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?

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.

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.

With a 5.3in, 1,280 x 800 Super AMOLED display beaming forth, the Galaxy Note immediately grabs the attention. The display is eye-searingly bright, and colours are as rich and saturated as we’ve come to expect from Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology. The huge resolution gives the Galaxy Note a super crisp 285 ppi (pixels per inch) pixel density, which leaves it not too far behind the 326ppi of Apple’s iPhone 4 Retina display.

Small hands will struggle with the Galaxy Note’s 83mm width – not to mention the fact that persons of a smaller stature will look like they’re holding a full-sized tablet to their ear – but this giant smartphone felt perfectly manageable in my larger palms. The 9.65mm thickness gives the Galaxy Note a slim, dainty profile, and while Samsung made no mention of weight, it didn’t feel it unduly heavy.

There’s a trick hidden in the Galaxy Note’s bottom corner, however: a removable stylus that Samsung’s dubbed the S Pen.

This stylus partners with Samsung’s S Note software for making handwritten notes or even artistic sketches. It’s possible to choose from a variety of pen/brush types and thicknesses with the drop-down menu, and thanks to the Galaxy Note’s sizeable screen, inking feels natural and comfortable.

While it’s easy to scribble handwritten notes, or doodle to your heart’s content, you can also import pictures onto the canvas. While any photograph will do, it’s possible to grab a screenshot – from Google Maps, for instance – and then directly annotate it with the S Pen.

Basic handwriting recognition also allows you to use the S Pen within the Note’s messaging application. In our brief time with the Galaxy Note, however, it appeared that only single words could be converted, and there was a noticeable pause as the recognition process took place. Clearly, the Galaxy Note’s handwriting recogniton still has some way to go. Still, with Samsung planning to release the S Pen SDK to app developers, there’s a potentially bright future for pen-driven apps.

Happily, though, the S Pen makes a great partner with the pre-installed Swype keyboard – without a finger to obscure the view, we found it quicker to tap texts than ever.

Samsung’s also trying to tout the Note as a hybrid business device. With Juniper Networks’ Junos Pulse installed as standard – an SSL-enabled VPN service – and that high-resolution screen making remote desktop operation entirely feasible, the Galaxy Note is potentially more capable than a standard smartphone.

Going by the range of accessories on show, Samsung’s keen to stress the Note’s versatility. In addition to swish leather cases, larger styluses, docking stations and vehicle mounts, the appearance of Bluetooth keyboards seems to suggest that the Note is capable of much more than just phone, SMS and internet duties.

There’s no doubting the Galaxy Note’s potential. With a dual-core 1.4Ghz processor powering Google’s Android 2.3; 16GB or 32GB of internal memory; wireless networking that includes Bluetooth 3 and reaches up to dual-band 802.11n;  an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front-facing camera; GPS; and Full-HD video recording at 30fps, the Galaxy Note can hold its own against any smartphone on the market today.

But with no set price or mention of a release date, we’ll just have to sit patiently and wait for our very own review unit to arrive. Only then will we be able to tell whether Samsung’s over-sized smartphone is a genuine star in the making.

In the flesh, it’s stunning to behold. Measuring only 15.9mm at its thickest point, the Z830 impresses before you’ve even hit the power button. And where other Ultrabooks proudly proclaim their sub 1.4kg credentials, the Portege Z830 trumps them all:  at 1.12kg, Toshiba hasn’t just left every Ultrabook in its wake, it’s even trumped Sony’s VAIO Z Series.

Despite that headline-grabbing weight, the internal honeycomb struture allows it to feel unusually burly. Given its millimetre-thick stature, we could barely coax any flex out of the Z830’s base.

The lid, meanwhile, is more pliable – it brings to mind the taut, yet highly flexible likes of Sony’s VAIO Z Series – allowing it to absorb the shunts and knocks of a laptop on the road.

After spying the USB 3 port on the Z830’s right-hand side, and the SD card reader and audio inputs and outputs on the left, we initially assumed that Toshiba had been forced to compromise on connectivity; not so. Somehow Toshiba’s engineers have managed to squeeze in a comprehensive selection at the rear.

With two USB 2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI and a VGA socket, Toshiba’’s accepted zero compromise to achieve such a stunning form factor.  Wireless connectivity also includes all the usual faces: 802.11n (no confirmation whether dual-band is on the cards), Bluetooth 3.0 and optional 3G.

The backlit keyboard is very similar to that of Toshiba’s existing 13in notebooks. In our snatched minutes with the Z830, we noted a soft, cushioned key action, and there’s not a jot of flex anywhere to be found. The wide keys felt a little too squat for our liking, but we’ll hold off judgement on the keyboard until we get to play with the Z830 for a little longer.

There are no such issues with the touchpad, however. Again retaining the familiar Toshiba design and discrete clicky buttons, Toshiba’s clearly foregone flashy glass and buttonless designs for straightforward practicality: a good thing. A fingerprint reader hides in the middle, and it’s also possible to disable the touchpad with the button above.

Toshiba were  a little more coy when it came to exact specifications and pricing, stating that such information would be following in the coming weeks. They confirmed the basics, however:  as yet undisclosed variants of Intel’s second Generation Core processors will take the reins alongside a 128GB SSD and anything up to 6GB of RAM. Given that every other manufacturer has been happy to release the details of the CPUs in their Ultrabooks, we can’t help feeling that Toshiba’s got something new up its sleeve for the Z830.

Pricing will make all the difference to the fortunes of Toshiba’s featherweight Ultrabook, but with Portege and Satellite branded versions of the Z830 set to hit the shelves sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, it looks like the battle for the best Ultrabook has only just begun.

