Building off of its success convincing the public to outfit their homes and offices with various Alexa-enabled Echo devices, Amazon introduced the very first Echo Auto in 2018. More than a million pre-orders and four years later, the Echo Auto is getting an upgrade, Amazon announced Wednesday at its 2022 Device and Services event.
The new unit will be slimmer than its predecessor and will include a mounting plate that adheres more securely than the last version — so make sure you really like where it’s positioned before taking off the backing film. The unit still leverages five separate mics to pick up commands over road noise so you’ll still have a good amount of flexibility in where you can place it. Once installed, it does what every Alexa does: respond to voice commands. It handles the standard fare of playing music — including a “follow me” function that allows you to switch audio from your home stereo to the vehicle as you get in — as well as navigation and hands-free calls.
“Ambient technology is at its best in environments where people are focused on other tasks, and nowhere is that more important than in the car,” Heather Zorn, Amazon’s vice president for Alexa said during the event. “Voice can minimize distractions and help you keep your eyes on the road so you can focus on the fun of driving.”
What’s more, with help from Amazon’s cloud the $55 Echo Auto will also be able to alert the driver when their pre-ordered Whole Foods grocery order is ready for pickup will also summon a tow truck if you run out of gas. Simply say, “Alexa, call Roadside Assistance.”
Amazon has revealed new Echo speakers, although they don’t look much different on the outside. Once the centerpiece of the company’s Alexa lineup, Amazon didn’t debut a new “regular” model last year. In 2020, it unveiled a completely redesigned Echo with a spherical shape instead of its previous cylindrical construction. The “regular” Echo isn’t getting a tune-up this time around either. Instead, the company says it has improved the audio performance of both the high-end Echo Studio and the compact Echo Dot while keeping the same overall design for both.
The retooled Echo Studio comes with new spatial audio processing that improves on Amazon’s previous 3D sound technology. The company says we can expect better stereo sound with “greater, width, clarity and presence.” The frequency range also got an update with increased mid-range clarity and deeper bass. The company’s high-end speaker now comes in a white color option and the updated version will ship October 20th for $200.
Amazon
For the Echo Dot, which Amazon says is the world’s bestselling smart speaker, the company has improved the audio as well. Amazon explains that it redesigned the interior to fit a larger speaker while keeping the device the same size as the previous model. The new driver offers twice the bass and clearer vocals over the last Echo Dot, according to the company. Amazon has also updated the Echo Dot with Clock so that the display can show information like artists, song titles and snooze timers. New accelerometers and sensors should improve touch controls as well — on both models. The Echo Dot will be available for $50 while the clock version is $60, and both are available for pre-order today and shipping October 20th. There are also two new options for Echo Dot Kids — dragon and owl — that will be available for $60 when they ship October 20th.
Amazon also announced today that it has packed Eero mesh WiFi tech in its speakers. This means that compatible Echo models can serve as range extenders, adding up to 1,000 square feet of internet coverage per device.
Follow all of the news from Amazon’s event right here!
Amazon wants to help you get better understanding of your sleep, but knows that many of us hate wearing something to bed just to track our rest. That’s why it made the Halo Rise — a bedside lamp and sleep tracker that works without a camera or microphone to track the person resting closest to it. It’ll also use machine learning to detect what sleep zones you’re in and will cost $140 when it’s available later this year.
It uses a “no-contact, low-energy sensor” to sense movement and respiratory patterns. Together with machine learning, Amazon can tell from the rising and falling or expanding and contracting of your body to determine your sleep stages throughout the night. Amazon says it “trained and validated the device’s sleep algorithm against the clinical gold standard for sleep analysis called… overnight polysomnography.”
If there’s another person or animal sharing your bed, Amazon said its algorithm can detect and exclude their activity and only include your data in your sleep summary, which you’ll see every day. The company will then offer you tips on how to sleep better, including suggestions on how to optimize your environment.
The Rise also has sensors to gauge the temperature, humidity and brightness of your room, and is also a lamp. It’ll glow in accordance with sunrise times so you can wake up to a gradually brightening grow instead of having your retinas scorched off when you open your curtains. You can also set a smart alarm that will monitor your sleep stages and wake you at an ideal time instead of disrupting you in the middle of deep sleep.
The Rise will also work with Alexa and you can set a compatible Alexa device to start playing your favorite song as you’re waking up, based on the Rise’s insights. If you have personalized sleep routines, the Rise can also trigger them when you get in bed, turning off your lights and other devices for you.
Those concerned about privacy can turn off the sleep-tracking sensor whenever they want, and Amazon said that all Halo health data is encrypted in transit and at rest in the cloud. You’ll also be able to download your health data, limit access to it or delete it altogether.
