Technology

Through Sunday, November 1st, Best Buy is giving shoppers another sliver of time to get in on some deals ahead of Black Friday later in the month. Most of these are repeats from the retailer’s Black Friday kickoff event that went up against Prime Day, though a few are newcomers. We’ll be keeping you posted on all of the latest Black Friday deals throughout the month, no matter where they’re coming from or when they actually drop, so stay tuned. If you’re hunting for a 4K TV with fantastic picture quality and contrast, the highlight deal is on Vizio’s brand-new 65-inch OLED TV. It normally costs $2,000, but it’s $500 off until the sale ends on Sunday. This model should be on your shortlist if you need a new TV that has HDMI 2.1, which will help you get the most out of your PS5 or Xbox Serie...

After launching two identically sized phones — the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro — last week, Apple will next start taking preorders for the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max on November 6th. But you won’t have to wait until then to get a sense of just how “mini” this year’s smallest iPhone is. A hands-on video running over 40 minutes in length was posted to YouTube by George Buhnici, only to be removed for unclear reasons and then republished by 9to5Mac. And yep, next to the iPhone 12, it’s downright tiny. Image: George Buhnici (YouTube) This is the first real-world look at the iPhone 12 mini, which has a 5.4-inch screen, but in the more modern notched-display design first introduced with the iPhone 12. That means you won’t have to deal with the bezels (and wasted space) of something like...

While the ascendant Yahoo of the 1990s now only lives in our memories, its name and branding continue to shamble on zombie-like to its owner Verizon’s other products — this time, the ZTE Blade A3Y, an exclusive phone for Yahoo Mobile bearing its namesake company’s familiar shade of purple. Besides its burst of color, ZTE’s 5.4-inch 720p phone mostly flashes its Yahoo heritage on your homescreen, with a crowded collection of bloatware helpful pre-installed Yahoo apps like the ad-free Yahoo Mail Pro (yes, Yahoo Mail normally features ads), Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News. The purple back of the phone features a fingerprint sensor for unlocking the device, an 8MP camera, and a removable back plate for accessing the phone’s battery. For charging that battery, there’s a USB-C port at the bottom of...

SpaceX is replacing two engines on its Falcon 9 rocket that will soon carry four astronauts to the International Space Station. The change is being made after SpaceX found a substance in the engines that could have caused them to start earlier than planned. SpaceX found the substance after one of the company’s launches halted just before liftoff in October. One of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, tasked with launching a new GPS satellite for the Space Force, shut itself down just two seconds before takeoff. “It was a good abort,” Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of build and flight reliability for SpaceX, said during a press conference. “It did exactly what we programmed it to do.” Today, SpaceX revealed the rocket had automatically stopped its own launch after two of its nine main Merlin engine...

Well, we had another hearing with the platform CEOs. The dream with this sort of thing is that Congress shows up with a full command of the issues, and asks the CEOs good-faith questions about matters of policy and law. And then I’d come along at the end of the day to walk you through the more provocative questions and productive answers, and gesture at what likely policy outcomes we could expect from this exercise in representative democracy. But “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?,” a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was not that kind of exercise. The word “sham” got kicked around a lot, especially by the participants. “Stunt,” too. Some of the Democrats declined to ask any questions at all. It was not the first of ...

Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is four years old, but the company isn’t giving up on it when the PlayStation 5 console launches next month. The headset is compatible with the new system, but you will need a special adapter. And Sony on Wednesday launched the online request form you’ll need to fill out if you want to get your hands on one for free. The adapter is actually not for the headset itself but the PlayStation Camera accessory that’s required to perform tracking while you wear the PSVR headset, as the new PS5 HD camera accessory isn’t compatible with the headset. Beyond that, everything is supposed to work, meaning you should be able to plug your PSVR headset into the PS5 and use your existing PlayStation Move controllers to play all but two PSVR games, Sony confirmed earlier this ye...

With the PS5 launch roughly two weeks away, Sony has unveiled a redesign for its PlayStation App on iOS and Android, and it makes me very excited to try it out when the new console launches. Early adopters of the console will have the ability to remotely launch games, sign in to their PS5 directly from the app, and the app will even allow you to remotely manage storage on your console in case you need to make room for a new game to install. Previously, the PlayStation App would let you download games on the PS4, but the app now allows me to download and launch games, plus manage the storage on my PS5. Based on Sony’s blog post, it looks like PS5 owners will have a lot more freedom to manage their consoles without directly interacting with it. It was such a pain having to shuffle around bet...

T-Mobile has announced another expansion of its 2.5GHz midband 5G network, which is now available in dozens of new cities, nearly doubling the coverage of its last major midband rollout from the end of September. With today’s expansion announcement, T-Mobile says that it now has midband 5G support in nearly 410 cities and towns in the United States. The new expansion comes just after the launch of Apple’s new 5G-compatible iPhone 12 lineup, which is expected to vastly increase the number of 5G devices in the US. T-Mobile’s 5G network combines its widely available 600MHz low-band network (which offers coverage on a nationwide scale but not much in the way of speed improvements of LTE) with the faster 2.5GHz network (which it acquired from Sprint) along with its ultra-fast mmWave network (wh...

3Doodler’s 3D-printing pens cover a wide range of potential uses, from preschool art projects to high-end professional model making. With the Pro Plus, 3Doodler is attempting to refine that professional offering, changing up how you adjust settings while drawing in 3D and offering more materials in more shapes and sizes to work with. The Pro Plus is an upgraded version of the 3Doodler Pro, and it carries over a lot of its visual design. When we covered that last version, we noted its streamlined look and more granular controls but were still left skeptical that the company would escape the “toy” association it gained with its other pens. The Pro Plus keeps a lot of what worked with the previous Pro, while slimming down the device by 50 percent and providing improved performance. The dial c...

Sony has announced more details about how its PlayStation Plus Collection will work in a new blog post. The service will launch alongside the console in the US on November 12th, and it’ll offer PS5 owners over a dozen classic PS4 titles. The titles will be available for PS Plus subscribers at no additional cost, and they’ll remain accessible for as long as a subscription is active. The service’s launch date varies globally depending on when the console itself will be available. It’ll be available on November 12th in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, and on November 19th in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia, and South Africa. The collection is not available in China, Sony says, and it seems to only be available for PS5 customers. It’s not cle...

Like most shared scooter companies, Lime was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. “We saw a 95 percent drop in ridership,” Lime CEO Wayne Ting says in an interview. “We’re a mobility company. And one of the things with mobility companies, when communities shut down, riders shut down.” But while the world still remains in the grip of COVID-19, Lime’s scooter business has begun to rebound. In May, the company made a crucial investment deal with Uber and others for $170 million to take over the ride-hailing company’s bike and scooter business Jump. That deal also saw Ting, then Lime’s global operations head (and former chief of staff to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi), replace Brad Bao as CEO. Now, Ting says that Lime’s riders are coming back; the company just announced it has reached the milest...

The creators of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated video games of the last few years, are having a rough go of it in the lead-up to launch, complicated by yet another delay announced yesterday to help the CD Projekt Red developers finish polishing the game before it launches across nine platforms on December 10th. Now, senior game designer Andrzej Zawadzki has taken to Twitter in the aftermath of the delay announcement to plead with fans to exercise some basic human decency by not continuing to send the Polish studio death threats. “I want to address one thing in regards of the @CyberpunkGame delay. I understand you’re feeling angry, disappointed and want to voice your opinion about it. However, sending death threats to the developers is absolutely unacceptable and just wrong. We ...