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Techradar |
- Buying Guide: Which is the best HTC phone?
- Review: iPad 2
- Tutorial: 15 handy Windows XP tips and tricks
- Tutorial: 15 handy Windows XP tips and tricks
- In Depth: Beyond the touchscreen: interfaces of the future
- Review: Lexmark Genesis S815
- Review: Lexmark Genesis S815
- In Depth: Beyond the touchscreen: interfaces of the future
- Review: Quirky Space Bar
- Review: Quirky Space Bar
- Catch up: this week's most popular posts
- Catch up: this week's most popular posts
| Buying Guide: Which is the best HTC phone? Posted: 12 Mar 2011 08:08 AM PST  Our constantly updated list of the best HTC phones. So you've decided that HTC is the brand you want to spend the next 24 months of your life with - but that's not the end of the quest. You have a plethora of devices, price points and operating systems to choose from and it can all get a little bewildering. But which is the best HTC phone for you? Thankfully TechRadar is on hand to help you out - check out our run down of all the HTC phones around at the moment: HTC Incredible S
OS: Android 2.2 The HTC Incredible S is rather nice piece of kit, but has a very odd rear - the innards are vacuum packed to the case, giving the impression of a much thinner phone than it actually is. The OS is still only Android 2.2, and we'd have hoped for a spot of Gingerbread on a cutting edge handset like this - but a decent camera, slick UI and bright 4-inch screen make this a worthy contender for you HTC dollar. Read our full HTC Incredible S review HTC Gratia
OS: Android 2.2 The HTC Gratia is a curious device; if you're after an everyday smartphone at a reasonable price, this could more than ably scratch that itch. In fact, we'd recommend it over many other phones in this bracket. It's very similar to the HTC Wildfire in terms of spec, although does have a smarter chassis design. If, however, you'd prefer a powerhouse packed with cutting-edge features, there's no doubt that this is too much of a compromise to satisfy. Camera cognoscenti also need not apply. Read our full HTC Gratia review HTC 7 Pro
OS: Windows Phone 7 Bringing a portrait QWERTY keyboard to proceedings, the HTC 7 Pro offers the simple Windows Phone 7 interface combined with physical buttons. However, the key design is a little poor, and the chassis is quite chunky too - although if you're hankering for a slide out keyboard and a Microsoft Mobile OS, this wouldn't be the worst option for you. Read our full HTC 7 Pro review HTC Desire HD
OS: Android 2.2 The super-sized HTC Desire HD is HTC's attempt to take smartphones to the next level and the HD features a flawless interface and fantastic web browser. Battery life isn't great, though, and it's a little on the large side. Read our full HTC Desire HD review HTC Desire Z
OS: Android An Android phone with a full QWERTY keyboard - so if a physical keyboard is a must on an Android phone, then this is the handset for you. Read our full HTC Desire Z review HTC HD7
OS: Windows Phone 7 With a 4.3-inch screen, this phone is huge, and while we're fans of its size some may instantly dismiss it as too big. Read our full HTC HD7 review HTC 7 Mozart
OS: Windows Phone 7 The HTC Mozart features a 1GHz processor, 3.7-inch WVGA screen, an eight-megapixel camera with Xenon flash and 720p HD video recording as well as all 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. Read our full HTC 7 Mozart review HTC 7 Trophy
OS: Windows Phone 7 The Trophy looks to be the cheapest of the HTC phones running WP7. £25 a month is ridiculously cheap for a phone that offers a 5MP camera, HD video recording, a dedicated GPU and the new Windows Phone 7 OS. Read our full HTC 7 Trophy review HTC Wildfire
OS: Android 2.1 A nice phone that's well packaged - it just needs a decent price to go with it and HTC could have solved the problems posed by the HTC Tattoo: a budget Android phone that doesn't scrimp on hardware specs. Read our full HTC Wildfire review HTC HD Mini
OS: Windows Mobile 6.5 This is the best Windows Mobile 6.5 handset currently available, and HTC's Sense interface which sits on top of the Windows Mobile interface makes the phone a joy to use. Read our full HTC HD Mini review HTC Desire
OS: Android 2.1 As a piece of hardware it's without par in the mobile world. A stunning phone, and one that will show the world that Android isn't just for the hackers and phone geeks any more. Read our full HTC Desire review HTC Legend
OS: Android 2.1 If you're someone that doesn't really care massively about apps or gets irritated by a day-long battery life, we couldn't recommend this phone more. The HTC Legend is not quite the phone to persuade the masses Android is finally an adequate iPhone replacement - but it's awfully, awfully close. Read our full HTC Legend review HTC HD2
OS: Windows Mobile 6.5 We so desperately want to give the HD2 4.5 stars to rank it alongside the likes of the Legend and the iPhone 3GS, but it just falls short. But until then it will have to be content with being one of the best 'business devices' on the market by a country mile. Read our full HTC HD2 review 
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| Posted: 12 Mar 2011 07:05 AM PST  Our iPad 2 review is a work in progress. Here are our initial findings... Just under one year ago, Apple shocked the computing world with a 9.7-inch touchscreen tablet that few truly expected. Some called the original Apple iPad a large-format iPhone. Others berated the name and made jokes that were not remotely funny. The early reviews were marginal at best – we handed the device a solid four stars. Technical folks decried the lack of Adobe Flash and the missing cameras. Now, 60,000 apps later (according to Apple, who counts every conceivable option) and just a few weeks after the first real Android 3.0 tablet contender hit the streets (Motorola Xoom), the iPad 2 has sauntered onto the playing field.
Some expected pure gold: a tablet that runs as fast as a laptop and weighs less than a newspaper. Yet, the reality with the iPad 2 is that Apple has taken an iterative approach. In many ways, the iPad 2 is a crowd pleaser because it does not rock the boat. At 241mm tall, 186mm wide, and 8.6mm thick, the iPad 2 is just a hair smaller than the original iPad and it's thinner than the iPhone 4. It has a curved edge that makes it look a bit more 'space age' and, surprisingly, easier to grasp because you can curve your fingers more easily around the bezel.
The most dramatic change is the weight. At 680 grams, the iPad 2 is 80g lighter than the first iPad. That is about the same weight as a juicy red apple (curious, eh?). Yet, in using the device, it feels strangely lighter than it really is. Overall, the new design is the major perk. It's fantastic.
Apple has made a second-gen iPad that feels lighter and more nimble, and its newfound mobility means it has lost the annoying heft of the original model. Meanwhile, the Motorola Xoom, at 730 grams, now feels like the tank that it is. (More about that later, because we do prefer the speedy processor on the Xoom that handles 3D maps and games.)
One other observation about the design: compared to the iPhone 4, the iPad 2 feels a bit more like a plastic plate (the back is actually metal) as though it really needs a protective case. Part of the reason for this 'cheap plastic' impression is that the device is one-third thinner than the original and 15% lighter. Overall, the design is a stunner – it's brilliant. The aesthetics are much improved, although not everything about the iPad 2 is so equally impressive.
One thing that has not changed about the iPad 2 is the price: the £439 entry-price for the 16GB Wi-Fi model is the same as the original iPad. And, the pricing goes up £100 or so for each successive model that doubles the internal storage. Features On paper, the iPad 2 is 'twice as fast' as the original iPad, running the brand-new dual core A5 CPU built by ARM. In practice, it might not be that obvious that the processor is faster. Many apps, such as the Safari browser and the iPod media app, start about as fast as the original iPad. But as we'll see, apps like iMovie and GarageBand do run much faster.
Also on paper, the iPad 2 has more memory for apps. The original model had 256MB of RAM, but the new version doubles that to 512MB. The Motorola Xoom has 1GB of RAM, and that provides an extra boost for running more apps and switching between them, and a noticeable speed improvement for 3D mapping. We tested the 64GB version W-Fi-only iPad 2 (our iPad 2 3G review is on the way!). With the Xoom, there is only one model with Wi-Fi and 3G. The iPad 2's 64GB of storage is twice that of the Motorola Xoom, although Motorola plans to update the device to support the built-in microSD slot. Curiously, the iPad 2 screen is the same size and resolution as the original model, running at just 1024 x 768 pixels.
