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The bad news: flagship phones cost a small fortune these days. The good news: we can help you pick the right one and get the most for your money.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The first season of Dune: Prophecy is about to wrap up — but there’s more on the way. Ahead of the finale on December 22nd, HBO has confirmed than the prequel series has been renewed for a second season.

The show premiered in November, and takes place 10,000 years before the events of the Dune movies from Denis Villeneuve. It stars Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as two Harkonnen sisters who form the galaxy-defining sect known as the Bene Gesserit.

“If you just know the Harkonnens from the movies, they’re these monstrous villains who are very clearly the bad guys,” showrunner Alison Schapker told The Verge about the series. “But that’s not where they started off, and this kind of story gave us a chance to complicate that understanding and dig into what made them that way.”

There’s no word on when to expect season 2, but it’s also not the only Dune project on the way: Dune 3 is in the works, as is a survival game set on Arrakkis.

Google Keep is being upgraded to a system app on Android 16 devices, joining the ranks of other Android apps that provide essential services like calling and messaging, reports Android Police.

Google’s free note-taking app appears as a system app on the latest Android 16 beta, Android 16 Developer Preview 2. Anyone upgrading to this OS version will no longer be able to uninstall the app unless they have root access.

Google integrated Keep with its Tasks feature in April after last year’s upgrades broke a trend of ignoring its note-taking app. Yet all of a sudden, it’s apparently considered a core feature vital to Android’s operating system, like Google’s Phone, Contacts, and Google Play Store apps.

Google has yet to explain the change, but this suggests the company could be planning on upgrading Google Keep with more powerful features so it’ll play a more central role in Android 16. It’s possible Google could be planning on integrating it with other core Android features, for example.

There’s a new voice assistant in town, and this one can work locally in your home without phoning home to its corporate overloads. This week, the popular hobbyist smart home platform Home Assistant officially launched its first voice assistant hardware — Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition.

Built for the open-source smart home platform, Voice PE costs $59 and brings a locally controlled, privacy-focused voice assistant to Home Assistant in a plug-and-play package. Once connected to Home Assistant, you can use voice to control any connected device, with commands such as “Turn on the living room lights,” “Lock all the doors,” “Create a timer for 5 minutes,” and many more.

While Home Assistant users have been able to control their smart homes with voice using either Home Assistant’s Assist on less capable third-party hardware or through the cloud by connecting to third-party services like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, this is the first dedicated Home Assistant voice hardware product.

Voice PE is the culmination of Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice, an effort from Nabu Casa, the organization behind Home Assistant, to let users control their homes locally, privately, and in their own language. It currently supports over 50 languages, compared to eight for Alexa and 20 for Google Assistant.

Image: Nabu Casa

The Voice PE is a small white box, about the size of your palm, with dual microphones and an audio processor. An internal speaker lets you hear the assistant, but you can also connect a speaker to it via a 3.5 mm headphone jack for better-quality media playback.

A colored LED ring on top of the Voice PE indicates when the assistant is listening. It surrounds a rotary dial and a physical button, which is used for setup and to talk to the voice assistant without using the wake word. The button can also be customized to do whatever you want (because this is Home Assistant). A physical mute switch is on the side, and the device is powered by USB-C (charger and cable not included). There’s also a Grove port where you can add sensors and other accessories.

Speaking of wake words, out of the box, you can talk to Assist with the wake words “Okay Nabu,” “Hey Jarvis,” or “Hey Mycroft.” If you want to get fancy, you can program a custom wake word.

The assistant can run locally in your home without an internet connection on Home Assistant hardware (such as the Home Assistant Green hub), or it can use the Home Assistant cloud. According to Nabu Casa, the latter is faster and supports more languages. The company says your data is not stored on the cloud nor used for training.

For those who don’t like the idea of always-listening microphones in their home from companies such as Amazon and Google, but who still want the convenience of controlling their home with their voice, the potential here is huge. But it may be a while until Voice PE is ready to replace your Echo or Nest smart speaker.

The Verge’s Callie Wright, a Home Assistant superuser, has been testing the Voice PE for a few weeks. While they are impressed with its capabilities (although it had some trouble understanding them when there was background noise), they aren’t quite ready to kick Alexa to the curb. “I think Amazon’s Alexa is still worth the privacy tradeoffs for me just because there are key things for me that Voice PE can’t pull off,” they say. “But the progress Home Assistant has made in its Year of the Voice has been incredible, and I’m more hopeful than ever that that future is coming.”

