Apple’s Final Cut Pro X was received with derision in some circles when it launched last year. Ostensibly it replaced the old version – Final Cut Pro 7 – but in fact it had been rewritten from the ground up. And there were gaping holes.

Erstwhile fans of the application moaned so hard I felt moved to write about the backlash, proponents of which complained about the lack of multicam features, as well as support for previous projects, XML and broadcast monitoring.

Now, Apple says, the free 10.0.3 update has filled in those gaps, fixed what was until now broken, and generally brought the new version up to the same level as before.

In a briefing, Apple spent a long time demonstrating the swish new multicam editing system, which looked suitably impressive, with support for up to 64 simultaneous angles, the ability to mix and match codecs and resolutions within multicam edits, and multiple synchronisation options. Editors can choose to synchronise clips based on analysis of the audio wave form, by marker or by keyword.

It also announced that, finally, there was a way of importing old projects from Studio 7 to Pro X – albeit via the $10 plugin 7toX for Final Cut Pro, from third-party developer Intelligent Assistance.

Apple was also keen to highlight burgeoning third-party support elsewhere – via effects plugins from the likes of GenArts, Red Giant and Sapphire Edge.

Also on the list of upgrades and improvements is a tweaked chroma key tool that allows editors more hands-on fine-tuning; updated XML support; the ability to import and handle multi-layered Photoshop PSD files; and Media Relink, a new tool for tracking down and re-integrating media into projects that may have been moved or modified.

Finally, Apple announced hardware support for external I/O devices such as colour-calibrated broadcast monitors (a feature still in beta while performance is being tuned). It demonstrated this by outputting its preview stream via a Thunderbolt-connected AJA Io XT to a Sony broadcast monitor.

There are still some areas that haven’t been addressed (there are issues with the import from and export to tape, for instance), yet for the most part this is an update that fixes many of the complaints when the software was originally launched. The fact that Apple has acted a mere seven months after launch is commendable; whether it will bring those disgruntled professionals back into the fold remains to be seen.

As part of an IT roll-out in the office the entire PC Pro team was moved over to Office 365 last week. For the most part it meant no change at all. After a quick call to IT the morning after the transition to get some some account details adjusted (I’d had no email since 9pm the previous day), I was able to carry on working, using my standard desktop installation of Office 2010, including Outlook, just as normal.

That’s no surprise. After all, Office 365 principally represents a change in the way businesses purchase and manage licenses for Microsoft Office software. From a user perspective, the desktop software – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – stays the same.

However, we have received one major upgrade – from our old, clunky webmail service to the swanky new Outlook Web App – and it could be about to change the way I work.

Now, when I log into the Dennis Publishing webmail address, I’m faced with an interface that actually looks like a proper email client, not the abomination of an interface that adorned the webmail before.

The layout is modern and fresh, but most importantly the web interface is quick – blindingly so – with keyword searches completed in a blink of an eye, faster even than my desktop Outlook client can manage.

Now I realise this may have as much to do with the way our Exchange servers were set up (and possibly because my desktop PC is running on steam) as the native speed of the Web App, but it’s been a revelation, and has persuaded me to carry out an experiment.

I’m going to try and use the Outlook Web App – and only the Outlook Web App – to see if it’s a workable alternative in a busy office environment.

The first few days

So far, I’ve been using it exclusively since Friday and I’m glad to report I have few complaints. I no longer have to wait an age as Outlook slowly rouses itself out of its morning stupor. Once Chrome is launched, the Web App takes less than three seconds to appear, so I can get to work straight away.

And I’ve come across very little that I can’t do in this version of Outlook. I can see all my folders, set up meetings and see others’ free time while doing so. I can set up tasks and assign them to members of my team. I can filter search results by category and attachment.

I’m also a real fan of the way the Outlook Web App displays conversations as an expandable list in both the message list and reading pane. This can be switched off, and doing so reveals another plus: the Outlook Web App’s settings and features feel much more accessible and easier to find than on the complex and intimidating desktop app.

Flies in the ointment

There are some annoyances, though, and the main one is a lack of pop-up notifications, although since I have the interface displayed permanently on my second monitor, that’s not the issue it could be.

