In Depth: Mobile web design: platform by platform
The mobile landscape is a complex and sometimes confusing place to be. Here we'll take a look at the most popular platforms, operating systems and app stores and offer some quick and easy tips to making the most out of the opportunities they offer.
Around 1.2 billion phones were sold last year, 174 million of which were smartphones. Symbian devices count for nearly 47 per cent of this market (with Nokia making up the majority of this figure), but they're losing market share to both Apple and Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind BlackBerry, which now have 14.4 per cent and 19.9 per cent respectively.
The fastest growing markets last year were Apple and Android, which grew by 6.2 per cent and 3.5 per cent respectively.
Smartphones enable consumers to download apps, and now there are app stores everywhere, courtesy of device manufacturers (eg Nokia's Ovi Store); OS developers (Android Market Place; Windows Marketplace for Mobile); operators (Vodafone's 360 Store; Orange's Application Shop) and Independents (GetJar; Handango). All are competing fiercely for eyeballs, clicks and sales.
At the moment, the Apple App Store is the undisputed champion; in January, it announced that three billion apps had been downloaded over the last 18 months. Others are catching up, though, with Nokia now proclaiming that it has broken the 1.5million app sales per day mark as of March.
The UK mobile scene According to the AdMob report on smartphone usage trends for January, 75 per cent of requests came from a combination of the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The next most popular were Nokia and HTC on 4.8 per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively.
With Apple firmly set with the top two handset models, it's left to HTC's Hero and Dream and Nokia's N95 to complete the top five UK smartphone handsets.
DROID MILESTONE: Amazing statistics released by app analytics company Flurry report higher sales for Droid than iPhone in the first 74 days of sale
This isn't the situation all around the world, though. For example in India, 17 out of the top 20 web-accessing devices are Nokia phones. Nokia here has a market share of nearly 60 per cent, whereas Apple has just under two per cent.
Palm and the WebOS
Palm has a vision that the future of mobile will be built on the web. Last summer it launched a new mobile operating system called WebOS, built using web technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
A JavaScript framework provides access to standardised UI elements, device hardware and services, enabling relatively rapid turnaround times for applications. Last December, Palm launched the first mobile development environment hosted entirely in the browser, Project Ares.
Currently in beta, it provides you with a drag and drop interface builder, code editor, visual debugger, log viewer and source code integration. You can preview apps in the browser or launch them directly on the WebOS emulator (installed as part of the SDK). Project Ares works on the latest browsers including Safari (OS X & Windows), Firefox (OS X, Windows & Linux) and Chrome (Windows).
If you'd like to have a quick peek at all the UI elements, a handy app to check out (it comes as part of the SDK) is one that goes by the name of Style Matters. It comes complete with all the lovely code for you to start digging and getting your head around the visual parts of the framework.
The Palm SDK, development guides, tools and more can be downloaded from developer.palm.com.
Android
As a developer, you have more freedom on the Android platform compared to iPhone because you have the ability to change or replace some of the core functionality (eg a custom dialler).
The Android SDK runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. Applications are developed in Java, normally in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), using the Android Development Tool plug-in. Other IDEs such as IntelliJ or Emacs are an option, but Eclipse remains Google's recommendation. The SDK provides you with all the tools you need, including emulators.
The Google Android Market app count has more than doubled over the last four months, with the purchase rate having trebled in the same period of time. And even more manufacturers will be releasing Android-based devices this year.
However, it's not all rosy news for Android: fragmentation between devices is beginning to present an issue. Phones are being released with a range of Android firmware versions (1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1) with a variety of different software feature sets and hardware. For example, the Nexus One doesn't run some of the more popular games due to its different resolution screen. What's more, there's a range of different user experiences available, with HTC and Motorola having developed their own UIs.
It's also worth noting the success of the Motorola Droid (in the UK it's called the rather less catchy 'Motorola Milestone'), which outperformed the iPhone in terms of sales in the first 74 days from launch. Google's Nexus One, on the other hand, sold very few units, which could be due to a combination of bad marketing and the fact that you could only buy it online.
Apple
To write an iPhone or iPodTouch app, you'll have to get used to the Objective-C programming language. This can take time for those unfamiliar with it, but having prior knowledge of object oriented concepts and the C language will be a big benefit.
There are also a number of tools on the market that enable you to code in different languages and then either compile down to Objective-C or provide access to the native Objective-C calls via special bridges, such as Titanium by Appcelerator (JavaScript, HTML and CSS); Flash CS5 by Adobe, which will include a packager for iPhone; Elips Studio 3 from OpenPlug; and the open source PhoneGap project.
PAY AS YOU GO: 'We Rule', a Farmville-style game by ngmoco is free, but features in-app purchasing
The performance of the apps that these tools create may not be entirely 100% when compared to a totally native app, but they're getting very close in some situations.
It shouldn't be forgotten that a very competent browser exists on these devices. For a web developer, it's a lovely place to be, writing mobile web apps in HTML5 and CSS3, with the ability of offline storage and advanced transitions blurring the boundary between native apps and browser based alternatives. It may only be a matter of time before the major native APIs can be accessed easily from within the browser.
Check out developer.apple.com/iphone for human interface guidelines, getting started videos, sample code and the SDK.
The Windows Phone(s)
With only 693 apps in Microsoft's store at time of writing, there are large gaps for developers to fill and monetise. Its upcoming app store for Windows Phone 7 devices has been designed to reward apps that deliver a high quality of experience rather than filtering first on price (with a focus on quality, there's also a certification process to getting your app in the marketplace).
There's also an optional Trial API for freemium business models, which enables the developer to program their own conditions for the 'try before you buy' experience. This is most commonly based on either time or experience, but you as the developer have the flexibility to develop your own set of custom rules, which could be quite interesting.
SNEAK PEAK: A peek into how the app marketplace on a Windows Phone 7 will look
In terms of legacy applications, developers should expect to rewrite from the ground up as so much has changed (eg UI best practices and underlying architecture). Developers will need to use either one or a combination of Silverlight, XNA frameworks and the .NET Compact Framework to develop the apps.
Windows Phone 7 is being targeted to consumers for now, leaving the enterprise market with 6.5 (which has still got a few updates due), which might still be a viable market for enterprise apps for the next year or so.
Although the phone has a release date of late 2010, Microsoft has already announced free development tools (Visual Studio 2010 Express and Expression Blend). To get started, visit developer.windowsphone.com. Also check windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wpdev/ for the latest blog articles.
Nokia
Nokia's Ovi Store is currently selling 1.5million apps a day, with growth of sales accelerating rapidly as it begins to capitalise on its market share. The latest version features a redesigned user interface and an upgraded rating system, with the new requirement that users must download an app before they can rate or comment on it.
There's still lots for Nokia to do, though, such as adding functionality to push app update announcements down to your device à la Apple. At last count, the Ovi store supports 112 devices, including S40, S60 3rd Edition (N95, N73) and S60 5th Edition.
Developers have reported that the S60 5th Edition phones drive the majority of the sales (N97, N97 mini, 5800 XpressMusic and 5530 XpressMusic), in part due to the Ovi store app coming embedded on more recent devices.
In terms of development choices, you have a few: Web RunTime (WRT), native Symbian, Java and Flash. Very broadly speaking, Java is used if you want to support a large number of devices (including the older ones) and especially for games, Symbian has been used for utilities (due to access to low-level APIs and hardware), Flash for more graphically rich touch apps and WRT for apps such as Facebook.
In my view, WRT is the future: it's got access to an increasing number of device APIs, is web standards-based (apps essentially run in a browser without the chrome) and it's relatively simple and quick to create apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
To create visual effects in WRT you're going to need to use a JavaScript library such as jQuery, which has a small footprint of under 20kb, making it ideal for working on mobile. There's also a jQuery-based UI library called Guarana UI specifically built for Nokia WRT devices.
It makes sense to re-use existing knowledge where possible so when it comes to building WRT apps, web developers out there already have all the skills they need. Check out www.forum.nokia.com/devices and filter by 'Ovi Store' to see a list of all currently supported devices. The web store-front can be accessed at store.ovi.com.
RIM
BlackBerry App World has been known to be unattractive and buggy but a recent update focuses on improving the efficiency and performance (rather than adding new front-end features). Its app catalogue is far smaller than Android's or the iPhone's.
STORE WARS: The potential for opportunity on platforms other than Apple is huge. You can keep an eye on the numbers at distimo.com/report
An interesting observation of BlackBerry app usage is that users are more likely to play games than use utility-based apps. This could be due to the rise of consumer market, where teenagers have chosen BlackBerry devices for their ability to text using the very usable QWERTY keyboards and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).
Billing at the moment is limited to PayPal, so there's an extra step for users whilst making an app purchase. Network operator billing is apparently planned for later this year.
BlackBerry App World has a number of nice little features: you can flag specific customer reviews for Admin review by RIM, which helps to raise the quality of reviews quite substantially; the web storefront features unique URLs for each app; and it's also well integrated to a number of social networks, which helps when making app recommendation to each other.
At Mobile World Congress this year, RIM announced that it plans to introduce the WebKit browser into its BlackBerry phones. It's a browser that gets a 100 per cent score on the ACID 3 test and provides a welcome speed boost over the current browsing experience.
The BlackBerry Developer Portal contains a lot of information at na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/.
The operators
Vodafone, Orange, O2, T-Mobile and 3 already sell applications, specifically selected for their customer and handset range. This isn't a new feature, though, as they've had the ability to sell content for some time. For example, Vodafone Live was launched way back in 2002, although it was more of a portal than an app store as such. The success of Apple, Google and Nokia app stores have made operators realise that they need to compete.
