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• Review: Asus Sabertooth 990FX
• Review: ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional
• Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 10
• Amazon Android App Store opens to UK users?
• Google Wallet opens for business
• Google search results to feature celebrity endorsements
• Facebook entertainment feed to launch at f8?
• Samsung to seek iPhone 5 sales ban
• New Motorola tablet appears on blurry cam
• 3D TV viewing improvements to be made in 2012
• Canon hunts for meteors with its 8-inch CMOS
• Exclusive: How Windows 8 is faster, lighter and more efficient
• Facebook to offer Twitter posting to all users?
• OnLive: 'All guns blazing' for UK launch
• Samsung Wave 3 UK release date narrowed down
• Google Wallet release date: 19 September?
• Updated: 30 best Mac apps for just about everything
• Buying Guide: What mouse? 10 best mice compared
• Buying Guide: Best mouse: 10 top mice compared
• LG Optimus Q2 QWERTY slider unveiled
• Netflix hints at global expansion of its streaming service
• Pirate Party wins support in Berlin elections
• Review: BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro C1
• Review: ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT
• Dell: Why we won't follow HP

Review: Asus Sabertooth 990FX Posted: 20 Sep 2011 02:00 AM PDT The top-of-the-range AMD 990FX chipset in the Asus Sabertooth 990FX motherboard is all about adding support for AMD's formidably titled and mysterious Bulldozer CPUs. Those eight-core, quad-mod Bulldozer chips should at the very least match the Intel i7 2600K pace for pace. Intel's chip is a four core, eight-threaded affair, while the Bulldozer chip will have eight actual cores. All that processing magic will appear on store shelves in Zambezi quad-mod chips before you'll be digging your winter coat out, but for existing AMD CPU customers, the Bulldozer-ready Asus Sabertooth 990FX still has features to offer right now. First, there's a landmark moment for AMD boards and multi-GPU. It's SLI and it's available across a range of the 9-series boards. Gigabyte's GA-990FXA-UD7 will actually support 4-way SLI or CrossFireX setups, while this Sabertooth can hack three-way support. This is quite a big selling point for loyal AMD gamers – these are the first motherboards to support Nvidia's multi-GPU tech, and the very fact it's included suggests Bulldozer has the grunt to match SLI'd GPUs. Sabertooth comes without that TUF thermal armour that gives its P67 iteration that odd look, but still sports the rugged design and heatsinks painted in ubiquitous military tones. There's plenty of space to fit a cooler, the side mounted SATA ports are out of your GPU's way, and it's compact enough to fit in most cases despite supporting three GPUs. TechRadar Labs AMD 9-Series CPU video encoding performance X246 v4: Frames per second: Higher is better ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX: 33 Asus M5A99X EVO: 33 Asus RoG Crosshair V: 33 Asus Sabertooth 990FX: 32 Gigabyte 970A-UD3: 33 Gigabyte H67MA-UD2H: 33 Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7: 33 MSI 970A-G45: 33 CPU rendering performance Cinebench 11.5: Index score: Higher is better ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX: 5.86 Asus M5A99X EVO: 5.86 Asus RoG Crosshair V: 5.86 Asus Sabertooth 990FX: 5.72 Gigabyte 970A-UD3: 5.78 Gigabyte H67MA-UD2H: 5.83 Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7: 5.74 MSI 970A-G45: 5.71 Verdict It's not the beast performing motherboard we've seen, but the military stylings betray the serious overclocking performance you can get out of the Sabertooth. Ultimately, the excellent build quality and Bios make this motherboard another great Asus offering.

Review: ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional Posted: 20 Sep 2011 01:30 AM PDT You can understand when Fatal1ty endorses a 1337 gaming mouse, but when a motherboard is emblazoned with the fatal one's name and face, it sends a slightly more confusing message. Is it a no-compromise AMD 990FX-based board capable of outperforming any other with raw performance and features? Or is it a stripped down racing car of a board, equipped with only the features you need? A quick glance over the ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional's spec sheet reveals it's definitely the former. The board's well endowed with gold capacitors and special mouse ports, but it's the software that impresses us most. F-Stream is a slick all-in-one program that enables you to fiddle with overclocking, energy levels and fan settings from the desktop. The UEFI Bios is similarly comprehensive, although rendered slightly unnerving by featuring Mr Wendel's face in blood red as a background. Things get slightly silly when you start looking into the I/O though. One of the USB 2.0 ports is the Fatal1ty mouse port. Once a mouse is plugged in here, you can alter the polling rate from 100 to 500MHz with the F-Stream tuning software. It's no less than we'd expect from a Fatal1ty-endorsed motherboard, but since we're not quite at pro gamer levels, it's difficult to see how much of a difference this actually makes. TechRadar Labs AMD 9-Series CPU video encoding performance X246 v4: Frames per second: Higher is better ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX: 33 Asus M5A99X EVO: 33 Asus RoG Crosshair V: 33 Asus Sabertooth 990FX: 32 Gigabyte 970A-UD3: 33 Gigabyte H67MA-UD2H: 33 Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7: 33 MSI 970A-G45: 33 CPU rendering performance Cinebench 11.5: Index score: Higher is better ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX: 5.86 Asus M5A99X EVO: 5.86 Asus RoG Crosshair V: 5.86 Asus Sabertooth 990FX: 5.72 Gigabyte 970A-UD3: 5.78 Gigabyte H67MA-UD2H: 5.83 Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7: 5.74 MSI 970A-G45: 5.71 Verdict The Jury's out on the number of pro gamers crying out for three-way CrossFireX support and six SATA 6Gbps ports. But there are certainly plenty of enthusiasts out there who don't get paid to click buttons quicker than anyone else who'll appreciate these features. Whether or not pwning is your bread and butter, this board has a lot to offer.

Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 Posted: 19 Sep 2011 09:01 PM PDT Overview and features Adobe Photoshop may be the world's most famous image-editor, but it's a complex, professional tool with a professional price tag. Photoshop Elements is the 'amateur' alternative. It's much cheaper and it's designed not just for experts, but novices and intermediate photographers too. It's designed around Adobe Photoshop, and in its Full Edit mode it has many similarities with Photoshop and the same techniques can often be used in both programs. Some of Photoshop's more advanced features have been taken away in Elements, though, and a range of novice-friendly quick fix tools and effects have been added, with Quick and Guided Edit modes designed for less experienced users. In Full Edit mode, Elements has much in common with Photoshop, but there are also Quick and Guided Edit modes. Elements is also designed more as a complete end-to-end tool for all your photographic activities. It comes with an Organizer which you can use to catalog your whole photo collection, offers simple image enhancement tools and can be used to launch a whole series of 'creations' like photo books, greetings cards and more. The Elements Organizer is an application in its own right, managing, sorting and searching your photo collection. You can get Photoshop Elements on its own, but it's also available as a bundle with Adobe Premiere Elements, Adobe's amateur-orientated video editing program. This has the same relationship to Adobe Premiere as Elements does to Photoshop. The Organizer works with both programs, which is why you'll see references to video, even if you just go for the Elements-only version. New features for Elements 10 Elements 10 comes with a list of enhancements to both the Organizer and the Elements editor itself. The Organizer gets some interesting new visual search tools which use clever image-analysis techniques. Not everyone has the time or patience to apply keywords to their photos, so this offers an alternative way of finding matching images where the software does the work, not you. There are enhancements for social networkers, too. You can now use your Facebook friends list to tag photos, and it's possible to upload videos straight to YouTube. It's never been that hard to do using YouTube's own upload tools, but you might find it useful to be able to do it from within the Organizer. Improvements to the Elements editor include 30 new Smart Brush effects and patterns which you can paint straight on to your photos. There are three new Guided Edit effects, too, for those who want to enhance their pictures and learn at the same time. New overlays for the Crop tool help you compose your photos more effectively according to the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Mean, and it's now possible to add text to a path (curved line), the outline of a shape or a selection. This won't hold much interest if you use Elements mainly for photography, but it enables you to add more interesting text effects to greetings cards, calendars and other photo creations. Performance The Organizer is an important part of the Elements package. This is not an ordinary file browsing tool like Adobe Bridge, for example, or Google's Picasa. It's an image database which brings all your photos together into a single catalog, where you can add keyword tags, organise them into albums, carry out searchs and 'stack' photos together, whether they're similar pictures you took at the same time, or edited versions of the same photo. Stacks prevent related photos from becoming separated, and they also simplify your catalog, so that you don't see whole screens full of similar-looking photos - instead, they're all stacked under a single thumbnail. Stacking photos keeps related images together, like these three shots of a derelict boat, and they can be collapsed to a single thumbnail. Organizer combines regular cataloguing tools like keywords and albums with new search technologies which use sophisticated image analysis techniques to find photos. It uses face-recognition technology, for example, to not only identify faces in photos but to distinguish one individual from another. You can use this to tag your friends and family so that they appear in the People section of the Keyword Tags panel. It also has a Visual Similarity Search tool where you select a photo you want to match and the Organizer then attempts to find similar-looking images to the one you've selected. It does this using a combination of shape and colour, and if the results don't quite match up, you can shift the balance between these two properties using a simple slider to try to improve the match. Visual Similarly searches can work well, though the percentage match ratings seem quite arbitrary and you can get some odd 'matches' thrown in. This is new in the Mac version of Elements 10 and enhanced in the Windows version. And it's joined by a new, more specific Object Search tool. Here, you choose an image containing the object you want to search for, then define it more precisely with a rectangular marquee. Organizer will then find images which it thinks contain the same object. The Visual Search tool isn't too bad. It does seem to match colours and shapes reasonably well. You might still end up with large numbers of completely dissimilar photos mixed in with the good ones, but there is clearly some intelligence at work. The new Object Search is less convincing. It helps if the object you use as the basis for the search is as clearly defined as possible, and ideally set against a neutral, contrasting background. If so, you've a fair chance of finding photos of the same object. The Organizer ranks these with the best matches at the top, indicated by a percentage value. As you scroll down through the search results, the percentages - and the relevance - drop off very quickly indeed. The new Object Search verges on the random. We searched for boats and Organizer came back with everything but the kitchen sink. Maybe it's still a very new technology that's going to improve in the future? It the meantime, though, it seems more like a smart-sounding gimmick that really doesn't work very well. The Duplicate Search is both more effective and probably more useful. It groups together images which it thinks are the same or similar so that you can stack them together. It's very good at finding matches, and while it does often throw in some bizarrely irrelevant images too, you can sidetrack those and just stack the ones which match. The new visual search tools might not be very reliable, but its existing cataloguing and search options are very good, so the Organizer is still a great tool for managing an ever-growing photo library. But what about Elements itself? How does that stack up against Photoshop, and are the new features in Elements 10 worth upgrading for? Like the Organizer, Elements is rather good. It's certainly better than either its price or its market position would suggest. As far as photography is concerned, there's not much you can do in Photoshop that you can't do in Elements. There are exceptions (see the blow-by-blow comparison below) but, essentially, Photoshop and Elements are interchangeable. Most published Photoshop techniques can also be carried out in Elements, sometimes with modest workarounds, but often without any modification at all. But Elements isn't just aimed at enthusiasts and experts. It operates not just in one mode but three. Quick mode offers a very simple set of sliders consisting of an Auto Smart Fix or separate Lighting, Color, Balance (white balance) and Sharpness adjustments. You can crop photos too, make them black and white and fix red-eye. It's all pretty basic, and there's a clear crossover here with the Photo Fix options in the Organizer, which could be confusing, but it's ideal if you're just starting out with image-editing tools. The Quick Mode's simple adjustments are ideal for those who are new to image-editing, and there are similar tools in the Organizer. The Guided Edit mode is more interesting. Here, Elements shows you how to apply a range of more advanced effects using a step-by-step approach that also introduces key Photoshop tools in an active context that shows what they do far more effectively than manuals or videos. And Elements 10 introduces a further three Guided effects, including a diffuse glow 'Orton' effect, a Picture Stack montage effect and a Depth of Field effect designed to de-focus backgrounds to make your subjects stand out. The Orton effect adds a flattering and atmospheric glow to portraits which is quite pleasing, and if you want to see how it's done, you can take a look in Full edit mode at the layers the effect has created. The new 'Orton' effect in Elements 6 works in Guided Edit mode and adds a subtle blur which can enhance portrait shots like this one. The Picture Stack effect takes a single picture and splits it up to make it look as if it's been assembled out of a series of smaller snaps. You might use it a couple of times, but it really has novelty value only. The Depth of Field effect works in two modes. You can create a crude but effective result using a radial gradient tool, or use the Quick Selection tool to define your main subject more precisely. The results aren't bad, but both the subject and your own technique have to be right. The Quick Selection tool turns up again in another guise as Elements' Smart Brush tool. This adds special effects to specific areas of your pictures, the selection and the effect both being created 'live' as you paint. And this is where another set of improvements can be seen in Elements 10. There are 30 new effects and patterns, including Snow, Pencil Sketch and Oil Pastel effects. The Smart Brush tool's been used to apply an 'Old Paper' texture to the background of this picture. Elements 10 has 30 new effects and textures. The disadvantage of this tool is the same as the Quick Selection tool - it only really works with objects that have clear, sharp edges. For softer-edged subjects and more subtle blending of image effects, you'll need to use Photoshop manually in Full edit mode and do some work blurring and editing the layer mask. The Crop tool's new compositional overlays are a minor enhancement rather than any kind of breakthrough. The Rule of Thirds is a compositional aid designed to help you produced more satisfying off-centre compositions. The Golden Mean is a more esoteric artistic concept that's trickier to grasp and apply to photographic subjects. They could be useful for students of photography learning to apply some basic theory, but composition is a little too complicated for rules like these to be effective all the time. The new Rule of Thirds overlay in Elements 10 can help you crop your photos more creatively, though the Golden Mean overlay is a little too technical. There are improvements to the photo creations, with new artwork and templates. You can create photo books, greetings cards and calendars, and share your photos via Facebook, Flickr or Adobe's own Photoshop Showcase site. You can launch these either from the Organizer or from Elements itself, which offers flexibility in one sense, but also illustrates one of the program's weaknesses - it offers a few too many ways of doing the same things, which can cause as much confusion as over-technical processes. Should you create an online album from the Organizer or Elements? Is there a difference? Should you use the Photo Fix tools in the Organizer, or the Quick mode in Elements? Why have both? Elements versus Photoshop So what does Photoshop have that Elements doesn't? Adobe Bridge: The Elements Organizer is more sophisticated, acting as an image database rather than just a file browser, but Bridge can display 'virtual' adjustments made with Adobe Camera Raw, and a wider range of metadata (copyright, keywords and much more). Vector tools: Photoshop has path and pen tools comparable to those in a dedicated drawing/illustration package. Elements can do basic shapes but it's not in the same league. Colour modes: Photoshop supports CMYK and Lab modes, which can be useful in commercial print publishing and some image enhancement tasks. Curves: Elements has an Adjust Color Curves dialog, but it's a weak imitation of the curves adjustments in Photoshop. Curves are important for precise contrast adjustments. Channels: In Photoshop you can manipulate individual colour channels and create new channels for saving selections and creating certain effects. It's something more advanced users might need. Masks: From version 9, Elements supports layer masks, a key took in many image-editing techniques. Photoshop also supports editable 'vector' masks made with the Pen or Shape tools. Actions: These are sequences of commands you can record and play back with a single mouseclick, and they can save a lot of time. You can't record Actions in Elements. Enhanced RAW tools: Both Elements and Photoshop come with Adobe Camera Raw, but the Photoshop has many more image-editing tools and options. Automated lens corrections: Photoshop Elements offers basic manual correction for lens defects, but Photoshop adds automatic lens correction based on profiles developed specifically for the lens in use. Layer styles: Layer styles can be used to add a wide range of effects. Those in Elements are limited in their scope, but Photoshop's are much more powerful. Verdict Photoshop Elements is not one program but two. The Organizer is very good image cataloguing tool, and an application in its own right. And Elements itself is far more than a dumbed-down Photoshop. Its Quick and Guided modes are designed to make image-editing easier for beginners, and there's, nothing wrong with that, but in its Full mode it can do the vast majority of things that Photoshop can. But Elements was this good already, even before this latest version. We liked Elements 10 combines a great cataloguing tool with an image-editor that's almost as powerful as Photoshop but a fraction of the price, and with its three editing modes it caters for everyone from novices to photo experts. We disliked Half-successful new visual search tools, some new image effects, enhancements to the crop and text tools and new creation templates don't make much of an upgrade. There's a bit more icing, but the cake's the same. Verdict The enhancements in Elements 10, even though they are fairly numerous, are pretty minor. You're just getting more of what it did already rather than anything genuinely new. And there does seem to be a trend towards features, like the visual search tools, which sometimes yield good results and sometimes don't. Maybe the problem is that there's nothing more for Adobe to add? If so, that's a testament to how good Photoshop Elements has become, but also explains why Elements 10 leaves a vague feeling of disappointment.

