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Google Pixel Watch.

Sofia Pitt

Three years after acquiring Fitbit, Alphabet is selling its first Google-branded watch with the fitness-tracking technology. It’s called Pixel Watch, and consumers can find it on store shelves starting Thursday.

I’ve been testing Google’s new Pixel products for the past several days. In addition to the Pixel Watch, there are the new phones, the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, which go on sale at the same time.

Most of the Pixel 7 phone upgrades are minor when compared with the last generation Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. Last year’s phones were the first to debut Google’s self-made Tensor processor and a brand-new design. The $600 Pixel 7 and $900 Pixel 7 Pro run on Google’s new Tensor G2 chip and are the company’s latest effort to establish a foothold in the global smartphone market, which Apple and Samsung dominate.

The core of this review focuses on the Pixel Watch since it’s the first time we’re seeing how Google is incorporating Fitbit, which it bought in 2019 for about $2.1 billion.

The Pixel Watch starts at $350 for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and $400 for 4G LTE. For smartwatch users, there’s not much new here. Heartrate tracking, fitness tracking and sleep tracking have been available for years in products from Fitbit and other companies, notably Apple.

I was hoping Google’s first Fitbit tie-in would bring some more groundbreaking innovations to the wearable game, especially for the price. The new Apple Watch SE is just $250 and has the same main features as the Pixel Watch. The same is true for Samsung’s Galaxy Watch5, which costs $280.

Google’s Pixel Watch is the company’s premium watch, whereas the Apple Watch SE and Galaxy Watch 5 are base models. But the features each offer are pretty similar.

The main benefit I can see to the Pixel Watch is the beautiful, inconspicuous design. The round face and domed glass design make the Pixel Watch feel more luxurious. It’s also made out of stainless steel, which is more expensive than cheaper aluminum smartwatch base models.

Overall, it’s too little, too late for Google. There aren’t enough exciting features to justify the price, and all of the important stuff is available on other cheaper smartwatches.

Here’s what you need to know before buying the new Pixel Watch and what I noticed about the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro phones.

Pixel Watch: What’s good?

The Pixel Watch is lightweight with a lovely design. The watch face is just 41mm wide, and it emulates a water droplet, which makes it feel like a watch and not like a computer on your wrist.

I was worried that the smaller size would result in a less powerful battery. Google promises 24-hour battery life, and I was able to get a full 24-hours out of the Pixel Watch, though I didn’t use it to track my sleep.

During my first day testing the Pixel Watch, I did a workout, kept the display on full-power mode, checked email and controlled my Google Home from my wrist without needing to charge it until the next morning.

The seamless integrations with Google’s other products are another bonus. I was able to use my Pixel Watch to broadcast a message on my Google Home, announcing to my husband I was on my way home. I was also able to turn on and off lights and play music.

As a Google Calendar user, I also appreciated having these reminders on my watch.

Another benefit of the Pixel Watch is high-frequency heart rate monitoring. Most watches only measure heart rates frequently when you’re in the middle of a workout, so it doesn’t drain the battery. Google says the Pixel Watch continuously tracks your heart rate.

There’s also a cool camera feature. You can position your phone camera to take a picture, and control the camera app with your watch. You can even see what the camera is capturing.

Google Pixel Watch allows you to control your phone camera remotely.

Sofia Pitt

What’s bad?

None of its alluring features allows the Pixel Watch to stand out from smartwatches that have been on the market for a long time.

I was hoping that for Google’s first integration with Fitbit software, there would be some new technology or that the device would be more affordable.

Also, fall detection isn’t going to be immediately available on the Pixel Watch. Google says it’s coming this winter. That’s disappointing, given it’s already available on other smartwatches.

Pixel 7 & 7 Pro updates

Google’s Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones.

Sofia Pitt

The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro have a few nice updates, especially to the camera. The coolest feature is photo unblur, which, thanks to Google’s new Tensor 2 chip, allows you to take any blurry photo and clear it up. Even better, you can unblur any photo, not just those you’ve taken on the Pixel phone. I tried it on a blurry photo of my husband and me. Here are the results:

Here’s a photo of Sofia Pitt and her husband before using Pixel 7’s new photo “Unblur” technology.

Sofia Pitt

Here’s a photo of Sofia Pitt and her husband after using Pixel 7’s new photo “Unblur” technology.

Sofia Pitt

Like unblur, most of the updates to the new Pixel phones are software related. When it comes to the camera, Google updated night sight, which means nighttime pictures are even clearer. Again, you have the new Tensor chip to thank for that. There’s also cinematic blur on videos, which makes the subject clear and background blurry to give videos a professional quality. There are improvements to real-tone so that photos of people of different races better represent their skin color.

Google is also making our lives easier when we need to call an 800 number. When dialing 1-800 on the Pixel 7, you no longer need to wait to “Press 1 for help” or “Press 2 for reservations.” The options just show up on your screen, saving you time so you can automatically connect to the relevant department instead of speaking to a robot.

