Innehållsförteckning för December 2020 från Tech Advisor

Microsoft may announce support for emulating 64-bit Windows apps alongside a refresh of the Surface Pro X this autumn. Sources talking to Windows Central report that Microsoft plans a refreshed Surface Pro X using Microsoft’s SQ1 chip, a derivative of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 5G, itself the next iteration of the Snapdragon 8cx chip that powered notebooks like the Samsung Galaxy Book S. Microsoft’s version of the 8cx Gen 2 5G would reportedly be called the SQ2. The name for the new Surface Pro X is unknown, though ‘Surface Pro X 2’ is a possibility. Windows Central reports that the design will remain unchanged, but with a platinum colour option. Though the Surface Pro X was Microsoft’s attempt at modernizing the relatively fixed Surface Pro tablet design, it…

Nvidia agreed to purchase Arm for up to $40 billion in cash and stock, the companies announced in a statement last month. This mammoth deal in the chip industry is expected to bolster AI and GPU powerhouse Nvidia’s chip portfolio, even as it’s sure to attract antitrust attention in the smartphone market. Nvidia will pay Softbank, the company’s current owner, a total of $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion payable at signing. Nvidia will also issue $1.5 billion in equity to Arm employees. It may also pay Softbank up to $5 billion in cash or stock if Arm meets specific financial performance targets – bringing the final purchase price up to $40 billion, the largest chip deal ever. The deal has been approved…

Price: Free Microsoft’s Windows 10 October 2020 Update (20H2) update will usher the new Microsoft Edge browser onto millions of PCs, while upgrading the venerable Alt + Tab shortcut with a needed new function. But Microsoft’s designers have turned the once-colourful Start menu into watery gruel with a less-than-impressive visual update. All in all, the Windows 10 October 2020 Update is another in a line of anaemic autumn feature updates. And that’s okay. We expected this. For the past two to three years, Microsoft’s major feature updates have coalesced within the ‘spring’ releases, leaving mainly minor patches and quality updates for the autumn release. This year is no different, though the small list of changes do allow for some interesting tweaks to your Windows 10 PC. Microsoft said in late…

Price: £129 from fave.co/2EqWpcN Honor is back with yet another budget smartphone, this time with the Honor 9A. The successor to the Honor 8A comes with some great plus points like long battery life and a decent camera for macro shots, but you’ll have to go without Google Mobile Services. I spent some time with this phone to see how it holds up in everyday life. Keep on reading to find out whether the Honor 9A is the budget phone for you. DESIGN At a weight of 185g and 9mm thick, it’s on the bigger side of smartphones, but that’s quite in keeping with Honor as a brand. It won’t fit in smaller pockets and you can’t use it one-handed with ease, but the larger screen makes it a good…

If you’re the kind of person who looks at the milk carton expiration date or squeezes the bread before you buy it, then you’ll want to buy a Chromebook with a long life ahead of it. Google publishes expiration dates for Chromebooks on its support site (see fave.co/3kEnrN6). But rather than drill down into each Chrome OS device maker’s page to find out if just one particular Chomebook was expiring, we compiled a list of every single device and then sorted it by expiration date. We found 51 expired devices, another 35 with just one year left of support. Another 29 had two years of ‘life’ left and another 13 with less than three years. Frankly, that’s a lot of Chromebooks you could potentially purchase that will no longer get…

Intel promised ”dramatic” clock-speed increases in its 11th-gen ‘Tiger Lake’ Intel Core CPU. It delivered. In August, Intel surprised us by promising that its new SuperFIN transistor would push Tiger Lake to a greater-than-generational improvement in CPU performance. While that claim will have to wait for actual testing, the numbers help bolster its case: the base clock speed of the top four-core, eight-thread Core i7-1185G7 reaches 3GHz – far above that of Intel’s flagship 10th-gen Ice Lake chips – with single-core turbo speeds hitting 4.8GHz. All told, Intel is launching nine new Tiger Lake processors for notebooks, five of which include the new Xe integrated graphics core. More than 150 designs based on the new 11th-gen Intel Core processors are expected from partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo,…

