IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Techradar) 01/05/2010

James Cameron to bring 3D to Mars

James Cameron is continuing is plight to turn everything 3D by helping out NASA and equipping its Mars rover with a 3D camera.

Curiosity - the name of the vehicle which is set to travel to Mars - has a launch scheduled in 2011, but before it jets off the rover is going to get a camera makeover.

The people behind the rover's camera Malin Space Science Systems have enlisted the help of Cameron who turned Hollywood on to the idea of 3D with his mega-hit Avatar.

Cinematic 3D

Cameron will modify the existing cameras â€“ which shoot HD â€“ for 3D filing, using the technology he built from the ground up for Avatar.

Speaking about the link-up Michael Malin, from Malin Space Science Systems, said: "The fixed focal length [cameras] we just delivered will do almost all of the science we originally proposed.

"But they cannot provide a wide field of view with comparable eye stereo. With the zoom [cameras], we'll be able to take cinematic video sequences in 3D on the surface of Mars. This will give our public engagement co-investigator, James Cameron, tools similar to those he used on his recent 3D motion picture projects."

If all goes well, expect 3D footage of Mars to hit Earth sometime in 2011.

Adobe CEO: Jobs' Flash attack 'is a smokescreen'

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has spoken candidly about Steve Jobs' scathing open letter 'Thoughts on Flash', explaining that the content of the letter is a "smokescreen" for Apple.

Jobs gave six reasons why Apple had not adopted Flash on its iPhone and iPad products, an attack that immediately focused huge amounts of attention on Adobe's products.

However, in a video interview with the Wall Street Journal, Narayen notes that: "The world is emerging where there are multiple devices which are used to access the internet and our customers continue to tell us that they would love to have a way in which they can get their content, their brand across multiple devices â€“ mobile devices, tablets, TVs and PCs.

"This article and Apple's recent behaviour show that there is a concern that Adobe is able to provide value to customers and consumers alike."

Flash forward

When pressed about what he thought were Apple's motives, Narayen explained: "The technology aspects of this article are really a smokescreen.

"We demonstrated through Adobe tools you could build content and applications [for Apple devices]. Over 100 applications were accepted on the store.

"We have demonstrated magazines and newspapers running with the fidelity that the Wall Street Journal wants on all of these devices.

"So when you resort to licensing language it is clear that it is nothing to do with technology."

Tools of the trade

Narayen also believes that Apple's dismissal of Flash will make it much harder for publishers to get their content out there digitally and even though Adobe is supplying the tools, Apple is scuppering the delivery.

"We will deliver authoring tools which will enable people to deliver content to any device, even for the iPad if you are using InDesign and DreamWeaver.

"We provide the world's best authoring tools, end of story. In terms of delivering that content the more these platforms adopt Flash you won't have to do anything else, it will just work. On the iPad, you will have to do additional steps."

In his letter Jobs stated that Flash caused crashes, ran down the battery on devices and was actually a closed system.

Unsurprisingly Narayen denied all of the above and in turn swiped at Apple's OS, saying: "I'm not aware that Flash is the cause of crashes. It has as much to do with the Apple operating system."

This is one of the most public war of words we have seen in recent years in the tech world and it is an issue that is not likely to go away anytime soon â€“ much to the annoyance of consumers everywhere.

Hands on: JooJoo tablet review

The iPad has made a splash, but Apple's Flash-free, App-centric platform has certainly left the door open for a web tablet not held back by Apple's shackles.

So enter the 12.1-inch JooJoo, which has just gone on sale in the UK. Designed by Fusion Garage, a company that has not been without some controversy, the platform is a gesture-based tablet that is, essentially, one big web browser with a Wi-Fi connection.

The cost, including UK VAT, is Â£374. We're expecting the entry-level iPad to hit the Â£399 price point. Is it worth as much as the iPad? Read on for our (varied) thoughts, but first, some basics.

JooJoo

The home screen essentially consists of a variety of web links rather than apps, though these are still downloaded from a 'Store'.

Obviously they don't need to be downloaded from a Store, but JooJoo hopes to ape Apple's success in this way - even if there are no applications to speak of.

JooJoo

First things first though, the hardware - it's slightly heavier than the iPad although the slick aluminium and dark-edged finish really does look the part - even if it's similar to Apple's device. There's a USB input as well as microphone, power and headphone sockets.

JooJoo has 4GB of built-in solid-state storage in addition to 1GB of memory and Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor - it would appear to have integrated graphics, though some web rumours have pointed to a future version based on Nvidia's Ion GPU.

While the storage is less than the 16GB entry-level iPad, you won't particularly need to store anything on this device as everything is completely web-based.

JooJoo

The bit of hardware that does disappoint is the screen - the 366 x 768 display isn't quite bright enough and certainly isn't good enough for group viewing. The iPad's display is a lot brighter and is far better for viewing alongside others.

So what's it like to use? Unfortunately, the Linux-based interface doesn't quite live up to its slick look. It is sluggish while the menu bar - which needs a one-fingered swipe downwards - appears sporadically.

The unit we have photographed here was also demoed to us previously. During the course of the demo, the device crashed twice and was slow to respond at times.

Apparently these problems (as well as some others we'll detail below) will be fixed by firmware updates in due course, but it begs the question - why is this device on sale now when it's clearly unfinished?

It's a real shame as there is A LOT of potential here. It's just that the JooJoo seems like a beta device - we're not that impressed that it's already on the streets.

JooJoo

One thing we did like was the way the browser enables you to easily swipe between browser screens. Unlike on the iPhone or iPad, this means that any video or music playing in that screen won't stop - it's more like a desktop PC in terms of user experience.

Here's your first glimpse of the keyboard, which works well for searching - there are shortcuts to Google, YouTube and other services.

JooJoo

And the main on-screen keyboard has two sizes, which you can see below in action using Google Docs. As the browser works just the same as that of a desktop PC, document editing isn't an issue. We were dismayed that the keyboard doesn't have a Shift key though! Expect this to appear soon.

JooJoo

The YouTube experience is good, but JooJoo hasn't got the blessing of Adobe and is doing things its own way. It has implemented the first beta of Flash 10.1 but doesn't have hardware acceleration and so 720p HD footage (we watched the Iron Man trailer) is poor. For this reason, JooJoo has had to provide us with a non-Flash MPEG playback of YouTube videos - you have to click on the JooJoo logo displayed on Flash videos - in other words, a "JooJoo mode" has had to be developed. Humph.

JooJoo

And for this reason, BBC iPlayer playback is also problematic as there is no "JooJoo mode".

JooJoo

So what do we think? The JooJoo clearly has a lot to offer, but it's marred by buggy software and an uneasy relationship with the very people that should be supporting it - Adobe.

This isn't an iPad killer yet, but it so should be! It's a real disappointment and could be so much better. JooJoo appears to have rushed it out because of the iPad. Instead, it should have waited and got things right first time.

Sky Sports coming to BT Vision and terrestrial

Sky has come to an interim agreement with Ofcom over Sky Sports, with Top Up Tv, Virgin Media and BT Vision all set to offer the channels.

The difference between what Sky wants to charge for its premium sports channels and what Ofcom wants to set will be paid into escrow until the arguments and legal battles have ended.

Sky is still appealing Ofcom's decision that it, and not the broadcaster, should set the wholesale rates for the channels.

Pleased

"We are pleased to have been able to put forward an agreement which provides substantial protection against the short-term impacts of Ofcom's decision," a Sky spokesperson said.

"We remain fully focused on our substantive appeal, which will be filed with the CAT in due course."

The news will be especially welcomed by Top Up TV and BT Vision customers who have not had the option of subscribing to Sky Sports before.

LG to supply 5MP cameras for iPhone HD?

While this might be as reliable as hearing it from a bloke down the pub, rumours are appearing that Apple's new iPhone will be packing a 5MP camera.

LG is apparently the company to supply the sensors, according to Asian title The Chosun, with the company already producing the dedicated cameras.

Mass production will being in the second half of this year - which makes us wonder about the validity of the story, given Apple is likely to begin shipping the new iPhone early in July.

Too little, too late?

This would give the manufacturers very little time to build and supply the cameras to iPhone manufacture.

However, the rumours of an improved camera for the new iPhone are pretty strong - the Gizmodo teardown of the new device didn't manage to uncover the sensor's capabilities, but showed the new unit has a flash.

With less than two months until the likely unveiling of the new device from Jobs, the speculation is only going to increase day by day - but thanks to the Gizmodo unveiling, it seems 'One more thing' will be a lot less of a shock this time.

Review: Zotac GeForce GTX 470

This is it, the more relevant take on Nvidia's latest GPU, the GeForce GTX 470. Representing the more affordable side of the Graphics Fermi 100 (GF100) GPU, the GTX 470 is being lined up to take out AMD's single-GPU hero, the HD 5870. Zotac was the first company to thrust the slab of warmed silicon into our sweaty grasp so here is their take on the great green hope.

When the GTX 480 first rocked up last month you could colour us impressed. In terms of single-GPU performance it's the fastest thing on two power connectors, blowing AMD's HD 5870 out of the water with a clear lead in the benchmark tables.

That said, it's retailing for nigh-on Â£200 more than AMD's competing card and so should be delivering such a lead over its rivals. Unfortunately for Nvidia though it couldn't garner a lead over the pricier still HD 5970, AMD's twin-GPU monster.

In both price and performance terms then it stands alone in between the competition's cards, forging a quite lonely furrow. The superior HD 5970 is nearly Â£100 more and the weaker HD 5870 is getting on for Â£200 cheaper. What Nvidia need then is to bring in a card that can directly compete with at least one of AMD's cards. And so the GTX 470 is born.

We're still waiting for Nvidia to get volumes of these latest cards to market; both the GTX 480 and GTX 470 are rare breeds indeed. The traditionally reliable Scan has got a few of these cheaper Fermi cards available, including a startlingly cheap Gainward board at Â£299, but no GTX 480s in stock at all, and Overclockers UK is all out of Fermi cards completely.

But AMD too had a nightmare trying to get volumes of its own DX11 parts to market when it first released those. Unfortunately for Nvidia that was over 6 months ago and yields have been steadily improving since, so now AMD's high end cards are available almost everywhere.

