Category: 4. Technology

Flagship M9 model sets new visual standard and updated M8 and M7 extend AI-powered ease of use

The Smart Monitor series continues to evolve based on how people work, watch and play

Consumers can avail launch benefits with an instant cart discount up to INR 3000 between July 7 and July 20, 2025

 

Samsung, India’s largest consumer electronics brand, announced its all-new Smart Monitor family, featuring the luxurious M9 (M90SF), alongside enhanced editions of the M8 (M80SF) and M7 (M70F). With advanced AI features across the lineup, the new offerings provide a more personalized and connected screen for work and entertainment.

 

“By combining Samsung’s 4K QD-OLED brilliance with intuitive vision AI, the M9 elevates the display into something more than a monitor. With real time picture and sound optimization, a sleek all-in-one design and seamless access to your favorite streaming and work tools, the M9 delivers a sharper, smarter and truly immersive experience,” said Puneet Sethi, Vice President, Enterprise Business, Samsung India.

 

Flagship M9: A Leap in Display Innovation

The M9 introduces QD-OLED technology to the Smart Monitor lineup for the first time. Merging flagship-level visuals with TV-grade smart functionality, the 32-inch M9 is engineered to deliver stunning contrast, vibrant colors, and immersive visuals. With a sleek, all-metal chassis, it blends museum-quality aesthetics with functional elegance, apt for a chic design studio or the coveted corner office.

 

Samsung’s Smart Monitor M9 introduces OLED Safeguard+ to maintain screen integrity over time, featuring a proprietary cooling system that minimizes the risk of burn-in. Its Glare-Free display reduces reflections, ensuring consistent visibility and comfort even in bright environments.

 

The M9 leverages AI-driven technologies like AI Picture Optimizer, 4K AI Upscaling Pro, and Active Voice Amplifier (AVA) Pro to enhance picture and sound quality in real time, adapting automatically to content and surroundings for optimized performance.

 

As a smart entertainment hub, the M9 offers access to popular streaming apps, Samsung TV Plus, and Samsung Gaming Hub, enabling cloud-based gaming without a console or PC. With a 165Hz refresh rate, 0.03ms response time, and NVIDIA G-SYNC compatibility, it delivers smooth, high-performance visuals ideal for gaming and other demanding tasks.

 

Paired with its 4K QD-OLED display, the monitor delivers visuals that align with content creators’ intentions, offering clarity and confidence for any application.

 

M8 and M7: Smarter Everyday Displays for Work and Play

The Smart Monitor M8 and M7 expand Samsung’s smart monitor lineup with 32-inch 4K UHD screens powered by advanced VA panel technology for sharp detail and rich contrast. Both models feature AI-powered tools like Click to Search and Tizen OS Home for intuitive content discovery and personalized recommendations.

 

All three models integrate seamlessly with SmartThings, support Multi Control between Samsung devices, and offer Multi View for multitasking. With Microsoft 365 access, users can create and edit documents directly from the monitor without a PC, making them versatile solutions for modern work and entertainment setups.

 

Prices and Offers

 

Model	Price (in INR)	Coupon/add to cart (in INR)
M90SF 32”	125999	3000
M80SF 31”	49299	3000
M70F 32″ (Black)	30699	1500
M70F 32″ (White)	31199	1500
M70F 43”	34299	1500

 

As a part of launch starting from July 7 and July 20, 2025, consumers can avail benefits with instant cart discount up to INR 3000 across all channels.

The Shine Turbine is on sale for $280, a $120 savings off its $400 retail price. You can also get the Shine Essentials kit at $147 off, on sale for only $342.

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I cover a lot of solar generators here, and they are all the rage. I’ve tested dozens of devices over the past few years and seen the technology go from strength to strength.

But I often get asked, “What happens when the clouds roll in and the sun vanishes?” Living in the UK, the sun can be in short supply for much of the year.

Also: 10 gadgets I recommend everyone should stock their toolkit with

This is when you turn your attention from solar to wind power. And there’s one company that makes portable wind turbines perfect for charging your smartphones, tablets, and other portable devices: Shine Turbine.

