AliveCor has suffered another setback in its long-running patent case against Apple. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has upheld a decision that the medical device maker’s EKG patents are not actually patentable. As a result, the Apple Watch won’t face a second import ban from the International Trade Commission (ITC).

This back and forth between AliveCor and Apple began in 2021. AliveCor went to the ITC claiming Apple had infringed on its EKG patents. The ITC ruled in AliveCor’s favor, recommending an import ban that would’ve prevented the sale of Apple Watches with the EKG feature in the US. However, it didn’t immediately go into effect because the Patent Trial and Appeal Board also ruled that the three patents in question weren’t valid. For the import ban to go forward, AliveCor would’ve had to win its appeal of the PTAB decision — which it didn’t.

“We are deeply disappointed by the Court’s decisions this morning and that the Court did not review the available secondary considerations, which the ITC found to be persuasive in their finding of validity,” says Sanjay Voleti, AliveCor’s chief business officer. “We will continue to explore all available legal options, including potential appeals, to defend our position that our patents are valid and that Apple infringed our intellectual property rights.”

“We thank the Federal Circuit for its careful consideration in this case. Apple’s teams have worked tirelessly over many years to develop industry-leading health, wellness and safety features that meaningfully impact users’ lives, and we intend to stay on this path,” Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz tells The Verge.

AliveCor used the same legal strategy as Masimo, another medical device maker. However, Masimo was successful in its bid to get an ITC import ban against the Apple Watch. The main difference is Masimo’s patents were over the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor, not its EKG tech. To get around the ITC import ban, Apple now disables the blood oxygen sensor in Apple Watches newly sold in the US.

Victoria Song is a senior reviewer at The Verge who mostly focuses on health tech and wearables and who, she says, occasionally has “existential crises over silly gadgets I bought on TikTok against my better judgment.” One of her favorite gadgets is the Logitech MX Vertical wireless mouse.

When did you get the Logitech MX Vertical?

I got this mouse in March 2022, so just about three years ago now. But I’ve been a vertical mouse enthusiast since I reviewed the Evoluent VerticalMouse C for PCMag in 2016. 

Why did you get it?

I’d been using Anker’s wireless vertical mouse for about three and a half years. It finally crapped out on me after my cat batted it from my desk. RIP. I didn’t love that it required a USB dongle for connectivity, and I had only heard good things about Logitech’s version from other vertical mouse fans, so I opted to shell out a bit more.

What do you like about it?

You can use it wired or wirelessly, and the battery lasts months on a single charge. Switching cursor speed is easy, and it’s got two customizable buttons right over the thumb. I mostly use it for forward and back, but it’s super convenient. I used to get wrist pain from using regular mice, and now I have zero wrist pain. 

Is there anything about it that you wish were different or that would improve it?

This is kinda gross, but it’s a dead skin magnet. Every once in a while, you have to take a cleaning wipe and really scrub that textured grippy area down, or you’ll have crusty, dusty imprints of your hand, bordered by dead skin. And I do mean a cleaning wipe. At first, I was wiping this thing down with a teeny bit of soap and a damp paper towel — nope. That same area also gets worn down by finger oil, so even if you regularly clean it, it can end up looking a bit greasy after a few weeks. The bottom is also a dust and cat hair magnet. Basically, I clean this mouse more than I should have to.

Otherwise, I wish it came in more colors like the cheaper Logitech Lift, which comes in white and pink. I was tempted to switch, but unfortunately, I have piano fingers and the Lift’s smaller size doesn’t work for me. Even on the MX Vertical, my index and middle fingers extend beyond the mouse’s edge.

Who would you recommend it to?

Anyone who has hobbies that depend on a healthy, pain-free wrist. Before switching to vertical mice, I had a lot of wrist and hand cramping from using trackpads, regular mice, and all my handwriting. I’ve been working on all of that, but it was so much harder for me to adjust my natural pen grip than it was to adopt a vertical mouse. And I’m not kidding when I said my wrist pain disappeared almost overnight — and comes back whenever I have to use my laptop’s trackpad on a work trip.

Anything else?

I’ve been using vertical mice for close to a decade now, but I distinctly remember that it took a few days before I felt really comfortable. 

Also, the MX Vertical doesn’t have a left-handed version. So if you’re a southpaw, you might want to look for a vertical mouse model that has both versions. (It’s baffling, but the Logitech Lift has both left- and right-handed versions, even if the MX Vertical doesn’t…) 

What else are you doing these days?

These days, I’ve been exploring gadgets that aren’t smartwatches — smart glasses, smart rings, AI wearables, CGMs, and even an NFC nail chip. I’m also trying to get back into another training block after I got derailed by a cold and some bad weather. (Training blocks are periods of structured workouts where you focus on a specific goal. My next one is going to be a 12-week block where I try to improve my 5K running speed.) Lately, I’ve also been trying to get back into my non-work hobbies, like calligraphy and scrapbooking. 

