Headphones, earbuds, or whatever you want to call them, primarily do one job: play music. Over time, they’ve evolved to take calls and block out external noise. Usually, the best headphones are those that handle all three tasks better than the rest. But Anker wants to add a fourth variable into the equation: AI note-taking and assistance.
Several buds from the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Google have incorporated some form of AI functionality, so what’s different here? According to Anker, the new ‘Thus’ AI chip platform in its Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro earbuds range reworks how on-device processing has worked so far (or should that be ‘thus far’?).
Anker claims that Thus combines the memory and processor, which are traditionally separated on the chipsets housed within most headphones. The theory is that bringing compute and memory together reduces power consumption and enables faster and more complex AI processing.
“Every AI chip built until now stores the model on one side and does the computation on the other,” said Steven Yang, Anker CEO. “To think, the device has to carry all those parameters across, many times per second, every single inference. Thus puts the computation where the model already lives.”
Without the need to transfer data between memory and the processor, earbuds with the Thus platform can reportedly use larger AI models locally. Anker’s $279.99 Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro and $359.99 Pro Max earbuds are the brand’s first to use the new processing technology.
What can the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro buds do?
Included within Anker’s announcement are lots of proprietary names for AI technologies. Put simply, the new earbuds are said to make calls sound clearer through better voice isolation, block out more noise via ANC, personalise EQ settings for each listener, and handle more AI-based tasks on-device.
That sounds like a lot, and technology companies are known for making big claims. To go over some of the basic specs, the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro range supports connecting up to three devices simultaneously via Bluetooth 6.1. Both models work with Apple Find My and Google Fast Pair technologies, and are designed to meet IP55 dust and water resistance.
Anker claims that its in-ear headphones last up to 6.5 hours with ANC on. Combined with the included charging cases, the total estimated battery life reaches up to 28 hours.
Charging cases with a twist
It’s these charging cases that are the most interesting comparison point. With the Liberty 5 Pro comes a case with a small 0.96-inch touch-enabled display, which shows quick readouts of battery life and playback controls, so you can leave your phone in your pocket.
Contrast that with the 1.78-inch touchscreen on the Liberty 5 Pro Max, which also doubles as a recorder with AI note-taking functionality. It’s like an evolved version of the Nothing Ear (3) case, which also functions as a microphone, albeit without the local recording capacity.
Anker says you can record meetings just by using the charging case without being connected to a phone. Afterwards, the recording syncs to the Soundcore app, transcribing the recording and summarising any main points or actions.
The non-‘Max’ model has a smaller screen without on-board recording. Image: Anker.
Interestingly, the Soundcore website mentions a limitation on how long you can record AI notes for free. According to one disclaimer, the free AI note-taking feature includes 120 minutes per month for 24 months. It’s not clear how much additional time costs.
Based on this disclaimer, it seemingly indicates that Anker’s new AI processing technology is mainly for noise cancellation and enhancement, and not for transcribing audio locally. Similarly, Nothing’s recently launched Essential Voice dictation tool also relies on cloud processing.
It’s an interesting twist on a well-established formula adopted by many headphone makers. Coming in cheaper than a pair of AirPods Pro 3, and with lofty claims about audio and call quality, these Soundcore buds might be a compelling alternative. Australians can try them out when the latest Liberty Pro buds arrive in the first week of June.
Samsung is going even bigger with its latest appliance in Australia, fitting even more clothes into its washer and dryer combo.
Dubbed the 2026 Bespoke AI Laundry Combo, Samsung’s appliance fits up to 19.5kg in a single washing load, and as much as 10kg when used as a heat-pump dryer. Compared to the previous model, it fits an extra kilogram of washing. That might be excessive for those living the bachelor lifestyle, but families would no doubt take full advantage.
Designed as an all-in-one appliance that washes and dries laundry without needing two separate machines, the new combo costs $4,999 in Australia, putting it squarely in the premium category. Like many high-end laundry appliances, this one automates much of the washing process, like detergent dosing and adjusting cycles based on individual loads.
On its website, Samsung brandishes a 10-star energy efficiency rating, which applies specifically to the appliance’s drying mode. When washing clothes, it has a 4.5-star energy rating and a four-star water efficiency rating.
Much of the efficiency stems from Samsung’s “AI Energy Mode”, which is activated via the SmartThings smart home platform. When enabled, the 2026 Bespoke AI Laundry Combo uses up to 20 per cent less power when washing, and 10 per cent less when drying. SmartThings can also show real-time energy consumption data, helping you keep an eye on your power bill.
If you regularly forget to do your washing until the last minute, Samsung’s “Super Speed” cycle might appeal. According to the brand, it gets through a small load of laundry in 68 minutes, washing and drying included.
