LG has finally released the 2022 soundbars it introduced in January, and it won't surprise you to hear that you'll pay a hefty price for the attention-getting flagship model. The 9.1.5-channel S95QR (pictured above) costs $1,799 (already on sale for $1,499 at Amazon and LG) and stands out with an up-firing center channel as well as similarly vertical wireless rear speakers. A subwoofer is included, too. In theory, you'll have a better "perspective" with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X audio as well as clearer dialog. You can also expect HDMI 2.1 passthrough (with variable refresh rate and auto low-latency mode for gamers) as well as larger woofers and greater distances between speakers than previous models.

You don't need to spend that much to get some of the benefits. The 3.1.3-channel S80QY ($899) and 5.1.3-channel S90QY ($1,199) also pack the upward-firing center speaker, and you can tack on a $200 SPQ8 kit if you want rear speakers. The $599, 3.1.2-channel S75Q is available if you're fine with a more conventional up-firing speaker layout, and you can pay a relatively modest $399 for the S65Q ($250 at Amazon and LG) if you're willing to skip vertical audio entirely.

Every soundbar offers Meridian Audio tuning, and most are compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant. WiFi-connected models (from the S80QY up) also support a Wowcast audio dongle that provides wireless uncompressed 7.1.4-channel sound.

These aren't the most affordable options at their official prices. On sale, though, they should compete well against some of the best soundbars in their respective categories. Just think carefully about the S95QR. While LG does have a center vertical speaker in its favor, Samsung's comparable HW-Q950A packs an 11.1.4-channel setup at a similar price.

If you store all your passwords on Chrome and use an iPhone, signing into your various accounts is about to get easier. The latest release of the browser for iOS (version M104) will bring the ability for you to set Chrome as your Autofill provider. It'll also add new "enhanced safe browsing" and Chrome Actions to the app on iPhones and iPads. 

Many of this features are already available in the Android edition of Chrome, like the Password Manager, which uses data you've elected to store in the browser to sign into apps on your phone. Enhanced Safe Browsing, when activated on your iPhone or iPad, will check if websites you're visiting are dangerous. Also, "Chrome warns you if your username and password have been compromised in a third-party data breach" when you enter your credentials into a website. It'll then urge you to change them everywhere. 

Something that's not yet available on Android is the first page when you re-open Chrome after awhile. According to Google's blog post, "We're making it easier for you to discover new content or start a fresh search in Chrome for iOS when you've been away for awhile." This is supposed to make "it easier to browse content, start a new Search or easily get back to your most frequently visited sites" while still letting you locate your recent tabs. Google added that this "will also come to Android soon."

Those who rely on Chrome's built-in translation tools might find the updated language identification model helpful. Google says this new on-device version will help you "accurately figure out the language of the page you're visiting, and whether it needs to be translated to match your preferences."

Meanwhile, Chrome Actions will make doing things like clearing your browsing data or opening an incognito tab easier on iOS. You won't have to go into the three-dot menu to hunt for those options anymore — you can just type a search term for the setting into the URL bar. "Delete history," for example, will bring you to the page to clear your browsing data. And if you were looking for info on that setting online, you'll still see the suggested search results below the suggested Action. 

Finally, Google also tweaked the three-dot menu "to be scannable and to highlight the most important destinations, such as your history, passwords and settings. The company said "your most commonly used destinations will be available at the top of the menu" and actions like creating Bookmarks or adding stuff to Reading List will be located higher up in the vertical menu. 

Microsoft is hoping to make Edge the browser of choice for gamers. The company is rolling out a host of gaming-related updates to most users, including perks for game streaming. A new (if long in development) Clarity Boost feature improves the visual quality of console titles when you're using Xbox Cloud Gaming on a Windows 10 or 11 PC. The spatial upscaling technology won't make you forget that it's a stream, but the sample Microsoft offered suggests it will reduce the muddy look that sometimes plagues remote games.

