Month: January 2025

Keen to watch the Australian Open 2025? Here are the best streams, the cheapest prices and how to watch every round from Melbourne as Jannik Sinner, Casper Ruud, Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic shoot for the title.

Australian Open 2025 is underway – which means it’s time to figure out the best (and possibly cheapest) way to watch live tennis from Melbourne from 12–26 January.

The first Grand Slam tournament of 2025 featuring defending champion Jannik Sinner is expected to be watched by a global TV audience of 25 million, with over one million fans through the gates over three weeks.

Tennis fans can watch the Australian Open for free on the local 9Now streaming service, and on major sports networks such ESPN and Eurosport, as well as via their respective apps.

Ready to see the world’s greatest tennis players on court? Stick with us for all the latest on the Australian Open including the draw, start times and highlights…

Watching Australian Open 2025: the essentials

Date: Sun, Jan 12 – Sun, Jan 26

Start time: 2pm ET / 7pm GMT

US: ESPN via Sling/Fubo

UK: Eurosport, Discovery+

🇦🇺 Australia (FREE): 9Now

📺 Our FULL GUIDE to Australian Open live streams

Who won last year’s Australian Open?

Jannik Sinner won the first major of what promises to be a storied career 12 months ago, coming from two sets down to beat Daniil Medvedev in the final. Sinner became the first Italian, male or female, to win the Australian Open.

Aryna Sabalenka retained her women’s singles title, overwhelming Zheng Qinwen for the loss of just five games in the final. Both Sabalenka and Sinner went on to win the US Open, to take both Grand Slam titles held on hard courts last season.

Where is the Australian Open 2025 being played?

Melbourne Park will again play host to the Australian Open in 2025, just as it has done since the venue first opened for the 1988 tournament.

Previously played on grass, the Aussie Open has been a hard-court tournament since its move to Melbourne Park 37 years ago. The Rod Laver Arena, the site’s biggest stadium and venue for each day’s biggest matches, holds up to 15,000 people, with the John Cain and Margaret Court Arenas able to accommodate 10,500 and 7,500 spectators respectively. Each has retractable roofs.

When does the order of play land each day?

Set your watches for 6pm AEDT / 2am ET / 11pm PT (-1 day) / 7am GMT for details of the schedule for the following day’s play.

Remember, there’s no set time limit for a tennis match, so you’ll need to keep an eye on how matches progress before your favorite player will make it onto court.

(Image credit: Robert Prange/Getty Images)

Will AI be calling the lines at the Australian Open 2025?

It’s not necessarily AI, but electronic line judges will again be in use at Melbourne Park. Back in 2021, the Australian Open became the first Grand Slam to employ technology on every court to call the lines and do away with human line judges for good.

Each match will still have the regular chair umpire, while players continue to have three challenges per set (plus a fourth in the event of a tiebreak) to dispute a contentious call, using Hawk-Eye technology.

Can I watch the Australian Open 2025 for FREE?

You can watch the Australian Open 2025 for free with English-language commentary on the 9Now streaming service in Australia.

9Now will be showing over 300 hours of live AO tennis (not to mention every upomcing Grand Slam), so it’s a great option for those who don’t want to pay to watch the tennis Down Under.

In the US, there’s also the option of signing up for a 7-day free trial to the Tennis Channel to catch some of the tournament. Subscriptions cost $10.99 a month or $109.99 a year when the trial ends.

🌎 Abroad right now? You’ll need a VPN to unblock your usual stream when traveling. NordVPN is available with a risk-free trial for 30 days.

Australian Open 2025 schedule

The tournament takes place every day from midnight UK time (7pm ET) each day on the outside courts and 1am (8pm ET) on the show courts.

Jan 12-14 – First Round (Women and Men)

Jan 15-16 – Second Round (Women and Men)

Jan 17-18 – Third Round (Women and Men)

Jan 19-20 – Fourth Round (Women and Men)

Jan 21-22 – Quarter-finals (Women and Men)

Jan 23 – Women’s semi-finals

Jan 24 – Men’s semi-finals

Jan 25 – Women’s final (8.30am GMT / 3.30am ET)

Jan 26 – Men’s final (8.30am GMT / 3.30am ET)

Which player should I watch on Day 1?