But current availability be damned, we want to know how these blazing boards perform and we're sure you do too. So without further speculation let's get down to the facts about NVIDIA's great green hope, the GTX 470.

gtx 470

Being priced directly in competition with the HD 5870, the GTX 470 represents a reasoned attack on AMD's flagship single-GPU card. A quick look at the specs though and it's clear this isn't a just straight up fight.

This is the same graphics processor that's been giving the twin-GPU HD 5970 a run for its money, though admittedly a rather chopped down version. So what's been chopped out of the GTX 470's GF100 then?

Nvidia fermi

Well, the full Fermi GPU sports 16 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) with 512 little CUDA cores (or shader units in its more common parlance) doing the grunt work. This was cut back for the GTX 480 to 15 SMs and 480 cores, presumably to increase usable GPU yields from the expensive but rather broken GF100 wafers.

Nvidia's big silicon knife has come out again for the GTX 470, cutting that down to 14 SMs with a functional total of 448 CUDA cores.

Clock speeds too have been slashed, with the GTX 470 coming in at a bizarre 607MHz (that extra 7MHz quite obviously making all the difference) compared to the GTX 480's nice and clean 700MHz.

You've only lost 8 ROPs and 256MB of graphics memory though and that memory bus is now 320-bit rather than 384-bit; so it looks like that blade has been wielded pretty smartly by the NVIDIAN engineers.

That leaves us then with a functional core speed of 607MHz, shader clock of 1215MHz and memory clock of 1674. Coupled with that there's that 320-bit memory bus, coping with 1,280MB or GDDR5, and a final total of 40 ROPs.

When you put that up against the HD 5870 AMD is hoping that its higher clockspeeds and extra shader units will be enough to offset the shorfall in ROPs, memory capacity and memory bus.

But these are very different architectures and we're definitely not comparing apples and apples here in terms of the GPU specs themselves.

GF100 architecture

The proof though is in the graphical pudding, and more especially the tessellated icing on top. Damn, I'm getting hungry nowâ€¦ But yes, the tessellation performance of Zotac's GTX 470 card is going to be key to its chances now, in the future and in its battle with AMD's HD 5870.

Nvidia sees tessellation as the great hope for PC gaming going forward and was so desperate to make sure it had the best architecture to take advantage of the Big M's new API that it was willing to wait half a year after the software hit user's machines before releasing a graphics card capable of using all that tessellated goodness.

While initially this seemed like a risky strategy it's looking like it could well pay off for the green side of the graphics divide.

AMD made sure it had DX11 cards ready and waiting (though not necessarily on the shelves thanks to its own yield issues) for the launch of DX11, but in relative architectural terms Nvidia claims it only really pays lip-service to tessellation.

With the single tessellation unit of AMD's Cypress chips compared to the 16 tessellation units wrapped up in each of Fermi's SMs it's immediately obvious where Nvidia sees the future of PC graphics.

Despite the fact that the GF100 GPU is a big, blazing hot, power-hungry beast of a chip - in short a very, very Nvidia chip â€“ it is also rather neatly designed. In terms of layout it's very much like a traditional CPU, with independent sections all emptying into a shared Level 2 cache.

This means that it is designed from the ground up to be well versed in the sort of parallelism that Nvidia is aiming for from its CUDA-loving graphics cards.

AMD's solution in its Cypress chips, the GPU powering the HD 58xx series, outputs its data directly into the DRAM. Compared with Nvidia's solution, which keeps all the date on the chip before the final output, the AMD cards could well be overloading the valuable graphics memory far more.

But how does the GTX 470 perform when put up against the great and the good from AMD's graphics stable? We're just about to find out...

Zotac geforce gtx 470

Well, the results are actually pretty damned good for the green side of the graphics divide. Almost across the board the GTX 470 comes out on top of the HD 5870, its only bum note being the comparatively poor showing in Metro 2033.

As one of the games heavily using tessellation in its character models the fact that it is behind the HD 5870 is somewhat strange. This strangeness is compounded by the relative results in the thoroughly tessellation-heavy Heaven 2.0 benchmark.

In the testing process the HD 5870 garners 28fps in our Metro 2033 benchmark while the GTX 470, powered by a GPU built from the ground up to be tessellation-friendly, only managed a slightly poorer 26fps. When you consider that's at the full HD resolution of 1920x1080, with all the bells and whistles turned on (bar the Nvidia-centric PhysX niceties), that's still not a bad showing.

The HD 5870 is practically half the speed of Nvidia's GTX 470 though when it comes to the Unigine Heaven benchmark, a benchmark that has been recently updated to version 2.0 to include a specific 'extreme' mode for its tessellation pathways.

The AMD card is in single figures at 9fps compared with the Nvidia card's 17fps. AMD's brilliant HD 5970 only manages to garner a result of 20fps, which goes to show just how powerful even the cut-down GF100 in the GTX 470 is when it comes to the DX11 poster-child of tessellation.

In general DX10 gaming too the GTX 470 shows a definite lead over the AMD shaped competition. In Just Cause 2 the GTX 470 is a full 25 per cent faster at the eye-popping 2560x1600, 30" panel resolution. There's clear water in the DX10 stallwart of Far Cry 2 as well.

So, it's done its job then; the GTX 470 is measurably better than AMD's HD 5870. The issue remains though that both these cards are over Â£300, and that most definitely is not where the sweet spot is for graphics cards these days. A quick scan over the benchmarks shows that only the very latest of releases need anywhere near this much graphical grunt, and only then when absolutely everything is turned on.

Heaven 2.0

GTX 480: 21
GTX 470: 17
HD 5870: 9
HD 5970: 20

Metro 2033

GTX 480: 33
GTX 470: 26
HD 5870: 28
HD 5970: 42

STALKER

GTX 480: 34
GTX 470: 15
HD 5870: 13
HD 5970: 19

DiRT 2

GTX 480: 52
GTX 470: 43
HD 5870: 41
HD 5970: 54

Far Cry 2

GTX 480: 64
GTX 470: 51
HD 5870: 45
HD 5970: 69

Just Cause 2

GTX 480: 25
GTX 470: 20
HD 5870: 15
HD 5970: 30

All games at 2560 x 1600, except Metro 2033 at 1920 x 1080

gtx 470

So the GTX 470 represents a clear win for Nvidia then in a place where it absolutely had to have one. In performance terms alone this means the green company's holding the second and third position behind AMD's awesome, but awesomely expensive, HD 5970.

But things are only set to become even stickier in the coming months as the full Fermi lineup begins to roll out and AMD starts the refresh wagon a-rolling.

With the vast majority of games available right now though around Â£200 is the most reasonable people ought to be spending on a new graphics card. That then brings the HD 5850 to the fore, though there are rumours Nvidia is looking to bring a GTX 460 to the table in June which could take care of that duel.

We liked

Despite the sticker that appears in every retail box, proclaiming the possible finger-burning heat of the card, the GTX 470 is a far cooler card than it's bigger, beefier brother, the GTX 480.

During full load the GPU hovers around the 60degreesC mark, where the GTX 480 was sometimes hitting over 90 degrees Celsius.

The fact that there is so much clear water between the equivalently-priced HD 5870 and this Zotac card is especially pleasing. NVIDIA has done well pitching this card directly against AMD's top single-GPU card.

We disliked

The noise the stock cooler makes under full load can be a mite distracting - it's almost like going to back to the bad ol' days of ATI's turbine-like fans on the X1900 XTX. We're definitely looking forward to seeing the different manufacturers releasing their own cooling designs if Nvidia ever release the designs later on.

We also think, like with the HD 5870, that Â£300 is too much for the normal user to be asked to pay for a card that /isn't/ the top of the line. A price sitting closer to the Â£200 or even Â£250 mark would have seen the GTX 470 being heralded as the best card in the world. Instead it's only a very good card.

Verdict

AMD have definitely lost this battle as it stands with the GTX 470 comfortably out-performing the HD 5870.

That though is only as it stands right now, as we write the overclocked HD 58xx series is on the test benches going through their paces, and we'd hope that would mean a drop in price of the vanilla HD 5870s. The 2GB overclocked versions of the HD 5870 is claimed to be getting much closer to the performance of NVIDIA's Fermi cards, and that could spell trouble once more for the green company.

You'd also think AMD would follow its previous form with us seeing a redesigned card with the HD 5890 moniker tipping up in the Summer or Autumn.

That said, with Nvidia's latest still desperately short on stock AMD might well be reticent to drop its prices until there's actually physical cards out in the wild to really test it's own GPUs.

Still, the GTX 470 is a very good card, and does exactly what Nvidia needed it to do. If you can find one then right now it is the Â£300 card to buy.

Related Links

Updated: 15 really useful Spotify tips and tricks

Spotify's been a massive success in Europe, with well over a million users in the UK.

With only the occasional advert interrupting the stream of music, it's like having the biggest music collection in the world.

It's so large that you might need a bit more help searching for songs and managing the results.

We've put together 15 hidden features, tips and add-ons that will help you make the most of Spotify.

1. Search modifiers

Search Spotify using modifiers to restrict and refine your results. For example, to search for Madonna's 1983 output you enter "madonna year:1982". You can also search for a range of years, like this: "rolling stones year:1965-1972". Other modifiers include "album", "artist" and "genre". These can be combined, for example: "album:love artist:cult" only finds tracks from The Cult's "Love". Finally, Boolean syntax can be used to exclude keywords, like this: "genre:trip-hop NOT morcheeba".

Spotify boolean search

EXCLUSIVE TRACKS: Filter bands and tracks out of search results with the Boolean NOT operator - or use the minus sign "-".

2. Search by genre

Spotify's most useful search modifiers is "genre". Search for "genre:post-rock" and you'll get more Mogwai than you can get wet after midnight. It's also the trickiest to use. The program itself only lists 18 default genres (in the Radio section), but it supports around 800! If you don't use the right wording, the search will return no results. For a full and current list of Spotify genres, go to Spotify Gateway.

3. Multiple versions

Many albums exist in multiple versions with different edits - and Spotify may have multiple listings for the same collection of tracks. When this happens you'll see a little arrow in the "Track" column of your results. Click it to see all the instances of that track appearing on a different version of the album.

