Brydge has unveiled the Brydge 11.0, a new keyboard lineup designed to visually match the four colors of Apple's entry-level 11-inch iPad: silver, blue, pink, and yellow. The anodized aluminum keyboards feature a full-size backlit keyboard, a glass trackpad supporting iPadOS gestures, magnetic attachment, and up to 40 hours of battery life with backlighting. They're compatible with the iPad 10th generation and iPad A16, priced at $159, and launch on Brydge's website and Amazon around mid-month.
Ernst & Young's U.S. arm is spending $100 million this fiscal year on bonuses for employees who demonstrate distinctly human traits like adaptability, judgment and innovation. Payouts range from small $500 awards to as much as $25,000 for major contributions, five times the previous cap, and any employee can nominate a colleague with no upper limit on total rewards. The move comes even as EY's AI-related revenue jumped 30% year-over-year in 2025.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a new flagship model the company describes as a major leap in cybersecurity, coding, and agentic task performance. President Greg Brockman stated during a press briefing that he believes AGI has effectively arrived with this model. The rollout begins with enterprise cybersecurity customers today, expanding to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users over the coming days, plus API and AWS access.
Hohem announced the Eyepic, a hybrid device combining a 4K/60fps wearable camera with a detachable three-axis gimbal for stabilized shooting. The camera can rotate its 2.5-inch touchscreen for cropless horizontal or vertical video, is waterproof to nearly 33 feet, and can be worn via lanyard, hat clip or magnetic mount. Hohem also revealed two new smartphone gimbals with Apple DockKit tracking and a multi-transmitter wireless mic system, though pricing and release dates remain unannounced.
Final Fantasy Resonance is an upcoming Square Enix title built on the HD-2D art style, blending sprite-based visuals with modern lighting and particle effects. The game expands on the decade-old mobile title Brave Exvius, reworking its story and cutscenes into a full standalone RPG with towns, side quests, Chocobos, and airships. It also introduces a new turn-based battle system inspired by classic Final Fantasy design.
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model it says beats OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on speed, accuracy and cost, pricing it at 10 cents per audio hour—a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged for its first model just five months ago. The new version supports 60 languages, up from 43, and adds built-in speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, targeting noisy real-world business audio rather than clean recordings.
A sponsored analysis argues that traditional SEO metrics like rankings and click-through rates no longer capture how consumers actually find brands, since AI tools now generate synthesized answers directly on screen instead of sending users to websites. The piece introduces 'pixel depth' as a way to measure how prominently a brand appears within an AI-generated answer, rather than its position on a search results page. It also notes that large language models extract and recombine facts from multiple sources rather than indexing whole pages, meaning a company's website is just one input among many.
Google is rolling out version 1.0.0.94 of its Pixel Weather app for Wear OS, adding three new watch face complications: Air quality index, Pollen, and Precipitation. These join the existing Sunrise/sunset, UV Index, and Weather complications available to Pixel Watch owners. Users can add them through the Pixel Watch companion app or by long-pressing the watch face directly.
New polling shows roughly 75% of Americans, including many Republican voters, oppose having data centers built near their communities, comparing the intensity of that opposition to resistance against Social Security cuts. Despite this, President Trump is intensifying his support for data center growth just before the midterm elections, and some GOP officials have dismissed the backlash as an orchestrated psyop rather than genuine grassroots concern.
Unionized staff at The New York Times and The Athletic issued a unanimous statement opposing a potential deal linking The Athletic with prediction-market company Kalshi. They cite New York's attorney general, who found Kalshi operates as an illegal, unlicensed gambling platform posing financial risk to users, and argue that any deeper partnership would compromise journalistic independence and credibility.
Samsung's Galaxy Watch 9 has become the first Galaxy smartwatch to support seamless updates, according to users who spotted the change during its first firmware update carrying the August 5, 2026 security patch. Instead of forcing the watch offline during installation, the roughly 193MB update downloaded and installed in the background while the device remained usable. Samsung did not announce the feature in its specs or changelog; it was discovered by users during installation.
A team led by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country has identified a giant ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn's south pole, mirroring the famous six-sided hexagon long observed at the planet's north pole. The feature was first glimpsed in amateur astronomer images from 2024 and confirmed through further analysis in 2025.