The Apple Watch is now the smartwatch of choice for National Hockey League officials. Apple and the NHL just announced a collaboration where on-ice officials will wear Apple Watches that are running special software to receive important in-game information.

Using the custom-built NHL Watch Comms app, on-ice referees can view the game clock directly from their wrist. They’ll also be able to receive haptic alerts for when NHL players leave the penalty box or when time is running out in the period. The haptic patterns for each timer are different, so as not to confuse the officials. The Apple Watches will also be synced to the NHL’s Oasis feed, a cloud system that enables player tracking, game telemetry, and other data, which will ensure that all officials receive the same information.

“We wanted to make sure that the officials had really good awareness and were able to keep their eyes on play,” says Andres de Corral, vice president of digital services at Presidio, a tech firm that helped develop the app. “So by enabling haptic responses, we were able to provide non-visual cues to the officials.”

Situational awareness is a major challenge for officials on the ice. On t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bad news for folks hoping the Powerbeats Pro 2 can replace their chest strap at the gym: while the workout buds are great at playing music and can connect to various gym equipment to track heart rate, they can’t do both at the same time. At least, not on iOS.

The issue was pointed out in YouTuber DC Rainmaker’s review of the buds. Rainmaker, who’s trusted by fitness enthusiasts for his rigorous heart rate and GPS testing, says that Apple confirmed the issue. The Verge also reached out for further clarification, but did not immediately receive a response.

In my testing, I unfortunately couldn’t get the Powerbeats Pro 2 to connect with the treadmills or bikes at my local gym (because it’s hard to get any peripherals to connect to the ancient machines there). Regardless, it’s counterintuitive to make users choose between heart rate and music on gym equipment. The whole draw of adding heart rate to headphones is that you can theoretically consolidate workout peripherals.

Rainmaker, and other fitness influencers like Shervin Shares, also maintain that the Powerbeats Pro 2 don’t track heart rate on iOS apps as reliably as they do on Android apps. On that front, Apple and Beats told The Verge in a press briefing that heart rate features on iOS were limited to seven partner apps at launch: Runna, Nike Run Club, Open, YaoYao, Slopes, Peloton, and Ladder. We were told that apps like Strava, Zwift, and even Apple’s own Fitness Plus are incompatible with heart rate tracking, but that Apple hopes to expand the partner list in the future.

In the iOS partner apps, the heart rate function is supposed to start up automatically without the user having to do anything. I tested the Powerbeats Pro 2 with Peloton and Ladder on iOS and had zero issues with connectivity and accuracy, though I stuck to low-to-mid intensity workouts like yoga and strength training.

These app limitations, however, don’t apply to Android — the buds work with any Android app that supports a Bluetooth heart rate tracker. One could argue this all traces back to Apple wanting things to “just work” within its ecosystem — and the complications arising from that. For example, the buds are programmed so that if you use them with an Apple Watch, the Apple Watch’s heart rate data will always take precedence even if you’d prefer to use the Powerbeats instead. Users aren’t given a choice. The buds don’t, however, impose that limitation on other third-party headphones with heart rate tracking, like the Sennheiser Momentum Sport or chest straps.

For these reasons, plus the fact that it’s unwieldy to view the Powerbeats Pro 2’s heart rate data in the Health app, we noted in our review that the heart rate feature isn’t particularly useful — especially for athletes who use Apple Watches or want the greatest freedom over their heart rate peripherals.

Update, February 27th: Clarified that the gym equipment and music issue affects iOS only. 

In 2022, I watched a video of mine and wanted to hide under a rock. My skin looked sallow, the dark circles under my eyes pronounced. Loved ones reassured me I was seeing things, but commenters confirmed my worst insecurities. While relating my woes to a friend, she interrupted my pity party to say I was using the wrong foundation color. Did I know my undertone? Choosing the wrong color, she warned, could make me look far more jaundiced on camera than in real life. 

About three years later, I finally found the right shade of foundation. I didn’t find it at Sephora, Ulta, or the K-beauty counter at my local H Mart. I custom-printed it using the $295 BoldHue.

BoldHue is a foundation printer that pairs with your phone. The back panel hides six cartridges: five for pigments (red, blue, yellow, white, and black), and a sixth containing a base with skincare ingredients, including glycerin, propanediol, vitamin E, vegan squalane, and antioxidants like tremella mushroom and rice bran extract. These are popular ingredients to hydrate and protect the skin. Unlike most commercial foundations, which use four pigments, BoldHue adds blue to the mix, increasing the number of possible shades. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google just announced it’s received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s Loss of Pulse Detection feature. It will start rolling out to US devices sometime at the end of March.

