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- Exclusive: Microsoft MD: Post-PC era is not here
- Exclusive: Microsoft MD: Post-PC era is not here
- Microsoft UK launches Windows Collections
- Microsoft UK launches Windows Collections
- 20 best mobile phones ranking set for massive update
- 20 best mobile phones ranking set for massive update
- Apple iOS gaming boom hits Nintendo hard
- Apple iOS gaming boom hits Nintendo hard
- Leaked HP slides suggest new future for music streaming
- Leaked HP slides suggest new future for music streaming
- HTC to unleash 16MP Windows Phone 7 handset?
- HTC to unleash 16MP Windows Phone 7 handset?
- Sony upgrades PS3 Move starter pack
- Sony upgrades PS3 Move starter pack
- Wireless devices to sell over 1.2 billion in 2011
- Wireless devices to sell over 1.2 billion in 2011
- .XXX domains hit the net
- .XXX domains hit the net
- LG E700 Windows Phone 7 spec emerges
- LG E700 Windows Phone 7 spec emerges
- In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated
- In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated
- In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated
- Review: HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B
- Review: HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B
| Exclusive: Microsoft MD: Post-PC era is not here Posted: 18 Apr 2011 11:28 AM PDT  Microsoft UK's managing director, Ashley Highfield, believes that we have entered the next phase of the PC's evolution, but that talk of a post-PC era is premature. Asked if Steve Jobs' suggestion that we are moving away from PCs at the launch of the iPad was premature, Highfield answered in the affirmative. "This is beginning of the next phase of the PC's evolution," Highfield told TechRadar. "With 29 million PCs in UK homes and 9 million more going to be sold this year [the PC] is clearly not over. "The iPad can fit in with the ecosystem in your home, but not going to eschew your PC. "It's still the machine that you are going to load your heavy duty software onto and sync with your other devices." Multiple devices Highfield points out that Microsoft's strategy does not revolve around one single device, with the market so big that differences of consumer need and desire must be brought together. "Clearly one size can't possibly fit all," he added. "When you're at that 29 million figure you are not in niche market. You have to have a range of device fitting ever more sophisticated needs of people who want to be ever more individual. "Obviously people now have more than one device – a Smartphone, an iPad, a PC and maybe other things as well – and yet the PC is at the heart of home network, if you like. "That's our vision, and our strategy is of social computing – a number of devices talking to each other with your apps and software or whatever, kept in sync on whatever machine you use and the cloud." 
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| Exclusive: Microsoft MD: Post-PC era is not here Posted: 18 Apr 2011 11:28 AM PDT Microsoft UK's managing director, Ashley Highfield, believes that we have entered the next phase of the PC's evolution, but that talk of a post-PC era is premature. Asked if Steve Jobs' suggestion that we are moving away from PCs at the launch of the iPad was premature, Highfield answered in the affirmative. "This is beginning of the next phase of the PC's evolution," Highfield told TechRadar. "With 29 million PCs in UK homes and 9 million more going to be sold this year [the PC] is clearly not over. "The iPad can fit in with the ecosystem in your home, but not going to eschew your PC. "It's still the machine that you are going to load your heavy duty software onto and sync with your other devices." Multiple devices Highfield points out that Microsoft's strategy does not revolve around one single device, with the market so big that differences of consumer need and desire must be brought together. "Clearly one size can't possibly fit all," he added. "When you're at that 29 million figure you are not in niche market. You have to have a range of device fitting ever more sophisticated needs of people who want to be ever more individual. "Obviously people now have more than one device – a Smartphone, an iPad, a PC and maybe other things as well – and yet the PC is at the heart of home network, if you like. "That's our vision, and our strategy is of social computing – a number of devices talking to each other with your apps and software or whatever, kept in sync on whatever machine you use and the cloud."
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| Microsoft UK launches Windows Collections Posted: 18 Apr 2011 11:00 AM PDT  Microsoft is launching Windows Collections, with the UK initiative aiming to showcase 30 selected computers from a range of major manufacturers and simplify the old problem of which PC to buy. Although technophiles have little problem wending their way through the myriad options available in the PC market, many find it difficult to pick out what computer they actually need. To that end, Microsoft is aiming to simplify the problem with Windows Collection, which groups 30 PCs in six categories including gaming, entertainment, everyday, business, portability and entertainment. PC's are current Microsoft's UK managing director Ashley Highfield believes that it's important to point out the importance of the PC in Britain, believing talk of the post-PC era to be premature. "One size can't fit all," Highfield told TechRadar. "PCs are not a niche market and people have ever more sophisticated needs. "The Windows Collection is about showcasing the best machines in key areas.The PC is at the heart of the home network, and people want a personal machine that is personalised for them. "We have 30 computers from nine different OEMs and we are hoping that we are showing that where others are zigging, we are zagging." Playing a role Microsoft's director of consumer business Leila Martine believes Microsoft should be playing a role in pushing the best and most innovative PC hardware. "I think we are going through a market shift now we have established Windows 7," she said. "I think we are poking our heads up and saying there is a role we should be playing in talking not just about software but hardware innovations in each season across our OEMs. "Each Spring, back to university season and the holiday season we're going to select 30 PCs. "We've limited it at 30 because it's not just an elite range it's a showcase of what meets the needs of the UK consumers." 
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| Microsoft UK launches Windows Collections Posted: 18 Apr 2011 11:00 AM PDT Microsoft is launching Windows Collections, with the UK initiative aiming to showcase 30 selected computers from a range of major manufacturers and simplify the old problem of which PC to buy. Although technophiles have little problem wending their way through the myriad options available in the PC market, many find it difficult to pick out what computer they actually need. To that end, Microsoft is aiming to simplify the problem with Windows Collection, which groups 30 PCs in six categories including gaming, entertainment, everyday, business, portability and entertainment. PC's are current Microsoft's UK managing director Ashley Highfield believes that it's important to point out the importance of the PC in Britain, believing talk of the post-PC era to be premature. "One size can't fit all," Highfield told TechRadar. "PCs are not a niche market and people have ever more sophisticated needs. "The Windows Collection is about showcasing the best machines in key areas.The PC is at the heart of the home network, and people want a personal machine that is personalised for them. "We have 30 computers from nine different OEMs and we are hoping that we are showing that where others are zigging, we are zagging." Playing a role Microsoft's director of consumer business Leila Martine believes Microsoft should be playing a role in pushing the best and most innovative PC hardware. "I think we are going through a market shift now we have established Windows 7," she said. "I think we are poking our heads up and saying there is a role we should be playing in talking not just about software but hardware innovations in each season across our OEMs. "Each Spring, back to university season and the holiday season we're going to select 30 PCs. "We've limited it at 30 because it's not just an elite range it's a showcase of what meets the needs of the UK consumers."
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| 20 best mobile phones ranking set for massive update Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:33 AM PDT  Here at TechRadar we're all about helping you pick the best technology for your pocket and our constantly updated 20 best mobile phones in the world today ranking is our easy way to impart that handset-centric knowledge to you. Mobile World Congress showered the world with a plethora of new handsets, and we've been painstakingly picking through them, fiddling with all the features, snapping them from every angle and bringing you our in-depth reviews on everything from the vacuum-packed HTC Incredible S to the budget Samsung Galaxy Ace. We've already reviewed 15 handsets to have emerged from the Barcelona event, with plenty more to come in the next few weeks - and now we have to fit them into our definitive guide to the best mobile phones. Changing of the guard? The quality of handsets has been stepped up this year - the HTC Desire has held onto top spot in our list for nearly 12 months thanks to a superb hardware and software combination as well as timely price drops - the latter being something the iPhone 4 can't boast. And at just £15, the Desire still represents huge value for money - but can it still be our number one phone in the face of such strong competition, and will users keep waiting for the HTC Desire Android 2.3 update? Dual-core phones are the order of the hot tech at the moment, and while we're still waiting to bring you our full Samsung Galaxy S2 and HTC Sensation reviews, you'd have to think the powerful LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix have a decent shot at the top spot. And it's not the end of the road for single core devices - the HTC Desire S and Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc are both on the market and selling well... and could the expensive Xperia Play quickly become a cult favourite? Cheap, cheerful and ready to rock The budget end of the spectrum has had some extraordinary tech welded into it - the Samsung Galaxy Ace, the INQ Cloud Touch and the HTC Wildfire S all are offering more bang for your buck than ever before. Or could it be a late charge from an old favourite that wins us over? With the Android 2.3 update landing, the Samsung Galaxy S only costs £18 a month and a modern Google experience. Keep your eyes peeled for our imminent 20 best mobile phones in the world refresh - and get ready to find the new phone that will be powering your summer. 
