Here’s your firmware update for October 5, 2024
This week Amazon’s early Prime-exclusive sale gave us some great deals, the Oura Ring 4 was announced, and Sonos said its app is almost fixed.
In case you missed these or any of the other biggest tech news stories of the week we’ve gathered the eight most important ones here so you can get up to speed.
Once that’s done you might want to catch up on the new Mac computers Apple is likely gearing up to announce later this month, and you’ll want to check out our picks for the seven new movies and TV shows to stream this weekend.8. Voting for the TechRadar Choice Awards 2024 opened
The TechRadar awards are back for 2024, and this year you can help decide the winner in a record 90 categories, split among the following sections:
Phones & Cameras
Computing & Gaming
TV & Audio
Fitness & Home Tech
You can vote in every category, or just a few, but make sure all of your votes are cast before 00:01am PST / 03:01am EST / 08:01am BST on Friday October 11th 2024, otherwise it won’t count.
Once we’re done counting the votes we’ll combine the scores with the rankings of our expert judges to decide the final winners – with the one exception being the Readers’ Choice Award which is 100% decided by you. Winners in every category will be announced during our big TechRadar Choice Awards Week, starting Monday, October 28th.
Read more: TechRadar Choice Awards 2024 voting is open now7. Amazon Big Deals Day early sales began
Amazon Big Deals Day – a sort of Prime Day 2 ahead of this year’s Black Friday sale – kicks off officially on October 8, but that hasn’t stopped plenty of discounts going live as part of the early sale across Amazon US and Amazon UK.
There are plenty of discounts across a wide range of products from Amazon’s own tech – even the brand new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablets are up to 50% off – as well as some of our favorite gadgets like LG TVs and Ninja kitchen appliances.
Just like with Prime Day, however, you must be a Prime member to access the exclusive Big Deals Day discounts – though some items are on sale for everyone, so you might be able to save big on the item you want without shelling out for a Prime subscription.
Read more: Here are 17 deals that are worth buying right now6. Sonos’ app apology tour has an end in sight
Sonos’ app launch in May was one of the biggest tech blunders of 2024, but this week it announced that 100% of the app’s missing features will be restored “in the coming weeks” – and that 80% have already made their return.
What’s more Sonos said that it’ll be extending the warranty of all Sonos products that are still under warranty by a year by way of an apology to disgruntled customers, and it now has made four pledges with the goal of «addressing the root causes of the problems with the app release» to ensure it never happens again.