The phone also transcribes audio messages, but only if they’re sent from another Android device.

Overall, the camera is great on the new Pixel, but the updates aren’t enough to get me to switch from iOS to Android.

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.

EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.

The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.

The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.

EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.

Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.

Read more CNBC tech news

At the time, the Commission said that Meta’s bundling of Marketplace with Facebook could mean competitors are effectively “foreclosed” given the distribution reach of the platform. Facebook counts more than 3 billion users globally.

The Commission also said that Meta imposes “unfair trading conditions” on other online classified ads service providers who advertise on its platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. It added that these conditions allow Meta to use data generated from other advertisers to benefit Marketplace.

Meta appealed the ruling at the time, saying that it “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services.”

“While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised,” the company said Wednesday.

EBay touted its integration with Facebook Marketplace as a way for the e-commerce site to “increase exposure to our sellers’ listings, on and off eBay, as part of our strategy to engage buyers and deepen customer loyalty.”

Facebook in 2023 announced a similar partnership with Amazon that lets users browse and purchase products without leaving the app.

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Additional reporting by CNBC’s Annie Palmer.

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days, at an Amazon fulfillment center in Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 2, 2024.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images

Amazon warehouse workers at a site in North Carolina will vote next month on whether to join a union, setting the stage for the company’s latest labor battle.

Workers at the Garner, North Carolina, facility will cast their ballots from Feb. 10 to Feb. 15, according to a Tuesday post on X by Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, the group seeking to organize staffers. Representatives from Amazon and the National Labor Relations Board didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Known as CAUSE, the grassroots group led by current and former employees has been working to organize Amazon employees at the warehouse, which is located in a suburb about 10 miles south of Raleigh, for the past three years.

If the election is successful, the warehouse, known as RDU1, would be only the second Amazon site in the U.S. to unionize. Workers at Amazon’s largest warehouse in New York City voted to join the Amazon Labor Union in 2022, but the group struggled to negotiate a contract with Amazon, and last June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the Teamsters.

A handful of union elections were held at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. in recent years but employees have either rejected unionization or the results continue to be disputed in lengthy court battles. Last November, a federal labor judge ordered a third rerun election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, after ruling the company improperly interfered in the vote.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

CAUSE filed for a union election last month, saying in a press release that 30% of workers at the North Carolina site signed union authorization cards, which is the necessary threshold to trigger an NLRB vote. Organizers are seeking to boost wages and improve working conditions.

The union filing comes after Amazon delivery and warehouse workers went on strike at nine facilities last month to push the company to come to the bargaining table, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the employees. The action was intended to snarl Amazon’s operations during the busiest holiday shopping period of the year, referred to as peak season. An Amazon representative told Reuters the company expected to see a limited impact on deliveries from the strike.

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Apple’s inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

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Apple's inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts, stoking concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.

Last week, a feature recently launched by Apple that summarizes users’ notifications using AI, pushed out inaccurately summarized BBC News app notifications on the broadcaster’s story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely claiming British darts player Luke Littler had won the championship.

The incident happened a day before the actual tournament’s final, which Littler did go on to win.

Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s AI system, falsely claimed that Tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

The BBC has been trying for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself — which never happened.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it’s working on an update to resolve the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in the notifications. Currently, generated news notifications show up as coming directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that it’s encouraging users to report a concern if they view an “unexpected notification summary.”

The BBC isn’t the only news organization that has been affected by Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarizing news notifications. In November, the feature sent an AI-summarized notification wrongly claiming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

The mistake was flagged on the social media app Bluesky by Ken Schwencke, a senior editor at investigative journalism site ProPublica.

CNBC has reached out to the BBC and New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to its AI feature’s misinformation issue.

AI’s misinformation problem

Apple touts its AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite previews of news app notifications into a single alert on a users’ lock screen.

It’s a feature Apple says is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and cut down on the overwhelming barrage of updates many smartphone users are familiar with.

However, this has resulted in what AI experts refer to as “hallucinations” — responses generated by AI that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect that Apple will not be alone in having challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services confidently telling mistruths, so-called ‘hallucinations’,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at tech-focused market research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.

In Apple’s case, because the AI is trying to consolidate notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of information, it’s mashed the words together in a way that’s inaccurately characterized the events — but confidently presenting them as facts.

“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ended up delivering erroneous messages,” Wood added. “Apple will undoubtedly seek to address this as soon as possible, and I’m sure rivals will be watching closely to see how it responds.”

Generative AI works by trying to figure out the best possible answer to a question or prompt inserted by a user, relying on vast quantities of data which its underlying large language models are trained on.

Sometimes the AI might not know the answer. But because it’s been programmed to always present a response to user prompts, this can result in cases where the AI effectively lies.

It’s not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution to the bug in its notification summarization feature will be fixed. The iPhone maker said to expect one to arrive in “the coming weeks.”

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