The best early deals from Amazon’s October Prime Day event

Amazon’s colorful Echo Pop is on sale for a mere $17.99, matching the smart speaker’s lowest price to date. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon’s next Prime Day-like sales event, doesn’t officially kick off until October 10th, but the tech giant is already giving Prime members and non-members alike a taste of what’s to come. A whole bunch of (mainly Amazon) gadgets are discounted ahead of the two-day shopping event, including Amazon’s latest smart speakers, e-readers, TVs, tablets, and various smart security devices.

Below, we’ve rounded up a selection of the best deals so far, many of which we expect to hold throughout the duration of the event. We’ll also be covering the deluge of other notable discounts once the event kicks off in earnest, so make sure to keep an eye on all of our deals coverage in the coming week.

The best smart...

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Google Pixel 8 launch event: all the news

Image: Google

Here’s a roundup of all the announcements from Google’s Pixel 8 launch event.

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Uber will return your packages for you — for a fee, of course

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Uber is expanding its package delivery service, Uber Connect, to include returns. Starting today, customers can use Uber to summon a courier, who will return up to five packages to the post office or FedEx or UPS stores.

The packages need to be resealed and include all the necessary prepaid postage to be returned by Uber. Customers can track a package’s return in real time and will receive a photo confirmation of the receipt once the return has been completed. Uber charges a flat fee of $5 or $3 for Uber One subscribers.

Online shopping has grown into a juggernaut, and with it, package returns have become their own booming business. People will often buy several different versions of the same item and then return the...

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Roku’s next update focuses on sports, live TV, and easier content discovery

Image: Roku

Today, Roku outlined a slew of new software features that owners of its streaming devices (or Roku TVs) can expect over the coming weeks and months. The company has over 73 million active accounts globally, and as always, it’s trying to increase the amount of time each of those users spends on the platform. This time, it’s doing so with a wide range of features, with some targeted at sports fans and others at casual viewers who want yet more help finding something to watch.

Roku’s sports hub will soon let you “favorite” your chosen teams, which will make it easier to track when games are happening and faster to hop into the relevant streaming app and start watching. Highlights are also coming to the sports section, and Roku says “users...

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Canva’s new AI tools automate boring, labor-intensive design tasks

Magic Studio is a one-stop shop for AI-powered content creation tools. | Image: Canva

As part of its 10th birthday celebrations, web-based design platform Canva is releasing Magic Studio — a new suite of AI-powered design tools that aim to make content creation more accessible to everyone, regardless of previous design experience. Canva describes Magic Studio as “the world’s most comprehensive AI-design platform” for organizations and individual users, providing a host of new tools for automating labor-intensive tasks like converting designs into other media formats or instantly editing images through generative AI.

The suite introduces features like Magic Switch, which allows users to instantly transform an existing design into another format, such as converting a blog into an email or social media post, without needing...

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AI bias tests gloss over a crucial aspect of skin color, Sony research claims

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

While the AI industry has focused on making its algorithms less biased based on the lightness or darkness of people’s skin tones, new research from Sony is calling for red and yellow skin hues to also be taken into account. In a paper published last month, authors William Thong and Alice Xiang from Sony AI, as well as Przemyslaw Joniak from the University of Tokyo, put forward a more “multidimensional” measurement of skin color in the hope that it might lead to more diverse and representative AI systems.

Researchers have been drawing attention to skin color biases in AI systems for years, including in an important 2018 study from Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru that found AI was more prone to inaccuracies when used on darker-skinned...

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Meta’s new AI-generated stickers are lewd, rude, and occasionally nude

Would you believe this was probably the safest image we could have used here? | Image: Meta / @Pioldes

Some early user tests for Meta’s new AI-generated sticker tool have resulted in some dubious (and rather hilarious) creations. After gaining access to the new AI-generated sticker tool on Facebook Messenger, X user @Pioldes was able to create a host of inappropriate sticker images — including child soldiers, gun-wielding Nintendo characters, Mickey Mouse taking a crap, and nude illustrations of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Other examples show that Meta’s AI-sticker tool will also happily slap a pair of breasts onto…well, just about anything, judging by the busty images of Sonic the Hedgehog and Karl Marx. There’s even a sticker that depicts a woman breastfeeding Pikachu.

found out that facebook messenger has ai generated...