The Loss of Pulse Detection feature is exactly what it sounds like: if the Pixel Watch 3 senses that you’ve lost your pulse through an event like a heart attack or an overdose, it’ll send you a prompt. If you don’t respond, it’ll automatically call emergency services on your behalf. Back in August, Sandeep Waraich, Google’s senior director of product manager for Pixel wearables, told The Verge that the Pixel Watch 3 is capable of differentiating between a genuine loss-of-pulse event and a person simply taking the watch off.

This feature has been available in the European Union since September 2024. However, high-stakes health features like Loss of Pulse Detection require regulatory clearance, and each country has its own governing bodies and procedures. Whether it rolls out to other regions will depend on the relevant local regulatory agency.

I am the last person on earth who needs another watch. As The Verge’s resident wearables reviewer, I’m always double-wristing the latest smartwatches. I am also the last person who needs another ring after spending a whole summer wearing six of them like a high-tech mafia wife. But I never said I had good sense, so I’ve spent the last few weeks wearing the $120 Casio CRW001-1 — or perhaps more aptly named, the Casio Ring Watch.

There is no pretense here. This is a tiny Casio watch that sits on your finger. Casio made it to celebrate its 50th anniversary and to cash in on your retro design nostalgia for the halcyon age of our collective youth. It harkens back to the vintage watch rings of the ’80s and ’90s, which you can find on Etsy for $10. This particular one just happens to be fully functional.

Unboxing it, my first thought as a reasonable person is that no one should buy this. For starters, it’s currently unavailable on Casio’s site and is going for upward of $300 on eBay. (Such is the fate of limited-edition gadgety baubles.) In an age when eggs cost $5 a carton — $7, if you live in my neck of the woods — your money can be spent on more practical things, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Soon, you’ll be able to use Apple Intelligence with the Vision Pro. That includes a mix of features we’ve seen before, as well as a new feature called Create Memory Movie that’s exclusive to the headset.

Apple has been keen to position the Vision Pro as a unique tool for viewing memories, and that’s the whole goal of the Create Memory Movie feature, which is built into the Photos app. To use it, you’ll enter in a description or a voice prompt, and Apple Intelligence will then find a photo or video that best matches that description. That “memory movie” can then be blown up to be viewed on a large-scale virtual screen or inside a virtual environment.

Other Apple Intelligence features for Vision Pro include writing tools with ChatGPT. That means Vision Pro owners will be able to dictate memos or emails, create bulleted summaries, or edit the tone of a draft using AI. This is a fairly typical AI feature these days, but it does address how writing within the headset isn’t always the easiest thing unless paired with a Bluetooth keyboard. Smart replies are also coming to visionOS, where you’ll be able to use Apple Intelligence to automatically respond to messages with a tap.

Other features include things like Genmoji and Image Playground, which is Apple Intelligence’s prompt-based image generator. Priority notifications and summaries will also be available, along with Image Wand, which lets you create more polished images based off rough sketches. Natural language search will also be available in the Photos app. You can view the full list of Apple Intelligence features for visionOS on Apple’s website.

Apple Intelligence will be part of the visionOS 2.4 update, which is available in developer beta today and arrives for the general public in April. Apple Intelligence for visionOS will first be available only in US English, with more features and languages slated to roll out throughout the year.

visionOS 2.4 will also bring a few other features that address some major pain points with using the headset. That includes an improved, easier-to-use Guest Mode, as well as two new discovery apps for discovering content: one for the iPhone, and the other acting as an Apple-curated content guide within the headset itself.

When I received my OnePlus Watch 3 review unit, part of me wondered, “What’s gonna be wrong with this one?” Now, I know. On the backplate, permanently engraved in stainless steel, is a typo. Instead of reading “Made in China,” it reads “Meda in China.”

To be fair, this is a minuscule error. I didn’t even notice it on my review unit until I spied an Android Police article in my feed pointing it out. But, in the history of OnePlus’ many smartwatch sins, this unfixable typo both makes complete sense — and is a major relief.

To understand why, you have to remember that the original OnePlus Watch was an unmitigated disaster. An abomination of a smartwatch, riddled with software errors and personally, the worst product I have ever tested in my career. In my review, I wrote that it’s health and fitness tracking was so inaccurate, it deserved the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The only smartwatch that could be conceivably worse is will.i.am’s Puls smartwatch, but I was fortunate enough to dodge that bullet. So traumatized was I by the OnePlus Watch, I was wary of the OnePlus Watch 2 when it launched last year.

That fear was compounded when OnePlus mistakenly sent me eleven review units of the OnePlus Watch 2 — a watch that also broke the sacred, nerdy covenant that a rotating crown on a smartwatch must scroll.

