The best Galaxy S21 screen protectors from Spigen, ZAGG, and more!

So, you picked up the Samsung Galaxy S21, Samsung’s newest flagship device. That’s great! Now, it’s time to make sure your expensive new purchase remains in pristine condition. Whether or not you need a case is up to your phone habits, but you can prevent scratches and blemishes by picking up one of the Galaxy S21 screen protectors below. You never know when a stray key may touch your screen! We rounded up some of the best Galaxy S21 screen protectors so that you can make sure your smartphone stays in mint condition.

Make sure you get the right screen protector for your phone! The Galaxy S21, S21 Plus, and S21 Ultra are all slightly different sizes, so each set of screen protectors will only work with one model of the Galaxy S21. The recommendations below are for the standard Galaxy S21 screen protectors – we have other guides for Galaxy S21 Plus screen protectors and Galaxy S21 Ultra screen protectors if you’re buying those phones.

QHOHQ Tempered Glass Screen Protector

Classic Tempered Protection

Sometimes the classic tempered glass screen protector is all you need. QHOHQ's three-pack of screen protectors are meant to go on bubble-free and are water-resistant while offering no troubles with the Galaxy S21's touch screen.

Buy at Amazon

Privacy Screen Protector and Camera Film

Protect Your Screen and Data

Want to make sure your data is protected in a public setting? A privacy screen protector is a smart idea. This screen protector will not only protect your screen from scratches and dings, but it will also make it difficult for others to read what's on your screen!

Buy at Amazon

ESR Liquid Skin Screen Protector

Easy Installation, Smooth Protection

If you're not a fan of tempered glass, a film screen will also work great! Film screens offer less protection overall, but also generally look and feel better than tempered glass.

Buy at Amazon

GBBC Tempered Glass Screen Protector

Protect The Bezel

Do you want the bezel around your phone? This tempered glass screen protector will also wrap around your phone's bezel.

Buy at Amazon

GlassFusion VisionGuard+ with D3O

Block Blue Light

If you're looking for premium protection, you can't go wrong with ZAGG's GlassFusion VisionGuard+. This screen protector blocks blue light without discoloration and is advertised to be unbreakable. It's a bit more expensive, but isn't your phone worth it?

$60 at ZAGG

Spigen NeoFlex Screen Protector for Galaxy S21

Easy Application, Simple Protection

Another film protector option, Spigen's NeoFlex Protector will give your Galaxy S21 screen nearly-invisible protection against light scratches and damage.

Buy at Amazon

You have our favorite recommendations, but you may be wondering what the best of the best is. I personally like film screen protectors over tempered glass, as the feel is better, and I don’t need too much protection for my screen. I’ve used ESR in the past, so I know the ESR Liquid Skin screen protector is going to be good. The camera protection is just a bonus! Also, anything that prevents blue-light from shining through at night is a good thing, so the GlassFusion VisionGuard+ with D3O is worth the look. Granted, you can also block blue light with software or phone settings, but a screen protector like this can be the least hassle to mess with.

When it comes to Galaxy S21 screen protectors, though, what you’ll want will depend mostly on how much abuse your phone will go through! So make sure to pick the best product for the job and stay tuned as we’ll be updating this post regularly with more options as they become available!

Samsung Galaxy S21

The Samsung Galaxy S21 is the starting point of the new 2021 flagship series, packing in a flagship SoC, along with a decent display and camera setup.

Pre-order on Samsung.com

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Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico: A $4 ARM microcontroller

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced the Raspberry Pi Pico, the company’s first microcontroller. Like other Raspberry Pi products, the new Raspberry Pi Pico is incredibly affordable at only $4, but it features the Foundation’s first custom chip: the RP2040.

When designing the RP2040, the Raspberry Pi Foundation set three goals for itself. They wanted the chip to feature high performance to handle integer workloads, have flexible I/O options to support most external devices, and be low cost to lower the barrier to entry. What they designed measures two square millimeters, is fabricated on a 40nm process node, and features a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor with 264KB of on-chip RAM. Also contained within the 7x7mm QFN-56 package are multiple I/O options, 2MB of flash memory, a power supply chip that supports input voltages from 1.8-5.5V, a single push button, and a single LED.

