Week Archives - Shapiro Consultants

We’ll likely get our first look at Android 15 this week – here’s what to expect

February 15, 2024
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The first preview version of Android 15 may launch on Thursday, February 15 if a recently discovered developer comment is to be believed.

It was originally posted to Google’s Android Open Source Project website on February 13, although the page hosting the message has since been deleted. If you go to the page right now, you’ll be greeted with an error message. Fortunately, 9To5Google has a screenshot of the comment and it states, in no uncertain terms, that the “first Developer preview is scheduled for Feb 15”. They even refer to it as “Android V” which the publication explains is a reference to the system’s codename, “Vanilla Ice Cream”.

Early Android builds are typically exclusive to Pixel devices and 9To5Google believes this will be the case with the preview. Because it is meant primarily for developers, the build probably won’t see a public release due to software instability. That said, we do expect to see people crack open the preview and spill all of its contents onto the internet, revealing what Android 15 is capable of.

It’s unknown what this early version of the OS will bring; however, we can look at previous reports to give you an idea of what may be arriving.

Features to expect

Back in December 2023, three features were found hidden in the files of a then-recent Android 14 beta that could appear to be for Android 15.

The first one is called Communal Space which lets users add widgets to the lock screen. At the time of the initial report, only Google Calendar, Google Clock, and the main Google App could be added, but we believe there's a good chance more will be supported at launch. The second is the introduction of a battery health percentage read-out akin to what the iPhone 15 has. It’ll offer a crystal clear indication “of how much your phone’s battery has degraded” compared to when it was fresh out of the box.

Communal Space on Pixel tablet — (Image credit: Mishaal Rahman/Android Authority)

The third feature is called Private Space and, according to Android Police, may be Google’s take on Samsung’s Secure Folder. It hides apps on your smartphone away from prying eyes. This can be especially helpful if you happen to share a device with others.

Then in January, more news came out claiming Android 15 might have a feature allowing users to effortlessly share wireless audio streams. On the surface, it sounds similar to Bluetooth Auracast, a unique form of Bluetooth LE Audio for transmitting content. We wouldn’t be surprised if it was Bluetooth Auracast considering it has yet to be widely adopted by smartphone manufacturers.

Bluetooth Auracast being shared by two children, on over-ear wireless headphones — (Image credit: Bluetooth SIG)

The last update came in early February revealing Android 15 may soon require all apps on the Google Play Store to support an edge-to-edge mode making it a mandatory setting. The presumed goal here is to better enable full-screen viewing. Edge-to-edge is typically only seen on certain types of apps like video games. Navigation bars and thick black stripes at the top of screens could become a thing of the past as Google establishes a new optimized standard for landscape viewing on Android.

That's currently all we know about Android 15. Hopefully, that one developer's slip-up is just the start of Android 15 reveals. While we have you check out TechRadar's list of the best Android phones for 2024.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

January 24, 2024
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Not many people have been in the same room as an Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset, let alone touched and worn the thing. But if you're itching to get close before the February 2 launch day, Apple has the next best thing on its Apple Store App.

People often forget that Apple does some of the best AR in the business, including some wicked occlusion capabilities that let virtual objects block the view of real ones that sit or move behind them – and Apple's AR rendering of its Apple Vision Pro is right up there with its best work.

If you're not already familiar with the mixed reality set that everyone is talking about, Apple's Vision Pro is the tech giant's first attempt at an AR/VR-capable headset. Apple calls the entire experience Spatial Computing. I've worn it four times now, and I've experienced movies, interactive AR experiences, incredible panoramic photography, and almost wept through realistic spatial video; and I've done most of it with little more than my gaze and subtle gestures.

It's a wildly expensive product, starting at $ 3,499, but that hasn't dampened interest (it reportedly sold out on pre-order and is a hot item on eBay), so it makes sense for Apple to give us this AR taste.

