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Techradar |
- Panasonic's £380k 152 inch TV selling well
- The Social Network wins big at Golden Globes
- Review: Klipsch X10i
- Review: AMD Athlon II X3 450
- Opinion: Is Ubuntu right to dump Gnome for Unity?
| Panasonic's £380k 152 inch TV selling well Posted: 17 Jan 2011 01:05 AM PST  Panasonic's ultra-wide 152 inch television has proven to be a success for the company, with 31 orders for a television costing over £380,000. The 50 thousand yen television was unveiled in January last year – and the plasma television immediately caught the attention, not least because it must have been hard to see anything else in the room. According to Asahi.com, 31 orders in not the end of it, with another 300 enquiries across the globe. Wall-sized The screen is a beastly 3.4 metres wide by 1.8 metres high – so essentially a wall – and is manufactured in Amagasaki. Although it is mainly businesses that have splashed out for the screen, there is one Middle Eastern billionaire who has forked out some of his hard-drilled oil money for the screen. For his cash, he does at least get a 3D picture – although for nigh-on 400 grand he could possibly have hired the actors to come around to his house and do a live performance. 
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| The Social Network wins big at Golden Globes Posted: 16 Jan 2011 08:33 PM PST  The Social Network was the big winner at tonight's Golden Globes awards ceremony in Hollywood taking three of the marquee prizes. The movie, which charts the rise of Facebook and that of CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the prestigious Best Motion Picture - Drama award, beating out the much fancied The King's Speech and Black Swan. David Fincher won Best Director for the film, while Aaron Sorkin also got the award for Best Original Screenplay. Lower down the order The Social Network also won the Best Original Score gong. Jessie Eisenberg, who portrayed Zuckerberg was nominated for Best Actor, but lost out to Mr Great Britain, Colin Firth in The King's Speech. Huzzah! Next stop Oscars? The ceremony, hosted by Ricky Gervais (in which he managed to offend pretty much everyone in Hollywood) combines the Emmys and the Oscars in recognising the best TV and films of the year. The glitzy show is usually seen as a pre-cursor to the next month's Oscars, with the winners here often going on to similar success there. So there you have it, a movie about Facebook has been recognised as the best film of 2010. Look how far we've come, tech fans. 
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| Posted: 16 Jan 2011 09:00 AM PST  Klipsch states that this is the world's smallest and lightest full-range earphone, so naturally it's got us excited, because small and light so often equates to all-day comfort, a close second to sound quality. Of course, discerning readers will want an in-ear to do two things: accurate music reproduction and adequate noise isolation and, to this end, our long-term reference earphones have been the costly In the real world, however, affordable in-ears can't have such tailor-made luxuries, but the £230 X10i still offers a respectable claimed -21dB noise-reduction and a spec sheet that's certainly audiophile-orientated. Nuts and bolts What truly marks the X10i out from its rivals is its negligible weight (10 grams!) and tiny dimensions, which equate to real ear-canal comfort and a sensation of 'nothingness'. To achieve the low weight, the X10i has an aluminium body, nicely finished with copper anodising. The 'tails' – the black sections at the end – are said to serve as an acoustic damper, cutting noise and reducing stress on the cable. The second rival-bashing feature is the patent-pending bullet-shape ear tips, which not only contribute to the sleek design and low weight, but are arguably the most comfortable in-ear tips we've used. Klipsch has (somehow) packed a full-range, balanced armature-type driver in the tiny chassis and incorporated a bass reflex system, to help with the bottom end. The package contains: a carrying case/pouch; quarter-inch airline adaptors; five sets of ear tips and Tiny dancer Like the 'Krells of the ear canal', the X10i is beautifully built. Sleek and free from any kind of protrusion, they appear difficult to snag and are a pleasure to use. The intimate fit is glove-like – the most comfortable we've used and is a credit to the designers. Annoyingly, there's a bit of cable microphony and we've also seen some better looking/feeling wires for the money, but the chosen leads do keep weight down and seem to complement the package, overall. There are a number of high-quality rivals out there from big-name brands and so value is a tough one to call, especially since the design is intentionally minimalistic. That said, up close, it's clear to see the classy build, and a value judgement would also have to be based on sound quality – more on this later. Close call We've sampled plenty of in-ears, and yet the X10i seemingly gets the balance just right. Although not the easiest to drive or the most dynamic (not easy for any in-ear), they are natural-sounding, which is all any music lover could hope for. Noise isolation is reasonable; we've heard better and the aforementioned custom moulds are the ultimate if you've the money, but the ergonomic ear-canal fit keeps plenty of noise out by safely going deeper into the ear. Surprisingly, the X10i has the sonic edge on our reference ACS models in silent background conditions, so how and where you'll use your earphones becomes critical. There's plenty of detail here and it's easy to follow the various tracks in a mix. Vocals have a believable quality, with radio-listening also finding favour. Nature calls Klipsch should rightly be commended for the X10i. It is a clever piece of engineering and one that scores points from a design perspective, too. Under silent background conditions, it's a pedigree performer, but the ear tips' ability to suppress more intrusive noise has its limitations. Luckily, the deep, ear-canal fit combats more than most noise-isolating designs, but it won't keep out the worst of the London Underground, for example. But, if you've been put off by the intimate fit of ear-canal earphones thus far, these would be an easy recommendation, thanks to the ergonomics, lightweight and all-day comfort. For the discerning on-the-go music listener, the X10i is closer to a good, full-size headphone than most and the comfort is simply the icing on the cake. Related Links
