Apple’s AirPods lineup is stronger than ever following the launch of , which now include many features formerly exclusive to AirPods Pro 2. But for me personally, there are still three key Pro-exclusive features that make the more expensive AirPods worth the upgrade.
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The Russian ISP blamed the Ukrainian hackers for causing a "complete failure" across its internet infrastructure.
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If there’s one thing that sucks the fun out of darts, it’s the mandatory math you have to do in order to work out how well you’re doing. That’s the malady British manufacturer Target Darts, making its first trip to CES, is solving with its Omni automatic scoring system, saving your beer-drenched brain.
Omni is a halo that magnetically attaches to a compatible board, equipped with four 1080p cameras and an LED light strip. When you throw your darts, the system uses computer vision to identify where they ended up on the board.
From there, the scores will be represented on a nearby computer or tablet, and can even be output to a big TV in the vicinity. Even better, is that you won’t just have your score tracked, but you’ll hear a pre-recorded voice telling you how many points you need to score on your next throw, just as you see in a professional match.
Omni isn’t out just yet, but when it launches, players will be able to use it in conjunction with Target Darts' existing Virt camera. That’s a pair of webcams — one facing the board, one facing the player — that enables darts fans to play against real people online either with friends, or with similarly-ranked strangers.
During the various shelter-in-place orders in force during the COVID pandemic, the UK's professional darts league actually operated like this for several months. Amusingly one star player, Gary Anderson, was unable to take part in a tournament because his home Wi-Fi wasn't fast enough to keep up.
Target Darts’ Omni scoring system will start shipping on January 31, and in the UK is priced at £449.95 (around $556). If you’d like to pick up a model in the US, you’ll have to find a reseller, a list of which is available on the company’s website.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/target-darts-is-bringing-tech-smarts-to-the-game-183015898.html?src=rss©
© Daniel Cooper for Engadget
WeWalk introduced a new version of its smart cane for people with visual impairments at CES 2025, bringing a redesign that addresses many of the first model’s shortcomings and adds AI features and more advanced sensors from TDK. It’s positioned as an alternative to the traditional foldable white cane. Co-founder Kursat Ceylan, who has been blind since birth, says Smart Cane 2 can make mobility easier and safer, offering features like turn-by-turn navigation and obstacle detection, along with a ChatGPT-powered voice assistant that puts on-demand information in users’ hands without the need for them to also juggle a smartphone.
The WeWalk Smart Cane 2 has a slimmer handle than its predecessor, which should make for a more comfortable grip, and the company says it’s now about as lightweight as a standard white cane. It has tactile buttons to be more user-friendly, doing away with the touchpad of the previous model that some people found to be difficult to use. Ceylan says it can be used in different weather conditions, not just when it’s warm and dry (WeWalk describes the new cane as “rainwater-resistant”).
“You can fold and unfold it when you need it. There's a speaker, a microphone, obstacle detection technology and a flashlight to make visually impaired people more visible at night. And also it has motion sensors in itself to provide a more accurate navigation experience,” Ceylan explained.
Under the hood, the WeWalk Smart Cane 2 has an ultrasonic time-of-flight sensor, an inertial measurement unit with six-axis motion tracking, a pulse density modulated microphone and a barometric pressure sensor from electronics company TDK. When it detects something ahead, it alerts the user with both haptic and audio feedback, according to Ceylan.
He demonstrated this in the very cramped, noisy environment of the Las Vegas Convention Center, and I was able to hear over the crowd when the cane told him he was approaching an obstacle — in this case, a carpeted step marked with yellow and black tape that I saw multiple CES attendees stumble over during our conversation. It also can connect to headphones via Bluetooth.
Paired with your smartphone, it can give navigation instructions and information about your surroundings, as well as public transportation options. “You can hear the names of stores and restaurants you are passing by,” he says. In Starbucks, where he isn’t able to read the menu, he says he might ask the assistant if they sell chocolate croissants.
“You don't need to hold your smartphone anymore while you are going somewhere,” Ceylan said. “You can put it into your pocket and then you can get all the information through your WeWalk smart cane.” There is a smartphone interface for those who want to use it, though, which he held up through the demo so I could see what was going on on the other end. Unlike the vast majority of products I’ve encountered at CES this year that seem to include AI or ChatGPT for no real reason other than the fact that they can, this actually felt like a situation where it makes sense and could even be pretty beneficial.
