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- In Depth: The future of the internet revealed
- Review: Getac V200
- Review: Dell Latitude XT2 XFR
- Explained: Powerline networking: what you need to know
- Review: Toshiba Satellite Pro C660-171
- Review: MSI CX623-258UK
| In Depth: The future of the internet revealed Posted: 26 Feb 2011 04:00 AM PST  Technology changes so quickly, it's hard to remember how bad we used to have it. UK internet access didn't really take off until Freeserve launched in 1998, few of us had broadband before 2001 and the UK didn't even have a 3G mobile phone network until 2003. Google was founded in 1998, Facebook and Flickr in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. It's impossible to imagine life without them now, and the pace shows no sign of slowing down. The internet we'll have in 2020 will look almost nothing like the one we have in 2011, from the information we access to the devices we use to connect. Can we predict exactly what it's going to look like? Almost certainly not, but we can see the seeds of it even now, and work out a few of the directions the industry will have to travel down to make it happen. At the back end If you think the internet is busy now, think again. The current internet population of 1.7 billion is expected to exceed five billion by 2020 - and we're not talking about people. Everything from televisions to old favourite the internet fridge will be hooked up. At the moment that's impossible, simply because we need many, many more IP (internet protocol) addresses than the current IPv4 system allows. IPv4 has room for four billion IP addresses, and according to internet co-creator and Google evangelist Vint Cerf we'll use up the last ones in the spring of 2011. The new IPv6 standard has capacity for "340 trillion, trillion, trillion" unique IP addresses, Cerf says, "so the theory is we won't run out, at least until after I'm dead". The move to IPv6 is crucial for several reasons. In addition to freeing up lots of internet addresses, it also improves network security and makes routers' lives easier. Unfortunately, it isn't backwards compatible with IPv4, so networks running IPv6 won't be able to talk to networks running the older protocol. Desktops, smartphones, laptops and routers generally support IPv6, but many ISPs and business networks haven't switched to it yet. To address the issue, 6UK is raising awareness of the looming crisis and urging businesses to act. "The biggest set of changes in the history of the internet [is] happening today," Cerf explains. "The change in the address space, the change in domain name languages, the introduction of digital signatures in the domain name system, the introduction of end-to-end cryptography in accessing internet-based services. This is a huge change in the net." The arrival of cloud computing has enabled us to outsource storage and applications to distant servers, and the trend won't just continue, but accelerate: Gartner Research predicts that by 2012, cloud computing will have become so pervasive that one in five businesses won't own a single IT asset. Moving to the cloud Our email, images and our work documents are often in the cloud already, and entertainment will follow in their footsteps. Video on demand services are ten-a-penny online, but streaming, not downloading, seems to be the technology of the future: it's the solution used by Netflix in the US and iPlayer here, and Apple is widely expected to unveil a streaming version of iTunes soon (which would explain why it's building a billion-dollar data centre in North Carolina). Buying something online will increasingly mean buying access to it, with no direct ownership at all. Gaming may move to the cloud too. A service called OnLive promises console quality games with minimal hardware by doing the processing in its data centres and streaming the results to a tiny 'micro-console'.
