Hokum watch: Safer Internet Day

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

It’s Safer Internet Day! The day on which we’re meant “to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology”, according to the official website. Instead, it seems many companies are using it to peddle irresponsible nonsense. Here’s just a few of those we’ve found – let us know if you find any more on comments below, and we’ll update the blog.

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Prepare to be patronised: it’s Safer Internet Day

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Nowhere, in a world full of vacuous guff, are grown adults treated with such unbridled contempt as when it comes to “advice” for keeping your children safe online.

Exhibit A: the latest video from the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP), a staggeringly insulting four minutes of patronising, big-budget twaddle, that’s about as informative and entertaining as getting an enema from Charles Bronson. I challenge you to watch all three minutes and 59 seconds of it, without wishing to punch someone in the face, primarily yourself.

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Smartr Contacts for iPhone review

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

We have mixed feelings about the Outlook plugin Xobni here at PC Pro Towers. On the one hand, we love the way it scrapes through your inbox, extracting useful contact details and other data that was previously buried under a thousand messages.

On the other, we despise how it makes Outlook feel as if it’s running on a virtual machine hosted on a Commodore 64, forcing most of the team to reluctantly uninstall it.

However, I’ve taken rather a shine to the company’s new iPhone app, Smartr Contacts. I should explain that the last time I actually saved someone’s contact details into Outlook was circa 1997. I’m appalling at maintaining a contacts book, normally relying on finding the relevant details by searching through my enormously bloated inbox.

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3D printing: undeniably cool, but lacks a killer app

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

There’s a sense of 3D printing coming of age here at CES 2012. A section of the South Hall is devoted to 3D printing, and there are several working models on the show floor – all with a healthy, fascinated crowd gathered around them.

3D Systems Corporation is, for example, showing off its new Cube personal printer (shown in the video below). It’s mesmerising to watch as, layer by layer, a 3D object slowly emerges before your eyes: a chess piece, a bracelet or a plastic figurine. But for $1,299 (around £850), I’d want it to print something more useful than an over-sized Christmas Cracker toy.

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8K video: what the future looks like

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

A couple of days ago, I teased you with Sharp’s announcement of the world’s first 8K video screen. Today, I got the chance to see it with my own eyes on Sharp’s 85in (7ft!) LCD screen. I can summarise the following blog post in one word: wow.

A little recap: 8K video means 33 million pixels of high definition loveliness. They’re going to need to invent a new definition superlative, because high, super-high or ultra-high won’t do it justice. The screen has a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 – 16 times as many pixels as a Full HD screen.

The picture quality is gobsmacking. There’s no point in me even trying to take photos of the screen because my DSLR sensor hasn’t got the resolution to do it justice. You’ll have to take my word for it.

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Logitech Cube review: first-look

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

With Ultrabooks making laptops more slender than ever, it feels somewhat counterproductive to continue lugging a full-sized mouse around if you can’t get on with the touchpad. Logitech claims to have the answer with the incongruously named Cube.

As you’ll see from the photo, it’s not a cube – in fact, when I first saw it on the table at the CES Showstoppers event last night, I thought it was a discarded box of matches.

However, this diminutive little device is a portable mouse cum presentation clicker. The entire upper surface of the device is touch surface. You tap the top of the Cube for a left-click, near the middle for a right-click, and run your finger along the surface to scroll. To move the cursor, you drag the little box of tricks around like a mouse.

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Viva Las BIOS

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Dell doesn’t have a stand here at CES in Las Vegas, but it does have its name up in bright lights on the Strip – although not in a good way.

A Dell Precision WorkStation 300 Series is clearly used to power one of the giant signs just along from our hotel, but instead of displaying details of Celine Dion’s Vegas Warblefest or some such nonsense, it’s currently displaying nothing but the BIOS screen.

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Extreme Ultrabooking at CES

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

In a city where a woman stood on a street corner dressed as Catwoman didn’t even bat the eyelids of passers-by, it can be pretty hard to grab people’s attention. But Lenovo achieved that feat at CES today, by sending out someone to test drive its new Ultrabook – on the roof of a stretch Hummer.

You might think driving around with a man sat using a laptop on the roof of the car would attract the attention of the local constabulary, and you’d be right…

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HP Envy 14 Spectre review: first-look

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

HP isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to good looking laptops. It’s probably not even the fifth or sixth. But the HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook might just alter that perception.

We were given a hands-on demonstration of the Spectre at CES today, and it’s one of the most immediately impressive Windows laptops we’ve ever smeared fingerprints over. HP’s product group director had to keep a cloth close to hand, because this 13.3in laptop is pure glass on top, with a grippy rubberised base. With the HP logo glowing through the lid, it’s a visually striking and very smart looking laptop. The wrist rest is also a slab of glass, giving a smooth, cool-to-touch surface from which to type on. The touchpad, meanwhile, offers multitouch gesture support that’s as slick as anything we’ve seen outside of Apple’s laptops.

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Huawei Ascend P1 S: first-look review

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Huawei hasn’t made much of an impression in the European smartphone market, but the Ascend P1 S could change all that.

The Chinese telecoms giant is billing this Android 4 handset as the “world’s slimmest smartphone”, and at only 6.68mm thick at its thinnest point, it appears to live up to the billing. When placed next to an iPhone 4s, it makes Apple’s handset look almost porky. A slightly thicker (and presumably cheaper) model, the P1, measures at 7.69mm.

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