The Motorola Xoom, at 1280 x 800 pixels, is notably superior -- especially for viewing videos, flicking through high-def photos, and using the Android 3.0 interface itself. That's one of the early findings with the iPad 2, that the screen itself is almost indiscernible from that on the iPad. That said, the iPad 2 's screen still has a better viewing angle than the Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab 7-inch.
Most of the power on the iPad 2 comes from the A5 processor, and our early tests show that this dual-core chip does provide some new-found speed, especially in apps like iMovie (on the original iPad, iMovie tends to stutter a bit). Interestingly, the iPad 2 starts up much faster than the Motorola Xoom. In fact, we started the iPad and browsed to a few Web sites before the Xoom even got to its home screen.
In another test, we loaded up the iPod media player on both the iPad and the iPad 2 with the same music and movie files. Here, we saw another noticeable speed difference – the iPad 2 finishes loading about a second faster. Those speed gains meant clicking on Arcade Fire's latest album to play music just a hair faster. Several other specs, which we'll cover in our final iPad 2 review, are also new or improved: the two cameras, one for photos and one for video chats; the faster graphics engine, which will made games more bearable; the HDMI-out capability at HD resolution that also lets you mirror whatever you see on the screen. Apple now offers a 30-pin to HDMI cable that could make movie night easier.
Even with the faster processor and better graphics engine, the iPad 2 still lasts about ten hours – or roughly the same as the Motorola Xoom. Apple has also added a new gyroscope similar to the one on the iPhone 4. This chip, in conjunction with the existing accelerometer, will help make the iPad 2 more sensitive to motion, especially in games but also when you change the orientation. Read more soon... We've given the iPad 2 a preliminary score of 4 out of 5. We'll revisit that when we finish the review in the next few days. But in the meantime, our reasoning for the prelim score is this: The lighter design, A5 processor, cameras, gyroscope, and other enhancements increase the value over the original iPad -- at the same price. But the original iPad is now £100 cheaper and Apple has had a year to innovate further. But despite that, in actual real-world speed tests, the most common apps don't perform any faster... yet. Check back on Monday for the rest of our iPad 2 review! Related Links
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| Tutorial: 15 handy Windows XP tips and tricks Posted: 12 Mar 2011 04:00 AM PST  We've all got a loyal old PC knocking around in a dark corner at home - one that's a bit of an old dog: arthritic and rather ponderous, but unwaveringly dependable if you can't use your main PC for any reason. That old machine will almost certainly be running Windows XP. Who not give it a bit of TLC and make it useful again? Here are our Windows XP tips to breathe new life into that machine. 1. Remove the Recycle Bin If you prefer to work with a completely clear desktop, you can hide the Recycle Bin with a little Registry hack. You can still use the [Shift] + [Delete] shortcut to access the Bin when you need it. Choose 'Start | Run' and type Regedit in the 'Open' bar. Click 'OK'. Now browse to the following location: 'HKEY_ LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\HideDesktop Icons\NewStartPanel\' Create a new DWORD value and give it the following name: '{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}' Double-click this and change its value to '1'. Quit Registry Editor, then right-click an empty space somewhere on your desktop and choose 'Refresh'. The Recycle Bin icon will magically disappear from the desktop. You can get it back again at any time by changing the value back to '0'. 2. Create your own toolbar
You can turn a folder into a toolbar for quick and easy access to its contents. Right-click the taskbar and choose 'Toolbars | New toolbar' from the menu. This launches the 'New toolbar' dialog. Select the item that you want to use as a toolbar. If necessary, browse through 'My Documents' or 'My Computer' to find the folder you want. Alternatively, click 'Make new folder' to create a custom one. Click 'OK'. Your new toolbar will appear as a button on the taskbar. Click this to see an expanding menu of its contents. Subfolders become their own expanding menus. Select a file to open it in its associated application. 3. Use Group Policy Editor Windows XP Professional Edition includes the Group Policy Editor, which is a very powerful tool that enables you to configure what permissions and access each account has. This isn't available in the Home Edition. To launch it, Choose 'Start | Run' and enter gpedit. msc in the 'Open' bar. Click 'OK'. Expand 'User Configuration' in the left-hand pane. You'll see subfolders for 'Software settings', 'Windows settings' and 'Administrative templates'. By expanding these, you can find a range of options to configure. Expand 'Administrative templates', followed by 'Control panel'. Here you can alter what appears in the user's control panel. One particularly useful setting is the one that prohibits access so you can stop other users changing your settings. Double-click 'Prohibit access to the control panel' in the right-hand pane. This opens a dialog. Select 'Enabled' and click 'OK'. Choose the 'Explain' tab to find out more about this setting. Each setting listed here has three options for configuration. 'Not configured' means you'll make no change to the current setup. 'Enabled' turns the setting on, and 'Disabled' turns it off again. It's worth exploring the various configurations you can make, but make sure you're fully backed up before you do so. 4. Cut the Start menu delay There's a slight delay built into the Start menu to give you thinking time. If you know your way around, you can shorten it with a Registry edit. Open the Registry Editor by choosing 'Start | Run' and entering Regedit in the 'Open' bar, then clicking 'OK'. Now go to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop'. Double-click the 'MenuShowDelay' value and change it from the default 400 to a lower number of your choice. 5. Disable autorun for discs Put a disc in your CD/DVD drive and you'll notice an appreciable lag as it spins up, even if you're not just about to use it. If you don't always need your CDs and DVDs to launch automatically when you insert them, the needless spinning up of the discs can slow your machine down. You can disable CD autorun by modifying this registry key: 'HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current ControlSet\Services\Cdrom'. Double-click the 'AutoRun Dword' value and set it to '0'. Change it to '1' to restore it. 6. Disable menu animation You can turn off animated menus in Windows XP for faster navigation. In Regedit, open the key 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop' and create the string value 'MinAnimate'. Give it a '0' value. To restore menu animations, delete this string value. 7. Reduce hanging time
By default, Windows waits for five seconds to allow time for any hung applications to be closed properly as you shut down your computer. You can change this hanging time with a registry edit. Browse to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop' and select the string entry called 'HungApp Timeout'. If you're using Vista, you'll need to create this entry. Right-click this and choose 'Modify'. The number is in milliseconds, so the default of 5,000 is a wait of five seconds. Simply choose a lower number to shorten the wait time. 8. Remove text from icons You can improve the general look of your PC's desktop by removing the names of shortcuts, leaving the icons to speak for themselves. If you try renaming a desktop shortcut to a single space, Windows XP won't let you. However, you can force it to accept a space as the name by holding down [Alt] and typing 255 on the number pad. If you want multiple shortcuts to have blank names, you'll need to give each one a different number of spaces to avoid them having identical names. 9. Create a mute shortcut You can make a custom shortcut that mutes and unmutes your PC's sound by downloading a small utility called Nircmd, which you can get from www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html. Download and extract the file contents to 'My Documents'. Next, right-click the desktop and choose 'New | Shortcut'. Enter the following for the shortcut location: "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\nircmd\nircmd.exe" mutesysvolume 2. Ensure that the path points to the location where you extracted the 'Nircmd.exe' file. Name the shortcut 'mute_ unmute'. Double-click it to mute your speakers and do so again to turn them back on. 10. Remove programs from the 'Open With' list Stop programs appearing on the 'Open with' list when you're trying to open an unrecognised file. Open Regedit and browse to HKEY_ CLASSES_ROOT\Applications', and you'll see a list of programs that are installed on your PC as subkeys in the left-hand pane. To remove an unwanted program from this list, select it and right-click in the right hand pane. Choose 'New | String value'. Name it 'NoOpenWith'. Repeat for each application that you want to remove from this list. 11. Correct file sorting By default, a file named '2.jpg' will be sorted after one called '20.jpg'. Many people work around this by starting single-digit numbers in file names with a leading zero, but you can change this behaviour by making a Registry edit. Browse to the Registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explore. Create a new DWORD value and name it 'NoStrCmpLogical'. Right click and modify its value to '1'. 12. Add new 'Copy to' key
Add a 'Copy to folder' option to the right-click context menu so that you can quickly copy a file by right-clicking it. In the Registry Editor, browse to 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers' and create a new key called 'Copy to'. Change its default value to '{C2FBB630-2971-11d1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}' and check it works in Windows. You can also add a 'Move to folder' option in this way. From the same 'ContextMenuHandlers' key, simply create a new key called 'Move to' and then change its default value to '{C2FBB631-2971-11d1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}' to do this. 13. Skip welcome screen
You can choose to log into Windows automatically and bypass the welcome screen by making a simple tweak. To do this, choose 'Start | Run' and enter control userpasswords2 into the 'Open' bar. Click 'OK' to see a dialog showing each user installed on the PC. Clear the box marked 'Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer'. Click 'OK'. Now restart your PC and you should go directly to your desktop. 14. Display shortcut keys When you open a menu or My Computer window in XP, you can see what shortcut keys are available by pressing [Alt] once - underlined letters will appear, and pressing that letter will trigger the appropriate shortcut, whether it's ticking a box or selecting a button. You can make these underlined letters appear automatically from the 'Appearance' tab under the 'Desktop' control panel. Click the 'Effects' button and remove the tick next to the box marked 'Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key'. Click 'OK' twice. 15. Say 'No to all' requests When you're copying or moving a group of files, you'll sometimes be prompted to provide a 'Yes' or a 'Yes to all' response - if you need to give permission for a process to to overwrite existing files, for example. Choose the latter option and similar files that prompt the same question will be ignored in future. But what if you want 'No to all' instead? There's no visible option, but you can select 'No to all' by simply holding the [Shift] key as you click 'No'. 