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Apple Vision Pro in AR — (Image credit: Apple)

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To find it, you'll need to open the Apple Store App on your best iPhone or best iPad. In it, look for the Vision Pro, select it, and then scroll until you see 'View in your space'. Tap this, and then point your phone's camera at a flat surface like your desk or kitchen table. Keep the phone still for a moment, and after Apple finishes analyzing the 3D contours of the space, a translucent Vision Pro headset will appear. Tap it to drop it onto the table. After that, you can use one finger to move the AR Vision Pro around, and two fingers to rotate it. You can also resize it with two fingers, but then it won't be represented at full scale (it's easy to snap it back to 100%).

You can also move your phone around the rendering to see the headset from all sides, and even get close and peer into the dual, 4K microLED displays, which appear to be showing some sort of landscape. It's an opportunity to get an up-close look at the features, materials like the recycled yarn woven band, the aluminum spatial photography button, and the digital crown.

There's even a MagSafe-style power adapter attached to one side with a woven USB-C cable running off of the Vision Pro, but instead of running to a nearby battery, the cable disappears at the edge of the woven band. There's also no option to depict the Vision Pro with the Dual Loop Band that will also ship with the headset; I think that's a shame, since I bet that's how many people will end up wearing the Vision Pro.

Ultimately, this is a chance to see what the Vision Pro will look like in your real world; however, one thing this AR experience can't do is replicate the feeling of all that money leaving your wallet.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

January 8, 2024
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Cast your mind back to June, and you'll remember that the Apple Vision Pro was unveiled in a blaze of publicity and hype at Apple's WWDC event – and seven months on, it seems that the mixed reality headset is finally going to go on sale.

According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg (one of the more reliable Apple tipsters), a full launch is now “imminent”, and stock is now apparently on its way to warehouses, and from there will be sent to Apple Stores.

Gurman goes on to say that the headset is likely to be available to buy in February, and that Apple may well make some kind of announcement to that effect this week – in part to draw attention away from all the news coming out of CES 2024.

Selected representatives from Apple Stores are being given training on how to demonstrate and sell the Vision Pro, according to Gurman, with training meetings for all retail staff planned for January 21.

Store sales and spatial video

A person using an Apple Vision Pro headset. There are multiple virtual displays in front of them, as well as a virtual keyboard. — (Image credit: Apple)

While Apple has told us a lot about the Vision Pro, there are also still plenty of questions surrounding it – not least how Apple will set pricing internationally. We know in the US the device will start at $ 3,499, which is about £2,755 / AU$ 5,225 with a straight conversion.

Since June, we've seen leaks of the software interface that we can expect, as well as hints at how the expensive gadget could be set up in stores. It's possible that buyers will have to pick up the headset in a physical store, even if they order online, so that it can be correctly fitted (and so users can get some basic training for how to operate it).

In December, TechRadar was one of the publications invited to take a look at how spatial video works in the Apple Vision Pro. Support for the 3D video format, which you can capture if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or an iPhone 15 Pro Max, could be one of the biggest selling points of the mixed reality headset.

We're very much looking forward to getting our hands on (and our heads into) the Apple Vision Pro, so stay tuned for our full review. This is a major new product category for Apple – although a second headset is apparently already on the way.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

September 23, 2023
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Earlier this week, Microsoft made a big announcement about the launch of its Copilot AI in Windows 11 which is happening with an update next week – but in case you were wondering, this isn’t the 23H2 update.

It is a big update to Windows 11, for sure, just not the annual update for 2023, which will arrive for the OS later, in fact.

As Neowin spotted, Microsoft made the clarification in a blog post following the announcement of the launch of Copilot.

The Copilot update will arrive as part of a rollout kicking off on September 26, and Microsoft said it will “later be included in Windows 11, version 23H2, the annual feature update for Windows 11.”

The 23H2 update won’t be released until Q4 of 2023, though, we’re told, which means it won’t begin to filter out until October at the earliest, and possibly not until later than that.

Analysis: A useful clarification

It’s a useful clarification from Microsoft, and we have to admit, we figured when the software giant talked about a big update coming next week, we assumed this would be the 23H2 update. That’s not the case, after all, but Copilot will be the biggest change to Windows 11 this year, so it’s easy enough to see how the confusion arose.

Still, we know where we stand now, and this won’t affect who gets Copilot next week – presumably those who have ticked the box to get the latest updates for Windows 11 as soon as they’re available.

