TechRadar News

• Star Wars Zero Company will take 30-40 hours to beat the main campaign
• The game won't feature New Game Plus mode, romance systems, or branching story paths
• Post-launch content is also unconfirmed at this time

Bit Reactor has confirmed that Star Wars Zero Company will take up to 40 hours to finish, and it won't have a New Game Plus mode.

The single-player turn-based tactics game is one of my most anticipated titles of the year, and ahead of its launch next month, the studio has conducted a community Q&A to answer a long series of questions.

One of the first questions asked how long the campaign will be, and lead producer Caydence Funk has confirmed that "Depending on your difficulty level and experience with the strategy genre," it's estimated that it can take between 30 and 40 hours for the average player to beat.

It's also confirmed that the story will be linear with no romance systems or branching paths.

"While we are excited about pushing the genre forward with a more cinematic approach, this is still a turn-based tactics game at its heart where adept skill and strategy are needed to overcome tense combat challenges," Bit Reactor said. "That said, there are story moments that can alter based on who you have in your squad, but the overall story is a linear one from beginning to end."

Personally, 40 hours is the ideal length, and a linear story means I can experience everything the story without having to worry about missing out on additional storylines.

"As far as exploration goes, yes, you’ll have the ability to explore a section of some planets prior to engaging in turn-based combat on them," the studio added.

"This is a minor facet of the game that we feel adds a unique, immersive quality to Star Wars Zero Company. These small segments are a chance for you, as Hawks, to conduct the espionage that Zero Company excels at, and are main-story-only segments that can affect the subsequent combat by granting Intel and Advantage Points."

Unfortunately, the game won't launch with New Game Plus mode, so new playthroughs will have to be completely fresh, "but players will unlock certain customization options on subsequent playthroughs" through progress.

Zero Company is set during one of my favorite Star Wars eras, the Clone Wars, so I'm very excited to experience a new story during this time period.

We can expect battles across the galaxy with the Separatist Alliance, a team consisting of a Clone Trooper, a Mandalorian, a Jedi Padawan, an Umbaran sniper, and more, as well as the appearance of Anakin Skywalker.

Customization will also play a big role in the game, and while players can't have an entire team of Clone Troopers, Bit Reactor confirmed that you'll have access to Clone armor cosmetics with the ability to customize your team's armor from the start. Outfits don't impact gameplay, but Clone Trooper helmets will provide a voice modulation effect, which sounds neat!

Even cooler, The Clone Wars TV series voice actor Dee Bradley Baker will provide his iconic voice to the character Trick and additional Clone Troopers, but the full cast has yet to be announced.

As for additional content, good news, there are no plans for microtransactions to be added to the game; however, the "Arc Trooper" Armor Set is only part of the "Grand Army of the Republic" Cosmetic Pack for the Deluxe Edition, but players will still have access to other cosmetic options in the base game.

The game also won't have mod support, and "right now" post-launch content isn't confirmed because Bit Reactor is "focused on making the best game we can at launch."

Star Wars Zero Company launches on August 27 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Series S.

• Varonis Threat Labs uncovered Dolphin X, a powerful RAT with 329 features across 10 categories
• Its standout “AI Profiler” ranks victims by usage and sends summaries to attackers daily
• Malware is sold on the dark web via subscription tiers, starting at $80 per month

What if malware could talk to its operator and tell it which of the infected victims is worth paying attention to, and which not? A few years ago, this might have been science fiction but today, thanks to breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), not only is it possible, it’s also already available on the black market.

Security researchers Varonis Threat Labs recently disclosed finding a rather revolutionary remote access trojan (RAT) called Dolphin X.

Even without advanced AI capabilities, the RAT is quite potent, acting as an infostealer, a Hidden Virtual Network Computing (HVNC), a DDoS botnet, or a loader. Just its infostealer capabilities are nothing short of impressive - it can target more than 300 applications to steal browser passwords, enterprise credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data, DevOps secrets, and different sensitive files, and it comes with 329 features split into 10 categories.

AI Profiler

However, the AI capability is the one that stunned the researchers. Called “AI Profiler”, the feature ranks victims by app usage, browsing history, and more, sending a daily summary to the attackers.

The malware is now being offered on the dark web, where other criminals can subscribe to one of three tiers. The basic tier costs $80 per month, while the top tier is around $230 per month. Lifetime subscription costs $1,140 for basic access, and goes up to $3,420 for the top tier.

"Dolphin X’s collection scope reaches well beyond browser passwords to SSH keys, cloud tokens, and DevOps credentials," Varonis said in its write-up. "On the wrong machine, a single infection could expose access to an entire production environment."

"Its use of AI is also interesting because it shows us how AI is being integrated into more cybercrime tooling."

• Live heart rate data will be free for Garmin Cirqa users
• Early testers noticed it had been put behind the Connect+ subscription
• The new tracker costs $199.99 / £179.99 / AU$299.99

We've already put the newly unveiled Garmin Cirqa through an extensive hands-on testing session, and came away very impressed. However, there were complaints from those who had early access to the device that live heart rate data was locked behind a paywall.

Now Garmin is taking that negative feedback on board: as reported by seasoned tech reporter Ray Maker (via Android Police), live heart rate data will be available to every Cirqa user "in the coming days", with or without a Garmin Connect+ subscription.

The subscription, which applies across all of Garmin's wearables, has been the subject of much debate since it launched last year. For $6.99 / £6.99 / AU$12 per month or $69.99 / £69.99 / AU$120 a year, it gives you access to more metrics and more insights about the fitness data you're amassing.

Live heart rate readings aren't usually locked behind Connect+, so it's strange that Garmin initially made this the case with the Cirqa. Whatever the reasoning or confusion, the anomaly is now being dealt with, which is good news.

The rise of subscriptions

Good news update! Garmin will be making a change to Garmin Connect Mobile in the coming days, so you'll now be able to see Live HR from Cirqa during a workout (previously, you could only see workout Average HR unless you had Garmin Connect+). See...feedback works. Sometimes. :) https://t.co/q5qL8T4YhZJuly 22, 2026

If you're new to the Garmin Cirqa (and it was only announced a few days ago), it takes on the likes of the Whoop wearables and the Fitbit Air by giving you a capable, lightweight wrist tracker without the distraction (and battery drain) of a display.

Both the Cirqa and the Fitbit Air offer basic tracking features and functionality for free, with a pile of extras available if you sign up for a subscription. With Whoop bands, like the Whoop MG, a subscription is compulsory, otherwise it's pretty much useless — plans start at $199 / £169 / AU$299 per year.

As we've written about before, it's a sign of the times that so many tech devices, from smartwatches to security cameras, now come with monthly subscriptions attached — usually stealing away the best features for the device in question.

If you're tempted by a Garmin Cirqa and its display-free design, it's available for $199.99 / £179.99 / AU$299.99 direct from Garmin, with availability from tomorrow, July 24 — and you will be able to record real time heart rate data, via the accompanying Garmin app.

Since Dutton Ranch season 2 was renewed a week before the season 1 finale, I assumed it would be a good few months — perhaps even until the end of 2026 — before we'd hear any solid updates from Paramount+ or its cast. But thanks to Variety's explosive interview with star Ed Harris, who plays vet Everett on the Yellowstone spinoff, I was wrong.

“Prior to signing on for it, I was talked to quite a bit about what the season was, and what my character was going to do — and that I was one of the four main characters,” Harris said. “And that wasn’t really the case."

He continued: “I said, ‘I’m feeling underused and inconsequential,’ and they kind of went, ‘Oh'. I’m being told my character will have a little bit more to do [in Season 2]. I was just a little frustrated, to tell you the truth.”

