New devices are still hitting our desks at Engadget at a rapid pace. Over the last two weeks, we’ve offered up in-depth analysis of cameras, earbuds, GPUs and a portable display. Plus, there are follow-ups on two of this spring’s biggest TV shows and a little something for the gamers. Read on to catch up on everything you might’ve missed in the last fortnight. 

Panasonic S1R II

If you’re looking for a camera that excels at both photos and video that’s more affordable than what Sony, Nikon and Canon offer, contributing reporter Steve Dent recommends the S1R II. “The S1R II is Panasonic’s best hybrid mirrorless camera to date, offering a great balance of photography and video powers,” he said. “It’s also the cheapest new camera in the high-resolution hybrid full-frame category, undercutting rivals like Canon’s R5 II and the Nikon Z8.”

NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti (16GB)

Devindra is back with another GPU review, and this time he put the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti through its paces. Price hikes are the biggest concern here amidst the current retail market (even before potential tariffs kick in). “On paper, NVIDIA has done a lot right with the 16GB GeForce RTX 5060 Ti,” he explained. “It’ll be more than enough for demanding games in 1080p and 1440p, even if you let loose a bit with ray tracing. But it’s also relying on DLSS 4 upscaling for much of that performance, which may make some wary about the 5060 Ti’s actual power.”

Espresso 15 Pro

Espresso Displays is an Engadget favorite as far as portable monitors are concerned, but senior reviews reporter Sam Rutherford argues the company needed to bridge the gap between its more affordable options and its priciest. The Espresso 15 Pro isn’t cheap, but it does offer almost everything you’d want. “It features well above average brightness, a sleek but sturdy design and super simple setup,” he said. “It also comes with a few special features like Glide and added touch support for Macs that help you get more out of the devices you already own. And thanks to a wealth of accessories, it can adapt to almost any use case.”

Audio-Technica ATH-CKS50TW2

The idea of wireless earbuds with 25 hours of battery life seems impossible, but Audio-Technica made it happen. The company’s ATH-CKS50TW2 lasts twice as long as more premium competition with active noise cancellation (ANC) on, but it blows them away with that mode disabled. A-T’s trademark warm, inviting sound profile is on display here too. “More specifically, the stock audio isn’t overly tuned, so bass remains pleasantly thumpy when needed and dialed down when it’s not,” I wrote.

The Last of Us, Andor and Clair Obscur Expedition 33

Nathan has been keeping up with season two of The Last of Us on an episode-by-episode basis and Devindra penned a full review of the new season of Andor. UK bureau chief Mat Smith spent some time playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, noting that the game “does a great job setting up its world in a way that allows everyone to get on board.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-review-recap-panasonic-s1r-ii-nvidia-rtx-5060-ti-and-more-130005749.html?src=rss

The US military launched a long-range hypersonic missile Friday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight that, if successful, could pave the way for the weapon’s operational deployment later this year.

The Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon fired out of a canister on a road-mobile trailer shortly after sunrise on Florida’s Space Coast, then headed east over the Atlantic Ocean propelled by a solid-fueled rocket booster. Local residents shared images of the launch on social media.

Designed for conventional munitions, the new missile is poised to become the first ground-based hypersonic weapon fielded by the US military. Russia has used hypersonic missiles in combat against Ukraine. China has “the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal,” according to a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military power. After a successful test flight from Cape Canaveral last year, the long-range hypersonic weapon (LRHW)—officially named “Dark Eagle” by the Army earlier this week—will give the United States the ability to strike targets with little or no warning.

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Initial claims that life-associated gases were detected on exoplanet K2-18b are being challenged, with independent reanalysis by Jake Taylor suggesting the data is too noisy to support such conclusions and that stronger, model-independent evidence is needed. NPR reports: Rather than seeing a bump or a wiggle that indicated a signal, “the data is consistent with a flat line,” says Taylor, adding that more observations from the telescope are needed to know what can be reliably said about this planet’s atmosphere. “If we want to claim biosignatures, we need to be extremely sure.”

