Kalakshar US

If you’ve been holding out for the best possible deal on the latest AirPods Pro, today might be the day to take the plunge. Apple’s newest earbuds have dropped to $200 ahead of Black Friday proper, and that’s $50 off their usual price and the best we’ve seen. They join the second-generation, standard AirPods, which have been on discount for a few days at $90 a pair. Some colors of the AirPods Max are also on sale for $450, which is $100 less than usual.

The second-gen AirPods Pro may not look very different from their predecessor, but that’s because most of the changes lie on the inside. They include Apple’s new H2 chip, which enables things like hands-free Siri, but also improvements like better sound quality and ANC, along with new features like Adaptive Transparency. In our testing, we found the new Pros to have significantly improved active noise cancellation and better sound than the model that came before it. The improved Transparency Mode is also the best we’ve tried on any wireless earbuds — it almost sounds like you’re not wearing them at all when you enable this feature. That means you can more easily jump in and out of conversations, or just keep your AirPods in your ears for longer periods of time in between actively listening to music.

Otherwise, the new Pros are much the same as the previous models. You get deep integration with the Apple ecosystem, which is a big reason why some will choose these buds over others. Quick pairing and switching allows you to use them in between Apple devices seamlessly, and they have a decent, six-hour battery life. Their wireless charging case is both Qi-certified and MagSafe-compatible, so you have a lot of options when it comes to picking a charger for these buds. Overall, they’re some of our favorite wireless earbuds at the moment, and they’ll be hard to beat for Apple fanatics.

Get the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers by following @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribing to the Engadget Deals newsletter.

 

A few weeks after he took over Twitter, Elon Musk said he will fulfill one of his early promises for the platform, reinstating Donald Trump’s account. The former president, who is running for the White House for a third time, will once again be allowed to tweet, Musk said. 

Twitter’s new CEO appeared to make the decision via a Twitter poll. On Friday night, Musk tweeted a poll asking people to vote on whether Twitter should reinstate the former President, who recently just revealed that he will run for the country’s highest office again in 2024. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk said in a follow-up tweet. The phrase is Latin for “the voice of the people, the voice of God.” Twenty-four hours later, the poll had closed, and Musk announced that Trump will indeed be reinstated.

Soon after, @realDonaldTrump was once again online, though the former president has yet to tweet. Trump claimed earlier this year that he would not be returning to the platform even if his account was reinstated.

The option to reinstate the former President won with 51.8 percent of the 15,085,458 votes. While the poll was ongoing, Musk said that it was getting one million votes per hour, and also said “bot and troll armies” were responsible for some of the activity. 

While Musk has long indicated he would allow Trump coming back onto the platform, he previously pledged to form a moderation council before reversing any permanent Twitter account bans. On November 18th, Musk reinstated a few accounts, including those belonging to Kathy Griffin and Jordan Peterson. At the time, he said no decision had been made about Trump.

Twitter booted Trump off the platform in early 2021 after he broke rules against inciting violence. He violated Twitter’s civic integrity policy by expressing support for the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th last year. His account was initially suspendedfor 12 hours. A couple of days later, in his final days in office, Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s personal account. Trump has been unable to use the platform since, despite his attempts to skirt the ban and a failed lawsuit that sought to have his access restored. It took Musk acquisition for Twitter for Trump to get his account back.

Trump’s return may be as much of a business decision on Musk’s part as much as anything. Earlier this week, a Reuters report suggested that many of Twitter’s heaviest users have moved away from the platform to the likes of Instagram and TikTok. Musk himself has noted that many of the most-followed Twitter accounts don’t tweet often.

For better or worse, Trump is a prominent figure and his tweets commanded attention. Whether advertisers will be glad to see Trump back remains to be seen. Just ahead of officially assuming control of Twitter, Musk sought to soothe any concerns by stating that “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”

In the wake of his actions surrounding January 6th, Meta blocked Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. As things stand, that suspension is set to expire on January 7th, 2023 — just as the 2024 election cycle gets into full swing. 

