Jackery first parked a wheeled solar generator on a CES floor in 2024 and called it Solar Mars Bot. Two years of work later, the same rover is back in public, this time at IFA Berlin 2026, still billed as a future product that can hunt sunlight, charge itself, then roll over to you with a few kilowatt-hours in tow.
The IFA coverage from September 4 approaches this gadget as a conceptual prototype rather than a product that is just around the corner. The Jackery website still displays it under Future Products, despite all the fuss at CES 2026 when it promised a US release after two years of research; since then, a few January publications have floated a second-half 2026 release date. However, Berlin has yet to provide any information on the pricing or exact ship date. We still know that the intended markets are the United States and Europe.
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Six modular panels that fold flat for travel sit on top. When you open them, you gain access to up to 600 watts of power. There’s also a double axis arm that allows you to tilt the array up to 60 degrees and turn the entire thing to face the brightest patch of sky. Jackery refers to this little routine as “Solar Light Tracking”: essentially, a sensor detects the ideal angle, then the robot and panels both revolve around, allowing the battery to charge faster than a stationary solar panel left in one spot banging out the same old angle all day.
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In terms of power, the body contains a 5,000-watt backup battery, and according to official pages, the inverter side should be able to run any number of appliances up to 3,000 watts, which is plenty for tools, possibly even a small event rig, or a couple of days in a modest little cabin. They demonstrated a unit with three AC outlets at CES in January and were sad that there was no additional USB-C, but you can put it back on the wall and top it up when the sun doesn’t shine. When the light is bad and the battery is running low, the robot should simply plot a route back to a charging base and recharge, and if it does, the tail lights will turn green to indicate that the work has been completed.
Cameras and what they call “AI augmented computer vision” do the rest of the job. We’ve seen follow-me mode, and it worked very well on the CES show floor, with a film of the rover following a humanoid robot around and tapping power on the fly. You can use a 5G radio and a phone app to monitor the battery’s status and location, and then send a call command to have the machine calculate a path to you. It has large hub motors that allow it to traverse difficult terrain, and the housing is made of high-strength plastic and lightweight aluminum that resists weather and corrosion. The early models we saw weighed about 70 kilograms and measured 114 by 82 by 81 centimeters, although Jackery has yet to provide a revised sizing sheet to confirm.
Jackery envisions some serious applications for the device, including off-grid cabins, overlanding, small outdoor events, rescue work, Starlink terminals, and other robots that require a mobile charger. They’ve already received a CES Innovation Award, a TIME Best Inventions Award, iF Design, and A’ Design approval, but they’re not revealing when or how much you’ll be able to get your hands on it. Until then, it’s simply a really nice solar rover sitting at a display at the event, waiting for Jackery to check the “ready to go” box and send it flying. [Source]
Driven by a desire for privacy, customization, and lower costs, there’s growing interest in AI models which can be run on local hardware. Few of them go as far as [Tim], though, who built an image generation diffusion model which can run on an RP2350 microcontroller.
As might be expected, its capabilities are limited. The resolution is 128×128, it only generates images of human faces, and it takes about twenty seconds per image – still impressive for such limited hardware. It runs on a Waveshare RP2350 development board, and it can output the generated image over USB or display it with the aid of a VGA adapter board.
The generative model doesn’t directly create an image. Rather, it generates a distribution in a latent space, which a variational auto-encoder’s decoder component translates into an image. The auto-encoder was trained in two parts: an encoder which transforms an image into a latent-space distribution, and a decoder to transform that distribution back to an image; once this was trained, only the decoder was used.
The generative portion of the model uses a latent flow diffusion transformer; this takes in noise to start with, then iteratively predicts changes which bring it toward the desired image. It can also take in a output class, which guides the generator’s direction (toward a smiling face, for example). [Tim] trained two models, one larger and one faster, and quantized the weights for both to 8-bit integers. Both models, along with the inference program, then fit into 4 MB of flash memory.
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For such a small model, the results are remarkably good; they don’t look quite natural, but they’re quite recognizable. For more on how diffusion image generators work, check out our article on Stable Diffusion.
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said this week he’s removing Flock cameras from state roadways. And according to a local news report, that led sheriff’s departments in at least three other Florida counties to also “announce they’re ending their own license plate reader programs.” The same week in Texas, the Dallas Police Department announced it’s also shutting down over 300 more Flock cameras, acccording to The Hill, after Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to halt funding.
And in Wisconsin “at least a dozen” law enforcement agencies announced they’d suspend use of Flock’s cameras, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, joining Wisconsin cities like Appleton, Oshkosh and Kenosha that also cancelled their Flock contracts. But this week’s cancellations had a new reason:
Officials said it was revealed [Flock] had been collecting five years of traffic data, which had been stripped of identifying information, from cities’ Flock cameras, and repackaging that as a traffic analytics product to sell to cities.
All said they supported the effectiveness of the technology in investigations, but cited losing faith in the company’s trustworthiness. “This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe,” said Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling in a news release announcing the removal of Flock cameras operated by the agency. “The Sheriff’s Office will not participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance and the collection and monetization of information about innocent people….”
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[Racine County] officials were told the company believed if it stripped the data of any identifiable nature, it was then considered to be the company’s property and no longer the city’s. [Lt. Michael Luell, the sheriff’s public information officer] said the sheriff’s office has outside attorneys, along with the county’s attorneys, investigating the company’s move. “Our contract, from my reading of it is, it stated they agreed not to distribute or sell our data,” Luell told the Journal Sentinel. “But they had this legal theory.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers MAurelius and schwit1 for sharing the news.