Oh, and you can also talk to the washing machine via Bixby. Advertised as understanding conversational language, the appliance can start cycles just from your voice. What a time to be alive.
The first thing I did after getting home from playing three hours of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced was boot up the original. I can barely remember playing Black Flag, long considered the pinnacle of the Assassin’s Creed series, in 2013. Remarkably, Ubisoft Singapore’s remake looks right at home as a 2026 game, while the soul of the game remains largely intact.
If anything, Black Flag’s pirate-themed adventure feels as relevant, if not more, than it did over a decade ago. Edward Kenway’s quest to subvert the class system of the 1700s, where he’d only earn a pittance for his hard labour in comparison to his superiors’ riches, appeals as a fantasy today, where gross wealth inequality continues to divide society.
Doing so sees the roguishly charming Kenway turn to piracy. Of the nautical kind, not the illegally downloading movies variety. He craves a better world for himself and his fellow man, and he believes it to be possible. It’s hard not to cheer for the fellow with such ideals.
At the time, the original Black Flag was considered a stunner. By today’s standards, its age is apparent, but it is by no means an ugly game. Taking advantage of the latest technology, Black Flag Resynced is drowning in beauty. Its characters show more emotional range, there’s more detail in every pixel, and the picturesque aquamarine waters of the Caribbean look postcard-ready.
What I played across an extensive preview spanned three distinct sections: the opening sequence, an hour of sailing the high seas, and a handful of missions set roughly halfway through the game. After three hours, it was apparent that this is a familiar remake, but one that is spectacularly confident in its vision.
Back to the Assassin’s Creed of yore
In recent years, Assassin’s Creed games have grown increasingly expansive. Large open-world locations and RPG systems became central to the series, rather than a singular focus on stealth and one-hit takedowns.
As a result, later entries rewarded time spent in-game over a test of skill. I distinctly remember my final hours in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a game I otherwise largely enjoyed (Kassandra could kick me off a cliff and I would thank her), as a grind-filled crawl.
As I neared the story’s conclusion, I encountered a slightly higher-levelled enemy. They weren’t a boss or anyone of note, just a run-of-the-mill foot soldier. And yet, with each hack and slash, their health bar barely diminished, while any return serve stole a chunk of my vitality.
It felt frustrating and wrong on multiple fronts. After dozens of hours spent with a Greek goddess of a character, growing in strength and accumulating more advanced weaponry, why was she barely able to scratch a relative grunt? Arbitrarily gating progress behind an ill-fitting RPG system is one of my greatest annoyances in modern games. Worst of all, the unnecessarily elongated fight was painfully boring.
Image: Ubisoft.
Ubisoft course-corrected to an extent with Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Levelling systems remained, but the dual protagonists in Naoe and Yasuke possessed a greater capacity to take down enemies swiftly, fulfilling the power fantasy and social contract established by the best Assassin’s Creed games.
It’s this era that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced seeks to return to. Developers from Ubisoft Singapore have gone to great lengths to distance the gameplay from the RPG stylings of recent games. Skill, not DPS (damage-per-second), is Resynced’s mantra. It attempts to smooth over the rough, splintered edges of the 13-year-old original, while attempting to modernise what hasn’t aged as well.
Swashbuckling, sword-swinging action
Going back to the original Black Flag’s combat was a shock to the system. By current-day standards, it’s imprecise and unwieldy, difficult to track enemies during a skirmish.
Resynced leans on the combat system of recent Assassin’s Creed games, mapping attacks to a controller’s shoulder buttons, while making encounters easier to parse with a robust targeting system. Going toe-to-toe with an enemy relies heavily on timing, trading blows until one combatant pierces the other’s defences.
At times, combat swings heavily towards waiting for an enemy to make a mistake. As a scrappy pirate, wouldn’t fighting dirty and creating your own openings be more thematically appropriate? Instead, some land-based fights reached a stalemate, where I awkwardly waited for a foe to make an errant thrust I could parry.
Image: Ubisoft.
Successfully parrying an attack does create further openings, however. In most cases, perfectly timing a parry lets you brutally take down an enemy in one hit, skewering them like a kebab. One kill leads to another, with Kenway able to swiftly chain multiple takedowns in quick succession, making you feel powerful.
Absent an RPG system may be, but there’s still merit in buying and upgrading new equipment. Better swords let you chain together more takedowns after parrying, so you can carve through more enemies in less time. It’s a much better system than an arbitrary stat upgrade — don’t expect to see a marginally better blade that includes a 2.38 per cent chance of giving your opponent explosive diarrhoea.