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| 20 best mobile phones ranking set for massive update Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:33 AM PDT Here at TechRadar we're all about helping you pick the best technology for your pocket and our constantly updated 20 best mobile phones in the world today ranking is our easy way to impart that handset-centric knowledge to you. Mobile World Congress showered the world with a plethora of new handsets, and we've been painstakingly picking through them, fiddling with all the features, snapping them from every angle and bringing you our in-depth reviews on everything from the vacuum-packed HTC Incredible S to the budget Samsung Galaxy Ace. We've already reviewed 15 handsets to have emerged from the Barcelona event, with plenty more to come in the next few weeks - and now we have to fit them into our definitive guide to the best mobile phones. Changing of the guard? The quality of handsets has been stepped up this year - the HTC Desire has held onto top spot in our list for nearly 12 months thanks to a superb hardware and software combination as well as timely price drops - the latter being something the iPhone 4 can't boast. And at just £15, the Desire still represents huge value for money - but can it still be our number one phone in the face of such strong competition, and will users keep waiting for the HTC Desire Android 2.3 update? Dual-core phones are the order of the hot tech at the moment, and while we're still waiting to bring you our full Samsung Galaxy S2 and HTC Sensation reviews, you'd have to think the powerful LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix have a decent shot at the top spot. And it's not the end of the road for single core devices - the HTC Desire S and Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc are both on the market and selling well... and could the expensive Xperia Play quickly become a cult favourite? Cheap, cheerful and ready to rock The budget end of the spectrum has had some extraordinary tech welded into it - the Samsung Galaxy Ace, the INQ Cloud Touch and the HTC Wildfire S all are offering more bang for your buck than ever before. Or could it be a late charge from an old favourite that wins us over? With the Android 2.3 update landing, the Samsung Galaxy S only costs £18 a month and a modern Google experience. Keep your eyes peeled for our imminent 20 best mobile phones in the world refresh - and get ready to find the new phone that will be powering your summer.
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| Apple iOS gaming boom hits Nintendo hard Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:25 AM PDT  Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets continue to eat away at Nintendo's long-held dominance in the mobile gaming market, according to the latest market research. While traditional console gaming remains strong, the latest market research data from Flurry and the NPD Group shows that Apple's iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is taking a serious bite out of Nintendo's market share in the portable gaming market. 3DS and NGP versus iOS Nintendo recently launched its new 3DS handheld in the UK, with hardened Nintendo fans and aficionados of in-depth gaming on the go certain to continue supporting the Mario factory's portable gaming initiatives for the foreseeable future. However, that said, Flurry's latest market data claims that Nintendo's market share has dropped a whopping 13 per cent, from 70 per cent in 2009 to 57 per cent in 2010, with iOS and Android smartphone gaming to blame. Whether the 3DS and the new Sony NGP can reverse this trend over the coming three to five years remains to be seen. Flurry combines gaming market data from the NPD Group with its own estimates of game category revenues from iOS and Android devices, taken from Flurry Analytics, the company's mobile application analytics service, which "tracks more than 12 billion anonymous, aggregated use sessions per month across more than 80,000 applications." 40 per cent of these app sessions are spent on mobile games. Prolific installed base gains "We estimate that iOS and Android game revenue increased from $500 million in 2009 to more than $800 million in 2010," notes the research group."Of this, the significant majority of revenue was generated by iPhone games. "It's clear that prolific installed base gains by Apple and Android devices, low priced games (including a very robust free-to-play model enabled by in-app purchases) and seamless digital distribution to games on devices so near to consumers 24-hours-a-day, is driving potent industry-disruption. "Over 2011, we expect to see continued and significant smart-device game growth fuelled by the recent launch of iPad 2, iPhone coming into distribution on Verizon, the expected release of iPhone 5, a relentless expansion of Android devices by leading OEMs across all major U.S. carriers, and Google's enablement of in-app purchase billing, a proven key driver in iOS game revenue." 
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| Apple iOS gaming boom hits Nintendo hard Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:25 AM PDT Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets continue to eat away at Nintendo's long-held dominance in the mobile gaming market, according to the latest market research. While traditional console gaming remains strong, the latest market research data from Flurry and the NPD Group shows that Apple's iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is taking a serious bite out of Nintendo's market share in the portable gaming market. 3DS and NGP versus iOS Nintendo recently launched its new 3DS handheld in the UK, with hardened Nintendo fans and aficionados of in-depth gaming on the go certain to continue supporting the Mario factory's portable gaming initiatives for the foreseeable future. However, that said, Flurry's latest market data claims that Nintendo's market share has dropped a whopping 13 per cent, from 70 per cent in 2009 to 57 per cent in 2010, with iOS and Android smartphone gaming to blame. Whether the 3DS and the new Sony NGP can reverse this trend over the coming three to five years remains to be seen. Flurry combines gaming market data from the NPD Group with its own estimates of game category revenues from iOS and Android devices, taken from Flurry Analytics, the company's mobile application analytics service, which "tracks more than 12 billion anonymous, aggregated use sessions per month across more than 80,000 applications." 40 per cent of these app sessions are spent on mobile games. Prolific installed base gains "We estimate that iOS and Android game revenue increased from $500 million in 2009 to more than $800 million in 2010," notes the research group."Of this, the significant majority of revenue was generated by iPhone games. "It's clear that prolific installed base gains by Apple and Android devices, low priced games (including a very robust free-to-play model enabled by in-app purchases) and seamless digital distribution to games on devices so near to consumers 24-hours-a-day, is driving potent industry-disruption. "Over 2011, we expect to see continued and significant smart-device game growth fuelled by the recent launch of iPad 2, iPhone coming into distribution on Verizon, the expected release of iPhone 5, a relentless expansion of Android devices by leading OEMs across all major U.S. carriers, and Google's enablement of in-app purchase billing, a proven key driver in iOS game revenue."
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| Leaked HP slides suggest new future for music streaming Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:58 AM PDT  Rumours that Hewlett-Packard is planning to develop its own cloud-based music and movie offering are gathering a head of steam this week. The latest suggestions that HP is developing its own cloud-based entertainment service to take on the likes of Spotify, Apple iTunes and Amazon come from a leaked presentation published over on PreCentral. HP is said to be developing its new cloud locker service for its forthcoming webOS-powered TouchPad tablet. The ultimate cloud locker The leaked HP document references the HP Music Store and the HP Movie Store, with some interesting details on the music store also included. HP's TouchPad will allow users to sync and remotely store their own music, as well as using a clever algorithm, which will keep the music you listen to most often on your device, much like Spotify gives you the options of downloading certain favourite tunes to your smartphone, tablet or laptop/netbook (but doing this for you automatically, by the sounds of HP's leaked info). It's a fascinating concept and, if HP manages to pull it off, it may well give them a significant competitive advantage in the increasingly important (and increasingly competitive) music streaming market. Whether or not it will persuade millions to invest in a TouchPad instead of an iPad 2, of course, remains to be seen… HP's new streaming service may well also be extended to stream music to webOS 3.0 smartphones in time, according to the leak. 
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| Leaked HP slides suggest new future for music streaming Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:58 AM PDT Rumours that Hewlett-Packard is planning to develop its own cloud-based music and movie offering are gathering a head of steam this week. The latest suggestions that HP is developing its own cloud-based entertainment service to take on the likes of Spotify, Apple iTunes and Amazon come from a leaked presentation published over on PreCentral. HP is said to be developing its new cloud locker service for its forthcoming webOS-powered TouchPad tablet. The ultimate cloud locker The leaked HP document references the HP Music Store and the HP Movie Store, with some interesting details on the music store also included. HP's TouchPad will allow users to sync and remotely store their own music, as well as using a clever algorithm, which will keep the music you listen to most often on your device, much like Spotify gives you the options of downloading certain favourite tunes to your smartphone, tablet or laptop/netbook (but doing this for you automatically, by the sounds of HP's leaked info). It's a fascinating concept and, if HP manages to pull it off, it may well give them a significant competitive advantage in the increasingly important (and increasingly competitive) music streaming market. Whether or not it will persuade millions to invest in a TouchPad instead of an iPad 2, of course, remains to be seen… HP's new streaming service may well also be extended to stream music to webOS 3.0 smartphones in time, according to the leak.
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| HTC to unleash 16MP Windows Phone 7 handset? Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:33 AM PDT  Now here's a rumour that's come out of nowhere: HTC could be working on a 16MP Windows Phone 7 handset. The apparent evidence is a video posted by mobile news site PocketNow, in which a line-drawn bunch of party-goers turn into real live high definition people when snapped using the camera phone. But we're not overly convinced, and here's why. Firstly, where has this video sprung from? PocketNow doesn't say where it found this mysterious Aha tribute video and it's not exactly difficult to knock together such a thing in this internet-savvy day and age. Bah, humbug Secondly, HTC has never before shown an interest in competiting in the digital imaging race; its highest megapixellage to date is 8MP, so why leap to 16MP? And surely a quality manufacturer like HTC knows it's not just about the megapixels; without a good lens and decent quality sensor, all those extra megapixels are nigh on pointless. The technology does exist to facilitate a 16MP camera; Qualcomm has a quadcore chipset that could support up to 20 megapixel cameras but such a chipset would no doubt push the price sky-high. However; we won't rule the possibility of a 16MP HTC phone out altogether. After all, it's tough to differentiate yourself in the tightly controlled Windows Phone 7 hardware market, and the handset in the video does look quite a bit like the recently-leaked HTC Mazaa. But imaging is where Nokia has shone in recent years - with the Finns racing to get into the Windows Phone market could we see a whole new megapixel war about to begin? 
