How truly eclectic are your music tastes? Spotify is here to express exactly how leftfield your playlists are, with Only You. No, not a niche Kelly Clarkson ballad, but a new feature that tells you how your song combinations are different from anyone else.
Only You begins with a unique artist pairing, showing two disparate musicians you might hop between. It also offers insight into music from specific years you stream often, and even the music or podcast you listen to frequently at a specific time of day.
If you're feeling particularly brave in your song tastes — this comes from someone who stopped sharing his Spotify listening after being heckled by one of his Engadget colleagues — another new feature, Blend, can merge two people's music collections into a curated playlist that's updated daily. Better you than me.
If speakers inside lamps and bookshelves weren't doing it for you, how about a frame? While a retail page on Ikea's site is no longer available, it briefly showed a new Symfonisk product that combines wireless speaker tech with, well, a picture frame. It'll be available in black or white, priced at $199. According to its description, you can hang it on its own, place it on the floor or lean it against a wall. While it's called a "picture frame," it doesn't sound like you can use it to display your own physical or digital images. It has "interchangeable fronts," however, that fit the frame. The frame appears to have a fabric cover, which could make customized artworks a little trickier, but we'll wait to test one for ourselves before offering our verdict. Continue reading.
Qualcomm recently announced a pair of updated Snapdragon ARM CPUs made for use in PCs, and now Samsung has announced new laptops featuring both of them. The new Galaxy Book Go promises instant-on performance and 18 hours of battery life with a Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 chipset. The 14-inch Windows 10 laptop can be customized with 4GB or 8GB of RAM, and either 64GB or 128GB of built-in storage. It's set to go on sale June 10th, with prices starting at $349. Continue reading.
Donald Trump's blog page is no more. From the Desk of Donald J. Trump has shut down permanently, and Trump senior aide Jason Miller confirmed that it won't be returning. If you recall, the Trump blog was a preemptive response to Facebook's Oversight Board ruling regarding the social network's ban on the ex-president. It launched May 3rd, meaning Trump's blog didn't even survive its first month. Continue reading.
Huawei is rolling out its own operating system, HarmonyOS 2, to existing smartphones and tablets, including the Mate 40, P40, Mate 30 and its MatePad Pro tablet. The company plans to shift around 100 existing products away from Android and on to HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS 2 offers upgraded connectivity and includes a drag-and-drop interface for pairing devices, which seemingly makes it easy to move files between a tablet and a Windows PC — something we've seen in Huawei's laptops already.
To celebrate the new OS, the launch touched on a new smartwatch and three new Huawei tablets. That included a new 12.6-inch MatePad Pro with an OLED display and Huawei's own Kirin 9000 processor. Continue reading.
As summer approaches, it's time to head outdoors. That means some dads will be obsessively monitoring the grill, trying to keep the family safe from bug bites and perhaps enjoying a cold beverage. Let's upgrade those experiences. Continue reading.
SpaceX's first ocean spaceport for its Starship launch could be ready to send spacecraft into space as soon as next year, according to company chief Elon Musk. The spaceport, Deimos, is still under construction at the Port of Brownsville in Texas, and a render of the structure posted by a fan prompted Musk's comments on Twitter. Of course, on Twitter.
SpaceX
The SpaceX boss has a reputation for overenthusiastic estimates for projects, which has caused trouble in the past for Tesla. At least SpaceX has a storied history of testing rocket recovery on water. Launches, however, are an entirely different challenge.
While most of the AMD news from Computex dropped yesterday, this nugget breezed through in both the company's keynote and accompanying press release. It could be an interesting one, however. AMD revealed that a future Exynos system-on-chip will feature RDNA 2 graphics technology, capable of supporting ray-tracing and variable rate shading.
"The next place you'll find RDNA 2 will be the high-performance mobile phone market," AMD CEO Lisa Su said on stage at Computex Taipei. Expect to hear more from Samsung later this year. Continue reading.
In case you forgot, Father's Day approaches. And if you haven't gotten around to getting something for Dad, Engadget's guide touches on several gift ideas, from quality headphones to wearables, books and even a smart oven. And if your budget is tighter, don't worry — we've got you covered with a standalone $50-or-less guide. Continue reading.
EA and Dice will share a first look at the next Battlefield game on June 9th. The reveal is slated to start at 10 AM ET next Wednesday. A supposedly internal trailer of the upcoming game leaked late last month. Besides that, we know the game will hit both current and last-gen consoles and arrive in time for the holidays. Continue reading.
The least exclusive members-only shopping event is back.
Amazon has officially announced the dates for Prime Day 2021: The event will begin at 12 AM PT on Monday, June 21st and conclude at 11:59 PM PT on Tuesday, June 22nd. Yep, like last year, Prime Day will be a 48-hour event, but unlike in 2020, this year's Prime Day will not signify the start of the holiday shopping season.
You won't have to scrutinize everything yourself, though: We will be covering Amazon Prime Day 2021, to bring you all the best tech deals. Our pro tip? Follow Engadget's Deals Twitter account for real-time deal updates throughout Prime Day. Continue reading.
I hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day weekend if you got the time off. You might have missed confirmation that Tesla's refreshed Model X and Model S cars are packing powerful chips from AMD. The company's CEO Lisa Su confirmed the new Teslas will feature AMD APUs (Ryzen chips with built-in Radeon graphics) for their infotainment systems. These will kick in when the system needs extra power, similar to how some laptops switch between integrated and discrete graphics cards.
You might wonder why pack so much graphics power into a car, and the answer seems to be the two screens, a 17-inch one upfront and a smaller one in the rear, that could tap into that power for gaming or high-fidelity movie watching.
NVIDIA has unveiled two new GFX cards — at a time when it's hard to find and buy its existing cards. The RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti will be available for $599 and $1,199 directly from NVIDIA as limited-edition Founders Edition boards. Pre-orders open on June 3rd for the 3080 Ti and June 10th for the 3070 Ti. As usual, NVIDIA partners like ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Zotac will have their own takes on the cards. According to Executive Editor Aaron Souppouris, if you pretend the state of buying GPUs isn't "a trash fire of scalpers, miners and overpriced GT 1030s," then the RTX 3080 Ti sounds like a flagship GPU worth chasing. Continue reading.
Uber and Lyft rides have been almost twice as expensive over the past few months in the US because the ride-hailing companies have struggled to meet refreshed demand. More and more people are going back to their old routines after getting fully vaccinated, which translates to higher demand for rides as passengers fire up their apps to go to work or to meet friends. In fact, Uber had its biggest total gross bookings this March. Continue reading.
Don't expect the PlayStation 5 or Nintendo's rumored Switch upgrade to get Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos support anytime soon. Dolby Atmos offers enhanced surround sound that adds height channels, while Dolby Vision is the company's take on HDR video enhancements. Microsoft apparently has console exclusivity on both for two years, according to an Xbox Wire France blog post.
This might not be a huge surprise: The Xbox One has supported both Dolby technologies since 2017. Continue reading.
You'll have to buy extra space if 15GB isn't enough.
Google Photos is ending its free unlimited storage on June 1st. From then on, any photo you upload (including compressed "storage saver" pics) counts toward your Google Drive storage limit unless it comes from a Pixel phone. If you need more space, you'll have to pay for Google One plans that start at $2 per month for 100GB. Any photos you upload before June 1st won't count toward the cap, and Google has also made it easier to delete unwanted photos with a new tool that does some of the sorting for you.Continue reading.
