The Find X9 Pro features a large battery, but it’s still a pretty slender device. Whenever I review a phone, one of the first things I do after setting it up is charge it to full and then just… let it run, using it as my only phone for as long as I can, resisting every urge to charge it along the way. The Oppo Find X9 Pro lasted for three full days. 74 and a half hours, to be a little more exact. I couldn't quite believe it either, so I ran it again. This time I turned on the power-hungry always-on display, and the phone ran for 50-odd hours before the battery hit low single digits. This is the best battery life of any phone I've tested in years, and by far the best of any flagship. The only real problem for Oppo is …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google's NotebookLM is the only AI tool I use almost every single day, and not just because it's excellent at what it does (which it is). Its use cases go far beyond its core functions, which is exactly why I keep coming back. Beyond studying and work, I’ve used it for all sorts of weird (and, if I do say so myself, genius) experiments.

Lenovo's ThinkPad lineup has always been at the top of the enterprise laptop food chain and for good reason. While the X1 Carbon tends to be the ultimate in light and thin work laptops, the ThinkPad T-series is a favorite for IT departments for good reason. Lenovo's T-series laptops are more upgradeable and repairable than standard enterprise laptops, which makes them perfect for an IT fleet.

We're living in a wonderful period for puzzle games. Seemingly everyone, from The New York Times to Linkedin, has fun puzzles to play, so every morning I have plenty of options to accompany my first coffee of the day. Lately, though, much of my daily puzzle time has come from an unlikely source: the Playdate.Panic's little yellow handheld is best known for being home to oddball indie games you can't find anywhere else, many of which utilize a crank to play. But it has also amassed a library of excellent puzzle games that are playable in quick bursts. It makes it easy to stick a Playdate in your pocket and grab it when you need to kill a fe …Read the full story at The Verge.

Being a freelance writer working full-time from home, I put myself in charge of all data management — be it on the cloud or offline on hard drives and my NAS. While actual storage of data is one part of the story, what makes local storage on my NAS smart are the apps that derive so much value and convenience from my files. These apps are the ones that have made working from home so much more convenient without having access to the managed system that big corporations offer their employees.

If Tiny11 has taught me anything, it's that I have a huge appreciation for people who can cut down an operating system to a portion of its original size. Granted, that usually involves lopping off some features (although one can argue that the services that do hit the cutting room floor aren't ones that people using the OS wanted in the first place), but the concept is there, and it's very cool to see.

Local voice assistants have a lot of appeal in the world of secure smart homes, but they often come with limitations. If you’re using a tool like Home Assistant to manage your smart home, you can typically install add-ons for speech-to-text (like Whisper) and text-to-speech (like Piper) and configure a voice pipeline. Plus, you can integrate your own smart speakers to work with. Home Assistant also recently rolled out the Home Assistant Preview Edition, a work-in-progress $69 voice assistant that allows you to manage your connected devices with voice commands. It doesn’t quite have the expertise that Amazon’s Alexa has in handling commands, and as with all local voice assistants, you’ll have to control the responses.

For many of us, a video player is just a video player, and we settle for whatever works — usually the faithful but often clunky VLC media player or the bare-bones native option. I was firmly in that camp for years, dissatisfied but too lazy to look for an alternative that truly fit the modern macOS environment.

Best Buy’s latest doorbuster deal nets you a cool $770 off the regular price. | Image: The Verge Best Buy’s early Black Friday deals are already live, with discounts to be had on everything from smartphones and gaming PCs to wireless headphones. If you’re in the market for a new 4K TV, Best Buy is also offering an exclusive doorbuster deal on LG’s 48-inch B5 OLED, bringing the price of the 4K TV down to just $529.99 ($770 off) for a limited time. You can also grab the 55-inch model from Amazon, Best Buy, and LG for around $896 ($604 off), an all-time low.LG B5 OLED TVWhere to Buy: $1299.99 $529.99 at Best Buy (48-inch) $1499.99 $896.99 at Amazon (55-inch) $1499.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (55-inch)LG’s entry-level B Series offers one of the most affordable ways to jump into the world of OLED technology. Although the B5 can’t match the brightness of comparably priced LED TVs, it delivers far better black level performance and contrast, as well as excellent viewing angles. As far as we can tell, the B5 closely matches the display performance of LG’s flagship C3 from a few years ago.In addition to 4K resolution, the B5 features four HDMI 2.1 ports — all of which support up to 4K at 120Hz with variable refresh rate for gaming — along with support for premium formats such as Dolby Vision and HDR10. It supports Filmmaker Mode, too, which aims to present movies as directors intended by disabling certain settings, such as motion smoothing and image sharpening. The B5 also runs on LG’s speedy Alpha 8 AI Processor Gen 2, so swiping through LG’s webOS interface isn’t a slog. Meanwhile, support for Apple AirPlay 2 and Google Cast makes it easy to stream content from a compatible device, including your phone or tablet.As great as the B5 is, the set offers middling peak brightness and struggles with handling reflections, according to the folks over at RTings. That said, it’s a great option for gaming, and if you can place it in a room without a lot of ambient light, it’s a nice upgrade for movie night. My 10-year-old Phillips TV broke at the beginning of summer, and I think I finally found a suitable replacement.

No matter how things go topsy-turvy in Windows, you always have the trusted Task Manager to bail you out. However, what if the Task Manager itself starts bugging out? Well, it turns out the answer to a malfunctioning Task Manager is to apply a second Task Manager to it.

Who doesn't want their PC performing at its best? On a gaming PC, the GPU determines most of your gaming experience. Chasing 100% GPU utilization seems like a reasonable goal. After all, you don't want to leave performance on the table. However, that doesn't mean you start panicking when your GPU utilization drops below 100%, desperately hunting for a CPU bottleneck or worrying about GPU overheating. GPU utilization is dynamic, and the factors that influence it are varied. In many cases, it might even be ideal to set a limit on your GPU performance — here's why.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hopefully, by now, you have your platter of scary media lined up and ready for the big night. However, if you're still on the hunt for something to play, how about a Resident Evil game? People have been really enjoying Resident Evil Village, and from now until November 11th, you can grab it for 75% off.