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| Tutorial: 15 handy Windows XP tips and tricks Posted: 12 Mar 2011 04:00 AM PST We've all got a loyal old PC knocking around in a dark corner at home - one that's a bit of an old dog: arthritic and rather ponderous, but unwaveringly dependable if you can't use your main PC for any reason. That old machine will almost certainly be running Windows XP. Who not give it a bit of TLC and make it useful again? Here are our Windows XP tips to breathe new life into that machine. 1. Remove the Recycle Bin If you prefer to work with a completely clear desktop, you can hide the Recycle Bin with a little Registry hack. You can still use the [Shift] + [Delete] shortcut to access the Bin when you need it. Choose 'Start | Run' and type Regedit in the 'Open' bar. Click 'OK'. Now browse to the following location: 'HKEY_ LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\HideDesktop Icons\NewStartPanel\' Create a new DWORD value and give it the following name: '{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}' Double-click this and change its value to '1'. Quit Registry Editor, then right-click an empty space somewhere on your desktop and choose 'Refresh'. The Recycle Bin icon will magically disappear from the desktop. You can get it back again at any time by changing the value back to '0'. 2. Create your own toolbar
You can turn a folder into a toolbar for quick and easy access to its contents. Right-click the taskbar and choose 'Toolbars | New toolbar' from the menu. This launches the 'New toolbar' dialog. Select the item that you want to use as a toolbar. If necessary, browse through 'My Documents' or 'My Computer' to find the folder you want. Alternatively, click 'Make new folder' to create a custom one. Click 'OK'. Your new toolbar will appear as a button on the taskbar. Click this to see an expanding menu of its contents. Subfolders become their own expanding menus. Select a file to open it in its associated application. 3. Use Group Policy Editor Windows XP Professional Edition includes the Group Policy Editor, which is a very powerful tool that enables you to configure what permissions and access each account has. This isn't available in the Home Edition. To launch it, Choose 'Start | Run' and enter gpedit. msc in the 'Open' bar. Click 'OK'. Expand 'User Configuration' in the left-hand pane. You'll see subfolders for 'Software settings', 'Windows settings' and 'Administrative templates'. By expanding these, you can find a range of options to configure. Expand 'Administrative templates', followed by 'Control panel'. Here you can alter what appears in the user's control panel. One particularly useful setting is the one that prohibits access so you can stop other users changing your settings. Double-click 'Prohibit access to the control panel' in the right-hand pane. This opens a dialog. Select 'Enabled' and click 'OK'. Choose the 'Explain' tab to find out more about this setting. Each setting listed here has three options for configuration. 'Not configured' means you'll make no change to the current setup. 'Enabled' turns the setting on, and 'Disabled' turns it off again. It's worth exploring the various configurations you can make, but make sure you're fully backed up before you do so. 4. Cut the Start menu delay There's a slight delay built into the Start menu to give you thinking time. If you know your way around, you can shorten it with a Registry edit. Open the Registry Editor by choosing 'Start | Run' and entering Regedit in the 'Open' bar, then clicking 'OK'. Now go to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop'. Double-click the 'MenuShowDelay' value and change it from the default 400 to a lower number of your choice. 5. Disable autorun for discs Put a disc in your CD/DVD drive and you'll notice an appreciable lag as it spins up, even if you're not just about to use it. If you don't always need your CDs and DVDs to launch automatically when you insert them, the needless spinning up of the discs can slow your machine down. You can disable CD autorun by modifying this registry key: 'HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current ControlSet\Services\Cdrom'. Double-click the 'AutoRun Dword' value and set it to '0'. Change it to '1' to restore it. 6. Disable menu animation You can turn off animated menus in Windows XP for faster navigation. In Regedit, open the key 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop' and create the string value 'MinAnimate'. Give it a '0' value. To restore menu animations, delete this string value. 7. Reduce hanging time
By default, Windows waits for five seconds to allow time for any hung applications to be closed properly as you shut down your computer. You can change this hanging time with a registry edit. Browse to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop' and select the string entry called 'HungApp Timeout'. If you're using Vista, you'll need to create this entry. Right-click this and choose 'Modify'. The number is in milliseconds, so the default of 5,000 is a wait of five seconds. Simply choose a lower number to shorten the wait time. 8. Remove text from icons You can improve the general look of your PC's desktop by removing the names of shortcuts, leaving the icons to speak for themselves. If you try renaming a desktop shortcut to a single space, Windows XP won't let you. However, you can force it to accept a space as the name by holding down [Alt] and typing 255 on the number pad. If you want multiple shortcuts to have blank names, you'll need to give each one a different number of spaces to avoid them having identical names. 9. Create a mute shortcut You can make a custom shortcut that mutes and unmutes your PC's sound by downloading a small utility called Nircmd, which you can get from www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html. Download and extract the file contents to 'My Documents'. Next, right-click the desktop and choose 'New | Shortcut'. Enter the following for the shortcut location: "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\nircmd\nircmd.exe" mutesysvolume 2. Ensure that the path points to the location where you extracted the 'Nircmd.exe' file. Name the shortcut 'mute_ unmute'. Double-click it to mute your speakers and do so again to turn them back on. 10. Remove programs from the 'Open With' list Stop programs appearing on the 'Open with' list when you're trying to open an unrecognised file. Open Regedit and browse to HKEY_ CLASSES_ROOT\Applications', and you'll see a list of programs that are installed on your PC as subkeys in the left-hand pane. To remove an unwanted program from this list, select it and right-click in the right hand pane. Choose 'New | String value'. Name it 'NoOpenWith'. Repeat for each application that you want to remove from this list. 11. Correct file sorting By default, a file named '2.jpg' will be sorted after one called '20.jpg'. Many people work around this by starting single-digit numbers in file names with a leading zero, but you can change this behaviour by making a Registry edit. Browse to the Registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explore. Create a new DWORD value and name it 'NoStrCmpLogical'. Right click and modify its value to '1'. 12. Add new 'Copy to' key
Add a 'Copy to folder' option to the right-click context menu so that you can quickly copy a file by right-clicking it. In the Registry Editor, browse to 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers' and create a new key called 'Copy to'. Change its default value to '{C2FBB630-2971-11d1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}' and check it works in Windows. You can also add a 'Move to folder' option in this way. From the same 'ContextMenuHandlers' key, simply create a new key called 'Move to' and then change its default value to '{C2FBB631-2971-11d1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}' to do this. 13. Skip welcome screen
You can choose to log into Windows automatically and bypass the welcome screen by making a simple tweak. To do this, choose 'Start | Run' and enter control userpasswords2 into the 'Open' bar. Click 'OK' to see a dialog showing each user installed on the PC. Clear the box marked 'Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer'. Click 'OK'. Now restart your PC and you should go directly to your desktop. 14. Display shortcut keys When you open a menu or My Computer window in XP, you can see what shortcut keys are available by pressing [Alt] once - underlined letters will appear, and pressing that letter will trigger the appropriate shortcut, whether it's ticking a box or selecting a button. You can make these underlined letters appear automatically from the 'Appearance' tab under the 'Desktop' control panel. Click the 'Effects' button and remove the tick next to the box marked 'Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key'. Click 'OK' twice. 15. Say 'No to all' requests When you're copying or moving a group of files, you'll sometimes be prompted to provide a 'Yes' or a 'Yes to all' response - if you need to give permission for a process to to overwrite existing files, for example. Choose the latter option and similar files that prompt the same question will be ignored in future. But what if you want 'No to all' instead? There's no visible option, but you can select 'No to all' by simply holding the [Shift] key as you click 'No'.