Rather than going overboard with upgrades of diminishing returns, Black Flag Resynced gives you logically better equipment to strive for. Buying a new sword doesn’t make Kenway magically more powerful. Instead, it just lets him fight more efficiently and is better able to take advantage of his latent skills.
I’m on a boat
Like the original, much of your time in Black Flag Resynced is spent on open water, commandeering a ship loaded with cannons, manned by a crew with a penchant for shanties.
There’s a compelling rhythm to Black Flag’s naval warfare. Each combatant fires a barrage of projectiles, with a brief respite while each ship’s crew prepares for the next volley. Positioning is arguably the most important factor; it’s a tight balance between sailing close enough to reach an opponent, while leaving enough distance so you’re not a sitting duck after firing your cannons.
In a way, the ship battles are like a choreographed dance. Timing is essential, as is thinking several steps ahead so you’re not caught behind everyone else. Unlike dancing, making too many mistakes will see you blown up and killed (unless there’s an extreme form of dancing I’m unaware of).
Image: Ubisoft.
While at the mercy of the seas, the punchy sound design is as important as what you can see. It’s a distinctly Newtonian soundscape in that every action is met with a corresponding reaction. Cannon fire punctuates otherwise calm seas, as projectiles whoosh perilously past your vessel, leaving you to pray that the next salvo won’t land. Ships explode into splinters of wood as if fracturing your very sternum, joined by the panicked shrieks of crew members.
If it weren’t for the fact that you’re solely responsible for the life and death of Kenway and his followers, it’d be a spectacular audio experience to sit back and unpack in granular detail.
Being on top of all this takes a while to grasp. Ships of such grand scale don’t turn quickly, ratcheting up the tension as gunpowder explodes from all directions. I bit off more than I could chew multiple times, but immediately jumped back in, eager for more.
It’s an assassin’s life for me
During one of the missions I played, Kenway remarked to a fellow pirate that it felt like he was stuck running errands rather than living the life he had envisioned. His comment came toward the end of a three-hour session, so perhaps it was fatigue setting in, but it felt apt considering a sense of familiarity had begun to set in.
For nearly two decades, Assassin’s Creed has revolved around a similar gameplay loop. Stalk a target through conveniently placed shrubbery, stab some dudes, and check off countless map markers — there have been some subtle variations along the way, but the nucleus remains the same.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag was one of the best examples of this structure over 10 years ago, and Resynced reinforces how much Ubisoft got it right the first time (and how little open-world games have tangibly changed since then). In a bizarre Ship of Theseus way, Resynced looks new, but still authentically feels like a game from the mid-2010s, sans the clunky controls.
That familiarity could yet be its greatest strength as Ubisoft bets big on nostalgia. We’ll soon see just how strong the pull of the sea is when Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced launches on 9 July for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Chris Button attended a preview event in Singapore as a guest of Ubisoft.
We’re big fans of the Logitech MX Master 4; it’s a comfortable productivity mouse with a bunch of clever features. One of the biggest changes from its predecessor was the addition of haptic feedback, confirming every click and action you take. In a recent update, the Logitech MX Master 4 will pair even more nicely with Windows 11 PCs, providing haptic feedback at an operating system level.
It means that rearranging windows or aligning objects in Microsoft programs, like PowerPoint, will produce a subtle vibration through the mouse, confirming the action. It’s similar to the haptic feedback you get from phones and trackpads, aimed at making everything you do feel satisfying and tactile.
The integration between Logitech’s mouse and Windows 11 is live now via a firmware update using Logi Options+. MX Master 4 mice shipped from spring onwards will already have the required firmware out of the box.
According to Logitech, support for additional haptic feedback across more Windows and third-party apps will arrive “in the coming months”. I could see haptic feedback helping in a lot of creative apps, like when using video editing software to line up clips precisely. Plus, the little hit of dopamine that comes from a little vibration wouldn’t go astray.
Although Logitech only confirmed Windows 11 integration for the MX Master 4, I’d be keen to see some form of Mac functionality in the future. Using a MacBook trackpad is very satisfying, and I’d enjoy getting that haptic feedback from an external mouse, too.
Yesterday, Apple launched its free sports app in Australia, one of 90 regions to be added since the app first launched in 2024. Naturally, there’s a FIFA World Cup around the corner, with everyone keen to tune in to the world game for the four-yearly event. Between major soccer leagues and various American sports, however, there’s a distinct lack of Australian representation in Apple Sports.
Newly updated for the World Cup, Apple Sports lets you choose which country you want to follow, receiving live score updates in a slick, minimalistic interface. Unlike many other sports scores apps, Apple’s isn’t riddled with unsightly ads in every corner.
