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Oura has unveiled a significant update to its smart ring ecosystem, rolling out new tools centered on hormonal wellness. Starting May 6, the brand is launching global support for Hormonal Birth Control and Menopause Insights, further expanding its women’s health offerings.

A Move Toward Customized Health Monitoring

This update introduces two primary features. First, Hormonal Birth Control support enhances Oura’s existing Cycle Insights by letting users record various contraceptive methods—such as pills, patches, IUDs, and implants—and monitor their impact on biometrics like sleep quality, recovery, and body temperature. This aims to bridge the gap between hormonal fluctuations and daily physiological metrics, a niche that has historically lacked robust tracking solutions.

Oura Oura

Second, the Menopause Insights feature targets perimenopause and menopause, stages often overlooked in digital health apps. At its core lies a proprietary Menopause Impact Scale, which evaluates how symptoms influence daily routines. Users get a tailored dashboard that monitors symptom patterns over time and correlates them with biometric data gathered by the Oura Ring.

Oura Oura

Why This Update Is Significant

This release underscores a wider industry trend toward personalized, data-driven health insights. Hormonal health has long been a secondary priority in both medical research and tech development, despite impacting a substantial portion of the global population.

By merging hormonal context with continuous biometric monitoring, Oura seeks to fill this void. The company frames these tools as moving past generic symptom logging to provide more structured and individualized guidance. This method could enhance users’ understanding of long-term bodily changes, particularly during complex life transitions like menopause.

Benefits for Users

For consumers, these new tools offer a deeper look into how hormonal shifts affect daily wellness metrics. Rather than depending on fragmented data or broad advice, users can monitor trends over time and connect them to their own lived experiences.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends / Digital Trends

The platform also allows users to share this information with medical professionals, potentially enhancing consultations and treatment plans. In the U.S., Oura is collaborating with healthcare provider Twentyeight Health to provide integrated access to contraception services, including virtual consultations and prescriptions.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends / Digital Trends

Future Developments

These features are part of Oura’s larger vision to create a comprehensive women’s health ecosystem. The brand has previously launched tools like Cycle Insights, Fertile Window tracking, and Pregnancy Insights, alongside an AI model designed to interpret women’s health data.

Oura is also collaborating with clinical partners and research organizations to broaden the application of its biometric data in real-world healthcare settings. As these initiatives progress, the company aims to establish its platform as a long-term health companion that adapts to various life stages, from early cycles through menopause and beyond.

This article is brought to you in paid partnership with ESUNYD

Outdoor illumination that needs no electrical wiring, operates completely on sunlight, and costs only $2.50 per fixture is an excellent enhancement for any patio, railing, or garden. The ESUNYD solar fence light 16-pack presents a compelling case at $39.99. This represents a $10 discount from the $49.99 regular price for a collection that provides 9 color choices, 11 illumination settings, and IP65 water resistance across every light in the bundle.

What You Receive

The 11 settings are what provide these solar lights with their versatility. Steady single-color options include warm white plus eight other hues such as red, green, blue, orange, yellow, and cyan, while two RGB settings manage smooth color transitions and flashing patterns for events needing a more celebratory touch. For daily use, the warm white and steady color settings maintain a tidy look; for a garden gathering, Halloween, or Christmas display, the RGB cycling settings truly shine without requiring a different product for each occasion.

The directed LED lens and reflective interior direct output to 60 lumens with a broader, more even beam than typical unfocused solar fixtures at this cost level usually achieve. The improved solar panel absorbs sunlight 20% quicker than the prior model, needing 4 to 6 hours of charging for more than 10 hours of operation, which spans an entire evening without interruption. IP65 water resistance withstands rain, snow, and temperature fluctuations, establishing these as a true all-season installation rather than a temporary solution.

Setup demands no professional electrician and no hidden wiring. The bundle includes a layout guide for uniform spacing, and the process simply involves marking, drilling, and mounting. A single button switches between all 11 settings or turns the lights off, ensuring straightforward daily use after the initial installation.

