Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2019 in PCWorld

High-end audio lovers finally got the attention they craved when Creative Labs showed off its upcoming $300 Sound BlasterX AE-9 sound card. Aimed at a more discriminating class of audio listeners, the AE-9 features such audiophile features as replaceable operational amplifiers, or opamps, to tune the flavor of sound from the card. Following the introduction of the gaming-focused Sound BlasterX AE-5 and Sound BlasterX AE-5 Pure last year, the AE-9 kicks it up a notch or two. Although still based on the same Sound Core 3D chip as the AE-5 and AE-5 Pure, the AE-9 jettisons the on-chip digital analog converter, or DAC, in favor of an external DAC. The premise being that a high-end DAC will make the sound even more pristine. Creative officials said the card is rated at a…

When the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti launched with a sky-high $1,000 theoretical price tag and $1,200-plus actual price tag, some people speculated that it simply took the place of the Titan at the top of Nvidia’s graphics card lineup. Nope. Recently, Nvidia revealed the Titan RTX, a $2,499 behemoth that the company also calls “T-Rex.” It’s certainly monstrous enough. Like its Titan V predecessor, the Titan RTX returns to the Titan’s roots as a prosumer card, with a focus on AI, data science, and content creation tasks. Nvidia’s flagship TU102 GPU packs 72 dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing and 576 tensor cores so beloved by machine learning tasks. That’s identical to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti’s loadout. While Nvidia’s announcement didn’t specify the Titan RTX’s CUDA core count, an…

Microsoft is overhauling its struggling Edge browser in pretty much every way over the next year. The proprietary EdgeHTML engine underpinning the browser will be abandoned in favor of the Chromium code used by Google’s Chrome and several other browsers. After the shift, Microsoft plans to end Edge’s Windows 10 desktop exclusivity by bringing it to Macs and older versions of Windows. How Chrome-like will Microsoft’s version of Chromium be? Enough that Chrome extensions will run on top of it, Microsoft Edge project manager Kyle Alden recently wrote on Reddit. Existing Progressive Web Apps (web apps that feel like Win32 apps) will continue to run and be downloadable from the Microsoft Store, he added. “People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all websites, while…

The new iPhone XR might not be a flagship, but it’s really good. So good, in fact, that I called it Apple’s best iPhone ever in my review—not because of its specs (which are technically inferior to those of the XS and XS Max) but because of its value proposition. That’s pitting it against other, pricier iPhones, though. I wanted to see how the iPhone XR would fare against three of Android’s best phones: the Galaxy Note 9, Pixel 3 XL, and OnePlus 6T. We’ll walk through all the major factors we review in a phone, discussing each phone’s pros and cons and picking a winner.   DISPLAY Ask any screen geek about the difference between the iPhone XR’s LCD and an AMOLED screen, and they’ll tell you that there’s…

Reviewing the Pixel Slate was like reviewing two devices. Out of the box, it’s something of a high-end Android tablet running full-screen Play Store apps and a touch-friendly interface. But when you attach it to the Pixel Slate Keyboard, it transforms into a premium Chromebook, with a large multitouch trackpad and PC-like multitasking. The Pixel Slate appears to be a dream 2-in-1, the rare hybrid device that truly conforms to your immediate needs. Where the iPad Pro and various convertible PCs fail to consider the jarring interface changes when switching from a touch-based UI to a keyboard-based UI, Google has designed Chrome OS’s new hybrid interface specifically with the Pixel Slate in mind. Google understands that you’ll use your Chromebook differently as a tablet than you would as a laptop.…

As DNA tests for ancestry explode in popularity, a fundamental problem remains: The tests deliver more detailed results for people of European descent, as evidenced by the ethnicities and data that major DNA testing companies represent. While this bias should recede as more people take the tests and add their genetic data to the mix, the companies have some work to do before their kits can work reasonably well on a worldwide population. In 2017, more people took DNA tests than in all the previous years combined, according to the MIT Technology Review, and that number keeps climbing. According to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG), more than 18 million people have tested their DNA to learn about their ethnic identity or to find relatives. DNA testing companies…

