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Techradar |
- Catch up: this week's most popular posts
- Buying Guide: What's the best Advent laptop?
- ZScaler to release security tool to extinguish Firesheep
- In Depth: Core i5 vs Core i7: which is best for you?
- Rumour: Android Gingerbread arriving next week?
- Review: LG Viewty Snap GM360
- Review: Nokia C7
- The Chuckle Brothers reveal 3D movie plans
- The Chuckle Brothers reveal 3D movie plans
- Updated: Android 3.0 rumours: what you need to know
- Buying Guide: What's the best Dell laptop?
- Picsel brings Microsoft Office to Android
- Updated: Samsung Galaxy Tab: best UK prices compared
- Tutorial: 25 handy Google search tips and tricks
- Tutorial: 25 handy Google search tips and tricks
- Exclusive: Facebook: There's no magic wand for apps
- Weird Tech: Freaky fembots and non-splatted bats
- Gary Marshall: David Cameron's high-tech hype
- Review: Blip Interactive NanoStudio 1.0
- New Sony Blu-ray rewritable drives to support 3D
- Windows Live team excited by Kinect's video calls
- Review: Get Backup Pro 2.4.2
- Video: Google Instant comes to Android and iPhone
- Review: Realmac Software Courier
- Google blocks Facebook from its Contacts
| Catch up: this week's most popular posts Posted: 06 Nov 2010 01:00 AM PDT  This week brought news that the iPhone 5 may ship phones with SIM cards that will connect to any network while other Apple rumours suggested that iOS 4.2 is coming this month. It's also rumoured that Google's OS – Chrome OS – will become available on consumer devices this month. Read on for this week's most popular stories on TechRadar… Top five news stories iPhone 5 to ditch SIM cards for online account? Apple could be bringing out the iPhone 5 with a SIM card that can be accessed on any network - effectively bypassing the carriers' distribution networks for selling the phone. GigaOM is claiming that Apple is working with SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto (which is coincidentally suing Google over Android) to create a special card that would allow users to buy a phone directly from Apple, and then connect to any network they chose. It seems Apple will unleash the next update to iOS this month – version 4.2. Rumours are circulating that iOS 4.2 could drop as soon as next week. As well as bringing bug updates to the iPhone and iPod touch, the new release will also bring multitasking to the iPad for the first time. The update will also fix the 'alarmgate' bug that caused problems with iPhone alarm clocks following the European move to Daylight Saving Time at the weekend. HTC Desire HD fails to knock original Desire off top spot Whether you consider the HTC Desire HD to be the sequel to the original HTC Desire or another in the family, it's not a better phone. That's according to TechRadar's 20 best mobile phones in the world buyer's guide, which looks at every smartphone around and brings you the cream of the crop. Reviewers found that the while the original Desire had battery issues, the new Desire HD has got the same problem - but thanks to a 4.3-inch screen, the drain is even harder, so with the best combination of all-round excellence, the original has hung on to the top spot. Skyfire brings Flash to iPad, iPhone and iPod touch If you want to watch Flash videos on your Apple iPhone or iPad then you will finally be able to later this week. Not that Apple has reached some kind of groundbreaking deal with Adobe, of course – rather, a new app launching this week provides iPhone and iPad users with a decent workaround solution to enable them to watch online videos originally encoded in Adobe Flash. Rumour: Google Chrome OS out this month Google Chrome OS rumoured to be released on consumer devices later in November 2010 Google's Chrome Operating system is rumoured to be launching later this month, according to anonymous "component players" in Asia. We first reported on Google Chrome OS back in November 2009, though Google has remained schtum since that time about its plans to release the new operating system in new consumer devices. Top five in-depth articles 10 best camera phones for 2010 These days, a phone isn't worth having if it doesn't have a top-notch snapper strapped to its back. We've rounded up the crème de la crème of camera phones and delved a little deeper than simple megapixels to establish what handsets should be on any self-respecting mo-pho's (mobile photographer's) wishlist. 20 best mobile phones in the world today We've all got at least one mobile phone each, right? The trouble is, how do you decide which is the best mobile phone for you? Hopefully, TechRadar's extensive mobile phone reviews can help you with that. But if you're still stumped, you've come to the right place. Because here we have a constantly-updated list of the best mobile phones you can get. Whether you're after the best budget music phone or a the best smartphone, the top ones are all here. And we've got in-depth reviews of all of them. The term 'smartphone' has been bandied about for over a decade now, but where it previously meant a horrible, clunky experience, and often the need for an unwieldy stylus, the new generation is more akin to something out of Star Trek. Everyone has one, and the user interfaces and applications are only getting better. Apple struck first with the launch of the iPhone, creating the expectation of a slick, touch-based experience. It blew away the competition by simply working as users wanted, which says a lot about the systems that came before. Hands on: Creative ZiiO tablet review We're just back from the launch of the Creative ZiiO tablets – and we managed to get some time with the latest addition to the Android family. First up, it's important to note the price-point – Creative has set the price for the 10-inch at £249.99 for an 8GB version and £269.99 for the 16GB version. For the smaller 7-inch version the prices are £199.99 (8GB) and £219.99 (16GB). The reason this is important is that Creative has taken some major decisions to bring the tablet price down to virtually half the price of the Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab. Samsung Galaxy Tab: best UK prices compared Before the Samsung Galaxy Tab went on sale, it was always a bit unclear how much it was going to cost. But now that it's on UK shelves, the UK mobile networks are rolling out their data plans along with subsidised retail prices, and the picture is starting to look a bit clearer. The good news is that monthly data plans are available from as low as £5 per month. The bad news is that most plans still involve an upfront fee of about £500. Top five reviews While Sony's PlayStation Move uses the PlayStation Eye camera to detect and measure the location of high-tech and spatially-aware handheld controllers, Kinect has no physical controllers to speak of at all. The idea is that your body is the controller. It's up to the Kinect games and apps to use the camera and microphone to work out what you're doing and what you're saying, and to interpret your commands in the appropriate fashion. T he Kinect sensor contains an RGB camera and a depth sensor to track your movement. It measures the positioning of 48 key joints in your anatomy and by tracking the movements of these joints, it can work out exactly what position your body is in. What's more, it sees in 3D by overlaying the input from the RGB camera with the depth sensor. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is the first major tablet release since the Apple iPad launched about five months ago. With a tidal wave of Android tablets about to sweep through the tech world, it's possible that if the Galaxy Tab were to disappoint, it could damage the perception that Android tablets will be able to top the iPad on features and performance. The price certainly indicates that Samsung believes the Galaxy Tab can topple the Apple iPad from its tablet tower. The 16GB model costs £530, which is £100 more than the Wi-Fi only version of the iPad. It is, however, exactly the same price as the cheapest 3G iPad, which is clearly no accident. HP has gone another route with the HP Beats Edition, and employed the help and expertise of legendary Hip Hop producer Dr Dre and his Beats brand, that manufacturers high-end headphones. Built around the chassis of a standard Envy 14, but £400 pounds more expensive, the HP Envy 14 Beats Edition features a number of audio upgrades.These include specially designed Beats speakers and clever positioning of the notebook's sound card, allowing for impressive sound quality when using the bundled Beats Solo headphones. The HTC Desire is, in effect, the second in the new Android range from HTC, with its much larger brother, the HTC Desire HD, taking most of the limelight. But it's more that 'spare a thought' for the HTC Desire Z, as this phone is designed to encompass the best Android has to offer with HTC's sublime Sense overlay - and a QWERTY keyboard to boot. A stickler for tradition, Epson's PX720WD resists the temptation of settling for five inks, as found in the likes of the Canon PIXMA MG5150 and HP Photosmart Premium C309G. So instead of getting both dye-based and pigment-based black inks as a compromise between document and photo printing, the Epson goes for the full 6-ink monty. Billed as an all-in-one for photo enthusiasts, it serves up the conventional mix of CMYK dye-based inks, along with additional light cyan and light magenta inks, boasting an enhanced colour range for truly photo-realistic output. At least, that's the theory. Also reviewed this week Audio systems Compact cameras Canon PowerShot SX30 IS review Desktops DSLRs eBooks Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch review Graphics cards MSIGeForce GTS 450 Cyclone review Keyboards Thermaltake eSPORTS Challenger review Laptops Dell Latitude E6410 ATG review Mice Microphones Mobile phones Monitors Samsung SyncMaster BX2350 review Printers Epson Stylus Photo PX720WD review Sat navs Software Parallels Desktop 6 Switch to Mac Edition review Norton Internet Security 2011 review Webroot Internet Security Complete review Ilium Software eWallet 7.1.1 review Storage Toshiba 750GB 2.5-inch HDD review StarTech 2.5" SATA HD rack review Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 64GB review TV receivers 
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| Buying Guide: What's the best Advent laptop? Posted: 05 Nov 2010 10:00 AM PDT  It can be hard to choose which laptop to buy, but once you've found the brand you want then what next? If you've settled on an Advent, then you're probably wondering what the best Advent laptop is for your budget. Here we've gathered together the top models for your delectation. But if you don't want to buy an Advent, check our 20 best laptops in the world piece. If it's a netbook you want, look at our 15 best netbooks. 1. Advent Modena Offering good usability, a great screen and ample storage at such a low price, the Advent Modena is sure to please first time buyers looking for an affordable and portable bargain. Read our full Advent Modena review 2. Advent Sienna 510 The Intel Core i5 processor power on offer for this price is an unbelievable bargain. Couple with great usability, this is superb for those looking for multitasking prowess on a budget. Read our full Advent Sienna 510 review 3. Advent Sienna 700 The Advent Sienna 700 features a stunning screen married with the power of an Intel Core i7 processer – and with great usability and an incredibly affordable price to boot, this machine is hard to ignore. Read our full Advent Sienna 700 review Don't forget to check out our 20 best laptops in the world piece. Or, if it's a netbook you want, our 15 best netbooks. 
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| ZScaler to release security tool to extinguish Firesheep Posted: 05 Nov 2010 09:14 AM PDT  ZScaler has announced that it will be releasing a free new tool that counters the high profile Firesheep Firefox extension that hit the press over the way it can steal login information and take over user accounts. The Firesheep login became big news when it was released, with the man responsible claiming it was created to show how easy it was to steal passwords. ZScaler has stated that it will release BlackSheep on Monday – which will serve as a counter-measure to Firesheep. Logins "As you're aware, Firesheep is the Firefox extension that makes it easier to steal logins and take over social media and email accounts (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) after users log in from a WiFi hotspot or even their own unprotected network," explained ZScaler. "Developers say they were simply hoping to shed light on the problem of not using SSL encryption for user sessions. But the temptation for people to use it for nefarious purposes is too great. "Zscaler researchers have created, and are now offering to every consumer, a free Firefox plugin called BlackSheep, which serves as a counter-measure. "BlackSheep combats Firesheep by monitoring traffic and then alerting users if Firesheep is being used on the network." 
