Last year I picked up an HP Touchpad in the fire sale that resulted in the model, and all of HP’s tablet plans, being discontinued.  Now RIM appear to be doing similiar with their Playbook tablet, with prices being slashed around the world.  You might think then that now would be the right time to pick [...]

In the last year I’ve reviewed and owned a fair number of tablets covering just about every aspect of the market.  These have included the monster 12 inch ASUS EP121 complete with a Core-i5 processor and 4Gb of RAM down to my latest arrival, a 7 inch Blackberry Playbook.  But what is the best size [...]

I received a new Blackberry Playbook 16Gb tablet today, actually it’s not completely new as it’s two weeks old and was owned by a family member who bought it because prices had been discounted recently here in the UK.  She liked it so much that she decided she’d rather have the 64Gb one and bought [...]

Microsoft yesterday at their keynote revealed that the company sold more than 18 million Kinect units for the Xbox 360 gaming console. Kinect, for those unfamiliar with, is a motion sensing input device that allows Xbox 360 gamers to interact with the system through body movement and their voice. Kinect for the Windows operating system [...]

Of the biggest tech stories in 2011 it was difficult to beat the news of the HP TouchPad fire sale where silly prices resulted in queues outside stores and websites crashing around the world.  I was lucky enough to get a 32Gb TouchPad myself for a price so low I can barely remember paying for [...]

In the first year since Microsoft’s Windows Phone smartphones first launched I’ve tested and reviewed a fair few handsets and I’ve been able to get a good insight into how the operating system translates onto different hardware types.  Of the current crop of phones none have been more hotly anticipated than Nokia’s first outing with [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to get the world exclusive on my personal website for EXO PC’s forthcoming EXOdesk.  This is a 40-inch, 10 point multi-touch Viewsonic screen (I wasn’t allowed to say who the manufacturer was at the time) built into a piece of fine furniture and running a custom [...]

Fancy a processor with 1 teraflop of processing power in your PC?  Intel have today unveiled their new Knight’s Corner chip that uses a 22nm build process to pack a huge 50 cores onto the die.  This new (MIC) Many Integrated Core chip isn’t for playing Battlefield 3, frankly it would be wasted on that.  [...]

It’s been announced that US government is about to expand its scheme to get broadband and PCs into low-income households across America.  It’s a similar scheme to others that have been run and that continue worldwide.  As part of the deal Microsoft will provide $250 laptops and desktops pre-loaded with Office and Redemtech will offer [...]

Now that Nokia have launched their new Windows Phones, and cemented their future with Microsoft (at least for the foreseeable future) we’re down to just four major players left in the smartphone space.  Apple with their hugely popular iOS operating system, Google’s free open-source Android, Microsoft’s new-kid on the block Windows Phone and RIM’s could soon [...]

2011 has not been a good year for HP’s WebOS tablet operating system.  The year began with the company praising the product they had acquired when they bought Palm but there then followed the sudden announcement of the dropping of the TouchPad, the first WebOS tablet only seven weeks after it went on sale.  Now [...]

Of all the laptops available at the moment, the two categories that interest me most are ultraportables and full desktop replacements.  Ultraportables can be incredibly useful for life on the move due to their small size and incredibly light weight.  For regular laptops to be useful though for anything more than light use is unusual [...]

When it comes to using a computer mouse, I like mine as plain and simple as possible. I only need three mouse buttons (left, right and middle) and a scroll wheel and that is it. A friend of mine, avid gamer, recently bought a 20+ button mouse as he likes all of the game controls [...]

British electronics retailer has today slashed the price of the RIM Playbook from £399.99 down to just £249.99, a decrease of £150.  It’s the most significant price drop for a tablet since the unexpected HP TouchPad fire sale a few months ago. The price drop, which was reported by PC Pro magazine, raises a few [...]

A few years back, buying an external hard drive meant buying an overpriced, loud, clunky housing, and then having to spring for a hard drive separately. It was, essentially, a pain. Even carrying it around was an annoyance, to some degree. These days, things have changed. Now the purchase of an external hard drive is [...]

A video card is not just a video card, as any enthusiast will tell you. There is a hell of a lot that goes into the design and manufacture of these devices, beyond just the chipset that is used. But, for the average joe, there may seem to be little difference between brands and models… [...]

