Netflix Australia to be GST-free, it's no surprise Quickflix ain't happy
The streaming war has intensified, with Netflix Australia announcing that it would not be charging users from Australia and New Zealand GST to use the service, effectively giving it the leg up against competing streaming services.
A spokesperson for the company has commented on the issue, explaining that Netflix is exempt from charging GST, as it’s "not a local entity".
The Netflix Australia spokesperson went on to say that discussions have occurred in both Australia and New Zealand to change the law to allow non-local entities to collect GST, saying that it’s “something to look at in the future”.
As Netflix is exempt from paying GST, we’re hoping to see that reflected in the service’s as-yet unannounced monthly subscription fee.
Netflix’s rivals aren’t happy
Quickflix founder Stephen Langsford is more than peeved about the news, understandably saying that it’s odd that Quickflix has to pay GST and Netflix doesn’t, and that "most Australians would expect Netflix to pay their fair share of tax," though we’d also assume that most Australians would be happier about having to pay less for Netflix.While Presto did not comment on the Netflix matter, a spokesperson for the company instead stated that the company “fully complies with its GST obligations” and that it will keep doing so “for the life of our business.”
A spokesperson for the New Zealand-based internet TV service Lightbox called the news “an example of the lack of a level-playing field,” stating that "Lightbox has been set up as a New Zealand-based company, working under New Zealand rules and paying New Zealand tax and we think other companies should be doing the same," which doesn’t really apply to Netflix, if we’re being honest.
The streaming service Stan did not offer any comments on the matter.
- Which streaming service will win the war? Check out our Netflix vs Presto vs Stan vs Quickflix battle royale.
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Download of the Day: Internet Download Manager
Keeping control of all your downloads is tricky when browsers can get hold of your content in lightning quick time but what if there was something that gave you a boost in speed plus more control over your downloads? Welcome to Internet Download Manager.
Why you need it
Downloading content from websites has almost become too easy since browsers began doing the job for you and Internet Download Manager allows you to wrest back some of that control without losing out on any speed.The small program is at its best when integrated with your favourite browser to take over the task of downloading content and giving you an overall view of any files that have been obtained. Any downloads are then listed in the program's main page and are able to be managed outside the browser, meaning they can be installed when you're ready.
Downloading programs straight from the browser is just a small part of what Internet Download Manage is all about. Anyone that has ever shutdown their browser in the middle of a large download will know the pain of having to try to start it up again and it, nine times out of 10, failing. Internet Download Manager can recover these downloads via its unfinished tab and resume them from where they stopped to save time.
Like other utilities, ISPs often offer more bandwidth for those downloading files between certain times of the day and Internet Download Manager's scheduling function can be set to only grab files at certain times of the day or night to prevent you incurring significant usage bills. It can even be set to power off the computer once it has finished.
Even though it doesn't offer an onboard search feature the fact that it's so lightning quick at getting downloads started is proof in itself that you should give Internet Download Manager a try.
Key features
Works on: Windows 7 and 8.1Price: Free
Neat and tidy: Internet Download Manager keeps all your downloaded files finished or incomplete all in one place to be manager and installed whenever you are ready.
Resume incomplete files: Browsers often don't let you resume big files once you finish your session and this program has a special facility to allow you to resume those files as and when you're ready.
Scheduled downloads: For those that have capped data and need to download at certain times of the day this can be set up easily from within the program.
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Review: Acer Chromebook 15
Introduction and design
Chromebooks thus far have cemented themselves into the small notebook space. Over the last few years, manufacturers have refined their cloud-based offerings and come out with some truly excellent machines, such as the premium 11-inch Samsung Chromebook 2 and 13-inch Toshiba Chromebook 2, one of the first models with a vibrant 1080p screen.Now, we have our hands on something new and yet very familiar with the the world's first 15-inch Chromebook from Acer. Aptly named the Acer Chromebook 15, this machine is not only the largest Chrome OS notebook to ever exist, it's also the very first that's come equipped with Intel's 5th generation processor.
Despite all these changes, the Chromebook 15 still comes at a very affordable $349 ( £249, about AU$458). That's well beneath the usual 500 smackers you would pay for a budget Windows laptops, and frankly, this Acer notebook has more than a few qualities that might make you consider this budget machine over all others.
Design
After so many 13-inch Chromebooks, Acer's latest 15-inch Chrome OS offering looks downright massive. Of course, that means way more plastic, but the Taiwanese computer manufacturer has done a great job at making it feel entirely solid.The laptop's entire plastic exterior is also wrapped in a net-like texture. The entire laptop has been given this finish including the lid, bottom and even the on the back of the screen hinges. So, no matter how you're carrying around the Chromebook 15, you'll have a bit more to grip onto. This woven finish also just feels much warmer than a slab of smooth plastic.
Open up the laptop, and you'll be greeted with a massive, 15.6-inch screen that seemingly just absorbs all light and diffracts it without any reflections or glare. Acer calls this its ComfyView antiglare display, and it's much easier on my eyes. Even with the screen turned off, it resembles something more of a dark satin sheet compared to the mirror like sheen that comes off other notebooks outfitted with with glossy panels.
Just below this extremely nice display, you'll find even more space for activities. The spacious keyboard deck leaves plenty of room for a full-size keyboard without any truncated tilde keys or short shift bars. I would have loved to see a number pad as well, but Acer reserved the space for two large speaker grills that flank the keyboard.
Towards the bottom there's also a large trackpad, which – not unlike the new MacBook – will click in no matter where you press on it. You'll want to be careful about pressing in too deeply around the trackpads two bottom edges, though, as it bends a few millimeters beneath the palm rests.
Specifications and performance
The Acer Chromebook 15 is definitely a laptop that falls into the 15-inch category, weighing in at 4.85 pounds (2,199 g), while measuring 15.08 x 9.65 x 0.95 inches (383 x 245 x 24 mm). The Chrome OS machine is still lighter compared to some of Acer's other 15.6-inch Windows laptop offerings, such as the 5.5-pound (2,494 g) Acer Aspire E5, which also has a larger 15 x 10.1 x 1.2-inch (381 mm x 257 mm x 30 mm) footprint.However, as a 15-inch notebook, it's easily bigger and heavier than any 13-inch machine we've reviewed. For instance, this Acer machine's smaller sibling, the 13-inch Chromebook 13, weighs in at 3.31 pounds (1,501 g) with dimensions measuring 12.9 x 9 x 0.71 inches (327 x 228 x 18 mm). Meanwhile, the 12.6 x 8.4 x 0.76 inch (320 x 213 x 19 mm) Toshiba Chromebook 2 tips the scales at 2.95 pounds (1,338 g).
Here is the Acer Chromebook 15 configuration given to TechRadar for review:
Spec Sheet
- CPU: 1.5GHz Intel Celeron 3205U (dual core, 2MB cache)
- Graphics: Intel HD graphics
- RAM: 4GB DDR3
- Screen: 15.6-inch Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, LED-backlit display
- Storage: 32GB SSD
- Ports: 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0, HDMI, SD card reader, headphone/mic jack
- Connectivity: 802.11ac Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.0
- Camera: 720p HD webcam
- Weight: 4.85 pounds
- Size: 15.08 x 9.65 x 0.95 inches (W x D x H)
Users who want to save an extra buck will also be able to purchase this laptop for $249 (about £168, AU$326) with some major tradeoffs. The lower-end model comes outfitted with only 2GB of RAM and a lower-resolution 1,366 x 768 display. Even if it means forking over an extra hundred clams, these are two downgrades I would suggest steering clear of.
Unfortunately, it seems that those in the United Kingdom have been dinged again. It seems Acer is only offering a model packing 2GB (but at least the FHD screen is still offered) in that region for £249.
