It’s been ten years since Fairphone launched with the laudable goal of making a better phone than its competitors. Not better in the spec-list sense, but by building it with greener materials and ensuring that they are easily and comprehensively repairable. More importantly, the company has sought to improve the working conditions of the people building the devices in the first place. That’s by paying fairer wages or offering workplace training and other benefits that major manufacturers might be unwilling to do. All the while attempting to produce gear that can at least stand proud alongside brand-name devices costing two or three times as much.

Now, Fairphone is launching its first pair of over-ear headphones, Fairbuds XL, with the same focus on utility and repairability. The company says they’re the “most sustainable headphones on the market,” with almost all of the parts user-replaceable and available to buy. They can’t just be repairable and last a long while, however, they also have to sound good enough that you’ll genuinely want to use these over what else is in the market. Specs-wise, you won’t just get the basics, but active noise cancellation (ANC), multiple audio modes, two-point Bluetooth connection and a two-year warranty that’s likely to include hardware support for a lot longer.

The Fairbuds XL are available either in speckled black or speckled green. I was loaned the green model for two weeks, and while the black looks like every other dull-ass pair of cans on the market, the green is utterly gorgeous. I love the orange contrast cabling and the lovely pop of copper on the four-way joystick, and enjoyed walking around in public with these on.

The design, with its visible wire connections and fold-in arms, is a generation or two behind the cutting edge. You know, your Sony XM5s and B&W Px7s and Bose QC45s, with hidden wires, hinged earcups and an overall more elegant setup. I don’t think it’s an issue unless you’re suffering from a serious case of status anxiety, but if you are, you’re probably not thinking about buying these.

As for the hardware, there’s the aforementioned four-way joystick, a dedicated ANC lozenge button and a USB-C port, and that’s it. This minimalism carries across to what else is in the box: A recycled polyester / nylon carry bag and a little paper manual. There’s no USB-C charging cable, audio adapter or anything else, since Fairphone assumes you already have this stuff, or can just as easily buy it from its store.

Daniel Cooper / Engadget

Fairbuds XL comes with 40mm dynamic drivers, Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and an Ambient Sound Mode. It has an 800mAh battery which the company says will last for 26 hours with ANC or for more than 30 hours with it switched off. You’ll get around 320 hours of standby time and, once that’s exhausted, charging from cold is pegged at three hours. Supporting Bluetooth 5.1, Fairbuds XL offers dual-point connectivity, letting you hook up and switch between two paired devices. This switching was mostly reliable, although I found there were some device combinations – like an Android smartphone and my mac OS laptop, that it simply refused to play nicely with. Weighing 330 grams (11.6oz), the cans don’t outstay their welcome on your head, or your ears. The earcups are soft enough that I’m not forced to take them off because they’re uncomfortable.

Inside, those 40mm diameter drivers have a frequency response running from 20Hz to 20KHz. That puts it in the same bracket as a number of low and mid-budget sets on the market, of which this probably sits at the higher end, price-wise. Since it lacks any real background in sound, Fairphone sought out help from Sonarworks, a sound calibration company that works with a number of pro audio companies and artists. Its SoundID software will let users calibrate their audio profile to tweak how sound comes out of their headphones for a more personalized experience.

Now on the whole, I do rather like the sound that comes out of the Fairbuds XL. I’m not a massive fan of some of the genres which modern audio tests calibrate for, preferring instead something calmer, cleaner and more atmospheric. One thing I’ve always used to test a headphone’s quality is to see how well you can hear the breaths of the horn players during Finale from the Tron Legacy soundtrack, which are really clear here. Or how alive Max Haymer’s piano feels when playing his jazz reworking of Optimistic that you think you’re in the room. London Grammar’s Stay Awake feels urgent, more meaningful here than in some headphones I’ve tried.

The ANC, meanwhile, was very reliable at drowning out a lot of the ambient noise in my office, inside and out. It totally eliminated the sound of my own typing, the sound of a vacuum cleaner, the building work a nearby neighbor was doing and a crying baby out in public. The one time I had an issue with it was taking a stroll around my local area and getting a face full of wind, but there’s no strong wind setting in the mobile companion app like you’ll find on other products.

