Table of contents for May 2020 in Tech Advisor

Microsoft is combining its Windows client and Surface teams into a dedicated unit led by product chief Panos Panay, according to a recent report, potentially aligning its operating system and PC hardware under the same roof. According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, the combination will be named ‘Windows + Devices’, and will be led by Panay. Joe Belfiore, who leads the Windows Experience team, will move over to the Office side of the house later in the year. A source close to Microsoft confirmed the report, though Microsoft’s not confirming it publicly for now. “Personally I’m very excited to lead the Windows Client for Microsoft, which will help us streamline our decision-making processes, be clear on our priorities, and deliver the best end user experiences from silicon through operating systems…

Price: $2,100 (£tbc) from fave.co/2HjnADV The HP Elite Dragonfly is a corporate laptop made to please your manager – and isn’t that the best way to get ahead in the working world? With a fingerprint-resistant finish, a beautiful cerulean magnesium body, and shoulder-friendly weight, the Elite Dragonfly is sure to earn you permission to leave 15 minutes early on Friday (thanks, boss). Just remember, the Elite Dragonfly is designed for the boardroom, not the racetrack, so don’t expect blazing speed. What you will get is a solid configuration with some premium options; good performance, amazing battery life; and let’s not forget the truly classy design. Hmmm, maybe this laptop is too good for your boss? Incredibly light weight, insane battery life The Elite Dragonfly’s main claim to fame is its…

Nvidia and Activision Blizzard seem like close partners. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is one of the biggest games to take advantage of the real-time ray tracing capabilities in modern GeForce graphics cards, and games like Overwatch have graced Nvidia’s GeForce Now for most of the gaming-from-the-cloud service’s multi-year beta. But a mere week after GeForce Now fully launched and obliterated Google Stadia’s value proposition, Activision Blizzard’s games are being yanked from the service at the publisher’s request, effective immediately. No more playing Overwatch on your old laptop. No more Diablo III on your phone. No more playing the latest World of Warcraft raid boss in way better fidelity than your potato PC can normally handle. No more real-time ray tracing from the cloud in Modern Warfare. Nvidia announced its…

You’re not the first person who’s wondered what it would be like to have a giant desktop monitor. Think of all the multitasking and immersive gaming you could manage if you had a 50- or 60in monitor instead of a standard 24in monitor. But you’ve probably noticed that as monitors get bigger, they also tend to get prohibitively expensive. You’ve probably already got a big screen in your house, though – a TV. At the end of the day, isn’t an HDTV just a giant, living-room-oriented computer monitor? Not exactly. While you can use a TV as a computer monitor in most cases, that doesn’t mean it’s the best option. In fact, it’s likely less attractive, convenient, and usable than you think (not to mention, probably not that cheap). There’s…

Cloud, cloud, cloud, followed by Office, gaming, Surface and then Windows: by now, Microsoft has laid out its priorities, and the financial results Microsoft reported last month reflected this. For consumers, the high point of Microsoft’s fourth-quarter calendar 2019 results was the fact that Microsoft reported $1.98 billion (around £1.4bn) in Surface sales alone – almost making Surface a $2 billion dollar business. Interestingly, chief financial officer Amy Hood implied that sales could have been higher, referring to unexplained “execution challenges” in the consumer portion of the Surface business. Overall, Microsoft reported profits of $11.6bn (around £8.9bn) during the second quarter of its fiscal 2020 calendar, up 38 percent from a year ago, from revenue of $36.9bn (around £28.45bn), up 14 percent from the same period. The More Personal Computing…

Price: £449 (inc VAT) from fave.co/2v6pncS I suspect I’ll always have a soft spot for dual screen phones. It’s the most absurdly over-engineered solution to a simple problem – minimizing the impact of a selfie camera on the display – but the sheer, unadulterated novelty of having two screens on one phone is hard to overstate. The first dual screen phones admittedly weren’t great, but the Nubia Z20 feels like a surprisingly mature example of a charmingly immature design, and the best case yet for slapping an extra screen on the back of a phone, thanks to a combo of attractive design, clever interfaces and a strong price point. Screens: Two for the price of one So yes, this phone has two displays. The main one is a 6.42in AMOLED…

Maybe this will be the year virtual reality goes mainstream. If we say it enough times we’ll be right eventually, yeah? But it really does feel like 2020 might be the year. Four years into consumer virtual reality, I finally feel excited again. The hardware is great, and cheaper than ever before. The games are promising, albeit few. And there’s a sense that maybe the ‘we need software to sell hardware to make developing software worthwhile’ vicious cycle has finally been overcome. Maybe. I could be wrong. I certainly hate to get excited about virtual reality’s prospects in 2020, in a ‘fool me twice’ sort-of way. I’ve had my heart broken by VR before. And yet… Quest for glory If VR does take off in 2020, much of the credit…

Price: £1,449 (inc VAT) from fave.co/2PbZKPN Microsoft’s Surface Pro 7, the latest in the company’s excellent Surface Pro series, continues the tradition of being a durable, dependable tablet for the ages. It’s measurably better this time around, too, with an internal upgrade to Intel’s 10th-gen, 10nm Ice Lake chip and a nod to the future, a USB-C port. There are many good reasons why we love the Surface Pro 7. Granted, it’s a lot easier to be the best game in town when rival Windows tablets are few and far between. At this point, the field consists largely of Microsoft’s Surface Pro models, the Surface Pro X (£999 from fave.co/2vpqq7L, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Tablet (£1,559 from fave.co/37t2pKx, monstrous tablet workstations like the HP Zbook X2 (£2,504 from fave.co/38nSnvt, and our…

Three long years after its CES 2017 reveal, and two years after its beta debuted on PCs, Nvidia’s GeForce Now game-streaming service has finally launched on PCs – fave.co/2HgKxaS The wait was worth it. GeForce Now obliterates Google Stadia’s value proposition in every way, from game selection to pricing. It’s available in both free and paid forms, with a ‘Founders’ premium tier costing just £4.99 per month. While Google Stadia will eventually offer a ‘free’ tier, it’s currently available only if you plunk down £119 (go to fave.co/2uFG6Dn then pay £8.99 per month for a Stadia Pro subscription. That Pro subscription gives you access to Destiny 2 and a couple of other games, but you’ll need to pay full price to stream any other titles in Stadia’s paltry library. Even…

Before earlier this month, all we really knew about Windows 10X was that it would be some flavour of Windows 10, optimized for dual-screen devices such as Microsoft’s own Surface Neo and an unknown number of third-party competitors by holiday 2020. Now we know much more, including what’s under the hood. At a developer event in February, the company made a Windows 10X emulator available – though you’ll need to assign a fairly powerful PC to the task, and dedicate it to the Windows Insider program. Microsoft revealed several intriguing characteristics of the new operating system as well, including lightning-fast updates, a special way of handling Win32 apps, and no apparent need for anti-malware apps. Some have characterized Windows 10X as a new Windows 10 ‘experience’, in much the same…