Month: June 2020

A new build of the Dell XPS 13 has gone on sale with one major difference – it has dropped Windows 10 in favour of Ubuntu.

The new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition ditches Microsoft’s software in favour of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS preinstalled to work straight out of the box, giving developers a new ultra-portable and powerful laptop option.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is now available in North America and selected EMEA countries including UK and Ireland from today costing $1,049/around £899.

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

The launch is is the first system available on the market with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which was released in April 2020, with Canonical pledging to provide security updates to the system for up to 10 years.

This means it comes with all the latest Ubuntu and Linux features, including new and updated applications such as LibreOffice 6.4 and Thunderbird 68.7.0. There’s also GNOME 3.36 adding improved user workflow and performance enhancements, over 6,000 snaps from the Snap Store including Visual Studio Code, Slack, Spotify, Plex and the JetBrains portfolio, a new desktop Yaru default theme with light and dark modes.

Users will also be able to benefit from increased customisation options thanks to improved settings for Wi-Fi, wallpaper and application groups in the ‘Activities’ overview.

As for the hardware, not much has changed from the initial Dell XPS 13 build, but there’s only a few configurations of offer for now. That means you’ve got the choice of 10th generation Intel Core 10nm mobile processors and up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, making the Ubuntu edition less powerful in some respects compared to its Windows 10 sibling – although there is Wi-Fi 6 configuration available.

But you still get a light and slim design made from either CNC machined aluminium, aerospace-inspired carbon fibre or woven glass fibre, sporting a larger 16:10 display, fingerprint reader, edge-to-edge keyboard, with larger keycaps and a larger touchpad.

We’re big fans of the Dell XPS 13 here at TechRadar, with our review calling it, “an extremely luxurious device (with) a design that’s something to die for.” You can check out where it comes on our full list of the best laptops around today.

Back in March, AMD had said that while posting about graphics issues related to its Radeon hardware on Reddit is helpful, submitting an actual bug report directly to the company is the better course of action. Pretty soon, that will be easier to do right from within AMD’s Radeon Software utility.

As spotted by a user on Reddit (Ceremony64), there is a new bug reporting tool in the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver package (version 20.20.01.05) for people who are participating in the Windows Insider program, who also are testing out the latest Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature.

“Yep, this is a new feature which we’ll share a little more about soon. Feel free to give the preview driver a try!,” a member of AMD’s Radeon Community Team responded.

Submitting bug reports to AMD is not new, nor is initiating the action from within the Radeon Software utility. However, instead of sending users to AMD’s website where certain system specifications need to be inputted manually by the user, the new built-in tool automatically collects the vitals it needs. The user still has to provide a description of the issue, but the streamlined process is far more convenient, and potentially more accurate.

This is a welcome move on AMD’s part. Black screen issues have been a particularly annoying occurrence for Radeon RX 5000 series owners over the last several months, which has kept AMD’s driver team busy—various black screen fixes have their way into a whole bunch of driver updates.

Hopefully this is something AMD will roll out soon, rather than waiting for the next big update to Windows 10 (which will arrive in the fall).

This beautiful-looking beast is the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, the very latest ultra-modern gaming laptop from the Republic of Gamers brand and the true successor to the original, ground-breaking Zephyrus machine. The GX550LXS has got the latest Nvidia graphics card, the latest Intel CPU, and a second, large touchscreen monitor built into the surprisingly svelte chassis. But I’m afraid I don’t really get it.

I mean, I do like it. The build quality is excellent—more effective than the first, mildly flimsy Zephyrus notebook—and the performance is pretty outstanding when you push it as far as it can go. But I really question why there’s a need for a gaming laptop to come with an integrated second screen.

To me it feels like it’s there purely because it can be. Asus’ ZenBook Duo and Pro Duo machines introduced the concept of the ScreenPad Plus in a laptop more designed for productivity than the gaming raison d’etre you’d expect for an ROG device. Drop Premiere windows or Photoshop toolbars onto the second screen and you have your main working display clutter-free and easily accessible. Sweet.

But when you’re gaming what’s that automatically raised second screen up to? Displaying CPU and GPU temps and frequencies, and maybe monitoring your OBS stream. Still, I’m not convinced a non-interactive display while gaming is enough of a win to make it necessary or even relevant. Though part of my problem with all this is how Windows deals with a second display, and that’s not Asus’ fault.

