Just before the weekend, the US Customs and Border Protection published a list of products excluded from Trump’s tariffs, including smartphones, PCs, memory chips and let’s say 80 percent of everything we write about at Engadget.
Google is back with another entry-level smartphone, the Pixel 9a. With more AI smarts, a new hardware design, and the biggest battery on any Pixel yet, on paper, it sounds good. Especially the sub-$500 price tag.
Welcome to 2025. Wave farewell to yesteryear with the biggest losers in tech. Picking our favorite villains in 2024 was challenging when it simply wasn’t a great time for tech. With the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won’t-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content, it’s just so noisy. Is it the internet of slop? Is it exhaustion? Is it AIs talking to AIs about AIs?
We’re wrapping up 2024, so why not do it with some frivolous CES announcements? Like this premium (it has to be premium!) microwave from LG, with a touchscreen bigger than your iPad. I’m not sure what you’ll watch in the three-and-a-half minutes it takes to heat that butter chicken curry, but you can do it in glorious full HD resolution.
As 2025 approaches, we’re reviewing all our… reviews. Yes, everything we poked, prodded, and critiqued this year. Alongside inevitable smartphone and laptop upgrades (it was a particularly strong year for Pixel phones, while Apple continues to offer a premium phone experience on its pro iPhones), it was also a year of impressive drones and cameras, keeping Steve Dent very busy.
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok owner ByteDance’s appeal of a law that could ban the app. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is set to go into effect on January 19, the day before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. ByteDance claimed the law violates free speech rights, a position the ACLU has supported.
OnePlus will launch its new flagship series, the OnePlus 13, on January 7, 2025. It’s getting increasingly difficult for smartphone makers to differentiate or push the envelope, but OnePlus is at least trying. Its new phone series will have IP68 and IP69 ratings.