Spotify for iPhone: first look

Monday, September 7th, 2009

The eagerly awaited music-streaming service Spotify has today arrived on both the iPhone App Store and on Android’s Marketplace, and I’ve been granted a seven-day guest pass to see if it’s really worth that £10-a-month premium account.

Over the course of a year that does seem like a lot of money – particularly as most users will already have huge music collections of their own – but the promise of millions of tracks available on the move is certainly tempting.

Starting up

Once logged in, you’ll be delighted to see all of your desktop playlists seamlessly synced with Spotify on your phone, and if that’s what you’re after you can just dive straight in. (more…)

First look: Corel Digital Studio 2010

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I’ve just hot-footed it back from the London launch of Corel Digital Studio 2010. The product is a combination of photo and video editing software, along with apps for burning and watching DVDs, all for the very reasonable (suggested) price of £60. But is it any good?

It’s certainly very slick. Both the PaintShop Photo Express and Video Studio Express applications share a common interface, which is clearly focused on making the software as easy to use as possible. In fact, if I had a pound for every time the words “easy” or “simple” were used in the hour-long demonstration, I wouldn’t have bothered coming back here to write this blog post, and would by now be sipping champagne with a lovely lady on my knee in one of Soho’s finest establishments.

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First look: Sony VAIO X-Series

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

We got our hands on an early sample of the all-new Sony VAIO X-Series at Sony’s pre-IFA show, and to say it looks an impressive feat of engineering completely understates matters.

Let’s get the facts out of the way first. This is the world’s lightest ever laptop, weighing less even than the Sony VAIO P-Series – and that weighed in at 640g.

Hold the X-Series in your hands and it feels breathtakingly light. Once you pick it up, you don’t want to put it down. (more…)

Mac OS X 10.6: a quick look at Snow Leopard

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

It wasn’t mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. It barely got a mention in the newspapers. Many non-Apple interest web sites didn’t mention it. When I went to the flagship Apple Store in Regents Street on Friday lunch time, there weren’t queues round the block (though there were a few inside). It seems that Apple have managed to launch a new product without all the usual fuss.

However, I am sure that everyone who reads this article will know that Snow Leopard is the update to Mac OS X that was released last week. Obviously as a keen Mac user, I did go and buy it on the day it launched and I did install it on my MacBook over the weekend but was it worth the £25 I paid for it?

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Can Lexmark change the way we buy printers?

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Lexmark’s inkjet printers have had a pretty rough ride from PC Pro in recent reviews and Greg Caster, senior development manager for inkjet R&D, admitted to me yesterday that its 2008 range was simply a step behind its competitors. To change that, Lexmark is finally moving to individual inks for its next all-wireless range of inkjet all-in-ones, and introducing a fantastic touchscreen interface that I’ll come to later.

But the real news for me – and for anyone who ever has trouble choosing a printer – is the way Lexmark’s eight-product line has been assembled.

Currently, buying a printer is a confusing experience, with too many competing manufacturers, each with too many printer ranges that contain too many similar models and accept too many different cartridge types. Even within a single manufacturer’s product range, the variation in quality and speed can be staggering.

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Meet Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destroyer

Friday, August 14th, 2009

If your job involves having to destroy hard disks and make sure that their data is impossible to recover, you’ll know that it can be an expensive business: properly disposing of each hard disk can cost between £5 and £10 and, when you’re managing the IT affairs of potentially large businesses, these costs can mount up.

One IT Manager has had enough, though, and taken the matter into this own hands by creating the Bustadrive, a machine that uses a powerful “hydraulic punch” to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable.

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Twitter goes down (again) but will it soon be counted out for good?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that. (more…)

First look: the Virgin Media Freedom netbook

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

While mobile broadband dongles are undoubtedly well-matched with netbooks, most mobile broadband firms offer third-party netbooks with their respective dongle deals: T-Mobile bundles its dongle with an Eee PC 904HD, Vodafone entices customers with a Samsung NC10 and Orange lets prospective buyers choose between HP, Asus, Samsung and Toshiba models.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

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First look: RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Earlier today I got my hot hands on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520, and thanks to our lovely art team we’ve managed to get a few nice photos to highlight its features.

Front on, the most interesting item is slap bang in the middle: a trackpad. This works almost identically to a normal laptop trackpad, except you press it to select on an item. Opinion in the PC Pro office is so far mixed: I found it intuitive, though it’s a little fiddly as you can’t jump about the screen as quickly as I’d like, whereas our esteemed news & features editor, Barry Collins, simply couldn’t get on with it at all. (more…)

Office 2010 Applications & Editions

Monday, July 13th, 2009

The, invitation only, Office 2010 Technical Preview has finally started and Microsoft have released details of which applications are going to be available in which editions of the Office suite.

As the information is a little difficult to take in, I thought I’d do a quick summary table.

The main changes are the reduction of the number of editions from eight to five and the fact that the Small Business Edition (which had more applications than Standard Edition) is retired and replaced by the new Home & Business Edition (which has fewer applications than Standard Edition). Another change is that Standard Edition is only going to be available through Volume Licensing.

Some very good news is that all editions will now carry OneNote. Hooray!

Update: Just for clarification, the spot against Web Apps in the table above is the right to run the new Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote web based applications on your own server hardware. Everyone will have access to the Web Apps free through Office Live or through a hosted subscription service.