14 million people across the world subscribe every month to World of Warcraft - a massively-mulitplayer online role-playing-game set in the world of Azeroth. That's more than the population of Greece. As a result, there's a growing market of devices targeted at the game's subscribers. The latest is the Creative Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Wireless Headset.

As the name suggests, it's a wireless headset built by Creative. It's big and chunky with a closed-cup design that means that they sit around your ears - blocking out external noise and stopping the roars of orcs from disturbing those around you, too. Each ear cup can fold 90 degrees, so you can store them flat, and the headband is adjustable, just in case you have a freakishly massive head.

There's several World of Warcraft-inspired design features. The outside of each ear cup lights up in your choice of 16 million colours (we went for a sexy purple) and proudly displays the logo of either the Horde or the Alliance. They're swappable, so if you play characters on both sides of the divide, then you can go for one on each ear. There's also a selection of dwarven runes and a few angular bits that resemble certain in-game architecture.

We were a little disappointed by the plasticky feel to the headphones. While the headband feels sturdy and strong, the outside of the earpads is flimsy and we'd worry about it breaking if they were accidentally dropped on a hard floor. They have four buttons on the left ear - on/off, mic mute, louder and quieter - and there's a Mini-USB port for charging, as well as a jack connector for the removable microphone arm.

The headphones are comfortable during use - you'll be okay wearing them for extended periods as long as you take them off for a minute or two occasionally. While the headphones can be used when charging, you won't want to for long, as the heat generated on your left ear is a little uncomfortable. Thanks, perhaps, to the plastic construction, the headphones aren't heavy - though they are a little bulky.

But what you really want to know is how they sound. Well, thanks to their closed-cup construction, there's plenty of deep bass. That's great for explosions and other similar sound effects, but a distinct lack of top end meant music felt a little claustrophobic. The audio is provided by a pair of 40mm Neodymium drivers which deliver plenty of punch, and given the sound isolation offered by the closed-cup design, you shouldn't hit the max volume ceiling too often.

Happily, there's also a whole pile of options to tweak the audio to your liking. THX has provided an audio crystalizer which works to make music and movies sound livelier - this helps a little with the treble issue, even on high bitrates. There's a surround virtualizer which works nicely in-game, but has the unfortunate effect of making music sound a little robotic. There's also a bass booster, an 11-channel EQ, a setting to enhance voice frequencies to make dialog clearer, and a volume normalizer.

As a little added bonus for both serious roleplayers, and also those who fancy a giggle, there's also a voice FX option that can make you sound like various Warcraft characters, including male and female dwarves, blood elves, or orcs. There's even an option to make yourself sound like a village elder, or - if you prefer - like archdemon Malganis.

We found the battery life for the headphones to be adequate for a long session, as long as you charge it when you're not using it. A charging stand or cradle of some sort would have been very welcome for this purpose. Connection is through a USB dongle, the lid of which you'll lose almost immediately. Luckily the set comes with a leatherette travel bag, which you can keep the dongle in when you're not using it. Range on the wireless isn't far - only a few metres - but it's likely that won't be a massive problem.

What may be an issue for you is the price - £150 for the wireless variant we tested, or £110 for a wired USB version. That's a huge outlay for even a hardened Wacraft fan - equivalent to more than a year's subscription to the game. The added features, although fun, don't justify an ear-bleeding price-tag like that over a standard £40 headset like the fantastic-sounding Sennheiser PC 151.

Tags: Audio Headphones Headsets Creative World of Warcraft Creative Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Wireless Headset Gaming accessories Gaming

Creative Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Wireless Headset originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:50:03 +0000

When we first heard word of the Alienware M11x, we raised an eyebrow. The company, famous for its mammoth gaming machines claimed it was planning the world's most powerful ultra-portable laptop, with an 11-inch screen but the ability to play Crysis. Surely this was a mis-timed April Fool's joke? But no - the Alienware M11x is real, and we've given it a thorough going over to find out exactly whether the combination of high power gaming and portability actually works. 

First things first - the exterior of the M11x looks almost identical to its bigger brothers, the M15x and M17x. There's the same sloped vents on the front, the same tiny lit-up alien head on the back, and the same premium glossy finish. It's got all the customisation features of its older brothers, too - including the ability to modify the colours of all the lighting. If you plan to use it in public, you'll likely want to turn off some of that immediately. It comes in two colours - black and grey.