STREAMING GAMES: OnLive promises to deliver console-quality gaming with the processing performed remotely OnLive is a serious company - it boasts 200 employees, and its investors include Warner Bros and BT. It's available now in the US and looks set to grow quickly. Cloud computing will be particularly important as smartphones and other mobile devices become the platforms of choice for most of our online activities. Phones don't yet have the power or storage necessary for desktop-calibre applications, so the emerging model is what Microsoft calls 'three screens'. Three screens As Steve Ballmer explains it, this is "an experience that spans the PC, the phone, the TV and the cloud". Rather than store your entire computing world on a desktop PC, you store it in the cloud and then access it on whatever device happens to be handy. There are some things that a big desktop will almost certainly always do better than a smartphone, including data input, but there's no reason why the app has to be installed or data isolated to its own hard drive. With smartphones expected to outsell PCs by 2013 and Google's cloud-based OS Chrome on the horizon, cloud computing is going to be very important in the coming decade. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, by 2020 most people can expect to "access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote server networks, rather than depending primarily on tools and information housed on their individual, personal computers." It's all very exciting, unless you're an ISP. Our appetite for online video is enormous and it's growing: the BBC's iPlayer delivers seven petabytes (7,000 terabytes) of video a month, while YouTube's bandwidth is estimated at 126 petabytes per month. Networking firm Cisco predicts that video will account for 90 per cent of consumer internet traffic and 64 per cent of mobile internet traffic by 2013. Microsoft thinks online video isn't smart enough, and its solution is adaptive streaming, which it calls Smooth Streaming. Unlike traditional streaming, where your connection speed is checked once (if at all), adaptive streaming monitors your internet connection constantly. If it becomes congested, the bitrate drops to something your connection can handle. When the congestion clears, the bitrate goes up. It works well, even on large-scale events, and you can see it in action at www.smoothhd.com. The problem with adaptive streaming is that it still uses the old client/server model, where the server transmits data to you directly across the entire internet. BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has an alternative idea, dubbed Project Pheon, which uses peer-to-peer networking to deliver streaming video. Speaking at the 2010 NewTeeVee conference, Cohen promised "around five-second latency from when the content goes out to when it's actually displayed on people's machines". Join the swarm Pheon - like BitTorrent - uses swarming rather than traditional downloading. As you download a file, the bits you've downloaded are shared with other downloaders, so in theory you should get faster downloads by connecting to somebody near you rather than a distant server. It's a technology that works best for popular files, and if you're a regular torrent user you'll know that new, popular torrents download like lightning while obscure ones crawl. This means swarming is best suited to big events, such as newly released films, live sports and concerts. Of course, to actually access such high bandwidth services, we'll need fast broadband. Will we have the super-fast service the government is promising by 2017? Trefor Davies is CTO and co-founder of business ISP Timico. "The problem facing the government is that the task is a huge one, and it would be very easy for them to decide that the only way they can realistically get to the end game is by roping in BT to help," he says, pointing out that while BT has offered to match the government's £830m funding to deliver 90 per cent super-fast broadband coverage by 2017, "coming from a company that claims to have 99 per cent broadband coverage, this makes us wonder what is meant by '90 per cent high speed broadband'." Davies believes the only way to get fast broadband throughout the UK is to involve communities. "There are things that communities can do to make it easier and cheaper to roll out fibre networks," he explains. "For example, companies like BT are charged anything up to £10 per metre for wayleaves to run cables across private land. [That's] a nice little earner for landowners: the average length of fibre in the Eden Valley is around 20km per community. That's a lot of wayleave charges that BT has to built into its costs." Landowners might waive those costs for community organisations, making fibre roll-out cost-effective. Going mobile
