Coming from someone who has dealt with many routers, mesh systems, and Wi-Fi cards in the past, setting up an optimal internet connection at home or at work can be a bit daunting. If you have a desktop PC and primarily rely on a Wi-Fi connection over Ethernet, you’ve likely faced frequent drops in performance and general connectivity issues. Wi-Fi routers have improved a lot, and while most motherboards have decent on-board Wi-Fi these days, these issues still manage to creep up at times. A quick fix to these problems is getting a dedicated PCIe Wi-Fi card for your PC.

The OnePlus 12R is one of the year's best mid-range phones. It offers flagship specs, such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, an OLED display, excellent battery life, and a decent set of cameras at an affordable price. To make things better, you can save up to $100 off the phone by trading in any old device you have, no matter what condition the old phone might be in.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Sony’s new PlayStation Portal has been hacked by Google engineers to run emulated games locally. The $199.99 handheld debuted in November but was limited to just streaming games from a PS5 console and not even titles from Sony’s cloud gaming service.Now, two Google engineers have managed to get the PPSSPP emulator running natively on the PlayStation Portal, allowing a Grand Theft Auto PSP version to run on the Portal without Wi-Fi streaming required. “After more than a month of hard work, PPSSPP is running natively on PlayStation Portal. Yes, we hacked it,” says Andy Nguyen in a post on X. After more than a month of hard work, PPSSPP is running natively on PlayStation Portal. Yes, we hacked it. With help from xyz and @ZetaTwo p... Continue reading…

The size of game downloads has ballooned over the past few years, with many triple-AAA games coming in at well over 100GB. Local storage has fallen repeatedly in price, but keeping up with a large and growing games library, especially across various PCs or devices, can be increasingly expensive. Not to mention the hassle of keeping multiple sets of updates going, especially if you're on a slow connection. Steam is now capable of detecting other clients on your network with a game installed and downloading them internally, but this isn't perfect and requires two devices to be on simultaneously. Storing games on your NAS can be a cost-effective solution to keeping many games downloaded, is relatively easy to set up, and can help alleviate some of the pain of a slower internet connection.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This year’s first Direct will take place Wednesday morning at 9AM ET, and, according to Nintendo, the 25-minute presentation will feature Switch games “coming in the first half of 2024 from our publishing and development partners.”We didn’t need to consult the video game oracles to know a Nintendo Direct was on the way. Not only have Microsoft and PlayStation shared their upcoming release schedules, but taking a look at the dates of the last handful of Directs revealed that Nintendo is fond of the first week of February. A #NintendoDirect: Partner Showcase is coming! Watch on-demand via YouTube on 2/21 at 6am PT for around 25 mins of info focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the first half of 2024 from our publishing and... Continue reading…

In modern gaming, two fundamental aspects compete for attention: visual fidelity and framerate. Visual fidelity refers to the graphical quality of a game, encompassing details such as texture resolution, lighting effects, and overall graphical realism. On the other hand, framerate denotes the number of frames per second (FPS) displayed on the screen, directly influencing the smoothness and responsiveness of gameplay. Balancing these elements is crucial for developers to deliver an immersive and enjoyable gaming experience.

Getting water on phones happens to the best of us. Lucky for us, there’s one household staple the internet consistently suggests will draw that liquid out and save phones: uncooked rice. But contrary to popular advice, Apple, like most people in tech support, explicitly advises against putting your wet phone in a bag of rice. “Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone,” Apple support documents said.The support documents first spotted by Macworld are technically addressing what to do when you get the liquid detection alert on your iPhone. They’re not just out to put a long lingering internet myth to bed. To that end they also suggested avoiding using an external heat... Continue reading…

You can now play many of your favorite PC games on the go, thanks to the rise of the PC gaming handheld. They differ from consoles or smartphones, running on the Windows 11 or Linux operating systems, and can access a vast library of PC games from various platforms such as Steam or GoG. While the trend started mostly with the Steam Deck, there are now plenty of excellent alternatives. We weighed the selections based on their performance, design, battery life, and price. Whether you are looking for a powerful machine that can handle the latest AAA titles or a budget-friendly option for playing the newest indie games, there is something for you.

For a little while now, Microsoft and Intel have enjoyed a good partnership. DirectML is coming to Intel NPUs, and for a little while, those with AMD processors were seemingly left in the cold. Now, Microsoft has finally shown the Intel rival some attention by giving AMD support for the Task Manager.

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Fujifilm’s X100V became so wildly popular that it felt like the camera was endlessly backordered at every camera retailer around. On the secondary market, prices for the rangefinder-style mirrorless camera shot up into truly silly territory after it had a big viral moment on TikTok. The X100V was so in demand that Fujifilm could’ve taken the easy route for a successor and still been guaranteed to have a hit on its hands. The new model, being announced today, looks practically the same on the outside, but the X100VI includes meaningful improvements that will make it a more capable camera — in far more shooting environments — than any previous entrant in the X100 series. The flip side to those upgrades is that the price has climbed by... Continue reading…

If you've ever tried to pair a PC, laptop, or gaming console with a TV screen, you must have heard of HDMI. Over the last two decades, HDMI has cemented its standing as the widespread display interface. However, DisplayPort continues to provide solid competition for HDMI, with many performance users and PC enthusiasts choosing the former over HDMI.

Image: Porsche Porsche announced two new plug-in hybrid Panameras, as the German automakers looks to hedge its bets by offering a broader set of electrified options. Late last year, Porsche unveiled the third generation Panamera, which included the Panamera Turbo E-Hybrid as the first of four Panamera E-Hybrid models that will eventually be offered. Today, the automaker is adding two more: the Panamera 4 E-Hybrid and the Panamera 4S E-Hybrid. The fourth model will be announced at a later date.Porsche says it is responding to “significant demand for efficient and dynamic E-Hybrid powertrains” with the release of these two new variants. Indeed, hybrids are increasingly in demand in a variety of markets, even as sales growth of pure battery-electric... Continue reading…