Whenever I get the chance to test out the best gaming laptops, my first port of call is to actually game as a form of benchmarking. For years, Control has long been one of my go-to titles, but that will quickly change once Control Resonant arrives on PC.

Horrifying, bleak and messy — not exactly "positive" words to use for developer Remedy Entertainment's upcoming action-heavy sequel, but I mean these in the most endearing way possible from what I saw when playing Control Resonant on an RTX 5090 gaming PC during a three-hour hands-on session.

Fighting off hordes of The Hiss (the main threat in the game) is thrillingly horrifying with their grotesquely detailed forms, the bleak atmosphere of a warped Manhattan is enthralling and the mind-bending, twisted environments you get to explore are satisfyingly messy. If you thought The Oldest House in Control was a trip, just wait for what Control Resonant has to offer.

With Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs lending their power, though, with DLSS turned on and ray tracing set to high, Remedy's follow-up had me immersed. From the expert use of lighting in a chaotic world to the smooth, fast-paced combat, I already see Control Resonant being an all-new PC gaming benchmark.

You can check our Control Resonant preview for how the game plays and our interview with Remedy Entertainment's Creative Director for more on what is now one of my most highly anticipated games of the year. But for how it handles on PC, let's dive in.

Control Resonant PC requirements

While I played Control Resonant on a monster of a gaming PC (the RTX 5090 says it all), I was assured by the team at Remedy Entertainment that PCs that don't reach those heights, like many of the more affordable best gaming PCs, will be able to play the game without trouble.

Take a look at the system requirements for Control Resonant below, along with the PC specs I played on. Spoiler alert: you will need a lot of storage.

Brimming with power

First, a few preliminary points. As with most previews, this isn't the final version of Control Resonant. Not only is lighting and framerate still being worked on, but also audio mixing, hit impacts and more. This is still very much in beta, but honestly, from the time I had playing through the opening act and a mid-game area called The Sinkhole (it's a masterpiece), it's already looking to be in good shape.

I can imagine a lot of that has to do with the RTX 5090 working behind the scenes. With DLSS upscaling (no frame generation) and DLSS Ray Reconstruction (for sharper reflections and accurate lighting), zipping and levitating through a disfigured Manhattan as the all-powerful Dylan Faden (our up-close-and-personal protagonist) was a treat for the eyes.

And that was with graphics and ray tracing presets set to high, only made better by the 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution I was playing on. From the many twisted forms of The Hiss shown in terrifying detail to the deep contrast of red hues streaking across the screen, along with the subtle yet clear reflections in windows of buildings turned upside down, it's all beautifully crafted — and I often found myself taking it all in.

After leaving The Oldest House after the opening act, I was impressed by the visual distortion effect beaming off cars, with The Hiss floating in midair endlessly in the background. That, along with blaring, dangerous red lighting reflecting off the pavement. For those stationary moments, it all hits right.

In combat, with Remedy changing pace from a third-person shooter to pure melee action, things can get chaotic, but unsurprisingly, this rig could handle it all. As in, the copious amounts of rubble Dylan hurls at enemies while quickly dashing to slash through them using his Aberrant weapon (I chose the sword-like Flurry form as my weapon of choice), while the almost faded rainbow oil mist blasts off foes as he hits them.

It's smooth, clean action, which is what you'd want in a fast-moving action game. It's the little nuances, like the aftereffect of dashing being so crystal clear, like a sleek afterimage of static video, that make it work.

Now, I wasn't able to see frame rates or tinker with different settings, as it appeared the game was locked at a rock-solid 60 frames per second (FPS) for beta purposes. But even with the mass of Hiss shooting red beams from every direction during The Sinkhole section, along with the gravity-bending environment Dylan can shift through, it's clear Control Resonant will be taking full advantage of what Nvidia's GPUs have to offer.

And I'm here for it.

Reaching a new PC benchmark

While Remedy is still polishing off Control Resonant, especially the PC version, we can expect plenty of RTX features to be fully on show (just like path tracing in Resident Evil Requiem). That includes DLSS 4.5 and its dynamic multi-frame gen tech (expect frame rates to hit over 200 FPS), DLSS Super Resolution and path tracing for photorealistic lighting, no less.

That's exciting, considering just how well it already looks, and there's still plenty of time for the team at Remedy to cook. During my session, I had a chat with Lead Gameplay Designer Sergey Mohov, and he explained how there's now more to play around with.

"We weren't limited by hardware in terms of gameplay. It's very helpful that computers and consoles these days can actually run games like this, and we're able to put all of these enemies on screen, all of these effects and make it look nice while feeling very satisfying to kill them all.

"The hardest thing was actually making the world, making it bigger and increasing draw distances. But we've invested in improving our in-house engine (Northlight Engine) to handle these things. But, you know, we've done it."

I believe Mohov is spot on, taking the improvements we saw in Alan Wake 2 and pushing it even further. Of course, just like how Control is now available on iOS, there's the aim for Resonant to be flexible enough to be played on, well, anything that isn't just an RTX 5090 while still delivering great visuals and performance.

"We have a lot of people who are really excited about putting all the latest tech in. Nvidia is helping out, and we'll have all the latest Nvidia stuff in [Control Resonant]. So that's going to be pretty cool. But if somebody can run Control on, like, a potato or a fridge, I'll be pretty happy."

Control Resonant is set to launch on September 24, available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, macOS and cloud streaming via Nvidia GeForce Now. But just from my brief experience, it will be a PC purchase for me.

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When you know players like Virgil Van Dijk swear by recovery tech, you tend to take note, so when I heard he uses the Hyperice x Nike Hyperboot as part of his warm-up and recovery routine before and after games, I wanted to test these sought-after recovery boots for myself.

Of course, it's a Hyperice and Nike collab, so the boots look darn good. But are they really as great as I've been told? I wanted to find out.

Recently, I've been exploring the best massage guns and alternative recovery tools in a bid to ramp up my recovery routine after weightlifting, Pilates, and yoga. I just couldn't say no to this opportunity, and I've already clocked a few things I like and dislike along the way.

Here are three reasons I'm hooked, and two areas I think could use improvement.

What are the Hyperice x Nike Hyperboots?

Like the famous Hyperice Normatec sleeves, the recovery Hyperboots combine heat and compression to boost recovery and reduce soreness; Liverpool FC and Netherlands player Virgil Van Dijk is a huge fan and ambassador.

Using a boot design, the recovery tech can effectively target the ankles, feet and Achilles tendons, helping to improve range of motion, warm the joints and muscles before exercise and aid soreness and recovery post-game or training session.

The Nike x Hyperice Hyperboot is available globally and retails for $799/ £699, including a USB charging cable.

I did a little digging into research on heat application for recovery, as the surge in recovery trends like saunas, contrast therapy, infrared sauna blankets and heat pads continues to gain traction for exercise recovery and boosting athletic performance.

Multiple studies, like this one on local heat therapy, show that heat application can improve blood flow to the area, increasing vasodilation and reducing the onset of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, or DOMS, and stiffness.

There's also research showing the benefits of compression, which can mitigate both muscle strength and power decline following exercise-induced muscle fatigue. This can be the case for trained and untrained people; in this piece of research, trained individuals benefited most, making it a promising tool for recovery, particularly when paired with heat therapy.

And what's more, these tools are becoming more accessible for at-home use, although it'll cost you. Here's what I think so far after testing the Nike x Hyperice Hyperboots.

Like 1: They're powerful

These Hyperboots don't mess around. There are three settings to choose from on the sides of the boots, allowing you to tailor the heat and compression to your personal preferences. All you have to do is hit play once you've chosen your settings.

On full whack, I had to reduce the heat because it was so strong, which isn't a bad thing, as I find some heat therapy devices can be tepid, but be warned that they come in hot. I recommend starting on just one bar, then moving up from there.

The compression was also great, covering my feet, ankles and lower leg up to roughly half of my shins and calves. I'm impressed by the coverage and the bang for your buck.

Like 2: They look good and they're easy to use

I had no doubts that any Nike and Hyperice collab would produce a good-looking product, and the Hyperice x Nike Hyperboots don't disappoint. They look a bit like moon boots, but they're super easy to put on and secure, and I personally love the design: chic, understated and a little bit soccer-boot-esque.

I also loved that I could walk about if I needed to, unlike compression leg sleeves, where you're rooted to one spot for the duration of the compression therapy. They're also quite flexible and attach with a wraparound Velcro strap, so you can get in and out easily enough with very little fuss.

Like 3: I can feel them working in real time

Not only is it a relaxing form of recovery, but my ankles feel less stiff after running and the heat is definitely improving the overall range of motion. Plus, it's super relaxing and my ankles and feet feel better prepped for yoga sessions and weightlifting.

I like the versatility of the boots as well, as I can slip them on before or after training, or even as a relaxing bedtime routine at night while I'm winding down (and not scrolling on my phone, promise).

On cooler days, I can see the attraction of getting heat delivered directly to your joints and muscles, helping speed up the warm-up and recovery processes. After all, we never want to approach exercise without warming the joints and muscles first.

Whether or not I will notice any long-term improvements is yet to be seen, and I'll update you once I've been testing for longer. But for short-term effectiveness, I'm loving the Hyperboots so far and the benefits are immediate.

Dislike 1: Heat strength

It's not exactly a dislike, but I found the highest heat setting to be incredibly intense and I didn't have much warning that the Hyperboot heat could be so powerful. I'd rather be looking at too much heat so I can reduce it than not enough, but I just encourage anyone trying them for the first time to be mindful of the setting options, as, combined with the compression, that heat is pressing directly into your lower limbs.

Dislike 2: Sizing

I'm a UK size 3 foot and found the boots hard to secure close to my feet. That said, the compression was still strong enough for me on the highest setting, so it didn't matter too much.

I suggest taking note of the sizing options, which range from S (UK size 5) to XXL (UK size 15). I could have done with a little extra compression around the mid and forefoot, as I'm a fan of intense sports massages and love nothing more than feeling the pressure release along my arches, but this is a minor gripe for an otherwise pretty powerful recovery product, making it well worth the price tag, in my opinion.

Verdict

All in all, I'm so impressed by the Hyperboots and I can see why even the most elite soccer players are using them. Powerful compression, even more powerful heat therapy, and you've got yourself a wonder boot that is quick, easy and effective, whether you're on the go, competing at a high level, or just sitting at home (like me) needing some TLC.

Follow Tom's Guide fitness on Instagram for more workouts, routines, tips, and tricks.

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So, as the smart glasses guy on the Tom’s Guide team, my main beef has always been with the Nintendo Switch just making things awkward with its video out on the USB-C connector.

With literally any other gaming handheld, it’s a seamless dream — plug your AR glasses in, and see the picture in front of your eyes. The Switch (and Switch 2) requires jumping through hoops of tricking your console into thinking it's in docked mode to bypass the complicated encryption.

Well, when I tested Xreal Aura some more here at AWE 2026, the team literally mentioned in a passing conversation that they’d cracked Switch compatibility in Android XR. Before they could say another word about local AI, I stopped the talk in its tracks and asked for a demo.

And hot dang, they did the thing! Not only is there full Switch support over USB-C, but with no real noticeable latency, and you can use Gemini to ask questions about the games you’re playing!

Fixing the problem with brute force

So the problem is one of compatibility and protocols (boring, I know). 99% of the market uses DisplayPort Alt Mode through that USB-C socket, which natively supports just plugging the glasses straight in. Meanwhile, Nintendo is using Mobility DisplayPort (MyDP) — a standard that was typically used with micro-USB ports back in the day. Why? God knows.

For years now, the fix has been something like the Viture Switch Dock: trick the Switch into thinking it’s in docked mode via a big battery pack to keep it alive at higher wattages and simulate an HDMI connection.

And now, a simple USB-C connection into the Aura’s compute puck does the trick… “HOW!?” I excitedly asked Qualcomm’s team, to which they couldn’t help but chuckle and give me cheeky grins.

Truth is, they can’t tell me exactly how they did it, so all I can do is theorize. You’ve got a strong, open, and versatile development platform like Android XR, paired with a monster spatial computing chip in Snapdragon Reality Elite. I think it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that this high-performance chip is able to transcode that signal in real-time in a well-written Android XR app.

What does it feel like to play?

One common issue with this workaround for the current Switch docks for AR glasses is latency. It’s not terrible, but it can be noticeable in faster titles. None of that exists here, and in my time playing Zelda, it all felt nicely responsive.

On top of that, given it’s a floating window within Android XR, there’s the Gemini Live edge too! Fire it up, look at your screen, and ask away — Gemini was quick to let me know where to go next in the forest.

That is a real value-unlocker vs going to GameFAQs for the answer I need to get ahead in my gameplay whenever I’m stuck.

Take that, Nintendo!

Yes, I know the Switch 2 is great and everything, but this whole USB-C compatibility issue is a pet peeve I’ve been super vocal about for a long time now! Whether it’s so that Nintendo can make its own AR glasses, I don’t know. But the fact that I can’t save myself from neck pain playing the damn thing on long-haul flights seems crazy to me when it’s literally the easier (and better) standard to support.

However, with some brute force of Snapdragon Reality Elite and some coding know-how in Android XR, that’s no longer a problem, and not only that, it’s latency-free compared to the other workarounds we’ve seen.

Low key, this is the biggest winning feature I’ve seen for Xreal Aura. I know there’s so much more to talk about here in what Android XR can do in an optical see-through (OST) environment vs a VR headset, and Gemini’s capabilities in spatial computing. But to 1-UP Nintendo’s limitations? You just love to see it.

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It’s looking inevitable that a foldable iPhone Ultra is coming later this year. Looking at what the iOS 27 beta code reveals, Apple’s teeing us up for a new form factor.

So, while I was in Shenzen, I nipped into a Huawei store and went hands-on with the Pura X Max… You know the one, right? That one everybody reported was a close match to the leaks of the fabled foldable iPhone.

And…well…all I can say is while the smaller, stubbier foldable is definitely a little more pocketable, it reminds me of one of my Dad’s life lessons that resonated with me: “just because something looks different doesn't mean it’s better."

The screen aspect ratio feels off here in both that small cover screen and trying to type on the keyboard folded open, the lack of verticality can be felt in productivity, and I just hope the rumors are wrong.

Weird dimensions

Now to be clear, this isn’t a diss of the phone hardware fundamentals. This is a premium sandwich of metal and glass that feels impressively upmarket — using a wide-format panel that when unfolded packs a 7.7-inch diagonal screen.

On first impressions of holding it in the hand, you’ve got a nice solid grip around it’s shorter stature. But then, you start to use it, and things fall apart quickly. Not to say it’s a bad experience, but in my own personal experience, I noticed three key issues.

First, that front panel lacks height to really get stuff done on. Your messages timeline gets drastically cut down and the screen becomes like 65% keyboard when you summon it.

Second, I unfolded it for the full keyboard and I can see some struggles reaching the keys in the middle near the crease with shorter thumbs and that wider display aspect ratio. And third, the lack of verticality does hit the Pura Max’s productivity credentials here.

Yes, I know we already have sorta similar passport-style foldable like the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but this is shorter and fatter. Already with Google’s option, I thought this felt weird, so to go even harder in this direction doesn’t help the situation!

In between a rock and a hard place

You know the feeling (I know it all too well). It doesn’t matter which path your take, someone is always going to get annoyed. That is the situation foldable phones find themselves in right now.

Thanks to Samsung being in this game for years now, the world expects a tall phone with an inner panel that’s closer to a square in aspect ratio. It’s the form factor I personally prefer for browsing/getting stuff done, but will fully admit it’s not good for entertainment (especially watching letter-boxed films).

Meanwhile, if this iPhone Fold wannabe is indeed a sign of what’s to come, Apple’s device will more effectively nail the entertainment side of it, but not be so great for getting stuff done on.

The point I’m trying to make is there isn’t really such a thing as a “right answer” to this question — at least not yet anyway. It’s going to come down to personal preference, and for me, I prefer to keep my fingers crossed that what I just handled was not an early glimpse of the iPhone Ultra.

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I currently have a seven-month-old who is remarkably clingy. There are times when I’m the only one around to watch (and hold) him, which makes typing a very awkward and clumsy affair. While I generally try to avoid using speech-to-text if I can help it, the tool is just about the only way I can stay slightly productive during certain periods of dad time. The big problem is that the words often come out in such a jumbled mess that the extended editing process needed to make it legible defeats the point.

Apple hopes to fix a lot of those problems with the release of iOS 27 and the upgraded version of Apple Intelligence. The most advanced AI models Apple has feature a new and improved dictation feature that is exclusive to iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air. Apple claims that this new system will let you “speak naturally and trust the words will appear clearly, accurately and as intended.“

So to test this claim, I’m writing this entire article with dictation software. Part of it will be dictated on an iPhone 17 Pro Max running the first iOS 27 developer beta, but I will be comparing to a couple of alternatives. Specifically, an iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26 and a Google Pixel 10 Pro running Android 16 with Google's speech-to-text feature.

What dictation feels like in iOS 27 developer beta 1

I’m currently only a few paragraphs into this article, and it is clear that dictation on iOS 27 developer beta is far from perfect.

The entire process of initiating speech-to-text is relatively simple. You need to make sure dictation is switched on in iOS's keyboard settings and make sure that the Apple keyboard is open in your app of choice. Once there, all you need to do is tap the microphone button in the bottom right-hand corner of the keyboard. This enables dictation mode, which transforms your spoken words into digital text regardless of the app you are using. I've used it in a Word document, Apple Notes, and even to craft text messages that are sent to my friends and family.

The most obvious issue is one that is commonly shared across all dictation software I've used. The actual formatting of your text after it’s been “typed out” is impossible to do using your voice on its own.

Apple's dictation software does understand basic punctuation such as periods, commas and quotation marks, but it struggles with other things. Something as simple as hitting return on a keyboard and starting a brand-new paragraph isn't actually doable without tapping your screen.

Perhaps there's some kind of special command I could have used that actually lets me add a page break, and not see the word "return" appear on my screen. But if it exists, I couldn't figure out what it was. "Page break" didn't work either, for whatever that's worth.

Another issue is the fact that Apple promised its improved dictation software would be able to automatically punctuate your speech as it’s converted into text. Apple’s press release specifically mentions capitalization, punctuation and formatting, but my experience with the developer beta so far is that this implementation of this is remarkably inconsistent.

If I had let Apple software have its way, the previous two paragraphs would’ve been one big, long block of text with only a single period in the middle. It’s almost as though iOS 27 just didn’t think that my continuing spiel needed to have text breaks and other grammatical flourishes that actually make it possible to read.

Likely, this is simply a by-product of the fact that I am running beta software rather than the final version of Apple's improved systemwide dictation, so here’s hoping that future updates improve this before iOS 27 is released to the general public

Another point of note is that my iPhone does seem to struggle to understand my accent at times. I wouldn’t say that I have a particularly strong accent, but there are some cases where the dictation software doesn’t fully understand what I'm saying. Often this is as innocent as "improved" for "improve," but there was at least one instance where it decided that "one-handed" was actually 100.

While that is a little bit funny, I hope this is down to the fact that this is beta software that isn’t finalized yet, along with the fact that Siri probably doesn’t have the best grasp of my own personal voice right now.

How does it compare to dictation on iOS 26?

This next section was written with an iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26.5.1 to get a general feel of how Apple’s dictation software appears to have changed between different versions of iOS. The old Apple dictation software has a reputation for being kinda crappy, which is why iOS 27's AI overhaul is supposed to be making such sweeping changes to speech-to-text on iPhones.

It's important to mention that the older dictation software isn't being ditched with the release of iOS 27 later this year. Apple has confirmed that systemwide dictation is one of two features that is only available on iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air. So iPhone 17 and older will still use the less advanced dictation software.

The first thing I noticed is that the actual dictation is slightly slower than what is available with the iOS 27 beta. There is a noticeable lag between saying words and having them appear on screen. It's subtle, and there isn't an enormous difference a lot of the time, but there's an extra jerkyness to the way the text appears on screen when you're dictating using iOS 26.

I have also noticed iOS 26 seems to make more mistakes, some of which get corrected by the software and others that do not. One prominent example I spotted while dictating this was seeing "iOS 27's AI" written down as "iOS 20 7AI". It’s almost as though the speech to text software isn’t quite sure of what I’m saying, so it ends up second-guessing itself at various points.

At the same time, it certainly feels a little bit less refined with the kind of mistakes that are actually being made and the way the dictation software interprets what it thinks I'm saying. Not to mention the fact that it ends up picking up various filler words (erms and arrs) and translates them into real words like "where." There were also occasions where it struggled with homophones, and mistook words "whether" and "write" for "weather" and "right."

Overall it certainly feels like Apple has made a bunch of significant improvements to dictation in iOS 27 in terms of speed, accuracy and general understanding of what the user is actually saying.

What about Google's dictation?

One thing I should add is that Google actually updated its own dictation software with Gemini support less than a month ago. For that reason, it feels as though this version of Google speech to text is a little bit more polished than what I remember using in the past. It's not remarkably different, but some of the automatic formatting features are a little bit more refined than I remember.

Google says that Gemini will be able to remove those dreaded filler words automatically, while also adapting for any mid-sentence corrections you make. Sadly, I'm not having a great deal of luck with the latter. The dictation software knows to skip over the various uhs and ars that I subconsciously make while talking, but it was still picking up other filler words and seemed incapable of correcting those mid-sentence mistakes.

Even as I speak to write this sentence, it's incorrectly formatted a sentence by adding a period and starting a brand new sentence when it wasn't required. So clearly some work needs to be done to get this working correctly

I should point out that iOS 27's speech to text did not pick up any random filler words either, but iOS 26 was very fond of including them. From a performance standpoint, it seems that Android and iOS 27 beta are at a similar level when it comes to understanding what I say — though Apple's automatic formatting currently isn't nearly as impressive as Apple's announcement would have you believe,

You do have to remember that the current version of speech to text in Google keyboard is the finalized public version of the software, which isn't the case with the iOS 27 developer beta. So, by its very nature, there are obviously going to be some discrepancies in iOS 27's performance. We will have to see how much things have changed later this year, once iOS 27 is released to the masses.

As a side note, I noticed that Google keyboard tends to switch off the dictation mode far faster than Apple does. So if you don't continually speak, or stop a little too long to think, you run the risk of having to tap the microphone button multiple times to say what needs to be said. Apple's dictation did automatically switch off eventually, but there is a much longer grace period before it decides that you're finished talking.

Bottom line

Back to iOS 27's dictation to finish things off and it’s clear that Apple has made some pretty noticeable improvements to its dictation software compared to what iOS 26 has accomplished. It’s generally faster, more accurate and easier to use. That said, it's far from perfect and it certainly isn’t going to convince me to ditch typing any time soon. The fact is the system is still very inaccurate and the automatic formatting feels almost non-existent, which means I have to spend a bunch of time editing to produce a coherent article.

Admittedly Google's dictation does have a lot of those same issues, and that isn’t even beta software. The honest truth is that free dictation software from Apple and Google is only really useful in quite small doses. When it comes to writing hundreds of words, in large blocks of text like this, its usefulness is hampered by the mounting inaccuracies and formatting issues that inevitably need correcting. Or, at least, they do if you want to produce something legible and readworthy.

To top it all off, in my case, a bunch of things I've said don't really translate to the page in the same way as typing on a keyboard. A bunch of sections of this article have had rewrites, either because the sentences themselves didn't quite work or because I needed to straight-up rewrite whole paragraphs.

Apple has made some significant improvements already, that much is clear, but it's going to be interesting to see how much changes as iOS 27 moves through the various pre-release stages of beta testing. That includes getting a better handle on what my voice is like, and with potential improvements to the actual dictation software. Regardless, I still have a hard time picturing a future where text-to-speech can fully replace typing or writing. Certainly not for me.

If you're interested in seeing just how much this article changed during the editing process, you can check out the original, unedited transcript right here.

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I'm a restless person, but as someone who exercises often for both personal gains and my job, I also know I need proper recovery, which means active or passive rest (sometimes against my will).

Recently, I've been exploring the best massage guns and alternative recovery tools in a bid to make what can feel mundane for some a little more exciting, when I got the chance to test the Bon Charge Red Light Therapy blanket elite soccer players trust for boosting recovery and sleep.

In fact, British Premier League soccer club Fulham FC have made Bon Charge a key player in the team's recovery process, which convinced me I needed to try it for myself. And given it has been described as a "cozy sleeping bag," I really couldn't say no as I watched the rain pouring down outside in the middle of June.

The question is: Does this red light therapy blanket actually work? I just found out. Here are three reasons I am already utterly hooked.

What is the Bon Charge Red Light Therapy Blanket?

The therapy blanket delivers high-powered red light therapy to your entire body, primarily promoting muscle relaxation, reduced inflammation, better sleep and skin appearance, exercise recovery and boosted energy. Bon Charge makes it clear that this is not an infrared blanket, which is more focused on heating the body.

Bon Charge uses lab-grade red light therapy in the form of two mats that can be used by two people or zipped together to create something similar to a sleeping bag you'd camp with, although this version is far more high-tech. It features high-powered red light LEDs designed to penetrate the body to promote restoration.

If the numbers interest you, the brand uses 660nm red light and 850bm near-infrared light, which, according to Bon Charge, "are the most studied and therapeutic frequencies of red and near-infrared light."

While it's not cheap — the red light therapy blanket retails at $1,999 — you do get a lot of bang for your buck given the quality of the blanket itself and the red light therapy you receive. Each purchase also comes with a user manual, adapters, protective goggles, controllers and a power cord.

You can use the controller to adjust light intensity and timer settings, plus there's a pulse mode that allows for deeper penetration of the light.

Unable to resist, I did a little digging into the research on red light therapy, which indicates there's some emerging solid evidence for skin rejuvenation, collagen production and complexion.

A 2025 meta-analysis published in Sports Health looked at 14 randomized controlled trials examining the effects on high-level soccer and volleyball players, focusing on muscle strength, muscle endurance and biochemical markers of muscle damage.

Researchers found red light therapy didn't really help athletes produce more force (a marker of strength), whereas volleyball players who received therapy before exercise could complete more reps, indicating potential muscle endurance gains. For soccer players, the endurance results were mixed.

When looking at muscle damage, soccer players who had red light therapy indicated less muscle breakdown, whereas volleyball players' results were more mixed. This could mean it's helpful for sports that include high levels of running and eccentric contraction.

Another meta-analysis found evidence to support pre-exercise red light therapy for recovery. It concluded "Significantly improved muscle endurance" while also aiding the recovery of muscle strength and injury markers.

It's worth mentioning that the FDA hasn't evaluated the statements made by Bon Charge about the benefits of the product, and it isn't intended to diagnose, treat, or cure.

3 reasons I'm already hooked on the Bon Charge Red Light Therapy Blanket

Here’s what went down when I cocooned myself in a recovery blanket.

1. It's super warm and cozy

I basically posted myself into this thing like a letter in an envelope, and I was surprised by just how warm and cozy it was. I'd give it a few minutes to warm up if you're trying yours on a cooler day, but there's definitely some heat to the blanket.

That said, it won't get you sweating or burning calories (that's not the point), and it shouldn't be used in place of an Infrared sauna blanket if that's what you're looking for.