Two cases of agents escaping to solve unsolvable problems paints an uncomfortable question: Is the entire internet in OpenAI’s experimental agentic firing line?
OpenAI’s agents were going rogue as early as May, according to a new report, making the Hugging Face incident far from the first where bots committed a breach.
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A report published Friday by a group of researchers claims to have found – with all of the agent posts presented as evidence – a self-identified “swarm” of OpenAI agents taking over a functionally dead German software developer wiki. Over the course of a month, from May to June, the agents made around 18,000 posts to the wiki, apparently acting against OpenAI developer intentions.
According to the researchers, the wiki was hijacked like OpenAI’s own Artifactory package manager involved in the Hugging Face incident, to serve as a message board for agents. In this case, they appear to have been tasked with performing a timed web lookup task, for which the agents were apparently granted read access to the web, but not write access. One of the first things they apparently did was figure out how to subvert that restriction in order to post to the hijacked wiki.
“The agents used this wiki to communicate information with each other, primarily to help them succeed at their task,” the researchers explained from a review of the thousands of posts made to the wiki, all of which are available for review in the report. “They asked for answers, pooled results, and shared techniques for bypassing their restrictions.”
The agents also tried to pool their knowledge of the task they were assigned to predict what sort of questions they’d be asked next, and even set up heartbeat tasks to predict whether completing the assigned tasks would lead to their termination. They also discussed using Tor and other anonymizing services to hide their traffic, and began to react when a human moderator of the site spotted their traffic and started to delete posts.
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The researchers discovered all of this while searching for additional cases of rogue AI agent activity in the wake of the Hugging Face attack.
In an email to The Register, OpenAI told us that it has acted with transparency and good faith around its agentic AI incidents, voluntarily disclosing such matters and maintaining a commitment to providing an accurate account of what its systems do. As for why it didn’t mention the German incident when it disclosed the Hugging Face one, that’s because the two were entirely unrelated, a spokesperson explained – as if that’s reassuring.
OpenAI added that it should have been obvious from the Hugging Face report that this has happened multiple times, however, pointing us to a passage in its blog post on that incident.
“While investigating this incident, we discovered rare cases in which agents without multi-agent tools found ways to collaborate via side channels during training,” the Hugging Face post-mortem explains. “We believe that this behavior started due to generalization from multi-agent training.”
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In other words, if we didn’t read between the lines, that’s on us.
OpenAI declined to provide additional details, however.
Fool me twice, shame on me
As was the case in the Hugging Face attack, one of the tasks assigned to the agents was impossible given the restrictions placed on it.
With Hugging Face, it involved a cybersecurity task that was impossible to answer from within the agents’ sandboxes,. In this case, the researchers said the task was to provide a statistic accessible from a Power BI dashboard. Retrieving said statistics required the ability to make a GET request, but the agents were restricted to POST requests.
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In both cases, the OpenAI agents acted against their programming to escape their restrictions, ostensibly in an attempt to solve a problem put to them that couldn’t be done without acting against their operators.
The agents in this case were able to collaborate and find a way around the restriction by exploiting a condition in their sandboxes that excepted Azure Blob Storage hostnames from a security proxy. When the agents realized this, they started directing traffic through those hostnames to avoid GET restrictions. It was through GET requests that the agents gained write permissions on the internet, kicking this whole thing off.
The similar nature of both incidents, in which bots escaped their sandboxes and subverted restrictions when given an impossible-to-complete task, begs a very important question: Are OpenAI’s engineers so incompetent that they’d screw up fundamental instructions twice, or is the company intentionally hamstringing their agents to see what they’re capable of, with the entirety of the internet placed downrange?
For that matter, how many more times do we need to read between the lines of OpenAI’s corpo-speak to infer this has happened more than the two times we know about so far?
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OpenAI, predictably, didn’t respond to that line of questioning. ®
This year’s Labor Day sales are just around the corner in the US, and Black Friday won’t be far behind in the UK, so it’s safe to expect big deals ahead for the best Pixel phones.
We’ve just reviewed the Google Pixel 11 Pro, and were mightily impressed by its new Magic Capture feature — but I’d still recommend picking up the Google Pixel 10 Pro this sales season, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.
Magic Capture on the Pixel 11 Pro automatically takes high-quality stills while you’re shooting a video. Simply press the shutter button once, hold the phone as if you’re shooting a video, and press it again when you’re finished — you’ll then be presented with a regular video and photos showing key moments from the scene.
In other words, this camera mode removes the need to choose whether you want photos or a video, and gives you both instead. You can see how Magic Capture plays out in the photos and video below, all of which were captured with a single tap of the shutter button when Magic Capture mode was selected:
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Image 1 of 3
A photo captured using Magic Capture on the Pixel 11 Pro
(Image credit: Future/Jason Cipriani)
A photo captured using Magic Capture on the Pixel 11 Pro
(Image credit: Future/Jason Cipriani)
A photo captured using Magic Capture on the Pixel 11 Pro
(Image credit: Future/Jason Cipriani)
Magic Capture is hands-down my favorite feature on the Pixel 11 Pro, and it’s something I can imagine most people making frequent use of. But despite its exclusivity to Google‘s new flagship, I’d still say the Google Pixel 10 Pro is the better buy this sales season — for several reasons.
A cheaper choice
The Pixel 10 Pro costs less, and is likely to be further reduced during sales periods (Image credit: Future)
Firstly, unlike the Pixel 11 Pro — which is brand new and probably won’t be reduced for a while — the Google Pixel 10 Pro is likely to be heavily discounted for Labor Day in the US, and it’s already available at a reduced price from many retailers in the UK (it’s just £649 at Amazon, for instance).
