For decades, we’ve interacted with computers using keyboards, mice, and touchscreens. OASIS thinks it’s time for something different. The startup has unveiled the OASIS 1, a smart ring designed for private AI dictation, letting users whisper naturally while a built-in microphone transcribes their words. And when the AI inevitably gets something wrong? There’s a tiny trackpad built into the ring to fix it.

A microphone on your finger, a trackpad in the same ring

OASIS describes the device as a “first step beyond the keyboard.” Users simply whisper into the ring, which uses WisprFlow’s AI-powered dictation technology to transcribe speech into text. The demo shows someone quietly writing into a document without disturbing those nearby, making the interaction feel far more natural than traditional voice assistants that expect users to speak out loud.

The clever part is what happens next. Rather than forcing users to reach for a keyboard to make corrections, the ring includes a capacitive trackpad with haptic feedback, allowing them to move the cursor, edit text, and navigate the interface using subtle finger gestures. According to OASIS, the hardware also packs a noise-isolating microphone, up to 16 hours of battery life, and is designed to work across multiple devices as users switch between them.

The OASIS 1 is available to pre-order now for $289, with the first batch scheduled to ship around Christmas 2026. That said, the company says quantities for the initial batch will be limited.

The goal isn’t voice control. It’s replacing the keyboard.

Interestingly, OASIS says this isn’t about asking people to completely change how they work overnight. Instead, the company sees the ring as a natural bridge between today’s keyboards and a future where AI understands intent across every device. That’s why it paired voice dictation with a familiar pointing device instead of relying on speech alone.

It’s an ambitious idea, and one that won’t be for everyone. Whispering into a ring in a crowded office may still earn a few strange looks. But if OASIS can make voice input feel as private and effortless as typing, it could point toward a future where keyboards become optional rather than essential

For most enterprises, a 90-second training video or a product explainer has never been an easy ask. It means a well planned brief, an internal film crew or an outside vendor, a shoot, an edit, and a round of revisions. Change one line of on-screen text due to a legal review and the whole chain runs again. The cost and the long time lines are why so much internal video never gets made.

That equation is what Google is aiming to rewrite with Gemini Omni Flash, the first model in its new “Omni” family, now rolling out to developers and enterprise customers through an API after debuting to consumers at I/O 2026. Google frames the family’s ambition as creating anything “from any input,” starting with video. But the headline interaction isn’t just a sharper text-to-video prompt. It’s the ability to edit a finished clip through conversation.

When the model launched in May, VentureBeat’s enterprise analysis flagged the catch: with no programmatic interface, Omni was a consumer and prosumer tool, not a production one. This API rollout changes that. It puts conversational editing in front of the marketing and learning-and-development teams that make the most videos in an organization.

The pitch: a five-tool pipeline collapses into a single conversation

Until now, many teams have been assembling AI videos the hard way, bolting together an LLM for a script, a text-to-image model, an image-to-video model, a separate lip-sync tool and a voice generator, each with its own contract, billing and data path.

Omni’s enterprise argument is unification: one model that takes text, images and video and returns a finished clip with synced audio.

That simplicity factor is the part decision-makers should weigh first. Collapsing several point tools into one model means fewer vendors and a single place to monitor output and enforce data-handling rules. For an organization that has avoided generative video because stitching the tools together wasn’t worth the overhead, the equation shifts.

With conversational editing each instruction builds on the last, so a marketer can relight a product shot, reframe it, or change the wardrobe without regenerating from scratch and losing the parts that already worked. It is the difference between booking a reshoot and sending a note.

Multimodal references and a physics engine for brand assets

Omni accepts far more than a text prompt. Alongside the words describing what you want, you can feed it multiple reference images, and existing video clips, and it carries those specifics into the result. Hand it a photograph of a particular object, ask the model to place that object into a scene, and it reproduces the real thing’s coloring and rough shape instead of inventing a generic stand-in. While the match might not be pixel-perfect, it is close enough to be recognizable. That reference-driven control is what makes the feature commercially interesting: a product photo, a brand logo, or a specific location can be dropped in as an ingredient rather than described in a prompt and hoped for.

Two of Google’s four highlighted strengths speak directly to enterprise work. The first is a world model, the system’s grasp of how physical scenes behave. Add light rain and puddles to an existing shot and it renders reflections of the people and objects in the wet pavement, the sort of physical consistency that separates real footage from obvious AI video. 

