News written by Petteri Pyyny (October, 2025)

Robotic vacuum development has been interesting to follow over the past few years. The leap in progress began around 2018, when tighter competition between Chinese manufacturers and long-time market leader iRobot started producing real innovations.

First came self-emptying dustbins. Then smarter maps, rotating mop plates, self-cleaning mops, obstacle avoidance, and more recently the ability to climb over thresholds.

So in that context, the new model from the industry giant Roborock feels in many ways a logical continuation of the ongoing development.

We got our hands on the spring 2025 release, the Roborock Saros Z70 robot vacuum, whose most unusual characteristic is the built-in arm.

Yes. An arm.

The robo uses its emerging hand as a cleaning aid - essentially to move forgotten socks and toys out of the way of the cleaning path.

But is the Roborock actually a good vacuum - or a jaw-dropping tech demo? We subjected the Saros Z70 to our usual multi-month test, where the robot was tasked with cleaning a very ordinary Nordic home for about three months. During that time it was the only floor-cleaning tool in the residence.

So let's see how the Saros Z70 ultimately fared...

TiVo was once a synonumous for digital recording of linear television programs, especially in the United States.

But times have changed, as streaming services have become a commonplace and virtually all traditional TV broadcasters have started offering their shows through one of the many streaming providers.

According to Cord Cutters, TiVo has removed all its hardware from its website - even all references to such devices.

TiVo's fortunes have dwindled as cable TV subscriber figures have dropped across the United States. Company's final physical device was TiVo Edge, launched back in 2021 that merged streaming services and live TV recording into one device.

Virtually all modern TVs have some sort of app support built-in with them, so, external device like TiVo apparently seemed like a hassle for most potential consumers.

And that is also the very route TiVo, as a company, is taking, as it focuses on selling its own operating system for TV manufacturers. The very same OS was at the core of the company's own hardware products, too. Company has made such deals already with HiSense and TCL in the U.S.

This week, the world of activity tracking was rocked by major news. The American company Strava, arguably the most famous sports app developer globally, has sued American sports watch maker Garmin.

Strava accuses (paywall) Garmin of violating its patents and is demanding that the court immediately block sales of all Garmin-made smartwatches as well as devices like bike computers.

At the heart of the dispute are two of Strava's software patents.

One concerns route sections, or segments, while the other covers so-called heatmaps.

Segments are a highly popular feature among Strava users, where, for instance, a specific stretch of a park becomes its own "section." In Strava, you can automatically track how well you performed on that stretch compared to others who have run along the same route.

Surprisingly, Garmin has had a similar feature in its Connect app since 2014 - though its implementation was so confusing that it was rarely used. Instead, Strava and Garmin later jointly developed the segment feature now found in Strava, launching it a year later.