Dyson Airblade Tap is ingenious cleaning combo
Dyson engineers are masters at re-imagining everyday tools and tasks. Case in point: the firm's new Airblade Tap hand dryer.
Capable of both washing and drying your hands, the tap releases water from the central stem and high-velocity air out of the two side-facing wings. As with other Airblade dryers, the pressurised air is designed to scrape the water off hands, not just blow at them with hot air.
High-cost hygiene
The result is drip-free bathroom floors and happier janitorial staff, we guess. With an R&D cost of $60-million (£40-million), according to Dyson, and an individual price-tag of $1,590 per tap, this is the hand-drying revolution you were not sure you needed, or wanted. This multi-million dollar development figure wasn't spent entirely on the the hand-drying tap though. Dyson is releasing three new Airblade dryers, including a 2.5kg lighter revision to the Airblade you find in bathrooms today, and the new Airblade V dryer, which is 60% smaller than current Dyson dryers. These dryers are also priced between $1,200 and $1,500. Fascinatingly, the Dyson team is boasting that its test team has had to simulate hand-drying over a billion times in the creation of the Airblade technology. We can only imagine the prune-like fingers those poor sods must have.
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Windows 8 sales are 'on par' with Windows 7 90 days in
Sales of Windows 8 struggled out of the gate, but 90 days since its October launch, Microsoft has indicated it's moving enough new operating system licenses to equal that of Windows 7.
"More than 60 million licenses sold is on par with the record setting pace we saw with Windows 7," said Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller in an official Windows blog interview.
That figure has been aided by a Windows 8 Pro upgrade discount for US$39.99, a deal that expired on Feb. 1. The new price is US$199.99.
Microsoft has also given Windows XP holdouts a chance to upgrade, skipping over Windows Vista and Windows 7. This convenient policy continues.
A Windows into the future
Reller said in the interview that there's still more to do after Windows 8's three-month milestone, and users' demand for touch is something Microsoft and its partners will pursue. "Together, we've made progress and the trajectory of touch devices continues to grow," she said about the importance of breaking down the boundaries between PCs and tablets. "From tablets, to touch laptops, to all-in-one PCs, customer interest in new touch form factors is increasing."Eating up Windows 8 apps
In addition to driving touch, Windows 8 users have been downloading a steady number of apps. Reller noted that the Windows Store reached the 100 million mark in the first 60 days. While not everyone is making apps for the Windows Store, she said that the number of apps available has more than quadrupled since the launch of Windows 8. Reller pointed out that the Windows Store allows app builders to use their own commerce engines and keep 100 percent of their in-app sale profits, a subtle jab at Apple's policy. With Windows 8 engaging users with 45 billion unique live tile updates as of early last month, the new operating system is keeping pace with Windows 7. However, it may take hardware, like the upcoming Microsoft Surface Pro or or a rumored Surface 2 tablet, to really give the operating system a jump start versus the previous OS.
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GDC 2013: what to expect
It's almost time once again for developers, producers, manufacturers, programmers, designers, artists, audio professionals, insiders and journalists to convene in San Francisco for five days action packed, game-centric days from March 25 - March 29.
Known in long form as the Game Developers Conference, GDC is considered the largest and longest running professionals-only event in the gaming industry. This is where deals are made, new games brought to life and new systems taken on test runs.
Now in its 26th year, the 22,500-attendee strong show helps to set the tone for the indie gaming industry the whole year long. While lesser-known developers and manufacturers are given a stage all their own at GDC, this year will be markedly different thanks to two major new systems.
Not only will the PS4 and Xbox 720 dominate conversation and lord over the conference like a last-level boss, we might even get the chance to play with one of the systems for the first time following its announcement.
You'll have to read out to find out which one (don't worry, we let you know soon enough) and what else we expect to see at this year's GDC.
Playtime with PlayStation 4
Two consoles will be on everyone's mind at this year's GDC: the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720. To tackle the former first, Sony is likely planning to unveil its next-gen gaming console - known internally as "Orbis" - during a Feb. 20 event in New York City, but we expect there will be plenty of PS4 playtime at the San Fran conference. Instead of waiting until June's E3 to show off its new system, Sony is (probably) very smartly holding a standalone event to snag the world into the PS4's gravitation pull. What we expect at GDC is plenty of one-on-one time with the console - for industry insiders, developers, publishers, media, and anyone else lucky enough to attend. This should be one of the first times aside from its NYC debut that anyone gets to lay eyes and hands on the long-awaited follow up to the PS3. There's a rumor that Orbis' controller will feature a PS Vita-like trackpad, and offering developers and gaming insiders the opportunity to maneuver it, learn about it and spread the word to their gaming friends and colleagues is just what Sony needs to squeeze as much buzz out of the system as possible. Graphics for it and the Xbox 720 will also be hugely important to gaming en masse moving forward, so if Sony decides to fill out its next console with something special on the graphics front, we'll hear all about it at GDC. On the flip side, if the PS4 falls short in GPU, it could leave a lot of room for smaller systems to take charge and boost underdog games along with them. If there's not much in the games announcement department during Sony's late-February event, we expect GDC to hold the goods on just who is making games for the PS4. If people aren't talking PS4 (and Xbox 720), they'll be thinking about both, so look for announcements and ideas on development leaning heavily on the big boys.Xbox 720 talk
As of now, we don't know when the next Xbox will launch or even when Microsoft plans to unveil it. Heck, without official word from Washington, we can't even confirm that the Xbox 720 - or whatever it's called - is in the works, though there are some very strong indicators that it is. Regardless if it's announced before GDC or not, the next-gen Xbox will, along with the PS4, be the buzziest system at the conference. The same questions apply - what games will we see on it, what's are its processing power and graphics like and what does it mean for systems moving forward? There's word game developers are already fiddling with the 720, so we could hear cemented word on just what games are heading to the system during the conference. The PS4, with its probable late-February reveal, will set the bar for the Xbox 720. Can the latter live up to and even surpass its competitor? We imagine quite a few lively debates will take place on the topic. What's really interesting about the Xbox 720 (or Xbox Infinity or Durango, other names we've heard used to describe the system) is that it has the potential for gamers to continue playing on their phones, laptops and tablets. With greater mobile integration comes a whole world of possibilities and platforms for developers, artists, and audio experts, just to name a few. We could really see and hear some exciting stuff on the mobile gaming front all stemming from the possibilities afforded with a new Microsoft system. Redmond representatives will be in the building during those days, so we should be able to gather what the Softies have going for their next console as well. Check out this nifty video TechRadar put together with all that we want to see in the next Xbox:Free-to-play, not pay-to-win
When you hear the phrase Free-to-Play, what games come to mind? FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Smurfs Village? Or Team Fortress 2, League of Legends and Star Wars: The Old Republic? This year GDC will hosting a conference on the F2P model, games that don't charge players for the initial dive in, but start shaking the cup for in-game items and character progression. This business model has gained a foothold in the industry beyond games your Facebook friends spam you about. Massively multiplayer games, such as Star Trek Online and DC Universe Online, faced waning subscriber interest have found new life with a F2P option. Other games like Hawken and Monday Night Combat have been F2P from the beginning, and seem to be striking a perfect balance of offering free entry while getting players to chip in for reasonable rewards. But GDC's F2P advisory board is mostly experts from the realm of browser games. While the folks behind successful Flash titles such as Marvel Alliance and Bingo Blingo obviously understand the marketplace, we're interested in the roll F2P can have for AAA 3D titles. Valve is attending; maybe someone from the TF2 hat department can chime in?Hands free gaming developments
Handheld controllers will never go out of style, though we'll certainly see them evolve over the next several years. While we do expect there will be some intriguing ergonomic additions to the controller and keypad ecosystem demoed at GDC, we'll be especially looking for the ways users can manipulate play while keeping their hands folded, stuffed in pockets, or cradling a slice of pizza. Tobii Technology, which recently showed its hands free Windows 8 peripheral at CES 2013, is one of the listed GDC exhibitors and we anticipate good things coming from these guys. The company is one of the leading developers in eye tracking and "gaze interaction," coming up with a system so users can rely just on their eye movements to maneuver PC applications. The tech isn't just great for gamers looking for new ways to interact with their players and virtual realms - the implications for special needs users is also an exciting front for the gaming industry to explore. Tobii's influence, which looks to be taking hold, should be something the gaming industry keeps...um...an eye out for, so we anticipate others to take notice and/or show off their own tech come GDC. Here's a demo video of the eye tracking tech from Tobii as used in Angry Birds:The best of Best in Play
The GDC has always had its Game Developers Choice Awards, where games industry professionals choose the highlights of the show. Now, for the second year in a row, the GDC will kick off award season early with the Best in Play awards.
Best in Play is for independent developers to show completed or in-progress titles in February. The winners, as chosen by GDC board members and the editors of Gamasutra, will receive full access to the GDC show, and special placement at the show.
Best in Play gives indie developers a head start, and gives attendees a heads-up on great title to check out that they otherwise might have missed. We look forward to seeing the titles that make the grade.
The story of story in gaming
It seems like every year games find ways to grab players not just with visceral thrills and flashy production value, but compelling characters and situations. As gaming grows as a medium, more and more emphasis is being placed on narrative.
Do gamers need a compelling reason to go for that hard-to-reach gold coin or decapitate just one more zombie? The folks of GDC sure think so. There are a half dozen or so lectures on video game story telling, including "Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story" and "Emotional Journey: Bioware's Methods Bring Narrative into Levels."
Bioware is a real frontrunner in storytelling through gaming, but recently met with a shocking amount of flack from gamers over the conclusion of its Mass Effect trilogy. The developer actually released a downloadable addendum to the game's ending, hoping to satisfy fans with an ending-expanding prologue.
Is Mass Effect 3 a cautionary tale of placing too much emphasis on narrative? Or was it just growing pains for a maturing medium? We're curious to see if this comes up in Bioware's presentation.
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Review: Acer 7600U
Introduction
The dream of the All in One is a simple standard that's rarely achieved. A full-power "desktop-in-a-display" that is simultaneously capable of serving as a general-use computer as well as a media streaming rig. Touch screens and Windows 8 are supposed to allow grab-and-go computing as well as more traditional deeper sessions. Gaming? Previously, 3D games were a tertiary concern, but this is rapidly changing, given the power-price-performance ratios found in high-end and high-mid-range laptops courtesy of the current crop of discrete mobile graphics parts. The challenge of the All in One form-factor is that, all too often, system builders are forced to cut corners in terms of the parts they integrate in order to cram everything into a thin-enough, big-enough display.
Based on the number of average-speed All in Ones we've looked at over the years, building a lightning-fast AIO is much harder to accomplish than it sounds. You compromise power for convenience here.
