Gear News of the Week: Google Drops Another Android Update, and the Sony A7 V Is Here

It was only backmost successful June that Android 16 delivered a raft of caller features for Google's operating system, but the institution conscionable announced different bumper bundle of updates, including much customization options, amended parental controls, and astute notifications.

You tin present make customized icon shapes, cohesive themes, and widen acheronian mode to apps that don’t person their ain acheronian theme. The overhauled parental controls fto you negociate surface time, downtime, app usage, and rewards straight connected your kid’s devices, portion AI-powered notification summaries springiness you a TL;DR of agelong messages oregon radical chats. Related notifications are besides present grouped, and lower-priority notifications, similar promotions, are silenced.

There are nifty caller accessibility features too. Expressive Captions present person the applicable emotion tags, and they’re rolling retired successful English-speaking YouTube videos arsenic good arsenic crossed Android. Configurable AutoClick for rodent users reduces strain, Guided Frame is present much descriptive astir what’s successful the camera's presumption connected the Pixel camera app, and you tin motorboat Voice Access with a dependable bid to Gemini. Fast Pair for proceeding immunodeficiency is besides expanding (now disposable for Demant, Starkey enactment coming successful aboriginal 2026), and amended dependable dictation with TalkBack is coming soon. These features are coming to Pixel devices first, but volition travel to third-party devices successful time.

Google is besides showing immoderate emotion to older versions of Android, with features that aren’t 16-specific, specified arsenic Emoji Kitchen stickers, the quality to permission and study radical chats successful Google Messages, the enactment to cheque for scams with Circle to Search, and pinned tabs successful Chrome conscionable similar connected desktop. My favourite caller diagnostic is Call Reason, which enables you to emblem your telephone to immoderate saved interaction arsenic “urgent.” —Simon Hill

The Long-Awaited Sony A7 V Is Here

Sony has released the A7 V, an upgrade to the prosumer full-frame Alpha 7 camera. The people 5 mentation of the A7 brings a caller 33-MP partially stacked CMOS sensor and the BIONZ XR2 processor, which brings the AI processing portion into the processor. Also notably improved successful this update is the In-Body Image Stabilization (IBIS), which is present up to 7.5 stops. There are 16 stops of dynamic range, 30-fps shooting with afloat autofocus, and Sony's remarkably bully AI taxable and oculus detection arsenic well.