@varietymagazine

Ed Harris says he felt “misled” about his “inconsequential” role on “Dutton Ranch,” and that halfway through filming Season 1, he was telling his team to “get me the f--- out of here.” “Prior to signing on for it, I was talked to quite a bit about what the season was, and what my character was going to do — and that I was one of the four main characters,” Harris said. “And that wasn’t really the case... I said, ‘I’m feeling underused and inconsequential,’ and they kind of went, ‘Oh.'” Harris explained that when he actually watched “Dutton Ranch,” he thought it was “pretty good,” and he felt his character was “relatively important to the story.” However, during filming, “it didn’t feel that way.” “I’m being told my character will have a little bit more to do [in Season 2],” he says. “I was just a little frustrated, to tell you the truth.”

♬ original sound - Variety

According to Variety, Harris explained that when he actually watched Dutton Ranch, he thought it was “pretty good,” and felt his character was “relatively important to the story.” However, during filming, “it didn’t feel that way.”

These potentially controversial comments are the ones making headlines, but for me — a self-proclaimed hardcore fan of the show — they aren't the most interesting takeaway from Harris' interview.

Not only are there heavy hints about when we're likely to see new episodes released, but the certainty of Harris' belief in season 2 indicates that a new showrunner has been found.

Dutton Ranch season 2 episodes will likely arrive in late 2027 as Harris confirms February 2027 filming schedule

Do a little bit of social media digging and you will find that there's more to the interview with Harris than the clip Variety has chosen to run with. Journalist Marc Malkin has posted the full footage to his Instagram, where Harris confirms that Dutton Ranch season 2 is due to begin filming in 2027.

I'll be honest with you: this is a lot later than I was expecting. However, it does confirm that we'll be seeing episodes in late 2027 (or slightly later, depending on if there are any other production hitches).

(Image credit: Paramount+)

Now let's examine what Harris allegedly knows about his season 2 character arc. For plans to already be so firmed up, this must mean that a new showrunner has been appointed to take over from Chad Feehan, who exited the show just weeks before the season 1 premiere.

This could easily have been a remark made by producers just to keep Harris happy enough to carry out his two-season contract with Dutton Ranch. But the fact that neither Paramount, nor Taylor Sheridan or 101 Studios chose not to comment on Harris' interview makes me feel hopeful that Sheridan has quietly resumed his position as showrunner.

Call it delusion if nothing else, as this is what I've always wanted to happen with the Yellowstone spinoff. But it's a smart move — with season 1 performing so well for Paramount+, everything needs to be perfect to keep up momentum. Annoyingly, it's likely that the showrunner won't be announced until season 2 begins production.

When the trio of Samsung Galaxy Z 8 foldables — the Galaxy Z Fold 8, Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, and Galaxy Z Flip 8 — arrive in consumers' hands in the coming weeks, they will be among the first mainstream handsets, aside from the Motorola Razr Fold, to feature silicon-carbon batteries. That's a big deal for the industry, but perhaps an even bigger deal with Samsung, which, a decade ago, had one of the biggest negative smartphone battery stories in a generation.

That was way back in 2016 when the Note 7, an otherwise excellent phablet (yes, that was a thing), occasionally blew up because of battery manufacturing imperfections. Ever since then, Samsung has not only had a perfect record; it's often been at pains to explain the lengths it goes to ensure smartphone battery stability and safety.

Now, as it introduces a relatively new and somewhat untested battery technology — silicon-carbon — Samsung is again making the effort to dive deep into the construction and chemistry of these new-fangled power sources to show just how much care and effort it's putting into the new tech, and into its new foldable phones.

What is silicon-carbon?

All three new Galaxy Foldables feature silicon-carbon battery technology (Image credit: Future)

Silicon-carbon is not a wholesale refashioning of lithium-ion battery technology. Instead, it replaces a key component of the battery makeup, swapping the negative electrode (graphite) for silicon-carbon. This material allows for higher density (more power in less space) and far faster charging speeds. It's part of the reason why Samsung can, despite not making the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra any thicker than the Z Fold 7 (it's actually 0.1mm thinner when unfolded), make the battery larger — it's now 5,000mAh.

With Samsung now having a solid decade of battery safety under its belt, perhaps no one is questioning the quality, let alone the safety, of this new battery technology. But Samsung clearly wants to shout about it, and has been sharing extensive details.

In a recent briefing ahead of the July 22 Galaxy Unpacked event in London, Samsung executives walked us through a near-atomic-level chemistry class to explain how it's custom-building the silicon-carbon batteries to ensure they work as expected.

"With Samsung's highest standards, we carefully verified the silicon-carbon battery so that our users can trust it and use it with competence," said Samsung EVP Moon Sung-hoon.

As for what that means, Samsung told us it fully redesigned the cathode, separator, and anode, which means that, at an atomic level, Samsung is managing the chemical reaction inside the battery that delivers the power to your next Galaxy Z Fold device.

Samsung wouldn't share the exact amount of silicon-carbon that's in the batteries, but it did confirm that its new Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 phones in every region would feature the new battery technology.

On coatings and voltage management

Even though we didn't learn the percentage of each battery element in the Galaxy Z8 phones, Samsung dove deep into the component construction, explaining that, in an effort to manage the reactivity of the silicon-carbon cells, it "innovated every single part of the battery system. This is why we call it the system level of innovation at battery."

A Samsung executive showed off a colorful illustration to detail all the work (sadly, I cannot share it with you here). But here's what I learned.

To the anode layer, Samsung's engineers added a micro-carbon coating, which offers protection to the layer without, thanks to carbon's natural pores, constricting it during charging and discharging,

On the cathode layer, they "injected additional atoms" to manage the naturally higher voltage and stability of the cells. To maintain that higher voltage, they added a solid electrolyte interface (SEI) that adds a "small coating to the anode cells". This also manages the cell reactivity.

Finally, for the chemical reaction that occurs in the battery, Samsung added a "hyperporosity separator," which has larger holes without reducing the stress or durability of the cell's separators, and therefore helps maintain stability.

While most of us non-chemical engineers might feel like we've just about wrapped our minds around this information, this is an unprecedented level of battery construction detail, which I don't think Samsung would have shared if not for its history with batteries.

For consumers, though, this may not matter as much as the fact that these are larger-capacity batteries in smaller frames that charge far faster than their predecessors — and that will feel like a win for most Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 owners.

For our early impressions of all three new phones, check out our hands-on Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra preview, hands-on Galaxy Z Fold 8 preview, and hands-on Galaxy Z Flip 8 preview.

• Guardio Labs found CVE‑2026‑48294 in Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension, enabling cross‑site data disclosure
• Attackers could steal WhatsApp Web chats if victims opened malicious landing pages with extension active
• Adobe patched the flaw in version 26.7.2.0; update recommended for 314M extension users

If you have Adobe Acrobat’s extension for Chrome, and you like chatting through WhatsApp Web, there is a potential security vulnerability you might want to address.

Security researchers from Guardio Labs discovered a “universal cross-site scripting (UXSS)-class cross-origin data disclosure vulnerability”, which is another way of saying that a website could use the flaw to read the contents of a different website, loaded in a separate tab.

The vulnerability was found in the Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension and is now tracked as CVE-2026-48294. It was given a severity score of 7.4/10 (high), and affects versions 26.5.2.2 and earlier. Guardio Labs dubbed it “HermeticReader” because of what it exploits.

"Insultingly ordinary" setup

The extension comes with different integrations, such as Google Drive or, in this case - WhatsApp Web. The WhatsApp integration component, internally known as "Hermes" is where the bug was found.

