TechRadar Reviews

Protecting your personal information online is as challenging as ever. With many platforms requiring signups to access information, you’re inadvertently going to disclose personal information online, and this information is often made public. Whatever is made public on the internet stays there for a long time, and you’re likely not comfortable with this. What’s a possible solution? A data removal service like EasyOptOuts.

Data removal platforms scan people-finder/data broker sites for your data, then send automated deletion requests on your behalf. When processed, your information gets deleted from the people-finder sites, enhancing online privacy. Data removal platforms also send manual removal requests, but EasyOptOuts doesn’t– it sends only automated requests.

I extensively tested and reviewed EasyOptOuts to help you decide if it’s worth adopting as your personal data removal service. Read on to learn about its core features, pricing, setup, customer support, and other essential factors.

EasyOptOuts: Plans and pricing

EasyOptOuts has a simple pricing structure - you can check out the full details by clicking here. It costs $19.99 per year for personal use. There’s no monthly plan or tiered plans like most data removal platforms. It’s just one package that unlocks access to all features.

(Image credit: EasyOptOuts )

Businesses (with 10+ employees) can get a bulk subscription, but the price still amounts to $19.99 per year per user. The exception is for registered nonprofits, which get a 25% discount from EasyOptOuts.

At $19.99 per year, or barely $1.80 per month, EasyOptOuts is much more affordable than its rivals. But, does this affordability make it a better option? Let’s explore more to find out.

EasyOptOuts: Setup

I found EasyOptOuts’ setup process very straightforward, or shall I say, easy. Entering the homepage and hitting the Sign Up button kickstarts the process. When signing up, you’ll provide your email address and other personal information like date of birth, home address, and phone numbers.

You’re probably wondering, “I’m trying to guard my personal information online and yet need to provide all this information again to a data removal platform?” The answer is that whatever information you provide is what the data removal platform scans people-broker sites for.

EasyOptOuts scans 200+ broker sites, which isn’t that many compared to competitors. However, EasyOptOuts doesn’t aim to be a mass-market data removal service. Rather, it focuses on U.S.-centric people-finder sites. Non-U.S. residents are better off with broader-focused data removal platforms.

After inputting your personal information, EasyOptOuts runs a deep scan on its network of 200+ people-finder sites. The complete scan can take a long time, based on the volume of data found across the network. It could be a day, 2 days, 3 days, or even a week, so don’t fret if you don’t get the results within a short period.

Once the scan completes, users receive an email alert and can begin monitoring the progress of the removal requests. I don’t like that EasyOptOuts sends only automated requests. Sometimes, automated requests aren’t enough to delete your information from people-finder sites, so manually drafted requests are needed to complete the process.

However, I understand that automated-only requests are how EasyOptOuts can keep its price as low as $19.99 per year. If it had to employ experts to manually draft deletion requests, the price would be much higher.

EasyOptOuts doesn’t just run the initial scan. It rescans its people-finder site network every four months, then sends another set of deletion requests if your personal information is discovered again. This rescan is important because some people-finder sites have a habit of reuploading information they were asked to delete. It ensures that your information stays off public view as long as your EasyOptOuts subscription is valid.

Compared to most data removal platforms I’ve tested, setting up EasyOptOuts felt noticeably easier. Everything ran smoothly, from providing my personal information to the initial scan and monitoring the status of deletion requests from my dashboard.

EasyOptOuts: Ease of use

Above, I’ve hinted at EasyOptOuts’ simple setup process and generally intuitive user experience. Like most data removal platforms, EasyOptOuts doesn’t have a native smartphone app, so you’ll access it from your browser.

I think a PC is the best option over a mobile browser, given the volume of information you’ll have to input to get scanned. A mobile browser would be inconvenient for the initial setup, but suitable for monitoring the status of deletion requests.

(Image credit: EasyOptOuts )EasyOptOuts: Security and privacy

EasyOptOuts is a good addition to your online security toolkit, particularly for U.S. residents. It helps keep your information off those infamous people-finder sites like BeenVerified and PeopleLooker.

These sites have built a business model of aggregating personal information from public sources and then offering access for a fee. Tools like EasyOptOuts send deletion requests to scrub your data off people-finder sites.

However, on EasyOptOuts, you won’t find complementary security features like a VPN or password manager. It’s all about one thing – data removal – and does its job effectively. The drawback is the limited, U.S.-centric broker site coverage.

EasyOptOuts: Support

EasyOptOuts provides decent support, although I think it could be better. There’s an official support page filled with detailed answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). For new users, this FAQs section helps answer important questions, so that you’ll not have to contact support directly for routine issues.

If you do need to contact the support team, there’s a dedicated email address for that. The support team is U.S.-based, so responses revolve around local working hours. I don’t like that there’s no telephone or live chat support, but given the low price charged by EasyOptOuts, it’s understandably difficult to maintain live support teams for users.

EasyOptOuts: Competition

EasyOptOuts has many competitors. Incogni and DeleteMe are the two notable names I’d like to highlight.

I chose Incogni because it feels like a more robust version of EasyOptOuts. It covers 420+ data broker sites, including non-U.S. ones, and offers both automated and manual deletion requests. This compares to EasyOptOuts, which covers 200+ sites and only supports automated requests. However, EasyOptOuts is much more budget-friendly, costing just $19.99 per year, whereas Incogni’s pricing starts from $7.99 per month.

DeleteMe provides much higher coverage, with 850+ sites, and supports manual deletion requests. I’ve tested it and can confidently say that you’ll get more data scrubbed with DeleteMe than EasyOptOuts. DeleteMe users also get complementary features like dark web monitoring and email masking.

However, DeleteMe is priced like a premium service. Its plans average $129 per year, multiples of EasyOptOuts’ $19.99 per year.

EasyOptOuts: Final verdict

If you’re a U.S. resident and need a budget-friendly tool for scrubbing your personal data off people-finder sites, EasyOptOuts is a good bet. For just $19.99 per year, much more affordable than competitors, you’ll get a reliable tool to scan people-finder sites and send deletion requests where your data is discovered.

Setting up your account, running the initial scan, and monitoring further scans are easy to handle, thanks to EasyOptOuts’ intuitive interface.

However, you should be aware of EasyOptOuts’ drawbacks, such as the limited people-finder site coverage, lack of manual deletion requests, and email-only support. Overall, it’s a reliable data removal platform.

The xTool X1 might initially look like another large, enclosed laser engraver, but it wasn't long into my months-long test of the X1, to realise it's something far more ambitious.

Essentially, xTool has brought years of laser engraving development together into a single, expandable manufacturing platform, making the X1 one of the most versatile machines I’ve ever reviewed. This is not the first machine that I’ve looked at recently to do the modular laser approach, with the superb Creality Falcon T1 doing something similar on a far smaller scale.

At the X1’s heart is a 55W CO₂ laser, similar to that seen in the excellent Bambu Lab R1 although now the larger X1 has arrived at the same price and with far more potential it will be interesting to see how the R1 fares.

Once again, the 55W CO₂ laser proves to be a powerful option for cutting and engraving wood, acrylic, and a wide variety of other materials. On its own, this one laser option would already make the X1 a superb option for anyone looking for a professional laser cutter.

But then again, xTool already has the xTool P2. To differentiate this as something new, xTool has thrown all their technologies at the design and added an optional 20W diode galvo module, which sits alongside the CO₂ head inside the machine, and this forms the foundation of what this machine then develops into.

One of the key features to the dual head system is that rather than relying on a conventional moving-head laser for every cut, engrave, and score, the X1 can use the galvo system for intricate, high-speed engraving before switching to the CO₂ laser for cutting. What I like is that both are controlled through xTool Studio, and switching between the installed lasers just takes a selection option in the software.

Throughout testing, this combination of laser options with backpack modules also highlighted the potential and the direction these laser machines are moving. Multiple laser options mean projects like wooden placemats and detailed pencil boxes, which would ordinarily take considerable time to engrave and cut, can be completed much faster, with the galvo speeding through the detail while the CO₂ handles the cutting. In one test, a placemat project that took the xTool S1 around two hours was completed on the X1 in approximately half an hour.

One of the X1's big features is its support for additional laser-source modules mounted on the rear of the machine. For this review, I used the 5W UV and 60W MOPA modules, which enabled me to engrave glass and emboss brass coins. I also used the MOPA for its accuracy to create precision apertures in thin metal for pinhole cameras.

Having previously used dedicated MOPA machines such as the xTool F2 Ultra, I was interested to see how a machine this size could perform similar metal engraving. The results were impressive, but as I found at every step of this review, there were a series of considerations due to the size, weight and complexity of the machine.

That first consideration is size. The X1 arrived in a substantial crate, and as it was dropped off in the driveway, I had to call on assistance from a neighbour to lift and manoeuvre it into position. Although the main machine can sit on a conventional workshop bench, the additional modules, extraction systems and accessories quickly highlighted that the space I had allocated was about half of what it should have been.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

The second point to make is the modular system. While the additional laser sources proved excellent, swapping them isn't quick, unlike some of the small multi-laser modular systems I have looked at recently.

With the X1 positioned against a wall, accessing the rear of the machine, changing the hardware, and recalibrating could take about an hour. Some of this was down to the restricted space in my workshop, but the swap of modules required the recalibration of the lasers, it’s worth considering if you intend to switch between different laser technologies regularly.

Price is another consideration although I'm actually surprised how cheap it is on balance. The base machine is listed at $3,699 / £2554, but adding the diode laser, specialist modules and accessories can take the complete system well beyond $10,000, depending on configuration.

Even so, there’s no getting away from how capable this machine is, and if you were looking for the equivalent in separate machines, say the P2 and F2 Ultra, you’d be looking at much the same costs. For general cutting, detailed engraving and small-batch production, the X1 is one of the most refined laser engravers I’ve used.

If you have an established workshop or small business handling a wide range of materials, the X1 offers huge potential. Just make sure you have the space, budget and patience to make the most of it.

xTool X1: Price & availability

The xTool X1 starts at $3,699 / £2,553 and includes the 55W CO₂ laser. The base price is in line with other machines that I have looked at recently. It's worth knowing that the costs rise quickly with optional modules.

The 20W diode galvo at $899 / approx. £674 is an optional, but essential upgrade, as it first enables faster engraving but is also needed to support the installation of the additional UV, fibre and MOPA lasers.

A fully equipped system comes in at just under $10,000 if you buy the components separately as upgrades, however, the bundle offer prices bring the cost right down. The X1’s integrated workflow, versatility and all-in-one design do keep things neat. You can find out more at xTool.

X1 Single CO2 (55W CO2): $3,399 / £2,554

X1 CO2 + Diode Galvo (55W CO2 + 20W Diode Galvo Module): $3,999 / £3,005

X1 CO2 + Diode Galvo + Fiber (Includes 30W Fiber Laser Source): $5,799 / £4,358

X1 CO2 + Diode Galvo + UV (Includes 5W UV Laser Source): $6,499 / £4,884

X1 CO2 + Diode Galvo + MOPA (Includes 60W MOPA Laser Source): $6,679 / £5,019

xTool X1: DesignSpecs

Machine type: Modular laser cutting and engraving platform
Primary laser: 55W CO₂, 10,600nm
Optional lasers: 20W diode galvo, 5W UV, 30W fibre, 60W MOPA
Laser technologies: Hybrid Motion and Laser Swap
Working area: 615 × 320 mm x 150 maximum
Dimensions:
Weight:
Camera and focusing: Dual cameras with image stitching, automatic focusing and height-adjustable bed
Connectivity: USB and Wi-Fi
Software: xTool Studio

There’s nothing particularly small or understated about the xTool X1. In fact, the first indication of what I was dealing with came when the machine arrived in a substantial wooden crate. I can usually handle these large machines with the help of a sack trolley and boxes.

However, this time I called on the help of a neighbor. It’s not quite the size of the P3, but you will still need two people to lift the X1 free of its packaging and to get it into position in the workshop. By the time we stripped away the protective materials and set it onto the work surface, it was obvious this wasn’t a typical desktop laser engraver.

The machine itself follows the same design direction as xTool’s recent P2S and P3 models, with a fully enclosed chassis and a level of refinement that feels far removed from the open-frame laser engravers that dominated the enthusiast market only a few years ago. When it comes to the size, it measures 1000×580×420 mm.

Having tested numerous xTool machines, I’ve consistently been impressed by the company’s build quality. While xTool and GlowForge used to be the two major players in this part of the market, rivals such as Bambu Lab, LaserPecker, and WeCreat have recently upped the game as well.

Everything from the large hinged lid to the internal processing bed feels solid and is exactly as I’d want in the workshop. The lid opens easily and is supported by pneumatic arms; on some machines of this size that I’ve looked at in the past, this can be a weak point, but here it all feels good and solid.

Compared with other machines of this type and size, the height of the machine is considerably taller; this is due to the adjustable bed inside that rises and lowers to position materials correctly beneath the laser. This is a far more sophisticated setup than the fixed-height beds on many smaller machines that require risers for larger objects. On the front of the machine, there are a couple of buttons that enable you to raise and lower the bed manually if needed.

Testing showed the bed adjustment was essentially fully automated, with the software handling most positioning. The work area is big, with a maximum of 615 × 320 mm, and offers plenty of room to lay out multiple parts, which is especially useful for small batches of products such as placemats.

What I quickly realised is that depending on the laser and type of work you’re doing, those work area dimensions change. For instance, with the CO2 laser the max height of anything placed into the machine is 150mm; however, with the other lasers that reduces to 140mm. Essentially, as you lay out your designs and select the lasers, the on-screen layout changes so visually that from the outset you know exactly where you are.

Inside, the materials are supported on the supplied slats, though as with other manufacturers, I would have liked a few more. I also had the optional honeycomb panel, which, as ever, became my preferred choice for almost everything I processed.

A honeycomb just provides a decent surface for supporting materials and makes it easier to remove completed work, and while small pieces of debris from the cuts will still fall through to the base, there’s less chance of scorching of cut pieces falling and accidentally getting re-lasered.

Unfortunately, one surprise was that there isn’t a simple removable waste tray at the base, so cleaning out smaller pieces requires a little more effort. I have a handheld Dyson for this exact job, and with the depth and space, it’s easy enough to get that into cleanup quickly after a few cuts.

In this review, alongside the 55W CO2, I have also installed the 20W diode galvo module. This sits alongside the CO₂ laser inside the main enclosure and takes a couple of minutes to fit; once installed, it can stay as a permanent part of the machine. After installation, the rest of the setup is completed in xTool Studio.

The software walks you through the calibration process, although some manual adjustment is needed to ensure that the laser paths are correctly aligned. I’ve encountered this with previous xTool machines, including the P2 and P3, and while it can take a little time to understand, the process is reasonably straightforward once you’ve done it a few times.

My first test didn’t produce the result I expected because the alignment wasn’t quite right, mainly due to me rushing part of the process. After repeating the calibration more carefully, the results vastly improved, and once everything was configured, the two installed laser systems are remarkably easy to use.

To switch between the two in the xTool Studio software, you simply assign the right laser to the right operation, and the machine handles the transition. There’s no need to remove one laser head and install another manually as you would have had to do with multi-laser machines in the past.

For everyday cutting and engraving, this combination of lasers works incredibly well and vastly speeds up the process of engraving and cutting, which is the bulk of what I personally do with these machines.

However, these two lasers are just the start of the story, and things do become a little more complicated when I started to install and use the rear-mounted laser-source modules.

xTool supplied the 5W UV and 60W MOPA modules; these are relatively compact, just larger than a shoebox and are solidly built. Before use, they need to be installed into the back of the X1, which takes time, especially when I needed two people to move the machine into the initial position. Essentially, I should have left a little more space to access the rear.

Installation of the modules involves removing covers, connecting power and communication cables, securing the module and checking the optical path. Depending on the configuration, you’ll also need to install the appropriate optics before calibrating the system.

I installed the combined UV/Fiber/MOPA field lens, which supports the different laser sources, and found that straightforward, it essentially just screwed in. The more involved part was mounting the modules and completing the optical alignment.

Initially, I was probably a little too enthusiastic with the manual adjustments, but thankfully xTool provide a small alignment target and tape which makes the entire process relatively easy. Once I realised that small adjustments were all that was needed, the process became much easier.

The software guides you through calibration using the supplied cards, and once the source has been registered, the machine recognises it automatically. My main issue here was the physical access to the back of the machine due to space.

My workshop already has several 3D printers, laser engravers, and other equipment, so I’d originally positioned the X1 against a wall on a fixed workbench. Every time I wanted to change the rear-mounted module, I needed to move other equipment, pull out the workbench and get behind the machine. Given the X1’s size and weight, I didn’t want to attempt this alone.

As a result, what might eventually become a 15 or 20-minute module change took me closer to an hour, including moving the machine, changing the source and checking calibration, the calibration is the part that takes the time. This issue would explain why xTool also provided the optional mobile work stand, which is where this machine will be moved to once I have had a bit of a reorganisation of the space.

Being able to wheel the machine away from the wall would make installation, maintenance and module changes substantially easier. I’d also recommend planning considerably more space than the official machine footprint suggests. In my workshop, allowing roughly half a machine depth more provided the clearance needed to work comfortably behind it, mainly due to the length of the tool you need to use to screw in the bolts through each of the modules.

As I got into using the machine, a few of the safety design features are also worth noting. First, as ever, the machine came with the Air extraction unit and, in addition, the fire safety 2 unit, which was attached, but again space was limited, so it sat on a lower shelf behind the machine.

The X1 is serious workshop equipment, though far nicer-looking than the machines from a few years ago. Its size and weight are balanced by its features, and after a month of use, I highly recommend the optional workbench, which, while not essential, it will ensure you can make full use of this machine's potential.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)xTool X1: Features

The xTool X1 is unusual because many of its headline features aren’t immediately obvious. At its core, it’s a powerful 55w CO₂ laser cutter, but its modular design means that it has far more potential, and that potential can only be fully unlocked with the investment in the other modules and accessories, of which there are quite a few.

In total, the X1 supports five laser technologies, with the 55w CO2 being the only one that is provided wth the base machine. The 55W CO₂ laser can be used for cutting and engraving materials such as wood, acrylic, leather, cardboard and fabric.

Alongside the CO₂ laser, there’s the 20W diode galvo laser, which adds high-speed engraving and surface marking, particularly on wood and many other compatible materials. This module sits inside the machine alongside the CO₂ and is quick to fit; it’s also essential if you want to use any of the other three backpack laser modules.

These other models include the 5W UV laser, which can be used for engraving on glass, crystal and other delicate materials. Then there’s the 30W fibre and 60W MOPA options, which enable you to mark and engrave into metal. The MOPA adds the ability to use colour effects and deep engraving and is similar to the fibre option, but is more expensive. In this review, I’ve been supplied with four of the five available laser technologies: CO₂, diode, UV, and MOPA.

As I started the testing, the instant highlight of the features was the Hybrid Motion, as this is the one feature alongside the dual mount lasers that will make a noticeable difference to everyday project work.

Essentially, what this looks like with the lasers is that alongside the traditional gantry-based laser toolheads that move physically through the X and Y across the material, you also have the Galvo, which uses rapidly moving mirrors to direct the beam across the surface.

This means that for larger designs, Hybrid Motion moves the galvo system between regions, enabling detailed engraving over a much wider area than a conventional fixed galvo arrangement, as I tested in the F2 Ultra. When combined, you not only cover a far larger area, but the Glavo focuses on detailed engraving while the CO₂ does the cutting.

The dual tool head laser system inside is just the start of the multi-laser set, and a Laser Swap system is used to enable different styles of laser to be fitted for different projects and materials. These Laser Swap modules fit to the back with the UV, Fibre and MOPA options.

The idea here is that instead of buying additional machines, you just buy the module and fit it, cutting down on the space needed and ideally cost. Although looking at the cost of the modules, they’re almost as much as the dedicated machines.

The process of swapping the modules isn’t tool-free, and it requires access to the rear of the machine, alongside physical hardware changes and calibration checks. I personally think that this is a great feature.

However, I would have liked to see a faster change system. In this review, for instance, I swapped the modules multiple times, and it was a hassle. But then most people will inevitably settle on their laser selection rather than approaching the machine in the way that I have in this review.

Some of the other features that really impressed during use were the close-up cameras that just help position artwork against materials, with the image appearing in the XTool software. Compared with the laser outline that we used for the full image, this is such an improvement; however, you can still click the framing preview if you prefer that way of working.

The camera system is really quite advanced, and you have the option through the xTool Studio software to change from capturing one wide-angle image, to capturing multiple sections of the workspace which are then stitched together, which helps with the accuracy of the positioning.

Although the software documentation describes automatic image capture when closing the lid, I generally triggered the capture manually during testing. Image quality from the cameras was excellent overall, although some reflective materials and darker areas could still make positioning slightly more difficult; a boost in the workshop's lighting also helped with these previews.

Another of the big features that really stood out through the use of the machine was the automated bed adjustment. Rather than requiring constant manual focusing, the machine measures the material and adjusts the bed height as needed.

Through the test, I added a range of material thicknesses and found the process just worked; compared with the often convoluted focusing process of some other machines and the physical effort of adding a riser base, this system is just simple.

Even with slightly irregular or curved materials, the positioning system generally handled setup well, and I didn’t need to override the measurements manually.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

Alongside the core accessories and in line with the xTools other machines, the X1 supports a wide range of accessories, including an automatic conveyor feeder, RA3 rotary attachment, honeycomb panel, mobile work stand, filtration, and fire safety equipment.

Throughout testing, I used xTool’s extraction and filtration setup, which is a little on the noisy side but does the job. For jobs that produce more smoke, particularly when cutting wood, I increased the extraction setting to keep the working chamber clear.

The optional Fire Safety Set Pro adds another level of protection. Installation was more involved than I’d expected, requiring the CO₂ cylinder, tubing and communication connections to be fitted before enabling the system in the software. Once configured, however, it didn’t actually require me to do anything else other than find somewhere for it to sit.

As a final point on the features, and an essential for any professional workshop, is that the machine also has an emergency stop button for quickly shutting down if needed.

xTool X1: Performance

After a month testing the xTool X1, what I realised was, that the way that I work with laser engravers normally would change with this dual laser setup. The mix of laser technologies in one machine isn’t just convenient; it means that you can select the laser technology that is best suited for the job, and often two lasers will enable a better and faster result. Most notably for me, that was the combination of the 55W CO₂ and 20W diode galvo lasers.

For most of my work, producing models, wooden components, boxes, camera accessories, and other workshop projects, these two laser systems provide an ideal combination.

The X1’s 55W CO₂ laser is excellent for all-round cutting, while the 20 diode galvo is better for detail.

To start the test, I ran through the supplied test projects before moving on to my own designs, including wooden boxes, placemats and model-making components.

Most of my work involved 3mm basswood plywood, although I also tested thicker materials up to 10mm. Across these tests, the CO₂ laser produced exceptionally clean cuts, with minimal scorching and very little need for additional finishing. The air-assist system kept the cutting path clear, while the extraction system removed smoke.

One of the most useful tests involved creating a series of 3mm plywood boxes. The accuracy was excellent, with the individual pieces fitting together cleanly without sanding or manual adjustment to the size. I could simply assemble and glue the components.

This accuracy and repeatability is something that is so important when producing models or small-batch products, where even small dimensional errors create extra work; even sanding takes time when it comes to getting the right fit. As this is a pre-production model, the usually excellent xTool Studio seemed to take most laser options down to 1, so initial models showed some scorching, however

I also tested acrylic sheets up to 10mm thick, including cutting a 3D-scanning calibration cube in half. Again, the results were impressive, with clean cuts and accurate positioning.

The machine also handled lighter materials such as paper, card, fabric, and leather without difficulty, though these need careful securing to prevent movement from airflow of the air assist and extractor.

For general cutting work, along the lines of what I use laser cutters for, the X1 matched the abilities that I have seen from other recent releases; the one point that made this slightly more exciting is that added height, which gives out-of-the-box flexibility without the need for a riser base.

The CO₂ laser provides the X1’s cutting power; the addition of the 20W diode galvo by its side for detailed engraving and speed is definitely an interesting development in the technology.

Essentially, rather than watching a conventional laser head mechanically move across every section of an image, the galvo rapidly sweeps the beam over the surface, completing relatively intricate artwork in a fraction of the time.

I tested it on wood, plywood, bamboo, acrylic, and coated metal samples, essentially everything in the samples box. Fine lettering was sharp and well-defined, intricate designs retained plenty of detail, and scorching was generally minimal, unless the piece that I was working on fell through the slats.

Initially, I worried the edges of the engraving might lose definition, or designs wouldn't join up perfectly as the galvo system moved from one area to another, however the meeting of the design and the quality remained consistent.

This, however, wasn’t quite the case at the outset, and initial testing showed a few issues, but after software updates and far more accurate calibration on my part, the joins between engraving regions became almost seamless.

Photographic engraving onto wood was also impressive, although as with most laser engravers, image selection makes the biggest difference to the success.

High-contrast photographs generally produced better results than flat, low-contrast images, and I used xTool Studio’s editing tools to adjust backgrounds and improve the final output.

Personally, I still prefer the look of detailed illustrations, lettering and line-based graphics when engraved into wood rather than photo imagery.

Taking a look at one of the main test projects highlights the workflow and speed. Normally, when creating a wooden box or placemat with decorative engraving, I’ll use a single laser head that handles both engraving and cutting.

The problem is that detailed engraving can take considerably longer than cutting the outline. With the X1, I was able to assign the intricate engraving to the 20W galvo and the cutting operations to the 55W CO₂ laser.

Once configured, the software handled the transition between the installed lasers without requiring me to reposition the material or swap heads; this made a dramatic difference to processing time.

For example, I created a series of wooden placemats with detailed artwork. A comparable project on the xTool S1 took around two hours, while the X1 completed it in half an hour.

That’s an enormous improvement in speed, particularly for small businesses producing multiple products. The same was true when creating detailed pencil boxes.

Projects that would normally take 20 to 30 minutes could be completed in minutes, with the galvo handling the engraving before the CO₂ laser cut the components.

Having both lasers permanently installed makes everyday projects straightforward, and once you’ve experienced the speed of the combined workflow, returning to a conventional single-head engraver feels a little archaic.

Hybrid Motion also changes what’s practical for larger designs. In the past, I’ve avoided elaborate engraving projects at scale because the processing time was too long and I’m hopeless at lining up materials when sheets need to be matched.

With the X1, I was able to start thinking about this type of project, as the speed of the galvo would vastly reduce the time involved, especially when used alongside the conveyor accessory.

After carrying out the majority of the review using the 55W CO₂ and 20W diode galvo lasers, I then moved on to the 5w UV and 60W MOPA.

The 5W UV module opens up a very different range of possibilities, particularly for glass, crystal and delicate materials. I ran a few tests on the glass samples, along with experiments on plastic components produced on a 3D printer.

The ability to add fine surface texture to printed plastic objects is interesting, as it creates new opportunities for finishing functional parts and decorative products. I’ll admit I’m still on the experimental side of this, but will update in the near future.

The glass side of the engraving process is also something that I have struggled with in the past, and again, I wasn’t entirely successful in achieving the results I wanted.

Based on the partial results, I suspect this was more about my initial setup and approach than a fundamental limitation of the machine. Still, it’s an area that needs further investigation.

The UV module adds even more felxibility, although I’ll explore its more advanced functions in a separate addition to th ereview once I’ve reorganised my workshop to give the interchangeable modules better access.

Of the two rear-mounted laser modules, I found the 60W MOPA the most interesting. I’ve previously used MOPA machines, including the xTool F2 Ultra, so I’m familiar with their capabilities for metal engraving, embossing and colour marking.

What makes the X1 different is the ability to use similar technology within a much larger enclosed working area. I tested the MOPA on brass, stainless steel and aluminium, producing detailed markings and experimenting with relief engraving.

One of the most interesting applications involved creating apertures in thin brass sheet for pinhole cameras. I produced holes ranging from approximately 0.25mm to 0.5mm with exceptionally good results.