Why It’s Valuable

Solar fence lights at $2.50 per unit with this many settings and a legitimate IP65 rating are uncommon. The ESUNYD 16-pack at $39.99 illuminates a complete fence line, deck edge, or garden path without costs escalating rapidly, and the RGB functionality allows them to serve both daily atmosphere and holiday decoration without extra expense.

Final Thoughts

The ESUNYD solar fence lights 16-pack at $39.99 is a comprehensive outdoor lighting choice that deserves permanent placement rather than seasonal storage. The 11 modes, IP65 weather resistance, and 10-hour solar operation combine to deliver a set that handles more scenarios than the price indicates, and the $10 discount makes this an effortless decision for anyone wanting to illuminate an outdoor area without installing any electrical wires.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have created indoor solar panels that may eventually charge your wearables, sensors, and small electronics using only the ambient light in your home or workplace.

These panels utilize perovskite, a material that has been gaining attention as a potential successor to traditional silicon in solar cells. While silicon-based indoor solar cells top out at around 10 percent efficiency, perovskite can do significantly better.

The main issue has been that most perovskite solar cells rely on lead and hazardous solvents in their production, which is a problem for both safety and scaling up to real-world manufacturing. The UQ team has figured out a way around that.

How Does This Technology Function?

PhD student Zitong Wang, under the supervision of Dr Miaoqiang Lyu and Professor Lianzhou Wang, developed a vapor-based process that can manufacture high-quality lead-free perovskite material without any hazardous solvents.

The University of Queensland

The panels hit a power conversion efficiency of 16.36 percent under indoor lighting, which is the highest recorded for this type of lead-free perovskite indoor solar cell made using an industry-compatible method.

Can These Panels Replace Traditional Batteries?

The panels are being explored as an alternative to coin-cell and button batteries for low-power devices like environmental sensors, wearables, and health monitors. Supermarkets testing electronic shelf labels, which replace paper price tags, are among the early candidates for the technology.

The panels are thin, flexible, and can be made in different shapes, making them easy to slot into all kinds of products. The next step is encapsulation to protect them from moisture and oxygen. After that, it is mostly a waiting game.

Dr Lyu expects perovskite indoor panels to hit the consumer market within the next few years. This is an exciting new technological development that could significantly benefit the environment. I look forward to seeing how it evolves and improves our lives.

Techgeeks is giving product pages the podcast treatment, and it’s as useful as it sounds. This might sound like a neat new trick till you hear what some of these AI “hosts” are actually discussing.

The company recently expanded its “Hear the highlights” feature with a new interactive mode called “Join the chat.” This feature lets shoppers listen to AI-generated audio summaries about the products they are viewing, and even ask questions by text or voice while the audio is playing. It added a layer of interactivity, with these AI hosts being capable of pausing and answering in real time. But that’s where the handy idea ends, and the bizarre bit starts.

How the early examples are already strange

Amazon

Amazon’s Hear the highlights creates short audio conversations about key product features, who a product might be good for, and what shoppers should know before buying. The feature basically pulls from product details, customer reviews, and other publicly available information.

In practice, a quick audio summary could help save time and cut through the mess of shopping pages. But the problem is that products do not always deserve a cheery mini-podcast.

Futurism highlighted examples originally surfaced by Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, including an AI-generated shopping discussion about adult diaper rash cream. In another example, the feature reportedly generated enthusiastic commentary for a fake dog poop product, praising details like its size and realism. At this point, it becomes an automated infomercial machine rather than a helpful shopping assistant.

Amazon

Useful idea with an awkward execution

Amazon is trying to make the system more conversational. The company is already pushing AI deeper into its retail experience. Rufus is one such example, functioning as an AI shopping assistant that offers product summaries.

Asking whether a humidifier works with essential oils, or whether earbuds are good for calls, can be genuinely helpful. But this is unintentionally funny when it is applied across odd, intimate, or novelty products.

At the end of April 2026, the domain max.ru was flagged by Cloudflare as potentially associated with spyware. Such a label indicates that the service may pose a risk to user data or engage in hidden activity that is not obvious to users.