While the intention is to surpass “Big Tech voice assistants,” Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant, recognizes it’s not there yet. Hence, Voice is launching as a Preview Edition. “For some, the current capabilities of our voice assistant will be all they need, especially those who just want to set timers, manage their shopping list, and control their most used devices,” says Schoutsen. “For others, we understand they want to ask their voice assistant to make whale sounds or to tell them how tall Taylor Swift is — our voice assistant doesn’t do those things… yet.”

In the meantime, if you want more features, Voice PE can connect to supported AI models, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, to fully replace Assist or use it as a fallback for commands it doesn’t understand. But for many smart home users, there will be plenty of value in a simple, inexpensive device that lets you turn your lights on and off, start a timer, and execute other useful commands with your voice without relying on an internet connection.

Thousands of delivery drivers who work for Amazon third-party contractors are now on strike, The New York Times reports. The workers are striking after “Amazon’s repeated refusal to follow the law and bargain with the thousands of Amazon workers who organized with the Teamsters,” according to a Teamsters press release.

Workers are picketing at Amazon warehouses from Atlanta, New York City, San Francisco, Southern California, and Skokie, Ill., with other Amazon Teamsters “prepared to join them,” the Teamsters say. “Teamsters local unions are also putting up primary picket lines at hundreds of Amazon Fulfillment Centers nationwide.”

The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Amazon earlier this year, saying that Amazon and one of its third-party contractors are joint employers of delivery drivers and that it has “a legal duty to recognize and bargain with the Teamsters Union,” per another Teamsters press release.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel shared the following statement with New York City’s WPIX and with The Verge:

For more than a year now, the Teamsters have continued to intentionally mislead the public – claiming that they represent ‘thousands of Amazon employees and drivers’. They don’t, and this is another attempt to push a false narrative. The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union.

Amazon employees who have organized with the Teamsters voted last week to authorize a strike.

Update, December 19th: Added that Amazon sent us a statement.

In what seems to be a battle between Threads and Bluesky for the hearts and minds of ex-Twitterers, Threads has been adding some interesting new features. The latest is the ability to share photos and videos without including the original post — in other words, without quote posting. (There’s a similar feature in X for videos.)

There has been some initial pushback on it. A photographer on Threads complained that “there will be a small watermark-like credit on the photo, but there won’t be a link back to your account.”

Curious, I tried out the new feature, went to see if there was indeed no link back to the original post, and followed bryanhansel’s instructions for turning it off. Here’s what happened, and how you can use and adjust Threads’ new feature. (All of these instructions have been followed using the mobile app.)

To share images alone

• Long-press on the image you want to share. A menu will pop up at the bottom of the screen.
• To share just the image, tap on Use media.
• The image will appear as a new thread, with space above it to add your own comment. Select Post when you’re ready.

The new post will indeed have the image with only your comment and without the previous…

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google has introduced a new AI “reasoning” model capable of answering complex questions while also providing a rundown of its “thoughts,” as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, is still experimental and will likely compete with OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model.

In a post on X, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean says the model is “trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning,” and also benefits from the speed that comes along with the faster Gemini Flash 2.0 model. The demo shared by Dean shows how Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking goes about answering a physics problem by “thinking” through a series of steps before offering a solution. This isn’t necessarily “reasoning” in the way humans perform it, but it means the machine breaks down instructions into smaller tasks that can produce stronger outcomes.

Another example, posted by Google product lead Logan Kilpatrick, shows the model reasoning its way through a problem that involves both visual and textual elements. “This is just the first step in our reasoning journey,” Kilpatrick says. You can try out Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking on Google’s AI Studio.

There have been quite a few notable updates in the AI space as of late, with Google revealing its upgraded Gemini 2.0 model earlier this month as part of the company’s push into “agentic” AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI made the full version of its o1 reasoning model available to ChatGPT subscribers.

8BitDo has announced an alternate version of its Ultimate C wired Xbox controller that’s 20 percent smaller and 10 percent lighter while still featuring full-sized triggers, joysticks, and buttons.

Although the new 8BitDo Ultimate Mini is designed for kids and teens, it will also appeal to any gamer with smaller hands who struggles with the size and weight of standard controllers. At 189.6 grams it’s lighter than the 287-gram Xbox Series S and X controllers (including batteries) and weighs less than half of “The Duke,” the 550-gram wired controllers the original Xbox shipped with. It’s available now in the US through Amazon for $34.99, as well as 8BitDo’s online store.

