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Crash detection debuted as one of a handful of new features on the iPhone 14 family and new Apple Watches in September. The feature utilizes an improved gyroscope, a new g-force accelerometer, microphones, GPS, barometer and an advanced algorithm to detect if you’ve been in a crash and automatically notify emergency services and your emergency contacts. If you are unconscious, your device will play an audio message for 911 and supply them with your latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates....

Considering its prideful demonstration, we have little doubt that Kingston worked overtime to milk every ounce of performance it could out of the SandForce SF-2281 controller. More importantly, that speed and stability remains after regular usage in my primary PC over the last few weeks. Kingston’s drive hasn’t skipped a beat in that time frame. Unfortunately, as with its competitors, the HyperX isn’t priced low enough to consider it a mainstream solution....

Apple MacBook Pro Apple has brought their popular MacBook Pro notebooks up to date with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors, including quad-core CPUs in the more expensive 15- and 17-inch models. Perhaps the most significant addition is the introduction of Intel’s Light Peak high-speed interface, which has been renamed Thunderbolt, doubles as a DisplayPort connector, and boasts 10Gbit/s bi-directional bandwidth. Graphics are powered by Intel’s integrated HD 3000 processor on the 13-inch model and AMD Radeon HD 6490M (256MB) or HD 6750M (1GB) on the 15 and 17-inchers....

The typical thin and light sports either a 12- or 13-inch display, Intel’s Core i3 and i5 processors, 2GB to 4GB of RAM, and 160 to 320GB of storage. Dropping an optical drive for the sake of portability and using a low-voltage processor variant alongside a long-lasting battery is also a popular trend in this category but not necessarily the norm. Sony Vaio Z Series At just over three pounds, the Sony Vaio Z packs some seriously beefy specs into the same beautifully designed form factor that has characterized this series....

The technology industry is now a massive part of the economy and it’s constantly on the lookout for new talent. For as long as we can remember, TechSpot has been a target of job sites and recruiters looking for tech talent. Today we are launching TechSpot Jobs, a new effort to help our community of IT and technology professionals connect more effectively with companies looking to fill positions in your areas of expertise....

We’re now only days away from the planned release date for AMD’s refreshed RDNA 2 graphics cards, and there’s no shortage of leaks about the gaming performance and recommended pricing of the new models. According to a report from Videocardz, the MSRPs of the RX 6x50 XT cards won’t be as exaggerated as previously expected. For instance, the flagship RX 6950 XT will have a manufacturer suggested price of $1,099, only $100 more than the RX 6900 XT....

Advanced new processors, additional connectivity ports, enhanced cameras and other internal improvements are clearly important as well, but in an era when so many products are starting to look the same, an intriguing new design of a popular device is bound to get a lot of attention. Thus it’s not a big surprise that the unveiling of both a Lenovo-branded notebook PC design and a Motorola branded smartphone with extendable displays at last week’s Lenovo Tech World 2022 event got a great deal of coverage....

I mention those two units as a transition to what we have for review today, the new ThinkPad X1. As the thinnest ThinkPad ever, the X1 seemingly takes the best features from the X220 and the U260 and merges them into one. The result is an extremely thin and sleek 13.4" notebook that is a real follow-up model to the X300 series that many came to own and love a couple of years ago....

Lexus has other ideas. The luxury division of Japanese automaker Toyota is reportedly developing a “manual transmission” that could one day be used in electric cars. As Evo Magazine recently highlighted, the system would use a virtual clutch pedal and gear shifter that aren’t actually connected to any sort of transmission. Instead, local haptics combined with software and artificial sound pumped inside the cabin would mimic the experience, right down to the electric motors’ torque delivery....

The curve is achieved through LG’s plastic OLED technology, which can also be used for flexible displays. Like many OLEDs of this resolution, a PenTile subpixel matrix is being used, although you’ll be hard pressed to notice the effects. I did notice, however, subtle graininess in the display’s picture, not caused by the display itself, but by one of the layers between the display and the outside world. Although the graininess is hard to spot unless you look closely, and doesn’t hugely affect picture quality, it’s not something I’ve seen on smartphone displays before....