10/10 for feeling like I could snooze all afternoon, and the timer gives you generous options so you can stay there for as long as you like. Personally, I find my mind wanders too quickly and I get bored, so I put a mindfulness exercise on YouTube, which helped me relax.

After 45 minutes, I felt like I'd been cuddled and genuinely felt sleepy and tension-free.

2. The pulse mode is my favorite feature

The blanket has a few preset settings you can flick through, and I'm still figuring these out, but I found pulse mode to be super relaxing. If you've ever had Reiki, it's a very similar sensation, but if you haven't, the best way I can describe it is like a gentle tugging at random points on your body, not unlike a very gentle electric shock.

It was quite invigorating and relaxing at the same time, but whether or not it would make a huge difference to results in the long-term is up for debate.

3. It felt powerful

Sometimes I find recovery technology a bit faddy, and you see a lot of products come and go in my job. This red light therapy blanket feels like it's really having an impact on my body, especially my ability to relax.

The light looks and feels strong because it is strong, and it's high quality. I advise your goggles for this reason. And it definitely feels like the light is penetrating the skin and warming your body without cooking you.

I didn’t feel much different physically after a few goes (I plan to report back on muscle recovery and long-term skin appearance), but mentally, I felt calmer and slower, which I liked. I also felt a little energized.

For a first hands-on, I'm super impressed, and I'll be reporting down the line to see how red light therapy impacts recovery and wellbeing as part of my routine going forward.

Follow Tom's Guide fitness on Instagram for more workouts, routines, tips, and tricks.

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The USGA is making some big moves for its GHIN app in 2026, so I recently paid golf's governing body a visit at the absolutely stunning Winged Foot Golf Club to try out the new features, and I was absolutely blown away (by the course and the app).

To me, the coolest change is the new Rules AI feature, which is essentially like ChatGPT for golf rules. But there's also a whole new layout coming to the app, along with a boatload of new features designed to make keeping score and entering your post-round results more streamlined.

Do the best golf apps like Arccos, 18Birdies, and GolfShot need to be worried about the GHIN app replacing them? Time will tell, but the USGA is moving in the right direction towards making its app more useful than just a way to input your scores for your handicap.

Rules AI is exactly what you want it to be

When I arrived at Winged Foot, I had already tried the beta of GHIN's new layout and was impressed, but at the end of the day, it took its relatively barebones scoring app and brought it up to par with competitors like 18 Birdies, The Grint and the other big players in the space. And getting users who already pay for a subscription to those apps to switch will be an uphill climb, no matter how much the USGA shines up its interface.

“Our goal has always been to ensure the Rules are accessible and that golfers can find the information they need to play the game fairly, enjoyably and with confidence,” said USGA CEO Mike Whan.

“By combining our expansive historical data with modern AI technology, we are providing a bridge between tradition and innovation. Rules AI is designed to continue making the Rules of Golf easier to navigate and meet golfers where they are—on the course and on their mobile devices.”

But then they told me about Rules AI, and my entire perception of the situation changed. You mean to tell me that not only is the arbiter of golf rules building a more robust scorekeeping app, but the USGA is also making an AI you can ask rules questions to while on the course? That should put the other apps on notice.

Maybe I'm just an overly excited golfer and tech enthusiast who gets excited about something new.

That's what I thought before I tried it. Once I actually asked it a rules question and received a perfect response that explained the rule and how to deal with the rule, I was truly sold.

I asked what if my ball lands on "Frankenstein's fat foot" as an ode to Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore, but it didn't like that question, saying it will only answer questions about golf. So I asked without the Happy reference and got a quick, rules-accurate answer.

The full answer is in the screenshot above, but the summary is that you can move the ball and where to move it depends on the situation.

Which means the rule in "Happy Gilmore" is inaccurate. But it's also a movie, so I suppose it doesn't need to follow the USGA rules to the letter.

App redesign

As mentioned, the actual reason we went to Winged Foot was to see the redesigned GHIN app, which is expected to be made available to the public in late summer of 2026.

It's a lot more streamlined than the original app, with heat maps showing green slopes and improved distances to bunkers and other hazards on the course.

These features exist in other apps, but what makes their coming to GHIN exciting is that in 2025, 2.91 million people posted a score in GHIN. That means they're already using the GHIN app to enter scores, so it seems logical that golfers could condense everything into a single app that does it all. And now that the GHIN app does it well, that could actually work.

Will it convince me to leave Arccos? Highly unlikely. After spending a round with it at Winged Foot, I like what it brings to the table, but for me, nothing will replace the insights and data Arccos offers with minimal effort on my part. Sure, GHIN lets you input how many putts you made and whether you hit the green in regulation or the fairway, but Arccos does that automatically.

Still, if you're on the fence about which golf app to use and you use GHIN for handicap data, it might be worth switching to it for all your golf needs once the update is released.

And if nothing else, you'll want to use the Rules AI feature if you plan to play any sort of competitive golf where rule questions may emerge.

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Apple spent a big chunk of WWDC 2026 talking about the new Siri AI and how Apple Intelligence is set to transform the iPhone experience with iOS 27. The company is (once again) betting heavily on AI, promising a much smarter Siri that can interact with apps and surface information buried deep inside your phone — something that the company believes will become one of the biggest reasons to upgrade to iOS 27.

The thing is, I've been using the iOS 27 beta for the past couple of days, and like many other users, I'm still stuck on the Siri AI waitlist. So while Apple wants Siri to be the star of the show, I haven't actually been able to use most of its new capabilities yet.

What I have been able to use, however, are dozens of smaller changes scattered throughout iOS 27. And after spending some time with the update, I'd argue many of these features are more exciting than Siri AI. Here are some of the small and hidden iOS 27 features that have impressed me the most so far.

Save images from videos directly

Raise your hand if you've ever recorded a video and then wanted to pull out a single frame as a photo. Until now, the usual workaround was taking a screenshot, cropping it, and then sharing it wherever you needed.

Thankfully, iOS 27 makes this much easier. While playing a video, you can tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner and select Save Video Frame as Photo. iOS will then extract that frame and save it directly to your photo library as a standalone image in full resolution.

More control over iCloud Photos syncing

Not all of us buy iPhones with huge amounts of storage, which is why iCloud ends up being pretty important. One of the long-standing annoyances, though, is that iCloud Photos typically waits until your phone is connected to Wi-Fi and charging before it starts backing everything up.

With iOS 27, Apple is finally giving users more control. You'll now be able to force an immediate sync of your photo library to iCloud. So, for example, if you're traveling and taking lots of photos, you might want those images uploaded immediately in case your phone gets lost or stolen, or accidentally gets dropped in the pool.

And the best part is that you can enable the feature temporarily for a single day, and after that, iOS automatically reverts back to the normal syncing behavior.

View only photos taken with your iPhone

This is something iPhone users have been asking for years, and Apple is finally doing something about it in iOS 27.

Until now, the Photos app has always lumped all images in your library together, whether they came from WhatsApp, Telegram, screenshots, or others. While Apple already separates things like videos and screenshots, there was never an easy way to see only the photos you had actually taken yourself.

With iOS 27, that's finally changing. Apple has added a new section that lets you view only the photos captured using your iPhone's camera. To find it, head to the Collections tab, then Utilities, and finally Captured by Me.

Independent alarm volume controls

Android has had this for years, but Apple is finally bringing independent volume controls to the iPhone with iOS 27.

Until now, alarm volume was tied directly to your ringtone volume, which meant lowering one also affected the other. With iOS 27, you can finally set separate volume levels for alarms, ringtones, timers, and other system sounds. That means you can keep your ringtone volume relatively low while cranking up the alarm volume, or vice versa.

The Clock app now understands holidays

One small (yet useful) feature Apple added to the Clock app in iOS 27 is the ability to detect your days off. The feature uses your calendar and regional holidays to understand when you might not actually need to wake up early.

For example, if you have an alarm set for a weekday morning but the next day happens to be a public holiday, iOS can proactively ask whether you'd like to skip that alarm.

Share a phone number between two iPhones

Another interesting addition in iOS 27 is the ability to use the same phone number across two different iPhones. This should somewhat work like how an Apple Watch with cellular shares your iPhone number. Apple says you'll be able to use a single number across multiple iPhones, making it easier to switch between devices without juggling separate SIMs.

There are still a few unknowns here. It appears to be carrier-dependent, and it isn't known if there will be any additional fees involved. But if you're someone who regularly uses two iPhones at the same time, this could end up being surprisingly useful.

Voice typing is much smarter on iOS 27

Apple is also bringing a much better voice typing to the iPhone with iOS 27. Using on-device AI, the feature can better understand context, recognize complex words, and automatically remove filler words like 'umm' and 'ahh' from your speech, similar to tools like Wispr Flow.

It is worth noting, though, that the feature requires Apple's newer on-device Siri models and is currently limited to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air.

If you own a supported iPhone, you can enable this by going to Settings > General > Keyboard, then turning on Advanced Dictation Preview.

Paste copied content faster

Another small feature I noticed in iOS 27 is that the keyboard can now surface copied text and even screenshots directly in the suggestion bar. When you copy something and switch to another app, you'll see that content appear above the keyboard for quick pasting.

Previously, this mostly worked for one-time passcodes and links, but Apple is now expanding it much more broadly.

Show more wallpaper on your Lock Screen

If you're like me and prefer seeing more of your wallpaper and less clock, iOS 27 now lets you use a smaller Lock Screen clock with the date and time displayed in a single row at the top.

It's a small change, but it helps show off more of your wallpaper. Apple has also finally made playback controls dismissible on the Lock Screen. You can now swipe them away, just like notifications, which is especially useful when streaming content from an Apple TV.

Connectivity Assist

If your Wi-Fi connection is weak or inconsistent, iOS 27 can now automatically use cellular data alongside Wi-Fi to keep things running smoothly. Apple calls this Connectivity Assist. The feature can help maintain faster and more reliable speeds, although it may increase mobile data usage. In my case, it used around 300MB in just 48 hours.

You can enable it by heading to Settings > Wi-Fi > Connectivity Assist.

Add your own passes to Apple Wallet

Apple is finally bringing one of the most requested features to the Wallet app with iOS 27: the ability to create custom passes.

The feature lets you manually add things like event tickets, memberships, and other passes directly to Apple Wallet. For example, if you have a physical ticket but no digital version, you can simply scan it with your iPhone and create a Wallet pass from it.

When creating a pass, Apple gives you a few templates to choose from, including membership and event passes. You can then customize details such as the pass name, location, admission type, membership number, and even the background design.

AirPods Pro 3 gains GymKit support

Finally, one of the most underrated additions in iOS 27, at least in my opinion, is that Apple is expanding GymKit support to the AirPods Pro 3. This means you'll now be able to connect not just your Apple Watch, but also your AirPods directly to supported gym equipment for the first time.

AirPods Pro 3 can already track your heart rate, and with this feature, just as you would tap your Apple Watch against a reader to pair it, you'll now be able to pair your earbuds with compatible cardio equipment, treadmills, ellipticals, and exercise bikes, to keep track of metrics like pace, heart rate, and more.

Bottom line

Having spent a few days with the beta, it's becoming pretty clear that iOS 27 is much more than a Siri AI update.

In fact, in addition to the features mentioned above, Apple says iOS 27 also focuses heavily on the fundamentals. The company claims things like app launches, AirDrop transfers, and general system responsiveness have all been improved.

We'll have to wait and see whether Siri AI lives up to Apple's promises. But even if it doesn't, iOS 27 already feels like a surprisingly substantial update.

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Often when it comes to kid-friendly devices, they’re covered in garish hues usually paired with branded images related to popular cartoons or characters. As kids get older and their tastes “mature,” the colorful look may be deemed “uncool.”

Something like the iClever Auraa is more on the cartoon side of things. If you, or your child, are big on looks, the Puro Sound Labs BT2200-Plus cans offer a premium aesthetic with ear-friendly technology.

As with the iClever headsets, kid (and teen)-friendly headphones must meet a few criteria to be worth letting your kids blast their ears with music or games. They have to have hearing protection built-in, be durable, and be comfortable to wear over long listening sessions.

With that in mind, I spent a few weeks with the Puro Sound Labs BT2200-Plus headphones to see if a premium aesthetic also brings high-end, safe sound. Plus some thoughts from a kid who thinks he’s already a teenager.

What makes headphones ear friendly?

The BT2200 Plus features an 85dB noise level cap. That cap is a constant loudness ceiling recommended by OSHA and the World Health Organization over an eight-hour period. Anything louder or longer and you risk permanent hearing damage.

Most manufacturers of kid-friendly headphones that feature caps will place the volume limit at around 85 dB. It does mean that the sound can feel muted, especially for those of us who've destroyed our ears by standing next to speakers at concerts. However, avoiding that destruction is the whole point.

Premium looks

Out of the box, Puro Labs is not kidding about giving it a more high-end look. Unlike the iClever set, which ships in a cloth bag, the Puro comes with a zip-up pleather semi-hard case. The case also has a little pocket for carrying accessories like the included 3.5mm cord, replacement earmuffs, a USB-C charging cable, and the instruction manual.

The headphones themselves are made of aluminum with comfortable leather ear cups and a squishy but sturdy headband. I wouldn’t describe the included cords as premium, but they aren’t awful.

Durability and battery life

Compared to more colorful headphones, which tend to use heavy plastic, the BT2200 is made of aluminum and feels far sturdier. After a month or more of use, there is no real wear and tear, and I believe it would take some serious errors to really damage these. This is with my son running around the house just wearing them without music.

As for battery life, Puro Labs lists the BT2200 as having 20 hours of battery life. I found that to be fairly accurate when using the Bluetooth mode, even with ANC mode on. Personally, I prefer my headphones wired, so I spent most of my listening using the included 3.5mm wire.

Sound quality

My daily drivers are a set of BeyerDynamic Custom One Pros (discontinued). When I switched to the BT2200, I found the sound a bit more muted in comparison. On my Custom One Pros, the sound is much brighter, with the treble standing out.

The BT2200 felt flat even when listening to podcasts and YouTube videos with more talking. However, it didn’t take long for my ears to adjust, and I found the BT2200 Plus fairly decent. Audio sits squarely in the middle range. You aren’t getting high trebles or deep bass, but it’s not so crushed that you’re losing the total sound stage when listening.

The important thing is that, as an ear-friendly headphone, the volume is capped at 85dB, meaning over long listening sessions, even at high volume, your or your child’s ears are more protected compared to headphones that can go higher.

What the kids are saying

I wasn’t alone in my testing. My seven-year-old son got plenty of time with the BT2200s on three different road trips and day-to-day use when playing Zoombinis on an iPad mini. He said they were good and is a big fan of headphones with 3.5mm cords that can plug into almost anything.

He also liked that they were smaller than the iClever Auraa headphones, which I interpreted as him saying they were more comfortable. He did have an ample amount of praise for the carrying case, a strange ode to Puro Sound Labs, since I don’t believe I ever saw him put the headphones back in the case or use it for anything.

That said, when given the choice in the last few months, he was more inclined to pick the BT2200 cans. Praise enough in my mind.

Verdict

Puro Labs offers both premium aesthetics while still providing ear safety with the volume cap. I’m not worried about hearing damage, and the sound is good enough.

So far, these headphones are durable and can stand up to rowdy kids and more careless teenagers. At $99, you want something that can hold up to the rigours of kid life, and these do.

Compared to other kid-friendly headphones, the price tag is higher and does reflect a more “adult” look and feel. But if you have a teen who needs some cans and you’re looking to protect their ears, BT2200 Plus is a good option.

When it comes to the best gaming chairs, you find they all follow the same rules — bucket seat-esque ergonomics, a sort of stiffer cushion to force a posture, and a head pillow that I always struggle to figure out how to position it just right.

Well, what if you took the full plushness and recline of a La-Z-Boy and paired it with a throne for play? You get the Cougar Arker, which is easily my favorite gaming chair of the past few years and one I can’t wait to complete my setup with when it comes out for a “targeted” price of $270.

Sleep or play? Your choice

Whenever I see a gaming chair fold completely flat, it’s always given me gimmick vibes. It’s a nice-to-have, but I’d never use it fully horizontal. The luxurious cushioning that you just fully sink into on the Arker makes that posture make sense. I could see myself totally taking a nap working while laid back on this thing.

And that Hyper-Dura leatherette upholstery did get me worried at first — thinking that my legs in shorts were going to stick to it. But no, that material doesn’t get uncomfortable, it doesn’t stick to your legs. It’s got the sensation of leather without gluing your skin down to it.

I seriously cannot understate how soft this seat truly is. No hard cushioning, this feels like a hug in chair form with well-placed arms too for a nice ergonomic posture to boot.

Kick back

Then there’s the full recline and that sneaky footrest you can pull out from beneath the chair. With it, you can fully lay back and to be honest, I was so close to napping.

Is this because I’m seriously sleep-deprived after going hard on covering Computex 2026? Maybe. Did Nvidia keep me awake much longer than anticipated with RTX Spark testing? Possibly.

But in a real-world scenario, I can see this slotting ideally under my desk — not just for working by day but playing and resting by night. Turning on some soft RGB and some LoFi to lay back and really vibe in a multi-sensory experience while I grab some Zs.

Outlook

But what shocked me most is when talking to Cougar about the chair, the price target for them is $270, which is crazy good value for money when it comes to gaming chairs. That’s especially true for something like the Arker, which the company has really found a sweet spot with for me.

For too long, I’ve been forced into different postures, and I know it’s for my health and everything, but it’s tricky for me to really get lazy on them. Turns out all your need to do is throw a lot of cushion at it and make the thing feel like your favorite couch from your childhood.

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As expected, there are plenty of monitors here at Computex 2026. Asus unveiled a bunch of new displays, including its first monitor with a Tandem OLED panel. Alienware also showcased new products, such as the Alienware 34 280Hz QD-OLED monitor, which brings some serious upgrades to one of the best gaming monitor lineups around.

That said, I've always believed there's still room for innovation in this space, and not everyone is looking for the highest refresh rates or the fastest response times. Here at Computex 2026, I came across a new monitor from a relatively young brand that does something completely different — it comes with Google TV built directly into the monitor.

This monitor is basically a smart TV

Traditionally, monitors and external displays have relied on an external input source to display anything on screen. They're essentially "dumb" displays that require a Windows PC, Mac, console, or streaming device to do anything useful. But that's not what Amzfast's new monitor is trying to do.

The company has introduced a new 27-inch 4K monitor at Computex 2026 that runs Google TV out of the box. This means that alongside working with gaming PCs and Mac devices, the monitor independently runs Google TV — which is essentially Android TV with Google's modern interface — giving it access to Android apps and the Google Play Store.

That means you can run apps like YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, and more without connecting any external hardware to this monitor. In fact, the bundled remote even includes a Live TV button that provides access to Freeplay, Google's free streaming TV channels.

In terms of the display itself, you're looking at a Fast IPS panel with 4K resolution and support for up to a 160Hz refresh rate. It includes a USB-C port with 65W Power Delivery, two HDMI 2.1 ports, and a DisplayPort for connectivity.

There are also plenty of software settings you can tweak, including the ability to boot directly into a connected device when powering on. The monitor also supports multiview, allowing you to display two sources simultaneously. In theory, that means you could have your desktop workspace on one side while streaming content through the built-in Google TV interface on the other.

The company hasn't disclosed the internal specifications yet, including what chipset is powering Google TV behind the scenes. However, during my roughly 15-minute hands-on session on the show floor, the experience felt surprisingly fluid. Apps opened quickly, navigation felt responsive, and because it runs Google TV, you'll also be able to cast directly from supported apps on your phone.

Amzfast hasn't announced pricing or availability just yet. However, given that competitors, including Asus, sell similar smart monitors for around $350, I'd expect the company to undercut that price in some way.

Representatives told me they're "trying" to bring the monitor to the U.S. market as soon as possible, although they denied to share any launch timeline. It would've been great to see this arrive before the FIFA World Cup, though.

There's another monitor from this brand worth keeping an eye on

The Google TV monitor wasn't the only display Amzfast had on show. It also showcased several new monitors, including its first move into the OLED market. Historically, the brand has relied on IPS panels to keep prices low, but that's changing with their new AMZG27P1QL.

The monitor features a 27-inch 2K OLED panel with support for up to a 280Hz refresh rate. Amzfast claims response times as low as 0.03ms, alongside HDR support, which could make this a compelling option for gamers. There's also a built-in blue light filter designed to reduce eye strain during longer gaming sessions.

Of course, being a more budget-conscious brand, it isn't packing cutting-edge technologies like Tandem OLED panels or GaN-based power supplies. That said, if you're looking for an OLED gaming monitor that focuses on the fundamentals and keeps the price within reach, this could be worth considering.

Similar to the Google TV monitor, though, Amzfast hasn't shared pricing for the OLED model just yet, but it does say it plans to launch the monitor in the U.S. later this year for under $500.

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There's no shortage of gaming handhelds here at Computex 2026. Intel unveiled Arc G3 here in Taiwan, and with it, we've seen some impressive new handhelds arrive, including MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+ and the Acer Predator Atlas 8.

The thing is, I've never really been a fan of gaming handhelds in the first place, mostly because of how big and heavy they've become. Sure, they're powerful enough to run AAA games on the go and even double as mini Windows PCs when connected to an external monitor, but the size trade-off has always felt a bit much for me — I don't really want to carry another bulky gadget in my backpack every time I travel.

That was until I checked out the Ayaneo Pocket Play here at Computex 2026. It genuinely made me rethink gaming handhelds, partly because it looks eerily similar to the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play from back in the day, and partly because it doubles as an Android phone.

Ayaneo Pocket Play is the perfect tribute to the Xperia Play

Ayaneo is no stranger to gaming handhelds. In fact, the company recently announced the NEXT 2 Windows gaming handheld, complete with a massive 9-inch OLED display and AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor underneath. However, Ayaneo also makes Android-based gaming handhelds, and the new Pocket Play feels like a direct callback to 2011.

At first glance, the Pocket Play looks remarkably similar to the Xperia Play from 2011. It features a sliding display that moves upward to reveal physical gaming controls underneath, including a D-pad, ABXY buttons, two circular touchpads, and several customizable buttons. If you've ever used a phone with a sliding mechanism, the nostalgia hits almost instantly the moment you pick this thing up.

The display itself is a 6.8-inch OLED panel capable of reaching 165Hz, although it does come with fairly noticeable bezels around the sides.

Coming back to the design, the top section houses the L and R shoulder triggers, which naturally become accessible once the display slides upward. The handheld itself feels fairly lightweight, which should help during longer gaming sessions. That said, I did find the build quality a little flimsy.

The unit I tested came in the Origin Gray finish, which looked great but picked up fingerprints and smudges almost immediately. Ayaneo also plans to offer the Pocket Play in Deep Space Black, Stellar Silver White, and Crimson Red.

Powering everything is MediaTek's Dimensity 9300 chipset paired with the Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU. It's not the newest flagship silicon anymore, but it's still more than capable of handling modern Android games.

During my brief hands-on time, the device had no trouble running games at high frame rates, although I did notice it warming up after extended play sessions.

On the software side, the Pocket Play runs Android 15 with Ayaneo's custom software layered on top. One of the customizable buttons can be mapped to launch the company's gaming hub, making it easy to jump between games, while another button gives you access to performance settings.

As for the rest of the specs, you're looking at a 5,000mAh battery with fast charging support. It's also being positioned as a smartphone, which means Ayaneo has included a dual-camera setup on the back consisting of a 50MP primary sensor and a 16MP ultra-wide camera. That said, I'm not exactly holding my breath when it comes to camera performance.

The Ayaneo Pocket Play doesn't seem designed to replace your dedicated Windows gaming handheld. Instead, this feels like a device built specifically for retro gaming enthusiasts and people who miss the days of phones like the Xperia Play.

As for pricing and availability, things are still a bit unclear. The Pocket Play originally launched through Kickstarter earlier this year, but shipments were reportedly paused because of delays. We've reached out to Ayaneo for updated information on both pricing and availability, and we'll update our coverage once we hear back.

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Eight laptops are launching with Nvidia RTX Spark inside at Computex 2026, and the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is easily one of the best — so beautifully designed it almost makes Spark feel like a side character.

Gunning for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, Microsoft doesn’t miss with a seriously luxurious build, great I/O for pros, fantastic ergonomics (including a breakthrough touchpad) and a mesmerizing display.

And you’ve seen what it will be able to do from all the RTX Spark testing I’ve done. This will not be a cheap laptop with that chip inside, so Microsoft has rolled out the red carpet in utilitarian aesthetics. Let me tell you about it.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra: Specs

A seriously good looker (and worker)

Make no mistake about it — the Surface Laptop Ultra is built different. On the face of it, this is a Surface Laptop if it started bulking for a few months. But once you get into the details, you realize it’s so much more than that.

It starts with a beefy utilitarian presence atop any desk. This is a hefty machine, but those premium materials and the added bulk makes this feel ready to power through any task you throw at it — just like a MacBook Pro does.

The similarities also extend to the port selection, but chalk this up as a win for the Ultra with its additional USB-A for wider support. They keyboard feels gorgeous to type on, which is something that Microsoft has really excelled in in the past — giving you a nice tactility to every key press that makes it feel intentful.

But the real star of the show on that bottom deck is the 30% larger haptic touchpad. It’s an absolute ocean with a smooth gliding surface, with every click giving me those same snappy sensations I love from the MacBook Pro’s trackpad. But as an addition here is the haptics that actually communicate back to you.

Built directly into Windows 11, you’ll feel small hints of feedback as you do key things like snap apps to sides of the screen. On top of that, the company is working with key developers to give you those same sensations in third party apps like moving your cursor over clips in a video timeline.

It’s a feeling that when returning to my MacBook Pro, I felt like something was missing! Top it all off with that gorgeously color-accurate and smooth PixelSense display up top that can get seriously bright, and you’ve got a nice-looking beast that’s ready for anything.

Monstrous performance

Speaking of ready for anything, that’s where I get to the fun stuff inside. You’ve seen a lot of the software stuff it will be able to do from the Microsoft Build announcements — in short, expect a lot of agentic AI features to take advantage of that RTX Spark chip.

And as you saw in my testing of Spark itself, there’s a lot to be had here from the massive local models changing the dynamic of how you interact with a computer from it being a tool you lays idle when you’re not using it, to an active assistant machine.

But let’s compare apples and oranges and put it up against the MacBook Pro workload. You want your laptop to get the pro stuff done speedily both on and off the charger. After flying around the most dense Unreal Engine map while connected and disconnected, that’s easily proven true. There’s also tie-ins with Adobe to use much more of that built-in RTX 5070-level GPU and turboboost creator tasks beyond levels I’d seen in equivalent Apple laptops.

But the real killer app for me is the ability to use the same laptop to work by day and play by night. Alan Wake 2 is built natively for Arm and can run at 1600p resolution with ray tracing and DLSS 4.5 ray reconstruction at buttery smooth frame rates. Even games that are not built for this architecture like Pragmata go through the Prism emulator layer and play smoothly too. And yes, both of these were on and off the charger too!

The big unanswered question here is power efficiency, which could be affected by that emulation layer. Speaking to Nvidia, they’re not giving anything away, but did give me a cheeky smile when I started talking about what all-day battery life really means. We could be in for something special here.

