TechRadar News

Focal Mu-so Hekla review

The Focal Mu-so Hekla is a wireless speaker in soundbar's clothing, featuring superbly detailed, sizable sound, a stunning build and a jumbo price. Weirdly, Focal insists it's not a soundbar, despite it sounding like a soundbar, connecting via eARC like a soundbar and looking an awful lot like a soundbar.

Named Hekla after one of Iceland’s most active stratovolcanoes — known semi-affectionately) as the ‘Gateway to Hell’ to locals — it's also been released under the Focal sister brand, rather than Naim's like the rest of the Mu-so line. So it does feel like the Hekla might be a bit confused about its identity... and honestly who could blame it?

(Image credit: Future)

At 4.65 x 39.37 x 11.61 inches / 118 x 1000 x 295mm, the Hekla is certainly proportioned like a soundbar. The fact that it’s compatible with Dolby Atmos, features side- and up-firing drivers to facilitate a spatial audio effect, and has an HDMI eARC socket for connection to a TV is quite soundbar-y too.

And the knowledge that this product has been branded ‘Focal’ (or, more specifically, ‘Focal powered by Naim’) because the French company is perceived to have greater credibility in the audio-visual and home cinema markets doesn’t really do anything to support Focal’s declaration that it’s primarily an all-in-one system either. Even at on Focal's website, it’s referred to as an ‘immersive Home Cinema system’ quite early on.

Get beyond these mild oddities, though, and the Focal Mu-so Hekla remains an intriguing device. Its black aluminum casing features anodized and shot-blasted aluminum heatsinks for a bit of visual drama on top of their practical applications, and the overall standard of build and finish is basically impeccable.

If you’re familiar with the Naim Mu-so (2nd Gen) wireless speaker, there will be nothing in the way the Mu-so Hekla looks that will come as any great surprise. It even features the same oversized control dial that’s been a feature of Naim equipment for a decade or more.

(Image credit: Future)

There are 15 individual speaker drivers across the cabinet, powered by an all-in total of 660 watts of Naim-designed Class D power. Across the front, there are three 130 x 60mm bass drivers, a pair of 60mm midrange drivers and a couple of 25mm tweeters — the bass drivers get 60 watts of power each, all the rest receive 40 watts each.

Each side of the cabinet features two 70 x 40mm full-range drivers, and there are two more of these drivers positioned on the top, behind those areas of perforated metal. It’s an arrangement that’s designed to deliver 7.1.2-channel spatial audio and a frequency response of 30Hz - 20kHz.

Getting the audio information on board in the first place can be done in a few different ways. There’s a digital optical input (which can comfortably handle up to 24bit/96kHz) alongside the HDMI eARC socket on the rear of the cabinet, where you’ll also find a pre-out for use with a subwoofer.

There’s dual-band Wi-Fi 6 on board, with the antennae integrated into the heatsinks. This means the Mu-so Hekla is compatible with (among other things) the ‘Connect’ versions of Qobuz, Spotify and TIDAL music streaming services, Apple AirPlay 2 and Google Chromecast. It’s also UPnP-compatible, can access internet radio provided by Naim servers, and it features Bluetooth 5.1 with SBC and AAC codec compatibility.

(Image credit: Future)

The Mu-so Hekla is able to deal with pretty much any worthwhile file type, and quite a few of the less worthwhile alternatives too. It can handle resolutions of up to 32bit/384kHz and DSD128 for two-channel stuff and up to 24bit/192kHz for multichannel and spatial audio content.

That large, illuminated and entirely gratifying control dial is useful for getting at the Focal’s headline functions. But for granular control of the Mu-so Hekla, the Focal & Naim control app (free for Android and iOS) is where the action is.

First and foremost, here’s where you get access to the nuts and bolts of the Focal’s spatial audio reproduction. You have a choice of five settings: Dolby Movie, Dolby Music and Dolby Night, along with a couple of Focal’s own designs called Sphere Movie and Sphere Music.

The idea is that the Sphere settings are best suited to small-to-medium rooms that have had a degree of acoustic treatment while the Dolby alternatives are better suited to larger rooms with less treatment.

Regardless of which one you decide best suits your purposes, though, you can properly stick your oar into the sound you receive. There’s a three-band EQ, ‘+/-10’ sliders to adjust settings labelled ‘height’, ‘surround’, low frequency effects’ and ‘voice enhance’, and the ability to trim the level of each of the 10 individual channels that comprise the Mu-so Hekla’s 7.1.2 layout.

The one thing you can’t do where spatial audio is concerned is turn it all the way off. It doesn’t matter what you feed into the Focal — two channel stuff, old-school 5.1 surround sound content, full-on Dolby Atmos soundtracks, you name it — the Mu-so Hekla will use all of its drivers, even if you feed in stereo content and select ‘stereo’ mode.

(Image credit: Future)

Between its room-correction routine and its spatial audio algorithms, the Mu-so Hekla is convinced it can deliver a sound that’s optimised to your space, every time, using every one of its 15 drivers.

Otherwise, the Focal & Naim control app is stable, extensive business as usual. Here’s where you get to control playback, access the various inputs, nominate as many as five shortcuts to favorite radio stations, playlists or what-have-you, and run the ‘ADAPT’ room correction algorithm.

On top of that, you can adjust the brightness of the lighting around the control dial, check for available updates, incorporate the speaker into a multi-room setup (using as many as 32 individual Focal or Naim streamers), and there’s a fair bit more too. The Focal & Naim app has been the subject of more-or-less continuous updates for years now, and it shows.

(Image credit: Future)

Given the best stuff to work with (and in this instance ‘best’ = ‘native Dolby Atmos’), the Mu-so Hekla is, in broad terms, one of the most successful one-box spatial audio solutions around.

There’s really not a huge amount of difference between the five spatial audio modes (at least, not much is apparent in my listening environment), but the Focal is a lively, robust, eloquent and, perhaps most importantly of all, spacious listen in every circumstance.

Certainly the soundstage it can summon is noticeably larger than the cabinet it comes from. There’s a gratifying amount of width and height to the presentation, and the Mu-so Hekla moves effects around from left to right, from top to bottom and from front to back confidently.

The spaces and silences between occurrences are given due prominence, too — but despite this, there’s no suggestion of remoteness or a lack of cohesiveness about the sound. Dolby Atmos movie soundtracks and music mixes sound unified and singular, and on occasion deserve the description ‘immersive’.

(Image credit: Future)

It’s even-handed where tonality is concerned, with a fairly neutral and natural approach to the timbre of the entire frequency range. And where frequency response is concerned, there’s just a suggestion of bloom at the very bottom end to disrupt what is otherwise a smooth and even line from the top end down.

Those lowest frequencies may be fractionally overstated, but they’re nevertheless nicely shaped, properly controlled and loaded with detail both broad and fine — the combination of punch and variation makes the Focal’s bass response very enjoyable, and it has no trouble expressing musical rhythms with real positivity thanks to the attention it pays to the decay and, especially, attack of individual notes or hits.

At the opposite end of the frequency range, the Mu-so Hekla is similarly revealing of detail in treble sounds, and summons enough substance to prevent the top end becoming hard or edgy even at volume. Don’t imagine for a moment the Focal isn’t capable of prodigious volume though.

(Image credit: Future)

The balance in the midrange is just as nicely judged. It’s articulate with voices, whether speaking or singing, and loads on the details to the point that everything from tone and timbre to breath control and vocal attitude are made perfectly apparent.

And while the unity of the presentation is never in doubt, the midrange in general and voices in particular project well — dialogue is always distinct, even when it’s surrounded by sonic chaos.

As well as being fully equipped where outright volume is concerned, the Mu-so Hekla has a generous amount of dynamic headroom — the distance it can put between quiet and loud (which is especially apparent during a big Hollywood set-piece) is huge.

So when the going gets intense during a symphony, or the whispered exposition transitions to an almighty explosion, the Focal can make the transitions absolutely apparent.

Focal Mu-so Hekla review: Price & release date

• Launched at the end of 2025 in parts of Asia
• Released to the rest of the world from late March 2026

The Focal Mu-so Hekla launched in South Korea and China at the end of November 2025, and became available in the wider world from late March 2026.

In the United Kingdom, it’s priced at £2,999, while American customers will need to spend $3,599, and in Australia it goes for AU$6,499.

(Image credit: Future)Focal Mu-so Hekla review: Specs

Dimensions

4.65 x 39.37 x 11.61 inches / 118 x 1000 x 295mm

Speaker channels

Up to 7.1.4

Connections

HDMI eARC; digital optical; WiFi 6; Bluetooth 5.1

Dolby Atmos / DTS:X

Yes / No

Sub included

No

Rear speakers included

No

(Image credit: Future)Should I buy the Focal Mu-so Hekla?

Attribute

Notes

Score

Features

Greater Bluetooth codec compatibility would be nice, as would the ability to listen in unprocessed stereo. Otherwise has everything you might reasonably expect.

4 / 5

Performance

Big, detailed and properly organized sound with just a hint of low-end overconfidence.

