The explosion of true wireless earbuds has finally settled down in recent years. However, this has also meant they’re all starting to look and behave pretty similarly.
Sony’s latest experiment — its new Linkbuds — shakes that up with an open-ear design made for ambient sound. The company has attempted to nail open-design buds since 2017, and rival Samsung, to its credit, also tried something similar with its beanish Buds Live.
The LinkBuds, according to Engadget’s Billy Steele, almost nail the concept. There are a lot of cool features built into these tiny things. The Linkbuds will mute audio when they detect you’re talking, and motion sensors mean you don’t have to tap the device to manually pause or skip tracks, which is nice to see – I hate whacking something inside my ear to adjust other in-ear buds. “Wide-area tap” covers the area in front of your ear. Sadly, there’s no noise cancellation (and even if there was, this open design would inevitably let noises through), but Sony’s design seems built for background listening. Check out our full verdict here.
— Mat Smith
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Netflix is making a ‘BioShock’ movie
It’s the latest game the service is adapting.
Netflix says it’s teaming up with 2K and Take-Two Interactive for a film adaptation of the BioShock series. No other details are available as yet, but based on the image Netflix shared in its announcement, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see it tackling the first game.
2007’s BioShock may translate well to the big screen. The original game has a striking Art Deco/underwater setting and an unforgettable story. No spoilers, promise.
The Mevo Start 3-pack is a tiny, powerful live streaming studio
A multi-camera miracle that falls short of greatness.
I’ve been playing with Logitech’s multi-camera Mevo Start pack. It consists of three wireless cameras you can network together to create a livestream studio. You can transition between cameras or get the companion app to do it for you. For streamers looking to elevate their broadcasts, there’s a lot of potential here. The learning curve is steep, however, and connectivity can be a little temperamental.
Microsoft’s 3D ‘Fluent’ emoji arrive in Teams
Over 1,800 redesigned characters have arrived
Last summer, Microsoft teased Clippy would return to Office and a handful of other apps as part of a broader update to more than 1,800 emoji. The new characters reflect the company’s Fluent design language, and you can now check them out in Microsoft Teams.
To enable the emoji, navigate to the app’s settings menu, then head over to the About section and click Public Preview. Microsoft’s goal, it said, was to design characters that better reflect how people work in the 21st century. That means dinosaur emoji.
OM Digital’s powerful OM-1 mirrorless camera may be the last Olympus-branded flagship
It can output 4K 10-bit or external ProRes RAW video at up to 60 fps.
OM Digital Solutions has unveiled the Micro Four Thirds OM-1, its first mirrorless camera since purchasing Olympus. It packs a new sensor and technology that gives it a big leap in performance over the last flagship Olympus models. This could, however, be the last Olympus-branded model.
The Polestar 5 will be built atop a ‘bespoke’ bonded aluminum platform
The vehicle body and battery platform are assembled as one.
The Polestar 5 will be cut from a different cloth than its predecessors when it launches at the end of 2024. Polestar announced on Tuesday its upcoming electric performance sedan will ride atop an entirely new, lightweight bonded aluminum platform. This time-saving design has already borne results, enabling the company to produce and deliver an early series of prototypes, just 18 months after the start of development.
A burger-flipping robot may be coming to a White Castle near you
The chain is planning to bring Flippy 2 to 100 more locations.
White Castle has announced it’ll be bringing Flippy 2, a robot chef that can essentially perform the same tasks as a team of fry cooks, to 100 more locations this year. This amounts to roughly a third of White Castle restaurants nationwide. It’s unlikely the average White Castle patron will notice the new robots. Since Flippy 2 is designed to perform “back-of-the-house” kitchen functions, that’s where you’ll find it. This might just be the start: Miso Robotics has come out with a wing-making version of Flippy. Buffalo Wild Wings is currently testing it out.
The problem with a lot of modern day electronics is that a lot of them aren’t necessarily built to be repaired easily. Presumably the idea is that companies would rather you just buy a new device rather than repair it, but over the years this has led to an outcry by customers who are outraged by the prices some companies are charging to fix their devices.