Technology

If you haven’t been able to nab an Xbox Series X, today may be your lucky day. Best Buy has the coveted console in stock for its usual price of $499.99, though, the drop is exclusive to paying Totaltech subscribers. If you weren’t already aware, Totaltech is Best Buy’s premium membership, one that combines tech support, product protection, and access to exclusive console restocks for $199.99 per year. It’s an expensive service, though if you feel you’re still struggling to find Microsoft’s next-gen console, it should improve your chances of landing a console. If you are a Totaltech member, make sure you’ve logged into your account ahead of time, double-check that your billing and shipping information is correct, and stay persistent. To get in line, make sure to click the “Add to Cart” butt...

Bethesda is retiring its Bethesda.net Launcher this year and will let people move their games and Wallet to Steam starting in early April, the company announced Tuesday. You’ll be able to access and play games on the Bethesda launcher until May. Any game you own on Bethesda’s launcher will be available for free on Steam. When you migrate to Steam, “you will not lose anything from your Bethesda.net account,” Bethesda says. “Many games will also have their saves migrated, with a few requiring some manual transfers. For games that require it, you will still use your Bethesda.net login to sign in to play.” However, Bethesda is only letting you migrate what’s on your Bethesda Launcher to Steam — you can’t use the switch as an opportunity to bring your games and saves to PlayStation or Xbox, acc...

China claims that a piece of distant space debris that’s about to slam into the Moon does not stem from one of the nation’s lunar missions, as astronomers tracking the object believe. However, it’s possible that China may have mixed up which mission the debris originally came from, as most evidence points to it being an old Chinese rocket. This doomed space object has received quite a lot of attention over the last few weeks, ever since an astronomer and space tracker by the name of Bill Gray first predicted that it would slam into the Moon on March 4th after years of orbiting the Earth. At first, Gray thought the object was a leftover chunk of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched a satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration back in 2015. But after some follow-up a...

Spotify’s Car Thing, the dashboard accessory that controls Spotify on your phone, is now widely available to buy in the US, the company announced today. The accessory was first made available free of charge as part of an invite-only limited release last April, and in October, Spotify opened up a waitlist for people to get their hands on the device. Now, Car Thing is going on general sale for $89.99 — a $10 increase over the advertised price in October. Car Thing is designed to offer a more convenient way to control Spotify while driving. It doesn’t have a speaker, and it doesn’t have its own data connection, so it’s essentially a Spotify remote that can output to your car’s speakers. It offers a combination of physical controls, a touchscreen, and voice controls via Spotify’s own “Hey Spot...

The pro-install home automation company Crestron Home is adding circadian rhythm lighting to its high-end residential platform. This week the company announced its new full-color, tunable downlight LED light fixtures with circadian rhythm capabilities will be available in August. Smart lighting isn’t a new feature for home automation, but lighting that automatically adjusts throughout the day in tandem with the natural changes of the sun is taking it up a notch. Circadian lighting is an option with some off-the-shelf smart lighting, such as Philips Hue light bulbs working with Apple HomeKit’s Adaptive Lighting. Crestron’s competitors in the pro-install space, including Savant and Control4, also offer various wellness-lighting-focused solutions. But, in general, the smart home has been slow...

If you’re on the hunt for a budget-friendly OLED TV, one of the best values at this moment is Gigabyte’s 48-inch Aorus FO48U OLED. It costs $800 at Newegg (via Slickdeals), but two steps are required to get this price. First off, enter the code FEB4SALE at the checkout page to knock $200 off the cost. You’ll pay $999.99 today. But make sure you fill out the mail-in rebate before March 29th, 2022, which will then take an additional $200 off (the rebate will come in the form of a prepaid card). While Gigabyte certainly doesn’t have the same (or, frankly, any) brand cache in the home entertainment space as LG, this model packs in many of the same specs as the coveted C1 OLED for a few hundred dollars less. It has two HDMI 2.1 ports that support up to 4K resolution at 120Hz, which you’ll likel...