4.5 / 5

Design

Hard to make a big speaker look anything but ‘functional’ but the Focal enjoys coherent industrial design.

4.5 / 5

Setup and usability

Swift, simple, logical, and with an excellent control app.

5 / 5

Value

If you want as little compromise as possible when it comes to the sound of your one-box spatial audio system, it’s going to cost you.

4.5 / 5

Buy it if...

You want a big taste of spatial audio without the need for multiple speakers
The Mu-so Hekla can’t compete with a similarly priced multi-speaker system, but it gets a fair bit closer than most.

You have a top-tier music streaming service subscription
The Focal is just as adept with Dolby Atmos music as it is Dolby Atmos movies.

You like nice things and you want everyone else to know you like them too
The Mu-so Hekla is a great big block of good taste where industrial design is concerned, and is the audio equivalent of a highbrow hardback book on a coffee table.

Don't buy it if...

You’re expecting the best spatial audio performance £3K can buy
The Focal represents simply the finest one-box spatial audio performance your £3K can buy.

You like to listen to stereo music in stereo
The Mu-so Hekla will attempt to work its magic on two-channel stuff, even if you’ve selected ‘stereo’ mode.

You think you might fancy a soundbar
It’s NOT a soundbar How many times do I have to say it?

Focal Mu-so Hekla review: Also consider

Focal Mu-so Hekla

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Premiere

McIntosh RS250

Dimensions

118 x 1000 x 295mm / 4.6 x 39.3 x 11.6 inches

160 x 932 x 121mm / 6.3 x 36.7 x 4.8 inches

145 x 630 x 324mm / 5.7 x 24.8 x 12.8 inches

Speaker channels

7.1.2

Not listed

2.0 (Stereo)

Connections

1x HDMI eARC, 1x Optical TOSLINK, 1x RCA subwoofer output, 1x Ethernet (RJ45), Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1

1x HDMI eARC (4K 120FPS / 8K 60FPS passthrough), Analogue audio via USB-C (3.5mm via adapter), 3x Ethernet (1Gbit switch), Dual-band Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.4

1x HDMI ARC, 1x Optical TOSLINK, 1x Moving Magnet (MM) Phono input, 1x 3.5mm Aux, 1x 1/4" Headphone jack, 1x Mono RCA Subwoofer output, 1x Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0

Dolby Atmos/DTS:X

Dolby Atmos

Dolby Atmos

No

Sub included

No

No

No

Rear speakers included

No

No

No

Features

15 speaker drivers, 660W total Class D amplification, Naim streaming engine, Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast/Chromecast, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect, UPnP streaming, Focal & Naim app multiroom support (up to 32 devices), illuminated top dial control

10 custom drivers, 550W total amplification, 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos decoding with True Image up/downmixing, Wide Stage technology, 90 responsive internal LEDs, Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Beolink Surround support, Cradle to Cradle Certified Bronze

8 speaker drivers (2x tweeters, 4x midranges, 2x down-firing woofers), 650W total power output, Illuminated digital output meters, Apple AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Roon Ready, aptX HD & Low Latency Bluetooth

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Premiere
A soundbar that’s prepared to admit it’s a soundbar, the Premiere is predictably ostentatious and predictably high-achieving. If the Mu-so Hekla seems a bit underdesigned and a bit too affordable, here’s the product you need.

McIntosh RS250
No spatial audio pretensions and no great shakes where ‘design’ is concerned either — but the RS250 is nonetheless an absolute powerhouse of a wireless all-in-one audio system. And it has VU meters too.

(Image credit: Future)How I tested the Focal Mu-so Hekla

• Connected to a Philips OLED TV via HDMI eARC
• Streaming via Qobuz Connect, TIDAL Connect and internet radio
• Tested for well over a working week

I used a QED HDMI cable to connect the Mu-so Hekla to my Philips OLED806 TV via each machine’s HDMI eARC socket. The TV features Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, National Theatre at Home and Netflix apps, so plenty of streamed content is available, including Dolby Atmos stuff — and it’s also connected to a Panasonic DP-UB820 4K Blu-ray player and a Sony Playstation 5.

I stream wirelessly using both Qobuz Connect and TIDAL Connect. Which, again, makes plenty of content available at a whole range of resolutions including music mixed in Dolby Atmos.

UPnP connectivity allows me to access a Buffalo Terrastation NAS device loaded with content of up to 24bit/192kHz and DSD64 resolution. And I listen to a mixture of these input options and file formats for more than a working week (if, like me, you count a ‘working week’ as Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm).

• Read TechRadar’s reviews guarantee
• First reviewed: October 2026

• WiCi puts an RTX 5060 Ti inside a complete wireless computer
• Wi-Fi 7 replaces the cable connecting WiCi's GPU to host devices
• WiCi's 11.52-Gbps wireless link trails conventional high-speed GPU connections

WiCi is preparing a wireless external GPU, the WiCi One, which houses a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of GDDR7 memory in a separate box.

The device communicates through Wi-Fi 7, while its enclosure also contains a processor, storage, power hardware, cooling and networking components.

The company says this is not a cloud-style streaming service, although the unit is a full computer with its own processor and storage.

A complete computer with a graphics processor

The 5060 Ti configuration pairs the GPU with an Intel Core 3 100U processor, 1TB NVMe 4 storage, and 16GB GDDR7.

The device supports Wi-Fi 7 connectivity with 4x4 MIMO and a 320MHz channel, allowing the host device to communicate wirelessly with the separate computer.

The company also intends to offer an RTX 5090 variant containing 32GB GDDR7, an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H and 4TB NVMe 5 storage.

WiCi says its software can make the graphics processor available through driver, software development kit and application programming interface modes.

It describes the arrangement as a local alternative to cloud processing, with data remaining inside the user's network unless deliberately transmitted.

However, the main question is whether Wi-Fi 7 can provide enough throughput for workloads that normally depend upon much faster wired connections.

Wi-Fi 7 can theoretically reach 46.1 Gbps under configurations using 16 spatial streams, but WiCi's hardware specifies only four.

That 4x4 arrangement, using 320MHz bandwidth and 4096-QAM, reaches approximately 11.52 Gbps at the physical layer.

But its Thunderbolt 5 interface can provide 64 Gbps for PCIe traffic, while PCIe 4.0 x4 through OCuLink also offers 64 Gbps.

WiCi relies on software to bridge the bandwidth gap

WiCi says its protocol reduces network traffic through caching, deduplication, compression, streaming, and pipelining.

Those techniques are intended to limit how much information must travel between the host and graphics processor during demanding workloads.

The company claims its RTX 5060 Ti model can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 80 FPS in 4K Ultra with DLSS 4.

It also claims Black Myth: Wukong reaches 60 FPS at 4K Cinematic settings, although independent testing will determine how those results translate in real-life usage.

WiCi tests place the computer approximately 50 cm from the connected laptop, leaving questions about performance through walls or amid competing wireless traffic.

At $1,999 for early signups, WiCi's 5060 Ti model costs considerably more than a conventional external GPU enclosure, although it also includes a processor, storage and other components needed to operate as a standalone computer.

That makes its comparisons with other compact computing systems more relevant than a simple eGPU price comparison.

WiCi lists competing pocket AI machines at between $1,399 and $2,999, while Apple's Mac Studio M5 Max starts at $2,499.

Those systems, however, serve different purposes, since WiCi is designed to place a discrete GPU on the local network and make its computing resources accessible to multiple nearby host devices.

• Meta closed a woman’s Facebook and Instagram accounts with no warning
• The closed accounts contained 20 years’ worth of ‘digital memories’
• The woman couldn’t contact a human and was forced to use AI chatbots

What would you do if you lost your Facebook and Instagram accounts along with all of the photos, posts, and memories they contained? That’s the prospect faced by one unfortunate woman — a situation made even worse by the actions of Meta’s AI chatbots.

When Jasmine Ault checked her phone in the middle of the night, she was greeted by a notification saying her Facebook and Instagram accounts had been permanently disabled, taking 20 years of personal data and contacts with them.

Ault attempted to contact Meta to rectify the situation, but found herself passed from pillar to post and unable to secure a resolution. In fact, Ault found herself completely shut out by Meta’s customer service and could only talk to an AI chatbot that couldn't fix it. Even after paying for expedited service, Ault was unable to get through to a human.

“It feels like I’ve lost everything in a metaphorical fire with my digital albums and my digital memories,” Ault told CBC News. “And who’s going to protect those if I can only speak to AI?”

Ault appealed the ban but says she received a summary judgment just minutes later declaring that her case had been closed and that there was no possibility of any further appeals. And with that, she had seemingly run out of options.

An opaque, uncaring system

(Image credit: Shutterstock / mundissima)

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a case like this. Social media is awash with reports of people being erroneously banned from Meta’s platforms without any means of recourse — there’s even a dedicated subreddit for it.

With Meta rolling out AI across its platforms, it’s likely that situations like this will continue. Many people have accused AI moderation tools of incorrectly flagging users’ accounts, which might be one cause of the distress.

