Print this article
I know Apple, and you're no Apple
Review "This is a truly historical meeting of the established and new media," said Les Moonves, the head of CBS, about his network's new video partnership with Google. Um, no, Les. So far, it's just a really crap web site.…
Latest and greatest?
Review The W900 is billed as the latest and greatest in the 3G Walkman phone series. Spotted at the launch in October in black and in white, the latest news is that only the white version will be released in the UK. And for the first three months, the W900 will only be available in the UK on the Vodafone network.…
It's here. It's impressive
Review Unless you've been living in a Buddhist Temple in the mountains of Tibet for the past few months you will be well aware that the Xbox 360 has launched in the UK. Although there has been a massive amount of coverage and speculation in the technology press regarding the 360, the general marketing has been slightly subdued. OK, so you may have seen the odd advert on TV over the past couple of weeks, but there hasn't been what I'd call a major marketing push. Perhaps Microsoft is waiting for Christmas to spend the marketing dollars, or perhaps the it knows that pretty much every 360 is going to sell on launch day whether it advertises it or not.…
Format-tastic
Review Buffalo probably isn't the first name that springs to mind when you think of DVD players, but the Link Theater is more than just a DVD player. Following in the footsteps of KiSS, Buffalo has created a DVD player that can play multiple video formats on multiple storage media. Gone are the days when consumers just needed MPEG 2 DVD playback in their living room, now MPEG 4 is as much a pre-requisite as retail DVDs.…
Real overclocking potential
Review The GeForce 6800 GT was a cracker. While Nvidia wowed everybody with the 6800 Ultra, it was the 6800 GT that most people bought, offering most of the bang without quite as much of the buck.…
Entertaining and stylish
Review 
Placed firmly in the musical youth market, the W550i is one of latest edition to the Sony Ericsson Walkman series: a tri-band GSM phone with music, Java, web and email capability. As with the K750i/D750i, Sony Ericsson has again introduced a cluster of phones with a common theme and brand, all based upon the same internal technology. The good news is that Sony Ericsson gets it right and has a selection of solid phones to suit the needs of media-hungry consumers.…
Slim and sweet
Review 
Ultra-compact digital cameras don't come much thinner than the 1.5cm-thick Sony Cyber-shot DSC T5 a supremely pocketable 5.1mp digital camera that will really turn heads towards the lens.…
Turn your Fs to Ps
Review The Avant Stellar keyboard stands as a major throwback in a PC industry that thrives on making devices smaller, sleeker and quieter. Creative VisionTechnologies has created a keyboard that's clunky, loud and heavy. And it may be exactly what you're looking for, especially if reprogramming keys is your thing.…
Too short?
Review 
Alienware is still fairly new to the UK market and up to now has stuck to its guns and produced only very high-end, and very expensive, PCs. But Alienware isn't only well known for its high-end, high-powered gaming systems, but also for its large, stylish cases.…
Cinema on the move?
Review Toshiba's Qosmio range is set up for entertainment and the G20 stands at its head. With a large widescreen display and running Microsoft's Windows Media Center 2005, Toshiba has pretty much thrown the kitchen sink at this thing in an effort to ensure that it can act as a full-on digital content hub.…
Gorgeous?
Review Just like Chelsea Football Club's manager, the D600 is a suave and sophisticated phone that comes across as one cool cucumber. But does the phone have the features to match or is it all style and no substance?…
Outclassed by PSP?
Review We might not like the idea, but manufacturers around the world are intent on telling us that we must and will watch movies on the go. One of the first companies to try and get you to swallow this mantra was Creative, and its latest attempt is its update to the Portable Media Center, the Zen Vision, writes Stuart Miles.…
Treo beater?