This is the sort of precision work I’ve previously done with dedicated MOPA systems, and it was great to see the X1 handle it so well, as it’s such a large machine I did wonder if it could handle the intricate work that I have used the F2 Ultra for.

I also experimented with engraving the aperture dimensions into the metal and cutting individual pieces from the sheet, although these more complicated processes still need further refinement.

Another highlight was engraving brass coins. While the F2 Ultra can do similar work, the X1’s larger processing area let me arrange several coins for engraving in one batch. Again, this is not a quick process; think days rather than hours.

Colour marking is another capability of the MOPA laser, though I’ve consistently found it requires considerable experimentation to get reliable results. The X1 was no exception.

I could create colour effects, but producing exactly the result I wanted across more complicated designs wasn’t always straightforward.

The take-home from the modules is that they expand the use of the machine, but those more specialist lasers require practice and experience to get the results that you would expect.

The other major part of the machine is the xTool Studio software. I’ve used the software across several generations of machines, and it's improved substantially over time and has really become the benchmark for all others to follow.

That said if you're new to the software then working out what type of cut and what laser is being used on what path can still be a little confusing, even with the colour coding. A text summery would be a nice quick reference before cutting.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

The latest workflow is much the same as I looked at with the superb xTool M2 recently, and once you’ve completed calibration and connected the machine, preparing a project is straightforward.

Import or create the design, select the material, assign the appropriate processing operation and laser source, then send the job to the machine; after that, you generally just press the start button and wait.

As ever, the xTool Studio software offers a huge range of material presets, and unusually the material presets for the CO2 and 20w diode were way off. Especially the power and air assist, which the software set to 1 for both, easy to rectify, but possibly something to do with the pre-release software as ususally the material presets from xTool are spot on.

Adding custom materials and modifying processing parameters is also relatively straightforward once you’re familiar with the interface.

USB and Wi-Fi connectivity were both simple to set up and reliable throughout testing. Despite using pre-release software, I didn’t experience any major crashes or application-caused job failures other than a little tweaking of presets, and it all seemed pretty final, really a reflection of what I have experienced before with the addition of being able to select the laser sources.

xTool X1: Final verdict

After a month of testing, the xTool X1 is one of the most versatile laser engravers I’ve ever used, but it isn’t without its faults, although those are mostly overcome by being organised and having plenty of space.

Essentially, the base machine is an impressive 55W CO₂ laser engraver and cutter, and once you invest in the 20W diode galvo laser, you have one of the most competent machines for any small to medium-sized business on the market. The point is that with these two lasers you have the base machine that you can then build on depending on what you need to do.

Through the test, I found that that simple combination was all I really needed, and the fact that I could then attach the UV and MOPA for more specialised work all added to the versatility. However, with the 55W CO₂ and 20W diode galvo lasers installed, the machine was able to sit on the workbench without issue; it’s large but containable.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

As soon as I installed the MOPA, I not only needed the additional space to mount the laser module, but it also added to the depth of the machine and for me, having the F2 for the more intricate work still made sense. While I could do the work on the X1, it didn’t necessarily mean that I would.

That aside, the pure build quality, size of the work area and depth, along with all the upgrade options, all make this one of the most substantial and complete laser engravers on the market. It is expensive, but it’s been designed in such a way that you can upgrade as and when you need.

Should you buy the xTool X1?

Value:

The base 55W CO₂ machine is well priced, specialist laser modules and accessories raise the total cost

5

Design:

Exceptional build quality for a machine of this size. Rear-mounted module changes could be easier.

4.5

Features

Support for five laser technologies, the new Hybrid Motion system offer one of the most feature packed lasers on the market

5

Performance

The combination of galvo engraving and CO₂ cutting give it an edge even before adding the other laser options

5

Total

The X1 is the most capable laser platforms I’ve reviewed, even considering its size and modular upgrade costs it's exceptionally well balanced.

5

Buy it if...

You need versatility

The X1 combines cutting, engraving and specialist material processing within one platform, making it ideal for workshops handling varied projects.

You produce products

Its powerful CO₂ laser and fast galvo engraving system can dramatically reduce production times for personalised products and small-batch manufacturing.View Deal

Don't buy it if...

You lack space

The substantial machine, rear-mounted laser modules and optional accessories require significantly more workshop room than the main unit’s dimensions suggest.

You need affordability

Although the base machine offers good value, specialist laser modules and accessories can quickly push up the total.View Deal

For more crafting tech, I've tested and reviewed all the best 3D printers and the best laser engravers.

Hisense XR10: One-minute review

The Hisense XR10 offers powerful projection that you can put all over the room and still get squared away. That’s thanks to extensive optical adjustments that include incredible zoom range and lens shift. Hisense definitely cranked up the elegance this year.

The Hisense XR10 is loaded up with blazing RGB lasers that give it stunning brightness and color, while an adjustable iris can help it clamp down black levels for dark room viewing with enhanced contrast. It’s all packed into a stylish box that’s much smaller and more portable than high-end theater projectors like the Sony Bravia Projector 7, and Hisense’s included carrying case will let you take it places in style.

(Image credit: Future)

All of this comes at a high price, though. The Hisense XR10 is $5,999 / £5,999 / AU$9,999 after falling from the original $6,999 price tag in the US. Though it has decent speakers for a projector and a serviceable operating system in VidaaOS, these don’t lend a ton of extra value. It also jumped the gun a bit and missed out on the VRR and 4K/120Hz support that a newer wave of projectors are offering. At its price, it’s not going to lead the charge for value, but you do get a lot for the money. It’s still probably worth waiting to see if the XGIMI Horizon 30 Ultra Max, JMGO Iris Ultra Max, and Hisense C3 Ultra Max leave the XR10 any room to breathe.

Hisense XR10 review: Price and release date

• Release date: mid 2026
• MSRP: $5,999 / £5,999 / AU$9,999

The Hisense XR10 made its debut at CES 2026 and started shipping in May. It came with an initial price of $6,999 / £5,999 / AU$9,999 but that US price has generally fallen to $5,999. In the time it’s been out, some deals have even brought it as low as $4,499, but it hasn’t been a sticky price drop and prices elsewhere seem to be much more static.

For the money, Hisense does include a special carrying case that’s far and away the highest quality one I’ve seen included with a projector like this. But even then it’s not adding thousands of dollars in value.

Hisense XR10 review: specs

Supported screen sizes

65-300 inches

Optical technology

3 Laser DLP

Brightness (specified)

6,000 Lumens

Audio

2x8-watt + 15-watt speakers

Ports

2x HDMI 2.1 (1x eARC), 1x HDMI 2.0, 2x USB-A, 1x optical, 1x 3.5mm audio

Smart TV

VidaaOS

Dimensions

11.5 x 10.7 x 8.4 inches

Weight

23.4 pounds

Hisense XR10 review: design and features

• Stylish, compact design and serious carrying case
• Highly adjustable optics
• VidaaOS is quick but may be limiting

Hisense has built something particularly gorgeous with the XR10. It simply looks like a work of serious engineering with its brown metal casing, stylish venting and machined accents, knurled lens cover, oversize lens cover, and dark color scheme. The front's sensor array also looks highly technical. The top is a little plain, but Hisense has included a volume dial, power button, ambient light sensor, and a little aesthetic nod to the RGB laser system inside.

The Hisense XR10 is a modestly sized box at 11.5 x 10.7 x 8.4 inches / 292.1 x 271.8 x 213.4 mm, yet with all its packing in it ends up weighing a considerable 23.4 pounds / 10.6kg. To help you lug it around, Hisense includes a fashionable carrying case that looks more like a piece of luggage than the styrofoam cases many projectors come with. It's complete with straps, zippers, padded slots for each component, and it even has wheels and an extendable handle for rolling.

(Image credit: Future)

The projector has everything it needs to help you get it set up for perfect alignment with your screen. It stands on four height-adjustable feet, so you can get it level and squared away with the wall. And it offers extensive zoom and lens shift capabilities. It can shift from a short throw ratio of 0.84:1 all the way to a 2:1 throw ratio, this means you can set it close to a wall or screen and still get a big picture or set it far from that screen and shrink it down to fit without having to use digital cropping. Plenty of competitors are offering zoom now, but the XR10 has a far wider range than most.

The XR10 goes well beyond that, too, adding on 130% vertical lens shift and 46% horizontal lens shift. This makes it much easier to set the projector wherever is convenient for you and still be able to dial in a crisp, perfectly aligned projection where you want it.

Hisense has also built in some automatic picture correction, like screen fitting and obstacle avoidance, but the projector tends to try zooming all the way out to make those corrections. So it's very easy to end up in a situation where the projection is simply too large for the projector to figure out what to do to fit it onto a small screen. Some features also get locked out if lens shift is used, like automatic keystone correction (something you should skip anyway) and eye protection (something it’s also great to have because these are some bright lasers).

(Image credit: Future)

Around back, the Hisense XR10 is pretty well geared up for serious home theater use. It includes a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports one of which supports eARC as well as one HDMI 2.0 port. It also includes a set of two USB 3.0 ports, a gigabit ethernet port, and both optical and 3.5mm analog audio outputs.

That ethernet port could be useful, but the XR10 actually has Wi-Fi 7 on board, so you can get pretty fast networking wirelessly as well. With that wireless connection, you can easily access streaming services using the built-in operating system, which is unfortunately not Google TV.

Instead it’s Hisense's own VidaaOS. It has most of the major streaming apps and some extras like Xbox Cloud Gaming but there's plenty that's missing. On the bright side, navigating the software is fairly quick and Hisense's included remote has a dedicated input button so you don't have to spend much time in VidaaOS if you want to use an external source for video.

(Image credit: Future)

The XR10 offers serious brightness for a small box, so there’s a bit of fan whir in operation to keep the insides cool. It’s noticeable in a quiet room when sitting close to the projector, but it’s easily drowned out by the 2.1-channel sound system.

The remote control included with the XR10 is a fairly simple one, offering directional navigation and direct access to input selection, autofocus, voice input, the settings menu, the home screen, volume and brightness controls, a mute button, and shortcuts to Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, and Disney+. It also has backlighting, but it's only activated after you press a button, not motion activated.

• Design & features score: 4.5 / 5

Hisense XR10 review: picture quality and performance

• Brilliantly colorful, stunningly bright, and capable of deep black levels
• Good gaming chops
• Punchy sound, but not cinematic

One of the greatest aspects of the Hisense XR10 is its color, coming by way of its RGB laser light source. For most content, it can look perfectly natural, but when it really comes time to jazz things up, it’s simply amazing. The attack on Rosalina’s home in the beginning of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a stunning showcase of its capabilities, with dazzling magical effects, so many colorful stars, and plenty of opportunity for the XR10 to demonstrate its vibrant color.

As the convoy heads out at the beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road, the subtle reds of the sand against the blues of the sky are simply gorgeous, and the deeper reds of the flamethrowers are all the more vibrant. The inside of the sandstorm is simply wondrous, with the chaotic flashing of lightning playing against the deep shadows.

All that color comes alongside serious brightness. In my testing with the projector in its Vivid picture settings, with the iris open and brightness set to maximum, I measured it outputting 6,841 lumens. It has the potential to go higher with a cooler white point and a Brightness Enhanced mode, reaching 7,757 lumens, but this tints the whole picture green.

In practice, the high brightness means the XR10 is strong enough to use in a room even if you’re not doing much to shut out ambient light. I found watching a lot of content even with some of my room lights on more than comfortable, and depending on what I was watching, I could even get away with leaving the windows open in the middle of the day and still see well enough.

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The Hisense XR10 offers potent contrast as well. It’s exhibited splendidly in Dune 2 during the black-and-white Harkkonen coliseum fight. Even without color, there’s splendid detail and rich shadows. This contrast comes by way of the low black levels that the projector is capable of by shutting down its iris. In all but the darkest scenes I find that the letterboxes around some videos appear almost completely black.

The projector gets dark enough that light control in the room actually becomes rather important. Light hitting the screen can bounce around the room and end up back on the screen where it should be dark, and this raises the black level. Using a VESA test pattern with two bright boxes in the corners of an otherwise black screen, I measured a contrast of 362:1 without controlling for room reflections. By blocking out the white boxes with black velvet, I could simulate a light-controlled room and measured a 3,251:1 contrast ratio. That was with the optical iris open. Cranking the iris down to its lowest level, I measured a 11,194:1 contrast ratio.

The XR10 uses motion interpolation by default, and this tends to introduce a lot of motion artifacts, though it can be a benefit to panning shots. I’ve found the visuals look smooth enough and avoid issues with the motion interpolation set to Film or disabled outright.

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Gaming on the XR10 is a joy. It supports both 4K/60Hz and 1080p/240Hz modes with very low latency in both, even without enabling Game Mode. I dashed through levels in Hades 2, easily keeping up with the pace of combat and played through 007: First Light while enjoying the deep cinematic shadows the projector enabled. The XR10 misses out on VRR, though, and a new crop of projectors are bringing in 4K/120Hz capabilities as well, leaving the XR10 a little bit behind on those fronts.

The audio of the XR10 is quite something for a box as small as it is. It features a 2.1-speaker setup with two main drivers and a subwoofer. There’s a bit of low-end brunt to it, though I found the volume drops off a cliff below about 70Hz, leaving the deepest rumble out of the picture. The speakers do a good job with most content and get plenty loud without distorting, but they don’t have much stereo separation to help along with the stunning cinematic quality of the projection.

For what it’s worth, the XR10 still comes with the DLP rainbow effect. It’s not as bad as I’ve seen on some DLP projectors, tending only to be noticeable with white on black visuals, but it may be distracting to those who are particularly susceptible to it.

• Picture quality & performance score: 4.5 / 5

Hisense XR10 review: value

• Premium price
• Capable and flexible projection

There’s no getting around the fact that, at $5,999 / £5,999 / AU$9,999, the Hisense XR10 is a very expensive projector, even next to a lot of its competition. It outprices models like the XGIMI Titan Noir Pro, XGIMI Horizon 30 Ultra Max, JMGO Iris Ultra Max, and even Hisense’s own C3 Ultra Max, and by a considerable amount. It is on the bright side of these projectors, though not the brightest. What it does have is a greater zoom range than any of these with its ability to go to a 2:1 throw ratio. For anyone who critically needs flexibility in positioning, that could be a big advantage.

The inclusion of decent speakers for a projector and a streaming operating system are nice to see, but not something that sets the XR10 far apart from its competition.

Ultimately the XR10 ends up with a sizable premium that might be hard to justify for everyone who’s seeking the most value. But if you’re after high-powered projection and serious capabilities, there are really only a few options that effectively undercut this one, and we're yet to see how well they hold up to their promises.

• Value score: 4 / 5

Should I buy the Hisense XR10?Hisense XR10 Scorecard

Attributes

Notes

Rating

Design and features

The Hisense XR10 is a complete package with advanced and highly flexible optics, powerful projection, punchy speakers, a competent operating system, plenty of ports, and strong wireless connectivity, all packed into an elegant box.

4.5/5

Picture quality and performance

The XR10’s RGB laser light source offers stunning brightness and looks wonderfully crisp through the optical system. The projector can get plenty dark using its iris, making it great for viewing in both bright and dark rooms. It has solid gaming chops as well, though VRR would have been a bonus. The speakers also leave a little bit to be desired but are still pretty solid for a projector like this.

4.5/5

Value

The XR10 brings a lot to the table, all in one package. But, it asks a high price, and a new fleet of projectors are offering a lot of its capabilities for much lower prices. Most don’t match its optical adjustments, but for many people, that may not be so critical.

4/5

Buy it if...

You want both bright and dark room viewing chops
The magic of the Hisense XR10 is that it can both get extremely bright and dial things down for excellent darkroom viewing. If you just wanted one or the other, you could find a cheaper projector that was capable enough.

You don’t like the gimbal stand aesthetic
Many of the high-end projectors that the XR10 would compete with have all jumped on the gimbal stand train. The XR10, meanwhile, sticks to a standard box format that might be a little bit easier to find space for and is much easier to level horizontally.

You need the lumens
Brighter projectors simply cost more, and the XR10 is terrifically bright. If you know you’re going to constantly be battling ambient light or are going to take advantage of its maximum projection size, it may be worth it.

Don't buy it if...

You’re not going to put it to work
If you don’t plan on using the full brightness, engaging the iris, or adjusting the optics from time to time, you won’t be getting the most out of the XR10 and could be just as well served by a cheaper model.

Gaming is your main use
The XR10 is good at gaming, but the latest wave of projectors steps it up with VRR and 4K/120Hz support. Many are nearly as bright and cheaper.

You can wait a few months
The new wave of projectors from Hisense, Xgimi, and JMGO promise a lot of what the XR10 is delivering at a much lower price. If their performance pans out, they could be a real bargain next to the XR10.

Hisense XR10 review: Also consider

Hisense XR10

Valerion VisionMaster Max

JMGO N3 Ultimate

Xgimi Horizon 20 Max

Price:

$5,999

$3,999

$2,999

$2,999

Screen sizes supported:

65 to 300 inches

40 to 300 inches

40 to 300 inches

40-300 inches

Brightness (specified):

6,000 lumens

3,500 lumens

5,800 lumens

5,700 ISO lumens

HDR support

HDR10+, HLG, Dolby Vision

HDR10+, HLG, Dolby Vision

HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision

Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HLG, IMAX Enhanced

Optical technology:

3 Laser DLP

3 Laser DLP

3 Laser DLP

Triple laser DLP

Smart TV:

VidaaOS

Google TV

Google TV

Google TV

Connections:

2x HDMI 2.1 (1x eARC), 1x HDMI 2.0, 2x USB-A, 1x optical, 1x 3.5mm audio

2x HDMI 2.1, 1x HDMI 2.0 (with eARC), 1x optical, 1x 3.5mm

2x HDMI 2.1 (1 with eARC), 1x HDMI 2.0 , 1x optical, 1x 3.5mm

2x HDMI (x1 eARC), 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1x 3.5mm, 1x optical audio out

Valerion VisionMaster Max
If you don’t need all the brightness the XR10 offers, the VisionMaster Max offers a wonderful picture and exceptional black levels to rival the XR10 while including optical adjustments of its own, costing less, and bringing Google TV to the table. Read our full Valerion VisionMaster Max review.

JMGO N3 Ultimate
The JMGO N3 Ultimate isn’t quite as flexible, and it doesn’t adapt as well to dark rooms, but it comes at a fraction of the price, supports VRR, and is competitively bright.

Xgimi Horizon 20 Max
Xgimi’s Horizon 20 Max also provides an alternative with competitive brightness, Google TV, and admirable performance. It also won’t quite win in a dark room battle, but that may not matter for everyone. Read our full Xgimi Horizon 20 Max review.

How I tested the Hisense XR10

• Tested at home in multiple, real-world viewing conditions
• Presented the display with a variety of media and formats
• I have tested numerous projectors and displays over the last half-decade

I tested the Hisense XR10 at home, in real-world conditions. This saw it faced with ambient light coming in from numerous windows, in-room lighting, as well as ambient noise that both the projector and speaker systems had to overcome. The projector was tested both against a bare, white wall and an Akia Screens CineWhite screen. It was presented with streamed content, HDR and non-HDR, and console gameplay.

My testing evaluates the projector’s performance with respect to its price and competition from other models I and colleagues at TechRadar have tested.

I have been testing projectors since 2021 and displays for even longer.

• First reviewed: October 2026
• Read TechRadar's review guarantee

SteelSeries Sensei Pro Mini: Review

The Sensei Pro Mini brings pro-grade wireless performance to those who prefer less of a handful, thanks to its state-of-the-art polling technology and ceaseless power.

It has the same symmetrical shape as its larger sibling but on a smaller scale. Its size should prove suitable for those with smaller hands, allowing them to get a secure grip around the entire unit. At just 49g, it’s very light, too — lighter than the standard model by 4g — which makes it easy to maneuver.

The sidewalls have a pronounced cinch that forces you to clamp your thumb and ring finger further inwards than is typical, which some may prefer for added security. Grip tape is included in the box if you require more traction, which is entirely possible given the smoothness of the outer shell. The central hump might prove contentious in terms of fit, though: in my experience, it didn’t sit back far enough in my hand, landing underneath my knuckles rather than in the middle of my palm.

(Image credit: Future)

To customize and tweak the Sensei Pro Mini, you can use SteelSeries’ GG peripheral software. Here you can rebind all six buttons, with a fair amount of mapping options available, including keyboard inputs and shortcuts for media controls and system actions. You’ll find some standard performance tweaks as well, including DPI adjustments, although the range is larger than you’ll usually find on other gaming mice (between 1 to 65,000). There are five presets to customize, which you can cycle through using the DPI button underneath the mouse.

There are more advanced tweaks in addition to these, though. You can adjust the click response between 0ms and 20ms, and set the lift-off and landing distances independently, each with a range of 0.7 to 1.7 (presumably this refers to millimeters, though no unit of measurement is given). You can also enable a feature called Scroll Jump Protection, which ignores your first scroll unless a second is performed within a certain time of the first. This threshold is adjustable between 100ms and 1500ms. Motion Sync and Angle Snapping toggles are here as well, with the latter featuring a slider with 10 levels to adjust its straightening effect.

(Image credit: Future)

This isn’t all, though: a further section lets you adjust acceleration, with several graph curve presets available to alter cursor speed relative to movement speed, as well as the angle of the mouse’s sensor by 45 degrees either side of center to match the natural angle of your hand movements.

Then there are the polling and sensor adjustments. You can set the ultra-wideband (UWB) polling rate and the sensor report rate independently, each with a range of 125Hz to 8KHz (with added 9KHz overpolling). There are five presets containing various combinations of both rates, which can be cycled through using the button on the UWB base station.

GG is clearly laid out and proved fast and stable during my time with it. It also contains explanations for many of its settings, which is something I’m always glad to see. One minor gripe I had is that the actual area to make adjustments and customizations opens in a second window, which is somewhat inconvenient.

(Image credit: Future)

The first thing that’s noticeable about the Sensei Pro Mini’s performance is just how smoothly it glides. This is no doubt thanks to the large PTFE skates underneath. There’s almost no friction when gliding over a mouse mat, which makes the Sensei Pro Mini feel incredibly gratifying to fling around, yet also allows for super-controlled slow movements.

Next is the Sensei Pro Mini’s buttons. Clicks are light and snappy enough for quick spams, yet still provide enough feedback to allow for controlled inputs. They also have just enough dampening to make them satisfying to use. The side buttons are great to use as well, being easy to reach and offering a clicky, tactile feel. The same is true of the middle click, and I didn’t trigger miscrolls when using it, since the notching, while light, is tight enough to prevent accidental knocks from registering. This also means that quick flicks and controlled single scrolls are both relatively easy to perform.

My one issue with the inputs concerns the DPI button. It’s underneath the Sensei Pro Mini, which makes it harder to access. This is exacerbated by the fact it’s placed on the thumb side (for right handers) rather than the pinkie side, which means you can’t wrap your fingers underneath to press it without turning the mouse over.

(Image credit: Future)

I didn’t experience any connectivity issues with the Sensei Pro Mini. Given the sheer size of the UWB station itself I would’ve been disappointed if I had. Also, the cable provided to connect it to your PC is long enough to give you versatile placement options to avoid interference. It’s a shame a mouse this expensive doesn’t have additional Bluetooth support, though; many other wireless gaming mice feature this, allowing you to hot-switch between two devices.

To power the Sensei Pro Mini, SteelSeries has kitted it out with its ‘infinite’ battery system, something it and a few other brands have used in mice and other peripherals before. The idea is that you’ll never need to go wired (the Sensei Pro Mini doesn’t even have a USB port) to charge. Instead, you’re provided a pair of removable batteries that you cycle between your mouse and the charging dock in the UWB station.

(Image credit: Future)

This system works well, as it’s quick and easy to remove and insert the batteries — just as well, since the battery life drains rapidly when every performance setting is at maximum, barely lasting a day. At less intensive settings, though, the battery’s longevity is much better, lasting more like several days.

There will be gamers who would like the reassurance of additional wired support, though, should connectivity be compromised for whatever reason (I’m reminded of inference issues derailing a recent Valorant tournament). At this very high price point, such an addition would be especially welcome, as would Bluetooth. As it stands, the Sensei Pro Mini is an elite gaming mouse with all the wireless performance a pro could hope for, and it’s perhaps only this cohort that’ll see the value in it.

(Image credit: Future)SteelSeries Sensei Pro Mini review: Price & availability

• $179.99 / £169.99 (about AU$260)
• Available now in black and white variants
• Top-end of the wireless gaming mouse market

The Sensei Pro Mini costs $179.99 / £169.99 (about AU$260) and is available now in black or white. A full-size variant is also available for the same price. It comes with two swappable batteries, the UWB base station (which doubles as the battery charging dock), and a braided USB-C-to-A cable, as well as spare PTFE skates and optional grip tape.

Even for a pro-grade wireless gaming mouse, the Sensei Pro Mini is expensive. It’s the same price as the Razer Naga V3 Pro, although that mouse has additional Bluetooth and wired support, as well as a lot more buttons. If you want the same limitless battery power, you can pair it with Razer’s charging mouse mat, although this a costly addition to an already expensive mouse.

Another pointer with a similar battery swapping system is the AngryMiao AM Infinity.97. This is even lighter than the Sensei Pro Mini at 47g. However, its garish style won’t be for everyone, and its software pales in comparison to the tweaking depth on offer in GG.

SteelSeries Sensei Pro Mini review: Specs

Connectivity

Wireless (Ultra-wideband)

Battery life

120 hours (1K), 32 hours (16 hours per battery) (8K)

Sensor

TrueMove 42K Pro Sensor

Polling rate

8KHz (with 9KHz overpolling)

Maximum sensitivity (DPI)

42,000 (65,000 with DPI Overdrive)

Programmable buttons

6

Dimensions

4.65 x 2.46 x 1.43 inches / 118 x 62.5 x 36.2mm

Weight

49g

Should I buy the SteelSeries Sensei Pro Mini?Scorecard

Attribute

Notes

Score

Design

A great size for those with smaller hands, although the hump might be inconveniently placed for some. The DPI button isn’t easily accessible, either.

4/5

Performance

Super smooth gliding and all the buttons respond brilliantly. There are plenty of performance tweaks available in GG, too.

4.5/5

Value

It’s very expensive, yet lacks Bluetooth and a wired option. Only gamers most concerned about elite wireless performance will see its worth.

3/5

Buy it if…

You want elite performance
Glides and inputs are superb, while the tweaking provided by GG is peerless.

You want infinite battery life
Thanks to the swappable battery system, you’ll never need to plug in to charge.

Don't buy it if…

You want a wired security
This mouse might upset Esports pros with its lack of a wired play, for when you can’t rely on a perfect wireless signal.

You’re a casual gamer
Its elite performance features will only be of use to the pros, while its lack of convenience features might deter those after something more versatile.

SteelSeries Sensei Pro Mini review: Also consider

Razer Naga V3 Pro
The Naga V3 Pro has additional Bluetooth support and wired capability, as well as a lot more inputs to customize. It also has ‘infinite’ battery life if used with Razer’s optional charging mouse pad, although this is an expensive add-on. Read our full Razer Naga V3 Pro review.

AngryMiao AM Infinity.97
If you want the same battery swapping system but in something more flashy, the AM Infinity.97 fits the bill. Its software is far less capable, though, and it’s slightly dearer than the Sensei Pro Mini. Read our full AngryMiao AM Infinity.97 review.

(Image credit: Future)How I tested the SteelSeries Sensei Pro Mini

• Tested for a few days
• Used for various tasks, including gaming
• Plentiful PC gaming experience

I tested the Sensei Pro Mini for a few days, using it for not just gaming, but also working and general browsing.

I played Counter-Strike 2, which is a great test for gaming mice, since it demands quick and accurate movements and clicks.