Either way, new Acer Chromebook 15 owners will get a few extra perks with their machine: including 100GB of Google Drive storage for a year, a 60-day pass to Google Music All Access and 12 in-air passes for GoGo Flight available until the end of the year.
The Toshiba Chromebook 2 comes at premium of its own with a $329 (about £223, AU$431) price tag. Like the Chromebook 15, this Toshiba laptop comes sporting a 1,920 x 1,080 screen in a more compact and sleeker 13.3-inch frame. It's also not quite as well outfitted, with an older 2.16GHz Intel Celeron processor and only 16GB of storage.
The Acer Chromebook 15's smaller 13-inch sibling is also quite alluring, coming in at only $249 or £219 (about AU$326) with a full HD display plus a 2.1GHz Nvidia Tegra K1 twist for the CPU.
Performance
Intel's last generation of Haswell Celeron processors were able to smoothly power Chromebooks, and you get even more milage out of the new Broadwell parts. Despite loading several tabs full of cat GIFs, the Chromebook 15 never hit a performance snag and it was a an almost perfect multitasking machine.That is until I started running into errant computer crashes. On more than one occasion, the Acer Chromebook 15 came to a hanging stop. Worse yet, a seemingly more serious crash happened in the course of writing this review: the laptop fell into a screen-flashing and audio-looping cycle until I performed a hard reset on my machine.
The crashes were random and have yet to cause a real problem, but it was still an annoyance to have to stop for a few seconds to force restart the computer. As of late, a few of Intel's latest processors have been buggy, including an underperforming Intel Core M chip inside Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, so Broadwell might just be going through some early teething pains.
Absolutely radiant
With such a large screen, the Acer Chromebook 15 is the perfect media streaming machine to share with some couchmates. Aside from when sharing your screen, you rarely get to appreciate how useful more screen real estate is until you have it.There's simply more room to move around windows, view web pages and generally feel less cramped. Plus, with a 15-inch screen you can just sit back and watch Netflix rather than getting right up to your screen as you have to do with a 13-inch or 11-inch machine.
The full HD resolution also makes the viewing experience much sharper from the app icons to text on websites. The best part of the display, though, is thanks to Acer picking out a vibrant IPS panel with some of the widest viewing angles we've ever seen – almost stretching to the very edges of the laptop screen.
The speakers on this laptop don't deliver the most full bodied sound, and they're surprisingly tinny considering the size of the underlying drivers, but they're serviceable. Unlike other laptops that have tweeters hidden under the keyboard deck, or worse pointing downward, the Acer laptop does a much better job of directing sound to your ears. Unless you have a particularly trained ear for the best sound setups, the on-board audio is more than serviceable and their positioning only adds to the laptop's overall cinematic experience.
An all day use machine
Intel promised better battery life with its latest crop of Broadwell processors, and the Acer Chromebook is one of the first machines to fully reap its benefits. Whereas anything over 5 hours is excellent for any 15.6-inch laptop, this machine was able to run for 7 hours and 49 minutes without stopping for a quick charge (or even a nap).During my battery test, I ran down the machine with a combination of web browsing on Chrome, reliving my favorite Metal Gear Solid 4 moments on YouTube for an hour, streaming Google Music and typing up a long word document in Google Docs. At the time, I was also using the machine at 75% brightness and playing music with the volume set to 10%. If you were to dim the laptop's screen some more, turn off Bluetooth and run fewer tasks at once, you could likely draw out another 45 minutes to an hour of battery life.
Comparatively, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 ran for a much shorter 6 hours and 26 minutes. If you're looking for the machine with the absolutely longest battery life, the Acer Chromebook 13 will blow your socks off with a run time of 8 hours and 56 minutes.
Verdict
The Acer Chromebook 15 is a breath of fresh air in the Chromebook space. It takes this series of laptops to two new places, as the first with a 15.6-inch screen and the first packing a Broadwell processor. More importantly, this Chromebook gets so many things right out of the gate, helping me overlook the minor flaws that can be expected when breaking ground.We liked
Acer has leveraged all it's past experience making Chromebooks to create a solid package, one that jumps over nearly all the hurdles early Chrome OS machines struggled with. First and foremost, it neither looks nor feels the least bit "budget".The laptop also comes well equipped and is fully capable machine for multi-tasking. What's more, it has a positively radiant screen that's perfect for long Netflix binges.
We disliked
Sadly, the Acer Chromebook 15 isn't without its problems, and sudden crashes are a huge issue. In just a few days of testing, the laptop came to a screeching stop that required me to do a hard reset to bring it back. In each case, I was able to get back online in mere seconds. But imagine if your machine froze as you were working on an online Google Doc file during a long flight. You wouldn't be able to log back on and continue working until the plane landed.The crashes came as a real surprise, because in my years working with these Chrome OS-powered machines, this is the first time any has ever outright crashed. Hopefully this is an issue Acer can address in the future with an update or software patch. (Plus, remember that your hard-earned cash also buys a one-year limited warranty.)
Final verdict
The Acer Chromebook 15 is a excellent Chrome OS laptop, but it asks you whether you need a machine this big just to run a Chrome browser?For most people, that answer would be no, but I would easily pick this machine over any budget 15.6-inch Windows laptop. It's simply better built and comes at a better price to boot. The 15-inch display on this laptop itself would even be worth the $349 or £249 (about AU$458) price of admission.
Both the Acer Chromebook 13, and even more so, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 are excellent options in their own right. So, picking the right machine for you will come down to how much screen real estate you need. No matter what though, the Acer Chromebook 15 is on the cutting edge and first sign of where Chrome OS devices will end up this year.
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Microsoft announces Windows 10 summer launch
If you're eagerly awaiting the launch of Microsoft's new Windows 10 operating system, you only have to wait a short while longer. At the Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) summit in China, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be officially available this summer.
Despite revealing the launch window for Windows 10, Microsoft EVP of Operating Systems Terry Myerson did not give a specific date.
"We continue to make great development progress and shared today that Windows 10 will be available this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages," Myerson wrote in a blog post on the company's website. "Windows has always been global with more than 1.5 billion users around the world and here in China hundreds of millions of PCs operate Windows today."
Taking Windows further
Once considered the operating system for desktops and laptops, Microsoft is unifying its branding efforts under the Windows 10 moniker. Windows 10, as a brand, will be used for smartphones, tablets, PCs, laptops, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and even on the Xbox home gaming console.Microsoft has launched a number of initiatives with Windows 10, including making a push for universal apps that run across different screens. Most recently, Microsoft announced that it would be bringing greater security and convenience to Windows 10.
New systems that ship with Windows 10 and support biometric security hardware will allow users to forego the password and use a fingerprint, face scan, or iris scan to log into Windows and apps, websites, and networks. Microsoft is calling its new native biometric authentication system Windows Hello.
"I can't wait to see how amazing companies around the world will continue to innovate with devices running Windows 10," Myerson said in a statement. "Working together I know we can create some incredible experiences with Windows 10 that will truly delight our customers."
Moving to 10
Microsoft previously announced that consumers on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 on their PCs for free within the first year of release. Microsoft has not announced what the upgrade pricing would be after the debut year for Windows 10.Windows 10 is currently in technical preview and users can join the Microsoft Windows Insider program to trial the new OS before its commercial release. In addition to Windows 10 for desktop, a separate but concurrent technical preview is also in place for Windows 10 for phones.
- Read our Windows 10 coverage for more information
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HTC confirms One M9 Australian release date and pricing
HTC has confirmed it will unleash its latest flagship, the HTC One M9 in Australia on the 24th of March. The One M9 keeps the iconic curved-metal unibody of the M8, extending it all the way around to the screen and will be available in two colours from launch.
The dual-tone silver and rose gold edition can be grabbed from all Australian carriers and major retailers, while the gunmetal grey grey edition will be exclusive to Telstra.