Multiple spotify tracks

MULTITRACK: Different edits of your favourite albums have different track versions. Spotify finds them, but hides them

4. Link to part of a track

As originally cited on the Spotify blog, you can send friends a track URI with a time index embedded in it. Copy the Spotify URI and paste it into your email or message window, then edit the URI to add '#time' to the end. For example, if the track has a brilliant solo at 1:26, you append #1:26 to the end of the URI. You can also do this with HTTP links, but you'll have to replace the hash tag "#" with "%23".

5. Draggable URLs

You probably already know that you can right click on Spotify playlists, tracks and albums to copy the HTTP link or Spotify URI to the clipboard. You can also drag and drop any Spotify link to the text box of another program; an email client, instant messager, URL shortener or Twitter window. The HTTP link is embedded - not the Spotify URI.

6. Top Lists

The often forgotten "Top Lists" feature shows you the most popular tracks everywhere on the Spotify network, by default. You can change the display to show top artists, albums and tracks. If you look in the top left corner - you can also change where Spotify gets its data. Choose "Everywhere", the United Kingdom or another region where Spotify is live. Finally, choosing "For Me" shows your most frequently played tracks since the list was last updated. This should happen once a week - but the feature is notoriously buggy.

Spotify top lists

TOP OF YOUR POPS: Spotify say that its lists of top tracks, albums and artists are refreshed once a week, so don't worry if your currents faves aren't at number one

7. Quicker playlist creation

So, you've found Spotify's most popular tracks - now turn them into a playlist. CTRL and click on tracks to make multiple selections, then right-click to open the context sensitive menu and choose "Save to" and "New Playlist".

8. Integrate Spotify with Firefox

FoxyTunes is one of our favourite plugins. It enables you to control Spotify (and over 30 other media players on Windows) from Firefox. You can also search for information on the current track direct from your browser. Combine it with Spotify Search for a complete search and playback solution in your browser.

FoxyTunes

FIREFOX ONLY: Though available in versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer, Spotify support is currently exclusive to Mozilla's browser

9. Keyboard navigation

Use keyboard shortcuts to navigate faster in Spotify; tab to move through columns, use up and down arrows to select tracks or move through tracks or playlists, hit enter to play. The Spacebar toggles pause on and off. When you're playing a tune, CTRL and right skips to the next in the list, while ALT and left or right goes back and forward through pages.

10. Volume control

Hold CTRL and hit the up or down arrow on your keyboard to change Spotify's volume. To mute playback, hit CTRL SHIFT and down - but note that adverts pause when you do that. You'll have to pay for a premium account to be rid of ads or try the rather convoluted solution blogging software developer Peter MacRobert used to auto-mute Spotify ads on his Mac.

11. Playlist privacy

By default, the new social features in Spotify make all your playlists public. Even the ones full of 80s power ballads. Prevent poor-taste embarrassment by clicking your own name in the "People" column - then click "Edit". You toggle whether a playlist is published on or off; green for yes, grey for no. While you're there, untick the box labeled "Automatically publish new playlists I create".

You can also right-click on a playlist in the column on the left and tick or untick "Publish" in the context sensitive menu.

SHARE VIEW: You can choose which playlist you'd like to display on your public profile, and turn off your top tunes, too

12. Clean up your tunes

Like iTunes, Spotify now uses the Gracenote database to maintain and clean-up information stored in local tracks. You can enable this by default when you first import local tunes into your library, or you can do it manually, if you spot a problem. Go to "Library > Local" in your user panel on the left, right click on the track that needs fixing and choose "Update info from Gracenote".

13. View other profiles

Facebook friends who enable Spotify's social features are automatically added to your people list. You can view any Spotify user who has enabled the new social features, whether you're their facebook friend or not though. If you know the username, type "spotify:user:" in the search box. If you're subscribed to a playlist published by someone else, you can navigate to their profile just by clicking on their username. In either case, you can then add them to your people list, by clicking the "Add " button.

Finding friends on spotify

FIND FRIENDS: If you know a Spotify user's name - and they've enabled its new social features - you can check out their profiles and add them to your people list

14. Prevent track spam

Anyone with a Spotify account can now send tracks to your inbox. It's as easy as dragging a track to a profile in the people column. What if someone you don't know starts spamming you with Hall and Oates tunes? Easy. You block them. Right-click their name in the "From" field and choose "Block from Inbox".

15. Share a playlist

You can drag and drop individual tracks to friends in the people list column or you can send tracks to them by right clicking and choosing "Send to > Spotify People > ". You can't do the same with playlists though. There are a few workarounds. Firstly, you can drag and drop a playlist URL to your instant messenger or email client and send it the old fashioned way. Secondly, you can right-click on a playlist and publish the link to Facebook or Twitter. Thirdly, and most clumsily, you can select all the tracks in a playlist and send them to a friend by right clicking and choosing ""Send to > Spotify People > username" - but that sends the tracks only, they won't be subscribed to the actual playlist.

Spotify shared playlist

SHARED PLAYLIST: For now, you can post playlist links to Facebook or Twitter but you can't send them to your friend's Spotify inbox

Updated: 15 really useful Spotify tips and tricks

Spotify's been a massive success in Europe, with well over a million users in the UK.

With only the occasional advert interrupting the stream of music, it's like having the biggest music collection in the world.

It's so large that you might need a bit more help searching for songs and managing the results.

We've put together 15 hidden features, tips and add-ons that will help you make the most of Spotify.

1. Search modifiers

Spotify boolean search

EXCLUSIVE TRACKS: Filter bands and tracks out of search results with the Boolean NOT operator - or use the minus sign "-".

2. Search by genre

3. Multiple versions

Multiple spotify tracks

MULTITRACK: Different edits of your favourite albums have different track versions. Spotify finds them, but hides them

4. Link to part of a track

5. Draggable URLs

6. Top Lists

Spotify top lists

TOP OF YOUR POPS: Spotify say that its lists of top tracks, albums and artists are refreshed once a week, so don't worry if your currents faves aren't at number one

7. Quicker playlist creation

8. Integrate Spotify with Firefox

FoxyTunes

FIREFOX ONLY: Though available in versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer, Spotify support is currently exclusive to Mozilla's browser

9. Keyboard navigation

10. Volume control

11. Playlist privacy

You can also right-click on a playlist in the column on the left and tick or untick "Publish" in the context sensitive menu.

SHARE VIEW: You can choose which playlist you'd like to display on your public profile, and turn off your top tunes, too

12. Clean up your tunes

13. View other profiles

Finding friends on spotify

FIND FRIENDS: If you know a Spotify user's name - and they've enabled its new social features - you can check out their profiles and add them to your people list

14. Prevent track spam

15. Share a playlist

Spotify shared playlist

SHARED PLAYLIST: For now, you can post playlist links to Facebook or Twitter but you can't send them to your friend's Spotify inbox

Review: Vivitek D511

The Vivitek D511 is the first data projector we've seen from the Taiwanese company and on first impressions it's a great example of what an entry-level projector should be. The compact body of the projector weighs in at a portable 1.9kg and while it's not the toughest construction around, it offers good value for money.

The manual focus ring protrudes from the front of the casing, while the zoom is fitted behind it and hidden away inside the body of the casing.

Buttons on the top of the unit offer the standard array of controls, with a large Power button and a ring below this with Menu, Source, Auto and keystone correction controls.

The Vivitek D511 ships with a mini remote control that mirrors the controls on the top of the unit. The menu controls are easy to get to grips with, but you will find that some of the controls are hidden away, such as the Eco-mode.

You'll find a full array of ports on the back consisting of the standard D-sub, s-video and component ports, and an HDMI port for connecting to a digital source.

With full support for 720p output, the D511 has a native resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, but will upscale to 1600 x 1200 pixels with ease. This projector is also 3D ready and so is capable of making the most of the big changes in presentation technology.

When it came to image quality, we found the D511 had quite a short throw range, so it isn't ideal for larger meeting rooms. In the home or small office, however, images look crisp and sharp.

Dropping the projector down into Eco-mode marks a noticeable drop in the noise generated by the fan, while it still manages to maintain a respectable brightness level.

The Vivitek D511 offers a fair degree of future-proofing for such an affordable data projector. Sure, it lacks the build quality of some other machines, but it still represents great value for money.

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Review: Viewsonic PJD6211

The Viewsonic PJD6211 is the most cost-effective data projector here. It takes the standard design route for a DLP device, being a squat device that sits length-wise with the lens fixed at one end and a large vent along the front.

It's quite compact but with a weight of 2.6kg, is not ideal for taking on the road. You will find it is a decent machine for sharing between rooms in an office, or possibly a school.

The lens has the usual manual focus and zoom rings and we found getting this projector up and running to be quick and easy. Controls on the top of the unit proved easy to get to grips with and while the menu system is comprehensive, you do need to scroll through quite a number of pages to get it set up to your liking.

With a brightness rating of 2500 ANSI lumens you'll be able to use this projector in most lighting conditions with ease. What's more, it has quite a small throw range, making it ideal for use in smaller meeting rooms and school classrooms.

Sadly, we found image quality to be fairly unimpressive, with the whites in our presentation test having a yellow tinge to them. Video seemed more appealing, however, with little in the way of pixelation, even during a fast action scene.

Running in Eco-mode dropped image brightness down by a noticeable degree but the cooling fan continued to run noisily.

Connectivity on the rear shows the entry-level roots of this device, as you won't find any digital ports. There are comprehensive analog connections for use with multiple analog sources, however, highlighting the office-based functionality of this device.

Odd then that the PJD6211 comes with 3D ready support. This is due to the 120Hz refresh rate of the lens and its native resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels.

The Viewsonic PJD6211 data projector offers decent value for money but unless you're on a tight budget we feel that it does have rather limited appeal.

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Review: Optoma EW330

The Optoma EW330 is the most expensive data projector in this group test, but it's also the smallest and lightest. With an overall weight of just 1.2kg, it is perfectly designed for life on the move. The compact chassis feels solid and is more than tough enough to be carried in a bag alongside your laptop.

The zoom ring is hidden away inside the main body of the projector, while the focus ring sits on the outside. Through the use of a clever design it works exceedingly well without protruding too much. The menu buttons are a little small and fiddly to use at first, but the menu software is easy to get to grips with.

With a brightness of 2200 ANSI lumens and a standard 2000:1 contrast ratio, you can use this projector in most lighting conditions. We found image size to be acceptable for smaller meeting rooms, but not nearly big enough for larger spaces.