There is a whole lot of laptop here, but for around the $4,000 mark you’d sure hope so. The specs for this GX550LXS build give it an impressive base; there’s the 10th Gen Intel Comet Lake Core i9 10980HK processor for one. That’s an eight-core, 16-thread CPU with a peak clock speed of up to 5.3GHz. On one of those cores, anyway. Compared with the desktop Core i9 10900K though it does at least display more of a proclivity for actually running the chip at that frequency.

Multi-core it will happily run at 4.5GHz for most of the time, though under serious load, for extended periods of time, it will drop back to 3.8GHz to cope. The extra cooling afforded by the flip-up screen does allow the chip to hit peak performance for a relatively lengthy period of time, though that also doesn’t stop it getting super toasty.

On the graphics side you do get something super too, an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, to be precise. That’s the top mobile GPU de jour (forget Brexit, I’m all about the Franglais right now) and will deliver the ultimate in on-the-go gaming performance. With 3,072 CUDA cores it’s a beast of a GPU, and that shows in the Zephyrus Duo’s top benchmarks. Even though it’s a Max-Q Design version of the card, with the requisite lower base and boost clocks, the cooling options allow it to boost way beyond even the non Max-Q GPU’s rated specs when running in ‘Turbo’ mode.

On the system memory side, the Zephyrus Duo comes with 16GB of DDR4 onboard, with an additional SODIMM slot to drop in up to another 32GB of RAM. This version just comes with another 16GB stick, giving it 32GB RAM running in dual-channel mode at 3,200MHz.

For storage there are a pair of 1TB NVMe SSDs, arranged in RAID 0 to try and max out the solid state speeds. In a world where we’ve got fast PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 SSDs I’m not that convinced about the pace of this RAID 0 pairing, and should one drive fail at any point any operating system or information stored across them is toast…

And then there are the screens. 

Our sample is one of the 4K versions, sporting a 15.6-inch UHD IPS panel with G-Sync support, though it’s only capable of a 60Hz refresh rate. There is the option to have a Zephyrus Duo 15 with a 1080p main IPS display running at 300Hz if you want to dial into the gaming prowess of this Asus ROG machine. And honestly, that would be my preference. 

On the productivity focused Zenbook Pro Duo, yeah, go 4K and edit all that ultra HD content you’re working on full screen. When you’re gaming, however, you need to be able to take advantage of a high 1080p refresh rate—running at 4K the RTX 2080 Super can’t even deliver a consistent 60fps at a graphics preset that won’t make you sad you spent $4,000 on it. Sure, you can always run games at 1080p on the 4K screen, but that introduces a whole new heap of issues…

The ScreenPad Plus is a 14.09-inch IPS panel, but with a seriously letterbox aspect ratio delivering a native resolution of 3840 x 1100. It’s touchscreen too, which neither of the potential main displays are. It’s designed to be able to offer quick access to apps and screen setups too. 

The quick launcher button means you can boot specific software at the touch of a button, adjust settings, and capture screen configurations. Arrange your windows how you want them, click the capture button and it will store your layout so you can recreate it quickly without having to go through the whole dragging and resizing rigmarole. 

The upshot of adding in the ScreenPad Plus is that, like the original Zephyrus, the keyboard has been shifted to the front of the laptop and the trackpad to the right-hand side. Which does mean I keep slapping the spacebar trying to use the pad where my brain thinks it should be, and also means Asus ships it with a rubber wrist rest which sits on your desk to make it more comfortable to type on the chiclet keyboard. Sadly that’s not a practicable solution when you’re out and about.

As you’d expect, with all that’s at the disposal of the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, it’s a hell of a performer. The caveat to that is the peak performance is only accessible if you’re willing to forego any semblance of acceptable acoustics. The speakers may be good, but if you put this thing into ‘Turbo’ mode and enable its reliance purely on the dedicated graphics (disabling Optimus, enabling G-Sync, and ditching the potential power-saving integrated CPU graphics), then the cooling fans are going to drown out anything the speakers are capable of outputting.

In standard ‘Performance’ mode the Max-Q Design kicks in and you get gaming performance that slides in behind the Acer Predator Triton 500 and MSI GS66 notebooks. The necessary cooling and acoustic demands rein in the GPU from the peak clock speeds it can hit when unleashed in ‘Turbo’ mode, but if you’re happy to accept the audible assault from the required cooling you’ll see between 20% and 30% higher gaming frame rates than listed here in the benchmarks above. And that makes it head and shoulders above the other two machines.

