The rollout of Android 16 happened sooner than we expected. However, the highly anticipated Material 3 Expressive design language won’t be available until the Android 16 QPR1 update later this year. In the meantime, we’ve seen multiple Google apps, such as Google Messages, introduce Material 3 Expressive elements into the app. The messaging app is now working on yet another change in line with the updated design philosophy.
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Material 3 Expressive brings what I love about Android into the modern day
A UI redesign for the users
An APK teardown of the latest Google Messages beta (version20250701_01_RC00) by Android Authority has revealed work on a design refresh for the contact profile/chat info page. This page can be accessed by tapping the contact’s name at the top of a 1-1 conversation or from the list of chats by tapping the contact’s profile image, followed by the “i” icon.
Current vs upcoming (via Android Authority)
This redesign focuses on enlarging the four key buttons on the contact profile page: Call, Video, Contact info, and Search. Compared to the current set of buttons, the upcoming version features significantly larger, oval-shaped buttons. These changes align with the Material 3 Expressive updates we’ve seen across multiple Google apps so far.
The updated visual elements should be available imminently
In addition to their larger size, Google is giving these four buttons more flair. A video uploaded by Android Authority shows how the buttons expand momentarily when the user interacts with them, which is a nice touch. It’s worth pointing out that this feature was manually activated, which means that simply sideloading the Google Messages beta APK on your Android smartphone won’t suffice.
There are no specifics available on the wider rollout of this contact page redesign, which isn’t surprising given that it is only accessible through the beta version. However, with Material 3 Expressive being a big area of focus for Google in the coming months, we’d be surprised if these changes didn’t reach the stable version of Google Messages imminently.
Similar to Google Messages, we’ve recently seen apps like Google Wallet gaining some Material 3 Expressive changes. Meanwhile, email client Gmail is also prepping an updated look in line with Android’s updated design language.
Aren’t pets such a drag? I mean, really. They’re all furry, and cute, and innocent. And you have to feed them and love them, and respect their autonomy and basic needs. For what? Borderline unconditional love? Who’s got time for all that? Certainly not me. My job is computer, and I need efficiency—a practical companion that’s alive when I want it to be and shutting the f**k up when I need to have the TPS report filed by EOD so corporate can circle back on the EOY roadmap. You got all that? Me neither; I’ll just have AI summarize it for me. Alright, sorry, I’m done joking now. It’s time to get serious—or should I say… Sirius.
Sirius is a $1,200 robot dog made by a company you’ve never heard of called Hengbot. It’s part of a long lineage of robot dogs punctuated by the likes of tech titans like Sony, Xiaomi, Fisher-Price, and, uh, Ideal Toy Company’s impeccably named mechanical dog from 1960, Gaylord the Pup (you can’t make this shit up, folks). But this isn’t just another Gaylord. It’s a robot dog with—say it with me now—AI. Using large language models (LLMs) like the ones that power ChatGPT, Sirius comes equipped with the ability to understand voice commands. What can you ask Sirius? Some stuff.
Pros
Dog-like movement
AI for natural language prompts
Game controller-compatible
Cons
Falls way too much
Connectivity issues
Voice commands are spotty
Not very cute
In a demo with Sirius, I saw the dog take voice commands like “sit,” “shake,” and “pee,” though I wouldn’t want to train your real dog to do that last one. They’re activated pretty much how you’d think they would be. Just blurt out, “Hey, Sirius,” and then talk away. The dog has to be connected to Wi-Fi to do all of this stuff, FYI—there’s no onboard processing, but this ain’t an iPhone after all. Speaking of iPhones, be careful when yelling “Hey, Sirius” because “Sirius” sounds an awful lot like another voice assistant, who’s had a bit of trouble with AI lately. I don’t know what happens when you ask your iPhone to pee, but frankly, I’d rather not find out.