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| In Depth: Core i5 vs Core i7: which is best for you? Posted: 05 Nov 2010 09:00 AM PDT  Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 PC processors are as quick as they come. But thanks to Intel's confusing branding scheme, it's not always obvious what the labels Core i5 and i7 really mean. The long list of models on offer plus two different sockets to choose from only add to the confusion. How do you know which is best for you? For some it will come down to price. Full power Core i5 processors extend up to around £200 where the Core i7 chips take over. For everyone else, here's TechRadar's guide to the pros and cons of Intel's top chips. In theory, Core i5 is Intel's midrange processor and Core i7 is its flagship chip. In practice, it's a little more complicated than that. Core i5 processors are available in both dual and quad-core trim for the LGA1,156 socket. Meanwhile, Core i7 processors not only come with four or six cores. They're also available for both the LGA1,156 and LGA1,366 sockets. If it's an upgrade CPU you're after, the crucial first step is therefore identifying the socket in your existing system. If you're building a new PC, every chip from both ranges is potentially on your radar. The key to knowing what you're actually getting is in the triple-digit suffix. The Core i5 is available in two series, the 600 and 700. All 600 series chips are dual-core models based on Intel's Clarkdale core and with HyperThreading switched on. That means they can crunch four software threads simultaneously. The final two digits in the processor name essentially indicate clockspeed. Thus the Core i5 650 is a 3.2GHz dual-core CPU, yours for around £140, and the Core i5 680 is a £225 3.8GHz dual. 700 series Core i5s, meanwhile, are quad-core processors derived from the Lynnfield core but without HyperThreading. Consequently, Core i5 700 chips can also handle four threads, but offer more performance because each thread gets its own core. Currently, there are just two models available, the 2.66GHz Core i5 750 and 2.8GHz Core i5 760. Both sell for around £140. Cheaper chips Given the extra cores of the 700 series chips, it seems slightly crazy that they tend to be cheaper. However, Clarkdale-based Core i5 600s do have an added extra. They've been fitted with an integrated graphics core. Admittedly, it's not much of a graphics core. But it does mean you don't have to buy a dedicated video card. Just remember that you need a supporting motherboard to enable the graphics core in Clarkdale chips. That said, the cheaper quad-core 700s offer much better all round performance. Unless power efficiency is a major issue for you, we wouldn't bother with the Core i5 600 chips. They're overpriced. But what about the Core i7? Pay attention, because this is where things get really tricky. The Core i7 800 series is essentially the same as the Core i5 700 series but with HyperThreading enabled and higher clocks. It's based on the same quad-core Lynnfield processor die and drops into LGA1,156 socket. So, the Core i7 870, for example, is a £230 quad-core 2.93GHz chip that can process eight threads simultaneously. Bonkers branding At the very top of the range, we find the Core i7 900 series. This is where Intel's branding really goes bonkers. The easy bit to grasp is that all Core i7 900 processors require the high end LGA1,366 CPU socket. This offers more performance potential but also demands three sticks of pricey DDR3 memory for optimal operation. LGA1,366 motherboards also tend to be pricey. However, what isn't obvious from the branding is the fact that 900 series Core i7s are available in both quad- and six-core format. There really is no other way of telling other than a full list. Thus the Core i7 930, 940, 950 and 960 are quad-core processors while the 970 and 980X chips pack six cores. Price-wise, there's a huge variation. The 2.8GHz quad-core 930 is actually excellent value at £210. By contrast, the two six-core chips are very, very quick. But it's debatable whether they are really worth £700 or thereabouts. Special K Finally, you may come across chips with either a "K" or an "X" tacked on the end of the name, such as the aforementioned Core i7 980X or the new Core i7 875K. These letters denote specialist models aimed at overclocking enthusiasts. The key difference is an unlocked multiplier, making frequency adjustments much easier. Taken as a whole, then, Intel's range of Core i5 and i7 CPU can be utterly baffling. But there is something to suit most budgets and requirements. As for where our own dosh would go, we'd take a Core i5 760 if money was tight or the Core i7 930 if things were looking up. 
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| Rumour: Android Gingerbread arriving next week? Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:52 AM PDT  Rumours have surfaced that Android Gingerbread – the eagerly awaited next generation of the popular mobile OS – could be with us in a matter of days. Gingerbread was expected to be the tablet-friendly Android 3.0 release, but it's looking increasingly likely to be an incremental upgrade and Android 2.3 for smartphones. That wouldn't rule out some tweaks to make Gingerbread run nicely on the slew of Android tablets that are arriving at the moment - including the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Trusted source The rumour has surfaced from a 'trusted source' which of course means very little, but it does appear to be backed up by less subtle hints from Google – including a giant Gingerbread man on the company's lawn. There are also some tweaks in the latest Google Maps release that suggest that Gingerbread is coming soon. So, with Samsung's much-hyped phone launch scheduled for 11 November in New York, the stage is well and truly set for a high profile announcement. If Gingerbread is Android 2.3 that would mean that Android 3.0 could well prove to be Honeycomb – a name first outed on TechRadar a few weeks ago. 
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| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:45 AM PDT  LG's crop of lower priced handsets is plentiful and each has its own little pinch of LG-style stardust to make it seem a bit different from the others. The LG Viewty Snap GM360, for example, is available from as little as £80 on pay as you go and free on £10-a-month contacts. It boasts 5MP Schneider-Kreuznach optics and something LG calls an 'Optic-all' zoom as its standout features. Don't get too excited, though – the latter's not an optical zoom. We'll come back to that in more depth later. Still, however it's dressed up, you can't really expect top-notch results from an £80 phone. So the question here is whether you're getting a good quality handset for your money, or if you'd be better off opting for a low-priced smartphone, such as the Alcatel OT-980, instead? Certainly with neither Wi-Fi nor 3G onboard, the LG Viewty Snap GM360 will have to work quite hard to earn our favour. In form, the LG Viewty Snap GM360 is a fairly small phone. At 108 x 53 x 12mm it should fit neatly into most pockets. Yet it still manages to pack in a 3-inch screen, with 400 x 240 pixels on offer, that's touch sensitive. It's fairly good in terms of viewability, but the screen is a tad small for some media-rich activities. There's a trio of buttons under the screen, two of which offer Call and End functions, while the neat centre button opens up a tabbed shortcuts area to running and favourite apps. The End button doubles up as a back button as well, so you can quickly leave the app you're using and get back to the home screen. Build quality is reasonable for a phone at this price too. There's even some fake brushed metal on the button area at the bottom of the front fascia. The long edges are well detailed, with a thin silver strip against the black plastic that forms the bulk of the chassis. The right-hand edge of the handset houses thin volume rockers and a camera shortcut on this strip, while the left-hand edge has a micro USB charger sitting under a hinged cover. On the bottom, there's a thicker silver trim and no connectors, while the top edge houses the on/off button and a 3.5mm headset connector. When we reviewed the LG Town, a budget handset with a slide-out keyboard, we said we weren't too excited about the user interface. The LG Viewty Snap GM360 takes the same approach to its UI and we feel similarly about it. There are three home screens, which you move between by sweeping as you would on any touchscreen handset. Each home screen has different, pre-designated functions, so there's no freeform ability to just stick widgets wherever you like. That said, the main home screen does have space for widgets of your choosing. You pull these onto the screen from a menu that sits along its bottom portion. You're limited to four and they sit in a configuration that's dictated by the wallpaper you've picked. The next screen is for housing your favourite people. Again, you can pull them onto the screen from a menu that sits along the bottom. The third home screen is the one that you may find you don't get on with at all. It's all about LG's LiveSquare system. You can add friends to this screen, giving them little avatars. These avatars animate and show you information about incoming calls and messages. Tap an avatar and you can see your contact history with them. It's a little bizarre to be honest. The status bar along the top of each of the home screens can be tapped for a little more information about the status of the LG Viewty Snap GM360, and you also get a quick Bluetooth toggle and music pause/play button here too. Each of the three main screens has a shortcuts bar beneath it. These enable you to quickly get to the phone dialler, contacts, messaging and the main apps menu. LG organises its apps into four groups: Communication, Entertainment, Utilities and Settings. A horizontal finger sweep takes you from the 16 shortcuts on screen to a second screen of 16. We've already seen how the LiveSquare screen and the favourite people screen can provide you quick access to your top friends and contacts. A quick tap on the Contacts icon at the bottom of any of the three main screens gives you access to your full database of contacts, and it's easy to add new contact details to the handset. Social networking is catered for and there's a fair range of services included. You'll have to be patient with them, though. The Twitter application, for example, is a Java app that takes a little while to load. Then you have to wait even longer to log in. There are further periods of waiting to endure if you want to look at mentions, or to search. It's poor in comparison to Twitter apps on Android handsets. There's a dedicated Facebook client too, but this also suffers. It feels slow and clunky in comparison to using Facebook on faster handsets with better, larger and more responsive touch screens. We wouldn't really want to rely on it. Still, the handset didn't drop the connection on voice calls, and we had no trouble having a voice-based conversation using the phone. There's a messaging icon on the main screen that, once tapped, takes you to SMS creation. The screen is a little cramped in tall mode, but you can switch between a T9 keyboard and handwriting recognition, depending on your desired form of input. You can also tap the on-screen keyboard icon in tall mode to switch to a widescreen mode with a full QWERTY keyboard. Handwriting recognition is quite slow, but then so is using either of the on-screen keyboards. The screen is a resistive type and it needs quite a serious press to register anything. There will be no feathery-fingered tapping at the speed of light on the LG Viewty Snap GM360. Aside from SMS, mobile email is supported too. You'll find the wizard for setting it up is pretty straightforward to work with. Web browsing on the LG Viewty Snap GM360 isn't the best experience you'll ever have. Neither Wi-Fi nor 3G are featured here and their absence means that all pages are excruciatingly slow to load. Particularly detailed pages, such as the Tech Radar home page, seem to take an age to become readable. What's more, the resistive screen is pretty unresponsive when it comes to moving around within a page. Zooming is annoying too. In principle, you can simply call up the Zoom bar and then sweep it to zoom in and out of a page. However, unless your fingers are very small, you'll find it difficult to get precisely the level of zoom you want. If you prefer to switch your reading angle, there's no accelerometer, but there is an option to switch into widescreen view. There's also a full screen view option to make the most of the space that's available. Oh, and there's no text reflowing either, so you often have to scroll horizontally to read web pages. On top of all that, the LG Viewty Snap GM360 actually reset itself a couple of times while we were web browsing. Yes, Opera Mini is hidden away in an apps menu, and this does give a better browsing experience, but it's also hampered by the lack of Wi-Fi and 3G. We doubt you'd want to use the internet on the LG Viewty Snap GM360 at all unless you were really desperate. Taking decent pictures is the LG Viewty Snap GM360's ostensible niche. To help with that is the Optic-all zoom. As we said at the start of this review, however, it's not an optical zoom. In fact, it isn't even a zoom feature as we would usually understand one. Optic-all zoom is a software feature that results in improved image quality as you zoom in on the phone. It doesn't function on images over 1MP in size, even though the camera shoots at up to 5MP. Presumably, that's because of the technical resources needed to implement the improved zooming quality. Regardless, it isn't worth writing home about. There aren't many photographic bells and whistles – just a Macro mode; a choice of three, six or nine continuous shots; a range of colour effects; White Balance settings for cloudy, incandescent, sunny and fluorescent lighting conditions; and a self timer. It's all fairly standard fare, even on much lesser handsets. Still, the camera does shoot pretty decent photos and benefits from having a flash. This shot reminds us of the glorious sunny September day on which it was taken. The definition is