Gadget Hacks: Page 2

Users are reporting that YouTube videos resume from the wrong position after ads. YouTube has not confirmed a resume bug tied to ad interruptions. What it has confirmed, twice in the past seven weeks, is that its mobile ad layer has produced serious playback failures, including undismissable overlay banners that force users to exit videos entirely. Whether those confirmed bugs are causing wrong resume points is plausible. It is not proven.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma said today that the Xbox mobile store is not dead. The statement is reassurance and, read carefully, an acknowledgment that reassurance was needed. The store has reportedly been put on hold, its placeholder website has gone nearly a year without an update, and Sharma is now the third Microsoft executive in roughly three years to publicly defend a product that has never launched, according to The Verge.

Microsoft cut Game Pass Ultimate from $29.99 to $22.99 per month this week and stripped day-one Call of Duty access from the subscription, capping a rapid reversal of the premium bundle strategy it launched just six months ago. The price drop lands as speculation about a deeper Discord Xbox Game Pass partnership circulates no deal has been announced, no terms are public but the existing Xbox-Discord relationship and new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's explicit push to fix the platform's social...

Galaxy phone owners using a Dell, HP, Lenovo, or any other non-Samsung Windows 11 PC can now access Samsung Galaxy Connect's continuity features on their existing hardware. Until this week, those features required a Samsung Galaxy Book. That requirement is gone, SamMobile reported yesterday, with WinFuture confirming the same day.

Apple's stock rose more than 1,900% during Tim Cook's tenure. That figure will appear in every retrospective, usually followed by a gentle qualifier: Nvidia is up 61,881% over the same period, Tesla up 24,564%, and Cook's return ranks No. 38 in the S&P 500, per WSJ coverage this week. The implication: Cook was very good, but not the most interesting story in the index.

Remedy Entertainment released Control: Ultimate Edition on the App Store for iPhone and iPad today, and the price is the first thing worth sorting out. According to GamingTrend, the intended price is $9.99, but the App Store was showing $4.99 at launch with no explanation of whether that's a promotion or a permanent repositioning. Several other things are also unresolved as of today: cross-save behavior across Apple devices is unconfirmed, no independent mobile benchmarks exist yet, and the...

Samsung's Music Studio 7 ($499.99) and Music Studio 5 ($299.99) went on sale today via Amazon, marking one of the first confirmed U.S. retail listings for either model since its January CES preview. Both speakers work as standalone room units, scale into a ten-speaker whole-home network, or slot into a five-device home theater setup alongside a Samsung TV and soundbar using the same hardware for all three configurations.

Apple has never put a variable aperture on an iPhone. That's not a gap in the feature list it's been a deliberate engineering choice. But the supply chain activity around the iPhone 18 Pro variable aperture camera suggests Apple may finally be changing course, and not just on paper.

Since last June, every smartphone placed on the EU market must meet minimum ecodesign requirements covering spare parts availability, software support, battery durability, and repair access. The same device must display a repairability score, A to E, at the point of sale. These are not aspirational targets they are conditions of market access, per the European Commission.

Google Wallet is now showing real-time flight updates on the lock screen and always-on display for Android 16 devices, reports this week from 9to5Google and PhoneWorld confirm. The feature surfaces flight status, estimated arrival time, and a progress bar without requiring travelers to unlock their phone or open any app. For anyone who has ever compulsively checked departure screens while waiting at the gate, that's the practical change in one sentence.

A company called Tiny Corp claims Apple has approved a driver letting AMD and Nvidia GPUs in external enclosures perform compute tasks on Apple Silicon Macs. That's a notable claim, because Apple's own documentation still says it isn't possible. If accurate, it represents a real exception to a firm architectural boundary. But the story rests on a single report, Apple has made no public announcement, and "compute tasks" is not what most people picture when they hear the words "Apple Silicon eGPU...

A Rome court recently ruled that Netflix illegally raised prices on Italian subscribers and ordered the company to issue refunds, reduce current bills, and inform former customers to inform them of their rights. The headline figures are striking up to €500 for long-term Premium subscribers. The reality is narrower, and none of it is final.

Apple seeded the first iOS 26.5 developer beta on March 30, a week after shipping iOS 26.4, and the tight turnaround tells you something: this is a maintenance cycle, not a marquee release. But iOS 26.5 beta 1 has more going on than the cadence suggests.