In theory, an attacker could create a new landing page and share it with the victim via email, instant messaging, SEO poisoning, or other methods. If the victim 1) has the vulnerable version of the Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension installed; 2) has WhatsApp loaded in a separate tab; and 3) opens the malicious landing page, it could trigger the extension’s vulnerable code path and allow the attackers to access everything the victim has on their WhatsApp.

Some sources argue that threat actors could use this vulnerability to pull one-time passcodes delivered via WhatsApp.

"The setup is almost insultingly ordinary: an attacker-controlled page, dressed to look like the kind of page you land on via search results, marketing emails, etc.," Guardio Labs wrote in its analysis.

"The visitor, who already has the Adobe Acrobat extension installed, opens that page. The page wakes up a dormant engine inside the extension, reaches directly into WhatsApp Web. Seconds later, the rendered WhatsApp Web view - the chat list, contact names, messages, the profile name, the text of whatever conversation is open - the whole WhatsApp in the attacker's hands."

Adobe has since publicly acknowledged the issue and thanked Guardio Labs’ researchers for their help. It has also fixed the problem in version 26.7.2.0 that’s currently available for download. The extension has more than 314 million users.

Via The Hacker News

Prime Video just got a massive free upgrade that should be on your radar if you're interested in playing popular video games like Fallout 4, Fortnite, and EA Sports FC 26 on your TV at no extra cost.

From today, Amazon Prime subscribers using Fire TV devices in the US or UK will be able to access Amazon Luna titles from directly within the Prime Video app. Luna is the company's cloud gaming service, and lets you play entire games by streaming them directly to your device like you would a TV show or movie — simply pick what you want to play in the new games tab, connect your phone (or a compatible gamepad) to use as a controller, and you can dive straight in, with no download required.

You don't need to pay extra for this either, as a formidable library of games is already included with your Prime subscription. This includes a wide range of casual GameNight titles designed for playing with a group of family or friends (including an exclusive Angry Birds and digital versions of popular board games like Clue and Exploding Kittens), in addition to some more hardcore titles available on a rotating basis.

If you want even more games, you can upgrade to Luna Premium for an additional $9.99 / £8.99 per month.

Prime placement

The move comes as Amazon tries to get more eyes on its game streaming service, which many Prime subscribers don't even know they have access to.

"You could argue we're the largest paid gaming subscription in the world," Amazon GM of gaming Jeff Gattis laughs in a conversation ahead of today's reveal. "Problem is, not enough people know about it."

Although he argues that the service is "really easy to get to if you know where you're going," he reckons the decision to initially roll it out via a dedicated Luna website and app that you "have to actively seek out and go find" has inadvertently created too many "friction points" for otherwise potentially interested users.

"It's crazy how much value we're putting in to the Prime tier," he added. "The fact that we just had the World Cup, and the you could play FC 26 if you're a Prime member for essentially free is is amazing. But again, it's only as good as people's ability to know about it."

In addition to the prominent positioning of the new games tab, Amazon is currently working on brand awareness campaigns to help get the word out.

According to Gattis, Fire TV is also just the beginning of a wider rollout that might see the update coming to the Prime Video mobile app, and so be in front of even more eyes, in future. "The grander vision is to get it to everywhere Prime Video is, and so we're excited just for more people to discover the benefit," he teased.

Overall, he believes that all of this will help align Luna more closely with the core principles that make other Amazon services like its e-commerce offering so successful. "It's convenience," he adds, "and I think it's value. And when you think about Amazon, what are the things that it does well worldwide?"

• ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott calls for move from "AI chaos to AI discipline"
• Comments come after OpenAI model infiltrated Hugging Face
• McDermott says ServiceNow tools come with a "kill switch" to prevent such incidents

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has laid out why his company's AI offerings have an advantage over the competition, partly because of built-in controls which can cut off access when needed.

Speaking to CNBC, McDermott said ServiceNow's tools are helping businesses move “from AI chaos to AI discipline.”

“We have a kill switch that stops AI agents that go rogue, so those things don’t need to happen, and they wouldn’t happen when companies run ServiceNow,” McDermott said

Not going rogue

McDermott's comments come shortly after the much-publicized incident which saw an OpenAI model breach online repository Hugging Face.

The incident was part of an experiment from OpenAI as part of its testing of GPT‑5.6 Sol and an “even more capable pre-release model” to see how well they would perform on the ExploitGym benchmark.

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf has called the event "a wake-up call", telling the BBC it, "will be one of the most common types of cyber attacks we see", adding that most firms are not aware that the "game has changed".

Many large software firms have experienced some disquiet over their increasing use of AI, however McDermott dismissed concerns this growing AI competition could affect ServiceNow retaining customers.

“If you look at the terms of our contracts, they’ve actually gotten longer,” McDermott said, noting that greater AI adoption should actually increase demand for tools such as those provided by ServiceNow.

“There’s going to be more AI. There’s going to be more incidents, and all these things drive more and more volume to ServiceNow,” he said.

The news came as ServiceNow reported its latest earnings, with subscription revenues of $3,877 million in Q2 2026, representing 24.5% year-over-year growth and 23% in constant currency

• South Korean government discloses ten‑month cyberattack on the National Diplomatic Academy’s online education system
• Data stolen included user IDs, names, emails, and encrypted passwords of at least 6,000 individuals
• MFA shut down IT systems, deployed enhanced security, and delayed disclosure due to diplomatic sensitivity

Current and former employees of the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), as well as other government personnel, may have had their data siphoned out by cybercriminals in an attack that lasted for ten months.

The South Korean government has disclosed an attack against the online education system of its National Diplomatic Academy. The system, set up in 2022 by the country’s premier institution for educating and training diplomats, apparently contained a security vulnerability that unnamed threat actors managed to exploit.

In an announcement published on the official website of the South Korean government, both the details about the flaw, as well as about the attackers, were not disclosed.

Thousands are affected

However, it did note that the attack took place between April 2025 and February 2026. During these ten months, cybercriminals were able to steal user IDs, names, emails, as well as encrypted passwords of trainees in the National Diplomatic Academy Online Education System.

Unique identification information, sensitive information, mobile phone numbers, home addresses, and photos were not compromised, it said.

In response to the attack, MFA shut down its entire IT infrastructure and deployed “enhanced security measures”, without elaborating what these measures were. It urged all employees to remain vigilant of incoming emails, and to reach out if they receive anything “suspicious”.

While the official announcement lacks details, BleepingComputer reported that the attack impacted “at least 6,000 individuals, 350 of them being current government attachés dispatched abroad.” Citing an MFA spokesperson, the publication said the Ministry decided to disclose the incident with a five-month delay due to the “sensitive nature” of the attack, and the need to thoroughly analyze it before going public.

"We recognized this issue in February, but we announced it five months later because of the sensitivity of the matter regarding our diplomatic and security affairs, and the need for careful review and analysis," said South Korea Foreign Ministry's spokesperson Park Il.

Via BleepingComputer

From the scourge of Generative AI to the RAM crisis, from PlayStation axing discs to Xbox cutting legendary studios off at the knees, it seems like gaming is under attack from every angle. The industry is in dire straits, with studios seemingly no longer able to bank on the success of AAA blockbusters or Live Service behemoths like it used to. Even the biggest game ever, the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, has had a troubled announcement, with its $80 price tag and discless contents getting people’s backs up.

It’s easy to feel helpless when seemingly insurmountable problems hit a medium you love, and speaking out feels like you’re merely howling into the void. But based on historic events, it's true that when enough gamers make themselves heard — and when they vote with their wallets — positive changes can occur, bad decisions can be reversed and better futures can be laid. Hey, even Xbox rolled back its Game Pass price hike (to an extent).

