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Razer Blade 14 (2023): Two-minute review This year’s Razer Blade 14 refresh has been outfitted with the latest specs, including the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU, which sports a 5.2 GHz max clock speed and eight cores/16 threads, and up to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. Despite containing such powerful and normally heavy components, it still manages to remain lightweight and thin, a contrast to the much larger laptop models like the 16-inch and 18-inch ones. And not only are the specs themselves impressive, but the overall performance is too. The laptop can get hot during more intensive gaming sessions but it never once stuttered, slowed down, or froze. Its chassis is simply all black with the logo in green, the distinctive style of Razer products. There’s also a white version called Mercury, but unfortunately no Quartz from the 2022 model. It’s a little over four pounds with a thickness of less than one inch which, combined with the 14-inch display, makes it easy to carry around in most...

Record players – they’re all the same, right? Well, not quite. Certainly the Victrola Stream Carbon has one or two points of difference. And it’s exactly the sort of product you’d like to think a company that’s fast closing in on its 100th birthday (as America’s Victrola is) might come up with: rooted in heritage and experience, but forward-looking and innovative at the same time. Priced at $799 / £899 / AU$1,199, the Stream Carbon goes up against some of the best turntables on the planet, from some of the most dependable and high-achieving brands. The likes of Pro-Ject and Rega in Europe, and Audio Technica and Technics in Asia will sell you a hugely well-regarded alternative for very similar money. But, of course, those brands are ‘only’ selling you a classic wired record player, whereas Victrola is throwing in some very unlikely functionality for the money, in the form of wireless Sonos connectivity. The Stream Carbon is a belt-drive turntable that can handle 33.3 and 45rpm spee...

Emma NextGen Premium mattress: two-minute review Announced in April 2023 and released not long after, the Emma NextGen Premium mattress is something of a departure for a sleep brand that's made its name selling memory foam and hybrid mattresses. With three thin layers of foam sitting on top of tall 18cm pocket springs, it appears to have more in common with traditional pocket sprung mattresses than with other hybrid beds that you'd find in our best mattress guide. The advantage to having such a deep spring layer is that it facilitates airflow and helps the NextGen Premium regulate temperature, and unlike many hybrids it doesn't feature foam side supports around the springs, again helping with airflow but, I discovered, resulting in less edge support than I'd have liked. Emma rates the NextGen Premium as a 6.5/10 medium firm; having slept on it for the past month, I'd suggest that this is understating its firmness a bit. My previous mattress was a firm pocket sp...

Garmin Fenix 7 Pro: One-minute review The Garmin Fenix 7 Pro is a new version of the Fenix 7, which launched in early 2022. This isn’t the first time Garmin has launched a Pro version of its feature-packed watch aimed at lovers of the great outdoors and is likely to fill the void before we see the Fenix 8. For the Fenix 7 Pro, the headline news is that one of the best Garmin watches is seeking to improve things even further in the display and heart rate tracking departments and now wants to help you better understand how well-equipped you are at tackling hills and endurance events. The Fenix 7 was an impressive watch and it’s more of the same with the Pro, offering a rich array of sports profiles, metrics, training and analysis insights and the kind of battery life that can keep you away from a charger for weeks. The problem that the Pro has is that many of the big software features have headed to the older Fenix 7 series, making the Pro version more of a sell for older Fenix own...

One-minute review (Image credit: Future / Philip Berne) The Kindle Scribe has improved enough since it launched to become my preferred tablet to recommend if you like reading, journaling, and now maybe even old school pen and ink games like crossword puzzles and sudoku. It has the biggest screen you can find on a Kindle, while keeping the display just as sharp as the best Kindle ereaders, so books and text look amazing, even better than reading on the best iPad .  If you’re a hardcore handwriter and note-taker, you might prefer the Remarkable 2 tablet, which has many more options for pen styles, background templates, and productivity. The Kindle Scribe still has advantages, especially its backlight that lets you read and write in the dark, which the Remarkable can’t manage. The Kindle Scribe keeps things simpler, and this will work better for most people who aren’t using the writing tablet in the boardroom. The Scribe’s cost is also more consumer-friendly.  I ori...

There was something we kept quiet about in our recent Shutterstock review .  While the Shutterstock service has long been hailed as one of the best free stock photo sites on the web, there’s more to the creative platform than assets and content library. There are also a series of online companion apps, available under the banner Creative Flow+.  You can try Shutterstock Creative Flow+ by clicking here.   Creative Flow+: Pricing & plans A service that’s included in Shutterstock subscriptions, available as a standalone product with a free trial   Creative Flow+ is a standalone subscription, independent of the rest of Shutterstock’s offerings. Although it’s important to note that when you subscribe to one of Shutterstock’s monthly or annual plans, you’ll get Creative Flow+ included for free. If you don’t need access to those plans, Creative Flow+ will cost you $13 per month, or $120 per year, and if you’re curious about the service, there’s a free month’...