Subtle, it is not. Honor has launched a new flip phone today, the Magic V Flip 2, and it arrives with a sparkly special edition in partnership with fashion designer Jimmy Choo.The former Huawei subsidiary has partnered with Choo before, for last year’s V Flip, and has kept to a similar formula this year, swapping glittery green for a brilliant blue. It also comes with custom wallpapers that are somehow even less subtle than the phone itself, an engraved hinge that’s oddly insistent on using Choo’s full name and titles, and a pair of sparkling cases so you can keep the phone both safe and shiny.The phone itself looks pretty impressive, and also comes in non-Choo versions in purple, white, or gray. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip inside isn’t quite top tier, but the full-size OLED cover screen is. It’s also got a 5,500mAh battery — pretty enormous for a flip phone, thanks to compact silicon-carbon tech — and supports 80W wired charging and 50W wireless. Water- and dust-resistance caps out at IP58/59 though, so the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s IP68 exclusivity holds for now.The V Flip 2 is available to preorder now, but only in China. If you’re hankering for a glittery flip phone but don’t live in China, there’s always Motorola’s Swarovski gem-encrusted Razr, set to launch soon. Meanwhile Honor itself has a London launch event on August 28th planned for its larger Magic V5, currently the world’s thinnest book-style foldable.

Hardening your home network is crucial to safeguard your devices from the constant scourge of malware. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to bolster the defenses of your systems, ranging from VPNs and multi-factor authentication to locally-hosted firewalls and intrusion prevention systems.

Ask home lab veterans about their motives for self-hosting services, and you’ll hear a bunch of different answers. Some tinkerers despise the privacy-intrusive nature of modern cloud platforms and deploy their own FOSS to prevent big corporations from collecting personal information. Others switch to the self-hosting landscape to stop their monthly subscriptions from piling up. You’ll also find folks who prefer the limitless customization options offered by locally-hosted apps. Then there are tinkerers like me, who do it for all these reasons (and also for the added flex).

Microsoft's PowerToys suite is home to many useful tools, and my favorites are usually the ones that help me organize my apps and windows, like FancyZones and Workspaces. However, there's quite a bit more in there for all kinds of users, and one of the more interesting ones is PowerRename.

Home labbing sounds like a complex endeavor requiring practical knowledge and plenty of devices. You need to have an array of devices ranging from desktops, screens, single-board computers, and smart/IoT devices. I always looked at it this way, unless I dived headfirst into the scene and discovered it was quite the opposite. You don't need a high-end ring for a simple homelab setup and automation; even an old but functional smartphone can help you start out.

When you're choosing a new SSD, you probably focus on the PCIe interface, transfer speeds, and price to make your decision. However, there are other important SSD specs to consider before you drop $100–$150 on an SSD. Perhaps the most important, and often overlooked, specification of these is DRAM. Being a dedicated cache memory that speeds up your SSD, DRAM can prove highly useful in certain scenarios. You should avoid DRAM-less SSDs if you have the budget for a DRAM SSD.

We've seen some great deals on monitors before, but this new discount on Samsung's 49-inch Odyssey G9 has to be one of the best, knocking a whopping $830 off the retail price for a very limited time. It features a 49-inch QD-OLED panel, 240Hz refresh rate, and .03ms response time. It's got everything you need and more, and at a fantastic price that can't be ignored.

Ever since I started looking for alternatives to OneDrive, Nextcloud has been the most recommended option by fellow writers at XDA. It's also fair because Nextcloud is indeed one of the best self-hosted file storage and sharing solutions out there. I also checked out OpenCloud and Seafile — both of which are good alternatives with lots of features. However, Nextcloud is surely the most popular among enthusiasts. While it works well for the most part, there are a couple of issues that may deter a few potential users. For starters, it's slightly harder to deploy since there's an elaborate setup process involved. Moreover, it offers a bunch of features that everyone may not use. I usually believe that more features are always good, but not at the expense of performance.

Amid a fierce debate about the environmental toll of artificial intelligence, Google released a new study that says its Gemini AI assistant only uses a minimal amount of water and energy for each text prompt. But experts say that the tech giant's claims are misleading. Google estimates that a median Gemini text prompt uses up about five drops of water, or 0.26 milliliters, and about as much electricity as watching TV for less than nine seconds, roughly 0.24 watt-hours (Wh), which produces around 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide emissions. Google's estimates are lower than previous research on water- and energy-intensive data centers that und …Read the full story at The Verge.

Who doesn't like a good love story? Two people meet, they hit it off, and the next thing you know, there's cheeky banter and flirting before falling in love. As straight to the point as it might sound, that's not always the case, and there aren't a lot of 'great love stories' that the world knows because they ended well.

Wherever you are in your PC building journey, there are always better or faster upgrades on the horizon. Someone rocking an RTX 5090 might be tempted to upgrade to a high-end OLED display, while another user might dream about a new GPU to replace their 5-year-old model. Upgrading to just a single powerful component can indeed transform your gaming experience, but only if the upgrade comes at the right time. If the rest of your PC isn't prepared for it, that flashy new upgrade can end up feeling inconsequential.

Managing computers isn't the easiest task when you've got a bank of servers and PCs to handle. Now, I'm not running a data center, but even within my home lab, I've been looking for a simple way to keep tabs on all my machines. Over the years, I've tried out a wide range of apps to keep tabs on servers. Some are complex, some have a subscription fee that blows my humble home lab budget, and others simply didn't work for me. However, I've recently come across an open-source project called MeshCentral, which has quickly become the backbone of how I manage my personal computer and servers. Here's why.