SMART CAMERAS: Google Goggles' visual search is a taste of things to come Our 3G phone networks weren't built with data in mind, and if you've ever struggled to download an email on a five-bar 3G signal, you'll know that networks are already struggling to cope. "I suspect that network operators have been caught by surprise by the increase in demand," Davies says, pointing out that operators "work on a two-year planning horizon, so if they do come across unexpected capacity problems it isn't always possible to do a quick fix." Two developments should help: freeing up the 800MHz frequency band when analogue TV signals are switched off in 2012, and network operators upgrading to LTE (Long Term Evolution), often dubbed 4G. LTE won't be widespread for several years though, so we're stuck with 3G until at least 2015. There is another option: HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access Plus) - an upgrade to existing 3G networks that can, in theory, deliver 42Mbps download speeds. It isn't as solid or as fast as LTE, but several UK operators are considering it. With demand for mobile data soaring, a crunch is coming. Network planners already report congestion issues, but these aren't spread equally: some congestion is in specific locations, other congestion at particular times of day. In a survey commissioned by telecoms billing firm Amdocs, 20 per cent of operators reported 'severe overload' at times, and just 37 per cent said their networks are running fine. 40 per cent of operators said 'bandwidth hogs' were contributing to problems. Expect to start paying more for mobile access, or more limits on what you can and can't do. "O2 is forecasting a hundredfold increase in bandwidth requirements over the next few years… the figures don't stack up," Davies says. "Mobile operators have to raise the cash to pay for the new infrastructure and so they are looking at innovative pricing mechanisms. This hasn't arrived in the public domain yet, but we are being warmed up for it." One such mechanism could be Dynamic Spectrum Access, a kind of electronic auction where your phone bids for bandwidth it needs. The good news is that the crunch isn't imminent, because the real bandwidth hogs are 3G dongles rather than smartphones. "I don't think that mobile apps will drive the need for the same bandwidth as fixed line in this timeframe, although we should never say never," Davies says. "My HTC Desire HD already supports 720p HD video, but the industry needs to sort out battery life before we will see serious high speed usage from handsets." Once that happens, mobile bandwidth is likely to become a premium product. If you want a fast, lag-free connection at peak times or in congested areas, you'll have to pay more for it. Bye bye browser? It seems backwards, but just as software moves online, the browser itself is becoming less important. Increasingly, data is delivered to and received from a range of apps on a myriad of devices, which all have a bit of browser built in. You can see that happening in social networking. Much of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr's traffic comes from applications: mobile phone apps, desktop software with social media export options, stand-alone photo uploaders, desktop widgets, browser-based aggregators that combine multiple networks in a single browser window and so on. It's a similar story with YouTube, which delivers video to the web, mobile phone browsers, televisions, and mobile phone and iPad apps, and which accepts uploads not just from the YouTube website, but from cameras, camcorders and games. The key to these apps is the API, short for application programming interface. APIs are hooks that developers can use to get data from or put data into online services. For example, Twitter's API enables third-party applications to post to and get data from Twitter. But the API is just part of the picture: the data also needs to be delivered in a format that means it's easy to use and easy to combine with other sources. Increasingly that means open standards such as HTML5. HTML5 and Flash Designing for the web used to be simple. If it was static, you built it in HTML and CSS. If it moved, you built it in Flash. Not any more. The emerging HTML5 standard does animation, video and effects too, and Apple for one believes that it's going to make Flash obsolete. Apple may be right. HTML5 does many things that once required plugins or stand-alone software, including video, local storage and vector drawing - and unlike Flash, it's an open standard that produces search engine-friendly content. HTML5 is far from finished and it'll be some time before it's as attractive to developers as Flash. It lacks the write-once run-anywhere appeal of Flash, because different browsers have implemented bits of HTML5 in different ways, and it lacks the excellent authoring tools that Adobe has spent years refining. In the long term, however, we'd expect more and more content to be created in HTML5 rather than Flash, much of it using Adobe tools. HTML5 has one particularly interesting trick up its sleeve: microdata. This enables designers to label content, and it's something Google already supports. Its Rich Snippets uses microdata to pull the relevant information about a website and display it in the search results. That information could be details of a restaurant's cooking style, the verdict of a review, contact details or anything else that can be expressed as text or a link. This metadata is machine readable, and machine-readable metadata gets people like Tim Berners-Lee very excited. In 1999, he said: "I have a dream for the web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers… the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Visions of the future At Intel's Visual Computing Institute (VCI) in Saarbrueken, Germany, researchers are exploring what could be the next generation of interfaces by combining motion capture, photorealistic computer graphics and 3D navigation. Can we expect 3D interfaces in the near future?