Acer's relatively new 7600U All in One embodies all of the good and the bad of this increasingly important category of system. On the surface, it looks well-designed. And with such a beautiful display, it has plenty of showroom game.
Unfortunately, aside from pure media functions, just about every other dimension of this system is pokey, frustrating, and sometimes even puzzling - particularly at this price point.
The display has it
The first thing anyone notices about any All in One system is the screen. Acer acquits itself well here, with a thin (1.38 inches in middle, about 3 inches at the top), fashion-forward 1920 x 1080 LED capacitive multi-touch display. Screen quality is excellent, and easily fulfills the media center duties that All in Ones promise. This is a great display to watch HD movies and TV shows on from across the room.
Unfortunately, the standard HD resolution is not so great for general, up-close productivity—a 2560x1440 display—like Apple's latest 27-inch iMac and Dell's XPS One 27 possess—would be much more effective,. At this price point, it should have the higher resolution.
Aesthetically speaking, the design of the Aspire 7600U will probably elicit mixed reviews. With a thin, TV-style bezel, and a thin acrylic panel at the bottom of the system, it is certainly designed to look good in a living room. And while the whole acrylic/Lucite look is making a comeback in some regions, the style is not universally adored.
One really nice touch is the Aspire 7600U's flexibility. You can tilt this system down to a 30 degree angle, which makes it perfect for standing and typing using Windows 8's improved 10-point touch controls. You can also quickly and easily adjust the position of the screen, making it quite versatile in a number of environments.
Another much-appreciated and outright cool element of this AIO's design is the power socket, which is embedded into the tip of the system's stand. Very nicely done.
The Aspire 7600U's keyboard and mouse extend the acrylic-oriented design. Unfortunately, both are inferior peripherals, almost to a maddening degree. The keyboard is particularly bad, with non-responsive keys and an infuriating space bar. Yes, this is subjective, but our bet is that you'll find yourself replacing the keyboard with something else almost immediately.
Another more mild frustration: there are three sets of bright white lights on this system. The Acer logo lights up when it's on or in sleep mode. The power button stays lit when the device is off, and an odd KITT-style (from Knight Rider) series of lights dash across the top right-hand corner of the screen when the system is off. This is not the kind of AIO you can use in a bedroom.
Specifications and Performance
In the configuration we received (A7600U-UR308), the Aspire has the following core specs:•CPU: Dual-core 2.5GHz Core i5 3210M •Video: GeForce GT 640M •Memory: 8GB DDR 3 RAM •Storage: 5400RPM 1TB drive •Optical: Blu-Ray combo driveLike most AIOs, the 7600U is not configurable or customizable, but there are a few different models (A7600U-UR12, A7600U, UR-11) that step up the CPU to a dual-core 2.6GHz Core i5 3230M processor. There are also lower-powered configurations in the $1,000.00 price range that step the CPU way down to a Core i3 CPU.
On the left side of the screen, you'll find two USB 3.0 ports, mic in and mic out, and a universal card reader. On the back of the system, you'll find two HDMI in ports, one HDMI out port, a SPDIF optical audio out port, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, and two USB 2.0 ports.
A Blu-Ray drive can be found on the right side of the system, and a standard resolution webcam is placed in the usual location.
The 7600U ships with a Bluetooth 4.0 adapter. It does not come with a TV card.
Performance
Here's how the Aspire 7600U fared in our standard AIO benchmarks:3DMark 06: 10,612 Cinebench 10 single core: 4,893 Cinebench 10 multi-core: 10,260 Boot Time: 26 seconds, (+10 seconds post log-in) Call of Duty 4: 94.1 fpsAs you've probably gathered, this isn't a very fast system in terms of day to day performance… and at the just-under $2,000 price point, feels sorely underpowered. The biggest weak spot here is the under-powered Core i5 3210M processor. It just doesn't have enough gas for CPU-intensive applications and functions. It's fine for watching movies and videos, but it's not the kind of system you'd want to use for putting together home movies. Here's a reality check. In our Cinebench 10 test, which wages a relentless attack on a system's processor, a single-core of this Aspire All in One trailed the 27-inch iMac by a little under 20%. That's not great, but in Cinebench's multi-core test, Acer's Core i5 gets crushed, with a score of 10,260 compared to the 22,404 thrown down by the iMac's Core i7 processor. More concerning is that at the same price point, you can get your hands on a 3.4GHz quad-core Core i7 processor in Apple's 27-inch iMac, or a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5-3330S in Dell's XPS One 27. That's a problem. Also a problem: The Aspire 7600U's pokey 5400RPM hard drive. Yes, it's huge at 1TB of total storage. But the slow spin rate means sluggish data access rates, slower start times, and more. And, when you look at the specs (and performance) of the iMac and Dell XPS All in One mentioned above, you'll find 7800RPM drives or hybrid drives at the same price point. The Aspire's saving grace is that, because it has a high-end Kepler-based GeForce GT 640M graphics part, it holds up surprisingly well for gaming. We were even able to play Borderlands 2, although more CPU-intensive games may bog it down. Still though, provided you don't mind turning some of the details (and possibly the resolution) down, you can actually play games on this system. Unfortunately, in terms of day-to-day performance, this system actually feels worse than our benchmark numbers indicate. It's slow to start up, require 36 seconds to go from power on to completely logged in. It stutters coming out of sleep mode, which is frustrating. Switching between users feels like it takes forever in comparison to other Windows 8 systems. There are occasional hiccups when launching the web browser. And so on. A faster hard drive and a faster Core i7 processor would not only have made a big difference here, they would make this system's $1900 price tag feel appropriate.
Verdict
Solid media system, with one exception…
The nice thing about a 27-inch All in One with a few HDMI inputs is that it makes for a great console gaming screen. Also nice is the single HDMI out port, which allows for a down and dirty multi-monitor set-up. Not nice is the lack of a remote control, although the built-in webcam-based gesture controls (detailed below) are a welcome substitute. There are also plenty of iOS and Android apps that will function as a remote as well. The sound quality of the 7600U is shockingly bad for an All in One. Music, games, and even Blu-Ray movies sounded consistently thin, bright, and tinny, and lacked any substantial low-end bass response. Even after adjusting all of the settings, both real and virtual (Acer has included a virtual surround sound emulator), I still couldn't get this system to produce a level of quality sound that I could imagine myself living with on a permanent basis. Sound quality here pales in comparison to just about every other All in One I've ever tested.Bloatware, interesting webcam gesture interface
Apparently buying a Windows 8 system means that we all now face twice the amount of pre-installed bloatware as before. Acer has loaded the Aspire with a number of apps both in the Win8 shell as well as the desktop interface. Some of these are useful—Evernote, Hulu, Skype. Many are not—TuneIn Radio, Cha-Cha, a proprietary cloud-based storage solution named AcerCloud, and more. The most interesting piece of pre-installed software on this system is called PointGrab, which allows you to operate the OS with your hand. The app opens up the webcam, which automatically detects your hand (depicted by a green "X" that appears on your hand) and , more importantly, various gestures you make. We've played with webcam-based gesture controls before - the Razer Blade gaming laptop had a very basic interface that allowed you to perform a few simple gestures. PointGrab goes far beyond basic. It essentially turns your hand into the mouse. As an example, you can literally move the Windows pointer to an area or object on the screen, make a grabbing or clicking motion, and the end result will be a left click on the desired object. We'd prefer a real remote control for operating from across the room, but PointGrab doesn't take long to get used to, and seems pretty non-intrusive as it's running on your desktop.We Liked
By far, the best thing about the Acer Aspire 7600U is its crisp 27-inch display. It's true that an IPS panel feels more appropriate at this price point (Apple's iMac has one), as does support for a higher resolution than 1920x1080. But it's a large, attractive screen, and that counts for something. Additionally, the touch screen is responsive, both at the Windows 8 general interface level as well as the virtual keyboard, and the non-Win8 desktop. The ability to quickly recline this big 27-inch screen to a 30 degree angle (virtually flat) is very cool, and allows for the kinds of fast, touch-based sessions we frequently use these types of systems for. We also like the PointGrab gesture-based interface, which is a little closer to the Kinect-style UI we think All in Ones should have. It's simple, but it works well. And every time it recognizes the palm of our hand, we feel a little rush of awe. (This said, over time we found ourselves not using it as much as we expected.) How about the Aspire's design? Well, we're not totally sold. Several of our friends and family liked the airy design. Several thought it looked dated. We'll call the aesthetics a wash. At the very least, it's a conversation starter, and you can't say it's ugly. Even if it feels impossible to compete with Apple's sense of style, we're happy to see manufacturers take chances with the industrial design of their systems.We disliked
Our biggest problem with this system is that it just isn't fast enough. The 7600U's lack of pep is immediately noticeable upon start-up. And not just by us—friends and family who used the system all had the same reaction. "Is something wrong with this system? It feels slow." When civilians are saying this, you know you have a problem. When you look at a system's specifications and grow concerned, you also know you have a problem. For $1,900, you should get a lot more in terms of performance and components. This isn't just idle speculation. Apple and Dell have released systems in the same price range with finer parts. Consider Apple's $1,799 iMac:•2.9GHz quad-core Core i5 CPU •8GB memory •GeForce GTX 660M •2560x1440 IPS display •1TB 5400RPM hard drive (upgradeable to 1TB Fusion hybrid drive for $250)Now look at Dell's XPS One 27, which also costs $1,799 in this base configuration:
•2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 3330S •8GB memory •GeForce GT 640M •2560x1440 LC display •1TB 7200RPM hard driveIn both cases, $100 less gets you a faster processor and a better display, with other faster options also available on each side. The quad-core processor is the real kicker because of the advantages it affords in video processing and multi-tasking environments. Aside from the price-performance concerns, there are way too many unpolished and mid-range features here for such an expensive system. The awkward keyboard. The non-responsive power button.
Final Verdict
The 7600U is good for media, and you can play games on it. If it was a $1,300 system, this would be a far more positive review, but at $1,900 it costs too much for what you get. In terms of mid-high-end AIO design, it seems like Acer is still caught in the old AIO mentality from 3-4 years ago, which unapologetically emphasizes clever aesthetics and design over performance. Modern PC buyers are smarter than this now, particularly given the amount of time Microsoft has spent emphasizing the performance advantages of Windows 8. Finally a real-world test. Whenever we test and review an All in One, we place it front and center in the corner of our living rooms. For many of us, our significant others' reaction to the system is an important part of the process. In the case of the Acer PC? Well, they didn't care for the looks ("It's trying to hard."), and quite often they despised the performance. This doesn't count for everything, but it counts for a lot. The good news for Acer is that the path of redemption is relatively straightforward: Upgrade the CPU and hard drive in this system at the same price, and it immediately becomes an above average buy. Upgrading the display panel to IPS and moving into the performance range of GPUs moves this rig into legendary territory.