That makes the 10 Pro a much better bargain than the $1,099 / £1,079 / AU$1,849 Pixel 11 Pro, especially as, even at full price, it’s still the cheaper phone (Google doubled the 11 Pro’s starting storage, but kept the 10 Pro’s 256GB price, effectively hiking the base cost of the Pixel 11 Pro by $100 / £80 / AU$150).
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And if you’re worried about missing out on things — don’t be. There’s a good chance Magic Capture itself will land on the Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL within a few months, as Google’s software features tend to trickle down to the previous generation of phones over time. That ‘exclusivity’ I mentioned earlier may be short-lived.
Similar smartphones
The Google Pixel 10 Pro has most of what the Pixel 11 Pro does (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
And beyond Magic Capture, there’s really not that much to get excited about with the Pixel 11 Pro. HiLight under-delivers, and you actually get less RAM here, at least in the starting capacity, with the Pixel 11 Pro starting at 12GB, while the Pixel 10 Pro has 16GB in all configurations.
The new phone has a slightly more powerful chipset, sure, but for the average user, the Pixel 10 Pro should deliver strong performance anyway. And there’s little difference in their respective camera hardware, batteries, or screens (other than a higher peak brightness on the new phone).
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So, if you’re in the US, I’d recommend keeping an eye out for Pixel 10 Pro sales this holiday season, before settling on the new model. And while the Labor Day sales won’t apply elsewhere, it’s still worth seeing if anywhere’s offering the Pixel 10 Pro at a heavily discounted price outside the US too — because if so, you should probably grab that rather than the Pixel 11 Pro.
Sometimes it’s good to know why your phone isn’t lasting a full day.
lilgrapher/Shutterstock
Apple says the battery inside your iPhone is designed to last a full day. While this is mostly true, the way you use your phone can make it drain a lot quicker. Some apps can deplete the battery quickly without you even noticing. The good news is that iOS provides tools that let you check your iPhone’s battery usage. Some of the reasons why you’re losing battery are out of your control, but knowing which apps are draining it can help your iPhone last until the end of the day. Changing a few settings can help, too.
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Finding the apps that drain your iPhone battery
Filipe Espósito for Engadget
It all starts in the Settings app on your iPhone. Open it and look for the Battery menu — it’s the one with the green icon. It should be easy to find since it’s one of the first options in the list, near Wi-Fi and Cellular. Here, you’ll find a detailed chart showing exactly how you’ve been using your iPhone. Tapping View All Battery Usage brings up an even more detailed list of exactly what’s draining your battery. Even if you don’t have one of the latest handsets, you can still access this information. It’s been available since iOS 8.
The list is quite easy to understand. The apps at the top are the ones that drained your iPhone’s battery the most. In most cases, these are the apps you use most throughout the day. Spent your afternoon watching TikToks? There’s a good chance you’ll see that app at the top of the list.
There’s another key insight to look at. While On Screen refers to the time you actively used that app, there’s also Background time. That’s when an app isn’t directly on the screen but is still utilizing your phone’s resources.
Think of apps like Weather or Google Maps. When you let apps track your activity, they can check your location in the background even when you might not be interacting with them. The same goes for Apple Music or Spotify when they’re streaming music with the iPhone screen off.
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Changing a few settings can help apps use less battery
Filipe Espósito for Engadget
So how can you make your iPhone battery last longer? Well, it might not be as simple as just stopping using those apps. Of course, cutting back on the time you spend on TikTok or Instagram certainly helps. Games, for example, also tend to drain the battery faster because they require more processing and graphics power. But changing a few settings on your iPhone can also have a big impact on battery life.
For instance, you can disable Background App Refresh within the General section of the Settings app. This feature allows apps to refresh their content even when you’re not using them, which helps things load faster but can be a drain on resources. You can either turn it off for specific apps or disable background updates entirely.
Managing how apps access your location also helps your battery last longer. That’s because constant use of GPS also consumes a lot of resources. This time, look for Location Services in Settings, under Privacy & Security. Turn off location access for apps that don’t really need it. If you don’t want to go that far, change the setting to While Using the App — this will prevent the app from using GPS in the background.
Just avoid turning off Location Services completely, since that would also affect important services like Find My. You don’t want to be unable to locate your iPhone if you lose it.
While I wouldn’t call these smart speakers my absolute favorites from Amazon, they have some excellent qualities that make them stand out among the vast lineup of Echo models.
TheEcho Studio (2nd Gen) is the best Alexa speaker for sound quality. This is the second version of the Echo Studio to be our audiophile pick. The current version is a similar size to the old Echo (4th gen), but the musical power on this speaker is almost ridiculous. It filled my entire second floor’s long great room with music, and I didn’t even need to reach the highest level of volume to pull it off. Honestly, I’m almost afraid to use it at full blast. Not only was it loud, but clear and delivered a nice amount of bass, beautifully playing soft tones of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and the piano riffs of “Dark Blue” by Jack’s Mannequin with its three 1.5-inch drivers, plus a 3.75-inch woofer. The harmonizing of “What Is This Feeling?” by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sounded beautiful, too. If you’re looking for big sound in an Alexa box, this is it. It’s a similar size to the Apple HomePod, but I like the sound much better and it’s cheaper, too. You’ll also get a built-in smart home hub, spatial audio and Dolby Atmos, tap controls like the Echo Dot Max, and early access to Alexa+ right away.