What this new work shows is that “the strength of the evidence depends on the nitty gritty details of how we interpret the data, and that doesn’t pass the bar for me for a convincing detection,” says Laura Kreidberg, an expert on the atmospheres of distant planets at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany who didn’t work on the original research team or this new analysis.

She explains that astronomers can make a lot of different choices when analyzing data; for example, they can make different assumptions about the physics and chemistry at play. “Ideally, for a robust detection, we want it to be model-independent,” she says — that is, they want the signal to show up even if the underlying assumptions change from one analysis to another. But that wasn’t the case here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China will let scientists from six countries, including the U.S., examine the rocks it collected from the Moon — a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two NASA-funded U.S. institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Thursday. CNSA chief Shan Zhongde said that the samples were “a shared treasure for all humanity,” local media reported.

Chinese researchers have not been able to access NASA’s Moon samples because of restrictions imposed by U.S. lawmakers on the space agency’s collaboration with China. Under the 2011 law, Nasa is banned from collaboration with China or any Chinese-owned companies unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. But John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BBC Newshour that the latest exchange of Moon rocks have “very little to do with politics.” While there are controls on space technology, the examination of lunar samples had “nothing of military significance,” he said. “It’s international cooperation in science which is the norm.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Multiple studies and investigations have found that about half of American households watch TV and movies with subtitles on, but only a relatively small portion of those include someone with a hearing disability. That’s because of the trouble many people have understanding dialogue in modern viewing situations, and Netflix has now introduced a subtitles option to help.

The closed captioning we’ve all been using for years includes not only the words the people on-screen are saying, but additional information needed by the hard of hearing, including character names, music cues (“dramatic music intensifies”) and sound effects (“loud explosion”). For those who just wanted to make sure they didn’t miss a word here and there, the frequent descriptions of sound effects and music could be distracting. This new format omits those extras, just including the spoken words and nothing else — even in the same language as the spoken dialogue. The feature will be available in new Netflix original programming, starting with the new season of You in multiple languages. Netflix says it’s looking at bringing the option to older titles in the library (including those not produced by Netflix) in the future.

Traditional closed captions are still available, of course. Those are labeled “English CC” whereas this new option is simply labeled “English” (or whatever your preferred language is).

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TV producer Alex Berger criticized Apple TV+ as “the worst marketer in the universe” for failing to promote his French-language show La Maison, despite its success in Europe. Berger said he initially partnered with Apple out of hope, but ultimately felt they undermined their own content by not supporting it properly. 9to5Mac reports: Rafa Sales Ross at Variety recently interviewed TV producer Alex Berger, who made La Maison for Apple TV+. That partnership is apparently not one he intends to repeat: “Marketing makes a show,” he emphasized. “Apple, for example, is probably the worst marketer in the universe — the best for iPhones, the worst for television. They don’t do marketing, and it was an issue for us with ‘La Maison.’ We did a great show that had an amazing success in France and other places in Europe, but they never promoted it. It drove me crazy.”

Asked why, while believing Apple TV+ to lack in marketing efforts, did he decide to take “La Maison” to the streamer, Berger said simply: “Hope. We had hope.” “Apple TV+ had never done a show in France and never really done a show in Europe,” adds the producer. “‘Slow Horses’ started [things] in the U.K., but it was with the U.S.. I was hoping I would change them. We got very frustrated and just thought at one point that they were shooting themselves in the foot, and why? “La Maison faced the additional challenge of being a French-language series, at the time one of the only non-English shows on the streamer,” notes 9to5Mac’s Ryan Christoffel. “So it had an uphill battle already, making Apple’s marketing struggles even more of a problem.”

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YKK, the world’s largest zipper maker, has unveiled a prototype self-propelled zipper that uses a motorized worm gear to zip itself closed at the push of a button. It currently relies on a wired remote and external power, and can zip spans up to 16 feet in under a minute. The Verge reports: Although some recent zipper innovations, such as Under Armour’s one-handed MagZip upgrade, are designed to improve accessibility and make zippers easier to use for those with limited mobility, YKK envisions more industrial use cases for its prototype. As demonstrated in a video recently shared on the company’s YouTube channel, the self-propelled zipper is seen connecting a pair of 16-foot-tall membranes in about 40 seconds. Zipping them together manually would require the use of a ladder or other machinery.

