HTC Radar review: first look

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

HTC used a swanky London event to unleash its second generation of Windows Phone 7 devices and, while it was the Titan taking most of the plaudits on the night, the Radar could prove to be just as enticing.

The firm’s European product director, Phil Blair, said the Radar was “designed around a social and mobile lifestyle”, and our hands-on time with the device certainly suggested that it’s got enough oomph to make Windows Phone 7’s Mango update feel slick, with no hint of slowdown or juddering as we navigated the various menus and applications. (more…)

HTC Titan review: first look

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

HTC has given its phones some odd names over the years, but there’s no denying that Titan is a step in the right direction (even if it is the second time HTC has released a Windows phone of that name). It’s certainly an  accurate description: with a 4.7in touchscreen taking centre stage in HTC’s new Windows Phone 7 flagship, it’s one of the biggest smartphones we’ve ever seen – and the largest to be loaded with Microsoft’s mobile OS.

Truth be told, the sheer size of the Titan made it feel a little awkward in our hands, but HTC has worked its familiar magic on the hardware.

The device feels rock-solid, it comes with the familiar matte rear and glossy bezel around the screen, and it’s also been made from one machined piece of aluminium. Impressively, it’s also only 9.9mm thick at its widest point. (more…)

Asus Eee Slate EP121 review: first look

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Not wanting to let Android have all the fun with its new Transformer, Asus has also introduced a Windows-powered tablet: the Eee Slate EP121.

It’s a hefty piece of kit, with a massive 12.1in screen and a 17mm-thick chassis weighing 1.15kg – almost twice as heavy as the iPad 2. Still, that makes room for some impressive hardware, with an Intel Core i5-470UM running at 1.33GHz and bringing two cores, Turbo Boost technology and Intel’s latest integrated graphics within a TDP of just 18W.

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Running PC Pro on Ubuntu: the verdict

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Yesterday, something remarkable happened. Our entire editorial team migrated to Ubuntu overnight and – by and large – it was business as usual. The website ran as normal, magazine copy was still written, we (just about) fulfilled our day jobs. (You can see how PC Pro’s Ubuntu day unfolded here.)

Several of the many excellent comments on yesterday’s live blog suggested our day-long experiment wasn’t a fair test; that no IT manager worth his space in the car park would migrate an entire office to a new operating system with almost no preparation or staff training. They were right. Yet what our somewhat reckless experiment revealed is that Ubuntu could cope. On a rag-bag selection of laptops and desktops, installed as a Windows “app”, a dual-boot or within a virtual machine, Ubuntu worked (sometimes at the second or third attempt) every time.

What our test also revealed is that the underlying operating system is becoming less and less relevant: what really matters are the applications. So much of our working lives are now spent in the web browser – updating the web CMS, scouring websites – that it really doesn’t matter if it’s Windows or Ubuntu propping the browser up. The Chrome and Firefox sync tools are so well implemented that you’re up and running with familiar bookmarks, extensions, search history and passwords within minutes.

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Hyper-V Cloud: Microsoft simplifies the private cloud

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Microsoft has announced the availability of Hyper-V Cloud here at TechEd Europe in Berlin: a seven-part programme designed to speed up client companies constructing their own internal clouds.

Some of the seven parts of the programme are relatively simple and clearly understood – for example, Microsoft and a grab-bag of hardware vendors have agreed a reference platform suitable for the construction of a pool of physical machines and virtual hosts to make up a private cloud. Other parts are frankly mind-boggling, like the cashback scheme. If you move to Hyper-V cloud and make it work for you, whether you’ve virtualised already or not, then Microsoft has some money for you.

