Technology

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Amazon’s Echo Buds are getting new fitness features that allow the true wireless earbuds to track your workouts. According to Amazon, the Echo Buds now have the ability to track walks, runs, and other workouts, all initiated with Alexa voice commands. The Echo Buds rely on built-in accelerometers for tracking steps, and this is used in combination with personal stats entered into a “workout profile” in the Alexa app for other data. Amazon says using your height and weight, in combination with the steps tracked by the accelerometer, the Echo Buds can calculate the distance of your runs and walks and the amount of calories burned. The duration of your workout is calculated using timestamps, and your overall pace is calculated by the… Continue reading&he...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony’s PlayStation 5 user interface could really use some work, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the simple act of trying to turn the thing off. On most recent consoles, it’s been pretty easy to shut down the device with just the controller. Simply press and hold the PS button / Xbox button / home button, and the UI will helpfully show you an option to power down the console in some way. This is true for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It takes just a few seconds, and I can happily end a gaming session. But turning off the PS5, for no good reason that I can figure out, is a needlessly cumbersome process. Instead, when I press and hold the PS button — the behavior I have used for years to start the process —… Continue readin...

Steve McQueen’s Widows was one of the best movies to come out in 2018: it was a smart, slick crime thriller that showed the acclaimed filmmaker could follow up a challenging drama like Shame and 12 Years a Slave with tremendous crowd-pleasers. Two years later, he’s back with his follow-up effort: Small Axe, which is five whole movies now streaming on Amazon Prime. We knew McQueen was good, and now it’s undeniable that he has the range. While it presents as a TV series — and that’s how the BBC is airing it across the pond — it’s best to think of Small Axe as five full-on movies, with a new one premiering every Friday. (My suggestion: watch it right after The Mandalorian.) Each film / episode features an entirely new story with a… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Money Even...

Waze is finally coming to Apple CarPlay’s new multiscreen dashboard. This is sure to come as welcome news to devotees of the Google-owned navigation app, who have been waiting for over a year for it to work with the much-improved, upgraded version of CarPlay. A tipster who is beta testing the new feature sent us this image of Waze operating in CarPlay’s new Split View function. Apple rolled out the new dashboard as part of last year’s iOS 13 software update, but it was limited to only work with Apple Maps at the time. Previously, CarPlay required bouncing between different screens to see a track name while getting directions to a destination. With Split View, you can see a map, what’s currently playing on the car’s stereo, and the next… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Mo...

Oomba was a startup designed to make a lot of money from the games industry — instead, everyone played each other Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.

Gift ideas for the creators in your circle Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.

Google Nest Wifi. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’re looking to improve your home Wi-Fi situation, the best thing you can do is invest in a mesh router. Mesh router systems make it easy to cover all corners of your home with a strong Wi-Fi signal and are easily expandable depending on how much square footage you have. If you have a basic home internet plan of 300Mbps or less, you can do fine with a Wi-Fi 5 based system, such as the entry-level Eero or Google’s Nest Wifi. If you have faster internet at home, up to a gigabit connection, you might want to invest in a Wi-Fi 6 system. Normally, mesh router setups can run a few hundred dollars, making them a significant quality-of-life investment. But several of our favorite systems are discounted right now for Black Friday, letting&#...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A COVID-19 vaccine developed by the UK’s Oxford University and AstraZeneca has an average efficacy of 70.4 percent, according to interim analysis announced today. In trials, the vaccine’s effectiveness varied depending on the dose amounts given. When two full doses were given a month apart the effectiveness stood at 62 percent, but this rose to 90 percent when the vaccine was given first as a half dose, and then as a full dose. The announcement follows promising early results from vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, and Moderna, which both appear to have slightly higher 95 percent efficacy rates. However, according to BBC News, the Oxford vaccine has the advantage of being cheaper and easy to store, since it can be transported and… Conti...

One Night in Miami | Amazon Prime Video I am currently suffering from The Crown withdrawal after finishing Season 4, and (like pretty much everyone) predicting we’ll see Emmy nominations for Gillian Anderson (Margaret Thatcher) and Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles). Also I’m very on board with this suggestion that Erin Doherty deserves her own Princess Anne spinoff series (please get on this asap, Netflix). She’s spectacular. I’m not quite ready to commit to a new streaming series yet so went to the backlog of movies I have queued up; I tried to get into Queen’s Gambit but honestly, I don’t get the hype about that movie, the dialogue is so clunky. I even went so far as to open an actual physical book yesterday (lol) before restarting Season 1 of The Crown (hi Claire Foy and John… Contin...

This is the new fourth-generation Echo speaker. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon has unveiled a heap of Black Friday deals to give you an early start on your holiday shopping. While we expect many more deals across all categories of tech for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these ones are focused on Amazon-made devices. This is especially good news since there are a bunch of new products seeing their first price cuts, including Amazon’s ball-shaped Echo speakers and Eero’s fastest mesh Wi-Fi routers. Plus, there are some solid deals on Fire TV streaming devices. Smart speakers and displays The smaller Echo Dot that takes the same globular form of the more expensive Echo is just $29 (usually $50) If you want the new spherical Echo Dot with a digital clock embedded in the fabric, that...

Photo by Andrew Lipovsky / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Charli D’Amelio is the first TikTok creator to hit 100 million followers. She’s the first by some distance, too — only two other creators have cracked 50 million. On TikTok, that makes her more than twice as big as Will Smith, three times as big as The Rock, four times as big as Selena Gomez, and five times as big as Kylie Jenner and Ariana Grande. It also means she reached 100 million subscribers in record time. On YouTube, it took 14 years before any channel hit 100 million. D’Amelio only started posting to TikTok in May 2019, and the app has only been available (under its current branding, at least) since August 2018. TikTok doesn’t have many opportunities for creators to make money It’s a huge milestone for both her and ...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter’s new ephemeral tweets, known as fleets, are supposed to last for only 24 hours. But a new bug was causing fleets to not totally disappear, remaining accessible well past their expiration dates. First reported by TechCrunch, the bug allows fleets to be viewed and downloaded by other users, but without notifying the fleet’s author. Twitter didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on Sunday, but told TechCrunch it was aware of the bug, accessible via a “technical workaround” which meant a fleet’s URL could be accessed after 24 hours had passed. “We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly,” a spokesperson said. The “workaround” referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets… Continu...