Transparency mode is an important feature found on many new headphones and earbuds with active noise cancellation. Noise-canceling headphones are great on planes or in a crowded office, but sometimes it’s necessary to hear the world around you for a few minutes. For example, it might be useful for letting you hear the traffic around …

Following reports that Google has been developing AR glasses, the company indeed announced a prototype pair of glasses at this year’s Google I/O conference.  Google’s focus with these glasses appears to be helpful features such as language translation. Google acquired smart glasses maker North in 2020, and its work with Google Glass pioneered smart eyewear nearly a decade ago. Now playing: Watch …

Google makes everything from connected thermostats to phones, speakers, TV dongles and laptops. Soon, you can add smartwatches and augmented reality glasses to that list. Why? To Google, the answer is simple: It wants to make technology less distracting.  The company discussed its vision for the future of computing during its annual I/O conference on Wednesday. A large part of …

If you’ve been wanting to upgrade your entertainment space, but price has been a barrier, now might be a good time to make the leap. Right now you can save $110 off this Westinghouse 50-inch 4K UHD smart Roku TV with HDR at Best Buy, bringing the price to just $280. But keep in mind that this deal will expire …

Before Google has its own pair of augmented reality glasses, it’ll need AR to work everywhere. World-spanning AR that blankets the real world using map data has been a goal for several companies lately, and Google is layering its AR using Google Maps. The toolkit, announced at Google’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday, could leap ahead of several competing efforts from rivals such …

Google on Wednesday debuted two new search features that tap into images online or photos you take in a store, part of the company’s effort to expand far beyond text you type into a search box. One feature announced at the Google I/O conference, scene explorer, lets you sweep your phone camera across a shelf of products at a supermarket or …

HP’s Victus 16 is a surprisingly robust and powerful gaming laptop that keeps up with the latest games at a more affordable price. For the uninitiated, Victus is HP’s line of gaming-focused laptops that have slightly less power than the Omen series, but are more budget-friendly. It offers a respectable amount of power at a relatively low price with four …

Just when you thought Google was out of the tablet game, the company is back in. At its latest I/O developer conference, Google teased a new Pixel Tablet arriving in 2023, featuring Google’s own Tensor chip. Google’s history with tablets has been very touch-and-go. Google’s last tablet, the Pixel Slate in 2018, tried to be a Chrome tablet and Chromebook …

Roku has a new Ultra streaming device for 2022, but “new” is probably stretching things a bit far. It’s really a very minor refresh of the 2020 Roku Ultra, basically a new bundle: The Roku Ultra now comes with the excellent Voice Remote Pro. The good news? The price is the same at $100. The bad news? Unlike Apple, which …

May 2022 When you have a product that a lot of people love, change can be risky. Such is the case for Sony’s WH-1000XM5, the fifth generation of the 1000X series headphones, which were first released in 2016 as the MDR-1000X Wireless and have become increasingly popular as they’ve improved with each generation. Over the years, Sony has made some …

If you’ve ever used the workplace messaging app Slack, you’ve heard the sound: “ssssscrape, knock-knock-knock.” Slack actually provides 11 other notification sound options, which most people probably don’t know about. The catalog of sounds ranges from a playful “boing” to a whimsical “ta-da” to a snappy “yoink.” And the options aren’t limited to onomatopoeias. At the bottom of the menu, …

The next Meta VR headset after Quest 2 will be something called, for now, Project Cambria. It’s a mixed reality-focused headset arriving sometime in 2022, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just demonstrated for the first time how it’ll work. Unlike AR headsets like the HoloLens 2 and the Magic Leap 2, which have transparent lenses and layer semitransparent holographic images on …

Google provided an early look at its Pixel 7 and 7 Pro phones during its Google I/O conference on Wednesday. Both devices will be launching in the fall with a new version of Google’s Tensor processor, Android 13 and a more refined version of the Pixel 6’s general design. Google didn’t share much information about its next-generation Tensor processor aside from …

When Google acquired Fitbit in 2019, I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d soon see a fusion of Wear OS and Fitbit into one device. Would Fitbit become the new face of Wear OS? Would a true Pixel watch emerge, fueled by Fitbit? The answer, it seems, is yes. Google’s newly announced and long-expected Pixel Watch, arriving in the fall, looks to …

A new report finds that 1.5 million apps on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store haven’t been updated in two years or longer and get hidden or removed entirely according to recent policy changes. These “abandoned” apps constitute one-third of the combined app catalogs of the App Store and Play Store, according to the report from analyst firm …