Category: Technology

For the first time, Amazon’s having a second Prime Day sales event in October. If you missed out on the original Prime Day that took place in July, this new two-day event, called the Prime Early Access Sale, will be your next opportunity to grab things like gadgets, clothing, shoes, household necessities and even early holiday gifts for less. Engadget will cover all of the best tech deals you’ll be able to get during the event, but there are some useful tidbits to keep in mind as you think about what you may want to pick up during this year’s Prime Early Access Sale.

When is the Amazon Prime Early Access Sale?

Amazon’s Prime Day “part two” of sorts will begin on October 11th and will run through the end of the day on October 12th. In typical Prime Day fashion, you’ll have to be a Prime subscriber to get access to all of the deals available during this event. Thankfully, Amazon still offers a 30-day free trial to new members, so you can start your free trial now ahead so you’ll be all set when the event arrives.

If you don’t pay for Prime and have no intention of doing so, you should still check out Amazon on Prime Day for sales that are available to all shoppers. Those were few and far between during the original Prime Day back in July, but they did exist. Also, since Amazon is likely using this event to kick off the holiday shopping season, we expect to see other retailers follow suit; you may be able to get the same discounts and additional sales during the same time period at Target, Walmart, Best Buy and other stores.

What deals can we expect?

As with Prime Day earlier this year, we expect Amazon to kick things off a little bit early by knocking down the prices of some of its own gadgets. Early Prime Day deals typically include discounts on Echo speakers, Fire TV gadgets, Eero routers and more, so keep an eye out over the next few weeks for those items to drop in price.

Typically, Prime Day is only matched by Black Friday when it comes to record-low prices on these gadgets. That means you can either choose to pick up Amazon devices during the two-day event or take your chances and wait until Black Friday the following month. There’s a good chance the sale prices we see during this event will come back for Black Friday – however, due to lingering supply chain issues and high demand around the holiday shopping period, there’s a chance you’ll have to wait longer to receive your items if you wait until the last minute to buy them.

Amazon devices will not be the only items on sale during this second Prime Day. The online retailer usually discounts things like household goods, clothing, shoes, books, appliances, beauty items and more for Prime Day, along with a plethora of gadgets. We expect to see a lot of the original Prime Day deals come back for this October event, so there’s a good chance you’ll be able to get headphones, laptops, TVs, gaming accessories, SSDs, robot vacuums and more for record-low prices.

How to prep for the Prime Early Access Sale

Our advice for this fall sale is much the same as ours for the original event – go into it knowing exactly what you want to buy. Amazon’s homepage will be one big distraction on October 11th and 12th and it’ll be easy to get sidetracked by deals that probably aren’t worth your time or money. Instead of falling into that trap, make a list of the things you hope to get at a discount for both yourself and for other people if you’re doing some early holiday shopping.

You can either use Amazon’s wish list feature to collect all of your desirables in one place online, or write it all down the old-fashioned way on a sticky note. We like Amazon’s wish list feature because it’ll show if something dropped in price after you added it to your list. That essentially makes the wish list a one-stop shop for you on Prime Day – it’ll have all of the items you want to buy, and it’ll show you how much of a discount you can get on it during the two-day event.

We also recommend using a price tracker like CamelCamelCamel to check out the price history for any items you plan on buying during the Prime Early Access Sale. That will help you decide if Amazon’s deal on that particular item is good enough for you to buy it.

Engadget will surface all of the best tech deals available during this Prime Day, so if you have a lot of gadgets on your list, be sure to check the site during the two-day event. You can also follow the @EngadgetDeals Twitter account and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter to stay up to date on the latest discounts.

 

People made some 760 million trips aboard New York’s subway system last year. Granted, that’s down from around 1.7 trillion trips, pre-pandemic, but still far outpaced the next two largest transit systems — DC’s Metro and the Chicago Transit Authority — combined. So when major storms, like last year’s remnants of Hurricane Ida, nor’easters, heavy downpours or swelling tides swamp New York’s low lying coastal areas and infrastructure, it’s a big deal.

And it’s a deal that’s only getting bigger thanks to climate change. Sea levels around the city have already risen a foot in the last century with another 8- to 30-inch increase expected by mid century, and up to 75 additional inches by 2100, according to the New York City Panel on Climate Change. To help city planners, emergency responders and everyday citizens alike better prepare for 100-year storms that are increasingly happening every couple, researchers from NYU’s Urban Flooding Group have developed a street-level sensor system that can track rising street tides in real time.

