The Galaxy S25 series has been a surprisingly exciting addition to Samsung’s similar yet barely different lineup of phones, and Now Brief is a big part of that. The function acts as a way for you to catch up on the day, with pertinent information summarized in one place. There’s just one problem — it’s incredibly bland.

Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 series is unsurprisingly not particularly colorful, but what’s more annoying than that is the new naming scheme the company has gone with which leave truly bizarre descriptions of the various colors at the very least, and feel like a failed attempt to capture the charm of past Pixels.

When Google launched the Pixel 9, one of the AI features that caused some concern and copyright problems was Pixel Studio. Since then, it has been tamed, but Pixel Studio needs a new home inside Gboard.

The early Made by Google event felt like a play to get ahead of the fruit company. Now that the iPhone 16 series has been unveiled — to less than usual fanfare — it proves that Google was right to bring forward the Pixel 9 launch, but let’s delve into the ‘why.’

Google announced this week that, effective immediately, Google TV will no longer allow users to buy new TV shows through the platform or the app on mobile, instead shifting that over to YouTube going forward. It’s a bizarre move but, in my eyes, Google has always been an awful place to buy TV shows anyway, so it’s probably not the worst idea to do away with it altogether.

The Oura Ring is currently in generation three and brings an impressive set of features for an ultra-thin wearable, but right on its heels is Samsung’s own version – the Galaxy Ring. The Galaxy Ring is going to have to be almost perfect to be a viable replacement for the Oura Ring.

Last week, Google announced that it would soon shut down the VPN service included with Google One. The company pointed to it only being used by a fraction of subscribers, and I wonder if part of that is due to a lack of consumer trust.

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would shut down its Google Podcasts app in 2024, moving users to YouTube Music. Unfortunately, YouTube Music misses the point of why I used Google Podcasts in the first place: simplicity.

If you were wondering if Google would be able to outsmart artificial intelligence, the early answers are certainly not looking good. Anecdotally, bot sites that have existed long before generative AI are likely going to embrace the new wave of technology to speed up their plagiarism, thus more robustly fooling Google into thinking that they are actual news sites, leading to Google promoting these stolen articles through the wildly popular and widely used Google News.

The Pixel Fold has bezels. As hinted at in previous leaks and now confirmed in the first hands-on one, Google’s foldable will have bigger-than-average bezels along the top and bottom. Here’s why that might not be the worst thing.

In the broadest sense, Pixel phones are differentiated by AI and ML-powered features. The Pixel Watch — in the modern era* — is Made by Google’s third form factor with “Pixel” branding. As a first-generation device, its claim to that name is somewhat more tenuous.