationary and press the side button to activate StandBy. Once activated, swipe left and right to switch between the various widgets, photos, clocks and other display options. Once you choose your favorite, scroll up or down to access adjustment options. For instance, swiping up when the alarm clock is on the screen will change the design.

Apple

If your phone has an always-on display, your StandBy widgets will run without interruption. For older phones, you’ll have to tap the screen when you want to see what’s going on. The iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max all boast an always-on screen. If you’re worried about the bright screen interrupting your sleep, just turn on Night Mode and the display will automatically adjust to low ambient light, covering everything in a non-intrusive red tint.

How to turn off StandBy

Done staring lovingly at an alarm clock? Turn StandBy off by heading to settings and then look for StandBy as an option. Once you open that, just click it to the off position like you would Bluetooth or WiFi.

How to customize available widgets

The default widget when you first launch StandBy is the alarm clock, and there are several more first-party options available by swiping left and right. However, there’s a simple way to customize the available widgets, allowing you to delete some from the stack and add others.

Apple

To start this process, just long press on any widget while StandBy mode is activated. Once the phone unlocks via Face ID, you’ll see the entire stack of widgets in the center of the screen in a jiggle mode reminiscent of when you delete apps. Look for the “+” icon in the top left of the screen to add widgets. Each widget will have a “-” attached to the thumbnail icon. Click on that to delete the widget from your stack.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) is implementing a new security measure at the Times Square subway station. It's deploying a security robot to patrol the premises, which authorities say is meant to "keep you safe." We're not talking about a RoboCop-like machine or any human-like biped robot — the K5, which was made by California-based company Knightscope, looks like a massive version of R2-D2. Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of privacy rights group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, has a less flattering description for it, though, and told The New York Times that it's like a "trash can on wheels."

K5 weighs 420 pounds and is equipped with four cameras that can record video but not audio. As you can guess from the image above, the machine also doesn't come with arms — it didn't quite ignore Mayor Eric Adams' attempt at making a heart. The robot will patrol the station from midnight until 6 AM throughout its trial run that's running over the next two months. But K5 won't be doing full patrols for a while, since it's spending its first two weeks mapping out the station and roaming only the main areas and not the platforms. 

It's not quite clear if NYPD's machine will be livestreaming its camera footage, and if law enforcement will be keeping an eye on what it captures. Adams said during the event introducing the robot that it will "record video that can be reviewed in case of an emergency or a crime." It apparently won't be using facial recognition, though Cahn is concerned that the technology could eventually be incorporated into the machine. Obviously, K5 doesn't have the capability to respond to actual emergencies in the station and can't physically or verbally apprehend suspects. The only real-time help it can provide people is to connect them to a live person to report an incident or to ask questions, provided they're able to press a button on the robot. 

NYC is leasing K5 for around $9 an hour for the next two months. The mayor sounds convinced that's worth what the robot can do even though, as The Times notes, he recently ordered several agencies to reduce spending by 15 percent. "This is below minimum wage," he said. "No bathroom breaks, no meal breaks." Adams has a history of supporting the use of machines as police tools. Earlier this year, the mayor also announced that the NYPD will acquire two Digidog robots for $750,000 each for use in hostage and other critical situations. That's quite a reversal from the NYPD's decision in 2021 to cancel its lease on what was then known as Boston Dynamics' Spot after facing backlash for its use.

If you want to easily share contact information with someone, Apple’s NameDrop is an efficient tool. With the recent launch of iOS 17, however, some consumers worry that accessing the new tool boasts a steep learning curve. That’s not true at all, as it’s quite simple to get started with NameDrop. Here’s our guide on how to share contact information like a true boss.

What is NameDrop?

NameDrop is a feature that comes with iOS 17. It allows you to instantaneously send contact information to other people just by placing your iPhone near to their iPhone. This is similar to the pre-existing Tap to Share toolset, but with a specialized emphasis on contact information. There have been plenty of third-party apps that do this sort of thing, but this is Apple’s first-party solution.

How to use NameDrop to share contact information

NameDrop is extremely simple. Just hold your iPhone near the top of someone else’s iPhone. That’s it. You’ll see a faint glow emerge from the top of both devices to indicate a successful connection and NameDrop will appear on both screens. 

Apple

Once connected, you’ll be able to adjust exactly what contact information gets shared between the two devices. You can receive the other person’s information, send your information or do both at once. If you want to cancel, just move the phone away before the system finishes its dark magic.

This only works for new contacts, though, and cannot be used to update pre-existing contact information. You can get around this limitation by deleting the contact before going in for the NameDrop.

How to use contacts on iPhone to share information

NameDrop requires that both phones are updated to iOS 17, and that’s not always a realistic possibility. You have another choice for sending out contact information. Just head into the Contacts app and select Share Contact. Select the specific data you want to share and tap Done. Finally, select the delivery method. You can choose between Messages, Mail and several other options. This isn’t as easy as moving one phone close to another phone, but it should still take just a few seconds.