Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 review: first look

Monday, February 27th, 2012

We were impressed with the 5.3in Samsung Galaxy Note when we reviewed it as part of our smartphone megatest in PC Pro recently, and it seems to have gone down a storm with Android enthusiasts since its launch just before Christmas. Now, Samsung is extending the Note brand into tablets with the Galaxy Note 10.1.

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Asus Transformer Pad Infinity 700 series review: first look

Monday, February 27th, 2012

All the headlines might have been stolen today by the Padfone, but Asus hasn’t put all of its eggs in one basket. At its MWC press conference, Asus also announced a renaming of its tablet range – from Eee Pad Transformer to Transformer Pad – and introduced a new, phone-free Transformer tablet.

Dubbed the Transformer Pad Infinity 700 series, it’s Asus’ new flagship tablet. At first glance there doesn’t look to be much difference between it and its predecessor, the Transformer Prime, which was the first tablet to support Android 4.

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Asus Padfone review: first look

Monday, February 27th, 2012

Asus first showed off its Padfone concept at Computex last year, but today was the first chance we’ve had to see the device in the flesh, with fully confirmed specifications.

If you haven’t seen it before, the Padfone is essentially a smartphone and tablet combo device. It’s a smartphone with a 4.3in screen for when you’re out on the road; and when more screen real estate is required, you simply slot the phone into a bay at the rear of the tablet part and the whole shebang is transformed into a 10.1in tablet. Anything you might have been doing on the phone is instantly transferred to the bigger screen of the tablet.

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HTC one X review: first look

Monday, February 27th, 2012

HTC has been producing some solid phones of late, but they haven’t been all that sleek or sexy. That all looks to be changing, though, with the latest range of phones – the HTC one series – launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The range is headed by the HTC one X, a smartphone that borrows more than one design cue from the Nokia Lumia 800. It’s built from a single, sleek chunk of polycarbonate (the same stuff used in ice hockey helmets according to one HTC spokesman). It has ‘micro-drilled’ speaker perforations and its 4.7in Gorilla Glass screen is even turned over at the edges like the Lumia’s.

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LG Optimus Vu review: first look

Monday, February 27th, 2012

With the big, beautiful Samsung Galaxy Note taking off in such an unexpected manner, it was only a matter of time before others followed suit to produce their own oversized handsets. The first to attempt the feat is LG, who showed off the Optimus Vu in a sneak preview event before the start of Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona.

The Vu is possibly the most unusual smartphone we’ve yet seen. On paper, its 5in screen isn’t quite as big as the Note’s 5.3in display, but the Vu does things differently. Instead of the smartphone standard 16:9 aspect ratio, the Vu’s screen is 4:3 – just like a tiny iPad. The resolution is an impressive 1,024 x 768, and behind the scenes is a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

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Will Apple’s Final Cut Pro X update placate the pros?

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

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.

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Switching to Office 365’s Outlook Web App

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

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.

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Amazon Kindle Fire review: first look

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

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.

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Ice Cream Sandwich on the Transformer Prime review: first look

Friday, January 13th, 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.

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The worst tech of 2011

Saturday, December 31st, 2011

There’s nothing more exciting than getting your hands on the latest technology. Occasionally, though, a product comes along that falls completely flat, or has a fatal flaw; a product that really should never have got past the design stage in the first place, let alone into the factory and onto the shelves.

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…

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