RP2040 Specifications

• Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
• 264KB (remember kilobytes?) of on-chip RAM
• Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
• DMA controller
• Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
• 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
• 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers
• 16 × PWM channels
• 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
• 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
• USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming

The Raspberry Pi Pico is programmable in C/C++ and MicroPython, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is providing a complete C SDK, GCC-based toolchain, and Visual Studio Code integration. Interestingly, there’s even a port of TensorFlow Lite available, in case you’re interested in running any machine learning programs on the Pico.

For $4, the Raspberry Pi Pico with its RP2040 chip has a lot to offer. If you’re looking to build a simple project at home to control your appliances, the Pi Pico seems to be a simple and cheap way to get into microcontroller programming.

You can view the board’s full specifications, datasheet, pinout diagram, on-device boot ROM, and other documentation from the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website. The Raspberry Pi Foundation also put together a book to teach beginners how to get started with MicroPython on the new Pi Pico. You can purchase the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and the book starting today from all Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers. If you’re a subscriber of HackSpace magazine, you’ll be given a Pico for free with the February issue.

Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a $4 microcontroller board with Raspberry's in-house, ARM-based RP2040 chip. It's programmable in C and MicroPython and features I/O options like I2C, SPI, and PIO.

Check it out at Raspberrypi.org

Alternatively, you can pick up one of the other low-cost boards from Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, or Sparkfun that make use of the RP2040 silicon platform.

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Windows 10X booted on the Lumia 950XL shows Microsoft’s OS scales well on mobile

These past few weeks have shown us that Microsoft’s Windows 10X should be a formidable alternative to Chrome OS. It seems to work well with a mouse and keyboard and on laptops with touch screens. Now, a pair of new images shows how well it scales to a mobile environment.

Twitter user Gustave Monce claims they managed to get an early build of Windows 10X running on a Nokia Lumia 950 XL, a device that was released all the way back in 2015. The images Monce shared shows how well the upcoming software scales to different screen sizes. On the Lumia 950 XL, which features a 5.7-inch display, Windows 10X’s task bar fits wells at the bottom of the screen, while the quick settings panel pops up with all the elements in place.

I did get to take two pictures, looks like the UI is very adaptive to this resolution. Also personally i think it looks lovely. pic.twitter.com/tqhZ51p5xj

— Gustave Monce (@gus33000) January 20, 2021

Monce said Windows 10X responds well to the smaller form factor, as the images demonstrate, but plenty of work still needs to be done from a usability standpoint. Still, if we didn’t know better, we’d say Microsoft was preparing to get back into smartphones (but we know that couldn’t be further from the truth).

Windows 10X is expected to be a lightweight take on Windows 10. As we’ve seen in previous leaks, it takes a lot of inspiration from Google’s Chrome OS, while still retaining the soul and design of Windows 10. As something that will likely be targeted at enterprise and education customers, Microsoft’s new software could be primed to have a breakout year.

As we’ve said before, Windows 10X won’t be something you’ll be able to upgrade your existing machine to. Instead, the software will come pre-installed on new machines similar to laptops that run Chrome OS. If you’ve been tempted by Chromebooks in the past, but are embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, the launch of Windows 10X is the perfect solution.

Windows 10X devices are expected to be released this year, possibly as early as this spring. Wouldn’t it be cool if Microsoft allowed old Windows Phone owners to download a working version of the software on their device? If only.

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Samsung is mass-producing 90Hz OLED displays for laptops

Samsung Display has announced that it will mass produce the world’s first 90Hz OLED displays destined for laptops. That’s an upgrade over current laptop screens, which offer a 60Hz refresh rate.

According to a press release, Samsung Display will initially produce 14-inch, 90Hz OLED displays beginning in March. While exact specs haven’t been revealed, these displays are expected to be available in laptops and notebooks released by “several global IT companies.”