One initiative announced earlier this year was a universal app store, with key backers involving the network operators: Telefonica, Orange, AT&T, China Mobile, India's Bharti Airtel and Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo as well as device manufacturers: Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG. Their aim is not to compete with Apple but to focus on the lower end of a largely untapped market by focusing on standards like BONDI and JIL.
CO-OPERATION: The Samsung H1 is a tailor-made Vodafone 360 phone, but the 360 experience is also available on a range of Nokia phones too
Last September, Vodafone launched a service titled 'Vodafone 360' to replace Vodafone Live. It's a collection of services that allows close integration of social network information such as Twitter and Facebook into your phone experience and includes an app store.
Vodafone has recently announced that it has over 7,000 applications available to customers – 2,000 more titles than Orange, which also launched an app store late last year. The operators have a lot of work to do though, as companies like Tesco are specifically choosing device manufacturer app stores over network operators (at least for the initial launch).
There are a number of advantages, such as a lesser requirement on porting because they can focus on a narrower range of handsets on the same platform. This in turn allows these big brands to publish the app sooner rather than later.
The indies
Are the independent app stores worth considering? Well, just going on downloads, the mobile internet messaging (IM) brands such as Nimbuzz and mig33 have roughly 30million and 23million respectively on GetJar alone. Additionally, GetJar are currently recording 50million downloads per month throughout their store with support for over 2,000 phones. So, what's the catch?
GetJar at this point doesn't have the functionality to charge for apps, so essentially your app will be available for free. To make the most out of your download numbers and generate revenue you'll currently have to employ in-app advertising. GetJar has mentioned in the past that it's working on a payment mechanism, but we'll have to wait for this.
It's certainly worth noting that PocketGear – who recently bought Handango, making it the third largest app store in the world – already has a payment system in place.
Where to start
There's a lot of choices to make when it comes to building your app for mobile devices. My suggestion would be to start off with what you feel most familiar with. If you have a web-standards background, start experimenting with HTML5 and CSS on iPhone, Palm Pre and Android browsers.
Although emulators help a lot, there's nothing like testing your application on a real device, where you start to understand what a user experience in a 2G-only zone is like. If you fancy creating an native-esque app using your web skills, look into using one of the packaging tools like PhoneGap or Elipse that enables you to publish to a number of mobile platforms.
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Review: Lenovo ThinkPad W701
As well as featuring laptops and netbooks within its ThinkPad range, Lenovo also manufactures mobile workstations. Aimed at professionals, these machines employ only the latest components to enable you to carry out pretty much any task, regardless how resource-intensive.
The ThinkPad W701 is the latest version, and provides near industry-leading performance, features and usability.
The power on offer is simply stunning, and although the benchmark score from 3DMark 2003 of 32,186 suggests there are other machines as capable of multi-tasking the same workload, further tests found the machine to be one of the fastest we've ever seen at carrying out any and all tasks.
The dedicated Nvidia graphics card is also extremely powerful, meaning that if you're after all-out power, this is the laptop for you and will help everyone from scientists crunching serious amounts of data to film editors who want to edit high-definition (HD) footage as fast as possible.
Stunning screen
The 17-inch screen is also fantastic and the 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution is the highest currently available on any laptop. Images are razor-sharp as a result and offer excellent detail and clarity. What impresses most, however, is the vivid colour reproduction and contrast.
The laptop features Lenovo's renowned build quality and the machine is very well put together. Aside from the very firm keyboard, there are three other input methods: a regular touchpad, a pointing stick and finally a Wacom tablet built into the palmrest.
One point worth noting is that the tablet is positioned on the right side of the palmrest and left-handers will brush the regular touchpad as they work. You can deactivate the touchpad using a hotkey, but it's worth noting.
Connectivity is also excellent, with the latest in Wi-Fi and Ethernet technologies helping you connect to network at the fastest speeds. You also get a FireWire port, eSATA interface and even a USB 3.0 port. This latest connection technology helps you transfer data to compatible external devices, such as a hard drive, at very fast speeds.
Somewhat predictably, portability isn't that impressive and the 161-minute battery life will mean you're largely chained to your desk.
At 4kg this is also one of the heaviest laptops we've seen. That shouldn't really count against the Lenovo ThinkPad W701, however, as where its strength really lies is its power, and in this it excels.
The ThinkPad W700 - its predecessor - was once the most powerful laptop we had seen, but the W701 has successfully stolen that crown.
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In Depth: The 5-minute guide to the MeeGo mobile OS
In the history of stupid names for Linux software, MeeGo tops them all. But what is it exactly?
That's not a very nice thing to say! But yes, MeeGo is an unusual name. OK, it's stupid.
It's a new project that brings together Moblin, a name that you wouldn't call great, but neither was it embarrassing, and Maemo, a name that kept making people disagree over whether it was pronounced Maymo, Maimo or Meemo. Cunningly, MeeGo tops them both in the silly name stakes.
Maybe it's an attempt at a catchy, web 2.0-inspired brand name…
Well no, it isn't. The name itself is quite old in fact. The Linux Foundation registered the meego.com domain over a decade ago. We've no idea what the thinking was behind doing this, but it's been sitting on the trademark for some time now.
Enough about the name. What's this all about? Is there any substance to it?
MeeGo brings together all the awesome work that Intel has done with Moblin, and the work that Nokia did with Maemo.
So before we even start thinking about what new things MeeGo brings to the table, there's already a wealth of software, tools, engineers and documentation from the existing projects.
What exactly does Moblin bring to this new project, then?
Whether you realise it or not, Intel is the company that kickstarted the netbook revolution. All the work that was put in to produce super-cheap devices for the One Laptop Per Child project meant that we had a glut of hardware that could be put together into a cheap laptop – and that became the first netbook.
Intel then followed this up with its Atom CPU, which lowered the cost and raised the energy efficiency even further.
So Intel's main contribution is on the hardware side of things, then?
Well, Intel is a hardware company, to be fair. But Moblin does have a lot of software. You see, something that Apple figured out years ago is that if you want to make people love your hardware, you have to make them love your software too. So Intel put in a huge amount of work to customise and optimise Linux for its hardware.
The result is that its customised Moblin distro boots fast, doesn't require much hard disk space and has a custom user interface, designed to make maximum use of small screens.
Much of that user interface was made with a toolkit called Clutter, which is a GTK-based system that enables fast drawing and cool animations. If you ever used the neat little interface in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, for example, that was Clutter. All Intel's work will be brought into MeeGo.
That sounds great. So what does Maemo bring to the MeeGo party?
Maemo hasn't had quite the same success as Moblin, for a few reasons. Firstly, for a long time it was only available on Nokia's high-end line of 'internet communicators' – that's the Nokia 770, the N800, the N810 and, most recently, the N900. These are great devices, but they're aimed at a niche market, so there aren't many of them out there compared to the number of netbooks.
What's more, for years Maemo was based on GTK with Nokia's own modifications. But a couple of years ago, when Nokia acquired Qt maker Trolltech, it became inevitable that Maemo would switch over to Qt at some point.
So Maemo uses Qt?
Er… no. Despite Nokia's acquiring it in 2008, support for Qt only started to appear in Maemo last year. And having support for Qt doesn't mean the actual system uses it – that's all still written in GTK.
As a result, Maemo has GTK and Qt, which isn't the slim and light approach that seems best for small devices.
If Maemo has GTK and Qt, and Moblin only has GTK, then won't they just standardise on GTK?
You might very well think that, but we couldn't possibly comment…
Oh, go on…
Sadly, instead of standardising on what both distros already have, MeeGo will use Qt for its user interface system.
Does that mean Clutter is dead?
Like we said, all of Intel's work will be brought into MeeGo, and that includes GTK and Clutter. However, the MeeGo project has made it clear that these two are only included for application compatibility – so that existing apps will work – and that the primary toolkit is Qt.
Given that Qt had yet to become the primary toolkit even on Maemo, this doesn't seem like a smart move. But Nokia owns Qt, so presumably it's somewhat obliged to use it.
Surely it's fantastic to have a big firm such as Nokia switch to Linux?
It's always great to have anyone join in our effort, but don't expect to see Nokia roll out MeeGo across all its hardware overnight. Nokia has a huge market share in the lower-end devices – phones with smaller screens, less computing power and lower costs.
So, while having a full-fat Linux distro is a great idea for phones with the latest and greatest hardware, it's not so nice on the kinds of phones that are given away free with a small contract.
I have a phone like that, and I like it – after all, it's a phone, not a web browser or an email client or an MP3 player, or any other stuff I don't want…
Right, and in those scenarios, something like Symbian – the modern descendent of Palm's EPOC operating system, and also owned by Nokia – is probably better. It's open source, and runs on nearly half the smartphones in the world.
What's more, Qt already runs on Symbian devices, which means that with a little bit of effort, MeeGo and Symbian apps are basically compatible.
Does this mean that over time, as phones get more powerful, we'll see more Nokia MeeGo devices appearing in the low-end phone marketplace?
That seems likely, but on the flip side, it's definitely in Nokia's interest to continue the optimisation momentum inherited from Moblin so that MeeGo can work on smaller and smaller devices in the future.
If apps can run on everything from Symbian devices with tiny screens, all the way up to netbooks, how can developers know what to design for?
This is certainly one of the concerns. All models of Apple's iPhone, for example, have a 320x480 screen, which means that all apps look and work the same. With MeeGo, you don't know what screen resolution you'll have or how much RAM there'll be – you don't even know what CPU it'll be running on.
That's an interesting point, but isn't the difference between a 1.6GHz CPU and a 1.8GHz CPU pretty trivial?
That's true, but MeeGo is also designed to work cross-architecture. This means that it'll work on Intel CPUs as well as ARM, which satisfies both Intel and Nokia.