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| HTC to unleash 16MP Windows Phone 7 handset? Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:33 AM PDT Now here's a rumour that's come out of nowhere: HTC could be working on a 16MP Windows Phone 7 handset. The apparent evidence is a video posted by mobile news site PocketNow, in which a line-drawn bunch of party-goers turn into real live high definition people when snapped using the camera phone. But we're not overly convinced, and here's why. Firstly, where has this video sprung from? PocketNow doesn't say where it found this mysterious Aha tribute video and it's not exactly difficult to knock together such a thing in this internet-savvy day and age. Bah, humbug Secondly, HTC has never before shown an interest in competiting in the digital imaging race; its highest megapixellage to date is 8MP, so why leap to 16MP? And surely a quality manufacturer like HTC knows it's not just about the megapixels; without a good lens and decent quality sensor, all those extra megapixels are nigh on pointless. The technology does exist to facilitate a 16MP camera; Qualcomm has a quadcore chipset that could support up to 20 megapixel cameras but such a chipset would no doubt push the price sky-high. However; we won't rule the possibility of a 16MP HTC phone out altogether. After all, it's tough to differentiate yourself in the tightly controlled Windows Phone 7 hardware market, and the handset in the video does look quite a bit like the recently-leaked HTC Mazaa. But imaging is where Nokia has shone in recent years - with the Finns racing to get into the Windows Phone market could we see a whole new megapixel war about to begin?
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| Sony upgrades PS3 Move starter pack Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:11 AM PDT  Sony is ditching physical media and embracing game downloads with its latest PS3 Move, err, move. The new PlayStation Move Starter Pack will no longer be made available to consumers with a demo disc in the box, with Sony offering gamers free downloadable content via the PlayStation Network (PSN) instead. Shoot and Move Sony is clearly realising that the vast majority of PS3 users regularly download demos, games and other content via PSN and thus, by extension, that the majority of physical discs which they sell with PlayStation peripherals such as Move are virtually worthless. The new PS3 Move Starter Pack SKU will not contain a disc because, Sony notes, content changes and is updated on such a regular basis. "As the content is changing and being updated so regularly, in order to offer the best consumer experience, we've made it available via PSN,"said Sony UK. If you are still in the market for motion control for your PS3, yet for whatever bizarre reason do not have your console hooked up to the internet, then you might want to move quickly to buy one of the remaining first gen PS3 Move Starter Packs still in stores, should you really need that demo disc… 
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| Sony upgrades PS3 Move starter pack Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:11 AM PDT Sony is ditching physical media and embracing game downloads with its latest PS3 Move, err, move. The new PlayStation Move Starter Pack will no longer be made available to consumers with a demo disc in the box, with Sony offering gamers free downloadable content via the PlayStation Network (PSN) instead. Shoot and Move Sony is clearly realising that the vast majority of PS3 users regularly download demos, games and other content via PSN and thus, by extension, that the majority of physical discs which they sell with PlayStation peripherals such as Move are virtually worthless. The new PS3 Move Starter Pack SKU will not contain a disc because, Sony notes, content changes and is updated on such a regular basis. "As the content is changing and being updated so regularly, in order to offer the best consumer experience, we've made it available via PSN,"said Sony UK. If you are still in the market for motion control for your PS3, yet for whatever bizarre reason do not have your console hooked up to the internet, then you might want to move quickly to buy one of the remaining first gen PS3 Move Starter Packs still in stores, should you really need that demo disc…
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| Wireless devices to sell over 1.2 billion in 2011 Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:52 AM PDT  Wireless local area networking (WLAN) devices are set to top one billion for the first time ever later this year. Additionally, by 2015, the number of WLAN-enabled smartphones, mobile computers and other devices worldwide is set to double to over two billion. The latest predictions for the growth in wireless-enabled consumer tech comes from a new study published by iSuppli this month. iSuppli predicts that global shipments of WLAN-enabled devices will top 1.2 billion by the end of 2011, a growth of 35 per cent when compared with the number of shipments from 2010. iSuppli claims that the total shipments of WLAN-enabled devices in 2015 will top 2.2 billion. "In today's world of connected electronics, consumers expect seamless access to internet communications, services and content in any place and at any time," according to iSuppli director Dr Jagdish Rebello. Growth in WLAN-enabled in-car devices and televisions are set to significantly boost sales over the next four years, according to the research group. Via The Register 
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| Wireless devices to sell over 1.2 billion in 2011 Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:52 AM PDT Wireless local area networking (WLAN) devices are set to top one billion for the first time ever later this year. Additionally, by 2015, the number of WLAN-enabled smartphones, mobile computers and other devices worldwide is set to double to over two billion. The latest predictions for the growth in wireless-enabled consumer tech comes from a new study published by iSuppli this month. iSuppli predicts that global shipments of WLAN-enabled devices will top 1.2 billion by the end of 2011, a growth of 35 per cent when compared with the number of shipments from 2010. iSuppli claims that the total shipments of WLAN-enabled devices in 2015 will top 2.2 billion. "In today's world of connected electronics, consumers expect seamless access to internet communications, services and content in any place and at any time," according to iSuppli director Dr Jagdish Rebello. Growth in WLAN-enabled in-car devices and televisions are set to significantly boost sales over the next four years, according to the research group. Via The Register
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:41 AM PDT  The internet overlords at ICANN have seen fit to tidy all the online porn away into one handy, easy to find corner of the web with the .XXX domain which has finally gone live. Over the coming weeks, more and more of the 200,000 adult entertainment sites which pre-registered for the sexy new domain will be going live. Previously, porn was strewn willy nilly (ahem) around the information superhighway, with nary a thought for the children. .xoxo Now, the curious little kittens need only try out a few likely web addresses ending in .XXX to find all the salacious, questionable and NSFW web content their little hearts might desire. They may be disappointed to learn that only premium adult sites are able to register a .XXX domain, so they'll need to lift a parent's credit card while they're at it. .XXXbox Actually, not all porn will be swept into the dodgy .XXX back alley, with the traditional online adult industry being less than thrilled about the launch of the domain. The Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry lobbying group, promised to boycott the domains, saying that segregating and pigeon-holing adult content is not the way to go. Diane Duke, executive director of the coalition, previously blogged, "Remember, more of these domain names have failed than succeeded, and without the support of the industry it is purported to serve .XXX is history!" Displaying an astounding lack of imagination, the first .xxx domains to go live include xxx.xxx, sex.xxx and porn.xxx; we'd visit and report back on the content but we're pretty sure that's more than our jobs are worth. 
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:41 AM PDT The internet overlords at ICANN have seen fit to tidy all the online porn away into one handy, easy to find corner of the web with the .XXX domain which has finally gone live. Over the coming weeks, more and more of the 200,000 adult entertainment sites which pre-registered for the sexy new domain will be going live. Previously, porn was strewn willy nilly (ahem) around the information superhighway, with nary a thought for the children. .xoxo Now, the curious little kittens need only try out a few likely web addresses ending in .XXX to find all the salacious, questionable and NSFW web content their little hearts might desire. They may be disappointed to learn that only premium adult sites are able to register a .XXX domain, so they'll need to lift a parent's credit card while they're at it. .XXXbox Actually, not all porn will be swept into the dodgy .XXX back alley, with the traditional online adult industry being less than thrilled about the launch of the domain. The Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry lobbying group, promised to boycott the domains, saying that segregating and pigeon-holing adult content is not the way to go. Diane Duke, executive director of the coalition, previously blogged, "Remember, more of these domain names have failed than succeeded, and without the support of the industry it is purported to serve .XXX is history!" Displaying an astounding lack of imagination, the first .xxx domains to go live include xxx.xxx, sex.xxx and porn.xxx; we'd visit and report back on the content but we're pretty sure that's more than our jobs are worth.
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| LG E700 Windows Phone 7 spec emerges Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:43 AM PDT  Details of an upcoming LG Windows Phone 7 handset have emerged, with a tantalising hint that the LG E700 could be the first handset to be released with the Mango software update on board. You wait all year for a Windows Phone 7 hardware leak and then two come along at once. But we're not complaining, given that the LG E700 offers some more interesting information than the HTC Mazaa we saw earlier today, including the possibility of a summer release. This leak doesn't come with any nice sharp pictures, but it does offer some lines of code taken from a GSM submission, offering a few revelations. What's in a name? The first is the product name, listed as the LG E700, although we're hoping for a snazzy Optimus style name for the retail release. Next up is screen display, specified as 480x800 – not exactly big news, given that it's the standard Windows Phone 7 WVGA specification. The real news, however, is the browser which is named as Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. We're expecting to see mobile-flavoured IE9 hit existing Windows Phone 7 handsets in the Mango update, which suggests to us that the LG E700 could be one of the first handsets released with the Mango update already on board. With Mango potentially set for release this summer, it's not out of the realms of possibility that we'll see the next wave of handsets out at around the same time. 