You won't need an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription for the other improvements. Windows 10 and 11 users will also see a toggle in Efficiency mode that automatically reduces Edge's resource use when you start a PC game. You might not have to close your browser to wring every last drop of performance out of your system.

Regardless of platform, there's an optional gaming-oriented homepage that points you to news, livestreams, new releases and quick access to the Xbox Cloud Gaming catalog. You can also visit a dedicated games menu that offers free-to-play arcade and casual titles to keep you entertained during uneventful meetings.

This isn't the first browser built for gamers. Opera GX launched three years ago with similar features, such as lower resource usage and quick access to livestreams. Microsoft features like Clarity Boost might be more appealing in some cases, though, and Edge's ubiquity on Windows systems gives it better odds of widespread adoption.

Blackmagic is finally updating the base Pocket Cinema Camera 6K with some welcome (if not earth-shattering) refinements. The company has introduced the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 with features borrowed from the Pro model, including its larger battery, swivelling touchscreen and support for a 1,280 x 960 OLED viewfinder. You can record video for longer while improving the composition of your shots, to put it simply.

The G2 otherwise sports the same capabilities as the original Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. You'll find its namesake 6,144 x 3,456 Super 35 image sensor with 13 stops of dynamic range and a peak dual native ISO of 25,600. A Canon EF mount gives you a wide selection of potential lenses, while mini XLR inputs provide high-quality audio. PetaPixelnotes you won't get the Pro's ND filters, however, and the conservative update means you won't find continuous autofocusing or in-body stabilization.

The 6K G2 is available now for $1,995, or $500 less than its predecessor cost when new. You'll also get the full DaVinci Resolve Studio to edit your work. This is clearly a better bargain if you're looking for a reasonably compact video-focused mirrorless camera, although you may still want to look at competition like the Sony A7 IV (with continuous autofocus and built-in stabilization) if you're equally interested in taking photos.

If you're looking to upgrade to a speedy, compact desktop, Apple's Mac Mini M1 is a good option. The machine is back on sale at Amazon right now for $570 thanks to a coupon that knocks $99 off its price. That's the lowest price we've seen on the desktop that runs on Apple's M1 chipset, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Yes, we're on M2 machines at this point, but only a couple of Apple computers run on that updated processor (and only the M2 MacBook Pro is even available right now). The Mac Mini M1 remains the most affordable way to get an M1 device in your home, too, as the latest iPad Pros that share the same processor start at around $799. The desktop is powered by an eight-core CPU and eight-core GPU, plus a 16-core Neural Engine. While we haven't given the Mini M1 the full review treatment, you can expect it to run similarly to the MacBook Air M1, which is speedily and efficiently.

While the Mac Mini M1's design isn't anything to write home about, that almost works to its advantage. Apple didn't change much from the Intel version, keeping the machine a sleek, square box interrupted only by a couple of ports: two Thunderbolt ports, two USB-A connectors, an Ethernet port, one HDMI port and a headphone jack.

The biggest issue we have with the desktop is its lack of upgradeability — its RAM and storage are soldered in place, so you're stuck with the amount that you initially purchase. RAM is arguably more crucial than storage here, since you can always connect an external SSD to the Mini M1 if you need to offload important files. If those limitations don't bother you, the Mac Mini M1 could be a great replacement for your aging desktop.

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The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to stop Juul from selling e-cigarette products in the US, and the decision could come soon, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Along with other e-cigarette makers, Juul submitted its products to the FDA for review in 2020. The agency was looking into the possible benefits of vaping as an alternative to cigarettes, but the popularity of the products among young people has had the opposite result.

Beyond the FDA, Juul has faced multiple lawsuits costing tens of millions of dollars over accusations of marketing to minors. In reaction to the news report yesterday, many vapers have apparently rushed to stock up on Juul supplies ahead of the possible sales ban.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Slack adds video and multi-person screen sharing to huddles

• Polestar adds Apple CarPlay support to its EVs

• IKEA’s latest AR app can erase your furniture to showcase its own

• PCI Express 7 will be 8 times faster than PCI Express 5

• Twitter invents the blog again with Notes

• Google News redesign puts a greater emphasis on local stories

• Meta, Microsoft, Epic Games and others join forces to develop metaverse standards

• Amazon employees in Maryland say they were fired for organizing workers

• Researchers built a low-cost camera system that recreates sound from vibrations

Nothing's transparent Phone 1 won't be coming to the US

The company has 'big plans to launch a US-supported smartphone in the future.'