Since being de-platformed from major services, Trump has turned his attention to smaller social networks, including his own app, Truth Social. Trump had pledged that he wouldn’t return to Twitter, but with 88 million followers there, he commanded an audience almost 22 times the size of the one he has on Truth Social (a platform that, for what it’s worth, Musk has described as “essentially a right-wing echo chamber”).

Twitter has gone through enormous changes since Musk took over the company. He has slashed the headcount by turfing out thousands of employees and contractors, as well as some dissenters. Several top executives are among those who’ve departed. Around 1,200 more are said to have left after refusing to commit to Musk’s vision of a “hardcore” Twitter 2.0 that would require working “long hours at high intensity.” Trump’s return won’t exactly help to steady the ship.

Mariella Moon and Karissa Bell contributed to this post.

 

Secure messaging platform Wickr is shutting down its consumer-facing app. In a blog post spotted by The Verge, the Amazon-owned company announced it would stop accepting new Wickr Me registrations by the end of the year before ultimately discounting the service altogether on December 31st, 2023. The shutdown won’t affect the AWS and Enterprise versions of Wickr.

“After careful consideration, we will be concentrating Wickr’s focus on securing our business and public sector customers’ data and communications with AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise, and have decided to discontinue our consumer product, Wickr Me,” the company said, adding that it was working on developing the capability for Wickr customers to securely communicate with individuals outside of their organization.

The announcement comes following reports that Amazon had been doing little to combat the problem of people using Wickr Me to exchange child sexual abuse material. In June, NBC News, citing court documents and information from law enforcement and activists, said the platform had become a “go-to destination” for those trafficking in that type of content.

Before next year’s shutdown, Wickr said it would share information with users on how to save their data. Thankfully, alternatives aren’t hard to find, with apps like Signal providing robust secure messaging.  

 

The days of the leap second creating headaches for software engineers are coming to an end. On Friday, government representatives at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris, France voted nearly unanimously to retire the practice of occasionally adding one second to official clocks (via The New York Times).

Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to reconcile discrepancies that can come up between atomic time and observed solar time, the leap second has been the bane of tech companies for decades. In 2012, for instance, Reddit was down for about 40 minutes when the addition of a leap second that year confused the company’s servers. More recently, Cloudflare saw part of its DNS services affected due to a time change in 2016.

Companies like Facebook parent Meta employ a technique called “smearing” to avoid outages whenever the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service adjusts UTC to add a leap second. Earlier this year, the social media giant published a blog post calling for an end to the practice. “Every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures,” Meta said at the time. Part of the push to eliminate the leap second has come as a way to preserve UTC as the world’s official international time.

With this week’s vote, dignitaries from the US, Canada and France called for the practice to end before 2035. Russia voted against the proposal. In the past, the country has sought to delay the demise of the leap second because GLONASS, its global positioning system, incorporates the adjustment – the Global Position System (GPS) operated by the US does not. Felicitas Arias, the former director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures told Nature the decision may force Russia to launch new satellites.

There’s still another organization that needs to weigh in on the matter before software engineers can breathe a sigh of relief. The International Telecommunications Union, the group responsible for transmitting universal time, will vote on the issue next year. If it moves forward with “Resolution D,” metrologists and astronomers will have until at least 2135 to figure out how to reconcile the atomic and astronomical time scales.

 

The Orion crew vehicle is exceeding expectations on its way to the Moon. NASA provided an update on Artemis 1 following the mission’s successful launch early Wednesday morning. “Orion has been performing great so far,” Vehicle Integration Manager Jim Geffre said during a press briefing NASA held on Friday. “All of the systems are exceeding expectations from a performance standpoint.”

