Technology

Phison took the wraps off its PS5031-E31T SSD controller at Computex 2023, with its DRAMless Gen5x4 single-CPU, built on TSMC's 7nm process, featuring an ARM Cortex R5 CPU and support for up to 8TB of 3D TLC and QLC NAND.

The first SSDs featuring the controller were teased at this year’s Computex, and now we’re starting to see previews of these drives.

KitGuru took a look at a 2TB reference drive from Phison (not a model that's actually destined to be sold) that uses the PS5031-E31T controller in combination with two packages of Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND.

An important SSD milestone

The site’s Simon Crisp said “For the 1TB and 2TB reference designs Phison quotes Sequential read/write performance for the 2TB model as up to 10,300MB/s and 8,600MB/s respectively with the 1TB model a little slower at 10,200MB/s and 8,300MB/s for read and writes respectively. Random performance is rated at up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,500,000 IOPS for writes for both capacities.” These impressive figures were backed up by the benchmarks the site ran.

Summing up its experience with the drive, KitGuru said “Phison's PS5031-E31T controller is a game changer. It opens up the promise of seeing Gen 5 SSDs not only in the mainstream market segment but also in the notebook space, given the E31T has been designed to run cooler and more efficiently than the previous generation Gen 5 controllers.”

TweakTown ran a gamut of benchmarking tests on a similar drive, and while Crucial T705 2TB topped the PCMark 10 test, followed by Sabrent Rocket 5 2TB and MSI Spatium M580 4TB, Phison’s reference drive came in 19th out of 52, and you can only imagine how much faster an SSD with that controller would be in a drive from Crucial, Corsair or Seagate.

Summing up its findings, TweakTown said, “Phison Electronics does it again. As we see it, the world's first retail-ready PCIe Gen5 x4 controller is a smashing success. And by smashing, we mean by far the best-performing flash-based DRAMless SSD delivered to date. What the E31T has to offer is an important milestone in the history of solid-state storage. It's over 10,000 MB/s of power-efficient DRAMless mainstream consumer storage performance, which we've not seen before.”

(Image credit: TweakTown) Excellent all-around performance

Declaring it a must-have and with a rating of 99%, TweakTown added, “Phison's E31T SSD controller is first to bring PCIe Gen5 x4 storage into the mainstream and does so with revolutionary combination of performance and efficiency.”

Tom’s Hardware produced a (p)review video the product which you can watch below. No surprises that it performed impressively. As the site says, “The SSD delivers excellent all-around performance, with excellent efficiency and power metrics, finally making PCIe 5.0 technology accessible to HTPCs, laptops, and more. Retail drives should begin shipping in the coming months, and it's a race now to see who will be first out the door.”

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Apple has announced a series of enhancements to its Business Connect platform in the hope that businesses across the world, including those without physical locations, can create and improve their brand presence and appeal more than a billion Apple users globally.

A relatively new tool, Business Connect was launched in early 2023 as a way for businesses to manage their presence on Apple Maps by customizing location cards, adding photos and logos, and offering actions like reservations.

Now, Business Connect has expanded to more areas, allowing company owners to tap into their powerful hardware to keep capital expenditure low.

Apple Business Connect gets a handy upgrade

Among the new tools are options for businesses to display their logo when accepting payments through Tap to Pay on iPhone, which eliminates the need to buy potentially pricey payment terminals and POS devices.

Apple has also added a new Branded Mail feature that allows businesses to display their logo in customer emails in the hope that the more cohesive and professional feel will reassure customers that the message is authentic.

Business Caller ID is also on the cards for next year, allowing verified businesses to display their name and logo on the incoming call screen to help customers identify genuine calls from companies.

David Dorn, Apple’s Senior Director of Internet Software and Services Product, commented: “We designed Business Connect to empower businesses to present the best, most accurate information to Apple users. With today’s updates, we’re helping even more businesses reach customers, build trust, and grow.”

Physical, online-only and virtual businesses can register for Business Connect through an Apple Account for free, and go ahead to manage their online presence from any device.

The Cupertino giant has also updated its Business Connect User Guide to reflect the changes, offering guidance to those looking to get started.

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I've been playing with Robosen's new voice-controlled, programmable Buzz Lightyear robot, and the details are impeccable.

Samsung's book-shaped foldable stands out for its reliable app support and stunning display.

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Are you looking for good broadband in Maury? CNET has gathered the top home internet plans available in this small Tennessee town.

During an event for Tesla’s new self-driving Cybercab—due out 2027—Musk revealed an expansive vision for cities transformed by a robotaxi revolution. Experts say the plan has some hitches.

Proton has added three new features to its business VPN to improve functionality and make it easier to protect devices.

For one, Proton now offers mobile device management support (MDM) for simple installation of Proton VPN on employee devices. It has also expanded its offering of servers from two to twelve countries.

