Now might be a good time to buy Apple's AirTags if you need more than one or two. Woot is selling a four-pack of the item trackers for $95, a rare dip below the usual $100 price. That breaks down to $23.75 per tag, and could make this tempting if you have multiple items you can't afford to lose. Just remember that Woot's return policy is stricter than Amazon's.
AirTags are only useful in the Apple ecosystem, but promise a few advantages over trackers from Tile and other rivals. On top of fast setup, ultra-wideband support offers precision finding (with iPhone 11 and newer) when you're close — you'll know just which couch cushion is hiding your keys. You'll also have an item-locating network that spans virtually all Apple device users, increasing the chances of finding a missing bag or wallet.
There are catches, of course. Android users need not apply, and the lack of a hole means you'll be buying an accessory to clip the AirTag to a keychain or backpack. The year-long battery life will also require that you keep a load of watch batteries on hand. If you don't see yourself leaving the Apple ecosystem any time soon, though, AirTags are a reasonably safe bet.
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We’ll get into why Facebook saw its entire business fall off a cliff on Monday, but first: e-readers.
It’s a device category we don’t see much development in — probably because it’s very much a device for reading text and not much else. Amazon’s Kindle, thanks to its powerful online e-book store, generally has the category sewn up, with several e-reader options from luxe to sometimes-$60 slates.
But I love an underdog — and most things with an e-ink display. Like this and this.
So I have time for Kobo's new $260 Sage e-reader, which lets you add handwritten notes with a stylus. It has an 8-inch 1,440 x 1,920 e-ink screen that adjusts brightness and color depending on the time of day. You can also convert to plain text your handwritten e-notes made on e-books and PDFs and send them to other devices — a feature Kobo already offered on its larger and more expensive $399 Elipsa.
If you’re looking for an e-reader that doesn’t have Amazon hooks — or you need to take notes on your e-books — you can pre-order the Sage now. It starts shipping on October 19th.
Following the massive service outage that took out all of its services, Facebook has published a blog post detailing what happened. According to Santosh Janardhan, the company's vice president of infrastructure, the outage started with what should have been routine maintenance.
A command was issued that was supposed to assess the availability of the backbone network that connects all of Facebook’s disparate computing facilities. Instead, the order unintentionally took all those connections down. Matters were made worse because the outage made it impossible for Facebook engineers to connect to the servers they needed to fix.
The Surface Pro 8 addresses many of the issues we had with the Pro 7, including a gorgeous premium design. Editor-in-Chief Dana Wollman put the hybrid device through its paces, and she particularly loved the 120Hz display.
But the starting price ($1,100) is higher than its predecessor — still not including a keyboard. That makes it tougher to justify picking the Surface Pro 8 over a comparably priced laptop. Especially at a time when there are so many excellent options to choose from.
Oh, we’re not done. Microsoft’s Laptop Studio was also in for review. Devindra Hardawar tested it out, and he believes the Surface Laptop Studio is a solid successor to the Surface Book. While it’s faster than the Book 3, and it has a gorgeous, flexible screen, it’s oddly lacking in sheer CPU power compared to the competition. He explains all in his full review.
The three main Kingdom Hearts games are coming to Nintendo Switch. You'll be able to play Kingdom Hearts - HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue and Kingdom Hearts III. They're all cloud streaming games on Switch, so you'll need a good internet connection to play them. The news came off the back of the announcement that Kingdom Hearts protagonist, Sora, will be final character to join Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Sora means ‘sky’ in Japanese, so there’s some irony in the game series being streamed from the cloud.
Find out all about the company's latest flagship phones.
The company plans to reveal everything there is to know about the Pixel 6 lineup on October 19th at 1 PM ET. Months ago, the company spilled some info on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, including what the phones look like. In August, Google said Tensor, the first system-on-chip it designed, will feature in the new additions to the Pixel series.
Expect some substantial camera upgrades, with the Pixel 6 Pro packing 4x optical zoom and an additional telephoto option. In comparison, Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro tops out at 3x optical zoom.