Nothing

Nothing's debut transparent-shelled Phone 1 smartphone won't be coming to the US, the company confirmed to PCMag. "While we’d love to bring Phone 1 to the entire community around the world, we're focusing on home markets, including the UK and Europe," the company said in a statement.

Nothing hopes to make it big in America one day: "We have big plans to launch a US-supported smartphone in the future," the company added. The challenge could be lasting long enough to follow up its debut phone with another device. It’s very hard to launch a new smartphone — especially if you’re a new company.

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MacBook Pro 13-inch review (M2, 2022)

Pro in name only.

Engadget

It’s another weird new MacBook from Apple. The new M2 chip gives the MacBook Pro a nice performance boost, but its Retina Display lacks ProMotion and the thin bezels we’d expect from a computer today. And with just two USB-C ports, it’s hard to recommend as a machine for professionals. Most of us would be better saving up a little bit more for the 14-inch MacBook Pro with a far better screen and more ports.

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You can pay for your Lyft ride with cash now

You don't need a bank account to rideshare.

In a blast from the past, you can pay for your ride with cash — kind of. Lyft has introduced an option to pay for rides using cash. Visit 35,000-plus stores like Walmart, ACE Cash Express and Kroger and you can present a barcode or ID number to turn physical money into a balance accessible through the Lyft app or website. You'll have to scan approved identification after requesting your first ride.

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Amazon's Alexa might be able to speak as your dead relatives

Today’s bleak story.

At Amazon’s re:MARS conference, Alexa’s senior vice-president Rohit Prasad exhibited a startling new voice assistant capability: the supposed ability to mimic voices. Amazon framed this copycatting ability as a way to commemorate lost loved ones. It played a demonstration video in which Alexa read to a child in the voice of his recently deceased grandmother. An Amazon spokesperson told Engadget the new skill can create a synthetic voiceprint after being trained on as little as a minute of audio of the individual it's supposed to be replicating. So far, there's no timeline whatsoever as to when or if this feature will be released to the public.

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Introducing the Engadget Deals newsletter!

It launches this week.

We launched our @EngadgetDeals Twitter account two years ago, and now we’re expanding our deals to a new newsletter — don’t worry The Morning After is going nowhere. You can subscribe now to get the latest deals on our favorite consumer electronics delivered to your inbox regularly — the first issue goes out later today. Expect some pretty major deals, like up to 46 percent off Amazon’s Omni Fire TVs and the first discounts on the latest product launches, like Sony’s LinkBuds S, which have dipped under the $180 mark.

Subscribe here.

TikTok users now have another way to catch up on their For You page. The app is available on Vizio smart TVs starting today and you'll be able to watch TikTok TV content directly from the home screen.

The app, which landed on smart TVs from the likes of Samsung and LG last November, reworks the TikTok experience for big-screen viewing. TikTok TV features popular videos from categories including gaming, comedy, food and animals. If you have a TikTok account, you can log in to view videos from your Following and For You feeds. The app has an autoplay feature as well, so you'll be able to watch an endless string of TikToks without interruption if you wish.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled its latest 200-megapixel camera sensor with some of the tiniest pixels yet, which it says will allow manufacturers to keep their premium smartphones slim. At the same time, the HP3 sensor packs technology like autofocus capability in every pixel, binning for better low light capability and multi-gain ISO for maximum dynamic range. 

The sensor is 1/1.4-inches in size, fairly large for a smartphone but extremely tiny for a 200-megapixel sensor. Samsung claims that it has the industry's smallest pixels at 0.56 microns, 20 percent smaller than the 0.64 micron pixels of the ISOCELL HP1 launched last year. However, that's not quite accurate, as Chinese manufacturer Omnivision unveiled a 200-megapixel sensor with the same 0.56 micron pixel size back in February. 

