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For the best listening experience possible, you should familiarize yourself with the sound settings on your audio products. In particular, the equalizer (aka the EQ). Understanding how to operate this tool can vastly enhance a sound profile when done correctly. No, a PhD in audio engineering isn’t mandatory.

Anyone can create an effective EQ directly on their media player or via third-party software. Need some guidance with the process? Say no more — Mashable’s got you. We gathered a few professionals from legacy audio brands to teach you how to properly customize the EQ settings on your headphones, earbuds, portable speaker, and car sound system. 

Before we jump in, let’s get you caught up on some basics.

A crash course in frequency ranges

All those numbers on an EQ can be intimidating to look at. Don’t freak out. They’re easy to grasp once you read a breakdown. Depending on your device, the sound frequencies are often listed as numbers above or below the sliders, with numbers on the left representing how much that frequency can be boosted or reduced by moving the sliders up and down.

Here’s a simplified breakdown of each audio frequency category and range:

• 50Hz (Sub-Bass): Boosts the fullness of low-frequency instruments (e.g, kicks, snares) and increases basslines. Decreases the “boom” effect.

• 60Hz - 200Hz (Bass): Adds warmth to brass (horns) and percussion instruments (piano), while giving fullness to guitars and snares. Increases clarity.

• 200Hz – 600Hz (Low-Mids): Adds fullness to drums, guitars, and vocals. Decreases the ambience and sharpness of high-frequency sounds. 

• 600Hz – 3kHz (Mids): Boosts bass, clarity, definition, and vocal output. Reduces dullness and harshness of low-frequency sounds. 

• 3kHz – 8kHz (Upper Mids): Emphasizes presentation of high-frequency instruments (e.g, cymbals, strings). Minimizes sibilance in vocals.

• 8kHz - 20kHz (Highs/Treble): Adds realism to electronic effects (e.g, synths) and brightens high-frequency instruments and vocals. Reduces hissing noises.

Got it? Now, take out your wireless headphones, so we can tune them to perfection.

How to customize the EQ on your wireless headphones and earbuds

Personalizing sound on your wireless headphones and earbuds is pretty effortless these days, thanks to companion apps. These mobile software suites often come equipped with a manual graphic EQ and preprogrammed presets that complement select music genres or content (e.g, podcasts or video). Some apps even come with an auto-generated EQ that can tailor sound to your hearing; results are based on a series of listening tests. 

There are also third-party EQ apps you can download from the App Store or Google Play.

Sony Electronics expert Shimo Jiroaki, the Product Marketing Lead for Personal Entertainment, has some excellent tips for optimizing EQ performance. For starters, Jiroaki wants listeners to abide by the following guidelines:

• Always adjust the EQ at the volume level you typically listen to, since perceived sound changes with volume.

• High-quality tracks already contain a lot of detail and dynamic range, so it’s usually best to keep EQ adjustments minimal. Even small changes can make a noticeable difference.

• It’s often more effective to reduce unnecessary frequencies than to over-boost others. 

• Noise cancellation makes EQ adjustments simpler. For instance, without it, when low-frequency sounds such as airplane noise are prominent, they can combine with the low end of the music, causing excessive bass. Cutting the low frequencies will then enhance the clarity of the music. However, with noise cancellation, you're less affected by such external sounds, allowing you to adjust without worrying too much about the noise's impact.

• Use music with vocals when tuning — our ears are sensitive to voices, making it easier to fine-tune.

Bass A screenshot of the EQ settings for Sony headphones on a phone, which shows the bass sliders boosted and the low-mid range reduced slightly. Credit: Alex Bracetti / Mashable

According to Jiroaki, those who want more thump from their headphones need to increase the 32–64Hz range. Slightly reducing the 125–250Hz range keeps bass separate from the midrange. This is vital because you still want to hear vocals and mid-range instrumentals clearly. 

Midrange A screenshot of the EQ settings for Sony headphones on a phone, which shows the mid-range sliders boosted and everything else reduced. Credit: Alex Bracetti / Mashable

If you want more clarity and presence from your sound profile, make the midrange stronger by “reducing 32–135Hz and 8kHz–16kHz, then increase 500Hz–2kHz.”

