Interview: 'The systems start at around £60,000'
There have been remarkable advances in digital sound technologies over the years, none more so than from Lyngdorf Audio, the Danish exponent of cutting-edge signal processing.
DSP signal tweaking is common on most integrated amps, but the ingenuity of the Lyngdorf proposition (which effectively allows audio to transcend the physical confines of any listening space) is startling.
To learn more, Home Cinema Choice magazine sat down with Rob Sinden, head of Lyngdorf's UK distributor Gecko.
Sinden has been a long-standing advocate of high-end audio and video and was an early convert to the potential of Lyngdorf. More recently the brand has attracted attention by partnering with audio legend Steinway...
Home Cinema Choice: We were blown away by the first Steinway Lyngdorf system. It's an interesting alliance...
Rob Sinden: Lyngdorf is the technology partner behind the collaboration, while Steinway is involved in the manufacture and the aesthetic design. Lyngdorf's gear traditionally keeps stereo audio (music) as a digital signal throughout its electronics, so far less noise and colouration is added to the recording.
Keeping the signal digital also means that any acoustic errors listening rooms may create can be reduced without compromising sound quality. That's normally not possible with traditional analogue amps. As a result, Lyngdorf digital audio systems will give far more consistent results from room to room.
Now the company has teamed up with Steinway [makers of premium musical instruments] to create a home cinema solution that keeps the signal in the digital domain throughout. That's important, as the audio signal in a home cinema goes through a lot more decoding than in a stereo hi-fi system. Even more noise is added.
The benefits of Steinway Lyngdorf's systems don't stop with the fidelity. While others may achieve reference volume levels up to 4 metres away, Steinway Lyngdorf's can fill rooms over 50m long.
Also, thanks to their unique room correction features, they will vary less than 2dB from room to room, rather than over 15dB from most other reference systems. And with a signal-to-noise ratio of 113dB rather than a typical 80dB or less, the sounds you hear are not accompanied by the noise that other systems create.
HCC: Traditionally, hi-fi purists will argue that the signal path should be as pure as possible. The Lyngdorf approach seems at odds with this...
RS: That obsession with keeping the signal path pure is completely logical, but the fact is that with any other brand you are immediately aware of the 'sound' of these components. With Lyngdorf and Steinway Lyngdorf systems, your music is being reproduced with nothing added by your equipment. The difference is really dramatic when you first hear it.
HCC: There's some heavy science behind Lyngdorf room correction. But how difficult is it to use? Do you need to be an expert to set it up?
RS: It has evolved quite a bit over the 11 years since the first [system] was introduced. When I first came across the room correction, it was something that needed a lot of experience to set up. But the current incarnation – called 'RoomPerfect' – is simple enough for anyone to set up, and doesn't require the laptop of its predecessors.
It's built into the Lyngdorf stereo amps, as well as the Steinway Lyngdorf music and home theatre systems.
HCC: But if you have a dedicated listening room or theatre, then the benefits must be minimal?
RS: At Gecko we've built what I hope is the best acoustic space in the country – maybe some recording studios are better, but beyond that... Dimensions and angles, wall construction, acoustic treatment – the designers (a company called Rives Audio) has factored in absolutely everything possible.
The speakers are Miller and Kreisel 150s, which we've used for years – and a lot of top film studios still use them for mixing their movies. We've also got some very powerful analogue amps and Audyssey room correction (which will make up to 10,000 corrections per channel, and has a resolution of a completely different order from any other EQ we've tried).
We've approached it as you would a professional system – put in the kinds of speaker they mix a lot of the films with, together with very good amps and room correction. And it sounds superb. But in my experience, the Steinway Lyngdorf system absolutely wipes the floor with it. It's simply far more advanced.
HCC: So how does RoomPerfect work?
RS: Well, say you've bought Bowers &Wilkins, Dali, KEF or whatever speakers, you presumably like the sound of them. RoomPerfect is not trying to change the sound of that speaker – instead, it's trying to remove the effect the room has on the speakers.