Connectivity is kept to a minimum, with a single D-sub port and s-video connection. However, there is also an HDMI port in place, so you can connect to a high-definition (HD) digital source with ease.

What we like best about the EW330 is the image quality it delivers. During our presentation tests we found it offered a very sharp contrast between black and whites, with documents looking crisp. With its 16:10 aspect ratio, it's designed for use with older laptop screens, so you'll find the native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels leaves a slight letterbox effect in place when running widescreen movies.

In many respects, the only real flaw with the EW330 is how hot it gets. We also found it quite loud, as the fan needs to work hard to keep the heat under control. If you're using it for presentations on the road, you'll need to wait for it to cool down properly before packing it away.

Overall, the EW330 is a great projector. We like the compact size and connectivity is decent, but most of all the image quality on offer is simply outstanding.

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Is Darth Vader coming to TomTom?

An interesting email has just hit TechRadar Towers from no less than Darth Vader himself, with the following statement: "I find your lack of faith disturbing. Drive with me to the Dark Sideâ€¦"

Does this mean that sat nav manufacturer TomTom has teamed up with Lucas Arts to bring the Darth Vader voice officially to their devices?

TomTom hasn't confirmed whether the voice will be available. But using the Force â€“ well Google â€“ we found that drivertothedarkside.com was registered 22 April somewhere in London and the MP3 file attached to the email plays in Media Player with the metadata saying 'TomTom albums'.

TomTom is no stranger to adding novelty voices to its sat navs. Just this month it was announced that Billy Connolly had lent his Scottish brogue and they have already snapped up the dulcet tones of Homer Simpson.

Vader voice

Adding Darth Vader to TomTom is definitely something which brings out our inner geek.

Will it come with a Hans-free kit? Will it work with a Jabba Bluetooth headset? Will it tell you where all the Leia-bys are?

You don't have to be a Jedi to figure out some sort of Star Wars / TomTom link-up is close, so we will be on the Luke out for more hints as and when we get them.

Review: Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3T

Lenovo's IdeaPad S10-3T is the a netbook with a swivelling touchscreen. Although this is certainly a different design and works as expected, the heavy chassis â€“ due to the large battery â€“ is a major letdown.

Build quality is great, with a thin cassis proving to be attractively patterned and tough. The keyboard is firm and responsive with tapered keys, although the tiny touchpad with integrated buttons is awkward to use.

However, this can be bypassed by using the touchscreen, as options can be selected by pressing directly on the display. This is flawed in netbook mode as the screen wobbles too much, but fortunately the entire display can be swivelled and laid flat across the keyboard, turning the netbook into a tablet-like device.

You support it with one hand while controlling it with the other, and the desktop can be rotated horizontally or vertically using a button on the side of the display.

Another button launches the Lenovo NaturalTouch interface, which allows you to play back media, launch your internet browser and perform other basic functions. Icons are generally much larger than in the standard Windows interface, which suits the touchscreen control, although scrolling through menus is often a jerky affair.

The touchscreen is responsive and easy to use, although the display quickly picks up smudges and fingerprints. The keyboard is also obscured with the screen laid flat across the chassis, meaning text input has to be done via an onscreen keyboard, which inevitably proves to be considerably slower and prone to errors.

Heavy chassis

A greater issue is the 1.6kg weight â€“ by far the heaviest in this group â€“ which makes holding it one-handed for any length of time uncomfortable. This is mostly thanks to the battery, which is incredibly bulky and juts out of the back of the chassis, although the resultant 619 minutes of battery life is the best in this group test.

The remaining features are a mixed affair. A System Restore button above the Escape key allows you to quickly back up your hard drive, while the included VeriFace software provides facial recognition security.

However, only two USB ports are included compared to three on most netbooks, and these are side by side, meaning a large peripheral will be likely to obscure the other port.

The Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3T includes some unusual features, including the swivelling touchscreen, but it sadly won't suit all tastes. It's too heavy to wield one-handed for long in tablet mode, while in netbook mode it doesn't quite match the usability of others.

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Humax PVR patch 'improves user experience'

Humax has released a statement assuring users of its 9150T, 9300T and 9200T Freeview+ digital TV recorders that any problems they are having with the machines will be rectified in an upcoming software update.

A number of forums have been reporting issues with the set-top boxes, ranging from freezing screens and the EPG not updating properly but Humax seems to be listening and is busy trying to sort out the problem.

It seems that the Humax engineers are preparing a software fix which will comes as an over-the-air update in the coming weeks.

This is said to improve performance and future-proof the machines against any other problems that may occur.

Complex nature

"Humax is very aware that, for several months, some customers have been experiencing a slowdown in operation and usability issues with our PVR models," explains the statement.

"Resolving these issues has been a priority for our technical team who have been working diligently on a fix, but unfortunately, due to the complex nature of the issues, it has taken much longer than we had hoped to develop new software to sort out the PVR issues.

"However, I am pleased to be able to inform you that our technical team has developed a software solution that will dramatically improve the user experience and address issues such as freezing and locking up.

"We have also ensured the new software mitigates the risk of future problems and have taken this opportunity to introduce a new feature as part of the upgrade to significantly reduce the time it takes to display the on-screen electronic programme guide (EPG) information, from many minutes to seconds."

Digital switchover to blame?

The slowdown has been put down to "The increasing complexity of the UK's broadcast infrastructure and requirement to process a substantially higher volume of information".

Essentially, the digital switchover has caused something of an info overload, which in turn lead the machines (in particular the 9200T) to suffer from slowdown and the like.

The automatic over-the-air software download for the fix will be available "in a matter of weeks," with exact dates to be confirmed soon.

If you want to be kept up to date with all things Humax, then sign up to their Twitter and Facebook pages.

Humax has also released the email address uksupport@humax-digital.co.uk for those who want to contact them.

Opera buys up FastMail webmail

Opera has bought an Australian webmail company called FastMail.fm, and will look to offer 'world-class' messaging capability on any device.

The acquisition has been made to allow Opera to extend its mail offering, which is currently limited to an email client built into its desktop browser.

"The newest generation of web users will discover the web through a mobile device," said Rolf Assev, Chief Strategy Officer, Opera Software.

Need for changes

"Having world-class messaging capability alongside a rich and compelling web experience is essential," he added

"By combining forces, Opera and FastMail.fm can offer messaging on any device.

"This will enhance the value Opera provides to consumers, while assisting our operator partners in reducing customer churn."

An Oz of change

Emails have gone out to FastMail.fm's customer base explaining the changes, and the company has explained the need for the move.

"In an increasingly competitive market, we believe we need to make some big investments to take the next steps forward," said FastMail.

"Joining together Opera's expertise in web browsers and especially the mobile market, and FastMail.FM's expertise in email, will allow us to grow and take on the next big challenges in running and building an email service.

"With Opera's expertise, and the combined technical talent of our staff, we believe we'll be able to create a significantly better FastMail for customers in the future."

Weird Tech: Mouth perfected - ear, nose & throat engineer required

The pieces are all slowly coming together.

While the more underground hobbyists concentrate on getting the bodies of our future robot companions looking (and feeling) as realistic as possible for deeply personal reasons probably rooted in childhood, researchers at Japan's Kagawa University have covered off another base - getting the/her mouth right.

The very kissable end result is little more than a rubberised, motorised mouth tube stuffed in a plastic box with a "nasal cavity" on top to aid realistic sound formation, but at least it shows we're finally moving forwards toward the dream of a fully realistic humanoid that could be programmed to love even us.

MOUTH ON: Strategically balance a wig on top and you'd have a friend for life

Now, who wants to start working on some eyes that don't look dead?

"Useful bottle-opening nose"

Another key part of the robotic life-companion dream is being assembled in Korea, where the country's Institute of Science and Technology has been working away on Mahru - shown in the picture above.

Mahru is the latest evolution of the team's dancing robot which is also capable of performing taekwondo manoeuvres, thanks to its/her ability to successfully mimic human movements - right down to being able to copy its creator's moves in real-time. You may soon have a dance partner.

According to IEEE's Spectrum, the test version of Mahru has already been kitted out with the ability to put some food into a microwave and bring you the steaming end result. We are literally about 10 years away from living the ultimate dream.

Big turn off

If you're finding it as hard to concentrate on reading this as we are on writing it due to having nine social networking tools open and blinking at you for attention at this very minute, you are not alone.

A study, reported by CTV, which deprived a selection of 200 students from their internets and Facebooks and the like for a period of 24 hours, found they felt anxious, frustrated and isolated as a result of the mother-brain disconnect.

We literally NEED all this nonsense.

Unable to concentrate without the numerous forms of stimulation that we all use to get us through the day without actually paying attention to anything, the poor darlings complained that they didn't know what to do with themselves with one student saying "I stared at the wall for a little bit" - before surrendering to boredom and taking some sleeping pills to help get through the rest of the boring tech-free day.

They should be grateful they didn't have to get through a Sunday in 1989.

Solar wind up

Japan's space program is about to unfurl what is being delightfully described a s a "space yacht" - which uses the power of the Sun to sail itself out into the very far away bits of the solar system not served by NASA's space buses.

The ship has been named Ikaros, which is a bit like "Icarus" only spelled intentionally incorrect for a reason - Ikaros actually stands for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun. They clearly thought up that acronym before even starting on the machine.

Ikaros

IT IS SAILING: Another thing Patrick Moore thought he'd never live to see

According to Switched On, the Ikaros craft will launch from Japan's Tanegashima space centre on 18 May, unfurling its sails once in orbit and using solar winds to push it out into space.

And it's not just space-wind-powered - the sails are covered in extremely thin solar cells to generate electrical power to keep the craft's MP3 player cranking out 'Telephone' as it whizzes away from us.

Review: HP Mini 210-1002SA

HP is the world's number one laptop manufacturer and makes a broad variety of devices and machines with an equally diverse range of specifications. The HP Mini 210-1002SA is one of the company's latest netbooks, combining an attractive design with decent portability.

Usability is impressive and the large, isolated-key style keyboard is a pleasure to use. We particularly like the clever design of the directional keys, which are large and easy to locate.

Touchpad lock

As with many of the other machines here, the touchpad is easy to brush while typing. To remedy this, HP has included a button located in the top-left of the touchpad, which deactivates it. This means you won't suffer from erratic cursor behaviour when you're typing.

