Running PC Pro on tablets: how we got on

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

Today, we tried to run PC Pro entirely on tablet hardware for the whole working day.

Tablets are often derided as mere toys, useful for little more than tweeting insults about Simon Cowell shows from the comfort of your sofa. We aimed to find out if that was true, by forcing the entire PC Pro editorial team to switch off their PCs and work purely on iOS or Android tablets for the day. We were using a variety of hardware, including the iPad 2, Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. We also issued the team with a variety of wireless keyboards and docking stations, to save them from bashing out copy on the built-in keyboards.

We attempted to do everything from reading and replying to email, to updating the website, to writing news and reviews, using nothing more than the tablets, their web browsers and a variety of business apps.

Find out how we get on with the blog updates below:

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Set-top censorship Virgin on the offensive

Monday, December 19th, 2011

When you have channels such as Television X and Playboy TV loitering in the nether regions of your electronic programme guide (EPG), it’s perfectly admirable to asterisk out some of the more risqué titles on offer, lest innocent teenagers accidentally wander into the listings.

But using a crude find-and-replace across your entire EPG can have unintended consequences. As Virgin Media has discovered, much to the amusement of the Twitterati…

God alone knows what Virgin’s EPG will make of Willy Thorne’s Guide to Scunthorpe’s Snooker Balls, which is coming to Eurosport in the spring.

Grabs from @MarcSettle and @TheMediaTweets

Will Windows 8 be a free upgrade?

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Nothing betrays desperation more than a company inflating statistics for its own end. Over the past couple of months, Microsoft has been inflating a stat about Windows 8 to the size of a hot air balloon.

Despite being probably a year away from launch, Microsoft claims that Windows 8 “represents the single biggest platform opportunity available to developers”. With tens of millions of iOS and Android devices already on the market, how on Earth does Microsoft justify the claim that Windows 8 is the biggest of them all? Because “half a billion PCs could be upgraded to Windows 8 on the day it ships.”

Replace the word “could” with “won’t” and you’ll be much closer to the truth.

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How bad is superfast broadband uptake?

Friday, November 11th, 2011

We’ve been waiting for years for true “superfast” fibre-optic broadband, but now it’s here it seems few people actually want it. At least, that’s the impression given by Ofcom chief Ed Richards’ comments earlier this week, when he said superfast (24Mbits/sec+) broadband uptake was “still low” and largely confined to families with teenage children.

How low is “low”? We asked BT for its latest fibre figures. More than six million premises now have access to BT’s fibre lines, but only 300,000 customers have actually signed up for the service. That’s a less than impressive sounding conversion rate of 5%.

It’s even less impressive when you consider that BT Infinity fibre costs no more than the company’s most expensive ADSL package, and that the company admits to “really going for it” in terms of marketing fibre to customers. People are being offered an effectively free speed upgrade and many seemingly don’t want it.

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How many photos/documents do you print?

Friday, November 4th, 2011

We need your help for a forthcoming PC Pro Labs report.

To help us calculate the true running costs of the 16 inkjet printers we’ll have on test in issue 208, we need you to tell us how often you print photos and documents. Please note: we’re asking specifically for your printer output on home inkjet printers, not lasers nor office machines.

The survey will genuinely take ten seconds to answer, using the embedded form below. Your help is much appreciated.

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How iMessage works

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

One of the best new features in iOS 5 is iMessage. This nifty little service subverts the traditional SMS text messaging system, allowing you to send free* text/picture messages to other iOS 5 users via the data channel (*free, presuming you don’t exceed your data cap, that is).

iMessage is very subtly implemented into the existing Messages app. You won’t even notice it until you attempt to send a text message to a contact with an iPhone, and the message suddenly goes blue. Apple automatically detects when the recipient is using iOS 5 and diverts the message via the data channel rather than your network’s SMS channel.

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A brilliant solution to Britain’s 3G woes

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

When Ofcom (or Oftel as it was known back in 2000) auctioned off the 3G spectrum for a sum that could probably buy you Belgium – Norway, at a stretch – those expensively acquired licences came with strings attached.

One of those strings was that each of the winning bidders had to cover 80% of the country – by population, not land mass – by the end of 2007. Four out of the five networks met that target, with O2 earning itself a fine for finishing the job late.

So, given that each of the five networks has at least 80% of the country covered by themselves, the figures released by Ofcom yesterday showing that only 73.1% of premises in the UK has 3G coverage from all five networks seems, at first, to be contradictory. Until you realise, of course, that those five lots of 80% coverage don’t overlap precisely, creating many “3G areas” where only one or two networks provide a signal.

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Google must get a grip on the Android orphans

Friday, October 28th, 2011

We may have griped about the problems we had upgrading our iPhones to iOS 5, but at least those old handsets are being upgraded to Apple’s latest OS. A new piece of research published in the US suggests the majority of Android handset owners are being left behind by the ever-evolving Google operating system.

The research, by Michael DeGusta from TheUnderstatement.com, tracked every Android handset released in the US before July 2010, and then recorded how many of them had been updated to the latest version of the OS. The results were startling.

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Upgrading to iOS 5: what worked and what didn’t

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Here at PC Pro, we try and do things so that you don’t have to. That’s why we’ve spent a good part of the weekend installing iOS on as many different Apple devices as we could lay our hands on. Although judging by the comments on our Twitter feed and earlier story about iOS 5 problems, many of you haven’t hung around to find out how we got on…

Our experience should help guide people who have yet to click the magic button in iTunes. And even if you’ve already downloaded iOS 5 onto your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, some of the problems and workarounds we’ve discovered will still be of interest.

Here’s what we’ve found:

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500px – the site to finally topple Flickr

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Yahoo hasn’t got much right over the past decade, but one of the best decisions it made was to buy the photo-sharing site Flickr. Alas, like many of the other once-excellent services in its portfolio, Yahoo has allowed Flickr to stagnate to the point where the only reason to keep using the site is the size and talent of its user community.

The Flickr homepage looks like its designers went on strike in 2003, its uploading facilities are basic and it simply doesn’t display your photos in their best light.

For months I’ve been looking for an alternative to Flickr, and at last I think I’ve found it: 500px.

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