There are plenty of reasons to grab a Surface Laptop this Prime Day. Perhaps you're on a Windows 10 device, and you want to grab a new one so you can use Windows 11 before the older operating system falls out of support. Maybe you're interested in Copilot+, and you want a device that supports it. Or perhaps you just want a shiny new Arm processor to see what Windows on Arm can do.

I've recently started tracking all the work that I do in a day to hold myself accountable. Along with work, I also keep track of other activities, such as workouts, time spent on social media, gaming, and content streaming. This has not only helped me manage my time better but also build effective habits in the long run. While there are several tools to track habits in a fun and intuitive manner, Habitica is one of the most popular ones, thanks to a gamified approach. While the app is certainly nice, I despise its cluttered UI. It's filled with too many elements, in my opinion, which can be overwhelming for a lot of people. However, since I liked the RPG-style approach of Habitica, I decided to do some research to see if I could make use of the concept differently.

Nextcloud is one of our favorite services at XDA. For those unaware, it's a cloud-based platform that allows you to store files, collaborate with others, and work on documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and more. Essentially, it is a replacement for Google Drive. What makes it a widely used service among several writers here at XDA is that Nextcloud can be self-hosted on a local server, which means you get all the goodness of the platform with its features without paying for additional cloud storage and storing your data on a remote server. While it works perfectly well, I recently started to face some performance issues with Nextcloud. File uploads would be slow, and syncing large folders would mean I had to wait for a long time. So, I started looking for alternatives that could perform the same tasks but with better efficiency.

Before the Switch line, there was the DS line. Before the DS line, there was the Game Boy line. And before the Game Boy line, there were the Game & Watch handheld devices. People mostly know the term "Game & Watch" as the character you can pick in Super Smash Bros games, but the name goes way back within Nintendo's history. Well, if you want to make your own Game & Watch at home, someone has uploaded plans on building your own, including one with two screens.

Prime Day is always an excellent way to score some storage for less. Every year, lots of HDDs and SSDs go on a pretty steep discount, so if your PC is slowly running out of space, you can give it the extra boost it needs by grabbing storage for less.

Although VR is still a compelling technology, it's taken a backseat over the years, as the hype from the early days has died down substantially. Of course, that doesn't mean that the technology is dead, and Meta is still trying to drum up some excitement for the technology in 2025, introducing new hardware to a new generation.

Persona5: The Phantom X is a new free-to-play gacha game on Steam and mobile, that uses the structure of Persona 5 to tell a new story about a different set of Phantom Thieves. My expectations for this game were fairly low, since it wasn't made by Atlus, and the free-to-play model didn't suggest that it would be a highly polished game. But the next Persona game, a remake of Persona 4, is a way off, and I love turn-based games, so it seemed like it was worth trying. I was delighted by how surprised I was with Persona5: The Phantom X, as it has pretty solid writing, a fun villain to start the game, and a new cast of characters that are great. Now that I care about Persona5: The Phantom X, the monetization has made me extremely frustrated with how it was woven into the game.

Amazon's Prime Day sales event is a great time to pick up those accessories you've been eyeing. While there are plenty of great deals to be had, we think this portable SSD from SanDisk is going to be a no-brainer, offering impressive storage at a great price. For a limited time, you can grab the 4TB model for way below its original retail price, coming in at just $220. It's the best price we've seen, so get it while you can.

When I first got my first NAS, I felt this burst of confidence, like I had built a data fort for myself in my living room. It became the destination for everything — from my photos and documents to device backups and work files. If a file existed, I moved it to the NAS. At that point, it all felt sorted and neat.

Espressif's ESP32 line has expanded far beyond the original dual-core Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip that first popularised low-cost IoT. What started as a chip ubiquitous in smart home technology has grown to be something so much more than that, building out an entire ecosystem of small, low-cost microcontrollers that anyone can use to do, well, basically anything. Today, the name covers several unrelated silicon "series" that share the same ESP-IDF toolchain but differ in CPU architecture, wireless mix, memory size, and peripheral blocks. We'll break down the major differences between all of them, as there's a lot to know if you're looking to invest in one of these to ensure you make the right choice.

Microsoft is making (another) big push into PC gaming. Windows overwhelmingly dominates PC gaming, sure, but Microsoft has struggled to marry its massive Windows userbase with the Xbox brand. That's apparently changing, as Microsoft aims to make Windows the "number one platform for gaming." That starts with what Microsoft calls an "Aggregated Gaming Library" in the Xbox PC app, which will automatically scan games from storefronts like Steam and add them to the Xbox PC app. The goal is clear — make a single launcher for everyone's PC games and lay the foundation for devices like the ROG Xbox Ally X.

If you own an Nvidia graphics card, there's a secret weapon for image quality and performance you're probably not using. I'm not talking about any upscaling or frame generation shenanigans; no, I'm talking about running your games above your monitor's native resolution.