The same gadget stories you read in the app, now on the web. Discover another side of familiar phones, cameras and game consoles.
October 10, 2026
From Retina and Super AMOLED to the S Pen, Face ID and folding screens, Apple and Samsung kept offering different answers to the same question: what should a better phone do?
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October 7, 2026
Before PlayStation reached shops, Sony had to prove its prototype to the people who might make its games. The original console brought together real-time 3D, disc production and a growing software library, with difficult choices for both its creators and its owners.
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September 30, 2026
The first portable CD player could not play reliably during a jog, needed a bolt-on battery case for use away from home, and lacked the name we remember it by. Sony's D-5 shipped in November 1984 as a compact disc compact player — while a trademark filing in New York was already calling it something else.
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September 26, 2026
Astell&Kern picked a DAC that sends music out as current, then redrew everything behind it — and then built that back end twice. Inside the A&ultima SP2000.
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September 12, 2026
Months before the iPhone reached a store shelf, a phone you worked with nothing but a fingertip went on sale in Europe. The sensing under its glass came from a Silicon Valley supplier — and neither AT&T nor Verizon ever carried it.
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September 12, 2026
LG removed the visible keypad from the front of a phone and redesigned the interior around touch sensing. On Verizon shelves in 2006, it partly reversed that decision with a physical D-pad.
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September 12, 2026
Review units failed publicly before the phone went on sale. Some reviewers had peeled a layer that looked like a protector; others had left it intact. Screens failed in both groups — and Royole had already shipped a foldable the previous December.
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September 11, 2026
It reached American counters in August 2002 as a Sprint handset; Europe had received the same design that spring as the SGH-T100. Many later claims about it do not hold up against the dates.
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September 2, 2026
Leica Camera AG's 2024 anniversary release calls the M3 the first M camera of 1954 and leaves Photokina out. The Contax I already used a bayonet mount in 1932. What arrived in Cologne that April was Leica's own first M — one mount, one 0.91× window, and a U.S. price that is still quoted as if it bought the body alone.
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September 2, 2026
Color LCDs already existed. Nintendo declined them in 1989; Sega chose a color screen powered by six AAs. Tetris was packed in for America, not for Japan. Battery-life estimates and the hundred-million sales figure also need their source context.
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September 2, 2026
The often-quoted $1,499 price for the ThinkPad 701C came from a 1996 cut, not IBM's launch list. Hardware Announcement 195-063 priced the Type 2630 from $3,799 to $5,649. TrackWrite put an 11.5-inch keyboard on a 9.7-inch chassis. IDC called it 1995's top-selling notebook.
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September 2, 2026
Fall 1977, about $199, two sticks, paddles, and Combat. 128 bytes and a cartridge slot turned a living-room box into a software business. The cartridge business brought Space Invaders and Activision, followed by a glut, a $180 million quarterly loss, and a landfill in New Mexico. ATARI 2600 first appeared on the fascia of the black four-switch model late in 1982.
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September 2, 2026
It appeared at the first West Coast Computer Faire on April 16–17, 1977, in San Francisco. The 4KB assembled machine shipped on June 10 at $1,298 — paddles and cassette demos included, monitor and disk drive not. Steve Wozniak designed the board and Jerry Manock the case. The color was an NTSC artifact, not a palette you picked from a menu.
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September 2, 2026
790 grams, thirty minutes of talk time, $3,995. Four decades on, the DynaTAC 8000X's spec sheet still holds up. Accounts differ on the details around it — the wording of the first call, the phone that actually opened Chicago's network, the date it went on sale, even where the nickname came from. The brick was real, but its legends need a second look.
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August 13, 2026
Sony's first personal stereo reached America under a different name, at $199.95, as 1979 turned into 1980 — and almost everything repeated about it since, from the sales figures to the orange button, is off by a season or a decimal place.
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August 13, 2026
When The New York Times put video games back on its front page in September 1986, the number under the headline was two million consoles for the year, a quarter of the 1982 peak. The machine driving that recovery had been designed in Kyoto three years earlier to meet a price target, and it reached American shelves one city at a time, with a robot in the box.
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August 13, 2026
Fall 1979 papers already called for a bitmapped, user-friendly screen — months before Jobs walked into Xerox PARC. The Super Bowl commercial did not air only once. The Hello demo ran on a 512K prototype. Apple's $2,495 Macintosh, introduced on January 24, 1984, was a cheaper Lisa whose origins predated the Palo Alto visit.
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