I’ve been PC gaming for over a decade, and used a great deal of pointers in that time. I’ve also reviewed plenty of them before, including the full size Steelseries Sensei Pro.

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

Sony Bravia Theater Trio (HT-A8) review

The Sony Bravia Theater Trio is hard to define, but easy to love. Hard to define because its three-speaker (Trio, geddit?) package doesn’t feel quite like either a soundbar or a home theatre separates system; easy to love because it sounds amazing.

Sony’s own story of how the Trio came to be states that it was borne from frustration in its audio department about the inability of regular soundbar solutions — even high-end ones — to deliver sound with enough power and scale to convincingly partner with really big TVs. It was deemed that rather than creating a mammoth uber-long single soundbar to solve this problem, a much more practical solution would be to create a three-piece centre, left, right speaker package instead.

(Image credit: Future)

While the left and right speakers of the Trio system are larger and heavier than the sort of satellite speakers usually sold with or as options for regular soundbar systems, the package overall still looks startlingly compact overall for a system designed for king-sized TVs. The center speaker only measures in at 23.19 x 2.52 x 6.5 inches / 589 x 64 x 165mm, in fact. But you can, of course, place the wireless left and right speakers pretty much as far apart as your room allows, to help create a soundstage commensurate in scale with a monster TV.

I would quickly add at this point, though, that I personally don’t see the Trio as only worth getting if you have a huge TV. It’s actually so good and, as I’ll explain, so flexible with its sound that it’s worth considering by really any home theater fan who’s able to afford it.

Just throwing a trio of speakers at the big TV audio problem won’t in itself guarantee a satisfying home theater audio solution, of course. Especially when those three speakers only deliver dedicated left, right, centre and up-firing channels, rather than the many more channels that even some single bar soundbars can manage these days. The thing is, though, the Bravia Theater Trio’s channel count isn’t actually restricted to the the handful we’ve just mentioned. The brand’s revolutionary 360 Spatial Sound Mapping system is capable of adding up to 24 ‘virtual’ (created by psychoacoustic processing) extra channels of sound to the system’s ‘physical’ ones.

(Image credit: Future)

The 360 Spatial Sound Mapping system’s calculation process for figuring out where to place the sound from these extra virtual speakers uses a supplied, high-quality mic dongle that plugs into your phone to tailor the sound to your room layout. This works so well that you’ll be able to still enjoy a totally coherent, balanced, symmetrical soundstage from your Trio system no matter how awkward your room layout might be.

This room adaptation part of the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping system becomes even more useful if you add a pair of Sony’s new Rear 9 optional surround sound speakers. Even when I deliberately set the the two front and Rear 9 speakers in the most unhelpful positions I could manage, the processing still somehow manages to put me at the heart of a colossal 360-degree soundstage.

I’ve let the Trio’s cleverest trick, though, lead me into discussing the system’s performance before I’ve finished going through every feature it has to offer. So let’s quickly get back to that.

While the Trio’s centre speaker’s long, slim design suits simple placement on a desktop under your TV, the left and right speakers sneak a narrow straight bit into their otherwise cylindrical shape to allow them to be wall mounted if that suits your set up.

(Image credit: Future)

Connectivity is passable. The highlight is an HDMI loop through that supports 4K/120Hz gaming feeds — as you’d hope with a sound system from the brand responsible for the PlayStation 5 — as well as the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR formats, but not HDR10+. And the HDMI output also supports the eARC system for taking in sound from your TV.

Unfortunately, the only other port is a USB slot that’s apparently only for software updates. A second HDMI input and an optical digital audio input would have been nice on a £1,999 home cinema system these days perhaps, but the Trio’s support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (6.0) alongside the HDMIs will likely deliver everything most modern households will need.

These wireless options support direct streaming from Spotify Connect and Apple Airplay 2. On top of this, the system can also utilize Hi-Res Audio files and carries Sony’s redoubtable DSEE Ultimate AI upscaling system for making compressed audio sound better.

The latest Bravia Connect app for iOS and Android helps you set the system up, as well as providing an attractive and useful visual interface as a back up to the fairly basic remote control the system ships with. And it's particularly handy, given the Trio doesn’t carry an LED display.

Finally in the feature department, the Trio can play both the Dolby Atmos and DTS:X surround sound formats. In fact, it doesn’t just play them; it eats them for breakfast.

Any doubts about the Trio’s $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$2,999 price evaporate in an irresistible bombardment of almost impossibly massive sound staging, levels of power, detail and impact that seem to go far beyond the system’s claimed 405W of confirmed power. It also serves up mesmerizing detailing and precision, and an immaculate tone that has more in common with a premium full separates system than a minimalistic three-speaker package.

(Image credit: Future)

The system’s remarkable drivers and even more remarkable 360 Spatial Sound Mapping processing create a soundstage that fills at least the front half of even very large rooms, with the physical existence of the Trio’s three speakers essentially completely disappearing. As well as being capable of creating an epic sense of space for big movie locations, the size of sound the Trio can produce means it's effortlessly able to ‘fill’ the screen area and match the cinematic scale of even the very biggest TVs.

Despite its immense and immersive size, though, the Trio’s sound doesn’t forget the small things in home cinema and music life. It can pull in the boundaries of its sound superbly when a soundtrack wants to portray a tight space, for starters. Also, every detail in a movie sound mix is beautifully rendered, no matter how small, and produced with exactly the correct weight relative to other mix elements.

There’s no hint of harshness or brittleness to any sound the Trio makes, no matter how high pitched or deep it might be. In fact, despite the center speaker’s small size, the system gives the impression of having no ceiling for treble sounds to butt up against and turn harsh, and no low-frequency floor for bass sounds to flatten off against.

The relatively hefty left and right speakers do most of the heavy low-frequency lifting without making deep sounds feel trapped in, hard edged or distorted. They’re reactive enough to serve sudden bass hits with impeccable timing, too, and have enough range in the low frequencies they can produce to stop rumbles becoming overwhelming or coarse.

(Image credit: Future)

This excellent bass performance is particularly welcome, given that bass has been a weakness of some of Sony’s current soundbars, and that the system is quite compact. Perhaps an even bigger worry is that Sony sells Sub 8 and Sub 9 external wireless subwoofer upgrades for the package, which always makes me wonder if there’s a weakness in the core system that such an add-on is required to fix.

The Trio can deliver hard, sudden impact sounds with proper venom and propulsion, while the soundstage remains balanced and authoritative even at high volumes, no matter how dense the content might be.

Sound systems that go as big and dynamic with film soundtracks as the Trio can aren’t always able to turn their hands effectively to music. The Trio, though, is at least as engaging with music as it is movies.

Even in native stereo mode, without any of Sony’s remarkable virtual surround processing in play, the trio of speakers deliver excellent stereo separation and vocal placement. Nothing sounds at all strained, no matter what type of music you’re playing or how dense a track gets. It retains its genuinely hi-fi feel, too, at higher volumes than you’ve probably ever heard your favorite albums before. And yet, at the same time, people with neighbors will be pleased to hear that its speakers are sensitive enough to deliver music compellingly even at low volumes, something many soundbars struggle with.

Dolby Atmos music sounds similarly refined. It's detailed without being forensic, but also enjoys a more three-dimensional presentation that includes height elements. And if you’re happy to take off your purist music hat, I’d also recommend you try stereo tracks — or, at least, relatively poppy or ambient stereo tracks — through its 360 Spatial Sound Mapping processing, which gives it a more spacious and surround sound feel. Certainly Sony’s ‘upmixing’ with this effect is much superior to similar modes attempted by most other home audio packages.

(Image credit: Future)

It’s a tough ask to find things I don’t love about Sony’s Trio system. But I’m paid to try, so here goes. First, for all its virtual speaker creating talents, it only creates a quite limited sense of sound coming from behind your seating position. This can be solved extremely well by adding Sony’s new Rear 9 extra wireless surround speakers — though, at $749.99 / £699 / $ 1,299 a pair, this upgrade isn’t cheap.

The left/right spread of stereo music strangely narrows slightly when playing music through the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping despite expanding in every other way. And finally — and possibly most frustratingly depending on how big your household is — the area you need to sit in after calibrating the Trio for the optimal 360 Spatial Sound Mapping effect is quite small. Though even outside of this sweet spot, it’s still gloriously easy to appreciate just how good the Trio’s overall sound is.

Sony Bravia Theater Trio (HT-A8) review: Price and release date

• Released: July 2026 (UK and Australia), May 2026 (US)
• $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$2,999

At first glance the Trio’s $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$2,999 price looks substantial for a three-piece speaker package. Samsung gives you a full surround soundbar package, the HW-Q990H, for just $1,499 / £1,499 / AU$1,499, after all. Once you’ve placed the Trio’s speakers wherever you want them to go, though, and run the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping system setup, the system reveals itself to be a pretty much separates-grade performer capable of partnering with a huge screen and even filling a big room.

Hitting almost $2,750 / £2,700 / AU$4,300 if you add the admittedly impressive Rear 9 speakers starts to look a bit of a stretch, but you could always add the rears later as funds allow. The out-of-the-box Trio won’t let you down in the mean time.

Sony Bravia Theater Trio (HT-A8): Specs

Dimensions

Main bar: 23.19 x 2.52 x 6.50 inches / 589 x 64 x 165mm; left/right speakers: 6.3 x 13.27 x 6.5 inches / 160 x 337 x 165mm

Speaker channels

3.0.2

Connections

One HDMI input (with eARC), one HDMI output (4K/120Hz), USB service port

Dolby Atmos / DTS:X

Yes/Yes

Sub included

Optional extra

Rear speakers included

No

Should I buy the Sony Bravia Theater Trio (HT-A8)?Sony Bravia Theater Trio (HT-A8) Scorecard

Attribute

Notes

Score

Features

The system’s three-front-speaker approach enables it to deliver a sound appropriate to really any screen size, even really huge ones. Its processing and audio format support is excellent too.

4.5 / 5

Performance

Despite the fairly compact size of its three speakers, the Trio package often manages to sound like a premium separates system

5 / 5

Design

From the surprisingly compact shape of the center speaker to the gorgeously well-built cylindrical stance of the left and rights, the Theater Trio is an elegantly understated addition to your room.

4.5 / 5

Setup & usability

The speakers all connected with each other automatically during my tests, and provided you plug the provided mic into your phone and run the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping set up procedure, its speakers are extremely flexible when it comes to where you put them.

4.5 / 5

Value

The Theater Trio package’s price puts it above the vast majority of regular soundbars — but its sound is a cut above any regular soundbar, too

4 / 5

Buy it if...

You have a very big TV
The Trio’s package of separate center, front left and front right speakers was expressly designed to solve the issue where regular soundbars just don’t create a sound stage big enough to match the size of the pictures made by massive TVs (especially those of 85 inches and more).

You want fantastic movie and music sound quality
The Trio throws off the shackles of some of Sony’s current soundbars, using hi-fi grade speaker designs and up to 24 virtual speakers created by Sony’s amazing 360 Spatial Sound Mapping to craft one of the most powerful but also most refined, balanced and immersive soundstages I’ve heard from a one-box speaker package.

You have an awkwardly shaped room
A key part of the Trio’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping involves adapting the sound of its real and virtual speakers to your room layout — and this process is so flexible that it can deliver a convincing sound stage no matter how awkward your speaker placement might be.

Don't buy it if...

You can’t afford it
There are some very good soundbars around for much less than the Trio’s $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$2,999 asking price - which rises to nearly $2,750 / £2,700 / AU$4,300 if you add the Rear 9 surround speakers. But if you can afford it, the scale and finesse of the Trio’s sound is a cut above those cheaper soundbar alternatives.

The small sweet spot is a problem
The Trio optimizes the sound stage created by its real and virtual speakers around what turns out to be a rather compact sweet spot. So if you have a big household to cater for, you’ll have to accept that not everyone will get the perfect experience — unless you all huddle up.

You want a sound system that can work as a switch box
The Trio’s limited connectivity prevents you from attaching more than one hard-wired source to it at a time.

Sony Bravia Theatre Trio (HT-A8) review: Also consider

Samsung HW-Q990H
If you can’t quite stretch your finances to accommodate the Sony Trio package, Samsung’s HW-Q990H soundbar system delivers a powerful and detailed full surround sound solution for $1,499 / £1,499 / AU$1,499. The Q990H crafts a remarkably full hemisphere of sound for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks, but the Trio’s sound is more refined and flexible — and only requires you to house three speakers. Read our full Samsung HW-Q990H review.

Sennheiser Ambeo Max
Sennheiser’s most powerful soundbar delivers a remarkably large sound stage for a single-bar device, courtesy of the fearsome array of ultra-robust and punchy drivers it squeezes into its uncompromising chassis. This helps it get nearer than any other remotely mainstream single-bar soundbar to supporting really big screens like the Trio does. While it used to cost $2,999.95 / £2,199 / AU$3,999, too, it’s now widely available for $1,699.99 / £1,599 / AU$2,999. It still can’t ultimately match the scale of the Trio, though, due to the latter’s separate left and right speakers.

How I tested the Sony Bravia Theatre Trio (HT-A8)

• I used the Sony Trio as my main living room audio system for 11 days.
• Also tested in a second room with a different size and layout, and with a pair of optional Rear 9 surround speakers.
• Tested with 4K Blu-rays, CDs, streamed audio, and games, using all direct HDMI connection, eARC and wireless connection options

I tested the Trio as my main living room audio system for 11 days overall, as well as using it in a second room with a different layout for two further days. I also moved the left and right speakers (and the optional rears) to all sorts of awkward places to test the flexibility of the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping processing.

During the testing period, I fed the Trio system audio content from a wide range of sources, including movie soundtracks from streaming boxes and 4K Blu-ray players over HDMI; music from a CD player and the various music streaming services the system supports; and game soundtracks from an Xbox Series X. Key movies used were Blade Runner 2049, It Chapter One, Civil War, and Sinners.

• First reviewed: October 2026
• Read TechRadar's review guarantee

Huawei FreeBuds Neo: Two-minute review

Storied Chinese company Huawei may still be struggling to win friends in the phone and tablet worlds, with its lack of access to the Play Store still making the company's hand-held products impossible to recommend, but the brand's been a surprisingly reliable maker of admirable earbuds.

We gave the Huawei FreeBuds 5 Pro a perfect score earlier this year, and I maintain that the Huawei FreeArc are the best hook-style open earbuds I've ever tested. But now, instead of doing something better than everyone else, Huawei is doing something different.

The Huawei FreeBuds Neo seem to be the result of someone thinking the AirPods Pro 3 are perfect except for being too big; the brand continues its mission of all-but imitating Apple, while slyly improving the formula. That is to say, these are wireless in-ear buds which are ice-white (note: other finishes are available) but really small.

We've seen small earbuds before (see the JLab JBuds Mini for something really diddy) but they often tend to be cheap and feature-light. Not the FreeBuds Neo, which don't ask you to make compromises and are still affordable, compared to the FreeBuds 5 Pro or AirPods.

The carry case is a slender pill, which was second to none when it came to how easy it was to slip into my pocket and forget about. The buds are light, with shortened stems which make them look truncated.

It's not all about the design. These buds sound fun and energetic, with a V-shaped sound profile that adds some zest to your music. They're not the best-sounding buds I've tested, even at the price, but only audiophiles will be let down by what you're getting.

Now for the let-down, and it's a common one for Huawei: software. You see, the brand's app isn't on the Play Store, and you have to download it through its own app store, which you have to side-load on your phone. A complicated process which literally didn't work for me. Throughout my testing process, I couldn't access the app, and I know from past experience that this isn't an unheard-of occurrence.

Admittedly the app isn't that useful if you don't want EQ — a problem in and of itself — but if features are locked behind the roll of the dice that is 'will the app download?', it's not great.

Add to that the knowledge that the battery life and ANC are both good, but not particularly stellar and you'll see compromises — but these are all more understandable when you bear in mind the small size.

Despite the setbacks, these are still the best small earbuds you can buy — the best of a small bunch, if you'll pardon the pun — but they might not be mighty enough to sway people who don't care all that much about the compact and oh-so-portable size of their earbuds.

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Price and release date

(Image credit: Future)

• Released in September 2026, sold October
• Goes for £119.99 / AU$290 (about AU$160)
• Don't get excited though; there is unlikely to be a US release

The Huawei FreeBuds Neo were unveiled on September 2, 2026, ahead of a release later in the month.

The buds cost £119.99 / AU$290 (about $160, but Huawei doesn’t officially sell them in the States). So they’re about a third cheaper than the brand’s top buds, including the FreeBuds Pro 5, which go for £179.99 (about $240, AU$360).

It’s a smart price, for buds which feel like a ‘Lite’ alternative to the Pro model, as you can consider them a streamlined pick.

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Specs

Drivers

11mm

Active noise cancellation

Yes

Battery life

6 hours (ANC on), 9 hours (ANC off)

Weight

4.8g (buds) 31.4g (case)

Connectivity

Bluetooth 6.0

Frequency response

20-40kHz

Waterproofing

IP55

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Features

(Image credit: Future)

• Significant app download problems
• Unimpressive 6-hour battery life
• ANC is fine, not great

Installing Huawei’s Audio Connect is a real challenge for Android users like me. It’s not on the Play Store, so you have to side load the Huawei AppGallery, and use that to download it. (If you have an iPhone, you’ll find Audio Connect on the App Store, easy peasy).

Not only does that mean you’re downloading an unwanted app just to get to another one, but the process is fraught with difficulty. Case in point, I simply couldn’t install the AppGallery onto my Samsung phone, despite trying multiple times and diving into the settings. The APK wouldn’t take, and so I couldn’t use Audio Connect.

I’ve had troubles with the process before, and I’m ready to declare the app unusable for some people. Every time I need to use it on a pair of buds, it feels like I’m tossing a coin to see if it’ll work out this time.

If you do download it, you’re offered the bare bones of such an app, including the ability to change the touch control functions, tweak ANC strength, adjust EQ, use multipoint connections and turn on spatial audio. I used the FreeBuds Neo just fine without Audio Connect, though if I’d paid money for the buds, I’d be irked that I wasn’t getting all of these tools.

(Image credit: Future)

The buds have a 6-hour battery life with ANC on and 9 hours with it turned off (not 6.5 and 10 hours, as Huawei advertises loudly — the small text on its website reveals that this is just for lower-quality music such as MP3s, which I really hope you don’t listen to).

Using the case, you get up to 22 hours with ANC on, or 33 hours with it turned off. Again, those stats are for higher-resolution music streaming, but you'll get more if you listen to low-res tunes. Don't do that to yourself, though.

It’s not an especially competitive battery life, but in my testing, it often felt like I’d eke an extra half hour or so out of the buds. And it’s hard to be too annoyed with the limited battery life with small buds: where would a chunkier battery pack go?

ANC isn’t ground-breaking either, but it’s absolutely fine. I used it on planes, trains and buses; it removed the engine rumble from the last two and lessened it on the former, but didn’t do as much to silence people around me with all their unreliable or sporadic sounds.

• Features score: 3/5

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Design

(Image credit: Future)

• Tiny 31.4g lozenge case
• Light short-stem buds
• Reliable in-ear fit

The FreeBuds Neo’s entire pitch rests on their design: they’re the JLab JBuds Mini meets the AirPods Pro 3. They’re small earbuds, both in terms of the carry case and the buds themselves.

As soon as I removed the lozenge-shaped charging case from the box, I was surprised by how small it was. It’s just shy of 7cm wide and 3cm deep, and weighs just 31.4g. It disappeared into my trouser pockets enough that I kept losing them, only to discover that what I thought was a rolled tissue was in fact the charging case.

Like the earbuds, the case comes in white, black, silver or pink. The case basically just has enough space for the earbuds, along with a USB-C charging port and color-changing status indicator LED, which was useful for letting me know if the buds were at full charge.

(Image credit: Future)

Those earbuds don’t take up much space either, because like the case, they’re minuscule. Unlike those other baby buds from JLab, the FreeBuds Neo are ostensibly stem-toting earbuds, but with the tiniest stem I’ve ever seen. They look a lot like imitation AirPods Pro, but if Huawei changed its mind half-way through making the stem.

True to the pint-sized promise, the FreeBuds Neo only weigh 4.8g, and the weight isn’t just useful for comfort. Tip-toting earbuds can be rather hit-or-miss when it comes to in-ear stability, but not once in my testing did the Huawei’s wobble or fall.

Despite the small size, Huawei found space in the Neo to add touch controls — if you can set them up in the app. The buds also have an IP55 protection, ensuring they’re safe against limited dust ingress and gentle jets of water (including rain).

• Design score: 4.5/5

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Sound quality

(Image credit: Future)

• 11mm driver per bud.
• Has V-shaped sound: focus on bass and treble
• Supports LDAC playback on supported phones

Huawei hasn't returned the FreeBuds 5 Pro's dual-driver system in the FreeBuds Neo, and I don't blame it; the whole point is for them to be nice and small.

Instead, you're getting a sole 11mm driver per bud, which acts as a jack of all trades across the audio spectrum.

Don't expect audiophile-level sound, then, but I see these being pleasing for the average listener. They offer a V-shaped sound profile, which means the bass is hearty and the treble sharp.

As is always the case with V-shaped sounds, it means that you'll sometimes find mids are lacking. For example in Mipso's Talking in My Sleep, you get lovely textured strings and vocals, and the bass is controlled and full, but it's hard to tell where the acoustic guitars begin and other instruments end. Likewise in What About Flamingos? by Lake Street Dive, you get lovely resonant low-end and articulate treble, but only the faint hint of all the other instruments making up the composition.

(Image credit: Future)

Of course, in plenty of songs, all you want is low-end and top-end. I enjoyed listening to pop and electronic music without feeling like I was missing out on anything. There's a reason this kind of sound profile is chosen by earbud manufacturers; it's a crowd-pleaser.

Perhaps a symptom of the small size or driver configuration, but I didn't hear as prominent or pronounced a sound stage as you often do in earbuds like this. Sometimes instruments sounded a little more squished together than I'd like, but it was only an issue in songs with a complex instrumentation.

If you perked up at my earlier mention of high-res and low-res playback, in the battery section, then you'll be happy to know that the buds do support the LDAC codec (as long as you're on Android, because iPhones somehow still don't support it).

• Sound quality: 4/5

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Value

(Image credit: Future)

• Cut the costs from premium alternatives
• Cost more than alternative small buds

Is size all you care about when it comes to your earbuds? Then as a super-small option, you're likely going to find these poor value for money. Buy the JLabs — the JLab JBuds Mini ANC even have noise-nixing!

For everyone else, though, these are a good get. They look like premium earbuds, they feel like premium earbuds, and they sound like them... However, they cost a fair bit less than you'd expect.

I'd happily recommend the FreeBuds Neo at their retail price. Obviously, discounts are always great, but you shouldn't wait for one before buying them if you're interested.

• Value: 4/5

Should I buy the Huawei FreeBuds Neo?

(Image credit: Future)Huawei FreeBuds Neo score card

Attributes

Notes

Rating

Features

The battery life and ANC won't wow you, but the app problems make the features worth ignoring.

3/5

Design

They're lovely and compact, and I never had comfort or fit issues

4.5/5

Sound quality

A charming V-shaped sound will be a crowd-pleaser, but not ideal for audiophiles.

4/5

Value

You're getting some solid ANC headphones for a smaller price.

4/5

Buy them if…

You want small-form earbuds
That's the main appeal of these, right? If you want something smaller than the average earbuds, these are the best ones to look at.

You want premium-feeling earbuds
I kept forgetting that the Huawei cost what they do, because they feel like buds which cost 50% more.

You want a charging indicator
It's a small feature, but many brands do it poorly; the Huawei's LED is great so you know as soon as your buds are charged.View Deal

Don’t buy them if…

You're a frequent app user
Always using your earbud app to tweak with settings? Fine if you're an iOS user, a bit risky if you're on Android.

You need top-tier ANC
The FreeBuds Neo are fine for noise cancellation, but you can do better, and you don't need to pay that much more for it either.

Huawei FreeBuds Neo review: Also consider

Looking for alternative over-ears? Here are a few small-sized ones we would recommend.

Huawei FreeBuds Neo

JLab JBuds Mini ANC

Sony WF-C710N

Drivers

11mm

6mm

40mm

Active noise cancellation

Yes

Yes

Yes

Battery life (ANC on)

6 hours (buds) 22 hours (case)

7 hours (buds) 25 hours (case)

8.5 hours (buds) / 30 hours (case)

Weight

4.8g (buds) 31.4g (case)

3.4g (buds) 20.7g (case)

5.2g (bud) 38g (case)

Connectivity

Bluetooth 6.0

Bluetooth 6.0

Bluetooth 5.3

Waterproofing

IP55

IP55

IPX4

JLab JBuds Mini ANC
These are small and, more importantly, roughly half the price of the Huawei. You won't get the same audio quality, but the even-smaller case and buds will please those who just want something tiny.
Read our hands-on with the JLab JBuds Mini ANC

Sony WF-C710N
Another tiny premium option comes from Sony, so you know they're good. They have fantastic ANC and sound great, but they don't support LDAC and don't have great touch controls.
Read our full Sony WF-C710N review

How I tested the Huawei FreeBuds Neo

• Tested for a month
• Paired with Android phone for Bluetooth playback
• Used on multiple holidays as well as use at home and around neighborhood.

The Huawei FreeBuds Neo got the pleasure of an entire month of use before I wrote this review, which gave me time to fully appreciate how they work.

That time included multiple holidays, so I brought the buds to various countries and tested them on flights, train journeys and coach trips. Of course, I also used them at home, at the gym, and on walks around my neighborhood.

During the testing process, the buds were connected to my Android phone. I listened primarily on Spotify and to my own music library of WAV tracks, but also conducted calls, played games and streamed lots of TV on Prime Video.

I've been reviewing tech for TechRadar since early 2019, and in that time have tested many other pairs of earbuds, as well as countless Huawei products.

• First reviewed in October 2026

• Read TechRadar's reviews guarantee

Staying safe online is as imperative as ever, especially since AI has inadvertently increased the volume of cyber attacks. Good online safety leans more on preventing attacks from happening in the first place than on countering them, and certain tools help you do that.

DuckDuckGo is most famous for its privacy-focused search engine and browser (we've reviewed it here), but it also provides other tools that help users surf the web without giving out their identities. These tools are offered under a single, cost-competitive Pro bundle. It's a VPN, AI tool, and data removal service all in one.

I’m reviewing the DuckDuckGo Pro bundle to help you decide if it’s worth adopting for your online security. Read on to learn what this bundle offers, its pros, cons, and how it compares to the competition.

DuckDuckGo: Plans and pricing

DuckDuckGo follows a simple pricing system, which I like - you can see all the plans by clicking here. A monthly subscription costs $19.99 and unlocks access to all Pro features. An annual subscription is discounted to $200, equivalent to $17 per month instead of the $19.99 paid on a month-to-month basis. This discount is quite small compared to what I’ve seen on rivals, but is a discount nonetheless.

The pricing varies slightly for users who live outside the U.S. For example, U.K.-based users pay 19.99 pounds monthly and 200 pounds annually. Converted to the U.S. dollar, that sums up to $27 per month and $273 annually (inclusive of value-added tax). Other countries have similar pricing variations, so you may pay more (or less) than the sticker price mentioned.

DuckDuckGo offers a 7-day free trial for its Pro plan. This is shorter than the 14 to 30-day free trials I’ve used on various online security platforms, but still provides an opportunity to test the features before deciding whether to pay.

Subscriptions can be cancelled anytime, but DuckDuckGo’s website doesn’t mention a specific money-back guarantee period. It seems that refunds can be requested, but it’ll take a lot of back and forth, which I consider a drawback.

DuckDuckGo: Setup

Setting up DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro isn’t as straightforward as most security software bundles I’ve reviewed. You’ll need to first download the DuckDuckGo browser on your PC or smartphone (you can’t use Pro features on Chrome, Firefox, or Edge). The privacy-focused browser is the foundation of DuckDuckGo’s Pro package: it blocks ads, trackers, and cookies that pose privacy risks. The browser is free, but the Pro bundle unlocks enhanced security features, which are the focus of this review.

