PC Pro Magazine 2012-08.pdf

Sky Virgin BT Vision

Who’s got the best TV tech and apps?

PC PRO

Stunning HD screens

Top-quality monitors from only £100

iPad vs The Rivals SMALLER. CHEAPER. BETTER?

14

TABLETS ON TEST

ON THE DVD EDITION

£5.99 ISSUE 214 AUG 2012

6 FULL PRODUCTS WORTH £159

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CONTENTS What’s inside?

CONTENTS

Issue 214 August

THE UK’S BIGGEST-SELLING COMPUTING MONTHLY COVER GUIDE p26

p148

p126

FEATURES

COVER STORY WHO’S GOT THE BEST TV TECH?

26

HOW TO SHAKE OFF THE NET SNOOPS

36

With Sky, Virgin Media and BT Vision offering up-to-the-minute TV hardware and services, we find out who delivers them best.

The government wants to know what you’re doing online. Nicole Kobie delivers tips and tricks to avoid such snooping.

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO WORK AT GOOGLE?

THE TRUTH ABOUT BYOD

40

Is working at Google the fun-filled, intellectually stimulating experience the company portrays? Stewart Mitchell finds out.

REGULARS

p60

IN DEPTH

REAL WORLD COMPUTING

Prolog

7

IDEALOG

Technolog

9

Feedback

12

Dick Pountain is caught dreaming under the old whiffletree.

How we test

114

Market Pro

161

A-List

162

Subscriptions

168

Contact us & next month 169 Epilog

66

Is letting employees bring in their own devices a great way to cut costs or a recipe for disaster? Tim Anderson weighs up the pros and cons.

170

CAREERS

65

70

Stuart Andrews reveals how to embark on the critical career of software developer, preventing bugs creeping into software and websites.

Advanced Windows & Mac

72

Mobile & Wireless

TAILORING YOUR WEBSITE FOR PEOPLE WITH LOW VISION 46

75

Davey Winder explains how to ensure low-vision users can use your website.

Online Business

80

Security & Social Networking

83

Office Apps

86

Web Apps & Design

89

Networks

92

BUILD CROSS-PLATFORM MOBILE APPS

50

Kevin Partner shows how to write for both Android and iOS at once. TAKE YOUR OS WITH YOU

56

There’s no need to haul a laptop around – simply carry your OS on a USB flash drive.

PC PRO PODCAST

NEWS

Don’t forget to download the latest PC Pro podcast. There’s a new show available every Thursday from www.pcpro. co.uk/podcast.

The flawed certificate authority system is leaving the web with a massive security risk – why isn’t anyone doing anything to fix it? Plus, we reveal the growth of Mac malware, what you need to know about the new cookie laws, and HP’s troubles with Autonomy.

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PC PRO•AUGUST 2012

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What’s inside?

CONTENTS

Now on the iPad and iPhone You can buy PC Pro on Apple’s Newsstand

COVER DISC

REVIEWS

55 NEW REVIEWS THIS ISSUE

60

Create PC backups, run complex virtualisation tasks, and get a complete office suite for free on this month’s packed PC Pro cover disc.

p100

IN THE LABS... COVER STORY

TABLETS

126

The new iPad goes head to head with the best the Android crowd has to offer. Plus, we’ve gathered together the best compact tablets on the market. COVER STORY

BUDGET TFTs

148

With high-end tech trickling into the budget market, you don’t have to spend big for quality. We put 12 to the test.

SUBSCRIBE THREE ISSUES FOR £1

Subscribe to PC Pro today, and you can benefit from our three issues for £1 offer – visit http://subscribe.pcpro. co.uk now.

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PCs, LAPTOPS & TABLETS Alienware M17x R4 Toshiba Satellite P855 Toshiba NB510 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition RIM BlackBerry PlayBook Gemini JoyTAB 8 Huawei MediaPad S7 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 Sony Tablet P Apple iPad (3rd gen) Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Archos 101 G9 Turbo Asus Transformer Pad 300 Motorola Xoom 2 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Sony Tablet S Toshiba AT200

100 102 103 106 134 136 137 137 138 138 140 142 143 143 144 144 145 145

TABLET ACCESSORIES Kensington PowerBolt Micro Car Charger 135 Motorola Wireless Keyboard and Mouse 135 Motorola S10-HD 135 Motorola Xoom 2 Media Dock 135 Tuff-Luv Faux-Leather Case and Integrated Bluetooth Keyboard 141 Belkin Storage Folio 141 Arcam drDock 141 Apple Camera Connection Kit and Digital AV Adapter 141 COMPONENTS & PERIPHERALS AMD Trinity 104 Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 108 Booq Python pack 108 KeySonic KSK-32-5 RFM Super-Mini 108 Krator N4-20U05B USB Speaker 109 Motorola Motoluxe 109

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BUDGET TFTs Dell UltraSharp U2312HM ViewSonic VX2336s-LED Asus PA238Q BenQ XL2420T Dell UltraSharp U2412M Edge10 EF240a AG Neovo U-23 AOC i2352Vh Iiyama ProLite XB2374HDS-1 Philips Brilliance 248X3LFHSB Philips E-Line 237E3QPHSU ViewSonic VP2365-LED

152 153 154 154 155 155 156 156 156 157 157 157

SOFTWARE Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Corel VideoStudio Pro X5 Tiffen Dfx 3

110 112 113

ENTERPRISE Lenovo ThinkServer TS130 D-Link DSN-6120 Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry Synology DiskStation DS1812+ WatchGuard XTM 330 LaCie 5big Office+ Kodak sceyeX Power Ethernet Socket T1000

116 118 120 122 122 123 124 124

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Prolog OPINION

BARRY COLLINS has a strong word with himself over a weak password

I

can still remember my first password: McAvennie. It was the name of the West Ham striker you had to utter to David Grainger to gain access to the “secret camp” we had at the back of our school playground. If someone had stolen my password, they wouldn’t have got very far. David Grainger was unlikely to be hoodwinked by an imposter – nobody else had a parka three sizes too big for them. Even if they bluffed their way in, the street value of the stashed Penguin biscuits and Shoot annuals was negligible. The same can’t be said for one of my newer passwords, which was compromised recently. Thanks to the fad for single sign-in, not only did this password grant access to my Hotmail account, but also my Xbox Live account and credit card details, and all the documents and data stored on my work PC, because Windows 8 practically begs you to sign in with Windows Live instead of a separate password. Now, here comes the mea culpa. The password “protecting” my laptop, Xbox and Hotmail was even weaker than the one eight-year-old Barry used to gain access to Camp David (I swear I’m not making that name up). It was a string of seven lower-case letters – not a proper noun or dictionary word, but certainly nowhere near strong enough. When I confessed to this on the PC Pro blogs, I was subject to the kind of abuse normally reserved for granny-muggers and John Terry. I deserved every globule of bile that was spat in my direction, although as the charitable Jon Honeyball remarked to one of my Twitter critics: “Everyone thinks their password is strong enough until they’re attacked”. Why wasn’t my password stronger? Part complacency, part convenience, part indulgence. That Hotmail password hadn’t been changed in years (another sin, I know), largely because I was never forced to. One of my critics threw Microsoft’s password advice in my face and, justifiably, accused me of negligence. “Strong passwords contain 7-16 characters, do not include common words or names, and combine upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols,” Microsoft advises – yet it still accepted a password that didn’t meet that criteria. As would Google, I later discovered. The other reason I didn’t scatter punctuation and upper-case letters into my password was because I sometimes entered it on an Xbox controller. It’s painful enough entering a lower-case string in that manner, let alone hunting down the dollar sign. None of these

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excuses justifies using a sloppy password, but I suspect I’m not the only one with a Hotmail/ Xbox password less secure than Nick Clegg’s chances of becoming the next prime minister. I should state at this point that it isn’t clear how my account was compromised. My account may have fallen victim to a man-inthe-middle attack, or I may have a trojan or keylogger – in which case it wouldn’t matter how short my password was. The one thing Microsoft and I are reasonably sure of is that someone didn’t “guess” my password – every attempt to log into my account in the month before the attack used the correct password, and it wasn’t something obvious like “barrypc”. Whatever the method of attack, we should be finding ways to lessen our dependency on the inherently insecure password, yet we’re doing the exact opposite. Access to a barrage of potentially sensitive Google services – Gmail, Drive, Analytics, Picasa – is granted with nothing more than a password as weak as my old one. I’ve lost count of the websites I can log in to with my Facebook credentials. Single sign-in equals single point of failure.

We should be finding ways to lessen our dependency on the inherently insecure password, yet we’re doing the opposite How have we got to 2012, still dependent on schoolboy security? I remember trade shows in the 1990s with iris scanners, fingerprint readers and the like, and yet none have evolved into a mainstream solution. Picture passwords introduced in Windows 8, which let you log in by tapping on predefined parts of a photo, are a step in the right direction – not least since they work equally well on touchscreen devices as on mouse-driven PCs, and are impervious to keyloggers – but Microsoft doesn’t seem to have the courage to make this the default login. In the meantime, it’s down to us to protect our passwords as best we can, using imperfect systems such as LastPass (which asks you to pay to access your logins on a smartphone) or by devising and remembering our own secure password system. But most people won’t; like a certain PC magazine editor who should have known better, they’ll only start to take password security seriously when it’s already too late.

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WIN AN ULTRABOOK

Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards 2012 for your chance to win a stunning Ultrabook. www.pcpro.co.uk/votenow

BARRY COLLINS is the editor of PC Pro, despite the protestation of several of the commenters on his blog. Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/barryc Email: [email protected]


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ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

Office 365: take your docs everywhere Watch and listen to Tim Danton, David Fearon and Microsoft IT evangelist Simon May in our exclusive videos and podcasts, only on office365.pcpro.co.uk

Don’t have access to your own computer but need to make a change to that crucial presentation? Not a problem with Office 365, because you can still edit and update documents thanks to Office Web Apps and SharePoint Online. The idea behind Office Web Apps is compelling in its simplicity. “A way to create, view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files online,” to quote Microsoft’s own description.

Video: An introduction to Office Web Apps

But let’s break that down. It means you don’t need Office on any PC, laptop or tablet you use to both view your documents and make changes. You can be in a branch office, an internet café or your kitchen at home – all you need is an internet connection, plus any of Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari or Mozilla Firefox. With Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online, your team can work together on an Excel or Word document from anywhere in the world.

Advice: Using the Word Web App

Unlike many of its online rivals, viewing a document in Office Web Apps doesn’t make any change to its formatting. This means you can change a bullet point in a presentation without ruining the transitions, or alter data in an Excel spread sheet safe in the knowledge your charts will still look precisely the same when it’s time to display them. The PC Pro guide to Office Web Apps, found at office365.pcpro. co.uk, is a completely independent analysis of what this collection of tools has to offer. Take a look today, or use the QR codes to the left.

Podcast: Why IT departments love Office 365

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PC PRO

Technolog OPINION

Fibre broadband is rolling out, and DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH is ready to do some throttling

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y home internet connection is an “up to” 20Mbits/sec service. ADSL being what it is, we actually get about a third of that – but over time, I’ve made my peace with 7Mbits/sec broadband. After all, it wasn’t so long ago my father and I were logging onto BBS services at 300 baud. The one irritation is that it isn’t always a smooth ride. The connection can be wayward and jumpy, in a way that isn’t all that noticeable when downloading software or browsing the web, but which is terrifically annoying when you’re trying to watch something on Netflix or BBC iPlayer. So I was intrigued last week when an email dropped into my inbox telling me that BT Infinity is now available in my area – a fibre-to-the-cabinet connection, offering a relatively stable 76Mbits/sec connection. (It didn’t hurt that, coincidentally, at the time I was 12 minutes into The Apprentice and staring at a “buffering” screen.) A quick trip to the BT website turned up the details. There are two packages on offer, one of which has a monthly download limit of 40GB. By my calculation, at 76Mbits/sec, that gives you just over 70 minutes per month of full-speed internet access – hmm. The other package is unlimited, and after a brief scan of the details I was more or less ready to sign up. My only lingering concern was the friendly note advising customers that “we manage speeds on P2P file-sharing networks at peak times”. I’m not necessarily opposed to throttling, so long as the network is up-front about it. The whole point of traffic management is to reduce costs, and that’s normally good news for everybody. All the same, I’ll admit I don’t always manage to keep up with my favourite TV shows before they vanish from iPlayer – and if you’re paying for a big fat pipe, you don’t want to be waiting around for downloads. Before entering into an 18-month contract, it seemed prudent to find out what sort of speeds I could expect if I did feel the need to fire up my BitTorrent client of an evening. This proved easier said than done. Actual details were nowhere to be found on BT’s website. The following morning, I spent 20 exasperating minutes on the phone, passing between no fewer than six departments, before eventually learning that BT doesn’t publish its traffic management policies. Officially this is because effective speeds vary, depending on

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unpredictable factors such as contention. I suspect BT also doesn’t want to commit itself to anything in particular. In the end, I tried Googling to see how existing customers were finding the service. I should have done this at the outset. In less than a minute I found multiple Infinity subscribers reporting BitTorrent download speeds of 10-20KB/sec. Yes, kilobytes: it appears P2P connections during peak hours are restricted to around 0.2% of your nominal bandwidth. To me this is insulting. It’s one thing to balance traffic, but BT Infinity is supposed to be a premium service – the very name implies it can’t be topped – and this is worse performance than you’ll get with a tenner-a-month DSL deal. I came away soured on the whole idea. Yet I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the dream of fibre-optic broadband, and a quick look at alternative ISPs revealed that Sky had also started offering its Fibre Unlimited package in my area. The progress of the Leveson Inquiry hasn’t made me eager to jump into business with Rupert Murdoch, but I figured it could do no harm to look over what was on offer.

It’s one thing to balance traffic, but this is worse performance than you’ll get with a tenner-a-month DSL deal What a difference from BT’s service it was. At the Sky website a helpful sales assistant confirmed that, although the service is “only” 40Mbits/sec, there’s no traffic management at all; if you want to download torrents in the evening, it’s around 250 times faster than BT. The contract term is only 12 months, and as a kicker it’s £5 a month cheaper than BT, even though the fibre is leased from the company. Assuming this is all correct – and I’ve no reason to think it isn’t – you have to wonder whether BT is even operating on the same planet. I suppose in the ever-evolving world of technology – in which everything is being tried for the first time – competitors will come up with different ways to sell what is, in a sense, the same thing. Dig into what’s on offer and you may find one deal is atrocious value, while the alternative is, if anything, underpriced. Frankly, I can live with that. I’ve just ordered a fibre-optic broadband connection for £30 a month, and for that I can put up with a bit of caveat emptor.

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DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH is PC Pro’s technical editor. He’s considering browsing exclusively over HTTPS once he joins Murdoch’s ISP. Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/dariengs Email: [email protected]


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COMPETITION Win!

Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards

AND YOU COULD WIN AN ULTRABOOK ey Take part in the UK’s biggest IT consumer survey for your chance to win one of these prizes

Intel-powered Ivy Bridge Ultrabook

OVER

£2,400 WORT H PRIZES OF I TOTAL N

The super-sleek Ultrabook is Intel’s vision for the future of mobile computing. Lightweight and long lasting, yet also powerful and feature-packed, this new breed of laptop is one part ultraportable, one part desktop replacement and very desirable. Based around the powerful yet efficient third-generation Intel Core processors, Ultrabooks are more than capable of handling intensive tasks such as video or image editing without sacrificing battery life. They’re also responsive in everyday use, thanks to their modern solid-state storage drives, all of which they fit into a chassis less than 21mm thick. We have one to give away, worth £799 www.pcpro.co.uk/links/awards1

Quiet PC Serenity Z68

NZXT PC Builder Bundle

The Serenity Z68 has been designed with performance and quietness in mind, using components that offer the best EAC balance of speed, silence and value. However, despite being designed primarily for acoustic excellence, the Serenity Z68 doesn’t compromise on performance, thanks to its quick 2.6GHz dual-core Intel Pentium processor and 4GB of RAM. Storage is handled courtesy of a 60GB Zalman SSD to offer nippy performance in everyday tasks. These components are housed in the sleek Nexus Prominent R case, which comes complete with noise-dampening foam, a built-in SATA dock and USB 3 ports as standard.

NZXT was formed in 2004 in California, and prides itself on producing PC hardware for enthusiasts and gamers. Included in the PC Builder Bundle is a special edition gunmetal-coloured Switch 810 case, which comes complete with high-end watercooling support, washable dust filters and innovative mechanical fan-mount blanking plates. This is teamed up with a Hale 80+ Bronze-rated 750W PSU and a Sentry LX fan controller. Topping off the bundle is a huge, dual-fan Phanteks PH-TC14 CPU cooler that’s guaranteed to keep any processor chilled.

WORTH

6 £57H

We have one to give away, worth £576 www.pcpro.co.uk/links/awards2

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WORTH

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We have one to give away, worth £380 www.nzxt.com

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Win! COMPETITION

Zotac Zbox nano XS AD11 Plus With the Zotac Zbox nano XS AD11 Plus, you can experience a high-definition computing experience with rich graphics and EAC web content. Processing power is provided by an AMD E-450 APU, with integrated Radeon HD 6320 graphics, which is capable of delivering stunning hardware-accelerated HD video online and offline, outstanding system responsiveness and Microsoft DirectX 11 compatibility. Storage is handled by a 64GB solid-state drive that delivers lightning-fast boot times, and the PC also features USB 3 and eSATA connectivity. Furthermore, an integrated IR receiver and bundled media remote make it easy to take control of the mini-PC from the comfort of a sofa. WORTH

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Enermax DreamBass The Enermax DreamBass provides a simple, attractive and flexible alternative EAC to the lacklustre onboard sound processing of modern day laptops and netbooks, thanks to its onboard VIA VT1620A audioprocessing chip. Simply plug the DreamBass into a vacant USB slot and you’re ready to go – there’s no inconvenient driver installation or setup required and the DreamBass provides both input and output mini-jacks. Bass tones are boosted and improved by the integrated 80Hz +6dB bass booster, and recording quality is improved too. The DreamBass can be used with the bundled headphones, or with headphones of your choice. WORTH

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Microlab Solo 7C Speakers The Solo 7C 2.0 speaker set from Microlab is the ideal choice for audio enthusiasts. Cased in beautiful wooden cabinets, the EAC speakers are machined to a high specification and feature Microlab’s sharp cone dispersion woofer design. Both speakers also sport a 1in tweeter to lend clarity to higher notes, and an IGBT OCL circuit for pure tones and dynamic acoustic production. Whether in the study or the lounge, the Solo 7Cs offer both music lovers and audiophiles a high-quality listening experience. WORTH

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We have six to give away, worth £30 www.pcpro.co.uk/links/ awards5

To enter, simply visit www.pcpro.co.uk/votenow

CLOSIN DATE: G 1 Augu st 2012

TERMS & CONDITIONS On completing and submitting this survey, you will automatically be entered into a draw for one of these prizes. No correspondence will be entered into and the winners will be notified by post or email within 28 days of the closing date. The prize draw is not open to employees of Dennis Publishing or participating companies. No cash alternative will be offered. The prize(s) described are available at the date of publication. Events may occur that render the promotion or the rewarding of the prize impossible due to reasons beyond PC Pro’s control, which may at its discretion vary or amend the promotion, and the reader agrees that no liability shall be attached to PC Pro as a result thereof. Proof of emailing will not be accepted as proof of delivery and no responsibility can be accepted for entries lost, delayed, mislaid or for any technical failure or for any event which may cause the survey to be disrupted or corrupted. Unless otherwise stated, entry to all prize draws is restricted to entrants of 18 years of age or over. Names of winners will be available on receipt of a request enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope to: Competitions Manager, Dennis Publishing, 30 Cleveland St, London W1T 4JD. If the winner of a prize draw is unable to take up a prize for any reason, the editor reserves the right to award it to an alternative winner, in which case the first winner chosen will not be eligible for any share of the prize whatsoever. The editor’s decision is final and it is a condition of entry to any prize draw that the entrant agrees to be bound by these rules whether they be published or not, and that the decisions of the editor and judges on any matter whatsoever arising out of or connected with the prize draw are final. No purchase of the magazine is necessary.

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FEEDBACK Your say

FEEDBACK

THE PICK OF YOUR COMMENTS FROM EMAILS, BLOGS OR PCPRO.CO.UK Cyberbullying is a “bigger threat” to children than being exposed to pornography

true that the reason Foxconn’s Chinese factories are so oversubscribed, for instance, is that pay is far greater than in other local industries. Yet surely there’s still an argument that billiondollar firms could, and should, do more to reward and look after their workers?

Web standards flashpoint

PC Pro vs Claire Perry MP

Claire Perry’s response to PC Pro’s challenge to say which type of “adult” content she’d like to see blocked was arrogant and dismissive (web ID: 374461). I have nephews and nieces aged from nine to 21, and if I asked them to defend a position they’d taken, they’d all make a better go of it than Perry. Her response – “Sigh… Get a grip” – seems to be the equivalent of a four-year-old stamping their feet. No-one wants children exposed to harmful content, but Perry either doesn’t know how technology works, or she does and just refuses to engage in an actual debate about it. If she really wanted to help children in a meaningful way she’d be better off tackling cyberbullying – something that has a far more damaging effect. I haven’t heard of many kids driven to suicide by seeing nudity, but have read of a disturbingly large number doing so after being bullied online – with apparently everyone powerless to stop it. If you want a meaningful campaign to protect our children, Claire Perry MP, try to tackle that one. MR_JOHN_T

Eat your greens

I read your recent feature about ethical computing with interest (see issue 212, p44), but it seems PC Pro has swallowed the anti-globalisation, anti-trade and anti-capitalism tirade almost unchallenged. There was reference to facts that undermined the emotive hyperbole of the article, such as the lower-than-average suicide rates and aboveaverage wages at Foxconn, but these points

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stood apart from sensationalist lines about suicide nets and didn’t impact on the tone or conclusion. There was no mention of the fact that factory wages are vastly higher than those in agriculture – the only alternative for many before manufacturing took off in China. The thrust of the article – that companies don’t own the supply chain used to make their products – was ignorant. No company owns everything used to produce its products, nor have many ever done so. More nonsense appeared elsewhere – I wasn’t shocked, for instance, to discover Foxconn is investing in technology to reduce labour content. By all means worry about the environmental impact of electronic consumerism, but please don’t conflate green considerations with the misinformed anti-capitalist ethics of Greenpeace and similar bodies. Most people are in favour of charity, and some of us don’t have a problem with giving money to poorer people and receiving something in return – if only because trade is more effective at reducing poverty than charity. MATTHEW PENNINGTON Contributor Simon Brew replies: There’s no swallowing of a particular argument, and of course we looked heavily into both sides before committing words to paper. But it’s a difficult question, with no clear answer. There seemed little point pretending otherwise. The question posed by the article was “Can you buy tech with a clean conscience?”, and the conclusion was “No, but...”. We stand by that as a fair summation of both sides of the debate. We agree that both sides are driven by a mixture of emotion and obfuscation, and it’s

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It’s hard to think of an article I disagree with more than Tom Arah’s recent RWC column (see issue 213, p91). The opinions are those of a man who has invested a lot of time in the Adobe technologies discussed and doesn’t like what’s happened. The web is better off with standards-compliant HTML5 and CSS3, as well as other open technologies, rather than closed systems subject to the whims of a third party, such as Flash. Flash, after all, is a buggy piece of software that Adobe has never managed to get working on mobile – and it wasn’t killed because of Steve Jobs, but because it never functioned properly. I’m glad it’s on the way out, since it prevents standards-compliant information sharing and cross-platform consumption. To genuinely suggest that the web will be better with closed, proprietary technologies such as Flash and Microsoft Silverlight is beyond belief. MARK WILSON Contributing editor Tom Arah replies: Thanks for your response in what is a heated debate. In fact, I’m neither a Flash nor a Silverlight developer, but I do recognise both technologies’ strengths – and what we’re losing as they’re driven out of cross-platform browsers and into proprietary app stores. I’m also a big fan of the various open standards grouped under the HTML5 banner. However, I think the assumption that these can do everything that Flash and Silverlight can is naive, as is the assumption that Apple and Microsoft are thinking of the best interests of all their users. Ultimately, it’s a question of freedom of choice, and we have been denied it.

Time for Ubuntu?

I read Barry Collins’ editorial (see issue 212, p7) with wry amusement. He mentioned how his otherwise-intelligent colleagues were struggling to find things such as the Start button, the Control Panel, or even

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Your say FEEDBACK Send your letters to: [email protected]

BLOG BITES

STAR LETTER

Follow the musings of the PC Pro team at www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs

I

’ve always been a subscriber to PC Pro. Your columns and articles are a monthly highlight, and over the years I feel like I’ve got to know you all quite well as you’ve slowly revealed little bits about your past and family life. As an educator and parent, I valued your insight and wisdom when you recently wrote about the role of parents in securing their children’s internet access. However, Davey Winder’s article about the fight to see his PC (see issue 213, p44) has to be your best yet. The article came as a shock and a challenge. The shock was the sudden onset of wet MD, and the challenge from the article itself. Recently I lost the use of my right arm following surgery to repair a torn tendon. The loss is expected to be temporary; six weeks immobilised in a sling, two months without driving and nine months of rehabilitation. Davey’s situation is much worse, yet there was no hint of self-pity in his writing. The article addresses the practical issues that he’s faced, and is working through, objectively. Huge courage and fortitude is displayed, and it’s an object lesson. I’m sure it’s been a rollercoaster few weeks and there’s still much to work through. My respect for Davey and appreciation of his writing has just grown even greater. IAN RUSSELL

Contributing editor Davey Winder replies: Thanks for the kind words, Ian. I’m a believer in getting on with life, no matter what it may throw at you. I also think that turning negatives into positives is a great way of dealing with adversity. That’s why I’m proud to be involved with the PC Pro and RNIB campaign (see p49) to raise awareness among developers about the needs of low-vision users.

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“Android developers should provide more quality. I’ve purchased so many apps only to return them in the allotted 15-minute window when I see it’s a poorly written conversion that doesn’t fit my screen or constantly crashes. I don’t buy a huge number of apps, but I’ve definitely returned more apps than I’ve kept.” YURI

“I know money must be made, but if a developer’s future is threatened by piracy, it clearly isn’t exploiting the massive amounts of goodwill that can be engendered. I’ve bought many games from small studios that connect with users and listen to feedback; big companies like to set the rules, and no-one likes a bully.” DUBIOU

“Football Manager on Android costs £6.99. I’ve paid for many Android apps, and one thing I’ve experienced is that performance can vary hugely between handsets. I would be hesitant to spend that much when I would have no guarantee it will perform adequately. A demo is better – get me hooked and I’ll pay.” PETERB

“I don’t mind paying for an app I like, but I object to Google’s 15-minute limit on refunds. That isn’t long enough, especially for apps that require additional downloads. I think it’s nice where there’s a free version to try. Pirating something that costs under £5 will drive developers to iPhone and Windows Phone.” SILVER FANG

This month’s star letter wins a Corsair 128GB Performance Pro SSD worth £164 Visit www.corsair.com

how to shut down the computer in Windows 8. I abandoned Windows six years ago for Ubuntu, and I’d never go back. One of the main criticisms is that it isn’t Windows, with familiar things in different places and with different names. It’s often said consumers will struggle because they’re too familiar with Windows and too lazy to explore something different. If Microsoft has changed everything in Windows 8, then consumers may experience the same confusion that affects newcomers to Ubuntu. If that’s the case, maybe the time has finally come for Linux on the desktop – after all, why pay to be baffled by your OS when you can be baffled for free? CHRIS BURMAJSTER

Android app piracy become a talking point this month after Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson claimed up to 90% of Football Manager sales on Android were pirated. Mike Jennings took to the PC Pro blog to ask Android pirates to pay for their apps – because developers won’t stay if there’s no money to be made. It generated plenty of debate.

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“I know a lot of people who don’t have a debit or credit card and aren’t able to buy from Google Play. I think support for PayPal or other payment methods would boost the number of purchases – if piracy is to be stopped, we’d have to start supporting things like SOPA, and that would do more harm than good.” VOID

“Why should you expect somebody, often an individual with limited resources, to put time into app development without any prospect of remuneration? If developers can’t obtain a return on their work, they won’t do it. It seems to me some thought needs to be put into who the real bullies are in this scenario.” ROY PEMBERTON

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013

NEWS PC Probe

NEWS

IN-DEPTH REPORTS, ANALYSIS AND OPINION

Certificate authorities: the web’s security blind spot The fundamental trust and security mechanism that underpins the entire web is stretched to breaking point, Stewart Mitchell discovers

S

ecurity experts are calling for a revamp of the web’s underlying security infrastructure after exposing critical flaws in the current certification system. The public-key infrastructure (PKI) system that validates websites via certificates is a major blind spot that could undermine trust in the internet if changes aren’t made – and soon. “We have a potentially big problem – we designed this protocol and infrastructure, SSL and PKI, back in 1994 and 1995, and essentially the evolution of the trust ecosystem stopped in 1995,” said Ivan Ristic, a co-founder of the non-profit Trustworthy Internet Movement. The concern follows a series of attacks against certificate authorities (CAs) last year. Such authorities generate the cryptographic certificates that tell web browsers that content is originating from the website that

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it claims. If a CA is hacked, the perpetrator could impersonate any site in the world – as happened when Dutch CA DigiNotar was hacked and its certificates were used to spoof Gmail and other major websites. Comodo, another CA, was also hacked last year. “The mistake that we made was not keeping the technology up to date, and last year we realised this through Comodo and DigiNotar,” said Ristic. DigiNotar was shut down as a result of the attacks, while Comodo said

“only” seven fraudulent certificates had been issued, all for communications systems, such as Skype, Gmail, Yahoo and Windows Live. According to research from Symantec, at least ten other CAs have also been targeted in recent months, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claims 248 compromised keys have been revoked due to CA compromise. “Hundreds of organisations are CAs, and each one of them has the power to authenticate any website

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on the internet to an end user,” said Dan Auerbach, a technologist with the EFF. There’s no clear picture of the true number of CAs – the EFF estimates put the figure at anything up to 650 – and compromising any CA lets hackers target any site. “Any CA that’s hacked will allow people to present a fake Gmail to end users,” said Auerbach. “This really isn’t a theoretical problem – for several months Iranian users were having Gmail traffic read [after DigiNotar was attacked].

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www.pcpro.co.uk/news It’s very serious given that we rely on encrypted sessions online for a variety of important transactions – financial transactions, for example, and also communications where your privacy is at stake.” One solution being discussed is restricting the number of CAs able to issue certificates for each website to only three, limiting the damage if one CA was hacked. Another proposal currently under review with the Internet Engineering Task Force would make it easier to pin keys to specific sites. Trust Assertions for Certificate

principal researcher with security company Norman. Equipped with a signed code certificate, attackers are able to install malware via flaws in software such as Word or Flash to snoop on victims. Fagerland has seen 200 examples of such an attack in the past year. “When code-signing certificates are being stolen in large numbers, it basically tells you that a signed executable can’t be called 100% safe,” he said. “Five or ten years ago, people would have thought ‘fine – it’s certified’. You can’t say that anymore.”

“If a certificate authority is hacked, the perpetrator could impersonate any site” Keys could be a significant improvement, but as Auerbach points out, “this stuff moves slowly, which is dangerous when people are actively attacking you”.

Code-signing threat

While a successful attack on a CA is the mother lode, there are other weaknesses in the system, with attackers targeting the signatures held by CAs’ customers to install malware on computers. These code-signing certificates are intended to verify executable and script authors, and to confirm the code hasn’t been interfered with since being signed with a cryptographic hash. However, hackers can steal these certificates to trick users into running dodgy files that won’t be flagged because they arrive fully certified, apparently from a trusted source. “A number of companies in China have been broken into electronically and their signing keys – the files they use to sign executables with – have been stolen,” said Snorre Fagerland,

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Once the theft is uncovered, a stolen certificate can be revoked, but fully removing them from user systems can be painful. “The problem is that if a code-signing certificate was stolen a year ago, and you backdate the revocation, you break everything else that’s

been signed using that certificate in that period, so you’re walking on a tightrope,” Fagerland said. “Many of the executables that are installed on computers are drivers – if you revoke the signature these have been signed with, you risk wreaking havoc on computers out there. You’re telling the computer that this driver can’t be loaded because it doesn’t validate anymore.”

Underlying lack of responsibility

The sheer number of certificateissuers makes it hard to police; every one of 650 firms needs to be both hack-proof and reputable. “To become a CA that’s able to authenticate Gmail, for example, it suffices to become a sub-CA of another major CA company, and to do that it costs about $500,000,” said Auerbach. “You go to one of the main CAs and say ‘I want to be a CA’, and they have a checklist of things you’re supposed to do. “Ideally, they’re very

vigorous and check that everyone conforms to the things on those checklists; in practice, it hasn’t been that rigorous – essentially, it comes down to half a million dollars. It’s not a lot to a government, for example.” In a competitive world where certificates cost as little as £20 a pop, Auerbach also questions whether due diligence is even possible. “Economically, CAs have an incentive to care about security as little as possible,” he said. “They want the cost of issuing a certificate to be very low [to them] and they want to issue a lot of them, so it’s a race to the bottom. As a CA, if you want to make money you cut corners. Browsers are trying to tighten this up, but it’s still a very precarious system.”

SSL weakness The Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM) has launched a tool to measure how well sites and browsers implement the SSL system – finding only 10% of sites are properly secured. “While it is possible today to deploy SSL and to deploy it well, the process is difficult: the default settings are wrong, the documentation is lacking, and the diagnostic tools are inadequate,” TIM declared when launching its SSL Pulse checker, which scans 200,000 major sites. “For these reasons,

we can’t say that the web is yet secure.” According to TIM, browser companies and site owners have been too slow to upgrade protocols that would improve security. A classic example is the BEAST attack, based on a TLS vulnerability first spotted in 2004, which was left unfixed because people didn’t think it would be exploited. Last year, hackers showed off an attack. “People are complacent – there was no immediate danger so things weren’t improved,” said TIM’s co-founder Ivan Ristic. “BEAST was

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fixed in 2006 in TLS 1.1 and 1.2 came out in 2008, but most people still use TLS 1 – 75% of sites,” he said. “Of the major browsers only Internet Explorer has implemented the newer protocol, but even then it’s not turned on by default.” According to Mozilla, major browsers have issued fixes for BEAST, but both browsers and websites need to be protected to fully solve the issue, and the company said it was still having “interoperability problems” updating to TLS 1.1.


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NEWS Headlines

TOP STORIES READERS REACT TO THE MONTH’S TECH NEWS

1

Microsoft ditches Aero for “flat” desktop UI

Aero is no more – Microsoft has largely ditched the design in favour of a “flatter” look for Windows 8’s desktop, removing the reflections and rounded corners in favour of square edges and basic white windows. The UI won’t simply mimic the Metro style; it will be similar to the app UI for “visual harmony”, while remaining familiar to Windows 7 users. The changes won’t all appear in June’s Release Preview, with some details held back to the final release, due in October. Microsoft also revealed that Media Center will be a paid-for add-on in Windows 8, with the OS left without a built-in way to play DVDs.

What we said:

“Extinguishing the attractive Aero effects, and doing away with staples such as DVD playback will do little to endear Windows 8 to those who are already suspicious of the Metro interface,” said editor Barry Collins. “Many have been begging Microsoft to compromise on the Windows 8 desktop, and reinstate an old-fashioned Start button. Instead, Microsoft looks set to turn back the clock even

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further, and replace semitransparent, rounded windows with the bland styling of Windows XP. Is Microsoft losing its way?”

What you said: The

desktop UI didn’t win over many fans on the PC Pro website. “This is just vile, it looks like a warmed-over Windows 3.1,” said Cerberus73. “I know retro is kind of geek chic, but this is going to extremes.” Gogster called the design “dull”, adding: “I can’t remember the last time Microsoft produced an OS that made me excited about getting my hands on it.” Sminc said it “looks like a poor attempt to make the desktop so awful that people prefer the Metro interface”. “As a MacBook Pro user, I find the Windows 7 implementation of Aero a real breath of fresh air,” said 0thello. “Yes, I was once a dreary-grey man, but OS X has pushed me too far. Give me swathes of coloured glass any day.” Others liked the new look. “To me clean, unobtrusive furniture in a UI is key,” said bentoan. “Change is difficult. I remember similar discussions when 95 and Vista were released.”

2

Facebook’s IPO fails to live up to hype

Facebook went public, with its IPO initially valuing the social network at more than £100 billion. Concerns about the earning potential of Mark Zuckerberg’s site cut through the hype, with shares falling below the launch price of $38 to $31 within days, after its own underwriters stopped propping it up. Zuckerberg – who still holds a majority share in the company he founded – was criticised before the IPO for a perceived lack of professionalism, with analysts suggesting Facebook overpaid for photo app Instagram, while one leading investor said the 28-year-old should swap his trademark hoodie for a suit. Others questioned Facebook’s earning potential. While it posted $1 billion in revenue last quarter, 82% of that was from advertising – and that took an ill-timed double hit when GM pulled its ads, and the site was forced to admit mobile ads were a weak point. Even with such concerns, the IPO was still the sixth largest in history.

What we said: “That

Facebook – with a relatively intangible business model and historical profit 100 times less

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than its flotation value – raised so much money before falling after the launch will have confounded investors,” said contributing editor Stewart Mitchell. “Despite the fact that it’s currently unrivalled online, it’s hard to forget the way predecessors Myspace and Friends Reunited fell from grace as users switched to fresher alternatives, particularly Facebook itself. Does it have enough users and momentum to avoid a similar fate? The investors that spent $16 billion for a piece of it will certainly hope so.”

What you said: The stumbling Facebook stock price didn’t surprise readers on the PC Pro website. “You’d be mad to [invest] at that price,” said wittgenfrog. “I remember the first dotcom bubble.” Still, readers expressed respect for the young billionaire, and praised him for sticking with his company despite lucrative previous offers. “Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t care about the money,” said Grunthos. “He’s in it for the long term, he’s a nerd.” www.pcpro.co.uk

For the latest news, visit our website www.pcpro.co.uk/news

Say

“No”

email: [email protected]

3

ISPs ordered to block The Pirate Bay

to

Slow

Switch to VIPRE – the antivirus that doesn’t slow down your PC Five ISPs were ordered by the High Court to block infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. BT was given more time to “consider its position”, but Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media received court orders to block the site following piracy accusations from music lobby group the BPI. Virgin was the first to implement the block and – despite consistently arguing against such measures in favour of improving legal services – was hit by a retaliatory distributed denial-ofservice (DDoS) attack from Anonymous. While that wasn’t a surprise, The Pirate Bay’s response was to call for Anonymous to stop attacking, saying taking down a site via DDoS was another form of censorship. The Pirate Bay remained accessible via mirror sites, including one run by the UK Pirate Party, and even reported a jump in traffic after being blocked.

What we said: “It’s

impossible to ignore the fact that The Pirate Bay is used for illegal downloads, but it’s equally impossible to figure out exactly what the courts and the BPI hope to achieve via site-blocking,” said

www.pcpro.co.uk

news editor Nicole Kobie. “There are myriad ways to dodge the block, and many other search tools to use to find illegal downloads – Google included. This is an embarrassing waste of time and money, and leaves UK courts standing at the top of a slippery slope towards greater censorship.”

What you said: Many readers, including absthame, noted the block would fail. “A court order that is, in practice, unenforceable brings the law and courts into disrepute.” Simbu said there were “idiots on both sides” of the debate. “The entertainment industry is trying to block one site, when five more will just spring up to replace it... On the other hand you have the baying masses, who justify their theft by saying the industry had been overcharging them.” Eliotnpt said lawyers were the only winners, and Revsorg agreed.“The losers are the people whose internet connections will be increasingly censored, by a judge who doesn’t realise freedom of speech is a loftier goal than protecting the outmoded business models of the creative industries.”

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NEWS Headlines

Autonomy boss leaves HP after culture clash HP mindset at odds with Cambridge start-up

A

clash of cultures and conflicting expertise were behind a rash of departures from Autonomy, the British firm bought by HP, according to analysts. The software company set up by Mike Lynch in Cambridge was bought for $10 billion by HP last year under the leadership of now-ousted CEO Leo Apotheker. Lynch left Autonomy on the same day HP announced 27,000 job cuts, while several senior Autonomy managers left over the previous few weeks, with a source

telling PC Pro that staff found it “exceedingly difficult to get anything done” with HP. “Autonomy is a very entrepreneurial start-up, whereas HP is a multinational global monolith; if you look at the cultures, they were quite different,” said Richard Holway, chairman of analyst firm TechMarketView. “American companies can be smothering.” HP’s latest CEO Meg Whitman blamed Lynch’s departure on disappointing results and “classic entrepreneurial company scaling

challenges”. But Holway said the situation wasn’t helped by HP’s reorganisation. “It’s a dysfunctional company at the moment – can you imagine Mike Lynch and his team of entrepreneurial people being parachuted into this dysfunctional, big-corporate bureaucracy?” Holway said Autonomy and its team also had their faults. “Autonomy isn’t totally blameless, and lots of people had told me that Autonomy hadn’t really grown up,” he said.

According to George O’Connor, an analyst at investment bank Panmure Gordon, the departures could leave HP struggling with Autonomy. “A lot of people have left since HP took over, so you could argue the guts had been ripped out of it in terms of key delivery specialists.”

Q&A

What’s next for web privacy The cookies law has finally come into play – but where does it leave web users? We speak to the ICO’s Dave Evans to find out

T

he cookie law is now being enforced in the UK, requiring websites to seek “informed consent” from visitors before dropping non-essential cookies on PCs. We spoke to Dave Evans, head of business policy at the Information Commissioner’s Office, to find out how this will affect UK sites, browsers and apps. Will sites simply tell users to leave if they don’t want cookies?

I haven’t seen it on large websites, but I’ve seen it on some smaller ones. In some contexts it might well be legally compliant. I expect that if I was advising a company, not on privacy but on how not to annoy your customers, it possibly isn’t a good idea – it certainly isn’t good practice. What will it take for browser settings to be enough? The issue with browsers, the reason why it’s only part of the solution and not the whole thing, is the browsers I use at

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home and on my laptop perfectly reflect what I do and don’t want to happen, because I’ve gone in there and changed my settings [but some users won’t]. We’re hoping to see from newer versions of browsers a kind of prompt when you first launch it; as well as all the other stuff you have to go through, [it says] here’s the default settings we want to apply, here’s what you can do to change them.

phone? I’m not scrolling through pages. And some of the stuff they get access to, it isn’t even “why”, it’s “what is that?”

“The app that turns your iPhone into a torch needs to know where you are – why?”

What about apps – will they be subject to similar laws? Apps are on the list… if somebody is storing information – or, more likely with an app, accessing information that’s already been stored – one of the arguments might be what form of consent they’re getting. We’ve all downloaded an app and clicked okay, but how informed are we? How do you get genuine informed consent on a mobile

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That app that turns your iPhone into a torch needs to know where you are – why? I’m in the dark, that’s all you need to know. Shouldn’t apps simply not collect this data in the first place? This concept of minimising the data you collect and minimising what you need is being reinforced. That someone is offering an app that collects a whole bunch of stuff that’s utterly irrelevant to the service they’re offering you – well, if they can’t answer the question of why they’ve collected it, then there’s a data protection issue there.

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2.9%

4 . 96 %

Mac market share

Flashback: Apple failed to quickly block this trojan and 600,000 Macs were infected.

2% 5.

Leap-A: One of the earliest worms affecting Macs spreads via iChat and disguises itself as a JPEG file.

2006

Malware volume

20 12

FakeAV: Fake antivirus that pretends your computer’s infected requesting the user’s credit card.

Data credits: malware details, Trend Micro Threat Encyclopedia; malware volume, Kaspersky Lab; Mac sales market share, Gartner

The rise of Mac malware

3.3 %

201

OpinionSpy: This malware hides on a screensaver and spies on network traffic.

8% .0

DNSChanger: Poses as a video codec and redirects the user to compromised websites.

WorldMags.net

2011

0

Mac sales are growing, but threats ut so are security threa

MacSweeper: This early Mac scareware demands $39.99 to clean up fake infections.

4

3.56%

Apple has long been a bit smug about security, with Mac owners facing much fewer threats than Windows users. While most PC makers are posting declining sales, Apple’s Macs continue to chalk up sales growth, making them a more lucrative target for criminals.

Krowi: Attached to pirated versions of iWork ‘09, this attack opens up a backdoor once installed.

This year, the Flashback trojan infected 600,000 Macs, not helped by the slow arrival of a patch from Apple. Here, we compare the Mac’s growing market share to the increasing malware threat – but despite the growth, threats remain negligible compared to those against Windows.

KEY Malware damage potential = low

20

= medium

2.4 3%

07

= high

9 200

NEWS Infographic

200 8

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NEWS Opinion

Microsoft needs to keep the crapware off Windows 8, argues NICOLE KOBIE

M

icrosoft has a vision for Windows 8: “it just works”. That refrain has echoed through blog posts, presentations and interviews; regardless of the topic at hand, Microsoft is repeating it like a mantra. If it sounds a wee bit familiar, yes, it’s been ripped off from Apple, but if Microsoft is going to mimic any of its rival’s ideas, ease of use is the one to go for. Microsoft wants customers to pick up a Windows 8 tablet or unbox a shiny Ultrabook and enjoy the experience, rather than uninstall crapware and tinker with settings while cursing Windows to high heaven. You shouldn’t have to fiddle endlessly to make a machine work – it should start easy, and become more difficult, complicated and configurable if you want it to, not the other way around, Microsoft argues. However, the companies actually making the PCs aren’t helping, burdening the OS with antivirus trials, own-brand utilities and other bloatware, slowing it down and leaving what should be a fresh and fast install of Windows irritating and slow.

No-one blames the PC if it’s running slowly, or the manufacturers – customers blame Microsoft for making a slow OS

News editor NICOLE KOBIE intends to keep Microsoft’s $99 fee in mind next time friends or family want a PC cleaned up. Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/nicolek Email: [email protected]

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To combat this, Microsoft is offering what’s been dubbed “crapware cleanup”, which it prefers to call its “Signature” service. Customers can either buy a PC directly from a Microsoft Store in the US, or bring in one they’ve bought elsewhere for a $99 charge, and Microsoft’s staff will strip it down and shine it up. “Many new PCs come filled with lots of trialware and sample software that slows your computer down – removing all that is a pain, so we do it for you!” Microsoft says. Such Signature PCs are the closest Microsoft has come to selling its own computers – which I suggested a few months back (see issue 207, p22). While the PCs aren’t bogged down with bloatware, they do feature the Zune app and Bing-optimised Internet Explorer, which more than a few commenters on our website blasted as little better than crapware itself. It isn’t a new idea: back in 2008, Sony had a similar thought, giving customers the option to pay $50 to buy a PC without crapware.

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After the predictable outrage, Sony backed down, saying the entire plan had been a “communications error”. So it isn’t as though PC makers and Microsoft aren’t aware of how annoying crapware is to their customers. Yet the plague remains, and for one simple reason: it makes manufacturers money, and they have incredibly tight margins – Apple’s profits are the exception that proves the rule. Exactly how much they make out of such deals isn’t clear, but Sony valued it at $50 per PC. Amazon is testing a similar idea: in the US, it sells Kindles with “Special Offers”, which is a lovely euphemism for an ebook reader with ads. In place of the screensaver, the Kindle will display an advertisement, helping to subsidise the cost of the device and dropping the price by $30. Microsoft is offering the reverse: you have already got the savings, so pay $99 extra to get one without marketing materials built-in. Should we pay a bit more for a clean install, or should we tolerate crapware slowing down our pristine new laptops for the sake of lower prices – altruistically keeping HP, Dell and the rest in business? In a way, it’s similar to advertising on the PC Pro website. We need to pay for all that content or I don’t have a job; if we don’t run ads, we’re not going to be able to offer it for free, if at all. Indeed, not all preinstalled software is useless – someone must take up those antivirus offers, otherwise the security firms wouldn’t keep at it. However, getting rid of the pop-ups shouldn’t be so hard – a “no thanks” rather than “I’ll deal with this later” button would be a good start – and no PC should be installed with so much crapware that it takes more than a few minutes in the Control Panel to get rid of it. But as long as that continues, it’s easy to see why Microsoft isn’t a fan of crapware. It gets the criticism, but – short of offering a cleaning service for all 350 million computers that ship each year – there’s little it can do. No-one blames the new PC if it’s running slowly, or the manufacturers for not installing updates and optimising the system – customers blame Microsoft for making a slow OS. No matter how many times Microsoft’s employees say the words “it just works”, customers won’t be convinced if it doesn’t. Windows 8 lands this autumn; Microsoft needs to pull manufacturers aside and tell them to cool it with the crapware – the new OS will have enough work winning over users on its own.

www.pcpro.co.uk

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FEATURE TV tech

Who’s got the best TV tech? Sky, Virgin Media, BT Vision and a host of free alternatives offer a vast range of TV apps, services and hardware. Which are the ratings winners?

Contributors: David Bayon, Jonathan Bray, Barry Collins, Mike Jennings

Illustrations: Jan Cihak

T

elevision today means more than a screen that sits in the corner delivering programmes to a schedule. Current services offer a complete package of intelligent set-top boxes, on-demand programming delivered over the internet, mobile apps, and plenty more. In this feature, we take a comprehensive look at the hardware and services being promised by Britain’s major television suppliers: Sky, Virgin Media, BT, YouView, plus the phalanx of hardware and online services that aren’t tied to a particular provider. We examine the sophistication of their set-top boxes, options for allowing you to record programmes when you’re

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away from home, and apps that provide access to live and on-demand programmes when you’re out and about. Television services are evolving at a rapid pace. For customers already tied to a particular service, our feature could reveal a little-publicised gem you’re missing out on with your current service provider, or give you the excuse you’ve been waiting for to switch to a better-equipped rival. Equally, our rundown of what’s on offer from the subscription-free alternatives on p32 might make you wonder why you’re handing over hundreds of pounds per year to companies such as Sky, Virgin Media or BT. Read on to find out what you might be missing out on.

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www.pcpro.co.uk

TV tech FEATURE

www.pcpro.co.uk

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FEATURE TV tech

Sky The video-on-demand features of Sky’s set-top box have been thrown open to a wider audience now that the broadcaster has sensibly stopped mandating that customers use Sky Broadband to access its Anytime+ service. Anyone with a decent broadband connection can choose from a wide library of on-demand shows and movies. Anytime+ programmes are downloaded to the hard disk on customers’ Sky+ boxes; you can set a movie downloading before you leave for work in the morning, and have it waiting for you on your return. You don’t have to wait for the entire show to download before you can begin watching: indeed, viewing begins almost

Anytime+ is free to Sky HD customers, provided you’re happy to run an Ethernet cable between your set-top box and router. If not, you’ll need a £60 wireless adapter from Sky.

recommends you issue the recording instruction no later than ten minutes before the start, but we’ve set recordings with only a minute or two to go and they’ve almost always succeeded.

Remote recording

Extra services

Sky’s remote recording facilities are excellent. Sky Guide (http://tv.sky.com/tv-guide) has an almost perfect replica of the set-top-box EPG, allowing you to scroll through schedules for the next seven days and set programmes to record. Handily, the guide is built in HTML, so it’s accessible on iPads and other tablets, as well as on PCs. There’s even a plain-text “accessible” version of the guide. There are also Sky+ apps for iOS and Android that provide a smooth, scrollable EPG, from which you can schedule recordings. To save you scrolling through hundreds of channels, you can pre-select favourites or search for programmes by name; results appear as you type. On both the online EPG and apps, you can’t record a programme that’s already started. Sky

“There are Sky+ apps for iOS and Android that provide a smooth, scrollable EPG” immediately if you have a broadband connection faster than 3 or 4Mbits/sec. A standard definition, 51-minute episode of Game of Thrones was a 670MB download; HD movies consume several gigabytes. Keep a close eye on your ISP’s data cap.

Sky’s video-on-demand apps extend to games consoles. Xbox 360 owners with Xbox Live Gold can download the Sky app for their console, which offers 32 live channels and a host of catch-up shows. It’s free to Sky subscribers, and if the Xbox console is in an upstairs bedroom, it’s an excellent way to avoid paying the £10 Multiroom subscription. Picture quality on the Xbox is closer to standard definition output than HD, in our experience. As with Sky Go (see below), if you’re not already a Sky subscriber, you can buy channel packages from £20 per month – although expect to pay double that if you’re after premium sport and movies. One thing to note about Sky’s mobile, PC and console apps is that you can assign only two devices per subscription: if you have Sky Go on your iPad and PC, you can’t access the Xbox app. Sky allows you to switch devices, but only a limited number of times each month.

APPS Sky has a wide selection of superb mobile apps. The Sky Go app (iOS, Android and PC) allows Sky subscribers to watch a relatively thin selection of sports, entertainment and news channels live, as well as a vast library of live and on-demand movies – provided you subscribe to the relevant channels. Streams are delivered at a variable bit rate, but as long as you’re on a steady broadband/3G connection, picture quality is normally perfectly acceptable for smartphone and tablet screens. Even live

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football is watchable on an iPhone. Streams do have a habit of dropping on the iPad, however. The Sky Sports app for iPad is stunning. Not only does it offer live streams of all the Sky Sports channels to TV subscribers, it includes interactive content for the tablet. For example, Formula 1 coverage is complemented by a moving map of the circuit showing driver positions, a timings screen and

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live tweets from the teams. It’s just a shame that buffering leaves the iPad up to a minute behind the TV stream, making it all but impossible to use the tablet app as a companion when watching the race. There are plenty of other Sky apps, including dedicated ones for football and cricket, some of which also stream content or highlights from Sky Sports.

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FEATURE TV tech

at a time. These are problems the web browser version of the guide solves, with a multidirectional, multichannel scrolling EPG – but we found it slow to load and sluggish even on a powerful, modern PC.

Extra services

We’ve already mentioned the TiVo box’s series of onboard apps, but there are other features worthy of mention, too. Customers with a pair of TiVo boxes can stream recorded programmes from one box to another – handy, if you fancy watching something recorded overnight on the living room box in bed the following morning. Hook it up to a router via Ethernet and the TiVo can be controlled over the home network, via a choice of third-party apps – Peanut and Zeebox (see below), for example. Then there’s the TiVo’s large range of standard TV recording tools, which push it way out in front of the competition. “Wishlist” recording allows you to record all shows matching certain keywords, actors, directors and genres (or any combination of those things). It will even automatically record shows in the background, based on ratings applied using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on the remote. Standard single programme and series recordings benefit from a whole host of options, too, from setting priorities for certain programmes (so they record even when there are clashes) to limiting the box to retain only a

Virgin Media On-demand content has always been one of Virgin Media’s main strengths, as a broadband connection isn’t required. Programmes can be streamed in standard or high definition straight over the cable connection to the set-top box, so there’s no damage to your data cap – and with no need for extra storage, even those without Virgin Media’s fancy TiVo box can take advantage. Another benefit of Virgin’s on-demand service is the variety of content on offer, and the flexibility of payment options. Virgin’s FilmFlex has thousands of titles available to stream; prices range from £2.50 for old favourites such as Finding Nemo, to £5 for the most recent HD titles such as War Horse. Quality is superb, whether with SD or HD streams, and in our experience the streams are totally reliable. Virgin also supplies regular on-demand TV content straight over its cables, including BBC iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Player and Demand 5, plus its own TV Choice service. Move up to a TiVo box and you unlock further on-demand services via a series of “apps” on the box itself: there’s access to Spotify Premium, plus the ability to log in to your Facebook and Flickr accounts and display photo and video slideshows among others.

Remote recording

If Virgin Media’s on-demand content is impressive, the supporting services are less so. First up is the Virgin Media TV Guide, available for Android and iOS devices as an app, and on the web for laptops and PCs. The apps are fairly basic. They open with a now-and-next view, with the channel selection replicating the TV package you have. You can tap a programme to view a description, then record that show or set up a series link. The remote record service isn’t advertised clearly, but it works well. As with Sky, TV programmes that are in progress can’t be recorded, and you need to give at least ten minutes’ notice for a successful recording to take place. There are flaws, however: with the apps there’s no search facility, and you can only view future programme content one channel

“The TiVo’s range of standard TV recording tools push it out in front of the competition” set number of episodes of a certain series, or being able to tell the box to ignore repeats. Finally, don’t forget the TiVo box has three tuners to the Sky+ box’s two, a feature that comes in handy more often than you may think.

