Notebooks, Tablets, Smartphones, Wearables And Gadgets
In-depth product reviews and news of notebooks, tablets, smartphones, wearable technologies and gadgets. We're now living in a contextually-aware computing world and mobile devices can not only help us enjoy the ride but create and capture new experiences as well.
Asus is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand this year. The manufacturer launched its ROG line in 2006 and has since developed a wide range of gaming products under the brand, including some monstrous gaming notebooks like the one we'll be showing you here. With the arrival of NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture...
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Although they were initially announced all the way back at Computex, ASUS held a casual event in NYC this past Wednesday (Oct. 5) to officially launch an array of new products, including the ZenBook 3, ZenWatch 3, ZenPhone 3, and Transformer Pro 3 and Mini. We’ve got some initial coverage of all of those products here at HotHardware if you’d...
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ASUS takes gaming seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has two sub-brands dedicated to hardware for gamers. One is the Republic of Gamers (ROG), a brand ASUS created in 2006 to designate products that deliver "innovative hardcore PC performance," and the other is Strix, a more recent creation that's taken from the ancient Roman and Greek...
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There's a first time for everything, as the saying goes, and the Alienware 13 OLED is a first for us without question. Though there were a couple of OLED (Organic LED) display driven laptops at CES 2016 this year, Dell's Alienware division is the first in the door here at HotHardware with a retail ready product. OLED displays offer better...
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Update: 6/25/16 - Check out our full review and deep dive of the Alienware 13 OLED right here.
Dell's Alienware 13 gaming notebook has been a favorite among gamers on the go and power users that want a little more horsepower in a light, 13-inch machine. However, over the past couple of years, the Alienware team...
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Earlier this month, we told you a bit about the next generation 64-bit ARM v8-A mobile processor core, codenamed Artemis. Artemis is built using TSMC’s 10nm FinFET process technology and promises some pretty sizable performance and efficiency gains over the Cortex-A72, which is built using a 16nm FinFET process...
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ARM has been working closely with TSMC – the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company – for a number of years now. Over the last six years or so especially, ARM and TSMC have collaborated to ensure that the latter’s cutting-edge process technologies work well with the former’s processor IP. So, with every...
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Internet privacy is kind of like a VCR or CD player, in that one day our kids will ask us “you used to have that?” It’s staggering how much of our online activity is tracked, catalogued, and used for a wide array of purposes, most of them related to commerce. But if you’re a dissident, journalist, someone who lives in...
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Amazon’s current generation of Fire tablets offer something for everyone, from the budget-conscious user who wants a super-cheap $50 tablet, to the consumer who’s willing to spend more in exchange for a larger format device with all the bells and whistles. Today, we’re going to take a look at Amazon’s Fire HD 10...
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At a glance, you may assume the phone we're testing here is one you've seen before -- a Nokia Lumia 1020 clone perhaps? Despite having a similar circular camera fixture on the handset's back side, suggesting a strong focus on photography, this is actually a newly released phone produced by ASUS. The ASUS ZenFone Zoom...
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When ASUS released the ZenFone 2 Laser, the company’s goal was to offer a premium smartphone experience with strong camera performance at an affordable price. On the surface the ZenFone 2 Laser has many of the key features of a premium phone, including an octa-core SoC with Adreno graphics, dual active SIM...
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We had good things to say about Asus’ super-slim ZenBook UX305 when we evaluated it early last year. Attractive, sturdy, and downright tiny, the UX305 was a good value for the price, and it had good looks too. A year later, the ZenBook is back with the updated UX305CA, so we got one in to see if the newer version is...
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Though it still hasn't grabbed consumers like some manufacturers had hoped, the smartwatch market is growing rather quickly, and a number of good options are currently available. For some users, price may be one of the key factors holding them back from buying a smartwatch. While many watches cost at least $250, and...
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You could hear the collective groan from the enthusiast community when Dell announced it had purchased Alienware, in what now feels like 100 years ago. It's actually been just shy of a decade since Dell took ownership, and rather than let the Alienware brand wither into irrelevance like some other boutique vendors that were later absorbed...
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Periodically, Amazon updates and revamps its lineup of tablets with upgraded models and new names. While the company's tablets have kept the Fire branding over the years, the combination of letters and numbers that follow have changed. This year, for example, Amazon removed the HDX tag and now offers tablets with simply “Fire” or “Fire HD”...
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New processor architectures inevitably lead to a flurry of refreshed product lines from PC makers. That's how things have been playing out with Skylake, a "tock" in Intel's tick-tock design cadence and its 6th generation Core processor family. As usual, ASUS is on the bleeding edge with new Skylake systems ready to...
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You don't need a crystal ball to figure out Apple will release a new iPhone handset every year. It's been doing it since the original came out in 2007, and starting with the iPhone 3G, Apple's naming convention has consisted of introducing a new model number every two years, with "s" variants in between. There was the iPhone 3GS in 2009, iPhone...
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Competing with Apple in the mobile space isn't rocket science, it's just a matter of sticking to a proven formula for success -- build a premium device with superior specs than the one Apple is selling, inject it with Android, and then undercut the iWhatever in price. That's not to say Apple is the only premium slate...
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Laptops are mostly static devices. What we mean by that is, for the vast majority of laptops, what you get at the time of purchase is what you get, and that's that. Unlike a desktop system, in which each individual component is upgradeable without too much fuss, only certain parts of a laptop are user replaceable, at least without some serious...
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Love it or hate it, Apple's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines have remained a watermark for which the majority of notebook manufacturers aspire to, whether it's enthusiast gaming companies like Razer with their Blade, or mainstream vendors like Dell via their outstanding XPS 13. Enter Asus. They've utilized their ZenBook line to...
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In November, Amazon announced the latest addition to its hardware line-up, the Amazon Echo. The Echo smart speaker doubles as a digital assistant and home entertainment device. It’s an always-connected, always-available Siri or Cortana-like device designed for your home that can provide answers to common questions...
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We've got a fairly well defined set of expectations from today's ultrabooks. What you trade away in performance, you usually gain in convenience with these ultra-light, ultra-portable, and easy to carry laptops. We wouldn't make an ultrabook our primary gaming system or video-encoding cruncher, for example, but we...
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