With Ultrabooks making laptops more slender than ever, it feels somewhat counterproductive to continue lugging a full-sized mouse around if you can’t get on with the touchpad. Logitech claims to have the answer with the incongruously named Cube.

As you’ll see from the photo, it’s not a cube – in fact, when I first saw it on the table at the CES Showstoppers event last night, I thought it was a discarded box of matches.

However, this diminutive little device is a portable mouse cum presentation clicker. The entire upper surface of the device is touch surface. You tap the top of the Cube for a left-click, near the middle for a right-click, and run your finger along the surface to scroll. To move the cursor, you drag the little box of tricks around like a mouse.

Read more

I’ll get one thing out of the way immediately: this is a blisteringly fast phone. Using it reminded me of moving from Windows Vista to Windows 7: everything just snaps into place, with no judder and no hesitation.

You might ask, “so what?” And that’s a fair argument. I’ve never heard an iPhone 4 owner moan about the speed of the interface, or anyone who’s bought a recent Android phone for that matter.

But there is something psychologically satisfying about using a phone that jumps in response to commands; going back to my usual phone afterwards, things seemed to be in slow motion.

Read more

Dell doesn’t have a stand here at CES in Las Vegas, but it does have its name up in bright lights on the Strip – although not in a good way.

A Dell Precision WorkStation 300 Series is clearly used to power one of the giant signs just along from our hotel, but instead of displaying details of Celine Dion’s Vegas Warblefest or some such nonsense, it’s currently displaying nothing but the BIOS screen.

Read more

“Just put your signature there,” said the ioSafe rep. “It’s nothing to worry about. Oh, but one thing. Whatever Dr Megavolt says, do it.”

I didn’t argue, merely noted from the indemnity document I was about to sign that it would be a very, very bad idea to place my fingers outside the Faraday cage I was stepping into.

A few minutes earlier Dr Megavolt had explained what was going to happen: a million volts would be sent through an ioSafe Thunderbolt external hard drive, which was protected by a titanium cover.

Everything would be fine, right? Well, as we were about to discover, things weren’t necessarily that straightforward.

In a city where a woman stood on a street corner dressed as Catwoman didn’t even bat the eyelids of passers-by, it can be pretty hard to grab people’s attention. But Lenovo achieved that feat at CES today, by sending out someone to test drive its new Ultrabook – on the roof of a stretch Hummer.

You might think driving around with a man sat using a laptop on the roof of the car would attract the attention of the local constabulary, and you’d be right…

Read more

One of the major complaints my colleagues at PC Pro have had about Windows 8 is that the touch-focused OS is annoying to use with a non-touch enabled laptop.

Convertible laptops and touchscreen desktops could help get around the problem, but eye-tracking firm Tobii has come up with a better idea.

Read more

A few months ago Engadget posted a blog about what people would like to improve about their Series 9. If the official line is to be believed, the 15in version was a very specific reaction to this.

Read more

There are some times when photos of laptops can fool you: they look beautiful when blessed with stunning lighting and clever angles of photography, but when you actually see them in the flesh it’s like going on a blind date with a “slim, athletic and handsome man” and ending up with Danny de Vito (sorry Danny).

Read more

The phone watch is an idea that just isn’t going away, with a different spin of the concept produced pretty much every year at CES. But this time, Sony assures us, it’s really going to happen and it’s really going to be fabulous.

Read more

CES Unveiled is the traditional curtain raiser for CES, allowing a limited number of companies access to journalists for three hours on the Sunday evening before the show starts proper. Autonomy, the company that reportedly cost HP a cool $11.7 billion back in August 2011, was one such company, and we caught a demo of its augmented reality technology.

The video is streamed directly to the app once it recognises the image, and then saved locally so that it can be viewed without eating up your data on subsequent occasions. For people like me, who can’t recognise faces almost a minute after I’ve been introduced to someone, the business card application looks particularly interesting.