Top Up TV leaps on Sky Sports bandwagon
Top Up TV has announced it will be carrying Sky Sports 1 and 2 in time for the coming Premiership season.
Top up TV uses the digital terrestrial platform to offer its wares, and it joins Virgin Media, Sky (obviously) and BT Vision in offering the channels.
"Top Up TV is the easy place to get Sky Sports 1, Sky Sports 2 and ESPN in the UK," said Top Up TV chief executive Nick Markham.
No 12 month contract
"With no 12 month contract, the lowest stand-alone price and no need to buy bundled packages, Top Up TV puts fans in control - you can choose the best sport on your own terms."
Just Sky Sports 1 will cost £22.99 a month, Sky Sports 1 and 2 will cost £31.99 per month or you can bundle in ESPN for £39.99 a month.
The packages will appear on 2 August, and Top UP TV will offer anyone who subscribed Sky Sports 1 and 2 or free for the first month with no obligation to continue the contract.
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Corsair extends Force Series SSD range
Corsair has announced three new additions to its popular Force Series family of solid state drives, including a 40GB version that is being pitched as an ideal Windows 7 boot drive. Corsair's Force Series offered 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, but the company has now expanded the range with three new storage options.
Those include 40GB and 80GB SSDs and a 160GB model, offering a broad range for differing uses.
Boot it around
The speed of solid state makes it an ideal option for a Windows 7 boot drive, and 40GB should offer a speedy route to your desktop and would handy paired with a bigger storage drive.
"Unlike most other current generation solid-state drives, the unique architecture of the SF-1200 SSD Processor allows lower capacity drives to perform with nearly the same performance as larger capacity SSDs," explains Corsair.
"All three Force Series models support the TRIM command, so write performance is maintained over time."
Although we are still chasing a UK price, the US prices are $130, for the 40GB, $230 for the 80GB and $449 for the 160GB version.
That would equate to £85, £150 and £295, but add on the usual cross-the-pond fee to that when the drives hit the UK release date of August.
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Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 review roundup
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460 is the most impressive iteration of its Fermi architecture we've seen so far. As well as being far cheaper than either the GTX 480, GTX 470 or the GTX 465, it's only bettered in performance terms by the £400 GTX 480. Reviewed here are four versions of the new card, from the stock 768MB and 1GB cards to the overclocked beasts.
It's a brand new chip design, slimming the original GF100 GPU down into its more svelte GF104 design. Moving forward it should also allow for improved top-end cards further down the line.
For now though the GTX 460 is a mid-range marvel, with the superlative 1GB version of the card being available for as little as £175 if you shop around.
In the £150-£300 pricepoint there really is no other graphics card worth picking up until you get to the Radeon HD 5870 at the top of that bracket.
We've reviewed at a selection of different versions of the card to give you a full idea of which iterations are worth the outlay.
Zotac GeForce GTX 460 1GB review
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB review
EVGA Superclocked GeForce GTX 460 768MB review
Asus GeForce GTX 460 768MB TOP review
Related Links
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Opinion: Don't do scammers' work for them
This is just between me and the almost 500 million Facebook users out there. The rest of you can read something else.Hi. Now, I know you love Facebook. And I know a large part of your day is spent sharing funny videos of men getting very excitable about double rainbows and ninja cats, or farming your way to fortune in a virtual field, but do you think I could have your attention for a minute?
You see, I'm worried that too many of you are clicking on links without properly thinking about the consequences. And your actions might not only be putting your own computer at risk, they could also be impacting your favourite Facebook friends and acquaintances too.
Take this latest example of a link that we've seen spreading rapidly on Facebook today, for instance:
"OMG!! Guys, you have to see this: This mother went to jail for taking this pic of her son!"
If one of your friends posts that you might well be very tempted to click on the link - but please PLEASE think twice.
You see, similar to the recent "Never Gonna Drink Coca-Cola Again" scam, where the Facebook page that you visit encourages you to share a Facebook page with your online pals, before you are able to view the image of a baby boy.
Watch the following video to see how the scam works:
As you can see, the scammers who started this viral campaign are actually only interested in tricking you to take part in an online survey. The bad guys can make money by directing web traffic to surveys like this, which scoop up your personal information. You shouldn't ever fill in such surveys - even if they do offer you a free iPad or tempt you with what they claim will be a hilarious photograph.
Too many of you haven't gained a "seventh sense" yet to spot dodgy links like this. The sad truth is that criminals don't need to spam out their scams anymore - they can rely on people like you to spread them on their behalf. Far too many people are prepared to endorse and share links on Facebook without properly thinking about what they are doing. In this case, you're doing it before you have any clue about what lies behind the page.
Now, I know not all Facebook users fall for these tricks - but an alarming number seem all too willing to unwittingly oil the wheels of cybercrime.
If you've been unfortunate enough to be hit by this or a similar attack, watch the video to see how to clean-up your news feed and delete entries related to the offending links. Hopefully next time you won't be so quick to click on a link recommended to you by a friend, and will actually be able to tell them to be smarter in future.
Wouldn't it be great if we could spread a security message virally, rather than a malicious one?
Here you go: Sophos's Facebook group warns of emerging threats on Facebook.
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Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos, and has been working in the computer security field since the early 1990s. When he's not updating his other blog on the Sophos website you can find him on Twitter at @gcluley.
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Opinion: Don't do scammers' work for them
This is just between me and the almost 500 million Facebook users out there. The rest of you can read something else.Hi. Now, I know you love Facebook. And I know a large part of your day is spent sharing funny videos of men getting very excitable about double rainbows and ninja cats, or farming your way to fortune in a virtual field, but do you think I could have your attention for a minute?
You see, I'm worried that too many of you are clicking on links without properly thinking about the consequences. And your actions might not only be putting your own computer at risk, they could also be impacting your favourite Facebook friends and acquaintances too.
Take this latest example of a link that we've seen spreading rapidly on Facebook today, for instance:
"OMG!! Guys, you have to see this: This mother went to jail for taking this pic of her son!"
If one of your friends posts that you might well be very tempted to click on the link - but please PLEASE think twice.
You see, similar to the recent "Never Gonna Drink Coca-Cola Again" scam, where the Facebook page that you visit encourages you to share a Facebook page with your online pals, before you are able to view the image of a baby boy.
Watch the following video to see how the scam works:
As you can see, the scammers who started this viral campaign are actually only interested in tricking you to take part in an online survey. The bad guys can make money by directing web traffic to surveys like this, which scoop up your personal information. You shouldn't ever fill in such surveys - even if they do offer you a free iPad or tempt you with what they claim will be a hilarious photograph.
Too many of you haven't gained a "seventh sense" yet to spot dodgy links like this. The sad truth is that criminals don't need to spam out their scams anymore - they can rely on people like you to spread them on their behalf. Far too many people are prepared to endorse and share links on Facebook without properly thinking about what they are doing. In this case, you're doing it before you have any clue about what lies behind the page.
Now, I know not all Facebook users fall for these tricks - but an alarming number seem all too willing to unwittingly oil the wheels of cybercrime.
If you've been unfortunate enough to be hit by this or a similar attack, watch the video to see how to clean-up your news feed and delete entries related to the offending links. Hopefully next time you won't be so quick to click on a link recommended to you by a friend, and will actually be able to tell them to be smarter in future.
Wouldn't it be great if we could spread a security message virally, rather than a malicious one?
Here you go: Sophos's Facebook group warns of emerging threats on Facebook.
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Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos, and has been working in the computer security field since the early 1990s. When he's not updating his other blog on the Sophos website you can find him on Twitter at @gcluley.
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Sophos video shows latest Facebook scam
Sophos has produced a video showing how hundreds of users are falling for dodgy Facebook links that say 'OMG mother went to jail'.Sophos has detailed how people are falling for the latest scam, which tricks users into Facebook Liking a page, adding a link to it on their wall and then being hit with a fake survey.
"I really feel like despairing that the general public will ever learn to avoid dodgy links like this," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
Not spam scams any more
"Criminals these days don't need to spam out their scams - they can rely on the public to spread them for them," he added.
"Far too many people are prepared to endorse and share links on Facebook without properly thinking about what they are doing.
"In this case, they're doing it before they have any clue about what lies behind the page."
Users who have been affected should view their profile, click on the 'Info' tab and remove any of the offending pages from the "Likes and interests" section. Obviously.
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Guide: How to downgrade iPhone iOS 4 to OS 3.1.3
Apple's iOS 4 looks great, has loads of new features, works just fine on a 3GS. But it's turned our iPhone 3Gs into expensive ornaments: it made them - and the 3Gs of everyone we know - so slow they were barely useable. The good news is that you can fix it; the bad news is that you need to dump iOS 4 and it takes ages. Here's how to roll back iPhone OS to 3.13.
Disclaimer: Future Publishing Limited provides the information for this project in good faith and makes no representations as to its completeness or accuracy. Individuals carrying out the instructions in this project do so at their own risk.
Step 1
Before you do anything, sync your iPhone with iTunes and ensure anything you want to keep - including contacts and photos - is on your computer. If you've disabled syncing of contacts, photos and so on it might be an idea to enable them again and do another sync.
We can't stress this enough: the downgrade will wipe your iPhone, and once you're back on OS 3.1.3 you can't restore data from backups made in iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1. That means if something hasn't been copied from your iPhone to your computer and you've added it since upgrading to 4.0 or 4.0.1, you'll lose it permanently.
Step 2
Now, we need to find iPhone OS 3.1.3. This should be on your computer: on a Mac, go to your hard disk and open up Macintosh HD > Users > Yourname > Library > iTunes > iPhone Software Updates; on a PC, head for C:\Documents and Setting\Yourname\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates. The one we're looking for is iPhone1,2_3.1.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw. If it isn't there, download it.
Please note this file is for a 3G, not a 3GS: if you're downgrading one of them for whatever reason, the .ipsw file you need starts iPhone2,1.
Step 3
Time for another download: RecBoot. On Windows, you'll also need to make sure you've got .NET 4.0 installed, and if you're running Vista or Windows 7 you'll need to run it in Compatibility Mode. Full instructions are here.
Now, put your iPhone into recovery mode. To do that, connect your iPhone to your computer and switch it off. When it's completely off, press and hold the power button and the Home button for ten seconds and then let go of the power button. Keep pressing Home until iTunes says that it "has detected an iPhone in recovery mode".
Step 4
If iTunes hasn't done it already, select your iPhone in the left hand iTunes panel so the Restore button is visible. Don't just click it, though: Alt/Option-Click it if you're on a Mac and Shift-Click it if you're on a PC. This enables you to select the file to restore from, which is the .ipsw one we looked for earlier, so locate that, select it and click on Choose.
Step 5
iTunes will now give you a factory-fresh iPhone 3G running OS 3.1.3. The process takes ten minutes or so, and when it's finished iTunes will probably tell you that the iPhone couldn't be restored because of an unknown error. Don't worry about this: that's why we downloaded RecBoot. On a Mac, run the RecBoot Exit Only application; on PC, launch RecBoot. Now, select Exit Recovery Mode.