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BlackBerry Z10 selling out in UK stores
BlackBerry's Z10 smartphone is off to a flying start in the UK, according to analysts who are reporting sell-outs in several Carphone Warehouse locations.
As reported by CNET, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek has also points to O2, Vodafone, Orange, and EE stores, who are claiming strong opening sales for the new BlackBerry 10 powered handset. All up, Misek is speculating that this could equate to several hundred thousand Z10 sales in the first few days on shelves.
Pre-orders in Canada are also noteworthy, with Misek reporting that the initial sales of the Z10 on BlackBerry's home soil could approach 100,000.
Last roll of the dice?
This is great news for BlackBerry with several weeks still before the phone launches in the US; a former stronghold for BlackBerry products and services, and a market significantly larger than that in the UK and Canada. Z10 handsets are expected in North America, Australia and parts of Asia at the beginning of March. The launch of the BlackBerry 10 OS and the Z10 handset have been called BlackBerry's last chance to reenter the ever-shifting smartphone and mobile computing market, following several years of dwindling sales and plummeting share prices. The Z10 is a full-touchscreen phone designed as a direct response to the handsets that challenged the dominance of the BlackBerry brand in recent times, like Apple's iPhone. BlackBerry will also release a more familiar design with the QWERTY keyboard packing Q10, expected in April.
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Dual display Samsung Galaxy Q smartphone could unfold at MWC
Rumor has it Samsung could debut a new type of smartphone at MWC at the end of February, in the form of the Galaxy Q.
No, not the 5.3-inch Galaxy Q that popped up in 2011 - this one's got dual 1080p AMOLED displays that fold together and unfold seamlessly, according to Slashgear.
The video below, from 2008, reportedly shows an early version of the technology used to make the Galaxy Q's two screens fit together without a break. It looks pretty incredible, though back then it wasn't quite ready for public consumption.
According to reports on Monday, though, 2013 will be the year that Samsung's folding smartphone finally makes its consumer-facing debut.
Benchmarks and rumors
The folding Samsung Galaxy Q popped up on Saturday at MobileGeeks.de when a reader tipped the site off to GLBenchmark's tests of a device with the model number GT-B9150. The results reportedly match the Galaxy Q, indicating the folding phone could be nearing release. If that's the case, a debut at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona seems likely. The GLBenchmark report and previous rumors suggest that the Galaxy Q could feature two 5.3-inch 1080p AMOLED displays, a 1.7GHz dual-core Exynos processor, 2GB of memory, 8- and 2-megapixel cameras, and a 3500 mAh battery, according to SlashGear. The Galaxy Q might utilize Samsung's flexible OLED display technology as well, though that part of the story is muddled. In fact, everything about the Galaxy Q seems muddled at this point. Hopefully Samsung will lift the curtain at MWC and introduce the world to what could be the next evolution in smartphones. We'd sure like to have a try at folding it in half.
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Will the iPad mini 2 top the iPad 4 in pixel density?
It's time for everyone to act surprised as a new rumor claims that Apple's follow-up to the iPad mini will feature Retina display.
Surprising as the rumor may be, overseas investment firm Brightwire claims that manufacturer AU Optronics is working on 7.9-inch displays for the iPad mini 2.
The display is said to have a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels, with a ppi of 324, boosting its resolution well above the current iteration's 1024 x 798 screen.
Packing the screen with pixels also means a higher pixel density than even the current iPad 4, which comes in at 264ppi. That screen's resolution is, however, exactly the same as the rumored resolution for the new iPad mini.
iRumors
Shortly after the iPad mini was out in the wild rumors began popping up that Apple's next small-size tablet would feature Retina tech. The exact same 324ppi display has been on the radar since November, and AU Optronics supplied screens for the first iPad mini, so the rumor comes as little surprise. A Retina display upgrade for the next iPad mini seems like a no-brainer for Apple, especially with the iPad mini sandwiched between the Retina-equipped iPhone 5 and iPad 4. Screen production is said to be in the piloting stage, and if Apple wants to avoid the same yield issues that plagued the original mini's production, we could be looking at a late 2013 release. All that's left is a price, which hopefully will be brought down from the iPad mini's steep $329/£269/AU$369. Oh, and an official confirmation from Apple would be nice, though that may be little more than a formality at this point.
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HTC plans cheaper phones for China as Samsung and Apple dominate
Smartphones haven't penetrated far yet into China, but HTC is looking to change that in 2013 by offering its cheapest phones yet in the emerging market.
HTC Chief Financial Officer Chang Chia-Lin said in a conference call Monday that the Taiwanese company will soon begin offering smartphones for under $320 (UK£203, AU$306), the current lowest tier of HTC phone available in China.
Chang told investors that HTC will focus more on emerging markets in general in 2013. It started with Myanmar last month, and it looks like China is up next.
He said the smartphone maker wants to make prices lower, but not too low - they firm is shooting for between 1,000 and 2,000 yuan, or $160 (UK£101, AU$153) and $320 (UK£203, AU$306).
Falling fortunes
Reuters reported on Monday that HTC predicted revenue in Q1 could drop as much as 17 percent from the past three months. The company predicted first quarter revenue of T$50 billion to T$60 billion (US$1.69 billion-2.03 billion, UK£1.07 billion-1.28 billion, AU$1.61 billion-1.94 billion), compared to T$60 billion in Q4 2012 and T$65.75 billion (US$2.22 billion, UK£1.41 billion, AU$2.13 billion) one year prior. Profit margins will remain flat at best, according to the company. Hopefully HTC's M7, the company's next Android flagship, thought to be launching Feb. 19 with a release date of March 8, can help straighten things out. Chang also hinted at other new products that have yet to be announced, according to Reuters.Blame Apple and Samsung
Unsurprisingly, Apple and Samsung's increasing global dominance are likely to blame for HTC's falling fortunes. Apple's revenue in Greater China in December was up 60 percent year-over-year, to $7.3 billion (UK£4.63 billion, AU$6.99 billion). Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to continue focusing more on the region in the near future. Samsung, for its part, scored a record profit of $8.3 billion (UK£5.26 billion, AU$7.95 billion) in Q4, an 89 percent increase, Reuters reported. The Korean company recently invested $58.9 million (UK£37 million, AU$56.4 million) in Wacom, a stylus company.
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Over 270,000 rush to download just-released iOS 6 jailbreak
Though jailbreaks for the iPhone 5 were previously readily available to developers, the public at large didn't have any options for cracking Apple's restrictive iOS 6.
There had been plenty of instances of prior iPhone jailbreaks happening, but to this point, the iPhone 5 had proven particularly challenging for hackers.
However, that all changed Monday when a group known as the Evad3rs team finally released an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6 devices, including the iPhone 5, downloadable by anyone with a computer.
The Evasi0n jailbreak allows users to run and download apps not approved by Apple right alongside the regular and certified downloads already on the device.
Flood gates opened
With so many users eagerly anticipating a way to jailbreak their iPhones and iPads, Evad3r's servers were pushed to the limits as soon as Evasi0n went live. While the number of visitors currently on the group's website wasn't necessarily indicative of the number of downloads, according to one of Evasi0n's developers, some 270,000 users were active when the download went live. Shortly after, another of the Evad3r devs tweeted downloaders had burned through 1TB of data on a hosting server in just ten minutes. Based on the file size of Evasi0n, the dev estimated the file had been downloaded more than 100,000 times in that time frame. A few hours later, that same developer revealed the downloads had surpassed 4.2TB on the same server, which put the number of downloads close to 500,000.Five feet high and rising
With more and more users downloading the jailbreak, and others getting temporarily shut out due to the immense amount of downloads, there's no telling where the number will peak at the end of Evasi0n's first day. The current pace of 500,000 downloads every two hours is pretty astronomical, and isn't likely sustainable for long duration. That said, according to alternative app store Cydia, where many of Evasi0n's new users will flock for unregulated apps, there are nearly 23 million devices currently hooked into the store. Now that devices like the iPhone 5, iPad 4, and iPhone 4S can access Cydia, that ecosystem is likely to grow quite a bit in the coming days.
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Samsung's 85-inch UHD TV coming this spring, yours for just £35,000
Samsung has revealed it will be launching its gigantic Ultra High Definition S9 television in the UK within the coming months, making it the first set of its kind to be widely available in Blighty.
The 85-inch, 4K display was launched at CES 2013 last month and is almost ready for distribution across the continent, according to Samsung, which has promised a spring release in Europe.
However, as one would expect, any ultra-early adopters are going to have to part with a serious wedge in order to reap the benefits of that extra screen resolution.
The TV will cost €40,000 in the Eurozone, which translates to around £35,000 in proper money, although an official UK price is yet to be confirmed.
Make some space for a 110-incher
Samsung also confirmed on Monday that a 110-inch version of the S9 is on its way later this year as it seeks to lead the way in the UHDTV space. The company will be up against the likes of Sony, Philips and Toshiba, who all revealed 4K offerings at the Las Vegas tech extravaganza in January. The uniquely-shaped television is set in an artist's easel-style frame and will come loaded with Samsung's new Smart Hub connected TV interface, which prioritises online viewing over traditional viewing. As there's very little (read; none) Ultra High Definition content available to buyers at the moment, the Samsung S9 offers an upscaling engine that brings current HD content up to the new resolution. The 'easel' frame also contains the S9's sound system, which offers an equivalent audio experience six-times greater than a typical TV, thanks to the three-way 2.2 channels of 120 watt sound.
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Vodafone UK going all-in on Windows Phone 8 from February 6
It has taken a while, but the latest generation of Windows Phone 8 handsets from Nokia and HTC will finally be available for Vodafone customers this week.
In a post on the network's official blog on Monday, Voda revealed that the Nokia Lumia 920, Lumia 820 and Lumia 620 will all be available on pay-monthly plans from February 6.
The Nokia range will be joined on Vodafone by the flagship HTC Windows Phone 8X and 8S devices, although another notable WP8 handset, the Samsung Activ S, is missing at present.
The network had promised that WP8 devices would arrive on the network eventually, but since the launch of the new OS and its first handsets, Vodafone has been putting the devices through various network tests.
Unscathed
The post read: "Windows Phone 8 is nearly here. Since announcing that we'd be stocking the phones in a post late last year, we've been working day and night to get the new breed of Windows Phone devices through our network tests unscathed." Vodafone is yet to reveal any pricing details, but given the range of devices going on sale, it's safe to assume there'll be something to meet every budget. We're likely to learn more when the handsets are officially listed on Vodafone's online shop on Wednesday. However, If you're already hell bent on snapping up one of the flagship WP8 models, then the Nokia Lumia 920 scored slightly higher than the HTC Windows Phone 8X in their respective TechRadar reviews.