Part of the problem is the opaqueness of Meta’s actions. While Ault received a message saying her account was banned for breaking the platform’s rules, she was never informed which specific rules had been broken or how. She told CBC that she stayed awake for 26 hours straight in an attempt to restore her accounts — and all the memories contained therein — back to working order.

Yet Ault has been unable to resolve the situation. Speaking to CBC, she said “it feels almost sick to me that they just think, like, ‘We can just shut these people’s accounts down, they can’t get through to us and talk to us,’ and it’s people’s lifelines. It’s people’s memories. It’s people’s everything.”

If you’re concerned something similar might happen to you, it would be worth downloading your Facebook and Instagram data so that you have a backup. You never know when Meta might send everything to the digital incinerator and leave you stuck with an unsympathetic AI chatbot.

Although AI has sucked up all the bandwidth of public discourse across the tech industry, quantum computing is arguably just as revolutionary a technology – but remains dormant for now. That said, key breakthroughs in the last couple of years are said to mean that these machines could be 'useful' before too long.

Quantum advantage

IBM's senior vice president and director of research Dario Gil explained to CBS' 60 Minutes exactly what the likely impact of useful quantum computers would be.

Quote of the day

This article is part of TechRadar Pro's QOTD project to provide an insight into the minds of the brightest and most recognized figures in the technology industry today and in years gone by. Read the full series here.

The idea of quantum advantage, he said, was slightly difficult to wrap your head around. That's certain given the ratcheting-up effect in terms of power that happens when you begin to scale up these machines from just a handful of quantum bits (qubits) to thousands, tens of thousands and beyond.

Because the capabilities of quantum computers grow exponentially the more qubits that you add to the system, it could one day achieve things we haven't been able to even conceptualise yet due to the rigid parameters of existing computing.

More problems

Quantum computing does represent a paradigm shift, as Gil was trying to convey, but that doesn't mean simply building powerful hardware will help us achieve anything. Scientists are also aware that we need to define problems to solve using these future machines.

Many companies like IBM and others have been granting businesses access to quantum computers through the cloud, but these have primarily been used for early pilot programs, to build proprietary algorithms or gear their systems for future hardware.

For example, both Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have partnered with the IBM Quantum Network to simulate chemical reactions inside EV battery cells.

• AMD's full EPYC 9006 price list tops out with the 256-core, 600W EPYC 9996 at $14,904 on a per-1,000-unit basis
• The CPU, which costs ~$58 per core or $29 per thread, is narrowly more expensive ($91) than its own older Turin flagship, which clocked in at $14,813
• While PCIe 6.0 is forecast to reach PCs around 2030, MRDIMM, a registered server module that specifically caters to AI memory bandwidth needs, may never make the jump

AMD has published specifications and 1,000-unit pricing for all 31 processors in its 6th Gen EPYC 9006 "Venice" family, and the top-of-stack chip sets a new high for the company on multiple fronts.

The AMD EPYC 9996 combines 256 Zen 6c cores and 512 threads with 1,024MB of L3 cache and a 600W default power rating on AMD's new SP7 socket, and it lists at $14,904, according to a full SKU sheet reported by StorageReview and corroborated by TechPowerUp.

The price is the highest for a single CPU that AMD has ever charged, as it continues to leverage its CPU lead and GPU business to carve itself a piece of an increasingly lucrative AI pie.

A measly pricing record coupled with plenty of real upgrades under the hood

When AMD's Turin launched in October 2024, it listed the 192-core EPYC 9965 at $14,813; our TechRadar Pro coverage described it previously as its most expensive processor to date.

Fast forward two years, and we have a CPU that costs $91 more but adds 64 Zen 6c cores, with benchmarks pointing to it as a significant performance upgrade for only a 1% increase in cost.

Hyperscalers willing to pay $77 a core for the EPYC 9965 would be more than happy to pay AMD's $58 ask, but that might be a moot point here; AMD's pricing is essentially guidance before OEM discounts and negotiations kick in for consumers who generally want chips in the hundreds or thousands for a typical deployment.

Interestingly, $14,904 might be where AMD's pricing caps out, but it is not the most anyone has historically asked for a server CPU; Intel's 128-core Xeon 6980P launched at $17,800 in 2024, making it considerably more expensive than its competition.

With a mammoth 600W power rating (AMD has retired its TDP rating for a 'default CPU power' figure that provides a more accurate power consumption under specific workloads), a gigabyte of L3 cache, and 256 Zen 6c 'compact' cores under the hood, the AMD EPYC 9996 is one of the fastest CPUs money can buy.

It also offers PCIe 6.0 connectivity and MRDIMM support for higher memory bandwidth, both key technologies for a current-generation AI workstation or datacenter's performance needs. The former is expected to reach desktop PCs by 2030, while the latter, a registered, buffered server module, might never see the inside of one for the foreseeable future.

AMD currently holds 46% of server CPU revenue, according to Mercury Research, which can lead one to conclude that AMD's nearest competitor is, as Storage Review put it, "its own last generation," at a time when Intel is still playing catch-up and OEMs are turning to Nvidia's Vera Rubin offerings as an alternative in the same space.

A more cynical take would be that list prices have drifted so far from what buyers actually pay that holding the sticker flat costs AMD very little, even as OEM partners and hyperscalers get to see the actual costs, which might not be as simple as an additional 64 cores for a $91 increase in cost at a time when AI demand outstrips supply on various fronts.

• Microsoft has admitted cloud-based M365 data owned by licensed nonprofits has been deleted in a license-switching cock-up
• Microsoft retired its 365 Business Premium Grant license, advising nonprofits to move to the Microsoft 365 Business Basic for free
• The deleted data cannot be retrieved

Microsoft has admitted it accidentally deleted the data from an undisclosed number of nonprofits with retiring Microsoft 365 Business Premium Grant licenses. While advising the customers to switch to a different license for free and offering a retention and export window, the software behemoth somehow managed to lose their data, rather than retain it.

Worse, Microsoft has also admitted the lost data is irretrievable. So unless the organizations concerned had their own backups of the cloud-based data, the situation is irreversible.

All organizations with an expired Business Premium subscription are affected, but Microsoft has offered them a complementary “concierge service” to help get set up on their new Microsoft 365 Business Basic license – assuming they haven’t switched to Google Workspace.

How has this happened?

Microsoft 365 Business Premium Grant licenses were specifically for nonprofit organizations. It provided 10 free licenses for eligible organizations.

The announcement of their impending closure was made in early 2025. Any renewal on or after July 1 2025, would have been the last one. At the time, Microsoft issued an email to licensees:

“The Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant will be discontinued on your next renewal on or after July 1, 2025. Your licenses will expire on April 1, 2026. We will continue to provide up to 300 granted licenses of Microsoft 365 Business Basic and discounts of up to 75 percent on many Microsoft 365 offers to nonprofits, including Microsoft 365 Business Premium.”

Once a decision was made, the license should have been migrated to a Microsoft 365 Business Basic or Microsoft 365 Business Premium license, based on the demands of the organization concerned. Emails and documents should not have been affected.

Instead, data has been lost.

Microsoft’s vague mea culpa

According to reports, Microsoft has admitted that “data cannot be recovered” and is similarly unable to provide any list or spreadsheet or log of what was lost. This leaves nonprofit organizations – notably, those with low license requirements, so presumably operating on minimal funding – without access to the data they had stored within the Microsoft 365 OneDrive cloud.

They will also be without emails, potentially including details concerning contracts, fundraising, and other critical information.

Microsoft has expressed regret and attempted to manage the situation by offering the affected organizations a specialist to assist in setting up a new Microsoft 365 account. However, given the fact that the data has been lost, and there is no migration headache to endure, it's a good bet Google Workspace or even Zoho Workplace are stronger options.

• Oura has partnered with women's precision health platform Xella Health
• Members can share sleep, HRV, temperature, and cycle data with Xella's clinicians
• Xella pairs that data with biomarker testing and physician-guided treatment plans

Oura has a new partner integration, and this time it’s a women's health platform that combines lab testing with telehealth care, dubbed Xella Health. Folks with an Oura ring in the US can now sign up to send ring data and other analysis right into Xella Health’s systems, assuming you’re subscribed to the platform.

Those subscribed to Xella Health can choose to share sleep, heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, temperature trends, recovery, activity, and menstrual cycle insights — essentially all the core Oura stats. Xella then runs what it calls "multi-omic" diagnostics, using custom AI to analyze the physiologic data from Oura alongside your hormones, metabolism, inflammation, nutrition, reproductive health, and cardiometabolic risk to spot patterns that may indicate a change in your health.

This assumes that Xella already has that information, and that you’re a Xella member. If so, combining wearable stats with Xella’s in-depth health metrics might shed light on changes with Oura readings, such as why a Readiness or Sleep score is fluctuating.