Though Amazon describes this as a “first of its kind bedside sleep tracker,” Google already introduced something similar last year with the second-generation Nest Hub. That device uses the company’s Soli radar sensor to monitor your breathing and is designed to be used by your bed, too. It doesn’t offer the alarm and lights that the Halo Rise does, but is based on the same principle. Google’s version didn’t work perfectly — it was tricky to set up and didn’t always know when I’d awoken. We’ll have to wait till we can test the Halo Rise for ourselves to see how well Amazon’s tracking works, but for now, it’s an intriguing device, especially for those of us keen on getting sleep insights without having to wear a gadget to bed.
Follow all of the news from Amazon’s event right here!
Nearly 15 years after introducing the first Kindle, Amazon is finally adding a stylus to one of its e-readers. At its fall hardware event, the company introduced the Kindle Scribe. The device features a 10.2-inch, 300ppi display with an adjustable front light and a stylus that magnetically attaches to it. According to Amazon, you don’t need to charge or sync the Scribe’s stylus, and you can use it for jotting down notes, journaling and making annotations in books you’re reading. Starting next year, it will also be possible to send Microsoft Word documents to Kindle Scribe.
Kindle Scribe will start at $339 when it arrives later this year. In addition to different storage options, Amazon will let you choose between a “basic” and “premium” pen. The latter includes a customizable shortcut button and a dedicated eraser on the top. In the US, the e-reader will come with a complimentary four-month trial to Kindle Unlimited.
Follow all of the news from Amazon’s event right here!
Over the last year, Valve has been more forthcoming about plans for its biggest Steam sales, including by revealing the dates well ahead of time. The company says the cadence will change starting in 2023. It will replace the Lunar New Year sale (which debuted in 2016) with the spring sale, which will run from March 16th to 23rd.
Valve said a spring sale was a popular request from developers and publishers, many of whom believed that the Lunar New Year edition (which typically took place in late January or early February) ran too close to the December holiday sale. “It will allow us to create more space between our four major seasonal sales and provide more opportunities throughout the year for developers to expand and execute their discounting calendar,” Valve added in a blog post. “We think many publishers will still opt to discount games around the Lunar New Year holiday, using the custom discount tools. But we suspect customers will be better served by a little bit more time between the big Steam-wide seasonal sales.”
This makes sense, as the winter sale is arguably one of Steam’s two biggest events of the year, alongside the summer one. Spacing things out more could be helpful for developers and publishers (that said, there’s not much time between the autumn and winter editions). Moreover, this move will shorten what was a lengthy gap between the Lunar New Year and summer sales, which could be handy for those who receive a Steam Deck and don’t want to wait too long to pick up a ton of discounted games for it.
Meanwhile, Valve reiterated the dates for the next two major sales. The autumn edition will run from November 22nd to 29th, while the blockbuster winter sale will take place between December 22nd and January 5th.
You’ll soon have an alternative if the Monster Hunter games are feeling a bit stale. EA and Dynasty Warriors creator Omega Force have introducedWild Hearts, a feudal Japan-inspired twist on the beast slaying formula. You (and your friends, in co-op) take on giant creatures using not just the usual bows and swords, but gadgets you build on the spot. You can craft giant mines that explode when a monster draws near, or harpoons that hold these enemies in place.
Omega Force isn’t a stranger to the concept. It developed the monster-slaying Toukiden franchise in the 2010s. In that sense, the team is mainly refining an experience it has been developing for years.
Wild Hearts will arrive on February 17th, 2023 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC (via Epic Games Store, Origin and Steam). You’ll learn more about the gameplay in an “extended” debut on October 5th. It’s too soon to say if the game will be derivative or a fresh take, but it could serve as a welcome fix for Monster Hunter fans who’ve exhausted the most recent titles and are looking for more.
And it’s a deal that’s only getting bigger thanks to climate change. Sea levels around the city have already risen a foot in the last century with another 8- to 30-inch increase expected by mid century, and up to 75 additional inches by 2100, according to the New York City Panel on Climate Change. To help city planners, emergency responders and everyday citizens alike better prepare for 100-year storms that are increasingly happening every couple, researchers from NYU’s Urban Flooding Group have developed a street-level sensor system that can track rising street tides in real time.
The city of New York is set atop a series of low lying islands and has been subject to the furies of mid-Atlantic hurricanes throughout its history. In 1821, a hurricane reportedly hit directly over the city, flooding streets and wharves with 13-foot swells rising over the course of just one hour; a subsequent Cat I storm in 1893 then scoured all signs of civilization from Hog Island, and a Cat III passed over Long Island, killing 200 and causing major flooding. Things did not improve with the advent of a storm naming convention. Carol in 1954 also caused citywide floods, Donna in ‘60 brought an 11-foot storm surge with her, and Ida in 2021 saw an unprecedented amount of rainfall and subsequent flooding in the region, killing more than 100 people and causing nearly a billion dollars in damages.
