Are this year`s major attacks the `cumulative effect of a kind of inaction on cyber security` from the government and big business? Read...

TL;DR: Get lifetime licenses for Microsoft Visio Pro 2024 and Microsoft Project Pro 2024 for Windows — both $49.97 until October 19 — to simplify workflows and manage projects with confidence. Professionals need tools that make complexity manageable, and Microsoft’s 2024 lineup delivers just that. With lifetime licenses for Visio Professional and Project Professional for $49.97 each until October 19, you’ll have two powerhouse programs that simplify workflows from start to finish. Visualize complex ideas with Visio Visio helps you turn messy ideas into clear visuals, whether it’s IT networks, business processes, or floor plans. Diagrams can also pull real-time data from sources like Excel to stay up to date, while enhanced collaboration and Microsoft 365 integration make sharing effortless. Wide range of professional diagram types Real-time data linking for live updates Cloud and mobile access for edits anywhere Smooth integration with Microsoft 365 250,000+ templates and shapes to choose from Microsoft Visio Professional 2024: Lifetime License for WindowsSee Deal Manage tasks seamlessly with Project Project Pro makes managing deadlines and resources far less stressful. Pre-built templates get you started quickly, while built-in reports and multiple timelines provide clear insights. Templates and reports for faster planning Teams integration and intuitive baselines What-if scenarios for smarter resource use Timeline and task visualization tools Timesheet submissions and collaboration support Microsoft Project Professional 2024: Lifetime License for WindowsSee Deal Microsoft Visio and Project Pro 2024 give professionals the clarity to plan and the structure to execute. Each license is available now for $49.97 each until October 19. StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

Amazon’s fall hardware events can usually be counted on for a couple of things: an avalanche of new devices, and at least one new product that’s genuinely nuts.  Take the Amazon Astro, a two-wheeled Alexa-powered robot that was rolled out—literally—during Amazon’s fall 2021 hardware event. A year prior, there was the Ring Always Home Cam, an indoor airborne drone that could patrol your home in a preset flight pattern.   Other gems from yesteryear include the Echo Loop, an early stab at a smart ring that put Alexa on your finger, while the Echo Look was a camera that allowed Alexa to give you a morning fashion check.  Even the introduction of the newly AI-enhanced Alexa—the first unveiling was back in 2023, mind you—was delightfully unhinged, with the “supercharged” Alexa channeling HAL-9000 during its spirited back-and-forth conversations. (In contrast, the February 2025 Alexa+ announcement focused on more prosaic applications such as shopping and smart home control.)  So for Amazon’s big hardware reveal in New York City earlier this week—the first one in two years, as well as the first to be hosted by ex-Microsoft executive Panos Panay, now the head of Amazon’s hardware division—I was ready for a firehose of new products, as well as something crazy. Personally, I was betting on a new, Alexa+-tinged take on the third-generation Echo Show 10, an Echo smart display with a motorized screen that could follow you around the room, perfect for allowing the new AI Alexa to scan your kitchen and guide you as you toiled over dinner prep.  Amazon showed off plenty of pratical upgrades at its fall hardware event, but nothing genuinely nuts.Ben Patterson/Foundry Or, how about this: a new generation of Echo Frames that would compete with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, complete with tiny integrated cameras that would let you take Alexa+ out into the world. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?  Well, it turns out I was only half-right about Amazon’s fall hardware event this year. There was a truckload of new products, including four new Echo devices, more than a half-dozen Ring cameras, a couple of Kindles and a series of new Fire TV sets, plus a budget Fire TV 4K stick.  Disappointingly, though, there was no crazy—no Echo robots, no Echo Show displays with autonomous rotating screens, no flying Ring drones, nothing to wear with Alexa+ on board. What gives?  Well, one answer could be that Amazon’s become much more practical about its devices in the past couple of years, with a renewed focus on profitability as Panay took the reins from longtime Amazon hardware chief David Limb in fall 2023—which was, incidentally, the year Amazon uncharacteristically skipped its regular hardware event.  Previously, Amazon seemed to take a throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks approach with its hardware, which led to a lot of wild pitches—and, consequently, a lot of abandoned products. That Ring Always Home Cam drone? Never left its early “Day One Edition” status. Same for the Echo Loop, while the Amazon Astro bot was briefly repurposed into a business-oriented guard dog before being summarily ditched. The Echo Look camera? Deactivated long ago.  Instead, we got a lineup of sensibly refreshed products, including spiffy new Echo speakers and displays with beefed-up internals, the first 4K-capable Ring cameras, and revamped Fire TVs with AI-enhanced search.  The upgrades all appear quite solid and practical, with reasonable price tags and no need to sign up for an early access ticket. In short, Amazon played it safe with this year’s new hardware—a smart move, from a business perspective.   Me, I miss the crazy. Read...