Aryna Sabalenka vs Sloane Stephens is the biggest match of the Australian Open 2025’s opening day, with the two-time defending champion facing the former major winner first up in the night session on Rod Laver Arena at 7pm AEDT / 3am ET / 12am PT / 8am GMT.

Big-hitting French wild card Lucas Pouille faces men’s second Alexander Zverev immediately afterwards.

Elsewhere, Aussie wild card Li Tu will look to get the home crowd in his favor as he faces 24th side Jiri Lehecka in the first match of the night session on Margaret Court Arena (same times as above). Earlier in the day, sixth seed Casper Ruud takes on Jaume Munar in what could be fascinating encounter, second on Laver.

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Nvidia’s desktop super computer is probably the greatest revolution in tech hardware since the IBM PC

Nobody really expected Nvidia to release something like the GB10. After all, why would a tech company that transformed itself into the most valuable firm ever by selling parts that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, suddenly decide to sell an entire system for a fraction of the price?

I believe that Nvidia wants to revolutionize computing the way IBM did it almost 45 years ago with the original IBM PC.

It may be time to introduce Jensen’s law to complement Moore’s law: At equal AI performance, it takes about 100 months to cut the price per FLOP by 25.

D. Athow

Project DIGITS, as a reminder, is a fully formed, off-the-shelf super computer built into something the size of a mini PC. It is essentially a smaller version of the DGX-1, the first of its kind launched almost a decade ago, back in April 2016. Then, it sold for $129,000 with a 16-core Intel Xeon CPU and eight P100 GPGPU cards; Digits costs $3,000.

Nvidia confirmed it has an AI performance of 1,000 Teraflops at FP4 precision (dense/sparse?). Although there’s no direct comparison, one can estimate that the diminutive super computer has roughly half the processing power of a fully loaded 8-card Pascal-based DGX-1.

At the heart of Digits is the GB10 SoC, which has 20 Arm Cores (10 Arm Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725). Other than the confirmed presence of a Blackwell GPU (a lite version of the B100), one can only infer the power consumption (100W) and the bandwidth (825GB/s according to The Register).

You should be able to connect two of these devices (but not more) via Nvidia’s proprietary ConnectX technology to tackle larger LLMs such as Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B. Shoving these tiny mini PCs in a 42U rack seems to be a near impossibility for now as it would encroach on Nvidia’s far more lucrative DGX GB200 systems.

All about the moat

Why did Nvidia embark on Project DIGITS? I think it is all about reinforcing its moat. Making your products so sticky that it becomes near impossible to move to the competition is something that worked very well for others: Microsoft and Windows, Google and Gmail, Apple and the iPhone.

The same happened with Nvidia and CUDA – being in the driving seat allowed Nvidia to do things such as shuffling the goal posts and wrongfooting the competition.

The move to FP4 for inference allowed Nvidia to deliver impressive benchmark claims such as “Blackwell delivers 2.5x its predecessor’s performance in FP8 for training, per chip, and 5x with FP4 for inference”. Of course, AMD doesn’t offer FP4 computation in the MI300X/325X series and we will have to wait till later this year for it to roll out in the Instinct MI350X/355X.

Nvidia is therefore laying the ground for future incursions, for lack of a better word or analogy, from existing and future competitors, including its own customers (think Microsoft and Google). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s ambition is clear; he wants to expand the company’s domination beyond the realm of the hyperscalers.

“AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry. With Project DIGITS, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers, placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI,” Huang recently commented.

Short of renaming Nvidia as Nvid-ai, this is as close as it gets to Huang acknowledging his ambitions to make his company’s name synonymous with AI, just like Tarmac and Hoover before them (albeit in more niche verticals).

(Image credit: Storagereview.com)

Why Mediatek?

I was also, like many, perplexed by the Mediatek link and the rationale for this tie-up can be found in the Mediatek press release. The Taiwanese company “brings its design expertise in Arm-based SoC performance and power efficiency to [a] groundbreaking device for AI researchers and developers” it noted.