Amazon Android App Store opens to UK users? Posted: 19 Sep 2011 08:09 PM PDT The Amazon Android App Store could soon be officially available in the UK, with many British-based users already claiming they can download apps from the site. The alternative to the Android Market has been a US-only venture, since its launch in March this year. Now, for the first time, Amazon users with accounts based in the UK, as well as the Netherlands, India and Australia say they have obtained applications from the service. Mystery Amazon has yet to make an official announcement, there has been no update to the Amazon UK site and users who have been successful in downloading apps have been going through Amazon.com. The official status remains somewhat of a mystery. We tried logging into Amazon.com with our UK-based account, but geographical restrictions were still in place when we tried to download apps. It's possible that Amazon is slowly making the service more widely available internationally, with more and more users being granted access as time goes on. Market contender The Amazon App Store hasn't enjoyed a somewhat quiet first fix months, despite offering free marquee apps on a daily basis. It also offers Android users the chance to test drive apps on their PC before deciding whether they'd like to download them to their handset. A widespread international launch would certainly assist Amazon's aim to gain traction and cut in on the Android Market's dominance. We've contacted Amazon for an official comment on this story, so stay tuned to TechRadar for the latest on the Amazon Android App Store's UK launch.

Google Wallet opens for business Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:10 PM PDT Google's Near Field Communications payment solution Google Wallet has officially launched to the public. The phone-based digital wallet NFC technology has been extensively tested and is now ready for a more mainstream trial. Google is only making the Google Wallet app available to Nexus S 4G customers on the Sprint network in the US, so it's still a pretty small sample that are able to use the service. The app stores your credit card details then allows you to pay for goods or cash-in coupons at stores which are geared-up with NFC reader devices, just by flashing your phone at the sensor. YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsaJMhcLm_A International hints Initially the service will be marketed in the US only for users of the CitiBank Mastercard through and through Google Prepaid cards which can be topped-up using any credit cards. However, the Guardian is reporting that the pre-paid cards can be used at internationally at Mastercard PayPass reader-equipped stores in the UK like Boots, Burger King and Tesco. At the time of writing, it hasn't yet been confirmed exactly what that means for UK Android owners as the app is only currently advertised for the 4G Sprint version of the Nexus S, not the UK device. As Mastercard's PayPass service is available in the UK, a launch on these shores is possible in the near future, but there's no official information on the Google Wallet website. NFC 'tap and pay' tech and the Google Wallet service will be coming to more Android phones as the roll-out continues. Maybe the UK will get some love with the next Nexus handset?

Google search results to feature celebrity endorsements Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:21 PM PDT Celebrity endorsements are set to appear in Google Search results as part of a new advertising trial. The plan is for notable celebs - well, so far it's just the Kardashians - will use their Google+ profiles to give a +1 to the sites of products they endorse. So, for example, if you search for Thomas Cook you could get a message telling you that "Jamie Redknapp endorses this product" if the injury-ravaged Sky Sports hunk let his allegiance be known. Google has been attempting to woo celebrities to get on-board with Google+ since its inception, after seeing how important they've been to the success of Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. In its early stages Google admits the endorsement trial is still in its early stages with only reality TV staples the Kardashian sisters are on board so far, but the company is still preparing for a US and UK roll-out. "Some advertisers use celebrity endorsement in their ads. This test extends the option of celebrity endorsement to online campaigns," a Google spokesman said. "We're always testing new ways to make advertising more compelling to our users and advertisers." It is thought that the plan will help Google clamp down on websites selling fake and illegitimate merchandise.

Facebook entertainment feed to launch at f8? Posted: 19 Sep 2011 12:38 PM PDT Facebook is set to launch a new entertainment offensive at the f8 conference, which gets underway later this week. The company is reportedly going to announce a new news feed which is dedicated to what members are reading, listening to and watching through the site. Central to the new ticker will be a whole batch of new media applications that will enable members to view entertainment content and share it with friends, without leaving Facebook.com The long-rumoured Spotify streaming link-up is set to be rubber stamped, while apps that allow movies and TV to be streamed and newspapers to be read are also expected to be announced. Watch, read and listen The Guardian is reporting that all of the above will form part of a "watch, read and listen" theme when Mark Zuckerberg addresses the audience at the f8 conference which begins 22 September. The report also asserts that changes to the "Like" button are also likely to be revealed at f8. Instead of simply "Like", developers will be able to add "Want," "Desire" or "Need"

Samsung to seek iPhone 5 sales ban Posted: 19 Sep 2011 11:09 AM PDT The moment the next generation Apple iPhone 5 lands in Korea, Samsung will attempt to have it banned, a senior company executive is alleged to have said. In the latest round of a tit-for-tat battle that is now set to be waged in Samsung's home country, the Korea Times is reporting that Samsung will seek an injunction to protect its 'wireless patents.' The Samsung executive, who wished not to be named, is claimed to have said: "Just after the arrival of the iPhone 5 here, Samsung plans to take Apple to court here for its violation of Samsung's wireless technology related patents." "For as long as Apple does not drop mobile telecommunications functions, it would be impossible for it to sell its i-branded products without using our patents. "We will stick to a strong stance against Apple during the lingering legal fights.'' 23 ongoing cases Any filing of court proceedings would add to the 23 patent infringement cases currently underway between the two companies. Apple has succeeded in gaining temporary injunctions against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in a number of countries, including Germany and Australia. It alleges that the Galaxy Tab and smartphones like the Galaxy S2 have "blatantly copied" the iPad and the iPhone. Samsung has issued a number of counter suits, but an attempt to get the iPhone 5 banned would certainly raise the stakes somewhat. Apple, of course, is yet to even reveal its new iPhone. An announcement is expected in the coming weeks.

New Motorola tablet appears on blurry cam Posted: 19 Sep 2011 09:55 AM PDT A solitary picture of what's purportedly a new tablet from Motorola has appeared online, with the latest gadget looking a lot slimmer than its predecessor, the Motorola Xoom. The picture, posted by This Is My Next, is disappointingly blurry but if you squint, slant your head to 45 degrees and say "there's no place like home" you can see what seems to be an ultra-slim 7-inch tablet. The tablet appears to have a 16:9 screen and This Is My Next reckons there are ports visible that show that it uses micro USB and has micro HDMI functionality. Personally, we think these could well be specs of dust picked up by the inept photographer behind the shot. Caught by the fuzz TIMN also reckons the black blob above the fuzzy tablet could well be the rumoured Droid HD. Either they are privy to some inside information or they have much better eyes than us. Motorola has hinted that a 7-inch tablet is on the way and it is a popular size for the format, given Apple is keeping a close eye on every tablet released that's the same size as the iPad. So, hopefully, we will find out more about this mini Motorola Xoom in the near future.