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| In Depth: Beyond the touchscreen: interfaces of the future Posted: 12 Mar 2011 02:00 AM PST  We're living in interesting times. Tech firms want to take over our TVs, our phones are more powerful than some recent PCs, and we can control games consoles through the medium of dance. New interfaces are all around us, from touch screens to augmented reality, and the way we interact with technology is being transformed. But which interfaces are genuine leaps forward and which are digital dead ends? What makes a good user interface anyway? Videos of very young children playing with iPads have become an internet cliché, but they demonstrate how intuitive technology is becoming: nobody was filming two-year-olds using IBM's original PC. The IBM PC's command line interface was streets ahead of 1970s computers' switches, of course, but it wasn't until the arrival of the graphical user interfaces of the 1980s and beyond that personal computing became simple enough for the mainstream. And now the landscape is changing again. After more than two decades of dominance, WIMP interfaces - windows, icons, menus and pointing devices - face new challengers in the form of multi-touch devices, voice control, gesture input and augmented reality. This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showed where we're heading. Microsoft demonstrated its Kinect sensor doing a great job of voice recognition - no mean feat in a crowded venue - and gesture control, with users controlling video apps with waves of their hands, while everyone else seemed to be showing off some form of touch-controlled tablet. Gestures certainly seem more futuristic than Google's vision of a QWERTY keyboard in every remote control, but are these ideas a mere fad? Is multi-touch a credible form of PC input? "It's credible," says Gord Kurtenbach, Autodesk's Director of Research. "We're just at the start of determining how multi-touch can be used in the context of desktop PC systems. Obviously adding multi-touch to the display monitor makes a cool demo, but when using it over a period of time your arms get tired… Some of the most promising work I've seen uses multi-touch in concert with standard desktop configurations of mouse, keyboard and monitor. After all, the keyboard is a multi-touch device and that has been pretty successful, so I can imagine multi-touch tablets and displays being used horizontally as controller devices." Everything's an interface Multi-touch certainly won't be the only way we interact with our gadgets. As James McCarthy, senior windows consumer product manager with Microsoft, points out, the era of natural user interfaces (NUIs) has already begun: Windows' Photo Gallery uses image processing to recognise faces, eight million Xbox 360 owners control their console using Kinect and some two million motorists are talking to Ford Sync-equipped vehicles.
Forget the ropey speech recognition systems of the 1990s: voice control is back, and this time it works. That's partly because modern systems now specialise. Hardware is now much more powerful, and cloud computing allows remote processing and real-time results. "The way we interact with technology is becoming more natural, allowing our devices to work on our behalf instead of just at our command," McCarthy says. "You can already envision the world we're imagining through Microsoft research projects like a prototype of an automated receptionist; Microsoft LightSpace, a technology prototype showing the potential of using depth-sensing cameras to naturally interact with any surface; and Project Gustav, a realistic painting prototype that lets artists become immersed in the digital painting experience, just as Kinect helps people become the controller in the gaming experience." The magic touch Touch control has been around for a long time. What's different about today's touch technology is that touch has become multi-touch: instead of prodding with a stylus we're pinching and pulling with one, two or ten fingers. That means tablets can be typewriters, pianos, canvases, or anything else we fancy playing with. Done well, multi-touch removes abstraction - instead of moving a device like a mouse to point at something, you just point at it; instead of clicking on piano keys or trying to remember which keyboard key corresponds to each note, you just play the note.
Multi-touch is a good illustration of Fitts's Law, which was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954. The law states that the time needed to move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. In effect, that means big icons are easier to hit than little ones, top-of-screen menus are easier to click on than top-of-window ones and pop-up menus are faster than pull-downs. There's more to effective UIs than big icons, of course. Good UIs remove complexity and obstacles, so for example, a mouse-and-windows OS is more intuitive than a command line interface and a multi-touch OS can be more intuitive than a mouse-based one. Designers can do several things to streamline interfaces. They can use metaphors to make things more obvious - for example, we all know what desktops are, what control panels do and what recycle bins are for - and they can use icons and nested menus to reduce visual clutter. They can use context-sensitive menus and hinting, where the interface offers visual clues such as tooltips, and they can add indicators to icons. However, if you keep adding features to the underlying system, eventually you'll run out of tweaks. As Microsoft program manager Jensen Harris recalls, by Office 2003 the UI was beginning to feel bloated, "like a suitcase stuffed to the gills with vacation clothes". No wonder - it was essentially the same UI that Office had in 1989. As Harris explains, "There's a point beyond which menus and toolbars cease to scale well. A flat menu with eight well-organised commands on it works just great; a three-level hierarchical menu containing 35 loosely-related commands can be a bit of a disaster." Microsoft redesigned the Office UI and the result was the Ribbon, which makes Office less intimidating and features easier to find. It annoyed power users though, demonstrating that when it comes to UIs, you can't please everybody. An extra dimension Three dimensional games, TVs and monitors are being hyped this year. How about 3D software? Microsoft and Nvidia have teamed up for what they call the 3D PC, but that's about consuming games and movies. A 3D OS would be far trickier to put together. Just ask Autodesk, which has been in the 3D business for decades. "Many people believe that because in the real world we navigate 3D physical spaces with ease, 3D navigation should make navigation of 3D virtual spaces easy as well," Kurtenbach says. "However, everything changes when the space is behind the display monitor. It becomes hard, like learning to fly an aeroplane using controls. So the old idea that your desktop will be easier to use if it's a 3D virtual space that you can navigate around hasn't really made things easier. Certainly, we've made big advances in 3D navigation with such product features as SteeringWheels, but these interfaces are for navigating spaces that truly need to be in 3D, such as CAD models." That doesn't mean it isn't possible. Toshiba recently showed an auto-stereoscopic display that uses a six-axis accelerometer, effectively letting users look around 3D objects, and Autodesk has the wonderfully named Boom Chameleon. "The Boom Chameleon is a very different approach to 3D navigation where the tablet PC acts like window into a virtual space," Kurtenbach says. "When you move the tablet, you change your window into the virtual space. With current tablet systems that have position sensors or built-in cameras, this type of thing can already be accomplished and I've seen examples of the Chameleon on tablets and mobile devices built by student researchers. As devices become more powerful, we'll see this becoming more practical and useful." One vision of the future is to replace the desktop and monitor with multi-touch screens. That's the thinking behind the BendDesk. BendDesk is a multitouch display in two sections: one where you'd normally have a screen and where you'd normally have a keyboard and mouse.