Remember when you were a kid and there was something that was just so cool that you absolutely had to have it? Even going so far as risking the ire of your parents as a result of your nagging, sulking and crying? Well, we’ve found something that would probably get the same reaction from grown [...]

When it comes to TVs, we are really getting spoiled these days. Never before have we had access to the kind of vibrant picture quality that we can find on the market today. And, even better, they are sleek, elegantly designed units that can be fitted into virtually any space, thanks to ideas like flat [...]

Amazon have today issued invitations to a “special press conference” on September 28 and the tech community is expecting the online retailer to formally announce the Kindle Tablet. The tablet, which has been rumoured for some time, would run on Google’s Android operating system which would be specially modified to get the best from Amazon’s [...]

Laptops come in all shapes and sizes these days from tiny netbooks to sexy ultraportables and everyday value machines.  Then however there are the workstations.  These laptops are designed with the needs of CAD designers, video production and engineering and geology projects in mind.  They pack the very finest and the best of everything and come [...]

The HP TouchPad is dead, long live the HP TouchPad!  It feels very odd reviewing a product that you can’t buy any more.  When you factor in though that this new tablet computer is brand new out and still in its review period, and that many people will this week be taking delivery of their [...]

Last week when HP announced both that it was going to sell off its PC division, but also that it was dropping its WebOS devices, the tech community went into shock.  This the world’s biggest PC manufacturer, with some 26% of the US market or 18% of the PC market worldwide. So far as WebOS [...]

If you’ve every suffered a hard drive failure, you’ll know how it feels to lose data. Even if you have a backup, it can be a pain having to copy everything back from a tape drive and there’s always that uncertainty as to whether the backups will work at all. RAID is an acronym that [...]

If you have a wireless network at home, and your house has many rooms, or if you want to surf the internet while sitting outside on your patio, you may need to set up what’s known as a repeater. Repeaters will pickup signals from your main wireless transmitter such as your router and pass on [...]

This was the convertible tablet that started it all back in January 2010.  The Lenovo U1 hybrid tablet / laptop concept was shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas all that long time ago and was the first real rival to Apple’s iPad to appear.  Despite predating Google’s Android tablet though, the [...]

Up until a few days ago I worked with wired PC headset exclusively. That worked considerably well, with the exception of the rate that I burned through those headsets. I usually needed to buy a new one every six to nine months or so, mostly because of cable problems. It came to the point that [...]

Have you ever wanted a laser printer at home, or even a wireless laser printer, but not had the money to be able to afford one?  Well things have changed radically in recent years.  When I bought my first last printer in 2003 it cost me £400 (around $550) for a basic colour model.  It [...]

You might remember last month I reviewed the very sexy little Samsung Series 9 Ultraportable, their “Macbook Air killer” and absolutely loved it.  The latest box to arrive at my door from the company contained something very far removed from the Series 9.  This time they’d sent their top of the line RF711 gaming laptop. [...]

Friday and Saturday have uncovered some pretty interesting things about the new contenders entering the tablet market. Both Sony and Motorola are apparently rushing towards new releases, and while both are expected to appear on the market by fall, information on each is scattered. Reports about Sony’s upcoming tablet(s) are quite literally all over the [...]

When mankind first started using computers one of the very first peripherals anybody would buy was a printer. Printing documents was just about the one thing people liked having computers for, and in the early days of dot matrix and bubblejet printers (before ink prices soared) people would print anything and everything at length. Now [...]

Last week I reviewed the Samsung Series 9 laptop and you can read Part 1 and Part 2 of my reviews here. Today the review unit goes back but I thought it appropriate to write a follow-up to the review as this laptop has actually had quite a profound effect on me. Let’s start correctly, [...]

Despite the popularity of Apple’s iPad and the booming market for Android tablets, there are still plenty of Windows 7 tablets out there.  The latest is Acer’s W500 hybrid tablet, a 10.1 inch tablet based on a 1GHz AMD C-50 processor, 2GB of DDR3 ram and a 32Gb SSD.  It also comes (optionally) with a [...]

I’ve got a keen interest in smartphones and tablets. I think they’re just both so brilliant for what you can do with them. For instance, being able to store spreadsheets and important documents in the cloud and update them on my phone is just amazing, and being able to use custom apps on a device [...]