Review Much as I like i-mate's Jasjar - aka HTC's Universal - its size makes it less practical for me as a phone rather than a PDA. I'm clearly not the only one who favours a smart-phone device that operates like a PDA but is small enough to hold up to my ear and use like any other handset.…
Back in black
Review It's not so long ago that Palm launched the LifeDrive, the first PDA to include a hard drive, and Palm set itself up with a tough act to follow. Its twin autumn launches comprised one PDA designed to get newcomers interested - the £80 Z22, and one for the more serious PDA fan, the T|X, writes Sandra Vogel.…
i-mode arrives
Review I remember getting my first WAP phone. The hype surrounding the technology was massive and I was expecting an amazing experience. Unfortunately I was sorely disappointed, and WAP proved to be slow, poorly implemented and often expensive. One of the things that annoyed me most about WAP, was that I was well aware that the Japanese were enjoying the benefits of i-mode, writes Riyad Emeran.…
Could do better?
Review It seems like every other week I'm reviewing yet another tiny Pentax five megapixel compact camera. In fact a quick browse through my camera samples folder shows that this is the eighth one that I've written about this year. Come on Pentax, give my aching fingers a break, writes Cliff Smith.…
Flash player perfection?
Review Despite it's higher model number, the T30 actually sits between iRiver's T10 and T20 players (reviewed here and here). Like the T20, it's intended to be a compact fashion statement, but with space for a AAA battery, it's designed to offer a very long play duration, as per the T10.…
High class tech in a non-nerdy case
Review Yesterday Cingular announced that it is bringing Nokia's 9300 Communicator to the US market starting in November. The 9300 puts a QWERTY keyboard, and a powerful computer, into a form factor apparently designed to repel gadget geeks, such is its conservative styling.…
Films in your face
Review Many dubious products have stumbled on the rocky road to true innovation. Before the mobile phone reached mass-market saturation, yuppies lugged around lumps of plastic that were closer to army field radios than items of desirable personal technology, writes Jonathan Bray.…
Wireless wonder?
Review HTC has been tempting its fans with the Universal handset since the beginning of the year. The prospect not only of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GSM/GPRS connectivity but also 3G, and with them a landscape-oriented display and full QWERTY keyboard, not to mention Windows Mobile 5.0, has fuelled interest in the machine since T-Mobile announced in February that it would be offering the machine on its network.…
One for the road?
Review 
iRiver's Flash-based T10 is one of the chunkier digital music players I've seen. It's clearly pitched at a more sporty audience - it's got yellow trim, always visual shorthand for a 'sport' model - and both its size and heft are intended to appeal to folk who maintain an 'active' lifestyle, whatever that is.…
Too small?
Review You've got to hand it to iRiver. Faced with Apple's iconic iPod, the company hasn't tried to emulate its rival by devising a single, clear product identity around which to build its range. Instead, it's gone for a scattergun approach: fire off lots of different models and hope some of them stick to consumers.…
Worth the wait?
Review If you have even a passing interest in 3D graphics, you've probably been waiting for the appearance of ATI's dual-GPU solution. It seems like aeons ago that ATI announced that it would produce a platform to rival Nvidia's tremendously successful SLi, but now, finally I have a CrossFire system in front of me and it's time to see if it was worth the wait, writes Riyad Emeran.…
Too many corners cut?
Review 
Navman is hoping to win back business from its PDA-based GPS rivals by creating a new range of budget units that offer a scaled down version of its advanced rigs but at a fraction of the cost. One of the first, the Navman iCN 320 is for the GPS newcomer. There's no large touchscreen, and everything is controlled from buttons placed on either side of the screen. As for the screen itself, although fairly large, it looks incredibly small compared to the unit, writes Stuart Miles.…
The Captain Scarlet of mobile PCs?
Review 
Panasonic has been making notebooks for a long time, but you may not have come across the Toughbook brand before. The reason for this is that Toughbooks tend to attract a buyer who is more concerned with durability than design and performance. To get an idea of who the Toughbooks appeal to, next time you see a BT engineer working on a junction box in the street, take a look over his shoulder. It's a near certainty that he'll be working on a Toughbook, writes Riyad Emeran.…
We test the top LGA755 motherboards
Review Which motherboard to buy? Determining the answer to this question is, arguably, the most important of all hardware choices. The choice of motherboard defines, in part, just how future-proof a system will be. Making a bad choice can lead to problems that aren't apparent for, say, CPUs and processors. Having to replace a motherboard usually necessitates a long-winded process of reinstalling an OS, programs and data. In short, your motherboard has to be good or your system won't be.…
iPod Nano need not panic
Review In the early days of Windows Mobile smart phones Orange was the UK's leading light, launching the first UK device way back at the tail end of 2002. Since then Orange has been joined by other operators and by operator-agnostic vendors, but the company has kept its own line flowing with a steady range of new entrants. The latest of these is the SPV C550, a blatant attempt to jump on the music bandwagon, but with a few other nice plus points too, writes Sandra Vogel.…
Treo-beater?
