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Tech News
Amazon is selling the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for $949.99, a $450 cut from its $1,399.99 list price. The listing carries a 4.6-star rating, and the phone features a 6.9-inch display, S Pen support, a customized Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, and storage options up to 1TB.
Google rolled out its November update for Googlebook OS, announced via Reddit and its Help Center, bundling 30 fixes alongside the November 2026 security patch. The update reduces RAM usage from on-device AI, freeing 3GB to 6GB of memory, and addresses issues including USB microphones not working, DRM video showing a black screen on monitors, and bootloops triggered by interrupted updates.
Android Authority contrasts Google's approach of weaving Gemini AI into core Android functions like messaging and photography with Apple's more restrained AI rollout on the iPhone 18 Pro. The piece notes Apple has focused on building on-device processing to keep AI features local and private rather than pushing users toward cloud-connected tools.
Georgia Tech researchers built a forensic tool called ORISA that reconstructs deleted conversations from on-device AI assistants running on Android phones. In a test using the ChatterUI app and a fictional assistant fed 100 facts, ORISA recovered 26 facts after deletion, compared with only 14 the assistant itself could still access before being wiped.
Eufy is offering an $80 discount on its Security Wall Light Cam S4, a solar-powered device that combines a motion-activated outdoor light with a swiveling 4K security camera. The camera stores footage locally on 32GB of built-in storage, requires no subscription, and includes on-device AI that can distinguish between people, vehicles, and pets.
Pulse Local, a new Mac budgeting app shown on Hacker News, downloads about 2.9GB of AI models to the user's machine so that financial questions are processed locally rather than sent to a remote server. When syncing accounts, the app fetches transactions via Plaid through Pulse's servers, but the developer says the data passes through server memory without being stored, leaving only connection metadata like institution name and last sync time on the backend.
National Design Studio released Rampart, an open-source system that detects and strips personal information from text before it leaves a user's device. It runs entirely in the browser, combining regex-based rules for structured data like Social Security numbers with the MiniLM machine learning model for names and addresses, aiming to complete the process in milliseconds.
Google released AI Edge Foresight, a note-taking app currently available only on MacOS that transcribes meetings from Google Meet, Zoom or in-person conversations entirely on-device. It organizes notes, works with files like PDFs and Google Docs, and offers a Live Assistance feature to answer questions based on meeting transcripts, all without sending data to the cloud.
Amazon is launching three new Alexa Tablets—the 8, 11, and 12 Pro—to replace its Fire tablet line, available in the US, Mexico and Canada from October 14, and in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain five days later. Prices start at $230 for the 8.7-inch Alexa Tablet 8 and go up to $500 for the 12-inch Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, which Amazon says is its fastest tablet yet with improved processing and graphics. An anti-glare Nanomatte display option costs an extra $50, and a $90 stylus is available for the Pro model.
A new speech recognition model called Whistle has been released for mobiles, wearables, robots, smart home devices, automotive systems and microcontrollers. It ships as a single 16.9 MB file that runs entirely on-device via CPU with no dependencies, handling transcription, word-level timestamps and speech embeddings for seven languages without sending audio off the device.
Google unveiled EmbeddingGemma 2, a multimodal on-device AI model that can process text, images, video frames and audio locally. Alongside it, the company released AI Edge Foresight, a macOS app that expands shorthand bullet points into polished meeting notes and answers questions live during meetings, all without sending data off the device.
Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow and former teenage hacker-house resident among early AI luminaries, has released an invite-only beta of Underdog, an AI assistant that runs entirely on a user's own device rather than in the cloud. Wen built a companion inference engine called Husky to run the models efficiently on Macs and Windows PCs, with Linux, iPhone and Android support planned. The assistant uses a 27-billion parameter model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8 27B and encrypts credentials for accounts it's authorized to access.