In order to offer a greater level of customization, Fairphone is also launching a Fairbuds App for iOS and Android. This will allow you to change the EQ presents – tuned by Sonarworks – for a similar level of tweaking as you could find in SoundID. The app also offers the usual bunch of guides, tutorials and access to customer service, as well as the promise of future software updates. You’ll also be able to order replacement parts directly from the app, which should help prompt you to seek out a fix if things start to go wrong.

There are four sound profiles: Amsterdam (standard), Copenhagen (more treble), Tokyo (more bass) and Boston (heavy bass). I’ll be honest, I found that only really Amsterdam and Boston offered much real difference, and even then, the changes weren’t massive. In fact, I’d say that I’d opt for Amsterdam over Boston even if I was listening to something pretty bassy like Low’s More, with its wonderfully teeth-rattling glitchcore overdriven bass. Suffice to say, I feel like the sound profiles need to be more distinct here, but it’s something that Fairphone should be able to improve upon in the coming months.

Daniel Cooper / Engadget

Of course, Fairphone’s obligation stretches beyond the idea of simply making the hardware modular and repairable. The company says Fairbuds XL uses 100 percent recycled aluminum, 100 percent recycled tin in its solder paste and 80 percent recycled plastic. It added that it has integrated Fairtrade Gold into its supply chain, and uses 100 vegan leather for both the ear cushions and headband.

In terms of working conditions for the people who made them, the company will pay 0.55 USD per headphone made to “fill the living wage gap of production line workers.” And that it is “working with the supplier on improving working conditions based on workers’ needs.” It will also back carbon-reduction projects to help reduce CO2 emissions to ensure the headphones are essentially climate-neutral.

These are all laudable, but even Fairphone serially admits that the effort it makes can only make a small difference in the grand scheme of things. Its work is limited both by its size and relatively small market share, which means that it can’t do everything that it would like to. As much as it can say it’s producing the fairest device on the market, it can’t claim ownership of a halo that it doesn’t deserve. The best it can hope for, however, is to try and push the technology world toward approaching a more sustainable approach for its products.

(This is a good moment to share a gripe about the company’s True Wireless Earbuds, which it launched alongside the Fairphone 4. These are made with fair and recycled materials, and were dubbed as “e-waste neutral,” but weren’t modular or repairable. Given most TWS earbuds have sealed-in batteries, they become effectively unsalvageable when they break. Fairphone offered replacement cases, tips and buds, but it seemed to join the tide as opposed to swimming against it. With the Fairbuds XL, the focus has moved back toward an audio product that sails closer to Fairphone’s true ethos)

Fairphone’s overall ethos is that its products are – with the above exception – user-repairable, and easy enough that anyone should be able to take them apart and keep them going for years to come. The company has already shared a list of parts you can buy from its online store, which includes a new battery, left and right speaker modules, headband assembly and cover, as well as the ear cushions. Prices range from €19.95 (around $22) for the battery all the way to €79.95 (around $88) for a new speaker module, which connects to the setup with an integrated USB-C cable.

As for the ANC selection button, four-way joystick and the specific PCBs inside the earcups, those can be repaired, but right now, only at the company’s repair center. This, to me, seems pretty fair, since users probably won’t be comfortable taking a soldering iron to their cans. The deal is that you can swap in modules to keep this thing going for as long as possible, but if you want to keep it going with completely-original parts, you’ll need more expert help.

Fairphone customarily ships out its loan units for review with an iFixit #00-size Phillips-head screwdriver in the package. This is because it wants reviewers, and by extension potential buyers, to know how easy it is to take apart its products and put them back together. Imagine if Apple, Samsung, John Deere or any of the other companies that are regularly behind anti right to repair legislation had a similar attitude. As usual, I didn’t start disassembling the Fairbuds XL until I’d spent enough time listening to them, just in case something broke, but I needn't have worried.

The easiest repair to make is swapping out the battery, which requires you to pop off the outside cap on the left earcup. If you’ve got strong fingernails, you can lever out the battery and swap in a replacement in half a minute if you’re on the slow side. Removing the ear cushions to replace them is similarly a matter of just twisting them a quarter-turn to unlock them from their mounts. This is easy stuff, which makes it all the more frustrating that most companies won’t let users make these sort of common repairs.