Does that mean that Intel is making software to work on non-Intel CPUs?
Yes it does. We suspect that it probably isn't too happy about doing this, but in the name of co-operation, anything's possible. So Nokia gets to use its user interface toolkit, Intel can use its packaging system, and both companies get CPUs that they're happy with. To be honest, it does feel a bit as though boardroom politics may have influenced some of the technical decisions here.
Hold on, what was that about a packaging system?
Don't forget that it's all Linux behind the scenes, and that means a package manager is used to install software. For Moblin, that was RPM, for Maemo it was APT. They chose one, and it was Intel's, so MeeGo uses RPM.
Oh no!
We're not big fans of RPM either, so this seems a strange choice. Still, for the most part, it'll be hidden from the user behind some sort of app store façade.
Ah, brilliant, so users will be able to get their apps from one central location?
You might well think that there would be a store a bit like Apple's, but…
Oh, you're kidding. You mean there won't be a standard app store?
Sadly, no. Instead of there being one central place where users can get their apps from, Intel will have its app store, called AppUp, which is currently in beta testing. Nokia, in turn, will continue to use its own existing Ovi store.
This all seems like a bit of a mess. Isn't Android going to mop up in the market?
It does have a stronger brand, but the Android world seems to be even more fragmented than MeeGo – there are lots of different devices about, all with different hardware, and all with different software too. Plus, Android support was recently removed from the Linux kernel because no one showed much interest in maintaining it.
Surely, out of all this mess, some sort of competition will emerge?
Free software does seem to work at its best by having a chaotic gloop of primordial SourceForge projects that – somehow – end up being viable and very popular. We're not sure yet whether we'll end up using MeeGo or Android, but, happily, they're both contributing back to the same community. And don't call me Shirley.
And where does all this leave Ubuntu Netbook Remix?
We think Ubuntu is likely to do what it has always done best: sit back, wait for other people to do the work, then take it all, respin it into something awesome and stick a brown colour scheme on top. It's worked in the past, so we think it'll work here too – Ubuntu Netbook Remix could well prove to be more popular than both MeeGo and Android.
Where can I find out some more information about MeeGo?
Somewhat predictably, the information's currently scattered across the Moblin and Maemo sites, with http://meego.com being a bit bare right now. So head over to www.moblin.org and www.maemo.org to get started. All being well, we should see the first software being released in a couple of months' time, and the first devices appearing by the end of the year.
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Review: Asus N61J
Asus' N61 range consists of multimedia machines featuring powerful components and the latest features, including Asus' own SonicMaster technology standards.
This is also one of the first laptops we've seen to feature USB 3.0, the next generation of USB technology.
The N61J is a powerful machine for the multimedia user, but there are a few issues here as well. One of the laptop's key selling points is the aforementioned SonicMaster standards.
We found that while the stereo effect was impressive, sound wasn't as good across the full audio spectrum, and tracks generally lacked bass and depth. Although better than most laptops, we still wouldn't use this machine as a replacement for desktop speakers.
Another point of note is the long awaited arrival of a USB 3.0 port – the successor to the incredibly successful USB 2.0. Designed to transfer data to external devices at far greater speeds than its predecessor, we tested the port with a Freecom external hard drive and were very impressed by the performance on offer. This will save a lot of time for those who regularly back up their entire laptop, for example.
An Intel Core i7 processor is coupled with 4096MB of memory to produce excellent performance and you'll have no problem running – even concurrently – demanding photo and video editing software.
The powerful Nvidia graphics card gives this laptop the kind of power associated with gaming laptops – so gaming and editing HD video won't be a problem.
Missing a trick
Considering the laptop's multimedia aspirations, it's a surprise there isn't a Full HD screen included. Instead, a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution is used and, while it is bright and vivid in colour reproduction, we think Asus has missed a trick here. It also means that, while you can watch Blu-ray discs on the laptop's optical drive, they won't run as intended in Full HD.
The 640GB hard drive will provide plenty of storage for all your files, folders and any other media libraries you'll want to carry around – allowing you to watch and edit your photos and films on the go.
Due to the resource-hungry components onboard, battery life is pretty woeful. We expect 180 minutes minimum from a modern laptop and the Asus falls some way short of that, meaning you'll need to carry the charger around with you.
The Asus G61J proves to be a bit of a mixed bag. The power on offer is excellent, and we were also impressed by the inclusion of USB 3.0. However, the lack of a Full HD screen is a shame, as is the underwhelming battery life and SonicMaster technology.
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In Depth: How games create emotional connections
Whatever the genre, making an emotional connection is what most games strive for.
That doesn't necessarily mean that it wants to you fall in love with the hero, hate the villain or sympathise with Pac-Man's quest to eat the cherries – more simply that without some connection, a game is doomed to be a purely mechanical toy.
If you don't care… ultimately, you won't care. It's the difference between Doom being a three-dimensional shooting gallery containing basic AI constructs and a combination of hit-scan and moving projectile emitters whose co-ordinated interplay offers myriad spatial and reaction challenges, and Doom being that awesome game where you kick Hell's arse.
Emotion can stem from almost anything. A rocking tune that sets your heart on fire. The pretty girl at the end of your hero's quest. The self-satisfaction of beating a difficult challenge. Think of a boss in a game that particularly annoyed you – any will do. In that split second that its leering face appears in your mind, who gets the brunt of your hate: the boss itself, or the programmers and designers responsible for it.
Logically, we know that it's only a mix of animation, sound files and basic AI routines, but that doesn't matter. Sitting in front of Street Fighter IV, we just want to ram an ice-pick through Seth's heavily modified balls. Well. We do. Your experiences may vary. (But shouldn't.)
There's no real limit to what we can identify with. A drawing or well-written description can bring on sexual desire every bit as much as a photograph or video, just as our hate can be focused on anything from a wireframe triangle to a walking, talking Piers Morgan.
Some genres definitely put more emphasis on trying to make it happen, particularly the story-heavy ones – adventure and RPG in particular, although action games aren't far behind, and have many of the best examples.
All of them have at least a few moments where they qualify, if only because frustration, boredom and despair are emotions every bit as much as love, guilt, rage and remorse. Let's take a closer look.
I, Protector
As we've mentioned many times, one of the biggest problems developers face is that the player is God. A game can't truly hurt us – not in a physical sense, at least. We can stop playing whenever we like, there are no personal ramifications to our actions, and if anything bad happens, we're just a quickload away from the status quo.
This tends to show up a lot in RPGs, with the hero routinely sent on missions like picking a fight with the town's toughest mobster or assassinating the king, then happily sauntering off into the sunset with no comeback at all. Sometimes, we don't even need the mission.
Mass Effect 2 demonstrates the sheer undiluted fun of giving every prick in the galaxy a taste of their own medicine. How do developers get past this? They think like supervillains, making us care about the other characters in the world, then getting to us through them.
Without any plot on its side, the arcade shooter Cannon Fodder did this by making Boot Hill into the level-select screen, with every soldier you lost turning into a cross on the rapidly grave-filled hill. The cunning X-COM series let you give a name to every member of your alien-hunting squad, knowing that most people would end up naming the characters after their friends and family and take extra care to keep Aunt Doreen away from the Chryssalids.
If instead they chose to give them bespoke appellations, the very fact that every soldier had a name, and had spent a whole career levelling up under your command made it a personal tragedy when one of your best troops finally took a bullet.
You might reload because you'd lost your primary gunner, but it was just as likely that you'd rewind time for Alan. Or, alternatively, put your least favourite squad members in the front-line, not give them any weapons and enjoy watching them get bisected by Sectoids.
GTA: GTA IV tried forcing you to like its characters. It just built resentment, not closeness
Nobody said emotional connections have to be nice. One of the earliest games to understand the benefit of the protector role was the Infocom text adventure Planetfall way back in prehistoric 1983. Here you start out as a lowly starship mop-jockey, much like Roger Wilco of Space Quest fame, who survives the destruction of his spaceship only to crash-land on a planet in decaying orbit.
While there, you encounter a child-like and instantly lovable robot called Floyd who becomes your sidekick, and together you work to repair the planet's systems and find a way to escape. So far, so normal. And then you get to the puzzle where you have to send Floyd to his death.
This proved a turning point for many players, who refused to sacrifice him for their own gain. In practice, Floyd gets repaired at the end of the game and returns in the sequel, Stationfall, but nobody knew that at the time. This is probably the first time that a game managed to instil a reluctance to push on, and still one of the most famous examples, even for people who missed out on the whole genre.
I, hero
Many other games have made protection and rescue the core of their emotional journey, from blandly rescuing the main character's kidnapped girlfriend in damn near every 90s game ever, or failing at the task, as with Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII.
In the Wing Commander games, losing one of your wingmen meant sitting through their funeral. In Mass Effect 2, the death of a likable character like Mordin or Tali in the suicide mission at the end of the game is all the worse for the fact that you could have prevented it, if only you'd been a little more careful.
The big moment might be a cut-scene, it might be interactive, it might be optional or part of the story, but it can work.
Ironically, the one place where this never seems to work is in that most hated of gameplay mechanics: the escort quest. These hateful, horrible missions always suffer from the same problem: they're a pain in the neck.
Any emotional connection you might have to the character is inevitably drowned out by annoyance at their slow pace, their insistence on trying to take on every enemy in the area no matter how slow, the enemies' tendency to rush them at every step, and above all else, your success being entirely based on their usually horrible AI. If none of that happens, it's usually because the AI character is either invincible or ridiculously overpowered, detracting from your own heroism.
Only Ico over on the PlayStation really stands out as an exception to the rule, with Half-Life 2 sitting exactly half-way. Alyx Vance can take care of herself. The other humans? Walking targets.
