Tablets often don’t come with kickstands or enough ports, so it’s a good idea to snag a few accessories to enhance your experience. These are some of our favorite tablet accessories, many of which you can also find in our Best iPad Accessories guide.
Satechi Aluminum Desktop Stand for $45: This is my favorite tablet stand, so much so that I took it on a trip with me to Atlanta, Georgia. It packs down relatively well, and is very stable—there’s no wobbling around here, and you can adjust the angle quite a bit. It works with my 12.9-inch iPad Pro perfectly, so it can handle huge sizes too.
Twelve South Compass Pro Stand for $50: This is made for iPads but I’ve had no trouble using it for plenty of other tablets. It’s more travel-friendly than the Satechi above and fairly stable, but when I lift the tablet off, the back leg tends to change positions. You can angle it pretty low for sketching or keep it upright for watching movies. Unlike the Satechi, it’s not a great option for keeping the tablet upright on a mattress.
Lamicall Gooseneck Tablet Holder for $25: I’ve used this on my bed frame to hold up the Galaxy Tab S7 FE for months. The gooseneck requires a bit of finagling to get to the right position, and if you’re constantly tapping the tablet, it will jiggle around. But it’s a great hands-free way to watch movies. Naturally, you can affix the clamp to any surface, like a desk or kitchen counter.
Twelve South HoverBar Duo Mount/Stand for $80: This one has been attached to my desk for several months to prop up the Nokia T20. You can either use it as a stand or an arm mount, and I prefer the latter. It’s sturdy, adjustable, and best of all, it doesn’t wiggle around as much as the Lamicall above when you tap the screen.
Vissles LP85 Mechanical Bluetooth Keyboard for $119: If you want to use a third-party Bluetooth keyboard with your tablet, a cheap one like this Logitech will do the job perfectly. But if you’re a mechanical keyboard snob like me, this Vissles is an upgrade that’s pretty easy to tote around. You can connect it to multiple devices and switch between them quickly, the keys light up in different, configurable colors, and best of all, it delivers the clickety-clackety experience you want with a mechanical keyboard. It needs to be recharged every three to four days.
Twelve South StayGo Mini USB-C Hub for $60: This works with iPads and other tablets just fine. You can either plug it in and keep it flush with the edge of a slate or use the included cord to keep it extended. You get a USB-C port you can use for pass-through charging, a USB-A, an HDMI, and a headphone jack.
Anker Nano Pro Charging Adapter for $20: Most tablets charge at around 18 watts, so this tiny 20-watt charger from Anker will do the job just fine. The plugs don’t fold, but it’s seriously compact. If your tablet does support faster charging—for example, the Galaxy Tab S7 FE supports 45-watt charging—then I recommend Satechi’s 108-watt 3-port USB-C charger ($75). This will let you charge your phone, tablet, and laptop all off of the same plug.
Like a lot of tech solutions to complex problems, facial recognition algorithms aren’t perfect. But when the technology is used to identify suspects in criminal cases, those flaws in the system can have catastrophic, life-changing consequences. People can get wrongly identified, arrested, and convicted, often without ever being told they were ID’d by a computer. It’s especially troubling when you consider false identifications disproportionately affect women, young people, and people with dark skin—basically everyone other than white men.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Khari Johnson joins us to talk about the limits of facial recognition tech, and what happens to the people who get misidentified.
Show Notes
Read Khari’s stories about how facial recognition tech has led to wrongful arrests that derailed people’s lives. Here’s Lauren’s story about Garmin’s Fenix smartwatch. (And here’s WIRED’s review of the latest model.) Arielle’s story about the wave of shows about Silicon Valley tech founders is here.
Recommendations
Khari recommends hoagies. Lauren recommends Garmin smartwatches. Mike recommends the show The Dropout on Hulu.
Khari Johnson can be found on Twitter @kharijohnson. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
Switch to Basic colors and you get a more standard set of palettes to pick from, which have nothing to do with your chosen wallpaper—although the same elements of the user interface get adjusted. Any changes that you make are applied instantly, so you can see how they look on your phone straight away.
Further down the same screen you can tweak the look of Android 12 in various other ways. You can change the size of the app grid used on the home screens, switch to a dark theme, and apply the chosen Material You theme to app shortcut icons as well—though this doesn’t always work perfectly with every app.
Installing and Using Repainter
Get Repainter installed on your handset and the number of available customization options increases, though as we mentioned above, the settings you’ll see will vary depending on your phone’s make and model. You may also be asked to install a separate (free) app called Shizuku to help with the theming if your phone isn’t rooted.
As before, you’ve got two choices for your color options, Wallpaper and Custom. With Repainter, there are a lot more color palettes to pick from in both categories. Again, the colors of the interface will adjust as you make different selections. When you’re happy with your choice, tap Done.
