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Dell is releasing two new Alienware-branded monitors this fall. Before you ask, they don’t feature QD-OLED panels like the drool-worthy . The more interesting of the two new monitors is the 27-inch AW2723DF. It features an LG Nano IPS panel with a 2560 x 1440 resolution, a native 240Hz refresh rate and a claimed 1ms gray to gray response time.

A factory overclock lets you push the refresh rate to 280Hz for games like Valorant and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For more immersive gaming, the monitor comes with support for AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and NVIDIA G-Sync. It doesn’t feature local dimming, but for what it’s worth, HDR performance was good enough for the AW2723DF to earn VESA’s DisplayHDR 600 badge .

Alienware is billing the AW2723DF as the perfect monitor for gamers who do content creation on the side. The AW2723DF’s screen covers 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. A toggle found in the monitor’s OSD menu allows you to switch to sRGB when doing work for the web. As with most Dell-made monitors, the AW2723DF won’t leave you wanting for ports. On top of the usual DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 connections, the monitor features multiple USB 3.2 Gen 1 inputs, as well as a headphone jack and audio output. All that’s missing is an . New to the Alienware design is a retractable headset hanger. The stand offers swivel, pivot, tilt and height adjustment. You can also VESA mount the AW2723DF if you want to use it with a monitor arm.

For the competitive gaming crowd, there’s the AW2523HF. It comes with a 25-inch LG IPS panel that features a Full HD resolution, 360Hz refresh rate and up to 0.5ms gray to gray response time. The screen covers 99 percent of the sRGB color gamut and is FreeSync Premium Pro certified. Like its sibling, the AW2523HF features a retractable hanger for storing your gaming headset. The AW2523HF also comes with a hexagonal stand instead of the V-shaped one that you find on most Alienware monitors. Dell says the design gives the AW2523HF a smaller footprint.

Of the two monitors, the AW2523HF will arrive first. It will go on sale on September 7th for $450. Meanwhile, the AW2723DF will cost $650 when it hits store shelves on October 6th.

Music is all around us, and if you happen to hear a tune that you like—in an advert, a film, or a prestige television show—then you’re going to want to know what it is. Or perhaps you’ve got something stuck in your head that you need a title for. Thanks to the magic of the digital devices at our fingertips, getting an answer shouldn’t be too difficult.

Apps to find out what song you just heard

There are numerous apps to choose from if you need to identify a piece of music, and they can often get a match in just a few seconds—even if there’s some dialog or other sounds playing over the top. You might want to have a couple of options on hand for those times when you need this kind of service.

Google Pixel phones are very good at this, thanks to the Now Playing lock screen widget that they come with. From Settings, pick Sound and vibration and Now Playing. Turn on the Identify songs playing nearby toggle switch and the lock screen will show matches for songs that your phone can hear. Enable Show search button on the lock screen to get a manual search option too, and Now Playing history to keep a log of identified songs.

Over on iOS, Shazam is now built in, as Apple owns it: Open the Control Center with a drag down from the top right corner of the screen, then tap the Shazam button when you need song recognition. If you can’t see the button, choose Control Center from Settings and add Music Recognition. Shazam is also available as a separate app for Android.

Another capable song identification app is SoundHoundwhich is free to download and install for Android and iOS: Finding the name and artist for a song is as simple as tapping the big button on the Search tab, and you can even sing or hum the tune if you like. You can also get help from Google Assistant or Siri, simply by saying “ what’s this song?” while it’s playing in the background.

Check for a song on a database

Apps don’t always work, and can’t always be used—like when you’re in the theater, say—but you’ve still got other options for identifying music. There are some very comprehensive databases on the web, for example , that dutifully log music that shows up in advertising, movies, shows, and just about anywhere else it might be heard.

Take the appropriately named TV Advert Musicwhich has information on a host of different ads, with the newest ones listed first on the homepage. If you don’t immediately see what you’re looking for, try running a search for a brand. Then there’s Adtuneswhich is more community driven: You can post requests for help or identify a song someone else has asked about, and it covers TV shows and films as well as ads.

