Tesla has long hidden hints in its code that it's giving owners live view access to its EVs' Autopilot cameras — now, the automaker is finally rolling out the feature. Its latest software update includes a feature called Sentry Mode Live Camera Access, which will allow owners to remotely view their car's surroundings when parked. Sentry Mode is Tesla's integrated surveillance system that uses a 360 dash cam to record damage and any attempted break-in. It has resulted to arrests of people who attempted to steal Teslas in the past, but owners haven't been able to use it to view their car's current surroundings until now.

In its update notes, Tesla says the live camera function is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be accessed by the company. To enable or disable it, owners need to go under Safety & Security in Controls. According to Electrek, however, owners must have an active Premium Connectivity subscription to activate live view. The subscription package gives them access to satellite maps and live traffic visualizations, as well as media streaming and web browsing on data. It does cost $10 a month, but owners can sign up for free trial before paying for the service.

At this point in time, live camera is only available to iOS users who can view the footage around their cars via Tesla's app. The automaker has unfortunately yet to announce when its Android app will also get the capability.

As promised at WWDC earlier this year, Apple today will start letting developers highlight their in-app events on the App Store. You'll need iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 to see the event listings, and they work as you'd expect, allowing you to see seasonal competitions, livestreams and more. It's a pretty straightforward feature, but it's the sort of thing that could encourage more people to install and use their apps. 

Hopefully, developers won't rely on it as a spammy way to rack up engagement. Many mobile gamers would love to know when they can log on for special item drops, for example. And if you encounter a particularly intriguing upcoming event, you can also create a notification or calendar reminder of when it begins. You'll also be able to share events to get your friends on board too.

Olympus cameras are getting a new name. Parent company OM Digital has chosen OM System as the brand's new moniker.

There are still some Olympus cameras on the market and those won't be rebranded, so the two names will co-exist for a while. But eventually the old name will fade away as OM System introduces new models and phases out the current ones.

In addition to cameras and lenses, OM System plans to sell audio products, binoculars and other services. It's currently developing a Micro Four Thirds-based interchangeable lens camera. OM Digital plans to make more compact and lightweight systems using that standard while "accelerating the improvement of image quality and photographic expression through the use of computational photographic technology," according to a press release.

Olympus finalized the sale of its imaging division to Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) at the start of the year. JIP swiftly spun out OM Digital Solutions as a separate company to oversee Olympus (now OM System) cameras.

Amazon's first in-house TVs may be showcases for Alexa, but that isn't precluding the company from supporting someone else's ecosystem. According to The Verge, Amazon has unveiled plans to add support for Apple's AirPlay 2 and HomeKit to both higher-end Omni and budget 4-series Fire TV sets now that they're available. You can use AirPlay 2 to cast content from your iPhone, iPad or Mac, but the HomeKit integration may be the most notable — yes, you can use Siri to control an Amazon TV as part of your wider smart home network. Amazon would only say the support was coming "soon."

The TVs themselves start at $370 for the 4-series, which provide the usual Fire TV integrations along with 4K and HDR support in sizes ranging from 43 inches to 55 inches. Omni sets, meanwhile, deliver Alexa-friendly far-field microphones and (on the two largest models) Dolby Vision HDR. They start at $410 and range from 43 inches to 75 inches.

The expansion isn't a complete shock. Insignia- and Toshiba-made Fire TV Edition sets received AirPlay and HomeKit support in July. We'd add that Apple and Amazon are relatively cozy. Amazon Echo speakers have streamed Apple Music since 2018, for instance, while Prime Video integrates with the Apple TV app. Amazon has a strong incentive to include AirPlay and HomeKit, if just to fend off competition from Android TV and sets that rely on Google Assistant.

As The Verge observed, though, there's no mention of either Apple platform coming to add-on media players like the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. For now, you'll have to buy hardware like the Apple TV or modern Roku devices to bring AirPlay and HomeKit to TVs where they aren't built-in.

iOS 15.1 was released yesterday, which means you can finally start checking out Apple's long-awaited SharePlay feature. After seeing how buggy it was on the iOS 15 beta, I was able to check out SharePlay this week during a briefing with Apple, and the experience was surprisingly smooth. Though SharePlay works with just a small collection of apps at the moment, it's also coming soon to Disney+, while the NBA and TikTok apps will be updated today to support it. I watched a few videos and a Milwaukee Bucks game via these apps on my demo, and beyond being impressed by how much more stable everything is since the beta, I also found some tips particularly useful.

