Latest in technology

HDR brightness

A monitor rated "HDR 1000" only has to hit 1,000 nits on a patch covering 10% of the screen. VESA tests sustained full-screen brightness separately, and that figure is far lower.

Raider A18 HX A9W

400 WCharger

Ships with a 400W adapter — the largest in our laptop catalogue, where the next tier is 330W.

10-bit colour

Plenty of screens advertising "1.07 billion colours" use an 8-bit panel that flickers between two adjacent shades fast enough to fake the extra depth. The technique is called FRC, and it is rarely on the box.

ASUS Zenbook A14 (UX3407)

0.98 kgWeight

A 14-inch laptop at 980g. Only one other machine we list gets under a kilogram.

Pixel binning

A 108MP phone camera usually does not shoot 108MP. It merges nine neighbouring pixels into one to produce a brighter 12MP photo; full resolution is a separate mode most people never open.

AMD Radeon PRO W7800 48GB

48 GBMemory

48GB of GDDR6 on one card — 16GB more than any other GPU we list, including the RTX 5090.

The nm number

TSMC's “3nm” process has a disclosed contacted gate pitch of about 45 nanometres — fifteen times the number in the name. The node label marks a generation, not a measurement.

RTX 5090

21,760CUDA cores

21,760 CUDA cores. The RTX 4090 it replaced had 16,384.

Charging to 80%

Dropping a lithium cell's peak charge voltage by 0.10V roughly doubles its cycle life. That single number is the whole reason phones and laptops now offer to stop charging at 80%.

QLED S90 Series 254cm (100) 144Hz Smart Google TV with AI Center Max - H100S90FUX (2025)

87.2 kgShipping weight

87.2kg in the box. Worth knowing before you plan the wall, and more than double the next TV we list.

Wireless charging

Charging over a wireless pad drew 24.4% more power from the wall than a cable in iFixit's testing, with 59% of the energy lost as heat before it reached the battery.

TCL X11L SQD-Mini LED TV -Pinnacle of Mini LED TVs

10,000 nitsPeak brightness

TCL rates this Mini LED panel at 10,000 nits peak — double the next-brightest set we list.

One charge cycle

A charge cycle is not one plug-in. Apple counts a cycle when you have used 100% of the battery's capacity in total — four days of 25% top-ups is one cycle, not four.

iPad mini

293 gWeight

293g. The next-lightest tablet in our catalogue is 372g.

A2 memory cards

An SD card's A2 badge promises random read/write speed for running apps — 4,000 and 2,000 IOPS. It adds nothing to the sustained speed that video recording actually depends on; that is the V rating.

boAt Airdopes 621

150 hoursBattery with case

150 hours quoted with the charging case — the longest of any earbuds we list.

SSD warranties

An SSD warranty runs for the shorter of its years and its terabytes-written rating, whichever ends first. Samsung's own terms say so — write hard enough and a drive is out of warranty in year one.

Drip Pro - Blue

30 daysClaimed battery

30 days on a charge, against 18 hours for a mainstream smartwatch. Different class of screen.

UFS vs eMMC

eMMC storage can read or write at any one moment, never both. UFS has separate read and write paths, which is why a UFS phone feels quicker under mixed load even at similar peak speeds.

iQOO 13

120 WWired charging

120W wired — tied for the fastest-charging phone in our catalogue.

Bluetooth LC3

In the Bluetooth SIG's own listening tests, the LC3 codec at 160kbps scored higher than the old SBC codec at 345kbps — better sound on less than half the wireless bandwidth.

Auracast

Auracast lets one source broadcast to an unlimited number of headphones with no pairing at all. An airport gate or a gym TV can transmit its audio like a radio station.

192kHz audio

Human hearing stops near 20kHz, and sampling theory says 44.1kHz already captures everything below 22kHz perfectly. A 192kHz file carries no audible detail a CD-rate file does not.

Wrist heart rate

The green LED heart-rate sensor in most wearables is measurably less accurate on darker skin: melanin absorbs green light, weakening the signal the sensor reads back.

IP68 fades

Water resistance is certified once, in a lab, with still fresh water. Apple states plainly that it "is not a permanent condition" and decreases with normal wear — an old phone is not the phone that was rated.