Finally, the company has added Gateway monitoring for organization-wide resource and application usage.

Boost for business

Proton MDM makes it easier to protect your business from the second a team member logs on, by automatically installing Proton VPN on to Windows PCs. So even if you have a new starter or roll out new business laptops to your team, you can be sure you’re protected. Proton will even sign them in for you automatically.

Moreover, you’ll be able to see where and on what devices Proton VPN has been installed, and add device restrictions. To further boost protection, you’ll be able to set your devices to require an active VPN connection to access apps and the internet and enable an always-on setting to reduce friction.

As for dedicated servers, you can now lease dedicated servers in multiple cities across twelve countries for better local resource access, segmentation, and remote team support.

Lastly, Gateway monitor provides at-a-glance information on users, connections, VPN connections, location, and device names, as well as more detailed information at the user level.

For additional information, visit the Proton VPN blog here.

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Netflix has shared a glimpse at Mel Monroe (Alexandra Breckenridge) and Jack Sheridan's (Martin Henderson) dreamy wedding in the new Virgin River season 6 teaser – and I'm now just waiting for my invite in the mail!

Save the dates are already in order as the best streaming service announced that Virgin River season 6 would be released on December, 19, so there isn't long to wait until the wedding of the year.

Mel and Jack have faced many hardships throughout their time in the sleepy town. While struggling with their own traumas, they've endured a heartbreaking miscarriage, love triangle, and a devastating wildfire. But now, our favorite couple will walk down the aisle and have the happily ever after they deserve.

The teaser trailer (see below) starts with a heartwarming montage of the couple's most romantic moments along with a voiceover of Jack's swoon-worthy proposal from the season 4 finale. We also get a glance at Mel's wedding dress and Jack looking dapper in his wedding suit, as well as snippets of Mel's bachelorette party.

Adjust your buttonholes and grab your bouquets

Spoilers follow for the ending of Virgin River season 5.

Virgin River season 6 focuses on the lead-up to Mel and Jack's wedding, with showrunner Patrick Sean Smith telling Tudum: “We’re trying to hit all the milestones of the pre-wedding planning, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, the rehearsal dinner. I’m so proud of how it turned out. It felt very Virgin River in its production - the ambition of it, and that we’re a small group of people that care about something so much: the fans. So we just busted our humps to get it done.”

While season 6 leans into the romance of the series, there's still going to be "the signature Virgin River twists and turns," Sean Smith said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

The upcoming installment of the best Netflix show takes place in the springtime, a few months after season 5's Christmas episodes where Mel discovered the identity of her biological father, Everett Reid (John Allen Nelson). We'll also be introduced to two new characters in Virgin River season 6, as Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) and Callum Kerr (One Piece) will play a young version of Mel's parents, Sarah and Everett who appear in flashbacks as they meet and fall in love in the 1970s.

In the meantime, I'll be watching these five powerful dramas and three small town dramas while I wait for my wedding invitation.

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The Garmin Fenix 8 is a fantastic watch. We thought it was one of the best Garmin watches yet and awarded it a rare five-star rating, albeit before we learned about a serious issue. The Garmin Fenix 8 seems to have a big problem with cold water, as for lots of users, it shuts down when immersed. Not ideal for a device marketed as a dive watch.

Those users include podcaster Joe Rogan. On The Joe Rogan Experience #2209, around the 2:40:00 mark, Rogan discusses the Garmin Fenix 8 with guest Paul Rosolie.

“I do wanna say, Garmin, that your new Fenix 8 watch shuts off when you get in the cold plunge. I have a Fenix 8 and a Fenix 7, they’re awesome, I love these things. [The Fenix 8] has a better heart sensor, it’s just better overall, but it sucks if you go in cold water, it doesn’t make any sense: how can you go backward? On the old one, you can go in cold water and nothing happens.”

“So if I’m in the water for five seconds, it shuts off. They’re apparently going to fix that, they think it’s a software issue. The crazy thing is, they have a dive feature… if you get down to depths and it’s below 40 degrees, it’s probably going to shut off."

“People have done it in cold water, so they’ve taken a glass of cold water and dropped the watch in, and it shuts off. Not good, Garmin... I ordered one, it took a while to get there and got all excited, then during my first cold plunge I thought 'What in the f***?'"

By “people”, Rogan means TechRadar. We recently ran a story where we put the Garmin Fenix 8 watch to a cold-water test in the office, compared to a Fenix 7. The Garmin Fenix 8 shut down twice through cold water exposure, while the Fenix 7 emerged unfazed.

