2025-12-02 22:47:47
Apple today released its 2025 Apple Music year-end charts, highlighting new global listening trends, expanded analytics, and several unexpected chart-topping performances across streaming, radio, lyrics, and Shazam activity.
Apple said the annual charts reflect a broader set of data collected throughout 2025 from global Apple Music streams, Shazam searches, time-synced lyric engagement, radio, Apple Music Sing usage, and more.
2025-12-02 22:15:13
The full Replay 2025 experience is now available in the Apple Music app, allowing you to reflect on your listening habits over the past year.
There are two main components to the Replay 2025 experience. First, there is a full year-end playlist containing the Apple Music songs that you listened to the most over the past year, as well as a Highlight Reel with images and a video that are designed to be shared on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
You can view your total minutes spent listening to Apple Music songs, the total number of artists you listened to, your favorite genres, and more for 2025.
Apple Music already offers monthly Replay playlists throughout the year, but this full year-end experience provides a lot more information. This year, Apple says it has highlighted even more listening habits related to the following:
2025-12-02 20:09:14
Opera has announced an expansion of its partnership with Google to integrate the latest Gemini AI models across much of its browser lineup.
The expansion means the Gemini-powered side panel previously exclusive to Opera Neon is now freely available in the company's free-to-download Opera One and Opera GX browsers.
By interacting with the side panel's AI chatbot, users can get contextually relevant answers based on the current webpage and group of webpages, as well as videos. Opera says responses can include easy research, content summaries, and comparisons between different tabs.
In addition, Opera AI supports voice input and output, along with file analysis for multiple file types, including images and video.
The company says the engine has been rebuilt for speed, with 20% faster responses thanks to the use of a new architecture that adopts an agentic-approach from Opera Neon.
Opera also emphasizes that its privacy features ensure the user has full control over what context is shared with Opera AI and what is kept outside its awareness.
"AI is reshaping how people interact with the web, and the browser is the natural entry point for those experiences,” said Opera's EVP Commercial, Per Wetterdal. "Through our partnership with Google, we are able to offer users the experiences they really want through native search and AI features, for free, directly in their Opera One and Opera GX browsers while our most advanced users of the agentic Opera Neon browser are already getting access to Gemini 3 Pro."Many users have been critical of AI's creep into browsers, but Opera argues that browsing is the next AI frontier. "Unlike a standalone chat interface, the browser has access to real-time context such as a user's open tabs, page content, and browsing flows," says the company's press release. "This enables more relevant and efficient assistance, supporting task completion directly within the browsing experience."
2025-12-02 17:57:21
Apple has announced that Tap to Pay on iPhone is now available in Singapore, providing a way for independent sellers, small businesses, and larger merchants in the country to use an iPhone as a contactless payment terminal.
Tap to Pay first arrived in February 2022 in the US, and allows iPhones to accept payments via Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets. All transactions are encrypted, and Apple has no information about what is purchased or the person who made the purchase.
No additional hardware or credit card machine is required to use Tap to Pay on iPhone. The feature uses NFC technology to securely authenticate the contactless payments, plus the feature also supports PIN entry, which includes accessibility options.
Tap to Pay will initially support Adyen, Fiuu, HitPay, Revolut, Stripe, and Zoho in Singapore. Apple says Grab will offer Tap to Pay on iPhone beginning early next year.
Tap to Pay on iPhone requires iPhone XS or newer models, and works for customers as any normal Apple Pay transaction would. Sellers just need to open up the app, register the sale, and present their iPhone to the buyer, who can then use an appropriate contactless payment method.
Tap to Pay on iPhone is now available in 50 countries and regions around the world. Apple's website maintains a list of countries where it is available.
2025-12-02 17:48:20
Apple will resist a new Indian government directive that would require all iPhones sold in the country to ship with a preinstalled state-run security app, reports Reuters.
This week, India's Department of Telecommunications ordered all smartphone makers to preload Sanchar Saathi, a non-removable government app designed to help users block stolen devices, report fraudulent calls, and verify second-hand phones.
The app includes detailed tracking functionality controlled by the government, potentially opening a pathway for broad data access and potential surveillance, so there are privacy and security implications for iPhone users.
According to The Business Standard, citing industry sources familiar with the matter, Apple has informed officials it does not plan to comply with the requirement. The company will reportedly tell the government it does not follow such mandates anywhere in the world as they raise a host of privacy and security issues for the company's iOS ecosystem.
Apple's resistance to the directive will put added pressure on New Delhi, with political opposition parties already accusing the government of overreach.
In response to the criticism, India's telecom minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia on Tuesday said the app was "completely optional," adding that users can choose to activate it and can "easily delete it from their phone at any time." Scindia rejected allegations of surveillance, stating the app contains no provisions for snooping or call monitoring.
There are more than 700 million smartphone users in India, so any final decision will have major implications for how much control the government can exert over device software and how far tech companies like Apple can go in enforcing their own privacy standards.
2025-12-02 09:02:17
Samsung today introduced the Galaxy Z TriFold, its first smartphone that has three total screens and two folds instead of one. The Galaxy Z TriFold features a 10-inch display when opened, and a 6.5-inch cover screen when closed, with "minimized creasing."
The device has an inward-folding design that's meant to protect the main display, and Samsung says that the "easy opening and closing" folding mechanism has been engineered with an alarm that alerts the user if it's folded incorrectly. Samsung is using a titanium Armor FlexHinge with two differently sized hinges that work together with a dual-rail structure. Samsung claims that the new design offers a smoother, more stable fold despite the varying weight across each display, plus greater durability thanks to the inclusion of a "thin piece of metal" that protects the folding mechanism.
A third of the display is 3.9mm thick when the smartphone is unfolded, though it is thicker in the area with the triple-lens camera. The main center screen is a bit thicker at 4.2mm, and the screen with the side button is 4mm. There is a reinforced overcoat over a shock absorbing display layer for better resistance, and the aluminum frame keeps the screens from making contact with one another.
There's a 5,600 mAh three-cell battery system with one battery behind each display panel. Samsung says it is the largest battery that it has used in a smartphone to date. There are three cameras at the rear of the device, including a 200-megapixel wide angle camera, a 12-megapixel ultra wide camera, and a 10-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom. There are two 10-megapixel selfie cameras on the cover screen and the main screen.
Galaxy Z TriFold users can use three different portrait-sized apps side-by-side, resize apps in a multi-window view, watch shows in full screen, or hold the device vertically for reading. Samsung added standalone Samsung DeX, so the Galaxy Z TriFold supports up to four workspaces with five apps running simultaneously. Samsung apps have been optimized for the larger screen, as has Google's Gemini Live.
The Galaxy Z TriFold is launching in Korea on December 12, and it will expand to other markets like China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the UAE later. It will launch in the United States in the first quarter of 2026, and pricing is unknown.