Setup and starting a SharePlay session

First, make sure you and your friends all update your devices to iOS 15.1 or iPadOS 15.1. Just like we observed in the beta, you need to start a FaceTime call before you can SharePlay anything. Once you're on a call, open a supported app and you'll see an alert at the top of the screen asking if you want to stream your content. When you start a session, your callers will see a box pop up at the top of the screen to join you. 

For the most part, everyone you're SharePlaying with will need to have the relevant apps installed (i.e. TikTok, HBO Max, Showtime, Paramount, Apple TV etc). In some cases, they'll also need to have a subscription or at least an account. 

While you watch a show together, anyone on the call can pause, skip forward or rewind, and that will bring everyone to the same point on the stream. As you watch something, FaceTime will run in picture-in-picture mode on top of your display, and whoever on your call is talking will appear in that box. 

Share your screen

If you want to share your screen instead of watching a show, though, you'll need to tap on the screen while on your FaceTime call to pull up the commands panel and press the button on the right that resembles a person in front of a rectangle. 

While you're sharing your screen, your friend can pinch to zoom on what you're showing them. But during a screen share session, your alerts (or other notices that pop up) won't appear on their screen, in case there's sensitive info you don't want others seeing. The pill on the top left of your screen will also turn purple to let remind you you're screen-sharing. 

When I was watching someone share their screen, by the way, I could still go back to my own phone and open another app. FaceTime's picture-in-picture tile showed my caller's screen with their face in an embedded picture-in-picture. Inception!

Other features

The controls box also lets you access the iMessage window for everyone on the call. You can continue to watch a game on the NBA app with your family without your camera or mic on, and send texts instead. That's particularly helpful when you need a toilet break when a game runs long.

Apple also built a feature called smart volume to automatically lower the streaming audio when you're speaking so everyone can hear you. This works best with AirPods, but it'll also work with your device's speaker.

Depending on each app's developers, other tools can be embedded to make them more useful. In Apple Music, for example, you can look at the song's lyrics as they play in real time, and tapping on a specific lyric will bring you and your callers to that point in the track. When you're all on TikTok together, each person can like the videos they want, too. The popular game Heads Up will also be coming to SharePlay so you can guess the word on your face while your friends act it out for you. 

SharePlay works with iPhones, iPads and Apple TVs, and most playback features are the same across Apple's ecosystem. Those with Apple Watches will also be able to use this feature for group workouts or meditations on Fitness+ with up to 32 callers. So far, SharePlay works with just a few apps, but as more developers integrate it, iOS users could find more ways to socialize and digitally gather with loved ones soon.

In case there wasn't enough news this week, Google is revealing a new version of Android that's designed for larger screens like tablets and foldables. It's called Android 12L, and is really just a set of new features for the existing OS that are optimized for big screens. The developer preview is available today as an SDK on Google's site so app makers can begin taking in some of the new features that should make for a more cohesive experience on devices with bigger displays. The public version of 12L will arrive early next year, "in time for the next wave of Android 12 tablets and foldables," the company said. The preview will also be "coming soon to the Lenovo P12 Pro."

While Android already supports a sort of multi-window experience, there are still areas of the interface that feel more like a blown up version of a phone OS, rather than something that makes better use of the increased space. One of the things coming to Android 12L is a two-column layout for the notification shade and lockscreen when the system detects that the screen is above 600dps wide. Google said other system surfaces and apps will adopt this look too, though it didn't specify which yet. 

Android 12L will also feature a taskbar at the bottom of larger screens that will let you more easily open apps. This will also simplify the process of launching things in split-screen mode: just drag and drop an icon from the taskbar. Google is also enabling all apps to run in split screen, regardless of whether they are resizable. 

Google

Cosmetically, Google is also adding tools that let developers make their apps look better in various windows or views. They'll be able to use custom letterbox colors or treatments, apply custom rounded corners and adjust the position of inset windows. 

The above features are already available for preview in the developer software, but there are also changes coming that app creators have to apply for users to experience them. Google recommends that developers create versions of their UI tailored to the window size class of each device, and it's added reference devices for programmers to see their layouts across phones, tablets, foldable's larger internal displays and desktops. 

For devices that can fold, Android 12L will offer an API that will allow developers to make their apps aware of hinges or other boundaries, and use them "as natural separators." This means that when supported, you might be able to use an app like Kindle and have it show a two-column layout when your device is folded and expand to fullscreen when you open your phone completely flat.

Google is also adding ways to make adopting this easier for developers with a new Activity embedding tool and other updates in the Jetpack Window Manager library. The interface will be backward-compatible, so those using older versions of Android can still use apps that are optimized for 12L. 