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Asus launches app-happy MeMo Pad with video rundown
While Asus just barely snuck out an announcement for the MeMo Pad last month, the firm is prepared to make a little more noise for the 7-inch tablet's launch today.
The firm officially launched the MeMo Pad today, and Asus is marking the occasion with a video overview of the tablet's features.
The video mostly highlights a range of pre-installed apps, like Asus Studio photo editing, BudyBuzz social media manager, MyPainter, SuperNote Lite, and Floating App for multitasking.
The video also delves into some of the tablet's more attractive hardware features, including 5GB of cloud storage from Asus that can be used to sync data between a PC and the MeMo Pad.
The other 7-inch Asus tablet
The focus on apps over hardware might have to do with the MeMo Pad not exactly being a powerhouse of a tablet, a sort of smoke and mirrors to distract from the less than stellar specs. It's equipped with a 7-inch 1024 x 600 display, a VIA WM8950 1GHz Mali 400 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 1-megapixel front-facing camera, and a microSD card expansion slot. Not exactly world shattering. That's a far cry from Asus' other 7-inch tablet, the Nexus 7, though it's still running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and has a powerful 4270mAh battery, so the MeMo Pad can hold its own for everyday usage. The MeMo Pad is priced at a budget-friendly US$149, and comes in gray, white, and pink. Though Asus says the tablet is launching today, it does not seem to be available for sale anywhere quite yet.
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Nokia CEO gives notice Windows tablets could be in pipeline
Finnish smartphone maker Nokia is firmly committed to Windows Phone, but recent comments made by its CEO suggest that tablets also powered by Microsoft's OS could be another point of interest for the company.
The Australian Financial Review reported Monday that Nokia might be poised to enter the increasingly crowded tablet market, judging from comments made by company chief Stephen Elop while speaking to reporters in Sydney.
While making it clear that Nokia has yet to make any formal decision let alone announce or launch a tablet, Elop did refer to such devices as complementary to its current Windows Phone products.
"We haven't announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely," the CEO said. "We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time."
Learning from Microsoft
Elop made it clear his company favors partnering with Microsoft, though a public relations executive reminded him that, again, nothing formal has been decided. "We would consider any option [Android or Windows]… It is important to note that the opportunity for companionship is something that any user is looking for," the CEO said. Android may not be a serious contender for Nokia, as the CEO appears to have no regrets 2 years after hitching his wagon to Microsoft - the company where Elop previously headed up the Office business division. "Our first focus on what we look at is clearly in the Microsoft side," Elop explained, noting that Nokia is watching and waiting to see what lessons might be learned from Microsoft's own Surface tablets. "When you think about the Lumia 920 running on Windows Phone, having a Windows tablet or PC or Xbox is something that will give us the opportunity to have a pretty integrated experience," the executive concluded.
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Updated: HTC M7 release date, news and rumours
What's that coming over the hill? Another monster smartphone, you say? Well, you may just be right as word continues to spread about the HTC M7.
The HTC One X and One X+ look to be on their way out at the top of the Taiwanese firm's tree, with the M7 the hotly-tipped successor.
HTC is looking to break the dominance enjoyed by Samsung and Apple over the past year and recapture the success it had with the original Desire.
Although not officially announced, HTC boss Peter Chou has already flashed us the M7 briefly during an appearance at the firm's end of year party in Taipei.
HTC M7 release date
Originally the HTC M7 was rumoured to make an appearance at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, but alas those reports didn't come to fruition. It now looks like the HTC M7 launch has been set in stone with the Taiwanese firm sending out invitations to events in both London and New York scheduled for February 19. Although the invite itself gives nothing away, TechRadar sources have said that this is indeed the HTC M7 launch event and the handset will be the firm's next flagship smartphone. It's interesting that HTC has decided to announce the M7 before MWC 2013 begins in Barcelona later in the month… clearly the Taiwanese firm is worried about being lost in the noise by revealing the handset amid the fervour in Spain. As far as the M7 release date is concerned it looks like we'll only have to wait a couple of weeks for the handset to land in stores, with the latest rumours suggesting it will touch down on March 8.HTC M7 price
The HTC M7 is going to be a flagship smartphone and therefore will carry a flagship (read: expensive) price tag. Expect the M7 to set you back a similar amount to the Sony Xperia Z, Samsung Galaxy S3, iPhone 5 and co, so you may want to start saving now.HTC M7 screen
Early rumours suggested that the HTC M7 would roll up with a 5-inch display, which would have put it firmly in competition with the Xperia Z, Huawei Ascend D2 and ZTE Grand S. This no longer seems to be the case with a number of subsequent reports all pointing towards a 4.7-inch display - which is the same size as the screen on the One X and One X+. The key difference is that the M7 display will have a full HD 1080p resolution, which still makes as, if not more, attractive compared with the three 5-inch handsets mentioned above.HTC M7 operating system
Leaked images of the HTC M7 along with various rumours all point towards the handset running Android Jelly Bean, which certainly is no great surprise - although we're not sure if it will be version 4.1 or 4.2. More interestingly some reports suggest that the arrival of the HTC M7 will also see the launch of a new version of HTC's famed Android overlay - Sense 5.0. The current iteration of Sense is version 4+ which arrived alongside One X+ (see what they did there), so we wouldn't be surprised if a more major overhaul was on the cards. This thinking was then backed up a few days later when screenshots appeared online claiming to show off Sense 5.0, sporting a more streamlined homescreen and cleaner approach.
HTC M7 processor
No surprise in the power department as we hear the HTC M7 processor will be a Qualcomm 1.7GHz quad-core offering, which will provide more than enough get up and go for Android Jelly Bean. It looks set to be a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 PRo offering with 2GB of RAM behind it to ensure everything keeps ticking over nicely.HTC M7 specifications
As well as the hotly tipped full HD display, quad-core processor and Jelly Bean platform the HTC M7 is also expected to pack some other treats. According to HTCSource and UnviewedView round the back you'll probably find a 13MP with modes such as HDR and slow-motion, while the front of the M7 will play home to a 2MP snapper. And there's a strong rumour that HTC will be breaking new ground on the camera phone with the introduction of Ultrapixels bringing more colourful and sharper images than ever before, thanks to packing three sensors under the hood. UnwiredView goes on to claim the HTC M7 will feature 4G connectivity, next-gen Wi-Fi technology and Beats Audio from Dr. Dre. In terms of storage the M7 is looking set to pack 32GB and follow in the footsteps of the flagship One X, One X+ and 8X with no expandable storage option. Battery life in HTC's flagship smartphones has come under scrutiny recently and we hope the rumoured 2,300mAh power pack, which would be the biggest battery the firm has put in a smartphone to date, will be able to cut the mustard. The high resolution display and powerful processor of the M7 does leave us a little worried, so fingers crossed the Taiwanese firm has done it power consumption sums if this is true.HTC M7 case
We've seen a few images pop up online claiming to be the HTC M7 and while none of them can be taken as gospel, it looks like the new flagship will follow in the design footsteps of the HTC 8X. The first snap of the M7 came from Unwired and claims to be a render taken from a short instructional video - although if you look at the later images this design looks to be off the mark.
Next up was a more official looking press shot claiming to be for the HTC M7, with the design of its Windows Phone 8 touting brother the 8X apparent.
The smooth curved back, less flamboyant camera and squarer finish is one we're fond of, and if this shot turns out to be legit the M7 could be one fine looking smartphone.
A video apparently showing the rear case of the HTC M7 then popped up a week later, comparing the supposed shell to that of the One X and the newer Droid DNA with the M7 sporting the most similarities with the latter.
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HTC M7 hails the end of megapixels on cameraphones
The forthcoming HTC M7 could be set to bring a new standard to photography on Android phones.
According to Pocket-Lint the Taiwanese firm is looking to ditch the standard camera sensor with ever-increasing MP counts to integrate three sensors running at 4.3MP each.
Every pixel would then be shot three times, with the resulting images combined and processed to bring the best image possible, in a similar manner to the Nokia PureView technology.
This 'pixel oversampling' would lead to higher quality images in both colour saturation and clarity, and allow for a greater ability to digitally zoom into images as well.
Bigger isn't always better
HTC has been putting a lot of effort into its cameraphones in recent years as it seeks to offer consumers something different in the face of overwhelming competition from Samsung and Apple. There's no confirmation that 'Ultrapixel' will be the final name of the technology, but it seems unlikely HTC will want to promise a megapixel count in the same way as Nokia's 41MP-toting 808 Pureview, in a bid to streamline its message. It's another exciting update for the forthcoming HTC M7, whichever way you look at it. The new sensor may then be used on other handsets too, but we'd imagine that won't happen until the company has had time to bed in the technology on its flagship device.
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Samsung F8500 LED TV will hit the UK in March
Not sure what to watch on the box? Well next month Samsung will start selling a set that'll recommend what you might like, based on your viewing habits.
Known as S-Recommendation, the feature is part of the new Smart Hub user interface, found on Samsung's flagship F8500 LED TV, which will hit the UK in March.
The set was unveiled at CES last month, but this is the first we've heard of a UK release date. We've contacted Samsung for a price, and will update this story when we hear back.
S-Recommendation will scour broadcast TV, video-on-demand, apps, social content, and anything you've downloaded to your personal devices to find something suitable.
It'll have Siri-style skills too, so it'll recognise what you're saying and find the relevant show or film, meaning you don't have to type. Which should save valuable telly-watching time.
"Magnum" design
The F8500 is quite a looker, with what Samsung calls its "premium Magnum design". Basically, the TV frame and stand are a single structure, with a naturally-curved back made of the same material. The new Smart Hub features five panels: OnTV; Movies and TV Shows; Photos, Videos and Music; Social; and Apps. The user interface also works across tablets, so you can schedule and watch shows on your portable device.
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Aspect Software signs deal with eg solutions
Aspect Software, a provider of customer contact and enterprise workforce optimisation solutions, has signed a strategic partnership and re-seller agreement with eg solutions, a producer of back office optimisation software.
In addition, Aspect Software UK has agreed to take stake in eg solutions. The agreement is to last for three years and to automatically renew for successive one year periods unless 90 days' notice of termination is given.
Aspect will work jointly with eg solutions in the European market, and integrate eg operational intelligence software with its eWorkforce Management and Performance Management products to provide a single back office optimisation solution. It will also provide training and sales support.
Spence Mallder, Chief Technology Officer at Aspect said: "Aspect will now be able to seamlessly orchestrate the people and processes that flow within and between the back office and front office to optimise how service is delivered. eg's domain expertise in the back office, along with the most open and flexible work distribution solution on the market, made them a natural strategic partner for Aspect."