So we want to hear from you — which issue are you most concerned about? Participate in our poll below and tell everyone what you think. No doubt many if not all of these issues are interconnected. For instance, I can’t help but laugh at the cruel irony of the RAM being used to power the Gen AI tools for the purposes of developing games more cheaply is pushing up the price of the systems for playing those games. Of course, there’s no easy fix to any one of them, but we’ll follow up by dissecting the results and discussing the potential routes to bring gaming out from the dark place it’s currently stuck in.

On the hunt for a pair of headphones that will deliver satisfying sound without clearing out your bank account? Good affordable headphones are tricky to come by, but they do exist — you just need to know where to look.

Here at TechRadar, we test dozens of pairs of headphones every year, and in amongst them we've unearthed some wallet-friendly wonders. I asked TechRadar's audio specialists which headphones they'd recommend to buyers on a budget, and rounded up their suggestions for this article.

If it's true wireless in-ears you're after, you'd struggle to do better than the Nothing Ear (a) buds, which Audio Editor Becky Scarrott awarded a perfect five stars, calling them "a resounding home run" for the British startup and praising the noise cancellation, sound quality and battery life in particular. In the over-ear arena, Becky loves the CMF Pro. In her tests, she was impressed with the "superb" sound quality, and pleasantly surprised to discover "the sort of... personal sound profile curation [we're] more used to seeing in headphones much higher up the food chain".

Read on for more budget-maximizing buys — and hit the 'View details' button for a summary of what we thought of them in our tests, plus links to the full reviews.

Top cheap earbuds and headphones

Nothing Ear (a)

Read our full review

Pros

• Fun, zealous, expansive sound
• Vastly improved active noise cancellation
• Smaller, more pocketable case

Cons

• No wireless charging support
• No flagship sound profile curation

JLab Go Pods ANC

Read our full review

Pros

• Solid ANC
• Lightweight build
• Truly low price

Cons

• Poor eartip fit
• Lean battery life
• Aggressive transparency mode

Soundpeats Clip1

Read our full review

Pros

• Fantastic listening test
• Comfortable build
• Competitive value

Cons

• Low max volume
• Cheap-feeling case
• Touch control issues

OneOdio Focus A6

Read our full review

Pros

• Sensational sound quality
• Extensive software features
• Comfy, quality construction

Cons

• On-ear controls are a little sensitive
• ANC is good rather than game-changing

CMF Headphone Pro

Read our full review

Pros

• Excellent hearing tests; unexpected at the level
• Emotive, circumaural sound
• Exemplary battery life

Cons

• ANC isn't amazing
• Energy slider feels a tad gimmicky
• No hard carry case or USB-C charger in the box

Huawei FreeArc

Read our full review

Pros

• Top-tier sound
• Competitive price
• Comfortable fit

Cons

• App download pains
• Middling battery life
• Would benefit from ANC

Sony WH-CH720

Read our full review

Pros

• Great sound balance
• Lots of detail in audio
• Effective noise cancellation
• Full of useful features

Cons

• Sound feels constrained
• Noise cancellation leaks in low sounds
• Plastic feels a little cheap

Great news for 4K Blu-ray fans: the huge half-price sale on Criterion Collections discs is still running at Barnes & Noble, and Amazon has some of the same discounts running too. Slightly more concerning news: the sale ends on July 26, so you only have a few days left to pick up some new discs!

• View the full Criterion sale at Barnes & Noble
• View the Criterion sale at Amazon

At Barnes & Noble, absolutely everything is a flat half-price, which makes things easy (and a stone-cold bargain). At Amazon, quite a few discs are half-price, but some have smaller discounts than B&N (or no discount at all). But I've included that sale too, because a lot of people like to start with Amazon for the convenience.

Obviously, there's a huge range of stuff to choose from, so your best bet is to browse the full sale directly, but I've picked out 12 options that I think are particularly tempting. And if you don't have a 4K Blu-ray player yet, don't forget to check our guide to the best 4K Blu-ray players, all tested by us!

Criterion 4K Blu-ray sale — quick links

• View the full Criterion sale at Barnes & Noble
• View the full Criterion sale at Amazon

Criterion 4K Blu-ray sale: 12 titles I'd recommend

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Eyes Wide Shut

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Wall•E

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection The Princess Bride

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection No Country for Old Men

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection The Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise / Before Sunset / Before Midnight)

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits (The Big Boss / Fist of Fury / the Way of the Dragon / Enter the Dragon / Game of Death)

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Sentimental Value

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Seven Samurai

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Dazed & Confused

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection Thief

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection After Hours

Save 50%

The Criterion Collection The Secret Agent

• View the full Criterion sale at Amazon
• View the full Criterion sale at Barnes & Noble

Last year, thousands of customers at one of the UK's biggest banking groups were locked out of their accounts. This cut people off from their own money, leading to declined cards, missed payments.

Across the UK, major banks and building societies racked up more than 800 hours of unplanned tech and systems outages last year. That's more than a month of disruption spread across the financial services millions of people rely on every day.

I don't believe this is bad luck or just a one-off error. It's something deeply structural and predictable. And it won’t fix itself.

The structural problem underneath the headlines

The headlines zero in on the disruption or the compensation bills or the apologies over social media. What gets missed is why it keeps happening in the first place.

Here's what I think is going on: In a lot of these cases, data is sitting in silos, systems don't stay properly aligned and no one has clear ownership of the key domains. So when something changes in one place, it doesn't stay contained. It ripples through other systems in ways that aren't always obvious.

A dependency breaks somewhere downstream, a third-party service doesn't behave as expected and the impact becomes harder to trace than it should be. Recovery slows because teams are spending time working out what actually changed before they can even start fixing it. This isn't a legacy technology problem or a budget problem. It's a data ownership problem, and the people running these organizations know it.

The UK's particular problem

Banks aren't short on ambition, and there’s no shortage of investment or early deployment. In fact, the vast majority of AI initiatives are now moving from pilot to production.

But complete rollout is a totally different story. In the US, around a third of banking executives say their AI initiatives consistently reach full deployment. In the UK, barely one in ten can say the same, and UK respondents are more than twice as likely to say projects never make it past the pilot stage. I don't think this is a technology gap. It's an organizational one.

UK institutions have spent years digitizing on top of legacy infrastructure, acquiring new capabilities without properly integrating them. Each layer adds complexity, more handoffs and more unclear ownership. That's the accumulated cost of organizational decisions that were easier to defer than resolve.

At that rate, UK banks risk getting lapped not just by their US peers but by the fintechs who are already drawing customers away.

The governance bottleneck

There's a second structural problem looming beneath the data fragmentation issue. Decision-making in financial services is still highly centralized. The majority of major tech investments still require C-suite approval, with only a handful of these delegated to the data or digital leaders closest to the systems and best placed to act. By the time approval arrives, the moment to act decisively has passed.

Those who've got it right have named who owns what. Decision rights sit closer to the people actually doing the work, governance is folded in from the start, not as an afterthought. And when things go wrong, which is inevitable, recovery comes faster because nobody has to spend the first hour working out who's responsible. That's the kind of margin most banks can't currently rely on.

What the minority are doing differently

Only a handful of financial services firms are planning to move to product-led, cross-functional team structures with clear data ownership and accountability. I'd argue that's the operating model most likely to produce faster delivery, clearer accountability and fewer of the outages that result in front-page headlines.

Among firms that have embedded intelligence directly into live customer journeys, results are already showing up. Real-time fraud alerts, payment resolution support and event-driven interventions are all cited as direct drivers of customer loyalty. These are the outcomes when data is clean and teams have the authority to act on it.

In a market where switching has never been easier, that's the difference between keeping a customer and losing one.