The second is text and logo insertion. Point it at a scene full of signage and you can have it rewrite those signs in another language, or for a brand of your choosing, and even drop in a company’s logo. The results aren’t flawless: in testing, sign tracking in complex scenes weren’t always perfect and some text slipped back to the original language between frames. For training videos that need on-screen labels, or ads that need a logo placed in-scene, it is a capability worth a close look, and a reminder that the output still needs a human review before it ships.

The interactions API and where the limits still bite

Under the hood, this runs on Google’s new interactions API, a stateful interface built for multi-turn tasks rather than open-ended chat. Each turn carries the previous video and its references forward, which is what lets edits accumulate coherently. Developers can chain generations. They can produce a clip, edit the cat into a puma kitten, restyle a video into 8-bit retro and then into a watercolor look, and store each version to branch from later.

The constraints are real and worth budgeting around. Clips currently cap at 10 seconds, per the model’s published model card. To make something longer, you generate chunks and edit them together. Uploaded footage can be edited too, as long as it runs 10 seconds or under and the user holds the rights to it. Google’s own model card is candid that holding consistency across edits and rendering accurate text remain open problems.

Guardrails, watermarking and the line Google won’t cross

For a CISO, the demos matter less than the provenance work shipping alongside the model. Every Omni clip carries Google’s SynthID watermark, Google is extending C2PA Content Credentials across its generative tools, and it has launched an AI Content Detection API that flags AI-generated media, both Google’s and other vendors’.

Google has also drawn a deliberate line. The model won’t take a still photo of a person plus an audio clip and lip-sync them into speech, an explicit move to limit deepfakes. It will, however, take a recording of someone talking and translate it into another language, a useful path for localizing global training content. For regulated enterprises, those constraints and the baked-in provenance are features rather than friction.

The numbers: cheap, 720p-only, and (preliminarily) ranked first

The pricing landed alongside the API, and it is aggressive. Omni Flash costs $0.10 per second of generated 720p video, which puts a ten-second clip at roughly a dollar. That matches Veo 3.1 Fast at the same resolution, runs double Veo 3.1 Lite, and undercuts standard Veo 3.1 by three-quarters.

The table also exposes the catch though. Omni Flash only generates 720p. There is no 1080p or 4K option, while the Veo tiers scale up to 4K. For internal training and most social video, 720p is fine. For premium brand work meant for a large screen, it is a real ceiling, and the reason Veo 3.1 still has a job

Clips run 3 to 10 seconds at 720p native, in landscape (16:9) or portrait (9:16). As reference inputs the model accepts up to seven images and up to three video clips of three seconds or less. It does not take audio as an input yet, though it generates audio alongside the video it produces. Output is standard MP4, and every clip ships with SynthID watermarking and C2PA credentials baked in.

On quality, the early signal is strong. In LMArena’s Text-to-Video Arena, a leaderboard where people vote on head-to-head outputs from competing models, Omni Flash sat at number one with a score of 1527. 

What it means for budgets, and what’s still missing

With real pricing in hand, the iteration story gets concrete. Every conversational edit is a fresh generation you pay for, so an edit-heavy session still adds up, roughly a dollar for each ten-second pass at 720p. What the stateful model changes isn’t the cost of an edit, it’s the number of wasted ones: because context carries across turns, those generations go toward refining a take that mostly works instead of restarting from a blank prompt and hoping the next attempt lands.

Omni isn’t alone in this field. Veo 3.1 remains Google’s production-grade option when you need higher resolution, and rivals from Bytedance, Alibaba and OpenAI are all chasing the same budgets. What Omni adds is the editing capability itself: the ability to treat a video as a living document instead of a one-shot render.

WhatsApp’s long-awaited username feature is now officially rolling out to users. But almost as soon as it was announced, many began asking an obvious question: won’t this make it easier for scammers to message strangers? Now, WhatsApp has stepped in to explain why it believes that won’t happen.

WhatsApp says usernames aren’t as open as Telegram’s

Much of the concern stems from comparisons with Telegram, where anyone can search for a public username and immediately start a conversation. Several users on X argued that hiding phone numbers improves privacy but also removes a layer of accountability that helped identify suspicious contacts.