After paying for a Pro subscription, the first feature to take note of is the VPN. This VPN, built into the DuckDuckGo browser, routes your traffic through remote servers to prevent third-party tracking. Your location, IP address, and browsing history get hidden from third parties, like advertisers or, at worst, malicious actors.

There’s a limitation, though. DuckDuckGo’s VPN servers are concentrated in the U.S. and Europe, with few outside these locations. If you’re surfing the web from, let’s say, the Middle East, connections can get a bit slower because of the server distance. DuckDuckGo’s VPN isn’t like full-fledged VPNs that let you choose from dozens of countries.

On the bright side, DuckDuckGo’s VPN has a default kill switch, which automatically cuts off your internet connection if the VPN malfunctions, ensuring your data doesn’t leak because of a slight network mishap. I checked thoroughly, but didn’t find any button to turn off this kill switch, which is a plus in my perspective. Turning off a kill switch poses privacy risks during network lapses.

The VPN coverage can be used on five devices simultaneously. For example, you can install it on your work PC, home PC, and smartphone via the DuckDuckGo browser. Your traffic gets encrypted on all connected devices.

Another key feature offered under DuckDuckGo Pro is quite unique: identity theft restoration. If you face any incident of identity theft, you can work with an expert to mitigate the effects. For example, the expert helps identify fraudulent transactions that your card may have been used for and then files reimbursement claims with your bank. You'll also get help in fixing any credit report errors from fraudulent transactions.

There’s a catch, though: DuckDuckGo doesn’t offer identity theft restoration services directly. Rather, it has partnered with Iris, a prominent ID protection platform, to provide this service. You’ll be working with Iris’ experts if you use this service.

In this AI era, you’ll hardly find a security platform that doesn’t offer an AI-centric feature. For Pro subscribers, DuckDuckGo offers advanced chatbots (based on ChatGPT and Claude) with active privacy protection. This way, you won’t have to pay separately for the premium versions of Claude and ChatGPT, as DuckDuckGo offers access under the Pro bundle.

(Image credit: DuckDuckGo )

Overall, DuckDuckGo’s Pro bundle is feature-rich and effective at maximizing online privacy. However, with plans starting at $19.99 per month, I think it’s quite pricey.

DuckDuckGo: Ease of use

DuckDuckGo is a mixed bag when it comes to ease of use. Its features are exclusive to the DuckDuckGo browser, not the more popular Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers.

For most people, paying for the Pro bundle means learning to use a new browser on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android. I didn’t find it difficult to get adapted to the DuckDuckGo browser, but it took some time because the browser worked differently from the ones I was used to.

(Image credit: DuckDuckGo )DuckDuckGo: Security and privacy

DuckDuckGo offers a very effective online privacy suite, starting with a browser that doesn’t allow cookies, trackers, or anything that keeps a trail of the sites you visit. The built-in VPN encrypts your online traffic and prevents third-party prying eyes.

Identity theft restoration is another valuable service, and so is the bonus of interacting with advanced chatbots. You’ll be a lot safer online when using DuckDuckGo’s Pro bundle.

DuckDuckGo: Support

DuckDuckGo offers decent support resources. You can start with the help page, which lists answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). I liked the breakdown of questions people often ask about DuckDuckGo’s privacy features and the detailed answers provided.

Users who need direct help can contact DuckDuckGo’s support team via email or by filling out a support form. There’s also an option to interact with DuckDuckGo’s staff via a dedicated forum on Reddit. However, there’s no telephone or live chat support, which I consider a major drawback given the price of a DuckDuckGo Pro subscription.

DuckDuckGo: Competition

Given the many features offered under DuckDuckGo Pro, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact competitor. Instead, I’ll highlight some competitors to key DuckDuckGo Pro features.

For the private browser, Brave is a notable option. After using both, I’ll say Brave offers more privacy controls and is more advanced in general. For instance, Brave supports browser extensions just like you’ll find on Chrome, but the DuckDuckGo Browser doesn’t.

For DuckDuckGo’s VPN, I’ll say any dedicated VPN app like Surfshark and Windscribe would be a better option, with broader server locations to choose from.

However, the point of DuckDuckGo Pro is to kill multiple birds with one stone: you won’t get the best of each feature, but, overall, you’ll get a good deal.

DuckDuckGo: Final verdict

A DuckDuckGo Pro bundle maximizes your online privacy, preventing third parties from tracking your online activities. If you want to surf the web without leaking data that’ll stay on the internet for a long time, I highly recommend it. However, you’d need to be ready to switch to a new browser and pay a significant amount, which I would see as drawbacks.

What you need to know

• Engineered for users 5'10" to 6'7"
• Reinforced frame with weight load up to 399 lbs
• Motorized lumbar support and bionic FlexFit backrest
• Built-in fan and OmniStretch massager
• Controlled recline with Dynamic Support

I get it. Most people won’t need the LiberNovo Maxis. Most people will see the price, baulk, and close the website. It’s expensive, its headline features run on a rechargeable battery, and it’s more chair than your everyday hybrid or remote worker needs.

But it’s also ergonomic, stunningly designed, cleverly engineered, and built for big and tall users without the usual flabby, foamy designs that I see for half or even a quarter of the price of the Maxis. It’s also one of the best office chairs I’ve tested. If you're over 5'10", you'll want to check this out.

On top of that, the model I’m reviewing here - the Maxis Airflow - includes a cooling fan in the seat, electric lumbar adjustments, and a back massager called the OmniStretch designed for relieving tension.

So, this is not your everyday office chair. It’s an elite seat for professionals who prize all-day comfort, a stylish ergonomic design, supportive top-end features, and don’t mind paying a fair chunk of change for that.

LiberNovo Maxis: Price & availability

The LiberNovo Maxis is available direct from the maker, and I’m also seeing it at online retailers including Amazon and Best Buy.

I’ve danced around that price tag enough. In the US, the LiberNovo Maxis has a list price of $1299; from the UK site, it’s £1099. At the time of review, both are discounted to $1119 / £1002.

And that’s for the base manual model. The Maxis Electric, which includes the electric adjustments to the lower back support sends the price to $1799 / £1579, while the Maxis Airflow reviewed here is priced at $1859 / £1699 (although again, at time of review, they are discounted by around two-hundred bucks).

On top of that, you can buy the chair in three different bundles: the standalone chair, the Standard pack which comes with a footrest, and the Premium Bundle which also adds a spare rechargeable battery. Unless you’re using the electric features constantly, I’d recommend either the Basic or Standard bundle.

All in all, the Maxis is firmly in the premium price bracket, alongside top-tier brands in the office furniture world like Herman Miller and Steelcase. I can understand why, in terms of build quality and design.

Seat depth

20.47in / 52cm

Backrest shoulder span

16.93in / 43cm

Backrest waist span

20.47in / 52cm

Headrest vertical range

5.51in / 14cm

Headrest horizontal range

4.72in / 12cm

Weight limit

Up to 399 lbs

User height

5'10" - 6'7"

• Value: 4 / 5

LiberNovo Maxis: Assembly

(Image credit: Future)

This beast of a chair came in two massive boxes (three, if you count the footrest).

As ever, I recommend building this in the room you’ll use it in because this one is heavy and unwieldy to move. The gouges and marks on my wall as I struggled to move it upstairs are evidence of that.

All told, it took me around 40 minutes from unboxing to fully built chair. That’s on the longer side, but LiberNovo makes assembly as easy as possible. Forget your little instruction manuals with walls of text. This one comes with a massive sheet of card that pictorially guides you through each and every step.

It’s also the first office chair I’ve ever tested that includes white gloves for handling it. Maybe that’s over the top, but can bet I pulled them on and wore them throughout the assembly process.

• Assembly: 5 / 5

LiberNovo Maxis: Design & build

(Image credit: Future)

Build quality and design are superb. The pieces feel weighty, and I experienced no creaking or squeaking as I swivelled, reclined, and generally made a nuisance of myself at my desk.

This is a premium chair across the board, right down to the wide single-piece aluminum base that feels like it will capably and confidently support anyone up to the recommended weight of 399 lbs (181kg).

Being built for big and tall users, the Maxis is designed for those between 5'10” and 6'7”. Now, I’m an inch shy of the minimum recommended height and yes, it is slightly too large for me - particularly in the broad seat, which provides ample width and depth. I had to dial down the adjustability on the headrest and armrests to its minimum settings to stay comfortable and snug. Effectively, my negative experience here is a positive for larger, taller body types.

In terms of design, I had one thought: This is like an office chair designed by HR Geiger with its Xenomorph-like exoskeleton on the tapering backrest. Unlike so many I test, it’s a real executive statement piece.

• Design & build: 5 / 5

LiberNovo Maxis: Performance & features

(Image credit: Future)

I always judge office chairs chiefly on two factors: comfort and support. Here, the LiberNovo Maxis is an easy win. I used this chair for eight hours a day while working and it stayed comfortable from first to last hour. After that, I spent a few extra hours in it, feet up on the footrest, while gaming. I still didn’t tire of the chair or feel fatigue or numbness that some cheap chairs can inflict on me.

And then, of course, there’s that back massager. Actually, I’m not sure ‘massager’ is the right word here. LiberNovo calls it the OmniStretch, billing it as a way to lean back and decompress. I’d liken it to having a couple of fists kneading deep into your lower back while the whole backrest quickly but gently vibrates. That may not sound comfortable, but I promise you it is. It runs for a set five minutes at the press of a button. My pregnant wife has been using it daily for relaxation and pain relief.

Now, I generally avoid foam and fabric office chairs. I run hot, and prefer breathable mesh. And while the seat can get warm when sitting down all day, I found the two-speed cooling fan - only available on the Airflow model - was a very good solution that actually helped maintain a cooler body temperature.

(Image credit: Future)

Adjustability is excellent on this chair, and I found it easy to fiddle around with the headrest, seat elevation, recline tension, and swivel armrests. However, the standout mechanism is the motorized lumbar support buttons located below the left armrest. So, I’m not constantly reaching under or around the chair to adjust the positioning for continued support.

What’s notable is the Dynamic Support, so when I reclined back, the seat stayed stable while the armrests dropped back with me so I could feel supported in any position. I appreciated the steady recline system in place here, too. As you lean back, it won’t suddenly fall back, but eases itself into position. The tension can be altered using the under-seat knob, while the recline can be set to lock at different angles depending on how far you want to lean back.

Where it lacks adjustments is the seat depth, which is fixed at a larger-than-average 52cm, which makes it more suitable for taller users. I would’ve also liked lockable armrests. Like a lot of office chairs, they’re directional, moving laterally and swinging in and out without much pressure. That’s fine if you’re getting up and moving around a lot, but not if you’re locking in for longer work sessions. But I appreciate this may be a me problem - I had the same complaint with the Boulies EP600 I recently reviewed.

As I say, it’s a lot of chair for the money - the only one I’ve tested that comes with a rechargeable battery. And not every professional, whether in the office or working hybrid/remote, will need a seat at this level. But I can’t fault the comfort or design at all.

• Performance & features: 5 / 5

Should I buy the LiberNovo Maxis?

(Image credit: Future)✅ Buy it if...

You’re built bigger or taller. The Maxis is specifically engineered for larger body types without compromising on style, comfort, or support.

You want all the bells and whistles. This high-quality office chair does it all. If you’re going to splurge out, it might as well be one with a massager and fan.

❌ Don't buy it if...

You don’t need the extra features. You're paying for well-designed ergonomics and features most office chairs will never have.

You’re under 5’10”. I’d recommend the LiberNovo Omni or LiberNovo Omni Pro if you want the same design ethos.

How I tested the LiberNovo Maxis

(Image credit: Future)

For two weeks, the LiberNovo Maxis Airflow became my daily driver chair. Eight hours a day, minimum, I've been sitting on it at work. And, once the work laptop was closed, I carried on using it, both while gaming and using the OmniStretch massaging feature multiple times throughout the testing period (when I could get my wife to stop using it!). During those times, I tended to pair it with LiberNovo's adjustable footrest for the added relaxation.

Acer Swift Spin 14 AI review: Two Minute Review

I really like the Acer Swift Air 14 and not just because of the price. It’s very portable, attractive in that clean minimalist way popularised by a certain Cupertino company, and comes with a battery life that’s as good as any other I’ve come across.

Acer has been impressing me with its recent Swift laptops, and this one is no exception. Of course, the price tag makes it a no-brainer for anyone wanting a solid, portable laptop at an almost budget price tag. It’s not sub-$500 / £500, but it’s close. I certainly think it’s one of the best laptops for the price.

It does, however, have some of the shortcomings that even the best Ultrabooks have. It’s not the most powerful laptop out there, by any stretch of the imagination – this is for people who just want to go online and do some office work or stream, not game or edit video. And the audio suffers from the laptop's smaller design.

Those things actually don’t bother me. That’s not what this laptop is supposed to be used for. But, Acer makes the same weird design choice that even Apple makes on more budget models, where there are two USB-C ports, both of which can be used for power, but, for whatever reason, they’re on the same side of the computer.

Still, quibbles aside, the amount of computer you get for the price in the Acer Swift Air 14 is pretty impressive.

The Acer Swift Air 14 has an etched lid, though it has more minimal etchings in some territories. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)Acer Swift Air 14 review: Price & Availability

• How much does it cost? $699.99 / £749.99 (about AU$1,010)
• When is it available? Available now
• Where can you get it? Available in the US and UK

If you’re looking for the Windows version of the Apple MacBook Neo, the Acer Swift Air 14 offers just as much value. The base configuration might start at a higher $699.99 / £749.99 (about AU$1,010) price tag, but if you want to match the Swift Air 14’s 512GB of storage, then two laptops end up at the same price. Unfortunately, that currently excludes Australia as it hasn’t yet been released there.

Granted, you’re not getting the most powerful laptop out there. If you’re looking for something similar but better, the Acer Swift Spin 14 AI is that computer. Sure, it’s $1,499.99 / £1,399 (about AU$2,150), but its Qualcomm CPU has double the cores and triple the NPUs than the base version of the Acer Swift Air 14’s Intel Core 5 320 CPU. You can upgrade the Acer Swift Air 14 to a configuration with the Intel Core 7 350 CPU and 12GB of RAM, but it’s still not going to do the same heavy lifting. Plus, the Acer Swift Spin 14 AI has a 360-degree hinge, touchscreen, and stylus.

It might be better to consider the Acer Swift Air 14 as Acer’s budget entry in its Swift line. It’s an excellent value while still functioning as a competent Ultrabook.

• Value score: 5 / 5

Acer Swift Air 14 review: specs

The Acer Swift Air 14 comes in two variants. The base configuration comes with the Intel Core 5 320 CPU with 8GB of RAM, and a model with an Intel Core 7 350 and 12GB of RAM. The difference in processors aren’t that different, except that the Intel Core 7 350 can be boosted to a higher turbo frequency, 4.8GHz vs 4.6, and has 21 TOPS NPU compared to the Intel Core 5 320’s 20 TOPS NPU.

Base

Max

Price

$699.99 / £749.99 (about AU$1,010)

£1,049.99 (about $1,400 / AU$2,020)

CPU

Intel Core 5 320

Intel Core 7 350

GPU

Intel Graphics

Intel Graphics

RAM

8GB LPPDDR5X

12GB LPPDDR5X

Storage

512GB PCIe Gen3 SSD

512GB PCIe Gen3 SSD

Display

14-inch diagonal, WUXGA (1920 x 1200) display up to 120Hz, 300 nits

14-inch diagonal, WUXGA (1920 x 1200) display up to 120Hz, 300 nits

Ports and Connectivity

2x USB-4 Type C, 1x USB-3.2 Type A, Aux

2x USB-4 Type C, 1x USB-3.2 Type A, Aux

Wireless

Realtek Wi-Fi 6E (2x2) and Bluetooth 5.3

Realtek Wi-Fi 6E (2x2) and Bluetooth 5.3

Camera

Full HD IR camera with physical privacy shutter

Full HD IR camera with physical privacy shutter

Dimensions

1.19 kg (2.62 lbs)

1.19 kg (2.62 lbs)

Weight

313.99 x 222.65 x 12.9/18 mm / 12.36 x 8.77 x 0.51/0.71 inches

313.99 x 222.65 x 12.9/18 mm / 12.36 x 8.77 x 0.51/0.71 inches

Beyond those internal configuration differences, the Acer Swift Air 14 is available in four different colors – Sage Green, Frost Blue, Blossom Pink, and Lilac Purple with only the Sage Green and Blossom Pink available in the UK. EMEA countries, including the UK, also sport more minimalist etchings on the lid.

Acer Swift Air 14 review: Design

• Very attractive, portable design
• Keyboard and touchpad are good but not amazing
• Both USB-Cs are on the left

The Acer Swift Air 14 is a gorgeous laptop. I’ve only seen the Sage Green color in person – the color of the test unit for this review – but the colors, lid etchings, and aluminum chassis all present a very aesthetically pleasing package. I imagine that the other three colors look just as good in that way that I think makes this an attractive alternative to the Macbook Neo.

Also in its favor is its utter portability. It weighs just over two and a half pounds. That’s about the same as an ankle weight. And it’s just over a half inch thick at its thinnest point. I don’t think you can really get any more portable without going down in screen size to a 13-inch laptop.

The Acer Swift Air 14 is attractive in its various colors. The reviewed model came in Sage green. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

Speaking of which, its 14-inch screen is a good-looking, if not amazing, non-touch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 1920x1200p resolution. It does get up to 300 nits of brightness – I typically have the brightness up only halfway when I’m using it.

I appreciate the 180-degree hinge, but that’s mostly because I feel like I don’t have to be as gentle with the Acer Swift Air 14 when opening it. I could see its use, though, if you want to share your screen with someone sitting across from you. If you do that, the viewing angle is more than enough for both people to see at 170 degrees.

The Acer Swift Air 14 comes with a 180-degree hinge for a bit more flexibility. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

Moving on, the keyboard is pleasant to use if nothing spectacular. I used the Acer Swift Air 14 to write this review and didn’t feel fatigue from typing. At the same time, it’s a linear keyboard with a somewhat short travel.

The trackpad is fairly responsive and accurate, though I found it to be a little too sensitive at times when my thumb was a little too close to it and had trouble getting the cursor to cooperate.

The Acer Swift Air 14's keyboard and touchpad are pretty good to use, if not mind-blowing. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

The port selection is about as minimal as one would expect on a laptop like this. Along with a USB-A port and headphone jack are two USB-C ports. Unfortunately, they’re both on the left side, a design choice that I always dislike since I find myself regularly having to plug the computer in on the right side, sometimes from a distance too.

The Acer Swift Air 14 has two USB-C ports for charging, both on the same side of the laptop. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

• Design score: 4.5 / 5

Acer Swift Air 14 review: Performance

• Decent for day-to-day work
• Slows down if using multiple RAM-intensive tabs
• Sound quality is just okay

Acer Swift Air 14 benchmarks

Here's how the Acer Swift Air 14 performed in our suite of benchmark tests:

3DMark: Fire Strike: 3544; Time Spy: 1643; Night Raid: 18712; Steel Nomad Light: 1164
GeekBench 7: 2337 (single-core); 7529 (multi-core)
25GB File Copy: 39.64
Handbrake 1.11.1: 9:34
CrossMark: Overall: 1358 Productivity: 1389 Creativity: 1431 Responsiveness: 1083
Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (1080p): 24.716 fps; (1920x1200p) 24.229 fps
Borderlands 3 (1080p): 3.66 fps; (1920x1200p) 4.44 fps
Web Surfing (Battery Informant): 16:52:40

One of the downsides of a laptop built for a sub-$1,000 price tag is that either the design or performance (or both) suffer. The design on the Acer Swift Air 14 is pretty good... so it goes that the performance is what is throttled.

Now, Acer built this laptop to hit a price point, but the company also built it to an expectation. This is supposed to be an extremely portable laptop with long battery life for not much money.

With that in mind, Acer used the affordable Intel Core 5 320 six-core CPU with a speed of 1.5GHz and 20 TOPs (21 for the Core 7 350) and put only 8GB of RAM in the computer. At least the 512GB SSD storage is sufficient.

The Acer Swift Air 14 can do some light gaming, but it's not a powerhouse. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

If you’re looking for a laptop to work on while in a cafe responding to emails in between social media side quests, then what the Acer Swift Air 14 does is more than enough. Even using the AI features like Acer PurifiedView and PurifiedVoice during video calls, both of which work well, or messing with CoPilot+ doesn’t tax this laptop.

But it’s not too hard to push the Acer Swift Air 14. When I’ve tabs open that require a lot of RAM and try to switch windows, I’ve experienced some freezing. And anything but the least demanding games are a jittery mess. I wouldn’t use this laptop for 4K video editing, either. A powerhouse this is not. Then again, it’s not meant to be.

As far as the sound quality goes, the Acer Swift Air 14 suffers from what ails just about all thin and light laptops. There’s just no room for any speakers capable of producing a full sound and it shows. There’s not much bass and the sound is on the thinner side. That said, it’s not harsh, so listening to music in the background while working is still pleasant.

One of the Acer Swift Air 14's AI apps is PurifiedVoice, which can minimize background noise or focus a speaker's voice during a video call. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

• Performance score: 4 / 5

Acer Swift Air 14 review: Battery life

• Almost 17 hours of battery life
• Charges relatively quickly

The new benchmark for a good laptop battery life these days is anything over ten to twelve hours. So, the fact that the Acer Swift Air 14 can hit almost seventeen hours in our benchmark is remarkable. Note that this benchmark requires the laptop to run for that entire amount unplugged.

I’ve been using this laptop regularly for a little over a week and I don’t think I’ve seen it go below 50%. I have charged it a few times, mostly out of habit, but I have yet to be compelled to find an outlet. Plus, it does a good job of holding its charge when the lid is closed.

Acer advertises that the Swift Air 14 has fast charging, which might be true on certain settings, but I found it to charge at a still-good 1% a minute rate when set to a balanced performance mode.

You can access a handful of proprietary AI-powered apps through the AcerSense app. You can also check and change battery settings here. (Image credit: Future / James Holland)

• Battery Life score: 5 / 5

Should I buy the Acer Swift Air 14?

Attributes

Notes

Rating

Value

The price is quite exceptional for what you get. It might be budget, but doesn’t look, feel, or work like a budget laptop.

5 / 5

Design

It looks great, is incredibly portable, and has a serviceable keyboard and touchpad. I do wish the two USB-C ports were on separate sides.

4.5 / 5

Performance

Good enough for everyday use but not demanding tasks, the Swift Air 14 can also handle some AI tasks. Audio is okay.

4 / 5

Battery Life

I’m not sure if the battery life can get any more impressive. You can get about two days’ worth of use without charging.

5 / 5

Final Score

Great value and great design, not to mention fantastic battery life, are only slightly hampered by less-powerful performance.

4.5 / 5

Buy it if…

You need the ultimate in battery life
The Acer Swift Air 14’s battery life is impressive to say the least. It can last a couple days without a charge, and charges back up relatively quickly.View Deal

You need portability
Not only is this laptop attractive in that MacBook kind-of-way, but it’s very light and thin, making it perfect to just throw in a backpack and take it on the road.View Deal

You’re on a budget
One of the best things about the Acer Swift Air 14 is its price. It feels like a much better laptop than what I would expect for $700 / £750.View Deal

Don't buy it if…

You want a lot of power
The Acer Swift Air 14 does what it does well, but it can’t handle demanding tasks. If you want or need a lot of power, there are plenty of less portable alternatives that might be a better option.View Deal

You get irritated by having all the USB-C ports on the same side
I know it’s probably not a big deal, but it’s one of those design choices that actually affects day-to-day use if you’re plugging into random outlets. There will be times where running the cable behind the laptop to the other side gets in the way or shortens the distance that you can be from an outlet.View Deal

Acer Swift Air 14 review: Also Consider

If our Acer Swift Air 14 review has you considering other options, here are two laptops to consider...

Acer Swift Spin 14 AI

The Acer Swift Spin 14 AI is a gorgeous laptop with a surprising amount of power, a battery life that competes with the Swift Air 14, and a 360-degree hinge and touch screen that allows for seamless 2-in-1 use.

Read our full Acer Swift Spin 14 AI review

Apple MacBook Neo

If you ever wanted an Apple laptop but at a budget price, there’s nothing better than this laptop. It has that classic MacBook look, full MacOS experience, and an exceptional screen, especially for the price. Of course, it is a bit limited in power and comes with just two USB-C ports.

Read our full Apple MacBook Neo review

How I tested the Acer Swift Air 14

• Tested for a week and a half
• Used it for work, gaming, and streaming
• Messed with its AI capabilities

I used the Acer Swift Air 14 for a week and a half. I used it for work, including typing up this review (along with the requisite online research). I used it to stream video. I even did some light gaming and attempted some semi-serious gaming. I played around with the AI as well.

After spending time with the Acer Swift Air 14, it’s clear that this is meant for those that want a portable and attractive laptop that’s nice to use on a limited budget.

I’ve spent the last few years reviewing tech gear for gaming and otherwise, where I’ve gotten a feel for what to look for and how to put a piece of kit through its paces to see whether it’s worth the recommendation.

• First reviewed: October 2026

AGM Pad P3: 2-minute review

Rugged tablets usually follow one rule. Make them big, make them heavy and hope the specification sheet distracts you.

The AGM Pad P3 does not play that game. It is an 8.68-inch tablet that measures 232 x 146 x 14.5mm. That is thin for a device that claims IP68 and IP69K protection. It means the tablet can survive brief submersion and high-pressure water jets. AGM says it is built for one-handed use, and it includes an adjustable strap for hands-free carrying.

Inside is the MediaTek Helio G99. It is an octa-core chip built on a 6nm process. It is paired with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. A microSD slot can add up to 1TB more if you need extra capacity. The SoC wouldn’t be classed as fast in 2026, but it has proved dependable in a lot of budget hardware, and it’s better than many of its competitors. Android 16 is the real surprise, since many rivals are still shipping with Android 14. And some of those won’t be getting an upgrade to the latest release.

If this tablet has a weakness, it might be the screen. It has a 120Hz IPS panel with an 800 x 1340 resolution, and AGM quotes a peak brightness of 600 nits. That smooth refresh rate helps scrolling feel quick, but the limited resolution only supports 720p video playback.

Connectivity is practical, but hardly concurrent. You get dual 4G SIM support and eSIM, plus NFC, GPS and WiFi. But there is no 5G, which will matter to some buyers and not to others. The 7,200mAh battery charges at 18W, so this is not a device you can top up in a hurry.

On the back is a 50MP main camera, and on the front is an 8MP selfie, not great but not terrible either. The system supports at least Widevine L1, meaning Netflix and other streaming services can play in HD.

So this is a compact, tough and affordable tablet. It makes sensible choices where cheaper rivals make clumsy ones with even older technology and lesser specifications.

It might not be the best rugged tablet I’ve tested, but it represents good value for money.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)AGM Pad P3: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? $236/£249/€300
• When is it out? Available now
• Where can you get it? Directly from AGM Mobile

To avoid confusion, this hardware has several naming options, including the AGM G3 Compact tablet and the AGM Pad P3, so I’ll use the latter.

The AGM Pad P3 is sold through the AGM EU store at a price range of €299 to €329, depending on whether you choose to include a tablet stand. The store lists versions with and without a tablet stand. AGM is also running a promotion that includes a free stylus with purchase, although this wasn’t included with my review model.

In the USA, you can get this hardware on Amazon for $235.99, and in the UK it’s £249.99.

That is a lot of tablet for the money. It is also significantly cheaper than AGM's own Pad P2 Active, which lists at €369 to €408.90 in the same store. The Pad P2 Active still runs Android 14. The P3 is smaller, has a faster 120Hz screen and runs a newer operating system.