Samsung

Still, Samsung's sensor has some nice tech tricks. Each pixel has autofocus detection capability and the "Super QPD" tech uses a single lens over four pixels that allows for quicker and more accurate autofocus. It can also bin four 0.56 micron pixels into a larger 1.12 micron 50-megapixel sensor for better low light capability, or even combine 16 pixels into one 2.24 microns in size. That's still considerably smaller than most camera sensor pixels (Sony's 61-megapixel full-frame A7R IV sensor has 3.76 micron pixels), but should allow for decent low-light shooting capability. 

In addition to high-res photos, it allows for 8K video at 30fps and 4K at 120fps, while using nearly the full sensor width. Finally, it offers 14-bit color depth (4 trillion colors), quadrupling the 12-bit depth of most smartphone sensors. Mass production is set to begin this year, and you'll probably see 200-megapixel phones using the sensor in 2023. 

If you’re an iOS user, you’re likely used to tapping “Report Junk” any time you receive a spam iMessage, which sends the information directly to Apple. MacRumorsreported that junk SMS messages will soon be included in the reporting feature on iOS 16 beta 2, which was released today for developers and will roll out to the public this July. Apple is only rolling out the feature for certain carriers but hasn't specified which ones. 

Users who flag SMS messages as junk will be sending the number and content of the text to both Apple and their phone or device’s carrier. Reporting unwanted texts to a phone carrier normally requires forwarding the entire message to a four-digit number (that most people likely have to look up), so wrapping this feature into the upcoming iOS update will save users a step. Reporting a message as junk doesn’t block the number, so users will still have to do this manually. 

If you’ve noticed an uptick in suspicious texts that offer free gift cards or delivery alerts for packages you didn’t order, you’re not imagining things. Spam and scam SMS messages are on the rise, partly due to data breaches and the availability of software that makes it easy for scammers to send such messages in bulk. Nearly 12 billion spam texts were sent in the month of May in the US, according to an estimate from spam blocking app RoboKiller.

If you’re nervous about installing the beta version of iOS 16, you’ll only have to wait a little while — Apple expects to officially release iOS 16 to the public in the fall.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a camera system that can seemingly detect sound vibrations with a level of precision that makes it possible to recreate the audio without inference or a microphone. A team from CMU's School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute (RI) built the system, which has two cameras and a laser. It can detect "high-speed, low-amplitude surface vibrations" that the human eye can't see, the university said in a press release.

The system features regular cameras rather than high-speed ones used in previous research, which should lower the cost. "We've made the optical microphone much more practical and usable," Srinivasa Narasimhan, an RI professor and head of the Illumination and Imaging Laboratory, said. "We've made the quality better while bringing the cost down."

An algorithm compares speckle patterns captured by a rolling shutter and a global shutter. It uses the differences between the patterns to calculate the vibrations and recreate the audio. A speckle pattern (which is created by the laser in this case) refers to the behavior of coherent light in space after it's reflected off of a rough surface. That behavior changes as the surface vibrates. The rolling shutter rapidly scans an image from one end to the other, while a global shutter captures an entire image at the same time. 

"This system pushes the boundary of what can be done with computer vision," assistant professor Matthew O'Toole, a co-author of a paper on the system, said. "This is a new mechanism to capture high speed and tiny vibrations, and presents a new area of research."

The researchers say they were able to isolate the audio of guitars that were being played simultaneously. They claim that the system was able to observe a bag of chips, and use vibrations from that to reconstruct audio being emitted by a nearby speaker with higher fidelity than previous optical microphone approaches.

There are a lot of potential applications for this tech. The researchers suggest, for instance, that the system could monitor vibrations from machines in a factory to look for signs of problems. Sound engineers could also isolate the sound from an instrument to improve the mix. In essence, it could help eliminate ambient noise from audio recordings.