STREAMING APPS The weakest area of Virgin’s on-demand offering is its streaming Virgin Media Player. Not only is the content weak, with only Virgin TV Choice and the four domestic streaming services available, but the way it’s accessed and priced is downright absurd. On the PC, Flash technology is used to deliver an adaptive stream via a standard desktop web browser. Subscribers to the M+, L or XL packages get the service for free. Others, however, must cough up using a bizarre

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pay-as-you-watch pricing structure. A “pass” for 15 minutes of TV costs 60p; 30 minutes is £1; 45 minutes is £1.50; and if you want an hour it’s £1.75. If you don’t use one of these passes within the first 24 hours, you lose it. To make matters worse, the smartphone apps work differently. Available on iOS and Android, they work only over 3G – not with Wi-Fi – increasing the chances of a stern letter from your network operator if used extensively. Everyone must pay for the apps, even existing

subscribers; it’s taken through your mobile bill. The rates are the same as detailed above. Far worse than this, though, is the service’s unreliability and lack of quality. While attempting to test both desktop and app streaming services, we only occasionally managed to get streaming TV running, and the quality was variable; we found it to be heavily compressed, blocky and unwatchable – far from the crisp HD quality available via the company’s set-top boxes.

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Subscription-free alternatives If Sky and Virgin don’t appeal, there are plenty of other ways to access content – live or otherwise Now that the digital switchover is almost complete, 90% of the UK can receive Freeview, and more than four million HD boxes had been sold as of December 2011. Freeview can’t compete with Sky and Virgin on the sheer number of channels, but it does include satellite favourites such as ITV2, BBC Three and Four, More4, Dave and more. Numerous text services and radio stations are also included. New TVs have Freeview built in, but it’s possible to buy a box for as little as £20 and be watching in minutes. Bear in mind, however, that cheap boxes eschew all luxuries, with scart rather than HDMI connections and no additional services. If you have the budget, there’s much more to Freeview than its basic service. Freeview+ boxes allow for programme recording and, as with standard boxes, there’s no single box to buy – a minimum specification is licensed to hardware manufacturers. This specification includes series links, recording split programmes as individual programmes, searching and offering to record related programmes, and also offering alternative airings of programmes if there’s a scheduling conflict. It’s similar to Sky+. Freeview HD, meanwhile, launched in December 2009 with only BBC HD and ITV, but that’s since grown to include BBC One, Channel 4 and regional equivalents. It’s also possible to augment your channel selection with TopUpTV. There’s no contract, and monthly payments unlock channels normally restricted to Sky and Virgin customers, such as Sky Sports channels and ESPN.

Both Freeview+ and HD usually come on high-end boxes. A £150 box typically includes a 160GB or 320GB hard disk as well as Freeview+ and HD, but for anything up to £300 you can get a terabyte or more of storage, twin TV tuners, Blu-ray drives and USB ports. The latter allows you to connect external USB hard disks or thumb drives and export recordings, although you may need to convert the video for playback on a PC, and

some programmes may be encrypted. This gives Freeview boxes a potential advantage over Sky and Virgin’s set-top boxes, which effectively disable their USB ports. Even if you’ve splashed out on an expensive box, there’s still one consideration that’s unique to Freeview: reception. The ongoing deactivation of the analogue signal has freed up precious bandwidth and improved coverage, but you’re still reliant on your signal to receive all the available channels. The first stop should be a postcode check at www.freeview.co.uk/availability. Sites such as www.ukfree.tv offer transmitter maps, service updates and information on the technical aspects of the Freeview service. The quality of reception also depends on the aerial: external aerials are best, but internal ones cost as little as £10; if you have trouble, spend more on one with a built-in amplifier.

Remote recording & mobile EPG

Freeview has been a little slower to fully embrace the world of apps than Sky and Virgin, but the official Freeview HD app is available on iOS and Android. It’s basically an EPG, with full schedule listings for all Freeview channels, but it has social features too: each information page has a “share” button, along with the ability to flag favourite programmes and set reminders. What it can’t do currently is remotely record programmes on your Freeview box. To do that, there are a number of internet-connected Freeview boxes, some of which allow you to set up remote recordings via a web interface. Currently only the

MOVIE RENTAL Although it’s growing rapidly, movie rental is one area where there’s still some way to go to match traditional television services. Mubi and other small players serve niches, but it’s the battle of Lovefilm and Netflix that’s most intriguing, since they both compete to turn their disc rental businesses into streaming services. Whether you access them through a console or online, there are two key factors to consider: the library and the streaming

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quality. On the former, there’s only one winner. Lovefilm’s growing library doesn’t directly match the disc library due to licensing issues, but it’s improving rapidly. The problem for many is that Lovefilm’s streaming quality remains very much standard definition – and often even lower than that. If the choice is between a quick fuzzy download and a Blu-ray through the post, many will still prefer to wait for the latter. Netflix, on the other hand, streams its content in something closer to 720p, as long as your

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connection can handle it. The experience is much better, although still prone to artefacts in busy scenes, and makes it feel more like the premium service it claims to be. The problem with Netflix is the library, which was paltry when it launched earlier this year and hasn’t grown particularly quickly since. You can try both services with a 30-day free trial. Judging by our experiences, a high proportion of people will choose to cancel at the end of that period.

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TV tech FEATURE

SmartBox range of Freeview devices can pair up with an app called FetchTV, which includes remote recording. Hopefully, the Freeview HD app will follow suit, although it’s presumably a more complex task when you’re not tied to a single piece of hardware.

Internet services

If you don’t want or need a TV, you can still watch many channels online. BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD and Demand 5 are all free to view (although you still need a TV licence to watch live broadcasts), and Sky now offers an online-only subscription to its channels. For £15 a month you can receive the basic entertainment pack with up to 20 channels, rising to £40 a month for the full sports and movies package. You won’t have the Sky+ features, but you’ll have the flexibility to cancel at any point – and no unsightly dish stuck on the side of your house. Then, of course, there’s the huge quantity of online video content not tied to an existing television broadcaster. Internet TV has been a buzz phrase for years now, and to a certain extent it’s possible to watch entertaining content that exists solely online. There are many popular YouTube channels, many in Full HD, along with shows that arrive on all manner of websites in regular slots. As traditional TV companies continue to grow their online output, the internet is already becoming a new home for TV – just not quite in the manner many originally predicted.

channels in your subscription, or pay as you go. It’s a major coup for Microsoft, essentially turning your Xbox into a second Sky box. The PlayStation 3 can’t quite match that, but it does have its own offerings. VidZone streams music videos in an array of styles and genres – much like the music channels on Sky, but here you get to choose what song plays next. The Xbox has the similar Vevo. The excellent Mubi, on the PlayStation 3, offers a selection of independent and classic films. There’s one other factor to take into

Consoles

A good example of this is in the world of games consoles. Most family households these days have at least one sitting under the TV, and they’re becoming increasingly powerful entertainment hubs. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 both offer streaming content from BBC iPlayer and 4oD, with the Xbox also offering Demand 5 and the PlayStation 3 offering ITV Player. Both consoles have Lovefilm and Netflix apps for streaming movies (see left), as well as some of their own on-demand movies and TV shows. They each have their exclusives. While the PlayStation 3 offers a selection of Sky shows for purchase in its PlayStation Store, the Xbox has a full Sky Go app with which you can either stream the

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account: everything on the PlayStation 3 is available for free; to get anything beyond iPlayer on the Xbox you’ll need a Gold subscription, which costs around £30 a year.

Apps

It isn’t only about the living room: the popularity of smartphones means that big TV companies now have their own apps. BBC’s iPlayer is available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry, and Sky has a range of apps to complement its TV offering. ITV has iOS and Android versions of its ITV Player, but Channel 4’s 4oD is available only on iOS. Channel 5’s on-demand service, Demand 5, is also available on iOS, with an Android version slated for a summer release. Then there are the streaming services. Netflix’s iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 apps allow direct streaming of movies as part of your subscription, as does Lovefilm’s iPad app. Alas, the Lovefilm apps for iOS, Android and Nokia smartphones only let you browse titles and watch trailers. TVCatchup has free, ad-supported streaming from a variety of channels on iPhone and iPad. Popular American service Hulu has made noises about launching in the UK, too, but its service and app – which works on both iPhone and iPad – hasn’t yet landed on these shores. It’s also possible to buy TV shows and movies from Apple and Google themselves. Apple’s iTunes serves up the broadest catalogue, with Google Play currently offering only movies, but the firm has registered domains such as www.googleplaytv.com, which could indicate a desire to offer TV shows too. There are other apps that, while not affiliated with particular streaming services or TV networks, can give your TV viewing a tech injection. IMDb (www.imdb.com) is primarily a movie site, but its seemingly endless database also catalogues the stars, crew and writers of most of the world’s TV. Dozens of apps offer TV listings, news and reviews of current shows, and innovative software such as Zeebox attempts to tap into the current growth in second-screen viewing by linking up with social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Finally, it’s possible to use your smartphone in conjunction with media-streaming boxes. Slingbox’s SlingPlayer software is available for iOS devices, Android tablets, Windows Phone 7 devices and BlackBerry handsets, and iOS devices can control Apple TV direct from the smartphone or tablet.


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FEATURE TV tech

BT Vision A cheaper alternative to either Sky or Virgin is BT Vision: it marries a Freeview receiver with on-demand IPTV programming in a set-top box available only to BT broadband customers. BT Vision offers only standard definition Freeview broadcast channels, although HD and 3D content is available to download. BT claims it adds ten HD movies to its online box office every month, for example, and when it says “HD” it means either 720p or 1080p. Premium Sky Sports and ESPN channels are available. The latest BT Vision+ box offers twin Freeview tuners and 160GB of hard disk space, BT’s Vision+ box offers twin Freeview tuners and 160GB of hard disk space

which BT claims will store up to 250 hours of programming. On-demand content is from a selection of domestic broadcasters. There’s a version of the BBC iPlayer on a dedicated channel, as well as content from ITV Player, 4oD and Demand 5. BT Vision doesn’t support HD content from any of the on-demand broadcasters, however, which leaves pictures looking fuzzy in comparison to HD iPlayer streams on offer from the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Sony Blu-ray players. There’s almost nothing in the way of apps or services for BT Vision. There are no option to set recordings remotely, nor any apps to watch content on your tablet or smartphone. Indeed, the only real advantage it offers over Sky or Virgin is its price: packages start from £17 per month including broadband (but excluding line rental at £10.75 per month). That’s with a 10GB data cap, though, which could be easily surpassed if you’re watching plenty of on-demand TV programmes. It’s also worth noting that the BT Vision set-top-box software is set for an upgrade later

this year. The new Linux-based OS has been tested with some customers, who at the time of going to press were barred from revealing any details. However, the new OS delivers a radical overhaul of the Vision interface, and new features such as music playlists and the ability to “bookmark” on-demand programming.

“The BT Vision set-topbox software is set for an upgrade later this year” However, according to the BT Vision help pages, there are pitfalls. Owners of the older, silver BT Vision boxes won’t benefit from the upgrade; all previously recorded programmes will be wiped when the software is upgraded on BT Vision+ boxes; and HD on-demand content will have to be downloaded in its entirety before viewers can start playback – a retrograde step from the existing software that allows you to start watching after a few minutes. BT’s help pages say that the problem will be overcome “very soon”.

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUVIEW? YouView – originally known as Project Canvas – is coming dangerously close to vapourware. The joint venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, BT, TalkTalk and others was originally slated to launch in late 2010. It now isn’t expected before the end of this year. Like BT Vision, YouView aims to marry Freeview/freesat broadcasts with on-demand IPTV content, but it’s a more ambitious technology than BT Vision’s set-top box. For starters, it will include HD channels and on-demand content. It also plans to let users scroll both backwards and forwards through the EPG, allowing viewers to catch up on

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programmes that have been broadcast. “Basically, you’ll get all the best bits of 21st-century TV, without having to grapple with complicated technology or pay any TV subscription fees,” the YouView website boasts. The specification for the Freeview YouView box – being made by half a dozen different manufacturers – includes twin DVB-T2 tuners, a 320GB hard disk (30GB of which is reserved for content being “pushed” to the box) and 802.11n Wi-Fi support. The specification for the freesat box hasn’t yet been announced. After overcoming various regulatory hurdles, YouView’s problems now appear to be

technical. Lord Sugar, who is the non-executive chairman of YouView and was brought onto the project for his experience of making set-top boxes with Amstrad, is reportedly unhappy with the stability of them, claiming they aren’t fit for public consumption. Insiders on the project have told PC Pro that expletive-filled email rants from The Apprentice star about the state of the hardware are common. Further delays could result in YouView losing one of its USPs: the backward-scrolling EPG is already set to be included in other Freeview boxes. It is, as Lord Sugar himself might summarise, a “bloody shambles”.

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FEATURE Net snooping

The government wants to know what you’re doing online. Nicole Kobie reveals how you can avoid such snooping

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very time the government talks about online surveillance or blocking sites, there’s a stock response from tech-savvy activists: there’s no point, it’s easy to dodge. Indeed, the day a court ordered five of Britain’s biggest ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, the site reported a surge in traffic – and used the opportunity to promote ways to circumvent the ban. While the government is yet to reveal its full web surveillance plans, it already has access to our phone conversations and online activity. ISPs and web services such as Google and Facebook are required to keep data on users, such as sites visited and searches made. With a court order or warrant, it’s easy to access such information or tap into real-time conversation. However, it’s also possible to use simple – often free – tools to keep them from seeing too much. We reveal how to dodge online censorship and prevent digital wire-tapping – and warn about the limits of the VPNs, encryption and other tools in our arsenal.

Web protection

The first step is to encrypt your browsing, which should prevent anyone tapping the line from reading your data. Sites such as banks and

Gmail do this by default – a reaction to the Chinese hack that saw Google’s search pulled from that country – but others require users to switch it on. While it’s easy to type HTTPS ahead of the URL, or tick the box in the settings of Facebook or Twitter, extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere force the browser to use the secure version of a site (if there is one). Google’s search offers a secure version. “Normally anyone with access to the network – anyone on the same network as you, or the ISP, or a government that’s tapping things – would be able to see exactly what you’re searching for and the results that come back,” says Seth Schoen, senior technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Using the encrypted version, this information is protected. Encryption isn’t perfect. It depends on the security of certificate authorities – not guaranteed after a run of hacks targeting Comodo and DigiNotar last year – and anyone with access to your PC could alter certificates without your knowledge. However, encryption does prevent snooping over Wi-Fi networks and keeps ISPs from seeing the content of your communications, if not where they’re headed to. “If people are concerned about the content of their communication, then they need to make sure they’re using HTTPS,” says Schoen.

“Encryption isn’t perfect – it depends on the security of certificate authorities”

VPNs & proxies

Those who are worried about revealing their IP address and browsing destinations need to look to tools such as proxies or VPNs. Proxies mask an IP address: type in the site you’d like to visit – say, The Pirate Bay – and it re-routes traffic, letting it dodge censorship such as countryspecific site-blocking, and prevents others from seeing your IP address. Free proxies are widely available on the web, as are free and paid-for VPN services, which offer further protection via an encrypted tunnel for your traffic. Widely used to access content with geographical restrictions or simply for added security, VPNs don’t offer perfect protection.

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Any company can be subpoenaed for data – as an alleged LulzSec hacker found out, after the UK firm HideMyAss passed over data on his logs last year. Danvers Baillieu, COO of the firm, told PC Pro that it collects only the name a user supplied, how he or she paid, and the time a user logs in and out – but has to pass it over if required by UK authorities. According to EFF’s Schoen, most VPNs are paid-for, making the subscriber easy to identify: the name is on the credit card. Second, the VPN

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itself can see the traffic. “With a VPN, you’ve essentially moved the ability to intercept or spy on your communications from your local network and ISP to other service providers,” says Schoen. “In a sense, it just moves the problem from one place to another.” That doesn’t mean VPNs are useless: one with routers based in a different country can bypass local censorship or site-blocking, but users need to be aware the system has limits – and find out what data a company collects before signing up. Many firms are aware of the potential weaknesses, so hold their servers in countries that don’t require logs; services such as Air VPN and Cryptocloud told P2P-watching site TorrentFreak that they don’t keep data on user activity, so can’t hand it over.

Onion routers

There’s a more comprehensive means of covering your tracks online: Tor – the onion router. It takes content and wraps it in an encrypted envelope with routing instructions. A web query, for example, is sent via three places, so the website or network provider can’t see where the traffic is coming from. “Tor separates who you are from where you’re going,” says Andrew Lewman, Tor’s executive director. To use it, simply download the Tor Browser Bundle, and surf from the Tor version of the

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Illustration: Simon Brader (www.simonbrader.co.uk)

Net snooping FEATURE

Firefox browser: it includes the HTTPS Everywhere extension, so content is encrypted inside the encrypted routing envelope. It doesn’t mean you’re invisible, however. Lewman related an example of an abused woman who used Tor to access a victim support forum hosted on Facebook. As soon as she logged into Facebook, that site knew who she was – a fact she didn’t realise. “Once you log in, Facebook knows who you are; it just doesn’t know where you are in the world.” While this may seem of little use to us, it gives people banned from accessing a site via their IP address a way to log in, such as when activists from Iran used Tor to access the social network. The main downside to Tor is frustratingly slow browsing. “Your traffic is likely bouncing across oceans and going all over the world,” says Lewman. “It takes time. If your first relay is in Japan, your second is in Argentina, the third relay is in Germany, and you’re sitting in the UK, it means your traffic has to traverse the world three times, every time.” While Tor has 3,000 relays through which to divert traffic, the system has been downloaded 36 million times in the past year alone, with between half a million and a million users a day. “That scale, between 3,000 relays, means some really busy relays,” he says. To help out, you can either set up your own relay or donate to groups running them.

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There are three types of relays: “bridges” to help people in heavily censored countries access the Tor network, plus non-exit and exit relays. “A non-exit relay can be either the first or the second hop of those three. As someone running a relay, all you’ll see is encrypted traffic coming and going,” says Lewman. “Exit relays are where you allow people to exit from the Tor network on your IP to wherever they’re going,” he adds – but that means your IP address is publicly viewable. In some countries – notably the US, with its DMCA takedown system – this means you’ll be the target of copyright control notices and even police attention. “If some jerk uses Tor and does something bad through Tor, you being the exit relay means the police will talk to you first,” says Lewman.

their own hosting server – called a “seed” – meaning they can keep control of their data. It’s easy to ensure a photo is really deleted when the server is 3ft away. If you don’t want to switch to Diaspora, there are ways to mitigate what Facebook, Google+, Twitter and the rest can see – which in turn limits what others can get from the sites after the fact. Many experts, F-Secure researcher Sean Sullivan included, suggest sandboxing Facebook in its own browser, so that it can’t monitor your browsing activity, for example. He uses Chrome for Google, another

“Social networking sites gather a frightening amount of data about users”

Social networks

Social networks gather a frightening amount of data about users – although, if you’re worried about being tracked or watched online, what are you doing on Facebook in the first place? For those willing to walk away from Facebook and Google+, there’s Diaspora. The open source, alternative social network lets users run

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for Facebook, and a third for general web browsing. “The browsers are so similar these days that I almost use them as applications… that kind of scatters your profile around.” Sullivan also suggests opting out of Facebook’s Platform – which follows users around the web to offer personalisation – and to be picky about apps and games. “It’s possible to use Facebook as a product instead of the entire ecosystem,” he adds.


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FEATURE Net snooping

To add an extra level of security to social networks, a service such as scrambls takes the text you’re posting and (predictably) scrambles it. In its place it posts a seemingly random series of characters, unreadable to the social network as well as other users – unless they, too, have the scrambls browser plugin installed and are on your approved list. CEO Steven Sprague says: “scrambls has the keys, Facebook has the content. It requires the co-operation of both organisations, through the plugin, for the information to be displayed on your screen.” At the moment, the system adds a layer of complexity to the simple act of posting an update, but the company hopes it could be eventually built into apps or sites. The scrambls system could also give users the ability to expire posts on social networks or to take back data following an acquisition. Sprague said it changes “the idea that content is permanently associated with you,” but also challenges the assumption that the only way to get rid of posts is deletion. “Did you really throw away all your teenage scrapbooks, or did you leave them in your mother’s basement?” Again, scrambls holds the key to your post: if the government demands it, and gets the messages from Facebook, it would be possible to unlock them. “It’s about obfuscation of the data or protection of the data, not where you’re trying to have clandestine communications at government level. It’s a consumer-level protection,” says Sprague.

Encrypting everything else

Webmail such as Gmail uses HTTPS to encrypt browsing, but the provider can still “read” your communications – obvious to anyone who’s noticed that an email about a friend’s new baby leads to advertisements about nappies. While corporate email uses the S/MIME protocol for encryption, for individuals PGP will block even service providers from seeing their missives. PGP uses public and private keys. If someone wants to send you an email, they use the public key to encrypt it; once you receive it, your private key decrypts it. Mozilla’s email client, Thunderbird, offers an extension to make use of PGP; other clients that enable its use on various email platforms are available. Alternatively, Hushmail offers a free webmail service that includes encryption via PGP. Cloud storage is another challenge for encryption. Services such as Dropbox can technically read your files, but not if they’re encrypted before uploading. The EFF’s Schoen says that a few cloud storage services do offer built-in encryption, but not the most popular ones. For those, you could use third-party encryption software, but the decryption key would have to be on any computer the data is accessed from, removing much of the mobile benefit of cloud services.

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It isn’t only written data that can be encrypted – internet voice traffic can also be protected. Skype has been mooted as one way to get around eavesdroppers on calls because its P2P-based system makes it hard for anyone to listen in. However, Schoen points out that Skype is a “very proprietary system”. “It seems to be relatively difficult to tap Skype calls, but the company has

“For individuals, PGP will block even service providers from seeing their missives”

CAN YOU SECURE A SMARTPHONE? Security experts recommend one way to prevent smartphone surveillance: take out the battery. With smartphones it’s almost impossible to avoid location tracking – indeed, operators need to know where you are to provide the service. “Nothing you can do about that, except not take your phone with you,” says F-Secure’s Sean Sullivan. Each of the major platforms has pros and cons, he adds, crediting Apple with being the most secure, thanks to its lockeddown market. “If you’re clever enough to slip something in and get people to install it, you could make more money by submitting a legitimate app and marketing that,” he says. “The economics work against run-of-themill crimeware.” Sullivan’s major complaint against Android is Google’s push-to-link services. “I don’t

Private conversations

want to take Google with me everywhere I go,” he says, adding that Windows Phone is heading in a similar direction. Although BlackBerry’s secure reputation is well earned, again, authorities with a subpoena can get access. Plus, the level of security differs depending on whether it’s a corporate or consumer handset, says the EFF’s Seth Schoen; data traffic is routed via a company for corporate handsets, but to RIM for consumer devices. “This was a point of pressure for governments blocking or monitoring web browsing.” Mobile privacy issues are beginning to be addressed: versions of Tor have been released for smartphones, while HTTPS Everywhere is in the works for mobile browsers. However, as Schoen adds, “the starting position is pretty bad”.

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the ability,” he adds. “They can use that ability to give governments the capability to intercept calls.” If that sounds too much like paranoia, Schoen points out that the company has allowed authorities to create a Chinese-specific version of the software, TOM-Skype.

Taking IM off the record

Instant messaging is a safer choice than SMS, since it’s usually encrypted between your device and IM provider, says Schoen. However, this means the likes of AOL, Microsoft and Google can see and record messages, so Schoen advises users to check data retention policies. If the terms don’t convince, consider Off-the-Record (OTR), encryption software designed for IM – although keep in mind both users need to have it installed. “If the person I’m chatting with also has OTR, then there’s an additional layer of encryption that AOL doesn’t have the key for,” says Schoen.

Hardware future

At the moment, most privacy tools are software-based, but that could soon change. The FreedomBox Foundation is developing plug servers – small, low-wattage boxes that plug directly into your wall socket – into plug-and-play web proxies. “Boxes in uncensored countries can bounce signals for users stuck behind censorship walls – each one is a tiny crack in the Great Firewall,” the foundation says. “Chinese users could surf the entire net free from government censorship.” Privacy could also be better built into networks, according to Nicholas Merrill, who previously ran an ISP in New York and has battled FBI demands for network access. He’s now raising funds for his non-profit Calyx, to set up an internet provider that puts customer privacy first, by including end-to-end encryption, limiting the data it holds, and challenging access demands from authorities. In the meantime, if you want to keep your data away from prying eyes, it’s up to you.

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FEATURE Google

Photography: courtesy of Google

Google? Is working at Google the fun-filled, intellectually stimulating experience the company portrays? Stewart Mitchell finds out

G

oogle has a reputation for being a fun place to work, full of toys and intelligent people working on world-changing projects. To look at the company’s brightly coloured campus images, you could be forgiven for thinking that working at the company is all about ball pools, gourmet canteens and bumper bonuses. But what’s life really like inside the secretive search company? When we asked Google to discuss campus life and daily routines for workers it declined; the majority of former employees are equally coy. However, we’ve spoken to people that have worked on campus, and trawled former employees’ disclosures to uncover what it’s actually like to work at the company with the “don’t be evil” mantra.

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Party time?

Part of Google’s image as an energetic company stems from almost college-like campuses where everything is laid on, with young employees and, indeed, founding staffers enjoying a riotous time, particularly in the early years. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created an image of a hip company willing to work hard and play harder. Folklore includes tales of company ski trips, TGIF meetings and other junkets that became the stuff of legend. In his book, I’m Feeling Lucky, Douglas Edwards, Google’s 59th employee, described some of the debauched parties that staffers were expected, rather than invited, to attend – even at the expense of domestic unrest. “When I let Kristen [his wife] know that Google required my presence

on the slopes at Lake Tahoe for an employee-only bonding trip, what she heard was: ‘Please stay at home with our three children while I head out with a bus-load of adrenaline-charged, hormonedrenched post-adolescents for three days of bacchanalian binge-drinking, substance abuse and room-key swapping.’ She got it mostly right,” he wrote. Edwards tells of a ski-trip bar stocked with $75,000 of booze – “and an ample supply of other social lubricants” – and naked frolics among staff. However, as the company grew, and the economy started to turn sour, many of the travel perks were slowly withdrawn; the hell-raising culture has certainly become more corporate over time. The culture may be more sober, but many of the perks that drew

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some of tech’s brightest minds to Google remain. “From the beginning, the founders wanted to provide employees with free and good food,” says Annika Steiber, an innovation management expert who has been interviewing Google employees for almost a year as part of a Chalmers University of Technology study. “The company wants to take care of them and reduce their stress about things outside work – whether it’s a doctor’s visit, haircuts, getting the dry cleaning done or help with daycare. Google wants to provide this so people can focus on the job. My interpretation is that Google truly cares – it really didn’t feel like it was just a message.” Alongside working with hyper-intelligent colleagues, the perks are still held in awe by staffers. “I had access to plenty

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Google FEATURE

of perks and more privilege than I’d ever had before, and it was all free – free meals, free gym, free electric scooters to ride around on; it was all very cosy and comfortable,” says Andrew Norman Wilson, who worked as a contract Google video producer until last year. Employees are also impressed with the work-orientated facilities. “All conference rooms are wired for everything you need to make your life easy,” says Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. “In companies I’d worked at prior to Google, I had to reserve a projector and carry around my power bricks and Ethernet cables. At Google, all the power adapters you need are in the conference room – Apple or ThinkPads; there are two projectors; and most have highbandwidth videoconferencing.” The fabled Friday afternoon company-wide TGIF meetings are also still going strong, with a weekly catch-up offering workers a chance to mingle with management. “The TGIF meetings were quite relaxed, with people eating and drinking,” says Wilson. “It was part celebration of the company, part a weekly catch-up meeting and a way of breaking down the business-social divide.”

Time to grow up

Yet as Google has grown, it has lost some of its adolescent enthusiasm and unruliness – the inevitable consequence of maturing into a company with almost $12 billion in profits in 2011. Indeed, some former employees believe the company’s

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culture has transformed beyond recognition. “The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate,” reads a now-infamous blog post from James Whittaker, a former test director with the company. “The Google I left was an advertising company with a single, corporatemandated focus.” Such criticism by former employees does, of course, require an element of scepticism. Trawling forums shows that most staff genuinely enjoy working at the company, and Google has tried to create an environment where people want to work hard. In 800 ratings from current or former employees on recruitment site Glassdoor, Google scores 3.9 out of 5, which is stronger than the scores of both Apple (3.8) and Microsoft (3.4). It does rely on finding the right sort of person to begin with, however. To the outsider, some of the hours that people are willing to put in might seem unhealthy, but Google selects people who will fit into a culture of working hard, and who believe that doing so can make a difference to the company and its users. “The semi-structured organisation works when you have a certain kind of person; the people in Google are selected through a very long recruitment process,” says Steiber. “They put in a lot of investment to pick the right people. Qualities of the Google person include being self-organised and self-driven; these people usually don’t need leadership, they need mentorship. “They need a visionary to pinpoint the priorities, but then

they want the leaders to back off and not micro-manage. These people are highly intelligent.” However, to progress, workers need to make an impact, and that often comes at the expense of long hours. Google workers at its major campuses are often on site earlier than necessary – in time to pick up a free cooked breakfast – and leave late, having stayed behind to get

Eating free food and sitting talking with like-minded colleagues may not sound like hard work, but from Google’s point of view it’s productive. Although Google might not actually demand staffers put in long shifts, there’s certainly a suspicion that staying online – both at home and in the office – will be recognised in appraisals

“The hell-raising culture has certainly become more corporate over time” their free dinner, too. The food on site is without fail championed by staffers: healthy, fresh, inventive dishes are served up daily. However, Google isn’t providing free food out of mere charity. Communal eating means many people work an extra hour in order to pick up their food, and there’s a feeling workers are still on the clock even while eating. “Google wanted people to meet in a natural way, since it believes in a sharing of knowledge and experience – in a campus restaurant, staff could meet a number of different people, and functions and groups,” says Steiber. “They have tables with signs saying ‘if you want to share interesting thoughts, sit here’. “The kind of knowledge they share is very tacit – it’s hard to code in a knowledge management system; hard to write down. It’s easier and faster to share in face-to-face meetings, so the restaurant could be such a natural meeting place.”

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and rewards discussions. Remember, this is the company that gave all of its staff a free Android phone for Christmas, and invented Google+, the most compelling feature of which was videoconferencing tool Hangouts. “Most employees were in their mid-20s,” says one former Googler on the company reviews section of the Glassdoor recruitment website. “These kids don’t have a life yet so they spend all of their time at work. Google provides nearly everything people need, from clothes to on-site healthcare, dental care, laundry service and a gym. “Imagine going from college to this environment and you can see how much everyone works. People are generally in the building between 10am and 6pm every day, but nearly everyone is on email 24/7 and most people spend their evenings working from home.” That isn’t to say the workaholic lifestyle doesn’t meet with the approval of the hungry young


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FEATURE Google

minds who work for the company. “You get a free shuttle to work, use available vehicles to run errands, and grab a coffee and gourmet breakfast before starting work with some of the most interesting people around,” one employee writes on Glassdoor. “During the day, you visit a tech talk and learn something new, have lunch with a colleague and grab an espresso on the way back to your desk, before collaborating on a new project with someone in a different working group. Back to your own work, then it’s time to grab dinner starting at 6.30pm and woah, it’s late – time to grab the 8.30pm shuttle home.” Of course, not everyone wants to work in that environment and, while concerns weren’t ubiquitous, employees did question the work-life balance, particularly as they got older. “You’ll be way older than most of the people you work with, and your manager may or may not understand family commitments,” says another Glassdoor contributor, while another complains that “yes, I am motivated, but don’t want to work on weekends to get a promotion.” Despite Google’s flat management structure and rapid growth, a common complaint is

centre of innovation, focusing on the 20% rule: workers can explore other projects during 20% of their working time. There re are conflicting opinions, however, r, on whether staff really have the time to work on non-core projects. cts. “The truth is that while every Googler has the opportunity to take 20% of their time to work on whatever they wish, it isn’t carte blanche to take Fridays off and play on the Xbox,” says Chris Smith, a Google software engineer in a blog. “Having a 20% project doesn’t mean you’re responsible for 80% of your job; more like you’re volunteering to put in 120% effort.” The ability to work on side projects will inevitably depend on whether somebody is on top of the day job. “At Google, performance is measured by impact – benefit to Google and its customers,” says Smith. “If an engineer is able to have a big impact, then spending some cycles on a 20% project is no big deal. However, if someone was having difficulty meeting expectations as-is, then contributing to a 20% project would be a poor decision.” Other employees are more enthusiastic. Innovation management expert Steiber found

“Office politics are just as prevalent in Mountain View as they are elsewhere” that there’s no obvious career progression, and recognition and feedback from management varies greatly between departments. The “fairness and respect” category on Glassdoor ranked a relatively lowly 3.6, with reviewers complaining it was impossible to work on high-visibility projects, and that promotion could often boil down to a popularity contest. Office politics, it seems, are just as prevalent in Mountain View as they are elsewhere.

20% time

Despite several high-profile research projects, such as Labs, being closed down in recent months, Google remains a company that touts itself as a

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that the 20% time scheme had a positive effect on innovation in the company. “The 20% projects were something people I spoke to talked about a lot, ” she says. “First, it’s actual time to work on a new idea. Second, the 20% rule is a symbol that the company will give you freedom to try your own ideas. There’s therefore an embedded expectation that you should do some creative stuff.” Looking for extra work will suit some workers more than others and that, in the end, could dictate what it’s like working at Google. As it’s grown up, Google has evolved and staff – like everywhere else – are expected to get through their work regardless of the pool tables or other distractions. Free-spirits and

LE’s GOOGE OF BADGOUR HON

It isn’t the car you drive but the badge you wear that’s the biggest status symbol for Goo Google employees. Full-time staff wear a white badge, which highlights their elevated status, while contractors highli wear a red badge. Interns are on green passes, while yellow badges are reserved for lower-skilled workers. Although the badges control access, it’s the perks afforded to the holders of the different colour badges that foster most resentment. “I am a consultant (a “red badge” as I often remark!),” says Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. “There’s little difference between roles and expected outcomes between a full-time employee and a consultant. Nonetheless, there’s a very different benefits structure at multiple levels for consultants. I also don’t have any holdings of Google stock, and, not being a full-time employee, I don’t hold any Google options.” Contractors complain that full-time workers on lesser badges have been actively hidden away by Google. “I was very uncomfortable about the class position, and like lots of others I wanted to have a white badge, which brought even more privileges,” says Andrew Norman Wilson. Wilson was sacked after he photographed yellow-card workers leaving a building. He claims the company was almost trying to keep the “lower class” employees out of the public eye, with working hours of 4am until 2.30pm. “They were full-time, but had no perks at all, and they were scanning in books, so it was a monotonous job – almost like working in a factory. They got no recognition and had these yellow badges to identify them as lower grade.”

cynics may hate the corporatecentric campus culture and almost institutional enthusiasm, but others with drive and a less weary outlook may find the immersion motivating. “I knew people, and still do, that are really into it,” says Wilson. “There were other people for who it was just another job, another company, and they might consider moving on. There were also people who were very clever and capable, but were critical of the ways things were done and the corporate culture.”

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Of course, as Google moves increasingly to the beat of shareholders, its decisions may make even the evangelists think twice about its direction, such as the Microsoft defector who fell out of love with the company. “Recruiters often asked me to help sell high-priority candidates on the company and… no-one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so,” Whittaker wrote. “In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.”

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IN DEPTH Accessibility

IN DEPTH

GET MORE OUT OF YOUR PC WITH OUR COMPREHENSIVE ADVICE

Tailoring your site for people with poor vision Davey Winder explains why, and how, you should ensure low-vision users can use your software and websites According to Fight for Sight, a third of people over 65 have difficulties with eyesight

Photography: Danny Bird

Looking through my eyes

W

e’re not getting any younger. Literally. Between 1985 and 2010, the number of people in the UK who were 65 and older increased by 20% to 10.3 million according to the Office for National Statistics. The percentage of under-16s fell. The Fight for Sight organisation estimates that a third of people over 65 have “difficulties with their eyesight”, while the RNIB puts the number of people who start to lose their sight in the UK at 100 every day. I myself was recently diagnosed as suffering from wet macular degeneration, making me just one of half a million people in the UK with the eyesight-warping condition, for which there’s no cure. Combine the ageing but IT-savvy population with the statistical chance of visual impairment, and the

046


consequences of the way in which websites and apps are coded start to become apparent. A visual impairment doesn’t necessarily mean total blindness, and limited vision presents a different set of problems when using IT than those facing a totally blind person. Yet all too often, as long as an application can be accessed by screen-reader software, the developer will consider it to be an “access-for-all” job well done. By ignoring the requirements of low-vision users, developers are effectively shutting out large numbers of people and, as already stated, that number is sadly growing all the time. Low vision isn’t a problem that will go away if you ignore it, but as a developer you can make a difference to the lives of those of us who are cursed by it and increase your potential userbase at the same time.

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Before you make any well-intentioned usability changes to your website or app, make sure you talk to people with low vision, as well as the organisations that represent them – and don’t forget to test the results with the same usability groups before rolling them out. Get to know what using an average application or visiting an average website might be like for someone with low vision. Although simulators exist, most are designed to show difficulties for people with colour blindness. For some great examples of what someone with various other ailments sees, visit the demonstrations online at www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214 lowvision1 and www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214lowvision2. These will give you a feel for the degree of difficulty people might have in viewing your work, and provide greater understanding of how to make it more accessible. Also try your hand at completing the various navigational tasks to be found at the WebAIM Low Vision Simulation (www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214lowvision3) – a representation of how users with macular degeneration can be frustrated by poorly designed web content. Once you’ve got your head around the user perspective, it’s time to apply the five Cs to your website, apps and software: colour, contrast, configurability, consistency and control.

Colour & contrast

One of the big problems facing low-vision users is a poor ability to distinguish between certain colours. Although it’s easy to think of colour contrasts that will be all but impossible for any

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Accessibility

IN DEPTH

Contents Accessibility..................................p46 Cross-platform mobile apps....p50 Take your OS with you..............p56

The WebAIM Low Vision Simulation can help you understand different visual impairments

low-vision user to read, such as black text on a grey background, other problematic combinations are more surprising: black text against a white background can be, as someone accurately described it to me recently, “like looking at ants on a lightbulb”. The trouble is that everyone has a different optimum contrast combination (yellow text on a blue background does it for me), so user configurability is the key here. That said, there are best-practice tips you can follow to make life easier for low-vision users: increase the contrast between the text and the background; consider adding support for at least two high-contrast settings (light on dark, and dark on light); and always use solid-colour, not patterned backgrounds, when overlaying text. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) accessibility guidelines also remind web developers that their pages shouldn’t rely on colour alone to convey functional meaning in their website designs. Here’s why: a low-vision user will often use a combination of custom colours with magnification, and, when looking at only a small section of the screen, contextual design clues to navigation are lost. This is compounded on websites where colour changes are used as a distinction between main content and navigation areas.

Configurability

Configurability is king for the low-vision user, so when designing your application or website strive to ensure that pretty much every aspect of content presentation is user-configurable. That means letting the user make text bigger or smaller, change the colour of that text along with the background colour it sits upon, and making the overall layout (in the case of a web page) relative rather than absolute, so it can be widened or narrowed without excessive horizontal scrolling. Web designers can adopt a simple rule of thumb: make sure the site is readable and usable (these aren’t necessarily the same thing), both when text is enlarged and pages are zoomed (once again, these aren’t necessarily the same thing). By ensuring that non-text content scales properly, employing relative font sizing,

and testing it to ensure the layout doesn’t break when the user increases the font, you should have a website that’s accessible to all. Columns can be problematic for low-vision users who are magnifying the screen and losing the visual context of the website design. Usability studies have shown that users employing screen magnification software often fail to move far enough to the right of the screen to encounter columns of text located in that area. A single-column layout is certainly preferable under such circumstances, but many developers will feel uneasy about what appears to be a retrograde step in terms of web design. The solution is as simple as it is obvious: use stylesheets to provide a low-vision-friendly, single-column option at the click of a button on the homepage. All developers should carefully consider how text is presented. A number of low-vision usability tests have shown that sans serif type is easier to read than serif. The good news is that research reveals the same is true for people with normal vision, so opting for a sans serif font is a no-brainer. Just because users with low vision will most likely be employing a screen magnifier, doesn’t mean you can’t make things easier for them by ensuring larger font sizes are available before they apply that magnification. Enlargement using a tool of some kind comes at a cost in terms of performance and quality, both of which can be minimised if that larger font is available to begin with. Legible text resizing should also apply to going smaller as well as bigger, by which I mean that some low-vision conditions, such as those causing tunnel vision, may require users to fit as much text as possible onscreen to be able to see it. When considering the configurability of text, don’t forget to include menus and tables as well as information dialogs and prompts. Finally, never present your text as an image, for so many reasons: high magnification renders it

Different people have different optimum colour combinations, so configurability is key

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IN DEPTH Accessibility

of screen-magnification software means that you should thoroughly test your application or site to ensure there are no problems with usability caused by layout issues when the window is zoomed in this fashion.

Consistency Screen magnifiers help, but can cause problems on incompatible websites

illegible due to pixellation; browser zooming has no effect on text presented this way; colour and contrast settings can’t be customised, and so on. Configurability touches on many more aspects of usable design than straightforward text and colour issues. Make all timed events adjustable by the user, since those with low vision will take longer to read, and therefore react to, information that’s only briefly displayed onscreen. If you’re using a CAPTCHA system for user authentication, then bear in mind the additional problems these can cause low-vision users. Even people with good eyesight have been known to have difficulty distinguishing the text from the background patterns, so make sure you provide an audio alternative such as reCAPTCHA for low-vision users, or implement a different verification process. Neither should you ignore audio prompts. A limited field of view, either caused by the visual condition itself or as a result of magnification levels, can mean that it’s very easy to lose context, because there’s relatively little information visible at any one time. Audio cues alongside visual prompts regarding state changes, or the availability of new information, go a long way to solving this problem, and give control back to the low-vision user. Talking of limited fields of view, the relatively small effective screen size being employed by a user

Consistency is an oft-overlooked piece of the low-vision design. When you can’t see an entire page in context at the same time, it’s almost impossible to navigate a website if dialog, menu and button positions move from one screen to the next. Keeping the basic navigational design consistent not only helps low-vision users, but makes things simple for everyone else as well. Consistency also applies to your use of colour and contrast, and your implementation of configurability options. There’s no point having a highly configurable homepage on your website if as soon as the user starts drilling down through the site they discover those options have been removed. Remember that many of the access aids used by low-vision users require the location of the keyboard focus to work properly, so make sure you consistently expose this focus indicator across your application so that the assistive technology software can “see” it. Include a highlight or focus indicator when dragging the mouse cursor, even at those times when the cursor is invisible. This adjustment will help screen enlargement software using “pan and zoom” features to track the user’s movements more accurately.

“Customisation is the key to a successful low-vision user experience”

Control

If there was one word that sums up good low-vision development practice it would be control; user control, that is. The single most important aspect of the UI from the low-vision user perspective is the ability to control certain

Complying with the DDA Since May 2002, the Disability Discrimination Act has required all service providers take “reasonable steps” to change a practice that makes it “unreasonably difficult” for disabled people to make use of its services. That includes people with visual impairments, and probably means that many websites and software applications have been in breach of the law ever since. Quite apart from the legal requirements, or the moral satisfaction of doing the right thing, there’s a commercial reality to consider: by alienating low-vision users you’re losing business, be it in terms of eyes on pages or

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aspects of it, rather than have everything imposed upon them through a rigid and static design process. A good example is the use of magnification tools. I regularly use the screen magnifier tool within Windows 7, for example, to allow me to quickly enlarge images and certain text elements onscreen. However, if the developer has opted to use an image of text then all that magnification does is increases the pixellation and make it even more unreadable. Think dynamic rather than static, allow the user to zoom images and text, change colours to get the best contrast and so on. Low-vision users will typically use the operating system, the web browser client and third-party screenmagnification software to varying degrees. But there’s no magic design bullet that dictates the best background colour, optimal font or screen layout that will suit the majority of users. The

software licences sold. When Tesco launched an access-friendly version of its shopping site a decade ago, it secured £13 million of new business in a year. It’s since gone on to roll the accessibility options into the main website, with a low-vision option that simplifies layout and disables JavaScript, for example. We’re not talking about technical accessibility, but real-world usability for people with low vision. This is about giving users the choice to experience your content in the way that’s best for them. It isn’t about exchanging your visual design concept for a boring, text-only step back into the 1990s.

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simple truth is that low vision impacts every sufferer differently, and customisation is the key to a successful low-vision user experience.

App development

Smartphones can be particularly vexing for low-vision users, as I have discovered myself. You can only pinch and zoom text so far on an iPhone before it becomes unreadable. With many apps, I have found myself resorting to a handheld illuminated magnifier to see onscreen information clearly. Far better for app developers to incorporate low-vision awareness into their apps at the design stage. There are detailed instructions within the Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines that explain how to create intuitive interfaces for disabled users, and the Apple Accessibility APIs define how iOS apps can make their user interface available to external assistive apps. Supporting these APIs enables apps to be compatible with the VoiceOver screen-reader function, which interacts with objects in the app to allow alternative gesture or voice control. Low-vision users can also benefit from the white-on-black display mode options. Finally, Xcode enables accessibility labels and information to be added without fuss to standard controls: use the Interface Builder “inspector” to enter descriptions for UI controls that are supported by VoiceOver. Android isn’t left behind by Apple in the low-vision stakes either, with an accessibility layer providing text-to-speech. The TalkBack screen reader comes preinstalled on many Android devices, so make sure your app supports it.

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180-DAY WEBSIGHT PLEDGE PC Pro and RNIB are launching a campaign to urge web and app developers to consider the needs of blind and partially sighted users. Find out how your company can get involved

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esigning a website or app that caters for the needs of blind or partially sighted users isn’t only the right thing to do, it makes sound business sense. Fail to adhere to basic usability guidelines and you’re potentially preventing millions of users from accessing your site or app. That’s why PC Pro has teamed up with Royal National Institute of Blind People to launch the 180-Day WebSight Pledge. We want businesses, big and small, to commit to making their websites and apps accessible to blind and partially sighted users within six months. By pledging to implement the five measures listed below, companies will make an appreciable difference to the lives of blind and partially sighted people – and significantly expand their potential customer base. We at PC Pro appreciate

that making such changes isn’t necessarily easy – indeed, we need to make adjustments to our own website to meet the pledges. That’s why we’re asking you to join us and make the changes within a sixmonth timeframe. We’ll be behind you all the way, with regularly updated blogs and advice on our website on how to make your sites and apps usable for those with limited vision. Website and app developers who take our pledge will be recognised in a forthcoming edition of PC Pro, and we’ll be working with RNIB to make sure that all companies meet the five stated pledges. We’ll be kicking off our campaign by urging several leading retailers to take the pledge, but we want businesses of all sizes to get involved too. So sign up for PC Pro’s 180-Day WebSight Pledge by visiting the website listed at the foot of the page.

THE PLEDGE

Within 180 days, we pledge to:

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Avoid fixedsize fonts, and make text size and colour userconfigurable where possible. Avoid the use of patterned backgrounds.

2

Make our website/app compatible with popular screen readers, such as JAWS for Windows, SuperNova, VoiceOver and NVDA.

3

Use a consistent interface and menu layout throughout our website/app.

4

Ensure that our website/ app is fully accessible using the keyboard alone.

5

Test our website/app with blind and low-vision users and their support groups before implementing major changes.

TAKE THE 180-DAY WEBSIGHT PLEDGE AT WWW.PCPRO.CO.UK/LINKS/WEBSIGHTPLEDGE www.pcpro.co.uk

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IN DEPTH Building apps

HANDS ON

Build apps that work on both iOS and Android If you’re an app developer, there’s no need to cut your market in two. Kevin Partner shows you how to write for both major platforms at once

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martphone and tablet apps are big business, with around 500 apps per day being added to Apple’s App Store. Google Play – formerly known as the Android Market – is burgeoning too. There’s a huge potential market for app publishers, but the divided nature of the market is a challenge. Why not get the best of both worlds and write one app for both platforms? This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Native iOS apps are created using Objective-C, while native Android apps are Java-based, so each needs its own codebase. Thankfully, Apple has reversed its earlier policy of insisting on native code, and banning apps created with third-party tools. This has allowed third parties to produce development environments that can help you write cross-platform code. However, it isn’t enough to simply compile your code for two different mobile operating systems; you also have to contend with a wide range of hardware models. In addition to the four main iOS configurations,

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there are hundreds of Android devices out there with different hardware characteristics. To help you tailor your code, decide at the outset whether to target phones, tablets or both. The nature of your app might suggest the format – navigation will suit a smartphone, whereas an art package needs the screen of a tablet. Otherwise, think about whether a single version can suit both a 3in and a 10in screen.

Development tools

The development tools can be grouped into two camps: browser-based environments, and software development kits (SDKs). In-browser tools allow you to create apps online, usually based on templates, but they’re not suitable for advanced projects; they’re more appropriate for basic purposes such as turning a blog into an app. We’ll focus on SDKs instead.

Most SDKs are aimed at game development – no surprise, since almost 60% of apps being published are games. GameSalad (www. gamesalad.com) is the first port of call for many app developers, thanks to its friendly drag-anddrop interface. However, this simplicity comes at a cost: GameSalad lacks the flexibility to be considered a professional development tool. For serious cross-platform developers, therefore, the choice is between Adobe Flash or Ansca Mobile’s Corona SDK. That may sound surprising, since iOS lacks support for Flash, but projects created in Flash Professional and Flash Builder can be packaged in an Apple-compatible format, as well as for Android. Sadly, Flash-derived apps are still dogged by performance issues, and only CS6 is fully optimised for mobile platforms. Corona SDK is a better fit, offering a wider range of features (including built-in physics, and in-app purchasing), and easier scripting thanks to the Lua scripting language. It’s cheaper to start, too: a cross-platform subscription costs $349 (£215) a year, while Flash Professional will set you back £667 at the Adobe Store.

Getting started in Corona

Corona works on both Windows and OS X, but Apple insists that apps are compiled on a Mac to publish for iOS. If you don’t own one, you can borrow or rent one for the final stages. Corona can be downloaded from www. anscamobile.com/corona: provide a few details and you’ll be able to download the latest stable release. You can try Corona for free, and even build test apps for your own device, but you can’t upload the results to either market without buying a subscription.

“To help you tailor your code, decide at the outset whether to target phones, tablets or both”

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www.pcpro.co.uk

Building apps

IN DEPTH

Is it more profitable to develop for iOS or Android? Find out in Kevin Partner’s Online Business column, p80 Corona is made up of two parts: the device simulator and the terminal. There’s no dedicated code editor – many Windows developers use the free Notepad++ text editor (www.notepad-plus-plus.org), or the more heavyweight Eclipse environment (www. eclipse.org). Both have plugins to enable code completion and syntax hinting for Corona. To create your first Corona project, make a new folder on your PC; then, using your chosen text editor, create a new text file called MAIN. LUA. Into the file, type this: local myName=display.newText(“Hello World”, 0,0,system.nativeFont,32);

Now, launch Corona Simulator, click File | Open and navigate to the MAIN.LUA file. Open it and you’ll see the text appear on a virtual iPhone. Click View | View As to choose a different device to see it on.

Developing for Android first

Many developers create for iOS first because it’s seen as more profitable. Practically, however, it makes more sense to begin with Android. Creating an Android app means designing code that can cope with different display resolutions, which makes it relatively simple to derive an iOS app from your Android code. Starting on Android also lets you publish your app on Google’s Play store as soon as it’s ready, without needing to go through a lengthy approval process. That isn’t to say that you should release unfinished or untested apps on the Android platform, but by publishing for Google Play you can eliminate the five-to-ten day (at best) approval process and receive feedback from real users more quickly.

Whichever platform you start on, you should abide by its interface standards as far as possible, and use native UI components and behaviours for standard functionality. This is one area where native code has an advantage over an SDK, as Corona requires you to “reinvent the wheel” rather than using system calls. This isn’t onerous, but we recommend referring to each platform’s app guidelines to make sure your interface looks and behaves in the way users will expect. You can find a guide to Android design via www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214android, and Apple’s official Human Interface Guidelines for iOS at www.pcpro. co.uk/links/214apple.

Building cross-platform into your code

Corona makes it easy to write resolutionindependent code. To illustrate this, let’s add another line to our “hello world” example: myName.x=display.contentWidth/2; myName y=display.contentHeight/5;

Here, “display” is a family of objects built into Corona that provides access to the screen in various ways. This code centres the text horizontally, and places it 20% of the distance from the top of the display. Since these values are proportional, they’ll change depending on the device. You’ll notice that, on larger devices, the font appears quite small: we’ve specified a fixed value of 32 (the last value in our display.newText function), but we can easily replace this with a calculated proportional size, such as “display.contentWidth/8”. Corona also includes a built-in physics engine, which can help if you’re creating a

collision-based app. Let’s make “hello world” more interesting. Here’s the full code: local physics=require(“physics”); physics.start(); local myName=display.newText(“Hello World”,0,0,system.nativeFont,display contentWidth/8); myName.x=display.contentWidth/2; myName y=display.contentHeight/5; myName:rotate(math.random(40)); local ground=display.newRect(0,display. contentHeight-10,display contentWidth,10); local left=display.newRect(0,0,10, display.contentHeight); local right=display.newRect(display contentWidth-10,0,display.contentWidth, display.contentHeight); physics.addBody(ground,“static”, {friction=0.1, bounce=0.9}); physics.addBody(left,“static”, {friction=0.1, bounce=0.9}); physics.addBody(right,“static”, {friction=0.1, bounce=0.9}); physics.addBody(myName,{density=20.0, friction=0.1, bounce=0.9});

The code is an illustration of how easy Lua is to understand. Lines 6-8 create rectangles at the sides and bottom of the screen (again, relative to the display size of the device), and lines 9-11 specify the physics to be applied to them. Line 12 adds physics to the text. Line 5 adds a random angle to the text, to make for an interesting collision when it hits the bottom. The semicolons at the end of each line are optional, but if you’re used to JavaScript, PHP or another language that requires semicolons, using them here makes life simpler. Mastering Lua would be a separate tutorial, but it’s a powerful and accessible language, and you’ll find extensive documentation and code samples on the Corona website.

Publishing your app

Corona SDK is the best-selling cross-platform development tool

www.pcpro.co.uk

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When the Android edition is complete, test it on real hardware. You can do this by downloading the Android SDK and using its command line to install via USB. A simpler approach is to install the Dropbox mobile app, and compile directly into a Dropbox folder on your PC: this way, the latest version is available on the mobile device as soon as it’s synchronised. Test your code thoroughly on the most popular smartphone (currently the Samsung Galaxy S II, which accounts for around 30% of all Google Play downloads in the UK), and as many other devices as is feasible. Enlist the help of friends to test on their devices. Once you’re happy with your code, register with Google’s Developer Program at www. pcpro.co.uk/links/214gdp. You’ll need an existing Google account and a working phone number for verification. Read and agree to the


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IN DEPTH Building apps

WALKTHROUGH

Publish to Google Play

1

Start by compiling your app: make sure you use a digital certificate, not the debug key. You’ll need to provide a unique package identifier: one approach is to base it on your web address. Click Build, and after a few minutes your app will be ready in the form of an APK file – a zipped archive containing the compiled app and its resources.

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Complete the regional information and set a price. Google will work out the equivalent in the native currencies of your chosen countries. You should now check that the screen layouts you chose during development are reflected under Supported Devices. Read and click the boxes next to the terms and conditions and click Publish.

Developer Distribution Agreement (make sure “United Kingdom” is selected in the dropdown). The developer registration fee is $25, and you’ll need a Google Checkout/Wallet account to make and receive payments. Finally, you must digitally sign your app before uploading it to the store. This requires the Android SDK, available from http:// developer.android.com/sdk, and Sun’s Java Development Kit, which will install alongside the SDK. Once these are installed, run the Command Prompt in Administrator mode and navigate to the “bin” folder of your Java installation using a command such as “cd c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_25\bin” (the exact location and version number of the SDK may be different – look for it in Windows Explorer). To generate your key, you type a command much like this at command prompt:

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Go to Google Play and click the Upload Application button. You’ll be prompted to upload your APK and presented with a Product Details page. Your screenshots must be in a standard size – 480 x 800 is common for Android. You’ll need a 512 x 512 icon, identical to your app icon, and a Promotional and Feature Graphic.

An hour or two later, your app will appear on Google Play and you can experience the singular thrill of being a published app developer. Go to the Developer Console on Play to see your downloads and sales – Google updates these figures every 24 hours with the new data appearing around lunchtime in the UK.

keytool -genkey -v -keystore yourappname.keystore -alias youralias_ name-validity 10000

Simply replace “yourappname” and “youralias_name” with your own values. This will generate a keystore file that you should put somewhere safe, as you’ll need it for signing the app and any updates to it. To sign your app in Corona Simulator, open a project and select File | Build. Select the new keystore file and the key alias from the dropdown. Your app is ready.

