Category: Technology

With its popular and well-regarded Ioniq lineup, Hyundai has been conspicuously absent from the list of major automakers signing on to use Tesla’s North America Charging Standard (NACS). Now, the Korean automaker has announced that it has reached a deal to adopt NACS in North America starting in Q4 2024 in the US, with Canada to follow in the first half of 2025. 

Hyundai’s EVs with a NACS port will gain access to more than 12,000 Superchargers across North America, doubling the number of DC fast chargers available to customers. “This new alliance will provide Hyundai EV owners confidence in their ability to conveniently charge their vehicles… with at least 30,000 stations across North America,” said Hyundai Motor North America CEO José Muñoz.

Upcoming Hyundai EVs equipped with NACs, including the Ioniq 5, Ioniq 6 and upcoming Ioniq 7, will gain access to the chargers in late 2024. New and older CCS charger-equipped vehicles will be able to use them in the first quarter of 2025, the company said. 

Along with access to Tesla’s network, Hyundai is teaming up with BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes to develop a North American network with at least 30,000 chargers. The first US stations are set to open in the summer of 2024, with chargers in Canada following at a later date. 

The lack of fast chargers has been a high hurdle for EV adoption, so most automakers have looked at Tesla as at least a stopgap solution. Hyundai Motors (including Kia) recently overtook GM for second place in US EV sales, but it’s still a distant second to Tesla, which sold 300,000 more EVs last year.

So far, major automakers that have now signed up to use Tesla’s Supercharger network include Hyundai, Fisker, Ford, GM, Honda, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Rivian and Volvo. Those still in talks reportedly include Stellantis and Volkswagen. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hyundai-evs-will-support-teslas-nacs-charging-starting-in-q4-2024-120517284.html?src=rss 

Ahead of its Prime Big Deal Days starting next week, Amazon is having a sale on the Apple Watch Series 8 and thanks to a coupon, it’s down to the lowest price we’ve seen to date. You can grab the 41mm model in red for just $225, for a savings of $175 off the regular $400 price (44 percent off). That’s a deal that’s hard to resist, considering that the next-gen Series 9 only came out two weeks ago. 

The Series 8 isn’t a huge update over the Series 7, but it does carry some useful new features. The main one is a temperature sensor tied to women’s health, giving female users an estimate on when they may be ovulating. It’s meant to be used overnight, sampling your wrist temperature every five seconds so you can see shifts from your baseline

The other is Crash Detection. Much as current watches can detect a fall, the Series 8 can detect car crashes via a pair of new accelerometers. It works in concert with other sensors to detect four different types of crashes, including rollovers, front impact, back impact and side impact. And of course, all of these Series 8 models have a cellular function, giving you internet connectivity, calls and texts for running, hiking and other activities that don’t require a smartphone. 

Finally, like other Apple Watches, you can use it to unlock your Mac, find your other Apple devices and pay with Apple Pay. The main improvements with the Series 9 are the Double Tap and Raise to Speak (Siri) features, so if you can live without those and are good with the red color, $225 is an incredible price. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-apple-watch-series-8-falls-to-a-new-low-of-225-103200743.html?src=rss 

Amazon’s Kuiper satellites will soon make their debut in orbit. The company is gearing up to deploy its first two satellites, the KuiperSat-1 and the KuiperSat-2, for its Protoflight mission that’s scheduled to launch on October 6. Project Kuiper is Amazon’s answer to SpaceX’s Starlink service. At the moment, its plans entail launching 3,200 satellites over the next six years to form a constellation that can provide internet connectivity even to far-flung places traditional providers can’t reach.

The KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 are the first version of Amazon’s satellites and will provide the company with an important learning opportunity. They’ll allow the company to conduct a series of tests that would add valuable real-world data to information already collected from the lab. Project Kuiper’s ground team will also get the chance to observe how the network performs, since Protoflight will be testing the satellites’ connection to Kuiper’s ground-based network and to customer terminals. In addition, it will serve as a trial for the launch operations of subsequent satellites.

“We’ve done extensive testing here in our lab and have a high degree of confidence in our satellite design, but there’s no substitute for on-orbit testing,” said Rajeev Badyal, Project Kuiper’s vice president of technology, in a statement. “This is Amazon’s first time putting satellites into space, and we’re going to learn an incredible amount regardless of how the mission unfolds.”

Amazon previously announced its intention to send the first two Kuiper satellites to space on top of a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket. However, ULA encountered delays with the new rocket’s development, and the satellites will be ferried to space on top of an Atlas V instead. ULA will deploy the satellites at an altitude of 311 miles, and then the Kuiper team will start testing the systems onboard and confirm all electronics are working, establish first contact and deploy the satellites’ solar arrays. After that, the team will send data back and forth to test the network. Amazon says both satellites will be deorbited by the end of the mission.

