However, rendered here in Motorola’s Watch app, everything looks fun and easy! Motorola (and Polar, I guess) uses Apple’s “close your rings” approach, with active minutes, steps, and calories. I particularly like that you can now use Polar’s sleep tracking with a cheaper Android watch. Polar takes into account sleep time, solidity (whether or not your sleep was interrupted), and regeneration to give you a Nightly Recharge Status.

You can still click through and see your ANS, but there’s a lot more context surrounding it. Also, the graphs are prettier. I compared the sleep, heart rate, and stress measurements to my Oura Ring 4, and I found no big discrepancies. The Moto Watch tended to be a little bit more generous in my sleep and activity measurements (7 hours and 21 minutes of sleep instead of 7 hours and 13 minutes, or 3,807 steps as compared to 3,209), but that’s usual for lower-end fitness trackers that have fewer and less-sensitive sensors.

On that note, I do have one major hardware gripe. Onboard GPS is meant to make it easier to just run out the door and start your watch. I didn’t find this to be the case. Whatever processor is in the watch (Motorola has conveniently chosen not to reveal this), it’s just really slow to connect to satellites and iffy whenever it does. This isn’t a huge deal when I’m just walking my dog or lifting weights in my living room, but it constantly cuts out when I’m outside and doesn’t have the ability to fill in the blanks, as another, more expensive fitness tracker would do.

It’s just really annoying to constantly get pinged about satellite loss and to have a quarter-mile or a half-mile cut out of your runs. That’s how I know the speaker works—it was constantly telling me it lost satellite connection during activities.

Finally, the screen and buttons are really sensitive. It does give you an option to lock the screen, but even then, I found myself accidentally unlocking it from time to time and turning the recording off when I didn’t mean to.

As I write this, I have seven different smartwatches from different brands sitting on my desk. If you’re looking for a cheap, attractive, and effective Android-compatible smartwatch, I would say that the CMF Watch 3 Pro is your best choice. However, I do think the integration with Polar was well done, and the price point is not that bad. I’m definitely keeping an eye out for what Motorola might have to offer in the future.

An insurrectionist robot unleashed by a mad inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. HAL 9000 sabotaging a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet, the self-aware global defense network that seeks to exterminate humanity throughout the Terminator franchise.

Hollywood has never wanted for audacious depictions of artificial intelligence or the ways in which it could alter the fate of our species. But the rapid integration of AI into the studio system and our now unavoidable interactions with it have severely compromised the genre, not to mention film as a medium.

On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable that screenwriters and studios would return to the subject of AI in recent years, particularly since it provokes such fierce debate within the industry. (A major cause of the 2023 labor strikes was the threat that AI posed to creative jobs.) Still, the novelty faded fast.

Consider M3GAN, a campy horror flick about an artificially intelligent doll who starts killing people, released just a week after the debut of ChatGPT in 2022: It was a surprise box-office smash. Last year’s sequel? A critical and commercial flop. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning (2023) introduced a rogue AI called The Entity as a final adversary for Ethan Hunt and crew. The resolution of its cliff-hanger ending and blockbuster finale for the spy saga, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025), underperformed its predecessor, and neither quite justified their expense.

The latest AI-themed bomb is Mercy, a crime thriller starring Chris Pratt as an LAPD detective strapped into a chair who has 90 minutes to pull enough evidence from security cameras and phone records to convince a stern judge bot (Rebecca Ferguson) that he didn’t kill his wife—or else face instant execution. Despite releasing in January, one reviewer has already declared it “the worst movie of 2026,” and judging by its mediocre ticket sales, many US moviegoers decided as much from the trailer alone. It’s almost as if nobody cared whether a fictional software program might be capable of sparing a life when real health insurance claims are being denied by algorithms already.

For those few who did see it, Mercy fell far short of its dystopian premise, failing to grapple with the ethics of such a surveillance state and its medieval-modern justice system in favor of cheap relativism. Spoiler: Pratt’s character and the AI ultimately team up to stop the real bad guys as the bot begins to show signs of unrobotic emotion and doubt, which manifest as glitches in the program. By the end, Pratt is delivering a true groaner of a we’re-not-so-different speech to the holographic Ferguson. “Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” he says. “And we learn.”

While the naive belief in AI’s progress toward enlightenment feels dated on arrival, you are also reminded of how prophetically cynical something like Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, now almost 40 years old, was in addressing a future of cybernetic fascism. Contrary to that kind of pitch-black, violent satire, the current trend seems to be propagandistic narratives about how AIs are scary at first but secretly good. (See also: Tron: Ares, Disney’s wildly misguided attempt to leverage an old IP for the era of large language models, another cinematic train wreck of 2025.)

In fact, the insistence on some inborn value or honor to artificial intelligence may be the driving force behind the new Time Studios web series On This Day…1776. Conceived as a blow-by-blow account of the year the American colonies declared independence from the British crown, it consists of short YouTube videos generated in part by Google DeepMind (though actual actors supply voiceovers). The project has drawn serious attention and scorn because acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky served as executive producer via his creative studio Primordial Soup, launched last year in a partnership with Google to explore the applications of AI in filmmaking. It probably doesn’t help that Aronofsky and company are valorizing the country’s founders in the same aesthetic that has defined the authoritarian meme culture of Donald Trump’s second term.