NOAA
As the NYC Planning Department explains, when it comes to setting building codes, zoning and planning, the city works off of FEMA’s Preliminary Flood Insurance Rate Maps (PFIRMs) to calculate an area’s flood risk. PFIRMs cover the areas where, “flood waters are expected to rise during a flood event that has a 1 percent annual chance of occurring,” sometimes called the 100-year floodplain. As of 2016, some 52 million square feet of NYC coastline falls within that categorization, impacting 400,000 residents — more than than the entire populations of Cleveland, Tampa, or St. Louis. By 2050, that area of effect is expected to double and the probability of 100-year floods occuring could triple, meaning the chances that your home will face significant flooding over the course of a 30-year mortgage would jump from around 26 percent today to nearly 80 percent by mid-century.
NOAA
As such, responding to today’s floods while preparing for worsening events in the future is a critical task for NYC’s administration, requiring coordination between governmental and NGOs at the local, state and federal levels. FloodNet, a program launched first by NYU and expanded with help from CUNY, operates on the hyperlocal level to provide a street-by-street look at flooding throughout a given neighborhood. The program began with NYU’s Urban Flooding Group.
“We are essentially designing, building and deploying low cost sensors to measure street level flooding,” Dr. Andrea Silverman, environmental engineer and Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, told Engadget. “The idea is that it can provide badly needed quantitative data. Before FloodNet, there was no quantitative data on street level flooding, so people didn’t really have a full sense of how often certain locations were flooding — the duration of the floods, the depth, rates of onset and drainage, for example.”
Urban Flooding Group, NYU
“And these are all pieces of information that are helpful for infrastructure planning, for one, but also for emergency management,” she continued. “So we do have our data available, they send alerts to see folks that are interested, like the National Weather Service and emergency management, to help inform their response.”
FloodNet is currently in early development with just 23 sensor units erected on 8-foot tall posts throughout the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, though the team hopes to expand that network to more than 500 units citywide within the next half decade. Each FloodNet sensor is a self-contained, solar-powered system that uses ultrasound as an invisible rangefinder — as flood waters rise, the distance between the street surface and the sensor shrinks, calculating the difference between that and baseline readings shows how much the water level has risen. The NYU team opted for an ultrasound-based solution rather than, say LiDAR or RADAR, due to ultrasound tech being slightly less expensive and providing more focused return data, as well as being more accurate and requiring less maintenance than a basic contact water sensor.
The data each sensor produces is transmitted wirelessly using a LoRa transceiver to a gateway hub, which can pull from any sensor within a one-mile radius and push it through the internet to the FloodNet servers. The data is then displayed in real-time on the FloodNet homepage.
URban Flooding Group, NYU
”The city has invested a lot in predictive models [estimating] where it would flood with a certain amount of rain, or increase in tide,” Silverman said. Sensors won’t have to be installed on every corner to be most effective, she pointed out. There are “certain locations that are more likely to be flood prone because of topology or because of the sewer network or because of proximity to the coast, for example. And so we use those models to try to get a sense of locations where it may be most flood-prone,” as well as reach out to local residents with first-hand knowledge of likely flood areas.
In order to further roll out the program, the sensors will need to undergo a slight redesign, Silverman noted. “The next version of the sensor, we’re taking what we’ve learned from our current version and making it a bit more manufacturable,” she said. “We’re in the process of testing that and then we’re hoping to start our first manufacturing round, and that’s what’s going to allow us to expand out”.
FloodNet is an open-source venture, so all of the sensor schematics, firmware, maintenance guides and data are freely available on the team’s GitHub page. “Obviously you need to have some sort of technical know-how to be able to build them — it may not be right now where just anyone could go build a sensor, deploy it and be online immediately, in terms of being able to just generate the data, but we’re trying to get there,” Silverman conceded. “Eventually we’d love to get to a place where we can have the designs written up in a way that anyone can approach it.”
Amazon is holding its annual fall showcase of new devices on September 28 at 9AM PT/12PM ET and as usual for an Amazon event, we expect things to get a little chaotic. Amazon’s stream is not open to the public, or even to all members of the press. Meanwhile, and during the one-hour-or-so presentation, we expect the company to unleash a firehose of new products ahead of the holiday season, from Fire TV devices to Echo speakers and displays to who knows what else. (Remember that time Amazon surprised us with an Alexa-powered microwave?)
