GoPro camera strapped to a remote-control helicopter: the ultimate boy’s toy

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

So how did I come to strap a GoPro camera to a remote control helicopter? (Play video in full screen and select 1080p option for best quality.)

At the recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, I was walking down an aisle between two large stands, and felt my hair being gently rustled by a powerful draft from above. Looking up, I saw a quad helicopter sitting a few feet above my head. It was perfectly stable, and under the control of someone off in the distance. It gently, and oh so accurately moved down the hallway, turned right and came to a landing.

Now remote control helicopters are not new. And ones that talk to your iPhone or iPad aren’t new either. Indeed, I bought the AR.Drone when it first shipped. It gave me two live camera feeds back to my iPad, and the facility to record the video. The only problem was that it was rubbish.

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Acer Iconia A1 review: first look

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

The Acer Iconia A1 is the latest of a flurry of compact budget tablets to have hit the market recently. It was launched alongside the exotic Aspire R7 and Aspire P3 at the company’s annual Global Press Conference in New York.

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Acer Aspire P3 review: first look

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

The Acer Aspire P3, launched at a glitzy New York press event in New York, wants desperately to be a rival to the Microsoft Surface. At first glance it looks like it could be: it has a keyboard cover, just like the Surface, and that cover can be folded over so you can use it  as a tablet or prop it up at an angle for use in laptop mode.

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Acer Aspire R7 review: first look

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

We’ve seen some wacky hybrids in recent months, but the recently launched Acer Aspire R7 has gone further out on a limb than most. Its hinge, dubbed the “Ezel”, resembles the central support strut of an all-in-one PC more than a laptop hinge, and it delivers a surprising amount of flexibility.

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Google Now draining iPhone battery

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Google Now was added to the Google Search app for iPhone and iPad earlier this week, and already appears to have infuriated many users with excessive battery drain.

Google Now provides a series of cards that deliver location-based data, such as how long it will take you to get home from your current location, local restaurant reviews, and how far you’ve walked this week. This obviously requires the app to make use of the iPhone’s GPS chip, and users of the app may have noticed that the GPS notification icon is now almost permanently displayed in the status bar at the top of the home screen.

GPS is one of the more battery-intensive tasks on a phone. Anyone who’s used a satnav app, such as TomTom, will attest how quickly the battery drains when the GPS is in constant use.

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3D printers: five things I’ve learnt

Friday, April 19th, 2013

 
This week, I’ve been playing with a 3D printer. The Afinia H-Series – also known as the Up! Plus – arrived on Monday, and I’ve been fiddling with it more or less non-stop since then. There will be a full dissection of the technology in a future issue of PC Pro, but here are some of my initial impressions from my first few days of tinkering.
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Raspberry Pi Fuze enclosure revives 1980s micros

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

This post was updated on 13 May 2013 to add information about the Fuze’s project cards and final hardware design.

It’s fair to say the Raspberry Pi is a hit with at least two constituencies. Without a doubt it’s captured the imaginations of youngsters attracted to its simple versatility. To those of us from an older generation, it also has a certain nostalgia value, harking back to the days when bare circuit boards were de rigueur and writing your own software was all part of the fun.

It’s appropriate then that the Fuze enclosure – made by Aylesbury-based Binary Distribution – looks like something that itself fell out of the eighties. Following consciously in the footsteps of the BBC Micro, Binary Distribution has aimed the Fuze at schools – a fact which explains its tough, aluminium casing. Each unit comes with a deck of 16 colourful and jovially written project cards (aimed at key stages one to four) that guide students through the fundamentals of BASIC programming, starting with a classic Hello World program and moving on to more advanced concepts such as variables and loops.

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How to move from iPhone to Android

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

For the past three years – since the launch of the iPhone 3GS – I’ve been firmly in the iOS camp. For the past week, however, I’ve been testing the HTC One (you can read my verdict on the device in our HTC One review).

Making the move from iOS to Android was a damned-sight less painful than I anticipated. Within a matter of minutes, I had all of my contacts, music and other data transferred or accessible from the HTC One.

If you’re thinking about making the move from iPhone to Android, here’s how to make the transition as easy as possible.

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Windows Phone 8 support and the deafening FUD

Monday, March 18th, 2013

Some websites appear to be using the Excel Web App to help them write their stories on the revelation that Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows Phone 8 in less than two years’ time, putting two and two together and coming up with five.

The incriminating evidence, dredged up from a nether region of the Microsoft Support site, shows that support for Windows Phone 8 is due to expire on 8 July 2014 – less than 18 months from now and (oddly, at first appearance) before support for Windows Phone 7.8 expires in September 2014.

Some of our more excitable colleagues at rival publications (I shan’t name them, they don’t deserve the Google juice) have suggested that this means Microsoft is yanking the carpet from underneath Windows Phone buyers again, and that customers who buy a Windows Phone today will be using an unsupported OS by the time their two-year contract expires.

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Samsung just cut Google out of Android

Friday, March 15th, 2013

In this month’s PC Pro, our Talking Point asks whether Samsung’s Galaxy brand is now bigger than Google? Had we written that after last night’s launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4, I suspect the conclusions would have been rather different.

Make no mistake: Samsung just shafted Google. The company spent about 10% of last night’s launch event talking about the new hardware, and the remainder of “the show” unveiling a phalanx of new services, many of which fall into direct competition with Google’s own. Android has effectively become a piece of open-source firmware on Samsung’s latest handset, not the money-generating gateway to services that Google intended it to be.

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