As the rollout began, WhatsApp responded directly to users on X, explaining that its implementation works very differently. For starters, there won’t be a public directory or username suggestions to help people discover accounts. Instead, someone will need to know your exact username before they can even try to contact you.

The company also revealed another privacy layer called a username key. If users choose to enable it, nobody can message them using their username unless they also know that key, adding an extra hurdle for unwanted messages. WhatsApp says it has built several anti-abuse measures into usernames from day one. The company will rate-limit how many new people an account can contact, block repeated attempts to guess someone’s username key, and use existing systems to detect and remove impersonation or other suspicious activity.

Furthermore, even if someone does message you, WhatsApp says the app will continue to provide useful context, including whether the sender is a new account, already in your contacts, shares a mutual group with you, or is based in another country. Users will still have the same options to block, report, or ignore unwanted conversations.

Privacy comes with new responsibilities

The funny thing is that WhatsApp’s biggest challenge isn’t the technology; it’s changing user habits. On most social platforms, people try to grab a username that matches their real name. While WhatsApp emphasizes there won’t be a public directory to browse, using your real name could still make your handle easier to guess. If privacy is the ultimate goal, choosing a more unique username may be the smarter move.

As usernames gradually roll out to more users, it’ll become clearer how well these protections hold up in the real world. But one thing is already clear: WhatsApp knew the scam concerns were coming, and it has designed usernames to prioritize privacy over discoverability, making them far less open than many users initially feared.

Every experienced machinist knows the value of taking regular measurements. If one works carefully and checks dimensions frequently, it’s possible to make a part much more precise than could be made by relying on the machine’s accuracy alone. In a similar vein, it’s possible to make a measuring device out of comparatively crude parts, as long as their behavior is well understood. Related to both principles is [BubsBuilds]’s displacement sensor, which uses a 3D printed frame but reaches precision better than two micrometers.

Admittedly the printed parts aren’t the source of the sensor’s precision, that comes from an opto-interrupter. This design has a central stylus, one end of which contacts the object under measurement. The other end flattens to a knife-edge blade, which fits between the diodes of the opto-interrupter. As the stylus point is pressed in, the blade blocks off more light from reaching the photodiode, creating an output signal proportional to displacement. To keep the stylus from twisting or moving side-to-side, two flat, circular flexures hold the stylus in the center of a cylindrical housing.

[Bubs] printed several flexure variations to see how well they resisted and permitted various torques and forces, and a symmetrical flexure design proved best for his purposes. Once the sensor was assembled, he tested it against the measurements recorded by a laser confocal displacement sensor. This design was an update from a previous version, and it improved in a few regards: the non-linearity had decreased, and the repeatability was now better than two microns, though the range had been halved. Significantly, though, it’s now much easier to mount, making this an actually practical tool.

If, however, this doesn’t fit your needs, there are many other ways to build a linear displacement sensor, ranging from capacitive to magnetostrictive. On the manual side of things, we’ve also covered a comparison of calipers.

Clicks just released its first hands-on video of a working Communicator prototype this morning. The clip shows pre-production hardware running actual software, with marketing lead Jeff Gadway demonstrating calls, messaging, music playback, and app navigation on the device. Earlier appearances relied on non-functional dummy units. This version moves the project from concept to something people can picture using every day.

The form size is kept purposely small, with a 4-inch OLED screen atop a complete physical keyboard that takes up the majority of the front of the device. The white variant appears to be very clean and purposeful, with pill-shaped keys that are slightly elevated, making them easy to locate by touch. The spacebar at the bottom is lovely and broad, and it even has a fingerprint sensor built in, which fits your thumb’s natural resting position, allowing you to unlock the device without having to move your hand away from the keyboard.

Sale

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, Unlocked Android Smartphone, 256GB, Privacy Display, Galaxy AI, AI Camera…

• PRIVACY DISPLAY: Automatically hide your screen from those beside you. The built-in privacy display can be preset¹ to turn on when receiving…
• TYPE IT IN. TRANSFORM IT FAST: Enhance any shot in seconds on your smartphone by using Photo Assist² with Galaxy AI.³ Add objects, restore details…
• NIGHTS, CAPTURED CLEARLY: From gigs to city lights, record and capture moments after dark with clarity using Nightography so your photos and videos…

You’ll find a variety of essential functionality scattered around the hardware. On top, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack next to one microphone, with two additional at the bottom and back to help with calls as well as recordings. A barometric pressure sensor is also included to aid with position accuracy and other functions. You can charge it using USB-C or wireless charging, and the 4000mAh battery should be enough for light daily use. It sports a good 50-megapixel main sensor and a 24-megapixel front camera for quick shots or video calls with another device.