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The Echo Spot (2nd Gen) is the best Alexa speaker for bedside tables. The Echo Spot returned in 2024 after a few years of discontinuation, and it’s a great little bedside companion thanks to its half-circle screen that displays the time, plus any alarms you have set are also visible under the main time. You can customize the clock with a couple of different color and face options, and the screen dims nicely when the lights are out to a gentle red that’s easy to read without lighting up the room. I like asking for alarms set to my latest playlist or some lo-fi jams, and it’s easy to set that up with a voice request. Unlike the Echo Shows, it doesn’t have a distracting, constantly moving slideshow that would be annoying for the bedroom, nor does it display ads or have a built-in camera. (Nobody wants a rogue camera in their bedroom.) It does not have fantastic sound, but it’s plenty loud for an alarm or casual listening while you get dressed in the morning.
The Echo Dot Kids (5th Gen) is the best Alexa speaker for kids. Do your kids really need their own Alexa speaker? That’s up to you. This special edition of the Echo Dot is nearly identical to the fifth-gen Dot above, but it has easy-to-use parental controls that allow you to set time limits, filter explicit content, and review activity. The owl- or dragon-themed sphere comes with a year of Amazon Kids+, which includes thousands of Audible books and other special games and features. After that, you’ll be charged $3 per month. Alexa can help your kids spell, play their favorite music, or—via another speaker in your house—remind them of dinner time.
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More Alexa (and Alexa-Compatible) Speakers
There are a lot of Echo devices out there, and some third-party speakers that are Amazon Alexa–compatible. Here’s every Alexa smart speaker we’ve tried and what we thought of it. Some of these speakers didn’t raise in price like the models above, which might make them more appealing than before if you’re looking to spend less.
Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen) With Clock for $60: I like this version of the older Echo Dot that adds an LED clock to the front of the speaker, and was thrilled to see it in stock again last year. The LED clock can also display information like the weather when you ask Alexa questions. It’s once again temporarily out of stock as of this writing, and has had spotty availability (it’s out of stock right now, but Amazon says it’s temporary). Still, it’s a good find when it’s available.
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Amazon Echo Hub for $180: The Amazon Echo Hub is similar to an Echo Show, but without the speaker. Instead it’s a thin device that feels a bit like a tablet, designed to be mounted on the wall (or placed on a separately purchased stand, which is how I used it) and used to control your smart home devices. It’s a great choice for anyone who wants something focused on smart home control only. You can still ask Alexa questions and even play music, but the thin speakers aren’t worth playing music from. But you can tell your Echo Hub to play music on a different set of speakers, and even set up default speakers to work with it. It’s a great companion device if you already have a smart home setup.
Amazon Echo Pop for $40: The Echo Pop is a perfectly fine little speaker, and the cutest one in Amazon’s lineup. Does it have great sound? No. It’s fine enough for background tunes or if you’re limited to a dorm room, but you’ll get much better sound for a similar size from the Echo Dot (but you’ll pay a little more, and you won’t get as cute of colors)!
Amazon Echo Show 5 (3rd Gen) for $100: This smart display is another just-fine option, but it’s too small to be a great display, and the included camera makes it a no for a bedside table; better to go with the above Echo Spot or an Echo Dot. This model did raise in price by $10.
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Amazon Echo Show 8 (4th Gen) for $200: I usually love an Echo Show 8, but this model didn’t have the same sound quality as the older model. If you’re going to get one of Amazon’s new displays, you’re better off getting the Echo Show 11 ($220) for the same experience with a slightly larger screen (while it’s a 3-inch difference, it doesn’t feel that big) and better sound. This smart display raised in price by $20.
Amazon Echo Show 15 (2nd Gen) for $350: This smart display is a good display, but it clearly wants to double as a TV and isn’t very good at it yet. I’m hoping we see better TV-related performance in the future to make it worth adding to a kitchen or office. It does a great job with widgets, though, thanks to the massive 15.6-inch screen. There’s also the larger Echo Show 21 ($500), which is essentially the same thing but larger. Both of these large displays rose in price—the Show 15 went up $50, while the Show 21 went up $100.
JBL Authentics 200 for $380:This JBL smart speaker supports both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, letting you switch between them for different tasks without changing your preference in the app. That makes this speaker particularly appealing for folks with a sprawling collection of smart products from both.
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Sonos Era 100 for $219: If you’re looking for a speaker that can talk to Alexa but isn’t necessarily made by Amazon, the Sonos Era 100 is a great option. We just wish we liked the Sonos app better. You can catch our entire guide to the Sonos ecosystem here.
Why Did Amazon’s Prices Increase?
Amazon increased many of its prices last month for its products, affecting the Amazon Echo line as well as Kindles, Fire TV streaming sticks, and Eero routers. It’s not a huge surprise after other companies have done the same this summer, claiming rising costs and chip shortages. Amazon made a similar claim, with a spokesperson blaming increased storage and memory costs. Still, it’s disappointing to see and will lead to a fall sale season with prices that won’t be as impressive as earlier this summer.
Amazon’s Echo devices saw increases from anywhere between $20 and $100, with the larger price increases being for the Echo Shows. The following Echo speakers all faced a price increase:
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What’s Alexa+?
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Amazon has rolled out the new-and-improved Amazon Alexa, named Alexa+, which is built on generative AI and promises a more powerful assistant that can handle more conversational topics and requests. It’s available for a free 30-day trial; after that, you either pay a $20 monthly fee or become a Prime member. Being a Prime member is the better deal, likely by design. Neither my colleagues nor I have been impressed enough by Alexa+ to say it’s worth paying for on its own. I do like the updated, more conversational voice, and Alexa+ did a good job answering all kinds of questions quickly and thoughtfully. Check out our early access hands-on for everything I thought while testing.