Step 6
Your iPhone should now restart, and after a moment iTunes will ask whether you want to set it up as a new iPhone or restore from a backup. Now that you've downgraded you can't restore from iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1 backups, so you'll have to choose a pre-iOS 4 backup (if you have one). The restore process takes about ten minutes.
Step 7
Your iPhone should restart again, but it's not ready to use yet: now, you need to sync it. That means copying across all your music, all your movies, all your apps… this would be a good time to make dinner, start a family, make a volcano from mashed potato or write the Great American Novel. Depending on how much stuff there is to sync, syncing your newly restored 3G can take hours. Trust us. It's worth it.
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Review: Acer Liquid E
As a relative smartphone newcomer, Acer entered the Android playpen last year with the Liquid S100. It was a decent first effort, but very a bold manoeuvre. The HTC Hero was topping the charts, while established players Motorola and Samsung were making waves with their deployment of handsets boasting the Google-made OS.
Despite releasing a mobile phone with an array of high-end specs, including the now commonplace Snapdragon processor and a superb screen, the Liquid was somewhat lost in the shuffle.
Without a trusted mobile name behind it, most of the smartphone-fancying kids threw the idea of purchasing this particular toy out of the pram.
Rather than being intimidated by the Android big boys, the notebook specialist is back with a second bite of the cherry.
The Liquid E (we laughed at the name too, and wondered if the Daily Mail would be launching a campaign against it) boasts the same design, same underclocked 768Mhz Snapdragon clip, same 480 x 800 hi-res 3.5-inch capacitive screen and same 5MP camera.
So what's new? Android 1.6 is out and Android 2.1 Eclair is in.
Okay, great. But now the playing field has been elevated with the HTC Desire, rather than the Hero, ruling the roost. Can a phone that does little to enhance the Android OS, while offering less than no improvement on the first device really contend with it?
With a top-end price of £400 SIM-free, it's really going to have to go some to achieve that. Let's investigate.
If you've seen the Liquid S100, you've seen the Liquid E. It's the exact same design, and it's not something that Acer is hiding, despite well-justified concern over the first phone's cheap-looking exterior.
The big selling point here is the new incarnation of the operating system.
At 135g, it weighs exactly the same as the HTC Desire, and it's 2g lighter than the iPhone 4.
It feels a good deal chunkier than both of those blockbusters though, measuring up at 115mm long, by 64mm wide, by a chubby 12.7mm thick.
The design itself is very minimalist without a single hard button nestling next to the 3.5-inch capacitive multi-touch screen.
There's plenty of space around that screen, with the SIM-free model we're reviewing boasting a white casing.
Indeed, one of the best things this phone has going for it, is that it looks like an Imperial Stormtrooper. We only hope it's smarter.
Occasionally, it struggles to be as receptive when hitting the smaller icons, like the Google voice search microphone, but swiping between Home screens is very slick, although not quite as rapid as on phones like the HTC Desire.
Below the screen are four touch-sensitive icons offering the Android buttons we've become accustomed to: Home, Search, Back and Menu.
We like the way they're designed here, nicely lit from beneath. They don't come alive unless the screen is unlocked.
Once the screen is unlocked, it's apparent that it's a strong effort. Icons appear in great detail and it's bright, colourful and very vibrant.
It's a shame that it's rendered practically useless in direct sunlight.
Housed on the rounded side-edges are the phone's only hard buttons. On the left is the power/lock screen switch, while the volume keys sit opposite.
The silver metallic keys would appear to be handily placed to use when handling the phone naturally, but they're actually quite difficult to press without squeezing those on the opposite side.
The phone's glossy plastic casing is also quite slippery. The seemingly convenient positioning turns out to be more of a hindrance.
Beneath the volume keys is the hard camera button and, when pressing the power switch it's also nigh-on impossible not to push this too. It never really matters as the camera key requires holding to open the app.
The back of the handset features the same five-megapixel camera and the external speaker, while the black bottom features the mini-USB charging port.
The top of the device offers a little more interest with flashing white lights emerging from the black casing when the phone is charging or when new messages arrive.
It can be a little distracting when you're trying to sleep at night, but all in all, it's a nice touch. Also housed at the top of the handset is a 3.5mm jack.
Somehow the device doesn't sit as well in the hand as the iPhone 4 and the HTC Desire.
The squarish top edges and the 64mm width mean it's not quite as comfortable in the palm as we'd hoped, and it's difficult to find a manageable position. As we mentioned, it's also rather slippy too.
Taking the back off involves pressing down in the centre of the handset and digging your fingernails underneath the top; something that doesn't really inspire that much confidence that you won't just snap it in two.
The battery may be housed in the upper half, but it's the lower half that gets quite warm.
It's a rather cheap and plasticky design, reminiscent Acer's laptops, but not necessarily an unattractive one. It's just not going to win any style points against the iPhone 4s and the HTC Legends in the densely-populated, drop dead gorgeous smartphone stakes.
In the box
Compared to what we're used to seeing these days, with Palm, HTC and Apple's minimalist offerings, the Liquid E's box is gigantic.
Beneath the handset are a few manuals and an instructions CD, and then box opens out like something out of Indiana Jones. Why? We're not quite sure. There's certainly no Lost Ark to be found.
There's a USB charging cable, separate mains plug and a set of decent headphones, which double up as a hands-free kit. There's a 2GB microSD card also bundled in, alongside an SD card adapter to slide it into. Nice touch.
There's also some screen protectors and a velvety sock with a drawstring. Kind of like a mobile phone sleeping bag.
After re-reading our review of the Liquid S100, there was always a worry of simply rehashing what had already been written. After all, we're looking at almost exactly the same handset.
However, here's an area where we don't have to worry about that. The sole reason for this phone's re-release is the incorporation of the Android 2.1 Éclair operating system currently tasting the good life on the HTC Desire, Google Nexus One and Motorola Milestone.
Couldn't that have just been handled with a firmware upgrade, we hear you ask? Yes, but it's hardly worth rolling out a update that no-one is going to download. A re-release with this tweak gives them that second bite of the cherry as a 'new' Android 2.1 handset.
So how does it shape up? HTC has the brilliant Sense UI to overlay and enhance the open source software, while Motorola has MotoBlur, Sony Ericsson has TimeScape, so what can Acer do? Well, not a lot really.
One of the beauties of Android is that any man and his (engineering-savvy) dog can build a smartphone and thanks to the open source operating system, instantly produce a handset boasting an excellent and familiar interface without putting any real work in.
Dell certainly put in a shift to customise the 1.6-toting Streak, but Android 2.1 on the Liquid E appears largely organic.
The only real differences that are instantly apparent from navigating around the phone are the bookmarks and media carousels housed at either end of the five Home screens.
Bookmarks enables you to flick between mini pages, in an attractive dovetail design. Positioned at the right-hand edge of the screen, it works really well.
Better still is the media fan, enabling you to switch between recent pictures, music and video, which is a convenient way of accessing that content without delving deep within the phone.
Another neat innovation is the neat main menu interface, which operates on a rolling belt, serving up your favourite apps.
There's a nice depth to it, since you can see the icons above and below your current screen, ready to be rolled into play.
It's one of the nicer ways of displaying the multitude of Android apps that come pre-loaded on the OS. It's a shame it stops at the end rather than continuing in a cycle though.
Once you select an app, there's a neat 3D animation which draws the app out from the icon to engulf the screen, ably assisted in this instance by the Snapdragon processor, which opens applications in an instant. When you're done and close an app, it's then sucked it back in.
This helps to add a much-needed bit of character to the Acer Liquid E.
But that's kind of it. The rest is very much Android 2.1 in the way the Google gods intended. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Not at all. It boasts so much of the great functionality that HTC Hero and Dell Streak owners are lacking.
Let's start with Live wallpapers, an added bonus that has proved so popular on phones like the HTC Desire.
Even though it's rather shallow of us, they really add a lot to the phone's enjoyability and look fantastic on the 480 x 800 screen, unlike the Vodafone 845 Android 2.1 phone that recently crossed our path.
The Live Google Maps wallpaper is especially satisfying, and kept much better track of our progress than it did on the Vodafone 845. That handset had us stranded in North Wales instead of sunny Shrewsbury, while the Liquid E's GPS maintained our actual position very well.
The Nexus, a cacophony of touch sensitive coloured lights, is so much fun that it's worth keeping a Home screen bear for.
The addition of Android 2.1 allows an additional two Home screens, bringing the total on the Liquid E to five customisable screens. Navigating between them is smooth, but it doesn't feel as slick as on HTC's newest handsets.
As with most new Android phones, there's a means of navigating back and forth without swiping all the way from left to right, and this is done by holding the on-screen menu grid, prompting mini Home screen cards to appear.
Multitasking is present, and holding the touch-sensitive home key prompts a menu of open applications and the underclocked Snapdragon processor handles many open applications relatively well.
The Android connectivity bar, which enables you to control Wi-Fi, GPS, brightness, Bluetooth and syncing, is also here, and is another area where Android just makes life easy.
Also on board is Google's voice-to-text functionality, which works wonderfully when conducting web searches. However when we tried to tell the phone to "Call Mum new", the handset Googled "cool mom nude".
Brilliant. That's how we found out that voice-to-text functionality didn't work on the rest of the phone. And found a website with Ma Radar on we didn't want to see.
The phone's general search functionality also takes note from Apple's spotlight interface, which searches the phone for contacts and apps before consulting online Google options.
Holding the touch-sensitive Search icon beneath the screen prompts the voice-to-text Google search functionality.
All in all, on this handset, the interface is basic, but very, very usable. There's no overly-customised skin like HTC's Sense or Motorola's MotoBlur, but the beauty of Android is that it just works, and works very well indeed.
With a fast processor and a great screen, the array of widgets and apps are always going to be a winner.
As with all new Android phones, filling your contacts book is an absolute doddle and can be done within minutes.
Say what you will about Google and privacy, but if you've ever used an Android phone before, repopulating the contacts folder on a new phone is painless.
Unless you've spent a long time refining your Google address book, there'll be a lot of unwanted contacts on there, so you'll need to do a little deleting.
Something that stood out to us, when setting up our contacts book was the ability to add our Twitter contacts into the mix, alongside Google, Facebook and SIM address books.
It's easy to hide Facebook, so your contacts folder isn't jam-packed full of the acquaintances who were mean to you at school. Facebook friends are listed in the Others section, beneath your phone contacts. Twitter pals also live there too.
Unfortunately we couldn't find a way to merge contacts, so the only ones who appear as both Facebook and Google contacts are those you've previously merged on other devices.
We tried changing names in the hope that they'd recognise each other and sync-up, but with no joy.
Those contacts that do have a Facebook profile attached to them have an "F" icon beneath their name alongside the "G" for Google.
Calling
Call quality is good, and audio was clear but not always reliable. We had to reset the phone because the recipients of our calls could not hear us. Upon reset the problem was solved and we've not experienced the same thing since. Still, it was quite worrying.
