ASUS has introduced a new initiative to make genuine laptop battery replacements easier for customers across India. Through this initiative, customers can now replace their laptop batteries with ease and get proper service and warranty advantages in the process. Rather than opting for risky third-party alternatives, customers can now purchase official ASUS batteries. This initiative covers not only regular laptops but also gaming laptops.

Battery Finder Tool Simplifies the Replacement Process

ASUS has launched a Battery Finder microsite that will make laptop battery replacement easy for its customers. Using this facility, consumers can enter their laptop model and find a compatible battery. The system also finds the locations nearest to them where such batteries are available at exclusive ASUS outlets and channel partners. Consumers can even contact ASUS’s authorized service centers for assistance.

The battery replacement program supports many of ASUS’s most popular laptop series. Customers with Vivobook laptops can access genuine replacement batteries through the initiative. Several ROG gaming laptops are also part of the program. ASUS has further expanded coverage to include ExpertBook, ProArt, and TUF models. The Battery Finder platform helps users confirm compatibility before visiting a store or service center.

ASUS Strengthens Its After-Sales Support Network

As part of enhancing its customer support services, ASUS has extended its post-sale service network in various parts of India. This has included areas such as Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab, and others. ASUS has made this service available as part of its Assurance Program. The organization’s main aim is to provide reliable and effective service, warranties, and an enhanced customer experience.

Apart from increasing the number of battery sources, ASUS is also working to help consumers manage their batteries effectively. Consumers are advised on how to charge their laptop batteries to ensure that their performance remains high. ASUS also highlights the need to control laptop temperature and have devices serviced regularly.

The lobby of Hyundai’s Seoul headquarters now waters its own plants. On Monday it was also handling security and deliveries, a row of robots laid on for one important visitor: Jensen Huang.

Nvidia’s chief executive was in the South Korean capital to deepen the chipmaker’s alliance with Hyundai Motor Group, and the pitch on display in that remodelled lobby, which Hyundai has rebuilt as a “physical AI testbed”, was the whole point.

After talks with Hyundai executive chair Chung Euisun, the two companies laid out an expanded plan to turn physical AI and robotics from research projects into industrial products, spanning mobility, manufacturing, and robotics.

The two are getting “very very close” to industrialising robotics, Huang told reporters, adding that they plan to bring AI to “all forms of mobility.” He was effusive about his host’s main advantage, scale.

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“Hyundai is incredible at manufacturing, incredible at mobility, incredible at heavy industries, manufacturing at extremely large scales,” he said. “No one is in a better position to take advantage of that and to create that than Hyundai.”

The clearest shift in the roadmap is location: moving robotics off the lab bench and onto the factory floor. The companies want to use Hyundai’s manufacturing base to build globally scalable robotics platforms, training the machines in simulation first. The marquee example is Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid, the Hyundai-owned robot whose production-ready version drew investor attention at January’s CES.

Much of the conversation centred on Hyundai’s 9 trillion won (about $5.9bn) plan to build an AI data centre, a robot manufacturing cluster, and a hydrogen plant in the western port city of Saemangeum, a site Huang cheerfully rebranded South Korea’s “AI Valley.”

Chung suggested more investment would follow and floated a “perfect AI ecosystem,” including a joint data hub, if Nvidia formally joins the project. Notably, it has not yet. For now Nvidia’s commitment is enthusiasm, plus the prospect of selling a great deal of compute, with the data centre expected to run on tens of thousands of its Blackwell GPUs.

The courtship fits Nvidia’s wider strategy. It has been wiring itself into the hardware end of AI, holding talks with LG Electronics on robotics and data centres, running factory-floor humanoid trials with Siemens, and pouring billions into AI equity stakes. Carmakers, with their plants, supply chains, and capital, are among the most valuable partners for a company betting that the same models behind chatbots will soon run machines in the real world.

Investors liked what they heard, with Hyundai Motor shares jumping almost 7% and Nvidia rising more than 6% on the day. Hyundai has said it wants to mass-produce Atlas from 2028, at up to 30,000 units a year. Whether the robots arrive on schedule is another question, but the ambition is plain.

For Hyundai, the future of carmaking looks less like an assembly line than a fleet of machines that taught themselves the job. For Nvidia, it is one more industry that runs on its chips, from the design software to the factory floor to the robots rolling off it.

Lilian Schmidt could not, for the life of her, figure out how to get her daughter to go to sleep.

