Author: batteryforpc

HP’s newest Spectre x360 13 brings forward its predecessor’s iconic design but in a much smaller package. As important, it appears that HP has fixed a major issue I experienced with the previous generation Spectre x360 13.

Before getting to that, let’s take a look at the most startling change: This 5th-generation Spectre x360 is 13 percent smaller than its predecessor. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you place the new unit on top of the old, you’ll find that the older 4th-generation Spectre x360 13 is almost one inch deeper than the new unit.

Obviously, something had to give. And sure enough, the new Spectre x360 13 sacrifices the stylized speaker grill that sat above the keyboard previously, and the wrist rest is a bit less deep as well. More impressively, HP has finally taken meaningful steps to reduce its previously-ludicrously large bezels on the display lid: The gigantic 25.82 mm bottom bezel on the previous version has been replaced by a much smaller 11.09 mm bottom bezel on the new version, a 57 percent reduction. And the top bezel has shrunk even more impressively, from 17.35 mm to just 5.85 mm, a 66 percent reduction.

Put another way, the previous-generation Spectre x360 13 had an unimpressive 78 percent screen-to-body ratio, but the new version has a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio. It looks great, and it still works as before: The tiny top bezel contains a smaller web camera and IR camera (for Windows Hello) components. HP wasn’t forced to “pull a Dell” and put the cameras below the display.

Beyond this most welcome change, the Spectre x360 13 carries forward with the gem-cut, hard-edged, angular aluminum CNC design of its predecessor. The look is polarizing—you either love it or you don’t, I guess—but it’s also practical. Because of the unusual 45-degree rear corners, HP has found a new and easily discoverable (and memorable) place for the power button, on the left rear corner. And it has placed a USB-C port on the right rear corner; thanks to its angle, an attached power cord won’t get in your way if you wish to use a mouse on the right side of the device. Smart.

For those who are not fans of the angular design, HP has somewhat softened the blow by bringing back a classic silver color option. This is ideal for those who don’t want the flashier color schemes—Nightfall Black with Copper Luxe accents, and Poseidon Blue with Pale Brass accents—that HP also offers. This is a PC that even the most conservative user can embrace.

Like previous HP x360 designs, the new Spectre converts between four usage modes: Traditional laptop, tent, presentation, and tablet. If you’re familiar with my notion of optimizing for the everyday, I feel like this is the right design for most users. Its optimized for the most common usage mode, a laptop, but can easily transform when needed. For example, you can use the included HP Pen to take notes on the display in tablet mode, and its smaller overall size makes it a better fit for that role than previous x360s.

Inside, the new Spectre is powered by 10th-generation Intel Core i5 and i7 quad-core processors with Intel Iris Plus Graphics, 8 to 16 GB of RAM, and 256 to 2 TB of SSD storage, with some models offering an Intel Optane option. The smaller new form factor necessitated a new thermal design, which consists of larger air inlets and outlets, more internal graphite sheeting to disperse heat, and new air inlet holes under the top middle of the keyboard.

Connectivity is likewise impressive: The HP features Wi-Fi 6 and gigabit 4G LTE, with 4×4 antennas and a unique ability to use both simultaneously if desired. It includes Bluetooth 5.0 capabilities as well.

External expansion is acceptable given the PC’s small dimensions. There’s a single full-sized USB 3.1 port on the left, complete with a flip-down half cover, and a combo audio jack.

On the right, you’ll find two USB-C ports—one of which, again, is on the angled back right corner—and a microSD card reader.

The keyboards on HP’s premium PCs are typically excellent, and the Spectre x360 13 appears to continue this trend, with ideal key travel and a comfortable typing experience. One possible concern, of course, is the smaller wrist rest area. I have very large hands, and I’m curious if this will remain comfortable over time. But I suspect that those with more normally-sized mitts will do just fine.

I mentioned upfront that I experienced one serious issue with the Spectre’s predecessor. That was with its trackpad, which proved so unreliable that I scuttled my review of the PC. HP heard the complaints—I wasn’t the only one, obviously—and it provides a precision touchpad in the new version. I assume that will fix the problems.

To compensate for the lack of space on the keyboard deck, HP moved the new Spectre x360’s speakers to the bottom, and in my early tests they sound pretty punchy, especially when the PC is on a hard surface. I’ll compare the sound to that of the previous version and to the new HP Elite Dragonfly, which has particularly good audio.

There are three display options, each of which is glossy: A Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS panel, that same Full HD panel with an integrated privacy screen, and a 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) IPS BrightView panel. The review unit—which includes a Core i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of NVMe M.2 SSD storage—is the first of the three, and my personal preference.

