Take a sneak peek at the Best Buy Black Friday deals before you buy

With Black Friday on the horizon, it’s becoming easier and easier to find a great deal. Though this buying holiday has predominantly been about waking up at the crack of dawn and rushing to your local retailer, the times are starting to change. Just last year, we saw about 10 million more Americans shopping online than in store.

It may be tempting to skip those Black Friday lines and join the online shopping revolution, but there are still some stores, like Best Buy, that make it worth your while to show up bright and early. To help you on your quest for the ultimate deal, here is a little preview of the Best Buy Black Friday deals.

You can also check out the Amazon Black Friday Deals Store for holiday savings available now.

Best Buy Black Friday preview

Best Buy’s doors will be opening at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, but don’t worry, some of these deals will be available online as well. Check out the Best Buy Black Friday preview to see the full list of deals, or take a look at our favorites below.

Product availability may vary by store location.

Sharp 50-inch 4K Ultra HD TV — $180

Save $320 on this 50-inch 4K TV. This particular television will be available in stores only, so you’ll have to plan you’re Black Friday route accordingly to take full advantage of this great deal. Make sure to take a look at our review before you buy, though.

You can also check out our favorite 4K TV deals for more options available right now.

Preview

128GB Apple iPad Mini 4 — $275

Normally priced at $400 this Black Friday deal will save you $125 on a brand new iPad. If you’re looking to do a little research before diving headfirst into that iPad life, you check out our hands-on review.

You can also take a look at our practical guide for choosing an iPad to help you decide.

Preview

Google Home Mini — $30 + Gift Card

Save $19 on this Google smart home device and you will also receive a $10 Best Buy gift card with your purchase. Choosing the right smart home device can be difficult, however, so make sure you read our review before you buy.

You can also see how it matches up to Amazon’s Echo dot to help you make the right decision.

Preview

Apple MacBook Air — $800

Normally priced at $1,000 this MacBook will be available for $200 off retail during Black Friday. If you’re an avid Apple follower, then you know that discounts on Apple products are quite rare, so you don’t want to miss this one.

You can also check out our guide for buying a MacBook for more info.

Preview

Xbox One S 500GB Console — $190

With the arrival of the Xbox One X, stores will be providing deep discounts to the Xbox One S. Save $90 on an awesome gaming console this Black Friday at Best Buy.

You can also check out a list of our favorite Xbox games to find the best games available now.

Preview

Looking for more great deals on tech and electronics? Check out our deals page or sign up for our deals newsletter for weekly updates and exclusive offers.

We strive to help our readers find the best deals on quality products and services, and choose what we cover carefully and independently. If you find a better price for a product listed here, or want to suggest one of your own, email us at dealsteam@digitaltrends.com.Digital Trends may earn commission on products purchased through our links, which supports the work we do for our readers.

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Gentlemen, start your engines: Here’s how to watch Formula 1 online

Every Formula 1 Grand Prix event is like a Super Bowl, All-Star Game, and championship party rolled into one. If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, you merely need to remember there are 20 of them each year, scattered across some of the most vibrant and affluent cities in the world. From Monaco to Abu Dhabi, you won’t want to miss even a tenth of a second when it comes to engine roars and tire squeals.

While Lewis Hamilton has already won this year’s championship, and Mercedes-AMG took home the constructor’s championship for the fourth year in a row, the action continues because the season isn’t over yet. Ready to tune in? there are a number of ways to stay up to date on one of the few driving sports that actually gives NASCAR a run for its money. Here is how to watch Formula 1 online.

Streaming options

NBC Formula 1 Live Extra

If you really want to watch Formula 1 racing online and see everything as it unfolds live, then you’ll likely have to opt for NBC. Doing so allows you stream all of the live coverage, so long as you have a compatible cable or satellite TV package.

