Today, USB Power Delivery (USB PD) is the closest we have to a universal standard. It’s widely used across phones, tablets, laptops and some gaming portables.

Newer versions of USB PD push the standard forward. USB PD 3.1 raised the maximum supported power to 240W, while USB PD 3.2 is the spec’s latest revision. Those higher power levels target demanding devices like laptops and monitors. Phones typically don’t need anywhere near those maximum limits. Besides, thermal constraints would make 240W (or anything close to it) impractical and unnecessary for a handset anyway.

The iPhone 17 series is among the devices that support USB PD. Samsung and Google phones use fast-charging systems built around USB PD and its PPS feature.

PPS, or Programmable Power Supply, is one of the more advanced USB PD features available on phones. It lets the device request smaller, more precise voltage and current changes as it powers up. That can improve efficiency and help with heat management.

Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra uses PPS as part of its 60W “Super Fast Charging 3.0” system. Meanwhile, Google’s Pixel 11 models use USB-C PPS charging to reach their fastest advertised speeds, with the Pixel 11 Pro designed for a 45W PPS charger. If you use Android flagships and want a versatile USB-C charger, PD with PPS is your go-to.

Remember Qualcomm Quick Charge? It was one of the first fast-charging systems for Android phones. Although it’s still around, USB PD has become the more broadly adopted standard across the mobile industry, to the degree that even newer Quick Charge versions themselves support it. In fact, a Qualcomm chip doesn’t even guarantee that the device uses Quick Charge, since phone makers can opt for other fast-charging systems instead.

Meanwhile, some Android phone makers use their own proprietary fast-charging systems. OnePlus and Oppo use technologies based on SuperVOOC, and Xiaomi uses HyperCharge on some models. The catch is that reaching the highest advertised speeds usually requires a compatible proprietary charger and, in many cases, the right cable, too. Still, many of these phones also support USB-C PD charging, although you might not get anywhere near the advertised speeds for the proprietary systems.

Speaking of which, it’s good to take manufacturer claims with a few grains of salt anyway. Phones marketed as supporting 80W or 100W charging don’t continuously draw that power from empty to full. Instead, they tend to charge fastest when the battery is fairly low, then rapidly taper the charging rate as the battery fills.

Watch Rowing World Championships 2026 live streams as reigning Olympic champions Oliver Zeidler, Karolien Florijn and the Sinkovic brothers battle for global supremacy at the Bosbaan on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

More than 1,200 athletes from over 60 countries are set to face off across 23 boat classes, including both Olympic and non-Olympic races – the men’s single sculls and women’s single sculls being the twin highlights.

In context: Walmart has remained perhaps the largest opponent to contactless payments for over a decade, preferring to steer customers toward its own proprietary alternative. Following a couple of disappointing quarters, the retail giant appears to have accepted that those efforts never caught on with shoppers.

Walmart has finally ended its years-long battle against contactless payments from tech giants like Apple and Google. The company recently announced that some stores and Sam’s Club locations will begin supporting Apple Pay and Google Pay starting August 24.

All locations will support the popular contactless payment systems by the end of 2026, and the rollout will reach fuel stations by mid-2027. Walmart didn’t disclose a reason for the sudden change, but the company is likely attempting to bolster its weakening stock price.

Walmart has been one of Apple Pay’s biggest holdouts since the NFC payment system launched in 2014. Soon after, Walmart, along with dozens of other retailers, backed an alternative called CurrentC, which worked via QR codes instead. The service was hacked before it even launched publicly and never caught on.

As recently as last year, Walmart stuck to its refusal to accept Apple Pay and Google Pay. Even in the press release effectively announcing its surrender, the company still promoted its current alternative, Walmart Pay.

Walmart and other former CurrentC supporters were always vague about their resistance to Apple and Google’s systems, but many suspect customer data was the primary factor. Contactless payment systems authenticate purchases via biometrics without fully exposing the buyer’s credit card information and other data.

Also read: How Apple Pay Works

Critics have accused Walmart of using CurrentC and Walmart Pay to harvest customer data for sale and targeted marketing. Anonymous payments through Apple Pay and Google Pay would make that much harder to pull off.

Walmart’s reversal follows disappointing earnings reports from May and earlier this month, which have pushed its stock price to its lowest level in about nine months.

Weak earnings guidance in May triggered the company’s worst single-day stock performance since 2023, and the stock suffered a nearly 9% decline earlier this week after same-store sales growth for last quarter fell short of expectations. Walmart’s same-store sales growth is often treated as a bellwether for overall US household spending.

Lanterns episode 2 has made its HBO Max debut — and the sci-fi crime drama appears to have revealed that a mysterious race called the Manhunters are the villains of its 2016 storyline.