Tunefind is another good bet, and the site covers TV shows, movies and video games. The database is a massive one, and you have the option to browse through what people have been looking for recently, or run a search of your own. Television shows are helpfully split up into individual episodes for you, and there are listening links included so you can quickly jump to YouTube or Spotify to make sure you’re got the right track.

We’d also like to mention Whatsongwhich lets you create and customize a personalized list of music that you’re interested in. Tunes are split up by the movie or the TV show that they appeared in, and by subscribing to updates for individual shows, you can get lists of songs before you even know what it is you want to look for. As with Tunefind, listening links are embedded in the database so you can launch your streaming service of choice with a click.

Find the soundtrack

There are yet more ways of tracking down a particular piece of music based on where you heard it or what it sounded like. Maybe try searching your favorite music streaming service for the soundtrack accompanying the relevant television show or movie, for example: This can be a useful way of finding an alternative version of a song or a more obscure tune that isn’t picked up by an app or listed on a database.

If you’re dealing with a film or show episode, then it will of course be listed somewhere on the Internet Movie Databaseand it’s likely that you’ll be able to find several clues about the music used from these listing pages. There should be a dedicated Soundtracks section on each page, and other details about tunes included in the film or show might be found in the Trivia or user review sections.

Wikipedia is always a useful resource for just about anything, and it has detailed pages for a lot of movies and television shows. A lot of the time, you’ll find dedicated sections on music that’s been featured, and there might even be some background on why particular tunes were chosen or how they were recorded. It’s definitely worth a look if your other avenues of inquiry aren’t going anywhere.

Lastly, if you can bear it, there’s always the social media option. Twitter is perhaps the best option here: You could put out a request for help with identifying a particular track, though how successful it will be is likely to depend on the size of your following. Running a Twitter search might bring up some results, if people with more followers than you are also asking about a particular song that just featured in a particular TV episode—the more popular the show, the higher the chance that people are talking about it.

We may be only a few months away from the launch of Google’s Pixel 7, but those who can’t wait for a new smartphone can save a bunch on the Pixel 6 Pro right now. Amazon has the current flagship for $649, which is $250 off its usual rate and the best price we’ve seen — even cheaper than it was on Prime Day last month. That’s what you’ll pay for the base, 128GB models, but the 256GB versions are also $250 off, so you can pick one up for as low as $749. The standard Pixel 6 is also on sale for $499.

Buy Pixel 6 Pro (128GB) at Amazon – $649 Buy Pixel 6 Pro (256GB) at Amazon – $749 Buy Pixel 6 at Amazon – $499

We like the entire Pixel 6 series, but the Pixel 6 Pro earned a score of 91 from us and earned a spot on our list of best smartphones you can get right now. It’s an attractive handset with a striking camera bar on its back, along with a 6.7-inch 120Hz OLED display. It’s powered by Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, which provides excellent performance while also being efficient — we were able to eke roughly 17 hours of battery life out of this smartphone, so it should easily last all day for most people.

But the Pixel 6 Pro really shines when taking photos. It has a triple rear camera array with a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 12MP wide-angle lens and a 48MP telephoto shooter, and those are in addition to the 11MP, 4K front- facing camera. We consider it to be the best smartphone for photography right now, as it handles all kinds of photos well including large group shots, wide landscapes, close ups, and more. Google’s Night Sight also does a fantastic job of producing solid images in low light, and its computational photography features enable things like Magic Eraser, Face Unblur and Long Exposure.

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Russia decommissioned its last self-run space station, Mir, in 2001. Now Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, has shared a model of the country’s future station, as it prepares to move out of the International Space Station. Nicknamed ROSS by state-controlled media, it would launch in two phases, starting with four modules and expanding to six with a service platform. The design would accommodate four people in rotating tours and reportedly offer better monitoring of Earth than Russia gets from the ISS today.

State media claim the first phase will launch between 2025 and 2030, with Russia expected to leave the ISS in 2024. It announced its departure from the ISS in July in response to sanctions and other measures following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

The newest Odyssey Ark is $3,500.