What the outages are really telling us

Last year's outage headlines prompted understandable focus on compensation and consumer protection. But I think that's the wrong question. The more important one is why these incidents keep happening, and what it would take to stop them.

That comes down to knowing who owns what, giving teams the authority to act at speed and building governance in from the start rather than adding it on when something breaks.

Banks can't keep treating these as isolated incidents. They're symptoms of operating models that haven't kept pace. Until that changes, the next outage isn't a question of if. It's when.

We've featured the best small business 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

• Dataintelo reports that the used video game market is worth $7.2 billion
• The firm thinks that Sony's decision to end the production of discs will cause it to decline
• Analysts say the market will "keep shrinking and eventually disappear"

The second-hand video game market could be in danger as a result of Sony's decision to end production of physical discs starting in January 2028.

A new story from CNBC included analysis from market research firm Dataintelo, which reported that the used game market was worth $7.2 billion in 2025 and predicted it could grow to $13.8 billion by 2034.

The figure represents all pre-owned games, console hardware, accessories, and peripherals, but consoles account for 42.3% of revenue, with North America being the biggest part of the market. That's compared to Europe, which captured 28.3% of global second-hand revenue last year.

The company explained that the second-hand game market is fuelled mainly by affordability concerns, an interest in retro gaming, and a "digital-to-physical gaming transition."

With Sony's plan to phase out discs in just two years, there's now a threat to the used game market.

"Realistically, at least one-third of games have been sold historically as used, and the games that were sold also provided currency to the gamer who traded them in as cash to pay for new games," said Wedbush Securities managing director of strategic planning, Michael Pachter. "Brick and mortar game retail is doomed."

However, physical discs and the second-hand market aren't likely to disappear all at once. Kazunori Ito, director of equity research at Morningstar, explained that the market will "keep shrinking and eventually disappear."

"There is an important difference between players accepting that shift because they see value in it, and having it effectively forced on them by taking away the alternative," Ito said.

"Most would prefer to make that transition in their own way and at their own pace, rather than having it driven by the end of physical discs."

In Sony's announcement earlier this month, it called it a "natural direction" for the company, arguing that the transition from physical to digital discs "will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today."

While fans continue to push back against the decision, analysts have determined that the PlayStation company won't change its mind.

"Their current profit margin has been too weak for years now, so they feel like they must act," explained Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games. "From an economic perspective, digital sales just make too much sense especially for platform holders."

A recent report from Circana senior director and video game industry advisor Mat Piscatella also suggested that the digital market is in Sony's favor right now, explaining that only seven PlayStation games "have sold more than 100,000 physical units year-to-date" in the US.

Middleware has traditionally been treated as a background process. Enterprises could afford to have this layer connect systems and data with minimal oversight – but that autonomy is no longer compatible with the scale and complexity of modern data flows.

Large enterprises, retailers, and financial institutions consist of transactions sprawled across a disconnected web of middleware.

IBM MQ, Apache Kafka, Apache ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and TIBCO are only a few of these environments, and each creates a step that introduces failure points where data can back up or stall completely.

This reality no longer aligns with the direction enterprises are heading. As organizations accelerate investments in agentic AI, the effectiveness of those systems increasingly depends on their ability to understand the operational environments in which they operate. Many large organizations are steadily advancing toward petabyte-scale volumes and agentic AI embedded throughout their processes.

Yet they overlook the need to secure the foundation on which these additional investments are built. These technological improvements depend on a deeper understanding of operational systems and a strong application base. As AI-powered operations and high transaction volumes become the norm, middleware teams can no longer afford to rely on disjointed oversight and fragmented structures for their middleware systems.

Closing the Context Gap for AI Operations

Across industries, agentic AI needs system awareness to function effectively. In a recent McKinsey & Company article, 33% of organizations cited data limitations, and 29% cited tech platform limitations as among the top three roadblocks to scaling AI.

These challenges are especially pronounced for businesses with complex, fragmented middleware landscapes. In many enterprises, these limitations stem not from a lack of AI investment, but from fragmented operational environments that prevent systems from accessing complete business context.

Without interconnected views across an organization, agentic AI struggles to understand how brokers, queues, topics, routes, and dependencies fit together across live environments. This means AI could generate insights, but they might not fully reflect the realities of the operational environment. In practice, this could look like a middleware system surfacing a “small” discrepancy that is actually a larger issue beneath the surface.

For example, a queue backlog in one broker may appear isolated, but it could signal a larger downstream application failure or potential architecture limitations. In a retail environment, this could manifest as delayed order processing, while in financial services, it could impact payment workflows and customer experiences. Misinterpreting these signals is problematic because middleware teams operate with little to no room for error.

Much of the information needed to build operational context already exists throughout growing enterprise telemetry. The challenge lies in the scale of the information operators would have to evaluate.

From Data Overload to Operational Intelligence

Enterprises are building increasingly large telemetry repositories, which offer significant potential. There is no shortage of data, and if organizations analyze it correctly, technology leaders could use it to move away from reactive monitoring and toward predictive insight generation. The issues surface when trying to manage this data in real time and detect signals with enough time to act.

The volume of this middleware telemetry is often too dense for operators to evaluate by hand, making its potential obsolete without practical ways to analyze it. Enterprises need ways to tie this information back to actual system behavior at scale. Raw data can show what happened, but enterprises need a broader understanding of what those signals mean for the overall operational picture.

Making AI and Telemetry Work Together

Organizations must correlate operational activity across traditional and real-time telemetry to prevent growing data volumes from hindering issue detection. This means establishing a telemetry foundation that allows businesses to view the entire production environment.

With a strong foundation, predictive intelligence is positioned to ingest, index, and query data without disrupting production workflows. Historical operating data, including communication paths and processing routes, could help AI read signals, identify issues early, and respond quickly and accurately. AI could interpret individual events in the context of applications, message flows, transaction paths, and business outcomes.

With operational context, agentic AI can identify anomalies more accurately and provide recommendations grounded in a deeper understanding of system behavior across platforms and environments. It could gather data over time and surface optimization opportunities for queue depths and message flows, alongside other functions such as automating repetitive connection testing and log analysis.

This framework would yield recommendations grounded in business realities and give middleware teams a chance to break away from routine logging and focus on designing scalable architectures for enterprise data flows.

Building for an AI-Driven Future

Enterprises can no longer treat the middleware layer as an afterthought. Fragmented integration architectures provide little transaction-level visibility and allow errors to compound unnoticed.

Data growth and AI-powered analysis are exposing the limitations of these legacy middleware standards. Organizations need full oversight of the interconnected systems that carry a transaction from one step to the next, as well as established connections between telemetry and business activity.

When enterprises build a strong foundation of operational context, AI can help businesses transition from reactive awareness to insights that predict what might go wrong in the future. In this environment, the organizations that pull ahead will be those that leverage AI and telemetry to turn raw data into meaningful business outcomes.

As enterprise AI adoption matures, competitive advantage will increasingly depend not only on the sophistication of AI models, but also the quality of operational context available to them.

We've reviewed, rated, and ranked the best cloud backup services.

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

• Samsung has raised prices for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8
• This is likely in large part due to rising memory costs
• However, prices in South Korea are substantially lower

As expected, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 cost more than their predecessors, with the Z Fold 8 Ultra’s starting price being $100 / £100 / AU$100 higher than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7’s, and the Z Flip 8’s being $100 / £100 / AU$150 more than the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7’s.

Given the rising prices of memory, that’s not entirely surprising, but what you might be surprised by is just how much of a better deal South Korea is getting, with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra starting at just ₩2.58 million there. As the Korea Times points out, that’s 20.4% lower than the US price and a whopping 44% lower than the European price.