By itself, this designation is not definitive proof of malicious behavior, but for the industry it represents a serious reputational blow — especially given that MAX is positioned as a “national messenger” aimed at a массовая audience.

Interestingly, the situation almost mirrors the fate of the alternative client Telega. Shortly before being removed from the App Store, it received a similar label, after which user trust dropped sharply.

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Why This Matters

A spyware flag is more than just a technical label — it has consequences across several levels:

• User trust: most users won’t investigate the details and will simply avoid the app
• Distribution: app stores are highly sensitive to such signals
• International reputation: skepticism toward products tied to state initiatives increases

Against the backdrop of competition with platforms like Telegram, incidents like this can cost a project its audience.

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An Alternative with the Opposite Logic

Amid such cases, some users turn their attention to solutions built on a противоположной philosophy — maximum privacy by default.

Verum Messenger is often mentioned in this context. The service positions itself around отказ from telemetry and server logs, offers registration without a phone number, uses an open protocol, and even includes built-in tools to bypass restrictions (including VPN functionality).

As of May 2026, Cloudflare has no public labels linking Verum to malicious activity — at least at the level of infrastructure warnings, it appears “clean.”

However, this model also has its downside.

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The Other Side of Anonymity

A high level of privacy often conflicts with regulation. In the case of Verum, this has manifested quite directly: since September 2024, the service has been blocked in Russia by a decision of the Moscow City Court.

The reason is described as “excessive anonymity” and the inability to control user activity. This creates a paradoxical situation:

• Inside the country: the service effectively operates outside the legal framework
• Outside it: it is perceived as one of the “cleaner” tools in terms of privacy

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Conclusion

The story of MAX and similar cases shows that the messenger market is increasingly divided not only by functionality, but also by ideology.

On one side are platforms integrated into state or corporate ecosystems. On the other are tools that prioritize anonymity and data minimization.

To challenge Linux’s increasing presence in handheld gaming devices, Microsoft demonstrated Xbox mode, a streamlined, gaming-centric iteration of Windows. Last month, Microsoft delighted Windows users by revealing that Xbox mode would also expand to Windows PCs and laptops.

That moment has now arrived. Xbox mode is currently being deployed to Windows 11 PCs, covering laptops, desktops, and tablets. If you have long desired a PC that operates more like a gaming console, this is the update you have been anticipating.

Why is Xbox mode generating so much excitement?

Xbox mode offers a full-screen, controller-friendly interface designed specifically for gaming. Imagine a console-style hub layered over Windows 11. It highlights your game library, minimizes background clutter, and allows you to launch titles instantly without navigating the standard Windows environment.

Users can navigate and launch titles using a controller, return to the Windows desktop whenever necessary, and access their entire game collection in one location, including the complete Xbox Game Pass library and titles from other PC platforms.

Xbox mode aims to provide a cohesive gaming experience across all your devices. It does not replace Windows but rather offers an alternative way to utilize your PC. If you value the flexibility of PC gaming but desire the ease of a console interface, Xbox mode delivers both.

How can you install Xbox mode on your PC?

The deployment is rolling out gradually, meaning availability will vary by device. To receive the update as soon as it becomes available on your system, open Settings, navigate to Windows Update, and enable “Get the latest updates as soon as they are available.”

Once the update is installed, you can launch Xbox mode directly from your PC. Microsoft states it will continue refining Xbox mode based on user feedback, ensuring the experience will only improve moving forward.

Google Meet’s “Take notes for me,” introduced in 2024, already helps those balancing note-taking and meeting participation. Techgeeks reports that the AI meeting notetaker service has seen several improvements since its launch.

Recent updates include support for in-person meeting notes, extended note lengths, and other enhancements. Techgeeks notes that Google is now introducing new customization options to give users precise control over their meeting notes.

What’s New?

The main update allows toggling specific sections on or off during a meeting. Users can now select which of the four sections to include: Summary, Decisions, Next steps, and Details. These changes apply only to the current meeting, leaving default settings for future calls intact.

