Welcome back, TechRadar readers. It’s been another busy week of new product launches, pumpkin carving, the first reports of Mariah Carey singing that Christmas song, and a whole lot of early Black Friday bargains.
That’s right – as soon as we stopped handing out the Halloween candy, the big online retailers started treating us to their early Black Friday deals. Apparently, we're all going to be shopping non-stop for the next 51 days.
Before you can start buying, though, you’ve gotta know what’s good – so let me start by pointing you to our annual TechRadar Choice Awards, our selection of the very best devices, gadgets and service providers of 2022. We combined reader votes and our own expertise to come up with our list of best TVs, air fryers, phones, streaming services and more – it’s a fantastic place to start as you’re trying to figure out what to buy over Black Friday and in the run-up to Christmas.
Here at TechRadar, the work of identifying the products that you the reader can trust never stops. Often, the best way to find out if the gadgets that Microsoft, Apple, Google and others produce are any good is to use them as if you owned them, and even now, I’m composing this newsletter on a brand-new Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G. My review is almost done, but I’ll give you a quick taster: Windows 11 can run on an ARM-based system just fine. Are there hiccups? Yes. Are they showstoppers? Nope.
And if you think I’m busy, you should catch up with our Cameras Editor, Mark Wilson. This week he was covering two major product launches, and running two live blogs at once: the eagerly-anticipated Fujifilm X-T5 and DJI’s new Mavic 3 Classic drone. It seems like everyone is racing to cram in a few more product launches before we get fully into the shopping season.
Sometimes, though, the person is the product, which has become very much the case with Twitter. In case you hadn’t heard, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, officially took charge at Twitter late last week, and now he’s busy making sweeping changes to the platform, including some that, in my opinion, might just destroy it. One of them is charging verified accounts $8 a month to keep their blue check, and I got pretty bent out of shape about this plan.
Speaking of social media, Instagram went down this week, taking many user accounts with it, and we all survived.
We’re only scratching the surface here. Why don’t you find a quiet place to sit down, put on some noise-canceling headphones (maybe the Air Pods Pro 2?), and settle in for a walk back through another action-packed week. Oh – and don't forget to drop me an email (include NEWSLETTER in the subject line).
Amazon is opening up its Mariah… sorry, music, catalogue to all Prime members (Amazon)
It’s hard to believe, but Amazon Alexa has been part of our lives for almost eight years – it actually has a birthday this weekend. In my home, we ask it questions and tell it to turn on and off various smart lights. We also, sometimes, play music through the various connected speakers.
As we have an Amazon Prime membership we have access to millions of songs, but often when we ask for a specific song, Alexa cheerfully informs us that said tune is behind the Amazon Music Unlimited paywall. Then she asks if we want to upgrade and we all shout in unison, “NO!”
This sounds pretty good to me, and I plan to start playing a bunch of Christmas albums as soon as I get home – maybe I’ll start with the aforementioned artist’s 1994 classic Merry Christmas.
The PSVR finally has a release date, and a (hefty) price tag (Future)
Just in time for the shopping season… no, wait. Strike that. Just in time for early next year, we now know the Sony PSVR 2 headset price and launch date. As our gaming sister site TRG reports, the new VR headset will go on sale in February, and – get this – it’ll cost you more than a PS5, at an eye-watering $549.99 / £529.99.
Perhaps Sony decided to get the news about that price out of the way early, and release the headset after the Christmas holidays, to avoid any 'lump of coal in the stocking' headlines.
I still think this is going to be a big buying season for VR, and maybe AR, too. On the VR front, we still have the all-new (and very expensive) Meta Quest Pro and the same company’s Ray Ban Stories, which Oprah Winfrey chose as one of her hot holiday gifts. My guess is that most people will choose the more affordable Quest 2 as the best VR gift.
Windows 11 won't let some users eject their flash drives (Krakenimages.com / Shutterstock)
Tell the truth. How many of you actually ‘eject’ your USB flash drives before pulling them from your Windows 11 PCs? Right… not many of you. The more conscientious among you, though, might have noticed a little problem with a recent Windows 11 update.