The general point I'd make is that there's no such thing as a perfect room – it just doesn't exist. If you take a hi-fi system and move it from one room to another, it will sound quite different. The ironic thing is that a lot of dealers' demo rooms are worse than the average consumer's living room. Often the walls of their demonstration rooms are cheap, lightweight partitions. It's like trying to have a party in a biscuit tin, it's so reflective and echoey.
Room correction can improve that considerably – it can't stop walls from resonating, obviously, and if you've got a bad speaker no amount of correction can make it sound good. All room correction can do is make the speaker sound as good as its potential allows. It brings a consistency from room to room, and from system to system.
There are 20,000 different audio frequencies flying around from multiple speakers with different responses, all arriving at different times. Some are hitting the floor or carpet first, while others might find a wall or a potted plant. Each one of these is going to do something different to the reflected sound that you hear.
HCC: What are your thoughts on home cinema room design?
RS: The conventional way of doing things is to use diffusers and absorbers to deal with unwanted reflections. Doing things the Steinway Lyngdorf way, there are no unwanted reflections of any significance, and so you don't need this damping and absorption.
More and more people in this country are starting to realise that they have to consider some acoustic design or treatment as part of a high-end home-cinema install. The problem is that a lot of people offering that service really aren't very competent – they're just not acoustics experts.
I've worked with a lot of so-called 'acousticians' in the past. A couple of them have been fantastic, but several others have been really lousy – they've not really understood small-room acoustics. When you hear the Steinway Lyngdorf system in a completely untreated room, the difference is quite apparent.
I think that most of the people who are going to go for these really high-end systems don't want to spend a lot of money on acoustic treatment. Indeed, I see it as a negative thing. In the cinema room that I used to have I had 10kW of amplification – much of the output of which was being absorbed! In other words, you're putting tons of power into the room and then sucking it out with room treatment.
HCC: So what would a typical Steinway Lyngdorf home cinema system be?
RS: There's a single processor it makes called the P1. That deals with all existing formats out there, and has the RoomPerfect technology built in. It links up to the digital power amps via proprietary cabling and connectors so it's digital all the way through.
The company makes a variety of different speaker systems that bolt onto that. It's modular – you add as many power amps as you need. The systems start at around £60,000, but I'm using a £100,000 7.8 system in my demo room, with loads of the boundary woofers (pictured above) in there.
HCC: That's pretty pricey! What sort of upgrade path is there? Can you start off with two-channel and work your way up?
RS: Lyngdorf equipment is stereo, but we are seeing lots of people who are changing to these systems from far more expensive conventional stereo systems. Many of these people are now adding conventional AV receivers and compact speakers for surround sound. That works really well, but it's an enthusiast's system.
A few installed Steinway Lyngdorf surround systems use the Model D stereo speakers – they've been purchased by those who want the best stereo as well as the best home theatre. If people have very large rooms, or they want crazy sound pressure levels, there's the Grand Theatre system which uses Steinway Lyngdorf's Model LS line-source speakers. A couple of film stars in the States have gone for those...
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Review: Bean 2.4.2
Over the years, word processors have taken on board aspects of desktop publishing software, and in doing so have become over-complex and bloated. To that end, many Mac users fire up TextEdit when all they want to do is write.
Bean attempts to offer something of a halfway house — the speed of TextEdit, but with some advanced features that Apple's own editor lacks.
In use, Bean comes across like an unreleased TextEdit Pro. It lacks a few TextEdit features (autocomplete in Snow Leopard being the sole major omission we noticed), but adds live word count, basic templating, date-stamped backups, and an enhanced Find panel.
Writing is also sped up in various ways: keyboard shortcuts provide access to a huge range of actions; selections can be made by font style, family, size or colour; and there's even a handy Complete Word option, for when you're struggling with how to spell tricky words.
We were also impressed by Bean's interface: the main window's toolbar and icons are great, and Preferences enable important things to be configured to suit.
Obviously, there are restrictions with an app such as Bean. Although it reads and writes to various formats, including DOC and DOCX, compatibility is limited — images, tables and formatting will be stripped from DOCX, for example, leaving just text.
However, for writing quick notes, Bean is a must-have download for anyone who wishes TextEdit offered a little bit more.