Slotting in between the price of the 16GB and 64GB models of the 4.7 inch iPhone 6, the HTC One M9 will cost $1,099 outright.
The M9 can also be pre-ordered from Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile on 24 month plans ranging from $59 to $80 per month.
Seven ate nine… But they all look the same
The M9 has a 5-inch screen and looks unmistakably similar to its predecessors, but the familiar device boasts more than just the latest Android Lollipop software.With a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core CPU, comprised of four 2GHz and four 1.5GHz processors plus 3GB of RAM, the M9 is certainly no slouch.
What's even better is the battery upgrade, with 2840mAh keeping this powerful handheld device running for up to 402 hours on standby.
HTC has attempted to make the M9 even more personal with customisable themes that suggest novel colour schemes based on a selected photo.
Though the spec sheet may suggest that the M9's camera is better, TechRadar's early One M9 review of the device stated that this is still the one area that that the M9 hasn't improved on the earlier models.
HTC has also announced the IP68 waterproof cases that protect the phone to a depth of one metre for two hours, with pricing still to be confirmed.
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Presto TV feeling foxy as it announces content deal with 20th Century Fox
Presto has signed a content agreement with 20th Century Fox to bring a range of the corporation’s most popular programmes to the Presto TV streaming service.
Under the agreement, Presto TV now has the exclusive Australian streaming rights to the hit comedy series Modern Family, with the show’s fifth season (featuring an episode set in Australia) debuting on the service in the second half of 2015.
Presto TV will also be getting several other current shows, such the award-winning drama series Homeland, the violent biker saga Sons of Anarchy, the creepy series American Horror Story, the spy series The Americans, the ever popular high school series Glee, and the depressingly hilarious comedy series Louie, as well as all seasons of the classic Fox back catalogue shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, My Name is Earl, Roswell and The X-Files.
Presto a.k.a. ‘Foxcatcher’
Presto’s acquisition of Fox television content is just one example of how the service has been making big strides as of late, kicking into gear in time for the impending arrival of rival streaming powerhouse Netflix Australia.Recently, Presto has expanded its service to smartphones, dialed up Android support, brought the Presto app to the Telstra T-Box and bolstered its line up with HBO and Showtime shows.
Whether those strides will be enough for the Presto service to keep its footing in a post-Stan and Netflix market is another story.
- How does Presto stack up? Find out who wins in the Presto vs Stan battle
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Google speaks up about what led to the downfall of Glass
Google Glass was always an experiment for Google, but it could have been much more successful than it ultimately was.
Now Google X research lab head Astro Teller has taken the stage at Austin's SXSW festival to talk about what happened and why.
Teller said the Glass Explorer program, by which the company let people try out Google Glass earlier than your average consumer, was a "great decision."
Their biggest misstep, though, was that, "We allowed, and sometimes even encouraged, too much attention to the program," Teller said, adding that they should have made it more clear that Glass was not a finished product.
Google X's attitude is that failure helps them learn, and the consumer version of Google Glass is (probably) still coming some time down the road. Hopefully we'll hear all about it at Google IO 2015 this May.
- Samsung's Galaxy S6 is a stunning phone
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Is 'Galaxy H' Samsung's next big phone lineup?
Samsung said last year that it was going to make significantly fewer smartphones in 2015. So much for that.
Or so it seems, as yet more new Samsung phone trademarks have been filed in the company's home country of Korea.
- The PS4 is still going strong
If that's the case, the Galaxy H phones will follow the Galaxy A, Galaxy E and Galaxy J series onto the already crowded - with Samsung devices in particular - market.
Samsung also recently trademarked the Galaxy A6, A8 and A9 with the Korean Intellectual Property Office. Whether anything comes of all this is anyone's guess, but chances are we'll know before the end of the year.
- The Xbox One keeps getting better
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Review: UPDATED: LG G Flex 2
Introduction, design and display
The LG G Flex 2 I tested this month isn't the world's first curved smartphone, but it is the first one that has the muscle to back up its constant, ostentatious flexing.This concave Android phone is the follow-up to the 2013's LG G Flex and, while it bends the same way, it has new dimensions and a much better display that make it less of a gimmick.
LG G Flex 2 is noticeably smaller and easier to hold with a 5.5-inch screen, which matches the display size of the LG G3. The previous Flex was a full 6 inches.
Going with that new, more manageable size is a high-resolution P-OLED touchscreen that's 1080p, up from the decidedly deficient 720p display of the original.
With a faster Snapdragon processor, speedier RAM and Android 5.0 Lollipop on board this banana-shaped phone, the LG G Flex 2 is both trendy-looking and powerful - most of the time.
The specs make more sense this time around, but does a curved smartphone make sense to begin with? I bent over backwards to test out all of the following features in my full review.
Release date and price
Straight from South Korea, the LG G Flex 2 I tested is available on only one carrier in the US and the UK. In the US, Sprint is the first network with the phone, though AT&T has a vague "first quarter" launch. Verzion and T-Mobile haven't announced a release date. In the UK, Vodafone is the exclusive carrier for the first six weeks starting in March.How much does it cost? While it's the equivalent of $737 (about £480, AU$943) without a contract in LG's home country, Sprint's charging $250 with a two-year contract and offering a $50 mail in rebate. All of a sudden $199 isn't so bad. Without an expensive contract, the LG G Flex 2 price is $504. It's a lot upfront, but actually a better deal than most US phones off-contract.
Vodafone, meanwhile, is selling the curved phone for £19 with monthly plans starting at £39.50. There's no SIM-free option just yet, but expect it to hover around £539. All prices are infinitely better than the original Flex that cost $700 (£690).
Design
As the name suggests, the LG G Flex 2 features a slight curve from top to bottom. That's in contrast to the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, which curved on its right and left sides. It doesn't radically change the look and feel of the phone like LG's marketing would have you believe.Instead, the curve gives it a subtle bow in the middle so, like one of LG's new 4K TVs, its faint curvature goes from a 400mm to a 700mm radius. It's a little more durable by flexing, a little more immersive for multimedia viewing and a little better-sounding during phone calls.
The Flex 2 felt contoured to my face and more accessible with one hand than a normal 5.5-inch phone. Throwing it under my foot several dozen times to apply pressure and straighten out the frame, the phone always flexed back into its original arch shape. I've seen the G Flex withstand 1,000 pounds of pressure, and LG claims this one is even stronger. It's the ultimate anti-iPhone 6 BendGate phone.
But more than anything, the G Flex 2 comes off as a trend-setting phone, even if a technical need for such a design is as subtle the curve. It serves to spice up the almost-always-flat and boring phone designs we see year in and year out. The Flex 2's colors include Flamenco Red and Platinum Silver at launch, and I happily ended up with the more-striking red variant.
To that point, the LG G Flex 2 attracted plenty of looks and praise from people I showed it to this week. Yes, it's plastic, but it's also extremely lightweight for its size at 152 g (5.36 oz) and feels natural in a pocket. It seemingly disappeared in my left pocket during a three-hour bike ride, whereas I my "smaller" iPhone 6 felt ever-present in my right pocket.
That has actually been the No. 1 question everyone has had about it: how is a curved phone supposed to fit in your pocket? Remember, thighs - at least mine - are curved. And back pockets? You better believe that area is plenty curved too.
The LG G Flex 2 actually fits better than any straight-shaped brick phone. In fact, the only two problems I've had with the curved design is getting a case to protect it and attaching it to my car windshield's via an existing smartphone dash mount.
Of course, a case isn't supposed to be all that necessary. Like its predecessor, this second edition of the phone boasts a self-healing back, one that kicks things into "advanced" adjective mode. That's right, LG now has coined the bluntly-named "advanced self-healing back."