But aside from that one cardinal sin and a sike of a delivery snafu, the OnePlus Watch 2 ended up being a redemption story. Not only was it a smartwatch that worked, it ended up becoming an excellent alternative to Google and Samsung smartwatches for Android users. I’m still testing the OnePlus Watch 3, but so far I have little to complain about, especially since the company finally introduced a proper rotating crown. And, if anything, I’m heartened to see that OnePlus’ signature oops this time around is a minor typo that most users will never really see. One could also argue that the misprint makes this first edition batch a collector’s item. That’s progress.

Besides, as far as typos go, it could’ve been far worse. At least OnePlus didn’t do a Mattel and accidentally misprint a link to a porn site on the product packaging. Compared to that, a “Meda in China” typo is actually kind of adorable.

Last month, Fitbit Versa 3 and Sense owners started getting notifications to download a mandatory firmware update. The problem? Overheating batteries. In an official consumer notice, Google (which owns Fitbit) notes that the firmware update would “reduce the risk of battery overheating and reduce battery capacity.” Affected users, of which Google says there is a “limited number,” were also eligible to apply for a $50 credit.

Technically, fixing this kind of problem is a good thing. You don’t want batteries to overheat and burn a customer — and the official notice also notes that this issue doesn’t impact all Versa 3 or Sense devices. However, affected users have reported on Fitbit’s forums and subreddit that the update dramatically reduced their devices’ battery life.

Multiple users have complained that devices that used to last anywhere between 2-6 days now barely last a single day after updating to the new firmware. Some have said the reduction has now made their devices useless. Others are upset that Fitbit is only offering $50 as an appeasement.

In its notice, Google does note that the firmware update will result in the battery lasting “for shorter periods between charges and [users] may need to charge [their] devices more frequently.” However, to smartwatch users, there’s a big difference between charging more frequently and charging daily. Many people who opt for Fitbits do so precisely because the brand’s smartwatches are known to last longer than a single day. The Verge reached out to Google for further details, but the company declined to add any additional commentary beyond the official notice.

It’d be one thing if this was a rare one-off. However, Fitbit was just fined $12 million after its Ionic watches’ batteries overheated and burned 78 users. And while it’s unrelated to overheating wearables, it certainly doesn’t help that Google recently issued a similar firmware update capping battery performance tied to a $100 credit for its Pixel 4A phones.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed in 2022 alleges that Fitbit’s problem wasn’t limited to the Ionic. The plaintiffs claimed the issue also impacted the Versa Lite and a Versa 2. The lawsuit also included photos of burns that people said came from their Fitbit Blaze, Inspire, Inspire 2, Sense, and Versa 3 devices. The latest firmware update seems to validate that battery overheating at least was a problem with the Versa 3 and Sense.

These sorts of battery complaints with Fitbits aren’t new. Peruse the r/Fitbit subreddit, and you’ll find years’ worth of Fitbit owners questioning if their devices are burning them or just causing skin irritation. There are also numerous threads of users pondering sudden, rapid battery drain. Almost all these threads also highlight difficult experiences with customer support. In other words, this most recent case just underscores how this has been a problem for quite some time — an issue exacerbated for longtime Fitbit users by a messy transition period since Google acquired Fitbit.

I’ve had the $329.99 OnePlus Watch 3 for a few days, and so far, this isn’t an Android watch that flips the script. Instead, it’s a story about refinement (and playing a bit of catch-up), rather than pushing boundaries. And you know what? If it means a strong Google / Samsung alternative with a rotating crown that finally scrolls, I’m totally fine with that.

On the design front, the Watch 3 is quite similar to the OnePlus Watch 2, with a few key changes. The OLED display is a smidge larger and brighter at 2,200 nits, and the bezels are notably smaller, though that’s partially because of a slight design tweak. The screen is spiffy to look at, especially with the new video watchface where you can upload your own clips. (I, of course, have uploaded one of my cat asking for belly rubs.) The casing is still stainless steel, but there’s a new titanium physical bezel, too. It gives it a more classic analog look, but otherwise, this isn’t a dramatic change. My big design gripe is that the Watch 3 still only comes in a single 47mm size. It’s not horrible, but I have smaller wrists, and the lug gaps are notable. Offering just one size excludes folks with smaller wrists from comfortably using the Watch 3, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

You can see the difference between the new physical bezel and screen size from the OnePlus Watch 3 (right) to the previous OnePlus Watch 2 (left).

I’ll forgive OnePlus this oversight now that there’s a proper rotating crown. This time, you can actually use it to scroll through screens — a baffling omission from the last watch. There are delightful haptics that go along with it, and while this isn’t a groundbreaking addition, it soothes my inner curmudgeon that OnePlus has seen the errors of its ways and now upholds the nerdy wearable covenant that a rotating crown must also scroll.