Nokia has a rich history of, well, interesting tablets like the iPad knockoff N1, but has only released smartphones since the brand was purchased by HMD Global. Now, HMD/Nokia have launched their first tablet together, the 10.4-inch T20, with the key features being a large battery, cheap price and US availability.
The T20 isn't what you'd call a beautiful tablet, given the plain-Jane design and chunky bezels, though it does have a solid metal body structure and relatively thin (7.8mm) and light (470g) profile. The screen also looks pretty nice on paper, with 2K (2,000 x 1,200) resolution and 400 nits of brightness.
Nokia
The key feature is the battery, though. With an 8,200mAh (non-removable) cell, it will let you surf the web for 15 hours between charges, play video for 10 hours or do Zoom-type calls for seven hours. It also comes with relatively fast charging (15 watts), though the charger in the box outputs just 10 watts.
Other specs are about what you'd expect for a tablet in this price category, including a Tiger T610 8-core CPU, up to 4GB of RAM/64GB of storage (expandable), and an 8-megapixel rear camera/5-megapixel front camera. There's optional LTE as well, though Nokia didn't say how much extra that would cost.
Giacomo Mantovani
For what it is, $250 price looks pretty decent. However, the world of Android tablets is an unremarkable one — will Nokia's brand recognition matter? The Nokia T20 arrives to the US and elsewhere around the world tomorrow (October 7th).
T-Mobile has slashed $10 off the wireless home internet service it launched in April. From $60, it now costs $50 a month, which is the same price it charged customers during the product's pilot program that started back in 2019. The service gives customers access to a gateway router/modem device that converts T-Mobile's 4G LTE and 5G networks into WiFi with typical download speeds of 35 to 115 Mbps. It has no annual contract, no data caps and, as the carrier keeps repeating in its announcement, no hidden fees and charges.
That $50 a month includes taxes and rental for the gateway, which customers have to return if they decide to cancel. They'd have to install it themselves, but the carrier says it will take them as little as 15 minutes. T-Mobile started testing the wireless home internet service in rural and underserved areas a couple of years ago in an invite-only trial for 50,000 homes. It rolled out access to the pilot program to over 130 cities across the US before the service's official launch.
Those interested will have to take note, however, that the price only applies if they pay via AutoPay. Without automatic billing, the price goes up to $55, which is still $10 less than the $65 it used to cost.
Canon has made a surprising product announcement, revealing a dual, RF mount fisheye lens that's part of an all-new system called EOS VR. Its aim is nothing less than to transform VR and AR production by making workflow simpler than current systems, while delivering the quality of a full-frame mirrorless camera.
The key product is the $1,999 RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye manual lens designed specifically to mount on Canon's 8K-capable EOS R5 camera. It's a highly unusual looking product, to say the least, with two bulging fisheye lenses mounted side by side. They're placed approximately 60mm (24 inches) apart to match human interpupillary distance and provide comfortable parallax for VR and AR.
The lenses project two circular images onto the EOS R5's 45-megapixel sensor. They support 190-degree capture, allowing for delivery of stereoscopic 180-degree 3D footage or photos at up to 8,192 x 4,096 resolution for AR or VR applications.
Canon
The lens has some unusual features, like a ring that focuses both lenses at once and an Allen screw adjustment that lets you tweak the focus of one lens to precisely match the other. Otherwise, you get features typically found in high-end Canon L RF mount glass, like coatings to control flare and ghosting, dust and water-resistant sealing and a solid F2.8 to F16 aperture range. Despite the odd looks, the lens is fairly compact and not much larger than Canon's 35mm F1.8 lens.
The lens is just one part of the equation, though. Canon is working on a firmware update for the R5 with new features to support the lens and EOS VR system. That includes MF peaking and manual focus confirm via Canon's Dual Pixel autofocus system, along with a "Magic Window" UI that helps user plan for delivery to different types of headsets.
In addition, Canon made its own EOS VR Utility and EOS VR Plugin apps, each available by subscription for $5 per month. The VR Utility app flips the stereo images left to right and converts them from circular to an "equirectangular" square image that can be viewed on a VR headset. It also offers quick editing tools like trimming of clips and application of a LUT, while letting you change to preset resolutions and file types (DPX, Pro Res, H264, etc.) prior to export.