The Shine Turbine kit comes with everything you need — the turbine, a stand, guy lines, pegs, and cables. Setting up the first few times took a bit longer than I expected, especially if you’re trying to do it while it’s blowing a gale. But as with most things, it does get easier with practice.

Also: The best portable power stations you can buy: Expert tested

There’s also a knack to setting the guy lines out effectively, which took me a while to figure out — a process that would have been a lot faster had I read the manual — because I found the setup all shaky the first few times. But once you get it figured out, it’s very robust.

Once set up, you have options. You can let the turbine charge up the internal battery and then use that to charge your devices, or you can attach a power bank to the turbine. Your choice depends on how you’re using the setup. Using the entire turbine as a big power bank makes sense for odd top-ups on the move, but in a base camp setting, it’s better to charge separate power banks and use those, keeping the reserve in the turbine for backup on still days.

Also: 5 gadgets I can’t go off-grid without (and why they make such a big difference)

I’ve found the Shine Turbine to be quite effective, but there are limitations. First, the 40-watt output is a low amount of power if you’re used to having 100- or 200-watt solar panels at your disposal. The Shine is ideal for smartphones, tablets, drones, and cameras, but laptops and other bigger devices are off the cards.

Setup is also rather time-consuming. I’m used to being able to throw solar panels out for my power stations in seconds. The best I got the setup time for the Shine Turbine was about ten minutes. Also, taking the turbine down involves carefully packing the guy lines away so as not to make the next setup a painful one.

But despite the downsides, the Shine Turbine is a great way to harvest power from Mother Nature when you are away from an AC outlet.

ZDNET’s buying advice

If you need power and can’t rely on the sun, the Shine Turbine really shines. Yes, it’s weighty, yes, setup takes some time, and yes, the power output from it is rather limited, but I’ve used a single turbine to keep my iPhone and a drone powered on a multi-day trip where a power station and solar panels weren’t an option.

Also: Can you trust Amazon Basics tools? My buying advice after testing the best-sellers

Starting at $399, the price is what it is — if you want power on the move, it’s a price worth paying because you’re getting the best portable wind turbines on the market and a package that will accompany you on many adventures.

Shine Turbine tech specs

• Power rating: 40 watts
• Internal battery: 3.7 V, 12,000 mAh
• Connector: Regulated 5 V DC, 2.6 A
• Charge ports: USB Standard-A, USB Micro-B
• Folded length: 35 cm / 13 3/4 in
• Folded width: 10 cm / 4 in
• Rotor diameter: 60 cm / 23 5/8 in
• Mount height: 91.4 cm / 3 ft
• Total weight: 3 lbs / 1.3 kg
• Protections: Over-voltage, under-voltage, under-temperature, over-temperature, overload and transient

Also: I tested this 130-pound power station off-grid – my buying advice after a week

This article was originally published on Dec. 6, 2024 and was updated on June 25, 2025.

Looking for the next best product? Get expert reviews and editor favorites with ZDNET Recommends.

SAVE $140: As of July 7, the Kindle Scribe is on sale for $259.99 at Amazon. That’s a saving of 35% on list price.

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The Kindle Scribe is one of Amazon’s most popular products, and not just for book lovers. Combine an e-reader and a notebook together, and you get the Scribe. The latest redesign added the ability to write on books — big news for margin people.

And there’s big pre-Prime Day news, because the Kindle Scribe is at its lowest-ever price ahead of Prime Day. Down to just $259.99, this price is for the 16GB and color tungsten option. This deal includes the Premium Pen, so you can jot down notes and convert them to text as easily as writing in a notebook.

This is a big upgrade on the basic pen, as this model comes with an eraser at the top so you can quickly remove mistakes just by flipping the pen. It is also battery-free and works through a special power source embedded in the Kindle Scribe, so you don’t need to charge it.

