Category: Article

Google today added a new setting to the iOS version of its Gmail app that will let you more easily block unwanted email tracking. The setting in question, the ability to prevent Gmail from automatically loading attached images, used to be found only on the web version of Gmail. Toggling that setting on allows Gmail to block incoming images, including invisible email trackers hiding in the body of email messages that, in most cases, will tell senders when and sometimes even where you opened the message.

This is a pretty clear response to the Superhuman controversy that erupted back in July, when former Twitter executive and designer Mike Davidson penned a blog post about the popular subscription email service that let its users track the location of a recipient and the time of day he or she opened a message. After Davidson’s blog post when viral, shedding light on an age-old and sadly pervasiveness form of privacy violation, Superhuman decided to turn its read receipt feature off by default and removed the location tracking aspect of its service entirely.

Google has built protections against non-consensual tracking into Gmail, by disabling an email sender’s ability to precisely locate a recipient via an IP address. (Google first routes incoming email messages through its own proxy servers, rendering any location tracking useless.) It has also for quite some time allowed you to disable automatic image loading to prevent any of these trackers from gathering data about you unless you deliberately decide to load an image.

But the image loading setting was previously restricted to the web version of Gmail, and that means it may have gone unnoticed by heavy mobile email users of the iOS app. Now, at the very least, you’ll be able to access this setting on your iPhone or iPad if you so choose.

As of Tuesday evening, the setting appears to be live for personal Gmail accounts, but not for enterprise ones managed through G Suite. It’s unclear if that’s because a system administrator has to enable it, or if Google is simply not supporting image blocking right now for users of G Suite. We’ve reached out to Google for further clarification.

Most 5G phones we’ve seen so far have been variants of products at the top end of manufacturers’ lineups: see the Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G, the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G, and so on. Samsung’s latest 5G phone, however, is the Galaxy A90 5G, which means it fits into its mid-range Galaxy A lineup below phones like the S10 and Note 10.

Samsung has recently released other Galaxy A models that focus on high-end features like quad-camera systems and flip-up camera mechanisms as part of a strategy to combat aggressively competitive Chinese manufacturers. And to be clear, the Galaxy A90 5G would have seemed like a very high-end phone at the beginning of this year, and still has a more than solid spec sheet. 5G connectivity and Samsung DeX support aside, though, the phone feels pretty familiar.

The A90 5G has a Snapdragon 855 processor, 6 or 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. The screen is a 6.7-inch 1080p OLED panel with a small “Infinity-U” notch and an integrated fingerprint sensor. There’s a triple-camera system with a primary 48-megapixel sensor (presumably Samsung’s own), an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 5-megapixel sensor for depth information, along with a 32-megapixel selfie camera. The battery is 4,500mAh and charges at up to 25W.

5G is of course a differentiator for some, but on paper the specs put the A90 5G right up against reasonably priced phones like the Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro (known as the Redmi K20 Pro in India), and it’s hard to judge how competitive it’ll be without release information for various markets. (5G isn’t yet a factor in India, for example.) All we know for now is that the Galaxy A90 5G is coming out in South Korea tomorrow, and Samsung hasn’t announced pricing details.

With just over a week until Tim Cook takes to the stage and the hand-picked audience prepares to act surprised at the new hardware, the final details of the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max are coming into focus. And there’s a solitary advantage that many will be picking up.

Support for the Apple Pencil is (finally) expected to arrive in the iPhone.

The Apple Pencil was launched alongside the iPad Pro, bringing Apple’s implementation of stylus input to its platform. Since then it has supported more of the iOS powered tablets but has not made the jump to the smartphone. Steve Jobs pointed out that the iPhone used the best stylus in the world, while holding up his finger; and that has been quietly agreed but the design team. Until now.