“OLED display panels can best satisfy the diverse consumer needs for laptops used in telework, online education, video streaming, and gaming,” Samsung Display said.

The company is claiming its 90Hz OLED screens will offer high-speed driving performance that’s on par with that of 120Hz LCD.

“Samsung Display tested blur length using the same motion picture of a fast driving car and found that the image drag of 90Hz OLED and 120Hz high refresh rate LCD screens is 0.9mm and 1mm, respectively,” the company said. “In short, 90Hz OLED screens smear amazingly little, at practically the same rate as a 120Hz LCD.”

Samsung Display didn’t say which OEM partners are expected to adopt these new 90Hz OLED displays, but it could be the beginning of a new era of quality. OLED displays are relatively rare in everyday laptops, though you can find them in some gaming options. The introduction of a 90Hz refresh rate could improve the gaming experience on laptops, but also make the everyday experience feel much smoother.

One possibility is Apple adopting Samsung Display’s new screens. The Cupertino-company is rumored to be launching a 14-inch MacBook Pro this spring, right around the time Samsung Display will begin mass production. That’s just speculation, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Either way, it’s an exciting development on the laptop front. We’ve seen mobile displays quickly adopt higher refresh rates, so it’s about time we see the same in other portable devices.

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Linux can now be run on the Mac Mini with Apple Silicon

Ever since Apple launched its new Macs with the company’s new high-performance ARM chips, third-party software developers have been hard at work getting alternative operating systems up and running on the new hardware. Early last month, a few developers booted Windows 10 and Fedora Linux on an M1 Mac via virtualization, but the biggest breakthrough in alternative OS development for M1 Macs has come from the team at Corellium, a firm that specializes in ARM device virtualization. The team has managed to port Linux and make it “completely usable” on the M1 Mac Mini.

Linux is now completely usable on the Mac mini M1. Booting from USB a full Ubuntu desktop (rpi). Network works via a USB c dongle. Update includes support for USB, I2C, DART. We will push changes to our GitHub and a tutorial later today. Thanks to the @CorelliumHQ team pic.twitter.com/uBDbDmvJUG

— Chris Wade (@cmwdotme) January 20, 2021

In a blog post, Corellium lays out how they ported Linux to the new Macs. The company leveraged its experience developing the Sandcastle project — which enabled booting Android on older iPhones susceptible to the checkm8 exploit — to write Linux drivers for the new Apple SoCs. Fortunately, Apple officially allows booting custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs, so there’s no need to leverage an exploit to boot an unsigned kernel. Without getting into the nitty-gritty details — Corellium’s blog post does a great job at that — Apple Silicon’s firmware interfaces and boot process are very different compared to other 64-bit ARM SoCs. With a bit of work, the Corellium team managed to add support for enough hardware interfaces to boot Ubuntu Linux on the M1 Mac Mini.

The patches needed to boot Linux on M1 Macs are documented here, while the source code for the pre-loader needed to start the processor cores can be found here. The changes have been pushed upstream, though it’ll take a lot more work before the code gets merged. Other members of the Linux community are working to support Linux on M1 Macs, fortunately. Most notably, the team behind the crowd-funded Asahi Linux project — which aims to port Arch Linux to Apple Silicon Macs — is working on reverse-engineering the GPU architecture to enable hardware acceleration. In order to boot Linux directly on M1 Macs, work is being done to use PongoOS as the bootloader.

If you’re interested in trying out Linux on your own M1 Mac Mini, Corellium has shared instructions on how to boot Ubuntu. You can find the full instructions here, but in summary, you’ll need to download their live image (which is slightly modified from the ARM64 Ubuntu build for the Raspberry Pi), copy the image to an external USB drive (which needs to be at least 16GB in capacity), connect your USB drive to the Mac Mini’s USB-C port, boot into the recovery OS, install the custom kernel (Corellium has provided a setup script), and then log in using the default credentials.