So, who are they? Where did they come from? And why are they seemingly being set up as the chief antagonists of HBO’s Green Lantern TV show? Let’s take a look at the Manhunters’ comic book history to answer — or at least try to answer — these questions.

Who are the Manhunters in DC Comics?

And they looked absolutely ridiculous doing it.

While Google has never quite matched its competitors in the smartwatch market, particularly when it comes to health tracking features, the Pixel Watch 5 feels like its strongest attempt yet to close that gap. With features such as Insulin Resistance Trends and Breathing Emergency Detection, Google is making a serious push in a category where wellness and proactive monitoring are becoming increasingly important.

With the Pixel Watch 5 now going head-to-head with Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 9 and Apple’s Watch Series 11, the differences go well beyond the usual Android vs. iOS divide. The interesting question isn’t which smartwatch has the longest feature list, since all of them are locked to their ecosystem, but which one implements those features better, or rather cooks up something new from the existing sensors.

Pixel Watch 5 vs. Galaxy Watch 9 vs. Watch Series 11: Specs at a glance

Health Guardian gives the Pixel Watch 5 an edge

The Pixel Watch 5’s hardware is solid but hardly distinctive next to its rivals. It uses the same 3,000-nit LTPO panel as Samsung, while still beating the Apple Watch for peak brightness, and the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 keeps things responsive enough for features such as Gemini Proactive Suggestions. It is also the thickest smartwatch of the three, so Google clearly isn’t winning this comparison on hardware alone.

Health Guardian is where the Pixel Watch 5 makes its strongest case this year. Using its existing sensors and a month of passive wear, the watch can estimate Insulin Resistance Trends and generate monthly Blood Pressure Trend reports without requiring a CGM or blood-pressure cuff. Samsung and Apple still don’t offer anything comparable.

Then there’s Breathing Emergency Detection, which monitors for dangerous blood oxygen level drops and can automatically call emergency services if it detects that you’re unresponsive. That gives the Pixel Watch 5 a practical safety advantage I wouldn’t dismiss, particularly for someone dealing with a serious health concern.

Gemini sits at the center of the software experience. Google’s Proactive Suggestions can surface smart message replies, pull up information from conversations, and handle quick actions such as creating calendar events. Raise to Talk also removes the need for a wake word, making voice interaction more natural.

Google has also put real thought into hands-free navigation. A wrist-turn back gesture and refined double-pinch controls are useful rather than gimmicky, while Smart Wake uses live heart-rate data to wake you during a lighter sleep stage. Atmospheric GPS goes a step further by factoring live weather conditions into route tracking.

Combined, these features make the Pixel Watch 5 feel less like a spec-sheet refresh and more like Google finally connecting its AI, health, and safety features into a coherent smartwatch experience.

Samsung tracks everything from body composition to cardio load

On hardware alone, the Watch 9 is the only one here to meet the MIL-STD-810H durability standards while also being the sleekest smartwatch option. It runs on the most powerful Snapdragon Wear Elite chip currently available for wearables, which should translate to smoother day-to-day performance. However, Samsung has cut corners with the onboard storage. 

Samsung’s strongest bet for your wrist is its BioActive sensor, which can estimate your body fat and muscle percentage, something neither the Pixel Watch nor Apple Watch can do. 

With One UI 9 Watch, you get the new Vitals dashboard. It spends the first week establishing a personal baseline for your SpO2, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and skin temperature, and then flags subtle deviations that could signal illness or overtraining before you’d notice symptoms yourself. 

Then there are several unique features like Daily Cardio Load and Antioxidant Index, which let you determine whether this should be a push or a recovery day and help you estimate whether your diet meets daily antioxidant requirements, respectively. Pair that with Hearing Protection Alerts, which monitor the ambient noise around you.

For anyone who trains seriously, Ghost Pacing lets cyclists race their own historical routes in real time. The updated Samsung Health app now supports custom GPX routing, which is quite useful for trail runners. On the software side, One UI 9 Watch’s split gesture system, including double pinch for yes, wrist shake for no, is the most intuitive control scheme on a smartwatch, at least for me. 

Add native Gemini integration via Raise to Talk, and Samsung has built the most well-rounded health companion of this group.

Hypertension alerts and Workout Buddy keep the Watch Series 11 relevant

The first and most obvious difference is that the Watch Series 11 is the only rectangular smartwatch here, a form factor I consider better suited for reading notifications, messages, or glancing at data. It’s slimmer than the Pixel Watch, but not the slimmest here. Then there’s the S10 chip and its four-core NPU, which enable the Apple Watch Series 11 to process Siri commands entirely on-device, including the new Siri AI experience. 