As its creators, members of Aachen University's Media Computing Group, explain: "BendDesk is a multi-touch desk that combines a vertical and a horizontal surface with a curve into one large interactive workspace. This workspace can be used to display digital content like documents, photos or videos. Multi-touch technology allows the user to interact with the entire surface." BendDesk is a concept, but advances in e-paper technology will make it possible within a few years. One thing it doesn't do is offer physical feedback of the kind we expect from keyboards, mice and other devices. But there may be an answer to that too: haptic feedback. Haptic feedback is physical feedback: the click of the mouse button, the pressure you feel when your fingers press a key and so on. Apple and Microsoft have both filed patents for haptic systems: the former's idea places small vibrators around a screen, with multiple vibrators creating effects at specific locations on a phone or tablet's surface, while Microsoft intends to make screens that can shape-shift.
Microsoft's application describes a screen made from hundreds of tiny, light-activated tiles: hit them with the right frequency and they change shape to make a D-pad controller, a keyboard or text in Braille. The move to mobile Smartphones enable all kinds of new interfaces. Apps can use the camera as an input device, or be controlled by voice. Accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS mean phones know where they are, what they're pointing at and if they're moving, which makes augmented reality possible. With augmented reality, the world around you is the interface. When they're done well, as they are in apps such as Nearest Tube, they're intuitive and instantly understood - although our experiences of augmented reality to date suggest it's still in the 'coming soon' category rather than a useful, everyday technology. Even without augmented reality, apps represent a new frontier in interface design: with an OS that's happy to give the entire screen over to an app, designers have been free to experiment. It's reminiscent of the early days of the web, and interface conventions will emerge. As technology evolves, networks improve and we cram ever more processing power into ever-smaller form factors, we'll use a mix of different interfaces: voice, augmented reality and maybe even a keyboard, real or virtual. As Gord Kurtenbach puts it: "We'll continue to add different setups to support different ways and times of working. Back in the '80s, I had to go to the university lab to use a computer. Later, I got one at home and I could do different types of work from both. Today I have desktop at home and work, a couple of laptops, a tablet, a mobile phone and so on. I use all of them, but in different ways for different things in different places." 
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| Posted: 12 Mar 2011 02:00 AM PST  This new Lexmark multifunction device (MFD) is full of fresh ideas. A printer, scanner and photocopier with USB or Wi-Fi 'n' connectivity and colour fax support. The Genesis' optical image capture is based on Lexmark's new Flash Scan technology, replacing the usual reflective scanner with a 10MP digital camera. This makes it incredibly fast, capturing the entire scannable area in just three seconds, with no warm-up time needed. Genesis abandons the traditional form factor in favour of a much more upright design. The 'scanner' is positioned in a near-vertical orientation, allowing for a smaller, space-saving footprint. A clip at the top of the scannable area and a shelf at its foot stop your documents from sliding down the glass. Its 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen does more than control the device's functions too. After connecting the Genesis to your wireless network, you can download and install Lexmark's SmartSolutions mini-apps. These include a basic calculator, clock display, Facebook and Twitter integration, apps to view, scan to and print from MobileMe, Flickr and Picasa, print your own graph or music paper and even display news and sports feeds from Apple, ESPN and the BBC. Over 60 apps are already available, and more are in the works. But for all its innovation, the Genesis also makes compromises. The camera-based image capture function has a maximum resolution of 300dpi. While this is good enough for most home users, if you need a high-resolution scanner, this isn't the printer for you. Also, its three-second image capture speed is rendered almost moot by the lack of an automatic document feeder. If you've a handful of pages to scan one after another, you have to open the lid and change them by hand after each scan. There's only one paper tray too, an open feeder at the back of the device – inconvenient if you like a second tray for letterheads or photo paper. Thankfully, there's no compromise in print quality. Text output is dark and crisp, remaining readable even at very low point sizes. Our 20-page text document printed in six minutes, five seconds, which is pedestrian but not problematic. A top-quality A4 photo print took two minutes, 32 seconds, which is perfectly acceptable. Default-setting plain-paper photo prints are natural and complete, and when you switch to photo paper and max out the quality settings, the results are commendable, but maybe not quite as good as a recent Canon. Lexmark's Genesis S815 is innovative and ideal for most home users. Versatile and user-friendly, it offers great integration with online services, but it's not the best for high-resolution scanning, fast document printing or stellar photo printing. Related Links
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| Posted: 12 Mar 2011 02:00 AM PST This new Lexmark multifunction device (MFD) is full of fresh ideas. A printer, scanner and photocopier with USB or Wi-Fi 'n' connectivity and colour fax support. The Genesis' optical image capture is based on Lexmark's new Flash Scan technology, replacing the usual reflective scanner with a 10MP digital camera. This makes it incredibly fast, capturing the entire scannable area in just three seconds, with no warm-up time needed. Genesis abandons the traditional form factor in favour of a much more upright design. The 'scanner' is positioned in a near-vertical orientation, allowing for a smaller, space-saving footprint. A clip at the top of the scannable area and a shelf at its foot stop your documents from sliding down the glass. Its 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen does more than control the device's functions too. After connecting the Genesis to your wireless network, you can download and install Lexmark's SmartSolutions mini-apps. These include a basic calculator, clock display, Facebook and Twitter integration, apps to view, scan to and print from MobileMe, Flickr and Picasa, print your own graph or music paper and even display news and sports feeds from Apple, ESPN and the BBC. Over 60 apps are already available, and more are in the works. But for all its innovation, the Genesis also makes compromises. The camera-based image capture function has a maximum resolution of 300dpi. While this is good enough for most home users, if you need a high-resolution scanner, this isn't the printer for you. Also, its three-second image capture speed is rendered almost moot by the lack of an automatic document feeder. If you've a handful of pages to scan one after another, you have to open the lid and change them by hand after each scan. There's only one paper tray too, an open feeder at the back of the device – inconvenient if you like a second tray for letterheads or photo paper. Thankfully, there's no compromise in print quality. Text output is dark and crisp, remaining readable even at very low point sizes. Our 20-page text document printed in six minutes, five seconds, which is pedestrian but not problematic. A top-quality A4 photo print took two minutes, 32 seconds, which is perfectly acceptable. Default-setting plain-paper photo prints are natural and complete, and when you switch to photo paper and max out the quality settings, the results are commendable, but maybe not quite as good as a recent Canon. Lexmark's Genesis S815 is innovative and ideal for most home users. Versatile and user-friendly, it offers great integration with online services, but it's not the best for high-resolution scanning, fast document printing or stellar photo printing. Related Links
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| In Depth: Beyond the touchscreen: interfaces of the future Posted: 12 Mar 2011 02:00 AM PST We're living in interesting times. Tech firms want to take over our TVs, our phones are more powerful than some recent PCs, and we can control games consoles through the medium of dance. New interfaces are all around us, from touch screens to augmented reality, and the way we interact with technology is being transformed. But which interfaces are genuine leaps forward and which are digital dead ends? What makes a good user interface anyway? Videos of very young children playing with iPads have become an internet cliché, but they demonstrate how intuitive technology is becoming: nobody was filming two-year-olds using IBM's original PC. The IBM PC's command line interface was streets ahead of 1970s computers' switches, of course, but it wasn't until the arrival of the graphical user interfaces of the 1980s and beyond that personal computing became simple enough for the mainstream. And now the landscape is changing again. After more than two decades of dominance, WIMP interfaces - windows, icons, menus and pointing devices - face new challengers in the form of multi-touch devices, voice control, gesture input and augmented reality. This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showed where we're heading. Microsoft demonstrated its Kinect sensor doing a great job of voice recognition - no mean feat in a crowded venue - and gesture control, with users controlling video apps with waves of their hands, while everyone else seemed to be showing off some form of touch-controlled tablet. Gestures certainly seem more futuristic than Google's vision of a QWERTY keyboard in every remote control, but are these ideas a mere fad? Is multi-touch a credible form of PC input? "It's credible," says Gord Kurtenbach, Autodesk's Director of Research. "We're just at the start of determining how multi-touch can be used in the context of desktop PC systems. Obviously adding multi-touch to the display monitor makes a cool demo, but when using it over a period of time your arms get tired… Some of the most promising work I've seen uses multi-touch in concert with standard desktop configurations of mouse, keyboard and monitor. After all, the keyboard is a multi-touch device and that has been pretty successful, so I can imagine multi-touch tablets and displays being used horizontally as controller devices." Everything's an interface Multi-touch certainly won't be the only way we interact with our gadgets. As James McCarthy, senior windows consumer product manager with Microsoft, points out, the era of natural user interfaces (NUIs) has already begun: Windows' Photo Gallery uses image processing to recognise faces, eight million Xbox 360 owners control their console using Kinect and some two million motorists are talking to Ford Sync-equipped vehicles.
