Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
Nissan’s Pixo Is a 161-Mile Electric City Car. It Is Not Coming to the US.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Transportation,
Nissan revived the Pixo name on September 23, and you cannot buy one. The Pixo is a European car. It is built in Slovenia, it is sold in Europe, and it is not scheduled for the United States at all.
What Europe gets is a small electric hatchback with a 27.5 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery and 259 km of WLTP range, which is 161 miles. Nissan says customer deliveries begin in early 2027. It has not said what the car costs. Market pricing arrives from December 2026 onward, and the under-20,000-euro figure being quoted today (roughly $23,000 before incentives) is an expectation, not a number Nissan has announced.
Click to continue reading Nissan’s Pixo Is a 161-Mile Electric City Car. It Is Not Coming to the US.
Samsung Pushed a Test Build to Korean Fridges Two Days Before Chuseok
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
Your refrigerator does not have a reboot ritual. You don't sit down with a coffee and watch a progress bar crawl across the door panel. It runs for a decade, and the only time you think about it is when the ice maker jams. On the afternoon of September 22, a batch of Samsung owners in South Korea found out that deal had quietly changed.
Samsung has confirmed that a test version of a refrigerator software update went out through SmartThings by mistake instead of the finished release. Units froze partway through. The panel sat on an update message and then went dark. Interior lights stayed off, the door's auto-open feature stopped responding, the SmartThings app listed the fridge as offline, and unplugging it and plugging it back in did nothing. What it stopped doing, above all, was refrigerate.
Click to continue reading Samsung Pushed a Test Build to Korean Fridges Two Days Before Chuseok
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Alibaba Says the Zhenwu V900 Is China’s Most Powerful AI Chip. It Won’t Say How Fast.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Alibaba's chip unit spent part of its Apsara Conference keynote in Hangzhou this week calling the Zhenwu V900 the most powerful AI chip in China. Then it declined to say how fast it is. No FLOPS figure, no process node, no foundry, no power number. What you get instead is 216GB of memory, 1,200GB/s of inter-chip bandwidth, and native support for FP8 and FP4.
Those are real specs on a real chip, and T-Head has shipped enough silicon that its existing Zhenwu parts serve more than 650 customers, so none of this is vapor. But the line everybody repeated afterward, Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu's claim that the V900 delivers "three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890," is a vendor number with nothing underneath it yet. The M890 had 144GB and 800GB/s. Do the division and both of those are exactly 1.5x. Tripling performance off 1.5x on memory and 1.5x on bandwidth means the compute engine has to be doing a great deal more work per clock, and that is the part Alibaba described with an adjective instead of a number.
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Quake Champions Tore Out the Battle Pass and Loot Boxes. Now It Costs $10.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
Games go free-to-play. That is the direction the traffic moves, and it has been for a decade. On Wednesday, id Software and Bethesda drove the other way. They took a nine-year-old free-to-play arena shooter, pulled the monetization out of it, and put a $9.99 price tag on the Steam page.
The 1.31 point release notes do not bury it. "Today's update marks a new chapter for Quake Champions as we transition the game from a free-to-play service to a paid application on Steam," id wrote. "Battle Passes and microtransactions have been removed. Quake Champions is now available for one low price on Steam." One sentence later, id adds that "No additional content updates are planned at this time."
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Meta’s Muse Charm Puts Your AI Agent on a Keychain by December
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Artificial Intelligence,
Meta saved its oddest piece of hardware for the last two minutes. At the end of tonight's Connect keynote, Mark Zuckerberg did a "one more thing" and held up a small black puck on a cord. It's called Muse Charm, Engadget's Karissa Bell put it at about the size of an Apple Watch, and its job is to give your Muse agent a body you can carry around. Zuckerberg said the design isn't finalized, but Meta plans to ship it "in time for the holidays," in December.
