Gear / Gear News and Events

It has long been said that visiting China from the West is akin to landing in a parallel universe. Pick any major city and most aspects look and feel broadly familiar, yet the fundamentals are different. You can’t hail an Uber or use Google Maps to get around, and your …

What does creativity mean to you? Creativity is not only about design, fashion, or art, but about solving problems. Humans have a remarkable ability to connect different pieces of information to solve new problems. I think software engineers can be extremely creative. Now, in the age of AI, human creativity …

“My predictions about achieving full self-driving have been optimistic in the past,” Musk admitted to investors in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD.” He certainly has. Many times. Indeed, Musk has a long history of making outlandish promises and unfulfilled predictions about his businesses—and it’s a habit that seems …

New technology doesn’t arrive fully formed, I remind myself as I strap on a pirate’s eye patch, then place a heavily modified bicycle helmet onto my head. It isn’t the most glamorous getup. But here, in a small office on an unassuming business park on the outskirts of Cambridge, England, …

This week, Fujifilm announced a new digital half-frame compact camera called the X Half. Like half-frame film cameras, the X Half shoots vertical frames, but records to an 18-megapixel sensor instead. The lens is a 32mm (35mm equivalent) f/2.8 aperture, which is close to the lenses of the X100 series …

But it’s difficult, and very expensive, to make a truly plastic-free automatic coffee machine. Plastic-free brewing is a bit of a holy grail, achieved mostly by much older, lower-tech methods like French press, moka pot, and pour-over. The Eight Series 2 comes as close as any automatic drip machine to …

Attached to the PencilVac are four conical brush bars called Fluffycones. With two brush bars on each side, the front cone rotates in one direction while the rear brush goes the opposite way. The four bars jut out at the sides too; that way, it cleans in all directions with …

And that brings us to the third focus for Android, which is the connecting line between all the Android ecosystem products—artificial intelligence. Almost the entirety of Google’s keynote was spent on Gemini, the chatbot replacing the nine-year-old Google Assistant in everything from Android Auto and Wear OS, to smartphones and …

Some of these Gemini features will be coming to users of Android and Google’s web apps for free, but others (and the more powerful feature sets) will be available via paid subscription. Google’s $20 a month AI Premium service has been renamed to Google AI Pro, and the cost stays …

Last year, I wrote about how one of my articles, previously appearing at the top of search results, was swallowed up and bumped down on the page by an AI Overview. Google eventually adjusted how it cited sources and more prominently added links beside individual paragraphs. While publishers seem primarily …