While NBC disperses the event coverage to a number of different networks, such as CNBC and NBCSN, every race is available for viewing on the NBC Sports site or within the accompanying iOS or Android app. The software is free to download, however, you’ll still need a valid username or password from your television service provider. Once obtained, you can watch each Grand Prix race live from anywhere you have an Internet connection and connected device.

Web iOS Google Play Windows Phone

Other resources

Formula 1 subreddit

While the Formula 1 subreddit offers a few streaming options that are further from the beaten path, it mainly serves as a great resource for discussion and information regarding the world of Formula 1 racing. The user-curated news and updates provide an excellent backdrop for arguing about which constructor brought the best sidepods of the year, or which driver exhibits the best consistency. On top of that, each Grand Prix features a dedicated thread for discussing the event, one in which users from every fanbase squabble and root for their team while chiding others.

Even if you don’t typically watch Formula 1, you’ll find Reddit’s active user base eager to bring newcomers into the fold, along with a wealth of non-F1 related topics you easily spend an entire afternoon perusing — if you can find the time.

Official Formula 1 site

If you want spot-on information, you have to go straight to the source. The official Formula 1 site currently doesn’t offer live streaming for any price, though it does offer a wealth of information on the various teams, constructors, and previous tournaments. The site compensates for the lack of live video with constant highlights, edited shots of the best moments for each team and event, and robust photo galleries of the individual cars and drivers.

Really want to get in on the action? If you sign up for a free account on the Formula 1 site, you can access the same live timing app that the teams use to monitor their drivers in the pits. You’ll get up-to-the-second competition data, vehicle information, and even notes from pit crews and coaches as the race progresses.

Playstation Vue

Don’t have cable or satellite? Don’t want to watch on your smartphone or tablet? Thanks to Playstation’s Vue app, you can stream live F1 coverage through your PS3 or PS4 console to your TV. Playstation’s Vue app uses NBC’s stream, which means you’ll still have to sit through commercials here and there, but you do get coverage of all NBC’s broadcast resources. Some of the highlights of the app include DVR ability so you can watch races you missed later, and pause/rewind/fast-forward controls. One of the only drawbacks is that the app will stop coverage abruptly and jump forward if your internet lags (if you have high-speed internet, this part won’t be an issue).

International streaming options

Channel 4: C4F1 (U.K.)

Those of you living in the U.K. have two good streaming options. The first is Britain’s live television broadcast. Channel 4’s C4F1 will show 10 live races, including the Monaco Grand Prix. The remainder of the races will be shown in delayed highlights. Though Channel 4’s race coverage is limited, if you have the proper receiver equipment, you can watch via free-to-air (FTA) broadcast.

Sky Sports F1 (U.K.)

Sky Sports gives you three ways to watch every Formula 1 race: On live TV — via a “Now TV” pass — and via  Sky Go. Unlike channel 4, Sky Sports doesn’t have any gaps in live coverage — every race is shown. If you have a cable or satellite TV package, you can watch the races on its dedicated channel. If you don’t want to pay for a monthly TV package, you can purchase a Now TV pass for the day, week, or month. If you prefer to watch on your mobile device, just download the Sky Go app or go to the live streaming page, and enjoy.

Antenna 3 (Spain)

Like NBC, Channel 4, and Sky Sports, Antenna 3 is a domestic TV channel for Spanish viewers. Antenna 3 has shown live F1 races since 2012. Like the other TV providers, Antenna 3 requires a cable or satellite TV package, but subscribers can watch races online via the Atres media player.

Sport 1 (Netherlands)

Sport 1 is the official Formula 1 broadcast in the Netherlands. In addition to uninterrupted live race coverage, Sport 1 has dedicated channels for pit lane and onboard camera footage. You can sign up for Sport 1 via traditional TV subscription or pay-per-view. Sport1 offers an online viewing option or streaming via the Ziggo Sport app.

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Action Launcher v31 adds adaptive folders, Essential Phone support, and more

New features, bug fixes, and a bigger focus on performance/stability are in store with Action Launcher v31.