Converting your app to iOS

Assuming you receive no bug reports or actionable feedback in the days following your Android launch, it’s time to build your iOS version. This principally means updating the

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look and feel, particularly any bitmap graphics that need to be recreated to suit the squarer aspect ratio of Apple’s devices. You’ll find all information to create an appropriate interface in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. There are four standard iOS screen resolutions to think about, but Corona’s proportional positioning functions make handling them relatively simple. You can also specify high-resolution bitmaps to be used on Retina devices by defining them in the configuration file for the project. For example, if the project’s base resolution is the 320 x 480 of the iPhone 3GS, you can tell Corona that images with the suffix @2 (for example, “[email protected]”) are to be used on the iPhone 4 and later, and files with the suffix @3 should be used on iPads. Full details can be found at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214retina.

www.pcpro.co.uk

Building apps

IN DEPTH

WALKTHROUGH

Walkthrough here Publish to thehead App Store

1

In Before this walkthrough, publishing your we’ll appbuild you’ll a simple need aapp Distribution that switches Certificate – between see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214cert. two images when the user clicks Generate a button. an App Follow ID by the going directions to the developer on p51portal to getand the Designer, selecting “iOS Blocks Provisioning Editor and Portal”. emulatorClick up and App running. IDs|Create Then, AppinIDthe and Designer, add a bundle click New identifier. Project, This give can it be a in the suitable format ofname the Java – we’ve package gone you withused “HelloGoodbyeAndroiclick for Android. Click Submit. OK.

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Download Now sign in our toimages iTunes Connect from www.pcpro.co.uk/links/ with your Apple developer 204android. ID. Click Unzip Manage theYour file and Applications|Add inside you’ll find New a pair App.ofFill files, outnamed the fields sun.jpg and and assign moon.jpg. your own Save SKUthem Number. somewhere Supply convenient, pricing and then availability, click Add a under 512 x the 512Media pixel icon heading and toward a few screenshots. the bottom Click right Save. of theDownload screen. Browse Application to each Loader image from inManage turn, clicking Your OK Apps toand upload upload it. your app.

Publish for Apple’s App Store

To publish software in the App Store, you’ll need to be a registered Apple developer. You can sign up at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214apd. If you have an existing Apple ID, you can use that as your developer ID, but it’s usually more convenient to set up a new profile to keep your personal and commercial profiles separate. Complete your professional profile page, and accept the terms and conditions on the following page. At this point you’ll be sent a verification email, and you may be asked to provide additional paperwork. If this happens, you may have to supply copies of identification documents by fax – a rather incongruous use of 20th-century technology when dealing with the world’s foremost tech company.

www.pcpro.co.uk

In Select the main Provisioning|Distribution. Designer window, drag Click a Button New Profile element and onto choose the a phone Profilescreen Name.inSelect the middle your App of the ID display; from thethen dropdown add anand Image click element. Submit. Download Under Properties, the profile setand the text copyfor it to Button1 [user]/Library/ to “Goodbye!”. You’ll MobileDevice/ProvisioningProfiles. see other properties are available In Corona, here, select too: you File|Build can change and the choose font,iOS, textthen sizeselect and style yourifprofile you like. in the Code Signing dropdown.

When Your app our status application is shown starts, in the we App wantInformation the image of screen the sun in iTunes to be displayed Connect. Itby will default. probably To achieve sit on “Awaiting this, we simply Review” load forthe at file least into our five Image working element. days before In the being Designer, reviewed click the and, Image1 if you’re element, lucky,then, in approved. the Properties If not, pane maketoyour the right, changes, clickcompile the Picture again text and area. cross Select your sun.jpg fingers. and This hit canOK be to a real placechallenge, the image. requiring perseverance.

Every app published to the App Store is reviewed by Apple. This process can take a week or more, so before publishing make sure you don’t fall foul of the most common reasons for rejection. Perhaps the most inexcusable mistake is not including the required icons with your app – you can see the full list via www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214apple – along with a start-up image to be displayed as the app loads. This shouldn’t be a splash screen, but rather a static view of the menu or main page of the app. It’s also important not to misuse iOS’s interface components – before you include a button with a plus sign in it, check

the Human Interface Guidelines to make certain your button works in the prescribed way. Finally, make sure that your version number is 1.0 or above.

“Before publishing, make sure you don’t fall foul of the most common reasons for rejection”

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Once you’ve become a published app developer, you’ll appreciate just what a huge amount of human energy the app stores represent. Where our ancestors built Stonehenge and the pyramids, we’ve built a hundred fart apps. Progress is a wonderful thing.


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ASUS ZENBOOK™

DO YOU BELIEVE IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT? It looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It feels like nothing you’ve ever felt. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. It’s ultra thin, ultra light and ultra fast. It’s an Ultrabook™ with a powerful 2nd Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor. It resumes in just 2 seconds with up to 2 weeks standby time, and the SonicMaster Audio delivers astounding sound. Introduce yourself to the most Incredible Ultrabook the ASUS ZENBOOK it will be love at first sight.

Scan to See The Zenbooks Design Story ZENBOOK.ASUS.COM/DESIGN

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Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Core, Core Inside, and Ultrabook are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

ASUS recommends Windows ® 7.

The Incredible Ultrabook™ Inspired by Intel. WorldMags.net

IN DEPTH Windows To Go

HANDS ON

Take your OS with you There’s no need to haul a laptop around with you – simply carry your OS on a USB flash drive. Darien Graham-Smith shows you how

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indows 8 is immediately recognisable from its Metro interface – but it’s a less visible feature that could prove transformative, especially for businesses. With the aid of the Portable Workspace Creator, you’ll now be able to export an image of a running Windows 8 installation to a USB flash drive – which can then be booted on a different PC, giving portable, hardware-independent access to the system, applications and data.

Windows To Go

The system is called Windows To Go, and although it isn’t active in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft has revealed a few details of how it will work. When Windows To Go is first booted on new hardware, it will try to automatically locate and install the necessary drivers. These drivers are then assimilated into the image, so this needs to be done only once per physical system. If you remove the flash drive while using Windows, the PC will freeze and wait for up to 60 seconds for you to replace it. If you don’t, it will shut down, leaving no footprint on the host PC. Running a computer off a USB flash drive brings a few challenges. Local storage is likely to be limited, and the disk itself is easy to lose. The system can be protected with full-disk BitLocker encryption, so you needn’t worry about thieves gaining access to data. But losing access to one’s entire OS

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could nevertheless be disastrous. If you’re using a system such as Windows To Go, it’s a good idea to keep your data in the cloud, using the likes of Microsoft’s SkyDrive; if the worst should happen, your personal data remains safe. It’s a concept that opens up new possibilities for businesses, technical support engineers and even home users wanting to keep an emergency backup of their OS. The good news is that you needn’t wait for the final release of Windows 8 to enjoy the benefits of Windows To Go.

Booting from external media

Windows 8 is the first desktop version of Windows that’s designed to boot from a USB flash drive or external hard disk. Windows 7 will refuse to install onto a removable drive, and if you use disk-imaging software to duplicate a running system onto an external disk, it simply won’t boot. It’s possible to hack the installer to get the desired effect, but the result won’t be very satisfactory. You won’t have the security of full-disk encryption (unless you’re using an Ultimate or Enterprise edition of Windows); disconnecting the disk will cause the OS to crash; and if you hit problems, there’s no technical support. Things are much easier if you’re happy to use a different OS. OS X has long supported booting from an external USB (or FireWire) disk. To prepare an external drive for use as an OS X system disk, just format it with at least one OS X partition and a GUID Partition Table, and ensure “Ignore ownership” is disabled. You can check this by right-clicking on the disk in the finder, choosing Get Info and checking the Sharing & Permissions

section of the Info window that opens. The regular OS X installation procedure will now allow you to install the OS to this drive, and modern Macs will boot from it happily. If you prefer Linux, there are plenty of distributions designed specifically to be run from external media. Ubuntu Linux, for example, lets you boot straight from the installation CD or DVD into a running OS – a so-called “Live CD” system. This isn’t ideal for everyday use: optical media is comparatively slow, and it’s read-only, so unless you want to make only basic use of the system, you’ll need to install drivers and applications on the local hard disk – or customise the image. Ubuntu also supports installation directly to USB devices, as do several other distributions, including Fedora, Gentoo and Knoppix. With the help of a network storage system such as the free Ubuntu One, it’s feasible to use “Linux To Go” in much the same way as is promised for Windows 8.

“You needn’t wait for Windows 8 to enjoy the benefits of Windows To Go”

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WinPE & WinBuilder

What if you need to run Windows applications? As we mentioned above, desktop editions of Windows aren’t designed to run smoothly from “live” media, but a cut-down version of Windows designed for precisely this role does exist. It’s called the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). It’s available for free download from Microsoft as part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit; if you’ve installed Windows in the past few years you’ve probably already used it, as WinPE is the lightweight OS that starts up when you boot from a Windows installation DVD. The standard distribution of WinPE includes basic support for things such as disk management and networking, but lacks important features: for example, there’s no support for printing or 3D games. Uptime is limited, too: as Microsoft explains, “to prevent its use as a pirated operating system, Windows PE automatically stops running the shell and reboots after 72 hours of continuous use”.

www.pcpro.co.uk

Windows To Go

IN DEPTH

For your chance to win an Ultrabook Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards, p10

WALKTHROUGH

Create a portable Windows 7 installation

1

Download and install WinBuilder (see p58). Install it to C:\ WinBuilder, to avoid issues with permissions. When you run it you’ll see a list of sources to scan for projects available to download. We want Win7PE, so we’ll select the appropriate source from the list at the bottom and click Download to get the default files.

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Pay attention to the settings under the “Main” and “Images” configurations. Tick the option for “Always use WIMMount Driver” – this slows things down, but it means all the required WinPE files are taken from your Windows 7 DVD, so you don’t have to download the Windows Automated Installation Kit from the Microsoft website.

On the left of the WinPE welcome screen you’ll see many options for tweaks to be applied and applications to be installed. You can accept the defaults, or customise the settings. You’ll notice that WriteMedia is unticked by default: tick this if you want to burn your portable Windows 7 installation to a DVD as soon as it’s created.

You need to tell WinBuilder where to find the files it needs. Click the Source button to see the options above. The source directory should be the root directory of a Windows 7 disc, or a folder containing a set of installation files. Leave the rest on default settings. The ISO file directory is where the image will be created.

Top tip

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Ilkajndfkl jnadsflkjn asdflkjn adsljkf; asdkjlfnals jnksadfk kjn dfkjnadfkjn adfkjn dffkjn sdfkjn Click the big blue Play button at the top of thesdfkjndf window and ddfkjn sddfkjn WinBuilder will work through allsdkfjn the scripts constitute dffkjnthat sdkjf.

Win7PE. If it hits a snag, a web page will open detailing which files couldn’t be found and tips on fixing errors. If you’re using the WIMMount driver, this part will take between five and 30 minutes.

www.pcpro.co.uk

6

Once WinBuilder finishes, the last thing the Win7PE script does is boot the ISO using the QEMU virtualisation host, so you can check it works. You can then burn the ISO to an optical disc (it’s in the folder referred to in step 4), or write it to a USB drive using a free tool such as Rufus (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214idos1).

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IN DEPTH Windows To Go

This makes WinPE, as supplied by Microsoft, an unsatisfactory alternative to Windows To Go. Yet this doesn’t mean WinPE can’t be useful. The freeware WinBuilder application (www. pcpro.co.uk/links/214idos2) lets you combine elements of desktop Windows with the WinPE core to create a bootable, portable Windows XP, Vista or 7 system. If you want to build your own live system, you’ll need the original installation files for the OS you want to use, and some technical knowledge, as WinBuilder gives you an embarrassment of options as to which features, applications and drivers should be included in your build. You can also customise the scripts to create a bespoke set of applications and features. See our walkthrough on p57 on how to build a live “Windows 7 To Go” system. Note that, since WinBuilder projects combine elements of two different products (WinPE and desktop Windows), the licensing situation is unclear. Microsoft hasn’t so far sought to restrict the use of WinBuilder projects, but we recommend you treat your live installation as an extension of your regular desktop OS, rather than a replacement – and don’t distribute copies to others.

Virtualisation

An alternative approach to carrying your OS around on a flash drive is virtualisation. Software such as the free VMware vCenter Converter (www.vmware.com/products/ converter) can duplicate a running system as a virtual hard disk file, which can then be loaded into VMware Player on any system you choose.

When using public PCs, a USB OS or portable applications are useful

connect directly to a remote PC, or to run network-hosted applications on their local system, no matter where they may be. It’s been in place for more than a decade, so IT departments should already be geared up to provide these services. Another alternative for a corporate context is to make use of roaming user profiles. With this feature active, when you log on to your domain from a new PC, files saved under your user profile are automatically copied from a central server to the workstation you’re using, along with Registry settings stored under HKEY_CURRENT_ USER. Changes are copied back up to the server when you log out. Logging in and out can be slow if you’re using large files over a network, and since it doesn’t replicate applications, it isn’t perfect for all scenarios. However, it’s an easy way to keep data and settings consistent across systems. If your IT department doesn’t support Remote Desktop or roaming profiles, you can use Microsoft’s Live Mesh – or a third-party service such as LogMeIn (www.logmein.com). These services provide free Remote Desktop access from anywhere in the world to any host. A small client is installed on each PC to maintain an active outbound connection, so you can reach your desktop PC even through a corporate firewall – although it’s a good idea to talk to your IT department before enabling this, as you could be opening a hole through which intruders can gain access to company resources. The major downside of this approach is the speed of screen updates, which can be glacial over a slow international line.

“A portable operating system can be a sensible option for users with no ‘home’ PC” It’s an approach that tends to compromise performance, especially if the host system isn’t generously equipped with memory. It’s also less inherently secure than Windows To Go, as files and resources you access may leave a footprint on the local hard drive. However, it’s an attractive alternative to the fiddling involved in creating a live DVD – so long as you can access a compatible virtualisation host on the hardware you want to use.

Access your OS remotely

A portable OS can be a sensible solution for users with no “home” PC – but if your data and applications are already installed on a desktop, or available via corporate application and file servers, there’s no need to carry around duplicate installations with you. Windows Remote Desktop Services allows users to

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Using applications on any PC

Although it’s nice to have a familiar desktop wallpaper and settings, the real benefit of taking your OS with you is having your applications to hand. In some cases, you can get this benefit without relying on a portable OS – all you need are portable applications. Portable applications are programs that can be run directly from a USB drive without needing to be installed, and without leaving libraries and settings behind on the host system’s local hard disk. This is achieved by placing needed libraries and components in temporary locations, or in the same directory as the program files themselves, and by using per-program configuration files to store settings, rather than relying on the Registry. There are plenty of portable applications available – you’ll find a list of popular programs at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214idos3. The list includes portable versions of the Chrome and Firefox browsers, Thunderbird mail, Skype, Media Player Classic and even the LibreOffice suite. Things such as video editing and audio production remain a stretch, however, and if you need access to network storage or remote servers you’ll have to configure it yourself. Of course, these days it isn’t even necessary to run applications to get work done. Thanks to online services such as Gmail, Office 365 and Photoshop Express, you can accomplish a surprising amount from a web browser, and it looks like this is the way the industry is heading. By the time Windows 9 comes out, there may be no need to take your operating system with you, as your applications and data will be available to you whenever you connect to the internet – no matter where you are or what device you’re using.

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COVER DISC CD & DVD

COVER DISC THIS MONTH’S CD & DVD – AUGUST 2012

£14 50 9 OVER

W R WO HO RT OF F PR RO O DTU P UH C O TS D S C IIN T NT TO L OT TA AL

Create PC backups, run complex virtualisation tasks and get a complete office suite for free on this month’s packed PC Pro cover disc ON THE CD & DVD: FULL PRODUCTS

NovaBACKUP Professional 12.5

WORTH

£42

Backup should be an essential part of your computing routine, but it’s all too easy to let it slip. With NovaBACKUP Professional 12.5, there’s no danger of putting off this important task: it’s easy, effective, and free on this month’s cover disc. The range of options makes it a comprehensive backup tool. NovaBACKUP’s Smart Select module can hunt automatically through your hard disk for documents, music files, emails and pictures; and back them up to internal volumes, external disks or network locations. Its Backup wizard lets you save previous jobs, too, so they can be run at the click of a mouse in the future. Other wizards let you restore data to a location of your choosing or create a boot disc that can be used to save your PC in the event of disaster, and NovaBACKUP’s scheduler means backup operations can be run when it’s most convenient for you – rather than interrupting your work. File restoration is simple, with options to recover entire backups or individual files, so you can easily hunt down important files or folders rather than wasting time restoring gigabytes of data. To register NovaBACKUP Professional 12.5, head to www.pcpro. co.uk/links/214novabackup and enter your details to receive your personal code. There’s an upgrade offer available, too, with NovaBACKUP Professional, Server or Business Essentials 13 available with a whopping 50% discount – so those three applications will cost only £21 inc VAT, £105 inc VAT and £126 inc VAT respectively. The latest versions of the software include numerous updated features, including extensive imaging support, the ability to recover systems to different PCs, and more versatile restoration options. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows 7/Vista/XP; 3GB hard disk space; requires online registration

NovaBACKUP Professional 12.5

CD& DVD A broad range of modules makes backup simple, from preserving precious photographs to looking after vital documents, and the extensive range of tools offers plenty of advanced options

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The application’s Smart Select tool automatically digs out pictures, emails, documents or music files and backs them up to specified locations – handy if you want to preserve certain types of file

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CD & DVD

COVER DISC

Technical problems? If you have any difficulties with your CD or DVD, check the cover disc forum at www.pcpro.co.uk/forum

Disclaimer For full listing, go to: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214disc

[email protected]

Dennis Publishing Ltd cannot accept responsibility for any loss, disruption or damage to your data or your computer system (including hardware) that may occur while using either the disc or programs and data on it. If you do not accept the terms and conditions, please do not continue. Full products available to UK readers only. Full product registration closes on 14 September 2012.

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NovaBACKUP’s wizards make it easy to back up all your important files, but you may prefer to set up a backup job manually using the application’s Windows Explorer-style interface and tickboxes.

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If you want to keep your files safe without disrupting your daily routine, make NovaBACKUP’s scheduling options your next port of call. Backup jobs can be set to run daily, monthly or even hourly.

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Backups may include sensitive data, so NovaBACKUP comes with full encryption capabilities. Backups can be password-protected, and there’s also a powerful virus-scanning engine.

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WALKTHROUGH

Protect your data with NovaBACKUP Professional 12.5

Backing up an entire PC can take up a lot of space, so NovaBACKUP’s estimation tool analyses the files involved, counts them up and calculates exactly how much hard disk space you’ll need.

Backups can be compressed, backup destinations can be altered, and backups can be uploaded to network locations. You can also choose to use incremental backups to save time and hard disk space.

As well as providing a complete local backup solution, NovaBACKUP Professional 12.5 also includes cloud-based storage options, plus disaster recovery tools and boot-media creation modules.

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COVER DISC CD & DVD

COVER DISC THIS MONTH’S CD & DVD – AUGUST 2012 [email protected] Paragon Virtualization Manager 12 Compact

Paragon Virtualization Manager 12 Compact

You may think virtualisation is for advanced computer users only, but with Paragon Virtualization Manager 12 Compact – free this month – it’s easy to set up and run your own virtual machines, thanks to its friendly step-by-step interface. One wizard lets you copy entire hard disks or individual partitions into new virtual machines, while another offers a variety of partition adjustment options, from transferring files between virtual disks and converting virtual machines to different formats. Paragon Virtualization Manager 12 Compact supports a variety of popular virtual disk formats, including Microsoft Virtual PC, Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Workstation and Fusion. It’s also possible to create new virtual disks from scratch, and built-in troubleshooting tools can help should you run into any difficulties. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows 7/Vista/XP; requires online registration

ON THE DVD: BONUS FULL PRODUCTS

CD& DVD This powerful and intuitive virtualisation tool includes options for virtualising hard disks and partitions across a range of popular formats

Abelssoft Backup 2012

Abelssoft Backup 2012

Abelssoft Backup 2012 is based on Windows 8’s Metro interface, so it’s clear and accessible, and its backup wizard makes the process simple: choose which drive or file type you’d like to back up – from your entire hard disk to your Office documents, emails, pictures or music files – and then choose if you’d like the backup to be password-protected. You can pick from hourly, daily, weekly or monthly scheduled backups, have backup files updated every time a particular external hard disk is connected, and save backups to internal disks, external drives or networked locations. It’s also possible to create bootable discs to restore your PC to its former glory should the worst happen. To register the software, simply enter your name and email address into the window that appears when you start up the application and an activation code will be emailed to you.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows 7/Vista/XP; requires online registration

Ashampoo Office 2010

DVD ONLY Abelssoft Backup combines a clean, Windows 8-style interf interface and da practical selection of options for simple, quick file preservation

Ashampoo Office 2010

Office software can be expensive, but this month you can take advantage of Ashampoo’s fully featured Office 2010 suite without paying a penny. The suite is split into three sections. The first, TextMaker, is a powerful word processor that includes everything you need to create letters and documents – and advanced tools, too, for more complex layouts and creations. The second utility, PlanMaker, serves up every option you’d expect from a spreadsheet tool, with more than 300 functions and dozens of 2D and 3D chart types. Finally, Ashampoo’s Presentations tool is a slick alternative to PowerPoint, with complex animations, stunning graphical effects and a range of professional-level options to choose from. To get started with this trio of applications, you simply need to register Ashampoo Office 2010. Press the “Get free activation key” button during the installation process, enter your email address, and register for an Ashampoo account: your licence key will then be emailed to you. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows 7/Vista/XP; requires online registration

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DVD ONLY With tools to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, this free software competes with expensive application suites

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RWC Contents

REAL WORLD COMPUTING EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF IT PROFESSIONALS

Our expert line-up Advanced Windows & Mac

72

Jon Honeyball on why Windows Update is an example of bad programming, and the possibilities of fibre-optic Thunderbolt.

Mobile & Wireless The truth about BYOD

Is letting employees bring in their own devices a great way to cut costs or a recipe for disaster? Tim Anderson weighs up the pros and cons.

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75

Paul Ockenden notices that smartphones are getting ever bigger, and wonders whether that’s what people really want.

Online Business

80

Kevin Partner asks whether Facebook is really worth $100 billion, and finds Android just as profitable as iOS in terms of app development.

Security & Social Networking

83

Davey Winder compares the relative security merits of Facebook and LinkedIn, and shoots down Google Drive.

Careers

Stuart Andrews reveals how to embark on the critical career of software test engineer, preventing bugs creeping into software and websites.

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BUSINESS CLINIC FREE BUSINESS ADVICE FROM PC PRO’S EXPERTS Do you need help with a business IT problem? PC Pro’s Steve Cassidy and Davey Winder will visit your company to deliver free advice on your firm’s IT setup. Send details to [email protected] and we could pay you a visit!

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Office Applications

86

Multiple systems waste time and lead to errors in data. Simon Jones shows how to get your CRM and LOB systems working together.

Web Apps & Design

89

Mark Newton reveals how affiliate ad schemes can boost website revenue, and takes a look at the MVC framework.

Networks

92

Steve Cassidy wonders why network printing is one area of computing that has barely been upgraded since the 1990s.

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Idealog

RWC

DICK POUNTAIN is caught dreaming under the old whiffletree

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t all started when I was asked to write a preface for a book on the history of Dennis Publishing, which required reminiscing about our start in the early 1970s. That triggered memories of the way we put magazines together back then: type the copy on an IBM Selectric “golf ball” composer, cut it up into strips with scalpels, and stick it down on the page with hot wax. The smell of that hot wax and the machine-gun rattle of the IBM came flooding back. That prompted me to look up IBM Selectric online, where I stumbled across a neat video clip by Bill Hammack (www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214idealog) showing how the IBM golf ball mechanism contained a cunning example of a mechanical digital-to-analogue converter. The problem that needed solving was to rotate an almost spherical print head around two different axes, to position the correct character over the paper – unlike older typewriters, this print head moved while the paper stood still (as in all modern computer printers). Rotation control involved adding together two digital “signals”, using four bits to specify the tilt and 22 bits to specify rotation around the vertical axis, which originated as key-presses, and were transmitted via cables like those used to change gears on a bike. The mechanism that performed this went by the name of a “whiffletree” (or whippletree). To my surprise, it turns out that whiffletree mechanism has been known since at least the Middle Ages, as a method for harnessing horses to a plough! It solves the problem of various horses pulling with different strengths, by adding together and averaging their pulls onto the plough. It’s a “tree” in the same way a directory tree is: each pair of horses is harnessed to a horizontal bar; these bars are connected to a larger bar and so on. The pivot links between bars can be put into one of several holes to “program” the whiffletree’s addition sum: if the lead horse is pulling twice as hard as the others, you put its pivot at the two-thirds mark. It’s an elegant mechanism. At this point, I ought to tell you that my first brush with computing was in 1961, as part of a team that built an electronic analogue computer from RAF surplus radar components to enter a county competition. It solved sixth-order differential equations in real-time (for instance, to emulate a pendulum swinging partially through oil) and we programmed it by plugging cables into a patch panel, like an old-fashioned synthesiser or telephone switchboard.

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I found myself wondering where else such ingenious devices have been used: it led me to naval gunnery controllers. Throughout World War II and through to the 1970s, American warships were fitted with electro-mechanical fire control systems that worked on a principle not unlike the IBM golf ball. An enemy plane is approaching, your radar/sonar system is telling you from which direction: keep the anti-aircraft gun pointed in such directions that its stream of shells intercepts the moving plane’s path. This problem was solved continuously in real-time, by gears, levers, cables and a few valves. Since Alan Turing’s 1936 paper, we’ve known digital computers can imitate anything mechanical or electrical analogue devices can – but sometimes there’s little advantage in it. We used to be surrounded by analogue computers, especially in cars, and still are to a lesser extent. One that’s long gone is the carburettor, which slid needles of varying taper through nozzles to compute a complex function relating petrol/air ratio to engine load. One that remains is the camshaft, whose varying cam profiles compute a similar function to control valve timing. Less

The ancient Greeks possessed as much sheer human ingenuity as we do. And look what happened to them... obvious is the windscreen wiper, whose blade is attached via a whiffletree to spread the torque from the motor evenly along its length. Just as my nostalgia was starting to wane, I watched a documentary on BBC Four about the Antikythera mechanism, a device of ancient Greek origin found by sponge divers in 1900. Investigation since has revealed this was a mechanical analogue computer, possibly after a design by Archimedes, with a rear face that calculated dates of solar and lunar eclipses to come, and a front face comprising an animated display of the then-known planets’ orbits around the sun. It worked using 70 hand-cut bronze gears with up to 253 teeth each. We’re constantly tempted toward hubris concerning our advances in technology, but once you’ve allowed for some 400 years of cumulative advances in chemistry and solidstate physics, it’s clear that the ancient Greeks possessed as much sheer human ingenuity as we do. And look what happened to them...

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DICK POUNTAIN is the editor of RWC, and joined Dennis Publishing in the days when it was still known as H. Bunch Associates. Blog: www.dickpountain.co.uk Email: via http://about.me/dick.pountain


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RWC Feature

FEATURE

The truth about BYOD Is letting employees bring in their own devices a great way to cut costs or a recipe for disaster? Tim Anderson weighs up the pros and cons

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epending on who you listen to, the current trend of bringing your own device to work is either the greatest productivity boost since the spreadsheet, or the biggest risk to security since Windows was connected to the internet. As the name suggests, bring your own device (BYOD) is about employees using their own computers, smartphones or tablets at work as well as at home. Evangelists will tell you BYOD is a win-win situation. Companies can reduce their hardware costs, while employees get to work with kit they feel comfortable with. However, there are huge implications for companies adopting a BYOD system: who pays for the device? How do you deal with the intermingling of company and personal data? Who is responsible for data security?

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Whether your business is pursuing a formal BYOD policy, or has adopted one by default with employees using their own equipment without the consent of the IT department, these issues – and many more – must be addressed.

Inspired by Apple

If there’s one company at the centre of BYOD it’s Apple, because it is iPhones and iPads that have crept into companies. “It starts when the CEO received an iPad for Christmas and wants to use it in the office to run corporate applications, Outlook and so on,” says Zoe Darling-Smith, advisory services director at CIO Connect, which advises British CIOs. The CEO then discusses those requirements with the IT department and this is the catalyst for change.

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Dave Frymier is responsible for the “consumerisation of IT program” at Unisys, a consulting and IT support firm. “Like many companies we started off with BlackBerrys,” he told PC Pro. “Our BlackBerrys started off as all corporate purchased. Then the iPhone came out in 2007. All these people showed up with these devices and wanted to use them for work. “Consumerisation of IT is driving BYOD, and the consumerisation of IT in addition to BYOD is driving a whole set of changes that are rippling throughout the IT infrastructure, all the way from the data centre through your remote access systems and into our networks.” Do employee devices such as tablets run alongside the PCs and laptops they were using before? “In some cases, no,” says DarlingSmith. “The next phase is how people are defining which device to have. It tends to be

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Feature

around the types of users, classifying which people should and shouldn’t have the ability to bring their own device. If you have people sat on customer service desks, the need for them to bring their own device is minimal. The other extreme is a sales force: they’re completely mobile, just needing to log into SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com.” Why does the CEO (or anyone else) want to use their iPad at work? Because it delivers a better user experience than he gets from his work-issued PC or laptop. Executives who spend a lot of time in meetings discover that

applications may be installed, with concerns not only about malware, but also about apps that suck up personal data such as contact lists and send it off to cloud services. At Unisys, security chief Dave Frymier was concerned when employees started forwarding company emails to Google in order to read them on an iPhone. “Once we found out that was happening, we had to put a stop to it quickly,” he says. “There’s obviously security issues around the leaking of confidential information, but the root problem is that the person who is sending the email doesn’t have an opportunity to evaluate where it’s going. For instance, we have policies that say that if you’re sending confidential information off the Unisys network it needs to be encrypted. So if you send a confidential email to what you think is [email protected], but it actually ends up being routed to john.doe@ gmail.com, then the sender has just been deceived into violating our confidential information policy.” Another common concern is uncontrolled use of synchronisation services such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive. These services let users effortlessly synchronise documents between laptops, desktops and mobile devices across all the main operating systems, and are so useful that they creep into business use without the say-so of the IT department. Documents end up in unprotected folders on desktop operating systems, and on the web protected only by what may be an insecure username and password. Research by information systems group ISACA revealed that 51% of UK respondents think that the risks of BYOD outweigh the benefits, and 61% prohibit the use of mobile applications for work on personal devices. The biggest concern, cited by 48%, is that company data will be stored insecurely. Implementing BYOD can also be costly. It isn’t only the cost of the devices – if the company is paying or part-paying – but also the impact on applications. A standardised environment in which all users have a certain version of Windows and are connected to the corporate network simplifies application deployment. Transitioning to allow a variety of devices means that old assumptions no longer apply, and users will demand access to essential apps from iPads, Android tablets or Mac laptops. Another aspect is how user-friendly mobile devices affect employee behaviour, particularly in their use of social media. The temptation to post a quick Facebook update or tweet may be

“The biggest concern about BYOD is that company data will be stored insecurely” iPads are great for reading documents and taking notes, plus they’re light, lie flat on the table, and have a long battery life. There’s a sense, then, in which the BYOD trend is really more about an Apple-shaped shift in the way we do computing at work. If you’re puzzled about why Microsoft is sidelining 30 years of the Windows UI to re-imagine it as a tablet OS in Windows 8, look no further for the answer. At the same time, this isn’t only about Apple. It’s also about models of computing and working. Businesses making sense of how to accommodate iPads or other mobile devices into their IT infrastructure may find themselves re-evaluating employees’ needs. Is Microsoft Office necessary, or will simpler iPad apps do all that’s required? Equally, employees who get business email wherever they are may work flexibly, even if that isn’t in their terms of employment. “Some of them are finding that if they’re able to use their own devices, the latest Apple usually, they’re seeing improved productivity, improved motivation, and less loss of devices,” says Darling-Smith. “The seamless integration between working at home and in the office means people will happily look at their work emails at 8pm or 9pm.” BYOD isn’t the preserve of larger companies. Small businesses that lack the IT infrastructure and policies of large organisations may already be intermingling business and home computing. The essence of cloud services such as Google Apps and Microsoft’s Office 365 is that you can work from anywhere on any device. Apple may be the premier brand, but the essence of BYOD is device flexibility, so it makes no sense to plan solely for expensive iPhones and iPads.

The business risks

The major concern among companies implementing or considering a BYOD policy is security. Personal devices used for work are less tightly controlled by the business. Undesirable

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RWC

higher on a device that’s designed to integrate with those services, which brings up issues such as distraction from work and protecting the corporate brand.

Fixing security flaws

A new iPad arrives without even a PIN to protect it. How can work-personal devices be set up with access to corporate applications and data, without compromising security? Unisys uses policies enforced by Microsoft’s ActiveSync, which synchronises Exchange data with devices. “We have a set of nine security policies, one of which is that we need to supply a digital certificate that identifies the device as being one that’s properly registered to use our service,” says Frymier. “We also enforce a four-digit or more PIN to be used to log into the device. People don’t like that, but they put up with it. We also enable remote wiping. People don’t like that either, but it happens so infrequently that it isn’t really a problem.” Another approach is to use a thin client and desktop virtualisation. Using a remote desktop client, or a client such as Citrix Receiver, users can access business applications from almost any device. There are two big advantages. One is that applications don’t need to be ported to work on the device, since they’re still running on the existing platform, usually Windows. The other is that confidential data isn’t stored on the device itself. Provided that the log-in is well protected, there should be no critical data on the device to lose. There are a few drawbacks. This type of solution is expensive. It also fails to deliver the best user experience, since you’re running applications that aren’t native to the device, and in the case of Windows applications, struggling

The popularity of Apple’s mobile devices has sparked the trend for BYOD

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RWC Feature

to operate an environment that expects a keyboard and mouse to be present. A third issue is lack of offline support, or access to business applications when the data connection is weak or intermittent. Another idea is to lock business-critical use into a specific app or container. Good Technology, for example, uses its own “enterprise container”, an encrypted block on the device used for business email and documents via a custom application. The general approach is to isolate and protect business data from private data on the device. Good Technology’s full solution includes security policies, device management with remote wipe (either of the container or the entire device), and encryption of data in transit as well as on the device itself. This is a more seamless approach than a thin client, although it may still be expensive, and doesn’t solve the problem of application availability beyond basic email, calendar and document sharing. The long-term solution is to design applications with BYOD in mind. Confidential data either lives in the cloud, where it’s secured at the point of access, or in apps designed for secure offline use. The extent to which it’s implemented varies, but there are certain characteristics that mobile devices from all the main players are embracing: • Applications are isolated from one another and from the OS; • Applications are easily reinstalled if the user replaces their machine and logs back on to the application store; • Data is moving to a cloud-and-sync model. It’s possible to take a blended approach to protect the user’s login to the device and to the cloud together with secure apps, and some data that lives only in the corporate cloud, however this is hosted. This is some way off,

Getting ready for BYOD BYOD isn’t a minority movement. “Most companies are aware of it. They can’t ignore it. It’s just how they approach it,” says CIO Connect’s Zoe Darling-Smith. Since BYOD studies typically report improved productivity and employee satisfaction, it isn’t something to fear, provided security is addressed. The key is to proceed with caution. Issuing or allowing a variety of devices without planning or a clear policy is unlikely to go well. Make sure the following issues are considered carefully.

though. Microsoft is only now remaking Windows 8 in this mould, while Apple – with its focus on consumers and ease of use – doesn’t have the best security. RIM has a history of strong manageability and security with BlackBerry, but not the devices that employees desire. In the meantime, techniques such as application virtualisation, remote desktops, and solutions such as those from Good Technology will continue to be part of the BYOD landscape.

BYOD models


employee uses their device for work, then it’s their choice and financial responsibility. “If you broke your wristwatch at work, you wouldn’t expect your employer to fix it for you,” says Frymier.

Insurance cover

An employee who has their own device stolen or broken while at work may feel that the business should take responsibility for it. The insurance perspective is that an employee’s

“The long-term solution is to design applications with BYOD in mind”

Despite the name, BYOD doesn’t necessarily mean that the employee brings their own device. There are a variety of funding models in use. • Device rollout: BYOD sometimes only means that the business has provided iPhones or iPads to some of its employees; • Choose your device: the business approves a selection of devices and issues the employee with one of their choice; • Co-funding: the business pays part of the cost of an employee device; • Zero funding: the employee is allowed to use their device, but the business doesn’t contribute; • Expense funding: the employee claims for business use of their own device. Aberdeen Group recently surveyed more than 100 companies with BYOD policies, and the majority reimbursed employees using monthly expense reports. However, the additional cost burden of processing the expense reports meant that this worked out slightly more expensive than issuing mobile devices and paying the bills. Unisys takes the view that if an A monthly expense policy for BYOD can lead to an additional cost burden

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• Which users are suited to a BYOD policy, which aren’t? • What kinds of devices will be used? • What are the risks? • Which devices can connect to the internal network and under what conditions? • How is support managed, in case of business use of personal devices? • What are the reporting requirements if devices go missing? • Which applications will be used, and can their security be guaranteed?

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device is a “personal effect”, and it might or might not be covered by a business policy. “Some business contents policies offer an extension for what you call you employee effects or their personal effects, which could range from a PDA to an iPad to a mobile phone,” says Deepak Soni, head of Hiscox Business Insurance, which specialises in insuring small and medium-sized businesses. “If you go to a reputable insurer, which understands SME businesses, it’s more likely to be offered or automatically included.” The snag with this kind of insurance is that it covers only the business premises. Work on your iPad at home, and it becomes your responsibility. The second option is to check the employee has their own protection in place, with home insurance covering devices taken to work. What if you get a virus from a work email, and have to pay to have the machine cleaned up? “We do provide e-risk cover that would cover the organisation,” says Soni – but again, this isn’t something that businesses will receive automatically. Clearly, businesses must check that the insurance meets their requirements and be clear with employees about what is and isn’t covered before embarking on a BYOD policy.

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RWC Careers

CAREERS

So you want to be a… software test engineer Stuart Andrews reveals how to embark on the critical career of preventing bugs creeping into software and websites

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ften abused by users and derided by developers, software test engineers play a crucial role in software development. They’re the last line of defence against the sort of bugs, usability and performance issues that make the difference between a great application and disaster. It’s a discipline that involves an array of skills and processes, but one that can be as rewarding as any development role. “Testing is often misrepresented as a low-skilled job that anyone can do,” says Steve Green, managing director of UK test specialists Test Partners. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Testing can be incredibly interesting and incredibly rewarding once you step away from a checkbox mindset.” As a software test engineer, it’s your job to take the code arriving from the development team and break it. You find the problems, prioritise their importance, and point the development team in the right direction to fix them. In doing so, you feed back to the developers, tell them what works and what doesn’t, and help decide whether products or websites are ready for launch. No application goes out entirely bug-free, but a good tester can ensure that those it does go out with are inconspicuous and minor.

of the application, allowing them to test its functions and get to grips with why defects might arise. In the second, it’s assumed that the tester has no such knowledge. All that matters is that if they follow a series of steps they’ll get the predictable and logical result. Even test processes may differ. In traditional models, testing will be scheduled as part of the development process, with a preparatory phase where tests are planned and developed and risks and requirements are quantified, followed by an implementation and execution phase where test data is created, tests are performed and scripts automated. This is followed by a reporting phase, where defects are fed back to the developers along with an analysis of their severity. Retesting and further testing follows until there’s a code freeze, final tests are carried out, and the application is signed off. However, more recent development methods, such as Agile, take a more iterative approach, where development goes hand in hand with testing – or is even led by testing. There are also exploratory approaches, where testers take different paths through the application, looking for issues. This variety of disciplines makes the role of “software test engineer” hard to define. Some

“You don’t necessarily need a technical background to work as a tester, but it helps” Software testing roles

Software testing encompasses many roles. On the one hand, there are both functional and non-functional tests, the former ensuring that the components of an application actually work, and the latter covering aspects such as performance, usability and scalability – the last of which is crucial for apps being distributed across an enterprise or the internet. There’s also a major distinction between white-box and black-box testing. In the first, it’s assumed that testers will have inside knowledge

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will run automated tools and check results against a specification, while others will focus on specific application types. “The different types of testing require different backgrounds and different approaches,” says Gordon McKeown, managing director of Facilita, a Cheshire-based firm specialising in performance testing. In functional testing, he feels “it’s often a question of a clear, methodical approach and attention to detail,” and that “technical knowledge might even be a hindrance”. For performance testing, this won’t be the case. Most good-sized software companies will have in-house positions to keep filled, but Facilita is just one example of a consultancy providing outsourced testing services and tools. As a rule, a role with more expertise will future-proof your career in an industry where automation is cutting jobs. Even Microsoft is moving from departments packed with less-skilled software test engineers to ones dominated by software design engineers in test roles, where engineers write their own tools and scripts.

Background & training

You don’t necessarily need a technical background to work as a software tester, but it certainly helps. “Our technical people come from a variety of backgrounds,” says

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A day in the life of a software test engineer Name: Adam Brown Job title: Software tester, Exco InTouch Experience: A-level in IT, trainee programmer, software tester I usually get into work around 9am. I try to read and reply to any emails, then catch up with testing-related blogs before diving into work. I plan out what’s been delivered, what’s been fixed and needs retesting, and which new features require testing on a mind map. Then I start working through it. I test all of the company’s internal and external web and mobile applications. In the industry we’re in, we have to ensure that the

Getting out at lunch is vital. I need to switch off for an hour and think about something else. As a tester, “defocusing” is important, as we can often fall into the trap of focusing on one thing for too long and ignoring something else that’s right in front of us. After lunch, I catch up on any emails, see if anything has been fixed and needs retesting, and then test anything that I’ve yet to test. At the end of the day, we have a stand-up

“At least once a week I try to test an application that I’ve never seen before; it allows me to hone my skills” software is thoroughly tested. It must be safe for patients to use, documented to a high standard, and fully compliant with the international governing bodies’ and the client’s individual standards. I try to get as much of my exploratory testing done and retest any bug fixes in the morning, as that’s when I’m most productive. It also allows time for the developers to fix any issues in the afternoon, then deliver another release I can test again tomorrow morning.

Life as a software tester can be tough. Some in-house development teams see test engineers as second-class citizens, Personal qualities while outsourced test consultancies can Whether specialist qualifications are vital or have their own difficulties. “The timescales not, testing requires a particular mindset. What can be crazy,” says Green. “There’s a defines it? “Attention to detail,” says Reid, with common scenario where clients call us skills such as the ability to communicate with about three days before a site is going to developers and the empathy needed to launch and they expect us to familiarise represent end users. “We want obvious things ourselves with it, test it – within about such as enthusiasm and application,” two days.” suggests McKeown, “but we also It also isn’t always easy to be the Salary look out for problem-solvers who bearer of bad news. “Sometimes, On average, software are creative… we need people people do like to shoot the test engineers will earn who are driven by an messenger,” says McKeown. approximately £34,000, intellectual curiosity.” “Customers who have got the with more senior and Green concurs. “We want right direction about their expert positions offering people who want to test own quality assurance will £47,000 or more. Entryeverything, and who won’t welcome the facts and want to level positions will take anything at face value. be informed, but some people pay around £18,000 They question everything. running the testing don’t leave to £22,000 Anytime you make an enough time for resolution.” assumption, you could be wrong.” And, as McKeown explains,

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McKeown, “but we’re looking for people with in-depth technical knowledge, preferably from a development background. It helps to understand what’s going on when things crash or when performance is poor.” Stuart Reid, chair of the specialist group in software testing for BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, believes that non-technical testers face a disadvantage. “Many testers were initially users who got into the industry when they were recruited as subject matter experts,” he says. “However, such testers often have limited IT skills and find themselves restricted. “In general,” Reid continues, “the best testers are those who also have a good understanding of development and have some practical programming skills. A degree in software engineering should provide a good grounding in this, and should also enable specialisation in testing in the final year.” Reid recommends ISTQB-BCS certification, which provides an internationally recognised benchmark of skills and experience. “Many employers in the UK consider the ISTQB-BCS foundation level to be a prerequisite,” he explains. McKeown concurs, if only up to a point. “We’d certainly look on things such as ISTQB-BCS as a positive, but they’re not critical. It’s more important candidates show evidence of a technical understanding, and that they can apply that to problem solving.” Not everyone is so positive about ISTQB-BCS. Like a number of people in the software-testing industry, Green feels that its methodology is outdated and ineffective. “The ISTQB-BCS approach, which says ‘thou shalt create a huge and lengthy specification and then test it’ is just totally unrealistic,” he says. “People are trying to practice that approach and completely floundering in the web environment. I think we need a new certification to replace ISTQB. I’m in favour of certification in principle, it’s just that we have a lousy certification at the moment.”

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meeting to discuss what we’ve done and what we plan to do tomorrow. This helps me plan out my work for the following day. I usually finish just after five. There isn’t usually any evening work, but I do a lot of research at home. At least once a week I try to test an application that I’ve never seen before; it allows me to hone my skills. We can all fall into the trap of looking at the same application for too long and just doing the same thing time after time.

today’s test engineers have to deal with more platforms and UIs than ever before, whether on PCs, tablets, thin clients or smartphones, or the web. “It’s why the recruitment and training of staff is so crucial to delivering the service,” he says. Still, the struggle is balanced out by the rewards. “For a very small company we can work on some very high-profile stuff,” says Green. “For example, we’ve worked on microsites for the Olympics. Some testers work their whole life and never work on anything that anyone else sees.” Reid notes that testing shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a step into development, but as its own meaningful career. Meanwhile, McKeown believes that testing brings real opportunities, “particularly in the area of performance testing, where there’s a shortage of really good people”. Testing, he concludes, “is great for creative people… we think that we can combine interesting customer interaction with variety and charge”.


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ADVANCED WINDOWS & MAC

False update status Jon Honeyball on why Windows Update is an example of bad programming, and the possibilities of fibre-optic Thunderbolt

JON HONEYBALL Computer journalist and consultant specialising in both client/server and office automation applications. Email jhoneyball@ woodleyside.co.uk

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ne of the most important considerations when designing a piece of software is how well it’s going to communicate with its users. You might think that this is so completely obvious that it isn’t worthy of mention, and it would be very nice if you were right to think that, but the depressing truth is that this hugely important point is far too often overlooked even by the best developers. By way of a demonstration, on your Windows 7 PC, choose Windows Update – a new window appears and you see a cheery green display bar telling you that everything is fine. You don’t really need to read the words on it because this green bar and those big words “No important updates available” tells you all you need to know, surely? Well, yes, up to a point. That would be the case if it’s correct, but what if it isn’t? That is predicated on when the software actually last checked for updates. Below that big green reassurance bar you’ll find the words “Most recent check for updates”, followed by a date and time, and it’s quite likely that this was some

been powered up for a while, the status will change to show the availability of a bunch of new updates. You might think this doesn’t matter much, but I recently came across a friend’s laptop where for some unknown reason automatic updates had been turned off, and because that display was always green and up to date, she never bothered to click “Check for updates”. It’s a small thing, but it matters. Users don’t read screens in detail, they just glance and make up their minds from that small snapshot of information. Some antivirus/ security software is guilty of this sort of defect too: I remember one package whose main status window displays a cheery status message to the effect that there are no problems at all, totally oblivious to the bright red warning pop-up that was visible in the corner of the same screen that said some nasty had been detected. Carry out a scan of the machine and the scanning window

“I’m disappointed by the capabilities of present-day development software” time yesterday, which many people might view as “new enough”. Maybe it is, but I take exception to being told that something that’s up to date was actually only up to date yesterday, or the day before. Click the “Check for updates” link and it will update the status information, and most of the time this remains the same – but sometimes, especially on a laptop that hasn’t

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reports something unpleasant lurking in the undergrowth, while that status window continues in its happy-but-dumb way to tell you that all is okay. Frankly, this is just an example of bad programming. The antivirus status level – like a military DEFCON status – should always be the same across all components of any software product, regardless of which part you happen to be currently looking at. As an aside, I have to say that I’m increasingly disappointed by the capabilities of present-day development software. Think back to the early 1990s, when Visual Basic 3 set a high watermark for rapid application development that hasn’t been matched since. The supposed ease of programming provided by HTML enabled everyone and their dog to hack together web pages, but it’s been a huge distraction from the pressing requirement to build fast and efficient programming tools that assist in writing correct programs and therefore satisfy business needs. I’ll admit that an awful lot of very poor VB code was written back in those days, too, hacked together by

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departmental managers who had an urgent business problem but couldn’t get timely assistance from the IT department, or couldn’t afford the time or budget to go through a proper development process. I’m sure that I’d now cringe at some of the stuff I wrote back then, too, but I also know that some of it was really pretty good. I’m sure someone will now write in to say that modern development tools are actually far better than I’m giving them credit for, and that I should stop being a grumpy old windbag. That may well be true, and even valid criticism, but I can see little happening today in terms of rapid application development for the HTML5 platform that wasn’t done far better back then. Put another way, does this new HTML5 development environment really deliver 20 years’ of improvement over the tools we were using back in 1992? I’m far from convinced.

Office for Mac

Microsoft just released a major update for Office for Mac, and then promptly withdrew it saying that it had considerable problems. Well yes, indeed, you could say that about the entire product. There’s still no sign of OS X Lion functionality, which came with the OS change last year – no sign of versioning, proper full-screen operation and so forth. It seems likely that yet another release of Apple’s OS will have arrived before the Microsoft team delivers anything better. I’ve been trying to get on with Outlook for Mac – which was written from the ground up for Office for Mac, and took over from the abomination known as Microsoft Entourage. I’ve given it every chance, including deploying it as a front-end to the host Exchange servers in Office 365, but its performance remains a pale shadow of Outlook for Windows; so much so, in fact, that I’ve reverted to using OS X Mail instead. Microsoft needs to do much better here if it’s to retain any relevance on the Mac platform, and I shiver at the thought of what the rumoured Office for iPad might be like. I don’t hold out much hope, to be honest.

Management tools

Recently, I attended the Microsoft MMS conference in Las Vegas – I had to be there for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show, so it made sense to squeeze both events

into the one set of travel plans. Despite my increasing disdain for the Office and Windows client teams, I still have an immense amount of regard for Microsoft’s Windows Server group, which has consistently delivered high-quality products with sensible incremental steps for well over a decade. This team has rarely put a foot wrong, and it’s clear that the people in the backroom doing all the planning have a very clear idea of where they’re going with the product. Although the arrival of server-side virtualisation and hypervisors from competitors such as Xen and VMware caught them slightly off balance, they motored forward with Hyper-V, which has now matured into an extremely solid enterprise grade platform. It’s the management tools, however, that are the real icing on Microsoft’s server cake. Following the various acquisitions made a decade or so ago, the tools platform has been developed in a coherent fashion, and is now priced and bundled in a very straightforward way. With the arrival of the new 2012 tools platform, I think it’s time for me to front up and admit that my previous allegiance to VMware for server virtualisation and management has now been comprehensively overtaken by the entire Microsoft suite. I’d find it hard today to recommend VMware’s solutions over the Microsoft platform, assuming we had a greenfield site to start from. Even where there is an existing VMware solution in place, I’d still be sorely tempted to look at the benefits of moving across to a wholly Microsoft OS, hypervisor and management tools stack. This isn’t to say that VMware has stagnated, far from it, but the new Microsoft management stack for 2012 is exceptionally powerful. Of particular note is its ability to build private clouds exceptionally quickly, and to have them wired up and running in a matter of a minute or so. Then there are the very strong capabilities to move VMs from local data centre operation to cloud-based operation, together with some truly amazing TCP/IP re-routing technologies. And let’s not overlook the management abilities for iOS and Android devices, including publishing applications to them and providing strong lockdown and remote management. Then you build your

applications on top of the Server 2012 infrastructure and it’s clear that the solid work of the server and management tools divisions has delivered some of the best and most complete solutions in the market.

Thunderbolt developments

Thunderbolt – Intel’s new, very-high-speed interconnect fabric, first employed commercially by Apple – continues to mature. Attending the NAB Show in Las Vegas exposed me to a mass of pro video and audio equipment, which was right up my street. As you might expect, several of these companies had made significant commitments to the Thunderbolt interconnect, which is hardly surprising given that pro video is the area of electronic equipment where you have to handle truly huge volumes of data, so

“I’d find it hard to recommend VMware’s solutions over the Microsoft platform”

When you fire up Windows Update, this is what you get...

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that a terabyte can be consumed in not very many minutes. One thing that I’ve been waiting for is the fibre-optic version of the Thunderbolt cables. The standard cables are fine except that they’re limited in length: ten or 20m cables would be a significant step forward, since they’d permit me to move electronically noisy devices out of my production area. At the NAB Show, completely out of the blue, I came across a roll of Thunderbolt fibre cable. It wasn’t just a mock-up, it was the real thing, connecting a laptop to a drive array on the Promise stand (the company that was first to market with those huge multidisk arrays that I use in my lab). I’ll confess that I did a double take and had to trace the path of the cables to doublecheck that it was, indeed, plugged into a laptop and a drive array. And yes, it was real. It seems that this fibre version of the Thunderbolt cable is in final testing: I found more of it on the Intel stand. It appears that the plug assembly is slightly longer than the copper plug, but otherwise looks identical, and works pretty much the same, to give the same throughput and capabilities as the already-shipping copper version. The only difference is that it can be a longer cable.