Pixel's Now Playing feature is recognizing music reliably again for many users, a meaningful turnaround after more than a year of widespread failures that had owners reaching for Shazam. The March 2026 Pixel Drop is responsible, but it arrived packaged with a platform transition that has quietly broken the lock screen experience for a portion of users who never got an explanation from Google about why.

In June 2007, Apple sold roughly 300,000 iPhones in a single weekend. That device had a 3.5-inch screen, a 2-megapixel camera, 2G EDGE data, and no App Store. By 2024, that single starting point had multiplied into 47 distinct iPhone models (ts2.tech, July 2025). The iPhone 17, launched September 2025, extends the lineup further, with a standard model starting at $799 and 256GB of storage, and a Pro Max topping out at 2TB for the first time.

Apple dropped the iOS 26.5 public beta this week, and the most useful way to read it is not as a feature checklist but as a map of three things Apple is working on simultaneously: a long-overdue privacy fix in Messages, an ad expansion into Maps, and platform-opening changes in the EU that regulators, not Apple, are driving. Most of what's here isn't ready for public use yet. That's the actual story.

Oppo launched the Find X9 Ultra today with a camera feature no rival has shipped in three years: a native 10x optical zoom camera built directly into the phone. No accessory required, no software simulation. The phone starts at 7,499 yuan ($1,099) in China, per Digital Trends; UK pricing lands at £1,449 ($1,959) with a May 8 launch date, Engadget confirmed. No U.S. launch has been mentioned in any of the confirmed coverage.

President Trump told companies Tuesday they would be "brilliant" to walk away from tariff refunds on duties a Supreme Court ruling struck down as unlawful. Then he added: "If they don't do that, I'll remember them." He named Apple and Amazon directly. The stakes are not small: more than 330,000 importers paid the duties in question, and companies are collectively seeking roughly $166 billion back from the government, Reuters reported earlier this month.

The Redmi K90 Max gaming phone launched in China today with a claim that shouldn't hold up on paper: a built-in spinning cooling fan paired with IP66, IP68, and IP69 water and dust resistance ratings. Phones with active airflow openings aren't supposed to be waterproof. Redmi says it engineered around that. Open sales began today, with the base 12GB/256GB model starting at CNY 3,199 (approximately $469), per GSMArena. No international launch has been announced.

Google is actively investigating a Pixel battery drain issue that first appeared with the March 2026 update and became significantly more visible after the April release. No fix exists yet. The bug has generated nearly 600 comments on a single Google Issue Tracker thread in under ten days, according to 9to5Google, and there is nothing users can directly do to fix it themselves.

Apple's latest Liquid Glass interface redesign has sparked heated debates across the tech community, but if there's one thing we know about Cupertino, it's that they rarely make major design shifts without a long-term vision in mind. While users are split on the new aesthetic direction, the real story here isn't about immediate user satisfaction—it's about where Apple is positioning its entire ecosystem for the future.

The streaming wars just got a major shakeup, and it all happened on Hollywood's biggest night. Warner Bros just pulled off something that hasn't been seen since the days of Ben-Hur and Titanic—they swept the 2026 Oscars with a record-tying 11 Academy Awards. But here's what makes this particularly fascinating: it's happening right as the studio is in a pending massive $111 billion acquisition deal with Paramount. More importantly for streaming subscribers, these Oscar wins demonstrate exactly...

Google Messages has spent years tormenting Android users with one surprisingly basic limitation: you couldn't easily copy just part of a text message. You know exactly what I'm talking about—you need to grab a verification code or tracking number from a longer message, but the app forces you to copy the entire thing or nothing at all. It's the kind of daily annoyance that makes you question how such a fundamental oversight survived this long in a major app.

Google Maps just received one of the most significant recent AI updates. The integration of a new conversational feature powered by Gemini, often referred to as 'Ask Maps,' is a major shift from traditional keyword-based searches to natural, conversational queries.

No exact date has been announced for the OnePlus Ace 6 Ultra launch, but multiple reports say the full reveal is expected before the end of April. OnePlus China president Li Jie personally showed off the phone's rear design last week, and Oppo's Chinese storefront already has an active reservation page, according to GSMArena. That combination of executive-level teasing and live pre-orders points to an announcement within days.