I, lover
Love. In 2009, a Japanese man calling himself Sal9000 officially married the love of his life, Nene Anegasaki, in front of witnesses and a priest. The catch? Nene is a cartoon character in a Nintendo DS game called Love Plus.
When we talk about games exploring love, we don't really mean this. That doesn't mean that games can't touch our hearts, just that it tends to be by proxy. An in-game relationship is typically about living vicariously through the fiction, about enjoying the sentiments that build up between our characters rather than sharing in the chemical obsession.
This can take many forms. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time tells a fantastic, largely non-interactive romance between the Prince and Farah, the daughter of one of his enemies, primarily via the softening of their rocky relationship throughout the game and the dilemmas they face.
Many Japanese eroge games are about hooking up, frequently but not exclusively in horribly pornographic ways. Other times, the romance is optional – something to pursue with your party as you quest around your world, slaying dragons and taking on the latest big evil.
ROMANCING THE PAD: Overly sexualised characters tend to be shunned. For all the silly costumes, gaming remains surprisingly conservative
As with escort missions, the obvious tricks rarely work. The princess at the end of the game is usually an irrelevance. We don't know her. We don't care. Likewise, the hyper-sexualised characters are typically forgotten almost as soon as they appear. Sure, everyone knows Lara Croft, and Elexis Sinclaire has her fans, but nobody really remembers or cares about FAKK2, Kimberly Stride or Lula.
Instead, much like real life, we like the people who make us like them – the ones who make us laugh, the ones we can sympathise with, the ones we want to spend our time with. There's nothing shameful about enjoying the sight of a soaking wet Lara Croft stretching after a dip in a river, or getting a kick from the way Bloodrayne almost orgasms as she feeds on a Nazi – but chances are that it's a witty, likeable character who looks like they chose their own clothes that really makes a personal impact.
Aeris and Tifa from Final Fantasy. Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. April and Zoe from the Longest Journey games. SHODAN from System Shock. What? Listen to the voice, she's hot…
Female gamers have it tougher. Generally, developers assume a male player, controlling a male character, with the love interests therefore primarily female. To pick on Bioware, although it's not the worst offender, Baldur's Gate 2 offered three girls of varying personalities and one utterly obnoxious guy, while the Mass Effect series is quite happy to let you play as a lesbian Shepard (romancing Liara in the first game, and Yeoman Chambers in the second) but carefully avoids any man-on-man action for a male Shepard. At least both do still get some decent romance options.
It's ironic therefore that Dragon Age has one of the best gaming romances ever, and it's one for girls only (or at least, anyone who plays as a girl, which seems to be almost everyone in our office). His name is Alistair – slightly geeky, very sarcastic, often surprisingly awkward. He's not the only romance in the game, but his background and role within it, coupled with Bioware's phenomenal attention to detail makes it practically the backbone of the main plot.
Unlike most game romances, jumping into bed with your intended quarry isn't the end of the story – the relationship forged there extends right to the end, and has consequences far beyond the stat bonus all the characters are awarded for getting lucky with the player character. We're not going to give away too many details, save that we've rarely played a game where going against an NPC's hopes and dreams felt so much like betrayal.
This relationship works on many levels. Alistair being funny means you want to spend the time with him, whether he can be romanced or not. He's the first NPC you get, so you spend a fair amount of the game with him (along with Morrigan, the other crucial plot character), whereas later characters can largely be swapped out and ignored, or perhaps never picked up at all.
The romance itself is carefully balanced. Fair or not, the standard in fiction is for the guy to make the first move, even when the girl is the hero of the story – in this case, by giving you a rose. After that, there's more give and take, with conversation options built around laughing at jokes, playful teasing and gradually building a connection, with the player character ultimately getting him to overcome his virginal nerves and into her bed.
The result is a relationship that doesn't simply feel like the kind of unsophisticated conquest that you'd fi nd in most games, but rather a mutual expression of love, and one whose real satisfaction comes in seeing him so happy. The fact that later decisions and plot twists can shatter it… what can we say? Love hurts.
I, friend
Friendship may be a softer emotional connection, but it's one that most players are much more willing to admit to. Spend £30 to ogle Lara's boobs? Sad. Spend ten years on tenterhooks waiting for another chance to sail alongside Guybrush Threepwood? Perfectly acceptable.
Unlike love, friendship has the advantage of not necessarily having to build to anything. We can enjoy the characters for what they are, and in many more ways. We don't have to feel their loss to empathise with it, we don't have to share their obsessions to want to see them achieve them, we don't need them to be real to feel guilty about screwing them over.
At its most ridiculous, Portal managed to make us feel bad about throwing a crate into an incinerator – a crate identical to every other box in the game except for a heart stencilled on its side and a computer voice calling it the Weighted Companion Cube. Valve now sells soft toys of the Cube on its website. Cuddly toys of a crate! A crate!
HAVING A LAUGH: A character who makes you laugh is that much closer to being a character you connect with
Just being there isn't enough, and much like love interests, the more forced they seem, the less most people end up liking them. The wacky comedy sidekick is typically either the best character in the game, as with the very Joss Whedon style Alistair in Dragon Age, or fingernails down a ten hour long chalkboard.
Everything from the words that come out of their mouth to the way they dress has an impact – first impressions count. A character who seems comfortable in clothes that you can imagine them picking themselves is that much closer than someone in a gratuitously sexualised outfit – even if there is some overlap, like Harley Quinn's ridiculous night nurse gear in Batman: Arkham Asylum, or Jack/Subject Zero's 'trying too hard' mass of elaborate tattoos and skimpy clothes in Mass Effect 2.
Somewhat darkly, the main reason to build up a character as likeable or sympathetic is that it's the best way to make the player care when they get hurt – instilling a sense of guilt if it's the player's action that causes it, anger if it's the villain responsible, or simply sympathy for a horrible situation.
Planescape: Torment arguably plays with this more than anything else. While it's not revealed for a fair way into the game, with the main character being an amnesiac immortal it quickly becomes clear that your character – to be exact, previous iterations of this amnesiac cycle – are responsible for almost every horrible thing you encounter, from the ghost of a woman he manipulated into loving him and then had killed so that she could be his bitter spy, to forcing a broken warrior-philosopher into servitude.
While most peoples' path through the game will be less evil, that's not essential – you can sell party members into slavery, murder people for fun and completely screw up innocent lives on a whim. Occasionally though, even a good player will be faced with a choice – notably when a pillar of skulls down in the D&D equivalent of Hell demands that you sacrifice one of your party in exchange for some vital, plot - unravelling information.
With the benefit of the right stats, you can play the system – shoving poor floating skull Morte back into his deserved punishment and then swiftly getting him back out before he slips to his eternal doom – but otherwise, the description of him being swallowed up for ever is a truly horrible, chilling moment you can't not feel bad about. Luckily, there are other alternatives too – but that's the one that really sticks in the mind after finishing.
I, victim
We started by saying that the player is largely immune to anything the designers can throw, but really, that's not the case. No, there's no reason to be scared of the dragon, and a new life is just a reload away. Doesn't matter.
The flipside of games simply being fiction is that the player is ultimately the only one that can be truly hurt by anything that goes on, the only one for whom it actually matters. If any moment in a game has meaning, that's why.
Take the most famous one of recent years – the nuke in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. In a game filled with death and destruction and with a body count that makes the entire Rambo series look like My Little Pony, only one moment tries to make death anything less than cheap: the first-person demise of your own character in the aftermath of a nuclear blast.
COD4: We kill thousands of people in shooters, often innocents. Why does Modern Warfare 2's infamous No Russian level feel so different?
While he doesn't have much character of his own, and most players probably don't even remember his name, in those moments as we claw him through the wreckage before his inevitable death, we feel connected to his suffering. Few games have ever offered that.
Many more will in the future. As our technology improves, so too does the subtlety with which games can tell their stories. 3D characters capable of making eye-contact, of saying one thing while their faces say another, of interacting with their virtual words instead of just spitting out lines of canned dialogue.
New interaction methods that can add extra senses to the experience, as seen in a very primitive form with the Nintendo DS (particularly in games like The Rub Rabbits! series, with mini-games that include sweet stuff like holding a girl's hand on a walk in the park). AI capable of doing more than just following a flowchart in deciding how best to respond.
All of these and more are just a sampling of how games are going to learn to make us love them, and hurt us for it in the future. Phrased like that, it may not sound like much fun, but that pain could well be what makes games the most powerful storytelling medium ever. And that day is coming soon.
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In Depth: 10 things you need to know about Ofcom's file sharing crackdown
We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Ofcom's proposed new Code of Practice doesn't look like it'll kill public Wi-Fi.
The bad news is that if you're naughty, you'll be listed in the Big Book of Dodgy Downloaders so that copyright owners can sue you silly.
Here are the 10 things you need to know, and the one thing that'll make you go "WTF?"
1. No one needs to panic yet
The Code of Practice is a draft, not a final version, and it's got to go through a consultation and approval process first. The consultation period ends in July, then it requires EU approval and UK Parliament approval. Ofcom hopes to have a final version in place by early next year.
2. Small ISPs aren't included
Ofcom proposes that the Code of Practice will only cover ISPs with more than 400,000 subscribers each. That means the big seven - BT, Talk Talk, Virgin Media, Sky, Orange, O2 and the Post Office - will be covered from day one, so the Code will affect 96% of fixed-line broadband users. Are small ISPs rubbing their hands with glee or panicking about their impending bandwidth bills?
3. Mobile internet isn't covered
The draft Code of Practice is purely for fixed-line ISPs, not mobile ones. Maybe that's because mobile internet is so pricey, downloading a dodgy DVD costs more than any court could possibly fine you.