Another is that I can’t display all I want on the screen. I normally have a to-do list displayed in a narrow pane on the right hand side; the Outlook Web App is restricted to email or calendar or contacts or tasks, not a combination of two or more. I’m not a huge fan of the way some keyboard shortcuts I’m used to work – CTRL-R – while others do not – CTRL-N.

However, these for me are minor irritations, and I say that because I haven’t yet been tempted back to the desktop client. Time may change my opinion, of course – what seem now like quirks may turn into full-blown pet hates – but for now I’m happy with this brave new world.

When Amazon launched the Kindle Fire last year, it made the rather irritating decision not to bring it to the UK at the same time. The rotters didn’t even let us have the Kindle Touch, leaving us with the (admittedly excellent) fourth generation Kindle. If the rumours are to be believed, however, changes are afoot, and with the UK braced to receive Amazon’s latest baby, we’ve managed to get our hands on an import to see what’s what.

Probably the most important thing about the Fire isn’t the hardware, the software or content offering, but the price. With no official confirmation of the launch, we can’t say for sure how much it will be, but in the US it’s $199, and given Amazon’s track record on its E Ink Kindles, we can’t see it costing much more than £200. In fact, it could be less. That’s significant. Where most other manufacturers are using the iPad as a yardstick when it comes to pricing, with 10in tablets costing around £350 to £400, and smaller tablets at around £300 to £350, Amazon is setting out all on its own, with a price more akin to no-brand Chinese knockoffs. The big question is, would you buy one?

The first thing to get straight is that this isn’t a tablet in the traditional sense. Yes, it runs Android (version 2.3), but the user interface is heavily customised. There are none of the ugly smartphone-esque graphics normally associated with cheap tablets – it actually looks attractive – and it works in an entirely different way.

Gone is the usual widget- and icon-littered Android desktop, to be replaced with a bookshelf-themed front-end. Along the top of the screen runs a bar with links to different content categories: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and Web. Below it is a horizontally scrolling carousel of recent items, and this covers not only books and other content, but also apps and web pages. At the very bottom on the screen – on the bottom shelves – is a list of customisable favourites, to which any number of items can be added.

It’s a design that makes sense, and the reason it works so well is that it’s driven by Amazon’s content offering. You’ll doubtless be familiar with the company’s ebook and periodical library, but the Fire also provides the opportunity to rent or buy movies and TV shows, and purchase music, with users also able to borrow books using the Kindle library lending service. And with the Fire, that content doesn’t even have to be downloaded and stored locally. As with books on the Kindle, Amazon keeps copies of all purchased content in the cloud, and files can be streamed or downloaded as needed. Files can even be removed and downloaded again later.

We weren’t able to test the whole process of downloading videos and music, unfortunately, as the service isn’t yet live in the UK, but we were able to stream track previews and movie trailers smoothly, and the Kindle eBooks service worked beautifully.

Performance

Clearly Amazon has put a lot of thought into the integration of content, but to hit such a low price it’s abundantly clear that cutbacks have been made. The first casualty is the design. The Fire is a real slab of a tablet, measuring 11.5mm thick and weighing 404g – that may seem fine, but this is a 7in tablet designed for reading books on, and held in one hand it feels unwieldy compared to the best small Android tablets.

There’s also very little in the way of design nicety. There isn’t much a manufacturer can do with the glass touchscreen of a tablet, admittedly, but the rear and edges give it a chance to shine. Amazon has turned down that opportunity. The rear of the Fire is plain black, slightly rubbery plastic, with the word “kindle” etched in counter-relief, while the edges are straight up and down – not a contour nor a chamfered edge in sight.

If the looks are disappointing, the specifications are doubly so. The dual-core Texas Instruments CPU looks fine on paper, but with only 512MB of RAM to back it up, the tablet frequently feels a little ragged and jittery. The user interface isn’t affected too badly, but scrolling up and down, zooming and panning around some web pages (the BBC or YouTube homepages, for instance) is hardly smooth. Here, Amazon’s lauded Silk browser, which loads some page elements server side and attempts to predict what you’ll click on next in a bid to speed up, cannot help. The slight performance lag also affects ebooks, pages of which seem to catch slightly as they’re swiped aside.

Other disappointments include a lack of Bluetooth, no front or rear camera, single-band wireless, no GPS, and limited storage space of 8GB, with no microSD for expansion. There’s no 3G version either, which seems odd, and the resolution of the screen – 1,024 x 600 – lends a slightly grainy look to affairs.