As you can see, the installation process is not very user-friendly, so it’s not recommended for beginners to muck around with Linux on their Mac Mini. Furthermore, there’s no GPU acceleration or support for the M1’s machine learning cores, so don’t expect to play games or run ML tasks. Still, this is exciting news for anyone interested in PC hardware and Linux. The performance and battery life on offer from Apple Silicon MacBooks are second to none, so these machines will be perfect for on-the-go programming. Even Linus Torvalds agrees.

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Mozilla will make it easier to install extensions in Firefox 85 for Android

Mozilla has made some notable changes to Firefox on Android over the past few months. In September of 2020, the company rolled out Firefox 79, and with it came limited extension support. The company then rolled out improved extension support to a Nightly build of Firefox for Android. Now, Mozilla said it’s planning to release another update on January 25 that will allow users to install supported Recommended Extensions directly from addons.mozilla.org (AMO).

Previously, Mozilla made it so extensions for mobile devices could only be installed from the Add-ons Manager, but the new update will feel more familiar to those who use Firefox on desktop. “We hope this update provides a smoother installation experience for mobile users,” Mozilla said.

“As a quick note, we plan to enable the installation buttons on AMO during our regularly schedule site update on Thursday, January 21,” Mozilla said in a blog post. “These buttons will only work if you are using a pre-release version of Firefox for Android until version 85 is released on Thursday, January 25.”

While Mozilla is committing to improving the optimization of add-on performance on mobile, the company didn’t comment on supporting additional extensions. But with installation now more familiar and accessible, perhaps this is just the first step to improving the experience.

Some of the extensions that are available for Firefox on mobile include Ghostery, AdGuard, Web Archives, and Bitwarden. Not a whole lot, but it’s a good start, and some major ones are available. Mozilla still has some work to do to get back into the good graces of Firefox users on mobile. But this week’s update is a welcome addition, and we look forward to seeing how Firefox on mobile improves down the road.

Mozilla said that you can use an override setting to install other extensions listed on AMO on Firefox for Android Nightly.

Firefox Browser: fast, private & safe web browser (Free, Google Play) →

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Microsoft Edge browser gets updated with loads of new features and themes

Microsoft has unveiled a major update for its Edge browser, introducing new features that include sleeping tabs, new themes, and improvements to performance. The latest features arrive a year after the Chromium-powered version of Microsoft Edge was released.

Likely the most exciting features from a consumer standpoint is the introduction of new themes in Edge. Microsoft said it created 24 new themes, giving users plenty of options to personalize their browser experience. Some of the themes are straight from Xbox, including Halo, Gears, Forza, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Sea of Thieves, and more.

The themes apply a new background on the new tab page, while tabs, address bar, and other parts of the browser also take on the look of the theme. Support is also available for vertical tabs in the Dev channel, which the company has recently been testing.

Speaking of design, Microsoft is incorporating more elements of its Fluent design system into Edge, beginning with the browser’s icons, which now take on a rounder and softer appearance. Microsoft said it plans to bring more of its Fluent design system to more of its products, but didn’t share details.

The next thing people will notice in Edge is sleeping tabs. Microsoft said the feature will boost browser performance by improving memory and CPU resource usage. “When you have several tabs open, it will release system resources for inactive tabs to help power new or existing tabs as well as other applications, preventing slowdowns and sluggishness.”

Microsoft is also rolling out new password manager features to Edge. One of the features is a password generator. The new will automatically suggest a secure password when you’re signing up for a new online account or changing an existing password. The password generator arrives ahead of other security features, including a password monitor, which will tell you if one of your passwords is part of a list of leaked credentials on the dark web.

In terms of improved privacy, Microsoft said Edge will include extra transparency to help users manage specific site permissions. Users will be able to control which sites you share location, camera, and microphone access. You can also review, edit, and reset site permissions if you change your mind.

These features are part of a much larger update to Edge, which is also rolling out history and tab sync to all users. The feature was previously made available to certain countries earlier this month.

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