Since it’s brand new, we don’t yet know how all of this will translate to real-world use. Pre-orders are now open for the WeWalk Smart Cane 2, and the first wave is expected to start shipping before the end of this month. There are two price models: $850 for the smart cane plus a subscription for the voice assistant that costs $4.99 per month, or $1150 altogether with no additional subscription fee for full use of the AI. WeWalk Smart Cane 2 is available internationally.
The London-based startup also has a partnership with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) that kicks off in February, when the organization will start using the WeWalk Smart Cane 2 for its cane training program. The goal is to gather meaningful data for instructors so they can really understand how people are using mobility canes (AI-enabled or otherwise), and help them get the most out of the tools. That, Ceylan says, “is so important, because the better you get around, the better you engage in life.”
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© Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget
For nearly four years, NASA's Perseverance rover has journeyed across an unexplored patch of land on Mars—once home to an ancient river delta—and collected a slew of rock samples sealed inside cigar-sized titanium tubes.
These tubes might contain tantalizing clues about past life on Mars, but NASA's ever-changing plans to bring them back to Earth are still unclear.
On Tuesday, NASA officials presented two options for retrieving and returning the samples gathered by the Perseverance rover. One alternative involves a conventional architecture reminiscent of past NASA Mars missions, relying on the "sky crane" landing system demonstrated on the agency's two most recent Mars rovers. The other option would be to outsource the lander to the space industry.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
One day after debuting beta 2 for developers, Apple has just released public beta 2 for its various software platforms. Beta 2 is available for macOS Sequoia 15.3, iPadOS 18.3, watchOS 11.3, and more.
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Apple has released iOS 18.3 public beta 2, bringing the latest version of the forthcoming software update to public beta users. Here’s what’s new.
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Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The AI news cycle didn’t slow down much this holiday season. Between OpenAI’s 12 days of “shipmas” and DeepSeek’s major model release on Christmas Day, blink and you’d miss some new development. And it’s not slowing […]
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“A Florida man pleaded guilty today,” began a Department of Justice press release published on Tuesday. In this case, the ever-infamous Florida Man is none other than Ted Farnsworth, the former CEO of MoviePass’ parent company. His plea comes fewer than four months after another MoviePass leader, former CEO Mitch Lowe, entered a guilty plea of his own.
Farnsworth pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud and another of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. He’ll face a maximum of 20 years in prison for the former charge and up to five for the latter. A sentencing hearing will be scheduled later.
The DOJ charged Farnsworth, 62, with scheming to defraud investors in MoviePass’ former parent company, Helios & Matheson Analytics (HMNY). The agency accused him of making false and misleading representations of HMNY’s and MoviePass’ business to artificially inflate stock and woo investors.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe pleaded guilty to the same charges in September. Lowe reportedly agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and regulators as part of his plea, a detail one can imagine tightened the vise on Farnsworth leading up to his plea.
MoviePass subscribers paid the company $9.95 monthly for what were supposed to be unlimited movie tickets with no blackout dates. Farnsworth and Lowe told investors the business plan was tested and sustainable and would at least break even — if not turn a profit — from subscription fees alone. On top of that, they used buzzwords like “big data” and “artificial intelligence” to claim they could alchemize subscriber data, transforming it into profit.
But according to the DOJ (and… logic), that was never the case. Instead, it was a marketing gimmick to lure in new subscribers and pump HMNY’s stock price.
Farnsworth falsely claimed that MoviePass’ cost of goods (the number of tickets each subscriber bought with their subscription) naturally declined over time, which was in line with his publicly stated expectations. But the DOJ says that was because the company directed MoviePass employees to throttle subscribers who used the service to buy the most movies, preventing them from getting what was promised from their “unlimited” memberships. That aligns with reports from 2019 that employees were ordered to change the passwords of frequent moviegoers.
Unsurprisingly, the company lost money from the plan. A downward spiral commenced, MoviePass and its parent company declared bankruptcy in 2020 and the pair of Florida men in charge of the too-good-to-be-true scheme have admitted their guilt in a federal court.
