The wait for 5G is almost nearly over. But if you want to live in this speedy new world, you're going to have to pay for it. Verizon on Thursday announced that the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G is available for preorder for delivery May 16 starting at $1,300 for 256GB of storage or $1400 for 256GB of storage.
The pricing is remarkably expensive and tops the iPhone XS Max and Samsung's own Galaxy S10+. The S10 5G comes in either silver or black, the latter of which you can only get through Verizon stores.
For now, in fact, the only place to buy the S10 5G in any color is at a Verizon store. It's not clear how long the exclusivity lasts, but AT&T and Sprint have already signaled that they will have the phone in the first half of 2019 as well.
You expect every laptop to have Wi-Fi and some kind of USB. What you probably don't expect is battling specs that will make it difficult to know what sort of wireless and USB you have. We'll sort it out for you here: What Wi-Fi 5 and USB 3.2 mean, and why they're the same thing as good ol' 802.11ac and USB 3.1.
Confused? That's okay. You're just the latest victim of a major rebranding of both Wi-Fi and USB. With the release of major performance updates to both specs, both have also received extreme makeovers. The good news is it's actually easy to understand.
Wi-Fi 6: This is the newest standard and has the shiny good stuff, like up to 3.5Gbps of speed, plus power savings and less network congestion (read our sibling site Macworld's primer for more details). We'll point out that you will also need a new router that supports Wi-Fi 6 to realize its full potential. If you care about Wi-Fi and intend to run the latest gear, you'll want to make sure it is Wi-Fi 6-complaint.
Oh HP Spectre x360 13, you're such an overachiever. While others in your class just phone it in year-after-year, you're always trying to improve yourself.
This year, you've really gone over the top. Besides a major body redesign with sculpted "diamond-cut" angles, you're also packing Intel's latest Whiskey Lake CPU and a 1-watt panel that just slays in the battery department. We won't even bring up all the other goodness that you've pioneered: pen support, convertible design, biometric cameras, and awesome bang for the buck.
So while others are content with a new color swath or LED change, the Spectre x360 13 (2019 model) still manages to impress. Of course no laptop is flawless, but this new model still managers to improve upon the really nice one it replaces.
Picking a gaming laptop is a lot more fun today than it was five years ago, when a "real" gaming laptop meant 12 pounds of back-breaking hardware to haul around. Check out our top picks immediately below, and keep reading to catch up on the latest news and reviews.
Keyboard choice can be very subjective. That said, we've based our reviews on hours spent with each model, banging away on work projects or surfing the web and keeping up on social media.
The laptop world is a-changing. New CPUs and GPUs—yes, mobile discrete GPUs—are bringing forth laptops that are thinner, lighter, and faster than ever, even gaming laptops. And the advances keep coming: After a busy round of CES announcements in January, Intel and Nvidia have welcomed spring with yet another round of products: the 9th generation of Core mobile processors, and mobile GeForce GTX 1650 and 1660 Ti graphics. Acer, Asus, Dell, Razer, and more companies are jumping on this bandwagon, so stay tuned for new models we bring in for review.
Configure your new PC to the $599+ price point and apply code BMSM60 to save $60. Or configure to $1,299+ and use code BMSM150 to save $150. Configure to $1,999+ and use code BMSM350 for a whopping $350 off your new PC. Click the codes just mentioned to learn more, or click right here to review available models, specs, and configurations.
Grammy Award-winning Childish Gambino isn't done collaborating with Google. Following his groovy Playground Playmoji released alongside the Pixel 3, Donald Glover's alter ego is back with Pharos, a brand new augmented reality app built using Google's ARCore platform, and it's quite a trip.
When you launch the app, you'll be prompted to plug in headphones, but they're not necessary for the experience. You'll then be instructed to scan the floor of the room you're in and then pinpoint an empty space. That will create a door that lets you literally step out of your reality and into Gambino's universe, which is where things get really weird.
A bug in Microsoft's Windows 10 is blocking users from upgrading to the May 2019 Update, for PCs that have either an SD card or USB device connected during the process.
Microsoft's May 2019 Update currently exists in a sort of limbo. It's available to Windows Insiders, but hasn't reached official "release" status. This bug is easily fixed: Simply remove the SD card and/or USB storage, then proceed through the upgrade as usual via Windows Update.
Microsoft has said it expects to fix the bug in an upcoming servicing release of Windows 10, and it has about a month to do so, before the May 2019 Update is finally pushed to the PC ecosystem at large.
