Snapdragon's 5GHz chip, YouTube's new money rules & a $499 AI toothbrush

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit kicks off September 22, and the headline leak is a big one: what could be the world's first 5GHz smartphone chip. This year Qualcomm is splitting its flagship into two - the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and a new Gen 6 Pro, both built on TSMC's 2nm process. The Xiaomi 18 is tipped to launch on it first, with the Galaxy S27, OnePlus 16 and iQOO 16 close behind. The date is official; the 5GHz figure is still a leak, so it's worth judging on real phones rather than keynote slides.

YouTube has overhauled creator monetization for 2026. The Partner Program now splits into two tiers, so smaller channels unlock Super Thanks, Channel Memberships and Shopping earlier, while ad revenue still sits behind the classic 1,000-subscriber gate. Shorts now need 10 million qualified views every 90 days to keep earning ad and subscription revenue - miss it and payouts pause. Long-form keeps 55% of ad revenue, Shorts 45%. Discovery has also gone format-aware: Shorts mostly reach people who already watch Shorts, so if your audience prefers long-form, your Shorts may vanish from Search and Suggested. And AI or template-based videos on sensitive topics are no longer ad-eligible.

Chrome's address bar can search your own browser, not just the web. Type @ and you'll get shortcut buttons for @tabs, @bookmarks and @history - tap one, then type, to search just that place instantly without touching the mouse. Separately, type a site's name and press Tab, and Chrome lets you search inside that site directly, skipping its homepage. Together they turn the omnibox into a keyboard-only way to find that one open tab or bookmark you lost.

'Charging overnight kills your battery' is one of the stickiest tech myths going. In reality, modern phones stop pulling power once they hit 100%, and Optimized (or Adaptive) Charging deliberately holds the battery at around 80% overnight, topping up to full just before your usual wake time. The things that actually age a lithium battery are heat and repeatedly draining to 0%. So you can stop babysitting the charger: keep the phone cool, avoid running it flat, and turn on Optimized Charging.

Dyson has launched a $499 AI toothbrush, the CameraJet. It has a 100,000-pixel macro camera that captures 28 images a second while you brush, machine learning that spots the gaps where plaque forms and fires a precision water jet at them, and - of course - its own toothpaste and mouthrinse. The engineering is genuinely impressive. The harder question is whether any of it belongs on a task a $3 brush already handles well. It's a near-perfect test of the 'AI in everything' era: clever, yes, but is it actually worth it?