The Latest from Gadget Hacks: Page 2

Apple Notes is gaining clipboard-level Markdown support in iOS 27, a change that removes a persistent friction point for anyone who moves text between Notes and external writing tools. Pasted Markdown converts automatically to rich text, and note content can be exported as raw Markdown syntax through a new edit menu option, 9to5Mac reported. That combination, along with native divider lines and several UI refinements, lands at iOS 27's general release. The AI-related additions operate on a...

Tap an app on your Galaxy Watch. The splash screen appears, holds for a few seconds, then the watch drops you back to the app drawer. No error, no explanation, no app. A Galaxy Watch 8 Classic user reported exactly that failure on Reddit, with Gmail, Google Calendar, and WhatsApp all refusing to open. Neither Samsung nor Google has said anything publicly about the Galaxy Watch apps not opening problem.

Google Health version 5.02 is rolling out, bringing back Hourly Activity, the hourly step-goal charts that disappeared when the app was redesigned. The Google Health 5.02 update also adds improved nap tracking and easier Key Metrics reordering on Android. It's the second meaningful release in under three weeks, and it delivers on a specific public commitment Google made in late May.

Apple announced today that iPhone users in Brazil can install apps from third-party stores and pay for digital goods through alternative payment systems, making Brazil the first major market outside Europe to receive these changes. The new options arrive under a formal settlement with Brazil's competition regulator CADE and take effect immediately as part of iOS 26.5, Apple announced. Whether they produce meaningfully lower prices or genuine choice for Brazilian iPhone users is a different...

Apple plans to raise prices, but CEO Tim Cook did not say which products will get more expensive, when the increases will happen, or by how much. But in a Wall Street Journal interview published June 17, he made one thing clear: Apple can no longer shield buyers from surging memory and storage costs.

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on June 18, 2026, that Apple had agreed to work with Intel to design and build chips in the United States. Apple and Intel have not publicly confirmed the deal or its scope. That gap is the story.

Vivo executive Han Boxiao announced on Weibo this week that the X Fold 6 will carry a 7,000mAh battery, making it one of the largest batteries ever confirmed for a foldable phone, according to Android Authority. That's a direct statement from inside the company, eight days before the phone launches in China on June 26 not a leak, not a certification estimate.

Apple released firmware 1B211 for the Beats Studio Buds, closing a Bluetooth vulnerability that could allow a nearby attacker to listen through the earbuds' microphone during the setup window before pairing was complete.

UC San Diego researchers are building a mini data center from 2,000 retired Pixel smartphones, stripped to their mainboards and clustered in groups of 20. According to a Google Research blog post cited by heise this week, each 20-board subsystem performs roughly on par with a conventional general-purpose server, and one such cluster already supports the simultaneous workloads of about 75 students running Jupyter Notebooks.

Apple is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for a spring 2027 release, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who cited multiple sources inside the company. Prototypes of the device, internally coded V62, are already in advanced testing, Thurrott reported yesterday. The reported iPhone Air 2 release date puts it alongside the standard iPhone 18 in a staggered launch cycle that breaks from Apple's long-established fall-only pattern.

Apple will stop issuing new relay addresses from its current Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email domains later this summer, consolidating both under a single shared domain. The Sign in with Apple domain consolidation affects only newly generated addresses; existing ones keep forwarding without interruption. Developers and email providers whose systems name the old domains explicitly need to update before the rollout begins.

A note on sourcing: benchmark data in this article comes primarily from Apple's own WebKit engineering blog. DMA compliance analysis draws on Open Web Advocacy, an advocacy group with an explicit position on this issue. The DMA text itself is primary law. Where claims come from parties with financial or policy stakes, that is noted.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions just announced the LYTIA L910, a 50-megapixel smartphone camera sensor that Sony claims can deliver 100 dB of dynamic range from a single exposure, with no multi-frame synthesis required. It is the first sensor in Sony's LYTIA lineup to feature LOFIC, a structural change to the pixel itself. Mass production is scheduled for this summer.

WhatsApp is testing a read-once option for plain text messages, bringing the platform's WhatsApp read-once disappearing messages capability to the one format that previously had no single-view equivalent. The feature has appeared in both the iOS TestFlight beta and a recent Android pre-release build, Engadget reported Wednesday citing WABetaInfo.

That small green dot in the top-right corner of your Samsung phone is a privacy indicator, not a bug. It means an app is using your camera, microphone, or both. If you also see a faint flicker near the top of the screen during calls, that is usually something else: the proximity sensor.

This guide walks through how to run a ChatGPT PC health check using only the system telemetry Windows already exposes to IT support. No personal files, documents, or passwords involved. Two paths, depending on how deep you need to go.

Turn off Autoplay Next Episode in your Netflix profile's Playback settings. That single change stops the continuous playback pattern that leads to the "are you still watching?" prompt, which fires after three consecutive episodes or about 90 minutes of uninterrupted viewing, per Engadget. The steps below walk through exactly how to do it on a browser and on mobile, and what to expect once you have.

Apple is reportedly planning two 20th anniversary iPhone models for 2027, not a single commemorative flagship. Bloomberg reporting covered by MacRumors this week says both sizes would share identical specs, including the same next-generation 2nm A21 chip and the same four-edge curved display. Buyers wouldn't have to choose between owning the anniversary device and owning their preferred screen size. That's a meaningful structural shift from how Apple handled the iPhone's tenth birthday.

Google began rolling out Android 17 to supported Pixel devices on June 16, 2026, and the update includes a dedicated gaming interface designed for foldable inner displays. The Android 17 foldable gaming mode is confirmed and built into the OS, but it is not user-accessible yet.