The company says it’s on track to deploy its first production satellites in the first half of 2024 and to start beta testing with commercial consumers later that year. Presumably, it could incorporate changes to its plans, depending on what it learns from this launch. ULA will be streaming the event live on October 6, with coverage starting at 2PM ET.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-first-two-amazon-kuiper-satellites-are-heading-to-space-on-october-6-054335694.html?src=rss 

Posts on X might look quite different, especially if you mainly follow news and media publications. The website formerly known as Twitter has started removing headlines and snippets from posted links, implementing a change Fortune reported in August. Back then, website owner Elon Musk said that the idea came from him directly and that it will “greatly improve the [platform’s] esthetics.” We tested it out by posting one of our stories, and only the article’s image with an overlay of its URL show up when it’s viewed on iOS. On the web, we still see the article snippet and a truncated version of its headline. 

Advertisers reportedly didn’t like the new format when they were shown a preview of it, but the change is clearly still pushing through. X’s main reason for the format switch is apparently to make posts look more compact by fitting more of them in the portion of the timeline that appears on screen. In addition, Musk reportedly thinks that it could help lessen instances of clickbait, which rely on headlines with shock value, on the website. 

While Musk publicly claims that the primary driving force for the change in format is the website’s aesthetic, it’s no secret that he’s been trying to encourage more people to post long-form pieces directly on X. The website expanded Blue subscribers’ post limit to 25,000 characters under his leadership, and he previously tweeted that journalists who want “more freedom to write and a higher income” should “publish directly” on the platform. More recently, he encouraged “more citizen journalism” on X and said that people can do “live video easily” from their phone. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-starts-removing-headlines-from-posted-links-011446351.html?src=rss 

Amazon is shutting down its short-lived audio app known as Amp, which previously offered a music library for users to create and broadcast custom DJ sets, according to reports by Bloomberg. Amazon’s Amp was available on Android and iOS and has only been live since March of 2022. While a pandemic bubble might have given it some attention, it never really took off. The tool was designed to allow creators to make custom content as modern DJ hosts. On this mobile-forward app, users could overlap conversations and chit-chat with live music, similar to what you would hear on a traditional radio station.

But as we all know, radio is dying as it is. And it’s no question that competition in the streaming space is hot. A lot of creators in the niche subset of online DJing might have already been on mainstream platforms like YouTube and TikTok or on more music-focused platforms like Stationhead or Tidal. The app was even initially reported as “something of a Clubhouse competitor.” Yet, Amazon did not explicitly cite why they made the decision to kill Amp altogether, or how far off it was from saving. In a memo to Bloomberg, Steve Boom, who led Amp at Amazon said that the decision was “not made quickly or easily.”

It may have something to do with the fact that it just never picked up in the mainstream as Amazon would have liked it to. When our very own James Trew put it to the test, he said he had trouble getting listeners. The mobile-first platform had some unusual limitations for how content could be created and listened to — all in all, probably playing to its downfall. For example, you could only play two songs from the same album within a three-hour period, which is a considerable amount of time to block off a DJ from being able to create a truly custom set.

The axing of Amp follows a series of cuts from the big box retailer, namely its Halo division which it dissolved back in April and Amazon Scout, a robot delivery service it killed before it could even start, around this time last year. This could signal some internal restructuring is still well underway at Amazon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-live-audio-streaming-platform-amp-closes-up-shop-214652658.html?src=rss 

Uber is adding another service to its ride-hailing app: package returns. The company announced a new feature — dubbed ‘Return a Package’ — where customers can have a courier pick up their packages and have them dropped off at a local post office, UPS or FedEx. It will only be available for parcels that are sealed and prepaid, however.
Using this tool, you can track your package’s movement in real-time in the Uber app and confirm when a drop-off is completed. This feature will have a flat rate fee of $5, or $3 for Uber One members. ‘Return a Package’ will be available starting today in the Uber and Uber Eats apps in nearly 5,000 cities throughout the United States.

This new service is similar to Uber’s existing Connect feature, which allows users to ship goods to and from friends and family — the difference here is that the receiver will be another service worker instead. However, Return a Package is by no means breaking new ground. DoorDash has been offering a similar service since January of this year. The new offering comes ahead of the busy holiday season, when lots of online shoppers buy and return items.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/you-can-have-uber-take-your-packages-to-the-post-office-now-172403100.html?src=rss 

If you’re rocking an iPhone 15, it’s probably a good idea to update to the latest version of iOS swiftly. Apple has released a fix for the overheating issues that have plagued its latest batch of iPhones. The company says that iOS 17.0.3 “provides important bug fixes, security updates and addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected.” An iPadOS 17 update is also available.

Apple partially blamed the overheating issue on an iOS 17 bug. It noted that there were also “some recent updates to third-party apps that are causing them to overload the system.” The company has been working with the developers of those apps (which included Uber, Instagram and Asphalt 9) to resolve the problem.

Your iPhone may be configured to update to the latest version of iOS automatically during downtime when it’s charging. You can also update your device manually, by going to Settings > General > About > Software Update on your iPhone. If iOS 17.0.3 is available to you (Apple rolls out updates gradually), you’ll be able to install it right away and hopefully keep your iPhone from getting too toasty.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-releases-ios-17-fix-for-iphone-15-overheating-issue-172616576.html?src=rss