Battery life has also been improved from 100 hours to 120 hours — or five days with regular use and the always-on display turned off. Turning on the AOD shortens that to roughly three days. That’s fairly typical for all flagship smartwatches these days. In a power-saving mode, you can get up to 16 days. OnePlus says it’s managed to stuff a larger 631mAh battery in the Watch 3 using the same silicon nanostack battery as the OnePlus 13. Since it runs Wear OS 5, that should add some extra battery mileage. I haven’t been testing the watch long enough to definitively comment on battery life just yet, but I always appreciate faster charging. You can get a full day’s worth in about 10 minutes.

OnePlus says it changed the sensor layout and made tweaks to the materials to improve tracking accuracy. Speaking of sensors, the Watch 3 adds one for wrist temperature, an eight-channel optical heart rate sensor, and a 16-channel blood oxygen sensor. It’s also revamped the GPS with a “circular polarized antenna,” which it claims will help improve GPS maps in areas with tall buildings. I’m getting over a cold, so I haven’t had the chance to test this on a run yet, but I’ll see whether it makes a dramatic difference. Technically, the Watch 3 can also take EKGs, but that functionality won’t be available for users in the US or Canada. In a briefing, OnePlus spokesperson Spenser Blank said that’s because OnePlus hasn’t received FDA clearance but that, for “business reasons,” the company doesn’t plan on pursuing FDA clearance.

That’s disappointing given some of the new health features. The big one is OnePlus’ 60S Health Check-In, where you touch the side button and get a quick scan of your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, mental wellness, wrist temperature, sleep quality, and vascular age. European users will get EKGs included in Q2 2025. Also new is a vascular health test, which measures your arterial stiffness. It’s similar to a feature Oura introduced last year, and it’s meant to gauge your circulatory system’s overall state. (Mine is “normal.”)

With the Watch 3, OnePlus is refocusing a bit on sleep tracking and wellness. The company says sleep tracking has been overhauled, and you’ll now be able to use the watch to track snoring patterns to assess your breathing disruptions. Stress tracking has also been rebranded as “360 Mind and Body,” and it uses heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and activity intensity to approximate how you’re doing… with emoji. Depending on how it evaluates your stress, you might get recommendations for guided breathing. I’ve been running a beta version of the OHealth app with these updates, and so far, I have received more insights into sleep tracking — though I’m not entirely sold on the emoji. So far, all I’ve been is roasted for my “moderate” wellness.

A lot of these updates are things other competitors already have. They just have a OnePlus twist to them, and it’ll take me some more time to really put subtler software tweaks through the testing gauntlet. So far, though, wearing the Watch 3 is a pleasant reminder of how OnePlus has surprisingly emerged as a competitive alternative to Samsung and Google. But one change I know I don’t love is the Watch 3 is $30 more expensive than its predecessor — though Blank told me that the price increase has nothing to do with tariffs.

The OnePlus Watch 3 is available for preorder starting today and will begin shipping on February 25th.

Apple announced today it’s launching a brand-new research study — the Apple Health Study. But this one is different from its previous efforts in the space. Case in point: there’s no specific area of focus. Instead, the study will gather data from iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods to try and discover new relationships between different areas of health, both physical and mental.

From a research perspective, this is all well and good. But for gadget nerds, Apple also has a good track record of actually shipping several features out of its health research. The most recent example is the new hearing test feature in AirPods. According to Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, that feature was born out of research from Apple’s Hearing Study.

“We use these research studies not only to learn, but to drive and inform our decisions about what things to add to the product roadmap when we see that there’s science that supports building up this work,” says Desai, noting that the company has passed on implementing features where the science didn’t hold up.

The virtual study will appear in the Research app and is being conducted in conjunction with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. (Apple also partnered with the hospital for its Heart & Movement study.) Users who opt in to the study will not only contribute their data but also answer periodic survey questions about their at-home life and habits. The study will encompass topics including activity, aging, cardiovascular health, circulatory health, cognition, hearing, menstrual health, metabolic health, mobility, neurological health, respiratory health, and sleep. To start, the study is set to last about five years and could potentially be extended further.

If the goals seem nebulous, that’s partly because the scope and potential scale are much, much bigger than what you’d find in traditional clinical research studies. Apple’s first research project, the Apple Heart Study, amassed 400,000 participants. By contrast, most traditional studies have much smaller sample sizes, with larger ones having participants in the hundreds, maybe thousands — but not hundreds of thousands. Fewer studies still are able to track participants over long periods of time. Widening the scope and scale has the potential to uncover heretofore unknown connections. On the flip side, it’s hard to say what will come out of the Apple Health Study because this is one of the first times researchers will get to cross-examine such extensive and disparate datasets together.

“We anticipate we will likely find some signals that have previously just been missed because we haven’t had studies that are this broad, or we haven’t had studies that are this continuous. We haven’t looked longitudinally or at this level of granularity,” says Calum MacRae, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who will serve as principal investigator on the Apple Health Study.

