Would anyone miss the Break and SysRq keys?

Monday, June 29th, 2009

If there’s one PC peripheral that’s seen about as much change as the Queen’s hairdo over the past 20 years, it’s the keyboard. Sure there have been attempts to jazz it up with ergonomic layouts, wireless transmitters and models with flashy shortcut buttons, but by and large, if someone plugged a 1989 model keyboard into your PC you’d barely notice the difference.

The deathly pace of keyboard evolution is actually a barrier to progress, according to HP vice president Phil McKinley, who I met last week. “The keyboard is still a hugely intimidating factor for users,” he told me, referring especially to users in developing countries who haven’t grown up with computers. “It still has a System Request and Break key on the keyboard. When was the last time you touched the Break key?” he asked.

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First look: the Ion-powered Lenovo Ideapad S12

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Lenovo’s Ideapad S12 is one of the first netbooks we’ve seen to use Nvidia’s Ion platform, which can allegedly “turn a netbook into a notebook” thanks to its combination of Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia GeForce 9400M GPU.

It’s a new part that’s only been used by Acer up until now, in its netbooks and A-Listed Aspire Revo R3600.

That ambitious claim comes courtesy of Matt Wuebbling, a senior manager in Nvidia’s notebook division, who’ll understandably talk up the chances of his own product in the face of endless scepticism. However, having been hands-on with Lenovo’s latest offering and seeing the Ion in action, we’ve seen plenty of evidence to support his claims.

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Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds has us seeing double

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Laptops, I have no doubt you’re tired of hearing, are taking over the world. Slowly but surely over the past decade or so, sales of portable computers have caught up and overtaken sales of desktops to the point at which most ordinary folk wouldn’t even contemplate buying a hulking great desktop machine.

But you still wouldn’t replace a graphics workstation machine with a laptop, would you? Well, if first impressions are anything to go by, you might if you had the chance to swap it for one of Lenovo’s W700ds workstation laptops.

You may have seen it before on various blogs and news websites, including perhaps our very own – it’s the one with two screens (the DS bit stands for dual screen), and understandably we were very keen to get one in.

But nothing quite prepared us for our first meeting with it…

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, February 6th, 2009

A week heavy on peripherals saw a video camera with an ultra-slow-motion mode, Dell’s entry into the fledgling pico-projector market, a mouse which reads your palm and one of the cheapest PC and monitor bundles we’ve ever seen.

Jumping killer whales and pico blues

Sanyo’s HD2000 pistol-grip camcorder has a special trick – it can record 1080p video at 60fps, and can even reach 600fps for those Planet Earth-style animal action shots if you don’t mind sub-YouTube resolutions. Its video quality may not quite reach excellence but its all-in-one ability to take good video and stills makes it a strong choice at a good price.

Another strong choice, but at a more premium price, was the superb LaCie 324 monitor. The 24in panel displays 92% of the NTSC gamut, and during our tests it had cooing crowds gathered around it as the ultimate endorsement. Bringing images alive in a way standard monitors just can’t match, it earned a deserved recommendation for professionals.

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Christmas came and went, New Year flew past with a bang but PC Pro’s reviews kept on coming. We’ve much catching up to do with this week’s round-up, so we’ll keep the focus on the most notable of the twenty-plus reviews since the festive period.

New Year’s entertainment

We got unfeasibly possessive over a little media player in the Labs, thanks to the fabulous AMOLED screen on Cowon’s S9. It shared so many strengths with the iPod Touch, but with its individually lit pixels – no backlight required – it breathed new life into those iPlayer programmes we’d saved over Christmas. A truly stunning screen and a very nice little device.

On the subject of screens, the oddly named Village Tronic ViBook arrived to extend the life of our old office TFTs. It attaches to the back and converts any display to work over DisplayLink – essentially USB – to run multiple monitors without the need for multiple video outputs. Will 2009 be the year of DisplayLink?

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Lenovo’s W700DS – the twin-headed laptop

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Lenovo may have already announced its latest laptop workstation, the hulking W700, but we only just recently caught a high-resolution glimpse of its more esoteric cousin, the W700DS.

Take a look at the pictures above and you can play a thrilling game of spot the difference. Is it the integrated Wacom graphics tablet lurking to the right of the trackpad? No, sorry, they both have one of those, try again. Is it the integrated X-Rite Pantone colour calibration sensor for discerning design professionals? No, you’re getting a teeny bit warmer though.

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First glance: Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 all-in-one

Monday, January 5th, 2009

This is the first photo of Lenovo’s glamorous looking all-in-one, the IdeaCentre A600. The 21.5in frameless screen offers a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, helping to take full advantage of the optional Blu-ray player. 

Intriguingly, The IdeaCentre has a Wii-like remote control that allows you to move the cursor around the screen simply by waving the remote around like a wand.

The PC packs an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, dedicated ATI Radeon graphics and up to 1TB of hard disk space.

There’s no word on a UK release yet, but the A600 will be released in the US in April, starting at $999. We’ll bring you more news on the IdeaCentre if it ever graces our shores.  

Samsung’s 360-degree turnaround

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

I spent the end of last week poking around the Samsung X360, and found that it fell short in several areas. One of these was the optical drive: whereas rivals from Sony and Lenovo manage to cram optical drives into the svelte dimensions, the Samsung doesn’t bother.

I found myself thinking that, well, maybe this isn’t actually a bad thing – in our day-to-day lives, who uses their optical drive on a regular basis any more?

My laptop is used on the train or on the sofa, for example, and I’m normally playing a game or working. The game doesn’t use a disc, and neither does Microsoft Word. Listening to music doesn’t need a CD anymore, as I have my mp3 player, and the vast majority of applications that I have on my laptop don’t require the CD in the drive to boot.

Of course, Samsung has included a USB DVD drive if you need to use a CD, but the excellent battery life means that this, surely, can be left at home more often than not – it’ll usually be wheeled out for an occasional product install, for instance.

I suppose that the optical drive could now be considered virtually redundant for the majority of users most of the time. It also appears that the Macbook Air may have actually done something right. What do you think?

Just in: Lenovo’s netbook – the IdeaPad S10e

Friday, December 19th, 2008

It’s been a long time coming, but Lenovo’s entry into the netbook fray, the IdeaPad S10e, has finally landed in PC Pro’s labs.

As the name suggests it’s a 10in netbook and – yes, you guessed it – it’s got an Intel Atom N270 inside and 1GB of RAM. So far, so very, very familiar.  

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Free laptops for life, monitors sprouting mini offspring, Toshiba’s first netbook and an open source media player from the chaps behind Firefox – it’s been a busy week for reviews.

Firefox vs iTunes

Surely the most interesting release of the week was from Mozilla. Although its been in development for a few years, Songbird finally saw an official release, with a media player and browser in one. Darien was hopeful it could finally give him an alternative to iTunes: “Since it’s open source, freely extensible and unfettered by corporate interests, Songbird’s future looks bright.” Try it and let us know what you think.

Not just for christmas

Fujitsu stole the headlines with its offer of a free laptop every three years forever, and Jon reckons “if you’re a cheapskate and don’t mind being tied to one brand for the rest of your life it’s got to be worth looking into”. If the best you can get is the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7720, however, you’ll probably be turning them down on their kind offer.

Dell’s Inspiron 1318 is a much more tempting proposition, with a price tag of just £383 exc VAT putting it dangerously close to netbook territory. Sasha was impressed by the ”portable chassis with great ergonomics and fine battery life – a potent combination”, and more than enough to earn it an award. 

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