Barnes & Noble has revealed its latest Nook e-reader, a more budget-friendly version of the Nook GlowLight 4 it announced in December. The Nook Glowlight 4e costs $30 less than the previous model but, as you might expect, there are some tradeoffs.
The e-readers share a similar design, with soft-touch casing and physical buttons for turning pages. However, at 212DPI, the GlowLight 4e has a lower-resolution display than the GlowLight 4, which has a six-inch, 300DPI screen. There's less storage too, with 8GB instead of 32GB. Rather than a month of promised battery life, Barnes & Noble says the GlowLight 4e will run "for weeks" on a single charge.
Other than those differences, the two models seem alike. They both support USB-C charging and have a built-in anti-glare screen protector with scratch resistance.
At $120, the Nook GlowLight 4e is $30 more expensive than the base Kindle. However, for those looking for an e-reader that's not tied to Amazon, it might be worth checking out.
Pre-orders for the Nook GlowLight 4e are now open. It will ship on June 7th.
IKEA continues its foray into smart home devices with the launch of a Google Matter-ready hub called DIRIGERA and a new IKEA Home smart app. With the new device and app, the Swedish company is promising to handle more smart device segments while making device integration easier. It says the app will be "convenient, easy to navigate and user-friendly" for anyone just getting into smart home tech.
"With the new DIRIGERA hub for smart products, users will be able to onboard all IKEA smart products to the system and steer them individually, in sets or in groups in the new IKEA Home smart app. This enables users to create different scenes with pre-set functions of the smart products and increases the personalisation options for the smart home," according to the company.
IKEA's first smart home hub/gateway TRADFRI and app launched way back in 2014, so it was long overdue for a refresh. The company said that you'll still be able to use that device, and current "products from IKEA can be connected to and work equally well with the DIRIGERA hub."
IKEA's smart home and device family continues to grow at a fairly rapid pace. Earlier this year it launched the VAPPEBY LED lamp that doubles as a Spotify-enabled Bluetooth speaker. It also recently refreshed the SYMFONISK bookshelf speaker, built in partnership with Sonos, along with smart blinds, a smart air purifier and other devices.
The DIRIGERA hub and new IKEA smart home app will launch in October 2022, the company said. It will also unveil remote "away from home" functionality in the first half of 2023.
Drones are everywhere these days, filming dramatic reveals and awe-inspiring scenery for social media platforms. The problem is, they’re not exactly approachable for beginners who have only ever used a smartphone. Last month, Snap debuted the $230 Pixy drone exactly for those people. It requires very little skill and acts like a personal robot photographer to help you produce nifty aerial shots.
You don’t need to pilot the Pixy. In fact, you couldn’t if you wanted to. Rather, it flies by itself, performing pre-programmed patterns that put the focus on you, the user. It has great potential for things like parties or tourist activities, grabbing awesome aerial shots with almost no user intervention.
Snap calls itself a camera company, but its other photo-centric products like Spectacles have met with limited success. To me, the Pixy drone holds more promise because it could help users get more interesting content than they could with a phone or regular camera. I’ve had one for the last week in the French countryside, so let’s see if it’s as versatile as I hope.
Hardware and setup
At just 3.6 ounces (101 grams), the Pixy is small enough to throw in a bag or wear around your neck using the supplied protective case with a strap. It’s pretty cute – I even heard some oohs and aahs from friends and bystanders – though it does look a little flimsy. However, it proved to be surprisingly resistant to falls and accidents, emerging from several such incidents without a scratch.
The four propellers are in a protective cowl, so they can’t buzz any tree branches or fingers. On top is a start button and mode dial, with the battery compartment and charge indicator lights underneath. You’ll also notice a camera on the bottom, but it’s strictly for detecting your hand and not taking photos or video. A USB-C port at back lets you charge the drone and transfer files to your phone or PC.
The main camera takes 2.7K video at 30 fps and 12-megapixel images. It shoots in 16:9 landscape mode, which is a bit odd considering the Snaps are vertical. However, a cropping tool in the app lets you convert your captures to portrait mode.
Steve Dent/Engadget
The first thing to do is sync it up to your account via Bluetooth by placing it in standby mode, then pressing and holding the start button. From there, Snapchat detects the Pixy and syncs everything up over WiFi. In my tests, the process was seamless on both an iPhone 12 and Samsung Galaxy S10.
Then, you set the dial to one of four flight modes: Hover, Reveal, Follow and Orbit. They’re pretty self-explanatory, with Hover keeping the drone in place and letting you do any actions in front of it. Reveal starts tight on your face and zooms away to 10 to 30 feet in height, revealing the background. Follow tracks you around (it works best if it can see your face) and Orbit does a 360 circle at about head height and at a distance between 10 and 30 feet.