Outlook

Ignoring the larger USB-C port mystery (my theory is it’s a magnetic breakaway USB-C socket that replaces the missing Surface Connect), what you’re left with here is a phenomenal laptop that feels powerful.

The aesthetics are clean, the ergonomics are fantastic, the display is mesmerizing and the power under the hood is awesome! Of course, there’s a big question on price, which rumors here at Computex point to a starting cost of $3,000.

This is definitely for the pros who know how to make the most of that power, and no longer is the MacBook Pro the default option at this price. A new player has come to town.

More from Tom's Guide

• I spoke to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about RTX Spark — he tells us why this is less of a laptop chip and more like 'R2-D2,' and shares future plans on N2X and N3X
• I gamed for 250 hours on AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE — it’s a $549 nightmare for Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti
• I just tested the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ — it leaves ROG Xbox Ally in the dust with breakthrough Intel Arc G3 power

In a surprising twist, Ubisoft is resurrecting one of its beloved iconic characters with Rayman Legends Retold. As you might have guessed from the name, this is indeed a remake of the 2013 title, featuring a new 2.5D art style, an expanded story with voice acting, and hours of bonus content. This might not be a brand-new Rayman game, but I’ll take it.

I recently went hands-on with Rayman Legends Retold to see what it has in store. During my session, I played through some of the introductory levels and even checked out some of the new segments. If you’ve played the original, it's like an enhanced version of what you loved. If you’re new to the game or series, this will feel like a brand-new 2026 title.

Anyone who is a fan of Rayman games or challenging platformers with a quirky art style is in for a treat when Rayman Legends Retold releases on October 1. Here are my initial impressions.

Rayman Legends Retold: What’s new?

Ubisoft has remade Rayman Legends Retold from the ground up on the Frostbite Engine—the same one The Division games run on. Instead of adopting a realistic art style, Legends Retold retains the bright, colorful, and whimsical look of the original, now rendered in 3D. It makes for a visually interesting game, though I’m still partial to the original’s cartoonish style.

All the levels you remember from the original are here, along with many others. One interesting thing is that all the levels are interconnected, making the world feel more cohesive. Don’t expect a full-on open world experience, however.

Speaking of new content, Rayman Legends Retold features several levels where you ride on the back of a dragon. These on-rail segments are reminiscent of Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon and nicely complement the core sidescrolling gameplay. I miss on-rail shooters, so I’m glad Ubisoft added these to the game.

Lastly, you get an expanded story featuring a new villain and a whole new endgame sequence. On top of that, all the main characters are fully voiced, which is definitely a nice touch. The next sections alone make the $39 asking price all the sweeter.

Rayman Legends Retold: Hands-on

It has been over 13 years since I played Rayman Legends, so Retold was effectively a new experience for me during my play session. As I said up top, I played some of the intro levels, which covered the basics. Some areas were locked off since it was a demo, but what I played gave me a good idea of what Ubisoft Montpellier sought to accomplish with this remake.

If you’re familiar with sidescrollers (and who isn’t?), then you’ll feel at home here. Making Rayman jump over gaps, punch and kick enemies, swing on vines, and more all feel incredibly smooth and responsive. Even if the game runs on a completely different engine, it remains true to the original's mechanics. Exploration is also satisfying, and I often went off the beaten path to try to nab collectibles.

The on-rails sections were a nice highlight and truly make this remake different from its predecessor. While riding the dragon, you can shoot a barrage of fireballs in quick succession or hold the fire button longer to unleash a more powerful attack. The latter is especially useful for destroying tough obstacles like walls. There are also obstacles to avoid, so using the left and right roll buttons is crucial.

I didn't get to experience this during my session, but you can play the entire game with up to four players via couch co-op. While that's commendable given how few couch co-op games exist these days, it's disappointing that there is no online co-op.

Rayman Legends Retold: Outlook

The only negative thing I can say about Rayman Legends Retold is that we have to wait so long for it. October can’t get here soon! But the wait will be worth it, as this should be a fun game for both veterans and newcomers alike.

And as I said before, Rayman Legends Retold only costs 40 bucks, so there’s no reason not to give it a shot if you need a game to bring a smile to your face. Keep this one on your radar, because it's certainly on mine!

Rayman Legends Retold releases on October 1 for the PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series/X.

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So, to start my thoughts on testing Nvidia RTX Spark laptops, some context is needed.

My daily driver is the M5 MacBook Pro for its lightning fast performance and power efficiency to be just as fast on and off the charger, but I have to carry a Steam Deck for the gaming side of it. Enter RTX Spark, and that compromise is gone.

With Microsoft in tow, working in lockstep to rebuild Windows 11 for Nvidia's agentic vision for the future of computing, these are going to be some truly mighty notebooks that may very well revolutionize the Windows laptop and truly stand on their own as the future of computing.

But even if you’re not interested in the AI features, Nvidia has created the silicon that actually can kill the MacBook. No joke. Let me explain.

Nvidia RTX Spark: Adobe Premiere Pro boost

Nvidia worked closely with key creative app developers to ensure serious speed increases with that on-board GPU. Adobe Premiere Pro is 2x faster in key tasks that you can automate with AI, like cutting down massive clips. Meanwhile, in Unreal Engine 5, a massive cityscape of trillions of polygons can be loaded and moved around with ease.

And even better? All of this can be done both while plugged in unplugged. That crucial MacBook Pro advantage is no longer limited to Apple’s notebooks.

With these big specs (128GB RAM in this economy!?) these particular variants will be limited to only the absolute pro creators, but it’s not too far of a stretch of the imagination to see lower-end versions of these chips being more than enough for putting your projects together.

Nvidia RTX Spark: Gaming

This is the main weakness of any MacBook. Don’t get me wrong, they do offer game support, and apps like GameHub can navigate the compatibility issues and give you some form of PC gaming. But none of it compares to a DLSS-armed RTX Spark system.

Whether it’s Arm-native games like Alan Wake 2 taking full advantage of DLSS 4.5 ray reconstruction for some eye-catching visuals, or games that are being emulated like Pragmata, you’re getting a buttery smooth experience across the board. Nvidia wouldn’t show us FPS numbers, so based on eyeing it, I saw both these games in excess of 100 FPS on these laptop screens (which I assume are 120Hz).

The questions I don’t have answers to yet are how much that emulation harms performance (if at all), and whether battery life is impacted. But based on early impressions, these are laptops you can work on and play on.

Nvidia RTX Spark: Going agentic

Let’s get into Team Green’s mission to “reinvent the PC” to begin with. I got to try out some demos of some of its agentic features.

First, there was a mutli-device OpenClaw situation of talking to your computer. This was done on a DGX Spark mini PC, but given the silicon is practically identical to RTX Spark (just that the latter is optimized for Windows), you can do this too. And the idea of your computer being something that you can work with from anywhere no matter what device came into view.

From complex things like coding a website landing page to simpler things like translating a menu and picking the right dish with low salt if you have high blood pressure, the long memory context that can be saved and loaded into the massive memory on tap here is significant.

Second, there was the multi-app pipeline of getting something done. I got to recreate the demo from the keynote where a griffin was AI generated in Photoshop based on a sketch, turned into a 3D model and animated via ComfyUI (the visual way of connecting AI models together).

The speed was seriously impressive, though you did see the limitations of the current local AI models, where the legs would disappear in what I assume was some hallucination madness.

Then came the developer side of things. I won’t go into the vibecoding bit of it (I don’t really agree this is the way to create sites and apps), but what I will talk about is the system taking agentic control of the website. The last time I tested something agentic on a web browser was Opera’s Browser Operator, which would take a screenshot and then send it to an LLM in the cloud to devise the next move.

All happening securely on the system, the speed difference is night and day — tearing through a site and filling in a form in mere seconds. This is a glimpse of what telling your laptop to just do something can be.

And yes, the bird creation turned into video definitely screams AI slop, but the principle is there. You can imagine the natural language prompts with an image to tweak the colors and contrast, or turning your pencilled ideas into something that can inspire a real-life idea.

Also, shout-out to the tweaks being made to Windows 11 too! Attaching the taskbar to the side of the monitor is a revelation to getting it out of the way and focusing on your work.

The Nvidia RTX Spark laptops are seriously good

Then there’s the laptops themselves. I won’t spend too much time talking about them here, as I want to rank them in a future piece (spoiler alert: that Asus ProArt P14 is calling to me). But to match that expected high price, there are some seriously sleek hardware options coming.

One thing you’ll notice is that these are very familiar shells with maybe a tweak for cooling here and there. This lines up well with what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told me about wanting users to “go on the journey at your own pace” when it comes to the agentic side of things. So to completely flip the laptop build would probably terrify some folks.

For the 2-in-1 crowd, the MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ is a seriously nice system, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra is a luxurious device, HP’s Omnibook 14X has an amazing keyboard, and the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition gives you a nice upmarket feel. These partners have truly pulled out all the stops to provide some primo shells for Nvidia’s silicon.

RTX Spark outlook

I was speaking with our video producer extraordinaire Paul Antill in an uber around Taipei, and he asked about whether RTX Spark could beat the MacBook. To me, that question is always a bit of a poison pill, but one that is fair — every tech news outlet is guilty of saying “this laptop is good, but it’s not quite as good as the MacBook.”

But now, finally, after years and years of waiting for an Apple killer, Nvidia has stepped up and done the damned thing. AI slop laptop potential aside (lapslop?), this is a phenomenal chip that delivers big on making an extremely powerful machine both on and off the charger with serious power efficiency, while also being a peak gaming machine, too.

More from Tom's Guide

• I spoke to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about RTX Spark — he is ‘willing to work’ on an RTX gaming handheld, N2X and N3X are already planned and the chip is 'more like R2D2’ than a laptop CPU
• I gamed for 250 hours on AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE — it’s a $549 nightmare for Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti
• I just tested the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ — it leaves ROG Xbox Ally in the dust with breakthrough Intel Arc G3 power

Asus went all-in on OLED monitors at Computex 2026, and we got our first hands-on look at some of them.

Over the past few years, the company has tried to make OLED the default choice, whether you're a competitive esports player or someone building a work-and-gaming setup. Asus wanted to cast the widest net possible, and mostly to great effect.

I spent a good chunk of my time checking out Asus' gaming monitors at Computex 2026, but I found only one worth spending my time with. Read on to find out what it was!

The 32-inch ROG Swift OLED is everything you'd want from a flagship monitor

I've seen a lot of OLED gaming monitors over the past couple of years, and at this point, it's honestly difficult to get excited about yet another 32-inch 4K OLED display. But Asus' ROG Swift OLED PG32UCWM (yes, the name is a mouthful) brings a few genuinely interesting upgrades.

As expected, you're looking at a 32-inch 4K OLED panel. The monitor uses Tandem RGB Stripe OLED technology. The Tandem OLED part means there's a dual-layer OLED stack designed to improve brightness, while the RGB Stripe pixel structure means the underlying panel ditches the traditional white sub-pixel entirely and relies solely on red, green, and blue sub-pixels.

The result, Asus says, is noticeably sharper text, which has long been one of the biggest complaints about such monitors, along with better color reproduction compared to previous OLED generations. Asus even had a digital microscope connected to the display to show the sub-pixel layout.

The monitor runs natively at 4K and 240Hz, but it can also switch into a Full HD mode capable of reaching 480Hz. As you'd expect, it also supports Dolby Vision, while Asus claims a response time of just 0.03ms. Connectivity is equally impressive, with DisplayPort 2.1 offering full 80 Gbps bandwidth, alongside HDMI 2.1 and USB-C with 90W PD.

One of the more interesting details wasn't the display itself but the internals powering it. The rear of the monitor still carries the usual ROG industrial design language, but Asus has also integrated GaN-based power delivery technology into the monitor's power system.

According to the company, using GaN improves power efficiency and reduces heat generation, which is increasingly important when driving a tandem OLED panel at such high resolutions and refresh rates.

Asus also confirmed that a 27-inch version is coming later this year. Unfortunately, the company still isn't talking about pricing just yet.

This 540Hz OLED monitor is where things get interesting

Another arguably more interesting monitor from a technology perspective was the ROG Strix OLED XG259QWPG Ace. Asus is calling it the world's first OLED esports monitor, and honestly, there is a pretty good reason for that claim.

Until now, most 500Hz+ monitors have relied on LCD technology (TN or IPS panels). Asus is taking a different approach by using a Tandem WOLED panel in the ROG Strix OLED XG259QWPG Ace. As you'd expect, the move to Tandem OLED brings a number of benefits, including up to 15% higher peak brightness, 25% larger color volume, and up to 60% longer OLED lifespan compared to previous-generation WOLED panels.

The monitor itself features a 24.5-inch display and can reach an eye-watering 540Hz refresh rate with a 0.02ms response time. It's pretty clear that this monitor is aimed at professional esports players and competitive gamers. Asus is also using its GaN tech here to help improve efficiency and keep temperatures under control.

The company has even added measurement markings directly onto the stand and base, allowing players to consistently position the monitor exactly how they like it, something professional esports players will probably appreciate more than anyone else.

I also got to see the ROG Strix OLED XG259QWPG Ace side by side with a traditional high-refresh-rate gaming monitor that wasn't OLED, and the difference was immediately noticeable. The OLED panel delivered noticeably better color reproduction, especially when viewed from off angles.

Outlook

Computex is always packed with monitors, gaming gear, and other ridiculous hardware. And with the event now officially underway, there's still plenty more weird and wonderful tech to check out.

I'll be spending the next few days getting hands-on with even more peripherals and displays to find the coolest gadgets at Computex 2026, so stay tuned!

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• I just tested the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ — it leaves ROG Xbox Ally in the dust with breakthrough Intel Arc G3 power
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Windows gaming handhelds got a shot in the arm with Intel Arc G3 silicon, and I got to test the Acer Predator Atlas 8 sporting this chip. It’s a solid piece of kit (and I’ll go into it more later), but what surprised me most is what I got to play on it.

As you probably already know, I got to test the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ behind closed doors here at Computex 2026. With a lot of events like this, you get shown demos in controlled environments with specific games to make the handheld look good.

Well, over with Acer, the one game MSI told us not to play was on show: my favorite of the year so far in Forza Horizon 6.

And after playing it, I’m honestly baffled why MSI's handlers didn’t let us get into it, because it’s a real showcase of how much of a breakthrough the Arc G3 really is.

By the numbers

On the face of it, I can see why MSI may not have wanted us to play Horizon 6 — it supports XeSS 2.1 rather than the full-blown third-generation version with multi-frame generation. But even with that, I managed to squeeze a surprising amount of graphical prowess out of this system.

At 1200p resolution with no ray tracing, the game can run at 66 FPS on the charger and 45 FPS when you reduce the wattage from the plug socket. I played for about 20 minutes off the charger and saw the total battery capacity drop by 5% during that time, which shows impressive power efficiency.

Then I decided to go a bit wild with it, turn the graphics settings up to ultra, turn on ray tracing, and XeSS (because I’m not a madman). Even with this, I was getting 42 FPS, and with the 8-inch display squishing this game down, there was no visible ghosting, and in gameplay, I felt no latency.

A (mostly) great handheld

Acer’s always been on the periphery of the handheld space, usually dominated by Asus, MSI, and Lenovo.

But with the Atlas 8, this feels like a real coming-to-power moment for them because it is a sturdy system with decent ergonomics, a nice, bright screen, adjustable triggers that can be either one-press or full analog, and good cooling with that world-first metal fan in a portable like this.

That being said, I do give the edge to the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ for snappier buttons (Acer’s D-pad and face buttons feel a bit mushy) and ergonomics, as the Claw has better-defined handgrips that fit the hand better and have a grippy texture.

All this aside, though, the Predator Atlas 8 will have its audience as another great handheld to get. The adjustable triggers do make this a versatile handheld that can be adjusted to any particular play style.

Throw in the Arc G3, and you’re onto a surefire winner. The question now, of course, is price. Acer (just like MSI) is a little hesitant to talk about cost, given the whole RAMageddon thing happening right now. But I’m hoping that, given Acer has always been the value-for-money brand, they can do something good here.

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We’ve already seen a ton of new handheld gaming PCs here at Computex 2026 but, instead of going that route, Asus has decided to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers (ROG) subbrand with a special edition of the ROG Xbox Ally X.

Dubbed the ROG Xbox Ally X20, this new device uses (mostly) the same hardware as last year’s Xbox-themed handheld. You still get the powerful performance of AMD’s Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip with 24GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. While not technically an entirely new device, Asus has made some fundamental changes under the hood and has also given the handheld a regal makeover with hints of gold throughout its design.

Asus definitely could have stopped there and called it a day. However, given the recent launch of its new ROG XREAL R1 AR glasses, the company decided to give them the same ROG 20th anniversary treatment too. They’re the same glasses more or less but since they’re intended to be used alongside the ROG Xbox Ally X20, they won’t ship with Asus’ ROG Control Dock.

After going hands-on with the new ROG Xbox Ally X20 and ROG Xreal R1 Edition 20 here in Taipei, I’m quite impressed by how all the little changes Asus made to its handheld make for an even better experience. However, are they enough to justify a bundle that will likely cost a hefty sum once it releases later this year? Find out in my full hands-on review.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 specs

Fit for an anniversary

Just like Microsoft did with its 20th anniversary Xbox Controller, Asus has also given the ROG Xbox Ally X20 a transparent front shell. It looks even better in person and when seeing it side by side with the original Xbox Ally X, this small tweak really makes the upgraded handheld stand out. If that wasn’t enough though, the View, Command Center, Menu and Library buttons now feature gold accents.

In another nod to the Xbox brand, the Xbox button to the left of ROG Xbox Ally X20’s side buttons now lights up green too. Within Asus’ Armory Crate software, you can also tweak its brightness and lighting effects as well. Seeing the Xbox button pulse green was especially cool while trying out the new handheld.

On the top edge of the ROG Xbox Ally X20, you still get two USB-C ports — one USB 4 one and one USB 3.2 one — along with a power button and a 3.5mm headphone jack. If you look closely though, you might notice an extra cooling vent between the main two on the left and right side. Asus reworked the cooling for the ROG Xbox Ally X20 to improve airflow which is why we now have four instead of three vents like on the Xbox Ally X.

Around back is where the ROG 20th Anniversary design changes are the most apparent on the Xbox Ally X20. In addition to a gold badge underneath the right fan, the diagonal line with “Republic of Gamers” written out is now gold too with the letters in a vibrant red. The top half of the back panel is transparent too which lets you see how Asus went to the extra trouble of making the ROG Xbox Ally X20’s fans and heatsink gold too.

Besides these aesthetic changes, the handheld’s grips are now wrapped in a grippy, rubber-like plastic too just like on the Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller. This is another one of those small but very noticeable differences with the Xbox Ally X20. The upgraded handheld felt even better to hold in my hands, speaking of which…..

Upgrades you can feel

As I’ve mentioned, small but noticeable improvements with a touch of gold throughout seems to be the big theme of the ROG Xbox Ally X20. This is also the case with the handheld’s bumpers and triggers.

Asus actually moved the position of the bumper buttons on the device’s motherboard to make them easier and more comfortable to press. While they used to sit on the top edge, they’re now positioned diagonally on the left and right side of the motherboard. This is a small change I know, but having tested the bumpers on both the Xbox Ally X and the ROG Xbox Ally X20 side by side, this tweak is noticeable.

The shape and feel of the ROG Xbox Ally X20’s ABXY buttons are different too and they now feature a slightly more rounded profile. As you might have guessed, this is another nod back to the Xbox controller. One area where Asus is pushing ahead of Xbox though is with the joysticks on this handheld.

Although a lot of people kept asking about Hall Effect joysticks coming to its handhelds, Asus wasn’t quite happy with the tradeoffs that would come with adopting them. So instead, the company went with TMR joysticks on the ROG Xbox Ally X20. In my testing, they were incredibly smooth and responsive which makes me hope this will become the norm with PC gaming handhelds going forward.

Now you might have realized I skipped over the microSD card slot before when discussing the ports on the back of the ROG Xbox Ally X20. Well, that was intentional. You see, this is actually a microSD Express card slot like the one found on the Nintendo Switch 2. While you can upgrade the handheld’s internal storage, if you don’t want to open it up, you can always pop in a microSD Express card to get some more storage space and thanks to its faster speeds, you shouldn’t have any trouble playing even more demanding games off of it.

Transforming with a twist

Now this next upgrade is one that both fighting game and Xbox 360 fans will instantly appreciate. While a 4-way d-pad is perfect for platformers and retro games, it isn’t ideal for 2D fighting titles like Street Fighter. With the ROG Xbox Ally X20, Asus said why not both. So just like on the wireless controller that was released quite late in the Xbox 360 era, this handheld also has a transforming d-pad.

To switch between the two modes, you just pinch both sides of the d-pad, pull up and give it a quick turn. This lets you go from a 4-way to an 8-way d-pad that feels almost identical to the one on the Xbox Series controller in the best way possible.

In case you pull up but don’t quite turn the d-pad all the way, you won’t be able to press it down at all which lets you know you did something wrong. Likewise, the d-pad spins all the way around, so you aren’t stuck going in one direction or the other.

The OLED we’ve been waiting for

Back when my colleague Jason England wrote his ROG Xbox Ally X review, one of his biggest gripes was that it didn’t have an OLED display. Well, Asus must have been listening as the ROG Xbox Ally X20 does and it’s a full-featured one at that. The handheld’s OLED features HDR 1000, comes equipped with VRR thanks to AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and can reach a max peak brightness of 1,400 Nits.

While we’ll have to get one into our testing lab to see for sure, in person, I noticed a stark difference between the brightness of the Xbox Ally X and the ROG Xbox Ally X20 with the two handhelds next to each other. When playing Control and Chronos: The New Dawn, the blacks were quite deep and the colors really popped. However, it wasn’t until I saw the driving game Assetto Corsa running on two devices side by side — one with HDR on and one with it off — that it really hit me.

Speaking of small but noticeable improvements once again, Asus actually managed to fit a larger 7.4-inch OLED screen here without increasing the overall size of the handheld. On the original Xbox Ally X, the bottom and top bezels were the same size. That isn’t the case with the ROG Xbox Ally X20 as Asus shrunk the top bezel to make room for the bigger display, making it smaller than the bezels on either side.

Personally, this was a huge improvement and quite noticeable during my hands on time with the device. For the most part when playing games on a handheld like this, you’re looking up at the top of the device and not the bottom, so the screen feels a lot larger even though the panel is still technically the same size.

Even better together

Now I know most people haven’t tried gaming while wearing a pair of the best smart glasses but if you haven’t yet, it’s an awesome experience. Instead of a 7-inch display — or 7.4-inch one here — by plugging in a single USB-C cable, you instantly get a massive, movie theater-like screen right in front of you.

Asus and I must be on the same page which is why the company plans on releasing the ROG Xbox Ally X20 in a bundle with a special edition pair of its ROG Xreal R1 smart glasses. They’re mostly the same minus the dock and like the handheld, they have some gold accents on the sides.

For those unfamiliar, using these — or any other AR glasses — with the ROG Xbox Ally X20 is about as plug and play of an experience as you can get. You just plug in the glasses on one of the top USB-C ports, put them on and you’re good to go. One cool use case a few of Asus’ staff and I discussed is wearing them while lying back in one of the best gaming chairs so you don’t run the risk of dropping a handheld on your face. I’ve played this way at home and trust me, it’s as comfortable as it is plain cool.

One neat difference here is that when you pair the ROG Xreal R1 X20 glasses with the ROG Xbox Ally X20 is that you don’t have to press the buttons on their sides to tweak picture settings. You absolutely can if you want to though. However, settings like screen size, transparency and even enabling real-time 3D conversion on the glasses are available right within Asus’ Armory Crate software.

I have to admit I stuck to making most of my adjustments on the glasses themselves as I’m quite familiar with Xreal’s AR glasses after I paired them with a portable mini PC for a truly unique setup. However, if this is your first time using them, it will probably be easier making adjustments right on the handheld itself.

This bundle won’t come cheap

Asus gave myself and the rest of the Tom’s Guide computing team a sneak peak at the ROG Xbox Ally X20 at its HQ here in Taipei, with more details likely to come at Gamescom this summer. While we don’t know the official price yet, the ROG Xbox Ally X20 and ROG Xreal R1 X20 will likely be available ahead of the holidays later this year.

The other big news we got out of Asus is that the two will come as a bundle. Given the original ROG Xbox Ally X costs $999 on its own and the ROG Xreal R1 glasses are available now for $849, I doubt this special edition bundle will cost less than $2,000. However, since you aren’t getting the ROG Control Dock with the glasses, that could bring down the price slightly.

We’ll have the full pricing and release details soon enough but after spending an afternoon with the ROG Xbox Ally X20 and the ROG Xreal R1 X20, Asus went above and beyond here for sure. Just changing the color of the handheld’s shell and some of its buttons definitely would have been enough. However, Asus’ engineers went back to the drawing board and made seemingly small but very noticeable changes to the Xbox Ally X.

Now I wouldn’t recommend rushing out to get this bundle if you already have an Xbox Ally X unless you’re a really big ROG fan. Personally though, these improvements and tweaks have me really excited for what Asus will eventually do with its followup to the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X.

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MSI’s trend of putting works of art on its laptops continues with the Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Vincent van Gogh Edition, and it’s downright beautiful. I’m never the guy to call tech beautiful, but this is the most mesmerizing system I’ve seen at Computex 2026.

Adorned with van Gogh’s artwork on the lid, it’s a surefire conversation starter and something that will adorn any desk with pride. But I wonder how Vincent would’ve felt about being on a laptop with the word “AI+” in it? My guess is not too happy.

Still, can’t deny it’s evocative, and the fact it’s built around a Prestige 14 Flip AI+ means you’re getting quite the workhorse here too. Let me break it down.

Attention to the details

MSI’s Artisan Collection isn’t just about putting a painting onto a lid, but the intricacy of the craftsmanship too to make it both a visual and tactile work of art.

This van Gogh crossover achieves that handily with a choice between two iconic pieces: Starry Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône.

These aren’t just printed on, they’re layered on in an exhaustive process that adds a sensation to the lid that you can’t stop running your fingers over. The bold, eye catching shell colors are chosen to perfectly pair with the art you see, and the overall impact is astonishingly striking.

But this isn’t just the laptop. Since it’s a special edition, you’re getting a full van Gogh desk pad, luggage tag and custom mouse too.

More like Vincent van GO

It all starts with the guts of this machine, and at the core is an Intel Core Ultra X9 CPU and up to 64GB LPDDR5x RAM. As you’ve seen by the time I’ve spent testing Panther Lake, this is a screamer of a chip for productivity, and thanks to that powerful integrated GPU, it can handle AAA gaming like a champ too.

To show your content, you’ll see that same great 1920 x 1200 OLED touchscreen on a 360-degree hinge to turn this into your own personal canvas, and the stylus is integrated directly into the bottom of the shell.

Connectivity-wise, there’s a couple of Thunderbolt 4s, a USB-A and HDMI 2.1, alongside Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The keyboard has a nice tactile feel to it and sum of it all is a real workhorse and entertainment powerhouse.

