Loading up HDR photos and videos can be a great way of showcasing the fancy display on your new phone and testing just how bright it can get. But sometimes, especially at night, you might not want your screen to crank into overdrive with blinding highlights just because someone posted a random video to Instagram in HDR. (Devices are increasingly set to capture video with the increased dynamic range by default, so let’s not blame each other.)

With its forthcoming One UI 7 update that’s currently in beta, Samsung is giving Galaxy phone owners a system-wide kill switch for disabling HDR content. As covered by 9to5Google, there’s a new “Super HDR” toggle in the settings menu.

The description — “automatically adjust the display to show the full range of colors and contrast in pictures taken with Galaxy devices” — is a bit misleading, since it turns out that toggling this on will keep your display brightness in check across all apps. But that’s exactly the end result that I’d want.

On the iPhone side, Apple currently has no such setting that’s specific to HDR. It’s possible to avoid HDR content by enabling low power mode on your iPhone, but doing so makes a ton of other system changes that might be overkill.

If you’re looking for a reprieve from HDR on Instagram in particular, you can disable it in the app’s settings in the “media quality” section. (I take credit for this after complaining about the issue a couple years ago.) That only applies to iOS, though. The option doesn’t exist on Android, which makes Samsung’s new toggle all the more useful.

This Bluetooth speaker’s design is a breath of fresh air, but Bose skimped on some features that are usually standard at this price.

Read the full story at The Verge.

This year paved the way for a future where earbuds are much more than audio accessories.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon today announced that its Dual Audio feature for Fire TV, which lets viewers listen through a hearing aid while others in the room experience standard sound from a TV’s speakers, will be rolling out in the next several weeks. It’ll be available first on the company’s latest Fire TV Omni Mini LED. Dual Audio uses the audio streaming for hearing aids (ASHA) protocol.

In a blog post, Amazon said this marks “the first time Fire TV customers with ASHA-enabled hearing aids will be able to listen to streaming content simultaneously with others using two different audio outputs” for a more communal viewing experience. The company is also expanding ASHA support “to include all Widex Moment Behind-The-Ear (BTE) and Receiver-In-Canal (RIC) hearing aids” with compatibility across a range of devices including the Fire TV Omni Mini LED Series, Fire TV Omni QLED Series, Fire TV Cube, Fire TV 4-Series, Fire TV 2-Series, and Fire TV Omni Series.

Amazon is also taking steps to make its packaging and included start guides more accessible. New QR codes on the latest packaging “include tactile, raised UV dots to improve discoverability.”

Scanning that QR code will bring you to Amazon.com for more in-depth product information and steps for setting up a device. “That’s critical so that customers who are blind or have low vision can easily find the code by touch,” Amazon’s Maiken Moeller-Hansen wrote in a blog post. Separate from these accessibility measures, Amazon is introducing new packaging for Echo, Kindle, and Fire TV hardware that uses 30 percent more recycled fiber (“on average”) and 60 percent less ink.

How to enable Dual Audio on the Fire TV Omni Mini LED:

• Pressing and holding the Home button on your remote
• Go to Settings → Accessibility
• Turn on the Dual Audio feature to pair a compatible hearing aid to the TV to begin streaming.

How to set up a hearing aid with Fire TV:

• Go to Settings → Accessibility
• Choose the Hearing Aids section and then select Add Hearing Aids

LG’s Signature OLED T, the transparent TV that was the company’s big flashy reveal at CES 2024, now has an official price: $59,999. It’s available beginning today in the United States “at select LG-authorized retailers including Best Buy, Video & Audio Center and via LG.com” the company said in a press release. You can’t just walk into your local Best Buy and get this thing, mind you; it’s a special order kind of situation. LG says the first purchase will be made later tonight at a gala at Video & Audio Center.

The OLED T lets you switch between its mind-boggling transparent mode, where you can clearly see whatever’s behind the OLED panel, and an opaque mode that eliminates distractions when enjoying content on the 77-inch screen.

As is usually the case with Signature models, this OLED gets some completely unique software tricks that you won’t find on other LG sets. These include:

T-Objet: an Always-On-Display (AOD) mode that transforms the screen into a transparent digital canvas, ideal for showcasing artwork, videos or photos in outstanding color and clarity.

T-Bar: a sleek info-ticker that appears along the bottom edge of the screen, providing sports results, IoT device statuses, weather forecasts or song title information. The rest of the screen remains unused when T-Bar is active, presenting a clean, uncluttered look and a clear view of the space behind LG’s “virtually invisible” display. For added convenience,

T-Home: offers a user-friendly interface that delivers a well-organized overview of available services, as well as quick access to apps, settings and other features.

