Acer Predator G1 desktop comes with its own suitcase… for first 1,000 punters

We had an inkling that Acer was going to lift the lid on new Predator gear at its global press conference in New York. Front and centre of its line-up is the new Predator G1 desktop.

Which, it turns out, is sort-of portable. It even comes with its own branded wheely suitcase. Well, if you’re one of the first 1,000 punters to put your cash down on buying one anyway.

The Predator G1 might be small as desktops go (it’s 16-litres), but it’s a potentially formidable machine, supporting full-size Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics (to Titan X), 6th-gen Intel Core i processors and up to 64GB DDR4 memory. You won’t get all that for the €1,199 starting price, of course… but you might get that suitcase if you’re speedy enough.

Also unveiled was the Acer Predator 17X gaming laptop which, quite simply, might be the most powerful gaming laptop we’ve ever seen. It’s a huge 17-inch beast, capable of running over-clocked Intel Core i7 at up to 4Ghz, alongside Nvidia GTX 980 graphics – as in desktop graphics, not the usual M-designation of many other gaming laptops. It’s cooled by a tri-fan cooling system, including an air intake to the front of the design. Prices start at €2,499 which we think is worth it for the snazzy multi-coloured keyboard alone.

Acer is clearly keen to throw its weight around in the gaming desktop and laptop arena and, on the basis of these two key products, it’s certainly swinging hard.

Microsoft only sold 2.3 million Lumia phones over the last three months

Microsoft has post its third-quarter fiscal results for 2016, and one thing is clear: its phone business isn’t doing so hot.

The company made $3.8 billion in net income on $20.5 billion in revenue, both of which are down year-over year. Speaking of things going down, Microsoft only sold 2.3 million Lumia devices in the period that ended on 30 March. That’s a whopping 73 per cent drop from 8.6 million in the same period last year. For comparison, Apple sold 13 million iPhone 6Ss its opening weekend.

Microsoft’s mobile revenue therefore fell by as much as 46 per cent Still, the company saw growth from Surfaces. The segment grew by $1.1 billion during the quarter, up 61 per cent year-over-year. Microsoft attributed this growth to Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book sales, but of course it neglected to provide firm numbers for how many tablets and computers it sold in the last three months.

Windows OEM revenue dropped 2 per cent, outperforming the remainder of the PC market. Microsoft said it was able to outperform the PC market because of a “higher consumer premium device mix”. It also saw some growth in the cloud department. Office commercial and cloud services like Office 365 spiked 7 per cent this quarter, while consumer versions of Office went up 6 per cent.

Microsoft now has 22.2 million Office 365 consumer subscriptions. As for server products and cloud services, Microsoft said revenue increased 5 per cent. Azure revenue increased by 120 per cent.

Lenovo’s Zuk Z2 Pro is an Android phone that syncs with Apple’s iCloud

Lenovo-owned Zuk has unveiled a follow-up to the Z1: the Z2 Pro phone.

It has a 5.2-inch 1080p Super Amoled display, runs the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 820 processor, includes a whopping 6GB of RAM, and offers 128GB of storage. It also has a 13-megapixel rear snapper with optical image stabilised, as well as a 3100mAh battery, and it plugs in using USB-C with USB 3.1 support. In other words… this is most definitely a flagship device.

It’s also a fun device, as it features a built-in heartbeat sensor, UV sensor, fingerprint reader, and altimeter. But that’s not the coolest part. Zuk has claimed that the phone syncs with Apple’s iCloud, making it easier for iPhone users to jump ship and try Android. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple responds to this syncing capability however, and whether it’ll kibosh it.

Zuk

Zuk has managed to keep the price down too, as it will put the phone up for pre-order on 22 April in China for 2,699 yuan ($416/£290). There’s also a trimmed down version that’ll be available in May. It comes with 4GB of RAM as well as 64GB of internal storage.

Oh, and the phone runs Zuk’s Android-based ZUI 2.0 We wish the phone had NFC too, because then it would be almost perf.

