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.

Pull off the outer sleeve and open the box, and inside there’s room for a 3.5in hard disk (or 2.5in with the included card “adapter”) to sit snugly. At the connection end the box has a flap through which you plug the combined power-and-SATA connector, the other end of which goes to both the mains and to either an eSATA or USB port on your PC. That’s all you need to get the drive running, then simply fold back a ventilation flap on the rear of the box, which doubles up as a stand to prop the drive up off the desk.

This video shows it off neatly. For a cardboard box, it’s actually rather elegant.

The question you might be asking is: why? The BytePac is billed as an alternative to external hard disks, but it’s not as robust as proper external drives, nor is it particularly thin and light. Few people will buy a disk specifically to use in a BytePac when far sleeker solutions are so common.

However, it’s best viewed as an attractive and simple archiving system. Once you’ve bought your first kit with its power box and set of cables (three empty boxes, one cable set, £34), you can simply buy more empty boxes (around £4 each) as and when you need them. Put an old disk in each, sensibly label the side of the box and stack them on a shelf as you would a collection of books. When you need some old data, just pull out the relevant BytePac and plug the cable in – the disk itself need never see the light of day.

You may already have your own archiving setup, and you may be wary of entrusting your valuable data to a cardboard box. But the BytePac is a cheap way to archive a large number of disks, it’s environmentally friendly, and it won’t look like it’s worth nicking if the burglars come round.

I’ve got one here that I’ll be playing with this week, and several people in the office have already made their minds up one way or the other, but I’m interested to hear what you think. Is the BytePac a neat archiving innovation or a piece of cheap tat?

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.

Tweets are now labelled with the number of days ago they were sent, rather than the actual time. That might not sound much, but I can think of many occasions when seeing a tweet was sent at 12pm or 12am made a big difference to the way I interpreted it. Every tweet now gives pride of place to the username of the sender, rather than the tweet itself. And unsurprisingly, the range of URL shorteners and photo services is cut right down, with Twitter’s own now the default.

It’s that oversimplification that constantly jars. When I first installed it and synced it up with my TweetDeck account, I was presented with a Home column of tweets, a Me column of mentions, and a Messages column for those all-important DMs.

But something wasn’t right. There were DMs I hadn’t sent or received. There were people in my Home feed I didn’t follow.

Now, I don’t just tweet from one account; I have three. I’m sure many people do the same, be it personal and work accounts, websites they run, or just a desire for different accounts for different needs.

New TweetDeck had taken it upon itself to make assumptions about my three accounts. The Home feed was taken solely from the team’s @pcpro account, which it had randomly assigned as my default despite there being seemingly no option to set an account as default. I’ve tried deleting all three accounts and adding them in a different order, but it always becomes the default. This also means every time I type a tweet, it assumes I’m sending it from that account, which I rarely do; if you see @pcpro tweet about its hangover on Saturday morning, blame TweetDeck, not me.

The Me feed and Messages column, on the other hand, automatically roll all three accounts into one, with no proper indication of which tweet came from which account. I don’t want to read my editor’s correspondence with our lovely readers mixed in with my own private messages; it’s confusing, a little bit scary and raises the potential for embarrassing blunders. I have three separate accounts for a reason; the decision to bundle them together should be mine, not TweetDeck’s.

Most of this can be fixed by simply deleting all of the default columns and creating new Timelines and Messages columns for each individual account, but to a long-term user like me it seems a perverse way of doing things. Don’t get me started on the way every link and photo now sends you to the browser, or clicking a tweet opens it over that column in the style of the Twitter web interface.

It’s not terrible, and I’m sure I’ll get used to some of its quirks. But for me the new client takes away much of what made TweetDeck so useful – namely the flexibility and control – and replaces it with much of what makes the Twitter web client so annoying. I don’t like the Twitter web interface, that’s why I use TweetDeck. Or at least it was until now. The former buying the latter means that distinction is only going to get narrower from here on in.

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?