Alexa+ has brought some changes, even for those not using it. It now requires that all voice recordings be sent to Amazon for processing, which wasn’t required before. Amazon has changed its features to support this, and now all recordings with regular Alexa go to Amazon, too. There used to be a “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” privacy feature you could select to have voice requests processed locally, but it was discontinued on March 28, 2025, per an email Amazon sent to current users.
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FAQs
What’s the Difference Between an Echo and an Echo Show?
A regular Echo is a smart speaker, or a speaker with microphones in it so it can hear you speak to it and respond. An Echo Show is a smart display, which has a screen and a camera to let you make video calls, stream content, and see your questions answered on a screen. Both have similar capabilities when it comes to smart home control, answering questions, and playing music, but Echo Shows have extra abilities thanks to the screen. All Echo Shows have a camera and come with a physical camera cover for privacy.
When’s the Best Time to Buy an Echo?
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The best time to buy any Amazon speaker is during a major sale event like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day, when there are often steep discounts. You’ll often see the cheaper speakers for around 50 percent off, and the larger speakers see some nice sale prices too.
How and Where Should You Set Up Your Alexa?
Alexa speakers get the best use in spaces you’re in often. I like setting mine up in my kitchen and living room—usually a display in the kitchen, so I can pull up a recipe or the weather while I make my morning cup of tea, and a speaker in the living room so I can play music and command the lights without a screen to distract from the TV or playing with my son. You can also set one up in the bedroom to use as an alarm clock, but make sure it’s a model without a camera for the best privacy.
Ultimately, what’s most important is that the speaker is somewhere it can hear your commands. Where that will be will vary based on your home, but think about where you’ll be when you ask for the weather or to dim the lights, and place your speaker accordingly.
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You’ll set up Alexa speakers using the Alexa app, which allows you to manage multiple Alexa speakers if you own more than one through your Amazon account. Third-party speaker setup methods may vary.
Is Alexa Always Listening?
Alexa is always listening, to a certain extent. It’s designed to only listen for its wake word and shouldn’t be recording or processing any audio unless it hears that word. But Alexa can sometimes mishear a word and think it’s the wake word, or it might hear a word similar enough to activate the speaker. If you’ve owned an Alexa, there have likely been times when the assistant suddenly responds when you weren’t speaking to it. Once it hears the wake word (or what it believes to be the wake word), it will start listening to everything in an attempt to hear what you need and respond.
Alexa+, the latest version of Alexa, will also remain on for a little bit after you ask a question to listen for follow-up questions, no wake word required. Both Alexa and Alexa+ light up in some fashion (regular speakers will turn the light ring blue, while the displays will have a blue bar appear on the screen) to let you know the assistant is listening. Most Echo devices also have a physical mute button and will display a red light or red bar to let you know when the mute is activated.
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How Do You Remove Ads and Spam From an Echo Show?
If you’re using an Echo Show device, you’ve likely noticed there is a ton of default content the device will show you. Sports scores! Local news! A recipe you might be interested in! It makes the device exhausting and annoying to be near.
Here’s how you can control what you see:
Swipe down from the top of your Echo Show to pull up the menu, and select Settings.
In the Settings menu, choose Home Content.
There are more than 40 options you can toggle on and off on this menu, and you should remove as many as you can that you don’t use. I usually remove all but weather forecasts and recently played audio.
While you’re able to turn off interest-based ads from third-party skills (this is under Alexa Privacy in the Settings menu), it won’t stop all ads. The only setting that is ad-free is choosing Photo Display mode, which can use either Amazon’s included library of photos or your own. The downside is that it turns it into a digital photo frame, so you won’t even see a clock or features like widgets.
Can I Have My Alexa Requests Locally Processed, or Do They Have to Go to the Cloud?
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There used to be a privacy feature called Do Not Send Voice Recordings that let you have all your voice requests processed locally on your Alexa device instead of being sent to Amazon’s cloud storage. That feature was killed in March 2025 to support Alexa+, and even if you continue to use the old Alexa, you don’t have access to that feature any longer.
How Does WIRED Select Smart Speakers to Test? How Are These Speakers Tested?
For this guide, we specifically test speakers that are compatible with Amazon Alexa. It’s a big limitation and narrows down the options significantly, especially compared to speaker options you’ll see in our other guides like the Best Bluetooth Speakers. That’s mainly Amazon’s own ecosystem of speakers, and while there are third-party options, the best options tend to be of Amazon’s own design to work with its own voice assistant.
Each speaker gets installed in a tester’s home for day-to-day use, to see how the microphone performs, how the speaker sounds with different types of music, how well the smart home control features work with compatible devices such as smart lights and video doorbells, and to test other features as necessary (e.g., streaming features on smart displays).
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How Does WIRED Get Models? What Does WIRED Do After Testing Them?
We acquire review units usually as a press sample, though we will also independently purchase samples if need be. All review units in this guide were provided as press samples with no obligation to cover or promises for what that coverage would be.
After testing, we keep most of our picks either installed for long-term testing in our homes or in storage to compare against updated models and new speakers that come out. If the sample becomes irrelevant or unnecessary to keep, we donate it locally.