Highs A screenshot of the EQ settings for Sony headphones on a phone, which shows the high-range sliders boosted. Credit: Alex Bracetti / Mashable

Raising the high end will bring out more detail in recordings. Jiroaki says to “boost 4kHz–16kHz, but adjust carefully, as too much can make the sound sharp or harsh.”

How to customize the EQ on your wired headphones and earbuds

You can’t adjust the EQ on your wired headphones or earbuds, at least not through a companion app. Instead, third-party software is required. Any audio adjustments made on these programs will apply to any wired headphones or earbuds that are plugged into your media device (i.e, desktop/laptop, smartphone, tablet). Another option is accessing the EQ on select music streaming services (e.g, Apple Music, Spotify), which will offer similar results.

How to customize the EQ on your wireless speakers

Adjusting the EQ on portable Bluetooth speakers is often no different than wireless headphones. JBL arguably has the most popular and user-friendly EQ for speakers, so we brought in Klaus Hartung, the Vice President of Intelligent Audio Lab at Harman International — which owns JBL — to discuss some essentials.

Several factors must be looked at when customizing the sound profile on a speaker, such as environment (indoor/outdoor), music genre, placement, room acoustics, surrounding walls, and vocal output. The boundary effect needs to be examined as well. This is when you hear a mix of the direct sound from a speaker and the sound that’s reflected from a surface (e.g, a desk or wall).

Bass A screenshot of the EQ settings for a JBL speaker on a phone, which shows the bass slider boosted. Credit: Alex Bracetti / Mashable

Start by adjusting +2–3 dB on the lowest band (125Hz). This creates “more punchy and balanced bass.” If the results are muffled, Hartung says to “reduce the level slightly by −1–2 dB in the 250–500 Hz region.” 

Something else to monitor is bass loss in outdoor settings. If this occurs, “increase the bass and treble (bass +2–3 dB, treble +1–2 dB),” says Hartung. Having your speaker in the living room around furniture and walls will affect sound quality. Adjust the EQ to the 60–200Hz range and cut the lowest band by −2 to −4 dB to eliminate muddiness. 

Midrange A screenshot of the EQ settings for a JBL speaker on a phone, which shows one of the mid-range sliders boosted. Credit: Alex Bracetti / Mashable

Increase by +1–2 dB in the 1–4kHz region to raise vocals. If the sound becomes too harsh, then decrease by −1 dB at 4kHz. Any EQ with a gain setting should be increased by 1–2 dB at 1–3kHz. When listening to acoustic genres, Hartung wants you to set the midrange to −1–2 dB at 200–400Hz for more clarity.

Highs A screenshot of the EQ settings for a JBL speaker on a phone, which shows the high-range slider boosted. Credit: Alex Bracetti / Mashable

“You’ll also want to consider room acoustics and how those high-frequency sounds reflect in the space,” says Hartung. Reduce treble by -1–2 dB in bright rooms (e.g., no curtains or carpets) and increase treble by +1–2 dB when in dull rooms (carpeted with curtains).

How to customize the EQ on your car sound system

If your vehicle has an HMI (Human-Machine Interface) system, then it likely supports an audio EQ. Bear in mind that the interface will look different across vehicles. Enter the Audio Settings menu and you’ll stumble upon a few controls, such as bass, midrange, and treble. 

Director of Global Experiential R&D at Harman Automotive, Jonathan Pierce, notes that a premium in-car system combines “high-quality components and sophisticated software tuning to achieve both power and clarity.” He also suggests that listeners ask for what they want more or less of and question whether they understand the tools available to “shape the experience.”

Bass

Per Pierce, “increase by +2 to +4 dB to add warmth and depth, but avoid going higher than +5 dB to prevent muddiness.”

Midrange

Keep the midrange near neutral (0 to +2 dB) for clearer vocals and instruments.

Treble

Raise this by +1 to +3 dB for a bit more sparkle and detail. At the same time, lower the treble slightly if it sounds “too sharp,” says Pierce.

American sedans with serious performance are becoming increasingly rare, but one model still delivers big horsepower, aggressive styling, and a driver-focused experience. With 472 horsepower under the hood, it offers thrilling acceleration and handling that rivals some much pricier sports cars, yet its days on the market are numbered.