The Google Play Store is filled with third-party launchers to tweak and customize the look of your phone, but one that we keep coming back to is Chirs Lacy’s Action Launcher. The last v30 update that landed in late October added the Pixel 2’s At a Glance widget and further customization options for the Quickbar, and now that v31 of the app is here, there are even more goodies to check out.

One of the biggest additions to Action Launcher with v31 is adaptive folders. Just like how adaptive icons change the shape of all your app icons to create for a more cohesive look, adaptive folders allow your app folders to match the shape of whatever your current adaptive icon style is set to. To celebrate this new feature, Lacy is making adaptive icon support free for all users – something that was previously reserved for Action Launcher Plus.

Also new with v31 is official support for the Essential Phone, the ability to use Google’s Product Sans front throughout your entire desktop for an even more Googley look, as well as support for pinned widgets and shortcuts from other apps.

Adaptive folders in Action Launcher v31.

Top this off with more than 20 different bug fixes, a dedicated support site, and a renewed focus on overall stability and performance of the launcher, and there’s a lot here to take in.

Action Launcher v31 is live on the Play Store now.

Google Now vs. Quickdrawer: An Action Launcher dilemma

Cricket replaces 8GB and 12GB plans with two unlimited options

Two unlimited plans sounds nice, but there’s a small catch.

Prepaid service plans are great options for customers that want affordable monthly bills without all the bells and whistles from the likes of AT&T and Verizon, and one of your better options in this field is Cricket Wireless. Cricket made some nice changes to its service plans earlier this month, but a new one that’s just been spotted isn’t quite as joyful.

According to Droid Life, Cricket removed its 8GB and 12GB data plans on November 8 and effectively replaced them with its Unlimited 2 and Unlimited options. Having two unlimited plans versus two limited ones might sound like an upgrade, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

On one hand, you’re looking at a potential larger monthly cost. The 8GB and 12GB plans used to cost $50/month and $60/month, whereas Unlimited 2 and Unlimited will set you back $55/month and $60/month, respectively. Unlimited 2 and Unlimited come with mostly the same features, but Unlimited 2 will limit your download speeds to a sluggish 3Mbps. If you upgrade to Unlimited for $5 more per month, you’ll increase to Cricket’s regular 8Mbps.

Along with the two unlimited plans, you still have access to Cricket’s 2GB and 5GB data plans that recently got upgraded from 1GB and 4GB.

See at Cricket

Apple retakes the top spot in wearable device shipments

It looks like Xiaomi’s reign as the wearable device champion was short-lived. Canalys’ latest estimates indicate that Apple regained the lead in wearable shipments during the third quarter of the year, shipping 3.9 million smartwatches over the summer. That’s only slightly ahead of Xiaomi’s 3.6 million and Fitbit’s 3.5 million, but that’s no mean feat when the Apple Watch is typically far more expensive (Xiaomi’s Mi Band 2 cost $23 when new) and only works with one manufacturer’s smartphones. And it’s no surprise as to why Apple pulled out in front: new hardware.

Canalys’ researchers attribute the shifting ranks to the Apple Watch Series 3 launch. Demand was strong enough that there were shortages in “major” markets, including China. And apparently, Series 3’s cellular data support is a big draw — analysts reckon that Apple shipped about 800,000 LTE-capable watches in the quarter. For comparison, Samsung is believed to have sold roughly 500,000 Gear S3 watches (LTE or otherwise) in the same period.

This doesn’t mean the wearable space is suddenly red hot. While Apple, Xiaomi and Fitbit did well, Canalys believes the overall market shrank 2 percent to 17.3 million units. As it explains, demand for “basic bands” (that is, entry-level activity trackers) was on the decline. That’s likely to be even more true now that Apple is more likely to keep up with Series 3 demand, and Fitbit is getting into full-fledged smartwatches with the Ionic. It’s no longer enough in many cases to give people their step count and heart rate. They increasingly expect a full-fledged smartphone companion, and the market is changing accordingly.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Canalys

Amazon Australia could sell more than books come Black Friday

Amazon’s Australian marketplace is going live “really, really soon,” the company’s local CEO, Roco Braeuniger, announced at a recent event. Apparently, “really, really soon” could mean next week: According to CNET, the e-retail titan has told third-party sellers in a letter to get their goods ready, because it’s hoping to launch the Australian marketplace by Black Friday. Amazon has yet to confirm the launch date, but it makes sense that the company is aiming to start things with a bang.

