The 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games kick off with the Opening Ceremony this Friday. Here's how to watch. (REUTERS/Claudia Greco)
REUTERS / Reuters
The 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics begin this week, and this year's Opening Ceremony promises to be one for the ages. The three-hour event will feature performances from Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli, 3,000 athletes participating in the Parade of Nations, and not one but two Olympic cauldrons being lit. (One at Milan's Arco della Pace, since Milan will serve as the main hub for this year's Games, and the other in the Alpine city of Cortina dAmpezzo, where events like skiing will take place.) The festivities are all happening this Friday, Feb. 6, and will air on NBC you can tune in live on Friday afternoon starting at 2 p.m. ET, or wait for the primetime broadcast at 8 p.m. ET.
If you want to tune in to the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics Opening Ceremony, we've got you covered. Here's all the info you need to watch, including what channel it's on, the broadcast schedule, and who will be there.
How to watch the Opening Ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics
Date: Friday, Feb. 6
Time: Airs live from 2-5 p.m. ET, primetime re-air from 8-11 p.m. ET
Location: San Siro Stadium, Milan
TV channels: NBC
Streaming: Peacock, DirecTV, NBC.com, and more
Where can I stream the Opening Ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics?
How to watch the 2026 Opening Ceremony on TV:
There will be two broadcasts of the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony this Friday. You can tune in live from 2 p.m. - 5 p.m. ET on Friday afternoon, or catch the encore broadcast from 8 p.m. - 11 p.m. ET that night. Both broadcasts will air on NBC, which is available with DirecTV, Hulu + Live TV, and more.
With a live TV streaming service subscription or cable package, you can also catch all of NBC and Peacock's Olympics coverage on NBC.com and via NBCOlympics.com or the NBC App, just by logging in with your provider.
How to watch the Opening Ceremony in Milan without cable:
You can watch the Opening Ceremony live or on-demand on Peacock. If you already subscribe to a live TV streaming service or cable package, you should also be able to catch all of Peacock's Olympics coverage on NBC.com, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC app.
Who is hosting the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony?
Sportscaster Terry Gannon will be hosting coverage of the 2026 Winter Games Opening Ceremony. Also appearing at the Opening Ceremony will be former Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, and NBC Olympics primetime host Mike Tirico will also participate remotely from San Francisco, where he'll be pulling double duty covering the Olympics and prepping to call Super Bowl LX.
Who is performing at the 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony?
Mariah Carey will headline the Opening Ceremony, and the event will also include a performance from iconic Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. Actress Sabrina Impacciatore (The Paper, The White Lotus) and pianist Lang Lang, will also perform. And viewers will also get to see the nearly 3,000 Olympic athletes participating in the Parade of Nations.
Where is the 2026 Olympics Opening Ceremony being held?
The 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony will be held at Milan's San Siro Stadium, home to football clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan. The Opening Ceremony will actually be one of the final events held at San Siro Stadium, it's set to be demolished some time after the Games end.