Artemis 1 seeks to confirm the crew vehicle can safely carry human astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite. The journey marks Orion’s first trip beyond our planet’s orbit. In 2014, the spacecraft completed a two-orbit test flight around Earth. A successful flight would pave the way for a manned mission to the Moon and eventually NASA’s first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The agency expects Artemis 1 to reach the Moon on November 21st. At that point, the spacecraft will perform the first of four main engine burns NASA has planned for the mission. At times, Orion will fly little more than 81 miles (130 kilometers) above the lunar surface. “We will be passing over some of the Apollo landing sites,” Flight Director Jeff Radigan said. Four days later, NASA plans to conduct a second burn to put Orion in a distant orbit around the Moon before finally setting the spacecraft on a return trajectory toward the Earth. If all goes according to plan, Orion will land in the Pacific Ocean on December 11th.

Orion’s early successes are a welcome development after the troubles NASA encountered with its Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. The space agency was forced to delay the launch of Artemis 1 multiple times due to engine problems, hydrogen fuel leaks and hurricane-force winds. Early Wednesday morning, it appeared that the agency would be forced to delay the mission again after the SLS ground team discovered a leak in one of the fuel lines on the rocket’s launch tower. However, after NASA personnel tightened some bolts, the SLS lifted off, creating a dazzling nighttime display.

 

Google paid Activision Blizzard approximately $360 million to prevent the troubled publisher from competing directly against the Play Store. The deal was one among at least 24 agreements the search giant signed as part of its Project Hug initiative, according to court documents seen by Reuters.

The financial details of Project Hug – later known as the Apps and Games Velocity Program – are at the center of the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between Epic Games and Google. In 2021, the studio alleged Google had spent millions of dollars in incentives to keep big app developers on the Play Store. This week, a newly unredacted version of Epic’s complaint was made public, providing previously unknown details about the scope of the Apps and Games Velocity Program.

According to the court documents, Google also signed deals with Nintendo, Ubisoft and Riot Games. In the case of Riot, Google paid about $30 million to “stop” the League of Legends studio from pushing forward with its own “in-house ‘app store’ efforts,” Epic alleges. Riot Games did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.

The lawsuit alleges Google knew signing with Activision would prompt the publisher to “abandon its plans to launch a competing app store,” a claim Activision disputes. “Google never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play,” an Activision spokesperson told Reuters. “Epic’s allegations are nonsense.”

Google accused Epic of “mischaracterizing” the intent of the Apps and Games Velocity Program. “Programs like Project Hug provide incentives for developers to give benefits and early access to Google Play users when they release new or updated content; it does not prevent developers from creating competing app stores, as Epic falsely alleges,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget. “In fact, the program is proof that Google Play competes fairly with numerous rivals for developers, who have a number of choices for distributing their apps and digital content.”

Update 1:03PM ET: Added comment from Google. 

 

While you may have a big list of gifts to get for others over the next couple of weeks, now is a good time to pick up things for yourself as well. There’s arguably no better time of the year to pick up expensive gadgets like robot vacuums since most of them will be on sale. Wellbots is kicking things off early this year in the smart home space by discounting both the iRobot j7 and j7+ vacuums, bringing them down to $349 and $599, respectively, when you use the codes ENG250 and ENG200 at checkout.

Buy Roomba j7 at Wellbots – $349Buy Roomba j7+ at Wellbots – $599

These are essentially the same robot vacuum, but the “plus” variant comes with a clean base. If you’re unfamiliar, clean bases are basically garbage cans attached to the robot’s charging base, and the vacuum will automatically empty its bin into the base after each job. If vacuuming is one of your least favorite chores, getting a robo-vac with a clean base makes it so you only have to interact with your cleaning robot once a month or so when you need to change out the base’s bag.

The Roomba j7 series came out last year and it features upgraded AI-driven computer vision that gives it improved obstacle avoidance. It’ll maneuver its way around chairs, table legs and more with ease, plus that enhanced technology should help it avoid an instances of a robo-vac’s worst enemy: pet poop. The j7 earned a spot in our best robot vacuum guide for its solid obstacle avoidance, plus its strong suction power, accurate home mapping and the ease of use of its companion app. iRobot’s mobile app will be easy for even novices to learn, and it lets you set cleaning schedules, remotely control the vacuum and more from anywhere.