Your old Twitter handle might be worth something to someone, apparently.

X (formerly Twitter) announced over the weekend that it will start selling inactive handles on the Elon Musk-owned social network. The company will facilitate sales through a new Handles Marketplace, which will only be available to paid Premium and Premium Business users. Some usernames will be "complimentary" (AKA free), and X is calling those "Priority" handles. Others will be doled out on a paid or invite-only basis, and those are designated as "Rare" handles.

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It's all bit strange, but our friends at PCMag have a clearer explanation of how this works. The free ones will be longer handles with full names or alphanumeric phrases, while the ones that cost money will be shorter and more recognizable handles, like the ones that brands use. Anyone who wants a free username will have to submit a request and wait for approval, while paid usernames will be given out via public drops or, in other cases, an invite-only program.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk's X settles $128 million lawsuit with Twitter executives

In case you were wondering, prices for these usernames apparently start at $2,500 and can go up to seven figures depending on "demand and uniqueness," per a support page cited by PCMag. Ownership of sold usernames cannot be transferred, so theoretically, there won't be a resale market for them.

This is certainly a unique solution to the age-old problem of wanting a username that's claimed by someone who doesn't use it anymore. There are definitely a couple of major potential issues with it, though. For starters, there's no indication that the previous owner of a sold username will see any of that money. Beyond that, this could easily be used for nefarious means; it's not hard to imagine someone buying @dril in a few years and using it to shill crypto scams, or whatever it is grifters do on X these days.

Given that X has already killed the original purpose of the blue checkmark as a verification tool and turned it into a paid status symbol, this at least feels like it could be an avenue for digital identity theft, the likes of which the site's current ownership and moderation policies might not be equipped to handle at the moment.

UPDATE Monday, 5:07 p.m. ET: Amazon indicated its AWS services were well on the way to fully recovering.

"We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services," the company wrote in an update to the AWS status page. Updates from the company heading into Monday evening, eastern time, suggested its efforts to mitigate AWS' issues were steadily resolving the problems.

UPDATE Monday, 3:05 p.m. ET: Amazon said its efforts to fix issues with its AWS services appeared to be working, just hours after its popular cloud services platform suffered a major outage during the early hours of Monday morning. The company wrote that it saw "decreasing networking connectivity issues" in its most recent update on its status page.

And at 2:20 p.m. ET, the company wrote that its "mitigations to resolve launch failures" were progressing and that it expected "launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside" as it worked to apply fixes more widely.

More on the AWS outage: Is Canvas still down?

UPDATE Monday, 1:25 p.m. ET: Amazon wrote that it was still working to resolve issues with its widely used AWS service.

"We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services," the company wrote in an update to the AWS status page.

The latest issues came after a massive outage in the early hours of Monday morning, eastern time. We'll continue to update this story, and you can read further details about why the crash occurred.

UPDATE Monday, 12:20 p.m. ET: Amazon wrote it was working on correcting the underlying issue that caused renewed issues with AWS on Monday.

"We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services," read the latest update from the AWS status page. "The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers."

UPDATE Monday, 11:35 a.m. ET: Amazon confirmed it was looking into "the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect," in its most recent update to the AWS status page. User-reported issues for a number of services were on the rise at Down Detector, including FanDuel, Snapchat, Apple Music, and many more.

UPDATE Monday, 11:15 a.m. ET: Hours after seemingly stabilizing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is again reporting issues, seemingly confirmed by a massive uptick in user reports on Downdetector. It's unclear which sites will be impacted, but Downdetector error reports are rising for Venmo and slowly rising for several other services. We'll continue to update this story, and you can also read more about why this morning's crash occurred.

Amazon services, including Prime and Alexa, as well as other internet services including Snapchat, Roblox, Lyft, and more appear to be disrupted, according to Downdetector.

The reported issues began shortly after 3 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector.

Amazon Web Services' status page first reported the issue at 3:11 a.m. ET. The page confirmed engineers were investigating the ongoing issue and had potentially identified the root cause as of 5 a.m. ET.

As of 6 a.m. ET, AWS reports services to be recovering, which is consistent with a drop of reported issues across impacted sites, per Downdetector.

