gadgets
9 stories filed under gadgets on Spoot: Spotted Early. The newest of them: “Amazon's flying security camera is weird, real, and hovering in your hallway”, “Infinix Opens Bali Flagship Where You Can Sip Coffee and Test Phones”, and “Apple's gadget lab is messy and I'm genuinely charmed”. Amazon actually built it. Beachwalk Shopping Center now holds Infinix's first global flagship store, and it comes with coffee. Spoot: Spotted Early New things, caught while they're still new and a little weird. Spoot finds fresh gadgets, clever inventions, crowdfunding campaigns,… The list below is every gadgets story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
Amazon's flying security camera is weird, real, and hovering in your hallway
Amazon actually built it. The Ring Drone Cam is real, and it hovers. We figured the indoor security drone was one of those ideas that gets announced at a presentation and quietly suffocates in a drawer somewhere, but no, they made a quadcopter that you can deploy to patrol your hallway. It's weird, and that's exactly why it's interesting. You commission a literal flying robot to handle home security instead of a static camera bolted to the wall. That changes the question from "where do I put it" to "where do I want it to go." It is not a toy. It is a security camera that moves.
Infinix Opens Bali Flagship Where You Can Sip Coffee and Test Phones
Beachwalk Shopping Center now holds Infinix's first global flagship store, and it comes with coffee. That's the pitch: sip something, test phones, maybe let a little creativity happen between the two. Bali's a dream destination for travelers, and now it's a stop for people who want to handle a handset before buying it. I like the move. A flagship store should feel like somewhere you'd actually linger, and a coffee bar is a smarter hook than another wall of glowing screens. It's a retail experiment worth watching, though the coffee won't tell you whether the phones are any good. For a different kind of curious launch, Voxel's mustard-yellow chassis wants your mess, not your compliments. Two strange debuts, one island. Stay spooty.
Apple's gadget lab is messy and I'm genuinely charmed
Apple's gadget lab is messy and I'm genuinely charmed. The iPhone gets more screens, the MacBook finally lets you poke it, and the HomeView just runs CarPlay apps. After years of polish, the most successful product maker on earth has decided to try things again, even when "trying" means slapping a touch panel on a lovely new MacBook Pro just to see if you'll use it. The results aren't always perfect, but watching Apple experiment is its own kind of fun. On The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate touchscreen laptops, and Nilay explains exactly why he's buying that new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. If you're in the mood for more delightfully weird hardware, check out our piece on the mycelium disposable camera that decomposes before your photos do. Stay spooty.
Garmin finally lets you yell at your bike computer
Garmin finally lets you yell at your bike computer. The Edge 1060 now has a microphone and a speaker, so you can bark commands at it instead of poking a sweaty touchscreen while dodging a pothole. That's the good news. The better news is it talks back, which means you might finally get turn-by-turn directions without taking your eyes off the road. Voice control has been sitting in our phones and smart speakers for years, so it's almost weird it took this long to show up on a bike computer. But here it is, and it makes immediate sense for anyone who's ever nearly swerved into a hedge trying to zoom in on a map.
Birdbuddy Nook Drops the Price of Smart Birdwatching Below $100
A hundred bucks. That's the number that finally makes a camera feeder feel less like a luxury and more like a Tuesday afternoon impulse. Birdbuddy's Nook squeezes the same video feed and AI species-spotting into a compact, affordable package, and honestly, I'm already wondering which neighborhood bird will become my new favorite coworker. The sub-$100 price matters because it removes the hesitation that comes with dropping a couple hundred on something that might just sit there. Now you can watch a finch argue with a sparrow without scaring either one off. If you're also hunting for home upgrades that don't scream office furniture, our piece on October's best desk gear that hides its cubicle roots is worth a detour. Stay spooty.
Apple's HomeView Finally Gives Your Smart Bulbs a Room With a View
Apple finally put a screen on its smart home hub, and it looks like the iMac G4's younger, wall-mountable cousin. The HomeView comes in two flavors: a tabletop model with a screen perched on a speaker base, and a flat, mountable panel for when you want your home controls to disappear into the wall. It handles Matter and Thread, so your smart bulbs and locks can finally talk to each other without a translator. That polish is pure Apple, but the real question is whether this arrives as a finished product or another concept that keeps slipping. It's a smart display, sure, but it's also a communication console and an entertainment screen. If you want to dig into why it feels like a nostalgic chimera, our piece on that angle is worth circling back to.
Apple finally built a smart home hub, and it brought some friends
Apple finally built a smart home hub, and it brought some friends. The HomeView is Apple's first smart display, and it arrives with a 7-inch squircle design that looks like a gargantuan smart speaker grew a face. It costs $299 and preorders are open, which is nice because Apple has been threatening to make a smart display for years and years without ever actually doing it. The HomePod Mini 2 also finally exists after nearly six years, coming in at $149 with preorders open and a Friday launch date. Spoot already has a tab open on that one. The whole "Welcome Home" event dropped a slate of new smart home and security accessories too, built with trusted third-party manufacturers. It is the most serious hardware push Apple Home has seen in a long time.
Crazy Creek's legless camp chair now floats so you can sit on the water
Crazy Creek has been making legless camp chairs for nearly four decades, and they've finally done something I've secretly wanted since the first time I sat on a paddleboard: they made one that floats. The new Crazy Creek Boat Chair straps directly onto recreational watercraft like rafts and paddleboards, combining that familiar back-supporting seat with a personal flotation device. It's not a chair shaped like a boat, it's a chair that lets you sit on the water without sinking, which is honestly more useful. I love the quiet cleverness here: no legs to pack, no frame to assemble, just a buoyant seat that turns any inflatable into something you can lounge on.
Googlebook isn't one laptop: it's an Android-native invite to everyone else's hardware
Google didn't build a laptop. It built a door and handed out keys. The new Googlebook project skips the house-brand hardware entirely, instead offering a desktop platform that several manufacturers will bolt onto their own machines. The twist that actually got my attention? It's native Android. No virtualized layer, no emulator shim, just apps running the way they do on your phone. That's the razor clam in this spec sheet, the detail hiding under all that "partnership ecosystem" language. I like it. Google has spent years making Android feel at home on phones, and now it's daring the laptop world to catch up. Will it work? The manufacturers are the wildcards, and the real test is whether the software feels as tight on a big screen as it does in your palm. I'm curious.