What’s the first thing you do when you start a fresh Windows install? For myself and many others, it’s installing Chrome (usually using Ninite). I throw Brave and Firefox on there after, but Chrome comes first. It’s part of the ritual. But as useful as Chrome is for downloading drivers and the Steam launcher, you can make it far more capable with the right extensions. After I’ve downloaded it, there are always a handful I install right away. If you’re staring at a fresh—starkly white—Chrome install and would like a few tips about how to make it that bit better, here are some of my favorites. DarkReader: Dark mode for Chrome Give your eyes a break with the Dark Reader extension for Chrome. Jon Martindale Argh my eyes! I don’t know whether I’m just getting older or my laser eye surgery is wearing off, but the stark whiteness of most modern websites feels blinding. I find working in dark mode much more comfortable, but unfortunately there are only so many websites that have a proper dark mode, and even then it’s not always uniformly applied. Pop open a private tab and watch how all your personalized dark modes disappear just as fast. With DarkReader you don’t have to worry about that. Regardless of the kind of blanched-white backdrops a website wants to shine your way, DarkReader nips that in the bud and forces a dark mode that it creates on the fly, inverting brighter colors and whites and making the web a more comfortable place to explore. Grammarly/Prowritingaid: Stop making typos (as much) Listen, I do this for a living typing out thousands of words every single day and I still make use of smart extensions like Grammarly and ProWritingAid to make my writing that extra bit better. Even if you use ChatGPT or other AI to craft emails or longer-form content for you, having a writing assistant like these give it a once over is a real help. Both are better in their paid versions, but they work well enough in the free edition too. And you can even enjoy them outside of Chrome if you like. StayFocusd: Block or limit time wasting sites StayFocusd will hit you with a pithy statement and engaging picture if and when you try to test its capabilities. If you’ve followed my coverage at PCWorld at all, you’ll know I struggle with procrastination and a big part of that is staying on task. If you, like me, find that you can’t quite stay away from Reddit when you’re supposed to be writing a guide on Chrome extensions, then StayFocusd is a great tool. It lets you block websites outright, or time limit your access to them by time or date. It won’t stop you going to another browser for your fix, but it does block you just enough to make you question whether you should get back to work instead. Various password managers: Pick your favorite I’m a big fan of low-fi password managers that keep everything decidedly offline, but I’m not the only one in my family and not everyone feels the same. Other people prefer cloud-based options, so when I install Chrome on a fresh PC, I usually install their password manager too so they can readily access it. Which password you use is down to your personal preferences (though we have a few of our own). Regardless of which one you prefer, though, you can find a Chrome extension for it on the Chrome store. Adguard: Block ads, limit socials     Adguard is an incredibly useful tool to more pleasantly browse the web. Blocking adverts online is a tricky business as sites often don’t like you doing it because it impacts their revenue. That’s why unfortunately, tools like Adguard—which are effective at blocking ads—will often make certain platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and similar unusable. They just don’t want to serve content if they can’t sell it to you. Outside of social media, though, Adguard is an effective way to block some of the more nefarious tracking adverts. It won’t get them all, and some sites might not like it, but if you want a cleaner web experience, Adguard does a great job. It’s particularly useful for YouTube. Raindrop.io: Save to read/watch later Another effective way I’ve found to beat procrastination is to lean into it: I’ll do it later. But instead of that being the work I’m supposed to be doing, I try to do the things I shouldn’t be doing at a more convenient time. Raindrop.io is a really useful tool for that, as it lets you save articles, web pages, videos, and more to look at later. It saves it all in a handy wallet that you can tag in collections for later filtering and you can even sync it up with your phone. Perfect for reading something later on the toilet. Ghostery: A simpler tracker blocker Ghostery is another useful ad blocking tool that might work better for you than AdGuard, depending on your preferences. Although it does block ads, Ghostery’s main function is to go beyond that and remove your personal information from trackers, making it harder for websites to find out about you—whether there’s an advert involved or not. This is particularly useful for stopping behavioral tracking on websites that might monitor what you do across the web. This can actually improve page load times in some cases as all the content that would otherwise need to load is simply blocked at the source. It also helps you make more informed choices about the sites you click through to by showcasing tracking information within search result pages. Onetab: Save memory, reduce clutter Are you spotting a theme here? I’m a messy worker too and as I work on multiple articles throughout the day my tab list can get extremely busy. Multiple browser windows with dozens of tabs in each; not only is it hard to parse through it’s also unnecessarily resource intensive. That’s where OneTab comes in to save the day. By collecting tabs together under a single header tab, you can streamline what you’re working on and better organize them together. This makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, come back to something you were working on earlier, and categorize tabs so that you save