When you’re signing up for internet access, how confident are you about what your bill’s actually going to look like? ISPs and cellular carriers both have a reputation for positively opaque billing practices, piling on fees and passing taxes along to end users. As a consequence, responsible lawmakers pushed for legislation aimed at simplifying bills, and forcing ISPs to be upfront and clear about all their fees. But right now, current FCC leadership is doing its darndest to undo some of those changes and make things easier for the ISPs.

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Alexa Plus is Amazon’s new paid digital assistant. Available for $20 per month (or included for free, if you’re a Prime subscriber), Alexa Plus injects extra AI functionality into your Amazon devices, like the ability to engage in more natural conversation-style interactions with Alexa through an Echo device. Turns out, it can also make some unhelpful changes to your Echo Show’s home screen.

In a post on the Amazon Echo subreddit, user Setati complains that their Echo Show 5 has recently become less fit for one of their primary use cases: telling the time. Setati writes that “about the same time as Alexa+,” their Show 5 started showing content that it didn’t before, replacing the full-screen clock with “news briefs and things it thinks I want to see.”

Notifications are such a double-edged sword. While tactfully deployed notifications are wonderful, keeping us informed about the things we care about most, it is far too easy to get carried away there, and once we ruin that signal-to-noise ratio with too many unwanted notifications, they all start becoming a lot less useful. Thankfully, developers are aware of the risks here, and have been working to develop systems designed to help us regain control and keep our notifications as beneficial as possible.

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Of all Google’s new hardware this season, could the breakout star be a lowly smartwatch? We maybe weren’t expecting a lot from the Pixel Watch 4 early on, when it sounded like it might be just a minor refresh of past generations. But as we started hearing more about the wearable we found a lot to start getting excited about, and ultimately came to appreciate it as the best-in-class model it really is.

One of the big improvements Google’s been using to promote the Watch 4 is its reparability — a consideration that’s all too often overlooked for wearables. But did the company actually make real progress there, or have those claims been a little oversold? According to the latest iFixit teardown, the Pixel Watch 4 very much delivers when it comes to being able to service its hardware.

Using eSIM to move your phone number between two Android phones or two iPhones has been a pretty simple procedure for some time now, but moving from iOS to Android or vice versa is a little more involved. Apple and Google have worked together to streamline the process in iOS 26 and Android 16, but getting your phone number to jump from an iPhone to a Samsung device using eSIM still requires contacting your carrier. It seems like that could change soon, though.

We’ve found evidence that Samsung’s upcoming One UI 8.5 update will include the option to port an eSIM phone number from an iPhone to a Samsung one without having to get your carrier involved. Given Samsung is the leading Android manufacturer, this change could end up benefitting a lot of Android converts.