Review Just as the great unwashed now think that all MP3 players are called an iPod, so there was a time when all handheld devices were simply known as iPaqs. This must have annoyed most vendors, especially Palm, but HP was never heard to complain, writes Stephen Patrick.…
Apple's master-stroke?
Review Unless you were hiding in a cave last week, you'll have heard about the latest changes made to Apple's iPod range. Out went the iPod Mini, which on the surface seemed like a strange decision. The Mini enjoyed a fanatical reception from the millions of style-conscious consumers who realised that they'd never fill a 20GB iPod no matter how hard they tried, while its smaller dimensions made it even cooler than the original white icon. However, when it comes to dimensions, the iPod Mini looks positively obese compared to its replacement, writes Riyad Emeran.…
Cross-platform development nirvana?
Review Since its arrival in the mid-1990s, RealBasic has been helping amateur and professional software developers create applications quickly by side-stepping most of the complexities other languages and programming environments throw at them.…
Cheap as chips?
Review If you aren't a gamer, integrated graphics may seem the best imaging option to choose for your next PC. Integrated graphics engines may be cheaper than add-in cards, but they can hit system memory performance hard, and since on-board graphics are usually only available on budget chipsets and motherboards, you may also miss out on key features such as RAID storage or dual-monitor support, writes Andrew Miller.…
Orange gets it right, second time around
Review Just under a year ago I reviewed the original 3G Orange Mobile Office Card and was decidedly unimpressed. Sub-standard hardware and poorly considered software added up to a package that, quite simply, wasn't up to the job at hand. This situation was made worse for Orange by the fact that only a few weeks earlier I had reviewed the Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G data card, and it had performed flawlessly, writes Riyad Emeran.…
Overclocker's dream - or too expensive?
Review Think of mainboards based around AMD's Socket 939 processors. Now think of the chipsets on which they're based. We bet that Nvidia and VIA would be on the top of most people's lists, and with good reason, as both companies have a well-established heritage in designing chipsets for AMD CPUs.…
Good for gamers and overclockers?
Review DFI's popularity has risen steadily ever since it launched its Lanparty range of motherboards a couple of years ago. Since then the Lanparty family has grown with the introduction of a 'lite' version in the shape of the Lanparty UT, writes Lars-Goran Nilsson.…
As fast as it's big?
Review We've never done a review of a single hard disk before, but this Hitachi drive justifies the attention. It's the first 500GB disk drive to hit the shelves - Hitachi has got its drive to market ahead of the likes of Maxtor and Seagate, who have announced drives but not yet shipped them. Half a terabyte in a single drive. Blimey! writes Leo Waldock.…
Time to scrap that PC music hub?
Review Germany's Hermstedt isn't a name you'd usually associate with hi-fi or digital music. The firm is better known for its ISDN-based file-transfer solutions for media companies, so the Hifidelio Music Centre marks something of a departure - I suspect the hand of a company staffer who had the product developed because he or she wanted to buy one.…
Solaris 10 on x86
Review If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap. In this series of articles, we take a careful look at Solaris x86, examining the good, the bad, and the ugly, with Linux as our chief point of reference.…
Good things, small packages?
Review Toshiba has been designing and manufacturing notebooks for 20 years, starting with the T110 in 1985, which weighed in at over 7kg, had a battery life of 60m and possessed a green screen. To celebrate, the company has chosen to revive one of its older ultraportable lines, in the form of the Toshiba Libretto U100. Initially there will be this one model but if it proves popular, the line will be expanded, writes Stephen Patrick.…
Entry-level two-core champion?
