We’ve been hearing warnings for months about incoming price hikes for practically every consumer electronic on the market due, in large part, to an ongoing RAM shortage. Today, we’re getting our first hints on what’s to come from Samsung throughout 2026.
As spotted by SammyGuru, the Galaxy A07 5G is heading to India after a recent launch in Thailand, and retailer leaks point to a pretty massive generational shift on pricing. Samsung apparently plans to charge customers in India ₹15,999 (~$175) for the base 4GB model, while the upgraded 6GB variant of the A07 5G will run for ₹17,999 (~$200). Both models, regardless of their RAM allotment, include 128GB of storage. Those prices might look fairly standard for Samsung’s low-end Galaxy A-series, but compared to the A07 5G’s direct predecessor, it’s actually a surprisingly large price hike — and without much to show for it.
In comparison, last year’s Galaxy A06 5G sold in similar configurations (one with 4GB of memory, one with 6GB, both with 128GB of storage) while priced significantly cheaper: ₹11,499 and ₹12,999, respectively, or about $125 and $140. That’s a significant price increase for a pair of devices that, as is Samsung’s MO, are practically interchangeable.
While it’s not always possible to notice big changes in a specs sheet, I’m certainly struggling to see where else the price hike could’ve originated from outside of our current RAM shortage. The Galaxy A06 5G and A07 5G have identical chipsets, camera specs, IP ratings, and more. Outside of a swap to a 120Hz 720p panel (improved from 90Hz on last year’s model) and a larger 6,000mAh battery that accounts for the thicker, heavier chassis, these two devices appear effectively unchanged.
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The Galaxy A07 5G won’t find its way stateside, so it’s a little difficult to read exactly what this could mean for both this year’s more premium A-series entries and, of course, the upcoming Galaxy S26 lineup. Analysts had predicted that low-end devices would be hit the most by rising memory costs — there’s just less headroom to find ways to adjust pricing. Either way, this is your first sign that upgrading to a new phone in 2026 won’t be as easy as it’s been in previous years, so you might want to start making plans before it’s too late.
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If Mexico is on your 2026 travel itinerary, your “booked and busy” plans could hit a federal wall before you even leave the pier.
A massive crackdown on e-cigarettes is turning routine port stops into legal nightmares for unsuspecting cruisers.
According to Come Cruise With Me, cruisers heading to the popular destinations of Cozumel, Costa Maya and Cabo San Lucas are forbidden from bringing vape pens to the port.
Cruise News Today reports Mexico’s new law prohibits the import, sale and marketing of vapes and e-cigarettes.
The law went into effect Jan. 17.
The illegal importation trap
The danger lies in the definition of “importation.”
Several publications, including Mexico News Daily, confirm that even if a device is for personal use, bringing a vape ashore at popular ports is now legally classified as smuggling a prohibited item under a constitutional reform of Mexico’s General Health Law.
For cruisers, this means you should leave your vape on board.
If you bring a vape ashore during a port stop, you risk being charged with illegal importation — even if it’s for personal use.
Penalties include confiscation, fines up to $12,500 or even jail time.
According to reports from Cruise News Today, customs officials are utilizing high-resolution X-ray scanners to detect lithium batteries and pods.
As demand grows for privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows.
The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year.
Across regulated sectors, enterprises have moved quickly to test generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow adoption for sensitive workflows — especially in legal, where contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing, and deal terms. Industry research has consistently flagged data security and privacy as key barriers to wider GenAI deployment in professional services, pushing vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep core contract intelligence on the user’s device rather than routing it through the cloud.
At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated its VerifAI workflow running end-to-end on Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, executing contract review and edits offline while keeping the document on the local machine. SpotDraft said internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing, and collaboration features, but contract review, risk scoring, and redlining can run fully offline without sending documents to the cloud.
SpotDraft sees legal as an early proving ground for on-device enterprise AI, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security, and compliance constraints.
“The future of how enterprise AI is going to be — right now, there’s got to be AI that is close to the document, which is privacy critical, latency sensitive, [and] legally sensitive, and those are the things that will move on device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.
SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capability extends beyond simply generating summaries, with the tool designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly inside Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already work. “VerifAI will compare a contract against your guidelines, your playbooks, your prior policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured above, right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.
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SpotDraft’s VerifAI works in Microsoft WordImage Credits:SpotDraft
Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI is emerging most clearly in tightly regulated sectors, including defense and pharma, where internal security reviews and data residency requirements can slow or block the use of cloud-based AI tools for sensitive documents.
On-device models have rapidly closed the gap with cloud-based systems, both in output quality and response times, Bhagat said. “Now we’ve come to a place where, in terms of eval, we are seeing as little as 5% difference between the frontier models, and some of these fine-tuned on device models,” he said, adding that speeds on newer chips are now “one-third of what we get in the cloud.”