As to how Copilot will turn out in its initial incarnation, well, we’re still a little dubious about that – though some first impressions we were treated to were positive, no doubt.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

July 22, 2023
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iPhone owners have been able to make use of ChatGPT for iOS for a couple of months now, and those of you on Android won't have to miss out for very much longer: ChatGPT for Android is launching next week.

The news comes via a tweet from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and the app is already listed on the Google Play Store. You can't download the app yet, but you can indicate your interest by clicking or tapping on the Pre-register button. That basically means you'll get an alert when it's available.

Details on the app are rather thin on the ground at the moment, but from the app screenshots and description, this looks to be very much like the iOS version. You can use the iOS app with both free and paid-for Plus ChatGPT accounts.

There's no indication yet as to whether ChatGPT for Android will be launching in every country at the same time – it took a week or so for ChatGPT for iOS to expand outside the US. For what it's worth, we were able to successfully pre-register for the Android app in the UK, so make of that what you will.

The usual ChatGPT experience

The ChatGPT mobile experience is almost identical to the desktop experience, only on a smaller screen. Your conversations get synced across all the devices you're logged in on, and you can ask about anything from gift ideas to ancient history.

It's not clear yet whether you'll be able to use voice input on ChatGPT for Android as you can with ChatGPT for iOS – but we'll be trying out the app just as soon as we can and giving you the lowdown on everything it offers. OpenAI has done well at integrating its app with iOS, and we're hoping for the same on Google's mobile platform.

The standard caveats apply when using ChatGPT on Android: remember that the AI-powered chatbot is prone to hallucinations and inaccuracies, and you should avoid sharing any personal or sensitive information in your conversations.

With Apple reportedly working on its own ChatGPT rival, and Google busy pushing AI into just about all of its products, OpenAI knows that it needs to keep ChatGPT relevant and fresh – and making the bot available for the billions of smartphones running Android worldwide should certainly help with that.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

May 19, 2023
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ChatGPT Plus subscribers will soon be getting early access to experimental new features for the popular chatbot. Web integration and plugins are rolling out in beta next week, which could prove to be two interesting updates to the chatbot.

If you're subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, a new beta panel will appear in your settings next week. Once the panel has popped up, you’ll be able to try the two new features – though of course, most users are likely to gravitate to the AI’s more important and likely more interesting web browsing capabilities.

ChatGPT Screenshot — (Image credit: ChatGPT)

According to OpenAI’s official blog post on the beta features, the new internet-connected version of ChatGPT will know when and how to browse the internet to answer questions about recent events or topics. This means you could ask ChatGPT about something going on in the news, about whether or not you should take a scarf on your afternoon dog walk, or dig up trivia for more recent films and TV shows.

Why does this matter?

This new beta puts ChatGPT in a similar sphere to Microsoft’s Bing Chat, without explicitly turning it into a search engine. The big takeaway is that ChatGPT will basically be able to identify when it lacks information to answer a query and needs to search the internet for a relevant source.

This should make asking for citations a lot easier and – hopefully – a lot more accurate. Alternatively, the chatbot will simply be able to direct you to a webpage that might help. This means that ChatGPT (or at least, the beta version available to Plus subscribers) will no longer be reliant on the limited dataset it was trained on.

However, the issue that comes with chatbots having the ability to scour the web at will is that they often don’t have an appropriate frame of reference or the physical real-world mobility to reliably pick out misinformation. ChatGPT could cross-reference what it finds and try to ‘verify’ the authority of the source, but it can’t truly confirm the information is true in the real world.

Say you want to know about something that is currently ongoing in the real world, like the real-time weather in your area. An AI can't properly go outside to verify these things are true. With ChatGPT now able to search the web of its own accord, I hope that it will effectively prioritize reputable sites and sources – and avoid digging into incorrect information.

The good news is that OpenAI is taking a relatively conservative approach here. It’s a smart idea to have this feature tested on a smaller scale, with only plus subscribers having initial access and the beta feature being opt-in only.

