BytePac: the cardboard hard disk enclosure

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Say hello to the BytePac. It’s a hard disk caddy made entirely out of 100% recyclable material (yes, cardboard), but before you jump to any rash, mocking conclusions – as half the office did when it arrived – let me explain how it works. (more…)

New TweetDeck: more mainstream, less flexible

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

The TweetDeck desktop client has seen a major overhaul, with a move away from Adobe Air and a whole new approach to accounts and feeds. It’s all very snazzy, with a blue theme and some very welcome touches: I’ve long loved Tweetlist’s highlighted usernames and links, so they’re very welcome here, and tweet boxes that scale dynamically to the length of the tweet are long overdue. That’s the positives covered.

On to the not-so-positives. The tweet box now pops up and steals the focus until you close it. A small change, you might think, but I regularly half-write tweets while I keep reading those of others, then react as I go. Sometimes I leave a tweet for ten minutes to decide whether it should really be sent (it usually shouldn’t). This prevents that, and it’s totally unnecessary. You also can’t send a tweet using Enter, and if you think you can go to Settings and change that, you can’t – it’s been pared back to the idiot-proof basics.

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No iPhone 5, but what did you expect?

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Poor old Tim Cook didn’t get off to brightest start as Apple CEO. He let other people do much of the talking, and his big moment brought us what is little more than a hardware refresh of the hugely successful iPhone 4. But while I’ll freely admit to leaving work last night feeling like Cook personally owes me two hours of my life back, some of the gleeful venom being spat in Apple’s direction makes no sense.

So I’m going to play devil’s advocate and ask you this: if the iPhone 4S has let you down in some deeply personal way, what exactly were you expecting yesterday evening?

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Windows 8 on a laptop: first look

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

All the talk so far has centred around the wonderful new Metro UI, and how it could well be the nicest touch interface yet – but what of the vast majority of PCs and laptops that don’t have a touchscreen? Does Windows 8 relegate them to an afterthought, or can you carry on with mouse and keyboard as if touch never existed? To find out, I installed the developer preview on a 15in Core i5 laptop and plugged in a mouse.

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SD cards: the cheap way to boost laptop storage

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

An increasing number of laptops these days boast SSDs, but capacities are rising quite slowly. For some people, 128GB as your main drive might be enough, but if you want more, is it worth shelling out the huge fees charged by manufacturers to upgrade to a higher capacity SSD, or can you make do with alternative storage?

To find out, we ran our standard file transfer tests – first between a RAM disk and the SSD of a brand new laptop, then between a RAM disk and a variety of external storage devices. (more…)

The Apple Store: doing things… differently

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

Confession time: last night I bought a MacBook Air.

I know many PC owners react to new Mac products with an ire usually reserved for a looter on benefits, but I’ve been without a laptop for nearly a year now, and this Sandy Bridge generation of Air has finally won me over.

The merits and otherwise of buying Apple kit are not the point of this blog though. This blog is about the Apple Store — or, more specifically, how utterly terrifying it is. (more…)

Just how popular is Google+?

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

We keep getting told that Google+ is Facebook’s biggest threat, that it’s on the rise faster than a 1990s house price and the only way is up. We’re told it already has 10 million profiles – or is it 20 million?

But is Google+ really catching on? I mean really, as in outside this little tech industry bubble we love to confine ourselves to? (more…)

The new PC Pro Reviews and Labs pages

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

When the new issue of PC Pro hits the shelves this Thursday, readers will notice quite a bit has changed – not least the Reviews and Labs sections. They’re among the most popular parts of the magazine, so we’ve been sure to retain what makes them so readable and comprehensive. But we hope a few simple changes will improve them immeasurably.

Here’s an actual page from the new Reviews section:

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It takes more than a new processor to fix the Windows tablet

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Intel’s “Oak Trail” Atom processor refresh has finally arrived, claiming to reduce heat and power consumption enough to power the next wave of tablets. On those promises it appears to deliver, with the Motion CL900 lasting almost eight hours on one charge – despite the bloat of Windows 7.

But if tablet manufacturers think this is the turning point for the Windows tablet – which, judging by the press releases arriving in my inbox, they do – they’re missing the mark by a mile. Yes, Oak Trail lowers the TDP to 3W to better suit handheld devices. But in doing so it takes a step backwards. (more…)

The big tablet debate: 3G or Wi-Fi-only?

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Upon reading my review of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, our picky editor Barry Collins turned to me with a criticism. “The fact that there’s no 3G version,” he argued, “should surely count against it, shouldn’t it?”

Should it? We tend to review the Wi-Fi-only models of tablets, because that’s what we’re usually sent. We’ll mention the 3G options in the review, but it’s up to manufacturers to decide whether to offer them or not, and up to consumers to buy them.

It started a debate, one which began in the office and spilled over to the PC Pro podcast as well. Then I posed the question – to 3G or not to 3G? – on Twitter, and it generated an unexpected level of response. (more…)