I wasn’t able to test the voice commands with my review unit of Sirius because I had trouble connecting it to Wi-Fi, but I did get to see them in a live demo, and Sirius’s voice assistant looks about as good as Apple’s, which is to say… pretty mid. It recognized some commands right away, and others not so much. However mid Sirius is at processing and understanding voice commands, it’s much worse at (sigh) walking. This thing falls kind of a lot, and unlike a dog made of flesh and blood, it cannot figure out how to get up after taking said spill. Lots of my time testing Sirius was spent extricating it from the insufferable foibles of its own clumsiness. I have my own foibles to suffer, thank you very much. I don’t need a robot dog to add to the pile.
(Note: you may not have the same Wi-Fi headache as the one I encountered. My unit was a demo version and didn’t have the same OTA update as the ones shipping after. We’ll be updating this post if and when I can get Sirus online.)
Using a game controller provided with my review unit, I tried parading Sirius around the Gizmodo office for shits and giggles but found that (especially when it’s in autonomous mode) it would often get tripped up when I sent in an input to walk forward or move side-to-side and then flop to the ground harder than Cristiano Ronaldo when his team is down 2-1. Say what you will about dogs, but they’re pretty good at locomotion most of the time. When Sirius isn’t falling over, you can use a game controller to do some fun stuff manually, like directing it to jump in four directions (left, right, forward, or back) and also activate some silly commands like making it sit and meow like a cat. Cute!
I think if I’m going to give Sirius any credit, it’s that the actuators used to move the dog around are pretty cool and can actually simulate the movements of a real dog fairly well. I suppose, depending on your feelings toward robots, that could also be a point against it, too. There’s something vaguely uncanny valley about Sirius, and the weird, single robot eye on the dog’s face probably doesn’t help.
Despite the fact that Sirius, with its onboard camera, can actually track your face, it cannot follow you around like other robot dogs like Xiaomi’s Cyberdog. That’s a bummer. I think going for a walk is probably high on the list of things people would want to do with their new $1,200 pet, or toy, or AI companion, or… wait a second, what is this thing, actually? If you’re reading these words (and I’m sorry if you are), please send me your coordinates so I can tell the police to save you from the evil villain Clockwork Oranging robot dog reviews into your eyeballs—then you may also be curious who Sirius is meant for. The short answer is I have no freaking clue.
Is it a toy for serious adults who want an AI-programmable companion? Is it supposed to be cute? Like, I don’t know, Furby cute? Or Sony Aibo robot dog cute? I’m not positive, but if it’s the latter, then I would venture to say that it’s not really hitting the mark. Superficially, it looks like a cross between Boston Dynamics’ Spot and a DJI drone, and functionally, it can do a little bit more than the robot dogs of yore, I guess. But in practice, it’s just not very, I don’t know… fun. There’s a sort of binary that exists in gadgets, robot dogs included. There are toys—things that aren’t meant to do much, but they’re fun to use. And then there are tools. Things that do a thing that you need or very much want done. As it stands, I don’t think Sirius is hitting either of those marks, but in the end, the stakes are kind of low. I don’t know who this robot dog is for, but some dogs have no master, right? Then again, those dogs, sooner or later, often get sent to the pound…
More details on iOS 26 and related updates continue to surface as Apple moves through beta testing in the wake of last month’s WWDC, but this week also saw a number of hardware-related rumors for later this year and beyond.
The most intriguing rumors were in reference to a mysterious MacBook running an A18 Pro chip, but we also shared details on the iPhone 17 Pro models, AirPods Pro 3, and an array of vision-related products ranging from future Apple Vision Pro-like devices to smart glasses.
New MacBook With A18 Pro Chip Spotted in Apple Code
Apple is working on a new low-cost MacBook model powered by the A18 Pro chip from the iPhone, according to both analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and backend code discovered by MacRumors.
The A18 Pro has performance roughly on par with the M1 chip found in the 2020 MacBook Air model that is still being sold by Walmart for $649. This A18 Pro-powered MacBook could be a successor to the M1 MacBook Air with some additional updates and be sold directly by Apple and across other sales channels.
iPhone 17 Pro’s New MagSafe Design Revealed in Leaked Photo
The much larger camera bump coming on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max will lead to moving the Apple logo lower on the rear of the devices, according to recent rumors. That change will force accessory makers to use a new MagSafe ring layout for their products, although existing MagSafe accessories should remain compatible with the iPhone 17 Pro models.
