New TiVo BOLT+ Now Includes 6 Tuners and 3TB Storage

On Monday TiVo announced their BOLT+ DVR, enhancing the company’s flagship line with a sleek, black unit that includes six tuners and 3TB of recording capacity. Six tuners may seem like a lot until you think about how the current TiVo paradigm works: you have the BOLT+ (or BOLT, or 4+ tuner Roamio) on one TV connected to cable, then you have TiVo Minis at all your other TVs. You only pay a subscription fee for your main device, and each of the Minis can stream live or recorded shows from the host. The trick is, each active Mini occupies one tuner of the host device when in use. Six tuners begins to make a lot of sense if you have even 2 or 3 TVs in action at any one point in time. TiVo is really the only company who is properly addressing the whole-house media viewing solution this way, and it truly makes life a lot simpler. TIVo’s new BOLT+ is priced at $499.99 and will be available online and at brick-and-mortar retail on Thursday, September 15th.

iOS 10 GM Adds "Announce Calls" Feature

Rolled out to to developers last week, the iOS 10 Golden Master release (Version 10.0.1 14A403) includes a new Announce Calls feature in Settings > Phone. When enabled, your phone will begin ringing as usual and then your ringtone’s volume will duck down while Siri announces the name or number of the caller. You have the option to set this to Always, Headphones & Car, Headphones Only or Never. If set to Always, it will announce through your iPhone’s speaker only when the Ring/Silent switch is in Ring mode. iOS 10 will be available for all users tomorrow, Tuesday, September 13th.

Hands-On with iPhone 7 Home Button: Disappointing Haptic Feedback, Increased Functionality

Apple had two major changes in iPhone 7 beyond incremental improvements. The first is the much-talked about lack of an auxiliary port for headphones, but the other will effect the way we do things far longer than the transition to Lightning audio. That’s moving from a physical Home Button to a touch-sensitive, stationary Home Button. Here’s what Bryan Chaffin thought about it during his hands-on session at Apple’s media event.