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.

FREE AV WILL RIDDLE YOUR PCs WITH VIRUSES!

“You may think you’re safe surfing the web but there are any number of internet nasties that can creep up and harm your computer,” warns the video on Virgin Media’s Parental Controls site. “If you have no internet security installed, or just other basic free solutions, viruses and malware can take over.”

Really? Running something such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free will leave you with a virus-riddled heap of silicon, will it? Even with detection rates that are not much worse than the Trend Micro-supplied software offered by Virgin? That’s scaremongering of the highest order. As our forthcoming Labs on internet security software will prove…

BRITAIN’S “SAFEST BROADBAND CONNECTION”

You may recall the ever-fearsome Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently took exception to TalkTalk describing its service as the “UK’s safest broadband”, just because it provides network-level content filtering.

Luckily, TalkTalk found a way around that ban – by adding the word “connection” to the end of that phrase – as we can see from the company’s Facebook page, which is of course promoting Safer Internet Day.

We’ll remind you what the ASA said about TalkTalk’s adverts last month. “Customers could interpret ‘safest’ as referring to a number of features, such as virus protection or protection from hacking, and that HomeSafe only offered a basic range of security features”.

A “basic range of security features” or “the UK’s safest broadband connection”? Which sounds more plausible to you?

POLICE VIDEO NASTY

As we pointed out yesterday, why bother spending taxpayers’ money educating the public about internet safety, when you can knock out a nauseating fifties-style public information video that is so bereft of information and entertainment value, even ITV4 wouldn’t touch it?

Step forward the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £6.4m per year – with this enormous waste of time and money.

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.

The video has been launched to coincide with Safer Internet Day, historically an opportunity for overpaid and under-qualified “child safety experts” to get five minutes on the This Morning sofa, trotting out the same bland sound bites they’ve been issuing since Netscape Navigator was de rigeur: don’t let kids sneak off to their bedroom with a laptop, talk to your kids about their internet habits, set boundaries on net access – advice any parent with a working frontal lobe will have figured out for themselves.

Yet, when it comes to actually delivering practical advice, these “experts” fall pathetically short. Take the following advice on implementing parental controls on the CEOP website (CEOP’s emphasis in bold, not mine):

Use parental controls on devices that link to the internet, such as the TV, laptops, computers, games consoles and mobile phones. Parental controls are not just about locking and blocking, they are a tool to help you set appropriate boundaries as your child grows and develops. They are not the answer to your child’s online safety, but they are a good start and they are not as difficult to install as you might think. Service providers are working hard to make them simple, effective and user friendly. Find your service provider and learn how to set your controls.

In other words – work it out for yourself.

Instead of paying a media agency £50,000 to knock out that appalling piece of faux-fifties codswallop, how about paying someone a tenth of that to write a set of concise instructions for Windows 7 parental controls, for example? You never know, it might actually protect some children.

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.

Smartr Contacts uses all the data it’s scraped from previous Xobni installations in Outlook and Gmail, plus contacts harvested from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and presents all that data in one gigantic searchable contacts book.

Across all of my accounts it’s managed to find almost 1,600 contacts, 90% of which I’ll probably never voluntarily contact again, yet comprehensive enough to ensure it has captured the email and telephone details of most of the people I’ve had previous contact with.

Wisely, it doesn’t flood all of this data into the default iPhone contacts app, keeping it in its own separate app container. Nevertheless, you can still call, text or email contacts directly, simply by pressing on the relevant number/address in the app.

Contacts can be searched by name, company or title. Better still, each contact has a list of related contacts, so if you can’t get hold of someone at a particular company, chances are you’ll find one of their colleagues in your address book.

It’s not perfect: Smartr Contacts often lists two or three phone numbers/email addresses for the same person, and is clearly unable to tell when someone has moved jobs or changed their mobile number. There doesn’t appear to be any way to even delete outdated entries manually.   The social networking profiles on the home screen are also erratic, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.

Nevertheless, for a disorganised lummox like me, this app does a decent job.

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.

3D Systems is working incredibly hard to spark innovation. It’s launching tablet apps that allow you to draw your own 3D models, and the option to create 3D models out of objects captured using the Kinect camera. It’s also launched the Cubify.com website to allow people to upload and share their 3D models, and a set of APIs to allow developers to create apps for its printers. The site was only launched last week, but so far I can’t see myself shelling out $15 to print a 5in model of a bull or $5 for a shirt button. The app store is currently bare.

One 3D printing service that’s already in Apple’s App Store is French firm Sculpteo. Its iPhone/iPad app allows you to create a selection of bizarre bespoke objects, which the company then prints out and despatches to your door.

You can, for example, take a photo of yourself or a friend on the iPhone’s camera and have their profile turned into a ceramic vase. (A copy of the new issue of PC Pro for the first person to identify the member of PC Pro staff whose profile is supposedly reflected in the vase below.)

You can also design your own cup, etch social networking data into the side of a mug or create a customised iPhone case. It’s all very clever, but little more than a novelty and frighteningly expensive – the vase costs in excess of £300, for example.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of 3D printing – many of which were discussed in our recent feature – but right now it feels like this amazing technology desperately needs a killer app to help it take off.

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.

The demo video shows a close up of a man’s face that delivers the kind of detail a dermatologist would kill his mother for

The demo video shows a close up of a man’s face that delivers the kind of detail a dermatologist would kill his mother for. Every pore, every bristle in the man’s beard, every eyelash is captured. I stood staring at the man’s face for so long it was getting a little homoerotic…

Another of the demo clips shows a frankly insane Japanese game, where hundreds of men chase a tree trunk down a ludicrously steep hill. As the tree trunk gathers speed, it starts sending dust billowing into the air, and it feels like you can see every last lunatic-choking particle when the camera zooms in.