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Review: Mindjet MindManager 8
A mind map is a graphical way of making notes, and MindManager 8 is a piece of software to help you with this process.
By visually organising your information, you can collect your thoughts and ideas around a central theme. Individual elements can be mapped as separate branches within your overall plan, further leading into minor details and specifics.
Information is readily accessible without becoming overwhelming, the relationship between individual concepts is clear and you can pay attention to the minutiae without losing track of the big picture. Progress can be recorded too, with milestones set and completed.
Mindjet MindManager 8 is one of the biggest mind-mapping tools on the Mac. It's surprisingly easy to use. Pre-designed templates are available for planning events, conferences, meetings, SWOT analyses (that's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats), to-do lists, travel plans and more.
Naturally, you can start with a blank map instead if you wish. You can save your mind maps as templates too.
Branching out
A very useful feature lets you link images, URLs, notes or documents with specific points on your mind map. For example, if you're planning a holiday, an entry about outward travel could be linked to a list of service stations on your planned route; a branch about day trips could offer bus timetables or web pages covering your intended destinations, and there's a collapsible side panel for your notes. It's certainly more comprehensive than ConceptDraw MINDMAP's linking tool.
If it all gets a bit unwieldy and overwhelming, you can hide specific branches, collapse and expand sub-topics and filter your map to hide and reveal specific items.
With this eighth release, the Mac version of MindManager is no longer the Windows application's poor relation. Launched over a year later than its PC counterpart, the extra time in development has clearly been put to good use.
A great deal of effort has been put into integrating it with OS X's native applications, as well as iWork and Microsoft Office. Yet this integration is a mixed bag. While calendar events can be added quickly and easily – accessed through the map entry with which they're associated – Address Book integration is clumsy and awkward.
Attaching addresses to your mind map is far from instinctive, and while it's useful for sharing your addresses as vCards with those who share your map, checking addresses is a chore.
One feature from the Windows version that's still lacking in the Mac app is the facility to export a specific branch to its own separate mind map, while retaining its links with the parent document. On a PC, it's as easy as right-clicking and selecting an option, but on the Mac, this feature is nowhere to be found.
This seems a bizarre omission considering how much attention has been paid to the Mac app's feature set, even to the point of supporting Gestures for when you're using it on a MacBook and sharing maps via iChat during real-time conversations.
Best of breed?
The casual user may prefer the more visually striking, very Mac-like and significantly cheaper OmniGraffle 5, but for the more demanding mindmapper, MindManager 8's integration with OS X applications, high degree of configurability and comprehensive linking tools win through.
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Guide: How to make a USB soundcard
Everyone has dreamt of being able to save the day by swooping in and helping that damsel in distress out, by plugging in that vital USB sound card when the sound fails on her laptop in the middle of an important product briefing. Haven't they? Just me then?
Daydream aside, the useful nugget of information we have to part with today, is that cheap throwaway USB headset you have lying at the bottom of a drawer can offer a useful life-enhancing function: working as a USB sound card.
The fact is, to connect and work via the USB it has to offer the analogue to digital conversion done by a standard sound card, along with the all important USB interface as well. This means combining the subtly of a lug hammer with a bit of crafty soldering we can easily construct a generic USB sound card with both stereo output and microphone input.
You're not going to need much more than a couple of 3.5mm mini-jack sockets, a suitable box or heatshrink to contain the thing, a little bit of wire and a soldering iron. This is a perfect little project to cut your teeth on if you've never tried soldering before.
Everything is made for you already and you just need to pick up a cheap soldering iron, usually you will be able to get a basic one for around £5, or pick up a starter kit on eBay for around £20.
What you will need
USB headset
2 x 3.5mm mini-jack sockets
Suitable box or heatshrink
Soldering iron
Costs: £5
1. Collect a bunch of stuff roughly along these lines.
2. Our main area of attack is the box dangling off the USB connection. If you can keep it in one piece great, if not, you'll need a replacement enclosure.