It's weighty, at 1.8kg, but feels very solid to hold - as if there's a massive amount of stuff packed inside. The screen is clear and bright, and runs at a very pleasant 1366 x 768 resolution - more than ample for a machine of this size. We had issues with the vertical viewing angle - contrast disappears very quickly if you're not viewing it at exactly the right angle - and we also found the glossy screen a nightmare when it was sunny, even on full brightness settings.

Inside our review model, there was a dual core Intel U7300 CPU running at 1.3GHz, 4GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD hard disk and - the star of the show - an Nvidia GeForce GT 335M graphics card with 1GB of GDDR memory that can be switched on and off when required. If you're playing a 3D game, it'll give you all the power you need, but if you want to save battery then you can turn it off using a keyboard shortcut. It doesn't feature Nvidia's auto-switching Optimus technology, but that could potentially be an option for the machine in the future.

The combination of a hefty graphics card, fast hard disk, respectable processor, plenty of memory and - crucially - low screen resolution means that games run remarkably well. Alienware cautioned us, before we received it, that it's "not in the same league" as the company's larger machines, so the first thing we did when it arrived was install Left 4 Dead 2, push all the settings to max and fire up a game, expecting to laugh at it as it struggled.

It didn't struggle. It delivered a perfectly playable experience. Sure, framerates weren't quite as high as they might be, but notching the settings down just a tiny bit allowed it to run silky-smooth. With Valve's reputation for excellent optimization of its games in mind, we reached for other titles - BioShock 2, Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft with a massive pile of memory-sucking user add-ons. The M11x ate them all up and spat them out with no trouble - not always on top top settings, but never far from them.

We were impressed, too, by the cooling. Although our review machine hasn't had time to accrue a thick coating of dust, the fan that kicks in when you start up a demanding game will shut off again less than 10 seconds after you finish a game, and the base of the machine never got uncomfortably hot during play.

Unfortunately, as a result of the machine's small size, the keyboard feels cramped and uncomfortable. While using the WASD keys in a game is fine, doing any serious writing work will give you wrist pains after a short while. Still, this isn't the kind of machine you'd buy to write the great American novel on, is it? Similarly, you're not going to be able to do much gaming with the trackpad, but we were impressed with its tactility during general use.

The battery is an 8-cell number which Alienware has been forced to integrate into the chassis - meaning that it's not user-replaceable. That won't be an issue when you buy the device, but after a year or two of use - especially if you leave it plugged in a lot - you might find that you're stuck with a dead machine that has to be shipped off to Dell for a replacement. It also means that you can't pack a spare for it if you know you'll be out of range of a charger for some time.

Tags: Hardware Laptops Netbooks Alienware Alienware m11x

Alienware M11x notebook originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:16:22 +0000

Philip K Dick can rest happily in the knowledge that his legacy is safe. Despite complaints from his descendants, Google hasn't done anything to smear the Nexus One name, which it shares with the Androids in Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". If anything, the search giant may even have given it greater status with a new generation who aren't as familiar with the book.

But let's start at the beginning. The Nexus One we're talking about here isn't a robot - it's a mobile phone created, marketed and sold by Google with a little help from HTC. It runs the company's Android OS, and - like every other high profile handset that gets released - has been labelled as an "iPhone Killer". But the big question is - can it stand up to the waves of hype?

A 3.7-inch AMOLED multi-touch touchscreen, running at a luxurious 480 x 800 pixels, is the centre of attention. That's 252.15 pixels per inch - a very respectable density that ensures that circles on the screen actually look like circles - not like jagged approximations. It's clear, bright even in sunlight, and video content looks fantastic with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio. There's a sliding scale to adjust the brightness, or an automatic option will read ambient light and set it accordingly - we found that it aimed a little low here, but does has the benefit of saving battery life.