Accessing your call contacts is straight forward as you can simply start typing a name into the dialpad, but this is one area of the phone that isn't quite as fluid. The haptic feedback seems to delay things somewhat.
For some reason, quite annoyingly, phone numbers are formatted in the American style 123-456-78901 style. No big deal, but still we'd like our numbers to be familiar.
Another interesting feature was the ability to put a contact on hold and make a second call, which is handy in a "hang on a second, I'll just ask him, let me put you on hold" kind of way.
Call quality comes through loud and clear from both the internal and the external speaker and no amount of holding it in different places could cause the signal to drop. Trust us, we tried, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Jobsy.
This isn't one of the more pleasant experiences when using this phone. It seems that it's impossible to turn of the haptic vibrations when typing out a message on the standard keyboard, which seems to slow down the entire process because the phone is always trying to catch up with itself.
It doesn't seem like a processor problem, because everything else is pretty slick. We've had this issue before on phones, turned the vibrations off, and it has been much easier to type, but here we couldn't turn them off even when doing so in the Android settings menu.
The text messaging interface is in-line with the familiar Android experience, with threaded messages, so there's no problem there, but actually typing it is a different experience altogether.
In portrait mode, the Liquid E's keys are a little too rounded and mistakes are a regular occurrence.
The space key is largely unresponsive and you have to access the numbers and symbols screen to type a comma. In the comma's place is a globe key to select language.
Why on earth does that need to be there instead of a comma? Worse still, if you hit it by accident, you have to trawl through all the languages to get back to English.
It also seems a little bit too keen to guess what you're typing. The dictionary functionality is great, and suggested words do appear in a menu below the text field, but the phone seems to second guess you more often than is necessary.
Often, one mistake can veer you off in a completely different direction, we were typing "they're" and made one mistake and all of a sudden the suggested word was "turther". We can't even begin to make sense of that one.
Type "Shearer" and the suggested word was "endeared". That may explain how we feel when we see Alan Shearer's face, but how does the phone figure that's what we wanted to type?
In other cases, it fails to correct when it really needs to. Why would the phone think we want to type "wad" instead of "was"? It won't even give us an apostrophe for I'm. It thinks we want to type "in". Backwards.
This happens time and time again and it makes typing a text a quite laborious and often infuriating experience.
The lack of reliability also removes being able to use the space bar to accept the suggested word. We typed "Maxi" and by the time we'd finished the text, we'd sent "Nazi". Not cool.
It's easier to type in landscape mode though, but that doesn't solve the problems.
One good thing about texting is the auto re-send functionality that will send your unsent messages when you regain signal, rather than having to do it manually.
Email functionality suffers from the same problems, although the organic Android 2.1 email interface on the Liquid E works very well. You can add Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo accounts very easily, and there's no messing about with POP/IMAP settings or incoming/outgoing servers.
Each inbox is colour coded, and you can choose the default account from which you want to send email. There's also combined inbox functionality too, but still no sign of threaded emails.
You'll need the native Gmail app for that. RoadSync is also built-in as standard allowing easy access to your Exchange email.
Browsing the web on an Android phone is always a painless experience, thanks to the native browser packed full of logical and straightforward functionality, but on this great screen it really is a joy.
With multi-touch on board it's easy to pinch-to-zoom and get close in on text and images thanks to the capacitive touchscreen and although text isn't reformatted to fit the new window, the experience isn't unduly affected.
Text is reproduced brilliantly even when zoomed to the maximum level and everything re-renders very quickly thanks to the snappy Snapdragon processor.
It would have been even quicker had Acer let it off the leash to achieve its 1GHz potential, rather than the 768GHz it currently operates at.
Double-tapping on the screen zooms out to a full page view or in close depending on the area of the screen you're looking to focus on.
The bookmarks tab to the left of the URL bar also gives easy access to your history and most visited pages, and it's also fair to mention the custom-built Bookmarks 'fan' widget on the Home screen again. The design is nice, serving up a visual reminder of the last page you visited on that site.
It's also really easy to share pages in a plethora of ways, with official Twitter and Facebook apps, email and RoadSync among the many options.
There's still no Flash player to speak of on the handset, which is strange considering that the pre-loaded and instantly dispensable Acer bookmarks, are all heavily Flash-based.
How many Android phones are there on the market at the moment? Thirty? You can count the ones with good cameras on one hand. The Dell Streak and HTC Desire are the ones that spring to mind, but nothin else really stands out.
The inauspicious tradition continues here with the Acer Liquid E. The 5MP sensor is exactly the same as the one housed on the Liquid S100.
Auto-focus is on board, but we would have really liked to have seen an LED flash and touch-to-focus, but it's difficult to expect a lot from a company with less photography experience than it has smartphone experience.
In good light, the camera can churn out some very decent results, with good colour reproduction and a decent amount of detail, but without the sun's help, it's very much a lame duck.
Trying to get up-close and personal is a waste of time, as the lens just cannot handle any kind of attempt at macro photography.
Taking pictures takes a long time, either through the on-screen shooting button or the hard button, neither of which incorporate a two-step focus that we've become accustomed to on some Android phones.
You have to really push the hard button right in to take a snap and it's a slippery customer, so taking pics isn't the most pleasurable experience in the world.
There's also a bunch of Android-imposed shooting settings, which can be summoned from a tab in capture mode. They include white balance, colour mode, location storage and ISO, but 99 per cent of the time you'll be using the custom setting.
Mono can produce some decent black and white pics however, while the Daylight WB setting improves contrast in your pictures.
DARKNESS: The phone struggles to let in light, even though you can see clear blue skies above
Click here to see the full res image
LANDSCAPE: Contrast is very heavy, restricting brightness in this shot
Click here to see the full res image
SUNNY: There's a much better showcase of natural colour and light when the sun peeks through the clouds
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MACRO: It's extremely difficult to get up close and personal with subjects from a close distance. The focus always tends to the background
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ZOOM: Images become extremely noisy when zoomed right in
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DETAIL: The camera can still showcase a decent amount of detail in the right light
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The Liquid E does put the geotagging to use more prominently than many of the latest smartphones. After taking a picture, you can instantly select a 'Show on map' option, which quickly prompts a Google Maps positioning of your snap.
This also crosses over into the brilliantly-designed custom Gallery application, that we first saw on the Google Nexus One, rumoured to be inspiring the design of Android 3.0 Gingerbread.
It's packed full of pretty animations, transitions and slideshows that would not look out of place on the Apple iPad.
Pictures load in a folder that also gives you the location of the pictures if you have it enabled (in this instance Shrewsbury, Shropshire) and options to share, crop and show on a map.
The NemoPlayer gallery, which isn't nearly as pretty, even gives the exact longitude and latitude co-ordinates. Fancy.
VGA video is also on-board, recording in customary 3GPP, which is basically an MPEG4. There's some similar video settings to the stills functionality, and the quality is pretty much as you'd expect from a basic Android phone.
Footage is surprisingly clear, however, and detailed. Although at just 20 frames per second, it's quite choppy. Again, everything is hugely dependent on natural light.
We mentioned this in the camera section of the review, but the best way to view your files is through the NemoPlayer Home screen media widget, which fans out into albums and dates, and can be easily flicked through with the thumb.
Clicking on the relevent thumbnail opens that particular album in an attractive gallery feature.
NemoPlayer replaces the standard Android media player to showcase your galleries, music and video under one banner, which is an interesting approach.
The problems reported with the first Acer Liquid, which saw the app crash whenever you tried to view a video on the new incarnation of the handset has now been resolved.
It's good to see because the scrollwheel Home screen widget is one of the more attractive reasons to adopt this phone.
The NemoPlayer widget does dominate a lot of that vital Home screen real estate, but also allows you to easily tab between photos, audio and video content with one-touch access, while also showcasing thumbnails, so it's definitely worth keeping there.
Beyond that, sadly, the unofficial Beeb Player app has disappeared from the Android Market, so there'll be no BBC iPlayer content for you. We're still waiting for the official nod from the Corporation.
The Android YouTube widget is implemented well here, allowing easy uploads and easy sharing, and shooting direct to the streaming service.
In terms of listening to music, the all-encompassing NemoPlayer does a decent enough job, and the Home screen widget allows you to select artists directly, which is a nice bonus.
The phone is capable of playing MP3, M4A WMA, WAV and iTunes' AAC files.
Inside the application, album art runs along the top tab allowing you select albums from there, but in most cases, album art resisted the switch from the PC and we were left with bland musical notes as icons.
The NemoPlayer app is one of the few areas where Acer opts to superimpose its will on top of the Android OS, so we have to give it a little credit.
You can still access the official Android music player, but for the sake of convenience you'll probably end up using NemoPlayer.
Audio quality isn't particularly great. An iPod touch it most certainly is not. The external speaker is terrible, not just encroaching on back-seat-of-the-bus territory, but building a chav fort there, thanks to some disgustingly tinny low-quality playback. Even Ma Radar commented on how bad it was.
The bundled in headphones are okay, but you'll need some decent cans to enable decent audio playback.
With video, NemoPlayer showcases footage you've copied over to the device alongside your captured video in the Home screen scroll wheel. One push on a thumbnail commences playback.
Video playback on the trailers we downloaded and transferred over to the device looked very good on the Liquid E's screen, and playback was fluid and lived up to the resolution of the footage. The device is capable of handling MPEG4, H.263/4 and, surprisingly, WMV files.
Multimedia performance, as a whole, is as expected, but Android's 2.1's gallery widget is in a different league to everything else on the phone.
The Android Market continues to blossom in a solid second place, as it chases the App Store down. While a swing in fortunes is highly unlikely, quality and quantity is improving greatly.
There still aren't many killer apps for Android phones, such as iMovie for the iPhone 4, and games are still extremely primitive, but the extremely well-designed and user-friendly Market does have a lot to offer.
The one advantage Android phones have over Apple is the free Google Maps Navigation app, which transforms any Android-toting smartphone into a full-function sat nav system complete with turn-by-turn voice instructions.
It's a masterstroke from Google, and something which adds so much value to new Android phones. Just install a simply piece of voice software and you're good to go.
The screen is good enough and large enough to handle the app, and the GPS signal remains true for most of the time.
Voice instructions are clear and delivered in plenty of time, and there's also the opportunity to add satellite and traffic layers. You're able to simply speak your destination into the phone thanks to the voice-to-text functionality.
It's also easy to cycle through the directions using the arrow keys at the top of the screen. Returning to your current position can be achieved by pressing the navigation arrow.
It'll also run in the background while you perform other tasks, while directions appear in the notifications tab at the top of the screen, and voice instructions continue as normal.
It's a magnificent piece of functionality and it is, without question, Android's killer app.
The Acer Liquid E can do something that the iPhone 4 can't do, without opening the wallet, which is the beauty of Android.
Social networking
We've talked a lot about NemoPlayer, but the social networking applications on the Android 2.1 OS have enjoyed a nice little bump, including an excellent official Twitter app.