The Scribe has a 10.2-inch, 300 ppi Paperwhite display, glare and ink-free. Like the OG Kindle model, it’s perfect for sitting outside in the sun or in hard-to-read lighting. And if you’re a hectic note taker, don’t worry, you can summarize your notes, as well as change their length and tone with clever built-in AI notebook tools.

Mashable Deals

Head to Amazon now and start working on that TBR list.

Microsoft-owned Turn 10 Studios has cancelled the entire Forza Motorsport series, a cornerstone of the racing simulation genre, as confirmed by former content coordinator Fred Russell via Facebook. 

The decision follows a massive wave of layoffs at the company. While exact numbers remain undisclosed, Eurogamer reports that the cuts affected multiple Microsoft-owned studios. 

John Schommer, a former content creator at Turn 10 Studios, expressed gratitude for his 10-year tenure, noting his role as a voice for the car-loving community.

Why It Matters

Forza Motorsport, known for its realistic driving physics and detailed car models, has been a staple for racing simulator enthusiasts. The genre, already niche, struggles with few new releases. 

Recent titles like Gran Turismo 7 (2022) have drawn criticism for requiring expensive in-game credits to unlock premium cars, making Motorsport’s loss a significant blow to fans seeking authentic racing experiences.

The cancellation has sparked disappointment among players, with many lamenting the loss of a series that offered immersive tracks and customisation. Russell clarified that the Forza Horizon series will continue, with Turn 10 Studios now supporting Playground Games, but fans remain concerned about the future of racing simulators.

Broader Industry Layoffs

Other Microsoft studios, including King and Zenimax, also face layoffs, with around 200 employees (10 per cent of King’s workforce) affected. Titles like Everwild and Perfect Dark, announced in 2019 and 2020, have been cancelled. 

Playground Games, working on the Fable reboot, remains active, but its stretched resources may delay future Horizon releases.

The loss of Forza Motorsport raises questions about the racing sim genre’s viability. As Microsoft redirects efforts to Horizon, fans hope for new projects to fill the gap left by this iconic series.

Also read: Xiaomi Won’t Sell Cars Outside China Till at Least 2027: CEO Lei Jun

Opinion In human imagination, AIs have been good for two things: trying to take over, and loving a good game. The earliest post-war AI thinkers took it almost for granted that once computers could beat humans at chess, true artificial intelligence would have arrived. Such thinking was disproved 50 years on when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Computers could be very, very good at chess while still having the IQ of a pebble.

This has in no way dimmed the dysfunctional love affair between playing games and playing AI. Machine learning boosters have trumpeted victories over Go players, as well as AI getting a taste for video games. On the other hand, top-branded generative AIs cannot beat an Atari 2600 at video chess — perhaps it would be kinder to start them off with the 1p24 bytes of eight-bit ZX81 1K Chess. ChatGPT remains gloriously incompetent at tic-tac-toe: fire it up and have a go. That’s a game so simple you can build an unbeatable machine out of a handful of relays and lightbulbs.

This is hilarious. What it isn’t is trivial. The early link between chess and AI was wrong, but it was an important disproof. At the time, the workings of human intellect were understood almost as little as the way computing would develop. That very smart people would think otherwise shows two things, that we intuitively use gaming as a benchmark of prowess, and that it creates a way of talking about AI that guarantees a wide audience. AI benchmarks that get people talking are going to be our best defense against the AI hypocalypse we are currently being urged to welcome.

Have a look at the most recent study of how well agentile AI actually works. AI agents are being hyped as the new magic, independent assistants that can be asked to do particular work-based tasks typically involving gathering, analyzing and acting on data. Do they work? Mostly, they do not. They do the normal AI things of failing to cope with complexity or context, hallucinating, deceiving and just not completing tasks.

We know this, because researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) created a fake business environment where they could play at being employees, and deploy AI agents where they could be closely monitored and scored. In other words, a simulation of real life challenges. In other words, a game. That humanizes a technical process, and that matters.

