The Latest from Gadget Hacks: Page 2

Samsung announced the Galaxy A27 5G today with confirmed specs, a July 3 release date, and no official pricing. What does exist on the pricing front is a leak: figures attributed to Roland Quandt, circulated two weeks ago by Notebookcheck and IntoMobile, put the A27 at €349 and €439 for the two main storage tiers. If those numbers hold, that's a €50 increase over what the Galaxy A26 cost at launch. Samsung has not confirmed them. GSMArena's launch coverage published today notes prices are still...

Siri is intermittently summarizing webpages in Safari and videos in YouTube when users ask behavior 9to5Mac reported today that Apple has not clearly documented and that appears inconsistent across requests. The same prompt that produces a summary one moment draws a refusal the next, with no visible difference in conditions. For a company that has built its Siri AI pitch around on-screen context awareness, the gap between that promise and this behavior is worth understanding.

Three Google system components on Samsung Galaxy phones have pending updates that do not appear on the Play Store's "Manage apps & device" screen, the same screen most users check to confirm everything is current. The components are Android System SafetyCore, Android System WebView, and Google Play Services. Each one requires a separate manual check to find and install.

Samsung announced what it describes as the industry's first UFS 5.0 storage chip, with sequential read speeds of 10.8 GB/s and write speeds of 9.5 GB/s. That's more than double the throughput of the UFS 4.1 standard found in current flagship Android phones, according to HotHardware. Samsung is framing the chip not just as a speed upgrade but as infrastructure for running AI models directly on a device, without a cloud connection.

Swift Package Index has become part of Apple, the two parties announced. The platform developers rely on to discover Swift packages, check cross-platform compatibility, and access hosted documentation is now inside the company whose language it serves. With more than 10,000 packages indexed and over 3.5 million compatibility builds processed last year, this is not a small community tool changing hands.

A buyer who picked up Google's new Home Speaker from Walmart before its wide release has confirmed what early Google Home Speaker unboxing posts have flagged as the device's most significant design constraint: a non-removable USB-C power cable attached directly to the speaker body. The Google Store lists it as a "captive cable," making clear this is intentional, not an assembly quirk, according to 9to5Google this week.

Google is rolling out Google Play alternative billing across the U.S., UK, and EU this June, letting Android developers route payments outside its system and avoid a portion of its fees. Australia, South Korea, and Japan will follow before the end of 2026. The rest of the world comes later, on September 30, 2027, Bloomberg Law reported in March.

Gemini in Chrome can now focus on exactly what a user points to, a chart, a comparison table, or a diagram, rather than processing an entire page and guessing what's relevant. Google updated its Gemini in Chrome support pages this week to document "Select from screen," a new desktop tool that lets users draw a bounding box around on-page content before submitting a prompt. The feature is reportedly rolling out now on supported desktop versions of Chrome to signed-in users who aren't browsing in...

On current lab evidence, AirPods Pro 3 are accurate enough for average workout heart-rate tracking, but not proven for beat-to-beat precision. A peer-reviewed study published recently found the earbuds tracked heart rate within about two beats per minute of a validated ECG chest strap during treadmill exercise. That's a number worth pausing on. It's also an incomplete picture, and the gap between "accurate on average" and "reliable beat-to-beat" is where the real analysis lives.

Samsung Wallet Trips Feature: Travel Itinerary Tool Explained

Nothing Warp Android to Computer File Sharing Tool: Why It Left Google Play

Motorola Razr Fold: 6,000mAh Battery, 4.6mm Thin, Stylus Included

Retail packaging for the Samsung Galaxy A27 has surfaced through a Kenyan e-commerce retailer's Instagram post, showing the phone in three color finishes alongside a regional price and a printed 24-month warranty. The images are the most recent entry in a leak sequence that now spans official renders, marketing materials, and an accidental Samsung product page publication and together they describe a phone that's being meaningfully repositioned, not just refreshed.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has hit its lowest no-trade-in price since Black Friday. Samsung.com currently lists the 256GB base model at $1,499.99, though availability may vary by color/configuration, while Amazon and Best Buy are close behind at $1,649.99, all without requiring a trade-in or carrier commitment. That's over $400 off a phone that launched at $1,999.99 last July and remained near its launch price for months before recent higher-storage price changes. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 deal...

