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The 98-inch TCL S5 just slashed $3,000 off its original price at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. Buy one ahead of football’s biggest weekend now.

Let one of the top robot vacuums from iRobot, Ecovacs, Shark, or Roborock clean up all of that unwanted pet hair for you. Here’s how to choose the best one.

H&R Block’s Deluxe tax preparation option can handle your federal and state needs — and you can get it at a discount now.

The company also shares news about its most advanced model yet – GPT-4 Turbo with Vision.

ZDNET has tested every Apple iPad model from the powerhouse iPad Pro to the portable iPad Mini to help you find the best iPad for you.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 isn’t taking Google’s Gemini AI with it to China. CNBC reported Friday that the Chinese version of the flagship phone uses Baidu’s Ernie chatbot to power the phone’s AI-powered features. Ernie arrived last August after reportedly receiving Chinese government approval. 

“Now featuring Ernie’s understanding and generation capabilities, the upgraded Samsung Note Assistant can translate content and also summarize lengthy content into clear, intelligently organized formats at the click of a button, streamlining the organization of extensive text,” Baidu and Samsung told CNBC in a joint statement.

Samsung’s description of the Galaxy S24 series on its Chinese website advertises many of the same Google-powered features it debuted last week in its San Jose, CA, launch event. These include a version of Circle to Search, real-time call translation, a transcription helper and a photo assistant. The Chinese Galaxy S24 product pages don’t have any references to Google, which has limited operations in the country.

Samsung

A recent report suggests Apple recently ended Samsung’s 14-year run as the global smartphone shipment leader. In addition, IDC published data this week suggesting the iPhone maker claimed the top spot in the Chinese market (with a 17.3-percent market share) for the first time in 2023. Samsung didn’t make the top five.

Engadget has tried the Galaxy S24 series, including the standard, Plus and Ultra variants. Samsung’s 2024 flagship phone lineup launches in the US on January 31.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsungs-ai-features-on-the-galaxy-s24-in-china-reportedly-ditch-google-for-baidu-174503505.html?src=rss

To the surprise of just about everyone — seemingly including the studio behind it — virtual reality game Ultrawings 2 has hit PlayStation VR2 earlier than expected. Developer Bit Planet Games wrote on X that “shadow dropping Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 today was not on our 2024 bingo card but, well, here we are.” (A shadow drop refers to a surprise release of a product as soon as it’s announced, like Hi-Fi Rush.)

It’s unclear exactly how Ultrawings 2, which debuted on Steam and Meta Quest in 2022, arrived on PS VR2 ahead of schedule. Bit Planet had wanted to bring the aerial adventure title to that platform by the end of 2023 but was unable to. It instead promised to release Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 early this year. On January 9, Bit Planet noted it had started the submission process.

Nevertheless, the studio says the PS VR2 debut was “unforeseen.” While the developers say the current version of the game has some “relatively minor issues,” those have been resolved and were planned to be fixed in a day-one patch. That’s more likely to be a day-five update, but the studio said Ultrawings 2 is “solid” as is.

In any case, at least there’s one more game for folks to try on PS VR2. In the 11 months that the headset has been around, Sony itself has only published three VR experiences on the platform.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ultrawings-2-hits-ps-vr2-early-and-even-the-developer-was-surprised-173918655.html?src=rss

The MicroKorg 2 has some big britches to fill. The original MicroKorg is one of, if not the best selling synthesizer of all time. It’s also probably the longest continuously manufactured synth, having hit the market in 2002. Of course, technology has advanced quite a lot in the last 22 years and it was time to give what is arguably the first classic synth of the 21st century an update.

The new version that Korg announced just ahead of NAMM 2024 stays largely true to the original design. It’s small, but solidly built. The mini keys might bother those with sausage fingers, but my slightly smaller than average hands didn’t have much issue. I did occasionally miss my mark slightly, but that has as much to do with my terrible keyboard skills as it does the compact keybed. The keybed itself is fine. Nothing to write home about, that’s for sure. But it’s also not worth getting up in arms about. I’ve played plenty worse.

The knobs and buttons, even on this prototype felt solid. And the big rotary knob, which is kind of what gives a MicroKorg its visual identity, has very satisfying detents as you change the genre of your patch selection. While there are big signs in the Korg booth proclaiming that the MicroKorg 2 is still a prototype, the hardware already feels quite refined.

Even the interface seems like its at least nearly complete. The screen itself is bright and colorful with decent viewing angles. It did get a little washed out at extreme angles under the glare of the Anaheim Convention Center’s lights, but it’s unlikely to cause an issue in regular use. 

Terrence O’Brien / Engadget

The UI is already looking pretty nice, with some stylish animations as you change parameters. And changing parameters is a lot easier than it was on the original MicroKorg, which had two edit selection knobs and a table you needed to look up what the five knobs across the top were controlling. On the MicroKorg 2 things are much quicker. For example, pressing the button below the second knob cycles through the settings for oscillator one, two, three and the noise source. And the screen tells you what parameters are assigned to those knobs, depending on the page you’ve selected. 

It’s hardly knob per function but it could be much worse.

Terrence O’Brien / Engadget

The one area where it was obvious that the MicroKorg 2 was still in prototype stage was in the presets. There were only eight preprogrammed into the unit I tried. And the NAMM show floor wasn’t exactly the ideal environment to do deep sound design. 

I did kick the tires on it a bit though, and was pretty quickly able to throw together a couple of decent sounding patches. And the handful of presets that Korg did have ready to go were bright and loaded with character. They were decidedly digital but didn’t feel clinical. Unfortunately the convention hall was even less conducive to testing out the vocoder and harmonizer features. It was just impossible to get a clean enough signal with all the cacophony going on around me.

Terrence O’Brien / Engadget

In general the eight-voice (or four-voice in bi-timbral mode), three-oscillator synth engine seems like a big upgrade from the original. It’s got not just your standard virtual analog waves, but a selection of single cycle waveforms and even samples that can be combined to create relatively complex sounding patches. 

The one thing that the original has over its successor though is price. Where you can still go pick up a MicroKorg from most music retailers for $430, the MicroKorg 2 will set you back $699 when it goes on sale later this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-microkorg-2-hands-on-a-stylish-update-to-an-iconic-digital-synthesizer-173034308.html?src=rss

Tonaquint’s upgraded data center is based in tornado alley and can withstand an F5 twister.

The 5nm Prodigy processor can dynamically switch between AI, HPC, and cloud workloads and costs $23,000