Table of contents for Christmas 2021 in Tech Advisor

Price: Review unit $2,699 (around £1,980) Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio feels like a glimpse of the future. Microsoft’s new pull-forward design arguably improves upon the Surface Book 3, its spiritual predecessor, offering you a light menu of gaming, content creation, and everyday computing capabilities to choose from. Tell us if you’ve heard this before, though: the Surface Laptop Studio doesn’t come cheap, and its excellent new inking capabilities require the separate purchase of a £120 Slim Pen 2. You can opt for Windows 11 to power this new 2-in-1 PC, though the new hardware, software, and drivers may make this a bit of a bumpy road to begin with. You’ll also have to decide whether this arguably niche device is worth the investment, versus general-purpose notebooks that may offer more…

Price: Free upgrade from Windows 10 Windows 11 doesn’t convincingly answer the question every PC user should ask: why do I need this upgrade? The new operating system repurposes some of Microsoft’s cancelled Windows 10X code, but lacks the unified vision that 10X promised. In some ways, Windows 11 feels very much like a product of 2020. Last year, we often felt we had to do something, and for some very good reasons, but without a real sense of the way ahead. And so goes Windows 11. Aesthetically, Microsoft’s OS sacrifices productivity for personality, but without cohesion. A new Start menu seems designed for enterprises. A hyperactive Widgets app pushes celebrity gossip. Teams Chat asks you to reorganize your social circles around Microsoft. Yes, you’ll find things within Windows 11 worth…

Those stringent hardware requirements for Windows 11? Forget about it. At least that’s what Microsoft seems to saying by releasing an official bypass for its new operating system. Microsoft recommends only installing Windows 11 after its PC Health Check check gives your system a pass, and that requires it to support TPM 2.0 and a strict list of compatible processors. But if your PC doesn’t meet the criteria, Microsoft has identified two ways to bypass some of those hard checks – though you may not be entitled to Windows updates if you do so, including critical security updates. Tread with caution, especially since we recommend most people skip Windows 11 for now anyway. The first method applies to upgrades from Windows 10. You’ll first need to make sure you have…

Price: £949 from fave.co/3040j5x Let’s get this out of the way: the Galaxy Z Flip3 is not a perfect phone (because there’s no such thing). But it’s a phone that absolutely nails what it sets out to: provide a premium-feeling folding phone that looks fantastic, feels great to use, and doesn’t cost the Earth. The perfect version of this phone would probably have slightly better cameras – but then it would cost a few hundred more. Or maybe it would have longer battery life – but in that case it wouldn’t be half so compact. Samsung made the right compromises, and the result is not only a foldable that can stand toe-to-toe with its slab phone rivals, but is comfortably the most exciting phone this year. DESIGN Last year’s Galaxy…

Price: £999 from fave.co/3awqGDd Microsoft’s Surface Pro 8 tablet arrives as Windows 11 goes out the door. Microsoft has already shipped one tablet this year, the Surface Pro 7+, which rose to the top of our round-up of the best Windows tablets of 2021. Can the Surface Pro 8 improve upon it? Yes and no. The Surface Pro 8 boldly strides forward with a larger, higher resolution, faster screen, a revamped inking experience spearheaded by the optional Surface Slim Pen 2, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports that supplement the legacy Surface Connect charger. It’s a dramatic reworking of the iconic Surface Pro tablet line, and that’s enough to grab your attention. If only we could leave it here. Put simply, we can’t be entirely certain how well the Surface…

Windows 11 has finally been released to the public, and you can download it right away. Here’s how. Downloading the official final version of Windows 11 is very much like downloading the original Windows 11 beta, but there’s an additional tool that Microsoft has added to facilitate the process. In fact, there are four ways to download Windows 11, each with their own unique advantages. We’ll show you all four, after explaining what you should know before upgrading first. WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO DOWNLOAD WINDOWS 11 Before you begin downloading Windows 11, make sure you have the right PC hardware. While we don’t think there’s much risk to downloading and installing Windows 11, there’s always the risk that something will go wrong. Take a moment and back up critical files…