Looking at the usual brand suspects for rugged tablets reveals that the Pad P3 may have found a niche, since most alternatives are more expensive, some excessively so.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 5 is closer to $500. However, you get a much better software ecosystem, guaranteed updates, Samsung Knox enterprise security, and an included IP68-rated S Pen stylus. Samsung also have the Galaxy Tab Active 4 Pro, but that 10.1-inch design is north of $650.

A more affordable Samsung option is the Galaxy Tab A9 (8.7-inch), a tablet that mirrors the size of the AGM P3. It is incredibly affordable at around $175, features a great UI, and has mass-market accessory support. However, it lacks the smooth 120Hz fluid display, comes with only 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM and lacks the processing power of the P3's Helio G99 chip.

The two competitors that AGM is truly up against are Ulefone and Oukitel, with the Armor Pad Pro from Ulefone and the RT3 Pro from Oukitel. The Armor Pad Pro is only $220, and that price includes 8GB of RAM and better cameras, but the SoC is less powerful.

The Oukitel RT3 Pro is the same price, comes with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of ROM, has only a 16MP main camera and runs Android 14. As with the Ulefone, it uses a less powerful SoC, in this case the G81.

The bottom line is that as a new product, the AGM Pad P3 is slightly more expensive than the closest competitor options, but the amount of processing power, RAM, and the 50MP primary camera sensor more than justify the extra money.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

• Value score: 4/5

AGM Pad P3: Specs

Item

Spec

CPU:

MediaTek Helio G99 (2x Cortex A76 at 2.2GHz + 6x Cortex A55 at 2.0GHz)

GPU:

ARM Mali G57 MC2

RAM:

6GB

Storage:

128GB + microSD (up to 1TB)

Screen:

8.68-inch IPS LCD, 120Hz

Resolution:

800 x 1340 (HD+), about 180ppi

Peak brightness

600 nits

SIM:

Dual 4G SIM plus eSIM

Weight:

535g (measured)

Dimensions:

232 x 146 x 14.5mm

Rugged spec:

IP68 and IP69K, MIL STD 810H [to be confirmed]

Rear cameras:

50MP main (single sensor)

Front camera:

8MP

Networking:

4G LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, GPS

Streaming:

Widevine L1

OS:

Android 16

Battery:

7,200mAh, 18W wired charging

Extras:

Adjustable carry strap, free stylus promotion, optional rotating metal stand

Colours:

Grey

AGM Pad P3: Design

• Slim by rugged standards
• One-handed use
• Stand is optional

Most rugged tablets are built like paving slabs. The AGM Pad P3 tries to avoid that form factor, being only 14.5mm thick, making it slimmer than many ordinary tablets with a protective case on.

My scales say it weighs 535g, although the official numbers are 540g, but that might include the provided strap. That is well under half the weight of the 8849 Tank Pad Ultra, which is a big difference if you carry a tablet all day.

The smaller 8.68-inch screen is critical to the design, letting you hold it in one hand like a large phone. That suits tradespeople on a job site, delivery staff and anyone using a tablet on their feet. An included strap supports hands-free carrying, connecting via loops through slots in each corner.

AGM offers an optional metal stand, which was included with my review machine. This relatively lightweight stand uses four tiny screws to secure it to the back of the P3. It offers a reasonably wide range of positions, from almost upright to nearly flat. In at least one position, it also supports the tablet in portrait orientation.

My only concern with the stand is that the small screws might easily be lost if you decide to remove them outdoors, and without those you won’t be able to reattach it.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

The button layout is simple and predictable, with no custom buttons or special functions other than the power button and volume rocker. Because the buttons are small, there is no fingerprint reader, but it supports facial recognition from the front-facing camera.

The SIM and microSD tray was one of my least desirable aspects of the P3. The rubber plug is thin and difficult to remove, and once it's shifted, you need to then find the tray ejector from the box to get the SIM tray out. It’s all excessively fiddly, and it might have been easier without requiring a tool. The tray accepts either two SIMs or a SIM and microSD, but as this tablet supports an eSIM, that’s hardly a significant limitation.

The IP68 and IP69K ratings are the expected baseline, providing serious protection. IP69K adds resistance to high-pressure, high-temperature water jets. The AGM promotional material also cites a MIL-STD 810H drop test, but it doesn't say how far it fell or what surface it landed on. It’s normally impossible for reviewers to test devices to destruction, but the P3 looks like it could take some abuse and keep working.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

Design score: 4/5

AGM Pad P3: Hardware

• MediaTek Helio G99
• 8.68-inch 120Hz display
• 7,200mAh battery

The Helio G99 is an old friend, as I’ve covered it in both tablet and phone reviews previously. It uses two fast Cortex-A76 cores and six efficient A55 cores on a 6nm process. The Mali G57 GPU is modest, but better than what you find in budget phones. The G99 is a platform for apps, maps, documents, and video, not demanding games.

AGM has paired it with 6GB of RAM, which is adequate but not exactly indulgent. The 128GB of storage is equally fine, and the microSD slot means you can get more storage space if you need it. Cards up to 1TB are supported, although you can only use one physical phone SIM if you install a microSD.

From a hardware perspective, the most compromised feature is the screen.

At 800 x 1340 on an 8.68-inch panel, it delivers only about 180 pixels per inch. That is on the low side, making text slightly lumpy and fine detail in photos appears missing until you zoom in. On the plus side, the 120Hz refresh rate makes everything feel smoother than the resolution suggests.

AGM claims a peak of 600 nits, and it can be bright, but the glossy display still makes it hard to see in natural outdoor light. If you can find a screen protector with an anti-reflection coating that fits, it might work better outdoors.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

As I mentioned in the intro, Widevine L1 certification is included, enabling it to stream HD content from most content providers. The only caveat to that is that the screen resolution doesn’t allow for anything higher than 720p, which has been designated ‘HD’ by marketing gurus.

I wish this tablet had an HDMI port, where it could display 1080p to a suitable TV, because the tablet is undoubtedly capable of doing that. But given how many tablets have only Widevine L3 encryption, even expensive ones, AGM deserves recognition for using L1.

The 7,200mAh battery is modest, but the screen is small, and the SoC is reasonably frugal, so it still lasts a decent amount of time. The snag is that the fastest charging you can get with the included charger is 18W. Some phones can charge at 55W, and some tablets take more power than that. In my performance assessment, I’ll cover how 18W charging affects speed.

The last few points about the hardware in the P3 are that it has no 5G, though dual 4G SIM and eSIM support covers most uses. NFC and GPS are on board.

Overall, not a spectacular platform, but one that is appropriate to its price and potential uses.

• Hardware score: 3.5/5

AGM Pad P3: Cameras

• 50MP on the rear
• 8MP on the front
• Two cameras in total

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

The AGM Pad P3 has two cameras:

Rear camera: 50MP Omnivision OV50B40
Front camera: 8MP BYD BF20A1

The main camera is a 50MP unit by Omnivision, the OV50B40. For a camera sensor in a tablet, this one is reasonable, as it uses pixel binning to achieve better colour representation.

But, in my testing, it didn’t care much for low-light conditions, resulting in grainy results.

It is possible to take some good pictures with this sensor, but most are taken outside in strong natural light. As you can see in my indoor shots, this sensor tends to crush contrast and slightly wash out saturation below a certain lighting threshold.

Looking at the drivers compiled for the Android distro on this phone, it suggests there might also be a 0.3MP focusing sensor, but AGM doesn’t explicitly mention it or list it in the phone's specifications.

What it does mention for selfie taking is an 8MP BYD chip designed by that brand for cars, like parking cameras and self-driving functionality.

With many phones now coming with Sony 32MP selfie cameras, this one appears to be intended as a cost-saving measure for the makers.

What’s slightly fascinating is that the best video resolution available is the same for both front- and rear-facing cameras, that being 1080p. Although the rear can offer 60fps over 30fps on the front.

The 50MP Omnivision OV50B40 specification says it supports video at 8K at 30fps, 4K at 90fps, 1080p at 240fps, and 720p at a whopping 480fps. However, the G99 can only process 2K (2048 x 1080) at 30 fps, but the camera app doesn’t have those as options. So what does it do with all those unused sensor pixels? It has stabilisation, which is useful for shooting on the move.

Let us be realistic. Nobody buys a tablet like this for photography, I hope. It is a tool for documenting. Think site inspections, damage records and stock checks. What matters is whether the camera is quick, steady and legible.

The primary sensor is good enough for that, and the selfie camera is acceptable for quick face-to-face conversations.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)AGM Pad P3 Camera samplesMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark PickavanceMark Pickavance

• Camera score: 3/5

AGM Pad P3: Performance

• Modern SoC
• Good battery life

Tablet

AGM Pad P3

Ulefone Armor Pad Pro

SoC

MediaTek Helio G99

MediaTek Helio G88

GPU

ARM Mali-G57 MC2

ARM Mali-G52 MC2

Mem

8GB/128GB

8GB/128GB

Weight

535g

560g

Battery Capacity

mAh

7200

7,650

Geekbench

Single

726

342

Multi

2014

1239

OpenCL

1604

1137

Vulkan

1541

1127

PCMark

3.0 Score

10014

7070

Battery

19h 50m (0%)

15H 4m (20%)

Charge 30

%

22%

6%

Passmark

Score

5968

6800

CPU

4579

3280

3DMark

Slingshot OGL

2607

1652

Slingshot Ex. OGL

2584

1259

Slingshot Ex. Vulkan

2463

1313

Wildlife

1314

641

Wildlife Extreme

374

N/A

The Helio G99 is no speed demon, but it’s better than the G88 that Ulefone used in its original Armor Pad Pro. That puts it in the middle of the budget field.

The natural comparison was AGM's own Pad P2 Active, which uses the same chip, but there wasn’t much to gain from comparing such similar machines.

The more interesting aspects of these results are to do with battery life, since the G99 is a 6nm chip, and the G88 is 12nm. The reduction in track size for the G99 provides greater power efficiency, and that is reflected in the nearly 20 hours it ran PCMark battery test versus the 15 that the G88 system managed. Admittedly, the Ulefone Armour Pad Pro still had 20% of power left, hinting at another two hours and 15 minutes of runtime. But given that the battery is 6.25% larger on the Pad Pro, it's still an impressive win for the Pad P3.

Charging was abysmal on the Ulefone tablet, and while it's better on the AGM, it could still take between 2.5 and three hours to get a full charge using the included charger.

I also noticed that if you use a high-end charger, like one of the Ugreen Nexode power packs, it actually charges slower than normal. Phones and tablets that are tuned to a specific charger is a recent development, and one I’m not keen on.

Looking at these numbers, I expect everyday use to be fine with the Pad P3. The 120Hz screen helps the interface feel snappier than the silicon deserves, which is why I expect it was used. Android 16 is also a bonus, as it brings better security and, in theory, longer support.

But AGM could improve Android update availability, since they’ve historically never made it a selling point.

• Performance score: 3/5

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)AGM Pad P3: Final verdict

For tradespeople, delivery staff and field workers, the AGM Pad P3 is easy to recommend. It is tough, small and cheap. It also gets the details right that matter in daily use, like Widevine L1 and a modern version of Android.

For everyone else, it is a sensible rugged option that doesn't cost much or take up much luggage space. At this price, one shouldn’t expect miracles, obviously.

The shortcomings are plain. The screen resolution is low for the size. The Helio G99 is a budget chip, and 18W charging is slow. There is also no 5G, if that’s important to you. None of these caveats is a surprise at this price, but it's best to go into this with your eyes wide open.

Compared with the AGM Pad P2 Active, the P3 is cheaper, smaller, newer and has a faster screen, but the same underlying SoC. It lacks the removable case of the older tablet.

If you need something more powerful, bigger or with a projector, you should look elsewhere.

Which device suits you depends on how much you value portability, because that’s probably the strongest aspect of the AGM Pad P3.

Should I buy a AGM Pad P3?AGM Pad P3 Score Card

Attributes

Notes

Rating

Value

Low price for a rugged tablet with a modern OS

4/5

Design

Slim, compact and tough

4/5

Hardware

Sensible choices, but a low-resolution screen

3.5/5

Camera

Fit for documentation work, but not ideal for photography

3/5

Performance

Old SoC delivers an adequate budget platform

3/5

Overall

Easy to carry and use, and highly affordable

3.5/5

Buy it if...

You want a tablet that is easy to carry
At 14.5mm thick and with a small screen, it fits places that larger rugged tablets cannot. For those who need to hike to a remote location, or want to travel light, the AGM Pad P3 will be your lightweight companion.

You stream content on the move
Widevine L1 means HD playback on major streaming services, so you can watch movies in at least 720p, not 480p. It’s only the screen resolution that holds it back from using 1080p sources.

Don't buy it if...

Don’t buy if...

You need a sharp screen
At 800 x 1340, text and images are not crisp, and it’s not ideal for reviewing video or still image captures that are at much higher resolution than the display.

You need fast charging
An 18W charger will take a while to fill the battery, so this isn’t the tablet you need for work and forget to connect to the charger the night before. Also, you need to use the charger that came in the box to get the fastest possible charge.

Also Consider

Ulefone Armor Pad 5 Ultra
A 200-lumen DLP projector, 120W charging, heavier at 1.6kg, but with dual 1000-lumen floodlights and auto-keystone correction. The issue is that this tablet is much more expensive, even if it has better all-around specs.

Read my full Ulefone Armor Pad 5 Ultra review

Ulefone Armor Pad Pro
Another practical, rugged design with an inbuilt camping light, with a slightly older SoC than that in the AGM Pad P3. However, it has better camera sensors and 8GB of RAM. And it has the uSmart expansion port that enables the attachment of endoscopes or microscopes.

Read my full Ulefone Armor Pad Pro reviewView Deal

For more ruggedized devices, we've reviewed the best rugged phones, the best rugged laptops and the best rugged hard drives

Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark: two-minute review

The Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is one of the new generation of laptops powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip. This all-in-one system-on-a-chip is packing 20 ARM CPU cores, 6144 CUDA GPU backed up by 64GB of RAM and promises to offer fantastic AI, creative and gaming performance in a lightweight, portable form factor. So how does this new SoC version of the Asus ProArt P16 laptop fare?

When powering up the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark for the first time, perhaps the first thing I noticed is its huge, vibrant 16-inch OLED screen. With a peak brightness of 1,100 nits and a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, it looked gorgeous whether I was loading up my digital artworks or watching movies. And its 120Hz VRR makes it perfect for playing games on.

That’s not the only part of the ProArt P16’s design that feels premium. Its overall build quality feels suitably luxe, with the smooth metal of its upper casing feeling wonderfully tactile. Inside, its keyboard is well designed and feels pleasant to type on, while its haptic trackpad is precise and gives snappy feedback, even if I did find it too easy to trigger the right click at first. I will say its lid has a little bit too much wobble for my liking though: if I’m honest, I’d expect a laptop at this price to have a slightly more stable hinge.

But let’s not just focus on the superficial here: the ProArt P16 RTX Spark has a lot going on under the surface. That’s predominantly thanks to that Nvidia SoC, which enables it to tackle a wider range of tasks than even many of the best laptops.

Perhaps the most attention grabbing feature is its AI capabilities. Designed for hybrid workflows, the RTX Spark makes it easy to use a combination of local and cloud models to run your AI agents. Testing it out with the Qwen 3 8B open-source local model, I certainly found it had pretty snappy performance for basic workflows, with a basic data analysis only taking about 12 minutes.

(Image credit: Future)

More involved tasks took much more refining and prompting over multiple sessions though — attempting to automate 3DMark benchmarks took many 75 minute runs before the completion time reduced significantly. Still, being able to run these workflows on such a lightweight, portable machine was pretty impressive

Another area the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark delivers potent performance is during creative tasks. Running multiple PugetBench benchmarks for automating Photoshop and Premier Pro workflows, the ProArt P16 was only a little behind Apple’s M5 chip when running image-based tasks and beat it when it came to video tasks. And this was borne out by my own testing: even my largest 4K 300dpi Photoshop file crammed full of clipping masks didn’t make it wince, with filters and generative fills executing smoothly. Even downscaling the whole image to 2K only took around five seconds, which isn’t bad for a nigh-on 2GB file.

Few SoCs to date have been designed with gaming performance in mind. But given Nvidia’s heritage in this space, it’s hardly surprising that the ProArt P16 RTX Spark is capable of some serious gaming power. While it’s not quite able to deliver at the same level as RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs, I enjoyed a very smooth 60fps on Cyberpunk 2077 on Raytracing Medium settings, while Gears of War: E-day ran at more solid than bedrock at over 110fps. So this laptop can achieve some stunning results, even if the performance you’ll get isn’t 100% the top of the range.

Given it can handle all of these tasks on the go, you’d hope it has a pretty capacious battery to back up that powerful chip. And it’s relatively good news on this front. While it only managed 11 hours of continuous video playback during my testing, during productivity based work it lasted well over 14 hours. That’s nowhere near as long-lasting as the Methuselah-like MacBook Pro M5 Pro, which clocked over 21 hours in our testing, but it’s certainly enough to get you through a standard day’s work.

Honestly, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is pretty adept at everything it tries to do: it’s a talented all-rounder. The only caveat really is its price: like many of the RTX Spark laptops, it isn’t cheap. Starting from $4,399.99 / £3,899.99 / AU$7,999, it costs just as much as a high-end gaming laptop or a pro-level creative workhorse — so, honestly, if you care more about getting the best performance you can in a specific niche, you may be better off investing in one of those instead.

However, if you need a single bow that can handle every single one of your strings, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is a good shout. It’ll handle running your own AI agents, whipping up creative work and even gaming for your downtime, all in a single, portable package.

(Image credit: Future)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review: price & availability

Having launched on October 9, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is available now. Unlike its smaller sibling, it ships with the higher-end Nvidia RTX Spark N1X with 6144-core GPU and 20-core CPU.

As a result, it’s a pricey meatball: its list price starts from $4,399.99 / £3,899.99 / AU$7,999 for the spec with 64GB RAM, 3K screen and 1TB SSD. That increases to $6,999.99 / £5,999.99 / AU$10,999 if you want the version with 128GB RAM, a 4K screen and a 2TB SSD.

Even with its impressive specs, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is a premium-priced laptop. Both in terms of price and spec, the ProArt P16 RTX Spark is pretty similar to the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, which will set you back $3,799.99 / £3,649 (around AU$5,410).

Alternatively, this kind of spend could net you the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 16-inch with 64GB for $2,999 / £3,999 / AU$6,299, which should give you a lot of performance and creative power but I wouldn’t expect to get quite as much gaming power for your buck.

(Image credit: Future)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review: Specs

Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark Base Config

Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark High end Config

Price

$4,399.99 / £3,899.99 / AU$7,999

$6,999.99 / £5,999.99 / AU$10,999

CPU

NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X 20-core

NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X 20-core CPU

GPU

NVIDIA Blackwell RTX 6144-core

NVIDIA Blackwell RTX 6144-core GPU

RAM

64GB

128GB

Storage

1TB SSD

2TB SSD

Display

16.0-inch, 2880 x 1800, 120Hz, 1100 nits OLED

16.0-inch, 3840 x 2400, 120Hz, 1600 nits OLED

Ports and Connectivity

3x USB-C, USB, HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack, SD Express 7.0 card reader

3x USB-C, USB, HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack, SD Express 7.0 card reader

Battery

99.9Wh

99.9Wh

Dimensions

13.94 x 9.57 x 0.63 inches / 354.1 x 243 x 15.9mm

13.94 x 9.57 x 0.63 inches / 354.1 x 243 x 15.9mm

Weight

3.9 lbs / 1.77kg

3.9 lbs / 1.77kg

(Image credit: Future)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review: design

• Gorgeous 3K OLED display
• Slim, sleek design
• Slightly flimsy hinge

Like all of the initial lineup RTX Spark laptops I’ve seen, the new Asus ProArt P16 is a sleek-looking unit. While its 16-inch span is pretty expansive, it’s still light in terms of weight, clocking in at 1.77 kg compared to my 16-inch MacBook Pro M4’s 2.14kg. It’s also got a pretty sleek silhouette — unlike some of the RTX Spark laptop models I’ve seen, it’s not concealing a much chonkier base with the help of gradually sloping bevels. And its nano black and neo white colorways feel suitably premium, although I marginally prefer the black version I tested here.

It’s not all about style though: the ProArt P16 RTX Spark has plenty of substance too. Manufactured from smooth metal, its external and internal surfaces feel wonderfully tactile, although I’d say the inner ones feel a tiny bit less sturdy than the solid bodywork of the outside. On top of this, there’s a tiny bit of wobble to its screen when you touch it — I’d expect a slightly firmer hinge on a premium laptop like this.

Speaking of that screen, I found Asus’s 3K touchscreen Lumina Pro OLED to be pretty impressive on the whole. Not only can my unit hit a peak brightness of 1,100 nits and a max 120Hz VRR but comparing it to my MacBook Pro M4’s Liquid Retina XDR display while watching Pixar’s Elemental was — sorry for this — pretty illuminating. While the latter can go slightly brighter at 1,600 nits peak, I didn’t find the difference all that pronounced. And the colors of the P16 RTX Spark’s OLED panel were noticeably more vibrant, with the reds, blues and greens of the fire, water and earth elements really popping.

(Image credit: Future)

To say laptop keyboards can be hit or miss might be the understatement of the century but, fortunately, the ProArt P16 RTX Spark’s keyboard falls more in the former category than the latter. Although the keys don’t have a huge amount of travel, I still found the typing experience to be pretty fluid. I rarely ever struggled to find my chosen key when touch typing — although I did occasionally knock both parts of the dual enter key, accidentally sticking random #s at the end of sentences. Still, it felt nice to use, whether I was prompting an AI agent or rapidly splatting demons in Doom: The Dark Ages.

For the most part, the P16 RTX Spark’s trackpad is also well designed. It’s very accurate, gives you a huge area for controlling your cursor and the haptic feedback is spot on, feeling exactly like a mechanical click. Really the only issue I found with it is the right click triggers far too far to the left, meaning I’d sometimes accidentally right click on certain elements. Still though, it’s a decent trackpad for the most part.

As you’d expect from a laptop this premium, the P16 RTX Spark comes with access to a wide range of connectivity options as well. On top of offering Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, it rocks a pretty decent selection of ports for such a slim laptop. These include three USB-C and one standard USB port, an HDMI 2.1 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack and an SD Express card reader. So even for most creative workflows, you should find you’re able to plug in plenty of devices to get things done.

• Design score: 4 / 5

(Image credit: Future)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review: performance

• Strong all-round performance
• Local AI workflows impressive but require some patience
• Specialist laptops can give better gaming or creative performance

I’ll be honest: by far the most exciting part about getting my hands on the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is that eponymous chip. Similar to Apple’s M-series silicon, Nvidia’s RTX Spark is the company’s first attempt at a full system-on-a-chip architecture. And given Nvidia’s involvement in both the AI and gaming spaces, it’s safe to say I was looking forward to putting the Nvidia Spark RTX through its paces.

Combining CPU, GPU and RAM all in one compact package, the version of the RTX Spark included with the Asus ProArt P16 I tested here rocks 20 ARM CPU cores backed up by 64GB of RAM. Meanwhile, on the graphics side, it wields 6144 CUDA GPU cores with 30GB integrated memory. In terms of raw hardware, it's less cooked and more meaty than steak tartare.

While this is the equivalent of using a steam hammer to obliterate a nut, general productivity tasks ran perfectly smoothly on the ProArt P16 RTX Spark. Whether I was browsing the web, tinkering with spreadsheets or leafing through huge PDFs, I never experienced any awkward hanging or slowdowns. Even on the odd occasion when I had to look something up online while the laptop worked on an AI task, there wasn’t any unpleasant gear-crunching, showing the ProArt P16 is plenty fast enough for general use.

But you’re unlikely to be buying an RTX Spark laptop just for doing a bit of Googling or filing your taxes. Instead, the most obvious use case for the RTX Spark chip in the ProArt P16 is its hybrid agentic AI functionality. Put simply, rather than being forced to choose between using cloud models that potentially jeopardize the security of your data and less powerful local models, this blended approach means you can pick and choose which parts of your workflow you’re going to outsource to the cloud and which you’ll keep under strict local control.

With its integrated fifth-generation Tensor cores, the RTX Spark should be perfectly placed to support this. To see how fast it could run some of these models locally, I used the MLPerf Client benchmarking tool to mimic data analyst and SWE agentic workflows using the Qwen 3 8B local model. And the results felt pretty rapid, with the pipelines completing after an average duration of 63.7 and 50.8 seconds and processing up to 14,005 and 10,238 tokens respectively.

But I wanted to see for myself what it could do. So I fired up Hermes, the open-source AI agent tool, and set it up to run the local open-source model Qwen3.8 27B to see what having my own personal AI version of Alfred could help me achieve.

(Image credit: Future)

Some of the basic tasks I threw its way, the RTX Spark practically scoffed at. When I asked Hermes to organize a spreadsheet full of web analytics for me and pull out actionable highlights, it whipped the file up into a pivot table and gave me six bullet points within about 12 minutes. Asking it to convert this info into a presentation with slides and prompts took a little longer at 23 minutes, but it helped highlight the best information to pitch — even if the slides themselves needed a considerable glow up before I’d ever call them up in a Zoom call.

In theory though, these hybrid agentic AI tools can go much further than this. Not only can you convert your prompts into skills or schedule them to run as daily tasks but you can even set them to target your apps and control your screen directly.

Some of my experiments paid off here: after one abortive run, I eventually managed to get Hermes to access my emails and create a daily digest in 70 minutes. But trying to automate some of my 3DMark benchmarking process ended up being a real rabbit hole — even with judicious prompts throughout the process and prompting Hermes to find ways to boost the skill’s efficiency, it took around eight runs to significantly improve its workflow. So it’s important to recognize that while some agentic pipelines may save you time in the long run, without utilizing some cloud models, training them may take a decent investment.

Agentic AI isn’t the only use you can put all of that processing power to though. While I’m not a massive fan of generative AI, I can definitely see how fast the RTX Spark is at whipping up new images and videos. Automating some imagery and video pipelines using ComfyUI, the laptop completed tests of Flux2.Dev - NVFP4 and Flux2.Klein 4B Base - NVFP4 models in just 46.5 and 16.2 seconds, while the LTX 2.5 - Distilled - NVFP4 video model took 88 seconds. Those are pretty swift run times for local generative models.

And if, like me, you prefer creating your own stuff from scratch, my testing showed the ProArt P16 RTX Spark can help here too. Using PugetBench to automate a range of creative workflows, I found Asus’s laptop was capable of some lightning fast processing.

Our standard Photoshop workflow completed in 10.83 minutes and achieved a score of 11,801 — that’s not far short of Apple’s M5 chip at 13,755. And the RTX Spark offered even speedier performance for video work, securing a score in our Premier Pro benchmark of 76,234 in 8.12 minutes, giving the M5 chip a bit of a drubbing at 69,887. Unfortunately, it can’t keep up with the similarly priced Apple MacBook Pro M5 Pro though, which managed to best it for both still imagery and video with scores of 15,204 and 105,580 respectively.

(Image credit: Future)

Naturally, I’m not just going to take these numbers on trust though, so I dug out one of my most demanding Photoshop files — a 4K, 300dpi PSD with dozens of clipping masks and adjustment layers — and checked how the ProArt P16 RTX Spark handled it.

Manipulating layers and applying filters caused scarcely any slowdown, in spite of the fact I’d tripled the number of layers in the file. Even downscaling the image to 2K — no small task given the total file size was now in excess of 2GB — only took around five seconds, which is pleasingly swift. And thanks to the optimization work that Adobe has been doing behind the scenes to allow its apps to take advantage of the RTX Spark’s AI capabilities, even generative fills and neural filters didn’t take long to generate.