Feeling braver, I then opted to detach the speaker modules from the headband in their entirety to mimic the process of replacing one. You just need to pop out the battery, twist off the ear cushions and then you can slide out the USB-C cable sticking up top. After that, you need to unscrew just two small screws which hold the whole assembly to the headband. The process took all of two minutes, and that was probably because I was going slow to avoid messing up.

Fundamentally, the Fairbuds XL follow through on the usual Fairphone promise of a modular, almost infinitely-repairable device. It has many of the necessary fundamentals to make them a worthwhile purchase for many people, including good ANC, long life and a comfortable design. What it lacks, for now, is a certain dynamism in its sound profiles that would give users more choice in how tunes are presented. Thankfully, that’s something that could be fixed in a later update, which is something that Fairphone has historically been very good at doing. In fact, if you’re happy with very good sound, and want to help make the world a slightly better place in doing so, then I’d say these are a very solid bet.

The name is a bit silly, however.

Fairbuds XL will be available to buy in Europe from tomorrow, May 11th 2023, on Fairphone’s website, priced at €249 (around $275).

Google's excellent Pixel 7a just hit the market for an already solid price of $499, but you can now save more thanks to a deal at Amazon. If you order now, you get a free $50 Amazon gift card that can be used for other purchases, effectively bringing the price down to $449 if you plan to order other things from Amazon. 

The Pixel 7a not only received praise in our Engadget review, but instantly became the best midrange Android smartphone in our latest roundup. Google has nailed the balance between price and performance, offering the same Tensor G2 chip as the Pixel 7, along with a 90Hz display, wireless charging and a higher-resolution rear camera. 

The two big changes over the Pixel 6a are a new high-res 64-MP main cam in back, along with a front 13-MP selfie camera can record videos in 4K. The Pixel 7a beats other smartphone cameras in its price range so handily for photography and video that it actually needs to be compared to flagship devices like the Pixel 7 Pro and Samsung's S23 Ultra. 

The extra resolution goes a long way to eliminating any concerns about the lack of a telephoto, as you can zoom in four times and still get a 16-megapixel image. And Google's Night Sight mode remains the best in the business, even though it does add a little more noise than we expected. 

In sum, the Pixel 7a delivers 95 percent of what you get from the regular Pixel 7, but for $100 less. The deal gives you a $50 Amazon card on top of that, which could be spent on accessories like a protective case. More importantly, you get a rare thing — a deal on a Google Pixel phone that just entered the market. 

Yes, Sony is still making smartphones, and its latest is the flagship Xperia 1 V designed for both photographers and vloggers. It features a new stacked, backside-illuminated (BSI) sensor along with features aimed at content creators found in its Alpha-series cameras. 

The Xperia 1 V has a new image sensor called "Exmor T for Mobile" designed to be faster and work better with computational (AI) photography, while offering "approximately double" the low-light performance of the Xperia 1 IV, Sony said. As you'd expect in a flagship, it offers other high-end features like a Snapdragon 8 Gen2 Mobile Platform, a 6.5-inch 4K 120Hz OLED HDR display, a 5,000 mAh battery that allows for up to 20 hours of continuous 4K playback, up to 12GB of RAM and more.

With that, Sony is promising "best in class" gaming performance, thanks to a Game Enhancer function that provides visual and auditory support. It also lets players livestream their gaming directly to YouTube. 

The key feature is clearly the camera system, though. The main 24mm f/1.9 equivalent 52-megapixel camera features a Type 1/1.35-inch (about 12mm diagonally) Exmor T sensor that's 1.7 times larger than the Xperia 1 IV's sensor, Sony said. It also comes with an ultrawide 12-megapixel camera and an 85-125mm 12-megapixel optical telephoto zoom, like the one on the Xperia 1 IV. The front 12-megapixel camera has a Type 1/2.9-inch sensor. 

Purists will be able to shoot video and photos using the professional modes that allow for full manual control. Chief among those is the Photography Pro mode designed for creative control. It also allows live streaming while letting creators see viewer comments in real time.

Sony

If you set it to Basic mode, though, you'll get a good dose of computational imaging seen in other Android phones. Those include a Night mode and color settings for subjects like flowers and a blue sky. It also delivers real-time eye autofocus and tracking, along with high-speed continuous shooting of up to 30 fps with auto-exposure and AF enabled. 