The Wirecutter’s best deals: Logitech Harmony 350 remote

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. Read their continuously updated list of deals at TheWirecutter.com.

You may have already seen Engadget posting reviews from our friends at The Wirecutter. Now, from time to time, we’ll also be publishing their recommended deals on some of their top picks. Read on, and strike while the iron is hot — some of these sales could expire mighty soon.

Sennheiser GAME ONE Gaming Headset

Street price: $150; MSRP: $250; deal price: $128

Here’s a great deal for marathon gamers on this high-end gaming headset. This is the first good sale we’ve seen on this product since it became a pick, and you’ll save $22 off the street price. The deal is only available on the white model of the headset, which runs a little cheaper than the black version.

The Sennheiser GAME ONE is the upgrade pick in our guide on the best gaming headset. Dennis Burger said, “Sennheiser’s GAME ONE may cost more than most are looking to spend, but its spacious sound, stunning bass performance, and noise-cancelling mic make it worth the premium for serious gamers.”

Grenco Science G Pen Elite

Street price: $170; MSRP: $170; deal price: $136 with code 420

The first great sale we’ve seen on this model since we published our guide. Use the code 420 to knock 20% off of the price, which brings it down to $136.

The Grenco Science G Pen Elite is our pick for the best portable vaporizer. Mark Smirniotis wrote, “This pint-sized vaporizer produces vapor that will convert any smoker and is easy to use thanks to high-end features like precision controls, a clear display, and Micro-USB charging.”

He had this to say about the quality, “The Elite produced vapor at a quality level that surprised all of our testers given the its small stature and price. While its vapor tasted a bit more cooked and looked a little thinner than higher-end models set to the same temperatures, it was still pleasant and always reliable.”

Adonit Jot Pro Fine Point Precision Stylus

Street price: $27; MSRP: $30; deal price: $22

The best price we’ve seen by a few bucks on this stylus. It tends to idle around $30, though recently we’ve seen it trending in the $27 range, with a brief one-day drop to $24.

The Adonit Jot Pro is our iPad stylus pick. The Wirecutter staff wrote, “The best stylus for most people using an iPad Air or iPad mini is Adonit’s newly redesigned Jot Pro. The Jot Pro is an elegant, comfortable-to-hold accessory that allows for precise input, thanks to the company’s unique disc tip.”

Logitech Harmony 350 Universal Remote

Street price: $37; MSRP: $50; deal price: $27

This is the best price we’ve seen on our budget pick. While it’s only a $10 drop, the street price is already an affordable $37. For comparison, we’ve seen our top pick for universal remote, the 650, drop down to $53.

The Logitech Harmony 350 is our budget pick for the best universal remote. Darryl Wilkinson and Grant Clauser said, “It misses out on the 650’s great Help feature and display, but controls eight devices at a cheaper price.”

They went on to write, “However, there are a few things that keep it from being our overall pick. The loss of the screen means it isn’t as simple to use. Also, its buttons aren’t backlit, which is a big deal if you’re trying to use the remote in the dark (which is most of the time for a lot of us). It also lacks the interactive help feature, which we find… you guessed it, helpful.”

Deals change all the time, and some of these may have expired. To see an updated list of current deals, please go to The Wirecutter.com.

Comedy Central, BET, MTV, more Viacom networks will hit Sling TV

Viacom networks Comedy Central, BET, MTV, Spike, Nick Jr. and others will land on Dish’s streaming service, Sling TV, in the coming months. These channels will be available in single-stream and multi-stream packages, though there’s no word on specific bundles just yet. It’s all part of a deal Viacom and Dish hashed out last night, just before their previous contract expired, and it ensures Viacom’s current lineup of 18 channels will remain on Dish satellite TV.

Sling TV is a $20 per month service that offers live and on-demand television. It comes in two forms: The single-stream option, which allows users to watch one stream on one device at a time, and the multi-stream option, which is in beta now and lets up to three people watch at once. The single- and multi-stream packages offer a few different channels — the single option has ESPN and Disney, while the multi option has Fox and FX, for example.