Android apps have a habit of being somewhat less aesthetically pleasing than their iPhone cousins, but Twitter is one of the exceptions to that mandate.
The application's Home screen features a cute animation of the Twitter bird tweeting out clickable trending topics.
It really is a fully-functional incarnation. If you'd like to tweet a photo, there's a camera button to summon the handset's snapper, or an upload key to add in a picture you've already taken.
The app also uses GPS to pinpoint your location if that's your bag.
Accessing your lists, tweets, mentions and retweets is also a doddle, and it's really easy to mention those you're following by ticking a check box. All in all, it's a great effort and even boasts a live updates Home screen widget which fills half a screen.
There are other Twitter apps available on the market, including the also excellent Twitdroid and Tweetcaster (which showcases tweets in a rolling slideshow), but the official one is by far the best, and it's free too.
Facebook for Android has improved in recent times, but it's not really up there with Facebook for iPhone.
Google Talk is on board and Skype is downloadable for free from the app store. The iPhone now has MSN messenger, but Android doesn't.
Calendar, documents and weather
The on-board calendar app syncs with your Google schedule, while RoadSync allows all your businessy-type business to be arranged.
We'd like to see an integrated Roadsync/Google calendar here, so we know whether we should be partying or in an important business meeting, but no dice.
Facebook event functionality, like on the Palm Pre Plus' webOS calendar, would also be a welcome bonus. You could do this on the web and have it ported to your phone, but that's a little convoluted.
The Documents to Go app enables Android phones to read Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, slideshows and PDFs, but you'll have to buy the full version to create those documents.
The Accuweather widget, which has become a fixture on Android phones, is available but doesn't look quite as good as it does on the Sense UI.
The trouble with having five Home screens is that two of them are pretty much dominated by the bookmarks and media widgets, while the two big social networking sites also take up a page.
Once you add the centre Home screen which features all of your pre-eminent apps and a Google search bar, there's scant room for anything else.
On the last available homescreen, we went for Accuweather, the connectivity bar and a custom version of the Sense UI clock and that was our lot.
Quite simply the worst battery performance we've ever seen on a smartphone.
The lithium 1350mAh battery (slightly lower than the 1400mAh on the HTC Desire) was fully charged at 10am on the first day of full testing and by 5.30pm it was completely dead.
And by dead we mean dead. It took forever to have the will to come back on. Even when plugged into the mains it took half an hour of resting up before we could even switch the thing back on.
To be fair to the Liquid E, we tested it to the max, employing the camera heavily and sending 3MB pictures via 3G, and continually using push email, but it surely shouldn't be draining to this extent?
We typed out a lot of texts and had the screen on full brightness to combat the sunlight, while live Twitter and Facebook widgets were running on the Home screen, but a seven-hour battery life is incredibly poor.
On another day, we used it sparingly and by 8pm it was also on the way out. Whereas we'll happily accept that most smartphones need to be charged in order to handle a second day's usage, not making it through the first day is completely unacceptable.
It promises five hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby battery. That's simply not true.
Connectivity
Android phones are always well-armed when it comes to connectivity and the Liquid E continues that fine tradition. There's 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, which performed very consistently, HSDPA to 7.2Mbps and quad-band 2G connectivity.
Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP is also present and AGPS works very well in terms of geotagging photography and Google Maps navigation. It does struggle in crowded areas, and it's not so reliable indoors.
The homescreen-housed connectivity bar allows you control most of that functionality with one touch.
For a laptop manufacturer, you'd think that the Liquid E would be jam-packed with cool PC functionality that would encourage users to own this phone as an extension to their Acer PC. Well, no-one at Acer thought of that.
There's no neat interface to allow file transfers or contacts back ups and the CD that accompanies the handset is merely a digital instruction manual.
Plugging the Acer Liguid E into the PC just prompts the microSD card storage, making it easy to drag and drop your files onto the device. Sadly there's no opportunity to utilise the device as a mobile broadband dongle.
Android has opened the door to all and sundry to enter the smartphone world, but whereas their natural competitors Dell went all out with the smartphone/tablet hybrid Streak device, Acer has chosen to create a decent device and just let Android speak for itself.
The Streak boasted a brilliant, premium design and, even though it was only Android 1.6, added a great skin to the OS giving the device a great deal of character and identity. All in all, that's a much better smartphone.
We liked
Android 2.1 is a reason to like any phone, and thanks to an excellent hi-res display, largely responsive touchscreen and a way-above-average processing speed, makes using it an enjoyable experience.
The screen really is up there with some of the better handsets on the market, colours are bright and vibrant, while icons are detailed and text is reproduced excellently, even when zoomed in all the way.
The 768MHz Snapdragon processor ticks both the like and dislike boxes. We like it because it adds a real zip to proceedings.
Apps open quickly and transitions between screens are smooth. Nothing ever crashes on this device, and there's never really any lag.
But why is it underclocked? Just let it rip, for heaven's sake – although battery life is clearly already an issue, so maybe that's not the best idea.
The touchscreen didn't cause us any problems either. While it's not as instantly responsive as the top-end handsets, it still obeyed our demands over 90 per cent of the time, only really struggling with smaller icons.
In terms of the Android OS, there's plenty to like. It enables the Liquid E to be a great browsing device, social networking phone and mobile sat nav. It has an app store second only to the App Store. Live wallpapers are also cool.
In terms of custom Acer functionality, we do like the NemoPlayer and Bookmarks scroll wheel Home screen widgets, and the gallery and geotagging features are fabulous.
We disliked
The Acer Liquid E is a lazy release from the company, serving up exactly the same design with exactly the same camera, and functionality, while only boasting an update it didn't create itself.
Android 2.1 is something to shout about, but this is something that could have been handled in a firmware upgrade, but the trouble is there'd be no-one to download it. We understand the move, but why not do something with the hardware to save a little face?
We absolutely despised using the messaging app on this phone, and couldn't wait to plonk the SIM back into our now-sluggish HTC Hero. It's terrible and using it filled us with trepidation.
The design, while endearing with it's Stormtrooper-esque appearance is no Darth Vader-like iPhone 4 both in looks and functionality. The battery life is also absolutely abysmal.
Verdict
In terms of hardware, design and specs, the Liquid E is no match whatsoever for the top ranked iPhone 4 and HTC Desire phones, but is a capable second-tier player that can definitely compete with the likes of the Nokia N900 and Motorola Dext phones.
It's nowhere near as good as the Xperia X10, Palm Pre Plus, HTC Legend or Dell Streak handsets, either.
Acer is not a recognised smartphone name and its reputation for producing quality laptops isn't such that this phone was ever going to make a splash at a time when there are more quality phones than ever before. The Liquid S100 didn't. The Liquid E won't.
However, any phone boasting Android 2.1 is worth a look, and when it's backed up by a fine hi-res screen and a fast processor you can't go that far wrong. This is a good and capable handset, make no mistake.
We're just a little disappointed in the lack of effort Acer has put into making this phone its own, or improving on the original Liquid S100 beyond the upgrade from 1.6 to 2.1.
We've seen much worse Android phones than this but can't hand-on-heart recommend it. It could have been so much more has Acer really put in the donkey work.
This phone looks like a Stormtrooper, but sadly, also packs as much character and identity as the hapless, instantly replacable servants of the Dark Lord of the Sith.
It'll do its job and it'll follow orders well, but when it comes up against an opponent of any might it can be vanquished with consummate ease.
This isn't the smartphone you're looking for, but we don't need Jedi mind tricks to convince you of that.
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HP still top of PC market, but Acer catching
Hewlett Packard has maintained its PCmarket leadership in Europe and the Middle East, with IDC's figures suggesting that the computer giant has become even more dominant in the desktop market but under pressure from its rivals in laptops. IDC's figures show growth for Acer – particularly in Central and Eastern Europe – with the Taiwanese company continuing its impressive showing in the mobile computing market.
HP remains just ahead of Acer in total market share with 20.3 per cent of the EMEA market compared to Acer's 20 per cent.
Dell is the third biggest in terms of total market share with 9.6 per cent.
Asus has put on a huge growth spurt in the year-on-year comparisons, overtaking Toshiba (5.8 per cent) in the past 12 months to move from a 5.2 per cent share in Q2 2009 to 8.3 per cent in Q2 2010.
Strong performances
Of the other vendors, IDC suggests that 'several vendors recorded strong performances'.
"In sixth position, Lenovo recorded an outstanding 70% growth, driven by major expansion in CEE and the healthy uptake in commercial demand in Europe, said IDC's report.
Samsung reinforced its seventh position in the EMEA ranking…The vendor launched its first all-in-one product, thus entering the EMEA desktop market.
"Apple and Sony continued to leverage strong consumer demand and branding, while Fujitsu remained constrained overall, but gained share in the commercial desktop segment in Western Europe, benefiting from the ongoing desktop renewals across several countries."
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Sponsored: See the big picture in HD and 3D
This is a sponsored article in association with MicrosoftKids today don't know they're born. When we first went online it took about ten minutes to download a tiny GIF image; today, even the most modest bit of kit can zoom in from space to the tiniest detail and back again in fractions of a second.
You can even turn plain old photos into a 3D world, add them to maps and help create a 3D model of the entire planet.
Don't believe us? Check out the Hard Rock Café's superb Memorabilia section, where you can go from a birds-eye view of the entire collection to the same view of Jimi Hendrix's guitar he saw when he played it with his teeth.
Or head for the Imperial War Museum, where you can view Churchill's wartime papers and photos in incredible detail. Or save endangered species by playing with the world's largest mosaic, which is helping raise money to save the Sumatran Tiger.
WAR MACHINE: The Imperial War Museum's superb Winston Churchill archive uses Deep Zoom to bring archive material to life
These very different sites all use the same technology: Deep Zoom. Built into Microsoft's free Silverlight plugin, Deep Zoom delivers instant online viewing of images in amazing detail.
Its secret is streaming: the images are scanned at incredibly high resolutions, and as you zoom in Deep Zoom streams the data your PC needs to see a closer view. Remember the movie zooms that show the Earth from space, then a country, then a continent, then a city, then a street, then a house, then the top of someone's head? That's what Deep Zoom delivers, and each zoom is seamless. It's really quite extraordinary.
Deep Zoom isn't the only trick Silverlight's got up its sleeve, though. Silverlight also powers PhotoSynth, which can stitch multiple photographs together to build a photorealistic 3D model that you can move around and Deep Zoom on. VisitBrighton.com has some great examples of it in action, including models of the Royal Pavilion and the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.
Hollywood has been quick to spot PhotoSynth's potential. MGM Studios' Stargate website uses it to great effect, and if you've played Warner Bros' promotional game for Sherlock Holmes all the high-quality photography you saw was created in PhotoSynth, too.
STAR ATTRACTION: PhotoSynth can bring you closer to your favourite programmes: MGM Studios' Stargate website puts you inside the programme, ready to go exploring
And of course, PhotoSynth can educate as well as entertain: just check out NASA's Mars Science Labs, where you can examine every inch of the Mars Rover and see a panorama of NASA's Mars Yard.