None of the advice given to her by sleep experts or her pediatrician worked—not using a white noise machine, not buying blackout curtains, not even giving her a massage. “Every single day, it took like two to three hours to put her to bed,” the brand consultant from Zurich recalls. “She’d scream and fight and we would all be so exhausted and frustrated by the end of the day.”

When her daughter was 3 and a half years old, a bleary-eyed and desperate Schmidt turned to a controversial parenting tool: ChatGPT. The advice it offered “was completely opposite from everything I’d heard before,” she says. “It said she needed more stimulation,” suggesting that her daughter chew gum or jump on a trampoline before bed.

To Schmidt’s utter shock, it worked. Within five minutes, her daughter snuggled up next to her and fell asleep. “I was freaking out,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, nobody was able to help me except ChatGPT.’”

From there, Schmidt, who also has a 14-year-old stepson, became something of an AI evangelist. In June 2025, she posted a TikTok video with the caption, “I Turned ChatGPT into my coparent,” and it went viral. Her follower count swelled to 27,000 in just three weeks. She made her own custom GPT, Coparent, and started selling access to it for $37 on her website.

Schmidt is one of a growing cohort of women branding themselves as a new type of momfluencer—not one who uses aspirational imagery to make the mundane labor associated with motherhood more aesthetically appealing, but one who asks whether the labor is even necessary at all. They post videos like “The AI Assistant That’s Basically My Mom Brain Now” and “How to Use AI as a Mom,” and promote customized prompts or handbooks to moms who “want a coparent who never forgets the sunscreen or asks you to write things down,” as Schmidt writes in one TikTok caption.

One person who is relatively absent from Schmidt’s content is her longtime partner. In her videos, she’s doing pretty much all of the parenting labor, including meal prep, grocery-shopping, and kiddie arts and crafts. This is reflective of reality; moms assume the vast majority of the physical and mental labor in US households, with a 2022 Department of Labor survey finding that employed mothers spend an extra 13.5 hours per week doing chores and an average of 12.5 hours per week on childcare—a 40 percent increase from 1975.

That’s not to say that dads aren’t helping around the house. Pew data shows that fathers now spend more than twice as much time on household chores and childcare than they did 50 years ago. But by and large, women are still expected to shoulder most of the household burden.

“It’s not that my partner isn’t helping, because he is,” Schmidt says. “But for women and moms, there is so much invisible labor that you carry and everything is in your hands, and it actually takes time with your kids away from you.” Moms flocked to her page once they saw she was using AI “to actually be more present with my kids and to be more emotionally regulated, so I can be a cool mom and a happy mom and not a stressed-out one.”

Women are less likely (more than 20 percent less likely, according to one 2025 study) to use generative AI in their everyday lives than men are, a discrepancy known as the “AI gender gap.” Generative AI tools suffer from what Stephanie Leblanc-Godfrey, a founder of the company Mother AI who refers to herself as a “maternal technologist,” likes to call a “PMS” problem, meaning they tend to be “pale, male, and stale.”

• Meta confirms 20,225 Instagram accounts hit by HTS password‑reset flaw
• Bug let attackers request resets to unassociated emails
• HTS disabled, passwords reset, full recovery‑flow review underway

Last week’s attack against Meta’s customer support affected just over 20,000 accounts, the company has now confirmed. Hackers managed to break into these profiles and most likely exfiltrate the data found inside.

Last week, news broke that cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability in Meta’s AI-powered customer support service, tricking it into sending password reset codes for other people’s accounts.

Uber customers in the U.K. can now join an interest list to increase their chances of being matched with a Wayve autonomous vehicle — another sign that the two companies are preparing to launch a robotaxi service in London. When that launch does happen, Uber will be competing directly with Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving company that is considered the robotaxi leader in the United States. 

Uber announced the interest list on Monday in London along with a branded, black Ford Mustang Mach-E equipped with Wayve’s self-driving system. While Wayve is handling the autonomous vehicle tech, Uber has designed what happens inside, including how riders will interact with the vehicle through interactive touchscreens that support 64 languages.

Uber has teased the impending robotaxi service, but has yet to provide an official date, only saying it will launch in the coming months, pending regulatory approval. After launch, Uber customers who request a ride on the app may be matched with a Wayve vehicle, at no additional cost compared with a traditional human-driven one.

