Hasta La Gadget!

“Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” Trump further threatened in a tweet early Saturday.

The Nintendo Switch has interesting controllers in the form of the Joy-Cons and the Switch Pro. For games like the upcoming Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fighter, launching December 7, some gamers will want a controller with a classic feel. 8BitDo has a new wireless adapter that is called the GBros. wireless adapter that lets you use your good old GameCube controller with your Switch.

The adapter will also work with controllers from the NES Classic and SNES Classic, as well as the Wii Classic Controller if you have those lying around. The adapter has home and screenshot buttons on it and connects to the Switch via Bluetooth.

One potential catch is that the adapter connects to the classic controllers via a short cable that might get in the way for some users. The GBros. wireless adapter ships on December 7, the same day that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launches, and costs $19.99. It should be available for pre-order on Amazon any day now.

[via Polygon]

“Who am I going to be worried about? Oh Facebook seeing? No, I’m not worried about Facebook seeing. They’re going to look at my great art collection and say they want to come steal it? No, I never really thought about it.” That’s my 72-year-old mother Sally Constine’s response to whether she’s worried about her privacy now that she has a Facebook Portal video chat device. The gadget goes on sale and starts shipping today at $349 for the 15.6-inch swiveling screen Portal+, $199 for the 10-inch Portal, and $100 off for buying any two.

The sticking point for most technology reporters — that it’s creepy or scary to have a Facebook camera and microphone in your house — didn’t even register as a concern with a normal tech novice like my mom. “I don’t really think of it any different from a phone call,” she says. “It’s not a big deal for me.”

While Facebook has been mired by privacy scandals after a year of Cambridge Analytica and its biggest-ever data breach, the concept that it can’t be trusted hasn’t necessarily trickled down to everyone. And without that coloring her perception, my mom found the Portal to be an easy way to video chat with family, and a powerful reminder to do so.

For a full review of Facebook Portal, check out TechCrunch hardware editor Brian Heater’s report:

As a quick primer, Portal and Portal+ are smart video screens and Bluetooth speakers that offer an auto-zooming camera that follows you around the room as you video chat. They include both Facebook’s own voice assistant for controlling Messenger, as well as Amazon Alexa. There’s also a third-party app platform for speech-activated Spotify and Pandora, video clips from The Food Network and Newsy, and it can slideshow through your Facebook photos while it’s idle. For privacy, communications are encrypted, AI voice processing is done locally on the device, there’s an off switch that disconnects the camera and mic and it comes with a physical lens cover so you know no one’s watching you. It fares well in comparison to the price, specs and privacy features compared to Amazon’s Echo Show, Google Home Hub and other smart displays.

When we look at our multi-functional smartphones and computers, connecting with loved ones isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind the way it did with an old-school home telephone. But with the Portal in picture frame mode rotating through our Facebook photos of those loved ones, and with it at the beck and call of our voice commands, it felt natural to turn those in-between times we might have scrolled through Instagram to instead chatting face to face.

My mother found setting up the Portal to be quite simple, though she wished the little instructional card used a bigger font. She had no issue logging in to her Facebook, Amazon Alexa and Spotify accounts. “It’s all those things in one. If you had this, you could put Alexa in a different room,” the Constine matriarch says.

She found the screen to be remarkably sharp, though some of the on-screen buttons could be better labeled, at least at first. But once she explored the device’s software, she was uncontrollably giggling while trying on augmented reality masks as we talked. She even used the AR Storytime feature to read me a bedtime tale like she did 30 years ago. If I was still a child, I think I would have loved this way to play with a parent who was away from home. The intuitive feature instantly had her reading a modernized Three Little Pigs story while illustrations filled our screens. And when she found herself draped in an AR big bad wolf costume during his quotes, she knew to adopt his gruff voice.

One of the few problems she found was that when Facebook’s commercials for Portal came on the TV, they’d end up accidentally activating her Portal. Facebook might need to train the device to ignore its own ads, perhaps by muting them in a certain part of the audio spectrum as one Reddit user suggested Amazon may have done to prevent causing trouble with its Super Bowl commercial.

My mom doesn’t Skype or FaceTime much. She’s just so used to a lifetime of audio calls with her sister back in England that she rarely remembers that video is an option. Having a dedicated device in the kitchen kept the idea top-of-mind. “I really want to have a conversation seeing her. I think I would really feel close to her if I could see her like I’m seeing you now,” she tells me.

Convincing jaded younger adults to buy a Portal might be a steep challenge for Facebook. But perhaps Facebook understands that. Rather than being seemingly ignorant of or calloused about the privacy climate it’s launching Portal into, the company may be purposefully conceding to the tech news wonks that includes those who’ll be reviewing Portal but not necessarily the much larger mainstream audience. If it concentrates on seniors and families with young children who might not have the same fears of Facebook, it may have found a way to actually bring us closer together in the way its social network is supposed to.

Just two weeks out from the biggest turkey-focused day of the year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that 164 people across 35 states have fallen ill from Salmonella-tainted raw turkey.

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Several months ago Samsung announced the Galaxy Home which is basically Samsung’s take on the smart speaker. However what Samsung did not mention during the announcement was when the device would launch, but the good news is that it looks like we could be getting pretty close to a release.

This is thanks to a recent sighting at the FCC where the device was spotted receiving its certification. For those unfamiliar with the process, for devices to be sold in the US, they need to pass through the FCC first. While an FCC sighting doesn’t necessarily give us a release date, the fact that it was spotted at the FCC at least lets us know that Samsung has cleared one of the necessary hurdles.

That being said, it is unclear as to how well the speakers will be received. Right now companies like Amazon and Google more or less command the majority of the market share thanks to them being early to market. Apple was a bit late to the game and with the price of the HomePod, it also made adopting it difficult.

Samsung’s Bixby has also been criticized in the past about not being as good as it should, so like we said, it is unclear as to how it will fare. In any case we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more information about its release, so check back with us at a later date for more details regarding availability.

Samsung Galaxy Home Spotted At The FCC, Coming Launching Soon , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.