Category: Article

Microsoft has joined other major tech companies such as Amazon, Googleand Sony in laying out some new commitments to mitigate climate change. One of the more eye-catching measures it detailed was a pilot project to make 825,000 Xbox consoles carbon neutral. It says those’ll be the first carbon-neutral consoles.

“Microsoft’s business operations have operated carbon neutral since 2012,” chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa wrote in a blog post. “Today, we are beginning the journey of extending that to our products and devices.” The Xbox pilot is the first stage of that project.

Joppa also affirmed Microsoft aims to reduce carbon emissions in its value and supply chain by at least 30 percent by 2030. The latest efforts it announced are part of its drive to be “even more ambitious than the Paris Accord targets, which mapped to a two-degree (Celcius) rise.” The Science Based Target Initiative certified Microsoft’s renewable energy target as being aligned with a 1.5-degree rise in future temperatures.

Additionally, Microsoft said it’s continuing to expand its AI for Earthprogram. It recently released its first APIs and code under the program, which has more than 430 grantees in 71 countries tapping into the company’s resources “to power new AI breakthroughs for the planet.”

News of Microsoft’s latest efforts follow an open letter that employees published last week, demanding more action on climate change. They called on the company to cancel its contracts with fossil fuel businesses, stop making contributions to climate change-denying politicians and lobbyists and commit to zero carbon emissions by 2030.

Meanwhile, the United Nations reported that 21 games industry companies (including Microsoft) have spelled out climate change commitments as part of the Playing for the Planet Alliance. Collectively, those efforts will lead to a “30 million-tonne reduction of CO2 emissions by 2030, will see millions of trees planted, new ‘green nudges’ in game design and improvements to energy management, packaging and device recycling.” Among the other companies involved are Sony, Google Stadia, Rovio, Supercell, Sybo, Twitch, Ubisoft and WildWorks.

Stadia, for instance, will release a Sustainable Game Development Guide and fund research on how developers can effectively integrate prompts for players to take green action into their games. Clash of Clans developer Supercell will offset its entire carbon footprint, while Rovio “has offset the carbon impact from their players charging their devices.”

There was a time that I was a voice in the wilderness that heralded a strong defense for Google’s relatively short Auto Update Policy for Chrome OS. End of Life policy if you prefer. Three years into this and I have conceded that it is time for a change. Chromebooks are coming into their own and the average price for a decent device has nearly doubles. If you really wanted to, you could drop nearly $2,000 on a Chrome Enterprise machine and that gives me a serious pause when I consider it may only get updates for 5-6 years.

Okay, before we get too far off into the weeds, we’ll put a pin in this and circle back around after we’ve discuss this weeks findings. Over the weekend, we shared some deals on a couple of MediaTek-based Lenovo Chromebooks. While the prices were great, one of the most common complaints we see in comments is the End of Life date for these devices. These are legitimate concerns when you’re dropping your hard-earned money on a new anything. Price is generally relative to the value of a thing. If you give me a brand new Chromebook and tell me it’s only $100, great. If you then tell me that it will cease to receive updates in six months, I’m probably going to take a hard pass. Sure, it’s only a hundred bucks but I can spend a couple of hundred more and get a device that will last three, four or even five years.

Lenovo has done a great job of getting some great mileage out of the MediaTek MT8173 SoC but at the end of the day, all of these Chromebooks were built off of the same platform. According to Google’s Auto Update Policy, the End of Life for all of them is to be based on the original device.

Google provides each new hardware platform with 6.5 years of Auto Update support. Multiple devices can share the same hardware platform. The 6.5 years starts when the first device on the platform is released(1). Manufacturers are advised to choose the newest platforms to ensure that they produce devices that have the longest Auto Update support available.

Google Support

That means that Lenovo’s (or any other manufacturer that produces a MediaTek device built on the same baseboard) latest S330 Chromebook has the same End of Life as the original Chromebook Flex 11. The latter was released two and a half years ago. Consumers don’t particularly like buying a Chromebook that was launched less than a year ago just to find out that the End of Life date is a short, three years away. That was the exact case for these Lenovo Chromebooks. Until recently that is.