In other iPhone 17 news, a new report claims that the iPhone 17 Pro Max will feature a battery capacity of approximately 5,000 mAh, which would make it the biggest battery ever in an iPhone. The upcoming Pro models are rumored to be a bit thicker than the current versions, which will make room for bigger batteries.
iOS 26 Adds a Useful New Wi-Fi Feature to Your iPhone
If you’re frustrated by having to enter your information on each of your devices whenever you join a captive Wi-Fi network like those found in hotels, gyms, airports, and other public places, a new feature in iOS 26 and related releases will sync the details across your devices to make it easier to get everything up and running.
We’re continuing to take a look at other iOS 26 developments in our recent feature guides, including a number of Lock Screen changes and a host of enhancements for Safari.
Five Features Coming to AirPods Pro 3
Aside from a shift from Lightning to USB-C on the case in 2023, the AirPods Pro haven’t been updated since 2022, but it looks like a more substantial update may be arriving later this year.
We’re expecting some new features like the heart rate monitoring that debuted in the Powerbeats Pro 2 earlier this year, improved Active Noise Cancellation, and some design tweaks, so they should be a worthwhile purchase for both new and existing users.
Apple Music Debuts All-New Personalized Playlist
Apple celebrated the 10th anniversary of Apple Music this week with some special shows and countdowns on Apple Music 1, as well as a new personalized “Replay All Time” playlist for all Apple Music subscribers.
Building upon the annual Replay playlists that feature your most-played tracks for a given year, Replay All Time includes your 100 most-played songs across the entire time you’ve been an Apple Music subscriber, and it will dynamically update based on your ongoing usage.
While the Apple Vision Pro headset hasn’t exactly become a mainstream product since it launched nearly a year and a half ago, Apple still has a lengthy pipeline of vision-related products in the works, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Aside from a spec bump to the M5 chip for the Vision Pro later this year, we’ll apparently have to wait until 2027 to start seeing more of these products hit the market, but expect lighter and cheaper models of Vision headsets, smart glasses similar to the Meta Ray-Bans, and eventually more powerful mixed-reality glasses with built-in displays.
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It shouldn’t be particularly surprising as Fedora Linux has always been known for shipping with a leading-edge compiler toolchain, but the formalities have now been submitted for Fedora 43 to ship with the latest GNU and LLVM toolchain components.
Fedora 42 already shipped with the GCC 15 compiler ahead of the annual stable compiler feature release in the spring. For Fedora 43 the plan is to ship with GCC 15.2 as what will be the newest point release to GCC 15 and should be out as stable around August.
In addition to moving to the GCC 15.2 point release, the GNU toolchain update proposal also includes shipping GNU Binutils 2.45 and GNU C Library 2.42 and GNU Debugger 17.1. All what will be their latest stable releases by this autumn for Fedora 43.
There is also a change proposal for shipping Fedora 43 with the LLVM 21 toolchain that will be the newest with Clang 21 and other LLVM 21 components for those using that GNU toolchain alternative. In addition, the LLVM package is now built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for better performance. The change proposal notes that the PGO’ed LLVM/Clang should be noticeably faster compiling C and C++ files.
These change proposals still need to be approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but with Fedora’s long history of always shipping the very latest compiler toolchain components, they’ll likely be approved with ease.
Cybersecurity experts are reporting a 19x increase in malicious campaigns being launched from .es domains, making it the third most common, behind only .com and .ru.
The .es top-level domain (TLD) is the domain reserved for the country of Spain, or websites targeting Spanish-speaking audiences.
Cofense said the abuse of the .es TLD started to pick up in January, and as of May, 1,373 subdomains were hosting malicious web pages on 447 .es base domains.