Serious momentum behind this move stared in late July with a flurry of analyst reports noting the increased support of the Apple Pencil. Case manufacturers working with pre-production mock-ups have a number of iPhone 11 Pro Max cases with space reserved to hold a small Apple Pencil in place. And Job’s iPhone had a 3.5 inch screen, nearly quarter of the expected real estate of the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

It’s also worth noting that only the iPhone 11 Pro Max that will be picking up support for the Apple Pencil. In a world where competing handsets are offering 5G connectivity, improved screen technology, and evolving design, there’s very little that Apple can offer in its 2019 updates that will reverse the trend of falling sales.

The iPhone 11 Pro Max will be the most expensive iPhone yet, which means that it will have one of the highest margins of Apple’s smartphones on a per user basis. As sales fall, Apple needs to counter that by increasing the average revenue per user. One of the long term plans for this is an increase in subscription based services, another is to raise margins and increase the attachment rate of peripherals.

I would suggest that this is the Apple Pencil’s role. Those who want the $99 peripheral are going to need to purchase the highest priced model, then purchase the stylus separately. That boosts Apple’s bottom line, it hands Tim Cook and his team a talking point at the event, and it provides momentum to the iPhone family in the face of Android devices that genuinely push the envelope.

Apple’s long-rumored plans for an augmented reality headset appear to be taking shape. MacRumors claims to have seen documentation for an internal iOS 13 build that points to work on AR headset support. They reference a “STARTester” app that can switch to a head-mounted mode, a “StarBoard” shell (a possible parallel to iOS’ Springboard) for stereo AR apps and code references to special modes, views and scenes. It even references a codename for one device, Garta, that might be linked to the previously rumored T288 project.

Earlier stories have painted varying pictures of what Apple is working on. Rumors from 2018 suggested it could be a powerful AR/VR device with 8K displays for each eye, but more recent reports have hinted the headset could be dependent on an iPhone.

Whatever the plans may be, more than one source has claimed that the headset could be available as soon as 2020. If so, the iOS 13 references would make sense. In this time frame, Apple would have just months to solidify the design and put it into production — prototypes would be virtually necessary at this stage.

The Windows 10 20H1 Update will introduce a new cloud recovery feature that allow users to reset their PC using Windows files downloaded from Microsoft’s servers.

Historically, when Windows users use the “Reset this PC” feature, Windows 10 will reinstall Windows using files already found on the computer.

With Cloud Recovery, Microsoft wants to make the process of recovering a corrupted installation of Windows 10 much easier by downloading a fresh copy of Windows files directly from Microsoft, without the need of Windows media.

“The cloud download option will reinstall the same build, version, and edition, that is currently installed on your device. This new cloud download option is available to all Windows 10 devices and is different from the “Recover from the cloud” feature available on some earlier Windows 10 devices.”

Microsoft notes that with this release, if the following optional features are installed the Reset this PC from the Cloud will not work:

EMS and SAC Toolset for Windows 10, IrDA infrared, Print Management Console, RAS Connection Manager Administration Kit (CMAK), RIP Listener, all RSAT tools, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Windows Fax and Scan, Windows Storage Management, Wireless Display, WMI SNMP Provider.”

This feature was first rolled out for testing in the Windows 10 20H1 18970 build and will be rolled out to everyone in the spring of 2020.

How to Cloud Reset Your Windows 10 PC from Settings

To get started with Reset this PC cloud downloads, you can follow these steps:

Open Settings by clicking the gear icon on the Start menu.

Navigate to Update & Security and click Recovery in the left pane.

Windows will present you with three options: Reset this PC, Go back to the previous version of Windows 10 and Advanced Startup.

Select “Get started” under Reset this PC section and Windows will present you with two options – “Keep my files” and “Remove everything,”. To continue, select the option you wish to use.

On the next screen, Windows will present you with two options – “Cloud Reinstall” and “Local Reinstall”. If you choose the first option, Windows will reinstall the same build, version, and edition by downloading the files from Microsoft’s servers. If you choose the second option, Windows will be reinstalled with the system image stored in your recovery partition.

For this guide, you should click on the Cloud download option.

Once you select an option, Windows will display a confirmation screen showing the options you selected and how it will be restored. When ready, click on the Reset button.