Riders can increase their chances of getting a robotaxi by going into their account settings, clicking on rider preferences, and selecting autonomous vehicles. If matched with an AV, riders will be able to decline it and opt for a human driver. The Wayve robotaxis will initially have a human safety operator behind the wheel before fully driverless operations begin in the future, Uber said. 

Meanwhile, Waymo is also on London’s streets. In April, Waymo began testing its autonomous vehicles with human safety operators. The company is testing about 100 of its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in a 100-square-mile area of the city.

The imminent showdown is complicated by Uber and Waymo’s existing partnership in the United States — one that is already showing signs of wear. The two companies, once rivals in a trade secrets lawsuit, agreed to work together in 2023 when Waymo put its self-driving vehicles on Uber’s app in Phoenix. That partnership has been relatively limited, though, since Waymo lets Phoenix customers directly hail a robotaxi through its own app as well. 

The pair expanded the partnership in March 2025, when Waymo agreed to put its vehicles on the Uber app in Austin, and later, in Atlanta. In both of those cities, prospective customers cannot hail a robotaxi directly through Waymo’s app, and have to use the Uber app and hope for a match. 

The two companies’ relationship has continued even as they appear to be drifting apart in other areas. Uber has spent the past two years investing in, and partnering with, dozens of autonomous vehicle companies, including Wayve.

Uber executives have also taken direct shots at Waymo, an unorthodox way to treat a business partner. For instance, Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli posted a video and commentary on X calling out the unsafe behavior of a Waymo robotaxi, calling it “scary.”

The ride-hailing giant has launched two new business divisions — a data play called AV Labs, and an operations-focused unit called Uber Autonomous Solutions — that illustrate the company’s broader ambitions to gain market share in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry.

Uber has placed many bets on autonomous vehicle companies that could compete with Waymo, most notably Wayve. In February, the U.K. startup raised $1.2 billion from a number of strategic backers, including Uber as a return investor. The total raise could reach $1.5 billion thanks to another $300 million from Uber contingent on deploying robotaxis, beginning in London.

There is one regulatory hitch that will delay the robotaxi face-off, at least for a while. The U.K. government is in the process of creating autonomous vehicle regulations, and it doesn’t appear to be wrapping up anytime soon. The government’s transportation department opened applications in May for companies interested in its AV pilot program. The department said it will take what it learns from the pilot program and apply it towards the development of its regulations.

But one of the positive things with the 15.3-inch screen is that Lenovo didn’t try to squeeze in a number pad. No, no. Just a standard keyboard layout with a centered touchpad and an adequate amount of room for your wrists. And yet, this also doesn’t feel like an overly large laptop. The width and depth dimensions are nearly identical to the 15-inch MacBook Air, and it’s only about 0.16 inches thicker. It’s definitely a backpackable and travel-worthy device.

And here’s where the remaining compromises are surprisingly few and far in-between. One of the first things I test with budget laptops is the touchpad. Cheap Windows laptops have notoriously awful touchpads, and it’s one of the important parts of a laptop that can’t be spelled out in the specs. I’m happy to report that the IdeaPad Slim 5x has a better tracking surface than most other laptops at this price. Performance is far better than on the HP OmniBook 3 or OmniBook 5. It’s certainly more responsive than the Asus Vivobook 14. I’d say it’s more or less on par with the Dell 14 Plus from last year, though that laptop has received a price increase in recent months. The sound of the click is my only real complaint about the IdeaPad Slim 5x’s touchpad. It’s too loud. I’ll take a responsive surface over a quiet click any day, but if you work in an office with coworkers, they might get annoyed by it.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I was also surprised by how the speakers sounded. They didn’t blow me away, but compared to the average set of speakers on an average Windows laptop at this price, they’re impressive. Of course, even a 13-inch MacBook Air sounds undoubtedly fuller and bassier, but these are at least serviceable. The webcam doesn’t fare as well. It’s really only adequate in good lighting.

It Only Gets Better

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus is no M5 killer—that’s for sure. Despite improvements to the GPU this time around, the Apple M5 is still in another league. But Qualcomm is closing the gap with CPU performance, even if the M5 remains the undisputed champion. I’d say that is a bigger deal in laptops designed with performance in mind, but here, that’s not as much an issue. You aren’t buying an $850 to be a full-time video producer, AI junkie, or esports gamer. For the things the IdeaPad Slim 5x is designed for, it excels.