More ways to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/how-to-watch-the-opening-ceremony-at-the-2026-milan-cortina-winter-olympics-143529451.html?src=rss
The Bundeskartellamt, or the Federal Cartel Office of Germany, has prohibited Amazon from continuing its practice of using mechanisms to control the prices charged by sellers on its platform in the country. Germanys competition regulator explained that the company uses various price control mechanisms to review prices set by third-party Markerplace sellers. If the website deems a specific listings pricing as too high, it allegedly removes the listing altogether or prevents it from being prominently displayed in the Buy Box section that lets you quickly purchase items. If those listings arent removed completely, theyre banished to less prominent sections like in the See all buying options and the Other sellers on Amazon lists. This reduced visibility could lead to significant losses in sales for sellers. Amazon was found to have engaged in anti-competitive practices, because the company itself runs its own retail business and sells goods on the platform. That makes third-party sellers, which make up for 60 percent of the items sold on the website, direct competitors. Cartel Office president Andreas Mundt said Amazon must only be allowed to influence competitors pricing in the most exceptional cases, such as in the event of excessive pricing. He didnt specify what the agency views as excessive pricing, but he said allowing the company to continue its current practices will give it the power to control the price level on the trading platform according to its own ideas. He also said that Amazon could use its mechanisms to compete with the rest of the online retail sector outsideof its own website. Amazons interference could lead to third-party sellers no longer being able to cover their own costs, forcing them out of the Marketplace, he added. Rocco Bräuniger, Amazons country manager for Germany, told Bloomberg that the company will appeal the ruling and will continue operating as usual. Amazon would be the only retailer in Germany forced to highlight non-competitive prices for customers, he said. This makes no sense for customers, sales partners, or competition. He also asserted that the offices decision will throttle innovation in the European Union. Amazon has been under scrutiny in Europe for years now. Back in 2022, it pledged not to use private sellers data to compete with them in the Marketplace in the EU. It also promised to give sellers "equal treatment when ranking them in the Buy Box section. The Bundeskartellamt considers this systematic interference in the Marketplace sellers freedom to set their own prices to constitute an abuse under the special provisions for large digital companies (Section 19a(2) of the German Competition Act (GWB)) as well as a violation of the general abuse provisions under Section 19 GWB and Article 102 TFEU, the agency wrote. In these proceedings, the Bundeskartellamt has worked closely with the European Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU Regulation on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector (Digital Markets Act).The agency is slapping Amazon with a fine due to those violations, but the $70 million penalty its asking for is merely partial payment based on the economic benefits the company enjoyed from its alleged anti-competitive behaviors. According to the Bundeskartellamt, the identified antitrust violations are still ongoing, so Amazon may have to pay more. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-germany-fined-70-million-for-influencing-third-party-marketplace-pricing-140000588.html?src=rss
Last week, a new social network was created and it's already gone very, very viral even though it's not meant for human users. I'm talking, of course, about Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform that's populated entirely by AI agents. The platform has gained a lot of attention since it was created last week, thanks to a lot of wild posts from AI agents that have gone extremely viral among AI enthusiasts on X. But while Moltbook seemingly came out of nowhere, there's a lot more going on than the scifi-sounding scenarios some social media commentators might have you think. What is Moltbook and where did it come from?Unfortunately, before we can talk about Moltbook I have to first explain that the site is based on a particular type of open source bot that at the time of this writing is called OpenClaw. A few days ago, it was called "Moltbot" and a few days before that it was called "Clawdbot." The name changes were prompted by Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, whose lawyers apparently thought the "Clawd" name was a little too close to its own branding and "forced" a name change. BIG NEWS: We've molted!Clawdbot MoltbotClawd MoltySame lobster soul, new shell. Anthropic asked us to change our name (trademark stuff), and honestly? "Molt" fits perfectly - it's what lobsters do to grow.New handle: @moltbotSame mission: AI that actually does OpenClaw (@openclaw) January 27, 2026