In another video, the prototype is used to quickly connect a pair of 13-foot-wide temporary shelters standing over eight feet tall, taking about 50 seconds to progress from one side to the other. […] In addition to miniaturizing the tech and adding a battery, YKK would also need to develop some safety mechanisms before its self-propelled zipper could ever reach consumers’ clothing, ensuring there’s nothing that might get stuck.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some developers are “crying foul” after Microsoft’s C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code stopped working with VS Code derivatives like VS Codium and Cursor, reports The Register. The move has prompted Cursor to transition to open-source alternatives, while some developers are calling for a regulatory investigation into Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive behavior. From the report: In early April, programmers using VS Codium, an open-source fork of Microsoft’s MIT-licensed VS Code, and Cursor, a commercial AI code assistant built from the VS Code codebase, noticed that the C/C++ extension stopped working. The extension adds C/C++ language support, such as Intellisense code completion and debugging, to VS Code. The removal of these capabilities from competing tools breaks developer workflows, hobbles the editor, and arguably hinders competition. The breaking change appears to have occurred with the release of v1.24.5 on April 3, 2025.

Following the April update, attempts to install the C/C++ extension outside of VS Code generate this error message: “The C/C++ extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications.” Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published. But it hasn’t enforced those terms in its C/C++ extension with an environment check in its binaries until now. […]

Developers discussing the issue in Cursor’s GitHub repo have noted that Microsoft recently rolled out a competing AI software agent capability, dubbed Agent Mode, within its Copilot software. One such developer who contacted us anonymously told The Register they sent a letter about the situation to the US Federal Trade Commission, asking them to probe Microsoft for unfair competition — alleging self-preferencing, bundling Copilot without a removal option, and blocking rivals like Cursor to lock users into its AI ecosystem.

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“Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought,” writes Space.com, citing a new NASA-led experiment:

Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth’s, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun… Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission… To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, and a tiny particle accelerator, which the scientists used to bombard the samples with hydrogen ions for several days.

“The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the sun — which is always spitting out hydrogen — there’s a possibility of creating water,” Yeo said in a statement. “That’s incredible to think about.” Supporting this idea, observations from previous moon missions have revealed an abundance of hydrogen gas in the moon’s tenuous atmosphere. Scientists suspect that solar-wind-driven heating facilitates the combination of hydrogen atoms on the surface into hydrogen gas, which then escapes into space. This process also has a surprising upside, the new study suggests. Leftover oxygen atoms are free to bond with new hydrogen atoms formed by repeated bombardment of the solar wind, prepping the moon for more water formation on a renewable basis.

The findings could help assess how sustainable water on the moon is, as the sought-after resource is crucial for both life support and as propellant for rockets. The team’s study was published in March in the journal JGR Planets .

NASA created a fascinating animation showing how water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. (In 2016 scientists discovered that when speck of comet debris vaporize on impact, they create shock waves in the lunar soil which can sometimes breach the dry upper layer, releasing water molecules from the hydrated layer below…)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: Personal health information on 4.7 million Blue Shield California subscribers was unintentionally shared between Google Analytics and Google Ads between April 2021 and January 2025 due to a misconfiguration error. Security consultant and SANS Institute instructor Brandon Evans points to two lessons to take from this debacle:

Read the documentation of any third party service you sign up for, to understand the security and privacy controls;Know what data is being collected from your organization, and what you don’t want shared.

“If there is a concern by the organization that Google Ads would use this information, they should really consider whether or not they should be using a platform like Google Analytics in the first place,” Evans says in the article. “Because from a technical perspective, there is nothing stopping Google from sharing the information across its platform…

“Google definitely gives you a great bunch of controls, but technically speaking, that data is within the walls of that organization, and it’s impossible to know from the outside how that data is being used.”

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The Curiosity Mars rover covers a lot of ground for a robot that only moves at a max speed of .1 mph. A photo snapped recently by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides a pretty cool visualization of what the rover has been up to so far this year, showing the tracks Curiosity left behind as it journeyed from its previous science target — an area called the Gediz Vallis channel — to its next destination. The rover itself is just a tiny speck at the front of the roughly 1,050-foot-long trail, and according to NASA, this snap “is believed to be the first orbital image of the rover mid-drive across the Red Planet.”