The rest of the outside of the Nexus One is plastic. There's a mechanical trackball at the bottom, which comes in handy while editing text but rarely otherwise. Above that are four touch-sensitive areas of the screen that serve as back, menu, home and search buttons. There's a volume rocker on the side, a power button on the top next to the 3.5mm headphone socket, and a Micro-USB charging socket on the bottom. Also on the bottom are four connection points for the Nexus One's accompanying dock - more on which shortly.

It feels solid in your hand, but it doesn't look amazing. It doesn't look as good as the iPhone does. Without turning it on, it won't blow away people who see it and don't know what it is. We're not saying that it looks terrible - it doesn't - it merely looks functional, and that's not quite good enough. The Nexus One bears more in common with typical US smartphone design than it does to HTC's other Android models - all curved edges everywhere, in the same way that the CDMA Hero looks rubbish compared to the GSM one. Maybe it's just that we miss the chin.

Inside, the brains of the operation is Qualcomm's 1GHz QSD 8250 Snapdragon ARM processor. It's mightily fast. If you're upgrading from a previous Android phone, like the Hero or Magic, or even an iPhone 2G or 3G, then you'll find it to be hugely more responsive. If you're upgrading from an even older device, you'll be blown away. It's not perfect - there's the occasional split-second of lag - but it's as fast as we've seen on a phone to date. It's pretty much equivalent to the excellent iPhone 3GS in zipping around web pages, viewing photos, or just navigating menus.

It comes with 512MB of internal memory, and a 4GB microSD card for storage. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of Android you can't store apps on the SD card - they have to sit in the memory, meaning that you're entirely likely to run out of space if you go crazy downloading extra content. This is a problem, but not one that's exclusive to the Nexus One, which actually has more storage than most of its Android competitors. The microSD slot can take cards up to 32GB, if you want to go crazy loading music onto it.

Unlike previous Android versions, the music player on the Nexus One is actually rather impressive. It looks great, it's intuitive, and if you don't like it you can always download one that you do like - a key advantage of Android over the iPhone, which refuses to allow third-party music apps, browsers and other apps that Apple provides out of the box. The Nexus One's camera and photo browsing apps are considerably improved over previous versions of Android too.

While this isn't a review of Android itself, it's worth mentioning a little about the platform for those who aren't too familiar with it. Android is a platform built by Google which is free for manufacturers to put on phones. The idea behind it is to considerably improve the experience that consumers get on their phones so that they use mobile web more. More people using the mobile web means more people being displayed Google's adverts - which is how the company makes its money from Android.

The company has therefore tried to create the best experience it possibly can, and has done a good job. If you're a user of Google's suite of web apps - calendar, mail, contacts, etc, then you'll find everything instantly set-up for you. Even if you're not, it's trivial to get your email and information synced, and stored in the cloud. The device needs little backing up, because everything is kept on Google's servers. The only exception is images taken with the camera - which you'll need to back up manually.

But while Android's experience is excellent, far beyond most of its competitors, it's still a little more complex to use than the iPhone. While it has a number of sizeable benefits over the iPhone - multitasking, Flash compatibility, much more customisation of the UI - the trade-off is that it's not as simple to use for technophobes. You might want to think twice before recommending an Android device to your Grandma.

Going back more specifically to the Nexus One, it runs version 2.1 of Android. Some have criticised the Android platform for rolling out so many phones, so quickly, that any device you buy is relatively obsolete within 6 months - such is the pace of development. With many phone contracts lasting 18 months or more, getting stuck with a handset that's rapidly made redundant can be frustrating - just ask the legions of HTC Hero owners who haven't been updated from Android 1.5. That might be a consideration for you, especially with the HTC Desire on the horizon, looking to snatch the crown of top Droid Dog from the Nexus One.

Some have claimed that the Nexus One is inferior to HTC's other handsets because it doesn't come with HTC's Sense UI. That's not true. While Sense is great, we didn't especially miss it in the Nexus One - the most recent version of Android has fixed a lot of the problems that Sense had previously patched up, with the sole exception of the keyboard. HTC's Sense keyboard is far superior to the default Android one. We really missed being able to long-press keys to get punctuation, rather than having to switch to a different set of keys entirely.