Since its launch in 2017, SpotDraft said it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 in February last year, and counts Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin, and Whatfix among its users. The company said adoption is rising on its contract lifecycle management platform, with customers now processing over 1 million contracts annually, contract volumes growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users. It also expects 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, after growing 169% in 2024 and posting a similar growth rate in 2025, though it did not share specific revenue figures.
SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its enterprise presence across the Americas, the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond financing into joint development and go-to-market efforts for on-device deployments. The startup’s on-device workflow is currently available to a limited set of customers, and the founders expect it to expand more broadly as compatible AI PC hardware becomes more widely available.
“SpotDraft’s ability to deploy their proprietary models securely on-device using Snapdragon platforms represents a meaningful advancement for a privacy-critical industry,” said Quinn Li, senior vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, and global head of Qualcomm Ventures.
Bengaluru- and New York-based SpotDraft said it has a team of 300-plus employees, including 15–20 in the U.S., where COO Akshay Verma is based, and four to five in the UK, with the rest of the workforce in Bengaluru.
To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including the latest Qualcomm Ventures investment. Its earlier investors include Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures, and Prosus Ventures.
If your TikTok feed has felt a little off lately, it’s not just you. TikTok says is still working to fix its service in the US following a power outage at one of its data centers that’s caused “multiple bugs” in the app. TikTok users have reported problems logging in and uploading videos, as well as strange behavior from the “for you” algorithm. Creators have also noticed that new uploads are seemingly getting o views or likes and that in-app earnings have disappeared.
“Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” the company wrote in a statement Monday. “We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
In a subsequent update several hours later, the company said that the power outage had caused a “cascading systems failure” that is still affecting the app and leading to “multiple bugs,” including those affecting view counts and load times. “Creators may temporarily see ‘0’ views or likes on videos, and your earnings may look like they’re missing,” the company wrote in an update on X. “This is a display error caused by server timeouts; your actual data and engagement are safe.”
The statement didn’t directly address reported issues with the app’s recommendation algorithm. Since Sunday, users have reported seeing a wave of generic videos flood their feeds, which are typically hyper-personalized. Other users have reported seeing the same few videos repeated over and over again.
The issues come just days after TikTok finalized a deal to spin off its US business into a separate entity largely controlled by US investors. That timing hasn’t gone unnoticed by users, many of whom are already suspicious of the company pushing a terms of service and privacy policy in the hours after the deal was finalized. The problems affecting the app’s recommendation algorithm have also raised questions about TikTok USDS Joint Venture’s plans to “retrain” TikTok’s central feature.
Update, January 26, 2026, 4:18PM PT: This post has been updated to include additional information from TikTok about the outage and bugs affecting users.
A number of Google Pixel owners have reported over the past few days that, following the latest update, their devices are running into issues with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
The January 2026 update for Google Pixel devices was released last week and, at first, everything appeared to be business as usual. But, as the update has rolled out more widely, a couple of strange issues have popped up. For many Pixel owners, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are acting up across various different devices.
Trending threadson Google’sforums as well as several Reddit threads document issues with the January update, with some users noticing that Wi-Fi is suddenly not working on their Pixel and unable to even search for networks, while other users report Bluetooth refuses to turn on. There are also some isolated reports of the camera not working properly.
The issue doesn’t seem to be affecting everyone, but it’s far from a limited issue as we’re seeing a considerable number of user reports over the past few days from devices including Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro XL, and others.
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There seems to be no obvious fix at the moment, and Google has yet to publicly acknowledge the problem outside of telling users to contact support for assistance. Users report that troubleshooting steps such as a reboot, network reset, and booting into safe mode do not appear to fix the problem. One user claims that the issue even persisted after a factory reset, but that re-installing the latest public build solved the issue on their device. Notably, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth issues do appear to have been happening in isolated incidents in the previous Pixel update, but it seems more widespread in this latest software build.
Are you having trouble with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on a Pixel device? Let us know what issues you’re facing and what software build you’re using in the comments below or on the new 9to5Google forums.
The estimated Powerball jackpot is $30 million. The lump sum payment before taxes would be about $13.6 million.
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Powerball is held in 45 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The Double Play add-on feature is available for purchase in 13 lottery jurisdictions, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.
A $2 ticket gives you a one in 292.2 million chance at joining the hall of Powerball jackpot champions.
The drawings are held at 10:59 p.m. Eastern, Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The deadline to purchase tickets is 9:45 p.m.
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To understand the stance of an unwavering Trump loyalist after United States Custom and Enforcement shocked the nation this weekend by shooting another American citizen in Minneapolis, look no further than Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois.
Rabois’ public support for ICE’s actions in the killing of Alex Pretti, made via posts on X, was so vehement that Khosla Ventures partner Ethan Choi and firm founder Vinod Khosla both publicly disavowed it.