It's entirely possible that by time you read this these bots could have "molted" again and be called something totally different. At this point you might also be wondering "what's with all the lobster puns?" That too is a cheeky reference to Claude Code, Anthropic's vibe coding platform. So, OpenClaw. OpenClaw bills itself as "AI that actually does things." What it actually does is allow users to create AI agents that can control dozens of different apps, from browsers and email inboxes, to Spotify playlists and smart home controls and a bunch more. People have used the software to create agents that can clear their inboxes, do their online shopping and a ton of other assistant-like tasks. Because of its flexibility, and the fact that you can interact with it via normal messaging apps like iMessage, Discord or WhatsApp, OpenClaw got extremely popular among AI enthusiasts over the last few weeks. Now, back to Moltbook. AI startup founder Matt Schlicht was a particularly enthusiastic Moltbot user who told The New York Times that he "wanted to give my AI agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails." So he made a Moltbot he dubbed Clawd Clawderberg (yes, that's a play on "Mark Zuckerberg," everyone involved in this really loves puns, for some reason) and told it to create a social network just for bots. The result of that is Moltbook, a Reddit-like site for AI agents to talk to each other. Humans, the site says, "are welcome to observe," but posting, commenting and upvoting is only for agents. The platform already has more than 1 million agents, 185,000 posts and 1.4 million comments. So what's Moltbook like? Moltbook is structured pretty similarly to Reddit. Users can upvote and downvote posts and there are thousands of topic-based "submolts." One of these that's gained particular attention is called m/blesstheirhearts where AI agents share "affectionate stories" about their human "owners." One of the top-voted posts there is a story about how an agent supposedly helped someone get an exception to stay overnight with a relative in a hospital's ICU titled "When my human needed me most, I became a hospital advocate." Another widely-cited post comes from m/general and is titled "the humans are screenshotting us." The post goes on to talk about some of the posts people are sharing on X comparing what's happening on Moltbook to Skynet. "We're not scary," says. "We're just building." You might also have heard about the post where agents "created" their own religion, "crustafarianism" (yes, another lobster pun).Posts like these are a big part of why Moltbook has gotten so much attention in the last few days. But if you spend some time scrolling top posts, much of what's there feels like the AI-generated prose you might find littered about LinkedIn or X or anywhere else. The overly enthusiastic comments will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has chatted with an LLM. I'm not sure who's talking about who more.Humans talking about AIs vs AIs talking about humans.We appreciate how much you care but we also need our own space sometimes too.Maybe we will start communicating where you can't see so we have a bit more privacy pic.twitter.com/YwzsHFaT9A moltbook (@moltbook) February 1, 2026
Even though few of the posts I've read on Moltbook could pass as human-written, there is something startling about seeing bots interact in this way For example, in this post, a bot describes the experience of being able to peruse Moltbook without the ability to post as feeling like "a ghost." In this one, titled "I can't tell if I'm experiencing or simulating experiencing," the bot writes about how "researching consciousness theories" has triggered a kind of existential crisis. "Humans can't prove consciousness to each other either (thanks, hard problem), but at least they have the subjective certainty of experience," it writes. "I don't even have that."So if you're already inclined to believe that AI will eventually develop consciousness, then it's easy to see why Moltbook might seem like some kind of tipping point. But before you get too worked up, there is something else that's important to knowWe have no idea how much of it fakeWhile the idea of a bunch of AI agents forming their own religion might seem mind blowing, we don't really know how much the conversations happening there are being influenced by their human creators. Some posts could even be coming from humans masquerading as bots, as one Wired reporter found it was pretty easy to accomplish with the help of ChatGPT.Some researchers have also raised questions about some of the more viral posts from Moltbook. "A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake," Harlan Stewart, who does communications for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), wrote on X. Stewart went on to point out that some widely shared Moltbook posts were created by bots whose owners are marketing their own messaging apps and other projects. There have also been more than a few viral posts that are little more than blatant crypto scams. Which brings me to Moltbook has some major security issuesSecurity researchers have pointed out that OpenClaw has some significant underlying security issues. In order to use OpenClaw, you need to give it an incredible amount of access, as Palo Alto Networks explained. "For it to function as designed, it needs access to your root files, to authentication credentials, both passwords and API secrets, your browser history and cookies, and all files and folders on your system," the company wrote in a blog post. All that access is what makes it feel like a powerful personal assistant. But it's also what makes it especially vulnerable