Black Friday is one of the holiday shopping season’s biggest days, after all, and it’s also quickly followed by Cyber Monday. Peter Kearns of 180Commerce, which helps Amazon sellers grow their brands, told CNET that the company has been actively recruiting sellers from the US and Australia to populate its marketplace before Thanksgiving week.

Amazon itself announced during its Australian Summit that its warehouses in the country are ready to fulfill orders both for its own offerings and for third-party partners. It also said that it’s aiming for a two-day turnaround for purchases. As Lifehacker Australia noticed, although Amazon’s Oz website is still dominated by Kindle books, it’s been getting more and more product listings — try searching for “power boards,” for instance. Australians will just have to get their credit cards ready in case the marketplace really does go online in time to offer awesome Black Friday deals.

Source: CNET, Lifehacker Australia

Razer’s latest gaming keyboard can survive spilled drinks

Razer’s keyboards have been many things, but tough generally wasn’t one of them — knock your drink the wrong way and that elaborate input device was toast. That won’t be as much of a problem in the future, as Razer has unveiled a new version of its signature BlackWidow Ultimate with IP54 water and dust resistance. While the rating doesn’t mean you can dunk the keyboard in the pool (you’d want IP67 or better for that), it’s good enough that your gaming session won’t be ruined by a splash or two.

Beyond that, it’s a familiar formula: you’re getting Razer’s mechanical switches (the Green Switch, to be exact) with 10-key anti-ghosting and full programming support. You’re limited to green lighting, but you can still create lighting effects like ripples and waves. The new Blackwidow is available online right now for $110 (€120) and should spread to stores worldwide before the year is over.

This isn’t a novel idea, to be clear. Corsair and others have had water-resistant gaming keyboards. Razer is arguably the most recognizable brand of the bunch, though, and the inclusion of water resistance in its flagship keyboard is bound to make the feature more commonplace. Don’t be surprised if splashproof design eventually becomes a must-have for keyboards like this.

Source: Razer

I wore a (virtual) flamingo head while smelling of the wetlands

At 9am, I was invited to inhale a fragrant cocktail of earthworm, soil, sea and, ugh, sulphur. This first part of Dance with flARmingos sets the stage, coaxing participants to imagine themselves in the wetlands that the iconic flamingo calls home. Iconic yes, but as artist Kristin Lucas noted, plastic flamingos (and other representations) “far outnumber the actual bird”.

The birds’ habitats have struggled to survive against ecotourism, overpopulation and climate change, affecting the numbers of birds in the wild even further. Dance with flARmingos uses a barrage of techniques beyond olfactory assault to both endear you to these birds and make you think about the threats to their home.

Once the wetlands cologne had faded a little, I was guided to an iPad running an augmented reality interface. Positioned on a window sill, I aimed the iPad through the window to reveal not only a handful of human-sized CGI flamingoes, but also two human participants, strapped into a Hololens headset, and transformed into an oversized flamingo head. The effect is like peering into a zoo, with two fake “flamingoes” getting in the way. The invisible zoo gets a little busier when more birds, with a tagged leg, join the fray.

Each of these tagged birds represents one of over 20 flamingoes that Lucas has actually adopted in the wild, and tapping on them throws up a mini-map on the iPad, showing its migration patterns across different parts of the world. It’s a smart way of grounding these, c’mon, silly-looking birds back to the real world.