Maxhub has unveiled a series of products focusing on sustainability and ecosystem integration to position its portfolio not as merely screens, but as true unified collaboration systems. In this way, it is seeking to raise the bar in an enterprise media sector where firms are increasingly looking to deploy systems that offer broadcast-quality production capabilities but without prohibitive costs and complexity.

In addition to new products spanning cameras, video bars, collaboration tools, consoles and digital signage, the provider of integrated commercial displays and unified communications announced further collaborations with Microsoft and NDI to create enhanced multimedia experiences in existing and potentially new audiovisual (AV) use cases through IP.

Maxhub is in the midst of a European expansion strategy that started when it established an office in the Netherlands in 2022 and a product warehouse at the beginning of 2023. In the same year, it defined its channel strategy, and a year later, it embarked on its first partnership with Microsoft on a global level. In 2024, the company introduced a collaboration meeting board to the European market, and in 2025, it launched devices compatible with Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR).

Deployment options include traditional setups using Windows Collaboration Board AIO and Windows Bar AIO. Other configurations include an Express Instal based on an XBar V50 kit and Signature Room and Coordinated Meeting spaces. The latter are based on devices from the company’s Xcore Kit Pro+ range and an MTR Collaboration Board.

Explaining the company’s European setup to Computer Weekly at ISE 2026, Maxhub Europe director Kevin Wang noted that it was important for the company to improve its regional customer support and user experience.

“That’s why we … have four RMA [return material authorisation] centres in different countries – the UK, Slovakia, Italy and France. We now have local teams in around 12 countries. In those countries, we are able to provide local support from sales, pre-sales, as well as other services to the channels and end users. We also have dedicated service centres in the UK, Italy, France and Slovakia.”

The primary focus of the launch portfolio is the Videobar XBar Series, an all-in-one collaboration solution for Microsoft Teams Rooms. The new XBar W70 Kit is claimed to be the first and only Windows-based Teams Rooms video bar with a 200-megapixel quad-sight lens and a 16 MEMS microphone array. It combines four cameras and a Windows-powered system in a single device. It supports three-in-one installation options to make it suitable for meeting rooms of different sizes.

Assessing how the product will be deployed, Wang said a key aim was to simplify the complexity of older product solutions, hence the adoption and preference for an open platform ecosystem. “[Technologically], Videobar X series is a complicated solution. But for the end users, it’s quite easy to use”

Another part of the evolution of the company and its product line is a move away from traditional HDMI cable-based technology to more efficient infrastructures. Specifically, that is adopting technology that is compatible with the NDI Display standard and part of a local area network (LAN) to boost scalability and maintenance in enterprise environments. 

At ISE, Maxhub also highlighted the Digital Signage CMB Series, the world’s first NDI-certified smart display. The CMB Series is purpose-built for business and optimised for MTRs, which, when activated, the display illuminates. Once a meeting concludes, it subsequently deactivates.

Wang outlined the clear benefits of avoiding the “mess” of traditional cabling. “When you step into a meeting room and try to share content on a big screen, probably the first step is to find an HDMI cable or an adapter for the HDMI cable. So it’s a mess at that time, because you just have minutes to join the meeting, and maybe one of your key customers is waiting in the lobby of the video conference. You cannot waste time. The [aim] is to try to solve this problem. We would like to cooperate with leading providers in our industry to build an open ecosystem to bring this kind of high-efficiency solution to end users. With NDI, you don’t need the cable, you just click to connect to the network.”

In addition to being more cost-effective, Wang said this new approach also lends itself to a more secure, managed collaborative environment. He remarked that the partnership with Microsoft made network offerings intrinsically more secure.

Also boosting management is the Pivot+, a web-based platform designed to make device and system management simpler, more efficient and “safer”. Pivot+ provides centralised control of Maxhub devices across up to eight organisational levels. It supports zero-touch deployment, AI-powered alerts and intelligent event detection to ensure optimal performance and minimise downtime.

The zero-touch deployment capabilities allow devices to be automatically grouped post-enrolment, with central management also allowing remote batch control. In addition to multi-device screen control, the system offers multiple ways to update firmware and anomaly incident features encompassing detection, alerts and resolution.

One of the key stated goals of Maxhub is “unlocking the full potential” of Microsoft Teams in any workspace. To this end, Maxhub is additionally partnering with Microsoft to launch The Co-Create 100 coalition to provide 100 fully equipped MTRs to selected users. The aim is to offer measurable productivity or operational improvements that enterprises expect from modern Teams-enabled meeting environments. The scheme will also see Maxhub collaborate with global companies to share success stories and demonstrate how MTR enhances efficiency and creates competitive advantages.

Wang explained some of the benefits of this: “[Even] nowadays, many people don’t know the latest technology in our industry. With this Co-Create 100 programme, we would like to promote our product or tell a lot of people that they can have the opportunity to get some devices or upgrade their facilities. So with that opportunity, they will know how to improve their internal communications and collaboration efficiency.”

The launches at ISE included a touch console for Surface Hub and XBoard, the Maxhub Universal Console. Maxhub’s European business development manager, Mikkel Frederiksen, said: “The Universal Console delivers three things: connect, control and convenience.”

Maxhub also unveiled the XBoard 92 device, which is said to be the first 21:9 collaboration board to achieve MTR certification.