FUTURE INTERFACES: Intel's Visual Computing Institute is experimenting with interfaces that mimic the real world "The answer is a qualified yes," says Hans-Christian Hoppe, Co-director of Operations at the VCI, who admits that "in the late 1990s, VR arguably fell into the category of 'a solution looking for a problem', and unfortunately not a very elegant solution. One could draw a parallel with tablet devices," Hoppe continues. "They have been around for many years, in many guises, but it was only when the user experience met expectations that the devices became successful." Hoppe says we're reaching that point with immersive interfaces. "Hardware has indeed advanced, in particular for mobile devices. That isn't the key issue, however. Social networking has evolved from a fad to addressing people's needs… immersive virtual worlds are now able to look like a natural extension of the likes of Facebook - suddenly, all this technology might be useful." "Pervasive network connectivity and performance are important, processing power and energy efficiency likewise, particularly on mobile devices," Hoppe says. But the technology needs to be matched with innovative thinking. "All we have today are extensions of tried and trusted 2D interfaces," Hoppe says. "What is needed is a uniform way of interacting with a mixed 2D/3D environment that's easy to understand, convenient to use and that doesn't strain the human perception and motion senses." We've been promised 3D internet before, but Intel's vision isn't blocky avatars but realistic, ray-traced images delivered in real time, and we're approaching the point where our hardware and networks are fast enough to deliver it. Whether we'll want it remains to be seen, but when it comes to technology, having extra options to explore is rarely a bad thing. 
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2011 03:00 AM PST  Getac sells a wide range of ruggedised mobile products, from laptops and tablets to compact handhelds. The V200 is a convertible tablet, much like the Dell Latitude XT2 XFR, and packs impressive power and features into its hard-wearing chassis. The V200 is tested to military standards for resilience. The magnesium-alloy chassis is staggeringly tough and its impact-resistant design will effortlessly take everything you can throw at it. Flawed covers With an ingress protection rating of IP65 the chassis is also well protected against infiltration from dust and water. Unlike the Dell and Panasonic's lockable port covers, however, the rubber plugs used here can snag on external objects and be pulled open unexpectedly, which isn't ideal. At 3.3kg, this is one the heavier ruggedised laptops, but while it lacks the built-in handle of the Panasonic, its textured finish makes it comfortable to carry. Battery life isn't that impressive, however, delivering less than four hours of use. Usability is excellent, as with the Dell, but the keyboard features an indented Control key, with the Function key in its place, which can take some getting used to. Nevertheless, the board is otherwise impressively smooth and responsive. As with the Dell and Pansonic, the Getac's 12.1-inch display is multi-touch compatible, letting you open and manipulate files using your fingers or the included stylus. Unlike the Dell, however, the screen uses resistive technology as standard, allowing use even when you're wearing gloves. While it lacks the responsiveness of the Dell's capacitive panel, interaction is suitably smooth. The screen is also incredibly bright, making it readable in even the brightest conditions. Unlike the Dell, however, the screen features a hazy quality often seen on resistive panels. Where the Getac stands out is its impressive power for such a rugged laptop.Although bettered by the HP and Panasonic, the use of a high-powered Intel Core i7 CPU means office software and tools for fieldwork are dispatched with effortless ease, even when multi-tasking. Benchmarks Battery life: 219 minutes Extra features are equally pleasing. The 320GB hard drive provides capacious storage for this type of machine, while a rotatable camera above the screen can be used to record front or rear-facing video in the office or when working out and about.
The tough chassis and striking power of the V200 make it a great machine for extreme outdoor use. With its resistive screen suiting use in even the coldest conditions, it makes a great alternative to the Panasonic Toughbook CF-31. Related Links
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2011 02:30 AM PST  The Latitude XT2 XFR adds to Dell's corporate range and is billed as being the world's first multi-touch compatible rugged tablet. Combining a stunningly hard-wearing design with average performance, it makes a tough and unique, albeit slightly flawed, choice. The fully rugged chassis is incredibly tough and has been tested to MIL-STD- 810G standards. You can drop it from three feet, use it at altitudes of up to 15,000 feet and work in sub-zero temperatures without any risk of significant damage. All the ports are sealed beneath lockable panels, providing protection against dust and water. The 12.1-inch screen has been tested to withstand impact, ensuring even this traditionally fragile component is well protected. Despite its tough build quality, the 2.6kg chassis is surprisingly portable. It is one of the thickest laptops around, but the rubber padding on its edges makes it comfortable to hold. The 254-minute battery is average, however, and bettered by the Panasonic Toughbook CF-31. Usability is excellent. The keyboard is spacious and responsive and a pleasure to work with. A rubber, backlit keyboard can be added for £286 (ex. VAT) to improve accessibility and protection. The tiny touchpad is less easy to use, but the Dell compensates with its touchscreen panel. Multi-touch panel The multi-touch display lets you easily use your fingers to scroll, rotate and zoom documents. A stylus is also included, letting you write on the screen to take notes. While the capacitive screen cannot be used with gloves on, a resistive option will be available soon to allow such use.