Samsung has gone all-out on its next-generation monitor. Samsung claims the Ark is the world’s first 55-inch monitor with a 4K resolution, a 165Hz refresh rate and a 1ms response time. You also get support for HDR 10+ and Dolby Atmos audio, and it’s got six built-in speakers that create a dome of sound. Oh, and you can use it vertically.

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The software is out of beta and brings some small but useful new tools.

Android 13 is coming out of beta and will start rolling out to Google’s Pixel phones today, with devices from Samsung, ASUS, Nokia (HMD), Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Sony, Xiaomi and more expected to get the update later this year.

The latest version of Google’s mobile operating system brings more granular privacy controls, a new photo picker, Bluetooth LE audio and more. Messaging app streaming might be the most notable new feature, letting you cast your messaging apps to your Chromebook so you can chat with your friends on your laptop. Google said this works with Messages “and many of your other favorite messaging apps.” The company added you’ll “soon be able to copy content — like a URL, picture, text or video — from your Android phone and paste it on your tablet,” or the other way around.

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From a company that worked on the movie trilogy’s special effects.

Wētā Workshop is working on a new Lord of the Rings game alongside publisher Private Division. The game is in early development and few details have been announced, but Wētā Workshop has “the broadest creative license to interpret the underlying lore of the books,” according to to a press release. If you’re wondering who or what Wētā Workshop is, it worked on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies as well as The Hobbit trilogy. The special effects powerhouse is also collaborating with Amazon on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It set up its gaming division in 2014.

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It’s a very, very simple version of DALL-E.

TikTok has introduced a basic AI greenscreen effect in its Android and iOS apps that turns your text descriptions into artwork. It’s much simpler than OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, producing abstract blobs rather than photorealistic depictions — which makes it a lot less interesting. However, AI art tools like DALL-E are usually limited to a select group of users. TikTok, meanwhile, has over a billion monthly users — while few of them are likely to ever use AI-generated art, the addition brings the technology to a much wider audience.

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The company is also redesigning its bikes for home assembly.

Peloton may soon allow users of competing fitness equipment to stream its workouts to their bikes and treadmills. In an interview with BloombergCEO Barry McCarthy said the company is “rethinking” its digital strategy. Peloton could adopt a freemium model offering some features and workouts in its mobile and TV app for free. Currently, the software costs $13 per month. In the future, people with stationary bikes or treadmills from companies like Bowflex, Echelon and NordicTrack could also stream Peloton’s content to their equipment’s display.

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We’ve always liked the idea of ​​home internet based on 4G/5G, and T-Mobile steadily expanded its service to cover “40M homes” last month, according to the company.

Yet, T-Mobile is ready to expand its Home Internet Service to the whole country or wherever it has a working wireless network with a slightly different service called Home Internet Lite.

That said, there’s a caveat because the Lite internet service comes with usage caps. It’s because it’s more akin to a large phone data plan than a proper “Home Internet” plan as people imagine them.

The full-speed access has caps of 100/150/200/300GB depending on how much you pay ($55/$80/$105 and $155). Based on the capacity, this is pretty expensive, and it’s not clear what the download/upload speeds are.

That said, depending on your location and needs, it might be enough for (very) basic Internet usage. To give you some context, a 720p zoom call uses 1GB per houraccording to zoom. Full-HD streaming from Netflix uses 3.1GB per hour.

If you go above your data cap, the connection won’t stop, but it will significantly slow down to 128 Kbpsreminding you of 2002 wireless modems. That’s terrible speeds you typically get while roaming abroad, for free.

Clearly, T-Mobile’s Home Internet Lite isn’t as great as the $50, no caps, standard T-Mobile Home Internet. That said, it might make sense if there’s nothing better around. As 5G coverage grows, there’s an excellent chance to go from Lite to standard Home Internet.

Filed in Cellphones >Home. Read more about Internet, Social Hit and T-Mobile. Source: cnet