For vloggers and content creators, it now features the same Product Showcase setting found on Sony's vlogging cameras like the ZV-E1. The new sensor also promises improved skin tones, thanks to extra saturation available on the sensor. It also has a new voice priority mic placed near the rear camera that can pick up voices even in busy outdoor locations. 

Sony

One cool feature that might justify the price alone for many video shooters is the ability to use the phone as a monitor for select Sony Alpha cameras. The Xperia 1 IV could do that as well, but the new model offers multiple display options with waveforms, gridlines, and zebra lines normally only found on professional field monitors. You can also control settings and record content to phones, features that weren't available before. Meanwhile, the phone's microphones can capture sound while monitoring audio via the Xperia 1 V's headphone jack.

As with past Xperia models, the catch here is the price. The Xperia 1 V starts at $1,400 (in khaki green or black) with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (upgradeable via an microSD slot). That's a lot of money for most smartphone users (even flagship buyers) but might make sense for content creators, avid photographers and others. 

Along with the Xperia 1 V, Sony also unveiled a far more mainstream smartphone, the Xperia 10 V. It's powered by a Snapdragon 695 chipset and offers a 6.1-inch 1080p OLED display that's 50 percent brighter than before, but only refreshes at 60Hz. The camera system features a main 48-megapixel Type-1/2.0-inch sensor with a wide lens, along with a 2x telephoto and an ultrawide. Other features include a 5,000 mAh battery and up to 6GB of RAM. It's priced at €449 in Europe, with sales set to start in June. US pricing/availability is not yet available.

Last year during Superbooth Roland unveiled the Aira Compact series – its first true competitors to Korg’s wildly successful Volca line. Now the company is back for Superbooth 2023 with a new addition to the family, the S-1 Tweak Synth. Like the T-8 and J-6, the S-1 uses Roland’s Analog Circuit Behavior (ACB) technology to recreate the sound of an iconic instrument from its past, the SH-101. While the core of the S-1 is ultimately quite familiar, in true Roland fashion there’s a lot of modern features packed in as well. And in even truer Roland fashion, many of them are buried in a bewildering array of indecipherable menus and button combinations.

I’m going to get this out of the way right now, because it’s a recurring theme in almost every review I write of a Roland product. The interface here is truly mind boggling once you get beyond the immediate hands-on controls. Almost every knob and button has at least one shift function. Many of them aren’t labeled. And the only visual feedback you’re given for anything is via a four-character, seven-segment LED display. A seven-segment LED display in 2023! I dare anyone to tell me what the hell “Nod.d” means without looking it up in the manual. And what about the D-Motion button suggests that this is where the probability and substep options are located? I’m not trying to suggest that I should be able to figure out every feature on an instrument right away without reading a manual. But I also shouldn’t feel like a lost ball in the tall weeds. Especially not when we’re talking about an entry level $200 synth.

The clunky interface here is particularly frustrating because the S-1 is otherwise kind of great. It actually has a decent amount of hands-on controls. It offers far more depth than any of the previous Aria Compact entries, even if you never touch the shift button. There’s an LFO with six different waveform options, including random. The oscillator section allows you to blend together a saw and square wave with pulse width modulation, as well as a sub oscillator and noise source. And, unlike the original SH-101 which was monophonic, the S-1 is polyphonic so you can play actual chords (up to four notes).

And the oscillators sound great. I’m not always the hugest fan of Roland’s ACB sound engine, but it shines here. Thick bass, acid leads and 16-bit JRPG arps are all easily attainable and satisfying. This is easily the best sounding member of the Aira Compact family.

The filter is excellent too. It stops just shy of self oscillation, but still gets pretty sharp and can certainly endanger your eardrums if you have your headphones up too loud. But at the lower end of the cutoff spectrum you get a surprising warmth and silkiness from this dirt cheap emulation of a classic analog circuit. 

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

Roland even threw in a delay, seven reverbs and four chorus options. The reverbs are merely ok, but the delay is a perfectly solid digital effect. You can even set the delay time to 1/128 and crank the … Anb(?) reverb model to get howling metallic textures that are out of this world. The choruses, pulled from the Juno and JX-3P are truly excellent. It’s just a shame they’re buried in the arcane menu system because I want to turn them on for almost every patch I make.

