Microsoft's new Surface laptops, reviewed

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It's Wednesday, October 06, 2021.

We’ll get into why Facebook saw its entire business fall off a cliff on Monday, but first: e-readers.

It’s a device category we don’t see much development in — probably because it’s very much a device for reading text and not much else. Amazon’s Kindle, thanks to its powerful online e-book store, generally has the category sewn up, with several e-reader options from luxe to sometimes-$60 slates.

But I love an underdog — and most things with an e-ink display. Like this and this.

So I have time for Kobo's new $260 Sage e-reader, which lets you add handwritten notes with a stylus. It has an 8-inch 1,440 x 1,920 e-ink screen that adjusts brightness and color depending on the time of day. You can also convert to plain text your handwritten e-notes made on e-books and PDFs and send them to other devices — a feature Kobo already offered on its larger and more expensive $399 Elipsa.

If you’re looking for an e-reader that doesn’t have Amazon hooks — or you need to take notes on your e-books — you can pre-order the Sage now. It starts shipping on October 19th.

— Mat Smith

Facebook explains how its October 4th outage started

It should have been routine maintenance.

Following the massive service outage that took out all of its services, Facebook has published a blog post detailing what happened. According to Santosh Janardhan, the company's vice president of infrastructure, the outage started with what should have been routine maintenance.

A command was issued that was supposed to assess the availability of the backbone network that connects all of Facebook’s disparate computing facilities. Instead, the order unintentionally took all those connections down. Matters were made worse because the outage made it impossible for Facebook engineers to connect to the servers they needed to fix.

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Microsoft Surface Pro 8 review

It addresses many of our earlier complaints, but that price…

The Surface Pro 8 addresses many of the issues we had with the Pro 7, including a gorgeous premium design. Editor-in-Chief Dana Wollman put the hybrid device through its paces, and she particularly loved the 120Hz display.

But the starting price ($1,100) is higher than its predecessor — still not including a keyboard. That makes it tougher to justify picking the Surface Pro 8 over a comparably priced laptop. Especially at a time when there are so many excellent options to choose from.

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Surface Laptop Studio review

A better Surface Book, a missed opportunity

Oh, we’re not done. Microsoft’s Laptop Studio was also in for review. Devindra Hardawar tested it out, and he believes the Surface Laptop Studio is a solid successor to the Surface Book. While it’s faster than the Book 3, and it has a gorgeous, flexible screen, it’s oddly lacking in sheer CPU power compared to the competition. He explains all in his full review.

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The Kingdom Hearts trilogy is coming to Nintendo Switch

But in streaming cloud form.

The three main Kingdom Hearts games are coming to Nintendo Switch. You'll be able to play Kingdom Hearts - HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue and Kingdom Hearts III. They're all cloud streaming games on Switch, so you'll need a good internet connection to play them. The news came off the back of the announcement that Kingdom Hearts protagonist, Sora, will be final character to join Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Sora means ‘sky’ in Japanese, so there’s some irony in the game series being streamed from the cloud.

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Google’s Pixel 6 launch event happens on October 19th

Find out all about the company's latest flagship phones.

The company plans to reveal everything there is to know about the Pixel 6 lineup on October 19th at 1 PM ET. Months ago, the company spilled some info on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, including what the phones look like. In August, Google said Tensor, the first system-on-chip it designed, will feature in the new additions to the Pixel series.

Expect some substantial camera upgrades, with the Pixel 6 Pro packing 4x optical zoom and an additional telephoto option. In comparison, Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro tops out at 3x optical zoom.

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