Adobe has had a busy year designing and redesigning a number of its most popular apps for mobile, and Premiere for iPhone is the latest—a mobile-first video editing workflow that adapts most of the tools from the desktop version of Premiere to a mobile user interface. You can trim, layer, edit, and even auto-generate captions, alongside all the basic editing features you’d expect, like color and exposure adjustments.
The automatic resizing feature is particularly nice, adapting videos to both horizontal and landscape platforms, making sure your subject is centered for both cuts. As with anything Adobe releases these days, there are plenty of AI-powered features, including the ability to generate backgrounds from a prompt and create sound effects from your voice.
Premiere for iPhone is free, though if you want to use the AI features, you’ll have to buy credits within the app. According to Adobe, the Android version is still under development. —Scott Gilbertson
Nothing Reveals an AI ‘Operating System’
No, Nothing isn’t switching from Android to a custom AI-powered OS. However, the phone brand announced a new platform called Essential, which will lay the groundwork for a future in which users generate their own apps and user interface. We’ve heard these ideas before, often called generative user interfaces, and it’s still early days for the technology.
Nothing’s plan starts with two apps: Essential Apps and Playground. The former lets you create “apps” with natural language, though these are really designed in the form of widgets. Just describe what you need—capture all the receipts in my camera roll and export a PDF every Friday—and this will be generated as a widget you can interact with on the home screen. The Nothing Phone (3) supports up to six of these Essential apps, but older Nothing devices are limited to two.
Playground is a place where you can publish not just your Essential Apps but also other Nothing oddities, like Glyph Toys from the Phone (3), camera presets, and EQ profiles. You can download what the community has made and even “remix” them into your own. Eventually, these features will turn into what Nothing is calling Essential OS, which it expects to debut in 2028. (Remember the Essential Phone from 2017? Nothing bought the company’s assets in 2021, and it seems like it was for the name.)
Nothing debuted some of these AI features with the “Essential” branding earlier this year. Essential Space is a new app that debuted on the Phone (3a), triggered by a dedicated button; tap it to capture your screen and have AI pull insights and summarize the contents. Now, there’s Essential Memory, which the company says “brings everything together by learning your habits, and surfacing forgotten details when you need them most.” It’s coming soon, so we’ll have to wait and see to learn more.
Whoop Now Lets You Order Blood Work
Courtesy of Whoop
Hot on the heels of Ultrahuman and Oura announcing that you will be able to schedule and take blood labs with their services, Whoop debuted Whoop Advanced Labs. Not only can you add your preexisting blood work to the Whoop app, but you can also book blood testing through the app (like Oura, Whoop has partnered with Quest Diagnostics). Whoop’s offering is a bit more expensive, at $199 per test, $349 for two tests per year, or $599 for four tests per year, as compared to Oura’s $99 per test. Both purport to combine blood work results with long-term continuous monitoring with their respective trackers.
Labs are routine medical tests that let doctors screen things such as high cholesterol, high blood glucose, and diabetes, or hormone or ferritin tests to check if your thyroid is working or you’re eating enough iron. They can be expensive, inconvenient to schedule and take, and fairly arcane to interpret, so it makes sense that startups are starting to offer them as part of their subscription services.
Still, it’s a sad statement on the current accessibility of health care that routine medical services are now being funneled into revenue streams for private companies. As much as I like the Oura Ring and the Whoop band, they’re not doctors; they still can’t actually treat you for a heart attack or colon cancer. —Adrienne So
Arlo Refreshes Its Security Cameras
Courtesy of Arlo
Arlo’s new Essential 3 range rounds off a busy week for security cameras, with Google showing off new Nest cameras and Amazon releasing a fresh batch of Ring and Blink cameras. Arlo’s Essential 3 lineup includes indoor and outdoor pan/tilt cameras (a first for the company), alongside a new generation of regular outdoor and indoor cameras.
The Essential Pan Tilt ($60) and Essential Pan Tilt Indoor ($50) offer 2K footage, 360-degree pan, 180-degree tilt, and automatic subject tracking, and there are HD versions for a bit less. The 3rd-gen Essential Outdoor Battery ($70), Essential XL Outdoor Battery ($80), Essential Security Camera Plug-in ($50), and Essential Indoor Camera Plug-in ($40) all offer 2K footage, and again, there are slightly cheaper HD versions of each.
Moving up the line, there’s the Pro Security Camera 2K ($125), which adds HDR and a wider 160-degree field of view, and the Pro XL Security Camera 2K ($200), which is the same but with a bigger battery inside. Finally, there is an update for the Ultra Security Camera 4K ($200), which combines 4K footage, HDR, and a 180-degree field of view.
What artificial intelligence can do for home security was talked up a lot this week, and Arlo was no exception, with its beefed-up AI promising real-time intelligence for Arlo Secure subscribers (plans start at $8 a month). The new AI can recognize known people and vehicles, detect animals and packages, alert you to fire by spotting flames, and even be trained to flag certain situations, such as you leaving the garage door open again. —Simon Hill
Elvie’s Smart Bassinet Arrives
Courtesy of Elvie
The art of getting a baby to sleep is filled with trial and error, and sometimes unsafe sleeping solutions. Babies should sleep on flat, firm surfaces, but these little critters love to fall asleep in bouncers and rockers, since those devices replicate the movement they felt in the womb. Elvie, maker of one of our favorite breast pumps, announced a solution earlier this year at CES that’s now available for purchase: the Elvie Rise.
It’s a smart bouncer and bassinet in one device, letting you switch from a rocker chair into a flat bassinet without needing to pick up and relocate your little one (thus letting them stay asleep). The “smart” aspect comes from the rocking technology you can control with a smartphone, choosing the perfect bounce level to soothe your baby. The app will also track how long the baby is in the bassinet and their overall sleep. It’s a handy all-in-one device, if you can stomach the $900 cost. Still, that’s considerably cheaper than a Snoo bassinet. —Nena Farrell
Back Market Opens a Retail Store (for a Short Time)
Courtesy of Back Market
Maybe you’ve seen billboards for Back Market, the company that sells refurbished, used tech. The company now has a physical retail presence in New York City, though only for a limited time. Located in SoHo at 449 Broadway, the pop-up store will run from October 1 to December 21. Instead of heading to an Apple Store to buy a new iPad or MacBook, you can go to Back Market’s store to shop for a used, refurbished device and save some cash along the way.
The store isn’t just a place to buy used gear, though. There’s an area that makes it a game to spot the difference between new and refurbished tech, and you can even get your devices serviced. The pop-up offers device diagnostics, screen repairs, cleaning services, and trade-in options. There’s also a unique tie-in with Google Fi, so you can learn more and shop for plans from Google’s cell service. The company also says there will be community panels and workshops discussing sustainability over the coming months.
Roland Debuts a New Drum Machine
Courtesy of Roland
Roland has announced its first analog drum machine in decades. The new TR-1000 Rhythm Creator builds on the legacy the brand cemented in the 1980s and 1990s with the iconic TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, which were used to make nearly every classic hip-hop album (and a shocking percentage of modern ones).
Roland has been modeling its analog hardware with digital chips for decades now, but the new TR-1000 uses 16 analog circuits from the original drum machines, then adds a digital backend to the sound that allows you to shape sounds and sequences. It also has sampling tools that will let you chop up songs, time-stretch, and sequence them.
It’s a premium product for a tier of producer most of us will never achieve—the TR-1000 costs $2,700 at launch—but it will likely be used hip-hop, pop, and other music for the next several decades. Ironically, the original 808 was so ahead of its time that it was a commercial failure. I doubt this will be the case with this new model. —Parker Hall
