Tech Advisorの April 2022 の目次

Nvidia’s proposed purchase of Arm for an estimated $40 billion in cash and stock was expected to have a difficult time winning the approval of regulators. It could not, and the two companies have called off the agreement. Nvidia and Softbank, which owns Arm, said that the proposed deal had been terminated. Softbank will keep a $1.25bn prepayment, but will instead divest of Arm via a public offering rather than an outright sale. That IPO will take place sometime before Softbank’s fiscal year ends on 31 March 2023. “The parties agreed to terminate the Agreement because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite good faith efforts by the parties,” the two companies said in a statement. The proposed agreement became much more challenging when the Federal…

The Galaxy S22 series is Samsung’s latest set of flagship smartphones, with three new models that sit at the top of the company’s non-foldable phone line-up. While the Galaxy S22 and S22+ are pretty much business as usual – which is no bad thing, to be fair – the S22 Ultra is a bit more radical, with a new design (and features) that are heavily inspired by Samsung’s now-defunct Galaxy Note line. With pre-orders for the three phones now live, here’s everything you need to know about every Galaxy S22 model. AVAILABILITY The S22 series is available to pre-order now and goes on sale on 11 March. PRICE While many had expected Samsung to raise prices for the phones this year, for the most part the prices of the S22…

Were you hoping that Intel would sell the new 12th-gen Core ‘Alder Lake’ desktop chips with only performance cores? If so, you’ve got your wish… sort of. Intel recently answered some of the questions surrounding its ‘Alder Lake’ 12th-gen desktop Core chips, unveiling the remaining 22 processors, the supporting chipsets, and even the coolers that will chill the chips. Intel also unexpectedly launched the 12th-gen ‘KS’ processor, which will run at up to 5.5GHz. Intel may have launched its 12th-gen desktop Core CPUs in October, but it did so with just a minimal offering, only three processors or six if you count additional ‘F’ versions with a disabled integrated GPU. Now, Intel has added 13 mainstream 12th-gen Core processors at CES 2022, with 65-watt offerings ranging from a Core i9…

When it comes to computer security, one must remain ever vigilant. If you need a refresher on that lesson, HP’s Threat Research department is ready to give you one today. Researchers spotted an incredibly convincing fake website, purporting to offer Windows 11 upgrades straight from Microsoft. Instead it served up a heaping helping of malware. The scam is pretty impressive. The operators of ‘windows-upgraded.com’ (now decommissioned) copied Microsoft’s presentation and style perfectly, with a big friendly ‘download now’ button for all those interested in an upgrade or clean install. What duped users actually got was a 1.5MB ZIP file containing ‘Windows11InstallationAssistant.exe’, which downloads a DLL disguised as a JPEG file. The end result is the installation of the well-known RedLine Stealer malware suite, dedicated to swiping usernames, passwords, credit card…

Price: £349 from fave.co/3sByhsJ The Galaxy Book Go is a lightweight, affordable laptop from Samsung that’s powered by a Qualcomm chip – instead of Intel – and offers the option of 4G connectivity. On paper that sounds great, but in practice this laptop is abominably slow, with Windows still refusing to play nicely with Qualcomm’s Arm architecture. The result is a laptop that’s difficult to recommend, and undeniably outclassed by most Chromebooks at the same price. DESIGN While I have my complaints about the Galaxy Book Go’s performance, I can’t really fault the way it looks. Only available in silver, this is a pretty sleek and attractive laptop for the price. Samsung has kept it slim (just 14.9mm thick) and relatively light (only 1.38kg), which is impressive bearing in mind…

Price: £179 from fave.co/3HuamBf Xiaomi has quietly become a force to be reckoned with in every price bracket, and the Redmi 10 sees it offering a solid mid-range phone at an impressively budget price. It’s a good-looking phone, too, offering a glossy finish that feels more premium than most phones costing under £179. It’s got a fingerprint sensor in the wake button, an almost all-screen front, and it performs admirably given its components. Sadly, though, its 90Hz screen uses LCD technology, making it feel more than a little hamstrung compared to phones that are using more modern OLED technology. Still, for the price, it’s hard to argue. DESIGN Despite that low asking price, there’s no denying that the Xiaomi Redmi 10 looks, and feels, great. Thanks to a matte finish…