If that's whetted your appetite, the PhotoSynth site is a photographic feast of towers, museums, bridges, art galleries and other visual delights - and you can easily add your own by putting your own pictures into the Synther, Microsoft's tool for making what it calls Synths.
For best results take lots and lots of photos at the same time (for consistent colour) and with lots of overlap (to make the Synther's life easier). To get an idea of what's possible and how amazing the results can be, head to PhotoSynth.net and enter "worldcup" in the search box to see synths of the various stadia used in this year's World Cup. It's particularly good because with photos, you can't hear the vuvuzelas.
Your synth could become part of something astonishing: the Silverlight version of Bing Maps, which enables you to find PhotoSynths on the map, swoop down from the sky to street level and start exploring in 3D. There are more than 14,000 geotagged synths to explore, including all of the world's major landmarks and many of the minor ones, too.
UP CLOSE: The Silverlight version of Bing Maps combines Deep Zoom and PhotoSynth to great effect, enabling you to view 3D models of popular landmarks
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Review: Chord Company Optichord
The most obviously upmarket feature of the Chord Company Optichord optical lead are the connectors, which have a metal body. As the optical fibre simply passes through them, they have no effect at all on the signal-passing properties, but they do make handling a bit more reassuring and, as Chord has taken care over the accuracy of the plastic mating parts, they fit nice and snugly into any of the various TOSlink sockets we tried.
A Mini-jack on one end is an option (for portable players) and lengths up to 10 metres are available for a relatively modest premium.
Each end of the fibre has been carefully shaped into a domed profile and then polished, giving optimum transmission of the light signal, even if the plug is inserted a little askew.
Chord pointed out that our results would most likely vary, depending on interference levels in the vicinity and the susceptibility of the connected equipment.
Performance
Complete insensitivity to electrical interference is, of course, the great advantage of optical links – that, and the lack of hum loops and the like. And sure enough, we found this lead highly advantageous in connecting the digital outputs of a PC to a Cambridge Audio DacMagic.
It was superior to a giveaway optical link, producing much clearer images. At the other end of the spectrum, the excellent jitter rejection of our dCS DAC made differences between this and other optical and electrical connections much less obvious.
Between a midrange CD player and DAC it was just slightly less successful than a good electrical link.
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Sponsored: Get amazing applications delivered to the desktop
This is a sponsored article in association with MicrosoftThe line between your desktop and the internet has been blurring for some time.
Online services such as the Windows Live suite do a good job of delivering services desktop packages used to perform, and even the venerable Microsoft Office comes in a web-based version.
But it hasn't been a one-way street, because the best online applications can burst out of the browser and deliver the best of the web to your desktop.
Tesco's new Virtual DVD, or vDVD, is a great example of an out-of-browser experience. When you buy certain DVDs in Tesco you can download the virtual DVD, which enables you to watch the movie on your PC or Mac together with a selection of exclusive online extras and goodies such as ringtones and games. It's great for anyone whose laptop doesn't have a DVD drive, or who likes a backup of their purchases, and the whole thing is written in Silverlight.
If you're thinking "isn't that a browser plugin?" you're right. The same technology that web designers can use to light up their sites can also deliver Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs for short, and they can run just as happily on the desktop as they do in the browser.
RIAs could be media players, such as Thirteen23's TED Video Browser, or they could be fully-fledged software packages such as the Sobees Twitter client.
DESKTOP POWER: Silverlight is great for bringing web-based services to the desktop, as Sobees does here with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks
Like many RIAs, the Sobees software runs in the browser but becomes a desktop application when you right-click and choose the "Install on this computer" option. It's one of several social networking applications that use the flexibility of Silverlight to deliver out-of-browser applications: there's also an excellent Facebook client, and the popular Seesmic Desktop 2 for Twitter can handle Twitter, Facebook and Buzz simultaneously. You can even expand it with plugins.
It's not just social networking, though. Thumba is a free image editor that provides a range of brushes, adjustments and effects to make every picture perfect, while eBay's Simple Lister makes selling your stuff on the auction site even easier. It enables you to list your item by finding similar ones from other sellers, provides sensible pricing advice on the items you're selling, and even enables you to crop, resize and edit your photos to show your items in the best possible light. Whether you're a Power Seller or just an occasional auctioneer, if you use the global eBay.com site it's a handy tool to have.
SELL MORE: The eBay Simple Lister, currently in beta, is a handy tool for auctioneers: it speeds up the listing process and helps you show your stuff to its best advantage
Another good example of what's possible is the RedCritter App Gallery, which uses Silverlight to deliver a range of applications or "apps" for Microsoft Outlook.
There are apps that integrate online services such as Bing Maps, Twitter and Office Docs, and the whole thing is free for individual use. It's a great example of the way in which Silverlight can blur the line between online services and desktop software, and how a connected desktop can make everyday tasks easier.
IMAGE EDITING: The excellent Thumba image editor works in your browser or runs as a stand-alone desktop application, and it's powerful stuff
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Sponsored: Get instant answers and find needles in haystacks
This is a sponsored article in association with MicrosoftOnline information tends to be pretty linear: "search for this", "show me that", "find me a picture of a tiger stuck up a tree eating a clown" and so on.
But what happens when you don't know what it is you're looking for, or if you can't express what you want in simple search criteria, or when you want to identify and explore the links between all kinds of different things?
Wouldn't it be great if you could amble down avenues of information to see what catches your eye, or chuck all of your data in a bag and shake it until something interesting or exciting falls out? That's what Pivot promises.
Pivot comes from Microsoft's Live Labs, and it's a whole new way of organising information. Part web browser, part image organiser, part search engine and part super-powered search system from the Planet Wow, it enables you to sift through data in all kinds of interesting ways. Instead of drowning in data, you'll be happily swimming in it.
The idea behind Pivot is collections, which organise huge groups of related items. Those items could be products, statistics about World Cup matches, Facebook friends, accident statistics, Top Trumps, Wikipedia articles, an online shop's product range, your web history, video files… anything at all, provided they have some kind of relationship to one another.
With Pivot you can then zoom in on the smallest detail, or zoom out and start reorganising collections according to specific criteria.
NARROW DOWN: Pivot takes you from big picture to specific details in the blink of an eye. Here we've refined entertainment news down to blog posts about Massive Attack in seconds
Remember the holographic screens in Minority Report? Pivot is as sci-fi and as eye-popping as that. Mere words don't do it justice: to see Pivot in all its glory we'd recommend you watch the video of the Pivot presentation Microsoft's Gary Flake gave earlier this year. If you listen very carefully you'll hear minds blowing in the background.
The difference between Minority Report and Pivot is that you can use Pivot right now, because our kit is finally powerful enough to pull it off. It's built on Microsoft's Deep Zoom technology, which delivers super-speedy visual displays - so fast that Pivot can move in and out of 2.3 million Wikipedia articles instantly - and which comes as part of the free Silverlight plugin.
EASY ANALYSIS: If you've ever thought "too much stuff!" you've found a job for Pivot. Here it's finding the perfect car for our very demanding criteria
Collections are written in a flavour of XML called Collection XML, and Microsoft has created several tools you can use to build your own Pivot collections. Because Pivot works in Silverlight, you can then embed your collections in your own web pages.
You'll be surprised just how useful it is, and how many different kinds of data you can analyse with it - but more than anything you'll be surprised how fast it is. For a great example of Pivot's speedy answers, check out Hitched.co.uk's superb wedding venue finder.
Depending on who you speak to Pivot could be the future of search, the future of web browsing, the future of data mining or all three. To get your hands on it, make sure you've got Silverlight installed, point your browser the World Cup Pivot and see how easy it is to sort and explore a mountain of football statistics.
QUICK WORK: Pivot can also make business data easily intelligible, as it's doing here with financial information about coffee shops
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Sponsored: Get stutter-free True HD - instantly
This is a sponsored article in association with MicrosoftIf you've ever thought "hang on, it's 2010. Surely someone should have made online video work properly by now?" then we've got good news for you: Microsoft seems to have it sussed.
It's come up with technology that not only banishes the dreaded "buffering…" message that always seems to pop up at the worst possible moment, but also delivers instant-on streaming video that can chuck proper high definition content down your broadband pipe.
The technology is real, it's here, it works and it's called Smooth Streaming. You can see it in action at .net, where it it's been used to deliver an exclusive interview with Stephen Fry, it's all over MSN, where it's used for long-form content such as BBC shark documentaries, and it's used by the world's biggest movie rental service, Netflix, to stream high quality movies.
The secret to Smooth Streaming is a technology called adaptive streaming. With traditional video, feeds are continuous bitrate, one-size-fits-all jobs, and if you're lucky you'll be offered the choice of high quality or low quality.
The problem is that connection speeds fluctuate and suffer from network congestion, so your high quality feed will often choke because it can't get the data to you fast enough. That's where the dreaded buffering message comes from.
SMOOTH STREAMING: Fancy seeing Smooth Streaming in action? Our colleagues at .net magazine used it to show off their exclusive interview with Stephen Fry
Instead of being forced to use the low quality feed, wouldn't it be great if the video automatically adjusted itself?
That's exactly what Smooth Streaming does. It adjusts the bitrate according to the speed of your connection, the amount of network congestion and the power of your PC. If your connection gets clogged, Smooth Streaming simply adjusts the bitrate downwards so your viewing isn't interrupted, and when things improve it wallops the quality back up again.
As a happy side-effect, that also means you don't need to wait for videos to start: Smooth Streaming kicks off at a relatively low bitrate so there's no waiting time, and then it boosts the quality to take full advantage of your broadband.
When we say "take full advantage" we mean it: if you've got a decent connection, Smooth Streaming will happily throw genuine 1080p high definition video to your computer. It can cope with big events and big demand, too: NBC used it to stream the 2008 Olympics, delivering live streaming and on-demand streaming in huge quantities: 70 million streams, serving some 600 million minutes of video.
NFL Sunday Night Football uses it to deliver a truly amazing experience encompassing HD video, a choice of five simultaneous camera views, instant replay and slow motion, live chat, real-time statistics and a free horse. We're lying about the horse.
IMMERSIVE: Smooth Streaming can be combined with multiple camera angles to deliver a truly immersive online experience - one where you're the director
So what's the catch? There isn't one. You don't need specialist hardware or software to use Smooth Streaming. You just need a PC or Mac with a decent web browser and the free Silverlight plugin.
If you're a website owner, you don't need an enormous investment either: if you're running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), it's just a matter of installing the free IIS Media Services and Silverlight extension.
If you'd like to find out more and see a demo showing how Smooth Streaming constantly tweaks video for the best possible quality, or if you'd just like to see a cartoon featuring an enormous bunny, check out the demo at IIS.net.
RUN, RABBIT: Microsoft's IIS site offers a demo with a difference: a genuinely funny cartoon that also delivers real-time data on your video stream
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Exclusive: Microsoft to tweak Windows Phone 7 before launch
Microsoft has told TechRadar that it will be adding 'polish' to Windows Phone 7 before launch - meaning some annoying niggles could be gone.Early previews of the operating system highlighted niggles in the system, such as long words not fully appearing on lists.
Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Microsoft, told us that this is the sort of thing Microsoft is keen to remove before launch to avoid criticism:
"There is a slight amount of polish that we'll do throughout the system between now and launch, although it's largely complete.
No new features
"From a feature standpoint there won't be anything new, so we're now at the point where we're trying to tighten up and polish.
"There is a design aesthetic we chose, but in cases like this (where lists don't show the rest of word), there is some polishing thing to be done before launch, and those are the type of things that may change."
Our hands on with the new build of Windows Phone 7 yielded a number of reasons to be more positive about the impending launch than previous Windows Mobile builds, and eradicating little problems like this will improve the appearance of the new platform in the eyes of the consumers.
Now, what about copy and paste...?
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Review: EVGA Superclocked GTX 460 768MB
The only real hope for the 768MB versions of Nvidia's latest card, the GTX 460, lies in these pre-overclocked, such as EVGA's Superclocked and Asus' GTX 460 768MB TOP.The 1GB version of the GTX 460 has been garnering impressive performance figures across the board and despite the fact its more expensive than the 768MB cards, that performance totally justifies the extra £20 you're paying.
Both the GTX 460s have the same clockspeeds, but the memory bus, cache size and ROPs count are different. They're both working on the same new GF104 GPU, based on the same Fermi technology that's in the GF100 GPU running Nvidia's GTX 480.
It's a more streamlined chip, and we've written a more detailed look at the GTX 460's chip architecture before.
These overclocked cards though hope to bridge the performance gap between the 768MB and full-fat 1GB versions.
Clockspeeds have been upped across the card along with the reassurance a long warranty covering that factory overclock gives you.
The out of the box performance of the Superclocked card is impressive, easily keeping pace with - and in Just Cause 2 beating - the 1GB GTX 460. The only issue is that card can be pushed even further past what the 768MB card can do at its limit.
With a simple overclock the 1GB card can be pushed to the sort of speeds the GTX 470 can achieve.
DirectX 11 Performance (2560x1600)
DirectX 11 Performance
DirectX 10 Performance
The first thing you notice about EVGA's iteration of the overclocked, sorry, Superclocked GTX 460, is the fact it's gone for pretty high clockspeeds out of the box.
This isn't even EVGA's top-end overclocked card – it reserves the Super-Superclocked and For The Win monikers for those beasties.
But out of the box you've already almost hit a full 100MHz overclock on the core speed and 200MHz on the memory side. That's a fair way over and above what Asus has gone with on its more pedestrian TOP edition.
It's worked out for EVGA, though, because this Superclocked card actually performs almost as well as the stock-clocked 1GB card. The more memory-heavy card though obviously does a better job at the more demanding tasks at the high-end.
Unfortunately, since it's essentially simply a hand-picked reference card that has proven overclocking capabilities, it's got the standard reference cooler sitting atop it.
Now, that reference cooler isn't as bad as we'd heard, and it kept things running nice and cool even under heavy load. That said, once we increased the overclock, we did have to also increase the fan speed to compensate, driving up the noise levels.
That was something we didn't have to do with Asus' TOP edition of the GTX 460.
It was also a little more flaky, though still managed, for the most part, the same high overclock that we hit on the Asus card. We could still hit 850MHz on the core, though occasionally performance figures would drop below what we had on the original settings.
Though these were only fairly rare anomalies, it was still a little concerning. However, each GPU is different and EVGA does only guarantee its own overclock.
But that guarantee is definitely worth mentioning, too. EVGA has a standard two-year warranty, which will cover the factory overclock, but if you register your card with them you'll then get a further eight years of warranty.
That's a ten-year warranty total with this card, and that's nothing to sniff at.
Unfortunately, though, with only £5 difference between this Superclocked card and the MSRP of the 1GB version of the GTX 460, it still makes little sense to opt for even the overclocked version of the memory-light card over the 1GB edition.
We liked:
The ten-year warranty is incredible and it's obvious EVGA is really trying to cater for its customers' needs.The factory overclock is impressive, especially in the context of the limited overclock on the Asus TOP.
We disliked:
The pricing between the 1GB, 768MB and overclocked cards is still a bit of a mystery to us. The 1GB card is only marginally more expensive and is definitely the superior card.Final word:
Despite the impressive factory overclock and incredible warranty offer, the Superclocked GTX 460 from EVGA just cannot stand up against the power and pricing of the GTX 460 1GB cards.Related Links
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Review: QED Profile Optical cable
The QED Profile cables are pretty much a budget range from QED, aimed just as much at the home cinema market as the full-on audiophile.All the same, we're inclined to give it some time, if only because QED has a good track record with budget audio links.
It's an unpretentious item, thin and very flexible, with small plastic-bodied connectors that give a snug fit to equipment.
Described by QED as 'medical grade' quality, it's possible to see the care with which the internal fibres have been prepared, while the company has achieved a good standard of finish on the cable ends – which bodes well.
It was interesting to compare this lead, not only with other optical examples, but also with two electrical connections, the van den Hul The Wave and the Atlas Mavros.
Performance
Under the most interference-prone conditions (PC to a budget DAC), we felt this was more successful than the (much dearer!) electrical links, proving the value of optical connection.
It didn't quite give the detail of the Chord Company Optichord, we felt, but it came very close. In our midrange set up it slightly lost out all round, its sound showing some lack of focus and precision compared to the others.
But once again, in a high-end context, it was only marginally less revealing than the others. And, of course, a simple, low-cost link like this is absolutely all one needs for connections to anything that is recording, rather than replaying, audio, where jitter is pretty much irrelevant (within sensible limits) and data integrity is all that matters.
We tried very hard to persuade ourselves that there was any difference between this and the expensive Mavros when feeding a digital recorder, but really... there isn't!
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Review: Tsakiridis Devices Alexander/Artemis
New to us in the UK it may be, but Tsakiridis Devices is a brand with over two decades of history. A family-run outfit from Greece, it makes valve-based audio with the emphasis very much on affordability. Many of the basic themes will be familiar to valve aficionados, including the use of simple circuits with little or no feedback, thus ensuring that the valves' character is unchecked, for better or worse.
The Artemis power amp comes with a choice of EL34 or KT88 output valves fitted. Small-signal amplification and drive for the output devices are provided by a pair of 12AT7 valves at the front and the simplicity of the circuit is obvious when one looks inside the case.
Of the two large transformers, one is for mains, one for output. Two top-mounted toggle switches give options for more or less feedback and for triode or 'Ultralinear' (tapped primary) operation.
The Alexander preamp is built into a large case, mostly made of polished stainless steel (as is the Artemis), with a dark plastic front panel. Again, there's plenty of fresh air inside, the audio circuitry requiring just one valve (E88CC) per channel and a handful of passive components.
Five inputs are provided, four on phono connectors and one on XLR, but this last is not in any meaningful sense balanced as one side of the XLR is connected to ground: the same is true of the XLR output.
The volume control is motorised for remote controllability and input switching is by relays.
It's clear that these amps are much more highly characterised than any others in the group and as such it's no surprise that they divided opinion among our listeners.
At best, they sound lifelike and energetic, with good midrange tonality extending up to a clear and sparkling treble. That suits them well to voices and music for smaller ensembles and indeed they play such stuff very convincingly and with a real sense of verve and enjoyment.
What they don't do quite so well is bass, be it transient (percussion, plucked bass) or sustained (heavy orchestral brass). It's not so much that the level is curtailed, but there's rather limited impact and not nearly as much precision as we heard from some others in the group.
It all seems rather splashy and approximate, and rhythm – when it depends mostly on the bass, which of course it often does – feels rather sluggish.
Detail is something of a mixed bag, too. Ultimately it is limited, but there's a saving grace in that such detail as comes through is cleanly presented so the lack is not as keenly felt as it might be. All the same, side-by-side comparison soon enough shows that some of the resolution of, say, the Cyrus and Rotel combinations is missing and familiar recordings seem to lack the occasional little touch here and there.
In fact, we felt that ultimately the variations in performance with dynamic level are the biggest failing of these amps. Quiet music is lovely, but we can't recommend £2,900- worth of hi-fi just for that!
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Forthcoming BlackBerry Curve 9300 detailed on video
The BlackBerry Curve 9300 has been caught out and about in the wild, and this time heavily detailed on video.Those of you looking at the high end BlackBerry smartphones but grimacing at the price tag will rejoice, as this handset is much more suited to the lighter pocket.
The Curve 9300 has been seen in the wild a few times in pictures and the odd fuzzy video, but now Vietnamese site Mainguyen (you know the one) has bagged a unit and shoved it in front of a camera for seven minutes.
Change your specs
We're seeing most of the specs we've already heard about confirmed - 3.2MP camera, optical trackpad, probable QVGA screen... yes, we know, not much to get excited about.
It's basically a bog-standard BlackBerry that adds in 3G for a spot of nicer web browsing, but it will join the rest of the family on the older BB OS 5.0.
At least we have a probable UK release date - IntoMobile has published a document from Vodafone UK, showing that the 9300 Curve will likely be coming in Q3.
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Review: Rotel RC-1580/RB-1582
Like NAD, Rotel has for many years steered a careful course somewhere between the vast multi-nationals (Sony, Yamaha) and the small specialists, as well as managing to maintain a profile associated with distinctive products of good performance and value. The RC-1580 and RB-1582 amps are actually among the more expensive we've seen from the company and it's no surprise to find out that they are the current stereo range-toppers.
In terms of basic specification they are well equipped, with the RC1580 preamp offering eight line inputs, plus phono (both flavours), while the RB1582 is a particularly high-powered beast. But does one actually need that much power for domestic audio?
Obviously the answer entirely depends on the speakers, the space to fill with sound and the target loudness. A few spare watts never hurt and the high current delivery, which is also on offer, is often handy for controlling awkward speakers, even at lower levels.
You'll notice that the preamp thoughtfully includes separate source selection for listening and recording. In order to provide this flexibility, Rotel has had to compromise slightly on the signal switching arrangements, which use relays for listening and an electronic switch for recording.
The volume control is a motorised mechanical one, and the (switchable) tone and balance controls also use mechanical parts.
The power amp features a particularly large mains transformer, with separate secondary windings for each channel, plus huge supply smoothing capacitors grounded via a large copper plate.
Even when playing at quite modest levels (the same as all the others in the blind test, decided empirically but well within the envelope of the least powerful here), these amps still manage to put out a powerful and convincing performance.
By unanimous acclamation, they rocked harder than any others here and overall achieved the most convincing musical results.
The nearest thing to a serious criticism was the mention of slight stridency on piano and other tuned percussive sounds. Take rhythm, for instance. Right across the board, the sound was felt to have not just excellent drive but also great rhythmic solidity and consistency – it never waivers whatever happens to the musical texture.