Rabois argued that Pretti was at fault, writing that the protester was committing a “felony.” One of Rabois’ posts said, “[N]o law enforcement has shot an innocent person. [I[llegals are committing violent crimes every day.” Another said: “[H]e unequivocally attempted to draw his weapon. [F]uck you.” In another post that discussed citizens’ ability to exercise their First, Second and Fourth Amendment rights, the VC responded weighed in to write: “[Y]es but interfering w a law enforcement operation is not protected by any of those amendments.”
Among other comments, Rabois went on to say he doesn’t believe that the Minneapolis police could be credible sources in an investigation. “[I] don’t think you should ask any law enforcement in MN. But i am very open to reading views from any other urban jurisdiction.” He instead blamed the city’s police for the situation. “Because the MN police’s refusal to cooperate is exactly what is leading to these treacherous conditions (for everyone).”
And so on.
X reacted as you might expect. Other Trump supporters cheered Rabois on, while those who condemn ICE’s actions argued with and condemned the investor.
The situation spiraled so much that when one person suggested that founders remove Khosla from their cap tables altogether, Khosla partner Choi piped up to distance himself.
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Choi posted: “I want to make it clear that Keith doesn’t represent everyone’s views here at @khoslaventures, at least not mine. What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong. Don’t know how you could really see it differently. Sad to see a person’s life taken unnecessarily.”
Then the founder of the firm, Khosla himself, stood by Choi. “I agree with @EthanChoi7 . Macho ICE vigilantes running [amok] empowered by a conscious-less administration,” he said in his post on X.
I agree with @EthanChoi7 . Macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration. The video was sickening to watch and the storytelling without facts or with invented fictitious facts by authorities almost unimaginable in a civilized society. ICE… https://t.co/ASvjZQB0Gg
Under normal circumstances, opposing political points of view can be a strength for a VC firm. Whatever anyone thinks of Rabois’ politics, he’s been a very successful investor backing such companies as DoorDash, Affirm, Faire, and Stripe, as well as co-founding Opendoor, among other startups.
But sometimes they are internally disruptive.
Sequoia was embroiled in a controversy over partner Shaun Maguire’s comments attacking New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Maguire (whose comments over the weekend on ICE align with Rabois’) remains as an investor at Sequoia. But its leader at the time of the Mamdani controversy, Roelof Botha, stepped down as senior steward in November. Botha was replaced by Alfred Lin and Pat Grady (neither of whom weighed in over the weekend).
In this case, the rift between Khosla partners spilled out publicly. But note that Khosla did not directly chastise Rabois. (The company did not respond to our request for comment.)
When Khosla Ventures re-hired Rabois in 2024, the firm knew it was bringing in an outspoken, self-proclaimed “contrarian” into its ranks, of the ilk that liked to blame the “woke” and praise President Trump. For Rabois’ part, he knew he would be working for a vocal Trump critic (Vinod Khosla has made his point of view on Trump very clear for years).
Will there be continued fallout? Perhaps — but only if founders really do start dumping Khosla Ventures from their cap tables.
It looks like Ubisoft is planning even more layoffs to accompany last week’s studio closures and game cancellations, . The company is planning a massive reduction of the workforce in its Paris headquarters. It has proposed the loss of up to 200 jobs, which is nearly 20 percent of the current staff.
This will be organized under France’s , in which staff can agree to form a collective, voluntary mutual termination agreement. It’s not a done deal just yet, with a company spokesperson saying “at this stage, this remains a proposal and no decision will be final until a collective agreement is reached.”
The RCC process is voluntary, which is good for Ubisoft Paris employees, but the company hasn’t made any statement regarding what it would do if it doesn’t get 200 willing participants. The company recently for employees to return to the office for five days each week, which could entice staffers with one foot out the door.
This is just the latest cost-cutting measure by Ubisoft, as the company has been . It shut down its Halifax studio employees entered into a unionization agreement. Last week, it shuttered its Stockholm studio and announced at several other developers under its umbrella.
It also announced the cancellation of six games, including the long-awaited Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake. It didn’t reveal the other five games that were scrapped. Ubisoft did announce, however, that seven additional games were being delayed. Inexplicably, Beyond Good and Evil 2, so we have that to (one day) look forward to.
Ubisoft’s stock has absolutely plunged in the past several years. The company was riding high at $20 per share in 2021, but now the stock .
At launch last July and the subsequent Veo 3 update, Google let you choose from two Photo to video options after selecting an image: Subtle movement or I’m feeling lucky.
Like in the Gemini app, Google Photos now lets you use custom prompts to “describe the movement, style, or effect you want.”
The interface will also offer prompt suggestions, with the ability to edit and refine after generation.
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Meanwhile, generated videos “may now include audio by default.” This was a key part of Veo 3 when it was announced last year.
This is rolling out now, but we’re not seeing it live on devices we checked this morning. Photo to video is available in the Create tab on Android and iOS alongside: Create with AI, Remix, Collage, Highlight video, Cinematic photo, Animation, and Me Meme.
All users get a number of video generations per day, with increased limits for AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.
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