Month: August 2019

Samsung’s Galaxy cameras have a history of excellence, but have struggled to keep up with low-light night mode shots compared to rival devices, like the best-in-class Huawei P30 Pro and Google Pixel 3. Baking in a dedicated night mode into the Note 10 and Note 10 Plus changes that — it’s the difference between night and day.

The dedicated night mode feature arrived over the air for Galaxy S10 phones in a software update after criticism (including mine) over the then-new automatic night mode that Samsung called Bright Night Shot.

Cameras, along with screen quality and battery life, make up one of the most important features that buyers consider. A dedicated night mode is becoming a must-have feature for the most premium phones.

The lack of a standalone night mode was one of the Galaxy S10’s major drawbacks when it first launched. Samsung insisted that the Galaxy S10’s Bright Night Mode would make shots clearer, but it rarely made a difference in my tests, and you had to wait for conditions to align for the camera to even surface it.

Contrast that with a standalone night mode, which you turn on at will. It processes a burst of photos at different exposures into a single photo. The slower process is designed to draw out details and cut down on image noise. Think dark signs you can suddenly read and more of the background scene emerging from the dark. Imagine a brilliantly lit night sky or sharp pinpoints of light as you look down a busy street at night.

With the Note 10’s Night Mode (again, it’s also now on the S10 phones), you’ll have to hold still to wait for the mode to take your picture — give it a good five seconds. The resulting photo should be brighter and more detailed.

I find that it’s especially good at reining in streetlights that otherwise look like they’re spraying all over the scene. Fine writing should also look sharper and easier to read.

In Samsung’s case, the Note 10’s dedicated night mode helps Samsung catch up with rivals. Its night mode tends to produce the brightest photos of the bunch, but it also enhances background detail outside the area of focus.

In several of my photos, the night mode can get a little carried away, making dark skies bluer than I’d like (I still want it to look like it’s dark out) and working too hard to brighten a scene. In some scenarios, I prefer the contrast of automatic mode over the dedicated night mode — Samsung has some work to do to perfect its night mode processing.

There’s no countdown to indicate how long you have to stand there while the photo processes, something the company can easily fix in an update.

While Samsung hasn’t surpassed Google or Huawei, its current Night Mode is off to a good start, and it helps makes the camera experience feel more complete. With the Pixel 4 and Mate 30 Pro coming up, these competitors could introduce even better low-light photography that could crank up the heat again.

Hopefully, next time, Samsung will be quicker to respond.

If your apps are sucking up too much of your time, you can outsource some self-discipline. Focus Mode is a new feature, announced in May, that brushes aside distracting apps — maybe for you it’s Facebook, YouTube or Instagram — while you mentally dive into what you need to do, by applying a timer that keeps you from accessing certain apps for a set amount of time. When the time’s up, Google will unpause the app.

Focus Mode is Google’s latest feature intended to promote something it calls digital health. It builds off Wind Down mode, a part of Android’s Digital Wellbeing feature set that turns the screen to grayscale if you schedule it to each night or manually turn it on. The idea is to make the screen less compelling to look at while also counteracting the blue light that’s believed to disrupt sleep patterns and keep you awake longer.

Google believes that app timers, like those in Focus Mode, help people keep from overusing apps more than 90% of the time. You can choose which apps you’d like to pause, like Facebook and Instagram, which tend to interrupt you with notifications. But you can also keep some messaging apps open for emergencies.

It’s available for the Android 10 (formerly Android Q) beta, but if you don’t see it yet, you may need to update to the latest version.

How to use Focus Mode for Android

1.Open your Digital Wellbeing app.

2. On the dashboard, select Focus Mode.

3. Tap on the box to the right of each app that you want to disable. You may have to select Show all apps if they’re not visible.

4. Tap Turn on now.

5. You’ll notice that all of your paused apps are grayed out. If you try to open the app, a box will open that says Focus Mode is on. You can either select Settings to make changes or tap OK to leave the app disabled.

6. When you’re ready to stop pausing your apps, go back into the Focus Mode settings and tap Turn off now.

Use Quick Settings to turn Focus Mode on

1.If you’re looking for a quicker way to turn Focus Mode on, open your Quick Settings menu.

2. Tap on Focus Mode. This will pause any apps you’ve got selected in your settings.

3. To make changes to the apps you have paused, you’ll have to go into the Digital Wellbeing app.

4. That’s it! Now you can concentrate on the task at hand, rather than looking down at your phone each time you get a notification.

AMD and Nvidia are (still) fighting it out for gaming dominance, with new products like the Nvidia RTX Super line and the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series. Right now, the landscape can be confusing, but generally the best gaming laptops are running Nvidia’s RTX graphics, which first came to desktop PCs in late 2018, and to laptops in January 2019.

For this roundup, we’ve taken all the laptops with discrete graphics hardware we’ve tested over the past year and a half and ranked them based on 3D performance. Below are those with top performance from that group, and you can also scroll through the full list of game benchmark results here.

If you’re building a desktop gaming rig, then start with our guide to desktop graphics, but if you’re in the market for a gaming laptop, these are the very best ones we’ve tested. All of these gaming laptops, from just under $1,000 to $5,000 or more, can easily support high-end virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and many new designs fit top-tier graphics hardware into wafer-thin laptop bodies.

