Technology news

Joy to the world, the need to take an annoying extra step while sending emails on your iPhone is no more.
Google has updated its latest version of Gmail, adding the option for it to become the default email client on iPhones. That's thanks to a change made by Apple to the new iOS 14, which dropped last week. 
Finally!
Image:screenshot: rachel kraus / mashable from gmail in the app store
At WWDC in June, Apple announced that users would be able to change their default web option from Apple's

Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge One of the more prominent changes introduced in iOS 14, and one that is generating a lot of interest, is the addition of widgets that can be added to any page. There are all sorts of weird and useful things you can do with them (especially if you’re willing to play around with apps such as Shortcuts and Widgetsmith). To begin, here’s how to add an existing widget to your home screen:Touch and hold an empty area on your screen until your apps jiggle a

Citymapper has long been one of the best mobile navigation apps. Some, including myself, would say it's even better than Google Maps. Now it's available to more people in the United States.
The Google Maps alternative for iOS and Android announced Monday it launched navigation support for 17 more cities in the U.S. These include Pittsburgh, Dallas, Miami, the Twin Cities, and several more. You can find the full list of supported cities here. 
SEE ALSO: How to blur your house on Google Stree

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Since 2017, the Google Pixelbook has maintained a spot on our list of the very best Chromebooks you can buy, with tasteful design and processing headroom that keep it competitive three years later. Yet you can’t buy it from Google anymore — it’s out of stock, and the company is strongly suggesting it’s been discontinued for good.
Here’s Google’s full statement:
We are proud of the success of Pixelbook, which will continue to

This year has been hard. Wildfire smoke has engulfed the West Coast, hundreds of thousands are dead from an ongoing pandemic, and the US government is deadlocked to the point of illegitimacy, incapable of taking action against the economic, political, ecological, and medical devastation that threatens to engulf us. Even for those not directly affected, the perception of the ongoing crises has turned into a kind of psychic assault, challenging the limits of what we can express.
Fortunately, a new

Blizzard Entertainment was forced to cancel its annual BlizzCon fan convention earlier this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the company has announced new plans for an online-only version of the show. BlizzConline will take place on February 19th–20th, 2021.BlizzCon — which is usually held in November as an in-person fan event — is where Blizzard typically makes some of the biggest announcements for its stable of popular franchises, including World of Warcraft, Ov

In an explosive complaint filed on September 14, an ICE whistleblower alleged that unwanted hysterectomies, a surgical operation that removes the uterus, were performed on immigrant women in ICE custody at a Georgia facility without their consent. The complaint is currently awaiting a full investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. 
The whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, a nurse formerly employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, maintained that while some women ex

Well, that was fast.
This morning, I analyzed Palantir’s newly published fifth amendment of its S-1 filing with the SEC as it pursues a public direct listing on the NYSE. I called the company “not a democracy” after it added new provisions to create a special mechanism called “Stockholder Party Excluded Shares” that would, in the language of Palantir, allow the company’s trio of founders to “unilaterally adjust their total voting power” at will, no

Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly removed information from its website saying that COVID-19 can spread through the air and that it may travel distances further than six feet. It also removed statements saying that the virus usually spreads when people inhale particles produced by others.The information was added in an update over the weekend and was taken down from a page called “How COVID-19 Spreads” e

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Nvidia’s RTX 3080 launch last week was a total mess, one Nvidia is still navigating the fallout from following its public apology earlier today. The aftermath of the graphics cards selling out in a matter of minutes at pretty much every major US retailer is that the limited supply that does still exist is being hawked on third-party seller sites in increasingly obnoxious fashions. That includes Amazon Marketplace sellers, which are now notifying interested

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If it’s time to upgrade your phone, you might be considering Samsung’s Galaxy Note 20 or the Note 20 Ultra. Both are among the most powerful Android phones around, with the Note 20 Ultra being particularly crammed with better specs than most other devices. And currently, both phones are available unlocked for $200 less than they usually cost. It’s been a few weeks since we last surfaced this deal, and it’s still happening all across the

Prezi You may know Prezi as an innovative PowerPoint-esque software that lays information out as an animated map rather than sequential slides. But the company has expanded in the past year, with a new focus on incorporating both live and recorded video into presentations. This month, as many schools attempt to utilize online instruction for the first time, Prezi is rolling out two new tools tailored to distance learning.
The first is a “video in video” feature, which will allow pre

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In a statement to reporters on Monday, Oracle announced that its new TikTok venture will be entirely divested from Bytedance, a significant break from previous reports of the agreed deal between the two companies.
“Upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global,” the c