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Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS online services will shut down in April

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge

Next spring, Nintendo will shut down the online services behind nearly all of its 3DS and Wii U software, affecting multiplayer and other connected features. According to Nintendo, “This also includes online co-operative play, internet rankings, and data distribution.”

News of this early April 2024 shutdown follows the return of online features for the Wii U versions of Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon, which had disappeared between March and August while Nintendo dealt with a “vulnerability related to online play.”

As of early April 2024, online play and other functionality that uses online communication will end service for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software. Thank you very much for your continued support of our products.

Find out more: h...

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Samsung’s new ‘fan editions’ of the Galaxy S23, Tab S9, and Buds bring flagship features to lower prices

Look! A purple phone that’s actually purple. | Image: Samsung

Samsung’s FE series is back after a year off, this time with a pair of Galaxy Buds in the mix.

The Galaxy S23 FE has the specs we’d expect of a “value flagship” smartphone and a price that makes more sense: $599, rather than the $699 Samsung charged for the S21 FE. The Galaxy Tab S9 FE comes with robust water and dust resistance and a much friendlier $449 price tag than the pricey standard S9, which starts at $799 — but you’ll have to settle for an LCD panel rather than OLED. And the Galaxy Buds FE offer active noise cancellation for $99.

Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE was the most recent phone in the FE series, and it didn’t make a lot of sense priced so closely to the standard S21. The company seems to have recognized the problem with this...

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Verizon bundles Netflix and NFL Plus Premium for $25/month

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Verizon has announced an exclusive combo offering Netflix Premium and NFL Plus Premium for $25 per month. Netflix Premium costs $19.99 / month right now (though it could go up soon!), and NFL Plus Premium is $16.99 / month. That sounds like a pretty good deal for Verizon customers if they’re ready for some football and they need their own Netflix account.

NFL Plus Premium includes live access to regional and primetime NFL football games across devices and includes the NFL Network, plus NFL RedZone. It does not includeNFL Sunday Ticket, which costs a cool $449 per year and gives you all the Sunday games regardless of region. Verizon’s promo page states that existing Netflix customers can transfer their subscriptions over to Verizon and...

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The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk

Image: Laura Normand / The Verge

Forget Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company — Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter.

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X has to pay $1.1 million in legal fees for ex-Twitter execs

Illustration: The Verge

A judge has ruled that X, the platform previously known as Twitter, must pay $1.1 million in legal fees associated with the investigations of the platform that unfolded during Elon Musk’s buyout of the platform last year, according to a report from Bloomberg.

As noted by Bloomberg, Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick ruled in favor of former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former lead policy officer Vijaya Gadde, and other executives, as Twitter “violated its duties to cover legal expenses generated by their work for the company.”

Elon Musk fired Agrawal and other high-level leaders once he took over the company and after Twitter sued Musk for attempting to back out of his agreement for the $44 billion acquisition.

In...

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Meta’s text chat for Horizon Worlds is rolling out to all users

Image: Meta

Meta’s text-based chat feature for Horizon Worlds will be available for all users beginning this week, Meta said in a blog post on Tuesday. The text chat, which Meta dubs “world chat,” offers a way to communicate with other people inside a Horizon Worlds experience without using your voice. Meta first launched world chat in a limited way in June.

The world chat feature is accessible from the options you can pick from when you lift your left wrist while in VR; it’s a little world icon inside a speech box. And to make text chat a bit easier, Meta says it offers quick replies so that you don’t have to take the time to manually spell out messages, which can be a big pain in VR.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to world chat myself just...

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Double tap shows up in watchOS 10.1 dev beta

Everybody do the pinchy pinch. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Double tap, which lets Apple Watch users tap their thumb and index finger together twice to contextually control the watch, is one of the coolest features of the latest Apple Watch models. It wasn’t included at launch, but 9to5Mac reports that it’s available now in the watchOS 10.1 developer beta. The public beta and general release are almost certainly not far behind, but if you have an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 and you’re feeling mildly adventurous, you can try it out today — it’s easy to sign up for the developer betas these days.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Double tap does have some customizability, though mainly for the widget stack and music controls.

The contextual pinchy pinch lets...

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Spotify is giving paid subscribers 15 hours of audiobook listening per month

This is Hot Pod_,_ The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.