From there, Xella’s AI creates a care plan with a doctor, which can include treatment for more than 130 conditions that impact women, such as endometriosis and PMOS. The integration with Oura enables Xella and its doctors to keep an eye on your Oura trends as care continues to catch any significant changes in your health. The partnership between Oura and Xella is targeting fertility, perimenopause, cardiometabolic health, hormonal health, and women's longevity.

"Wearables have transformed our ability to detect physiologic change," Kelly Lacob, CEO and co-founder of Xella Health, said in a statement. "By combining continuous data and insights from Oura with Xella's molecular diagnostics and clinical care, we're creating a more complete picture of women's health."

It's worth noting that Xella is a separate, paid membership on top of Oura that requires an annual fee of $499. Women in all U.S. states, except New York and New Jersey, can sign up to integrate with Xella and go through the process. Of course, an Oura Ring 5 starts at $399 and has a monthly cost of $5.99, but it’s also not a medical device; it's a smart wearable without a screen.

Pairing wearables with lab testing is becoming a battleground for the premium screenless crowd. One of Oura's biggest competitors, Whoop, has opened its blood-testing and cancer-screening service to non-Whoop owners, and Oura has already partnered with women's health app Natural Cycles.

Xella gives Oura a clinical, women-focused answer to Whoop's approach.

• Critics claim a competition-winning video was made using AI
• They cite unusual movements in the cells shown in the footage
• Contest organizer Nikon says it is investigating

Last month, a video depicting airway cells in motion in a child’s body wowed the world and took home first prize in Nikon’s annual Small World in Motion competition. Yet the footage might not have been all that it seemed, with Nikon now reportedly investigating whether AI played an outsized role.

The image in question showed a child’s airway cilia, which are tiny hair-like structures that protrude from cells. The video was captured at 100x magnification and was shot by Dr. Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, who said that “When people watch cilia beating, they immediately understand that something beautiful and important is happening inside us.”

As charming as that sounds, the video raised questions once it became apparent that it had taken home Nikon’s prize. Some scientists have questioned whether the motion seen in the video accurately reflects cilia movements, raising the idea that AI might have been used at some point.

And Nikon has since clarified its position. Commenting under its own post on LinkedIn, Nikon said that it was “carefully re-reviewing the information provided during the initial vetting, along with additional supporting materials from the entrant.”

It added that “Dr. Ning Xu is respectfully complying and has provided detailed technical documentation outlining the microscopy equipment, imaging methods, and processing techniques used to create the source video. We plan to update the Nikon Small World community next week.”

Claims of AI watermarks

Dr. Xu has denied breaking the competition’s rules, saying on LinkedIn (via BBC News) that “AI was not used to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion.” However, they have conceded to using AI to “to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images.”

Some critics have argued that the entry’s use of AI goes far beyond that, with claims being put forward that the cilia’s shapes do not fit with known behaviors and that the cilia appear to be too large.

Edward Phelps, Associate Professor at the University of Florida, said on LinkedIn that “There any many serious problems with this video,” for instance, with certain elements “popping in and out of existence and migrating between cells.”

What’s more, Ian Donovan a PhD student at UT Southwestern Medical Center, claimed to have uncovered “an embedded SynthID watermark identifying synthetic/AI-generated content.”

We’ll have to wait to see what conclusion Nikon’s investigation reaches, but it should perhaps not be surprising that, in the age of AI, remarkable images come under much more suspicion than they might have done in the past. AI or not, it’ll be fascinating to see what Nikon’s probe uncovers.

• New Microsoft report shows cyber activity is increasing around the globe
• AI is reducing the timescale of attacks, but its also helping defenders detect intrusions
• The UK faces the most state-sponsored cyber activity in Europe

As AI becomes more widely available and lowers the barrier of entry into cybercrime, hackers are launching a record number of campaigns against consumers and businesses alike, experts have warned.

The United Kingdom is now fifth in the world for countries where customers are most frequently impacted by cyber threats, with the nation accounting for 3.8% of global activity, according to a new report from Microsoft.

The UK has also risen to the top as the most targeted country for nation-state and geopolitical cyber activity in Europe, facing 76 observed events in the past year.

AI reduces cyber activity timeline

Cybercriminals and state-sponsored actors are now capable of putting together sophisticated cyberattacks in minutes as AI compresses the attack lifecycle. Attackers no longer need to spend days mapping and planning an attack.

But the points of entry haven’t changed much. Phishing attacks jumped globally from 7% to 23% of incident-response intrusions year-over-year, showing that humans remain as the weakest link despite AI helping defenders improve detection.

Voice phishing is also showing significant growth as an attack vector. While workforces have been drilled on the dangers of email phishing, a fake Teams call from a colleague or IT helpdesk adds a sense of urgency. To that end, voice phishing has jumped 502% over the past year.

Ransomware is also on the rise around the world. The United States saw a 50% jump in ransomware detections, Germany increased 276%, and the UK saw an increase of 66%.

Attacks against state and local government, education, and critical infrastructure are also increasing. Research and academia is the most targeted, making up 38% of all cyber attacks against this sector, followed by transport at 22%, and government agencies and services at 13%.

“Security in the AI era is no longer simply about preventing individual intrusions. It is about ensuring institutions can operate effectively in an environment where risks are interconnected, threats move faster, and attackers remain hidden longer,” said Mike Yeh, Vice President, Customer Security & Trust at Microsoft.

“Public-private partnerships are also more important than ever for securing critical government infrastructure and developing the policies and regulations needed for emerging technologies.”

Swedish homeware titan IKEA has joined forces with Xbox to create what might be the perfect gaming collection. The YXSTABY range is quirky and playful, but doesn't forget the practical considerations of gamer furniture. Many of the pieces are on castors so they can be wheeled into place when needed and tucked away when not, and plenty have hidden pockets, slings and compartments to stash your gaming gear neatly.

If you'd rather make a feature of your kit, the wall-mountable, mirrored display boxes will show your controllers off from every angle. I'm a particular fan of the storage unit that doubles as a side table — again on castors for easy wheeling. You can slide the casing to reveal your gaming gear or hide it away.

To create the collection, the designers drew inspiration from the Xbox controller. The D-pad features in a lap cushion and on a decorative platter, and — less subtly — the thumbstick has been transformed into a stool. (TechRadar's James Pickard had a chance to sit on one when the collection was unveiled at Gamescom and insists that despite being completely absurd, it's "more comfortable than it looks".)

The YXSTABY range is finally available to buy today — scroll down to check out the full collection.

US: YXSTABY collection

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Thumbstick Stool - Black

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Thumbstick Stool - Green

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming TV Stand on Castors - Black

IKEAIKEA YXSTABY Gaming TV Stand on Castors - White

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Side Table on Castors - Oak Veneer/grey

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Monitor Stand - White

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming D-Pad Cushion - Green

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Lounge Chair - Vissle Beige

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming D-Pad Controller Platter

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Controller Display Box - White

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Controller Display Box - Black

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Laptop Support With Storage - White

UK: YXSTABY collection

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Thumbstick Stool - Black

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Thumbstick Stool - Green

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming TV Stand on Castors - Black

IKEAIKEA YXSTABY Gaming TV Stand on Castors - White

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Side Table on Castors - Oak Veneer/grey

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Monitor Stand - White

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming D-Pad Cushion - Green

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Lounge Chair - Vissle Beige

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming D-Pad Controller Platter

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Controller Display Box - White

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Controller Display Box - Black

IKEA YXSTABY Gaming Laptop Support With Storage - White

I’ve watched engineers lose a week before an audit collecting screenshots no one will ever look at again. I’ve seen incident response plans that exist on paper but have never been tested, and vendor questionnaires completed once and filed away while the risk quietly changed underneath them.

Security teams are under more pressure than ever to prove they can be trusted by customers and boards alike. Yet the frameworks they rely on to demonstrate security are increasingly disconnected from how risk actually shows up in practice.

This gap between appearing secure and being secure isn’t new, but AI is making it impossible to ignore. As AI systems become more complex, traditional compliance-first approaches are struggling to keep pace. The result is a growing reliance on what many security leaders now describe as security theatre: activities that prove a control existed at a point in time but say nothing about whether it works today.

AI can automate the appearance of control just as easily as it can automate the control itself. The governance challenge that concerns me most is this: if an AI agent is attesting your controls, what assurance do you have over the agent itself?

I see the same pattern everywhere: teams pouring energy into proving they're secure instead of reducing the risks that actually matter.

Industry research puts numbers on it: more than half of UK security leaders believe AI-driven threats are advancing faster than their teams can respond, yet 80% are already using or planning to use AI agents as part of their security strategy. That gap between adoption and assurance is where the next incident lives.

The harder question is how teams maintain trust once AI starts making or influencing security decisions. Without answering it, AI risks amplifying security theatre rather than solving it.

The growing AI security gap

Despite the compliance automation tooling now available, most compliance work is still done by hand. UK organizations report spending around 12 weeks each year on compliance tasks and a further nine weeks on vendor reviews, diverting time away from meaningful risk reduction.