These figures are all running at 1080p, however, when ideally you’d want to be gaming at your panel’s native resolution. But the demands of high-end 4K gaming are still beyond even the RTX 2080 Super inside the Asus Zephyrus Duo—in my testing, even with ‘Turbo’ mode enabled, it could still barely get near the 60fps we’d normally want for comfortable gaming. More often than not the performance was sitting around the 30fps mark.

You can obviously drop down your quality settings, but that kinda negates the point of spending around $4,000 on a gaming laptop…

As I alluded to before, dropping the resolution down also brings its own problems, mostly because Windows really doesn’t like you going outside the non-native specifications of your panel, especially when you have a pair of them connected to your PC. Ditching the Optimus settings and relying purely on discrete graphics can negate some of the issues, but the vagaries of scaling and dual monitor wielding can still crop up when you least expect it.

The OS doesn’t like it when you’re scaling your 4K panel (which you kind of have to as at 15-inches running at 3840 x 2160 makes things tiny) so if you try and run a game full screen at 1920 x 1080 instead it will sometimes just stick it in a window anyways.

If you preempt this and set scaling to just 100% then you can game at 1080p full screen, but actually using your touchscreen second panel will drag you out of the game and back to the Windows desktop. Because that’s just how dual monitors work. You can run games as borderless windows, so you could smoothly use the second screen at the same time without issue, but if your desktop is 4K then a borderless full screen window has to be the same res or it comes out super small, which is unplayable.

Aaaaaaaaand if you’re running the second panel at its native 3840 x 1100 resolution, and choose to run a full screen game at 1080p, so you can get decent frame rates, then anything you have set up on the panel will sometimes get messed around as Windows rejigs the offset resolutions. Got some monitoring software running on the second screen? Forget it, the vital information you’re looking to track will be shoved off half the screen and become inaccessible.

You can also preempt this by setting the second screen’s resolution down to 1920 x 550, but that’s such a paltry resolution you wouldn’t get enough screen real estate to make out anything useful anyway.

If you followed any of that screed… well done. If not, you just need to understand using the second screen is complicated, awkward, and of questionable benefit for gaming. Picking up the Zephyrus Duo with a 1080p 300Hz panel, however, might be of more use, especially if a few more devs follow suit with Techland and make the use of a second screen a plus point within their games.

There may otherwise be a niche sector of mobile gamers that would get a lot out of this multi-screen setup. Set up correctly, monitoring your gaming stream while playing might come in handy for a select few folk, should you not wish to use a more effective desktop rig instead. But for the vast majority of us PC gamers it’s a luxury of dubious utility.

Which all leaves me questioning why the Zephyrus Duo really exists under the Republic of Gamers brand. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an impressive beast of a gaming laptop. The cooling enables you to get unprecedented levels of gaming performance out of it—admittedly at the expense of your eardrums—and the build quality is typically excellent. But it’s super-expensive, and its layout and design is more immediately arresting than it is comfortably usable for a decent length of time. 

It may not look like much, but the Addlink S90 is a tiny revolutionary. A small drive trying to upset the status quo. Conventional wisdom says quality storage only comes from a few big players. Names like Samsung, Western Digital, Crucial, Intel et al. Addlink doesn’t have much respect for the old ways though, so following the success of its S70 (which makes a prominent appearance in our best NVMe SSD guide), the S90 moves things up a level by offering speedy PCIe 4.0 throughput. Which isn’t bad for a company predominantly seen as a budget player.

If you’ve followed the shift to PCIe 4.0 at all, you’ll have spotted that every drive out there currently uses the Phison E16 controller, whether that’s the Corsair Force MP600, Gigabyte Aorus SSD, or Seagate FireCuda 520. And sure enough that’s what you’ll find underneath the sticker here, alongside the equally ubiquitous Toshiba 3D TLC NAND flash memory. They’re not all exactly the same, but they’re close enough to be almost indistinguishable.

It’s worth noting at this point that you’ll need a Ryzen 3000 processor and an accompanying X570 or B550 motherboard to get the most from this drive. If you’ve sided with Intel, then the drive will work, but you’ll be stuck with the limits of PCIe 3.0 (3.4GB/s), and while you can future proof yourself a little by buying a drive like this, next-gen drives do come with a premium attached, so weigh that one up carefully. Especially as we know Samsung has a PCIe 4.0 drive on the way.