My normal workflow consists of juggling a full load of work apps, dozens of browser tabs, and probably some music and video streaming simultaneously. The X2 Plus didn’t skip a beat. I came away convinced that there’s more performance than what most people will even need. That’s especially impressive since the X2 Plus is a step down from the more powerful X2 Elite (or X2 Elite Enhanced), which is partially how Qualcomm and Lenovo were able to get the price down.

The display is also an aspect of this laptop that surprised me. It’s brighter and more colorful than most laptops at this price, and the addition of a touchscreen is handy. While I don’t typically like matte screens, the IdeaPad Slim 5x’s more subtle anti-glare coating made this display feel premium and clear–just without the heavy reflections.

Microsoft has finally put a date on one of its biggest upcoming games. Gears of War: E-Day will launch on October 6, 2026. It’s now set to arrive exclusively on Xbox, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

The announcement came during Xbox’s Summer Game Fest showcase. It appeared alongside a new trailer packed with brutal combat, collapsing cityscapes and plenty of the series’ trademark chainsaw-fuelled action.

More importantly, it offered a closer look at the game’s setting: the infamous Emergence Day. This was when the Locust Horde first erupted onto Earth and changed humanity’s future forever.

The footage opens with a younger Marcus Fenix before he became the battle-hardened soldier fans know today. It also appears to show his first meeting with Dominic Santiago. This is setting up an origin story for one of gaming’s most iconic duos.

UBTECH spent years refining full-size humanoids for factory floors and warehouse aisles. Those machines learned to move with care around people, handle precise assembly steps, and stay safe in busy production lines at places like NIO and FAW-Volkswagen plants. Now the same engineering team has turned that foundation toward regular homes through a new consumer brand called UWORLD and its first offering, the U1 series.

A recent teaser clip shows two models in a dramatic, low-light scene. One of them is dressed sharply in a cut dark suit, with well-combed light hair and glasses that catch even the smallest reflection. The other is seated comfortably in a chair, her long wavy hair framing a well-made-up face with a smooth complexion and expressive eyes. Close-ups show a subtle shine, natural-looking hair, and delicate skin texture, all thanks to a silicone exterior that closely resembles human skin.

Unitree R1 Humanoid Robot (White, R1 Air)

• Three models, one lightweight platform R1 Air (20 DOF, monocular camera), R1 (26 DOF, binocular camera, head+waist joints), and R1 Edu (26 DOF…
• Easy setup – no coding required for basic use Unbox, power on, and start. Manual teaching feature: physically pose the robot, and it replays the…
• More DOF = more expressive movement 26‑DOF models (R1 / R1 Edu) add head and waist articulation for smoother dance and running. For safety reasons…

The male model stands 183 centimeters (6 feet) tall, while the female model is 168 centimeters (5 feet 6 inches) tall. They each have 88 degrees of freedom across their bodies, allowing them to move in a very coordinated manner, including legs, arms, hands, neck, and chest. They stay connected to cloud services via Wi-Fi and last approximately 2-4 hours on a single charge. UBTECH took a deliberate approach to developing these devices, using on lessons learned from real-world industrial applications such as learning balance, gentle movement, and safe navigation in changing environments.

The idea here is to establish an emotional connection, as this is the ultimate goal. Onboard AI moderates the conversation and, in essence, wakes up when you do. It picks up on conversations even when you’re close by and uses tone, facial expressions, and speaking rate to estimate your mood. When things seem dismal, the robot can flip to encouraging banter or try to steer things in a more positive direction. When the mood is right, it enjoys joining in and talking normally. Personal memory is encrypted on the device to keep your conversations secret. Owners can modify cosmetic elements and character qualities at any time, allowing each robot to develop an own personality over time.

JD.com opened pre-orders on June 2, with a 3,000 yuan deposit required to secure a spot in the initial batch, which got over 2,000 reservations in just a day or two. Shipments to clients who ordered early will arrive in mid-September. A full public presentation is expected for June 30, at which UBTECH will discuss final pricing, particular features, and any software updates planned after launch. We’re still waiting for the final retail price, but it appears that this device will be more affordable than a high-end enterprise system.

Their physical abilities are reportedly limited, as in they can get up, sit, and move over flat indoor surfaces using taught gait patterns, but stairs, rough terrain, or tough household tasks are out of the question for now. According to UBTECH, these units will not accept custom programming or behaviors, preventing owners from configuring them to perform new functions on the fly. The emphasis is on communication, with some incremental personalization on the side, as these devices will not be used to retrieve mail or perform chores anytime soon.
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