Apple iPhone 13
The next Apple iPhone 13 has landed in four forms; Mini, Standard, Pro and Pro Max. For gamers there’s a lot to get excited about as all these phones have 5G support and the new A15 Bionic chip. This gives it 50% faster processing than any other phone, and 30% faster graphics. All the phones benefit from better battery life and improved cameras, too. The Pro and Pro Max, however, step it up again with a 120Hz refresh rate for the screen. This is brilliant for gaming, creating crystal clear, sharp gameplay. If it’s been a few years since you upgraded your phone, now is a good time.
PS5 SSDs
Sony has finally unlocked the hard drive expansion bay on the PS5. It means you can now get more storage on the console itself, from which you can play PS5 games. There are 28 compatible cards in Australia at launch, but the key is to look out for SSD drives that are faster than 5500MB/s, have a heatsink and are compact. That also must be NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen 4 cards, so make sure you see that in the name. The best we’ve come across so far are the 2TB Adata XPG S70 Blade and the 1TB Seagate FireCuda 530.
Windows 11
It’s always a big deal when Microsoft updates the Windows operating system for PCs, and that’s started to happen this month. It will roll out over the next six months as a free upgrade, starting with people on newer PCs. There’s a drastic change to the interface, with the start menu now in the middle of the screen and providing quicker access to more apps. For gamers there’s big changes, with the addition of XSX features like Auto HDR, DirectX 12 Ultimate, Raytracing and Xbox Cloud Gaming. If you have a fast SSD, games will load a lot quicker, too, thanks to the DirectStorage API.