While the chip shortage continues, graphics cards and CPUs are hard to find and wickedly expensive on the secondary market. Newfangled DDR5 RAM is hard to find, and even motherboards are getting pricey. But the one component that’s remained refreshingly cheap is storage: You can find multi-terabyte drives at their lowest prices ever, even for the best SSDs. Or at least, you could. A factory accident has tainted millions of new flash storage components, affecting billions of gigabytes of storage headed to the market. Two flash fabrication factories in Japan, used by Western Digital and Kioxia, have experienced ‘contamination of certain material used in [the] manufacturing process’. While details are scarce on precisely what happened, it’s reportedly taken out ‘at least 6.5 exabytes’ of flash capacity – roughly 6.5 million…

Not long ago, it felt like Samsung was the only Android tablet maker worth talking about. Such was the iPad’s dominance, few other phone companies dared make slates of their own. Unless you wanted a Surface tablet running Windows, picking up a Galaxy Tab was your main alternative to Apple. But that’s changed significantly in the past year or so. Competitive slates from the likes of Xiaomi, Realme and Nokia have all come to market – Samsung can no longer consider itself the default company for Android tablets. The company needed to respond, and it did so in style at its February 2022 Unpacked event. The Galaxy S22 Series might have been the star of the show (see page 4), but Samsung also revealed three new flagship tablets in the…

Intel’s Core i9-12900HK indeed fulfils the company’s proclamation of being the “The fastest mobile processor. Ever”, based on the results of our early, exclusive hands-on performance testing of several 12th generation laptops. Our colleagues at PCWorld recently took four nearly identical laptops outfitted with the Core i9-12900HK for a spin. While the four pre-production laptops aren’t quite final units, they are based on MSI’s GE76 Raider with final drivers, firmware and tuning still to come. The laptops were outfitted with the 14-core Core i9-12900HK CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU, 32GB of DDR5/4800 RAM and Windows 11. The updated GE76 remains the same externally as the previous-gen model, but there have been some upgrades to it, including a new MSI ‘phase-change liquid metal’ thermal pad that boosts the…

Microsoft’s cross-platform preview version of Windows Defender, known as Microsoft Defender Preview, is now live: an attractive way to protect your Android phone as well as your PC. If you just own a Windows 11 PC, there’s nothing that demands you download Microsoft’s new preview app. It’s quite different, however, if you own an Android phone in addition to your PC. We’d recommend that you try out this attractive, free utility that promises to watch over the files you download on your phone as well as the links you access. (Defender Preview will supposedly protect Macs, as well, though we haven’t tested or confirmed this.) There is a small catch, though: you’ll need a Microsoft account to use the Microsoft Defender Preview, and it will only protect a total of…

Price: £399 from fave.co/3LwiOTu Samsung pulled out of the laptop market in Europe a little while back, which was a shame as I often found their products to be very good. Now, the South Korean company is back in the UK with a brand new affordable Chromebook. So, is it a triumphant return? Read on to find out. DESIGN While the name might be a little too close to Google’s Pixelbook Go, the price and reduced specs show that Samsung isn’t quite taking aim at that particular model, but rather offering a simple and affordable Chromebook that should appeal to most people. The plastic casing means that the device is reasonably lightweight (coming in at 1.45kg), but you wouldn’t want to drop it too many times. Although, Samsung does state…

Android 12 is truly a tale of two different Android updates – at least, from a practical perspective. On the one hand, if you own a Pixel phone, Google’s latest and greatest software is easily the most significant Android release since 2014’s Android 5.0 Lollipop era. Android 12 introduces a whole new interface and design language that’s much more than just a fresh coat of paint. It reimagines Android’s identity and transforms practically every part of the operating system – extending even into an ever‑increasing number of third‑party apps. If you own a Samsung device, on the other hand, Android 12 probably doesn’t feel that earth-shattering. As is often the case, Samsung has omitted many of Google’s most meaningful design changes and skipped over some of the software’s core feature…

