Gear Live Gadget News and Reviews

Is Micro RGB Finally a Reason to Upgrade Your TV? (Samsung R95H Review) (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: HDTV, Product Reviews, Videos,

Samsung's 85-inch R95H stopped me mid-step the first time it turned on, and the reason was color. Brightness and size are the usual pitch for a flagship TV. This one's pitch is how it makes red, green, and blue in the first place, and you can see the difference in about 20 seconds.

Musk Says Optimus Won’t Reach Outside Customers Until Late 2027. The Hands Are the Reason.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,

Walking turned out to be the easy part. Asked on Tesla's third-quarter earnings call this week what is still standing between Optimus and a paying customer, Elon Musk went straight to the fingers. "It's mostly the hand," he said.

He put a date on the rest of it, too. Musk said he expects the hand, the reliability and the AI to be worked out "around the end of next year," and that this is "the time to expect when we're delivering Optimus to companies outside of Tesla." Late 2027, then. That is later than the dates Tesla was giving out in 2024.

Banks Are Reportedly Catching AI Agents Logged Into Customer Accounts. Schwab Blocks Them Tens of Times a Week.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,

Give an AI agent your banking password and your bank sees you. It uses the same credentials, the same login screen, the same session you would. There is no field in the log that says a robot did this.

Axios reported Thursday morning that major US banks have started finding exactly that, with third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts and most of them never approved by the bank. The reporting, by Axios' Madison Mills, rests on people familiar with the situation rather than on bank statements, so treat it as a report. Where banks have gone on the record, they have been careful. A Morgan Stanley spokesperson told Axios the firm has not seen instances of "rogue AI agents accessing our platforms."

Kindle Unlimited Is Now Kindle+

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Handhelds, Artificial Intelligence,

Your Kindle Unlimited subscription has a new name and a pile of audiobooks in it, for the same $11.99 a month you were already paying. That part is a real upgrade. It is also a catalog where some of the narrators don't exist.

Amazon flipped the switch on October 22. Kindle Unlimited is Kindle+ now, the price and the features carry over, your reading history and bookmarks and notes come with you, and you can still borrow 20 titles at a time with no due dates. The Canadian signup page says it flatly: "Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+." Amazon's reason for the rename is that the catalog has grown past ebooks and it wanted a name that, in its words, "works across every marketplace."

How Amazon Designed a Tablet for the AI Age with Panos Panay (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Videos, Artificial Intelligence,

Would you pay $499 for an Amazon tablet? I took that question to Panos Panay in the smart home lab at Amazon's headquarters, and his first answer was to put the new Alexa Tablet 12 Pro in my hands and tell me to hold it. The plan behind it took two and a half years: Move off Fire to core Android so the apps people want are there, then build Alexa into the whole product.

Talking App Store Indie Games Week with Apple - What You Need To Know! (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Video Games, Videos,

No Man's Sky runs on an iPhone 11. That's a seven-year-old phone running a procedurally generated universe, and it's the detail I kept coming back to when I sat down with Apple's Carson Oliver, head of the global App Store, and Sebastian Kriese, head of games business development, to talk about App Store Indie Games Week.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra Is Official and Starts at $2,599

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, PC / Laptop,

Yesterday the Surface Laptop Ultra was a spec sheet Microsoft had confirmed nothing about. Today Microsoft put the machine on a stage in San Francisco and confirmed nearly all of it, along with the one number the leak never had. The entry configuration costs $2,599.

Microsoft calls this its first "builder class" PC, built for developers and AI researchers rather than for people who want a nice Windows laptop. At $2,599 to start, it sits well outside normal Surface territory. You do not buy this one because your old laptop got slow.

XREAL’s Aura Finally Has a Price. It’s $1,279, and You Can’t Buy One Yet.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Google,

XREAL has been taking deposits on the Aura without telling anyone what it would cost. Today the company filled in the blank. The Android XR glasses start at $1,279, and the larger configuration is $1,499.

If that sounds like phone money, it is. The catch is that you probably can't spend it yet. Preorders opened only to people who already put down a reservation deposit. Everybody else waits for what XREAL calls "the coming weeks," which is not a date.

Leaked Photos Show LG’s Apple Home Cameras. Code in iOS 27.2 Names Schneider Electric Too.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smart Home, Rumors,

Two leakers moved the Apple and LG home story along today, and Apple had nothing to do with it. Mark Gurman reported yesterday that Apple co-developed a line of home accessories with LG that will ship under LG's name. Today an X account called @ringo_tech posted images of four of them, and the leaker pdfu found code in iOS 27.2 that labels two Schneider Electric products the same way Apple's code labels the LG gear.

The photos will get the attention. The Schneider line in the code is the part I keep rereading. "Second-party" is Apple's own label inside its HomeKit database, and right now only the LG accessories and those two Schneider products carry it. The label reportedly means those accessories get special treatment from the operating system, which would put them in a tier between Apple's own hardware and the HomeKit gear anyone can build.

Windows Search Is Becoming a Chatbot, a Year After Microsoft Promised Less Copilot

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Type a file name into Windows search and you get web results. Type an app name and you wait. Microsoft knows, and the fix it showed today is to turn the Search Menu into something you talk to.

Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president of Windows and Devices, demoed the rebuilt Search Menu on stage in San Francisco. It's a chatbot-style box that takes short typed commands and then does things: toggling settings, pulling up apps and files, or holding a conversation with the Copilot app without you opening Copilot at all. It arrives this fall.