Ofcom says it's because piracy levels are low on mobile networks and that they are costly for the operators to police, given that mobile internet users are on dynamic IP addresses and "an IP address identified as related to copyright infringement may be in use by multiple individual subscribers at the time of the alleged infringement."
4. It's a three-strike process
Ofcom proposes a three-stage notification process for ISPs, rather like the verbal warning / written warning / final written warning disciplinary process many employers adopt. You'll receive your first angry-gram the first time you're caught, a second one if you're caught again at least one month later, and the third and final warning can be triggered a month after that. Each notification will include the evidence against you.
5. You'll have the right to appeal
Feel you've been fingered unfairly? Ofcom "will establish an independent, robust subscriber appeals mechanism for consumers". The appeals body will be able to award costs and/or compensation to people unfairly or wrongly targeted, which suggests that appealing might be an expensive exercise.
The grounds for appeal are pretty much what you'd expect: "it wasn't me", because you've been wrongly matched to an offending IP address; "it wasn't infringement", because you were downloading Ubuntu, not U2; "it wasn't me" again, because your connection had been hacked; or "you're doing it wrong", because the ISP or copyright owner didn't stick to the rules.
6. Public Wi-Fi doesn't appear to be doomed
Ofcom argues that Wi-Fi is essentially the same as fixed-line broadband, but while it argues that Wi-Fi providers such as hotels and coffee shops are indeed Internet Service Providers, "the number of subscribers would not meet the required threshold". So maybe we're not going to lose public Wi-Fi after all.
7. There's a new acronym to worry about
CIR, or Copyright Infringement Reports, are documents produced by copyright owners such as record labels claiming copyright infringement. They must include "robust and accurate evidence" of wrongdoing and be sent to your ISP within 10 days of gathering that evidence. Your ISP will then match the IP address to the account holder.
9. Nobody's crippling your internet just yet
There's nothing in the proposed Code about throttling connections, blocking ports or booting people off the net altogether, but that doesn't mean such measures aren't coming. If the new Code doesn't "significantly reduce online infringement" - which, let's be honest, it won't - then the Digital Economy Act "gives the Secretary of State the power to introduce further obligations."
10. You can change the Code
None of this is final, and Ofcom is actively encouraging interested parties to have a look at its proposals and comment on them. You'll find the consultation documents at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/copyright-infringement/.
The WTF bit…
In much the same way that hungry curry addicts can choose the most tempting dish from a takeaway menu, angry copyright owners will be able to choose targets for their lawyers from a Big Book of Dodgy Downloaders, known as a Copyright Infringement List or CIL.
This is an ISP-provided list of people the ISP has sent a third bad behaviour warning to, and it'll be sent to copyright owners on request. However, it won't include your name and address - that requires a court order - and it will only list warnings that are relevant to the copyright owner, so if Sony's asking for a CIL it'll only get lists of people allegedly caught downloading Sony's stuff.
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Review: Apple iPad 3G
After many delays, the Apple iPad is now available in the UK in both 3G and W-Fi-only flavours. The model we're testing today is actually called the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G in full parlance, but iPad 3G will do for us. (Read our review of the iPad Wi-Fi version.)
If you're hoping to get your hands on one you'd better be quick though - Apple Stores had limited stock on launch, while website orders now cite just 'June' as a shipping date.
The iPad 3G checks in at a pricey £529 - £100 more than the Wi-Fi only version. And that's just for the basic 16GB edition - it's an extra £70 for the 32GB model and a further £100 if you want the full 64GB. That means the top end iPad 3G that we're testing here checks in at a sobering £699 – ouch.
Then, of course, you need to budget for an iPad data tariff – check out the fourth page of our review for more details on all the costs.
If you're more interested in the iPad Wi-Fi, then check out our main Apple iPad review.
The iPad 3G is a little different in terms of appearance – it has a black plastic strip at the top of the back of the iPad, which makes sure the iPad gets decent 3G reception. An all-metal case wouldn't be any good for this.
There's also the microSIM slot, so you also get a SIM eject tool as well as the Dock Connector to USB cable. Sadly, there's no dock in the box, but you do get a power adapter.
The other big boon of the iPad 3G is that you get GPS capabilities, so you'll get a better experience in, say, Google Maps and geo-tagged tweets, for example. Both models do have a digital compass, though. However, testing in our other iPad review for the Wi-Fi-only model indicated that the iPad Wi-Fi was still fairly good at picking up the current location via Wi-Fi.
The iPad uses iPhone OS which, at the time of writing, is yet to support multi-tasking. However, iPhone Os 4.0 is imminent, which will mean that multi-tasking apps will be supported.
The use of the iPhone and iPod touch OS means that the iPad is a great living room-type device. It's great for just popping online or emailing sporadically. We've seen tablet-type computers before, of course – most notably courtesy of Microsoft – but they haven't stepped up to the plate. Instead, they've had dodgy handwriting recognition and poor controls.
As usual with Apple, they've taken something established and done it better – and that's even before you get to the apps which take the iPhone and iPod touch model to a completely new level.
Even Windows 7, with its touch compatibility, isn't quite up to the job of providing a completely intuitive touch-based interface.
So no wonder Apple has had so much success with iPad. But remember this is just the beginning – we'll soon see tablets based on Android (like the Dell Streak) and, later in the year, Google's Chrome OS. So let's look at iPad 3G in depth.
In terms of basic hardware, the iPad isn't overly impressive, although the 1,024 x 768, 9.7-inch diagonal screen is absolutely gorgeous. It's about the same size as the average netbook screen and puts the 3.5-inch iPhone and iPod touch screen way in the shade. It's more than a little strange when, after a little time playing with the iPad, you go back to your iPhone – it feels restricted.
Storage is provided in three capacities on the iPad 3G – 16, 32 and 64GB – as it is on the standard iPad.
Every iPad also boasts the Apple A4 processor, a system-on-chip ARM-based processor that has been developed in-house by Apple and boasts in-built graphics capabilities as well as providing audio and power management. Like the iPhone chip, it's still manufactured by Samsung.
In the Wi-Fi only model, the antenna is hidden behind the Apple logo, but the iPad 3G has an extra plastic oblong at the top of the back of the device. This is pretty ugly, and it's an unusually inelegant solution from Apple. Still, it was probably the only way to keep a generally aluminium body on the device.
Component features
As we mentioned, there's also an accelerometer, GPS chip, ambient light sensor, on/off switch, standard dock connector and volume controls as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. Indeed, the one thing the iPad has over the iPhone is the addition of a screen-rotation lock switch – this is a great addition, which we'd also like to see on the iPhone itself. The 3G certainly helps the GPS with exact positioning, too, as it does on an iPhone.
Surprisingly though, there's no built-in camera. We'd have expected one, and we reckon it's a dead-cert for the next generation of the iPad and we're also expecting a front-facing camera on the new iPhone, too.
Sound works well, with a lot more beef than the iPhone's internal speaker. There's certainly a good effect from it – during games the sound really reverberates throughout the device, creating a really solid effect. It's hardly force feedback, but it's pretty darn good.
Battery life
Like all Apple kit these days, the Li-Ion battery isn't user-replaceable, but because of the integrated A4 chip, the power consumption is fairly frugal. For the standard iPad, Apple quotes 10 hours of surfing on Wi-Fi. This decreases reasonably if you're on 3G, but certainly no more than you'd see with an iPhone. And, of course, if you're playing graphically intensive games (more on that later), this decreases substantially.
Size-wise, the iPad 3G is the same as the Wi-Fi version, 242.8mm by 189.7 mm, but weight is 730g instead of 680g. You will notice this in your hand – it's certainly not something you'll want to be holding in one hand for any length of time, for example.
The 13.4 mm thickness does make the device feel extremely slim, but it remains fairly weighty. There's also been a lot of criticism about the iPad's 12mm black bezel, but it doesn't look quite so bad in real life as it does in photos – don't judge that one until you've seen it in store. You also need something to hold onto, so the bezel does actually serve a purpose.
Screen
As mentioned above, the screen on the iPad is absolutely beautiful. It's LED by design, meaning it's extremely bright and the colours exceptionally vivid. Watching videos on the iPad is a rewarding experience, with even YouTube clips looking crisp.
What's more, due to the use of in-plane switching tech, it has a super-wide viewing angle of 178 degrees, which means when a group of people gather around it (hardly an unlikely event given the hype surrounding this product) everyone will be able to see just fine.
Speedy. That's what we'd call the interface of the iPad, even if there is a bit of a stagger when you move across to the Spotlight search screen (as on the iPhone). It's better at moving between other screens than the iPhone, though. And, of course, you get all of the iPhone's snazzy multi-touch controls.
The Apple A4 chip certainly seems to cope quite well with the graphical demands of the device and apps load quickly, too.
In terms of games, Tiger Woods PGA Tour took 5.5 seconds to load on the iPad; on the iPhone 3GS it needs 8.4 seconds.
Peggle was ready in 5.8 seconds; the iPhone 3GS took 8.4 seconds. Both were iPhone versions of the apps for direct comparisons.
We also had better performance for website loading. On the iPad, boingboing.net loaded in a quick 6.2 seconds; on the iPhone it took 19.3 seconds. GamesRadar.com loaded in 10.5 seconds instead of 21.3 seconds on the iPhone.
Some annoyances
We don't like the massive gaps between apps on the home screen though – what's that all about? The app icons are bigger, but why so sparsely spaced?
Another gripe is that the keyboard isn't a brilliant working experience. It's responsive, but there are no numbers on the main panel, so you still have to switch over to the symbol version using the ".?123" key. There hasn't been enough iPad-specific work put into the UI – it feels like things have just been dumped over from the iPhone. More options are also needed here.