The mouse buttons are integrated into the touchpad, meaning if you simultaneously use one hand for controlling the buttons and another for controlling the cursor, the touchpad gets confused and behaves oddly.

The 10.1-inch screen features a unique style, courtesy of its flat, non-bezelled design, and looks great. The lid doesn't fold open much past the vertical, so finding a comfortable viewing angle in a confined space â€“ such as on a seat-back table â€“ can be tricky.

The minimal, rounded chassis design that is the hallmark of HP netbooks is in place, and the tough plastics used make the machine suited to a life on the road.

A large battery is included, which slightly ruins the otherwise smooth lines of the machine, and fails to provide as impressive battery life as some other netbooks. The machine also gets hot to the touch quickly, which proves a little uncomfortable when working on your lap.

The HP provides faster performance than many netbooks, as it's one of the few to feature a hard drive that spins at 7200rpm, as opposed to 5400rpm. This means it can access your data quicker, thus making the netbook run with more speed. It's only marginal, however, and will still struggle to multitask more than two applications at a time.

Connectivity isn't as good as some of the other netbooks here and, along with the Dell, this is the only machine to feature the slightly older 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, so wireless networking won't be as fast as those machines that feature 802.11n.

Despite a few shortcomings, we like the HP Mini 210-1002SA. It's a comfortable machine to use, with the touchpad lock a particularly useful touch, and the fast-spinning hard drive will certainly appeal to those after performance.

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In Depth: 10 tech demos that went horribly wrong

You're poured millions into R&D. You've cranked the hype machine into overdrive. And now you're on stage in front of millions of adoring fans.

And what do they do? They point and laugh. Yup, it's the 10 worst tech demo disasters

1. Lost in translation?

You're French cybersecurity expert Jeroma Athias and you want to tell people at a security conference about your product. So what do you do? Give a rambling, amateurish and incoherent presentation in dodgy English with crappy slides and classic 'is this on?' microphone weirdness.

What's worse is that his presentation is so simplistic it'd insult the intelligence of a 5-year-old. Who didn't even know what hacking was. Or a computer, for that matter.

2. Mind those stairs

This should be easy. You have to go on stage and walk up a few steps while a nice Japanese lady talks about the fact that you can walk up steps. Only you're a robot. And you're not actually looking where you going.

The funniest thing about this 2006 classic is the panic that ensues once the Honda Asimo falls over - as if placing screens between the robot and the crowd is going to save anyone any embarrassment whatsoever.

3. Run, take aim, shoot

Now technically speaking there's nothing wrong with this demo at all. It starts. It runs. It finishes. It's what happens in between that's truly unspeakable. Especially to the poor old lady who is one of the actors.

The Microsoft guy who introduces the clip tries to hide his obvious embarrassment with bluster and talk of 'going beyond'. Yes, it's Project Natal from CES 2006.

4. Moving right along...

Ah Windows Vista. The hype. The hype. Shame it didn't wow us in quite the way Microsoft intended, as these two chaps prove by plugging a flash drive into a laptop only to be greeted with the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). The Bill Gates-alike quips at the end "this is why we're giving away free versions." If only, eh?

5. A touching demo

In which a Japanese Microsoft guy attempts to demo Microsoft Surface Globe running on Windows 7. Live on TV. You can guess the rest. Makes us feel nostalgic for the old Tomorrow's World days.

6. Apple fail

Apple presentations are remarkable for their robotic slickness - but it wasn't always that way. This compilation of old keynotes shows Steve Jobs stumbling over his words, forgetting what key Apple technologies are and getting frustrated his Mac doesn't work properly. No wonder Sony's president is lost for words.

7. What goes up must come down

No field of human endeavour is without its fair share of mistakes. But few are as spectacular or as tragic as the ones that befall space travel. The European Space Agency must certainly rue the day its Foton-M1 space mission ended earlier than planned.

It lost a precious payload of expensive experiments, while on the ground one soldier was killed and several others were injured. The reaction of the crowd is particularly telling (warning: contains strong language).

8. Video? What video

This is every presenter's worst nightmare. You're in a room packed with your peers (in this case member of the local technology association) and every single thing you try to demo fails. Sadly there's no video, but the Seattle Times reported that plucky YouTube advertising director Suzie Reider kept going anyway, despite the fact that she couldn't show any actual YouTube videos. Apparently the venue's AV system worked perfectly well later on when local companies stepped up to collect their awards.

9. It's not shipping yet

Poor Microsoft. Another live TV demo. Another failure. This time it's for Windows '98 and Bill Gates covers his embarrassment by quipping "this must be why Windows '98 isn't shipping yet." Nice one, Bill.

10. And the world's most embarrassing tech demo failure goes to...

Steorn. Two years ago the Irish company invited journalists and fans to see it's amazing Orbo - a new kind of technology that promised free energy forever. Only the demo, which was supposed to take place at the Kinetica Museum in London, never happened.

Steorn MD Sean McCarthy initially blamed technical problems with the demo unit and the museum got closed for the day. The product was last demoed at the Waterways Visitor Centre in Dublin in February, only this time it was evidently battery-powered. So much for free energy.

Adobe CS5 goes on sale

Adobe's Creative Suite 5 has gone on sale, with the eagerly anticipated design and development software going to set you back at least Â£1,000.

It's been a miserable week for Adobe, with Apple's Steve Jobs issuing a devastating attack on the company's Flash software, but the arrival of its flagship package of some of the most familiar names in software should gee its employees up.

CS5 has already hit the headlines with its innovative additions to the likes of Photoshop, Flash and InDesig, including the 'content-aware fill' that was so effective in demos that it was labelled a hoax.

Early reaction

"We've seen from early customer reaction that Creative Suite 5 continues to inspire the design and developer world by combining time-saving workflow and productivity features with astonishing new capabilities, such as Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5, that really push the creative envelope," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe.

"Whatever the media, CS5 is ensuring that publishers and creatives can deliver stand-out work and build great businesses around their unique digital assets and content."

But, if you want to take advantage of the new features, you may need to dig deep, it's Â£1,032 for CS5 Design Standard, Â£1,509 for Design Premium, Â£1,429 for CS5 Web Premium, Â£1,509 for CS5 Production Premium, Â£1,032 for CS5 Design Standard and Â£2,303 for Master Collection CS5, although upgrade pricing, volume licensing and education discounts are available.

Nokia N900 gets Firefox 1.1 upgrade

Mozilla might be all about pre-alpha Android builds these days, but that hasn't stopped it updating Firefox for the N900.

Based on the soon to be replaced Maemo OS, the N900 was one of the first devices to get a full version of the mobile version of Firefox.

The new 1.1 upgrade offers a number of new features, and the headline ones will help make your Firefox Mobile experience that little bit better.

One handed fun

First, there's the portrait browsing - the N900 is an almost exclusively landscape device, with only calling performed vertically. But most of the time you want to browse with one hand, and this finally is possible with the new update.

The volume switch now zooms in and out of web pages, like in the other browser on the phone, and menus have been improved to offer more intelligent and context sensitive options during browsing.

Overall there are nine changes in the 1.1 update of varying importance, so if you want to get the latest version then simply choose to upgrade within the browser of your phone, or head over to Firefox.com/m/beta

Opinion: The flaws in Steve Jobs' anti-Flash attack

So Steve Jobs finally posted the reasoning for his decision to kill Flash, in any form, on the iPhone/iPad platform.

Some of what he says makes sense. It really does. I don't necessarily disagree with the decision not to support Flash directly.

I do think it's a bit like Apple's decision to pre-empt the market by dropping serial and parallel ports, rewrite its OS from scratch instead of crippling it with backward compatibility, and so on. In other words, brave and forward-looking.

Then again, there's stuff here that Steve is Just Not Getting.

For example:

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer.*

Love how he makes this sound like Apple supported Adobe, rather than vice versa. The Mac's big foothold in the market was always in the creative industries, primarily as the basis for the DTP revolution. Without Adobe technology that would never have happened. For years, Macs couldn't even render fonts without Adobe Type Manager.

Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products.

What a load of utter cobblers. Adobe is still hugely focused on the creative industries and the creative industries are still hugely dependent on Adobe. To portray Adobe as having decamped to the corporate dark side isn't even funny, it's just stupid.

Mac users buy around half of Adobe's Creative Suite products.

Let's put that another way, shall we? Creative Suite users account for [insert your own very significant proportion] of professional Mac sales. If Apple were to piss off Adobe to the extent that Creative Suite disappeared from the Mac, I wouldn't switch to Apple's graphics and publishing software, I'd switch to Windows. You know why? Apple doesn't make graphics and publishing software.

Anyway, Steve, go on?

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe's Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Oh, you wanted us to better understand that fact? Sorry, I thought you wanted to bury it in clause 3.3.1 of a developer agreement revision that you didn't even publicly announce. Next time I want someone to better understand what I'm doing, I'll write it on a PostIt, stick it up my own arse and blog about it a month later.

Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

Why bother? Everyone else and their dog have already rehearsed this argument. Blah blah blah. Highlights of Steve's version:

â€¦HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many othersâ€¦

Whoa! That's big news. Last I heard, HTML5 was unlikely even to be recommended as a standard for another couple of years, let alone finalised and ratified. It's almost like you're telling us we don't need Adobe's stuff because something to which Apple has made a negligible contribution is going to come along sometime within our lifetime and do similar things. Which would be silly, obviously. Wait, that is what you're saying.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser [...] Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Run that by me again. Developing a browser (software for viewing, not making, web pages) that supports existing standards is 'creating open standards'? Tortuous much?

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access "the full web" because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don't say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264.

'Almost all'? What? What? This is beyond reality distortion.

YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web's video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever.

Agreed (see, I'm not just randomly arguing with everything) â€“ but some YouTube content still refuses to play on my iPhone, and even if you counted their whole 40% of the market, it simply isn't my experience that 'almost all', or even a majority, of web video I try to access on my iPhone will play. That's just video, before we even get into Flash proper.

iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren't missing much video.

Absolutely, totally, utterly, flat wrong. If you put that in an ad, there's no way it would be approved for broadcast. Just not true.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true.

As that woman in Catherine Tate's office sketch would say: Yes. It is.

Meanwhile:

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009.

Meh.

We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.

