Wayne Williams

Huawei has taken the wraps off its Mate X7 foldable phone at a new "Unfold the Moment" event in Dubai. The new device features a slimmer profile and a hinge system designed for repeated daily use. The Mate X7 comes in a nano fiber woven-style Brocade White finish, with vegan leather versions in Nebula Red and Black also available.

Huawei has made a number of improvements to its camera system, including the addition of new Ultra Lighting HDR Camera, an Ultra-Wide Camera and a Telephoto Macro Camera, as well as second generation True to Color Camera, which promises 43 percent better color accuracy. Video can be recorded at up to 17.5 EV HDR to capture brighter highlights and more shadow detail.

As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. AI generated video is already absolutely everywhere, and you're about to start seeing a lot more of it -- this time featuring a host of well known Disney characters. The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI have agreed a new deal that brings characters from the House of Mouse’s many brands to Sora.

The partnership links Disney’s library with OpenAI’s video generation tools and gives fans new ways to create and watch short clips. If you've ever wondered how Lady and the Tramp would react to sharing a meal with Pumbaa, you'll soon be able to find out.

Generative AI is often praised for its ability to analyze data, summarize research and even propose scientific ideas, but new findings suggest its creative limits are more substantial than many of the exciting headlines imply.

Research led by Professor Amy Wenxuan Ding of emlyon business school and Professor Shibo Li of Indiana University found that while GenAI can imitate the process of science, it cannot yet produce the imaginative leaps that drive true discovery. In their study, which you can read here, a computer simulated experiment challenged ChatGPT-4 to solve a real genetics puzzle, asking it to propose hypotheses, design lab experiments and revise its thinking as results unfolded.

Two months after its invite-only debut, Opera’s experimental agentic browser, Opera Neon, is now available for anyone to download and try out. Neon is designed for people who want to work with emerging AI tools as soon as they become available.

The software has been in a closed "Founders phase" since early October, and the removal of the waitlist means anyone can now sign up to use it for $19.90 a month.

Stardock has rolled out an update for its popular Fences desktop organization tool. The program creates grouped areas on the Windows desktop for managing icons, folders, and automation rules, and version 6.20 introduces new interaction options along with fixes that address behavior in both single and multi display setups.

The update's biggest new addition is a "click to open" option for Rollup Fence groups. These groups normally expand when the mouse passes over them, occasionally leading to accidental openings. The feature can now be set to require a click instead, or have the group open only if the pointer pauses briefly over the area, offering a slower hover response.

Firewalla has announced Firewalla Orange, a portable multi-gigabit firewall and WiFi 7 router built to bring Zero Trust protection to networks in homes, offices, and travel setups. It’s the latest product in the company’s range of cybersecurity devices that includes Firewalla Purple and Firewalla Gold SE.

The new product delivers an advanced security stack that includes intrusion prevention, VqLAN microsegmentation, device isolation, GEO-IP filtering, VLAN support, and Active Protect rules that shut down threats in real time. It’s rated for more than 2Gbps of packet processing, so can support cloud services, smart home devices, and remote work activity.

Adobe has launched Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat inside ChatGPT, giving the AI platform’s 800 million weekly users direct access to its most popular creative and productivity tools.

The integration combines Adobe’s image editing knowhow with ChatGPT’s conversational interface, allowing people to edit photos, design content and transform documents simply by describing what they want to do.

Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) has announced the US retail availability of the Raikiri II Xbox Wireless controller, the company’s first Xbox certified wireless gamepad. On sale through Best Buy, it supports Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Windows PCs, and several of Asus' handheld systems including the ROG Ally and Ally X.

The controller uses tunneling magnetoresistance joysticks rather than traditional mechanical designs in order to reduce drift and improve motion accuracy and energy efficiency. It promises a 1000Hz polling rate in both wired and 2.4GHz wireless modes on PC, supported by ROG's SpeedNova wireless technology, which reduces input latency.

Cybersecurity experts are offering warnings about the year ahead, and while they come from different backgrounds and companies, their predictions all point to AI changing the nature of attacks, speeding up intrusions and forcing defenders to rethink how they work.

Most analysts expect 2026 to be the first time that AI-driven incidents outpace what the majority of teams can respond to manually, and some see the biggest changes coming from attackers who use fully autonomous systems.

Kioxia has taken the wraps of the Exceria Pro G2 SSD, a new flagship in its Exceria personal SSD range. The drive targets enthusiasts and professional users who need very high throughput from PCIe 5.0 storage, and uses the the Japanese memory maker’s BiCS Flash TLC 3D memory and an updated performance controller.

The Exceria Pro G2 reaches sequential read speeds of up to 14,900MB/s and write speeds of up to 13,700MB/s, placing it among the fastest consumer SSDs announced to date. The drive also promises solid random read and write performance, reaching up to 2.3m random read IOPS and 1.95m random write IOPS, which helps improve responsiveness when handling large projects, media assets, and modern games.

A new study from Surfshark reveals that AI powered home security cameras are gathering more information than buyers expect. The report says that these devices go far beyond routine recording. By standardizing facial recognition, they create biometric profiles that can include neighbors and passersby -- not just the people who own the cameras.

Surfshark says that many companion apps also gather personal details unrelated to security features, further raising privacy concerns for owners.

Most new computers don’t come with optical drives anymore, but a surprising number of people still create discs for use in cars, stereos, DVD players, and older devices that can’t read from USB or cloud storage.

Burning tools have, inevitably, become less common as a result, but there’s still demand for reliable software that can handle audio discs, backups, and simple video creation. Ashampoo’s latest update aims to cover that space with a refreshed version of its long-running disc burning tool.

A new report on browser privacy places OpenAI's new ChatGPT Atlas squarely at the bottom of its rankings, citing weak protection against tracking, poor link security, and almost no effective data blocking. The study, conducted by software provider Digitain, reviewed 13 browsers and scored them across multiple privacy categories.

The report notes that the AI browser failed every state partitioning test, which means websites can track users across separate browsing sessions. Chrome also performed poorly, while more privacy focused browsers like Brave and Mullvad took the top spots.

NordVPN has added a new tool to its security suite for macOS and Windows, introducing email protection for users facing growing phishing and malware threats. The feature checks links inside emails as you open them in a browser and displays visual alerts when it identifies unsafe destinations. It then gives users real time guidance before they click anything risky.

Email protection checks each visible link in an open message and compares it with threat intelligence data. If a link leads to a site tied to phishing, malware, or other harmful activity, the system alerts users immediately so that they can take the relevant steps to avoid it.

Tuxedo Computers has launched its latest Linux laptop, the Gemini 17 Gen4. The new 17.3 inch notebook is designed as as a desktop replacement and combines an Intel Core i9 processor, Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics and a 2560 x 1440 240Hz display. It's aimed at users who want workstation performance in a portable form.

The Gemini 17 Gen4 is built around on Intel’s Core i9 14900HX, a 24 core chip with eight performance cores and sixteen efficiency cores. It supports up to 32 threads with Hyperthreading and can reach up to 5.8GHz on single core loads. Tuxedo allows the CPU to draw up to 115W in this chassis. Under lighter workloads, the efficiency cores handle most tasks so the system can keep fan speeds low.