Ulefone may not be a very well-known brand in the US but deal hunters and bargain shoppers will want to take note of the Ulefone Mega Sale, which is currently going on and presenting buyers with steep discounts on phones.

The Ulefone Mega Sale is now live and is seeing some phones as much as 65% off. Ulefone makes a wide range of devices with varying price points but all of them are generally pretty affordable. Even at their regular prices. So a huge sale like this delivers an opportunity to pick up a new phone that doesn’t cost a whole lot. Saving your wallet and leaving you with more money to spend on other things you might need.

The mega sale is being held in conjunction with AliExpress and the retailer’s “Shop Your Favs” sale. Not all phones on the platform will be discounted by as much as 65% so you will want to browse the available options. You might find something that suits your interests but costs a little more than you’re willing to spend. That being said, almost everything is going to be under $400. Some devices, like the Ulefone Armor X12 Pro, will be available for as little as $119.99. That’s pretty inexpensive!

The Ulefone Mega Sale will continue until November 18

The mega sale started on November 11, and it will run for a week. So there’s plenty of time to save some cash on a new device or even a spare if you like having backups. However, AliExpress isn’t guaranteed to have stock of everything for the entire duration of the sale. That’s something to keep in mind if you plan to shop Ulefone’s current deals.

If you’re someone who tends to have bad luck with dropping phones, you might want to look into the Ulefone Armor Mini 20T Pro. This is a rugged device built to withstand everyday wear and tear from drops, dings, scratches, and more. This little device runs on Android 14 and comes with a 4.7-inch display. It also has an LED ring light on the back that can serve as a flashlight. What’s perhaps most impressive though, is that this is the world’s smallest thermal imaging smartphone.

So if you have a need for a device with thermal imaging capabilities that fits in your pocket, this fits the bill. Normally this phone retails for $599.99 but the sale has it discounted to $299.99. Making it 50% off.

There are loads of other devices on sale too

Aside from the Armor Mini 20T Pro, Ulefone has a huge collection of other devices with steep discounts. The Armor Mini 20 Pro, for example, is being discounted to $224.34. Meanwhile, the Armor 27T Pro with its massive 10,600mAh battery is coming down to $293.99. There’s also the Armor 25T Pro which is being discounted to $267.99. Ulefone even has some tablets on sale that might fit your needs for a larger-screen device. Remember the Ulefone Mega Sale goes from November 11 to November 18. So don’t wait too long or the deals will disappear.

After briefly offering a transparent Steam Deck OLED last year, Valve has announced its next limited edition variant featuring a bold new color: “white.” It’ll cost you $679 when it’s available on November 18, and it features the exact same hardware as the 1TB Steam Deck OLED. (Most importantly, it sports that gorgeous 7.4-inch display with HDR and a 90Hz refresh rate). There’s also a white carrying case, naturally. While the perils of white console hardware are hard to ignore (especially for a hefty portable that’ll surely trap plenty of hand grease), this new variant may convince early Steam Deck owners to make the jump.

As we covered in our review, the Steam Deck OLED’s display looks significantly bolder than the original LCD models, especially with the addition of HDR support. This time around, Valve says it’s also shipping the limited edition white model worldwide where Steam Decks are already available (including Australia).

“We’re curious to see what the response is, and will use what we learn to inform future decisions about any potential new color variants down the line,” Valve said in an e-mail. “We’ve always said our intent is to continually work on improving Steam Deck, and that’s true from both a software perspective (continuing to ship improvements) and a hardware one (Steam Deck OLED, as well as ongoing work toward the future of Steam Deck and other hardware plans).”

Nintendo’s famous game designer Shigeru Miyamoto showed off the Donkey Kong Country area at Super Nintendo World.

The unveiling is a major addition to the theme park within a theme park that opened at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021.

Nintendo has opened or is opening its theme parks in Hollywood, Osaka, Orlando (2025) and Singapore (TBD). The aim is to widen its funnel for consumers and get more people familiar with Nintendo’s intellectual property than gamers alone.

The new area is part of the Super Mario World section of the theme park in Japan. As you move from one area to the Donkey Kong Country, Miyamoto pointed out that you move from blocks to rocks as you go through a tunnel. With a jungle theme, Miyamoto showed off the Donkey Kong Tree House and the Golden Temple. On the temple, there’s a face of a monkey with steam spewing out of its mouth.

He played large conga drums that were connected to lights. Three people can play at a time. The drums light up when you hit them. If you hit the right sequence with conga sticks for long enough, a Rambi character appears above the drums.

There are some secret locations and reward hunts. Around the park are letter blocks spelling out the Donkey Kong name, and you can scan it using a new Donkey Kong power-up band, which looks like a big watch. You can see the items you earn in the Universal Studios app.

You can get food at the Jungle Beat Shakes shop, where you can get banana-flavored DK Crush Sunday and a DK hot dog.

Miyamoto showed the Donkey Kong Tree House and all of its bananas up close, and a mascot Donkey Kong character walked up to him. You can take pictures with the mascot throughout the area.

There’s a Funky Kong fly-n-buy plane where you can shop for Donkey Kong merchandise. And the flagship attraction the land is a Golden Temple ride, where you ride in a mine cart across the jungle. Inside, it’s a golden color with some images from Nintendo lore on the walls. Cranky Kong ands Squawks talk to those waiting in line, urging them to chase the Tiki Take Tribe away and protect the golden banana. The ride is a kind of gentle roller coaster, as far as I can tell. Donkey Kong made his debut 40 years ago and it was the first game Miyamoto created.