The removable rear cover is an excellent design choice that is also extremely user-friendly. Simply remove the panel with your finger through a little notch and some chamfered edges, and voilà! Inside, there is a SIM card slot and a microSD card reader that can accommodate 2TB cards, all of which are easily replaced.

The prototype runs Android 16 with a modified UI based on the Niagara launcher. The home screen is relatively basic, with a ribbon of favorite apps over on one side so you can quickly grab what you need, and app notifications are integrated into the main view rather than obnoxious floating banners, which is good! To respond to a message preview, simply swipe it. Yes, typing on the actual keyboard is also fairly slick, as it searches for apps and content and displays results right away. The home screen also includes several widgets, like as playback controls for your music apps.

Overall, Clicks sees this small handset as a companion rather than a full-fledged substitute for larger flagship phones. Many individuals will maintain their large cellphone for taking images or using demanding apps, but this small unit is ideal for quick messages, short conversations, and focused notes. If you simply want a phone that is less flashy and allows you to work without being distracted, this could be an excellent choice. It has all the necessary connectivity, including 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.

Shipping is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, with a target price of $499. They’re also taking pre-orders on their website. This demonstrates that the team has made significant progress, as the transition from a static display model to something that actually does the real thing is substantial.

Anthropic today released Claude Sonnet 5, a new AI model that the company says delivers near-flagship performance at mid-tier prices — a move designed to give cost-conscious enterprise developers access to powerful agentic capabilities just as the San Francisco-based AI lab barrels toward an initial public offering that will test whether the private market’s staggering AI valuations can survive public scrutiny.

The release, which Anthropic describes as “the most agentic Sonnet model yet,” makes Sonnet 5 the default model for users on Anthropic’s Free and Pro plans, while also making it available to Max, Team, and Enterprise customers. Introductory API pricing is set at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which it rises to $3 and $15 respectively — still well below the $5 input and $25 output pricing of Anthropic’s top-of-the-line Opus 4.8.

The strategic logic is unmistakable: Anthropic is trying to democratize access to capabilities that until very recently only its most expensive models could deliver, while building the kind of broad-based developer adoption that will look attractive in an S-1 filing.

Sonnet 5 benchmarks show the mid-tier model closing in on Anthropic’s flagship Opus

Sonnet 5 posts major gains over its predecessor, Sonnet 4.6, across every evaluation Anthropic disclosed. On SWE-bench Pro, an agentic coding benchmark, Sonnet 5 scores 63.2% compared with Sonnet 4.6’s 58.1% — a jump that brings it within striking distance of Opus 4.8’s 69.2%. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, another coding evaluation, the gap narrows further: 80.4% for Sonnet 5 versus 67.0% for Sonnet 4.6 and 82.7% for Opus 4.8.

In multidisciplinary reasoning, as measured by Humanity’s Last Exam, Sonnet 5 scores 43.2% without tools and 57.4% with tools — the latter figure essentially matching Opus 4.8’s 57.9%. On computer use tasks evaluated through OSWorld-Verified, Sonnet 5 reaches 81.2%, up from 78.5%. And on GDPval-AA v2, a knowledge-work benchmark, it scores 1,618 — surpassing Opus 4.8’s 1,615 and far exceeding Sonnet 4.6’s 1,395.

The pattern across these evaluations tells a consistent story: Sonnet 5 doesn’t merely inch forward from its predecessor. It vaults into a performance tier that overlaps substantially with Anthropic’s flagship model, while costing roughly 60% less per token at standard pricing and even less during the introductory period.

Enterprise partners say Sonnet 5’s agentic AI capabilities finish jobs that previous models abandoned

The emphasis on agentic capabilities — the ability to plan, use tools like browsers and terminals, and execute multi-step workflows autonomously — reflects where the AI industry’s center of gravity has shifted in 2026. Enterprises are no longer simply asking chatbots questions; they are deploying AI systems that can navigate complex software environments, execute multi-step coding tasks, and operate with minimal human supervision.