Matt Hanson (who will be back writing this newsletter next week), wrote about a potentially frustrating Windows 11 bug that makes it difficult to do the right thing and eject your flash drive before pulling it.
Windows 11 is an incredibly complex piece of platform software, so it’s not surprising that every time Microsoft delivers an update we also get at least one or two annoying bugs. And while this one might seem inconsequential, it can be a big mistake to remove a drive without ejecting it. If your system is still writing to it or using it in some fashion, it could destroy the code on the drive (meaning some of your files).
In any case, read Matt’s report to determine if you’ve stumbled on this bug, or if you’re just using your PC wrong.
Netflix's ad-supported tier is up and running (Shutterstock / Vantage_DS)
The price of everything is going up. Well, not everything. Netflix, our favorite binging partner, just got cheaper. The only catch is that you have to like ads, or at least sit through them. Oh, and there are a couple of other catches, as Axel Metz explains.
Axel details what the streaming service’s new $6.99 / £4.99 per month tier means, and, more importantly, how you can get in on it.
I find it somewhat ironic that the company that started the all-you-can-eat, ad-free binge culture is now leading the charge on bringing back ad-supported content – and others are likely to follow. I wonder how many people will sign up – tougher economic times point to it being a very big number.
The Photo Restoration tool can optionally colorize your retouched images (Future)
Some years ago, as my mother was about to hit a milestone birthday, I took an old tattered photo of her father – my grandfather – and spent literally hours working to restore it in Photoshop. How I wish I’d had a time machine, and been able to travel to today.
As Dave writes: “It’s fair to say that I came to Photoshop's 'Photo Restoration' filter with a sense of seen-it-all-before cynicism. AI photo-editing has been around for a while, and top-quality results have long been thin on the ground. Then I ran the 'Photo Restoration' filter, and it’s fair to say my jaw hasn't left the ground since.”
The results he shows off in the story are astounding. And, yes, there are controls, so that you can fine-tune the auto-fix if you want to. The optional beta download isn’t always fast, especially if you make some adjustments, but… well, if I’d had this a decade ago, I would’ve saved myself so much grief.
Actually, I would’ve saved even more grief if my mother hadn’t taken one look at the result of my efforts and said, “I don’t think that’s a picture of my father.”
Gamers know what makes a comfortable pair of headphones (Shutterstock / aslysun)
Working on TechRadar, I sit among people working for a whole bunch of Future Publishing’s myriad tech and gaming brands, and I’ve noticed that the gaming folk are often sporting some serious headphones while, yes, playing games. It’s their job, so it makes sense, but I’ve never really thought about their headgear – I mean, headphones are just headphones, right?
Wrong. As this article makes clear, there are a specific set of don’ts when it comes to buying gaming headphones – and I think most could apply to headphones for Zoom meetings as well.
Without giving too much away, the number one recommendation is: go for comfort. Even as a non-gamer, this makes sense to me – I’ve been in enough long video conference meetings to know the pain that comes with wearing uncomfortable cans for too long.
This is really… sound advice – and your ears will thank us for it.
A warming Arctic could be affecting the climate across Europe (Shutterstock)
Even as we have our heads turned by shiny new gadgets and ponder the fate of our favorite social media platforms, there are bigger issues that we ignore at our peril.
Evidence, the report notes, of this phenomenon is all over Europe, in the shape of floods, wildfires, and droughts. It sounds bad because it is. Europe is at least working hard on climate change mitigation policies (even if none of them will entirely work). The rest of the world, however, might not be in lock step, with big fossil-fuel-consuming countries like China and the US being slower to act.
It is a thing, though – and I suggest you read the whole piece for a harsh dose of reality.
The Sign Off
That's it for another week – I hope you've enjoyed reading this Week in Review as much as I enjoyed compiling it. To hear some of my other random thoughts follow me on Twitter (for as long as it exists), and stay tuned to TechRadar. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your feedback, comments and questions, so keep those emails coming.
Have a great weekend!
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