Sketchy merchants have been bribing Amazon employees and contractors to reinstate unsafe and counterfeit products on the e-commerce site and manipulate reviews, according to the U.S. Justice Department. 
On Friday, federal officials announced indictments against six suspects who allegedly paid more than $100,000 to Amazon employees and contractors in commercial bribes. 
“In exchange for bribes, and the promises of such bribes, the Amazon insiders baselessly and fraudulently confe

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google just released the official update to Gmail, allowing it to be set as the default email application for iOS 14 devices.iOS 14 — which was released by Apple last week — added the option for users to set third-party email applications as the default for iPhone and iPad devices running the latest version of Apple’s operating system. But it still fell to developers to actually add support for the feature, which the latest Gmail update

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Nvidia has apologized for the RTX 3080 GPU preorder fiasco, which saw the highly desirable graphics card sold out pretty much everywhere. “We were not prepared for this level, nor were our partners,” Nvidia writes in a new FAQ. “We apologize for this.”Nvidia said demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 was so high it caused its website to stop working properly, claiming that it was “inundated with over 10 times the traffic of our previous ge

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S consoles will be available for preorder around the world on September 22nd — and depending on where you live, that’s happening very soon. If you’re reading this in New Zealand, you’ll be able to place an order in just under two hours, with the wait being just a bit longer for those in Australia. By the time those on the US East Coast wake up, gamers in the UK and Europe will have already put mon

Microsoft Microsoft’s redesigned Xbox store rolls out digitally to all users today, after its successful initial deployment to insiders early last month.As my colleague Chris Welch pointed out in his early review, the new storefront loads dramatically faster than its predecessor. It’s been “optimized for the era of Game Pass,” meaning it’s easier to see the differences between different versions of a game in the store, and there’s a new focus on parental cont

Marvel Studios’ first big Disney Plus project, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, is being moved back to 2021, making a rough year for Marvel fans a little bit rougher.Although Marvel hasn’t made any official comment on the matter, the description for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney Plus has changed to note it’s coming in 2021. The show, which follows Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan’s characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, Sam Wilson (Falcon) a

It’s September 21st — the final day of summer, the eve of the equinox, and far more importantly, the day memorialized by the 1978 Earth, Wind & Fire classic, “September.”
It’s also the day when the internet impatiently tweets at comedian Demi Adejuyigbe, waiting for him to post his latest celebration of the day and date. Adejuyigbe has been making videos for five years now where he dances along to the most salient part of the song, and they have truly turned the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft’s priciest video game acquisition, a $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media, shocked the industry on Monday. The deal puts Bethesda, one of the industry’s biggest publishers and owners of some of the most successful gaming series, under the Xbox brand. It also raises a simple but powerful question: how does buying Bethesda fit into Microsoft’s overall Xbox strategy?
The immediate and inevitable

Image: Lego You know what’s better than buying a toy version of The Child Baby Yoda? Building a replica of Baby Yoda by purchasing the new set Lego is making.That’s right. Lego is releasing a new 1,073-piece set that allows you to recreate the adorable character from The Mandalorian in all his glory. It stands 7.8 inches tall and is designed for builders ages 10 and up.The set does not just net you a Lego statue of a cute character: you can have some fun with how he poses in your ho

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is preparing to launch an ambitious networking and location system later this year under the name Amazon Sidewalk. Sidewalk will link smart home devices and other Amazon products using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), connecting beyond the range of a standard Wi-Fi network.
Meant to be operated at the scale of a neighborhood, Sidewalk would turn devices like smart floodlights and home assistants into network bridges, passing along security updates and c

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is revealing today that it now has 15 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers. That’s up 50 percent from the 10 million the company previously disclosed back in April. Xbox Game Pass is a subscription service that offers access to a growing selection of more than 100 Xbox games for $9.99 per month.
Microsoft has been pushing Xbox Game Pass heavily in recent months, particularly ahead of its next-gen Xbox console hardware launches in November. X

Minecraft’s PlayStation VR update is available now to download. Developer Mojang Studios announced the update earlier this month but hadn’t previously said when it would be playable. If you own Minecraft on PlayStation, then the update is completely free.The update does exactly what it says on the tin, making Minecraft playable on Sony’s PlayStation VR platform. It’s not the first time Minecraft has come to virtual reality, but it’s a welcome addition to the roster

Adobe is preparing to add an AI-powered sky replacement tool to Photoshop that makes it easier to swap out the sky in any picture with just a few clicks. The company previewed the tool on YouTube ahead of its Adobe Max conference, scheduled for October 20th–22nd.The tool uses machine learning to automatically identify the foreground and background of a picture, saving people from creating complicated masks to separate the two. You can load in a number of dramatic preset skies, and the algo