Users can also add a selection of premium channels to either package, including an additional $15 a month for HBO and $10 for Cinemax. Plus, Dish is working on a set-top box that will grab free, over-the-air broadcasts of local channels.

Many legal porn sites are fronts for child abuse

There has been a sharp increase in the number of websites hiding illegal images of child abuse behind otherwise legal-seeming adult pornography sites, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation reported this week.

In 2015, the IWF identified 743 websites that “provide a secret route to child sexual abuse content,” by showing only legal content when accessed via a browser, but hosting illegal materials out of sight behind a maze of links. That’s more than double the number from just 18 months earlier. About 21 percent of those sites were set up to profit from the trade of those illegal materials.

The disturbing trend should be a wake-up call to everyone, as even those who only seek out and view legal content could potentially find themselves with a suspicious cookie trail leading back to a website they didn’t know was serving as a front for illegal activity.

“It’s extremely significant,” IWF’s executive director Fred Langford explained to The Guardian. “Some people may think they’re going to legal adult content but they unfortunately have picked up the cookies on the way that means that they are served the child sexual abuse material. There’s a huge risk there.”

As watchdog groups, law enforcement agencies and tech companies ramp up their efforts to detect and remove child pornography from the internet, their increasingly difficult work also reveals a harsh truth: The problem is always bigger than it initially appears. In the two years since UK Prime Minister David Cameron allowed the IWF to proactively seek out illegal imagery, the number of pictures and videos it has removed has more than quadrupled. Overall, the IWF found 68,092 cases of confirmed, illegal child sexual abuse images in 2015.

Ads force German xenophobes to hear the plights of refugees

People searching for anti-immigrant YouTube videos in Germany are going to have an awkward time doing so thanks to a novel advertising campaign by Refugees Welcome. The organization has put together a series of 30-second spots featuring real refugees who discuss their situations using a potent mixture of perspective, fact and humor to counter the country’s rising xenophobic tide.

The organization is focusing its campaign on people who search for specific keyword strings like “refugees out”, “refugees terrorists” and “the truth about refugees.” To view any of the hundred or so pieces of right-wing propaganda that those phrases return, users will have to watch an unskippable 30-second ad.

Source: Quartz

Apple MacBook (2016) review – CNET

The Good The 12-inch MacBook gets a decent boost to performance and battery life, while keeping the same slim, light premium body. The high-res display and responsive trackpad remain the gold standard. Color options add a fun bit of personalization.

The Bad The single USB-C port will continue to be an inconvenience for many. The shallow keyboard isn’t ideal for long-form typing. Other super-slim laptops manage to fit in more powerful processors.

The Bottom Line With a handful of subtle improvements, the updated 12-inch Apple MacBook is more of a mainstream machine, but remains a few tweaks away from being the best laptop on the market.

The modest updates to Apple’s 12-inch MacBook laptop don’t go far enough to make it the new must-have machine for everyone. At the same time, there’s a sizable enough boost to performance and battery life that the system can no longer be considered an outlier only suited for a very limited audience that values portability over productivity.

Nor is it the only player in the game. Since the 2015 original, we’ve seen super-thin laptops such as the upcoming HP Spectre shaving millimeters from previous versions, or tablet hybrids such as the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and Samsung Galaxy TabPro S showing off what Intel’s new Core M chips can do in a small, reasonably priced package.

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Sarah Tew/CNET

But even if it’s closer to the middle of the road than the it was last year, the 12-inch MacBook is still a love-it-or-hate-it laptop. It seems to inspire either fierce loyalty or intense derision, at least judging from comments on my review of the original version, and social media feedback on any follow-up stories since. A new set of updates for 2016, including new processors for faster performance and better battery life, plus a new rose gold color option, may help throw off some of that shade, but not all.