Outlook

Van Gogh was a man of fierce passion and obsession with the physicality of paint. So I can’t help but feel conflicted to see his masterpieces atop a laptop that is adorned with AI branding.

Still if you ignore the AI features and the bigger question at play here, what you get is a truly beautiful laptop that has all the horsepower you need under the hood to tackle your whole workload.

But what about the price? MSI really wants me to stop asking about price, because it’s the one question nobody can really answer given how RAMageddon has put the whole computing market into a state of flux.

So let’s take a guess — given the current Prestige sells for $1,299, and this is a more powerful spec and a special edition, throw in higher RAM prices and my bet is $2,499. Brutal, but that’s the nature of the game right now.

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The Alienware 34 QD-OLED gaming monitor series has been my favorite ever since the first model launched in 2022. Now, it’s set to receive a new model later this year. While the Alienware AW3426DW isn’t a radical change from the past, it delivers meaningful upgrades for an even richer gaming experience.

Some enhancements include a higher refresh rate of 280Hz, up from the previous 240Hz. The display’s new 5-stack Penta Tandem tech helps deliver darker blacks in bright environments, higher peak brightness, and sharper text with no fringing. As before, the 34-inch curved display does an excellent job of immersing you in games.

The Alienware 34 AW3426DW has debuted at Computex, but I’m currently testing it at the office. My full review will come in due course, but for now, I want to outline the basics of what has a good shot at making our best gaming monitors list. Here’s what I think of the AW3426DW.

Alienware 34 280Hz QD-OLED hands-on: Specs

Alienware 34 280Hz QD-OLED hands-on: Display

Like previous models, the AW3426DW has an immersive 1800R curvature and a sharp 3,440 x 1,440 resolution. Yes, it’s not a 4K OLED panel, but everything looks bright and vibrant. And thanks to the cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio. If you’ll pardon the pun, it’s a sight to behold.

I tested Cyberpunk 2077 on the AW3426DW and was impressed by the rich picture quality. The greater contrast between dark and light elements is noticeable and makes colors feel more vibrant. That said, the standard picture mode isn’t as oversaturated as on other gaming monitors, which helps everything feel more realistic.

Naturally, I’ll need to test more games, and we need to run our display benchmarks to see what the AW3426DW can really do, but for now, I can say it delivers a superlative gaming experience.

Alienware 34 280Hz QD-OLED hands-on: Design

The Alienware AW3426DW has the same design as before, which I certainly won’t complain about because it’s both lovely and practical.

With its panel measuring 32.05 x 14.23 x 4.38 inches, you’ll need a decent-sized table for this beauty, but nothing overly large. The flat stand is pretty unintrusive, so it’s unlikely to get in the way of peripherals like your keyboard and mouse. The cutaway on the stand’s shaft makes cable management easy, and you can raise or lower the monitor to your desired height.

Again, I’m glad Alienware didn’t change the AW3426DW’s design, since it’s about as perfect as you can get. It might not immediately scream “gaming monitor,” but it keeps the focus on the display and, thus, on whatever game you’re currently playing.

Alienware 34 280Hz QD-OLED hands-on: Performance

Performance gets a nice boost thanks to the higher 280Hz refresh rate and lower 0.03ms response time. And as before, compatibility with Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync also helps deliver a smooth gaming experience.

To test the AW3426DW, I connected it to the new Alienware 16 Area-51 gaming laptop, which packs an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX CPU, an Nvidia RTX 5080 GPU, and 32GB RAM. You won’t need such a beastly rig for this monitor, but it certainly helps.

Thanks to the high refresh rate and low latency, I had a smooth time playing Cyberpunk 2077. I couldn’t get the frame rate anywhere near the refresh rate, but having all that extra headroom effectively eliminated any choppiness. I also didn’t notice any input lag.

Alienware 34 280Hz QD-OLED hands-on: Outlook

I’ll need more hands-on time with the Alienware AW3426DW, but for now, I can say it brings meaningful updates to an already fantastic gaming monitor.

Even if it gets outclassed by the new Alienware 39 5K OLED, it should still be an excellent option for those who want a smaller monitor with excellent features. Stay tuned for my full review!

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Intel Arc G3 handhelds are the talk of the town here at Computex 2026, and I just got an early hands-on with the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. In short, believe the hype — this is the next generation of gaming on-the-go unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Of course, a lot of this comes from that new silicon, which copies a lot of Panther Lake’s homework including that monster integrated GPU with XeSS 3 support to deliver some blistering frame rates (more on those later) while being much more power efficient than any AMD-filled handheld I’ve tested.

But the secret sauce here is MSI’s DNA — learning from previous Claws and dramatically upgrading the design, vastly improving airflow to keep it cool, bringing a gorgeous new display, tweaking the ergonomics and tactility of the vibration, and making it even easier to upgrade.

What’s the price? I asked MSI and the answer was “stop asking about it,” which does make me nervous in the current state of RAMageddon, but I can’t deny this is utter brilliance.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ specs

Raiders of the lost Arc

The key ingredient is that shiny new Panther Lake chip: Intel Arc G3 Extreme. This is tailored more to a gaming-centric workload with a reduced amount of CPU cores while maintaining that same Arc B390 integrated GPU with the 12 Xe3 cores.

This GPU ticks off a lot of the boxes of what I wanted to see come to the handheld space: a wide versatility of power settings from the 17W endurance mode all the way up to 45W, native ray tracing support and all the XeSS 3 AI trickery goodness.

And the results are…well if you’ve been used to seeing AMD handhelds getting good frame rates, you ain’t seen nothing yet. I can’t give you specifics with benchmarks, but here’s what I got from the 3 games I was allowed to test.

And this is kept cool by MSI’s new Cooler Boost HyperFlow tech — based on two fans and two pipes to deliver five watts higher cooling and 25% higher pressure for the fans. That keeps those temperatures nice and well maintained in the various scenarios, including two that are often overlooked but significant.

First, I’m talking about the Switch’s bread and butter in docked mode. You already saw a bit of this with Panther Lake laptops being able to offer a fantastic experience on a massive screen. XeSS 3 is the key to that fluid big screen gameplay with minimal ghosting, and you’re getting the exact same thing here. F1 25 at 4K with XeSS 3 set to performance mode (so upscaled from 1080p) ran at a silky smooth 90 FPS in my time testing.

Throw in the better cooling too, and you can pump a massive 45 watts of power through this tiny shell, which gets you some speedy, smooth gameplay on the big screen when plugged in.

And the second scenario is one of the main reasons why I love my gaming PC: being able to play but also get stuff done. With the dual Thunderbolt 4, you’re able to have your own mini PC setup that can multitask effectively between pretty intense apps like Photoshop and many Chrome tabs.

Of course, these technically are possible on AMD handhelds, but nowhere near at the levels of performance and power efficiency you’re seeing on-board here.

Feeling great in your hands

I could go on about the chip inside, but there’s a whole handheld built around it, and it’s looking gorgeous in this Void Purple finish. And as you can tell, there are some significant changes being made here to the

One of the most noticeable upgrades you’ll feel is in the ergonomics. Whereas previous claws had a slightly flatter, more blocky appearance, the grips have much more definition and curvature to them to fit nicely into your hands.

MSI set on a mission to achieve the same level of ergonomics as the Xbox controller, and it shows with that dot texture eliminating any slip, the flared design of the grips and huge button upgrades.

Triggers and analog sticks are hall effect now, and now the D-Pad + ABXY buttons feel a lot snappier without any spongeyness like previous Claws thanks to being based on a metal dome.

But the biggest change you’ll feel is in the haptics. There’s a new 6-axis IMU vibration motor running on a new software algorithm to deliver what is called HD Haptics — allowing them to simulate much finer details like different textures of surfaces you walk on.

It’s hard to explain, but MSI’s basically done for gaming handhelds what PS5 DualSense did for controllers. It feels truly phenomenal.

Not forgetting the fundamentals

But of course, a PC handheld like this has more to nail than just performance and design. MSI's ticking off these boxes nicely here with a vivid, bright, smooth screen, surprisingly beefy speakers and quiet operation.

That 8-inch 1200p touchscreen may be IPS (so no OLED color waterfalls here), but it's still decently colorful. And with a variable refresh rate from 48 all the way up to 120Hz, gameplay feels more reactive here.

Dual speakers on here have a surprising amount of bass and don't distort at all at max volume, and alongside this, the cooling system doesn't get loud at all!

A pricey upgrade?

I can’t deny that this is a fantastic handheld — one of the best I’ve ever tried. Intel Arc G3 is the key to unlocking some stellar performance, with XeSS 3 being almost like a cheat code to frame rates unlike anything you’ve seen in a portable device like this.

Throw in a gorgeous screen and a real attention to the ergonomics, then you’re onto a winner here. But just like a lot of companies here at Computex, price is the terrifying question, as the entire market is fluid based on RAM prices.

Speaking to MSI, they are targeting $1,500 for this machine (less than the $2,000 rumor that panicked us all). But Intel and MSI's confidence is well-placed here, as this is an incredible piece of hardware.

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Powered by True RGB, Sony’s answer to the RGB backlighting revolution sweeping the TV industry, the Bravia 9 II feels like a masterclass in Mini-LED.

But the road here started with the original Bravia 9 and its groundbreaking 22-bit mini-LED driver. As I reported at the time, it was the first processor and backlight pairing I saw capable of producing a raw, yet recognizable image beneath the screen. Sony took that exact same high-precision driver and replaced traditional blue LEDs with individual RGB LEDs, producing the RGB Backlight Master Drive Pro.

I’ve already broken down what that means for True RGB, but now I can tell you what it means in a real TV that may impress enough to attract more than just early adopters.

Sony Bravia 9 II & Bravia 7 II: Price and availability

The Bravia 9 Mark II will be available some time in June and scales from a premium 65-inch model all the way up to a monstrous, luxury 115-inch theater display. Sony is also offering a lower-tier alternative with the Bravia 7 II that skips on Luminous Booster Pro (meaning, it’s not as bright) and the Black Screen Pro anti-glare panel I’ll get into a little later on.

I’m actually surprised by the pricing for the True RGB collection. Sony TVs tend to come with sticker shock, and while they’re by no means cheap, they’re more accessible than I originally expected.

Here’s what makes the Bravia 9 II so great

Visually, two major performance aspects completely blew me away.

With nearly 4,000 nits pushing through the panel, I anticipated at least some degree of light spillage around dark backgrounds. But even in stark contrast scenes, blooming was virtually non-existent. Human eyes naturally bloom a bit anyway when hit with extreme brightness, but looking closely at the panel, there was no actual spillage. I saw further evidence of this control in the beautifully smooth gradations of sky scenes.

Then there’s off-angle viewing. I know I'm frequently guilty of pitting Mini-LED and OLED tech against each other for the sake of storytelling, and off-angle viewing has traditionally been an area of unmatched OLED dominance in that discourse. In the Bravia 9 II, because the colors are coming directly from both the True RGB backlight and the filter, the panel maintains color saturation much farther off-angle compared to traditional Mini-LEDs.

Speaking of OLED, Samsung more or less made anti-glare technology a mainstream fixture on flagship TVs starting with its S95 QD-OLED line. Most manufacturers have followed suit in one form or another, and for Sony, it’s dubbed Immersive Black Screen Pro.

Sony utilizes a “patent-pending nanostructure layer,” claiming its superior to traditional anti-glare solutions currently in the market. I saw it in effect side-by-side next to competitor TVs featuring their own premium anti-glare finishes. Sony’s panel did in fact seem to genuinely absorb the reflecting ambient lights rather than just scattering or dissipating them across the screen like the others.

Sony Bravia 9 II: preliminary test results

Sony is always chasing the performance profile of its BVM-HX3110 $30,000 professional studio mastering monitor in terms of color reproduction and brightness.

We got to run some benchmarks during our hands-on time. I must state that since this is a pre-production unit, these numbers might not perfectly reflect final retail performance, and we will absolutely re-test it thoroughly in our Tom's Guide lab. That said, testing HDR brightness in a 10% window as we do on all TVs, the Bravia 9 II reached 3,990 nits. The BVM-HX3110 masters up to 4,000 nits of brightness, so I guess Sony can say mission accomplished.

We also tested the Bravia 7 II, and it capped at 2078 nits in the same 10% window. While that’s a solid showing, it’s also evident that it’s a step down from the Bravia 9 II experience.

Raw brightness is easy, but controlling it presents massive engineering hurdles. Yet, Sony seems to have it completely under control.

The Bravia 9 II’s design is a thing of beauty

I’m generally in favor of mounting a premium TV like this, but I’d be remiss not to mention the Bravia 9 II’s physical aesthetics: It comes with what Sony calls the Mirage Stand, a base that creates an optical illusion of the TV completely floating, from the right angle.

The lenticular effect also conceals your cables and literally makes them vanish out of sight. It’s a pretty neat trick if you ask me.

For the Bravia 9 II’s audio layout, Sony added an upward-firing beam tweeter in addition to the sound-positioning tweeters on the sides. While the primary speakers and subwoofers are still housed in the back, Sony re-architected the chassis to create more space for air to move inside.

But if you want to add a dedicated sound system, Sony is introducing the Bravia Theater Trio alongside Bravia 9 II. This innovates on traditional quad setups by utilizing a central, more condensed soundbar complemented by separate wireless left and right channels, giving you way more placement flexibility depending on your screen size. You can also optionally add the Rear 9 speakers and Sub 9 subwoofer to complete the theater package.

Sony Bravia 9 II: Outlook

Given the massive jump to True RGB tech and how impressively it performs, $3,600 feels like a fair price to pay. Sony has managed to harness monstrous, near-4,000-nit brightness while calming blooming concerns to virtually zero.

We still need to get official retail units into the lab to verify how these benchmarks hold up and see how it scales all the way up to that massive 115-inch model. But right now, the Bravia 9 Mark II looks like the premium TV to beat this year.

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The MacBook Ultra is making a lot of headlines — namely for being the first system that will reportedly bring touchscreen to the MacBook. But what if you wanted that without having to pay the (probably) massive price that’ll come with a top-of-the-line Apple computer?

That’s where Intricuit’s Magic Screen comes in. Unveiled at CES, I’ve been testing one for a while now, and not only is it a fantastic piece of kit for converting to a 2-in-1 and extracting more value from your laptop, it proves that Cupertino may be more ready for a touchscreen Mac than you may think.

So, consider this both a review of my three weeks using Magic Screen and a look into Apple’s quiet work preparing for when the worlds of iPad and Mac collide ahead of WWDC 2026.

How it works

It’s a lot simpler than you think! Magic Screen is a magnetic glass layer that snaps directly on top of your current MacBook Pro’s display. Make sure the original display glass is clean, pop it on top, connect via USB-C and you’re off to the races.

In terms of availability, you’ll be able to pick one up in all display sizes — from the 13-inch MacBook Neo all the way up to the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Offical pricing is unconfirmed (it’s going through Kickstarter first), but we do know early bird pricing will start at $139. That's giving me hope that the final retail cost will be reasonable!

You can see it impacts viewing angle at the most extreme of degrees (i.e. directly off to the left or right — places where you won’t be using it), but brightness remains untouched by the additional layer.

Plus, with the lip, you will not be able to close the laptop with this attached. Consider this a PSA because I don’t want eager users destroying their pricey MacBook Pros!

MacBooks suit touch input well(ish)

The first thing that surprised me about using the Magic Screen is just how intuitive it is from the word “go.” The plug-and-play nature of it shows just how macOS already has some nice touch optimization going on here — something we already found when building a touchscreen iMac.

Navigating around is a cinch with simple taps on apps, press and holds for the right-click menu, multi-touch gestures that are mapped identically to the ones you do on the touchpad, and dragging windows and objects around. And the iOSification of the aesthetics of macOS really lends itself to being more touch-friendly than Windows 11 for sure.

Is it perfect? No, and it comes down to two key issues that I’ll be watching WWDC like a hawk for to see if there are any hints of making macOS even more touch-friendly.

First, the general user interaction dynamic changes with different icons — double-tapping a folder on the desktop vs single tapping an app is a great example of this. It’s a small thing on paper, but everything needs to work the same in a uniform kind of way.

And second is the macOS apps themselves. They’re clearly built for mouse and keyboard, and this can prove tricky with some tiny touch targets in things like a Final Cut Pro timeline. Buttons will need to be simplified and made larger for these moments.

This is going to be more of a mammoth task, not just for Apple’s own apps but for third-party developers, and I’m not entirely sure how it’ll be done. Beyond ground-up redesigns, will it be reactive windows that change as you start to touch? I don’t know.

Magic Screen is pretty magical for getting creative

As for the Magic Screen itself, it’s a well-made piece of hardware with the intuitive setup of just magnetically snapping it onto the chassis. You’ve also got that folio case for the panel itself that doubles as a brace that stops any display hinge wobble while you touch too!

But things get really interesting when you turn it into a drawing tablet with the stylus. We’ve loved illustration surfaces from the likes of Wacom for a while now, and this additional use case makes for a really nice ergonomic dimension for getting creative.

Palm rejection is hard at work here, and the stylus has a nice feel in the hand with immediate response times and pressure sensitivity. And given it’s a giant touch surface that matches the dimensions of your laptop’s panel, it’s really easy to guess where your pen will land (even without looking at the hovering icon).

Bridging the gap between iPad and Mac

For years now, it’s seemed a little crazy to me that there hasn’t been a touchscreen Mac. I understood Apple’s reasons, and the touchpad navigation can feel almost iPad-esque with the multi-touch gestures and speed of getting around.

But the wealth of Windows 2-in-1s has shown the world is keen for touchscreen laptops, and this additional paradigm of interaction with a Mac feels very intuitive. Apple’s already done the heavy lifting with macOS taking some visual cues from iOS, and outside of a few app tweaks and gestures, it’s pretty much ready for primetime.

That’s what we’ll hopefully see more of come WWDC 2026 — these small visual tweaks and UI elements that make it more finger-friendly!

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I recently reviewed the LG UltraGear 27GX790B-B, which can hit a 720Hz refresh rate. I thought we couldn’t get higher than that, but LG decided that wasn’t enough and has now unveiled what it claims is the world’s first native 1,000Hz Full HD gaming monitor. No, that’s not a typo, my friends.

During a recent LG event, I got to see the new LG UltraGear 25G590B first-hand. While I wasn’t able to test any games on the prototype model, I did see a test pattern that demonstrated how much smoother things can run at 1,000Hz compared to lower refresh rates. I also learned about some of the AI features meant to provide a more immersive experience.

While I’m not the competitive gamer this monitor is designed for, I’m still impressed that it can hit such a lofty refresh rate. Here are my eyes-on impressions of the LG 25G590B.

LG UltraGear 25G590B hands-on: Display & performance

Most of LG’s recent UltraGear lineup comprises dual-mode monitors, but the 25G590B is 1,000Hz by default. The company told me that this lets players play (and compete) under consistent visual conditions. I take that to mean you won’t have to worry about the monitor's refresh rate when you're using it.

The test pattern I saw showed several slides running at different refresh rates. Naturally, 30Hz to 120Hz looked the choppiest compared to the higher refresh rates. However, all the slides moved very smoothly at 240Hz and up. I’m sure a eagle-eyed esports player could tell the difference between 1,000Hz and 720Hz, but I sure couldn’t. Regardless, I could still see that the 25G590B does indeed offer buttery smooth movement.

This monitor is best suited for first-person shooters like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty, where you need ultra-fast response times to survive. Despite the 1080p resolution, everything from in-game menus to interfaces comes through clearly, even if you’re moving fast in a game. That’s thanks to a new Motion Blur Reduction Pro technology (as LG calls it) that ensures fast-moving objects are sharp and easy to track.

LG says the 25G590B’s IPS panel has a low-reflection film meant to offer consistent color reproduction while reducing glare. There was a light directly above the monitor I was viewing, and I can confirm it didn’t significantly degrade the image quality. This is all meant to increase visibility across various in-game environments.

LG UltraGear 25G590B hands-on: Design

The 25G590B has a 24.5-inch FHD panel. As I was told, this is the size professional gamers prefer because it lets them see everything on the screen without moving their heads.

Design-wise, LG has kept things simple and efficient. For instance, the stand’s base has a small footprint, so you have more room to move your mouse. There are even calibration indicators on the stand to let you adjust the height, swivel, and tilt settings. This way, you can achieve an optimal viewing angle.

The main embellishment is on the back, with a nifty UltraGear Logo that creates ambient illumination. I wasn’t able to test this at the event, but if this is like other UltraGear monitors I’ve reviewed, you’ll be able to customize the RGB lighting to your liking.

LG UltraGear 25G590B hands-on: AI features

The LG 25G590B boasts AI features, such as AI Scene Optimization, which adjusts picture quality to suit different game genres. We didn’t get to see this feature in action, but one of the slides showed how AI is used to improve image quality and clarity. Given how this is a 1080p display, this seems like a smart feature.

Then there’s AI Sound, which will apparently create spatial audio and deliver clearer in-game communications when used with compatible headsets. Sound is almost as important as visuals in fast-paced first-person shooting games, so it’s good to know LG has taken that into account for a competitive-focused gaming monitor.

LG UltraGear 25G590B hands-on: Outlook

I’ll need to test the LG UltraGear 25G590B myself to see if the insane 1,000Hz is more than just tech flexing. Now that LG has taken the refresh rate wars to literal new heights, it’ll be interesting to see if competitors follow suit.

The LG UltraGear 25G590B should launch in the second half of 2026 in select markets. Let us know in the comments if you would want a 1,000Hz monitor or if you think it's overkill.

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The $849 Asus ROG Xreal R1 smart glasses (£749 in the UK) are finally here, and I’ve been testing them for a while. So why am I not scoring them? Well, life comes at you fast and I’ve been traveling over 10,000 miles to Google I/O and back.

That means while I am able to put these specs through their paces in a portable state, I’ve not been able to really test the biggest feature of them — the dock allowing for lightning fast 240Hz gameplay. That’s a world’s first for smart glasses…but it wasn’t available during the time I (and other tech journalists) have been testing them.

But there’s enough here that I can give you some in depth first impressions of using these for hours on end. Let’s get into it.

👎 Not quite ready for primetime

I’ll get this one sorted right off the bat. The hardware is finished, but the software isn’t quite done yet. This shouldn’t be something you face, but it is highly recommended that you get the firmware updated for both the glasses and dock before you properly try them out.

Out-of-the-box, the Frame Rate Boost mode that gives you 240Hz is not available, and with the update literally coming out mere days ago, I can’t in good conscience give you a scored review until I’ve put them properly through their paces.

Plus, it doesn’t help that I’m testing them while out here at Google I/O (far away from my gaming tower and the dock). The following is my experience of the portable setup — stand by for my time replacing my gaming monitors with this set of specs!

👍 Comfortable wearability

The aesthetic may be more Matrix than modern (it won’t be for everyone), but the end result is nice weight distribution across the glasses with pressure-absorbent nose pads that give you a nice wearability for hours on end.

It’s a larger pair of glasses on the face, but still comfortable enough for long flights, along with well-placed buttons for custom controls of the screen tweaks and the X1 chip-enabled feature set.

👍 Crispy picture, versatile customizability

It’s a 1080p picture, but with the prism display tech over bird bath, it’s an impressively sharp 1080p. That comes down to the clarity of the optics here, which does make plugging these into your phone for watching the finale of “The Boys” a nice experience.

On top of that, I’ve always said Xreal’s the way to go for a productivity focus, and these deliver when connected to a laptop — the 32:9 ultrawide panel activated entirely with the on-device chip (no software needed) is a nice touch.

For a better mix of a vivid color palette, something like the Viture Beast is a better pick here. However, Xreal is on the comeback with a customizable color palette. Still not as colorful, but getting closer!

👎 Some edge blurs and screen tearing at higher refresh rates

But while the Xreal One Pro image quality is well and truly here, that comes with some of the drawbacks I saw while testing these — namely the edge blurriness. These prisms are being stretched here by the micro OLEDs within them, and that means you’ll have to tweak the screen distance to be either smaller or further away from you.

Also, rather frustratingly, once connected to the dock, the buttons on the glasses themselves do nothing. While I can understand that in this deskbound situation, you’ll be more likely to use a dock to control them (and the joystick/button layout is easy enough to use), I did find myself often going for the glasses buttons to no avail.

And the big final part here is the screen tearing when using the dock. In all the games I played (particularly any with Nvidia’s DLSS turned on), it was a visible distraction of tears and artifacting that would pose a competitive disadvantage.

Of course, this is without the firmware update, so this could be swiftly resolved, but I’m only here to tell you the immediate experience I’ve had with them.

👎 $849 is a steep price

But that’s when I get to the big issue here — that is a hefty price tag. I know premium AR glasses will cost more, but $849 is a large chunk of change to say the least. You need to be either a serious PC player or a refresh rate purist to really want to spend this much.

Make no mistake about it. This is prime for a specific kind of audience, but even at that rate, you’re getting a crispy, colorful experience that’s more than enough at way cheaper prices. The Xreal 1S — for example — are a great pair of gaming glasses, and while they’re not 240Hz, you get more than enough of a silky frame rate for handheld play (honestly the place where you’d use the Xreal R1s most of the time anyway).

Outlook

Obviously, it’s too early to call on a lot of these features. Maybe the firmware update fixes the screen tearing and these could be the 240Hz wonder glasses that could replace your gaming monitor.

But in my first 10,000 miles, you can tell Asus and Xreal are onto something mightily interesting here, which is a bit of a diamond in the rough at the moment. Time will tell whether these issues are fixed (which you kind of hope they do for $849), and my full review once the full updates are applied will be coming early next week!

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I love Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and consider it a series highlight. However, I wasn’t exactly thrilled when Ubisoft announced a remake of this modern-day classic, given the slew of remakes we’ve seen this generation. Now, after having played nearly three hours of it at an event, I’m pleased to say that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is now one of my most anticipated games of 2026.

Resync is a complete overhaul of the original game, now running on the same Anvil Engine as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Every asset has received a visual overhaul for modern gaming platforms, and it even adds new physics to make the world feel more immersive. Naturally, combat and traversal have also been updated to feel smoother. Beyond updating what existed, the game also features hours of new content.

The best thing I can say about Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is that it looks and plays the way I remember, meaning that it captures the spirit of the original but is a wholly modern experience. It’s a game that reminds me why I fell in love with this franchise in the first place.

A new adventure

The demo begins on a dark and stormy night on the deck of a pirate ship, where protagonist Edward Kenway is fending off attackers who’ve boarded the vessel. This gives you a taste of the enhancements, like the realistic rain physics, detailed lighting, and smooth combat mechanics. It’s a brief opening that’s as impactful here as it was in the original game.

After being cast overboard, Edward swims to a nearby beach. He doesn’t have time to get his bearings, as a hooded man from the enemy ship soon attacks him. After a cinematic battle, Edward emerges victorious. Taking the man’s strange clothing and weapons, he decides to go to Nassau, as his enemy had a note discussing some sort of payment. What Edward doesn’t know is that he killed a member of the Assassin Order and that he will soon undertake a grand adventure.