It's all about the feeling
So it's certainly fast. But the lack of Adobe Flash and multi-tasking (in this version) becomes more noticeable here. On a phone it's OK – you still access mobile versions of a lot of websites, despite what Apple says. But here you need that better capability. You really feel the lack of app-switching and multi-media capability – even if many sites, like the BBC iPlayer, get round the lack of Flash admirably.
This latter point should become less important with the advent of HTML 5, but it still remains a problem at the moment, while Mobile Safari doesn't provide as good a browsing experience as many desktop browsers. The menu bar is along the top, rather than the bottom of the screen.
But surfing is effortless, as is flicking through pictures. Things are just easy.
Apps and games
While the iPhone's mail app is more useful for triaging messages, the iPad's large screen lets you actually deal with your email properly. Mail is a far better experience and, like Outlook, you have a list of your mail on the left and the body of your mail on the right, all in nice large type. Landscape mode is best, as portrait hides the header column but you can get more than 500 words of text on screen.
Video is another great boon for the iPad. iTunes HD video looks superb, while watching YouTube videos are also an impressive experience. Like on the iPhone, there is an app for this. BBC iPlayer has just started working properly for the iPad, while TV Catchup also works great on the device.
The iPod app is fully featured and far better than the iPhone version which can be clunky. Shame there's no Cover Flow, though – we'd have liked that.
Contacts and Calendar both have a great look to them, while they support over-the-air syncing. Exchange support is there – but it's still only for one single account until iPhone OS 4.0 arrives. Coincidentally, you don't get Calculator or Stocks. Why? You do, however, get Notes.
The new area where Apple is hoping to capitalise is with iBooks. Of course, there are a great many magazine apps being launched, but books is where Apple is concentrating. You need to download iBooks from the App Store when you get your iPad, but once you do you can get reading and download books from the iBookstore using your iTunes account.
However, it's not a great device for reading on. The colour, while initially better looking, actually distracts, as does the fact your Twitter account, email, photos, music and games are all a couple of swipes away!
Games are really brought alive with the iPad. Real Racing HD (£5.99) is brilliant (and is being used as a demo game on in-Apple Store iPads) – control the car by tilting, and N.O.V.A. HD (£3.99) isn't a bad first person shooter. Simple games like Angry Birds HD (£2.99) and Plants vs Zombies HD (£5.99) can prove better though, but Apple is truly becoming a serious player in terms of gaming.
Most iPhone games and apps work on the iPad, but if it's not optimised for iPad, you can run it at its original iPhone size - 480 x 320. You can hit the 2x button to pixel double, but generally speaking things look pretty rubbish – the upscaling works for basic apps, but graphics are horrid.
With the iPad 3G carrying a not-insignificant £100 premium on top of the Wi-fi only version – before your monthly tariff charges, of course - the obvious questions then, are: does the 3G work well, and is it worth paying for?
The advantages of the iPad 3G are obvious. While the original iPad relies entirely on Wi-Fi hotspots to stay connected, the iPad 3G is a true roaming device which uses 3G phone networks to stay online whenever you've got reception.
We're testing the iPad 3G using the Vodafone UK network, but there are lots of different networks and tariffs to choose from.
The cheapest iPad 3G data plan in the UK comes from Three, with 1GB of data costing you as little as £7.50 a month, while £15 a month will net you a 10GB plan. That's a heck of a lot cheaper than some of the other networks. Vodafone, for example, is charging £25 for just 5GB.
3G data plans for the iPad are available from Three, O2, Vodafone and Orange, and you can read more about the best deals in our Best iPad data plans for UK buyers piece.
SIM card
The iPad 3G uses a new kind of SIM card called a microSIM. The chip is exactly the same as on a normal SIM card, there's just less plastic surrounding it so it's smaller. The microSIM fits into a slot on the left hand side of the chassis.
In the box you'll find a small pin tool which you can use to eject the microSIM holder, which then just slots neatly back in once you've inserted the SIM.
Network speed
It goes without saying that browsing the internet using the iPad's 3G connection is nowhere near as slick an experience as using the Wi-Fi - just as with the iPhone.
Websites take around three times as long to load, even with a full signal. This depends on the network of course, and has little to do with the iPad itself. The iPad will always try to connect to a Wi-Fi connection if one is available anyway, so you'll only use your data connection where absolutely necessary.
The App Store is one place you might want to avoid going if you're away from a wireless network. It's a slow process browsing it, and downloading and installing Apps can be a laborious experience unless your connection is bullet proof and lightning fast.
Drawbacks
While the benefits of 3G connectivity are obvious, it's not all smooth sailing for the iPad 3G. We think the price is a massive drawback – it could even be a dealbreaker, and this is why…
Remember the iPad 3G costs from £529 with that £100 premium. You've then got to pay your tariff, which could cost anywhere between £7.50 and £25 a month. And that means in your first 12 months, the iPad 3G will cost you £619 at the very least –if you want more than a 1GB plan it'll be more of course – up to £829. Whichever way you look at it, that's ludicrously expensive.
The Three MiFi is one example of a product you can pair with the Wi-Fi only iPad to negate the need to spend that extra £100 for the 3G model.
It's a dongle which offers up its 3G connection as a Wi-Fi signal to any or all of your wireless devices. As far as the iPad is concerned, it's connected to a Wi-Fi access point – except you're on the move and not tied down to that Starbucks café you had lunch in.
The MiFi is available from as little as £9.50 a month on an 18 month contract. What's more, you'll be able to use it for your phone and your laptop as well. The total comes to a minimum of £543 – still expensive in our book, but much more agreeable than the alternative – especially if you insist on a 3G connection.
So, iPad. Much-awaited. Much-wanted. And, yep, it's terrific – a tablet experience like nothing else we've seen. But we know that more variants are coming. Android, Chrome, even Windows Phone 7 – we'll no doubt see more devices like the iPad. And very soon, too.
The great thing about the iPad ecosystem is the apps, of course, and as long as developers keep developing , the iPad will make for a tremendous device. Some of the iPad-enabled apps are absolutely cracking. Even something like AccuWeather really comes alive when used on such a great screen.
Even if you've used an iPhone, the iPad really is something you need to experience first-hand. And this iPad 3G version really opens up the possibilities for go-everywhere web surfing and tweeting.
Yep, so that's available on the iPhone, and whether you need this 3G variant really depends on if you think you'll need the 3G capability when you're out and about. After all, £100 is quite a premium for the iPad 3G capability. And that's before you get to the not-inconsequential cost of a data tariff.
We liked:
The iPad has all the great stuff from the iPhone, but really puts it on a device that makes the internet sing. And it's great for video. Really, really great for video. It's a terrific coffee table device, even if it's not immediately clear how you're meant to sit with it – you might want to invest in a case with a stand, for example.
The Apple A4 processor is speedy and graphics are crisp, but we wonder whether it will stand the test of time. You can just tell that it might not be too long before, like the iPhone 3G's chip – it's just no longer up to the task. The battery life is decent, too. We liked the data experience of the iPad 3G and being able to receive data when we were out and about, too.
We disliked:
It's not all good. The main problem with the iPad 3G is its extra price. As if £429-£599 wasn't enough of a price to pay for an iPad, you need to budget for an extra £100. And that's before you get to the iPad data deals.
Then, there's the keyboard. It's not quite good enough and needs more options. It's also no good for use for more than a little bit of data entry. The iPad is not a word processing or work device, despite what Apple might say with its iWork apps, available for £9.99 each on the App Store.
Flash is also still a problem, but it's just one of those things – either you're with Apple, or you're not.
Verdict:
Chances are you've already made up your mind whether or not to get one, so if you have your choice is just whether to get an iPad 3G or just the iPad Wi-Fi. Whichever iPad you choose, it does many things very well.
There's no doubting it: the iPad 3G is a great device and it certainly lays down the gauntlet for tablet competitors. It's expensive – and through monthly costs far, far more so than the iPad Wi-Fi. We do think the iPad Wi-Fi is a more compelling option. Especially when you consider that despite the lack of 3G in that model, you can still get online using other means, such as 3's MiFi.
Now check out our iPad Wi-Fi review
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In Depth: 8 of the best photo managers for Linux
Since the arrival of consumer digital cameras, hard drives have been filling up with images of every social occasion, no matter how boring.
It soon became apparent to happy snappers that where you once merely had to look in a drawer or a photo album to find a particular snap, there may now be thousands of them on your hard drive. And so the need for photo management software was born.
The advent of digital has meant that people generally take as many pictures of the same thing as they can, resulting in a glut of similar images. Good software can help sift the keepers from the ones that belong in the trash, by displaying quality thumbnails and keeping track of sources.
Adding tags and metadata is almost a necessity too. High-end cameras can usually shoot what are known as RAW images. These files are the high-quality recorded data direct from the camera's sensor, but this comes in a dazzling array of formats, so isn't a format as such, but a term applied to a huge number of different and often proprietary file types.
Because cameras have limited resources, the JPEG images they produce can often be improved upon in software on a computer. A good photo app will accept the RAW data and convert it to a JPEG file. The long-used utility, dcraw, is often employed to decode these formats, and all the apps here use it or their own libraries to decode RAW files, to varying success.
Good organisational abilities include being able to tag images, search for specific camera metadata and finally being able to upload, display or print selected images. Some people simply keep their photos on their computer, but many now wish to share them.
Support for photo sharing websites is a bonus, even for professional software. All most people want is to be able to put their pictures somewhere, and find the ones they want, when they want them.
Fotox: This dark horse packs in some surprising features
Fotoxx, despite the celebrity of having appeared in HotPicks a number of times, is far from the mainstream of photo management software, in terms of features and probably users. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider it.