The Charm has a screen, and your Muse avatar lives on it. In Zuckerberg's case that's Agrippa, the toga-wearing Roman he'd been talking to all night. Tom's Guide's live notes say Meta has "only built a few of these so far," that you tap a fingerprint sensor in the corner, and that the "entire Muse AI" is built in. Engadget's Cherlynn Low said it "feels like a Tamagotchi met an AI wearable," and the stage shots back her up.
Click to continue reading Meta’s Muse Charm Puts Your AI Agent on a Keychain by December
YouTube Will Build a Feed From Your Description
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Artificial Intelligence,
Your YouTube homepage is a guess. Most days it's a good one, built out of everything you've watched, skipped, and let autoplay through at one in the morning. It is still YouTube deciding what you're in the mood for, though, and soon you'll be able to tell it directly instead.
That's the headline feature in a batch YouTube announced today. Custom feeds let you describe what you want in a conversational prompt, and YouTube builds a tab for it. The examples run to a feed for workouts, one for long documentaries, and one that surfaces new creators in a niche you care about. It's coming to web, mobile and TV, in the US first, and the only timing attached to it was "soon."
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Meta’s $1,299 VR Glasses Weigh 100 Grams Because the Computer Rides in Your Pocket
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Displays, Video Games,
Every VR headset asks you to strap a computer, a battery, and two screens to your face. Meta's new VR Glasses take the computer and the battery off. The glasses weigh about 100 grams, roughly a deck of cards, and everything heavy lives in a phone-sized puck that clips to your pocket and runs a cable up to your temple. They cost $1,299.99 and go on sale in spring 2027.
Mark Zuckerberg spent a big chunk of tonight's Connect keynote on them. Meta had been focusing less on the metaverse unless there was a breakthrough, he said, and then: "This is a breakthrough." He called it the result of more than a decade of work. It's Meta's first new VR hardware in about two years, since Quest 3S in fall 2024, and the pitch on stage came in three words: "Cinema. Computer. Console."
YouTube Studio Will Soon Test Three Cuts of Your Video to Find the Best Hook
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Software,
Every creator has an intro they aren't sure about. You cut the cold open, put it back, trim four seconds, and publish whichever version was on screen when you ran out of patience. YouTube Studio is about to let your audience make that call.
The biggest Studio news from Made on YouTube today is video A/B testing, which lets you run up to three cuts of the same video to see which hook performs best. YouTube says it's coming soon. It arrives with a batch of AI additions to Studio: feedback on early drafts, thumbnails generated to match your channel, and thumbnails that change depending on who's looking.
Beat Saber Goes Controller-Free and Supernatural Comes Back in Meta’s Connect Games Slate
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Video Games,
"VR gaming is alive and well," Andrew Bosworth said on the Connect stage tonight. It's a confident thing to say eight months after Meta closed three of its own VR studios, and Meta backed it up with a games slate built around playing without controllers.
Most of these games are coming to Meta's new VR Glasses, the $1,299.99 lightweight headset that ships next spring (we covered the hardware separately), and most also run on Quest. The headliner is a Beat Saber you can play with bare hands. The surprise is Supernatural, the fitness app Meta bought and then stopped updating, which returns this fall without Meta.
YouTube Is Putting a Gemini Editor in Shorts That Trims Your Pauses for You
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Artificial Intelligence,
Most of editing a Short is grunt work. You scrub through a clip to find where you stopped saying "um," you nudge a cut until it lands on the beat, and you shuffle clips around until the thing moves fast enough that nobody swipes away. YouTube wants a chatbot to do that part.
At Made on YouTube today, YouTube announced a conversational editing assistant built on Gemini for Shorts and the YouTube Create app. You start with one of its suggested prompts or type your own, and it builds a first draft. From there you keep chatting, and it offers personalized suggestions: trim the pauses, reorder clips for better pacing, reorder frames, and trim music and sync it to the beat. You can jump out to the regular timeline and edit by hand at any point, then come back to the chat. YouTube didn't say when it ships or in which countries.