And yet, that’s just what we’re going to do: TechRadar would like to announce its Game of the Year Awards 2017. Like last year, categories will be both platform-based (like best PS4 game) and genre-based (like best action-adventure game) and can be found listed in their entirety below. So far, we’ve picked out 12 categories for games to fall into, and that’s not including our overall Game of the Year pick, our readers’ choice and our Most Excited About award for a game that’s coming next year. W

Samsung is doubling down on its laptop efforts in 2018, announcing its plans to start the year strong with three new laptops, namely a brand new model dubbed the Samsung Notebook 9 Pen. Samsung says this is made possible through a Micro Arc Oxidation (MAO) process that gives the surface an oxide coating. Specifically, the Notebook 9 Pen is just 2.2 pounds (995g) heavy and 0.57 inches (14.6mm) thick at its thinnest point. One USB-C port, one USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a microSD reader and an aud

Image credit: Samsung/US Patent OfficeThere’s a new patent out for Samsung featuring a smartphone with a screen that wraps around the edge and partly onto the back of the device, as discovered by LetsGoDigital . It certainly doesn’t explain what the point of the wraparound screen would be, which only goes about halfway around the back of the phone. LG also won a patent for a phone with an “ornamental” wraparound screen earlier this year. In Apple’s case, though, the OLED screen used for the devi

It seems like everyone’s trying to get into streaming TV these days, and now T-Mobile has tossed its ambitions on the pile following its acquisition of Layer3 TV. T-Mobile says the upcoming, unnamed service will “un-carrier” your TV at some point in 2019, and the company describes it as a bit of a halfway point between a traditional cable service and the on-demand channels like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. “T-Mobile plans to launch its own disruptive new TV service next year, tapping into the

The iPhone X, even if you can’t see it, can do nifty tricks like Animoji and Face ID all thanks to invisible lasers. This money will allow Finisar to increase R&D and high-volume production of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers already in the iPhone X and AirPods. The iPhone X uses these advanced lasers to power the TrueDepth camera for Aminimoji, Face ID and bokeh-rich Portrait mode selfies. How will Apple and Finisar push boundaries of their already high-tech lasers? Apple seems laser-foc

If you have one of Samsung’s latter-day QLED or UHD high-end TVs like the Samsung Q9F , you’re in for a treat. As of today, you can stream in HDR10+ now on the units through Amazon Prime Video. Samsung claimed in a press release that it’s the first time this kind of quality has been achieved through streaming alone. Tossing the licensesIn fact, HDR10+ is an open standard for HDR video that was developed by Amazon and Samsung themselves, and it’s particularly known for the way it can adjust brigh

Google announced that it is bringing Assistant to tablets, reversing its original decision to keep the voice-friendly assistant a phones-only affair. You’ll soon be able to find it on any tablet running Android Marshmallow or Android Nougat. This includes a wide swath of options available from the likes Samsung, Asus, Lenovo and more. One caveat that Google notes is the Assistant will only be coming for users using English in the US. Additionally, Google has announced that it will be rolling out

Best TV Buying Guide: Welcome to TechRadar’s round-up of the best TVs you can buy in 2017. We’ve all been at Best Buy, staring down a wall of brightly glowing TVs and thought to ourselves, “Wow, these all look great.” The 55A1 – and the A1 OLED series overall – are crowd pleasers in just about every way. These prove emphatically what we’ve long suspected: More brands using OLED technology can only lead to good things. But instead of going straight for Samsung’s flagship from last year, consider

It’s hard to predict exactly what 2018 will hold, but more Nintendo mobile games seems to be a pretty safe bet if a recent report from The Wall Street Journal is anything to go by. According to this report, Nintendo is looking to partner up with more mobile developers in order to raise the pace of its output after 2017 fell somewhat short of expectations. The Wall Street Journal states that, by partnering with a larger number of developers, Nintendo believes it’ll be able to release more games a

Bluesound Vault 2There are many ways to rip your CDs and store music on a network, but nothing matches the simplicity of the Bluesound Vault 2. The BluOS app also lets you stream music from Tidal, Spotify, TuneIn, Deezer and Qobuz. Apple iPad 5th generationThe latest iteration of Apple’s evergreen tablet is as good a portable interface for your digital music system as you’ll find. Just load up the BluOS app and browse your Bluesound Vault at leisure (although you could use an Android tablet, or