The partnership, I believe, benefits Mediatek more than Nvidia and in the short run, I can see Nvidia quietly going solo. Reuters reported Huang dismissed the idea of Nvidia going after AMD and Intel, saying, “Now they [Mediatek] could provide that to us, and they could keep that for themselves and serve the market. And so it was a great win-win”.

This doesn’t mean Nvidia will not deliver more mainstream products though, just they would be aimed at businesses and professionals, not consumers where cut throat competition makes things more challenging (and margins wafer thin).

Reuters article quotes Huang saying, “We’re going to make that a mainstream product, we’ll support it with all the things that we do to support professional and high-quality software, and the PC (manufacturers) will make it available to end users.”

Gazing in my crystal ball

One theory I came across while researching this feature is that more data scientists are embracing Apple’s Mac platform because it offers a balanced approach. Good enough performance – thanks to its unified memory architecture – at a ‘reasonable’ price. The Mac Studio with 128GB unified memory and 4TB SSD currently retails for $5,799.

So where does Nvidia go from there? An obvious move would be to integrate the memory on the SoC, similar to what Apple has done with its M series SoC (and AMD with its HBM-fuelled Epyc). This would not only save on costs but would improve performance, something that its bigger sibling, the GB200 already does.

Then it will depend on whether Nvidia wants to offer more at the same price or the same performance at a lower price point (or a bit of both). Nvidia could go Intel’s way and use the GB10 as a prototype to encourage other key partners (PNY, Gigabyte, Asus) to launch similar projects (Intel did that with the Next Unit of Computing or NUC).

I am also particularly interested to know what will happen to the Jetson Orin family; the NX 16GB version was upgraded just a few weeks ago to offer 157 TOPS in INT8 performance. This platform is destined to fulfill more DIY/edge use cases rather than pure training/inference tasks but I can’t help but think about “What If” scenarios.

Nvidia is clearly disrupting itself before others attempt to do so; the question is how far will it go.

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Here’s the biggest tech news stories, from CES 2025, Samsung, Apple TV, OnePlus and more for January 11, 2024.

A new year always brings with it a slew of new devices to get excited about – and it all starts at CES.

The annual show in Las Vegas is a festival of technology, with everything from new TVs to laptops to weird and wacky robots on display – and we’ve rounded up the best of it below.

But that’s not been the only source of news this week, and outside of CES we got more rumors around the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S25 phones (arriving in January) and the Nintendo Switch 2 console (due sometime this year) – so in terms of tech leaks, 2025 is starting much as the previous year ended.

7. We failed to find any faults with the OnePlus 13

The OnePlus 13 is a genuinely impressive piece of kit (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

The OnePlus 13 went global this week, which means those of us outside China can get our hands on it – and judging by the official TechRadar review from US Mobiles Editor Philip Berne, it’s a fantastic flagship. Try as he might, he couldn’t find anything to complain about, though there’s lots to talk about in terms of positives.

It’s described as “beautiful to hold”, “pleasing to use”, and the most powerful phone you can currently buy (until the next Samsung Unpacked, at least). Find out how the phone ranks in all the key areas that matter, from the quality of the screen and the photos it takes, to the battery life and the on-board Android software, in our review below.

Read more: OnePlus 13 review: I’m dumbfounded, I can’t find anything wrong with this phone

6. We reviewed the first six episodes of Severance season 2

Are you ready for more Severance? (Image credit: Apple TV Plus)

Another big review that went live on TechRadar this week was our take on the first six epsiodes of Severance season 2, and this time it was Senior Entertainment Reporter Tom Power doing the reviewing. In short: this new season is likely to be a hit with existing Severance fans, as well as winning the show some new ones.

If you don’t mind some light spoilers about how the first six episodes progress, read on to find out why Tom called this second season “a terrific and coherently written sophomore season that’s packed with melodrama, sci-fi sensibilities, black comedy, and enough mysteries to keep Sherlock Holmes busy for years to come.”

Read more: Severance season 2 review: Apple TV Plus’ superb mystery thriller gets back to work with a bigger, bolder, and more brilliantly bizarre entry

5. We saw more Nintendo Switch 2 leaks

The Nintendo Switch is due a successor (Image credit: Shutterstock/Kyli Petersen)

Judging by the number of rumors we’re now seeing, it can’t be too long before the Nintendo Switch 2 is made official, and we had another flurry of leaks this week.

