Technology

The Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel is a computer I will never own. But I really, really wish I could. Artists, creators, and engineers who are looking for a powerful high-end convertible have all kinds of options on today’s market. But only Acer’s ConceptD line can fold in six different ways. There are not one, but two hinges attached to the display: a traditional clamshell hinge and another one in the middle of the lid that enables the screen to rotate outward. By using the two hinges in tandem, you can put the screen in nearly any position you want. This unique form factor makes the ConceptD 7 Ezel unlike any other laptop on the market. Verge Score 8.5 out of 10 Good Stuff Innovative screen design Built-in Wacom EMR pen Great build quality Bad Stuff Very heavy Expensive 16:9 CPU gets hot There are...

eBay is now allowing NFTs to be sold on its platform, making the digital collectibles available side by side with physical ones. Whether you’re looking for a physical Dogecoin replica or a digital representation of Elon Musk holding Doge, eBay is apparently now the place to get both. At the moment, eBay wants to make sure that NFTs are listed by trusted sellers, and only in certain categories like trading cards, music, entertainment, and art. The company does say, though, that it hopes to expand its policies and tools in the future to allow more categories after it’s gathered feedback from the community with the current crop of NFTs. The first result when searching “NFT” on eBay, to the surprise of no one. The blog post also mentions future updates to allow “blockchain-driven collectables,...

Tig Notaro filming a scene for Army of the Dead on a green screen. Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix/ During the weeks Tig Notaro spent working on Army of the Dead, Zack Snyder’s new zombie-heist movie, one thought kept running through her head: How on earth did telling jokes lead me to this moment? It was Notaro’s first action gig, and the 50-year-old was stepping into a role originally performed by fellow comedian Chris D’Elia, who had recently been accused of pursuing multiple teenage girls. The allegations against D’Elia had surfaced in June 2020 and within weeks, his agency, CAA, had dropped him and Netflix canceled his deal for an unscripted prank show. (D’Elia continues to deny the allegations.) By that time, Snyder was deep into postproduction on Army of the Dead, which follows a team ...

Amazon’s Alexa has a voice familiar to millions: calm, warm, and measured. But like most synthetic speech, its tones have a human origin. There was someone whose voice had to be recorded, analyzed, and algorithmically reproduced to create Alexa as we know it now. Amazon has never revealed who this “original Alexa” is, but journalist Brad Stone says he tracked her down, and she is Nina Rolle, a voiceover artist based in Boulder, Colorado. The claim comes from Stone’s upcoming book on the tech giant, Amazon Unbound, an excerpt of which is published here in Wired. Neither Amazon nor Rolle confirmed or denied Stone’s guess, which he says is based on conversations with the professional voiceover community, but Rolle’s voice alone makes for a compelling case. Listen to the videos below: the firs...

Aaron Fisher first came face to face with the US’s inconvenient and broken electric vehicle charging infrastructure two years ago. Driving a borrowed BMW i3 from New York City to Hartford, Connecticut, for his grandmother’s 90th birthday party, he assumed the journey would be a short, three-hour jaunt. Instead, it lasted a grueling seven hours. “I had charger issues, I had payment issues, I had customer service issues, I had routing issues, because of the fragmentation around electric vehicle charging,” Fisher said. As for his grandmother’s birthday? “I missed her dinner,” he said ruefully. “She was not mad, but very disappointed.” “I had charger issues, I had payment issues, I had customer service issues, I had routing issues” There are approximately 41,000 public charging stations in the...

Intel is adding new processors to its 11th Gen Core H-series lineup today, and over half a dozen laptop manufacturers are announcing new machines that make use of them. In total, there are 10 new Tiger Lake-H processors being announced today, including five consumer processors and five commercial processors, with between six and eight cores. Here’s our full writeup on the chips themselves. According to Intel, its new H-series processors will be used in over 30 upcoming ultraportables (aka: laptops that are 20mm thick or less) and upward of 80 workstations. Companies including Razer, HP, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, Acer, Gigabyte, and Dell are announcing their first laptops with the new chips today, and we’ve rounded up their models below. Razer Razer has announced a range of new Blade 15 Advanced l...