Google

The company is also releasing its Material You design system to Jetpack Compose, so that developers can add the adaptive theming capabilities to their apps. This means that, when supported, third-party apps can also take on the color scheme that Google derived from your wallpaper, and buttons or menu highlight hues can reflect the palette for a more cohesive look throughout Android 12. 

Finally, to give developers a reason (or disincentive) to get their apps optimized for Android 12L, Google is updating the Play Store. It will check each app against its large screen app quality guidelines and take the results into ranking and search listing considerations. It'll go even further by warning people on bigger devices with notices on an app's Play Store page if it's not been optimized for 12L. 

Android has long faced criticism over being a poor OS for tablets and bigger displays, and 12L does appear promising. Google also announced some updates to make it easier for developers to code for WearOS, including offering Jetpack Compose support for the platform. It looks like the company is working hard to improve areas that it's been behind Apple on, and we'll have to see how developers take to these changes to know if Google's tablet, foldable and smartwatch dreams might succeed.

Hinge is the latest dating app that's making a push into audio. Starting today, users can attach voice clips to profiles, in what's said to be a first for a major dating app. You can also send audio notes to your matches.

You can add an audio clip to your profile by going to the Edit Profile section of the settings and selecting Voice Prompt. You can choose a prompt (a question or comment suggested by the app to highlight something about you) and respond with a 30-second recording. “This is just the beginning of a lot of things that we’ll see come out over the next six to 12 months that really help people tell a richer story in their profiles,” Hinge CEO Justin McLeod told CNBC.

Hinge

Some users might find it easier to get to know matches through voice messages rather than text. Many dating apps have added video and audio features, particularly after the onset of COVID-19 made in-person dating more difficult. 

Rival dating app Bumble has allowed would-be lovebirds to send audio messages to each other since April 2020, while Tinder started allowing users to add videos to their profiles this summer. Hinge, however, has had the latter feature since 2017.

Hinge is introducing more features for LGBTQ+ users too. As of Thursday, the app will introduce a non-binary gender category to its algorithm. McLeod noted that although other apps let users identify as non-binary, they typically require those users to say whether they want their profile to be seen by people looking for men or women. Prompts designed for LGBTQ+ users will also be added in November.

We've been hearing about Intel's powerful hybrid chips for so long, they've achieved almost mythical status. The idea behind them is intriguing: they feature both performance-cores (P-cores) and and efficient-cores (E-cores) on a single die, giving you chips that can be beefy and a bit more power-conscious, depending on the task. Previously, all of Intel's CPU cores were pretty much the same, which led to the energy-hungry designs we've seen over the last few years. 

Now the company is ready to launch those chips, previously codenamed "Alder Lake," as its 12th-gen desktop processors. And maybe, just maybe, it'll be able to steal the spotlight back from AMD and Apple.

In addition to their hybrid configuration, these 12th-gen chips are also the first under the "Intel 7" process technology, which was previously seen as a refined 10nm design. When Intel revised its product roadmap in July with new names, it seemed to just be steering us away from its 7nm delays. But the performance of these 12th-gen chips may be enough to justify the new branding.

Intel

Intel is throwing some major numbers around: it says 12th-gen chips are up to 19 percent faster than 11th-gen CPUs overall, and they're twice as fast in the Adobe After Effects Pulse benchmark. When it comes to multithreaded performance (tasks built specifically for more than one core, like video and 3D rendering), the company claims the top-end i9-12900K is 50 percent faster than last year's 11900K while using less power. And even better, it can achieve performance parity while using only around a quarter of the power. Basically, everyone who held off on upgrading over the last few years is in for a treat, as these chips promise to be a big leap forward.

Intel's 12th-gen Core chips can fit in up to 16 cores on the i9-12900K. That's a combination of 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores, with a total of 24 process threads (every P-core counts double, since they support hyper-threading, but the E-cores don't). Given that this is an entirely new way of designing its chips, the company also worked together to develop a new Thread Director with Microsoft, which intelligently assigns tasks to the appropriate core. That way you don't have to manually assign a background thread to an E-core, or start mucking about your settings once you start working on concurrent tasks. (If the hybrid core design seems familiar, it's because ARM has been pushing something similar for the past decade with its big.LITTLE technology on mobile CPUs.)

Intel

Intel claims P-cores can perform up to 28 percent faster than its 10th-gen Comet Lake S chips in single-threaded performance. The E-cores, meanwhile, are just as fast as the 10th-gen hardware on their own. As you'd expect, these chips shine best when you're throwing serious workloads at them. Intel says the i9-12900K can get around up to 84 percent higher framerates while playing Mount and Blade II and streaming over OBS, compared to the previous generation chip. Similarly, it's 47 percent faster while multi-tasking with Adobe Lightroom Classic and Premiere Pro.

