So this is apparently what the Google Pixel 7a will look like. Vietnamese website Zing News (via The Verge) has shared photos of what it says is a prototype of the upcoming midrange phone that programmers were using as a test device. After its owner leaked photos of it online, Google reportedly locked the phone remotely, but not before they were able to check that it was running Android 13 and had a 90 Hz screen option in the Settings app. They were also able to confirm that the device has 8 GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage.

As you can see, the phone comes with a camera bar like its predecessors, but it's metal with a matte finish unlike the Pixel 6a's glass bar and the Pixel 7's polished aluminum one. It seems to have two 12-megapixel cameras — one standard and one super wide angle — like the Pixel 6a, as well.

The case itself is composed of two glass sides with a metal frame that has cutouts for the speakers and the USB-C charging port at the bottom. Along its edges, there's a slot for the SIM tray that can accommodate a single physical SIM card. The owner, who reportedly purchased the device from an acquaintance, wasn't able to confirm whether it has eSIM support. On the front with with its screen switched on, it's easy to see that it still has the 6a's thick bezel and a rather large front cam cutout. 

These new images and details confirm information from previous leaks, which included renders that showed a phone that looks similar to the Pixel 6a. Older photos also showed a device with a "Smooth Display" capability, allowing users to adjust its refresh rate from 60Hz to 90Hz, which is a first for the A-series line.

Google has yet to announce the Pixel 7a, but it has historically introduced its Pixel A devices at its annual I/O event. This year, the keynote for the developer conference will take place on May 10th. 

With its durable design and high-end features, the Apple Watch Ultra is is one of the best wearables for sports and outdoors enthusiasts — but at $800, it's not cheap. If you've been waiting for a deal, it's now on sale at Amazon for just $730 with an instant rebate, or $70 (9 percent) off, matching the best deal we've seen to date. 

The Apple Watch Ultra is truly built for outdoor activity. It offers refined navigation and compass-based features, like the ability to set waypoints and ability to retrace your steps if you get lost. For scuba enthusiasts and others, there's a depth gauge and dive computer too. As such, it's the ideal wearable for hikers and divers.

Other features are geared toward endurance athletes, like the accurate route tracking and pace calculations that make use of a dual-frequency GPS. And Apple still includes the health features found in other Watch models too, like sleep tracking, temperature sensing and electrocardiogram readings, along with messaging, audio playback and Apple Pay. It offers a stellar 36 hours of battery life as well and up to 60 hours in low-power mode.

On the downside, the Apple Watch Ultra has a chunky (though rugged) case that you may not find comfortable to wear to bed. Moreover, the positioning of the action button is a little awkward, because it's right where many people will go to steady the Apple Watch Ultra with one finger while they press the digital crown or side button. Still, it garnered an excellent score of 85 in our review.

That $730 sum is still a lot, but Amazon has some other deals too. If you need a solid smartwatch that's only missing a few features, the Watch SE is still on sale at an all-time low price of $219. Plus, Apple's mainstream Watch Series 8 continues to have a nice 18 percent discount, letting you pick one up for $329. 

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Sennheiser needs little introduction, but there’s a chance you know the company best for its headphones and soundbars. Meanwhile, in the pro audio world, it’s perhaps most famous for its microphones - some of which have achieved legendary status (I’ll also personally recommend the MK4 for podcasting to anyone who asks). Enter the company’s newest offering - the $130 Profile USB microphone - that aims to bring some of that pro-audio magic to the podcasting or streaming worlds.

The company doesn’t make a lot of USB microphones, so it’s fair to say that the Profile is Sennheiser’s play for the creator market. The space that’s dominated right now by the Blue Yeti or Rode’s NT-USB among others. Not only is it priced similarly, it offers the same key features such as gain control, direct monitoring and a mute button (something not every USB mic has, but probably should).

One little touch that makes the Profile stand out is its built-in “tilt” mechanism. Where the Yeti and the NT-USB, for example, can be tilted via their stands, the Profile can be adjusted to your preferred angle without an additional mount. There’s a standard 5/8” thread underneath for fixing to boom arms and stands. You can also buy the Profile in a $199 bundle that comes with a dedicated boom, which has its own original design that’s a little less imposing than rivals like Rode’s PSA1+.

Thankfully, Sennheiser has bucked the general trend of making podcasting/streaming mics larger than they need to be. The Yeti ($100) is imposing (even the Nano is on the chonky side), the NT-USB ($170) isn't much smaller and other popular options like the HyperX Quadcast ($140) and even Elgato’s Wave 3 ($150) feel large by comparison. At $130, the Profile also sits on the more affordable end among its rivals.

Of course, no amount of features matter if it doesn’t sound any good. Of the three mics mentioned here – which is far from exhaustive but covers two popular alternatives – the Profile most closely resembles the Blue Yeti, which is no bad thing given its sustained popularity. There’s a pretty steep shelf off under 100Hz with some light enhancement around the 5- and 12kHz areas - the latter of which is common for adding some of that elusive vocal “sparkle.”