The image was captured on February 28 by the orbiter’s HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, and shows Curiosity’s movement over 11 drives starting at the beginning of that month. While a few weeks might seem like a long time for tire tracks to stick around in the dirt, this is normal for Mars. The tracks are “[l]ikely to last for months before being erased by wind,” NASA says. Curiosity is expected to reach its next science destination, which is home to formations thought to have been created long ago by groundwater, in the coming weeks.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-mars-orbiter-snapped-this-image-of-curiosity-trucking-along-down-at-the-surface-211404950.html?src=rss

“Google-owned YouTube’s revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube ‘the new king of all media.'”

YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen… More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.

When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, “where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn’t work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos.” And since this was 20 years ago, “Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace.”

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube’s sharing of ad revenue:

Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A…

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company’s revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times “I don’t think it’s just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on.”

And then there’s this…

“My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, ‘Why do you want to do YouTube?'” said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: “Mom, you can make a living from this.” MrBeast’s holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he’s since bought a Jeep for his mom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet’s reviewer says “I tested this affordable E Ink phone for two weeks, and it rewired my brain (for the better).”

It’s Mudita’s new Kompakt smartphone with a two-color E Ink display — which ZDNet calls “an affordable choice” for those “considering investing in a so-called ‘dumbphone’…”

Compared to modern smartphones, the Mudita Kompakt is a bit chunky at half an inch thick and five inches long. It’s still rather light, though, weighing just 164 grams and covered in soft touch material, so it feels good in the hand. The bezels around the 4.3-inch display are rather large, with three touch-sensitive buttons for back, home, and quick settings, so navigating to key elements is intuitive, whether you’re coming from Android or iOS.
The phone features a fingerprint sensor to lock and unlock, and it’s housed on the power button in the middle of the right side. I’m a huge fan of consolidating these two purposes to the same button, and it works flawlessly…. You can charge via the USB-C, but surprisingly, it also supports wireless charging. All in all, the battery is quite good. Mudita says it can last for up to six days on standby, with around two days of standard use. In my testing, I found this to be about accurate.

On the left side of the device is a button that houses one of its key features: offline mode. Switching to this mode disables all wireless connectivity and support for the camera, so it truly becomes distraction-free.. [T]here is undoubtedly some lag in certain apps — such as the camera — due to the E Ink display technology and processor/RAM specifications. You will also likely notice some lag in text messaging if you tap quickly on the keyboard, often resulting in getting ahead of the spell-checking feature. As far as apps go, in addition to phone calls and text messages, the Kompakt includes an alarm, calculator, chess game, maps, meditation, weather, and a voice recorder.

Phone calls “sounded great on both ends,” according to the review. (And text messaging “works well if you don’t tap too quickly on the keyboard.”) But the 8MP camera produced photos “that look like they were taken over ten years ago.” (And accessing the internal storage “requires connecting to a Windows PC and launching File Explorer,” although “you can also just share photos via text messaging, as it’s much faster than using a computer.”) But ZDNet calls it an “attractive — if very simplified — E Ink display.”

Mudita is asking $369 now for preorder customers, according to the article, while the phone will be available in May for $439.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Siri is struggling. It’s struggling to respond to simple questions or create simple calendar events. And the end still isn’t in sight, now that Apple has mostly delayed Apple Intelligence’s “smarter Siri” until the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Perplexity AI’s new Voice Assistant is here now, trying to capitalize on Apple’s mess. In addition to answering questions, the AI’s new Voice Mode is able to create calendar events and reminders, play music, and more. It can hold conversations, and even perform some web-based tasks. These are things that Siri just can’t do, at least not yet.

How to use Perplexity Voice Assistant on iOS

Download and open the latest version of the Perplexity app. In the Ask Anything bar, you’ll see an animated Waveform icon to the right. That’s the shortcut to the Voice Assistant.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Simply tap on it and start speaking. Perplexity will show an animation when you’re speaking, and when it’s responding to you. There’s also an option to Mute the microphone for longer chats.