There’s always a bit of a “brain gap” when it comes to announcements about virtualisation – it takes a while for listeners to get their heads around the concepts and bat back a few apposite questions, and I think Microsoft caught the assembled press throng well and truly on the hop with the cashback offer. Yes, it does extend beyond domestic US clients. Whether it’s conditional on making use of the new hardware freshly published on the Hyper-V Cloud compatibility framework list is an intriguing question. It’s also a bit too early to figure out things like return on investment since, there are no customers using this newly announced toolkit yet.
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Another Intel security lapse at IDF 2010

Monday, September 13th, 2010

The 2010 Intel Developer Forum opens today in San Francisco, and yesteday my colleagues and I went through the registration process. That’s a simple matter of filling in a web form on one of the provided laptops, and at first glance it looks the same as it did last year — when (as I blogged at the time) it ended up revealing visitors’ personal information to all and sundry.

As I entered my details this year I was pleased to notice that that particular data leak has been plugged. The information fields no longer support autocomplete, making it impossible to browse previously-entered information. A step up, surely, in security.

Sadly, the process remains fantastically insecure for other reasons. The computers themselves are regular Windows 7 laptops with full internet access – and they’re positioned facing away from the registration staff. So while it may no longer be possible to get information out of them directly, it’s a breeze to to download and install any software you wish (such as a keylogger or database scraper) without anyone being any the wiser. Indeed, since the registration machines are in a public lobby, you can just walk in off the street and start tampering with them.

Is this a serious problem? Admittedly, there’s probably a limit to how much havoc you can wreak on an IDF registration laptop. But if someone were to install an aggressive worm on one of these machines, it could easily spread to more sensitive systems, especially if the hardware ends up going back to Intel HQ. Good security practice means anticipating and eliminating risks like that.

Fundamentally, the lesson is the same as last time: when you build on an existing platform, your system inherits all the complexities and vulnerabilities of that platform. And, once again, this demonstration of that fact comes, poetically enough, from one of the pre-eminent producers of platform technology.

Windows vs Ubuntu: in a nutshell

Monday, July 19th, 2010

You may recall how Dell dug itself into an almighty hole last month, after proclaiming that Ubuntu was safer than Windows, before swiftly changing its mind and declaring itself more neutral than Switzerland.

Well, now the PC maker’s had time to think the matter through, another page has appeared on the Dell website, condensing the whole Windows vs Ubuntu debate into about 100 words.

From Dell’s perspective the choice is clear. You should choose Windows if (and I swear I’m not paraphrasing here):

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Anglian Windows gets more than it bargained for on Bing

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

By now I expect everyone is familiar with the idea of buying keywords in search engines. Identify a keyword you like, stake your claim to it, and you get a featured listing whenever someone puts that term in the search box.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

Technologies of Christmas past

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

The grandest Christmas traditions have been with us for centuries, and many will doubtless stick around for centuries more. Trees, gifts and alcoholic exuberance come to mind.

But we techie types have some more modern rituals too. Online Christmas shopping, for example. Loading up your Sky+ Box or Windows Media Center with films you’ll never watch. And, of course, hiding away in the study while you get to grips with this year’s must-have PC game.

For many of us, these customs are as much a part of the Yuletide season as wassailing and mulled wine; yet the technology that makes them possible has only come into being within the past few decades. And as 2010 comes knocking, I find myself looking back over Christmases of the past and marvelling at the huge advances we’ve made within my lifetime to get here. (more…)

Does Windows BitLocker spell the end of the office loan laptop?

Friday, November 13th, 2009

This has been an interesting week for the USB key.

No really; the ubiquitous key, which has been implicated in incidents of corporate data loss around the world, now occupies a central role in Microsoft’s view of corporate security.

Far from being the main means by which secrets slip out of your organisation, the Microsoft security technique depends on carrying your BitLocker keys around on a USB stick.

This is a great leap forward, and I can foresee lots of corporates finding themselves strongly obliged to take up BitLocker, especially when you consider the surprising hard line being taken by the Information Commissioner, as reported in this BBC article. Let’s put the headline conclusion up here so you bear it in mind: if your company loses data, then it’s half a million quid as a fine.

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