Windows 10 will now start to download the files from the Cloud that are needed to reset the PC. When done, the PC will automatically restart.

Once restarted, Windows 10 will automatically begin the Reset this PC process and reinstall Windows 10 on the machine.

When done reinstalling, Windows will reboot and then prompt you to login. Once logged in, Edge will be opened to the welcome page as shown below.

Your PC has now been reset from Windows files downloaded from the cloud.

How to Cloud Reset your Windows 10 PC from Recovery Menu

In addition to performing a cloud reset within Windows 10, you can also do so from the Windows 10 recovery menu.

If you start Windows in Advanced Startup and then select Troubleshoot, you will be able to Reset the PC while not in Windows.

This process also allows you to select a “Cloud download” or “Local reinstall” as shown below.

Dell’s XPS 15 laptops are high-end, high-spec machines with a starting price of £1,499 (inc. VAT; £1,249.17 ex. VAT), rising higher if you want an OLED display. As well as the OLED option (the first time this technology has made an appearance in an XPS laptop), features include discrete graphics, long battery life, up to 2TB of SSD storage, 9th generation Intel processors, and Wi-Fi 6. It may pack a premium price, but the XPS range offers a lot of bells and whistles.

With a starting weight of 1.8kg the 15-inch XPS 15 7590 is no ultraportable. It’s relatively bulky too, measuring 357mm wide by 235mm deep and 17mm thick at the back, tapering to 11mm at the front. It challenged my smallest (15-litre) backpack, needing something a little more capacious for transport.

Dell has done what it can to keep the size down; for example, its InfinityEdge display has screen bezels of just 6.04mm along the short edges and 7.08mm along the top (it shows how much bezel measurements mean to Dell that it quotes hundredths of a millimetre).

The build materials account for some of the XPS 15’s weight: it has an aluminium frame, Gorilla Glass 4 screen protection, and a carbon fibre wrist rest. Few laptops I’ve reviewed feel more solid: I couldn’t bend or bow the relatively thin lid using my hands.

Open the lid and it’s the screen that grabs your attention, although the keyboard is also noteworthy, with large and well spaced keys — as you’d expect given such a sizeable chassis. That said, the Enter Key is double height but only single width at its widest, falling to about two-thirds width. I mishit Enter for a little while before getting used to this key.

The keys have 1.3mm of travel and while they have a firm action, I found the feel to be comfortable. The click may be a little loud for quieter environments, and this will be accentuated for heavier-handed typists. There is a two-level backlight, and the touchpad is responsive.

Dell claims that its carbon fibre wrist rest is cool to the touch, and that is indeed the case — although it did little to help during the 30-degree plus heat of the review period.

The 15.6-inch screen is the star of the show. FHD (1,920 x 1,080) and UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolutions, IPS and OLED panels, and touch functionality are available. More specifically, you can have IPS with or without touch, but OLED only without touch; and you can have IPS at either resolution, but OLED is only available at UHD.

It’s a relatively complex combination of specs to wade through, and one of the reasons there are 11 configurations of this laptop available off the page at the time of writing.

My review unit had an OLED screen with 3,840 by 2,160 pixel (UHD) resolution, and it’s an absolute stunner. The large, bright, high-resolution display is great for having two documents open side by side, and for viewing all kinds of video content. The screen is slightly reflective, but has an anti-glare finish. Viewing angles are superb, and I didn’t need to go above 60% brightness when working — indeed, maximum brightness was almost uncomfortable on the eye.

Dell emphasises the screen’s colour gamut (100% Adobe RGB) and the added punch that its own PremierColor software brings to colour tuning. I certainly had no complaints watching movies, and the experience was enhanced by high-quality stereo speakers (although if being picky I’d have appreciated more bass).

The XPS 15 7590 is not a convertible laptop with 360-degree screen rotation. In fact it only allows the screen to push back a little over 90 degrees. That does mean the usability of this laptop for some work based presentations scenarios might be a bit hampered.