On the positive side, the benchmark figures indicate that the tablet should take most apps and games in its stride. It finished the SunSpider JavaScript test in a time of 2,567ms – not the quickest we’ve seen, but far from poor. It completed the PC Pro HTML render test in an average of 15.5 seconds, which again isn’t bad. Although we weren’t able to use the Amazon app store, we were able to side-load a couple of games and get them running using their APK install files, and both worked smoothly.

Other aspects of performance are more impressive. The screen is a bright IPS model – we measured it at a maximum 414cd/m2, with a contrast ratio of 796:1 – so movies do look punchy and colourful, notwithstanding the low resolution. With the brightness turned down, reading text is easy on the eye too, and with more options for tweaking text than the standard Kindle, the Fire makes a decent ebook reader.

Finally, in our looped video battery test we found the Fire lasted a total of 8hrs 43mins, which is pretty good compared to other Android touchscreen devices of a similar size and with similar specifications. It’s clearly nowhere near the E Ink-based Kindle that can last weeks on a single charge, though.

Prospects

That Kindle Fire, then, is tricky to assess in light of established genres. In the context of other Android-based tablets it looks light in several areas; things we’d normally come down heavily on a normal tablet for. Although the screen is bright, and battery life acceptable, other tablets offer far more power and features, better responsiveness and more attractive design. On the other hand, it won’t satisfy fans of the E Ink Kindles, with their huge battery life and paper-like displays.

Consider it on its own merits, however, and the Fire begins to make more sense. Its inextricable links with Amazon’s services, and its focus on content, in fact, make it more of an iPad-lite than a budget Android knockoff. The cloud-based approach is ingenious, too, and adds an extra dimension.

The key thing, as mentioned at the very beginning of this preview, is the price. If Amazon does bring this tablet to the UK, and it’s around the same cost as it is in the US, it will almost certainly have a winner on its hands. It’s clearly far from perfect, but the low price, coupled with the Kindle name and Amazon’s content services, should be enough to ensure it’s a force to be reckoned with in 2012.

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is currently the pick of the bunch when it comes to Android tablets, but one of its few weaknesses was the lack of the latest version of the OS. Not any more. It’s received its update, so we thought we’d do an update of our own.

You can read about our first encounter with Android 4 – or Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) – in our Samsung Galaxy Nexus review. We were impressed with it, but had a couple of concerns, chiefly concerning the use of soft buttons and the potential waste of valuable screen real estate. That, fortunately, is a non-issue on tablets. We’re already used to it on Honeycomb tablets, and it takes up a negligible amount of room on a 10.1in tablet such as the Prime.

Initially things don’t look that different, but a few minutes of browsing around really brings home the main advantage of the new OS: the Prime was already pretty responsive, but Android 4 takes that to the next level. It feels even more immediate than before, sweeping from desktop to desktop with the sort of smoothness typically associated with Apple products. Launching and scrolling menus feels buttery smooth, and there’s barely a judder or hesitation to be found.

In more practical terms, this translates to faster and more predictable behaviour in complicated websites. During our day-long test working with tablets, we found sites such as WordPress were barely usable on a tablet, whether iOS- or Android-based. With this ICS update, in most cases there’s zero typing lag and no irritating keyboard buffer run-on. One exception to this rule we found was Zoho Writer, which still feels sluggish in use.

Results in various benchmarks back up this impression. In our own in-house HTML test, which times the loading of 28 web pages, the Prime took an impressive 8.9 seconds, only a little behind the iPad 2’s 7.7 seconds. By comparison, with Android 3.2 on board, the Prime took 17.6 seconds.

Moving on to SunSpider, and oddly the position is reversed. On Android 3.2, the Prime  scored a scorching 1,796ms; with Android 4 on board it slipped to 2,340ms. Just for the hell of it, we also headed of to the BrowserMark website to see how the Prime would fare: it scored 116,360. Alas, we didn’t get the opportunity to test in BrowserMark under Android 3.2, but the general consensus in other reviews is that it scores around 100,000. Another victory for Android 4.

We also retested battery life, but this is one area that appears to be unchanged. With our standard looping video test and the tablet in battery saver mode, the Prime lasted for 9hrs 49mins – that’s roughly the same as the 10hrs 8mins time we achieved under Android 3.2.