SEE ALSO: AWS outage list: Roblox, Fortnite, Snapchat, Signal, and more

Many sites and services rely on AWS to operate, which can cause a ripple effect across the internet when disrupted.

(Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns Mashable.)

Sites impacted by AWS outage

Here is a partial list of websites or services seemingly impacted by the AWS problems, according to Downdetector:

• Snapchat

• Amazon

• Roblox

• Robinhood

• Amazon Alexa

• Ring

• HBO Max

• Chime

• Venmo

• Lyft

• Prime Video

• Fortnite

• Disney+

• Hulu

• Roku

• Signal

• IMDb

• United Airlines 

• Amazon Music

• Reddit

• Character.AI

• AT&T

• My Fitness Pal

• Steam

SEE ALSO: Amazon internet outage reactions hit full meltdown

It's important to note that not all services were knocked offline completely by the outage. Reddit for example, is reporting degraded performance as it deals with issues in "Reddit infrastructure." The issues, while not explicitly tied to the AWS outage, were observed to be occurring at the same time.

Slack is also experiencing significant performance issues attributed to an "upstream provider," but the service is still functioning Monday morning.

This is a developing story. More details will be provided as they become available.

Spotify is good for streaming music, but it's also a good place to follow music in general. And an important part of music, especially for diehard fans, is live music and concerts. Spotify can already inform you of concerts, but now, it just made it way easier to keep you in the loop of nearby concerts as well.

The huge 43-inch Samsung 4K Smart Monitor is being sold at its lowest price ever right now. This is a major 24% discount that drops the price to a surprisingly low price of just $380 on Amazon. This is a great deal considering its normal price is $500, letting you save a cool $120.

Attention Oura Ring users: A new app experience is coming. On Oct. 20, the fitness tech brand revealed that the Oura app is getting a redesign in the coming weeks. But that's not the only news. Oura is also unveiling cumulative stress metrics and other updates along with the redesign.

The new Oura app

Oura has not provided an exact date for the new app design. The brand has said the new design will rollout globally in the coming weeks, so don't be surprised if you wake up to a new in-app look sometime soon.

The new Oura app will allow more personalization for users to see the information they want first. Credit: Oura / Mashable SEE ALSO: Oura Ring 4 review: It's got a key edge over Apple Watch

The Oura interface is getting a refresh, but it's maintaining the same three tabs: Today, Vitals, and My Health. While it still delivers all the same data and health biometrics, it'll do so in a refreshed package.

The new app design has more integrated design, Oura says. Rather than separate boxes delivering each biometric, it'll have a better flow between categories. The background will show serene natural landscapes, adding to an overall zen-like app experience.

The tab with the biggest overhaul is the My Health tab, which now prevents an overview of your long-term health metrics at the top of the page, before diving into the specifics of your resilience, heart health, and sleep health.

An update to Cycle Insights Cycle Insights will now have a 12-month view in the Oura app. Credit: Oura / Mashable

One of the most popular features in the Oura app is Cycle Insights, used to track and support reproductive health. The new app design will now support a 12-month view of predicted period and fertile windows. Plus, users used to wait 60 nights before receiving personalized cycle phase data, but now it will be available after one night's sleep.

Oura launches Cumulative Stress Cumulative Stress will be calculated from sleep continuity, heart stress-response, sleep micromotions, temperature regulation, and activity impact Credit: Oura

Oura measures daily stressors as will as users long-term resilience to stress, but a new metric is coming. Cumulative Stress will now monitor chronic, long term stress. The metric will be calculated from five factors: Sleep continuity, heart stress-response, sleep micromotions, temperature regulation, and activity impact.

Cumulative Stress can be viewed in a new Stress Management page where users can see it alongside Daytime Stress and Resilience.

SEE ALSO: We tested the top fitness trackers of 2025: See our favorite wearables and smart rings Oura is looking for FDA-approval on blood pressure insights

While the new app design and Cumulative Stress are coming soon, Oura is also getting started on blood pressure insights. Oura has received approval from an Institutional Review Board to begin a study on blood pressure insights in Oura Labs, an early step in potentially receiving FDA approval for a future blood pressure feature.