Intel

Intel's figures sound impressive when compared to its own hardware, but the company also noted that its Ryzen benchmarks were run before AMD and Microsoft deployed Windows 11 updates to fix some performance bugs. At the time of its testing, the i9-12900K appeared to have a commanding lead over the Ryzen 5950X in many games, like Troy: A Total War Saga and Grid 2019. But it'll be interested to see what those numbers look like now. And of course, AMD could easily come back with speedier hardware of its own early next year.

The new 12th-gen chips are also looking towards the future, with support for up to 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and DDR5-4800 RAM. Intel's new 600-series chipset will feature PCIe 4.0 support, integrated WiFi 6E, and an updated Direct Media Interface (DMI) that'll offer "double and faster bandwidth between the chipset and the processor." There's also support for up to 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports, as well as far more USB 3.2 Gen 2 connections in general.

As you'd expect, it'll cost a bit more to jump into Intel's 12th-gen chips. The Core i9-12900K will go for $589, compared to the 11900K's $539 to $549 price range. You could always save $20 or so by getting the "KF" chip without onboard graphics, but in general I'd recommend keeping graphics in case your GPU gets fried. The more approachable Core i7-12700K, thankfully, hasn't budged from its predecessor's $409 price, while the Core i5-12600K is around $20 more than before if you want onboard graphics.

The real question for Intel is how this new hardware stacks up against what AMD and Apple have coming. Benchmark leaks suggest that the i9-12900K is faster than Apple's M1 Max chip, but that's also a power-sipping laptop part. A faster, desktop-focused chip from Apple would likely leave Intel lagging behind again. Still, this uncertainty is a good thing for the PC industry as a whole. Now we've got several companies producing powerful processors. Their attempts to one-up should ultimately be a very good thing for consumers.

Spotify isn't the only service PlayStation 5 owners can stream music from while they're playing Deathloop, Returnal or other games. Starting today, you can fire up tracks from Apple Music as well.

The PS5 is the first console with Apple Music integration. Subscribers can access the service's library of more than 90 million songs, playlists, Apple Music Radio and 4K music videos on a PS5. You can control playback while playing games by hitting the PS button on the controller and going to the music tab. You'll also see music recommendations for the game you're playing.

The Apple Music app (which you can download via the Media section) will let you view music videos too. If you're watching a video and leave the app to switch to a game or another screen, the music will keep playing. 

It's the second Apple app to hit the console after Apple TV landed on PS4 and PS5 last year. This summer, Sony and Apple offered PS5 owners six months of free access to Apple TV+.

Spotify has been a part of the PlayStation ecosystem since it arrived on PS4 in 2015. Six years later, it's neat to see players getting another option for streaming music. It'll be a nice perk for Apple Music subscribers who've managed to score a PS5.

More than two years after announcing the Osmo Action, DJI is back with a new rugged camera that not only drops the Osmo name but also adopts a fresh new design. The Action 2 features a 155-degree field of view lens and 12-megapixel sensor that can capture 4K footage at up to 120 frames per second, and 240 frames per second slow-motion video at 1080p. In 2021, that’s not impressive for an action camera when you consider GoPro’s latest top-end model, the Hero 10 Black, can do 5.3K at 60 frames per second and 240 frames per second at 2.7K. So what makes Action 2 into something interesting? It’s all about the form factor.

DJI

DJI’s latest device weighs just under two ounces and includes a magnetic mounting system you can use to expand the functionality of the camera. We’ve seen companies like Insta360 pull off similar designs, but DJI’s execution looks particularly handy. Want to add a front-facing display to make the Action 2 into a vlogging camera? You can with a touchscreen module that adds a secondary OLED display and three additional microphones to the camera, as well as allows you to record up to 160 minutes of footage without stopping. A separate battery module extends the Action 2’s battery life from 70 minutes to three hours and adds an extra microSD slot. Other accessories allow you to mount the camera to a floating handle, a 3-in-1 extension rod and a lanyard, among other things.

Other nifty features include a dedicated sensor that can help the camera produce accurate color tones in challenging lighting conditions and underwater. A feature called SnapShot allows you to turn on the device and start recording right away by holding down the power button. It also comes with all of DJI’s usual camera features, including the ability to double as a web camera and capture time-lapses.

The Action 2 is available to buy today from DJI’s website. The company isn’t selling the camera on its own. Instead, you can either buy it as part of either a $399 or $519 bundle. The former comes with the aforementioned battery module while the latter includes the touchscreen accessory. Both bundles also come with a variety of mounts.