The researchers said that 99 percent of these were focused on credential phishing, while the other 1 percent were devoted to distributing remote access trojans (RATs) such as ConnectWise RAT, Dark Crystal, and XWorm.
The malware was distributed either via a C2 node or a malicious email spoofing a well-known brand (Microsoft in 95 percent of cases, unsurprisingly), so there was nothing overly novel about the campaigns themselves other than the TLD.
Emails seen in the wild tend to be themed around workplace matters such as HR requests or requests for the receipt of documents, for example, and the messages are often well-crafted, rather than low-effort one-liners.
The .es domains that host the malicious content, like the fake Microsoft sign-in portals, are in most cases randomly generated rather than crafted by a human. For potential targets, this potentially makes it easier to spot a lookalike/typosquat-style URL.
Some examples of the types of subdomains hosted on the .es base domains are as follows:
ag7sr[.]fjlabpkgcuo[.]es
gymi8[.]fwpzza[.]es
md6h60[.]hukqpeny[.]es
Shmkd[.]jlaancyfaw[.]es
As for why exactly the .es domain was proving so popular, Cofense did not venture any guesses. However, it said that aside from the top two most-abused TLDs (.com and .ru), the remainder tend to fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter.
Regardless, the general nature of the phishing campaigns experts observed over the past six months suggests dodgy .es websites could be here to stay.
Cofense said: “If one threat actor or threat actor group were taking advantage of .es TLD domains then it is likely that the brands spoofed in .es TLD campaigns would indicate certain preferences by the threat actors that would be different from general campaigns delivered by a wide variety of threat actors with varying motives, targets, and campaign quality.
“This was not observed, making it likely that abuse of .es TLD domains is becoming a common technique among a large group of threat actors rather than a few more specialized groups.”
One similarity Cofense saw between almost all of the malicious .es domains was that 99 percent of them were hosted on Cloudflare, and most of the phishing pages used a Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA.
“While Cloudflare has recently made deploying a web page quick and easy via command line with pages hosted on [.]pages[.]dev, it is unclear whether their recent move to making domains hosted by them easy to deploy has attracted threat actors to their hosting services across different platforms or if there are other reasons, such as how strict or lenient Cloudflare is with abuse complaints,” the researchers blogged.
European Union country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) like .es are typically among the least abused, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
They typically come with more restrictions on who can register a ccTLD compared to a generic TLD (gTLD) like .top and .zip, and don’t support bulk registrations, making them less appealing to those who wish to abuse them en masse. ®
Lost Your Job? Xbox Exec Says Talk to a Chatbot About Your Feelings PCMag
Laid-off workers should use AI to manage their emotions, says Xbox exec The Verge
Xbox Producer Offers Laid-Off Devs to Use AI For ‘Emotional Clarity & Confidence’ 80 Level
Xbox executive producer offers “best advice I can” to those caught up in Microsoft’s latest lay-off spree – AI prompts to “help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss” GamesRadar+
Xbox Producer Recommends Laid Off Workers Should Use AI To ‘Help Reduce The Emotional And Cognitive Load That Comes With Job Loss’ aftermath.site
Infinix recently unveiled the Hot 60i with the Helio G81 Ultimate chip at the helm, and now it has announced that it will soon launch the Hot 60 5G+ featuring a “One-Tap AI Button.”
The image shared by Infinix with us shows that the One-Tap AI Button will be located on the right side of the Hot 60 5G+ below the volume rocker and power button. Infinix says it’s a “smart and seamless shortcut that redefines user interaction” with the device and is designed for professionals, gamers, students, and regular users alike.
The One-Tap AI Button supports single press, double press, and long press, and can be customized for over 30 apps. Moreover, the AI Button adapts to an individual’s usage patterns to provide relevant, real-time assistance.
The One-Tap AI Button can also be used to summarize articles, trigger Circle to Search, or get explanations of the on-screen content. It can also launch personalized tools based on the content displayed on the phone’s screen.