We have, on multiple occasions, pointed out the upcoming EOL dates on these Chromebooks. While they’re often a steal, we want our readers to be aware of what they’re buying. If we ever forget to point this out, forgive us. Thankfully, I get to be the bearer of good news today. While looking at Google’s Auto Update Policy page this weekend, I noticed that the dates for a number of these MediaTek devices had changed.

I’ve uncovered eight Chromebooks in all including seven Lenovos and the oddball Poin2 Chromebook 14. All of these devices were once slated for End of Life around June of 2022. Three years. Not that bad but still, some of these Chromebook have been on shelves for less than 12 months. That being said, Google has changed the date to June of 2025. Talk about a stay of execution.

NOW, THE CAVEATS.

These devices have an extended AUE date; however, providing updates beyond June 2023 is subject to certain limitations including reliance on third party component suppliers. Google will work with suppliers in an effort to ensure continued support.

Google Support

Here’s the full list of devices with the extended AUE dates:

Flex 11 Chromebook

100e Chromebook 2nd Gen MTK

N23 Yoga Chromebook

300e Chromebook

300e Chromebook 2nd Gen MTK

Ideapad S330 Chromebook

Ideapad C330 Chromebook

Poin2 Chromebook 14

So, this extends the life of these Chromebooks way out. This isn’t something we’ve seen from Google, ever. At one point, the Auto Update Policy was updated from 5 to 6.5 years but this adds that amount of time to these Chromebooks based more closely on their release date as opposed to their platform launch. Could this be a sign of things to come?

There has been a lot of scuttlebutt around the world of Chrome OS about Google taking a fresh look at the AUE policy. With devices costing over a thousand dollars at times, the expectation of a longer support cycle is quickly becoming the common consensus and I tend to agree. Being that Chrome OS lives as one, unified Stable release, there aren’t the concerns of which model supports what version. The late-gen devices on the market are powerful enough to offer 7-10 years of reliable use if Google and the Chromium OS developers are willing to keep them updated. I understand that there would be exceptions as technology continues to evolve but the cloud-centric nature of Chrome OS allows a lot of the work to be offloaded from the local machine which means a device that capable today should be capable a decade from now.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that these MediaTek Chromebooks just got a new lease on life and that makes them much more of a value than they were just a few weeks ago. Picking up a Chromebook that performs well enough for the casual user that will do so for 5+ years and do it for around $250 is a big win for the consumer Chrome OS market. That’s my two cents. Hopefully, this will be a new trend for Chrome OS and Google will continue evolving the policy.

Pair this with a next-gen Threadripper CPU and you’ve got a drool-worthy configuration.

The arrival of PCI Express 4.0 on consumer systems has led to the release of several blazing fast solid state drives capable of sequential read performance of up to 5,000MB/s. That’s around nine times faster than the speediest SATA-based SSDs. It’s also almost pedestrian next to Gigabyte’s upcoming add-in card (AIC) solution with four high-speed NVMe SSDs stuffed inside.

First introduced at Computex a few months ago, the upcoming Aorus Gen4 AICfeatures four 2TB SSDs configured in a RAID 0 array. According to Gigabyte, this beastly storage card is rated to deliver up to 15,000MB/s for both sequential reads and writes.

Gigabyte notes those figures are based on its own internal testing and that actual results may vary. That goes for pretty much any storage solution. In this case, Gigabyte might be rounding the numbers—back at Computex, it was touting reads of up to 15,376MB/s and writes of up to 16,184MB/s.

Like every PCIe 4.0 SSD we have seen to date, the drives in Gigabyte’s AIC solution are powered by Phison’s PS5016-E16 controller.

One of the caveats to hitting these crazy-high speeds is that only AMD has embraced the PCIe 4.0 spec, and as it pertains to consumers, and just on its X570 chipset for third-gen Ryzen. You can still use these drives in an Intel rig or an older AMD platform, but you won’t maximize performance.

The other caveat is cooling—hitting these high speeds and maintaining them for any meaningful amount of time requires keeping thermals in check. Gigabyte says its AIC solution tackles this by combining “smart active and passive cooling.”

“A large all copper heatsink touches the SSD’s hottest controller and transfers heat to the multi-cut copper heatsink. The blower fan helps to draw heat away more quickly, preventing thermal throttling on the SSD to maintain amazing speeds at all times.,” Gigabyte says.