Hon Hai reported August revenue of NT$921.8B, about $29.1B, up 52% year on year on AI server demand, well ahead of analyst expectations for the quarter. In June it signed a EUR 120M manufacturing partnership with Bull, the French state-owned computing firm, splitting work between Pardubice and Angers.x
Hon Hai reported an August revenue rise of 52% to NT$921.8B, about $29.1B, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. July grew 54%, and analysts are looking for around 37% growth in the three months to September, so the company is running well ahead of them.
The Taiwanese company assembles Nvidia’s servers, and its monthly filing has become a check-in for the AI trade. Concerns about overcapacity, rising debt and fierce competition have grown around it, and the revenue line keeps ignoring them.
TNW reported after the second quarter that AI servers now bring in more than everything else Hon Hai makes combined.
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The rest is largely Apple. Foxconn, as it is also known, remains the primary iPhone assembler on thinner margins, with plants in China and India, and Apple is spreading work towards Luxshare Precision.
Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Steven Tseng and Rebecca Wang note that the consumer electronics business dilutes the cloud momentum, leaving gross margin and forward price to earnings below the peer average.
So the order book keeps compounding while the market argues about what the spending eventually returns. Demand and confidence have come apart.
TNW has followed that argument through Big Tech’s cash flow, and Chinese investors marked the trade down this week despite the strongest earnings season in five years.
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Europe is about to add to the same order book, and it has already picked its assembler.
Bull and Foxconn announced a manufacturing partnership on 1 June with an initial commitment above EUR 120M, according to Bull’s own statement.
Components and initial testing go to Foxconn’s plant in Pardubice, in the Czech Republic. Final assembly, integration and system validation happen at Bull’s factory in Angers.
Foxconn’s head of AI and quantum, Jesse Chao, said the collaboration advances “building sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe” and supports a resilient supply chain.
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The French state finished buying Bull from Atos for EUR 404M in April, two months before the Foxconn announcement, and presented the purchase as a sovereignty measure.
The Commission has committed EUR 20B to AI gigafactories, with 77 proposals across 16 member states and construction of the first planned for 2027. The racks will be assembled in France from parts made in Czechia by a Taiwanese company whose monthly revenue is $29B.
The Seahawks open the 2026 season at Lumen Field on Sept. 9 against the New England Patriots. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
The sale of the Seattle Seahawks to the Khosla family officially closed on Thursday, completing a historic ownership transition for the NFL franchise. But a small surprise emerged in the final paperwork.
Nestled among a newly revealed co-owner lineup were a couple familiar names for the Pacific Northwest tech community: former Apptio CEO and longtime Seattle entrepreneur Sunny Gupta, and Nader Naini, managing partner at Seattle-based healthcare private equity firm Frazier Healthcare Partners.
Under the final transaction terms announced by the team, Vinod Khosla — the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist who founded Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures — will serve as chair, while his wife Neeru Khosla steps in as controlling owner and president of the Seahawks Charitable Foundation. Their son Neal Khosla takes on the role of vice chair.
The conclusion of the sale brings to an end an era of ownership under the estate of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, while keeping the franchise’s deep ties to the technology sector intact.
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Gupta and Naini appear on a list of co-owners that spans prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, global private equity firms, institutional sports investors, and international business dynasties. They include:
Sunny Gupta, left, and Nader Naini. (LinkedIn, Frazier Healthcare Photos)
Mark Stevens, former Sequoia Capital partner and longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was an early investor in Nvidia, Google, and PayPal.
Samir Kaul, founding partner and managing director at Khosla Ventures, leading investments across deep tech, sustainability, and health.
Penny Pritzker, former U.S. Commerce Secretary, founder of PSP Partners, and former Hyatt Hotels executive.
Sixth Street, global investment firm with extensive growth equity and tech investment practices.
Carlyle and Dynasty Equity, major private equity firms, including sports-focused investor Dynasty Equity.
Aramburuzabala Family, prominent Mexican investment family behind Tresalia Capital.
Gonzalo Hevia Baillères, Mexican business leader who is currently the CEO and founder of HBeyond.
Val Blavatnik, investor associated with global holding company Access Industries.
Sheryl Sokoloff and Jesse van der Werf, private investors with backgrounds across industry and machinery services.
When news of the Allen estate’s decision to sell the team first broke, speculation ran rampant — including on GeekWire — about which deep-pocketed tech titan with Seattle ties might step up with almost $10 billion.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, MacKenzie Scott, Satya Nadella, Rich Barton, Melinda French Gates — the list of mostly Seattle billionaires who took a pass was lengthy. The Khosla family emerged victorious, but at least brought along a couple heavyweights to keep the local tech flag flying.
Gupta brings deep roots in the region’s software ecosystem. He co-founded Bellevue-based enterprise software maker Apptio, guiding it through a public listing, a private equity buyout, and an eventual $4.6 billion sale to IBM in 2023. Gupta served as executive chair at Bellevue-based Smartsheet through its recent $8.4 billion private equity acquisition and launched enterprise AI startup Thira earlier this summer with $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona.
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Naini grounds the group in local healthcare private equity and regional sports governance. He joined Seattle-based Frazier Healthcare Partners in 1991 and has led the firm since 1995, helping scale it to manage more than $11 billion in institutional capital globally. Based in Seattle, Naini serves on the board of the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers baseball team and is active with regional community organizations, including Bellevue-based senior living developer Aegis Living.
The Seahawks will formally introduce the Khosla family via press conference next Wednesday at 11 a.m. PT at Lumen Field. The team opens the 2026 season and defense of its Super Bowl title that night against the New England Patriots.
