During the Snapdragon Summit last year, Qualcomm unveiled its new Snapdragon X Elite chipset. This is a new chipset that is designed to compete against the Apple Silicon and bring more Arm-based computers to the market. Now thanks to benchmarks of the Snapdragon X Elite that have been spotted on Geekbench, it looks promising.

This was discovered by Windows Latest who found a benchmark for the Surface Laptop 6. It is widely speculated to be the Snapdragon X Elite, even though the chipset was not identified specifically. According to the scores, it managed to achieve 2,714 for single-core performance and 14,078 for multi-core performance.

For context, Apple's M3 Pro scored 3,084 in single-core and 14,017 in multi-core. While the M3 Pro seemingly leads the way in single-core performance, the Snapdragon X Elite has it slightly beat in the multi-core department according to the benchmarks. That being said, it should be noted that these scores only tell one side of the story. There are other things to consider when purchasing a laptop.

Plus, Qualcomm seems to be mired in some controversy right now regarding its benchmarks. The company has yet to disclose its chip TDP. This means that it is possible that the company's chipsets could be drawing more power than the Apple Silicon. This in turn could give it higher benchmark results. We'll have to wait for the actual laptops to be released to get a better idea.

One of the changes to Android we've seen in the past few years is dark mode. This is where the overall UI takes on a darker look so it doesn't look so glaring at night. Developers have largely supported it, but there are some that haven't. Luckily, Android 15 will change that by forcing all apps to go dark even if they don't support it natively.

According to a report from Android Authority, a recent APK teardown has revealed that Google plans to introduce a feature in Android 15. This new feature will basically force all apps to have a dark mode. This comes in the form of a toggle called "Make all apps dark", although there is a bit of a catch.

Since some apps don't have a native dark mode, Google notes that toggling on this feature could result in some display issues. Android Authority tested it out and found that in some cases, it ended up reducing the contrast of some buttons. We suppose it will vary from app to app, but it could be a good way to make sure all your apps are dark when dark mode is toggled.

For the most part, a lot of apps out there do support dark mode. Hopefully this could force those holdouts to implement something native of their own, or risk ruining the user experience. Either way, we'll have to wait and see, but if you do like using dark mode, then this Android 15 feature could be something to look forward to.

OnePlus recently announced that it will be launching an exclusive new edition of its flagship smartwatch model, which it calls the OnePlus Watch 2 Nordic Blue edition. The new special color variant is designed for European markets, and draws inspiration from classic timepieces. Priced starting at £329 / €379, it's currently exclusive for European and UK markets, and adds a bit of flair to the otherwise plain-looking design on its siblings.

This includes a new hybrid leather strap, which combines fluororubber and genuine leather design accents for a more classy look and feel, in addition to a unique-looking two-tone blue GMT dial not found on the other OnePlus Watch 2 variants. It does make for a much-welcome does of variety though, in case you want something other than the original two models launched a while back.

With all that said, the new color edition comes with all of the same hardware specifications as on the other variants - this includes a 1.43-inch AMOLED touch screen, IP68 dust and water protection, Snapdragon W5 chip, 2GB of RAM and 32GB ROM, as well as the secondary BES 2700 MCU Efficiency chipset.

As for price, buyers in the United Kingdom and EU regions can grab the OnePlus Watch 2 Nordic Blue edition for £329 / €379.

The advent of new AI-based technologies including GenAI and LLMs (large language models) has no doubt resulted in big industry names pushing for continued work on everything AI. With that in mind, Microsoft recently announced its new Phi-3 family of open models. Unlike LLMs such as Gemini and ChatGPT though, the Phi-3 models are described by Microsoft as cost-effective small language models, aka SLMs.

The company says that its new Phi-3 models outperform models of the same size and even the next size up in terms of different benchmarks covering language, coding and math capabilities. According to Microsoft, this is made possible via training innovations developed by the company's researchers.

Additionally, Microsoft adds that it's making the first Phi-3 model publicly available via Phi-3-mini, which measures at 3.8 billion parameters and is able to outperform models twice its size. Phi-3 will be available in the Microsoft Azure AI Model Catalog and on Hugging Face, a platform for machine learning models, as well as Ollama, a framework for running models on a local machine. It will also be available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice with a standard API interface.

Finally, additional models to the Phi-3 family will be made available soon to offer more choice across quality and cost - these include Phi-3-small (7 billion parameters) and Phi-3-medium (14 billion parameters), which will be available in the Azure AI Model Catalog and other model gardens later on.

While most people will know Samsung from its vast selection of Galaxy smartphones and electronics, the South Korean manufacturer also invests considerable R&D into other product lines. As such, the company recently announced that it has begun mass production for its one-terabit (Tb) triple-level cell (TLC) 9th-generation vertical NAND (V-NAND).

With that in mind, Samsung says that it has improved the bit density of the 9th-generation V-NAND by about 50% compared to the 8th-generation V-NAND. This includes new improvements which cuts down on cell interference and improves cell life extension, to name a few.

The company adds that its 9th-generation V-NAND is equipped with next-generation NAND flash interface, dubbed as "Toggle 5.1." This supports increased data input/output speeds by 33% to up to 3.2 gigabits-per-second (Gbps). Samsung also plans to expand support for PCIe 5.0. For power consumption, there's a 10% improvement with advancements in low-power design, compared to the previous models.

Samsung states that it has begun mass production for the 1Tb TLC 9th-generation V-NAND this month, which will be followed by the quad-level cell (QLC) model in the second half of 2024.