Forget the ropey speech recognition systems of the 1990s: voice control is back, and this time it works. That's partly because modern systems now specialise. Hardware is now much more powerful, and cloud computing allows remote processing and real-time results. "The way we interact with technology is becoming more natural, allowing our devices to work on our behalf instead of just at our command," McCarthy says. "You can already envision the world we're imagining through Microsoft research projects like a prototype of an automated receptionist; Microsoft LightSpace, a technology prototype showing the potential of using depth-sensing cameras to naturally interact with any surface; and Project Gustav, a realistic painting prototype that lets artists become immersed in the digital painting experience, just as Kinect helps people become the controller in the gaming experience." The magic touch Touch control has been around for a long time. What's different about today's touch technology is that touch has become multi-touch: instead of prodding with a stylus we're pinching and pulling with one, two or ten fingers. That means tablets can be typewriters, pianos, canvases, or anything else we fancy playing with. Done well, multi-touch removes abstraction - instead of moving a device like a mouse to point at something, you just point at it; instead of clicking on piano keys or trying to remember which keyboard key corresponds to each note, you just play the note.
Multi-touch is a good illustration of Fitts's Law, which was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954. The law states that the time needed to move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. In effect, that means big icons are easier to hit than little ones, top-of-screen menus are easier to click on than top-of-window ones and pop-up menus are faster than pull-downs. There's more to effective UIs than big icons, of course. Good UIs remove complexity and obstacles, so for example, a mouse-and-windows OS is more intuitive than a command line interface and a multi-touch OS can be more intuitive than a mouse-based one. Designers can do several things to streamline interfaces. They can use metaphors to make things more obvious - for example, we all know what desktops are, what control panels do and what recycle bins are for - and they can use icons and nested menus to reduce visual clutter. They can use context-sensitive menus and hinting, where the interface offers visual clues such as tooltips, and they can add indicators to icons. However, if you keep adding features to the underlying system, eventually you'll run out of tweaks. As Microsoft program manager Jensen Harris recalls, by Office 2003 the UI was beginning to feel bloated, "like a suitcase stuffed to the gills with vacation clothes". No wonder - it was essentially the same UI that Office had in 1989. As Harris explains, "There's a point beyond which menus and toolbars cease to scale well. A flat menu with eight well-organised commands on it works just great; a three-level hierarchical menu containing 35 loosely-related commands can be a bit of a disaster." Microsoft redesigned the Office UI and the result was the Ribbon, which makes Office less intimidating and features easier to find. It annoyed power users though, demonstrating that when it comes to UIs, you can't please everybody. An extra dimension Three dimensional games, TVs and monitors are being hyped this year. How about 3D software? Microsoft and Nvidia have teamed up for what they call the 3D PC, but that's about consuming games and movies. A 3D OS would be far trickier to put together. Just ask Autodesk, which has been in the 3D business for decades. "Many people believe that because in the real world we navigate 3D physical spaces with ease, 3D navigation should make navigation of 3D virtual spaces easy as well," Kurtenbach says. "However, everything changes when the space is behind the display monitor. It becomes hard, like learning to fly an aeroplane using controls. So the old idea that your desktop will be easier to use if it's a 3D virtual space that you can navigate around hasn't really made things easier. Certainly, we've made big advances in 3D navigation with such product features as SteeringWheels, but these interfaces are for navigating spaces that truly need to be in 3D, such as CAD models." That doesn't mean it isn't possible. Toshiba recently showed an auto-stereoscopic display that uses a six-axis accelerometer, effectively letting users look around 3D objects, and Autodesk has the wonderfully named Boom Chameleon. "The Boom Chameleon is a very different approach to 3D navigation where the tablet PC acts like window into a virtual space," Kurtenbach says. "When you move the tablet, you change your window into the virtual space. With current tablet systems that have position sensors or built-in cameras, this type of thing can already be accomplished and I've seen examples of the Chameleon on tablets and mobile devices built by student researchers. As devices become more powerful, we'll see this becoming more practical and useful." One vision of the future is to replace the desktop and monitor with multi-touch screens. That's the thinking behind the BendDesk. BendDesk is a multitouch display in two sections: one where you'd normally have a screen and where you'd normally have a keyboard and mouse.
As its creators, members of Aachen University's Media Computing Group, explain: "BendDesk is a multi-touch desk that combines a vertical and a horizontal surface with a curve into one large interactive workspace. This workspace can be used to display digital content like documents, photos or videos. Multi-touch technology allows the user to interact with the entire surface." BendDesk is a concept, but advances in e-paper technology will make it possible within a few years. One thing it doesn't do is offer physical feedback of the kind we expect from keyboards, mice and other devices. But there may be an answer to that too: haptic feedback. Haptic feedback is physical feedback: the click of the mouse button, the pressure you feel when your fingers press a key and so on. Apple and Microsoft have both filed patents for haptic systems: the former's idea places small vibrators around a screen, with multiple vibrators creating effects at specific locations on a phone or tablet's surface, while Microsoft intends to make screens that can shape-shift.
Microsoft's application describes a screen made from hundreds of tiny, light-activated tiles: hit them with the right frequency and they change shape to make a D-pad controller, a keyboard or text in Braille. The move to mobile Smartphones enable all kinds of new interfaces. Apps can use the camera as an input device, or be controlled by voice. Accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS mean phones know where they are, what they're pointing at and if they're moving, which makes augmented reality possible. With augmented reality, the world around you is the interface. When they're done well, as they are in apps such as Nearest Tube, they're intuitive and instantly understood - although our experiences of augmented reality to date suggest it's still in the 'coming soon' category rather than a useful, everyday technology. Even without augmented reality, apps represent a new frontier in interface design: with an OS that's happy to give the entire screen over to an app, designers have been free to experiment. It's reminiscent of the early days of the web, and interface conventions will emerge. As technology evolves, networks improve and we cram ever more processing power into ever-smaller form factors, we'll use a mix of different interfaces: voice, augmented reality and maybe even a keyboard, real or virtual. As Gord Kurtenbach puts it: "We'll continue to add different setups to support different ways and times of working. Back in the '80s, I had to go to the university lab to use a computer. Later, I got one at home and I could do different types of work from both. Today I have desktop at home and work, a couple of laptops, a tablet, a mobile phone and so on. I use all of them, but in different ways for different things in different places."
