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Valve's new Steam Deck restock comes with a huge price hike — "these new prices reflect the current state ... across the industry"

✇Windows Central - News, Forums, Reviews, Help for Windows 10 and all things Microsoft.
Par : [email protected] (Brendan Lowry)
After months of being out of stock, Valve's beloved Steam Deck is available again — but its return has been accompanied by a massive price hike.

Steam Deck Trackpad

A close-up view of the Steam Deck. After the new price hike, it's significantly more expensive than it used to be.

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This Ceramic Vase Is Actually a Phone Speaker That Needs No Power

✇Yanko Design
Par : JC Torres

The home has become increasingly cluttered with gadgets that need charging, pairing, and their own dedicated spaces. Even something as simple as playing music from a smartphone often involves a Bluetooth speaker sitting on a shelf, waiting for its battery to drain. There’s been a quiet counter-movement in product design, where objects do their jobs without power and sit in a room the way a vase or a mug would.

Kenji Abe’s ECHO is exactly that kind of object. It’s an analog speaker that amplifies smartphone audio simply by being set on top of the phone, requiring no power, no pairing, and no setup beyond placing it down. The concept takes its cues from wind instruments and seashells, two forms that have been shaping and projecting sound for centuries without the help of electricity.

Designer: Kenji Abe

The inside of ECHO works like a chamber, built to catch the phone’s audio and carry it outward in soft, diffused waves rather than projecting it directly. The geometry draws from the same logic as a cupped hand, but with more control over how sound travels. The result isn’t a dramatic volume boost so much as a room-filling quality that feels warmer than a powered speaker on a desk.

The choice of material makes as much of a statement as the form. Abe uses glazed ceramic, the same material found in vases, mugs, and tableware, giving ECHO a texture and presence that belongs in a home rather than on a tech shelf. It doesn’t look like an accessory. It looks like something that was always there, something that simply happened to be placed near a phone.

That quality matters when the phone is on the kitchen counter and you want music while cooking, or on a desk where you’d rather not have a speaker taking up permanent residence. ECHO doesn’t need to live next to a charging cable or be put away between uses. It sits on the table and becomes part of the room, as unobtrusive as any other ceramic piece nearby.

A guest walking in wouldn’t necessarily clock it as a tech product. That’s partly the point. The glazed surface catches light the way pottery does, and the form is quiet enough to sit beside books or plants without demanding attention. When a phone is slid underneath it, it starts doing its job. When the phone is gone, it just stays there, still looking like it belongs. The same underlying principle runs through the Battery-free Amplifying iSpeakers, where a Duralumin metal enclosure amplifies a smartphone’s audio without any power.

Abe designed ECHO to exist comfortably in a room even when it isn’t doing anything, a goal most speakers never consider. Most audio accessories announce themselves. This one quietly waits, and when a phone is close enough to fill the cavity with sound, the room gets a little warmer and a little fuller without anyone having to reach for a power button.

The post This Ceramic Vase Is Actually a Phone Speaker That Needs No Power first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Nocturne’s Free App Turns Your Bricked Spotify Car Thing Into Something Better Than the Original

✇Yanko Design
Par : Sarang Sheth

The open-source community has a long history of doing more with abandoned hardware than the original manufacturers ever did. The PSP got emulators Sony never approved. The Wii got homebrew loaders that ran software Nintendo pretended didn’t exist. The pattern repeats because the hardware is always fine; it’s the corporate support structure around it that evaporates. The Spotify Car Thing joined that lineage in December 2024 when Spotify killed server-side authentication and turned every unit into an expensive knob with a screen attached.

Nocturne picked up where Spotify dropped off. The project launched in October 2024, anticipating the shutdown, and has shipped four major versions since. V4.0.0, currently in beta with a public release imminent, finally delivers true Bluetooth connectivity without phone tethering, a companion app, and a feature set that makes the original Spotify firmware look like a rough draft.

Developer: Nocturne Team (Brandon Saldan, Dominic Frye, and contributors)

The Car Thing runs a 512MB RAM, 4GB storage Amlogic S905D2 SoC, which is a polite way of saying it has the processing power of a mid-range router from 2015. Early versions of Nocturne required a Raspberry Pi as a co-processor just to get the thing online, which was a heroic workaround but not exactly mainstream-friendly. V3 replaced that with Bluetooth tethering through your phone’s hotspot. V4 cuts the tether entirely, pairing directly via Bluetooth through the new Nocturne Companion app, which requires a Nocturne+ subscription to fund the team’s continued development.

What the photos make immediately clear is how clean the UI actually looks in practice. The now-playing screen pulls album art and renders it as a full bleed gradient background, the same visual logic Spotify used but executed with noticeably more polish in edge cases. The typography is large and glanceable. The playlist browser view is dense but organized, using album thumbnails and track titles in a layout that navigates naturally with the knob. Image 3 shows a subtle ambient lighting effect around the screen border, a rainbow glow that responds to the current track, which is the kind of detail you wouldn’t expect from a community firmware project running on 2021 budget hardware.

The gesture control, OTA updates, Spotify Connect device switcher, podcast support, local file playback, and DJ mode all carried over from V3. The V4 architecture also bakes in full offline functionality, meaning the firmware survives without Spotify’s servers being cooperative, which was precisely the failure mode that bricked every original unit in the first place.

Nocturne’s GitHub currently lists V3.0.0 as the stable release, with V4.0.0 accessible to donors via Discord while the team finishes the public build. If you’ve got a Car Thing in a drawer, the installation guide at usenocturne.com is the next tab you should open.

The post Nocturne’s Free App Turns Your Bricked Spotify Car Thing Into Something Better Than the Original first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Winhanced just made the Xbox app feel outdated on handheld gaming PCs, and I can’t believe how much smoother it is

✇Windows Central - News, Forums, Reviews, Help for Windows 10 and all things Microsoft.
Winhanced is quickly becoming one of the most interesting alternatives to the Xbox app on PC, combining Xbox, Steam, Epic, and GOG libraries into one controller-friendly experience built for handhelds and console-style gaming.

ASUS ROG Ally displaying Winhanced home screen with Steam, Game Pass, and Epic Games integration.

Xbox Ally X running Winhanced

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