According to MacRae, insights from traditional research can often take a long time to become applicable in everyday life because researchers go in with a specific goal in mind. Meaning, they pick a population and a topic to study on day one and then are stuck with those decisions for potentially decades, even if the field of research itself changes within that time. Conversely, access to a huge and diverse cohort — basically, in this case, anyone who owns an Apple product — opens the door to the acceleration of discovery and progress.

“The more diverse and broad the age range, demographics, and other criteria, the better. We can find an initial signal, test and validate it, and associate it with more events. The more people that are in the study, the more events occur, and suddenly, we’re in a position to be able to really dramatically change the pace at which these things happen.”

Another potential benefit, says MacRae, is that the Apple Health Study’s broad scale could help researchers identify and fill in information gaps. One challenge of traditional clinical studies is that they tend to have a more limited pool of participants. For example, if a health study primarily consists of young, white men, the findings may not apply to women, children, older adults, or people of color. One real-life example is how women were rarely included in clinical trials between 1977 and 1993, leading to a massive gap in what we know about women’s health and serious disparities in healthcare. In this case, such information gaps wouldn’t necessarily be limited to sex. They could, MacRae says, include things like how time zones influence sleep patterns or even loneliness during specific seasons.

One hope is that the study may uncover ways to build more proactive features. For instance, detecting if an early change in hearing could reduce the risk of cognitive decline down the line. Desai also noted that features may not be limited to hardware, pointing to Focus modes as an example of software that users may not immediately consider to be health-related.

Desai noted that it’ll be a while before we see anything tangible from the Apple Health Study.

“I wouldn’t expect anything this year, just because that wouldn’t be scientifically possible,” she says, noting product development can also take two or three years on its own. The company’s sleep apnea feature for the Apple Watch, she says, took roughly five years. “It’s probably going to take a few years before these hit, but I definitely think the pipeline will be full.”

After an epic wait, the Powerbeats Pro 2 are finally here. No, seriously. The original Powerbeats Pro released nearly six years ago, roughly an ice age as far as gadgets go. Turns out, it was worth it thanks to new active noise canceling, a transparency mode, and heart rate monitoring. None of these features are new to the category, but they are fresh to the Powerbeats. The only things unchanged with the Pro 2 are its IPX4 rating and the $249.99 price tag — which, given the state of things, is frankly a miracle. 

They’re more compact. The comically large case is 33 percent smaller. The buds are 20 percent lighter, and the ear hooks are 50 percent tinier. There’s a new H2 chip, upgraded microphones and amplifier, and improved sound. Battery life is longer, with 10 hours on the buds and 3.5 extra charges from the case for a total of 45 hours. Fast charging is supported, with a five-minute top-up netting 90 minutes of playback.

Let’s get into it.

Comfy fit

As a Beats Fit Pro lover, I was skeptical of the Powerbeats Pro 2’s ear hook. I wear glasses, and ear hooks tend to crowd and weigh down my ears. Apple says the hooks have been redesigned to be more ergonomic, but I j …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A common reader request I get goes something like this: what should I buy if I don’t want a smartwatch but want basic fitness tracking? When I suggest alternatives like budget fitness bands or smart rings, I get an unsure hmm and a displeased scrunch of the nose. After a few more back-and-forths, I usually find that many people do want a smartwatch. They just don’t want one from Apple, Samsung, Garmin, or Google. They want something more akin to ye olde Pebble or this retro-chic $56 Casio. For those folks, consider the humble Amazfit Active 2.

Amazfit’s shtick is delivering an outsized bang for your buck. The Active 2 starts at $99.99. For $30 more, you get a fancier version with an extra leather strap and a more durable sapphire crystal lens. There’s a 2,000-nit OLED touch display, upgraded health sensors, new sleep and heart rate algorithms, offline maps, and the Zepp Flow AI assistant. There’s also the Zepp Coach for personalized training plans and a mini app from Wild.AI, which gives diet and workout recommendations based on your hormonal and menstrual cycles. You won’t find dual-frequency GPS on this watch, but it has built-in GPS with access to five satellite sy …

Read the full story at The Verge.

We were whizzing down the slopes, screaming because it is sort of ridiculous to go flying down a snowy hill in an inflatable tube. There was a friendly family competition going on to see who could get down the hill the fastest. Other snowtubers had their phones out — my spouse had planned to record everything on their Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. They got partway through a video when their fully charged smart glasses abruptly died. We never did find out who truly won.

That’s been an unexpected discovery this past winter: smart glasses are incredibly susceptible to dying in cold weather. It makes sense when you think about it. Phone batteries are affected by extreme temperatures, as are smartwatches. You might not notice it as much because you keep your phone in a pocket or a bag. Your smartwatch is ostensibly shielded under a sleeve. But a pair of smart glasses? Those tend to house the batteries in the arms, which are much more exposed to the elements around you. (Unless you have one of those fuzzy hats with ear flaps. Then you might stand more of a chance.)

