Enlarge (credit: Fitbit)

Google's continued abuse of the Fitbit brand is continuing with the shutdown of the web dashboard. Fitbit.com used to be both a storefront and a way for users to get a big-screen UI to sift through reams of fitness data. The store closed up shop in April, and now the web dashboard is dying in July.

In a post on the "Fitbit Community" forums, the company said: "Next month, we’re consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app. The web browser will no longer offer access to the Fitbit.com dashboard after July 8, 2024." That's it. There's no replacement or new fitness thing Google is more interested in; web functionality is just being removed. Google, we'll remind you, used to be a web company. Now it's a phone app or nothing. Google did the same thing to its Google Fit product in 2019, killing off the more powerful website in favor of an app focus.

Dumping the web app leaves a few holes in Fitbit's ecosystem. The Fitbit app doesn't support big screens like tablet devices, so this is removing the only large-format interface for data. Fitbit's competitors all have big-screen interfaces. Garmin has a very similar website, and the Apple Watch has an iPad health app. This isn't an improvement. To make matters worse, the app does not have the features of the web dashboard, with many of the livid comments in the forums on Reddit calling out the app's deficiencies in graphing, achievement statistics, calorie counting, and logs.

Enlarge / The Pixel 8. (credit: Google)

Google's June Android update is out, and it's bringing a few notable changes for Pixel phones. The most interesting is that the Pixel 8a, Pixel 8, and Pixel 8 Pro are all getting DisplayPort Alt Mode capabilities via their USB-C ports. This means you can go from USB-C to DisplayPort and plug right into a TV or monitor. This has been rumored forever and landed in some of the Android Betas earlier, but now it's finally shipping out to production.

The Pixel 8's initial display support is just a mirrored mode. You can either get an awkward vertical phone in the middle of your wide-screen display or turn the phone sideways and get a more reasonable layout. You could see it being useful for videos or presentations. It would be nice if it could do more.

Alongside this year-plus of display port rumors has been a steady drum beat (again) for an Android desktop mode. Google has been playing around with this idea since Android 7.0 in 2016. In 2019, we were told it was just a development testing project, and it never shipped to any real devices. Work around Android's desktop mode has been heating up, though, so maybe a second swing at this idea will result in an actual product.

Enlarge / Google Pay is dead! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Google has killed off the Google Pay app. 9to5Google reports Google's old payments app stopped working recently, following shutdown plans that were announced in February. Google is shutting down the Google Pay app in the US, while in-store NFC payments seem to still be branded "Google Pay." Remember, this is Google's dysfunctional payments division, so all that's happening is Google Payment app No. 3 (Google Pay) is being shut down in favor of Google Payment app No. 4 (Google Wallet). The shutdown caps off the implosion of Google's payments division after a lot of poor decisions and failed product launches.

Google's NFC payment journey started in 2011 with Google Wallet (apps No. 1 and No. 4 are both called Google Wallet). In 2011, Google was a technology trailblazer and basically popularized the idea of paying for something with your phone in many regions (with the notable exception of Japan). Google shipped the first non-Japanese phones with the feature, fought carriers trying to stop phone payments from happening, and begged stores to get new, compatible terminals. Google's entire project was blown away when Apple Pay launched in 2014, and Google's response was its second payment app, Android Pay, in 2015. This copied much of Apple's setup, like sending payment tokens instead of the actual credit card number. Google Pay was a rebrand of this setup and arrived in 2018.

The 2018 version of Google Pay was a continuation of the Android Pay codebase, which was a continuation of the Google Wallet codebase. Despite all the rebrands, Google's payment apps were an evolution, and none of the previous apps were really "shut down"—they were in-place upgrades. Everything changed in 2021 when a new version of Google Pay was launched, which is when Google's payment division started to go off the rails.

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  The AIs are learning to cooperate! Siri talks to ChatGPT. [credit: Apple ]

Reports of Apple signing a deal with OpenAI are true: ChatGPT is coming to your Apple gear.