time not clicking through them all. Memory use drops by up to 95% with it enabled, too, helping your system respond better. Google Keep: Great for note taking Google Keep lets you save all of those notes you’ll need later—even if they’re just about cats. If you’re researching for a personal or professional project, saving notes for later can be a godsend in retaining the context of what you’re looking at, or helping to craft a narrative from all your research sources. Google’s Keep extension works just like the app on your phone. Along with your personal notes, though, you can also save page links, text, and images, add labels, and sink it up with your phone to work on later. VolumeMaster: Make it LOUD Watching an old YouTube video and the volume’s too low? Find that new Netflix show dialogue is just too quiet to make out what they’re saying? Time to give it a boost. VolumeMaster lets you increase the stock Chrome tab volume by up to 600%. That’s enough to give your ears a beating and your speakers a workout, so be careful with already-load videos. But for anything that’s just too quiet to make out, VolumeMaster is a great way to regain control of your audio. Hive AI Detector: Spot AI images if you aren’t sure Hive AI Detector can even detect what LLM was used in its creation in some cases. Did you try that test out a few months ago to see if you could spot AI images? I figured I was pretty well situated to ace it and barely scraped by with a 60% success rate. That felt like an embarrassing failure, but I’m far from alone. Spotting AI images can be hard, but Hive’s AI Detector can make it a little easier. Don’t let yourself get duped by fake AI generated images. Just run this free extension as a litmus test for what’s real and what’s not. Want even more tips? Here’s how to spot AI images yourself. Read...

Whether you’re a small business trying to promote your services, a content creator looking to polish your latest YouTube post, or simply someone who wants to experiment with making cool home videos, using the right software is essential. If it’s too complex, then it can get in the way of your creativity. Alternatively, not having enough tools to fully realise your vision is a very frustrating experience.  Adobe understands this and provides a variety of solutions so you can get just what you need. Plus, the incorporation of the latest AI technology means you can easily do a lot more than you might have thought possible. So, which is the right package for you? Adobe Firefly makes dreams a reality Thanks to its powerful generative AI capabilities, Adobe Firefly is the perfect tool for creating short videos that can boost a presentation or social media post. Using ordinary language prompts or an existing image, you can quickly transform your ideas into professional-looking clips with just a few words. There’s even a built-in prompt enhancer to help produce the results you’re after with the minimum of fuss.  Adobe You don’t need any pro video skills, as Adobe Firefly takes care of everything, but you do get a great level of creative control over aspects such as lighting, camera motion, animation timings, cinematic effects, and video style. There’s also the ability to instantly translate the audio or text in the video to another language and open up the global appeal of your content. Adobe Firefly is one of the fastest ways to generate video ideas, making it perfect for B-roll, storyboards, or just to bring a bit of sparkle to your work. Videos run for 5 seconds, all in high-fidelity 1080p, are designed to be safe for commercial use and can be downloaded as MP4 files that are easy to share or import to other software. Adobe Express brings AI power to your existing videos If you already have video you’ve shot, then Adobe Express is a great platform on which to assemble, polish and output your finished mini-masterpiece. That doesn’t mean it’s old-school though, as Adobe Express is enriched with AI-powered tools that make editing smarter, faster and more inventive. At the heart of the software are one-click tools that streamline edits such as trimming, splitting, and adjusting the speed of footage. These are joined by the option to enhance speech, add captions automatically, or record vocals over the video – all directly within the app. Clip Maker is an amazingly useful new tool that goes through an existing video and pulls out the key moments to create short-clips for sharing on social media. Something that would have taken hours before is now done in minutes. Adobe As Firefly is baked into Adobe Express, you can also use the generative AI capabilities to convert a static scene into animated video, again without the need for any expert skills. When you’re done, there are templates available to format and post videos to social media platforms, with outputs available as GIFs or MP4. Invent new worlds without astronomical prices You might think that the vast array of creative and editing options on offer in Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly would make them out of reach for normal people, but that’s far from the truth. Adobe Firefly has a free tier where you can experiment with its amazing capabilities, and if you want to create more videos then there’s the Standard plan that costs only $9.99/£9.98 p/m. Sign up to Adobe Firefly today! Adobe Express also has a free tier that includes many of the editing tools mentioned above, with a Premium plan that adds advanced features and generative AI capabilities for $9.99/£9.98p/m. If you’re still not sure, then there’s a 30-day free trial so you can get to grips with all it has to offer before you sign up to a subscription. Try Adobe Express for Free Video is the communication method of the modern internet, so make yours the best they can be, all without having to learn loads of editing commands or investing in expensive software. Let Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express take care of the hard work so you can concentrate on being creative. Read...

