PCWorld January 2020

Lost amid the 5G phone hype, analysts say, is a little-known fact: None of the high-priced 5G phones currently being sold in carrier stores can access both 5G mmWave and sub-6GHz networks. It’s one of the main reasons why you shouldn’t jump on the 5G hype train too early. But that will change during the first quarter of 2020, Qualcomm senior executives said during the company’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, Hawaii. As it stands now, 5G is basically an either-or proposition. The OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren Edition that T-Mobile announced as it “turned on” its 5G network on December 6 is a “lowband” phone, capable of accessing T-Mobile’s 600MHz 5G network. But it won’t be able to access the short-range, high-bandwidth, and extremely fast mmWave spectrum that Verizon is…

Let’s be honest: We’re a bit skeptical of the new Snapdragon 7c and 8c story, Qualcomm’s latest expansion of its Snapdragon Compute lineup into cheaper markets. But we had a chance to play around with them, and they’re…fine? At the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company offered reporters a chance to try out a pair of 7c and 8c demo machines. Both of the units we saw were reference designs, with pre-production hardware. Miguel Nunes, senior director of product management for compute products, supplied us with a few more details about each chip. The 7c includes a pair of ARM Cortex-A76 “performance” cores, with six Cortex-A55 cores serving as the low-power “efficiency” cores. There’s an X15 LTE modem, too. The Snapdragon 8c uses four A76 and four A55 cores each,…

Intel’s redesign of the thin-and-light notebook, known as Project Athena, may have struggled to be more than a name to most consumers. But Intel claims that its design partnership with PC makers has paid off in a way you might not think about: battery-powered performance. “Performance” is usually synonymous with plugging a laptop in. Unplugging a laptop usually translates to long battery life at the expense of a slower clock speed. But Intel unveiled battery-powered performance numbers alongside the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Conference to bolster its design chops. Intel already has about eighteen certified Project Athena designs in the marketplace, ranging from the Dell XPS 13 to HP Elite Dragonfly to the Lenovo X1 Carbon and the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex and Ion. With each, Intel and the OEM engineers work together…

When the Pixel phone landed in 2016, the promise was that the handset would be continuously updated, not just with regular Android security and version updates, but with new features like Apple does with the iPhone. Over the years, Google has obliged by regularly bringing newer Pixel features to older phones, but it’s stopped short of delivering big feature-packed updates. That’s changing with the first ever “Pixel feature drop.” According to a blog post, the updates are already rolling out and involve two steps: a system update and app updates via the Play Store. It’s unclear whether the update is part of the December security update that began rolling out last week (and has yet to hit the Pixel 4) or a newer Android 10.1 update, but it should reach all…

Well, you can’t argue that Microsoft isn’t giving anyone enough notice. Microsoft said recently that it plans to shut down its Wunderlist to-do list service on May 6, 2020. You’ll still be able to use Wunderlist until then, though Microsoft is cutting off new signups. You’ll have the option to remove your data from Wunderlist—or, as Microsoft hopes, export it to the company’s own To-Do app. Microsoft originally bought the Wunderlist app in 2015, and then said in 2017 that it planned to phase out Wunderlist in favor of a similar, self-developed app called To-Do. Since then, To-Do has been developed and integrated within other apps, such as Outlook, to provide a more holistic note-taking service across multiple Microsoft apps. At the time, Microsoft said that Wunderlist would be maintained while Microsoft…

In a year that’s seen the death of Inbox, Google+, and the goo.gl URL shortener, not to mention the loss of free original quality photo storage with every Pixel phone purchase, Google isn’t putting its knives away just yet. Next to go is Google Cloud Print. Cloud Print has been around since 2010, but despite a fancy website and deep Android and Chrome OS integration, it never actually made it out of beta. And now it never will. Google has quietly announced that users have until December 31, 2020, to enjoy Cloud Print. When the calendar changes to 2021, “devices across all operating systems will no longer be able to print using Google Cloud Print.” That’s 12 months away, so it’s giving users lots of time to find something new, but it’s…