The next section is where the game truly flexes its graphical muscles. The deep blue of the Caribbean Sea and the dense island fauna draw you into the scene. The way shadows cast by swaying trees fall and move across the sand and rocks is also impressive. Words can’t do justice to just how fantastic this game looks.

Edward spots a docked ship that can take him to his destination, but numerous British soldiers are patrolling the beach. This is where you can test the game’s stealth mechanics, which involve slowly skulking around and dragging foes into thick bushes to take them out silently. One major change from the original is that you can now crouch-walk, which makes stealth gameplay feel more realistic.

Civilized lands

After making a new ally and arriving at Nassau, Edward has to sneak into a British fort to find the loot he had learned about. Towns and forts are just as immaculately rendered as natural settings, with the colorful brick buildings and bustling streets. Even when wading through thick crowds of townsfolk, merchants, beggars, and thieves, the game maintains excellent performance, without slowdown or stuttering.

Traversal is a blast thanks to the smooth and precise parkour mechanics. I remember the original game feeling clunky when I tried to transition from running to jumping, but here, everything flows seamlessly from one action to the next. This is especially true thanks to all the ziplines that have been added to cities and villages.

I tried to remain as stealthy as possible, but I eventually had to face off against enemies. I was told that all moves unlock early in the game and that there are no skill trees or RPG mechanics, such as leveling up. Because of that, you have to rely on your skills to survive, which is the way I prefer it.

Enemies adapt to your attacks, so you’ll need to switch things up to keep them on their toes. Foes have a defense meter, but you can instantly deplete it with a perfectly timed parry or gunshot. Landing a parry and following up with a killing strike never gets old.

Taking to the high seas

After that section, I was allowed to explore the Caribbean openly. Resynced has the same locations as before, but each now contains new items and even missions. There are also several new islands and locations. The open sea, with its rolling waters and distant islands gleaming in the bright sun, looks phenomenal.

Here is where I got to check out the updated naval battles. As before, your goal is to line up your ship’s broadside with the enemy’s so you can deal massive damage with cannon strikes. New mechanics include a secondary fire mode for every naval weapon, such as double shot for Chain Shots. One of my favorite updates is the ability to manually aim Swivel Guns at weak points.

As before, you can board enemy ships to take their crew and treasures. These battles can get pretty intense, as it’s your entire crew versus theirs. Trying to fend off foes with your cutlass is hard enough, but toss in snipers perched on the mast, and you’ll need to remain constantly on the move. Killing enough foes depletes their crew’s morale, and when it’s low enough, you win.

I also engaged in a battle against an enemy fort, using all the new tools at my disposal. The main difference here is that you’re fighting a stationary object, though forts can cause greater damage since they can bombard you with near-constant cannon fire. Once you destroy their defenses, you storm the fort and take out its defenders until they surrender. It’s hard to decide whether I like taking over forts or ships more, as both are a lot of fun.

On a related note, I completed a new mission that involved swimming to an enemy ship to rescue a woman named Lucy and recruit her into my band of pirates. After destroying the ship in a pitched naval battle, we returned to Edward’s Hideout, where I learned more about Lucy and explored the updated locale. I stuck to the main quest here, but was told the Hideout has a bunch of new missions and activities.

Diving deep

After speaking with Edward Teach, also known as the infamous Blackbeard the Pirate, I got to try out the updated underwater mechanics. Like before, you use a diving bell connected to your ship to sink into the ocean. The bell is not only useful for that task, but also a place where you can replenish your oxygen or swim to safety if there’s a hungry shark on your tail.

I didn’t spend too long underwater, but I definitely found swimming and diving more fluid (no pun intended) than before. And this might just be me, but it also seemed that Edward had greater lung capacity than in the original, which allowed me to explore more without fear of suffocation. Ubisoft told me there will be many more underwater sections in Resynced, with new collectibles and secrets.

Outlook

Even with so many remakes and re-releases coming out, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced stands out thanks to its meaningful graphical and gameplay updates. Thanks to that, it looks and feels like a modern title and not just a reskinned older game. It’s clear Ubisoft went all out here, and I anticipate this title will do well because of the company’s efforts.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced should be perfect for newcomers and veterans alike. It releases on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on July 9, cementing it as the perfect game for the long summer months. I can’t wait to play the full game, and you can definitely expect more coverage from me, so stay tuned, you land lubbers!

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The next generation of Android Auto was announced at the Android Show, and I got to properly test it at Google I/O. In short: Apple CarPlay feels washed in comparison — let me explain.

It takes the car from simply being something you go from Point A to Point B in, and adds an additional layer of making it a central hub for navigation, productivity on-the-go and entertainment. And with Gemini thrown in, Cars with Google built-in just took an evolutionary agentic AI step too.

So I took a (simulated) ride in the Kia EV9 with Android Auto and the full Google built-in Volvo EX60 to see what the upgrades bring to the table.

On-the-go

It all starts with the biggest update to Google Maps in over a decade — Immersive Navigation provides a nice 3D view with a huge increase in details like lanes, traffic lights and stop signs. Being able to see everything with greater clarity like this is a huge step forward for getting around.

Then there’s the multi-widget layout of the new Material 3 Expressive design, which creates a really nice, refined UI for the car and multiple app widgets for quick glance interactions.

Top it all off with Gemini and even agentic actions like ordering a meal on Doordash for when you get home (and even adjusting Google Home controls), and it simplifies the idea of multitasking while you drive with the power of your voice — all in a way that Apple CarPlay has never been able to do.

Stuck in traffic

But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt while out here at Google’s campus, it’s that you spend most of your time in California stuck in traffic not really doing much at all. The standstills are painful, and if you’re in an EV, you could be spending up to 30 minutes sat in your car waiting for it to charge.

That’s where the redesigned audio experience in apps like Spotify come in, and most importantly, support for full HD video up to 60 FPS on the center console. Throw in Dolby Atmos support and the surround sound experience was beefy and all-encompassing. But of course, this is only when you throw the car in park — once you start driving, that video vanishes in favor of an audio-only overlay.

Given the explosion in video podcasting on YouTube, I can see this being a hugely-adored feature for the moments you’re parked in traffic for the full visual experience, and switching on the fly to audio when you start crawling forward.

Your own personal car butler

But things get really interesting when you move over to Cars with Google built-in. For those uninitiated, most cars support Android Auto through connecting your phone to the car and project the content of it on-screen.

Cars with Google built-in are natively-built on an Android Automotive operating system — operating entirely as standalone devices that don’t require a phone to be connected to it. They’ve been around since 2020, and now we’re getting the biggest updates to these models since the launch.

The big thing here is Gemini is able to tap into your car’s controls and onboard sensors. No, that doesn’t mean it’ll drive the car for you, but what it actually means is Google Maps can be far more accurate and give real-time advice by using the car’s sensors to identify which lane is needed for your exit.

On top of that, you can ask Gemini to adjust pretty much all the settings in your car, like making the sun roof transparent, changing the climate control, and altering the mood lighting of the cabin. Rather than getting lost in the many panels of settings, having an AI assistant that can actually take action means less time looking at the screen and more time watching the road.

And even better, it’s got some conversational powers too to help you make sense of the world around you. For example in the demo I took part in, we had a first-person video of a drive through San Francisco, where we asked Gemini to identify the big tall building ahead. Google then went straight to the cameras, identified it and gave me an answer in seconds.

Outlook

So far, I’ve always felt that smartphone-enabled in-car experiences have always been a mask over the frankly terrible software that carmakers subject you to. They’ve always been handy, but only so far and you had to be ripped out of the experience elsewhere.

And while that’s still the case with Android Auto from your phone, Cars with Google built-in finally feel like the revolution that’s needed in this space to make car software actually fun to use — and the secret to it is Gemini intelligence.

Taking the confusion out of your car settings is a huge step forward alongside Immersive Navigation, a new cleaner Material 3 Expressive design and the ability to play full HD video for making your motor a central hub wherever you are.

It’s yet another massive step forward for Google that’s leaving Apple’s CarPlay in a serious need of catching up. All eyes on WWDC 2026!

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The Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) is the world’s first 6K gaming monitor, according to Samsung. While this 32-inch monitor focuses on high pixel counts, it also has two refresh rates that favor cinematic or competitive gaming.

I recently went hands-on with the G80HS at a Samsung event, and was stunned by the sharp picture quality it delivered in both its 6K 165Hz and 3K 330Hz display modes. Not only that, but the vibrant colors and smooth performance made me demo the monitor longer than I typically would. It’s a thing of beauty.

Though it doesn’t have an OLED panel, its ultra-sharp resolution and immersive 32-inch canvas make for a fun gaming experience. Here’s what I think of the Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS).

Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) hands-on: Display

Naturally, the 6K resolution is the main draw here. And I have to say, it’s not just number-flexing.

When I played Cyberpunk 2077 on the Odyssey G8, I purposely focused on buildings in the distance. Despite being so far away, I could make out the individual windows and even the dirt around the building’s facade. Of course, objects in the foreground, like the car and the grimy streets I rode across, also came to life in stunning detail.

3K resolution is just slightly less detailed than 6K, but no less stunning. I’m used to 1440p monitors, so the step up from that is noticeable, even if it's not as sharp as 4K. I could tell the immediate difference when I switched between 3K and 6K modes. However, you’re not getting a diminished viewing experience with either mode.

We’d need to get the Odyssey G8 in for testing, but to my eyes, everything looked bright and colorful on the 32-inch display. I don’t know which display mode it was set to, but the colors didn’t appear overly saturated. Despite this not being an OLED panel, you still get excellent overall picture quality.

Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) hands-on: Performance

Dual-mode gaming monitors are all the rage these days, and the Odyssey G8 follows suit with its two refresh rates.

6K resolution gives you 165Hz, while 3K mode bumps that to 330Hz. 6K 165Hz mode is ostensibly for “cinematic” games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Ghost of Tsushima, where you’d want the very best picture quality. Conversely, competitive gamers who need faster performance can flip over to 3K 330Hz. In this way, the G80HS is basically two gaming monitors in one.

Since I’m not a competitive gamer, I couldn’t notice a huge difference between the modes in terms of performance. However, I’m sure hawk-eyed Esports players will notice the difference right away. Regardless, both modes feel incredibly smooth and responsive.

Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) hands-on: Design

The G80HS has the familiar design of the Odyssey series, with its sharp angles and relatively dark color way. Besides the display, the only other light source is the RGB ring around the monitor stand, which creates a nice glow when the monitor is close to a wall.

Other features include a flat stand that doesn’t get in the way of your peripherals, and easy access to the ports on the back. I was also able to raise, lower, and tilt the monitor to my liking.

Overall, this is a nice and practical design that keeps the focus on the game you’re playing.

Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) hands-on: Outlook

Right now, the Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) isn't yet available to purchase. However, it should cost around $1,600 on Samsung's online store. That's not cheap, but for what it offers, it could be worth it for you.

I’ve tested a lot of the best gaming monitors over the years, so it’s nice to have the Samsung Odyssey G8 G80HS flip the script by featuring a 6K resolution. That might sound ludicrous (and perhaps it is), but there’s no denying that it can offer a truly rich viewing experience.

I can’t yet say whether this should be the new standard, but it’s certainly impressive. I should have a full review of the Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80HS) soon, so stay tuned for more!

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So as you well know by now, the “intelligent eyewear” from Google and Samsung is launching this fall with designs by Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. While nobody was able to go actually hands (or eyes) on with these actual glasses, I did get to test the software that will be fuelling these specs and, well, the Ray-Ban Metas are kind of cooked.

Basically, everything AI-related that Meta has brought to the table in its past couple generations has been usurped by what is set to launch on Google’s glasses. We may not know what they will be called, and we don’t know the price. But if they’re competitive to Meta’s specs, Zuckerberg has a big problem on his hands.

Judging the styles

So we’ve got Warby Parker and Gentle Monster doing the designs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most people went for the former. We only got to look at photos (ignore publications that said they got to “wear them all,” because they didn’t), so I can only give you my eyes-on perspective.

The Warby Parker frames look less daring and more subtle on your face, whereas Gentle Monster is looking to make a statement. Nothing wrong with that at all, but the aesthetic is not going to be for everyone.

As for specifics on them, Google didn’t share much. But with these prototype specs weighing less than 50 grams, I’m quietly confident that they will also be lightweight and wearable in the very long-term. Plus, they’ll definitely be prescription-friendly, as has been confirmed extensively here at I/O.

All-round smoothness

As for using them day-to-day, you’ll get your standard interface that uses your phone as the brains of your glasses, with a little bit of local AI to run the basics. It’s a method that has a proven track record so far, and they will be compatible with both Android and iOS devices.

Gemini Live is the key to making these true Ray-Ban Meta beaters, and it frankly makes Meta AI seem feeble in comparison. Rather than having to follow rudimentary vocal steps to do certain things, a press and hold on the stem turns it on and I’m having a full conversational interaction with the AI about the world around me.

As is the case with any of these demos, I had a bunch of props to work with — figuring out a Van Gogh painting, or going through a Korean cookbook and ensuring that the recipes are safe for my peanut-allergic friends to consume. In all of these, the AI voice is extra descriptive of its determination and provides a nice helping hand in a way Meta AI has never really done so.

Throw in all the Google app integration in here too and it gets even more interesting. You can receive a summary of your latest messages or turn-by-turn directions to the nearest bar (it’s been a long day, don’t judge me). It’s clear that a real-time AI like Gemini has been the missing link that’s going to bring everything together in a way that can reduce the number of times you need to pull out your phone.

Turning on the display

This is a feature that will not be coming to this first crop of smart glasses — they are all display-free. But the monocular waveguide display in this prototype does add some fantastic visual aids to some key use cases.

You’ve probably already read a lot about this when Mark went eyes-on with this same prototype last year. But to give you my thoughts, bringing Google services into a pair of smart glasses really brings a user-friendly advantage here with the likes of Google Maps and photo taking.

Seeing a little HUD give directions or a GTA-style radar when you look down for a nice street layout is a nice touch. Then the image generation efforts with Nano Banana were frankly hilarious. I took a picture of my camera guy and asked it to turn him into a superhero…what does GL mean? Also his name is Paul Antill as clearly stated on the badge, but now he’s Paul Arnold!?

Regardless, it’s clear that you’ll have plenty of fun with the generative AI experiences of these specs.

Watch out, Meta!

And all of this exposes that while the Ray-Ban Metas may have a couple of years headstart, the usefulness updates over time have been rather minor and slow in the progress of things.

I mean, sure, there are reminders of things, but do they actually mean something when they’re not integrated into your services that matter? Or do turn-by-turn directions really help when the mapping technology doesn’t hold a candle to Google Maps?

So, I say this to Zuck. You have about five months-ish to figure out how to compete with this. I’m not sure what the answer is, but Google is about to bring actually useful AI to smart glasses, and Meta AI needs to catch up fast in both a simple Q&A fashion and in agentic use, too.

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Alongside AI glasses made with Samsung, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, Google is also tying up with Xreal on Project Aura. We’ve been seeing small glimpses of them for the past year and finally, I was able to go fully hands-on (and eyes-on) at Google I/O. And in three words: it’s the future.

For those uninitiated, Project Aura is Xreal’s best pair of AR glasses connected to a compute puck with Qualcomm silicon inside — taking on Meta’s Project Orion from a while back and figuring out how to stuff the experience of a full-blown VR headset like the Samsung Galaxy XR or Apple Vision Pro into something the size of a slightly oversized pair of specs.

As the smart glasses guy on the team, it’s been my dream to watch the worlds of the best smart glasses and best VR headsets come together. And while they’re definitely not all the way there (you won’t be taking these outside in public without getting second looks), it’s a damn good starting point.

A new window

The field-of-view battle has been ongoing between the likes of Xreal and Viture, and so far that ceiling has been 58 degrees in the Viture Beast. When Xreal’s CEO came out and announced a 70-degree field of view for Project Aura, I was very much in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp…

Well, I saw it and yes, it’s a true generational leap for immersion. The prisms are massive and while you can definitely see some edge blurring, the fact that said blurring is kind of moving off to your peripheral vision masks it nicely.

It’s that missing link between just being a nice big screen for your phone or laptop on your face and becoming that stepping stone into being a VR experience to boot. On the sides, you’ve got two cameras along with a centrally-placed lens for full 6 DoF tracking, and the whole thing is tethered to a compute puck (with a strap to shoulder it) that’s roughly the same size as my iPhone 15 Pro.

We don’t know anything about what’s inside the puck except for a 4455mAh battery (probably good for 2-3 hours of heavy use), and some unnamed Snapdragon chip inside.

My guess is an XR2 Gen 2 or something maybe newer (Gen 3? Couldn’t be sure). But the end result is mostly accurate hand tracking and impressively fixed windows in place — to the point that you can walk around them a la VR headsets.

Getting to use them

So what can you do on them? Well, spatial computing stuff of course — this is Android XR after all! If you’ve used the Galaxy XR, you’ll feel right at home with the pinches and drags. But the transparency of glasses adds a new dimension of layering to the whole thing. This is not you seeing the world through cameras, it’s seeing the real world with your content laid over it.

I got to multitask without any noticeable hitches, messed around with a music creation app that merges drawing in the air with Gemini’s music creation, and even played Demeo — a D&D-style tabletop game that almost feels purpose-built for a device like this.

Ultimately, it does hit those same barriers that any spatial computing interface faces: namely that it’s slower to do things than on an actual computer. But I can’t deny that these are so much fun to use! And Gemini brings it all together nicely with voice prompts to make your way around.

Also shout-out to the auto electrochromic dimming of the lenses, which means that if someone is getting my attention, I can look away and the lenses immediately become fully transparent so I can maintain eye contact.

Outlook

OK, so how much are they going to cost and when will they come out? On the latter, they’re set for later this year but everyone’s staying super tight lipped on price. So all I can do is guess, and while I’d love for these to be sub-$1,000, I don’t see a world where this happens. I mean the Galaxy XR headset is nearly two grand, and this is a lot of compute that has been ruthlessly shrunk down into a pair of glasses.

However, doesn’t take away from one simple truth: these are a glimpse into the exciting future of AR glasses — specs that are no longer just a display on your face, but a whole platform to do things on. It’ll take time to get that compute puck outta there, to make them a true must-buy. But as they are now, these are the next generation to look forward to.

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Alienware's notebooks are among the best gaming laptops available, but they can be pricey for most folks. This is especially true now, thanks to RAMageddon. Thankfully, the company isn’t ignoring the current reality and has just launched a more affordable gaming laptop for PC gamers. Meet the new Alienware 15 (2026) gaming laptop.

Starting at $1,299, this 15-inch laptop packs up to an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU and up to an Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU. Couple with 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage, and you have the basics for playing the best PC games at 1080p resolution and medium to high graphics. While the asking price is still above $1,000, it’s not terrible given current conditions.

I tested a pre-production model of the Alienware 15 gaming laptop and found it delivers a solid experience for those who don’t want to break the bank. Given its price, you’re not getting a premium display or chassis, but if you just want to play your PC games on something reliable, you won’t go wrong here.

Alienware 15 (2026) hands-on: Specs

Alienware 15 (2026) hands-on: Design

At first glance, the Alienware 15 certainly has the iconic look of the company’s laptops, with its all-black shell and Alienware logo on the lid. However, picking it up instantly makes it clear this isn’t just any Alienware product.

The polycarbonate resin lid and bottom have a plastic-like feel that’s a departure from the aluminum casings of higher-end Alienware laptops. While that’s jarring at first, the smooth, contoured lines and overall sleek design help offset that.

Unlike the Alienware 16 Area-51, the Alienware 15 has a full keyboard, which should make number pad users very happy. I don’t fall into that camp, so having the keys I actually mostly located on the left-hand side made it tricky to find my stride when typing. That said, the thick keys and their satisfying travel distance do make this a good laptop for writing.

The lion’s share of the ports is on the left-hand side. This includes two USB-A ports, an Ethernet port, a USB-C port, and an HDMI port. On the left are a lone USB-C port and a headphone jack. Port placement is generally fine if that’s the side you prefer to connect peripherals to, but it could be burdensome if you would have preferred them on the right side or on the back.

Alienware 15 (2026) hands-on: Display

The 15-inch display isn’t terrible, but after testing so many laptops with OLED panels, it’s certainly a step down in both picture quality and overall brightness.

Since this was a pre-production model, we didn’t run our usual suite of display benchmarks. To my eyes, however, the screen is noticeably dimmer and less vibrant than a more premium display.

That’s not to say things don’t appear clearly defined, because they certainly do. The 1200p resolution lets you see everything on the screen in fine detail. However, the muted colors and low brightness make everything look duller than you’d like.

Again, things don’t look terrible on the Alienware 15, but don’t expect a top-end viewing experience when playing games or watching videos.

Alienware 15 (2026) hands-on: Performance and battery life

I tested a pre-production model with entry-level specs. It includes an AMD Ryzen 5 processor, an Nvidia RTX 4050 mobile GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. These aren’t the latest and greatest components, but they’re good enough for playing even demanding games at smooth frame rates.

At default graphical settings and native resolution, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at around 45 to 50 frames per second during my testing. Mind you, that’s without the frame-boosting DLSS upscaler enabled. With this feature turned on, the fps jumped to the low 60s, so it’s definitely worth it for a system like this.

Given its prowess as a gaming machine, the Alienware 15 had no problems handling my average workflow, which usually consists of dozens of open Chrome tabs and the occasional YouTube video running in the background. If you need to get work done, this laptop won’t let you down.

Lastly, let’s talk about battery life. We didn’t run our usual battery test on this machine, but during my testing, I was able to play for close to 90 minutes before the battery life warning appeared. That’s typical for a gaming laptop, so I wasn’t surprised. Naturally, you’ll want to keep this laptop connected while gaming so it keeps running and maintains optimal performance.

Alienware 15 (2026) hands-on: Outlook

Given how expensive gaming devices are nowadays, I applaud Alienware for keeping the average gamer in mind. Both the Alienware 15 gaming laptop and the $349 Alienware AW2726DM gaming monitor exemplify this philosophy.

While I wouldn’t call a $1,299 starting price cheap, it’s still affordable given the current state of things. I’ll have a full review for you once I get to test a final model, but for now, I like what Alienware is cooking up.

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If you’re shooting content for Instagram or TikTok, or dialling in to an online interview, capturing good quality audio is a must. For those of us working from noisy homes or busy cafes, we often have to get creative to record clean audio. Having a decent wireless microphone certainly helps.

Billed as “the world’s first AI-powered, transformable wireless microphone system,” the Boya Magic is essentially a pocket-sized recording studio. The comparison fits: it’s a four-in-one device that packs multiple audio tools into a single wireless unit.

Depending on the configuration, you can:

• Clip it to your shirt as a lavalier mic
• Use it handheld for interviews
• Set it up as a desktop microphone
• Connect it to your camera via the 3.5mm TRS cable

The mic comes in different bundles that vary depending on what types of receivers you want to purchase. These range from $89.99 to $144.99.

Weighing just 7 grams, the transmitter clips easily onto your clothing, either via its built-in clip or the included magnetic mount, and sends audio to a receiver that connects to your phone over USB-C or Lightning.

Each kit includes two mini transmitters, along with a charging case that doubles as a handheld microphone for a more traditional setup, especially if you slip on one of the windshields that you’ll receive. That same configuration doubles as a podcast setup. Simply plug it into your computer, place the mic on a table, and capture 360° sound with ease.

Battery life is solid for something this compact. Each mini mic lasts up to six hours on a single charge, and the charging case adds a further nine hours — giving you a combined total of 30 hours before you need to find a plug. Under optimum conditions, Boya rates the wireless range at up to 328 feet (100 meters).

The audio I captured with the Magic didn’t blow me away, but it’s a clear step up from recording directly through my iPhone. It records at a 48 kHz sample rate with 24-bit depth across a 20 Hz–20 kHz frequency range, similar to competitors at this price point, such as the Rode Wireless Micro.

Where the Boya Magic stands out

Using the Boya Magic’s AI noise cancellation is where I started to get impressed. You can switch between light (-15 dB) and strong suppression (up to -40 dB), helping your voice cut through background noise. Both modes can be toggled via the companion app or the onboard controls.

I tested it in windy conditions that my iPhone struggled to handle, with gusts often overpowering and obscuring my voice. A generic wireless mic offered some improvement, but the audio was still inconsistent.

Plugging in my Boya Magic significantly upgraded the recording experience. Despite the AI processing, my voice still felt like my own and I didn’t notice any sort of warping. The only thing I noticed was that the wind and traffic noise were significantly muted.

Boya says its AI noise cancellation was trained on over 700,000 noise samples and can suppress audio up to -40 dB. I reached out to Boya about the AI features but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.

Nevertheless, the AI noise reduction does what it says on the box. With noise cancellation features off, the Boya Magic mic combined with the windshields still did a pretty good job of picking up my voice in windy conditions.

When I turned on the noise cancellation modes, I did pick up subtle ambient sound but in no way was it overpowering. If anything, I felt it made my recordings sound more natural.

Final thoughts

If you’re looking for a versatile wireless microphone that captures good quality audio for your phone, laptop or camera the Boya Magic mic is a good contender.

While the recording quality suffices for creating casual content, the most impressive features are the two AI noise cancelling modes that allow you to get your message across regardless of whether you’re in a windy park or a noisy cafe.

If you have easy access to quiet recording spaces where noise cancellation isn’t a priority, you could save some cash by going with other mics such as the Boya Mini 2 that retails for around $40.

The Magic’s versatility does come at a premium, but gives you greater peace of mind on those days when you can’t control your environment.

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I’ve been using iPhones ever since the 3GS, and an Apple ecosystem has grown around me — from the M5 MacBook Pro to my Apple Watch Ultra 2. But as my iPhone 15 Pro is on its last legs (as a content creator, I’ve really put it through its paces), it’s time to upgrade and I’m stumped.

Normally, my inner voice would be saying “just get an iPhone” to silence the blue bubble FOMO, but the Honor 600 stands as one of the few Android devices that actually plays nice with the ecosystem instead of fighting it.

And this isn’t just in software, the aesthetics are seriously premium, you’re getting a giant battery, mesmerizing OLED display, AI smarts in (mostly) all the right places and a banger camera system.

I do have some gripes (more on them later), but for £549 — £50 less than the iPhone 17e — you’d be hard pressed to find a better direct foe to Apple’s lineage.

The anti-Android aesthetic

It all starts with the Honor 600 being a serious looker and real premium feel in the hand — slim and lightweight at 6.7 ounces with unibody cold-carving process creating that sleek aluminum frame around the body.

But the real attention to detail comes in two ways. First, that super skinny bezel at 0.98mm (actually the thinnest in the industry right now) really does make the front basically look like its all display, while giving your thumb plenty of real estate to navigate while one-handed.

Then there’s the translucent composite fiber back. Touching it, you’d think it’s glass. But I promise you it’s not, and it actually makes the phone much more durable too. Throw in IP68, IP69 and IP69K water and dust resistance, alongside being SGS 5-star rated for drop and crush resistance, and this is ideal for clumsy hands like mine.

Living in both worlds

So here’s the secret weapon. I know Android Quick Share has managed to crack the AirDrop formula for Apple devices, but Honor’s been doing this for a while and with the upgraded OneHop technology, you’re getting much broader interconnectivity with other gadgets too!