The birds are intentionally simplified and boxy: The animation is a little bit scrappy, making the rendered creatures look a lot like puppets. Occasionally, they interact as a flock. They walk around each other in similar patterns, and once the mating rituals begin, the excessive dance moves are almost in sync — we’ve all seen wildlife documentaries where crowds of animals are doing pretty much the same thing, at the same time.

The third and final part of the experience puts you into that invisible zoo, with a mixed reality experience that allows you to participate in the mating ritual dance — if you’re low on inhibitions, anyway. While Hololens’ mixed reality experience might be the future beyond heavy VR headsets, the fact you can see other viewers and participants (instead of a virtual world that blocks out the real one) left me very aware of the iPad-equipped “zoo” visitors.

When you strip away the experiential and high-tech interactivity, Dance with flARmingos delivers a message of precarious wonder. Flamingos-made-of-boxes made me smile, but the animal itself is more than some kitsch symbol. The team behind flARmingos tells show attendees that it has sponsor forms for anyone interested in adopting (and helping to protect) this species — technical showcases like this help connect animals in need of financial support with those that can.

Typically, when you sponsor an animal, you might get a photo and an ID tag to monitor its movements, but you’re unlikely to ever meet your feathered beneficiary. Dance with flARmingos, then offers a charming, symbolic space to connect.

Dance with flARmingos was made possible through funding from the Engadget Alternate Realities grant program, established in May 2017. It debuted, along with four other prize-winning immersive-media projects, at the Engadget Experience on November 14th, 2017.

‘Your Hands Are Feet’ describes feelings where words can’t

The interactive experience Your Hands Are Feet is a smorgasbord of feelings. Take the titular example. Creators Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Sarah Rothberg wanted to pinpoint the feeling of shoes not fitting quite right. Ill-fitting footwear is not a catastrophe, but a mild annoyance that bugs you throughout the day. You can still get things done, but not as easily. It’s as if, in their mind, their hands were feet.

If it does not make sense in words, that’s okay. The point of their demo — whose first playable version debuted at the Engadget Experience today — is that virtual reality can convey this feeling in a way that other mediums, like text, can’t.

Earlier in its development, Winger-Bearskin and Rothberg explained how they wanted to find fresh ways to describe nuanced emotions. In Your Hands Are Feet, you select a virtual egg and lob it into a portal to kick off a vignette conveying one such feeling. It’s not immediately apparent what you’re supposed to do, and that surprise is part of the enjoyment.

One scenario places you in a surrealist kitchen — equipped with a sink, cooker and cactus — with feet on the ends of your limbs (you can still pick up a phone on the counter). Another surrounds you with hundreds of eyeballs staring at you, meant to evoke the sensation of seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes. Or, you might end up in a window cleaning cart with a giant pink razor, dispatched to shave a giant’s leg. Lopping off its jet black cylindrical bristles while in an oversized bathtub in the desert is satisfying, but you can never get a clean shave within the time limit. It’s a psychedelic spin on a Sisyphean task that can never be completed.

Other interactive metaphors include the feeling of being at “the corner of three corners” (imagining your past and future self) or that “everything has vibes” (touch the environment and your controllers will vibrate).

In essence, Your Hands Are Feet is about the subjective ways we see the world. It feels like a disorienting trip into someone else’s psychological structures; the weird ways we conceptualize our experiences in our heads. Each experience evokes different emotions: The infinite stretch of eyes are creepy, the giant shaving is both futile and amusing.

While many VR experiences try to place participants in another person’s external world, this project places you deeper inside someone else’s mind. The alternate reality the project presents is an internal one. Winger-Bearskin and Rothberg hope they can offer new frameworks through which people can see the world.

“We’re showing people these new ways of viewing the world and those ways will come up for them,” said Rothberg, who teaches VR at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “Whenever I shave my legs now it’s like ‘oh yeah it’s like there’s a tiny person.’”

They’ve made both an experience and a statement about what VR can do: describe the world in a language that’s unique to the medium.