The difference in pricing for the standard Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is even greater. We don’t have a previous model of this to compare to (since the Z Fold 8 Ultra is the successor to the Z Fold 7), but this phone starts at $1,899.99 / £1,699 / AU$2,699, with that US price being 23.2% higher than Korea’s, while in Europe, buyers are paying 48% more.

The table below details the full price rises this generation, but in South Korea, people are paying less for the Z Fold 8 series than other places were charged for even the Z Fold 7 series.

Phone

256GB

512GB

1TB

Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra

$2,099.99 / £1,899 / AU$2,999

$2,299.99 / £2,069 / AU$3,299

$2,699.99 / £2,409 / AU$3,899

Galaxy Z Fold 7

$1,999.99 / £1,799 / AU$2,899

$2,119 / £1,899 / AU$3,099

$2,419 / £2,149 / AU$3,549

Galaxy Z Flip 8

$1,199.99 / £1,149 / AU$1,949

$1,399.99 / £1,319 / AU$2,249

N/A

Galaxy Z Flip 7

$1,099 / £1,049 / AU$1,799

$1,219 / £1,149 / AU$1,999

N/A

Home-field advantage

So, what’s going on here? Well, the Korea Times reports that, during a press conference on the sidelines of the Galaxy Unpacked launch event, Samsung Electronics co-CEO Roh Tae-moon said, “The support, feedback and encouragement from Korean consumers have been the foundation for strengthening the Galaxy brand's global competitiveness. In recognition of the importance of the Korean market, we will continue striving to offer Galaxy devices at the most competitive prices in Korea and maintain that policy going forward.”

So, in other words, Samsung is rewarding its home market for supporting the company. But that explanation is unlikely to satisfy Samsung fans from other countries, given that this shows Samsung could clearly charge less and still turn a profit — after all, it’s not going to be losing money on South Korean sales.

Now, there will be other factors in the differing prices, such as different taxes, but while from one perspective this could look like a nice gesture from Samsung, from another it looks like most of the world is facing unfair prices.

In any case, one other interesting detail from this press conference was Roh’s claim that the three models offered this year are “the complete form" of Samsung’s foldable line, with two models no longer offering enough variety now that foldable phones are becoming more mainstream.

I’m not sure what that says about the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, if that’s not part of the “complete form”, but it does suggest there will be more Galaxy Z Flip models in the future, which goes against a rumor hinting that the Galaxy Z Flip 7 would be the last one. So, that’s some good news at least.

Every time there's a new Samsung launch, the official store is usually the first place I look for the strongest deals. And it looks like the best option yet again, as you can currently get a Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 for as low as $129.99 when you trade in, thanks to this limited-time launch offer.

To get this full $250 rebate, you need to hand over a Galaxy Watch Ultra or an Apple Watch Ultra 2, which most would consider a bit of a downgrade. However, there are also discounts of up to $150 available for trading in several other smartwatches from Apple or Samsung. You can check Samsung's trade-in calculator to see what's available for your old tech.

While other retailers are offering gift cards or watches for free when you also sign up for a mobile plan, I think Samsung's launch deal is the most straightforward and accessible option, so it's the one I'd go for if you're looking to upgrade to the manufacturer's latest smartwatch ahead of the August 7 launch.

Today's best Samsung Galaxy Watch deals

Samsung Galaxy Watch 9: was $379.99 now from $129.99 with a trade-in at Samsung
With Samsung's preorder offer on the new Galaxy Watch 9, you can save up to $250 when you trade in your existing smartwatch. You get the full rebate with a Galaxy Watch Ultra or Apple Watch Ultra 2, but there are savings available for trading in several different Samsung and Apple wearables. The latest Galaxy Watch 9 boasts improved vitals and health tracking, including sleep apnea and blood pressure monitoring, smart AI assistance, a comfortable fit, and a lengthy 40-hour battery life.View Deal

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2: get up to $250 off with a trade-in
Want Samsung's latest and best smartwatch? The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is also available direct from the manufacturer with savings of up to $250 when you trade in. We were very impressed with the wearable, awarding it 4.5 stars in our Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 review, praising the slimmer design, powerful features, exceptional battery life, and intuitive interface.View Deal

It wasn't just smartwatches unveiled at the recent Galaxy Unpacked event. We also got a full reveal of the latest foldable handsets from Samsung, and we've spent some time with all of them. You can check out our hands-ons with the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 Ultra, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 to see what we thought of all devices.

After that, I've gathered together all of the best Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 preorder deals if you're interested in picking one up for yourself.

Within a short space of time, AI has made the leap from experimental technology to everyday business tool. Enterprises across sectors are today deploying AI to take on routine, time-intensive tasks to allow their teams to focus on more strategic tasks or work that requires human judgement. According to McKinsey, most organizations are using AI in at least one business function.

Network management and monitoring is one of the fastest-growing areas of interest. The timing is no coincidence. Technologies like cloud computing are driving significant increases in both network traffic and complexity, making modern infrastructure far harder to manage than it was even a few years ago.

To stay ahead, IT teams are embracing AI and automation - but how widely is AI-based network monitoring used today and where is it headed next?

Relieving the pressure on IT staff

The task of monitoring network activity is complex and requires continual attention. It involves keeping infrastructure healthy, identifying faults, and reacting swiftly to unusual activity. These tasks were once handled manually but growing network scale and an increasingly hostile cyber threat environment have made traditional approaches hard to sustain.

IT professionals now find themselves spending a disproportionate amount of time on repetitive work such as firewall management, network provisioning, and routine monitoring.

AI addresses this directly by automating large portions of network supervision. Machine learning models can continuously process enormous volumes of network data, identifying anomalies such as traffic spikes, suspicious access patterns, or behaviors associated with known threats - and doing so in real time. This means teams can intervene before a problem becomes an outage or a security breach.

AI also sharpens focus. Rather than requiring specialists to wade through endless logs and alerts, AI-powered systems sift swiftly through these, filtering out the noise and drawing attention to only the issues that pose genuine concern. False positives are reduced, and teams can direct their energy toward real risks - including fast-moving threats that rule-based tools simply cannot keep pace with.

Scalability is another advantage. As demand fluctuates, AI monitoring systems can expand their coverage automatically, without the need for additional headcount. In environments where networks are growing larger and more dynamic by the day, this kind of elasticity is no longer a luxury.

Adoption today

AI-enabled network monitoring is already embedded across a wide range of industries. For many networking professionals, automation and AI are now considered core operational capabilities rather than nice-to-haves. A meaningful and growing share of network management activity - covering design, deployment, maintenance, and troubleshooting - is already handled through automated processes.

However, adoption does not automatically guarantee success. Many organizations are actively deploying AI features within their network tools, and some are even training models on their own IT and security data. Yet far fewer report achieving fully successful outcomes. The gap between using AI and genuinely benefiting from it reflects the real-world difficulty of moving beyond pilots to reliable, production-grade operations.

Two challenges consistently hold organizations back. The first is data quality - incomplete records, inconsistent formats, and poor documentation undermine AI model performance before it even gets started.

The second is skills. Many IT teams simply do not have the in-house expertise required to deploy, train, and manage AI-driven networking tools effectively, which slows progress and erodes confidence in outcomes.

Agentic AI: what's coming next

Despite these hurdles, the direction is clear. AI-based monitoring is a crucial component in networks management, and the next evolution, agentic AI, is already beginning to take shape.

Where conventional AI tools focus on detection and recommendations, agentic AI goes further. These systems can identify anomalies, diagnose root causes, predict capacity issues, and take corrective action - either autonomously or with minimal human sign-off. Rather than simply flagging problems, agentic AI is built to analyze, decide, and act, moving networks toward genuinely autonomous operations.

