Honda Goes Big on Hydrogen; TikTok Mutes More Songs; Meta’s 1st True AR Glasses Out This Year; Battery & Attached Phone

Honda has announced a hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle for the US. It’s basically a 2025 CR-V, but with a crazy additional name…try saying Honda CR-V e:FCEV 3 times quickly. Theverge.com reports that the fuel cell electric vehicle will have an EPA range of 270 miles, including 29 miles of all-electric driving. The fuel cell is co-developed with General Motors, and built by the two companies’ Fuel Cell System Manufacturing venture in Michigan. No price as yet, but it will be available for lease in California later this year. It has 174 horses, and can be recharged on a normal wall outlet or a Level 2 charger. Honda had formerly sold the Clarity hydrogen car until 2017. 

TikTok continues to battle with Universal Music Group over royalties. Recently, UMG pulled some recordings it owns or distributes from TikTok including tracks from the likes of superstars Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd. The standoff is now impacting songs published by UMG, with millions more tracks expected to be muted on TikTok by the end of this week. According to Engadget.com, the tussle is over split copyrights. UMG has now removed some 3 million songs. Besides that, UMG’s deal with TikTok over its publishing catalog expires later this week…that could mean some 4 million songs will disappear from the platform. 

Meta is aiming to unveil its first “true” augmented reality glasses this fall at the company’s Connect event for third-party developers. ZDnet.com reports that the glasses aren’t related to the Ray Ban/Meta glasses from 2019. They are coming out of Meta’s Reality Labs, which is the division that oversees all of the social media giant’s augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence projects. CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo on Threads earlier this month, and from that it appears that they have built several prototypes. The upcoming glasses are expected to include spatial computing like Apple’s Vision Pro. If they can bring them out at a lot lower price point than Apple’s, Meta may really open up a wide market for AR glasses. 

If you are always worrying about running your smartphone battery down, this may be just the deal for you. It’s the Energizer Hard Case P28K. Arstechnica.com notes that it is nearly a battery pack with attached phone. The handset has a 28,000 mAh battery, so you won’t run out of juice soon, but it thicker than 3 iPhones! The handset is made by Avenir Telecom. Honestly, it is described as being just a budget phone, so if you are anywhere near a power user, it won’t be for you. On the other hand, it can go 5 days on a charge. If you want one, it drops in October for $273.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.