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Samsung selling three TVs every second
Forget the Galaxy S4, the next big thing in tech is… home appliances. That's according to Samsung President BK Yoon who spoke at the Samsung EU Forum in Monaco today.
Samsung already owns the living room, claimed Yoon. "Three Samsung TVs are sold every second," he said. "And in 2012 we made $184bn in sales. We invest $9bn every year in R&D to develop the next big products."
For reasons that are unlikely to become clear anytime soon, TechRadar found itself at Samsung's home appliances press conference in Monte Carlo, where the Korean company launched products including the new eco bubble washing machine, a new fridge and a robotic vacuum cleaner.
The Samsung press conference, which involved some bizarre role playing from American actors, was designed to illustrate Samsung's belief that high tech is expanding from consumer electronics into the home appliances business.
Home is where the corporate growth is
"We think innovation is truly the key to our company's success," said Yoon. "That's how we are able to bring the world's first, best and amazing products to the market. We believe that the next big thing is home appliances. Why? Because the home is the most important place for all of us, in each country, in each culture. "We want to make your home more pleasant and more enjoyable. We must understand the need of consumers around the globe." TechRadar's inexplicable presence at the event – which awarded each attendee a patchwork knot bookmark – was made worthwhile with the unveiling of Samsung's new "grab and go" plastic basket which comes part and parcel with its new fridge. That's a condiments tray to you and me, and worth every penny of the R&D invested in it.
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Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 looks to be on the cards
It looks like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 is alive in an 8-inch variant, according to benchmark results showing up online.
We've already heard plenty of rumours surrounding the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, but the Korean firm doesn't seem content with just one slate at this size.
Word on the web seems to suggest that Samsung is lining up a trio of tablets under the Galaxy Tab 3 moniker and GLBenchmark has now providing another piece to the puzzle.
What can you bench?
According to the benchmark results for a device going by the model number GT-P3200, Samsung's second new 8-inch slate will sport a 800 x 1280 resolution, 1.5GHz processor and Android Jelly Bean, version 4.2.1. You'll need to take this information with the recommended sodium chloride as benchmarks can be faked, but a third generation of Galaxy Tabs arriving this year isn't hard to believe. Samsung is expected to launch a host of new devices at MWC 2013 in Barcelona - or possibly even sooner - and TechRadar will be there keeping an eye out for the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 and co.
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HTC admits sales woes are partly its own fault
Can things get much worse for HTC? The Taiwanese phone firm is expected to announce its profits have fallen 90 per cent in the last three months of 2012.
It's not the only bad figure either. Revenue is expected to drop 17 per cent in the three months to the end of March, which is worse than analysts predicted.
HTC reckons its first quarter revenue will be between NT$50 billion and NT$60 billion ($1.69 - $2.03 billion, £1.07 - £1.29 billion), which is below the analysts' forecast of NT$62.77 billion. Gross profit is expected to stay pretty flat or decline marginally on the last three months of 2012.
"Not enough marketing"
HTC's CEO Peter Chou blamed the sales slump on strong competition and a lack of marketing. "Our competitors were too strong and very resourceful, pouring in lots of money into marketing," he told the Wall Street Journal. "We haven't done enough on the marketing front." He said 2013 "would not be too bad" for the company. HTC is set to unveil its M7 handset at an event ahead of Mobile World Congress. Though Peter Chou has already taken to the stage to show off the device. It promises to be the new flagship, challenging the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5. Via BBC, ZDNet, Reuters
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In Depth: Beyond gadgets: what's next for wireless power?
The surprise hit of this year's CES was wireless charging - and the technology is set for a major boost during the remainder of 2013.
Nokia, LG, HTC, Motorola and Samsung have already put Qi standard wireless power receivers into recent phones like the Lumia 920 as well as Bluetooth headsets.
Nokia promised last year that US coffee chain Coffee Bean would offer wireless charging points in its tables and the Las Vegas store marks the fifth US city to get them. You can borrow a charging case or micro USB adapter if your phone doesn't have Qi built in.
Buying a whole new wireless charger might seem like a waste when you get a wired charger free with your phone.
If you have one of iDAPT's handy multiple charging bases which have interchangeable tips to charge three or four devices at once, the company will soon have a $60 module that adds Qi charging. You can slot it onto the charging base – or use it to turn your existing charger into a Qi charging pad.
The other approach is to put a Qi charger into something you're already plugging in – like a Bluetooth wireless speaker. Put your phone on top of TDK's new Wireless Charging Cube and it uses NFC to pair the two, Bluetooth to stream your music and Qi to charge your phone. By CES 2014 we're expecting to see almost anything you plug in, from a speaker to a lamp to a set-top box to have a Qi charging point built in.
Pretty soon, that will also include your tablet. Fulton (who has developed many of the components that put Qi into devices like the Lumia 920) showed us a modified Galaxy Tab with a two-way wireless power antenna inside.
It charges wirelessly from a medium-power charging pad (which goes up to 15W) but when you turn it over, you can charge your phone or your Bluetooth headset wirelessly from the tablet. That way, you can boost whichever device you need to use most.
The medium power wireless charging specification is almost finished and tablets and tablet charging pads should be out this year. It's powerful enough that you don't have to worry about getting devices aligned as precisely with the charging coil in the pad (which can be almost as fiddly as plugging in a cable) and they can be an inch or two above the pad as well (in a case or bag, for example).
The second version of the medium power spec will cover laptops and power tools, with charging pads delivering 80-100W. After that comes the high power specification, which will let you run kitchen appliances like blenders – and once you've put a wireless power point into your worktop to power a blender, you can use it to charge your laptop or phone as well.
For lower power devices, like AA batteries, Fulton can print the entire charging coil and connector with conductive ink on paper. We saw a demo of a printed business card with an e-ink panel that light up when we put the card on a wireless charging point.
That means you could print a wireless charging receiver onto the label that the manufacturer wraps around a standard rechargeable battery – turning it into a wireless rechargeable battery that fits anywhere a normal battery does, like an Xbox controller or your TV remote. And now that you don't have to have the receiver right on top of the charging pad, you'll be able to recharge those batteries without having to take them out of whatever you're powering.
Qi isn't the only way to deliver power wirelessly. Australian company Power by Proxi is hoping to turn wireless charging upside down with a system that also doesn't make you to line your device up neatly on a charging point, or take the batteries out of devices like toys and remote controls.
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Giant Huawei Ascend Mate gets average-size price tag
The first cost indication for the gigantic Huawei Ascend Mate has popped up online, suggesting a highly affordable price tag.
Chinese site Liaow has published a pre-order page for the 6.1-inch Ascend Mate with a speculative price of $575 (around £366/AU£550).
That would make the Ascend Mate significantly cheaper than its closest rival the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 2 which currently sells for around $700/£470/AU$999. However, let's not get too ahead of ourselves here, as the Chinese price will probably carry some hefty tax and other price hikes when it makes it way across the waters, so the Huawei Ascend Mate could cost significantly more when it appears.
Bang for your buck
Huawei launched the Ascend Mate at CES 2013 in Las Vegas and as well as the massive 6.1-inch IPS+ HD display the huge handset also packs a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 32GB of internal storage, 8MP camera, 4,050mAh battery and Android Jelly Bean. This means you'll get a lot of bang for your buck and anyone who's been tempted by the Galaxy Note 2 but put off by its lofty price tag may be licking their lips at Huawei's proposition. During our hands on Huawei Ascend Mate review we noted that the smartphone did feel a little slow under thumb, not to mention the sheer size of the thing which makes it tricky to grasp.
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PS Vita gets an Ice Silver makeover, will hit Asia this month
PlayStation fans have more than one reason to celebrate this month. Not only is Sony expected to announce the PS4 in just a couple of weeks, it's also bringing a new version of its PS Vita handheld to Asia at the end of the month.
The Ice Silver edition of the PS Vita joins the ranks of the blue, red and white hues we've already seen. It'll hit Asia on February 28.
It'll cost HK$2,280 ($294, £187) in Hong Kong, and is also promised to come to Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Apart from the new colour, the handheld remains the same as the standard black PS Vita.
Other PlayStation news
There's no word on whether the silver colour will reach other parts of the world. Sony has already teased a major announcement for February 20, involving the PlayStation symbols, and inviting us to "see the future". Which hints quite heavily that we could be seeing the PS4. Which would cast quite a shadow over a new colour of PS Vita, admittedly. The PS4 is rumoured to have an eight-core AMD CPU, AMD graphics, and more grunt than the Xbox 720. According to other rumours, the PS4 controller could have a Vita-esque touchpad where the Start, Select and PlayStation buttons are, opening up the gaming potential. Via Engadget
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Review: Updated: Office 2013
Introduction
Microsoft Office has changed. It's not just that Office 2013 gets the Windows 8 treatment, with a touch-friendly interface and a sparser look, as well as new features in every application. Office is also going to the cloud, with subscription pricing, on-demand installation and automatic syncing of settings and documents you save in the cloud – if you want to pay for it that way. As usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this time around the different editions are not just about whether you're using them at home or in a business or which applications are included.
Buying Office 2013
As usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this time around the different editions are not just about whether you're using them at home or in a business or which applications are included. Even if you decide you want to buy a pay-for-it-once-and-keep-it copy of Office 2013 in a box, you won't find a DVD inside – just a product key to unlock the software you download. (Buyers in "developing countries with limited internet access" can still get a DVD, but that's not an option in the UK or US.) If you prefer to pay an annual subscription to get extra features, Office 365 editions let you download the Office 2013 applications onto multiple PCs (or share them with your family). For home users, there are four options. Buy the boxed software and you can put it on one PC. Office Home and Student 2013 with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote costs £109.99/$139.99; Office Home and Business 2013 adds Outlook and costs £219.99/$219.99. Office Professional 2013 has the full set of programs for £389.99/$399.99; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher. Then there's the new subscription version that Microsoft released this week, Office 365 Home Premium, which costs you $99.99 a year for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher. That's good value if you share it with the family; up to five people in the same household can have their own installations of Office on their PC or Mac at the same time (for the Office programs that run on a Mac – and Mac users get the current version of Office for Mac until a new release comes along in the future). And when the next version of Office comes out, you'll get it on the same subscription. All five people get an extra 20GB of storage on SkyDrive to keep documents on and 60 free Skype world calling minutes a month (which can be calls to a landline or a mobile and from your PC or from a smartphone with Skype installed).
You can download the Office programs temporarily on another PC if you're away from your usual PC (even if it already has another version of Office installed). So if you have a document on a USB drive or on SkyDrive that you need to edit on another PC, and using the Office Web Apps from SkyDrive doesn't provide of the features you need (like seeing revision marks in a tracked document you're collaborating on), you can use Office on Demand to get the full version of Word in just a few minutes.
