iRobot's latest Roomba that can detect obstacles — including pet poop — along its cleaning journey is cheaper than ever right now. Both Amazon and Wellbots have the Roomba j7 and j7+ for $150 less, so you can grab them for $499 and $699, respectively. Both robots are the same, but you'll get the clean base with the j7+ model, allowing you to set and forget the robot and only empty the clean base about once every 60 days.
The j7 series builds upon the Roomba i7 robots with more powerful cameras, better sensors and more power. The AI-driven computer vision technology allows the device to detect obstacles and move around them as it cleans, and you can label those obstacles as permanent (in the case of a chair or another piece of furniture) or temporary. Not only does this mean the j7 robots should better navigate around things like piles of clothes and charging cords, but they can also detect a robot vacuum's arch nemesis: pet poop. iRobot even has a Pet Owner Official Promise (yes, P.O.O.P.) which states that you'll get a new robot vacuum if your j7+ runs into poop in the first year of you owning it.
Aside from that, the j7 series takes advantage of iRobot's improved mobile app, which lets you schedule cleanings and set routine triggers. You can also label rooms in your home after the robot has created a map, so you can better direct it to a specific room when you only need a quick clean.
While the clean base included in the j7+ package isn't necessary, it takes the convenience level up a notch. Instead of emptying your robot's bin after every job, the j7+ will automatically empty its contents into the clean base when it's done. You then only have to worry about emptying the base once every two months.
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You'll have to go large if you want an Intel-powered Mac desktop. 9to5Macreports Apple has quietly discontinued the 21.5-inch iMac about half a year after introducing the M1 model. The company had been selling a lone dual-core model for $1,099 through a relatively hard-to-find page, but YouTube Tech God noticed that it disappeared sometime on October 29th.
We've asked Apple for comment on the move. The company has a long history of keeping legacy Macs around for a while before silently dropping them, but it seldom elaborates on those decisions. A notable exception came in March this year, when Apple confirmed it was winding down iMac Pro sales.
This won't thrill educational customers that may still want the 21.5-inch iMac for its relatively low price, small size and legacy ports. You'll have to buy at least a 27-inch iMac or a $1,099 legacy Mac mini if you're not ready to leap to Apple Silicon. This does signal Apple's confidence in its processors, though — it clearly believes its mainstream desktop customers are ready to make the switch.
Apple may have given us a glimpse of what the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros' insides look like, but it had a surprise waiting for the folks at iFixit nonetheless. The iFixit team said removing batteries from recent MacBook Pros required "infinite patience, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and an optional bottle of human-friendly alcohol." They expected the same from this generation of laptops but were pleasantly surprised by the presence of pull tabs instead when they tore down the new MacBook Pros.
The outer battery cells have noticeable pull tabs that you can, well, pull to detach them from their adhesive underneath. Even the central battery cells have pull tabs — they're just harder to find inside the laptop chassis beneath the trackpad. iFixit was able able to confirm that the laptops will recognize and work with battery replacements just fine.
In addition, most of the laptops' ports, except for the SD card reader and the HDMI port, are modular. That means they can be easily and cheaply replaced if they suddenly break or malfunction. Conversely, the laptops' keyboard will still be hard to replace, but hey, at least the days of Apple's butterfly keyboard are now over. You can watch iFixit's teardown process in the video below, and it also has more photos of the laptops insides on its website if you want to have a better look at their components. iFixit also took apart Apple's $19 polishing cloth, in case you're wondering what makes it more expensive that its typical counterparts.
This week, we tested out new flagship smartphones, high-powered laptops and much-improved earbuds. Devindra Hardawar reviewed the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros and reports back that they provide almost everything one could want out of a powerful laptop. Billy Steele spent time listening to the third-generation AirPods and concluded they sound much better than the previous version. And Cherlynn Low used Google’s Pixel 6 and 6 Pro and found that the camera-heavy handsets have a lot more to offer, including a great starting price.
Devindra Hardawar says the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros are precisely what media professionals have been waiting for: speedy M1 Pro and Max processors, a comfortable keyboard, serious battery life and great speakers. They also feature most of the crucial ports MacBooks have been missing for years, including (finally!) an SD card reader, though the laptops are thicker and heavier as a result. And of course, all that comes with a high starting price of $1,999.
