Innehållsförteckning för June 2018 från PCWorld

Google always pulls out the stops for the keynote at its annual I/O developer conference, and this year was no exception. Google I/O 2018 lacked the flashy flagship hardware that defined previous keynotes—nary a new Chromebook, Pixel, or Google Home could be found—but it still managed to shine, thanks to some serious improvements to the software and services underlying the entire Google ecosystem. Hardware’s nothing without software that tells it what to do, after all. And at I/O 2018, Google’s software was focused squarely on making the Internet more about you through the power of machine learning. Let’s dig in. GMAIL SMART COMPOSE Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked things off with Smart Compose, which is basically Gmail’s Smart Reply cranked to 11. Whereas Smart Reply would scan your emails and…

In case you missed it, LG recently introduced its latest flagship phone, the G7 ThinQ, which is packed with all of the things premium smartphones need in 2018: good looks, lots of screen, a Snapdragon 845 processor, Android Oreo, AI, wireless charging, IP68 water resistance, and a dual camera. On paper, the G7 checks off all the boxes, and even when you pick it up, it feels the part, with Gorilla Glass all around and a thin, comfortable frame. Yet, the G7 isn’t going to turn many heads in 2018, partly due to LG’s fading relevance as a smartphone maker, but mostly because smartphones have hit an innovation wall. AI is still waiting for a killer use, display tech hasn’t advanced to the folding stage yet, and cameras have gotten…

The smart home assistant battle has shifted. No longer is it about how well your speaker can understand what you’re saying, it’s about how many devices can understand what it’s telling them to do. And Google Assistant just made a big leap in that department. Google has announced that Assistant can connect with more than 5,000 devices for your home, an increase of nearly 250 percent from January’s 1,500 devices. That includes many of Google’s own devices such as Chromecast, Nest thermostats and cameras, as well as popular smart home devices from a variety of manufacturers. In the blog post, Google said that “every major device brand works with the Assistant in the U.S.” Specifically, Google called out Dish Hopper, August smart locks, and IKEA lights as recent smart devices that…

Tough, fast, and generous with battery life, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga has a lot going for it, but a bargain price isn’t one of them. We certainly admire the ThinkPad’s top-notch construction, impressive performance and clever touches, like its retractable keys, built-in pen charger and privacy-minded webcam shutter. That said, expect to pay up for the ThinkPad X1 Yoga’s premium features. PRICE AND SPECIFICATIONS We tested the ThinkPad X1 Yoga model 20LD0015US ($1,673.10 from Lenovo), which packs in an quad-core 8th-gen i5-8250U processor, 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM, a 14-inch 1920-by-1080 touch display, a 512GB solid-state drive, integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics, and a Bluetooth-enabled ThinkPad Pen Pro. One of the first things we should flag about the X1 Yoga’s specs is its $1,673 price tag (as of this writing,…

Lenovo’s new Mirage Solo with Google Daydream separates “good” VR from a glorified View-Master experience because of one thing: the ability to move. No, not turn your head as though locked in a brace, but actually kneel on the floor and feel as though you just put your head underwater to get a better look at a kelp bed below. As the first stand-alone VR headset to let you do just that, without needing a gaming PC, console, or separate doohickeys and emitters, the Mirage Solo with Google Daydream almost aces it, despite a few key letdowns. But first let’s bask in its wireless six degrees of freedom. WHAT IS 6DOF? The secret sauce of the Mirage Solo, and what likely raises its cost over the competition, is its six degrees…

It happened again. Another major web service lost control of its database, and now you’re scrambling to stay ahead of the bad guys. As much as we hate them, data breaches are here to stay. The good news is they don’t have to elicit full-blown panic no matter how sensitive the pilfered data might be. There are usually some very simple steps you can take to minimize your exposure to the potential threat. Here’s how. STEP 1: DETERMINE THE DAMAGE The first thing to figure out is what the hackers took. If they got your username and password, for example, there’s little point in alerting your credit card company. News articles and company statements should make it very clear what leaked. Was it just your email address, or was it…

Windows 10’s Timeline feature helps answer the question: what was I working on? This handy, optional feature can track the documents and Web pages you’ve been working on over the past weeks and months, organizing them into a collection of documents you can quickly open to pick up where you left off. Timeline is part of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, also known as Redstone 4. Chances are you already know where it’s found, even if you’ve never used it: Down in the taskbar, next to the Cortana search box, there’s a small icon called Task View within the Fall Creators Update. A slightly different icon identifies Timeline within the latest version. Part of the reason Timeline was added within Task View was because few users were using Task…