One leak actually gave us a mockup of the expected Switch design: it looks like it’ll be new but familiar, with a larger screen than the current series of consoles.

Nintendo has actually stepped in to comment, so steady have the leaks and rumors been. It described the aforementioned mockup as “unofficial”, so make of that what you will. It looks as though the updated console might see the light of day within the next couple of months, when all will finally be revealed.

Read more: Nintendo has finally commented on the Switch 2 leaks, but it’s only left me with more questions

4. Samsung Unpacked got its official date

What’s in store at the next Unpacked? (Image credit: Google / Future / Samsung)

Samsung has confirmed that it’s holding another Unpacked product launch event on Wednesday, January 22, but we don’t know too much more than that in terms of specifics – well, not officially. The rumors and leaks around this event have been non-stop, however, so we’ve made some educated guesses about what’s coming.

In short, the Samsung Galaxy S25 series will be leading the new gadget charge – there might be as many as four of them this time around – but we could also see news about Samsung’s virtual reality headset and a successor to the Galaxy Ring that launched last year. Whatever happens, TechRadar will be there to cover all the news for you.

Read more: 5 things to expect at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, from the Galaxy S25 Ultra to Project Moohan

3. Nvidia unveiled the RTX 5000 series

The RTX 5090 leads the way with Nvidia’s new GPUs (Image credit: Nvidia)

One of the biggest announcements at CES was the reveal of the long-awaited RTX 5000 series from Nvidia, led by the high-end Nvidia RTX 5090. These GPUs look like substantial upgrades over their respective predecessors, and as well as the levels of performance on offer, we’re also excited about support for smaller cases.

Laptop and PC makers wasted no time in unveiling new machines with RTX 5000 series components inside them, and we heard about models from Acer, Asus, Razer and others. There was also the first laptop we’ve seen with a rollable screen from Lenovo, giving users instant access to a larger display at the push of a button.

Read more: Nvidia unveils new GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 graphics cards at CES 2025

2. We saw TVs get bigger and bigger

Hisense unveiled a TV measuring 163 inches corner to corner (Image credit: Future)

CES is always packed with TVs, and this year was no different, giving us a preview of the televisions that’ll be rolling out across 2025. Some TV makers went all in on the 100-inch-plus end of the spectrum, with Hisense going all the way up to 163 inches – though these giant sets are going to cost you a pretty penny.

If you’re in the market for a new television this year, then you’d be able to shop TV tech that’s better than ever: some of the key TV innovations we saw at CES 2025 included variations on RGB backlighting, upgrades to wireless connection boxes, and improvements in OLED tech that mean brighter pictures with better color.

Read more: Big-screen TVs are everywhere at CES 2025, but I doubt they’ll replace projectors anytime soon

1. We chose our favorite gadgets from CES 2025

It was another very busy CES (Image credit: Future)

There was an awful lot on show at CES 2025, but the TechRadar team did its very best to get hands on time with as many gadgets and gizmos as possible during the course of the week (see our TikTok feed for details). Now the Las Vegas dust is beginning to settle, we’ve picked out our favorite 25 gadgets from the expo.

The range of new tech products here gives you some idea of just how busy CES was: we’ve got gaming consoles, TVs, wireless earbuds, turntables, laptops, phone chargers, augmented reality glasses, AI-powered gym equipment, and more besides. We also came across some rather weird and wacky robots this week.

All told it was a dizzying and dazzling showcase of what the next year will have to offer us – and based on this, there’s plenty to look forward to.

Read more: The 25 best gadgets we saw at CES 2025, from next-gen TVs to better portable gaming to a smart grill

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CES just proved that robot vacuums can do more than clean your floors.

As one of TechRadar’s Homes Editors, I’ve been following the robot vacuum market closely for some time now. While I’m enthusiastic about efficient home cleaning, it’s rare I’ll get wind of any robovac news that will make me do a double-take at the press release. Today’s best robot vacuums are very impressive but rarely exciting.