3D TV viewing improvements to be made in 2012 Posted: 19 Sep 2011 09:21 AM PDT The DVB (Digital Video Broadcast) Group has revealed that it is looking to enhance the quality of 3D TV in the UK and it hopes it will be able to put a number of improvements in place in 2012. According to Wotsat, the DVB Group is looking to add Depth Range Control and is investigating how to upgrade to Full HD detail from today's half-HD 3D. These features are set to appear in the Phase Two 3D TV standard which will arrive in the UK next year. Poke your eyes out Speaking at IBC about the improvements set to be made, David Wood, chairman of the DVB commercial module said: "Young people like more depth in the IR pictures than old people do. They like 'poke your eyes out', but older consumers like flatter images." There are two ways, according to Wood, that these improvements can be made. The first will be at expense to consumers, as it would mean using the MCV format used in Blu-rays, which would mean the purchase of compatible TVs and set-top boxes. The other way is to keep the half-HD 3D quality that's being piped through at the moment but implement extra picture detail with the use of a second signal.

Canon hunts for meteors with its 8-inch CMOS Posted: 19 Sep 2011 08:12 AM PDT Canon has announced that its biggest sensor yet, the ultra-large-scale, ultra-high-sensitivity CMOS sensor, has found itself a home. Developed last year, the CMOS is a massive 8x8 inches in diameter, which is the world's largest surface area for a CMOS sensor. Don't expect it to come to a household camera any time soon, though – the sensor is only making its way into massive telescopes at the moment, with the first installed in the Schmidt telescope at the University of Tokyo's Kiso Observatory, Institute of Astronomy, School of Science. Stroke of lux To give some idea of how much detail the sensor can take in, the CMOS can record video in dark conditions with as little as 0.3 lux of illumination. Given that 6 lux is a decent measure of how dark twilight is (the time of day, not the emo vampire movie), it's fair to say the sensor is pretty powerful. When the Schmidt telescope was tested it managed to pick up more meteors in one day than was identified in the whole of last year. This is because the sensor, according to Canon, can record approximately at "60 frames per second, resulting in the successful video recording of faint meteors with an equivalent apparent magnitude of 10 across a wide 3.3° x 3.3° field of view." More information about the image tests are set to some out this week from the Kagoshima University in Kyushu, Japan.

Exclusive: How Windows 8 is faster, lighter and more efficient Posted: 19 Sep 2011 07:42 AM PDT Windows 8: faster and lighter Never mind Windows 8's Metro interface and the inevitable iPad comparisons. Just as significant for the future of Windows is the question of what's under the hood. Those Metro apps – whether they're HTML5 or Silverlight – are running on a whole new system called WinRT, but the whole of Windows has been significantly improved to boot faster, use less memory, be more secure and handle networks better. We asked the director of Windows program management, Gabriel Aul, to explain how Windows 8 manages to deliver that. For instance, how come the preview version of Windows 8 uses a little over half the memory that the preview version of Windows 7 took up (going from 540MB to 281MB on a 1GB netbook, for example)? "When you have a lot of apps open," Aul told us,"you will have different apps will have [pieces of] memory that are identical but they each have their own copy; these things could be a common runtime or a shared library. Throughout memory you'll have lots of little 4K pages that are really identical but we're maintaining separate copies. We have a new feature called page combining; Windows can look through memory to find copies and basically condense them down to one shared copy. If an app writes to its copy of memory it splits apart and gets its own private copy again but the cumulative effect can actually be quite significant." LESS MEMORY: Storing just one copy of a piece of code in memory not matter how many apps are using it helps cut down the load Windows 8 Active Standby "We said we would hold the system requirements and we did," Aulboasts. "We can do all this new stuff while still being even leaner than Windows 7. it's not just memory, we also optimised for CPU usage including coalescing system timers and adding this new dynamic sleep mechanism that allows CPUs to stay in a lower power state for much longer." Windows 8 boots in just a few seconds, "but one of the things we're getting used to with phones is not having to boot". The new state - which Aul calls Active Standby, although we've also heard the term Connected Standby - will give Windows 8 will have much longer battery life on low-power PCs running ARM and the next generation of Intel and AMD CPUs. "When we press the power button Windows 8 just turns on at once and it's fully active - it's even been refreshed with your latest email." That's because when the system is 'off' the Wi-Fi is still on, but only accepting traffic from servers you get email, messages and VoIP calls from. "If you look at the power chart, the system is just waking up for a second and doing a quick burst of background activity and then going quiet again. This is all controlled by the operating system so it's not like an app can arbitrarily wake the machine up, so the system can stay in low power mode for a very long time." If you leave a PC on standby when you get home from work and turn it back on in the morning – call it 16 hours – that should use up no more than 5% of the battery. Windows 8 Secure boot Booting Windows 8 is more secure as well as faster, Aul claims. On PCs with newer UEFI BIOSes, the boot processes are protected by a certificate stored in UEFI, and anti-virus se can kick in while the PC is booting. "We call it 'early load antimalware'. After the secure boot process finishes validating all the components, we allow antimalware to load very early on and you have full protection from your antimalware throughout the rest of the boot process." And to prove that doesn't slow things down or use more power, he told us all the demonstrations of booting Windows 8 and all the power graphs have been on systems with early load antimalware running. Windows 8 network connections Windows 8 will spot the best network connection you have access to and use that, but it's also smart about how expensive that can be. "If I have an Ethernet connection and a Wi-Fi connection and a mobile broadband connection, we switch behind the scenes. But mobile broadband is a special connection because it's often metred with a data plan, so we need to be extra smart around how we're utilising that because switching so seamless. In windows itself, in all places we use networking, we added the ability to understand if on metred network or not. So In Windows Update for example, we automatically pause any background downloads, whether you're set to Automatic Updates or not - and even if you go in and say I want to go download something you get a little warning that you're on a metered network." You can even go into task manager and look at the history for apps you've been using and see which of them have been using your 3G connection if you can't work out why you've used all your bandwidth. Now that's smart. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Facebook to offer Twitter posting to all users? Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:28 AM PDT Facebook is looking to roll out its Twitter-linking functionality to all of its users, according to a document sent out to developers and seen by the BBC. The new functionality will allow any user to use Facebook to post information in their news feed that will appear automatically in their Twitter feed as well. This is something that can already be done on Facebook, but only with fan pages – although there are a number of third-party apps out there that also allow you to link up Facebook posts with Twitter. Life's tweet for Facebook The news of this proposed link-up comes just a week after Facebook announced some very Twitter-like functionality. The arrival of the Facebook Subscribe button means you can now subscribe to a Facebook profile that you are not friends with – just like Twitter's social-networking model – and this will give you access to their news feed. Facebook's inaugural F8 developers' conference is set to take place 22 September, where the company is set to reveal a number of new features for the site. It is here that we could see Zuckerberg announce its new deal with Twitter. If this is the case, it will re-ignite privacy issues surrounding the social network; although for the Twitter link-up to work it is thought you will need to set your profile to Public.

OnLive: 'All guns blazing' for UK launch Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:16 AM PDT OnLive's John Spinale has insisted that the UK will benefit from lessons learned from the streaming gaming service's year of operation in the US. OnLive's launch in the UK on Thursday will attract widespread interest, with gamers keen to see if a streaming service can truly sidestep the obvious latency issues in order to provide top-level gaming from a set-top box. The platform's VP of games and medis has told TechRadar's fellow Future stablemate CVG that mistakes made in the US mean that the UK's version will arrive with 'all guns blazing' "We haven't really talked about OnLive much in the UK yet so I don't think we deserve any credit, but soon hopefully we'll get some good reactions," he said. "We started off in the US with a soft launch. We did some PR and said 'hey, this is neat and revolutionary technology', but we didn't really market or push it hard because we were still developing what it was." Fundamental "We limped out with the fundamental architecture... but we didn't have a fully robust feature set that gets everybody excited," he added. "Now we have a really robust platform so we have the ability to come out guns blazing in the UK and show everybody the opportunity is huge." BT has sealed a deal with OnLive to bundle the gaming service in with its broadband, although people can sign up with OnLive direct if they are on other ISPs.