(Image credit: Future)

After his assistant clarifies that you can put the watch in Beta to solve the issue, Rogan immediately retorts with, “but Beta disables the dive function”. So he’s clearly done some reading around the issue – including our coverage. He then goes on to espouse its virtues, with Maps, elevation, waypoints, the long battery life and the LED flashlight, all features he loves. “These f***ing things are incredible.”

A regular cold plunger, Rogan has a solution: he wears the Garmin Fenix 7 during cold plunges and sauna, while mentioning he uses the Garmin Fenix 8's LED flashlight and elevation out in the woods, presumably while hunting. It seems as though he swaps from one to the other depending on the task at hand.

It’s not the high-profile plug Garmin would have wanted for the next iteration of perhaps its most popular watch series, despite Rogan evangelizing on the series in general. However, it does put additional pressure on Garmin to solve the issue quickly, when users like Rogan with reach and clout become public Fenix 8 detractors.

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The latest Boom speaker stays mainly the same, with one key upgrade.

In a recently published blog post, Google explained how it makes its software less susceptible to flaws and vulnerabilities, and thus less interesting to cybercriminals. Its approach includes two key pillars: hardening super-popular, yet unsafe, programming languages, while slowly (but surely) transitioning towards up-and-coming, memory-safe languages.

Earlier this week, Alex Rebert of Security Foundations, and Core Developers Chandler Carruth, Jen Engel, Andy Qin, wrote an article saying that about 70% of severe vulnerabilities in memory-unsafe codebases are due to memory safety bugs.

These vulnerabilities are then found, and exploited, by malicious actors who can do real-world harm. Last year, the number of vulnerabilities exploited in the wild almost hit an all-time high, and of those figures, 75% CVEs used in zero-day exploits were memory safety vulnerabilities.

C and C++

Understanding these problems also means doing something about them, and Google is apparently now going for this two-pronged approach.

“Our long-term objective is to progressively and consistently integrate memory-safe languages into Google's codebases while phasing out memory-unsafe code in new development. Given the amount of C++ code we use, we anticipate a residual amount of mature and stable memory-unsafe code will remain for the foreseeable future.”

Basically, Google is saying that it is impossible to flat-out replace C and C++, despite the general consensus being that they are memory-unsafe languages. Therefore, before that migration is complete, the company will work on risk reduction and containment, which includes C++ hardening (retrofitting safety at scale in memory-unsafe code), security boundaries (strengthening critical software infrastructure components through expanded use of isolation techniques), and bug detection (investing further in bug detection tooling and innovative research).

Lastly, Google said it is “actively working” with the semiconductor and research communities on emerging hardware-based approaches to improve memory safety.

“We believe it’s important to embrace the opportunity to achieve memory safety at scale, and that it will have a positive impact on the safety of the broader digital ecosystem,” Google concludes. “This path forward requires continuous investment and innovation to drive safety and velocity, and we remain committed to the broader community to walk this path together.”

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OnePlus has announced that it will release an Android 15-powered update to its OxygenOS operating system on October 24 via an online event on official OnePlus channels.

The company says OxygenOS 15 will bring “meaningful AI features” and a “distinctive design style”, with a focus on user-friendliness and speedy performance.

Though we don’t have specific details of the mentioned AI features yet, OnePlus says these have been “strategically designed across multiple common scenarios”.

It’s not yet clear whether these AI tools will be proprietary or based on those built into the Android 15 operating system.

OnePlus says the underlying animations of the Android operating system have been reconstructed for OxygenOS 15, with the aim of providing a smoother experience.

OxygenOS 15 will be the first version of OnePlus’ proprietary wrapper to make use of Android 15, the source code for which was released on September 4.

However, it’s only recently that phone makers have begun to implement the latest version of the world’s most popular operating system, with Android developer Google rolling out Android 15 to its Pixel phones on October 15.

On October 17, we reported that Motorola had begun issuing an Android 15 update to select devices in beta, with Xiaomi and Honor going the same route in global markets.

However, we don’t expect OxygenOS 15 to launch in beta, which means OnePlus has a shot of being the second phone maker to implement a stable release of Android 15.

Which OnePlus phones are likely to get Android 15?

The OnePlus 12 launched globally in January 2024 (Image credit: Future / James Ide)

We aren’t yet sure of which OnePlus phones will receive the OxygenOS 15 update, but we’re expecting all of the best OnePlus phones to make the cut.

The premium OnePlus 12 and OnePlus Open, as well as the mid-range OnePlus Nord 4, are likely to get this Android 15-powered update, as OnePlus has promised four years of updates for each handset.

The OnePlus 12R is also likely to receive OxygenOS 15, as it’s still in the first year of a promised three years of updates.

For the moment, much of the above remains speculative, so we’ll be on the lookout for more official OnePlus announcements.

For the latest updates on OxygenOS 15 and Android 15, be sure to keep up with our OnePlus coverage and Android coverage.

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