Oura Labs is the brand's hub for testing experimental features before they've officially launched. Users can beta test features and provide Oura with feedback before they officially launch.

The blood pressure study in Oura Labs combines Oura health data with information from a user questionnaire focusing on family history, medication, and lifestyle habits. Participants in Oura Labs will then receive one of three hypertension assessments — no signs, moderate signs, or major signs. According to Oura, "the Blood Pressure Profile Study will be used to refine and validate a future feature for submission to the FDA for clearance."

UPDATE: Oct. 20, 2025, 3:28 p.m. EDT This article has been updated to clarify the status and availability of the blood pressure study in Oura Labs.

Netflix often dominates the water cooler discussion with its TV shows like Stranger Things and Wednesday, but the service also has plenty of great films, both original and licensed, that you shouldn't overlook.

There isn't much to think about when buying a mouse, but one of the most important aspects is one you can't tell by glancing at the box—how it sounds.

Many online services are having reliability issues today, or have fully gone down, due to an outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Snapchat, the Alexa voice assistant, Reddit, Asana, IMDb, and many others are affected.

I spent years writing everything in Microsoft Word. But over time, its cluttered interface, messy formatting, and sluggish performance began to distract me from what truly matters—writing. That’s when I tried Markdown. Its clean, distraction-free approach won me over—and I haven’t looked back since.

When your PC is sluggish, adjusting a few settings can help. If you don't know what's under the hood of the Windows 11 OS, I’m sharing some tips that work. These hidden Windows 11 settings give PCs an instant speed boost with minimal effort.

More than a decade after its initial launch, the original Pebble app is now re-listed on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. It's compatible with all models of the Pebble smartwatch, including the new Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2.

Excited for Stranger Things Season 5, but don't have time for a full rewatch? Don't worry: The Stranger Things cast is here to help.

SEE ALSO: 'Stranger Things 5' teaser: We're in for a traumatic final season, aren't we?

In the lead-up to the release of Season 5, Netflix has released videos of Stranger Things' cast reacting to the biggest moments from prior seasons. This week, it's Season 3's turn, meaning Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and more are turning back time to the summer of 1985. The Starcourt Mall has opened, Robin (Maya Hawke) has joined the cast, and the Mindflayer is about to rain down carnage on Hawkins.

Check out the full video above to see the cast's full reactions to Stranger Things Season 3. Highlights include Joe Keery reliving the Steve and Robin bathroom scene, and Gaten Matarazzo rewatching Dustin's standout performance of "The NeverEnding Story."

"It feels like it was designed fully to fuck with me," he laughs. And Stranger Things audiences are grateful for it!

Volume 1 of Stranger Things 5 premieres Nov. 26 at 8 p.m. ET on Netflix. Volume 2 premieres Dec. 26, and the series finale premieres Dec. 31.

Hope you've caught your breath after mid-October's Prime Day sales. Today (Monday, Oct. 20), Best Buy became the first major retailer to announce its 2025 holiday plans — and for the first time ever, it will start dropping early Black Friday deals on Halloween.

"We know it’s early, but Halloween has been knocking on our holiday door for a while now and we’re ready to let it join the party," the company said in a press release. "This year, we’re putting the creep in 'holiday creep.'"

Best Buy will continue to release early Black Friday deals throughout November in the lead-up to its official Black Friday sale, which begins more than a week ahead of time on Thursday, Nov. 20. (Black Friday 2025 technically falls on Nov. 28.) The 10-day sale will run through Saturday, Nov. 29 and feature "deeper savings on categories like computing, gaming, home theater, wearables, and more," the company said.

Best Buy will then kick off its Cyber Monday savings event on Sunday, Nov. 30, and it will run for 48 hours through Dec. 1 (aka actual cyber Monday). Shoppers can save up to 50% on select tech during that sale.

Credit: Best Buy

Like last year, Best Buy will be supplementing its early Black Friday deals with several rounds of limited-time doorbusters that involve "some of the best deals on the hottest tech." They'll go live online, on the Best Buy app, and in stores every Friday throughout the season starting on Halloween. (Best Buy has an apt name for the first batch: DoorBOOsters.)