Image: 8BitDo

The Ultimate Mini features the same layout as larger Xbox controllers but with action buttons, the directional pad, and its drift-resistant magnetic Hall effect joysticks all positioned closer together. There are also Hall effect triggers on the back, along with a pair of slightly smaller shoulder buttons.

Image: 8BitDo

It comes with a white, pink, or green translucent shell, which makes a ring of LEDs surrounding each joystick glow more prominently. Called the Fire Ring, there are different lighting modes that react to various button presses with flashes, cycle through different colors, or follow the direction each joystick is being pushed.

The 8BitDo Ultimate Mini is compatible with the Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X, and PCs running Windows 10 or 11. There’s no wireless connectivity which helps keep the controller lightweight without batteries inside. But parents with kids who are prone to rage-quitting games and throwing their controllers may want to think twice about a gamepad that’s physically tethered to a console with no breakaway connector.

Variety is reporting that Paramount Pictures is planning to extend the Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy by yet another movie. Sonic The Hedgehog 4 has been greenlit with a target release window of spring 2027.

The news comes mere hours before Sonic The Hedgehog 3 releases in theaters on Friday December 19th. The movie once again stars Ben Schwartz as Sonic, Colleen O’Shaughnessey and Idris Elba as his friends Tails and Knuckles, with Jim Carey returning as their nemesis Dr. Ivo Robotnik. Sonic 3 will also feature the arrival of Keanu Reeves playing Sonic’s on-again off-again enemy-turned-friend Shadow The Hedgehog.

With Sonic 3 anticipating tidy profits as North America prepares for the Christmas / New Year’s moviegoing season, developing a fourth movie makes sense. There are several rogue characters from the Sonic universe aiming for their silver screen debut. (See what I did there?) Neither Variety nor Paramount Pictures have confirmed any plot details or who might get their Sonic movie debut. We’ll probably get a hint though, in the post-credits for Sonic 3.

“The future of gaming handhelds is coming to CES ‘25 and you have a front row seat!” the email in my inbox exclaims.

Let me translate: it looks like Lenovo just tacitly confirmed it will announce its first SteamOS handheld in Las Vegas on or before January 7th, 2025. We’re expecting it to be the Steam button equipped Legion Go S that leaker Evan Blass revealed last week.

Why do I say that? The January 7th event, titled “Lenovo Legion x AMD: The Future of Gaming Handhelds,” will feature a special guest: Valve SteamOS and Steam Deck co-designer Pierre-Loup Griffais. Lenovo and AMD are calling him Valve’s “Chief Design Architect” for purposes of this event.

(Most Valve employees are simply considered designers internally, since they fluidly switch between teams and tasks; I believe Griffais once told me he prefers the same, but it’s true he’s also been one of the few public faces of SteamOS and the Steam Deck. It’s a fascinating company.)

Griffais won’t be the only intriguing choice of panelist on stage: Jason Ronald, Microsoft VP of Xbox Gaming Devices and Ecosystem will also be in attendance. He’s now being introduced as Microsoft’s “VP of Next Generation.”

We exclusively shared with you last week that Lenovo will revamp its larger, seemingly Windows-based Legion Go with detachable controllers, too. And we’re also expecting Lenovo to hedge its bets with a Windows version of the smaller Legion Go S based on those same leaks. It’s a reasonable bet some, if not all of these devices will come with AMD’s yet-to-be-detailed Z2 Extreme chips.

Image via Evan Blass

Here’s the full description of the event:

Join us for a cocktail reception hosted by Lenovo Legion and AMD gaming leaders, with special guests Valve and other gaming industry giants. We’ll be sharing our thoughts on what lies ahead in the gaming handheld space and showcasing our latest Lenovo Legion Go innovations advanced by AMD. Come to hear how Lenovo Legion and AMD Ryzen are making gaming more immersive for all and stay to experience the future of handheld gaming firsthand!

We’re not currently expecting Microsoft to surprise with an Xbox handheld at the event, as gaming boss Phil Spencer has suggested that might be a few years away. But it’s possible that Microsoft and Lenovo will try to suggest that all handhelds are Xbox handhelds, like Microsoft does in its new “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign:

I’ll be attending, and I’ll let you know!