While this wasn’t a surprising revelation, it underscored something I’ve been noticing in my long-term Ray-Ban testing. Aside from style, battery life will make or break whether smart glasses can become a mainstream gadget.

Meta is positioning the Ray-Bans as the ultimate vehicle for AI. And if an ever-present AI companion is the goal, you’re ostensibly wearing the glasses for most hours of the day. (It’s why you can get these with clear or transition lenses.) If the battery dies, it’s no biggie if you don’t actually need glasses to see. But if you do need prescription lenses in your smart glasses, the battery dying before bedtime is a pain. You’re forced to either give up the smart features you paid extra for, or the ability to actually see because you have to take the glasses off to charge.

Right now, the Meta Ray-Bans get an estimated four hours of moderate use. In my own testing — and watching my spouse, a power user who wears them as their main pair of specs — that’s not enough for all-day wear. The other catch is any of the cool smart features zap the battery life you’re trying to preserve. When I wrote about Meta’s Live AI feature, I had blind and low-vision readers reach out to tell me they were excited at the opportunities such a feature could afford their community. Live AI utilizes the Ray-Ban glasses’ camera so you can ask Meta AI real-time questions about the world around you. For folks with visual impairments, I was told this could help them navigate their surroundings, identify objects, and live more independently. It’s an exciting prospect — but my main concern is those possibilities are hampered by the fact that Live AI reduces the glasses’ battery to a mere 30 minutes.

There’s no way to charge the Ray-Bans — or many of the other smart glasses I’ve tried — with an external battery pack. Some glasses utilize stands or cases for charging, while others have proprietary cords that attach to both arms. However they charge, it’s virtually impossible to power and wear them at the same time. Furthermore, I’ve yet to see a pair of smart glasses with repairable or replaceable batteries.

Take the Ray-Bans. A Meta support page clearly states that “it’s not possible to replace the battery inside your glasses or charging case.” If the battery fails under warranty, you should be able to get a replacement free of charge. But once the battery starts degrading over time, as all batteries do, you have no options other than to get a new pair or a replacement case. I get why the batteries aren’t replaceable — trying to reduce the size so the glasses are wearable means soldering components close together. It’s an issue plaguing the entire wearables category, not just these glasses. But it is a problem.

This is something Meta and other smart glasses makers will have to meaningfully address for this gadget category to be as ubiquitous as phones or smartwatches. I’d argue that nailing all-day battery life is more important than figuring out how to incorporate AR displays. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a wearables reviewer, it’s that people hate charging devices.

Meta isn’t shy about its ambitions to make its Ray-Ban smart glasses a mainstream gadget. So much so, it’s made not one but two Super Bowl ads featuring not one, but two Marvel actors. (And Kris Jenner.) And as a little cherry on top, Meta announced it’s creating a limited edition Super Bowl version of the glasses that won’t be for sale to the general public.

You can already watch the first of the two Super Bowl ads, which features Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt causing chaos in Kris Jenner’s personal art collection. The actors are shown asking the Meta AI to identify art pieces, as well as translate foreign languages. Jenner, meanwhile, is shown asking the AI glasses to ring up her lawyer after an incident with a $6.2 million banana.

In a blog about the ads, Meta says the limited edition glasses will be a pair of matte black Wayfarers with either gold, mirror-like lenses or lenses featuring the team colors of the Super Bowl finalists. The glasses will also come with a custom-etched case. However, they won’t be available for purchase, hinting that these will likely be seeded to celebrities and influencers to drum up buzz.

There are a couple things at play here. For starters, smart glasses have come a long way with the public from the debacle that was Google Glass. Meta announced last week that the Ray-Bans have sold over 1 million units in 2024. That’s the type of success for an emerging gadget category that could justify an expensive Super Bowl ad. Second, Meta has recently shown it’s keen on pushing that success further using new styles and limited edition versions, not unlike how Nike or other sneaker companies create hype. Meta will purportedly release Oakley-branded smart glasses later this year for athletes, and last year, it also had a limited-edition translucent model of the Ray-Bans for its Meta Connect event.

Smart rings are in the middle of a renaissance. That’s great because we finally have way more options than just an Oura Ring. The downside is most of Oura’s would-be rivals are launching their first, maybe second-gen smart rings. Meaning, if you want an Oura Ring alternative, there’s a good chance you’ll have to put up with quirks and a distinct lack of polish. The $199.99 Amazfit Helio smart ring is no exception.