The city of New York is set atop a series of low lying islands and has been subject to the furies of mid-Atlantic hurricanes throughout its history. In 1821, a hurricane reportedly hit directly over the city, flooding streets and wharves with 13-foot swells rising over the course of just one hour; a subsequent Cat I storm in 1893 then scoured all signs of civilization from Hog Island, and a Cat III passed over Long Island, killing 200 and causing major flooding. Things did not improve with the advent of a storm naming convention. Carol in 1954 also caused citywide floods, Donna in ‘60 brought an 11-foot storm surge with her, and Ida in 2021 saw an unprecedented amount of rainfall and subsequent flooding in the region, killing more than 100 people and causing nearly a billion dollars in damages.

As the NYC Planning Department explains, when it comes to setting building codes, zoning and planning, the city works off of FEMA’s Preliminary Flood Insurance Rate Maps (PFIRMs) to calculate an area’s flood risk. PFIRMs cover the areas where, “flood waters are expected to rise during a flood event that has a 1 percent annual chance of occurring,” sometimes called the 100-year floodplain. As of 2016, some 52 million square feet of NYC coastline falls within that categorization, impacting 400,000 residents — more than than the entire populations of Cleveland, Tampa, or St. Louis. By 2050, that area of effect is expected to double and the probability of 100-year floods occuring could triple, meaning the chances that your home will face significant flooding over the course of a 30-year mortgage would jump from around 26 percent today to nearly 80 percent by mid-century.

As such, responding to today’s floods while preparing for worsening events in the future is a critical task for NYC’s administration, requiring coordination between governmental and NGOs at the local, state and federal levels. FloodNet, a program launched first by NYU and expanded with help from CUNY, operates on the hyperlocal level to provide a street-by-street look at flooding throughout a given neighborhood. The program began with NYU’s Urban Flooding Group.

“We are essentially designing, building and deploying low cost sensors to measure street level flooding,” Dr. Andrea Silverman, environmental engineer and Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, told Engadget. “The idea is that it can provide badly needed quantitative data. Before FloodNet, there was no quantitative data on street level flooding, so people didn’t really have a full sense of how often certain locations were flooding — the duration of the floods, the depth, rates of onset and drainage, for example.”

“And these are all pieces of information that are helpful for infrastructure planning, for one, but also for emergency management,” she continued. “So we do have our data available, they send alerts to see folks that are interested, like the National Weather Service and emergency management, to help inform their response.”

FloodNet is currently in early development with just 23 sensor units erected on 8-foot tall posts throughout the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, though the team hopes to expand that network to more than 500 units citywide within the next half decade. Each FloodNet sensor is a self-contained, solar-powered system that uses ultrasound as an invisible rangefinder — as flood waters rise, the distance between the street surface and the sensor shrinks, calculating the difference between that and baseline readings shows how much the water level has risen. The NYU team opted for an ultrasound-based solution rather than, say LiDAR or RADAR, due to ultrasound tech being slightly less expensive and providing more focused return data, as well as being more accurate and requiring less maintenance than a basic contact water sensor.

The data each sensor produces is transmitted wirelessly using a LoRa transceiver to a gateway hub, which can pull from any sensor within a one-mile radius and push it through the internet to the FloodNet servers. The data is then displayed in real-time on the FloodNet homepage.

”The city has invested a lot in predictive models [estimating] where it would flood with a certain amount of rain, or increase in tide,” Silverman said. Sensors won’t have to be installed on every corner to be most effective, she pointed out. There are “certain locations that are more likely to be flood prone because of topology or because of the sewer network or because of proximity to the coast, for example. And so we use those models to try to get a sense of locations where it may be most flood-prone,” as well as reach out to local residents with first-hand knowledge of likely flood areas.

In order to further roll out the program, the sensors will need to undergo a slight redesign, Silverman noted. “The next version of the sensor, we’re taking what we’ve learned from our current version and making it a bit more manufacturable,” she said. “We’re in the process of testing that and then we’re hoping to start our first manufacturing round, and that’s what’s going to allow us to expand out”.

FloodNet is an open-source venture, so all of the sensor schematics, firmware, maintenance guides and data are freely available on the team’s GitHub page. “Obviously you need to have some sort of technical know-how to be able to build them — it may not be right now where just anyone could go build a sensor, deploy it and be online immediately, in terms of being able to just generate the data, but we’re trying to get there,” Silverman conceded. “Eventually we’d love to get to a place where we can have the designs written up in a way that anyone can approach it.”