Samsung Wave 3 UK release date narrowed down Posted: 19 Sep 2011 05:30 AM PDT Samsung has apparently firmed up a Samsung Wave 3 UK release date – with an executive from the company apparently telling a Bada development conference that the phone would make an appearance in October. The Korean giant's smartphones have become some of the most eagerly anticipated handsets around, and the Wave 3 will certainly attract widespread interest. Blog SammyHub.com suggests that the beans were spilled at a conference in India for developers, although more details than a launch window of next month were not forthcoming. Screen beauty TechRadar spent a little time with the Samsung Wave 3 at IFA in Berlin a few weeks ago, and found the handset worthy of praise for it design, despite some issues with the Bada operating system. brightcove : 1151465153001 The Samsung Wave 3 boasts a 1.4Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512MB of memory and 3GB of storage (expandable via a microSD slot). The handset is a shade less than 1cm thick but it is the AMOLED 4 inch screen that proves the phone's real headliner.

Google Wallet release date: 19 September? Posted: 19 Sep 2011 05:02 AM PDT Google Wallet may have been announced back in May but we have yet to see the service come into effect. This could be about to change, however, with a leaked memo (posted by TechCrunch) suggesting that it will launch this week at the NFC World Congress. Google Wallet is a tie-up with MasterCard that allows users to top up their handsets with pre-pay (PayPass) credits and then pay for goods with a swipe of their phone. Annoyingly, like a lot of Google's services, it is thought that Google Wallet will be US only when it launches and it is an app that will only be available to those who have a Google Nexus S that's running Android 2.3.4. NFC, easy as 123? The NFC World Congress takes place 19 September and is a summit where 2,500 NFC luminaries are getting together to talk near field communication. One of the keynote speakers is John Lambert from MasterCard Europe and there are also speakers from Visa, Samsung and Orange at the event. Given that Google is close to launching its latest handset, Google Prime, it makes sense that Google wants its Wallet service out in the wild. It will be interesting to see, though, how long it keeps the app within its own smartphone family. Eric Schmidt did mention back in May that Google was hoping to port the technology over to other manufacturers, even ones that don't use Android.