Excel macros are like mini-programs that perform repetitive tasks, saving you a lot of time and typing. For example, it takes Excel less than one-tenth of a second to calculate an entire, massive spreadsheet. Manual operations slow you down, so instead use macros to combine all of these chores into a single one-second transaction. EXCEL MACROS: TIPS FOR GETTING STARTED We’re going to show you how to write your first macro. Once you see how easy it is to automate tasks using macros, you’ll never go back. First, some tips on how to prepare your data for macros: • Always begin your macro at the Home position (use the key combination Ctrl+Home to get there quickly). • Use the directional keys to navigate: Up, Down, Right, Left, End, Home, etc.,…

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx is the chip the company hopes will scale the performance mountain, reaching the heights that competing Intel Core chips have already surmounted. After trying it at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, we can say it seems promising. As we learned, the Snapdragon 8cx was designed as a ground-up, optimized design specifically for laptops. Its mission is to achieve performance comparable to that of an Intel U-series Core i5 chip. Qualcomm supplied a limited number of Snapdragon 8cx reference notebooks at the event, all running Windows 10 Pro. We tried to navigate to one of the web-based benchmarks we’ve used to test previous Snapdragon PCs, but we were told that benchmarking wasn’t allowed. In part, that’s because the clock speeds of the chip haven’t been formally determined.…

So how fast is 5G, anyway? About as fast as a premium-tier cable modem, according to a live test performed by Qualcomm, Motorola, and Verizon. All three companies showed off the technology at the Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, demoing a prototype 5G device on a prototype 5G network. (The entire first day of the summit was devoted to 5G.) According to the test, the modem transferred a gigabyte’s worth of data in 17 seconds. That’s 0.0588 GBps, or about 470 Mbps. That’s pretty damn fast. Want to see it for yourself? Watch the demo. Unfortunately, you have to take this demo with a fairly large grain of salt. And you have to ask some important questions: Who owns the network? What device are you using for downloads? How far…

If you’ve been following along with the Galaxy S10 rumors, then you know Samsung is planning something very different for its 2019 flagship: A display with a hole in the front rather than a notch. And we may have just gotten our first look at it. Samsung has taken the wraps off the Galaxy A8s, a midrange China-only phone that’s likely to cost hundreds of dollars less than the Galaxy S10. However, the two phones might not look too much different: the A8s is the first phone to feature Samsung’s new Infinity-O display, a near–edge-to-edge screen that has a small hole in the right corner for the selfie camera, rather than a notch. At 6.4 inches, it has a bigger screen than the 6.2-inch Galaxy S9+ but without the bulk of…

AMD’s Radeon RX 590 is the best 1080p graphics card you can buy, and at $280, it won’t break the bank. But the Sapphire Radeon RX 590 Nitro+ we’re reviewing today proves it’s even better than we originally thought. The card draws an immense amount of power, and the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy that AMD sent U.S. reviewers ran hot despite coming equipped with a massive triple-slot cooler. Pushing AMD’s Polaris architecture so far—this is the same GPU’s third incarnation, after the Radeon RX 480 and 580—requires heavy metal, we concluded at the time. While that’s still true, Sapphire’s graphics card shows that the Radeon RX 590 doesn’t have to be gargantuan. The bright blue Sapphire Radeon RX 590 Nitro+ ($280 on Newegg) comes loaded with features. Even more impressively,…

OnePlus sure knows how to make an entrance. Arriving at the tail end of a jam-packed Android season that included nothing less than the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, LG V40 ThinQ, Google Pixel 3, and the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, the OnePlus 6T could have easily been a victim of flagship fatigue. But OnePlus took a different tack with the 6T. Rather than try to garner attention with over-the-top features or specs, it elevated the phone by delivering the one thing fans have been hoping for since the OnePlus One: U.S. carrier support. The 6T marks the first OnePlus phone to be sold at T-Mobile stores, so the 6T actually has a chance to steal sales from its premium peers. And it probably will. The 6T continues OnePlus’s breakneck pace…

It’s been a couple of months since a major company unveiled a data breach that affected millions of people, so it’s time for a new one. The Marriott hotel chain has announced a major database breach that could affect anyone who stayed at its 6,700 worldwide Starwood hotel properties since 2014—up to 500 million people in total. That’s a lot of people and a long stretch of time, so check out our FAQ: WHAT HAPPENED? Marriott says it received an alert from an internal security tool on September 8 warning of an attempt to access the Starwood guest reservation database in the United States. In its investigation of the incident, Marriott learned that an unauthorized party gained access to the company’s customer database and “copied and encrypted information, and took steps…