good and the sky really was that blue and cloudless. See the full size version here. The camera struggled a little with this photo, because the foreground was in shade and that bridge on the left of shot was painted bright white, giving it a lot of variation in brightness to deal with. Still, it is a passable photo. See the full size version here. Zoom into this photo of an information board and it is perfectly readable, although there's obvious pixellation as you go further in. The Macro mode enables you get so close to an image and no further. We were only a couple of inches from these blackberries and, as you can see, the photo's a bit blurry. This did not show up on the handset itself, though, and the colour reproduction is excellent. The LG Viewty Snap GM360 has a music player, which had no problems finding tracks hiding all over our micro SD card, but failed to pick up album art. Also, composer tags aren't supported, just artists, albums and genres. You can make playlists on the fly, and there's a music player widget for the home screen so you can control playback from there. The music player has a Sleep mode – handy if you want to have music playing in bed before you go to sleep or for some other timed reason. The 3.5mm headset jack on the top of the chassis means you can use your favourite earphones if you want to, and there's an equaliser to help you choose the sound output style you want. The sound quality is passable, but not great. The FM radio auto scans for tracks and will fill up to 48 slots with saved channels. If you want to manually tune it, there's a neat little roller button in the middle of the radio screen. You can record from the radio too, but sadly it doesn't have the same sleep function as the music player does. Video playback is a bit limited with just MPEG4 supported, but videos themselves played well enough in both wide and tall screen modes. With just a 900mAh battery to keep everything together, you'd be forgiven for guessing the LG Viewty Snap GM360 has poor battery life. In reality, however, it's quite good, thanks in no small part to the fact that it lacks 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS, which are three of the big battery drains on modern smartphones. You should be able to get two days from this handset as long as you don't use it constantly as a portable music player. With no GPS onboard, it won't surprise you that there's no map or navigation software to be had here. Nor is there an app store. LG does provide a fair few apps – for example, there's a drawing app, memo maker, voice recorder, calendar and task manager – but you can't expand on what you get with the phone itself. Comparison The LG Viewty Snap GM360 is far from a high-spec handset, lacking Wi-Fi, 3G or GPS. If you want those features and the ability to add more applications, then an Android handset might be more to your liking. The Alcatel OT-980 or ZTE Racer could be good bets. If you're an LG fan, though, and are keen on messaging, check out the LG Town. It has a very similar user interface and setup, but adds a QWERTY keyboard into the mix. There are good things to say about the LG Viewty Snap GM360. It has a decent camera, some pleasing apps and a fairly simple, easy to understand user interface. Sadly, there are a number of black marks to mention too. It has a strange three-screened home page system, which doesn't appeal to us. It lacks 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS. Web browsing is a trial. To cap it all, you can get Android-based handsets, such as the Alcatel OT-98, that offer 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS and access to an army of third-party apps for a similar amount of money. That makes it hard to recommend this handset as a good buy. We liked The app switcher system via a single button beneath the screen. There are some neat features here, such as a sleep timer on the music player. Some nicely designed visuals – the rolling tuner on the FM radio, for instance. Battery life is pretty good. We disliked The LG Viewty Snap GM360 is a self-contained handset with no opportunity for downloading apps. What you get is what you're going to have to live with. An Android handset may be a better bet if this functionality matters to you. There's no Wi-Fi here, so all your data sharing activity has to be done over the network. 3G is absent from this handset and any communications involving data really suffer. We can't help wondering if non-3G handsets are so far off message these days as to make them unsellable. No GPS means no navigation or location-aware capabilities. Verdict The LG Viewty Snap GM360 might have come out quite well in a review even six months ago, because budget Android handsets were rare as hens' teeth at that time. Now we have the likes of the Alcatel OT-980 and ZTE Racer, though, so it's difficult to see why anybody would want to spend close to £100 on a handset that lacks Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G and an app store when they could get so much more for their money. 
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| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:17 AM PDT  The Symbian^3 operating system is really important for Nokia. The company has taken a lot of knocks from the iPhone and the many handsets running Android, meaning its market share has suffered. Android phones such as the HTC Wildfire and Orange San Francisco have muscled in on Nokia's vital mid-range territory, and that's been a real pain in the proverbial for Nokia. Google's OS has even snaffled up Sony Ericsson and Samsung's attention, as evidenced by Sony's Xperia X10, X10 Mini, Mini Pro and Samsung's Galaxy S, leaving Nokia to hold the Symbian baby. So can Symbian^3 still come to the rescue? We're not so sure. The Nokia N8, which we recently got to review after a massive six-month wait, puts Symbian^3 into a high-end, flagship handset. We liked the N8 itself, but had some issues with how Symbian^3 worked. That doesn't bode well for the C7, which runs the same OS and so works in pretty much the same way. At the time of writing, the N8 had a SIM-free price of £429 and the C7 clocked in at a still pocket-draining £389. What do you get for your hard-earned cash, then? Well, the C7 totes an 8MP camera and has a front camera for video calling. It also has 802.11 b, g and n Wi-Fi; 8GB of built in memory; GPS and, just like the N8, Bluetooth 3.0. This has a greater range and is a whole lot faster than Bluetooth 2.1 as long as you're connecting to another 3.0 device or enabled PC. Communicate with older Bluetooth versions, though, and the Nokia C7 is pulled down to their standard. There's 8GB of internal storage too, and support for a microSD card to add more space. However, we think it's a design issue that you need to remove the battery to get to the microSD card slot – it's terribly inconvenient. Anyone who likes to hot-swap their stills, video or other content is going to find themselves doing a lot of rebooting, which is never acceptable. And to add insult to injury, the SIM (which you hardly ever want to get at) can be removed without touching the battery. The C7 can't compete with the N8 in build quality either. The body is mostly plastic, although there is a metal backplate that echoes the N8. Still, the plentiful plastic does mean a light handset, and the C7 has a heft of just 130g. Despite its plastic frame, the Nokia C7 feels comfy in the hand. It's quite slim and has a fairly narrow profile too. It's easy for smaller hands to reach all the way across it for one-handed use – ideal when you're on the bus and holding on for dear life with the other hand. Our review sample has a black all-round chassis, but you can also chose reddish brown (Nokia calls it Mahogany Brown) and silver (Frosty Metal) alternatives. There's a fair amount of space both above and below the 3.5-inch screen. At the top it looks a bit wasted, although the rare front camera sits here, as does the Nokia branding mark. Beneath the screen lie Call and End buttons, along with a wide, lozenge-shaped menu key. These all light up when you use the handset in entirely expected green, red and white shades. There are plenty of buttons and connectors, mostly huddled on the top and right edges of the chassis. On top, there's a USB port for connecting to a PC, which is protected by a hinged cover. The 3.5mm headset connector is here too, as is the main on/off switch. Meanwhile, the right-hand edge houses a camera shortcut button; a lock switch, so that you can make the handset lock down easily; a pair of buttons that double for volume and zoom controls; and the Voice Key, which sits between them. We'll come back to this a bit later on. All on its lonesome on the left-hand edge of the chassis is a charge connector. The phone will also charge over USB. Nokia's new operating system, Symbian^3, has a lot that feels familiar about it, while offering some interesting new stuff. You get three home screens that you can fill with widgets and shortcuts. That's a big step forward for Nokia, although the process of stepping through the screens is still a bit clunky. The handset doesn't respond to finger sweeps as quickly as we would have liked. Having come to the Nokia C7 straight after the ultra responsive HTC Desire HD we really noticed the time lag between sweeping and the screen actually moving. Rather like Windows Phone 7, the home screen system is a bit constrained. In both cases, widgets have to be the same size and Symbian^3 can accommodate six on each screen. We can see precisely why Nokia likes this idea. When you tip the screen into wide format, the widgets neatly rearrange themselves. And you've got some flexibility in that a widget can contain an application controller, such as for the media player or FM radio, information such as calendar or Facebook updates, or app shortcuts – four on a widget and six widgets per screen means a max of 24 app shortcuts on a screen. But setting things up can be a pain, especially for app shortcuts. On an Apple or Android handset, you just tap and hold and app icon to put it onto a main screen. In Symbian^3, there's a lot more tapping to go through. The multi-stage approach makes the lure of dropping that great new app you just acquired onto a home screen much more of a grind than it is with Android or the iPhone. When it comes to the main apps menu, Nokia shows that it doesn't have a clue how the modern smartphone user likes to work. Instead of offering one straight list of all the apps on the handset, Symbian^3 falls back to the old S60 days of nesting. Take the File Manager for example. To find it, you need to choose Applications from the main menu screen, then choose Office, because that's where Nokia thinks the File Manager should be. Ditto the voice recorder, calculator and a number of other apps. There's one other aspect of the interface that needs a bit of attention. Voice commands. The idea always sounds like fun, but tends to turn out to be a bit silly. Who really wants to talk at their phone to launch an app? The touch screen should be all you need. In the case of the Nokia C7, the voice commands system proved a waste of time. To start the process, you tap that side-mounted Voice Commands key we mentioned earlier – on the right-hand edge of the chassis. Then say a command and you get a choice of possible matches that pop up on screen. If what you want is at the head of the list, wait a second and it will kick in. If what you want isn't at the head of the list, scroll around and tap what you want. So, we said "Facebook". But the handset offered us things like the voice recorder and music player. Turns out that to launch Facebook you have to say "application manager", then tap the screen to choose "installed apps" then tap again for Facebook. So we tried a different tack and used a phrase we found out is available by looking at the commands list – "What time is it?" This was recognised first go, so we waited a second and a horrid computerised male American voice said, "It is one oh 15." Frankly, we'd rather glance at the clock on screen. Add in the fact that the button is a bit of a fiddle to press, and you can deduce that we left this feature alone pretty quickly. Contacts management is quite straightforward in the Nokia C7. If you've got an Ovi account, sign in and you can synchronise contacts, calendar and notes. You can set up time intervals for this so that if you use Ovi as your main calendar tool, your handset keeps itself nicely up to date. The Nokia C7 will pick up contacts from your SIM and you can add them manually too. Because the Nokia C7 has a video-calling camera on the front of the chassis, you can even designate a separate number for video calls. But if you want true social network integration, you're going to have to look at another handset, we're afraid, because the offering here isn't up to much. To use social networking from the Contacts app, you need to be looking at someone's contact screen and then click on the Social Networks option that appears there. After that, Ovi runs and you can see a contact's Twitter or Facebook data – if they've got the same username as you have for them in Contacts. If not, then you have to type out their actual username and repeat the search. Only then can you add profile info to a contact. It is just too convoluted and not rewarding enough. Will you remember the Twitter and Facebook names of all your friends so you can complete the searches? Can you really be bothered to go through this process for everybody just to be able to see their profile and send them a message? We can't, which means we'd probably leave it at using the standalone Social Networks app for an overview of Twitter and Facebook updates; the ability to tweet and reply; and to send messages, comment or like in Facebook. On the plus side, you can have a Facebook Updates widget on one of the home pages that gives you scrolling updates and links into a nicely designed Facebook page. There's also a Social Networks widget that gives both Twitter and Facebook updates. In stark contrast to social networking, making calls is a great experience. The Nokia C7 produced a crystal clear voice at our end, and nobody we spoke to complained, so we assume they could hear us perfectly well. The dialler starts to search