Dell has erred in the past with the location of its webcam — putting it beneath the screen on last year’s XPS 15 2-in-1, for example, making for awkward and unflattering ‘up-the-nose’ video calls. This time, thankfully, the webcam is where it should be: in the centre of the upper bezel.

There are also technical improvements for the webcam, which is smaller and has a new lens that’s designed to deliver sharper images across the whole frame. I made a few video calls during the test period, and have no complaints about the experience.

There’s no equivalent to Lenovo’s ThinkShutter — a manual sliding lens cover allays privacy fears. The webcam supports Windows Hello, and there’s a fingerprint reader in the circular power button that sits in the upper right edge of the keyboard section.

A noteworthy feature is the Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 Wi-Fi 6 module, which has a theoretical throughput of up to 2.4Gbps. For those with a need for speed, this may be alluring.

While you might not want to tote a laptop of this size and weight very often or very far, when you do need to carry it, battery life will be important. Dell provides detailed estimates of battery life on its website: up to 20.5 hours on a FHD model with a 97Whr battery when using productivity applications like Word or Excel, and up to 14.4 hours when streaming Netflix. With a UHD screen Dell says you can get up to 13 hours 22 minutes using productivity apps or up to 9 hours 22 minutes of Netflix streaming. And with OLED the estimate is up to 10 hours 24 minutes on productivity apps and up to 9 hours 23 minutes of Netflix streaming.

My OLED 3,840 x 2,160 panel, in combination with the standard 97Whr battery, performed very well. Setting the brightness to (a perfectly adequate) 60%, I worked for five hours on a combination of writing into web-based apps and streaming some music, and depleted the battery by around 35%. If this is any indication, then a full day’s work plus a bit of movie or TV watching in the evening should be entirely possible.

With 11 configuration choices off the page in the UK, finding the right version of the Dell XPS 15 7590 might be a challenge. I’ve picked out the entry-level and top-end variants here:

9th Generation Intel Core i7-9750H, Windows 10 Home, 15.6-inch FHD (1,920 x 1,080) InfinityEdge Anti-Glare Non-touch IPS 100% sRGB 500-Nits display, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD

£1,499 (inc. VAT; £1,249.17 ex. VAT)

9th Generation Intel Core i9-9980HK, Windows 10 Home, 15.6-inch 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) OLED InfinityEdge Anti-Reflective Non-Touch 100% DCI-P3 400-Nits display, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD

£2,699 (inc. VAT; £2,249.17 ex. VAT)

My review sample was not among the off-the-page choices, but for the record it had a 9th Generation Intel Core i7-9750 processor, Windows 10 Home, a 15.6-inch 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) OLED InfinityEdge Anti-Reflective Non-Touch 100% DCI-P3 400-Nits display, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Whatever configuration option you go for, the array of ports and connectors is limited. On the left edge the power slot is a small round-pin connector. It’s a bit awkward to use, and the power brick is both large and heavy. Next to this is a USB 3.1 port, a full size HDMI connector, a USB-C port with Thunderbolt, and a 3.5mm headset jack. The right edge houses an SD card slot (full size SD, not MicroSD) and a second USB 3.1 port. Dell should have found room, at the very least, for a second USB-C port.

Having said that, it’s nice to see a small battery life gauge on the right edge. Press in a tiny button and up to five white LEDs illuminate to give an idea of remaining battery charge. It’s a useful Dell feature that I always like to see.

Conclusions

Even at the entry level price, the XPS 15 7590 is an expensive laptop. Boost the configuration with an OLED screen, plus plenty of RAM and SSD storage, and you’re looking at a serious price tag. For that money, we think Dell should provide more connectivity options, and might also reconsider the chunky power brick with its tiny round-pin connector. It’s a bit much to carry that as well as 1.8kg of laptop.

Still, if you can afford the specifications you want, you’ll get a powerful laptop with a superb screen, plenty of internal storage, good battery life and a very robust design.

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!