It can recover from light scratches in about 10 seconds, due to its high-density molecular shell. The previous Flex took about three minutes for its mutant Wolverine-like powers to kick in.
That's an impressive turnaround, but looking at the back cover, I still received what must be considered "medium" scratches that haven't gone away. Sadly, it doesn't live up to the hype - don't put this phone in the same pocket as some teethy keys.
Complimenting the Flex 2's easy-to-grip tiny arch is the fact that it has no buttons on the frame. The side and top are free of the power and volume buttons I so commonly press on other phones that I grab. LG stuck with its design formula that puts them on the back cover.
The placement will always be strange. It's either a love-it wise decision or hate-it design flaw. Getting used to where the power button is was difficult at first and often led to inadvertent camera smudges. Taking screenshots of the Flex 2's interface was also a problem.
That said, with a little practice, my index finger and brain got used to the novel approach eventually, and I really appreciated the button-free frame. I also heavily relied on the double-tap-to-wake technique to turn on the screen.
I can't say I could ever get used to the back speaker, however. At a time when the top-rated HTC One M8 and its successor HTC One M9 are giving us front-firing stereo BoomSound speakers that project music in the correct direction, LG is busy spitting the jams from one speaker embedded in the back cover. It's a powerful tweeter, sure, but awkwardly placed.
Display
The original LG G Flex developed a cult following, one that lauded its 6-inch phablet size, and some of those people will miss that aspect. No one will miss the 720p display.LG uses the same curved plastic OLED display technology, but gives the Flex 2 the 1080p, full HD boost it deserves. More pixels combined with the smaller 5.5-inch display leaves us with 403 pixels per inch, not the original's jaggy-ridden 245ppi.
That's a real reason to buy this phone. The screen looks like it has 2.5 times as many pixels, because, well, it does. Less important, and not a real reason to buy it, is the "immersion factor." I found myself sucked into games a tiny bit more and, in landscape mode, the phone offers just the right bezel-to-screen ratio. It's easier to see in sunlight too, but its value is negligible.
In fact, for the expected LG G Flex 2 price, you can get a higher-resolution smartphone right now, even one from LG, and save money. Its own LG G3 flagship sports a 1440p Quad HD display that measures 5.5 inches. Its 2,560 x 1,440 resolution comes out to 534 pixels per inch. So, as much as the G Flex 2 has caught up, the competition is now further along, packing in even more pixels than before. And the LG G4 release date may be a few short months away.
Extra pixels are nice, but 1080p should be good enough for everyone, whether or not they're stuck using Apple devices (that's the max "cutting-edge" resolution for just the iPhone 6 Plus). The jump from 720p to 1080p is more significant to the human eye than the trendy move to 1440p, anyway, and the G Flex 2 screen offers more durability. Its specially coated Gorilla Glass 3 treatment, dubbed Dura Guard Glass, makes it 20% more durable, and the curve makes it likely to survive drops 30% more than flat phones. That's something that can't be matched. Not yet at least.
Specs and performance
At CES 2015, a few days into the new year, LG had joked that the LG G Flex 2 was the fastest device of 2015. All jokes aside, the specs, backed up by benchmarks, make that the partial truth.LG's curved phone straight-up beat every other smartphone in our speed test initially, thanks to its first-ever use of the speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor. It's the chip maker's latest 64-bit, octa-core system-on-a-chip with a clock speed of 2.0GHz.
This blazing-fast CPU, combined with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 430 graphics chip that's 30% faster than the GPU in the original G Flex, achieved a Geekbench 3 score of 3,506 at first. That would have handily beat the top-performing Samsung Galaxy Note 4's 3,351 score.
Then I ran the test again. The LG G Flex 2 score dropped to a still admirable 3,145. Okay, still in the ballpark. A third test drove the score down to 2,931, a fourth to 2,656, a fifth to 2,224 and a sixth to 2,191. You get the picture. It became nearly as slow as the LG G Flex (2,067).
These topsy-turvy benchmarking scores didn't affect my 3D gaming video watching exploits using the imported phone. Menus would stutter here and there, which is always annoying, but its overall performance was relatively lag-free. Instead, the LG G Flex 2 became hot around the back cover's power button and volume keys. At times, I couldn't turn the display brightness up past a certain percentage because the device needed to cool down. However, this has been a common protection of past LG smartphones too.
Wouldn't you know it, by taking a short break, the score shot right back up to 3,427, which is more in line with how we expect the new Snapdragon 810 processor to perform. This led me to think that the chipset is experiencing overheating issues, but LG suggests that it's likely related to the software and can be fixed post-launch.
"The devices sampled are representative of final industrial design and user experience but are continuing to undergo additional optimizations to enhance benchmark performance," an LG representative told TechRadar in a statement.
"We expect our upcoming software releases to provide further improvements in this area. We remain confident that the G Flex 2 will deliver great experiences to our customers with a tremendous blend of multimedia, performance and industry-leading design."
In the future, once Snapdragon 810 becomes stabilized, it will compete with other top mobile CPUs including Samsung's Exynos chips. It should get even better, too, as 3GB of RAM is included in the souped-up Flex 2 model with 32GB of internal storage. I tested the 2GB RAM model with 16GB of space, which is expandable up to 2TB via a microSD slot behind the back cover.
Call quality
As novel as the LG G Flex 2 is in design and performance, one of the most important features at its core is making calls. Luckily, there are no ups and downs here.Conference calls went on without a hitch when I used the phone normally, and the microphone was positioned closer to my face. That theoretically gave me a call quality compared to a candybar-style phone, like the iPhone 6. No one reported hearing a difference, of course.
The speakerphone was also adequate, though I still don't appreciate hearing all of my calls via the backward-facing speaker that's within the Flex 2 back cover.
Interface and apps
For those still waiting to upgrade to Android 5.0 Lollipop, the LG G Flex 2 is a shortcut to unlocking the newest version of Google's mobile operating system. The phone comes with the OS pre-loaded and is a huge improvement over the original LG G Flex that used the LG G2 interface.It actually comes with Android 5.0.1, but you wouldn't know it, as visual draws of the Nexus 6 are masked by LG's own Optimus skin. That means, while it has a lot of the behind-the-scenes benefits of the new Android update, the interface looks almost exactly like that of the LG G3.
Lockscreen notifications are the biggest change on the curvy phone. They can now be read as you enter a lockscreen password like the LG's tap-initiated Knock Code. The bottom home screen buttons that reflect Google's latest design guidelines and the "clear" button at the bottom of the notifications panel represent smaller alterations.
Sliding
left on the concave screen pulls up LG-exclusive widgets like its
exercise-focused Health service and Smart Tips tutorial. Both are
skippable. One of the best fitness trackers we have reviewed will do you a lot better with a modern user interface.Sliding down from the top when the phone is unlocked reveals a combined quick controls and notifications menu. This is actually faster than Google's decision to force users to swipe twice (or with two fingers simultaneously) to access quick controls for WiFi, display brightness and Bluetooth.
Sliding down from the top when the phone is locked lets you peek at the time and date. It's provided me with a fast time check without forcing me to unlock the phone or kill the battery with the entire screen illuminated. I also really liked how I could set a home time and local time here, good when crossing country border in different time zones.
I also fully appreciate LG's decision to add an easy way to change the main volume and also dive into a volume submenu to adjust the ringtone, notifications and multimedia sound separately. There's nothing I hate more than turning the volume all the way down on my Nexus 6 only to play a blaring YouTube video in the middle of the night because the hidden-away media volume slider was still cranked all the way up.
Movies and music
LG G Flex 2's curved display doesn't feel dramatically immersive for movies compared to any other smartphone I've tested. However, it's new 1080p resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio make it a multimedia treat nonetheless.The 5.5-inch size isn't a big letdown either, despite the fact that I was previously using the much larger Google Nexus 6. The sound is my only complaint for movies and all music. The backward-facing speaker shoots audio in the wrong direction.