Slack is experiencing some issues, making it difficult for users to send and receive messages, as well as access the platform altogether. Across social media, users have complained that trying to access work-related chatrooms meets long load times, the inability to view threads, and issues when trying to send a message to colleagues. Some customer may be experiencing issues with loading Slack. We’ll provide a status update once we have more information. We’re sorry for the disruption. https://t.co/rd7foQMlhf — Slack Status (@SlackStatus) February 22, 2022 The Slack Status Twitter account has since acknowledged issues loading the platform. “Some customer[s] may be experiencing issues with loading Slack,” Slack writes. “We’ll provide a status update once we have more information....

Microsoft is currently experimenting with two new methods to warn Windows 11 users that they have installed the operating system on unsupported hardware. In the latest test builds of Windows 11, a new watermark has appeared on the desktop wallpaper, alongside a similar warning in the landing page of the settings app. If the test build is running on unsupported hardware, the desktop watermark simply states “system requirements not met,” and appears alongside the build number that is only shown on evaluation or pre-release versions of Windows. It’s similar, but less prominent, to the semi-transparent watermark that appears in Windows if you haven’t activated the OS. Twitter user Albacore first spotted the settings warning earlier this month. Both the settings and desktop wallpaper include a ...

Virgin Hyperloop has laid off almost half its staff as the company switches its focus from transporting passengers to shifting freight. Cuts totaling 111 jobs were confirmed by Virgin Hyperloop to The Financial Times, which spoke to former employees at the company. They described the scale of the redundancies as “definitely not expected.” The US-based Virgin Hyperloop is one of the leading firms developing the eponymous technology — an updated version of a centuries-old idea to reduce the energy demands of trains by placing them in vacuum-sealed tubes where air resistance is minimal. The concept was resurrected in 2013 when Elon Musk published a whitepaper on the subject, incorporating magnetic levitation used by bullet trains and bestowing the current branding. Virgin Hyperloop, formerly ...

OnwardMobility, the startup hoping to revive Blackberry phones with a 5G keyboard-equipped Android device, is ending its work on the phone and shutting down as a company. “It is with great sadness that we announce that OnwardMobility will be shutting down, and we will no longer be proceeding with the development of an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard,” the company wrote in a statement on its website. The announcement doesn’t come as much of a surprise given reports that OnwardMobility’s 5G Blackberry had been cancelled earlier this month. But at the time there was speculation that the company might live on and attempt to produce a 5G keyboard-equipped Android phone without the Blackberry name. Now, however, we know it’s the end of the line for the company as a whole as well...

Panasonic has announced its latest video-focused Micro Four Thirds camera, the Lumix GH6, after a delay. The new numbered entry in the popular GH line was teased almost a year ago alongside the launch of the GH5 Mark II; Panasonic confirmed at the time that it would shoot up to 10-bit 4:2:0 4K at 120fps, 10-bit 4:2:2 4K at 60fps, and 10-bit 5.7K at 60fps. Now the camera has been revealed in full, and while it looks similar to its predecessor and features the same 3-inch articulating screen, the internals are all new. There’s a new 25.2-megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor and a new Venus Engine image processor, which together let you shoot photos at 14 frames per second with autofocus locked. It’s the highest resolution sensor ever found in a Four Thirds or Micro Four Thirds camera. Panasoni...

Phones in a flagship lineup have come to feel like variations on a theme. There’s the base model, the bigger base model, and then the biggest model with an extra camera and some other minor hardware upgrades. Features, screen size, and cost all increase in increments as you go up the chain, but you’re more or less getting the same phone in three different flavors. That’s been true of Samsung phones for the past few years, but it’s not the case anymore — the $1,199 Galaxy S22 Ultra sits at the top of this year’s lineup as an entirely different option. It’s the first S series phone to include a built-in stylus, a feature it’s inheriting from the evidently now-retired Galaxy Note series. On top of that, it still offers a very good 10x optical zoom, as well as some appealing updates to its pho...