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Amazon is currently selling Samsung's new Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 for $699.99, and buyers who purchase it now receive a complimentary $100 Amazon gift card. The promotion effectively lowers the cost of acquiring the rugged smartwatch through the retailer.
The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off its annual lineup, featuring new work from Takashi Miike, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Werner Herzog, and a four-hour Elon Musk documentary. Among the festival's early standouts is 'The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,' starring John Turturro as an aging, technophobic thief navigating a city that has moved on to smartphones. The film hits theaters October 30th.
A veteran smart-home reviewer argues that Apple's next major hardware push should be a dedicated home computer that processes data locally rather than another cloud-connected screen. She notes that new CEO John Ternus described the iPhone using language—an 'intelligent personal hub' focused on local processing and privacy—that better fits a smart home hub than a phone. The piece also points to Anker's Eufy MindBase, shown at IFA Berlin, as an early example of this 'super hub' category supporting Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread, Zigbee and Matter.
Apple unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its Sept. 9 event, both running WatchOS 27 with features that work independently of a paired iPhone. Unlike this year's iPhones, which saw price increases, both watches kept their previous starting prices—$400 for the Series 12 and $800 for the Ultra 4—with preorders open now and shipping Sept. 18.
TrendForce projects Apple will ship 5 million units of its newly announced iPhone Duo foldable in 2026, giving it nearly a quarter of the global foldable smartphone market. That would help offset a broader slump in the category, with non-Apple Android foldable shipments expected to fall more than 20% year-over-year even as total foldable shipments edge up slightly to about 20.2 million units.
Security experts warn that travel scams have become more sophisticated than traditional pickpocketing, targeting vacationers through new digital and in-person deception methods. They are urging travelers to adopt updated precautions before and during trips to avoid falling victim to these schemes.
A tech commentary piece pushes back on comparisons between Apple's rumored foldable iPhone Duo and the Apple Vision Pro, arguing the two products face very different market conditions. The Duo starts at $1,999, well under the Vision Pro's now $3,699 price tag, and functions as a pocketable phone-tablet hybrid rather than a stationary headset with limited daily utility.
A Geekbench 6 benchmark result attributed to Apple's unreleased A20 Pro chip has surfaced online, showing single-core and multi-core scores roughly 25% higher than the current A19 Pro. The chip, built on a 2nm process, is expected to power the upcoming iPhone Duo foldable and iPhone 18 Pro models, with clock speeds nearing 5 GHz.
A tech writer with years of foldable phone experience shares candid impressions of what daily use is like, framed around anticipation of Apple's rumored foldable iPhone. The piece notes that a larger screen and unique software tricks come bundled with real-world trade-offs that new foldable owners should expect.
A hobbyist blogger purchased a WiFi-enabled Lidl Smart Kettle and began probing its network behavior after setting it up through the companion Lidl Smart Home App. Using nmap and netcat, they found the kettle opens a single TCP port (6668) that responds to connections but returns no identifiable banner or HTTP response, leaving its underlying protocol a mystery for further investigation.
A survey of 1,517 US adults by data removal service Incogni found that people who say they have 'nothing to hide' are more likely to spy on others' phone or laptop screens in public than those who admit to having something to hide. The survey also found generational differences, with Gen Z most likely to peek at others' screens, and revealed that many respondents who dismiss their own privacy concerns still snoop through partners' or family members' devices without permission.
An investigation by YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, working with independent security researchers and Level1Techs, found that LG smart TVs scan local Wi-Fi networks to catalog connected devices and nearby network names, even while offline or in standby mode. The TVs also use automatic content recognition to track viewing habits and have microphones capable of capturing and transcribing nearby conversations, with the collected data reportedly funneled to LG's advertising arm.