AI is increasingly being adopted to relieve that pressure. Many leaders are comfortable with AI contributing to strategic decisions, such as helping prioritize risk or surface emerging issues earlier.

Governance hasn't kept pace with adoption. Closing that gap starts with visibility: a complete inventory of not just the AI systems you deployed on purpose, but the model APIs your engineers call, the AI embedded in your SaaS stack, third-party agents, MCP servers, and the shadow AI spreading faster than shadow IT ever did.

The same discipline applies to identity. Every agent you deploy is a new actor in your environment, and it deserves the same treatment as a new hire: its own identity, access scoped to the job it was hired to do, and no shared service account with the keys to everything. This gap between adoption and governance matters.

Automation may reduce workload in the short term, but it undermines trust if decisions can’t be explained, traced back to evidence, or challenged when something looks wrong. Before deploying an AI agent, teams should decide what it can access, what data it can see, where a person needs to approve an action, and how that action could be rolled back if necessary.

High-impact actions such as changing user access, deleting data or moving money should always retain meaningful human oversight. Those decisions are much easier to make before deployment than after an incident.

Those controls shouldn't stop at deployment. Enforcement needs to happen continuously through runtime controls such as least-privilege access, just-in-time permissions, segmentation, circuit breakers and automated containment, helping reduce the blast radius if something does go wrong rather than relying on investigation afterwards.

When compliance becomes security theatre

Rising regulatory pressure, from the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to the FCA’s operational resilience rules, has intensified the security theatre problem. We found over half of UK security leaders say they now spend more time proving security than improving it, and many describe current frameworks as little more than security theatre.

AI can help here, but only if it’s applied thoughtfully. Automation is already reducing burnout and improving productivity for overstretched teams. However, when compliance remains static and checklist-driven, AI risks accelerating the wrong outcomes: faster evidence collection, more controls to maintain, and greater administrative burden, without a corresponding improvement in resilience.

The fix isn't more automation — it's a different target. Compliance should be a byproduct of security that actually works, not the finish line.

Why this shift matters now

The next phase of security will be defined by how well organizations can coordinate people, processes and systems continuously, rather than relying on periodic audits or point-in-time assurances. In an AI-driven environment, risk changes too quickly for static approaches to keep up. Leading teams are moving towards continuous trust by keeping risk signals, controls and evidence aligned as their environments change.

Evidence can be pulled automatically from cloud platforms, identity providers, ticketing systems and code repositories instead of relying on screenshots collected before an audit. Teams can spot control drift when it happens and fix it before it becomes a much bigger problem.

AI is both the newest risk on the register and the best tool for managing everything else on it. The governance programs that work won’t be the ones that slow people down; they’ll make the approved path easier than the shadow one while keeping meaningful human oversight where it matters most.

The winners won’t be the fastest adopters. They’ll be the teams whose agents can answer the same questions we ask of people: what did you access, why, and who signed off.

We've featured the best endpoint protection software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• AOC has revealed the Agon Pro AGP257FT, a 24.5-inch Full HD monitor
• It has a native 1,000Hz refresh rate
• Expect this gaming monitor to debut in Q1 2027, but we don't have a price yet

AOC has announced a new gaming monitor which runs at a native 1,000Hz refresh rate.

TechPowerUp posted the press release for the Agon Pro AGP257FT, which is a 24.5-inch Full HD IPS monitor offering a response time of 0.3ms (grey-to-grey) and DisplayHDR 400 support.

As mentioned, it runs natively at 1,000Hz, meaning you get that refresh rate out of the box (and there's no dual mode here, where a monitor has two refresh rate settings with different resolutions, dropping the latter to achieve the faster rate).

You get 1,000Hz at 1920 x 1080 resolution, with an overclock option to push the refresh rate slightly further to 1,050Hz.

The AGP257FT is an oxide-based 'Fast IPS' panel that has 20-zone local dimming and 90% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut (and 99% coverage for sRGB), with a brightness of 450 nits.

The monitor supports Nvidia G-Sync and has an adjustable stand (allowing for 150mm of range in height) with tilt, swivel and pivot (complete with markings to keep a favored position).

You get two HDMI 2.1 ports along with a DisplayPort 2.1 connector and a headphone output, plus a USB hub (sporting a trio of USB-A ports). There's a headset hook here, too.

The Agon Pro AGP257FT monitor is set to arrive in Q1 2027, with pricing still to be confirmed.

Analysis: rating the rate

(Image credit: AOC / TechPowerUp)

Don't expect this to be a cheap monitor. With the 1,000Hz refresh rate, this is aimed at professional esports gamers, so it'll exact quite the toll on your wallet. Especially given that even monitors aren't immune to the price hikes we've seen across all sorts of tech thanks to the pressures of the RAM crisis and global geopolitical climate (affecting shipping).

Of course, do you really need a 1,000Hz screen even if you are a competitive gamer? Perhaps it's justifiable from some viewpoints, but unless money really is no object with your gaming setup, it's going to be major overkill for most people.

For starters, you're not going to get 1,000 frames per second (to match that 1,000Hz refresh rate) even on esports shooters with a top-end PC – remembering that it's not just a matter of reaching or peaking at that level, but sustaining it (on average).

Okay, so it is also true that there are still benefits in terms of a smoother image with less motion blur, and less input lag, when running at 1,000Hz, even if your frames per second aren't up at that level – so this tech isn't wasted in this scenario.

Still, whether the price of these kinds of screens is worth it is, shall we say, highly debatable. Besides which, in the case of this AOC monitor gamers will argue that IPS isn't the best choice if you want motion clarity anyway, and that you'd be better off looking at, say, a 720Hz OLED (which is still a blazingly fast refresh rate).

The vast majority of gamers will be better off focusing their expenditure on the PC itself, though – and there's certainly a need for the extra money given the RAM crisis – rather than pushing out the boat for a monitor which probably only offers minor advantages in the end (unless you're actually a pro gamer).

• AI is accelerating exploitation of known vulnerabilities more than zero-day discovery
• Google observed sharp rises in disclosed flaws and real-world exploitation
• Defenders must prioritize intelligence-led patching as n-day weaponization speeds up

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping cybercriminals find and exploit software bugs faster, more easily, and with greater consequences, a new report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has claimed. However, it’s not in the way you’d expect - there’s very little focus on zero-day vulnerabilities.

GTIG's Vulnerability Discovery and Exploitation Trends in the AI Era paper outlines how AI is already having a “measurable impact” on the vulnerability landscape, not just in the speed at which new flaws are discovered, but also in the nature of the vulnerabilities themselves. Researchers found that the number of flaws discovered in 2026 doubled throughout the year, and the number of those exploited in the wild rose significantly, as well.

GTIG says that the number of bugs found each month this year rose from 5,045 in January to 10,740 in August 2026. During the same period, the average number of flaws exploited in the wild rose from 10.5 a month in 2025, to 18 a month.

Speeding up n-day exploitation

But it seems AI’s ace in the sleeve is not finding zero-days, as Mythos would have you think. Google’s researchers found only a marginal increase in zero-day exploitation (from 8 a month in 2025, to 11 a month this year). Instead, GTIG argues that the bigger threat is the rapid weaponization of n-day flaws:

"It is possible that threat actors are finding it more accessible or efficient to use LLMs and AI tools to automate analysis of differences between product versions, patches, vulnerability disclosure announcements, and Proof-of-Concept (POC) code to rapidly weaponize n-days, rather than to discover new zero-days," the report states.

In other words, the exploitation growth recorded this year was mostly within previously known vulnerabilities, not zero-days. The number of exploited high-risk flaws doubled year-on-year, Google said.

Finding high-impact flaws

But AI is also helping defenders, especially when it comes to filtering out less impactful flaws and focusing on the most dangerous ones. Looking just at vulnerabilities discovered with the help of AI, Google says there are proportionally fewer low-risk ones, and significantly more medium and high-risk ones. In fact, 50% of AI-discovered vulnerabilities resulted in remote code execution (RCE), compared to 26% across the broader vulnerability ecosystem.

GTIG says the security community is using AI primarily for high-level flaws in critical infrastructure, privilege boundaries, core libraries, and runtime environments where they’re more likely to be found.

Google highlighted at least one example where an AI-discovered vulnerability quickly attracted the attention of threat actors. The company cited CVE-2026-1731, a command-injection vulnerability in BeyondTrust products that was discovered by a third-party AI research agent. GTIG said threat actors began exploiting the flaw within days of public disclosure, using it in campaigns that included privilege escalation, data theft, and malware deployment.

In the near future, both vulnerability discovery and exploitation rates are expected to grow, Google says. Threat actors are increasingly experimenting with AI to build exploits, as well as various vulnerability discovery tools.

The defenders, on the other hand, need to focus on n-days even more, and understand that crooks will be able to weaponize them at unprecedented speed.

As a result, organizations will need to move away from broad, unprioritized patching programs and toward intelligence-driven vulnerability management capable of keeping pace with increasingly automated adversaries.