...but press the Check button, and you get a very different picture

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grade connector. After all, Thunderbolt 1 can must also carry a remain as the domestic/SOHO version. As for DisplayPort channel. the DisplayPort requirement of Thunderbolt 1 Now, I have no carrying over to Thunderbolt 2, there was problem with much silence and wringing of hands from Intel. implementations Hopefully it isn’t too late for this to be undone that run DisplayPort over Thunderbolt – it Actually, this isn’t quite true – there’s one and reconsidered, both for 1 and 2. makes a great single-cable expansion solution significant difference: the copper version One final Thunderbolt snippet: Promise has for a laptop – but notice that little word of Thunderbolt carries a 10W power feed finally delivered an updated management tool “must carry DisplayPort”. It isn’t optional – alongside the data, while the fibre version suite for its R4 and R6 arrays, together with it’s mandatory. This makes it quite difficult has no copper conductor and hence can’t updated firmware. Upgrading both of my R6 to build a Thunderbolt-enabling PCI card carry electrical power, so you can’t plug units to the new firmware was straightforward for desktop or server PCs, because you’d any bus-powered Thunderbolt device and painless, and is something I recommend have to route their display video through it, onto the end of a fibre cable and expect owners to check for immediately. too, in the form of DisplayPort. I’m totally it to work. astonished at the stupidity of However, all is not lost since it’s this decision. Allowing going to be simple enough to WWDC sell-out Thunderbolt to carry make a back-to-back repeater Unmissable “And finally Cyril, and finally Esther…” (for DisplayPort is undoubtedly a box for Thunderbolt that will Rumours suggest that those with long memories), Apple announced good thing, especially on let you daisy-chain cables Microsoft’s next Build the dates for its forthcoming Worldwide laptops, but to make it together, regenerating the conference – the one that will cover the final launch of Developers Conference (WWDC). All the mandatory for all interfaces laser signal on the way. Such Windows 8 itself – will happen tickets, thousands of them, sold out in a record is a numbskull decision of a small box would require a in the September or October two hours, which is the sort of timescale one eye-watering proportions. power source, and could 2012 timeframe; that will expects for a globally famous rock band such We could have had easily inject the 10W power be one not to miss as the Rolling Stones. This certainly belies the Thunderbolt interfaces for back onto the Thunderbolt for sure. notion that people would only go to listen to Mac Pros, or for high-power bus. So you could run a long Steve Jobs, at least in the eyes of the OS X and desktop PCs running Windows: length of fibre cable into a powered iOS developer communities. these could be shipping today as cheap repeater, then hang any self-powered For those of us, myself included, who and cheerful cards. PCs running Windows item off that via a copper cable. I don’t know didn’t manage to book in time for a week in apparently wouldn’t even need driver software, who will be the first to sell such a box, but it’s glorious San Francisco, Apple has announced since it’s just a PCI bus extension after all. a really obvious product that must happen. that all the key items will be made available And there was a significant amount of interest What else is good? Well, the use of fibre for streaming over the internet, which is a about Thunderbolt for PCs at NAB. This is not only allows for longer cable runs, it’s somewhat more sensible and more 21st-century really coming this year. also wholly impervious to outside electronic proposition than flying halfway around the As for Thunderbolt 2 – the rumoured interference. The technology inside world. Although I have to say that, having just even faster version – no information was Thunderbolt is really operating at the bleeding returned from MMS, there’s really nothing forthcoming, but I put in a claim for it to be edge and so is extremely sensitive to noise, and quite like being there. given a far stronger, lockable professionalrunning a cable length that’s immune to interference is a very good thing indeed. That’s why I’ve requested 2.5m and 5m versions of the cable from Intel, because I believe fibre should be employed in any professional mission-critical installation where the 10W bus power isn’t required. To reiterate, you can use the fibre cable anywhere you’re currently using the shipping copper version, and you can run it further, so long as you can do without the 10W bus power. A final point: this Thunderbolt fibre-optic cable has an incredibly small turning radius, which means you can fold it back on itself and pinch it tightly and it won’t damage the fibre inside. This is significant, because fibre has a historic reputation for fragility. I can’t wait for my fibre cables to arrive. One detail about Thunderbolt has always confused me – why isn’t it possible to create a PCI Express card that interfaces Thunderbolt into a normal PC? After all, Thunderbolt is essentially PCI Express technology and so it would seem to be a simple thing to do. I asked this question to the Thunderbolt team at NAB, and its answer had me howling with pain at its abject stupidity. Someone inside Intel has decided that Thunderbolt can’t just be the straightforward interconnect that it is, but The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference sold out as quickly as a rock concert

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MOBILE & WIRELESS

The curse of the mega-phones Paul Ockenden notices that smartphones are getting ever bigger, and wonders whether that’s what people really want

PAUL OCKENDEN Owner of one of the UK’s oldest web agencies, Paul works on award-winning sites for many bluechip clients. Twitter: @PaulOckenden

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as anyone else noticed what’s been happening to top-end smartphones recently? They’ve started to get big – really big. Comedian Dom Joly used to do a sketch with a giant spoof Nokia phone (funny the first few times you saw it), but if smartphones keep growing at their current exponential rate, it will look more like prophesy than parody. It’s certainly true that with a bigger phone you’ll often get a bigger screen, and with a bigger screen you’ll see much more of a web page without having to pinch and zoom. But do people really want that at the expense of carrying around such a huge, heavy lump of tech in their pocket? To sidetrack a little, I collect watches – especially those with fascinating movements. For years I’ve been collecting all kinds, some very old, some brand new, but a few years ago I stopped collecting new ones. Why? Because the fashion in high-end mechanical

back and case sizes have become sensible again. During that annoying period, manufacturers thought they knew what customers wanted – big watches – and focused solely on them, while ignoring the substantial number of us who preferred something more discreet. I feel that the same thing is happening now with smartphones. I realise this trend for huge phones isn’t welcomed by everyone, because when I recently asked on Twitter whether people liked the current trend for such monsters, I received lots of replies saying how much people hated them. I saw messages such as: “Spot on. It will be interesting to see whether Apple bucks the trend with the iPhone, but I doubt it,” from @garleton; “Couldn’t agree more about the latest big phones. I’m tempted by the Sony Ericsson mini Android phone for that reason,” from @MuPhi; and “A phone has to fit in my jeans’ change pocket. More important to me than number of cores, screen resolution etc,” from @bigajm. This little bit of research wasn’t scientific, but I believe that last tweet adequately sums up how many people are feeling. It’s as though mobile manufacturers are frantically revising their spec sheets upwards in order to win a game of smartphone Top Trumps, rather than making the phones people want. They don’t appear to realise that more cores or more pixels don’t necessarily make a better phone. It isn’t as if such mega-phones bring larger batteries that will last for longer, because their increased size usually brings extra bells and whistles, all of which eat up power: that bigger screen requires a bigger backlight and touch sensor; the higher screen resolution means more pixels to push around; and that in turn means the GPU will be sucking more life from the battery. The trouble is that

“Mobile manufacturers are frantically revising their spec sheets upwards” wristwatches from premium manufacturers such as IWC, Zenith and Breguet shifted towards huge monstrosities that just looked silly on my skinny wrist. They were all churning out watches with 50mm+ case diameters, and they were often quite thick too. Thankfully, that particular fashion pendulum has swung

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With a 5.3in screen, the Samsung Galaxy Note is a monster of a phone

fashion dictates phones that are larger in the two visible dimensions, but there’s still a desire to have them thin, so battery capacity inevitably suffers. I recently witnessed HTC’s official Twitter account proudly retweeting a couple of folk who claimed they’d managed to get a full day’s use out of their HTC One X phones, as if this were some kind of epic win. Wow! A whole day without a trip to the charger! I’m sorry, but in my book a full day is the absolute minimum one should expect from a smartphone, and the fact your device can just about stagger


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through a real-world day is hardly something to be proud of. HTC’s vice president of product strategy, Björn Kilburn, recently said that customers consistently prefer thinner phones, even if that svelte profile involves shorter battery life. Yet when the Android Authority website ran a poll of visitors, 68% said they wanted better battery life compared to only 4% who wanted a thinner phone (the remaining 28% wanted both, of course). This is big-watch syndrome all over again: the manufacturers believe they know what we want, and can probably produce carefully crafted research to support their marketing strategy; meanwhile, we who live in the real world dream of powerful yet easily pocketable phones that can go two or three days on a single charge. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the pendulum to swing back.

BlackBerry Balance is probably the best BYOD mobile device firewall, but it’s only available on RIM’s handsets and tablets

Bring your own headache

Flavour of the month right now in IT and business circles is BYOD, which stands for “bring your own device”. A good 25% of the press releases I’m currently receiving contain this magic initialism (not an acronym!) somewhere. So what is this idea? For a start, it isn’t really new – I’d imagine that, like me, a fair proportion of the readers of this column have been “bringing their own device” (whether phone, tablet or laptop) to work for decades now. What’s really caused the current BYOD mania is that IT managers awoke to the fact that plugging unauthorised devices into the company network presents both a security and a management risk while, simultaneously, vendors realised this anxiety provides a nice opportunity to sell “solutions”. Most of the BYOD press coverage currently seems to focus on smartphones, and while it’s likely their prevalence (and to a lesser extent that of tablets) woke IT managers up to the potential threat, we mustn’t ignore laptops. Taking your own laptop to work – especially in smaller companies, and most especially those in the creative sector – is very common indeed.

handle on the additional support costs imposed by staff using their own devices rather than company-provided ones. This is always the big issue – BYOD may deliver a saving on hardware costs, but is this saving simply eaten up in higher support costs? He says: “Our stats here at G2 show that companies that allow employees and contractors to bring their own laptops into work see about a 15% increase in support needs over companies that provide hardware that’s locked down in the usual way.” A couple of observations before we go any further: first of all, Oliver is only looking at BYOD laptops here, and I’d expect the additional support costs for BYOD smartphones to be significantly less (although their management costs will be higher); second, it wouldn’t be prudent to pin all of this 15% onto the BYOD scheme itself – it could just be that those companies that allow BYOD have a more lax corporate culture, so that all their IT support costs are higher. Nevertheless, it’s a valid metric, given the sample size. As Oliver says: “As a support company we can’t complain about a greater need for support!” I also asked him whether he had a gut feeling about how well BYOD was working in practice. “How well this works seems to be down to who you ask,”

“A fair proportion of readers have been ‘bringing their own device’ to work for decades” To find out a bit more about the real-world problems surrounding BYOD, I had a chat with Oliver Marshall from G2 Support. Oliver is very much the go-to guy when it comes to IT support among Brighton’s ever-burgeoning new media industry. The first thing I asked him to do was examine the stats from his ticketing system, to see whether it was possible to get a

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he said. Certainly, companies see a benefit from the initial cost savings BYOD can bring, and the ease and speed with which a new user can be up and running. However, the end users either fall into love-it or hate-it attitudes. In the main, though, the feedback is positive, with companies feeling they save money, and staff feeling liberated from office machines.” I asked Oliver to describe some of the main problems he and his company encounter in BYOD environments. “With BYOD laptops, we really see three common areas of issue: security, reliability and support. Users bringing in their own laptops or devices typically don’t maintain them very well, and as such it’s still all too common to see machines appear that have no basic antivirus or anti-malware provision. Home users’ machines also tend to be of a lesser specification than would normally appear in the workplace, and tend to be slower and less reliable (partly due to the lack of maintenance) – although clearly this isn’t a concern when it comes to some other devices; an iPad is the same wherever you get it. “Support can be a bone of contention. If a user is dependent on their home machine for working in the office, and something happens while at home to prevent their machine from working when next in the office, who is responsible? With office-owned laptops you typically see policies, either written or enforced by security permissions, which prevent users from performing certain tasks such as adding or removing software. With home-owned devices, such policies are harder to enforce. Even where the laptop is only used as a thin client when in the office, for Remote Desktop working, companies still need to remember that issues with that laptop can affect other users on their network, so robust security policies and procedures are just as important. We install monitoring software on most BYOD laptops, which we can then use to provide compliance information to clients to show that machines are being updated, antivirus is running, firewalls are on, and so on. “With devices such as tablets and phones, the support element tends to fade away (although by no means disappear). The issue here tends to be that of data possession and security. A user is more likely to lose or damage their own device than a work-owned one, and what happens to the data in that situation? Do you force users to add their device to your corporate management policies in the case of BlackBerrys and iPhones? When a staff member leaves and you lock down their account, can you remove the company data that’s still held in the inbox

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The truth about BYOD Read our feature on p66 on their device? These are the kind of real-world questions that get asked of us – unfortunately, usually long after they should have been asked.” That’s a really useful insight, and I’d like to thank Oliver for imparting it. I’ve written here before about how companies running a fleet of recent BlackBerry phones (and indeed PlayBook tablets) can employ BlackBerry Balance to put a firewall partition between the corporate and personal stuff on their phones. This extends to both apps and data, and it works very well. Regrettably, though, while Mobile Fusion can extend RIM’s management and security platform onto iOS and Android phones, it doesn’t stretch to Balance, which remains exclusive to RIM’s own devices. There are plenty of BYOD helper products available for other mobile platforms, and desktop operating systems too, but I’ve yet to see anything that works quite as well and as unobtrusively as Balance. Various commentators continue to write off RIM – indeed, I’ve noticed that whenever one of my BlackBerry articles appears on the PC Pro website, someone will post a “RIM is dead” comment within a few minutes – but I seriously believe that Balance could prove to be the firm’s salvation. Owning the complete platform (hardware, OS, and even supporting infrastructure) has enabled RIM to create the most viable BYOD platform currently available.

DiDa d’oh!

Remember how I wrote about mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) offering data on the 3 network (see issue 211, p79)? Remember how I said it was “ridiculously cheap”? Remember how it looked too good to be true? Well, it seems that it was. Those cheap data SIMs from DiDa (as well as ones from other 3 MVNOs, such as Freedom Talk) all seemed to stop working at the start of April: these SIMs would no longer register on the 3 network. I’ve struggled to get any clear or reliable information as to what went wrong. DiDa initially wouldn’t give any reason, and simply referred customers back to their original reseller to get a refund for their unused data, then a few days later said something about the SIMs being subject to a “manufacturing fault”. I’ve tried several times to contract 3’s press office to get the story from its end, but was unable to get any response. I’ve seen an internal email from one of the companies involved, and it seems that between the MVNOs and the 3 network there’s a whole chain of middlemen companies involved, from “network aggregators” to “mobile

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There are reports in various forums about data problems with DiDa and other 3 MVNOs

network enablers”, whatever they might be. There appears to be a bit of a blame game going on at the moment, and there are court proceedings and injunctions happening, so I’m not going to go into great detail here for fear of prejudicing any of this legal action. Perhaps when the situation settles down a bit I’ll be in a better position to bring you some of the facts. In the meantime, the good news is that resellers that were offering these cheap deals on eBay seem to be honouring DiDa’s commitment to a refund for any remaining credit – I spoke to one reseller (who trades as Little Cube on eBay) who said he’d had to set up a specially dedicated customer services team just to deal with complaints from customers whose SIM had stopped working. He even gave them the option of a replacement 12-month unlimited data SIM on the T-Mobile network – a very generous offer, but having been once bitten, it seems most of them opted for the refund.

Nostalgia

The smallest phone I ever had was Sony’s CM-R111, back in 1993 before smartphones (even pre-GSM). My little Sony measured only 64.2 x 85.5 x 24.4mm, the size of a matchbox, and it needed a flip-down stick for its microphone. Regrettably, it proved to be an evolutionary dead-end in phone design, but it was longe being beautiful and despite it no longer supported by any UK mobile network, boxed examples sell for £100 or more as collectors’ items.

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I don’t want to alarm you, but…

Finally this month, a cautionary tale. Mobile technology allows us to carry round astonishing levels of computing power and communication ability, and to use them wherever and whenever we want. Yet there’s one device from the office environment that doesn’t yet have any viable mobile equivalent, and that’s the printer. At this point I know some of you will be asking “what about the paperless office?”, but I’m sure that by now most of us realise that’s simply never going to happen. It was first promised decades ago, and yet we still often need to print out various things. You must have bought something via an e-commerce site and been presented with that final “we suggest you print this page”. Most business printers are networked these days, and most serious road-warriors will have a VPN connection back to their office, so the simplest solution is that while out and about you just use it to print on your office (or indeed home) printer. It usually works very well. However, there’s a potential gotcha: although such remote printing works well enough during the day, I’ve seen several cases reported where someone has printed a document at night that’s set off the office burglar alarm! I’m not sure whether single sheets appearing in the printer tray are enough to cause this, or whether it takes a large document that causes the paper tray to fill up and starts scattering pages all over the floor (hence tripping a motion detector). Either way, here are two possible solutions: site your printer in a location that isn’t “seen” by the alarm system’s sensors, or else get your alarm company to swap the PIR sensors for “pet friendly” alternatives. They might tell you you’re bonkers for wanting pet-proof sensors in an office, but I’ve discovered that such sensors are also A4-paper proof!


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ONLINE BUSINESS

Find the true value of your web business Kevin Partner asks whether Facebook is really worth $100 billion, and finds Android just as profitable as iOS in terms of app development

KEVIN PARTNER Online businessman and app developer. Runs MakingYour OwnCandles.co.uk and app firm NlightN.co.uk. Email kev@fixedprice website.co.uk

I

just watched a documentary about an American who raised wild turkeys: since he was the first creature they saw upon hatching, he became “mother turkey”. This enabled him to mingle with them for eight months, observing their vocalisations and personalities, their playfulness and curiosity. He learned that these birds enjoyed the present, without any concept of a future. We humans attempt to predict our futures using science, with the aim of controlling it – but with about as much success as when we believed that sacrificing goats

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ensured a good harvest. For example, we predict the future value of a company such as Facebook will be $100 billion, on annual earnings of only one-twentieth of that sum. (The same Facebook just paid $1 billion for Instagram, an app-based photo service with no revenue stream at all.) Turkeys may not be the smartest of creatures, but they may have steered clear of these assets. We appear to have learned nothing from the internet bubble of the early 2000s, in which companies gobbled up billions of venture capital dollars that they had no underlying business to repay. A few levelheaded analysts remarking that these emperors’ dangly bits were visible was enough to cause dozens of them to collapse. I’m not suggesting this will happen to Facebook, but this offers an important lesson for smaller online businesses. Facebook is “worth” $100 billion solely because this is what investors are prepared to pay for it; for smaller enterprises, the real fundamentals are far more important. You’re most likely to sell your business to an individual or single company, and you won’t benefit from the herd mentality that forces up a company’s price for fear of being seen to have missed out. The idea that you can start a net business just to sell it for a fortune in a few years’ time is a fantasy – that isn’t to say it doesn’t happen, but most entrepreneurs would be better off building a solid,

profitable business for its own sake, rather than its future value. Google struggled until it stumbled onto ad-serving as its revenue model: it wouldn’t dominate search without AdWords behind it. Amazon had a more traditional model in place from the start and so weathered the dotcom bust, with a huge drop in valuation, because it was generating real money. Strong

“We appear to have learned nothing from the internet bubble of the 2000s”

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business models survive bad times and good; the fluff is blown away once the wind gets up. Facebook exists somewhere between Amazon’s traditional retailing approach and the smoke and mirrors of the infamous Boo.com. It believes that, like Google, advertising can become its cash cow. Its “products” are its users and their data, and like a turkey farmer it keeps those products safely fenced off in a coop, feeding them scraps of new features so that they’ll lay new content. Its real customers are the businesses that pay to advertise, and there’s ample evidence over the past year that Facebook is having a hard time working out how best to monetise the turkeys. Last year, I tested which Facebook ad types worked best for my businesses, and compared them with Google’s AdWords, but the options have now changed so much that I’ve had to re-run those experiments, with startling results. If you’re considering running Facebook ads, then ideally you’d work out how much each user is worth. You might think you could cross-reference your “fans” against your order book to see what percentage convert into paying customers, but that leaves out orders placed by their friends who were exposed to you via your fans’ timelines. Although I insist on solid metrics wherever possible, in the end I settled for considering what I was prepared to pay now for a new Facebook user and to judge later whether that investment was worth it. If I knew the average

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Facebook user would generate, say, £1 of revenue, then I could safely spend 50p on each to attract as many fans as possible. However, since I don’t know how much they’ll actually generate, my budget needs to be just high enough to make the experiment valid without damaging my overall cashflow. That’s the difference between investing and gambling. At present, Facebook is offering traditional ads and Sponsored Stories (along with a hybrid of the two). With a Facebook ad you can direct clickers either to your Facebook pages and apps, or to an external URL; if you want to promote your main website this approach is similar to AdWords, although enriched by Facebook’s data. You could, for example, place an ad that encourages users to buy a particular product from your external site, but the text below it may be composed from the interactions your friends have with your business’ Facebook page. It all gets a little labyrinthine, and the options for previewing ads in situ are still poor, so in many cases the only way to find out how it will look is to run it and then log into your dog’s Facebook account to see whether it appears. My test of Facebook ads last year found they offered a very poor return, with clickthrough rates a tiny fraction of their AdWords equivalent. This year I focused on using Facebook Ads to increase my number of “likes” rather than to sell anything directly, and the key metric was therefore the cost per “like”. The first and simplest Sponsored Story is the “Page Like Story”, which can be used to publicise any page or app by placing an ad into the right-hand

What do we want you to do here? 50% of the people who see this page click the button

best aligns my aims with Facebook’s. One caveat, however, is that by “clicks” Facebook means any click on the ad – whether that’s on the Like button or the link to your page – so the value you get will be lower than the price you pay per “like”. “Page Like” ads are probably the simplest way to get into Facebook advertising, since you don’t write any copy, but given they’re only shown to those connected with an existing page fan, you’ll need a reasonable community to begin with. The “Post Like” ad type works in a similar way, except that the ad appears to those connected with your fans whenever they “like” a status update on your Facebook wall. Finally, I compared “Page Like” and “Post Like” ads with a standard Facebook ad that pointed at a tab on the business’ Facebook page. It’s considered best practice to create a dedicated “landing tab” for new visitors, the express purpose of which is to get them to click Like. The new Timeline design, which has now been rolled out for pages, makes it impossible to set up such a landing tab as the default for

“My test of Facebook ads last year found they offered a very poor return”

column of each target visitor’s view that says “[friend’s name] likes [your page name]”. Within the body of this ad is a link to the page and a Like button. Your audience is made up of those linked in some way to each fan: in my test, only those who didn’t already “like” our page would see it, which gave me an audience of more than 91,000 people. You can choose to pay by the impression, click, or according to the “action-optimised CPM” method – a new charging model in which Facebook tries to work out who’s most likely to click, but most bizarrely then charges per thousand impressions, which suggests it doesn’t trust its own algorithm to produce profitable results. Not surprisingly, I chose The standard Facebook ad (left) directs users to a landing tab; the pay per click, as this Page Like Sponsored Story encourages users’ friends to click

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new visitors, but you can point to it from an ad. You get far more flexibility when targeting a Facebook ad, and for my online craft business I chose to narrow mine down to represent typical customers: women of 35+ who were friends of existing fans, and therefore more likely to be interested in crafts themselves. I ran all three ad types for a few weeks with a daily budget of £5, and the results were pretty conclusive. The “Page Like” ad was the most cost-effective at 53p per “like”: I’d set a cost per click of around 20p, but only one in three ended up becoming a fan. The “Post Like” ad was a disaster that cost £1.57 per “like”; only one in seven clickers became a fan – this is a puzzle and I may fiddle with it a bit to work out why it performed so poorly. Finally, the standard Facebook ad pointed at our landing tab generated “likes” at a cost of 66p each: interestingly, although it had the lowest clickthrough rate, around half of those that arrived at the landing tab clicked the Like button. So if I could reduce the cost per click, this would end up being as effective as the “Page Like” – and more flexible. At the start of my experiment I was prepared to pay around 50p per “like”, and I want to boost our Facebook following so I can then run experiments to work out what impact Facebook has on our bottom line, which is the only metric that really matters.

App economics

Last month I wrote about why more developers choose to target Apple phones and tablets than Android (see issue 213, p82), which I believe is because Apple users are more likely to have


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Android users seem more prepared to download a free app but less prepared to pay for one

Android Market into Google Play, so I also credit card payment registered for their replaced all the buttons linking to the store. As device, thus removing any barrier to impulse a result, I’ve doubled the conversion rate from purchases. Since then I’ve launched my first free to paid. (Don’t get too excited, though: this app, teaching road sign recognition, in both doubling only took the rate from 1% to 2%, so paid and free versions for both iOS and I shan’t be retiring soon on the extra income.) Android. I created the Android version first, so Once I was satisfied that the Android I have a couple of months’ data on the Android versions were stable, I began converting them versions and a month or so on the iOS ones. to iOS, first the paid-for version and then the Readers may recall my theory that free. Using Corona SDK as my development non-game apps can be successful if they’re part platform has brought two big advantages: I was of a suite of services: for example, supermarkets able to create the Android versions in 12 days have made it possible for home shoppers to (far faster than would have been possible in create shopping lists using their phones as Objective-C) and, more barcode readers. For PassYourTheory’s app important still, it’s we simply followed our audience onto mobile possible to quickly devices, offering much of the same content convert the Android code they’d find on the full-fat website, but sliced to work in iOS, rather into several bite-sized apps. This approach gives than starting from scratch us the benefits of cross-marketing, where the in Java. So after a few main website publicises the apps and vice versa, days of repurposing and also makes it easier for our customers to graphics for the squarer aspect ratio of the use our service than those of our non-mobileiPhone and iPod Touch, the apps were ready to aware competitors. submit to the Apple App Store. I’m also developing two other apps for At the time of writing this column, these PassYourTheory (one in partnership with iOS apps have been available only for a few Leafcutter Studios) that, once launched, will weeks, but already their sales pattern has been mean the bulk of PassYourTheory is available interesting. In a nutshell, the free version of in app form. In the meantime, Road Signs the Android app is downloaded three times as Express – the paid-for version – was launched often as its iOS equivalent, whereas for first, followed by Road Signs Free, both the paid versions the number of for Android. The free version Lotto? daily sales is roughly the same features a more restricted library For all but a lucky few, on both platforms. Now you of signs, shows ads served by relying on your app might remember that in my last inneractive, and also displays becoming a “staff pick” column I reported on research messages intended to tempt in your marketplace that claimed for every dollar an people to upgrade. I monitored store is rather like app makes on iOS its Android the ratio of free to paid users basing your business version makes only 24¢. My and, not satisfied, tweaked model on winning experience is suggesting these messages by replacing most the lottery. something different: I’m making with a clearer upgrade text. In the the same money from both platforms meantime, Google had changed

but the free/paid ratio is very different. On Android I can expect two sales for every 100 downloads of the free version, whereas on iOS I’m seeing two sales for every 20 downloads. What does this mean? For me it suggests that Android is just as valuable a platform as Apple, since it generates equivalent revenue. The higher conversion rate on iOS may be because I’m persuading more Apple users to upgrade to the paid-for version, or it may simply be that there’s more competition on iOS so fewer users download the free one. Currently, I tend towards the former, because if it’s a matter of competition, that would affect the paid-for version as much as the freebie. I fully accept that this is a tiny experiment, and I wouldn’t want to draw any firm conclusions from it. It looks as though the money I’m making on Android per download is far lower than it is on iOS, but overall revenue is much the same since its particular market generates higher volumes. Given that the marginal cost of a free download is zero, it doesn’t matter to me that it’s harder to persuade an Android user to upgrade to the paid-for version (for all the reasons suggested in my last column) – so long as the number of downloads is high enough to compensate for this. I’m about to launch my next cross-platform app, and it will be interesting to see whether it confirms these results. I’d guess it’s just as likely to turn them on their head, but that’s part of the fun of experimentation. I’m not only relying on users finding my apps through the stores – although some do – but I’m also including a mention of these apps in emails sent to new users of PassYourTheory.org.uk on joining the free service. My results may

“In the race to success, the smart marketeer beats the genius developer every time”

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have been different had I not done this, but marketing apps externally to the App Store and Google Play is fundamental to my approach, and I’m not about to release any app without such support. Indeed, for a future app I’m creating a website devoted entirely to it, to see whether new users can be attracted through old-fashioned SEO. The successful publishers of the future will be those who embed their apps within a wider marketing system. As in any market, your starting point is having a great, original idea, and you won’t get to launch day without having good development skills. But without effective, multichannel marketing, your little gem is destined to sit on the virtual shelf unwanted, while inferior apps with better marketing are snapped up in droves. In the race to success, the smart marketeer beats the genius developer every time.

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Security & Social

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SECURITY & SOCIAL NETWORKING

LinkedIn: safer for business than Facebook? Davey Winder compares the relative security merits of Facebook and LinkedIn, and shoots down Google Drive

DAVEY WINDER Award-winning journalist and smallbusiness consultant specialising in privacy and security issues. Email davey@happygeek. com; follow him @happygeek on Twitter

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hich is safer for businesses: LinkedIn or Facebook? It’s an interesting question and one that I’m being asked more often as media reports of malicious Facebook postings start to penetrate the corporate psyche. But what’s the answer? Well, even though it may spit in the face of various statistical surveys and malware incident reports, I’ve formed the opinion that it’s the wrong question and therefore the answer is of no relevance. I suspect this position will need explaining. If you take at face value the results of a survey into social media security such as the one carried out recently by Faronics (www.pcpro. co.uk/links/214ss1), then you’d have to conclude that LinkedIn is a more dangerous

place to do business than Facebook: this research reveals that a third of LinkedIn users have accepted connection requests from people they don’t know, compared to only 15% accepting friendship requests from complete strangers on Facebook. Combine this nugget of data with other key findings, such as the fact that almost two-thirds of those users asked were happy to open an unsolicited attachment if it appeared to be a response to an action they’d initiated, or simply because it looked interesting or relevant. Or again, what about the third who admit that they’d send privileged personal information (bank account number, password, mother’s maiden name) to somebody online who they didn’t know in the real world? You should be starting to understand why such social connection request statistics are an important indicator.

The research

So, does the fact that a greater percentage of LinkedIn users are prepared to connect with strangers really make it a more dangerous place than Facebook? Let’s examine those Faronics research results in a little more depth. For a start, the 33% of LinkedIn members who will accept “blind requests” suggests that there’s a greater sense of trust between users in that network, compared to Facebook where only Do you think you are at risk of becoming a victim of half as many people cyberfraud as a result of your social media activities? are prepared to do the same. The reality of 60 this greater trust is further illustrated by 50 50.7 the fact that only 20% 40 of LinkedIn users have 37.8 configured who can % 30 view their profile information, compared 20 to 46% of more nervous Facebook 10 11.5 users. The most 0 obvious conclusion Yes No Maybe to draw from these How safe do you think you are online? figures is that LinkedIn

Graph: Faronics

Faronics Social Media Survey

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users certainly believe that it’s a safer place to work, perhaps because of the business focus of that network compared to the consumer-based vibe on Facebook. But what if they’re deluded, perhaps feeling a false sense of security similar to what you might call the “Apple Effect”? That effect is the result of Mac users being far less exposed to malware and security breaches than PC users – not because their hardware is any more secure, but because the Windows market is far larger, and hence that much more lucrative and attractive to criminals than the OS X market. In the same way, Facebook’s 800 million members provide a target that’s six times bigger to the bad guys than LinkedIn’s 130 million. In both cases, it’s a false sense of security – it matters not one jot how many other people are being targeted once one them is you, or your business. Consider that far from taking it off the cybercriminals radar, the very fact that LinkedIn is a business network may instead be a big flashing neon advert to those types who are looking to “spear phish” and specifically target the corporate data “dark market”. As the social networking threat landscape evolves, it would be a mistake to believe only Facebook faces security problems, merely because it’s the one that’s achieved critical user mass and media momentum. Security risk assessment isn’t achieved by totting up the column inches of media scare stories and then prescribing the most caution for the network that comes out on top. It’s a serious mistake to emphasise the platform and its media image, rather than the factors that matter most, which are user behaviour and corporate security infrastructure. One social network is just as dangerous as the next if the people using it have no idea how to do so in a risk-aware manner, and if the


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Is your Facebook information valuable to data thieves?

computers they’re connecting from are inappropriately protected. Sadly, the first condition is all too prevalent, given that 51% of those asked insist that they’re not at any risk of fraud. To compound this complacency, 28% also insist that the information they post on social networks has absolutely no value to anyone else. That’s quite wrong, because every little fact has some value, even if that value isn’t apparent to the poster. The most casual of comments can be of huge value to a cybercriminal, especially when the person making it has no idea that they’re at risk of fraudulent action. This is the perfect template for creating a successful spear-phishing attempt, is it not? Mind you, the bad guys might not even have to bother hatching elaborate psycho-social scams to steal corporate data, given that a shocking 13% of those asked said they’d send their password to a stranger whose request appeared genuine. What kind of request received via a social network, or even by email, could ever look genuine enough? (Possibly a video call from your mum, with no gun visible at her head.) No wonder that among those 51% who admitted having been targeted by spear-phishers, 12% of attacks succeeded.

Security by the numbers

Although it will perhaps be hot and sunny when you read this column, I’m writing it at the back end of a rather soggy week in April. I should be at the Infosecurity Europe show in London, but instead I’m at my office desk in a converted mill outside Halifax trying to catch up on deadlines missed by going on my honeymoon. That non-attendance doesn’t prevent me from getting soaked by the tsunami of IT security information pouring out of the Earls Court arena, though, hence my fascination with facts and figures this month. Typical is PwC’s 2012 Information Security

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Breaches Survey, which I found of particular interest given the likely impact of proposed changes to the European Commission Data Protection Directive regarding data breach notifications (see Tardy?, below) and that most UK businesses are unprepared to comply with it. PwC, in conjunction with Infosecurity Europe, found that 82% of large organisations had reported security breaches caused by employees, and 47% of them had lost or leaked confidential information. That last number is made all the worse when you take into account that corporate data encryption policies often fail to cover smartphone and tablets, with only 39% of large businesses and 24% of smaller ones encrypting mobile devices, yet 75% of the big boys and 61% of small businesses still happily allow employees to connect their mobiles to the corporate network. If you thought these figures couldn’t get any more alarming, take a deep breath, because 54% of the smaller business organisations polled didn’t bother with any kind of user

education about data security, and nor did an incredibly slack 38% of larger companies either. Perhaps the number that slapped me around the chops the most, though, was the revelation that, of all those companies that did actually have such an education programme, only 26% believed that it had given their staff a good understanding of IT security. I may keep banging on about the importance of getting the people who use the technology to understand the risk factors, but these statistics provide an excellent justification for such constant nagging. According to PwC, the organisations that have invested in such staff education and training are four times as likely to have people working for them who understand the security policies in place, and are half as likely to suffer a staff-related data breach, compared to those businesses that haven’t. According to the latest Websense Security Labs Threat Report titled “How cybercriminals are infecting networks and stealing data undetected” (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214ss2), some 74% of all email is now spam, which is actually a good thing, since last year the figure was 84%. Not such good news is the revelation that 92% of such spam now contains at least one URL, pointing to a convergence between various email security threat strategies into a unified form. The Websense Security Labs analysis reveals that the top five “lures” employed in such emails are now e-commerce/

“The most casual of comments can be of huge value to a cybercriminal”

Tardy?

The European Commission’s Data Protection Directive about disclosure of data breaches and notifying those who have lost data is unlikely to succeed if research conducted by OnePoll for LogRhythm is accurate: 87% of UK businesses surveyed couldn’t identify the affected individuals within the statutory 24 hours; 13% said it could take up to a month; and 6% couldn’t do it at all.

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shopping order notifications, ticket purchase confirmations, delivery notices, test emails and – perhaps thanks to the time of the year that this latest report has surfaced – the good old “you have a tax refund” notification from a dummy HMRC site. A further cause for concern is the statistic that 55% of data-stealing malware communication is now web-based, and 82% of malicious websites are hosted on compromised hosts. As is the statistic that 43% of all Facebook activity is now streamed media, because video-based lures on social networks are rapidly becoming a favourite scamming strategy. That streaming media activity figure is more than five times as large as the next category on Facebook’s popularity list, “news and media” at only 8%, which might explain why the bad guys are paying it so much attention. Facebook is hot stuff as far as cybercriminals are concerned, as you can tell by studying the attack angles they’re using. Among the most common lures used to exploit the streaming media aspect of Facebook is the “like-jacking” attack, which involves first compromising the account of someone in your

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Security & Social

RWC

For your chance to win an Ultrabook Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards, p10 circle of friends (most likely through them being infected by the same scam) and then posting a “like” for a non-existent video claiming to show something unmissable, such as a celebrity exposing her breasts on a foreign TV channel, or some other dork doing something totally dorkish. A single click-toview moment of madness is all it takes to get infected yourself, and the scam is perpetuated. As well as these video promise lures – perhaps a little too obvious for most PC Pro readers – there are browser plugins that connect to a script in order to hook into the Facebook API, and create a persistent distribution network that spreads the target scam links to everyone you know. Or how about the profile creeper option, which involves rogue apps that promise to reveal who’s been looking at your profile, and seemingly manage to fool plenty into installing them, after which they post links to your friends in order to affect a cost-peraction (CPA) survey generation scam. This is so successful that most of the apps are built around an off-the-shelf template that’s openly available for less than £15 to anyone who goes looking for it. This might explain why the bad guys are achieving an increasing success rate, since too many people are relying upon security measures that concentrate on identifying malware files – obviously that remains an important part of the threat detection process, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Actually, if you think of a typical advanced threat as arriving in six stages, you can see just where many people’s security is failing. The attack process now commonly consists of these steps: a lure (1) is followed by a redirect (2) that leads to an exploit kit (3), that allows a file to be dropped (4) that initiates a call-home communication (5) and finally ends up with the theft of your data (6). While you might think that blocking stage 4 with antivirus software will prevent your data from being stolen, that’s only the case if the dropper file is actually detected. Many of the more advanced threats now employ dropper files that are new and unique, and therefore not immediately recognisable by antivirus applications that rely on database-driven file identification: the flaw

in relying upon blocking only that one stage of attack becomes pretty clear. Similar flaws may apply elsewhere – for example, if you attempt to place all your security eggs in the stage 2 redirect basket: relying on your security software to recognise and block iFrame and SQL injections is just as ineffective. What about the growing problem of Facebook wall post redirects, or Twitter feed redirects? That’s without even touching upon the whole “malvertising” industry that exists out in the big bad online world of today. Indeed, according to this report’s authors, at least 80% of the attacks today require some kind of multistaged defence if they’re to be effectively deflected. Even allowing for the MRDA effect (Mandy Rice-Davies Applies, or “well, they would say that”), I’m inclined to agree with them. As the report correctly says, “web security today is about context and containment”, and within some kind of predictive analysis framework. Multilayered, and intelligently multilayered at that, security technology is the only sensible way to protect your data.

the launch of Google’s brand-new (as I write this, it’s literally only a couple of days old) Google Drive cloud data storage service. It’s free, or rather it’s free for users who need only 5GB of storage space, and it lets you store and share whatever data you want so long as it’s legally yours – it finally brings collaboration via Google Docs into the cloud storage mix. What more could you want? How about a bit of fairness about data ownership or, more to the point, about what rights you assign to whom and for how long,

“At least 80% of attacks require multistaged defence if they’re to be effectively deflected”

Google Drive-by cloud data hijack

Given that I’m an editorial fellow and contributing editor over at our sister publication Cloud Pro, you can probably infer that I’m not one of those nay-saying critics of cloud computing. To be sure, I have concerns about cloudy data security, but on the whole these concerns have more to do with user errors than with platform immaturity or service provider incompetence. I’ve been evangelising for the cloud from a small-business and high-end consumer perspective since long before it was even called “the cloud”. That said, sometimes even I’m left deflated, disappointed and just a tad angry about the way that data we’re being asked to trust to the embrace of cloud storage is treated by some providers. Consider, if you will,

concerning the data you place into the cloud? I deliberately chose the word “fairness” rather than “clarity”, because Google is quite clear about this matter in the terms and conditions that you have to agree to in order to use the service. These start off reassuringly enough with a promise that you “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours”, but go downhill quite fast thereafter: “when you upload or otherwise submit content to our services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.” The fact that this licence “continues even if you stop using our services”, and allows Google to use your data for the “limited” purpose of promoting and improving its services, as well as developing new ones, should be of concern to all. At the time of writing, Google hasn’t responded to any requests for a comment to clarify the data ownership and privacy situation.

1. LURE

Two types email and web.

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2. REDIRECT

Funnels and sends the user to a hidden server.

3. EXPLOIT KIT

User’s system is inspected for an open vulnerability

4. DROPPER FILE

If vulnerability exists, malware dropper file is delivered.

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5. CALL HOME Calls home for more malware to expand attack.

6. DATA THEFT

Cybercrime reaches out into internal systems for data to steal.


Infographic: Websense

The six stages of the advanced threat attack process

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OFFICE APPLICATIONS

Integrating CRM with LOB Multiple systems can waste staff’s time and lead to errors in your data. Simon Jones shows how to get your systems working together

SIMON JONES An independent IT consultant specialising in Office Automation, Visual Basic and SQL Server. He lives up a mountain in Wales. Email simon. [email protected]

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ustomer relationship management software (CRM) is a particular class of application that sets out to assist and document all the interactions between the sales staff at your company and their clients and potential clients. There are many different CRM packages available from many different vendors, but they all do a broadly similar job: the purpose of CRM is to help your sales staff turn potential customers into actual customers, and potential sales into actual sales, by making sure that they always have the relevant customer information immediately available to them. CRMs may also be employed in a product support role. The CRM software industry often employs its own jargon that you’re more or less forced to use if you want to understand the products. A potential customer is normally referred to as a “prospect” and a potential sale an “opportunity”. Companies you’ve already sold to, or are about to sell to, are “accounts”, while

conversations and so on. It isn’t as free-form as, say, a collection of office documents held in a folder structure, but neither is it as rigid as a regular database. It’s often left up to the users as to when to create each type of record and what information they should put into it. CRM systems can typically be customised by adding, removing or rearranging the fields on each form, and specifying what values are to be placed on every dropdown list, but you won’t be able to change the fundamental relationships between prospects, opportunities, contacts and accounts that are built in. Some CRM systems let you add your own entities and forms with which to edit them, and define the relationship between the new entity and the standard prospects, opportunities, contacts and accounts. In more simplistic systems you can define new entities, provided they fit loosely into one of the built-in entity types. CRM systems provide an efficient way to market products to your potential customers:

“CRM systems are an efficient way to market products to your potential customers” people who work for accounts or prospects are “contacts”. These are all in fact the standard jargon of traditional salespeople, but may be unfamiliar to staff in other departments. A CRM system essentially consists of a large repository of semi-structured data, such as customer names and addresses, notes of

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they can assist you in running a marketing campaign by telephone, email, snail mail or print advertising, and in measuring the response and conversion rates (the proportion of prospects that were converted into accounts after running a particular campaign). Some of them provide the facility to write sales scripts, which are to be followed by telesales staff when speaking to prospects, and/or links into mass email systems that enable you to send regular newsletters or special offers to your customers and potential customers. A CRM system may also be set up to intercept all your email traffic and keep a record of all messages that are sent to and from your contacts, then tie those emails into the relevant prospects, opportunities, contacts and accounts records. This enables everyone in your company to see exactly what’s been said to any customer at any point, so there’s never any hold up or uncertainty if that customer emails or phones while, for example, their regular account manager is on holiday. Your CRM system may also hold the list of all your products and prices, so you can record in each Opportunity record what types of products that Contact might be interested in.

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Office Applications

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CRM Prospects

You could use such product and price information in marketing campaigns, to create quotes, or even to generate invoices. But hang on a minute, aren’t invoices better kept in your accounting system from where they could be posted to the company’s nominal ledger? And doesn’t your accounting system already hold all of the details of your products in its stock control module? Your list of suppliers is also most likely to be held in your accounting system – if you’re going to hold product information in a CRM system as well, do you need to hold suppliers in the CRM system too? What if you’re a manufacturer and need to take in raw materials from suppliers, and to schedule and manage the production process in order to manufacture the products to be sold (that is ordered, delivered and invoiced) to your customers? In short, where should one computerised management system stop and the other begin?

Opportunities

Campaigns Mailshots

A good way to plan a computer system is to draw a Venn diagram of the major systems

Contacts

will contain errors, especially if there’s no cross-checking of the data. Let’s Invoices say projects are kept in one system and invoices in another, but Invoices have to contain a project Sales Orders ID typed by the user with no check Nominal Ledger Products on what they enter, then around Expenses 20% of your invoices will contain Payroll Suppliers a wrong project ID. It’s even worse if you expect them to type in stuff Purchase Orders Projects such as customer names, which they Deliveries Materials can misspell. These types of mistakes ACCOUNTING Staff can make reporting a total nightmare. You can’t sum project values across Assignments companies if all you have to group them by is the company name, but each company’s name top of the is spelled four or five different ways. You can’t range. CRM reliably sum invoices for projects if those systems, however, LOB invoices are randomly assigned to the wrong are usually designed to projects because of typing errors. be customised and extended, Option 2 may well be possible, but it to better fit the way you work – but their UI depends on what technology you’re using for may impose limitations you wouldn’t encounter your systems’ back-ends. For instance, you in a bespoke LOB system. might employ SQL Server Integration Services Where some entity’s table sits in the overlap (SSIS) to copy/transform data from one system area between two (or more) major systems, you to another every night. Data entered into one face the following choices. Line-of-business systems system could then be used for look-ups in the 1. Duplicate the table so that it exists in both CRM is all about getting the business in the other system, but you couldn’t edit the data systems, then rely on your users to enter data first place; scheduling and stock control is in both systems, and data newly entered or correctly into both systems. about making and storing products; and the changed wouldn’t show up in the other 2. Duplicate the table, but write automating accounting systems are about buying and system until the following morning. Two-way routines that synchronise the data between selling. But what should sit in the middle, synchronisation between the systems, either systems (either one way or in both directions). co-ordinating all these different systems? This periodic or in real-time, may be possible 3. Decide which system will hold that data and middle bit is generically referred to as a depending on the platforms involved, but if then make the other system read and write line-of-business system, or LOB. It’s whatever there’s any delay in the synchronisation then from it as a foreign database. you need to actually run your business, whether you’re more likely to encounter clashes where Option 1 is a very bad idea indeed. Users you’re a manufacturer, reseller, conference several people are trying to edit the same data are terrible at keeping such data in sync and organiser or whatever. There can be overlap in both systems at the same time. SSIS can get you can almost guarantee that 20% of the data between these various systems, and how you handle such overlaps can be interesting. Some companies – resellers, for example – probably won’t have any data that can only live inside a LOB system; all their data might fit comfortably into a CRM or accounting system. Other companies may extend their CRM system to take over most, perhaps all, of their LOB needs. However, extensively customising a CRM system doesn’t usually result in a slick interface, and its users may find it challenging to work with such a lashed-together system. If you’re planning a new computer system, or an extension to an existing one, a good way to visualise it is to draw a Venn diagram of your major systems – CRM, LOB, accounting and so on – and place all the major entities (that is, database tables) onto this diagram to illustrate where they fall. Work out whether your existing systems can be customised or extended to encompass the new functionality you require and, if they can, do they fit together well? Accounting systems often can’t be extended at all, except by buying pre-built modules from their original manufacturer, unless you spend an arm and leg on buying the Dynamics forms aren’t good for Master/Detail records as each line has to be edited separately

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Customers

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the software, so that not only can they use to interface to the new SQL Server Reporting Services to write their data: once again, own bespoke reports on the data, but they LightSwitch seems to could also stop having to print out reports on be a good fit as the paper and then re-key that data into the LOB development tool. or payroll system. Such re-keying is pure The Dynamics CRM drudgery, which takes too much time and UI can be a little effort, and introduces a serious possibility of clunky, especially for keying errors that might affect people’s pay traditional business packets. Once the data is in SQL Server, other entities that have systems can read or write it directly and you headers and content can far more easily write routines to convert lines (orders, invoices and import the data into other systems, and the like), but avoiding those keying errors and freeing staff LightSwitch makes it from a couple of very boring hours of work easy to deploy Master/ Xpert360’s adapter connects LightSwitch applications to Dynamics each week so they can do something more Detail forms with a useful. Computers are good at boring, repetitive couple of clicks. We’re aiming to rewrite or at any data for which you can have an ODBC tasks – and never complain – so make them do update the parts of their LOB system that don’t or OLE DB driver, or an Entity Framework it rather than a human. get subsumed into Dynamics CRM using Data Provider. SSIS is a very powerful tool for If you’re considering buying an off-the-shelf LightSwitch. Development of this replacement copying, mapping and transforming data from package, such as a time-recording system, ask LOB front-end should be fast, despite that fact one database to another, and it comes free with the vendor or the consultants advising that the data is split across two SQL Server. Just look for Integration Services you about the options for different back-end systems. projects in Business Intelligence Development Resources back-end data storage and Perhaps you have multiple Studio (BIDS) or in SQL Server Data Tools ADO.NET Entity Framework integration with your other LOB systems in use at your (SSDT) if you have SQL Server 2012. www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214oa1 systems. Don’t let the company, each dealing The best solution, however, is usually option RSSBus Data Provider person installing it with a separate area of 3, where you store the data only once, in that www.rssbus.com/ado fob you off with a your business, and the system for which it makes most sense. This is Visual Studio LightSwitch Developer Center standard, standalone interfaces between usually the one where it will be used the most, www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214oa2 installation when a these will present the but may also depend on the links available to Sage Developers Programme more centralised, same problems as and from each system. If your CRM system is www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214oa3 integrated approach between CRM, LOB Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce, or Xpert360 Lightning Data Adapter will give you more and an accounting your accounting system is QuickBooks, then for Dynamics CRM Online flexibility now and system. Such systems there are .NET Entity Framework Data www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214oa4 in the future. Also rarely work in complete Providers available from a company called Intuit Developer Network remember to ask about isolation: more often than RSSBus that could greatly simplify development http://developer. APIs, SDKs, ODBC or not there’s an overlap, and of any LOB system. If your accounting system intuit.com OLE DB connectors or wherever possible it’s better to is Sage Line 50, there’s an OLE DB connector Entity Framework Data Providers deal with that overlap using proper available, so you can write a LOB system that for any package you’re thinking of buying. integration rather than duplication of data. accesses Sage data via ADO.NET. This isn’t as Avoid little data islands: integrating disparate You should try to ensure that the data from fully featured as Entity Framework, but it’s still systems doesn’t have to be difficult, and disparate systems is stored in the same, or at relatively easy to use. By using such connectors spending a little time to make separate least in a compatible, back-end database. you can make your LOB system read and write systems work together definitely beats Some of our customers use electronic accounts data such as invoices, and CRM data condemning your fellow workers to hour time-sheet systems for clocking staff in and out, such as contacts directly, without having to upon hour of mind-numbingly boring re-keying which often come with a default installation of hold duplicate copies of the data. – and even more wasted time and expense an Access database to store their data, but they I’m currently writing a LOB system for one expended in sorting out the mess of may be able to store that in SQL Server instead. of our customers that writes purchase order duplicated and contradictory data later. SQL Server is far more robust than Access and and invoice data into QuickBooks, derived you can arrange for from requisitions and works orders that are proper, centrally held in an LOB system built on SQL Server. controlled backups of This LOB system’s front-end is written in all your SQL Server Visual Studio LightSwitch, the rapid data far more easily application development platform I wrote than if you have lots about previously (see issue 203, p88). of Access databases LightSwitch offers an incredibly fast way to dotted around on create forms over databases, and since it’s various machines. based on Entity Framework and MVVM We’ve had to go in (Model, View, ViewModel) technology, it to a couple of these means you can quickly join unrelated databases customers and move into one seamless model, under which neither their time-sheet data the front-end application nor the user cares from Access over whether the data is stored in the back-end of to SQL Server, the LOB, the CRM or the accounting system. usually by a simple Another customer wants to install Microsoft reconfiguration of Dynamics CRM but needs their LOB systems SSIS copies and transforms data from one database to another

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Web Apps & Design

RWC

WEB APPS & DESIGN

Selling ad space on your website Mark Newton reveals how affiliate ad schemes can boost website revenue, and takes a look at the MVC framework

MARK NEWTON MD of the internet company ECats Ltd (Electronic CATalogueS), specialising in internet-based solutions. Email [email protected]

T

hese days, when almost all information is put onto the web, there may seem little point in visiting traditional trade shows such as those held at Earls Court or Birmingham’s NEC. Even the possible benefit of face-to-face networking on the show stands has dwindled with the advent of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, via which you can accost prominent industry figures at any time – albeit on their terms, and lacking the immensely satisfying feeling when you’ve cornered them at an event with a tricky question. That feeling, along with the likelihood of encountering companies you were previously unaware of, is the best reason for still attending these events. There are two annual shows I try never to miss. One is Internet World, which offers a smorgasbord of internet-based companies and products. While it’s no longer as big as the shows I used to attend in the 1980s, it still

Expo (OA&A), although calling this an “Expo” is just an attempt to make it sound bigger than it actually is. In this case, though, size isn’t that important, but rather the quality of the exhibitors that it attracts. At both these shows you can expect to meet a high number of marketing types, and consequently a barrage of confusing terminology. Often when asked by an exhibitor whether I was interested in their products, I’d reply perhaps, if only I could understand what their buzz-phrases meant – a complaint many of them sympathised with. “Cross-channel engagement with prospects” and “management of affiliate relationships” are just a couple of the more comprehensible ones. Having your senses bombarded with such unfathomable stuff makes you a little jaundiced after an hour or so, but this year (like last) I was on a particular mission, to find companies

“Many advertisers have moved away from pay-per-click to a commission based on sales” presents a variety that’s difficult to find elsewhere. The other show on my must-visit list is the far smaller and more tightly focused Technology For Marketing & Advertising (TFM&A) show. As often with such shows, it’s been combined with several smaller events, one of which is the Online Advertising & Affiliate

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willing to advertise on our own and our clients’ websites. A couple of years ago, I had a great deal of success with such an approach, signing £7,000 worth of advertising for only one site within a month or so of the show. The market has toughened quite a bit since, and while there’s still interest there, the sums on offer are smaller and renewed effort was required. Rather than approaching every individual company that might be interested in advertising, a simpler approach is to join an affiliate programme. These are run by companies that aim to put advertisers (them) in touch with publishers (you), usually via a semi-automated website on which you select companies you think will want to advertise on your site. Your request is forwarded to the company in question, which can then either approve your site for its ads or not. If approved, you can choose which of its ads suit your site, and the necessary code will be supplied for you to paste into your site. The affiliate company also provides a reporting website, where you can check how your adverts are doing and whether they’ve earned you any money.


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Many of these advertisers have moved away from pay-per-click scenarios to a commission paid on actual web sales, which obviously suits them far better. It isn’t so good for you, however: the most important thing for many such businesses is building a brand, and you’re effectively helping them do this for free with such a payment scheme. If you’re happy with a commission scheme, though, there are plenty of advertisers to choose from – many affiliate companies offer this form of advertising, LinkShare (www.linkshare.com) being one of the biggest. Google has recently launched its own affiliate programme in the UK (www. pcpro.co.uk/links/214wa1). Which advertisers to choose is often a matter of guessing which will best fit your visitor profile, then trying them out. Google can help, since it provides extensive stats on each of its advertisers at the DoubleClick Ad Planner site (www.google.com/adplanner). You’ll find a lot of demographic information on visitors to many sites: take a look at the PC Pro site’s entry (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214wa2) for an example of what sort of information is gathered, which includes everything from age, education and income to hobbies and interests – all useful to a prospective advertiser or publisher. There was a serious worry that after 26 May 2012 much of this data would no longer be collected from any site with a UK presence, because new privacy laws came into effect that prohibit the placing of “non-essential cookies” without the user’s express permission. However, it now seems that web analytics cookies will be permitted (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214wa3), so quite what cookies are banned on the basis of privacy is difficult to imagine. Obviously, all this information is anonymised so that facts about any particular individual can’t be discovered from the site, but it’s most useful for gaining an idea of which types of user access the site and so might be interested in your adverts.

Online services make it possible to see a profile of the visitors to many websites

involved can’t find the traffic stats for your site, for which purpose it may have been looking at Alexa (www.alexa.com), Google Trends (www. google.com/trends) or the Google Ad Planner mentioned above. Sometimes supplying them with your own web page stats can help their decision-making process. When an advertiser does accept your site, it’s simply a matter of selecting which of their many ad formats will fit on your site, and then copying the supplied code and pasting it either directly into pages of your site, or into whichever advertising engine you’re running. I currently use the excellent XIGLA banner engine (www.xigla.com) on all our sites, since we use ASP and ASP.NET, but there are many others. If you’ve built your site using a content management system (CMS), most of them offer ad modules you can employ. The reason for using such engines is that they let you designate zones on your pages where ads will appear, then decide exactly which adverts will appear, without having to recode the pages. Such engines also allow you to rotate several adverts within each zone, so your visitors get to see a selection, hopefully increasing the chance they’ll click on at least one of them. The advertising engine will also give you reports on how popular each advert is, as a clickthrough rate (which might differ from the stats that the affiliate site supplies, as they’re often only interested in clicks that convert into sales). Once the adverts are in place on your site, you merely need to monitor their performance via the web interface supplied by the affiliate company. Keep in mind that while the advertising space on your site may be

“Which advertisers to choose is a matter of guessing which will best fit your visitor profile” Feeling rejected

Once you’ve selected a range of companies whose ads might be a good fit for your site and its visitors, you need to sit back and wait for the rejections to come in. The companies have to agree to have their ads put onto your site, and they employ a variety of criteria, which aren’t always made clear; don’t expect to be able to host just anyone’s adverts. Don’t be disappointed if you get a lot of rejections at first: we’ve found that once you start hosting some adverts then other advertisers will jump onboard and sign up. If a company rejects you at first, try reapplying after a month or so. One reason for a refusal may be that the company

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valuable real-estate, companies can be put off if you’re running too many ads, particularly if these are from very different industry sectors. Making sure that the ads you’re running are generating revenue is very important, too, and using the big affiliate networks obviously isn’t the only route to generating revenue from website advertising. I’ve often found that approaching the smaller specialist affiliates, or even the companies directly, can pay big rewards. One of our sites is about the card game bridge, and it regularly attracts enquiries from gambling companies, particularly poker sites. These ads seem to be popular with the visitors to the site, and so hosting their adverts produces a good income flow without being too intrusive to our visitors. Good luck.

Fotolia

While we’re on the subject of doing business through your website, make sure that you don’t forget to offer the full user experience. Do you ask users to sign up for your site? If so, you should also make it easy for the same users to resign, even though it may hurt your pride that anyone would want to commit such a heinous defection. I was the victim of a perfect example of how not to do this just the other day. At a show I was offered free access to the Fotolia website (www.fotolia.com) and access to 25 copyright-free images to use on our own websites. This seemed too good an offer to refuse, and it also gave us a chance to check out Fotolia’s product, as we normally use iStock Photo (www.istockphoto.com). The registration page on the Fotolia site required me to enter credit card details in order to sign up – obviously in the hope that I’ll find the service so useful or that I’ll forget to unsubscribe at the end of the one-month trial period – a

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Web Apps & Design

requirement that isn’t too unusual. I’m told that the practice was pioneered by the more dubious adult websites out there... What wasn’t so easy about Fotolia is that there’s no easy way to unsubscribe. After looking through the help pages it appears that you have to email the company to tell it that you want to unsubscribe, but doing this doesn’t fire off any auto-reply to confirm that it’s received your mail, so there’s no feedback confirmation loop to assure you that your request has been lodged. I’m still waiting for a reply to my emails requesting that it unsubscribe me, and all I’m currently receiving from the company is further offers. Thanks, but no thanks Fotolia.

mine hasn’t come through yet. When it does – and assuming that these initial trials aren’t confined to the USA – then I shall write about the service in a future column. I mention it at this early stage only because if you’re thinking of investing in the infrastructure for your own video-streaming setup, it might be a good idea to hold fire for a few months to investigate this first of a series of Microsoft cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) solutions.