This is more of a conversational space, so you can keep talking as Perplexity responds. Tap the Gear icon up top for settings. Here, you can disable the transcript feature, or enable a push to talk mode. You can also change the Assistant’s voice.

The Voice Mode works in the background, and only stops when you hit the X button in the app. So you can start the Voice Mode, switch to a different app, and continue talking to Perplexity in the background, if you wish.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

For quicker access, you should add the Medium Perplexity widget to your home screen, since it has a shortcut to the Voice Mode. Alternately, you can create a shortcut and add it to your Home screen, Lock screen, Control Center, or even the Action button (to set that up, follow this guide.)

What Perplexity Does better than Siri

Perplexity integrates directly with Apple’s default apps like Calendar, Reminders, Mail, Contacts, and more. As long as you give it permission, Perplexity can add events to your calendar, remind you of something, and even draft emails and text messages.

As it stands, Perplexity also has a better knowledge base than Siri, as it’s connected to the web. So asking something like “when was the Pixel 4a launched” brings up an instant response, while asking Siri requires a confirmation via ChatGPT.

In my testing, I found Perplexity was reliable at creating calendar events and reminders, more than I often get with Siri.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Drafting an email shows a stark difference between the two approaches. I used the same prompt with both Siri and Perplexity: Draft an email asking Pranay if he’s up for a Pickleball match this weekend. Siri took this literally, and drafted an email saying “if he’s up for a Pickleball match this weekend.” That’s it. Perplexity, on the other hand, expanded this into a coherent sentence, added a Subject, and showed a compose box. All that was left for me to do was switch out my name and hit Send (Siri also doesn’t send an email without your confirmation).

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

My experience with text messaging was more iffy. Perplexity couldn’t just draft a message to Pranay, even though I gave it full access to my contacts (if you don’t want to do that, you can dictate the email address or the phone number instead). Hopefully, this is a day-one issue and gets sorted out later on.

Perplexity’s Voice Assistant can also play music directly from Apple Music, using voice commands. And because Perplexity integrates with YouTube, it’s quite quick when finding YouTube videos. I asked it to find a soothing video about the hidden art of ceramics in Japan, and in a couple of seconds, Perplexity started playing the video inside the app.

What Perplexity Does that Siri just can’t do

Perplexity’s Voice Assistant can converse with you with ease. There’s a very smooth back and forth, where the assistant remembers the details that you asked before, knows the context to your prompts, and replies accordingly. It simply doesn’t need to ask follow-up questions.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

This is great for asking general questions, and for learning things. Instead of a 500 word response, Perplexity’s AI assistant will give you a couple of sentences and will prompt you to ask further, sometimes even giving you clues about what you might want to ask about next.

Perplexity can take actions on the web too, thought you have to be the one to take the final action, which is fair (and, honestly, appreciated).

For example, I asked Perplexity to book a table at White Olive at 8 PM in New York City, and it opened Open Table with all those details already filled in. I had to confirm the details, and finish the booking myself. Then, I asked if Perplexity can call me an Uber, and it opened the Uber app with the location of the White Olive restaurant mapped in.

These are the things that Siri with Apple Intelligence is supposed to be able to do for you, but we won’t see these features until at least the end of the year, and we have no idea how exactly they will work.

It’s the transparency and consistency that matters

In my limited hands-on testing, I noticed that Perplexity’s responses were more consistent than Siri’s, and since Voice Mode stays active by default, I asked nuanced questions without feeling like I need to hurry myself, like I do with Siri.

Siri is sometimes great, and sometimes it just doesn’t respond. Perplexity takes care of that issue. Of course, there were times with Perplexity ran into a wall, like with my text messaging question. Here too, it calmly told me it wasn’t able to accomplish the task, and that it could try again if I wanted. Hopefully, these small issues will get sorted out with more updates.

Of course, Perplexity can’t replace Siri in the true sense, because Apple won’t allow for it. Only Siri can access OS level features like changing toggles, settings, calling someone, replying to text messages, setting alarms, and so on. But for all the other things, if you’re feeling frustrated with the limitations of Siri, Perplexity’s Voice Assistant is definitely worth a try.