Author: batteryforpc

There’s no smartwatch as popular as the Apple Watch, and Apple keeps selling millions of units every quarter. Apple’s smartwatch is quite easy to tell apart from its main competitors, as its design is instantly recognizable. But come next week, Samsung will launch a Galaxy Watch 2 that looks very familiar.

“The best I can do is pass along details from trusted sources. Nothing I say should ever be taken as gospel until the press release is out,” prominent leaker Evan Blass commented on Twitter about a recent Galaxy Note 10 specs leak he posted. “Unless there are pictures,” he followed, sharing the image above.

This was a week ago, and, at the time, we didn’t know what to make of it. Blass didn’t explain what the smartwatch was, and it looked just like a round version of the Apple Watch rather than a Galaxy Watch. Just check out the colors, the metal and glass blend, the physical buttons, and, most importantly, the watchfaces. It all screams Apple Watch, and some people thought it was a press render of the Apple Watch Series 5.

The device Blass leaked could not be an Apple Watch, however, because, as other users observed, the image delivered two important clues. First of all, the watch shows the time as 10:08, which is one second earlier than Apple’s usual 10:09 time for the Watch. Moreover, the date was August 5th, and Apple doesn’t have any Watch events planned for August.

At the time, we thought the Galaxy Watch 2 would be introduced during the August 7th Galaxy Note 10 event, which made the press render even more puzzling. A few days later, leaked FCC documentation (via Droid-Life) revealed actual images of the Galaxy Watch 2. As it turns out, the circular watch design looked exactly like the device in Blass’s press render. However, the similarities with the Apple Watch were no longer obvious. After all, while it may be easy to replicate the Watch design and its watchfaces, it’s harder to copy the watchOS software. Not that Samsung would want to do that again, would they?

I’ll also point out that we saw several Note 10 preorder leaks that included Galaxy Watch 2 renders, but you can barely make out the device in these pics:

In other words, it sure looks like the Galaxy Watch 2 might have a design that could convince some people that they’re looking at an Apple Watch. I wouldn’t call it a blatant ripoff, because it’s not identical, but this Galaxy Watch 2 design looks like it drew its inspiration from Apple’s best-selling wearable.

Gears 5 is a third-person shooter that launches in September and The Coalition keeps on providing us with new details about the upcoming game. Recently, Gears 5 Multiplayer Design Director Ryan Cleven discussed servers and balance tuning. The franchise will feature 60 Hz servers for the first time with Gears 5 and there is one tuning setup across core and competitive multiplayer modes.

The servers that track action at 60 Hz should make shooting feel much more precise. This should give every shot more meaning. You can read Cleven’s comments on Twitter below.

The Coalition wanted to have the same balancing tuning for core and competitive modes. This means that weapons, recoil, and other attributes of the shooting mechanics should feel the same across all of the affected modes. Keep in mind that there is no aim assist for competitive modes so you’ll have to rely on your skills alone.

It’s unclear how these changes will be perceived by the community. Only time will tell once the game is in everyone’s hands. Hopefully, these changes will make the game fairer.

Gears 5 shines with Unreal Engine 4. The game looks stunning and should run at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second (FPS) on Xbox One X. Gears of War 4 ran at 4K 30 FPS during the campaign and 4K 60 FPS during multiplayer. This time around, both modes are the same frame rate.

One of the more jarring experiences you’ll encounter when updating your iPad to Apple’s iPadOS 13 this fall—including having to call it that from now on—are the slightly smaller icons now gracing your iPad’s Home screen and pages.

Like a juice cleanse, this icon diet is only a temporary fad. It appears Apple is going to let you revert back to the beefier icons you’ve been using all this time if you prefer your apps to look like a delicious thicc steak than a lean patty. At least, that’s my impression based on the latest iPadOS 13 beta—version 5!—which now comes with a little setting for adjusting the size of your app icons.

Make your app icons big or small

If you’re currently running the iPadOS 13 beta, or you know smaller icons are going to drive you crazy and you’ll want to change this as soon as iPadOS 13 drops in (probably) September, here’s how to fatten up your icons.

First, pull up the Settings app. You’ll then want to tap on Display & Brightness. Toward the bottom of this section, look for the new option for “App Icon Size.” You can’t miss it, as you’ll see a little graphic that shows you how many icons will fit on a page in “More” and “Bigger” modes:

That’s it! I haven’t reinstalled iPadOS 13 lately, but it makes sense that Apple would alsoask you this preference as part of your device’s initial setup process. If not, now you know where to find it.