One year ago, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 845, the brains behind flagship smartphones like the Google Pixel 3, the U.S. version of the Samsung Galaxy S9, OnePlus phones, and others. Now, Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon 855 promises those platforms even more enhancements: dedicated logic blocks for digital assistants, revamped camera logic for computer vision, specific gaming boosts. It also gives the traditional JPEG file format the boot. According to Qualcomm executives, the goal for the Snapdragon 855 is to “unlock” AI and XR (mixed reality), with the new 5G capabilities leading the way. The company claims that it’s offering the first commercial mobile platform to support this trifecta. Qualcomm’s next-generation 855 is due to ship during the first half of 2019, meaning that phone makers will be able to design and…

Intel has published its first Modern Windows Driver for several of its modern integrated GPUs, representing a new way for graphics drivers to be pushed to your PC—and something to keep an eye on until the new driver infrastructure settles in. Modern Windows Drivers, also known as Universal Windows Drivers, are a new feature of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update that takes advantage of the UWP infrastructure within Windows 10. As Microsoft explains it, a Modern Windows Driver is a “single driver package that runs across multiple different device types, from embedded systems to tablets and desktop PCs.” The first Intel driver to take advantage of this is labeled UWD 25.20.100.6444. Microsoft doesn’t intend for you to do anything different to obtain the new Modern drivers. If you own…

We just spent a week hearing about the future of Qualcomm’s PC chips. Now it’s time to return to the present. Until the Snapdragon 8cx comes out around Q3 2019, the battle of Intel vs. Snapdragon is being played out in stores and online, with the scrappy Snapdragon 835 and 850 facing a small army of Intel mobile CPUs. Should you buy a laptop with a tried-and-true Intel chip, or an upstart from mobile leader Qualcomm? While it’s generally accepted that the Intel chips offer better performance, and the Snapdragon chips offer better battery life, we had a unique opportunity to dive deep into the differences when we tested two versions of HP’s Envy x2: one with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835, the other with Intel’s 7th-gen, low-power, Core i5-7Y54. Both are shipping products…

Samsung’s 860 QVO SSD is an excellent everyday performer and an outstanding bargain in its 2TB and 4TB flavors. It’s also the second quad-level cell (4-bit) SSD to pass our portals, the other being Intel’s SSD 660P. The reason I mention this competitive drive from Intel up-front is that it’s becoming clear that 4-bit NAND, while allowing greater capacity, also extracts a performance hit that vendors must work around. How well a vendor does that affects which 4-bit drive you should buy, and whether you might be better off with an MLC or TLC drive. Note: Samsung refers to the 860 QVO as 4-bit MLC. As the acronym MLC stands for “Multi-Level Cell,” this is technically correct. However, most refer to it as quad-level cell or QLC, which is what…

Another week, another massive hack. Recently it was Marriott Starwood hotels (page 105); now it’s question-and-answer website Quora’s turn. Late on a Monday night in early December, Quora revealed that “a malicious third party” gained access to its systems and swiped the account data of approximately 100 million users. That includes personally identifiable information, like your name and email address, as well as details about the actions you’ve taken on Quora itself, and data from other sites you’ve linked to your Quora account. It’s bad, and the Quora hack affects a lot of folks. Here’s everything you need to know. SO WHAT HAPPENED? Quora is still investigating, but CEO Adam D’Angelo says that “On Friday [November 30] we discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained…

OnePlus doesn’t subscribe to the once-yearly update cycle we see from most smartphone makers. Instead, it updates its hardware quickly, and adds new features with each iteration. The OnePlus 6T just launched around the world with one of the first in-display fingerprint sensors, and it’s now being sold in the U.S. via T-Mobile—a first for OnePlus, which previously sold phones unlocked, direct-to-consumer. So, you’ve got a shiny new OnePlus 6T, but how can you make the most of it? By taking advantage of the 10 features we describe here. And if you don’t yet have a 6T, make sure to read Michael Simon’s OnePlus 6T review (see page 83). 1. ONEPLUS SWITCH The OnePlus 6T has a standard Android device restore feature as part of its setup process, but you…