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the next version of Windows running on ARM processors at only 1GHz.  Many people have been sceptical, few more so than myself.  Rather than be a naysayer however I decided I’d find out if Windows really could run on processors with this little grunt so Microsoft kindly sent [...]

This week I’ve been testing Samsung’s new Ultraportable laptop, their Macbook Air equivalent.  Yesterday I wrote about the hardware itself which is absolutely gorgeous and even lighter than the Air.  Today I’ll be wrapping up this review by talking about what the Series 9 (known in the USA as the 900X3A) is like to use [...]

Ranked as the no. 2 PC manufacturing company in the world, Acer Inc. has announced plans to produce an ultra book which will be a super light computer model. The plan is to launch this new product as early as the fourth quarter of 2011. This statement was made by the President of Acer Inc. [...]

In the race to beat the Macbook Air for size and portability, there have been precious few Windows laptops.  Indeed so far we’ve only seen Sony’s Z Series and the Dell Adamo which is no longer on sale.  Now though Samsung have stepped bravely into the fold with the Series 9 (known in the USA [...]

ASUS look set to unveil a phone that can dock with a tablet at the Computex event at the end of this month, according to reports. The device, which is rumoured to be called the Padfone, looks to be the second iteration we’ve seen of the PC in your pocket concept that Motorola recently pioneered [...]

In Building A Custom PC 2011 Part 1: The Assessment I mentioned what I’d needed in a new Pc that I was about to build. I have mentioned my expectations and other requirements in the same article. Today I’m using the information to select a first set of components that I might use to build [...]

There have been two recent advancements in technology that will make it easier for manufacturers to put a lot more punch in smaller packages. Intel released news about a new 3d transistor technology, and Seagate announced breaking the 1 TB per platter hard drive barrier. Both of these announcements show the drive for companies to [...]

A driver, or hardware driver, is needed so that computer devices like the mouse, monitor or video card, can communicate with the operating system. The Windows operating system ships with a huge number of drivers, which means that some users do not have to install a single third party driver to get all of their [...]

The best way to protect data on one of your storage devices is to encrypt it. There are several free solutions out there, for instance by using the Open Source encryption software True Crypt, to protect data from unauthorized access. While it is not a problem for tech savvy users like you and me to [...]

I’m building a new PC every 18 months or so and post the progress of selecting the right PC components here on this blog. I actually spend more most of my time on the evaluation of computer hardware, as I have to live with the selection for the next 12 to 18 months. Bad choices [...]

As people are using PCs for many more things at home and the computer itself has become, in a few cases, an objet d’art in the case of some all-in-one devices companies are putting much more effort into peripherals.  In this review I want to look at two of these high-end devices, Logitech’s illuminated keyboards. Let’s start [...]

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or through other social networks may know that for the last month I’ve been testing NetGear’s new, top of the range Neo TV 550 Ultimate HD Media. This box is a small, and I really do mean small, do it all box for the connected home.  It [...]

In the last few years the world of computer peripherals has changed with many high-end products coming to market.  Now though a great many of these products are the norm with keyboards and mice now costing over £100 ($150).  We’ve generally accepted these price increases as consumers as commonly they bring additional benefits such as [...]

I was pretty excited when I read for the first time about Microsoft’s Arc Touch mouse. The unique design and touch capabilities brought features to the table that no other Windows mouse offered at the time of writing. Many questions remained unanswered though which I definitely had to find out before I’d consider purchasing the [...]

The inimitable Sinclair ZX Spectrum is to be reborn for its 30th birthday with an interesting twist.  Games company Elite, which wrote many of the best-selling titles for the original home computer, is planning to relaunch the Speccy as a Bluetooth keyboard for mobile phones according to the Telegraph. Why?  They’ve noticed the upsurge in [...]

In a move that’s reminiscent of the famous Pentium floating point bug, Intel has issued a recall of all new Sandy Bridge PCs and laptops that run its latest generation of processor. The recall is to fix a problem with the Series 6 chipset, used in all Sandy Bridge systems.  The company says that  the [...]

Ed Bott has published a very interesting article today about the benefits of running Windows 7 on a solid state hard disk (SSD).  He wanted to test the real-world benefits, if there are any, of upgrading to an SSD on which to install your copy of Windows. I won’t repeat what the article says here, but it’s [...]