If you're suffering from gaming nostalgia fatigue, you're not alone. But you might want to make some extra room in your media center because the latest retro console, the Sega Genesis Mini, might also be the greatest.
If you spend most of your day typing or coding, a mechanical keyboard is a worthwhile upgrade over a cheaper, less comfortable keyboard. After spending months testing 19 of the most promising options, we found that the Varmilo VA87M is the best tenkeyless mechanical keyboard thanks to its excellent build quality and compact, minimalist design. It's also available with a ton of switch options and colorful high-quality keycaps to match your preference.
Lenovo's first AR headset had a strange limitation. It would only play games, and at launch there was just one of them: Star Wars: Jedi Challenges. Sure, that's a massive franchise, but it was hard to believe the company expected people to spend $200 on an AR kit just to play a single game. As it turns out, the Star Wars title will no longer be the Mirage AR's solo offering. Continuing its partnership with Disney, Lenovo is releasing a new Marvel: Avengers game called Dimension of Heroes, along with some new controllers.
Microsoft will test its Project xCloud game streaming service in South Korea this October. The company has announced a public preview that will allow "selected" SK Telecom customers to test the platform over a 5G connection. Testers won't need an Xbox One console to test the service -- like the upcoming Google Stadia, all games will be streamed to their phone from a datacenter somewhere. That's in stark contrast to the console streaming feature that Microsoft announced at E3 a few months ago. That capability, which also goes live in October, will turn your Xbox One into a personal server that's capable of streaming games to other devices.
If you weren't up this morning to watch Acer's IFA 2019 keynote, we don't blame you: it started at a very early 5:30AM ET for those of us in North America. Thankfully, the Engadget crew was on the ground in Berlin to catch all the latest announcements from the Taiwanese manufacturer. and we've got 10 minutes of the presentation's highlights for you. Acer's press event had a bit of everything, including new laptops aimed at creative professionals, entry-level gaming machines and a new cooling material the company says will replace thermal paste. To top it all off, Acer showed off its new $14,000 Thronos Air Gaming Chair.
ASUS hosted its IFA 2019 press event at 7AM ET this morning. We don't blame you if you were still sleeping, or on your way to work, and missed it. Lucky for you we were on the ground in Berlin and we've condensed the whole thing down to just under 10 minutes so you can catch up quickly. The company announced a new smart watch, expanded availability for its high-end ROG Phone II gaming phone, powerful new laptops for creative pros (including the first to harness NVIDIA's Quadro RTX 6000 graphics), displays and a whole lot more.
With waves of GPU upgrades and Intel processor refreshes keeping things interesting, gaming laptop competition has never been fiercer. In a bid to pick up gamers not quite willing to spend thousands of dollars on their rig, the Predator Triton 300 keeps the thin-and-light credentials of the series (this one is just 2.3kg), and ties together a 9th-gen Intel Core i7 with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. There's 16GB of DDR4 memory which is upgradeable, and a 15.6-inch HD IPS display with a 144Hz refresh rate. Yes, there are more powerful machines out there, but the spec sheet sounds suitably gamer-friendly -- just don't expect ray-tracing. It'll support up to two 1TB SSDs in RAID 0, and there's WiFi 6 alongside a mandatory ethernet port if you're playing online.
For years, Razer has been chasing the specter of a truly ultraportable gaming laptop with its Blade Stealth line -- something lighter than its flagship Blade notebooks, but with enough power to play a few rounds of Overwatch. With its latest Blade Stealth 13, Razer might have finally succeeded. The new models weigh just 2.8 pounds and feature Intel's 10th-gen Core CPUs and your choice of Iris Plus graphics or NVIDIA's GTX 1650. That's more than enough hardware to play Overwatch -- a decked out Blade Stealth should handle most modern games in 1080p.