3. Once open you need to establish which of the headphone wires carry which signals. The ground here is labelled 'GND' and is the unshielded copper wire. The blue and red wires carry the left and right channel audio, while the white is the microphone line.
4. With the wires identified – we literally wired up a jack and touch the wires to each terminal – you'll need to decide if you want to transfer the lot to a new box. In that case you could mount internal jacks and use a bit of breadboard to easily couple the connections, else you can cut the headset and start stripping the wire.
5. Once you've added a couple of strips of heatshrink make sure you tin the jack terminals.
6. Slip the jacket over the wire and solder the wires in place.
7. The mic and speaker port share the common ground, we soldered a wire to the ground in-wire.
8. We used two layers of heatshrink: one to cover each single wire and a larger one to cover where the split occurs and give it a little physical support.
9. If you have any affinity for your headset then you can always attach 3.5mm mini-jacks to this and keep on using it.
10. The final thing ends up looking like this. Slightly more useful than what it started off being.
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Review: Panic Unison 2
Usenet has become the ageing, drunken uncle of the internet family. It used to be fun, but it's seen better days and most 21st century internet users ignore it.
Yet while much of its functionality has been superseded by web forums, social networking sites and torrent trackers, there's still some very good discussion and download groups there. Perhaps it's time to rediscover this most ancient of online facilities.
Unison 2 makes it really straightforward to access Usenet servers and navigate newsgroups. There's an easy-access directory for popular subjects, or you can pick your way through the server's entire range of groups using its folder tree and Unison 2's search field.
Managing your favourite newsgroups is simplicity itself, and you can set a group to always open with a specified server from your stored list, which is useful if you need a newsgroup that's not carried by your regular service.
Several posting profiles can be set up and the handling of binaries has been overhauled, making it much easier to find and download the files you want. It's amazing how much configurability has been crammed in without compromising ease of use.
On the downside, the useful facility to unthread a group and manage individual posts has gone, which is surprising. We hope it returns with the next update.
But that's the only (very minor) fault we can find with this comprehensive, capable and very easy to use newsgroup application.
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Review: BusyMac BusyCal 1.2.1
Most people use iCal as their calendar software, since it does most things well, has plenty of features, synchronises with MobileMe and portable devices, and comes for free with OS X. However, it does have its limitations. BusyCal is intended as an 'iCal Pro' for people who want what iCal offers but need more features.
Its advanced features are to do with synchronisation: it can synchronise your calendars with Google Calendar and it can synchronise and edit the calendars of any Macs also running BusyCal.
These features will be useful for some people, although we found BusyCal's Google Calendar synchronisation too buggy and lacking in user-controllable features.
Most of the program's strengths are in improvements to iCal's feature set. It has a list view, sticky notes, and the option to customise fonts and colours for individual events.
To Do's appear on the calendar on the date they're due and they can be set to recur at intervals. The Info panel can be docked, there's a menu bar item, and you can have the weather and phases of the moon show in the calendar.
BusyCal does lack some iCal features, such as CalDAV and read-write Exchange support. Since it stays in sync with iCal, your iPhone, Entourage et al using OS X's SyncServices, you can use BusyCal and other programs at the same time to fill in the blanks in their feature sets.
The program does have some useful functions, but at over £30, BusyCal will be seen by many as overpriced.
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In Depth: 10 new technologies that will revolutionise your life
Staying up to date with everything that's going on in PCs and tech is almost impossible, so these are the ten technologies that you should be most aware of, as they're the ones that'll make the biggest difference to your life.
1. 3D gaming
The fact that to get any kind of 3D image from a 2D screen means wearing a pair of sunglasses or worse means that three dimensional gaming isn't quite as convincing as multitouch and natural user interfaces, even though the two have been commoditised at almost the same time.
An Acer Aspire 5738 laptop with a 3D display costs about £550 at the moment, not bad for something with cutting edge technology that adds depth to any DirectX 9 game. The screen is of the polarised filter type, which is the new norm for extra dimensions.
Instead of using coloured filters splitting an image into two – one for each eye – the vertical pixel columns are alternated between left image and right image and shone through a piece of polarised glass. A pair of dark glasses with oppositely polarised lenses ensures that only one image is seen by each eye. The difference to a game is tangible too, something like WoW runs and looks incredible on the low-end graphics hardware.
