Experimentor

Samsung’s FE series is back after a year off, this time with a pair of Galaxy Buds in the mix.

The Galaxy S23 FE has the specs we’d expect of a “value flagship” smartphone and a price that makes more sense: $599, rather than the $699 Samsung charged for the S21 FE. The Galaxy Tab S9 FE comes with robust water and dust resistance and a much friendlier $449 price tag than the pricey standard S9, which starts at $799 — but you’ll have to settle for an LCD panel rather than OLED. And the Galaxy Buds FE offer active noise cancellation for $99.

Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE was the most recent phone in the FE series, and it didn’t make a lot of sense priced so closely to the standard S21. The company seems to have recognized the problem with this…

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Verizon has announced an exclusive combo offering Netflix Premium and NFL Plus Premium for $25 per month. Netflix Premium costs $19.99 / month right now (though it could go up soon!), and NFL Plus Premium is $16.99 / month. That sounds like a pretty good deal for Verizon customers if they’re ready for some football and they need their own Netflix account.

NFL Plus Premium includes live access to regional and primetime NFL football games across devices and includes the NFL Network, plus NFL RedZone. It does not include NFL Sunday Ticket, which costs a cool $449 per year and gives you all the Sunday games regardless of region. Verizon’s promo page states that existing Netflix customers can transfer their subscriptions over to Verizon and…

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It was bound to happen eventually: a company has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Elon Musk’s X Corp. over its renaming of Twitter (via Reuters). The company in question is X Social Media LLC, an ad agency from Florida that alleges X Corp. is guilty of violating Florida common law because of “unfair competition and trademark and service mark infringement,” as well as the state’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

X Social Media (hereafter referred to as XSM to make this article easier to write) writes in the complaint that it has used its registered trademark, “X SOCIALMEDIA,” continuously since 2016. XSM claims it has “already suffered loss in revenue that correlates with X Corp.’s rebrand and use of the mark ‘X.’”

It’s…

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It was never clear who the $10,000 to $17,000 18-karat gold Apple Watch was for, beyond celebrities and the ultrarich, but I hope whoever bought one way back in 2015 expected Apple to stop supporting them at some point. That day has come. Apple has now internally listed all first-gen Apple Watch models, including the solid-gold Edition, as “obsolete,” MacRumors reports.

Apple’s obsolete label doesn’t just mean the end of software support. That ship has sailed; the original Apple Watches (widely referred to as Series 0) never updated beyond watchOS 4.3.2 in 2018. It means the end of hardware support: the company will no longer provide parts, repairs, or replacement services.

The solid-gold Apple Watch Edition was something of a passion…

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The Google Pixel Buds Pro may be getting some nifty new software features that should sound a bit familiar if you were paying attention to the latest tweaks for Apple’s AirPods Pro. According to notable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska (@Za_Raczke), Google plans a software update for its flagship earbuds that includes conversation detection, a hearing wellness monitor, and clearer call quality going both ways.

The first feature sounds similar to Apple’s Conversation Awareness that just came to all second-gen AirPods Pro earbuds, with Google’s implementation automatically pausing your media playback and activating transparency mode once the Pixel Buds Pro detect the wearer is talking. Though, before Apple, Sony had already implemented this…

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Time really does fly, doesn’t it? The summer is over, fall is here, and Amazon’s fall Prime Day sale, the period when Amazon (and probably a significant number of its competitors) will be dropping prices on a lot of its products for Prime members, is happening on October 10th and 11th.

If you’re interested in the goodies being offered but haven’t signed up for Amazon Prime, don’t worry — Amazon makes it very easy. (Not surprisingly. After all, it would be the sorry vendor who would make it difficult for people to become new customers.)

Besides giving access to Prime Day bargains, Amazon has come up with a bunch of features to…

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On the stand in US v. Google, the Microsoft CEO said he’d do just about anything to make Bing better. Google’s lawyers said he should have been doing that for decades.

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Tesla’s China arm announced in a WeChat post Sunday morning that it released a new Model Y with design and performance tweaks that keeps the same starting price as before (via Reuters). The new car follows the company’s release of the revamped “Highland” Model 3 in China, which also hit Europe early last month.

According to Tesla’s Chinese website, the Model Y now has a 0–100km/h time of 5.9 seconds, which Bloomberg notes in a report is slightly faster than before. The car gets new wheels and an ambient LED lighting strip in the dash, like the refreshed Model 3.

The car starts at 263,900 yuan (about $37,000), and…

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Apple will soon bring its powerful internal search engine to the App Store and other apps, as Mark Gurman reports in this week’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. Apple debuted upgrades to its Spotlight search feature in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, letting users search there for web results, details from apps, documents, and much more.

According to the newsletter, former Google executive John Giannandrea’s search team is working to bake the internally-named “Pegasus” search engine more deeply into iOS and macOS and could even use generative AI tools to enhance it further. Last year Apple also launched Business Connect, a tool that helped strengthen its information database with details about businesses’ hours and locations in a way that could…

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A leaked Pixel 8 “Switch to Pixel” ad posted to X by Arséne Lupin highlights Google’s AI features, including Best Take, which lets you swap faces into an image from other pictures (via 9to5Google). Google’s Pixel event is just around the corner on October 4th, but there’s seemingly very little we don’t already know about the phone, considering the steady stream of leaks.

The ad kicks off highlighting the process for transferring data to a Pixel 8, but spends most of its time on the AI features of the phone — some new, like Best Take, and some old, like Magic Eraser:

9to5Google also points to a leak from Kamila Wojciechowska,…

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