As CES 2025 – the world’s largest consumer tech event – approached, I was expecting more of the same: robot vacuums that are more capable, efficient and intelligent than their predecessors, but nothing overly dramatic. I was wrong. The robovac brands are going truly off-piste this year, and I am here for it.

It started with a call about a robot vacuum with a giant mechanical pincer arm attached, and it just escalated from there. Next thing I knew, I was hearing about a bot that could hoist itself up on stilts to climb over doorways. Then there was a robot vacuum that wasn’t content with cleaning your floors, it also wanted to be able to deliver your granny a sandwich. Whether these innovations will turn out to be useful remains to be seen, but they’re certainly interesting.

Now CES has wrapped up for another year, here’s my pick of the most weird and wonderful robot vacuum innovations to debut at this year’s event.

1. Bionic arms

Roborock launched three new robot vacuums at CES 2025, but by far the most eye-catching was the Saros Z70. And that’s because it has a big mechanical pincer arm. This arm remains hidden beneath a mysterious hatch on the top of the bot until called upon, whereby it emerges to do its owner’s bidding. I got an early, pre-CES preview, and it was pretty mesmerizing.

The Saros Z70 can tidy up before it vacuums (Image credit: Future)

At this point, the main function of the arm is to tidy away your mess. For example, you can instruct it to pick up anything it identifies as a sock and deposit it next to the laundry basket. This leaves the floor clearer for more effective vacuuming.

Perhaps more exciting is that this isn’t a technology of the far-flung future – last I heard, the Saros Z70 was due to go on sale in the first half of this year. Moving forward, Roborock seems enthusiastic about adding further functionality too – it’s working on training the arm to play with your cat, for instance.

Dreame is also experimenting with robotic arm technology (Image credit: Dreame)

While Roborock is furthest along in its journey, it’s not the only brand that’s experimenting with handy robots. Dreame used CES to demo a robot vacuum with a ‘Bionic Multi-Joint Robotic Arm’. Unlike Roborock’s efforts, this arm can pivot in various directions, theoretically enabling it to operate in tighter spaces.

On the SwitchBot event homepage, there’s a video showing a bot with two arms ending in human-looking molded hands. However, these aren’t addressed anywhere else, so I’m assuming the idea is still in the early development stage.

Read the full story: Roborock’s new robovac has a mechanical arm that can pick up your socks and maybe also play with your cat

2. Robovacs that can also be fans, air purifiers, security cams…

Many of today’s top robovacs can mop as well as vacuum. But what if that’s not enough? What if you want your robovac to keep you cool, or hold up a tablet while you make a video call? What if you want it to deliver a sandwich to your grandma? These are issues SwitchBot thinks are plaguing the general public right now, and it’s come up with a solution.

This bot docks under a wheeled platform, where other appliances can be mounted (Image credit: SwitchBot)

On its own, the SwitchBot K20+ Pro looks like a regular, albeit pint-sized, robot vacuum. However, dock it under the so-called ‘FusionPlatform’ and a whole world of possibilities opens up. SwitchBot has designed a range of attachments that fit onto this wheeled mounting platform, at which point the robovac essentially serves to drive these around.

So, you could pop a tray on top and use it to deliver things to others in your household, or you could mount a phone or tablet and turn it into a mobile tripod. It’s also compatible with a fan, air purifier and security camera. That’s about it for the current offerings, but SwitchBot seems keen that you experiment further, highlighting that it can be integrated with custom-made attachments, 3D-printed components, and third-party devices.

Read the full story: This robot vacuum can also bring you a sandwich

3. Tiny little robot legs

Robovacs are getting ever more capable, but they have always had one ultimate nemesis: stairs. Like The Doctor’s greatest foe, robot vacuums have remained cruelly bound to a single floor only. But Dreame is going to change that. Maybe.

The new Dreame X50 Ultra Complete has tiny little feet that it can use to hoist itself up over steps. To be clear, it’s steps rather than stairs – it can climb over obstacles up to 4.2cm in a single bound, or 6cm tall in two. Even though it won’t be climbing the Eiffel Tower any time soon, it’s still a big step up (pun intended) for anyone with a taller-than-usual threshold between rooms.