It's over in TV land that the real push for 3D is happening, though, as LCD suppliers ask us to upgrade again to watch hyper-real cinema in the lounge. Compared to the other technologies we've talked about here, though, 3D requires a lot of effort on behalf of the watcher (those pesky glasses) and most of us are very lazy; hence the ubiquity of MP3 and standard definition movies, while Blu-ray and higher resolution sound standards continue to flounder. We value ease of use over quality every time.
In its favour, 3D doesn't actually require any work on behalf of games developers or publishers, as the stereoscopic image is created at the driver level. On the other hand, that means there's no massive push by the people who make and sell games to encourage us to adopt it.
2. Streaming games
The advancements in superfast broadband hasn't just helped the cause of downloadable games. It will also have no some small impact on the future of streaming games over broadband, or at least that's the theory.
There are several companies pursuing and a significant amount of money invested in the idea that one day, your precious PC will be almost entirely redundant as a games machine.
The concept is simple: all the game's data is hosted on a central server and all you will have to do is receive the display and send back input commands. It's a little like the technology used for MMORPGs, except that the rendering engine isn't on your PC, it's actually in the same server farm as the core intelligence.
This idea was actually mooted some years ago with the Phantom console, which never made it to the stores. It's looking unlikely that OnLive (www. onlive.com), Gaikai and Microsoft's own streaming project will end up as vapourware though, despite the obvious concerns about input lag: the delay that occurs every time you press a key. The signal has to travel hundreds of miles before a character even moves.
Proponents say that even twitch gaming FPS games are possible but we're a little more sceptical. There's another reason that at least one of these services will be properly launched soon, and that's vested interest by games publishers.
Because no content is stored on your machine, of course, it's impossible to pirate a streamed game, which is obviously an attractive proposition for them. In the immediate future, though, it is more likely to be a technology that runs like games such as Quake Live, which use a combination of some local processing power and some serverbased cycles. That's certainly the route Microsoft is taking, and seems more achievable than relying on 'the cloud' at this stage.
3. Six-core processors
You won't have to wait long for this one. Intel's Westmere CPUs may be hanging around with the dregs of processor society at the moment, chucking their chips in with the integrated graphics crowd, but they're about to grow up – and fast.
Sometime over the next few months Intel will go two better than the current line up of quad-core CPUs by launching a six-core version of its high-end Core i7 line. Based on the existing Nehalem architecture, the headline feature is a process shrink down to 32nm, while the rest of the spec sheet remains largely the same. It could be a genuine upgrade.
Games programmers are getting much better at working with multithreaded code so that most major titles, like Empire: Total War and its forthcoming sequel Napoleon, will see a much bigger performance increase when given extra cores to play around in than the often sporadic leaps in frame rate we saw going from two to four cores.
Because the benefits will be in the amount of cores, rather than the speed of things you can do at once, Intel are encouraging some developers to add extra content specifically for people with a six-core CPU. Given the plethora of disappointments we've had lately with almost every technology that's promised to increase our frame rates, we'll reserve judgement until we have one in the office.
The good news is that these hexa-powered processors will fit into most existing X58 motherboards after a simple BIOS flash. The bad news is X58 motherboards are still very expensive too.
4. Wireless power
A few years ago we saw a demonstration by a team at Fulton Innovation of a product called eCoupled. Using the principle of electromagnetic induction, by which an electrical charge can be stimulated in a wire coil by placing another one nearby, the crazy boffins were able to display wireless power transfer.
Despite being high voltage, they said, it was safe, efficient and could be applied to any surface. The demo room consisted of a kitchen without plugs, but full of lights that could be stuck anywhere and a frying pan that heated up just by sitting it on the counter. Put a phone on the same counter and it began charging. Clearly, this was the future.
Fulton are still working on wireless power, but it's a different company that's beat it to the shops, Powermat – and its products are expensive for something that replaces a 50p mains plug.