It looks nice and is easy to use, but its appeal only reaches as far as your preference in sporting leagues. Aside from the World Cup, the selection of available sports is very American and Eurocentric. Premier League, Formula 1, NFL, NHL, NBA, and PGA among the included sports you can follow within Apple’s app — each of which has a reasonably strong following in Australia.
Apple, where are my Australian sports?
Conspicuously absent is any inclusion of Australia’s major sporting codes. There’s no AFL, NRL or cricket, for starters. Even the A-League can’t crack a mention among the collection of soccer leagues in the app.
As much as we love sports in Australia, our viewership would be a drop in the ocean compared to the global competitions favoured by Apple. Still, there’s little reason at this stage to choose Apple Sports over something like the ESPN app, which has been around for far longer.
Screenshots: Chris Button.
I couldn’t even use Apple Sports to follow Australian athletes in individual-based competitions. I’d be more inclined to use the app if my home screen could show how Min Woo or Minjee Lee went in the golf, Alex de Minaur’s latest tournaments, or where Oscar Piastri is in the F1 rankings.
Unfortunately, Apple Sports currently only lets you follow teams, not individual athletes, limiting its appeal in Australia. There’s a good foundation for an all-in-one uncluttered sports scores app once it takes its overseas sports blinkers off.
Give me some AFL, cricket, and the ability to follow Aussie athletes in individual-based sports, and I’ll be back on board.
Amazon is bringing a couple of updated versions of its outdoor Ring security cameras to Australia, claiming sharper video quality at a more affordable price.
While it’s not quite at the low price point of Amazon’s budget Blink range of security gear, the 2nd Gen versions of the $279 Ring Spotlight Camera and $329 Floodlight Camera compete closely with other mid-range smart home security cameras.
Previous versions of these cameras recorded 1080p footage, while the new models use what Ring calls “Retinal 2K” quality. Retinal refers to the brand’s clearer video quality, first introduced with its 4K cameras last year. In addition to the boost in resolution, it’s also meant to improve low-light visibility.
As the names of the latest cameras suggest, seeing in the dark is something of a speciality. On the 2nd Gen Ring Spotlight Camera is a 550-lumen light to help brighten up dark areas. Meanwhile, the new Floodlight Camera goes even brighter, with its built-in floodlights rated at 2,000 lumens. Aside from increasing visibility at night, the lights also act as a deterrent to would-be intruders.
Both cameras have a field of view spanning 140 degrees horizontally and 85 degrees vertically. Each one uses Wi-Fi 4 technology, only supporting the 2.4GHz network band. Although more smart devices are starting to support 5GHz bands these days, 2.4GHz is still widely used due to its increased range.
Like most floodlight security cameras, the 2nd Gen Ring Floodlight Camera relies on a wired connection. On the upside, it means ongoing power without worrying about battery life, and support for continuous recording, which requires an add-on purchase with a Ring Protect subscription. The less power-hungry Spotlight Camera is available in a few other configurations, including battery, wired, and a plug-in model.
Apple has switched on its free Apple Sports app for Australian iPhone users, part of a global rollout that adds the app to more than 90 new countries and regions.
The app, which serves up real-time scores, live stats and play-by-play tracking, is now available in over 170 countries around the world. The Australian launch arrives alongside a fresh set of features built for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which kicks off in just over a month across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
A customisable home for live scores
Apple is positioning the app as a second-screen companion for live sport. Fans choose their teams, tournaments and leagues during setup, and the Home screen scoreboard arranges fixtures in the order they want. The layout remains focused on the action, with scores ticking over as games unfold.
Customisation runs deeper than just team selection. Users can prioritise how leagues and tournaments appear, follow an entire competition instead of a single side, and reorder the scoreboard to put their most-watched events up the top.
Scorecards, favourite teams and more can be found in the Apple Sports app. Credit: Apple
New features for the 2026 FIFA World Cup
For the World Cup, Apple has added a tournament bracket view. The scrollable layout shows matchups and results for every round, letting users follow their team from the group stage through to the final without flicking between schedules.
Game cards have also been redesigned. Each match shows visual starting lineups with on-field formations, giving viewers a quick read on tactics before kickoff.
A new One-Tap to Apple News feature sends fans straight to editorial coverage from inside Apple Sports, including World Cup announcements and post-match analysis. So it’s more like one-stop hub for fans who would rather not bounce between sources.
Available now
Apple’s Sports app announcement is just in time for the build-up to the World Cup, the next major event on the global sporting agenda. It’s great that Australian fans now have a place to track scores on their iPhones, with no ads, no subscription and no sign-in barrier.
There’s also an Apple Sports widget for Macs, iPads and iPhones. Source: Apple
Apple Sports is available now as a free download from the App Store. Users who already have the app installed will see the new World Cup features and expanded country coverage land via an update.