On that note, HP rates the battery life at 22 hours, which it says is the longest battery life of any quad-core 13.3-inch consumer convertible PC; web browsing is rated at almost 12 hours, and that’s likely closer to accurate. It can also charge to 50 percent in just 30 minutes.

There are some additional unique touches. Like its predecessor, the new Spectre includes a hardware switch—located on the right side of the device between the microSD card slot and the USB-C port—for toggling the webcam on and off for privacy. But new to the 5th-generation unit is a microphone mute toggle key on the function row of the keyboard.

HP also bundles a few security-oriented software apps on the Spectre—ExpressVPN and LastPass—but I find these additions to be largely superfluous. ExpressVPN is free for one month only, and LastPass is the free version.

Speaking of software, the crapware-laden load-out that HP supplies is not ideal. The taskbar comes with icons for ExpressVPN, a Dropbox promotion, and HP JumpStarts, and the Start menu is cluttered with even more, including two McAfee apps, and a surprisingly long list of HP and Intel applications and utilities. And that’s on top of the nonsense that Microsoft dumps on us all in Windows 10. I thought we had moved past this phase, but I guess not.

Pricing is reasonable for a premium PC of this type: The HP Spectre x360 13 starts at $1099 for a model with a Core i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage. The review unit retails for $1299, and it includes a Core i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. Upgrade to the 4K UHD AMOLED display, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD + 32 GB of Intel Optane, and you’re looking at $1699.

One of Google’s simpler services is Google Tasks, which offers traditional to-do lists that are synced across your devices with your Google Account. However, while Google Tasks has a convenient app for Android and iOS, the only way to access it from the web is from the sidebar of other Google apps like Gmail. A third-party developer has created an alternative way to access Google Tasks in full-screen on your laptop, desktop or Chromebook.

While there are undoubtedly more featureful to-do apps available, Google Tasks is used by many for its simplicity and integration with Gmail. Unfortunately, Tasks doesn’t have its own website, and instead can only be accessed via a small UI within other apps like Gmail, Calendar, and Docs.

Frustrated with that state of affairs, a developer has created a Chrome extension that gives Google Tasks a full-screen UI, even somewhat mimicking the design of the existing apps. Once launched, the extension opens as a standalone app, which you can also pin to your shelf on Chrome OS.

The app’s two-pane design makes editing and organizing your tasks simple. The full-screen UI is also quite useful on Chromebooks, as the Android app for Google Tasks only works in an awkward vertical orientation, not a horizontal one.

9to5Google’s Take

At this point, it’s just silly that Google hasn’t made a proper full-screen web interface for Google Tasks, especially after shutting down the old one early this year.

AMD may not keep us waiting much longer for the anticipated Radeon RX 5500, which the company unveiled back in October. The new graphics card, particularly the rumored Radeon RX 5500 XT could be coming next week, according to VideoCardz.

There’s still little detail on the Radeon RX 5500 XT. We know the 5500-series graphics cards will have 22 compute units with 1408 stream processors, a bit more than half of those found on the RX 5700 XT. The new cards will use a 128-bit memory bus (half that of the 5700-series) and offer up to 8GB of GDDR6, according to an official slide from AMD, shared by Hot Hardware.

That leaves some room for guessing as to just what the RX 5500 and 5500 XT could do. The two cards would need to differentiate somehow, and if it’s not in stream processors or clock speeds, it could be in memory. VideoCardz believes the RX 5500 may come exclusively with 4GB of GDDR6 memory while the RX 5500 XT could offer 4GB and 8GB variants, similar to the way the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 has come in 3GB and 6GB variants.

A contest of variety

AMD is playing a hard game against Intel on the processor side and Nvidia on the graphics processor side. This has been working for AMD in the processor fight, with Ryzen CPUs stealing market share from Intel, but Nvidia’s cards still offer the most power at the high end.

AMD has still managed to make progress against Nvidia’s market share, and these new Radeon RX 5500-series cards could help it snag even more of the budget market. Team Red will be positioned to challenge Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 and 1660 models, including the Ti and Super versions. Given that Nvidia effectively has six graphics processors in the low-to-mid-range space, it makes sense for AMD to introduce more than just one version of the RX 5500.

Leaked benchmarks have shown the Radeon RX 5500 giving the GTX 1650 serious competition, and a higher-spec 5500 XT could be the card to run against the GTX 1660. If the new graphics cards come out this month, we may get to see just how the competition heats up just in time for the next big shopping rush.

Qualcomm took a different approach from the rest of the smartphone industry last year when it announced its 3D Sonic in-display fingerprint sensor. Instead of relying on an optical image of your finger for authentication, the 3D Sonic system uses ultrasound to get an impression of the surface texture of your prints. That method has a couple of benefits, namely the ability to use the scanner with wet fingers as well as better security over optical sensors. Today, the company is announcing the 3D Sonic Max fingerprint sensor that it says is the world’s largest and is 17 times larger than its predecessor. It’s so big, in fact, that it can authenticate two fingers at once.