Devindra was particularly impressed by the Liquid Retina XDR displays, which come close to 4K resolutions, and have mini-LED backlighting to produce up to 1,600 nits of brightness. He was also pleased to find support for 120Hz refresh rates, and by the benchmark testing in which both MacBook Pros blew away competing Windows PCs. However, while the laptops were able to speedily convert a 4K video clip to 1080p, Devindra doesn't think they'd make the best gaming machines — trying to load Borderlands 3 produced an unplayable mess. Overall though, he says these computers have practically everything one, especially a creative professional, would want in a powerful notebook — as long as you can stomach the price tag.
Apple’s latest AirPods have been almost completely redesigned from the previous version; the buds themselves have a new look, courtesy of the contoured shape which reduces weight and features a tapered silhouette and an angle to increase comfort. Billy Steele says the company’s efforts to build better AirPods have paid off: the new buds are more comfortable and and have much better audio quality, with bigger and more immersive sound that remained open and airy. That’s thanks to a custom driver paired with a high-dynamic-range amplifier, as well as the new H1 chip and the inward facing mic. Billy says these changes made the AirPods something he actively wanted to listen to music with.
The new AirPods also have an IPX4 rating so they’ll survive sweaty workouts or small splashes. They can also detect skin which, combined with the built-in accelerometer, makes for more accurate pausing and extends battery life. The new chip means you can listen to tracks in Dolby Atmos on Apple Music, and the spatial audio is available with dynamic head tracking to change the position of the audio when you turn your head. However, the latest AirPods still lack active noise cancellation and Transparency mode as these features are still reserved for the pricier AirPods Pro. While Billy acknowledges that these earbuds aren’t for everyone, he says they continue to offer Apple users features that are well integrated with iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Cherlynn Low says the newest Google phones — the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro — are the most intriguing phones that the company has made in years. Featuring the first Google mobile processor, Tensor, the two handsets also have improved camera hardware, lovely OLED screens, speedy refresh rates (120Hz for the 6 Pro, 90Hz for the 6), and decent speakers. Cherlynn says the best feature is the surprisingly low starting price — only $599 — which makes some of the drawbacks more forgivable.
One of the issues she had with the phones was the laggy under-screen fingerprint sensor, which requires the display to be on before it unlocked — a process that she says doesn’t need to have two steps. She was more impressed by the new voice keyboard, which did an excellent job of transcribing speech, and the additional camera features. The sensors are sharper and bigger with larger pixels, producing bright, clean photos — and special camera features, like Magic Eraser and Face Unblur, give users a lot of control over their photos. The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro excelled in our battery tests, too, lasting 20.5 hours and 17 hours, respectively. Overall, Cherlynn calls the handsets a superb return to form, showing off Google’s strengths in the software and photography departments.
November is right around the corner and, if you weren't already thinking about all of the gifts you have to buy this year, now's the time to start. Black Friday sales have started earlier than ever, and we anticipate more to come once November 1st hits. This week, we saw the updated AirPods Pro with the MagSafe wireless charging case drop to $220, while Samsung knocked hundreds off one of its high-end projectors. Blink home security cameras have hit near record-low prices and you can still grab a Shark robot vacuum for $150 off. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.
AirPods Pro (with MagSafe case)
Billy Steele / Engadget
Apple's updated AirPods Pro with the new MagSafe charging case are $30 cheaper right now, bringing them down to $220. The earbuds themselves have not changed, but now you'll be able to magnetically attach them to MagSafe wireless chargers. We gave them a score of 87 for their better fitting design, good ANC and handy Siri access.
Apple's latest MacBook Pros are already $50 less on Amazon even though they just became available this week. We gave the laptops a score of 92 for their excellent performance, lovely Liquid Retina XDR displays, good battery lives and new bevy of ports.
The 1TB 11-inch iPad Pro is $200 off right now, bringing it down to $1,300. It's still quite expensive, but with that much storage, this iPad could make a great laptop replacement with the right accessories. We gave the 2021 iPads a score of 87 for their powerful performance and new Center Stage cameras.
