Inhoudsopgave van July 2024 - Tech Advisor

Microsoft’s latest Windows update has fixed an earlier bug that could prevent VPNs from working properly, Microsoft has said. Microsoft’s release for May 2024 (KB5037771 or OS builds 22621.3593 and 22631.3593) has just one highlight: “This update addresses a known issue that might cause your VPN connection to fail,” it says. “This occurs after you install the update dated April 9, 2024, or later.” A similar update patches Windows 10, too. The update will automatically update via Windows Update, although you can check the update history to see if your PC has downloaded it. Microsoft said earlier that its April update to Windows 10 and 11 could unexpectedly break VPNs, and that there was no patch available at the time. Microsoft said then that it was working to resolve the…

Microsoft has been trying to get Windows users to adopt machines based on the Arm architecture (the same type of chips that power smartphones and other small devices) for years, with limited success. But the upcoming push in conjunction with Qualcomm might just do it, if a new Dell documentation leak is accurate. The new chips reportedly deliver jaw‑dropping battery life. A leaked internal slideshow and spec list shows Dell’s own testing for laptops based on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X architecture. These laptops are coming later this year from a variety of vendors. Crucially, this info includes Dell’s battery life estimates meant to be shared among its own employees – not the usual battery life estimates shared with promo material, which is often generous as best. According to the leaked…

Google showed off the future of Gmail at Google I/O: the ability to question email threads and even command it to perform tasks in the background via AI agents. It’s an important evolution, one that recognizes that the reason Gmail became so popular is because email is intrinsically complex, with questions and replies and attachments all over the place. Google is using its Gemini AI search to help make sense of it all. But – and this is a big but – this isn’t here yet. It will roll out in Google’s Labs workspace this fall. And even then, consumers will have to pay a whopping £18.99 per user per month for the Google AI Premium plan (fave.co/3wIXB6c) that makes it all happen. GMAIL Q&A In a demonstration, Aparna Pappu,…

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, a new major version of Android is coming later this year. We’ve known that Android 15 was on the way for a while now, but Google used its I/O developer conference keynote to reveal lots more about the new software. That includes all its top new features, and there are three in particular that I’m really excited to try. Let’s dive in. PRIVATE SPACE I use my smartphone more than any other piece of technology, meaning it has a lot of sensitive information stored on it. But right now, when I give it to a friend or family member, they’re just one tap away from accessing this information. Enter Private Space. It’s a space that’s totally separate from the rest of Android 15, allowing…

Price: £849 from fave.co/3ytGcyW Gaming Chromebooks feel like a concept that should have died with Google Stadia, but they’ve persevered. That makes more sense than it seems. Stadia is gone but its competitors, like Nvidia GeForce Now, PlayStation Now, and Xbox Game Cloud, are thriving, and they all work well on Chrome OS. They make the 516 GE a viable gaming machine and, despite a few imperfections, it’s also a pleasant laptop for casual use and office productivity. DESIGN My first thought when I unboxed the Acer Chromebook 516 GE was, “Wow, this feels old-school.” Chromebooks are typically associated with portable, lightweight, and inexpensive systems, but the 516 GE is a beefy laptop with a 16-inch display. It’s also far from the slimmest laptop at 21.3mm thick. Weight deviates from…

Smartwatches are one of the best bits of tech you can buy right now, providing you with almost endless amounts of convenient features on your wrist. These are the best smartwatches. This guide contains our top 10 expert picks from the wearable market. The Apple Watch is an obvious choice for many but even Apple has various models to choose from. Google Wear OS devices provide a wealth of choice and there are others, too, including Garmin and Xiaomi. You’ll find our list of the best smartwatches below, all of which have been thoroughly tested by our expert team. WHAT TO LOOK FOR Why you need a smartwatch There’s an interesting theory that smartwatches are to the smartphone what wristwatches were to the pocket watch. Picture the way the average…

