Latest news, developments and reporting on Products & Applications.
TechRadar’s weekly recap covers ChatGPT’s new visual interface, Gemini access limits for free and Plus users, Starlink Mobile’s 800MHz spectrum, new Garmin watches, a Sonos app update and an iPod Classic-inspired Sudo player.
Lefeng reported on Oct. 10 that Li Auto plans to use self-developed batteries across more models after 2026 and has invested RMB 2.65 billion in Sunwoda Power. Nio CEO William Li told staff the next three years will focus on the core business, premium segment and key markets, while former BYD Europe chief Shu Youxing has founded a new energy company.
Ring's first smart lock has a hand-powered dial that generates electricity to unlock the door when the battery dies, ZDNet reports.
Ifanr reports that AI-driven memory demand has pushed memory and SSDs to nearly 40% of PC material costs, helping drive a 20.1% year-over-year drop in global PC shipments in the third quarter of 2026. Gigabyte is extending BIOS support for older LGA1700 and DDR4 boards, while open-source software shows ordinary PCs can run large models with trade-offs.
Sennheiser's fifth-generation Momentum True Wireless earbuds sell for 2,398 yuan and add Bluetooth 6.0, Auracast, LE Audio and head-tracked Dolby Atmos, alongside adaptive noise cancellation and CD-quality aptX Lossless playback.
A writer testing the $269 Kiwibit Bird Feeder 2 Pro found its AI camera could identify small garden birds, but a common wood pigeon ignored the feeder’s nuisance alarm and forced the device into storage.
F1's first night Sprint highlights the 2026 Singapore Grand Prix at Marina Bay Oct. 9-11, with free and paid streams available.
Nace.AI open-sourced Drex 1.5 and Microsoft released Microsoft-Decision-1, two 9B-class decision models that return probabilities over fixed options instead of writing text.
BYD said its 150,000th new energy commercial vehicle, a Q3 battery-electric tractor, rolled off the line at its Huai'an truck smart factory on Oct. 9, 2026, marking an 18-year push from buses to trucks and a sharper focus on heavy-duty electric haulage.
Ugreen’s NASync DXP8800 Ultra, on sale since September 2026 at $1,779.99, adds an Intel Core 7 150U and a 96GB memory ceiling to the DXP8800 Plus formula. A TechRadar review calls the gains modest and says the Plus remains better value for most buyers.
At IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh, Columbia University's Yunzhu Li presented FlexiTac, an open-source tactile sensor platform being commercialized by Analog Devices, while University of Queensland's Jen Jen Chung argued in a keynote that more data does not guarantee better robot decisions. Conference papers and workshops pointed to physics-aware foundation models, hierarchical control, tactile manipulation, and cheaper data collection as the field's main engineering directions.
AI is now used by almost 90% of legal professionals in the U.K. and Ireland, according to Clio, pressuring law firms' billable-hour model and changing how junior lawyers learn. Major firms are deploying tools such as Harvey even as they debate what remains human work.
Mifeng Technology launched Mifengpai in Shanghai, calling it the world's first all-category physical AI data crowdsourcing platform. It also announced a robot trainer career plan, a 100 million yuan subsidy package and a data governance initiative.
The 2026 China International Security Products Expo and the third Intelligent and Security Industry Development Conference will run Nov. 3-6, 2026, at China International Exhibition Center (Shunyi) in Beijing, with new zones for embodied intelligence, low-altitude security and AI large models, organizer the China Security Protection Industry Association said.
Seres reported September NEV sales of 29,271 units, up 20.7% month-on-month. The new-generation AITO M9 series surpassed 40,000 cumulative deliveries in 16 weeks, while AITO New M8 opened presales and Huawei and Seres signed a new five-year cooperation to upgrade the AITO business.
TechRadar says Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Garmin Fenix 9 Pro each stayed within 2 bpm of a chest ECG monitor on a hilly run.
A 20-day test of more than 3,000 photos finds Gloam, Project Indigo and Apple's native Camera app offer distinct approaches to iPhone 18 Pro photography, from film simulation to restrained computational rendering and manual controls.
At GMIF 2026, executives said China's daily token calls exceeded 140 trillion as of March, forcing SSDs, NAND and data tiering to take on new roles in AI inference. The summit detailed QLC SSD replacement of HDDs, Z-NAND and HBF efforts, and active scheduling of KV cache and MoE weights.
A closed-beta screen-time app asks users to pick a session length before opening apps they want to limit, and rewards voluntary exits with stars.
A hands-on report from ifanr says Nvidia's DLSS 5 uses 3D-guided neural rendering to add realistic lighting, materials and detail to games. In NBA 2K27, it made players, jerseys and courts look closer to a real broadcast, but cut frame rates on an RTX 5080 from 120 fps to about 45 fps.
ChatGPT has been adding stray foreign words and gambling or porn ad fragments to the automatic titles of user conversations since mid-August, a fault developers first saw in Codex CLI in January and traced to a tokenizer change made in 2024.
Jake Dyson told TechRadar that Dyson only enters a new product category when the first product is radically different, works properly, and is backed by a roadmap of further products.
Apple suppliers dispute iPhone 18 Pro order cuts as Xiaomi and Huawei raise prices; AI firms rehearse crisis responses.
A Spanish computer museum built a 1:1 Cray-1 replica from 30 old Mac Minis, reaching 1.3 teraflops in recent tests.