Screenshots

Android 4 doesn’t just boost performance. It also brings with it an overhauled user interface and a load of new settings and features. The lock screen has the new Android 4 font, but also a change in functionality: the lock icon can be dragged to the right to unlock the tablet, or to the left to unlock and launch the camera. Small beer, but every little helps.

Once you’re into the UI proper, more small changes become apparent. In the top-right corner, the + symbol has now disappeared. This used to launch the customisation screen – where shortcuts, apps, widgets and wallpapers could be dragged onto any of the five Honeycomb desktops. That screen has gone, with widgets moving to the app drawer (see below) and the wallpaper menu accessed via a long press on the desktop.

You may also have noticed a small black square filled with app icons in the bottom-right corner. That’s a folder. As with the phone version of Android 4, folders are created by dragging one app icon onto another on the desktop, then giving it a name.

Here’s the new app launcher screen, complete with widget preview. As with Honeycomb, you swipe left and right to navigate, and there’s a new fade-in animation: as the current page of apps exits stage  left, rather than scrolling in from the right the new page of apps fades in from behind. Frivolous, but neat.

Another small change is the ability to tidy up the recent apps list. Pop up the list in the normal manner and you’ll see that the individual thumbnails can be removed with a quick swipe of the finger.  Note, that  process also removes the app from Anroid’s cached processes list, effectively killing the app completely. You can see the effects by visiting the App section of the settings screen, where you can now switch between a view of running apps and cached processes.

Speaking of which, this is the new settings screen, which looks similar to Honeycomb’s but sees a reorganisation of sorts. The list to the left is now broken up into sub-headed sections: Wireless & networks, Device, Personal and System. It’s a little easier to find your way around as a result, although it took us a while to get used to it.

There is also a handful of new options and tools hidden away in the various settings screens. Above is the new data usage screen, which gives an overview of how much data you’re consuming overall, plus a breakdown of data usage on an app by app basis. There’s the option to encrypt your tablet – apps and all – to improve security, as well as the ability to remove the lock screen if you so wish.

In terms of the core apps there are more tweaks, but nothing hugely dramatic. The Gallery app now looks a little neater, with thumbnails tidily tesselated together instead of surrounded by acres of wasted black space.  A long press on any photo or album allows photos to be shared as before, but with slightly changed options – a one-click shortcut to the  last service used is handily displayed next to the sharing dropdown.

While we’re on the subject of photos, the camera app has seen a dramatic overhaul. Much more of the screen is now given over to the viewfinder; the shutter button is surrounded by a zoom control, and there’s an extra option in the bottom-right corner for shooting panoramic photos.

Elsewhere, the changes are a little more sedate. Aside from a slight redesign, the Gmail app looks largely the same as before, and the same holds true for the email app used for POP3, IMAP and Exchange accounts. There’s still no sign of search (sigh), although you can at least browse your Outlook folders.

The Calendar, meanwhile adds a new Agenda view, listing upcoming meetings in a vertically scrolling list to the left and details in a larger pane on the right.

As far as the browser is concerned, it’s more minor tweaks. As you can see from this screenshot, there’s a new section – Accessibility – in the settings menu, which allows you to fiddle with text scaling, the amount the page zooms when the screen is double-tapped, and the minimum font size. Elsewhere, there’s a new ‘Fast Scroller’ setting, which brings up a scroll bar when the edge of a page is tapped. In a bonus for 3G tablet owners, there’s the option to switch off Google’s search result preloading, potentially saving a bob or two on data.

Finally, the keyboard sees a slight usability improvement. The look is a little cleaner, fitting in with the whole Ice Cream Sandwich ethos, but more importantly, each key is now a few pixels taller, making it a touch easier to type onscreen. The new keyboard is on the left in the above screenshot; the old Honeycomb one is on the right.

Verdict

Overall, Ice Cream Sandwich is an excellent update that turns a great tablet into an even better one. I’m sure there are more new features to find, but hopefully this gives a flavour of what to expect when the OS update starts to roll in aboard shiny new quad-core tablets over the coming months.