PlayStation fan boys like to say the Xbox doesn’t have enough exclusive games. Well, now the Xbox will have games. Last month, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, the publisher behind iconic gaming franchises such as Doom, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Quake, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, Prey, and more, for $7.5 billion. That’s a heck of a birthday present for the Xbox Series X, the next-gen console that lands on 10 November. Pre-orders for the Xbox Series X open tomorrow. It will probably put your PC to shame. While PlayStation enthusiasts should be worried about the future of those franchises on their console of choice, PC faithful shouldn’t sweat the acquisition. Microsoft has doubled down on PC support in recent years: bringing all its first-party games to…

Price: £2,052 from fave.co/2ZYuYyj The Dell Latitude 9510 2-in-1 is a business laptop that just won’t quit. Seriously: With nearly a full 24 hours of battery life, it just keeps going and going. Intel and Dell engineers architected the Latitude 9510 as a ‘Project Athena’ laptop, optimized for responsiveness and battery life. It certainly ticks those boxes. Dell bills the Latitude 9510 as a productivity machine, but you probably don’t know what our review units are loudly telling us: the audio subsystem is also among the best there is. BASIC SPECS Dell ships its Latitude 9510 in either clamshell or 2-in-1 form factors; we received the latter option. The differences between the two are slight. The 2-in-1’s display includes an anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating, with active pen support, and it…

Price: £34.99 from fave.co/3iV7mCi Don’t call it Bitdefender 2021, but the popular Windows antivirus suite has added several new features over the past year. The company is now going with a rolling release plan, where new features are released as they’re ready. This is becoming common as many services prefer the approach of continually updating apps instead of a single yearly release. Bitdefender Total Security’s main changes, the company told us, is that it has improved its vulnerability scanning, and in our opinion the overall look of the scan results are easier to read. At a glance you can see issues with operating system updates, the strength of Windows account passwords, the security of the browser and other applications, network issues, and more. The company also changed its VPN to…

The new Intel Evo sticker you’ll see on laptops this autumn is Intel’s answer to the question, “So what this makes this laptop PC so special, anyway?” Ever since the company launched its Project Athena premium thin-and-light PC programme 18 months ago, Intel and its partners have struggled to communicate what makes their collaboratively designed notebooks better than the rest. Evo is its new signal. In what Intel is informally calling the “Project Athena Second Edition,” Intel told our colleagues at PCWorld how it is prioritizing its new Intel Evo brand as a badge to identify these premium ultrabooks, while redefining what they stand for: cloud-and browser-based work. Intel launched the new Evo brand alongside the formal, final unveiling of its 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors (see page 6). The second…

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Intel’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake is perhaps the most important laptop CPU launch for the company. While previous generations suffered no real competition from AMD, Tiger Lake enters the ring facing a legitimate foe: Ryzen 4000. Today, however, is all about whether Intel’s new 11th-gen 10nm Tiger Lake chip and its SuperFin transistors and Iris Xe graphics have what it takes to keep AMD at bay. Intel gave us the opportunity to take an 11th-gen Tiger Lake reference laptop (a sample design, not a retail product) for a spin. Keep reading to see how it fares. A PREVIEW WITH CONDITIONS For this performance preview, Intel loaned us the laptop with a few strings attached. We say few, because there were a couple more…

Price: £289 from fave.co/3lhVHPo The stylus used to be one of the defining features of ‘smart devices’, back in the age of the PalmPilot and its reign more or less continued until Steve Jobs famously berated the peripheral while introducing the touch-driven original iPhone in 2007 – changing attitudes towards smartphone interaction, forever. Of course, since then Apple’s – and the wider mobile industry’s – opinion of the stylus has softened, to the point that it’s been able to enjoy something of a renaissance. While today’s stylus-toting stars are namely Samsung’s Galaxy Note range and the pairing of iPad and Apple Pencil, there’s definitely room for more players in the space, especially at more affordable climbs; a region that Motorola is exploring with the Moto G Pro. WHAT’S MEANT BY…

Not everyone needs a computer with a full set of bells and whistles. A Chromebook’s simplified interface makes it popular with schools – and those of us who serve as IT support for less tech-savvy relatives. You don’t need to worry about managing irritating updates or avoiding malware on a Chromebook, like you do if you simply install Chrome on an old Windows laptop, and the lightweight operating system feels much snappier than Windows on modest hardware. Chromebooks can cost less than a budget PC, too. You might not even need to spend anything if you have an older laptop already lying about. Installing the equivalent of Chrome OS onto aged hardware takes less than an hour’s worth of elbow grease, and the final result often feels snappier than today’s…