Updated: 30 best Mac apps for just about everything Posted: 19 Sep 2011 04:47 AM PDT 30 best Mac apps for just about everything: 1-15 The selection of great free or inexpensive Mac programs on offer has never been better. You can now get amazing software designed by small or independent developers to cover practically anything you could ever want to do on your Mac. With the rise of the App Store, it's easier than ever to pick up software that you know is safe to use, and is recommended by other Mac users. You can find everything from video compression apps to music makers, invoice creators, photo editors, presentation tools and much more. Not all of the apps here are from the App Store, but all are guaranteed to be awesome and essential in the day-to-day running of your Mac. Here's our list of 30 Mac apps you shouldn't be without – ever: 1. AirDisplay - £6.99 I'm a firm believer that multiple medium-sized monitors make you more productive than one big one – we humans seem to work well with compartmentalised tasks – and if you have an iPad or even iPhone, you can add AirDisplay to turn it into an extra screen for your Mac. It works over Wi-Fi, and I've found myself using it often at home when I just want a separate space to look at grabs, say, while I'm writing. It's not a permanent solution, but it's a handy thing to have. That iPads/iPhones are battery-powered and wire-free is a bonus. 2. Anime Studio Debut - £20.99 With even mid-range Macs now carrying plenty of processing power, it's possible to do even more with them for a thoroughly reasonable price. Take Anime Studio Debut – it's a way to creating animations really quickly and easily, but without sacrificing more advanced features. Its Character Wizard makes it easy to create characters, and using its skeletal animating makes it simple to get things going. There's a Beginner's mode for those just starting out, and you can build into using the more complex tools. 3. ArtRage studio - £29 For all but the most dedicated – or especially solvent – graphic artists, the natural media application Corel Painter is an expensive luxury when the ArtRage range exists. Its watercolour is a bit disappointing, but the acrylic paints look good, and there's enough flexibility here to work with. I love that the interface can easily be shoved to the perimeter so that I can concentrate on my drawing or painting – my background's in design – and the way I can have source images pinned to the screen. The tracing feature is a really great way to get a head start on a piece if you're in a hurry. 4. Bento - £20.99 Bento is a flexible personal database app, enabling you to keep track of projects and tasks, plan events, create a more powerful contacts directory, and much more besides. It comes with plenty of templates to get you started, and you can share your databases across your local network with any other Macs you have. Something like a database app can seem like overkill, but when its made this easy to use, you'll find there's plenty you can do with – what you might have kept as text notes or a spreadsheet looks much better and is easier to search through if you take the time to use Bento. 5. BetterTouchTool - £FREE With OS X Lion now on the loose, Multi-Touch is the big thing on Macs, and this handy utility let you make the most of it. It enables you to assign just about any Multi-Touch gesture supported by your Magic Mouse or Trackpad to a set preset action, or to a key combination of your choosing. Want to be able to create a new folder in Finder with a pinch? You can! Want to split clips in iMovie with a swipe? As long as you know the keyboard shortcut, you can do just about anything. Use it wisely and you'll by flying along using only your Trackpad! 6. BOINC - £FREE In the old days, if scientists wanted to crunch a bunch of numbers, they'd have to build or rent space on a supercomputer, one single, monolithic, terrifyingly expensive cluster of processors. The advent of the internet, however, has given rise to a new kind of computing: distributed computing. The basic idea may be simple – an organisation parcels up little bundles of work, and sends them out to millions of computers all over the world to do then report back on – but the results can be extraordinary. Though there are a few different distributed computing frameworks around, BOINC is particularly worthwhile as it enables lots of different research institutes to run their projects on a common system; install BOINC, and you can choose to participate in projects looking for cures for cancer and AIDS, looking for models that will help predict climate change, or even just looking for extraterrestrial life with the venerable SETI@home project. Install BOINC, sign up for one or more projects, and decide how you want it to run. You could run it constantly in the background or just as a screensaver. Either way, this app offers a great way to put your Mac's spare processor cycles to good use. 7. Byword - £6.99 This is an app I use all the time for writing. It's a great exercise in simplicity and a focus on a few features making an appindispensable. Byword is designed for distraction-free writing, and does it with your choice of fonts, so there's as little to get in your way as possible. It's being updated all the time, and new features added include a typewriter scrolling mode (for keeping the line you're working on in the centre of the screen) and smart substitution of some punctuation. On top of that, it's got full OS X Lion support, including a fullscreen mode, autosaving, Version compatibility and Resume. 8. Carbonite - £36/year I'm paranoid about backup – as everyone ought to be! – so as well as using Time Machine, SugarSync and SuperDuper!, all for different reasons, I also bought a subscription to Carbonite as it enables me to back up everything on my MacBook Pro to a secure, offsite, properly managed server system. Even if my flat was razed to the ground, my data – irreplaceable photos, never mind work stuff – is safe. 9. DaisyDisk- £6.99 This is a beautifully designed way to view the space taken up on your hard drive, and gives you a way to very simply analyse what's there. Got some suspiciously big folders lying around? DaisyDisk will highlight them clearly, so you can delete them, if you want. Notebook users in particular will find this hugely useful when disk space gets a bit tight. 10. Delivery Status - £FREE This lovingly crafted little widget for Mac OS X's Dashboard layer tracks deliveries though all the big courier companies, including City Link, FedEx, Parcelforce, the Royal Mail, TNT, UPS and USPS. Delivery Status also ties directly into some stores' order and delivery systems, most notably Amazon and, of course, Apple. Entering delivery details is easy, and the fact that it's a Dashboard widget means you only have to tap a single key to take a quick glance at how your delivery is coming along. And with Dashboard becoming more prominent in OS X Lion, it's more useful now than ever. Of course it's only as good as the data the courier provides, but it's undeniably more convenient, especially if you're tracking multiple deliveries. I love, too, that it syncs with a service in the cloud that can also push delivery notifications to a £2.99 iPhone/iPad app. 11. djay - £34.99 Wannabe DJs with a huge selection of music to mix in their iTunes libraries won't be able to keep their hands off the djay app for Mac. It's recently been improved with OS X Lion features such as a fullscreen mode and better Multi-Touch control, but it's always been an excellent choice. Mix songs, beat match, fade, apply effects and generally rock whatever room you happen to be in at the time. It's a brilliantly visual app too, and uses your iTunes artwork on the 'decks' to give your actions more personality. 12. EyeTV - From £45 with tuner The current incarnation of this app is nicely evolved, but it's functionally very similar to how it's always been – EyeTV is still the nicest way to watch, record and edit TV on your Mac. I use it on my Mac mini media centre all the time; I particularly like setting up a Smart Guide to list all upcoming films that I can just scroll through and record, later trimming and exporting to iTunes. It has broadened my taste in movies, and boosted my iTunes collection. 13. Evernote - £FREE I make a lot of notes. Ideas for features, apps to check out, things I might want to do at the weekend – I want to jot it all down somewhere before I forget. The brilliance of Evernote is that it syncs it all to the cloud, so whatever I make a note of on my iPhone or iPad is there on my Mac when I get to it. I can arrange things how I want, tag them for future searches, share notebooks with others, and even search text that's in images. It's had an interface overhaul for OS X Lion, with a new fullscreen mode, so new Mac users should pick it up straight away. 14. HandBrake - £FREE Handbrake is basically a transcoder; it converts digital video files into a different format. Sounds dull, but one of its best uses is to convert almost any movie into a file that can play on an iPod, iPhone or iPad. It comes with a slew of different presets, but it's hugely configurable as well, so that with sufficient experimentation, you can balance quality and compression to suit you. It hooks up with VLC for codec help and some other naughtiness that lets it convert commercial DVDs. 15. iPlayer Desktop -£FREE Yes, it's an AIR app, and yes, its use of Flash for the video player means iPlayer Desktop is really demanding on your CPU, but the ability to download BBC programmes for later watching is terrific. 30 best Mac apps for just about everything: 16-30 16. iStat Menus -$16 As you'd expect, I'm forever working on fresh Macs, or setting up new systems. Literally, the first thing I do – before I even open Software Update to patch the system – is go to bjango.com and download iStat Menus. Without it installed on a Mac, I feel blind; is that site loading slowly because the server is having problems, or is it my internet connection? Why are my MacBook Pro's fans suddenly spinning up; what app's gobbling up CPU cycles? Hey, that Time Machine backup seems to have stalled; is there actually any data flowing on the FireWire 800 bus? Do I have enough space on my internal SSD to download that HD programme on iPlayer? iStat Menus puts a series of highly configurable status icons in my Mac's menubar that I glance frequently to check what my Mac's up to; if I want more detail, I can click on the various icons to drill down into richer info. And even though the Mac can display the date beside the clock in the menubar, I much prefer the smart black icon that iStat Menus can use. 17. iStudio Publisher-£12.99 Apple's Pages has always been good for laying out pages with images quickly and easily, but it's not very powerful for more advanced page design. Home publishers won't exactly want to pay what Adobe demands for its InDesign software, so enter iStudio Publisher. It's not far from being a pro-level DTP program, and it costs less than a good pub dinner. It's got a simple interface that won't scare of beginners, but advanced users will find plenty of features to get their teeth into. It even exports to ePub, so is great for ebook publishing. 18. Kindle - £FREE Speaking of ebooks, here's Amazon's Kindle. Though your Mac may not be the ideal place to do some long-form reading, there are plenty of books on the Kindle service that you might want to reference while working, or you might just want to pick up on what you were reading while you're at your desk for ten minutes. Amazon's servers will sync your place in your ebooks across all your devices, from the Kindle app on your iPad to your actual Kindle device, to the Mac app. You'll never forget where you are, and it's easy to search books and save notes. It could be ideal for students, especially. 19. LogMeIn - From £FREE There are lots of VNC apps around now – more so than ever before, mainly thanks to the iPad and the great ideal of accessing your desktop Mac from anywhere. Many of them are excellent, but can be unreliable. LogMeIn works every time, so you'll find yourself worrying about it. 20. Plex - £FREE Those who like to use a Mac as a media centre, like me, will have been disappointed with the sudden demise of Front Row in OS X Lion. The silver lining is that it leaves an opportunity for other developers to fill the gap, and Plex is a superb choice. It's got wide codec support, an appealing interface, and works across many different platforms, including iPad and iPhone. 21. Reeder - £6.99 This tool for reading the feeds from your Google Reeder account is simply the best way to browse news on your Mac. I use it all the time to keep on top of what's going on, simply because it presents everything in such an easy-to-read way. It makes articles eminently readable, has a fullscreen mode for OS X Lion (so you can read without distraction), and integrates with Evernote, Instapaper and ReadItLater. 22. Scrivener -£31.99 Scrivener is a word processor, but one focussed on the task of writing complex, structured documents such as novels or, in my case, features and group tests for MacFormat. (It also has a range of presets for writing screenplays, and so is a legitimate competitor to the heavyweight Final Draft app.) Rather than creating one hugely long, linear document in Byword or (shudder) Word, Scrivener lets me create a raft of discrete, re-orderable documents that I can focus on one at a time. Each document can have a word or character count associated with it, as well as a notes field that is invaluable when writing group tests. The Research folder can hold webarchive files from Safari – a terrific way for me to refer to products' spec sheets or Wikipedia references, for example – as well as PDFs. And because you can split the writing view horizontally or vertically, it's easy to write while keeping an eye on your notes and reference. Documents can be exported in a range of formats, and Scrivener documents themselves are just a special kind of folder; right-click on one to Show Package Contents and you'll see that they just consist of a series of nested RTFs. Your writing isn't locked away in a dangerously proprietary format. The developer himself is actually a writer who, when he realised there was no software that did what he actually wanted it to, took time out, taught himself how to code, and created Scrivener. It shines through; this really is a writer's tool, and I'm delighted not only by Scrivener's fantastic abilities, but also by the fact that whenever I discover a new ability, it works in exactly the way that I'd want it to. It's also now got support for OS X Lion, including a new fullscreen mode. 23. Spotify - From £FREE We're banned from usingSpotifyat work, and you can understand why; if hundreds of people were using this free music streaming service, our bandwidth would plummet! At home, though, it's a fantastic way of checking out bands; though the free service is now very limited. The paid-for premium service offers unlimited listening to an absolutely huge range of artists and albums, however. And the ability to collaborate on playlists is great for parties (or annoying friends!). 24. SugarSync- From £FREE I bought a subscription to SugarSync because it acts not just as an offsite backup – copying essential work files to its servers – but because it syncs files across multiple computers, even those running Mac OS X 10.5 or Windows XP and later. Unlike Dropbox, which currently mandates that you put the files you want to sync into a specific folder, SugarSync just asks you what folders from your existing folder hierarchy you want to sync. I especially love that if I have to put my MacBook Pro in for repair, I can just use another of my computers; all the files will be there, and any changes I make will be synced back when I open up the laptop again. 25. SuperDuper!- £19.85 If the SSD in my MacBook Pro failed, I have to give all the other backup systems I use time before I could actually start working again. With Time Machine, I'd have to reinstall and start to copy everything back to a new disk, and Carbonite and SugarSync would take an age to download. SuperDuper!, though, creates a bootable backup. I just have to restart and hold down Alt, pick the SuperDuper backup volume, and I'm working again. The paid version does incremental backups, so the clone is updated at 16:45 every work day. 26. Things - £34.99 Thirty-five quid? For a to-do manager? Yeah, I know, it seems like – and, frankly, is – a lot, but, although I'm late to the party, I'm a total Things convert. The beauty of the system, for me, is that once I've taken a little time to set up areas of responsibility, projects, tags and deadlines, I can throw stuff I need to do into the app, and each day check it to see what I need to do. It syncs with the iPhone and iPad – though each edition is a separate app – over Wi-Fi, and though the system isn't perfect, it's a great de-stresser; I don't have to worry about remembering stuff any more. 27. Transmission- £FREE There are lots of clients for the Mac that hook into the world of BitTorrent, but Transmission is the one I use; it's clean, simple-yet-configurable, and Mac-like. BitTorrent is a system for downloading files that are held not on a central server, but on the hard disks of many thousands of ordinary users like you and me all over the world. Though it has a murky reputation, BitTorrent can be used for good; Linux distros, for example, many of which work on Intel or even PowerPC Mac hardware, are often distributed using it. I like the web interface, too, which lets me add torrents to my Mac mini at home from my iPhone when I'm away. 28. Transmit - £23.99 It will come as no surprise to learn that I'm forever shuttling huge files – podcast recordings, high-resolution graphics, InDesign files and more – around the world. And I also, because of the way our networks are set up at Future, use FTP to transfer stuff to and from our corporate servers from the personal MacBook Pro on which I do all my work. Transmit is a lovely client for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and other standards, and the new version even lets you mount remote servers as disks in your Finder sidebar, making it easy to open files live from remote servers. Its developers are gratifyingly passionate about the Mac, too; the attention to detail is staggering. 30. VMware Fusion -£53.95 I always have to keep the occasional Windows machine around to check stuff, and Fusion is my favourite way to do it. I keep virtual machines for every major version of Windows since 3.1 as virtual machines on a big external disk. Ironically, perhaps, our sister PC magazines often come to me for grabs.