The second-generation Apple Pencil is on sale for $100 right now, which is an all-time-low price. It works with all iPads except for the latest 10.2-inch entry-level model, which still supports the first-gen stylus. It's a must-have if you plan on taking notes or creating artwork with your iPad.
Shark's AV970 robot vacuum is $150 off, bringing it down to a near record-low price of $250. It has a self-cleaning brush roll, IQ navigation and Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands, plus an extra-large bin that will hold more debris than other robo-vacs.
You can still grab a 55-inch The Frame smart TV for less than $1,000 in Samsung's latest early Black Friday sale. These TVs use Art Mode to show artwork and photos when you're not actively watching something, and they support 4K QLED set with 100 percent color volume, 4K AI upscaling and Alexa voice commands.
Samsung's high-end Premiere Projector is on sale for as low as $2,498. That's for the model with a 2.2 channel sound system, but the one with a 4.2.2 channel system is a whopping $1,500 off, bringing it down to $4,998. Both projectors support HDR10+ and up to 2,800 lumens of brightness, plus they both have separate red, green and blue lasers to cover the full Rec.2020 color range.
Amazon knocked up to 33 percent off Blink security cameras this week and you can still get a camera for as low as $25. Blink Outdoor and Indoor cameras are wireless and support 1080p video, motion detection, two-way audio and Alexa commands. If you plan on watching over the outside of your home, the weatherproof Outdoor cameras as they ones to get.
Arturia has a promotion going on right now that gives you three plugins for free when you buy a MiniLab MkII, KeyLab Essential or KeyLab MkII controller. The plugins themselves are worth over $400, so they're solid freebies to grab if you're already set on getting one of the company's devices.
NordVPN, one of our favorite VPNs, is running a sale on a two-year subscription. You can sign up and pay $99 for two years, plus you'll get an extra three months free. We like NordVPN for its speed, its no-logs policy, the thousands of servers it has to choose from and that one account supports up to six connected devices.
Another one of our top VPN services, Tunnelbear, is offering a two-year subscription for $100. You'll save 58 percent if you sign up with this deal, and we think Tunnelbear is one of the easiest VPNs to use, especially for those that don't want to go crazy configuring their connections.
If you've been holding out for a better price on a high storage capacity iPad Pro, Amazon may have you covered. The latest 11-inch iPad Pro with 1TB of storage is $200 off right now, bringing it down to $1,299. That's the best price we've seen and $100 cheaper than its previous low.
There are very few differences between this year's 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros. The larger model has Apple's new Liquid Retina XDR display, which will improve your video-watching experience. But just because the 11-inch model doesn't have the latest display tech doesn't mean it has a paltry screen. You're still getting a 2,388 x 1668 resolution Liquid Retina panel with ProMotion and True Tone technology, which is to say, it's still a lovely screen.
Otherwise, the 2021 iPad Pros are much the same. Both run on M1 processors, giving them powerful performance and making them the best laptop alternatives Apple has made yet. They also have 5G support, a USB-C port that double as a Thunderbolt connector with USB 4.0 compatibility and new Center Stage cameras. The latter works to keep you in the center of the frame when on video calls, and that will make a big difference whether you're on a Zoom meeting or just FaceTiming with your family.
Most people probably don't need 1TB of space, but it'll be useful if you're a creative professional using the iPad Pro for both work and play, or someone who wants to ditch their old laptop for a hybrid device. Paired with the right accessories, this iPad Pro would make a solid laptop replacement.
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Canon has unveiled the PowerShot PX, a stationary camera that uses facial recognition and auto-subject search to automatically capture 11.7-megapixel images or 1080p60 video. It's based on the PowerShot Pick, an experimental, crowdfunded camera that was released only in Japan.
The PowerShot PX has pan-and-tilt functionality (340 degrees horizontally and 110 degrees vertically) and a 19-57mm (35mm equivalent) focal length range. The idea is that you you can place it a strategic spot, like on a table during a family picnic, for example. The camera can then scan the scene, find people's faces and automatically determine the best moment to capture a photo. "The best photos aren't always the posed smiles.... the PowerShot PX captures a huge range of looks and precious reactions that you might not capture," Canon wrote.
It can frame subjects "intelligently to capture natural expressions and reactions," Canon says. You can also prioritize specific faces, like if it's someone's birthday. In theory, that would allow you to enjoy a gathering without the need to break away and take photos, knowing that it will be done automatically. You can also grab photos manually via an app or voice control.