A Tauranga business owner has reduced her team’s hours because sales have dropped since paid parking started on her street. Read...

It’s hard for people in these areas to bounce back because the odds of being able to find another job that values your skills is limited, an economist says. Read...

Mini PCs are great for fitting into a tight desktop workspace, that’s why a lot of them can be mounted to the rear of a monitor on a VESA plate. But in order to turn it on, you still have to, well, turn it on. What if you could do that like a modern TV with a console or sound bar, just by pressing the monitor’s power button? This little MSI mini PC does just that. Adam Patrick Murray has the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 2MG in the PCWorld Labs, and like he’s done with the last few mini PCs, he’s taking it apart in our latest PCWorld YouTube video. The outside has a few interesting features, including a fingerprint scanner on the power button and a header port so you can run a secondary power button on a cable. The inside is a little funny, because there’s an internal speaker mounted to the bottom tray, something you don’t always see. With an Intel Lunar Lake laptop chipset (Ultra 7 258V in this case), you get memory that’s included on the CPU itself, so the only things the user can service are the SSD (standard M.2 2280) and the Wi-Fi card. The rear of the device holds its unique selling point: an HDMI port with CEC functionality. “Consumer Electronics Control” just means that a few things can be done over HDMI, including a full power on and off for either component. With a compatible monitor that can handle HDMI 2.1 and CEC, you can press the monitor’s power button and the PC will start. With the Cubi mounted to the rear of said monitor, you’ve basically just rolled your own all-in-one desktop PC, like the iMac or similar designs. Neat! This is definitely focused on the business market, possibly for use in an area with multiple users who won’t need to reach around to adjust things. (The integrated speaker makes a little more sense in that regard.) The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 2MG doesn’t appear to be on sale in the US just yet, but it should be coming before too long. For more looks at the latest mini PCs, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and check out our weekly podcast The Full Nerd. Read...