It’s been nearly three weeks since AMD’s launch of the new Ryzen 3000 series CPUs and our extensive coverage of the new parts. Among one of the things that didn’t quite go as smoothly is AMD’s BIOS and software situation where as things were still very much in flux following the launch.

One issue that was repeatedly brought up by the community over the past weeks was the new CPU’s idle behaviour both in terms of temperature as well as voltages. In particular, the new parts seemingly looked like they rarely idled at lower performance states and instead looked to remain at high frequencies even when not doing much.

While initially appearing as an issue, it really wasn’t one and rather just a side-effect of AMD’s new CPPC2 fast frequency ramp-up behaviour. Monitoring applications that are badly programmed tend to have a too heavy of a monitoring loop that causes load on the CPU – triggering a frequency ramp-up as the CPU is seeing a larger load. Given the new CPU’s sub-1ms ramp-up this meant that it was very hard to actually catch the machine at the lower frequencies – even though it most likely did idle correctly.

As AMD states in their community brief on the issue, part of the new behaviour change is that the new scheduler settings will now have a much more relaxed ramp-up time compared to the previous versions. In particular, when the chip will be at its base frequency and idling voltage, it will now take a significantly longer load for the chip to ramp up to its boost frequencies.

In our quick A/B testing between the two driver versions, we can see that prior to the update the CPU would ramp up in around 840 microseconds to its boost clocks, whilst on the new power plan in this data-set took it a longer 17.5 milliseconds.

The new behaviour thus should make the CPU ramp-up much less susceptible to smaller transient loads. The new boost duration is still very much adequate and extremely fast – sustained CPU workloads will see largely imperceptible difference, while intermittent workloads such as games also won’t be affected as once the CPU gets over the initial base frequency ramp threshold it maintains the sub-1ms frequency change behaviour.

AMD has also addressed concerns about the reported high temperatures of the chip. The company explains that generally the value that most applications are reading out is the maximum of several sensors on the chip. Essentially this acts as the junction temperature of the chip – whilst most of the die would actually be a different/lower temperature.

A new version of Ryzen Master now includes a different temperature readout algorithm that is meant to better represent the “overall” temperature of the die rather than the absolute maximum a sensor reports. AMD says this is a better representation of the temperature of the CPU. Besides averaging across different sensors, it also averages readouts over a small time-window. In my testing the most affected scenarios are idle and low-load scenarios and the new temperature behaviour isn’t nearly as erratic and spiky.

Apple is being surprisingly open about the iPhone you should buy, and it’s not the iPhone 11. Moreover, this just confirmed it.

In a new report attained by MacRumors, famed Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo has confirmed that Apple will now upgrade all three of its 2020 iPhones to 5G. Kuo previously revealed that Apple planned to only upgrade its two premium iPhones to the next-gen standard, but that changed after it acquired Intel’s smartphone modem business. And that’s just the start.

Kuo also explains that all three 2020 iPhones will support 5G with mmWave and sub-6GHz spectrum. The former enables cutting edge 5G speeds but only covers a short distance, while the latter still outpaces 4G but sacrifices some speed to cover wide areas – a key factor for rural and suburban coverage. In contrast, a number of Android rivals are expected to only support sub-6GHz 5G.

Interestingly, Kuo also notes that Apple is investigating a sub-6GHz 5G iPhone at a lower price point, but he says it remains uncertain whether the company has the resources to develop four new iPhones simultaneously.

Interestingly, despite Apple’s modem acquisition (and Intel’s willingness to divulge the product roadmaps), Apple is still expected to make use of its April deal with Qualcomm to supply 5G modems in 2020. This is because Apple will not yet have the scale to cater for its own demand next year but, quite brilliantly, it is the Qualcomm deal which facilitated the Intel sale and now Apple has autonomy long term. This is exactly the kind of supply chain mastery Tim Cook specialises in.

And the reasons to wait for a 2020 iPhone don’t stop there. While the iPhone 11 will be more of the same, Apple is completely redesigning (and resizing) the iPhone range next year, upgrading the displays and giving them the all-new camera tech it pulled from the iPhone 11 at the last minute. Touch ID may also make a comeback.

For those who still think the iPhone 11 will be enough for them (and it has some compelling features), there’s also another factor to consider. Kuo states that Apple’s primary motivation to push all 2020 iPhones to 5G is because customers will deem it essential, so trying to sell your 4G iPhone 11 in a few years time is highly unlikely to give you the great trade-in prices normally associated with iPhones.

So yes, there has never been a better time to delay an iPhone upgrade. The choice, as always, is yours but if you do buy an iPhone 11 I suspect you’ll eventually regret it.