Opening up ASP

The other announcement is that Microsoft has released the source code of ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) as open source, Into the Azure to join ASP.NET MVC, There have been a couple of interesting which will now ship with jQuery, Modernizr, announcements recently from Microsoft, the NuGet, Knockout and JSON libraries from the first of which is the launch of Azure Media open source family. Not only is the code being Services (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214wa4). released, but also, for the first time, Microsoft This service will provide a mechanism for will allow developers to submit their own streaming live video content via the cloud. In a patches and code contributions. Obviously this previous column (see issue 198, p126) I wrote code will be checked by Microsoft’s about how easy it is to set up a live mediadevelopment team before it gets anywhere near streaming service on your own server, but I did the code that you and I will use, but this is a comment that you’d need decent amounts of great move by Microsoft towards exiting its bandwidth to host this if the demand to see ivory tower to further involve and embrace its your content was anything more than friends very talented third-party developer community. and family. Now this limitation has been These days, it’s quite crazy not to take removed by Azure, providing a fully scalable advantage of such an active and skilful resource solution that can be ramped up and down to to improve your products, and the surprise isn’t match the demand. that Microsoft has made this move now, but To try out this service you currently have to rather that it took it so long to make it. If you email Microsoft to request an account, and want access to this source code and all the submissions to it, or if perhaps you have code that you’d like to submit, then it’s all listed on CodePlex (http://aspnetwebstack. codeplex.com). If you’re a developer using Microsoft technologies and you haven’t tried the ASP.NET MVC framework yet, might I suggest that you give it a look. For those of you who don’t know MVC, it stands for Model-ViewController, which may not be more helpful (apologies to those of you who do know for a short digression). Let me explain: Model, View and Controller are the three separate An alternative way of building ASP.NET applications is with MVC sections of any

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application developed using this methodology, which is set to become the major framework for ASP.NET development and will possibly eventually replace Web Forms. The MVC methodology wasn’t invented at Microsoft (it dates back all the way to Xerox’s Smalltalk project in the 1980s), and if you’ve been programming for a while you may be using something similar without knowing it. A Model is an object that holds the logic of your application, which could draw data from your database, work on it and then write new

“The MVC framework suits large complex projects that employ teams of developers”

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data back. For a small app, this may be dealt with by the database engine itself, so that no physical model object need exist in your code. Views, as the name suggests, are the components that display the data in your application: for example, you might have both an editing view and a read-only view of the same data. The Controller is the piece of code that handles user input – so, for example, it may accept and manipulate a string value entered via a view, which it then passes on to the model, which turns the value into a query to fetch data and returns the result to another view. The reason for separating these three areas is to help build more robust applications, by making debugging and alteration easier. All the UI logic should belong in the View, while all the business logic belongs in the Model. With only a loose coupling between the three components, each could be developed by a different team, safe in the knowledge that the whole application should work as intended – and if it doesn’t, then the area causing the problem can be found more easily and blame apportioned! The MVC framework suits large, complex projects that employ teams of developers, giving you more control over the behaviour of the application. If you’ve ever tried adding extra JavaScript code to a Web Forms-based application, to try and alter the behaviour of an object on a page, you’ll know that it’s often fraught with problems because the code from Web Forms is built during page rendering, and so conflicts with your own JavaScript code. This may not only occur often, but can make it tricky to see what’s causing the problem. This doesn’t mean Web Forms are dead – far from it – but they’re more suited to smaller projects. They’re less complicated for developers, but the code can be difficult to bend to your needs if they differ significantly from the default behaviour of the object you’re using. MVC is well worth checking out. It’s free and fully integrated with Visual Studio, so there really is no excuse – apart from there being not enough hours in the day, of course!


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NETWORKS

1997 and all that – printing bites back Steve Cassidy wonders why network printing is one area of computing that’s barely been upgraded since the 1990s

STEVE CASSIDY Steve mixes network technologies with human resources consultancy work. Read his blog at www.pcpro.co.uk/ blogs/stevecassidy. Email cassidys@cix. compulink.co.uk

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here were many things to enjoy in 1997, but state-of-the-art networked printers weren’t one of them. Actually, I should qualify that: network problems back then were deeply irritating thanks to the idiot ubiquity of certain bugs and crashes, but I did make a fair amount of money solving them – I could apply the same solutions wherever they popped up. What I really wasn’t expecting, however, is demand for those skills to re-emerge in 2012. To adopt the current fashion for asking questions in a sneery, impatient tone: “And this matters why...? Surely we’ve moved on in 15 years and all this stuff has been swept away?” Well, it matters because there’s a difference between a deprecated feature, a part of the OS not often visited, a part removed as a security risk, and the next smart trick. Network printing was sorted out a long while ago, like the basics of file-sharing, and hasn’t really had an overhaul from the ground up since. You still glance around someone’s unsecured Network Neighborhood, courtesy of code largely unaltered since the days of LAN Manager (well before 1995), because the printing subsystem in Windows has never been properly upgraded. It can look as though it has, because the computer trade realised that some alleviation of its principal vulnerabilities might be quite a good idea, back in the mid to late 1990s. The basis of this effort was to introduce the LPR/ LPD structures from Unix and Linux – a confusing pairing, because LPR is a protocol while LPD is a daemon or background process. Despite the confusing nomenclature, this pair was my salvation back then and is widely found

now, mainly as implementing LPD requires far less processing horsepower and complexity than is found in the average Windows installation. If you have a bottom-end networked printer, it’s a no-brainer to install LPD and thereby to invite connections using LPR, which is easily added to Windows (it isn’t installed by default, but no download or original install media is needed to set it up). I know, these are baby steps for many of us net wizards – certainly for me – and the only reason I explain them in such detail is that I had a meeting last week that transported me all the way back to pre-LPD days; I met up with some photocopier people.

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In part this was because I’d stuck my neck out. A client had tidied up its network in an office move, affording me the chance to put a server up on the bench between offices. It was a bit of a bodge: an ex-head-office, 64-bit Windows 2003 machine that had been retired from duty as main virtual server host when VMware bare-metal hypervisor took over from VMware Server for Windows as the client’s default choice. Its retirement had been interrupted by the demise of an ancient server in the old office, so as a result this old warhorse was dragged out and a rushed virtualisation of the ailing server performed onto it.

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Networks

RWC

For your chance to win an Ultrabook Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards, p10 I’ll confess that I’d hardly looked at the machines that went through virtualisation courtesy of VMware Converter. Time was short and there was a lot of data to move. Up on the bench almost a year later there were signs that all wasn’t completely well. One of the two VMs was distinctly sluggish, something that’s actually quite hard to achieve even on an old hypervisor setup these days. Normally I’d suspect that someone was sent on a basic course and came back waggling every slider in every dialog they could find, but I knew that this machine was kept well away from the usual suspects, so I passed on to thesis B – that old servers are vulnerable to old viruses. Very often these older infections can still get into a machine, even when their original supporting infrastructure has long since been deleted or filtered beyond accessibility by ISPs and backbone connectivity suppliers. Once they’ve got in, the server slows right down because the virus is sitting there continually phoning home for instructions from a botnet that’s long gone and forgotten.

Photocopier virus

The source of the infection didn’t take long to isolate: since the last time I’d seen these machines, the slow one had grown an ominously named directory called C:\FTP, and inside it were various infectious packages and a large pile of PDFs. Here’s where I made my first mistake, because I discovered the directory and the PDFs were all part of a scan-to-email system helpfully set up and configured by the installation engineer who’d arrived with the office’s new networked photocopier. From his point of view, he found it reassuring to use a widely understood and well-documented connection standard to deposit files made by his copier onto “my” server. Unfortunately, his understanding of the variety of uses for FTP and the variety of miscreants who exploit its shortcomings were quite inadequate for using this protocol to a Windows server. You can see the fate that awaited me. After expressing disgust at the security consequences of deploying a general-purpose protocol to do a special-purpose job, and allowing an outside engineer open access to the company’s server, I was invited to the photocopier meeting as punishment. It was a free ride back to the Cool Britannia era, and to its clunky, painful and bug-ridden world of software. Now it’s worth considering the perspective of photocopier guy for a minute. Businesses had photocopiers long before they had laser printers, and the business model for photocopiers is all about rental. There’s been a long interregnum during which laser printers printed while photocopiers copied – but during those decades, copiers went from being principally photographic devices to being a laser printer in a big box with a stunted computer as its controller. It’s quite recently, in terms of the history of photocopying, that these devices have

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been allowed inside the network. Companies with a sharp eye for printing costs realised that photocopiers are the lowest pence-per-page devices you can get, and so suddenly the interest shifts from the copier guys being on the periphery of the reprographics scene to being bang in the middle. The sales prospect changes from selling devices to handle paper to selling them as super-printers for digital data. I’m still receiving mail from people with objections to my use of the description “window-washers with screwdrivers”, so I’ll be more careful in describing the typical skill level of those who sell or maintain photocopiers. I think it would be safe to say that this isn’t a niche much sought by network architecture gurus. In fact, much of their effort goes into matters of financing, tightly coupled to an intimate understanding of the mindset and priorities of the typical photocopier user (that is, junior office staff). Both are topics the average computer person seldom focuses on. They have, it’s fair to say, a different attitude to the use and nature of LANs, which becomes quite clear when someone like me gets invited to their sales-pitch meeting. The part that brought me up short with a shiver of premillennium déjà vu was about “follow me” printing. This isn’t an especially new idea, but it’s gaining fresh traction as everyone hunts for ways to save money, and as an understanding of the high cost of personal inkjet printing penetrates the collective psyche of the workforce. I’m being a bit mealy mouthed here to avoid giving ammunition to those professional naysayers who sneer their way through their jobs in technical support and systems design. Print costs are a battering ram

with which those with the least rewarding jobs can assault the ivory tower of Return on Investment. Thomas J Watson was once asked how many computers the world would need, and replied: “I think one per country would be enough”. As regards printers, the last thing anyone wants is to have to get up and walk anywhere to pick up their print-out – a basic truth that can lead to a whole lot of bad blood. Computer people like me are closer to Tom J – a bit of wandering about the office and mild socialising while tidying up prints for their respective authors is good for both body and

“Photocopier people better understand what office workers want than any techie”

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soul. On the other hand, many office workers feel everything they do is so top secret that they can’t possibly leave it unattended in an output tray for longer than a tenth of a second. In short, photocopier people better understand what office workers want than any techie could. But they have a dilemma, because nobody ever made a penny by renting out desktop inkjets, so they need companies to rent big fat copiers with touchscreens, three-phase power supplies, A2 paper trays and eyeball-singeing Xenon scanner lamps. Hence, follow-me printing. The idea is that you throw your print job into a central queue, then walk to the nearest copier, log yourself in, and out comes your print – but only once you’ve got there. This is such a staggeringly simple idea that I expect, like me, you’ve just driven right past it when you’re doing the specification for a network overhaul: “Oh yeah, clever trick, let’s move along to the database schema, the firewall, all the interesting


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stuff”. But just pull over into the intellectual lay-by that is printing for a minute and consider some worst-case scenarios with me. The first, and worst, is that follow-mee printing builds on the original concept in which a central computer would share a single printer located right beside it, and via the offices of the spooler system service ice make as much of the printer driver available able to client PCs as seemed prudent. If that sounds excessively careful, that’s because it is: the actuality of this worst-case scenario was such a disastrous horror story as to make users doubt the sanity of the storyteller. Print spooling by sharing the surface, UI parts of the printer driver worked reasonably well so long as that interface was dull and worthy, but as printers became more complicated, and the mix of user rights, printer choices, font lists and the like became more baroque, so shared-spooler printing became progressively less viable. From a networking point of view, a minor issue can make a print job inflate in size in the most astonishing way. Who decides whether a print is going to be in black and white or colour? If it’s to be black and white then where is this decision made? Ideally, it’s on the user’s PC just as they hit OK – they’ve made a decision that the collection of machines between them and the printer will honour and preserve. As you might guess, though, this isn’t always the case, because network admins who’ve been seduced into the absurd idea that users can’t be trusted may restrict rights to print queues, defaults, options, even to paper trays. A very strange world, as I said. The worst case is that the user presses Print on a document using only black and white, sending it to a printer that has a limited-access printer driver that’s stuck on colour. Perhaps this printer employs PostScript, in which case the job the spooler

A single-page Word document can expand to hundreds of megabytes

printers, in comes a hot new pr “follow-me” print system. “fol Or it would, were it not for the loud squeaking noises coming from your cloud server provider and whose infrastructure for cloud ISP, w server clientele is built on the assumption that all data flows back sends to it will balloon from a few hundred assump to the office will reduce (because pretty well kilobytes of metafile data to several megabytes every customer over-specifies their bandwidth of a CMYK-separated, 7-bit-encoded PostScript requirements). But follow-me printing drives dump file. I’ve understated those numbers: a coach, horses, outriders, highwaymen I’ve actually encountered single-page Word and several pantomime cats through that documents that expanded to several hundred assumption. Pretty soon, to get adequate megabytes when printed in this way. But performance out of the rest of your LAN, quoting that sort of figure will get you funny photocopier guy suggests a local Windows looks in any meeting that has agenda items server installation to support his setup... such as “auto-staplers” and “billing codes”. This may sound overly severe, a scenario Once we get to cloudy matters, things take caused by idiots for idiots, and we IT people an even more unfortunate turn. Suppose you’re are always at risk of dismissing it glibly thus. in a business that’s been deploying expensive The fact remains that photocopier guys have local printers for years, without the dubious been hanging around with our users for benefit of central spooling. You’ve decades before we got there, and moved all your servers into the their understanding of what cloud because your IT Too people want has made them activities mostly face much stuff? The Lausanne project a good living. Of course, “outside” your premises, (see below) makes me wonder it isn’t on the leading and the initial deal to what other people who enter the edge, and in this case take your IT off-site petabyte league (and bigger – Amplidata there isn’t a leading looked very promising. hints a Hollywood movie may occupy edge, because options Once that capital cost tens of petabytes) are keeping and why. for connecting has been moved out, Perhaps there aren’t enough mouse-clicks efficiently and flexibly the next obvious target left in the future of humankind to look to printers haven’t is printing and copying, through all this stuff. That prompts changed in at least and that quote from a different question: is anyone a decade. It’s about photocopier guy looks ever going to see time someone found this appealing on a pence-peryour stuff again? topic worthy of a little page basis. Out go those local 21st-century attention. point-to-point connected network

A petabyte sense of scale Everyone must have played “how many floppy disks is that”, but the problem today is that few have seen a floppy disk since before Tony Blair was elected. Worse still, there’s a point at which the number of floppies no longer imparts any sense of scale but itself becomes incomprehensible. Humans can’t easily imagine numbers even in the hundreds of thousands. The value of the floppy as a unit of data has other shortcomings too: the works of Shakespeare in plain ANSI text will fit onto a floppy about three times, but how many floppies will fit into a 40ft shipping container, and how many could fit into the cargo bay of a Boeing 747? What if

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that data was stored on the current standard 4GB microSD card used in everyone’s phones? Please show your workings. It’s when we come to petabytes that this dizzying perspective really starts to hurt your head. A storage guru of my acquaintance airily talks about “petabytes per floor tile”, since data centres have liftable floors made up of standard-sized tiles. A petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which is a thousand gigabytes, and so on. How can you think about that much data, really? I came across a truly amazing project in the spring, which has as its working front-end a copy a petabyte of

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data (compressed, and partial). You can read about it at www.pcpro.co.uk/ links/214networks in more detail, but I’m going to summarise here to pursue my point about sizing for the real world. The petabyte in question, stored on a suitably massive array from Amplidata, is the University of Lausanne’s working copy of the archive of the Montreux Jazz Festival: 40 years of festival performances, some digitised from analog magnetic tape, some even from that funny old stuff called “film”, and the rest all in HD since the early 1990s. Let’s not go too far into such lovely seductive details. So one petabyte equals the whole lifetime of the world’s crème de la crème showcase for jazz, progressive rock and various other genres I know even less about.

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REVIEWS Contents

REVIEWS LABS REVIEWS HIGHLIGHTS

FOR A FULL INDEX, SEE PAGE 5

Alienware M14x R4

100

Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor makes its first laptop appearance.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 690

AMD Trinity

104

Find out if AMD’s latest laptop platform can challenge Intel.

108

Find out what makes the £900 graphics card tick.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

110

The latest long-term release goes under the microscope.

IN THE LABS

Tablets

126

All tablets great and small take on Apple’s market-leading iPad. Can it possibly be toppled?

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Budget TFTs

148

We put 12 of the latest crop of low-cost screens to the test, and find that their image quality is better than ever.

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Opinion REVIEWS

DAVID BAYON questioned what he’d use a tablet for. The answer was almost everything

B

eing in this job, my home isn’t exactly short of technology. Since the day I persuaded myself I needed a £350 graphics card for my university PC (Far Cry looked amazing, thanks for asking), I shudder to imagine the money I’ve thrown away on gadgets to scratch an itch that I’ve since learned never really goes away. My impulsive purchases have ranged from the good (an AV amp and speakers that killed my credit card but get used every day) to the bad (a Nintendo DS that I played twice; a photo printer that produced fewer than a dozen photos; a Soda Stream). In the long run, the bad safely have the edge. As much as I love handling new kit, I’m awful at resisting the desire to have the latest and greatest thing. When I had to review the new iPad, I spent the next two months arguing with my imaginary bank manager. But we need one, I’d say. Just look at that screen, I’d argue. We could keep track of our spending with it, I’d lie. But from his perch on my shoulder, he’d always come up with persuasive counterarguments. You know you don’t need an iPad, he’d sigh. You already have a PC, a laptop and a smartphone, he’d correctly point out. Don’t you remember the Soda Stream? He knows we don’t mention the Soda Stream. Of course, the arguments against a purchase were all correct, and the arguments for were weak. I didn’t need an iPad at all, just like I didn’t need a new set of golf clubs or a bigger fish tank. But logic rarely comes into the buying process, so I bought one anyway. That was almost a month ago. If there was any doubt as to whether my purchase falls into the good or bad camp, the sulk on the face of my laptop should comprehensively erase it. It started with Twitter. Usually I’d have TweetDeck open on my laptop while watching TV, but I thought I’d try Tweetbot on the iPad. Its neat design and its ability to temporarily mute tweets that mention The Voice on a Saturday night very quickly made it my go-to Twitter client. Sadly, my sister often forces me to watch The Voice anyway (even though I paid for the TV and the Sky HD box), so the iPad also became my emergency TV, via the superb Sky Sports and BBC iPlayer apps. At this point my laptop was still relatively happy with the attention I gave it while browsing the internet, but that didn’t last long either. First came The Guardian app’s 14-day

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free trial, then a first purchase of the excellent Sunday Times iPad edition, and after that I discovered the delights of Zite’s constantly learning personal newspaper. The laptop was rightly beginning to panic. It still has the monopoly on Football Manager – at least until I get round to buying the Football Manager Handheld app – but I’ll sink hour upon depressingly wasted hour into New Star Soccer; my sister will steal it when I’m not looking and gurn over Diner Dash and its countless spin-offs. The supply is seemingly endless, and gaming on an iPad is free from the unsociability of taking over the TV for a round of Call of Duty. There are the recipe apps that have turned it into my cooking assistant; the photography apps that have made it both a second screen for quickly editing shots from a proper camera and a main camera for shots around the house; the Next, Amazon and eBay apps that empty my wallet; and the genuinely brilliant curios, such as the Paper art-creation app. I didn’t think a tablet would change my daily routine, but it has – dramatically so. It’s

The simple fact is that you often don’t know how useful something will be until you get it home and use it changed as much as it did when the smartphone first appeared, and more, to the point where I haven’t powered on my desktop PC all month and now use my laptop pretty much solely for Word and Excel. And if the price of an iPad, or the idea of lumping everything into Apple’s walled garden, is too much to bear, none of this is exclusive to Apple. An experience like mine can be had with any of the recommended tablets in this month’s Labs on p126. Like so many things in life, it’s easy to dismiss a tablet as something that has no obvious purpose. A tablet is just a keyboard-less netbook. A tablet is just a big smartphone. What can I do on a tablet that I can’t do on a laptop? All of these arguments are perfectly valid, and I’ve made them all myself. But the simple fact is that you often don’t know how useful something will be until you get it home and use it. Now, does anyone want to buy a Soda Stream?

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DAVID BAYON is PC Pro’s deputy reviews editor and would like to reassure his parents that the £350 graphics card was vital to his degree. Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/davidb Email: [email protected]


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Photography: main intro, Danny Bird; cutouts, Julian Velasquez; repro, Jan Cihak

REVIEWS Hardware

PC PRO

Alienware M17x R4

RECOMMENDED

A quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU and AMD’s Radeon HD 7970M make the M17x R4 a gaming force to be reckoned with, and the chassis is an absolute monster. Be sure to configure it to your needs

❱❱ PRICE £1,533 (£1,839 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.dell.co.uk

W

hile most manufacturers are paring down their laptops to Ultrabook proportions, Alienware’s M17x R4 looms at the other end of the scale. This giant will spill over the edges of the average lap, comes with a 17.3in Full HD screen, and houses a super fast graphics card. But the

BATTERY: HEAVY USE 1hr 10mins

BATTERY: LIGHT USE 3hrs 2mins

100


real headline is the arrival of the first Ivy Bridge laptop processor. The quad-core Core i73610QM is a 45W CPU with a nominal 2.3GHz clock speed that Turbo Boosts up to 3.3GHz. As with all the new Ivy Bridge parts, the die shrink to 22nm combines with Intel’s Tri-Gate transistors to provide even more performance per Watt. The integrated GPU has been upgraded to the HD Graphics 4000, which adds DirectX 11 support and an extra four execution units to bring the total up to 16. Tasked with the challenge of our Real World Benchmarks suite, the new Ivy Bridge hardware teamed up with the M17x R4’s 64GB Samsung PM830 SSD and 8GB of DDR3 RAM to produce a

scorching result of 0.94. By comparison, the Samsung Series 7 Gamer (web ID: 373027), with its 2.2GHz Sandy Bridge Core i7-2670QM, scored 0.84. The Alienware is only 6% slower than our reference desktop PC, powered by a Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K. It’s a stunning achievement, even more so when you consider the Alienware’s performance in the media encoding portion of our

REAL WORLD BENCHMARKS

3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K, 4GB DDR3 = 1

0.86

RESPONSIVENESS

1.03

MEDIA

0.25

BETTER

0.94

MULTITASKING 0

0.5

0.75

1

WorldMags.net

1.25

KEY SPECS 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM • 8GB DDR3 RAM • 64GB SSD • 500GB HDD • Blu-ray reader • 17.3in 1,920 x 1,080 TFT • Intel HD Graphics 4000/AMD Radeon HD 7970M • 4 x USB 3 • HDMI • mini-DisplayPort • D-SUB • SD card reader • 1.3mp webcam • Gigabit Ethernet • single-band 802.11abgn • 2mp webcam • 410 x 304 x 45mm (WDH) • 4.37kg (5.35kg with charger)

0.94

OVERALL

benchmarks, where it proved 3% quicker than the desktop PC. Gaming isn’t bad either. The Alienware comes with a top-end AMD Radeon HD 7970M, which we’ll come to in a moment, but first we disabled that to test the processor’s integrated graphics. With Crysis running at 1,366 x 768 and Low quality, it managed an average of 43fps, 25% faster than the HD Graphics 3000. At 1,600 x 900 and Medium quality

1.5

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Hardware REVIEWS

The M17x R4 lacks nothing in terms of connectivity

that dropped to 22fps. Given that Ivy Bridge’s Crysis performance is almost on a par with AMD’s new Trinity platform (see p104), AMD will have to work hard to remain price competitive. Of course, on this laptop you won’t be gaming using the processor, as the AMD GPU is a beast: with 1,280 pixel shaders and 2GB of RAM it tore through Crysis, pushing an average of 42fps at Full HD and High quality. Only at Very High did it drop below 40fps, finishing with a final average of 35fps. That’s superb, but it means we can’t properly test Ivy Bridge’s efficiency with this laptop. The CPU certainly runs cool – we never saw the core temperatures exceed 83°C, even after running at 100% load for several hours. But that huge 17.3in display and the high-performance components take their toll on battery life. The M17x R4 ran dry after only 3hrs 2mins in our light-use test, and taxing the CPU with our looping Cinebench test saw the Alienware expire after only 1hr 10mins. We’ll have to wait for the first Ultrabook to see if Ivy Bridge can really deliver on its promises.

That bulk, however, proves the perfect ally for the high-end components within, leaving plenty of room for sizeable internal heatsinks, large twin exhausts and a pair of internal 2.5in hard drive bays. Those rear exhausts aren’t only for effect, either – they provide the processor and GPU each with dedicated cooling, so temperatures remain reasonable even when they’re both flat out. With the GPU cooled by a triple heatpipe and the CPU by a dual heatpipe arrangement, the Alienware brushes off the demands of all-day gaming effortlessly. The only downside is noise – push it flat out and both fans spin up to intrusive levels.

Cinematic experience

Physically, this is very much an Alienware laptop. The AlienFX lighting array can illuminate the laptop in multiple colours or be switched off completely, so the M17x R4 can gently glow or adopt all the subtlety of an Ibiza nightclub. It’s entirely up to you. The thick, contoured body has an air of brutishness, but there’s one downside to the bomb-proof construction: it’s almost impossible to carry with one hand, tipping the scales at a massive 4.37kg.

Fire up one of the latest titles, such as Diablo III, and the Alienware delivers a full-bodied, luscious experience. Our model came with the Full HD 17.3in display option, and while colours are a little cold, the 621:1 contrast ratio and 298cd/m2 brightness are plenty to make games pop off the screen. With Klipsch speakers firing out of the glowing front grilles, audio is crisp, detailed and underpinned by only enough bass to make us hesitate before reaching for the headphones. The backlit keyboard has a delightful soft-touch feel under the finger, and the keys have plenty of travel, and a cushioned break at the end of the stroke. While few gamers will use the touchpad, it’s equally good. The discrete buttons are welcome, and the wide touch area provides lag-free cursor control and responsive twofingered pinching and scrolling. Around the huge chassis you’ll see acres of space for connectivity.

3D BENCHMARKS DISCRETE

3D BENCHMARKS INTEGRATED

Built like a tank

CRYSIS

CRYSIS

93fps

54fps

SMOOTH PLAY

42fps

SMOOTH PLAY

SMOOTH PLAY

SMOOTH PLAY

LOW

MEDIUM

HIGH

LOW

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The bulky chassis allows plenty of space inside for cooling

43fps

22fps PLAYABLE MEDIUM

N/A HIGH

The colours of the keyboard backlights are customisable

With four USB 3 ports, HDMI 1.4, mini-DisplayPort, D-SUB, Gigabit Ethernet, an SD card reader, an optical digital output, headphone and microphone jacks, and a dedicated headset output, there’s nothing missing. If we have one quibble, it’s with the single-band 802.11n Centrino chipset, which seems out of place on such a high-end laptop. We’d pay the extra £15 for the Killer Wireless-N upgrade with its triple stream and dual-band support. Indeed, the sheer level of customisation on offer is astonishing. The base model starts at £1,300, and it’s easy to send the price soaring over £2,000 by adding faster CPUs, dual hard drive setups, RAID arrays and SSD boot drives; by swapping the AMD or Nvidia graphics; or by upgrading to a 120Hz 3D-capable, display. This is one flexible beast.

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Verdict

Alienware’s M17x R4 is a heavyweight in every sense of the word. The Ivy Bridge processor delivers outstanding performance, the AMD Radeon HD 7970M is more than a match for the latest games, and the gargantuan chassis oozes quality from every port. It isn’t cheap, but spend some time judiciously sifting through the options and it’s possible to get the price closer to the £1,500 mark. If you’re looking for a multimedia powerhouse to take the place of a bulky desktop PC, this Alienware machine is simply out of this world. SASHA MULLER

OVERALL

PERFORMANCE FEATURES & DESIGN VALUE FOR MONEY

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪


101

REVIEWS Hardware

Toshiba Satellite P855 A poor screen and touchpad prove the undoing of an otherwise attractive laptop ❱❱ PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.johnlewis.com

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oshiba has pulled out all the stops for its latest entertainment laptop, the Satellite P855. It has Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor and Nvidia’s new 600 Series GPU onboard, and with both housed in a slick new chassis, this 15.6in laptop is set to deliver a serious performance kick for £1,000. Visually, Toshiba has made a real effort to give the Satellite P855 a bit of pizzazz. Its silvery-grey chassis is part metal, part plastic, and is covered with a textured weave pattern. Apart from the black of the square, Scrabble-tile keys and the occasional accent of black and chrome, every inch of the Toshiba is covered in silver, with the patterned finish stretching right around the metallic lid and wristrest and seeping across the laptop’s plastic base. It isn’t a laptop that stuns like Apple’s MacBooks or HP’s Envy range, but it balances a smart, unfussy chassis with plenty of

BATTERY: HEAVY USE 48mins


sensible practicalities. For one, it isn’t too heavy: at 2.55kg, it’s fine for the occasional trip. Build quality is reassuringly stout: despite a little flex here and there, the chassis and solid lid feel well up to lasting the course. Connectivity is also ample, with four USB 3 ports, HDMI, D-SUB, Gigabit Ethernet, and an SD card reader. In fact, our only moan is that Toshiba has cut corners by including a bogstandard single-band 802.11n wireless adapter. For a £1,000 laptop, that’s stingy. What’s more impressive is that Toshiba has squeezed in one of Intel’s quad-core Ivy Bridge processors: the Core i7-3610QM. This is the same processor found in the Alienware M17x R4, and it sports a quad-core, eight-thread architecture, clocked at 2.3GHz. Toshiba hasn’t gone to town with fancy extras, with a standard 5,400rpm 1TB hard disk and 8GB of RAM, yet the Satellite P855 tore through our benchmarks to an overall result of 0.96, a mere 4% slower than our reference desktop PC. Driving the display is a pair of graphics chips: the new Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU for less taxing jobs, and an Nvidia GeForce GT 630M for gaming. The latter isn’t particularly exciting, but it makes all the difference to games, giving

The Satellite P855’s part-metal, part-plastic chassis looks attractive

a score of 34fps in the Medium quality Crysis test. Drop the resolution to the Toshiba’s native 1,366 x 768 resolution, and the Nvidia chipset is capable of delivering 25fps at High quality. Such immense power comes at the expense of stamina. With a modest 4,200mAh battery clipped to its rear, the Satellite P855 struggled to impress in our battery tests. Under light use the Toshiba managed 5hrs 33mins. With the quad-core CPU at full tilt, this figure dwindled to 48 minutes. Even at maximum brightness, though, the display is terribly disappointing. The backlight is perfectly capable, giving a brightness of 298cd/m2, but the colour accuracy and overall image quality is poor. Measuring the Toshiba’s panel with our X-Rite colorimeter revealed a heinously

3D BENCHMARKS CRYSIS

34fps

KEY SPECS

15fps

PLAYABLE

90fps

UNPLAYABLE

SMOOTH PLAY LOW

MEDIUM

2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM • 8GB DDR3 RAM • 1TB HDD • Intel HD Graphics 4000/Nvidia GeForce GT 630M • 15.6in 1,366 x 768 TFT • HDMI • D-SUB • 4 x USB 3 • Gigabit Ethernet • single-band 802.11n • Bluetooth 4 • 1yr C&R warranty • 385 x 253 x 32mm (WDH) • 2.55kg (3.21kg with charger) PART CODE: PSPKBE-042008EN

HIGH


3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K, 4GB DDR3 = 1 0.96

OVERALL

0.92

RESPONSIVENESS

102

0.25


0.95

MULTITASKING 0

OVERALL

BETTER

1.01

MEDIA

0.5

0.75

1

1.25


low contrast ratio of 165:1, and a gamma reading of 1.5. It’s a huge stumbling block, and we also found fault with the Toshiba’s touchpad and its irritating integrated buttons. Leaving a thumb poised on the left- or right-hand button area occasionally interrupts the cursor movement, and clicking the button sometimes bounced the cursor out of position. Fortunately, the keyboard is better. With such a capable processor, good gaming performance and a Blu-ray reader included as standard, the Satellite P855 appears to be a tantalising prospect. In reality, it’s desperately unbalanced, with the touchpad and poor-quality display destroying its appeal. The top-of-the-range model, which adds a Full HD glasses-free 3D display and a faster Nvidia GPU for £200 more, looks promising, but this mid-range model doesn’t cut it. SASHA MULLER

1.5

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Hardware REVIEWS

Toshiba NB510 Intel’s new Atom adds smooth HD video playback to what was already a solid all-round netbook ❱❱ PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.johnlewis.com

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he netbook fad may have died down, but Toshiba is one of several manufacturers keen to show there’s life in the form factor yet. Its NB510 looks strikingly similar to last year’s model from the outside, but it’s the first to sport Intel’s Cedar Trail update to the Atom platform. Cedar Trail isn’t a huge update, but it does bring improvements. It brings a die-shrink to a 32nm fabrication process, a change that promises reduced power consumption and less heat output. It now has support for faster DDR3-800 and DDR3-1066 RAM (the previous models topped out at DDR3-667), and although the CPU architecture remains relatively unchanged from the previous Pineview platform, the integrated GPU gets a big boost. Cedar Trail waves goodbye to the old GMA 3150 and ushers in the all-new GMA 3600 and 3650 cores – tweaked versions of PowerVR’s SGX 545 chipset. Where their predecessor struggled even with standard definition video streaming, the new generation introduces Full HD hardware decoding. It’s a change that means you can expect to see HDMI ports appearing as standard on Cedar Trail netbooks. The Toshiba NB510 uses

the slower of the two Cedar Trail processors, the 1.6GHz Atom N2600, and after only a few minutes it’s clear CPU performance is as modest as ever. Put to the test with our Real World Benchmarks, the new Atom delivered an overall score of 0.21 – exactly on a par with the previous generation. But the GMA 3600 GPU is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor. Testing Crysis on a netbook is faintly ludicrous, but where it wouldn’t even run on last year’s models, the NB510 limped through our 1,366 x 768 Low detail test at 6fps. It isn’t enough to turn the Atom into a gamer, but the extra power may just about be enough for basic titles. It’s video playback that sees the biggest improvement, however. Our local Full HD test clips played smoothly, and although YouTube HD content was choppy at 1080p, dropping the resolution to 720p delivered a smoother frame rate. Equally, HD content from BBC’s iPlayer didn’t fare too well in our initial tests, but a Flash update buoyed the frame rate to a watchable standard. Video playback still isn’t perfect – there’s the odd dropped frame and the scaling leaves HD images looking rough around the edges – but it’s a huge step forwards. Battery life remains strong. Our light-use test saw the NB510 last

PC

The NB510 is built upon Intel’s Cedar Trail Atom processor update

8hrs 46mins. Pushing the CPU to its modest limits saw that figure drop to only 5hrs 45mins. Physically, you’d be hardpressed to tell the NB510 apart from last year’s model. The 1.18kg chassis isn’t rock solid – there’s a little flex when you really grapple with it – but it’s no worse than many of its competitors, and the textured plastic finish feels tough enough to fend off scratches and scrapes. There’s no lack of features by netbook standards, with three USB 2 ports, D-SUB, HDMI, a headset jack and an SD card reader. Networking is fine, too, with single-band 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 3 and 10/100 Ethernet. Toshiba has stuck with the usual 1,024 x 600 resolution for the 10.1in display, but quality is still rather good by netbook

BATTERY: HEAVY USE 5hrs 45mins


KEY SPECS 1.6GHz Intel Atom N2600 • 1GB DDR3 RAM • 320GB hard disk • Intel GMA 3600 graphics • 10.1in 1,024 x 600 TFT • D-SUB • HDMI • 3 x USB 2 • 10/100 Ethernet • 802.11n Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 3 • Windows 7 Starter 32-bit • 1yr C&R warranty • 262 x 187 x 35mm (WDH) • 1.18kg (1.48kg) • Part code: PLL72E-01W019EN



0.21 OVERALL 0.39 RESPONSIVENESS

OVERALL

BETTER

0.15 MEDIA


0.09 MULTITASKING 0

0.25

0.5

0.75

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standards. The glossy panel reaches a brightness of 266cd/m2, and while the 223:1 contrast ratio is modest, it’s good enough to kick back and enjoy a movie. The wide touchpad goes about its business without drawing attention to itself, and the keyboard’s large, square keys are comfortable to type on. If there’s a flaw, it’s the shrunken right-Shift key. It took us time to adjust to its size, and in our first hours we often found ourselves dabbing the Page Up and Page Down buttons by mistake. That’s one blip on an otherwise spotless record. The NB510 is a fine netbook, all the better for the presence of Intel’s new Atom. CPU performance is as limited as ever, but the HD video acceleration turns this 10.1in netbook into a cheap entertainment device, perfect for a commute or long-haul flight. With the usual netbook strengths combined with solid design, the NB510 reminds us why we loved netbooks in the first place. SASHA MULLER

1.25

1.5

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REVIEWS Hardware

GMC

Channel

UNB

L2 cache

AMD HD Media Accelerator

DDR3 Controller

L2 cache GPU

Dual Core x86 Module

PCle PCle

PCle AMD’s A10-4600M APU struts its stuff in a basic 14in Dell laptop

Dual Core x86 Module

Display Controller

Display DP/HDMI PLL

AMD’s Piledriver CPU cores debut alongside the HD 7000-class GPU

PREVIEW

AMD Trinity

down the GPU and boosting the CPU for single-threaded CPUbased operations, or limiting the CPU to its rated speed while delivering more power to the GPU for gaming. Trinity’s GPU has received a welcome upgrade, too. The Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs tout up to 384 stream-processing units apiece, and offer DirectX 11 and Shader Model 5 support as well as a significantly improved tessellation engine. AMD is keenly pushing the GPU’s computing capabilities, with the redesigned GPU cores providing higher GPU compute performance than the Llano generation. And, as ever, the integrated GPUs are capable of combining forces with a discrete AMD GPU in CrossFireX mode. The new architecture will roll out across the A6, A8, A10 and

AMD’s latest mobile processors make their debut, and promise much-needed competition in the laptop market ❱❱ AVAILABILITY June 2012 ❱❱ WEBSITE www.amd.com

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t’s been almost a year since AMD’s Llano platform made its mobile debut, and now its successor has landed in PC Pro’s Labs. Promising twice the performance per watt of the previous generation, an upgraded graphics core and a whole host of improvements, AMD’s pinning its hopes on Trinity in the battle to win back market share from Intel. It’s a major move forward for AMD’s mobile chips. Where AMD’s Llano used a tweaked version of the aged Phenom II architecture, the new generation sees AMD’s updated Bulldozer technology, codenamed Piledriver, make its debut alongside revisions of the integrated Radeon HD 7000 GPUs. It’s this partnership that forms the new Trinity-class accelerated processing unit (APU). Trinity is still built on a 32nm process, but the transistor count has swelled from Llano’s 1.178 billion transistors to 1.303 billion in the new chips. AMD has added support for the AVX, AVX 1.1

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and FMA3 instruction sets, and memory support takes a step forward, too, with the Trinity now capable of harnessing DDR3 at up to 1,600MHz and supporting low-voltage, 1.25V DIMMs. Power efficiency is a driving force behind the new design, with power gating, dynamic voltage and speed control on offer across the whole chip, while individual CPU or GPU cores are powered down when idle. AMD’s Turbo Core technology also reaches its third generation. Turbo Core 3 intelligently adjusts clock speeds on the CPU and GPU, clocking CRYSIS

(fps)


1,600 x 900 Medium quality Core i3-2350M, Intel HD Graphics 3000 A10-4600M, AMD HD7660G

A10-4600M, 4GB RAM

20

Core i7-3610QM, Intel HD Graphics 4000

Core i3-2350M, 6GB RAM

22

Core i3-2310M, Nvidia GeForce GT540M

Core i7-3610QM, 8GB RAM

36 0

5

10

3.4GHz Core i7-2600K, 4GB DDR3 = 1 Core i3-2310M, 6GB RAM

12

15

20

25

30

35

FX ranges, including dual- and quad-core parts, but it also brings with it the potential for a whole host of new low-powered APUs. Where the most efficient Llano APUs had a minimum TDP of 35W, the new Trinity APUs span 17W, 25W and 35W TDP designs suitable for everything from budget laptops, through to the new HP-branded Ultrabook rivals, Sleekbooks, right up to enthusiastclass gaming laptops. Our test platform came plastered with AMD logos, but there was no hiding the laptop’s origins: this was clearly an unbranded Dell Vostro 3400. Inside its unassuming grey 14in chassis, we found one of the high-end Trinity APUs in the shape of the A10-4600M. Based on a quad-core architecture, the A10-4600M cores operate at a

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0.55 0.58 0.62 0.94

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0

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Hardware REVIEWS

nominal 2.3GHz, boosting up to 3.2GHz in single-threaded operations, and are partnered with a Radeon HD 7660G GPU. We put it to the test with our Real World Benchmarks, and found the A10-4600M’s raw performance underwhelming. While AMD’s own material compares Trinity against Intel’s Sandy Bridge-generation Core i5 CPUs, we found the A10-4600M performing closer to the Core i3 range. The responsiveness portion of our tests puts it squarely between the two Core i3 CPUs, and it lagged behind in both the media encoding and multitasking tests. With an overall result of only 0.58, it’s a modest debut. Just as we found with AMD’s Llano, however, it isn’t until you bring the GPU into play that these APUs really step up a gear. Gaming performance is, by the standards of integrated GPUs, outstanding. The Radeon HD 7660G GPU embedded into the A10-4600M managed a smooth 47fps at low settings in our Crysis benchmark. Pushing the resolution

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A10-4600M

A8-4500M

A6-4400M

A-Series low voltage and ultra low voltage A10-4655M A6-4455M

2.3GHz/3.2GHz

1.9GHz/2.8GHz

2.7GHz/3.2GHz

2GHz/2.8GHz

2.1GHz/2.6GHz

35W HD 7660G 384

35W HD 7640G 256

35W HD 7520G 192

25W HD 7620G 384

17W HD 7500G 256

497MHz/686MHz

497MHz/655MHz

497MHz/686MHz

360MHz/497MHz

327MHz/424MHz

A-Series Clock speed (base/ maximum) TDP GPU Radeon cores GPU clock (base/ maximum)

up to 1,600 x 900 and upping Crysis detail settings to Medium saw a similarly impressive effort – the AMD returned an almost playable 20fps. That’s well ahead of the Sandy Bridge generation, but Ivy Bridge keeps pace. With the new HD4000 GPU in Intel’s latest scoring 43fps and 22fps respectively, AMD will have to keep prices down to compete. Compared to a low-end discrete graphics chipset, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GT540M, the Radeon HD 7660G’s gaming performance remains modest, but this is to be expected. The graphical performance of AMD’s Trinity APU bodes well for systems that can’t fit a dedicated GPU into their budget or, indeed, the thermal limitations of their chassis.

With the possibility of pairing the integrated GPU with a discrete AMD GPU in CrossFireX mode, Trinity is capable of powering the beefiest of gaming laptops. Battery life is one area where Trinity’s advances over the previous generation are particularly tangible. Dell’s Vostro 3400 is equipped with a standardcapacity 42Wh, 4,800mAh battery, so we were impressed to see AMD’s A10-4600M keep ticking over for 7hrs 2mins in our light-use battery test. Pushing all four cores to 100% with our looping Cinebench test saw a similarly impressive result: with every core running flat-out, the laptop kept going for 1hr 56mins. Intel has had an easy ride in the laptop market, but Trinity

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may finally be enough to turn the tide, and the forthcoming Sleekbooks based on the new technology could even challenge Intel’s Ultrabooks for supremacy. It depends on the prices: if they’re low enough, many people will be willing to forego the superior grunt of Intel’s CPUs in favour of Trinity’s all-round gaming prowess. With the first AMD Trinity-powered laptops due to arrive in June, we can’t wait. SASHA MULLER BATTERY: HEAVY USE 1hr 56mins



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REVIEWS Hardware Tablets Labs Read reviews of 14 other tablets on p126

PC PRO

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) Not the most luxurious, but strikes a balance between performance, price and usability ❱❱ PRICE Wi-Fi, £166 (£199 inc VAT); 3G, £274 (£329 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.carphone warehouse.co.uk

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t arrived too late to make it into the tablets Labs (see p126), but we felt we had to squeeze in a review of Samsung’s latest compact tablet. That isn’t because it’s the sleekest, sexiest piece of hardware, nor is it an iPad beater. What it is, though, is a breakthrough product: the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) is the first Android tablet from a big-name manufacturer to launch at less than £200. Only the BlackBerry PlayBook (which fell to £169 after a year on sale) and the disappointing Gemini JoyTAB are cheaper in the Labs this month. And the good news is that, as well as being cheap, the Tab 2 (7.0) is also very usable. That’s largely thanks to the combination of dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor, 1GB of RAM and Android 4, which results in stutter-free menu and homescreen navigation, and fluid web browsing. It’s the same processor, in fact, as in our favourite compact tablet, the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition, (although clocked 17% slower), and it’s accompanied by the same PowerVR SGX 540 GPU. Angry Birds Space was perfectly playable on it, as was the demanding Shadowgun, but we didn’t experience perfectly smooth frame rates. In performance tests, the results give substance to those impressions, with the Tab completing the SunSpider JavaScript test in The Tab 2 (7.0) is 10.7mm thick and weighs 340g

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2,235ms and gaining a respectable score of 2,790 in Quadrant. With a tablet, overall usability is as much about the screen as CPU grunt, though, and here the Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) scores another hit. It’s an area in which cheap tablets typically struggle, with their displays afflicted by poor viewing angles and low brightness. The Tab 2 (7.0)’s plane-to-line switching (PLS) display bats such concerns effortlessly aside, recording a maximum brightness of 387cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 968:1. Viewing angles, meanwhile, are fine, with colours hardly changing as you shift position horizontally and vertically. It’s a perfectly competent display. To hit such a low price, however, there do have to be compromises, and the Tab’s main one is resolution. At 1,024 x 600 its display can’t match pricier compact tablets: the Labs-winning Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition shoehorns a resolution of 1,280 x 800 into its 8.2in display and the Huawei MediaPad does the same with its 7in panel. The Samsung’s pixel density of 170ppi means that text and graphics still look crisp, though, and it outstrips the 149ppi of 1,280 x 800 10.1in tablets. The other area in which the Tab 2 falls short is design. The chassis is solidly put together, but it isn’t particularly desirable. A bland, grey plastic adorns the rear, with no distinguishing features, and it isn’t notably slim,

RECOMMENDED

Samsung’s pop-up mini-apps are useful for basic jobs

measuring 10.7mm from front to back, and weighing 340g. The Xoom 2 Media Edition is thinner, and even with a larger expanse of glass on the front weighs only 48g more. Battery life is the one key area where the Tab 2 outstrips the Motorola, but 7hrs 8mins is still well short of the best-in-class Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. The final cuts include only 8GB of internal storage (although this is ameliorated by the inclusion of a microSD slot, allowing expansion to 32GB), and a 3-megapixel/720p rear camera. The latter has no flash and shoots smeary stills and grainy video. Suffice it to say, it won’t see much use. Also, there’s nothing here to match the infrared emitter and water-resistant coating of the Motorola. The software complement is better, with a number of notable inclusions. There’s a licensed copy of Polaris Office preloaded, and Samsung’s own Video Maker editing package, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s iMovie. Then there are Samsung’s TouchWiz UX UI enhancements, which add a useful collection of pop-up mini-apps to a dock at the bottom of the homescreen, and a smattering of extra widgets, including dual-

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clock, stock, weather and photo frame panels. In all, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) is a good tablet at the right price. It isn’t as fully featured as premium tablets, and it doesn’t feel quite as fast as the more expensive devices either. The lower pixel count means it feels more cramped in use, too, and for these reasons we still prefer the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition. At this price, however, we can’t help but have a soft spot for the diminutive Tab 2 (7.0), which we feel strikes the perfect balance between price, performance and usability. Had it arrived a few days earlier, instead of the day before the magazine was sent to the printers, we’d have squeezed it into the Labs to claim second place among the compact tablets, just in front of the BlackBerry PlayBook. JONATHAN BRAY

KEY SPECS 1GHz TI OMAP 4430 CPU • PowerVR SGX 540 graphics • 1GB RAM • 8GB storage • 1,024 x 600 PLS TFT • single-band 802.11bgn Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 3 • A-GPS • 3.2mp/720p rear camera • 0.3mp front camera • Google Android 4.0.3 • 1yr RTB warranty • 122 x 10.7 x 193mm (WDH) • 340g

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REVIEWS Hardware

Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 Astonishing levels of power for crazy amounts of cash, this is a card reserved for the privileged few ❱❱ PRICE Typically, £750 (£900 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk

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he GeForce GTX 680 (web ID: 373696) beat every other graphics card into submission when it was first released, but even that wasn’t enough for Nvidia. It has now released an even more powerful card, the GTX 690, which teams two 680 GPUs on one 280mmlong board for a truly ridiculous amount of gaming grunt. As is usual with dual-GPU cards, the cores have been clocked down a little, from the 1,006MHz stock to 915MHz. Aside from this,

little has changed. Nvidia’s Turbo Boost technology remains, so that core clock adjusts every millisecond, hitting a peak of 967MHz at full load. Each GPU still has 2GB of 6,008MHz GDDR5 RAM. There have been no architectural changes either, with the card packing a total of 3,072 stream processors and just over seven billion transistors. That power translated to ridiculous benchmark results. At Full HD, it clearly isn’t pushed: its 73fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test isn’t as far ahead as you might expect over the GTX 680’s 57fps. Crank up the resolution and detail, however, and the two cores

Booq Python pack There are camera bags, there are laptop bags and there are iPad cases; rarely, however, do we see a bag that lets you lug all three around as comfortably as the Booq Python pack. The price is steep but, make no mistake about it, this rucksack is well worth the investment. The materials employed are high quality, with a tough, water-repellent 1,680-denier “ballistic” nylon outer shell, plus lots of padding for your gear inside. There’s a rain cover, a compartment fitted into the lumbar support pad, and more pockets than we could enumerate. Load laptops up to 15in in size in the top pocket, a tablet in a separate side compartment, and smaller gear in a pocket under a flap at the top. The side-mounted DSLR compartment is particularly useful: it provides quick access to your camera and individually padded mini-compartments for up to four lenses. All in all, it’s a highly practical, beautifully made gear bag. We want one. JONATHAN BRAY RECOMMENDED

❱❱ PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER http://shop.colour confidence.com ❱❱ OVERALL ✪✪✪✪✪✪

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The GTX 690 straps two GTX 680 chips on one long board

get to work. At 2,560 x 1,600 its score barely dropped to 70fps; the GTX 680 and HD 7970 ran through the same test at 42fps. Crysis 2 at 1,920 x 1,080 and Ultra settings saw the GTX 690 average 57fps, the same score as a single GTX 680. Again, though, at 2,560 x 1,600 the GTX 690

averaged 55fps, to its single-core stablemate’s 33fps. The way to see what the GTX 690 can really do is to run tests across three screens at the huge resolution of 5,760 x 1,080. After a lot of fiddling we had it up and running, and the results were impressive: 108fps in DiRT 3,

KeySonic KSK-3205 RFM Super-Mini As anyone who owns a mediacentre PC knows, controlling it from afar can be tricky. It’s a problem KeySonic aims to solve with its odd-looking wireless keyboard remote. It’s essentially a BlackBerry without a screen: a five-row Qwerty keyboard occupies the bottom half, with an optical thumb pad above that flanked by left and right mouse buttons. At the top of the device is a D-pad, plus volume and media transport buttons; you get back and forward buttons too for web browsing. It feels cheaply made, but otherwise this pocket-sized device is wellexecuted. Turn the sensitivity down and the touchpad works well for controlling the mouse when navigating around Windows, the keyboard makes light work of tapping in search terms and URLs, and switching to the D-pad for moving around Windows Media Center is a breeze. We like the £35 inc VAT price too. JONATHAN BRAY

❱❱ PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.systo.co.uk ❱❱ OVERALL ✪✪✪✪✪✪

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Hardware REVIEWS

83fps in Skyrim and 56fps in Battlefield 3 – all with 4x anti-aliasing enabled, blowing every other card away. Nvidia has talked about the GTX 690’s frugality with power, noise and heat, and while it’s at the high end of every scale – it requires two eight-pin power sockets, it performed relatively well in our tests. At idle and full load, our test rig consumed 96W and 373W respectively – not much more than the GTX 680. Its thermal properties were even more eye-opening: under full load it hit a mere 65°C. Those results can be attributed to the card’s vapour chamber coolers, visible through one of two polycarbonate windows. The rest

KEY SPECS 28nm die • 3,072 stream processors • 915MHz core clock • 7 billion transistors • 4GB GDDR5 RAM • 256-bit memory bus • 2 x 8-pin power connectors • 280 x 99 x 38mm (WDH)

of the card has an air of luxury about it, too: it’s made from cast aluminium and protected with a hi-tech chromium coating, the fan housings are constructed from injection-moulded magnesium alloy, and the GTX 690 logo on the side of the board is laser-etched plastic with LED backlights. Given the luxury and speed, it’s no surprise that the GTX 690 costs £900. That’s a ludicrous sum, and we can’t recommend you pay it unless you’re planning to game on three screens at the highest quality levels – that’s the only real-world scenario where this card makes sense. Still, as an exercise designed to cement Nvidia’s status as top dog in the graphics world, it does the trick. Your move, AMD. MIKE JENNINGS

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Krator N4-20U05B USB Speaker A new face to PC Pro’s pages, Krator is a Taiwanese audio brand that takes its name from the term “Impact Crater”. Curious branding aside, the first speakers we’ve seen from the company are novel. These stereo units draw power from a USB connection, and audio is carried over a separate 3.5mm audio cable. Two knobs at the rear adjust the volume or tweak the bass. The teardrop-shaped design makes for a lovely looking pair of speakers, and they feel sturdy considering the price. Unfortunately, looks aren’t matched with audio quality. Music sounds thin and anaemic, even with the bass tweaked to maximum, and there’s little in the way of clarity. They improve on the speakers in most laptops, and are reasonably portable, but their thin, tinny sound quality leave them outclassed by mains-powered 2.1 sets. SASHA MULLER

❱❱ PRICE £11 (£13 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk ❱❱ OVERALL ✪✪✪✪✪✪

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Motorola Motoluxe A reasonable budget handset, but don’t expect the ageing hardware to stand up to Android’s toughest tests

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he smartphone market goes into hyperdrive every time a flagship phone is released, but there’s also a steady stream of mid-rangers and budget models to consider. The latest is Motorola’s Motoluxe, available free on a £15 per month contract. That’s a tempting price, but don’t expect miracles from the modest hardware. It scored a lowly 1,025 in Quadrant and took just over seven seconds to finish SunSpider – a slow time these days, even for a budget phone. That’s down to the ageing Qualcomm MSM7227 processor. It wasn’t a bad chip when it arrived, but in 2012 it’s unable to keep up. The same could be said of the Adreno 200 graphics: it handles Angry Birds, but 3D games such as Temple Run show signs of struggle. Elsewhere it has a lowly 512MB of RAM, only 1GB of storage, a microSD slot for cards up to 32GB, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. The 1,400mAh battery serves up standard longevity, with 60% left after our 24-hour test. Motorola hasn’t added many bells or whistles to Android 2.3. The lockscreen works in a similar way to HTC’s Sense 3: pull the lock icon out of a ring to unlock, or pull six app icons into the centre to go directly into that app. There’s a pleasing lack of third-party apps and crapware, but despite this the Motoluxe still feels sluggish, with homescreen transitions stuttering rather than sliding by. The 8-megapixel camera is good in close-up shots, but detail in wide shots was lacking, with blurry details. The zoom mode is also pretty poor.

