Technologies
My Favorite Smartwatch Isn’t the Latest Model, but It Does Everything I Need
The Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatch has all the features I want, and it’s a bargain compared to newer models.

My phone pings constantly from where it’s plugged in across the room. But I’ve got my Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 on my wrist, so I can check to see who’s pinging me, which app the notifications are from and whether it’s important enough to merit my standing up and walking the dozen or so steps to unplug my phone and look, or just respond on my smartwatch (or swipe the notification away).
Smartwatches are becoming an essential tech item, but most people don’t need the latest and greatest version to get what they need. One of the best ways to get some solid technology without spending a ton of money is to choose a previous version of a current device. (This is also a good way to pick up a thoughtful tech gift without spending too much on it.) So if you’re searching for a cool gift for someone (or yourself), might I suggest my favorite smartwatch, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4?
SMARTWATCH DEALS OF THE WEEK
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Why I love the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4
Sure, it’s not the latest model of the Samsung Watch. That would be the Galaxy Watch 7 or Galaxy Watch Ultra. But it still has all the main features, including ECG, blood pressure monitoring, sleep monitoring, Google integration for most things and Samsung Health.
I’m not a fitness fanatic, so I don’t need all the latest tracking features or even the improved battery life and bigger screen size of the Watch 7, which has a list price of $300, but is going for as low as $200 right now if you want the upgrade. The Galaxy Watch 4 has the fitness tracking I need without being overly complex. (Though it has advanced workout tracking for six modes including running, rowing and swimming, if you like those auto-detected tracking features.) For everyday use, I can check my notifications and respond, take hands-free calls, track sleep and skip between songs when listening in Spotify. Oh, and check the time.
If you’re looking for a wearable, it’s the one I’d recommend checking out before looking into the latest version of the Galaxy Watch series. One caveat: Some people have complained lately that their battery is depleting quickly. Samsung has advice on how to run a diagnostic on your watch and fix the issue.
Why the Galaxy Watch 4 makes a good purchase
The Galaxy Watch 4 probably isn’t right for a hard-core tech enthusiast or for anyone locked into the Apple ecosystem. However, it’s perfect for anyone who wants a smartwatch and doesn’t care about getting all the bells and whistles, or for someone who doesn’t know what they want in a smartwatch. For more, here are our other favorite smartwatches and our roundup of the best deals on the Samsung Galaxy S25.
Technologies
iOS 26: AI Summaries Come Back to iPhone News Apps, but With a Warning
Apple initially disabled these summaries in January.

Apple released iOS 26 on Monday, a few months after the company announced it at the June Worldwide Developers Conference. The update brings a new Liquid Glass redesign, call screening and hidden features to your iPhone. The update also brings AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps back to Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone.
Apple disabled AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in January. That came a few weeks after the BBC pointed out in December that the feature twisted the media organization’s notifications and displayed inaccurate information.
Here’s what to know about those AI summaries and the new warning.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
iOS 26 warns about summary inaccuracies
When I updated to iOS 26, I was greeted by some splash screens asking for various permissions. One splash screen was for the AI notification summaries. When you see this screen, you have two options: Choose Notifications to Summarize or Not Now. If you tap Not Now, the splash screen goes away.
If you tap Choose Notifications to Summarize, you’re taken to a new page where you’ll see three categories: News & Entertainment, Communication & Social and All Other Apps. Tapping one of these categories allows notification summaries for apps in that category. Beneath the News & Entertainment category, there’s a warning that gets outlined in red if you tap it.
«Summarization may change the meaning of the original headline,» the warning reads, adding, «Verify information.»
There’s also a warning across the bottom of the screen that reads, «This is a beta feature. Summaries may contain errors.»
After tapping the categories you want, tap Summarize Selected Notifications across the bottom of your screen. If you selected all the categories, this button will read Summarize All Notifications.
And if you don’t want these summaries, you can tap Do Not Summarize Notifications. If you allow these summaries and don’t like them, you can easily turn them off. Here’s how.
How to turn off AI notification summaries
1. Tap Settings.
2. Tap Notifications.
3. Tap Summarize Notifications.
4. Tap the Summarize Notifications toggle in the new menu.
You can also follow the above steps to turn AI notification summaries back on. You’ll have to select which categories you want these summaries for again, too.
For more on iOS 26, here’s my review of the OS, how to reduce the Liquid Glass effects in the update and how to enable call screening on your iPhone. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet.
Technologies
Amazon Prime Is Ending Shared Free Shipping. What to Know and When It Happens
How Prime Invitee program’s end could affect your free deliveries.

