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 Pebble just announced the Index 01, a smart ring for recording thoughts. It's a little ring with a built-in microphone and that's about it. The Index 01 is almost anti-tech in its simplicity. There's no needless AI component shoehorned in, aside from speech-to-text. It's a ring with a microphone that you whisper ideas into and I want one.
Here's how it works. You get an idea while walking down the street, so you quietly whisper it into the ring. The ring sends the idea to a notes app or saves it for later review. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky calls this an "external memory" for the brain, but I call it a nice way to avoid having to dig the phone out of a pocket or bag just to utter something like "pizza, but for cats."
The ring doesn't record unless a button is pushed, so it won't be listening in on private conversations, and it doesn't require a paid subscription of any kind. It's on the smaller side, about the size of a wedding band, and is water-resistant.
The battery also lasts for "years" and never needs to be charged. The ring is designed to be worn at all times, so users develop the muscle memory of holding down the little button when they have something to share. See what I mean? I want one, and I've quite literally never worn a ring in my life.
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 Apple Arcade will be adding four new games on Thursday, January 8, including True Skate , Cozy Caravan, Sago Mini Jinja's Garden, and Potion Punch 2 .
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A collaborative report from Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union has uncovered pricing experiments within the Instacart app that yielded higher or lower prices for different users on the exact same items from the same store location.
The organizations partnered to enroll 437 shoppers in an experiment across four cities, where each shopper added the same items to their carts within Instacart from the exact same store. Almost 75 percent of grocery items were shown to shoppers at multiple price points, with as many as five different prices shown for the same item. The average difference between the highest and lowest price shown was 13 percent, while the highest delta on an individual item was a whopping 23 percent.
Engadget reached out to Instacart and received the following response. It reads in part: "Just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partners — ones that already apply markups — do the same online via Instacart. These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." An Instacart spokesperson added that this is not dynamic pricing (insofar as it is not based on supply and demand), that no personal demographic data is used in the process and that these experiments are random.
The bulk of the tests were conducted at Safeway and Target stores, which both yielded similar results. A Tar
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Holiday travel is almost upon us and, while it likely won't be something out of a Richard Curtis film, there are ways to make it easier. You can raid our list of best travel gifts for 2025 and pick up our favorite MagSafe power bank: Anker's MagGo
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The debut game from Liquid Swords will arrive in early 2026, it was announced at today's PC Gaming Show. Samson: A Tyndalston Story is billed as "a consequence-heavy noir action game" by its developer, and focuses on the eponymous Samson McCray, a man who's got himself into serious debt in a city that doesn't seem particularly forgiving.
The debut trailer doesn't give too much away in terms of story, but I'm getting gritty Max Payne-y vibes. Combat looks crunchy and visceral, and it sounds like Liquid Swords is going for an oppressive atmosphere. "Samson is built on a simple, brutal truth: every day costs you," writes the studio in a press release. "Debt grows with interest, and time works against you. Each job burns a limited pool of Action Points and every decision shifts how the city treats you—there are no do-overs. You move forward because standing still makes everything worse."
Liquid Swords has been teasing its first game for a while. The studio has some serious pedigree, being founded in 2020 by Christofer Sundberg, who created the Just Cause franchise when he was at Avalanche Studios. Developers who previously worked on Mad Max and the Battlefield series have also joined Sundberg at Liquid Swords, and the studio says it drew on its collective experience in combat systems, systemic design, animation and action-oriented storytelling to create Samson.
Just Cause was an open-world series, but it sounds like Samson will be a more focused experience, possibly reflected by its $25 price tag. At the beginning of t
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Roskomnadzor, Russia's federal agency for monitoring and censoring mass media, has blocked access to Snapchat and FaceTime in the country, Bloomberg reports, citing Russian news service Interfax. The bans were reportedly put in place because the platforms were used "to organize and carry out terrorist acts," and commit fraud.
It's not clear if either service is still accessible by using a VPN, but banning Snapchat and FaceTime fits with Russia's crackdown on communication and social platforms that started after the country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Facebook and X were blocked in March of that year, and Instagram was added to the ban list not long after. In 2024, the encrypted messaging app Signal was also banned, and more recently in July 2025, Russia threatened to block access to WhatsApp.
Engadget has contacted both Apple and Snap to comment on the Russian bans. We'll update this article if we hear back.
Banning or restricting these platforms is a way to exert control over where and h
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