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    I changed 10 Samsung phone settings to drastically improve the user experience

    Prakhar Khanna/ZDNETSamsung’s One UI 7 is my favorite Android skin right now. It is fast, responsive, and intuitive. But nothing comes fine-tuned to your experience straight out of the box. You need to personalize your smartphone to make it more appealing. I change almost a dozen settings on every Samsung Galaxy phone to best suit my needs, and I believe these will elevate your user experience, too. Also: The best Samsung phones to buyFrom setting the highest available screen resolution to more privacy-focused features, here are 11 Galaxy phone settings that I recommend changing to enhance your Galaxy phone experience. Please note that some settings might be phone-specific.1. Turn off pop-up notifications More

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    The only travel charger you’ll ever need – and why I swear by it

    <!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The Tessan 65W GaN Universal Travel Adapter retails for $42. It’s the perfect size, weight, and power output for traveling. It doesn’t convert mains AC voltage, and the USB ports on the bottom can be tricky to use. –> Gone are the days of packing multiple chargers with different connectors when […] More

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    Mullvad VPN review: Fast speeds and low prices, with a focus on privacy and anonymity

    <!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways Mullvad VPN has a unique fixed-pricing system for short- and long-term subscribers. The VPN is optimized to provide strong protection and achieves top speeds ideal for high-bandwidth browsing and streaming. Mullvad lacks native apps for some devices, has a small server count, and limits simultaneous connections. –> Mullvad is a VPN […] More

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    Think DeepSeek has cut AI spending? Think again

    Bloomberg, courtesy of Corey Sipkin The stock market collapse in January, prompted by the sudden fervor for the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) breakthrough DeepSeek AI, and its apparently much cheaper computing approach, might make you think that companies are dramatically reducing their spending on chips and systems for AI. A generative AI conference on Wednesday […] More

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    The rise of AI PCs: How businesses are reshaping their tech to keep up

    Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETThe artificial intelligence (AI) boom is transforming industries and reshaping work. Now, it’s setting its sights on a long-overlooked tool: your work laptop.The reach and capabilities of AI models go far beyond what people have seen from tinkering around with ChatGPT, which, although a great tool for proofreading or debugging code, only gives a brief glimpse into what large language models (LLMs), the technology powering tools like the chatbot, can do. Also: What is an AI PC exactly? And should you buy one in 2025?For instance, HCLTech, a consulting firm, worked with one of the largest end-to-end healthcare providers in the US to help implement a user-friendly, compliant AI clinical advisor. The clinical advisor, trained using one of the world’s largest clinical libraries, allows medical professionals to conversationally ask for the information they need to consult without wasting time digging for it. According to Alan Flower, EVP and head of AI & Cloud Native Labs at HCLTech, running the models locally on the device was key to effectively implementing this model.Also: Nvidia dominates in gen AI benchmarks, clobbering 2 rival AI chips”By using the clinician’s laptop, it frees up clinician time whilst also ensuring the privacy and security of the patient’s information,” said Flower. “It has that secondary advantage — it reduces the cost to run the solution since we’re not consuming expensive cloud tokens when we can use the neural processing unit on an AI PC, effectively, for free.” Flower said that since implementing the AI clinical advisor, within a typical 20-minute consultation with a doctor, the AI clinical advisor has freed up three minutes from the appointment, time the doctor can spend researching and focusing on the patient’s care. Also: With AI models clobbering every benchmark, it’s time for human evaluationCompanies are discovering that if they want to take full advantage of AI and run models locally, they need to upgrade their employees’ laptops. This realization has introduced a hardware revolution, with the desire to update tech shifting from an afterthought to a priority and attracting significant investment from companies.  More