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Indeed, I liked the 2015 version of the MacBook, despite its many limitations. It relied on Intel’s initially unimpressive Core M processor, and its performance and battery life compared unfavorably to the bigger MacBook Air and Pro systems. The keyboard was unusually shallow, in order to fit into such a thin body. And most of all, the single USB-C port was a hard pill to swallow for those convinced of the need for separate power, video, and data ports.

It was not the perfect laptop for everyone, or even most people. But over time, I found myself appreciating Apple’s exercise in strictly enforced minimalism. I turned to it more and more often, especially for on-the-go computing in coffee shops around New York, eventually declaring it as my all-around favorite (as of March 2016, at least). But, it could still get bogged down with too many programs and windows open, and the battery life wasn’t at the level where it could go days and days between charging sessions. The USB issue turned out to be less serious than I feared, and only two or three times in the months after the product’s original release did I find myself stymied by a lack of ports (although when I did get stuck with a USB key and a misplaced converter dongle, it was very annoying).

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The 12-inch MacBook, on top of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, on top of a 13-inch MacBook Air.

Sarah Tew/CNET

With this 2016 update, Apple has addressed some, but not all, of the issues with the original. Both this system, and other computers with the second generation of Core M processors (confusingly part of Intel’s sixth generation of Core chips, also known by the codename Skylake), are closer to the mainstream levels of performance seen in laptops with more common Core i3 and Core i5 processors from Intel.

Along with new Core m3 and m5 CPUs (the M series now follows the same 3/5/7 format as the Core i-series chips), the new MacBook gets Intel’s updated 515 integrated graphics, which won’t make you a gamer, but may help with video application performance. The speed of the internal flash memory has also improved, but I doubt that’s something casual users would even notice.

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Frankly, the most obvious difference between the 2016 MacBook and the 2015 model is the new addition of a fourth color option, rose gold, which is already available on iPhones and iPads. Sadly, our review sample is a rather straitlaced space gray (silver and gold are the other two options).

Note also that we’re testing the step-up model, which costs $1,599 in the US (£1,299 and AU$2,199), and includes an Intel Core m5 processor and a big 512GB of storage. The base $1,299 model (£1,049 and AU$1,799) has the Core m3 and 256GB of storage.

Color aside, the body is identical to last year’s model, weighing a hair over two pounds and measuring 13.1mm thick. The HP Spectre packs a 13-inch display (but only a 1,920×1,080-resolution one) into a 10.4mm body, but at the cost of more weight, at 2.45 pounds. That coming-soon HP also uses Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, which should give it a significant performance boost. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that PC makers need to balance size, weight, performance and battery life, but can usually max out two out of those four at best.

Apple MacBook (2016)

A keyboard you may like, but won’t love

This is still the thinnest Mac that Apple has ever made. Part of the reason for that is the butterfly mechanism under the keyboard. The nearly edge-to-edge keyboard has very large key faces, yes, but the keys are shallow, barely popping up above the keyboard tray and depressing into the chassis only slightly. It takes some getting used to, especially if you’re accustomed to the deep, clicky physical feedback of other MacBooks or the similar island-style keyboards of most other modern laptops. It took a while to get used to, and it’ll never be my favorite keyboard, but I found it was easy to acclimate to after a few days of heavy usage, and I’ve easily written more than 100,000 words on the 2015 version of this system.

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Sarah Tew/CNET

The touchpad retains the Force Touch feature found in both the previous MacBook and the current 13-inch MacBook Pro. (A version of this migrated to the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus as 3D Touch.) A set of four sensors under the pad allow you to “click” anywhere on the surface, and the Force Click effect, which combines the sensors with haptic feedback (or, as Apple calls it, “taptic”), allows you to have two levels of perceived clicking within an app or task. That deep click feels to the finger and brain like the trackpad has a stepped physical mechanism, but in fact, the movement you feel is a small horizontal shift, which, even when fully explained, still feels like you’re depressing the trackpad two levels.