The company has since been resurrected with a new business model after co-founder Stacy Spikes bought its scraps in 2021.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/former-moviepass-head-pleads-guilty-to-securities-fraud-180603455.html?src=rss©
© TedFarnsworth.com
Broadly speaking, there are two types of e-bikes: Ones with a motor in one of the wheels, and ones with the motor mounted between the pedals. Those in the former group, known as hub motors, are cheap and bountiful, but lack the oomph required to cover rough terrain and high inclines. Those in the latter group, known as mid-drive motors, have all the power, but are heavy on the wallet as well on your arms as you lug them around. Consequently, I’m excited by what Urtopia turned up with to CES 2025: Titanium Zero, a 3D-printed titanium concept e-bike weighing less than 20 pounds packing Quark DM1.2, a custom-designed mid-drive motor that’s small enough to fit inside the bottom bracket and weighs just 2.6 pounds on its own. By its own admission, it’s not as brawny as chonky mid-drive models from Bafang and Bosch, but it might be a perfect alternative for less extreme trails.
Of course, right now it’s just a concept device so we should keep the salt of reasonable skepticism in our left palm at all times. Even so, Urtopia’s Titanium Zero is plenty light enough in the hand, looking a lot more like a regular steel-framed three-speed bike than an e-bike. Hell, if it didn’t have the little controller visible on the crossbar, you could easily mistake this for an old-school racing bike, down to the drop handlebars.
And then there’s the aforementioned Quark DM1.2, which adds another layer of theoretical desirability onto the package. Urtopia says the tiny mid-drive motor can produce 65nm of max torque, which isn’t going to give any of the bigger names any nightmares; a Bafang M560 can output 130Nm. But it’s a rough rule of thumb that a regular rear hub motor can output around 40nm, so there’s a significant performance boost. It’s the sort of hardware I’m quite eager to test on the comically steep hills near to my home, just to see if the claims match the reality.
Sadly, the Titanium Zero and Quark DM1.2 aren’t ready for prime time, and so we’ll have to wait for now.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/i-want-urtopias-titanium-zero-concept-e-bike-174539195.html?src=rss©
© Daniel Cooper for Engadget
This isn’t just any retro-styled microphone, but an all-in-one tool for music creators looking to record vocals when on the go. It’s the creation of Hisong, a startup looking to build a more elegant alternative to toting around a microphone, mixer and headphones wherever you go. The AirStudio One is a wireless condenser microphone with a few secrets buried inside, like a professional audio interface, a wireless USB-C dongle and a pair of true wireless headphones. The idea being you can record a banging vocal when you’re on the road without any additional hardware.
AirStudio One isn’t just a regular microphone, either, since it’s been engineered with a multi-core Digital Signal Processor to help get the best sound from its slender body. Open the companion app on your phone, and you’ll be able to mix the audio, set the EQ and even apply audio effects in real time. This isn't the first product we've seen this CES that puts more of the meat inside the microphone — Shure's MV7i carries its own two-channel audio interface.
You could also use this to record sound for your videos, and if you opt for the analog dongle, can even output your sound to any device with a 3.5mm line-in. It’s worth saying the ambient noise at CES made it impossible to test the sound quality of microphone. But this is the sort of gadget that has “intriguing prospect” stamped all over it. We’ll likely give this a deeper prod when it’s available to buy later in the year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/airstudio-one-is-a-portable-microphone-thats-full-of-surprises-173019602.html?src=rss©
© Daniel Cooper for Engadget
Nintendo still isn't ready to officially reveal any details about the Switch 2 (beyond a brief mention of backward compatibility in November). But that hasn't stopped gaming accessory maker Genki from giving us one of the best looks yet at the size and shape of Nintendo's upcoming hardware, as well as a video glimpse of how the console's new Joy-Cons will attach to the base tablet.
Genki is reportedly using a scale 3D model of the Switch 2 to show off its console cases behind closed doors at the Consumer Electronics Show. A video from French tech site Numerama shows that 3D model dwarfing an original Switch model in both length and width.
VIDEO — La Nintendo Switch 2 en avant-première au #CES2025.
L'accessoiriste Genki indique posséder la vraie console et expose une maquette 3D + des accessoires.
Les détails ici : https://t.co/5LDlnR2zC1 pic.twitter.com/IJ6taQggIQ
— Numerama (@Numerama) January 8, 2025
In a longer write-up of Genki's Switch 2 mock-up, Numerama reports that Genki says its 3D model was derived from an actual Switch 2 console, not merely "3D blueprints." Genki's model also includes a second USB-C port atop the system, Numerama reports, as well as a mysterious C button underneath the home button on the right Joy-Con.
© Numerama