Canon
There's also the EOS VR plug-in for Adobe Premiere that "will convert the dual fisheye imagery to equirectangular, while allowing the ability to cut, color, and edit with the full control of Premiere Pro," Canon told Engadget. It also lets you export footage to the desired spec for different types of delivery.
The system can be used for weddings, journalism, sports, training, events and more, while offering a number of advantages over current VR cameras. To start with, it's designed to deliver quality superior to standalone VR cameras with smaller lenses and sensors like the $5,000 Insta360 Pro 2. At the same time, you get all the R5's tools like log shooting, RAW capture, 10-bit video and more. And when you're not using the VR lens, the R5 can be used for regular video production or photo shoots, unlike dedicated VR cameras.
At the same, the production process is simpler and cheaper than with dual cameras used in higher-end productions. Those cameras must be rigged, synced, focused and positioned correctly, with the end result being two files in many cases. Canon's EOS VR system, by contrast, delivers similar quality but offers focus and setup like a regular camera, while leaving you with a single file to edit at the end.
The entire system isn't exactly cheap, considering you need to pay $1,999 for the lens and $3,899 if you don't already have an R5 camera, for a total of $5,898. However, considering how niche the lens is, it costs less than I expected. There's also the issue of R5 overheating that limits 8K recording times to 20 minutes, with a 10-minute recovery period. You can improve that by capturing 8K to an external Ninja V+ RAW recorder, but that'll add $1,500 to your cost.
Still, it looks very promising for VR, which has boomed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's been especially in-demand for business training and collaboration, which in turn requires content production. A lot of producers, particularly those who already have a Canon EOS R5, might be willing to jump into that type of work if Canon's new system is as easy to use as it promises.
In 2019, Axel Grell, the designer of Sennheiser’s legendary HD580 and HD800 headphones, left the company to found Grell Audio. Two years later, the startup is coming out with a pair of true wireless headphones known as the TWS/1. Set to cost $200 when they go on sale next month, they feature components individually sourced and designed by Grell. Highlights include custom 10mm drivers, support for ANC and a proprietary feature called Noise Annoyance Reduction (NAR) that the company claims cancels out high-end noises.
Grell Audio
Codec support is also extensive. In addition to mainstays like SBC and AAC, the earbuds can connect to your device over LHDC, aptX, aptX HD and aptX adaptive. Outside of a handful of proprietary Sony formats, all that’s missing here is Qualcomm’s recently announced aptX Lossless codec. You can get up to 28 hours of battery life from the headphones with the included charging case.
Grell plans to employ a direct-to-consumer model that will see the company sell the TWS/1 earbuds exclusively through its website and Drop. Pre-orders open today, with general availability to follow in November. The Drop version of the headphones will be known as the tws.01 and feature an all-black finish and come with an additional set of blue wingtips.
Following Monday’s massive service outage that took out all of its services, Facebook has published a blog post detailing what happened yesterday. According to Santosh Janardhan, the company's vice president of infrastructure, the outage started with what should have been routine maintenance. At some point yesterday, a command was issued that was supposed to assess the availability of the backbone network that connects all of Facebook’s disparate computing facilities. Instead, the order unintentionally took those connections down. Janardhan says a bug in the company’s internal audit system did not properly prevent the command from executing.
That issue caused a secondary problem that ultimately made yesterday’s outage into the international incident that it became. When Facebook’s DNS servers couldn’t connect to the company’s primary data centers, they stopped advertising the border gateway protocol (BGP) routing information that every device on the internet needs to connect to a server.
“The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational,” said Janardhan. “This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers.”
As we learned partway yesterday, what made an already difficult situation worse was that the outage made it impossible for Facebook engineers to connect to the servers they needed to fix. Moreover, the loss of DNS functionality meant they couldn’t use many of the internal tools they depend on to investigate and resolve networking issues in normal circumstances. That meant the company had to physically send personnel to its data centers, a task that was complicated by the physical safeguards it had in place at those locations.