Following an event, you can use the PowerShot PX's iOS or Android apps to get recommendations on the best photos to keep. Those are then stored on a memory card, where they can be uploaded to a computer. It supports WiFi and Bluetooth for smartphone connections, so you can control images with no need to check the device, Canon said. It can also double as a webcam via Canon's webcam utility app. (It runs on batteries with charging via USB-C.)
The PowerShot PX is coming to Europe and the UK in November 2021 for £500/€500 (around $585). There's no word yet on a release to North America or elsewhere.
For most of this year, Facebook has been talking about its plans for the metaverse, pledging to lose a lot of money in order to bolster its ambitions in the space. Yesterday, the company announced that it would rebrand its corporate identity to “Meta” in order to double down on this commitment. (And, you know, the other reason.) The metaverse, as Meta describes it, “is a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences using technologies like virtual and augmented reality.” Given the number of companies who are now starting to talk about the metaverse in very real terms, we have to answer one, very obvious question: What the Hell is a metaverse?
Everything that follows is, to a certain extent, meant to be read with the right number of ahs, ahems, polite coughs and other caveats. After all, a number of companies have started using the term in order to bask in the reflected glory thrown out by the metaverse hype train. Much like “Web 2.0,” “The metaverse” has a loosey-goosey definition that is being used to define whatever is coming next for the internet. A virtual world that mirrors our own? Metaverse. A way to buy and sell NFTs of Elon Musk dressed as a dog? Metaverse. A new way of creating commerce and communications? Metaverse. It’s likely that when we look back at the metaverse a decade or two from now, should it actually happen, it’ll look vastly different to what its boosters predict.
In his Founders Letter, CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” He goes on to talk about how “in this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.” And then cites the benefits of that, including a reduced carbon footprint and less time stuck in traffic.
The easiest and most obvious point of comparison is the metaverse as represented in pop culture. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (where the term originates), Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix are all examples of this virtual, digital-world-that-actually-mirrors-our-own. Those with (long) internet memories will recall projects like Second Life, which promised to do this sort of thing 18 years ago. And some folks have suggested that Roblox and Fortnite, which are both games and virtual spaces where stuff other than games takes place, are forms of metaverse.
Meta’s interest is clear as a way of building out its work in the virtual space through its acquisition of Oculus. Sir Nick Clegg, who after his political defenestration and inexplicable Knighting became Facebook’s vice president of Global Affairs and Communications in 2018, wrote that the metaverse is designed to create a “greater sense of ‘virtual presence.’” The Guardian reported that Clegg claims to use Meta’s virtual presence service, Horizon Workrooms, to take his “Monday morning meetings in the metaverse with a virtual table and whiteboard.” You may be thinking, then, that the metaverse will be little more than Zoom but with a requirement to spend more to own some pricey VR gear.
Alexandru Voica, Meta’s Technology Communications Manager in Europe, says that a better way to understand the metaverse is as “the next evolution of the internet.” He used the video call we were on as an example of something that the metaverse could hopefully improve. “We’re meeting in this 2D video call, and it’s great compared to a phone call but it’s not as good as if we were sitting together [in the real world],” he said, “The idea is, how can you take this interaction and get it as close to you and I being together [in a public space].” He added that the metaverse wasn’t envisioned as supplanting real-world connections, but to make virtual experiences more lifelike.
Voica added that these virtual engagements will feel a lot more real with the use of technologies like VR, AR and spatial audio. When you have a series of boxes on a Zoom screen, for instance, it’s harder for your brain to process all of that information at once. In the virtual world, with people’s audio directed toward you from wherever their avatar is sitting, it’s easier for you to engage.
Some of this feeds back to Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Next Decade’ manifesto from the start of 2020, where improvements in AR and VR technology will better empower remote work. Obviously that was before COVID-19 made remote work a necessity for millions of people, and before it became one of the defining culture-war non-issues this year.