Gemini Live App Redesign: What Changes for Android Users

iOS 26.4 Always Play on iPhone Alarm Feature Explained for Apple Watch Users

YouTube Watch History Workaround: Browse Without the Algorithm

A surfaced Huawei vertical tri-fold phone patent points to something more consequential than a single filing: Huawei appears to be treating the Mate XT not as a finished product line but as an engineering platform, with a vertical folding axis as the next stress test. Where the Mate XT folds horizontally to open into a wide tablet slab, a vertical tri-fold would collapse a tall display into a compact, phone-shaped rectangle. That is a different ergonomic proposition entirely, and the...

If you've ever walked away from your desk and wondered whether your PC is still unlocked, your phone can help — but the best method depends on the phone you use.

A Weibo leaker is warning that the iPhone 18 Pro could repeat the finish-durability complaints reported by some iPhone 17 Pro owners, especially around the Cosmic Orange colorway. A separate report claims Apple may have revised its aluminum manufacturing process to reduce discoloration risk. Apple has confirmed neither claim, leaving buyers eyeing the rumored Dark Cherry colorway with two opposing signals and no official guidance.

Memory has overtaken the processor and display to become the single most expensive component in a smartphone, Nothing CEO Carl Pei warned this week, and he says phone prices are going up and will keep rising into next year. That claim matters beyond Nothing's own lineup: independent market data from IDC puts the memory shortage at the center of what it calls the steepest smartphone market contraction in recorded history.

Apple announced three concrete upgrades to iPhone Mirroring at WWDC, and the macOS 27 iPhone Mirroring upgrades cover the full range: Control Center access, protected video playback, and a resizable window that can shift aspect ratios beyond the iPhone's fixed proportions.

Peacock is launching its vertical video feed in the Peacock app, rolling out original Bravo microdramas and a swipeable short-form section built into the mobile app. According to Peacock, the two Bravo series are the first official originals in the microdrama format announced by a major U.S. entertainment streaming platform.

Apple's supply chain is reportedly preparing parts and module production for an iPhone camera the company has never built before. Sunny Optical has started producing actuators for a variable aperture mechanism destined for the iPhone 18 Pro, while LG Innotek is preparing full module assembly at its Gumi facility in South Korea for June or July, ahead of its normal schedule, specifically because the new mechanism raises defect risk, MacRumors reported. That points to supply-chain preparation,...

Nothing adds cloud backup to Essential Space: what to verify

Galaxy S24 S25 Battery Drain After April Update: What the Evidence Actually Shows

Fox Corp. agreed Monday to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, gaining a foothold in the operating system running inside more than 100 million streaming households globally. As Deadline framed it yesterday: "Fox Corporation is buying an operating system." Analysts and executives have described it as a distribution and ad-tech play rather than a content-library acquisition, and the numbers bear that out.

A Google employee confirmed this week that the company has been investigating a Google Pixel bootloop issue tied to its March, April, and May 2026 software updates, with devices freezing on the G logo or crashing immediately after PIN entry. The acknowledgement covers the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10 series, and the public issue tracker has accumulated close to 800 entries since March, according to heise. Google says updated guidance is now available.

Tesla CarPlay support has long looked like a business decision dressed up as a product omission. For more than a decade, Tesla resisted CarPlay while competitors leaned on Apple and Google to compensate for weaker native platforms a dynamic that ABI Research noted last December when it confirmed Tesla was reportedly testing native CarPlay integration for the first time. But reporting over the past year points to something more specific than corporate reluctance: Tesla's driver-assistance...

T-Mobile subscribers who make voice calls abroad could soon pay twice as much per minute. Multiple customers have received notices warning that standard T-Mobile international roaming call rates will jump from $0.25 to $0.50 per minute on June 25, according to Android Authority today and PhoneArena four days ago. The timing puts the reported change squarely in the opening weeks of peak summer travel season.

The debate over Apple AI privacy risks in Europe is being framed as a Brussels problem. Apple used part of its WWDC 2026 keynote to announce a product it isn't shipping: Siri AI, the most capable version of its assistant, demonstrated at WWDC pulling a FIFA World Cup schedule from the internet, searching a user's Messages history for a recipe, drafting a party invitation, and preparing to send it to a group chat, all without the user opening a single app. That assistant will not reach iPhones...

Here's how to use Visual Intelligence on macOS Golden Gate, what the keyboard shortcut actually does, and where the beta still falls short. This guide walks through both entry points, explains what each popout action does in the current developer beta, and tells you when the feature is worth reaching for and when to skip it.

Strava rolled out a broad set of new hiking features covering route planning, offline navigation, off-route alerts, and route following on Apple Watch. The features that matter most on an unfamiliar trail, planning where to go, staying on route, and navigating without cell service all sit behind the subscription paywall. Free users get a more capable recording screen and better social tools. Subscribers get the navigation suite.

If you need to know how to see which Mac apps will stop working after macOS Golden Gate, the check is now built directly into macOS itself. This guide walks through every method available, explains what the results mean, and gives you a concrete path forward for each app you find. On Golden Gate, the whole thing takes a few minutes. On Tahoe, two built-in tools cover the same ground.

Tamil Nadu's pollution regulator has given one of Apple's most important Indian suppliers a formal ultimatum: explain alleged groundwater contamination near its Hosur iPhone parts plant, or face a power cutoff and forced closure. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board served Tata Electronics a show-cause notice last month under India's Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, demanding a response within 15 days, per The New Indian Express this week. Tata says its own accredited...