Robot cleaners aren't limited to the Jetsons and the Robinsons anymore, but they're definitely a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario. But today you can get a great one for hundreds of dollars less than its asking price: Best Buy is selling the Neato Botvac D4 Connected vacuum for $300Remove non-product link, down from a list price of $530 and the lowest prices we've seen by a wide margin.
Google I/O is just around the corner, and this year is promising more than just new Assistant voices and Android features. According to a flurry of leaks, Google is finally going to release a cheaper version of the Pixel, appropriately called the Pixel 3a and 3a XL.
Courtesy of serial leaker Evan Blass, we have our first official look at the smaller of the two phones, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. Google has never blown us away with its design, and the Pixel 3a is very much a vanilla-looking handset. Like the Pixel 2, there are giant bezels around screen with lots of dead space above and below it, and the back has the same trademark two-tone design sporting a single camera and a fingerprint sensor.
If you're a gamer in the market for a great deal on a new monitor, you're probably looking for three things: 4K, HDR, and FreeSync. Well, your search is over. Newegg is selling the 27-inch LG 27BK85U-W display for $420 with the checkout code EMCTYVY22Remove non-product link, the lowest price we've ever seen and more than a thousand dollars off its original retail price.
In the previous episode of Last Cam Standing we saw the iPhone XS' camera win its second straight victory over Huawei, Xiaomi, and Sony. In this matchup, Samsung steps into the ring with its S10+, Nokia pushes boundaries with the Nokia 9 Pureview, and Google's Pixel 3 is back for a rematch. Let's start this epic photo fight!
Last Cam Standing is PCWorld's video series that determines the best phone camera for still images in a King-of-the-hill style battle. Whichever phone wins moves on to face the next contender—so subscribe to PCWorld's YouTube for future shootouts!
Almost any PowerPoint presentation would benefit from clever animation. And, lucky for us, the Internet has an endless supply of animated templates that you can download for free (or for a nominal fee) and customize to your company's specific needs. Just search on "free animated PowerPoint presentations," and stand back for the avalanche of results.
However, if you're a great artist (or even a rookie) and fancy a challenge, study the templates for ideas, then create your own animated slideshow. For a refresher course on PowerPoint animations, see these articles: PowerPoint tips from Duarte's Five Rules Presentation and How to create Motion Paths in PowerPoint.
There are few things as annoying as Wi-Fi dead spots, but a satellite-based router system can help put those frustrations to rest. Today, you can grab the Orbi whole-home plug-in Wi-Fi system with two satellites for just $200Remove non-product link, $100 off its list price and just one cent away from its all-time low.
The Razer Blade Pro 17 is one of the first laptops out of the gate with two shiny new parts: Intel's 9th-gen Core i7 mobile chip, with 6 cores and 12 threads of processing goodness; and Nvidia's RTX 2080 with Max-Q. Further improvements include a trimmer overall package, narrow bezels, and connectivity to spare. Prices start at $2,499, and product will start shipping in May.
The Razer Blade Pro 17 was long overdue for a refresh, and almost everything is new—and more compact. The chassis is 25 percent smaller than the predecessor in overall volume, and about 20 percent lighter at 6 pounds, compared to 7.4 pounds for the prior model. The bezels are 6mm thin and surround the sole display option, a 1080p/144Hz non-GSync panel.
Gamers on a strict budget can finally get a taste of the improvements found in Nvidia's Turing GPU architecture. On Tuesday, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 1650, a $150 graphics card built to slip easily into pre-existing PCs and start playing 1080p games with minimal fuss. It joins the more powerful GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti in the current GTX 16-series lineup.
Like those cards, the GeForce GTX 1650 will be available only in custom designs by Nvidia's board partners—there won't be a Founders Edition version. But unlike its cousins, the GeForce GTX 1650 will be available in some boards that consume a mere 75 watts of power, avoiding the need for a supplemental power connector from your power supply. That unique capability helped make its predecessors, the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, such popular gaming options. Graphics cards that don't need extra power connectors can turn even cheap prebuilt PCs into proper gaming rigs.
Intel debuted six new 9th-gen mobile H-series Core chips on Tuesday—with its fastest, the Core i9-9980HK, soaring to a new high-water mark: 8 cores, 16 threads, and a whopping 5GHz clock speed, after boost. After launching its 9th-generation Core chips for desktop PCs last October, Intel has now brought that same capability to notebooks. Intel executives said systems based upon the 9th-gen chips are expected to debut shortly.
All the chips are based on the "Coffee Lake Refresh" (Coffee Lake-R) architecture, and all are fabricated on a 14nm process. Last year's 8th-gen mobile Core chips topped out at 4.8GHz, and offered only 6 cores.