You might know of Oppo as a company opaquely related to OnePlus, but it recently became the leading smartphone maker in China — the beneficiary of Huawei’s sanctions-induced slide in sales even in its home market. As such, the new Find X3 Pro flagship is an important handset for the company, presenting an opportunity to solidify its place as a major player in premium smartphones. And this time around, Oppo isn’t keeping the Find X3 Pro in China. The company still doesn’t sell phones in the US, but there are international models with Google services available in countries like the UK, where it starts at £1,099 (about $1,500). If you have the option and you’re shopping for a high-end phone, it’s worth checking out, because this is one of the sleekest Android devices you’ll see this year. Ver...

Peak Design, the bag and accessory maker that created one of our favorite backpacks, is launching a new online exchange in the US for people to buy and sell used Peak Design products. The Peak Design Marketplace opened in beta form in March, but today the used gear storefront opens for anyone looking to buy and sell gear…provided it was made by Peak Design. To sell a product on Peak Design’s marketplace you have to register it on the company’s site (it offers instructions in video form) and provide pictures and details of the current condition of what you’re unloading. Peak Design says it reviews every listing and has the right to approve or deny anything before it shows up for sale. The company also provides a recommended sale price, but you can set it to any amount you choose. The ...

Nothing, the tech startup from ex-OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, will reveal its debut pair of true wireless earbuds this June. The company says the earbuds will be called Ear 1, but it’s staying tight-lipped about other details like their specs, price, and final design. However, an illustration released alongside today’s blog post shows what appears to be a silhouette of the earbuds with a rather lengthy stem. We know the earbuds will be designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering and feature a “stripped-down aesthetic.” A concept render from March gives more clues like the use of transparent materials in their construction. Nothing announced back in February that its first products would be wireless earbuds. A concept image illustrating Nothing’s design elements.Image: Nothing A Jun...

It’s a little-known fact that you can sling a PS5 or PS4 to another room of your house, streaming your games to a Mac or Windows PC, iOS or Android device, or even an old PS4 with Sony’s PS Remote Play app. But until recently, you could only remotely control your shiny new PlayStation 5 with the old DualShock 4 gamepad. That’s now changing, as Sony has just announced the PS5’s new DualShock controller is supported across every Apple platform running the latest operating system, including iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, and Apple TVs running 14.5 and Macs running macOS Big Sur 11.3. I just gave it a quick try myself with an iPhone 12 mini and a recent iPad Pro, and I have some thoughts! The good news: if the only controller you own is a DualSense controller, it totally works — and your awesom...

Mario Kart in real life is a commonly shared dream, one that doesn’t typically live up to your imagination — but we’re definitely not giving up. Recently, Nintendo launched an official $100 R/C car with mixed-reality tracks and and a full-on AR ride at Japan’s Super Nintendo World. Now, independent filmmaker Ian Padgham has come up with another must-try idea: riding a lawnmower on a closed course, from the perspective of a self-flying drone. Yes please.Image: Ian Padgham Not that he’s actually playing a game in this awesome video, mind: Padgham just set his Skydio drone to film a normal video of him riding around, and then he added a lot of CG in post. “The footage itself was already pretty stable so I was able to just take it in After Effects and Cinema 4D and do tracking and make a topo ...

UploadVR has some exciting rumors about what Sony will be including on the next-gen VR headset it’s announced for the PS5: it’ll apparently include 4K resolution, eye-tracking, and a vibration motor in the headset for haptic feedback (to complement the controllers with haptic triggers). According to UploadVR, the new headset should have a total resolution of 4000 x 2040, giving each eye 2000 x 2040 pixels. The original PlayStation VR had a resolution of 960 x 1080 pixels per eye, for comparison, so this would be nearly double in each direction. The Oculus Quest 2 has 1832 x 1920 pixels per eye, slightly less than Sony’s headset is rumored to have — in both cases, the high resolution can help to avoid the “screen-door effect” that can often keep VR headsets from providing a clear image. It ...