The Samsung Galaxy S II tops our A-List these days, but the iPhone 4 is still the second best phone out there – a full 14 months after its launch. It has a faultless high-resolution screen, a design that remains more stylish than anything HTC has produced, and an app catalogue Android can only dream of. Plus – and this really does need to be emphasised – it’s none the worse off for still being single-core. Having owned one for a year I’d argue a second core isn’t particularly necessary given the efficiency of iOS.

But it’s getting one. And faster graphics, putting it on a par with the iPad 2. And an 8-megapixel camera. And voice recognition.

Perhaps the people still speculating that there simply must be an iPhone 5 round the corner could tell me what else they think Apple can add right now. A bigger or sharper screen? Size maybe, but the resolution will be difficult to raise without borking a lot of apps. 4G support? Useless in the UK right now. A 3D gimmick? I’m not even going to answer that one.

The simple truth is that, yes, the iPhone 4S is a mere update, but it’s about as good as Apple can make it with current technology. If any other manufacturer had produced a phone like this, we’d say it’s very good and carry on with our lives. No, Cook shouldn’t have wasted two hours of our time to unveil it, but if some people are disappointed with what they got, just imagine the furore had Apple given in to the pressure and called this thing the iPhone 5.

The Metro UI

First things first, Metro is your main entry point whatever your hardware – and that’s going to annoy a lot of people. It’s large, it’s almost childlike in its design, and it’s so obviously meant for tablets that it feels slightly insulting to anyone who’s comfortable with the ins and outs of the Windows environment.

The concept of full-screen-only apps makes little sense for any device above tablet size, as anyone who works with Outlook, Word, Tweetdeck and Chrome permanently open will quickly realise. You can split apps so that one occupies two-thirds of the screen, but that’s not particularly helpful on larger screens. The desktop itself is technically an app, so you can have that occupy two-thirds with several traditional windows within it. It’s not something I found useful, though.

Metro is a bit iffy to navigate with a mouse. While the live previews in larger tiles are great (giving quick access to tweets, emails and the like – and they can be put on your lock screen too), the icons themselves are big and boxy on a 15in screen, and finding an application to launch manually – even once you’ve dragged them all into related groups of tiles – means much scrolling left and right.

Of course, that’s not the quickest way to launch an application from an idle desktop. In Windows 7 I simply press the Windows key and start typing the name, and the good news is you can still do that here – the difference is no Start menu appears. Or more accurately, the Metro UI is the Start menu, and a press of the Windows key (or a click of the now pretty useless bottom-left Start button) always takes you to that grid. If you’re fast you can ping the full-screen Metro interface up, type the app name and be back on the desktop again in a second, which begs the question why it needs to appear at all when the old, less graphically demanding and space-intensive system worked so well.

The closest thing to a traditional Start menu on the desktop arrives if you instead hover over the Start button. There you get a few menu options, along with a different way in to that search function, which here attempts to search within the currently active app. If that’s not where you want to search – and it usually won’t be – you pretty much have to end up with the full-screen Metro search taking over again. It needs work.

Changing your ways

As you’ll quickly discover, if you want to spend the majority of your time in the traditional desktop, you’re going to have to get used to doing things differently. More specifically, you’ll want to make extensive use of your desktop and taskbar. As we’ve seen, any application not pinned to one of those two locations is tough to launch without returning to the Metro UI in some form. Whether you pile your desktop high with shortcuts will largely depend on how annoying you find that big green grid on a daily basis.

At every opportunity, Windows 8 reminds you that Metro is its new baby: plugging in a USB stick brings up a green tile over the desktop, and further settings are all laid out in the Metro style. Selecting any of the menu options on that previously mentioned mini Start menu produces a vertical Metro bar to the right of the desktop. (Don’t even get us started on why a button in the bottom-left opens a menu on the far right, another design decision made seemingly without the mouse in mind).

