All the week’s reviews

Friday, January 16th, 2009

For those of you not swamped by tax return gubbins – we’ll shamelessly plug our ‘How to avoid tax return hell‘ feature at this point – it’s been a PC-centric week on reviews, but with some interesting variations on the usual black box design.

All-in-one PCs and Phenomenal CPUs

The Mesh Matrix II was a traditional PC, but inside sat one of AMD’s brand new Phenom II processors. We put it through its paces and it blew the old Phenoms away; it’s not up there with the recent Core i7s from Intel, but the price makes it a real competitor. The Mesh PC it came in was pretty special too, earning six stars out of six in our review. (more…)

Hands on: NEC’s Intel Classmate PC

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

The BETT education technology show at London’s Olympia was heaving today, suggesting that education may be one of the few sectors of the IT industry that isn’t yet suffering as a result of the economic meltdown.

Few stands, however, were attracting as much attention as the ones sporting Intel’s new Classmate PCs. NEC’s version of the Classmate is called the Otomo, and we managed to get our hands on the device for a few minutes on the BETT showfloor.

As we reported yesterday, the child-friendly laptop sports a new design that allows you to swivel the screen from the traditional laptop configuration into a tablet PC. A built-in accelerometer rotates the screen depending on which up way the tablet is being held – whether that be landscape or portrait – although it was certainly a little temperamental on  the pre-release version that we had our hands on.

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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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All the week’s reviews

Friday, December 12th, 2008

This week’s the reviews desk has been in a professional mood, with some high-end peripherals dominating proceedings.

The monstrous NEC MultiSync LCD3090WQXi was set up in the Labs for all of eight seconds before a drooling crowd had gathered to marvel at its stunning colour reproduction and ginormous 30in, 2,560 x 1,600 H-IPS panel. Yes, it’s a £1,400 investment, but if you compare it to the main professional-level competition we reckon it actually looks like quite a bargain.

Continuing the professional theme was the Epson Stylus Photo R2880, the flagship of its A3 range. Remarkably quiet in use, extremely simple to use and maintain, and using not one but three separate black inks (surely Light Light Black is just Grey?) it’s a photographer’s dream. Even at £357 plus VAT it’s a quality investment for any semi-pro.

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