In the days leading up to a potential blackout of NBC channels on YouTube TV, NBCUniversal made a seemingly outlandish claim. “Google, with its $3 trillion market cap, already controls what Americans see online through search and ads—now it wants to control what we watch,” the company said. While NBC did not elaborate on what exactly that meant, we’ve since learned that Google (which owns YouTube TV) wants to fundamentally change how programmers like NBC distribute video in the streaming age. In addition to carrying NBC’s broadcast and cable channels, Google also wants YouTube TV to serve streaming content from Peacock, NBC’s separate streaming service. (For now, the companies have agreed to a short-term deal extension to avoid a blackout.) Why is this a big deal? If Google gets its way, it will give customers one place to watch all of NBC’s programming, tearing down a longstanding divide between pay TV packages and standalone streaming services. While that ultimately makes sense for viewers, it’s probably not something NBC and its programming peers want. What the YouTube TV and NBC dispute is about As I often tell folks who are trying to cut cable TV, streaming TV options typically fall into two buckets. The first bucket includes standalone streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and Peacock. They offer a mix of original and library programming, including exclusive shows and movies that aren’t available on cable. The second bucket consists of live TV streaming services, also known as cable replacements, or vMVPDs in the TV industry (the acronym stands for virtual multichannel video programming distributor). These services replicate the cable experience with a big bundle of live TV channels, cloud-based DVR service, and a library of on-demand programming. YouTube TV is the largest of these services with an estimated 10 million subscribers. Others include Hulu + Live TV, Fubo, and Sling TV. The distinction between these buckets used to be pretty clear, but in recent years the lines have blurred. Standalone streaming services increasingly carry content that was once exclusive to cable channels, and live TV providers have started bundling up access to individual streaming services that have their own exclusive programming. (DirecTV, for instance, offers a bundle of entertainment channels, Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max for for $35 per month.) These changes are happening because traditional pay TV bundles are becoming worthless for anything but news and sports. The best new shows moved over to standalone streaming years ago, so distributors want to bundle up those services as a way to preserve value. But surely you can see the problem, right? If YouTube TV starts offering bundled access to services like Peacock, people might spend less time using the actual YouTube TV app. The future could be one in which subscribers must sign into a bunch of different apps to watch everything that comes with a YouTube TV subscription, which isn’t great for YouTube and isn’t ideal for viewers either. Enter “ingestion” So when Reuters’ Aditya Soni and Puck’s John Ourand report that YouTube TV is seeking “ingestion” of Peacock’s content, they mean that YouTube wants to solve the problem of sending subscribers elsewhere. YouTube TV doesn’t want to just bundle Peacock subscriptions with its service, it wants the full Peacock catalog to be available directly inside YouTube TV. NBCUniversal doesn’t like that idea. It wants people spending time inside the Peacock app, where it can collect viewing data, make more money from targeted ads, and promote more Peacock content. When the company says Google “wants to control what we watch,” it’s likely alluding to YouTube being in control of the experience, plus all the advertising and data collection that comes with it. (Also, NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast, which has its own plans to aggregate streaming content, so it might not want to cede ground to a competitor.) Not every programmer is entirely opposed to “ingestion.” Philo, for instance, says it will bring HBO Max and Discovery+ content into its own app early next year, and Fubo will add ESPN+ programming to its app in the coming weeks. Amazon has also built a thriving business selling subscriptions to other streaming services (including Peacock’s ad-free tier) and offering their content through its own Prime Video app. Still, programmers are unlikely to give up complete control of their content to third-party aggregators, which means skirmishes like the one between YouTube TV and NBC will keep happening with each new carriage renewal. While Hollywood loves to complain about how streaming destroyed the pay TV bundle, it’s not all too eager to let streaming companies build it back up again. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming insights. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Competitive handheld performance Big and beautiful OLED display Detachable controllers Surprisingly quiet Cons Expensive Windows isn’t ready for handhelds yet Glossy display isn’t ideal in direct sunlight A little heavy Our Verdict The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is an awesome handheld gaming PC with the best display you’ll find on a handheld gaming PC. The hardware is excellent, but the high price and the Windows 11 experience are huge drawbacks. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Lenovo Legion Go 2 Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is a high-end handheld gaming PC that outshines the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X in many ways. The huge 8.8-inch OLED display is beautiful, and you’re getting everything from a built-in kickstand to detachable controllers for flexibility. For a handheld gaming PC, this is great hardware. There are two huge elephants in the room here, so let’s get them out of the way so I can review the Lenovo Legion Go 2 for what it is. Lenovo Legion Go 2: The elephants First, Windows 11 still isn’t ready for a gaming handheld. When I reviewed the Lenovo Legion Go S, I noted how much of a mess the interface is compared to the Steam Deck I own. For example, Windows 11 has a “gamepad” keyboard layout that lets you navigate with the on-screen keyboard with the joysticks, but it’s not activated by default. You have to tap into the little settings menu in the on-screen keyboard and turn it on before you can use said on-screen keyboard with the joysticks. Many people will miss this buried setting. Why is this not activated by default on a handheld gaming PC? Windows 11 is full of issues like this. The good news is that Microsoft is making Windows better for handheld PCs, but the bad news is that Legion Go 2 owners will have to wait for the fix. The Legion Go 2 will get it in “Spring 2026.” If you want it sooner, you’ll have to buy Asus’s ROG Xbox Ally, which will be available in mid-October, shortly after the launch of this Lenovo’s Legion Go 2. I haven’t yet gone hands on with ROG Xbox Ally console, but from a user experience standpoint, I imagine its optimized Windows experience for handheld PCs is going to be much better than the Legion Go 2 at launch. (There’s already a leaked way to enable it on any handheld, but your mileage may vary.) The second elephant in the room is pricing. The Legion Go 2 we reviewed is $1,349 at launch, and the base model starts at $1,099. Handheld PC gaming started off with surprisingly affordable hardware, but this device costs more than many gaming laptops. It’s a premium device. Tariffs are almost certainly to blame for part of this. But deals can still be found — as I write this, it’s the Steam Autumn Sale and you can grab a base-model Steam Deck for $319.20. You’d have to really want higher-end hardware (without a polished operating system experience) to pick this over a Steam Deck. However, if you are looking for a high-end handheld experience and you don’t mind the extra expense — and if you know what you’re getting into with the Windows operating system quirks on a device like this one — this handheld combines the latest high-end handheld-optimized hardware with a beautiful OLED display in a nice form factor, and I really enjoyed playing with it. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Specs The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has an AMD Ryzen Z2 processor with AMD Radeon 890M-class graphics. I reviewed the $1,349 model, which comes with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware and 32GB of RAM. Bear in mind that the base model comes with AMD Ryzen Z2 hardware and 16GB of RAM, so it won’t perform at the same level. Under the hood, this is RDNA 3.5 — the same graphics you’ll find in Ryzen AI 300 series (Strix Point) laptops, but tuned for a handheld where power usage is critical. There’s a lot to like here: The RAM is soldered, but the internal SSD is user upgradable. Plus, this machine’s USB4 ports mean external GPUs are a possibility. Model number: Lenovo Legion Go 2 83N0000BUS CPU: AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM Graphics/GPU: AMD Radeon 890M NPU: None Display: 8.8-inch 1920×1200 OLED display with touch screen and up to 144Hz variable refresh rate Storage: 1 TB M.2 SSD Webcam: None Connectivity: 2x USB Type-C (USB4), 1x combo audio jack, 1x microSD card reader Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 Biometrics: Fingerprint reader Battery capacity: 74 Watt-hours Dimensions: 11.64 x 5.38 x 1.66 inches Weight: 2.03 pounds MSRP: $1,349 as tested Lenovo Legion Go 2: Design and build quality Foundry / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is made of black plastic — Lenovo calls this color “Eclipse Black.” It’s a thoughtful design that feels good to hold, and the plastic is high-quality. Lenovo has really gone above and beyond thinking through ways to make the hardware better than many competing consoles, including the Steam Deck I own and the Legion Go S I reviewed. The Lenovo Legion Go 2 isn’t trying to be the lightest console — it has a big 8.8-inch OLED screen — so it’s no surprise it’s a little on the heavy side. But the extra weight is a fair trade for the higher-end hardware and larger screen. For example, you can easily detach the side controllers like you’re using a Nintendo Switch. The Legion Go 2 also has a built-in kickstand, so you can easily prop it up and use it on any surface. The power button has a built-in fingerprint reader so you don’t have to tap a PIN into the sign-in screen each time you wake the console. While the side controllers are detachable, you have to press a button on the back of each one to detach them. While attached, they feel incredibly secure. Foundry / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Legion Go 2 isn’t trying to be the lightest console — it has a big 8.8-inch OLED screen — so it’s no surprise it’s a little on the heavy side. At 2.02 pounds (compared to 1.41 pounds for a Steam Deck OLED), that’s a real factor. It’s not that it’s too heavy to hold, but the weight discourages me from holding it in certain positions for extended periods of time. But the extra weight is a fair trade for the higher-end hardware and larger screen. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Joysticks, controls, and trackpad Foundry / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Legion Go 2 touts Hall Effect joysticks for a smooth experience and no stick drift, and they feel great. The buttons on the Lenovo Legion Go 2 feel great. Lenovo has also added a few extra buttons for accessing Legion software features, the desktop, and Alt+Tabbing between apps. On the top of the handheld, you’ll find power and volume buttons. The right controller can be used in “FPS Mode” — you detach it, snap it into a base, and flip a switch on the bottom. Then you can hold it and move it around. While it looks like a joystick, it’s more like a virtual mouse. I didn’t find it particularly ergonomic in my experiments with it, but perhaps you’ll love it if you put some time into learning it. This handheld also has a good-size trackpad on the right controller, and it’s just the right side and shape to use the mouse with your thumb. After the extremely tiny trackpad on the Lenovo Legion Go S, this one feels excellent. But it’s not like a Steam Deck’s trackpads — there’s no haptic feedback here. It’s a convenient way to accomplish some mouse input, but I wouldn’t want to use it all the time. The display here is also a touch screen with multi-touch. That’s often critical for navigating Windows, but it does mean you’re encouraged to put fingerprint smudges on the display. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Display and speakers Foundry / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Legion Go 2’s display is one of its standout features. It’s an 8.8-inch OLED screen on a handheld PC. What’s not to like? I’m not sure I’d even want a larger screen than this one when I’m holding it this close to my face! With HDR support and up to 1,100 nits of peak HDR brightness and a variable refresh rate up to 144Hz, it’s beautiful. And the display doesn’t seem to massively cut into battery life, either. The battery life was ticking down at a reasonable rate that felt similar to other gaming handhelds I’ve used, despite this higher-end display. While this is a vivid OLED display, it has a glossy surface. It’s prone to reflections in bright environments like direct sunlight. If you’ll be using this as a handheld console outdoors in challenging lighting environments, that’s going to be a problem: You may want to look for a device with a more anti-reflective screen. But glossy screens look beautiful in the right lighting, and this one is no exception. Foundry / Chris Hoffman The HDR support was another place where Windows 11 doesn’t make sense on this handheld: By default, Windows disabled HDR on this device while it was unplugged “to save battery life.” That’s yet another example of Windows not understanding these devices. The speakers here are great for gaming. They had more than enough volume, and the chunky sounds of firing a shotgun in Doom: The Dark Ages were satisfying. Naturally, there’s not a lot of bass in a handheld console. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Microphone and biometrics The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has a dual-array microphone setup. The microphone sounds fine, and the audio is clear enough for in-game chat on a handheld gaming device. It’s a little muffled — this doesn’t sound like a high-end business laptop mic picking up crystal-clear audio for Zoom meetings. But it’s plenty good for voice chatting while gaming. There’s no webcam on the Lenovo Legion Go 2, but you probably wouldn’t want one and it might be a challenge to fit it into the bezel. Lenovo put a fingerprint reader into the power button, and it works extremely well. When you wake the Legion Go 2 by pressing the power button, it can instantly sign you into Windows with Windows Hello. You just have to rest your finger on it for a split-second longer. It makes the experience of waking the console fast and streamlines a major pain point Windows 11 has on a gaming handheld. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Connectivity Foundry / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has two USB Type-C ports, and both of them are USB4. You’ll find one on the top of the handheld and one on the bottom. It comes with a USB-C charger, so it’ll charge through one of these ports. Because these are speedy USB4 ports, this handheld should be ready for external GPUs, too. Aside from the two USB-C ports, you’ll find a combo audio jack and a microSD card slot on the bottom of the handheld. That’s it, and it’s plenty of ports for handheld gaming PC. If you want more ports when using it at a desk, you can connect a dock to the USB-C port. This device has both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. I’d prefer to see Wi-Fi 7 at this point, especially in a premium $1,349 handheld gaming PC, but most people don’t have Wi-Fi 7 yet anyway. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Performance The Lenovo Legion Go 2 had solid performance. I was able to play Doom: The Dark Ages, and while I prefer shooting demons with a higher FPS, it was technically playable. Treating this like a console, I fired up games like Sonic X Shadow Generations and saw buttery-smooth performance. The reality is that, while handhelds are improving a lot, their graphics performance is far from high-end desktop or laptop GPUs. If you’re mainly looking to play the latest high-end, most-demanding games, these may not be ideal. But the hardware here offers incredible smooth performance in older games. I was impressed by how quiet the fans stayed, even in demanding games like Doom: The Dark Ages. The speakers could easily drown them out, and the console itself stayed comfortable, with cool air being sucked in on the underside of the device and blown out the vents on the top. Playing a lightweight 2D game like Deltarune, they were so quiet I could only just barely hear them once I muted the game. As always when we review gaming PCs, we ran the Lenovo Legion Go 2 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. The results show us how it performed against previous generation hardware (I benchmarked