Overall, the sound profile is very much in line with what most streamers and podcasters will be looking for - fairly neutral with a slight enhancement in the frequencies that give most voices extra clarity. Combined with the competitive pricing and the full suite of gain/mix/mute settings the Profile makes a very compelling case for itself.

Uber and Lyft don't have to worry about reclassifying its workers in California for now. An appeals court has just ruled that gig workers, such as rideshare drivers, can continue to be classified as independent contractors under Proposition 22. 

If you'll recall, California passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) in September 2019 that legally obligates companies to treat their gig workers as full-time employees. That means providing them with all the appropriate benefits and protections, such as paying for their unemployment and health insurance. As a response, Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash poured over $220 million into campaigning for the Prop 22 ballot measure, which would allow them to treat app-based workers as independent contractors. It ended up passing by a wide margin in the state.

In 2021, a group of critics that included the Service Employees International Union and the SEIU California State Council filed a lawsuit in 2021 to overturn the proposition. The judge in charge of the case sided with them and called Prop 22 unconstitutional. He said back then that the proposition illegally "limits the power of a future legislature to define app-based drivers as workers subject to workers' compensation law." 

The three appeals court judges have now overturned that ruling, though according to The New York Times, one of them wanted to throw out Prop 22 entirely for the same reason the lower court judge gave when he handed down his decision. While the appeals court upheld the policy in the end, it ordered that a clause that makes it hard for workers in the state to unionize be severed from the rest of the proposition. That particular clause required a seven-eighths majority vote from the California legislature to be able to amend workers' rights to collective bargaining. 

David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union in California, told The Times in a statement: "Every California voter should be concerned about corporations’ growing influence in our democracy and their ability to spend millions of dollars to deceive voters and buy themselves laws." The group is now expected to appeal this ruling and to take their fight to the Supreme Court, which could take months to decide whether to hear the case. 

Earlier this year, an amateur Go player decisively defeated one of the game’s top-ranked AI systems. They did so using a strategy developed with the help of a program researchers designed to probe systems like KataGo for weaknesses. It turns out that victory is just one part of a broader Go renaissance that is seeing human players become more creative since AlphaGO’s milestone victory in 2016

In a recent study published in the journal PNAS, researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Yale found that human Go players have become less predictable in recent years. As the New Scientist explains, the researchers came to that conclusion by analyzing a dataset of more than 5.8 million Go moves made during professional play between 1950 and 2021. With the help of a “superhuman” Go AI, a program that can play the game and grade the quality of any single move, they created a statistic called a “decision quality index,” or DQI for short.

After assigning every move in their dataset a DQI score, the team found that before 2016, the quality of professional play improved relatively little from year to year. At most, the team saw a positive median annual DQI change of 0.2. In some years, the overall quality of play even dropped. However, since the rise of superhuman AIs in 2018, median DQI values have changed at a rate above 0.7. Over that same period, professional players have employed more novel strategies. In 2018, 88 percent of games, up from 63 percent in 2015, saw players set up a combination of plays that hadn't been observed before. 

"Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making," the team writes.

That’s an interesting change, but not exactly an unintuitive one if you think about it. As professor Stuart Russel at the University of California, Berkeley told the New Scientist, “it’s not surprising that players who train against machines will tend to make more moves that machines approve of.”

Meta is “winding down” its support for NFTs on Facebook and Instagram less than a year after its push to adopt “digital collectibles” across its platform. The update comes as the social network has laid off thousands of workers and shuttered numerous projects amid what Mark Zuckerberg has described as the company’s “year of efficiency.”

“We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses,” Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s Head of Commerce and Financial Technologies wrote in an update shared on Twitter. “We learned a ton that we’ll be able to apply to products we’re continuing to build to support creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse.” He added that the company would instead be focusing on “monetization opps for Reels” and “messaging payments across Meta.”

The update comes almost exactly a year after Zuckerberg took the SXSW stage to announce that Instagram was working on NFT support, which debuted last May. The company announced another significant expansion of the feature in November, when it revealed plans to allow creators to mint and sell the collectibles directly on Instagram.

Kasriel didn’t elaborate on why Meta was reversing course on NFTs, which Zuckerberg had suggested could play a role in the company’s metaverse plans. “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places,” he said during his SXSW appearance last year.

But it’s not the only once-ambitious initiative that has fallen flat in the last year. Meta also shuttered its crypto wallet, Novi, which was once rumored to have NFT support on its roadmap, last year. The company has also cut projects with its metaverse division, Reality Labs, and its program that paid bonuses to Reels creators.

At the start of the year, someone on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit, a community dedicated to upcoming Marvel productions, posted the mother of all MCU leaks. A month before the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a user named MSSmods shared a 63-page Google Doc transcript of the film’s dialogue. Now, Disney wants to know who was behind the leak and is trying to force Reddit and Google to identify the person or group of people responsible.