Image quality and visibility are excellent. The matt finish prevents reflections and it is an extremely bright screen, so is easy to view in direct sunlight. Colour, contrast and sharpness are equally strong, producing a detailed and vibrant picture. Where this machine falls short of its rivals is performance. Rather than a cutting-edge Intel Core processor, it uses last-generation Core 2 Duo technology. There is ample power for running office applications, but consider your needs if you need maximum power in the field. Benchmarks Battery life: 254 minutes Storage also falls short with just 128GB of space, so bear this in mind if you have many large files to carry with you. The Solid State Drive is more stable than the mechanical disks of its rivals, however, so you may consider the improved resilience it provides to be a worthwhile compensation. While there's no denying the quality and build of the Latitude XT2 XFR, its limited specification, power and battery life lag a little too far behind the competition. It's a fantastic fully rugged laptop though and well worth considering. Related Links
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| Explained: Powerline networking: what you need to know Posted: 26 Feb 2011 02:00 AM PST  Sending data over power lines has been around long enough now for us to forget how amazing the idea was when the first HomePlug standard emerged in 2001. Imagine, you could use the power wires in your house as network cables, a fully-wired house in an instant! The simplest use is to connect your broadband box of tricks hanging off your phone jack, which is often somewhere useful like the downstairs hall, to your PC, which is likely to be anywhere but the hallway. The widespread adoption of wireless modems has reduced the impact somewhat, but for networking your house it's a neat and simple solution. You've no problems with thick walls either: it'll run up to 300 metres and in theory you can add 254 devices (although more than 10 starts to slow things down). Plus it all happens outside your PC (let's just say that the lack of Windows drivers is no bad thing). It's about as simple as networking gets. The technology goes under a lot of names, but we'll go with HomePlug. Actually the basic idea is an old one: the power companies have been sending control signals over the mains since the 1920s - that's how electricity meters know to switch to the off-peak rate. And it's about much more than just networking computers and their peripherals: sending data over the power lines can be used to monitor and control everything connected to the mains. Enter the internet fridge, and, we trust, more useful appliances. The same, only faster So why are we here again? New faster standards, that's why! The original HomePlug 1.0 standard accelerated out of the blocks at a somewhat pedestrian 14Mb/s, peaking at 85Mb/s a few releases down the line. This was followed in 2005 by HomePlug AV, which could manage a peak rate of 200Mb/s and traded on the ability to cope with video and voice, hence 'AV'. The Technical Working Group of the HomePlug Alliance (both are just what they sound like they are) has now rustled up the HomePlug AV2 standard, which it claims "is expected to deliver a five times increase in performance". Big talk, as that'll be 600 Mb/s. AV2 is fully interoperable with the older HomePlug AV standards and two other new formats: Green PHY and IEEE P1901. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the world's largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity (that's what it humbly says about itself anyway). These are the people behind the 802.3 Ethernet and 802.11 Wireless standards and they've outlined the P1901 standard, which offers 500Mb/s. P1901 is based on HomePlug AV and is in the final stage of certification. There's also Green PHY, or HomePlug GP, which isn't aimed at PCs as such - it's a sort of green thing for the remote control of devices and part of the Smart Grid idea. It's basically a trimmed-down, low-bandwidth and low-power version of HomePlug, enabling you to monitor and turn things on and off remotely and whatnot. Eventually you'll be able to sit on the sofa and control all the electrical devices in the house. But is the emergence of two new higher-speed standards a problem? Not at all: they will work with each other and P1901 is really just another layer of standardisation and ratification for HomePlug, a base standard to work from. If things go to plan, just about all the versions should talk to each other and you'll be able to mix and match, buying on price and performance rather than being tied to any one standard (backward compatibility for version 1.0 aside - that's technically possible, but economically unfeasible). This is important for the whole industry, so we're sure they won't muck it all up by splitting the market. We don't want any more incompatibilities such as that between the 200Mb/s NetGear and Devolo