That brings about numerous benefits, but most important of these is improved security. Both optical and ultrasound fingerprint readers had a major drawback. Their relatively small size made them far less secure than the larger ones that guard banks and entryways, for example. According to Gordon Thomas, senior director for product management, existing fingerprint sensors for mobile devices (including the existing 3D Sonic) typically measure around 4mm x 9mm. That would only detect part of your finger.

A larger sensor captures more information and looks for more signs to identify you, and is inherently more stringent. For example, if you’re looking at a slice of a pizza, you can generally guess if it’s Hawaiian or meat or vegetarian, but it takes evaluating the entire pie to know for sure. Full fingerprint authentication is simply more secure. “The police would never accept partial prints,” Thomas told Engadget.

The 3D Sonic Max scanner measures 20mm x 30mm for a 600 square millimeter area. This decreases the chances of fooling such a system greatly, and Thomas said the company is aiming for a 1 in a million accuracy rate. That’s the same level of accuracy that Apple claims Face ID has.

That isn’t to say that you’re doomed if you rely on your phone’s fingerprint scanner today. The industry standard for commercial smartphones is 1 in 50,000, which is what Apple says Touch ID offers. While it’s nowhere near acceptable by government standards, it’s generally good enough. But for those of us who are more paranoid about protecting our data, 3D Sonic Max is good news.

Qualcomm is also enabling dual-fingerprint authentication with the larger surface area, which means the system will be looking for two unique prints at the same time. This can be used for situations that require even tighter security, like accessing your bank apps or sensitive company information, for example.

The larger scanner also adds a few other conveniences. For one, you can register your fingerprint on your phone just by tapping once, instead of repeatedly for about 16 to 20 times. With such a large target area, too, you can more easily sign into your device instead of blindly jabbing your finger at a spot where you think the scanner is.

Thomas also said that because Qualcomm built its reader on thin-film-transistor (TFT), which is similar to the material used for LCDs, it’s able to keep costs low and maintain a small footprint. The sensor itself is just 0.15mm thin, so it doesn’t cut into space that would otherwise be devoted to battery or result in a larger phone. 3D Sonic Max will also be able to make out the shape of your finger and look for geometric signs like the distance between the tip of your thumb to the middle of it, and use these as additional layers of identification.

Compared to the last-gen 3D Sonic, the Max carries out its ultrasonic identification (i.e. telling the difference between skin and other materials based on the sound waves) within its hardware, instead of having to rely on algorithms and processing elsewhere on the device. That would theoretically also make it more secure than before by minimizing potential points of vulnerability.

Qualcomm expects the 3D Sonic Max will show up commercially next year. Since Samsung used the 3D Sonic in the Galaxy S10 and Note 10+ flagships, it wouldn’t be surprising if the phone maker adopts this next-gen component in its upcoming phones. For now, we just have to wait for other companies and apps to adopt more-secure methods of ID-ing us. The good news is, the 3D Sonic Max is sure to create some competition in the mobile security space, which should lead to improvements overall.

Rumor has it that AWS (Amazon Web Services) is set to bring in more powerful second-gen processors for use in its servers and data centers, with the ARM-based CPUs apparently bristling with as many as 32-cores.

The next-gen chips will reportedly be based on ARM’s Neoverse N1 architecture and would succeed current AWS’ first-gen Graviton processors, being something like 20% faster, according to a report by Reuters which cites two industry sources.

As Anandtech, which spotted the report, further notes, Neoverse N1 is designed around providing maximum single-thread performance, running at relatively high frequencies.

We are talking clock speeds of up to 3.1GHz, with a likely TDP of around 100W.

Price perspective

While Amazon’s chips obviously won’t be able to rival the likes of Intel’s or AMD’s server processors in terms of pure performance, by the looks of this, they are set to offer an impressively beefier level of performance than their predecessors. And they will likely do so at a very competitive price/performance ratio (both in terms of the overall price, and the ongoing cost of running the chips).

So this could represent a reasonably potent threat to Intel’s dominance in the server market, because if these efforts pan out – and remember, this report is just speculation (albeit from one of the more reliable sources in the tech world) – AWS could certainly turn to use more of its own hardware.

Of course, Intel is already under heavy fire in the server market, fighting a battle against AMD’s rival chips.

AMD’s latest Epyc (Rome) processors are innovative and powerful offerings (running with up to 64-cores) which have already tempted some big-name defections away from Intel, including Google and Twitter (and indeed AWS itself – for the time being, perhaps).