If you’ve been using someone else’s Amazon Prime membership for free shipping, but you don’t live in the same house, you may need to pay another subscription fee soon. According to Amazon’s updated customer service page, the online retail giant is ending its Prime Invitee benefit-sharing program Oct. 1.
Amazon’s Prime Invitee program is being replaced by Amazon Family, as reported earlier by The Verge. It includes many of the same benefits, but Amazon Family only works for up to two adults and four children living in the same «primary residential address» — a shared home.
You’ll still be able to use free shipping to send gifts elsewhere, but your Prime Invitees will no longer be able to use the perk.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
Amazon isn’t the first company to prevent membership sharing between family and friends. The e-commerce giant is just the latest to follow Netflix’s account-sharing crackdown. While it’s unclear whether this change will work for Amazon, Netflix gained over 200,000 subscribers following its policy change. We also saw a similar account-sharing crackdown with Disney Plus and YouTube Premium.
Read more: More Than Just Free Shipping: Here Are 19 Underrated Amazon Prime Perks
What the Amazon Prime shipping crackdown means for you
If you’re the beneficiary of someone else’s Prime Invitee benefits, you have one more month to take advantage of the current program before the changes take effect.
Starting in October, you’ll have to get your own Amazon Prime subscription to benefit from the company’s free shipping program. First-time subscribers get a year of Prime membership for $15, but you’ll be stuck shelling out $15 a month to maintain your subscription thereafter.
Read more: Your Free Pass to Prime Day Deals (No Membership Required)
Why is Amazon ending the Prime Invitee program?
This move follows shortly after Reuters reported that Amazon’s Prime account signups slowed down recently despite an extended July Prime Day event. While the company reported blowout sales numbers, new Prime subscriptions didn’t meet internal expectations. In the US, they fell short of last year’s signup metrics.
According to Reuters, Amazon registered 5.4 million US signups over the 21-day run-up to the Prime Day event, around 116,000 fewer than during the same period in 2024, and 106,000 below the company’s own goal, a roughly 2% decline in both metrics.
By forcing separate households to have their own subscriptions, Amazon could be looking to attract more Prime accounts after previously failing to do so.
The new Amazon Family program (previously known as Amazon Household) offers Prime benefits to up to two adults and four children in a single home, including free shipping, Prime Video, Prime Reading and Amazon Music. The subscription also includes benefits for certain third-party companies, such as GrubHub.
Technologies
Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Pack Points System Needs an Overhaul Yesterday
The pack-opening pity points system is pitiful. There’s a very easy way to improve it.

Pokemon TCG Pocket is more than a mobile game: It’s a money-making machine. The virtual trading card app raked in more than $900 million in its first six months, eclipsing even Pokemon Go’s revenue in the same post-release time span. As it turns out, fake Pokemon cards are just as much of a hot commodity as the real thing.
People love ripping open card packs, hunting down ones with their favorite illustrations of fan-favorite Pokemon. It feels great to beat the odds by pulling an elaborately-inked full art or a shiny secret rare. But it really starts to irk me when I’m missing only one or two cards from a set and I can’t get lucky enough to pull them out of a pack.
Pokemon TCG Pocket has a «pity points» system that’s supposed to make this feel less terrible: Every time you open a pack, you earn five pack points, which you can directly trade in for a card of your choosing.
You can trade in 35 points for a common card, but if you want to get the rarest cards from a set, they could eat up 500 points, 1,250 points or even a whopping 2,500 points each. That means you’d have to rip open 500 card packs in order to earn a single copy of one of Pokemon TCG Pocket’s rarest cards.
It sounds absurd (and it is), but that’s to be expected for a free-to-play game, especially one where the developer makes money by encouraging players to pay for extra card pulls. My real big issue with pack points is that they’re restricted to the expansion set you earned them in.
For example, I have 210 pack points for the latest card set, Secluded Springs, and I’ve been exclusively pulling those packs since it was released. I also have 700 pack points for the game’s first-ever expansion Genetic Apex — but those points are locked to Genetic Apex, and can’t be used for any other set. I’ve accrued hundreds of pack points, but they’re essentially useless to me because they won’t help me complete the sets I’m still missing cards in.
Pokemon TCG Pocket expansion sets are released on a monthly basis, which means no one really has time to earn enough pack points for a rare card before the next shiny slate of cards is dangled in front of your eyes. It propagates a desperate sense of FOMO that I’ve criticized in the past, but there’s a simple solution that would make the problem disappear overnight.
Instead of locking pack points to any one set, they should be an account-wide currency instead. Every time you earn pack points, they should be added to one large pool that you can use on any of the in-game card sets. That way, players wouldn’t have to feel a manufactured sense of guilt for ripping open packs from older sets.
While it’s customary for gacha games to have a pity system that guarantees a certain reward after a certain amount of pulls, it’s by no means a requirement for these games to have these systems. In a sense, I’m grateful that the pack points exist in Pokemon TCG Pocket in the first place.
I think we should always argue for a more consumer-friendly experience in modern gaming. Overhauling the pity system so that pack points can be used universally across all of the in-game card sets will make the game fairer and give more players a real chance to get the rarest cards.
It creates a greater sense of parity between free-to-play and paying players, and it might even cause some people to spend more money on pack openings to boot. Universal pack points are a win-win for players and DeNA alike.
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