Would that be 'know first hand' as in 'don't have any evidence to show'? Still, fair cop, it certainly crashes my Mac more often than anything except the operating system, iTunes and Safari. And all Microsoft's software. You still like Microsoft, right?

We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems.

Yeah, you phoned Adobe's main switchboard and got a ticket number.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices.

Not really qualified to comment on that, but general impression: true. Hence, I understand the reluctance to pollute iPx.

Fourth, there's battery life. To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware [...] Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder.

Wait â€“ wait â€“ wait! You don't want Flash now because of a limitation Flash had in the past? Really? Have you been drinking German beer?

Fifth, there's Touch. [...] Apple's revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn't use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

OMFG.

Well, here I have to admit I was wrong. I said:

I realise Steve Jobs may have trouble understanding that other people actually have to do stuff to respond to change, not just shout at someone 'Fire Flash devs! Hire iPhone devs!', but I don't believe he's oblivious to the scale of the challenge.

OK, now I do believe it. Totally oblivious.

Finally, to the app packager question.

Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices. We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps.

I would interrupt here to insert a list of all the sub-standard apps already approved by Apple that have nothing to do with Flash, but I don't have three months of my life to spare.

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Sort of get that. Problem: at the moment, for the thousands of developers and creatives who do have the skills to use Flash but don't have the first glimmer of a clue how to code in Objective-C, none of the enhancements of the iPx platform are available. The platform isn't available at all. (I wrote about this in my reaction to 3.3.1.) And the only way it's ever going to be available is via some kind of third party tool. One with full typographical support. You know, like Adobe TLF.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple's mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary.

No it doesn't. Because from magazine companies, arguably the content sector most excited about the iPad, there's so far an avalanche of PDF-derived shovelware but only a trickle of original apps with genuinely innovative and appropriate ux. And that now looks like changing very slowly at best. Far from ensuring the predominance of high quality content, removing the Flash route delays it.

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future.

Agree! But Steve â€“ what about the present?

*Come on, Steve, you can at least put the right capital letters in PostScript and LaserWriter. I bet you wince when people write 'IPOD Touch'.

This post first appeared on 29 April 2010 at www.adambanks.com

Review: Asus Eee PC 1005PE

Asus can personally take credit for the explosion of netbooks a few years back, as its original Eee PC kicked off the trend of smaller, lighter portables. The Eee PC 1005PE is the latest in a long line of Eee PC netbooks and, while this new model offers few original features, the quality has not dipped.

In terms of design, Asus has stuck quite firmly to the stylish chassis used in previous models. The glossy lid and interior look is as sleek as ever, although they are highly prone to attracting dust and fingerprints. Durability is reassuringly strong, with firm hinges and minimal flex.

The touchpad also remains unchanged, with a tactile, textured surface that sits level with the chassis. This may not suit all tastes due to a lack of edge definition, but the pad is responsive and the mouse buttons are suitably firm and responsive.

Revamped keyboard

Another area that remains from previous models is the keyboard, with an isolated-key design similar to other netbooks. All keys are well separated and raised from the chassis. This is perfect for frequent touch-typing, as it's hard to hit the wrong key by mistake. The keyboard is also pleasingly quiet to use at all times.

Battery life is another area where Asus Eee PCs excel. In this case we managed to work for an excellent 419 minutes away from mains power. While this result isn't class-leading for netbooks, it is still more than enough for a full day's work and should satisfy most needs.

A 10.1-inch screen is in place, as is pretty typical, and it does its job well. The display is not particularly bright but images are sharp, and the lack of a glossy Super-TFT coating means reflections are eliminated, making this netbook perfect for working outdoors.

Wireless connectivity is provided by speedy 802.11n Wi-Fi and backed up by the inclusion of Bluetooth for transferring files to and from other Bluetooth-enabled devices. 10/100 Ethernet is also available for attaching to wired networks.

A small button above the keyboard lets you quickly power the netbook up with a more basic Linux-based operating system â€“ called ExpressGate â€“ for speedy access to the internet. Windows 7 is also installed. Other features include 500GB of online storage, boosting the 250GB of local hard drive space. Three USB ports are also in place.

The Asus Eee PC 1005PE is a well-rounded netbook with almost no flaws. Its solid build is further enhanced by the excellent keyboard and responsive touchpad, and network connectivity is strong. While Asus has taken few risks with this new model, it's still an excellent option for those looking for a netbook.

Related Links

Updated: 15 best graphics cards in the world today

The graphics card is without doubt the star of any PC capable of gaming, but the options out there are vast. So it's TechRadar to the rescue with our new and improved definitive guide to the top ten fastest and best commercial graphics cards on the planet.

The graphics card is the thoroughbred racehorse of your rig, but picking through the nags that are on offer out there is not for the faint hearted. In this guide though we'll let you know what's hot, what's cool and what the fastest GPUs available are.

The key thing here is that you don't always need to drop Â£500 on a new graphics card; the ubiquitous nature of console conversions in the games industry and the relative age of the current generation of consoles means that more often than not the latest PC games aren't going to stretch the fastest GPUs to their limit.

To that end we've also put together a five card shortlist of the best budget graphics cards if you don't feel like selling the kids to fuel your next gaming fix.

So how does your graphics card stand in our countdown, and is it time for an upgrade? Well, there's only one way to find out...

ATI radeon hd 5970

There are a lot of terms and acronyms that get bandied around when talking about graphics cards, and not a lot of explanation to go along with them.

Before we delve into the meat of the feature let's take a minute to clear things up a little.

GPU - This is the graphics processing unit, the chip at the heart of the graphics card. Many cards use the same GPU but partner it with different components and at different clockspeeds to produce slower or faster graphics cards.

GDDR - Graphics Double Data Rate memory is the specific kind of memory that is used on graphics cards.

ROPs - The Render Output unit comes into play during the final stages in the rendering process, bringing together the data from each of the memory buffers in the graphics card's local memory. The more of them you have, the better off you are.

CUDA - The Compute Unified Device Architecture is a coding language Nvidia invented to allow parallel computing on its range of GPUs. From its 8 series upwards all its cards can use CUDA to speed up parallel processing applications, such as video encoding, in a faster way than your computer's CPU.

PhysX - Originally an accelerator chip and software layer from the small company Ageia, Nvidia bought up PhysX and has now applied it to its GPUs, again from the 8 series forward. It allows for more advanced physics simulations, such as liquid or cloth, in games that have been coded with the PhysX software included.

Crossfire and SLI - These are the relevant multi-GPU configurations from both AMD and Nvidia. Both allow multiple graphics cards to be connected together to increase the rendering performance. Historically this has been fraught with driver issues and diminishing returns for the extra cards, but as the latest cards have been released we are getting closer to doubling the performance by adding in a second card.

PCB - The Printed Circuit Board is the physical board that graphics cards (and all other micro-electronics) have their components attached to. The boards are printed with conductive pathways between the relevant components instead of using physical wires.

DirectX - Microsoft's DirectX is a collection of its own proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) for dealing with multimedia tasks on its own operating systems. The Direct3D part is specifically to do with 3D graphics and utilises hardware acceleration if there is a GPU in place to take advantage of it.

Tesselation - This is one of the key buzzwords to come from Microsoft's latest graphical API, DirectX 11. Essentially it is designed to add extra geometry to a simple polygon using displacement maps to tell the GPU where to raise and lower parts of the polygon as the graphics card computes the data. The idea being to add geometry to objects in a game world without significantly impairing performance and it is set to become a key battleground in the graphics war in the coming years.

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As we've already discussed, the fastest graphics cards in the world aren't the only graphics cards you need to think about.

With the fast-paced evolution of the GPU the lower-end cards of today are exponentially better than the budget cards of yesterday. Much of the sub-Â£100 end of the market is dominated by AMD and this represents a conscious effort on behalf of the Texan company.

Seeing the dominance of Nvidia at the high-end of the graphics market over the last couple of generations AMD decided to put its efforts into sleeker, lower-cost designs hoping that doubling up its cheaper GPUs into multi-GPU cards would deliver competitive cards at the high end.

This strategy has paid off for AMD who now sees its cards being competitive at all price ranges, though most especially at the low-end.

You've also got last generation's cards dropping down in price to the point where they now represent a real bargain. We've picked five of the best budget graphics cards available today for your delectation and delight.

The best Â£150 graphics card

zotac

The pick of the bunch at this price has to be last generation's Nvidia GeForce GTX 260. The version two of the GTX 260 is a die-shrink of the GT200 GPU from 65nm to 55nm, which meant Nvidia was able to produce a cheaper, cooler, lower-power edition.

It runs the same GT200b GPU as the superlative GeForce GTX 275, but with reduced clockspeeds across the board. This does make it slightly slower than that card, but against the Â£150 competition the overclocked GTX 260 has the lead in performance terms. It is purely a DX9/10 card though, with no ability to use the DX11 API.

The best Â£125 graphics card

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This is a tough one to call as it really depends on how future-proof you want your gaming rig to be. With the spectre of massed DX11 titles on the horizon do you want to be lagging behind in your GPU's feature-set?

Both the 1GB HD 4870 and HD 5770 are available for around the Â£125 price-point but offer different things.

The HD 4870 has a definite edge in DX10 games, but the HD 5770 has the added ability of being able to take advantage of all the goodness DX11 offers.

That said your actual gaming experience would be faster on the HD 4870 across the board as the added strain that DX11's tessellation would put on the HD 5770 slows it down considerably.

The best Â£100 graphics card

At this price-point we get much the same duel as we had at the Â£125 mark. The Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 is the performance card being just a rebranded 9800GTX, in its time a Â£300 card and then the pinnacle of single-GPU cards.

There are also GTS 250 cards out there carrying a die-shrink of the 9800GTX's G92 GPU, the G92b, giving it lower power and cooling requirements. It's competition is the 1GB HD 5750, a DX11 part but unfortunately no performance king, especially at the higher resolutions.

The best Â£75 graphics card

Here there is no competition at all; it's all about the ATI Radeon HD 5670 straight down the line. It's not an incredible performer compared to the more expensive cards by any stretch of the imagination, but a card for this price that can run Far Cry 2, with all it's DX10 finery, at 2,560x1,600, in double figure framerates, is nothing to be sniffed at.

