Barnes & Noble reveals a cheaper version of its Nook GlowLight 4 e-reader

Barnes & Noble has revealed its latest Nook e-reader, a more budget-friendly version of the Nook GlowLight 4 it announced in December. The Nook Glowlight 4e costs $30 less than the previous model but, as you might expect, there are some tradeoffs.

The e-readers share a similar design, with soft-touch casing and physical buttons for turning pages. However, at 212DPI, the GlowLight 4e has a lower-resolution display than the GlowLight 4, which has a six-inch, 300DPI screen. There’s less storage too, with 8GB instead of 32GB. Rather than a month of promised battery life, Barnes & Noble says the GlowLight 4e will run “for weeks” on a single charge.

Other than those differences, the two models seem alike. They both support USB-C charging and have a built-in anti-glare screen protector with scratch resistance.

At $120, the Nook GlowLight 4e is $30 more expensive than the base Kindle. However, for those looking for an e-reader that’s not tied to Amazon, it might be worth checking out.

Pre-orders for the Nook GlowLight 4e are now open. It will ship on June 7th.

IKEA made a Matter-ready hub with a new smart home app to match

IKEA continues its foray into smart home devices with the launch of a Google Matter-ready hub called DIRIGERA and a new IKEA Home smart app. With the new device and app, the Swedish company is promising to handle more smart device segments while making device integration easier. It says the app will be “convenient, easy to navigate and user-friendly” for anyone just getting into smart home tech. 

“With the new DIRIGERA hub for smart products, users will be able to onboard all IKEA smart products to the system and steer them individually, in sets or in groups in the new IKEA Home smart app. This enables users to create different scenes with pre-set functions of the smart products and increases the personalisation options for the smart home,” according to the company.

IKEA’s first smart home hub/gateway TRADFRI and app launched way back in 2014, so it was long overdue for a refresh. The company said that you’ll still be able to use that device, and current “products from IKEA can be connected to and work equally well with the DIRIGERA hub.”

IKEA’s smart home and device family continues to grow at a fairly rapid pace. Earlier this year it launched the VAPPEBY LED lamp that doubles as a Spotify-enabled Bluetooth speaker. It also recently refreshed the SYMFONISK bookshelf speaker, built in partnership with Sonos, along with smart blinds, a smart air purifier and other devices. 

The DIRIGERA hub and new IKEA smart home app will launch in October 2022, the company said. It will also unveil remote “away from home” functionality in the first half of 2023. 

Amazon is taking up to 60 percent off WD and SanDisk storage for today only

If you’re building a new PC or just need a storage device for your computers and gaming consoles, make sure to check out Amazon today. You can get both internal and external disk drives, as well as memory cards, for up to 60 percent off from the website’s ongoing one-day Western Digital and SanDisk sale. One of the most deeply discounted items included in the event is Western Digital’s 2TB Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD that’s currently listed for $170, or $210 off its original price. The component went on sale at Amazon earlier this month, but this is the lowest price we’ve seen it go for on the website. It has read speeds of up to 560MB/s, sequential write speeds of up to 530MB/s and is compatible with computers that have standard SATA connectors.

Buy Western Digital and SanDisk storage and memory products at Amazon

In case you’re looking for a memory card, the SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card with 400GB capacity is also on sale for $36, down $34 or almost half its original retail price. It’s compatible with most devices that have microSD card slots, such as Android phones and tablets, and it has transfer speeds reaching 120MB/s that will let you move up to 1,000 photos within a minute.

For portable storage devices, there’s SanDisk’s Extreme PRO Portable SSD with a 2TB capacity. It’s currently on sale for $260 — its all-time low on the website — or $250 off its retail price. The device has 2000MB/s read or write speeds, comes with a USB-C and a USB-A cable and can work with both Windows and Mac computers. 

But if you need external storage with an even bigger capacity for your home or office, you can get Western Digital’s 10TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive HDD instead. It’s currently available for $175 — not quite an all-time low, but still $125 lower than its retail price of $300. The storage solution is plug-and-play ready for Windows PCs, but you can also use it for your Mac computers, as well as for your PS4 and your Xbox consoles.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Panasonic 新一代的 Toughbook 強固筆電比前代輕了少許

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Dyson’s been secretly working on robots that do household chores

Dyson has been getting into more and more offbeat products these days, like the Zone noise-canceling headphones that blow purified air at your face. Now, the company has revealed that it has an entire division that’s secretly been developing robot prototypes that do household chores. 

The company didn’t detail any of the models in particularly, but many look like regular robot arms adapted to do specialized home chores like cleaning and tidying. One appeared to be designed to vacuum out the seat cushions, mapping an armchair out in detail to do the job. “So this means I’ll never, ever find crisps around the back of my sofa again?” the company’s chief engineer, Jake Dyson, asked a researcher in a video (below).

Another robot was putting away dishes or at least placing them in a drying rack, and another was grasping a teddy bear, presumably picking up after a child. Dyson also showed off a “Perception Lab” that was all about robotic vision systems, detecting its environment and mapping humans with sensors, cameras and thermal imaging systems.

Dyson is currently on a recruiting drive, looking for around 700 engineers, which is one reason it finally decided to show off the lab (located at Hullavington Airfield, Wiltshire in the UK) after keeping it under wraps. “What you’re developing counts an awful lot in terms of excitement and attracting engineers,” he said. “One thing about robots, as with wearables, is that they are the future of Dyson.”

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The Morning After: Google claims ‘unprecedented photorealism’ from its new text-to-image AI

Google has shown off a new artificial intelligence system that can create images based on text input. Its Imagen diffusion model, created by the Brain Team at Google Research, offers “an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language…