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| LG E700 Windows Phone 7 spec emerges Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:43 AM PDT Details of an upcoming LG Windows Phone 7 handset have emerged, with a tantalising hint that the LG E700 could be the first handset to be released with the Mango software update on board. You wait all year for a Windows Phone 7 hardware leak and then two come along at once. But we're not complaining, given that the LG E700 offers some more interesting information than the HTC Mazaa we saw earlier today, including the possibility of a summer release. This leak doesn't come with any nice sharp pictures, but it does offer some lines of code taken from a GSM submission, offering a few revelations. What's in a name? The first is the product name, listed as the LG E700, although we're hoping for a snazzy Optimus style name for the retail release. Next up is screen display, specified as 480x800 – not exactly big news, given that it's the standard Windows Phone 7 WVGA specification. The real news, however, is the browser which is named as Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. We're expecting to see mobile-flavoured IE9 hit existing Windows Phone 7 handsets in the Mango update, which suggests to us that the LG E700 could be one of the first handsets released with the Mango update already on board. With Mango potentially set for release this summer, it's not out of the realms of possibility that we'll see the next wave of handsets out at around the same time.
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| In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated Posted: 17 Apr 2011 04:00 AM PDT  The number of files stored on the average desktop PC keeps increasing. Our needs change as we do, and every year we depend more on digital documents while our storage devices get bigger to keep pace. In short, the way we proudly arranged our files just a few years ago has become obsolete. The upshot is that you not only need an efficient assistant for the common task of dealing with your files, but also a workhorse for the next time you want to do some serious cleaning. This is why, even in these times of social desktops and cloud computing, file managers remain relevant. The litmus test for any file manager, then, is its ability to manage large numbers of files efficiently, and this is one of the two main criteria for the applications in this roundup. Our other primary concern is advocacy. Could each file manager here help convince inexperienced Linux users that the OS can be either familiar and easy to use, or different in that it's much more flexible than what they've previously experienced? As such, we've given lots of space to the file managers of popular and novice-friendly desktop environments. However, we've also included applications that are in most Linux live CDs for low-end systems, plus a couple of outsiders to encompass the richness of the Linux ecosystem. Of course, we could have further demonstrated this by including equally valid programs such as Midnight Commander or EmelFM2, but these have all already been covered in relatively recent LXF articles and so we've chosen to pass over them here. Nautilus
Fire up Nautilus in Fedora 14 and by default you'll see a multi-pane affair with a tree on the left, some icons along the top and plenty of space reserved for viewing files. This is known as Browser mode. The alternative view is Spatial mode, which opens a window for each folder you access - almost as if each was a physical file. You can set whichever you prefer as the default using the app's Preferences menu. Your options don't stop there, though - Nautilus can display directory contents in List, Icons or Compact view, accessible via a drop-down menu. You're also able to choose between single- or double-clicking to open a file, while thumbnails can be toggled off or on, and enlarged. To zoom in or out, click on the two small buttons to the sides of the current zoom level. Each click corresponds to a 50% variation, but we'd prefer a finer degree of granularity. What's more, you can have additional views of several folders all in one Nautilus window. To open a new pane just select View > Extra Pane. In our default Browser view, Nautilus shows the current directory with breadcrumbs - that is, a list of the path to the current directory you can use to retrace your steps. Right-clicking these Nautilus enables you to choose whether to move there or open that folder in a separate window or tab. Other buttons in the top bar enable you to move through recently visited folders, or go up one level in the filesystem. Notably, whether files are local or remote makes little difference, since Nautilus can connect to FTP, WebDAV, SSH servers and Windows shares. You can also save frequently visited folders as bookmarks. The small arrow-like symbol at the right-hand end of the toolbar activates Nautilus's search functionality. With this, you can define which kind of files it should look for, and where. You can even name and bookmark a search as if it were a normal folder. To aid you in finding files at a glance, Nautilus can attach Notes and Emblems - little pictures added to a file's icon - to your files. To add a Note, right-click a file, select Properties, go to the Notes tab, type whatever you want and click Save. That text will then be visible in the left pane whenever you're in Notes Display mode. In the case of Emblems, you can use them as visual reminders of the purpose or nature of each file. For example, you can add the Important Emblem to crucial files. If the predefined options here don't suit your needs, you can create your own: go to Edit > Background And Emblems, then click Emblems and Add A New Emblem. Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to use Emblems as search criteria. Finally, Nautilus opens a context-sensitive menu when you select a file or folder. This menu always has a Send To entry, which you can use to send files via instant messaging or email, to DVDs, or to compression programs. A simple way to extend Nautilus's capabilities is to add your own actions to this menu. A Nautilus action is simply an executable shell script placed in a special directory, normally $HOME/.gnome2/nautilusscripts/. Its contents are shown in the Scripts submenu. When you select one, Nautilus will run it with the selected files as parameters. There are already plenty of these scripts online: find them at http://g-scripts.sourceforge.net. Verdict Version: 2.32.2.1 Nautilus is a great tool. Its interface has improved greatly with age too. Rating: 8/10 Dolphin
Dolphin is the official file manager of the KDE desktop. Its standard configuration gives the user a left-hand panel listing Places, with Home, Network, Root and Trash as the defaults. Meanwhile, the main area shows the contents of the current directory as Icons, Columns, or by Details. The latter resembles the listing you'd get in a terminal window. When you're using it, you can show or hide the hierarchy of your directory tree with the Expandable Folders option. The Split button turns on or off a two-pane layout, or you can open several tabs. If you're ever stuck as to what a button does, pressing Shift+F1 when the cursor is over it provides a handy tooltip. As is standard, thumbnails are available. Dolphin's zoom function is harder to notice than Nautilus's: it's just a tiny slider in the bottom right corner. However, it also works better, in that you can set it to any value you want within the pre-defined range. With View > Location, you can set the location bar in Breadcrumb or Editable Box mode. Almost all shortcuts in Dolphin are configurable, as is the priority of file-sorting criteria. Dolphin also has panels for Information and Folders, and an integrated terminal. Panels can be maximised, minimised or detached from the main Dolphin window by clicking on the small diamond button in their corner. The Information panel shows a preview of whatever you've selected in the main area. It's also possibly the most powerful part of Dolphin, because it enables you to associate comments, ratings and tags to each file or folder in the manager (or, rather, Nepomuk) and displays whatever you've previously entered. The mechanism is similar to the Digikam picture manager. Dolphin just generalises that approach and the interface. It can be timeconsuming, but the reward is worth it if you have lots of files. When it comes to finding files, Dolphin's search capabilities are powerful, but the way they're presented can confuse first-time users. There are two different search functions, but the distinction isn't as evident as it should be. The first interface is the box you get when you press Ctrl+F or select Tools > Find File. The other is the small input field that appears at the right-hand end of the toolbar if you choose Settings > Toolbars Shown. The Find File box enables you to search in the traditional Unix sense: according to file names, content if they're text, or properties such as size or modification date. The other interface does something quite different. You can still refine results by setting limits on file sizes or modification dates. However, this toolbar queries the Nepomuk database. If you activate its indexer, it also looks at file contents, but otherwise it only returns files whose tags or comments match what you've typed in their Information box. As with Nautilus, you can save search queries as bookmarks and Dolphin also has a configurable contextual menu.