Fortunately, Team Engadget are among the media outlets that can view the livestream, and we’ll be liveblogging everything that comes out of the event. Bookmark this page and tune in below to our liveblog, kicking off around the same time the event does, at noon ET on Wednesday.
For the first time, Amazon’s having a second Prime Day sales event in October. If you missed out on the original Prime Day that took place in July, this new two-day event, called the Prime Early Access Sale, will be your next opportunity to grab things like gadgets, clothing, shoes, household necessities and even early holiday gifts for less. Engadget will cover all of the best tech deals you’ll be able to get during the event, but there are some useful tidbits to keep in mind as you think about what you may want to pick up during this year’s Prime Early Access Sale.
When is the Amazon Prime Early Access Sale?
Amazon’s Prime Day “part two” of sorts will begin on October 11th and will run through the end of the day on October 12th. In typical Prime Day fashion, you’ll have to be a Prime subscriber to get access to all of the deals available during this event. Thankfully, Amazon still offers a 30-day free trial to new members, so you can start your free trial now ahead so you’ll be all set when the event arrives.
If you don’t pay for Prime and have no intention of doing so, you should still check out Amazon on Prime Day for sales that are available to all shoppers. Those were few and far between during the original Prime Day back in July, but they did exist. Also, since Amazon is likely using this event to kick off the holiday shopping season, we expect to see other retailers follow suit; you may be able to get the same discounts and additional sales during the same time period at Target, Walmart, Best Buy and other stores.
What deals can we expect?
As with Prime Day earlier this year, we expect Amazon to kick things off a little bit early by knocking down the prices of some of its own gadgets. Early Prime Day deals typically include discounts on Echo speakers, Fire TV gadgets, Eero routers and more, so keep an eye out over the next few weeks for those items to drop in price.
Typically, Prime Day is only matched by Black Friday when it comes to record-low prices on these gadgets. That means you can either choose to pick up Amazon devices during the two-day event or take your chances and wait until Black Friday the following month. There’s a good chance the sale prices we see during this event will come back for Black Friday – however, due to lingering supply chain issues and high demand around the holiday shopping period, there’s a chance you’ll have to wait longer to receive your items if you wait until the last minute to buy them.
Amazon devices will not be the only items on sale during this second Prime Day. The online retailer usually discounts things like household goods, clothing, shoes, books, appliances, beauty items and more for Prime Day, along with a plethora of gadgets. We expect to see a lot of the original Prime Day deals come back for this October event, so there’s a good chance you’ll be able to get headphones, laptops, TVs, gaming accessories, SSDs, robot vacuums and more for record-low prices.
How to prep for the Prime Early Access Sale
Our advice for this fall sale is much the same as ours for the original event – go into it knowing exactly what you want to buy. Amazon’s homepage will be one big distraction on October 11th and 12th and it’ll be easy to get sidetracked by deals that probably aren’t worth your time or money. Instead of falling into that trap, make a list of the things you hope to get at a discount for both yourself and for other people if you’re doing some early holiday shopping.
You can either use Amazon’s wish list feature to collect all of your desirables in one place online, or write it all down the old-fashioned way on a sticky note. We like Amazon’s wish list feature because it’ll show if something dropped in price after you added it to your list. That essentially makes the wish list a one-stop shop for you on Prime Day – it’ll have all of the items you want to buy, and it’ll show you how much of a discount you can get on it during the two-day event.
We also recommend using a price tracker like CamelCamelCamel to check out the price history for any items you plan on buying during the Prime Early Access Sale. That will help you decide if Amazon’s deal on that particular item is good enough for you to buy it.
Engadget will surface all of the best tech deals available during this Prime Day, so if you have a lot of gadgets on your list, be sure to check the site during the two-day event. You can also follow the @EngadgetDeals Twitter account and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter to stay up to date on the latest discounts.
Nintendo’s approach to online gaming has sometimes been awkward (having to use your phone just to chat, for example), but it just took an important step forward. The Vergereports Nintendo has updated the Switch Online apps for Android and iOS with Splatoon 3 home screen widgets. You can quickly review your recent game stats, gaze at your screenshot album and check the stage schedule to see when a favorite game mode will come into the rotation.
You can only slightly customize the widgets, and some occupy more screen real estate than others. You’ll need to clear some room if you want the stage schedule, while the photo album is relatively small. iPhone owners can also forget about iOS 16 lock screen widgets.
You’ll need a Switch Online subscription to use these features, although that isn’t surprising when they’re tied to the Splatoon 3 multiplayer experience. When combined with the game’s matchmaking improvements over Splatoon 2, though, they indicate that Nintendo is getting the hang of internet gaming.