You manage all this from the revamped Office.com and there's a link to your account there in the ribbon of all the Office applications. (To activate the Skype minutes you have to link your account to the Microsoft account you're using for Office 365, which can be done on the Office.com site.)
You also get a list of your recently edited documents, which helps when using Office on Demand to give it a fresh edit.
If you're at college or university (or you teach at one) it's possible to get Office 365 University on a four-year subscription for $79.99 that you can use on up to two PCs or Macs.
Also, as you might expect, Office 2013 and Office on Demand only run on Windows 7 and 8, not on XP or Vista.
Office for business
Although Office 365 Home Premium might also sound like a great deal for a small business, it's not licensed for commercial use (Like the Windows RT versions of Office 2013) unless you already have an Office business licence. Instead, you need one of the Office 365 business subscriptions, available from February 27. These will include the new Office 2013 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online, which are already available to run on your own servers. It's taking some time for Microsoft to upgrade Office 365 to run these new server versions, which explains the later availability (there are a number of issues in SharePoint the Office 365 team is working on). We've tried these out with the Office 2013 applications (and we looked at SharePoint Online 2013 in more detail here. Office 365 Small Business Premium includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Lync. The annual $149.99 subscription lets you run them on up to five PCs or Macs at once (again, you can use Office on Demand to download Office to any PC you're using temporarily, and you get regular updates and new features). You can host online meetings with audio and HD video conferencing in Lync and run a public website on SharePoint, plus you get Exchange with a 25GB mailbox for each user and SkyDrive Plus storage on SharePoint. That gives you 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra 500MB for each user, but you can choose how the storage is allocated between users and you can control how they use it – like forcing them to encrypt confidential documents. Office 365 ProPlus (short for Professional Plus), is aimed at midsize businesses (10-250 employees) and includes the same desktop Office software as Small Business Premium. But it also has tools for business intelligence, consistency checking to Excel and automated deployment, as well as more options for the SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services. Office 365 Enterprise has the full Office 2013 set of features in the desktop software and SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services, like archiving, legal hold, Data Loss Prevention and rights management to protect confidential information. If you're looking for five or more copies of Office 2013 and you don't want the Office 365 services at all, you can buy Office Standard 2013 (with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Publisher, the Office Web Apps and limited Lync, SharePoint and rights management services) or Office Professional Plus 2013 (with the full range of desktop Office programs and server features) through volume licensing. We've already looked at the final (RTM) version of the Office 2013 applications. Now we've been able to try out the Office 365 Home Premium service with the new Office.com site, where you can download some of the new Office apps (although the apps for Outlook won't work until you have Exchange 2013).Installing Office 2013
With any of the Office 365 subscription version of Office 2013, you don't have to worry about downloading and saving a large installer for Office (or even about uninstalling previous versions of Office, apart from Outlook). Whether you start the download from the Office 365 site or you try to open an Office document on a PC that doesn't have Office, the programs stream from the cloud. This is a much improved version of the click-to-run virtualisation that Microsoft has used for the Office trial versions for a few years, which enables you to start using the applications just a few minutes after you download them. You don't have to wait for the full download; you can use the first features as soon as they download and if you click on a tool that hasn't yet downloaded, the installer will get that next.
The streaming happens quickly enough that the slideshow of new features you can watch while the other applications install is actually running in PowerPoint (and you don't have to watch it unless you want to).
You do have to pick a few options like the language to use for Office, the design you want to see in the ribbon and whether you want to send Microsoft anonymous telemetry about how you use Office. You can also fill in your Microsoft account details, which Office uses to sync settings like recent documents from SkyDrive, email accounts, custom AutoCorrect entries, the list of your Office Apps and the buttons you add to the Quick Access Toolbars.
It might seem odd to sign in with your Microsoft account on the Office.com site and then get asked for it during installation, but this is how you share the subscription; use the account that's paying for the licence to log in to Office.com, start the download, then sign in with the account of the person who will be using Office on each PC.
It's all very simple and very well thought out. This is your personal version of Office, on any PC, a lot faster. If you've downloaded the Customer Preview of Office 2013 you've tried this already. (The traditional Office desktop installer uses similar technology so the installation is faster there as well.)
Office 365 Home Premium adds several more designs that you can use to decorate the Office ribbon, including doodled circles, lunchbox sandwiches, pens and pencils, cartoon fish and spring leaves. It's a little odd, but there's something for most tastes (including a blank ribbon).
Once the programs are installed you can also choose from three Office themes (click your account picture at the top of the screen and choose Account Settings or open File > Account. The default white gives you the clean look you might have seen in the Customer Preview or in Office RT; pale Ggrey adds a light tint to the ribbon and other panes and dark grey is a high contrast colour scheme that puts a mid grey on the ribbon and panes and replaces most of the accent colours in each application with a very dark grey.
If you're not a fan of the new Windows 8 look, experiment with the themes to see if an alternative changes your mind.
Word 2013
Office 2013 takes the clean, unadorned principles of what used to be called Metro design and applies Office 2013 takes the clean principles of the Microsoft Design Language and applies them to desktop apps. This puts your documents centre stage, with tools such as the ribbon fading slightly into the background. The ribbon looks much more spacious but takes up no more space on screen. Office 2013 is also designed to showcase Windows 8 and the touch features (the same is true of the Windows RT versions). Even the desktop apps are ready for touch. Press the Touch Mode button that Office automatically puts on the quick address toolbar if your PC has a touchscreen and the layout of the interface changes, with bigger buttons and more space to touch them without pressing the wrong thing. In the final version of Office 2013 this is a big improvement on the version you may have tried in the Customer Preview. Instead of a fiddly and confusing little round button it's a clear pointing finge. Tapping it brings up a mini menu explaining the differences – on big icons that you can easily press with your finger.
It's not perfect but it makes Office 2013 far more touch friendly but not too big and chunky to be efficient when you use mouse and keyboard.
These are several improvements to the ribbon compared to Office 2010. Word has a new Design tab on the ribbon, which is a more logical place for the formatting and page background tools previously found on the Page Layout tab.
If you've seen the preview of Office 2013, the final version of the ribbon has some other subtle changes, making some of the tool icons clearer and crisper. The icons for the individual programs have also been redesigned to look better on the tiles of the Windows 8 Start screen.
The layout features are far better than in Word 2010; you can now embed videos directly into Word documents, or search your Facebook and Flickr accounts for photos to place in documents without having to save them first. These are both well designed, easy to use tools.
Getting your pictures in the right place is much easier with the new alignment guides that appear as you drag objects around (so you can see when the object is in the centre of the page or lined up with another element), and the layout options tool that appears so you can set text wrap.
The alignment guides make it much easier to tweak Word Art quickly, instead of spending hours adjusting spacing and sizes if the default Word Art layout doesn't fit what you want to show.
The improved layout options may be why the new PDF reflow feature works so well. This opens PDF files as if they're Word files – converting the layout so you get a Word document that looks like the original PDF, complete with fonts, layout, images, tables, charts and page numbers and making it all editable. This is fast (for a two-page file it takes only a few seconds longer than opening the PDF in Acrobat Reader) and remarkably accurate.
One option, Read Mode, removes most of the Word interface, reflowing documents to fit on screen with thumb-friendly buttons either side of the page. You can choose wide or narrow columns and set the page colour to sepia or even white on black. Tap on pictures, videos and charts to pop them out of the page in a larger window, or collapse sections you're not interested in (you can do that in page layout view as well).
But cleaning up the interface also means losing some useful tools; the handle that you can drag in Word to divide the document window into two scrolling panes (so you can see two separate sections of your document on screen at once) disappears, relegated to a button on the View ribbon so it takes twice as many clicks to get the split view.
Maybe you won't need it as often with the handles that enable you to collapse sections of your document under their headings or the vastly improved Navigation pane that turns document headings into a handy outline (you can even drag sections around in the pane). But when you do it shouldn't be more work than it used to be.
Also, the AutoCorrect features have disappeared from the menu when you right-click a spelling mistake; you have to go all the way into Word's huge Options dialogue to add corrections you want to use. Handy tip: if you're one of the handful of people who add their own AutoCorrect entries, pin the AutoCorrect dialogue to the Quick Access Toolbar on the ribbon.
Office 2013 seems to be designed for widescreen tablets: for example, task panes are back. In what feels like a flashback to Windows XP, dialogues such as spell check sit at the side of your screen rather than floating over the document and obscuring a few lines.
Install a dictionary app from the Store on Office.com and you get definitions and synonyms for words below the spelling suggestions. This is useful, but is it worth that much screen space? On a high resolution screen on a 16:9 tablet, these panes at the side work well; on an older notebook your screen starts to feel cramped.
Thankfully, you can undock the Spelling dialogue and drag it around (and Office remembers your preference), but the default is for Office applications to spread out on screen and get comfortable rather than to cram in all the information and functions you're used to in the same small space. The newer your PC, the more you will like this.
The new interface is great on a touch-friendly widescreen tablet with the 1366 resolution you need for Windows 8 and space to spare (and even better at the 1920 resolution of a high end notebook), but it's a step backwards for working on multiple documents on a low resolution notebook or desktop.
Snap two windows open side by side and press F7 to start the spell check. In Word 2013, on a 12-inch 1024 x 768 screen, the 5-inch snapped window sacrifices 1.75 inches of space to the spelling task pane. Add the navigation pane and you see only a thin strip of your document in between. Do the same thing on an 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 tablet and you won't find much to complain about.
Mostly the space is very well used. If you collaborate on documents with others, using tracked changes and comments, the improvements to these are extremely welcome and can save you hours of frustration. Instead of turning the page into a sea of red strikeouts and blue underlines to show deleted and inserted text, there's a new Simple Markup view that shows you the final version of the document with a line in the margin to show where there are edits.
Click it to see the details of those changes (which turns on the old All Markup view); click it again to hide the changes and keep reading. A speech bubble shows where there are comments to read; click to open a floating comment view that you can drag around the page, or switch to All Markup and see the comments in a wide margin at the edge of the document.
You can finally leave a reply to a comment rather than just leaving a comment nearby, and you can mark a comment as dealt with. This greys out the comment so it's not distracting, but it's still there if you need to refer back to it later.
If you're collaborating on a large document, Word 2013 (on a high resolution screen) is hands down the best way to do it, especially as having your document on SkyDrive or SharePoint means multiple people can edit it at the same time (they can't change the paragraph you're working on and you don't see their changes until you save when they're highlighted in green, so the page won't ever change without you knowing about it.)