Microsoft's April 14 cumulative update for Windows 11, KB5083769, shipped with a formally documented known issue: devices running a specific non-recommended BitLocker Group Policy configuration may be prompted to enter a recovery key on the first restart after installation, according to Microsoft's support bulletin. Enter the key once, and the machine moves on. That is the confirmed Windows 11 April 2026 update BitLocker recovery issue bounded, documented, and recoverable.

The Advanced Sharing Settings panel shows "on." The network profile says Private. And the other PC is still invisible in File Explorer. If that's your situation, the toggles aren't broken they're just not the whole answer.

A leaked One UI 8.5 changelog never mentions Galaxy Glasses. What it does describe, read alongside Google's published Android XR platform documentation, is a phone being quietly reorganized to handle every job that smart glasses hardware cannot: storing files, running AI queries, bridging audio, and maintaining continuity across secondary displays. That gap between what the leak says and what it implies is worth examining carefully.

New CAD renders suggest the Sony Xperia 1 VIII is dropping the vertical camera strip that has identified Xperia flagships for years. In its place, a squared, centralized island housing three sensors and a flash, according to Concept Phones, which published the renders earlier this month. The Sony Xperia 1 VIII leak points to a rear design that, for the first time, could pass for any number of mainstream Android flagships.

The latest MacBook teardown from iFixit has revealed something remarkable: Apple has delivered the most repairable MacBook battery system we've seen in over a decade with MacBook Neo. This is a turning point in how Apple approaches device serviceability, potentially signaling broader changes across its entire laptop lineup.

Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) replaces the standard Windows desktop taskbar, Start menu, and shell with a controller-friendly launcher built around the Xbox app. When the startup option is enabled, Windows skips loading background processes until the first time you switch to the desktop, which Microsoft Support says improves system performance and reduces startup time. The result is a PC that boots directly into a console-style interface, with the standard desktop still one keypress away.

Samsung has confirmed on the record that it is actively developing silicon-carbon batteries for smartphones and that none have passed its internal testing bar yet. That confirmation, delivered by EVP Jeong Seung Moon at the Galaxy S26 press briefing two months ago, is the firmest foundation the Galaxy S27 Ultra battery upgrade story actually has. Everything else is a layer of leaked documents on top of it.

The Pixel phone in your pocket comes with a hidden privacy feature that most people never discover. Google includes a built-in VPN service on new Pixel devices, but many users aren't aware of it. This free security tool can protect your browsing on public Wi-Fi networks and add an extra layer of privacy to your mobile internet activity, yet many Pixel owners remain completely unaware of its existence.

If you've been using your Pixel recently and something about the Recents screen felt... off, you're not losing your mind. Google's March update has quietly stripped away one of Android's most useful multitasking shortcuts, and it's the kind of change that hits you right in the daily workflow.

Samsung's satellite connectivity feature represents a significant shift in how we stay connected beyond traditional cellular towers, though it barely got a mention during the Galaxy S25 launch. While select Galaxy phones now support satellite connectivity features that work when you're completely cut off from cellular networks and Wi-Fi, the rollout has been surprisingly quiet compared to how Apple marketed its Emergency SOS feature.

If you've been following Android's beta releases closely, you might have noticed something significant in Android 17 Beta 2. Google is testing a major security enhancement in Android 17 Beta 2.

Apple M5 Max: The Ultimate Guide to Apple's Next-Gen Powerhouse

Apple has been steadily building its "Ultra" brand across different product categories, but recent industry reports suggest the company's premium hardware strategy is about to get more complex. While we've seen the Ultra designation transform everything from the Apple Watch to Mac processors, Bloomberg's latest reporting via AppleInsider indicates that Apple's 2026 roadmap includes several high-end devices that won't carry the Ultra moniker at all.

Apple's latest product launch has stirred up the tech world in an unexpected way. The new MacBook Neo represents Apple's entry into truly affordable Mac computing, according to Trusted Reviews, bringing "the magic of the Mac at a breakthrough price" to consumers who've been waiting for a budget-friendly option. But here's the twist: this $599 laptop might actually pose a bigger threat to iPad sales than to existing MacBook models. With both the MacBook Neo and refreshed iPad Air M4 launching at...

The foldable phone revolution has been brewing for years, but there's one persistent question that keeps consumers hesitant: will these innovative devices actually survive daily life? Samsung has been working overtime to change that narrative, and their latest efforts reveal just how seriously they're taking durability concerns. The company isn't just making claims about tougher screens—they're putting their foldable displays through increasingly rigorous testing protocols to prove their point.