Infinix hasn’t revealed anything else about the Hot 60 5G+, but said the smartphone will launch in India on July 11 and will be sold online exclusively through Flipkart.
If you’re in the market for a new tablet, now is the time to take the plunge. Even though it’s past the official day, the Fourth of July sales are still in full force and Amazon Prime Day deals are already starting to heat up. Which means it’s a great time to upgrade your tablet for less. Our CNET shopping experts have been scouring all of the sales going on now to find the deepest discounts on top tech, and one of our favorite offers is on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE Plus.
Right now the 128GB Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE Plus with Wi-Fi is down to $600 on Amazon ahead of Prime Day, which saves you $50 over its usual asking price. Best Buy is also matching this deal. If you need more storage, Amazon is selling the 256GB version of this tablet at $50 off, bringing it down to $700.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 FE Plus tablet has a 13.1-inch screen and a stunning QHD display with 2880 by 1800 pixel resolution. That means you’ll get detailed images, brighter colors and better contrast. Samsung equipped this tablet with a battery that lasts up to 21 hours and made the S10 FE Plus waterproof for more durability. Your purchase comes with an S-Pen calibrated to work precisely so you can draw, take notes and work more easily. You’ll also get a USB-C cable for easy charging as well. All S10 FE Plus tablets can seamlessly sync with other Samsung devices, which is a boon if you’re well-integrated into their ecosystem.
If you’re on a budget and need alternatives, the 128GB Samsung Galaxy S10 FE is now just $450 at Best Buy, saving you $50. Amazon also has this same offer. Looking for a new tablet but not sure if this deal is for you? Check out our list of the best Prime Day tablet deals for more ideas.
Best Prime Day Tablet Deals
Save yourself from scrolling through Prime Day tablet deals with the help of our shopping experts, who have rounded up top savings for you right here.
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TABLET DEALS OF THE WEEK
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Why this deal matters
The Samsung Galaxy S10 FE Plus offers a long-lasting battery, QHD resolution and plenty of memory. This new discount of $50 at both Amazon and Best Buy offers the perfect opportunity to score one of these tablets without paying for full asking price, and S10 FE options are also available for those who want a slightly cheaper option.
Valve has released the latest Deadlock patch notes, as it continues on the road to the full launch. The Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 studio has made a plethora of changes with this update, as a global reduction to gun and ability damage take centre stage. So whether you’re still active or fancy diving back in, these changes to Deadlock make now the ideal time to get playing.
The first change Valve makes to Deadlock in this newest patch is to bullet cycle time, which has been increased by 5% for every single hero. Developer ‘Yoshi’ explains that this will effectively reduce all gun damage per second by 5%. This should put more weight into how and when you use skills, changing the flow of battle ever so slightly and impacting the fight for minion kills.
Yoshi also says “Ability base damage and AP bonus damage [are] reduced by ~8% (spirit power growth unaffected),” which means everyone should also find their abilities to be slightly weaker moving forward. Combined with the changes to DPS, it looks like Valve wants to reduce lethality across the board in the game, which should give you more chance to turn fights around. While Deadlock is already one of our picks for the best MOBAs on PC right now, it’s worth noting that Valve is still deep in development, so a lot of this could change again.
Your overall Spirit gains from leveling have also been reduced from 1.25 to 1.1, while your Spirit bonus based on souls spent in the tree is increased by a whopping 25%, changing the way we power up throughout a match. Speaking of which, the team is also increasing Ultimate cooldowns by 10%, which it says “affects base and upgrades, so the total CD with AP is 10% longer.”
While we don’t know when the next Deadlock patch could be, I’d expect some big stuff on the horizon. Earlier this year the studio completely reworked the shop, introduced new items, and made some major visual changes, all of which almost made Deadlock feel like an entirely new game. With the Deadlock release date still on the horizon, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Valve has now released the Friday July 4 Deadlock update. You can go through all the changes right here.
As you dive into all of these changes, make sure you check out our tier list of all the Deadlock characters. We’ve also got a very useful look at Deadlock crosshairs, which will help your shooting.
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