First up is Siri, which can tap into ChatGPT to answer voice questions. If Siri thinks ChatGPT can help answer your question, you'll get a pop-up permission box asking if you want to send your question to the chatbot. The response will come back in a window indicating that the information came from an outside source. This is the same way Siri treats a search engine (namely, Google), so how exactly Siri draws a line between ChatGPT and a search engine will be interesting. In Apple's lone example, there was a "help" intent, with the input saying to "help me plan a five-course meal" given certain ingredient limitations. That sort of ultra-specific input is something you can't do with a traditional search engine.

Siri can also send photos to ChatGPT. In Apple's example, the user snapped a picture of a wooden deck and asked Siri about decorating options. It sounds like the standard generative AI summary features will be here, too, with Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi mentioning that "you can also ask questions about your documents, presentations, or PDFs."

Enlarge / A South Korean flag, left, and Samsung Electronics Co. flag fly outside the company's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. (credit: Jean Chung/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Samsung Electronics workers are on strike. As The New York Times reports, Nationwide Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) has about 28,000 members, or about one-fifth of Samsung's workforce, walking out of the job on Friday. It's Samsung's first workers' strike.

Specifically, the walkout is in Samsung's chip division, which makes RAM, NAND flash chips, USB sticks and SD cards, Exynos processors, camera sensors, modems, NFC chips, and power and display controllers. Depending on how each quarter goes, Samsung is often the world's largest chipmaker by revenue thanks to this division, and its parts are in products from a million different brands. It's probably hard to find a tech product that doesn't have some kind of Samsung chip in it.

As you might expect, the union wants higher pay. Samsung's workers have gotten as much as 30 percent of their pay from bonuses, and there were no bonuses last year. UnionVP Lee Hyun Kuk told the Times that “it feels like we’ve taken a 30 percent pay cut.” The average pay for a union member is around $60,000 before bonuses.

Enlarge / The Humane AI Pin.

The Humane AI Pin has launched, crashed, and burned, with founders already looking to sell the company just one month after launch. The New York Times has an article detailing exactly how the company got to the point of launching a dead-on-arrival product and provided a few updates on the sales of the product and the company.

Humane, if you haven't heard, is a company founded by two former Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018. The company raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and, before launch, was valued at $1 billion. The product, the AI Pin, is sort of trying to be a Star Trek communicator. You magnetically clip it onto your shirt and can tap it for voice commands. It has "no apps" (the founders bragged about this feature) and is mostly just a voice assistant box with a touch panel, battery, camera, and speaker/microphone. There's no traditional screen, but a laser projector can shoot a smartwatch-like UI onto your hand that you control with gestures.

The going rate for one of these things is $700, plus a $24 a month subscription, a hard sell in the face of a $400 Apple Watch. It also doesn't really work and was universally panned in reviews, with conclusions ranging from The Verge's "not even close" to Marques Brownlee's "the worst product I've ever reviewed." Apparently, the voice commands are very slow, the battery life is an awful two to four hours, it's heavy and drags down your shirt, and the projector doesn't work well in many lighting conditions. It's also reportedly a fire hazard, with Humane emailing customers this week and telling them to "immediately stop using and charging" the battery case because some units with defective batteries "may pose a fire safety risk."

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  The Motorola Edge 2024. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola's newest phone is the Motorola Edge 2024. This is a mid-range phone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. It costs $550 and will be in stores June 20. Every Motorola phone nowadays looks exactly the same, but Motorola assures us this is new.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 is the bottom of Qualcomm's "7 series" lineup and features four Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores built on a 4 nm manufacturing process. The phone has a 144 Hz, 6.6-inch 2400×1080 OLED panel with curved sides. It has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 5000 mAh battery, 68 W wired charging, and 15 W wireless charging. Cameras include a mid-range 50 MP Sony "LYTIA" 700C, 13 MP wide-angle, and a 32 MP front camera. The phone has NFC, Wi-Fi 6E, an in-screen fingerprint reader, and—a big addition compared to other Motorola devices—an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.

Just like on the Moto G Stylus, this phone has a "vegan leather" back option that should be softer than the usual plastic, but it's still plastic. Unlike that phone, there's no headphone jack or MicroSD slot. A customizable hardware button on the left side of the phone lets you open the Google Assistant or whatever other app you choose.