Windows 11 introduces a new, centred Taskbar, complete with icons that are grouped in the centre of your screen, rather than the familiar left-hand corner – a key complaint in our Windows 11 review. That includes the Start menu button. If this feels weird, here’s how to move your Start menu and Taskbar icons back to where they were in the days of Windows 10. Why put the Start menu back in the left corner? Muscle memory. By now, you’re probably used to the familiar way of dragging your mouse cursor down to the left-hand corner and clicking the Start menu icon to launch an application. With the Windows 11 layout, you can’t unconsciously do this. In fact, as more icons add themselves to your Windows 11 Taskbar, the Start…

Price: £399 from fave.co/3FCToAA Since Sony revamped and simplified its smartphone line-up two years ago, the company has prioritized quality over quantity. Indeed, we’ve only seen three new Sony phones in 2021, excluding the Japan-exclusive Xperia 10 III Lite. The regular Xperia 10 III is the cheapest of the trio getting a global launch, although that still doesn’t extend to the US. There’s also been a significant delay between announcement and release, albeit not on the same level as the more expensive Xperia 1 III and Xperia 5 III. Was it worth the wait? I spent a few weeks with the device to find out. DESIGN Unless you’re familiar with Sony phones, the Xperia 10 III will take some getting used to. Its tall, narrow body and 21:9 aspect ratio…

Microsoft’s original Surface Duo folding phone designed in some serious flaws. The Surface Duo 2, to its credit, appears to have at least addressed them. When Microsoft launched the Surface Duo folding phone a year ago, Microsoft executives preceded it with a gauzy veil of hype that concealed the many flaws reviewers noted: a poor camera, a lack of NFC and 5G, a subsequently poor track record of patches and updates, and an interface whose bugs made the dualscreen interface painful to use. Microsoft’s Surface Duo 2 is available for preorder for £1,349 on up, with shipments starting 30 November. That’s about the same price as Microsoft’s earlier Surface Duo. Can the new phone fix the flaws of the first? On paper, it takes a good first step. For one,…

Windows 11 is here, and while we recommend most people stick to Windows 10 for now, the allure of hot new Windows 11 features like AutoHDR in games and enhanced Snap functionality might be too tempting to pass up. If you want to upgrade your PC to Windows 11, this checklist can help ensure success. This checklist applies to both in-place upgrades and clean installs of Windows 11. An in-place upgrade lets you move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without wiping your applications and files, while a clean install starts you with a fresh copy of Windows that needs to have applications installed. For clean installs, you have to restore your files from a backup to have access to them again. 1. CONFIRM YOUR HARDWARE MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS You…

If you’re wondering how to increase the performance of your Windows 11 PC, you may already know one way: Use the Windows 10 power-performance slider. But in Windows 11, Microsoft has hidden it in a new location. We’ll show you where. Microsoft offers you an easy way to boost performance in Windows 10. On the Windows taskbar, clicking the battery icon opens what we know as the power slider, where you can trade lower performance for extended battery life. Naturally, this feature is common on laptops, less so on desktops. But it does make a difference. Microsoft, for example, dials down the performance slider on its devices to their most minimal settings, preserving battery life at the cost of performance. On Surface devices like the Surface Laptop 4 and the…

If you’ve read anything about technology in the past few years, you may have seen the term ‘encryption’ floating around. It’s a simple concept, but the realities of its use are enormously complicated. If you need a quick 101 on what encryption is and how it’s used on modern devices, you’ve come to the right place. But first, we have to start at the beginning. THE BASICS OF CRYPTOGRAPHY At its most basic level, encryption is a way to mask information so that it can’t be immediately accessed. Encryption has been used for thousands of years, long before the rise of the information age, to protect sensitive or valuable knowledge. The use and study of encryption, codes, and other means of protecting or hiding information is called cryptography. The most…