Author: Amelia Scott

Victorgeorgiev/Getty Images Sony sold Vaio laptops from 1994 to 2014, representing a period of nearly 20 years for the brand before its high production costs, combined with competition from rivals like Dell and Lenovo, led to its sale. In February 2014, Sony announced that it would reform its business plan for PCs and TVs. The shakeup would shift focus away from the company’s PC business, as its PC and TV profit targets, bundled in financial reports, were not achievable in the fiscal year ending March 2014. Sony’s financial pressure from…

Memorial Day is fast approaching, and with it comes plenty of retail sales. Even though 2026 continues to be an expensive year for tech, there are still plenty of opportunities to save if you know where to look, and these deals may even extend to popular brand-name items. Luckily, finding deals is one of our specialties, and right now there are two different retailers offering a popular Apple product at an attractive price. The Apple AirPods 4 are currently on sale at Walmart and Amazon for less than $100, but customers should be aware that the model on sale does…

Play Games Sidekick also benefits from wider deployment. Stockinq/Shutterstock This year’s Google I/O introduced a series of updates to the Google Play storefront. Most of the new features are, as usual, developer-focused, but there are some notable changes to the way regular Android users will interact with the store. We knew AI would be a big factor in Google’s upcoming plans, with Gemini Intelligence announced at the Android Show: I/O Edition, and of course, there’s even more AI on tap. Google Play is rolling out a new AI-powered feature called Ask Play. This is an overlay…

It’s not Photoshop, but it might be better than what’s in Google Photos. Google Alongside a series of updates to its Workspace apps, including Docs and Drive, Google is launching a new image editing app that combines generative AI tools with fine-grained editing. Google Pics is built on Nano Banana, with object segmentation, meaning you’ll be able to move, resize or transform individual parts of your images, whether they’re AI-generated or not. While we’ve seen this sort of thing (with varying degrees of success) from Google, Adobe, and even on some smartphones, Pics has its own…

It will even look for opportunities to maximize your loyalty points. Google Google is announcing a series of updates to Shopping today, the most notable of which is probably its new Universal Cart. Universal Cart is a tool that brings all your purchases under one roof and allows you to shop from multiple locations. Essentially, you’ll be able to add products to that cart from every corner of Google’s mansion, including search, YouTube, and Gmail. Once you add a product to the cart, the system’s agentic AI will get to work finding the cheapest price, comparing…

TikTok, the social video app, has two different owners. There is the main company, ByteDance, which owns TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. In 2025, a third arm was created, with US control transferred to a joint venture, TikTok USDS JV. Who Really Owns TikTok is an interesting rabbit hole to explore. If you’ve only seen it on the surface, the reasoning behind the company’s current situation is fascinating. The corporate-level mess comes mostly from the U.S. government, but also from other companies trying to get their way on the most popular social media app of all time. In 2021,…

Anchor your snow globe worlds to real locations from Google Maps. Google Project Genie is rolling out today to all Google AI Ultra adult subscribers worldwide, following its US debut in January. The service is also getting a new Street View feature that can generate interactive landscapes based on real-world locations found on Google Maps, starting with places in the United States. Project Genie is Google’s AI-powered system for creating explorable snowball environments from written prompts, with creations lasting 60 seconds at 720p and 24fps. Users can create contained worlds in the style of their choice,…

It’s great when a specific manufacturer becomes almost synonymous with its most popular products. Examples like the Roomba robot vacuum (made by iRobot) immediately come to mind when it comes to automated cleaning technology, and one of the first brands you might think of when someone mentions “Bluetooth speaker” is JBL. Over the past few years, JBL has released a ton of speakers that customers love. Still, the underdogs deserve their chance at glory. While there are an unimaginable number of Bluetooth speakers to choose from in stores and online, there are a handful of underrated Bluetooth speaker manufacturers that…

The company is expanding SynthID to Chrome and Search. Google As Google introduces new models and tools for generating AI content, it also makes it a little easier for people to answer the question “was this created with AI?” » The company is expanding its SynthID AI detection system so that features such as Circle to Search and Lens are able to identify AI-generated and edited images. SynthID is the watermarking system developed by Google that adds invisible metadata to content created or edited with its own AI tools. Last year at I/O, the company launched…

Google Search is becoming even more of a centerpiece of its AI ambitions. Today at Google I/O 2026, the company announced that Search has been upgraded to the Gemini 3.5 Flash model, which it says offers faster inference, smarter results, and the ability to process different media types. As a result, Google is also launching a new smart search box that can dynamically expand to accommodate complex queries, as well as use videos, images, files, and even Chrome tabs as inputs. However, none of this comes as a surprise. Over the past year, we’ve seen Google gradually upgrade AI mode…