“We know that HiFi quality audio is important to you. We feel the same, and we’re excited to deliver a Spotify HiFi experience to Premium users in the future. But we don’t have timing details to share yet,” the moderator said. “We will of course update you here when we can.” Spotify first announced its plans to introduce a HiFi streaming tier back in February 2021. The company back then said that the rollout will begin in select markets “later this year”....

In the past few weeks, Instagram has been announcing a bunch of new features for its users. Today, they’ve unveiled yet another tool on Instagram Stories to provide Instagrammers an even more interactive experience. The emoji slider is a variation of the polling sticker for Stories that uses a sliding scale featuring an animated emoji. Instead of giving users separate options, the slider lets how much they love or hate something by simply dragging the emoji up or down the scale....

ZAGG claims the screen protector has an “anti-microbial treatment,” which protects the screen protector from the “growth of odor-causing bacteria.” As for the Pixel 6a protective cover, it can reportedly sustain drops of up to 13 ft (4m). These accessories are now official and ZAGG’s website says they’ll be coming soon. As for pricing, the Crystal Palace case retails for $39.99 and the Glass Elite screen protector retails for $49.99....

I suppose it shouldn’t come as much surprise that drones have become the hot gift this year. There’s more drones on the market now than ever before. They range in price from $10 to thousands, and anybody can get hold of one. But, what surprises me is the number of them that seem to crash within 24 hours of emerging from their box. It’s almost like the manufacturers don’t even pop any suggestions in the box at all....

When the clouds evaporate and your DVD, Blu-Ray and hard drive backups are no longer readable, what are you going to do about accessing your data? Valuable personal images might be gone forever (of course, that’s also a good argument for printing your photos), or perhaps you shoot for a living, and keep a permanent archive of all your work. It’s a lot of hard work to maintain reliable digital backups and to keep shifting all your data from one storage medium to the next generation every few years – especially when some hard drives might not be as reliable as we were led to believe, and cloud services have the potential to accidentally delete data at will....