It supports RAW images, for example, and packs a selection of tools to manipulate them. It also has features missing from some of the more mainstream apps here. Most of these exotic features can be discovered in the Combine menu.
The Panorama mode, for example, combines several shots, using a bit of manual placement from the user. Shots are placed one by one, and the results are pretty good – it isn't a replacement for stitching software, which creates a whole montage, but it does the job for a 360° panorama.
What Fotoxx calls HDF mode is a similar combination effect, but here it takes multiple images with different areas in focus, and tries to combine them into a continuous whole, giving an infinite depth of field.
There are plenty of other tricks, such as manual tone-mapping and HDR support. Again, this has the possibility for manual adjustment, so there's no problem taking separate images by hand rather than having a camera that takes three at once.
With support for a variety of RAW formats through the UFRaw libraries and 16-bit colour depth, Fotoxx can churn out high-quality images, given the right source material. There's basic tagging support using Exif data, but this is decentralised.
Some may argue this is a better way to organise images – Fotoxx stores your tags and other info direct to the Exif. The downside is that it has to index all the images if you're searching for a particular pic, which means knowing roughly where it is to begin with.
Verdict
Fotoxx 9.7
Price: Free
Website: http://kornelix.squarespace.com/fotoxx/
Great for experimenting; probably not for organising lots of photos
Rating: 5/10
Picasa: Google tries to grab some mindshare for your photos
Picasa is, if you aren't aware, Google's photo management client, with strong links to the web-based sharing service of the same name. It interfaces with the online service, but you can use it as a standalone app without ever signing up for a Picasa account.
We chose the 3.0 alpha release for Linux, which might seem unfair, in case of any bugs. Ironically, it works better than the stable 2.7 version on most modern distros.
The biggest problem with Picasa is its dependency on Wine. It isn't a native Linux app – the RPM and Deb versions are more or less the same as the Windows one, but with a special version of Wine included. A brief look at the support forums will tell you that it doesn't always play nicely.
That aside, Picasa's strengths are its management and indexing tools. On first running the software, it hunts out all the images in your home directory and presents them in date-ordered folders. It makes short work of importing files from other sources and will even use sane back-ends to support any scanners you may have.
Organisation is a strong point. Picasa keeps a database, but leaves your images in situ, preferring to index them and their tags. You can search for tags, and the software even includes features such as searching by colour.
Some of the options may have a gimmicky feel, and the low-fi stitching mode, Collage, isn't for serious stitchups, but it's quick and easy to use, as are the basic editing functions. You can export and sync your snaps with Picasa online, or blog images to Blogger services, but it doesn't enable you to use non-Google services.
Verdict
Picasa 3.0 Alpha
Price: Free (proprietary licence)
Website: http://picasa.google.com
Great indexing, easy to use, but lacks advanced photo features.
Rating: 8/10
Bibble Pro: This one's big on features, but has a price tag to match
This is the only software in this Roundup that asks you to part with cash, but when you see the features on offer, you may be tempted.
Cataloguing, tagging, colour profiles, colour correction, lens correction… It even has a database of lenses, which it can match using the camera Exif data to choose the best settings for you.
The ability to have multiple databases is a neat feature, and practically everything is capable of being saved as a profile in some way, so that it can be applied to similar shots. For that, the catalogue is excellent, because it can sift through images based on the Exif data.
For all of this, it's still a little light on the detail tools – you may need an external editor to do some retouching of images after they've been exported.
In mitigation, if you can spare the time, Bibble has a masterful layer mode, which, combined with the selection tools, can be used to produce a tweakable correction layer to any image.
If there's one major criticism of this software, it's the tiny, spindly interface font, which makes most dialogs and menus unpleasant to read. The only option in the prefs is to make it smaller!
Bibble is priced competitively for the professional market where, on other platforms, it's up against the likes of Adobe Lightroom. In that respect, the price isn't too extreme. It does offer far more precise tools than any single Linux app, and you get commercial support for the software.
It's probably more than a little over the top for the home user, unless you need features such as noise reduction for your photography. There is a Lite version planned, but details on its features and price weren't available at the time of writing.
Verdict
Bibble 5.0 Pro
Price: $200 (£131)
Website: http://bibblelabs.com
Some of the most precise editing tools you'll see, but at a price.
Rating: 9/10
Rawstudio: It's grey and looks cool, but lacks organisation and edit tools
Rawstudio emerged out of the need to process RAW files on Linux. It uses the excellent dcraw libraries, which currently support more than 300 cameras, and usually do a better job of decoding them than the software supplied by camera manufacturers.
This app is workflow centred, and is focused on RAW camera images (although you can also load JPEG files if you wish). Point it at a directory (it won't download images direct from your camera unless it's mounted as a device) and it automatically generates thumbnails in a top panel.
Click on one to select it, and the tools in the right hand panel become live, making for easy curve adjustment, exposure control and the usual stuff you might want to do while processing a RAW file. A simple tap of a number key, 1, 2 or 3, will group or prioritise the images, making it a little easier to go through and select the winners from a session.
Individual adjustments can be made to one of three setting profiles, and the results can be exported one at a time, or as part of a batch. This is the best feature of Rawstudio, particularly if you're processing a lot of images.
In terms of editing images beyond cropping and straightening, there's nothing here, neither are there any management tools, though it does honour rating tags. This could easily form part of a workflow though, where the generated images were subsequently loaded into another app, such as Gimp, for retouching.
Rawstudio does a neat and efficient job of generating JPEGs, or even batch processing JPEG images, but it isn't a one-stop-shop for all your photo needs.
Verdict
Rawstudio 1.2
Price: Free
Website: http://rawstudio.org
Great for batch processing, but you probably need to edit elsewhere.
Rating: 5/10
F-Spot: The poster child of the Mono generation has some great features
This app came out of nowhere and became the default Gnome program for photo management, on merit.
The vision of the software is to provide a complete photo management solution, from when you download an image from your camera to when you email it, print it out or upload it to one of the half-dozen online services (such as Flickr, Facebook and Picasa) that F-Spot supports.
Tags can be applied at the time of importing, and images can be copied to a central location where they're sorted into folders depending on date. The entire catalogue can be navigated through a timeline at the top (reminiscent of iPhoto), but you can also search based on tags.
F-Spot has a lot of neat features, such as searching for duplicate images, or the way it keeps a history of files that have been edited, cropped or retouched. One problem is that the tools for correcting images aren't that great.
Although it does an impressive job of importing RAW images, there isn't the fine control of curve adjustments as with Bibble or Rawstudio. The controls give adequate adjustments for normal images though, but the lack of editing tools means that retouching has to be done elsewhere.
In such cases, F-Spot will launch the app for you and make a backup of the original if you ask it to. Hierarchical tags are nice and are easier to manage. F-Spot does the decent thing when exporting them, so you can keep the same tags on Flickr, for example. It also generates an HTML page directly from the images for you to upload to your own site.
Some of the cool features of F-Spot are organised as plugins, and a few are not enabled by default – so check the Edit > Manage Extensions menu.
Verdict
F-Spot 0.6.1.5
Price: Free
Website: http://fspot.org
A great all-rounder, but you'll need something else for fine detail editing.
Rating: 8/10
RawTherapee: The newcomer with plenty to offer
RawTherapee hasn't had much attention from Linux users so far, perhaps because it has only recently been released under the GPL. The author has decided that it might be useful if some other coders helped out with maintaining this app, but it's amazing to consider that, as it is, it's pretty much the work of one man.
It falls very much into the camp of Rawstudio and Bibble, in that it's a tool suited to workflow management for high-quality DSLRs, so if you're unused to photo editing, you may find a lot of the controls and functions confusing. And there are a lot of controls!
This software features much of the functionality and fine control that you find in the commercial Bibble Pro. It may lack some of the finesse and depth to colour correcting and noise removal, but the features are there.
A disappointment is the lack of a curve editor for controlling the contrast and brightness of the image. This was present in earlier versions of the software, so it seems likely that it will be reintroduced to this testing version shortly.
As with some of the other software in this test, you can save different profiles to make processing whole sessions or shots from a particular camera that much easier. Like Rawstudio, this app supports a batch processing mode, so you can run conversion tasks in the background.
For output, it supports JPEG and 8-or 16-bit TIFFs and PNGs. You can export direct to an editing program to retouch. Due to the alpha nature of the software, some features are currently operating in a mode of non-functionality, notably the thumbnail previews, but it's likely these bugs will be ironed out soon.
Verdict
RawTherapee 3.0 Alpha
Price: Free/GPL
Website: www.rawtherapee.com
A stunning program, but may be too complicated for basic home use.
Rating: 8/10
Digikam: The KDE contender outputs some impressive images
Like any application that has been around for more than a few years, Digikam has had its ups and downs, but the last 12 months have been an up. The number of features that have been added and the work done on this app is staggering.It's no great wonder that it got a landmark 1.0 release just before Christmas.
New features include the ability to load 12- and 16-bit images from RAW files and to work at that bit-depth, so that you're not throwing information away. This lifts it to rank with the likes of Bibble and RawTherapee in terms of output quality.
The work hasn't all been on the technical side of things. One of the enduring criticisms of Digikam has been that it's tricky to learn. To some extent, that criticism is still fair – it doesn't work like most other image apps, so some sort of learning curve is inevitable. However, it has made strides in being more user-friendly.
The old side-by-side before and after image display has been updated to include a mouseover change, enabling you to see the whole image more clearly. By incorporating Marble, there's an easy way to drag and drop images on to a globe to add geolocation information.
If you can't remember where an image is stored, but do know what it looks like, you can always try the fuzzy search – draw your best shot at the photo and Digikam will try to match it.