There’s a solid arpeggiator, and you can even record directly from the arpeggiator into the 64-step sequencer. That’s pretty handy for laying down glassy high notes then going back in and overdubbing some bass to accentuate the chord changes. I will say though, I haven’t quite figured out how to get to 64 steps. By default sequences are 16 steps, there is no obvious way to go beyond that and I was not provided a manual with my review unit. 

Roland also added motion sequencing to S-1, so you can tweak settings as you’re recording to slowly increase the amount of delay over the course of a pattern. Or even go into the menu and turn on and off the chorus, or change the sub-oscillator tuning on a per-step basis. It really opens up a lot of possibilities on an instrument this small and affordable. You can ratchet notes, set per step probability, and there’s even Step Loop for quickly mangling your sequence into new riffs on the fly, though that is far more useful on a drum machine.

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

If the feature list for the S-1 ended here, that would be perfectly fine. But Roland added more. So. Much. More. Maybe too much more.

There’s a draw and chop function, which allows you to create custom waveshapes for even wilder tones. Then use the multiplier on your freshly drawn waveshape, or the comb on your chopped wave for hard-synced and dissonant metallic noises. You can also turn the noise source into a sort of pulsing riser effect. Though, I was unaware of this when I accidentally activated it while messing around one afternoon and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on. This is one of those many unlabeled features hidden behind a seemingly arbitrary button combination. (For the record, you hold down shift then press 1 and 2 simultaneously to cycle through a few different riser modes.)

The one last feature worth mentioning (I think), is a bit of a head scratcher. D-Motion allows you to change parameters by picking up the synth and tilting it about. It’s a fun novelty for a few minutes, but it doesn’t feel practical. Though, at least it makes more sense on the small, battery-powered and portable S-1 than it does on the SH-4d.

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

Beyond that the S-1 resembles the rest of the Aira Compact line. It’s plastic, has a rechargeable battery built in and weighs next to nothing. There are 3.5mm MIDI, sync and audio jacks for connecting other gear. And USB-C for charging, but also for sending audio and MIDI to computers, phones and tablets. My one other minor gripe, physically at least, is that the mushy keys are painfully small. Playing chords on this thing is a bit of a headache. But not much more so than on any other instrument of this ilk, like the Modal Electronics Skulpt or a Volca Keys.

Photo by Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

The S-1 Tweak Synth is both the most compelling and most frustrating member of the Aira Compact series. It has plenty of hands-on controls, sounds great and is deceptively powerful for the price. But it is also, perhaps, too complex. It tries to do too many things and ends up feeling cluttered and confusing. Which is the exact opposite of what you want from what is essentially a $200 music toy.

What made Korg’s Volcas so successful wasn’t their laundry list of features, it was their simplicity. They sounded good enough, were affordable, and unintimidating. Roland seems to have gotten the first two parts of the equation down. Now it just needs to work on the last ingredient.

Google's I/O event this year was jam-packed with new product launches and an in-depth introduction to its new generative AI offerings. The star of its new set of device was, perhaps, the new Pixel Fold, a veritable rival to Samsung's foldables powered by a Tensor G2 chip. Like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, it opens like a book so you can fully use its 7.6-inch display, though it also comes with a 5.8-inch external display. It's now available for pre-order and will set you back $1,799 when it starts shipping in June. 

The company has also unveiled its new mid-range phone, the Pixel 7a, that will cost you $499. In addition, the Pixel Tablet is now available for pre-order for the same price. You can use the 11-inch tablet as a smart home display with Google Assistant and Chromecast when it's attached to its speaker dock. On its own, it can last for 12 hours, and while it doesn't come with a stylus, it does support third-party pens. 

But the most important and relevant unveiling of the event was the company's PaLM 2 AI language model, which is the technology behind its Bard AI chatbot and which will power new features across its products. Bard will soon have the ability to decipher images in your queries and respond with images in turn — it's now available without a waitlist in 180 countries. Gmail will have the ability to craft responses to emails for you, while Photos is getting a Magic Editor that can move objects in your pictures. You can get a glimpse of all Google announcements in a condensed version of its I/O keynote above.