The Dreame X50 Ultra Complete has tiny legs to hoist it over steps (Image credit: Dreame)

Bots with feet feel like the logical conclusion in the growing trend for robovac brands trying to figure out more effective ways of dealing with uneven floors. Back in September, Roborock released a robovac with quadbike-like suspension, and Shark has one that’ll kind of twerk itself over thresholds – but Dreame’s approach looks especially promising.

Read the full story: Eat your heart out Daleks – Dreame’s newest robovac can climb stairs

4. Pop-up navigation pucks

Most leading robot vacuums have a raised central puck, which plays a key role in navigation, offering the bot a more complete view of its surroundings. That’s great, but the downside is that it also adds height, which means the robot might not be able to venture under low-lying furniture, where dust can quickly collect.

Roborock has found a way to solve this issue in its new Saros 10R (an armless sister model to the Saros Z70 I discussed above). This robovac has a navigation puck that pops up and down like a periscope. That means it can still use the brand’s tried-and-tested LDS system for mapping, without limiting where it can clean.

The Roborock’s Saros 10’s central puck pops up and down like a periscope (Image credit: Roborock)

The LDS puck has an extra ToF (time-of-flight) sensor that points upwards to detect vertical distance. When the robot senses it’s entering a reduced-height area, the puck will retract, automatically emerging again when the surroundings allow. It also features a wide-angle vision module designed to offer improved mapping, meaning the bot is less likely to lose its way when its puck is down.

With the puck down, the 10R is just under 8cm in height. That’s impressively shallow for a robot vacuum, and short enough that it’ll be able to boldly go into the dusty depths beneath most people’s sofas.

Read the full story: Roborock’s new robovacs are determined to get under your sofa – here’s how

5. Moonwalking carpet cleaners

Robot vacuums tend to have less suction power than manual vacs, which means they can struggle to pull dust from carpets – especially if they’re of the deep pile variety.

Narwal has come up with a couple of ways to tackle this issue and added them to its soon-to-be-released Narwal Flow robot vacuum. Upon encountering carpet, the Flow will start in the usual way: driving forward and vacuuming. Then, things get a little more jazzy, with the bot backing up, Billie Jean-style, along the same section of floor. As well as tackling the ingrained dirt and hair from the opposite direction, this motion should also help lift the carpet fibers and release anything trapped deeper down. I haven’t seen this approach anywhere else, and it seems to make particular sense for thick carpets.

It’s not the only carpet-focused feature to grace the Flow. Finding itself on carpet, a cover next to the brushroll will descend, creating a slight vacuum (in the non-appliance sense of the word) in the area, and enhancing suction.

Read the full story: Narwal’s new robovac will moonwalk your floors to get even the thickest carpets clean

6. Bots with super-vision

Robot vacuums are getting ever more intelligent when it comes to correctly identifying objects they encounter, and responding appropriately. This is important because it means if the bot encounters, say a sofa leg, it knows to vacuum as close up to it as possible, but if comes across your sleeping cat, it will give it a wide berth rather than trying its best to suck it up.

The Eureka J15 Max Ultra takes things one step further because it can see things that are invisible. Or at least transparent.

The Eureka J15 Max Ultra can see liquid spillages, even if they’re transparent (Image credit: Eureka)

Previous robot vacuums from this company used something called ‘IntelliView AI’ to intelligently tackle wet cleaning tasks. When met with spilled coffee, the bot would rotate, raise its roller brush to keep it dry, and prioritize mop cleaning to clear the liquid. The only problem came if you spilled a clear liquid because the ambient light could confuse the robot’s vision sensors.

However, the new IntelliView AI 2.0 is designed to recognize even transparent liquid spills. It creates two types of views – one using an infrared vision system and another an FHD vision sensor – simultaneously and in real-time. It uses these images to generate a high-definition image of the area, which isn’t as affected by lighting variations. The bot then uses AI to identify subtle differences in surface texture and reflections, thus highlighting any liquids, including clear ones. It then knows to respond appropriately and clear the spillage.

Read the full story: This new robot vacuum-and-mop is so eagle-eyed it can even spy clear liquid spillages

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