The good news is that the Wireless Power Consortium are going to be finalising a standard for wireless power called Qi later this year, which should mean prices drop and manufacturers have the confidence to build the technology straight into devices, rather than requiring an adaptor.
If you think that's crazy, though, take a look at Airnergy by RCA. It's a tiny dongle that can turn Wi-Fi signals back into electricity for charging phone batteries and the like.
5. Wireless displays
The last two standards for monitors, HDMI and DisplayPort, didn't exactly have us all rushing out to upgrade our PC screens and graphics cards, so it's a safe bet that DVI will remain the cabled interface of choice for some time to come. What about connecting a monitor to your PC without wires though?
That's something that could be worth shelling out for. Two different technologies were on the show floor at CES, which should be available en masse this year.
The first, WirelessHD is being pushed by the usual line-up of TV and DVD player manufacturers as a replacement for HDMI. It uses a short range, high bandwidth in the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) spectrum to transmit HD video and audio from a set-top box or media centre to a TV screen.
The idea is nothing new, Philips have had a kit out for a while that does the same thing, but WirelessHD is a proper standard and should ensure maker A's TV works nicely with maker B's Blu-ray machine and so on.
Perhaps more relevant for us, though, is Intel's new Wireless Display, or WiDi. It's designed specifically for laptops in order to remove the hassle of cables when you want to dock them with a proper screen, and like WirelessHD sends the video signal to a receiver box.
Unlike WirelessHD, WiDi can't handle protected content and the like, but it is much simpler since it requires no new hardware inside the laptop. Instead of using a separate transmitter, WiDi is a software layer on top of the existing Wi-Fi chip, so it's much cheaper to produce. Providing there's no latency introduced to the picture refresh rate, this could be a killer.
6. OLED displays
Yeah, we hear you. Another year, another promise that OLED screens are going to take over. Haven't we heard it all before? Except this time it could be true.
Google's Nexus phone has just launched with an OLED screen, and by all accounts it makes the handset almost – say it in hushed tones – more desirable than the iPhone. Brighter colours, sharper resolutions, darker blacks, whiter whites; why is this OLED technology so superior?
Put simply, it's because instead of filtering the light from a white or blue lamp behind the screen, each pixel in an OLED panel produces its own light. You don't have to be an optometrist to see why this is better, but it is much more expensive to produce.
Still, it also means OLED screens are much thinner than backlit ones, for obvious reasons, and while you may not be using an OLED PC monitor by the end of the year there are a lot more laptops with the technology arriving.
7. Superfast broadband
There are two things about broadband you should be concerned about. The first is whether or not the Digital Britain report, with its three strikes policy, outrageous invasion of privacy and extra charging for bandwidth, makes it into law before the general election final hits.
The second is what's going on at your exchange. By early next year, 75 per cent of us should be living in proximity to a telephone exchange that has a fibre optic connection to the internet. It's all part of BT's 21CN project to replace the entire copper telephone and broadband internet infrastructure with a single ethernet-based network fit for the 21st century.
So far, it's been dogged by delays and problems, but it's finally picking up the pace and is being tested by ISPs all over the country. The idea is that it will increase competition for high-speed broadband and bring down access prices, as well as bring services like IPTV – of the sort Virgin customers enjoy – to everyone.
It doesn't just mean better access to large downloadable game files and lower ping times, however. Our biggest hope is that it will eventually encourage telephone companies to do away with the irritating £12 a month line rental charge for a phone we don't actually use.
8. Augmented reality
Actually, we're kidding ourselves with this one. Augmented reality: the ability to overlay information on a live video feed of the world, is very cool, and it's impossible not to love iPhone apps like Yelp that pull in details and distances to the nearest pub or restaurants as you point the camera in their general direction.
Holding your phone three inches in front of your face as you're walking around feels a little too ridiculous to catch on, though. Perhaps it's like handsfree and Bluetooth headsets. Not so long ago people still sniggered if they saw someone using a phone without holding it to their ear, and not so long before that mobile phones themselves were devices for sales dorks.