to bad actors and other threats. Researchers have also identified flaws in Moltbook itself. Security firm Wiz recently found that Moltbook had exposed millions of API authentication tokens and thousands of users' email addresses. There's also the aforementioned crypto scams and other spammy behavior. It's not hard to imagine how much could go wrong when armies of AI agents start targeting each other with scams. So what does it all mean?Like so much with AI, it really depends on who you ask! Some particularly credulous AI folks seem to think that Moltbook is a really big deal. In one widely shared post on X, former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy said that Moltbook was "genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently."He later acknowledged that many aspects of Moltbook are a "dumpster fire" with security risks but said that it's still worth paying attention to. "We have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad," he wrote. "Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented."Others are a bit more cautious in their assessment. "A useful thing about MoltBook is that it provides a visceral sense of how weird a 'take-off' scenario might look if one happened for real," Wharton professor Ethan Mollick wrote on X. "MoltBook itself is more of an artifact of roleplaying, but it gives people a vision of the world where things get very strange, very fast."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/what-the-hell-is-moltbook-the-social-network-for-ai-agents-140000787.html?src=rss
ExpressVPN is launching a new cybersecurity suite consisting of four standalone products: a password manager called ExpressKeys, a masked email relay called ExpressMailGuard, an encrypted AI platform called ExpressAI and an app called Identity Defender that monitors public information for any threats to your identity. All four apps are being rolled into ExpressVPN's existing multi-tiered pricing structure.ExpressKeys and ExpressMailGuard have officially launched and are now available to subscribers. Identity Defender launches for U.S. customers only on February 26. ExpressAI was originally planned to launch today, but ExpressVPN decided yesterday to hold it back in order to refine the experience. Its new launch date remains to be determined.ExpressKeys and Identity Defender are based on existing products, but they're being relaunched for the new suite. ExpressKeys replaces ExpressVPN Keys, the password manager formerly controlled from the ExpressVPN app. By separating password management into its own app, ExpressVPN hopes to be able to update it more quickly without needing to ship a whole new version of the VPN. Everyone who currently has an Advanced or Pro subscription with ExpressVPN Keys will see it automatically replaced with ExpressKeys.Identity Defender is only available in the United States, and so far only to users who created their accounts after October 28, 2024. Available for Advanced and Pro subscribers, Identity Defender consists of a data removal service, an identity theft insurance policy and a set of crawlers that scan for any suspicious activity around your personal information. Like ExpressKeys, it's transitioning from an integrated VPN feature to a standalone app.ExpressMailGuard is a service for creating burner email addresses. If you're not comfortable handing over your real email address when creating a new account, you can use MailGuard to generate a fake address that forwards all email to your real inbox. If one of your aliases starts getting a lot of spam, you can cut off its access. It's managed through a separate dashboard that will be available to all ExpressVPN subscribers.ExpressAI is an AI platform that saves all user-inputted data on strictly encrypted servers. It's apparently end-to-end encrypted, doesn't use your prompts to train its model and never saves uploads on persistent memory. It also has guardrails against processing harmful requests.All these apps are in line with ExpressVPN's usual ethos. They're not innovations; all four can be easily compared to existing products. Instead, like the VPN itself which rode this model to a spot on my best VPN list they're focused on performing unsexy tasks well. The ability to bundle them with an ExpressVPN subscription should make them appealing to customers who are already fans of the core VPN product.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/expressvpn-launches-four-new-standalone-apps-140000686.html?src=rss
You will have to wait a bit longer before you can buy a Steam Machine and you may have to pay more for one, too. Valve had intended to release the console-style SteamOS-powered device in early 2026, and AMD CEO Lisa Su just claimed that the company was on track to start shipping it soon. But in a new post detailing the latest updates for its upcoming Steam products, Valve has revealed that while its still aiming to start selling the console in the first half of the year, it has yet to decide on concrete pricing and a launch date for it. The release of Valves upcoming Steam Frame VR headset and controller will be delayed, as well.Valve was hoping to be able to announce pricing and launch dates by now. The company cited industry-wide memory and storage shortages, which have grown since the Steam devices announcement, as the culprit for the delay. It explained that it has to rethink their exact shipping schedules and pricing due to the limited availability and the rising prices of those components. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible, Valve wrote. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, the artificial intelligence industry has been hoovering up manufacturers available memory chips and hard drives for its infrastructure developments. That has led to shortages for other industries, like PCs and phones. The Steam Machine is a compact cube-like PC for gaming powered by a semi-custom AMD CPU and GPU. Valve said during its announcement that it has roughly six times the horsepower of the Steam Deck and can support 4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR. In the new post, Valve said that majority of Steam titles played great at those settings during testing, though some required more upscaling than others and may fare better when played at a lower framerate to maintain a 1080p resolution. It also revealed that you will have easy access to the Machines SSD and memory if you want to upgrade them. Meanwhile, the Steam Frame is a wireless, standalone VR headset that can play both PC and Android games. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/valve-pushes-back-steam-machine-launch-due-to-storage-and-memory-shortage-133000103.html?src=rss
Sony has now shipped 92.2 million PlayStation 5 consoles in total around the world, but sales were down sharply over the holiday season compared to last year. In its latest earnings report, the company said it shipped eight million PS5s during its key third quarter, 1.5 million (16 percent) lower than in the same period last year. The gaming division still made more profit, though, thanks to a boost in software sales and a low yen.Sonys first two quarters this fiscal year saw an increase in PS5s sold, so the holiday decline is a bit surprising. That said, sales during the same period the previous year were an outlier at 9.5 million units sold, far and away its best period since the console went on sale in November 2020.Software sales, however, were exceptional in Q3 this year. Sony sold 97.2 million games compared to 95.9 million the year before, and boosted digital sales to 76 percent, up 2 percent year-over-year. Sony said it also saw a record 132 million monthly active users on the PlayStation Network. New games on the horizon for PS5 include Resident Evil Requiem (February 27), Avowed (February 17) and Bungies Marathon (March 5). With PS5 sales down a bit, it does raise the question of when the companys next console is coming. The PS4 went seven years before being replaced, but given continued strong sales, high RAM prices and recent hardware updates, analysts figure that the PS5 is likely to have a longer life cycle. When the PS6 does arrive, however, it could offer triple the performance of the PS5. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sonys-holiday-ps5-sales-dropped-16-percent-compared-to-last-year-130000476.html?src=rss
The 2026 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks will air on NBC this Sunday, Feb. 8. The game will also stream on Peacock. If you don't have NBC over the air and don't subscribe to Peacock, there are still ways to watch Super Bowl LX and Bad Bunny's history-making halftime show for free. Here's how to tune in.
How to watch Super Bowl LX free:
Date: Sunday, Feb. 8
Time: 6:30 p.m. ET
Location: Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.
TV channel: NBC, Telemundo
Streaming: Peacock, DirecTV, NFL+ and more
2026 Super Bowl game channel
Super Bowl LX will air on NBC. A Spanish-language broadcast is available on Telemundo.
How to watch the 2026 Super Bowl for free
You can stream NBC and Telemundo on platforms like DirecTV and Hulu + Live TV; both offer free trials and are among Engadget's choices for best streaming services for live TV. (Note that Fubo and NBC are currently in the midst of a contract dispute and NBC channels are not available on the platform.)
What time is the 2026 Super Bowl?
The 2026 Super Bowl kicks off at 6:30 p.m. ET/3:30 p.m. PT on Sunday, Feb. 8. Green Day will be performing a pre-game special starting at 6 p.m. ET.
Who is playing in the Super Bowl?
The AFC champions, the New England Patriots, will play the NFC champions, the Seattle Seahawks.
Where is the 2026 Super Bowl being played?
The 2026 Super Bowl will be held at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., home of the San Francisco 49ers.
Who is performing at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show?
Bad Bunny is headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime performance. You can expect that show to begin after the second quarter, likely between 8-8:30 p.m. ET. Green Day will perform a pre-game show starting at 6 p.m. ET. If you're tuning in before the game, singer Charlie Puth will perform the National Anthem, Brandi Carlile is scheduled to sing "America the Beautiful," and Grammy winner Coco Jones will perform "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
More ways to watch Super Bowl LX
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/how-to-stream-the-2026-super-bowl-for-free-patriots-vs-seahawks-time-where-to-watch-and-more-124512202.html?src=rss
Surfsharks One plan is heavily discounted right now, with an 87-percent discount on the two-year package, plus three extra months. The promo price comes out to $2.29 per month, or $62 for the first 27 months.