We’re over the moon* that every year is now bringing us more Star Wars, and this year – in case you’ve been pushed into a waste compactor – we get an honest to goodness numbered film with Star Wars VIII, The Last Jedi, hitting the silver screen. Here at TechRadar, we’re huge fans of a galaxy far, far away, so we’re celebrating this new arrival to the Star Wars world with a series of articles. *That’s no moon…Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi is here! Here’s what you need to know before you

Star Wars hype is once again through the roof, thanks to the double whammy of the brand new Star Wars: Battlefront 2 game having recently been released, and the upcoming release of Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, and to celebrate we’re once again running our Star Wars week that celebrates everything from that galaxy far, far away. If you’re eagerly awaiting your opportunity to step into a Stormtrooper’s shoes – or you want to fight the good fight on the side of the Rebels – then Star Wars: Battlef

Scroll down far enough through your Netflix library and they start to appear, those categories that seem just a little too specific. Maybe Netflix will assemble a collection of “Quirky comedies” for your amusement, or “Historical TV Dramas”. You can blame Mike Hastings for all of the categories you see while browsing Netflix. When Netflix moved towards its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system and away from a 5-star rating system, he lamented the loss of the feature. Once genre has been established, Net

The holidays are an expensive time, so we’re bringing you a special treat: a full, free Windows program to download every day until Christmas. Behind door 13 on our free downloads advent calendar you’ll discover Ashampoo PDF Free – a complete toolkit for viewing, editing and creating PDFs. Not only is Ashampoo PDF Free a great looking reader, it also lets you combine pages from multiple PDFs, move and delete pages, and complete forms in seconds. Ashampoo PDF Free also includes a superb search fu

Online retail and the wonder of one-day delivery means you don’t really have to worry until Christmas day has actually passed, right? To help you get a gift that will leave your friends wondering if you’ve been snooping on their letters to Santa, we’ve put together some handy gift guides. Fortunately, the best Christmas deals can now usually be found online. We’re here to help you find the must-have Christmas tech gifts and get the best deals on everything you can. Below we’ve got some essential

It’s not every leading industry figure, however, that sees microtransactions as the best option across the board. In a recent interview with MCV Square Enix CEO, Yosuke Matsuda, made it clear that his company is unlikely to push microtransactions in its console releases. “Gone are the days,” he explained, “in which single-player games were of primary status and multiplayer games secondary. That’s an important thing and very vital for us to provide that.”Square Enix won’t completely eschew microt

Nvidia unleashed a new most powerful GPU in the world at the end of last week, and now the Nvidia Titan V has been benchmarked in terms of its GPU mining abilities. So how did Nvidia’s new graphics card with 110 teraflops of computing power perform when it came to mining? So this potentially bodes well for the mining performance of the more affordable Volta models (i.e. AMD has even indicated that it expects demand for GPUs used in cryptocurrency mining to fall as we head into 2018. Nvidia’s Tit

At the weekend we heard word of the first Android Wear watches that will be upgraded to Oreo, but we now have a full list of devices and some will get the new software soon. That’s impressive considering those are mostly fashion-forward brands rather than focusing on the tech angle. Lots of other devices have been confirmed to be getting the update at some point, and we’ve got all of those listed below. Exactly when the update will be landing on those watches is still currently unclear, and if y

Despite likely launching early next year we haven’t seen much of the Samsung Galaxy S9 yet, but a newly leaked sketch might give us a good idea of how it will look. Posted on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging platform), the sketch shows a phone that looks a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S8, complete with a curved screen and tiny bezels. However, we’ve previously heard rumors that only the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus will get a second lens, so that lines up. Could this be the form the Samsung Galaxy S9 wil

The new iMac Pro comes out tomorrow starting at a wallet-damaging price of $4,999 (£4,999 or about AU$6,679), and perhaps the way some people will afford one is by trading in their old Mac – particularly considering that Apple has just upped the maximum trade-in value to $2,500 in the US. Apple’s trade-in scheme is run in conjunction with partner firm Phobio over in the States, and the previous maximum payment was $1,500, but has now been increased to the aforementioned $2,500. A hefty boost ind