Amazfit isn’t a household name but is well-known among wearable bargain hunters. It’s a compelling brand because its gadgets get you a lot of bang for your buck. That’s the case with the Helio ring, the brand’s first foray into smart rings. It’s primarily a sleep tracker, but it comes with an AI chatbot called Zepp Flow, an AI coaching feature, and it has an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor for monitoring stress, a blood oxygen sensor, a temperature sensor, and period tracking. It also syncs with popular third-party fitness apps like Adidas Running, Strava, and Komoot, as well as  Apple Health and Google Fit. Like the Samsung Galaxy Ring, it works with Amazfit’s other smartwatches so you can double up on data sources — or switch between the two …

Read the full story at The Verge.

While Mark Zuckerberg and Meta press forward with augmented glasses projects buoyed by its million-selling set of smart Ray-Bans, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says that Apple just pulled the plug on an AR glasses project. Codenamed N107, they’re described as something that would’ve looked similar to regular glasses but with added displays in the lenses that could connect to a Mac.

With features that sound similar to devices like the Xreal One AR glasses, the glasses could’ve delivered on the Vision Pro feature that’s closest to being any kind of a killer app (popping up a huge virtual monitor anywhere) without the $3,499 price and heavy design that required a head strap. The glasses also would’ve had tint-changing lenses that, like the Vision Pro’s Eye Sight, could signal to onlookers whether the wearer was busy or not. While other details are fuzzy, it doesn’t appear as if the N107 glasses would’ve had a camera or any of the mixed-reality features of the Vision Pro.

A big problem, according to Gurman, was developing something that worked well while being cost-effective proved to be a challenge. Apple initially wanted the N107 to connect to an iPhone, but it proved to be a battery-guzzler, and the iPhone itself didn’t have enough juice to power the glasses — hence the shift to a Mac. Unfortunately, that switch purportedly didn’t seem to go over well with executives in testing.

This most recent cancellation puts a big question mark over Apple’s future AR and XR plans. Apple purportedly canceled a separate AR glasses project in 2023, and rumor has it that work on a Vision Pro 2 has been put on hold in favor of trying to create a cheaper Vision Pro. Meanwhile, the Vision Pro itself has struggled to find a foothold.

The cancellation also means Apple is falling further behind the competition. CES 2025 was a playground for all sorts of smart glasses, and Google recently entered the fray with Android XR. Samsung has also thrown its hat in the ring with its Project Moohan headset. Last year, Meta showcased its Orion glasses, an AR glasses prototype with advanced Micro LED displays and a neural wristband for controls. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also been bullish on smart glasses as an ultimate vehicle for AI assistants, and the company is expected to release both Oakley-branded smart glasses for athletes and a higher-end version of its current Ray-Ban glasses with a display this year.

Apple has agreed to a $20 million settlement in a class action lawsuit over battery swelling in early Apple Watch models. If you experienced the issue and owned an Apple Watch Series 0, 1, 2, or 3, you may be eligible for a small payout.

The lawsuit, Smith et al. v. Apple Inc, was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. In both the settlement agreement and claim website, Apple explicitly denies that its smartwatches ever had battery swelling issues and “denies all allegations of wrongdoing” and liability. Instead, it says that Apple is choosing to settle to “avoid further costs of litigation.”

In a statement sent to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Aushawna Collins says the company “strongly disagree[s] with the claims made against these early generation Apple Watch models.”

To be eligible for a payout, you have to have owned an eligible watch model and have reported any potential battery swelling issues to Apple between April 24th, 2015 and February 6th, 2024. Anyone who fits those criteria has until April 10th to confirm or update their payment information to receive a payout. According to the settlement’s FAQ site, the payment is estimated to be roughly $20 to $50 per covered watch. Accepting a payment means you also give up any future action regarding battery issues on these particular watches. Those who do not wish to be part of the settlement have until February 24th, 2025 to exclude themselves or object to the settlement.

Update, January 31st: Added comment from Apple.

Dell is the latest tech company to announce it’s ending its hybrid and remote work policy. Starting March 3rd, Dell employees will have to show up in person five days a week.

In an email obtained by Business Insider, CEO Michael Dell writes that “all hybrid and remote team members who live near a Dell office will work in the office five days a week. We are retiring the hybrid policy effective that day.”

“What we’re finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction. A thirty second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days,” Dell writes.

Despite this mandate, Dell also continues to sell remote work solutions, noting that remote work offers “benefits such as flexibility, reduced commute times, and cost savings for employees, while employers can access a broader talent pool, reduce overhead costs, and increase productivity.”

Technically, Dell had already required its sales, manufacturing, and lab engineers to return to office. The email cites the “new speed, energy, and passion” from those teams as a reason for implementing it company-wide globally. For previously remote workers who don’t live near an office, Dell says they can continue to work remotely.

Dell is not the only company to issue return-to-office mandates in recent months. AT&T, Amazon, Stellantis, and JP Morgan have all either started or announced return-to-work policies this month. Meanwhile, President Trump also issued an executive order last week requiring all federal employees to return to office, noting that all government departments “terminate remote work arrangements.”