Author: batteryforpc

AOC has just revealed its new CU34G2X gaming monitor, offering a 34-inch 21:9 aspect ratio UltraWide experience with a native 3440 x 1440 resolution.

The 34-inch UltraWide has a super-fast 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time, so you should be pretty good for even the fastest shooters on the market. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and its battle royale mode Warzone would be pretty damn near perfect on the AOC CU34G2X.

AOC taps a VA panel for its CU34G2X monitor, with a curvy 1500R curvature. AMD FreeSync is supported on the monitor, so you might want to grab a Radeon RX 5700 XT or wait for the new RDNA 2-based cards that are coming in the next few months.

Xiaomi has its fingers thoroughly in a number of tech pies, and for its tenth anniversary, the Chinese tech giant announced a swathe of new products, including the Mi 10 Ultra flagship smartphone and… a completely transparent TV.

Despite having a pretty considerable novelty factor, the Xiaomi Mi TV LUX OLED Transparent Edition is actually going to be available to consumers in China from August 16, where it’ll cost a cool ¥49,999 (roughly $7,200 / £5,500 / AU$10,000).

Xiaomi’s transparent OLED joins the novelty TV ranks of Samsung’s The Frame…

…the rotating, vertical Samsung Sero TV…

…and of course, Samsung’s mammoth, yet paper-thin, The Wall

As its title (and transcendental product video) suggests, you can see through the TV both when it’s turned off and when it’s displaying content, with Xiaomi claiming that the “images seem to be suspended in the air”.

Outside of its star feature, the Transparent Edition of the Mi TV LUX sports a 55-inch OLED panel, 120Hz refresh rate, 93% DCI-P3 color support, and “150000:1 static contrast ratio and an infinite dynamic contrast ratio”.

Of course, all of these specs are only as impressive as the TV’s environment allows for – the furniture, walls and other objects you place behind it will no doubt have an impact on its clarity, as will the room’s lighting situation.

While there’s no word yet on global availability (and there’s every chance that it won’t leave the Asian market), the fact that a TV with transparent capabilities is at a point where it can be mass-produced is a big step forward for the completely necessary technology.

Chinese news outlet IThome received word that Huawei is on the brink if launching the brand’s new desktop PC (internally known as Pangu) for the domestic market. The system utilizes a variant of the company’s Kunpeng 920, which is also known as the Hi1620. The report claims that the Kunpeng 920 3211K’s multi-core performance is slightly better than the Intel Core i9-9900K Coffee Lake processor.

The Kunpeng 920, which is based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 (codename Ares) microarchitecture, boasts core configurations that span from 24 up to 64 cores, running between 2.4 GHz and 3 GHz. TSMC used to produce Kunpeng 920 for Huawei on its 7nm process node before cutting off all ties with Chinese tech giant due to new U.S. regulations.

The Kunpeng 920 3211K in particular has 24 cores that max out at 2.6 GHz. Huawei pairs the processor with 8GB of SO-DIMM memory, a 512GB Samsung SSD and AMD’s Radeon 520 mobile graphics card.

Huawei tailors the Pangu to government and enterprise markets, meaning the system is equipped with China’s homemade Unified Operating System (UOS). User expansion and customization on the Pangu is close to zero. The Kunpeng 920 3211K is soldered to the motherboard and doesn’t support other graphics cards. The UOS is cemented into the PC so you can’t install Windows on it either. We suspect you may be able to upgrade the memory or SSD, but that’s about it.

The purported images of the Pangu show three USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port and a single 3.5mm headphone jack in the front of the case. There is also room for an optical drive. The rear of the case holds four USB Type-A ports, one Ethernet port, three 3.5mm audio jacks and a D-Sub port. IThome’s report states that the Pangu comes with a 23.8-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and 70% NTSC color gamut.

Pricing and the exact release date for the Pangu is unknown. The IThome reader only insinuated that the Pangu will launch soon.

The Windows version of Google Chrome is preparing to add a desktop shortcut to open directly into an Incognito window, perfect for whatever you use Incognito Mode for.

Incognito Mode in Google Chrome has more than its fair share of uses, be it hiding certain web pages from your history, bypassing paywalls from larger news sites, or just wanting to do a search without it appearing in your Google Search history. Whatever you use Incognito Mode for, the current best way to open an Incognito window is to first open Chrome, then use the Ctrl-Shift-N shortcut or the “New Incognito window” menu option.

Now it seems Google is preparing a newer, handier way to open Chrome’s Incognito Mode, exclusive to Windows, by allowing you to create a desktop shortcut that opens directly to Incognito. This comes from a pair of Chromium code changes [1, 2], one of which adds a new flag to chrome://flags.

Enable Incognito Desktop Shortcut

Enables users to create a desktop shortcut for incognito mode.

#enable-incognito-shortcut-on-desktop

Digging a bit deeper, we find that this flag will add a new “Create Shortcut” option to Incognito Mode’s profile menu, just as Chrome for Windows already allows each profile to create a desktop shortcut. For now, we’re not sure why this feature is exclusive to Windows, instead of also arriving on Mac and Linux.

As this feature is still early in development and Chrome 86 is less than a month from reaching Beta, we expect that Chrome’s new Incognito desktop shortcut will probably not arrive until Chrome 87, due to release sometime in November.