Another common frame of reference is Matthew Ball’s essay on what a metaverse is from January 2020. At the time, he said that any metaverse would be a persistent and synchronous virtual environment with its own economy. Ball added that the metaverse would enable “would-be laborers” to “participate in the ‘high value’ economy via virtual labor.” He cited the practice of Gold Farming — where players of a large MMO in a low-wage country works for hours to earn large amounts of virtual currency (or goods) which they then sell on to other players for real-world cash — as a current example of this “virtual labor.”
Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images
Ball went on to say that the metaverse would also offer “unprecedented interoperability of data.” A user would be able to move objects freely between worlds, like being able to take a skin for a gun in Counter-Strike and carry it over to Fortnite. To be honest, the idea that games publishers would agree to the free-sharing of their intellectual property, with all the lost profits that would entail, is the most unbelievable idea in the document.
But even Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney is open to the idea of some cross-communication in some form or another. This July, Sweeney told The New York Times that said a “tunnel” could exist between, in this example, the virtual worlds of Roblox and Fortnite. What’s not clear, however, is what a user could take from one end of that tunnel to the other beyond their own, custom-designed avatar.
Voica says that this cross-sharing of IP will be vital to ensuring the success of the metaverse. He used the example of a user buying a designer jacket, as a digital item which could be worn by their avatar as they went about their day. That item doesn’t have any value if you’re only able to wear it in the specific designer’s own virtual world. “It would be like buying a Manchester United shirt and only being able to wear it inside Manchester United’s stadium,” he said. And he believes that consumers wouldn’t buy into a system with such a limitation, saying that “people don’t want to be locked in.”
There’s also a line of thinking that a metaverse will actually describe the unification of the digital and real worlds. AR glasses that overlay a rich data set onto the street as you go about your day, outsourcing tasks from your own brain. That will, naturally, require smart glasses with transparent displays capable of actually reproducing this data in a useful manner. Not to mention a quantum leap in computer vision, data processing and battery life to make it viable for whole-day use. This, of course, will also require a dramatic shift in how we view privacy in public and private spaces a decade on from the privacy objections raised when Google Glass was briefly en vogue.
This September, The Washington Post interviewed Sima Sistani, the co-founder of Houseparty who now works for Epic Games. They said that the metaverse would be the thing that replaces Social Media to suck away all of our free time. Sistani believes that, unlike now, where people simply create images and post status updates, the next generation will enjoy collaborative experiences with one another. And that the next generation of content creators will create fresh experiences for the rest of us to enjoy, once we’ve paid for them.
One of the things that is kinda/sorta clear, at least from the metaverse’s boosters, is that the platform won’t be owned by a single person or company. Instead, it will — hopefully — operate much like the internet does now, with multiple providers offering infrastructure to build a cohesive whole. Or at least, that’s the theory, and there’s the additional hope that decentralized technologies will help reduce the potential for a single arbiter to rule over this new frontier.
Projects like Decentraland, its own virtual environment, are already working on this principle, with its economy running on Ethereum’s blockchain. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, Decentraland’s market has already seen real-world brokers buying up parcels of virtual real estate. And there are already art shows and casinos in operation inside Decentraland, all of which can be tied to some form of digital commerce. This is sadly at-odds with the potential for a post-scarcity digital utopia that a metaverse could theoretically foster.
Pop-culture descriptions of metaverses commonly present them less as a social good and more as a symptom of impending collapse. Even the reference onanism that is Ready Player One shows a world that has slid into economic, social and environmental decline. When asked about the metaverse, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel cited Snow Crash’s “virtual world created by an evil monopolist.” Not long after, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey agreed that Neal Stephenson’s novel was intended as a warning, rather than a guide. [An aside, in Snow Crash, poor users accessing the metaverse through a public terminal are rendered in monochrome, and are derided by the wider society as a consequence — something that was replicated in the real-world by Fortnite players who bullied “Default” players who didn’t buy custom skins for their avatars.]
Now, Meta believes enough in the metaverse that it’s hoisted its flag, and fortune, to the idea for the next few years. And it’s hard to think that, however convenient, its metaversal ambitions are a smokescreen for the very real issues the platform is currently facing. Titles like Roblox and Fortnite provide a vague sense of how a persistent, universal online world could hold the attention of users for thousands of hours, but those are for now curated experiences. And projects like Decentraland offer a hint as to how a virtual economy would function, but nothing yet gives us a cohesive grand narrative of the metaverse which can show us where it’s going. In many ways, companies like Meta are trying to put together this jigsaw without much of an idea of what it’s going to look like when it’s finished.