You might think we hated these products, but in their own inimitable way they’re just as fun to write about as the market leaders. So, for your delectation and ours, we’ve compiled our favourites from the past 12 months: the PC Pro rogues gallery…

The garage sale that never happened

I go. You go. Who go? MeeGo

A touch of madness

The HP TouchPad made quite an impression when it arrived in the PC Pro labs back in July. We liked the hardware and loved the operating system, but we weren’t impressed with the lack of apps.

Given time, we hoped, apps would flourish and the TouchPad would become a viable alternative. It was just a shame HP hadn’t been brave enough to challenge Apple on price.

A month passed, and then came what was one of the most baffling and bizarre events I’ve witnessed in the technology industry. HP canned the TouchPad after six weeks of (admittedly sluggish) sales, retired its entire smartphone offering and put webOS on ice.

It then had a massive fire sale, slashing the cost of the 16GB version of the tablet to £89 and the 32GB to £115. They sold out in minutes, wherever they appeared, and yet HP stuck to its guns and left the poor old TouchPad alone and abandoned.

A sorry tale indeed, but at least a handful of enterprising bargain-hunters (including our very own Darien Graham-Smith) got their hands on a tablet for comparative peanuts.

Read in the water

Aside from Amazon, Kobo and Sony, is there anyone out there that truly understands what makes a good ebook reader? When we gathered the best the industry had to offer together earlier this year, we were hoping to discover a hidden gem.

Alas the rest of the contenders, from BeBook, iriver, and Greenreader – failed to float our literary boat – offering either suspect ergonomics, performance that would make watching paint dry an exercise in high entertainment, or both.

Worst of all, though, were the prices. With Amazon’s new Kindle pricing, none of the others even came close to offering the sort of value needed to compete.

It is still possible to produce a competitive product, as Kobo and Sony proved, so come on the rest – how about joining in too?

AMD’s dozy moment

The announcement of the new Amazon Kindles caused all manner of excitement in the PC Pro office this week, until we realised Amazon actually had no plans to release the most exciting products in the UK. What a let-down. Still, that does at least give other manufacturers a chance to steal a march, and that appears to be exactly what Sony has done with its new Reader Wi-Fi, of which we have an early sample.

The first thing to notice when you pick up the Reader Wi-Fi is how light it is. It tipped our scales at just 162g, which makes the current Kindle look positively portly. With no keyboard it’s small enough to slip into an inside jacket pocket, and although it does feel a touch plasticky, it’s well made and the soft-touch plastic rear gives you a nice grippy surface to hold onto.

The screen is 6in across with a resolution of 600 x 800, and you get 1.4GB of usable memory expandable via a microSD slot, plus an infrared touchscreen just like the US-only Kindle Touch. This means you can sweep your finger right to left to turn a page, make handwritten notes and annotations with the supplied plastic stylus, and highlight text effortlessly (more on this later). For Sony, though, that’s nothing new. Where this device differs from its predecessors is in the inclusion of an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter.

Once logged into your network using the onscreen keyboard, it offers direct access to the Sony ebook store, and through that a free subsection of Google Books, plus selected local libraries via the Overdrive eLibrary system. The latter provides time-limited DRM-based loans and, while the selection isn’t anywhere near as broad as the Kindle Store, the books are free.

Alas, the service isn’t yet up and running (and won’t be until the end of October), so we can’t pass judgement on its implementation in the device itself. We can only hope it rivals the gloriously simply system in the Kindle. But the good news is that you no longer need to rely on Sony’s Reader software to get content, which can only be a good thing.

The device’s onboard WebKit browser is fully functional and, in conjunction with the sensitive touchscreen, works surprisingly well. It’ll never rival a tablet for ease of use, but for accessing free ebook sites such as the Gutenberg Project, and even checking the odd email, it’s perfectly functional – and miles better than the Kindle’s browser. Even inertial scrolling and pinch-to-zoom operations function, although you may find the constant screen refresh sends you cross-eyed after a while.

Elsewhere, the Reader Wi-Fi exhibits similar strengths and weaknesses to previous Sony readers. It’s a superlative PDF-reading device. The multitouch capabilities of the screen mean even complex pages can be manipulated quickly and simply, and there are all manner of other ways of reading pages. You can set a custom crop to make pages with large borders more readable. In Navigate Page mode, the reader can be set to zoom right into the first column on a page, then follow the flow of text down then up and across when you hit the next button, instead of simply navigating to the following page.