Unlike its budget-friendly predecessor, the Addlink S90 is only available in 1TB or 2TB trim. There’s no 256GB or 512GB model here designed to be paired with a beefy hard drive or SATA SSD. It also means that while both drives do offer great value for money, they still represent a high initial outlay. You’re looking at $196 (£199) for the 1TB model, or $399 (£398) for the 2TB drive. That’s still only 20 cents a gigabyte, but there are a lot of gigabytes involved.

This is a budget SSD, make no mistake. This is evident from the packaging and the fact that there is nothing else to sweeten the deal. No software, no utilities to monitor drive performance, and nothing in the way of cooling (although Addlink does offer another drive, the H90, which is essentially the same as the S90, but ships with a heatsink).

NVMe SSDs are known to get hot, and any motherboard worth its salt will have some form of heatsink present. The Gigabyte X579 Aorus Master used for testing has heatsinks on every M.2 slot, and this is what I’ve used for testing. Even so, the S90 peaked at 69 C during testing, which is high, and right at the limit of the suggested operating temperature of 70 C. I didn’t see any throttling though, even when really pushing it.

In terms of performance there’s a lot to like about the Addlink S90, as there is any PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. In the synthetic benchmarks it gives even the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs a sound thrashing, with the sequential reads almost doubling. The write performance is also about 1GB/s better. The real world performance can’t quite live up to these figures, but the Addlink S90 still manages to shave a few seconds off. 

There’s not a whole lot between any of the PCIe 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested of late, although the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 did produce slightly better numbers pretty much across the board. Not enough to recommend that drive over this in performance-terms alone, but there is a bit more of a difference between these drives.

The problem for Addlink is that it’s thrown everything at the budget angle of the S90, and when you take that away, you’re left with a drive that doesn’t have too much going for it. In essence it’s a decent drive. Good performance, strong value for money, and industry standard components. 

The problem is, the market has responded to its release and has dropped prices accordingly. So you can now pick up the likes of the Corsair MP600 Force for $200 (£190), which performs pretty much identically, but comes with a funky heatsink—which can be useful if your motherboard doesn’t have one.

A bigger problem to the likes of Corsair and Gigabyte dropping the price of their PCIe 4.0 drives comes from another budget operator, Sabrent. The Sabrent Rocket 1TB NVMe 4 SSD also rolls in at $199, but can often be picked up for less, and ships with a cooler, has its own toolbox utility, and bundles Acronis True Image. All for the same price. That makes for a pretty easy win for the Sabrent drive.

This is great news for anyone actually buying a next-gen SSD, because it now means there is plenty of choice out there, all at similar price levels. Unfortunately this will only last while there is real competition, and we’re not sure how long this will last. Unless Addlink can respond to such price drops in kind, it’s hard to suggest that this is the drive you should buy. Which is a shame, because without the Addlink S90 we possibly wouldn’t have such cheap next-gen drives. As it is, the Addlink S90 feels like the kingmaker, not the actual king.

iOS 14 introduces new ways to customize the Home Screen, discover and use apps with App Clips, and stay connected in Messages

Cupertino, California — Apple today previewed iOS 14, introducing the biggest update ever to Home Screen pages with beautifully redesigned widgets and the App Library, a new way to tap into the App Store with App Clips, powerful updates to Messages, and more.

The new widgets present timely information at a glance and can be pinned in different sizes on any Home Screen page. Users can create a Smart Stack of widgets, which uses on-device intelligence to surface the right widget based on time, location, and activity.

Home Screen pages can display widgets that are customized for work, travel, sports, entertainment, and other areas of interest. At the end of the Home Screen pages is the App Library, a new space that automatically organizes all of a user’s apps into one simple, easy-to-navigate view, and intelligently surfaces apps that may be helpful in the moment. Users can choose how many Home Screen pages to display and easily hide pages for quicker access to the App Library. 

Incoming FaceTime and phone calls and Siri interactions take on an all-new compact design that enables users to stay in the context of what they are doing. With Picture-in-Picture support, iPhone users can now watch a video or take a FaceTime call while using another app.

“iOS 14 transforms the most iconic elements of the iPhone experience, starting with the biggest update we’ve ever made to the Home Screen,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “With beautifully redesigned widgets on the Home Screen, the App Library that automatically organizes all of your apps, and App Clips that are fast and easy to discover, iPhone becomes even more powerful and easier to use.”