❱❱ PRICE SIM-free, £158 (£190 inc VAT); from free on £15/mth, 24mth contract ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk; www.buymobilephones.net And it’s all wrapped up in an uninspiring chassis. It feels sturdy, and at 10mm thick and 124g in weight it isn’t particularly chunky, but the rubberised rear and seams feel very much part of a budget phone. One area where the phone wins points is its screen. Its 356cd/m2 brightness is impressive for a cheap handset, and it has a contrast ratio of 711:1. At 4in and 480 x 854, the resolution results in crisp text and graphics. It isn’t all bad then, and £15 per month is a very reasonable price. Be warned, though: spending only £5 per month more will net you a far more desirable phone than this. MIKE JENNINGS

The Motoluxe’s screen is decent for a budget smartphone

KEY SPECS 800MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor • 512MB RAM • 1GB storage • 32GB microSD card slot • 4in 480 x 854 TFT • Bluetooth 3 • 802.11n Wi-Fi • 8mp camera • 1,400mAh battery • Android 2.3 • 61 x 118 x 10mm (WDH) • 124g

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OVERALL


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REVIEWS Software

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS A release that consolidates Ubuntu’s strengths into a polished, business-friendly proposition the fiddly pop-up scroll bars, but you can get rid of these with the gsettings shell command. ix months have passed since There are a few the last release of Ubuntu, worthwhile upgrades and that means it’s time for hidden away beneath a new version – complete with a the surface. Right-click new zoological codename (the on the Home icon, or “Precise Pangolin” this time, better The Unity interface makes Ubuntu accessible for casual users on the “Dash” – the known as a scaly anteater). be sure, there’s a vibrant ecosystem videos, which scans not only your search icon at the top of the This release is more significant of open source applications on PC but online sources including Launcher – and you’ll see than most. As the “LTS” indicates, offer – the latest LibreOffice is BBC iPlayer and YouTube. that “Quicklists” are now this is a long-term support release, included, along with Firefox and Software Center now offers preconfigured, allowing you to meaning it will receive updates and the Rhythmbox media player personalised recommendations, jump directly to various folders patches for five years, while more (returning after a brief absence and lets you use PayPal to buy or various types of search. The experimental releases continue to in version 11.10). However, as a commercial software. feature itself isn’t new, but setting appear biannually. The idea is to mainstream proposition it remains These refinements don’t greatly it up in previous versions of encourage businesses to install it hamstrung by the lack of native transform the Ubuntu experience Ubuntu meant delving into without fear it will quickly become support for industry-standard from what it was in version 11.10, configuration files. To have it obsolete – and this version ups applications such as Microsoft but they contribute to an overall working out of the box makes the the ante on that front, as previous Office and Adobe Photoshop. sense of polish. The WindowsOS feel more mature and usable. LTS releases offered three years of When it comes to creative pursuits based graphical installer helps, Another interesting new feature support on the desktop. such as video editing and music too, providing a friendly and is the “Head-Up Display” – a text Predictably, therefore, the composition, the Linux platform straightforward online setup field that appears at the top of the emphasis is on stability, rather is years behind the curve. process. There’s no need to mess screen when you tap the Alt key. than trialling groundbreaking To its credit, Canonical isn’t around with ISOs and flash drives, Start typing and you’ll see a list features. The default installation is complacent about the challenge. and you get a choice of desktop of menu items from the active outwardly identical to the previous It’s already announced plans to manager for those who don’t like application that match your text. release, with the Unity Launcher expand the OS onto smart TVs the default Unity front-end. You can navigate with the cursor sitting down the left-hand side of and mobile devices, creating a The best bit is how snappy it keys, or click with the mouse to the screen, and the familiar menu top-to-bottom platform similar to all feels: we had doubts about the directly access the option you bar along the top. This is no bad Microsoft’s vision for Windows 8. responsiveness of the Dash and the want. It’s a speedy alternative to thing: the native Ubuntu desktop If the idea succeeds, it could spur Launcher in earlier versions, but hunting through menus, although is perhaps a little simplistic, but application development and give on modern hardware the ensemble it works only with programs that power users will have no problem Ubuntu a new lease of life. now feels supremely slick. On support the Unity menu system. replacing it with something else, That’s a few years away, older hardware, Ubuntu’s System applications have and for casual use we find Unity’s however. For now, Ubuntu comparatively modest memory received a few tweaks. The Dash Mac-alike styling accessible and 12.04’s appeal remains limited. requirements make it smoother gains a “Lens” for searching attractive. Our only gripe is with For businesses that have wavered than Windows. Factor over whether or not to deploy in all the traditional Ubuntu, long-term support may benefits of Linux – swing the deal, but in the main we including free licensing, anticipate that Precise Pangolin strong security and will meet the same reception as excellent stability – its predecessors. That’s to say, and the overriding existing Ubuntu users will love impression is of an it, and for them upgrading is a operating system that’s no-brainer; for anyone with ready for the big time. an established Windows or And yet, and yet. OS X workflow, switching still We’ve said before that involves too many sacrifices. the fundamental DARIEN GRAHAM SMITH problem with Ubuntu isn’t the OS itself, but a lack of application OVERALL ✪✪✪✪✪✪ support – and sadly, EASE OF USE ✪✪✪✪✪✪ there’s nothing here FEATURES & DESIGN ✪✪✪✪✪✪ that changes that. To Ubuntu’s Head-Up Display lets you quickly find menu commands VALUE FOR MONEY ✪✪✪✪✪✪

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REVIEWS Software

Corel VideoStudio Pro X5 Lots of interesting features and a slightly clunky interface – it’s business as usual for VideoStudio ❱❱ PRICE £45 (£54 inc VAT); upgrade, £38 (£45 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

V

ideoStudio has a homely feel to it, but it has always been quick to keep up with the latest developments. In 2007, it introduced Blu-ray and AVCHD authoring before any other consumer software. This year’s trail-blazing feature is HTML5 authoring. This restores the navigation functions (such as chapters) users lost as they moved from optical media to the web to distribute videos. Adobe Premiere Elements provides this using Flash, but HTML5 is a better choice with wider device support. VideoStudio uses the HTML5 canvas element, with a background video layer and image and text overlays. These overlays can act as links, either to chapter markers within the timeline or external URLs. Sadly, VideoStudio’s HTML5 output has problems. Playback doesn’t start automatically, leaving us to click Play on the transport bar after selecting a chapter from the top menu. There’s no way to stop playback from looping, either. External links open in a new

browser tab, which isn’t so useful for jumping between pages on a site. When we started from a template, chapter links jumped to the wrong places, although this problem disappeared when we started from scratch. Meanwhile, one project’s links worked fine when viewed on an iPad, but another’s became trapped in a loop. The transport progress bar didn’t work on the iPad, and musical accompaniments encoded in Ogg Vorbis format didn’t play. The HTML5-authoring tools could be better too. Rather than rework the DVD module, Corel has created an HTML5 project type, with graphics and links arranged on the timeline. This reminded us that VideoStudio’s timeline controls are cumbersome when it comes to manipulating many objects across multiple tracks. Ripple editing is overly complex, and can’t be switched off, despite what the interface suggests. It isn’t possible to reorder tracks, and there are only two dedicated tracks for text objects. Our biggest frustration is that, for HTML5 projects, effects and transitions are available only for the video tracks, and not for graphics on the overlay tracks. We tried to use the HTML5 features

HTML5 support means text and graphics can function as web links

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to produce an animated slideshow and export it as JPEGs and a music file rather than a video. It worked to a point, but without access to the Pan & Zoom effect, transitions or any way to rotate portraitshaped photos, it didn’t live up to expectations. Still, it’s unfair to expect this video editor to become a fully VideoStudio’s Screen Capture utility is straightforward and effective fledged web design application in one Preview performance is update. It’s a promising start for a excellent, thanks to enhanced feature we imagine being a staple support for multicore processors. of consumer video production VideoStudio Pro X5 played five within a few years. There’s work streams of AVCHD video without to be done, but it deserves praise dropping frames, a performance for getting there first. that outstrips even Sony Vegas Also new is a Screen Capture Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 utility for recording animated (web ID: 367906), which managed screengrabs. It’s probably more four. The maximum track count useful for people who publish or has been raised accordingly, from review software than the average seven to 21 video tracks. That’s Joe, but it’s still handy for more than most projects need – or capturing games, creating business computers can handle – but it’s graphics or showing grandma how good to have capacity to spare. to empty her Recycle Bin. The timeline controls seem a Its execution is hard to fault, little more responsive than before, with a dropdown list offering the but they’re still lethargic, often choice between screen, window or taking a second or so to respond marquee-based capture. There’s a to input. This rose to anything choice of audio from three to ten seconds with sources, including a lots of HD files stacked on top microphone or the of each other. Clicking anywhere computer’s audio causes playback to stop, which output. Capture is at is particularly frustrating when the native resolution at zooming the timeline. 15fps in WMV format, There’s much to like here, but and gave clean, sharp VideoStudio struggles with the results. The only basics. Timeline editing is clunky caveat is small text and at times unresponsive. Colour sometimes displays correction is crude, both in terms skewed colours, but it’s of control and output quality, and fine for anything but can’t be keyframe-automated. Still, the most exacting at this price, we’d consider it production. Along with purely for its extra modules. If the existing stopthese appeal, it’s worth giving the motion animation, trial version a whirl. BEN PITT time-lapse and animated drawing OVERALL ✪✪✪✪✪✪ tools, VideoStudio is EASE OF USE ✪✪✪✪✪✪ well equipped for FEATURES & DESIGN ✪✪✪✪✪✪ generating video in VALUE FOR MONEY ✪✪✪✪✪✪ interesting ways.

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Software REVIEWS

Tiffen Dfx 3 Easy to use and stuffed with features – turns ordinary snaps into something extraordinary ❱❱ PRICE Standalone, $170 (around £106); plugin, $200 (around £124) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.tiffen software.com

R

aw processing and photo-editing software is almost as commonplace these days as digital cameras. You can process photos on your tablet, laptop and even your smartphone, and it’s getting ever easier to do so. However, a large, complex application is often the only way to achieve the desired results. For those without a black belt in Photoshop, or any inclination to acquire one, Tiffen Dfx offers an alternative. It’s available as a standalone package (as reviewed here) or a plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. Ostensibly, it’s a package of filters; in reality, it’s much more than that. Dfx’s defining characteristic has to be its huge number of presets. In addition to the usual neutral density and graduated colour effects for accentuating sunsets and skies, there’s also a selection of more exotic filters. Our favourite is the selection of 35mm film stock

PC PRO

RECOMMENDED simulations. With one click, it’s simple to give a photo that distinctive Fuji Velvia look, or Ilford black-and-white film – it’s difficult to vouch for the accuracy of these, but the looks they lend to photographs can be striking. This is but one aspect of Dfx, however, with thousands of other presets to choose from, most based on the range of professional glass A huge library of film simulations is Dfx’s most attractive feature filters the company sells for use in be combined at will. To help exporting the full-resolution movie production. Again, the produce advanced compositions, it results, effects appear almost range of effects is jaw-dropping, also features a powerful array of instantly, an efficiency that allows from soft-light glamour effects to selection and masking tools. EZ before and after comparisons to be Technicolor three-strip and twoMask is the most useful, turning made with astonishing ease. strip colour process simulations, rough scribbles around the outline There’s also a wide array plus lens distortions and lighting of objects into quick, accurate of standard processing tools effects. Another notable effect is selections, but it’s also possible to including levels, noise reduction the new light rays tool, which paint masks in, draw a smoothly and detail enhancements, plus new can be used to create dramatic curved B-spline path using the Pen deblocking and debanding tools shafts of light, emanating from a tool, apply a gradient or spot for eradicating JPEG artefacts. single point in the photo. Live mask, or trace around objects with Take a peek into the parameters thumbnails allow you to preview the equivalent of Photoshop’s panel for each preset, meanwhile, all these individual effects without Magnetic Lasso. and you’ll find a deep array of having to apply them first. We won’t pretend Dfx doesn’t adjustments – some presets have Whatever filter we tried, have the odd rough edge. The more than 50 different sliders, however, the results were high interface feels clumsy at times, checkboxes and dropdown menus. quality, in many cases dramatically especially on screens below 1,920 There’s more to Dfx than just improving otherwise unremarkable x 1,080 – the panels take up too filters, though. Using layers and shots. It’s also seriously quick. much room. Although these can be an array of blending and opacity By displaying a lower-resolution docked, tabbed and spread across adjustments, individual effects can version of your image, then multiple monitors, they don’t always behave predictably outside their standard locations. There’s batch processing, allowing a custom preset to be applied to multiple images, but there’s no file management panel within the application; images must be opened one at a time. Noise reduction, meanwhile, isn’t a patch on that of Lightroom. All things considered, however, Tiffen Dfx is hugely likeable, and reasonably priced. It lets those with little knowledge create professional-style effects quickly, and there are so many presets, it will be some time before they’ve mastered even a fraction of the tools on offer. JONATHAN BRAY

OVERALL One of Dfx’s new effects is a light rays tool, which can be applied to dramatic effect

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EASE OF USE FEATURES & DESIGN VALUE FOR MONEY

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪


113

REVIEWS How we test

How we test A REFERENCE GUIDE TO OUR BENCHMARKS AND TEST METHODS

O

ur benchmarks are designed to reflect the way people actually use computers today. We use current applications, as well as a set of general responsiveness tests, to get an all-round picture of a PC’s or laptop’s performance.

Responsiveness

With low-power netbooks now so popular, it’s vital to know how responsive a system is. To measure this, we first time how long it takes to open documents and switch between a series of common applications, including Word and Excel, Acrobat Reader X and Internet Explorer. We then

3D BENCHMARKS CRYSIS

27fps 86fps

10fps

PLAYABLE

UNPLAYABLE

SMOOTH PLAY LOW

MEDIUM

HIGH



OVERALL

0.60

RESPONSIVENESS

Focus on…

BETTER

0.63

MULTITASKING 0

0.25

0.45 0.5

Overall

time how long the system takes to open, close and move dozens of Explorer windows.

Media

Our Media tests expose how well a system can process music, photos and video files. We use iTunes 10 to encode an album into AAC and MP3 formats, then Adobe Photoshop CS5 to work on a folder of 12-megapixel RAW photographs. We adjust the colours and curves, apply artistic sharpening and blurring, and save the results in JPEG format. Finally, we use Sony Vegas 10 to render a short 1080p video, with a picture-in-picture effect and a cross-fade transition.

Multitasking

0.71

MEDIA

Finally, we time how long it takes the multithreaded Cinebench 11.5 renderer to produce a complex 3D scene.

PC PRO

0.75

1

1.25

1.5

To really test a system, we simultaneously run the iTunes and Photoshop tests, then launch our Responsiveness tests over the top.

We compare all timings with those of our reference platform: a 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 7,200rpm hard disk. All desktops are tested at 1,920 x 1,080; we test laptops at the display’s native resolution. Each score is given relative to the reference platform: a score of 1.5 would indicate a PC that was 50% faster. We combine the three scores into an overall average, but we also show the breakdown of the three tests, so you can easily see a system’s strengths and weaknesses.

3D benchmarks

We test 3D performance using pre-recorded sequences in Crysis. We use the game’s Low, Medium and High quality settings in the resolutions of 1,366 x 768, 1,600 x 900 and 1,920 x 1,080 respectively. For really fast systems we replace the Low test with one at 1,920 x 1,080 and Very High quality. A system’s 3D graphs (see left) will be coloured red, amber or green to indicate how smooth on average gameplay will be.

BATTERY LIFE BENCHMARKS Our battery tests are also designed to reflect the real world, so we aim to determine the battery’s life for intensive tasks and everyday browsing. In the light-use test, we optimise the system for power efficiency – Windows’ power profile is set to Power Saver and we set the screen brightness as close to 75cd/m2 as possible using an X-Rite i1Display 2 colorimeter. We disconnect the mains and run a script scrolling a selection of web pages until the system shuts down, giving you a realistic idea of surfing time. For the heavy-use test, we engage Windows’ High Performance power profile, set the brightness to maximum and run the taxing Cinebench 3D renderer to push the processor load to the limit. This gives a worst-case figure for battery life from a single charge. BATTERY: LIGHT USE 3hrs 14mins

Displays

Tablets & smartphones

Routers

Hard disks

We test all monitors, laptops and tablet screens in the same way. We use an X-Rite i1Display 2 colorimeter to gauge colour accuracy (technically known as Delta E), maximum brightness, black level and contrast ratio. We also display a selection of our own high-resolution test images and Blu-ray videos to get a real-world perspective.

Tablets and smartphones are similar products, so we test them in largely the same way. We run a selection of browserbased speed tests (including the SunSpider JavaScript test). We also thoroughly test battery life by simulating real use: phone calls, browsing, playing a podcast, and leaving the device on standby for 24 hours.

We test wireless routers in a domestic setting using similar file-transfer tests to hard disks. We use two laptops – one hooked up via Ethernet to the router, the other connected via wireless to the router – and copy a series of small and large files to and fro. We measure speeds in two locations: at close range and a 40m distance.

We time how quickly internal and external drives can read and write files within Windows. We do this first using a single, 1.5GB data file, then with a folder containing 15,000, 100KB data files, to tax the drive controller and file system. We give the results in MB/sec and also compare costs in terms of price per gigabyte.

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REVIEWS Enterprise EXCLUSIVE

Lenovo ThinkServer TS130 A low-cost first server for a small business, but it’s limited by its basic storage potential ❱❱ PRICE £484 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.lenovo.co.uk

L

enovo’s ThinkServer TS130 is designed to offer the smallest of businesses the perfect entry point into purpose-built servers. This little pedestal system aims to deliver top value with high reliability, and introduces an interesting new direction for Lenovo’s server management. The system on review costs less than £500, for which you get a 3.1GHz Xeon E3-1225 processor and 4GB of DDR3 UDIMM memory. The chassis is solidly built and, along with the DVD drive, there’s room at the front for Lenovo’s optional USB RDX removable cartridge drive for essential server backup. The TS130 may be slightly smaller than Dell’s PowerEdge T110 II (web ID: 369607), but Lenovo hasn’t made particularly efficient use of the space. Compared to the Dell’s support for four or six SATA or SAS hard disks, the TS130 is limited to two SATA drives. The price includes a 250GB SATA disk loaded in a cold-swap

carrier in the upper bay (see 1 ), with another carrier located in the base for a second drive. The Intel C206 chipset offers two SATA II and two SATA III ports, but with only two drives available, RAID options are limited to stripes or mirrors. The chassis has fans front and rear, and the processor is fitted with an active heatsink (see 2 ). Even with this movement of air, we found the server quiet in use, making it well suited to a small office. Expansion potential isn’t great, however: the motherboard has pairs of PCI Express and 32-bit PCI slots, and the only upgrade on offer is an extra Gigabit card. The motherboard also has onboard audio, although we can’t see much use for this in a server – or the rear DisplayPort connector, for that matter. Power comes via a fixed 264W supply, and the TS130 was the very model of frugality in our tests. With Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle, we measured a miniscule draw of 25W, peaking at only 83W under heavy load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app. Server management sees a big change, since Lenovo no longer includes its EasyManage software with its entry-level servers. We’re not too surprised, as our review of the ThinkServer TS100 (web ID: 235032), found this LANDesk variant to be total overkill for SMBs. Lenovo now promotes Intel’s Active Management Even with both front and rear fans, the TS130 is quiet in use

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1 2

Technology (AMT) 7 as its solution for both SMBs and service providers. As part of Intel’s vPro technology, AMT provides the hardware to remotely monitor and control the server; to get this you must specify a Xeon E3 processor, since Core i3 doesn’t support vPro. Once configured in the BIOS, AMT shares the embedded Gigabit port and provides web browser access to the server, where you can view its settings, monitor critical hardware and directly control power. If you want more control, you’ll need a compatible software application; for testing, we used Intel’s Manageability Developer Tool Kit. The main component is the Commander Tool, which kicks off by running a network auto-discovery routine for AMT-enabled systems. It had no problems locating the TS130 and, once connected to the server, we could view its sensor data, check its event and alert logs, and control the server remotely. We were particularly impressed with AMT’s embedded KVM abilities. For basic BIOS control, the Terminal Tool uses a serial over LAN (SOL) link for remotely configuring BIOS settings and applying a variety of boot commands to the server. You can boot it to any available local device or use the IDE Redirect function to boot the server from

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remote media. For full KVM over IP functions, such as direct operating system control, use the KVM redirect option from the Commander interface. The biggest competition to the TS130 comes from Dell’s PowerEdge T110 II and HP’s ProLiant ML110 G7 (web ID: 370198). The Dell offers better storage and expansion potential – and it’s cheaper, too, as we found a similar model with a 500GB SATA drive and three-year warranty for £40 less. The HP is more costly, but it’s the one we’d look to if remote management features are important, since it comes as standard with HP’s smart iLO3 controller. Next to the Dell and the HP, this Lenovo is still a worthy low-cost choice as a first server, but it has limited storage potential and upgrade options. DAVE MITCHELL

KEY SPECS Pedestal chassis • 3.1GHz Intel Xeon E3-1225 • 4GB DDR3 UDIMM expandable to 32GB • 250GB WD SATA II cold-swap hard disk (max 2) • embedded Intel RAID with 2 x SATA III and 2 x SATA II ports • supports RAID0, 1, JBODs • Gigabit Ethernet • 10 x USB 2 (2 internal) • 2 x PCI-E • 2 x PCI (32-bit) • Lenovo EasyStartup software • 3yr on-site NBD warranty • Power: 25W idle; 83W peak • Part code: 1105-1CU

OVERALL


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Reducing complexity has never been simpler. Designed for growing business, the IBM System x3650 M3 Express server with the latest Intel Xeon processor 5600 series can help you simplify your IT infrastructure. With simple start-up, intuitive management and tool-less design, this server is easy to deploy and manage whether your IT infrastructure is physical or virtual, onsite or remote. Additionally, you get the valuable expertise of IBM Business Partners to create an IT environment optimised to keep up with tomorrow, today. Rated No.1 in Server Customer Satisfaction by TBR for the 9th consecutive quarter 1.

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External disk storage with 6GB/s Serial Attach SCSI (SAS) interface

processors

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Up to 192GB Registered DIMMs (RDIMMs) or 48GB UDIMMs

Scalable up to 48TB with 500GB NL-SAS 2.5" drives

high-performance, new generation Double Data Rate 3 (DDR-3) memory

Support for 96 drives with combination of EXP3512 or EXP3524 expansion

Internal storage flexibility with up to eight 2.5" hot-swap Serial Attached

enclosures

SCSI (SAS)/Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) HDDs or

Field upgradeable with FC or ISCSI host interface cards

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x3650M3

Contact the IBM Team to help you connect to the right IBM Business Partner. 0800 028 6282

TBR 3Q11 x86-Based Servers: Corporate IT Buying Behavior & Customer Satisfaction Study, November 2011. 2 Quarterly price quoted is based on IBM s 0% System x Solution Finance offering (FMV lease). Terms & Conditions Apply: Offering availability subject to credit approval; for more details and full Terms and Conditions please visit: http://www.ibm.com/financing/uk/lifecycle/acquire/xsolutionfinancing.html Rates and offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice. Prices include VAT at a rate of 20%. IBM hardware products are manufactured from new parts or new and serviceable used parts. Regardless, our warranty terms apply. For a copy of applicable product warranties, visit http://www.ibm.com/servers/support/machine_warranties. IBM makes no representation or warranty regarding third-party products or services. IBM, the IBM logo, System Storage and System x are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. For a current list of IBM trademarks, see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All prices and savings estimates are subject to change without notice, may vary according to configuration, are based upon IBM s estimated retail selling prices as of 01/01/2012 and may not include storage, hard drive, operating system or other features. Reseller prices and savings to end users may vary. Products are subject to availability. This document was developed for offerings in the United Kingdom. IBM may not offer the products, features, or services discussed in this document in other countries. Contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner for the most current pricing in your geographic area. ©2012 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.

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D-Link DSN-6120 Offers excellent IP SAN performance and redundancy, plus plenty of potential for expansion – all wrapped up in an affordable package

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RECOMMENDED

❱❱ PRICE Diskless, £4,688 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.lambda-tek.com

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-Link’s DSN-6000 Series of IP SAN appliances provides enterprise-level redundancy at a cost SMBs can afford. To add value, all features are included in the initial price: snapshots, cloning, rollback and even remote replication come as standard. The foundation of the series is a 2U 12-bay chassis that accepts a range of hard disk and controller options. D-Link sent us the DSN-6120, which comes with dual controllers, each with four Gigabit data ports (see 1 ). The company also offers controllers with dual 10GbE ports. The controllers in the DSN-6120 function in active/ active mode, so all eight Gigabit data ports are up for grabs and can be used to create redundant network links. Controller cache contents are mirrored across a high-speed internal interconnect, so if one controller fails, the other takes over all operations. The chassis has two 500W hotplug supplies for power redundancy (see 2 ) and two hotplug fan modules. The controllers each have 4GB of DDR2 cache memory protected by battery backup packs, and even these are hot-swappable. You’re spoilt for RAID choices: along with stripes and mirrors, you can have RAID5, 6, 50 and 60 arrays, or N-way mirroring, where the array contains multiple mirrors of a drive for N-1 failover. Each controller has a SAS expansion port, and up to four of D-Link’s

Behind the DSN-6120’s lockable front panel sit 12 hot-swap drive bays supporting SAS and SATA drives

DSN-6020 12-bay disk shelves can be daisy-chained. This takes the total drive count up to 60, and with dual controllers you can create multiple redundant links. Behind the lockable front panel sit 12 hot-swap drive bays that support SAS and SATA drives, although only at 3Gbits/sec. The web management interface is easy to use, and you start with volume group (VG) creation by selecting member drives and a RAID array type. For testing we slipped in six 600GB Hitachi SAS drives and created a RAID5 volume group using them all. Within each volume group you create virtual disks (VDs) that are presented as iSCSI targets, and each volume group can contain multiple VDs of varying capacities. During VD creation you enter a capacity, choose a block size, enable read-ahead operations and can turn on the AV-Media mode, which optimises disk operations to suit video editing. You can make a VD available to all hosts using a wildcard, or enter the IQNs of the host initiators that are allowed to use it. You can also decide on read and write privileges and apply CHAP authentication. For performance testing we called up a Broadberry quad-node

Intel Xeon 3400 rack server, all nodes running Windows Server 2008 R2. Each node had a dedicated connection over Gigabit to the appliance and was assigned its own VD from the RAID5 array. Using the Iometer benchmarking app, we saw one server report a fast 112MB/sec read speed. Adding a second server returned a cumulative speed of 224MB/sec, rising to 336MB/sec and 448MB/sec when we added the third and fourth servers. For write operations across the four server nodes, Iometer reported cumulative speeds of 112MB/sec, 223MB/sec, 318MB/sec and 305MB/sec. This showed contention for resources was occurring during write operations, but only under heavy loads. For normal usage you select the RAID type during VD creation, but if you want it for cloning then the backup type is selected. Cloning is a simple process: you pick the source VD, select the set clone option from its dropdown menu, choose your target VD and away it goes. The first clone operation will be a full backup, and you can run scheduled incremental snapshots thereafter

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to keep it updated. The clone can be presented as a new VD to a specific host at any time, where it appears as a read-only optical drive. You can create on-demand snapshots manually or set up schedules to run them regularly at hourly, daily, weekly or monthly intervals. Snapshots can then be used to rollback their associated virtual disks in the event of a problem, and you can “expose” snapshots as new read-only or read-write VDs. Remote replication to another DSN-6000 appliance requires one data port to be dedicated to these operations. The corresponding port on the second controller also goes with it to provide link redundancy. The D-Link DSN-6120 delivers high levels of redundancy and, with all features included in the price, it offers good value as well. SMBs on the hunt for an affordable, fault-tolerant IP SAN disk array with plenty of expansion potential will definitely be impressed. DAVE MITCHELL

KEY SPECS 2U rack chassis • 2 x 500W hot-swap power supplies • 2 x hot-swap fan modules • 12 x SAS/SATA II hot-swap drive bays. Dual hot-swap RAID controllers each with: 1.2GHz Intel IOP CPU • 2GB DDR2 cache upgradeable to 4GB • battery backup • supports RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60, JBODs • 4 x Gigabit Ethernet • 10/100 management port • mini-SAS expansion port • 3yr RTB warranty. Options: DSN-6020 12-bay expansion enclosure, £2,365 exc VAT

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Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry Fujitsu brings enterprise deduplication to SMBs, and our tests show it delivers impressive storage savings

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RECOMMENDED

❱❱ PRICE 4TB, £8,851 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.fujitsu.com/uk

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ujitsu moved into the data deduplication space a few years ago, and it now wants to make this hot technology affordable for SMBs. In this review, we test the Eternus CS800 S3 Entry model, which combines big reductions in storage usage with good value and ease of use. This model shares the same foundation as its CS800 brethren: namely, a top-quality Primergy RX300 S6 2U rack server (web ID: 360022). It comes equipped with a 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5620, 24GB of DDR3 memory and two 800W hotplug power supplies. For storage it has a pair of 300GB SAS SFF drives, split into mirrors for the OS and the index database. General backup storage is handled by ten 500GB SATA drives configured in a RAID6 array, and all are looked after by Fujitsu’s SAS 6G RAID card, which has 512MB of battery-protected cache. You can’t upgrade capacity beyond 4TB and, unlike the larger models, the appliance doesn’t support Fujitsu’s DX80 disk expansion shelves. But the price includes all data compression and deduplication features, plus replication to a remote CS800.

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Ten 500GB SATA drives in a RAID6 array handle backup storage needs in Fujitsu’s Eternus CS800

A key feature of the CS800 is how it presents storage as NAS shares, making for easy deployment. Furthermore, as data reduction is carried out at the appliance, it’s transparent to all host systems. It supports any backup software application, and will even deduplicate drag-anddrop copies to a share on the appliance. You also get Symantec’s OpenStorage plugin, which allows the appliance to present itself as storage servers to NetBackup. We found installation simple, with a wizard guiding us through initial configuration and network port setup. The appliance has six Gigabit ports, five of which can be kept separate or bonded together in load-balanced, redundant teams; the sixth port is retained for service and maintenance functions only. Next you can get down to creating network shares. Up to 128 CIFS or NFS shares are

supported, either public or private, and for user access control you can enable workgroup or AD modes. Deduplication can be enabled on a per-share basis, and once set it can’t be removed. However, you can specify backup windows for a share, during which time deduplication is disabled. The web interface provides plenty of status information for deduplication, RAID and network activity: you can view the current data reduction ratio, monitor storage, and set up alerts that can be emailed to multiple recipients. Fujitsu doesn’t publish any hard facts about potential data reduction ratios, so we used the Binary Testing deduplication test suite to ascertain these for file server backup operations. Using a 4GB data set of 1,000 files, the suite allowed us to introduce controlled changes within a desired percentage of the files. At the host end we loaded CA ARCserve Backup r16 (web ID: 373744) software, and to use the CS800, we just mapped a share and declared it as a disk-based backup device. We used ARCserve to manage a standard backup strategy consisting of daily incrementals and weekly full backups, and after the first full backup had run, 2% of data was modified in 40% of

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files prior to each subsequent backup. After a four-week simulation period, the appliance delivered a deduplication ratio of more than 10.5:1. During the test, we had thrown over 44GB at the appliance, but only 4.4GB of its capacity had been consumed. We also tested real-world backup speeds by using ARCserve to secure a 35GB test folder containing almost 17,000 files. Run over Gigabit Ethernet, the job returned an average speed of 45MB/sec. We’ve heard claims that deduplication can cause performance problems when restoring data from the block store, but we saw no evidence of this. Using ARCserve to restore the entire test folder from the appliance back to the server, we saw average speeds of 38MB/sec. The Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry offers a larger repository than most of the competition for a similar price; with deduplication on the case, this becomes a big factor to consider. It’s easy to deploy and delivered huge savings in our data reduction tests. It’s a fine piece of kit. DAVE MITCHELL

KEY SPECS 2U rack chassis • 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5620 • 24GB DDR3 • 2 x 300GB SAS and 10 x 500GB SATA SFF hot-swap hard disks • Fujitsu SAS 5/6 RAID card with 512MB cache and BBU • 6 x Gigabit Ethernet • 2 x 800W hotplug power supplies • 1yr NBD advanced replacement warranty

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REVIEWS Enterprise

Synology DiskStation DS1812+ A top NAS appliance for small businesses that’s affordable, fast and brimming with new features ❱❱ PRICE Diskless, £633 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.dabs.com

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ynology must believe there’s life left yet in Intel’s trusty Atom, equipping its first eight-bay desktop appliance with the latest dual-core 2.13GHz D2700. The DS1812+ also introduces Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) 4 firmware, which adds a heap of new features including cloud backup services. Synology has already certified Hitachi’s 4TB SATA drives for use with the DS1812+, so capacity can be pushed to 32TB. The two eSATA ports at the rear can be used to add a couple of five-bay DX510 expansion units, which takes this to an impressive 72TB. The Assistant utility makes light work of installation, and the

DSM web interface looks very smart indeed. It has seven new widgets for monitoring system health and resources, connections, backup jobs and logs. Free antivirus scanning is provided, the Surveillance Station package has been improved, and iSCSI LUN backup has been added. Two cloud services are provided, with ezCloud using Synology’s free DDNS service for secure remote access to shares. Enabling the Cloud Station package from the web interface brings in remote syncing services for up to 32 file versions. You install the Cloud Station Windows app locally, enter your ezCloud

PC The DS1812+ comes with antivirus and multimedia features

account details and then choose which folder you want synced. Usefully, the QuickConnect feature doesn’t require router port-forwarding rules; just enter a unique code into the Cloud Station UI instead of the service URL. It worked well: as we added files to our source folder, or

modified existing ones, they were synced to the appliance immediately. To restore files, access the appliance’s File Station app remotely and view your home directory. Browse all file versions, choose one to restore and download it to a location of your choice.

EXCLUSIVE

WatchGuard XTM 330 Delivers a host of sophisticated security measures at a very reasonable price ❱❱ PRICE Appliance with 1yr security bundle, £843 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.broadband buyer.co.uk

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atchGuard already lays claim to a sizable chunk of the SMB network security market, but with its latest multifunction appliance it wants even more. In this exclusive review we look at the new XTM 330, which offers impressive performance and strong features for a surprisingly low price. This 1U rack appliance claims a high firewall throughput of 850Mbits/sec, and complements that with a good range of security services. These cover gateway antivirus, anti-spam, application

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controls, IPS, web filtering and WatchGuard’s own reputationenabled defences. The appliance, plus a one-year subscription to its LiveSecurity support and all the above security services, costs £843 exc VAT. Go for a full three-year subscription and it’s yours for £1,325. Installation has been streamlined, with a wizard stepping through the initial setup process, registering the appliance and activating your subscriptions. The web interface has been spruced up to make it more intuitive, and the homepage provides plenty of

PC

detail on appliance performance, subscription status and security service activity. Firewall policies combine settings for each security service, where you select a proxy, apply it to any or all of the seven Gigabit interfaces, and define a proxy action. There’s a good choice of proxies: along with HTTP, FTP, SIP, H.323, POP3 and SMTP, it has HTTPS as standard. The WebBlocker service provides 55 categories that can be blocked or allowed on a

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The XTM 330 delivered fine results in our live filtering tests

per-policy basis. The appliance needs to be pointed to a separate system that hosts the category database, but we found it worked happily on a Windows 7 system and delivered excellent results in our live filtering tests. The Commtouch anti-spam service is configured via the POP3 and SMTP proxies, but if you choose not to use the separate quarantine server you can only tag suspect messages. For testing, we created a policy

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Enterprise REVIEWS

Along with the Cloud Station, Synology offers a huge choice of free packages. The antivirus package can run scheduled scans on the entire appliance or on selected shares, and delete or quarantine infected files. There’s a plethora of multimedia features, and the appliance has server packages available for Syslog, LDAP, DHCP and even PPTP VPNs. For data protection, along with the Data Replicator 3 workstation utility, there are options to secure shares to external devices, another Synology appliance, an rsynccompatible server, or Amazon’s S3 cloud backup service. The DS1812+ is no slouch in the performance stakes. For speed testing we slipped in four 2TB Seagate SATA II drives and

KEY SPECS Desktop chassis • 2.13GHz Intel Atom D2700 • 1GB DDR3 expandable to 3GB • 8 x 3.5in or 2.5in SATA II hard disk hot-swap bays • supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, Hybrid, hot-spare and JBODs • 2 x Gigabit Ethernet • 2 x USB 3 • 4 x USB 2 • 2 x eSATA • Synology Assistant, Download Redirector and Data Replicator 3 software • Options: DX510, £317 exc VAT

that tagged suspect messages, and created rules on our Outlook clients that moved them to separate folders. We left the appliance filtering live email for a month and saw an impressive spam detection rate of 98.9%. The Bulk mail detection is too enthusiastic, but you can turn this off and let these messages through if you wish. If you have issues with social networking in the workplace, WatchGuard’s application awareness could be the answer. This can control apps such as Facebook so you can decide by AD user or group who can log in, chat, edit their profile, play games, access webmail, use video and transfer files. WatchGuard’s latest Fireware 11.5.1 software provides

KEY SPECS 1U rack chassis • 7 x Gigabit Ethernet • 2 x USB • 850Mbits/sec firewall • WatchGuard and Firebox System Managers plus WebBlocker, Report, Log and Quarantine server software included • 1yr RTB warranty • Options: Appliance with 3yr security bundle, £1,325 exc VAT

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created a RAID5 array. Using a Broadberry rack server equipped with dual 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2670s and running Windows Server 2008 R2, we saw drag-and-drop copies of a 2.5GB video clip return read and write speeds of 101MB/sec and 97MB/sec. FTP speeds were better, with the FileZilla utility returning rates of 108MB/sec and 101MB/sec. It handled our 22.4GB collection of 10,500 files well: the folder copied across to the appliance at an average of 69MB/sec. At £633 for a diskless model, the DS1812+ offers excellent value. Qnap’s eight-bay TS-859 Pro+ costs slightly more but has a slower 1.8GHz Atom, while Netgear’s elderly ReadyNAS Pro 6 (web ID: 234354) loses you two bays, doesn’t even come close for features, and costs around £30 less. We’d definitely go for the Synology. DAVE MITCHELL

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improvements such as IPv6 routing and clientless SSO (single sign-on). WatchGuard has also enhanced its Log Viewer and Report Manager apps with a new web-based logging and reporting tool. Viewed from a separate web interface, this provides improved logging detail on security services, users, alerts and traffic. On-demand reports for specific time periods can be exported as PDFs, and the new boxes under management report shows the status of your VPNs. The XTM 330 isn’t as easy to configure as Netgear’s ProSecure UTM 150 appliance (web ID: 368296) for example – but it’s much smarter. It packs in plenty of security features and is more versatile than any other appliance we’ve seen at this price point. DAVE MITCHELL

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LaCie 5big Office+ A well-built Windows-powered NAS appliance that’s easy to set up – but performance is weak

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aCie is a keen proponent of Windows-powered NAS appliances, and the 5big Office+ is its first to use Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials (WSSE). Aimed at small businesses of up to 25 users, it offers file-sharing, remote web access, automated PC backup, bare-metal recovery and optional cloud backup. A wizard helps set up WSSE basics before you download the Windows Connector and Launchpad software to clients. Further management is handled via the WSSE Dashboard, which provides easy access to all its features. It lists all PCs running the Connector, and for each one you can set up backup schedules and choose which drives you want protected. A single backup schedule is used for all clients; you can decide how long to keep daily, weekly and monthly backups. For bare-metal recovery, the appliance converts a USB stick to a bootable WSSE Full System Restore disk. Pop it in the PC into be recovered, follow the wizard, and leave it to restore the complete system from the selected backup. Real-world speeds aren’t great: copying a 2.52GB video clip over Gigabit Ethernet returned read and write speeds of 75MB/sec and 61MB/ sec; utilisation for the Atom processor hovered around 20% during these simple tests. You can install add-ons to the Dashboard, although most – such as the Advanced Admin Console – cost extra. The Office+ also has an add-on preinstalled for accessing LaCie’s Wuala-hosted cloud

❱❱ PRICE 10TB, £1,049 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.lacie.com/uk backup service. The Dashboard provides direct access to your account, or you can log in from another system running the Wuala UI. A default set of WSSE Server Folders on the appliance are selected, and you can add more, create backup schedules, or opt for continuous syncing. Wuala maps its off-site drive to the appliance, so files can be restored from its UI or via drag and drop. It’s useful for off-site backup, but you get only 1GB free; a 100GB Business Starter Pack for five users costs around £250 per year. The 5big Office+ is good value, but its Atom CPU struggles to run WSSE. Its backup and recovery features are easy to use, but if performance and features are a higher priority then Qnap’s TS-559 Pro+ or Synology’s DS1512+ five-bay appliances are worth a look. DAVE MITCHELL The 5big Office+ offers optional cloud backup services

KEY SPECS Desktop chassis • 1.6GHz Intel Atom D510 • 2GB RAM • 5 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA II hot-swap hard disks • supports RAID0, 1, 5, 5+spare • 3 x USB 2 • eSATA • 2 x Gigabit Ethernet • external power supply • Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials preinstalled • 3yr RTB warranty

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REVIEWS Enterprise

Kodak sceyeX An innovative desktop scanner, but it’s expensive and image quality is variable ❱❱ PRICE £719 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.bmisolutions. co.uk

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he Kodak sceyeX puts an interesting spin on scanning: it’s designed to scan documents right off a desk. Similar to an Anglepoise lamp, it extends in two sections, with the scanner head pointing downwards. A laser projects an outline of the scanning area, and four white LEDs illuminate it. The scanner uses a 10-megapixel RGB CMOS sensor with a 300dpi optical resolution; if you want a higher

KEY SPECS 10mp RGB CMOS • 300dpi optical resolution • four white LEDs • max scan area: 325 x 244mm • USB 2 • canvas carry bag • 3yr advanced replacement warranty

quality, the sceyeX MonoPro model improves sharpness but scans only in greyscale. The sceyeX is USB-powered, and its sceye-RACE utility provides quick scans directly into an application using keyboard shortcuts: you load the app, hit the shortcut keys and the document is captured. We tested successfully with Word and PowerPoint 2010, InDesign CS5.5 and PaintShop Pro, and if you don’t have an app open it sends it to the Clipboard. The sceye-Explorer utility provides direct access to the scanner and a workplace for organising your scans. The sceye-Autoscan utility handles multiple documents, detecting new ones as they’re placed beneath the head and automatically scanning. Quality depends on the ambient lighting and direction,

and the paper type. Business documents and receipts on white or coloured matte paper were reproduced well using the scanner’s LEDs. For glossy paper, the LEDs had to be turned off via the sceye utility to avoid glare, and bright sunlight from the window created unsightly reflections. Glossy photos are almost impossible to scan without serious imperfections, and bright ceiling lights will cause the scanner head to cast a shadow. Speeds were good, with A4 documents scanned and uploaded in fewer than six seconds. Anti-skew worked well, straightening smaller documents placed at an angle. The sceyeX is a space-saving solution, but it’s expensive, scan results aren’t brochure quality, and it has limitations you won’t find with a flatbed or ADF-equipped scanner. DAVE MITCHELL

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Power Ethernet Socket T1000 Uninspiring performance, but it offers a simple and unobtrusive way of securely extending networks in a busy office ❱❱ PRICE Twin pack, £235 exc VAT ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.broadband buyer.com

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he Power Ethernet Socket T1000 builds on HomePlug adapters by embedding the circuitry into a standard wall socket and teaming it with a four- port 10/100 Ethernet switch. It’s a neat solution, with the electronics hidden in a plastic shell behind the faceplate, and installation is no different to a standard wall socket.

KEY SPECS Power Ethernet double-width wall socket • 4 x 10/100 Ethernet switch • standard 3-pin power socket • 128-bit AES encryption • max range 300m • 0.5W power-save mode • PowerPacket for Windows • 1yr RTB warranty

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We installed the sockets a few metres apart, connected a dual-Xeon X5560 Windows Server 2008 R2 system to one, and linked the other to the network. With no further intervention, the sockets established a 128-bit AESencrypted link between them. The PowerPacket Windows utility monitors connections, and you can change passwords to allow selected sockets to be isolated into different groups. The integrated switch is also manageable and supports VLANs, QoS and SNMP, but the software for this is currently in beta testing.

The T1000 is the next step in HomePlug adapters

For performance testing we used a Synology DS1812+ NAS appliance, and as a baseline we started with a direct Gigabit link. Iometer reported a 112MB/sec raw read rate for a mapped share, and copying a 2.52GB video clip returned 102MB/sec. With all connections moved to the PE Sockets, Iometer reported 5.3MB/sec, and the

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The sceyeX scans documents placed on the desk in front of it

video clip took just over eight minutes to shift across to the NAS. We then reinstalled one socket at a distance of 25m. We still had a green light for link quality, but Iometer reported 4.3MB/sec. Real-world speeds will limit use to low-demand applications, but these are similar to other 200Mbits/sec powerline adapters. The sockets don’t support HomePlug AV 500Mbits/sec speeds, as the heat output of the current chipsets makes them unsuited to this design. Speed aside, the T1000 offers reasonable value, as each provides four network ports and a power socket. The biggest advantage over standard adapters is the T1000’s integration with the building’s wiring, which makes them less likely to be removed – accidentally or deliberately. DAVE MITCHELL

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LABS Tablets

Tablets

The new iPad goes head to head with the best the Android crowd has to offer. Plus, we’ve gathered together the best compact tablets on the market and discovered that Apples aren’t the only fruit

Photography: main intro, Danny Bird; mini-intros and cutouts, Julian Velasquez; repro, Jan Cihak

Contents Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition RIM BlackBerry PlayBook Gemini JoyTAB 8 Huawei MediaPad S7 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 Sony Tablet P Apple iPad (3rd gen) Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Archos 101 G9 Turbo Asus Transformer Pad 300 Motorola Xoom 2 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Sony Tablet S Toshiba AT200

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Buyer’s guide How we test How the tablets measure up Feature table Essential accessories: Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition Should you wait for Windows 8? Essential accessories: Apple iPad Graphs View from the Labs

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Tablets

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LABS Tablets

Buyer’s guide HOW WE TEST

With tablets operating across different platforms, it’s difficult to develop system-level benchmarks that run on every model, as we do with Windows-based PCs. However, there are still some things that can be measured, giving substance to our subjective appraisals of how a tablet feels in use.


Performance

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s the tablet market slowly matures, the choices are becoming broader. The iPad is still hugely popular, and marches forwards with each update, but the quality of the rest is improving too. The question is, why might you choose an Android tablet (or indeed a BlackBerry PlayBook) instead of an iPad? Read on and you’ll see why. Android tablets have much more variety, both in form and function. Where Apple has stuck to the same design, others are pushing the envelope. Asus, for instance, has a pair of netbook-style devices with detachable keyboards and booster batteries for the ultimate in stamina. Sony has an innovative dual-screen device. Compact tablets are coming on nicely, too; in fact, we’ve given compact tablets, from 7in to 8in, their very own section in this Labs. Most Android tablets are more flexible than the iPad when it comes to expansion and desktop connection. Many offer microSD or SD card slots for adding to the built-in memory, so there’s no

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need to spend extra on highercapacity models. Mini- and micro-HDMI outputs are also common; iPad owners must invest in a £35 dongle to add that capability. Some even have full-sized USB ports for adding peripherals and further storage. In addition, Android tablets aren’t tied to one method of synchronisation or one PC – as the iPad is with iTunes. Documents, music, photos and video can all be dragged and dropped over USB – and, in some cases, wirelessly. But never forget it isn’t all about the hardware. Although there’s an increasing number of tablet-specific apps and games for Android, it still can’t match the iPad. Often the best games will come out on Apple’s platform first, following some time after on Android, or perhaps not at all. Don’t forget to consider the surrounding accessories available for your tablet of choice. You’ll inevitably want to purchase a case and a stand once you’ve paid for the device itself, and most tablets have a limited range of dedicated accessories. On this front, again, the iPad is unassailable.

Almost all popular commercial websites rely on JavaScript to render pages, and all tablet browsers support it. Measuring JavaScript performance gives us an idea of the quality of the browsing experience, how quickly pages will render and how smoothly they scroll. We do this by running the well-known SunSpider 0.9.1 test (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/214labs) in the tablet’s native browser, which gives a result in milliseconds – the lower the number, the better. For Android tablets, we run the popular Quadrant benchmark, which tests several aspects of raw CPU and 3D performance. During testing, we also install and try out a selection of demanding action games, including Shadowgun on Android and Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD, to get a feeling for raw GPU power.

Battery

To measure battery life, we shut off wireless connections, set the brightness to medium and play a low-resolution, 320 x 240 podcast video on loop until the battery runs out. The tablets are connected via their 3.5mm headphone output to a Windows laptop, which we use to record the audio signal. By viewing the resulting wave file in audio-editing software, we can see precisely when the tablet ran out of juice.

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Screen

The quality of the display is critical, and we gauge this not only with our eyes, but with the colorimeter too. We turn the brightness right up, then measure the luminance of pure white and black screens to gauge the maximum brightness, the black point, and derive the contrast ratio from those two figures. We measure screens using a colorimeter

www.pcpro.co.uk

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LABS Tablets

How the tablets measure up It can be difficult to get an idea of the size of a tablet simply by looking at a photo in isolation. So, we’ve put them all in a line-up to show you exactly how big, and small, each tablet is

Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition

Apple iPad (3rd gen)

Sony Tablet S

Gemini JoyTAB 8 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 RIM BlackBerry PlayBook

Sony Tablet P

Huawei MediaPad S7

179mm 340g

368g 390g

388g 425g

500g 586g 652g

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www.pcpro.co.uk

Tablets

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime

Asus Transformer Pad 300

LABS

Archos 101 G9 Turbo

Toshiba AT200

276mm

Motorola Xoom 2

508g 565g 599g

www.pcpro.co.uk

594g 630g

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649g


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LABS Tablets

LABS WINNER

RECOMMENDED

LABS WINNER

COMPACT

Overall Performance Features & Design Value for Money

STANDARD

Gemini JoyTAB 8

Huawei MediaPad S7

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

RIM Motorola Xoom BlackBerry 2 Media Edition PlayBook ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪


Sony Tablet P


✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Prices (inc VAT) Wi-Fi only 8GB

£125 (£150)

16GB

No stock yet

£141 (£169)

£333 (£400)

£333 (£399)

32GB

£261 (£313)

£166 (£199)

£442 (£530), pre-order

£399 (£479)

64GB

£208 (£249)

£466 (£559)

Other Wi-Fi & 3G 8GB

£266 (£319)

16GB

£400 (£480)

£416 (£499)

32GB

No stock yet

£483 (£579)

64GB

£549 (£659)

Other

4GB, no stock yet

4GB, £333 (£399)

Purchase information Manufacturer

www.geminidevices. com

www.huawei.co.uk

www.motorola.co.uk

http://uk.blackberry. com

www.samsung.co.uk

www.sony.co.uk

www.apple.com/uk

Supplier

www.laptopsdirect. co.uk

www.amazon.co.uk

www.amazon.co.uk

www.dixons.co.uk

www.expansys.com

www.sony.co.uk

www.apple.com/uk

Warranty

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

2yr RTB

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

Operating system

Android 4

Android 3.2

Android 3.2

BlackBerry Tablet OS 2

Android 3.2

Android 3.2

iOS 5.1

App resource

Google Play

Google Play

Google Play

BlackBerry App World

Google Play

Google Play

Apple App Store

Software

Display Size

8in

7in

8.2in

7in

7.7in

5.5in x 2

9.7in

Resolution

600 x 800

800 x 1,280

800 x 1,280

1,024 x 600

800 x 1,280

1,024 x 480 x 2

2,560 x 1,536

Pixel density

125ppi

216ppi

184ppi

170ppi

196ppi

236ppi

264ppi

Panel technology

TFT

IPS

IPS

IPS

Super AMOLED Plus

TFT

IPS

Dimensions (WDH)

154 x 10.7 x 210mm

124 x 10.5 x 190mm

216 x 9.5 x 139mm

194 x 10.3 x 130mm

133 x 7.5 x 197mm

179 x 22 x 84mm (closed), 179 x 11 x 168mm (open)

186 x 9.4 x 241mm

Weight

500g

390g

388g

425g

340g

368g

652g

Processor

1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A8

1.2GHz Qualcomm 1.2GHz TI OMAP Snapdragon MSM8260 4430

1GHz TI OMAP 4430

1.4GHz Samsung Exynos

1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 T20

1GHz Apple A5X

Cores

1

2

2

2

2

2

Physical

CPU & memory

2

GPU

Mali-400MP

Adreno 220

PowerVR SGX540

PowerVR SGX540

Mali-400MP

ULP GeForce

PowerVR SGX543MP4

RAM

512MB

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

Storage expansion

microSD

microSD

microSD

microSD

802.11bgn

802.11bgn

802.11n

802.11n

Connectivity Wi-Fi

802.11n

802.11n

802.11abgn

Bluetooth Desktop connection

micro-USB

micro-USB

micro-USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

Charging

DC in, 5V

DC in, 5V

micro-USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

DC in, 5V

Proprietary USB

5mp/720p

5mp/720p

5mp/1080p

3.15mp/720p

5mp/720p

5mp/1080p

1.3mp

1.3mp

1.3mp

3mp

2mp

0.3mp

0.3mp

Other Rear camera (stills/video) Front camera GPS

3G models only

Gyroscope Light sensor Infrared emitter Accessories provided Mains charger

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Mains charger

Mains charger

Mains charger, neoprene slip case

Mains charger

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Mains charger

Stereo headset, USB mains charger

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LABS

Tablets

RECOMMENDED

Archos 101 G9 Turbo ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Asus Transformer Pad 300 ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

£333 (£400)

£367 (£440)

RECOMMENDED

Motorola Xoom 2


Sony Tablet S

Toshiba AT200

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

£216 (£260) £225 (£270)

£275 (£330)

£333 (£399)

£249 (£299)

£274 (£329)

No stock

£399 (£479)

£316 (£379)

£316 (£379)

£458 (£550)

£466 (£559)

250GB, £253 (£303) £261 (£313) £269 (£323)

£400 (£480)

£399 (£479)

£367 (£440)

£483 (£579)

£333 (£399)

£549 (£659) 250GB, £294 (£353)

www.archos.com

www.asus.co.uk

www.asus.co.uk

www.motorola.co.uk

www.samsung.co.uk

www.sony.co.uk

www.toshiba.co.uk

www.sony.co.uk

www.carphone warehouse.com

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

www.archos.com

www.currys.co.uk

www.simplyelectronics.net

www.amazon.co.uk

www.carphone warehouse.com

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

1yr RTB

1yr C&R

Android 4

Android 4

Android 4

Android 3.2

Android 3.1

Android 3.2

Android 3.2

Google Play

Google Play

Google Play

Google Play

Google Play

Google Play

Google Play

10.1in

10.1in

10.1in

10.1in

10.1in

9.4in

10.1in

1,280 x 800

1,280 x 800

1,280 x 800

1,280 x 800

1,280 x 800

1,280 x 800

1,280 x 800

149ppi

149ppi

149ppi

149ppi

149ppi

161ppi

149ppi

TN

IPS

IPS

IPS

Super PLS

TFT

TFT

276 x 13 x 167mm

262 x 10.7 (22) x 180mm

262 x 8.8 (19) x 180mm

254 x 8.8 x 173mm

257 x 8.6 x 176mm

241 x 10.1 (20.4) x 173mm

255 x 7.8 x 175mm

649g

630g (1.15kg)

594g (1.13kg)

599g

565g

586g

508g

1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460

1.2GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 T30L

1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 T30L

1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430



1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430

2

4 + companion core

4 + companion core

2

2

2

2

PowerVR SGX540

ULP GeForce

ULP GeForce

PowerVR SGX540

ULP GeForce

ULP GeForce

PowerVR SGX540

512MB

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

microSD

microSD, SD

microSD, SD

SD

microSD

802.11n

802.11n

802.11n

802.11n

802.11n

802.11n

802.11n

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

Proprietary USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB, micro-USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

Proprietary USB

micro-USB

Proprietary USB

Proprietary DC in

Proprietary USB

8mp/1080p

8mp/1080p

5mp/720p

3.2mp/720p

5mp/720p

5mp/1080p

1.3mp

1.2mp

1.2mp

1.3mp

2mp

0.3mp

2mp

USB mains charger

Mains charger

Mains charger

Mains charger

Mains charger, stereo headset

Mains charger

Mains charger, sleeve

www.pcpro.co.uk

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LABS Tablets

2

1

3

PC PRO

iPad

LABS WINNER

Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition Slim and light design, excellent screen quality and a handful of useful extra features make this the best compact tablet on the market ❱❱ PRICE £261 (£313 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

M

otorola built the very first Android tablet back at the beginning of 2011, but despite being in the game longer than anyone else, it’s yet to move either of its new tablets to Android 4. As with most Android 3.2 tablets, this means certain aspects of its performance – general responsiveness, panning and scrolling – don’t feel 100% smooth. iOS on the new iPad, OS 2 on the BlackBerry PlayBook, and Android 4 tablets are generally much smoother. Yet despite this shortcoming, the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition noses in front of tough competition to win the accolade of

BATTERY LIFE 4hrs 19mins

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best compact tablet. There are many reasons for this, not least its physical design. This tablet has an 8.2in screen – the largest of all the models in the compact section of this Labs – but it doesn’t look or feel that big. The rubberised, chamfered edges of the tablet make it easy to grip and comfortable to hold, and it’s slim and sleek, measuring 9.5mm from front to rear, with a weight of 388g. That makes it lighter than the BlackBerry PlayBook, Huawei MediaPad and Gemini JoyTAB 8, all of which have smaller screens. It impressed us in other core areas too. Despite having a larger screen than the MediaPad and the PlayBook, the Xoom 2 Media Edition’s pixel density is still high. The resolution of 800 x 1,280 stretched across 8.2in gives a density of 184ppi – higher than most 10in tablets. The display’s IPS technology, meanwhile, ensures a colourful picture and

exceptional viewing angles. Contrast and punch aren’t up to the standards of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7’s gorgeous Super AMOLED Plus display, but it’s excellent nonetheless. Other pluses include a decent camera, capable of producing sharp 5-megapixel images in good light (although its 1080p video was a little smeary), and good performance. The Media Edition is powerful, too, with a dual-core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor producing SunSpider and Quadrant scores of 1,715ms and 2,720 respectively. If that all sounds great, it’s the Xoom 2’s extras that push it over the line in the race for top honours. As with its larger sibling, this tablet has been treated with a special water-resistant “nano” coating – on both the outside and inside – so a sprinkling of water or a dousing in hot coffee shouldn’t mean a trip to the repair factory. There’s also the small matter of

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1 2 3

The screen has a resolution of 800 x 1,280 For a tablet, the Motorola’s 5-megapixel camera is good Pixel density isn’t as high as the new iPad, but it’s fine

an infrared emitter, embedded in the top short edge, which allows the tablet to function in tandem with the bundled Dijit app as a universal remote control for your TV, hi-fi and set-top box. If there’s one disappointment it’s battery life. In our looping video test, it lasted only 4hrs 19mins, which puts it at the bottom of the table this month. There’s no microSD slot for storage expansion either. Even with these factors taken into account, however, the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition wins our vote. Its combination of innovative extras, a quality screen and sumptuous design, plus a price that significantly undercuts the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, makes it the best compact tablet in this Labs – by a whisker.