In part, this is due to the very solid, but also very well-tuned, bass, but the taut midrange clearly also plays a role. Treble is clean and detailed, with very nice decay into ambience, while the detail is just delightful, clear and precise. You want more? Dynamics, maybe?
They're generous and beautifully judged, on both the small and the large scale – the big swells across a whole orchestra and the little inflections in an individual voice or instrument.
Oh, and though it couldn't be part of the main listening as several amps didn't have one, the phono stage is also something of a gem.
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PC market grows by 21 per cent
The PC market has grown by 21 per cent in Europe and the Middle East during the second quarter of 2010, with sales of both laptops and desktops recorded by IDC's latest figures. IDC suggests that the growth for the PC market has been solid – in line or slightly ahead or predictions – with businesses beginning to upgrade and consumers feeling confident in replacing their old systems.
"While European economies remained challenged by a potential new wave of crisis across the eurozone…the PC market continued to deliver a robust performance in Western Europe," said Eszter Morvay, Research Manager for IDC's EMEA Personal Computing.
Cycle beginning again
"Mainstream notebook renewals continued to be the key engine of growth for the second consecutive quarter, while demand for mini notebooks slowed further, with volumes contracting in Western Europe," added Morvay.
"With the renewal of a large notebook installed base having been put on hold for the past 12 months, many users are now looking at replacing their main platform.
"This latest renewal cycle of primary PCs is also stimulating a revival of consumer desktop demand, supported by the attractive price/performance ratio of standard desktops as well as new appealing all-in-one systems."
IDC puts the growth in desktops down to businesses beginning a new purchase cycle for businesses and the rise of sales of all-in-one PCs.
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Seagate GoFlex Home network storage unveiled
Seagate has unveiled its GoFlex Home network attached storage – making it easy to share your files throughout your home without a complicated set up.The Seagate GoFlex Home NAS is compatible with Apple Time Machine as well as Windows and MacOSX and can wirelessly stream to DLNA compatible devices.
"When this easy-to-use device is connected to a wireless router, an entire household can centrally store, easily access and continuously back up files wirelessly from both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems on the home network," explains Seagate.
Two versions
The GoFlex home storage is available in 1TB and 2TB versions, and the drive can be upgraded by simply unplugging the existing HDD and plugging in a new GoFlex Desk hard drive.
"With broadband and home networks reaching higher levels of penetration and operating at higher speeds, consumers are increasingly downloading and streaming content into their home and wanting to access that content from anywhere," said Darcy Clarkson, Seagate vice president of Retail Sales and Marketing.
"The GoFlex Home system makes it easy for families wanting to quickly and effortlessly backup, enjoy, and share their favourite home movies music or photos from any room in the house.
"We spent a lot of time focusing on simplicity with this product and believe people will find it very intuitive to set-up and get started.
"With the GoFlex Home system, now home networking is within reach for today's digital households."
The GoFlex network storage system is on sale now with a suggested retail price of £129.99 for 1TB and £189.99 for 2TB.
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In Depth: 10 best Linux distros for 2010
Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other. This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog the each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.
This is why the answer to the question, of which distribution is best for you, changes with the tides, and why we're keen to keep on top of distribution developments. What follows is our recommendations for this year, split by typical users. Try them yourself. They're all free.
1. The best distro for beginners: Ubuntu 10.04
There can be few people who haven't heard of Ubuntu. It's a word that's become synonymous with Linux, raising both praise and chagrin from the Linux community in equal measure. But outside the community squabbling, there's no doubt that this is a distribution to be reckoned with. Especially if you're a beginner.
Ubuntu is the antidote to a world of uncertainty. For the vast majority of installations, it will just work. You won't have to worry about hardware incompatibility, software installation and configuration. Stick the disc in the drive, answer a few easy questions, and you'll find yourself looking at the beautiful new design of version 10.04, the so-called Lucid Lynx.
Unlike most other distributions, Ubuntu developers know how to make a desktop look good. The aurora-like swathes of purple, orange and black may have taken their inspiration from Cupertino, but they easily beat the tedious dull-brown of previous versions.
What's not so great, for seasoned users, is that the window control buttons, such as close, minimise and maximise, are now on the top-left border. But new users, especially those used to OS X, won't find this a problem, and neither did we after a couple of days to acclimatise.
Ubuntu is still ahead of the game, and for new users it's unbeatable. It offers the best looking default desktop, an unparalleled software repository, easy installation of proprietary software like Flash and Nvidia drivers, and incorporates one of the largest and most accessible communities on the internet. It's still a winner.
UBUNTU: Easy installation, a massive package repository and a dedicated user community help keep Ubuntu a great choice for newcomers
Also consider: Mandriva 2010.1
2. The best distro for experts: Fedora 13
The Fedora distribution takes a trail-blazing, no compromise, approach to free software. It offers many of the same advantages of Ubuntu like excellent hardware support, a refined desktop and great package choice, with some of the core-philosophy ideals that have helped make Linux such as a success.
As a result, it's not an ideal distribution if you're looking for proprietary and closed software. MP3 codecs, Adobe Flash and Nvidia drivers are not easy to install, and get even less easier with each new release. Instead, you'll want to stick with the open source alternatives provided by Fedora.
Which isn't such a bad thing. The new version includes the fantastic, hardware accelerated, and open source, Nouveau Nvidia driver, while the new photo manager, Shotwell, is an interesting alternative to the potentially patent crippled F-Spot.
Version 13 is the latest Fedora release to tackle the growing popularity of Ubuntu, and as a result, it's one of best looking and usable distributions around, regardless of your politics. But it's also a distribution you can easily make your own.
Creating a development environment is easy, for example, and the locations used by shared libraries, configuration files and kernel headers strictly adhere to long established standards. This means that with Fedora 13 you get the best of both worlds. A good looking, usable desktop straight from installation CD, and a completely customisable, standard and stable environment from which you can build your perfect distribution.
FEDORA: The result of a fusion between a noble cause and an uncompromisingly corporate business plan
Also consider: Slackware
3. The best distro for Windows Migrants: PCLinuxOS
This is the first distribution we've looked at to use the KDE desktop environment by default. Although you can grab versions for all the other major desktop environments, we consider KDE to be the best match for Windows power-users. This is because it's an environment who's slate grey and blue surface belies an underworld of configuration options, complexity and customisation on the interior.
The 4th generation of KDE has experienced stability problems, but the current 4.4 cycle has finally been able to throw off the puppy-fat pain of earlier versions.
And thanks to the quarterly ISO update cycle of PCLinuxOS, it has become an excellent choice for users who want to stay ahead in the KDE features and stability game. The latest, for example, includes significant updates to the K3b Blu-Ray, CD and DVD burner, the Digikam photo management tool, the Choqok social networking tool and the Amarok media player, all wrapped around the very latest KDE release.
Combine this with the bundled Flash player, proprietary drivers and a visually stunning desktop, and you have a great choice for users who have spent the last couple of years getting the most from the Windows File Manager, the Registry Editor and the Aero effects of the Windows 7 desktop.
PCLINUXOS: One of the few distributions to dramatically change the look of the default KDE desktop
Also consider: Mepis 8.5
4. The best distro for older Hardware: Puppy Linux 5.0
Linux's great strength is its flexibility. It runs on everything from mobile phones to space ships. As a result, it's extremely good at scaling, and makes a good choice for older hardware. Unlike some other operating systems, you won't have to resort to running older versions either. There are plenty of distributions that will take the latest software, the latest kernel and the latest drivers, and build them into a distribution tailored for older bits of kit.
The best we've found is Puppy. It's a diminutive, yet fully functional, operating system that runs from your system's memory for extra speed. Just burn the 128MB ISO to a CD and boot. What's most impressive about Puppy is that while it may be only be running from RAM, it still writes your changes back to the spare space on your CD or DVD boot media, getting the most from both possible worlds.
But the best thing about version 5 is that it now uses the same package repository as Ubuntu. This gives you immediate access to thousands of the most popular packages and means that, while your installation may start small, it's likely to grow into the perfect fit for whatever hardware combination you're using.
PUPPY: Pull out that old machine from the loft, Puppy Linux will turn it into a fully fledged 2010 Linux powehouse
Also consider: Slitaz
5. The best distro for your desktop: Linux Mint 9
Linux Mint, with its beautiful imagery, simple aesthetic, and 'go-do' attitude, gets our vote in a competitive field for the best Linux distribution for everyday desktop use. It may be based on Ubuntu, but it isn't afraid of challenging people expectations by combining the best pre-built tools and desktop environments with its own unique take on how a desktop should feel.
The default Gnome version is the perfect example. Gnome's top-bar is gone, leaving the lower status window as the only screen ornamentation. The launch menu gets the same treatment, replacing Gnome's trio of 'Applications', 'Places' and 'Administration' with the singular Mint Menu.
The new version is a solid upgrade, adding right-click support and transparency. If you use a lot of applications, this is a massive improvement over Gnome's default, and is easier to configure and modify. Alongside Ubuntu's prodigious packages, Mint includes quite a few of it own.
These are available through a new software manager that's better than Ubuntu's, thanks to the sporadic reviews and screenshots. You can also enable desktop effects, Compiz, and other bits of eye candy easily through a new desktop setting panel embedded within a custom Control Center application that's growing with each release. The end result is a distribution that stands on the shoulders of giants to become one the best contenders for your desktop.
MINT: Blows a breath of fresh air across a world dominated by brown, blue and purple
Also consider: Crunchbang
6. The best distro for netbooks: Ubuntu UNR 10.04
Great hardware compatibility, a refined GUI and a redesigned launch menu help make UNR our number one choice for netbooks
While Apple is slowly pulling the carpet out from underneath the netbook market, there's still great demand, and some great bargains to be had, for these diminutive PCs.
And despite a terrible start with distributions like Linpus and Xandros, Canonical's UNR really does hit the mark. It's quick, boots in around 20 seconds, and provided your hardware is listed as compatible, you get great battery life with suspend/resume and faultless wireless for the vast majority of Atom-based netbooks.
Canonical has also spent a great deal of effort redesigning the desktop. The borderless window managers lets you switch between Ubuntu applications that can make maximum use of the available screen resolution, and the Clutter-based launch menu gives you painless access to whatever you've got installed.
The new Epiphany messenger system also makes good sense on a netbook, rolling email, instant messaging, status updates and social networking into a single, invisible application.
It's also the platform that makes best use of Ubuntu's new on-scren notification system, informing you of low battery levels, new Tweets and incoming email in a pop-up, configurable window. All of which helps to make UNR feel far more functional and together than its closest competitor.
Also consider: MeeGo 1.0
7. The best distro for sys admins: Debian 5.0
Debian has become the paternal grandfather of the Linux new wave. Ubuntu, originally based on Debian, has inherited many of its strengths, including its package format, its breadth of packages, configuration files and locations.
And as a result, so has Ubuntu's own derivatives, including Mint, Crunchbang and gOS. This gives Debian a great advantage. It's already going to feel familiar to millions of people who have never used it. And for that reason, it's the perfect choice for system administrators who have used one of its derivatives.