Consider a practical example. On a hospital campus, a staff member unknowingly connects an unauthorized access point to the network. A rogue SSID appears - a classic vector for man-in-the-middle attacks.

An agentic network management system detects the anomaly instantly, classifies the threat based on policy, and presents the administrator with a targeted remediation action: block the port or quarantine the MAC address. In sensitive environments, human sign-off is preserved by design. The AI does the analysis; the human makes the call. This is not a future concept - it is in production today.

Industry analysts expect agentic approaches to gain significant traction over the next few years, particularly in large and complex network environments. For most organizations, however, getting there will require a phased approach.

The immediate priority is deploying AI-based monitoring solutions that integrate cleanly with existing infrastructure, while ensuring teams are trained and confident in using them. As organizations build trust in their data quality and in the reliability of AI-generated insights, they can progressively introduce more autonomous capabilities.

The direction is clear: the organizations that treat AI-driven network management as a strategic investment today will operate faster, more resilient networks tomorrow - while those that wait will find the gap increasingly difficult to close.

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

AngryMiao AM Infinity.97: two-minute review

It seems everyone and their dog is betting on where the high end gaming mouse market is going next, and the AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 is betting big on super light and powerful mice that nail the basics.

Okay, we've already seen this with the Razer Viper V4 Pro, but AngryMiao takes a different approach, with a heavily perforated chassis that looks like it's escaped from a sci-fi film rather than the gaming section of a branch of Currys or Best Buy.

Look past the aesthetics, though, and there's a genuinely accomplished mouse underneath. A sub-50g weight with or without a battery, a zippy 30,000 DPI PixArt PAW3950 sensor and true 8000Hz wireless polling put it right up there with the best ultralight mice I've tested this year, and its swappable battery system is a genuinely clever solution to the age-old wireless mouse problem of battery anxiety, with spares stashed inside the wireless receiver box for whenever you need them.

(Image credit: Future)

It's not a mouse without its flaws, though. The companion software is basic and has an annoying habit of running in the background, there's no dedicated DPI button or clutch anywhere on the chassis, and at $189 it's more expensive than its direct rivals. Whether that's a dealbreaker depends on how much you value standing out from the crowd.

That's ultimately what I feel you're paying for here. The AM Infinity.97 looks and feels like nothing else on the market, and backs that up with performance that goes toe-to-toe with mice from far bigger names. If you want a boutique ultralight mouse that doesn't sacrifice substance for style, this is one of the most compelling options I've tested all year.

AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 review: Price & release date

• $189 (approx £141/AU$270)
• Released in January 2026
• Towards the top end of the market

The AM Infinity.97 costs $189, and that puts it right at the top of the ultralight gaming mouse market against some genuinely excellent competition. The Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike costs $179.99, and the Razer Viper V4 Pro is $159.99 — meaning AngryMiao's boutique option is comfortably the priciest of the three.

It launched in January 2026 as the slightly smaller brother to the brand's original AM Infinity mouse, offering a different take on the highly competitive ultralight mouse sector from a brand better known for its keyboards than such potent mice.

For the price, it's competitive in features, too, with a flagship wireless sensor and polling rate specs, clever swappable batteries and a magnesium alloy chassis that's lighter than both Razer and Logitech's choices. In terms of features. It's perhaps closer to the Viper V4 Pro in that it seeeks to nail the basics of being a competitive ultralight mouse, rather than introducing new features such as rapid trigger, as the G Pro X2 Superstrike does.

AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 review: Specs

Sensor

PixArt PAW3950

DPI

100 - 30,000

Polling Rate

125 - 8,000Hz

Connectivity

Wired, Bluetooth, 2.4GHz Wireless

Switches

TTC Orange Dot Optical V2

Weight

39g (without battery), 47g (with battery)

Battery

340mAh swappable (up to 165 hours at 1KHz)

AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 review: Design

• Sci-fi-inspired looks
• Magnesium alloy chassis keeps things sturdy
• Software has very little frills

AngryMiao is a brand I associate more for its wacky keyboards than mice, but its house style is unmistakeable. As with the likes of Gravastar, it leans into a sci-fi aesthetic with a perforated chassis in keeping with the older guard of what ultralight gaming mice used to look like.

Intriguingly, it's slightly smaller than rivals, too, being only 97% of the size of a standard gaming mouse. That's because of AngryMiao's own market research that demonstrated this kind of size was what players preferred, not least for a mouse designed more for claw grippers than palm or fingertip users. Saying that, I had no issues using this high-power rodent with my usual palm grip, and the little orange piece on the rear of the chassis acts as a useful grip that does more of the heavy lifting than you might initially expect.

The AM Infinity.97 is available in three colors: black, white, and pink. I asked for my sample in the vivid pink, but ended up with a white one – no harm done, though, as it's a nice white that's almost got a creamy, off-white hue in some lighting environments.

(Image credit: Future)

At 47g with the battery in, it's one of the lightest mice I've used this year, and pulling out the battery for wired use drops that to a genuinely absurd 39g. That's a fair bit lighter than both Logitech and Razer's choices, although not quite as light as the Corsair Sabre V2 Pro, which weighs 36g with its internal battery.

That lightness doesn't feel flimsy, either. The AM Infinity.97's chassis is magnesium-aluminium alloy, and it's properly sturdy under the fingers, with gentle contouring to to sit well in the hand and a cool metallic touch that's oddly pleasant during longer sessions.

The button layout here is sensible, with two main clickers and a scroll wheel on top, side buttons within easy reach on the left, and a Bluetooth/2.4GHz toggle tucked underneath. What you don't get is a dedicated DPI button – an odd omission at this price, and the first real crack in an otherwise polished package. The main clicks use custom TTC Orange Dot Optical V2 switches, and I've become a big fan of these in my two weeks with this mouse. They're snappy and positive under finger, and because they're optical rather than mechanical, they're also noticeably quicker to register than more traditional gaming mice.

(Image credit: Future)

Okay, there isn't the rapid trigger or haptic feedback you'll get from the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike, but the short, sharp travel with ample tactility still feels pleasantly brisk and solid under finger.

If there's one area where things get less impressive for this AngryMiao mouse, it's th software. Being a web-based UI means things should be lightweight, although it's paired with a a downloadable executable that has an annoying habit of nibbling away at system resources you'd rather it left alone when running in the background.

(Image credit: Future)

When you do open it, it's easy enough to navigate, but there isn't much to it — DPI and polling rate, remapping, macros, profiles, lift-off distance and acceleration is about where the feature list ends. The bigger brand rivals offer much more complete software customisation.

• Design score: 4.5 / 5

AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 review: Performance

• Flagship 30,000 DPI sensor
• 8000Hz wireless polling
• Innovative swappable batteries

AngryMiao has fitted the AM Infinity.97 with a 30,000 DPI PixArt PAW3950 sensor, one I've put through its paces in plenty of other mice as a top-end flagship sensor, and it's every bit as sharp and responsive here either for general navigation or for getting stuck into Counter Strike 2 – my usual test for peripherals.

You won't get away for using the full 30,000 DPI all the time, as it turns this rodent into a jittery nightmare, hence why it can be moved down to a number of preset levels between 100 and 30,000 DPI in the mouse's software. Somewhere between 1600 DPI and 3200 DPI is where I ended up, preferring the former for more precise aiming in CS2, and the latter for navigating Windows and productivity workloads.