Excel 2013
Excel gets the same interface changes as the rest of Office and some of the same features (the dialogue for inserting images from the web that's also in Word and PowerPoint and the apps for Office gallery, but not Word's new comment interface). And like Word, Excel offers more help for using existing features as well as some very powerful new ones. Select a range of cells with numbers and the Quick Analysis tool pops up next to the selection with a gallery of conditional formatting, the charts that show the most information from that specific data, formulas, table formats and in-cell sparklines. Hover over an option and you see it either in your data (for formulas such as average or heat map formatting that highlights the highest and lowest figures) or in a pop-up for charts. The categories are always the same, but the suggested charts change to match the information you're showing – with your live data previewed in the chart and an explanation of why a Clustered Column and Line chart or a Stacked view fits your data best. If the data is complex enough to analyse with a PivotTable, it can build a PivotTable model automatically. This Chart Advisor comes from Microsoft Research and a prototype appeared on the Office Labs, but it's much more useful to have it integrated with the other analysis tools in Excel.
It's a baby version of the intelligence built into analysis tools such as Tableau – it doesn't go as far as suggesting colour palettes for example – but it makes complex tools such as Pivot Tables (possibly the most powerful and least used feature in Excel) far more accessible, and helps to get the chart right first time.
If you do need to edit a chart, the contextual tools that pop up make it faster and easier; you can preview different designs and checkboxes add and remove chart elements or sections of data interactively. This takes something you've always been able to do in Excel - if you had unlimited patience and unerring accuracy at right-clicking on just the right spot in the chart – and makes it easy and engaging.
Change the data that a chart is based on and the chart doesn't just update, it animates to show the change happening. If the new figures are significantly bigger, first the rest of the chart shrinks, then the new bars grow on screen. Update a single figure and the line moves up or down to its new position, so you can't miss the impact.
Even as you move between cells or add a figure that changes a formula, there are subtle animations to draw your eye to what's changed or to where the cursor has moved.
It's not enough to be annoying, because the animation is less animated close to the change. Click a cell and the highlight appears to fly into place, leading your eye there; change or delete a figure that changes a calculation and the result rolls over to show the new figure.
This makes it much harder to change or delete information that changes your results without noticing that it makes a difference. It's simple but makes Office feel alive and responsive, and conveys useful information.
Even error messages are more useful; drag a cell across the worksheet when you only meant to click somewhere else and Excel gives you a truly informative warning that there's already data in that cell. It shouldn't be a breakthrough, but in the past Excel has been more prone to bald refusals to save or confusingly cryptic errors – this is, mostly, a new and friendlier Excel.
If you want to dig further into your data, there are several new tools, including a Timeline slicer that organises data by date so you can filter down to a specific period or jump through figures month by month to see the differences.
There's a new add-in to look for errors and inconsistencies between worksheets and Power View – which used to be a Silverlight-based web tool for exploring and visualising data that you could use with SharePoint or save as PowerPoints – is now in Excel where it belongs. It's not relegated to a separate window; when you insert a Power View you get a new tab and the tools for pivoting and filtering data, plus simple layout options.
Of course the first problem is getting data into Excel. If you're trying to paste it in from a badly formatted report or an online credit card statement, the new Flash Fill feature is vastly easier than trying to work out how to split data into columns in just the right place.
Paste in the messy data, then start typing the piece of information you want to extract, such as the date or the name of the company you made the payment to (without the unwanted details such as the business number or foreign currency). It feels very good.
After you type a couple of examples, Flash Fill uses them as a template and works out the right pattern – and fills in all the other entries for you. You can extract multiple patterns from the data, so you can get the date, the business name and the amount, all by typing a couple of examples.
Again, this is a feature from Microsoft Research using machine learning. It's the kind of artificial intelligence that websites such as Tripit use to scrape information out of emails and web pages. It's enormously powerful, and it's blissfully simple to use. And it's not often you can say that about Excel.
PowerPoint 2013
The uncluttered new interface works very well in PowerPoint; again the tools fade into the background so you can concentrate on your document. Like all the Office 2013 applications, when you open PowerPoint you don't go straight to a blank document; instead you get what's almost a welcome page with a list of recent documents and thumbnails for templates and themes (and a blank document if that's what you want).
You can search the library of free templates on the Office site from here. The results come up in what Microsoft used to call the 'backstage' view – the full-screen File menu – and you can preview the layout, filter the results by various categories and keyboards, or even look at the templates for other Office applications.
Many of the templates have multiple colour themes to choose from; whichever one you pick to start with you can switch to the other variants later. As with the rest of Office 2013, a lot of the new templates are optimised for widescreen aspect ratios, like the 16:9 tablets Microsoft hopes you'll buy to use Windows 8.
If you're going back to a document you've worked on, before both PowerPoint and Word make it faster to pick up where you left off; just click the pop-up window to jump to the last slide or page you were working on. This really works when you use Office (or SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps) on multiple PCs (or on your PC and your Surface) and you can start from where you were working on a different machine.
For layout, PowerPoint has the same tools as Word for inserting online images and videos. These are much easier to use than the PowerPoint 2010 video options; a single friendly dialogue enables you to search YouTube or Bing for videos, browse your SkyDrive and local system for video files or paste in the embed code from a video's web page.
It's as simple as searching, previewing and selecting the video you want and it's easy to add frames, effects and corrections – even to online videos.
This is one place where putting controls into task panes works much better than having an on-screen dialogue box, even on an older, low resolution PC. It's much easier to work with the border styles, layout effects, positioning options and video correction tools in a task pane than in a dialogue with 12 tabs that sits right on top of the video you're trying to edit.
There are also 'quick' formatting tools that appear next to selected objects, much like the Quick Analysis tool in Excel, putting the tools you need the most next to the object you're working on.
For positioning, PowerPoint not only has the new green alignment guides that show when you have an object at the edge or centre of a slide. It also has extra 'smart guides' that show when you're aligned with other graphics, and when objects are evenly spaced across the page – these are in addition to the alignment guides on smart art shapes, which now show both horizontal and vertical alignment instead of just one at a time.
You can set your own guidelines on master slides; for example if you have an image in the background of certain slides that you want to line up with.
There are new transitions, like Crush, Fracture and Origami, for a total of 48 different ways to get from one slide to another. There are no new shapes to place in presentations, but you can combine two shapes into one – cutting one out of the other, breaking them up into pieces, turning the space between them into a shape or just gluing them together. That enables you to create new shapes far more precisely than trying to draw them out.
Finally, there's an eyedropper tool for selecting colours from existing objects (although only within the same presentation, not in other applications or even other PowerPoint windows).
PowerPoint gets Word's friendly comments as well, complete with replies; again, this makes good use of a widescreen resolution. That's especially useful now the PowerPoint web app lets you have two people working on a presentation, in the web app and the desktop version of PowerPoint at the same time.
When it's time to give your presentation, the presenter tools have some great new features, such as a thumbnail grid for reviewing all your slides that only you can see. You can pinch to zoom in and out of this, and it's handy for jumping ahead to a later slide without clicking through one at a time.
You can also zoom in on a specific slide in the presentation if the audience needs to see fine detail.
It's possible to see a preview of the next slide, and your presenter notes, which might stop people cramming pages of text onto a single slide and then reading it all out loud very slowly (we can only hope).
You also get a counter for elapsed time for the current slide and the whole presentation, plus the current time, and tools for drawing on the slides or showing a fake laser pointer to highlight things. And you don't have to have a second monitor or projector connected to see the presenter tools, so you can practice running through the presentation complete with your tools.
Again, these are designed to work well on a tablet so you could hold it in your hand and drive your presentation by touch instead of crouching over the keyboard.
Outlook 2013
Outlook uses the clean Windows 8 look to make your inbox look less cluttered without putting much less information on screen. That makes room for tools that let you work right where you are. Reply to an email using the button at the top of the message and you're typing in the main Outlook window, above the message you were reading. You can pop it out into a separate window if you need to, but this is a clean way of working. If you click away from your reply it's automatically saved into the draft folder and the mail you were replying to gets an orange Draft label on it (making that stand out against the rest of the interface is one reason for the signature colour of Outlook changing from orange to blue). We also like the option to change the zoom for the message you're reading to fit more of it on screen. Touch mode in Outlook 2013 gets the same mini-menu as in the other apps but the touch option also puts a bar of five frequent commands (reply, delete, move to folder, flag and mark as unread)about where your thumb will be if you're holding a tablet in both hands in landscape. There are some attractive 'touches', such as using pinch-to-zoom in the Outlook calendar to zoom between day, week and month views.
In all the desktop Office 2013 apps finger right-click works better than anywhere else in the Windows 8 desktop.
If you're writing an email or editing an appointment, press and hold and instead of a context menu you get a finger-sized bar of handy commands. This includes the useful options from the mini Office bar such as bold and bullet points and adds Cut, Copy and Paste right where your finger already is.
In Outlook 2013 you also get a finger-friendly menu of commands for dealing with your inbox when you press and hold on the list of messages: tap in a field where you can type and the keyboard opens automatically so you don't have to press the little keyboard button on the taskbar.
Even more helpfully, when you have a keyboard attached to your tablet you can use your finger to put the cursor in the right pale without having the screen covered by a touch keyboard you don't need.
Fans of Windows Phone will be pleased to see the All and Unread buttons in the inbox; you can quickly jump between all your messages and just the ones you need to deal with.
This makes it much faster to get through email messages because every time you reply to, delete or just finish reading one, you're where you need to be to handle the next message without scrolling and selecting.
With all these handy tools you can probably keep the ribbon in Outlook minimised a lot of the time, making room for even more messages on screen. If so, you get one extra button that's always visible; click it to write email, make a new appointment, create a new contact or set up a new task depending on whether you're in mail, calendar, people or task views.
The new look is also a great design for the address book. Iimages from social networks are automatically used for a thumbnail view and you can see and edit contact details without having to open a separate window.
Like Windows Phone, Outlook automatically links together any contacts it believes are the same person, and adds their details from LinkedIn, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and any other social networks you connect to Outlook.
You can make links yourself, once you find the Link Contacts button on the menu that appears when you click the three dots at the side of the popup contact pane. Windows Store apps in Windows 8 have made this Windows Phone convention more familiar, but if you've not used either you might not realise it's a menu.
Once you do find the menu, this is a great way of getting Outlook to clean up all the duplicates that accumulate in your address book over the years, as well as seeing social network updates next to all the other details you have about people.
If colleagues are sharing their calendars with you, you can also see whether they're currently free (and for how long) and Lync is integrated so you can start a video or IM conversation anywhere you see someone's name.
You can swap between the mail, calendar, people and task windows (and the seldom used notes, folders and shortcuts) using text labels rather than the space-wasting buttons in Outlook 2010, but the new Peeks mean that often you won't need to do so.