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| Posted: 16 Jan 2011 08:37 AM PST  The harsh truth about the AMD Athlon II X3 450 is that it only exists because AMD is currently struggling to compete with Intel for raw processor performance. That may change in 2011 when AMD rolls out its hotly anticipated new processor architecture, known as Bulldozer. In the meantime, AMD is forced to scrounge for scraps at the budget end of the market. In practice, that means filling out its model range with a large number of very similar budget-priced chips based on the same basic architecture but offering different core counts and clockspeeds. Running at 3.2GHz, the X3 450 is towards the quicker end of AMD's scale for clockspeed. But perhaps its most intriguing feature is a hidden fourth core. We should point out that there are absolutely no guarantees when it comes to unlocking cores in AMD processors. In our experience, it works around 50 per cent of the time. When it does come off, as it does with our particular Athlon II X3 450 sample, the results can be dramatic. With the fourth core unlocked and the chip clocked up to 3.6GHz, this processor is ludicrously quick for a sub-£60 CPU. It's truly stunning value for money when you compare it to Intel's pricey dual-core processors. If you get unlucky and the fourth core doesn't fly, performance is still decent in the context of such an affordable processor. OK, it can only encode video at half the speed of AMD's fastest six-core Phenom II X6 processor. But then it does cost less than one third the price. Related Links
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| Opinion: Is Ubuntu right to dump Gnome for Unity? Posted: 16 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST  There's the whiff of irony in Canonical's latest announcement. For the next release of Ubuntu, Canonical has said it's going to replace the default Gnome desktop with something it calls Unity. As founder Mark Shuttleworth puts it, this is "the most significant change ever" for Ubuntu – a statement whose portent is reflected by the Unity story being the third hit when you search for 'most significant change ever' on Google. The irony is that there's not much agreement, little unification, no federation and no coalition in the wider community over its decision – all words a thesaurus will spit out when you search for 'unity'. 'Divisive' would have been a more fitting name. You already know Unity. If you've used Canonical's netbook Linux distribution, UNR, it's what provides the front-end interface for application launching, file management and system configuration. It doesn't replace Gnome – it sits on top of it. Gnome is still there. Unity does work well on a small screen. Icons are large and applications run borderless in fullscreen. It's uncertain how similar UNR's Unity is to the version due to appear in April, but that's not the main problem with the controversy surrounding Unity. The main issue is that there's a major new version of Gnome due at the same time, and Gnome is a desktop that doesn't take updates lightly. Its last major overhaul was almost nine years ago, and you might expect that Gnome-based distributions such as Ubuntu would be champing at the bit to help launch a new version of a desktop that's remained quietly effective for years. But not Ubuntu. It's decided that this moment is the perfect time to introduce its own desktop interface. Radical overhaul What's even more worrying for the community is that Gnome 3.0 is itself attempting a radical overhaul of the user interface, pasting something called the Gnome Shell onto the surface of the standard desktop we all know and love. Gnome Shell encapsulates application management, launching and configuration into a full-screen, dynamically adapting console. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a strikingly similar concept to Canonical's Unity – two desktop shells that use GTK+. And because Canonical isn't known for its copious source code contributions to other projects, certain members of the community feel that it should have made more of a determined effort to merge its attempts at innovation with the Gnome team to produce a single upgrade next year. The timing is bad. Had this happened a year or two ago, no one would have worried if Canonical made an announcement to say it wanted to start experimenting with its desktop environment. They would have been happy to see Ubuntu rise or fall on the back of its own success, and would probably have been interested to see what a company with such a strong design aesthetic could do to the desktop. But switching to Unity at the same time Gnome is switching to Gnome Shell dilutes the momentum for both desktop technologies and, ultimately, does Linux a disservice. It's the same old argument about diluting expectation with redundancy. The important question is whether two projects, taking a similar approach, are better than one. I would argue that it's the results that matter, and it's too early to say. Duplicity isn't working on the desktop because there's no clear winner. Having a plethora of options isn't working for the sound layer, the file manager, the web browser or the word processor. One becomes dominant because it's better, or because it's innovated. Competing for usability Perhaps the only way for innovation to appear is for two projects to compete for usability. When one succeeds, it supplants the other. The only difficulty is knowing when we've reached that point. I've argued for less division and more unity, but I'm not sure if that's the best approach to innovation. I want unity when there's a clear choice for applications and environments, but the Linux desktop is lacking real innovation. If someone wants to try their hand at adding it, that can only be a good thing. All popular desktops, whether they're on Windows, OS X or Linux, have evolved from slightly different interpretations of the same idea – a metaphor for the computer desktop. And while Linux has attempted to ape both Windows and OS X in its quest to welcome new users, what's really needed is a solid desktop advantage. Only then will new users choose to use Linux over its competitors. It needs to do things better, not just cheaper. It needs to combine many of its good ideas into working ones. It needs to innovate or remain the third option. 
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