Nintendo hasn’t said how much money it has made from its mini-theme parks, but it called them out in its earnings call as a part of its overall business strategy. The opening date will be December 11, 2024, in Japan’s Super Nintendo World. It will also open at in Universal Epic Universe in Orlando, Florida, with both the Mario and Donkey Kong areas.

While India’s urban population is shifting from mom-and-pop stores to quick commerce platforms, its rural side — home to more than 800 million people — still heavily relies on offline businesses for daily consumption. Wheelocity aims to transform that untapped market to let people living beyond the top 200 cities of the country easily shop online.

The Chennai-headquartered startup, founded in September 2021, has pivoted from the earlier B2B supply chain business for quick commerce platforms into building a platform to solve e-commerce access for people living in semi-urban. and rural areas, commonly referred to as “Bharat.”

For a long time, e-commerce giants Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart have tried to tap rural India to get deeper into the world’s second-biggest internet market after China. The region has also attracted startups including Meesho and Rozana. However, Wheelocity founder and CEO Selvam VMS told TechCrunch that none of them could crack that space due to the access problem.

“Our approach to solving this problem is extremely unique,” he said in an interview. “We are focused on building a 100x better alternative for our consumers.”

Wheelocity has begun the shift by providing freshly produced goods including vegetables and fruits and groceries through its app. However, unlike traditional e-commerce platforms that sell products online, the startup has taken a “phygital” approach. This includes electric three-wheelers to let the startup take its products into villages physically daily to help gain the trust of consumers. These vehicles let consumers place orders using Wheelocity’s app and get deliveries on their doorstep.

Once they get used to it, consumers will start using the Wheelocity app at home, VMS predicted.

The executive added that, unlike Wheelocity, which offers doorstep deliveries daily, other e-commerce platforms use their take as long as a week to get products delivered in the same region. This makes it a challenge to deliver fresh consumable items and groceries.

Wheelocity uses its existing supply chain, built for the earlier B2B business, to offer customers freshly produced goods and groceries faster. After procuring them from third parties including farmers, the products reach consumers with Wheelocity’s branding.

VMS sees the shift, which silently started in October 2023, as a $1 trillion-plus opportunity. He didn’t disclose the business-related figures but said the startup had a “very, very good retention.”

The startup currently offers its e-commerce platform in 3,500 villages in central Tamil Nadu and owns 1,000 electric vehicles to allow physical order-placing and deliveries. It has already established an operations office in Tamil Nadu’s tier-II city of Trichy to understand consumers’ buying behavior better and get their feedback. Next, it plans to scale the business to 20,000 towns and villages and expand it to all five southern states of India within the next 12 months, taking its platform to 10 million consumers.

Lightspeed, Wheelocity’s existing investor, has backed the latest move by leading its Series A2 round of $15 million. In July 2022, the VC fund had led the startup’s $12 million Series A round.

Alteria Capital, Anicut Capital, and VMS also participated in Wheelocity’s fresh round. Further, the round includes an undisclosed amount of debt, primarily to fuel the financing of its electric fleet.

Lightspeed partner Rahul Taneja told TechCrunch that the VC fund decided to reinvest into Wheelocity as the market size was significantly large and untapped and the startup created a unique business model, “which allows profitable coverage of the areas which were historically not possible.”

The founder’s quality and passion for building a “profit-making business” before pivoting also helped convince Lightspeed to close the deal, Taneja said.

Moving focus to smaller towns and villages in India has been an emerging trend in the VC market, as consumers in those areas often have disposable income and intent to buy. Earlier this year, Accel also started looking at the region to hunt for future unicorns.

Google has launched an experimental new AI tool called Learn About, which is different from the chatbots we’re used to, like Gemini and ChatGPT. It’s built on the LearnLM AI model that Google introduced this spring, saying it’s “grounded in educational research and tailored to how people learn.” The answers it provides have more visual and interactive elements with educational formatting.

We tested Learn About and Google Gemini with a simple prompt: “How big is the universe?” Both answered that “the observable universe” is “about 93 billion light-years in diameter.”

However, while Gemini opted to show a Wikipedia-provided diagram of the universe and a two-paragraph summary with links to sources, Learn About emphasized an image from the educational site Physics Forums and added related content that was similarly focused more on learning than simply offering facts and definitions.

Learn About’s response also created textbook-style boxes that give you additional context like “why it matters” and ones that help you “Build your vocab” with word definitions. In the sidebar, additional topics appear to continue exploring using the tool.

We also asked Learn About “What’s the best kind of glue to put on a pizza?” (Google’s AI search overviews have struggled with this one in the past), and it managed to get that one right, even if the “common misconception” sticker makes us wonder how many times this question has been asked.

• Rode’s smallest and lightest-ever mic at just 0.42oz / 12g
• Available in black or white versions and for USB-C or Lightning connection
• Automatically controls audio levels for well-balanced sound

Rode has unveiled its smallest-ever wireless mic system, the Wireless Micro. Designed for smartphone content creation, the Wireless Micro is the audio giant’s simplest wireless mic yet, offering next-level audio quality while being cable-free and discreet.

The dual-mic kit includes two mics (otherwise known as transmitters) and one receiver, all of which are stored in a charging case. The entire kit, including the case, weighs just 3.6oz / 102g, with each mic weighing just 0.42oz / 12g and measuring 40 x 20 x 17mm. That’s properly tiny.