The purpose of gaming in our species isn’t to win, at least not at heart. Most people don’t win most of the time. Games are places to learn skills through experimentation. For us humans, these include the crucial skills of co-operation with and evaluating others. Over-confidence, lack of skill and a preference for deception over reality soon get a team player a reputation that follows them into real life. These are not people sane employers hire: if they do, that sanity is questionable.

AI, especially the sort that claims to be able to act on your behalf, should not get a free ride on promises alone, any more than an actual human assistant should get a post purely on what they claim in their resume. AI makers promise the world, while the AIs themselves are masters of (over)confidence. Just as the interview process is — or should be — a way of evaluating promise and confidence against skills and integrity, benchmarks need to be evolved that can be used by those who will have to work alongside the AIs. That cannot be limited to people with AI evaluating skills. Those skills are rare, where they exist at all.

Which is where gaming comes in. It’s a very human evaluation technique, and the results are very easy to communicate to others. The final score is important, but not as important as the sentiment of playing, and it’s that emotion which drives stories that people care about and want to tell.

If you do ask ChatGPT for a game of tic-tac-toe, you can ask it beforehand what it thinks of its own strengths, and try to explain to it afterwards where it went wrong. You’ll end up with a story about the technology that you can tell to anyone, and will want to.

This is precisely what we need to defend against AI hype. It’s no good talking to IT peers about how rubbish a technology is; it has to get into the culture so deeply that your aunt, your nephews and your CEO know it too. Finding ways to create a game-like environment that you can plug people and AIs into is a challenge, but the CMU paper has plenty of pointers. It’s not as if the gamification of business has no other applications, after all.

The AI industry, if it had more well-founded confidence than bluster and hope, should be all over this. Previous AI winters happened as much through sentiment as spreadsheets: the perception that AI was on the brink of greatness and more investment would get it there faded as other stories got more compelling. Demonstrating that AI agents are good to work with in ways that people intrinsically appreciate can only be a good thing, right?

That it doesn’t think so is a good story in itself. That it wants to put its technology at the heart of business with flaws so deep it couldn’t get a job as a deputy assistant teamaker is another. Finding a way to tell those stories outside the temples of technology is a very serious business indeed. Game on. ®

Galaxy A16 5G is eligible to get Android 16 (One UI 8.0)

• APT36 leveraged the popularity of BOSS Linux to compromise sensitive networks connected to national security.
• The attackers use a visual decoy in the form of an HTML document pretending to be a cybersecurity advisory.
•  Upon execution, a malicious ELF binary exfiltrates data and monitors compromised systems.

A cyber-espionage campaign orchestrated by the threat actor APT36, also known as Transparent Tribe, targets Indian defense personnel and organizations using BOSS Linux, a distribution widely employed by Indian government agencies, via malicious archives attached to phishing emails.

This incident marks a significant evolution in APT36’s operational tactics, now incorporating malware specifically engineered for Linux environments.  

According to CYFIRMA’s research, the attack begins with highly targeted phishing emails containing ZIP file attachments. Within these attachments lies a malicious .desktop file masquerading as a “Cyber-Security-Advisory.” 

Upon execution, this file initiates a multi-stage process designed to evade detection and lower user suspicion.  

The attack deploys a decoy PowerPoint presentation to gain the target’s trust while simultaneously executing a malicious ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) binary in the background. 

An HTML file containing an

Known as “BOSS.elf,” this binary enables unauthorized access to the target system, allowing for data exfiltration and advanced surveillance operations. 

Further technical analysis reveals that the malware collects critical system information, conducts reconnaissance, and maintains persistent communication with a command-and-control (C2) server at 101.99.92.182.  

The ‘sorlastore’ domain was also used in malicious macro-embedded PowerPoint Add-in (PPAM) campaigns targeting Windows.

The campaign’s complexity demonstrates a significant escalation in Transparent Tribe’s capabilities and highlights the increased vulnerabilities of critical systems. APT36 has leveraged the popularity of BOS Linux to compromise sensitive networks connected to national security.

This social engineering approach targeting official entities has been widely used, with recent campaigns including the Russia-affiliated Void Blizzard APT sending fake European Defense & Security Summit emails.