When it comes to gaming performance, I’d say the ProArt P16 RTX Spark hovers somewhere between mid-range laptops with RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 GPUs. For example, when playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Raytracing Ultra settings at 1080p, I found the Asus hovered around 30.16fps — but, by contrast, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI with an RTX 5060 only reached a marginally smoother 34.47fps. Other games told a similar story. For example, Doom: The Dark Ages on Ultra settings sat at a pretty decent 48fps on the ProArt P16. In comparison, with its slightly beefier RTX 5070, the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra whipped the game like meringue into a much smoother 63.98fps.

But that’s running things on max settings. In practice, when actually playing games on more moderate settings, they ran plenty smoothly enough, especially those that are already well optimized for the RTX Spark. As I explored Dogtown in Cyberpunk 2077 at Raytracing Medium settings, it chugged along at a perfect stable 60fps. And playing Dogs of War: E-day on Ultra settings, I never saw it drop below 110fps, which shows what wonderfully smooth experiences you should still be able to expect from native gaming on the RTX Spark.

Honestly, I’d say that if you put the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark up against any similarly priced, specialist laptop focused on AI, creative workflows or gaming, you’ll likely find its performance can’t quite keep up. But that’s the point — RTX Spark laptops are a triple threat: they’re designed to be a swiss army knife that can handle every task you might throw at them. So if you want a lightweight laptop that combines the agentic AI hosting of a compact desktop, the creative power of the Apple M5 and the gaming oomph of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 5060, all in one handy package, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark should have your back.

• Performance score: 4.5 / 5

(Image credit: Future)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review: battery test

• Battery should last 14 hours of standard use
• Some similar rivals can outlast it

Being able to achieve all of this on the go is impressive. But for that to be sustainable, it needs a battery that can keep up with these kinds of heavy duty tasks. Fortunately, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is capable of decent battery life, even if it’s not quite as exceptional as some of its rivals.

Running it through our standard battery tests, I played a 1080p video at 50% brightness and volume to see how long it took to drain the battery from 100% to 0%. The ProArt P16 RTX Spark ran out of juice after 11h 23m — that’s not at all bad but it’s also not quite at the level I’d expect for a premium laptop like this.

But a video test doesn’t necessarily give you the full picture. One of the big benefits of an SoC is through boosted efficiency during CPU usage, so I wanted to also run some tests that showed how the laptop fared in action. Running PCMark 10’s applications battery test — which runs various Microsoft Office based tasks until the battery is drained — the ProArt P16 lasted 14h 24m.

That’s definitely a better score, even if it falls a little ways short of some of the best laptops for Windows. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra managed well over 15 hours in our benchmark tests and that wasn’t even the strongest contender. The MacBook Pro M5 Pro 16-inch clocked over 21 hours, which makes the ProArt P16’s look pretty short-lived in comparison.

Fortunately, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark does have one extra trick up its sleeve: its charging rate. Thanks to its 140W fast charging, topping your battery up again should be a relatively speedy affair. Sadly, my US unit didn’t come with a UK plug — slight oversight there — so I wasn’t able to test this as I would have liked. Still, my 65W charger topped it up relatively quickly, so you’ll definitely get pretty speedy charging out that 140W cable.

So I’d say that, all in all, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is capable of competitive battery life. When you’re doing standard office work, it’ll get you through a full day without you having to hunt out a charger. But it’s still not quite able to keep pace with the most enduring batteries on the market and particularly intensive tasks like AI or gaming are going to drain it much faster.

• Battery score: 4 / 5

(Image credit: Future)Should I buy the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark?

Attributes

Notes

Rating

Value

The Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark has a lot of power behind it, an attractive lightweight design and a gorgeous screen. But that price is going to be a stumbling block for many, particularly when specialist gaming or creative laptops achieve better performance for similar cash.

2.5 / 5

Design

A stunning 3K OLED screen, lightweight design and premium feeling materials, although it loses a few marks here and there for small details like its wobbly screen and slightly off-balance trackpad.

4 / 5

Performance

While the ProArt P16 RTX Spark doesn’t offer top level performance in creative workflows or gaming, its AI tools and how much power it crams into a small frame are very impressive. Additionally, the fact it performs so well across so many categories makes it a great all rounder.

4.5 / 5

Battery Life

At roughly 14.5 hours, this laptop’s battery is strong but not exactly exceptional. You’ll comfortably get more than a day’s work out of it but it will definitely tap out sooner than a MacBook Pro during intensive workloads.

4 / 5

Total

The Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark is a good-looking, lightweight laptop that’s perfect for anyone who wants to create, game and use AI agents on a single device. But that high price means that if you care most about performance in a single area, you’ll be better off with a specialist laptop.

4 / 5

Buy it if…

You want to game, create and use AI on a single device
Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC, the Asus ProArt P16 puts considerable power behind every task you might throw at it. So if you’re a bit of a polymath, it may well be the only device you need.

You want a seriously portable 16-inch device
Despite that gorgeous and expansive 16-inch display, the laptop’s wonderfully light — at 3.9 lbs / 1.77kg, it’s svelter than other powerful laptops like the MacBook Pro M5 Pro or the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra.

Don’t buy it if…

You want top performance in any one category
If you only really care about gaming or creative work is your sole priority, there are laptops out there that can give you peak performance for a similar spend.

You don’t have loads of money laying around
There’s no getting away from it: this laptop ain’t cheap. Even in its base spec, you’ll be paying $4,399.99 / £3,899.99 / AU$7,999, so if you’re not feeling flush, you might want to look elsewhere.

Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review: also consider

Apple MacBook Pro M5 Pro
If you’re wanting a true creative powerhouse, the MacBook Pro M5 Pro will get you there. Despite costing a similar price, this incarnation of Apple’s laptop will absolutely blitz both image and video workflows, while also offering an absurdly long 21-hour battery life. While you’re not going to get top shelf gaming performance out of Apple silicon, this is still a great choice if your main concern is sheer creative thrust. Read our full Apple MacBook Pro M5 Pro review.

Asus Zephyrus G16 2026
With its discrete Nvidia Geforce RTX 5080 GPU, the Asus Zephyrus G16 2026 offers seriously nippy gaming performance, besting the P16 RTX Spark in both benchmarks and in-game frame rates. Okay, it’s not going to unlock the same oomph the P16 can for hybrid AI workflows. But if your main concern is pure gaming punch, the Zephyrus G16 will deliver.

(Image credit: Future)How I tested the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark

• Tested over the course of several weeks
• Ran a huge number of benchmarks for different workflows
• Conducted experiential AI, gaming and creative testing

Testing the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark over the course of several weeks, I ran a wide range of benchmarks. Not only did I run a variety of baseline hardware tests using Geekbench 7.1 and Cinebench R23, but I tested performance across a wide range of tasks as well. I used MLPerf Client to test agentic workflows, ComfyUI to simulate generative workflows, PugetBench to automate creative tasks and 3DMark and gaming benchmarks to test in-game GPU performance.

On top of this, I did a wide range of experiential testing. Not only did I use the laptop for plenty of daily and productivity-based work but I also extensively tested agentic AI workflows using Hermes and the local open-source model Qwen3.8 27B. I also tried carrying out creative work using large, hi-resolution Photoshop files and played a range of games including Cyberpunk 2077, Gears of War: E-day and Planet Zoo 2.

As TechRadar’s reviews editor, I have plenty of experience covering laptops. As well as editing scores of laptop reviews over the last few years, I’ve reviewed multiple gaming handhelds and have used a huge variety of laptops over the years, both Windows and MacOS.

• First reviewed: October 2026
• Read more about how we test

We’re not there yet, but mainly thanks to PDFs, we’re slowly making our way towards a paperless society. But how do you sign a document without actually touching a physical piece of paper? One solution is to use an online digital service like Nitro.

Available for Windows and Mac, there’s also a version of the PDF editor app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. But how does the latest version measure up to the best PDF editor software we've used? We put it to the test.

Nitro PDF: Pricing & plans

• Two subscription plans for small business and enterprise
• Three-year license also available

You can check out Nitro by clicking here.

Nitro PDF is the core offering, available for individuals, small businesses, and enterprise depending on one of two plans you choose. Prices start at $15 or £11.50 each month, billed annually. However, a three-year license option is also available - Nitro PDF Classic is priced at $270 or £200.

Nitro Sign is the second option, designed for those who just need basic e-signature features, and that costs $10 or £7.50 each month.

Higher end tiers for PDF editing are also available but they’re more of a bespoke custom tailored option. These are known as Nitro Sign Plus, Nitro Sign Enterprise, and Nitro PDF Plus, but you’ll need to contact their sales team to get a bespoke custom tailored price for them.

• Pricing: 4/5

Nitro PDF: Interface & experience

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)

• The page layout is clear and easy to navigate
• Each tool has a prominent area to click on to activate it

Having logged in (yes you do need to give Nitro your email address), you’ll be graced with the service’s dashboard. I was pleasantly surprised you can download software for Windows, macOS, and iOS, although you’re not given much information regarding its system requirements. I had to search online for it (it's here).

But interesting though this is, I’m more curious about the online service. Not only would this allow me to work with PDFs on any machine I care to log in from, but the web-based version always includes the latest available tools.

The web page is clean and simple. Beneath the links to download the various versions are all the available tools. You have “Smart Tools” where complex algorithms analyse the document for you.

This includes ‘Nitro Assistant’ which can summarise or even translate a PDF, and includes live conversations with an LLM. ‘Table Extract’ converts tabular data into an excel file, and ‘Form Extract’ does the same, but focuses on form data, ie, it extracts names, dates, addresses, and more from a PDF.

The ‘Convert PDFs’ category lets you turn any Microsoft Office document into a PDF, or a PDF into one of the three Microsoft Office formats, as well as turning it into a JPG. The last two on the list are what we were originally here for: signing PDFs and requesting others to do the same.

• Interface & experience: 4/5

Nitro PDF: Tools

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)

• Relatively simple to use
• Interesting AI tools that work well and save time

I do appreciate that not only can you upload a file from your computer simply by dragging it onto the right part of the page, but Nitro can link up to your online storage account, be it Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Box or SharePoint, giving you a lot of flexibility.

I thought I’d try the summarisation tool first, but it turns out, I didn’t need to do anything: the moment I uploaded a file to the ‘Nitro Assistant’, the algorithm started working right away and after a few seconds, provided me with a summary. Since I’d written the original, I could tell it actually did a decent job of finding the key points, and providing a suitable synopsis.

Interestingly, the ‘Convert’ and ‘Optimise’ options are there in ‘Assistant’, so there would be no need to select their respective separate tools in the Dashboard: you can do it all straight from ‘Assistant’.

‘Table Extract’ was more interesting than I expected. I uploaded an article that contained copy as well as a couple of tables, and the algorithm was able to locate those, tell me which pages they were from, and grab the information from them.

Unfortunately it wasn’t perfect: a couple of cells were merged into one, it didn’t realise a table spanned two pages, and only gave me the data from the first. Given that there were only 2 rows on the second page, that wasn’t a major problem.

Just to be sure, I then tried the service with documents made up entirely of tables, spanning multiple pages. ‘Table Extract’ grabbed every single row each time. So when the PDF is obviously a table, the result is faultless, but when it’s interspersed with paragraphs and images, it could be a little tricky. As always, your mileage may vary.

Considering many similar services charge you credits to use what they call AI, the fact Nitro did all this without additional charge is a big plus for this service.

• Tools: 4/5

Nitro PDF: Signing

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)

• Simple and straightforward to set up e-signature collection
• Nitro handles everything in the background for you

As is similar with other tools in Nitro’s arsenal, choosing one signing tool actually gives you direct access to the other. Whether you choose ‘Request Signatures’ or ‘Self Sign’, you’ll have access to both, making the interface once again needlessly complicated with redundant buttons.

Despite this, the process is remarkably simple. You’re selected as the default recipient, and you get to drag specific fields onto the PDF document for you to fill in. There’s a button you can click on for the algorithm to detect existing fields, but it’s in beta, so if you want to be sure, just drag the relevant fields yourself.

When it comes to signing, you can draw using your trackpad or mouse (which didn’t work for me, even using different browsers), type in your name (Nitro uses a single script font for that, you don’t get a choice on that front), or you can upload a JPG, PNG or TIFF file bearing your signature.

Other fields include requests for the date, name, initials, checkboxes, even a custom field is available, enabling you to populate the form with all the information you require, including the option of making any or all of them compulsory.

It’s also possible to set a signing order, so a recipient will only be informed they need to sign once another, or others, have already done their bit. Best of all, those recipients don’t even need to create an account to do so. Nitro handles everything and will contact you once the document is completed.

The entire process was incredibly simple and well handled, and once the ‘detect fields’ button is out of beta, it’ll be even more effortless.

• Signing: 4/5

Should I buy Nitro PDF?

(Image credit: Nitro // Future)Buy it if...

You need to access and sign a lot of PDFs, would benefit from converting these files into other documents, and appreciate a little computer help to summarise a document.

Don't buy it if...

You don’t need AI to do the work for you, can already convert documents into PDF and back again, would rather not have another subscription, and prefer to print documents to sign them anyway.

Nitro // FutureNitro // FutureNitro // FutureNitro // FutureAlternatives

Adobe Acrobat Standard
The original remains, in our opinion, the top choice for best PDF editor out there. It's rich with features and tools for editing, converting, and organizing all your PDF documents. The workflow and user experience is sublime once you get past the initially overwhelming interface. In our review, we couldn't help but not that "sometimes, the best solution on the market has its reputation for a reason."View Deal

Foxit PDF Editor
"Manipulate PDFs in style with a great multi-platform PDF editor" was how we kicked off our review of Foxit's excellent PDF editor. It's packed full of powerful tools, including an outstanding data redaction tool. Ultimately, we found it to be "a great app for businesses who need to manipulate, edit, redact and otherwise alter PDFs on a regular basis."View Deal

EaseUS PDF Editor
EaseUS PDF Editor offers much of what Nitro does, although you have the choice of a perpetual license or taking out a subscription. When we tested the product, we found "a powerful, PC-only PDF editing software tool that allows you to manipulate and alter documents with relative ease. It also comes with more standard features, such as a converter, and has good OCR capabilities."View Deal

How I tested Nitro PDF

As this is mainly an online service, I checked it out on a couple of web browsers, namely, Firefox and Safari. All the tools worked great, aside from the drawing function for the signature which failed for both. Thankfully there were other ways to sign a document.

One of the good things of an online service is it’s not dependent on your computer’s specs, so you most definitely don’t need the latest and greatest to run Nitro PDF. In fact, I used a machine over 7 years old for this and it worked without a hitch.

Everything ran smoothly (aside form the drawing part) and I had no problem finding my way around.

For additional PDF editing software, we reviewed the best Adobe Acrobat alternatives and best free PDF editors.

Regular readers will know I’ve reviewed Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 365 a few times over the years, mostly because, as a subscription service, they update their software very regularly.

Sometimes these improvements are minor, like additional transitions, or season-specific effects, while others introduce new tools or refine existing ones.

So, I wanted to see what’s changed and what's new, and whether it's still one of the best video editing software options out there (spoiler: it is, but it's easier to recommend on Windows over macOS).

CyberLink PowerDirector 365: Price & availability

• Perpetual license and subscription options
• Reasonable pricing

Cyberlink’s PowerDirector is mostly a multi-platform tool - I say mostly because although you can run it on the Mac and PC, there isn’t full feature parity between the two versions. In fact, the PC version gets updated much more frequently. With that in mind, I’ll be looking at the PC version in this review.

As for the cost, although Cyberlink pushes you (hard) to rent their software, there is an option to buy a perpetual licence, which you can do for $140. Existing owners of versions 2024 and 2025 can upgrade for $90. You won’t get access to as many features, and you can only take advantage of any future updates for a year, but at least you won’t need to pay any more.

If you prefer renting, and enjoying all the latest additions as and when they’re released, the usual price is $80 per year, but as of this writing, you can subscribe for $55, which is the equivalent of around $4.60 a month, much cheaper than some of its competition.

Thankfully, a free trial is also available - no credit card required - which allows you to test the software, and make sure it does what you need it to do, before deciding which financial route you’d like to take.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365: Interface

(Image credit: CyberLink // Future)

• Well-organized interface
• Clear navigation

Launch PowerDirector and you’ll be graced with its welcome screen. From there, you can of course click on ‘New Project’ and get into the editing side of things (more on that in a minute), but that’s not all that window has to offer. You’ll find a handful of large icons, most of which offer quick drag-and-drop effects.

They’re there if you’ve already got a video clip or exported project which you wish to alter with one specific effect throughout. Click on one of those icons, a pop up window appears, drop a clip onto it, and the software will get working. Convenient, yes, but editing this isn’t. So let’s check out the editing side of things.

We’ve reached the stage now in terms of interface development, that if you’ve seen one video editor, you’ve pretty much seen them all. I don’t view that as a bad thing: it makes it easy to switch between them; aside from having a sidebar on the right instead of on the left, or similar, it should take you seconds to find your way around PowerDirector’s interface.

You’ll find a list of icons, top left, which control the top third of the interface. These allow you to switch between your clips, and specific functions, such as titles, transitions, effects, and so on. Top right is the preview section; it’s linked either to your timeline (which takes up the bottom half of the interface) or any selected clip in your media section.

Unlike Premiere Pro, the interface isn’t customisable. You work with what you get. It’s even more inflexible than Final Cut Pro - and I thought FCP was strict! - but at the end of the day, that’s not entirely a bad thing: it means you can sit in front of any computer with PowerDirector installed and know where everything is. That’s a big plus in my book. But the price for that familiarity is a rigid interface. A price worth paying? That would depend on your preference and workflow.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365: Tools

(Image credit: CyberLink // Future)

• Everything you need to edit a video
• Free to add effects, transitions, and titles
• No keyboard controls

Everything you need to edit a video project is there for you to use. The timeline has multiple layers, so you can end up making a relatively complex movie. You’ll find various animated titles, Transitions, Effects, Particles, Stickers, and more, all ready to spruce up your edit. They are all excellent and well crafted.

If you’re on a subscription, it’s all available to you, but if you’re working with the free version, you’ll encounter some serious limitations: most of these tools are ‘premium’ ones; you can recognise them thanks to a small black crown inside a yellow circle, top left of a tool’s icon. Despite that, you’ll still be able to insert them into your project, but when it comes to exporting it, you’ll be offered the option of forking out some of your money to be able to use them, or having them automatically removed prior to rendering.

Some tools can’t be accessed unless you log in to your CyberLink account (which is free to setup). That’s because they’re AI-based and require credits to function. You do get 100 credits per month with a subscription, and any additional credit packs are reduced by 50% as long as you keep paying, but you can also get these packs at full price while using the free version. They start at 100, and go up to 2,000, and obviously the more you buy, the cheaper each individual credit gets.

Editing is simple, but it could be easier, mind you. Maybe it’s because I’m used to more professional editors: I use the keyboard a lot when editing, and other programs allow me to use the JKL keys to playback in reverse, stop and go forward respectively; using the left and right arrow keys moves me back or forward one frame, and the up and down arrow keys jump me to the next or previous edit point…

And there are so many others. These greatly speed up my work. Unfortunately, PowerDirector doesn’t have any of those, which forces users to rely more on the mouse or trackpad. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you’re not used to such shortcuts, but the lack of options certainly is.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365: Editing

(Image credit: CyberLink // Future)

• A great editing platform (layering order notwithstanding)
• A wealth of very well done effects, transitions, templates and titles

When it comes to editing, proper editing I mean, with fingers, a keyboard and a mouse or trackpad, and not a text prompt in sight, PowerDirector is pretty darn good at it.

There are however two approaches when working with multiple layers of media. One replicates what happens in the real world: place a sheet of paper on top of another, and you can no longer see the one that’s underneath.

The other does the opposite: the sheet on the bottom is the one you see. I personally prefer the former, but Cyberlink have designed their interface on the latter. Either approach works. It’s just a question of preference and of getting used to it.

Aside from that personal inconvenience, I found PowerDirector to be an extremely competent video editor. As you’d expect, you’re offered Titles, Effects, Transitions, and even Overlays and Templates to add to your project. Many are free to use with the trial version, but some, those with a yellow crown icon on their thumbnails are premium effects. You can add them, but you won’t be able to export your work without paying.

Subtitles are added manually (a chore), by importing a compatible SRT or TXT file (a better option), or by spending credits to let AI do the work for you (the rise of the machines).

Whether you use AI or not, this is an excellent video editor with great looking effects that are easy to add to your project. I found myself editing very quickly with it, even though I’m no fan of their layer order.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365: AI

(Image credit: CyberLink // Future)

• Fully embraces AI tools
• You’ll need credits to use them, or edit without ever touching them

With each passing year, CyberLink makes a greater and greater emphasis on AI in PowerDirector, essentially encouraging you to let AI do all the heavy lifting for you.

For instance with ‘AI Storytelling’, you get to import your shots, choose an AI narrator (or let PowerDirector clone your own voice - which absolutely, definitely isn’t freaky at all), select the type of movie you’d like it to create and let it get on with it. Of course, you have control over some settings, but if a machine did all the work for you, did you actually do anything at all?

Or course, any feature that needs to offload its work to an online server will cost you AI credits. If you’re renting the software you’ll have 100 of those each month, and you can also earn 3 additional credits every day, although you need to collect these manually to get them. Be aware that all these credits do not roll over and expire after 30 days.

If you’re into AI, there’s a lot there to appreciate. In addition to letting a machine edit for you, you can use AI to create a talking avatar, using audio imported for that purpose, or a typed script which will be converted into audio for you.

If you’ve run out of media to use, and can’t find anything suitable through free online media libraries, like Pexels.com, PowerDirector’s AI can generate video or images for you.

It can create cinematic shorts, allow you to edit by chatting to it through a text prompt, even transform images into video. Like I said, the push for AI is strong. So strong in fact, the software’s subtitle is "Edit like a pro with AI”.

And if you’re really into AI, you’ll know how credit-hungry these features are, and 100 a month (or 190 if you manage to get those 3 free credits each day) won’t be enough to satiate your appetite. Thankfully, you can buy more. There’s a sliding scale the more you buy; for instance, 1,000 credits will cost you $60, whereas 50 go for $6. Additionally, purchased credits are valid for one year.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365: Latest updates

(Image credit: CyberLink // Future)

• Regular updates
• Most tentpole features are AI-based

This is actually one great advantage of this software: the developers constantly release new features and improve its tools.

Some of the latest include pretty powerful AI-based ones. One feature I liked is ‘Auto-Reframe’, which analyses your project and crops it so it looks great on any platform, whether the video ends up being 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1.

Aside from the usual refinement of existing functionality (something that’s always welcome), the very latest features as of this writing, include ‘Text to Video’. The title says it all really, but you also have the ability to upload a reference image so the algorithm has some idea of what you’re after.

Essentially all the major new features added this year are AI-based. It’s AI all the way down with PowerDirector, including ‘Text to Image’, and ‘AI Storytelling’ (the feature where a computer pretty much does your project for you, with you guiding it along the way).

Should I buy CyberLink PowerDirector 365?

Buy it if...

You’re looking for a video editor brimming with AI tools that can help do a lot of the editing work for you.

Don't buy it if...

You feel the world is going too AI crazy, and would prefer using your brain, fingers and mouse to build an edit rather than let a machine do it for you.

How I tested CyberLink PowerDirector 365

Although Cyberlink PowerDirector is available for both Macs and PCs, there isn’t feature parity between the two platforms and, unsurprisingly, most of the latest and coolest toys (ie new features) are on the PC side of the equation, so I grabbed my venerable Core i5 PC laptop and fired it up.

It’s obviously not a top of the line machine, but it shows that despite that, PowerDirector still performed admirably. While some software demands ever more power, this one worked well on what is now considered a mid-range computer, which is definitely a tick in PowerDirector’s favour.

You most definitely don’t need the latest and greatest hardware to run this video editor on (probably because all the AI stuff doesn’t rely on your computer’s specs, but is sent to a server somewhere in the world which handles all the heavy lifting).

Hostinger Business Email lets you set up email addresses using your own business domain, while keeping your website with whichever hosting provider you already use. You can move existing messages across and access your inbox through webmail or a compatible email app. That makes it an option whether you’re setting up business email for the first time or replacing your current provider.

Whether this is the best email hosting service for you will depend on several factors, really. The low starting prices are appealing here, but my main reservation is the commitment behind them. The advertised discounts require four years paid upfront, and renewal rates are higher. For your business, the question is whether the mailbox and tools justify that commitment, particularly when you’re paying for several employees.

Hostinger email: Pricing & plans

(Image credit: Hostinger Mail)

The Starter plan starts at $0.39 per mailbox per month, followed by Standard at $0.99 and Premium at $1.99. You pay for 48 months upfront to get those rates, so they aren't monthly subscriptions. The initial charges are $18.72, $47.52 and $95.52 respectively, excluding VAT.

Feature

Starter

Standard

Premium

Introductory monthly equivalent

$0.39

$0.99

$1.99

Initial payment for 48 months

$18.72

$47.52

$95.52

Renewal monthly equivalent

$1.59

$2.79

$3.99

Mailbox storage

5GB

20GB

50GB

Dashboard forwarding rules

5

20

50

Aliases per mailbox

5

10

30 advertised*

Eligible domain, first year

No

No

Yes

Email-open tracking

No

Yes

Yes

Link / tracked-file activity

No

No

Yes

The renewal rates above also apply to a 48-month term. Multiplying them by 48 gives $76.32, $133.92 and $191.52 per mailbox before tax. These are calculations from the advertised rates, not separate checkout quotations. Budget for the full renewal payment rather than treating the monthly equivalent as your next bill.

Premium's free domain covers one year on an eligible new purchase, not your whole email term. Hostinger also lists a 30-day refund window for eligible email purchases, but the email-storage add-on is non-refundable and a claimed free domain can reduce your refund. I wouldn't upgrade for either perk unless you need the extra mailbox capacity.

Hostinger email: Features

For a solo business, aliases let you route sales and billing addresses into one mailbox rather than manage separate inboxes.

Second, the catch-all feature also catches misspelled addresses when the domain is correct. This doesn’t add any storage, so choose your tier around the messages and attachments you need to keep.

Now, once those messages build up, Standard and Premium's AI tools can even help you write replies, summarise threads and search in natural language. Like, a summary of a long client exchange strikes me as more useful than another suggested greeting. The Starter plan includes 10 AI credits per month, while the higher tiers are unlimited subject to fair use.

The higher tier plans also offer open tracking, with link and tracked-file activity. Simply enable tracking before sending, and treat the results cautiously. Security scanners can trigger false opens or clicks, so an alert can inform your follow-up but doesn't prove a customer read your proposal.

You can use browser-based webmail or compatible external clients too. The Email Import tool moves existing messages, provided your new mailbox has enough free space. Keep the old mailbox active until incoming and outgoing mail work. You can also set automatic replies when you're away.

For more technical workflows, Agentic Mail connects mailboxes on all three plans to external code or AI agents through APIs and webhooks. Its allow/block lists control outgoing recipients, not incoming senders. I see that as useful for a defined automation, but you'll need to check the permissions and set up the connection.

Hostinger email: Support

Hostinger advertises 24/7 help through online channels. You can start with Hostinger Agent in the dashboard, with a Customer Success Specialist able to join when you need more assistance. Email and WhatsApp are also available, but telephone support isn't. That's the omission I'd notice most during an urgent email problem.

Those contact options tell you how to reach support, and not how quickly your issue will be resolved. I haven't run a support test. Before moving your email, follow the official import instructions and keep the source mailbox accessible. Hostinger warns that Microsoft Exchange imports can disrupt folder structure, so check how that affects your transfer rather than assuming it will be straightforward.

Hostinger email: Security

Hostinger lists spam, virus and phishing filtering, alongside mailbox activity logs. These controls don't mean every malicious message will be stopped. Its marketing also uses the phrase end-to-end encryption, but the configuration guide establishes SSL/TLS connections. That alone doesn't show that only the sender and recipient can read a message.

Your domain's MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records also need attention, especially when DNS is managed elsewhere. Check them as part of setup so email is routed to the right service and outgoing messages are authenticated.