for matches as soon as you tap a key to type a name or a number. If you don't have many friends, this means one single key press could be enough to highlight the person you want to phone. The huge Call button on the dialler is hard to miss too, and when you are in a call there are equally giant Hold and End buttons. Video-calling works over Wi-Fi as well as 3G, although you might be hard pushed to find a handset you want to call that actually supports it. Still, if you don't get through, you are offered the option to send a message or make a voice call instead. Lots of people spend a fair amount of time writing text on their handset. Mobile email types write longer missives, while texters and tweeters keep it short. Whatever your preference, you need reliable text input, so anything that helps speed things up is welcome – and there's both good and bad news here. The screen of the Nokia C7 measures 3.5 inches, and 640 x 360 pixels – a ratio that tells you it is a fair bit taller than it is wide. That means accommodating a full QWERTY keyboard in tall mode is a bit of a challenge. So we forgive Nokia for opting for a mobile phone-style keyboard in its tall mode screen. Predictive text helps with text entry speed if you don't want to take the multi-tap route – and who does, really? But it feels clunky, because you have to tap into a white text box until you hit the green tick, at which point your message pops into its proper screen, such as the SMS interface. The same white box situation prevails if you switch into wide mode, except that the text box is much smaller. At least you get a full QWERTY keyboard this time around, and there are tap-and-hold options for numbers and common punctuation. There's a second set of options available if you hit the Sym key, again with tap-and-hold second functions, giving quick access to a lot of characters. And you get Swype included with the C7 (something that's not offered on the Nokia N8) – a system that enables you to sweep a finger over all the letters of a word rather than tapping individual keys. Swype can be fast if you know where letters are, but since your finger covers the letters you're moving over, it can be a bind if you aren't familiar with keyboard layouts. Still, you can always try it and reject it if it doesn't work for you. What's more, typing the old-fashioned way on this screen can be a slow process too. The screen is capacitive, but not as responsive as many. We had to slow down a little from our top typing speed to ensure accuracy – and we're by no means bullet-fast. When it comes to messaging options, you've got Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and Exchange ready to go, with most of the info needed already in the phone, and the ability to set up POP accounts too. There is good news in that the SMS viewer lets you see threaded messages in conversation style, and you can create audio messages as well as text-based ones. TThe screen of the Nokia C7 is a bit on the small side at 3.5 inches and 640 x 360 pixels. That inevitably means you don't get to see quite as much of any single web page as you do on, say, new Windows Phone 7 devices such as the LG Optimus 7, with its 800 x 480 screen, or even our old favourite the HTC Desire, which has the same number of pixels. We ought to mention the ClearBlack display too – an AMOLED tweak that's designed to give a high-contrast result. It certainly does that, though it is not, for our money, as sharp and bright as the Super AMOLED used by Samsung in its Galaxy S. The pinch-to-zoom system, which you'd think might add value to the browsing experience, is iffy. We found that, just as with the Nokia N8 it was jerky and unresponsive at times. It seems to falter most when zooming to a smaller screen view rather than when homing in on something for a detailed look. If it is just text you want to zoom in on, then you can do a quick double tap on the screen to go one level in. Double tap again to go move back out. This sounds great, but there's no text reflowing, so you're left needing to do a lot of panning to read information. Sometimes you can fix that situation by flipping the screen into wide mode, but that strategy doesn't always work. We also found the actual process of using Nokia's web browser really, really tedious. With a new operating system, you might have thought Nokia would take the opportunity to revamp its entire web experience. But no. We really dislike the way the user interface works. Sure, it's great that a web page is shown full screen with no menu bars consuming space, but the menu system is convoluted. To get to menus and options you have to tap a little arrow in the bottom-right of the screen. This calls up menu screen number one, which disappears after a very short time if you don't make any selections. Tap the top icon (the three lines) and up pops an enormous menu of choices. It's just a bit too 'round the houses' for our liking. There's also a YouTube client, which has its moments – both good and bad. One time, it managed to crash our review handset in mid-play, which resulted in the need to remove the battery and reboot. Never fun. However, for the most part, playback was smooth. If you pinch to zoom in a video, though, things can go squiffy. On the other hand if you double tap on a video to bring it to full screen, things are fine. You can get the BBC's iPlayer too, which means catch-up TV is at your fingertips. This worked well for us in full screen mode. It is best watched over Wi-Fi, and a quick double tap on a video toggles it to full screen mode. However, as with the Nokia N8, the flash support isn't perfect. The Nokia C7 is reliant on Flash Lite 4.0, so really intensive videos might present a problem. We couldn't watch video from the BBC news website, for example. The camera specifications are pretty high-end on the Nokia C7. There's a double LED flash next to the 8MP main camera, which has a video capability of 720p. Still, it's not quite up to the standard of the Nokia N8's 12MP shooter and Xenon flash. There are a few potentially useful features here, though, such as face detection and a vivid colour tone option in addition to the more usual black-and-white and sepia treatments. The camera is easy to use thanks to its side button, and it kicks in quickly enough for you to shoot a candid shot or video. There's none of the start-up lag here that we saw with the N8. In addition, there's a front facing VGA camera for making video calls. Not to everyone's taste, but we can't see the harm. The camera did well to pick out the detail in this photo on a dull day. Click here to see the full resolution image. There is a maximum of 2x digital zoom for stills, and you can even zoom when shooting at 8-megapixels. The zoom level and resulting image quality are both pretty good. Follow the links to view the full size versions of the station and zoomed in tracks. The sepia option lets you add an air of age to any photo. We did think there was a bit too much grey rather than brown in the photos we took, though. Follow the links to see the full size normal and sepia-toned versions of this shot.
The 720p video is shot at 25 frames a second, and it is one of the best examples we've seen. Sharp and clear, it becomes slightly jerky on our fast panning, but we've seen a lot worse. The music player automatically searches any microSD card you insert for songs and podcasts and adds them to its library, integrating this with whatever else is already on the handset. With content duly processed, you get a scrollable carousel of your library. Tap anything to play it. The player looks quite cool on screen and sound quality from the handset speaker is great. It's loud and perfectly good enough to listen to without feeling your ears are being assaulted by a set of stones grinding together. Plug a decent pair of headphones into the top-mounted 3.5mm slot and, again, the quality is impressive. There is an equaliser, but it doesn't have a huge number of presets and you can't save a personalised one. There's an FM transmitter too and this worked perfectly well, sending tracks to various radios we tested with no problems (with track listings even showing up as RDS info where applicable). The FM radio autoscans for stations the first time you run it and saves what it can find, which in our case was a hearty 19. You can scroll through stations by panning left and right. Where the wide, narrow screen might not be best suited to web browsing, it comes into its own for video playback. We were able to watch a good range of movie trailers and other video content we'd downloaded. Again, sound quality was pretty decent too. The C7 can support a wide variety of video formats, including MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV, all of which look nice on the ClearBlack OLED screen and offer a fairly decent movie-watching experience. The Nokia C7 has a 1200mAh battery, which on paper seems a little low to us. And since the handset functions particularly well as a music player, we suspect it could get a lot of use in that respect, which would usually result in fast battery drains. Still, with what we consider to be an average usage pattern, including plenty of Wi-Fi, some GPS mapping and some music playback, we got two days straight from the handset without having to worry about recharging. What's more, Nokia has put oodles of apps onto the Nokia C7 and there should be something for most users here. We've already mentioned some of the apps. Document lovers can take advantage of QuickOffice for viewing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, although you have to register before you can use it and can't edit documents either. There's a PDF reader too. Photo and video editing is catered for; the Tesco groceries app is present; Filmscope tells you about movies, both those upcoming and showing now; Sports Tracker monitors your training; and there's a candidate for stupid app of the year in the shape of World Class Excuses. Its silly little excuses can be texted, emailed or posted to Facebook. And if nothing that's built in takes your fancy, you always have the Ovi Store, of course. It should be no surprise that the Nokia C7 packs Ovi Maps, and we found the GPS to be very good at maintaining a fix in built-up areas. We were impressed at how quickly it got a fix too, even being accurate when we were indoors and with a half view of the sky through a window. The Nokia C7 is not an inexpensive handset. At £389, it is on a par with the likes of the HTC Desire and recently announced BlackBerry Bold 9780. As an early Symbian^3 smartphone it will certainly garner some attention. But we aren't sure Nokia has done enough to make its revamped OS special. It still has nested menus that would make HTC and Apple cringe, and our review handset crashed a couple of times, which ought to make any handset manufacturer hang their head in shame. Symbian^3 just doesn't feel like it has the sparkle or ease of use to take on the leaders, we're afraid. We liked Neat and tidy to hold with a thin design. Superb speakers and a well-positioned headset slot coupled with an all-too-rare FM transmitter. Superb battery life. A good camera that produced some great 720p footage. Three home screens with a reasonable amount of flexibility in widget placement seem fine to us, although we can see how some people might not like the rigidity of the grid design. We disliked No handset should ever crash. Symbian^3 just doesn't feel modern enough. Sometimes, there are two different menu systems – for instance, when using the camera – which can be confusing. Also, nested apps in the main menu should really be a thing of the past. Poor integration of Facebook and Twitter data with contacts. No text reflowing in the web browser. Verdict Some aspects of the Nokia C7 are great. We like the good battery life; the screen is sharp and clear, if a little small; and there are plenty of apps on board. We find the three home screen system is perfectly liveable, and the camera and video playback are both well above average. But Symbian^3 might not be enough to lift Nokia from its current popularity levels into the stratosphere.We feel that Nokia has tried to box clever by retaining much of the old S60 look and feel in order to prevent forcing a steep learning curve on existing fans. In doing so, it's constructed a new OS that is too close to its predecessor for us. Nested menus in the main menu listing is a disaster for quick access, as is having to remember how to navigate through two different menu systems when using the camera. Related Links
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| The Chuckle Brothers reveal 3D movie plans Posted: 05 Nov 2010 07:51 AM PDT  The greatest children entertainers of all time (well, on a par with the cast of Rentaghost), The Chuckle Brothers are to release a 3D movie of their exploits which is set to be more 'to me, at you' rather than 'to me, to you'. In what could well be the movie which knocks Avatar off of its po-faced 3D perch, The Chuckle Brothers have revealed that not only are they making their first movie but it will be in another dimension. "We've always wanted to make a film. A Chuckle Brothers movie," Barry Chuckle said to Digital Spy. "We've always wanted to do that and there is one in the pipeline now for us to do next year. That is very exciting. "We'll probably be doing that in May, June time. It is a spoof horror and it's going to be in 3D, which is another first for us. We've never been in 3D before." Brothers beyond Spoof Horror? 3D? Consider us sold. Personally, TechRadar is hoping that the movie is more Spooky Goings On than Spooky Goings On 2, though if the plot has any of the pathos of the Brothers' earlier TV effort Doctor What & the Return of the Garlics, then we will be more than pleased. Although The Chuckle Brothers have made a pact with the devil to look the same forever, The Chuckle Brothers have been plying their trade since 1967, but only really made it to the screen in 1985. Interestingly, this is a mere year after James Cameron hit the big time with The Terminator. Although Cameron's and the Chuckle's careers have taken decidedly different paths since then, it will be interesting to see if in 2011 The Chuckle Brothers 3D will be the movie which truly brings 3D to the mainstream. 