OVERALL


✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

www.pcpro.co.uk

Tablets

LABS

Essential accessories Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition Kensington PowerBolt Micro Car Charger ❱❱ PRICE £17 (£20 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.theaccessoriescrowd.com One thing the Xoom 2 Media Edition isn’t blessed with is wonderful battery life, so any chance you get you’re going to want to top it up. This isn’t as easy as you might think in the car. Although the Xoom 2 will charge over USB, as with the iPad it needs a current supply of at least 2A. Most no-brand chargers won’t do this without overheating or burning out, but the Kensington PowerBolt’s 2.1A output copes with ease – at a price.

Motorola Wireless Keyboard and Mouse

Motorola S10-HD

Motorola Xoom 2 Media Dock

❱❱ PRICE £40 (£48 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.play.com

❱❱ PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.theaccessoriescrowd.com

❱❱ PRICE £25 (£30) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.clove.co.uk

Most Bluetooth keyboards and mice will work fine with the Xoom 2 Media Edition, but few boast the full range of navigational and media shortcuts of this set. It’s also very nice to type on: the action of the square Scrabble-tile keys is a little rattly, but light and positive. The mouse works surprisingly well too. The one negative is the keyboard’s half-height Enter key, but this is a small gripe in an otherwise excellent peripheral package.

A set of Bluetooth headphones lets you listen to games and media on your tablet without the hassle of being tethered via cables, and the S10-HD makes a robust audio companion. Its round-the-neck design literally clamps the headset in place, it’s solidly made, and a microphone means you can connect it to your phone afterwards to take calls. Sound quality is good for a Bluetooth set, but don’t expect to be blown away. Bass is good and midtones rich, but the highs lack definition.

Motorola’s official dock for the Xoom 2 Media Edition is principally designed to hold the tablet in portrait mode, so it isn’t much use for watching video. It has plenty of features, though, allowing audio and video to be passed out via 3.5mm audio and micro-HDMI jacks, while a micro-USB socket allows charging and/or synchronisation. Meanwhile, an adjustable support, locked into place with a substantial knurled thumbscrew, holds the tablet securely in position.

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LABS Tablets STOP PRESS: Late arrival Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) challenges the PlayBook for budget tablet top honours. See p106 for the full review

PC PRO

RECOMMENDED

1 2

iPad

3

RIM BlackBerry PlayBook Apps remain a weakness, but the selection is growing, and at this price with the updated OS the PlayBook is a steal ❱❱ PRICE 16GB, £141 (£169 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.dixons.co.uk

I

t might seem a little odd to be reviewing the PlayBook again a year on from its damp squib of a release, but circumstances have changed significantly. First, the price has been slashed: the 16GB model costs a mere £169; the 32GB is £199; and the 64GB is an amazing £249. Plus, with new software on board, owners no longer have to link it with a BlackBerry smartphone to receive and send messages. Those two developments transform the PlayBook, and make it worth a second look. The hardware was never a problem, and it still fares well. It has an excellent screen, with a


136


maximum brightness of 537cd/m2 topping every other tablet on test, good contrast, and a decent resolution for its size. It may not reach Retina levels of crispness or colour vibrance, but squeezing 1,024 x 600 pixels into a 7in screen results in a density of 170ppi, higher than 1,280 x 800 10.1in tablets. The 5-megapixel stills and 1080p video from the rear camera are pretty good for a tablet. And physically, it’s solid. Twist the boxy, black chassis and you’ll find there’s hardly any flex, although it isn’t the slimmest, measuring 10.3mm from front to back. The still-current TI OMAP 4430 processor and 1GB of RAM, coupled with the PlayBook’s second-generation NXT-based OS, mean the PlayBook is as much of a dream to use as it was last year. It’s responsive, and once you’ve learned how to bring up the multitasking view by swiping a finger up from the bottom border

of the screen, and the settings by pulling down from the top, you’ll be flying along in no time. Benchmarks show it isn’t the fastest tablet around, but it’s certainly no slouch, and the battery life is good, lasting 8hrs 50mins in our looping video test. The new email, calendar and contacts apps are long overdue, but they work nicely. The mail client is a highlight, with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn alongside the usual Gmail, Exchange and POP3/IMAP synchronisation. These can all be displayed in one big linked inbox, or browsed one at a time – simply tap the appropriate tab in the left-hand panel. There’s also a fully licensed version of the DataViz Documents To Go office suite preinstalled. Our biggest concerns about the PlayBook remain third-party apps and the BlackBerry App World store. The PlayBook runs a different OS to the company’s existing smartphones, so it had to

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1 2 3

A 5-megapixel camera produces decent image quality The screen is bright, but it can’t match the iPad’s detail It’s by no means glamorous, but the PlayBook is well made

start from scratch last year, and its library isn’t anywhere near as big as Google Play or the Apple App Store. Prices are higher, too, with major games (even Angry Birds) regularly costing £5. The good news is that support isn’t likely to evaporate as it did with HP’s TouchPad last year. RIM’s new smartphones will eventually run a variant of this OS, and with Android developers now able to port their apps over to the App World quickly, the numbers should rise steadily. If you can swallow that particular pill, and take the PlayBook for what it now is – a capable communications tool and powerful media player – it looks to be a steal. Act fast, though: once stock runs out RIM won’t be making any more.

OVERALL


✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

www.pcpro.co.uk

Tablets

LABS

Gemini JoyTAB 8 A cheap, attractive and well-built tablet – but the quality of the screen simply isn’t good enough ❱❱ PRICE 8GB, £125 (£150 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.laptops direct.co.uk

G

emini Devices is a new name in the UK tablet market, and the first model to reach us is its 8in JoyTAB 8. This budget Android tablet makes a very good first impression. We’re used to tablets at the lower end of the price spectrum feeling cheap and plasticky, but the JoyTAB is different. The rear panel is constructed from stiff aluminium that’s finished in an attractive, anodised dark grey, and on the front is the polished glass of a capacitive touchscreen. Ports and sockets include a mini-HDMI output, a microSD slot for supplementing its 8GB of storage, plus a 3.5mm audio output and a mini-USB socket. There’s no rear camera, but you do get a front-facing VGA one for video calls. Understandably at such a low price, it doesn’t have the latest CPU technology. In fact, its single-core 1GHz ARM Cortex A8


is now three generations old, and that age really showed in testing. In the SunSpider JavaScript test, the JoyTAB recorded 7,759ms – the slowest by a mile this month. It’s clearly no speed demon, yet it isn’t all bad news. In fact, the presence of Android 4 helps it run much more smoothly than you might expect. Menu scrolling and web page zooming and panning felt usable and responsive. Even gaming wasn’t a complete disaster. There’s one big problem, however: the display is poor quality. We measured brightness at a mere 195cd/m2, and contrast at 197:1, and narrow viewing angles mean colours shift significantly when viewed away from head on. The 600 x 800 resolution, meanwhile, makes everything look heavily pixellated. With mediocre battery life of 5hrs 27mins in our looping video test, no Bluetooth or GPS, and that terrible display, it’s impossible to rave about the JoyTAB 8. This is a shame, since it’s otherwise an attractive, usable low-cost tablet. For those on a severely restricted budget, the PlayBook is the more sensible option.

OVERALL


✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Huawei MediaPad S7 An awful lot of tablet for the money, including a 3G adapter and excellent display quality

H

uawei mostly plies its trade producing “white label” smartphones for mobile phone networks, but it’s also now started making tablets. The MediaPad S7 is the first to hit the shelves in the UK. The basics look good. It’s a compact 7in Android tablet with an 800 x 1,280 screen, 8GB of storage and a microSD slot for expansion. It has a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with 1GB of RAM, and a pair of cameras: 5 megapixels at the rear and 1.3 megapixels at the front. Surprisingly, there’s also 3G to go with the 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. Normally, this is a luxury item, restricted to high-priced premium models, but it comes as standard here. The second surprise is the design of the tablet, which feels exceedingly well made. It’s hewn from a single block of aluminium and finished in matte silver, with triangular plastic bumpers at the top and bottom to prevent scratching. It’s chunky compared to the Samsung Galaxy 7.7 and Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition, but not in an unpleasant way. Finally, the screen is lovely – an


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❱❱ PRICE £266 (£319 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk IPS panel with wide viewing angles and vivid colours. We measured its brightness at a maximum of 348cd/m2 with a contrast ratio of 800:1, and text and graphics look sharp-edged and crisp, thanks to a high pixel density of 216ppi – the third best this month, behind the new iPad and the Sony Tablet P. The MediaPad acquitted itself well in our other tests, too, with a SunSpider time of 2,203ms and Quadrant score of 1,549. The only downsides were slightly iffy battery life (6hrs 30mins) and the presence of Android 3.2, which meant the occasional stutter when navigating the OS and web pages. The price is good, though, and in the final analysis we found it tough to separate the MediaPad from the Xoom 2 Media Edition. In the end, we gave the overall award for best compact tablet to the Motorola thanks to its water-resistant coating, larger screen and infrared capability – but if you value 3G, this is a top-quality alternative.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 A simply gorgeous piece of kit, but it comes at a premium price ❱❱ PRICE 16GB Wi-Fi, £333 (£400 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.expansys.com

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amsung has the broadest range of tablets of any manufacturer, but the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is the best. Let’s start with the physicals: it’s the thinnest tablet on test, and weighs a barely there 340g. It’s so small and light we’d happily use it as an ebook reader in place of a Kindle, and the brushed aluminium rear looks gorgeous. The screen continues this excellent showing. As with the Huawei MediaPad S7 and Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition, Samsung has squeezed in a 800 x 1,280 screen; the difference is that here it’s coupled with an AMOLED panel. This means contrast is perfect and colours leap right out. A top brightness of only 200cd/m2 isn’t brilliant, though – in bright sunlight readability suffers. It’s a beautiful device, of that there’s no doubt, and under the hood there’s plenty of juice to keep


Android running at speed. Processing power is supplied by Samsung’s own dual-core 1.4GHz Exynos CPU (based on the ARM Cortex-A9) and complemented by 1GB of RAM. Disappointingly, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 runs Android 3.2, but other than the odd bit of unevenness in the front-end, there’s nothing to complain about when it comes to performance. Its SunSpider time of 1,940ms is fine, and in Quadrant it streaked ahead of most with a score of 3,803. Battery life is excellent, with a time of 12hrs 25mins only surpassed by the iPad. Note that this score is with the tablet’s battery-saver options turned down to minimum; switch them back on again, and it will last even longer between charges. With such good all-round performance, not to mention the presence of a microSD slot for memory expansion, you may be asking “why no award?” The reason is the high price. At £400 inc VAT for the 16GB, non-3G model, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is just too expensive.

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Sony Tablet P Too quirky and expensive to be recommended, despite some interesting design ideas

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t isn’t every day a device like the Sony Tablet P comes along. It’s the most unusual tablet in this Labs, using not one but two screens, either side of a hinging clamshell chassis. This means it can be folded up and stowed neatly in a pocket. It’s 22mm thick (unfolded) and weighs only 368g, making it the most compact tablet you can buy. Its credentials as a take-anywhere device are strengthened by a 3G adapter. The SIM slot is found under the curved panel backing the top screen, and it’s compulsory – there’s no Wi-Fi-only model. The Tablet P’s pair of 5.5in TFT screens is as impressive as the design is innovative. Each has a resolution of 1,024 x 480, resulting in a needle-sharp pixel density of 236ppi – only the iPad display is better in this respect. We found brightness and contrast varied between the two, the top screen measuring 448cd/m2 and the lower 370cd/m2, but both are good and with excellent contrast of 800:1 and 700:1 respectively, pictures, video and games look great. It matches many of its peers when it comes to raw power, with


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❱❱ PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.sony.co.uk a Nvidia Tegra 2 T20 providing the horsepower, assisted by 1GB of RAM. Results are as we’d expect, with a SunSpider time of 2,203ms and a Quadrant score of 1,549, slightly low due to the high combined resolution of the screens. For the most part, the Tablet P works just like any tablet. Most apps expand across both screens, which then act as one big 2,048 x 960 display. There are circumstances in which the screens affect the way apps work. When text entry is required, for example, the keyboard fully occupies the lower screen, with the app at the top. The Sony reader app splits text so it displays a page on each screen, just like a book. There are also a handful of exclusive games that place a controller, with virtual buttons, on the lower screen. The system isn’t perfect, with some apps (including Google Play) defaulting to one tiny screen. That inconsistency, along with the high price, rules it out of contention.

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Tablets

LABS

Should you wait for Windows 8? W

indows 8 will be arriving on tablets – both x86 and ARM-based – by the end of this year. Should you postpone a purchase until Microsoft tablets have flooded onto the market? Here’s a rundown of some of the unique features you can expect.

User accounts

Tablets are currently single-user devices. Buy an iPad or Android tablet and – barring rudimentary

Although Windows 8 does synchronise settings between different devices, it doesn’t automatically synchronise Metro style apps across all your tablets and PCs. Instead, the Windows Store has a folder containing all the apps you’ve already downloaded on other devices, allowing you to install a game you’ve already paid for on your PC to your tablet for free. The flip side of Microsoft’s approach is that there will be no sharing of apps between tablet and

“Windows 8 will be the first tablet OS to offer multiple user accounts on the same device” parental controls – your kids will have access to all your apps, email and browsing history, with all the risks entailed. Windows 8 will be the first tablet OS to offer multiple user accounts on the same device. Each user account has its own Metro style apps and data, so there’s no chance of your teenager accidentally sharing your business spreadsheets on Facebook. The downside is it currently looks like you’ll have to pay twice if two users on the same device want the same app, because apps are tied to each person’s Microsoft account. It would, however, be possible to set up a shared account using a separate Microsoft login, where you could download and install low-risk apps such as games.

Desktop-to-tablet sync Windows 8 will also be the first operating system that allows you to run the same apps on your tablet as you do on the desktop.

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smartphone, as there is on iOS and Android. Despite sharing the Metro look and feel, Windows Phone and Windows 8 are (currently) different platforms, in much the same way the Mac App Store and iOS App Store are independent of one another. Windows 8 will, therefore, become something of a test case of which is the stronger: the link between PC and tablet, or that between tablet and smartphone.

versions of Office, Photoshop and alternative web browsers can run. There are obvious limitations. Only a tiny number of existing x86 applications are geared for touch control. We wouldn’t recommend editing an Excel 2010 spreadsheet with your fingers and an onscreen keyboard. Although we’re yet to see final hardware, it’s unlikely many Windows 8 tablets will come with optical drives, so installing PC applications on your device could be a problem if you only have the original discs. The biggest obstacle is users of the ARM version – or Windows RT as it’s now called – won’t be able to run x86 software. As a sop, Microsoft will bundle Metro versions of Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint with Windows RT.

A variety of form factors

Windows 8 will certainly deliver a wider variety of tablet form factors than the one-size-fits-all

approach of Apple, and maybe even the more versatile Android. We’ve already seen manufacturers such as Lenovo demonstrate convertible Ultrabooks, where the device can be used in either traditional laptop configuration or as a slate, with the screen swivelling round to lay on top of the keyboard. There will also be a selection of slates with detachable keyboards, docks and other accessories. For professionals, meanwhile, Windows 8 will offer the best support for pen/ stylus operation. Unlike iOS and Android, handwriting recognition is built into the operating system by default – as it is in Windows 7. Coupled with applications such as OneNote, it’s an extremely powerful combination for taking and automatically transcribing handwritten notes. Not to mention the swathes of bespoke, pen-based apps already being used by companies on existing Windows tablets. BARRY COLLINS

x86 software compatibility

Windows 8 won’t only run Metro style apps, but also traditional x86 Windows software. Even on tablet devices supplied without a keyboard or mouse, you’ll still have access to the old-school Windows desktop, where applications such as existing

The desktop isn’t the only new feature in Windows 8

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LABS Tablets

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LABS WINNER


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It remains the class leader thanks to its incredible display, great battery life and huge app library – but storage is becoming a concern ❱❱ PRICE 16GB Wi-Fi, £333 (£399 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.apple.com/uk

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pple has hit the bull’s-eye with its products so regularly in the past few years that the third update to its genre-defining iPad was in danger of being a disappointment. At first glance you’d be forgiven for not thinking much of it – after all, there are no significant physical changes over the iPad 2, bar the small matter of 50g extra ballast. Yet despite that, in one fell swoop Apple has manoeuvred its tablet way out in front of the chasing pack yet again. We’d never stoop so low as to employ Apple’s horrible neologism “resolutionary”, but we agree with


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the sentiment. Squeezing a 2,560 x 1,536 IPS panel into the 9.7in confines of the iPad’s case is a technological feat worth cheering. This may seem like overkill, but it makes a real difference to the experience of using the new iPad: text looks as crisp as you’ll ever have seen on any type of display, and its pixel density of 264ppi is way ahead of every other tablet on test. Brightness and contrast don’t disappoint either; our measurements of 426cd/m2 and 906:1 show it isn’t the absolute best, but it’s close. Everything else about the iPad is almost incidental after that screen, but despite appearances Apple hasn’t rested on its laurels. More graphical grunt has been introduced to address all those extra pixels, hence the upgrade to a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU. Although the CPU is still the dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 used in the iPad 2, iOS 5.1

remains as smooth and stutter-free as ever. Only occasionally, with lots of action onscreen in the most demanding Retina-optimised games such as Real Racing HD, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD and Infinity Blade II, did we notice the odd stutter, and even then it was never enough to affect game play. With a more power-hungry screen and graphics chip, the danger was that battery life would suffer. Again, Apple retains its lead on this front, introducing a 70% larger battery; it achieved 12hrs 32mins in our looping video test. It isn’t as good as the iPad 2, but that time still puts it ahead of every other tablet in this Labs. The rear 5-megapixel camera is a big step forward over the iPad 2, and in good light it produces sharp, usable photographs and excellent, stabilised 1080p video. Again, it’s the best on test. The screen’s extra resolution does have one downside. We’ve

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The iPad’s Retina display is the best ever on a tablet A new 5-megapixel camera improves quality no end The only difference over the iPad 2 is a little extra weight

already seen games and digital magazines increase in size as developers rush to take advantage of the extra pixels, then there’s the 1080p video and higher resolution photos you’ll take yourself, and that leads us to recommend the 32GB model as the baseline. If not, you may find storage capacity quickly swallowed up, and with no way of expanding the iPad’s system-level storage, you could be sucked into an endless spiral where every app installed requires another to be removed. The 32GB iPad certainly isn’t cheap at £479 inc VAT, with the 3G version at £100 more. Even at these prices, however, we’d say the new iPad is worth every penny – if you choose to invest, you almost certainly won’t regret it.

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Tablets

LABS

For your chance to win an Ultrabook Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards, p10

Essential accessories Apple iPad Tuff-Luv Faux-Leather Case se and Integrated Bluetooth Keyboard ❱❱ PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.theaccessoriescrowd.com Anyone using an iPad for work needs a keyboard case in their armoury, and there are plenty on the market. Tuff-Luv’s Bluetooth keyboard case is one of the more unusual. Rather than the standard, hard plastic keys, it uses a rubbery membrane stitched into the fabric of the case. To say this is odd would be an understatement. The keys are soft and squishy and the whole thing feels decidedly weird to type on at first. Even more strangely, we found ourselves warming to it after a while. With a light, quiet action and well-spaced keys, it’s surprisingly easy to get up to speed. Critically, the case allows the iPad to be propped up at a number of different angles, courtesy of a simple series of horizontal rubber ribs running above the keyboard. The faux-leather case is also well padded, and the magnetic flap that holds it all together doubles as a comfy wristrest. There are weaknesses. There’s no right-Shift key and the apostrophe isn’t in the normal place, but we still like it.

Belkin Storage Folio ❱❱ PRICE £25 (£30 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.theaccessoriescrowd.com

Arcam drDock ❱❱ PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.richersounds.com The idea behind the drDock is to set your iPad to work as a high-end audio source. By stripping out the digital audio signal from the tablet and passing it unadulterated through the drDock’s superior Burr-Brown internal DAC, it can improve the sound quality to audiophile levels. This assumes you already have a decent amp and set of speakers, of course, but if you do, the drDock makes an admirable addition to your setup. It’s beautifully made – a heavy lump of aluminium with a full rubber base that holds the iPad securely in place. There’s a simple remote in the box, and sound quality is noticeably superior to audio taken from the iPad’s headphone output. It’s also possible to hoo hook up the drDock to your TV via the HDMI output, or an external DAC via S/PDIF. out

If you don’t need a keyboard, Belkin’s folio case is a top alternative. It holds the iPad firmly in place with a system of sturdy rubberised arms that grip each corner, and wo the case folds back on itself to provide two different viewing angles. It’s nicely made, with soft microfibre inside and tough nylon outside providing just the right balance between protection and slimness, and a useful storage pouch on the outside in which to keep cables, connectors and headphones.

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Apple Camera Connection Kit and Digital AV Adapter ❱❱ PRICE Camera Connection Kit, £21 (£25 inc VAT); Digital AV Adapter, £24 (£29 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk If you’re a keen photographer, the first accessory you must buy for your new iPad is Apple’s Camera Connection Kit. The £25 cost sticks in the craw, but with this pair of small dongles you’ll be able to import photos and videos straight from the camera via USB or an SD card. As soon as you view your first import on the iPad’s Retina display, you’ll be glad you forked out. The HDMI adapter is even more expensive, but allows you to set your iPad to work as a home-entertainment workhorse, pushing everything from BBC iPlayer HD to Spotify to your TV or hi-fi.

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LABS Tablets

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PC PRO

RECOMMENDED

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime It isn’t cheap, but Asus’ top-end hybrid is the only tablet in this Labs that comes close to the all-round quality of the iPad ❱❱ PRICE 32GB, £367 (£440 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.simply electronics.net

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n an effort to differentiate itself from the Android hordes, Asus has so far insisted on releasing only hybrid laptop/tablet products. The Eee Pad Transformer Prime is its third such device, and currently sits at the top of the firm’s range. The Prime follows the same template as its other hybrids, including the more recent Transformer Pad 300 (see p143). It can be used as a plain tablet like most others here; alternatively, by snapping it into its keyboard dock you can turn it into a netbookstyle Android laptop, complete with a multitouch trackpad.

BATTERY LIFE 10hrs 8mins (18hrs 5mins)

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The dock also adds an extra battery, as well as additional ports and sockets. With the two together, you can connect USB peripherals and storage, full-sized SD and microSD cards, and hook the tablet up to an external screen via micro-HDMI. In either tablet or laptop mode, it’s the best Android tablet in this Labs, and that’s down to a multitude of factors. Android 4 is a good start, but the raw performance provided by the latest CPU technology caps it off. The Transformer Prime features a quad-core 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU, and as a result it’s an outstanding performer. It feels smooth and responsive – it’s as close to the iPad as makes no difference – and the benchmarks bear that impression out. Its SunSpider time of 1,803ms and stonking Quadrant score of 3,701 put it right at the top of the table. We’ve yet to come across a game or application that strains

the Prime – it will even play a BBC iPlayer HD stream smoothly, something most tablets buckle under the strain of. The Super IPS+ display boasts a maximum brightness of 484cd/ m2, which is better than the iPad, a contrast level of 896:1, and viewing angles of which a TN panel could only dream. With a resolution of 1,280 x 800 spread across 10.1 inches, its 149ppi pixel density isn’t as good as the iPad’s 264ppi, though, meaning text and graphics look less refined. If you’d never seen a new iPad, however, you wouldn’t complain. The Prime is a real looker, with a purplish, “spun” aluminium finish and a 9mm-slim frame. Even the LED flash-equipped camera is good, producing detailed 8-megapixel snaps, with touch-tofocus adding to its flexibility, and fine 1080p video to boot. Despite all the horsepower, battery life is remarkable. That’s because the quad-core processor is

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The pixel density isn’t as high as the iPad’s... ...but brightness, contrast and colours are simply superb The keyboard base includes a battery and extra ports

accompanied by a low-power fifth core (dubbed the “companion core”) that takes over when brute force isn’t required. In our battery test, which continually loops a low-resolution podcast video, the Prime performed admirably, achieving a time of 10hrs 8mins for the tablet alone, and a total of 18hrs 5mins when hooked up to the keyboard base. The one downside of the Prime is that you can only buy it with its keyboard dock, which inevitably puts the price higher than standard tablets. However, with 32GB onboard and a keyboard dock with extra battery included, it’s in fact much better value than it may at first appear. If your heart’s set on an Android tablet rather than an iPad, it’s clearly the current leader of the pack.

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Tablets

LABS

Archos 101 G9 Turbo It’s cheap, but definitely not cheerful, with plasticky build and a poor-quality display ❱❱ PRICE 8GB Wi-Fi, £216 (£260 inc VAT) ❱❱SUPPLIER www.archos.com

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hen we first heard about Archos’ latest budget tablet, we were excited. Here was a 10.1in tablet with a powerful processor, a capacitive touchscreen and Android 4, all for comfortably less than £300. We’d been waiting some time for a good, cheap Android tablet, but when we popped open the box we were in for a letdown. No two ways about it, the 101 G9 Turbo feels cheap. From the ugly grey plastic finish to the chunky profile, it’s the least appealing device in the this group. That disappointment continues with the screen. The problem isn’t resolution or viewing angles, but the colours, brightness and contrast. Sat next to any of the tablets in the 10in section of this Labs the screen looks drab, and the figures back this up: a maximum brightness of 244cd/m2 and contrast of 406:1 are both poor. There’s also no rear-facing camera, and we were none too impressed with the G9’s stamina: it petered out after only 5hrs 43mins in our looping video test.


The G9 does have some strengths. Android 4 is one, ensuring a smooth response to touch-based operations, whether you’re navigating around the OS, apps or web pages. The powerful dual-core 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460 processor is another. Its benchmark scores of 2,770 in Quadrant and 1,603ms in SunSpider put it right at the top of the table for pure speed, and in games it didn’t skip a beat. The 101 G9 Turbo is the cheapest way to get 3G in a tablet. A recessed USB socket at the rear allows you to add Archos’ 3G dongle for only £53 extra. A slim, integrated kickstand is another nice touch, and the G9 isn’t short of sockets, with a mini-HDMI output, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an externally accessible microSD slot, and a micro-USB socket that can be used to charge the G9 as well as transfer files. None of these strengths can make up for the disappointment of the poor screen and plasticky build of this Archos, however. If you really can’t bear spending any more, it will suffice, but we’d strongly suggest you save a bit longer and get the Sony Tablet S or Motorola Xoom 2 instead.

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Asus Transformer Pad 300 Great performance, but given the weak screen we’d expect a lower price to match the appeal of the Prime

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o word has reached us yet as to when Asus’ most exciting launch for 2012 – the Full HD Transformer Pad Infinity 700 – is set to arrive. But we do have the Transformer Pad 300, the first of Asus’ new wave. It’s essentially a more affordable version of the awardwinning Eee Pad Transformer Prime. Instead of a metal finish, the chassis is clad in textured blue plastic. Compared to the Prime, it’s 36g heavier and 1.9mm thicker in tablet mode, and 200g heavier and 3mm thicker when attached to the bundled keyboard dock. Otherwise, it has all the benefits of the original, with its extra battery and full-sized SD and USB ports. Its 8-megapixel camera lacks a flash, but aside from that and the physical changes, the Transformer Pad 300 is all but identical to its more illustrious counterpart. The processor is the same quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3, albeit clocked a little slower at 1.2GHz, and it’s a very quick performer. With Android 4 onboard, the tablet feels as slick and fluid as they come, and the benchmark results back that up. A SunSpider


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❱❱PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.currys.co.uk time of 2,008ms is quick, and a 4,037 score in Quadrant is superb. It’s every bit as fast as its more expensive sibling. However, there are differences. A smaller battery in the base means it can’t quite match the Prime’s stamina. In our looping video test the Transformer Pad 300 gave us 10hrs 20mins, and 15hrs 32mins with the dock. The 300 falls significantly behind its sibling when it comes to screen quality, too. It’s an IPS display, so viewing angles are wide, but it’s far from the brightest in this Labs. We measured a maximum of only 304cd/m2, a figure that puts it second bottom in this section of the Labs – a big disappointment. Maybe if the Transformer Pad 300 was a little cheaper we’d overlook this fault, but as it stands the mere £40 saving over the more desirable Prime just isn’t generous enough. Give it a few months on the shelves, the price may drop, and we’ll have to revise our verdict; for now, though, we’d advise you look elsewhere.

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LABS Tablets

Motorola Xoom 2 A fine tablet, well made and with plenty of features, undermined by a lack of storage expansion ❱❱ PRICE 16GB Wi-Fi, £275 (£330 inc VAT) ❱❱SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

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hen Motorola was acquired by Google in August 2011, you might have expected its new devices to receive priority treatment when it comes to software updates. This hasn’t happened, however, with neither of the Xoom 2 models in this Labs yet making the step to Android 4. This isn’t a complete disaster, but as we’ve found previously, tablets sporting Android 3 don’t run quite as smoothly. This is evident here, with the home and app launcher screens stuttering slightly as they’re dragged back and forth. Still, the Xoom 2 makes up for that with a host of features. As with its smaller cousin, the Media Edition (see p134), this tablet has been treated with a special water-resistant “nano” coating, which should stave off disaster in case of accidental spillages. Also, on the top edge next to the 3.5mm headphone jack is an infrared emitter, which allows the Xoom 2 to double as a high-end universal remote control for all your home entertainment gear.


The preloaded Dijit remote control app, which enables this feature, even allows you to customise your remote control layouts and “teach” the tablet obscure commands. Meanwhile, the Xoom 2 gets most of the core aspects of what makes a good tablet right. The 5-megapixel/720p camera is unusually accompanied by a single LED flash, and quality is decent, if not outstanding. The screen is a good-quality 1,280 x 800 IPS unit – we measured it at 478cd/m2 maximum brightness with a contrast ration of 800:1 – only a fraction down on the superb Transformer Prime’s display. Meanwhile, raw performance and battery life are top-notch. It scored 1,931ms in the SunSpider test and 1,779 in Quadrant, and a time of 10hrs 54mins in our looping video test is up with the best this month. Generally, the Xoom 2 is an excellent piece of kit, and in some ways it’s superior to the Recommended Sony Tablet S. However, it’s more expensive and has no memory expansion slot, which in conjunction with the lack of Android 4 means it just misses out on an award this month.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Still a very nice tablet, but others have now overtaken it – and at much lower prices

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hen the Galaxy Tab 10.1 first launched, Apple was so worried about the impact on sales, it tried to get it banned. We can see why Apple felt threatened, but now Samsung’s challenge is fading as newer and better models arrive. This doesn’t mean the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a bad tablet – far from it. Physically, it’s still a match for any device on the market: at 565g and 9mm thin, not many get close. The 1,280 x 800 Super PLS screen (Samsung’s own take on IPS) is superb, producing vibrant colours and superb brightness, although with slightly lower contrast at 600:1 than the best in this Labs. We also like the fact that the Galaxy Tab is readily available in Wi-Fi and 3G configurations, and in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions. Although Android 3.1 is hardly cutting-edge, Samsung’s judicious customisations add a little extra something. Samsung’s memo, calculator, calendar and task manager mini-apps, which launch in small boxes atop whatever app you happen to be running, are very handy, and there’s also a selection of desktop widgets, a simplified notifications menu providing


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❱❱ PRICE 16GB Wi-Fi, £333 (£399 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.carphone warehouse.com one-touch access to flight mode and Bluetooth, plus a fully licensed version of Polaris Office. Even the benchmarks look respectable: a SunSpider time of 2,355ms is slow, but 2,200 in Quadrant outstrips many newer tablets. There are problems, however, serious enough to rule the Galaxy Tab 10.1 out of contention this month. First, there’s no SD or microSD slot for memory expansion. You can purchase a dongle for connecting SD cards and USB drives for around £20, but this is an inelegant solution. Second, battery life is mediocre, with the Tab achieving 7hrs 18mins in our looping video test. Finally, despite a general downward trend in prices for Android tablets, Samsung’s remain high. With the base 16GB model still retailing at just below £400 – the same as the 16GB iPad (with Retina display), and almost £100 more than the Sony Tablet S – we can’t recommend it any more.

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Tablets

LABS

Sony Tablet S Lots of features, an innovative design and memory expansion, all at a reasonable price ❱❱ PRICE 16GB Wi-Fi, £249 (£299 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.sony.co.uk

S

ony has clearly put a lot of effort into the design of its Android tablets, so much so that it appears as if it’s deliberately set out to be quirky. It’s an approach that has its risks: we’re not entirely convinced the radical Tablet P quite works, for example. The Tablet S, however, is subtler in its eccentricity, and as a result is much more successful. From head-on, you’d struggle to tell it apart. Like the rest it has a capacitive touchscreen surrounded by a dark, black bezel. Peer around the side, however, and you’ll see what the fuss is about. Instead of trying to slim down the Tablet S to within a hair’s breadth of oblivion, Sony has made one long edge thicker than the other, with a 20.4mm textured spine tapering down to 10.1mm at the front. This looks odd at first, but pick it up and you’ll soon realise the genius of Sony’s wedge design. The thicker edge makes the tablet easier to pick up and hold in one hand, and has the added benefit of tilting the screen towards you when it’s sat on a desk.


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We’re also a fan of the Tablet S’s slightly smaller 9.4in screen. It isn’t the brightest around, with a measured maximum of 379cd/m2, but contrast is good at 733:1, viewing angles are fine, and with a slightly higher pixel density than the other 10.1in Android tablets, text and graphics look sharp. If that wasn’t enough, the tablet is stuffed with extras. As with the Tablet P, Sony bundles a couple of classic PlayStation games – Crash Bandicoot and Pinball Heroes – with the device, and there’s an infrared emitter built into its top edge that can control over living room appliances. The Tablet S’s dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 T20 CPU is looking a little long in the tooth, but it runs perfectly well, and Sony’s development team has worked hard on the integration. The Tablet S feels more responsive than most tablets with Android 3. With good battery life, at 8hrs 41mins in our looping video test, memory expansion via a full-sized SD slot, and an attractive £299 inc VAT price, there’s very little not to like. Plus, once the promised update to Android 4 arrives in the UK (Sony says it’s imminent), it should get even better.

OVERALL


✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Toshiba AT200 A slim and light tablet, but it’s too expensive for us to get excited about it

T

oshiba has a long and distinguished history in the business technology market, but on the consumer front its offerings have rarely made the headlines. Its latest Android tablet aims to buck that trend, and it makes a fantastic first impression. The AT200, despite the boring name, is anything but in the metal. It’s the slimmest 10in tablet on test, measuring only 7.8mm from the front of the screen to the rear of the chassis, and it’s the lightest, too. In fact, at 508g, it weighs a full 144g less than the new iPad. That, combined with its squaredoff edges, makes it extremely comfortable to hold. In most other respects, alas, the AT200 is merely average. It runs Android 3.2 rather than version 4, which for a recently launched device is a disappointment. The screen is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a TFT display rather than an IPS unit, and although brightness at 400cd/m2, contrast at 800:1, and viewing angles are fine, the colours just don’t pop out as they do on the Retina display of the iPad, the Transformer Prime, or the Xoom 2. Inside, there’s more standard fare, with the dual-core 1.2GHz


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❱❱ PRICE 16GB, £274 (£329 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.carphone warehouse.com TI OMAP 4430 CPU (the same used in the Xoom 2 devices and BlackBerry PlayBook), and it isn’t nearly as quick as the Tegra 3 chip in the Asus Transformer Prime. On the whole this doesn’t prove a problem, with a SunSpider result of 2,108ms, but as with many Android 3.2 devices it doesn’t feel smooth 100% of the time. We also experienced a little typing lag, where tapping a key on the keyboard doesn’t instantaneously result in letters appearing on the page, but a fraction of a second later. Even battery life is middle of the road, with a time of 6hrs 46mins in our looping video test. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the Toshiba AT200, and we like the slim, light design, but at this price we expect something a little more exciting. It’s more expensive than the Sony Tablet S and the same price as the superior Motorola Xoom 2, yet it’s better than neither.

OVERALL


✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪


145

LABS Tablets

VIEW FROM THE LABS

T

here’s an enormous splurge of gossip that surrounds any Apple launch. For months, “leaked” photos of the new device pour out from thousands of blogs as journalists speculate endlessly over the details. Then, in the build-up to the launch event, websites and commentators across the world engage in games of guess-tennis, desperate to look like they know what they’re talking about. As it turns out, most of the rumours

Labs we have six compact tablets, but it was hard to find any more devices of sufficient quality to fill the section. Why is this? It can’t be that there isn’t a big enough pool of potential sales. In the US, the Kindle Fire has proved that a 7in device – half tablet, half ebook reader – can sell, and in sufficient numbers that even Apple has to sit up and take notice. In many ways, a compact tablet makes more sense than a bigger one. For gaming and reading in particular, a smaller tablet such as the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition is both more comfortable to hold and easier to sling in a bag than the 652g of an iPad or even the 508g of the Toshiba AT200. We’d happily use the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 as a replacement for our Kindle (if only we could afford one), and the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition makes a fabulous games console and personal video playback device. We also used the Media Edition in last month’s satnav apps Labs, and a smaller tablet works better for this job too. The reason for the slow progression, as always, is that prices so far have been unrealistically high for these types of tablets.

“A smaller tablet is both more comfortable to hold and easier to sling in a bag than the iPad” were pretty accurate this time around. The iPad’s expected Retina display materialised, as did an improved rear camera and more power. One theory that didn’t turn out to be true, however, was that alongside a new 9.7in iPad, Apple would also launch a smaller device along the lines of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 or the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition. Instead, Apple has left a gap in the market for others to exploit. What’s most surprising is that so few manufacturers have capitalised on the opportunity. In this

The principal reason the Kindle Fire has been so successful in the US is that it’s being sold at a realistic $199. It’s shifting in huge numbers as a result, while the vast majority of compact tablets produced by other manufacturers have struggled. Although prices tend to fall (check out the £169 BlackBerry PlayBook) over time, the high initial prices put off consumers. The one exception to the rule this month is the £150 Gemini JoyTAB 8, but one device isn’t enough to jump-start a whole sector. Even if it offered enough quality, which it doesn’t, we’d need a few more manufacturers to join the party. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t buy one of the more expensive devices. For our money, the Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition offers an excellent balance of speed, screen quality and features – and for once there isn’t anything Apple offers that compares with its blend of power and portability. We just wish that Samsung, Motorola, Sony and the rest would start pricing their tablets more aggressively. Maybe then they’d sell more.

JONATHAN BRAY [email protected] SUNSPIDER JAVASCRIPT BENCHMARK Archos 101 G9 Turbo

1,715 Labs winner


1,803 Labs winner

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Motorola Xoom 2 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 Asus Transformer Pad 300

1,803 Recommended 1,931

Toshiba AT200

2,108

Toshiba AT200

Sony Tablet S

2,191 Recommended

Sony Tablet S

2,203

Sony Tablet P

2,203

RIM BlackBerry PlayBook Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Gemini JoyTAB 8

0

3 4 5 (thousands)


400

6

7

348

8

9

304

0

10:08 Recommended 8:50 Recommended 8:41 Recommended 7:18 6:46

Sony Tablet P

6:32 6:30

Archos 101 G9 Turbo Gemini JoyTAB 8

195


200

10:20

Toshiba AT200

200

100

12:25 10:54

Huawei MediaPad S7

244

Gemini JoyTAB 8

7,759

426

379 Recommended

Archos 101 G9 Turbo Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

2,355

2

454 448

Huawei MediaPad S7 Asus Transformer Pad 300

2,337 Recommended

1

478

300

400

500

600

700

WorldMags.net

12:32

Labs winner

Motorola Xoom 2 Asus Transformer Pad 300 Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime RIM BlackBerry Playbook Sony Tablet S Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

484

Apple iPad (3rd gen) Labs winner

2,008

Huawei MediaPad S7

492

(hrs:mins)

BATTERY LIFE Apple iPad (3rd gen) Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

537

Sony Tablet P

1,940

(cd/m2)

MAXIMUM DISPLAY BRIGHTNESS RIM BlackBerry Recommended Playbook Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Asus Eee Pad Transformer Recommended Prime Motorola Xoom 2 Motorola Xoom 2 Labs winner Media Edition

1,603


146

(milliseconds)

5:43 5:27 4:19 Labs winner 0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

www.pcpro.co.uk

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LABS Monitors

With high-end panel technology trickling into the budget market, you don’t have to spend big for a quality screen. We put a dozen 23in and 24in monitors to the test

Budget TFTs 148


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Contents

www.pcpro.co.uk

Dell UltraSharp U2312HM ViewSonic VX2336s-LED Asus PA238Q BenQ XL2420T Dell UltraSharp U2412M Edge10 EF240a AG Neovo U-23 AOC i2352Vh Iiyama ProLite XB2374HDS-1 Philips Brilliance 248X3LFHSB Philips E-line 237E3QPHSU ViewSonic VP2365-LED

152 153 154 154 155 155 156 156 156 157 157 157

Buyer’s guide Feature table How we test IPS vs TN Results View from the Labs

150 150 151 158 159 159

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149

Photography: main intro, Danny Bird; cutouts, Julian Velasquez; repro, Jan Cihak

Monitors LABS

LABS Monitors

Buyer’s guide

T

his month’s Labs sets its sights on the affordable end of the monitor market, but with a keen eye on quality. With basic models starting at as little as £101 inc VAT, and rising to the feature-packed 3D-capable BenQ XL2420T for £275, we’ve taken a cross-section of the best 23-24in TFTs that money can currently buy. On paper, you’ll find little to separate them. Indeed, when it comes to screen resolution, there isn’t much choice. With the 16:9 screen ratio popularised by HDTVs all but killing off the older 16:10 displays, almost every budget monitor from 21in up has a Full HD, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. Only Dell’s UltraSharp U2412M bucks the trend, with its old-school 16:10, 1,920 x 1,200 panel.

The numbers game

Specifications on manufacturers’ websites include figures for claimed brightness, contrast ratio and response time. Brightness is measured in candelas per square metre (cd/m2): between 120 and 160cd/m2 is sufficient for normal use, but it’s common to find TFTs far exceeding that at default settings. The BenQ XL2420T is eye-poppingly bright, and for good reason: once you fire up a 3D game and don the Nvidia 3D Vision active-shutter glasses, the BenQ’s gleaming backlight helps combat the lenses’ dimming effect. Contrast ratio represents the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black a monitor can produce. Most TFTs claim 1,000:1; claimed dynamic contrast ratios should be taken with a pinch of salt. Dynamic

contrast circuits try to achieve darker blacks and brighter whites by continually raising or lowering the brightness to match the onscreen content, but this often results in a distracting yo-yo effect. Good contrast is crucial to a monitor’s performance, and those with the highest contrast ratios can display detail in all areas of a scene. It becomes critical once the contrast ratio drops to 700:1 or lower: at this point, dark scenes look washed out, blacks look like a dark grey, and photographic images lose their realistic look.

Panel technology

Image quality also depends on the quality and type of panel. Many budget monitors use the cheaper twisted nematic (TN) technology, sharing similar specifications for

contrast ratio, response time and brightness. Although such panels boast quick response times for displaying fast-moving objects, they have limited viewing angles. TN is no longer the only choice for a budget monitor, however – this month sees In-Plane Switching (IPS) panels reach the mainstream. IPS trounces TN for viewing angles (see p158), and is also technically capable of providing better colour, even if the colour fidelity of some TN TFTs has closed the gap in recent years. Their compromise comes in response time: place a TN and IPS panel side by side, and you’ll notice smearing around moving objects on the IPS panel. Some panels employ so-called overdrive circuits to speed up response times, but the worst offenders still show through.

1. Mainland UK only. 2. Reliability rating in reader-voted PC Pro Excellence Awards 2011. Where N/A, companies didn’t receive enough feedback to be rated. See www.pcpro.co.uk/links/awards2011.

LABS WINNER

Overall Image Quality Features & Design Value for Money Information Price (inc VAT)

AG Neovo U-23

AOC i2352Vh

Asus PA238Q

BenQ XL2420T

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Dell UltraSharp U2312HM ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

£170 (£204)

£147 (£177)

£115 (£138)

£172 (£206)

£229 (£275)

Price of delivery 1 Supplier Manufacturer

Free

Free

Free

£10

Free

www.morecomputers.com www.agneovo.com

www.morecomputers.com www.aoc-europe.com

www.cclonline.com http://uk.asus.com

www.scan.co.uk www.benq.co.uk

www.amazon.co.uk www.dell.co.uk

Warranty

3yr swap-out

3yr C&R

2yr RTB

2yr RTB

3yr on-site (zero bright pixels)

Reliability rating 2 Main details Viewable diagonal Native resolution Panel type & finish Response time Brightness rating

N/A

89%

94%

94%

N/A

23in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS matte 6ms GTG 250cd/m2 1,000:1 (50,000,000:1 dynamic)

24in 1,920 x 1,080 TN matte 120Hz 3D-capable 5ms 350cd/m2

23in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS matte 8ms GTG 300cd/m2

1,000:1

1,000:1 (2,000,000:1 dynamic)

Contrast ratio

23in 1,920 x 1,080 TN glossy 3ms GTG 250cd/m2

23in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS matte 5ms GTG 250cd/m2 1,000:1 (20,000,000:1 1,000:1 (1,000,000:1 dynamic) dynamic)

Speakers Connectors

(2 x 1.5W)

Video inputs

D-SUB, DVI, HDMI

Extra connectors

3.5mm in & out, headphone out, 3.5mm in & out 1 x USB 2

3.5mm out, 4 x USB 2

Tilt

Tilt

Height (100mm), tilt, portrait mode



572 x 174 x 403mm

512 x 194 x 385mm

549 x 201 x 496mm

572 x 150 x 413mm

547 x 186 x 493mm

(2 x 1W) D-SUB, DVI, HDMI

D-SUB, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort

D-SUB, DVI, 2 x HDMI, DisplayPort 3.5mm out, 3 x USB 2, detachable control panel

D-SUB, DVI, DisplayPort 4 x USB 2

Physical attributes Stand adjustability Internal PSU Standard VESA bracket Size (WDH), including base

150


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Monitors LABS For your chance to win an Ultrabook Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards, p10

HOW WE TEST

We conduct a series of tests on every monitor to pass through the Labs. We evaluate everything from build quality to the ease of use of each panel’s onscreen display; from power consumption to overall image quality.

Image Quality

Using LaCie’s blue eye pro software with our X-Rite i1Display 2 colorimeter, we can get a detailed précis of each monitor’s strengths and weaknesses. The results provide accurate figures for brightness, contrast ratio and colour accuracy, and make it easy to pinpoint specific issues. We start with each TFT at its default, out-of-the-box settings, then attempt to

RECOMMENDED

Dell UltraSharp U2412M ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Edge10 EF240a ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

improve its overall results by tweaking its contrast, brightness and preset settings. If we find a simple way to maximise a monitor’s performance, we’ll tell you how it’s done. We also look at photos, Blu-ray movies and games to gauge real-world performance, focusing on backlight bleed, sluggish response times and other image quality anomalies that the X-Rite colorimeter can’t detect.

Features & Design

We look at each monitor’s build quality, the stability of the stand, the array of video (and audio) inputs, and both the features and ease of use of the panel’s onscreen display. We also use our colorimeter to set every screen to a

Iiyama ProLite XB2374HDS-1 ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Philips Brilliance 248X3LFHSB ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

brightness of 120cd/m2 – the recommended level for comfortable viewing in a room with normal lighting – and measure power consumption. After comparatively scoring these factors, we produce a final Features & Design figure using a weighted average of the various results.

Value for Money

The Value for Money figure is derived from a combination of the Image Quality and Features & Design score, with the overall price of the monitor factored in. Thus, the highest Value for Money score doesn’t go to the cheapest model; it’s the one that crams in the most for the money.

Philips E-line 237E3QPHSU ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

BEST VALUE

ViewSonic VX2336s-LED ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

ViewSonic VP2365-LED ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪

£188 (£225)

£84 (£101)

£129 (£155)

£210 (£252)

£119 (£143)

£92 (£111)

£161 (£193)

Free

£5

£10

£6

£10

£5

Free

www.amazon.co.uk www.dell.co.uk 3yr on-site (zero bright pixels) N/A

www.micom.co.uk www.edge10.com

www.scan.co.uk www.iiyama.co.uk 2yr on-site (3yr with registration) 95%

www.misco.co.uk www.p4c.philips.com

www.digital-fusion.co.uk www.p4c.philips.com

www.amazon.co.uk www.viewsoniceurope.com

2yr C&R

2yr C&R

3yr RTB

93%

93%

91%

www.ebuyer.com www.viewsoniceurope.com 3yr RTB (zero dead/ bright pixels) 91%

23in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS matte 5ms 250cd/m2 1,000:1 (5,000,000:1 dynamic)

23.6in 1,920 x 1,080 TN matte 2ms GTG 300cd/m2 1,000:1 (20,000,000:1 dynamic)

23in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS matte 14ms 250cd/m2 1,000:1 (20,000,000:1 dynamic)



D-SUB, HDMI

D-SUB, 2x HDMI

D-SUB, DVI

D-SUB, DVI


3yr on-site exchange N/A 23.6in 1,920 x 1,080 TN matte 2ms GTG 300cd/m2 1,000:1 (2 x 2W)

(2 x 2W)

D-SUB, DVI, DisplayPort

D-SUB, DVI

D-SUB, DVI, HDMI

4 x USB 2

3.5mm in

3.5mm in


Tilt


Tilt

Tilt

Tilt


556 x 180 x 514mm

555 x 200 x 400mm

547 x 250 x 408mm

578 x 194 x 443mm

568 x 238 x 435mm

548 x 201 x 426mm

548 x 250 x 433mm

www.pcpro.co.uk

4 x USB 2

WorldMags.net


151

WorldMags.net

Monitors LABS

Contrast

Brightness (cd/m2) Colour temperature Ideal 6,500K

400

1,200

1,025:1

287

7,750K

9,000K

5,250K

6,552K

1

4,000K

Delta E colour accuracy

0

0 Perfect

2.7

Less accurate 5

0

PC PRO

BEST VALUE

ViewSonic VX2336s-LED ViewSonic goes back to basics on everything but the IPS panel, resulting in a monitor that performs far better than its price suggests ❱❱ PRICE £92 (£111 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

N

ot so long ago, spending less than £200 on a monitor would have guaranteed a basic TN panel. This is no longer the case, as IPS monitors seep into the mainstream with the promise of great image quality at competitive prices. ViewSonic’s VX2336s-LED is a prime example: it packs in a 23in Full HD IPS panel for only £111. Sit the ViewSonic alongside the rest of the budget TFTs here and you’d be hard-pressed to tell it apart. There’s the same frumpy design, the same lightweight build quality, and its styling extends to a strip of glossy black plastic running around the base and the edge of its bezel; it’s unexciting. There’s precious little in the way of features, either. It has only D-SUB and DVI ports at the rear, along with the power socket.

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While the stand wobbles at the slightest provocation, a notch in the base allows cables to be neatly routed out of sight. The onscreen display is basic, with a brightness and contrast control alongside a few presets for colour temperature, but it’s simple to navigate thanks to the four buttons on the front. For a budget monitor, the ViewSonic’s IPS panel delivers unusual levels of refinement. Test images that often look undersaturated on TN panels oozed with rich, saturated primary colours. If it weren’t for the frumpy plastic body, you’d think you were looking at a far pricier monitor. Putting the ViewSonic to the test with our X-Rite colorimeter, we saw fantastic results. The maximum brightness of 287cd/m2 may not top the group but it’s ample, and a contrast ratio of 1,025:1 is exemplary. Its colour accuracy is up with the best, too, with a Delta E of 2.7, and while

1 2

The plasticky stand is basic and tilts only back and forth Connectivity is limited to DVI and D-SUB inputs

2

the low gamma of 2.04 leaves images looking a little paler than is ideal, the colour temperature measured an almost perfect 6,552K. For a monitor costing only £111, it’s a fine performance. Closer inspection reveals flaws, however. The LED backlight is reasonably power-efficient – the ViewSonic drew a modest 18W when calibrated to a brightness of 120cd/m2 – but it isn’t as parsimonious as others. The backlight leaks around the panel’s edges, and it’s noticeably patchier than the more expensive award-winners this month. Then there’s the question of response time. ViewSonic quotes a grey-to-grey (GTG) response time of 6ms, but that’s optimistic.

WorldMags.net

Compared to the almost flawless performance of Dell’s U2312HM (quoted at 8ms), the ViewSonic exhibited more obvious smearing around the edges of fast-moving objects, particularly with swift camera pans in action movies. At this price, however, they’re not killer blows. ViewSonic has gone back to basics and built a monitor that delivers good image quality at a far lower price than we’d expect. For those craving a taste of the high end, the VX2336s-LED redefines what we expect from a budget monitor.

OVERALL

IMAGE QUALITY FEATURES & DESIGN VALUE FOR MONEY

✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪ ✪✪✪✪✪✪


153

LABS Monitors

Asus PA238Q Asus makes a play for the professional market with its 23in IPS-panel monitor, with mixed results ❱❱ PRICE £172 (£206 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.cclonline.com

A

sus monitors are a regular in the Labs, but this is the first of its professional models we’ve seen. There’s one thing that sets the PA238Q apart from its consumer stablemates: Asus calibrates its professional models to guarantee the best possible colour accuracy. While not the prettiest monitor on the market, the PA238Q is unerringly practical. The wedge-shaped stand takes a little more effort to move than some, but it rises up and down by 100mm, swivels smoothly left and right, and tilts back and forth. Connectivity is beyond reproach, too, with D-SUB, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort all present. The four-port USB hub locates two USB 2 ports at the rear and a further two on the monitor’s left-hand edge. Finally, the 3.5mm audio output acts as a pass-through for digital audio carried over the monitor’s HDMI or DisplayPort connections. Asus boldly states that every PA238Q has a measured Delta E of less than 5, and our review model lived up to this claim. Without fiddling with the onscreen display, the PA238Q IPS panel delivered bright, vibrant colours

154


and natural-looking skin tones. Our X-Rite colorimeter reported an average Delta E of 2.7 and an almost perfect colour temperature of 6,382K. Brightness reaches 283cd/m2, but the PA238Q’s greyish blacks leave contrast ratio at around 788:1. It’s by no means poor, but detail in darker scenes is subtly lacking compared to some rivals. Further examination reveals that the LED backlight is another weak point. It’s bright, but the slight leakage around the panel’s edges is compounded by more intrusive light seeping in from the right. There’s no question that the PA238Q is as feature-packed as 23in monitors come, but it takes its toll on power consumption. At maximum brightness, the PA238Q is greedier than Dell’s UltraSharp U2412M. Even with brightness calibrated to a sensible 120cd/m2, the Asus draws a considerable 24W. Class-leading connectivity and good image quality thrust the Asus PA238Q among the frontrunners. Ultimately, though, the average backlight and high power consumption see it nudged out of contention by the cheaper Dell.

OVERALL


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BenQ XL2420T BenQ successfully takes aim at gamers and movielovers with this 120Hz, 3D-capable premium monitor

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enQ’s XL2420T is quite different to your average monitor. Designed with the rigours of competitive gaming in mind, this 24in TFT boasts a host of gamer-friendly features. Where most monitors operate at a 60Hz refresh rate, and so can display no more than 60fps, the BenQ’s TN panel refreshes at up to 120Hz. Pair it with Nvidia’s 3D Vision kit, matching active-shutter glasses and a suitably powerful graphics card, and you have a setup ripe for 3D immersion. Alternatively, it’s possible to use the ultra-high refresh rate to display non-3D games at 120fps – if you have the PC to handle it. Fire up a game, and the BenQ puts in a sterling performance. 3D images are as crisp and crosstalk-free as we’ve seen from any of the current 3D-capable monitors on the market, and the bright LED backlight does a great job of counteracting the dimming effect of the 3D glasses. Switch to 2D and the 120Hz operation makes a subtle but tangible difference, with fast-moving action games more fluid. The panel’s nippy response time means there isn’t a hint of smearing, either. The XL2420T is packed with features to tweak image quality to the gamer’s advantage. The preset modes tweak colours to look more vivid, or lighten darker shades to reveal opponents lurking in the

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❱❱ PRICE £229 (£275 inc VAT) ❱❱SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk shadows. It’s even possible to scale the image to emulate playing on a range of different screen sizes, to best simulate tournament play on a specified size of monitor. Swapping between the user-created preset modes is fast too, thanks to the BenQ’s little USB controller and its three numbered buttons. Absolute colour accuracy isn’t top of BenQ’s priorities. Colours lack the natural look of the best IPS monitors here, and our test images looked too dark and underexposed at default settings. Switching to Gamma Mode 1 in the BenQ’s menu made a positive difference, however, dropping the average Delta E from 4.5 to 2.9, and lowering the high 2.56 gamma to a much more accurate 2.18. Needless to say, this isn’t the right monitor for, say, an amateur photographer. But with a 120Hz TN panel, a nicely adjustable stand and some nifty features at its disposal, the BenQ XL2420T is the perfect ally for casual and professional gaming addicts alike.

