Indice dei contenuti per April 2019 in Tech Advisor

For some, two of the best products Microsoft ever produced are Windows Mobile and Windows 7 – and support for both are ending in about 12 months’ time. Earlier this year, Microsoft reminded customers that official support for Windows 7 ends on 14 January 2020, even posting an official reminder page to encourage customers to hurry up and adopt Windows 10. Now is also the time for Windows phones to finally accept their fate: Windows 10 Mobile, version 1709, will lose support on 10 December 2019. At that time, Windows 10 Mobile users will no longer be eligible to receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft for free, the tech giant says. In other words, no new patches. Backups, at…

The PC’s been enjoying a resurgence over the past few years, and judging by what we witnessed at CES, the pedal will remain planted firmly to the metal in 2019. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia all hosted blockbuster keynotes brimming with big announcements. Monitors evolved beyond being simple 27in rectangles. Gaming laptops embraced innovation in wildly different ways. And there’s a lot of gear coming that’s just plain badass. These are the big CES hardware reveals and trends that PC enthusiasts need to know about. Buckle up, and be sure to hit those links if you want deeper details about any of these topics. 1. Nvidia Unsurprisingly, the company continued its real-time ray tracing push, bringing the technology to the masses by announcing mobile RTX GPUs that appeared in almost every…

Price: To be confirmed Release date: To be confirmed Asus further cemented its position as one of the premium hardware manufacturers at this year’s CES. If it’s taking gaming hardware in a new direction with the ROG Mothership (page 41) or cramming as much performance as possible into a tiny form with the ZenBook S13, Asus is fighting its corner vigorously. The S13 is a beautiful device. The almost bezel-less design makes it look extremely clean and tight, and the inclusion of the ‘reverse notch’ places the webcam where it doesn’t increase the size of the top bezel. In terms of the more interesting and innovative design choices we saw at CES, Asus certainly took more calculated risks and they’re paying off. Design When looking at the device for the…

Price: From $199 (around £150) Release date: To be confirmed As Google and Amazon began to introduce smart displays to the market, pretty much the first question anyone asked was: why not just use a tablet? It seems that Lenovo at least has taken the criticism to heart, using CES 2019 to unveil its two new Smart Tabs: Android tablets that boast Alexa support and are sold together with a speaker dock. Designed to offer the simplicity of the Echo Show or Google Home Hub – or Lenovo’s own Smart Display – while pairing it with the convenience and portability of a tablet, this seems like an obvious win, though it faces obvious competition in Amazon’s Fire tablets, which come with the option of a charging dock that accomplishes the…

If you didn’t buy the Global version of your new Xiaomi phone, you may now be regretting your purchase. It’s a great phone, yes, but if you don’t speak Chinese you may be struggling without the software. Fortunately it’s easy to add all the usual Google services with which you’re familiar. Note that we’ve installed Google Play on a Note 5A running MIUI 9.5. If you are running an older version of the OS you may not be able to install the necessary software, so it’s worth checking you’re running the latest version first. Update MIUI 8 • Open the Settings app. • Scroll down to and select ‘About phone’. • Tap the link at the bottom of the screen for ‘System updates’. • Follow the prompts to install any…

The battle over your wrist just got way more interesting. In January, Fossil announced that it was selling $40 million worth of its smartwatch technology to Google, giving the Wear OS purveyor a serious stake in the wearable hardware game. The deal may be a relatively small sum compared to the billions Google spent on Nest, but it could be just as important. For one, Fossil is one of the only companies consistently turning out new Wear OS watches that people actually want to buy. But even if this deal doesn’t result in a Pixel watch or Google-branded hardware at all, for the first time Google will have a wearable hardware team under its roof to help drive future design, navigation, and UI decisions. And most importantly, it means that…

Price: From $2,549 (around £1,975) Release date: To be confirmed Alienware has been a staple of the gaming market for almost two decades, setting trends in both design and engineering that other manufacturers attempt to follow. The Area-51m is big, beefy and incredibly powerful. It has specs to rival most high-end gaming desktops, but is still (just about) a laptop. The gaming laptop industry has been focusing on getting the most power into the smallest form factor possible for several years now. While this is an area of the market that does need to be addressed and served, Alienware is providing a product that offers desktop performance that consumers can pick up and walk around with. Design The Area-51m’s design sees a change from the traditional Alienware looks we’re familiar…

