Amazon’s Blink adds its first wired floodlight camera

Blink, Amazon’s other home security company, primarily focuses on small, affordable and mostly battery-powered devices. Today, however, it’s launching a Floodlight Camera that, unlike the existing model, can be wired in to your home’s external power supply. The Blink Wired Floodlight Camera offers a beefy 2600-lumen LED light, a 1080p live view and two-way audio, as well as enhanced motion detection. That latter feature is aided by Amazon’s AZ2 Neural Edge Processor, which enables the processing to be handled locally, rather than in the cloud.

Blink Mini Pan Tilt
Blink / Amazon

At the same time, Blink is also trotting out a pan-and-tilt mount to its indoor Mini security camera. The Blink Mini Pan Tilt (the lack of an and in that name should bother you as much as it bothers me) attaches to the base of your mini to offer 360-degree coverage of a room. You can also attach it to a tripod or, for an extra fee, a wall mount if your needs are more specific. In terms of pricing, the Floodlight Camera will arrive shortly for $100 while the Pan Tilt (yup, still bothers me) is up for pre-order today for $30, or bundled with a Mini camera for $60.

Follow all of the news from Amazon’s event right here!

Ring brings radar detection to its Spotlight Cam Pro

We’ve already seen Ring add Bird’s Eye View — its fancy 3D motion detection — to its flagship security camera and its flagship outdoor light camera. Consequently, you get no prizes for guessing that the feature is now coming to the new Ring Spotlight Cam Pro. The new Pro Spotlight Cam is joined by a Spotlight Cam Plus, which offers a slightly nicer design than its predecessor.

For the uninitiated, Birds Eye View is a system that offers users a top-down map of their area, showing the path a person took to your front door. It’s designed to let you know if someone’s been peering into your windows, or anywhere else, while on your porch.

Both of Ring’s Spotlight Cams will be available in Battery, Plug-In, Solar and Wired variations, although not all of them are ready right now. The Spotlight Cam Pro Battery and Plug-In can be bought for $230, while the Solar model will set you back $250. The Plus, meanwhile, is available for pre-order today, with prices starting at $200.

Image of Astro and Ring Protect
Ring / Amazon

At the same time, Ring is also launching a more business-focused way of using Amazon’s Astro, its (terrifying) home security robot as a security guard. Astro can already patrol the ground floor of your home at night, and new buyers get a free six-month trial of Ring Protect Pro thrown in for good measure. Now, however, the company is integrating Virtual Security Guard to Astro for small businesses who don’t need (or can’t afford the cost of) a living and breathing security patrol.

Much like the home-friendly version, Astro will patrol your office (or other stair-free facility) keeping watch. Should the Ring Alarm or one of the sensors spot a disturbance, the system will connect to a local monitoring and security company. From there, an operator can take control of Astro and go investigate if there’s something worrying going on in the back office.

Like many of Ring’s newest products, this will be first tested by a small group of business customers in the following months.

Follow all of the news from Amazon’s event right here!

Logitech refreshes its range of Mac-specific MX keyboards and mice

Logitech is today announcing a quartet of products in its Designed for Mac series of wireless accessories. The first headline item is the MX Mechanical Mini (for Mac), an Apple-favoring variation on the existing MX Mini which launched earlier this year…

Framework made a modular, repairable Chromebook

Framework, the company spearheading a new generation of modular, repairable products, has made a Chromebook. It teamed up with Google to produce a ChromeOS-friendly version of the standard Framework machine with the same promise of modularity and repairability.

Internally, the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition comes with a 3:2, 2,256 x 1,504 display, a 12th-generation Core i5-1240, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. You can order up to 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD, although you’re also at liberty to upgrade those components yourself at a later date.

You’ll also, as before, be able to spec the machine how you want, including USB-C, USB-A, MicroSD, HDMI, DisplayPort and Ethernet. Plus, if you’re looking to bolster the storage beyond the SSD, you can buy dedicated storage expansion cards, blanked-out port modules that can hold a 250GB or 1TB of additional solid-state storage.

The one major change really is the fact that this model comes with the Titan C security chip baked into its chassis. It’s not clear yet if that’ll have any noticeable impact upon your ability to swap out the mainboard when it’s time to upgrade.

The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition is available to pre-order in the US and Canada from today, with the base model priced at $999. Would-be buyers can expect their shipment in late November or early December, and folks are required to put down a $100 refundable deposit to hold their place in the shipment line.

Bo’s futuristic e-scooter will gain a solar-powered charging stand in late 2023

British micromobility startup Bo has already realized that its e-scooter of the future needs an equally futuristic charging dock. The company has today announced bo E, a parking spot that combines a small solar panel and battery to help you re-juice your ride for free. Bo E is a dock measuring 1.5 meters (4.9ft) tall by 0.5 meters (1.6ft) wide, and is designed to be anchored to the sunny corner of your home.

The idea is that the dock will, while you’re at work, gently soak up all of the available solar energy and charge its internal battery. Then, when you return home, you can connect up your Bo M scooter and let the electrons flow from one to the other overnight. Bo E also has its own 4G setup, enabling you to keep an eye on your power status when you’re not guarding over the dock itself. The company says that the scooter is sufficiently energy-efficient that such a small charge will be enough to top up its 2kWh battery, but we’ll wait until we can test both in the real world before making any judgment.

Naturally, the biggest concern anyone can have about leaving their $2,400 e-scooter outdoors is security. Bo says that the E lodges high-tensile steel pins into the body of the scooter, making it difficult to remove easily, and anyone who tries will set off a screamy audio alarm. There’s also talk of an insurance product that might help go some way to assuage wary buyers about the risks inherent in leaving a scooter out of doors.

The Bo M is expected to start reaching customers by the end of 2022, and there’s a tentative launch date of Q3 2023 pencilled in for Bo E both in the UK and US. There is, however, no word on price, but you can imagine it’ll be similarly premium