The sound didn't make me want to stop streaming Netflix, but it did make me want to reach for a tablet. There are no better signs than when a big smartphone makes you use your tablet less or stow your earbuds because the quality is just that good. In this case, LG gets it half right.
Games
Playing games from the Google Play Store wasn't a problem, even though the Snapdragon 810 processor speeds were all over the place. It didn't slow down my 3D racing skills in Asphalt 8: Airborne. In fact, I bested my lap time.This is where the curved display of the LG G Flex 2 is a little more immersive. By focusing on the screen so intently, I got a little sucked into the game. It wasn't revolutionary and certainly not a reason to spring for a more expensive phone. But the bend, combined with the proper bezel size that didn't interfere with the touchscreen, made it marginally superior for gaming.
Camera
The LG G Flex 2 acts like it's the curved version of the LG G3 when it comes to the camera specs. They're exactly the same and, in turn, much better than the first LG G Flex.
Alright, it's the same 13-megapixel image sensor as before. But now we've got ourselves a competent camera with LG's speedy laser autofocus, optical image stabilization and dual LED flash. Whether the picture-taker's hand is shaking or the subject is moving, this camera does its best to remedy the situation. The image quality is right up there with current LG's flagship.
The default camera app from LG is still straightforward without manual adjustments. Instead, returning modes let you get creative with panoramas and dual-lens shots that use the rear and front 2.1-megapixel camera, which never quite works out. Post-shot focus adjustments seems to have been axed from the app as a mode.
New to the LG G Flex 2 is the, for better or worse, increasingly-important selfie camera software, or at least one change to the routine. I was able to snap a selfie by holding an open hand and then forming a fist in the air to trigger the convenient three-second timer. Moving the phone from a high to a low angle to review the shot, the app automatically slides my photo into view, detecting my quick arm motion. It's just that much faster for me to delete the hideous photo.
I like this natural photo review process, which LG dubs "Gesture Shot," when using the front-facing camera. I still can't stand the skin smoothing slider that is automatically set to a medium four (out of eight). This "beauty bar" looks like every selfie I take is airbrushed in the worst possible way. Of course, reducing the slider to zero every time and taking a comparatively gritter-looking photo leaves me not wanting to take selfies at all. Maybe that's for the best.
Camera samples
The LG G Flex 2 camera features the same image sensor as the LG G3, which features the same image sensor as the G Flex, which features the same image sensor as the G2. But there have been like the G3, this curved phone features OIS+, a laser autofocus and a better selfie capture mode.
Battery life
The G Flex 2 is better than its curved predecessor in every way save for battery life. It packs a 3,000mAh battery instead of the larger 3,500mAh size in its predecessor. You're not going to get two or more days from this handset, but are in the clear for all-day moderate use.
TechRadar's smartphone battery life test proved it to last much longer than the LG G3, which also packs a 3,000mAh battery. Running a looped HD video for 90 minutes, the battery drained by 13%, while the G3 went down by a whopping 30%.
The difference? LG G3 is firing up way more pixels on account of its energy-sucking Quad HD display. Plus, to a lesser extent, it's not running the better-optimized Android 5.0 Lollipop OS.
The 6-inch LG G Flex from 2013 dropped by just 6% from a full charge, but the rule of thumb is bigger phone size, bigger battery. The shrunken LG G Flex 2 had to compromise on the size. I just wish LG didn't also settle on a non-removable battery. While the curved phone's back cover can be taken off to access the microSD card slot, there's no way to swap out the battery.
On the plus side, the LG G Flex 2 now features fast-charging capabilities via its included travel charger. It's akin to Motorola's TurboCharger for the Droid Turbo, Moto X and Nexus 6. It charges 50% in 40 minutes, and I was able to reach a full charge in 1 hour and 38 minutes from a completely drained battery.
Verdict
My smartphone, unlike my cat, always seems to drop right smack on its face. I have broken the glass that protects the precious screen before. My phones certainly don't have nine lives, but, thanks its curve, maybe the G Flex 2 has a better chance at survival.There's a lot to like about the LG G Flex 2, and thankfully most of the perks have to do with the specs and similarities to the LG G3. It doesn't just rely on the curve this time around.
We liked
The G Flex 2 has some muscle to it. Under the right conditions, it has the fastest processor of any smartphone and ports over LG G3's camera with an excellent snap-and-review selfie feature. Android 5.0 Lollipop is here in limited form, but that includes the decidedly clutch lock screen notifications.This phone has the brains, so it's okay to pay attention to its slick-looking curvy features. Matching LG's curved 4K TV shape and coming in at a much more reasonable 5.5-inches, the flexible 1080p display is as comfortable as it is durable. This second Flex has a much better shot of breaking out of the series's current cult hit status.
We disliked
LG's G Flex 2 is once again solving a problem that not everyone is clamoring to fix, as much as people spend money on cracked-phone replacements and cases to prevent future accidents.While the outside is trendy, the question remains: why not just go with the cheaper LG G3 or wait for the LG G4? The Flex 2's chipset benchmarks are inconsistent at the moment, and the battery here isn't swappable. The self-healing back doesn't pass the scratch test either.
Final verdict
In a year-and-a-half since the LG G Flex first launched, things have changed. Apple's BendGate controversy became worldwide news, and now everyone's mom and dad on their family plan has begun to worry about their phones breaking in their back pocket. That's still not reason enough to spring for a curved, flexible phone.Instead, the more important development has been the significant specs bump found within the new LG G Flex 2. LG's debut of the Snapdragon 810 chip, while inconsistent and running hot right now, shows promise. The 1080p resolution more than doubles the amount of pixels on a 5.5-inch screen that's smaller and more manageable.
Ultimately, the LG G Flex 2 is a trendier-looking LG G3 variant with the same great camera and better battery life than the first. If you don't want to wait for the LG G4 and don't mind paying a little extra, it's time to take a chance on something new, and for interesting phones like the Flex 2 and the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge to graduate from cult hits into the mainstream.
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Passwords usage easily outpaces biometrics in the UK
Biometrics replaced the trusty old password just yet.
A new study from SecureAuth revealed that 39% of United Kingdom's IT decision makers (ITDMs) admitted their firms only use passwords, and that figure grows to 45% with public sector organisations. Meanwhile, 39% of firms that have over 1,000 employees also admitted that's the case with their companies as well.
IT and telecoms companies bucked that trend with 74% of those companies using more than one method of authentication and the figures come as device manufacturers clamour to develop more and more biometric solutions.
Opinium conducted the research for SecureAuth by taking a sample of answers from 500 ITDMs within UK organisations with 50 or more employees.
In the future, 44% plan to change of enhance security model in the next two years and 28% think that companies will begin to use biometric security measures in the coming five years.
Employees using three or more devices
When it comes to their attitudes towards employees, over half (54%) are worried they could compromise access to the corporate network, intentionally or unintentionally. This comes at the same time as huge growth in bring your own device and flexible working, and 42% of ITDMs admitted employees are using three or more devices to access corporate systems. The study also found that 33% of employee time is spent accessing the organisation's IT network remotely.Rather worryingly 20% of respondents said they "don't know" how many IT security policies their organisation has in place. Even worse, 24% admitted that passwords are altered less than two to three times each year.
- Check out: The top emerging security solutions of 2015
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Could larger capacity flash drives spell the end for the hard disk?
Solid state storage has not always been a smooth ride for Samsung. Having burnt the bridges with traditional spinning hard disk drives (it sold the business to Seagate which still continues to use the Samsung brand), the company encountered what we'd describe as a few growing pains at the beginning of its journey.