I could have sat watching all day, but Sharp has a couple of employees on hand to keep the crowd moving and mop up the saliva. If this is what the future of television looks like, I may never leave the house again.

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.

It’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker

I’ll stress that I only had chance to spend a couple of minutes with the Cube at the Logitech stand, and this should by no means be considered a definitive judgement, but… I really don’t like it.

The Cube is obviously very light, and that makes it hard to move the cursor with any precision. I’m not the biggest fan of trackpads, mainly due to their lack of accuracy, but I can’t see the Cube being any better in that regard. Having to retrain your muscle memory for left- and right-click could also prove an obstacle. And it’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker.

I do like the way that the Cube becomes a presentation clicker when you pick it up: you “click” the Cube to advance to the next slide, and flip it over and click the other side if you want to go back. It’s also unobtrusive: a little USB receiver sits almost flush in one of the laptop’s ports and the battery is rechargable via USB.

Whether that’s enough to justify the $70 (around £45) price tag is, at this stage, highly questionable. But I’ll reserve full judgement until we can literally get our hands on one in the PC Pro Labs.

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.

Our colleagues at Micro Mart used to urge readers to send in photos of BIOS screens and Blue Screens of Death in public places. I think we may have just found the biggest… unless you know better.

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…

Except the policeman tailing the Hummer wasn’t pulling the driver over for recklessly endangering his passenger, he was providing a police escort. Only in Vegas.

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.

The attention to detail on the Spectre is exceptional. It’s fitted with a proximity sensor, which illuminates the backlit keyboard when you’re ready to type, and dims the keys when you’re sitting back and watching a movie, eliminating any distractions. Each of those backlit keys has its own LED, allowing HP to light up individual keys to suit the situation: illuminating the volume controls when the laptop’s playing music, for example.

Further care has been taken with the ports running down the left hand side. To keep the Ethernet jack the same size as the other ports, it’s fitted with a little drawer that widens the port when you plug in the cable. Alongside the Ethernet jack there’s a Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and two USB 3 ports – although HP has omitted the suddenly fashionable Thunderbolt port “for cost reasons”, which seems a little parsimonious on a premium laptop such as this. An enormous headphone socket and SD card reader rounds off the left-hand side of the laptop.

The right-hand ports are devoted to music controls, which allow you to listen to your music collection with the lid down. Here you’ll find a volume wheel, a mute button and another that launches the Beats audio control panel. The speakers are located on the base of the laptop, and emit a decent wallop of volume by rebounding the sound off the surface they’re placed on.

HP hasn’t taken its eye off the ball when it comes to the accessories, either. The charger is compact enough to fit in Ronnie Corbett’s top pocket, and includes a USB socket for charging MP3 players, smartphones etc, which is a thoughtful touch. The laptop arrives in a stylish black cardboard box that looks like it should be housing a cut-glass decanter, and there’s also a stylish fabric sleeve for the laptop inside the box. It’s the kind of package they wouldn’t be ashamed to hand out to celebs at an awards ceremony.

The Screen

Stunning packaging and all the other trimmings would be fore nothing if the core computer wasn’t up to scratch, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. For a start, the screen is stunning. HP claims it’s a 14in display trapped in a 13.3in laptop chassis, which we’re still struggling to wrap our Vegas air-conditioned brains around, but whatever the mathematical gymnastics, it’s a beauty. A resolution of 1,600 x 900 delivers a delectably crisp image, and the viewing angles are astonishing: at one point we were sitting at almost a right angle to the screen, and we could still comfortably see the demo video.

Inside, the Spectre can be specced with either a Core i5 or Core i7 processor (Sandy Bridge, not the much-touted Ivy Bridge revision, which has yet to make an appearance here at CES). It can be fitted with up to 256GB of solid-state storage and ether 4GB or 6GB of RAM.

Bundled software hasn’t been neglected, either. There are full versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements and a two-year licence for Norton Internet Security.

So how much will this tempting package cost? A minimum of €1,299, which pushes it towards the premium end of the Ultrabook spectrum and on a level with the 13in MacBook Air. We’ll wait until we get one into the Labs before delivering a definitive verdict, but we can’t wait to get our hands on one again.

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.

Huawei claims it has customised components, used a unique moulding and injection technology and selected the very thinnest slither of Corning’s scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass – measuring just 0.55mm thick – to get the P1 S so slim. It appears to have been worth the effort. In the hand, the phone feels remarkably slender, but no so fragile that you live in constant fear of dropping it. The textured plastic casing lacks the outright luxury of the iPhone’s metallic finish – it’s very similar in feel to the Samsung Galaxy S II – but it still has the feel of a high-end handset.

The 4.3in Super AMOLED 960 x 540 screen is stunning. It’s bursting with colour and delivers exceptionally sharp, high contrast images.

Huawei claims the slender design hasn’t come at the expense of performance. It boasts that the Ascend P1 S is faster than the Galaxy II and the Motorola Razr in the Quadrant benchmark. There was certainly no hint of stutter in our very brief hands-on with the handset.

Battery life hasn’t been compromised either, claims the Chinese manufacturer, with “more than 20 key technologies and algorithms” used to deliver “industry leading” longevity.

We’ll have to wait until one lands in the PC Pro Labs to tell if that’s true or not, but it now looks like the Samsung Galaxy SII now some very serious competition on its hands in the Android market. Alas, we’ll have to wait until April for it to arrive in Europe.