Hover your mouse over the word 'Calendar' and you get a pop-up preview of today's appointments and tasks; click a day to see what you'll be doing. Hover over People to see frequent and favourite contacts and over Tasks for your to-do list and flagged emails.
This is just as convenient as having the details in the calendar bar on the right of the window all the time but less distracting. You can pin them back there if you want, but it's not as useful as it was in Outlook 2010 because you can no longer drag mails onto the calendar to create appointments on specific days. This is frustrating because it was a very useful feature.
The Suggest Replacement is a free Outlook app that will add a button to create an appointment automatically from the details in an email, but it only works if you have Exchange 2013.
If you do make it all the way into the Calendar you'll see a three-day weather forecast at the top of the screen (as long as you're online – it's not cached for later in case it gets out of date).
In many places the new interface is a big improvement. but Outlook is where the chunky Windows 8 notifications are the most intrusive. You get one for every new mail and they stack from the top-right of the screen down, rather than staying in the same place.
If you open Outlook after a long flight e, your screen fills up with multiple notifications. And while they fade away on their own, we didn't find a way to dismiss all of them at once, so you have the choice of waiting, playing whack-a-mole or remembering to tell Windows 8 to turn off notifications for an hour before you re-open Outlook.
Even more annoyingly, you can no longer delete a message or accept an invitation directly from the pop-up notification. This is another place where Office 2013 values clarity over productivity.
You can at least dismiss multiple alarms at once; these pop up in the familiar alarm window even on Windows 8, rather than as notifications.
Something that you'll welcome on tablets is the way the defaults when you set up an Exchange account are slightly different. You still get cached mode (so Outlook keeps copies of your mail from the server in a .OST file) but the default is to only download the last 12 months' worth of mail.
There's a slider in account settings to control that, and you can still have all your mail. If you don't, then you see another Windows Phone feature; when you do a search there's a link to search on the server if you haven't found what you're looking for.
On Windows 8, if you use your tethered phone or a mobile broadband dongle to get online, Outlook recognises you're using a metered connection and it doesn't send and receive email automatically to save your bandwidth. Click the notification at the top of the screen if you do want to connect and get your messages.
Outlook metred.png
Outlook 2013 warns you when you're on an expensive connection
It's a shame that Outlook 2013 loses a couple of useful features for the sake of the new interface because otherwise it's a great blend of the principles of Windows 8 design and the power of the desktop.
OneNote 2013, Access 2013 and Publisher 2013
OneNote 2013
OneNote 2013 is the best hidden secret in Office, a note taking application that's easy to use, organised like a paper notebook and crammed with features. You can link notes to the original document, or a meeting from your Outlook calendar (handy to get the agenda or job titles and the correct spelling for everyone's names), or send information from any file or web page into OneNote. Insert an image and optical character recognition picks up any text in it automatically. You can take audio and video recordings of meetings and have your written or typed notes time synced to them (a feature that's sadly missing in the Windows RT version). OneNote now enables you to embed even more information – embed Excel and Visio files and you can see the live content in your notebook. The table tools are much better than in previous versions, and you can turn a table into an embedded Excel spreadsheet to get more formula options.
All the Office 2013 applications have the Touch Mode button; the core apps (but not Publisher or Access) also have a Full Screen Mode button next to the minimise and maximise buttons.
Instead of just hiding the ribbon, status bar and most of the rest of the interface to enable you to concentrate on your document (as it did in the Customer Preview), this now brings up another mini-menu letting you choose between hiding the ribbon, only showing the ribbon tabs or showing the full ribbon. This duplicates the little arrow on the ribbon that collapses the commands, but it's easier to find if you don't already know how the ribbon works.
OneNote has an even more extreme view that hides everything but the notebook picker (and the button to get the rest of the interface back), leaving you the full page to take notes on - ideal on a tablet. Click the arrow at the top of the page and your note expands to fill the screen or see the normal interface.
There are some new ways of presenting tools that can get irritating. OneNote's handy screen clipping, Send to OneNote and quick note features are combined into an odd pop-up window that showcases these useful options but proves intrusive once you know what they are and how to get to them, and the pop-up doesn't even close properly.
It also commandeers the Windows-N shortcut for making a new quick note (renamed from side note because it's not really at the side of the screen and hasn't been for several versions), so you have to press Windows-N N. Thankfully Windows-S still works for clipping information from anywhere on screen into your notes.
It's hard to show new users an important feature without irritating experienced users by getting in their way, and you can turn off the popup. But the detailed options for choosing where different types of information go when you send them to OneNote are very welcome; you can set default folders and other options for email, web pages and other sources individually.
OneNote was the first application to sync between PCs, onto SkyDrive and the OneNote web app and to a wide range of smartphones. That now includes Windows RT; what's rather confusingly called OneNote for Windows 8 is a free WinRT version of OneNote.
This has a large proportion of the OneNote tools, and even more touch features, although it only opens notebooks you keep on SkyDrive.
Select text in the OneNote WinRT app with your finger and you get the new radial menu - the finger equivalent of the mini Office bar that fades into view when you select text with a mouse, and even easier to use than the finger-sized version you get in the Office 2103 desktop apps.
You can tap to choose a pen colour, then swipe round to pick the shade you want. Tap to change text size and swipe round to pick how large you make it.
There's an undo button and a button to apply tags. This puts the most useful OneNote features quite literally at your fingertips, with the radial menu appearing on the right of the screen, where your thumb is if you're holding a widescreen tablet in both hands (as you might notice, Microsoft has definite views about how most people will hold tablets).
You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like Windows RT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.
You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like WinRT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.
Access 2013
Access continues its journey to being less a database and more a database app development tool. It has the same clean new interface as the rest of Office and that carries through to the applications you can build and the controls you put in them.
You can still create both desktop and web apps as well as SharePoint lists, but web apps now run on SharePoint or Office 365 and now look like WinRT applications, complete with an app bar and other navigation options.
Publisher 2013
Publisher gets the same tool for inserting pictures from online services as Word and PowerPoint (but not videos, even if you're creating a web publication), and the same task panes and formatting tools, as well as the rest of the new interface. It even has Touch Mode, which is probably more useful for checking publications than laying them out. Oddly for a DTP package, it's one of the last applications to keep the small floating spell check dialogue. Replacing and switching images is far easier than in previous versions. Publisher now puts new images you insert in a column in the scratch area rather than dumping them all on the page. Drag an image from the scratch area or elsewhere in the layout until it's over an existing image and a pink highlight appears around the existing image; let go and the new image appears there instead. If you want to use an image as a full page background you can just right-click and choose Apply To Background (as a fill or a tile). There are also lots of new formatting options for images and text.
We like the new 'photo printing' option that saves each page of your document as a JPEG; ideal if you want to use a photo book printing service to create an album as a keepsake using your own layout.
Publisher already had features ranging from a full set of alignment guides to support for OpenType stylistic alternates to 'building blocks' for creating common objects such as pull quotes, banners, calendars, adverts and more. These new features may not be major but they're certainly welcome and this is a powerful DTP package that's easy to use.
Verdict
With a new version of Office, the first question that always springs to mind is whether there is anything new that Microsoft can add to a mature and powerful productivity package.
Word is a product with 20 years of features and being able to insert videos and online images is more a matter of catching up with the times than a major new feature. But PDF Flow and the massive improvements in tracking changes and comments in documents are hugely useful and if you have a touchscreen PC, this is by far the best version of Office to use on it.
All of the key Office applications get new features that are well implemented and equally well worth having.
Also, with the switch to subscription pricing, the days of asking 'is it worth upgrading for this feature, no matter how useful?' are over. When new features come along, you'll just get them for the same price. But you won't be able to skip a year if you're happy with what you have, so do the sums on what Office costs you long term.
We liked
Office 2013 is about more than a new interface. From little touches such as animating calculations as they change to new tools that help you get the Excel chart that shows what's important in your data, from in-place replies in Outlook to change tracking and commenting in Word that doesn't make your document look like a battlefield, the desktop apps get worthy new features. We like the new tools for designing presentations in PowerPoint. We like the new presenter tools even more. Whether you create presentations or just sit through them, PowerPoint 2013 should make your life better. If you switch PCs often, you'll love the fast streaming install and seeing your recent documents on every PC. And we're looking forward to getting more new features through Office 365 instead of waiting three years for neat new features that you might want without paying for an upgrade (or spend the time updating every PC in the office).We disliked
Sometimes cleaning up for the Windows 8 look means dumbing down. Advanced features such as Split View and Autocorrect are now harder to use, which is a step backwards not forwards, and strangely at odds with the clear and simple way other powerful features such as Pivot Charts are exposed. The newer your PC and the higher your screen resolution the more you will like the new interface. If you have an older PC with a low resolution screen, you'll have to minimise more of the interface to see the same amount of your document.Final verdict
If you look at a list of the new features in Office 2013, you might not see any one feature you can't live without, but after even a few days of using the new applications there are plenty that you'll miss. This is another big advance in usability, combined with some extremely clever new tools. Performance is excellent and the Office 2013 programs are slick and smooth in use. There are features for power users, especially in Excel and PowerPoint, and there are others that either make it easier to use the power of existing tools or give you whole new ways to complete tasks without being an expert. While this isn't a perfect touch version of Office, the improved Touch Mode is extremely usable on any decent touchscreen PC. What's missing is a version of Outlook for Windows RT users (and there's nothing for iPad users). Mostly Office 2013 gets the right balance between streamlining and oversimplifying; there are some places where we miss specific power user options, but the sheer usability and ease of use will give the vast majority of uses a much better experience. The great thing about a subscription service is that you won't have to wait as long to get updates and improvements; they won't change the fundamentals but you will keep getting more options the longer you pay for Office 2013.
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Hurry! Amazon Kindle drops to £59 for today only
The Amazon Kindle has dropped in price by £10, but for today only.
The e-book reader will set you back £59, instead of the usual RRP of £69. The offer started at 8pm last night, and goes on until just before midnight, according to Amazon's terms and conditions page.
And if you really can't wait, you can choose Evening Delivery and have your new toy in your hands by tonight.
Wi-Fi-only
At just £59, it's quite a steal. The device has a 6-inch e-ink display, for crisp rendering of text. And it's a touchscreen, so just tap to turn the page. Wi-Fi is on board for downloading e-books wherever you can find a hotspot, though there's no 3G. The device weighs just 170g, so won't sag your pocket. And it'll hold up to 1,400 e-books, which should keep you entertained for a few years, no matter how much of a bookworm you are. If you're a member of Amazon Prime, you'll be able to borrow from a selection of 200,000 free e-books, thanks to the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. There are no due dates either, so it won't be like incurring the wrath of your local library staff.
Via Amazon
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