Besides its support for file information, the other strength of Dolphin is that there are interesting add-ons of all varieties, including a Dropbox interface, making DVDs of picture galleries with Kdenlive and converting scanned text to plain text format with Tesseract. Verdict Version: 1.5 Dolphin's interface is tidy, but it's packed with features Rating: 9/10 4Pane
This multi-pane, list-based file manager was designed to put speed before visual effects. Its name comes from the fact that the default configuration displays two identical pairs of panes. Each of these couples consists of a directory tree view and a detailed list of files. You can, however, add or remove panes as you wish, use tabs and store bookmarks too. The first time you start 4Pane, a wizard looks at your system to create a basic configuration, or enables you to import an existing one. Once you've arranged 4Pane as you please, you can save that setup as a template. Shortcuts are available and configurable for most functions. Indeed, as 4Pane's 'Help for people who don't read manuals' says: "Just about everything is configurable, mainly from the Options > Configure 4Pane menu and [by] pressing F1 you'll get context-sensitive help…" The interface contains buttons or menus to mount and unmount drives or partitions, manage archives and go back to recently visited folders. Besides this, 4Pane supports mass renaming or duplication of files, and can handle removable drives, NFS or Samba shares. Following the detailed instructions in the full user manual, 4Pane can also be extended with user-defined tools. To get an idea of what's available, looking in the Tools menu displays the ones supplied with 4Pane: find, grep and locate. 4Pane even features an integrated terminal. Selecting View > Show Terminal Emulator opens it. It isn't fully featured, since you can't use su, sudo or escape sequences. However, pipes, redirection and command histories are supported, so it can save you time, especially if you want to work half with the mouse and half at the prompt. Verdict Version: 0.8.0 4Pane is spartan, but fast and efficient when moving lots of files. Rating: 7/10 Thunar
Thunar is the default file manager of the Xfce4 desktop environment. It's simple, but well designed, fast and easy to use. The top most menu contains nothing more than File, Edit, View and Go entries. Bookmarks and mounted drives are shown in the left pane as icons or in a tree view, while the current directory's displayed either with breadcrumbs in Thunar's Pathbar style, or in an editable text box in its Toolbar style. The latter also adds Up, Back and Home buttons, which work just like those in Nautilus. Another similarity between the two is the choice between detailed icons, a compact list or a detailed list as views. An Open Terminal Here command is always available in the main contextual menu. The Send To option in the same menu can create a desktop link for the selected file, attach it to an email, or copy it to other drives or Bluetooth devices. The last option in the pop-up menu is a bulk renamer, which you can also activate by pressing F2 or choosing Edit > Rename... from the main menu. With this, you can add, remove or replace characters in the names of previously selected files, or add dates or progressive numbers to them. Extra renaming options are available for certain filetypes with the right plugins - you'll find a list of Action add-ons here. Creating your own is easy too. If you select Edit > Configure Custom Actions and then click the plus sign, you'll get a panel with two tabs. The first tells Thunar how to associate a generic program to a new menu entry. The second defines Appearance Conditions: the types of files to which Thunar should associate that menu entry. Verdict Version: 1.0.2 Friendly and fast: Thunar is perfect for novice users on limited systems Rating: 8/10 Rox-Filer
The Rox-Filer is only a part of Rox, a desktop environment inspired by the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) strategy. The Filer window has only a few buttons. Three are shortcuts to your bookmarks, your home directory and parent directory. Others sort, hide or show files or display thumbnails instead of icons. You can also colour files based on their type. Rox-Filer has almost all the functions of other file managers, it just puts them in a different place: namely, a pop-up menu activated by the right mouse button. From it, you can open a terminal or a location bar, search for files (with regular expressions), activate the List or Icon views and more. A Next Click submenu even enables you to decide what the next action will be before telling Filer which file or folder should be the object of said action. The default terminal here is Xterm, but you can change it if you wish. The Rox desktop uses the 0install system, which puts programs in self-contained application directories. Installing such programs is as simple as copying a folder wherever you want, which is what we did with Filer. A full manual is also provided in HTML format and available online. However, when you click the LIFESAVER icon (at least in Fedora 14), Filer doesn't open its manual pages in a browser, only the folder in which they were copied. Using Filer is an intriguing experience. It's fast and flexible, with a refreshingly different look. Sometimes you feel like you've gone back 10 years, but in a good way - offering a glimpse of what Linux might have become if it had taken a different path. While it has all the necessary functions, though, be warned that it does take some effort on your part to make all of them usable. Verdict Version: 1.5 Rox-Filer is pretty bare but powerful and pleasingly fast: try it! Rating: 7/10 PcManFM
PcManFM can probably be considered the simplest and least intimidating file manager in these pages. The toolbar beneath the main menu only has five buttons: ones for the previous and next folder, links to parent and home directories, and one to open a new tab. In addition, there's the location bar and a small arrow that opens a list of recently visited folders. The left-hand pane is divided in two parts: graphic versions of the Go and Bookmarks top menus. The Go part of this pane contains shortcuts to some predefined locations. The default ones are your home directory, Desktop folder, Trash and an Applications folder, which enables you launch all the applications used to manage the Gnome System settings. In general, the look and feel of PcManFM reminds us of a much simplified version of Nautilus, with a Thunar-like style, and that's a compliment. These are only some of the reasons why PcManFM was used in LXDE, the Light Desktop Environment. This program is fast and lightweight, but still gives the user tabbed browsing, and four view modes: Icon, Thumbnail, List or Compact. It's also capable of volume management and you can drag and drop across tabs. Thumbnails are present for image files, plus there are bookmarks and handling of filenames with encoding other than UTF-8. The main limitations of this app are that there's no search interface and the Tools menu only provides two choices: open a terminal in the current folder (F4) or as the root user. There are no direct links to any documentation, but the interface is so simple that this isn't much of a problem. Verdict Version: 0.9.9 Speed and simplicity in an attractive package, but it lacks documentation Rating: 7/10 The best Linux file manager is... Dolphin 9/10
All the file managers presented here perform well on the medium- to high-end desktop computers that are common these days. If you're looking for something simple to use on a machine with limited capabilities, though, both Thunar and PcManFM are good choices. If simplicity and familiarity aren't essential, try Rox- Filer for a novel experience, or 4Pane if you have to move or analyse lots of non-graphical files with find and grep. In general, however, a complete file manager that's suitable for the majority of users must offer something more than these applications. Heavy file management requires a few key features, such as blending a graphical interface and quick command line into one app as seamlessly as possible. The former is useful to quickly figure out if that bunch of JPEG files with impenetrable names are your holiday snaps or sales forecast diagrams. The latter is handy for those moments where you'll need more flexibility, automation or speed than a GUI-only application could provide. Sure, you can run a file manager in one window and a terminal in another, but the closer they are to hand, the faster you'll work. Other important features are direct support for search (we love find, but it's not for every circumstance) and extensibility. That's why we're happy to declare Dolphin the winner of this roundup, with Nautilus coming a close second. Dolphin is a very good mix of all the features we just mentioned, and then some. The in-window terminal and integration with Nepomuk for semantic searches are major advantages, and while Nautilus's Emblems system is certainly handy, we find it less flexible than the file information data that Nepomuk can handle. Both are great apps, though. Looking at them side by side, we have only one regret: why don't they share file metadata and at least their simplest extensions? In a perfect world, it would be great, for example, if Nautilus could read Nepomuk tags entered from Dolphin, or if the KDE file manager could automatically find and use Nautilus shell scripts. 
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| In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated Posted: 17 Apr 2011 04:00 AM PDT The number of files stored on the average desktop PC keeps increasing. Our needs change as we do, and every year we depend more on digital documents while our storage devices get bigger to keep pace. In short, the way we proudly arranged our files just a few years ago has become obsolete. The upshot is that you not only need an efficient assistant for the common task of dealing with your files, but also a workhorse for the next time you want to do some serious cleaning. This is why, even in these times of social desktops and cloud computing, file managers remain relevant. The litmus test for any file manager, then, is its ability to manage large numbers of files efficiently, and this is one of the two main criteria for the applications in this roundup. Our other primary concern is advocacy. Could each file manager here help convince inexperienced Linux users that the OS can be either familiar and easy to use, or different in that it's much more flexible than what they've previously experienced? As such, we've given lots of space to the file managers of popular and novice-friendly desktop environments. However, we've also included applications that are in most Linux live CDs for low-end systems, plus a couple of outsiders to encompass the richness of the Linux ecosystem. Of course, we could have further demonstrated this by including equally valid programs such as Midnight Commander or EmelFM2, but these have all already been covered in relatively recent LXF articles and so we've chosen to pass over them here. Nautilus
Fire up Nautilus in Fedora 14 and by default you'll see a multi-pane affair with a tree on the left, some icons along the top and plenty of space reserved for viewing files. This is known as Browser mode. The alternative view is Spatial mode, which opens a window for each folder you access - almost as if each was a physical file. You can set whichever you prefer as the default using the app's Preferences menu. Your options don't stop there, though - Nautilus can display directory contents in List, Icons or Compact view, accessible via a drop-down menu. You're also able to choose between single- or double-clicking to open a file, while thumbnails can be toggled off or on, and enlarged. To zoom in or out, click on the two small buttons to the sides of the current zoom level. Each click corresponds to a 50% variation, but we'd prefer a finer degree of granularity. What's more, you can have additional views of several folders all in one Nautilus window. To open a new pane just select View > Extra Pane. In our default Browser view, Nautilus shows the current directory with breadcrumbs - that is, a list of the path to the current directory you can use to retrace your steps. Right-clicking these Nautilus enables you to choose whether to move there or open that folder in a separate window or tab. Other buttons in the top bar enable you to move through recently visited folders, or go up one level in the filesystem. Notably, whether files are local or remote makes little difference, since Nautilus can connect to FTP, WebDAV, SSH servers and Windows shares. You can also save frequently visited folders as bookmarks. The small arrow-like symbol at the right-hand end of the toolbar activates Nautilus's search functionality. With this, you can define which kind of files it should look for, and where. You can even name and bookmark a search as if it were a normal folder. To aid you in finding files at a glance, Nautilus can attach Notes and Emblems - little pictures added to a file's icon - to your files. To add a Note, right-click a file, select Properties, go to the Notes tab, type whatever you want and click Save. That text will then be visible in the left pane whenever you're in Notes Display mode. In the case of Emblems, you can use them as visual reminders of the purpose or nature of each file. For example, you can add the Important Emblem to crucial files. If the predefined options here don't suit your needs, you can create your own: go to Edit > Background And Emblems, then click Emblems and Add A New Emblem. Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to use Emblems as search criteria. Finally, Nautilus opens a context-sensitive menu when you select a file or folder. This menu always has a Send To entry, which you can use to send files via instant messaging or email, to DVDs, or to compression programs. A simple way to extend Nautilus's capabilities is to add your own actions to this menu. A Nautilus action is simply an executable shell script placed in a special directory, normally $HOME/.gnome2/nautilusscripts/. Its contents are shown in the Scripts submenu. When you select one, Nautilus will run it with the selected files as parameters. There are already plenty of these scripts online: find them at http://g-scripts.sourceforge.net. Verdict Version: 2.32.2.1 Nautilus is a great tool. Its interface has improved greatly with age too. Rating: 8/10 Dolphin