While Facebook the social network is still Facebook, the overarching company that it created is now called Meta. Facebook Inc. is changing its name in order to distinguish its myriad parts from the social network, which has an increasingly poor reputation pretty much everywhere. Particularly in the last few weeks.
While the company hopes it’ll offer some degree of distraction from current sentiment (and political focus), it’s not going to stop people talking about Facebook Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name during his keynote for the company’s Connect event. He said: "From now on, we're going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook first."
The change appears very similar to how Google, the search and tech part, was bundled inside Alphabet — a bigger company to contain all the other parts.
The timing is, perhaps, even odder. The Facebook Papers — internal documents detailing the social network’s major failings and issues — encompassing misinformation, hate speech and censorship, are now public knowledge. Is this a distraction or Facebook wilfully forcing its own transformation at a time when most of us are more interested in how it’s going to fix its current state.
If I don’t want to use Facebook — why would I want to use its take on VR and the metaverse?
Facebook Portal will also be known as Meta Portal moving forward.
Following the above announcement, a Facebook post from incoming CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth revealed that Meta is retiring the Oculus brand. Beginning in early 2022, the Oculus Quest will instead be known as the Meta Quest. Similarly, the Oculus App will be called Meta Quest App. According to Bosworth, the intention is "to make clear" to consumers Quest is a Meta product. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make," Bosworth said. The name is trickling down to other physical products. Facebook Portal will also become Meta Portal.
Teenage Engineering is best known for its synths, but it likes to explore other avenues, from designing wireless buds to games consoles and even an IKEA collaboration. It has announced an ITX PC case it’s calling the Computer-1. The company says it has been working on the design since 2014. “It’s not a ground-breaking PC case, but we like it, and use it every day,” TE says on its website. Alas, iIt’s currently sold out, but you can sign up to get a notification once it is available — which is what I just did.
The company just reported its results for the quarter ending on September 30th, and Apple made 29 percent more revenue than a year ago — that's $83.4 billion, for those keeping track. While iPhone sales made up almost 47 percent of Apple's total revenue. While Mac revenue was only up two percent, that was just enough for Apple to say it was a new all-time high for the Mac.
A boost in third-party games helped offset a drop in first-party sales.
Sony's PlayStation 5 sales remain relatively steady and strong, despite widespread supply shortages, with 3.3 million units sold in fiscal Q2 compared to 2.2 million last quarter. That brought total sales up to 13.4 million units, Sony announced. Game sales were also up significantly at 76.4 million units compared to 63.6 million in the previous quarter. The company has already stated that it has enough components for 22.6 million units to be sold by March 2022. That would be enough to meet its sales projections, but if sales really explode during the holidays, that could mean shortages could continue.
Bloomberg has published an image showing a Facebook/Meta smartwatch with rounded corners. It also has a notch with a front-facing camera. App developer Steve Moser found the image inside the company's app used to control its Ray-Ban Stories AR sunglasses, hinting that it could also be used to control the watch in the future.
Meta — that is, the company formerly known as Facebook — may be developing a smartwatch that can take photos and videos. Bloomberg has published an image showing a smartwatch with rounded corners similar to the Apple Watch, except it also has a notch with a front-facing camera. App developer Steve Moser found the image inside the company's app used to control its Ray-Ban Stories AR sunglasses, hinting that it could also be used to control the watch in the future.
Meta
In addition to having rounded corners and a camera, the smartwatch appears to have a stainless steel casing and detachable straps. Moser also says that the code inside the app indicates that the watch could be called Milan and that it could allow for the photos and videos you captured with it to be downloaded on a phone.
According to Bloomberg, Meta is hoping to launch a smartwatch as early as 2022, but nothing has been finalized yet. Further, Facebook's parent company is reportedly already working on three generations of product that will be released at different times. It's not clear if the device shown in the image is one of those, or if it will even be released at all. The Verge also reported earlier this year, though, that Facebook is working on a smartwatch with a front-facing and a 1080p rear camera with autofocus. It could have a heart rate monitor and LTE connectivity, as well, though those features could be distributed across the three different models.