Ariel and Amrita coming to you with another joint issue today. It’s a jam-packed Tuesday, with Spotify debuting its biggest audiobook development yet, an exclusive interview with the writer of the Audible Original Six Sermons, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries laying off a third of its staff.

Spotify gets serious about audiobooks

At a company event this afternoon, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify subscribers in the UK, Australia, and, in the winter, the US will be able to stream 15 hours of premium audiobooks each month. It’s a big leap from Spotify’s initial a la carte audiobook model and has the potential to...

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You can now use the DALL-E 3 AI image generator inside Bing Chat

A banana bed, as created by DALL-E 3. | Image: OpenAI

The image generator inside the AI-powered Bing Chat is getting a big upgrade today: Microsoft announced that OpenAI’s latest DALL-E 3 model is now available to all Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator users. It has been rolling out over the last week or so, first to Bing Enterprise users and then to Bing Image Creator, but now it’s open to everyone.

Bing is getting DALL-E 3 access even before OpenAI’s own ChatGPT does — that’s scheduled to happen this month, but only for paying users. Microsoft is likely to be the most popular image generating tool for a while.

DALL-E 3 is, of course, the third version of OpenAI’s image generating model. The company says it understands prompts far better than before and can create images that are both more...

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Zoom Docs launches in 2024 with built-in AI collaboration features

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

At Zoomtopia 2023 today, Zoom announced Zoom Docs, a collaboration-focused “modular workspace” that integrates the company’s Zoom AI Companion for generating new content or populating a doc from other sources — you know the drill by now.

Along with the Mail and Calendar offerings launched during last year’s event, Zoom Docs is another step toward a full office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, which both have started to integrate AI-powered tools of their own, dubbed Duet AI and Copilot, respectively. The company says it will be widely available in 2024.

Like other AI helper software, users can ask Zoom AI Companion to do things like summarize meetings, chats, and information from inside Zoom Docs or generate...

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Gmail is getting emoji reactions

Emoji reactions are coming to a Gmail inbox near you. | Image: Gmail

It’s finally here — the tool that could turn your email inbox into a nightmare or a pure delight, depending on your POV. Google is adding the ability to react to an email with an emoji.

First rumored last month, Google has now confirmed it is bringing emoji reactions to its Gmail service. The feature will roll out gradually, starting with Android users and coming to web and iOS users over the next few months.

Image: Google

An animation of how emoji reactions will work. Happily, you’ll be able to “unsend” just as you can with a regular email (for those times when you accidentally hit the thumbs-down emoji.)

When you have access, you’ll see a at the bottom of a message. Click on that to choose your emoji from...

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The Cruz BlenderCap lets you make smoothies and shakes on the go

Founded and funded by ex-Apple designers: a portable USB-C blender.

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Quick fix: what can I do about that double diamond icon in my Chrome address bar?

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Issue

As Chrome continues to develop — or, rather, as Google continues to tweak it — it is more and more likely that you may find features that you weren’t aware of or suddenly be confronted by an icon that means absolutely nothing to you. This happened to me recently when I noticed an icon that resembled a pair of twinned diamonds to the left of the bookmark star in my address bar.

Your first question might be: what is that double diamond symbol? The second: what is a service handler?

I hovered my cursor over the triangles to find out what they were and was greeted with the phrase “page wants to install a service handler.”

Thanks. Clear as mud. What is a service handler, and should I let the page install it?

Quick...

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Amazon reportedly used a secret algorithm to jack up prices

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon deployed a secret algorithm to gauge how high it could raise prices before its competitors stopped increasing their prices as well, according to a new report from The Wall Street JournalTuesday.

The existence of the algorithm, codenamed Project Nessie, was first revealed late last month in a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission accusing the e-commerce giant of violating US antitrust law. The FTC’s public complaint alluded to Project Nessie, but the section was heavily redacted. According to the Journal, Nessie would inflate prices and monitor whether other retailers, like Target, would follow suit. If the competing retailers maintained the lower price, the algorithm would automatically revert Amazon’s to its normal...

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The best fitness trackers to buy right now

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

From simple fitness bands to rugged sports watches to rings, these are the best trackers you can get.