Dolphin is the official file manager of the KDE desktop. Its standard configuration gives the user a left-hand panel listing Places, with Home, Network, Root and Trash as the defaults. Meanwhile, the main area shows the contents of the current directory as Icons, Columns, or by Details. The latter resembles the listing you'd get in a terminal window. When you're using it, you can show or hide the hierarchy of your directory tree with the Expandable Folders option. The Split button turns on or off a two-pane layout, or you can open several tabs. If you're ever stuck as to what a button does, pressing Shift+F1 when the cursor is over it provides a handy tooltip. As is standard, thumbnails are available. Dolphin's zoom function is harder to notice than Nautilus's: it's just a tiny slider in the bottom right corner. However, it also works better, in that you can set it to any value you want within the pre-defined range. With View > Location, you can set the location bar in Breadcrumb or Editable Box mode. Almost all shortcuts in Dolphin are configurable, as is the priority of file-sorting criteria. Dolphin also has panels for Information and Folders, and an integrated terminal. Panels can be maximised, minimised or detached from the main Dolphin window by clicking on the small diamond button in their corner. The Information panel shows a preview of whatever you've selected in the main area. It's also possibly the most powerful part of Dolphin, because it enables you to associate comments, ratings and tags to each file or folder in the manager (or, rather, Nepomuk) and displays whatever you've previously entered. The mechanism is similar to the Digikam picture manager. Dolphin just generalises that approach and the interface. It can be timeconsuming, but the reward is worth it if you have lots of files. When it comes to finding files, Dolphin's search capabilities are powerful, but the way they're presented can confuse first-time users. There are two different search functions, but the distinction isn't as evident as it should be. The first interface is the box you get when you press Ctrl+F or select Tools > Find File. The other is the small input field that appears at the right-hand end of the toolbar if you choose Settings > Toolbars Shown. The Find File box enables you to search in the traditional Unix sense: according to file names, content if they're text, or properties such as size or modification date. The other interface does something quite different. You can still refine results by setting limits on file sizes or modification dates. However, this toolbar queries the Nepomuk database. If you activate its indexer, it also looks at file contents, but otherwise it only returns files whose tags or comments match what you've typed in their Information box. As with Nautilus, you can save search queries as bookmarks and Dolphin also has a configurable contextual menu.
Besides its support for file information, the other strength of Dolphin is that there are interesting add-ons of all varieties, including a Dropbox interface, making DVDs of picture galleries with Kdenlive and converting scanned text to plain text format with Tesseract. Verdict Version: 1.5 Dolphin's interface is tidy, but it's packed with features Rating: 9/10 4Pane
This multi-pane, list-based file manager was designed to put speed before visual effects. Its name comes from the fact that the default configuration displays two identical pairs of panes. Each of these couples consists of a directory tree view and a detailed list of files. You can, however, add or remove panes as you wish, use tabs and store bookmarks too. The first time you start 4Pane, a wizard looks at your system to create a basic configuration, or enables you to import an existing one. Once you've arranged 4Pane as you please, you can save that setup as a template. Shortcuts are available and configurable for most functions. Indeed, as 4Pane's 'Help for people who don't read manuals' says: "Just about everything is configurable, mainly from the Options > Configure 4Pane menu and [by] pressing F1 you'll get context-sensitive help…" The interface contains buttons or menus to mount and unmount drives or partitions, manage archives and go back to recently visited folders. Besides this, 4Pane supports mass renaming or duplication of files, and can handle removable drives, NFS or Samba shares. Following the detailed instructions in the full user manual, 4Pane can also be extended with user-defined tools. To get an idea of what's available, looking in the Tools menu displays the ones supplied with 4Pane: find, grep and locate. 4Pane even features an integrated terminal. Selecting View > Show Terminal Emulator opens it. It isn't fully featured, since you can't use su, sudo or escape sequences. However, pipes, redirection and command histories are supported, so it can save you time, especially if you want to work half with the mouse and half at the prompt. Verdict Version: 0.8.0 4Pane is spartan, but fast and efficient when moving lots of files. Rating: 7/10 Thunar
Thunar is the default file manager of the Xfce4 desktop environment. It's simple, but well designed, fast and easy to use. The top most menu contains nothing more than File, Edit, View and Go entries. Bookmarks and mounted drives are shown in the left pane as icons or in a tree view, while the current directory's displayed either with breadcrumbs in Thunar's Pathbar style, or in an editable text box in its Toolbar style. The latter also adds Up, Back and Home buttons, which work just like those in Nautilus. Another similarity between the two is the choice between detailed icons, a compact list or a detailed list as views. An Open Terminal Here command is always available in the main contextual menu. The Send To option in the same menu can create a desktop link for the selected file, attach it to an email, or copy it to other drives or Bluetooth devices. The last option in the pop-up menu is a bulk renamer, which you can also activate by pressing F2 or choosing Edit > Rename... from the main menu. With this, you can add, remove or replace characters in the names of previously selected files, or add dates or progressive numbers to them. Extra renaming options are available for certain filetypes with the right plugins - you'll find a list of Action add-ons here. Creating your own is easy too. If you select Edit > Configure Custom Actions and then click the plus sign, you'll get a panel with two tabs. The first tells Thunar how to associate a generic program to a new menu entry. The second defines Appearance Conditions: the types of files to which Thunar should associate that menu entry. Verdict Version: 1.0.2 Friendly and fast: Thunar is perfect for novice users on limited systems Rating: 8/10 Rox-Filer
The Rox-Filer is only a part of Rox, a desktop environment inspired by the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) strategy. The Filer window has only a few buttons. Three are shortcuts to your bookmarks, your home directory and parent directory. Others sort, hide or show files or display thumbnails instead of icons. You can also colour files based on their type. Rox-Filer has almost all the functions of other file managers, it just puts them in a different place: namely, a pop-up menu activated by the right mouse button. From it, you can open a terminal or a location bar, search for files (with regular expressions), activate the List or Icon views and more. A Next Click submenu even enables you to decide what the next action will be before telling Filer which file or folder should be the object of said action. The default terminal here is Xterm, but you can change it if you wish. The Rox desktop uses the 0install system, which puts programs in self-contained application directories. Installing such programs is as simple as copying a folder wherever you want, which is what we did with Filer. A full manual is also provided in HTML format and available online. However, when you click the LIFESAVER icon (at least in Fedora 14), Filer doesn't open its manual pages in a browser, only the folder in which they were copied. Using Filer is an intriguing experience. It's fast and flexible, with a refreshingly different look. Sometimes you feel like you've gone back 10 years, but in a good way - offering a glimpse of what Linux might have become if it had taken a different path. While it has all the necessary functions, though, be warned that it does take some effort on your part to make all of them usable. Verdict Version: 1.5 Rox-Filer is pretty bare but powerful and pleasingly fast: try it! Rating: 7/10 PcManFM
PcManFM can probably be considered the simplest and least intimidating file manager in these pages. The toolbar beneath the main menu only has five buttons: ones for the previous and next folder, links to parent and home directories, and one to open a new tab. In addition, there's the location bar and a small arrow that opens a list of recently visited folders. The left-hand pane is divided in two parts: graphic versions of the Go and Bookmarks top menus. The Go part of this pane contains shortcuts to some predefined locations. The default ones are your home directory, Desktop folder, Trash and an Applications folder, which enables you launch all the applications used to manage the Gnome System settings. In general, the look and feel of PcManFM reminds us of a much simplified version of Nautilus, with a Thunar-like style, and that's a compliment. These are only some of the reasons why PcManFM was used in LXDE, the Light Desktop Environment. This program is fast and lightweight, but still gives the user tabbed browsing, and four view modes: Icon, Thumbnail, List or Compact. It's also capable of volume management and you can drag and drop across tabs. Thumbnails are present for image files, plus there are bookmarks and handling of filenames with encoding other than UTF-8. The main limitations of this app are that there's no search interface and the Tools menu only provides two choices: open a terminal in the current folder (F4) or as the root user. There are no direct links to any documentation, but the interface is so simple that this isn't much of a problem. Verdict Version: 0.9.9 Speed and simplicity in an attractive package, but it lacks documentation Rating: 7/10 The best Linux file manager is... Dolphin 9/10
All the file managers presented here perform well on the medium- to high-end desktop computers that are common these days. If you're looking for something simple to use on a machine with limited capabilities, though, both Thunar and PcManFM are good choices. If simplicity and familiarity aren't essential, try Rox- Filer for a novel experience, or 4Pane if you have to move or analyse lots of non-graphical files with find and grep. In general, however, a complete file manager that's suitable for the majority of users must offer something more than these applications. Heavy file management requires a few key features, such as blending a graphical interface and quick command line into one app as seamlessly as possible. The former is useful to quickly figure out if that bunch of JPEG files with impenetrable names are your holiday snaps or sales forecast diagrams. The latter is handy for those moments where you'll need more flexibility, automation or speed than a GUI-only application could provide. Sure, you can run a file manager in one window and a terminal in another, but the closer they are to hand, the faster you'll work. Other important features are direct support for search (we love find, but it's not for every circumstance) and extensibility. That's why we're happy to declare Dolphin the winner of this roundup, with Nautilus coming a close second. Dolphin is a very good mix of all the features we just mentioned, and then some. The in-window terminal and integration with Nepomuk for semantic searches are major advantages, and while Nautilus's Emblems system is certainly handy, we find it less flexible than the file information data that Nepomuk can handle. Both are great apps, though. Looking at them side by side, we have only one regret: why don't they share file metadata and at least their simplest extensions? In a perfect world, it would be great, for example, if Nautilus could read Nepomuk tags entered from Dolphin, or if the KDE file manager could automatically find and use Nautilus shell scripts.