It’s a safer way to start rolling out features like this without forcing it on the entire user base – a lesson that Microsoft could possibly learn from OpenAI, rather than shoving Bing AI into everything on Windows. With this change, we could see a smarter ChatGPT with more real-life applications, rather than just a text-content-vomiting machine.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

April 16, 2022
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April 14 was the day that I became a married man. And during the two years spent arranging it, there were a few apps on iOS 15 that we constantly used to make sure everything was paid for, and perfectly scheduled to play its part on the day.

Planning a wedding involves tasks that you would never expect to have to sort out – from agreeing on the music that would play while you sign the marriage certificate, to checking if the right tree logs for the table have been picked up by the best man.

If we didn't have our iPhones and apps at hand, we may have had to hire a wedding planner to avoid the multiple moments of stress we would have inevitably had.

But thankfully, there were five apps that helped us manage big chunks of the wedding that I was not expecting when I proposed back in 2020.

Notes

Apple's Notes app is one I've relied on since the first version of iOS. It's simple, useful, and has always helped remind me of what's needed to be done for certain tasks.

For the wedding, its usefulness went to another level, thanks in part to the ability to manage notes with someone.

Having both of us add and remove checklists across the two years helped a bunch, especially when an update can appear as a push notification.

Things 3

While we had been arranging the wedding since 2020, tasks didn't really ramp up until the beginning of this year, which is where a to-do app came in.

Having tried other apps in this category, such as OmniFocus, Things 3 won out thanks to the quick actions of its Today screen. I could add and remove sudden jobs, and they'd also display in a helpful widget on my iPhone.

It's not just available on your iPhone for $ 9.99 / £9.99 / AU$ 11.99, it's also available on the iPad for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 24.99, and on the Mac priced at $ 49.99 / £29.99 / AU$ 59.99.

Being reminded to pay for a photo booth or to decide on types of flowers in Things was a big help. In fact, it was so helpful I've expanded it to other aspects of my life, including my job at TechRadar, and hobbies like, embarrassingly, weekly Fortnite challenges.

Shazam

Spotify and Apple Music are two apps I've constantly used for the last decade. I still pay for iTunes Match, which is a yearly service that allows me to host all the music content that I owned on my iPod.

For the wedding itself, we found Spotify useful in arranging the entire playlist from start to finish, mainly due to the ability to have collaborative playlists.

This allowed us to add and remove songs in a playlist as we pleased, with our initials letting each of us know who added the most embarrassing song of the evening.

However, Shazam was most useful in helping us discover artists and tracks that we never would have considered. Going to wedding fayres and shops we heard a lot of music and by using Shazam to discover what the titles were, we could add them to our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.

It's a handy app that can help bolster your music library on whichever music app you use, without being intrusive.

A recent update also allows Shazam to be set up as a shortcut in Control Center on iOS 15, which saves you time before the track stops playing.

Angry Birds

For me, managing a wedding is the equivalent of spinning 50 plates while standing on one leg, and reciting the alphabet backward in Spanish.

And that can lead to moments where you just want to escape the planning and the picking, and the paying, and just play a game instead.

This is where I decided to revisit some games thanks to Apple Arcade, and I rediscovered Angry Birds. It was an ideal pick for alleviating some of the frustration that occurred with some suits in February.

The game's maker, Rovio has also re-released the original game on iOS and Android, which I promptly downloaded. Flicking the irate fowl across four worlds on my iPhone 13 Pro turned out to be a great stress reliever while I was on a train to sort out the suits again or deciding on the right type of chairs for the reception.

Monzo Pots

Weddings cost money – lots of money. If you want to make sure that the location or items you had your heart set on for years can be part of your special day, you're going to hear the word deposit a lot until the big day arrives.

It's also a great lesson in managing your funds, which is where a feature from Monzo came in handy for us. Pots are a way of moving money into sections that can't be used by your debit card. They're essentially saving methods without creating a savings account.

You can lock a pot to stop you from withdrawing any money from it, alongside naming it whatever you wish and setting it with a picture. If you want, you can set any transactions to round up the payment to the nearest unit, with the spare change being sent to this pot.

It removes a worry about how much you have ready for the wedding or other saving goals, alongside making sure it's safe from temptation.

