Windows 11 is getting a new look according to a leak – but it might be exclusive to AI-powered PCs

It looks like Windows 11 could get a new official default wallpaper, according to leaked images that have emerged just before Microsoft Build 2024, the company’s annual conference for developers – where it’s expected that we’ll see some big debuts showing off the fruits of collaboration between Microsoft, Qualcomm, and other partners. 

Microsoft has been pretty tight-lipped about what it plans to show off, and hasn’t even officially announced the new wallpaper, although it’s already available for download in high resolution. 

This was uncovered by German tech blog WinFuture, whose sources leaked information about Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge Pro laptops with ARM chips. The leak included multiple photographs of the laptop from a variety of angles, as well as the new wallpaper, which joins the series of Windows 11 signature Bloom wallpapers (Neowin has a collection of others you can view and download). Neowin speculates that the new AI-focused PCs will ship with the new background. 

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Accompanying the leak, X user @cadenzza_ shared a high-resolution version of the brand new Bloom wallpaper variation (apparently shared in a private Windows Insider Telegram group originally) that you can download by saving the image below or from @cadenzza_’s post, and set on your device.

The full image of the new Windows 11 colorful Bloom background wallpaper

(Image credit: Microsoft/X(Twitter) user @cadenzza_)

Microsoft's lips are sealed and it's got our attention

It’s interesting how closely Microsoft’s been guarding what it’s about to share, with this static wallpaper being one of the things that we can confirm at all. Neowin has proposed that Microsoft might be crafting new desktop background effects for Windows 11, perhaps making use of the next-generation devices’ AI capabilities, and creating effects simulating depth, and possibly making the background reactive to how you move your cursor. 

We’ll have to see if this is the case at some point in the next few days as Microsoft Build goes on. We expect the announcement of consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, and whatever AI innovations Microsoft wants to bring to our attention. Another new hardware introduction we expect is a Copilot keyboard button, which has been discussed for a while now. Other Copilot-related news could have to do with OpenAI’s recent debut of GPT-4o, and possibly a souped-up Windows Copilot AI assistant.

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Exclusive: We’re all far more dependent on Teams and Zoom than we want to believe

The widespread dependence on collaboration and video conferencing services brought about by the pandemic has introduced significant business risk, new research suggests.

According to data collected by software firm StarLeaf, provided exclusively to TechRadar Pro, almost all (97%) businesses say that tools such as Zoom, Webex and Teams are now essential to their operations.

More than half (57%) of the 2,000 UK-based respondents claim their company would not be able to operate for more than an hour without access to their communications tools, while 27% admitted they would struggle to function for even 30 minutes.

What back-up plan?

With a large proportion of workers still confined to their home offices by the pandemic, it is obviously uncontroversial to predict a continued dependence on cloud-based collaboration software. However, what comes as a surprise is the lack of contingency planning among organizations, most of which are now utterly reliant on these kinds of services for business continuity.

Despite this “extreme dependency”, only 32% of companies have established a back-up plan that insures against service outages, which have been relatively common in recent weeks. Among this group, a quarter said their contingency plan would involve turning to consumer apps like WhatsApp, which are ill-suited to professional use cases.

StarLeaf says the consequences of downtime would be particularly acute in sectors such as customer service and sales, with staff unable to carry out their jobs without access to communications tools. 

Respondents registered serious concerns about the consequences of a pause in service caused by an outage. Half of those surveyed suspect an incident of this kind would have a severe impact on the reputation of their company, with knock-on effects on the bottom line.

“The way of doing business now takes place predominantly using communications platforms. And while this has many benefits, such as the ability to work from anywhere and hire staff from across the world, this is also leaving companies vulnerable to major disruption. The sheer pace of digital transformation over the last two years is the reason for this liability oversight,” said Mark Richer, StarLeaf CEO.

“As we look ahead to 2022, businesses need to ensure they have a failover system so they can continue to operate, no matter what happens to their comms platform.”

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Exclusive: Has Google won the cloud storage wars?