We should mention a couple of other issues too. For some reason, the Nexus One doesn't like WEP encryption on Wi-Fi. It's fine with open networks, and it's fine with WPA, but if you try and get it to connect to WEP, it'll try and get an IP address for a while before declaring, poignantly, "Failed". There doesn't seem to be a way around this, except to change your router to WPA encryption instead. Though, that's not a bad thing - it's relatively trivial to crack a WEP connection, so you should opt for WPA-2 if you have the choice.

Also, our handset - ordered from the US - didn't come with any network settings preloaded, meaning that you'll need to track down the right servers yourself to get 3G and MMS capabilities on your handset. You should be able to call up your network to get them, but it's an extra step of hassle that you'll want to be prepared for before your handset arrives. Of course, if you pick one up with a contract from a network, you won't have that issue.

The camera has a 5-megapixel sensor, with support for video in 720 x 480 resolution. It has an LED flash and autofocus, as well as the ability to control white balance and add colour effects. Test images taken were adequate, if a little flat, in good light - with plenty of detail visible in macro shots. In darker environments, the flash proved a little too glaring, and shots with flash turned off were noisy and underexposed. In short, it's not going to replace a real camera, but it'll do in a pinch.

Call quality was great - we had no problems hearing anyone in our testing, and they had no problems hearing us - even in noisy environments. The Nexus One actually has two microphones - one on the back - to reduce background noise during phone conversations with a voice processor, and this seems to work well.

There's an optional dock you can purchase with your order, which allows you to charge the device while keeping it upright and in front of you. When you plug it in, it automatically starts a clock application which has the time in big bold letters, the weather, battery life, alarm status and shortcuts to music, pictures and the normal homescreen. There's also a button on this screen to turn off the backlight, so you can have it by your bed as an alarm clock. The dock has a 3.5mm jack connector, and when docked it'll play through that instead - allowing you to hook it up to your stereo.

We found the 1400mAh battery's lifespan to be about equivalent to competitors in our testing - about a day. You'll need to charge it every night. We had hoped that the OLED screen would get a little more juice out of the battery, but it seems like that juice has been directed elsewhere instead - probably at the 1GHz processor. Happily, the battery is fully removable, so if it conks out then you can get a replacement relatively easily. 

Related links:

• Buy it! - Google Nexus One

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Google Nexus One HTC Android

Google Nexus One originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:34:08 +0000

You're hardcore, aren't you? You cracked guitar and bass within months of picking up Guitar Hero. You saved up for the full band kit, and now you're blasting through "Won't Get Fooled Again" on drums on Expert. But something doesn't feel right. Your pedal can't take the strain, the green drum is sagging ominously and you've lost a cymbal.

But instead of just grabbing another normal drum kit, you spot Logitech's rather meatier offering - a nearly full-size electronic kit that might be able to take the pounding that you'll inevitably be giving it. But is it worth the extra cash over the regular drums? We put it through its paces to find out.

It comes in a massive impressive-looking box, which opens up with the drums already attached to the crossbar. Setup is very easy - you just twist out the legs, unscrew, position the drums at the right angle, and then add the cymbals and Xbox 360 interface unit. Then you just connect some handily colour-coded cables. It took us about 20 minutes, at most.

While the adjustability is considerably improved over the default drum unit, it's still not quite as good as we'd like. It's not possible to change the height of the cymbals, for example, and the highest drum setting still knocked our knees a little when we tried to get under it. A smidge more height would have been welcome. Our review unit also sat a little wobbly on the floor - though this was easily rectified with a bit of folded up paper - pub-table style.

When everything was plugged in and set-up, we stuck in Band Hero and fired up the Spice Girls' "Wannabe". Hitting the pads with the sticks, we immediately felt 20 times cooler than we've ever felt playing Guitar Hero on the little plastic drums before. The stick bounce is just right, the increased size of the rig is reassuring, and the metal-topped pedal feels sturdy as a rock.

Except we promptly failed the song, because we weren't quite used to where the pads were, and kept missing. But when we got used to it, after an evening's play, we felt like rock gods again. The alcohol may have helped a little, but we were impressed how different the kit feels to the bog-standard Guitar Hero drum set. 

One flag we should raise is that these drums are noisy. While there are plenty of silencing options available, if you need them, be aware that the default kit - particularly the drums - won't make you popular with the neighbours. Overall, however, the durability of the kit was impressive - we gave it a pounding and it stood up to the punishment without any complaint.