For recovery, Hostinger documents up to 30 days in Trash for deleted messages. Anything manually removed from Trash, or kept there beyond that period, cannot be restored through that route. Export important correspondence regularly. Trash can help you undo a mistake, but it isn't an independent backup.

Hostinger email: The competition

Zoho Mail is the first alternative I’d consider for a small team. It’s Mail Lite plan starts at $1 per user per month, billed annually, with a 5GB mailbox, shared calendars and email and folder sharing. You get the same mailbox capacity as Hostinger Starter, plus tools for coordinating correspondence with colleagues, without the four-year commitment behind Hostinger’s lowest advertised rate.

DreamHost Professional Email is another product worth comparing when you need more storage and shorter billing term.: It includes 25GB per mailbox for US$1.99 a month, or an advertised US$1.67 monthly equivalent with annual billing. That gives you more space than Hostinger Standard’s 20GB and the option to pay monthly, although Hostinger Standard costs less at its US$0.99 introductory monthly equivalent when you prepay for 48 months.

Hostinger email: Final verdict

The Standard plan from Hostinger remains my pick for regular client correspondence when 5GB looks too tight. Its 20GB mailbox and broader AI allowance give you a concrete reason to upgrade. For a light inbox, Starter may be enough. Premium makes more sense when you need 50GB or its additional tracking.

Before buying for a team, check what an upgrade would cost across your domain. Hostinger applies plan upgrades to all its mailboxes, although you can add storage to individual paid mailboxes.

That matters when only one employee needs more room. So, the final decision is whether the four-year commitment fits your business, and not how small the introductory monthly figure looks.

Hostinger email: FAQsWhat is Hostinger email?

Hostinger Email is an email hosting service that lets you send and receive messages using your own domain, such as hello@yourbusiness.com. You can access your inbox through webmail or a compatible email app, with storage and additional tools determined by your plan. It works separately from Hostinger’s website hosting, so you don’t need to move your website to use it.

What is a business email and how to use one?

A business email is an address used for work, typically with your company’s domain, such as name@yourbusiness.com. To set one up, you need a domain and an email hosting service. After creating your mailbox and connecting the domain through the required DNS settings, you can send and receive messages through webmail or a compatible app. You use it much like personal email, while keeping customer conversations and other work correspondence separate.

Is it worth hosting your own email server?

For most small businesses, I’d choose a hosted email service rather than run a separate mail server. Self-hosting gives you more control over the setup, but it also makes you responsible for security, updates, backups and troubleshooting. It makes sense when you have specific requirements and the technical skills or support to maintain it. You don’t need your own server simply to have email addresses on your business domain.

Can I keep my Hostinger email if I change my web hosting provider?

Yes, provided you keep a separate paid email subscription active and leave your domain’s email records pointing to Hostinger. Moving your website doesn’t require you to move your email as well. However, a free email trial bundled with website hosting is different because cancelling the hosting also cancels that trial. To keep using those mailboxes, upgrade the trial to a paid Business Email plan before cancelling your hosting.

Can I use Hostinger Business Email for multiple employees?

Yes, you can buy a separate mailbox for each employee who needs their own inbox. Additional mailboxes on the same domain share your existing plan’s expiry date, so you pay for the remaining subscription period when adding them. A different domain requires a separate email plan. Aliases are useful for giving an existing mailbox alternative addresses, but they don’t provide employees with separate inboxes.

Can I cancel my Hostinger Business Email subscription before the 48-month term ends?

Yes. Turning off auto-renewal stops the next payment while allowing you to keep using the service until your paid term ends. Eligible purchases also have a 30-day refund window, although exclusions apply and cancellation doesn’t automatically entitle you to a refund for unused months. If you request a refund and it’s approved, the service ends immediately, so export any messages you need to keep before proceeding.

What happens to my business emails if my subscription expires?

Hostinger’s cancellation guidance says that expiry ends the service and deletes its associated data, so renew your subscription or export important messages before it expires. Don’t assume you’ll have extra time to recover them afterwards. The separate 30-day Trash recovery window applies to deleted messages and should not be treated as a grace period for an expired email subscription.

Can I use Hostinger Business Email to send bulk marketing emails?

You can send newsletters to people who have agreed to receive them, provided you stay within your plan’s limits. Starter allows 1,000 outgoing messages per mailbox in a rolling 24-hour period, while Standard and Premium allow 3,000. Each message can have up to 100 recipients, with a 35MB limit for the complete outgoing message and a 25MB attachment limit. For larger mailing lists and regular campaigns, a dedicated email marketing service is the better fit. Unsolicited spam is prohibited.

Shockbyte is an Australian game server host founded in 2013. Minecraft remains its best-known product, but it now sells hosting for a long list of other games, including Rust, ARK: Survival Evolved, Project Zomboid, Palworld, and Valheim. Its appeal is straightforward: take the routine server administration out of the customer's hands without charging VPS-level prices.

That formula continues to work. Shockbyte is our best game server hosting for beginners and our best cheap game server host for simplicity. The new Shockbyte Panel strengthens that case, although the buying and setup journey is not quite as polished as the dashboard itself.

With that in mind, I bought the cheapest Minecraft plan and worked through provisioning, backups, server instances, plugins, files, support, and the self-service refund process.

Shockbyte has 12 different Minecraft-themed plans to choose from (Image credit: Shockbyte)Shockbyte: Plans and pricing

(Image credit: Shockbyte // Future)

Shockbyte's Minecraft range starts with the Dirt plan, which includes 1GB RAM and is intended for a small, basic server. The standard month-to-month price shown at checkout was $3.99.

My order received a 30% recurring discount, reducing both the amount due immediately and the monthly charge to $2.79. Europe added nothing to the bill, and the order summary clearly separated the free backup and instance tiers from optional extras. That is unusually transparent for a low-cost hosting checkout.

The broader lineup scales through plans such as Cobblestone and Redstone to 16GB RAM at the top end. Current plans include NVMe storage, unlimited bandwidth, DDoS protection, a free subdomain, and access to the custom panel. Shockbyte advertises a 100% network uptime guarantee. The main purchasing decision is therefore how much memory the game, player count, and chosen mods need rather than which management features are unlocked.

The cheapest plan is compelling for a lightly configured private world, but 1GB leaves little headroom. Shockbyte's own interface showed 475MB of the available 1GB in use while my new Vanilla server was idle. Heavier modpacks require a larger plan: for example, RLCraft's installation notes recommend 3GB to 4GB, despite the catalog presenting it with an Install button on my 1GB server. Buyers should size by the software they actually plan to run, not simply choose the lowest price.

The refund window remains only 72 hours, which is shorter than the guarantees offered by many general web hosts. The process itself is excellent. Manage plan showed that my server was eligible, explained that the refund would return to the original payment method within one to seven business days. It also handled the request without making me open a ticket. The plan was marked refunded and the server suspended immediately.

Shockbyte: Ease of use

(Image credit: Shockbyte // Future)

The current setup experience is substantially different from Shockbyte's old two-login workflow. The order confirmation led into the same account and then a guided server wizard. I chose a private Minecraft server, Vanilla, the Stable release channel, version 26.3, and automatic Java selection. These choices were explained well enough that a first-time administrator would not need to know the differences before starting.

The operator and whitelist steps were less polished. The wizard would not let me leave the player field blank, even though an administrator may reasonably want to make that decision later. I removed the temporary entry from the console once the server was live.

There was another small disconnect with backups: I enabled recurring backups in the wizard, but the setting did not carry into the finished server, so I created the schedule again from the Backups page.

The panel improves considerably after setup. Its overview places console output, CPU and RAM use, player count, and common game settings on one screen. The left navigation gives quick access to files, configuration, plugins, modpacks, instances, and backups without burying basic controls under an advanced-server vocabulary. I found it fast and easy to navigate, and the live console made it obvious when a change had completed successfully.

(Image credit: Shockbyte // Future)

Shockbyte's server instances are particularly useful. The free tier allowed two configurations, so I added a Paper 26.3 instance alongside the original Vanilla server.

The panel warned that switching could take three to five minutes, but the whole change completed in about 15 seconds in my test. Only one instance runs at a time, which is sensible at this price, but being able to preserve separate setups makes experimentation much safer.

(Image credit: Shockbyte // Future)

The modpack browser is broad and inviting, with search, filtering, curated listings, and URL, ZIP, or MRPACK imports. It is one of the strongest reasons to recommend Shockbyte to beginners, but it also exposes the main weakness in the plan guidance: demanding packs should display a clear RAM warning before installation, rather than relying on the customer to research requirements separately.

Shockbyte: Speed and experience

(Image credit: Shockbyte // Future)

Shockbyte offers server regions across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. I selected Germany for the new server, and the panel displayed an estimated latency of 78ms from my connection.

The Vanilla process then reported that it had finished starting in 2.247 seconds. When I switched to Paper, the control panel and console completed the full change in roughly 15 seconds, far faster than the warning suggested.

Our gameplay testing on a European Minecraft server also produced a steady 30ms to 35ms ping, with no downtime or noticeable deterioration as more players joined. The experience remained stable for a standard Minecraft world, helped by sensible maintenance and avoiding more mods or plugins than the selected RAM could comfortably handle.

Those results support Shockbyte's reputation for dependable entry-level game hosting, while the current panel makes resource limits much easier to see than before.

(Image credit: Minecraft)

Backups were quick once configured directly in the panel. The free tier provided three backup slots and 10.5GB of total storage, with the first backup guaranteed to fit. I set a daily schedule, retained the latest three copies, and enabled automatic replacement of the oldest backup.

The first 124.9MB backup completed in around 15 seconds. I liked the allowance and the clear retention controls; I simply wish the onboarding choice had survived the move into the live server.

Shockbyte: Support

Shockyte's knowledgebase has plenty of helpful tutorials and the company's YouTube channel also provides a wealth of videos to help you get started (Image credit: Shockbyte)

Shockbyte's strongest support resource remains its knowledge base. It covers setup, server types, files, plugins, backups, locations, common Minecraft problems, and advanced tasks in clear steps, while the company's YouTube library provides visual walkthroughs. The panel also links relevant guides from the feature being used, which is often faster than waiting for an agent.

Direct support is more uneven. The automated assistant responded immediately and correctly explained that the optional Server Management add-on covers hands-on installation work, while customers can still use the panel's Files, Backups, and Modpacks tools themselves.

However, it could not confirm whether the promotional discount recurs, whether Europe costs extra, or how the Dirt plan's free tiers apply, so it escalated the questions to billing. More than eight hours later, I still had no human answer; the checkout ultimately supplied the missing pricing details.

That experience matches the main reservation from our longer-term use: answers are generally useful once they arrive, but support speed can be inconsistent. There is no telephone support, so customers with urgent issues depend on the ticket queue. The extensive self-help material softens the problem for routine tasks, but it does not replace a prompt human response when a billing or account question falls outside the bot's documentation.

Shockbyte: Final verdict

(Image credit: Shockbyte // Future)

Shockbyte is still an easy recommendation for beginners who want a Minecraft server without turning server administration into a second hobby.

The entry price is excellent, the new panel is far better than the old workflow, and routine jobs such as creating an instance, installing a plugin, browsing files, and scheduling backups are quick and understandable. That combination makes a convincing case for its place as our best game server host for beginners and one of the best cheap options for simplicity.

It is not completely frictionless. Mandatory player fields in the wizard are unnecessary, the backup setting selected during onboarding did not persist, and the modpack catalog should warn more clearly when a pack is too demanding for the purchased RAM. Support follow-up can also be slow.

These are real annoyances, but none cancels out the value of a $3.99 monthly starting price, a useful free backup tier, and a panel that handles complex tasks without making them feel complex.

Choose Shockbyte if you want low-cost, managed Minecraft hosting with room to experiment. More experienced administrators who want full operating-system control may be better served by a VPS, while large modpacks and busy communities should skip the 1GB tier and budget for more memory. For its intended audience, however, Shockbyte remains fast to set up, approachable to manage, and very hard to beat on price.

Planet Zoo 2 is the sequel to 2020’s zoo-building management sim. And it’s crammed with more animals, scenery items, and game modes than ever, so you can really let your creativity run wild.

Building zoos is my happy place. Life is stressful, the cost of living is shocking, and politics is so absurd I often feel like I’m being doped with increasing levels of satire to make the world’s first irony-immune man. Playing games like Planet Zoo 2 lets me spend time in a simpler world, where I can spend five hours tweaking the placement of ferns and rocks to make simulated siamangs happy.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time playing the original Planet Zoo. More than a lot, actually. Over 1,100 hours. That’s more than 45 days straight — a fact that makes me feel slightly queasy about my priorities in life. I’ve spent more time experiencing its highs and dealing with its limitations than I’ve spent with my extended family. So, naturally, as soon as I heard Planet Zoo 2 was in development, I knew I had to be the person to put it through its paces.

With the addition of aquariums, aviaries, wildlife reserves and more besides, I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into the new game and see what it was capable of. Even if it meant jettisoning a thousand hours of work, binning my old zoo and starting building from scratch, I was eager to see how all the new tools and content upgraded play. So are the two games birds of a feather, or is Planet Zoo 2 of a different stripe entirely?

Wings, fins and fur

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)Best bit

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Without a doubt, aquariums are my favorite new feature. Not only can you add a fantastic variety of undersea beasties, but you can also decorate tanks with rich-looking reefs, with everything from fronds of seaweed to brightly colored corals.

As a bit (okay, a lot) of a Planet Zoo nerd, when Planet Zoo 2 was announced, I had plenty of things on my mental wishlist of upgrades I’d like to see. But top of my list were the addition of both flying birds and fish, two types of critters that felt conspicuous in their absence from the huge roster of DLCs released for the original game. So honestly, it was pretty pleasing to see both of these kinds of exhibits included when previews of the game dropped.

Flat out my favorite addition has been aquariums. These new piscine enclosures are as pretty as a picture. Aquariums feel really versatile, whether you want huge open-air tanks or to build a wall of fish into your restaurant. Walkthrough tunnels make creating immersive exhibits a breeze, and the need to filter habitats separately depending on whether they require fresh, brackish, or salty water adds an extra layer of — excuse the pun — depth.

Underwater decorations also look fantastic, allowing you to create really richly colored coral reefs and rafts of seaweed and grasses. But naturally, the animals in Planet Zoo are the stars of the show, and there’s a huge variety of sea life on offer to populate your tanks, whether you’re looking for sharks, rays, turtles or schools of fish. Wisely, Frontier has steered away from including many sea mammals like whales and dolphins — a sensible decision in light of the increasing attention that’s been paid to the ethics of keeping highly intelligent, social mammals in small tanks — but the game does include manatees, and there’s still huge potential here for semi-aquatic mammals like seals and walruses.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Leading up to Planet Zoo 2’s release, I was particularly excited about the addition of flying birds, as this adds a whole new dimension to your habitats compared to flightless fowl like ostriches and emus. While aviaries — essentially roof support poles and netting sitting over a classic habitat — don’t feel quite as fresh an experience as creating aquariums, I can still see how I’ll be able to use them to create stunning enclosures. And the variety of feathered friends already on offer is decent, adding everything from toucans to brightly colored long-tailed parakeets.

In fact, animals in general have had a definite glow-up in Planet Zoo 2. Not only have the earliest, lower-definition critters from the base game, like lions and African elephants, received new meshes to bring them in line with sleeker-looking critters from later expansion packs, but fauna in general looks stunning in this game.

There’s also a really solid variety of animals on offer at launch, from gila monsters to giant pandas. Don’t get me wrong: some of my personal favorites from the original game and expansions still aren’t here. Frankly, any zoo that doesn’t have fennec foxes in it is not a zoo I want to spend time in. But all the classics are here, with just enough funky additions — Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo, anyone? — that I’m already pretty jazzed about additions that might be coming up with future updates.

All told, the variety offered by Planet Zoo 2 makes creating diverse, vibrant zoos feel easier than ever.

Management material

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Given that Frontier Developments has launched two more park management games — Planet Coaster 2 and Jurassic World Evolution 3 — in the almost seven years since the OG Planet Zoo’s release, its core gameplay loop has inevitably evolved.

First off, career mode feels the most well-rounded it’s been in a Planet game to date. While you’ve always been able to dip in and out of individual missions on the map to complete objectives and pick up bronze, silver, and gold medals, the progression between them feels increasingly organic.

Functioning as an extended tutorial, career mode leads you through a variety of maps and scenarios throughout the world. As you complete bronze medals at each zoo, you’ll learn new mechanisms and unlock new accreditation tiers, in turn granting you access to higher tiers of animals. While this does mean your progression is somewhat locked to missions, the non-linear connection between maps made me feel much freer to pop in and out of maps than past games.

A big part of this is down to the addition of wildlife reserves. Releasing animals was a relatively shallow mechanic in Planet Zoo — enabling you to offload unneeded creatures in return for dollars or Conservation Points — in its sequel, this has been spun out into a sub-game in its own right.

Wildlife reserves’ core gameplay loop is pretty straightforward. When you arrive in a new reserve, you’ll create ecosystems for released animals by painting one in the landscape, clearing any invasive plant species, and balancing the terrain and plant requirements. Once it’s ready, you’ll be required to release animals from your zoos of the compatible type, balancing the ecosystem, and place research items like camera traps and acoustic monitors to unlock higher levels of research in your zoos.

I’ll be honest here: wildlife reserves are the area that I feel both sound like the most transformative on paper and yet haven’t fully clicked for me in practice. Part of this is because they rely heavily on my least favorite tool: the terrain painter — more on that shortly.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

But it’s also just because these mechanics feel relatively shallow. These reserves don’t really require much ongoing management, and given there’s not much more detailed interplay among the flora and fauna once it’s placed, you can basically just set and forget these areas. As a result, I often found myself just rushing to establish ecosystems and dump the required animals in them so I could return to meatier zoo management. I’m hoping that the more I play with them, the more I’ll find to love about these freer locations, but so far they’ve stood out the least to me.

One other factor that's occasionally caused me slight discomfort is the presence of bugs. No, I'm not talking about those tarantula exhibits: at release, there have definitely been some odd issues creeping in.

I've encountered nothing game-breaking, just slightly hinky behavior here and there. At one point, items I was meticulously placing using the advanced move tools would randomly jump to a different position once I clicked place. Meanwhile, I've experienced several well-documented issues where animals ghost through their bars or get boxed up en masse inside their habitats for no clear reason. Fair play to Frontier Developments, though: they promised to patch these issues pretty quickly and, at the time of publishing, I think all of these issues have been fixed.

If you're wanting a freer experience than career mode can offer, Planet Zoo 2 still has all the other game modes you loved from the original. Franchise mode lets you focus on building your global zoo network from scratch as always, adding the ability to create your own wildlife reserves to help you feel like you’re really contributing to global conservation.

But hands-down my favorite gameplay mode is still Sandbox. I’m a bit prone to hyperfixating on small details — I know: the dude with 1,100 hours in the game is a bit obsessive. You don’t say. And that’s why I love this mode. Being able to concentrate on tweaking every last detail and focusing on building the most realistic zoo I can without needing to sweat about profitability or management just speaks to the creative part of my brain.

And, on that front, Planet Zoo 2 is better than ever.

Build baby, build

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Given I’m talking about a game crammed with gorgeous wildlife, brand new habitats and new game modes, I’ll admit this makes me sound tiresomely dull. But honestly, what’s gotten me most excited about Planet Zoo 2 is the part that should be the most boring: logistics upgrades.

Rather than management sims, I’ve always felt like the Planet games are fantastically creative park design tools with a fun game on the side. And these tools have been refined across the board.

Let’s start with the placement tools. Not gonna lie, on release the placement tools in Planet Zoo were so rigid I can honestly understand if many people rarely dug into creating detailed scenery. Fortunately, these have been significantly improved — they feel more fluid, while the scale tools from Planet Coaster 2 and mirroring tools have been added, giving each decorative item significantly more versatility and making it much easier to create organic-looking areas like rockfaces.

Frustrating memories of trying to select scenery items in Planet Zoo — with their utterly random-seeming hitboxes — still haunt me to this day, particularly as deselecting items felt super awkward. In its sequel, these tools have been overhauled, not only making it easier to select and deselect items even on controller but also providing a range of toggles that allow you to restrict selection to certain types of objects, from nature objects to pathing.

While creating pathing used to involve an exasperating degree of trial and error in the original, pathing tools have had significant improvements here. Alongside the original’s straight and curved pathing options, upgrades from Planet Coaster 2 and the Jurassic World Evolution series have been introduced, like stamp and draw tools. This makes it trivial to introduce more organic-looking paths than ever and even super-precise circular courtyards and viewing areas.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

All of these features contribute to making buildings and decorative items feel far easier and more fluid. But it’s not only placing man-made structures that has been improved. I’d argue that one of the hardest areas of creating your dream zoo in Planet Zoo used to be making natural scenery look organic. A significant proportion of that monumental playtime I clocked in the first game came from meticulously placing bushes piece by piece to make scenery look suitably wild.

Fortunately, Frontier has introduced the scenery brushes first created for Planet Coaster 2 into this game, enabling you to quickly paint scenery across your landscape. Not only does it come with a wide array of pre-created options, but you can also make up your own using any combination of scenery you’d like. While the end result can be slightly random-looking and the brushes still don’t get tight enough for creating really dense-looking foliage, this massively speeds up initial placement and allows you to then manually shift and complement the items for significantly faster decoration.

Similarly, terrain brushes have also had loads of new options added, with attract, repel, and curl brushes adding good variety to the existing toolset available. Terrain painting also comes with a significantly wider array of options, with not only lots of sub-terrain types — such as wild grass, long grass, forest floor or scree — but also brush presets that blend combos of the above.

Sadly, these terrain painting tools are the ones that I feel most lukewarm about. While they should add an enormous amount of extra variety to your landscapes, in practice I found them quite hard to blend subtly, with the intensity slider never quite going low enough to reduce hard borders between terrain types. You can achieve a similar effect by rapidly clicking to feather the brushes, but this is one of the few areas where I feel the tools at your disposal could do with some more refining.

Still, though, the impact of the tool and brush improvements has made the game feel far more fluid in action. They’re all tiny QoL upgrades in isolation, but they’re huge in aggregate. It takes Planet Zoo from a game that’s almost notoriously fiddly and rigid to something that feels more approachable for people who don’t have 1,000 hours to learn all of its tricks.

Should you play Planet Zoo 2?

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)Play it if…

You want a whole new world of aquatic and avian critters
Aquariums and aviaries add a whole host of flexible new habitats to bring your zoos to life. Watching turtles and toucans explore their new homes is still a magical experience.

You want the best park design tools to date
Honestly, I can’t think of a single clunky tool from the OG Planet Zoo that hasn’t had a QoL improvement here. They’re more usable, flexible, and creative than ever before.

Don’t play it if…

You want to fill a quick 15 minutes
Preset buildings make playing Planet Zoo 2 much quicker, but creating things from scratch can take a long time. If you want to design your own zoo piece by piece, be prepared to invest some serious time.

You want a whole new game
Planet Zoo 2 builds on its predecessor, so it’s more evolution than revolution. You’ll see some duplicate items and animals, but the range is still staggering, feeling much larger than in the original.

Accessibility features

There’s a small range of accessibility features available here. For those with visual impairments, you can scale the in-game font from 60% to 100% and the UI from 70% to 100%. Meanwhile, Planet Zoo 2 caters to most forms of color blindness, allowing you to change the color of subtitles, as well as the positive, warning, and negative UI feedback colors.

How I reviewed Planet Zoo 2

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Given its lengthy career mode and how long it can take to build custom enclosures, I wanted to make sure I had a broad experience of the game, so I played Planet Zoo 2 for over 75 hours. While I was reviewing the PC version, I made sure to try it out on a variety of devices, including my desktop gaming PC, the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark, and my Steam Deck. I also tried playing it with the SteelSeries Aeon Pro controller to ensure it was as playable on controller as it is on mouse and keyboard.

When in-game, I tried to test out as wide a variety of content as possible. I played a significant chunk of the campaign, started several franchise zoos, and began building my own zoo in sandbox mode. I built aquariums, aviaries, and traditional habitats, as well as other scenery items. And I completed multiple research levels in different wildlife reserves.

As for my own experience, not only do I have that ludicrous 1,100-hour playtime in the original Planet Zoo game, but I’ve been playing management sim games ever since the OG, Theme Park, back in 1994. I’ve been gaming across a wide variety of platforms for at least 35 years and now play principally on my PC, Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

• First reviewed: October 2026

Any personal information posted on the web remains there for a long time and can reach far-flung corners. That name, email address, and location can be aggregated by people-finder sites (or data brokers) and sold to subscribers.

These data broker sites pose privacy risks, but there’s a way to protect yourself online. You can use platforms like Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover to scan sites for your data, then send deletion requests if found. Malwarebytes facilitates the deletion requests, so there isn’t much to worry about.

Malwarebytes is an all-in-one cybersecurity software suite and is mostly known for its antivirus app. However, it offers other valuable tools, including the Personal Data Remover (if the name didn't give it away, it's a data removal service).

I’m reviewing this tool to help you decide whether it’s worth adopting. Read on to learn about its pros, cons, pricing, support, ease of use, and other essential factors.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Plans and pricing

Malwarebytes doesn’t offer the Personal Data Remover as a separate tool. Rather, it’s offered as part of the Ultimate plan but you can scan for free by clicking here.

The Ultimate plan costs $280 per year, but it’s discounted 50% to $140 on the first year. It unlocks access to the Personal Data Remover and complete antivirus protection, a VPN, and identity protection for 3 devices.

For $400 per year, discounted to $200 on the first year, the Ultimate bundle can be extended to 10 devices for family use.

There are less costly Malwarebytes bundles (Standard for $60 per year and Plus for $80 per year), but none of them include the Personal Data Remover. It seems that if you want access to the Data Remover, you’ll also need to adopt Malwarebytes’ antivirus and VPN apps, which is a major drawback. I’d prefer if the Data Remover were offered as a standalone tool, which I could use alongside other VPN and antivirus tools.

(Image credit: Malwarebytes )

Malwarebytes offers a 14-day free trial of its Ultimate plan, allowing you to test its features before making a final decision. Who knows, you could choose to adopt Malwarebytes as your all-in-one cybersecurity suite after a free trial. There’s also a 60-day money-back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied after paying.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Setup

Firstly, I should note that Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover is only offered to U.S. residents. Non-U.S. residents can use the free Digital Footprint Scanner, which scans your email address against known data breaches and alerts you if any associated account was compromised. However, this Digital Footprint Scanner can’t scan people-finder sites and send deletion requests like the Personal Data Remover.

Malwarebytes’ setup follows a straightforward pattern. First, you’ll activate your subscription (or free trial) on the website. After this step, sign in to Malwarebytes and head to the Secure Hub page. This page provides an overview of all Malwarebytes services available under your subscription.

On the Secure Hub page, look for Personal Data Remover and click “Activate Now”. Once activated, enter your personal details (first and last name, state, city, etc.) to begin a search. Submit the details, and Malwarebytes will run a deep scan across people-finder sites for this data.

The scan can take anywhere from a few hours to several days, depending on how many people-finder sites your data gets discovered on. Once the scan is complete, you’ll be alerted by email to take further action.

Malwarebytes’ scan covers over 100 popular people-finder sites that aggregate data on U.S. residents. This coverage is lower than I encountered on rival platforms, but quantity isn’t all that matters. Malwarebytes makes it clear that its Personal Data Remover is designed for U.S. residents and doesn’t offer global coverage. It focuses on the sites that host U.S.-centric data.

After the scan, you’ll see a list of all sites found to host your personal data. Then, you can initiate deletion requests right from the dashboard. Malwarebytes sends automated deletion requests, and you can track the progress of each request.

However, it doesn’t support manually drafted requests, which is a disadvantage. For websites where automated requests won’t suffice, it does offer to guide you through the site’s manual opt-out process, but that’s no substitute for sending manual requests directly to a site.