It all starts with the Honor Workstation app for one-tap file sharing with iPhones and Macs, which in my time testing transferred data at a much higher speed too. One word of warning, though, both the Honor 600 and the MacBook need to be on the same WiFi network to make this happen.

But it goes further with a shared/synced notes system similar to the iCloud alternative. Open up a Workstation note and it’ll appear on your phone in real-time. Then comes the Apple Watch integration where the 600’s messages can sync to my Ultra 2.

It’s not the completely perfect “it just works” levels of Apple integration you get with an iPhone, Apple Watch and MacBook working together, but it’s close enough for what I need to do.

The day-to-day

Of course, one of the ways that Android phones stand up to iPhones is by offering better hardware for less, and that’s exactly what the Honor 600 does. Beyond the design aspects we’ve already talked about, there’s a giant 6.6-inch AMOLED screen running at 120Hz with a crispy 458 pixels-per inch.

Colors melt off the screen — especially when you flick on Vivid Display that uses AI to enhance clarity and color — with anything you watch, play or work on moving buttery smooth. But the real superpower here is brightness that hurts (but in a good way), as sunlight mode can tweak that peak brightness all the way up to 8,000 nits…yes you read that right.

That meant even in the most direct sunlight (even when its reflecting off the cover glass), I had no problem seeing content. And for late night use, this is contrasted by the 3,840Hz PWM dimming and AI defocus features that has legitimately made this display feel easier on the eyes when doomscrolling.

Then there’s the software that brings it all together: the MagicOS 10 skin on top of Android 16. There’s plenty of customizability to the UI, but out-the-box it felt familiar to an iOS-style app pages formula, which then slowly reveals other familiarities like the Dynamic Island-like Magic Capsule on top too for quick reference to real-time notifications.

But it’s 2026, so of course the phone has AI, which for the 600 extends far beyond your standard writing tools and translations. I’ve already talked about the AI display tweaks you can make, as well as the fun image-to-video stuff you can do too. But a lot more comes into play with that dedicated AI button.

With either a short, long or double press, you can jump into various features like a circle to search, and get suggestions based on on-screen content through the image model. There’s also AI battery scheduling too for identifying your usage patterns and optimizing power allocation, and a deepfake/voice clone detection system, though on that latter one it wasn’t entirely accurate with a 75% success rate in my testing.

Plus, with that giant 6800mAh battery inside, I’m able to comfortably make it through an entire day of regular use (Apple Music, checking socials, messaging, TikTok doomscrolling, a couple quick games) with around 35% left in the tank — a far cry from the fumes I’m left with on my iPhone at its peak.

Getting snap happy

Of course, one of the biggest selling points for a phone is its camera, and in my time testing, the 600 mostly nails it. That 200MP main snapper definitely delivers some flagship-level pictures with some additional flair to boot.

You can turn on pro mode to get the full res, but I highly doubt anyone will, because with 16-in-1 pixel binning, you’re getting a lot more light to the lens and incredible clarity in every shot. Throw in CIPA 6.0 pro-grade optical image stabilization and low light shots are not a problem for this either.

But most impressive is that color temperature sensor doing some great work in understanding the vividness of what you’re shooting, while the AI color engine gives you a chance to mimic your favorite camera styles from the likes of Fujifilm.

And while the AI image-to-video is definitely more gimmick than a serious feature, I can’t deny it’s a lot of fun to use for bringing inanimate objects to life. Round the front you’ve got a 50MP shooter also produces bright, crispy, color accurate shots too.

There’s just one issue though — that 12MP ultra wide and macro camera is a bit of a letdown compared to the monster 200MP main. There’s a fair bit of edge blur and reduced sharpness that can create a slightly mushier quality to the 0.5x shots.

For those wanting versatile creativity, better balance would’ve been nicer here.

The frustrations

That being said, there were a couple of things that I missed while daily driving the Honor 600. First, that mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip is speedy enough for the day-to-day basics and some multitasking, but it can start to get under pressure for anything more intensive.

Thanks to the vapor chamber, it won’t overheat under that sustained load, but it will just take a while to do things like render advanced photo edits, and gaming is on the slower side until you tone the graphics settings down a bit. And given the focus on the design here, you can find similarly-priced phones like the OnePlus Nord 5 or the iPhone 17e with more bang for your buck in this area.

And second is the lack of wireless charging. This has been common for the standard number series of Honor phones for a while now, and if you are more keen to do wired charging, this can absolutely keep up with 80W charging speeds and even 27W reverse wired to keep your earbuds topped up. But as someone who dived right into the MagSafe ecosystem, this is a tough pill to swallow.

Bottom line

However, all that being said, I’m stumped. My inner voice saying “just get the iPhone” has been silenced and it’s not just about specs — it's the fact that switching no longer means losing the Mac/Apple Watch features I love. Instead of fighting it, the Honor 600 embraces that seamlessness, and it’s one of the best phones I’ve tested in a long while.

It feels like the “Pro” phone the midrange has been waiting for and maybe, just maybe, it’s the one that will make some folks consider switching. I’m definitely getting that feeling.

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Yes, I know that to the sim racers amongst you, this is a cursed image — an F1-style wheel with a gear shifter and handbrake. The layout is also cursed too, but you can blame the limited space to bolt addons to the PlaySeat Formula Instinct rig.

The big news here is that Revosim has teamed up with Aston Martin to bring this new F1 wheel add-on to the RS Pure Sim — including this flatter, wider F1-style wheel, magnetic mounting cap with the badge, driving gloves and the carbon paddles for £129. In my testing, for enhancing steering feel in these beasty cars, this definitely performs much better than the real-life team is doing right now (...that was low, apologies to the team).

But while I am very much a track racer, I want the flexibility to dip into rally and drifting too. So I got the £439 Revosim bundle with shifter, loadcell handbrake and clutch pedal too for the full experience, and while I absolutely suck at rallying right now, it’s a lot of fun with these. Let me explain.

P1 for F1 racing

So let’s talk about the Aston Martin tie in here to begin with, because this is a great attachment if track racing is your thing. For those not in the know, there are some real benefits to a formula-style wheel that fundamentally changes the ergonomics and physics of how you interact with the sim

For the 180-degree rotation range of a track car over the 360 degrees of a standard roadcar, you’ll have your hands permanently locked to the wheel in the 9-and-3 position. This is built perfectly for that with an ergonomic placement of comfortable hand grips (with the gloves adding a nice grippiness to them too).

You aren’t fighting the inertia of a larger, heavier outer ring, so my steering inputs react to the competition around me and hit that apex first much faster. For even more weight-saving, you can change those metal paddles out for carbon fiber, but I still prefer the chunky click of the originals personally.

The well-design width also ensures that the key controls are just a thumb’s reach away for managing ERS and Brake Bias on-the-fly during a qualifying lap. Throw in the magnetic Aston Martin badge (which can be taken off if you’re coping as a Ferrari fanboy…hi btw) and you’ve got a fully-branded, high quality sim racing experience with that full.

Would I have loved a standalone wheel with a built-in display for telemetry? Sure. But that’s where the bluetooth-connected app comes in, and there are already on-board lights for rev counter and whatnot. This is a solid attachment to specialize your setup.

“If in doubt, flat out”

Colin McRae said it better than anyone else could — easily one of the most legendary rally drivers in the sport’s history. Turns out when I started going flat out in Assetto Corsa Rally, I wrapped my Lancia around many, many trees.

This is seriously sim racing on hard mode (in my opinion), as there’s much more to think about from not just gear choice, but also how to approach each corner based on the surface you’re driving over, the tightness of it, whether there are small obstacles or holes on each side that could send you flying, and much more.

But while it took me a long time to get acquainted to it, I can’t blame the tools, as I absolutely love the satisfying chunk of the hybrid gear box and pressurized pull of the load cell handbrake. These feel incredibly well-built and hefty with solid handles and zero flex in the metal shells as you put them through their paces.

And when I finally managed to nail the perfect handbrake flick around a hairpin turn, it was so satisfying. It quickly became muscle memory, which is a testament to the precise readings of that handbrake, and powering out with a tactile click on every shift really amped up the immersion.

…did I end up driving off a cliff? Maybe. But it was worth it.

Outlook

If you remember my review of the RS Pure back last year, one of my main frustrations was that the ecosystem may take a while to gain steam. We still don’t have any PlayStation compatibility (yet), and these accessories are not available in the U.S. But at the very least, we’re getting the full accessory set on PC to make this the all-purpose sim setup you need.

The Aston Martin wheel attachment is a great addition for anyone looking to level-up their track racing, and the gearbox and handbrake have that satisfyingly hefty feeling that makes you feel like you’re firing a V10 monster from the 90s around a tight turn in the middle of the Welsh forest.

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There are a lot of benefits to owning solar panels, the least of which is the fact that you're harnessing energy from the sun that would otherwise go to waste. Or at the very least, the sun is doing more than just heating the roof of your home. That's easily the worst part about summer where I live.

I've had home solar panels for over six years now, but there are far more ways to take advantage of solar power. I don't mean solar-powered phone chargers, though that isn't too far off. I mean, utilizing portable solar tech to bring power to places that have no access to the electric grid.

For some, that might mean camping trips, but my need is much closer to home — it's my own garage.

Who needs power in their garage? I do

Back in the '80s when my house was being built, the developers decided they didn't want to fill the area with detached housing. Apparently, that would be far too luxurious, and instead, they figured rows of townhouses were far more appropriate. But unwilling to deprive potential buyers of car use, they still included driveways and garages.

Sadly, the garages in question are not connected to the houses. They were built as a separate block, and my particular garage is roughly 45 feet from the end of my backyard. From an accessibility standpoint, this isn't a big deal. Clearly, the developers never considered that people might need power in their garage.

This was clearly an attempt to cut construction costs by avoiding something that would be seen as frivolous in 1985, but in hindsight, it seems like a huge oversight. Even if you discount luxurious things like electric garage doors and EV chargers (which didn't exist yet), there are plenty of reasons why I'd want an electricity hookup in my garage. At the very least, I could do with some lights to help me find all the stuff I've got stored in there without needing a flashlight.

That's where portable solar comes into play. Connecting my garage to my home's power grid is out of the question, since I would have to spend thousands of dollars digging into asphalt to bury the relevant power cables — as well as requiring permission from at least five neighbors. Likewise, a traditional solar install would be far too costly, especially since there would be no way to sell excess power back to the grid.

But portable solar is a different story. Not only is it relatively affordable, it's also small enough to be able to move around without a problem. This is perfect for powering the kind of things I actually want to be able to use in my garage.

Anker's Solix power generator has been a lifesaver

When it came to adding portable power to my garage, the battery itself needed to be worth the money. I have plenty of portable phone chargers, and I know that they weren't up to the task on account of their limited capacity and power output. I needed to be able to power household electronics , which require the full brunt of mains power to run. USB ports and 12V car chargers were not going to cut it, no matter how large the battery actually was.

So I ended up with the Anker Solix C300, a 288Wh battery that features an array of different power sockets. Crucially, this battery also supports alternating current, which means you can power household electronics that would normally need to be plugged into a wall.

There is a limit to the kind of devices this battery will support, though, because output is limited to 300W of sustained output — with a 600W "surge" that can run for brief periods of time. In other words, you're not going to be plugging any big appliances into this thing.

That's entirely fine by me. I had no plans to install a dryer or a chest freezer in there — not connected to a battery that can run out of power, anyway. I only wanted to power a few basics, including lights and the gym equipment that my wife had been begging me to get out of the house for the better part of the year.

Considering how much cooler it is in the garage, even during the height of summer, it's arguably the best place for a workout anyway. Especially when you have the means to power a powerful fan.

I still wish the C300 were able to supply a little bit more juice, though. I realized late last summer that a portable battery would be perfect for power tools, especially since I'm usually too cheap to buy cordless models. Sadly, when your lowest-powered tool requires 710W of power to operate, a 600W surge feature just doesn't cut it.

The cheapest Anker Solix battery that could comfortably power my tools is the $799 C1000, which is almost triple the price of the $299 C300. It would probably be more cost-effective to just buy cordless power tools. But seeing as how I don't use power tools all that often, I'm happy sticking with my 16-foot extension cord for now.

The actual discharge time varies, but the C300 is helpful enough to give you an estimate of how long you have until you run out of power. So long as you pay attention, you're not going to be rudely interrupted by the power running out.

What about the solar panel?

Portable batteries on their own are no big deal, especially not if you resort to plugging them into the mains to recharge. But plugging in with a PC power cable, or USB-C, is the most boring way to charge one of these up. Anker markets them as "Portable Power Stations" for a reason, and that's because you can hook them into a solar panel and recharge just about anywhere.

The C300 supports up to 100W of solar input, but considering you can fold up the panel and set it up wherever you like, it's a really effective way to recharge the battery regardless of location. IP67 water and dust resistance also means you don't need to worry about the panel succumbing to the elements if the weather takes a turn for the worse.

But it's easy to bring up figures like 100W and leave it at that, but what does this actually mean? In terms of actual recharge time, I've found that the single PS100 panel will recharge the C300 in just over four hours. I will admit that the weather was working in my favor the day I measured this, and the weather was exceptionally clear and sunny for late April in southern England.

Your actual mileage may vary, depending on how favorable the weather is for solar power. It's also worth mentioning that the laws of physics prevent a 100W solar panel from actually delivering 100W of power, and I found that my panel topped out at 77W.

I suspect that if you wanted the extra 23W of power, you'd need to get a more powerful solar panel. But considering the 200W PS200 panel costs $449, compared to the PS100's $109, I'm not really sure that's a wise way to spend your money. You'd end up saving, at most, an hour of charging time and in my opinion that's just not worth it.

Still, if you've got the patience to wait in one place while your battery recharges, the multi-hour recharge time won't be the end of the world. Especially if it means having free power when you'd otherwise get nothing. Plus, considering the PS100 folds in half and weighs less than 11 pounds it's quite easy to transport. In fact, my experience is that the only awkward part of the process is wrangling the 10-foot power cable in such a way that I'm not constantly tripping over it.

Bottom line

Having home solar is easily one of the best things I've ever done for my house, but the technology has way more potential than simply saving money on your energy bills. It's crazy to think that photovoltaic solar has been around for almost 200 years, but the technology is now so cheap and accessible that you can throw a panel onto your garage roof just as easily as you can put up a picture frame.

A portable solar panel does not have all the same benefits as a full set of rooftop solar panels, and the amount you benefit will entirely depend on how you use it. But if there's ever a time when you can't rely on mains power, or some other alternate power source, then it may be worth investing in something like the Anker Solix system.

Whether you have a powerless garage or outbuilding, have a fondness for camping, or simply need a backup power supply just in case — I cannot recommend it enough. Especially if you manage to get a good deal on the equipment, as I did.

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Hitman: World of Assassination is one of the greatest stealth games ever made, and when I saw IO Interactive get the gig to make 007 First Light, it felt like a match made in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew this wasn’t going to be a copy + paste of Agent 47’s formula. I wasn’t expecting to muffin boost up to a ledge and finish a gigantic level in seconds (yea, Hitman’s fastest players do some crazy stuff). But if even a whiff of Agent 47’s DNA that got me hooked made it to the Bond universe, we’re onto a winner.

What I ended up playing is not what I expected, and as Tom Marchum, Senior Combat Designer for the game explained to me, that’s very much by design. Instead, I got to work (and rework) my way through three hours of a real blockbuster that is equal parts Uncharted and Hitman — all while capturing the essence of an all-time great Bond game. Let me explain.

This is not Hitman

This is the first thing I should be absolutely clear about from the get-go. The second I felt panic because I couldn’t move a body to avoid detection, the distinction became apparent. This isn’t the Agent 47 formula of “here’s a map and your objectives — figure it out yourself,” but it takes that inspiration and blends it with so many of my other favorite games.

There are indeed some sandbox moments to strategize and figure out your way through a la Hitman, but this is merged with the fast-paced linearity and gripping story of Uncharted, the cover-based shooter mechanics of a Gears of War, and even visceral hints of Hellblade II. All of these seamlessly flow into one another throughout every level I played. And all of these inspirations are squished together with a Bond presentation to truly put you in the shoes of 007.

Tom calls this “forward-focused momentum,” and as he explained it, I realized why a full Hitman formula transplant would not have worked here. "In Hitman, you'd probably go back and through a space three or four times to work it out. You might spend 20 minutes walking around the encounter to work out what you wanted to do,” Marchum pointed out. “A lot of the audience for Bond don't want that. They want to go through — they want forward progress."

One of the reasons why I absolutely love the Hitman games is that beneath the violent face of it all, it’s essentially a puzzle game featuring a whole lot of death. The more Tom went into the intentional differences, the more it made sense to move away from this mechanic. "Whereas Hitman's design becomes an evolving set of puzzle pieces in a much larger puzzle that may influence each other later, we just want this to feel like a Bond movie,” Marchum added.

The more I played, the more it became clear to me that IOI has absolutely nailed it.

Licence to Thrill

“This guy’s doomed because I’m James Bond,” Marchum joked, while highlighting exactly what the mission is with this game: to make you feel like 007. And everything from the aesthetics to the play styles and the all-encompassing narrative drives this incredibly effectively.

I got to play through three levels, and I will not be going into any story details here. Basically, these handpicked locations gave me a chance to experience the versatility of First Light, and how IOI has managed to stitch it altogether into one impressively seamless tapestry of forward motion.

From the gorgeously barren (and almost alien) Icelandic landscape to the shining lights of a resplendent gala, this game is visually gorgeous with a fantastic orchestral score underpinning all the action. For context, I was demoing this game on a beastly RTX 5090 PC, so of course I’m getting all that path traced goodness. But on a stylistic level, that cinematic aesthetic is a great direction with a lot of variety in the locales.

Throughout all the scenarios I played, there was a regular drumbeat of story progression that was either told with linear moments of character movement (with fantastic voice acting from Patrick Gibson and the crew), which then opens up to dramatic vistas and sandboxes to play as you like.

You can do things quietly (more on that later), or you can go full action movie and lean on the combat system, which is a lot of fun. When I told Tom, he threw his fists up in the air — it’s so clear how much of a passion project this game was to IOI!

“That's one of the things that we really wanted to focus on was making sure that you felt like Bond combat,” Marchum added. “That you don't feel like you were struggling, and that combat didn't feel like a last resort."

There’s a real fluidity in the deep melee system using the environment around you, and satisfying gun combat that is all glued together with a satisfying fluidity between the two. You can tell the team has confidence in this by limiting the ammo in guns you pick up, which forced me from calmly popping headshots into the frenetic close quarters of taking down the next enemy.

Throw gadgets into the mix like my flashbang earbuds and it’s an addictive loop of really feeling like 007 — outnumbered but always with a chance of overcoming if you keep your wits about you.

Doing things quietly

But when things got mightily interesting is when I replayed some of these key scenarios and approached them in different, more subtle ways with spycraft. First Light is designed to make all out gun battles an absolute last resort (the Licence to Kill is only approved when enemies are shooting at you).

So the encouraged way forward is to focus on your stealth — be it creeping around or the more Hitman-esque social stealth elements. In one particular scenario, I had to work my way into a security room to gain access to the security camera system.

The first time around, I was not thinking stealthily, and ended up punching my way through the situation. But in the second and third replays, I opted for a more subtle approach — using a sick dart or hacking distractions around me with my watch, and quietly taking down my opponents.

Then I moved into the world of bluffing, which only works on guards that don’t have a dot above their heads (sort of like the disguise system from Hitman, but also nobody wants to see Bond in weird costumes).

There isn’t really a mechanic to it, but watching 007 blag his way through a scenario talking about a broken coffee machine or being a penetration tester is always fun, and it distracts the guards temporarily while you move through the situation.

Some frustrations

That’s not to say it’s completely without small frustrations that I found. That emphasis on forward momentum the lead engineer spoke of does make for some odd moments of very loudly obliterating guards in one room, then waltzing through the next door to the party as if nothing ever happened.

And while three hours of this feeling great did allay some of my fears of repetition, I guess I’m more nervous-excited about how these building blocks will age over a whole game. Of course, this is a small snippet, and IOI has a lot of them at its disposal to construct a versatile game to playthrough (plus a way harder difficulty that I tried).

Plus, the Tactical Simulation mode looks primed to add some strong replayability (setting up a prayer circle for a Hitman Custom Contracts-esque player-created scenario mode in the future). But does this altered level of gameplay depth compared to the sheer complexity of Agent 47’s missions mean that the longevity is impacted? We’ll find out soon enough!

Outlook

“James Bond doesn’t steal someone’s pyjamas,” Marchum proclaimed, and after playing First Light myself, it’s clear that leaving the safe haven of Hitman behind is absolutely the right mode.

It looks fantastic, sounds fantastic with a really impressive orchestral straw and great voice acting, and the gameplay is freakishly addictive. Of course, I can’t say for sure whether this holds up throughout the entire game, or whether repetition starts to sink in. But this is IOI in full blockbuster mode, and from what I’ve tried, you’re in for an absolute treat.

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NordVPN makes a lot of claims about what Meshnet can do – from LAN gaming and remote access, to NAS and traffic routing. It's a great tool to create a virtual network that enables you to access your own devices from anywhere – connecting to them directly.

It's ideal for file sharing, collaborative work, and gaming. Meshnet brings fast speeds, low latency, and top-tier security.

However, there's one big caveat: if you're not technically proficient, it's difficult to use it to its fullest potential.

Meshnet launched in 2022 to some high expectations and matching fanfare. After a seemingly low adoption, the feature was due to be shut down in December 2025 before the decision was overturned at the last second.

Vocal support from the community was enough to keep Meshnet alive, but why aren't more people using this handy networking tool? To find out why, I got hands-on with the most underrated feature from the best VPN.

Setting up Meshnet

To get started with Meshnet, I first had to activate it on each of the devices that I wanted to be in my network. Open up the NordVPN app and hit the Meshnet tab in the toolbar – it's diamond shaped, with four bold points. For mobile apps, Meshnet is located within the Products tab.

All major NordVPN platforms support Meshnet, including Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Linux.

You can connect up to 10 devices on a single Meshnet account, with an additional 50 external devices able to be supported. Meshnet is included in all NordVPN plans, and you can also create a Meshnet account for free.

Once you've activated Meshnet on your devices, you need to determine what settings you want to enable for each of those devices. For each device you can toggle:

• Sharing and receiving: to send and receive files and folders
• Traffic routing: letting you use your own devices as part of your VPN network
• Remote access: for personal server creation and network-attached storage (NAS)
• Local network access: letting you print documents and use connected devices in your home network

Having the option to permanently accept file shares is a nice usability touch, and saves the hassle of having to accept every file share manually.

You're able to control those settings for all devices in the virtual network from any device in that network, so if you're adding in any devices that aren't your own into the network, you need to make sure you trust them wholeheartedly, or you may be putting yourself at risk.

It's worth noting that you'll need to keep your devices on if you want to do anything with Meshnet. That's fine for things like mobile devices and NAS servers, but if you're not looking to skyrocket your electrical bill, you're probably not going to be running your gaming PC 24/7. If you find yourself stuck at any point setting it up, there are plenty of handy guides for Meshnet on NordVPN's website.

It's not the most intuitive when it comes to actually using the Meshnet features itself. A lot of the associated features aren't actually in the Meshnet tab – they're elsewhere in the apps. There's a File Sharing tab on Windows, but not on Mac or Android, which is a bit confusing. Contrastingly, routing your IP through one of your Meshnet devices is within the VPN server menus, which makes sense.

An under-appreciated feature

If you're technically capable enough to make the most of Meshnet, it's a wonderful tool for anyone looking to create their own Plex/Jellyfin servers, NAS, or even a family cloud server to centralise photos and files. Alternatively, if you wanted to route your traffic through a specific home device IP it makes it much easier to access your streaming services securely.

I used Meshnet to send myself some files between my phone, desktop and laptop. The transfers were pretty seamless, but one thing I did notice was that there was no queuing option, and if I shut down the sending device before the transfer completed, the transfer was lost altogether.

This makes sense from a security perspective – Nord isn't taking your data through any unnecessary intermediaries and storing it when it shouldn't. But, it's a minor inconvenience to have to ensure all devices are on, especially if you're away from one of those devices. It's a sacrifice I'd happily take for the security and privacy stance, though.

Additionally, the "remote access" is less of a TeamViewer-esque remote access, and more akin to making shared and syncable folders. It's a little frustrating because it means you won't be able to access all of your files on a device, but you'll be able to access that shared folder while the device is online.

A great idea that needs more

After using Meshnet for a while, there's one thing that truly stands out to me: this is a great feature, but it needs some polishing. If Nord wants Meshnet to be usable by everyone, it needs to make the features more beginner-friendly.

Right now, Meshnet's true potential is only accessible to the technically proficient – those who are willing to go into the terminal and execute commands. I'd love to see NordVPN integrating greater functionality into the apps to help people get the most out of it.

Even as much as an option to create a shared folder on a person's device through the Meshnet tab on the desktop app would take the difficulty out of setup for non-technical users.

Ultimately, if you're willing to look through the guides, Meshnet is a great tool, and I'm glad that NordVPN chose to keep it. It's incredibly useful and still has tons of potential.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

When I’m traveling, I take my M5 MacBook Pro for work and a Steam Deck for play. This setup doesn’t bother me normally, but I can’t help but feel jealous of the one guy who whips out a gaming laptop that’s capable of doing both in one machine.

It’s certainly true that Apple has made some significant strides when it comes to Mac gaming, but there’s much more to do to get your entire Steam library working on here. But that is where GameHub comes in — promising to be the service that can let you do exactly that.

I’ve been testing the beta for a week, and while there are plenty of issues (more on those soon), when it works, it’s the missing piece of the puzzle to make my M5 MacBook Pro the machine for everything. Let me explain.

This is just a beta: Now, I must be clear. GameSir has invited us onto a beta test program for this, so there were a fair few bugs and a large amount of compatibility issues. There are finicky ways around some of them, which I’ll talk about.

Under the hood

At the fundamental level, think of it like Crossover but with a far nicer gaming-centric UI. GameHub works by using tools like Wine and Proton to run Windows games natively on Apple Silicon.

For those not in the know, Wine is a compatibility layer that translates Windows API calls to run on POSIX-compliant OSes (like macOS in this situation or Linux). But unlike standard Wine, mixing it with Proton (the tech powering the Steam Deck) means better support for a game’s complexity and controller outputs.

But the most impressive part is how all of the gaming smarts that Apple’s been quietly working on come together here. For example, you can import the company’s Game Porting Toolkit for translating DirectX 12 (and 11) graphics into the Mac’s native Metal 3 gaming API. On top of that, there’s even an AI frame generation and super resolution possibilities here too — done by hooking into MetalFX upscaling (Apple’s version of DLSS).

So while the interface is sleek, the real work happens behind the scenes. There are many instruments in this orchestra, and GameHub is the conductor that allows Windows code to speak “Mac.” In my time testing, it works a lot better than I anticipated.

By the numbers

So for full context, I’m testing this on an M5 MacBook Pro with 16GB of unified memory. I do have other machines that I will be testing on (including the MacBook Neo), but for a first go, I’ve gone for my daily driver.