Text can also be “reflowed” or stripped out so it fits the screen exactly. You can make handwritten annotations and highlight text for downloading via the Sony Reader software. A long press of the finger on a word, meanwhile, displays not only a dictionary definition at the bottom of the screen, but also pops up five buttons. These allow you to make a highlight the word, make a quick note and search the text, or carry out a keyword search in Google or Wikipedia.

And, although we can’t speak for the forthcoming Kindles, against the current model the Sony Reader Wi-Fi holds its own in terms of screen refresh speed and readability. Epub pages flip by in a single second, and as the screen uses the same E-Ink Pearl panel, contrast is largely the same as well. If anything the Kindle’s screen demonstrates a touch more contrast and crispness, but there’s very little in it. We took a macro photograph of each screen using identical lighting, shutter, aperture, ISO and white balance settings, then measured the black and “white” levels of each using Photoshop’s eyedropper tool. The result was a contrast ratio of 2.48:1 for the Kindle and 2.36:1 for the Sony.

The Sony Reader Wi-Fi is clearly a capable device; we can see that even without the benefit of being able to use the store on the device. It’s quick, readable and can handle PDF files in a much more intuitive and satisfactory way than the current Kindle – plus it’s incredibly light. The problem is with the price: at £130 we can’t see it competing with either current or future Kindles. We’ll have a full review when the services go live.

That price undercuts pretty much every Honeycomb tablet and iPad currently on the market, so we were keen to see how the tablet itself stacked up. When Fusion Garage CEO, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, came in for an interview he was keen to show it off too.

The Grid10 makes a pretty good first impression. It isn’t the sleekest tablet in the world – it’s considerably thicker than an iPad 2 or a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 at 14mm from font to back, but it is handsome enough and at 689g not too heavy. The rear panel is made from curved, brushed aluminium, and the edges and corners have a smart, chiseled look to them. These frame what looks to be a decent screen: a 10in unit with a 1,366 x 768 resolution – a few more pixels than most other tablets of its size can muster.

Under the sharp-suited exterior is a prettty standard feature set, though: a dual-core, 1GHz  Nvidia Tegra 2 processor is backed by 512MB of RAM, 16GB of storage, Wi-Fi (the 3G version is launching at the same time), GPS and a single, front-facing 1.3-megapixel video call camera. Plus there’s a reasonable selection of ports: Micro USB for synchronisation, Micro HDMI and a microSD slot for memory expansion.

The GridOS desktop

If that doesn’t get your juices flowing, then the interface just might. The Grid10 sports Fusion Garage’s proprietary GridOS (based on the Android 2.2 Kernel), and it looks very different to your average tablet OS.

The key to this is the main home screen: instead of having multiple horizontally-scrolling desktops, GridOS has just one, giant multi-directional scrolling space, around which are scattered themed clusters of apps – games, media, Amazon and so on. The clusters are essentially groups of square icons arranged loosely in a grid-like structure, and each icon is  shortcut to an app or settings screen. Check out the video below for a full demo of all the Grid 10’s features.

As you’d expect the desktop can be customised at will, the clusters can also be expanded and collapsed with a tap of the finger, while a thumbnail window at the top right of the screen gives you a quick overview, and can be tapped to reveal various options, such as changing the desktop wallpaper.

Meanwhile, running along the top of the screen is a thin toolbar hosting displaying volume controls, remaining battery life, connectivity status icons and a clock.

Gestures and navigation

With navigation, GridOS makes further departures from the tablet norm. Scrolling the desktop around is achieved simply enough – by dragging a single finger around – and so is manipulating web pages: pinch-to-zoom and single-finger panning is again the order of the day.

But, since there are no buttons nor any persistent on-screen controls for back or home, GridOS relies on a handful of special gestures for these core tasks. A two-fingered swipe from the right edge of the screen takes you back a stage; two fingers dragged from the top of the screen dumps you back in the home screen; and a two-fingered swipe from the left edge brings up the multi-tasking area of the OS, dubbed Heart Beat.

In the browser, meanwhile, menus and so on are launched with a quick swipe up from the bottom left corner of the screen. The browser is otherwise completely free of clutter. Interestingly, highlighting keywords in the text of a web page brings up a context menu allowing you to carry out various actions – a web search or, if the word is a film title, say, a link to buy the DVD.