The best Â£50 graphics card

At this pricepoint you're not really looking at 3D gaming to any high degree, but the ATI Radeon HD 5450 will do the goods for your small form-factor media centre if you fancy a bit of World of Warcraft on your HD television. It's a half-height, passively-cooled card that doesn't have the raw grunt to throw pixels around at high resolutions but will do all you need in terms of encoding and decoding HD content in a lounge PC.

4890 review

10. ATI Radeon HD 4890

AMD's last-generation super-card still holding on to the top 10

Price: Â£190
GPU:\ RV790XT
Manufacturing process: 55nm
Memory:1,024MB GDDR5

Coming a lengthy nine months after the launch of its inaugural HD 48xx card, the HD 4870, the HD 4890 was much more than just an overclocked version of AMD's fastest single-GPU card of the time.

And batting at number ten in our chart of the fastest graphics cards around, the revisions AMD made to the GPU at the heart of this card made it a much more competitive product in such a crowded marketplace.

The clockspeeds have been upped from the HD 4870, but only by a somewhat measly 13 per cent - from 750MHz to 850MHz - and the actual make up of the chip hasn't changed much from the outside.

4890 bench

It still houses the HD 4870's 800 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs, but the chip itself has been reworked from the ground up to enable the higher clockspeeds and the other board components were tweaked too.

Combined with the constant evolution and maturation of AMD's driver set, this has all lead to the HD 4890 still being a relevant card today.

Indeed all the work AMD put in to create a card competitive with Nvidia's fastest single-GPU card paid off, shown by the HD 4890 being almost on a par with the monolithic GTX 285.

4890 bench

There are a host of overclocked versions which close the gap even more, and if you can palate the thought of jumping into a Crossfire setup adding a second HD 4890 isn't a bad option given those mature drivers.

Still, you always have to be wary of multi-GPU configurations if you're going to be playing the latest gaming releases - if there is a driver problem you could be waiting a couple of months for an effective fix to be put in action.

Read: ATI Radeon HD 4890 review

Available in these additional flavours:

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9. Nvidia GeForce GTX 275

The GTX 275 has all of the Nvidia power but at a fraction of the cost

Price:Â£176
GPU:GT200b
Manufacturing process: 55nm
Memory:896MB GDDR5

Coming closely on the heels of the HD 4890 is Nvidia's brilliant GTX 275. Why is it brilliant? Well, from a business point of view it isn't all that, but from a consumer's it was every bit as important a release as the 8800GT was back in its day.

Barely three month prior Nvidia had released its refresh of the GTX 280, the GTX 285. It was a die-shrink from the 65nm manufacturing process to the new 55nm process, meaning smaller chips, less power draw and hence could be higher clocked leading to improved performance.

gtx 275 benchmarks

The GTX 285 was, and still is, a well performing card. The problem was that it was significantly more expensive than the GTX 275, which wouldn't have been a problem if it was also significantly faster.

Unfortunately it wasn't. The GTX 275 is so close to the performance of the GTX 285 that on its release Nvidia practically retired its own fastest single-GPU card in one stroke. There simply was no point spending the extra cash on a GTX 285 when the GTX 275 could do practically everything the GTX 285 could do for a fraction of the price.

gtx 275 benchmarks

It's got the same basic GPU core and only very slightly lower clock, shader and memory speeds. You lose four ROPs, just over 100MB of DRAM and a smaller memory bus, but in real-world terms that makes so little difference as to be barely noticeable.

There is very little between this and AMD's 4890 making the bottom two in our fastest GPU countdown for the most part completely interchangeable.

We've placed the GTX 275 higher simply because it represents far better value for money and performs a shade faster in more of our tests.

There's also the added bonus of the PhysX and CUDA capabilities of the Nvidia family of graphics cards, allowing you to utilise some of the extra gaming features PhysX gives you and the GPU computing features of the CUDA programming language.

Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 review

Available in these additional flavours:

gtx285

8. Nvidia GeForce GTX 285

Still a very speedy card, but less relevant these days

Price: Â£240
GPU:GT200b
Manufacturing process:55nm
Memory: 1,024MB GDDR3

This, the GTX 285, was Nvidia's fastest single-GPU card right up to the launch of the GTX 480 last month.

It was the six-month refresh and die-shrink of Nvidia's thoroughly impressive, and mightily successful GTX 280 card. The GT200b GPU beating at its heart packed in the same 1.4bn transistors in a chip that was actually over 100mm sq smaller, which is why it was able to ramp up the clockspeeds of this lightning fast DX10 card to such an extent.

The move from 65nm manufacturing process to 55nm then was a far smoother ride than the move from 55nm to 40nm has proven to be with the scarcity, lower-than-expected performance and price of the latest Nvidia graphics cards.

gtx 285 benchmarks

This die-shrink also meant that it was far less power-hungry than the outgoing GTX 280, with a maximum power draw of 183W against it's older brother's 236W.

The win-win situation of more performance for less power made the GTX 285 one of the most desireable graphics cards of its time and the fact that it can still keep up with the most recent GPUs proves that it's still got a lot going for it.

At this price it's a little prohibitive to new buyers looking at the other cards in the market around the same price point. There is a significant jump in performance moving up to just a HD 5850, which is only another Â£10 at today's prices, and that is a card that will be as happy playing around in DX11 as it is in the venerable surrounds of DX10.

gtx 285 benchmarks

The problem though is that GTX 275 shaped fly in the ointment. On the release of that card a little less than three months later, Nvidia practically retired its most powerful single-GPU card of the time.

The GTX 275 as we've shown is a gnat's hair away from the GTX 285 in performance terms and is significantly cheaper. It was a shame for the GTX 285 that Nvidia effectively boxed it so quickly, though for us consumers it was a godsend.

Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 review

Available in these additional flavours:

5850

7. ATI Radeon HD 5850

The first affordable performance DX11 card is a cracker

Price:Â£250
GPU: Cypress PRO
Manufacturing process: 40nm
Memory:1,024MB GDDR5

AMD's HD 5850 represented the first vaguely affordable, performance DX11 card, and despite being a way down the list of fastest graphics cards, in some ways it still is.

As the first DX11 cards on the market the HD 5850 and HD 5870 had a price premium attached to them as Nvidia's response was some way off at the time.

Prices have come down and what was once a Â£300 card is now a more reasonable Â£250. You should expect prices to fall off even further with Nvidia's Fermi cards relatively close to availability, hopefully dropping this card closer to the Â£200 mark.

5850

In performance terms it is still quite a way off the numbers posted by the DX11 glory-boys, the HD 5870, HD 5970 and GTX 480, GTX 470 partnerships.

Still, it is capable of topping the 30fps mark at the highest settings at the eye-bleeding resolution of 2,560x1,600, the native res of 30-inch panels.

It's also far smaller than any of the faster cards in this list, making it a much better bet for small form-factor PCs that still want to pack one hell of a punch.

5850

A word of warning though; if you've been distracted by the Â£200 HD 5830 as a viable alternative to the HD 5850 it's time to think again.

That card is one of the biggest irrelevances in today's graphics market and represents little value for the money you're saving over the HD 5850. The HD 5830 doesn't make an impact on the fastest graphics cards list, failing to compete as it does against the much cheaper last generation of cards. Steer clear.

A pair of HD 5850s in Crossfire setup also is worth a look if you're after some multi-GPU action for your rig.

Or indeed if you can't afford any of the top three right now, but want the option of adding a second card later. The HD 5970 is essentially a couple of overclocked HD 5850 GPUs strapped to a single PCB and therefore you should get close to that awesome card's performance with a pair of these.

Available in these additional flavours:

6. AMD Radeon HD 4870 x2

A single-card, multi-GPU graphics card done the right way

Price: Â£325
GPU: R700
Manufacturing process: 55nm
Memory: 2 x 1,024MB GDDR5

The HD 4870 X2 is another of the last generation of graphics cards that has clung onto its place in the top ten performing graphics cards thanks to its ground-breaking design.

For years both ATI and Nvidia had been trying to create a multi-GPU card that combined two graphics processors in one single card design. And both had failed quite impressively until the HD 4870 X2 hit the market proving that it coule be done and done right.

Nvidia had its fingers burnt with the terrifically under-performing, and woefully unsupported, GeForce 7950 GX2 and AMD had a tough time with its inaugural multi-GPU card, the HD 3870 X2.

Just one generation later though and the HD 4870 X2 showed just how its done. The fact that it is still competitive in performance terms with the current generation of DirectX 11 cards is proof of just that.

Obviously the card isn't able to cope with the rigours of DX11, and the tessellated goodness that entails, but for general graphical performance it's got it where it counts.

The difficulty is that at this price you are always going to want to push for the newer card with a modicum of future-proofing. Anyone purchasing this card for over Â£300 now is making a grave error, but if you've already got one purring away in your rig it's worth knowing that what was once the pinnacle of graphical performance is still not that far off the top almost two years down the line.

And in the fast paced evolution of computing that's an aeon.

The real problem with the twin-GPU HD 4870 X2, pricing aside, is the heat that the two graphics chips produce. In the vanilla flavour the stock cooler is capable enough to keep things running smoothly, if a little warm.

Many of the overclocked versions though are unfortunately stuck with that same stock cooler leading to issues further down the line. We had an overclocked version in a rig of ours and barely three months later it was regularly falling over because one core was seriously over-heating, leading to permanent damage to the card.

So it's still a quick card, but beware of the cooling.

Read: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 review

Available in these additional flavours:

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5. ATI Radeon HD 5870

The first DX11 card that hit the market is still right up there with the big boys

Price: Â£320
GPU: Cypress XT
Manufacturing process: 40nm
Memory: 1,024MB GDDR5

ATI's HD 5870 is the card that kicked off the whole DirectX 11 bandwagon, and sits comfortably at number five in our list of the fastest graphics cards in the world.

Just a couple of weeks ago it would have been far higher, but the recent launch of Nvidia's GTX 470 and GTX 480 has relegated it down the list.

Still, it's well over half a year old now, and in graphical terms that makes it an old hand. The bonus of that is that AMD has had time to fully mature its driver set through its usual monthly driver updates.

5870

That means it's about as stable a DX11 card as you're going to find, with the value-added extra of also being rock-solid when set up in a Crossfire configuration. With two HD 5870s connected together you'll find it a far more powerful graphical setup than even the super HD 5970.