Expect to see better looking Android TV apps, as well as more offerings from developers, in the future. At Google I/O today, the company announced the alpha version of Compose for TV, a framework that will make it easier to build attractive Android TV apps with less code and more intuitive tools. Google says developers will be able to bring over their existing code, and by moving to Compose it should be easier to update apps moving forward. The framework has direct access to the Android APIs — which most devs are already used to — and will support code from existing Android mobile and tablet apps. Google is also unveiling a set of TV design guidelines to help developers optimize their apps for big screens.    

Google has certainly come a long way when it comes to home entertainment. Its first Google TV platform, released in 2010 before the rise of streaming services, fizzled and died. It bounced back with the cheaper and far more popular Chromecast, which eventually led to Android TV, a platform that now houses a revived "Google TV" interface. 

When it comes to streaming platforms, Apple still has more tools for developers to build attractive TV apps, but it's nice to see Google making an effort. It's not like there's much competition from Roku or Amazon's Fire TV devices. Android TV's true power is its ubiquity, much like Android itself. According to Strategy Analytics, Android TV shipped on more devices than any other streaming platform last year. (Even my Formovie projector has Android TV built-in.)

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

It’s been two years since Google introduced its Project Starline holographic video conferencing experiment, and though we didn’t hear more about it during the keynote at I/O 2023 today, there’s actually been an update. The company quietly announced that it’s made new prototypes of the Starline booth that are smaller and easier to deploy. I was able to check out a demo of the experience here at Shoreline Park and am surprised how much I enjoyed it.

But first, let’s get one thing out of the way. Google did not allow us to take pictures or video of the setup. It’s hard to capture holographs on camera anyway, so I’m not sure how effective it would have been. Due to that limitation, though, we’re not going to have a lot of photos for this post and I’ll do my best to describe the experience in words.

After some brief introductions, I entered a booth with a chair and desk in front of the Starline system. The prototype itself was made up of a light-field display that looked like a mesh window, which I’d guess is about 40-inches wide. Along the top, left and right edges of the screen were cameras that Google uses to get the visual data required to generate the 3D model of me. At this point, everything looked fairly unassuming.

Things changed slightly when Andrew Nartker, who heads up the Project Starline team at Google, stepped into frame. He sat in his chair in a booth next to mine, and when I looked at him dead on, it felt like a pretty typical 2D experience, except in what felt like very high resolution. He was life-sized and it seemed as if we were making eye contact and holding each other’s gaze, despite not looking into a camera. When I leaned forward or leaned closer, he did too, and nonverbal cues like that made the call feel a little richer.

What blew me away, though, was when he picked up an apple (haha I guess Apple can say it was at I/O) and held it out towards me. It was so realistic that I felt as if I could grab the fruit from his fist. We tried a few other things later — fist bumping and high fiving, and though we never actually made physical contact, the positioning of limbs on the call was accurate enough that we could grab the projections of each other’s fists.

The experience wasn’t perfect, of course. There were parts where, when Nartker and I were talking at the same time, I could tell he could not hear what I was saying. Every now and then, too, the graphics would blink or appear to glitch. But those were very minor issues, and overall the demo felt very refined. Some of the issues could even be chalked up to spotty event WiFi, and I can personally attest to the fact that the signal was indeed very shitty.

It’s also worth noting that Starline was basically getting the visual and audio data of me and Nartker, sending it to the cloud over WiFi, creating a 3D model of both of us, and then sending it down to the light display and speakers on the prototype. Some hiccups are more than understandable.

While the earliest Starline prototypes took up entire rooms, the current version is smaller and easier to deploy. To that end, Google announced today that it had shared some units with early access partners including T-Mobile, WeWork and Salesforce. The company hopes to get real-world feedback to “see how Project Starline can help distributed workforces stay connected.”

We’re clearly a long way off from seeing these in our homes, but it was nice to get a taste of what Project Starline feels like so far. This was the first time media demos were available, too, so I’m glad I was able to check it out for myself and tell you about it instead of relying on Google’s own messaging. I am impressed by the realism of the projections, but I remain uncertain about how effectively this might substitute or complement in-person conversations. For now, though, we’ll keep an eye on Google’s work on Project Starline and keep you posted.