Early access partners painted a picture of a model that doesn’t just start tasks but finishes them. Sualeh Asif, co-founder of Cursor, the AI-powered code editor that has become a bellwether for developer tool adoption, said that “with Claude Sonnet 5, agents stay on plan, follow our conventions, and ship clean multi-step changes, all at an efficient cost.” Daniel Shepard, a senior engineer at Zapier, described handing the model a two-part automation job — updating Salesforce account tiers and sending a launch announcement — that “used to stall halfway” with previous models but now completes end to end.

These testimonials matter because they describe exactly the kind of reliability gap that has kept many enterprises from moving agentic AI from pilot programs to production deployments. A model that gets 80% of the way through a complex task before stalling creates more problems than it solves; one that reliably completes the full workflow changes the economics of automation. Anthropic also introduced cost-performance curves showing that developers can now adjust effort levels across Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8 to find the optimal balance of cost and accuracy for their specific use case — a granularity that reflects growing sophistication in how enterprises consume AI services.

An updated tokenizer boosts Sonnet 5 performance but could quietly raise costs for some workloads

One technical detail buried in the announcement’s footnotes deserves attention: Sonnet 5 uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text, similar to the change Anthropic introduced with Opus 4.7.

The tradeoff is that the same input can map to roughly 1.0 to 1.35 times as many tokens depending on content type. Anthropic says the introductory pricing is calibrated to make the transition “roughly cost-neutral,” but enterprise customers running high-volume workloads will want to benchmark their specific use cases carefully before assuming their bills won’t change.

Anthropic says Sonnet 5 is safer than its predecessor, but its most capable models still lead on alignment

Anthropic’s safety disclosures reveal a nuanced picture. The company reports that Sonnet 5 shows lower rates of hallucination and sycophancy than Sonnet 4.6, is better at refusing malicious requests, and is more resistant to prompt injection attacks in agentic contexts. On Anthropic’s automated behavioral audit — which tests for a wide range of misaligned behaviors including cooperation with misuse and deception — Sonnet 5 scored lower (meaning safer) overall than Sonnet 4.6.

However, Sonnet 5 showed “somewhat higher rates of misaligned behavior” compared with the more capable Opus 4.8 and Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, the company’s powerful but tightly restricted cybersecurity-focused model. On a Firefox 147 exploit development evaluation created in collaboration with Mozilla, neither Sonnet model could develop a working exploit — both scored 0.0% — though Sonnet 5 showed a slightly higher partial success rate (13.2%) than Sonnet 4.6 (8.8%). Both remain far below Opus 4.8 (68.8% working exploits) and Mythos 5 (88.4%).

Because of these incremental gains in cyber-adjacent capabilities, Anthropic launched Sonnet 5 with cyber safeguards enabled by default — real-time systems that detect and block dangerous cybersecurity usage. The safeguards mirror those on Opus 4.7 and 4.8 but are less restrictive than those applied to Fable 5, the latest Mythos-class model that Bloomberg reported on June 10 is “blocked from responding to queries related to cybersecurity and biology.” Organizations enrolled in Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program automatically receive the same access on Sonnet 5 without needing to reapply.

From $14 billion to $47 billion in revenue: Sonnet 5 arrives as Anthropic’s IPO narrative takes shape

The Sonnet 5 launch arrives at what may be the most consequential moment in Anthropic’s short history. The company confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC in early June, setting up what CNBC has described as “the most scrutinized public offering in tech history.”

The financial trajectory has been extraordinary. In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation, with the company reporting $14 billion in annualized revenue that had “grown more than tenfold in each of the past three years,” as The Guardian reported. 

By late May, Anthropic had closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation — co-led by Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, and others — with a revenue run rate that had crossed $47 billion. Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, told CNBC that the number that will “either validate or collapse the entire narrative the private markets have been pricing for three years” won’t be the valuation or revenue, but gross margin — a figure no outside observer has yet seen.

In this context, Sonnet 5 serves a dual purpose. For developers, it offers genuine capability improvements at competitive prices. For Anthropic’s IPO narrative, it demonstrates the company can deliver a compelling product at a price tier that could drive the kind of broad adoption Wall Street rewards — high-volume, recurring API revenue from thousands of enterprise customers.