kit. Right, guys? Real-world speeds HomePlug AV2's top speed of 600Mb/s is a theoretical maximum of course. Add encryption, fluctuations in the mains, interference, distance, various overheads and so forth and well, we shall see. The 200Mb/s AV version returns about 190Mb/s under ideal conditions in a simple speed test across about 10 feet. In the real world this'll mean it'll be more like 150Mb/s or so, dropping to under 100Mb/s if you really push the parameters. We won't get 600Mb/s, sigh. We should easily see over 400Mb/s or so though, which is fast enough for lots of HD video, which is what everybody seems to insist on pushing across links now. It's no Gigabit LAN, sure, but it has to do much more work in a hostile environment. Sounds great, but there's a good reason why everybody doesn't use HomePlug: it's not cheap. A basic two plug starter system goes for around £50 for version 1.0 and £80-odd for HomePlug AV. Adding another device adds another £25 or more. When you start to explore what's going on inside a HomePlug unit, it becomes clear why they cost what they do: there's some serious electrical trickery involved. A lot of the current kit is beautifully built: Devolo in particular knows how to produce good looking, family friendly kit. We recently tested its dLAN 200 AVSmart+ Starter Kit and were most impressed - it was built like a tank. The other big player is Netgear: its kit isn't quite as accomplished, but it's cheaper. Then there are Belkin, Cisco, Sharp and a few other big names: not a lengthy list yet, but growing.
MULTI-ROOM AUDIO: The Collage system from Russound features natty remote controls with which you can access all areas HomePlug isn't the only network you'll need. Wireless is still, well, wireless, and if you want the fastest possible connection then using a Ethernet cable is still the way to go, and always will be; you can't beat a direct wired connection. But the idea has grown from a curious approach to a solid standard for houses that aren't fully-cabled expensive new builds. There's also the technology to go the whole hog and use the mains to deliver your broadband too, no phone socket required. With Broadband over Power Lines (BPL), your modem can be plugged into any socket in the house. This one does require a spot of infrastructure investment in mains wiring, though - repeaters and filters and whatnot. It's currently one of those 'It's technically possible, should we give it a proper go commercially?' ideas that are currently floating around. You'll be seeing a lot more of HomePlug and similar technologies in the future. Electrical devices are going to start talking to each other through the power lines - a network of wires that makes the internet look meagre in comparison. Computers started life in isolation. Networking and then the internet brought a whole new dimension. Now every electrical device you plug into the wall can join in. Hyperbole? Yes, but you get the picture. Meanwhile, HomePlug is a very workable and neat system. At the moment it's expensive, but it will soon get fast enough to be very interesting. What we need now is volume to lower the cost of the kit. Related Links
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| Review: Toshiba Satellite Pro C660-171 Posted: 26 Feb 2011 02:00 AM PST  We've long been fans of Toshiba laptops, but the Satellite Pro C660-171 falls below the usual high standards of the Japanese manufacturer, due to a sub-standard design and a lack of features. Whereas other manufacturers including Acer and Dell, have created laptops that are a pleasure to own thanks to excellent designs, this laptop looks considerably cheaper than it is. This is down to its very plastic design that you could only call functional, with the only positive being it's very hard to mark and will prove suitably durable on the road. Usability suffers slightly as a result. The plastic keyboard is surprisingly flexible and the action of the keys is a little too stiff for our liking. You might not mind this, however, but we would recommend trying at your local superstore before you buy. The laptop's screen is decent enough, and the 1366 x 768-pixel resolution provides a detailed enough picture for viewing photos and films. It's also worth mentioning the shiny Super-TFT screen coating is very reflective in bright light. Features-wise the laptop falls short here. This laptop doesn't feature an HDMI video out for connecting to an external high-definition (HD) source, such as a TV or monitor, and you also only get 10/100 Ethernet. This is the slowest wired connection currently available, and those who regularly use Ethernet for setting up home or office networks will prefer the Gigabit connections offered on similar laptops at this price. Finally, there are also only two USB ports supplied. Those who are used to plugging in a wealth of peripherals, from smartphones to external mice, will find this restricting to say the least.