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| Posted: 12 Mar 2011 01:30 AM PST  Products that get everything right are a rarity, but Quirky's Space Bar comes close to such perfection. Its design shows a great deal of attention to detail and aesthetics. Crafted from brushed aluminium and finished with white plastic details, it's the perfect match for Apple's aluminium keyboard and an iMac. At 52cm long and 17cm deep, it's spacious enough to support most monitors, and is obviously an ideal fit for both the iMac and Apple Display's footprint. The area underneath the device is 44cm wide and 1.5cm tall, which is big enough to stow a full-sized Apple USB keyboard with numeric keypad. If you need some more room on your desk and you're not using your Mac, just push your keyboard under the Space Bar and free up valuable space. It's also enough for a closed Apple notebook, so you can connect your laptop to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse, and keep it under the Space Bar while you use it in closed clamshell mode. It's engineered to support up to 20lbs, which is enough for a 21-inch Apple iMac. On paper, the latest Apple displays are a little too heavy at 23.5lbs, but you'd probably be okay. As well as a monitor raiser and desk tidy, the Space Bar also functions as a powered USB hub. When we previewed it in our Gadgets section back in MF219, the plan was to offer three ports on each side. The final release version still offers six ports, but two are at the rear of the device. It's better this way. The front-facing ports are less crowded, so plugged-in peripherals are less likely to block an adjacent port, and the rear-mounted ports are ideal for things you seldom unplug, like your keyboard or printer. And while your digital camera, iOS device or other such peripheral is connected, the Space Bar also functions as a convenient shelf to keep them safe and tidy. The Space Bar is an excellent mix of form and function. It looks great, is robustly built and does a great job of helping you organise your desktop. At £80 it's expensive, but not overpriced. Related Links
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| Posted: 12 Mar 2011 01:30 AM PST Products that get everything right are a rarity, but Quirky's Space Bar comes close to such perfection. Its design shows a great deal of attention to detail and aesthetics. Crafted from brushed aluminium and finished with white plastic details, it's the perfect match for Apple's aluminium keyboard and an iMac. At 52cm long and 17cm deep, it's spacious enough to support most monitors, and is obviously an ideal fit for both the iMac and Apple Display's footprint. The area underneath the device is 44cm wide and 1.5cm tall, which is big enough to stow a full-sized Apple USB keyboard with numeric keypad. If you need some more room on your desk and you're not using your Mac, just push your keyboard under the Space Bar and free up valuable space. It's also enough for a closed Apple notebook, so you can connect your laptop to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse, and keep it under the Space Bar while you use it in closed clamshell mode. It's engineered to support up to 20lbs, which is enough for a 21-inch Apple iMac. On paper, the latest Apple displays are a little too heavy at 23.5lbs, but you'd probably be okay. As well as a monitor raiser and desk tidy, the Space Bar also functions as a powered USB hub. When we previewed it in our Gadgets section back in MF219, the plan was to offer three ports on each side. The final release version still offers six ports, but two are at the rear of the device. It's better this way. The front-facing ports are less crowded, so plugged-in peripherals are less likely to block an adjacent port, and the rear-mounted ports are ideal for things you seldom unplug, like your keyboard or printer. And while your digital camera, iOS device or other such peripheral is connected, the Space Bar also functions as a convenient shelf to keep them safe and tidy. The Space Bar is an excellent mix of form and function. It looks great, is robustly built and does a great job of helping you organise your desktop. At £80 it's expensive, but not overpriced. Related Links
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| Catch up: this week's most popular posts Posted: 12 Mar 2011 12:00 AM PST  While most eyes are on the iPad 2 at the moment one analyst at least reckons that Android tablets are set to take the market lead. And in the OMG PANIC department, news came out that over-reliance on sat navs could cause death. Hopefully some of us will be left alive, though, as the UK government is pressing on with a £50m broadband plan to bring high-speed internet to rural areas. So if you live in the country, get rid of your sat nav or your dreams of finally getting to watch cats playing the piano on YouTube without the constant buffering may never be realised. Read on for this week's most popular stories on TechRadar… Top five news stories Android tablet sales to 'dominate' over the iPad by 2014 The spotlights might be magnetically drawn to the iPad 2 at the moment, but it seems those backing the Android OS need not worry too much. A research note from Mike Abramsky, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, states that the tablet market is (unsurprisingly) set to explode over the coming years, moving up to a global revenue of £42 billion in 2014. By that point, the research note states, the Android will have assumed the market lead as the dominant tablet OS in an accelerating product category. Metal-backed iPhone 5 to have antenna in Apple logo? The latest iPhone 5 rumour sees the much-anticipated smartphone doing away with the glass back of the iPhone 4 and opting instead for a metal backplate. And that's not all; the illustrious Apple logo is also said to be getting a new role; that of an antenna. The rumour mill suggests that the new logo will be made of resin, integrating with the Wi-Fi, cellular and other radio antennas on the handset. Sat nav failure could 'cause loss of life', says report A report from the Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report which claims that the UK is 'dangerously dependent' on GPS and sat nav devices. The report also warns that we are at risk from both deliberate and accidental interference, with back up systems ill-equipped to handle such an attack. Not afraid to steer directly into the sensational, Dr Martyn Thomas, chairman of the Academy's Global Navigation Space Systems (GNSS) working group, said that a GPS system failure could "conceivably cause loss of life". iPad 3 release date: September 2011? The iPad 2 hasn't even been officially announced but it seems that the iPad 3 is already poised for a September launch. Hinting at things to come in the tablet market, influential blogger John Gruber from Daring Fireball reckons that the iPad 3 release date will indeed by 2011 – which is an estimated six months after the iPad 2 is launched. UK government pressing on with £50m broadband plan The UK government will continue with a £50m plan to bring high-speed, next-generation broadband to rural areas. The Chancellor, the Gran Moff Tarkin-esque George Osborne, says £50m of new funding is being made available to local authorities to help improve their own areas. Currently no companies have been chosen to roll out the tech in order to fulfill the government's promise of making the UK the best place in Europe for super-fast broadband by 2015. Mr Osborne said: "This is very much a locally-driven process and we encourage bids from all local people with plans for improving broadband in their local area. Top five in-depth articles 20 best mobile phones in the world today Our verdict on the best mobile phones / best smartphones - constantly updated. We've all got at least one mobile phone each, right? The trouble is, how do you decide which is the best mobile phone for you? Hopefully, TechRadar's extensive mobile phone reviews can help you with that. But if you're still stumped, you've come to the right place. Because here we have a constantly-updated list of the best mobile phones you can get. Whether you're after the best budget music phone or the best smartphone, the top ones are all here. And we've got in-depth reviews of all of them. iPad 2: all the latest details The iPad 2 launch took place on 2 March. Links to all of our iPad 2 coverage are in the link above. iPhone 5 rumours: what you need to know iPhone 5 (or the iPhone 5G, as some are calling it) rumours are flying thick and fast already. Will there be a rush release to erase memories of the iPhone 4's antenna problems? Maybe not - with the Verizon iPhone 4 Apple showed it wasn't afraid to tweak the current iPhone design. Will the 5th generation iPhone deliver ultra-fast mobile internet? Will it ever end up on Verizon in the US? Let's raid the iPhone 5 rumour fridge to find the tomatoes of truth amid the stinky stilton of baseless speculation. iPad 2 vs Galaxy Tab 10.1 vs TouchPad vs Xoom vs PlayBook When they were announced, the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (P7100),HP TouchPad, the Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook wiped the floor with the original iPad in terms of raw specification. After all, they are all dual-core. However, the new iPad, the iPad 2, has a dual-core Apple A5 processor. And, what's more, the iPad 2 looks like it will even beat the