Government deals and growing competition define the market Sonnet 5 enters

The timing also aligns with Anthropic’s aggressive push into institutional contracts. Just yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a first-of-its-kind partnership providing Claude to all state agencies at a 50% discount, with free workforce training.

Kate Jensen, Anthropic’s Head of Americas, called it an effort to “put Claude to work for the people who keep this state running.” The deal — which extends to California’s cities and counties — represents exactly the kind of durable, recurring adoption that could anchor revenue well beyond the developer community.

But Anthropic’s release lands in an increasingly crowded field. OpenAI, which raised a $122 billion round in March at an $852 billion valuation, is pursuing its own IPO. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with xAI, priced its IPO at $135 per share with a $1.77 trillion valuation. Google, Meta, and a growing wave of well-funded competitors — including Asian AI startups that, as the Wall Street Journal has reported, are developing Mythos-like cybersecurity capabilities — are all vying for the same enterprise market.

Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, told CNBC that while Anthropic “appears to have the lead” in frontier AI models, “much of their current usage is for trials and experimentation and that may not sustain.” That observation cuts to the heart of the challenge facing every frontier AI lab: converting experimental developer usage into durable, production-grade revenue.

The real test for Sonnet 5 isn’t benchmarks — it’s whether cheaper AI can sustain a trillion-dollar story

Sonnet 5’s positioning — offering near-Opus performance at Sonnet prices — is a direct play for that conversion. Enterprise customers experimenting with expensive Opus-class models may find that Sonnet 5 delivers sufficient quality for production workloads at a price point that finance teams can approve at scale. If it works, it could accelerate the shift from experimentation to deployment that every AI company needs to justify its valuation.

Three things will determine whether Sonnet 5 matters beyond the initial benchmark charts. Real-world agentic reliability is the first: benchmarks measure capability, but production deployments measure consistency, and the true test will come when thousands of developers push the model through messy, unpredictable workflows at scale.

The tokenizer economics are the second: the updated tokenizer’s 1.0 to 1.35x token expansion could quietly erode the pricing advantage for certain workloads, and enterprise customers should run their own cost analyses rather than relying on headline per-token prices. The third is the IPO narrative itself: when Anthropic’s S-1 eventually becomes public, investors will scrutinize whether the Sonnet tier — cheaper but high-volume — or the Opus tier — expensive but high-margin — drives the bulk of revenue and, critically, gross profit.

As PitchBook’s Rolfes told CNBC, the 2026 IPO window “either becomes the most consequential IPO cycle since the dot-com era or the most expensive lesson in narrative-versus-fundamentals that public markets have ever taught.”

Anthropic is betting that a model good enough to rival its flagship and cheap enough to run at scale is the product that closes the gap between those two outcomes. The public markets will soon decide whether they agree.

Looking to watch CazeTV – the Brazilian YouTube channel with the rights to all 104 World Cup 2026 games? Read on and we’ll show you how to watch CazeTV outside Brazil – including the US, Europe and beyond.

After starting out as a Twitch streamer, Casimiro Miguel has changed the game when it comes to sports broadcasts in the modern era with his CazeTV YouTube channel.

If you like the idea of owning the very best action camera but have so far been put off by the price, then let me bring you some fantastic news. This excellent value GoPro Hero 13 Black bundle is on sale at Amazon for $379.99 (was $479.99).

That’s a new record-low price for the highly rated 5.3K resolution camera from the industry’s leading brand. Considering the camera ordinarily retails for $429 by itself, this bundle deal is even more impressive.

In addition to the excellent GoPro camera, the bundle features a handle, two Enduro batteries, two curved adhesive mounts, a 64GB SanDisk MicroSD card, and a handy carrying case. That’s everything needed to get filming as soon as it arrives at your door.

Competition for the top spot in our best action camera guide is fierce, but the GoPro Hero 13 Black has held prime position for a long time now. Its commendation is in large part thanks to the excellent-quality 5.3K video, a superb range of accessories, including new auto-detected Lens Mods, and improved battery life and heat dissipation.

You can read more about why we love it in our GoPro Hero 13 Black review. Specifically, we praised its Bluetooth audio support, versatile mounting options, and ability to capture great-looking footage in well-lit areas.

I don’t record much video for social media specifically, but if you do, then you’ll love the 27MP sensor, which enables footage to be recorded in an 8:7 aspect ratio. Say goodbye to the awkward cropping of landscape footage for portrait outputs.