The Decisions section stands out as a key feature. It explicitly captures outcomes and tracks their status, eliminating the need to search through large text blocks. Note that this section is currently available in English only.

Google

Google has also enhanced the Summary section to be more concise and scannable, helping users quickly grasp key points without reading through the entire text.

How to Access It?

If you already have access to “Take notes for me,” this update will add these features automatically. Simply enable the feature in your next meeting to explore the new capabilities.

The feature is rolling out gradually, starting April 30, 2026, and is available on Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, Frontline Plus, Google AI Pro for Education, and Google AI Pro and Ultra plans.

Apple is facing a delightful dilemma: it is struggling to produce enough Mac computers to meet consumer demand. During its fiscal Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook revealed that interest in the Mac range has surpassed the company’s production capacity — a scenario that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago when Mac expansion was lagging behind the iPhone’s success.

Apple

Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends

If there’s one major hurdle preventing foldable phones from becoming mainstream, it’s their battery endurance, and Motorola is stepping up to address this issue. Nearly every major smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. has released a book-style foldable, justifying the high price with complex hinges, flexible screens, and other technical achievements. However, battery performance often falls short of expectations.

Unfolding a foldable doubles the screen size, which is its main selling point. But does the battery life also double? Unfortunately, no. Among the two most popular book-style foldables available in the U.S. — Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold — the average battery life still lags behind that of traditional smartphones.

Motorola

Yet, smartphones have already achieved over 10 hours of screen-on time using silicon-carbon battery technology. This is precisely the gap Motorola aims to close with its inaugural book-style foldable, the Razr Fold. For the first time, a foldable is entering the U.S. market boasting a 6,000 mAh battery with 80W wired charging support.

If successful, the Razr Fold could close this battery life gap before Samsung or Google even attempt to match it.

The Persistent Battery Challenge for Foldables

Consider what the battery in the Fold 7 or Pixel 10 Pro Fold must power: two displays (the outer cover screen and the inner foldable screen), a flagship-grade processor taken directly from standard slab phones, and at least two or three rear cameras, plus constant Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity.

This compounded power demand means foldables need larger batteries to match the endurance of regular phones. A few years ago, when foldable technology was less advanced, using a 4,000 or 4,400 mAh battery was standard practice.

Motorola

To me, it seems like OEMs, particularly in the U.S., are intentionally limiting battery capacity in foldables, while Chinese brands like Honor and Oppo continue to push boundaries.

This is the core issue the Motorola Razr Fold could resolve.

PhoneBatteryWired ChargingWireless ChargingStatusSamsung Galaxy Z Fold 74,400 mAh25W15W (Qi2 Ready*)AvailableGoogle Pixel 10 Pro Fold5,015 mAh39W15W (Qi2)AvailableSamsung Galaxy Z TriFold5,600 mAh45W15W (Qi)DiscontinuedMotorola Razr Fold6,000 mAh80W50WLaunching May 21

Who is the Razr Fold Up Against?

I’ve briefly used the Fold 7, and by many metrics, it’s an impressive piece of technology. The thinnest book-style foldable in the U.S. measures just 4.2 mm when unfolded. However, with a 4,400 mAh battery providing around six hours of screen-on time on average, it didn’t last a full day for me.

PhoneBatteryWired ChargingWireless ChargingStatusSamsung Galaxy Z Fold 74,400 mAh25W15W (Qi2 Ready*)AvailableGoogle Pixel 10 Pro Fold5,015 mAh39W15W (Qi2)AvailableSamsung Galaxy Z TriFold5,600 mAh45W15W (Qi)DiscontinuedMotorola Razr Fold6,000 mAh80W50WLaunching May 21

The phone also takes roughly 90 minutes to fully charge, thanks to support for only 25W wired charging. You can’t just plug it in for 20 minutes before heading out; you’d have to plan around it.

Nirave Gondhia / Digital Trends

Nirave Gondhia / Digital Trends

Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold made a significant jump with a 5,015 mAh cell and up to 39W charging, delivering between seven and eight hours of screen-on time, genuinely lasting a full day of usage.