The OLED T is forever out of reach for mere peasants like myself, but even if I had $60,000 burning a hole in my pocket, I’m not sure the transparency trick would be enough for me to hand it over. The far more conventional LG G4 would do just fine. But if you lead a lavish lifestyle and have the perfect scenario dreamed up for this thing, it’s now actually available to buy.

Often at CES, you’ll see a very impressive new technology debut at exorbitant prices before trickling down to more affordable models a couple years later. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what we’re seeing with LG and its Zero Connect Box. We got our first look at it with the M Series OLED in 2023. Now the company is bringing that Zero Connect Box, which beams audio and video to the TV panel, to one model of its still-terribly-named QNED Evo Mini LED lineup.

The box can transmit 4K video at up to 144Hz, and by all accounts from reviews last year, it works as advertised and poses no issues for gaming. The only cable that runs to the TV screen itself is the power cable.

LG says the QNED Evo series is also ditching quantum dots this year for a “proprietary wide color gamut technology, Dynamic QNED Color Solution” that supposedly produces “pure colors that are as realistic as they appear to the eye in general life.”

Unfortunately, I predict we’re going to see a lot of hype about AI on TVs at CES 2025 — even more than usual — and LG is already backing up my theory. It’s even putting a new AI button right on the Magic Remote for this year’s TVs. In what’s destined to be a controversial decision, the AI button actually takes the place of the traditional inputs button:

A short press on the AI button guides users to relevant keywords and TV features, while a long press enables personalized searches based on a large language model (LLM4). For example, if a user is planning a trip to France, they can ask their remote, “Recommend movies to watch on my trip to Paris.” The AI will understand the context and suggest movies set in the French capital, including specific genre recommendations based on the user’s viewing preferences.

Do people actually want this functionality from their TV? I digress. LG claims AI will also allow for more advanced upscaling, more fine-tuned HDR, and the conversion of two-channel stereo sources to a virtualized 9.1.2-channel sound output. LG claims its new AI tricks can also better distinguish voices from background noise — a challenge that TV makers never seem finished addressing — and make them clearer.

LG hasn’t yet shared pricing or a release timeframe for the 2025 QNED Evo lineup. But again, this is how CES TV announcements always go. You hear about the flashy new tech and better-than-ever picture quality months before learning how much it’ll cost you. The Verge will be in Las Vegas in just a few short weeks for the show, so you can at least count on some first-hand impressions of LG’s latest TVs.

Threads is about to begin testing the ability to schedule posts, according to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. “Replies cannot be scheduled,” he added, explaining that “we want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversation.”

Mosseri also makes sure to note that Instagram has been working on this feature “for months.” I’m choosing to take as a sign that the Instagram chief is fed up with the notion that Bluesky is the motivating factor behind every new improvement that comes to Threads. Last week, Threads introduced curated collections of people to follow, which drew comparisons to Bluesky’s starter packs.

Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads now has over 100 million daily active users, marking the first time that the company has revealed a DAU figure for its Twitter / X competitor. Threads also has more than 300 million monthly active users. No matter how Meta is calculating those figures, Bluesky objectively remains far smaller.

Instagram has long offered the option to schedule feed posts, and this week it announced the same convenience is being extended to DMs.

I maintain that YouTube TV is the very best of the streaming TV services, but good grief is it getting expensive. Today YouTube announced the service’s latest price hike, which brings the monthly subscription to $82.99. The change is effective immediately for new customers and will be reflected starting January 13th for “most existing customers.” As usual, the company attributes this increase to “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service.”

$82.99 is the same price as Disney’s Hulu + Live TV bundle.

YouTube TV last raised its subscription cost to $72.99 in March 2023. Before that, it was $64.99. The days when the service ran only $50 now feel like a lifetime ago. Some of you who got in early might even remember it costing a mere $35 per month.

But since then, YouTube has routinely found itself in carriage disputes with Disney, NBCUniversal, and other content owners, and those renegotiated agreements have led YouTube TV’s price to climb higher and higher. The YouTube TV of today is much different than it used to be; there are more channels, yes, but the service has also shed a number of regional sports networks.

The company is quick to note that none of the service’s core benefits are changing. The base subscription still includes over 100 channels, cloud DVR with unlimited storage, up to six user accounts per household, and the flexibility of three concurrent streams. But YouTube TV still charges extra for 4K streaming, which seems harder to rationalize after this $10 price bump.

Customers are predictably none too pleased about the news and are weighing whether a service that now costs more than double its original price is still worth it.