Price: $999 (around £800) Release date: Q1 2019 Huawei’s MateBook X and MateBook X Pro are some of the best-looking laptops on the market, but they each came with a few compromises – and hefty price tags. That’s all the more reason to be excited about the MateBook 13, which promises to bring the same style at a friendlier price. Announced at CES 2019, the MateBook 13 looks an awful lot like the X and X Pro – with a few compromises, to be fair – but shaves a few hundred off the price, turning it into a competitive rival to the likes of the MacBook Air or the new Dell XPS 13 and potentially one of the best laptops of 2019. Design If you’ve seen any of Huawei’s recent…

Price: £1,209 Release date: Available now from fave.co/2R3pZVO While the phone industry wrestles with notches, pinhole cameras, and full-screen displays, there’s another massive smartphone revolution waiting in the wings: flexible displays. Royole is one of the companies that’s developed the flexible screen tech itself, but is making its proper smartphone debut with its own device, the FlexPai. We tracked it down at CES 2019 to give it a bend ourselves and see what it’s like. Design So yeah, the Royole FlexPai folds. The full screen is a 7.8in AMOLED, essentially making this a proper tablet, but it’s made out of a flexible plastic that means you can fold it over to get something closer to the average smartphone size – albeit one with a display that then wraps round to…

Put aside all misconceptions that CES is a smart home show, a home entertainment show, or even a car stereo show. CES is a computer show, and we’ve got the battle scars to prove it. Our intrepid reporters immersed themselves in all the laptops, chips, components, accessories, and outright PC monstrosities they could find. Here are our favourites. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Nvidia groin-kicked cost-conscious gamers when it introduced its GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at far higher prices than their older counterparts. Even worse, there was no ray trace-ready option for mid-range gamers. Well, it appears Nvidia heard the howls of anger and decided to introduce the RTX 2060, the first card capable of hybrid ray tracing at an almost reasonable £329 from fave.co/2AYDD7m. Our…

Price: To be confirmed Release date: Q1 2019 Asus has been a name to watch in the high-performance gaming space for a while now, producing some of the best hardware that you can have on your desk or in your lap. The ROG Mothership continues this trend in force with a powerful spin on the 2-in-1 style form factor. If you’re having a hard time picturing this – think about a Microsoft Surface 2-in-1 that hits the local gym hard for its new year’s resolution, discovers the weights room and decides it wants to do nothing else. With specs that look remarkably similar to the Alienware Area-51m that we took a look at, the Mothership is certainly running in the same race, but does have a few obvious key differences.…

Price: $1,699 (around £1,300) Release date: To be confirmed The trend towards ‘smaller, thinner, faster’ continues as LG showed off its gram 17. This laptop is so light it’s almost hard to get your head around, but it doesn’t sacrifice power, speed or build quality for that lack of weight either. Design Weighing in at just 1.34kg this is the lightest 17in laptop currently on the market. The design is business as usual for the most part. It’s slick and stylish, with a decent-sized keyboard and trackpad. The whole thing is beautifully engineered and pleasing to look at and use. It won’t break any records when it comes to innovative aesthetic design, but to be fair LG isn’t trying to. The build quality is excellent here. It’s passed seven US…

What makes your house your home? Is it the furniture? The art? A few favourite collectibles arranged on the shelves? Your PC doesn’t have to be any different. If you’re new to Windows 10, we’ll show you how to personalize your PC to make it feel, well, yours. From the moment you first power on your PC, you’ll be asked to choose how to manage your privacy and security. But once you complete that short process, the fun begins: you’ll be able to select backgrounds, configure your Start menu, and select apps and shortcuts. Think of this story as a complement to our previous tutorial on how to set up your new PC efficiently and effectively. This is the fun stuff. The Windows 10 out of the box Experience Any…