It’s basically a full-body suit of armor, and according to Gigabyte, temps are 30C lower with it than without.

This kind of speed is way overkill for a gaming setup—though SATA SSDs are far slower, they’re still much faster than a hard drive. Anything faster really only comes into play outside of gaming, like transferring large video files and that sort of thing. This particular drive is probably best suited for a workstation environment, though Gigabyte seems to be targeting enthusiast consumers.

While a product page now exists for this drive, Gigabyte has still not announced a launch date or price.

Samsung has something big in store for the Galaxy S11, and that could be a sliding screen. According to a recent patent filing, the South Korean firm is exploring the option of a handset with a display that can extend along a vertical plane. To do this, it’s experimenting with a 21:9 aspect ratio — meaning the screen is long, rather than wide. This is advantageous for one main reason: You can fit more on the screen, from top to bottom. It also makes for a more immersive viewing experience when watching cinema-style 21:9 footage, like a movie on Netflix or a trailer on YouTube.

Arguably more interesting than the revelation is the technical explanation of the sliding mechanism itself. Deciphered from various sketches and scraps of information in the supporting documentation by Dutch outlet Let’sGoDigital, the flexible Dynamic OLED screen is said to fold at the bottom. Doing so will allow it to wrap around a shaft, letting it fold back on itself — a bit like folding two sheets of toilet paper along the seam. The screen will then slide up, in effect unfolding on the inside, creating a larger surface area (roughly a 25% increase) for the end user.

The device is intended to be as high-end as can be, with the rear covered with fine leather and the frame made from metal. Samsung is also said to be experimenting with a new style of screen for the section that extends from the frame, dubbed Waterfall Display. It’s not dissimilar to the Horizon OLED Display rival Huawei debuted on the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, wrapping around either side to meet the frame in the middle. However, it’s unable to use it for the entire screen, because it would be blocked by the frame that houses the sliding mechanism and excess screen.

This is just one of the various designs Samsung is said to be exploring for the Samsung Galaxy S11 and Samsung Galaxy S11 Plus. Earlier this week, we heard that the duo could also be the firm’s first buttonless devices. There’s also been some chatter claiming that the Samsung Galaxy S11 and Samsung Galaxy Note 11 may not even be real, with Samsung instead deciding to unify the two lines with the Samsung Galaxy One. The fact of the matter is, it’s just far too early to tell. Still, we’re revelling in the various leaks and theories, and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

In less than a month, Google is expected to announce the Pixel 4 series. While we have already seen extensive leaks of the device including the colours, Google loves taking shots at other manufacturers with colour names. The same is true for Pixel 4 as well.

According to 9to5google, the colours of Pixel 4 will be Just Black, Clearly White, and Oh So Orange. Apart from that, Google will be introducing colour cases for Pixel 4 as well. The cases will be available in Blue, Chalk, Black and Orange. Yup, no fancy cheeky names here from Google.

Google Pixel 4 is expected to come with a Snapdragon 855 SoC coupled with 6 GB of RAM and up to 128 GB of storage. Apart from the specs, there’s much more to the Pixel 4 like the Soli sensors, triple cameras on the back and course Android 10.

Ahead of Microsoft’s launch event on October, new documents confirmed the latest feature for the Surface family.

Thanks to Microsoft’s fillings with the FCC earlier this month, we now know that it is working on a stylus pen that includes wireless charging capabilities similar to other styli. And the obvious inference is that the upcoming Surface Pro is going to have an updated Surface Pen with this capability.

I’ve looked out the pen that came with the first Surface machines back in the day, and it was a passive unit relying on induction to calculate the tip’s location. The Surface Pen has seen a number of improvements over the years, moving to wards an active device for improved accuracy and features, but always retaining compatibility over the whole family of Surface devices.

A move towards wireless charging certainly avoids the issue of replacing the regular battery inside the pen, but it also allows for a much more power hungry device, with the designers feeling safe in the knowledge that the Surface Pen can be topped up through wireless charging.

I’m curious to see how that charging happens – the obvious answer is that this is part of the magnetic attachment to the carrying point on the side of the new Surface Pro and Surface Book designs (much like the Apple Pencil 2 on the iPad Pro), but the older hardware will not have a charging plate built in. That means a wireless charging surface pen is going to need to come with a charger for backwards compatibility, or this Surface Pen will struggle with backwards compatibility.