Sonos will soon encourage employees on its various product teams who live near its US office locations to come in for at least two days per week, The Verge has learned. That’s a notable break from the company’s history, throughout which Sonos has enthusiastically supported fully remote and hybrid work. Job listings at Sonos routinely state that “it’s about impact, not location.” Glassdoor reviews have long backed this up, with employees reporting no pressure to come into the office.

But that lax stance is set to change slightly as Sonos continues its effort to right the ship following this year’s app mishap and stay on track with upcoming products. It’s adopting a stricter policy that will call for product employees within proximity of Santa Barbara, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco to regularly be present at those offices. The Santa Barbara location is where Sonos is headquartered. The company also currently operates international offices in Paris and the Netherlands

“Flexibility has been a core tenet of how Sonos has operated since our founding. Flexibility is not going away, but like many companies, we are evaluating the impact that in-person collaboration has on the...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Roku City, the purple-tinted cityscape screensaver that debuted in 2018, might look a little sharper and more detailed the next time you see it scrolling by. This week, Roku is increasing the screensaver’s resolution to 1080p; it was still stuck at 720p until now — despite running on millions of 4K Roku TVs and 4K-capable streaming players. That’s blasphemous, if you ask me, so it’s nice to see some progress.

The surprisingly popular, fictional skyline is also being updated with an “expanded color palette” and more activity and Easter eggs that you’ll spot if looking closely. Apparently there’s a train station in there somewhere, so the denizens of Roku City have gained a mass transit system. Billboards “will now feature a new star button that allows viewers to learn about things like original Roku content, Roku Zones, and more.” (If I had to guess, the “more” at the end there is probably referring to ads and sponsored content.)

It took six years for us to reach full HD. So if this cadence stays on track, maybe we’ll all be experiencing Roku City in native 4K by 2030.

Get some peace and quiet with any of our top picks for noise-canceling headphones. Sony’s still the best overall, but there are reasons to go elsewhere, too.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The company closes out a difficult year with this terrific soundbar that proves Sonos still knows how to do hardware. Software, though...

Read the full story at The Verge.

There’ve already been renders of Google’s yet-to-be-announced Pixel 9A and one real-world sneak peek. Now we’re getting yet another look at an early prototype of Google’s next mid-range phone. X user fenibook has posted two shots of the phone, and it’s got the company’s usual markings that designate this as a still-under-development device.

These latest images offer yet more proof that Google plans to ditch the camera bar — a visual hallmark of recent Pixels — on the 9A in favor of making the camera flush with the back of the phone. That’s a bit surprising to see, but Google’s Claude Zellweger told us back in August that designers were likely to reevaluate the ratio of camera hardware to phone hardware thanks to advancements in computational photography.

The Pixel A-series might be the ideal phone for Google to test whether it can get away with a smaller sensor and camera housing without sacrificing too much in the way of image quality. It’s logical to expect the company’s very best photo capabilities from the flagship models, but as my colleague Allison Johnson can attest, “pretty good” is often enough for the mid-tier Pixel. That said, this phone looks rather bland as is, so hopefully Google will give us a good selection of colors to pick from.

Rumors indicate the 9A will have a larger 6.3-inch display with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz and the same Tensor G4 used in the Pixel 9, 9 Pro, and 9 Pro Fold. But there have also been reports that Google will saddle it with an older modem, which would be a shame since the Pixel 9 lineup really made strides in cellular performance this year.

Google could announce the Pixel 9A as early as March, so the rumors claim. The series has traditionally stuck to a spring release timeframe, but after Google changed up the schedule this year, anything’s possible. Android 16 will be rolling out earlier than usual, so the two might line up nicely.

After bringing Hulu content to the Disney Plus app earlier this year, Disney is now doing the same for ESPN Plus programming.

A new ESPN tile is being added to the app’s homescreen. The tile just says “ESPN,” because for right now, it’ll only include the live games and shows that are normally part of ESPN Plus. But next year will mark the long-awaited debut of a true ESPN streaming service — you know, the actual cable channel with shows that sports fans can’t live without — and that’ll eventually be accessible through this Disney Plus portal, too.

Disney’s reasoning for putting all this content under one umbrella is simple: it wants to get more people signed up for the Disney Plus / Hulu / ESPN Plus triple-package bundle. And the less friction there is, the more appealing that bundle becomes for customers who might only be paying for the core service right now. To help push the bundle even harder, Disney Plus subscribers can now access “a curated selection of live sports events and shows from ESPN Plus and movies and series from Hulu.” The tiles for both services will now appear in the main navigation even if you’re not paying for Hulu or ESPN.