The Watch 11’s most useful and unique feature is Hypertension Notifications. Apple’s optical heart sensor tracks how your blood vessels respond to each heartbeat over a 30-day period, then alerts you if it detects patterns linked to chronic high blood pressure, a condition many people don’t discover until a doctor’s visit.

Like the Galaxy Watch 9, the Watch Series 11 also lets you detect the early signs of Sleep Apnea. Another similarity is the new Vitals app (Apple did it first), which aggregates overnight heart rate, respiratory rate, and wrist temperature into one dashboard so you can see at a glance whether you’re deviating from your own baseline. 

Workout Buddy is Apple’s most interesting new addition for anyone who actually trains, in my opinion. It’s an Apple Intelligence-powered coach that adjusts pacing and offers encouragement mid-workout (that is important), pulling from your paired iPhone. Google’s Gemini Health Coach is mostly passive during workouts, giving Apple an edge here.

Combined with genuinely advanced sport tracking, including SWOLF scoring for swimmers, offline topographic maps for hikers, Stride Length and Ground Contact Time for runners, and the new wrist flick gesture for one-handed control, the Series 11 remains an intuitive smartwatch and a reliable health-monitoring device.

Which one should you get?

Ultimately, there’s no one winner here. Call it a pro or a con, but the decision depends on the phone in your pocket. The Pixel Watch 5, with the new Insulin Resistance and Blood Pressure Trends feature, is the best to pair with the new Pixel 11 series, or any Pixel for that matter. The Galaxy Watch 9, on the other hand, has a hardware advantage in the form of the BioActive Sensor, making it the best smartwatch for Galaxy phones. Finally, the Apple Watch Series 11, while its falling behind when it comes to unique or new health monitoring features, is still the best smartwatch to pair with iPhones.

Samsung may be preparing to make its boldest Exynos claim in years. A new report shared by industry analyst Ice Universe, citing Korean media, suggests that Samsung is highly confident its next-generation Exynos 2700 chipset can outperform Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, including its higher-end Pro variant.

The reported figures are ambitious enough to raise eyebrows. If they hold up in production hardware, the Galaxy S27 could mark a major turnaround for Samsung’s in-house processor business. For now, however, the numbers remain early estimates rather than independently verified benchmark results.

Samsung’s next Exynos could finally challenge Qualcomm

According to the report highlighted by Ice Universe, the Exynos 2700 is targeting a 19% advantage over the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 in Geekbench 6.5 multi-core performance, while reportedly remaining 9.5% ahead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro.

Graphics performance could be even more significant for smartphones. At peak performance, the Exynos 2700 is said to be around 5% faster than Qualcomm’s Pro chip. Under a 2.5W power limit, however, the reported advantage widens considerably, with Samsung’s chip allegedly delivering 24% better GPU performance than the standard model and 22% more than the Pro version.

That distinction matters because phones rarely spend long periods running at their absolute performance limits. Gaming, camera processing, and AI workloads can generate heat, forcing chips to reduce performance. A processor that performs better at lower power could potentially offer stronger sustained gaming performance while using less battery.

The report also claims an AI advantage. In Llama 3.1 8B testing, the Exynos 2700 reportedly generated responses 18% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, while prompt processing was said to be roughly 5% quicker.

The bigger prize is Samsung’s independence from Qualcomm

Efficiency may be the most important claim of all. In a test intended to simulate real-world smartphone usage, the Exynos 2700 reportedly consumed 161mA, compared with 185mA for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, representing approximately 12.7% lower power consumption.

Samsung is expected to manufacture the chip using its second-generation 2nm GAA process, known as SF2P. Strong results would therefore benefit not only Samsung’s mobile division but also Samsung Foundry, offering evidence that its latest manufacturing technology can compete at the highest level.

There is also a financial incentive. The report notes that Samsung spent approximately KRW 13.8272 trillion on mobile application processors in 2023. Expanding Exynos use in the Galaxy S27 lineup could reduce the company’s reliance on Qualcomm and lower the cost of sourcing flagship chips.

A winning Exynos chip, however, will need to do more than post impressive benchmark numbers. Samsung will eventually have to prove the reported advantages in shipping phones, where thermals, sustained gaming performance, battery life and camera processing matter far more than a laboratory score.

If Ice Universe’s reported figures are even close to accurate, the Exynos 2700 could be Samsung’s strongest flagship processor in years. The real test will come when production hardware arrives, and Qualcomm gets a chance to answer.

Don’t let Siri become a hassle instead of an assistant; keep it quiet in the car to reduce distractions.

The most important toggle: Driving Focus

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Keep Siri quiet in the car

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Disable navigation guidance

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