Microsoft is expected to launch updates to the Surface Laptopand Surface Pro machines – and the latter is perfectly suited to feature a new Surface Pen. A third-generation Surface Book may show up as could a dual-screened laptop like device.

There’s no 8K content to watch. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. But that doesn’t mean 8K TVs aren’t worthwhile. That’s especially true for the LG Z9.

What we have here (again) is a classic chicken-or-the-egg-scenario. Which should come first? The 8K content, or the TV to watch it on? If the path 4K took nearly 8 years ago is any indication, the TV must come first.

Hollywood, along with production houses like Netflix, HBO, and many others, need some convincing. Moving to 4K was a hard sell several years ago (though HDR gathered support relatively easily), but selling 8K is a steep uphill battle for TV makers. Is there a benefit to the viewer? Is 8K that exciting?

I’m willing to bet that if any TV can convince Hollywood skeptics to invest millions of dollars into bringing us 8K content, it’s the LG Z9.

What’s so great about this TV?

The LG Z9 is, first and foremost, an OLED TV, and that fact alone makes it stand out. For now, OLED is the prettiest display technology you can realistically put in your home.

It’s got the best back levels, more than adequate brightness, awesome color, killer response time, low input lag for gamers (similar to the C9 at around 13ms), HDMI 2.1 for future-proofing, variable refresh rate, auto low latency mode, excellent upscaling, and a whole litany of other reasons why anyone who has ever seen an OLED TV thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas. Take the 9-point score we gave to the LG C9 OLED earlier this year and push that up to 11 for the Z9.

Yes, there’s new TV tech on the horizon which could give OLED a run for its money. But for now, OLED TVs hands-down have the best picture quality you can get, and the Z9 is the pinnacle.

The LG Z9 is also the world’s largest OLED TV. LG likes to use that as a marketing phrase, but it’s true, and making a huge OLED panel is no easy task. It took a lot of investment, research, and development to make an 88-inch OLED panel, let alone an 8K version.

The Z9 is a beautiful TV, especially considering how large it is. The stand upon which it sits is composed of sleek brushed aluminum and has just the right amount of sheen to it. There is some hardware housed in this stand, and the stand pulls a third duty by porting sound from the Z9’s down-firing speakers out toward the listener. Side note: The TV sounds very good, though I can’t imagine not surrounding the Z9 with a killer home theater audio system.

Finally, the LG Z9 is, presently, the finest technical execution of an 8K TV on the market today, if one believes in things like imaging standards — which I do.

Uhhh … imaging standards?

I need to take a side-step from the standard review format and make a special note about a topic LG has been aggressively preaching about in the tech space. It’s called “contrast modulation” and it has to do with how a TV handles its pixels. You might have seen something about this in the news, but you may have quickly forgotten about it because it hasn’t been reported on very well. I’m going to try to fix that here, but in the end, LG says that contrast modulation has everything to do with whether an 8K TV is really 8K or not.

I predict LG will make a big marketing push behind this concept of “real 8K,” and the company would love it if I acted as a megaphone around this topic. While I’m loathed to oblige anything on the marketing effort, I do think this topic is worth discussing because TV tech can get deep, and at the end of the day, it does affect what we buy and how we watch. So let’s do this right, shall we?

What in the hell is contrast modulation and does it really make this TV better?

At its most basic, contrast modulation is a TV’s ability to distinguish one pixel from another. According to the International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM), contrast modulation is more important than pure pixel count in qualifying a TVs resolution because if you can’t distinguish one pixel from another, then you don’t have fully resolved, independent pixels.

Take a look at the two pictures below. On the left is a close-up of a TV’s pixels with poor contrast modulation. On the right is a picture of LG’s 8K Nanocell 8K LED TV, which has excellent contrast modulation (the Z9 8K OLED is even better, as you may imagine). See the difference? One TVs pixels look like a smeared mess while LG’s pixels look very clean and distinct.