The aforementioned size of the kit helps too. It's considerably larger than the default edition, meaning that you'll need a bigger space to keep it in - worth considering if you live in a small flat, and don't expect to stick them in a bag to take to a friend's house - they'll only just fit in the boot of a car. Luckily, the foldability helps here.

You might think that one nice side-effect of the kit being based on real electronic drums is that they can be used as real electronic drums. Unfortunately not. Although there's a MIDI port on the back of the Xbox control panel, it's a MIDI-in port for future expansion. That's a missed opportunity, we think - a MIDI-out port would add a lot of value to those considering moving to real drums.

We haven't had any issues with battery life - the device is rated for about 50 hours of play, and it'll turn off automatically after a while if you're not using it. It takes 2 AA batteries, so they're easy to replace too.

Oh, and if you're a Rock Band drummer, you'll be pleased to hear that it's compatible with that series too - though you'll need to mentally switch one of the four drums of the Rock Band kit to a cymbal, which may prove a little confusing at first. You'll get used to it over time.

Tags: Gaming Xbox 360 Music games Rock Band Guitar Hero Logitech Logitech Wireless Drum Controller

Logitech Wireless Drum Controller for Xbox 360 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

If you're someone who regularly finds themselves driving, or cycling, or skiing, or cooking, or cleaning, or doing anything - for that matter - which requires your hands and at least a portion of your concentration, then you'll know the value of a Bluetooth headset. 

But in the more energetic of the aforementioned pursuits, you'll find that a regular ol' one-eared headset won't do. They fall out. When you're halfway down a Colorado piste, or leaning over your stew, the last thing you want that little bit of expensive plastic to do is fall out.

Enter Sony Ericsson's MW600 - a teeny-tiny device with a big clip that lets you turn any pair of headphones into a Bluetooth headset. But is it worth shelling out your hard-earned cash for? Do you really need the MW600 in your life?

Look down at your little finger on your left hand. The MW600 is about the same size as that. It has a clip on the back that reaches two-thirds of the way down, and an OLED display on the front. The top has a headphone jack, the bottom has a Micro-USB socket, and there's power, call, volume and music controls scattered all over.

Pairing is simple and quick - when you turn the device on it'll automatically start searching. Turn on Bluetooth on your phone - or any other A2DP device, and you should spot MW600 in the list of things to connect to. Select it, and you should be paired - it's that easy.

Once you're paired, plug in your favourite pair of headphones - anything with a 3.5mm headphone jack will work - and you're good to go. A microphone on the device itself will allow you to chat away to anyone on the phone, and you'll look like you're an insane person, talking to yourself, when you're walking down the street.

The fact you can use your own headphones - or even speakers - is an absolute godsend. Too often we've struggled with the fit of Bluetooth headsets, and the option to switch from a tiny headset to a whopping great pair of cans at will is very welcome. Sound quality was impressive, with all the detail in the sound coming through warmly.

If you've got a Sony Ericsson phone, you'll be able to send song info to the screen of the device, but most smartphones should also allow you to skip tracks and do voice commands too, albeit with a little bit of delay between you pressing the button and it actually carrying out the action.

A word of caution, though - using the Spotify app on the Android-1.5-powered HTC Hero, we found that the phone's default music player would cut in when we hit pause, rather than Spotify just stopping. If you're not using a Sony Ericsson phone, your mileage may vary here.

Holding down the play button brings you to a menu where you can also select to listen to AM or FM radio through the device. We found the navigation to be exceptionally fiddly, but it's something you'll get used to in time. Just don't expect to be able to hand it to your mother and expect her to use it off the bat.

Battery life is respectable. We charged it fully once, and haven't managed to drain it over a week with medium usage. Sony Ericsson reckons you'll get about 10 hours out of it before needing to recharge, which you can do with a supplied Micro-USB cable.

Tags: Audio Headsets Bluetooth Sony Ericsson Mobile phone accessories Radios Sony Ericsson MW600

Sony Ericsson MW600 Bluetooth headset originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:45:53 +0000

Dell surprised many people with its announcement at CES that the next Alienware machine to join the company's hardcore gaming line-up would be a tiny 11-incher that had more in common with a netbook than a traditional gaming PC.