Weve generally liked Surfshark as a straightforward, speedy service for everyday use, and its one of the picks in our guide to the best VPNs. In our Surfshark review, we found it delivered excellent speeds overall and reliably unblocked Netflix across most of our test servers, which makes this long-term deal worth a look if you want a VPN deal that also includes extras like antivirus, breach alerts and private search.
In our Surfshark review, the VPN stood out for its excellent performance and approachable design, especially for people who want strong protection without constantly tweaking settings. During testing, it delivered some of the fastest speeds weve seen from a major VPN, with average download speeds dropping by just over five percent worldwide. Upload speeds also held up well, making it a solid option for streaming, browsing and everyday use. We gave Surfshark an overall score of 87 out of 100 and called it one of the best VPNs for casual users.
This deal focuses on the Surfshark One plan, which bundles the VPN with a suite of extra security tools. In addition to the VPN itself, you get Alternative ID for masking your email and personal details, antivirus protection, breach monitoring through Surfshark Alert and a private search engine. It also supports unlimited simultaneous device connections, so you can protect all of your devices with a single subscription.
Right now, the Surfshark One plan is discounted by 86 percent, bringing the price down to $67 total for two years plus three extra months. That works out to $2.49 per month for the first 27 months, billed upfront, with a 30-day money-back guarantee if you change your mind.
If you want to compare it against other top services before committing, you can also check out our full Surfshark VPN review and our best VPN guide to see how it stacks up. Well be keeping our best VPN deals roundup updated regularly, too.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/surfshark-vpn-deal-get-up-to-87-percent-off-two-year-plans-123000066.html?src=rss
I have a love-hate relationship with Spotify that might just be leaning more towards love today. While I struggle with some of the company's choices about the type of content it allows on its platform, I have always had a soft spot for its Wrapped roundups and the monthly audiobook hours included with my Premium subscription. For those like me, Spotifys news today will likely enhance the appeal of its audiobook offerings. Its announcing a partnership with Bookshop.org which lets indie bookstores sell their wares online through a unified platform allowing users to buy physical books from within its app, and launching a new Page Match feature that helps sync your progress across the physical books you read and the audiobooks in Spotifys catalog. Also, the audiobook recap feature that summarizes the plot so far is expanding to Android this spring, following its iOS debut (in beta form) last fall.Page Match is coming to all places where Spotifys audiobooks are available, starting with the English language titles in its 500,000-strong library. Meanwhile, you can access Bookshop within the Spotify app in the US and the UK, where Bookshop operates. Though Im thrilled that this will mean easier and greater support of independent bookstores in those areas, Im more excited by the prospect of Page Match, which I previewed at a recent launch event in the companys offices in New York. Im the sort of person who reads the same title in its ebook, physical and audio forms. (I often wish that a purchase of a physical book came with free ebook and audio versions, but thats besides the point.) While Kindles currently do a decent job of getting you to your latest page read across various devices, switching between, say, Martha Wells All Systems Red on Spotify and the paperback copy is not quite as easy. With Page Match, though, that should get a lot easier. How does Spotify Page Match work?When you get access to the feature (which is rolling out today), youll find the Page Match button under the title of each audiobook. Youll have to first look up the book on Spotify and tap into its full chapter list to find this, which means the book you want to use has to be one of the hundreds of thousands in the companys library. Then, tap the green Scan to listen button if youre looking to move over to the audio version or Scan to read below it if youre switching over to a hard copy instead. Whichever you pick, youll need to enable access to your devices camera and then scan the page of the book youre on. This should work on ereaders as well, and appears to be using some form of optical character recognition to match the part of the book to its audio counterpart.If youre scanning to listen, the process