As first reported by TorrentFreak, Disney’s MVL Film Finance unit, a subsidiary the company established to support Marvel Studios productions, has filed two Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoena applications designed to compel Reddit and Google to identify who was behind the leak. As MSSmods is an account shared among the moderators of r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers, Reddit complying with the application would entail the company identifying more than one person. What’s more, Disney has requested that Google and Reddit share any “identifying information” they have on MSSmods — including names, telephone numbers and IP addresses — along with details on any user who may have been involved in posting, editing or uploading the leak.

Reddit did not say if it intends to comply with the application. “Reddit is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We have rigorous processes in place to assess legal requests and object when appropriate,” a Reddit spokesperson told Engadget and pointed to the company’s legal request guidelines. Google did not immediately respond to a comment request.

It’s not clear what, if anything, Disney plans to do about the source of the leak, possibly a subtitle vendor or freelance translator. The document MSSmods shared was a translation of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s Portuguese subtitles, with some of the dialogue not presented in chronological order.

Activision is attempting to quell anxious Call of Duty: Mobile fans after a legal filing last week suggested the studio is already planning the game's demise. In a tweet today, the Call of Duty: Mobile team said it planned to continue supporting game "for the long haul," calling it an important part of the franchise. 

The long-term future of Call of Duty: Mobile came into question on March 8th, as part of ongoing legal negotiations in the UK over Microsoft's proposal to purchase Activision-Blizzard for just under $69 billion. Microsoft has been repeatedly downplaying Activision's power in the video game industry in an attempt to thwart anti-trust concerns from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, and the studio applied the same treatment to Activision-Blizzard mobile games in a legal filing last week. 

Specifically, Microsoft's response said, "CoD: Mobile is expected to be phased out over time (outside of China) with the launch of Warzone Mobile."

Warzone Mobile is scheduled to come out this year, bringing the Call of Duty battle royale experience to Android and iOS devices. Warzone Mobile represents Activision's attempt to unify the Call of Duty franchise, sharing technology, progression, socialization and payments among the annual mainline games, Warzone and Warzone Mobile. Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Mobile has its own battle pass and seasons.

The tweet from the Mobile team is intended to keep existing players invested. It doesn't delve into specifics about how long the game's lifespan will be, and it doesn't directly address Microsoft's suggestion that the game will eventually be shut down everywhere except China. But, it promises Call of Duty: Mobile will be sticking around for a while longer.

"We ... intend to continue supporting the game with a robust roadmap of fresh new CODM content, activities and updates for the long haul," the statement said.

Last summer, Elon Musk and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert announced "Coverage Above and Beyond," a joint initiative that aimed to bring Starlink satellite coverage compatible T-Mobile devices. Now, SpaceX is getting ready to begin testing its satellite-to-cellular service.

During a panel at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition 2023, SpaceX VP of Starlink enterprise sales Jonathan Hofeller said the company had plans to "start getting into testing" its satellite-to-cell service this year. "We're going to learn a lot by doing — not necessarily by overanalyzing — and getting out there, working with the telcos."

Hofeller didn't specifically say which Telco SpaceX was working with, but the timeline certainly lines up with Musk's original vision for the T-Mobile partnership. In August, he promised that Starlink V2 would launch in 2023 and would "transmit direct to mobile phones, eliminating dead zones worldwide." At the time T-Mobile said the service would give the carrier "near complete coverage" of most of the United States, specifically highlighting areas that are notoriously difficult to find a signal: National Parks, mountain ranges, deserts and other remote locations.

Either way, the panel seemed optimistic about the future of sat-to-cell technology. Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller said that satellite cellular service has the potential to be the "biggest category in satellite," and Iridium CEO Matt Desch sees cellular satellite service as just the beginning. "Satellite should connect everything everywhere," he said at the event, imagining the technology connecting to computers, vehicles and more.

With models like the A7R V and A7S III, Sony is known for pushing camera technology to the bleeding edge. With its newest release, however, the company isn’t touting the capabilities of its latest sensor or autofocus system. Instead, it’s a device that’s about making photography accessible to those who couldn’t enjoy the hobby before.

Announced today, the DSC-HX99 RNV is a camera kit designed for those with visual impairments. The system consists of two parts: a Sony point and shoot and a viewfinder with a retinal laser projection system. The camera is a Cybershot DSC-HX99. First released in 2018, the HX99 features an 18-megapixel backside illuminated sensor with built-in image stabilization and a 24mm to 720mm zoom lens.

Sony

As for the viewfinder, it’s a Retissa Neoviewer from Japan’s QD Laser. It projects a digital image from the camera directly to the retina of a user. Sony notes the technology won’t work for everyone, but for those who it does, the viewfinder will allow them to use the HX99 to see faces, read signs and capture photos and videos. “The laser retinal projection of Retissa Neoviewer is a completely new technology that has been put to practical use for the first time in the world,” according to Dr. Mitsuru Sugawara, the president and CEO of QD Laser.

The HX99RNV kit will cost $600 when it arrives this summer. That means it won’t cost more than a DSC-HX99 on its own. In a show of support for the low-vision community, Sony says it will bear “the majority” of the cost to produce the device. That said, the kit will only be available directly through Sony, and the company will limit purchases to one per person. Sony also plans to work with American and Japanese schools to provide the device to low-vision individuals.