As part of The Pokémon Company and Longchamp Paris’ fashion collaboration, Niantic is adding special in-game items for players to dress up their trainers. A Longchamp backpack will be available beginning on October 2nd, starting at 11AM ET.The backpack is Pikachu-themed, adding the iconic character to the black-and-white Longchamp logo. The event will apply to some pokémon, which will be dressed up in special bow ties and hats. The promotion lasts until October 8th; it’

Following the announcement of Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax — owner of Doom, Fallout, and more — some of the biggest questions I saw bouncing around the internet were whether future Bethesda games would become Microsoft exclusives, and whether previously announced PlayStation 5 exclusives Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo would remain so.We now have a little more clarity there — Microsoft will honor the exclusivity commitme

During the most recent quarter, only a few earnings reports stood out from the rest. Zoom’s set of results were one of them, with the video-communications company showing enormous acceleration as the world replaced in-person contact with remote chat.
Another was Peloton’s earnings from the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, which it reported September 10th. The company’s revenue and profitability spiked as folks stuck at home turned to the connected fitness company’s ware

Biotech has become one of the hottest areas of venture investment in recent years, asprogress in machine learning, genetics, medical devices and biology fuse together into new products for the gargantuan health industry.
Case in point: Grail, which began in 2016 as a spinoff from genetic sequencing giant Illumina and co-founded by longtime Google executive Jeff Huber (who was involved in the creation of the company’s experimental laboratory Google[x]),is now being spun back in to the tune

Bird, the electric scooter startup that helped kick off the shared micromobility boom, is doubling down on personal ownership. Over the weekend, the company unveiled its new, foldable electric scooter, the Bird Air, which can be purchased for $599.It isn’t the most powerful scooter on the market, with a top speed of 16 mph (25 km/h) and a range of 16 miles (25 km). But at $599, the Bird Air is significantly cheaper than the company’s first retail scooter, the Bird One, which retails

The Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group (ARD) is pictured at Zhongguancun on August 16, 2020 in Beijing, China. | Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images Microsoft plans to address dwindling water resources in its latest environmental pledge. Microsoft made a new commitment to replenish even more water than it uses for its global operations by 2030, making the company “water positive.”“We’re going to invest as much as we need”
For now, the commitment is

Palantir is not a democracy, and it really, really, really wants you to know that.
Palantir’s governance has been under an exacting lens from regulators the past few weeks as it prepares for a public direct listing on September 29th. In revision after revision of its S-1 filing to the SEC — now totaling eight including its draft registration statements — the company has had to continuously explain and re-explain what exactly it is trying to do to prevent retail investors from c

Cowboy 2 electric bike. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Owners of older Cowboy 2 and brand-new Cowboy 3 e-bikes will receive a free software update that adds crash detection by the end of September. It’s an industry-first safety feature, according to the Belgian startup that recently took in €23 million for expansion.Cowboy can detect a fall using the bike’s built-in sensors. The company uses the speed sensor in the wheel, the torque sensor to check if force is being appli

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube says it’s bringing back human moderators who were “put offline” during the pandemic after the company’s AI filters failed to match their accuracy.Back in March, YouTube said it would rely more on machine learning systems to flag and remove content that violated its policies on things like hate speech and misinformation. But YouTube told the Financial Times this week that the greater use of AI moderation had led to a signifi

Microsoft is releasing a new Xbox app for Android today that includes an overhauled design and the ability to remotely play Xbox games streamed directly from your console. The Xbox remote play feature, known previously as Console Streaming, lets you remotely connect to an Xbox One console and play games you’ve already downloaded to it.
This is different from Microsoft’s xCloud service, as anyone with an Android phone can now stream all of their games directly from their own Xbox One

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s epis

Bethesda Softworks Microsoft has agreed to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Doom and Fallout studio Bethesda Softworks. The acquisition follows earlier Bethesda games coming to Xbox Game Pass on console and PC, and it gives Microsoft control of upcoming games like the space epic Starfield.
The news arrives just as Microsoft is gearing up to launch two new consoles, the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S. The companies haven’t indicated how this might affect the launch of futu

Photo by Cindy Ord/WireImage One of the biggest bands in the world is coming to one of the biggest games in the world. Today, Epic Games announced that K-pop group BTS will be debuting their next music video on Fortnite’s party royale island. It’ll be a choreography video for the single “Dynamite,” and it will be airing on September 25th at 8PM ET. In addition to the video, two new emotes — which Epic says were “choreographed by BTS” — will go on