Buying Guide: What mouse? 10 best mice compared Posted: 19 Sep 2011 04:00 AM PDT What mouse? Find the best mouse for you In the fifty-odd years since its invention we've seen the humble mouse improve considerably, with the addition of weight systems, laser sensors and masses of buttons and flashing lights. The best mice combine all these elements in sleek, ergonomic shells or have a unique selling point that justifies their consideration. Choosing which is the best mouse for you comes down to a number of factors, and all the mice in our round-up come with various features, from rechargeable wireless functionality to Wii-like gesture controls. Read on to find out what mouse will suit your click-happy digits. 1. Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX - £44 Logitech's Anywhere mouse is aimed at laptop and netbook users who want a little more comfort and control over their machines. It's tiny, fast, smooth and responsive, and its Darkfield technology means it can be used on any surface. Read our Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX review 2. CM Storm Sentinel Z3RO-G - £46 128kb might not sound like a lot of memory, but on Cooler Master's mouse it plays host to your profiles, as well as a tiny low-res bitmap file you can stick on the OLED screen. On top of that it's a smooth mouse, and the provided software will please those who love to tweak. Read our CM Storm Sentinel Z3RO-G review 3. Logitech G700 Wireless Gaming Mouse - £62 Logitech's latest venture into gaming mice packs a lot of tech into its unassuming housing, such as a gaming grade 5,700DPI sensor, polytetrafluoroethylene feet and wireless connectivity. In fact, the only niggle we had with the mouse was with its battery indicator. Other than that, it's a fantastic deal, and a must-have for furious fraggers. Read our Logitech G700 Wireless Gaming Mouse review 4. Genius Wireless Pen Mouse - £19 Genius' pen-shaped mouse didn't exactly wow us, and it's certainly not going to usurp Wacom-style tablets any time soon. But it's still a fully-featured rodent in a familiar form factor, and it's ideally suited to multi-monitor displays where the cursor can be swiped from one end to the other quickly. Read our Genius Wireless Pen Mouse review 5. Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 5 - £50 Mad Catz's exoskeletal stylings certainly make its mice stand out, but they're as functional as they are funky. Infinitesimal adjustments mean they suit any gaming hand, and they're smooth and responsive, too. At £50, the R.A.T. 5 is the cheapest in the range, but it's still a cracking little rodent. Read our Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 5 review 6. Roccat Kone [+] - £58 That [+] in Roccat Kone [+] refers to the EasyShift [+] button, which acts like the shift key on a keyboard, and allows access to secondary functions such as volume control and muting. It's easy to program, and a 6,000dpi maximum resolution and surface calibration make it a pleasure to use. Our biggest bugbear is its price, which isn't much less than Mad Catz's R.A.T. 7. Read our Roccat Kone [+] review 7. Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 9 - £95 Mad Catz' Cyborg R.A.T. 9 is the most expensive mouse in our round up, and it packs all the adjustments and features of the R.A.T. 7, as well as wireless connectivity. It's incredibly responsive, and the obligatory precision button makes those crucial headshots nice and easy. It is expensive, but we reckon the sheer number of features justify the price tag. Read our Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 9 review 8. Gyration Air Mouse Elite - £91 Gyration's Air Mice function like normal rodents on desktops, and they can also be lifted up and used in mid-air, Wii-mote style. They're designed primarily for presentations and media centre PCs, but you can also just about use them for gaming. The Air Mouse Elite is the best we've seen so far, but we'd still recommend that you try one before buying. Read our Gyration Air Mouse Elite review 9. Kensington Orbit Trackball - £15 A mouse round-up wouldn't be complete without a trackball device, which will take up far less room than a conventional mouse and mousemat combo. At under £20 Kensington's Orbit is rather cheap, and does the job adequately - we even managed a five kill streak in Modern Warfare 2 with it. Read our Kensington Orbit Trackball review 10. Microsoft Sidewinder X8 - £47 Microsoft's original Sidewinder divided audiences, but there's no denying that it's well-made and utterly functional. The X8 adds wireless capabilities, but a unique magnetic system means it can be plugged in to charge as well. At the time of our review we complained that it was a tad too expensive, but the price has dropped considerably since. Read our Microsoft Sidewinder X8 review -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buying Guide: Best mouse: 10 top mice compared Posted: 19 Sep 2011 04:00 AM PDT Best mouse: mice 1-5 In the fifty-odd years since its invention we've seen the humble mouse improve considerably, with the addition of weight systems, laser sensors and masses of buttons and flashing lights. The best mice combine all these elements in sleek, ergonomic shells. Choosing which is the best mouse for you comes down to a number of factors, and all the mice in our round-up come with unique selling points, from rechargeable wireless functionality to Wii-like gesture controls. Read on to find out what mouse will suit your click-happy digits. 1. CM Storm Sentinel Z3RO-G - £46 128kb might not sound like a lot of memory, but on Cooler Master's mouse it plays host to your profiles, as well as a tiny low-res bitmap file you can stick on the OLED screen. On top of that it's a smooth mouse, and the provided software will please those who love to tweak. Read our CM Storm Sentinel Z3RO-G review 2. Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX - £44 Logitech's Anywhere mouse is aimed at laptop and netbook users who want a little more comfort and control over their machines. It's tiny, fast, smooth and responsive, and its Darkfield technology means it can be used on any surface. We wouldn't recommend it for long periods of usage, but it's fine for anyone who's often on the road. Read our Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX review 3. Logitech G700 Wireless Gaming Mouse - £62 Logitech's latest venture into gaming mice packs a lot of tech into its unassuming housing, such as a gaming grade 5,700DPI sensor, polytetrafluoroethylene feet and wireless connectivity. In fact, the only niggle we had with the mouse was with its battery indicator. Other than that, it's a fantastic deal, and a must-have for furious fraggers. Read our Logitech G700 Wireless Gaming Mouse review 4. Genius Wireless Pen Mouse - £19 Genius' pen-shaped mouse didn't exactly wow us, and it's certainly not going to usurp Wacom-style tablets any time soon. But it's still a fully-featured rodent in a familiar form factor, and it's ideally suited to multi-monitor displays where the cursor can be swiped from one end to the other quickly. Read our Genius Wireless Pen Mouse review 5. Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 5 - £50 Mad Catz's exoskeletal stylings certainly make its mice stand out, but they're as functional as they are funky. Infinitesimal adjustments mean they suit any gaming hand, and they're smooth and responsive, too. At £50, the R.A.T. 5 is the cheapest in the range, but it's still a cracking little rodent. Read our Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 5 review Best mouse: mice 6-10 6. Roccat Kone [+] - £58 That [+] in Roccat Kone [+] refers to the EasyShift [+] button, which acts like the shift key on a keyboard, and allows access to secondary functions such as volume control and muting. It's easy to program, and a 6,000dpi maximum resolution and surface calibration make it a pleasure to use. Our biggest bugbear is its price, which isn't much less than Mad Catz' R.A.T. 7. Read our Roccat Kone [+] review 7. Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 9 - £95 Mad Catz' Cyborg R.A.T. 9 is the most expensive mouse in our round up, and it packs all the adjustments and features of the R.A.T. 7, as well as wireless connectivity. It's incredibly responsive, and the obligatory precision button makes those crucial headshots nice and easy. It is expensive, but we reckon the sheer number of features justify the price tag. Read our Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 9 review 8. Gyration Air Mouse Elite - £91 Gyration's Air Mice function like normal rodents on desktops, and they can also be lifted up and used in mid-air, Wii-mote style. They're designed primarily for presentations and media centre PCs, but you can also just about use them for gaming. The Air Mouse Elite is the best we've seen so far, but we'd still recommend that you try one before buying. Read our Gyration Air Mouse Elite review 9. Kensington Orbit Trackball - £15 A mouse round-up wouldn't be complete without a trackball device, which will take up far less room than a conventional mouse and mousemat combo. At under £20 Kensington's Orbit is rather cheap, and does the job adequately - we even managed a five kill streak in Modern Warfare 2 with it. Read our Kensington Orbit Trackball review 10. Microsoft Sidewinder X8 - £47 Microsoft's original Sidewinder divided audiences, but there's no denying that it's well-made and utterly functional. The X8 adds wireless capabilities, but a unique magnetic system means it can be plugged in to charge as well. At the time of our review we complained that it was a tad too expensive, but the price has dropped considerably since. Read our Microsoft Sidewinder X8 review -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LG Optimus Q2 QWERTY slider unveiled Posted: 19 Sep 2011 03:40 AM PDT LG has shown off its latest Android and Tegra toting handset, the LG Optimus Q2. Packing a decent number of stats, the Optimus Q2 is one of the first smartphones to be given a new dual-core 1.2GHz Tegra 2 chip – an update to the processor found in the LG Optimus 2x. Like the Optimus 2X, the phone has also been given a 4-inch screen which is an IPS-based LCD. Unlike the 2X, however, this handset packs a flip out QWERTY keyboard. Life's good When it comes to size, the LG Optimus Q2 is a mere 12.3mm and weighs around 147g. It also comes with Wi-Fi Direct support, a 5MP rear camera and a VGA front-facing camera and runs on Android 2.3. There's no LG Optimus Q2 UK release date, but the phone is coming out in South Korea next week. Given that the original LG Optimus Q didn't actually reach UK shores, however, this may be one phone we will have to admire from afar.