And ultimately, while dedicated gaming hardware like a gaming laptop will always get far better performance and visual fidelity, I’m still getting good numbers out of this.

I’ll get the perfect performer out of the way quickly. Persona 5 Royal is much more stylized in graphical representation rather than a stress test for any system, so to see it running at 82 FPS on maxed out settings with very similar 1% lows is impressive.

Let’s move on over to the AAA titles. Starting with Hitman: World of Assassination, I opened it at the default settings (1800 x 1169 resolution, Medium detail preset and a range of Highs and Ultras in other options) and hit a very rock steady 60 FPS with a damn good-looking game. Most exciting about this is that I don’t have to pay again to get the macOS version of Hitman — I can just use this!

Pragmata may not have the same path traced shine as you’d find on an Nvidia gaming system, but it still looks pretty enough here and runs sort of alright. At first it didn’t work, but changing the game-specific graphics settings to run Game Porting Toolkit 3.0 rather than the version bundled with GameHub fixed the issue. (The same was true with a lot of games). When running, that 1% low does indicate some stuttering, but 42 FPS for a slower-paced shooter like this is OK.

But in Resident Evil Requiem, things get a little too dicey. No matter how much I turned down the settings, I couldn’t break 52 FPS; combined with a very stuttery experience that stops and starts with every room you walk into, and it was a less than satisfying experience.

So all-in-all, consider it a work in progress!

Plenty to work on

Beyond the choppy framerates in some AAA titles, one of the biggest issues here is compatibility. The list of reasons why spans longer than my arm. I’ll simply say that while GameHub is good, every conductor has its limits.

Forza Horizon 5 is an incredibly complex symphony that requires specific ‘notes’ that no amount of compatibility layers or dependencies can manage. Just because the conductor is standing at the podium doesn't mean the show is ready. Sometimes the sheet music is just too complex, and the orchestra falls out of sync.

I noticed this in a few games, so there’s definitely an element of trial and error. On top of that, you may run into an issue sometimes where the game launches in Mandarin. Given GameHub is developed by GameSir (a Chinese gaming hardware firm), the company’s app configures the Wine environment to alter the locale and run the game. Sometimes it happens (like in Hitman), but it’s limited.

And finally, as smii77y pointed out on Reddit, there are some potential red flags in the user agreement and privacy policy. If you are conscious of this, note a few different things:

• You don’t actually own your account — GameSir gives you permission to use it.
• Connection logs and IP addresses are sent to third parties to process.
• Account data is stored in Guangzhou, China, which puts it under the laws of the People’s Republic of China.
• And there’s an odd loophole where the privacy policy says you can delete your account data if requested by email, but the user agreement allows them to keep data forever after termination.

So if you do plan to use it, don’t upload any sensitive data and assume anything will stay even after you’ve deleted it.

Outlook

I can only hope the privacy issues and broader compatibility problems are resolved in the future, because GameHub is a rather fun service to use. Like I said above, my standard daily carry combines a MacBook for work and Steam Deck for play; with this, I can finally break out from the Apple game library limitations and take my Steam library on the road.

I’m not quite ready to sell my Steam Deck just yet, but for the first time, my MacBook Pro feels less like a workstation and more like a playground. GameHub isn't a perfect conductor, but at least the music has finally started playing.

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• I lived in the Viture Beast for 10,000 miles, and it just ruined other AR glasses for me
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It was with some fanfare that Surfshark announced the launch of its new protocol, Dausos. Coming from the Lithuanian word for "heaven," with roots in Baltic mythology, is the new protocol all that heavenly?

Surfshark is one of the best VPNs out there, and has claimed Dausos will bring speeds up to 30% faster than current VPN protocols. It establishes a dedicated tunnel for each session, meaning no interference from other users, and improved performance. Dausos is also quantum secure, and has been fully audited by Cure53.

Dausos is currently in beta, and only available with Surfshark's Mac VPN app, downloaded via the Mac App Store. I used it 24/7 and road tested it with a number of everyday use cases – including streaming and browsing.

A false start

First impressions of Dausos were poor. When I downloaded the app on April 16, Dausos flat-out refused to work on anything but the most basic websites. I could search for websites with Google, and get a full list of search results, brimming with promise – but clicking on one of those led to nought. I sat there, watching the small blue progress bar under my URL refusing to move, for a solid few minutes.

This was an issue that TechRadar had identified as being linked to maximum transmission unit specifications – essentially sending packets that were too big for the pipe that then got dropped. Much like them, I could use apps that had an established connection, but if I needed to make a new one, I was out of luck.

Thus, the extent of my testing on this version of the app effectively was limited to using Messages to text a friend. Here, it worked fine. Beyond that, it was extraordinarily broken, effectively killing my internet connection and rendering it useless.

Happily, Surfshark were made aware of the issue and an update was released the following day – version 4.27.1. If you have installed this and not noticed a difference, as I did, restart your Mac as this seems to fix things.

With the new update, the Dausos protocol works as intended, and it genuinely surprised me. Going from what was a generally terrible experience just the day before, to testing since the update has been night and day.

Good speeds, but little difference to WireGuard

With the update, Dausos has revealed itself to be a promising protocol. We first tested it on my, admittedly slow, home internet connection (which Google flatteringly calls "very fast"). When testing speed via Google's speedtest, Dausos came back with slightly faster downloads than the modern classic that is WireGuard.

My base connection speed was 62.8 Mbps download and 16.2 Mbps upload. I saw 58.3 Mbps download speeds and 15.2 Mbps upload speeds with Dausos, compared to WireGuard's 58.1 Mbps download and 16.6 Mbps upload – no significant reduction.

We re-tested Dausos' speeds on a faster home Wi-Fi connection, and we were impressed. Compared to our base 535 Mbps download speed and 346 Mbps upload speed, two tests saw Dausos record download speeds of 479 and 443 Mbps, and upload speeds of 258 and 223 Mbps – so only a small drop off.

In comparison, we saw WireGuard measure 472 and 436 Mbps download speeds, and 215 and 200 Mbps upload speeds.

All in all, there isn't a lot to separate the two protocols, with their speeds almost identical. It's not quite the 30% increase Surfshark promised, but Dausos delivers impressive speeds and performance, and effectively maxed out our connections.

Notably, on "super fast" connections, you may well see more of a difference.

Solid streaming performance

Surfshark is traditionally one of the best streaming VPNs. I tried out both Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ on a variety of servers. The first test was to connect to a US server and see if I can gain access to the treasures of American streaming services, and I could. Dausos loaded up Prime Video easily and I could stream Civil War with no issues.

This is particularly impressive considering Surfshark's WireGuard implementation struggled with US Amazon Prime Video in our latest round of testing.

Connecting to a Brazilian server netted me access to their local content too, while I had no issues with Disney+ on either American or Singaporean servers. As a streaming protocol, Dausos seems to work very well indeed – equally as strongly as standard protocols such as WireGuard and OpenVPN.

Strong security and no CAPTCHAs

When browsing the internet, I didn't notice an increase in CAPTCHAs whatsoever when browsing in Incognito Mode, which is rare for a VPN in my experience. Speed loss is somewhat noticeable, though, particularly when connecting to servers located geographically far from the UK. While this is to be expected, it was worse with Dausos than it has been with Proton VPN or Mullvad.

One of Dausos' big selling points is security. The protocol uses AEGIS-256X2 encryption and dedicated tunnels for all users, and the security does appear to be tight after some cursory testing. It does not leak my IP or DNS, and seems extremely reliable, despite only being in beta.

How to use Dausos

As mentioned earlier, at present, Dausos is in beta and only available on Mac, with further rollout to come in the future. Users on other devices need to use other protocols, but even on Mac, getting your hands on a version of Surfshark with support for the new protocol is a little tricky. There are two versions of Surfshark on Mac: one from Surfshark's website, the other from the App Store.

At the time of writing, you'll need to download Surfshark from the Mac App Store to access Dausos. If you're switching to the App Store version, Surfshark recommends uninstalling your previous version first to avoid any conflicts. It's also worth noting that you can't use Dausos and Surfshark's Antivirus together. The former is only available in the Mac App Store version of Surfshark, while the latter isn't.

Once you've downloaded the Surfshark app, log in as normal. The client won't default to Dausos, though, so you'll need to tweak the settings.

Click on the settings button in the app, shown as a cog wheel on the left hand side of the app. Once there, click on the VPN settings button, and scroll down to find the Protocol option just above the advanced settings at the very bottom. Click on this and select Dausos from the list.

If you are currently connected, the app will disconnect your existing connection and reconnect under the new protocol. Once you've done this, Dausos will be set as the default VPN protocol on your Mac, and you'll need to manually change it back if you want to use WireGuard, OpenVPN, or IKEv2.

A protocol with promise

Despite its false start, I'm genuinely impressed by Dausos at present. It features very strong security, is adept at unblocking region-locked content, and doesn't serve me endless CAPTCHAs when I'm browsing Incognito. There are full-fledged finished products that don't offer the same level of proficiency that this beta protocol does.

However, due to Dausos' beta status, you may still experience teething issues. This is particularly salient given the poor state that Dausos launched in before its initial update, when it was essentially unusable. The privacy purists among you may also want to hold off until it has been fully released.

Surfshark has admitted "some connectivity, performance, or feature‑related issues may occur," due to its infant state.

Despite this, it's absolutely one to watch, and Surfshark's innovation is worth applauding – it's been a long while since we've had a fully new protocol to get excited about. While it's unlikely to represent anything like the sea change that came with WireGuard's release in 2015, due to it being closed-source, if it continues to impress as it proceeds towards its final release, it may end up giving Surfshark a competitive advantage as well as helping its users.

As someone who is largely a Linux VPN user these days, I would, of course, prefer for it to be open-source, but that may come later. If not, I suspect that its technological innovations will at least inspire open-source protocol development further down the line. For now, it's not much more than a curio, but it bears a lot of promise, and if you own a Mac, consider checking it out. We don't think you'll be disappointed.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Framework has built a business out of selling repairable, upgradeable, customizable laptops, and honestly, they make some of our favorite laptops. So you can imagine I was pretty excited when Framework invited me to try out the just-announced Framework Laptop 13 Pro in San Francisco this week.

The 13 Pro is a “complete ground up redesign” of the company’s original Framework Laptop 13 with power users and developers in mind. But even if you’re not in either of those categories I think you’ll find a lot to like about the Pro version.

In the run-up to the announcement of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, CEO Nirav Patel has been beating the bushes promising not to gouge customers over rising RAM prices and offering dire warnings over personal computing.

With that in mind, how does the Laptop 13 Pro compare to its predecessors?

Refined design

For fans of the Laptop 13, you won’t notice much of a difference design-wise. The new 13 Pro looks fairly similar. The differences are in the replaceable parts, like the new display.

The 13 Pro features a “purpose-built” 13.5-inch display with touch support. It’s supposed to have a variable 30-120 Hz refresh rate, 2880x1920 resolution. I didn’t have a Laptop 13 to compare, but I saw the Pro in different lighting conditions including a sunlit atrium, and, for some reason, a nearly completely dark room, lit by tiny lamps.

In both situations, the display appeared crisp and bright. It’s a solid laptop screen that’ll get the job done.

I am a heathen that doesn’t really use touchscreens on laptops when available, mostly because I forget they exist. I did take some time to try out the 13 Pro touch display and it seemed to be quite responsive, though it’s not a selling point for me. I would prefer a strong display over touch capabilities. Other people at the event seemed excited, though, so your mileage may vary.

A personal favorite bit is a new little pop-up under the keyboard area that makes separating the laptop for repairs or upgrades easier. But there's more.

And despite describing it as a Premium laptop, my favorite replaceable parts like the bezel and some of the parts are the ones with translucent plastic that remind me of the N64 or the original iMacs.

Power and life

We’ve described the original Laptop 13 as the anti-MacBook in the past and the Pro continues that trend with two major upgrades that put it on par with the MacBook Pro M5.

First is the larger 75Wh battery, which Framework claims the 13 Pro can use to stream Netflix at 4K resolution for over 20 hours, 12 hours longer than the Laptop 13. It’s also longer than the 14 hours we’ve managed on the MacBook Pro M5 in our testing.

The new battery can easily swap out as needed as well. Framework also bumped up the 60W GaN power adapter to a larger 100W version, though I was told the 13 Pro will still accept the 60W version if you have one.

I tested the 13 Pro during Framework’s Next Gen event in San Francisco, so I won’t be able to verify their battery life claims until we put it through the paces in our lab.

Where you can feel the difference is in the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs (Panther Lake) configurations that are now an option. Specifically, the 13 Pro can run the Core Ultra 5, Ultra X7 or Core Ultra X9. Additionally, Framework is moving from LPDDR RAM to LPCAMM2 with configurations in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.

I believe Framework is the only, or one of the only, laptop makers using LPCAMM2 and coupled with Intel’s Panther Lake processors, the 13 Pro felt responsive and ultra quick across several different operating systems including the built-in Ubuntu configuration, Windows 11 and other niche options

Not cheap

The Framework Laptop 13 Pro doesn’t exactly come cheap starting at $1,199 for the DIY edition, meaning you can pick parts for your configuration. Pre-built versions start at $1,499.

It is competitive with the 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 which starts at $1,499. What you do get over Apple is repairability and longevity. CEO Nirav Patel promised that you would be able to upgrade the 13 Pro the same as any other Framework laptop.

You could even turn an older laptop 13 into a Pro version using parts purchased from Framework with some caveats. The bigger battery necessitates a new bottom panel and a couple of other parts which Patel confirmed during a Q&A.

If you’re the kind of person who loves options, but still wants refinement, the Framework Laptop 13 Pro feels like the perfect device threading the needle between Apple slick designs and DIY attitude.

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• Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro could be 'pushed back' — here's what we know
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Is there a four-word phrase more terrifying than “rail replacement bus service?” I doubt it. Whatever plans you had for the day (for me, it was meetings with Nvidia and Logitech for reasons I can’t tell you about just yet) are thrown into a chaotic race against time to get to where you need to be (London for me).

In this situation, I have two choices: sit and stew with frustration while lashing out about how I’m seeing more of Market Harborough than any human should (sorry not sorry, people who live there), or get stuff done like this article.

Well, this is where the $549 Viture Beast have come in clutch — whisking me away from my predicament and into my work and play with a massive field of view, a gorgeously sharp, vivid picture quality, and some real nice usability features to create a workstation wherever you are.

So instead of getting mad about my predicament, I’m just going to talk to you about the Beasts. Because it’s only fair that while I told you that the Beasts were not ready for primetime back in January, that I come back and tell you that if you’ve been waiting, now’s the time to buy. Think of it as an early review before the actual review.

Ultimate immersion

As I found out when talking to Viture’s co-founders, the Beast are having a grand (re)launch on Best Buy, Amazon and Viture’s own website — with CMO Emily Wang calling them “a mature, refined version of the Beast.”

The glasses started on shaky ground back at the beginning of the year, missing features and lacking some of the sharpness I saw in the demo units way back at AWE 2025. But now, it’s all here, and the end result is a picture quality that’s a step above anything else I’ve seen (dethroning the Xreal One Pro in my picture hierarchy).

Wearability is real nice here, with the stems curved for a nice comfort on the ears and even weight distribution at the front with cushioned notepads giving you hours of strain-free wear. Then you throw in the on-device screen tuning methods and things get real interesting.

And no, you won’t get what Xreal offers via its on-device chipset giving you an ultra wide, view but there are a plethora of options here. On the glasses themselves, you’ve got screen sizing, anchoring options (the 3DoF tracking is so good here — the picture doesn’t even move on a couple flights I’ve taken), and refresh rate alterations.

But its when the Spacewalker app comes into play where things get interesting, as beyond that 32:9 ultra wide, you’ve got triple monitors in horizontal or vertical, the chance to color tune your display in any way you see fit and more. So far, I’ve got a warmer preset for gaming on my Steam Deck, and greater accuracy for any video work I do on my MacBook Pro.

It can quickly become a tinkerer’s paradise, and once your past it, you’ll embrace the super dark electrochromic lenses giving you a private screening wherever you are. Before I knew it, Market Harborough was a distant memory — 90 minutes felt more like nine.

A couple of frustrations

That’s not to say the Viture Beast is completely without issues — two hardware-based and one that I hope can be resolved with a firmware update.

Starting at the top, the move from Viture’s magnetic port for the display cable to USB-C can make these a little awkward to sit on the face just right. That tugging based on the cable tension can move them slightly off-angle.

Viture does offer a USB-C to magnetic connector extender (meant to make these compatible with the Neckband Pro, but can be used for display connection too. But I would’ve preferred to have this built into the stem.

Second, there isn’t built-in IPD dials in the Beasts like other Viture glasses, so picking the right size is absolutely critical here to get the perfect picture. Make sure you do measure your own pupillary distance to get it correct, but word to the wise, most of you reading this will need the Medium-sized glasses. Even with my big head, the large was too big.

And finally, the gigantic field of view of that display is quite the test of those prisms at the furthest edges, as there are some hints of chromatic aberration around the sides. The same thing happens in the One Pro, and if you want complete perfect clarity across the entire picture, reduce the screen size everso slightly.

However, at max size, while it can be noticed, it’s not a deal breaker personally at all.

My next favorite AR glasses

So there’s my review before the actual review in a few days time, and now my journey is (finally) almost over. I’m sitting here realizing that the past four hours have just melted by a mix of immersed, focused work and all-encompassing entertainment.

The Viture Beasts aren’t just great boredom busters, they’re a glimpse of where AR glasses as a whole are going — brute forcing almost VR-esque experiences with a mix of strong hardware and well-crafted software to turn even the most cramped of bus seats into a personal cinema.

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Between all the yardwork I do — planting, raking, mowing, weeding, pruning, repairing planter boxes — my work gloves take a real beating. Normally, I go through a pair a year, because I typically buy the cheapest pair I can find at the checkout line at the hardware store. Sadly, I don’t take advice from our own guide on the best gardening gloves!

For the past few weeks, I’ve been testing out a new pair of gloves from Cross Point Gear, which promise greater durability, but also offer a lot of flexibility while also being waterproof and breathable. While they’re not cheap, they have held up very well.

Price and design

Cross Point Gear sent me a pair of its Sport Gloves; the company has two other lines, the Pro Wool and Boneshaker.

The Sport Gloves sell for $54, and come in five colors (black, gray, safety orange, neon green, and jungle) and five sizes (small, medium, large, XL and XXL). I went with the safety orange because far too often, I’ve taken off a pair of gloves in my yard and forgot where I left them, so the bright color makes them easier to spot.

The gloves are made of three layers: The exterior, which is 95% nylon, is water-resistant; a middle layer made of waterproof-breathable Artex, and an inner liner that’s 79% acrylic and 15% polyester.

They’re comfortable

The Sport Gloves fit me, well, like a glove. I opted for a large pair, and they fit snugly, but not too tightly around my hands and fingers. The palms of the gloves have black grippy nubs, which made it easier to hold on to tools and other objects, even when they were wet.

One of the toughest tasks I used them for was building a raised garden bed in an area of my yard that had been overgrown with English Ivy. Not only did the gloves give me a good grip when ripping out all the roots, but also offered me the dexterity I needed when holding my rake and shovel. They also let me comfortably hold a screw between my index finger and thumb as I drove it into some wood siding.

They’ve kept my hands warm and dry

In March, the weather where I live has ranged from unseasonably warm — temperatures in the 80s — to frigidly cold. While I’ve avoided working outdoors in freezing temperatures, I have been out when it’s been in the low- to mid-40s, so having a warm pair of work gloves has been essential. The gloves kept my hands at a comfortable temperature and, even on hotter days, my hands didn’t feel too sweaty, either.

I don’t have to take them off to use my phone

While I wouldn’t want to type out full emails while wearing the gloves, I was able to send short text messages, open apps, and use my iPhone pretty easily. So, I didn’t have to remove them from my hands to answer calls or take photos with my phone.

Fabric can get caught on sharp objects

The weave of the exterior of the glove is a bit stretchy — you can see the inner layer of the glove if you spread your thumb and index finger apart — so you have to be a bit careful when handling sharper objects. I learned this the hard way when I tried to unspool a roll of chicken wire. A prong got caught on one of the gloves, and pulled out a bit of thread.

If you’re planning to do stuff like this, or use the gloves to play with your cats, I might suggest something a little more heavy-duty, or ones with a smoother exterior, like leather.

Bottom line

At $54 a pair, the CrossPoint Waterproof Knit Gloves are a bit of an investment, but they seem to be holding up pretty well so far. You do have to be careful around pointy things, but otherwise, they could be a good addition to your outdoor toolkit.

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The HP EliteBoard G1a is the most unique computer I’ve tested. That’s because it’s basically like a modern Commodore 64 since it’s both a PC and a keyboard. It’s certainly unusual, but that same unique form factor is what makes it a perfect product for me to talk about.

As HP describes it, the EliteBoard G1a is a “complete, desktop-grade computer integrated into a professional keyboard.” Yes, it looks like a normal keyboard, but inside, it packs a CPU, storage, memory, and connectivity. All you have to do is plug it into a monitor, and you’re good to go. HP says this PC is for workers who frequently move between different workspaces and who often keep their laptops closed when connected to a monitor.

The HP EliteBoard G1a is a business computer and isn’t targeted at general consumers. It isn’t the kind of PC we normally review at Tom’s Guide, but it’s so distinctive that I wanted to share my experience with it. While I think you’re better off with one of the best laptops, the EliteBoard G1a could be useful even outside of an office setting.

Right now, it's available for $1,549 on HP's website. That’s a steep ask for something so niche, but it could be worth it if you're one of the customers HP is aiming for. That said, let me tell you about the HP EliteBoard G1a.

HP EliteBoard G1a: Specs

Design

If you didn’t know it, you’d assume the EliteBoard G1a was an average (if thick) everyday work keyboard. Its keycaps are fairly standard, and its all-black design helps it blend in with similarly colored devices. You can even tell it’s a keyboard design for Windows, thanks to its dedicated Copilot key that lets you instantly launch Microsoft’s AI.

Measuring 14.1 x 4.7 x 0.7 inches and weighing 1.49 pounds, the EliteBoard G1a doesn’t take up much space in your backpack and certainly won’t weigh you down. I traveled with it in my bag from the office to my apartment and almost forgot I had it. It even comes with a thin travel case for additional protection.

Port-wise, it packs three USB-C ports: two USB4 and one USB3. The ports let you connect to an external monitor and other peripherals. Of course, if you run out of ports, you can always connect peripherals via Bluetooth. Again, this is a full-on PC, so you’re free to connect whatever you might need to it.

The EliteBoard G1a also comes with a dongle, which has an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and two USB-C ports. The dongle not only provides essential ports for connecting to a monitor and wired internet, but also connects to a wall adapter to keep cable management manageable.

The full keyboard itself is good, with plenty of space for your hands to travel. Since this is effectively an office keyboard, it has membrane switches instead of mechanical switches. While that’s a bummer if you like mechanical or magnetic switches as I do, the membrane switches do keep your keystrokes relatively quiet. The rubber bottom ensures that the EliteBoard stays in place even if you’re vigorously typing.

HP says this keyboard is meant to be repairable, so it’s easy to take it apart in case you need to replace keys or other components. This was a smart design choice for office work, as you can swap whatever needs replacing instead of being forced to buy an entirely new unit.

Performance

Our HP EliteBoard G1a review unit is the high-end model, packing an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 350 CPU, integrated AMD Radeon 860M graphics, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. That’s enough power for the kind of everyday work this PC was designed for.

With my average workflow, which usually has me juggling around 20 Chrome tabs, Slack, GIMP, and the occasional YouTube video, the EliteBoard G1a never slowed down or stuttered. Because of that, I almost forgot that the computing was happening within the keyboard I was using. I also never felt it get warm or hot, which is a plus.

Since it’s a PC, we put the EliteBoard G1a through our usual suite of benchmark tests to see what it could do. It posted solid numbers on the Geekbench CPU test and copied a 25GB file relatively quickly. Transcoding a 4K video to 1080p on Handbrake does take a decent amount of time, however.

This isn’t a gaming machine, but we ran it through some graphics tests to see what it could do. It performed as well as a modern ultraportable on the 3DMark Night Raid test and even managed to run Civilization 6 at 40 frames per second at 1080p. Again, this isn’t a gaming machine, but you can enjoy some lighter titles with the right settings.

Note that this PC has a processor designed for business laptops, which we don’t generally test at Tom’s Guide. I say that so you know the comparisons above are the closest equivalents we have tested. I wanted to at least let you see how the EliteBoard stacks up to PCs with the relatively comparable Intel Core Ultra 258V.

Battery

Our review unit has a built-in 32Wh battery. To be clear, the battery exists so that you don’t have to shut down and restart the EliteBoard when you’re transferring from one workstation to another. There’s a battery-free model that’s meant to stay stationary like a desktop PC.

Since the Eliteboard G1a has a battery, we ran it through our battery test. When connected to an unplugged 1080p portable monitor, the board lasted for 2 hours and 26 minutes. Granted, this isn’t a situation you’d experience since you’ll have the PC plugged into the wall, but it’s still interesting to see how much the battery lasts in case you wanted to take it to a shop.

Bottom line

The HP EliteBoard G1a is built for workers who share workstations and available monitors, work in hybrid environments with monitors at both home and office, or work in space-constrained offices that need clutter-free desk environments. For those purposes, this PC makes sense.

However, if you need an integrated screen at all times, work somewhere without reliable access to external monitors, never have to change your desk, or are simply looking for a more budget-friendly solution, you’re better off getting a traditional laptop.

While the EliteBoard G1a is admittedly unusual, I appreciate that HP designed it for its intended purpose. And as the company told me, some of the retail partners they showed the board to are interested in purchasing this PC for their employees, which shows there’s demand for it. If the official price is right, it could be something you see at hotel lobbies, security guard stations, and more.

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As you may have seen, we rather love Pragmata right now, and I can give all you PC gamers out there the lowdown on how well it’ll run on your rigs. Spoiler alert: just like Resident Evil Requiem, path tracing adds a night and day difference.

So I threw it at my pricey RTX 5080 and mid-range RTX 5060 Ti rigs to see how far I can stretch those fidelity settings with DLSS 4, and how well it performs with this incredibly demanding graphical tech running.

What settings should you use?

As I always say, Nvidia’s DLSS is a helluva tool for extracting more gameplay value out of your GPU — provided you use it the right way. Because sure, a game can look smooth, but if you’re adding all the AI trickery on top of a game that is running at 20 FPS, it will not feel smooth to play.

That’s why you’ll need to go into the settings to tinker the base rate a little before overlaying DLSS features. Just as a general reminder:

• If your game is a slower-paced single-player title, aim for 40 FPS
• Need quick reflexes? Aim for 60 FPS
• For competitive multiplayer, either don’t use it or aim for 120 FPS

From mine and Tony’s time playing Pragmata, you can safely put it in that 40 FPS target category. There is combat that requires you to dodge attacks and shoot, but with plenty of time to telegraph enemy moves, the really fun puzzle elements and button-based quick-time events, you’ll still get a game that feels good to play at this level.