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

Google doesn't have a direct equivalent to Apple's AirTags, but it might come close. Chipolo has teamed up with Google to introduce One Point (shown above) and Card Point (below) item trackers that work exclusively with Android's Find My Device network. They take advantage of the phone platform's ubiquity to not only increase the chances of locating your gear, but to find unknown trackers that might be used to spy on your whereabouts.

Both trackers support Android's Fast Pair to speed through setup, and are water-resistant. The differences extend beyond their shapes. The One Point is the loudest with a 120dB ring, and lasts a year on its replaceable battery. The Card Point is quieter at 105dB and relies on a renewal program when the battery wears down, but it also lasts for two years.

Chipolo

Chipolo is taking pre-orders for both devices now. The One Point sells for $28, and the Card Point is available for $35. Four-packs for each respectively cost $79 and $112, and you can get a One/Card bundle for $77. Orders should ship by the second half of July. You'll need a phone running at least Android 9 with Google Play Services. That covers many phones released in North America and Europe over the past five years.

The Point trackers are really counterparts to Chipolo's iPhone-oriented One Spot and Card Spot. However, they also reflect Google's broader effort to flesh out the Android ecosystem. You don't have to rely on a third-party tracking network like Tile's or Samsung's to find missing items. Of course, this also locks you into Android — you'll have to replace your trackers if you ever switch platforms.

You won't have to install Android apps on your Chromebook when you need them in a pinch. After a preview at CES last year, Google has enabled app streaming through Phone Hub in Chrome OS Beta. You can quickly check your messages, or track the status of a food order without having to sign in again.

Once Phone Hub is enabled, you can stream apps by either clicking a messaging app notification or browsing the Hub's Recent Apps section after you've opened a given app on your phone. Google doesn't describe certain app types as off-limits, although it's safe to say that you won't want to play action games this way.

The feature works with "select" phones running Android 13 or newer. The Chromebook and handset need to be on the same WiFi network and physically close-by, although you can use the phone as a hotspot through Instant Tethering if necessary.

Google is ultimately mirroring the remote Android app access you've had in Windows for years. However, the functionality might be more useful on Chromebooks. While app streaming won't replace native apps, it can save precious storage space and spare you from having to jump between devices just to complete certain tasks. This approach is also more manufacturer-independent where Microsoft's approach is restricted to Samsung and Honor phones.

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

At I/O 2023 today, Google shared a few updates for both Android Auto and Android Automotive OS. Perhaps the biggest news is that Google is working with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex to bring those virtual meeting apps to Android-equipped vehicles. If the thought of joining a video call in your car sounds like a driving hazard, don't worry: the meetings will be audio only with simplified controls on the infotainment display.

Google is also rolling out Waze in the Google Play Store for all vehicles with Google built-in. This means the popular navigation app will be available outside of just Android Auto and beyond Volvo and Polestar models. What's more, the company is allowing developers to integrate the instrument cluster with their navigation apps. As you might expect, this will put turn-by-turn directions in the driver's line of sight. Plus, developers can access vehicle data like range, fuel level and speed to give drivers even more insight on their trips. 

Google

Google has added new app categories to the Android for Cars App Library. That repository now allows developers to add IoT and weather apps for use in vehicles. For example, The Weather Channel app will be available alongside existing software like Weather and Radar later this year. The company is also making it easier for media apps (music, audiobooks, podcasts, etc.) to port their software to Android Auto and Android Automotive OS.

Additionally, the company has new categories for video and gaming apps in its library, with the goal of expanding to browsing apps soon. These are specifically designed for use when the car is parked or by passengers. YouTube is now available for all automakers to add to cars with Google built-in. Google says Polestar, Volvo and other "select partners" have committed to adding the video-streaming app via over-the-air updates. In terms of games, the initial slate includes Beach Buggy Racing 2, Solitaire FRVR, and My Talking Tom Friends. What's more, Google plans to add multi-screen support to Android Automotive OS 14, which will allow "shared entertainment experiences" between drivers and passengers. 

Google

Google says Android Auto will be available in almost 200 million cars by the end of 2023. The company also says that the number of cars with their infotainment systems powered entirely by Android Automotive OS with Google built-in should nearly double by the end of the year. That latter figure is spurred by adoption by automakers like Chevrolet, Volvo, Polestar, Honda, Renault and more. In March, GM announced it would phase out Android Auto and CarPlay in its EVs in favor of Android Automotive.

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