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Monitors LABS

Dell UltraSharp U2412M An old-school 1,920 x 1,200 resolution married with superb image quality, great build and plenty of features ❱❱ PRICE £188 (£225 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.amazon.co.uk

T

he U2412M is one of a dying breed. With most PC monitors adopting the 16:9 aspect ratio and Full HD resolution, this Dell’s 24in IPS panel perseveres with the oldschool 16:10 ratio to give an extra 120 pixels of vertical resolution. That 1,920 x 1,200 resolution may not sound like a big deal, but the difference is tangible in use. Those extra pixels extend the screen by roughly the height of the Windows taskbar – a good inch or so. It’s enough to make the desktop feel more spacious, and particularly so in portrait mode, where the U2412M feels less cramped than its 16:9 competitors. Dell hasn’t compromised on quality, either. The IPS panel is lit by an LED backlight, and there isn’t a hint of bleed or any sign of unevenness across the 24in diagonal. That backlight is capable of scorching brightness if required, too – we measured it at a maximum of 356cd/m2. Image quality gives little cause for complaint. The overall colour accuracy is lower than we may have hoped – an average Delta E of 3 isn’t outstanding – but our

tests revealed few visual nasties. The high contrast ratio of 1,023:1 sees the U2412M pulling out detail in everything from the brightest onscreen elements to the murkiest of shadows, and gamma and colour temperature measure almost perfectly. There’s barely anything to criticise. It takes only a single hand to adjust the Dell’s excellent stand, which tilts, swivels and rotates around into a portrait position, and an oval cutout in the stand’s rear neatly clusters cables together. D-SUB, DVI and DisplayPort inputs are all present, and an integrated four-port USB hub provides two rear-facing USB 2 ports and a further two on the monitor’s left-hand edge. Even the Dell’s onscreen display is a cut above, providing simple and quick access to all the monitor’s features and image presets. Dell has put together a fantastic package with the UltraSharp U2412M. It’s a little pricier than some models here, but with great build and image quality, this 24in monitor is well worth shelling out the extra for.

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PC PRO

RECOMMENDED

www.pcpro.co.uk

Edge10 EF240a It might not be the last word in image quality, but it’s surprisingly capable given the asking price

A

s the cheapest monitor on test, Edge10’s EF240a has its work cut out. Yet, despite a host of pricier monitors easily bettering it for features and design, this budget 23.6in model looks like good value at £101. Pull the EF240a from its packaging and you’ll be left in no doubt as to its budget heritage: not a penny has been wasted in making this monitor look pretty. The thick, black plastic body is ugly next to rival monitors, and the hollow-feeling chassis and wobbly stand are what we’d expect for a monitor at this price. There’s understandably little in the way of luxury. D-SUB and DVI ports are accompanied by a 3.5mm input for the internal speakers. They’re not much to get excited about, with the flat, plummy sound soon overcome by a veil of distortion as the volume control passes the half-way mark. The onscreen display is basic, too, and rather fiddly. Image quality was initially disappointing. At default settings, images were tainted with an overbearing blue tint and skin tones took on an unnatural hue. Delving into the Edge10’s onscreen display soon explained why: bizarrely, the colour temperature is set to 9,300K by default. Turning down the setting to 6,500K transformed

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❱❱ PRICE £84 (£101 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.micom.co.uk its performance. Colours and skin tones appeared far more natural and whites regained their untainted sheen. Our X-Rite colorimeter revealed the extent of the transformation. The colour temperature dropped from 7,682K to a more reasonable 6,197K, and the monitor’s Delta E dropped to 2. For a budget monitor, this is impressive. However, further examination reveals chinks in the armour. While the TN panel is surprisingly capable, the LED backlight isn’t so assured in its performance. The maximum brightness of 180cd/m2 is fine for most purposes, but it’s lower than we’d like. Backlighting is uneven, too, and there’s obvious leakage around the screen’s edges. So Edge10’s EF240a offers a reasonable performance for a seriously low price, but with the ViewSonic VX2336s-LED delivering vastly better image quality for only £10 more, we think the Edge10 is a false economy in the long run.

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LABS Monitors

AOC i2352Vh

AG Neovo U-23 ❱❱ PRICE £170 (£204 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.more computers.com AG Neovo’s U-23 is unusually heavy for a 23in monitor. The reason for its heft isn’t the thick-set chassis, but rather the panel of glass laid over the Full HD panel. The glossy finish initially makes for a punchy, high-contrast image, but colour accuracy is an immediate concern. The TN panel struggles to render skin tones without a pallid and unnatural tint, and darker scenes in our movie tests looked unpleasantly pale and washed out. Put to the test with our X-Rite colorimeter, the AG Neovo’s weaknesses are clearly evident. Colour accuracy is the worst of all the monitors here, with an average Delta E of 4.3.

Meanwhile, the low gamma of 1.82 explains the washed-out greyscales in darker scenes. The U-23 is also poorly equipped considering the high price. The stand merely tilts back and forth, and the internal speakers are disappointing and lacking in fidelity. It has D-SUB, DVI and HDMI inputs, and the headphone socket on the monitor’s left-hand edge is a nice touch, but the USB hub’s single USB 2 port seems a little stingy. With other monitors here providing far superior IPS panels and a better array of features for significantly less cash, the AG Neovo U-23 is a monitor to avoid.

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❱❱ PRICE £115 (£138 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.more computers.com With IPS monitors edging ever closer to the £100 mark, the AOC i2352Vh finds itself surrounded by talented competitors. The question is whether its LED-backlit IPS panel is up to the challenge. You certainly wouldn’t clock the IPS panel from a glance at the exterior. Matte-black plastic abounds, and although the i2352Vh is slender, it’s unlikely to set the pulse racing. Despite those slimline dimensions, however, the AOC has it where it counts. There are D-SUB, DVI and HDMI inputs, as well as a 3.5mm audio input for the mediocre internal speakers and a headphone output alongside. AOC has managed to shoehorn in an internal PSU, too.

The i2352Vh delivered a solid performance in our tests. The 287cd/m2 maximum brightness is ample, and the 844:1 contrast ratio is good enough. Colours tend to look a little too warm and reddish – due to the panel’s low 5,927K colour temperature – but they’re reasonably accurate, as testified by a Delta E of 3.4. If there’s a downside, it’s the panel’s response time. Action scenes in movies and games reveal noticeable smearing and loss of detail around moving objects. So AOC’s i2352Vh is a good all-rounder, but with ViewSonic’s VX2336s-LED offering improved image quality for less, it has to settle for second best.

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Iiyama ProLite XB2374HDS-1 ❱❱ PRICE £129 (£155 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.scan.co.uk Iiyama might be late to the IPS party, but its ProLite XB2374HDS-1 looks like the dictionary definition of a great-value budget monitor. It isn’t the prettiest we’ve seen, but the practicalities are well served. That dull black plastic chassis rises up and down by 110mm, rotates to portrait and swivels left and right. It’s clunky,

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but it takes only a single hand to adjust the monitor’s height. Connectivity is beyond reproach, with D-SUB, DVI and HDMI inputs located on the monitor’s rear panel. The muffled internal speakers aren’t much to write home about, but they’re fine for emergencies. The IPS panel is a mixed bag. Brightness reaches 244cd/m2 and colour accuracy is acceptable, with an average Delta E of 3.4 and a colour temperature of 6,506K. Contrast is lacking, however, and,

after noting murky greys and a lack of detail in darker scenes, our X-Rite colorimeter measured a ratio of 617:1. The panel’s response time is slow, too: even with the Iiyama’s overdrive circuit pushed to its maximum, fast-moving objects caused noticeable smearing. Iiyama’s XB2374HDS-1 is packed with features for the price, but in present company it doesn’t stand out.

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Monitors LABS

Philips Brilliance 248X3LFHSB ❱❱ PRICE £210 (£252 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.misco.co.uk With a striking aqua-blue bezel running around the edge of its 23.6in panel, the Philips Brilliance 248X3LFHSB looks quite different to your average monitor. Turn it on, and its bezel lights up with Philips’ LightFrame technology. Philips claims the illuminated bezel reduces eye fatigue and is capable of giving a “greater sense of well-being”. We didn’t find ourselves energised from extended sessions with the monitor, but image quality is great. Despite the TN panel, the Philips delivers accurate colours and great contrast. That superb image quality worsens quickly if you view the monitor from the side or from above, however, due

Philips E-line 237E3QPHSU

to the narrow viewing angles of the TN panel within. Still, an average Delta E of 1.9 sees the Philips narrowly clinch the top spot for overall colour accuracy, and both the colour temperature and gamma measure almost perfectly. The claimed grey-to-grey response time of 2ms is on the money, too, with not a hint of smearing during our tests. Ultimately, though, Philips’ novel LightFrame technology and fine images aren’t enough to warrant a recommendation. With other monitors here putting in a great performance for considerably less, the novelty comes at too high a price.

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❱❱ PRICE £119 (£143 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.digital-fusion. co.uk For a reasonable £143, the Philips E-line 237E3QPHSU offers an LED-backlit, 23in IPS panel with the usual Full HD resolution. A strip of blue-tinted plastic runs around the edge, and Philips has squeezed in an internal power supply, twin HDMI sockets and a D-SUB input. Image quality is good for a budget TFT. Close inspection of our test photos didn’t reveal any huge problems, and despite a tendency for skin tones to look warm, the overall presentation was impressively balanced. Technically, it scored well in our tests. Philips claims the IPS panel has a 1,000:1 contrast ratio;

our readings put it at 888:1. Brightness is a little lacking, with a maximum of 249cd/m2 proving dimmer than ViewSonic’s VX2336s-LED. Colour accuracy is excellent, though, with an average Delta E of 2.3 only a whisker in front of the award-winners. There are problems, however. The backlight is rather uneven, and leaks in from the edges. The bottom-left corner is the worst affected, with a halo extending several inches into the panel – in this area, contrast dipped to 400:1. The Philips looks a good-value IPS monitor, but others offer better quality for less, and the backlight puts paid to its aspirations.

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ViewSonic VP2365-LED ❱❱ PRICE £161 (£193 inc VAT) ❱❱ SUPPLIER www.ebuyer.com ViewSonic pulls no punches with the marketing for its VP2365-LED. It’s described as a “professional-grade monitor for pros”, and with its 23in IPS panel and fully adjustable stand it certainly looks the part. The all-black plastic body has little in the way of curves to excite the eye, but the stand floats up and down by 135mm, swivels left and

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right, and pivots to portrait orientation. There’s no DisplayPort, but the D-SUB and DVI inputs are accompanied by a four-port USB hub. The 23in IPS panel makes a great first impression. Colours are bold and accurate, and while performance was good out of the box, the ViewSonic was one of the few monitors here that benefitted from the installation of the supplied driver. With that done, it performed superbly, with an overall Delta E of 2.7 and a

maximum brightness of 284cd/m2. However, the low gamma reading of 2.03 leaves darker scenes a tad too light, and the LED backlight is uneven. With a bright strip along the edges and bright spots in the corners, it’s far from the best. The VP2365-LED puts in a good performance, but with Dell’s UltraSharp U2312HM offering more for less, this professional TFT has some catching up to do.

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LABS Monitors

IPS

In-Plane Switching gets its name from the fact that the panel’s crystals all move freely in the same plane. As a result, colours remain consistent from extreme angles.

vs

TN

Twisted nematic panels exhibit poor viewing angles. As the crystals are fixed at one end and twist round 90 degrees, colours vary wildly from different angles.

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Monitors LABS

Results

VIEW FROM THE LABS

Interpreting the results from monitor tests can be a tricky business. As you can see from the graphs below, an impressive result in our colour accuracy test isn’t necessarily enough to guarantee success. Monitors need to exhibit good brightness and contrast, a backlight that lights the image evenly, and good colour accuracy if they’re to prove their quality. The contrast results were generally good across the board, but Iiyama’s ProLite XB2374HDS-1 comes very close to dipping below what we’d class as acceptable performance. With a ratio of only 617:1, its ability to show detail in darker scenes is compromised. Blacks look more like a dark grey, and images lack the solidity and punch of the best models here. The Delta E results indicate a monitor’s ability to precisely display a particular colour – the higher the figure, the further from the ideal colour. The human eye struggles to see differences below around 2.5. What the Delta E figure fails to account for is how exactly the colour varies from the ideal; whether it’s under- or oversaturated, or tainted with a particular hue. As the human eye is more or less sensitive to variations in certain colours, some relatively large Delta E deviations may not even be visible. The results are simply one indicator of display quality, which is why we double- and triple-check with subjective tests such as test patterns, Blu-ray movies and photographs.

CONTRAST RATIO

T

ake a trip to the PC Pro Labs, and among the stacks of graphics cards, NAS devices and assorted tech, you’ll find our giant reference monitor, the Eizo ColorEdge CG275W. It’s as good as monitors get: with a 27in 2,560 x 1,440 screen, a built-in calibration tool and an IPS panel capable of staggeringly accurate image quality; it’s enough to make any professional go weak

“IPS technology is within the reach of budget monitors” at the knees. There is, however, one tiny problem: it costs the best part of £2,000. Few people can afford such a high-end monitor, but as the 12 monitors in this Labs prove, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get great image quality. For the price of our Eizo monitor, you could buy 11 of this month’s Labs winner, the Dell UltraSharp U2312HM, or 16 of our runner-up, the ViewSonic VX2336s-LED. These budget monitors have taken a

huge leap forward in quality compared to previous years. The reason for this quantum shift? It’s all due to the constant trickledown of technology from the high-end to the low-end. At last, IPS panels – yes, the very same technology used by the £2,000 Eizo ColorEdge CG275W, or the Retina display of Apple’s iPad – have fallen within reach of the budget monitor. Eight of the 12 monitors this month use an IPS panel, and several cost £150 or less. For us monitor geeks, it’s an exciting development. If you’re not convinced IPS can make a big difference, see opposite. The cheaper TN technology may have also advanced in leaps and bounds over the years, but IPS usually has the edge. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want their monitor to provide rich, saturated colours and crystal-clear detail with ultra-wide viewing angles? Now that IPS monitors are available so cheaply, great image quality for all is no longer just a pipe dream. It’s reality.

SASHA MULLER [email protected] COLOUR ACCURACY: MAXIMUM DEVIATION

COLOUR ACCURACY: AVERAGE DEVIATION

units = Delta E

units = Delta E

ViewSonic VX2336s-LED

1,025:1

Best value

Dell UltraSharp U2412M

Philips Brilliance 248X3LFHSB

1,023:1

Recommended


Asus PA238Q

AG Neovo U-23

920:1

Dell UltraSharp U2312HM

Edge10 EF240a

902:1

ViewSonic VP2365-LED


888:1



886:1

AOC i2352Vh

844:1

BenQ XL2420T

841:1

AOC i2352Vh

617:1 0

200

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400

600

6.3

2.7

AOC i2352Vh

6.4

2.7

Asus PA238Q

6.4

2.7

Edge10 EF240a

2.7


2.3

Labs winner

Best value

2.9 Recommended

Iiyama ProLite XB2374HDS-1

788:1


5.3


BenQ XL2420T Dell UltraSharp U2412M

Asus PA238Q

2


926:1

Labs winner

5.2


Edge10 EF240a

957:1


1.9


3

800

1,000

1,200

1

2

6.6

Labs winner

6.7

Dell UltraSharp U2412M

Recommended

AG Neovo U-23

3.4


4.3 0

Best value


3.4

AG Neovo U-23 3

4

6.5

7.2 7.8 8 8.5

BenQ XL2420T

5

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0

2

4

6

8


10

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Top Windows Phone handsets tested and rated Find out all the tips, tricks and shortcuts The best apps and games to download

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THE A-LIST LAPTOPS, PCs & TABLETS COMPACT TABLET Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition

FULL-SIZE TABLET Apple iPad (3rd gen)

£242 (£290) www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 372142 ISSUE 210

32GB Wi-Fi, £399 (£479) www.apple.com/uk WEB ID 373648 ISSUE 212

Small and light, with a good screen and attractive design. You don’t quite get the battery life or power of a larger device, but portability more than compensates.

Faster graphics and a better camera, but the groundbreaking high-resolution screen is the reason to splash out – it’s a genuine leap forward. We’d opt for the 32GB version.

KEY SPECS 8.2in 1,280 x 800 TFT; Android 3.2; quad-core 1.2GHz CPU; 1GB RAM; 16GB storage; 802.11n Wi-Fi;

KEY SPECS 9.7in 1,536 x 2,048 TFT; iOS 5.1; 1GHz dual-core Apple A5X; 1GB RAM; 32GB storage; dual-band

5mp rear/1.3mp front camera; 139 x 9.5 x 216mm; 388g ALTERNATIVE

NEW

802.11n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4; 5mp rear/0.2mp front camera; 186 x 241 x 9.7mm (WDH); 652g ALTERNATIVE

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0)

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime

It isn’t the most luxurious tablet, but for an incredible sub-£200 price it performs well, offers seven-hour battery life, and gives you access to the Google Play store. A bargain.

The first quad-core tablet we reviewed, and with Asus’ wonderful keyboard dock too. If you’re an Android fan, this is what the future looks like. £398 (£478); www.scan.co.uk WEB ID 371776

8GB, £166 (£199); www.carphonewarehouse.co.uk WEB ID N/A

BUDGET LAPTOP Acer Aspire 5750G

HIGH-END LAPTOP Asus N55SF

£375 (£450) www.saveonlaptops.co.uk WEB ID N/A ISSUE 212

£625 (£750) www.hmv.com WEB ID 367873 ISSUE 202

Not the most stylish of laptops, but it boasts strong performance in both applications and games, and can last six hours on one charge – the ideal budget all-rounder.

Quad-core power, fast Nvidia graphics, and Bang & Olufsen speakers complete with external subwoofer. It’s an excellent all-round laptop at a surprisingly modest price.

KEY SPECS 2.1GHz Intel Core i3-2310M; 6GB RAM; 640GB HDD; DVD-RW; Nvidia GeForce GT 540M; 15.6in 1,366 x 768; Windows 7 Home Premium; 382 x 253 x 35mm; 2.52kg. Part code: LX.RAZ02.136

KEY SPECS 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-2670QM; 6GB DDR3 RAM; 640GB HDD; Nvidia GeForce GT 555M; 15.6in 1,600 x 900 TFT; Windows 7 Home Premium; 2yr RTB warranty; 379 x 261 x 38mm; 2.79kg. Part code: N55SF-S2342V

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

Dell Inspiron 17R

Dell XPS 15z

Bulky and with a short battery life – but the quality screen, great speakers and gaming power make it a 17in bargain. £424 (£509); www.dell.co.uk WEB ID N/A

Powerful and well built, the XPS 15z has an excellent 15.6in Full HD screen and it lasts a very respectable six hours of light use away from the mains. A near-perfect all-rounder. £999 (£1,199); www.dell.co.uk WEB ID 368896

ULTRABOOK Asus Zenbook UX31E

NETBOOK Toshiba NB510

£833 (£1,000) www.pcworld.co.uk WEB ID 370723 ISSUE 210

£200 (£240) www.johnlewis.com WEB ID N/A ISSUE 214

Core i7 power, gorgeous design and a high-resolution display make this one of the best Ultrabooks yet, at least until Ivy Bridge models arrive.

The arrival of the Cedar Trail update to the Atom processor finally brings Intel netbooks into the media age, with the muscle to process Full HD video. The rest of this device is very nice too.

KEY SPECS 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-2677M; 4GB RAM; 128GB SSD; Intel HD Graphics 3000; 13.3in 1,600 x 900 TFT; Windows 7 Home Premium; 326 x 224 x 21mm; 1.4kg

KEY SPECS 1.56Hz Intel Atom N2600; 1GB RAM; 320GB HDD; Intel GMA 3600 graphics; 10.1in 1,024 x 600 TFT;

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

Apple MacBook Air 13in

Toshiba NB-520-10P

It isn’t technically an Ultrabook, but it’s the laptop after which the new wave are modelled. It’s wonderfully thin and light, and packs a still rare Thunderbolt port.

A luxurious alternative that’s well built, and boasts an older Pine Trail dual-core CPU and proper laptop speakers. Given the arrival of Cedar Trail, the last stock will be vanishing this month.

£916 (£1,099); www.apple.com/uk WEB ID 369001

£257 (£308); www.misco.co.uk WEB ID 372907

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NEW ENTRY

Windows 7 Starter; 262 x 187 x 35mm; 1.18kg. Part code: PLL72E-01W019EN

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Our hand-picked selection of 102 best buys, chosen from the dozens of products tested each month in the PC Pro labs

BUDGET PC Palicomp Phoenix i5 Destiny

HIGH-END PC Chillblast Fusion Flash

£582 (£699) www.palicomp.co.uk WEB ID 366679 ISSUE 201

£1,049 (£1,258) www.chillblast.com WEB ID 369781 ISSUE 206

An overclocked Sandy Bridge processor, a Blu-ray drive, a solid 22in Full HD monitor, and now with an updated graphics card. At this price, it’s a great low-end deal.

Blistering speed, a fine Full HD IPS monitor, both an SSD and a hard disk, and good quality throughout all combine to make this a great all-round choice at this price.

KEY SPECS 3.3GHz Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.5GHz; 4GB RAM; Asus P8Z77-V LX Pro-B3 motherboard; 1TB HDD;

KEY SPECS 3.3GHz Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.8GHz; 16GB RAM; Asus P8Z68-V LE motherboard; 120GB SSD; 1TB

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

Blu-ray; ATI Radeon HD 6670; 22in AOC TFT; 2.1 Logitech speakers; Windows 7 Home Premium

HDD; Blu-ray; AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics; 23in Asus TFT; 2.1 speakers; Windows 7 Home Premium

Chillblast Fusion Elixir

Chillblast Fusion Immortal

A basic but solid base unit that’s deceptively fast thanks to a huge CPU overclock. It’s quiet in use, and well put together.

A pair of AMD Radeon HD 7970 cards provides stunning gaming performance in a quiet, well-built PC with few faults.

£499 (£599 VAT) www.chillblast.com WEB ID 372364

£1,749 (£2,098); www.chilllblast.com WEB ID 373126

SPECIALIST PC Tranquil PC MMC-12

ALL-IN-ONE PC Apple iMac 27in

£624 (£749) www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk WEB ID 372430 ISSUE 210

£1,166 (£1,399) www.apple.com/uk WEB ID 367360 ISSUE 202

It isn’t exactly cheap, and it has no TV tuner as standard, but this beautiful and silent media system would be a stylish addition to any living room.

An iMac update both internal, with Sandy Bridge finally bringing raw power, and external, thanks to the addition of Thunderbolt ports. It’s still brilliant, and not much dearer than its rivals.

KEY SPECS 2.5GHz Intel Core i3-2100T; 4GB RAM; 80GB SSD; DVD writer; 2 x USB 3; 2 x USB 2; eSATA; Windows 7 Home Premium; 3yr RTB warranty; 395 x 225 x 40mm

KEY SPECS 2.7GHz Intel Core i5-2500S; 4GB RAM; 1TB HDD; DVD-RW; AMD Radeon HD 6770M; 27in 2,560 x 1,440 TFT; 17W speakers; OS X Lion; 650 x 207 x 517mm; 13.8kg

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

fit-PC3

HP TouchSmart 610

With its tiny chassis and cooling fins, it’s the perfect PC for locations where space is limited, dust is an issue, or bills need lowering. It’s capable performer, too. Part code: FITPC3-PROWIN7.

A stunning system that combines innovative physical design with a good 23in screen and solid components. The price is pretty good too.

£544 (£653); www.fit-pc.co.uk WEB ID 373813

£936 (£1,124); www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 366928

BUSINESS/EXECUTIVE LAPTOP Sony VAIO Z Series

BUSINESS PC Dell OptiPlex 790

£968 (£1,162) www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 368422 ISSUE 205

£663 (£795) www.dell.co.uk WEB ID 369544 ISSUE 205

Sony totally revamped its tiny portable late last year, lifting out the optical drive and GPU into an external media dock. Expensive, but brilliant.

Dell’s latest PC comes in a tiny yet versatile chassis. It has the raw performance to handle business tasks yet consumes very little power, and it’s customisable too.

KEY SPECS 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M; 4GB RAM; 128GB SSD; Intel HD Graphics (media dock optional); 13.1in 1,600 x 900 TFT; 3G; Windows 7 home Premium; 330 x 210 x 17mm; 1.5kg. Part code: VPCZ21M9E

KEY SPECS 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2400; 4GB RAM; 500GB HDD; DVD-RW; Intel HD Graphics 2000; Windows 7 Professional; 3yr NBD on-site warranty

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

Toshiba Portégé Z830

Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p

The first Ultrabook to focus on business has its niggles, but it’s light, thin, has long battery life and is packed with features. Part code: Z830-104.

It’s expensive, but thanks to superb chassis design and strong performance – now with Sandy Bridge – it’s well worth the cash for demanding business users.

£875 (£1,050); www.saveonlaptops.co.uk WEB ID 371551

From £533 (£640); www.lenovo.co.uk WEB ID N/A

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163

A-LIST Best buys

MOBILE SMARTPHONE HTC One X

MONITORS

CAMERAS

BUDGET TFT ViewSonic VX2336s-LED

DIGITAL COMPACT/BRIDGE Nikon Coolpix S9100

Free, £26pm, 24mths www.mobiles.co.uk WEB ID 374140 ISSUE 213

NEW £92 (£111) ENTRY www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID N/A ISSUE 214 14

It’s big, curvy and has the killer combination of blistering power and a gorgeous IPS screen. It’s the best smartphone yet, and lays down a challenge to the impending Samsung Galaxy S III.

Superior IPS panels are now entering the mainstream, allowing ViewSonic to go back to basics and build a monitor that delivers good image quality at a far lower price than we’d expect.

Great performance, great image quality, a huge zoom and an intuitive interface make this the king of point-and-shoot compacts – especially given the reasonable price tag.

KEY SPECS 1.5GHz CPU; 1GB RAM; 32GB storage; 4.7in 720 x 1,280 IPS LCD; 802.11n Wi-Fi; 8mp camera; Android 4; 70 x 134 x 8.9mm; 130g

KEY SPECS 24in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS matte TFT; DVI, D-SUB; 250cd/m2 brightness; 548 x 201 x 426mm

KEY SPECS 12mp CCD; 18x optical zoom; 3in LCD; shutter speed

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

£150 (£180) www.comet.co.uk WEB ID 372181 ISSUE 208

NEW

1/2,000-1sec; 160-3200 ISO; 103 x 34 x 62mm; 214g

Apple iPhone 4S


Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ150

Faster, with a better camera and the wonderful novelty that is Siri. Not the full revamp many were expecting, though.

A bit dearer than the ViewSonic, but it offers superb image quality, excellent build and a great warranty.

SLR fans may scoff at the thought, but this bridge camera does everything – and does it brilliantly.

Free, £31pm, 24mths; www.vodafone.co.uk WEB ID 370735

£147 (£177); www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID N/A

£308 (£369); www.jessops.co.uk WEB ID 371305

PREMIUM TFT Dell UltraSharp arp U2412M NEW

DIGITAL SLR/SLD Pentax K-r

ENTRY £188 (£225) www.amazon.co.uk 14 WEB ID N/A ISSUE 214

£313 (£375) www.direct.asda.com WEB ID 371119 ISSUE 206

If you own a smartphone or tablet, apps are now a very cheap way to benefit from quality navigation, and the TomTom app for iPhone and iPad is undoubtedly the best of the bunch.

Not the cheapest 24in monitor, but it offers an old-school 1,920 x 1,200 resolution on a superb IPS panel, with great build quality and a fully adjustable stand.

A Canon or Nikon DSLR might feel like a safer bet, but the K-r’s competitive image quality, excellent controls, abundant features and outstanding performance make it our favourite.

KEY SPECS Requires iPhone/iPad (or iPod Touch with GPS add-on); UK/ ROI maps; HD Traffic, £27/yr or £4/mth; speed cameras, £27/yr or £4/mth

KEY SPECS 24in 1,920 x 1,200 IPS matte TFT; DisplayPort, DVI, D-SUB;

KEY SPECS 12mp CCD; 27-82.5mm zoom; 3x optical zoom; 3in LCD;

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

SATNAV TomTom £42 (£50) Apple App Store WEB ID N/A ISSUE 213

4 x USB 2; 300cd/m2 brightness; 556 x 180 x 514mm

shutter 1/6,000-30secs; ISO 100-25600; 125 x 143 x 98mm; 798g

TomTom Go Live 825

Samsung SyncMaster S27A850D

Sony NEX-C3

Performs superbly and at a very reasonable price. If it’s too much, the Go Live 820 is the same but with a 4in screen.

Samsung’s PLS panel technology makes a fine debut, and good image quality comes with a USB 3 hub and adjustable stand.

Looks like a point-and-shoot, but with a superb 16-megapixel sensor. A true hybrid of SLR and compact camera technology.

£158 (£189); www.dixons.co.uk WEB ID 368701

£505 (£606); www.dabs.com WEB ID 370729

£323 (£387); www.jessops.co.uk WEB ID 371128

EBOOK READER Amazon Kindle

SPECIALIST TFT Eizo ColorEdge CG275W

DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERA Panasonic HC-X800


£1,389 (£1,666) www.nativedigital.com WEB ID 368146 ISSUE N/A

£491 (£589) www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 372862 ISSUE N/A

The Touch model has arrived, but doesn’t significantly improve on this. If all you want to do is read books, its simple design, rip-snorting performance and low price are a perfect combination.

The Eizo ColorEdge CG275W is one of the finest TFTs ever made. Image quality is superb, and the ingenious integrated colorimeter takes the hassle out of regular colour calibration.

Now that the HDC-TM900 has disappeared from stores, this is the video camera to buy. It shoots fantastic footage in all conditions and the image stabilisation system is superb.

KEY SPECS 6in 600 x 800 E Ink screen; 16 greyscale levels; 2GB

KEY SPECS 27in 2,560 x 1,440 IPS TFT; 270cd/m2; 850:1 contrast;

KEY SPECS 1080/50p AVCHD; 3 x 1/4.1in CMOS sensors; 12x optical

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

storage; 1yr RTB warranty; 114 x 8.7 x 166mm; 170g

DisplayPort; mini-DisplayPort; DVI; 646 x 282 x 425mm; 13.6kg

zoom; 9.15mp; 3in LCD; 63 x 68 x 134mm; 345g

Sony Reader Wi-Fi

HP ZR30W

Sony Bloggie MHS-TS20K

The store works well; it offers free library loans; it’s readable, quick and handles PDFs well; and it has a great touchscreen.

With a 10-bit IPS panel and a huge 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, HP’s flagship 30in monitor delivers sublime image quality.

A neat update to the pocket camera, with one ace new feature: a 360-degree lens adapter that makes for hours of fisheye fun.

£108 (£129); www.sony.co.uk WEB ID 371920

£835 (£1,002); www.dabs.com WEB ID 361456

£125 (£150); www.play.com WEB ID 367357

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Best buys

A-LIST

Create your own reviews comparison shortlist www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews

PRINTERS

SOFTWARE

CONSUMER ALL-IN-ONE Canon Pixma MG6250

INTERNET SECURITY Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2012

BACKUP/STORAGE Livedrive

ACCOUNTING FreeAgent


£15 (£18), 1 PC, 1yr www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 374038 ISSUE 211

Unlimited, £5/mth, 1 PC www.livedrive.com WEB ID 373558 ISSUE 210

£15 (£18) www.freeagentcentral.com WEB ID 367126 ISSUE 201

Extra photo black and grey inks make this the finest A4 all-in-one for photo enthusiasts, but it’s also very good for documents. You pay a bit extra for the quality, but it’s worth it.

Offers a compelling combination of usability and effectiveness that you won’t find in any of the free packages.

Easy to use, cheap and packed with features, Livedrive is the best all-in cloud storage service.

Small-business owners, freelancers and traders lacking accounting experience will love the online FreeAgent.

KEY SPECS 7-ink engine; 3in screen and touch panel; 2 x 150-sheet

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

input trays; duplex; CD tray; USB; 802.11n Wi-Fi; 470 x 367 x 173mm

AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012

Acronis True Image Home 2012

Sage Instant Accounts 2011 (v17)

It’s riddled with ads, but offers great malware detection and web protection.

Still a very good backup package, now with live folder syncing.

No longer the automatic choice for novices, but still a good package.

£41 (£50); www.sainsburys.co.uk WEB ID 372337

Free; http://free.avg.com WEB ID 374035

£16 (£20); www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 370153


OFFICE ALL-IN-ONE HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus

PRODUCTIVITY Microsoft Office 2010

WEB DEVELOPMENT Drupal 7

GRAPHICS/DESIGN Adobe CS6 Design Standard

£205 (£246) www.printerbase.co.uk WEB ID 372043 ISSUE 208

From £68 (£81) www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 358660 ISSUE 190

Free www.drupal.org WEB ID 364549 ISSUE 198

£860 (£1,032) www.adobe.co.uk WEB ID 374218 ISSUE 213

A superlative scanner, great document prints, obscenely low running costs and a big list of office features make this worth every penny for a small business.

PowerPoint and Outlook see the biggest changes, but usability boosts make this a worthy upgrade.

It isn’t a simple turn-key CMS, but the combination with its add-on modules puts it a step ahead of the competition.

Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator all benefit from interface overhauls and much deeper improvements.

KEY SPECS 4-ink engine; 4.3in touchscreen; 250-sheet input tray; fax;

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

HP Photosmart 5510 If you don’t print as often, this HP is cheap to buy, not too dear to run, and produces high-quality prints and excellent scans.

duplex; 50-sheet ADF; USB; Ethernet; 802.11n Wi-Fi; 502 x 428 x 308mm

Scrivener for Windows

Adobe Dreamweaver CS6

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7

The ultimate document creation and organisation tool for serious writers.

Improved for mobiles, although no longer the dominant web standard it once was.

Graphic design, photo editing and much more in one bargain package.

£121 (£146); www.printerland.co.uk WEB ID 367939

£23 (£27); www.literatureandlatte.com WEB ID 371680

£302 (£362); www.adobe.co.uk WEB ID 374221


PERSONAL LASER Lexmark C540n

PHOTO EDITING Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

VIDEO EDITING Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

AUDIO PRODUCTION Steinberg Cubase 6

£88 (£106) www.printerbase.co.uk WEB ID 353659 ISSUE 199

£83 (£100) www.play.com WEB ID 372220 ISSUE 210

£675 (£810) www.adobe.co.uk WEB ID 374092 ISSUE 213

£352 (£422) www.musicmatter.co.uk WEB ID 366139 ISSUE 200

A well-built, network-capable colour laser with reasonable running costs, a huge 250-sheet paper tray and fast, top-quality document and image output – all at a competitive price.

As much an organiser as an editor, it offers the tools that most photography enthusiasts will need.

A new interface and improved engine make this powerful professional editor more tempting than ever.

An ambitious update, with improvements for editing live recordings and boosting the quality of MIDI performances.

KEY SPECS A4 colour laser; 21ppm speed; USB; Ethernet; 250-sheet

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

Canon Pixma MX885 Can’t match the HP for value, but for a more creative office, its photo black gives the best of both worlds.

input tray; 100-sheet output tray; 595 x 495 x 402mm ALTERNATIVE

Brother HL-2270DW A mono laser with all the features a home office needs, plus good print speed and quality as well. £119 (£143); www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 362242

www.pcpro.co.uk

Google Picasa 3.5

Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11

Ableton Live 8

Offers simple tagging, including effective face recognition – and it’s free.

For amateurs, this is an incredibly powerful tool that costs a pittance.

The best version of Live yet, with a well-rounded feature set.

Free; www.picasa.google.com WEB ID 352597

£18 (£22); www.ebuyer.com WEB ID 367906

£249 (£299); www.play.com WEB ID 257713

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A-LIST Best buys

NETWORKING

COMPONENTS

EXTERNAL HARD DISK Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go USB 3.0

PROCESSOR Intel Core i5-3570K

MAINSTREAM GRAPHICS CARD AMD Radeon HD 6850

500GB, £48 (£57) www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 370369 ISSUE 204

£138 (£166) www.aria.co.uk WEB ID 374158 ISSUE 213

Typically, £100 Depends on brand WEB ID 362152 ISSUE 211

A portable drive that placed among the top USB 3 performers in our tests, comes in a variety of exotic colours, and has a very reasonable price per gigabyte.

When the chips become widely available, we can safely assume this Core i5 model will be near the sweet spot. It’s fast and efficient, and the ideal starting point for a new PC.

For most people, a card that will play the latest games at high settings on a 1080p screen is the goal, and this one will do exactly that.

KEY SPECS 500GB HDD; USB 3; Nero BackItUp & Burn software; 2yr RTB warranty; 80 x 121 x 15mm; 150g

KEY SPECS 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Mode); LGA 1155 quad-core CPU; Intel HD Graphics 4000; 6MB L3 cache; 77W TDP; 22nm

KEY SPECS 960 stream processors; 900MHz core; 1GB GDDR5 RAM;

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

40nm; 2 x 6-pin connectors; 230mm long

Iomega Prestige Desktop

Intel Core i3-2100

AMD Radeon HD 6450

Avoid the overpriced 3TB model, but otherwise this USB 3 desktop drive offers an awful lot for the money.

Until the first Ivy Bridge Core i3 chips arrive, this remains the ideal starting point when building a cheaper PC.

This is fine for playing HD video on an old PC without modern integrated graphics.

1TB, £69 (£83); www.scan.co.uk WEB ID 370366

£70 (£85); www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID N/A

Typically, £26 WEB ID N/A

NETWORK STORAGE Synology DiskStation DS212j

MOTHERBOARD MSI P67A-GD53

ENTHUSIAST GRAPHICS CARD Nvidia GeForce GTX 680

Diskless, £136 (£163) www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 374536 ISSUE 212

£71 (£86) www.lambda-tek.com WEB ID 367642 ISSUE 202

Typically, £400 Depends on brand WEB ID 373696 ISSUE 212

Fast, feature-packed and blessed with the best interface of any NAS around. And with an imminent DSM4 update promising a host of new cloud storage features, it’s only going to get better.

For a Sandy Bridge PC we’d use Intel’s P67 chipset. MSI’s board may not boast enthusiast features but it covers the basics, including USB 3 and UEFI software, at a reasonable price.

If you have enough cash, Nvidia’s 28nm debut blows AMD away: quicker in practically every test, with impressive new features, and more efficient, too.

KEY SPECS Consumer NAS; 2 x 3.5in drive bays; RAID0, 1, JBOD; 2 x USB 2; 2yr RTB warranty; 100 x 226 x 165mm

KEY SPECS Socket LGA 1155; Intel P67 chipset; 2 x PCI-E x16;

KEY SPECS 1,536 stream processors, 1,006MHz core, 2GB GDDR5 RAM,

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

2 x PCI-E x1; 2 x PCI; 2 x USB 3; 8 x USB 2; 4 x DDR3 DIMM sockets

28nm, 2 x 6-pin connectors, 257mm long

Qnap TS-412 Turbo NAS

Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H

Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448

This four-bay NAS device doesn’t major on speed, but good design and a range of features make it the high-end choice.

Intel’s more mainstream H55 chipset best suits cheaper systems and this is a fine implementation.

The power to handle the latest games on a single screen and, at half the price of the leaders, it’s a more realistic alternative.

Diskless, £208 (£249); www.amazon.co.uk WEB ID 374695

£43 (£51); www.overclockers.co.uk WEB ID 356773

Typically, £180 WEB ID 364639

WIRELESS ROUTER Netgear DGND3700 N600

SOLID-STATE DISK Corsair Performance Pro

HARD DISK Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D

£100 (£120) www.scan.co.uk WEB ID 371293 ISSUE 206

256GB, £199 (£239) www.scan.co.uk WEB ID N/A ISSUE 213

1TB, £61 (£74) www.scan.co.uk WEB ID N/A ISSUE 213

A pricey, but very quick router across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz that works with cable or ADSL connections. It’s unreliable on older ADSL 1 lines, though.

If you want the best, you have to pay for it – but this drive is reasonably priced for its 256GB, and it’s blisteringly fast. The enthusiast’s choice.

The fastest drive in our Labs, yet the price for a terabyte – while not exactly dirt-cheap – isn’t nearly as high as you’d expect. A great blend of value and performance.

KEY SPECS Dual-band 802.11n cable/ADSL router; 4 x Gigabit; 2 x USB; UPnP; 76 x 160 x 233mm

KEY SPECS 2.5in SATA 6Gbits/sec solid-state disk; Marvell 88SS9174 controller. Part code: CSSD-P256GBP-BK

KEY SPECS 3.5in SATA 6Gbits/sec HDD; 7,200rpm spindle speed; 32MB cache; 3yr RTB warranty. Part code: HDS721010DLE630

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

Asus RT-N56U A low-price cable router with sterling performance, simple operation and a design that won’t stick out in a living room.

Corsair Force GT

Seagate Barracuda Green

For tighter budgets, this drive is a little slower, but comes in six capacities and doesn’t cost the Earth.

It won’t win any speed awards, but this is a very efficient drive at a good price.


240GB, £167 (£200); www.ebuyer.com WEB ID N/A

2TB, £67 (£80); www.aria.co.uk WEB ID N/A

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Best buys

A-LIST

For the latest Enterprise news and reviews visit www.pcpro.co.uk/enterprise

ENTERPRISE RACK SERVER Dell PowerEdge R620

PEDESTAL SERVER HP ProLiant ML110 G7

SECURITY APPLIANCE WatchGuard XTM 330

£6,083 exc VAT www.dell.co.uk WEB ID 373312 ISSUE 212

£935 exc VAT www.hp.co.uk WEB ID 370198 ISSUE 206

1yr Security Bundle, £843 exc VAT; www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk WEB ID N/A ISSUE 214

Dell sets new standards for server design, with an unbeatable range of features and remarkable expansion potential. It’s great value, too. HP and IBM have their work cut out.

Small but big on features, with an unusual choice of storage options for an entry-level server. Compact, affordable, well-specified and with classy remote management.

Not as easy to configure as, say, Netgear’s UTM 150 appliance, but much smarter. It packs in a lot of security features and is more versatile than any other appliance at this price point.

KEY SPECS 1U rack; 2 x 2.9GHz Xeon E5-2690; 32GB DDR3; 4 x 146GB

KEY SPECS 3.3GHz Intel Xeon E3-1240; 4GB DDR3; 2 x 160GB HDD; cold-swap RAID0, 1, 10; 2 x Gigabit; iLO 3

KEY SPECS 1U rack chassis; 7 x Gigabit; 850Mbits/sec firewall; WatchGuard and Firebox System Manager software

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

hot-swap HDD; supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10

NEW ENTRY

Dell PowerEdge R720

Dell PowerEdge T110 II

Fortinet FortiGate 111C

A versatile 2U rack server that delivers an impressive Xeon E5 package with plenty of features for the price.

Well built, efficient, plenty of expansion room and a wide range of options to juggle the price. A fine entry-level server.

It has every security angle covered; the centralised management options make it suited to SMBs and remote branch deployments.

£7,463 exc VAT; www.dell.co.uk WEB ID 374416

£1,123 exc VAT; Dell 0844 444 4155 WEB ID 369607

From £2,442 exc VAT; www.fortinet.com WEB ID 372340

BACKUP DEVICE HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 SAS

BUSINESS LASER HP LaserJet Pro 400 MFP M475dw

£2,365 exc VAT HP 0845 270 4000 WEB ID 357982 ISSUE 190

£475 exc VAT www.printerland.co.uk WEB ID 374509 ISSUE 213

A top NAS appliance for small businesses that’s affordable, fast – thanks to its dual-core Atom processor – and absolutely brimming over with new features.

Many pundits said tape was dead. They also said that LTO was at the end of its roadmap. HP’s 3000 SAS proves them wrong on both counts.

A lot of features in a compact, affordable device. It delivers on its speed promises and offers excellent output quality, and wireless mobile- and web-printing services.

KEY SPECS 2.13GHz Intel Atom D2700; 1GB DDR3; 8 x SATA II hot-swap

KEY SPECS LTO-5 tape drive; 1.5TB; transfer rate 140MB/sec; 256MB

KEY SPECS A4 colour laser MFD; 20ppm; 2 x USB 2; 2 x RJ-11; 10/100

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

STORAGE APPLIANCE Synology DiskStation DS1812+ Diskless, £633 exc VAT www.dabs.com WEB ID N/A ISSUE 214

NEW ENTRY

bays; RAID0, 1, 5, 6, Hybrid, hot-spare and JBODs; 2 x Gigabit Ethernet

buffer; 6GB/SEC SAS

Ethernet; 802.11n; fax; 250-sheet input tray; 50-sheet ADF; duplex

Qnap TS-879 Pro Turbo NAS

Quantum LTO-4 HH

Dell 5230dn

Impressively fast over Gigabit and 10GbE, and absolutely drowning in features, including superb cloud backup services.

A compact LTO-4 SAS tape drive kit for businesses with big backup requirements and a need for speed.

Good speeds, acceptable quality, low running costs and huge expansion potential make this mono laser good for workgroups.

Diskless, £1,369 exc VAT; www.lambda-tek.com WEB ID 371404

£1,266 exc VAT; Span 020 8288 8555 WEB ID 213831

£529 exc VAT; www.dell.co.uk WEB ID 370231

UPS DEVICE APC Smart-UPS 1500 LCD

NETWORK BACKUP Symantec Backup Exec 2012

NETWORK MONITORING Paessler PRTG Network Monitor 9

£382 exc VAT www.apc.com/gb WEB ID 374788 ISSUE 213

From £970 exc VAT www.symantec.co.uk WEB ID 374467 ISSUE 213

500 sensors, £808 exc VAT www.paessler.com WEB ID 371584 ISSUE 208

You pay a premium for an APC UPS, but it’s worth it. It offers unbeatable management features, and its battery runtime is the only one we’ve seen to come close to a manufacturer’s claims.

KEY SPECS 1,500VA/980W line-interactive UPS; 8 x C13 battery

BE 2012 is a very different beast to BE 2010, and we’d recommend existing users familiarise themselves with it before upgrading, but it simplifies backup and recovery processes immensely. There’s also an all-you-can-eat licence, priced on the data to be secured prior to any deduplication or compression.

Licensed by the number of sensors, and with a proprietary database included, PRTG offers great value with no hidden costs. It provides an impressive range of network monitoring tools and combines them with quality reporting and alerting facilities, making it our favourite network monitoring tool.

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

ALTERNATIVE

protected outputs; RJ-45 serial and USB ports

CyberPower CP1500EAVRLCD-UK

CA ARCserve Backup r16

Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold 15 Premium

A low-cost UPS with a big battery, making it a fine choice for protecting a small-business server.

Unbeatable data protection features, and CA’s new licensing schemes make it more affordable for SMBs and enterprises.

The redesigned web console is a step up, the existing monitoring tools are present, and the price makes it affordable for SMBs.

£215 exc VAT; www.systo.co.uk WEB ID 373693

From £317 exc VAT; www.span.com WEB ID 373744

100 devices, £1,970 exc VAT; www.ipswitch.com WEB ID 370246

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In the mag NEXT MONTH

PC PRO

EDITORIAL Tel: 020 7907 6012 Fax: 020 7907 6304 LETTERS [email protected] SUBSCRIPTION ENQUIRIES 0844 844 0083

EDITOR Barry Collins: [email protected] RWC EDITOR Dick Pountain: [email protected] REVIEWS EDITOR Jonathan Bray: [email protected] DEPUTY REVIEWS EDITOR David Bayon TECHNICAL EDITOR Darien Graham-Smith LAPTOPS EDITOR Sasha Muller NEWS EDITOR Nicole Kobie: [email protected] SENIOR STAFF WRITER Mike Jennings

NEXT MONTH ON SALE 12 JULY

IN FEATURES

Cash-in on your old kit

ART & PRODUCTION Tel: 020 7907 6274 MANAGING EDITOR Priti Patel: [email protected] ART EDITOR Camille Neilson: [email protected] DESIGNERS Jon Ashford, Sarah Ratcliffe SUB EDITOR Monica Horridge CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom Arah, Steve Cassidy, Jon Honeyball, Simon Jones, Dave Mitchell, Stewart Mitchell, Mark Newton, Paul Ockenden, Kevin Partner, Davey Winder

There’s a healthy market for second-hand and recycled kit. We show you how to earn maximum money from your old hardware and software, by safely cleaning and selling an old laptop, PC or smartphone.

Raspberry Pi competition

Find out how your children can create their own computer games using the Raspberry Pi – and then submit your game for a chance to win a fantastic prize.

The real-world guide to parental controls

CONTRIBUTORS Tim Anderson, Ben Pitt PHOTOGRAPHY & PREPRESS Danny Bird, Jan Cihak, Julian Velasquez ADVERTISING Tel: 020 7907 6662 Fax: 020 7907 6600 GROUP ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Julie Price SENIOR ADVERTISING MANAGER Ben Topp: [email protected] ACCOUNT DIRECTOR Karren Cook: [email protected] ACCOUNT MANAGER Sophie Cowan: [email protected] GROUP AD MANAGER Gary Rayneau: [email protected] ONLINE AD MANAGER Paul Franklin: [email protected] US ADVERTISING MANAGER Matthew Sullivan-Pond: 001 646 717 9555 [email protected] AD PRODUCTION Tel: 020 7907 6055 GROUP PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Robin Ryan PRODUCTION MANAGER Kerry Lambird PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Kimberley Montack

IN LABS

Ivy Bridge PCs

Intel’s new CPUs are here and ready to take performance up a notch. We ask the leading British PC makers to put together an Ivy Bridge system for less than £999 inc VAT, so you can expect monstrous graphics cards, SSDs and all the power you need to run today’s top-end applications.

Photo-editing software

MARKETING & PROMOTION Tel: 020 7907 6270 MARKETING & EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE Paul Goodhead: [email protected] LIST RENTAL AND INSERTS EXECUTIVE John Perry: [email protected] CIRCULATION & SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 0844 844 0083 [email protected] CIRCULATION MANAGER Emma Read NEWSTRADE DIRECTOR David Barker COVER DISC TECHNICAL SUPPORT [email protected] REPRINTS Tel: 020 7907 6625 Ben Topp: [email protected]

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Photoshop is the biggest name, but it isn’t the best choice for everyone. Do you need all that pixel-editing power? Or is a ph photo management package more useful for consumers? To find out, we test a wide range of software for SUBSCR IBE handling and editing images, from expensive Orde powerhouse suites right down to simple raw subscrip r your 27 June tion before processing tools. to delivery guarantee of this is sue. h ttp://sub Coming up in future Labs scribe. p c p ro .co.uk Issue 216: Ivy Bridge laptops; CPUs Issue 217: Linux distros; high-end DSLRs

Please note that Labs and features are subject to change.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Price: UK £49.99; Europe £70; Rest of World £90 To renew a subscription, change an address or report any problems, visit www.subsinfo.co.uk

GROUP MANAGING DIRECTOR Ian Westwood MANAGING DIRECTOR John Garewal EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Tim Danton DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Julian Lloyd-Evans FINANCE DIRECTOR Brett Reynolds GROUP FINANCE DIRECTOR Ian Leggett CHIEF EXECUTIVE James Tye CHAIRMAN Felix Dennis

LIABILITY While every care has been taken in the preparation of this magazine, the publishers cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the information herein, or any consequence arising from it. Please note that all judgements have been made in the context of equipment available to PC Pro at time of review, and that value for money comments are based on UK prices at the time of review, which are subject to fluctuation and are only applicable to the UK market.

PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION Printed by BGP. Distributed by Seymour Distribution, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT. Tel: 020 7429 4000 PC Pro is published monthly by Dennis Publishing Limited. Company registered in England, number 1138891. All material © Dennis Publishing Limited. UK property of Dennis Publishing Ltd. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form in whole or in part without the written permission of the publishers.

www.pcpro.co.uk

The government wants ISPs to block adult content by default – but will it work? We expose the flaws in network-level filters and provide real-world advice on what parents can do to keep children safe online.

SYNDICATION & INTERNATIONAL LICENSING PC Pro is available for licensing overseas. Licensing contact: Hannah Heagney, [email protected] +44 20 7907 6134; Syndication contact: Anj Dosaj-Halai, [email protected] +44 20 7907 6132 Certified distribution 54,367 (Jan-Dec 2011)

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OPINION Epilog

JON HONEYBALL can’t believe what he’s seen at the shows in Las Vegas

T

he past few months have redefined the term “busy” for me. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve travelled through Heathrow – and here I am again today, on a Saturday, passing through Terminal 5. The reason? The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show has been coincidentally taking place in Las Vegas during the same week as the Microsoft MMS2012 conference, and two shows for the price of one was too good to miss. Always one with an interest in high-resolution, professionalquality audio and video, I’ve been pounding the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center looking at cameras, lighting systems and serious hardware porn. I’ve mentioned Red (www.red.com), which has made a huge impact in the cinematography arena with its 4K cameras, in previous columns. To put 4K into perspective, it’s almost three times the resolution of Blu-ray, and is the choice for serious directors such as Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame. The Red stand at NAB

I have never, ever seen 3D like this. The image was sharp enough to cut yourself on and as stable as a mountain

WIN AN ULTRABOOK Vote in the PC Pro Excellence Awards 2012 for your chance to win a stunning Ultrabook. www.pcpro.co.uk/votenow

JON HONEYBALL has contributed to PC Pro since issue 1, and has been to Las Vegas more times than his credit card cares to remember. Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/jonh Email: [email protected]

170


contained a wide range of jaw-dropping camera hardware, but it was its small projection theatre that held the crown jewels. How about a native 4K, 3D laser-based projector for less than $10,000? Due to ship later this year, it’s clearly something to watch. And what a performance. I have never, ever seen 3D like this. The image was sharp enough to cut yourself on and as stable as a mountain, possibly due to its ability to project both the left and right frames simultaneously, rather than relying on left/right shuttering. The material shown? A new short film from one of my cinema heroes, Ridley Scott. I came out shaken and stirred, wondering how I could fit such a projector and screen into my lounge at home. Apparently, Peter Jackson’s forthcoming The Hobbit movie will be projected at 4K at 48 frames per second. For a chance to see it in its full glory, I strongly suggest you hunt out a cinema that can do it justice.

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It was the rapid pace of R&D that impressed me most at NAB. Professionalquality video and audio pushes the hardware to extraordinary limits, and you must remember the huge data rates involved. Hence the wave of interest in Thunderbolt-interfaced devices. I was also knocked sideways by the sheer capability of virtual studios. One stand had a large green-screen background, and a few actors pretending to read the news. On the monitors placed around the stand, you could see the entire virtual newsroom with the actors correctly placed into the scene. This, of course, is nothing new – but having an actor behind a virtual desk, complete with virtual shadow casting, all running off a PC was certainly a sight to see. It was good enough to make you question what reality is these days – and remember that this was running in real-time, not some frame-by-frame composited effort taking hours to perform. It’s this suspension of disbelief that the high end of professional broadcast technology allows, and it does so for a price that almost defies belief. Even modestly priced DSLRs can create broadcast-quality video today at a prosumer cost. If you decide that you can’t live with the video compression on your two grand Nikon D800, then just bolt on a native raw video recorder such as the Sound Devices PIX 220 for less than the cost of a decent lens. All of this is incredibly empowering. Back in the 1980s, if you wanted to create a record like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, you needed several million pounds worth of investment, and that was at 1980 prices. The mixing desk would have cost £400,000, the Sony digital multitrack recorders were £100,000 each, and then you needed a specially constructed building to house it all. Today you can do more, better on a laptop running software costing only a few hundred pounds. The same is happening to video. Yes, high-end cameras such as the Red or Arri aren’t exactly cheap, but they’re vastly cheaper than lesser cameras of years gone by. You can work with a DSLR, a laptop and a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro on a decent laptop. We shouldn’t overlook the democratisation that this brings. Of course, making these tools accessible to a wider audience will open the floodgates to a wave of mediocrity. Just look at blogging for proof of that. But it also allows the future Ridley Scotts to work at the highest level too, and to unleash their full creativity. For that, it’s worth wading through the dross.

www.pcpro.co.uk

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“You even get six-star customer support thrown in.” PC Pro magazine

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