Winger-Bearskin, the director of nonprofit Idea New Rochelle, founder of the Stupid Hackathon and former opera singer, describes VR as “a place where you can prototype the human experience through a computational environment.” Her hope is that it can “maybe create some new ways that we can frame and communicate the way we think and feel to each other.”

It’s commonplace now to hear of virtual reality as an “empathy machine” and the idea of creating human connection, seeing the world like another person does, is part of Your Hands Are Feet, too. The difference is that connection comes not from sharing an external environment, but understanding your own mind better. The next step is to connect with someone who sees their life events through the same metaphorical construct.

“I feel like that is the way that I can step closer to empathy: if I can say ‘we have common experiences,’” said Winger-Bearskin. The creators of Your Hands Are Feet want to give people the tools to convey a complex emotional state to someone else. By understanding themselves better — even via the most obscure, Spongebob-meets-Psychonauts universe — they can hopefully understand each other better, too.

Your Hands Are Feet was made possible through funding from the Engadget Alternate Realities grant program, established in May 2017. It debuted, along with four other prize-winning immersive-media projects, at the Engadget Experience on November 14th, 2017.

‘Untrained Eyes’ puts an AI spin on looking at yourself in the mirror

What if you stood in front of a mirror and saw someone who barely looked like you? That’s exactly what happens in Untrained Eyes, an interactive sculpture debuting today at the Engadget Experience, a one-day event that showcases exhibitions which mix art with technology. Untrained Eyes, created by conceptual artist Glenn Kaino and actor Jesse Williams (Grey’s Anatomy), doesn’t require a headset to be experienced. Instead, the project uses your face, a mirror, a Kinect and machine learning to show you pictures of people who you may look like — or not.

Sometimes you won’t get a person who resembles you in any way, but that’s the entire point of Untrained Eyes. When Kaino and Williams set out to make this project, it was always with the intention to shed light on the inherent flaws of artificial intelligence algorithms, particularly those utilized in image search databases. The experience itself works effortlessly. You walk up to the installation, wave at the mirror and then, within a few seconds, you’ll be presented an image of your alleged doppelgänger. The images displayed are pulled from a curated dataset that will “match” your appearance, based on your facial attributes.

In its current iteration, Untrained Eyes features five mirrors, which wasn’t the original idea. Kaino said that, toward the end of the development process, he realized that the installation would be better with more than a single mirror. That way people could see each other’s reactions to their image results. And you can definitely see the difference when someone who tries it gets a picture of Brad Pitt, as opposed to another human being who’s, well, less attractive. People will keep going back in front of the mirror, waving their hand, and waiting until they get an image of someone who they’re satisfied with.

An Engadget editor gets an unlikely match.

Regardless of the results, Kaino wants Untrained Eyes to make everyone think about the bias of image searches on the internet, be it on Google or other platforms like it. For example, he pointed to the fact that when you search Google for “men,” most of the results you get served are pictures of white men. Then, there was the time in 2015, when Google Photos mistakenly labeled black people as “gorillas.” These are just two instances where machine-learning has failed. “If there’s anyone that could have an infinite dataset of everyone in the world, it would be Google, “Kaino said, “and even then they have massive failures.”

Ultimately, those failures served as inspiration for Kaino and Williams to create Untrained Eyes. The reward has been the effect it has on people’s insecurities when they see “themselves” in the mirror. “The paradox is, once you see yourself. Even when we people get matches that are close to them, they immediately start distancing themselves [from the mirror],” Kaino said. “They might be happy with it but they’re like, ‘Oh, but my hair is a little bit better than that person,’ or ‘Those aren’t my eyes, but it’s good enough. There’s an immediate distancing that happens despite any of the gratification.”

I, for one, know I felt much better when I saw Johnny Depp in my Untrained Eyes mirror and not Salt Bae.

Untrained Eyes was made possible through funding from the Engadget Alternate Realities grant program, established in May 2017. It debuted, along with four other prize-winning immersive-media projects, at the Engadget Experience on November 14th, 2017.