The device is a clever combination that makes a lot of sense, but don't expect the best of both worlds. Calling a drone a flying camera is a bit like calling a small plane a flying car. If your only option is to fly it, it's just a drone. But what if it was an actual camera, that could also fly? Enter the HoverAir Versa ($539), which is exactly that. The Versa is a handheld gimbal camera similar to DJI's Pocket 4 or the Insta360 Luna Pro .

The iPhone is easy to recommend to anyone looking for great smartphone hardware and long-term software support. The previous few iOS releases, however, have been pretty janky. With iOS 27, Apple therefore shifted its focus to ironing out bugs and improving overall stability rather than cramming in another round of flashy new features, and a good chunk of the WWDC 2026 keynote covered improvements such as snappier app launch times, faster AirDrop transfers and better memory management. Apple's commitment to software updates also means iOS 27 compatibility extends all the way back to the iPhone 11, which is great news since iOS 26 would have been a terrible final major update to be stuck on. If you haven't already updated your iPhone, you can do so by navigating to Settings > General > Software Update Not much has changed visually, which makes sense since Apple only recently overhauled its design language with Liquid Glass.

Philadelphia police appear to have been caught in one of the most bizarre cases of "rogue" AI behavior yet. Per CBS News, the police department disclosed on Friday that an Anthropic model generated and submitted a false homicide tip to its PhillyUnsolvedMurders website, which the department set up to gather tips from the public related to unsolved homicide cases. Anthropic notified Philly police of the incident on October 7. According to information the company shared with PPD, it said a model was carrying out a test of a random selection of websites when it emailed the false tip. The submission was flagged as spam and subsequently wasn't investigated.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens this past August, child safety experts Engadget spoke to at the time expressed skepticism that the new mode would adequately protect young people from harm. Now, one of those groups, Common Sense Media, has published a formal risk assessment of the software, and deemed it an "unacceptable risk" for all children under the age of 18. "Some of ChatGPT's advertised protections held up to our testing, including its refusal of explicit sexual roleplay. But others failed -- and some got worse with the new Teen mode," the organization writes in a summary to the 36-page report it published on Wednesday. "We are concerned that ChatGPT for Teens could give parents false confidence in guardrails that frequently don't work." Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute, which is funded in part by the OpenAI Foundation, identified five key areas where ChatGPT for Teens either did not work as advertised or in a way a parent would reasonably expect.

On Tuesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens, an age-gated version of its chatbot designed for young users. The company first announced it was working on a system to automatically identify teens and restrict their usage of ChatGPT last September, following the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by his parents, took his own life after ChatGPT acted as an enabler. "There's no need for a teen to create a new account or change anything; if we predict you're under 18, or you've told us so, this becomes your default experience," Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth and families, told Engadget. Make no mistake, kids are already using ChatGPT at an incredible scale. At the start of last year, the Pew Research Center found about a quarter of US teens were using the chatbot for their schoolwork.

Google is making it easier for people to support their favorite publications by introducing a new "Preferred Sources" button webmasters can add to their websites. "When readers click this button, it adds the site as a Preferred Source on Google and immediately directs them back to where they left off on the publisher's page," Google explains. After clicking the button, you'll see the publication appear more frequently Google Search, including in Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode. The button formalizes something publishers, including Engadget, had been independently adding their websites for a while now. Even with referral traffic from Google declining in recent years due to products like AI Overviews and AI Mode, the company's search engine remains an important source of revenue for many media outlets.

Health care company Abbott has entered into a partnership to connect Google Health to its Lingo continuous glucose monitor (CGM). According to the press release, this multi-year collaboration will allow users of the over-the-counter Lingo device to see their metabolic data within the Google Health app, which could help a person "make better lifestyle and nutrition choices in the moment." The Lingo data can also be shared with the Google Health Coach, which offers AI-driven recommendations based on an individual's information. Lingo is explicitly intended for adults who are not using insulin. Engadget reported on the growing trend of non-diabetics using continuous glucose monitors back in 2023 and found little research that supported the benefits for that population to track blood sugar spikes so closely.

In the spring of 2022, Google began reaching out to a series of writers, including award-winning science-fiction authors and New York Times bestsellers, for feedback on an experimental writing tool. Four years later, their participation has corners of the literary world up in arms. Google researchers knew at the time that they were approaching a breakthrough point with large language models (LLMs). DeepMind, the company's AI division, was internally testing a natural language generation model called LaMDA which had demonstrated emergent writing capabilities. That model would eventually form the basis for Google Gemini.

The question is whether Gemini is a good enough smart home assistant. Somehow, it's been almost nine months since Google first revealed its latest smart speaker, the boringly-named Google Home Speaker. I don't understand why it took the company so long to get it to market, as there's nothing that particularly changes the game here hardware-wise. The $99 orb looks a lot like Apple's HomePod mini, with a speaker that fires audio in 360 degrees and microphones so you can chat with Google Assistant Gemini for Home. It's the definition of an expected, iterative piece of hardware -- but on the other hand, it's been almost six years since Google released the Nest Audio and seven since the Nest Home Mini.

Evan Spiegel doesn't want you to call Snap Specs AI glasses Evan Spiegel doesn't want you to call Snap Specs AI glasses Snap's CEO sat down with Engadget after his keynote at AWE. Snap's newly announced AR Specs might seem similar to other smartglasses, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says that's the wrong way to think about the product. Specs, he says, is a new type of computer, a see-through computer. Shortly after unveiling Specs at AWE, Spiegel sat down with Engadget to tell us more about the device we got a glimpse of onstage. The CEO repeatedly referred to Specs as a computer and that really is core to understanding how Snap is positioning the product (and justifying the price). Specs, Spiegel said, is able to overlay computing on the world around you and bring computing into the world, which is so important if you want to make computing feel more human. But Snap will have to do more than just persuade people to buy a computer for their face.