Why are laptop screens so far behind mobiles?

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

Pop quiz, hotshot. Of all the visitors to this website in the month of writing, what percentage arrived using 1,920 x 1,080, Full HD screens? Make yourself a cuppa and have a think, we’ll come back to the answer later.

In the meantime, you’ll no doubt have noticed we reviewed the new iPad last month. As is customary, it attracted all sorts of negative reports at launch, from teardowns showing it’s the most tightly sealed, least recyclable iPad yet, right up to Daily Mail hysteria about it burning people’s hands. But there’s one feature no-one in their right mind was criticising: the screen.

Love or hate Apple’s methods, few can deny that its products drive technological progress. When Apple first introduced the Retina display on the iPhone 4, minds were set racing as to where this would eventually take us: if high-pixel-density displays were viable on a mobile phone, with Apple’s huge economies of scale, how long before they’d spread upwards? (more…)

First details of Intel’s 7 Series chipset

Friday, April 6th, 2012

With Ivy Bridge processors finally due to launch later this month, Intel this week teased us with details of the new 7 Series chipset – codenamed Panther Point – that will drive compatible motherboards.

The real meat of the update will be in the processors themselves, but there are a few welcome features we’re allowed to talk about now.

There will be eight Intel 7 Series chipset offerings in the first batch, and the first motherboards will be available from 8 April. The HM75 and HM76 (consumer), and HM77 and UM77 (consumer/SMB) chipsets will cover laptops, with the H77 (mainstream), Z75 and Z77 (performance), and B75 (SMB) on the desktop.

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TweetDeck 1.3 review: better, but not quite there yet

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

In December, the newly Twitter-owned TweetDeck client was thrust upon us, charmlessly sweeping away the old suite’s power and flexibility. It was such a backwards step that more than three months later, I’m still using the unsupported existing client.

This week, TweetDeck was updated to version 1.3, with the developers saying they’ve listened to feedback and made some much-needed improvements. While that may be true, when you start again from near zero as they have, it’s difficult to get back to where things were in a few months.

List management

You can now create lists from within the app, and every user now has an “Add or remove from lists” option on their profile. The lists themselves work fine, but the creation process is unnecessarily arduous. You have two options. If you spot a tweet from a user, you can use the “Add” option on their profile. But if you want to manually make a list in the first place, here’s the creation screen:

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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…)