Paid members of the My Best Buy program will get up to $25 in bonus rewards on select doorbusters.

Per its Holiday Price Match Guarantee, Best Buy will price-match items it sells earlier in the season if they get cheaper down the road. It will also accept returns for most items purchased from Oct. 31 through Dec. 31 through Jan. 15, 2026. That's stretched to Jan. 31 for My Best Buy Plus and Total members.

Best Buy will extend its store hours for the holidays beginning Sunday, Nov. 2; check your local store's listing for more info. Best Buy stores will be closed on Thanksgiving, as they have been since 2020.

Competing retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have yet to confirm their own plans for Black Friday and the 2025 holiday season.

Hybrid cars are having a serious moment in the U.S. right now. With gas prices showing no signs of easing up, more drivers are realizing hybrids hit the sweet spot between efficiency and practicality.

The developers of Jellyfin announced the full release of Jellyfin server version 10.11.0 on Sunday, October 19. The major update brings several improvements for the self-hosted media streaming platform I'm excited to see, including a system backup and a startup interface for administrators.

DigiKam, KDE's popular open source photo and image manager, just hit version 8.8.0. It brings a fantastic new tool that lets you easily blur the background or subject in a photo. This update, code-named "Eclipse," also packs a ton of other improvements you'll want to check out.

Meta's most futuristic device is here, and critics have some thoughts about it.

The $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which have a built-in display for the first time in Meta's brief history of making techno-glasses, are now available. As such, plenty of people who review this stuff for a living have had some time with the glasses, giving us a bunch of well-informed reviews to look at.

What are critics saying about the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses? Keep reading to find out.

Meta Ray-Ban Display review roundup

The overall vibes seem positive, but that's not to say there aren't major criticisms to be found here.

Critics like the display, mostly

Obviously, the big reason to buy these glasses over the cheaper Gen 2 Meta Ray-Ban glasses is that the Display has, well, a display built into the right lens. You can use them as a viewfinder for taking photos, a language translation tool, a way to read and respond to text messages, or anything else that the Meta app store (which reviewers didn't really have access to) will enable over time.

The good news is that, per reviewers, this works pretty well. Victoria Song at The Verge spoke highly of the ability to offer live text captions for anything someone says to you. While it doesn't work as well in very noisy environments or when someone is talking to you from out of your line of sight, Song said it's still a strong selling point.

"Even so, it’s a scenario that feels magical when all the pieces fall into place," Song wrote. "When I show the feature to my in-laws, their jaws drop. Immediately, their minds go to relatives who are hard of hearing who might benefit."

Tech Fowler, a tech review channel on YouTube, also spoke highly of the display overall, especially the ability to use it as a camera viewfinder for taking photos. The other Meta glasses simply can't do that, so anyone who works in content creation should highly consider these ones instead, according to Tech Fowler. However, that review did mention one particular issue that could be an annoyance for some users.

"To be honest with you, because it's only in one eye, it does take a little bit of time to get used to," Tech Fowler's review said. "That's because I find that sometimes it feels a bit, I wouldn't say fuzzy, but I do get double vision a little bit. I'm only getting an image in one eye, my brain is kind of interlacing the images from both eyes together, and because of that, there is some shared vision in both eyes."

Battery life is a problem

Obviously, adding a display to any device is going to make battery life an even bigger priority. According to early reviews, battery life is not a strength of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses.

Engadget's Karissa Bell noted that Meta rates the glasses for about six hours of use on a charge, but that's apparently a generous rating, depending on how much you use the display.

"With very limited use, l was able to stretch the battery to about seven hours, but if you're doing display-intensive tasks like video calling or live translation, it will die much, much more quickly," Bell wrote.

Nathie, another YouTube tech reviews channel, offered some slightly more damning specificity. According to that channel, the device ran out of juice after about 3.5 hours of use. It really seems like this is going to vary from person to person depending on how much use they get out of the display, but given that the display is such a major selling point with this device, it's worth pointing out that heavily using the display evidently kills the battery.

The frames are heavy and don't offer enough privacy

One thing that pretty much every review I found pointed out is that the frames, which come in at 69g of weight, are simply too chunky to be used as all-day-every-day glasses. Just listen to what Song had to say in her review.