Malware is just one way hackers and scammers can get you. Another common tactic is social engineering – a collection of methods that exploit vulnerabilities in human behaviour to steal sensitive info, takeover accounts, or otherwise infiltrate your life. Businesses and individuals alike can suffer big losses from successful campaigns. But while antivirus software can block malware, including those that involve social engineering (for example, scareware), it can’t stop all types of social engineering attacks. New variants continue to emerge, with no signs of stopping. You must keep watch yourself – which is easier if you know the key signs to watch for. At the recent 2024 RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, Microsoft broke down social engineering attacks into three distinctive pieces. Once you become familiar with them, they’re…

Technology giant Microsoft recently released its sustainability report (fave.co/4bGEGaU) for the 2023 financial year, and it didn’t exactly have positive numbers. Microsoft set a climate goal in 2020 to become carbon negative by 2030 (fave.co/3WKTEZq), sequestering more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits, but the company seems to be on the wrong track to achieve this goal. Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 30 percent in the 2023 financial year – and it’s all Copilot’s fault. The big culprit is the company’s huge AI investments. It takes huge amounts of energy to train and use AI models. The International Energy Agency (fave.co/3X8eAtJ) expects energy consumption for data centres worldwide to increase from 460TWh in 2022 to between 620- and 1,050TWh by 2026, due to AI and cryptocurrency use.…

Got a fairly recent Nvidia discrete graphics card? Got a Firefox browser, huge collection of extensions optional? Then you’ve got everything you need to let your GPU flex its muscles on upscaling some low‑quality web video. Nvidia announced yesterday that Mozilla’s browser has added compatibility with the RTX Video Super Resolution upscaling and HDR tools. As Nvidia says on its blog post (fave.co/44OY5o6), RTX Video combines both algorithm-powered upscaling (boosting the resolution of each video frame by dynamically filling in the intervening space) and translating standard dynamic range frames into high dynamic range with intelligently-boosted colour vibrancy and contrast. Your videos should look better even if you don’t have an HDR-compatible screen to show them. As we said when we tested the feature at its launch. RTX Video is available…

The difference between the real world and the AI world is a flight of a dozen stairs. In my basement office, I listened to what Google presented at Google I/O. I heard executives talk about search, Android, and Project Astra: a future multi-modal ‘universal agent’ that can understand audio and video, built around versions of Gemini both large and small. One million tokens is a big deal, right? I guess. But to whom? What I heard at Google I/O was a future that is still in the future, for a price that most people can’t afford, and with features that were developed by Google employees for Google employees. It’s a Google that, more and more, seems to have lost the plot. EVERYTHING’S NOT HERE YET For the most part, what…

As expected, Google has used its annual I/O developer conference to speak about Wear OS 5, its upcoming smartwatch operating system update and here are the four most important pieces of news. There’s a buzz around Wear OS this year, and that’s come out of many interesting smartwatches hitting the market over the last year or two – including Google’s own Pixel Watch 2. Google says its user base grew 40 percent in 2023, so you’ll want to know what’s coming to the wearable platform in the next full version upgrade. RELEASE DATE Although Google was only talking about the developer preview during its I/O keynote, it did confirm that Wear OS 5, which is based on Android 14, is “arriving later this year”. And there might not be long…

Price: £299 from fave.co/4bIPZQ3 Less than a year on from the OnePlus Pad, which introduced the brand to the cut-throat world of Android tablets, the ‘Never Settle’ firm is back with the OnePlus Pad Go. Interestingly, this isn’t a direct follow-on from the original Pad, and it doesn’t seem to be trying to do anything massively different to the OnePlus Pad. Rather, the OnePlus Pad Go tries to do a similar at a cheaper price. It’s another full-sized media-focused tablet, but one that makes judicious cuts to the core specs in order to hit a sub‑£300 price tag. DESIGN OnePlus has broadly stuck to a similar design language as the OnePlus Pad for the Pad Go. This is another sage-green (‘Twin Mint’, in fact) tablet with rounded corners and a…

