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If Samsung’s foldable smartphones have caught your eye, perhaps for yourself or as a gift for someone else, now might be the right time to take the plunge. The 256GB model of the Galaxy Z Flip 4 has dropped to $760 at Amazon, which is an all-time low. That’s a considerable $300 (or 28 percent) off the regular price. What’s more, this variant is currently cheaper than the 128GB model. That’s also on sale at the moment, but it’s $800.

Buy Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 at Amazon – $760

We gave the Galaxy Z Flip 4 a score of 86 in our review. We liked the improved battery life compared with older generations (it generally lasted for a full day) and the hands-free applications. The matte finish makes it less slippery than previous models, which is a definite plus. It also has a smaller and seemingly sturdier hinge, while the shell is scratch resistant. However, we did have some reservations when it came to the durability prospects in terms of how well the device will hold up after years of use, as well as the quality of low-light photos.

The 1.9-inch cover display gained more functionality, including ways to control smart home products and a quick reply option for messages. Flex Mode, which comes into play when the Galaxy Z Flip 4 is half-opened, is handier too — you’ll be able to use the lower half as a touchpad while looking through photos on the top side of the screen. You can prop the device up without a stand as well, which is useful for hands-free video calls.

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

 

Now is the time to splurge on a gift for a rookie podcaster or game streamer. Amazon is running a sale on many Blue microphones for Black Friday, with up to 35 percent off Yeti models. The Blue Yeti Nano is down to $70 (normally $100), while the regular Yeti has dipped to $90 (usually $130). You can also find deals for higher-end models and bundles.

Blue has a reputation for quality microphones, particularly for anyone making their first foray beyond built-in mics. As Engadget’s own Valentina Palladino noticed, the ‘entry’ Yeti Nano provides a major audio quality upgrade for podcasts and video calls without consuming much desk space. It’s also reasonably future-proof with both cardioid and omnidirectional polar patterns — you can host roundtable podcasts in addition to virtual chats.

Higher-end models mainly improve fidelity and monitoring. The standard Blue Yeti has three condensers versus the Nano’s two, and supports stereo and figure-eight patterns. Spring for the top-end Yeti X and you’ll get four condensers, 24-bit/192kHz audio, LED metering (to keep your output at the right volume) and even custom lighting. These won’t replace the most advanced microphones on the market, but the sale prices make them good values for many users.

Buy Blue microphones at Amazon – starting at $70

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NASA’s Artemis I mission will hit a key milestone today as the Orion capsule makes its “outbound powered flyby” of the Moon, getting as close as 80 miles to the surface. The burn is the first of two maneuvers required to enter what’s known as a “distant retrograde orbit” (DRO) around the Moon. During the flyby, cameras inside and outside the spacecraft will document the view, with shots of the Moon, Earth and Orion itself. “It’s going to be spectacular,” said lead flight director Rick LaBrode. 

The flyby is “the big burn that will actually move Orion and send it toward the planned distant retrograde orbit” that allows it to burn less fuel, LaBrode said earlier. “DRO allows Orion to spend more time in deep space for a rigorous mission to ensure spacecraft systems, like guidance, navigation, communication, power, thermal control and others are ready to keep astronauts safe on future crewed missions,” said Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin.

The capsule’s service module ICPS engine, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will fire for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. As Orion passes behind the Moon, engineers will lose contact for approximately 34 minutes starting at 7:26 AM. It will spend 6 to 19 days in DRO to collect data and allow mission controllers to assess spacecraft performance, according to the space agency. 

So far, the mission has gone mostly to plan. However, two “active anomaly resolution teams” are investigating faults in the star tracker system’s random access memory and a malfunctioning power conditioning and distribution unit. “Both systems are currently functioning as required, and there are no mission impacts related to these efforts,” NASA said. 

 

While some thought Twitter would fall apart over the weekend, given the engineering constraints it’s now under, it made it to Sunday. And it’s even got one of its most divisive users back. On Friday night, Musk tweeted a poll asking people to vote on whether Twitter should reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. Trump recently announced he will run for the country’s highest office again in 2024.

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 it was getting one million votes per hour, and also said “bot and troll armies” were responsible for some of the activity.

Reinstating Trump’s account was one of Musk’s early promises for the platform, which some thought was a joke. It was not. Earlier in the week, Twitter reinstated the accounts of three other controversial users, including comedian Kathy Griffin, conservative satire site Babylon Bee and conservative author (and former YouTube personality) Jordan Peterson.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison on fraud charges

The Theranos founder is due to surrender in April.

Holmes, the former CEO and founder of Theranos, has been sentenced to just over 11 years in prison for defrauding the investors of her blood-testing startup. The sentence comes almost a year after Holmes was found guilty on four counts of fraud. She will also be ordered to pay restitution, though Judge Ed Davila said that amount will be determined at a separate hearing. Judge Davila said restitution would be based on $121 million in losses to 10 investors, according to The New York Times.