All the talk from the launch event has been from people using Windows 8 on tablets, so the quick gestures are getting a lot of love in LA. Back in the real world of PCs and laptops, you can hover over the left edge of the screen to see the last application you had open, and either drag it out to switch to it or right-click to snap it to the right-edge column. It works okay, but other gestures just don’t translate: swiping upwards to unlock, for example, is just horrible with a mouse. Thankfully, a press of the keyboard’s up cursor does the same job, and as far as I can tell most existing keyboard shortcuts still work.

Improvements

Whatever you think of Metro, there are also several smaller changes that really do make a difference on a PC or laptop.

The new Task Manager is excellent, keeping the existing performance monitoring tools but adding heatmapping (think Excel’s conditional formatting) so you can instantly see which processes are using resources, and several graphs, including live wireless throughput. It adds detailed tabs for app history and user activity, and finally brings the Startup options of msconfig into a much more accessible place. Crapware can now easily be prevented from starting up with Windows.

Explorer windows bring back the Up button they’ve been sorely lacking, and while a lot of people hate the ribbon interface I’m not one of them. The file transfer dialog has been improved, with a dynamic graph now showing the transfer speed second by second, and an estimation of time remaining. It rolls multiple transfer jobs into one window too, which is a vast improvement on having them stacked up.

Finally, boot and resume times are excellent, at least on this test laptop. About a year old, and with nothing fancier than a 320GB mechanical hard disk inside, it boots to the lock screen (if you’ve set a password) in around 13 seconds, and to a ready-to-go Windows 8 in just under 19 seconds. Strangely, the only way to power the laptop down appears to be to go into the Power option in the Settings menu; presumably, Microsoft is hoping laptop users will simply close the lid and make use of the improved sleep mode.

Windows 8: the tablet OS

The biggest realisation from a couple of days with Windows 8 on a laptop is that if you’re not willing to throw yourself into the Metro interface with gusto, you’re really not going to see the kind of changes to the OS that everyone else will. Those who just want Windows 7 but better are going to find that, at least behind the fancy new UI, it doesn’t feel a whole lot different.

The desktop is still there, your existing applications can still be run, and most of the noticeable upgrades are to background elements of the environment. We’ve no doubt prettying up the Control Panel and various other tools is long overdue, but what Windows 8 seems most intent on is changing your ways to suit the direction Microsoft is taking. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certain to split opinion among long-time Windows users.

This is a very early build and I’m well aware that I’ve not spent nearly enough time with it to make a proper judgement. But it’s no surprise that Microsoft installed Windows 8 on a tablet to give to attendees of its Build conference, as that’s clearly where it’s more at home.

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. The results are in the table at the bottom of this post.

The SSD

The tidiest upgrade is to a larger internal SSD, and there’s no doubt this is also best for performance. With a single 1.5GB file, the SSD in our test MacBook Air delivered read and write speeds of 187MB/sec and 156MB/sec. More importantly (you’ll see why later), with 1.5GB of tiny files its read and write speeds were a healthy 87MB/sec and 75MB/sec.

The big problem is the hefty price of a bigger SSD, with Apple charging £250 to step up from 128GB to 256GB in its 13in MacBook Air, and Sony charging £410 for the same upgrade in the VAIO Z. That’s a lot of money.

The external hard disk

The first alternative is an external hard disk, and it’s a cost-efficient way of adding storage, particularly for files you won’t always need to hand. The winner of this month’s USB 3 hard disk Labs (issue 204, in shops now!) costs only £51 inc VAT for a 500GB drive.

In our tests with a single 1.5GB file, it achieved identical read and write speeds of 82MB/sec. With 1.5GB of tiny files this figure fell, but only to 60MB/sec read and 51MB/sec write; not as fast as an SSD, but significantly cheaper.

Of course, not all laptops have USB 3 ports – the MacBook Air being one such example. In our last USB 2 hard disk Labs, the winner achieved 32MB/sec read and 28MB/sec write speeds with a single 1.5GB file, and 26MB/sec and 12MB/sec with 1.5GB of tiny files.