“They’re hard to get into, and once you’re inside, the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access to them,” according to Janardhan. Once it could restore its backbone network, Facebook was cautious not to turn everything back on all at once since the surging power and computing demands may have led to more crashes.
“Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better, and there’s plenty for us to learn from this one,” said Janardhan. “After every issue, small and large, we do an extensive review process to understand how we can make our systems more resilient. That process is already underway.”
Razer is joining many PC makers by unveiling new Windows 11 systems, although the biggest news may have more to do with prices than the computers themselves. To begin with, the Razer Book now has a regular starting price of $1,000 as a company store exclusive. You'll still get the familiar 11th-gen Core i5, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage, but you no longer have to wait for the 13.4-inch machine to go on sale if $1,200 is too extravagant.
Higher-spec Razer Book models are also better values than their outgoing models, at least at official prices. A jump to $1,500 gives you a touchscreen, a Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD (previously $1,600), while it now takes 'just' $1,800 to buy a 4K touch variant that now includes 1TB of storage on top of the existing Core i7 and 16GB of RAM.
There's also a slight update for heavy-duty gamers. The Blade 15 Advanced now comes in new configurations that mate a 240Hz QHD screen and a 11th-gen Core i7 with faster GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 graphics choices. They won't be cheap, of course. The 'base' starts at $2,700 with the RTX 3070, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, while the all-out $3,100 model leaps to the RTX 3080 and 32GB of RAM.
All the new Windows 11 PCs are available to order today. Existing Razer systems (including those still on sale) can upgrade to Windows 11 as well, although you'll want to check the compatibility list before you pick up an older model.
Google has revealed the date for its big fall hardware event. It will show off the Pixel 6 lineup in more detail on October 19th, starting at 1PM ET.
The company has already revealed some details about the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, including what they phones look like. In August, Google said Tensor, the first system-on-chip it designed, will debut inside these phones. The SoC will power the Pixel 6's AI-heavy features, such as speech recognition and on-device live captions and translation.
The phones will have camera upgrades, of course. The Pixel 6's main camera will allow in approximately 150 percent more light than previous models, while the Pro will have 4x optical zoom and an additional telephoto option. The company claimed that Tensor will improve the photo processing capabilities too.
You can expect up to a day's worth of battery life from a single charge, Google told us. The devices are 5G compatible and they'll be able to take advantage of all the new features of Android 11.
Amazon announced a revamped Kindle Paperwhite family last month, but the standard Kindle remains one of the best options if you're looking for a reliable and relatively affordable e-reader. It's normally priced at $90, but you can get it for $60 right now in a limited-time sale. The only time we've seen the e-reader drop to a lower price was during Prime Day back in June when it was $55.
We gave this model of the Kindle a score of 91 when it came out in 2019 — while it doesn't have as many bells and whistles as the Paperwhite has, it will be exactly what some need in an e-reader. Key upgrades include a higher contrast display and four LED front lights that make it easier to read in dark environments. Amazon also refined the design to be sleeker, although this Kindle is not waterproof like the Paperwhite is.
The Kindle excels at being a basic e-reader and it will be an upgrade if you're used to reading books and articles on your smartphone's screen. The anti-glare display is much easier on the eyes, the built-in 8GB of storage can thousands of titles and the battery will last weeks on a single charge. The only major downside to the Kindle is one that all other Kindles have, too: you'll have to deal with Amazon's lockscreen ads, unless you pay extra to remove them.
If you are interested in the extras that come with the Paperwhite, Amazon seems to be trying to get rid of the previous version as it anticipates the arrival of the 2021 e-reader, which will ship at the end of this month. The 2018 Kindle Paperwhite in twilight blue is currently on sale for $75, which is a record low. This model gives you a higher density display, a waterproof design and Audible support, so you can listen to audiobooks saved on the device when you connect a pair of wireless headphones. Both e-readers are good choices, so it ultimately comes down to which features are necessary to you and how much you're willing to spend.
