Gear Live Tech News
Valve Leaked Its Own Left 4 Dead 2 Trailer To Get Around The ESRB
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Features, Video Games,
In October 2009, a few weeks before Left 4 Dead 2 shipped, a cinematic trailer for the game turned up online with nobody's name attached. Kotaku covered it on October 22 under the headline "Leaked Left 4 Dead 2 Trailer Full Of Joy, Gore." It was not much of a leak.
Chet Faliszek, a writer on both Left 4 Dead games, says Valve put it there on purpose because the ESRB would not clear it for release. "We leaked our trailer ahead of time, because they wouldn't let us release the trailer," he says in a YouTube video titled "Cutting Left 4 Dead Lines." "I'll just admit that. I think we can't get in trouble for that now. It's like 20 years ago."
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TCL P80 Ultra Puts NXTPAPER on an AMOLED Screen for the First Time
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Displays,
Take any phone outside on a sunny day and the screen turns into a mirror. TCL has been working on that problem for years with NXTPAPER, its matte, paper-like screen treatment, and the catch was always that you had to take it on an LCD. The new P80 Ultra and P80 Pro, both announced at IFA this week, are the first phones where you don't have to make that swap.
Both use a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED running at 120Hz and peaking at 3,200 nits, with the NXTPAPER layer built into the panel. The Ultra starts at 549 euros for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, or 599 euros for 512GB. The Pro is 429 euros. A third phone, the plain P80, comes in at 349 euros and skips the NXTPAPER treatment entirely. European sales started September 3, Latin America follows in October, and TCL says the US gets them later without saying when or for how much.
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Gamescom Apologizes to the Indie Devs Whose Laptops Were Stolen, Promises a Security Review
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
Losing a laptop at a trade show is bad. Losing the only copy of the game you have been building for months, at the show where you were finally going to put it in front of people, is worse. That is close to what happened to several indie studios at Gamescom 2026, and for about a week the show's answer was to point at its own terms and conditions.
That answer has changed. In a statement posted to X, Gamescom said the criticism it took was justified, then said the part it skipped the first time around: "Our first response did not strike the right tone, and it did not show the people affected the empathy they deserved. We are sorry."
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The Xbox Disaster Microsoft Never Recovered From (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games, Videos,
Microsoft spent a decade building Xbox into the console everyone's friends owned, then burned it down in about an hour. On May 21, 2013, Don Mattrick walked onto a stage in a white tent on Microsoft's Redmond campus and spent the first 30 minutes of the Xbox One reveal talking about TV. When a reporter asked what people without reliable internet were supposed to do with a console that phoned home every 24 hours, he told them to buy an Xbox 360. Xbox still hasn't recovered, and I think the reason has less to do with that stage than with what players were doing at home.
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NVIDIA Is Selling RTX 50 GPUs at MSRP at PAX West, If You Can Find the Right Guy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Video Games,
The cheapest way to buy a GeForce RTX 5090 at $1,999 this weekend involves a PAX West badge, a walk through the Seattle Convention Center, and watching one Nvidia employee's X account closely enough to know which hallway he is standing in.
Nvidia is selling RTX 50-series Founders Edition cards at list price, in person, at PAX West right now. That's the RTX 5090 at $1,999, the RTX 5080 at $999, and the RTX 5070 at $549, while supplies last. That last clause is doing a lot of work.
Verbatim’s AA, AAA and 9V Batteries Charge From a USB-C Cable, No Charger Needed
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, USB, Misc. Tech,
Somewhere in your house is a drawer with loose AA batteries rolling around in it, and you have no idea which ones still work. Verbatim's answer, shown off at IFA in Berlin, is to move the charging port onto the battery itself. Plug the cell into the same cable that charges your phone and wait.
The company brought AA, AAA and 9V lithium-ion cells, all of which charge over USB-C with no dedicated charger involved. The AA and AAA packs come with a multi-connector charging cable so you can top up several at once. The AAA is worth a second look, because its USB-C port runs lengthwise along the cell instead of sitting across the end, which is about the only sane way to fit a port that size on something that skinny.
CD Revenue Jumped 58.6% in Six Months, and K-Pop Fans Get Most of the Credit
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Features, Misc. Tech, Music,
Nobody was supposed to be buying CDs in 2026. US CD revenue hit $171.1 million in the first half of the year, up 58.6% from $107.9 million in the same six months of 2025, according to the RIAA's mid-year report. Shipments rose 45.7% to 17.5 million discs. Labels moved $312.4 million worth of CDs in all of 2025, so the format cleared more than half of last year's entire haul before July.
That is a real number and a small one. Physical formats account for 12% of US recorded music revenue. CDs on their own are under 3%. Streaming took 82% of the money, and streaming's six-month increase of $219 million was bigger than the entire CD business. Keep the scale in mind. What changed is who is buying, and that has a specific answer.
Audacity 4.0 Looks Like a Different App, and Edits Like One Too
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Music, Software,
If you have ever cut a podcast in Audacity, you know the routine. You get a clean take, you go to slide one clip a half second to the left, and the app makes you work for it. Audacity 4.0 shipped on September 3, and it is the first version in years that seems interested in making that part easier.
This is the largest update since version 3.0 in 2021, and it changes both how Audacity looks and what it can do. It is still free, still open source, still maintained by Muse Group.
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Tesla’s FSD Can Now Take the Wheel While You’re the One Driving
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Transportation, Artificial Intelligence,
You're driving your Tesla. Yourself, hands on the wheel, Full Self-Driving switched off. A car ahead stops short, and the wheel turns without you.
That is what Tesla added in FSD (Supervised) v14.3.9, detailed in release notes that went out Friday afternoon. Tesla's wording: "FSD Supervised can now activate on your behalf when an imminent collision is detected and Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) may not be enough." It can also switch itself on, Tesla says, if the car decides you're heavily distracted or that you disengaged FSD by accident. The feature is called Automatic Collision Evasion, and as of Friday it was "starting to roll out shortly."
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Xiaomi’s Smart Band 11 Tracks Sleep HRV for About $43
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Misc. Tech,
An Oura Ring 4 costs $349, and then it asks for a monthly membership on top. Xiaomi's Smart Band 11, now official in China, costs 289 yuan. That is about $43, and it also wants to tell you what your heart rate variability did while you were asleep.
Xiaomi is not claiming the Band 11 matches a $349 ring sensor for sensor, and nobody should assume it does until reviewers spend a few weeks with one. But the price is low enough that the usual question about wrist trackers, whether the data is worth what you paid for it, mostly answers itself.
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