The SD card

Adding external storage is cheap and fast, but if you prefer the convenience of having something you don’t have to carry around, you could make use of the SD card slot. Now, SD cards aren’t built for the kind of constant writing that you do on your main hard disk. They have a limited number of guaranteed write cycles before the card risks failing, so they’re best considered for storing files you don’t update often – a media collection, for example.

There are also several speed categories of SD cards. Look for a class rating on the packaging: this refers to its minimum non-fragmented sequential write speed. So, Class 2 will do at least 2MB/sec, and Class 10 at least 10MB/sec. To confuse matters, some manufacturers use “x” ratings that have minimum rates even higher than Class 10.

Sure enough, in the large file test a Class 10 card saw read and write speeds of 30MB/sec and 23MB/sec. For Class 6 this was 18MB/sec and 15MB/sec, while Class 4 saw 16MB/sec and 6MB/sec. You wouldn’t want to write 64GB of data regularly, but for a one-off the speeds are fine.

With small files those cards had healthy read speeds too, from 44MB/sec on Class 10 down to 20MB/sec with Class 4. But the big problem with using an SD card in this way is writing multiple small files: transferring 1.5GB of files to a Class 10 card pummelled the speed down to below 1MB/sec, and that fell even further with lower classes. If you’re going to regularly write a lot of small files, these cards are a terrible choice.

The value question

For data that will be written once and largely stay unchanged, however, does an SD card offer a value alternative to an SSD upgrade? At the kind of large capacities where it’s feasible, we found several 32GB Class 10 cards on sale for less than £40 inc VAT, and 64GB Class 10 cards at around £100. That’s for basic cards; those rated faster and with a higher number of guaranteed write cycles can cost up to several hundred pounds, so you can pick and choose to suit your needs.

You’ll need an SDXC slot for 64GB cards, and some slots don’t accept the card fully inside – on the MacBook Air it protrudes by 8mm, ripe for the snapping. But if your laptop meets the requirements, and if you’re after only a quick boost in capacity for non-critical files, the sheer convenience of being able to leave an SD card in there at all times makes it a great way to save money. And at lower capacities we really are talking pocket money.

(Click to enlarge)

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.

I’ve never been in one before, ever. I’ve walked past many times, and always been struck by how unlike a shop it looks. Now I know: that’s because it is totally unlike any normal shop.

Walking in as an Apple Store virgin, it’s impossible to figure out what you’re supposed to do. To the left and right of the front door, people are checking their emails and posting Facebook updates on MacBooks. To the back there are “Personal Setup” stands, manned by staff with smiles that would scare Cherie Blair. Upstairs are Genius bars and iPod stands, and rack upon rack of accessories, where shoppers with glazed expressions try things on for size as if this were a Topshop sale.

But nowhere is there a bloody till! A simple sign that says “Pay here”. Where do you, y’know, actually buy things?

After ten minutes not unlike the experience of walking past a Scientology centre — head down, ignore the cheery clones, don’t give them money — I eventually asked a woman idly standing in the middle where I could go to hand someone money in exchange for an expensive Apple product.

“Ask the man over there with the iPad 2,” she replied. The man with the iPad 2. Obviously.

I found the only man with an iPad 2 that wasn’t covered with drool, and I asked him if I could buy a laptop, please sir thank you very much. He took my name and told me the next available assistant would be ten minutes. Other people were waiting there too, just milling around in the middle. Worst still, there seemed to be no concept of a physical queue.

Ten minutes later a man with an iPhone 4 walked over and introduced himself (”Hi David!”) with the kind of enthusiasm I only just muster at my annual salary appraisals. He clicked through a few order screens on an idle MacBook, then we had a perfectly pleasant chat about his Windows PC (seriously) while an order progress screen ticked over with agonising slowness. From behind me a man appeared holding my MacBook Air, handed it over, then vanished again. I’d been here 20 minutes by this point.

To pay, we walked over to a card terminal sitting randomly in a corner, where I entered my pin, while my new best friend put my purchase into a trendy pull-cord shoulder bag with no useful carrying handle. “That’s great, David, I’ll just grab your receipt.”