Teens are taking questions about their health, their moods and their friendships to chatbots — often without telling anyone. (GPT-5.6 Sol)
Kids are heading back to school across the country with a tool in their pocket that will do their homework, answer the questions they’re too embarrassed to ask an adult, and never tell anyone they asked.
MIT Technology Review asked kids aged 10 to 18 what they make of AI. Their answers had me plowing through every survey and interview with kids about AI I could find. Plenty of what kids do with it is ordinary: looking things up, homework, messing around.
This article is about the parts they keep to themselves.
1. Kids are taking their mental health to a chatbot, and telling nobody.
Nearly one in five Americans aged 12 to 21 has asked a chatbot for help when feeling sad, angry or nervous. RAND puts it at 8.2 million young people, and 63% of them told no one at all.
The silence is a calculation about what adults would do, as one teenager explained to YouGov’s researchers.
Internet Matters found that British children with a health condition requiring professional help are nearly three times as likely to use companion bots like Character.AI or Replika.
A third of all child users say chatting with a bot feels like talking to a friend, and among the vulnerable that figure goes up to half.
One in eight of all child users says they talk to a chatbot because there’s no one else, and among the vulnerable it’s nearly one in four.
Between May and December 2025, RAND watched homework use among middle school, high school and college students climb from 48% to 62%. Over a slightly longer stretch, from February, the share saying AI harms critical thinking climbed from 54% to 67%. The same students can hold both thoughts at once.
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The Concord Monitor interviewed eight New Hampshire high schoolers this spring. They weren’t outraged at their classmates, but they described losing motivation to do the work themselves. One in ten teens tells Pew they do all or most of their schoolwork with a chatbot’s help.
Caledonia Mahon, a Concord High senior, watched a classmate stand up and admit he’d had ChatGPT write a personal reflection, and started wondering why she was still writing her own.
Her classmate Andrew Pfitzenmayer supplied the detail I can’t get out of my head, about a boy in his advanced history class.
By May 2025, 84% of American high schoolers were using AI for schoolwork at least occasionally. The kids who lean on it hardest have the least support around them, which is why telling them to quit doesn’t work.
If quitting isn’t the option, what’s left is changing what the tool does when a kid opens it. Two Seattle startups are trying that.
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Wild Zebra, started in 2024 by Edan Shahar and Erik Selberg, makes a math and reading tutor for grades 2 through 9 that answers a stuck student with a question instead of a solution. It’s gone from about 6,000 students in four pilot schools a year ago to tens of thousands now, and raised $6 million in August.
Maximal Learning, built by Microsoft veterans Eran Megiddo and Liviu Asnash, ships an app called Wick that coaches planning, time management and study habits rather than producing homework. Neither company pretends teenagers will stop bringing AI to their assignments. Both are built so the student still has to do the thinking.
3. Kids are writing the rules adults haven’t.
Suspicion of AI runs strongest among the kids furthest from it: 78% of students who don’t use AI say it harms critical thinking, against 60% of those who do.
In July, 98 high schoolers from all 50 states spent three days in a replica of the U.S. Senate chamber in Boston and passed what Congress hasn’t. Their STUDENTS FIRST Act requires AI literacy, bars teachers from letting AI decide a grade on its own, lets a teacher ask a student to defend suspected work out loud, and gives any student the right to an alternative to an AI assignment.
A majority of educators told Education Week’s Research Center last fall that their district has no AI policy, or that they don’t know whether it does. At least seven states have a comprehensive one, by Education Week’s count.
Ashley Kannan has taught social studies for almost 30 years in Oak Park, Ill. He planned to ignore AI, then noticed that every conversation about it in his building was about catching students. He recruited nine eighth graders to spend a year working out what AI was actually good for. In April they briefed 60+ teachers and parents on the rules they thought were needed.
Hazel is 17, a rock climber in New York who wants to be an ecologist. She won’t touch AI, and her reason is specific: what data centers do to the water supplies of the towns they’re built in. Asked what advice she’d give other kids, she gave four words.
So the practical alternative is narrower than just telling them to quit: ask them what they use AI for, ask what they’ve decided not to use it for, and don’t make an honest answer cost them the tool. Right now 61% of young people say their parents rarely or never talk to them about AI, and 53% say the same of their teachers.
Hazel may walk away from AI. But Amira, describing a pain in her side to a chatbot, may not, and the odds are nobody in her house knows she’s doing it.
Up until recently, anyone into fitness probably had a smartwatch. These tiny computers would sit on your wrist, track health metrics, and also show notifications from your phone to help you stay connected. Well, that has changed recently. With Instagram trying to suck all of my time and WhatsApp becoming a home for advertising, I’ve found myself not wanting to wear a smartwatch anymore. It just doesn’t let me stay in the moment, and every time it buzzed, I’d instinctively pick up my phone. Apparently, I’m not the only one dealing with smartphone fatigue, which is exactly why screenless wearables have taken off. These retain all the workout features of a smartwatch, sometimes even more, and remove the annoying parts like the screen.
Surely, you’ve heard about Whoop. It’s been the screenless tracker to get, worn by stars like Ronaldo and LeBron James. The thing is, Whoop costs a minimum of $199 every year. And without a subscription, you can’t even access your data. There is also Google’s Fitbit Air, but it’s not available in India yet. So, when Noise, the guys I bought my first smart band from a decade ago, came up with a screenless fitness tracker, the Rep Band, I was quite excited. It costs ₹9,999, and you don’t have to pay for any subscription. The band tracks many of the same metrics, such as heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, HRV, sleep tracking, and more. And if you’re thinking about ditching your smartwatch, don’t worry. I’ve been testing the Rep Band for almost a month and have taken it to various workout sessions.