Google released Android 17 QPR1 Beta 5 on June 23 for Pixel phones, less than two weeks after the previous beta. The short gap between releases, combined with a ten-item bug-fix changelog and no new features, points to a cleanup build rather than a feature drop, per Droid Life and 9to5Google. Build CP31.260608.007 carries the June 2026 security patch. None of the ten fixes touch Quick Settings.

Apple SVP Eddy Cue used his appearance at Cannes Lions this week to sketch out where Apple TV+ is heading: more films with franchise potential, new originals every week through 2026, and live sports anchored by Formula 1. Cue's push for more Apple TV content, as he framed it at the Palais, comes down to two words: "better, more." What those words mean in practice is narrower than they sound.

Forty-eight China-based iOS developers filed an antitrust complaint today with China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), targeting the regulator now best positioned to press Apple after March's China commission cut. They want the standard 25% commission reduced to 5%, and they're betting that SAMR has more use over Apple than any Chinese court has managed in nearly a decade of failed litigation.

Your work Google Calendar and your personal iCloud Calendar don't talk to each other. Accept a dentist appointment on the personal side, and your work calendar still shows that hour as free. Accept a last-minute team meeting at work, and anything checking your personal availability has no idea.

Strings pulled from a pre-release build of Android System Intelligence suggest Google is working on a feature called Google Pixel Audio Memory, one that would consolidate passive song tracking, in-app music history, and lock-screen song display into a single background service. That part has a solid footing. A second part, touching on "important conversations," does not.

Major consumer streaming services currently top out at 4K video, and 4K/60Hz is within HDMI 2.0's bandwidth ceiling. The bottleneck in your setup is the service, not the cable.

Google has a genuine record of pushing AI features to older Pixel hardware, and the pattern across its last several feature drops confirms it. What those drops also show, if you read them closely, is that the most capable experiences are concentrating at the flagship end, and the mechanism Google is using to bridge the gap for older devices carries different privacy assumptions than what the company sold when those phones launched. That shift is worth being direct about.

A YouTube TV Help Community Product Expert said a recent change removed Live Guide background playback from YouTube TV on certain devices, cutting a feature that let subscribers keep a live channel running while browsing upcoming programming. The change is intentional, no app setting restores it, and the community explanation doesn't fully account for all the hardware where users are reporting the loss, including Roku devices, based on user reports cited by multiple outlets last week.

Dark Green is the only confirmed color detail from Samsung's entire 2026 foldable lineup. It belongs to the Fold 8 Wide. Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Flip 8 colors remain unconfirmed, with a reported July 22 Unpacked event now less than a month away. In a cycle where hardware changes are modest across the board, the absence of color information is itself a data point worth examining.

Google rolled out a one-click Gemini Google Sheets formula fixer, giving users a way to diagnose and repair broken formulas without leaving the cell or writing a prompt. When an error appears, a single click prompts Gemini to return both a plain-English explanation of the problem and a corrected formula ready to drop in. The catch: the feature is locked to paid tiers, and Google's own benchmark evidence doesn't directly measure what the tool actually does.

The new Fire TV interface is now available worldwide on all current-generation Amazon Fire TV Stick devices and Amazon Ember smart TVs, and Amazon says all current-generation Fire TV Sticks, the Fire TV Cube, and Ember smart TVs purchased globally now ship with the redesigned UI. That's the broadest distribution since the update quietly began on a handful of premium devices four months ago.

Apple's Beta 2 release notes for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate confirm that the AirPort Utility app is going away, 9to5Mac reported. The app has been Apple's official management tool for AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, and AirPort Time Capsule hardware since Apple discontinued that product line in 2018. Eight years of post-discontinuation software support is ending this fall.

Apple has formally approved Samsung Display to begin manufacturing foldable OLED panels for its first foldable iPhone, a concrete supply-chain milestone that moves the device from persistent rumor into active component production. Samsung has already activated a portion of its Vietnam back-end facility to fill an initial order of roughly 3 million panels, with approximately 50 of the facility's 80 production lines now running, The Elec reported today.