We leave Microsoft’s Build developer conference with more questions than answers about the state of Windows, and that’s not a good thing. We wrote rather optimistically about a March reorganization that erased Windows from the roles of senior management. Microsoft never answered the underlying questions that reshuffling posed: Is Microsoft Windows as important as it once was? Is the PC? What will it mean for developers and users, who’ve enjoyed a steady stream of new features over the past few years, and bought into Microsoft’s unified vision of Windows phones, tablets, and PCs? These are all valid, important questions that Microsoft could have answered at Build. If you talk to Microsoft representatives, they believe they did. Windows enthusiasts might feel differently. Instead, Microsoft made a fundamental mistake that experts sometimes do,…

Valve’s in-home streaming tech is proving to be its most forward-thinking development. First it helped kill off the company’s own short-lived Steam Machines, with the $50 Steam Link perfectly capable of putting PC gaming in your living room without the need for another high-end PC. And now it’s putting PC gaming…well, anywhere you’d like. But probably the bathroom, if I know people. In mid-May, Valve announced that it will be releasing a free Steam Link app for iOS and Android devices by the end of the month. Like the Steam Link proper, you’ll need a somewhat decent gaming PC to run the games themselves. Valve takes care of the rest, though, streaming low-latency video of said games to basically any phone, tablet, or TV-bound device in your house. Valve claims the…

There are a few games I remember exactly where I was when I first played them. Star Wars: Episode I Racer is one of them. It was an N64 demo kiosk at a Toys ‘R’ Us in New Jersey. I stood there craning my neck up at the tiny CRT screen enraptured for probably 30 minutes as my family wandered around the store. I distinctly remember getting stuck on the Malastare level—there’s a jump in the middle (Google tells me it’s called the “Sketto Leap”) that I could not hit fast enough to fly over. Nearly 20 years later and Star Wars: Episode I Racer is available once again. It recently surprise-launched on GOG.com for $10, and it turns out I still can’t nail that jump to save my life.…

The SanDisk Extreme Pro NVMe offers nearly the same performance as Samsung’s class-leading 970 Pro, but costs the same as that company’s slower and lower-priced 970 EVO. Targeted at creative types and power users with lots of big files to store, it’s a game-changer that bodes ill for budget NVMe vendors—and Samsung’s profit margins. Before we go further, one thing that needs to be clear: The Extreme is the exact same SSD as the WD Black NVMe. Not similar, but exactly the same drive with a more colorful label and a slightly different audience. WD owns SanDisk. Aha. DESIGN AND SPECS PCIe-based NVMe (Non-volatile Memory Express) is the successor to the SATA bus, designed from the ground up for solid state drives. While SATA 6Gbps drives top out at 550MBps,…

Razer’s Mamba Hyperflux mouse and Firefly Hyperflux charging-pad combo sound like science fiction. Get this: It’s a wireless mouse…without a battery. When I heard about it at CES, I didn’t believe it would work. Now that I’ve had it in my hands for a few weeks I can confirm that, yes, it does. Even knowing logically how the trick works, I’m nevertheless fascinated by it. It’s only when the illusion breaks, that I’m reminded, oh yeah, this is a real piece of new technology, complete with some first-generation flaws. THREE’S COMPANY Razer’s Hyperflux is the third wireless-mouse charging solution to cross my desk in the past several months, and all are based on different principles. First came Logitech’s Powerplay, which completely changed my opinion of wireless mice when it debuted…

Google has had voice search features in Android for years, but when Google Assistant rolled out on the Pixel in October 2016, everything finally came together. You can now get Assistant on all modern Android devices, and Google has already announced new Assistant features at I/O 2018 that will make it even better (okay, and maybe a little too real, in the case of Duplex). It can be easy to miss the improvements if you don’t obsessively keep an eye on the news, so here they are in one place: the 12 coolest new features in Google Assistant. 1. SYNC CONNECTED SMART HOME DEVICES Google Assistant supports numerous smart home devices, but you might notice that devices you’ve just added to your account don’t always work right away. That’s because Assistant…

Not so long ago there was pretty much one way to interact with a video game: You sat down and played it. Maybe you watched an older friend or sibling play while pointing out all their mistakes, but gaming was never what you’d call a “spectator sport.” That’s changed in recent years thanks to YouTube gaming celebrities, the booming popularity of professional e-sports, and most importantly, the online game-streaming service Twitch. Firing up a stream and watching someone else play a thousand miles away is now a perfectly legitimate way to enjoy a game. Best of all, anyone is free to participate on either side of a Twitch stream—PCWorld even has its own Twitch channel. If you want to be the one gaming in front of a live audience, you…

