Will Intel scratchcards unlock a new business model?

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Yesterday I returned from the Intel Developer Forum to be greeted by some interesting news that definitely wasn’t mentioned at IDF. In case you missed it, the CPU Goliath has started selling upgrades to its low-end Pentium CPUs in the form of scratch-cards – in the US, at least.

It’s a simple idea. The processor ships at a low price with some of its capabilities disabled, and these cards – which sell for $50 – reveal a code to download a software tool that unlocks those extra capabilities.

Not everyone approves. Some commenters (on more hysterical forums than ours) see this as an outrageous way to treat customers. “They’re selling deliberately crippled parts!” they cry. “They want to charge you twice for the same thing!” And, to an extent, they have a point. (more…)

Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 review: first look

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Adobe has refreshed its consumer-friendly version of Photoshop with a smattering of new features – at least one of which it’s borrowed from its vastly more expensive big brother, Photoshop CS5. We’ll have  a full review of Photoshop Elements 9 in the next couple of days. (UPDATE: Click here to read our full review of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9)

In the meantime, here are our first impressions of three of the key new features in this year’s suite.

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TomTom 940 and the tortuous road to recovery

Monday, September 20th, 2010

If you read my Epilog column in the new shiny edition of PC Pro, you will know that my respect for TomTom and its software upgrade process really couldn’t be much worse.

In short, the company released a major update for the TomTom 940 almost two months ago which simply didn’t work. It wouldn’t connect to the online TomTom Live services, which is the very reason for having this device. The Live services gives you features such as live traffic rerouting, Google access and so forth.

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Android App of the Week: QuickDesk

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Multitasking’s great, but it has its downfalls. Say you’re in the middle of a crucial level of Angry Birds when you notice that your battery’s draining fast. You don’t want to leave the game, but you need to turn off power-hungry services such as your phone’s 3G and GPS modules to ensure that you’ve got enough juice to last until home.

That’s a Catch-22 situation unless you download QuickDesk, our new Android App of the Week.

QuickDesk works in a similar fashion to the iPhone 4’s dock: hold down your search button (or, if your prefer, double click the home button) and a dock slides up from the foot of the screen. In typical Android fashion, though, it’s far more versatile than the iPhone’s restrictive attempt at multitasking. (more…)

Microsoft Arc Touch mouse review: first look

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

This is Microsoft’s new Arc Touch and, to experience the latest in cursor control technology, you’ll have to stump up £70.

Yes, seventy English pounds.

Thankfully, Microsoft’s at least attempted to justify this high price by cramming it with some pretty impressive technology. For starters, it’s possible to snap the Arc’s curved back into a totally flat position, which turns it off and makes it easy to slip into pockets and bags. It’s also absolutely tiny: 14mm thick at the business end, and just 7mm from top to bottom at the rear. (more…)

If you’re drowning in email, try Gmail Priority Inbox

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

New research says that modern office workers are suffering from information overload and email is the counter-productive cause. Yet not only is getting to grips with email not rocket science as far as the average small business is concerned, it doesn’t have to cost you anything either.

In research which covered more than 1,000 workers from a number of UK-based businesses, OnePoll (on behalf of salesforce.com) concluded that “unnecessary emails are the bane of the modern office, with seven out of ten workers complaining about being sent irrelevant emails or being copied on emails of no interest”.

To be specific (with my specifically sarky remarks in parenthesis) the research suggested that the average office worker receives 43 emails per day (yay, I’m above average in the amount of email I get: 500 per day here) and some 11% get between 51 and 150 emails per day (hah! still above average). That 38% complained about suffering from information overload is the statistic which blew me away. Not because I think it’s one of the big problems facing the average small business today, but exactly the opposite.

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The dangers of moving home on Twitter

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

If you follow PC Pro on Twitter, you may have noticed this morning that our regular @pc_pro handle has changed to the underscore-free @pcpro.

As The Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) astutely noted, this makes PC Pro 0.8% more efficient on Twitter, which is the biggest efficiency saving we’ve made in years, but not the real reason we decided to make the move.

When we first joined Twitter in 2008, some charlatan had already laid claim to the @pcpro address and was using it to divert people to a rather shady, ad-filled website (no it wasn’t www.pcpro.co.uk, before someone makes the joke on comments). He made one tweet in two years, yet somehow accumulated hundreds of followers – doubtless people who came looking for PC Pro and blithely followed the wrong account.

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Time for an iPod spring-clean button, Apple

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

The last of our latest iPod reviews is up, and very nice the 4th generation touch looks, but like all iPods, it’s still missing a button that would make so much sense. Just why can’t Apple put a simple “delete song” button on its MP3 players?

When I’ve mentioned this to friends of a fruitier computing ilk than myself, they suggest quite correctly that you can delete songs via iTunes when it’s connected to a computer. But that’s not the point of a portable music device.

Organising a large music collection – sifting through files, tweaking ID3 tags and searching for files that you want to delete – while sitting in front of a computer feels like work. The joy of MP3 players is the freedom of music anywhere, listening to a large collection wherever the mood and Shuffle takes you.

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Another Intel security lapse at IDF 2010

Monday, September 13th, 2010

The 2010 Intel Developer Forum opens today in San Francisco, and yesteday my colleagues and I went through the registration process. That’s a simple matter of filling in a web form on one of the provided laptops, and at first glance it looks the same as it did last year — when (as I blogged at the time) it ended up revealing visitors’ personal information to all and sundry.

As I entered my details this year I was pleased to notice that that particular data leak has been plugged. The information fields no longer support autocomplete, making it impossible to browse previously-entered information. A step up, surely, in security.

Sadly, the process remains fantastically insecure for other reasons. The computers themselves are regular Windows 7 laptops with full internet access – and they’re positioned facing away from the registration staff. So while it may no longer be possible to get information out of them directly, it’s a breeze to to download and install any software you wish (such as a keylogger or database scraper) without anyone being any the wiser. Indeed, since the registration machines are in a public lobby, you can just walk in off the street and start tampering with them.

Is this a serious problem? Admittedly, there’s probably a limit to how much havoc you can wreak on an IDF registration laptop. But if someone were to install an aggressive worm on one of these machines, it could easily spread to more sensitive systems, especially if the hardware ends up going back to Intel HQ. Good security practice means anticipating and eliminating risks like that.

Fundamentally, the lesson is the same as last time: when you build on an existing platform, your system inherits all the complexities and vulnerabilities of that platform. And, once again, this demonstration of that fact comes, poetically enough, from one of the pre-eminent producers of platform technology.

iPhone App of the Week: Bloomberg

Monday, September 13th, 2010

iPhone-wielding investors have always had the default Stocks app to keep them up-to-date with the latest market movements, but it’s lighter on hard data than The Bible. Bloomberg, on the other hand, furnishes market watchers with as much information as they could reasonably expect from a mobile app.

A search facility allows you to find companies and their stock ticker with impressive ease, allowing you to swiftly build a portfolio of ‘My Stocks’ to track. Aside from the latest share price, Bloomberg presents a plethora of information for each of your followed stocks. Highs and lows from both the last trading session and the past year are offered, as well as trading volumes, price earnings ratios and market capitalisation data.

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