Our pick of the best iPhone deals in 2022 so far

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

April 16, 2022
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If we didn't have our iPhones and apps at hand, we may have had to hire a wedding planner to avoid the multiple moments of stress we would have inevitably had.

But thankfully, there were five apps that helped us manage big chunks of the wedding that I was not expecting when I proposed back in 2020.

Notes

Apple's Notes app is one I've relied on since the first version of iOS. It's simple, useful, and has always helped remind me of what's needed to be done for certain tasks.

For the wedding, its usefulness went to another level, thanks in part to the ability to manage notes with someone.

Having both of us add and remove checklists across the two years helped a bunch, especially when an update can appear as a push notification.

Things 3

While we had been arranging the wedding since 2020, tasks didn't really ramp up until the beginning of this year, which is where a to-do app came in.

It's not just available on your iPhone for $ 9.99 / £9.99 / AU$ 11.99, it's also available on the iPad for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 24.99, and on the Mac priced at $ 49.99 / £29.99 / AU$ 59.99.

Shazam

For the wedding itself, we found Spotify useful in arranging the entire playlist from start to finish, mainly due to the ability to have collaborative playlists.

This allowed us to add and remove songs in a playlist as we pleased, with our initials letting each of us know who added the most embarrassing song of the evening.

It's a handy app that can help bolster your music library on whichever music app you use, without being intrusive.

A recent update also allows Shazam to be set up as a shortcut in Control Center on iOS 15, which saves you time before the track stops playing.

Angry Birds

For me, managing a wedding is the equivalent of spinning 50 plates while standing on one leg, and reciting the alphabet backward in Spanish.

And that can lead to moments where you just want to escape the planning and the picking, and the paying, and just play a game instead.

Monzo Pots

It removes a worry about how much you have ready for the wedding or other saving goals, alongside making sure it's safe from temptation.

Our pick of the best iPhone deals in 2022 so far

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

March 17, 2022
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As usual, we're going to be spoiling today's Wordle answer if you read on – so make sure you've solved it first before scrolling on.

Is this the hardest week in Wordle history? If you look at Google Trends this week, with people searching for the Wordle answer, you might think that it's been almost impossibly difficult:

Today's trends data on white background — WATCH, CATER and MOVIE have all seen huge spikes of interest in the Wordle answer. (Image credit: TechRadar / Google)

If you followed that graph, and looked at the trending Twitter terms, you'd easily surmise that the WATCH, the answer last Friday, and CATER yesterday were the worst offenders – along with the tricky solution of MOVIE today.

But we spoke to Shaun Savage, editor in chief of Try Hard Guides, a site with its own dedicated Wordle solver pages, and he gave some surprising statistics:

“Today's word [MOVIE] is definitely giving people some challenge. By and far, 56% of people have figured out that the word ends in 'IE' but are struggling to think of words that fit.

“Following that, about 15% of people have figured out there's at least an O in the word. It seems like the “V” is the most difficult letter to determine!

“We aren't even seeing too many people looking for “OVIE” or “MO_IE,” so it seems many are getting 2-3 letters but getting four is a struggle.

“Our page on '5 letter words' ending in IE' was the most trafficked post this morning – a lot of people like to get ideas but, perhaps, not just get to the answer immediately, so these types of posts help clear away some fog.”

So it's clear that today's Wordle was, perhaps, one of the hardest in a while, even if it's not had the same number of players desperately searching for the answer online.

But what about the last seven days as a whole?

The hardest Wordle week ever?

Wordle guess rages — (Image credit: New York Times)

With three words this week that trended massively on Twitter (and saw massive spikes in traffic to our Wordle hints and answer page), does that mean this has been the hardest time for Wordle users yet… especially against the backdrop of accusations against NY Times making the game easier?

And while it has been a very difficult week, it appears that people are searching for Wordle answers for different reasons this week – rhyming words mean people can get to their final guess with no obvious answer:

“From our data, this week has been harder than the earlier weeks in March, though, with a good mix of reasons. _ATCH just had a lot of options and people quickly maxed out on guesses,” added Savage.

