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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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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