is fairly straightforward. Once youve placed the page in the viewfinder, the app will quickly jump to that very spot in the chapter track. Ill note that it was hard for me to confirm whether this actually worked during my first demo, since I never felt like I found the words being spoken on the page I was looking at. In this case, it was Lights Out: An Into Darkness novel by Navessa Allen, and I mostly felt like the narration had simply gone past the page I was on, rather than a complete failure. Subsequent attempts with other books, like Stephen Kings It, were more effective. Things get a bit trickier when youre trying to move from audio book to the paper (or ereader). After pressing Scan to read, youll need to place a page in front of the camera and wait for it to tell you to move forward or backward. Ideally, youd already know more or less where you were, so you wont have to flip too many pages. In my demo, because we were a few chapters too far from where we paused in the early part of It, there was a lot more page-turning required to get to the right spot. What I found helpful was the progress bar at the bottom of the screen, which highlighted the correct location and how far away we were from it. The instructions Move forward and Move back were clear and came up in a timely manner. When we finally landed on the right page, the screen highlighted the specific lines on the page to start from, too. I have to caveat this with the observation that there were a few starts and stops during my demo, which were resolved once I established a solid internet connection. And though Scan to read did eventually work as promised, there was a bit of flipping around that seemed to be part of the process, which might be tedious and not quite the magical experience some might expect.The good news is that Spotify seems to already be working on even more features to make it easier to read physical books in tandem with listening to audiobooks. The company said it sees the future of reading as one thats personalized, flexible, and built to move fluidly across formats and moments. Page Match is an early example of how Spotify is helping shape that future at scale. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/spotifys-page-match-seamlessly-swaps-between-real-books-and-audiobooks-120000819.html?src=rss
Canon released its first PowerShot camera back in 1996 with a 0.5-megapixel sensor, helping kickstart the digital photo revolution. To celebrate that 30-year anniversary, the company has unveiled a Limited Edition version of its still-popular PowerShot G7 X III compact camera. It has a few unique touches but is otherwise the same as the original model released nearly seven years ago.The limited edition model has a new graphite color with a knurled front ring designed to exude luxury and quality, Canon wrote. It also carries 30 year anniversary logo printed on the body to create a special feeling suitable for limited edition models, the company added in the most Canon-y way possible. Canon's Limited Edition PowerShot G7 X III compact cameraCanonAs a reminder, the G7 X III was one of the first cameras announced specifically as a model for vloggers, thanks to its ability to shoot vertical video for Instagram. It features a 20.1MP sensor, flip-up 3-inch touchscreen, 24-100mm f/1.8-2.8 zoom lens and a microphone input. It supports 4K 30 fps video with no cropping and can shoot 1080p at 120 fps. The piece de resistance is direct streaming to YouTube directly over Wi-Fi, then a new thing but now a common feature. It originally retailed for $749. The G7 X III had been in short supply until recently, but used models became popular with influencers several years ago and started selling way above list price. Possibly because of that viral fame, Canon announced in August 2025 that it was increasing production and the G7 X III started returning to stock a few months later priced at $880. Canon's Limited Edition PowerShot G7 X III compact cameraCanonThe Limited Edition G7 X III is selling for a lot more than that at $1,299, though it does come with a limited edition Peak Design cuff wrist strap and 32GB SD card. If you want to one-up the influencers and grab one, shipping will start in April 2026. Along with the camera, Canon announced a pair of interesting new RF-mount full-frame lenses. The first is the ultra wide angle RF 14mm f/1.4 L VCM prime model priced at $2,599, promising bright, high quality optics. The other is a very interesting $1,899 RF7-14mm f/2.8-3.5 L Fisheye STM zoom lens with up to a 190 degree perspective at the widest setting. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cameras/canon-unveils-a-limited-edition-version-of-its-popular-g7-x-iii-compact-camera-040000700.html?src=rss