The receipt was somewhere at the back of the store, presumably coming out of an actual till that remains hidden because it’s not wafer-thin and made of machined aluminium. He walked back over and handed it to me, shook my hand and hoped to see me again like an old friend, and I gratefully stepped back out into the pouring rain.

When I compare the simple experience of buying this laptop with that of the last one I bought, I’m shocked by how stressful this was. Last time, I walked in, pointed to a laptop, went to a till and paid. It took five minutes at most, and that was in the hell otherwise known as PC World.

Much as I love my new MacBook Air, I would take that experience over the horrifying Apple Store every single time.

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?

I have a Google+ profile, but have to say I haven’t exactly jumped on board yet, and the biggest reason is that so few of my friends have. My feed right now comprises a lot of posts from several prominent Twitter personalities, a couple of IT friends who clearly like it a lot – and not much else. If I switch streams to seeing just my friends – as in my real, proper, non-PC Pro friends – there’s one person, and his last update was a week ago.

To fix this, I decided to import my entire Facebook friend list over to Google+ to breathe a bit of life into it. There’s no official way of doing so – Facebook doesn’t want you to, for obvious reasons – but it’s very simple to do using a Yahoo Mail account, as this blog post explains.

The result?

Of the 53 Facebook friends who weren’t already in my Google+ circles – so that’s excluding all my work colleagues and one early-adopter mate who jumped in and got bored as quickly as I did – this import found that a grand total of zero had Google+ profiles.

Yes, zero. And most of my friends are tech-literate and in their late twenties/early thirties. The prime Google+ audience.

Some have suggested it’s the lack of invites that’s the problem, and that lots of people are just waiting to be allowed in. But most people I know who wanted in have found a way – I did.

And of course, any number of these 53 people may have created new GMail accounts in order to sign up to Google+, so their Facebook email wouldn’t be recognised. But if so, none of them have mentioned their new Google+ accounts on Facebook, as you’d expect of someone trying to fill their circles.

So is this like being on Twitter during the AV vote, where my entire feed suggested YesToAV was the only possible outcome, then the real non-tweeting world said otherwise? Are we in a bubble of our own making? With the number of tech sites currently writing eulogies to Google+, and the paucity of real-life conversation on the subject, it certainly feels that way.

Try the import for yourself and let me know in the comments how many of your friends have dived in. I’d be interested to see if Google+ is anything but hype.

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

The first thing you’ll notice is the shift in focus towards meaningful photography. Rather than a fixed angle throughout the magazine, products will be shot and laid out on the page to accentuate their most interesting features. For PCs that means going bigger on the guts shot than a plain product photo; for a camera it might mean the screen and controls get as much page space as the fascia. For Enterprise reviews, it’s a revelation.

This is combined with a new captioning system. By placing numbered dots onto interesting points of the product image, we can link straight to the relevant section of the text – and vice versa. The focus is on making the reviews as readable as possible while retaining depth, and getting as much as possible across via good photography.

Nowhere benefits from this shift more than Labs, where the most interesting products now get a whole series of shots – both full and close-up – to make every feature as visible as possible. Add this to the still-comprehensive feature tables, and the reviews themselves benefit from more freedom to focus on what a Labs is all about: real-world analysis and an informed buying decision.

We make space for these “hero” products by reducing the focus on every last product in a Labs. All of the Labs products are still put through the same intensive tests, but readers are naturally more interested in finding out more about the products that do well in our tests, and not so much about, say, a laptop that comes 15th in a test of 20. So instead we’ve introduced a Best of the Rest page in some Labs to round-up the also-rans.

We think it all makes PC Pro’s Reviews and Labs sections clearer and more interesting, both to read and to look at. We hope you do too.

The new issue of PC Pro goes on sale 14 July.

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.

We’ve seen dual-core Atom tablets in the past, but the Z670 is a single-core processor running at 1.5GHz. In all of our benchmark tests that puts its performance right next to single-core Atom netbooks – that is, at the bottom of the chart. In the netbook world, we’ve long since got used to the boost that dual-core provides, and even then there are still many things a netbook can’t comfortably do.