the Lenovo Legion Go S) as well as modern gaming laptops. Spoiler: It’s a big upgrade over the last Lenovo handheld I reviewed. In many workloads, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware in the Legion Go 2 was often nearly twice as fast as the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go hardware in the Legion Go S. Foundry / Chris Hoffman First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. This is designed as an overall system performance benchmark, but CPU performance is a big factor. With an overall PCMark 10 score of 7,285, overall performance was quite good. The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware here is substantially ahead of the lower-end AMD Ryzen Z2 Go hardware in the Lenovo Legion Go S. It scored on par with lower-end gaming laptops. Foundry / Chris Hoffman Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage. The Lenovo Legion Go 2 with its eight-core Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU produced a multi-threaded score of 5,239, a huge jump over the Legion Go S. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t catch up to larger and more power-hungry gaming laptops, but this is very respectable for a handheld PC. Foundry / Chris Hoffman We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the PC’s cooling kick in, and many PCs will throttle and slow down under load. The Lenovo Legion Go 2 completed the encode process in 1,076 seconds, which is nearly 18 minutes. That’s only a bit slower than gaming laptops with AMD Ryzen hardware. It’s also a massive improvement over the Legion Go S’s performance here. Foundry / Chris Hoffman Next, we run a graphical benchmark, just like we do on gaming laptops. First, we run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. With an overall 3DMark Time Spy score of 3,984, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 showed substantial improvements over the Legion Go S. The HP Elitebook X G1a in the chart here isn’t a gaming laptop, it’s a premium business laptop with a similar GPU. That’s a perfect example of what you’re getting here — higher-end integrated graphics from AMD. Compared to gaming laptops with beefy discrete GPUs, this machine is far behind on GPU performance. But that’s the idea. It’s designed for handheld use, possibly away from an electrical outlet. Big gaming laptops need to be plugged in to deliver solid gaming performance. Foundry / Chris Hoffman After that, we run the benchmark built into Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an older game, but one that’s very useful for comparing performance across hardware. With an average FPS of 40, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was playable on the highest settings here, unlike on the Lenovo Legion Go S. You’ll get even smoother performance if you nudge the settings down, but once again this is a great example of the relative performance of a handheld vs. a traditional gaming laptop. Foundry / Chris Hoffman Finally, we run the benchmark in Metro Exodus. This is a very demanding game, and we run it with extreme detail settings. With an average FPS of 14 in our standard benchmark, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 was substantially faster than the Legion Go S here — nearly twice as fast. But you can see how much faster gaming laptops are. Overall, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme and its Radeon 890M-class graphics delivered solid performance for a handheld gaming PC. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Battery life The Lenovo Legion Go 2 has a 74 Watt-hour battery along with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme hardware, which can operate between 15W and 35W of TDP. The precise battery life you’re going to get will heavily depend on how you use the handheld. A less demanding game will use much less power. Also, you can configure power usage by pressing the button at the top of the right controller and choosing your preferred thermal mode. “Performance” will deliver more hardware power for gaming but drain the battery faster, for example. Depending on the game you’re playing, lower thermal settings may be just fine. Foundry / Chris Hoffman For our standard Windows PC battery benchmark, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the PC suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks. This is a best-case scenario for any PC since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this. The Lenovo Legion Go 2 lasted 796 minutes in this test — that’s over 13 hours and beats even the HP Elitebook X G1a, which is a business laptop. This hardware can really scale down and sip electricity when you aren’t playing demanding games. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Conclusion The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is a high-end handheld gaming PC. The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor and its Radeon 890M-class graphics delivered solid performance and efficiency for a handheld gaming PC, the screen is big and beautiful, and the hardware is well thought out. You get detachable controllers and a kickstand for extra flexibility, too. But, between the Windows handheld experience and tariffs driving up the cost of hardware, Lenovo is fighting an uphill battle here. At $1,349, you could currently buy a $999 gaming laptop and a $319 Steam Deck and come out ahead with a more powerful laptop at your desk and a more lightweight handheld for on-the-go gaming. But if you want a handheld gaming PC with higher-end premium hardware — that 8.8-inch OLED is nice — and you’re willing to wait for an improved software experience or deal with the realities of Windows 11 today, you’ll be happy with this, assuming you’re ready to spend this much cash. Read...