But there's another, more important, reason. Major version Debian releases are generally years apart, and the software that makes the final cut has been tested to the point of destruction. The current version, Debian 5, is due for replacement later this summer, when version 6.0 should arrive.
It will build on what is already the perfect platform for your own tools, utilities and solutions, and enable you to install almost anything you need through the package manager. A task that Fedora can't quite compete with. Debian might not have the commercial backing of Fedora, but it's still enviably secure, bundling SELinux, the latest X server and desktops, and a new found ability to run as a Live CD, which is perfect for ad-hoc troubleshooting.
DEBIAN: Despite being part-named after the founder's girlfriend, Debian has matured into a stable, sensible and sober distribution for discerning Linux users
Also consider: Arch Linux
8. The best distro for the office: OpenSUSE 11.3
This is only the second distribution in our list to use the KDE desktop by default. The other is PCLinuxOS, which we've recommended for Windows migrants, and OpenSuse is chosen for a similar reason: the desktop is likely to feel most familiar in an office environment.
But where PCLinuxOS is a relatively small project with very little support, OpenSuse is the last great hope of Novell, the once dominant network-layer provider. As such, not only is it well supported at the desktop level, but also in the world of enterprise computing, where Novell competes with Red Hat Linux for server space.
This means that if your office systems are critical to your success, OpenSuse has both the pedigree and the functionality you'll need. It also helps that Novell makes a significant contribution to the OpenOffice.org suite of applications, which is likely to be the main application suite running in an office, alongside its own (paid-for) Microsoft Exchange interface and a close affiliation with Microsoft itself.
OpenSUSE 11.3 bundles the latest version of KDE, as well as Mono. This is the Microsoft .Net compatibility library that has recently been removed from both Fedora and Ubuntu, and its inclusion might be important if you're working in a cross-platform environment, and you need greater compatibility with Microsoft's products. Which is exactly what Novell wants you to think.
OPENSUSE: Thanks to strong links with Microsoft, OpenSUSE is a great option if your office needs to work with Office
Also consider: gOS
9. The best distro for Servers: CentOS 5.5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is almost untouchable in the business market. It's one of the most profitable and well supported areas of the Linux ecosystem, and as you might expect, it's expensive. It's only available if you're willing to pay for the service, support and upgrades, at prices that put it out of reach of cash-strapped upstarts.
But RHEL is still open source, and while the binary packages might not be available, the source code for those packages has to be. Which is where CentOS comes in. It takes the source code and rebuilds RHEL in its own image, feature for feature, for each release. It gets close enough to be almost 100% compatible with third-party RHEL packages, and is the best choice for many online projects that can't stretch to a supported RHEL contract.
Version 5.5 was released in May, less than two months after the equivalent RHEL release. You get the same packages, the same fixes, the same Gnome desktop and applications. The only thing missing is support, but the CentOS community is very active, and always more than happy to help, making CentOS the only option for real-world critical performance at almost no cost.
GOS: The only real difference between CentOS and RHEL is the logo and desktop themes
Also consider: PC-BSD (we know this isn't strictly Linux, but it's a brilliant BSD distribution)
10. The best distro for multimedia: Ubuntu Studio
Linux has thousands of creative software titles, but the average distribution isn't always the best platform to use them. This is especially true of music software, which needs a specially configured kernel and a specific configuration of audio drivers to work at its best. Adjusting your everyday distribution to accommodate those changes isn't easy, which is why there are plenty of distributions that attempt to do the job for you.
The best is Ubuntu Studio. It's designed for music and audio, but you can install anything from the standard Ubuntu repositories. Thanks to the realtime kernel, audio latency is low, and you shouldn't have any problems running resource heavy applications like The Gimp loading a large image.
You won't have to hunt around for the best software either, as the developers have chosen the cream of creative applications to install by default, including audio, video and graphics editors and a customised desktop.
The latest version, for example, is a 1.7GB DVD image, rather than the CD size of Ubuntu, and installation from this can save you a lot of time. But the best thing about this distribution is that it includes a working 'Jack' configuration, a low-latency audio layer that can transform your Linux desktop into a virtual recording studio. A task that isn't very straightforward without a little help.
UBUNTU STUDIO: Forget the complexity of building a working music studio yourself. Just run Ubuntu Studio and start recording
Also consider: PureDyne
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ARM seals new deal with Taiwanese chip maker
ARM has signed a deal with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp to produce next generation 20 and 28nm chips. John Heinlein, vice president of marketing for British company ARM, announced the deal on his blog, believing that the deal with TSMC will make devices smaller and sleeker and improve battery life.
"ARM and TSMC announced a major new collaboration to help drive this kind of innovation forward for many years to come," wrote Heinlein.
Key challenges
"One of the key challenges in delivering advanced devices is achieving the performance gains we have come to expect while also achieving battery life improvements and making devices smaller and sleeker," he continued
"This collaboration is designed to help our partners achieve exactly that.
"…this agreement establishes a long term relationship between TSMC and ARM centered on the development of ARM Physical IP for TSMC's most advanced 28nm and 20nm processes, products like memory compilers and standard cell libraries that our partners use to assemble their chips."
Shaping innovation
Heinlein states that the deal is vital to continue the kinds of innovation that have shaped the first decade of this millennium.
"My latest smartphone is smaller than ever and yet boasts a high resolution still and video camera," says Heinlein.
"Also, I'm shifting more and more of my work to an ultra-thin tablet that's smaller and lighter than a full-size notebook.
"But as everyone knows, it's getting tougher and tougher to deliver that kind of innovation.
"That is exactly why today's announcement between ARM and TSMC is so important to the future of mobile and other consumer devices."
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Review: Asus Republic of Gamers Rampage III Gene
If, in some perverted alternate reality, Watty Piper had been more interested in PCs than trains, ASUS' latest piece of Republic of Gamers rolling stock, the Rampage III Gene would be the The Little Board That Could. The Rampage III Gene has more features per square inch of PCB than almost any other we can think of, nearly matching its stablemate, the Rampage III Extreme, for extras, put packing it into a micro-ATX format.
Of course, there's an argument that says if you're the kind of person who wants to cram a high end Core i7 CPU into a small form factor case suitable for LAN gaming, and then try to overclock the hell out of it, then your reality must be slightly skewed anyway.
Stick a Core i7 980X in – and we did – and you have six core/16 thread performance in a shoe box case. Madness.
If that's your thing, though, you're well catered for. The Rampage III Gene goes up against the similarly small and well-specced likes of MSI's X58M and DFI's LANParty JR X58-T3H6.
To differentiate itself, it comes armed with USB 3.0, 6Gbps SATA and some clever on-board proprietary technology for maximising the Turbo features of a Core i7 chip.
The problem is that it's also the most expensive of the bunch. MSI's X58M can be had for less than half the price, so here's the question: is the Rampage III Gene twice as good?
The basic specs set the Rampage III Gene off to a good start. It's as good as it gets with an X58 chipset that supports triple-channel memory and both Crossfire and SLI multi-GPU set-ups.
It also looks good, with contrasting red and black porcupine heatsinks on a red PCB.
What's going to justify the cost, though, is the quality of the extra intelligence added in by Asus.
CPU Level Up and TurboV EVO work together to add performance on demand that goes over and above Intel's own Turbo technology built into the Core i7, while an 'Energy Processing Unit', or EPU, works to maintain efficiency and lower the power draw.
All of them are fully customisable to a frightening degree, but can also be set to Auto to let the motherboard decide on the optimal settings by monitoring a range of on-board sensors in realtime.
As well as a comprehensive BIOS, there's also a handy Windows app that opens all of the settings on the desktop, although changing some will require a reboot anyway.
Round the back of the Rampage III Gene there's an impressive nine USB ports. Two of them, coloured blue, are compatible with 4.8Gbps USB 3.0. One of the remaining seven can be used for RoG Connect – a unique feature that enables you to connect a laptop to the port and change BIOS settings from a different PC.
It's a killer feature if you're planning on spending a weekend with the Rampage III Gene and a flask of liquid nitrogen, but unlikely to be used by most.
What you are going to appreciate, though, is the CMOS Clear button that sticks out of the rear panel and the power and reset buttons mounted on the motherboard itself. They're exceptionally convenient if you're tweaking with the case off.
Perhaps the most universally beneficial bonus is the SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio processor that comes with THX Studio Pro certification for surround sound.
What do the benchmarks show? Well, nothing bad, and given the size of the Rampage III Gene, that's a good start.
It keeps up with a full size X58 motherboard, in the shape of Asus' bargainous P6X58D-E, slightly slower in some places and slightly quicker in others. What's important is that these are only base speeds. Overclocked, it performed even better.
HD Video Encoding Performance
3D Rendering Performance
Motherboard Gaming Performance (Low graphics, high physics)
If you made it through the rather breathless specs section without flinching, then you'll be keen to know exactly what this motherboard is like to actually use. Let's start off with the problems.
First of all, there's really little point in the dual graphics support. One double width GPU renders all of the other expansion slots more or less unusable, and no single slot card suitable for a high end system like this springs to mind as obvious candidates for replacement.
Then there's those overclocking tools. They're incredibly detailed, but there's no documentation supplied to help you use them, or inline help files to explain what all the settings do.
That's a problem, because some can conflict and cancel each other out, and you'll only know it after a lengthy set-up and full system restart. The EPU, for example, is a great idea, but enabling that and TurboV EVO overclocking effectively borked both for good.
The automated overclocking came back in at some point, but our test system actually drew 70W less power once the EPU software was uninstalled.
Nothing, however, tops the bizarre horizontal placement of the CMOS battery. It stands upright just beside the memory slots, so it's right in the line of fire when you're fitting, well, everything. It's hinged to avoid damage, but nevertheless is far too easy to snag and twist.
But that's the griping over and done with. Everything else about the Rampage III Gene delivers exactly what it should.
The TurboV EVO didn't push our Core i7 980X to extremes of overclocking, but it did push it a good 100-200MHz further than the on-chip Turbo allowed. And when it comes to overclocking, the ability to tweak just about anything, and remotely from another laptop, is hard to find fault with.
Performance is good, at least on a par with other X58 boards and occassionally better, while overclocking beyond 4GHz was smooth and remarkably trouble free.
But everything comes back to that original point. If you're going to build a system for overclocking, it's unlikely you'll want to do it in a microATX case.
This is a great niche board if you're planning some customised watercooled rig, and we're glad it exists. But as the price suggests, it's really not one for the masses. If you're after a small motherboard, there's a good chance it isn't this.
We liked:
Other than multiple GPUs, there's little you sacrifice for the cut-down size of the microATX Rampage III Gene, and it's as feature packed as its RoG brethren. There's attention to detail with power buttons and reset switches, and it's stable under overclock.We disliked:
The only question about the Rampage III Gene is whether or not you can find a small form factor case with suitable cooling, so you can actually play around with its incredible overclocking abilities. Or even get to grips with them in the first place, given the lack of documentation.Final word:
The biggest problem, though, is the price – it's a niche product with a very well-defined audience.Related Links
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