Netflix hints at global expansion of its streaming service Posted: 19 Sep 2011 02:07 AM PDT Netflix has announced that it is spinning off the DVD side of its company into an entirely separate entity, renaming it Qwikster, and looking to expand its streaming service to a global level. Initially, this is in a bid to make sure there is no confusion in the US between the pricing of the streaming and DVD rental part of the service – something the company has admitted it got wrong – but a blog post hints that the Netflix streaming service is set to go global. In a candid blog, Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO, Netflix, said he was sorry for a lack of communication about the pricing structure at Netflix and that he hoped the separation of the two sides of the business would remedy any problems customers were having. "I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation," said Hastings. "It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology." Substantial new content The blog goes on to note that the reason for the split is to become better as a service and company, but he also mentions that he hopes its streaming service will break free from the US. "Going forward, Qwikster will continue to run the best DVD by mail service ever, throughout the United States. "Netflix will offer the best streaming service for TV shows and movies, hopefully on a global basis. The additional streaming content we have coming in the next few months is substantial, and we are always working to improve our service further." While Netflix built its name on its DVD rental arm, it is clear that the streaming service is where the future of the company lies, as this still holds the Netflix brand. Hastings looks as if he is trying to embed Netflix as the streaming service of choice as soon as he cans, explaining in the post: "Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly."

Pirate Party wins support in Berlin elections Posted: 19 Sep 2011 02:06 AM PDT Berlin's local election saw a big backlash against mainstream parties, with the Pirate Party capturing a jaw-dropping 8.9 per cent of the vote according to preliminary results. The Pirate Party claims to represent digital rights, civil liberties and politics fit for the 21st century – and boasts 12,000 members since its creation in 2006. "We will get right to work," top Pirate candidate, Andreas Baum, told ZDF television according to the Washington Post. "This is all new for us." Reforms Chief among the Pirate Party's policies is the opposition of European data retention laws and information privacy as well as calling for major reforms to copyright law. German chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition party – the Free Democrats – suffered badly, with only two per cent of the vote. With the controversial Digital Economy Act a major topic of conversation at the UK Liberal Democrat party conference – part of the coalition government, of course – it is clear that political parties are being forced into being more savvy about digital legislation. With the internet a major part of our everyday lives, and increased fears over our personal data in a digital world, ignorance and ad hoc legislation is clearly no longer cutting it in politics.

Review: BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro C1 Posted: 19 Sep 2011 02:00 AM PDT Be Quiet's Dark Rock Pro C1 is a well put together twin stack cooler with a huge cooling area. Designed with each stack comprising 44 nickel-plated aluminium cooling fins, this is a serious chip chiller. The cooler uses seven 6mm heatpipes that run from the nickel-plated copper base plate and right through the two cooling stacks. Sitting between each stack is one of the two 120mm SilentWing Be Quiet PWM fans used for cooling. Be Quiet claims they produce 57.2 CFM of air each and together only generate a quoted noise level of 25.9dB(A) at 1,700rpm – the fastest the fans spin. Both fans run off a single four-pin PWM motherboard connector and each is already fastened in place with tensioned wire mounts. Size matters As a result of its sheer size, this is another CPU cooler that makes the first memory slot and even the second one a bit tricky to occupy. Certainly, using modules with tall heatsinks is out, but standard sized modules should be okay. The Pro C1 doesn't seem to cool as well as it should. In our tests it couldn't beat Scythe's Yasya for cooling, and the Yasya only uses a single 120mm fan. Although it's still a big cooler, it's somewhat smaller than Be Quiet's monster. You do get a nagging feeling that the Dark Rock Pro C1 should be doing better than it does.

Review: ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:30 AM PDT We've been raving about Sandy Bridge ITX boards such as the ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT since they first appeared and quite frankly we make no apologies for it. If you want to build a small, compact PC with plenty of grunt then now's the right time. The boards even come with a x16 PCI-e slot so you can keep gaming. We tested ours with a trusty HD 6850 – it's quite a sight to see a graphics card looking bigger than the motherboard. You may be of the opinion that a motherboard that measures 17cm square is just too small to be of much use, but one look at the following feature list might put an end to that. You get two DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 16GB of 2133MHz (OC) RAM, integrated eight-channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, a pair each of SATA 3Gbps and SATA 6Gbps ports, four USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports and the rear panel also holds the three output ports for the integrated video; DVI, VGA and HDMI. You can tell ASRock has a pretty good idea where most of these boards will end up, because the company bundles a USB infrared dongle and a Windows MCE-compatible remote control in with the board. Push the power Overclocking isn't something a lot of the users of this board will be interested in – mostly because it will probably end up powering home theatre PCs and media systems. However, we gave it a go anyway. There's not enough space on the board for one of the seriously big third-party coolers, so extreme overclocking is out, but we got our example to run an i7 2600K happily at 4GHz without experiencing any problems. It may not be quite as feature-rich as some of its tiny competitors, but ASRock's offering is still one of the most powerful ITX boards that we've seen to date.

Dell: Why we won't follow HP Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:03 AM PDT Dell founder Michael Dell has insisted that his company has no intention of following rival Hewlett Packard in attempting to shed its PC making business. Mr Dell has already publicly mocked HP's much-discussed decision to seek alternative routes forward, and he reasons that his company could now have a significant market advantage. "We are very distinct from some of our competitors," Dell told the Financial Times. End-to-end "We believe the devices and the hardware still matter as part of the complete, end-to-end solution," he added. "Think about the scale economies in our business. As a company spins off its PC business, it goes from one of the top buyers in the world of disk drives and processors and memory chips to not being one of the top five." "…that raises the cost of making servers and storage products. Ultimately we believe that presents an enormous opportunity for us and you can be sure we are going to seize it." HP is still seeking to spin off its hardware business and restructure, but the repercussions will be watched with interest by the computer world.

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