Improved battery life could be put forward as a justification for the backwards step, but only if the software was lightweight enough for a single core to suffice.

Lightweight. Windows 7. Hmm.

So the problem is Microsoft. The Oak Trail processor could dance the salsa and excrete cold, hard cash out of its air vents, but it’s still powering a car crash of a tablet OS. Windows requires a faster processor than a mobile OS, yet Intel is giving us a slower one and telling us that’s for the better.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the general problems with Windows 7 as a touch interface, over which Oak Trail has zero influence.

To be fair, Oak Trail is a technological success. If Intel ports Honeycomb onto it, as rumours suggest, we’ll see just how good it is compared to the ARM competition. But until Microsoft catches up and provides a proper tablet operating system, a new processor won’t make a blind bit of difference to its share of the tablet market.

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.

Obviously, it does all depend on what you’ll use it for, and plenty of you said you’d buy with or without 3G depending on that. But just as many came out firmly on one side or the other, with no clear winner.

In the 3G corner…

Led by @bazzacollins.

Senior staff writer @mikejjennings: “A supposedly “mobile” device without constant (network-dependent) net access? No thanks.”

Contributing editor @PaulOckenden: “Huge yes from me. What if you’re out of Wi-Fi range?”

Contributing editor @JonHoneyball: “I wouldn’t buy a tablet unless it had a 3G socket/modem built in. I might not buy a sim immediately, but…”

Plenty of readers agreed with those sentiments.

@allpointsnorth: “3G for me, but only cos I’m on the go a lot - replaces dongle. Cloud/Openzone not always that reliable either.”

@MarkTechArc72: “3G is a must – for a mainly information consumption device, what’s the point if you have no internet when you’re out?”

@the_pc_doc: “Manufacturers not offering 3G as an option will go the same way as the dinosaur or the dodo…”

And a few picked up the travel theme too:

@mikehamer: “iPad 3G was very useful on our holiday in Italy (with Italian SIM). Google Maps on its big screen was fab.”

@smithsocksimon: “3G is handy if you travel, cause you can buy a local SIM for each country.”

It was left to Mr Honeyball to offer some sensible advice: “Buy it with 3G but without SIM. Buy a monthly contract SIM like 3 for 15 quid. Try it both ways. You’ll hate Wi-Fi-only mode.”

In the Wi-Fi corner…

Led by @Bayonnaise:

@tomaszrykala: “3G isn’t a must, as the research confirms, majority of tablets don’t ever leave the house.”

If you do leave the house, a huge number of people suggested different ways to get data…

@chatanm: “I’d recommend a Mi-Fi and Wi-Fi tablet instead of 3G tablet. More flexible and the battery life would be better on your tablet without 3G.”

@MerseyMal: “For the rare occasions away from Wi-Fi would use phone. Don’t want two 3G contracts.”

@alanjrobertson: “It’s a no from me – seems to add about £100 + extra contract to cost. Happy with Android Wi-Fi hotspot function instead.”

@jim_herd: “Big issue for me is only paying for one data contract. Makes Mi-Fi or mobile tethering the way to go.”

And several people came up with the same response regarding their experiences with 3G tablets.

@johnny_winter: “I bought 3G iPad last year. It wasn’t necessary so cancelled 3G SIM. Can use personal hotspot on iPhone if required now.”

@itf: “Got a 3G iPad, never used the 3G.”

The judges’ decision

Those are just a few of the tweets we got, but the result is hardly surprising: some people want 3G in a tablet, some people don’t, and it’s entirely dependent on where you are and how you use it.

We even got a response from @MattJEgan, editor of (boo hiss) rival PC Advisor, supporting both sides: “Yes [to 3G]! Commuter, etc. That said, the PC Advisor Reviews Ed has a Wi-Fi iPad and carries a 3G MiFi dongle for all his toys.”

All of which I suppose vindicates Barry on his original argument: it is a bit short-sighted of Asus not to give the option.