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I’m more of a tapper than a clicker, and the first thing I do on any new MacBook is turn on tap-to-click in the settings menu (which is still inexplicably turned off by default), so I have not given Force Touch much thought since it was introduced, with the exception of deep-clicking on addresses occasionally to bring up a contextual map pop-up. Here’s another Mac trackpad tip: besides the tapping feature under the trackpad preferences menu, you should go to the accessibility menu and look under Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad options to turn on tap-to-drag.

A small but sharp screen

The 12-inch Retina display has a 2,304×1,440-pixel resolution, which gives you a very high pixel-per-inch density, as well as an aspect ratio that sticks with 16:10, as opposed to the 16:9 aspect ratio found on nearly every other laptop available now, and in HDTV screens.

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The slightly glossy screen works from wide viewing angles and is very clear and bright. On-screen icons, text and images all scale well to be very viewable despite the smaller size and higher resolution. While the bezel around the display is thin, it’s nowhere as minimalist as the barely there bezel on the excellent Dell XPS 13.

FBI paid over $1.3 million to unlock San Bernardino iPhone

Today, FBI director James Comey noted that the cost to the bureau to unlock the iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook was more than what he would make in the seven years and four months before his retirement. Reuters busted out its calculators and determined that he would make $1.3 million in his time left as head of the government agency. So you know, more than that.

While that seems like a ton of cash to circumvent the security of a phone, it’s actually pretty on par with what exploit merchants might be be charging. In 2015, Zerodium offered a $1 million bounty for iOS 9 zero-day vulnerabilities.

The FBI is expected to use more third-party firms to extract information from encrypted devices. If it does, this sort of payout will soon become a regular occurrence.

Source: Reuters

The complete guide to customizing Windows 10 – CNET

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

An operating system is only useful as it is customizable. After all — if you can’t make an OS look and act the way you want it to, then who cares if it’s objectively better (faster, more powerful) than any other OS?

Good news, Windows 10 users: You can easily customize both the look and feel of Microsoft’s new OS, and make it work for you. Here’s our guide on how to make Windows 10 pretty and easy to use.

Windows 10 Settings menu: The Personalization tab: A look at Windows 10’s new Personalization settings — the bedrock of all your visual customization needs.

How to customize the Windows 10 Start menu: We were all excited about the return of the Start menu — even though it’s more like a hybrid of the Windows 8 Start screen and the Windows 7 Start menu rather than a traditional Start menu. Here’s how to make it yours.

Pin links to the Start menu from any browser: Put your favorite links on the Start menu, no matter what web browser you favor.

10 ways to customize the taskbar in Windows 10: If you’re like me, the taskbar — not the Start menu — is the real workhorse in Windows 10.

How to disable the Windows 10 lock screen: Windows 10 is designed for every device, including mobile devices, which is why it has a lock screen and a log-in screen. But for many of us desktop and laptop users, the lock screen is redundant and inconvenient. Here’s how to get rid of it.

Make people jealous of your lock screen with Windows Spotlight: If you must have a lock screen, it might as well look awesome with pretty, high-res photos from Windows Spotlight feature.

How to uninstall default apps in Windows 10: Windows 10’s default apps don’t take up a lot of space, but do visually clutter up your Start menu (especially if you don’t use them). Here’s how to uninstall them (and how to reinstall them).

3 ways to customize Microsoft Edge: Microsoft’s new Edge browser is a work-in-progress, but here’s what you can do right now to make it look pretty.

How to get the home button back in Edge: Edge has decided to take a leaf out of Google Chrome’s book and be too cool for a home button. But some of us like home buttons, so here’s how to get it back.

Here’s how to get rid of Internet Explorer: Edge is such a work in progress that Windows 10 also ships with Internet Explorer 11. You can’t really uninstall IE11, but you can hide it so you don’t have to look at it.

Force Cortana to use Google instead of Bing: Make Microsoft’s virtual assistant use the Web search engine of your choice.

Get rid of default cloud service icons in File Explorer: Cloud storage service icons show up in the left menu of your File Explorer, whether you want them to or not. But you can remove them with a relatively simple Registry hack.

How to change your computer’s name in Windows 10: What’s customization if you can’t customize your PC’s name?