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. The same could not be said of the Core i7-based Dell Studio XPS 435mt, which failed to impress us at all.

We had two PCs with integrated displays, both from PC World brand Advent, both interesting in different ways. The Advent AIO100 is the company’s net-top offering, with a bigger screen and a more grown-up design than the child-like Asus Eee Top. It’s Atom-powered, so not a speed-demon, but of the short list of net-tops we’ve seen it’s the best yet.

Then we had the Advent AIO200, a larger and dearer beast at £766 plus VAT, but with plenty more to offer. It had more style than we expected, a quad-core processor and a decent spec, so it actually surprised us by being really quite appealing. Whether it could knock our current A List champion from its throne was a different question entirely, though.

Peripherals and Google

Elsewhere we saw NEC go all green with its EA261WM monitor. With a 26in screen it might be a stretch to call it one for the environmentally conscious, but a gimmicky carbon footprint calculator encourages a lower brightness setting. It’s easily ignored – and probably will be by most people – but credit to NEC for trying something. As for the screen, we liked it but not enough to recommend.

We also got to play with Google Apps Premier Edition – is now the time to ditch your powerful apps and move everything online? Short answer: No. And we saw external hard disks from Memorex and Verbatim, as well as the stylish new Pure Avanti Flow internet radio.

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.

Intel has designed a chunky software interface to sit on top of the Windows XP operating system, so that pupils can merely jab at a button labelled ‘internet’ rather than scour the Start menu for Internet Explorer and wreak merry havoc in the Control Panel they found listed underneath. Clever design ensures that when kids lean their palm on the screen to write with the stylus, the palm press isn’t recognised as an input.

Though not a fully-ruggedised laptop, the Otomo certainly feels capable of withstanding the bumps and scrapes of playground life, with rubberised edges, splash-proof keyboard and a sturdy, extendable handle to hold the reasonably lightweight device by. We await the first newspaper report of a playground bully lamping his victim with a vicious swing of a Classmate laptop with uneasy anticipation.

NEC’s David Newbould assured us the laptop had been drop tested from 1m, although NEC’s literature claims a mere 50cm. Either way, we’d put £10 on it surviving an inadvertent freefall from a classroom desk.

Teacher in control

The most impressive part of the Classmate PC isn’t the hardware itself, but the teacher’s management software, which can be used to exert complete control over a classroom of networked Otomo laptops. The teacher can see what a child is doing on their PC without leaving their desk, simply by clicking on the pupil’s name. The teacher can broadcast a lesson to the entire class, or allow a child to share their screen with the group, allowing the child to present what they’ve been working on. No more standing at the front of the class and mumbling from a sheet of A4.

If the little swines are too pre-occupied with tapping away at their screens instead of listening to the teacher at the front, Sir or Miss can “silence” the entire class’s laptops at the touch of a button, which both mutes the Otomo and blacks out the screen at the same time. Feel the power.

The Otomo laptops can also be supplied with a “recharge cabinet”, a trolley that can be used to recharge the laptops when the kids have finished with them at the end of the day. The cabinet’s also networked, so software updates can be applied overnight, rather than disturbing class time. Pupils can also take the laptops home, with anti-theft software disabling a stolen laptop if it doesn’t connect to the school server at set times.     

NEC has yet to set final pricing for the Otomo, but NEC’s Newbould estimated a unit price of between £300-£400. That’s certainly not cheap in the netbook era, but would I want my kids to be taught on such a system? Absolutely.

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?

Nvidia continued its strategy of releasing superpowered graphics cards with the mighty GeForce GTX 295. With two chips on one board it’s lighting fast at the latest games, but are there really enough people out there willing to pay £400 for a graphics card?

Reviews editor Jon Bray is adamant that pocket “YouTube video cameras” will storm the market in 2009, and Kodak launched its entry, the Zi6. It didn’t exactly blow us away though, with poor colour accuracy and a bulk that puts it in significantly larger pockets than others we’ve previously been impressed by.

Systems for 2009

If the news of Sony’s not-a-netbook netbook didn’t excite you this week, we had Lenovo’s ThinkPad SL500 and IdeaPad S10e as more usable alternatives. The former is a supremely solid 15.4in small-business laptop with more than enough going for it to earn a Recommended award; the latter is Lenovo’s belated entry into the netbook market – with mixed results.

In the PC realm, Chillblast’s Fusion Gemini continued the manufacturer’s good run of success with gaming PCs, while Logitech’s G13 Advanced Gameboard might make a good companion for those serious enough to spend nearly £50 in the pursuit of gaming excellence.

Christmas business

On the more serious side of the industry, the most interesting arrival was the Imation Pro 7000 64GB, an SSD costing nearly £600 – we reckon it’s only a matter of time before they become the norm in servers, which will pave the way for consumer take-up too. 

Elsewhere we saw the Thecus N4100PRO business NAS device, with support for RAID-6 dual redundant arrays plus mirrored stripes, and the D-Link DNS-34Li3 RAID5 alternative. Servers from NEC and Lenovo completed a busy week.

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.

PCs and laptops

The Panasonic Toughbook CF-F8 arrived for a preview, departing from its predecessors in that it boasts a widescreen-aspect display. Sasha gave it a battering and determined that it’s the perfect choice “for the serious business traveler who values reliability and longevity above all else”.

Mesh’s latest budget PC, the Titan GT Pro, packed a surprising punch – it scored 1.82 in our benchmarks despite costing just £575 – and was only let down by a fairly old graphics card and a mediocre monitor. Still, Mike reckoned it’s one to look out for if you’re “looking for a desktop system on a stringent budget”.

The netbook swarm continued, with the uninspiring Fujitsu Siemens AMILO Mini Ui 3520 being easily overshadowed by the bright pink LG X110. Our esteemed editor took one look at the garish colour, tucked it under his arm and jealously guarded it for the next few days. He reckons “if you want to buy a 10in netbook on contract it’s currently the best choice”; we can’t argue – he won’t let us touch it.

Best of the rest

Home servers are yet to really catch on, but a select few manufacturers are trying their best. The Tranquil PC SQA-5H Home Server is the first we’ve seen to really concentrate on design, with an Apple-white finish and sensible dimensions. Darien reckons it’s not cheap, but it’s a fine example of the technology for enthusiasts – whether it’ll grab those all-important non-enthusiasts remains to be seen.

Elsewhere, we looked at the Creative HS-1200 headphones, Darien got his nose into Bruce Schneier’s self-titled …on Security tome, while the business team tested the Lantronix SecureLinx Spider IP device and the Axis P3301 IP camera.