Tamil Nadu health authorities are still investigating water contamination complaints near Tata Electronics' iPhone components factory in Hosur, even after Tata said on June 16 that the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board had dropped further action tied to its show-cause notice. The key distinction is where the samples were taken: Tata's clean results came from inside the plant, while unresolved findings involve farmland and wells outside it.

Chinese tipster Digital Chat Station claims Samsung is testing its Privacy Display technology for the Galaxy S27 Pro, according to SamMobile's report on the leak. The feature currently ships exclusively on the Galaxy S26 Ultra. If the Samsung Galaxy S27 Pro privacy screen rumor holds, it would mark the first time the technology has moved beyond a single SKU in Samsung's lineup.

Poplar Group, the media relations firm that had handled Trump Mobile's T1 Phone press operation since at least June 2025, is no longer working with the company. Poplar founding partner Chris Walker told The Verge on June 19, 2026, that his team is "not assisting Trump Mobile any further" and said he did not know whether a replacement firm had been retained.

Microsoft has shipped Outlook for Mac version 16.110, bringing a full Liquid Glass visual overhaul and native PST file import to the app. Both changes are live now through the Mac App Store. This Microsoft Outlook for Mac update marks two significant shifts at once: the app finally looks like it belongs on macOS, and it can now directly import email archives that previously required workarounds to access on Mac.

Samsung has officially acknowledged the Exynos 2700 for what appears to be the first time, with an executive stating development is on track and the chip is headed for "top-tier" smartphones, Android Authority reported this week. The Galaxy S27 was not named specifically, but Samsung's flagship chips have always debuted on the Galaxy S series, making the connection a reasonable inference rather than a stated commitment.

Six days after Android 17's stable rollout began on June 16, a growing number of Pixel owners are reporting that the Android 17 Pixel touch screen bug has made their devices genuinely unreliable. Swipes invert direction, taps either fail to register or fire multiple times, and screens go briefly unresponsive before recovering, according to Phandroid and Android Police. Google has confirmed the bug and says a fix is in progress. No root cause has been named, and no timeline has been given.

Turn Google Home Mini into Home Assistant Speaker Using a Drop-In PCB

iPhone 18 Pro Camera Upgrades Move Into Active Production

ETOE opened pre-orders today for the Dolphin 2, a portable Google TV projector that combines a 54Wh built-in battery with certified Google TV, bringing Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, and Disney+ without any external streaming hardware. Early-bird pricing sits at $927 in the US and €799 in Europe through June 28, with units shipping in early July, according to the ETOE press release.

Apple has opened iOS to rival app stores and alternative payment processors in Brazil and structured the terms so it collects a fee on every digital transaction, whether or not its store or payment system touches the sale. The changes took effect yesterday with iOS 26.5. All alternative distribution must run through an Apple-authorized marketplace; every app distributed outside the App Store still passes through Apple's Notarization process, a combination of automated scans and human review,...

Alogic unveiled three new product lines at InfoComm 2026 today, extending its Mac touchscreen display lineup across desk, travel, and enterprise use cases. The additions are the FOKUS large-format interactive panels, the Aspekt Touch 27-inch desktop monitor, and the Folio and Folio Duo portable displays, with pricing running from $899 to $3,999, MacRumors reports. The catch common to all of them: macOS still has no native touch support, so every display in the lineup depends on Alogic's driver...

NTS Radio and Swedish audio company Atonemo launched the NTS Radio Player today, a compact Wi-Fi streamer purpose-built for NTS's curated channels and continuously running mixtapes, designed to connect directly to speakers and amplifiers you already own. The practical question it raises: does dedicated hardware make NTS meaningfully better than casting from your phone to whatever speaker is nearby, The Verge reported today.

Microsoft's release health page for Windows 11 version 26H1 currently lists no active known issues and no recently resolved ones at the time of this writing. Understanding the difference matters if you manage a Windows fleet, evaluate hardware procurement, or are simply trying to figure out which release health pages are worth monitoring right now.