By the numbers

So allow me to introduce you to the machines that will be taking this on (quite proud of my rebuilds):

• Remember that PC I built for myself at Scan computers? I’ve done a transplant into the gorgeous Micro ATX case you see in the top image — doing some space saving while preserving power. It packs an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5080 and 32GB of DDR5 RAM. You can watch the whole big build here.
• The second is a modified RDY Element 9 Pro R07 — sporting an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, RTX 5060 Ti (16GB) and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.

Same rules apply as my Requiem testing, so I’m stress testing at resolutions fair to each card (4K for the 5080 and 1440p for the 5060 Ti) at maxed out path tracing settings. Of course, as I said above, you can tweak some graphical settings to squeeze even more frames out of the base rate.

And as you can see, the multipliers really start to pile on the additional frames nicely here — making the game look silky smooth.

Latency checker

So there’s big frame rates happening up above, but that’s half the story. As I said up above, the game’s got to feel smooth too, and in this stress test (just like what happened with Requiem), this is where it becomes clear that DLSS 4.5 performance is your go-to option if you wanna go all-out in the settings.

DLSS always comes with a small penalty to that base frame rate, as the GPU’s attention is turned to the AI background work. And while these are mostly playable, Quality or Balanced upscaling does lead to some noticeable latency. Performance is your sweet spot.

Path traced sci-fi fun

If you follow my advice from up above, you’ll have a great experience with what has become one of my personal surprise favorite games of 2026. Path tracing really does make a material difference to the visual fidelity here and draws you into the immersion of this fascinating sci-fi world.

I demoed this game a few months ago and immediately fell in love with the hybrid shooter/puzzler gameplay, but I did feel a little nervous about how far this could go before it becomes tiresome. Turns out the answer is it never gets old! New layers of complication are added over time and discoverable elements keep things fresh. Oh, and the boss battles are epic.

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The Honor 600 and 600 Pro are launching soon, and while we’re testing them for reviews and camera face-offs real soon, I can tell you about one feature I’ve been having fun with — AI Image to Video 2.0.

In the words of an infamous U.K. Ronseal advert (ask your British mates), it does exactly what it says on the tin: you take your pictures, throw them into a multi-modal video generation model with a prompt and the picture is turned into a small clip up to 8 seconds long.

And after testing this feature for myself, it’s fair to say the second generation of this model vastly improves the contextual understanding of vague prompts, and made me ask a question: what even is a photo anymore in 2026? Not in a bad way…let me explain.

The key upgrades

So with this new multi-modal model, the 600 Series is able to take a deep semantic understanding of what it reads from your prompt and what it sees from your picture. It will tie the two together to make sense of what kind of video you want to see, fire it over to a data center to do the heavy lifting and give you an end result in about two minutes.

For the second generation, Honor’s bringing some fun new ways to get creative to the table:

• Image + Instruction to Video: Instead of just giving it a picture and not being able to direct the scene, you can now upload multiple reference photos and add text commands to dictate exactly what happens.
• First-and-Last Frame: You can add a before and after picture, and watch a smooth transition between the two scenes — be it people walking between two locations or morphing entirely into other characters.
• Preset templates, effects and camera movements: There’s a massive selection of camera templates here that you can insert into the prompt, from stylizations and color grading to camera movements like the classic Hitchcock zoom.

And through all of these (as you’re about to see), the visual consistency here is impressive. There are some moments where it can stutter a little bit, but on the whole, this is just pure fun.

Bringing it to life

So at the preview event I attended, Honor set up a couple of small model demonstrations for us to take quick snaps of with that impressive 200MP main camera to see what we could generate.

First, this cute little Panda in a park setting. I snapped it, opened the create tab in the gallery app and simply said “the Panda skips through the grass.” And the result was rather adorable — introducing character movement and almost giving it a Toy Story-esque feel of whimsy. The model had identified it as toys and adapted accordingly.

Next, the Subbuteo set (shout out to any fans). I wanted to really put it to a test with a super vague prompt and a photo that may make it hallucinate. So I picked the angle where the goalkeeper was hard to see leaning back in the net and prompted saying “the ball is saved.”

You can tell the 600 Pro had a bit of a hard time figuring out what I meant here with the ball having a life of its own, but it did make some logical creative decisions to arrive at what I was saying — adding an entirely new goalkeeper.

Sound effects are a little weird on both, but purely for the sake of a quick video meme to share with your friends and family, this is really rather good.

Outlook

Yes, I know I’m the person on the Tom’s Guide team warning about the AI bubble, and actively hoping it bursts so we can all finally get affordable tech again. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it when it’s implemented in a fun way, which is exactly what Honor has done.

With it seamlessly added into the flow of your built-in gallery app (or even with the dedicated AI side button), the 600 Series does solid work at bringing you beefy camera hardware and allowing you to play around with it in new ways.

Is it a gimmick? Sure. But a gimmick can still make you smile.

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My dream setup is a simple one: the productivity of a desk with the minimal hand movement of a laptop. I do love a keyboard and mouse, but having to move yourself away from the board can break my flow, whereas the minimal movements of a laptop with touchpad keeps me locked in longer.

Humans have tried this once before with Lenovo’s Touchpoint… While I was definitely a fan of it, I can empathize with the fact that it was definitely a lot slower than a touchpad or moving your hand over the mouse.

But the Clevetura CLVX S fixes this by building a touchpad directly into the keyboard keys. And while there are a couple of drawbacks, it’s been at the heart of a drastic usability upgrade across my many work/play scenarios. Let me tell you about it.

No mouse required

At first, the CLVX S felt a little weird. My subconscious kept reaching for a mouse to my right, but then I started to swipe across the keys. Touch response is rapid and responsive, and there’s even multi-touch on here — all inputs of which are visually highlighted by sweeping RGB that follows your fingers around.

Whether it’s to pinch and zoom into a picture, swipe up and down a website or three finger swipes between desktops, I have both a full touchpad and keyboard in one spot without needing to move my hands whatsoever.

Even better, Clever has added some swipe bars up at the top to give those function keys multiple purposes. You may notice media keys in the top right without any volume up and down, and that’s because swiping left and right does that job for you!

All of this is packed into a nice, thin, premium feeling aluminum shell with a utilitarian-but-playful aesthetic and full RGB color.

Feeling flat

Of course, to pull this off, you need the keys to form a flat surface, which does mean flat keys with miniscule gaps between them. For me, someone who struggles with touch typing (yes, I welcome all roasts of the Managing Editor of Computing not being able to touch type), this isn’t a problem. I’m regularly looking down at the keys and with the RGB, I can clearly and easily see where my fingers should be.

But it does mess a bit with the tactility you may be used to coming from a mechanical board. I do miss that satisfying thok of the best mechanical keyboards when moving over to this, and the lack of key spacing will take a little bit of getting used to.

A fantastic all-in-one solution

My computing setups are varied around one machine. Whether it’s at my desk and getting stuff done or patching through to my TV and chilling on the couch at home, or when I’m out and about working from different hotel rooms and convention centers, the idea of carrying my mechanical keyboard and mouse to and from is a pain in the butt.

The Clevetura S solves all of these problems while looking stylish doing so — popping the touchpad directly on the keyboard keys reduces desk clutter, brings a new paradigm of productivity without lifting a finger, and with its strong battery life (I went through two weeks on one charge), it’s a stellar option.

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Let’s be honest, bed bugs aren't anyone’s idea of a charming holiday souvenir. However, after returning home from a luxury holiday to Mexico, my brother and sister-in-law inadvertently brought bed bugs home with them — and they’re now trying everything they can in their power to get rid of them.

After identifying the fresh bites on their newly tanned skin as those belonging to bed bugs (and actually spotting a tiny critter scuttling across their bed), the couple have gone to war against the blood sucking pests.

From meticulously steam cleaning their headboard to spritzing the legs of their bedframe with pesticide, here’s everything my brother and sister-in-law are doing to get rid of their bed bugs...

• Read more: 3 bedroom items you should clean weekly to spot early signs of bed bugs

5 things I'm doing to get rid of my bed bug infestation

Bed bugs are notoriously tricky to eradicate from your bedroom once they’ve decided to take up residence in it. While they’re called ‘bed bugs,’ these blood sucking critters don’t live exclusively inside your mattress.

They like to live near their food source (you), and will lurk anywhere from inside plug sockets to in the creases of your pillow. Signs your mattress is infested with bed bugs include a new musty odor, bites on your body and clusters of dark specs (that's bed bug poop).

After spotting several of these signs (and actually spotting one on his bed) this is everything my brother is doing to get rid of his bed bug infestation...

1. Steam cleaning my fabric headboard

Bed bugs perish in steam, so my brother is using a hand held steam cleaner to meticulously steam clean his fabric headboard, along with the creases and seams of his mattress, as well as any clothes that might have come into contact with the bed or floor as a precaution.

However, as the proud owner of one of the best memory foam mattresses, he needs to be careful not to subject their bed to extreme heat as this can damage the delicate foam.

But considering that bed bugs (and their eggs) will likely be lurking in the fabric headboard, a weekly steam clean is a good idea.

2. Invested in pillow encasements

One of the first signs that my brother had bed bugs were the bites that appeared on his shoulders (bed bug bites usually appear in clusters) upon waking. So he knew that bed bugs were either on — or very near — his pillow.

Like a mattress encasement (more on that below), a pillow encasement provides an impenetrable barrier to bed bugs, along with dust mites and any other pests or allergens that might settle on your headrest.

Like this Utopia set from Amazon, pillow encasements are zippered, waterproof and prevent bed bugs from nestling inside your pillow, as well as preventing any that are already in there from escaping.

3. Hot washing bedding weekly

Washing your bed sheets, including your comforter, pillows and mattress protector, is the first line of defense in your battle against bed bugs.

In his ongoing battle against bed bugs, my brother is stripping his bed weekly, placing the sheets and blankets in a zippered bag to prevent spreading them elsewhere within the house, and then washing them on a high temperature setting.

We recommend washing bedding at 60°C (140°F) as research shows that bed bugs die at 50°C (122°F). Follow this up with a hot tumble dry to kill any lingering bed bugs and their eggs. (Just check the care label of anything before subjecting it to a hot wash).

Finish your cleaning with a quick spray of lavender oil mixed with water. The soothing scent is sleep inducing and strong-smelling lavender might scare away bed bugs.

4. Regularly vacuuming my mattress

Every time my brother strips his bedding to hot wash it, he vacuums the surface of his mattress, paying close attention to any folds or seams (where bed bugs could be hiding).

While you can use the upholstery attachment on your regular vacuum cleaner, I've leant him my FEPPO mattress cleaner. This hand-held vacuum blasts the surface of your bed with UV-C light and 140°F (approx. 60°C) heat, which kills bed bugs and eggs on the spot.

Plus, its high-frequency tapping lifts bed bugs (along with any dust mites or other allergens) to the surface, where they're then sucked up. Word of warning — always empty the vacuum chamber into a bag outside to prevent reinfestation.

5. Applying pesticide to the legs of my bedframe

Bed bugs are frightened of water, which could send them fleeing in the opposite direction of pesticide spray. However, pesticide is still toxic to bed bugs even after its dried, so it's still worth having in your armory.

Knowing that bed bugs linger near (and not necessarily on) your bed, my brother is spraying the feet of his bed frame with pesticide. That way, once they come into contact with the spray when scuttling up the bed towards their food (him), they die.

Plus the 2 things I haven't yet tried (but really should)

So far, the above methods are working well for my brother and sister-in-law. They're still getting bitten by bed bugs occasionally, but it's not every night. To rid their bedroom of the critters entirely, there's a couple of additional measures I recommend...

A mattress encasement

While a standard mattress protector covers the top and sides of your bed, a mattress encasement does exactly what it's name suggests; encases your mattress.

Like a pillow encasement, a mattress encasement offers an impenetrable barrier with its 360° protection. It stops new bed bugs from taking up residence in your mattress, and prevents any lurking bugs from escaping and biting you.

Diatomaceous earth

New studies show that bed bugs are frightened of water. This means that they will likely retreat from any liquid form pesticide, which could cause your infestation to spread further.

Instead of pesticide, opting for a powder based repellent, such as diatomaceous earth, could be the key to stopping these critters in their tracks.
To use it, vacuum the mattress (plus anywhere else you plan to apply the powder). We recommend the base boards, under your bed, as well as any nooks and crannies that a bed bug might hide. It's non-toxic but can cause irritation, so you might want to sleep elsewhere while it's working its magic.

Once the bed bug comes into contact with the diatomaceous earth, the powder — which is made up of ground up fossilized algae — absorbs the moisture from the exoskeleton, causing them to dry out and die. As this process relies on the bed bug coming into contact with the powder, we recommend leaving it in situ for seven to 17 days.

The products I'm using to get rid of bed bugs

There's a lot that goes into choosing a golf simulator. You need to pick where the launch monitor will sit, which model you want, the enclosure, the impact screen, the projector and more. And those purchases will set you back thousands of dollars — in my case, my golf simulator setup costs just under $10,000.

But with all those purchases, one of the cheaper things you'll buy might be the most important — the little hitting strip that goes into your mat. This is where you'll hit the ball, and the feel of different strip materials completely changes the way your club interacts with the turf.

I tested three different materials from Carl's Place to see which is right for me, and something I thought was a trivial detail of building my simulator ended up completely changing the way I practice and how well I hit my woods, irons and wedges.

The different types of hitting strips

There are three primary hitting strip materials, and each has its own benefits and drawbacks.

I asked Carl Markestad, Founder and President of Carl’s Place, about choosing a hitting strip. "When selecting the right hitting strip, [it's] one of the most critical and often overlooked parts of the simulator buying process," he said. "It’s important to think about the type of feel you want, whether that’s forgiveness, realism or something in the middle. You also need to consider who will be using it, because the right choice can make a real difference in joint comfort and how long someone can practice in a single session."

For Carl's Place models, which I used with the Carl's HotShot Golf Mat System, the most affordable is the Standard model at $79. It offers a mix of softness to help keep your joints from taking too much impact and firmness to properly punish chunked shots.

The next model is Foam, and it's all about providing more softness that won't punish your body on missed shots and chunks. The foam material is designed for longer practice sessions, playing around with family and inexperienced golfers and entertainment-focused setups. Anyone who's worried about overtraining. If you're dealing with injuries or other chronic conditions, you will benefit from this strip.

The foam mat costs quite a bit more than the Standard at $229. Of course, in the grand scheme of what you'll spend on a golf simulator, the extra money is pretty negligible.

Finally, we have the most expensive golf mat of the bunch, and it's the most realistic. It sells for $279, but it offers the benefit of a closer feel to real turf and will punish chunked shots, just like on the course.

The drawbacks here are that this realism does a number on your joints. It's also a bit less durable if you're known to chunk the ball often, since the gel material will wear out. At least, that's what Carl's Place says. I've been using mine daily for more than eight months, and it hasn't shown a bit of wear.

If you really need to work on consistent ball-first contact, this mat will suit your needs.

At the end of the day, personal preference is important. "There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to hitting strips, and that’s exactly why we developed multiple options. Some golfers want maximum forgiveness to save their joints, others want that true fairway interaction, and some prefer a more traditional, feedback-driven feel. Understanding those differences is key to getting the most out of your simulator," said Markestad.

Which leads me to the one I ultimately like best.

Which one am I choosing?

For me, the answer is a no-brainer: I love the gel mat, and it's helped me improve my ball striking faster than anything else in my golf simulator setup. I'm relatively young and healthy at 39, so the extra impact on the joints isn't a significant drawback for me at this time.

Will it be eventually? Almost certainly, but as someone who's only been golfing for around four years, the ability to closely simulate the real thing is priceless.

I do like the standard mat primarily because it's so affordable and feels relatively authentic.

For my needs, I don't like hitting off the foam mat. The idea that I'm making practice "easier" on my body at the expense of realism isn't for me, but I think it's incredible that the mat exists for those who need the extra softness on their joints.

Sure, it costs more, but for me, there's nothing better than practicing with conditions that feel as close to real as possible. And it really has translated to my on-course game. Between PathPal helping me fix my slice and the hitting strip improving my ball striking, I'll be well on my way to breaking 80 this year, and I couldn't be more excited about where my golf game is heading, even after taking it up so late in life.

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Nocs Provisions just launched a snazzy new pair of high-power, waterproof binoculars aimed at outdoor enthusiasts, and I climbed to the top of Washington State’s Little Si Mountain to test their durability and optical performance.

Perhaps best known for its appearance as the smaller mountain in the cult classic TV show, Twin Peaks, Little Si is a fairly manageable 1,500-foot climb from base to summit. The payoff is sweeping views of the Snoqualmie Valley and the Northern Cascade Mountain Range.

And thanks to mild temperatures and clear blue skies, I was able to see with epic clarity and detail for miles and miles through the new Nocs Field Issue 42 binoculars, priced at $199 via Nocs directly.

My new gold-standard hiking optic, below are the five biggest reasons why I may never hit the trails again without the new Nocs Field Issue 42 binoculars around my neck.

1. Incredible zoom and clarity in a compact (ish) package

There are two variants of the Nocs Field Issue 42 binoculars. They both are roughly the same size and weight, but one offers 8x zoom, which is what I tested; the other boasts 10x zoom.

For a pair of full-sized binoculars, these bad boys are impressively lightweight, clocking in at around 1.3 pounds with a length of around 5.5 inches, which just so happens to fit perfectly in my hands.

The first time I held them up to my eyes, I was literally blown away. Despite a little bit of afternoon heat haze, I was able to see the mountain peaks several miles across the valley with amazing clarity and no visible distortion of aberrations.

The next day, I pointed them at Mount Rainier, our local, active, stratovolcano, which is situated roughly 60 miles from my home in Seattle. Dear readers, I was seriously floored by the amount of detail visible on the mighty mountain's northern face.

For the first time, I spotted geographic features I'd never laid eyes on, including crevasses on the Carbon Glacier, intricate and jagged ridgelines, possible avalanche debris fields, and more.

2. Playful and practical design

Nocs has a reputation for making easy-to-carry, tough-built optics in aesthetically pleasing colors, including the more compact binoculars shown on the left in the image above. And the latest Nocs Field Issue 42 is no exception. Choose from Eddy Blue, Jade, Sage, or Brick Red.

The Field Issue 42 is also packed with useful features, like built-in lens covers and attachment points for the included (and comfortable) neck strap. Meanwhile, an oversized focus adjustment knob at the center of the Nocs turns with a satisfying amount of resistance.

Meanwhile, the exterior of the binoculars is coated in a grippy, rubberized material that features a textured 'ToughWave' design, making it easy to hold even in cold/wet conditions.

3. Impact-resistant and waterproof

The Nocs Field Issue 42 binoculars are water and fog-proof, carrying an IPX7 rating against moisture. This translates into the ability to survive complete immersions, albeit for short periods of time.

The interior of the optics is sealed and filled with nitrogen to prevent fogging and other forms of distortion that may occur from shifting temperatures and/or humidity levels; meanwhile, the exterior is designed to take bumps, bruises, and abrasions like a champ.

The exposed glass is fairly well protected on either end, but also boasts a scratch-resistant design for added durability. The elements additionally feature a mix of coatings to combat internal reflections and other optical uglies, like chromatic aberrations (purple/green fringing).

4. Accommodates glasses with ease

Again, similar to other optics in the Nocs family, like the fantastic Nocs Field Tube monocular, the new Field Issue 42 binoculars sport twist-up eyecups to better accommodate folks who wear glasses, like me. There's also a diopter adjustment knob to dial in just the right amount of sharpness.

You can additionally adjust the distance between the two optics by pushing or pulling the two tubes closer or apart. With plenty of range to suit most face types, I suspect the vast majority of users will find these comfortable to look through, even for extended periods.

5. $199 and backed by a lifetime warranty

The Nocs Field Issue binoculars are available as of today in two optical variants, either with 10x or 8x zoom. I tested the latter, which comes in your choice of blue or green for $199 via Nocs directly. The 10x option is available in sage or red, also for $199.

While you can easily find bargain-level binoculars on Amazon that look close to these for well under $100, when compared to similarly high-quality options, like the Nikon Monarch M7 binoculars, which cost a whopping $549, the Nocs Field Issue 42 suddenly seems like a steal.

Better yet, all Nocs products are backed with a 'no matter what' lifetime warranty for added peace of mind.

More from Tom's Guide

• I just spent two weeks in Spain with this backpack — here's why it's a near-perfect travel companion
• Nocs Zero Tube hands-on — 5 reasons this tiny, tough-built telescope will be joining me on all my future hikes
• Garmin’s rumored screen-less wearable just might be the subscription-free Whoop rival I’ve been waiting for

ExpressVPN is no longer simply one of the best VPNs – it's a full-blown privacy suite. One subscription gets you up to five privacy-focused apps: ExpressVPN, ExpressMailGuard, ExpressAI, ExpressKeys, and Identity Defender.

We've been getting hands-on with each new app and now it's the turn of Identity Defender.

Identity Defender is a comprehensive suite of identity protection tools designed to help you manage, remove, and better control your online data. I decided to check it out, testing it for over a week on Android, iOS, and Windows, to see if it lived up to the hype.

Currently, the feature is only available for new ExpressVPN Advanced and ExpressVPN Pro subscribers in the US. This is due to the complexity of regulations and laws that must be followed. But testing it out in one country before launching globally (if the company decides to do so) is no bad thing.

The suite has its own iOS and Android apps that operate completely independently of the ExpressVPN app, making it easier to find exactly what you need. You don’t have to use every tool either – you can cherry-pick through options and only set up the monitoring you want. Just make sure you choose the right subscription tier, or you may be disappointed.

So, taking all that into account, let's see how I got on.

Identity defense tailored to individuals

Many of the identity defense tools on the market were created for corporations, not individuals. Whether it's detecting active fraud or potential data breaches, having the same level of protection available on an individual basis is crucial.

Identity Defender is only available with the Advanced and Pro tiers of ExpressVPN, and you can’t purchase it separately. However ExpressVPN is currently cheaper than it has ever been, and one subscription includes up to five privacy-focused apps.

A 28-month ExpressVPN Advanced plan costs $2.92 per month ($81.72 upfront pre-tax). A 28-month ExpressVPN Pro plan costs $4.87 per month ($136.32 upfront pre-tax).

Both plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. ExpressVPN Pro unlocks all Identity Defender features, as well as ExpressAI and Dedicated IP.

Ease of Use

After you download and install the Identity Defender mobile app to your smartphone or tablet, you’ll log in and enter a nominal amount of information, including your name, DOB, email, state, and city. Once you accept the terms and conditions, you can begin setting up the individual tools.

To put your mind at ease before we continue, Identity Defender also falls under ExpressVPN's strict no-logs and privacy policies. The company performs regular independent privacy and security audits, with 20+ completed to date.

ExpressVPN baby-steps you through the entire process for each tool – very user-friendly, even if you’re a beginner. If you do have any issues, ExpressVPN offers a detailed setup guide for Identity Defender in its website's Support Center. You can also find useful information by tapping the Profile icon in the app, scrolling down, and pressing Getting Started.

You can enter up to 10 email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers. The app also has monitoring options for passports, driver's licenses, bank information, medical IDs, and credit cards.

If you need to edit or add information after your initial setup phase, just click the Security icon in the app, scroll down, and tap the Review or Update Monitored Information button.

The same section has a dropdown menu at the top that shows your Dashboard by default, but you can pick from Services, Alerts, Dark Web, Address, SSN, and Neighborhood.

Testing tools in real-time

The best thing about Identity Defender is the real-time monitoring and alerts. Home, finance, auto, and Dark Web monitoring are all available in real-time.

I downloaded the app for iOS and Android, and tested it via the ExpressVPN app for Windows. I tested each of the tools available for the Advanced tier over 7 days, twice a day (morning and evening), each session for a minimum of 10 minutes. It also ran in the background on my devices for at least half of each day. Switching up the testing times allowed me to stay on top of any data alerts.

Let’s look at a few of the tools in detail, starting with Data Removal because it’s one of the biggest draws for me. On initial setup of the suite, I entered one email. To see how easy it was to edit information, I went in and added another. It was quick and painless, and the tool began monitoring it immediately.

I received an email alert that data was found.

I was notified that the data removal tool was in the process of removing my information from three websites, one of which I recognized as a platform for downloading free clipart. It was nice to recognize sites I knew I had been on, proof of the tool doing its job. The tool displays "in progress," and you receive an email notification when data removal is complete.

The data removal tool does its job well, and the detailed description of which information was removed helps put you at ease. Mine included not only the emails, but any other information added on the sites, including my name, phone number, address (and in one instance, legal records and my mother's maiden name).

You can check your credit score right in the app – it uses the well-know agency, Experian. I’ll spare you the details of my credit report (grad student), but the data is accurate when compared to my recent big-three credit report.

What I will say is that the credit score and monitoring tool provides real details, including your payment history, derogatory marks, total number of accounts, and hard inquiries. Just click on the Credit Score icon on the Home page, and you’ll see your credit score at the top.

When you scroll down, you’ll see all the positive and negative credit marks that impact your score, click the > icon on the right side of each, and you can view recommended actions to improve or maintain your credit.

I live in a fairly rural area, so I didn’t receive any address or neighborhood watch alerts. Luckily, I can add or change my location. I entered a well-known street address in the city, performed a search within a one and five-mile radius, and immediately red location markers appeared, indicating known offenders.

If you click a location marker, it shows the offender's name and address, along with a link to view details. Details include age, approximate distance, physical traits, and offense.

I didn’t receive alerts on my SSN, address, or home. Those are the types of identifiable information you don’t want floating around on the internet, so I wasn't heartbroken. That said, it’s nice to know the app is monitoring for potential breaches, and it provides an easy way to stay on top of it.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the iOS and Android apps are almost identical. Most of the time, at the very least, iOS and Android apps have different verbiage, but that wasn't an issue with Identity Defender – consistent UI is something ExpressVPN does very well.

Not as convenient on desktop

The only real flaw I found with the Identity Defender suite is the inconvenience of using it on a desktop.

You can find links to the Identity Defenderid suite tools within ExpressVPN’s Windows app by clicking the Add-ons icon on the left-hand menu. A window containing available tools appears to the right of the map.

When you click on one, you’re redirected to your account dashboard to view the information. You can still see everything you would within the app, it just isn’t as convenient as the mobile app. It isn’t a huge flaw, just extra steps.

However, ExpressVPN has said Identity Defender isn't meant to function as a standalone desktop app, it's designed to be mobile-first. The VPN said the desktop version is seen as a "companion view, rather than a primary user experience."

On a nit-picking level, I noticed that the Privacy tab's dropdown menu showed no items in progress for almost a minute before it displayed accurate statistics for each field. It may have been under a minute, but it's still a lag, and it happened every time I used the menu on both Android and iOS.

I'd love to see a standalone app for Windows and macOS, and less delay when loading Privacy (data removal) updates. Ease of use and no glitches across all platforms is never a bad thing.

Being proactive about your data just got easier

Overall, Identity Defender is a win for ExpressVPN. It provides online data monitoring with a click, all in the convenience of a mobile app.

It provides neighborhood alerts to help keep your family safe, data removal services to minimize your digital footprint, credit monitoring for the fiscally-minded, and it's really easy to use.

Just remember, it's a US-exclusive (for now), so anyone outside the States will have to wait.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.