“Scott, did you charge the phone?” I hear this and know my wife meant the Apple Watch. But it’s how we think of it in our family: It’s the wrist-phone. Now that the new Family Setup feature allows Apple Watches to work for family members, unleashing the watch from the iPhone a bit, it’s suddenly …

Picking up your Switch and racing on Mario Kart tracks with friends on a TV is one thing, but Nintendo is now going to let you race laps with an RC car in your home with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. The Nintendo Switch-connected remote-controlled car game, arriving Oct. 16, turns actual cardboard gates and your floor space into a …

A year after Google launched Stadia, Amazon seems like it’s doing the same thing for cloud gaming. The just-announced Amazon Luna service is entering a streaming games market that’s suddenly quite crowded, alongside Stadia, Microsoft’s Game Pass Ultimate and Sony’s PlayStation Now. Luna has a controller, like Stadia. It has Alexa on it, like Stadia has Google Assistant. Luna has big …

Imagine you’re training to be a pilot or a doctor, experiencing a simulation in VR with convincing images and tools that feel like the real thing. And not only do you get to know how you did afterwards, but you can see how you focused, what your pulse rate was and maybe even what you were feeling.  VR headsets like …

The eighth-gen iPad feels familiar. It should be familiar: iPads don’t change much. But the world certainly has. My whole family is trapped at home, working and going to school; remote connections are our whole lives. And iPads and Chromebooks are everywhere in our house. My kids connect to their classes through devices: one on a Chromebook, the younger one …

Update, Sept. 22, 2021: Microsoft held its 2021 Surface event on Sept. 22, and unveiled the Surface Duo 2. The new folding phone features a faster processor, better cameras and many other upgrades compared to the Surface Duo.  Phones are like lifeboats now. iPads ($170 at Amazon) and Chromebooks are classrooms. VR is my escape pod. Every device in my house …

Egocentric. It’s a weird word. To Facebook, regarding AR and VR, it means a world where computers start processing the world as you perceive it. It’s a cornerstone of a strange future we seem to already be heading towards, where assistants and notifications and social media meet us where we’re already looking. Or where we seem to be looking. Virtual …

Remote school has already begun, but iPads are still on their way. Apple’s newest $599 (£579, AU$899) iPad Air looks like the best choice for older students and people who do lots of work on their tablet, but it’s not arriving until October. Also, we don’t know how good it is yet next to the iPad Pro… but it sure …

We won’t be wearing our magic Tony Stark AR smartglasses this year, or the year after, or maybe not even the year after that. Although Facebook is already working on smartglasses with Luxottica, those won’t be world-sensing mixed reality devices yet. But Facebook’s Project Aria is ready to start mapping the real world with a head-worn sensor array being deployed …

The scramble for getting the perfect computer and tablet for your remote learning or work-from-home setup started almost six months ago. You probably already have a system that works for you, but Apple’s upcoming Sept. 15 event could still deliver a new iPad (or iPads) to the mix. If you’re shopping for an iPad, wait at least until later today. …