 

Nintendo’s approach to online gaming has sometimes been awkward (having to use your phone just to chat, for example), but it just took an important step forward. The Vergereports Nintendo has updated the Switch Online apps for Android and iOS with Splatoon 3 home screen widgets. You can quickly review your recent game stats, gaze at your screenshot album and check the stage schedule to see when a favorite game mode will come into the rotation.

You can only slightly customize the widgets, and some occupy more screen real estate than others. You’ll need to clear some room if you want the stage schedule, while the photo album is relatively small. iPhone owners can also forget about iOS 16 lock screen widgets.

You’ll need a Switch Online subscription to use these features, although that isn’t surprising when they’re tied to the Splatoon 3 multiplayer experience. When combined with the game’s matchmaking improvements over Splatoon 2, though, they indicate that Nintendo is getting the hang of internet gaming.

 

Oura has, after many years of trying, finally managed to sand out the hard edge from its body tracking smart ring. The company is updating the third-generation of its ring, originally released at the end of 2021, but this time with a perfectly round body. The Oura (Gen3) Horizon keeps the same suite of advanced sensors found in the existing model, but looks far nicer on the finger.

Most wearables, even the elegant ones, have a hard edge or two in their designs since common batteries and components are built in rectangles. While the Oura 3 wasn’t ugly, the hard side did knock a point or two from its style stats, especially at certain, unflattering, angles. And if the ring slid around, it’d dig into your knuckles while you were working out, which wasn’t ideal.

The ring itself is mostly unchanged from the Gen3, unsurprising since it was loaded with a boatload of features Oura itself is still trying to harness. The company has drip-fed new features out across the year, including daytime and workout heart rate, period prediction and blood oxygenation sensing. 

Our Ring (Gen3) Horizon is available to order right now, and is priced at $349, with the existing ring remaining at $299. Would-be buyers can also pick it up in Silver, Black, Stealth and Gold, with the Horizon getting an exclusive Rose Gold colorway, which looks pretty tasty. Not to mention you’ll still need to pay $5.99 per month to unlock all of the goodies the company keeps tucked away for power users.

 

Wacom has unveiled one of its most advanced drawing tablets yet for creatives, the $3,500 Cintiq Pro 27. It has an all-new compact design, a 26.9-inch, 120Hz 4K reference touch display and all-new Pro Pen 3 that’s adjustable for weight, balance, button layout and thickness. 

The Cintiq Pro 27 is actually smaller than the Cintiq Pro 24, thanks to the significantly slimmer bezels. Wacom also moved the ExpressKey buttons to the back left and right sides, but they’re located on the grips to make them easy to find and use. 

While previous models effectively required an external monitor to view accurate colors, the new multi-touch display is effectively a reference monitor itself. It uses a true 10-bit and not a dithered 8-bit 4K panel, delivering 99 percent of the Adobe RGB gamut and 98 percent of the DCI-P3 (HDR) gamut. It also runs at 120Hz for smooth and responsive drawing and has a peak brightness of 400 nits, just enough to display HDR content. It’s even Pantone SkinTone validated, meeting the Pantone standard for the full range of human skin tones.

The faster refresh allows the new Pro Pen 3 to track twice as quickly as previous models. And the pen itself is customizable, giving users the ability to change the size, weight, center of gravity and even the button layout via swappable parts. The battery-free electro-magnetic resonance tech offers 8,192 levels of pressure and ships with five standard and five felt-tip nibs.

The Ergo Stand supports 20 degrees of screen rotation along with tilting functions, but it’s not included in the price and costs $500. However, the display also supports VESA mounts if you prefer to go that route. The Cintiq Pro 27 is now available for $3,500 from Wacom and select retailers — a lot of money to be sure, but more reasonable as a professional tool. 

 

Netflix has launched the ability to create public handles for its games, laying the foundation for additional features that would make the service more social. People can use this public username across all its titles, allowing them to find friends (or to meet new ones) to play with in multiplayer games like Rival Pirates without having to reveal their Netflix name and profile icon. It’s also what’s going to be displayed on leaderboards for single-player games, such as Dominoes Café and the platformer Lucky Luna. 

As TechCrunch had previously reported, there are codes in the app suggesting that the company is also working on ways that would allow users to invite each other to play games and to show other people that they’re online. Netflix didn’t confirm that those features were underway, but Mobile Games Product Manager Sophia Yang said in the company’s announcement that the launch of game handles “is only the beginning in building a tailored game experience for our members around the world.” Yang added: “We’ll continue to adapt and evolve our service to meet the needs of our members…” Seeing as Netflix recently revealed that it’s going all in on games and is building its own studio in Helsinki, Finland, it wouldn’t come as a surprise for the company to roll out features that would make its service more interactive.

