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Nintendo's 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System launched in North America 35 years ago, arriving nine months after its Japanese debut as the Super Famicom. The console shipped with Super Mario World and went on to host classics like Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and Star Fox, ultimately selling 49.1 million units before discontinuation in 1999.
Vivo product manager Han Boxiao revealed on Weibo that the upcoming X500 Pro will use a custom 'Ultra Dynamic Camera' sensor, co-developed with ZEISS and Sony, offering 17 stops of dynamic range. The phone is also claimed to be the first to record slow-motion video at 4K resolution and 240 frames per second, ahead of an expected September launch.
Valve, the studio behind Half-Life and Steam, was founded on August 24, 1996, by former Microsoft engineers Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. The company released Half-Life in 1998, reshaping first-person shooter design, then launched Steam in 2003, establishing digital game distribution as an industry standard. Today the company celebrates its 30th anniversary with both products still shaping the industry.
Google has fully retired Manifest V2 extension support in Chrome, closing the workarounds that let power-user ad blockers like uBlock Origin keep functioning. Google frames the move as a security and maintenance improvement, though critics see it as tightening control over what extensions can do. Users left without full ad-blocking now have a handful of options, including uBlock Lite, other Manifest V3-compliant extensions, switching browsers, or running external tools like AdGuard.
Researchers at Kyoto University led by Mitsuaki Kaneko, Shunya Shibata, and Tsunenobu Kimoto built a silicon carbide transistor that operates at 600°C using standard ion implantation, the same doping process used in commercial chip fabs. Their bottom-gate, double-well design narrowed the gap between designed and measured threshold voltage to under 0.1V at 400°C, a sharp improvement from the more than 2V drift seen in conventional layouts, while also curbing substrate leakage as temperatures rise.
A reviewer tested Xreal smart glasses that tether to a laptop via USB-C and project a virtual screen equivalent to a 170-inch TV directly into the wearer's field of view. Unlike Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, these devices from makers like Xreal, Viture and Rokid contain no cameras or recording features, instead mirroring displays from laptops, phones, tablets or handheld consoles for a personal, portable viewing experience.
CPUID has released CPU-Z version 3.01, updating its long-standing hardware information utility with a diagnostic feature called Validator V3. The tool scans a system for more than 100 possible problems, such as overheating components, outdated drivers, hardware faults, and unwanted preinstalled software.
A leaked internal One UI 9 build on the Galaxy S25 Ultra shows Samsung testing Virtual Reflector, a software tool that brightens backlit subjects without overexposing the background. The feature originally launched on the Galaxy S26 Ultra and is being tested through Samsung's Expert RAW app, letting users adjust reflector color, reflectance, and light direction. Samsung has not confirmed a One UI 9 beta rollout for the S25 series, so the feature's inclusion remains unconfirmed.
Xiaomi has detailed its new XRing 03 processor on Weibo, built on a 3nm process and featuring an unannounced Arm G2-Ultra NX GPU with 16 cores and AI-based upscaling. The chip also includes a 10-core CPU with six 'super' and four 'large' cores, no small cores, peaking at 4.35GHz, plus a four-core NPU rated at 200 TOPS. It will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, set to launch next month.
HP has cut $2,200 off its Omen Max 45L gaming desktop, dropping the price to $4,799.99 for a complete system built around an RTX 5090 GPU, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD, and an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor. That price is roughly $30 less than what the RTX 5090 graphics card alone currently costs at retail, making the entire prebuilt machine effectively cheaper than one of its components.
Logistics companies are deploying AI systems to handle the constant stream of calls, texts and emails that coordinate shipments across trucks, trains, ships and planes. The technology aims to speed up an industry long reliant on manual coordination, though its effectiveness depends heavily on the quality of underlying data and the safeguards built around it.
Flashforge is participating in AliExpress's annual 828 sale, offering discounts on its Adventurer 5M, AD5X, and Adventurer 5M Pro 3D printers as well as HS PLA filament. Buyers can apply tiered coupon codes that increase in value based on total cart spend, ranging from $3 off a $15 purchase up to $120 off orders of $600 or more.