A New Way to Discover and Use Apps with App Clips

An App Clip is a small part of an app experience designed to be discovered the moment it is needed. App Clips are associated with a particular product or business, and load within seconds to complete a specific task, such as renting a scooter, purchasing a coffee, or filling a parking meter. They can be easily discovered and accessed by scanning a new Apple-designed App Clip code,1 or through NFC tags and QR codes, or shared in Messages or from Safari, all with the security and privacy expected from apps.

Powerful Updates to Conversations in Messages

Messages is central to communicating with friends and family, and now it’s easier to stay connected and quickly access important messages. Users can pin conversations to the top of their messages list, easily keep up with lively group threads through mentions and inline replies, and further customize conversations by setting a group photo using an image or emoji. New Memoji options in Messages are even more inclusive and diverse with additional hairstyles, headwear, face coverings, and more.

Greener Ways to Explore and New Guides in Maps

Maps makes it easier than ever to navigate and explore with new cycling directions, electric vehicle routing, and curated Guides. Cycling directions take into account elevation, how busy a street is, and whether there are stairs along the route. Electric vehicle routing adds charging stops along a planned route based on current vehicle charge and charger types.2 Guides provide a curated list of interesting places to visit in a city, created by a selection of trusted resources. Guides are a great way to discover hot new restaurants, find popular attractions, and explore new recommendations from respected brands, including AllTrails, Complex, The Infatuation, Time Out Group, and The Washington Post, among others.

Enhanced Privacy Features for More Transparency and Control

All apps will now be required to obtain user permission before tracking.3 Later this year, App Store product pages will feature summaries of developers’ self-reported privacy practices, displayed in a simple, easy-to-understand format. In addition, users can upgrade existing accounts to Sign in with Apple, choose to share their approximate location with app developers rather than their precise location when granting an app location access, and get even more transparency into an app’s use of the microphone and camera.

Additional iOS 14 Features

Translate is designed to be the best and easiest app for translating conversations, offering quick and natural translation of voice and text among 11 different languages.4 On-device mode allows users to experience the features of the app offline for private voice and text translation.

Siri expands its knowledge, helps find answers from across the internet, and can now send audio messages. Keyboard dictation runs on device when dictating messages, notes, email, and more.5

The Home app makes smart home control even easier with new automation suggestions and expanded controls in Control Center for quicker access to accessories and scenes. Adaptive Lighting for compatible HomeKit-enabled lights automatically adjusts the color temperature throughout the day, and with on-device Face Recognition, compatible video doorbells and cameras can identify friends and family.6 The Home app and HomeKit are built to be private and secure, so all information about a user’s home accessories is end-to-end encrypted.

AirPods gain the ability to seamlessly switch between Apple devices with automatic device switching.7 Spatial audio with dynamic head tracking brings a theater-like experience to AirPods Pro. By applying directional audio filters, and subtly adjusting the frequencies each ear receives, sounds can be placed virtually anywhere in a space to provide an immersive listening experience.

Digital car keys give users a secure way to use iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock and start their car. Digital car keys can be easily shared using Messages, or disabled through iCloud if a device is lost, and are available starting this year through NFC.8 Apple also unveiled the next generation of digital car keys based on Ultra Wideband technology for spatial awareness delivered through the U1 chip, which will allow users to unlock future car models without removing their iPhone from their pocket or bag, and will become available next year.

Find My will add support for finding third-party products and accessories with the new Find My network accessory program. This will allow customers to use the Find My app to locate other important items in their lives, in addition to their Apple devices. User privacy remains central to the Find My network with end-to-end encryption built in. A draft specification is available for accessory makers and product manufacturers starting today.

Safari offers a Privacy Report so users can easily see which cross-site trackers have been blocked, secure password monitoring to help users detect saved passwords that may have been involved in a data breach, and built-in translation for entire webpages.9 

Health has all-new experiences to manage sleep, better understand audio levels that may affect hearing health, and a new Health Checklist — a centralized place to manage health and safety features — includes Emergency SOS, Medical ID, ECG, Fall Detection, and more.10 Health also adds support for new data types for mobility, Health Records, symptoms, and ECG.

The Weather app and widget keep users up to date on severe weather events and a new next-hour precipitation chart shows minute-by-minute precipitation when rain is in the forecast.11

Accessibility features include Headphone Accommodations, which amplifies soft sounds and tunes audio to help music, movies, phone calls, and podcasts sound crisper and clearer, and sign language detection in Group FaceTime, which makes the person signing more prominent in a video call.12 VoiceOver, the industry’s leading screen reader for the blind community, now automatically recognizes what is displayed visually onscreen so more apps and web experiences are accessible to more people.