(Photo: Lenovo)Lenovo has announced its first Arm-based Thinkpad at the Mobile Word Congress trade show in Barcelona. The company is stating that the combination of an energy efficient processor combined with its Thinkpad platform will provide a “smartphone experience” with “PC performance.” And by smartphone experience, the company means insane battery life, which could be up to 28 hours. The gains in longevity are thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 platform, which is the first 5nm Arm SoC made for Windows. Qualcomm has promised up to 1.85x better CPU performance and 1.6x better GPU performance for this new SoC.
Oppo is one of the largest smartphone makers in the world, but you’d never know it if you buy all your phones in the US. Oppo is part of the Chinese megacorporation BBK Electronics, which also runs Vivo, Realme, and OnePlus among others. Smartphones in this family are about to get a faster charging standard, according to Oppo’s Mobile World Congress preview. The new SuperVOOC standard , guaranteeing a full charge in just 15 minutes. For years, smartphones have demanded more powerful hardware, but battery capacity has stagnated. Most flagship Android phones still only have 4500-5000mAh of battery power, so most OEMs have worked to make charging faster.
If you’re looking for games you can play on a low-end PC or laptop, you’ve come to the right place. This is ExtremeTech’s staff-nominated list of favorite games that will play well, even if your PC is old enough to run for president, with the computing power of a potato. You shouldn’t have to give up on immersive gaming just because you’ve got an older or low-end rig. If your hardware can’t handle the games of today, don’t be afraid to explore the games of 10 or even 20 years ago. We’ve tried to round up a wide variety of types and genres here, including several that are mod-friendly.
(Photo: Robins Weermeijer/Unsplash)Scientists may have found a cause for multiple sclerosis (MS), a debilitating disease that affects the functionality of the brain and spinal cord. A team of researchers at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health have established potential causality between the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and MS. EBV, a common type of herpes virus, has long been suspected to cause or otherwise interact with MS, a chronic disease that prompts the immune system to attack neuron’s essential myelin sheaths. Like other types of herpes, EBV establishes a lifelong latent infection that currently has no cure. The virus is also known for engendering mononucleosis, known colloquially as “kissing disease.
(Photo: USPTO)A recent patent filing by Apple suggests the company is working on some kind of full-blown Mac computer that could be tucked inside one of its Magic keyboards. The design could allow a person to simply unplug the keyboard from an external display, stuff it in their rucksack, and be on their way as opposed to hauling a notebook around. The patent filing is unambiguously titled, “Computer in an input device.” The lengthy , which was unearthed by , is quite clear. It states: “The computing devices described herein can incorporate or otherwise house one or more computing components within an input device to provide a portable desktop computing experience at any location having one or more computer monitors.
The Valve is now available, well, technically. The first units are shipping in the coming days, and reviews are out. You might feel more inclined to order one after reading the generally positive reviews, but don’t get your hopes up. The shipping queue is going to stretch into the middle of the year. Valve’s new handheld benefits from its x86 architecture, which opens up a huge library of games. However, is no lightweight at 1.47 pounds — it makes the Switch look positively tiny by comparison. The AMD hardware is sufficient for desktop-class games like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Dark Souls III.
(Photo: Bill Ingalls)The results of a tweet-turned-stock selloff have prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch an investigation targeting Elon Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk. The Tesla CEO and his restaurateur sibling are suspected of having violated insider trading rules by conspiring to offload billions of dollars worth of stock, to a source for The Washington Post. In November, Elon Musk asked his Twitter followers whether he should sell ten percent of his Tesla stock to reduce the amount of tax he’d owe on unrealized capital gains. Elon Musk promised to abide by the results of the poll regardless of the outcome.
On Friday of last week news broke that someone had infiltrated Nvidia’s network, though at the time it wasn’t clear what they were after or if it was somehow related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It now appears the Nvidia hackers were after a very obvious target: the code behind Nvidia’s Low Hash Rate (LHR) limiter, which reduces GeForce GPU performance when mining cryptocurrency. As we , the nefarious activity “completely compromised” some of Nvidia’s internal systems, causing the company to lose access to its email system for several days. Nvidia also shut down some of its own systems to prevent the spread of malware and to allow it to investigate.
Google has long relied on the network pings from Android phones to power the robust traffic monitoring features of Maps, but this data is no longer available in Ukraine. that Google has disabled the feature following reports that Maps could reveal the movement of troops and civilians as Russian forces continue their assault on Ukraine. In some places, like the US and Canada, the iPhone is more popular than Android. That’s not the case in Ukraine and Russia, where about three in four phones run Android. Any Android phone that has location services enabled will report back to the Google mothership, and the aggregate of that data helps to show traffic congestion in Maps.