Each of those can be tweaked in the app with different flight times, distances and more. If you often use a flight mode like Reveal with a specific setting, you can save that to the Favorite dial for easy access, using the app.
In use
Steve Dent/Engadget
Once the flight pattern is selected, just hold the Pixy up so its camera can see your face and press the start button. It’ll take off and perform the selected maneuver, saving video and/or photos to the 16GB of fixed internal storage. That’s enough for around 100 videos and 1,000 photos, depending on the mode and settings.
All of the flight patterns worked well, though as mentioned, the Follow mode works best if it can see your face. It doesn’t detect specific people, but it did seem to lock on tenaciously to the same face even if multiple people were in a shot.
When it’s done, you just hold your hand underneath and it’ll land directly on it, which is where the bottom camera comes into play. It worked pretty reliably, but sometimes I had to move my hand around a bit to catch it or keep it from falling.
Steve Dent/Engadget
Afterwards, when you jump into the Memories section of the Snapchat app, it’ll tell you that you have some Pixy clips ready to import. You can also copy them over to your PC via USB-C, but you have to adjust a Snapchat setting in the Pixy section (“Import via USB”) first.
Once you have some clips, you can get started editing them. If you want to post on Snap, you can use the auto-crop function to convert to vertical video while centering your subjects. You can then trim the video, add music and use special Pixy AR lenses, like “Flame Aura,” “Multiples” (making three of you) and Record, an old-timey VHS tape effect. It also comes with two special speed ramp effects, Jump Cut and Hyperspeed.
Trade-offs
So far so good, but there are a number of things it can’t do. To start with, there are no obstacle detection sensors at all, so if something gets in the way, the Pixy will crash right into it. Leaves and twigs didn’t always stop it, but walls, branches and human bodies certainly did. Luckily, as mentioned, the Pixy is pretty tough.
Since it can’t go very far or high (up to 30 feet at most) the lack of obstacle detection shouldn’t be an issue for most people. To avoid any issues, though, you should test each maneuver in a wide open area to get a feel for how far away it travels.
Steve Dent/Engadget
Another significant limitation is flight time. Snap told me that the Pixy can fly for four to five minutes on a charge, or between five and 10 flights. You can buy extra batteries for $20 each, and get a portable dual-battery charger for $50. If you think you’ll need that extra flight time (you will), your best bet is the Pixy Flight Pack, which adds the charger and two extra batteries for an extra $20.
It also lacks a gimbal and relies strictly on electronic stabilization, so you might get some shaky footage if you’re flying in a lot of wind. Speaking of which, the Pixy’s light weight means you can’t really fly it outside at all in gusty conditions.
Image and video quality isn’t amazing, but it does the job. When I showed it to a professional photographer friend, he was pleasantly surprised. The exposure levels were good, and it adjusted well when going from shade to sunlight. It worked fine indoors provided I had a reasonable amount of light.
When you open videos or photos on a PC screen, it’s clear that it can’t compare to a smartphone or other drones, particularly in low light. But even when you reduce the resolution by cropping vertically, it looks decent on a smartphone – so it’s absolutely good enough for most Snapchat users.
My photographer friend took it to a wedding and he found it great for grabbing some extra shots or to show behind-the-scenes goings on. Since it requires almost no setup or piloting, all he had to do was just launch the Pixy and it would do the rest – ideal for a busy photographer if quality isn’t a concern.
I enjoyed it too as a quick and easy drone and I feel like it would be something I’d take with me while traveling to get some nice reveals and aerial shots. I was curious to see how it compares with other Snapchat camera products like Spectacles, and what ambitions Snap has for it, so I asked Engadget senior editor Karissa Bell, who covers social media.
“If you think about what they’ve done with Spectacles… there was a lot of interest in the beginning, but once you start to use them they’re more of a novelty,” she told me. “The Pixy’s interesting because it really does seem to have more possibilities.”
“If you’re somebody who’s really active on Snapchat [or] making videos for Spotlight, which is their take on a TikTok-like feature, you can get really creative. But $230 is not a small amount of money, especially for younger people in Snapchat’s core demographic. So I think it could be more of a success than Spectacles, but there are a lot of drone companies out there if you’re just looking for a drone.”
In fact, it already looks like it’ll be a challenge to get one, as the wait time has stretched out to four whole months after pre-orders started on April 28th. That could be down to demand, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel also toldThe Verge that the company “should have made more.”