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Microsoft overhauls OneDrive with a big new design, AI Copilot integration, and more

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is announcing the third generation of its OneDrive cloud storage today, complete with the company’s AI-powered Copilot system, a Fluent design refresh, and big improvements to the way businesses share and use cloud documents.

OneDrive hosts trillions of files for consumers and businesses, with 2 billion files added every single day. Microsoft is now overhauling a lot of the experience of working in OneDrive for businesses, with many quality-of-life improvements that will make managing and using files a lot better on the web, in Windows, and in Microsoft’s various Office apps.

Image: Microsoft

The new OneDrive web view.

Microsoft is overhauling the main OneDrive web app with a new Fluent design. It...

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How to find the best deals during Amazon’s October Prime Day event

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year outside of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with this year’s autumn installment running October 10th through the 11th. The two-day shopping affair, known as Prime Big Deal Days, will likely grant Prime members access to some of the best prices of the year on Amazon devices as well as products from Bose, iRobot, Sony, and other well-known brands. This applies to items spanning a range of categories, including gaming peripherals, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories, and more.

As always, you can count on us to publish only the best deals during Prime Day — including those featured at Walmart, Best Buy, and other competing retailers. That said, if you want to be sure you...

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The wholesome, feel-good true crime of Hit Man

Image: Film at Lincoln Center

Gary Johnson has a particular set of skills. He talks to strangers about offing loved ones: family members, business partners, or anybody close to them that they want dead. In imaginative detail, he tells them how he’ll murder them. There’s a contract, money is exchanged, an agreement is made. But the thing about Gary is that he isn’t actually a killer; he’s working with the cops.

In director Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, that’s how the sting works. Someone admits they want a person killed and passes Gary the cash. That’s enough evidence for the police to make an arrest. And Gary (Glen Powell), the guy posing as the hard-boiled killer who’s going to fulfill those contracts? When he’s not acting, he’s as normcore as they come, a philosophy...

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Streaming services keep getting more expensive: all the latest price increases

There’s more good stuff to watch than ever — if you can afford it. | Image: Amazon

Whether you subscribe to Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock, Hulu, or just about anything else, the cost seems to always be going up. And it may not come down anytime soon.

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Grimes sues Elon Musk after saying he won’t let her ‘see my son’

Photo by Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic

Grimes is suing Elon Musk to establish a “parental relationship” with one of their three children, according to the New York Post. Details of the lawsuit remain under seal, but TMZ speculates that it revolves around their youngest child, Tau, after Grimes said that Musk will not allow her to visit one of their children.

Last month, Grimes posted on X — the site formerly known as Twitter — that she was pursuing some sort of legal action against Musk. “Tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer,” she wrote in a response to Walter Isaacson, who was promoting his biography of the Tesla CEO.

The lawsuit, filed September 29th in California, is meant to establish the child’s legal parents when their parents are not married. A...

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FCC issues first-ever fine for leaving junk in space

A satellite in space. Dish Network will pay the price for failing to move its EchoStar-7 satellite out of harm’s way. | Shutterstock

The FCC has issued its first fine for space junk to Dish Network for not properly deorbiting its satellite. The company admitted it was liable for not shifting its EchoStar-7 to a safer spot and will pay a penalty of $150,000 and implement a compliance plan.

Space debris — non-functioning manmade materials floating around space — can pose a hazard to working infrastructure, including the ISS, which has had run-ins with debris in the past. According to the FCC, defunct satellites like Dish’s can also interfere with “the nation’s terrestrial and space-based communication systems by increasing the risk of damage to satellite communications systems.”

“This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement...

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Meta’s head of news relations, Campbell Brown, has stepped down

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

As Meta continues to take steps back from news promotion on its platforms, its head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, is leaving the company, reports Axios. She was hired in 2017 to help news organizations get their content in front of users as the company pushed to make Facebook a major news aggregator.

Brown will continue to “remain affiliated with Meta” as a consultant, according to internal documents Axios viewed. Meta, during her tenure, added a News tab, worked to get big licensing deals with news publishers, and even offered grants through its Facebook Journalism Project to help fund struggling local news outlets.

Brown said in a 2018 Code Conference interview that her job was “not to go recruit people from news organizations...

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Florida men win Overwatch League Grand Finals

Photo: Blizzard

The Florida Mayhem won what is likely the last Overwatch League Grand Finals in a 4–0 blowout over the Houston Outlaws.

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