Hasta La Gadget!

Members of the U.S. Air Force reserve unit detoured to Martha’s Vineyard to load a bike onto their Super Hercules aircraft, before continuing to California.

The cryptocurrency market continued to hemorrhage money Thursday, with the most popular coins down double-digit percentages over the past 24 hours. And absolutely no one knows when things will bottom out, with many people worried the entire market of fake digital money could go to zero as the stablecoin Tether…

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Polyend’s Tracker is a fascinating piece of gear. It’s not for everyone, but it’s hard to argue with the value and power it delivers. This year the company is taking that same basic format, and going in a slightly more familiar direction. The Polyend Play is a sample-based groovebox, but it does away with confounding tracker (lowercase “t”) workflow.

At its core Play is an eight track sample sequencer, with an additional eight polyphonic tracks specifically for sending MIDI to external gear. That means it can serve as the brains of a full studio or stage setup, while still handling the duties of a drum machine. Like the Tracker, it also has punch-in effects for performance and live remixing, as well as a DJ-style master filter.

Even though the sequencer on the Play was built from the ground up specifically for the device, it still retains many of the convenient features like autofill, randomization and chance that helped make Tracker so powerful. Play can hold 128 patterns, with each of the 16 tracks having 16 variations up to 64 steps long. And tracks can have independent lengths, BPMs, playback modes and swing amounts, allowing you to create really complex interplay. Plus it has a song mode for arranging all your patterns into a finished composition.

While the layout is completely different, Play uses the same anodized aluminum build and appears to use the same delightfully clicky keys. The large click wheel is gone and the screen is smaller, but the grid of pads has been expanded from 48 to 160 (if my math is correct).

It comes loaded with 3,000 samples, though you can easily load your own from a microSD card (a 16GB one is included). There are 35 different playback modes, though Polyend hasn’t revealed a full list of what those are yet. And there are built-in effects like reverb, delay and saturation for coloring your songs. And, just like the Tracker, Play is powered over USB-C so you can plug into a portable battery and make music on the go.

There are still a lot of details we don’t know about the Polyend Play yet, but one of the biggest is the release date. But whenever it does land (and we expect sooner than later) it will set you back $799.

The worst–keptsecret in tech is a secret no more. At its I/O 2022 developer conference today, Google just confirmed the existence of the much-leaked Pixel Watch. Not only that, the company showed pictures of the device, and it looks a lot like a bezelless Samsung Galaxy Watch. 

The Pixel Watch has a domed, round face and, like most Google hardware, appears to have a pastel-based color scheme. There is a “tactile crown” and customizable bands will be available, too. The device will run Wear OS 3, which the company launched last year in collaboration with Samsung, but with updates we heard about earlier during today’s keynote. Some features we already knew about, like offline Maps directions on your wrist, are finally arriving for real. Emergency SOS and a new Google Wallet are also coming to Wear OS on the Pixel Watch.

Google is also promising deep integration with Fitbit, which it recently acquired, for health and fitness-tracking features. Wear OS has long lacked comprehensive activity and biometric tracking tools, and now, the OS will better. Google had already said it was working with Fitbit and learning from Samsung on how to efficiently implement constant heart rate monitoring and sleep tracking. It appears the Pixel Watch, with the latest Wear OS, will offer that.

It will also have a Fitbit app that lets users collect “Active Zone minutes” that fans of the activity band maker will find familiar. You’ll also be able to log your progress against preset goals. It’s not yet clear how the Fitbit app will work with Google’s own Fit, or if there will be any overlap.

In fact, not much else is known about the Pixel Watch itself, except that more details will be released in the coming months and that it will launch in the fall with the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. We don’t know what chipset Google is using, or what battery life to expect. One thing worth noting is that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, which was the first smartwatch to run the new Wear OS, does not work with iOS. The Pixel Watch won’t either. But most iPhone users will likely opt for the Apple Watch, which to this day is the best smartwatch available.

The Pixel Watch is an intriguing offering from Google, but until we have more information, it’s hard to know if the company will be able to steal Apple’s crown. For now, after having had to wait so long, we’ll still have to wait a little longer to get all full details.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Google’s last tablet was the ill-fated Pixel slate, a device that was widely criticized — so much so that in 2019, Google said it wouldn’t make tablets anymore. In classic fashion, though, the company is changing its tune. Today as part of its hardware presentation at Google I/O 2022, Google teased the Pixel Tablet, a premium Android-powered device that’s set to arrive sometime in 2023. 

As this product is months away from being released, Google is only giving us a scant few details right now. Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP of devices and services, said that the Pixel Tablet is a “premium” device that will run on the company’s custom Tensor chips, just like the latest Pixel phones. What we haven’t heard is how much it’ll cost, how big the screen is or when it will be released. We can say that, based on the renders we saw, it looks a bit like someone just took the screen off a Nest Hub.

Naturally, the new tablet will run Google’s version of Android specifically built for larger screens, an initiative that’s been in the works for a while now. Historically, the big knock against Android tablets is that the software never feels like it’s built for the bigger screen, and that apps aren’t optimized to use this bigger view. Even with changes made to Android to support larger screens, it doesn’t necessarily mean developers will build their apps to take advantage of that space. 

But Osterloh told reporters in a briefing ahead of I/O that Google has clearly heard that users want a larger-screen Pixel experience to compliment their phones — so the company is at least seeing some level of consumer demand for such a device. Whether that leads into market adoption is another question entirely, as neither Chrome OS nor Android tablets ever caught on in a significant way. Samsung has had some success with its Galaxy Tab line and Amazon’s budget lineup of Fire tablets have both stuck around, but Apple’s iPad remains dominant. 

Given that this device won’t be out until sometime in 2023, it’s far too early to predict if Google has learned from its past mistakes in the tablet arena. But the company made a commitment at I/O to rebuild more than 20 of its apps for large-screen devices, and huge developers like Facebook, TikTok and Zoom are on board as well. If more third-party developers get on board by the time the Pixel Tablet arrives, it could have a shot at redefining what we think of when it comes to premium Android tablets.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!