In this sale, the $600 Roomba j7+ is the same price as the j7 usually is without the clean base, which makes the higher-end configuration even more compelling. However, if you’re on a tighter budget, you can skip the clean base and get all of the same cleaning technology for only $350.

Get the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers by following @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribing to the Engadget Deals newsletter.

 

It’s a good time to buy a TV that doubles as an art installation. Amazon is selling Samsung’s 2022 Frame TVs at their best prices to date for Black Friday. All models are on sale, but the highlights are a 55-inch model for $998 (normally $1,498) and a 65-inch variant for $1,533 (regularly $1,998). Samsung is matching these prices if you’d prefer to buy directly. You’ll need to pay extra if you want a fancier bezel, but the savings could make that easier to justify.

The 2022 version of the Frame is, in some ways, the set you were expecting when Samsung introduced the lineup. Thanks to a matte screen finish, the always-on art mode is more convincing than with previous models — it almost looks like a canvas painting that just happens to be a TV. This is also a fully up-to-date device with 4K, HDR and creature comforts like voice assistant support (both Alexa and Google Assistant) and a game mode. You won’t sacrifice much just to have a conversation piece in your living room.

There are a few considerations. You won’t get Samsung’s absolute best image quality, so you may want to look to high-end conventional TVs like the mini LED-based QN85B if you don’t need the artwork. Also, you’ll typically need to pay for either an Art Store subscription or individual works if you want masterpieces from the likes of Da Vinci, Van Gogh and Vermeer. The Frame is a strong value at these prices, though, and makes plenty of sense if you were already planning to wall-mount your screen.

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When it comes to smart locks, August’s 4th-gen WiFi model is one of our favorites. The device typically costs $230, but you can snag it for a solid discount ahead of Black Friday. Use the code ENGLOCK when you check out at Wellbots, and you’ll get $55 off. That means you’ll get the August WiFi smart lock for $174. While that’s not the best deal we’ve seen for the product, it’s still a good price.

Buy August WiFi smart lock (4th-gen) at Wellbots – $174

We gave the smart lock, which is available in black or silver, a score of 80 in our review. We liked the fact that it’s easy to install (it should fit over most existing deadbolts) and that it won’t take up too much real estate on your door. It’s slimmer than previous versions. Another big plus is that it’s WiFi-connected and doesn’t require a bridge to operate it. On the downside, the smart lock only works with 2.4GHz WiFi networks, so you’ll need to make sure your router is set up for that.

You’ll be able to lock and unlock the door remotely, which could come in handy if a friend is stopping by to check on your home and water the plants while you’re on vacation. There’s the option to provide folks with timed-entry keys, meaning that they’ll be able to enter a home on their own without having to wait for the resident to unlock the door manually. Because the August smart lock fits over an existing deadbolt, you’ll still be able to use your same physical keys to open your door — so don’t worry too much about the power going out when you’re away from home.

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Tesla has issued a recall for 29,348 Model X vehicles, because their airbag might deploy incorrectly in some situations. This recall affects 2021 to 2023 Model X cars manufactured for customers in the US. According to the recall notice (PDF) published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the restraint control module calibration on those specific vehicles could cause the frontal passenger airbag to deploy “in an unintended configuration during certain low-speed collision events.”

While the notice didn’t illustrate the airbag’s “unintended configuration,” it said that it would result in noncompliance of the law when a child around three to six years old is seating in the front passenger seat without a seatbelt and out of position. Reuters notes Tesla’s shares fell by 3 percent after the recall was published, leading to its lowest in nearly two years, but it’s worth noting that the company says it’s not aware of any “warranty claims, field reports, crashes, injuries, or deaths related to this condition.”

Earlier this month, Tesla also recalled 40,168 Model S and Model X vehicles over a software defect that could potentially cut power steering assistance due to potholes and other bumps on the road. And in September, it issued a recall for over a million vehicles because their window automatic reversal system could malfunction and pinch the driver or passenger. 

Like those other recalls, though, owners don’t have to turn their vehicles in or go anywhere for a fix at all. The issue can be fixed by an over-the-air firmware update, which the automaker will roll out to all affected vehicles.