Historically, malicious Office macros have been the equivalent of email’s phishing attempts, launching malware at the click of a user’s mouse. Microsoft announced last month that it’s finally clamping down on this security vulnerability, blocking Visual Basic (VBA) macros by default. To date, Microsoft has warned users about the dangers of untrusted macros, but allowed users to download and run them by manually approving them. Now, untrusted macros will be blocked by default within Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word for any file downloaded from the Internet. The change will roll out to Microsoft’s Current Channel of these Microsoft 365 apps beginning in April, and applied later to the other update channels, too. “At a future date to be determined, we also plan to make this change to Office LTSC,…

As we’ve already seen, Samsung used its event to announce new phones and tablets. But that wasn’t all: the company also said it would provide longer software support, and that will apply not just to the new devices but also to 2021 flagship and foldable phones. The S22 and Tab S8 ranges will receive operating system updates for four years and security updates for five years. This is great news for buyers, as it means they can keep their devices for longer. What’s surprising is that this will also apply retrospectively to a large number of older Samsung phones: the Galaxy S21 range (S21, S21+, S21 Ultra and S21 FE), Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Galaxy Z Fold 3. No other smartphone maker offers software support for longer. Even Google’s…

The 5GHz war between AMD and Intel is back in full force if this year’s CES is any indication. As part of their ‘one more thing’ teases, both companies demonstrated desktop CPUs running at 5GHz or greater. AMD’s started the rap battle by demoing its next-gen Ryzen 7000 processor running the game Halo Infinite with all of the CPU cores reportedly at 5GHz or above. Which CPU model and how many cores wasn’t disclosed, but we’re assuming at least 8-cores or more cores for it to be impressive. Two hours later, Intel fired back with its own game demo of Hitman 3 being played on an upcoming 12th-gen Core i9 ‘KS’ chip, with every performance core running at 5.2GHz. While impressive, Intel doesn’t technically qualify for the ‘all-core boost’ prize…

Microsoft has revealed that it will soon be delivering its first real update to Windows 11 this month, including an improved taskbar and a taskbar weather widget. But how it delivers those new features to your PC won’t be immediately obvious. A recent blog post, however, provides some clues on what to expect. Windows 10 and 11 users are used to receiving notices about upcoming Windows feature updates, either within the Windows Update subsection of the Windows 10 Settings menu, or via a popup notification. Microsoft recently said Windows will be one big feature update per year going forward. But there are new, smaller ways in which Microsoft will be rolling out improvements to Windows outside of those milestone releases, too. In a blog post (fave.co/3JryiGt) explaining what’s next for…

Price: £549 from fave.co/3zkLEQW There’s no denying that Motorola finds itself in a fiercely competitive market. With brands such as Xiaomi, Realme, and OnePlus throwing down increasingly impressive specs at affordable prices, we’ve all come to expect our phones to do more, and our wallets less. So when it comes to Motorola’s latest 5G flagship, the Edge 20 Pro, the bar is high. While it may not be apparent thanks to Motorola’s ever-confusing naming conventions, the Edge 20 Pro is a direct successor to 2020’s Motorola Edge. There are, however, significant differences between the two phones. Motorola culls some features while boosting specs in other places, resulting in a handset that headlines with a 144Hz OLED display (with HDR10+), a 108Mp main camera and a 4,500mAh battery. DESIGN The 6.7in…

To say that Android tablets have been a let-down might be the understatement of the century. When you step back and think about it, the fact that Android tablets are such an under-emphasized afterthought is almost shocking. Android is the world’s most popular operating system, after all – by a pretty hefty margin. It’s easy to forget sometimes, but more humans carry Android-powered smartphones than any other type of device in the universe. And yet, for all of those advantages, Google has year after year failed to turn Android tablets into a compelling, sought-after type of technology that’s more than a mere blip on the mobiletech radar. It’s reached the point where I tell friends to stay away from Android tablets and consider Chromebooks instead, because unlike the typical Android…