The app Paperman gives your screen some added texture in an effort to make it easier on your eyes. It works best for reading, writing, or otherwise working with text. Tech is so sterile now--everything lives on the same shiny screens. It's nice, then, when you find an application that exists mostly just to add a little grit to these devices. That's how I'm interpreting Paperman, which makes everything on your computer screen look like it's printed on paper.

Two years after trying to sidestep mobile apps with dedicated AI hardware, Rabbit is launching OS3, a cross-platform agent that lives on the screens you already use. Jesse Lyu doesn't think the Rabbit R1 was a flop. Lyu's gadget was among the first in the gold rush to create dedicated AI hardware that acted as a virtual assistant. You could speak into the R1 and ask it to complete tasks for you--book an Uber; order food on DoorDash. After a buzzy launch at CES 2024, it earned scathing reviews.

Viture's first display-free smart glasses have bone-conduction microphones to privately record your daily musings. David Jiang, cofounder and CEO of smart glasses company Viture, tells me about how he used to yell at his kid. His 10-year-old son played tennis. During tournaments, Jiang says he had a habit of shouting and criticizing his son's mistakes as he played. He wanted to apply pressure to make him succeed--it was the way he'd been taught to raise kids, after all.

Apple lovers have long enjoyed seamless connectivity between their iPhones and Macs. Apple's hardware synergy means you can launch iPhone apps right from the macOS desktop, respond to texts without picking up your iPhone, and even copy text on one platform and paste it on the other. That kind of seamless connectivity does not natively exist for Android phone owners at the operating system level. Google's trying to change that with Googlebooks, a new class of laptop. First teased in May, the company finally shared more details about the new OS at a media-only event in New York City last week.

I've spent decades testing, reviewing, and (most importantly) using different to-do list applications. And I think we can all admit that most of these apps are way too complicated. A to-do list is just a list. Humans have been making lists for thousands of years, long before computers existed. Paper works well, but so does a stone slate if that's what you've got handy.

The Relay Q, due next year, is the latest attempt to reposition voice as the most seamless method for human-computer interaction. How much do you hate typing? The advent of large language models has rapidly advanced voice-to-text technology. Whether it's Wispr Flow joining your meetings to summarize discussions or Google debuting smarter on-device dictation in its latest Pixel smartphone, these tools do far more than transcribe: They intelligently strip filler words, clean up unscripted thoughts on the fly, and seamlessly mediate multilingual conversations. Now, a new startup is entering the fray.

Google's Pixel Camera chief, Isaac Reynolds, thinks year-to-year upgrades to smartphone cameras are still critical, even though some detractors think they're passé. "A person who is a casual photographer and desperately wants to be a hobbyist--they're never going to break that ceiling unless you give them the tools, he says. The features that others call'meh'--for some people, those features are life-changing. Take the 30X Super Res Zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro from 2022, which uses machine learning to stitch together multiple frames in a digitally zoomed photo to give you a result that's much sharper than you're used to. Reynolds says that because of this feature, Google now sees people using 30X zoom dramatically more than before. The new Pixel 11 Pro, announced today, can zoom up to 120X, though in addition to the digital stitching, it relies on AI-generated pixels to fill in some details. Reynolds says maybe having that capability is enough to get someone interested in, say, wildlife photography. After experimenting on their phone, they'd be ready to invest in a professional camera and a big zoom lens. "There's a reason I work on low light and zoom every single year, he says.

The Pixel 11 smartphone lineup is here, alongside the Pixel Watch 5 and the all-new Pixel Tag. Google is dialing things up to 11 this year with its Pixel phones . Ahead of its annual Made by Google event in New York City, the company unwrapped the Pixel 11 smartphone family--which includes the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold--alongside the Pixel Watch 5 smartwatch . There's also a new hardware addition: the Pixel Tag, which seems designed to be the AirTag of the Android world. Here's everything you need to know about the hardware changes and software upgrades on Google's latest devices.

Honor's Robot Phone Has a Gimbal-Powered Camera for Vloggers Honor's new China-exclusive Android phone features a pop-out motorized gimbal camera designed to replace your action cam. You hear it often: Smartphones have plateaued . A small boost to battery life here, a minor camera upgrade there--our glass slabs don't seem to change all that much from year to year. That's exactly the kind of sentiment Honor wants to counter with the Robot Phone, which has a motorized camera that pops up out of the top. Honor has been teasing the phone since late 2025 .

Meta Is Charging a Subscription for Smart Glasses Features. Now you'll need to subscribe for "expanded access" to the most advanced features. So you paid a few hundred bucks for a neat little gadget and think you're good to go. But it turns out you'll need to subscribe to a monthly plan to unlock its advanced features. That where AI-powered consumer electronics are increasingly heading, and Meta is the latest to prove it with its smart glasses .