The worry for the HD 5870 is the fact that as such an early DX11 part it is simply not going to be able to compete with the Nvidia big boys when it comes to the burgeoning use of tessellation in PC gaming.

The Nvidia cards were delayed partly to ensure they could cope with the demands of tessellation with the chips being fully designed with that in mind. The architecture of AMD's Cypress GPU, the chip powering all the HD 58xx cards, has only one tessellation engine where the Nvidia cards have up to 15 (one in each of the shader microprocessors).

5870

It's not apples for apples as they work in very different ways, that said though Nvidia's performance in the tessellation-heavy Heaven 2.0 benchmark puts its cards far in advance of the HD 5870.

The other concern is the price of the card itself. It was an expensive ol' graphics card when it first came out and it still is seven months down the line. With the GTX 470 being priced directly in competition with this card though you should expect AMD to slash the prices of both the HD 5870 and the HD 5850 once Nvidia is able to actually get its cards in stores and available for purchase.

It may only be fifth in the top ten performance graphics cards line up, but it's out their in the wild and doing the business, just keep an eye out for the price drop and you could be in for a bargain.

Read: ATI Radeon HD 5870 review

Available in these additional flavours:

zotac-gtx-295-infinity

4. Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

Price: Â£420
GPU: GT200b
Manufacturing process: 55nm
Memory: 2 x 896MB GDDR5

Still pumping out the pixels with the best of them, Nvidia's venerable GTX 295 is sitting pretty at number four in our top ten GPUs. This was Nvidia's last multi-GPU card and has ruled the roost for a long time, it was only AMD's latest dual-GPU card, the HD 5970, that managed to best it in performance terms.

The GTX 295 has just about got the edge in performance terms over the HD 5870, thanks to those twin GT200b GPUs humming away in that sinister-looking, monolithic casing.

These chips mean that the card can still play with the big boys even when the resolutions reach the eye-popping heights of 2,560x1,600.

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The downside of this last generation graphics card though is that it simply cannot stand the pace when you factor in DirectX 11 performance. There are still relatively few real DX11 titles out there to take advantage of the hardware though, so the GTX 295 can hold its head up high for a while yet.

The stumbling block remains that the price hasn't dropped in a long while, and it is unlikely now to ever do so.

295

You may be able to pick one of these up second hand for the price of a brand new HD 5870, but anyone with any sense must surely pick the AMD card over this. The HD 5870 is only just shy in terms of raw performance and can cope with the all the tessellated goodness that DirectX 11 offers.

So, while it's still got the performance where it counts, the GTX 295's days are well and truly numbered, and we wouldn't recommend this as a purchase to anyone looking to upgrade.

As a hint to the future though, and if Nvidia can come to terms with the incredible heat produced by even a single GTX 480, we could well see Nvidia looking to the multi-GPU solution to [spoiler alert] give it back the lead in the graphics war.

Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 review

Available in these additional flavours:

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3. Nvidia GeForce GTX 470

The GTX 47 is finally here, but was it worth the wait?

Price: Â£320
GPU: GF100
Manufacturing process: 40nm
Memory: 1,280MB GDDR5

Not so hot on the heels of Nvidia's first DX11 graphics cards comes the GeForce GTX 470, an even more cut down version of the GF100 GPU the green company is rightfully proud of.

Given the nigh-on Â£500 pricetag of its big brother this represents the most affordable Fermi card out there. There is a GTX 460 reportedly coming out in June, which will be another cut down GF100, before the real mainstream parts really start rolling out mid-summer.

For now though the GTX 470 is the third fastest graphics card in the world and that has come as quite a surprise, not least to us here at TechRadar.

470

The innumerable delays to its launch and the incredible scarcity of cards meant that before we managed to cadge our very own card we held out little hope for it. Sure it shared the same price point as ATI's HD 5870, but if it was so shy then it surely didn't have the brass cojones to best it.

Well, luckily for Nvidia it does. Just. At the lower end of the resolution spectrum, at the native 22-inch resolution of 1,680x1,050, the card is a fair way ahead of the HD 5870, but when things get cranked up the performance isn't quite so good.

Indeed in our World in Conflict benchmark it actually dropped behind. Still, thanks to its Fermi roots the GTX 470 has still got the tessellation goods and this is more of a future-looking card.

gtx 470

Still, Nvidia is having problems getting enough cards out into the market meaning that in those terms at least the AMD cards have the edge, having gotten over their own production problems.

Many of Nvidia's manufacturing partners had only the one sample card doing the rounds for the entire of the UK press, and that says a lot about how easy it will be for the consumer, you, to actually find a GTX 470 in stock anywhere.

Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 470

Available in these additional flavours:

2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 480

The fastest single-GPU card in the world. Job done.

Price: Â£470
GPU: GF100
Manufacturing process: 40nm
Memory: 1,536MB GDDR5

When you come this late to the party you need to make sure you bring one hell of a good bottle of wine and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 is just about good enough to justify its tardiness. Coming almost six months after AMD launched the first DirectX 11 graphics cards ever things were looking fairly bleak for the Californian company.

Yields from its 40nm production facilities meant it wasn't getting the number of fully functional processors out of its wafers that it wanted and so it had to cut the expected performance of these chips in order to improve the number of good chips coming out of the factory.

285

The full Graphics Fermi 100 GPU (GF100) is a marvel of graphical architecture, but some of the 512 small processing (CUDA) cores had to be dropped. The GTX 480 then comes with 480 of these cores, but still manages to pack one hell of a punch.

The key for Fermi, and the purported reason for its lengthy delay, was to ensure it had the best possible tessellation performance.

Tessellation is going to be one of the key tasks for future GPUs, the ability to render more detailed geometry rather than simply better, smoother textures, and Nvidia wants to be at the forefront.

285

The difficulty is that once tessellation becomes that important, and that heavily used in modern gaming development, this card may not quite have the grunt. For now though, if you can find one of these rare-as-dog's-eggs cards, it's still an incredible piece of engineering.

The minimum aim for the GTX 480 was to beat AMD's HD 5870 and thankfully for AMD it has managed that. Unfortunately for Nvidia though it cannot lay claim to the number one slot in our best graphics card list, and instead must settle for the fastest single-GPU card. I wonder then if you can guess which card grabbed the top spot...

Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 480

Available in these additional flavours:

ati-radeon-hd-5970

1. ATI Radeon HD 5970

More powerful than Steve Jobs...

Price: Â£560
GPU: Hemlock XT
Manufacturing process: 40nm
Memory: 2 x 1,024MB GDDR5

So here it is; the fastest commercial graphics card available today; the Radeon HD 5970.

AMD has taken the top spot and managed to hold out against the very, very late Fermi card from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 480.

This twin-GPU beauty is one big, beefy, powerhouse of a graphics card, capable of spewing out polygons like last night's bad chicken kebab. And it bloody well should be considering it'll cost you the best part of Â£600 for that simple pleasure.

It isn't just two HD 5870s strapped onto one slab of PCB though - there's definitely nothing simple about fitting two graphics cards into one form factor.

5970

The actual GPUs are slightly slower than a vanilla HD 5870, making them more akin to twin overclocked HD 5850s. This also means that a Crossfire setup sporting two actual HD 5870s will beat this card in a foot race. But this is Crossfire made easy and that's something that could rarely be said in the past.

Surprisingly, given the power requirements, it doesn't get quite as hot as the volcanic GTX 480, a card that actually wiped some of our fingerprints during testing. And, again surprisingly, it's remarkably stable and happy to be overclocked.

Some would say though that overclocking what is already the fastest graphics card in the world is a bit of an overkill, but the option is there for the brave. There are already concerns over driver support though, given that DX11 launch title, and AMD Game title, DiRT 2 didn't support the multi-GPU HD 5970 until very recently, so it could present an issue going forward.

5970

The only real problem with the HD 5970 though is that incredible price. You can actually buy gaming PCs that will do a sterling job for the price of this graphics card alone.

That said it is most definitely the fastest graphics card out there, posting figures with a healthy lead over the closest competitor from Nvidia. Considering that just a couple of generations ago ATI looked to be choking on Nvidia's dust with the HD 3xxx series of cards, it's quite incredible that it has managed to take the top spot and hold it against cards coming out almost half a year later.

Hats off to you then HD 5970, you are the fastest graphics card in the world.

Read: ATI Radeon HD 5970 review

Available in these additional flavours:

ati-radeon-5870-review

AMD's ATI brand is the no holds-barred winner in the performance graphics war then, with the incredibly fast Radeon HD 5970.

It is, without doubt, the single fastest graphics card commercially available right now. But does that necessarilly equate to being the best?

benchmarks

There are many different things to factor into what constitutes the best graphics card on the planet, and performance is certainly not the least of them.

The price/performance ratio though has to be the most important factor and as good as the HD 5970 is, it's hard to justify spending almost Â£600 on a single graphics card, no matter how fast it is.

benchmarks

In gaming terms graphics cards have a far longer shelf life than they've had in years, as shown by the number of last generation cards still outperforming the latest GPUs.

This is mostly down to the fact that most games are multi-platform now and so developers are designing games to run on five year old hardware, namely the Xbox 360.

benchmarks

That means that unless you're playing on a 30-inch panel, at its 2,560x1,600 native res you'll get lightening performance out of any of the cards in our top ten graphics cards list.

Indeed you're still looking at above 30fps across the board even at that resolution.

benchmarks

It has to be said then that the real performance sweet spot is around the Â£250 mark, with the HD 5850.

And remember you can still get great performance, though not the future-proofing of DX11 capabilities, when you dip below Â£200. But no matter what your budget, as we've shown, there is a great graphics card there waiting for you.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Techradar) 01/05/2010

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The best Â£150 graphics card

The best Â£125 graphics card

The best Â£100 graphics card

The best Â£75 graphics card

The best Â£50 graphics card

10. ATI Radeon HD 4890

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9. Nvidia GeForce GTX 275

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8. Nvidia GeForce GTX 285

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7. ATI Radeon HD 5850

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6. AMD Radeon HD 4870 x2

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5. ATI Radeon HD 5870

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4. Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

Available in these additional flavours:

3. Nvidia GeForce GTX 470

Available in these additional flavours:

2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 480

Available in these additional flavours:

1. ATI Radeon HD 5970

Available in these additional flavours:

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