New Gadgets

Intel's nascent effort to build chips for other companies, called Intel Foundry Services, won over a major customer, Taiwan-based MediaTek.
By helping Intel's efforts to reclaim its chipmaking leadership and expand processor manufacturing in the US, MediaTek's business could make Intel and the country more competitive.

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It’s been a long and winding road for Intel’s return to the discrete GPU market. It seems like it was first announced in a different era, and since then a lot has changed. Along the way Intel has run into several delays, generating confusion about what was launching, and when. The mist seems to be clearing though, and Intel has now stated its high performance GPUs are launching soon. Or at the very least, they will be in reviewers’ hands in the near future.As a refresher, Intel stated in May that the Arc GPU launch would be delayed to “later this summer.” It announced it was doing a “staggered” launch that would start in China, then eventually make its way to the US. Six weeks later, the first Arc GPU launched, again, in China. However, in addition to the staggered launch it became clear Intel was also starting at the bottom of the stack, then working its way up to the top cards.

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Nvidia has been tinkering with cloud gaming longer than just about anyone, but its GeForce Now service is often overlooked in the era of Xbox Cloud Gaming and Stadia. If you’ve already got a library of games, GeForce Now could be the best way to stream them, particularly now that it supports higher frame rates and smoother gameplay on Android phones. Nvidia has announced that all Android phones with 120 Hz screens can now stream at 120 FPS.

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Facebook's parent company Meta on Wednesday reported a revenue drop for the first time in its history as ad sales shrank amid growing economic concerns. The social media giant also missed earnings expectations for the second quarter.

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It’s the PC vs. Mac war all over again, but this time it’s Meta vs. Apple. At least, that’s what’s about to unfold according to Mark Zuckerberg. In a recent all-hands meeting, the Meta CEO stated the coming battle for control over the metaverse will be not just between it and Apple. It will also be a philosophical battle pitting open standards against Apple’s locked-down, walled garden. If that sounds familiar, it’s almost the exact same battle that played out decades ago between Apple and Microsoft. Apple wanted to control both the hardware and software for Mac, while Microsoft took the opposite approach. It let other companies design hardware for its software, and it ultimately won that battle. Now it appears a similar showdown of ideas will occur in the metaverse.

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Sony is sweating as multiple countries’ antitrust watchdogs inspect Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard. Just this weekend, Sony’s official responses to Brazil’s probe became public—and it’s clear the company is worried about one intellectual property in particular.Idas, a member of the online video game forum ResetEra, found Sunday that Brazil is legally required to keep its regulatory reviews accessible to the public. Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (known locally as CADE) requested comments from various major tech companies about the acquisition, including Ubisoft, Riot Games, Google, Apple, and Sony. According to Idas—who claims to be a tenured IT lawyer and native Spanish speaker—the former companies are largely unconcerned about the merger. Sony, however, feels differently.
Call of Duty, which currently has about 100 million players across several different platforms, might “influence users’ console choice” if acquired by Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony told the CADE. Right now gamers can play Call of Duty on PlayStation systems 2 through 5, meaning the popular franchise doesn’t (yet) act as an ultimatum for those who feel they must dedicate themselves to a single console. If Microsoft acquires Activision, however, it could easily put an end to the franchise’s availability on PlayStation, along with other fan favorites like Diablo and Starcraft.

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Samsung’s 2022 lineup of TVs and monitors got a gaming upgrade in June with the addition of Stadia, GeForce Now, and Xbox Cloud Gaming support. At the time, Samsung said its new Gaming Hub would get support for Amazon Luna in the future, and the wait was shorter than expected. As promised, Luna is now available on compatible Samsung smart TVs.

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For many people, the iPhone has become a storage hub for everything from photo libraries to music collections, books, games and much more. But that also means it can be easy to run out of space. Even though Apple increased the iPhone's default storage from 64GB to 128GB with the iPhone 13, that might not be enough for everyone.
The best way to save local storage is to invest in a cloud storage service like Apple's iCloud, Google Drive, Box or Dropbox to offload some of your files. But there are also certain settings you can change to make sure you're using your iPhone's storage capacity to its fullest. When iOS 16 launches, your iPhone will also be able to detect duplicate photos, which should make it easier to keep your image library lean and organized.
See below to learn more about how to free up storage space on your iPhone.

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Windows 11 offers users a number of ways to customize their desktops. Perhaps the most notable customization option is the noble widget, which can do anything from displaying the weather and the user’s calendar to cycling through photos or conveniently converting international currencies. Soon, there will be a new widget on the block: a Game Pass carousel that shows off the latest titles to join Microsoft’s subscription service.Microsoft announced earlier this week that it was introducing a Game Pass widget to the Dev Channel. The widget will display new additions to Game Pass as well as warn users when titles are about to leave the service. It will also highlight games from certain categories. Although Microsoft didn’t specify whether these highlights would feature categories the user is known to purchase from (versus periodically highlighting various categories of Microsoft’s own choosing), the company did say later on in its announcement that it was excited to offer “personalized recommendations” of games it believes users will love, so it could very well be the former.

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Netflix may have big hits like Stranger Things and Squid Game, but it’s seeing its first subscriber losses in its history. One of the ways Netflix hopes to staunch the bleeding is with a cache of mobile games accessible only to Netflix subscribers. However, app tracking data shows that under one percent of Netflix subscribers are playing those games.

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