Review At the beginning of the month AMD launched its latest budget processor, the Sempron 3400+. Launched on the same day was the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Right now you have the choice between single core or dual-core but before long dual-core will become very much the norm, writes Benny Har-Even.…
Jack-of-all-trades...
Review This Brother All-in-One is more all-in-one than most. Although it has a footprint not much bigger than an A3 sheet of paper, it can print, scan, copy, fax, download your digital photos, answer the phone and make you a nice cup of camomile tea. OK, the tea's just on our wish list, but all the other tasks are within the compass of the MFC-620CN, writes Simon Williams.…
Real paper, a real pen, linked to a computer
Review It's been given loads of different names, but my favourite is 'Gerard's syndrome', named after a chap I used to work with. This office-bound ailment is the pest of many an over-worked office type, who spends so much time in meetings, feverishly scribbling down notes, that they never have time to write them all up or action any of the points raised, writes Charlie Brewer.…
Getting Turion right
Review The general consensus here regarding Acer's Ferrari 3200 notebook was that it was a decent, well-featured machine, but no one was really sure that they wanted a bright red laptop. It seems that Acer has taken this on board, and the new Ferrari 4000 is more understated - in fact the general opinion this time around is that it looks damn cool, writes Riyad Emeran.…
Business or pleasure?
Review Whereas a few years ago Nokia was big enough to see off the likes of Ericsson and Siemens, it's not quite the giant it once. Part of the reason for that is the fact it's made some odd decidedly odd handset design choices in recent years. It let Sony Ericsson overtake on styling, its early 3G offerings misfired and its more quirky designs rarely convinced, writes Benny Har-Even.…
Re-inventing the wheel... er... ball
First UK review Apple has insisted that mice need only one button for so long that its stance has become an article of faith for many in the Mac community. What a shock then that this week it should release a mouse with essentially not one but four buttons. And some of you thought the shift to Intel was bad...…
Slim, sexy, yes - but is it any good?
Review The Z1 features the same CCD technology found in the FinePix F10 - SuperCCD HR technology - providing 5.1 megapixel resolution in an extremely svelte package. The camera is so thin because it incorporates a lens with folded optics that enable a non-extending 3x optical zoom lens to be crammed within its body; it's similar to the lens technology developed by Konica Minolta for its 'X' series cameras and also featuring in Sony's 'T' series models and Nikon's Coolpix S1, writes Doug Harman.…
With 64-bit and SSE 3 support, is it the best budget processor?
Review The arrival of AMD's Sempron 3400+ will come as no great surprise to anyone who has heard the rumours about its imminent launch. When it comes to budget processors AMD doesn't normally make big announcements, so those who've not kept up to date with the latest processor developments might wonder what the all the fuss is about, writes Lars-Goran Nilsson.…
What doesn't it do?
Review 
Epson's latest entry into the photo printer market helps fill the gap between its R800 and R200 models with an update of the R300. The Epson Stylus Photo R320 comes complete with a new, colour screen and memory card slots for 13 of the most popular card formats, including xD, SmartMedia, Memory Stick - Pro, Duo, Pro Duo and MagicGate - SD and miniSD cards, writes Doug Harman.…
Perfect portable photo printing?
Review When HP launched its portable PhotoSmart Printer range last year we were very impressed. The print quality was good, the portability great and the overall packages top notch. A year on and there's another model in the range, the 385. Does the new model add anything to the mix? asks Stuart Miles.…
Impressive... most impressive
Review I've got a bad feeling about this, I thought to myself when I first heard that Alienware was going to build a Star Wars-branded PC. I know how much licences like these cost - my wife used to work in licensing for LucasFilm. Believe me, Mr Lucas knows all too well the power of his brand, and he's never likely to undervalue it. That said, if any PC company could construct a Star Wars box that looked great and could make point five past light speed, it's Alienware, writes Riyad Emeran.…
Memory card in innovation shock
Review SD cards aren't exciting products. They do what they're supposed to: slip into your digital camera, PDA or whatever as removable storage. Most of the time there's little to differentiate one from another, bar read and write speed. But this particular SD card is very different from any other SD card you're likely to find and it's definitely far more convenient, writes Riyad Emeran.…