To set a public nickname, Android users can select the games tab in the navigation bar and navigate to “Create your Netflix game handle.” iOS users will first have to download Rival Pirates or Lucky Luna and then launch the game to get a prompt asking them to create a handle. 

 

Deezer can now help you find songs that suddenly start playing in your head in the middle of the night. The music streaming service has upgraded its in-app SongCatcher feature so that it can now identify a track just by humming or even whistling parts of it. Once the service identifies a track, it will show you an information page with its title, artist and single/album cover where you can play the song, add it your playlist or queue and add it to your favorites.

The company says it’s the only music streaming service with an in-app track recognition feature that includes humming and whistling, but it’s worth noting that you can do the same within Google search. I tester Deezer’s new feature and compared it with Google’s and found that the latter is a bit better at recognizing my off-key humming. Google was even able to easily ID the more obscure parts of some Japanese pop songs. 

For Deezer, I sometimes had to hum the more recognizable parts of a track, such as its chorus, even if they’re enormous hits. I’m talking songs like Lady Gaga’s Always Remember Us This Way, Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next and Lil Nas X’s Industry Baby. If you’re a subscriber, though, it’s the more convenient option, seeing as you can directly add tracks to your playlists. To ID songs by humming, you simply have to go to Search, then tap on “What’s this song” to launch SongCatcher and choose “Sing Now.”

Maybe I was just extra out of tune while testing Deezer — nobody has ever called me a good singer. The good news is that the feature could become much better at identifying tracks over time. Alexandra Leloup, VP Core Product at the company, explained: “As we keep improving the algorithm, the feature will become faster and even more accurate when it comes to recognizing songs across our 90 million track library.”

 

One of Shark’s higher-end robot vacuums is on sale at Amazon, and you may want to check it out if you’re looking for a model with a clean base. The Shark IQ RV1001AE robot vacuum is currently listed for $300, and the deal is only available today. That’s half off the model’s original retail price of $600 and just a dollar more than its all-time low on the website. The RV1001AE vacuum features powerful suction that can clean both bare floors and carpets, as well as a self-cleaning brush roll that can remove pet and human hair on its own. No more balls of tangled hair getting stuck and preventing the vacuum from being able to clean efficiently.

Buy Shark RV1001AE IQ Robot at Amazon – $300

The machine cleans the floor row by row, and its IQ navigation capability means it can map your whole home so that you can select specific rooms to clean. If it runs out of battery, it can even go back to its dock, recharge and pick up from where it left off. When you want to the robot to start cleaning, you can get it to move by controlling it with your voice through Alexa and Google Assistant. And yes, the vacuum is also connected to the company’s app, which you can use to schedule cleanings for your whole house or for certain rooms at specific hours of the day. The robot empties its bin into the clean base once it’s done, and that bagless base can hold up to 45 days’ worth of dirt.

In case you’d rather get a model you can manually use — maybe your pet is deathly afraid of robot vacuums or maybe you personally want to make sure no corner gets missed — Shark has another two models on sale at Amazon. The Shark IZ363HT has a self-cleaning brush roll, as well, and is listed for $230 at 34 percent off. Meanwhile, the Shark IZ483H is currently on sale for $300, or $200 off its regular price. It has a self-cleaning brush roll, a removable hand vacuum and a 120-minute battery life on a single charge.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

 

Russia has removed all iOS apps from VK, the second largest tech company in Russia, The Verge has reported. That includes not just the VK social media app that’s the fifth most popular in Russia, but others like Mail.ru and VK Music. The move was made in response to UK sanctions against the Russian government.  

VK confirmed that “some VK applications are blocked by Apple, so they are not available for download and update in the App Store,” according to a (Google translated) press release. “Their core functionality will be familiar and stable… [but] there may be difficulties with notifications and payments. VK will continue to develop and support applications for iOS.”

These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government. In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location.

Apple confirmed that it removed the apps and shut down VK’s developer accounts. “These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government,” a spokesperson told The Verge. “In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location. Users who have already downloaded these apps may continue to use them.”

Earlier this week, the UK government imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs over the sham referendums held in Ukraine. Included in the list are executives from Gazprombank, a Russian bank with ties to VK. “Today’s sanctions will target those behind these sham votes, as well as the individuals that continue to prop up the Russian regime’s war of aggression,” said UK foreign secretary James Cleverly in a statement. 

Russia’s Ministry of Digital Affairs told state media site RT that it’s investigating the reasons for the removal. The apps are still available on Google Play — Engadget has reached out to Google to see if it plans to follow Apple’s lead. 