At any rate, we caught up with Thomas Arenz from Samsung Semiconductor to find out the latest on what's coming up in terms of storage and system memory.
DDR4 volume is ramping up as enterprise customers are transitioning to the new technology which allows more memory to be crammed in per module, with a lower power consumption compared to the previous generation.
Most Samsung DDR4 modules are on 1.2v with 1.05v ones expected to draw even less power. Arenz also confirmed that speeds are likely to pick up "by at least 50%", which means that one can expect DDR4 to hit a whopping 3.2GHz – which would surpass what's currently available on the desktop.
Many expect DDR4 to hit well over 4GHz without overclocking in the long-term which means that the technology still has some headroom.
Storage bullishness
It was storage however that got Arenz excited. "V-NAND is allowing us to surpass Moore's law," he said. Moore's law is the established belief that transistor density doubles every 18 months, which in layman's terms, and applied to SSDs, means that capacity should double at least every 1.5 years.This, together with the rapid transitioning to NVMe, means there are the two main reasons for Arenz's bullishness when it comes to storage. "NVMe will kill SAS and then SATA in the long-term," while offering cheaper prices and dramatically improving endurance compared to previous generations.
That's the theory – in practice, however, Samsung is ambitious, much more ambitious than that. Its PM863 entry-level SSD model currently tops at 3.84TB and Arenz hinted that the next iteration – which will double in size to 7.68TB – will appear sooner than many would expect.
SSDs to win on capacity
At this rate, one can reasonably assume that SSDs may well match and then surpass hard disk drive capacity sometime in 2017, if not next year, so that if you want a 3.5-inch device that is fast and capacious (and assuming you have very deep pockets), SSD will be the product to embrace.Hard disk drives currently top 10TB in capacity, but improvements in capacity have been gradual rather than in multiples. SSD can only grow in whole numbers (2x being the minimum).
What lies ahead? Given that the current V-NAND technology uses a 30nm class node and that Samsung's latest products use a far thinner node, it's likely that SSD would benefit from that at some point.
Add more layers (currently on 32, likely to hit triple digits at some point in the future) and Arenz, as we ended the interview, appeared to be confident that Samsung will produce a 1Tb chip within the next 36 months.
That's 8x the 128Gb chip that powers its current offering and one that may well find its way into a 30TB (yes 30TB) drive by end of 2018.
Hard disk drives will not disappear
It's very, very unlikely that hard disk drives will have caught up by then. But while they will have lost the performance and storage battles, don't expect them to lose the price one as they still benefit from huge economies of scale.High capacity SSDs are likely to carry a massive premium for the foreseeable future not least because Samsung has to justify the billions of dollars' worth of fab capital investment it has outlaid recently (like its Chinese Xi'an plant).
Samsung will have to watch out for its biggest and most aggressive rival, Intel, which also invested in 3D NAND and late last year promised to deliver 256Gb NAND chips that could power a 10.2TB SSD by the end of 2016.
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This is Microsoft's entire cloud universe on one slide
One slide at the presentation of Kushagra Vaid, GM, Server Engineering, Cloud+Enterprise Division at Microsoft resumed beautifully the extent of Microsoft's clout in cloud.
Vaid was a keynote speaker at the DCD event in CeBIT 2015 in Hannnover and was particularly candid and open about what the company learnt since starting doing business on cloud.
The company currently offers more than 200 cloud services in more than 90 countries worldwide. It serves more than a billion customers and a whopping 20 million businesses.
Some of the numbers were already in the public domain but it was refreshing to get them all combined on one slide.
There are more than 400 million active users on Outlook.com, more than 3.5 million subscribers to Office 365, more than 250 million active OneDrive users and a staggering 50+ million active users of Office Web Apps.
These numbers however pale in comparison with the 30 trillion objects currently stored in Azure or the one trillion expected annual Active Directory authentications on the same platform.
Microsoft has more than one million production servers scattered around the globe with 15 major data centres.
All data is triplicated by Microsoft to ensure that none is lost in the event of outages. Customers can also request data to be double-triplicated across primary and secondary regions to maximise redundancy.
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Microsoft opens kimono on its servers and a UPS killer
Microsoft has disclosed some interesting details about what makes up its own data centres and one particular piece of hardware that may well make business for UPS vendors slightly more complicated.
Kushagra Vaid, GM, Server Engineering, Cloud+Enterprise Division at Microsoft revealed that the company swapped its data centre technology roughly every three years. The current Gen5 data centre has achieved a PUE (power usage efficiency) of only 1.07 on 15MW.
He also presented a Microsoft-designed power supply unit that could well make centralised UPSes within DCs obsolete.
The Local Energy Storage (LES) is essentially commodity batteries (used in cameras) squeezed into a 1.6KW power supply unit.
Vaid said that it slashed UPS capex by 80% while improving PUE by a sixth and cutting facility footprint by a quarter. Perhaps most importantly, it allowed the company to embrace PAYG for UPS capacity, having eliminated the need to get full UPS capacity initially.
He also shed more details regarding its own Open CloudServer devices. Each of those servers follow a set strict of rules (minimalist hardware design, standardised specs, high efficiency and focus on service and repair simplicity).
The model presented by Vaid is a twin-socket 120W 14-core CPU model (likely to be the recently-launched Intel Xeon E5-2683v3 which runs at 2GHz and has 35MB of L2 cache) with two X16 PCIe slots for optional accelerators, a 40GbE NIC with ROCE v and M.2 Flash solid state storage.
These are them mounted on a 12U chassis that has shared management, fans, power and signal backplane as well as JBOD expansion.
Vaid was a speaker at today's first session of DCD at CeBIT 2015.
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Review: Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X
Introduction
Nvidia has maxed out its Maxwell graphics architecture and this is the result: the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X. The most powerful consumer GPU we've ever seen.Brilliant. That means, once again, we can trot out the familiar "fastest graphics card ever" headline, right?
Well… no. There's actually a bit of a distinction between the fastest single GPU and the fastest graphics card – the two do not necessarily mean the same thing. But we'll come to that in a bit.
What we do have here though is a brand new "ultra enthusiast," super-expensive, $999 graphics card. Think Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition CPU, Apple Watch Edition or Audi R8 and you'll be on the right path.
But where the Audi really needs a race track to show its full worth, the Apple Watch Edition needs a millionaire who doesn't get out much, and the 5960X can't shine without rare complex number-crunching algorithms, the Titan X will deliver impressive gaming performance at almost any level.
Like all the other Titan cards Nvidia has released over the last three years, this is a card for gamers who want the best gaming experience possible and don't mind paying for it.
But it's also a card designed to be an object of desire. This is an aspirational piece of hardware, likely to be much wanted but less purchased by the average PC gamer.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X is a headline-grabber, a card built to showcase the Maxwell GPU tech and hopefully convince the more money-conscious to spend their GPU upgrade cash on one of the more affordable Maxwell-powered graphics cards.
The trickle-down effect is real here, because the GTX Titan X is using the same overall GPU design. However, it's also throwing many more cores and a lot more memory at the gaming problem to deliver seriously impressive frame rates.
And the target for those metrics? Nvidia has 4K gaming at peak settings firmly in its sights for the GeForce GTX Titan X. And, for the most part, this card is very accomplished at delivering on that lofty ambition.
Architecture and benchmarks
The beating heart of the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X is the brand new GM 200 GPU at its core. This is what I mean by the full power of the Maxwell architecture – it's the biggest GPU core around, packing in 50% more processing tech than the GM 204 silicon in the GTX 980.And the Titan X is housing the full GM 200 core too.
With the first Titan card Nvidia left some of the top Kepler core on the test bench, chopping out a few SMX units here and there, and other chunks of its full core configuration, to ensure it could hit the yields necessary on its big chip. It took another year for Nvidia to release the GTX Titan Black, rocking the full implementation of the GK 110 GPU.