Cortana can see you. Maybe. A mysterious, cone-shaped device, shown in a demo at Microsoft’s Build event in Seattle, hinted at a big leap in capability for the company’s digital assistant: the ability to see and identify people. In the ruthless war among Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant, this is a feature we haven’t yet seen from the competition. What we don’t know is what this prototype is, and whether it will ever come out. Microsoft’s official, overshadowed demonstration showed us the conference room of the future. Microsoft incorporated Cortana, the Surface Hub, and Skype’s translation and transcription features, together with PowerBI and Microsoft Teams, into a cohesive working environment. In a presentation led by Raanah Amjadi, a marketing manager for Microsoft Teams, Microsoft showed off how simply…

After weeks of rumors and a counterattack by AMD’s Radeon, Nvidia is ending its mysterious, controversial GeForce Partner Program. “A lot has been said recently about our GeForce Partner Program,” Nvidia’s John Teeple wrote. “The rumors, conjecture and mistruths go far beyond its intent. Rather than battling misinformation, we have decided to cancel the program.” So what is the GeForce Partner Program? Despite the strong words above, Nvidia never dived into details publicly, but additional reporting suggested it was intended to keep gaming brands from Nvidia’s graphics card partners (like Asus and Gigabyte) off of Radeon hardware. Nvidia introduced the GeForce Partner Program in a vague post at the beginning of March, stating that it was “designed to ensure that gamers have full transparency into the GPU platform and software they’re…

Microsoft’s Windows 10 April 2018 Update barely received a formal title, which understandably makes you wonder how much importance the company ascribed to it. But as our review shows, what Microsoft internally referred to as the “Redstone 4” release conceals numerous changes and improvements, with two—Timeline and Nearby Sharing—sharing the marquee. Really, though, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (Version 1803) is an ensemble show, with a supporting cast of more minor enhancements. There’s Quiet Hours, now called Focus Assist; improved data usage management; and a ton of updates in Edge, some of which you’ve seen before within other browsers. Underneath it all, Microsoft may be building something new, as the Edge engine includes the underpinnings for Progressive Web Apps, a fresh way of supplying apps to the Microsoft Store.…

Samsung’s EVO series has owned the title of fastest TLC-based M.2 NVMe SSD since there has been such a thing. But unfortunately for the company, that distinction went the way of the dodo with the release of the WD’s game-changing Black NVMe in April. Samsung’s response? The brand new 970 EVO. However, it’s a case of darn close, but no cigar—the Samsung 970 EVO outperforms the WD in several tests, but falls short in sustained write performance with larger amounts of data. That said, the shortfall is liable to affect few users. SPECIFICATIONS, PRICE AND WARRANTY The Samsung 970 EVO is your standard M.2, 2280 (22 millimeters wide, 80 mm long), NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) PCIe x4 solid state drive. That x4 means it can utilize four PCIe lanes for…

Microsoft’s latest Windows 10 upgrade, known as the April 2018 Update, improves Windows in numerous ways. But Microsoft has also added innumerable under-the-hood adjustments. That’s why this roundup exists: to underscore smaller additions you might miss, or explain subtle changes in how Windows 10 works. Unlike previous lists we’ve compiled, some of these hidden features seem tentative, with more work clearly needed. Fortunately, Microsoft seems inclined to keep developing Windows 10, with no major replacement on the radar. (We highlight the very best features as part of our review on page 37.) ONE-CLICK DATA DELETION One of the continued complaints about using Windows 10 is Microsoft’s use of telemetry, i.e., collecting all sorts of information about you as you use Windows. Well, in addition to the privacy controls already built…

We have access to more fonts today than ever before, and so many are free! Fonts, like graphics, can make or break a presentation (such as a PowerPoint slideshow); sell a book, magazine, or newspaper (or leave it on the shelf); and make an advertisement succeed or fail. We’ll go over fonts in detail so you can start downloading and using them for your own projects. WHAT ARE FONTS? Fonts are the complete set of characters—that is, letters, numbers, and symbols/icons—within a typeface, which is the design of the characters. For example, Arial is the typeface; Arial Bold, Italic, Narrow, Extended (Wide), Black, etc., are the fonts, or font family. Each typeface or font falls within one of five classifications: • Serif (Times Roman, Bookman Old Style, Cambria, Garamond, etc.)…