Latest news, developments and reporting on Products & Applications.
Google has released Chrome 155 with decoding support for JPEG XL, a format it says compresses images 30 to 50 percent better than JPEG and also handles lossless compression, HDR, animation and progressive decoding.
Shengshu Technology has opened Vidu Q4 Preview, a high-expression video-generation model priced from 0.09 yuan per second, with support for up to 15 reference images and 2K or 4K output, according to ifanr.
Police departments are expanding AI-powered real-time crime centers like Axon's Fusus, while privacy experts warn the tools create broader surveillance risks than Flock cameras.
LA County is building automatic financial-aid screening to prevent hundreds of millions in medical debt.
Mole, an open-source Mac cleanup command-line tool, has become a paid Mac desktop app after reaching 60,000 GitHub stars and more than 120 contributors. Its developer says users pushed the shift and shaped safeguards for cleaning AI-generated files, while the CLI remains free and open source.
A TechRadar piece attributed to Samsara's CMO argues physical AI stalls on execution rather than budget, citing BCG, PwC and Capgemini findings on spending, value capture and robotics deployment.
Code in Android 17 QPR3 Beta 1 points to a Googlebook feature that unlocks the laptop using a nearby Android phone.
AVEVA’s Arti Garg says industrial AI must pair autonomy with safety, governance, and human oversight in physical operations.
BMW unveils the iX4, an electric X4 with up to 428 miles of range and 603 horsepower, arriving in March 2027.
OpenAI is rolling out GPT-6 to every ChatGPT tier with an Intelligent UI that builds interactive replies; paid users get GPT-6 Sol, Free and Go accounts get the less capable Luna.
Google is rolling out Pixel Connected Camera support to 11 more communication and work apps, bringing the total number of officially supported apps to 16, according to Android Authority.
Smart Launcher and Kustom Industries, the team behind the KWGT widget toolkit, are merging into a new brand called Wild Pixels, promising tighter integration between their Android products.
Microsoft introduced a Windows update built around locally running AI agents and a new Surface Laptop Ultra it says can run models above 120 billion parameters on-device, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appearing at the launch.
An account published by the lifestyle outlet Sspai on October 8, 2026 describes a decluttering routine its author spread across roughly four months, one room at a time, with rules for deciding what stays and a principle that an object's place should follow the user's habits rather than the reverse.
Tesco lifted its annual profit forecast after reporting resilient consumer confidence and higher first-half underlying profit, helped by online and premium own-label sales.
Perplexity released pplx-embed-v2-late, ColBERT-style multimodal embedding models in 0.6B and 9B sizes, with MIT-licensed weights on Hugging Face. The 9B model scored 92.4% on MADQA, while the 0.6B model is designed for edge query encoding.
UK drivers can now check live petrol and diesel prices on Google Maps, using government Fuel Finder data, in a move aimed at increasing price transparency and competition.
CAIR released CARES 4.0, a multimodal clinical agent system, at the fourth CREATE Symposium in Hong Kong, where clinicians, hospital leaders, researchers and investors discussed medical AI's path into clinical workflows and commercialization.
KargoBot said on Sept. 22 that it has launched a large-scale AI transport network in Inner Mongolia, combining human-driven trucks, driverless trucks with cabs and cabless transport robots as it pushes autonomous freight toward commercial scale.
Felix Mobile launches Unlimited+ in Australia, offering unlimited data at up to 80Mbps on Vodafone 5G/4G for AU$50/m.
Steven Spielberg's sci-fi espionage film Disclosure Day is now streaming on Peacock in the U.S. as of October 8. A $1 Walmart+ trial can include Peacock, while viewers in the UK, Canada, and Australia must rent or buy the film; TechRadar recommends a VPN for U.S. subscribers traveling abroad.
Microsoft and Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark, an Arm-based PC platform, and the Surface Laptop Ultra, aiming to run local AI agents with up to 128GB unified memory and 1 PFLOP FP4 compute. The Surface starts at $2,599.99 on Oct. 16, with OEM laptops and desktop systems to follow.
Jieyue Terminal will launch STEPX Neo, its first large-model-native agent phone, in Shanghai on Oct 13.
Google has launched a public web tool, SynthID Detector, that can identify SynthID watermarks in AI-generated or AI-edited images, video and audio from Google, OpenAI, Nvidia and Kakao. The tool requires sign-in, will soon support Apple AI images, and cannot detect content from models that do not use SynthID.