You’ll then be taken to the main Repainter screen, where you can see the color palette that’s been selected in more detail via the Colors tab. Switch to the Settings tab and you can adjust how Repainter works in a variety of ways—you can set how it picks colors from your chosen wallpaper, pick different colors for individual widgets on the home screen, and turn theming on and off with a tap.
Pick Settings and then Color and you can really dig into the colors you’re using: You’re able to shift color brightness and vibrancy, add tinted backgrounds, and apply a “pure black” background that looks fantastic on OLED screens. Some of these settings can be adjusted to match the wallpaper you’re using as well, so the look of the interface adapts depending on your home screen backdrop.
Yes, it’s finally here. After years of glimpses and half reveals, Volkswagen has taken the covers off the production version of its all-electric ID Buzz. And like all the EVs we like most here at WIRED, it’s got character—bags of it. Probably a lot more than can be squeezed into its microbus proportions.
With a flat front, long wheelbase, short overhangs, and a styling that pleasingly echoes the hippie bus of old, the ID Buzz is a world way from VW’s more recent, not entirely successful, forays in EV van territory. Despite the VW T1, or “Bulli,” looks, this multipurpose vehicle is actually based on the same platform as the ID.3 electric hatchback. This means the ID Buzz has a 201-bhp, 150-kW electric motor driving the rear wheels. The on-board battery is 77 kWh, and while there isn’t a confirmed range for the ID Buzz yet, we can expect around 250 miles.
The ID Buzz people carrier and ID Buzz Cargo van also have 170-kW charging, so that battery can be charged from 5 to 80 percent in 30 minutes if you can find a powerful charger. The Buzz also apes the skill we like best on the Kia EV6, as both models will have bi-directional charging as standard. What does this mean? Not only should you be able to use your Buzz to power household appliances like a juicer or blender or TV, you can, in theory, put power back into the grid. Indeed, VW is even suggesting owners can use the feature to cut energy bills, by charging a Buzz during the day on cheap electricity, then feed this back into your home storage battery (if you have one) for use in the evening. The power transfer and auto communication to do this take place via a special DC bi-directional wall box.
Production of the ID Buzz begins later this year, with first deliveries due in the autumn in Europe. For those obsessives waiting for the all-electric ID Buzz California camper van, that likely won’t be surfacing until 2025 at the earliest. For now, the people-carrying Buzz will have to do.
But there’s a lot of detail here to celebrate. In the Buzz there’s room for five people and their luggage, with 1,121 liters (40 cubic feet) of capacity. If the second row of seats is folded, that capacity increases to up to 2,205 liters (78 cubic feet). You get the choice of either two or three seats up front. For Cargo users, a fixed partition separates you from the 3.9-cubic-meter (138-cubic-foot) rear space.
From a new iPhone SE and iPad Air to a beefy M1 Ultra chipset, Apple’s spring hardware event brought refreshed versions of existing gadgets and processors. But the company also introduced a completely new piece of hardware on Tuesday called the Mac Studio—a small but mighty M1-powered desktop computer.
It’s safe to say the Mac Studio is like the Mac Mini on steroids, with a ton more features inside and out. At a glance, it looks similar to Apple’s headless desktop—with a cube-like shape that stands 3.7 inches tall and measures about 8 inches on each side. So it’s compact enough to place on your desk or under a display. It also packs a ton of ports, including two USB-C ports and an SD card slot on the front, along with four Thunderbolt ports, two USB-A slots, an HDMI port, a 10 GB Ethernet port, and a headphone jack on the back.
Under the hood, you can opt for one of Apple’s custom chips, either an M1 Max or the newest processor, the M1 Ultra, which was also unveiled today. When it’s powered by the M1 Max, Apple claims the Mac Studio has up to 50 percent faster CPU performance and over three times faster graphics than a Mac Pro with a 16-core Xeon processor. Meanwhile, the newer M1 Ultra is up to 90 percent faster in CPU performance than the same Mac Pro and 80 percent faster than the fastest Mac graphics card, according to claims Apple made during its presentation.
Regardless of the configuration, it shouldn’t run hot. During the unveiling, Apple touted the Mac Studio’s thermal design, which works to keep the internal components cool. This consists of double-sided blowers, airflow channels, and thousands of perforations on the back and bottom of the machine’s case. Since this design requires less fan-spinning action to keep things chill, the Mac Studio should stay quiet even when it’s handling more power-intensive tasks.
The Mac Studio can connect to any monitor of your choosing, but Apple has also designed a display to match the desktop. The new Studio Display is a 27-inch monitor with 5K resolution. It also features a 12-megapixel webcam (with Apple’s Center Stage feature that keeps you centered in the frame on video calls), a six-speaker sound system that supports spatial audio and Dolby Atmos playback, a three-microphone array, and four force-canceling woofers for the audio low end. The Studio Display also comes with three USB-C ports and a Thunderbolt port.