"At 69g, these are also too heavy for daily all-day wear. My normal glasses with very thick lenses are 31g. I was fine wearing these for a few hours, but discomfort crept in after that," Song wrote. "A few times, I felt the telltale signs of a headache at the back of my head and nose bridge. The bottom of the frames also left indentations on my cheeks. I’m prone to dry eye, so needing to wear contacts with these every day has been deeply uncomfortable. Artificial tears help, but the combination of the weight, eye strain, and dry eye has been tough to navigate."

Tech Fowler also pointed out that the Ray-Ban Display frames weigh about twice as much as his regular glasses. This seems to be a pretty ubiquitous complaint. Song also pointed out that the LED light which is meant to signal to other people that the glasses are recording footage is too subtle to be noticed in some situations. Privacy is a huge concern for a device like this, as it was for Google Glass a decade ago. It doesn't seem like Meta has solved that particular issue yet.

The neural band works well Do you want to wear a wristband all day? Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Meta's new glasses can be controlled via voice commands using Meta AI (the same as other Meta glasses), but since there's a display now, some finer control is warranted. That's where the wrist-worn neural band comes in. You slap it on your wrist, make sure it's charged up (apparently its battery can last a full day or so), and use hand gestures to navigate the UI. Critics were generally pretty kind to the neural band.

"In more than a week, it almost never missed a gesture, and it never falsely registered a gesture, despite my efforts to confuse it by fidgeting or rubbing my fingers together," Bell wrote at Engadget. "The gestures themselves are also pretty intuitive and don't take long to get used to: double tapping your thumb and middle fingers wakes up or puts the display to sleep, single taps of your index and middle fingers allow you to select an item or go back, and swiping your thumb along the side of your index finger lets you navigate around the display."

Critics also noted that there's a helpful little haptic vibration to let you know when it's registered a gesture, so there's no uncertainty there. Another big bonus is that you don't need to have your hands in view of the camera for these gestures to work, unlike some other XR devices.

These are for early adopters right now

In general, these reviewers came across as fairly positive on the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. They mostly work as intended, despite poor battery life and the (at the time of reviewing) total lack of an app store, which is not an issue most consumers will have to worry about. However, there's still the matter of value. At $800, these cost as much as a good smartphone, while not offering nearly as much day-to-day usefulness. As such, multiple critics agreed that these glasses are really for early adopters right now.

"Unless you are an early adopter, you need to have the newest tech, or you really love one of the features in particular, I don't think these are worth it," Tech Fowler's review said. "I think $800 is a huge amount of money for something that doesn't do that much."

Nathie, our other featured YouTube reviewer, echoed the sentiment.

"Having used these for a week, it became clear to me that there are still many challenges that have to be tackled to go truly mainstream," Nathie's review said.

It sounds like the biggest steps for Meta going forward are going to be be making sure there's a robust selection of apps, improving battery life, and finding some kind of way to alleviate the privacy issue.

It looks like the rumored Samsung Galaxy S26 Pro is no more. According to a report from SamMobile, Samsung has decided against introducing a "Pro" rebrand for its next smartphone lineup. Instead, the company will stick with the standard S26 naming convention.

SEE ALSO: Everything we know about the Samsung Galaxy S26 (so far)

It’s a fairly unexciting move, but not a surprising one. Per the report, the "Pro" model would have been a marketing play rather than a meaningful hardware upgrade — an attempt to mirror Apple’s naming strategy with its iPhone Pro series. In other words, Samsung’s base model will keep its name, and its specs will stay in familiar territory.

That might be a bit disappointing for fans hoping for something new, especially since other Galaxy news has been underwhelming. Just last week, reports surfaced that Samsung is axing its Edge line after only one release — the S25 Edge, which debuted just five months ago in May. It’ll reportedly be replaced by the S26 Plus, and rumors suggest there won’t be any groundbreaking design changes beyond a refreshed camera bump.

Meanwhile, the S26 Ultra also seems poised for only minor updates, primarily a larger camera module. So, unless Samsung has a surprise up its sleeve, expect the 2026 Galaxy lineup to look familiar: a base model, a Plus, and an Ultra — and not much else.