“GTIG expects that vulnerability discovery and exploitation will continue to grow in the short to medium term,” Google said. “To counter the increased risk from rapid vulnerability discovery and exploitation, organizations must transition from unprioritized mass-patching to threat-intelligence-driven triage, combining targeted edge-defense with automated, agentic remediation.”

If you work in an office you’ll know we’re deep into performance review season. But how would you feel if you found out that your boss had used AI to write your yearly appraisal? I know I’d be pretty annoyed to learn that AI was deciding whether I was worthy of a raise this year.

AI use by employees is becoming commonplace, but it's also being adopted by managers. A recent survey by Headway of 1,000 managers found that 33% had used AI to write feedback or prepare a performance review, while 31% had turned to AI to resolve team conflicts. A further 27% had used AI to help write uncomfortable conversations they needed to have.

That may sound like a lot, but the figure is actually down a bit from 41% admitting they have used AI to draft or revise a performance review in a similar survey from a year ago, but still high.

Your annual performance review: "Please take a seat..." (Image credit: Shutterstock / PeopleImages)The ease AI

For managers, the appeal of using AI is easy to understand. Faced with having to write several performance reviews each year it can be a real timesaver to dump the work onto AI, however the risk is that what should be very personal performance feedback is being outsourced to a bot.

Managers' AI use is not stopping at performance reviews, either. The survey also found that 57% of managers have already scripted or rehearsed a difficult conversation before having it using AI.

Thalia-Maria Tourikis, a qualified health coach and burnout prevention and recovery expert at Headway, commented:

“When encountered with a difficult conversation, one might think that using AI can help organize their thoughts. However, you should not give up that interaction to automation. When human emotions such as trust and empathy are involved, it is best conveyed when written by a person. The perfection of AI reads as superficial and doesn’t have the same impact.”

A sliding scale

Bosses using AI to help rate employee performance isn’t the only threat from AI that workers face, there’s also the threat of being monitored by AI. Owl Labs' State of Hybrid Work survey spoke to 8,000 workers worldwide, which found that 58% of employees believe their employer has deployed AI-based monitoring tools.

The Headway survey doesn’t make it clear whether managers are using AI to simply improving their grammar, or change the occasional word for something better, or wether their actually generating the text of the performance review entirely using AI. There’s a big difference between these two extremes and one involves much more cause for concern than the other.

It’s especially concerning with performance reviews because these are often link to financial compensation. If your performance review makes a difference to your annual salary, and wether you deserve that raise or not, then finding out that it’s really AI deciding your future rather than your human manager would be especially galling.

• Keurig Alta is a single-brew system that uses tablets of compressed coffee
• AltaRounds are compostable, and are brewed in the Keurig Alta machine
• The Alta machine is also fully backward-compatible with K-Cups

Keurig is famous for its K-Cup coffee pods, but it's breaking away from the traditional capsule format with a single-serve system called Alta that uses tablets of compressed coffee with no individual packaging. According to a press release, "Keurig Alta represents the future of single-serve — and the future of Keurig," though you don't need to worry about your favorite coffee pods disappearing any time soon.

The new coffee tablets, called AltaRounds, have a recipe code printed on the surface, and are brewed using a new Alta coffee maker that uses the code to determine the right brew style, pressure, and temperature for your drink.

The concept is very similar to the pressed coffee tablets used by the Lavazza Tabli system I tested this week, but there are a few key differences. For example, Keurig's AltaRounds have a thin plant-based coating to keep the coffee fresh, prevent breakage during transit, and help generate the pressure for brewing. Lavazza's coffee tabs are uncoated, and don't have a code to provide brewing instructions.

Keurig's first Alta coffee maker is quite different to Lavazza's Tabli machine as well. The Tabli only prepares espresso, whereas the Keurig Alta also has an integrated milk frother for more complex drinks like lattes and cappuccinos. A color screen on the Alta machine walks you through a range of coffee and espresso beverages, and the system is backwards-compatible with K-Cups in case one of your favorite drinks isn't available in Alta format yet.

KeurigKeurigKeurigKeurig

The switch to AltaRounds will be gradual, and K-Cups aren't vanishing overnight. Keurig Alta Coffee & Espresso is the first brand of AltaRounds, and six varieties will be rolling out after the machine's launch:

• Single Shot: medium roast single espresso
• Double Shot: dark roast double espresso
• Bold Ambition: dark roast coffee
• The House: medium roast coffee
• Fresh Take: light roast coffee
• Sweet Spot: caramel flavored coffee

Peet's Coffee AltaRounds are coming soon as well, with more brands to follow.

AltaRounds are packaged in an SFI-certified paperboard carton, and their coating is made from an NSF-certified plant-based material that includes alginate from seaweed harvested off the coast of France.. The whole AltaRound, including coffee and coating, is certified for home and commercial composting, so you can dispose of them just like ordinary coffee grounds.

A limited early access bundle is available direct from Keurig until October 15, while supplies last. Pre-orders will ship October 21. The bundle is priced at $499.99, and includes a Keurig Alta brewer, four boxes of AltaRounds pressed coffee, and glassware made by Ethan Rode of FLUR.

The price works out at approximately £380 / AU$720, but the bundle is only available in the US.

• Amazon has overhauled its entire Kindle ereader line
• They have new materials and a repositioned power button
• There are also new accessories, some of which will turn heads

Yes, Amazon has an all-new line of 13th-generation Kindle ereaders. Sure, they're marginally lighter and thinner than ever, with scant display upgrades, newly smooth, flush faces, and some with stamped aluminum unibodies that come in brilliant and quite trendy colors. But can we talk about buttons? Or, rather, one very specific one, the power/sleep button?

Every once in a while, a tech company makes me feel seen, or at least heard. I've been complaining for years about the placement of the Amazon Kindle e-reader's power/sleep button. It sits on the bottom edge, where it's too easy to trip when, say, I prop the Kindle Paperwhite up on a hard surface, or even on my lap or chest while reading.

When I asked Amazon's Kindle hardware lead Kevin Keith about the issue in 2024, he told me there was a need to put the button as close to the ereader's light guide as possible. I accepted that explanation, and grumpily moved on.

Turns out, though, that's not the full story. As I held the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2026 edition in my hands, and marveled at the newly repositioned power button (it's on the right side!) Amazon VP of Design Chris Green told me the reason for the original placement was to keep costs down.

Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition 2026Lance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / Future

"The reason why it was at the bottom originally was because it's the lowest-cost location. The main logic board was down at the bottom with the USB....We were trying our hardest to have the lowest carbon footprint, the lowest cost price, to push it all to the benefit of the customer," said Green, who told me he joined Amazon 19 years ago on the day the original Kindle launched. Since then, Green has designed every Amazon hardware product, including these new Kindles.

After I wrote the piece linked above, airing my frustration about the original button placement, readers dragged me for making a mountain out of a molehill. I ended up thinking I was alone in my take. Turns out, Green has been fielding similar complaints for quite some time.

Kindle Colorsoft 2026Lance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / Future

"The amount of people that complained about it with [using it] on treadmills, while sitting, and putting it on the tummy, and all those kinds of things...the worst case is a treadmill, because if you don't tap it, you stab it. And so people were stabbing this display, and the button was moving," said Green.

Amazon's attempts to address the issue without moving the button, by recessing it, shifting it slightly, failed. "The long and short of it is, it's got to go on the side," said Green.

Now every new Kindle in the refreshed lineup has a power/sleep button, on the right side, relatively close to the top edge of the device.

Those new ereaders are:

• Kindle e-reader 6-inch entry-level
• Kindle e-reader 6-inch Aluminum
• Kindle Paperwhite 7-inch
• Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition 7-inch
• Kindle Kids
• Kindle Colorsoft
• Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition

Across the line, Amazon introduces new colors (Graphite, Alpine Sky, Seaglass Green, Ube), thinner, lighter designs, and new materials. With the exception of the base model Kindle (140g, which is 13% lighter and 6.8mm thick), the lighter and thinner frames can usually be measured by a millimeter here and a gram or two there.

The Paperwhite Signature Edition and Colorsoft, notably, get accelerometers which will recognize if you've turned the reader upside down and will automatically rotate the text. The reader will also support reading in landscape mode, which might be kind of cool for graphic novels.

Lance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureKindle 2026Lance Ulanoff / Future

On the face of its most affordable Kindle, the 6-inch model, Amazon took away the raised bezel for a perfectly flat and smooth all-glass face, which matches the look of all the other Kindles in the new lineup. But Amazon has gone a step further by introducing matching colors to the bezels of the entire Kindle line. So a Ube (purple) Kindle's color will wrap from the back all the way to the front and quite close to the E Ink display.

There was, it turns out, a reason these bezels surrounding the E Ink screen have traditionally been black. That light-absorbing color ensures that the front lights don't bounce off a colored cover and obstruct or weirdly bedazzle your e-reader display.

The solution for this, Keith explained, was first used on Kindle Scribe devices.

"We invented a new edge color technology that does a black mask on the back and, in this case, Ube on the front, and so you're able to get the absorption of the light, but you're also able to get this beautiful color."

