News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 2

Multiple leaks point to higher prices on premium storage tiers, not a blanket increase. The $1,999 entry price may hold. The Flip 8 picture is murkier.

The new VSCO Studio Pro app launched on iOS this week, targeting high-volume photographers — weddings, portraits, events, sports, and school photography — with a macOS version confirmed for later this year. The broader strategic move may be the subscription bundle around it: VSCO One, priced on par with Adobe Creative Cloud Pro at $499.99 per year, packages Studio Pro alongside Galleries, Sites, AI Lab, Workspace, Canvas, Capture, and The Freelance Photographer business mentorship program.

Google has ended production of the Nest Mini and Nest Audio. A single $99.99 Google Home Speaker now replaces both devices, which means Google's smart speaker lineup no longer has anything below $99.99, roughly $50 more than the Nest Mini's $49 entry price, according to SoundGuys. The Nest Mini and Nest Audio are discontinued: two products gone, one replacement announced, and a meaningful gap left at the affordable end of the market.

New leaks around Apple's rumored foldable iPhone point to a wide, book-style device that could feel like a standard iPhone when closed and open into something closer to a compact iPad. Recent rumor coverage has pointed to a possible fall 2026 debut alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, though Apple has not confirmed the device, the timing, or the "iPhone Ultra" name.

Samsung appears to have briefly posted a full product page for the unannounced Galaxy A27 5G on its Czech Republic website before pulling it down. The listing, according to Los40, citing SamMobile, makes months of Galaxy A27 5G renders look far less speculative: It points to a cleaner design, a Snapdragon chip, four color options, six OS upgrades and six years of security updates, and one notable durability downgrade.

Apple is making the full Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix weekend free to U.S. viewers in the Apple TV app from June 26–28, 2026. Practice, qualifying and the Grand Prix will stream at no cost with an Apple ID, with no paid Apple TV subscription required. Sports Business Journal reported Thursday that this is the first time Apple has made a complete F1 race weekend free in the United States.

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.

The Pixel Watch June 2026 update is rolling out now to Pixel Watch 2, 3, and 4, and the most consequential change is one that fixes a problem users have been complaining about since Gemini launched on the watch: Raise to Talk was unreliable. It would cut off mid-sentence, time out before users finished speaking, or simply fail to activate. Google says an improved gesture recognition model addresses that. Three other confirmed changes ship alongside it: a rebuilt Contacts app, Remote Media...

Google began rolling out Bubbles on June 16, 2026, giving Android 17 Pixel phone and foldable users a way to keep apps available as floating windows without leaving the app they're using.

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.

YouTube TV NBC Audio Issue Leaves Subscribers With Low, Muffled Sound

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

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...

Chrome 150, expected around June 30, removes one of the last internal flags that allowed determined users to keep old Manifest V2 ad blockers alive in Chrome. Chrome 151, expected in July, removes the remaining cleanup code tied to the old extension platform.

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.

20th Anniversary iPhone Rumor Explained: Design Vision vs. Reality

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 six major new product categories explained

Nothing adds cloud backup to Essential Space: what to verify

A new leak suggests the iPhone 18 Pro aluminum casing will carry forward the same alloy Apple introduced with the iPhone 17 Pro, and if accurate, that means inheriting both the thermal performance gains and the cosmetic wear susceptibility that came with it. Leaks from Fixed Focus Digital described the 18 Pro as "still aluminum alloy, with really good heat dissipation" and the same color scratch risk as its predecessor.

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.

The iPhone 18 release date delay is shaping up to be the biggest structural change to Apple's product calendar in years. If the reporting holds, there will be no standard iPhone 18 this fall. For the first time since Apple unified its Pro and non-Pro launches in 2019, the base model appears to be sitting out the September event entirely, pushed to spring 2027 alongside the iPhone 18e, per MacRumors last month.

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...

The Trump Mobile T1 Phone turns one year old today. Here is the full ledger: the device has cleared FCC authorization, PTCRB certification, and Google Play certification. NBC tested its basic functions. Journalists have held it at events. And as of this writing, The Verge cannot identify a single ordinary customer, someone who placed a preorder through the public process and paid a $100 deposit, who has received one.

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...

Apple is overhauling how Reminders accepts input in iOS 27. Instead of scanning typed text for recognizable keywords, Apple Intelligence now reads a full plain-language description and populates all the relevant metadata you mention — date, time, location without requiring you to confirm each value individually.