This time around though both Nvidia's 28nm production process and its Maxwell architecture are mature enough for it to be able to confidently produce such complex 601mm2 slices of super-powered silicon with good yields.
And boy, is it complex.
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X specifications
GPU GM - 200Lithography - 28nm
Transistor count - 8 billion
Die size - 601mm2
SMM units - 24
CUDA cores - 3,072
Texture units - 192
ROPs - 96
Base clock - 1,000MHz
Boost clock - 1,075MHz
Memory capacity - 12,288MB GDDR5
Memory bus - 384-bit
Memory clock - 3,505MHz
TDP - 250W
That massive GPU contains a full 3,072 CUDA cores and around eight billion transistors. Putting that in context the GTX 980 has almost three billion fewer transistors while AMD's top GPU, the Hawaii XT, is rocking around two billion fewer.
Those CUDA cores are split between 24 streaming microprocessors (SMMs) with 192 texture units and an unprecedented 96 render output units (ROPs).
Chances are though there's another number which has piqued your interest surrounding the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X and that's the enormous 12GB frame buffer.
Running across the same aggregated 384-bit memory bus as the original Titan cards, but including Maxwell's new memory compression algorithms, its memory configuration provides a welcome level of future-proofing to Nvidia's top consumer GPU.
Those 12,288 megabytes of speedy GDDR5 memory might look like overkill right now, but back when the first Titan hit the desktop its 6GB frame buffer looked stupidly large. And now we've got Shadow of Mordor filling out around 5.7GB with its high-res texture pack running at 4K ultra settings.
The chunky frame buffer is also likely one of the reasons the green team has decided to remove double precision processing from this iteration of the GTX Titan. Previous Titans all had full double precision floating point calculation enabled, but this is the first to have that pro-level feature blocked.
Given the huge frame buffer on the GTX Titan X we'd guess there was a certain concern it might cannibalise more Quadro sales than in previous iterations. And unsurprisingly there's going to be a new GM 200 Quadro launched around the same time as this latest Titan.
However, Nvidia has also said most of the Titans doing the professional grunt work in institutions were only using single precision floating point calculations anyway. But that lack of DP does make the GTX Titan X a resolutely gaming card rather than a professional level option.
Benchmarks
DirectX 11 1600p synthetic performanceHeaven 4.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (26) 58
AMD R9 295X2 - (23) 66
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (18) 40
Palit GTX 980 - (22) 42
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (17) 34
DirectX 11 4K synthetic performance
Heaven 4.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (15) 27
AMD R9 295X2 - (14) 30
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (13) 20
Palit GTX 980 - (11) 20
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (10) 17
DirectX 11 1600p gaming performance
Bioshock Infinite - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (15) 100
AMD R9 295X2 - (20) 102
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (9) 74
Palit GTX 980 - (16) 81
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (15) 59
GRID 2 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (103) 134
AMD R9 295X2 - (99) 134
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (69) 86
Palit GTX 980 - (86) 107
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (71) 90
DirectX 11 4K gaming performance
Battlefield 4 Ultra - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (31) 48
AMD R9 295X2 - (13) 60
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (18) 31
Palit GTX 980 - (24) 36
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (17) 30
Shadow of Mordor Ultra - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (38) 48
AMD R9 295X2 - (36) 57
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (26) 33
Palit GTX 980 - (25) 34
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (18) 36
Metro Last Light - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (14) 20
AMD R9 295X2 - (12) 27
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (7) 14
Palit GTX 980 - (13) 17
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (11) 14
Peak temperature performance
Battlefield 4 - Degrees Centigrade: lower is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - 83
AMD R9 295X2 - 75
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - 83
Palit GTX 980 - 76
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - 69
Peak platform power draw
Battlefield 4 (1600p) - Watts: lower is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - 373
AMD R9 295X2 - 681
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - 353
Palit GTX 980 - 335
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - 361
Overclocked 4K gaming performance
Heaven 4.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (17) 32
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (14) 30
Battlefield 4 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (34) 55
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (13) 60
Shadow of Mordor - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (42) 56
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (36) 57
Metro Last Light - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (15) 24
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (12) 27
Our GPU test rig is a stock-clocked Intel Core i7-4770K on an Asus Maximus VI Hero Z97 motherboard with 8GB of 1,600MHz DDR3.
Verdict
So no, the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X can't call itself the fastest gaming graphics card available right now. That's because of the continued impressive performance of AMD's top-end R9 295X2 card.The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is still the fastest graphics card in terms of gaming, offering higher average frame rates in the latest titles at 4K resolutions. And if average frame rates were the whole story, you could happily conclude that the cheaper AMD card is a much better purchase than this pricey Titan X.
But they're not.
The Radeon is able to achieve its performance with its last-gen, soon-to-be-second-tier GPUs, because it's using two of them to power one card. It's a CrossFire setup on a single slice of circuit board. That's impressive, but it introduces a whole host of problems that the resolutely single GPU Titan X doesn't have to worry about.
For a start there's the power draw. The GeForce GTX Titan X only requires a 600W PSU in your PC where the R9 295X2 simply wouldn't cope under such restrictive power offerings.
On our test rig the Radeon draws a hefty 681W under 1600p gaming load, so ideally you're looking for a 1KW PSU for that monster.
That energy requirement also means it demands a closed-loop water cooler attached to both AMD GPUs to keep it cool enough to run at its rated speeds. And that takes a whole lot of space. The GTX Titan X could happily fit into a mini-ITX chassis, and still deliver a frighteningly powerful micro machine.
Then there are the vagaries of multi-GPU gaming. You can't always trust twin GPUs to deliver the performance you've paid for – we'd always recommend spending your graphics money on the fastest single GPU you can afford. Splitting the cash over two cards might net you some improvements in average frame rates, but often you'll be sacrificing smooth gaming to that particular god.
Multi-GPU setups can suffer from the dreaded micro-stutter. This is where the overall performance seems good, but the actual experience rings hollow as visible stutters interrupt the smooth running of your games.
You will also come across situations where, having picked up a game on launch day, you find at least one of your GPUs is sat twiddling its thumbs while you wait for the devs to update support for either SLI or CrossFire.
Such experiences are infrequent, and becoming even more so. We've run both AMD and Nvidia multi-GPU setups in the labs for years and things are definitely getting better, especially on day one performance. But still, a powerful single GPU will always be preferable to a less-trustworthy twin-GPU setup.
So, it's a similar situation to when the inaugural GTX Titan was released.
Back in 2013 we already had the GTX 690, with its twin GK 104 GPUs delivering speedy gaming performance. The first Titan fell a little short in terms of average frame rate but was able to offer a more elegant, efficient solution in a single GPU package.
The only difference today is that the GTX Titan X's competition is coming from AMD and not from within its own stable of cards.
The competition
With no single GPU competition from AMD (thanks to the tardy nature of the upcoming but still far off Fiji silicon in its Radeon R9 390X), Nvidia has almost been given a free pass with the GeForce GTX Titan X.It's the fastest single GPU card around and delivers almost the same level of gaming performance as the dual-GPU behemoth from AMD, with more elegance and more efficiency.
Which means that Nvidia can easily charge this much cash simply for the privilege of owning a GeForce GTX Titan X.
That could change when the Radeon R9 390X turns up, with its touted $700+ price tag and high bandwidth memory configurations, but until then the GM 200 core in the Titan X stands alone.
Even so, this won't be the only consumer graphics card to rock the GM 200 GPU from Nvidia. There is almost certainly going to be a GeForce GTX 980 Ti released soon after AMD finally gets its R9 390X out of the door in the Summer.
We're betting on an August release for the GTX 980 Ti.