Apps and the app store

The first thing to note is that the Grid10 will not ship with Android Market, and will never do so. It’s also missing all the standard Google apps you might expect on an Android-based tablet, and instead of Google search, features Microsoft’s Bing service.

That’s disappointing, but it isn’t all bad news. The Grid10 will run all Android apps natively, and instead of the Market, will come with Amazon’s app store pre-installed – the  first device in the UK to do so. We’ll have to hold judgement on this until we can actually use it, but it should at the very least tie the whole experience of downloading apps, music and video together more successfully than Google’s offering currently does.

Fusion Garage also has its own app store, though if past experience of proprietary app stores is anything to go by, you won’t be visiting it very often.

Performance and verdict

Fusion Garage was keen to stress during the demonstration that the software isn’t quite final, and we can see why. For while the core desktop scrolling operations, and web page scrolling and zooming responded smoothly to the touch of our demonstrator, other aspects were laggy and slow.

The “motion picture class animations”, as Rathakrishnan was keen to refer to them (transition animations between screens to you and me), took an age to respond, lists of messages scrolled arthritically up and down and context menus to a moment or two to appear. Those two-fingered gestures seemed to misfire with worrying frequency too: during the demonstrations, Rathakrishnan had to repeat gestures that weren’t recognised on several different occasions.

The quality of the screen isn’t great. Head on it looked bright enough for viewing indoors, but it isn’t in the same class as the iPad 2 or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. And horizontal viewing angles were dreadful: we spent large parts of the demonstration craning our necks around in an attempt to see what Rathakrishnan was demonstrating to us, and even then had trouble seeing what was going on.

And, while it may grow on us once we’ve had the opportunity to live with it for a while, we’re not convinced the GridOS is particularly intuitive. The big desktop may seem like a good idea, and it certainly looks pretty, but we can foresee it becoming rather confusing and unwieldy once it’s laden with a few more apps.

That said, Fusion Garage’s latest offering does have a certain charm to it and, with the market crying out for a tablet under £300 that actually works, it may have hit upon a recipe for success with the Grid10. Our opinion may change when we get our mitts on a fully-fledged review sample, but for now the outlook is reasonably bright.

There are so many devices and routers now using the unlicensed space between 2,400MHz and 2,475MHz that finding a quiet, undisturbed channel for your network to reside on is nigh on impossible. That’s why we recommend anyone upgrading their wireless router chooses a dual-band model — one that gives you the option of connecting in the less congested 5GHz frequency band.

This can be a difficult concept to grasp without visual aids, so let me show you exactly what we mean when we talk about RF congestion.

Using our recently-acquired Wi-Spy spectrum analyser (kindly supplied by Metageek for use in a forthcoming wireless router Labs), combined with the firm’s Chanalyzer 4 radio frequency (RF) analysis software, we recorded the above graph.

It shows all the RF activity in the vicinity of the PC Pro office, and can detect not only nearby wireless networks – of which there are an alarming number — but also other devices using the 2.4GHz band.

Look closely and you’ll see that, on channel 8, there’s a non-Wi-Fi source of interference, represented as three bright stripes in the bottom “waterfall” window: I’ve not tracked down the culprit yet. To the right, the broad red/green stripe flanked by two narrower vertical green  lines shows you the devastation a cheap wireless video sender can wreak.

While this might seem a rather extreme example, I’m sure that many living in densely populated urban centres will be surrounded by a similar level of congestion and interference. Just imagine how many baby monitors, cordless phones and wireless routers there are in a modern, central London block of flats, and you’ll get the idea.

It’s frequency band bedlam out there, and the effect is slower, more unreliable wireless networks. Now take a look at the 5GHz band at the same location:

The difference is quite staggering — an oasis of calm by comparison, with only PC Pro’s own dual-band wireless router interrupting the tranquil RF landscape.

If that doesn’t get you hankering after a dual-band router, then nothing will.

I’ve had a soft spot for Olympus’ retro PEN cameras ever since the E-P1 was released two years ago. The design harks back to the days when old-fashioned rangefinders were all the rage and photography was a game of patience, not instant gratification.

(It might also have something to do with the fact that I’m the proud owner of an Olympus 35SP 35mm camera – a legend in its own time, and a wonderful portrait camera.)