Earlier this year, Apple halted sales of all its products in Russia in response to the Ukraine invasion, while also limiting Apple Pay and pulling apps from outlets like RT and Sputnik. Last year, a Russian law went into effect that required Samsung, Apple and other manufacturers to pre-install Russian apps like VK and Yandex on devices sold there. 

 

A few years ago, Samsung had major battery issues when several faulty Galaxy Note 7 phones had exploding batteries. The devices were recalled, and the company spent a lot of time over the following years outlining all the rigorous battery tests it did to ensure it didn’t happen again.

Now, YouTuber Mrwhosetheboss, as well as others, have noticed batteries in Samsung phones are swelling up at a disproportionately high rate. This usually affects older devices, but some are only a couple of years old – the 2020-era Galaxy Z Fold 2, for instance.

Samsung hasn’t formally responded yet, but battery swelling isn’t a new problem, nor one unique to Galaxy phones. As lithium batteries age, their increasingly flawed chemical reactions can produce gas that inflates battery cells. Many companies suggest you keep device batteries at a roughly 50 percent charge if you won’t use it for extended periods.

– Mat Smith

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Department of Transportation approves EV charging plans for all 50 states

$1.5 billion is available to fund charging stations along highways.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law earmarked $5 billion in funding over five years to help states install chargers along highways, and that process just took an important step forward. The Department of Transportation has approved EV charging plans for all 50 states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico. The proposals cover 75,000 miles of highways.

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The latest iPadOS 16 beta brings Stage Manager to older iPad Pro models

An M1 chip is no longer required, with a caveat.

The biggest change with iPadOS 16 may be Stage Manager, a totally new multitasking system that adds overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad. The latest iPadOS 16 developer beta can run Stage Manager on several older devices: It’ll work on the 11-inch iPad Pro (first generation and later) and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (third generation and later). However, there is one notable missing feature for the older iPad Pro models – Stage Manager will only work on the iPad’s built-in display. You won’t be able to extend your display to an external monitor.

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Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs offer up to 24 cores and 5.8GHz speeds

The Core i9-13900K sounds like a beast.

Intel’s 13th-gen Core chips, AKA Raptor Lake, have landed. The company’s new top-end chip, the Core i9-13900K, sports 24 cores (eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores) and can reach up to a 5.8GHz Max Turbo frequency. Last year’s i9-12900K offered 16 cores and a maximum speed of 5.2 GHz. Intel claims the new 13900K is 41 percent better for multi-threaded work, like video encoding. If you skipped last year’s chips or are running even older Intel hardware, the 13th-gen CPUs look like the update you’ve been waiting for.

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Volvo has developed the world’s first interior radar system for cars

It’s a new safety feature.

Set to debut on its upcoming flagship EX90 electric SUV, Volvo’s new radar system monitors both the cabin and trunk, to prevent a car from being locked while anyone is inside. The idea is to guard against situations where pets or children may be inadvertently trapped inside a car on a hot day, with the car surfacing reminders if it recognizes there are occupants inside when being locked. Volvo says the multiple radars in the trunk, in the car’s overhead console and in roof-mounted reading lamps can detect “sub-millimeter” movements.

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Apple Watch SE review (2022)

The best smartwatch $250 can buy.

Apple, of all companies, delivering the most competitively priced smartwatch you can buy in 2022? Apple’s starter smartwatch offers a comprehensive suite of health and fitness tracking tools, emergency features and snappy performance. As long as you’re not extremely clumsy or impatient, you won’t miss features like the hardier screen, dust resistance or the always-on display found on the more expensive models.

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Chipotle is moving its tortilla robot to a real restaurant

The chain is also piloting AI that tells kitchen staff what to cook.

Chipotle’s tortilla-making robot is moving to a real restaurant. In October, the machine will start cooking tortilla chips in Fountain Valley, California. Feedback from customers and workers will help the company decide on a national rollout. Artificial intelligence will influence some human cooks, too. Chipotle is piloting a demand-based cooking system that uses AI to tell staff what and when to cook based on forecasts for how much they’ll need.

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Fujifilm X-H2S camera review

The most powerful APS-C camera yet.

With the X-H2S, Fujifilm has a new flagship camera. It features a new 26.2-megapixel stacked sensor that delivers shooting speeds up to 40 fps in electronic shutter mode. At the same time, it has the most advanced video features of any APS-C camera, with up to 6.2K video. It also offers in-body stabilization, a high-resolution EVF, CFexpress support and more. The main drawback: The autofocus still isn’t quite as fast as rival cameras.

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