“Words like TODAY, FOCUS and SMELT all had slightly less popular letters in them; SMELT is also not a commonly used word so the 'SM' and 'LT' combinations may have been tricky.

“CATER was the same way; common letters, so many quickly found as possibilities but lots of options. MOVIE has three vowels and contains two lesser-used consonants (M and V).”

A better week ahead

It's good to hear that things have been tricky this week – we at TechRadar have had such a tough week that we've even run live blogs on the hardest puzzles to allow readers to air their thoughts on the difficulty.

We also spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK’s University of Warwick, previously to find out why CATER was such a tough word:

“Looking back at Project Gutenberg's list of common n-grams,” Dr Voice tells us, “you can really see why getting some of [the] letters in place isn't necessarily narrowing down the possibilities. ER is the fourth most common combination of any two letters in the whole of the English language, it seems, and TER the twelfth most common combination of three.

“That said,” he adds, “I also think it's interesting to think about why 'CATER' might not seem like an immediately obvious option to everyone who's got the point of finding _ATER. The answer to this might be to do with our expectations about morphology – the way we combine together different parts of language to make new words.”

So, while it's impossible to put a full and defined metric against the difficulty of words in the current Wordle games, it seems that this week has certainly been full of a few pitfalls.

And if you're getting tired of Wordle, then try Scholardle– it's Wordle if you want to make things a lot harder.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

March 17, 2022
No Comments

As usual, we're going to be spoiling today's Wordle answer if you read on – so make sure you've solved it first before scrolling on.

Is this the hardest week in Wordle history? If you look at Google Trends this week, with people searching for the Wordle answer, you might think that it's been almost impossibly difficult:

But we spoke to Shaun Savage, editor in chief of Try Hard Guides, a site with its own dedicated Wordle solver pages, and he gave some surprising statistics:

“Today's word [MOVIE] is definitely giving people some challenge. By and far, 56% of people have figured out that the word ends in 'IE' but are struggling to think of words that fit.

“Following that, about 15% of people have figured out there's at least an O in the word. It seems like the “V” is the most difficult letter to determine!

“We aren't even seeing too many people looking for “OVIE” or “MO_IE,” so it seems many are getting 2-3 letters but getting four is a struggle.

So it's clear that today's Wordle was, perhaps, one of the hardest in a while, even if it's not had the same number of players desperately searching for the answer online.

But what about the last seven days as a whole?

The hardest Wordle week ever?

“Words like TODAY, FOCUS and SMELT all had slightly less popular letters in them; SMELT is also not a commonly used word so the 'SM' and 'LT' combinations may have been tricky.

“CATER was the same way; common letters, so many quickly found as possibilities but lots of options. MOVIE has three vowels and contains two lesser-used consonants (M and V).”

A better week ahead

We also spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK’s University of Warwick, previously to find out why CATER was such a tough word:

So, while it's impossible to put a full and defined metric against the difficulty of words in the current Wordle games, it seems that this week has certainly been full of a few pitfalls.

And if you're getting tired of Wordle, then try Scholardle– it's Wordle if you want to make things a lot harder.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Posts tagged "Week"

We’ll likely get our first look at Android 15 this week – here’s what to expect

Features to expect

You might also like

The Apple Vision Pro arrives in stores next week, but you can ‘see’ the AR headset at home now using… AR

You might also like

We could get a big Apple Vision Pro launch announcement this week

Store sales and spatial video

You might also like

Microsoft clarifies Windows 11 23H2 update isn’t arriving next week

Analysis: A useful clarification

You might also like

ChatGPT for Android is launching next week, and you can pre-register now

The usual ChatGPT experience

ChatGPT Plus will get a huge update this week – here’s why it’s a big deal

Why does this matter?

I got married this week, and these five iOS apps helped reduce our stress levels

Notes

Things 3

Shazam

Angry Birds

Monzo Pots

I got married this week, and these five iOS apps helped reduce our stress levels

Notes

Things 3

Shazam

Angry Birds

Monzo Pots

Is this the hardest week in Wordle history?

The hardest Wordle week ever?

A better week ahead

Is this the hardest week in Wordle history?

The hardest Wordle week ever?

A better week ahead