The basics to this LG monitor include a 32-inch 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) IPS panel with a refresh rate up to 160Hz through an overclocking feature in the OSD. It includes the usual adaptive sync features including G-Sync Compatible and FreeSync Premium Pro branding, plus it’s also been HDR certified with DisplayHDR 1000. However, the actual HDR hardware is relatively weak, with just 32 edge lit dimming zones....

Such users often deal with massive amounts of highly valuable data on a day-to-day basis. Complicating matters further, all that data needs to be backed up around the clock, which is generally achieved through some form of RAID mirroring. Therefore, while having 20 hard drives in a desktop PC may seem extreme, in actuality, professionals would likely only be using 10 drives with the other 10 as mirrored backups....

With the empty cases on the work bench, we picked up all the hardware that would eventually end up inside. The list was as follows: Thermaltake Toughpower XT 850w power supply, Asus M3A78-T motherboard, 4GB (2x2GB) Kingston memory, AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor with the ThermoLab Baram cooler, Asus GeForce GTX 260 Matrix graphics card, Western Digital Black 500GB hard drives in RAID0, and a Samsung DVD-RW....

We immediately spotted another improvement the PC-Q25 has over the PC-Q08: it gets a separate motherboard tray instead of forcing the right panel to pull double duty. This allows you to easily remove the right side door without having to dismantle half the system first. The tray itself is fairly basic and supports Mini-ITX as well as Mini-DTX motherboards. The case floor has a removable adapter capable of supporting an additional three 2....

Retrofitting an existing home with all of these nifty new IoT gadgets, as you can imagine, isn’t exactly cheap. A Nest Learning Thermostat, for example, will run you $250 while connected appliances such as a refrigerator can set you back upwards of $3,000. Amenities like being able to remotely adjust the temperature inside your home or receiving a text when the laundry is done certainly sound appealing, but are they really all they’re cracked up to be?...

China has been hit hard by the latest wave of Covid-19. The country’s strict anti-pandemic policies and the increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant have resulted in several Chinese cities getting locked down, in turn affecting supply chains. Apple is the latest victim of these lockdowns as the production of their MacBook Pro 14 and 16 laptops can’t keep up with demand. Quanta Computer, reportedly the sole manufacturer of said notebooks, has been suffering from production levels as low as five percent of capacity at its Shanghai factory in the past few months....

Microsoft’s refresh of OneNote starts this week for current channel users, primarily with smart pen dictation improvements. OneNote can now make pixel-perfect versions of shapes users try to draw with Windows Ink. Handwriting can now convert into text of the right font size, and a digital ruler can help users draw straight lines. OneNote can also now automatically sort pages by name and date. Users can still manually sort, and the app will remember their choices....

Microsoft has teamed up with Paramount Pictures to give away a custom Xbox console and a pair of very unusual controllers. The promotion offers participants the opportunity to take home a custom black Xbox Series S featuring a golden ring above an embossed Sonic the Hedgehog 2 logo. It also comes with a set of matching Sonic Blue and Knuckles Red Xbox wireless controllers with “textured coatings reminiscent of the “bristly” texture of hedgehogs in the wild....

Metacritic ranks its list of top publishers using several criteria: the average Metascore for all games released that year, the percentage of scored products with Good reviews (a score of at least 75), the percentage of scored products with Bad reviews (49 or lower), and the number of titles that fall into the Great category (90 or higher with a minimum of 7 reviews). Xbox Game Studios released five games across last year, though it had 10 Metacritic entries due to the different platforms they were released on....

The board features two DIMM slots, a single PCIe x16 slot, four SATA ports, eSATA, USB 3.0, 8-channel audio, Gigabit LAN… and that’s about it, except for Z68 features such as Intel’s Smart Response Technology. Still, virtually all of its features are standard across Z68 products. The DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel memory at 1066/1333/1600MHz, while 1866MHz and 2133MHz are supported when overclocking. Although it’s more likely that you’ll only want 4GB or 8GB of memory, the board can handle up to 16GB (two 8GB modules) if desired....