Amazon Kindle 6-inch previous model on left new flat bezel on right (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

Some of the new e-readers (both entry-level and Paperwhite) feature a chassis material not seen on a Kindle since the discontinued Kindle Oasis: aluminum.

It's a rigid but strong and lightweight stamped aluminum unibody with a 6mm back and 1mm sides; however, it's how Amazon is making it that's interesting.

Where most tech companies are choosing to mill out their aluminum chassis with CNC machines, Green told me Amazon went with stamping. The benefit is that while CNC milling can take 30 minutes, the stamping process takes seconds.

Kindle Aluminum modelLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / Future

"It's a three-stage process: when we start with a flat sheet, and you stamp it, and then you take this piece, and then you put it into a forge, and you press it... Then you do a light CNC to clean it up. Now what this means is you're literally wasting 60% less material, and you're also wasting 60% less energy," explained Green.

Amazon hasn't really upgraded the software or E Ink displays in any noticeable way, but when I asked Green about the E Ink partnership and how their close association impacts any design and development decisions, he said, "They are obviously a very important partner to us. We have looked at other types of technology. For these types of displays, they're just the best, and we have to work with them."

Green paused for a second and smiled almost wistfully, "Do I wish there were other people out there? Well, let's just say they're the only ones out there."

Amazon, by the way, has gone a little wild with physical buttons in this round of Kindles, or rather with this round of Kindle accessories.

For the new aluminum-backed (and magnetically ready) Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition and Colorsoft models, both of which feature a series of connector pins on the back, there's now a cover that adds physical page-turn buttons: the Page-Turn Cover ($79.99).

That's right, Amazon is going full-on retro with a perhaps unintentional nod to the original Kindles, which featured a lot of physical buttons.

Kindle Page-Turn CoverLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / Future

The Page-Turn Cover snaps onto the back of the Kindle, nestling a bar featuring forward and back page-turn buttons tightly against the right edge of the reader. The case also features a copy of the right-side power button on the outer edge of the case bar.

I gave the case a little test drive, rapidly pressing the forward and back buttons as I watched the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition quickly refresh and turn pages (it's reportedly 30% faster).

Amazon, though, isn't done with buttons. There is yet another accessory, and it takes page turning off the Kindle and puts it in the palm of your hand. It's called the Kindle Click ($34.99) and is, as the name implies, like a remote control for your Kindle.

@techradar

♬ original sound - TechRadar

Looking like a pale, undersized TV remote, it features two large, thumb-pressable buttons on the face for forward and back page turns. There are also two thinner and smaller buttons on the side for brightness control.

While I struggled to understand why anyone would need a remote for a device that's often just 10 inches from their face, Keith explained the thinking behind this unusual accessory.

Kindle ClickLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / FutureLance Ulanoff / Future

With BookTok inspiring more and more young readers who are creating elaborate setups for reading (sometimes under the covers with special stands for the e-readers), Keith sees a need for gesture-free page turning and brightness control.

"My use case is I work out on an Elliptical, and I used to have to swipe, and now you can just turn the pages," he said, adding that it could be a game changer if you're flying on an airplane and just want to prop up the Kindle and sit back and casually turn pages by pressing the remote. If I start using it while reading on my Kindle, I'm sure to fall asleep reading that much faster; after all, raising my hand to swipe pages is usually all that's keeping me awake.

The 6-inch Kindles, in Ube and Graphite, arrive today (October 1) and are still $149 / £149.99 / AU$279 for the 16GB model. "We really were trying to bring innovation to the lineup and be able to absorb as much of the memory costs as we could to be able to keep our prices affordable," said Keith. The new aluminum chassis Kindle, in Alpine Sky and Seaglass Green, starts with 32GB of storage for $189.99 / £169.99 / AU$299.

The updated 7-inch Kindle Paperwhite (starting at $199.99 / £199.99 / AU$369), Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition ($249.99 / £229.99 / AU$399), and the 32GB Kindle Colorsoft, which starts at $289.99 / £259.99 / AU$449 ($319.99 / £289.99 / AU$499for the 32GB aluminum Signature Edition), arrive October 28.

• CD Projekt Red originally wanted to add Geralt's silver chain to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but there were technological constraints
• Songs of the Past game director Jakub Rokosz says modern tech allowed the team to finally add it in the upcoming expansion
• Rokosz says the 11-year time difference between the base game and Songs of the Past has made a huge difference

CD Projekt Red couldn't implement Geralt's silver chain in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt due to technological constraints, but modern technology finally allowed it to add the weapon in the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Gamescom, Jakub Rokosz, Fool's Theory CEO, Songs of the Past game director, and former Witcher 3 senior quest designer, explained that the chain, which first appeared in the first Witcher game, was something CDPR originally "always wanted to bring" to the third installment.

"There were numerous conversations that we [had where we] would want to do the chain even during the base game, but it was impossible from a technological standpoint to do it properly," Rokosz said. "Back then, the way the combat, the targeting, the camera, the enemies were implemented, it would require too much of an overhaul just for one feature."

CDPR didn't have the tools to overhaul these features for one weapon; however, working on the remaster and Songs of the Past with today's updated tech allowed the team to bring the chain to life.

"When we started working on Songs of the Past and the remaster at the same time, we knew that we were going to be touching up on various things, and all of a sudden the chain became a reality," the developer said.

"Also, one other thing is that the physics and animation technology had to go a little bit forward in time. And trust me, 11 years is a lot of difference. So now we were actually able to make the animations of the chain feel very natural, very fluid, and simulated very easily. Whereas 11 years ago, we would probably have to animate it by hand, with all the animations."

Senior quest designer Despoina Anetaki added that, "from a practical standpoint," it's challenging to work with so many animations for a huge game like The Witcher 3.

"When it comes to the remaster, it's a lot of things already, so you can focus on new things, right? And this was a good opportunity for the chain," Anetaki said. "I think it's a really cool weapon."

Geralt's crossbow can be switched out for the silver chain, and players can use it on flying enemies, enemies in water, and for crowd control, with Anetaki saying she thinks fans will love it.

"It's a very versatile weapon, and I think it's gonna fulfill that butcher fantasy for a lot of people, especially those who have read the books and are imagining a badass Geralt with a chain. I think it's gonna be very good for them," she said.

Rokosz added that it was important to make sure the chain wasn't "a gimmick item" you get in Songs of the Past and wanted it to be "a very important piece" of a witcher's arsenal that can be used in the base game and previous expansions, with Anetaki saying that it is something that is "woven into the narrative."

Songs of the Past doesn't have a release date yet, but it's slated to launch in 2027.

• Only 44-47 of the Netherlands' 186 large data centers publicly reported energy and water usage
• The EU hides raw data behind efficiency labels, which make local judgments hard
• EU criticized of breaching Aarhus Convention

A new Lighthouse Reports investigation has found most European data centers are still obscuring their actual environmental impacts from the public despite EU rules aiming to improve transparency around energy and water reporting.

Among the included metrics are water and energy consumption, renewable energy use, waste-heat use and cooling efficiency, however while they may be reporting to governments, Lighthouse Reports argues that obtaining this information as a member of the public is far harder.

The report also criticizes the EU for exposing efficiency labels, much like your household appliance, rather than the actual raw data.

European data center reporting isn't all that transparent

Without access to the raw data, communities and policymakers can have a hard time judging the environmental impact of a proposed or operational data center, because even the most efficient hyper scale campus will still consume huge amounts of electricity and water.

In a Netherlands example, of the 186 500kW+ data centers operating in the country by late 2025, only 44 offered public electricity consumption figures and 47 offered water consumption figures.

However, Lighthouse Reports claims that Netherlands reporting is actually among the most transparent, and after trying to make similar attempts across all 27 EU member states, numerous requests were denied because they didn't possess the relevant information or because they deemed it confidential.

"The Commission has bowed to confidentiality clauses demanded by the industry," Lighthouse Reports concludes.

The group has since one on to file a complaint under the Aarhus Convention, claiming the EU is breaching the Convention's guarantees to "rights of access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters."

TechRadar Pro has asked the European Commission for a response to the report and subsequent complaint, but we did not receive an immediate response.

The Celebrity Traitors is back for a second series on BBC One, which means I'll once again be spending far too much time trying to work out who's lying, who's being murdered and why nobody else can see the incredibly obvious Traitor. Last year's winner Alan Carr wasn't exactly a master of subtlety, yet somehow got away with almost everything. David Olusoga summed it up perfectly afterwards, saying Alan “could have come down to breakfast in a green cloak” and he still wouldn't have suspected him.

I feel a particular affinity with the show because I actually used to own a duplex apartment in a castle, complete with a turret. There weren't any murders planned there, but, as the top half was an ensuite bathroom, it did make getting up in the night feel suitably dramatic. To celebrate the return of The Celebrity Traitors, I've come up with 12 suitably treacherous products to bring a touch of Ardross Castle into your own home — no green cloak required.