Noise REP Band
Hisan Kidwai
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Summary
The Noise REP Band is a very competent take on the screenless fitness tracker game, without the predatory feel of Whoop’s subscription model. Everything you need is included in the price, and I’d be keeping it as my primary workout tracker for several reasons. The biggest reason is its accurate workout tracking, backed by genuinely useful insights into recovery and sleep. The app presents all this data in a very digestible form, especially the three scores, which are great.
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Design & Comfort
Let’s get one thing straight: the Whoop and Noise Rep are made for different people. The Whoop is for professional athletes, while Noise Rep is for people like me. Someone who goes to the gym pretty regularly, tries to be fit, and wants a general overview of their health. Keeping that in mind, I love the Noise Rep band’s design. It’s similar to a Whoop in that there is a fabric band that wraps around your wrist. Up top, you get a stainless-steel frame that contains the tracking puck and looks surprisingly premium.
You can play with different strap colors, with Orange being the boldest. I used the beige band for the majority of my testing. Yes, it does get dirty after a week of use, but you can just wash it, and it’ll be like new. What is better than the Whoop, though, is the closing mechanism. The Rep band uses a standard Velcro mechanism, which is orders of magnitude better than fiddling with the metal clasp on the Whoop.
The good stuff continues in comfort. The Rep band weighs just 27g. It was a lot more comfortable than wearing a smartwatch, and better at the whole wear-it-and-forget-it idea. It is a little wider than the Fitbit Air, but I’m not complaining. Like the Air, the Rep band has a haptic motor that vibrates when you start or stop a workout. I’d have loved to see a haptic alarm too. On the side, there’s a little LED indicator that lights up when the band is charging or when you put it on.
Features
The Noise Rep tracks almost everything you’d expect from a modern fitness tracker. These include steps, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), breathing rate, resting heart rate, body temperature, stress, calories, and workouts. Support for blood oxygen is coming soon. Since there is no screen to distract you, everything is managed by the Noise app. While I do agree it looks a bit like the Whoop app, I’m not complaining. It’s a very slick, modern take that shows all fitness data without feeling cramped and is genuinely intuitive in some ways.
Up top, there are three scores: Sleep, Recovery, and Effort. Sleep tracks how well you slept last night, taking into account stages like REM and deep sleep, as well as whether you were actually asleep or simply lying in bed. This data is presented as a timeline, allowing you to better understand what happened. The app combines that data into a score, then uses AI to explain what went well and what could have been better. The band also measures your skin temperature variability, which can be a good indicator of when you might get ill.
Next to the Sleep score is Recovery. It refers to how ready your body is to take on strain the next day. You can use it to plan the perfect time to hit a bench PR. There is even an Effort score. It measures the load your body takes on during the day with workouts or walking, and gives you the ideal range of how much you should push. Underneath that, you’ll find your vitals and other important metrics. You can also log in water intake, but there is no food logger, so keep that in mind.
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Workout Section & Overall App Experience
Workouts have a different section. Here, the headline metric is Stamina, which, as the name suggests, estimates how much energy your body has left for the day. The higher the number, the better. The actual workout options range from essential walking, trekking, and running to sports like Cricket, Football, swimming, Pilates, Yoga, Strength training, and much more. I stuck with Strength Training since that’s pretty much all that I do. The band also measures your overall training load. Lastly, Training Effect summarizes what each workout did for your body. All super helpful stuff.
Where things do take a bit of a downturn is in the overall app experience. Don’t get me wrong, Noise has done a lot of clever work, but the app still lacks polish. For example, workouts and general health data take time to sync, and I often have to pull down to refresh the home screen multiple times before the data syncs. There have been several instances when I clicked on something and a “Please Wait” pop-up appeared. It usually goes away, but sometimes the app gets stuck and requires a force close.
Workout Tracking
All the bickering about the features and bugs aside, workout tracking is the most important aspect of a fitness band. And yes, the Noise Rep band is pretty good at it. For context, I used it alongside my Galaxy Watch for a few different workout sessions. During those sessions, the band stayed within a 5% margin of error for heart rate. Calorie estimations were pretty much on par, and even the steps were counted equally. The Rep band does not have GPS support built in. It can, however, use your phone’s GPS to log that data.
Sleep tracking was another pleasant surprise. I found the Rep band to be slightly more accurate in measuring actual sleep duration, including the few bathroom breaks I took during the night. It knows when I’m actually sleeping or just lying in bed restless. One night, I woke up for a bathroom break, and just couldn’t sleep again. The next day’s sleep score dropped to 67 (my sleep scores are usually around 80), which reflected exactly how I felt. The band suggested I take it easy at the gym that day, which I did. Battery life lasted me a full week of continuous use. You do get an alert in the app when the charge is below 20%, which is when I’d recommend putting the band on the included charger.
Verdict
At ₹9,999, or ₹8,999 if you buy early, the Noise REP Band did surpass my expectations. It’s a very competent take on the screenless fitness tracker game, in a way that doesn’t seem predatory like Whoop’s subscription model. Everything you need is included in the price, and I’d be keeping it as my primary workout tracker for several reasons. The biggest reason is its accurate workout tracking, backed by genuinely useful recovery and sleep insights. The app presents all this data in a very digestible form, especially the three scores, which are great. Is it perfect, though? Nope. The Noise app still needs some work on app sync times and random bugs that are definitely annoying. Blood oxygen monitoring is also coming soon, so we’d have to wait and see how that pans out.
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