It might not be the most simple software to use – many of its best features take some searching for – but it has so many tools that it's difficult to make them all easy to get to. Newer releases have had some stability issues, but sadly this is more to do with the underlying KDE libraries being flaky. It does tend to run more reliably on some distros, such as SUSE.
Verdict
Digikam 1.1.0
Price: Free
Website: www.digikam.org
A packed list of features and great output quality ranks this with the best
Rating: 9/10
KPhotoAlbum: Organise your shots and export to practically anywhere
KPhotoAlbum doesn't really pretend to be anything much more than an organising and viewing tool, and sits in alliance with Digikam on the KDE side of the fence. In fact, a lot of work has been done on the KDE graphics libraries to make them share nicely, much to the benefit of KPhotoAlbum in terms of its Exif data support, for example.
One of the first downers about KPhotoAlbum is that it immediately asks you where you want to store all your images. The software will only index a single directory, so all your images will have to live in the same place.
Also, there's no real notion of importing files from a camera or card reader – if you want them in your album, you must copy them yourself.
In organisational terms, once the images have been added, there's a lot to be said for KPhotoAlbum. It has a timeline device similar to F-Spot, and can organise images based on tags or properties. It's quick and easy to make slideshows too.
KPhotoAlbum will read RAW files, via the omnipresent dcraw utility, but you can tell it would rather not – there's even an option to ignore RAW files if a similarly-named JPEG image is present. Editing options are limited to simple transforms, but right-clicking enables you to send the image to another app.
The main feature of KPhotoAlbum is its web-awareness. It has by far the broadest range of export options, mainly because it supports all the common photo-sharing sites, as well as the likes of Smugmug and Facebook. It does this through an impressive set of export plugins, so there's the chance that more may be added.
Verdict
KPhotoAlbum 4.1.1
Price: Free
Website: www.kphotoalbum.org
It works and the web features are great, but it's a bit restrictive overall.
Rating: 4/10
The winner: Digikam: 9/10
All the software performed well in the tests, even the alpha versions, so at least they all work to some extent. The key question is how well the features of the various programs meet the needs of the average photographer, and indeed, who exactly is the average photographer?
Different people are going to want to do different things with their images. If you have some desperate need for the most professional features at any cost, Bibble 5 Pro is probably the best bet, simply because of the comprehensive feature set. It doesn't play as nicely with Linux as some of the other apps, and the lack of appearance settings might be a pain, but it produces good output.
For significantly less cash, you can get almost the same feature set from RawTherapee, which has an amazing amount of functionality for high-end digital photography. But these are really at the specialist end, and for the home user, lack some of the ease of use and labour-saving functions found elsewhere.
For more general use, Picasa, F-Spot and KPhotoAlbum all have their merits, particularly in terms of organisation. If you share photos online with Picasa already, the Picasa client is a bit of a no-brainer.
F-Spot is very good at organising images and helping you find pictures if you intend to keep them all accessible on your computer, and has more than a few options for uploading and generating web pages too. KPhotoAlbum is restrictive in some ways, because it forces you to store images in a central location, but it does support the widest variety of uploading options.
Perhaps it's because a sparkly new version just came out that Digikam takes the overall trophy here. It combines organisational and editing features, and is almost as at home with high-end files as it is with family snaps.
With useful editing tools as well as accessible auto-correction features, it does mostly live up to the claim to be an all-in-one photo app. It might not be the easiest software to understand and use though, so it's far from perfect, and it would be perfectly understandable to opt for something more friendly such as Picasa or F-Spot.
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Guide: How to turn an old hard drive into a cool clock
Everyone must have an old 3.5-inch hard drive lying around the place? Either through sheer laziness or the fear that some probing youth might find whatever incriminating video is left stored on it.
We know we've got a small mountain of the things that need to be put beyond use. So why not take one of those waiting environmental catastrophes and turn it into something that's functional and beautiful?
So while it may not be everyone's cup of tea, we like it. The stark antiseptic reflective disc, contrasted by the functional hands of a mechanical analogue timepiece. Artful.
For the mechanism we're using one of the many that are up for sale on eBay. But most hobby stores sell them for all manner of projects. The important thing is to go for a long spindle as it needs to be long enough to go through the centre of the driver platters. Ideally, you'll want hands about 50mm long with a contemporary style, though you can trim longer ones back easily enough.
The main difficulty you will discover in completing this build is removing the drive platters so the clock mechanism can be installed.
First of all the platters need to be removed so the mechanism can be installed. Second, you will need to remove any extra platters, again, so the mechanism will fit. These extra platters are usually fixed in place with star-head TORX screws and you'll find the motor itself will need to be manhandled into shape.
What you will need
3.5 HDD
Clock mechanism
TORX screwdriver set
Hammer
Hacksaw
Workmate
How to make a HDD clock
1. The main problem is getting the platters out and making sure you get a long spindle mechanism.
2. Most hard drives now use star-shaped TORX screws to perturb consumers from opening them. Thankfully, these screwdrivers are stocked by most DIY stores. Older drives may have crosshead screws.
3. Many drives conceal securing screws beneath warranty seals; check them all. With the screws removed you'll need to lever the lid off, as most have a dust-tight seal.
4. To make getting the platter out easier remove the read heads. We found the magnets surprisingly strong. Watch your fingers.
5. Remove the TORX screws from the drive platter, we found a T6 worked best. With the top removed, the platter and spacing rings will easily lift out.
6. Some HDD motors are screwed in place, easy. New ones are not, just take a hammer and a screw driver and bash the spindle out from the bottom of the drive. Under the motor will be the copper armature, pull this out with pliers.
7. You'll need to bash out the various bearings from the remaining motor assembly.
8. Cut the end of the motor assembly off, about 5mm worth, so you can screw the end section into it and have everything fit in place.
9. Screw the end-cap into the section you cut from the motor assembly and slide a left over space in place. Place a platter over the clock mechanism and bolt the end section into place.
10. Fit the whole thing into place and voilà : hard drive clock.
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Review: Acer Aspire Ethos 8943G
Acer's Aspire Ethos 8943G is built to entertain, with an impressive Full HD screen and built-in 5.1 surround-sound speakers. A solid range of features and quality build make this a superb desktop replacement.
An 18.4-inch widescreen display with sharp 1920 x 1080-pixel resolution is in place, featuring incredible detail and brightness levels. LED backlighting and the glossy screen coating bring images to life, with rich colours that truly stand out.
Unfortunately, there was no Blu-ray drive on our pre-production model, although one is promised in the retail version.
The surround-sound speakers also lack punch, with top-volume levels surprisingly muted.
Core i7 promised
The full retail version will have the latest Intel Core i7 processor and 4096MB of DDR3 memory, but our model came with a Core i3 CPU and less memory. Our tests therefore showed much weaker performance than can be expected of the finished item.
However, the DirectX 11-compatible ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphics card perfectly complements the crisp display and has no trouble running even high-end multimedia software.
The chassis is one of the largest we've seen recently, but is also reassuringly solid and surprisingly thin. The minimalist brushed-metal design which covers the lid and most of the interior is attractive and adds to the sturdy feel.
We managed to work for 247 minutes away from mains power, which is impressive for such a large laptop, although lugging it anywhere is a chore, due to the heavy 4kg weight.
Usability is impressive, with a full-sized isolated-key style keyboard and a smooth, responsive touchpad. Pushing a button just below the touchpad turns it into a media control panel, which allows you to bring up your music or movie folders and browse through your media, although you can't move the onscreen cursor while this is active.
These controls are responsive, but we found that hitting the 'Music' option sometimes brought up the Windows movie folder instead.
Five USB ports are available, one of which doubles as an eSATA port, and HDMI as well as VGA connections can be used to connect an external display, if the 18.4-inch screen isn't enough.
A fingerprint scanner is in place and can biometrically secure your data on the 640GB hard drive, while a TV tuner is also included.
Anyone looking for a desktop replacement multimedia machine won't be disappointed by the Acer Aspire Ethos 8943G, thanks to the excellent screen and impressive features.
The finished laptop should be a knockout when released this summer, with a Blu-ray drive and speedy Core i7 processor included.
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Review: Sony S-Frame DPP-F700
The Sony S-Frame DPP-F700 is something completely different in printer designs.
Consisting of a 7-inch digital photo frame with 1GB of internal memory, enough to store up to 2000 photos, it's backed by a 4 x 6-inch dye sublimation printer.
The idea is that should someone take a fancy to one of the images you're displaying, printing it out is as easy as adding the paper cartridge.
While you are limited to 4 x 6-inch shots, the built-in software allows you to print ID-photo size, index prints and even add a calendar to your favourite shots.
This may be a Sony product, but there are a host of connections on the side, allowing you to add everything from Sony Memory Stick cards through to standard SD and even xD-Picture cards. In terms of design, you'll fi nd this is a small but rather boxy affair.
7-inch LCD
The 7-inch photo frame has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and images look sharp. To the right of the screen touch-sensitive controls are in place, which disappear when not being used. These are also mirrored on a small and neat remote control.
When you wish to use it in frame mode, you can add a small metal leg that raises the screen to a more upright angle. However, you can't print with this leg attached, as you need to manually affix the printer tray. Thankfully, the dye sublimation print cartridge stays inside once you've fitted it.
A single cartridge with 40 sheets of paper costs around £15 (inc. VAT), which works out at a little less than 38p per photo, which is good value for money.
Image quality can't compare with the full-blown photo printers here, but the 800 x 480dpi (dots per inch) printouts are certainly on par with images from a shop.
The Sony S-Frame DPP-F700 can't really compete with full-sized photo printers, but it's not intended to. Very much ahead of its time, it will appeal to those with limited storage space and who like the idea of printing out occasional images when it takes their fancy.
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