Top 12 Traitorous treasures

Waverley Books Tartan Notebook/journal

Blueprint Collections

Blueprint Collections Traitors Letter Writing Set

Yankee Candle Scented Candle

St. Martin's Press Liespotting book

Nordik By Design Leather Desk Mat

Edwin Blyde Celtic Sword Letter Opener

Thorne Antiques and Collectables Highland Stag Sculpture

Teslyar Wood Phone Docking Station

Tailormap Harris Tweed Wool Valet Tray

Tailormap Harris Tweed Pen Pot

Blueprint Collections Traitors Pencil Case

Donql Mini Chalkboard Signs

• Read more: How to watch The Celebrity Traitors

OM System PEN

Panasonic Lumix L10

OM System has finally given Olympus PEN fans what they've been wanting for years: a PEN update. The series of rangefinder-style cameras with Micro Four Thirds mount has a cult following, and the latest model to join the ranks, simply named the OM System PEN, is surprisingly affordable.

At the time of writing, I'm still using and testing the new OM System PEN for my in-depth review — look out for my comprehensive verdict, coming soon. But throughout my time with the retro-cool camera I've been struck by just how similar it is in design and size to another hit camera from 2026: the Panasonic Lumix L10 premium compact.

I've already used the Lumix L10 alongside the viral Fujifilm X100VI to see which of those two premium compact cameras I preferred, and there's lots to like about the classy model, which marked the 25th anniversary of Lumix — but how does it fare against a mirrorless camera?

I took the Lumix L10 and the OM System PEN with me on a work trip to China, where I had plenty of opportunities to shoot cityscapes, street photography and more with both cameras, and get a real feel for them in the process. Let's dive in and see how they compare.

Lenses: the major differenceThe OM PEN with the 14-42mm mark III kit lens attached, the Lumix L10 with its built-in lens retractedTim ColemanBoth lenses extend when in use, but the Lumix L10 lens packs away smallerTim ColemanTim Coleman

• OM System PEN: Micro Four Thirds lens mount, with hundreds of lenses to choose from
• Lumix L10: A built-in 24-75mm f/1.7-2.8 lens

The OM System PEN features a Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens mount, meaning it's directly compatible with hundreds of MFT lenses that between them cover just about any situation — macro, portraiture, wildlife, you name it. The camera can be purchased body-only, or with a new kit lens — the 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 III (equivalent 28-84mm). Unlike previous versions, this third-generation lens is "splash proof", as is the OM PEN body.

The Lumix L10, meanwhile, has a built-in 10.9-34mm f/1.7-2.8 zoom lens (24-75mm equivalent), which is more compact than the OM PEN's new kit lens. It extends when you turn the camera on and when zooming, and is, theoretically, at risk of dust ingress over long-term use. Panasonic doesn't class the lens as dust- and moisture-proof, but does note that the design has been improved from previous LX100 cameras that the L10 is based on.

If I'm comparing the two cameras based on using the PEN with its kit lens, then I easily prefer the Lumix L10. The lenses have similar optical zoom ranges — 3x (OM PEN) to 3.1x (Lumix L10) — but the wider focal length of the L10 at the short end of the range makes it the more versatile of the two. The L10's lens is also physically smaller, and its brighter maximum aperture is way more versatile for portraiture and low-light photography.

All that being said, you can easily swap out the OM PEN's kit lens for another, and doing so makes many of the above comparisons moot. For example, I also used the tiny 45mm f/1.8 lens (90mm equivalent) with the OM PEN, and capturing shallow-depth-of-field portraits with this combo is a breeze.

Of course, more lenses means additional cost. If you're starting off with the OM PEN's kit lens, and unlikely to buy more glass, then the Lumix L10 wins here.

In the handTim ColemanTim Coleman

It's remarkable just how similar the OM System PEN and Panasonic Lumix L10 look. Their bodies are nigh on identical in size, and strikingly similar in appearance and layout. If you want retro looks, both fit the bill.

Both feature a rangefinder-style 2.36m-dot EVF, and I couldn't spot any real differences between these displays. The same is true of the 3-inch articulating touchscreens, though the L10's has a higher-resolution display that looks slightly crisper to the eye. Both feature a hotshoe for accessories such as an external flash, and a largely similar control layout.

There are some minor differences; the OM PEN has an additional color mode dial on the front beside the lens, and it's screen sits nice and flush in the body when folded away. The fiddly on/off switch is poorly designed, though — good luck trying to simply turn it to photo mode without shooting past to the video modes.

Tim ColemanTim ColemanTim ColemanTim Coleman

The Lumix L10 has a slicker, classier feel to it, with a shutter button (complete with a thread for a cable release) set within the zoom rocker, and a button set within an exposure dial (both the button and the dial are customizable). I'm less convinced about the memory-card door placement being on the camera's underside as opposed to the side. Also, its retractable lens design results in a two-second wait before the camera is ready to shoot from powering up, which limits its street photography credentials.

Battery life is solid for both models too, at 420 shots (L10) to 410 shots (OM PEN) respectively. Overall, I enjoyed the feel of the Lumix L10 more.

Features to play with

Both cameras feature a Micro Four Thirds sensor — the OM PEN's is a 20.4MP, while the Lumix L10's is 26.5MP. You'd think that would be an image-quality win for the Lumix L10; however it's not that simple. Because of its built-in lens design, the L10 can't use the entire sensor area for photos, and with 20.4MP effective pixels, the playing field regarding resolution is leveled — image-quality potential (ignoring factors such as lens choice) is effectively the same.

One major difference is that the OM PEN's sensor features 5-axis image stabilization (IBIS), whereas the Lumix L10 has no such feature. OM System rates the effectiveness of the OM PEN's IBIS up to 5.5EV, which makes it the more versatile of the two for some handheld photography and video.

Pair that image stabilization with the PEN's computational photography modes, which includes Live ND for long-exposure effects (up to 4EV), High-Res shot (quadrupling the camera's resolution for detailed landscape shots), focus stacking (ideal for macro photography), and HDR (extending dynamic range in a final single shot), and you have a powerful tool, no tripod needed.

The Lumix L10 has tricks of its own, mind you, including High-Res shot, while it's the more feature-packed of the two for video, with 5.6K recording, 5.2K open gate, and Panasonic's latest Real Time LUTs profiles and phase detection autofocus. For stills, autofocus performance is similar, but for video the L10 has the edge.

Lumix L10 sample galleryThe Lumix L10 with its lens set to 75mm f/2.8Tim ColemanTim ColemanI took this night shot handheld using the 24mm focal lengthTim ColemanHere I secured the camera to a tripod and enabled a slow shutter speed to blur the moving water — the old fashioned approach to long exposure photographyTim ColemanTim ColemanTim ColemanOM System PEN sample galleryI used the 14-42mm kit lens and matched the Lumix L10's 75m focal length here, and the maximum aperture available is f/5.3, so the L10 can blur backgrounds betterTim ColemanTim ColemanHandheld at 28mm, not quite as wide as the Lumix L10's 24mm zoom lensTim ColemanA long exposure effect, handheld, using the Live ND computational photography mode. I needed a tripod to get this effect with the Lumix L10Tim ColemanTim ColemanTim ColemanPrice and availability

• OM System PEN: $999.99 / £849 / AU$1,499 body-only, $1,099.99 / £949 / AU$1,799 with the 14-42mm kit lens
• Lumix L10: $1,499 / £1,299 / A$2,599

OM System has priced the new PEN very aggressively, which is refreshing in a time of component shortages and price hikes. I can't think of another camera with a built-in EVF and in-body image stabilization for a price this low — $999.99 / £849 / AU$1,499 body-only, or an additional $100 / £100 / AU$300 for the 14-42mm mark III lens kit.

The latter kit-lens price is the fairer comparison, since you're getting a built-in lens with the Lumix L10, and the PEN is still cheaper. If we're talking optical quality, however, then a pricier OM System lens, such as the 12-45mm f/4 Pro, is an even fairer comparison, at which point each camera feels like similar value for money. Yes, it's cheaper getting started with the OM PEN, but if you're going to build your lens collection then the Lumix L10's one-off price will likely end up being the lower long-term outlay of the two.

(Image credit: Tim Coleman)OM System PEN vs Lumix L10: early verdict

The OM PEN's rangefinder-style design is well suited to everyday photography, as is the Lumix L10. As such, users are typically going to pair the PEN with lenses that sit within the range that the Lumix L10's built-in 24-75mm f/1.8-2.8 lens already covers. To a degree, therefore, the PEN's lens-choice advantage becomes less important, which surprised me.

Overall, I preferred the feel of the Lumix L10 — it's the classier and slicker camera of the two, and better equipped for video. However, it's slow start-up time (because of the retracting lens design) is a drawback, while I appreciated the OM PEN's in-body image stabilization, and its arsenal of computational modes for creative shooting techniques.

As with so many camera comparison tests I undertake, each of these models has its own distinct advantages. I like the convenience of the OM PEN, but as a standalone package I prefer the Lumix L10.