Wrap-up
Steve Dent/Engadget
Still, it does look like Snap is onto something with the Pixy. It’s not nearly as capable as pricier drones from DJI and others, but that’s not really the point. Rather, it’s a way for social media users to get some cinematic shots without the need to be a drone expert.
You can also turn over photo and video chores to the Pixy and focus on creating your Snap content. If you’re on a night out with friends, you can send it off to grab some shots without the need for a selfie stick or other gear.
It’s not perfect, as battery life is pretty poor and image quality merely passable. And at $230, it’s also quite expensive considering that you could buy a decent drone for that kind of money – we’ve seen DJI’s Spark Mini on sale at $250, for instance.
But Pixy isn’t designed for avid drone users who might balk at that price. It’s made for social media creators who might even consider it to be cheap considering what it could do for them. The reactions I saw from passersby and friends were overwhelmingly positive, with a number saying they might buy one. If that’s any kind of sign, the Pixy might become a hit.
If you're building a new PC or just need a storage device for your computers and gaming consoles, make sure to check out Amazon today. You can get both internal and external disk drives, as well as memory cards, for up to 60 percent off from the website's ongoing one-day Western Digital and SanDisk sale. One of the most deeply discounted items included in the event is Western Digital's 2TB Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD that's currently listed for $170, or $210 off its original price. The component went on sale at Amazon earlier this month, but this is the lowest price we've seen it go for on the website. It has read speeds of up to 560MB/s, sequential write speeds of up to 530MB/s and is compatible with computers that have standard SATA connectors.
In case you're looking for a memory card, the SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card with 400GB capacity is also on sale for $36, down $34 or almost half its original retail price. It's compatible with most devices that have microSD card slots, such as Android phones and tablets, and it has transfer speeds reaching 120MB/s that will let you move up to 1,000 photos within a minute.
For portable storage devices, there's SanDisk's Extreme PRO Portable SSD with a 2TB capacity. It's currently on sale for $260 — its all-time low on the website — or $250 off its retail price. The device has 2000MB/s read or write speeds, comes with a USB-C and a USB-A cable and can work with both Windows and Mac computers.
But if you need external storage with an even bigger capacity for your home or office, you can get Western Digital's 10TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive HDD instead. It's currently available for $175 — not quite an all-time low, but still $125 lower than its retail price of $300. The storage solution is plug-and-play ready for Windows PCs, but you can also use it for your Mac computers, as well as for your PS4 and your Xbox consoles.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Dyson has been getting into more and more offbeat products these days, like the Zone noise-canceling headphones that blow purified air at your face. Now, the company has revealed that it has an entire division that's secretly been developing robot prototypes that do household chores.
The company didn't detail any of the models in particularly, but many look like regular robot arms adapted to do specialized home chores like cleaning and tidying. One appeared to be designed to vacuum out the seat cushions, mapping an armchair out in detail to do the job. "So this means I'll never, ever find crisps around the back of my sofa again?" the company's chief engineer, Jake Dyson, asked a researcher in a video (below).
Another robot was putting away dishes or at least placing them in a drying rack, and another was grasping a teddy bear, presumably picking up after a child. Dyson also showed off a "Perception Lab" that was all about robotic vision systems, detecting its environment and mapping humans with sensors, cameras and thermal imaging systems.
Dyson is currently on a recruiting drive, looking for around 700 engineers, which is one reason it finally decided to show off the lab (located at Hullavington Airfield, Wiltshire in the UK) after keeping it under wraps. "What you're developing counts an awful lot in terms of excitement and attracting engineers," he said. "One thing about robots, as with wearables, is that they are the future of Dyson."
Google has shown off a new artificial intelligence system that can create images based on text input. Its Imagen diffusion model, created by the Brain Team at Google Research, offers "an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding."
This isn't the first time we've seen AI models like this. OpenAI's DALL·E (and its successor) performed similar witchcraft, turning text into visuals. Google's version, however, tries to create more realistic images. The researchers created a benchmark and asked humans to assess each image from a range of AIs. They "prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment," Google said.
It’s not available to the public, and there are reasons for this. “Datasets of this nature often reflect social stereotypes, oppressive viewpoints, and derogatory, or otherwise harmful, associations to marginalized identity groups," the researchers wrote. Imagen has inherited the "social biases and limitations of large language models" and may depict "harmful stereotypes and representation." The team said the AI encodes social biases, including a tendency to create images of people with lighter skin tones and place them in certain stereotypical gender roles. The system could be used to make unsavory images to intentionally cause offense.
The team may eventually allow the rest of us to play with the model to generate our own images, but the researchers need to consider a framework first — a challenge in itself.