We liked
The GeForce GTX Titan X is an ultra desirable component. The fact it is able to produce the same level of gaming performance as the top dual-GPU AMD card is important, but what puts it in a league of its own is its ability to do that with half the power draw and without needing a full closed-loop water cooler.I'm also rather stunned by the overclocking performance of our reference sample.
The Maxwell architecture tends to welcome a little light clock tweakery, but it's the fact it has such a bearing on gaming performance that really impresses. The mid-range GTX 960's GPU could be boosted by a huge amount, but it didn't really translate into much in the way of frame rate improvements.
That couldn't be further from the truth with the GM 200 and GTX Titan X.
I was able to close the gap between Titan X and R9 295X2 to almost indistinguishable levels with some easy tweaks, knocking the GPU up over 1,400MHz and the memory clock up to around 3,900MHz.
We disliked
Nvidia has dropped an unwelcome colour change on the latest Titan. The aluminium shroud of the original Titan was a total departure from the black plastic covers of previous Nvidia cards. This back to black aesthetic makes it look like the Titan's cheaper cousin to us.But for an internal component that's close to an irrelevance.
What's of more consequence is the amount of money Nvidia is asking you to pay out for a GTX Titan X. At $999 it's prohibitive, not quite as bad as the GTX Titan Z, but still pretty damned high. But this is a top-of-the-line card, and a top-of-the-line price is part of the package.
Then there's gaming performance. Sure, it's the absolute fastest single gaming GPU on the planet, but it's by no means an unprecedented performance. There are still cheaper graphics cards around capable of delivering on the overall gaming speed, if not quite on the same elegant experience.
Verdict
Let's be honest, most of you reading this are not going to buy a GeForce GTX Titan X. It's simply too much money to spend on a single component for your average enthusiast.But we're pretty sure you want one. You definitely should want one.
It's the fastest single GPU card around – an elegant, efficient package offering performance previously seen only in monstrously power-hungry dual-GPU cards.
It's the standard bearer for Nvidia's Maxwell architecture and shows just how far ahead of AMD its engineering teams are right now. Once they hit the 20nm process, the performance per Watt levels of these green cards is going to be enormous.
The only reason not to buy this powerful card is the price, but with a price this high, that's going to be a very compelling reason to a lot of people. If you're one of them, don't worry: there will surely be a more affordable GM 200-powered card rocking up before the end of the year.
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Infiniflash could make hard disks (and tape) redundant
A couple of weeks ago, Sandisk, the storage vendor better known for its memory cards, announced the release of a new product, called Infiniflash, one that promises to commoditise flash within the enterprise.
Sandisk claims that the enterprise storage array provides 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability of traditional hard disk drive arrays while consuming just a fifth of the power.
Make no mistake, this product is squarely aiming at the massive legacy installation of spinning hard disk drives that occupies tens of thousands of Us across data centres worldwide.
What made the headlines though was the $1 per GB price point (and actually less than that). While it is more expensive than comparable consumer-grade SSD, it is actually surprisingly cheap for commercial SAN/NAS all flash arrays.
On par with magnetic storage
According to Roland Rosenau from Sandisk, it is comparable to 15K HDD solutions, especially when taking into account the long tail total cost of ownership (beyond the initial capital expenditure).How did the company achieve that without apparently cutting corners? Well, it took the bold decision of creating its own form factor and it also makes its own flash memory (19nm for nearly two years now).
Physically, the device occupies a 3U 19-inch rack containing 64 flash cards, each with an 8TB capacity. That's 512TB of SAS-connected storage or a staggering 7.168 PB in a 42U enclosure (although usable capacity is likely to be less than that).
That unit doesn't come cheap though with an MSRP of half a million Dollars. The unit reaches in excess of 1M IOPS with a 1ms latency, 7GBPS throughput and consumes 250W when idle or 750W when active with eight SAS 2.0 ports.
Rosenau hinted that Sandisk is also looking at on the fly compression which could bring that 42U capacity to a jaw-dropping 14PB assuming a 2:1 compression (as used by the tape industry).
What will the competition do?
That's another potentially very lucrative market that Sandisk would be very keen to explore. Sandisk used the popular, open source CEPH platform and has got the backing of partners such as Dell to incorporate the solution into their offerings.Switching to CEPH, Sandisk says, have resulted in a 10x improvement on block reads and 2x improvement on object read flows.
In the short term, it will be interesting to see how storage vendors like Netapp and EMC react to Sandisk's announcement.
Furthermore, given that the array uses SAS-2 rather than SAS-3 or even FC, one can expect future versions of Infiniflash to significantly boost IOPS performance.
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HP debuts ultra-cheap tower servers for small businesses
Budget conscious small and medium sized businesses have a couple of new server options from HP as part of its growing Compute portfolio.
The two new tower servers take the form of the HP ProLiant ML10 v2 and ProLiant ML110 Gen9 with prices starting at just $300 (around £203, or AU$393) and providing increased productivity and reduced overall costs.
ProLiant ML10 v2 is an entry-level 10 series tower server with an incredibly low initial price for those looking to tighten the purse strings. It has a large number of connectivity slots for both storage and networking, and is ideal to run general purpose applications.
The ProLiant ML110 Gen9, meanwhile, is a 100 Series tower server with more memory, hard disk drives and I/O expansion. It is also optimised for small businesses physical and virtual workloads and applications.
Bargain basement prices
ProLiant Tower servers are also incorporated into certain HP Just Right IT solutions for SMBs that include HP servers, storage, networking and services all configured with applications from HP partners. They can also be added to with various HP Qualified hard drives, memory, storage controllers and network adapters.ProLiant ML110 Gen9 will be available to order on April 1 from HP and worldwide channel partners and base pricing starts at $1,000 (around £678, or AU$1,312) whereas the HP ProLiant ML10 v2 will be available from the same places in mid-April prices starting at a bargain $300 (around £203, or AU$393).
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Top 7 drinking gadgets for St. Patrick's Day
There's more to St. Patrick's Day than just drinking vast amounts of green beer and Guinness on a Tuesday. There's also a ton of gadgets to help you serve and enjoy said green beer and Guinness.
Yes, just as much as St. Patrick's Day is an excuse to consume copious amounts of alcohol, it's a day in which every beer-loving technology buff can demo their best drinking gadgets.
From the best-drink serving tech ideas to the safety equipment that will ensure many more St. Patrick's Days to come, pull up a stool, gather around and hear which gadgets got our Irish blessing.
Smartphone case bottle opener
Beer Belt under your Aran sweater
Shot-pint glass to make you go Erin Go Bbbleh
Beer Tower that's taller like the Blarney Castle
Green LED Ice Cube Drink Marker
Best iOS, Android app for Beer
Breathalyzer so you don't fall into the Chicago Green River
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LinkedIn bolsters big data recruitment through Careerify acquisition
LinkedIn's big data recruitment strategy has stepped up another notch after it acquired a Canadian software startup known as Careerify.
First reported by TechCrunch, Careerify will close down two of its software products as part of the move, yet a third product focused on employee referrals will remain open to existing customers. However, LinkedIn will not allow any new users to sign up.
The two Careerify products that have been culled are an employer branding software product to help firms appears more attractive to candidates and "internal mobility software" that assisted companies in internal hiring efforts.
Making use of social connections
Careerify's referral software that survived uses an employee's social connections from the likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to suggest individuals for job postings at their place of business. As such, Careerify's app fits in well with LinkedIn's overall business strategy.Harpoon Sambhi, CEO and founder of Careerify explained that the decision to join LinkedIn was to give them the "massive scale" they lacked. Joining Sambhi at LinkedIn are software engineers Luthfur Chowdhury and Prashant Viswanathan, and all three will be relocating to Mountain View from LinkedIn's new Toronto office in due course.
Via: Careerify
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