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| The Chuckle Brothers reveal 3D movie plans Posted: 05 Nov 2010 07:51 AM PDT The greatest children entertainers of all time (well, on a par with the cast of Rentaghost), The Chuckle Brothers are to release a 3D movie of their exploits which is set to be more 'to me, at you' rather than 'to me, to you'. In what could well be the movie which knocks Avatar off of its po-faced 3D perch, The Chuckle Brothers have revealed that not only are they making their first movie but it will be in another dimension. "We've always wanted to make a film. A Chuckle Brothers movie," Barry Chuckle said to Digital Spy. "We've always wanted to do that and there is one in the pipeline now for us to do next year. That is very exciting. "We'll probably be doing that in May, June time. It is a spoof horror and it's going to be in 3D, which is another first for us. We've never been in 3D before." Brothers beyond Spoof Horror? 3D? Consider us sold. Personally, TechRadar is hoping that the movie is more Spooky Goings On than Spooky Goings On 2, though if the plot has any of the pathos of the Brothers' earlier TV effort Doctor What & the Return of the Garlics, then we will be more than pleased. Although The Chuckle Brothers have made a pact with the devil to look the same forever, The Chuckle Brothers have been plying their trade since 1967, but only really made it to the screen in 1985. Interestingly, this is a mere year after James Cameron hit the big time with The Terminator. Although Cameron's and the Chuckle's careers have taken decidedly different paths since then, it will be interesting to see if in 2011 The Chuckle Brothers 3D will be the movie which truly brings 3D to the mainstream. 
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| Updated: Android 3.0 rumours: what you need to know Posted: 05 Nov 2010 07:01 AM PDT Details about the next version of Android – Android 3.0, or Gingerbread – are starting to emerge. 05 NOV UPDATE: Gingerbread might actually be Android 2.3 rather than 3.0. If this is the case, we can expect it to be a much smaller update. If Gingerbread is Android 2.3, then Honeycomb will be Android 3.0. 05 NOV UPDATE 2: Rumours have surfaced that Android Gingerbread – the eagerly awaited next generation of the popular mobile OS – could be with us in a matter of days. The rumour has surfaced from a 'trusted source' which of course means very little, but it does appear to be backed up by less subtle hints from Google – including a giant Gingerbread man on the company's lawn. There are also some tweaks in the latest Google Maps release that suggest that Gingerbread is coming soon. UPDATE: On 20 October, we reported that Android 3.0 tablets are rumoured to be heading out to engineers in time for Christmas. If true, this means that we'll see a whole bunch of tablets running Android 3.0 at CES 2011. UPDATE: On 19 October, Android site Phandroid bagged new details on Android 3.0, saying that Android had gone through a graphical change and that carrier branding was "more prominent". Phandroid also found Android 3.0 to have new icon animations, a YouTube makeover, and better Google Voice and Google Talk integration. Android 3.0 release date
Android 3.0 release date is looking like early 2011. Gingerbread is already in some testers' hands - Phandroid has shown an unverified photo of a test build of Android 3.0 running in the wild, while the TweetDeck blog shows Android 3.0 as one of the versions of Android using Android TweetDeck Beta. Android 3.0 features As we reported earlier in July, a Russian podcast details how Android 3.0 will be restricted to high-end handsets (and tablets). The podcast explained that Android 3.0 phones will require at least a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 3.5-inch or larger displays. Confirmed Android 3.0 features include improved copy and paste and support for WebM video playback. The WebM Project confirmed that "WebM support in Android is expected in the Gingerbread release". WebM files are compressed with the VP8 video codec, which Google purchased and open-sourced earlier this year. It's also rumoured that Android 3.0 will feature a new user interface. TechCrunch reported that "Google is focusing the bulk of its efforts on the user experience for the upcoming Gingerbread release." This, Google apparently hopes, will deter handset manufacturers from adding in their own Android 3.0 customizations (such as HTC's Sense). Android 3.0 phones One of the first Android 3.0 phones could be the Samsung Galaxy S2 if another rumour is to be believed. The leaked details of the Galaxy S I9200 claim a 4.3-inch screen with a resolution of 1280x720. On 27 October 2010, reports appeared that Google is to release an Android 3.0 powered Nexus Two with Carphone Warehouse, although we think it's unlikely that Google will bring out another handset now that so many manufacturers are producing them. It's also likely that the PSP Phone will be running Android 3.0. We'll bring you more Android 3.0 details as they emerge. 
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| Buying Guide: What's the best Dell laptop? Posted: 05 Nov 2010 07:00 AM PDT  It can be hard to choose which laptop to buy, but once you've found the brand you want then what next? If you've settled on a Dell, then you're probably wondering what the best Dell laptop is for your budget. Here we've gathered together the top models for your delectation. But if you don't want to buy a Dell, check our 20 best laptops in the world piece. If it's a netbook you want, look at our 15 best netbooks. 1. Dell Inspiron M101z This little Dell does some surprising things for a machine of its type. Not only does it feature an AMD processor, but it has some very fine SRS-powered speakers. It's more powerful than you might think, so will keep you satisfied for some time. Read our full Dell Inspiron M101z review 2. Dell Vostro 3500 Dell's replaced the staid design of previous Vostro machines with a tough and sleek consumer look, Dell has hugely invigorated the range. The addition of powerful Intel Core i3 technology and fantastic usability adds enormously to the package, making a great success for Dell. Read our full Dell Vostro 3500 review 3. Dell Inspiron 15R For the money, the Dell Inspiron 15R is a great machine. The power and usability makes this one of the best machines around. Read our full Dell Inspiron 15R review 4. Dell Latitude E6410 ATG It may be expensive, but the Latitude E6410 ATG is a hugely powerful machine that offers excellent protection for your data – if you're after a semi-rugged portable this is a great choice. Read our full Dell Inspiron E6410 ATG review 5. Alienware M17x Dell-owned Alienware has managed to combine awesome power with great design, along with a host of great features that'll keep you entertained for hours. It's a product that you'll enjoy owning for many years, and in our view this is the best gaming laptop you can currently buy. Don't forget to check out our 20 best laptops in the world piece. Or, if it's a netbook you want, our 15 best netbooks. 
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| Picsel brings Microsoft Office to Android Posted: 05 Nov 2010 05:10 AM PDT  A new app has hit the mobile phone market, which offers up a whole load of functionality from Microsoft's Office suite through your handset. Available for Android, Bada and iOS phones, the application brings the likes of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to your phone, allowing you to view and edit your Office documents on your mobile. At the moment, Picsel Smart Office can boast about being the only document editor available on the Apple App Store and the makers of the app have tried to make it as easy as possible to view and edit docs. For viewing Word and the like, the app automatically resizes content into an easy scrollable format and there's also a carousel style viewer for multiple documents. Ch-ch-changes For those that want to tinker with docs on their mobile, Picsel Smart Office offers a full editing suite. So you can bold up words, underline, change fonts, change size, and save in original format. For added gimmick Picsel Smart Office also has 3D functionality, which means you can view the content in 3D if you have a stereoscopic screen or in anaglyph on a standard screen. Not sure if we would want to see an Excel document in 3D, but it would work pretty well for PowerPoint. While Windows Phone 7 is, understandably, offering up very good Office functionality on Windows handsets, Picsel Smart Office sounds like it is scratching those hard to reach places QuickOffice can't quite reach. Picsel Smart Office is available for download on the Apple App Store, Android Market and Samsung Apps for £5.99 now. 