When reviewing a gaming laptop or desktop, we run preset performance tests using several games, including Far Cry 5, Metro: Exodus and others, along with standard benchmarks like 3DMark, which is designed to test a computer’s 3D graphic rendering capabilities.

For this list, we’re ranking the best gaming laptops in descending order of 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra scores, but the real-world game scores (presented as the number of frames of animation per second the laptop can render) match very closely. Note that these scores are specifically for the exact configurations of each laptop we tested, and almost all can be configured with a wide range of options.

At the very top are two high-end gaming laptops that use desktop-class processors and full-power Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics: the Alienware Area-51m and the Origin PC Eon-17X. Those are both at the top end of the price scale, but gaming laptops at more reasonable prices, including systems from Asus, Dell, Origin PC, Lenovo, HP, MSI and Razer, among others, are all represented.

New and notable for this summer update of the best gaming laptops are the Acer Triton 900, a unique laptop with strong performance, a pivoting hinge, the Razer Blade Pro, and a new Origin PC Evo-16S, which has a still-rare 16-inch display.

The exact scores and graphics hardware specs for all tested gaming laptops are located here.

Alienware Area-51m

On top of the satisfying visual refresh rate of Alienware’s highest-end laptop, the Area-51m offers an impressive 17.3-inch display, an excellent keyboard, and plenty of processing overhead from PC gaming CPUs and the latest RTX GPUs. Plus, a modular processor and GPU design lets you get inside the case and replace both the processor and graphics card for terrific gaming performance.

Origin PC Eon-17X (2019)

Like the Alienware Area-51m, the Origin PC Eon-17X features the desktop-class Intel Core i9-9900K processor and the new Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card. This combination made these our two top-performing laptops so far from all of 2018-2019.

Acer Predator Triton 900

The Acer Predator Triton 900’s rotating display is a great idea that’s also well executed. The keyboard incorporates mechanical switches that feel very good, and its performance is fast — though as a laptop, the keyboard and short battery life may be a drawback for some.

Origin PC Eon-17X (2018)

The 2018 version of this laptop, with a desktop CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, was right behind the updated version. It’s pricey and has a modest battery life, but it delivers top-notch performance.

Asus ROG Zephyrus GX701

This updated Asus ROG Zephyrus combines both a slim, professional-looking design with the expanded power of Nvidia’s new RTX graphics card for an excellent gaming experience, though at the cost of battery life.

Dive into the exact scores and configurations for all the top performers in the full buyer’s guide list of 30-plus gaming laptops. 

The LineageOS custom ROM is best known for its wide range of device support. In the past month alone, the project has added the Razer Phone, Zenfone 6, and other phones to the official roster. It seems a bit strange that they weren’t already available, but ports for the OnePlus 6T and 7 Pro are now live.

LineageOS has now added support for the OnePlus 6T (code-named fajita) and 7 Pro (guacamole), thanks to the work of maintainers LuK1337, PeterCxy, and Tortel. Both devices are receiving daily builds based on LineageOS 16 (Android 9 Pie). Since these are officially-sanctioned releases, there shouldn’t be any breaking bugs.

It’s always great to see Lineage add more flagship phones to its roster, as the current selection is somewhat lacking if you don’t have access to Xiaomi devices. The more the merrier!

The design of the PlayStation 5 reportedly leaked through patent drawings, featuring a much different look compared to the console’s predecessors.

The patent, spotted by Dutch blog Let’s Go Digital, was submitted in Brazil in May and published on August 13 at the World Intellectual Property Office, where it falls under the category of electronic devices. It appears that Sony’s technical director, Yushiro Ootori, is the man behind the concept.

Let’s Go Digital later created renders for the drawings found in the patents, potentially showing the first look at the PlayStation 5.

There is little doubt that the render is a potential PlayStation 5 design, due to the classification of the patent which is also where the PlayStation 4 is categorized. However, without official confirmation from Sony, the leak looked too good to be true.

Matthew Stott, a game developer since 1992 and currently working as a senior artist in Codemasters, then confirmed that the leaked design was indeed for the PlayStation 5 — but not yet for the console that will ship to customers. In a tweet, Stott said that the device was the PlayStation 5 development kit, though there is a chance that it ends up as the final design for the console.

The post gained traction online, but Stott’s tweet has since been blocked from public view. It is unclear what happened, but it is plausible that Sony reached out to him to take down the post.

If Stott is indeed telling the truth, the PlayStation 5 development kit looks very different compared to the PlayStation 4. The cutout at the top stands out, possibly to provide additional ventilation, and the console also features five USB ports and several buttons at the front, plus two USB ports at the back.

It remains unclear if the final PlayStation 5 design will look like the development kit, but as with any rumor, everything is up in the air until official confirmation.

The PlayStation 5, which is expected to launch in 2020, will be powered by AMD chips that will be able to support 3D audio, 8K graphics, and ray tracing. A leaked benchmark test on the PlayStation 5 claimed that it will be four times more powerful than the PlayStation 4.