Holmes delivered a brief statement at her sentencing hearing: “I regret my failings with every cell of my body,” she said, according to Law360’s Dorothy Atkins. The tale of Theranos (and of Holmes) has been made into a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried, while Apple is still reportedly working on a movie.

Continue reading.

Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035

Even if Russia isn’t on board.

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. Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to even out discrepancies between atomic time and observed solar time, the leap second has been the bane of tech companies for decades. It’s taken Reddit offline and messed up Cloudflare services in recent years. Dignitaries from the US, Canada and France called for the leap-second practice to end before 2035. Russia voted against the proposal. GLONASS, its global positioning system, incorporates the leap second. This decision may force Russia to launch new satellites.

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Waymo’s fully driverless rides are coming to San Francisco

It still needs to secure a deployment permit.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has granted Waymo a Driverless Pilot permit, which allows it to pick up passengers in a test vehicle without a driver behind the wheel. It’s only the second participant in the CPUC’s Driverless Permit program, with Cruise being the first.

By securing the permit, Waymo now has the authority to offer driverless rides throughout San Francisco, portions of Daly City and parts of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. Its vehicles are allowed to go as fast as 65 miles per hour and can operate 24/7, but the company can’t charge for the rides just yet – it needs another permit for that.

Continue reading.

All the ‘fun’ grown-up gifts we would like to receive

LEGO sets, jerky and, oh baby, smart water leak detectors.

Working on Engadget’s holiday gift guides, we often can’t help but think about the things we’d like to receive as gifts – unusual stuff beyond headphones, laptops and games consoles. While scrambling to find gifts for the people we love, here are a few things we’d love to get this holiday season. Me? I’d appreciate some new noise-canceling headphones, please.

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Meta is taking new steps to lock down teens’ privacy settings. The company is making changes to the default privacy settings for teens’ Facebook accounts, and further limiting the ability of “suspicious” adults to message teens on Instagram and Facebook.

On Facebook, Meta says it will start automatically changing the default privacy settings on new accounts created by teens under 16. With the changes, the visibility of their friend list, tagged posts, and pages and accounts they follow will be automatically set to “more private settings.”

Notably, the new settings will only be automatically switched on for new accounts created by teens, though Meta says it will nudge existing teen accounts to adopt similar settings. The update follows a similar move from Instagram, which began making teen accounts private by default last year.

Meta is also making new changes meant to prevent “suspicious” adults from contacting teens. On Facebook, it will block these accounts from the site’s “people you may know” feature, and on Instagram it will test removing the message button from teens’ profiles. The company didn’t share exactly how it will determine who is “suspicious,” but said it would take into account factors like whether someone has been recently blocked or reported by a younger user.

Additionally, Meta said it’s working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on a “global platform” to prevent the non-consensual sharing of intimate images of teens. According to Meta, the platform, which could launch by mid-December, will work similarly to a system designed to prevent the sharing of similar images from adults.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, the system will allow teens to generate a “private report” for images on their devices they don’t want shared. The platform, operated by NCMEC, would then create a unique hash of the image, which would go into a database so companies like Facebook can detect when matching images are shared on their platforms. The spokesperson added that the original image never leaves the teen’s device. 

 

Amazon has started its Black Friday sales on a number of watches including $60 off the Watch Ultra, its best discount yet. We’re also still seeing nice discounts on Apple’s other new models, including the Watch Series 8 and Watch SE 2nd-gen, with savings up to 13 percent. 

Shop Apple Watch models at Amazon

Unlike the last sale, the Apple Watch Ultra models are available with both the small, medium and large Alpine Loop bands, so they should fit everyone’s wrists. You can currently get one in green, orange and starlight colors, all for the same $739 price with any band size.  

As we detailed in our Engadget review, the Watch Ultra is geared toward outdoor activity and endurance athletes. It offers more refined navigation and compass-based features than regular Watch models, like the ability to set waypoints and guidance so you can follow your own breadcrumbs if you get lost. There’s a new depth gauge and dive computer, along with accurate route tracking and pace calculations, thanks to the dual-frequency GPS. 

Like other Watch models, it also delivers sleep tracking, temperature sensing and electrocardiogram features, plus messaging, audio playback and Apple Pay. It currently offers about 36 hours of battery life, but that will increase to 60 hours maximum with an upcoming low-power mode.

If $739 is still too much, don’t forget that the latest Watch Series 8 GPS model (41mm) is still on sale for $349 (13 percent off) in red or black with two different sized wrist bands. While not a huge update over the Series 7, it does carry some useful new features like a temperature sensor tied to women’s health and Crash Detection. In addition, the budget Watch SE 2nd-gen model is also available at 8 percent off, bringing the already affordable $249 price down to just $229.

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

 

Following its stretchy LCD panels, LG Display’s latest gadget is a super-thin speaker designed to be installed in car interiors while remaining “invisible.” The Thin Actuator Sound Solution was developed with a “global audio company” (LG didn’t say which), as a replacement for traditional speakers in automobiles. 