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| Updated: Samsung Galaxy Tab: best UK prices compared Posted: 05 Nov 2010 05:10 AM PDT  Before the Samsung Galaxy Tab went on sale, it was always a bit unclear how much it was going to cost. But now that it's on UK shelves, the UK mobile networks are rolling out their data plans along with subsidised retail prices, and the picture is starting to look a bit clearer. The good news is that monthly data plans are available from as low as £5 per month. The bad news is that most plans still involve an upfront fee of about £500. You can also get the Galaxy Tab SIM-free from £499. So what are the best Samsung Galaxy Tab deals currently available in the UK? Vodafone Galaxy Tab prices Vodafone is offering the Galaxy Tab for a set upfront fee of £499, providing you also sign up for a data plan. The cheapest Tariff is £3 per month, but on that deal you'll have to pay an additional £2 every day you use 3G data, with a 500MB limit for that day. You've then got the following one-month rolling deals:
Orange Galaxy Tab prices Orange is going for a slightly different strategy, offering a slightly better upfront deal depending on which data plan you choose. The cheapest monthly deal is a pay-as-you-go type deal where you pay 5p per MB with a £40 cap for the month. On this deal you pay £529 for the device upfront. The other deals on offer are:
We're expecting more networks to reveal their 3G data plans for the Galaxy Tab soon, so we'll let you know when we know more. Talk Mobile Galaxy Tab prices Talk Mobile – Carphone Warehouse's own virtual network (using Vodafone's infrastructure) is also offering Samsung Galaxy Tab deals. They are as follows:
Phones4u Galaxy Tab prices Phones4u is showing the Galaxy Tab on its website with the following prices:
Carphone Warehouse Galaxy Tab prices Carphone Warehouse has Galaxy tab deals on its site as follows:
PC World Galaxy Tab prices PC World is selling the Galaxy Tab SIM-free and on contract with Three and Vodafone. Prices are as follows:
Best Buy Galaxy Tab prices Best Buy has just one Galaxy Tab option as follows:
Play.com Galaxy Tab prices Play.com is also offering the Tab SIM-free:
Dixons Galaxy Tab prices Dixons has gone down the SIM-free route, too:
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| Tutorial: 25 handy Google search tips and tricks Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:40 AM PDT  The good thing about Google is that generally, you don't have to be too precise or bend over backwards to find things. When you want something specific, though, or just can't find it the old-fashioned way, these tips will bring it right to your fingertips. 1. Add context Simply typing in a search term is usually enough, but you can help Google along by adding a little more context to your query. The easiest way is with Boolean operators. For instance, type fish+chips. The most common are + and – for adding and removing elements, but you can also use * as a wildcard, the tilde symbol (top left of your keyboard) for similar terms, and quotes to get only the "exact phrase you type". One that almost nobody uses is |, which means 'or'. 2. Search certain sites Google doesn't have to look at the entire internet. By adding a 'site: clarification', you can point it to just one page (or, using an 'I' as well, multiple). For instance, if you can't remember whether you read an article on our page or on our sister site TechRadar, you could ask it for microsoft site:pcplus.co.uk | site:techradar.com to bring up lists from both. The order you get them in will depend on how much PageRank the individual articles have, but both of them will appear in the lists. 3. Check spellings Google can also zero in to specific types of search, such as replacing your dictionary. Do the search define:portmanteau and it'll pull definitions of the word from a number of different sources, including Wordnetwb, Wiktionary and Wikipedia. You can also use a regular Google search to check your spelling by typing in how you think a word goes. If you have it wrong, the correct version will be listed at the top of the search results. Of course, it'll still do the search too. 4. Do sums Google has a powerful calculation engine built in. Try a simple sum like 4*25 and it'll spit out 100 almost immediately. That's not the clever part. Try 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius, or MMX in decimal and Google pulls the numbers and works it out. It's not guaranteed, of course – often you'll just get search results. A few of the more advanced ones include the Faraday Constant, the mass of Earth and handling distances in Astronomical Units. However, for more powerful calculations of that sort, accessing many more databases, try Wolfram Alpha. 5. Ask direct questions Simpler searches will pop up immediately, which can be very handy. Why mess around with time zones when you can just ask What is the time in San Francisco? You can also look up similar live details, including the status of flights in the air, although to be on the safe side, it's best to go to the airline company's own page for live lookups. 6. Search by location Location-aware search may still be limited, but you can get a head start by telling Google where to look. Say, for instance, that you want fish and chips. There's no point simply typing fish and chips, unless you're interested in the history or cooking details, but add your postcode on the end of the search – in the case of our office, fish and chips ba12bw, and it'll highlight the nearest places, give you phone numbers, show you a map and even display some reviews. 7. Filter your results Google is often smarter than it appears, given a nudge. In Google Images, try a word that could be misconstrued – a name such as Heather or Raven or Cliff . Down the left-hand side, you'll see a dedicated option to only show faces, stripping out any non-human entries. The same panel can also only show clip art, photos or line drawings, ignore colour or monochrome as you prefer, and even focus solely on results meeting a particular colour palette. By default, Cliff mostly shows, obviously, cliffs. Switch to faces, and it's Cliff Richard. Choose red, and it's a DVD called Red Cliff . 8. Browse by subject The Wonder Wheel gives another way of browsing these options. It's also in the left-hand sidebar, but this time it produces a chart. The original search provides the starting node, with paths jutting off in all directions. Click these and you move from node to node, getting further away from the original search, but hopefully in the right direction. This is great for when you're not sure what you want, or you just want to explore. 9. Log your searches As well as searches, Google can keep a log of the sites you've visited using a feature called Web History – try it out by visiting www.google.com/history. This uses a toolbar to track your movements – not just on Google – bringing up a timeline of your actions and searching your archives online. You can also switch it to just monitor your searches. Needless to say, if you're worried about the privacy implications of this, or that you might accidentally stumble onto the 'wrong' site, make sure you leave this one alone. 10. Sort by time The explosion of blogs, Twitter and live news reporting means that Google now factors time into its searches. Many searches will now display Twitter posts, videos and relevant news stories, but to be even more specific, look in the left-hand column to zero in by time. This ranges from simply 'Latest' to 'Past 24 Hours', 'Past 2 Days' (good for factoring in time distances), or a 'Custom Range' for if you know when something happened. Simply typing a year into the search box rarely works. 11. Use the cache If a site's down, it's not the end of the world. Google caches most of the pages in its search collection, and you can access them by entering, say, cache:pcplus.co.uk – although hopefully our site is up and running perfectly smoothly while you read this! The cache tells you when the snapshot was taken, and gives you the option for a text-only view. Importantly, though, when you click on a link, it goes outside the cache. You'll need to append the 'cache: tag' to each page in turn if you want to keep browsing. 12. Search for specific files Trying to find a particular type of file? Google doesn't only look for HTML. Type what you're looking for and then append the 'filetype:tag' on the end. For instance, 'filetype:doc' will only bring up those types of file. This search supports PDF, Office formats, Shockwave Flash and a few more. 13. Optimise your search results If a search isn't producing the right results for you, there are ways in which you can optimise it. In the left-hand sidebar, look for the option that says 'Related Searches'. At the top of the search, you'll find a stack of other searches that have taken people to the pages you're looking at. Searching for 'Inception', for instance, offers alternatives ranging from 'inception meaning' and 'inception 2010' to 'inception plot' and even 'christopher nolan'. 14. Personalise your search The more you use Google, the more it learns about you. By logging in, it remembers what you've looked at and makes it easier to find things. Of course, you might not want that, in which case you can log out. You'll also want to do this if you're ego-surfing or doing SEO work to make sure you're getting the same Google rankings that anyone else would. 15. Search by Timeline The Timeline lets you zoom in on any time range and see news pulled from assorted sources, including books in Google Books, newspaper reports and web pages. Searching for the Anglo-French Wars, for instance, brings up a timeline that runs from 1600-2010, stepping down into individual years, then months. This is a great way to track the progress of a story back through time. 16. Customise your search The Google sidebar offers a number of useful customisation options, including stripping out shopping sites if you just want information, or vice versa if you're in the mood to buy. You can also prioritise sites you've visited, sites you've yet to see and much more. 17. See more results It's said that most people only look at the first few results, but if you want more, you can crank up the number. Simply visit the preferences page and you can alter this so it displays up to 100 results, although this will obviously slow down the search. 18. Search safely Everyone knows you can activate SafeSearch to cut out most of the nasty content online, but if you want to be a little safe, 'Search Preferences' also lets you lock SafeSearch on any PC. It only applies to the browser you're currently using, and you'll need a Google Account to do it. 19. Search by extension It's amazing what you can find if you know what file extensions to look for. Feeling nosey? Do a search for inurl:view/view.shtml and you'll get nothing but webcam views from around the world. Think of it as oneway chat roulette. 20. Monitor social media Not a Twitter or Facebook user, but want to see the latest stories being passed around? Google now acts as a targeted firehouse for update content. Do a search, then click on the 'Updates' option in the sidebar. Any new results are automatically displayed. 21. Follow trends Even if you only run a simple blog or fan page, it's worth spending some time thinking about SEO. Google Trends lets you see what people are looking for around the world, revealing the most sought-after stories. 22. Look for title content Google isn't restricted to searching page text. If you really want to be precise, look for content in the title via 'intitle: tag'. This can be used in a few other ways, such as looking for directories on an FTP server by searching for site:myftp. gov intitle:index of. 23. Add Google to your site If you love Google, you can integrate searches into your own pages. Access the Custom Search Engine beta at www.google.com/cse. You can add sites and pages to its archive, and add the boxes wherever you like. It's $100 for an ad-free version. 24. Get advanced If you're having difficulty forming a search, try the Advanced Search option at www.google. com/advanced_search. There are no tags or Boolean complications, but most of the same abilities in a very easy sheet. Click the option at the bottom for even more tips. 25. Get extra detail Not getting enough information from Google's site descriptions? In the sidebar, look for the option 'Page previews'. This gives you shots of the sites you might be about to visit, as well as extending the site descriptions of the first couple of entries. 