The firm’s European product director, Phil Blair, said the Radar was “designed around a social and mobile lifestyle”, and our hands-on time with the device certainly suggested that it’s got enough oomph to make Windows Phone 7’s Mango update feel slick, with no hint of slowdown or juddering as we navigated the various menus and applications.

The Radar feels extremely sturdy as it’s hewn from one piece of metal, and its 137g weight is partnered with a 11mm depth, so it’s far more pocketable than its super-sized stablemate, the HTC Titan. It’s just a shame that, as with other HTC phones, the design doesn’t exactly scream innovation or adventure.

Instead, the Radar bears more than a passing resemblance to the Android-equipped Desire S and, while that’s no bad thing, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that HTC’s handsets are falling behind in the looks department.

The 3.8in touchscreen is a mite smaller than most other smartphones we’re seeing these days, but the 480 x 800 resolution is on a par with most rivals – which means the capacitive panel is extremely sharp.

The screen is responsive, and looked to be serving up vibrant colours, albeit under the dimmed lightning of HTC’s venue. And if you’re not keen on its white finish, don’t worry – it’ll be available in black or grey, too.

The usual 1GHz processor is installed, and it’s partnered with 512MB of RAM alongside all of the usual bells and whistles – GPS, the full range of positional sensors, 802.11n Wi-Fi and a 5-megapixel camera.

The Mango update is the big draw here, and it comes with several interesting enhancements: true multitasking is included, feeds from various social networks are now integrated into the People area, and Windows Phone 7’s familiar tiles now come with more dynamic features, such as notifications of when you receive an instant message on Facebook or the latest weather updates.

Elsewhere, there’s turn-by-turn navigation, QR-code scanning, and support for synchronisation of Office 365 documents – ideal for those who like to work on the move.

So, what do you think? Is this the handset that’ll convince you of Windows Phone 7’s merits, would you rather splash out on a Titan, or are you still wary? You’ve got until October to make your mind up – so let us know in the comments.

The hardware

The 372g Tablet P measures 26mm thick and 180mm long. That’s a bit chunkier than the latest breed of slip-thin phones, but the thick-set, curvy figure fits comfortably in the hand. And, while we’d struggle to squeeze it in our jeans pockets, it’s still far more pocketable than any of the current breed of Android 3.2 tablets.

Push the Tablet P flat, though, and the two 1,024 x 480 5.5in displays combine to form a 7in, 1,024 x 960 resolution display. Despite the several millimetres of bezel in between, it works well and ensures that navigating Android 3.2 never feels unduly cramped.

The Tablet P’s novel dual-screen design makes it possible to use it in a variety of ways. Set it on the desk like a miniature laptop, and while the top screen displays video, pictures or text, the bottom screen can assume a variety of roles. While playing a video or music, it displays playback controls, elsewhere offering a gallery view or an on-screen keyboard.

The design really comes to life once you fire up one of the included PS One titles. Where the Tablet S floats its gaming controls at the sides of the screen, the Tablet P relegates them to the lower screen, which feels far more natural; more like a traditional portable gaming device, such as Nintendo’s DS.

Sony’s Reader Store reveals another trick: tilt the Tablet P round so that you’re holding it like a book, and text flows down each screen to mimic individual pages. The narrow 480 pixel resolution of each screen leaves the pages looking a touch narrow, though, and we’ll be interested to see how it copes with diagram-filled textbooks and the like.

Swiping left or right smoothly scrolls from page to page, while highlighting text allows you to search through books or refer to Wikipedia for rapid reference. With the Reader Store reaching the UK at the end of October, it’s a feature that’ll live or die on the pricing and selection of books on offer.

Specifications

The Tablet P’s tiny body doesn’t leave much room for a battery, but Sony claims that the P will survive 120 hours in standby, and up to 6 hours of web browsing via WiFi.

And though the Tablet P shares the same Tegra 2 processor as the Tablet S, its standard specifications are a little different. There’s only one model (part code SGPT212) which comes with 3G, a rather stingy 4GB of onboard memory and a 2GB microSD card. Those looking to carry around heaps of music and movies will need to invest in larger microSD media.

Though the Tablet P’s novelty factor will have gadget fiends salivating, the pricing may dampen their enthusiasm: at £479, we can’t help thinking that Sony is being just a touch optimistic.

Truth be told, the sheer size of the Titan made it feel a little awkward in our hands, but HTC has worked its familiar magic on the hardware.

The device feels rock-solid, it comes with the familiar matte rear and glossy bezel around the screen, and it’s also been made from one machined piece of aluminium. Impressively, it’s also only 9.9mm thick at its widest point.

Under the hood is one of the beefiest specifications we’ve seen on a smartphone. The 1.5GHz processor makes short work of the most demanding applications, and there’s 512MB of RAM and up to 16GB of storage, as well as an 8-megapixel camera.

The result is silky smooth operation, with Windows Phone 7’s distinctive menus, tiles and graphical effects handled without disruption, and apps opening with the minimum of loading times.

One interesting inclusion is DLNA compatibility, which should make it easy to stream media from your phone to a TV, and is a feature that’s only been seen so far on one Windows handset – the LG Optimus 7.

The 4.7in panel should afford plenty of on-screen real estate, but we were a little disappointed to find the Titan only comes with a resolution of 480 x 800. While menus and apps look pin-sharp, it feels like a wasted opportunity; after all, that’s the same number of pixels as the smaller Radar, and even less than the 540 x 960, 4.3in screen fitted to HTC’s current Android flagship, the Sensation.

Still, HTC’s European product director Phil Blair, claimed that Windows Phone 7’s latest update, Mango, was “such a step forward it deserves a new update”, and fans of the OS will have plenty to look forward to when the Titan is unleashed in October.

Perfect fit, or just too big? Let us know what you think of the Titan on the comments below.