I’ve reviewed various data removal platforms that draft deletion request letters where automated requests aren’t enough, and the lack of this service on Malwarebytes is a major drawback.

I’ll rate Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover as a decent service, but there’s a lot that could be improved on. The lack of manual requests and non-U.S. coverage are major drawbacks. Malwarebytes is more of an antivirus and VPN software suite, and the data removal service seems like an add-on.

It’s suitable if you already use Malwarebytes as your cybersecurity suite and don’t want to pay extra for a data removal service, but I wouldn't pick the data removal platform as a first choice.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Ease of use

I didn’t encounter issues when navigating Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover and other features. The signup process was smooth, and so was inputting my personal data, initiating a scan, and getting alerted about the scan results. After initiating removal requests, I tracked the progress of each request conveniently from my dashboard. Malwarebytes has a user-friendly interface that makes using its tools very convenient.

(Image credit: Malwarebytes )Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Security and privacy

Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover doesn’t rank high over various options I’ve tested. Its data removal features are decent, but rival platforms like DeleteMe offer much more.

However, when considering Malwarebytes’ complete cybersecurity suite, it proves invaluable for your online privacy. Under a single subscription, you'll get a VPN to encrypt your browsing activities and hide info from third parties, an antivirus tool to guard against malware attacks, and a platform for removing your data from U.S.-centric people-finder sites.

Identity protection (with insurance) is also offered under the Ultimate bundle, completing the toolkit needed to stay safe online.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Support

Paid subscribers get extensive support resources from Malwarebytes, starting with the official cybersecurity help center. This help center features in-depth guides about data removal and all other Malwarebytes features.

It also contains guides on routine cybersecurity topics like password management, identifying deepfakes and phishing attempts, spoofing, and more.

If you need direct help, Malwarebytes offers email and live chat support. During my live chat support experience I first got connected to a chatbot, but after requesting human support, I was quickly connected to a real support agent.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Competition

Incogni and DeleteMe are two major competitors to Malwarebytes’ Personal Data Remover. They improve on the Malwarebytes limitations I mentioned earlier, offering much broader broker coverage and manual deletion requests. You’ll get more data scrubbed when using Incogni and DeleteMe, particularly as a U.S. resident.

On the other hand, Incogni and DeleteMe don’t offer the various complementary features you’ll find on Malwarebytes. They’re focused primarily on data removal, while Malwarebytes is more of a complete cybersecurity software suite.

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: Final verdict

I recommend Malwarebytes more as a complete cybersecurity suite than as a data removal platform. It frankly isn’t my top choice for a data removal service, but considering the other security features accessible through a Malwarebytes subscription, it proves valuable.

Any personal information posted online could be harvested by data broker sites and remain in their databases for a long time. These sites pose privacy risks that need to be mitigated. A data removal service like PrivacyHawk is an effective mitigation strategy: it scans data broker sites for your data and sends deletion requests where it’s discovered.

PrivacyHawk is one of many data removal services and identity theft protection tools out there. And you’re probably wondering, “Why should I choose it over other options?” I reviewed the platform to answer this question. Read on to learn about its features, pros, cons, and other factors to help decide whether it’s your ideal choice.

PrivacyHawk: Plans and pricing

You can check out the PrivacyHawk platform by clicking here.

It has a simple pricing system. Individuals can choose either the Premium or higher-priced Platinum plan. The former offers mostly data removal, while the latter offers extra features like dark web monitoring, identity theft protection, and priority support.

The Premium plan costs $20 per month, and the Platinum plan goes for $30 per month. However, PrivacyHawk offers steep discounts for users who choose to pay annually. An annual Premium subscription goes for $74, compared to $240 if paid month-to-month, and an annual Platinum subscription costs $125, compared with $360 if paid month-to-month. These steep discounts make an annual payment the best option.

(Image credit: PrivacyHawk )

PrivacyHawk also offers family discounts for both the Premium and Platinum plans. For Premium, a Family package (covering 4 people) goes for $200 annually, and the Platinum Family package costs $300 annually.

If paid month-to-month, the Premium Family plan costs $40, while the Platinum Family plan costs $50. This sums up to $480 over 12 months for the Premium plan, and $600 for the Platinum plan, which are overly high prices. I wouldn't advise paying month-to-month for the Family package—choose it only if you can afford the annual payment.

PrivacyHawk doesn’t offer a standard free trial, which is a drawback, but there’s a 30-day window to request a refund if you're unsatisfied with what you get. After downloading PrivacyHawk, I discovered that I could run some free scans (as part of a so-so, unofficial free tier package), but this isn’t a substitute for a standard free trial.

PrivacyHawk: Setup

Setting up PrivacyHawk doesn’t take much effort. It has designated iOS and Android apps, a feature that sets it apart from most data removal platforms I’ve tested. Setting up PrivacyHawk starts with downloading the app from the Play Store (Android) or App Store (iOS).

After downloading the app, you can sign in with an existing Google or Apple account. Provide the necessary sign-in permissions, and you’ll enter your PrivacyHawk dashboard.

PrivacyHawk welcomes new users with a free scan, as I noted when discussing the lack of a standard free trial. To begin the scan, you’re prompted to enter your name, last name, and age. PrivacyHawk then runs this data against a network of 100+ people-finder sites to discover where your personal data may be present.

Notably, this scanning is geared towards U.S.-centric data broker sites. Non-U.S. residents can run a digital footprint scan, but can’t scan or send deletion requests to data broker sites.

I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I needed to sign into my email again to run a digital footprint scan (although I did eventually). For most platforms I’ve reviewed, typing the email address is what’s needed to run the scan.

However, PrivacyHawk claims it works by analyzing email inboxes to see which companies could expose personal data. It also compiles a list of junk email senders that you can quickly unsubscribe from. If you’re comfortable with signing into your email address for a deep digital footprint scan, you can do it.

PrivacyHawk covers a network of 100+ data broker sites. This figure isn’t large compared to several competitors, but PrivacyHawk only focuses on U.S.-centric data broker sites, rather than providing global coverage. A scan can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, after which you’ll see a list of the data broker sites hosting your data. You can quickly initiate deletion requests, and this is where the real work begins.

PrivacyHawk sends automated deletion requests to data broker sites, asking them to remove your personal information from their database. If an automated request isn’t sufficient, PrivacyHawk’s team can send a manually drafted legal request to the data broker sites. Processing removal requests can take a long time, maybe 30 to 90 days, depending on the data broker site. Fortunately, I could monitor the progress of each request from the smartphone app.

You may have discovered your data present on a data broker site that isn’t covered by PrivacyHawk. In that case, you can initiate a manual removal request for that site from your dashboard. PrivacyHawk’s team will send a deletion request on your behalf and follow up on it.

After the initial scan and deletion requests, PrivacyHawk runs monthly rescans of your personal data and sends email alerts if your data is found on any site. You can then initiate new deletion requests. Overall, I found PrivacyHawk to be a reliable data removal platform, although with limited U.S.-centric coverage.

PrivacyHawk: Ease of use

PrivacyHawk scores high when it comes to user-friendliness. The mobile app felt very smooth to navigate, with features neatly arranged and an uncluttered dashboard for scanning, initiating, and monitoring deletion requests.

The interface features a white background with brightly-red-colored icons & buttons that are easy to find. From signing up to scanning and managing deletion requests, I have no complaints about PrivacyHawk’s ease of use.

(Image credit: PrivacyHawk)PrivacyHawk: Security and privacy

PrivacyHawk may not be the best data removal platform, but its complementary features make it practically a full-fledged security suite. With a single app, you can check if your data was discovered in data breaches, identify and block robocall numbers, and counter spam emails. A PrivacyHawk subscription significantly boosts your online privacy and security.

PrivacyHawk: Support

PrivacyHawk users have access to a detailed Help Center with user guides and manuals related to all its features. This Help Center proved very valuable as a new user navigating through data broker and digital footprint scans.

When I needed direct help, I contacted PrivacyHawk’s team via email. I saw what looked like live chat support, only to discover it was an AI chatbot, and I couldn’t chat with human support staff. Given the price of a PrivacyHawk subscription, I think live chat or telephone support should be provided, but they aren’t available.

PrivacyHawk: Competition

I’ll highlight OneRep as the main competitor to PrivacyHawk. It offers broader coverage, with a network of 300+ public data broker sites and 500+ non-public ones, compared to PrivacyHawk’s 100+ coverage. Its plans are more affordable than PrivacyHawk’s.

However, PrivacyHawk offers complementary features like dark web monitoring, identity theft protection, and robocall blocking, while OneRep offers email breach monitoring and little else. I think PrivacyHawk is a more complete security suite, but OneRep is a better option for data removal.

PrivacyHawk: Final verdict

PrivacyHawk has its pros and cons. Its data broker coverage is limited, but for the covered sites, it offers deep scans and effective deletion requests.

For sites not covered, you can still initiate manual deletion requests, although success rates may be lower. PrivacyHawk offers advanced complementary features that make it feel like an enterprise security suite.

The most notable drawbacks are the limited customer support, the lack of a standard free trial, and the limited broker coverage. However, PrivacyHawk remains a decent data removal platform.

Sennhesier Accentum Clip: two-minute review

Clip-on (or cuff-style) examples in our best open earbuds guide once felt like a niche trend alongside the more sensible shape — the one that arcs behind your ear. But these ear cuff-esque offerings may now be the next major personal audio craze.

The first ones to hit were Huawei’s FreeClip, and they were followed soon after by the premium Bose Ultra Open Earbuds. That was in early 2024, and they’re still among the best options you can buy today.

These days, everyone from Soundcore and Shokz to Earfun and Sony offers a clip-on set of buds, made to attach to the back of your ears and direct audio with tiny speakers pointing to your ear canals. They’re good for hearing everything around you at the same time as your music, and Sennheiser has just got in on the action with its Accentum Clip, available in Black and Cream colors.

The naming of Accentum (as opposed to Momentum) means they’re part of Sennheiser’s more affordable range, but they still promise the brand’s well-known rich and natural sound. The press release for the new buds says that “the growing demand for truly open earbuds has come with sonic compromises” and that these buck that trend by offering “brilliant Sennheiser sound in every situation”.

But we’ve also been here before with the cheap and slightly disappointing Sennheiser Accentum Open. I was keen to try the Accentum Clip and hoped they improved upon the previous attempt.

The good news is that these offer great performance in most of the areas that matter. Once you get a comfortable fit (which I found a tiny bit more challenging than usual), they deliver a clean and accurate sound. You have to be careful with volume levels, as too much volume introduces distortion, but they’re overall pretty delightful-sounding for this category.

And they’ve got excellent battery life, although I did encounter a couple of connection and multipoint quirks. Rivals from Shokz beat these on comfort and weight, while Soundcore undercuts them in the price department. That said, I still reckon they’re some of the best-sounding clip-ons I’ve heard, and that is important in a congested market.

The bad news? If you’re in the US, you seemingly can’t buy these at launch. They could be coming at a later date, but for now, US buyers will have to look at other clip-on contenders. As to why, Sennheiser told prospective buyers that it’s a "strategic decision based on the legal environment”, in a comment on Reddit. But decisions can be rethought, can't they…

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Sennheiser Accentum Clip review: Specifications

Component

Value

Water resistance

IP54

Battery life

9 hours; 36 hours with case

Bluetooth type

Bluetooth 6.0

Weight

6.8g per earbud

Driver

12mm dynamic

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Sennheiser Accentum Clip: Price and release date

• Launched on July 23, 2026
• Sells for £149 / AU$289 (around $180, although not officially available yet)
• Sennheiser’s first-ever clip-on buds

The Sennheiser Accentum Clip went on sale on July 23, 2026, after being announced almost a month earlier, on June 18. While they’re Sennheiser's first-ever challenger in the clip format, the brand previously tried its hand at a “semi-open” AirPods-style with the Accentum Open, which lacked app support and had flimsy build quality.

You can buy the Accentum Clip for £149 / AU$289. That puts them firmly in the middle of the pack for this style of earbuds. You can get the Soundcore AeroClip or new Shokz OpenDots Air for a competitive $129 / £129.99 / AU$219, or increase your budget to get the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds for $299 / £299 / AU$449.95.

Another top pick, the Shokz OpenDots 2, costs $199.95 / £179.99 / AU$339, while budget contenders like the EarFun Clip 2 set you back as little as $79.99 / £69.99 (about AU$120).

So, stiff competition — and Sennheiser's come in at a busy time.

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Sennheiser Accentum Clip review: Features

• 9 hours of playback on a charge; 36 hours with the charging case
• 5-band graphic equaliser in the Sennheiser Smart Control Plus app
• LDAC support and a battery protection mode to enhance longevity

The Sennheiser Accentum Clip are easy to set up and customise, and they support the Sennheiser Smart Control Plus app, which is one of the best companion apps in the business.

Right after adding them to the app, I was able to do a firmware update, turn on battery protection (more on that in a moment), Bluetooth multipoint, and customise the default touch controls. Here, you can also enable “advanced sound quality”, which turns on the buds’ LDAC capabilities.

As they’re open earbuds, you’re not getting any noise-cancellation (very few buds like this offer it, although the Shokz Openfit Pro and Honor Earbuds Open are two that do), which would draw more battery, so the promised battery life is 9 hours of listening, which extends to up to 36 hours when you factor in recharging via the case.

I checked battery life after three hours of continuous playback and they'd dropped by 40%, indicating a respectable 7.5 to 8 hours of total playtime at 50% volume. That's not quite Sennheiser's official figure, but still a solid real-world showing for open-ear buds — matching rivals like the Bose Ultra Open and Huawei FreeClip.

There’s not a long list of features here, although I do think they nail the basics. The battery protection mode, which makes them charge more slowly and prevents them from charging to 100%, is a fantastic feature to increase the longevity of your earphones. It reduces stress on battery cells and means you could vastly improve their lifespan.

There’s a 5-band EQ for tinkering with the sound, the ability to turn on the high-res LDAC codec and connection management. I’ll talk more about sound in a separate section, but it’s worth saying that one of my few disappointments here was with connectivity. Multipoint just didn’t really work effectively.

It connected to two devices, but audio would restart on the wrong device when pausing and playing again, or sound wouldn’t come out when watching some Instagram Reels. With multipoint off, you also can’t “pull” the connection from one device to another like you can on others. You have to manually disconnect and reconnect. These were all unexpected flaws for buds running Bluetooth 6.0, and hopefully will be fixed via firmware.

• Features score: 4 / 5

(Image credit: Sennheiser)Sennheiser Accentum Clip review: design

• Comfort takes a little getting used to
• As do the touch controls…
• IP54 dust- and splash-resistant

Most cuff-style buds look pretty similar, but there are some notable deviations from the formula in Sennheiser’s design. They’re a little heavier than some rivals, at 6.8g per bud, and a little more of that mass is at the back, where the battery is held in the part that clips behind your ear.

In use, this makes them “pinch” ever so slightly more than some comparable rivals, and it’s essential to find the right position to angle the driver to fire audio into your ears. Get it slightly wrong, and you’ll have a less-engaging sound.

The stretchy part is a little chunkier than on some rivals, too, which may also affect how they feel to wear. I was able to get them sitting comfortably, but it takes a little trial-and-error.

Once they were on, the other big difference I noticed is that they use touch controls at the front of the buds (on the speaker part) rather than at the back on the battery container. This, unfortunately, does mean several more accidental taps. But, luckily, you can tweak and turn off capacitive control in the app.

They’re IP54-rated, so they can survive dust and light splashes, and they go in a fairly compact and discreet charging case with the Sennheiser logo on the top. I like that the case stands upright on a tabletop, and it’s small enough to be pocketable.

They’re just in white or black shades, and the plastic of the buds and case doesn’t feel quite as premium as Sennheiser’s flagship true wireless pair; but this is the Accentum line, so that isn’t a huge shock.

• Design score: 3.5 / 5

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Sennheiser Accentum Clip review: Sound quality

• Natural, warm Sennheiser sound
• Best suited for indoor listening
• They have LDAC support, but it doesn’t make a difference

Open earbuds always have to make a couple of compromises to bring you audio while maintaining your awareness of the outside world. Keeping your ear canals unplugged means you don’t have the acoustic seal required for deep low frequencies, for example.

That said, Sennheiser has managed to bring much of its natural and balanced sound signature across to the Accentum Clip, and these offer a pleasant, warm listen. Vocals and instrumentation sound as I expected, and there’s none of the harshness or hollowness I’ve heard on some cheaper clip-ons.

Across a wide range of listening (including ambient focus playlists, the new Myles Smith album, summer pop playlists, and Michael Giacchino’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day soundtrack), I found the 12mm drivers deliver impressive clarity and refinement. At moderate listening levels (up to about 70%) I felt they had a good bass presence with a bit of weight to kick drums.

But, crank the volume up and it does change things a bit. I’d definitely prefer to use these in quieter indoor environments over the busy outdoors, because increasing the volume introduces distortion, takes some of the texture out of the bass, while fine details end up getting a bit lost.

Audiophiles will be happy to see that the Accentum Clip support the high-res LDAC codec, alongside standard AAC and SBC. In use, though, I couldn't detect any meaningful audible difference when switching between streaming via LDAC on a Google Pixel 10 Pro and AAC on an iPhone 17 Pro. High-res support is great, but it doesn’t make an obvious difference in this product and using LDAC will probably just burn through your battery life a little quicker.

• Sound score: 4 / 5

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Sennheiser Accentum Clip review: Value

• Great value compared to Sennheiser’s last 'open' pair
• But they’re undercut by quite a few other cuff buds

While the Sennheiser Accentum Clip are a good pair of clip-on buds, you’re paying mid-range money for a pair that feels ever so slightly below-mid-range, given how many elements are evidently a “first try” at this form factor.

I like them for sound quality, but because I found comfort, control and connectivity a little less convincing, I think there are cheaper rivals with better features.

When compared to Sennheiser’s last open earbuds attempt, the Accentum Open, these are a far better value proposition because they include app support and features like battery protection, control customisation, and LDAC.

But if compared to the rest of the open bud market, there are serious challengers available at lower prices from the likes of Shokz, Earfun, Soundcore, CMF by Nothing and Soundpeats.

• Value score: 4 / 5

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Should I buy the Sennheiser Accentum Clip?Score card

Features

Solid battery performance, useful battery protection, and extensive app controls (including EQ and customizable touch gestures) make for a strong feature set.

4

Design

Cuff-style clip with an IP54 build, though the touch controls are prone to accidental taps. The fit does also feel slightly heavier than some rivals.

3.5

Sound quality

Impressively warm and natural at moderate volumes, though bass and detail fall off when pushed louder.

4

Value

More affordable than flagships like the Bose Ultra Open, offering great audio and features for the price despite having several cheaper rivals.

4

Buy them if…

You need Sennheiser sound in the clip-style
At moderate volume, I loved the sound on offer from the Sennheiser Accentum Clip — they’re detailed, warm, and engaging.View Deal

You need LDAC support
LDAC is extremely rare for the open clip-on category; even the major players stick to the basic codecs, and while I can’t say it made the biggest difference in sound, some high-res purists will appreciate its presence.View Deal

You want to hold onto them for a very long time
That battery preservation feature is a big deal — controlling how fast they charge and setting a charge limit could double or triple how long they last compared to others.View Deal

Don’t buy them if…

You need a fuss-free fit
An ever-so-slightly chunkier build (for this category) meant I needed a few attempts to get the right fit, and that can be frustrating with the oddly-placed touch control panel.View Deal

You’re on a tight budget
This may be a lower price for Sennheiser, but there’s healthy competition among open buds, and these aren’t quite among the best budget options.View Deal

You’d like to use multipoint
While it may be fixed in a firmware update, I can’t pretend the multipoint issues aren’t a strange issue and one I wouldn’t have expected in 2026 from buds at this price — especially a pair with Bluetooth 6.0.View Deal

(Image credit: Future / Simon Cocks)Sennheiser Accentum Clip review: Also consider

EarFun Clip 2
These prove you don’t need to spend loads of money to get comfortable, secure clip-on open earbuds that actually sound good. While the cheap build reflects the budget price tag, the inclusion of LDAC, an impressive 11-hour battery life, and IP55 water resistance make them a great entry point for those new to open earbuds.
Read our full EarFun Clip 2 reviewView Deal

Bose Ultra Open Earbuds
It's been two years since they launched, and the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds are still a benchmark for open-ears, delivering rich sound and Bose’s immersive audio while keeping your spatial awareness intact. They're undeniably expensive, but the featherlight cuff design is so comfortable and surprisingly secure that I often forget I'm wearing them.
Read our full Bose Ultra Open Earbuds review View Deal

How I tested the Sennheiser Accentum Clip

• Tested for two weeks
• Paired with Android, iOS and macOS devices
• Used during multiple activities

I tested the Sennheiser Accentum Clip over two weeks, pairing them with my iPhone 17 Pro, MacBook Air, and Google Pixel 10 Pro, which allowed me to thoroughly test multipoint connectivity and LDAC support.

I wore them mostly at home while working, cooking, and during full-day listening sessions, as well as outside on walks in the park. I used them to play a wide variety of media, including music of several genres, podcasts, and YouTube videos.

I also ran a battery test on these to see if the real-world performance lived up to the claims.

I've been testing gadgets since 2020, and I've reviewed countless headphones and earbuds, including dozens of open-style models from brands like Shokz, Nothing, Soundcore, Bose and Huawei.

Read more about how we test at TechRadar

• First reviewed: October 2026

Surprises are rare in gaming. At first glance, Phantom Blade Zero had all the hallmarks of a solid, if middle-of-the-road, release. Now that I’ve sunk almost 20 hours into this wuxia- and martial arts-inspired roleplaying game (RPG), it’s clear S-Game has delivered one of the most thrilling action games in a long time.

A blistering opening sets the tone, with bombastic battles, dramatic visuals, and gorgeous cinematics that introduce wandering warrior Soul and the reason he’s on a battle-filled journey across the corrupted land of Wulin. The 20+ hour adventure that lies ahead may not deliver everything narratively, but it excels with a stunning world to explore and combat that sings.

Review info

Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release date: October 29, 2026

It’s clear that so much effort has gone into getting this combat spot on, with detailed weapon designs, satisfying sound effects, and some truly outstanding animations. Every time I saw a new weapon or secondary Phantom Art from the impressive variety in the game in action, I was dazzled by the string of attacks and finishing-move flourishes it offered.

Of course, not all of them were bangers or suited the way I wanted to play, but the better ones stand out way more than the bad, which gave me a lot of tough choices when deciding which two I wanted to upgrade and wield. Even though I stuck with a few favorites throughout the game, I rarely tired of stringing together the intricate combos each one offered.

Having flashy weapons is all well and good, but if you don’t have decent dance partners to put them to use against, it can get dull fast. Outside of a few exceptions, fodder enemies are fairly easy to cut your way through, but Phantom Blade Zero doesn’t miss a beat with its lineup of tough and inventive boss encounters that will put your skills and weapon choices to the test.

Stop trying to hit me and hit me

(Image credit: Future / S-Game)

What I appreciated most is that, while these bouts are often a relentless barrage of attacks from either side, combat is actually quite forgiving.

That mainly comes from the option to hold block to deflect most attacks. This will drain your sha-chi (effectively a stamina resource that’s also used for certain skills and abilities), but it lasts a lot longer and can be refilled with a quick weapon switch to keep you in the fight longer.

You can also choose to try and parry attacks with perfect timing as they land, meaning you do not lose this resource and drain more from your opponent instead, leaving them open to a lot of attacks while it recharges.

(Image credit: Future / S-Game)

Mix in attacks with blue flashes that can be parried with perfect timing to deliver a devastating counterattack, and red flash attacks that must be dodged to avoid significant damage, and combat becomes chaotic but not overwhelming.

Best bit

(Image credit: Future / S-Game)

Unlocking a new weapon or Phantom Art and seeing what animations have been cooked up to show it off is one of the most exciting parts of Phantom Blade Zero. The work that has gone into making each piece of equipment unique is impressive, creating an arsenal of gear that is acrobatic, impactful, and continuously satisfying to wield. Thankfully, the game is also generous with resources, so you can try lots of these weapons with ease to find favorites.

Key moves you need to watch out for are very readable, while the ability to block almost everything else means you have time to study the opponent’s moves, find your own windows to attack, and survive any small slip-ups — rather than being repeatedly punished for imperfect play.

That’s not to say Phantom Blade Zero is without any degree of challenge. A good handful of bosses did flatten me repeatedly, including several dramatic fights that are hiding away off the main path or in side quests, so exploration can be very rewarding if you like to test yourself.

When facing these enemies, I was especially thankful that there’s no need to trudge back to collect your resources on death if you just want to move on. With the game’s much less punishing difficulty curve, this change of pace is a blessing if you’re not in the mood for yet another Souls-like.

Memory problems

(Image credit: Future / S-Game)

Some of that genre’s obtuseness is kept in the narrative, however. A lot of the game’s story is told in bits and pieces, mainly through flashbacks, Soul’s memories, and memory flowers found in the world that reveal the stories of the people in the places you travel through.

It makes for some fascinating moments of discovery and some genuinely engaging asides when they come together, but breaking things up this way, especially with multiple story strands in play at once, can make it harder to follow exactly what’s going on all the time. It can kill the pacing at times, too, as sometimes you stop-and-start to listen to multiple of these audio-logs-as-flowers one after the other.

The problem is only emphasised in a game that’s packed with proper nouns, making it exhausting to keep track of the who, what, where, and when as you ping between different perspectives and time periods.

At least it’s easy to get swept up in the aura and atmosphere of it all. And when you get back into combat, unsheathing a sword that gets more powerful as you get more drunk, sending enemies flying with a giant tower shield, or chopping some poor soul in half with a two-handed claymore, any niggles fall away. The action at the core is so good and an awesome achievement from the debut developers.

Should you play Phantom Blade Zero?

(Image credit: Future / S-Game)Play it if…

You want to experience some of the best action combat in gaming
Phantom Blade Zero is up there with the genre greats when it comes to action combat, delivering on variety with a satisfying arsenal of weapons and abilities, and execution when it comes to animations and sound design.

You enjoy the wuxia genre
Phantom Blade Zero draws from a lot of the iconography and tropes of wuxia in both its story and combat, so if you're a fan, or just want to experience it, then this is a great place to start.

Don’t play it if…

You want a comfortable and easy-to-follow story
It is rarely too complicated to follow, but the way the story is presented in Phantom Blade Zero, along with the barrage of proper nouns you have to contend with from minute one, means you might struggle to stay engaged with it at all times.

You want a more traditional Souls-like experience
While it can be argued that there is some crossover, Phantom Blade Zero is more action-focused and draws very little inspiration from the Souls-like genre, so don't go in expecting an experience similar to the likes of Dark Souls or Elden Ring.

Accessibility features

There are limited accessibility features in Phantom Blade Zero. You can choose to play the game with English VO or with the traditional Chinese VO with subtitles in many languages. Subtitles can be in normal or large, although a very large option would likely be useful for some. There are three controller presets, but no option to remap specific buttons. You can also adjust the intensity of camera shaking, turn off motion blur, and reduce the level of violence.

How I reviewed Phantom Blade Zero

I played Phantom Blade Zero for around 20 hours, taking my time to complete a handful of side quests while making significant progress on the main story — and I'm absolutely going to stick with it to the end.

Again, I played on a PlayStation 5 Pro on a Samsung S90C OLED TV and Samsung HW-Q930C soundbar while using a DualSense Wireless Controller. I did play briefly using the PlayStation Portal, and found it was a perfectly fine way to run the game, too.

Phantom Blade Zero has the option to play in Quality, Balanced, or Performance mode. I stuck with Balanced mode for my playthrough, which did a good job of running the game at 40 frames per second (fps) in dynamic 4K with ray tracing, as I experienced very few and very minor stutters. Performance mode targeting 60fps is likely a better option, though, if you prefer smoothness throughout.

First reviewed October 2026.