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| Tutorial: 25 handy Google search tips and tricks Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:40 AM PDT The good thing about Google is that generally, you don't have to be too precise or bend over backwards to find things. When you want something specific, though, or just can't find it the old-fashioned way, these tips will bring it right to your fingertips. 1. Add context Simply typing in a search term is usually enough, but you can help Google along by adding a little more context to your query. The easiest way is with Boolean operators. For instance, type fish+chips. The most common are + and – for adding and removing elements, but you can also use * as a wildcard, the tilde symbol (top left of your keyboard) for similar terms, and quotes to get only the "exact phrase you type". One that almost nobody uses is |, which means 'or'. 2. Search certain sites Google doesn't have to look at the entire internet. By adding a 'site: clarification', you can point it to just one page (or, using an 'I' as well, multiple). For instance, if you can't remember whether you read an article on our page or on our sister site TechRadar, you could ask it for microsoft site:pcplus.co.uk | site:techradar.com to bring up lists from both. The order you get them in will depend on how much PageRank the individual articles have, but both of them will appear in the lists. 3. Check spellings Google can also zero in to specific types of search, such as replacing your dictionary. Do the search define:portmanteau and it'll pull definitions of the word from a number of different sources, including Wordnetwb, Wiktionary and Wikipedia. You can also use a regular Google search to check your spelling by typing in how you think a word goes. If you have it wrong, the correct version will be listed at the top of the search results. Of course, it'll still do the search too. 4. Do sums Google has a powerful calculation engine built in. Try a simple sum like 4*25 and it'll spit out 100 almost immediately. That's not the clever part. Try 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius, or MMX in decimal and Google pulls the numbers and works it out. It's not guaranteed, of course – often you'll just get search results. A few of the more advanced ones include the Faraday Constant, the mass of Earth and handling distances in Astronomical Units. However, for more powerful calculations of that sort, accessing many more databases, try Wolfram Alpha. 5. Ask direct questions Simpler searches will pop up immediately, which can be very handy. Why mess around with time zones when you can just ask What is the time in San Francisco? You can also look up similar live details, including the status of flights in the air, although to be on the safe side, it's best to go to the airline company's own page for live lookups. 6. Search by location Location-aware search may still be limited, but you can get a head start by telling Google where to look. Say, for instance, that you want fish and chips. There's no point simply typing fish and chips, unless you're interested in the history or cooking details, but add your postcode on the end of the search – in the case of our office, fish and chips ba12bw, and it'll highlight the nearest places, give you phone numbers, show you a map and even display some reviews. 7. Filter your results Google is often smarter than it appears, given a nudge. In Google Images, try a word that could be misconstrued – a name such as Heather or Raven or Cliff . Down the left-hand side, you'll see a dedicated option to only show faces, stripping out any non-human entries. The same panel can also only show clip art, photos or line drawings, ignore colour or monochrome as you prefer, and even focus solely on results meeting a particular colour palette. By default, Cliff mostly shows, obviously, cliffs. Switch to faces, and it's Cliff Richard. Choose red, and it's a DVD called Red Cliff . 8. Browse by subject The Wonder Wheel gives another way of browsing these options. It's also in the left-hand sidebar, but this time it produces a chart. The original search provides the starting node, with paths jutting off in all directions. Click these and you move from node to node, getting further away from the original search, but hopefully in the right direction. This is great for when you're not sure what you want, or you just want to explore. 9. Log your searches As well as searches, Google can keep a log of the sites you've visited using a feature called Web History – try it out by visiting www.google.com/history. This uses a toolbar to track your movements – not just on Google – bringing up a timeline of your actions and searching your archives online. You can also switch it to just monitor your searches. Needless to say, if you're worried about the privacy implications of this, or that you might accidentally stumble onto the 'wrong' site, make sure you leave this one alone. 10. Sort by time The explosion of blogs, Twitter and live news reporting means that Google now factors time into its searches. Many searches will now display Twitter posts, videos and relevant news stories, but to be even more specific, look in the left-hand column to zero in by time. This ranges from simply 'Latest' to 'Past 24 Hours', 'Past 2 Days' (good for factoring in time distances), or a 'Custom Range' for if you know when something happened. Simply typing a year into the search box rarely works. 11. Use the cache If a site's down, it's not the end of the world. Google caches most of the pages in its search collection, and you can access them by entering, say, cache:pcplus.co.uk – although hopefully our site is up and running perfectly smoothly while you read this! The cache tells you when the snapshot was taken, and gives you the option for a text-only view. Importantly, though, when you click on a link, it goes outside the cache. You'll need to append the 'cache: tag' to each page in turn if you want to keep browsing. 12. Search for specific files Trying to find a particular type of file? Google doesn't only look for HTML. Type what you're looking for and then append the 'filetype:tag' on the end. For instance, 'filetype:doc' will only bring up those types of file. This search supports PDF, Office formats, Shockwave Flash and a few more. 13. Optimise your search results If a search isn't producing the right results for you, there are ways in which you can optimise it. In the left-hand sidebar, look for the option that says 'Related Searches'. At the top of the search, you'll find a stack of other searches that have taken people to the pages you're looking at. Searching for 'Inception', for instance, offers alternatives ranging from 'inception meaning' and 'inception 2010' to 'inception plot' and even 'christopher nolan'. 14. Personalise your search The more you use Google, the more it learns about you. By logging in, it remembers what you've looked at and makes it easier to find things. Of course, you might not want that, in which case you can log out. You'll also want to do this if you're ego-surfing or doing SEO work to make sure you're getting the same Google rankings that anyone else would. 15. Search by Timeline The Timeline lets you zoom in on any time range and see news pulled from assorted sources, including books in Google Books, newspaper reports and web pages. Searching for the Anglo-French Wars, for instance, brings up a timeline that runs from 1600-2010, stepping down into individual years, then months. This is a great way to track the progress of a story back through time. 16. Customise your search The Google sidebar offers a number of useful customisation options, including stripping out shopping sites if you just want information, or vice versa if you're in the mood to buy. You can also prioritise sites you've visited, sites you've yet to see and much more. 17. See more results It's said that most people only look at the first few results, but if you want more, you can crank up the number. Simply visit the preferences page and you can alter this so it displays up to 100 results, although this will obviously slow down the search. 18. Search safely Everyone knows you can activate SafeSearch to cut out most of the nasty content online, but if you want to be a little safe, 'Search Preferences' also lets you lock SafeSearch on any PC. It only applies to the browser you're currently using, and you'll need a Google Account to do it. 19. Search by extension It's amazing what you can find if you know what file extensions to look for. Feeling nosey? Do a search for inurl:view/view.shtml and you'll get nothing but webcam views from around the world. Think of it as oneway chat roulette. 20. Monitor social media Not a Twitter or Facebook user, but want to see the latest stories being passed around? Google now acts as a targeted firehouse for update content. Do a search, then click on the 'Updates' option in the sidebar. Any new results are automatically displayed. 21. Follow trends Even if you only run a simple blog or fan page, it's worth spending some time thinking about SEO. Google Trends lets you see what people are looking for around the world, revealing the most sought-after stories. 22. Look for title content Google isn't restricted to searching page text. If you really want to be precise, look for content in the title via 'intitle: tag'. This can be used in a few other ways, such as looking for directories on an FTP server by searching for site:myftp. gov intitle:index of. 23. Add Google to your site If you love Google, you can integrate searches into your own pages. Access the Custom Search Engine beta at www.google.com/cse. You can add sites and pages to its archive, and add the boxes wherever you like. It's $100 for an ad-free version. 24. Get advanced If you're having difficulty forming a search, try the Advanced Search option at www.google. com/advanced_search. There are no tags or Boolean complications, but most of the same abilities in a very easy sheet. Click the option at the bottom for even more tips. 25. Get extra detail Not getting enough information from Google's site descriptions? In the sidebar, look for the option 'Page previews'. This gives you shots of the sites you might be about to visit, as well as extending the site descriptions of the first couple of entries. 
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| Exclusive: Facebook: There's no magic wand for apps Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:39 AM PDT  Facebook's head of mobile has claimed that Android and other mobile platforms are now just as important as the iPhone to the social network. Some consumers have claimed that Apple users always get access to the best Facebook Mobile features, like being the first to try out Places, but Henri Moissinac told TechRadar that it's simply a case of what works best for each platform: "Of course, we want to deploy [all features] across all platforms at once, but in the past we've done things first on the iPhone and then tested to see what happens. "Yesterday was the first time we launched two at once [new applications for the iPhone and Android], but we don't have a magic want to update all platforms at once; if you ask any developer trying to synchronise across all at once is very hard. "It's not that the iPhone has all the best features, for instance you can't share directly from taking a picture or sync contacts to your address book - in that case Windows Phone 7 is best. "But until we can get a much larger engineering team or a magic wand [there will always be disparity in places]." Combined future Moissinac also said that the desktop and mobile applications would always co-exist, although some users have migrated almost exclusively onto mobile: "Comparing the mobile and web versions of the site, there are some users that are mobile only, or might only check on a PC ever six weeks or so. "There has been some cannibalisation from the likes of iPhone or Android users, but when you look at the metrics both formats are still on the increase, so we see a world when the world is both web and mobile together." 
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| Weird Tech: Freaky fembots and non-splatted bats Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:00 AM PDT  If we were asked to describe the last seven days in one word, we'd say "week" - but if we weren't allowed that word, we'd say "roboty", "batty", "flashy" or "printy". The Uncanny Valley is when a robot or image is almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from a human being. Our brains spot that something isn't quite right and we get a severe case of the creeps - which is exactly what happens when you see Actroid-F in action.
FREAKBOT: Actroid-F is a robot. We think the F stands for "freaky", or "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu-" [that's enough - Ed] This humanoid robot is designed to work in hospitals, presumably by frightening old people to death so that someone else can get their beds. It's just a matter of time before someone tries to mate her with NASA's R2D2-ish Robonaut 2. It's a lot less bovver with a hover There's something deeply disturbing about machines that seem to work by magic, and the Quadrocopter definitely falls into that category.
WHIRRRRRR: Flying with lasers? Pull the other one. IT'S MADE BY ALIENS! According to Engadget it "is designed to get energized by converting beams into power via a set of photovoltaic panels on its underside, and in a recent test, lasers were able to keep it afloat for over 12 hours". Laser-powered aircraft? Sounds like magic to us. Walls have ears (and USB plugs) If you've ever thought "Peer to peer file sharing is ace, but it'd be much more convenient if I had to visit New York, locate a USB drive stuck to a wall and plug it into my laptop" then artist Aram Bartholl has a sharing system for you. According to Discover magazine, Bartholl is happily sticking USB drives around New York so that "people will share something important to them, possibly pictures, art, or words." LOLCATS and viruses are much more likely, we reckon. Bat for smashes Dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, BAT-AAAAGH! That's the sound of wind turbines in action: it seems that US wind farms have an unfortunate habit of turning bats into blancmange as the vision-impaired rodents fly through the turbine blades. It's a particular problem for the Hoary Bat, which wind farms tend to turn into the Splatty Bat. Good news for bat fans: a slight change to the way wind farms work could stop them shredding the cheeky little squeakers. A new study found that a slight increase in the turbine speed reduced bat splatting by as much as 93 per cent, with virtually no loss in power generation. Print your own Porsche Wouldn't it be great if you could print your own car? That's the thinking behind the Urbee Hybrid, which claims to be the world's first 3D printed car.
OUCH: Imagine printing your own car. Now imagine the cost of the inkjet cartridges Before you get excited about downloading BMW blueprints from Bittorrent, we'd better point out that the Urbee is a bit more complicated than that: while its bodywork was printed using 3D printing technology, the oily bits that make it go weren't. Given the cost of inket cartridges that's probably for the best: our quick back-of-envelope calculations indicate that printing an Urvee will cost you a million jillion pounds. 