Honestly, I’m not yet convinced that the human eye can distinguish between a display that has a paltry 12% contrast modulation and one that has 90%. I mean, the principles and math seem right, and the bigger number seems a lot better, but until I can put one TV against another and spend hours analyzing the real-world differences I’m not going to make an official call. Still, I like pristine definition, and LG has a compelling argument.

The battle over what is “real 8K” continues. As I wrote this review, the Consumer Technology Association — you know, that huge organization that puts on the biggest tech show in the world known as CES? — launched an 8K Ultra HD display definition and logo program that leans heavily on the standards defined by independent authorities like the aforementioned ICDM, ANSI, and others. Guess what? LG’s 8K TVs far exceed the standards for contrast modulation. Most of LG’s competitors? Not so much.

Again, it would be easy to write this off as a swipe at Samsung, but when international and U.S.-based standards organizations align with the CTA and make a call, it’s hard to ignore.

Is there anything not great about this TV?

Aside from the price ($30,000) making it unattainable for most of the world’s population?

There’s just a touch of tint shift when you view an LG OLED at an extreme angle. I noticed a slight magenta and green coloration in different areas of the screen when well off to the side. Still, OLED’s overall off-angle viewing quality still blows away every LED/LCD TV I’ve seen.

Also, the TV doesn’t support a wall mount. The aforementioned stand is too integral to the TV to be separated. LG says it could be done, but the solution would not be elegant and the company would not endorse such a move.

But there’s no 8K content!

This is mostly true. There’s a selection of 8K content on YouTube, but to watch it in 8K you have to download it and play it through a special decoder box that LG provides with the purchase of this TV. Besides the hassle, who wants to watch 8K nature videos all day?

For now, 8K TVs need to be awesome upscalers until native 8K content is being made and can be feasibly delivered to us (expect to need at least an 80Mbps downstream internet connection for streaming) Thankfully, the Z9 is an outstanding upscaler. In our A/B comparisons between 4K and native 8K versions of the same content the visible differences were minimal. That begs the question. How would an 88-inch 4K OLED look compared to this 88-inch 8K OLED? We’ll probably never know since LG has no intention to make a 4K version of this massive OLED TV.

Our Take

The LG Z9 88-inch 8K OLED TV is a straight-up “shit-your-pants TV,” because it performs at an incredible level of unexpected excellence.

There are over 33 million tiny pixels, yes, but it’s the work those pixels do that’s meaningful. From what I was able to see, the pixels were doing outstanding work. The pixels are also brushed on a large, impressive canvas. In many ways, the LG Z9 is one of the most outstanding displays I’ve ever seen and is currently the best-looking TV you can buy.

Is there a better alternative?

Practically speaking, virtually any other TV is a better choice for most folks given the Z9’s $30,000 price tag — one could do very well with LG’s own 75-inch 8K 75SM9970 at $5,000 or Samsung’s 82-inch Q900R at $7,000. One could also do very well with a 65-inch4K Sony A9G OLED or a 77-inch 4K C9 OLED for $5500. Technically speaking, though, the Z9 is in a class all its own.

How long will it last?

The LG Z9 has full-spec HDMI 2.1 ports onboard and very advanced chipsets, making it as future-proofed as a TV gets these days. I’d expect to get a solid 7 to 8 years out of this TV at the least.

Warranty

One year parts and labor when purchased from an authorized retailer.

Should you buy it?

Yes, with the obvious caveat of “if you can afford it.” At $30,000 it’s an incredibly expensive television that’s not aimed at the average living room, but it does deliver a glimpse at what the future of television will look like.

Also, if you do buy this TV, please invite me over to your house for movie night. I can’t wait to see the LG Z9 in action again and you, Mr. or Ms. Moneybags, might be my only hope.

Despite all their quirks, foldable displays have managed to cause quite the stir ever since the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X. While the technology is still yet to mature for smartphones, laptop OEMs have started considering foldable designs for the future as well.

Shortly after Lenovo introduced the ThinkPad X1 with a foldable dual-screen display in May, Dell’s then VP of XPS and Alienware Frank Azor indicated that the company was indeed experimenting with such a device. LetsGoDigital has now accessed a patent published on September 12, 2019, which was filed by Dell with the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) in March 2018.