The system eschews the usual voice coils, cones and magnets found in most speakers, instead employing so-called film-like exciter technology. That can vibrate off display panels and various materials inside the car body to enable a “rich, 3D immersive sound experience,” according to the company. 

With the panels’ small dimensions (5.9 x 3.5 inches and just a tenth of an inch thick) and 1.4 ounce weight, they can be hidden inside car interior parts like the dashboard, headliner, pillar, and headrests. That frees up spaces normally occupied by speakers “without compromising sound quality,” according to LG. 

The concept isn’t entirely new, as we’ve seen similar vibrating panels used in OLED TVs from Sony and LG itself. However, car interiors are a new application with appreciable benefits, if LG Display’s claims about sound quality are accurate. We may find out for ourselves soon, as LG is due to show the technology off at CES 2023 (yep, it’s right around the corner). LG said the speakers will be commercialized in the first half of 2023.

 

Samsung’s 32-inch Smart Monitor M8 plays dual roles, acting not only as a monitor with a webcam, but also a smart TV with built in speakers and support for cloud gaming and streaming. Now, with Black Friday week upon us, it’s dropped back to its all-time low price of $500 (in white, pink, blue and green) at Amazon and Samsung.

Buy Smart Monitor M8 at Amazon – $500Buy Smart Monitor M8 at Samsung – $500

As a computer display, the Smart Monitor M8 offers UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution at up to 60Hz, along with HDR10+. With a VA panel, it’s decently bright at 400 nits, offers a 4-millisecond response time and displays up to a billion colors, with 99 percent sRGB coverage. Input-wise, you get USB-C and Micro HDMI 2.0 inputs, along with a USB-C charging interface. Finally, it has a a detachable SlimFit Cam for video calls, making it a solid choice for work or light content creation.

Other features include the ability to change the angle and position with the high-adjustable stand, along with a game bar that makes it easy to switch between cloud services. And with Samsung TV Plus and Alexa built in, you can watch streaming content, play games and even do work activities without the need to be plugged into a PC. Normally the white model sells for $700 and the color models for $730, so you get a 29 percent discount on former and 32 percent off the latter.

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

 

Bob Iger is returning as Disney CEO in a shocking leadership shakeup, with current CEO Bob Chapek stepping down, the company announced in a press release. Iger is set to return temporarily for two years, with a mandate for “renewed growth” and to find and groom his successor. Iger said he’s returning “with an incredible sensor of gratitude and humility — and, I must admit, a bit of amazement.”

“We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic,” said Disney chairman Susan Arnold in a statement. “The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period.”

Iger handpicked Chapek to follow him as CEO, but a clash in their styles quickly became clear. Iger was known as a talent- and creative-friendly CEO, while Chapek focused on streaming, particularly as the pandemic decimated Disney’s theme park and theatrical distribution businesses.

Under Chapek, however, Disney initially failed to react to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and criticized Black Widow star Scarlett Johansson over her lawsuit involving streaming vs. theatrical distribution. And during a Disney retreat, Iger reportedly urged the company not to rely excessively on data to make decisions — seen by some as a dig at Chapek, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Under Chapek, Disney+ has grown to 235 million subscribers (including ESPN and Hulu), but the company lost $1.5 billion on streaming last quarter. Its market capitalization has also fallen from $257.6 billion in Iger’s last full year to $163.5 billion. Much of that fall is pandemic related, though, as movie theaters and Disney’s parks were forced to shut down.

The move comes as a surprise considering that Disney had renewed Bob Chapek’s contract for three years (no comment from Chapel was available in the press release). Iger, meanwhile, has a near-mythical status at Disney CEO, having presided over the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox. That legacy will be put to the test, though, as Disney faces challenging times — the company recently announced plans to freeze hiring and said that layoffs are likely to come soon. 

 

Tesla is recalling more than 321,000 vehicles over a software issue that causes the tail lights on some cars not to work properly. The automaker announced the action on Saturday in a National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration filing (PDF) spotted by Reuters. The recall covers 2023 Model 3 and 2020 to 2023 Model Y vehicles manufactured for US customers.

“In rare instances, taillamps on one or both sides of affected vehicles may intermittently illuminate due to a firmware anomaly that may cause false fault detections during the vehicle wake up process,” the NHTSA notice states. “Brake lamps, backup lamps and turn signal lamps are not affected by this condition and continue to operate as designed.”

Tesla will release a software update to address the issue. The company hasn’t had reports of any crashes or injuries related to the bug. The automaker became aware of the problem in late October. In a separate announcement the day before, Tesla recalled about 30,000 due to an issue that can cause the front passenger airbag in Model X vehicles to deploy incorrectly in some situations.

As of this year, Tesla has so far issued 19 recalls in the US. Earlier this month, the company recalled 40,186 Model S and Model X vehicles over a software issue that could cut power steering assistance to vehicles going over potholes. Before that, the company recalled more than a million vehicles over windows that weren’t working properly.