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| Gary Marshall: David Cameron's high-tech hype Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:30 AM PDT  It's easy to mock the government's plans for Silicon Marshes, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't. Here's a quick round-up of what's happening. East London will become a high-tech haven, with businesses getting a helping hand from Google, Facebook and other tech titans. The government will review intellectual property laws to make them nicer, and there will be a visa programme enabling firms to bring in talented folks from other countries without worrying about immigration caps. On paper it all sounds very impressive, if a bit naive – with the best will in the world, Shoreditch won't ever be Silicon Valley's mini-me as long as the UK remains one of the most highly taxed and most expensive countries on the planet – but when you look at it in a bit more detail there are some worrying questions. London-centric First up, why London? The UK's a big place, but there's nothing in the high-tech plans for the rest of the country. I'm sure that's gone down well in Dundee, where the beleaguered games industry won tax breaks from Labour that were promptly cancelled by the ConDem coalition. Secondly, intellectual property laws. In opposition, Nick Clegg railed against the Digital Economy Act, arguing that "it was too heavily weighted in favour of the big corporations". Clegg promised to abolish it and the Tories to amend it; the second they gained power they changed their minds. Now, it seems, we're going to review our laws to make them more Google-friendly - including, it seems, our patent laws. The prospect of US-style software patents is a chilling one, with big firms using them to stifle competition and patent trolls effectively running legal extortion rackets. This post on the patent mayhem surrounding Android should give you an idea of how crazy the US system has become. Thirdly, there's the involvement of Facebook and Google. There's something disturbing about seeing the two online giants so close to government, because our government appears particularly bad at getting them to stick to the law. A hub and a home Still, it's nice that Google will create "an Innovation Hub in East London" and that Facebook "has agreed to create a permanent home in East London for their successful Developer Garage programme". Do you know what would be even nicer? If Google and Facebook paid tax properly. Both firms use - legal - tax avoidance schemes to avoid paying the taxes they should, with Google managing an effective tax rate of just 2.4%. By channelling its UK revenues through Ireland, Google avoids an estimated £110 million per year in UK tax. Facebook is building a similar system of avoidance. Google and Facebook aren't the only ones happy to help the UK's high-tech sector. David Cameron announced that "Vodafone has committed to bring its Vodafone Ventures investment fund to the capital". That's the same Vodafone whose shops are currently being picketed over claims of massive tax avoidance. Campaigners say that an "unbelievable cave-in" by the taxman let the firm avoid paying a six billion-pound tax bill, although Vodafone denies the allegations. Is it just me, or is there something horribly unethical about all of this? Having Google and Facebook throw Shoreditch a few crumbs while avoiding hundreds of millions, even billions of pounds in tax is a bit like someone stealing your dinner and then offering you a half-chewed chip. Games industry group TIGA reckons that tax breaks for the videogames industry would create 3,500 jobs and bring in £200m for the treasury over five years. If they're right, just imagine how many jobs could be created if the government's high tech heroes actually paid what they should. 
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| Review: Blip Interactive NanoStudio 1.0 Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:30 AM PDT  NanoStudio's arrival on the iPhone in July was swiftly followed by MacFormat scurrying off to a darkened room, to spend hours composing exciting electronic music. The £8.99 app was a revelation – loads of great built-in voices, a six-track sequencer, effects, live recording and pattern editing – and it made redundant the need for GarageBand on iOS. With the app being pricey, the developer decided to create a 'demo' for PC and Mac, which became NanoStudio 1.0. What you get with NanoStudio for the Mac is essentially the iOS version: dozens of voices, pads and pitch-bend that can be manipulated live, knobs to twiddle and effects to apply. When you're done recording, you can edit patterns in a GarageBand-like fashion, amend the mix, and export everything as a WAV. Unfortunately, controls are accessed by mouse-clicks only – there's no Mac keyboard or USB piano-style keyboard support; and the workspace is tiny, as per the iPhone version. This makes using some aspects of the app decidedly quirky, although we still found it usable, which shows how much thought went into the iOS version. It's way more than a mere demo, but just short of classic status; but since it's free, it's still a no-brainer. Related Links
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| New Sony Blu-ray rewritable drives to support 3D Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:23 AM PDT  Sony has announced that it will be producing half-height internet Blu-ray Disc rewritable drives – which will allow playback of 3D Blu-ray movies. Sony Optiarc America has announced that the new drives have a 12x recording speed for single BD-R content and 8x for dual-layer. "Available in a retail and OEM configuration, the new drives are an ideal replacement burner for a standard DVD drive while offering all the benefits of Blu-ray Disc technology, including Blu-ray 3D high-definition playback," explained Sony's release. SATA "The internal drives feature a Serial ATA (SATA) interface and standard 5.25-inch form-factor for easy installation inside a desktop PC," it adds. "They also incorporate intelligent monitoring for consistent recording, and adjusting read-speed technology which enhances smooth playback." The drives will be available in November in the US, although there is as yet no details on UK release date or pricing. 
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| Windows Live team excited by Kinect's video calls Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:00 AM PDT  Microsoft is celebrating the launch of Kinect, but the Xbox 360 team is not the only one in buoyant mood, with the Windows Live team also hoping that the video call functionality of the new arrival will be popular. Video Kinect allows people to use their shiny new Kinect to video chat with their messenger friends – even if they only have a more typical web cam. "At Windows Live, we're very excited…because it gives our more than 300 million Messenger users worldwide a new way to stay connected with their Messenger friends," blogged Piero Serra. At launch "At launch, Xbox LIVE Gold members will be able to video chat with friends from their TVs using the new Video Kinect feature," he continued "And not only can you video chat from Xbox to Xbox, you can also video chat with your Messenger friends and family from your TV set to their PC or Mac with a webcam." The Kinect video chat also offers some enhanced (and some would say eerie) functionality. "Kinect's new smart cameras do a lot more than an ordinary computer webcam, automatically panning, zooming, and physically tilting up and down to follow you around the room while you chat," added Serra "And if another person walks into the viewing area, the camera automatically reframes the shot to fit everyone in." 
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| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:00 AM PDT  You may be under the impression that all you need is Time Machine to ensure the integrity of your data. However, a belt-and-braces approach is always a much safer option. The more backups you have of your data, the less likely you are to be worried when a hard disk starts making a weird clicking noise. There's no shortage of backup tools available already, but just like everything, some approaches suit a working style better than others. The latest edition of Get Backup Pro offers a three-way approach to try and bridge a gap of sorts. You can run a backup regimen that enables you to save specific folders of content, such as your iPhoto library, mailbox, iTunes folder and Address Book. Or, if you prefer, you can simply clone your disks for a complete copy. Thirdly, you can synchronise selected folders so content is stored in two places at once. This is, no doubt, a good way to attract those users who like a belt, braces and another-belt-for-good-measure backup routine. The good news is that this triple-routine doesn't add to the complexity at all. Get Backup Pro has a very approachable and easy-to-follow user interface. The three backup options are all managed from a single interface, but the layout doesn't lead to confusion and it's clear whether you're backing up, cloning or syncing. The three sections are easy enough to master, starting with the backup window. Here there are five pre-defined backup routines: iPhoto, Mail, iTunes, Documents and Address Book. Simply click on one of the icons to add that folder to your backup procedure. You can mix and match, do one at a time or all five, with the option to save to different locations or all to the same disk. If you prefer, you can also simply add a folder of your choice. The clone window is, as you might expect, easy enough to follow too – simply choose a source and destination – with the Synchronise pane just as clear. Each backup is referred to as a project and you can have just a few or a selection of different ones, but naturally the more you have, the more complex it becomes to manage. You can schedule the backups to occur whenever you want and, in this pro version, encrypt your backups for extra security. (There's a free version without the encryption options, synchronisation limited to one-way syncing, and some other minor restrictions.) If you've got a lot of data, you'll be in for a long wait the first time you use it. After that, we found it to be speedy and stable. If you're a home user, then the Pro version probably isn't necessary, but having encrypted backups, two-way synchronisation, and incremental backups is handy. We really liked the clear interface, which makes it easy even for the complete novice to manage a range of backup routines. Related Links
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| Video: Google Instant comes to Android and iPhone Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:42 AM PDT  Google has announced that it has brought Google Instant, its super-speedy search tech, to Android 2.2 and iPhone handsets in the US. Although this isn't a global launch of the technology, it shows that Google is investing a lot of its search efforts in its mobile arm. Google Instant originally came to the web back in September and has wowed and scared people in equal measure. Although the search engine does look like it is having a fit, coughing up results faster than you can think them, Google is pleased that its technology is breaking search boundaries. Big speed improvements "With Google Instant on mobile, we're pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks. "You will probably notice a big improvement in speed when you search thanks to a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation for mobile that dynamically updates the page with new results and eliminates the need to load a new page for each query." How well the technology works is based on how good the 3G and Wi-Fi is in your area, with Google explaining: "Google Instant for mobile works best on 3G and Wi-Fi networks, but since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we've made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the "Turn on" or "Turn off" link." As for a launch in the UK – we are still waiting with bated breath, but knowing Google it will be just around the corner. 
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| Review: Realmac Software Courier Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:30 AM PDT  Courier transforms the process of sharing your media, by doing away with lists of files and replacing them with the analogy of an envelope you put in the post. Pop your photos in the digital envelope, stamp it with the service you'd like to upload it to and hit Deliver to send your images off to your chosen location. It supports popular services including Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and FTP, and you can add others as plug-ins, such as TwitPic. All you need to do is authenticate each account and Courier does the rest. Courier looks the part from the moment you open it. The app has a gorgeous interface that feels right at home in OS X, and is slightly reminiscent of the excellent Delicious Library. You can tag media you add and give each a description, although annoyingly you can't tag batches. Certain services also enable you to upload to a specific album, which can save you time. It's a fantastic idea that works well on the whole, but it's blighted by a series of niggles. Despite its stunning looks, finding your way around isn't all that intuitive, and the interface's sparse nature can make it difficult to know what to do next. For example, if you try to deliver an envelope without stamping it, Courier tells you that action can't be completed, but it doesn't offer you an instant way to rectify the problem. And the Stamp button on the user interface looks more like a pencil than anything else. Frustration can easily ensue. There are other areas where this lack of intuitiveness undermines Courier – when an FTP upload went wrong, for example, we weren't given any reason why. Such instances are a shame, because this could be a gem. Fingers crossed for the next version. Related Links
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| Google blocks Facebook from its Contacts Posted: 05 Nov 2010 01:59 AM PDT  The increasingly frosty relationship between Facebook and Google has grown a little colder, with the search giant making a change to its terms and conditions that will stop the social networking site having access to your email contacts. Facebook has previously been allowed to comb through your Gmail contacts to find potential matches, but Google is unhappy that its openness is not being reciprocated. A change to the site's Terms of Service – as reported on TechCrunch – means that any site that wants to use the Google Contacts API has to offer reciprocity. Pulled the plug Facebook does not allow the export of contact information for your friends – and this means that Google has pulled the plug. "Google is committed to making it easy for users to get their data into and out of Google products," said a Google statement. "That is why we have a data liberation engineering team dedicated to building import and export tools for users. "We are not alone. Many other sites allow users to import and export their information, including contacts, quickly and easily. But sites that do not, such as Facebook, leave users in a data dead end. "So we have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook they are effectively trapped." Ways and means There are still ways and means for users to export their own contacts and then convert them into a file that Facebook can read - although this is obviously a major hurdle for the average person and some way away from the convenience of the previous method. "Google users will still be free to export their contacts from our products to their computers in an open, machine-readable format – and once they have done that they can then import those contacts into any service they choose, added Google "However, we will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites." This will be a major, although by no means critical, blow for Facebook – with its huge user base having already used the tool previously and dels with Yahoo and Microsoft (Hotmail) meaning they will not close off their contacts to the social networking giant. We're guessing that Mark Zuckerberg may not be receiving a Christmas card from Larry and Sergei this year. 
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