Image: Disney

“This gives our bundle subscribers one place to consume everything they love from all our brands.” Alisa Bowen, president of Disney Plus, said in a press release. ESPN Plus offers access to “over 30,000 live sports events each year” along with plenty of original content. But this is really just a half-step towards the end goal of bringing real, linear ESPN to the service. Disney says what we’re seeing today is “the groundwork for an expanded sports offering on Disney Plus in the US upon the launch of ESPN’s flagship direct-to-consumer product, expected in fall of 2025.”

That ESPN streaming service is expected to launch as early as August and has been rumored to cost upwards of $30 per month. Yes, just for ESPN. You’ll be able to view it through Disney Plus, but CEO Bob Iger has said the ESPN app will offer a more feature-packed sports experience with integrated betting and fantasy leagues. The Disney option is there for people who want the convenience of everything being crammed into a single app.

Disney is determined to make its streaming business a reliable profit maker, and the real money is in bundles and ad-supported plans. On the ad front, advertisers will have the ability to purchase inventory “by sport, league, team, within live events, and across all marketplaces” now that ESPN content is streaming within Disney Plus. The company has also taken steps to tackle password sharing and now charges customers between $6.99 and $9.99 for letting others sign into their Disney Plus account from a different location.

The cost of subscribing to Disney Plus is inevitably going to keep climbing higher. And Disney will no doubt cite the app’s value as an all-encompassing entertainment hub — now with sports — as the rationale for those hikes. For the end user, it can all feel reminiscent of cable, but that’s the streaming era we find ourselves in.

If you made me give up all of the Sonos products I own except for one, I’d keep the Sonos Five each and every time. Well, in my case, technically, it’s the second-generation Play:5, but that speaker sounds identical to the current iteration. Typically priced at a steep $549, Sonos positions the Five as its true hi-fi option for audiophiles and vinyl listeners. (The speaker has an aux input for plugging in a record player and other external audio sources.)

For Cyber Monday, the Five is seeing a rare discount and is 20 percent off, which brings the price to a more palatable $439. How rare? The speaker hasn’t dropped this low since 2020, according to CamelCamelCamel.

Something people occasionally say about Sonos gear is that the hardware...

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I had a lot of positive things to say about Bose’s SoundLink Max when I tested the portable Bluetooth earlier speaker this year, and that praise was universal from other reviewers as well. But there was one main hangup: the price.

At its usual retail cost of $399, Bose’s flagship Bluetooth speaker gets lumped into a very competitive crowd and isn’t far off from more advanced products like the Sonos Move 2 and much larger party speakers. Even if you put those alternatives aside, it’s a lot of money to spend on a Bluetooth speaker that doesn’t offer any smarts, lacks audio playback over Wi-Fi, and has no AirPlay / Chromecast compatibility to speak of.

But as is often the case, when you slash the price by $100, it’s much easier to make an...

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The best from Apple, Bose, Samsung, Sony, Beats, Google, and more.

Read the full story at The Verge.

There’s no better time than the holidays to treat yourself (or someone you care about) to an overdue upgrade and pick up a fresh pair of earbuds or headphones. Cyber Monday is a great opportunity to save big on the latest products from Apple, Bose, Google, Samsung, Sony, Sennheiser, and countless other brands. Plus, the extended return period at many retailers gives you ample time to test out whatever you buy and make sure it’s the ideal choice.

While you browse through the 2024 Cyber Monday deals, be sure to reference our buying guides for the best wireless earbuds and best noise-canceling headphones, which break down the strengths and weaknesses of many of the products featured below.

Quick gifts $100 and under

• The Nothing Ear (a) a...

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Threads will now let users decide what feed they want as their default when opening the app. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a post, saying that you’ll be able to choose between For You, Following, or any custom feed that you’ve set up. Zuckerberg’s post notes that Threads is “testing” this option and will also different feeds “more visible” in the app.

It took over a year to get here, but Threads is finally doing the obvious thing and allowing people to use the app however they prefer. Hopefully this test expands to all users before long.

If you’re in the test, here’s how to set your default feed: open the Threads app and tap and hold on any feed at the top. From there, choose “edit feeds,” and that’s where you’ll...

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Yesterday Android Headlines reported that Google had canceled its development of the Pixel Tablet 3 — even before announcing a second-gen model. Well, today Android Authority is saying that it’s in fact the second-generation Pixel Tablet that has been canned, meaning that the device released last year will apparently be a one-off and that Google is bailing on the tablet category for the second time in a little over five years. At best, we’re in for a long pause until the next one.

If true, the news would suggest that sales of the Pixel Tablet have been so poor that Google has decided further investment in a follow-up just isn’t worth it. As recently as last week, there were rumors of new features and a keyboard accessory for the...

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