In the past few years, there’s been an explosion of new laptops featuring OLED displays. Just like the phone market saw them become nearly ubiquitous, the laptop market is finding more and more models offering up OLED displays at nearly every price bracket save for some of the cheapest systems. And that highlights a crucial detail: OLEDs cost a premium over traditional LCD displays. So the big question, then, is whether an OLED display is worth the extra cash you’ll have to spend to have it on your laptop. Like most tech questions, the answer will come down to what you want to do with your laptop and what you’re hoping to get out of it. So we’ll need to dive into the perks of OLED and the drawbacks so…

Microsoft recently unveiled (fave.co/4bHiA8i) a series of Outlook updates designed to combat spam emails. There are a number of new features for the web, desktop and mobile versions of Outlook, which should ensure that spam mail ends up in the right place, and help you avoid phishing attempts. To make sorting easier in your Spam tab, you will no longer need to open an email to see the sender’s email address, it will now appear directly under their name. You will also get a new warning box if you start opening links in emails that are in Spam. It will also be easier for you to report spam and phishing emails. You will now be able to report an email address with the click of a button and unsubscribe or…

At the start of Google’s yearly I/O developer event today, the tech giant didn’t seem all that interested in telling developers what they’ll be able to do with Google – it’s more interested in telling regular users all the cool stuff that the company’s Gemini AI can do right now, and will be able to do in the future. Presenters really wanted us to know we’re in the ‘Gemini era’. What does that mean for regular users? More or less, it’s all about smarter searching that pulls more and deeper information from more websites, and organizes it in smart ways. It all starts with ‘AI Overviews’, the new, fancy version of the Rich Results you currently see before (and sometimes to the right of) standard text results. AI Overview will…

Google releases a new major version of Android every year, and that’ll be no different in 2024. Android 15 got its official launch at Google I/O 2024, and two public betas are now live. So, what should you expect in terms of features and compatibility with existing phones? And when will the new software arrive on your device? Here’s everything you need to know about Android 15 at this stage. RELEASE DATE Google hasn’t confirmed when Android 15 will be released, but based on the timeline below, it’ll be sometime towards the end of the year. As you can see from the past few generations, it usually begins rolling out in the second half of each year. Android 14: October 2023 Android 13: August 2022 Android 12: October 2021 Android…

Price: £2,235 from fave.co/4bxkWXW The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (Gen 9) is a well-executed 2-in-1 laptop that delivers a beautiful dual-screen monitor experience on the go. After PC fans spent years watching Microsoft cancel devices like the Courier tablet and dual-screen Surface Neo PC, it’s great to see Lenovo deliver year after year, upgrading last year’s successful experiment with the latest Intel hardware. If you want a lot of screen on the go, this machine delivers a better experience than Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold – and it’s less expensive, too. FEATURES The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 155U CPU, Intel integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid-state drive for storage. This PC’s Intel Core Ultra 7 155U is a little different from the…

Price: £599 from fave.co/44EOgJn For the longest time, Motorola was best known for its cheap and cheerful Moto G phones, but the Lenovo-owned brand has been quietly making a name for itself a little further up the pricing scale of late. The Edge 50 Pro is another example of a classy mid-ranger with a couple of flagship-level features. Even so, it might not be quite what you’re expecting. Motorola has had a bit of a rethink about the positioning of its three smartphone offerings in 2024. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro isn’t actually a direct follow-on from the flagship Motorola Edge 40 Pro from 2023, but rather is far closer in price and spec to the mid-range Motorola Edge 40. For £599 you’re getting a good-looking phone with a great…

It never fails. You get a shiny, brand-new laptop with ALL the bells and whistles, and yet the same thing lets you down every time. The built-in webcam. Even laptops that promise superior webcams ultimately fail to deliver. And if you’re wondering ‘why?’ the answer comes down to everything else you love about your laptop. Unfortunately, in this modern world, the webcam is more important than ever. Chances are you’re all too familiar with the terms, ‘Zoom’ and ‘Teams’ which now mean something totally different than they did 15 years ago. More people are working from home, and even those in the office are still attending remote meetings. And if you’re a professional, you want to look good. So why does your laptop’s webcam make you look terrible, and what…