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| In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated Posted: 17 Apr 2011 04:00 AM PDT The number of files stored on the average desktop PC keeps increasing. Our needs change as we do, and every year we depend more on digital documents while our storage devices get bigger to keep pace. In short, the way we proudly arranged our files just a few years ago has become obsolete. The upshot is that you not only need an efficient assistant for the common task of dealing with your files, but also a workhorse for the next time you want to do some serious cleaning. This is why, even in these times of social desktops and cloud computing, file managers remain relevant. The litmus test for any file manager, then, is its ability to manage large numbers of files efficiently, and this is one of the two main criteria for the applications in this roundup. Our other primary concern is advocacy. Could each file manager here help convince inexperienced Linux users that the OS can be either familiar and easy to use, or different in that it's much more flexible than what they've previously experienced? As such, we've given lots of space to the file managers of popular and novice-friendly desktop environments. However, we've also included applications that are in most Linux live CDs for low-end systems, plus a couple of outsiders to encompass the richness of the Linux ecosystem. Of course, we could have further demonstrated this by including equally valid programs such as Midnight Commander or EmelFM2, but these have all already been covered in relatively recent LXF articles and so we've chosen to pass over them here. Nautilus
Fire up Nautilus in Fedora 14 and by default you'll see a multi-pane affair with a tree on the left, some icons along the top and plenty of space reserved for viewing files. This is known as Browser mode. The alternative view is Spatial mode, which opens a window for each folder you access - almost as if each was a physical file. You can set whichever you prefer as the default using the app's Preferences menu. Your options don't stop there, though - Nautilus can display directory contents in List, Icons or Compact view, accessible via a drop-down menu. You're also able to choose between single- or double-clicking to open a file, while thumbnails can be toggled off or on, and enlarged. To zoom in or out, click on the two small buttons to the sides of the current zoom level. Each click corresponds to a 50% variation, but we'd prefer a finer degree of granularity. What's more, you can have additional views of several folders all in one Nautilus window. To open a new pane just select View > Extra Pane. In our default Browser view, Nautilus shows the current directory with breadcrumbs - that is, a list of the path to the current directory you can use to retrace your steps. Right-clicking these Nautilus enables you to choose whether to move there or open that folder in a separate window or tab. Other buttons in the top bar enable you to move through recently visited folders, or go up one level in the filesystem. Notably, whether files are local or remote makes little difference, since Nautilus can connect to FTP, WebDAV, SSH servers and Windows shares. You can also save frequently visited folders as bookmarks. The small arrow-like symbol at the right-hand end of the toolbar activates Nautilus's search functionality. With this, you can define which kind of files it should look for, and where. You can even name and bookmark a search as if it were a normal folder. To aid you in finding files at a glance, Nautilus can attach Notes and Emblems - little pictures added to a file's icon - to your files. To add a Note, right-click a file, select Properties, go to the Notes tab, type whatever you want and click Save. That text will then be visible in the left pane whenever you're in Notes Display mode. In the case of Emblems, you can use them as visual reminders of the purpose or nature of each file. For example, you can add the Important Emblem to crucial files. If the predefined options here don't suit your needs, you can create your own: go to Edit > Background And Emblems, then click Emblems and Add A New Emblem. Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to use Emblems as search criteria. Finally, Nautilus opens a context-sensitive menu when you select a file or folder. This menu always has a Send To entry, which you can use to send files via instant messaging or email, to DVDs, or to compression programs. A simple way to extend Nautilus's capabilities is to add your own actions to this menu. A Nautilus action is simply an executable shell script placed in a special directory, normally $HOME/.gnome2/nautilusscripts/. Its contents are shown in the Scripts submenu. When you select one, Nautilus will run it with the selected files as parameters. There are already plenty of these scripts online: find them at http://g-scripts.sourceforge.net. Verdict Version: 2.32.2.1 Nautilus is a great tool. Its interface has improved greatly with age too. Rating: 8/10 Dolphin
Dolphin is the official file manager of the KDE desktop. Its standard configuration gives the user a left-hand panel listing Places, with Home, Network, Root and Trash as the defaults. Meanwhile, the main area shows the contents of the current directory as Icons, Columns, or by Details. The latter resembles the listing you'd get in a terminal window. When you're using it, you can show or hide the hierarchy of your directory tree with the Expandable Folders option. The Split button turns on or off a two-pane layout, or you can open several tabs. If you're ever stuck as to what a button does, pressing Shift+F1 when the cursor is over it provides a handy tooltip. As is standard, thumbnails are available. Dolphin's zoom function is harder to notice than Nautilus's: it's just a tiny slider in the bottom right corner. However, it also works better, in that you can set it to any value you want within the pre-defined range. With View > Location, you can set the location bar in Breadcrumb or Editable Box mode. Almost all shortcuts in Dolphin are configurable, as is the priority of file-sorting criteria. Dolphin also has panels for Information and Folders, and an integrated terminal. Panels can be maximised, minimised or detached from the main Dolphin window by clicking on the small diamond button in their corner. The Information panel shows a preview of whatever you've selected in the main area. It's also possibly the most powerful part of Dolphin, because it enables you to associate comments, ratings and tags to each file or folder in the manager (or, rather, Nepomuk) and displays whatever you've previously entered. The mechanism is similar to the Digikam picture manager. Dolphin just generalises that approach and the interface. It can be timeconsuming, but the reward is worth it if you have lots of files. When it comes to finding files, Dolphin's search capabilities are powerful, but the way they're presented can confuse first-time users. There are two different search functions, but the distinction isn't as evident as it should be. The first interface is the box you get when you press Ctrl+F or select Tools > Find File. The other is the small input field that appears at the right-hand end of the toolbar if you choose Settings > Toolbars Shown. The Find File box enables you to search in the traditional Unix sense: according to file names, content if they're text, or properties such as size or modification date. The other interface does something quite different. You can still refine results by setting limits on file sizes or modification dates. However, this toolbar queries the Nepomuk database. If you activate its indexer, it also looks at file contents, but otherwise it only returns files whose tags or comments match what you've typed in their Information box. As with Nautilus, you can save search queries as bookmarks and Dolphin also has a configurable contextual menu.