The patent talks of a device with two displays connected by a narrow hinge. That’s not really new, but the patent also talks about a continuous foldable display with focus on display characteristics such as brightness, color, and contrast, and how color shifts can happen in different parts of the display. The patent also talks about addressing the problem of flexible OLED screen burn-in.

Of course, a foldable Dell XPS laptop is still quite sometime away from reality. Although Azor did claim back then that Dell was “95 percent of the way there”, a lot of work needs to be done on the software side of things to enable a seamless workflow. The issue of getting the keyboard and battery mend according to the display fold needs to be figured out as well.

The patent makes for some interesting reading, so do check it out at the Source link below.

Huawei used its annual shindig HUAWEI CONNECT in Shanghai last week to show off its latest all-flash storage array, the OceanStor Dorado V6. And it’s a monster – with the biggest capacity that Blocks and Files has seen in a storage array.

The company has not announced availability but prior to launch it has pumped out some big numbers via a press release and a marketing page.

The Dorado V6 performs up to 20 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) – twice as much as the next-best player according to Huawei, which did not name the rival. We think it is referring to Dell EMC’s PowerMax 8000 which delivers up to 10 million IOPS. Read latency for the Huawei system is down to 0.1 ms.

Speeds and feeds

The five Dorado V6 models support Huawei’s Hi1812E NVMe SSDs and NVMe-oF access. They scale by IO port counts and the maximum number of SSDs supported, as the table shows.

Basic maths says the maximum raw capacities are:

3000 – 36.8 PB

5000 – 49.2 PB

6000 – 73.73 PB

8000 – 98.3 PB

18000 – 196.61 PB

As it is 2019, the Dorado V6 of course has an AI processor – a first for a storage array, Huawei claims. The system uses this for performance tuning and management. The Dorado V6 is also packed with fault-tolerance features and Huawei claims a one-second switchover with uninterrupted links in the event of controller failure.

The array features inline deduplication and compression, thin provisioning, remote replication, continuous data protection, quality of service, cloning and snapshots and cloud backup.

Huawei has not revealed pricing yet but the V6 will probably cost $2.5m or more, judging by SPC-1 benchmark results for Dorado V3 and V5 arrays. You can apply for pricing on Huawei’s website by providing project details and a budget range into a general pricing inquiry pop-up.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules, NAND Flash products, and mobile accessories announced the launch of the XPG SX8100 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive (SSD). Utilizing PCIe Gen3x4, 3D NAND Flash, and featuring 3500/3000MB/s read and write, the SX8100 M.2 2280 SSD gives DIY enthusiasts, overclockers and graphics professionals the performance they seek. ADATA also announces the launch of the ADATA SC680 external solid-state drive (SSD). The SSDs features a stylish and compact form factor for easy portability and implements the USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface for excellent read and write performance.

Error Correcting Features On The SSD

Supporting PCIe Gen3x4 and the NVMe 1.3 standard the SX8100 delivers read and write speeds of up to 3500/3000MB per second and random read and write of 300K/240K IOPS. Along with 3D NAND Flash, it offers high capacities, efficiency, and durability, while the M.2 2280 form factor supports the latest Intel and AMD platforms. With SLC caching and a DRAM cache buffer, the SX8100 accelerates PC performance for quick access to files and game loading.

The SX8100 supports LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check) error correcting code technology to detect and fix a wider range of data errors. Meanwhile, E2E (End-to-End) Data Protection and RAID Engine ensure security, integrity, and durability. Every component on the SX8100 has passed meticulous screening, testing, and certification. What’s more, it ships with the comfort of a 5-year warranty.

Super Lightweight and Extra Thin – Also Uses A Type C Connector

Lightweight (35g), and only 10mm thick, the SC680 is very portable, slipping into pockets and bags with ease. Utilizing the USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface it’s also fast too, sporting read/write speeds of up to 530/460MB/s, making it over 6.6 times faster than external hard drives. This performance not only benefits users when transferring stored data but also when loading game titles. What is more, it is shockproof, operates quietly, and consumes less power than many other external SSDs.

The SC680 uses a USB-C (Type C) connector, which is reversible, so there is no right or wrong orientation when plugging in. It also plugs and plays with Windows, Mac OS, and Android, meaning users can move content between devices without limitations. Whether for work or enjoyment, the SC680 empowers users with simple connectivity and the convenience of USB-C.