Starlink’s internet service for RV drivers and ‘vanlife’ types is live. While applying for a regular Starlink dish and service will put customers on a waitlist until 2023, Starlink for RVs is immediately available and will ship out to buyers right now. However, network resources are always deprioritized for RV connections, and the service costs $135, which is $25 more than a regular Starlink connection.
It uses NVIDIA's Reflex tech to reduce system latency.
ASUS has unveiled what it calls the "world's first" 500Hz G-Sync gaming display, the 1080p ROG Swift 500Hz. Designed for competitive gaming, it uses a special panel and incorporates NVIDIA's G-Sync Esports technology to maximize motion clarity. It also uses NVIDIA's Reflex Analyzer technology, which delivers real-time stats to help you reduce end-to-end latency if you're using a Reflex-optimized mouse and NVIDIA GPU.
The key highlight remains the 500Hz refresh rate, which draws eight times faster than typical 60Hz displays.
Canon has launched its first EOS R APS-C crop sensor cameras, the 32-megapixel EOS R7 and 24-megapixel EOS R10. The new models bring Canon's APS-C and full-frame RF series in alignment, so you can finally use lenses interchangeably. More importantly, they carry impressive specs, like 15 fps mechanical shutter shooting speeds and 4K video at up to 60 fps.
The EOS R10 will cost $980 for the body only and $1,100 with the RF-S18-45mm lens and $1,380 with the RF-S18-150mm lens. The R7, meanwhile, will sell for $1,500 for the body only and $1,900 with the S18-150mm lens. Both should arrive later this year.
Microsoft's new Live Share feature should make it easier for Teams apps to enable real-time collaboration. If this sounds familiar, it's because Microsoft announced plans to make Teams the go-to option for collaborative apps last year. Live Share is based on Fluid Framework, Microsoft's attempt at atomizing components of traditional documents and making them collaborative. Microsoft says several partners, including Accenture, Frame.io and Hexagon, are already building Live Share experiences in Teams projects.
Later this year, NVIDIA will begin selling a liquid-cooled version of its A100 GPU for data centers. The GPU maker is positioning the video card as a way for cloud computing companies to make their facilities more energy-efficient. NVIDIA claims a facility outfitted with its water-cooled A100 GPUs ran the same workload as an air-cooled data center while using about 30 percent less power.
For the privacy-minded, ProtonMail has been one of the better options for secure email — you can get an (admittedly basic) account for free and enjoy end-to-end encryption for your communications when you're messaging other ProtonMail users. But the company's plans have gotten a little out of date. Free accounts only come with 500MB of storage, while the €4 / month plan bumps you to a modest 4GB of storage with some other limitations like a daily 1000-message sent cap.
Starting today, though, the company is making it easier to go all-in on ProtonMail and the other services it offers, including a VPN, cloud storage and an encrypted calendar. Going forward, ProtonMail is rebranding itself simply as Proton, pushing its whole suite of privacy-focused services and updating all of its plans. The company has a new website (proton.me), and both new and existing users can use the @proton.me address rather than the old @protonmail.com option if they're so inclined.
Proton
Going forward, Proton will offer three plans: Free, Mail Plus and Unlimited. The new free tier expands storage to 1GB and remains fairly constrained — you can only send 150 messages per day and have three labels and folders, for example. You can also access the basic Proton VPN tool and user Proton Calendar, though you're limited to only one calendar on this plan. Proton has long said that since it doesn't serve ads, it relies on subscriptions for revenue, so it's not too surprising the free plan is restricted.
The Mail Plus plan will cost €5 / month, though you can get it for less if you sign up for a year or two years all in one shot. It's a big upgrade over the old plan, though. Users now get 15GB of storage shared between their email and Proton Drive cloud storage account. There's no restrictions on how many messages you can send or how many labels and folders you can create, and it also supports IMAP email clients via the Proton Bridge tool. There are also additional features like a new "short domain" email alias (@pm.me) that you can use to send and receive messages as well as 20 calendars that you can share with other users.
Finally, the Unlimited plan costs €12 / month; the company is positioning it as a way to get the top tier of all its services at once. That means 500GB of total storage, making Proton Drive a lot more viable for people to use as a backup service. You can use Proton Mail with up to three different custom domain addresses (up from one on the Mail Plus Plan) and with a total of 15 different email addresses (up from 10 on Mail Plus).