Motorola Xoom to UK shops. The iPad 2 UK release date is 25 March, while the Motorola Xoom UK release date looks like the beginning of April. iOS 4.3: what you need to know The iOS 4.3 release date has arrived, and once again the update brings some new goodies to your iPad, iPad 2, iPhone and iPod touch. But not the old ones, because the iOS 4.3 specs only support the iPhone 3GS and third-gen iPod touch onwards. So what iOS 4.3 features should you be getting excited about? Top five reviews The Radeon HD 6990 is the fastest and most powerful graphics card in the world. The problem is that it's horrendously expensive. A pair of HD 6950s is cheaper, and potentially more powerful. Well, if you're thinking that the HTC Desire HD was a great handset, but the screen was a little too large and the battery life was a real worry, then you're in for a treat - this is the phone for you. MacBook Pro 2011 15-inch review Although there are no immediately obvious external changes to the notebook's form factor, the February 2011 refresh of Apple's MacBook Pro range is more than just a minor update. MacBook Pro 2011 17-inch review Apple is wise to spec-match the sole 17-inch model to the top 15-inch MacBook Pro instead of the next one down, and although expensive, the performance is worth it We haven't seen a smartphone with a built-in desktop operating system until now. Motorola calls it a webtop and, as we'll explain, the infrastructure is currently quite limited, since you need to use a special dock. Also reviewed this week... Hands on reviews Laptops Hands on: New MacBook Pro 2011 review review Tablets Hands on: Apple iPad 2 review review Hands on: Asus Eee Pad Transformer review review Cameras Hands on: Sony Cybershot DSC-HX100V review review Hands on: Sony Cybershot DSC-WX10 review review Hands on: Sony Cybershot DSC-HX9V review review In depth reviews iPod accessories Laptops Mobile phones Software WinZipWinZip Mac Edition review LifeField SoftwareLife Manager Pro 4 review Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB review TVs Sony Bravia KDL-32EX403 review 
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| Catch up: this week's most popular posts Posted: 12 Mar 2011 12:00 AM PST While most eyes are on the iPad 2 at the moment one analyst at least reckons that Android tablets are set to take the market lead. And in the OMG PANIC department, news came out that over-reliance on sat navs could cause death. Hopefully some of us will be left alive, though, as the UK government is pressing on with a £50m broadband plan to bring high-speed internet to rural areas. So if you live in the country, get rid of your sat nav or your dreams of finally getting to watch cats playing the piano on YouTube without the constant buffering may never be realised. Read on for this week's most popular stories on TechRadar… Top five news stories Android tablet sales to 'dominate' over the iPad by 2014 The spotlights might be magnetically drawn to the iPad 2 at the moment, but it seems those backing the Android OS need not worry too much. A research note from Mike Abramsky, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, states that the tablet market is (unsurprisingly) set to explode over the coming years, moving up to a global revenue of £42 billion in 2014. By that point, the research note states, the Android will have assumed the market lead as the dominant tablet OS in an accelerating product category. Metal-backed iPhone 5 to have antenna in Apple logo? The latest iPhone 5 rumour sees the much-anticipated smartphone doing away with the glass back of the iPhone 4 and opting instead for a metal backplate. And that's not all; the illustrious Apple logo is also said to be getting a new role; that of an antenna. The rumour mill suggests that the new logo will be made of resin, integrating with the Wi-Fi, cellular and other radio antennas on the handset. Sat nav failure could 'cause loss of life', says report A report from the Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report which claims that the UK is 'dangerously dependent' on GPS and sat nav devices. The report also warns that we are at risk from both deliberate and accidental interference, with back up systems ill-equipped to handle such an attack. Not afraid to steer directly into the sensational, Dr Martyn Thomas, chairman of the Academy's Global Navigation Space Systems (GNSS) working group, said that a GPS system failure could "conceivably cause loss of life". iPad 3 release date: September 2011? The iPad 2 hasn't even been officially announced but it seems that the iPad 3 is already poised for a September launch. Hinting at things to come in the tablet market, influential blogger John Gruber from Daring Fireball reckons that the iPad 3 release date will indeed by 2011 – which is an estimated six months after the iPad 2 is launched. UK government pressing on with £50m broadband plan The UK government will continue with a £50m plan to bring high-speed, next-generation broadband to rural areas. The Chancellor, the Gran Moff Tarkin-esque George Osborne, says £50m of new funding is being made available to local authorities to help improve their own areas. Currently no companies have been chosen to roll out the tech in order to fulfill the government's promise of making the UK the best place in Europe for super-fast broadband by 2015. Mr Osborne said: "This is very much a locally-driven process and we encourage bids from all local people with plans for improving broadband in their local area. Top five in-depth articles 20 best mobile phones in the world today Our verdict on the best mobile phones / best smartphones - constantly updated. We've all got at least one mobile phone each, right? The trouble is, how do you decide which is the best mobile phone for you? Hopefully, TechRadar's extensive mobile phone reviews can help you with that. But if you're still stumped, you've come to the right place. Because here we have a constantly-updated list of the best mobile phones you can get. Whether you're after the best budget music phone or the best smartphone, the top ones are all here. And we've got in-depth reviews of all of them. iPad 2: all the latest details The iPad 2 launch took place on 2 March. Links to all of our iPad 2 coverage are in the link above. iPhone 5 rumours: what you need to know iPhone 5 (or the iPhone 5G, as some are calling it) rumours are flying thick and fast already. Will there be a rush release to erase memories of the iPhone 4's antenna problems? Maybe not - with the Verizon iPhone 4 Apple showed it wasn't afraid to tweak the current iPhone design. Will the 5th generation iPhone deliver ultra-fast mobile internet? Will it ever end up on Verizon in the US? Let's raid the iPhone 5 rumour fridge to find the tomatoes of truth amid the stinky stilton of baseless speculation. iPad 2 vs Galaxy Tab 10.1 vs TouchPad vs Xoom vs PlayBook When they were announced, the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (P7100),HP TouchPad, the Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook wiped the floor with the original iPad in terms of raw specification. After all, they are all dual-core. However, the new iPad, the iPad 2, has a dual-core Apple A5 processor. And, what's more, the iPad 2 looks like it will even beat the Motorola Xoom to UK shops. The iPad 2 UK release date is 25 March, while the Motorola Xoom UK release date looks like the beginning of April. iOS 4.3: what you need to know The iOS 4.3 release date has arrived, and once again the update brings some new goodies to your iPad, iPad 2, iPhone and iPod touch. But not the old ones, because the iOS 4.3 specs only support the iPhone 3GS and third-gen iPod touch onwards. So what iOS 4.3 features should you be getting excited about? Top five reviews The Radeon HD 6990 is the fastest and most powerful graphics card in the world. The problem is that it's horrendously expensive. A pair of HD 6950s is cheaper, and potentially more powerful. Well, if you're thinking that the HTC Desire HD was a great handset, but the screen was a little too large and the battery life was a real worry, then you're in for a treat - this is the phone for you. MacBook Pro 2011 15-inch review Although there are no immediately obvious external changes to the notebook's form factor, the February 2011 refresh of Apple's MacBook Pro range is more than just a minor update. MacBook Pro 2011 17-inch review Apple is wise to spec-match the sole 17-inch model to the top 15-inch MacBook Pro instead of the next one down, and although expensive, the performance is worth it We haven't seen a smartphone with a built-in desktop operating system until now. Motorola calls it a webtop and, as we'll explain, the infrastructure is currently quite limited, since you need to use a special dock. Also reviewed this week... Hands on reviews Laptops Hands on: New MacBook Pro 2011 review review Tablets Hands on: Apple iPad 2 review review Hands on: Asus Eee Pad Transformer review review Cameras Hands on: Sony Cybershot DSC-HX100V review review Hands on: Sony Cybershot DSC-WX10 review review Hands on: Sony Cybershot DSC-HX9V review review In depth reviews iPod accessories Laptops Mobile phones Software WinZipWinZip Mac Edition review LifeField SoftwareLife Manager Pro 4 review Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB review TVs Sony Bravia KDL-32EX403 review
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