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An early Prime Day deal has the Apple Watch Series 9 for $100 off. Several color options are available for Apple’s latest model, Engadget’s pick for the best overall smartwatch. The sale brings the Apple Watch down to a record low of $300.

The Apple Watch Series 9 adds Double Tap, a gesture for hands-free controls. With the feature activated, tapping your index finger and thumb together twice can unleash shortcuts for scrolling through widgets, controlling music tracks and more. Great for when you’re holding something like a dog leash or bag of groceries, Double Tap will get more valuable in watchOS 11, as Apple is giving third-party developers an API to customize what the gesture does in individual apps.

Not much has changed on the watch’s outside from its predecessor, but there are other improvements on the inside. That starts with a new S9 SiP that enables Double Tap, on-device Siri processing (great for privacy and when you’re offline) and zippier navigation of watchOS. It also speeds up Siri’s Raise to Speak feature by capturing a rolling two-second audio buffer to understand your requests faster.

The chip also includes a new second-generation ultra-wideband (UWB) chip, also found in the iPhone 15 series. It unlocks a new precision interface for pinging your paired phone if you aren’t sure where it is: The watch will show how many feet away it is as it guides you to the buried (in a couch cushion) treasure.

The Apple Watch Series 9 has a broader range of brightness, reaching a maximum of 2,000 nits (double its predecessor) and a minimum of 1 nit. This can help the watch emit just the right amount for a wider variety of lighting conditions.

The $300 price for Amazon Prime Day is for the 41mm case, the smaller of the two. But the 45mm model is only $330 (usually $429). Not every color is on sale, and some require you to click a “clip coupon” box, so look closely at prices on the product page before checking out.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Amazon Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/early-prime-day-deal-discounts-the-apple-watch-series-9-to-300-164458596.html?src=rss 

Amazon Prime Day may not actually start until July 16, but early deals continue to roll in. Prime members can now scoop up five whole months of Amazon Music Unlimited for free. This is Amazon’s streaming music platform, like Spotify, Apple Music and the rest. So that’s five months of unlimited access to pretty much every song ever made.

Again, this deal is only for current Prime members. The service costs $10 per month once the free trial ends, which is more-or-less in line with rival streaming platforms. If you want the free trial without having to worry about getting charged, just set a reminder to cancel before those five months are up.

Amazon Music Unlimited didn’t make our list of the best music streaming services, but it’s still a mighty fine option. It narrowly missed the list due to a slightly less elegant interface than some rivals and aggressive podcast marketing. Otherwise, it’s a decent choice. It sounds good and the library is nearly-identical to other platforms. What else is there?

There’s one downside that applies to not just Amazon, but all music streamers. The payout to artists is absolute trash. Amazon Music Limited pays around $0.004 per stream, which is right in the middle of Spotify’s range of $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. However, Amazon does have direct licensing agreements with major labels, so someone like Taylor Swift likely negotiated a better deal than that. Emerging artists, as always, remain screwed.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Amazon Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-prime-day-early-deals-include-five-months-of-amazon-music-unlimited-for-free-165639788.html?src=rss 

Amazon has revealed an all-new Echo Spot ahead of Prime Day. It’s very much like the original Echo Spot that came out in 2017 and was discontinued two years later except the front face is now split between a hemispherical display and speaker.

Amazon says the new model comes with better sound and a sharper display. Time will tell if the reboot suffers from the same screen flicker issues as its predecessor. Otherwise, the conceit is more or less identical: it’s a bare-bones smart alarm clock that, via Alexa integration, can manage a few simple tasks like providing the weather forecast or showing song titles when playing music from your streaming app of choice.

Arguably, the best part about the new Echo Spot is that it doesn’t have a camera. The original model had one baked in, which was useful for video chats, but not everyone was enthused about having a camera sitting on their bedside.

The Echo Spot’s outer shell comes in Black, Glacier White and Ocean Blue, and the display can be customized with six hues: magenta, violet, orange, lime, teal or blue, which can be mixed- and-matched with various clock faces. The Echo Spot will be available for $80, which is $50 cheaper than the original model. If you’re a Prime member, you can get it for $45 through Prime Day.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-unearths-the-echo-spot-from-the-dustbin-of-its-product-line-160304130.html?src=rss 

It has finally happened. Microsoft’s text editor Notepad just got a spellcheck feature, more than 40 years after the software launched in 1983. For the history buffs, Ronald Reagan was still president in 1983 and Ghostbusters, then called Ghost Smashers, was an unmade script set to star Eddie Murphy. It was a long time ago.

Microsoft just rolled out the new spellcheck tool to the Notepad app in Windows 11 and it works how one would expect. It automatically checks spelling errors. The company began testing the feature, to whatever extent it required testing, back in March and now it has been quietly updating the software these last few days, as reported by The Verge.

Specifically, the feature works nearly the same as it does in Word or Edge. Misspelled words are highlighted via a red underline. When you right-click on the misspelled word a couple of times, you get a list of correct spelling options to change to. Microsoft has also added autocorrect to the mix, which automatically fixes errors. You get the gist. It’s 2024.

One interesting aspect, however, is that you can disable spellcheck on the basis of file type in Notepad via the settings menu. In other words, you can toggle the feature off for file types like .md or .srt. It’s automatically disabled with file types associated with coding, like log files. Also, it takes an extra click on Notepad to replace a spelling error when compared to Word. As for Word, it first got a spellcheck in 1985. Ronald Reagan was still president and Ghostbusters had just proven itself to be a massive hit.

Microsoft is about to remove the WordPad app from Windows 11 later this year, so it’s beefing up Notepad to pick up the slack. Notepad has recently gotten a dark mode, actual tabs, a character count and, well, a virtual fidget spinner. It’s also been stuffed to the gills with AI, in the form of Copilot integration.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-notepad-just-got-spellcheck-in-the-year-2024-154043158.html?src=rss