As we all take a much-needed break over the Christmas period, we can start to reflect on what a year this has been – and how we can hope next year is better. One company that hasn't had a bad 2021 is Google and, specifically, Drive. 

An exclusive TechRadar Pro poll carried out by OnePulse shows that Google Drive is by far and away the most popular cloud storage provider going, used by around 44.1% of respondents. 

While this might not come as a surprise, there is a lot of competition in the cloud storage market at the moment. Apple, for example, has been expanding the scope of iCloud this year, introducing a bunch of privacy-focused features. Dropbox and OneDrive, too, are long-time competitors biting at Drive's heels. 

One provider to rule them all 

But the extent of the domination is impressive and worth pondering for a while, driven at least initially by Google's willingness to give away generous services for free, alongside the overall ecosystem lock-in for its services and Android.

According to OnePulse, around 44% of respondents use Google Drive's free or paid services, followed by iCloud (31.2% across free and paid), OneDrive (11.2% across free and paid), Dropbox (6.8% across free and paid), and then everyone else makes up the remaining 6.8%. 

So not that surprising overall but you can clearly see the influence of Apple's iPhone and Mac customer base electing to use the tightly integrated iCloud services. 

Digging deeper, the poll found most people (48.7%) have been using their service for between one and five years, with the rest either under a year (16.3%) or over five years (35%). 

In terms of storage, around 55.4% use between 1GB and 100GB, 30.8% have no idea how much storage is left, and 13.8% use between 101GB and 1TB or more. 

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Exclusive: Most people use Gmail but don’t know how full their inbox is

As the year begins to end and people focus on taking a well-earned break over the Christmas holidays, it's a good time to take stock of life, work, and love. We're only focused on the second of those three today and specifically email usage. 

TechRadar Pro has commissioned an exclusive poll of 500 respondents from OnePulse showing which email services people use and some details about how. 

Surprise, surprise Gmail comes out on top. 

Close up of a person touching an email icon.

(Image credit: Geralt / Pixabay)

A lot of people absolutely hate email, and with good reason. Clients, especially default clients like Apple Mail, are often slow and geared towards casual users, not power users at work. 

On top of that, Slack and Teams, plus a bunch of others, have sprouted up to fulfil work-specific chat needs – even Meta has got in on the action with Workplace

To email or not to email 

So, let's break down the results. 

According to our survey, the dominant email service is Gmail – and it's not even close. A full 59% of respondents use Google's email offerings, followed by Outlook (19.7%), Yahoo (13%), iCloud (2.9%), and others (5%). 

But what about power users? Well, they're in the minority too. Most people (75.6%) have between one and 10,000 emails in their inbox, followed by 16.75% who have between 10,001 and 100,000, and then a rarified 7.59% have over 100,001 or more. 

The story is similar for email storage: just over half (50.2%) either don't know or don't care how full their inbox is. The rest have up to 5GB filled (32.8%) or over 5GB (17%). 

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Here’s the biggest free cloud storage right now, 200GB exclusive to TechRadar readers

Cloud storage company Degoo may not be a household name, but it has managed to carve out a niche in the competitive cloud storage market, with its offerings attracting more than 15 million users over the past eight years.

The Swedish company has teamed up with TechRadar to deliver an even better package than usual – get 200GB free cloud storage for a year with no strings attached.

After 12 months, this will revert back to the regular 100GB package, which is still plenty for most.

One of the cheapest cloud storage offers

You can also get a staggering 10TB for two years at just $ 99.99, exclusive to TechRadar. That’s 58% off the standard price of $ 9.99 per month – blowing the cloud storage competition out of the water.

Unlike some rival services, there are no file size limits and you don’t need another Degoo account to receive files. 

Uploaded files are encrypted in chunks (zero knowledge encryption) and spread out to data centres on four continents to eliminate the risk of account compromise.

Carl Hasselkog, CEO of Degoo, told TechRadar its infrastructure is five times more efficient than Dropbox per stored byte.

It's worth noting the free version has basic storage replication and no zero knowledge encryption, plus a 90-day account inactivity limit. It also carries adverts in the feed on Android.

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