SLIM landed close to its target, but engine troubles during the descent saw the lander flipped upside-down and unable to properly recharge its solar batteries. | Image: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) has been resurrected, over a week after the probe ran out of electricity following its troubled lunar touchdown on January 20th, leaving it upside-down and its solar panels pointing in the wrong direction. On Monday, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that communication with the SLIM spacecraft had been re-established, and operations to hunt for clues about the Moon’s origins had resumed.JAXA had predicted that a change in sunlight direction could allow the probe’s battery to be recharged from its awkwardly angled solar panels. It’s unclear how long this power will last — the agency previously said that SLIM was not designed to survive a lunar night, which will next... Continue reading…

iOS 18 beta 1 is around four months away from its official WWDC24 debut. In early June, we expect Apple to preview the upcoming iPhone software update for the very first time. And while details about this forthcoming release have been somewhat scarce, we've been reading some generic rumors about its potential offerings. According to a fresh report, iOS 18 could potentially be the biggest iPhone update yet.

The Nomad Stand offers 15W of wireless iPhone fast charging for $100. | Image: Nomad Nomad’s Stand is the latest Qi2 charger to hit the market, offering up to 15W of wireless charging speed to Qi2-compatible phones like the iPhone 15. The accessory was announced in late December, but it’s now shipping in a choice of black or white for $100 from Nomad’s website.It’s $100 price point makes the Stand $10 cheaper than Nomad’s equivalent MagSafe model, the Stand One, and offers the same “up to 15W” charging speeds and magnetic attachment compatibility as Apple’s MagSafe (Apple helped develop the Qi2 charging standard). The bad news is that Nomad’s $100 asking price doesn’t include the required 20W power adapter — you just get a USB-C to USB-C cable. Image: Nomad Nomad’s Stand in black. Nomad’s... Continue reading…

Most of Apple's latest iPads offer a single USB-C port, which makes connecting wired accessories to them somewhat tricky. Considering that some models offer proper support for external displays, certain customers have even been relying on these excellent tablets as laptop replacements. Nevertheless, the lack of diverse port types limits those trying to fully leverage the power of iPadOS 17 and the M-series chips. Fortunately, you can buy one of these excellent USB-C hubs to make the most of your iPad.

Embracer Group, the company attempting to forge one video game publisher to rule them all, has just presided over another round of layoffs. Eidos Montreal is letting go of 97 game developers and support staff, the company announced today on X, shortly after Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier scooped that the studio has canceled an unannounced Deus Ex video game. Image: Eidos Montreal “The global economic context, the challenges of our industry and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio.” “The global economic context, the challenges of our industry and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio,” wrote Eidos Montreal. Eidos... Continue reading…

You can buy the portable power bank on sale at Amazon in a variety of colors. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Anker’s new Qi2-compatible chargers may be capturing all the attention, but that doesn’t mean older devices like the Anker 622 Magnetic Battery (MagGo) aren’t worth a look. The portable, 5,000mAh charger may not be as fast as Anker’s new Qi2 MagGo Power Bank, but it’s still one of our favorite models — one you can currently pick up for $34.99 (half off) at Amazon and Walmart.While the new 6,600mAh MagGo Power Bank recharges your phone twice as quickly, Anker’s magnetic Qi charger still delivers a respectable 7.5 watts of power to MagSafe-compatible phones. It also weighs a lot less, making it a better option if you want something you can easily slap onto your phone while on the go. Its foldable kickstand may not be as sturdy as the new... Continue reading…

The MSI Claw gaming handheld. | Image: MSI The MSI Claw will be one of the first handheld gaming PCs with an Intel Core Ultra processor inside — but despite what the company told us at CES 2024, it won’t have a variable refresh rate (VRR) screen. To my knowledge, the Asus ROG Ally is the only handheld with that dynamic gameplay smoothing display feature, and it’s one of its biggest advantages. I’m disappointed the MSI Claw won’t have it, too.Instead, MSI marketing specialist Anne Lee tells me you’ll be able to manually set the seven-inch 1080p, 120Hz screen to 48Hz or 60Hz if you want. MSI claims that still counts as “VRR” — but it doesn’t unless you’re taking the phrase in an exceptionally literal direction I’ve never heard a company argue before. VRR is the generic form of... Continue reading…

Arc Search browses the web for you, and then builds you the webpage you wanted. That’s the idea, anyway. | Image: The Browser Company / David Pierce A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, “What happened in the Chiefs game.” That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I’d Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the “Browse for me” button instead. Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years, went to work. It scoured the web — reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today — and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later. I got the headline: Chiefs win. I got the final score, the key play, a “notable event” that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about... Continue reading…

Amelia Krales General Motors’ shift from an internal combustion engine-producing company to one that makes electric motors is sputtering. EV sales are up, but growing slower than expected. The company’s next-generation Ultium platform, in particular, isn’t meeting expectations. GM’s new electric trucks and SUVs seem perennially delayed — or full of buggy software. I think I have an easy solution to a lot of these problems: bring back the Chevy Volt. Remember the Volt, GM’s scrappy Toyota Prius fighter from the mid-2010s? The company was lauded when it first came out in 2010 as a prescient bet on vehicles with electric powertrains. And it was undeniably a very good hybrid. The first-generation model got 36 miles of electric range before the gas... Continue reading…

Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest investor, and the former company has injected billions of dollars into the latter company. Well, we're starting to see the investment pay off for Microsoft. While OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus has long been an expensive way to get the best AI features available, it has now been usurped by Microsoft's Copilot Pro subscription. As skeptical as many Windows 11 users were when Microsoft began going all-in on Copilot, the service has grown significantly since it was first shown in preview mode. We're now at the point where the following can be said definitively: Copilot Pro is a better AI subscription than ChatGPT. Here are four reasons why that's the case.

There’s a lot to like about the Kobo Elipsa 2 compared to something like the Kindle Scribe, especially with today’s discount. | Image: Kobo As much as I like physical books, I’m planning a move and considering consolidating my collection to make that process more painless. You might be in the same boat, or perhaps you want a more convenient way to knock out your beefy reading list for the new year. If that sounds like you, you might want to consider the Kobo Elipsa 2E, which is currently on sale for $349.99 ($50 off) direct from Rakuten Kobo.In addition to reading ebooks on its large E Ink display, you can use the ad-free Elipsa 2E to take notes using the included stylus. In fact, we consider it the best ebook reader you can buy for that purpose — one that’s even better than the Kindle Scribe given you can write directly on any page in any book. (The Scribe only supports... Continue reading…

Bundles freshly harvested chard. | Photo by Waltraud Grubitzsch/picture alliance via Getty Images One of the most ambitious assessments yet of our global food system calculates the health, environmental, and economic losses of business as usual. It also outlines what governments can do to reap trillions of dollars’ worth of benefits by producing food more sustainably. All in all, the damages caused by the current system — how food is produced, marketed, and consumed — add up to $15 trillion in losses a year. That includes health costs associated with poor nutrition, biodiversity loss, climate change, and other environmental harms. “In short, our food systems are destroying more value than they create,” says the report published today by economists and scientists with the Food System Economics Commission (FSEC). It’s time for a... Continue reading…