Is it too much to expect an iPhone to last two years?

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

I’ve heard countless stories of exceptional customer service from Apple. Without wishing to be the type of person who tweets the storyline to Game of Thrones before it’s aired, Jon Honeyball writes about another example of Apple’s superb customer care in a forthcoming issue of PC Pro. Apple is so keen to avoid upsetting customers, it even replaces stolen iPhones without question.

And it’s not just folklore and anecdotes that gives Apple a good name: the company won last year’s reader-voted PC Pro Excellence Award for both smartphones and laptops, with an industry leading customer service score of 85% in the latter.

So I was surprised to see Apple’s petulant response this week, when it was effectively forced to bring its warranties in line with EU law and extend the minimum period of coverage from one to two years.

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HP Z1 workstation review: first look

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

All-in-one machines tend to trade versatility for style and space-saving, so HP’s new Z1 workstation came as a bit of a shock.

In similar fashion to the TouchSmart 610, this business machine’s 27in screen tilts down to a horizontal base. It’s an impressive feat, but it’s not the Z1’s main party trick. Click the green tab on the stand and the 27in screen lifts away in a smooth motion — helped by the sort of hydraulic cylinder that’s usually found on a car boot — and the entirety of the machine’s internals are laid bare.

It’s the first time we’ve seen an all-in-one prove so versatile when it comes to component access, and HP hasn’t just lazily screwed a motherboard to the inside of its machine; instead, it’s clear that plenty of thought has gone into the Z1’s design. The Nvidia Quadro graphics card slots into a PCI Express 3.0 slot that takes inspiration from SO-DIMMs found in laptops, and it’s powered by a bespoke adapter that plugs in seamlessly when the card’s installed.

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SuperMicro showcases Xeon E5 GPU supercomputer

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Intel’s new Xeon E5 series will be powering plenty of application servers in the near future. But at CeBIT, high-end hardware company SuperMicro has demonstrated another use for the platform: as the basis of a GPU-based supercomputer. (more…)

Carl Zeiss Cinemizer OLED review: first look

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Last September, at IFA, Sasha Muller experienced Sony’s HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer and was suitably impressed. Now, at CeBIT, optics giant Carl Zeiss has got in on the action with its slightly sinister-looking Cinemizer OLED headset display.

As the name suggests, Zeiss’ 3D goggle display uses OLED technology to produce an image that’s startlingly bright and vibrant – though, it must be said, not as immersive as Sony’s, owing to a conservative frame size that simulates a 40in display at two meters. Resolution isn’t stellar either: at 870 x 500 per eye, there’s enough detail to enjoy movies and the like, but the image has a definite pixelated quality. On the plus side, the 3D effect is rock solid – as it should be, since each eye gets its own dedicated screen. (more…)

Archos 80 G9 Turbo ICS tablet review: first look

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

The original Archos 80 G9 Android tablet was released in October. It turned heads with its unusual 8in frame and, more to the point, its £200 price tag for the 8GB model. The general consensus, however, was that it felt cheap and plasticky, and the screen suffered from an annoying “ripple” effect when the slightest pressure was applied to the casing.

Archos hasn’t given up on the idea, though, and at CeBIT we had the chance to play with its revision of the 80 G9.

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The new iPad review: first look

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

The tablet we’ve all been expecting was finally unveiled by Apple CEO Tim Cook today, ending a week of feverish speculation in the press. And “the new iPad” as it’s entirely uninspiringly named, is very much as expected.

The headline upgrade is the move to a higher resolution, ‘Retina’-style display at an astonishing 2,048 x 1,536. That’s higher even than the Asus Transformer Prime’s 1,920 x 1,200 screen, which we looked at last week in Barcelona, and leads to a total pixel count of 3.1 million.

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Hardware diagnostics at the push of a button

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

When your PC is behaving erratically, tracking down the culprit can be a titanic task, involving swapping out the memory, CPU, graphics card, power supply, motherboard and more. At CeBIT, German system specialist Toolhouse has been demonstrating hardware diagnostic tools which can take the pain out of the process.

The principle is simple: boot from a USB stick into ToolHouse’s bespoke test environment and all components will be thoroughly tested, including the CPU, drives, memory, graphics and networking hardware. For more insidious problems, ToolHouse also makes a PCI card with its own two-digit LED display providing easy-to-decode numeric status codes (useful for motherboards that lack them) and convenient contact points for attaching your own electrical meter.

For now, ToolHouse’s main business is in Germany, though English-language versions of its tools are available on request. If you’d like to try out its tools, and brush up your German at the same time, you can download trials of some of ToolHouse’s products. Be warned, it doesn’t come cheap: the Windows-based diagnostic suite costs €229, while the full Linux-based suite costs a steep €299. But for a busy IT department that could pay for itself very quickly indeed.

Turn your iPhone or iPad into a projector

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Tucked away in a corner of CeBIT, Taiwanese manufacture Aiptek – manufacturer of one of the first “pico-projectors” back in early 2009 – has been showing off a novel idea: pico-projector modules that plug into an iPhone or iPad, turning the device into a portable slide viewer or movie projector.

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Toshiba AT470 review: first look

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

If you’ve listened to PC Pro’s most recent podcast, you might have heard us fawning over Samsung’s latest tablet, the gloriously petite Galaxy Tab 7.7. Well, it seems Samsung isn’t the only manufacturer with a mini-sized slate on its mind, and Toshiba gave us a quick glimpse at a prototype model of its very own 7.7in tablet, the AT470.

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Toshiba Qosmio X870 review: first look

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Toshiba today unveiled its newly honed range of consumer laptops. But, in amongst the troop of affordable 13in, 15in and 17in models, there lay something far more exciting – its latest 17.3in gaming laptop, the Qosmio X870.

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