Nevertheless, the original E-P1 did have its flaws. Quality was great but not quite a match for a DSLR, and performance, particularly with the contrast detect autofocus system, was sluggish. Olympus is aiming to address those issues with the PEN E-P3, which I had the chance to tinker with yesterday.

Olympus is set to unleash three new PEN models: the top-end E-P3, with which I took all of the photographs on this page (except for the stock shots of the cameras themselves); the mid-range PEN Lite E-PL3; and the PEN Mini, aimed at novices who want a simple camera that offers better quality than a compact.

I only had eyes for the 12.3-megapixel E-P3. Top of the PEN range and the first to hit UK shops in August, it’s set to cost an eye-watering £799. It includes a 14-42mm kit lens, and features a number of key improvements over its predecessor.

The sensor is still a micro four-thirds, which is smaller than the one you’ll find in Sony’s superb NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras, but the hardware is new. The image processing engine is improved too, with sensitivity levels of up to 12,800 ISO.

Olympus also claims to have boosted autofocus speed, dubbing the new system (rather unimaginatively) Fast AF. It certainly felt snappier than the original, although general performance didn’t feel up to the levels of a DSLR.

There are plenty of other improvements on the cards too: a built-in pop-up flash; a cracking 3in, 460-kpixel OLED capacitive touchscreen with touch focus and shutter release functions; 1080/60i video recording with live autofocus; plus a range of hugely impressive in-camera “art” filters, which can be applied to video and combined to create compound effects (as you can see from the shots on this page).

The other two new PENs feature the same core sensor and image-processing engine, but differ slightly in size and features. The PEN Lite boasts a tiltable LCD, but has no touchscreen and a reduced number of on-body controls. The PEN Mini, meanwhile, is targeted at the point-and-shoot brigade: it’s compact but has no tilt or touchscreen, and on-body controls are minimal with most settings accessed via the 3in screen.

Olympus is adding a pair of new prime lenses to its micro four-thirds armoury: a 12mm (24mm equivalent) f/2.0 and a 45mm (90mm equivalent) f/1.8 portrait lens.

The big question is whether the E-P3 or any of its siblings can dethrone the current king of the SLD (single lens direct view) segment: Sony’s NEX range. We’ll deliver our verdict when we’ve got our hands on a review sample, but for now the new PENs are looking good.

Toshiba first showed off its glasses-free 3D laptop as a concept back in February – and the company has now put flesh on those bones, giving it a name, launch date and a price. At a press launch in central London, Toshiba announced it would be shipping the Qosmio F750 to UK retail outlets in August.

3D laptops are nothing new – we’ve seen quite a few in the past couple of years – but the difference with the Qosmio F750 is that it features a lenticular 3D display, which means you benefit from the full 3D effect without having to don a pair of uncomfortable specs.

Although a little on the grainy side, the demo videos Toshiba showed us exhibited an appreciable degree of depth. You can view both 2D and 3D material onscreen simultaneously plus, in a clever twist, you don’t have to be facing the dead centre of the screen to see perfect 3D.

The laptop’s webcam tracks the position of your eyes, adjusting the screen’s lenticular lens layer accordingly. That worked well, although the effect wasn’t instantaneous, with a slight lag as the screen adjusted itself to new eye positions.

The chassis itself is nothing to write home about. The bright red plastic lid and carbon-effect interior look smart, but the laptop itself is thick and chunky. But the Qosmio F750 does back up its clever 3D tricks with an interesting specification.

The CPU is a 2GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM accompanied by 6GB of DDR3 RAM, while Nvidia’s mid-range (but still fast) GeForce GT 540M powers the graphics. For audio you get a pair of Harmon Kardon-branded stereo speakers, storage comprises a 640GB hard disk, plus there’s a Blu-ray XL drive built-in – a first for a laptop as far as we’re aware – allowing you to write to optical discs up to 100GB in capacity.

On the rear, a coaxial aerial connector suggests the laptop will ship with an integrated TV tuner, and the F750’s 15.6in screen is a Full HD unit.

A bigger catch, however, is that, to grab yourself some of this juicy new 3D technology, you’re going to have to splash the cash. The F750 is set to cost around £1,300 inc VAT when it launches in August, a price which looks set to restrict the Qosmio to 3D enthusiasts only.