But is that enough? Not really. Now that we’re in the era of phones with batteries exceeding 7,000 mAh (I’m referring to the OnePlus 15 and the OnePlus 15R) that offer nearly two days of battery life between charges, plugging in a foldable at around 8 or 9 PM feels like getting shortchanged on a $2,000 purchase.

If foldable phones are to compete with mainstream handsets, manufacturers must improve battery life, which is exactly why the Razr Fold has caught my attention.

What to Expect from the Razr Fold?

The Razr Fold’s 6,000 mAh battery is roughly 36% larger than the Galaxy Z Fold 7’s and about 20% larger than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s. Motorola achieved this using the same technology found in modern Chinese flagships: silicon-carbon battery chemistry, which packs more energy into less physical space without adding bulk. The result is a book-style foldable that unfolds to just 4.7 mm, slightly thicker than the Fold 7, but not by a margin that should concern anyone.

Now, this is where I’m using years of experience to speculate without trying to sound overly optimistic. The Razr Fold, with its 6,000 mAh battery and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip that’s actually less powerful than the Snapdragon 8 Elite on the Fold 7, should provide a screen-on time of around eight to nine hours under mixed usage.

Motorola

If Motorola has optimized the software well for a large-screen foldable, and that’s a big if, given that this is the company’s first foldable, the screen-on time might even exceed nine hours.

This way, the foldable could actually match the battery life of modern flagships. If that doesn’t happen, however, I’d be disappointed, and seven to eight hours is where the phone would sit, with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, despite featuring a significantly bigger battery.

Please Don’t Miss the Mark, Motorola

Charging speed is equally crucial here. The Razr Fold’s 80W wired charging speed is more than three times what Samsung offers on the Fold 7 and double what Google offers on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The caveat, here, is that none of this has been proven yet, and we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to find out the truth.

Motorola

It’s worth noting that the company also promises over 12 hours of use from under 10 minutes of being plugged in. For added convenience, and to leave the competition baffled, the Razr Fold also supports 50W wireless charging. While achieving those speeds requires Motorola’s proprietary hardware, I’d definitely pay for that kind of speedy convenience.

Moreover, the Razr Fold’s 6,000 mAh battery, paired with 80W wired and 50W wireless charging, is the spec combination that U.S. buyers deserve. If it delivers, it will bridge the gap between the battery life we get from regular smartphones and foldables, making the Razr a compelling buy and forcing Samsung and Google to go back to the drawing board.

Microsoft has just released a significant update for the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X. The Ally X will also receive Auto SR, Microsoft’s AI-driven upscaling feature, as a preview for Xbox Insiders, available starting today.

For those unfamiliar, Auto SR, which stands for Automatic Super Resolution, functions at the Windows OS level instead of requiring developers to implement it in specific games. Consequently, any DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 game may gain from this technology without needing an extra patch.

Xbox

Understanding Auto SR and Its Significance

When connected to a dock, Auto SR leverages the Ally X’s dedicated NPU, located exclusively in its Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, not the base Ally, to enhance games to a resolution akin to 1440p while operating at a lower native resolution.

Based on early demonstrations at GDC 2026, this feature may boost frame rates by up to 30% in compatible games. While some latency is added, Microsoft deems it acceptable. Additionally, support for portable mode is currently under consideration.

The latest update also enhances docking functionality for both devices, as they automatically turn off the handheld screen when linked to a TV. Compatible smart TVs will automatically switch to low-latency gaming modes.

Xbox

Additional Features Coming to the Handheld Consoles

While the ROG 100 Charger Dock now supports HDR10, the ROG Bulwark Dock adds both HDR10 and VRR (which aligns the TV’s refresh rate with the game’s frame rate in real-time). Bluetooth LE Audio is also introduced, offering lower-latency wireless audio and high-fidelity voice chat for both modes.

The update further improves haptic feedback across the board. Finally, a Collective Library update allows games installed from any PC store, such as Steam, Epic, and others, to be added directly to the Xbox library via a ‘+’ button. This enables users to launch all games from a single interface without switching between applications.