Proton
But the big difference is that you get the full-fledged Proton VPN with the Unlimited plan, rather than the more basic option that comes with the other two Proton plans. This includes up to 10 VPN connections rather than one, a total of 1,700+ servers across 63 different countries (rather than 100-ish servers in three countries) and faster speeds. For the time being Proton will continue offering its VPN as a standalone product, too — you can get the details on that as well as the breakdown between the basic free VPN and what you get with the full version here.
If you're new to the Proton world, right now the company has iOS apps for mail and VPN services, and Android apps for mail, VPN and calendar. The Drive cloud storage option is still technically in beta, so there aren't any mobile apps for it just yet — they're slated for later this year.
And while Proton doesn't have any major updates to the mail service or its other apps aside from unifying them with its new design language, the company has made a few updates in recent months. Last month, the iOS Mail app got some design updates and a dark mode, as well as a "conversation" mode to make threads of messages easier to read. Back in February, Proton turned on encrypted search in the Mail web app, and in January it added a tracking pixel blocker.
Insta360, best known for its action and 360 degree cameras, has just launched an interesting drone camera. The Insta360 Sphere attaches around the body of DJI's Mavic Air 2 or Air 2S drones, letting you film 5.7K 360 footage or create regular 2D videos with the option of reframing them later in post. Better still, Insta360's tech ensures that the drone is "invisible" in shots.
Since 360 cameras film in all directions, half the video can be obstructed by the drone itself. However, Insta360 mounted cameras on either side of the drone to ensure it doesn't appear in the footage. To provide seamless footage, "Insta360's proprietary dynamic stitching algorithm makes the whole drone (including the propellers) disappear automatically," the company wrote.
The Sphere attaches to Mavic Air 2/2S drones with an "ultra-secure" mechanism, and doesn't affect its structural integrity or impact the GPS signal or control system. Insta360 is also promising smooth flights via its FlowState stabilization tech that's been fine-tuned for the Sphere. At the same time, you can simultaneously capture video from the drone's own camera.
The company showed off some fancy footage in a YouTube video, with barrel rolls and dolly zooms, created in its Insta360 app. The Insta360 Sphere is now available in the US and mainland China for $430.
Windows 11 widgets could become more useful in the coming months. Microsoft revealed at its Build developer conference that the operating system will start supporting widgets for third-party apps later this year. Developers will be able to create widgets for their Win32 apps and progressive web apps using Microsoft's Adaptive Cards platform.
"We’re energized by the customer feedback on widgets to date. People are enjoying the quick access to content most important to them in a way that is seamless without breaking their flow," Panos Panay, Microsoft's chief product officer for Windows and devices, said.
Microsoft brought back widgets, which previously appeared in Windows 7, when it released Windows 11 last year. However, it tucked the widgets behind a dedicated button. In any case, we felt they weren't all that useful.
Opening up widgets to third-party developers so they can provide some at-a-glance information Microsoft doesn't offer through its own apps could be handy. You might, for instance, eventually see your Twitter timeline or WhatsApp messages in a widget.
The company shut down widgets (aka gadgets) in Windows 7 in part because they could be exploited. Microsoft hasn't revealed too many details about how third-party widgets will work in Windows 11 just yet, so here's hoping there's some quality control to fend off bad actors.
Last year Universal Audio decided to make the leap from plugins the pedal with the UAFX line. Then it got into the mainstream audio interface game, launched a series of high-end modeling microphones, and even a subscription plug-in service. But, UA isn't doesn't appear ready to slow down yet. Now the company is expanding its line of stomp boxes with a trio of amp modelers.
The Dream '65 Reverb, Ruby '63 Top Boost and Woodrow '55 Instrument Amplifier bring UA's excellent emulations of vintage amplifiers to a board-friendly format, using the same hardware it did for last year's Astra, Golden and Starlight pedals. The UAFX Guitar Amp Emulators all have a host of modern amenities and options, but they are, at their heart, recreations of iconic amps that have been staples of studios around the world for over five decades. The Dream is based on a Fender Deluxe Reverb, Woodrow is a Fender Tweed Deluxe and Ruby a take on the Vox AC30.
Each pedal has a handful of speaker, cabinet and mic options to further shape your tone, as well as reverb and vibrato on the Dream and Ruby, respectively. The pedals also have additional customization options available the UAFX Control mobile app, plus the ability to save presets.
Of course, UA doesn't cheap out on the hardware front either. These are solid pedals built to withstand abuse, with stereo ins and outs, plus USB-C and Bluetooth connectivity.
All three of the UAFX Guitar Amp Emulators are available now for $399. Which, certainly isn't impulse purchase territory, but considering a real-deal Fender Tweed Deluxe can fetch around $5,000, this seems like an absolute bargain.