In a couple of years time, it may seem the most natural thing in the world to see someone walking around with a phone held at arms length, directing them to food or drink with their own personal dynamic GPS system, or pulling up interesting information about the buildings and people in front of them. Yes, that's right, people.
Twitter 360 is an iPhone app that directs you to geotagged tweeters on your friends list, while TAT (www.tat.se) is working on an Augmented ID program, so if people point a camera at you various bits of information from your social feeds floating around your head. Makes stalking a lot easier then. Scary.
9. Natural user interface
In his CES keynote presentation, Steve Ballmer made several references to the 'Natural User Interface' (NUI), which is a handy catch all to describe all the Wii wand-waving, multitouch point and Project Natal-style aerobics that are catching headlines out there.
The keyboard and mouse is by no means dead, but the sudden flood of cheap laptops and all-in-ones with a built-in, multitouch screen suggests that it won't be long before we'll all have something a little bit different on our desktops.
Over in the US, for example, custom laptop maker IBuyPower has already started selling high-end gaming notebooks with a multitouch screen, and French developer, Eugen Systems has incorporated Win7's multitouch controls into the heart of its forthcoming strategy title R.U.S.E. It's all very exciting, except for one thing.
Multitouch may be native to Win7 and no other operating system, but the implementation is nowhere near as smooth as it is on, say, the iPhone. PCFormat has yet to use a multitouch application on a PC that doesn't suffer from a bit of inaccuracy or sluggishness, and the key to the NUI is in the first word. It has to feel natural, unforced and invisible to the end user. That's what using multitouch on an iPhone is like, and that's what Windows must achieve. If the mouse remains faster and more trusted, that's what people will use.
There are some brilliant ideas out there, though. Project Natal, Microsoft's full body 3D gesture recognition system for Xbox 360, is by far the most ambitious prototype, and we can't wait for a PC hack.
At CES the prototype Light Touch projector, from Light Blue Optics (lightblueoptics.com), was a show stealer. Using a technique called holographic laser projection, this tiny projector turns any 10inch surface – flat or curved - into a sharp multitouch screen.
10. Long-term evolution
The idea of getting high speed, super-reliable mobile broadband from a cell tower to your laptop or phone via WiMAX is not quite dead in the water, but it's certainly in need of a bit of mouth to mouth.
Far from being the 'Next Big Thing' as it was touted a few years back, it's had a painful and traumatic incubation period, which has seen some US carriers begin to adopt it and, in fact, quite a few businesses use it for point to point communications, but public access has dwindled from trial areas to almost nothing.
Partly, this may be because the company which owns the licence to operate WiMAX licences in several cities, Freedom4, was recently bought out and the new owners aren't in any rush to monetise the technology. More likely, it's because the mobile phone companies are happy with the current HSPDA speeds and are betting on an alternative technology, which is known as 4G, or Long Term Evolution (LTE) to supply almost the same amount of bandwidth without completely reworking their networks for WiMAX.
Lucky Scandinavians living in Stockholm or Oslo with a TeliaSonera contract can already sign up for LTE, while O2 is planning on launching a 150Mbps LTE package in the UK some time this year. We don't expect WiMAX to give up without a serious fight, though.
In the US, mobile networks are beginning to fall over because of the volume of 3G traffic running over them, and WiMAX's new architecture could well be a way to increase capacity to cope with demand. In which case, expect to see it begin sprouting up everywhere.
Faster bits and bytes
Rather more prosaic than the technologies listed elsewhere in this article the internals of your PC are also being overhauled by the powers that be. There's a revision to the SATA standard out for disk drives, and USB 3.0 is appearing on motherboards to speed up the default peripheral connection.
They are big steps forward. SATA III doubles the bandwidth available to storage from a theoretical 3Gbps to 6Gbps, while on paper USB 3.0 is a ten-fold increase from 480Mbps to 4.8Gbps for cabled peripherals.
Motherboards sporting ports of both flavours are already available from most manufacturers. Although both technologies are much faster than their predecessors, neither is likely to have a huge impact on consumer PCs.
In the world of business where milliseconds are money, the upgrades may mean something, but for the likes of us, compatible drives and peripherals will be a while coming yet.
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