Alongside the beefy sensor, the AM Infinity.97 benefits from true 8000Hz polling across both wired and 2.4GHz connectivity, plus you get Bluetooth as an added bonus. In my testing, both wireless connectivity methods felt rock solid throughout testing, whether I was on Bluetooth with a MacBook Pro or the 2.4GHz receiver box on my Windows gaming PC.

(Image credit: Future)

As much as 8000Hz wireless polling isn't the standout feature it was a couple of years ago, and its efficacy for normal folks is debatable, it's still very nice to see for a competitive oriented rodent such as this AngryMiao choice. It's something competitive players will feel more than us normal folks, but is still handy for peace of mind your mouse is performing at its best.

The fact is that the high DPI sensor, fast wireless polling, superlight chassis and snappy optical switches combine to make the AM Infinity.97 one of the best gaming mice I've tested this year, and I've given both the G Pro X2 Superstrike and Viper V4 Pro a run for their money, too. I'd wager it's closer in philosophy to Razer, nailing the fundamentals rather than throwing haptics and rapid trigger into a light chassis the way Logitech does — but as a first impression, it's a knockout.

I found its low mass makes wrist flicks and sweeping CS2 movements almost effortless, while those optical switches give you brisk, satisfying clicks and its sensor felt dead accurate to boot.This is a mouse that nails the basics and turns that into something genuinely excellent.

The AM Infinity.97 also has one further trick up its sleeve with a feature I've only seen on a couple of other gaming mice – the Glorious Model O3 and D3 Wireless – with swappable batteries. In this instance, the batteries clip on magnetically to the underside of the mouse, and can be swapped out for a spare kept inside the 2.4GHz wireless receiver box that connects to your PC with the bundled USB-C to USB-A cable.

(Image credit: Future)

The mouse also works wired, so a dead battery is never really a crisis. What you don't get is an internal backup cell, meaning if both external batteries die, you're out of luck until you plug in – Glorious has a 'Guardian battery' inside the mouse chassis itself, which is the one area where I think they win.

This swappable battery system leads AngryMiao to claim 'infinite' battery life in its marketing bumf, although a little further down the product page, it's more reasonable. With 1,000Hz polling, you'll see up to 165 hours, while at the full 8,000Hz, this drops to up to 30 hours. For reference, I was getting between 25 or so hours on a charge on one battery with 8,000Hz enabled, demonstrating just how thirsty a higher polling rate continues to be.

• Performance score: 4.5 / 5

Should I buy the AngryMiao AM Infinity.97?AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 scorecard

Attribute

Notes

Score

Design

The AM Infinity.97 features adistinctive sci-fi-inspired magnesium alloy chassis that's remarkably light without sacrificing rigidity, plus sensible button placement and snappy optical switches. Basic software and the lack of a dedicated DPI button are the only real drawbacks in my book.

4.5/5

Performance

We've got flagship-grade sensor performance, true 8,000Hz wireless polling and excellent optical switches that combine to deliver one of the fastest, most responsive ultralight gaming mice I've tested, with clever swappable batteries adding genuine practicality. Just watch out for the drop-off if using 8,000Hz polling all the time.

4.5/5

Value

It's the most expensive of the other two rivals I've put the AM Infinity.97 against, but you can get it more affordably on sales, and it's still very competitive given the feature set.

4/5

Average Rating

The AM Infinity.97 is a striking mouse from a brand better known for its keyboards, and it backs up the looks with genuine substance. It's one of the most responsive, comfortable ultralight mice I've used all year, with a genuinely clever swappable battery system to boot. Basic software and a steeper price than its rivals stop it from being such an easy recommendation, but as a statement piece that also performs, it's a very compelling option.

4.5/5

Buy it if…

You want flagship-level performance:
The AM Infinity.97 delivers some of the most responsive, accurate performance of any mouse I've tested this year, backed by a genuinely clever swappable battery system.View Deal

You want a mouse that looks like nothing else:
Its perforated alloy chassis and sci-fi styling make it stand out instantly against a sea of similarly shaped ultralight rivals.View Deal

You want virtually infinite battery life:
AngryMiao's magnetically swappable batteries is a genuine innovation in this highly competitive sector, and can unlock virtually endless battery life if you play your cards right.View Deal

Don’t buy it if…

You want something more affordable:
The big thing with this AngryMiao mouse is a higher price tag against its rivals, although they trade on innovative features and overall mass.View Deal

You want a subtler-looking mouse:
The heavily perforated chassis is a statement piece rather than something built to blend in, and if you'd prefer an understated rodent, then key rivals will serve you better.View Deal

You want more polished software:
The AM Infinity.97's web-based companion app is basic, prone to running in the background, and offers far less depth than rivals when it comes to customisation.View Deal

Also consider

Razer Viper V4 Pro:

If you want the basics nailed brilliantly without the boutique price tag, the Viper V4 Pro is $30 cheaper and matches the AM Infinity.97 for pure responsiveness while also being especially light. It skips the swappable battery gimmick, but has much stronger software and remains an excellent pick for competitive play.

Read our full Razer Viper V4 Pro review.View Deal

Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike:

The G Pro X2 Superstrike goes further than either AngryMiao or Razer on features with its clever HITS system that enables haptic feedback and rapid trigger and packs it into a familiar chassis to anyone who's used a G Pro X Superlight 2, albeit it is heavier than either Razer or AngryMiao's option. That being said, it undercuts the AM Infinity.97 on price.

Read our full Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike review.View Deal

How I tested the AngryMiao AM Infinity.97

(Image credit: Future)

• Tested over two weeks of use
• Used across both Windows and macOS
• Extensive gaming mouse review experience

I used the AM Infinity.97 for a couple of weeks across both a Windows gaming PC and a MacBook Pro, testing it over Bluetooth, the bundled 2.4GHz receiver, and wired via USB-C.

Counter-Strike 2 formed the backbone of my performance testing, given how heavily it leans on quick, accurate mouse movement, alongside general everyday use for browsing and productivity to assess comfort and grip over longer sessions. I also used the web-based software extensively to test each of its functions.

I've been a tech journalist for the best part of a decade, and have reviewed plenty of gaming and productivity mice in that time from brands big and small from up and down the price ladder.

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

• OpenAI Presence is a new tool to monitor and update AI agent behavior
• It works across voice and chat agents from launch, including OpenAI's phone support
• Presence is led by forward-deployed engineers who already know an organization inside-out

OpenAI has launched a new, dedicated platform for building, deploying and iterating AI agents for business workflows, which it's calling OpenAI Presence.

From launch, the tool focuses on voice and chat agents that can answer questions, resolve problems, access company systems, perform approved actions and liaise with humans.

The addition comes in response to what the company sees as the challenge of keeping agents reliable after deployment.

Presence keeps your agents current and relevant

For example, OpenAI explained how agent behavior may need to change as company policies, products, systems and customers evolve.

With agents only granted access to the knowledge and systems needed for a particular task, the ChatGPT maker wants to keep decisions like what the agent is authorized to do, which actions require human approval, which policies must be followed and when the interaction must be escalated to company admins.

"Every deployment generated insights that continuously inform OpenAI research and product development, creating compounding benefits for customers," the company noted, adding that Presence comes from years of first-hand experience dealing with customers.

Presence also includes a Codex-powered improvement process designed to help agents continue evolving once they've been launched, with the agentic coding assistant capable of investigating behavior and proposing changes.

OpenAI also used its announcement to plug its forward-deployed engineer (FDE) program, which inserts OpenAI experts within customer organizations to build AI tools and processes tailored to their exact needs.

The new tool already powers the company's English phone support service (1-888-GPT-0090), handling open-ended requests, accessing account information and taking actions across billing and refunds.

Presence deployments are also FDE-led, and certain eligible enterprise customers can get access to the scheme through a limited general availability program.