News

ZTE Blade Z Max comes with dual cameras, super-affordable price

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The big players may be grabbing all the headlines, but ZTE is discreetly building a lineup of smartphones with excellent value. The Blade Z Max is the newest of which, and it offers features you’d normally find in handsets more than twice its price.

You wouldn’t think the Blade Z Max could offer anything substantial with its US$ 129 price tag, but all that changes at the first glance alone.

The back shows off a dual-camera setup composed of a 16-megapixel sensor coupled with a secondary 2-megapixel shooter to help with portrait duties. Below that, you can find the fingerprint scanner — another feature that was once reserved for much more expensive phones.

You can’t tell by the renders above, but the Blade Z Max has a massive 6-inch Full HD display and 8-megapixel selfie camera up front, as well as a 3.5mm audio port at the bottom. While the large screen would suck more energy out of the battery, the capacity is a healthy 4080mAh, and unlike most entry-level phones, this one has the more future-proof USB-C connection.

To keep things efficient, this ZTE model has a Snapdragon 435 processor and a decent amount of memory at 2GB. This means it’ll struggle to play graphics-intensive games, but running several light apps simultaneously should be manageable. On the bright side, its 32GB of storage can be expanded using a single microSD card.

All these are encased in a metal frame and textured back — again, not bad for a Android Nougat-powered smartphone costing less than US$ 150! The official release date is August 28; if you want it earlier, you may pre-order through MetroPCS in the US starting today.

SEE ALSO: Best Budget Smartphones below $300 (August 2017 Edition)

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Computers

AMD expands Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series lineup

Scalable, efficient AI compute for industrial, edge solutions

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AMD has recently announced the expansion of its AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series processor lineup.

This enables scalable and power-efficient AI compute tailor-built for industrial and AI edge systems. Scenarios include factory automation, physical AI in mobile robotics, and other AI-driven edge applications.

With eight to 12 high-performance Zen 5 cores, AMD ROCm support, and up to 80 total system TOPS, the new x86 embedded APUs deliver up to:

  • 2x more CPU core counts
  • 8x higher GPU compute
  • 36% higher system TOPS

This way, developers and system designers get an expanded and scalable portfolio of power-efficient edge computing solutions. These processors support real-time AI from vision to control and reasoning, as well as offer advanced graphics capabilities.

On a single chip, clients get up to 80 TOPS physical AI acceleration, AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics for real-time visualization, and an NPU based on the AMD XDNA 2 architecture.

Moreover, the processors can withstand industrial temperature ranges (-40° C to 105° C) and can support continuous 24/7 operations for up to 10-year life cycles. That’s along with low-latency and power-efficient AI inference.

Real-life applications include intelligent factories, autonomous robots, and medical imaging devices. For instance, the processors can deliver CPU performance required for real-time inspection and process optimization.

For mobile robots, meanwhile, processors can manage navigation, motion, control, and route planning while the GPU processes multi-camera feeds for spatial awareness.

Furthermore, for 3D health imaging, the processors can enable the powering of 3D imaging for ultrasounds, endoscopes, tissue classification, and tumor detection at the edge. This is done with models like U-Net, nnU-Net, and MONAI.

The processors then accelerate image-to-report workflows with MedSigLIP and support clinical reasoning and Q&A with Med-PaLM 2.

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Gaming

Valve is embroiled in a lawsuit with New York over loot boxes

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Valve has been embroiled in an odd war as of late. A few weeks ago, the New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the gaming company for allegedly encouraging children to gamble through loot boxes primarily found in Counter-Strike 2. Today, Valve is fighting back by declaring how little its loot boxes have to do with gambling.

For years, governments have had a problem with loot boxes. To them, the mechanic makes it too easy for gamers to fall into a gambling addiction. In essence, loot boxes are earnable packs that contain a single or a number of random items that the player can use for their game. Most of the time, these items are purely cosmetic and don’t give a gameplay advantage.

Like Blizzard before it, Valve is also defending its loot boxes as non-essential to how players engage with their games. “There is no disadvantage to a player not spending money,” their statement reads.

Additionally, Valve says that their loot boxes are no different from Pokémon cards and Labubu blind boxes. As such, the company is also defending their users’ right to transfer obtained items to other users, as with two players trading cards or Pop Mart figurines.

Now, these items have monetary value in the market. In the same way, a rare Counter-Strike 2 skin can fetch thousands of dollars. However, Valve says that they are already proactive in shutting down accounts made only to gamble and avoiding pro-gambling businesses.

Valve is capping off its statement by saying that the NYAG is forcing the company to collect more information from its users, especially those using VPNs to prevent being located in New York. The company says that it will continue to protect user data, despite the demand.

SEE ALSO: Valve is delaying the launch of the Steam Machine

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Gaming

Microsoft is launching Xbox Mode to Windows 11 PCs

It collects all your games in one place.

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What is an Xbox? For the past year and a half, Microsoft will tell you that anything can be an Xbox. Now, with Project Helix on the horizon, Xbox wants to bring the idea of playing anywhere to the next level. Microsoft will start rolling out its new Xbox Mode to PCs in April.

Since the very first device out in the market, handheld consoles have changed how people play games. Naturally, a lot can already be said about the portability and the convenience of its hardware. But the software needs a special shoutout, too.

Though they are essentially PCs at heart, these consoles are built explicitly for gaming. Fiddling around with Windows isn’t ideal. Instead, they have special software that can collate all of a user’s games into one hub.

The new Xbox Mode, adapted from the ROG Xbox Ally X’s Xbox Full Screen Experience, will do just that but on an actual PC. As announced via an official blog post, Xbox will release the new mode to Windows 11 devices in April, starting with select markets. Like the software used in handheld consoles, Xbox Mode should include all the available games from the Game Pass, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.

Right now, the feature will likely go up against Steam’s Big Picture Mode, which does the same thing but only for Steam titles. However, it should also transition neatly to Project Helix. Xbox is now ramping up the development of its next-generation console codenamed Project Helix. The upcoming machine will be a high-end PC and a gaming console rolled into one, making it perfect for Xbox Mode.

SEE ALSO: Project Helix is Xbox’s next console, and it plays PC games

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