Decent performance Nevertheless, the Intel Core i3 370M chip provides decent performance. Everyday users will have no problem running all their regular software, even concurrently, although the 3072MB of memory is a bit low for the price, making the laptop less suited to multi-tasking than the Dell Inspiron 15R. Similarly, the integrated Intel graphics card provides limited multimedia power, although there's enough performance on offer here for entry-level photo editing, as well as watching films and streaming video from the internet. Benchmarks Battery life: 209 minutes The 500GB of hard drive storage is excellent for the money, and will provide a great deal of future-proofing for all but the most data-hungry users. Portability is also just about acceptable, with 209-minutes of battery life available and a chassis weight of just 2.4kg. It's hard to like the Satellite Pro C660-171 when it offers so little for its asking price. Splashing out a little more on the Acer Aspire 5741G or Dell Inspiron 15R will pay greater dividends. Related Links
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2011 01:30 AM PST  MSI enjoyed a successful year in 2010 producing a succession of impressive machines that ranged from excellent netbooks to high-end gaming kit. The CX623-258UK comes from the manufacturer's classic range and, despite a few design quirks, makes a competitive choice for the whole family. The screen is one of the best we have seen around this price and is on a par with the Dell Inspiron 15R. Brightness is exceptional, as is colour reproduction, but it's the contrast and deep black levels that really impress. As a result, this laptop would certainly suit those for whom viewing videos and photos is a priority, as it makes them look great. The keyboard is very spacious and uses isolation-style keys. The keys are also large and, therefore, hard to miss-hit, but the board is quite spongy, giving a slightly rattly feel to proceedings. Ultimately, however, we found the laptop very comfortable to type on for long periods. Irritating touchpad Unfortunately, the touchpad is very easy to brush when typing, meaning you're likely to spend a lot of time rearranging bits of text which you've inadvertently launched across the page. This is a big flaw and quickly becomes hugely infuriating. Despite the flexible keyboard, the laptop is very well put together, featuring tough plastics. However, some potential purchasers may be put off by the unusual paint scheme used.
Another strange design choice is to place the majority of ports at the back of the laptop's chassis, making attaching peripherals, for example, a bit fiddly at times. Internally, an Intel Core i3 380M processor and 4096MB of memory provide average performance, judging by the benchmarking scores, but in reality we found the laptop to perform well, running everyday applications, such as email clients, with little issue. Benchmarks Battery life: 246 minutes However, if you're after the most for your money in terms of performance, you would do better considering the Dell Inspiron 15R. Graphically the laptop is surprisingly powerful, thanks to its Nvidia GeForce 310M chip, and those wanting to edit their holiday videos and photos with high-end software will be well served here. The laptop will struggle to run the latest games, however. The 640GB hard drive is exceptionally generous for the price, and will take the average user many years to fill, saving you from having to constantly move your excess data to an external drive to free up space. A standard CD and DVD rewriter is also in place for creating your own discs. A few design quirks aside, we were quite impressed by the CX623-258UK. It may not be the most comprehensive option here, but it is certainly worth your consideration at this price. Related Links
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