Besides its support for file information, the other strength of Dolphin is that there are interesting add-ons of all varieties, including a Dropbox interface, making DVDs of picture galleries with Kdenlive and converting scanned text to plain text format with Tesseract. Verdict Version: 1.5 Dolphin's interface is tidy, but it's packed with features Rating: 9/10 4Pane
This multi-pane, list-based file manager was designed to put speed before visual effects. Its name comes from the fact that the default configuration displays two identical pairs of panes. Each of these couples consists of a directory tree view and a detailed list of files. You can, however, add or remove panes as you wish, use tabs and store bookmarks too. The first time you start 4Pane, a wizard looks at your system to create a basic configuration, or enables you to import an existing one. Once you've arranged 4Pane as you please, you can save that setup as a template. Shortcuts are available and configurable for most functions. Indeed, as 4Pane's 'Help for people who don't read manuals' says: "Just about everything is configurable, mainly from the Options > Configure 4Pane menu and [by] pressing F1 you'll get context-sensitive help…" The interface contains buttons or menus to mount and unmount drives or partitions, manage archives and go back to recently visited folders. Besides this, 4Pane supports mass renaming or duplication of files, and can handle removable drives, NFS or Samba shares. Following the detailed instructions in the full user manual, 4Pane can also be extended with user-defined tools. To get an idea of what's available, looking in the Tools menu displays the ones supplied with 4Pane: find, grep and locate. 4Pane even features an integrated terminal. Selecting View > Show Terminal Emulator opens it. It isn't fully featured, since you can't use su, sudo or escape sequences. However, pipes, redirection and command histories are supported, so it can save you time, especially if you want to work half with the mouse and half at the prompt. Verdict Version: 0.8.0 4Pane is spartan, but fast and efficient when moving lots of files. Rating: 7/10 Thunar
Thunar is the default file manager of the Xfce4 desktop environment. It's simple, but well designed, fast and easy to use. The top most menu contains nothing more than File, Edit, View and Go entries. Bookmarks and mounted drives are shown in the left pane as icons or in a tree view, while the current directory's displayed either with breadcrumbs in Thunar's Pathbar style, or in an editable text box in its Toolbar style. The latter also adds Up, Back and Home buttons, which work just like those in Nautilus. Another similarity between the two is the choice between detailed icons, a compact list or a detailed list as views. An Open Terminal Here command is always available in the main contextual menu. The Send To option in the same menu can create a desktop link for the selected file, attach it to an email, or copy it to other drives or Bluetooth devices. The last option in the pop-up menu is a bulk renamer, which you can also activate by pressing F2 or choosing Edit > Rename... from the main menu. With this, you can add, remove or replace characters in the names of previously selected files, or add dates or progressive numbers to them. Extra renaming options are available for certain filetypes with the right plugins - you'll find a list of Action add-ons here. Creating your own is easy too. If you select Edit > Configure Custom Actions and then click the plus sign, you'll get a panel with two tabs. The first tells Thunar how to associate a generic program to a new menu entry. The second defines Appearance Conditions: the types of files to which Thunar should associate that menu entry. Verdict Version: 1.0.2 Friendly and fast: Thunar is perfect for novice users on limited systems Rating: 8/10 Rox-Filer
The Rox-Filer is only a part of Rox, a desktop environment inspired by the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) strategy. The Filer window has only a few buttons. Three are shortcuts to your bookmarks, your home directory and parent directory. Others sort, hide or show files or display thumbnails instead of icons. You can also colour files based on their type. Rox-Filer has almost all the functions of other file managers, it just puts them in a different place: namely, a pop-up menu activated by the right mouse button. From it, you can open a terminal or a location bar, search for files (with regular expressions), activate the List or Icon views and more. A Next Click submenu even enables you to decide what the next action will be before telling Filer which file or folder should be the object of said action. The default terminal here is Xterm, but you can change it if you wish. The Rox desktop uses the 0install system, which puts programs in self-contained application directories. Installing such programs is as simple as copying a folder wherever you want, which is what we did with Filer. A full manual is also provided in HTML format and available online. However, when you click the LIFESAVER icon (at least in Fedora 14), Filer doesn't open its manual pages in a browser, only the folder in which they were copied. Using Filer is an intriguing experience. It's fast and flexible, with a refreshingly different look. Sometimes you feel like you've gone back 10 years, but in a good way - offering a glimpse of what Linux might have become if it had taken a different path. While it has all the necessary functions, though, be warned that it does take some effort on your part to make all of them usable. Verdict Version: 1.5 Rox-Filer is pretty bare but powerful and pleasingly fast: try it! Rating: 7/10 PcManFM
PcManFM can probably be considered the simplest and least intimidating file manager in these pages. The toolbar beneath the main menu only has five buttons: ones for the previous and next folder, links to parent and home directories, and one to open a new tab. In addition, there's the location bar and a small arrow that opens a list of recently visited folders. The left-hand pane is divided in two parts: graphic versions of the Go and Bookmarks top menus. The Go part of this pane contains shortcuts to some predefined locations. The default ones are your home directory, Desktop folder, Trash and an Applications folder, which enables you launch all the applications used to manage the Gnome System settings. In general, the look and feel of PcManFM reminds us of a much simplified version of Nautilus, with a Thunar-like style, and that's a compliment. These are only some of the reasons why PcManFM was used in LXDE, the Light Desktop Environment. This program is fast and lightweight, but still gives the user tabbed browsing, and four view modes: Icon, Thumbnail, List or Compact. It's also capable of volume management and you can drag and drop across tabs. Thumbnails are present for image files, plus there are bookmarks and handling of filenames with encoding other than UTF-8. The main limitations of this app are that there's no search interface and the Tools menu only provides two choices: open a terminal in the current folder (F4) or as the root user. There are no direct links to any documentation, but the interface is so simple that this isn't much of a problem. Verdict Version: 0.9.9 Speed and simplicity in an attractive package, but it lacks documentation Rating: 7/10 The best Linux file manager is... Dolphin 9/10
All the file managers presented here perform well on the medium- to high-end desktop computers that are common these days. If you're looking for something simple to use on a machine with limited capabilities, though, both Thunar and PcManFM are good choices. If simplicity and familiarity aren't essential, try Rox- Filer for a novel experience, or 4Pane if you have to move or analyse lots of non-graphical files with find and grep. In general, however, a complete file manager that's suitable for the majority of users must offer something more than these applications. Heavy file management requires a few key features, such as blending a graphical interface and quick command line into one app as seamlessly as possible. The former is useful to quickly figure out if that bunch of JPEG files with impenetrable names are your holiday snaps or sales forecast diagrams. The latter is handy for those moments where you'll need more flexibility, automation or speed than a GUI-only application could provide. Sure, you can run a file manager in one window and a terminal in another, but the closer they are to hand, the faster you'll work. Other important features are direct support for search (we love find, but it's not for every circumstance) and extensibility. That's why we're happy to declare Dolphin the winner of this roundup, with Nautilus coming a close second. Dolphin is a very good mix of all the features we just mentioned, and then some. The in-window terminal and integration with Nepomuk for semantic searches are major advantages, and while Nautilus's Emblems system is certainly handy, we find it less flexible than the file information data that Nepomuk can handle. Both are great apps, though. Looking at them side by side, we have only one regret: why don't they share file metadata and at least their simplest extensions? In a perfect world, it would be great, for example, if Nautilus could read Nepomuk tags entered from Dolphin, or if the KDE file manager could automatically find and use Nautilus shell scripts.
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| Review: HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B Posted: 17 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT  The HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B is the entry-level model in the PhotoSmart range, yet comes with a whole set of features that belies its budget status. This all-in-one device comes with a colour LCD display on the screen, as well as full scanner, copy and print modes. It has a rather tall and boxy design, but with a front-loading in and out tray, it's rather compact. HP has done away with physical buttons, opting for touch-sensitive buttons around the display. Below this you'll find an SD Card slot for uploading your documents and pictures, which you can then edit and trim via the screen before directly printing. This printer comes with Wi-Fi built in and, along with installing the software and setting up the printer, you'll find it takes over 45 minutes to be up and ready to print. Inserting the four cartridges is standard, but we like that the black is a high-capacity module. The rather large size of the printer allows for the A4 scanner, which is neatly concealed. We found scanning quality to be good and on a par with the Epson Stylus SX425W. When it comes to printing, you'll find this quite a loud machine. However, the results are spectacular, with colour prints being rich and vibrant. Equally, mono text is crisp and sharp with plenty of depth to the black. Cartridge replacements work out the most economical, with a four-pack costing around £22 (inc. VAT), while individual colours can be bought for just £7 (inc. VAT). The high-capacity black cartridge is more expensive, but even at £13 (inc. VAT) it represents great value for money. The HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B is a loud and rather slow printer, but the results are well worth waiting for. With highly economical running costs, this all-in-one certainly gives the Epson a run for its money. Related Links
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| Review: HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B Posted: 17 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT The HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B is the entry-level model in the PhotoSmart range, yet comes with a whole set of features that belies its budget status. This all-in-one device comes with a colour LCD display on the screen, as well as full scanner, copy and print modes. It has a rather tall and boxy design, but with a front-loading in and out tray, it's rather compact. HP has done away with physical buttons, opting for touch-sensitive buttons around the display. Below this you'll find an SD Card slot for uploading your documents and pictures, which you can then edit and trim via the screen before directly printing. This printer comes with Wi-Fi built in and, along with installing the software and setting up the printer, you'll find it takes over 45 minutes to be up and ready to print. Inserting the four cartridges is standard, but we like that the black is a high-capacity module. The rather large size of the printer allows for the A4 scanner, which is neatly concealed. We found scanning quality to be good and on a par with the Epson Stylus SX425W. When it comes to printing, you'll find this quite a loud machine. However, the results are spectacular, with colour prints being rich and vibrant. Equally, mono text is crisp and sharp with plenty of depth to the black. Cartridge replacements work out the most economical, with a four-pack costing around £22 (inc. VAT), while individual colours can be bought for just £7 (inc. VAT). The high-capacity black cartridge is more expensive, but even at £13 (inc. VAT) it represents great value for money. The HP PhotoSmart Wireless CN245B is a loud and rather slow printer, but the results are well worth waiting for. With highly economical running costs, this all-in-one certainly gives the Epson a run for its money. Related Links
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