But despite its diminutive dimensions, the M11x we reviewed crammed rather a lot into its tiny chassis. It packs an Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a switchable 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 335M graphics card which can be turned on and off at whim, an 11.6-inch TFT display running at 1366 x 768 resolution, and a 250GB hard drive.

There's a massive range of connectivity options, too - on the physical side, there's 3x USB ports, HDMI-out, a DisplayPort connector, Mini FireWire, VGA, card reader and even a slot for a SIM card. On the wireless side, there's 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and the aforementioned 3G if you've got a handy SIM card lying around.

We've had a couple of opportunities to get hands-on with the M11x now, and every time we've been impressed. The dinky little thing looks just like a full-size Alienware M15x or M17x, but as if a mad scientist has turned a shrinking ray on it. There's the same speaker ports, the same alien head staring at you from above the keyboard, the same backlighting and the same applications that let you tweak all of the above to customise how you want it.

We've never been the biggest fans in the world of Alienware's big alien head design - finding it a bit gaudy and - if we're frank - a little embarrassing. Thankfully the company has toned it down considerably since being bought by Dell in 2006. Even so, Alienware laptops can't be described as "subtle". Essentially, you'll either love or hate it - the problem is that if you hate it then there aren't too many alternatives - most other gaming machines have similar design.

The 11-inch screen is clear, bright and crisp. Viewing angles are good, but while we couldn't fault the contrast ratio in the dark rooms we tested it in, this is obviously a portable machine and we weren't able to see how it performs in sunlight. Not great, we'd imagine, but no worse than other laptops.

The weight is worth remarking on. While the M11x is the size of a netbook, it weighs more like a regular laptop - about 1.8kg. For comparison, the 10-inch Acer Aspire One weighs 1kg - nearly half as much. It's not going to break your back - it's still portable - but don't expect not to feel it if you're lugging the machine around a lot in your bag.

We were impressed by the keyboard. It's smaller than a regular one, but the keys are rounded, travel a good distance and don't feel flimsy in the slightest. You won't have to worry about the R key pinging off just as you desperately need to reload your weapon. The WASD keys felt just about big enough. The trackpad was nicely textured but small - you're definitely going to want to plug a mouse in if you're playing games for long.

The big question, though, is whether the performance of this machine lives up to its Alienware branding. Well, given the specs above and the relatively low screen resolution, we weren't too surprised to find that this thing flies. We tried Call of Duty 4, Arkham Asylum, and Left 4 Dead 2, and despite the occasional stutter when there was a lot going on on-screen, things ran very smoothly indeed - albeit without any anti-aliasing or "Ultra" graphics settings.

The battery life is claimed at about 6.5 hours if you're just using it normally, and 2 hours of full-on gaming. If it can truly deliver those kinds of times, we'll be impressed, but we were disappointed to discover that the battery is not user-replaceable - it's built into the device. Apparently that was the only way to get the machine as small as it is - otherwise it would have been sticking out of the back.

Tags: Hardware Laptops Alienware Alienware m11x Dell Gaming PC games

First Look: Alienware M11x originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:52:00 +0000

Gaming laptops occupy a strange space in the market. Most hardcore PC gamers like to tweak and upgrade their machines, so opt for cheaper, upgradable desktop towers that they build themselves. More casual gaming fans make do with lower performance on regular laptops.

That leaves a tiny gap for gaming laptops - hardcore gamers who need portability, if they go to lots of LAN parties, for example. Or more well-off sections of the market who don't know how or can't be bothered to build a desktop and want something powerful with lots of nice flashing lights.

But that hasn't stopped computer companies building gaming notebooks, and today we look at the 16-inch Asus G60Vx, part of the company's "Republic of Gamers" series that also feature motherboards. How does it perform when pushed to its limits? Find out right here.

First things first, let's deal with the basic specs. There's an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 chip, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, dual 7200rpm 320GB Seagate Momentus hard disks, a Blu-ray drive and - the star of the show - an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M with 1GB of graphics memory.

Around the sides, there's VGA-out, 3x USB ports, an HDMI-out, SD-card reader, Ethernet port, an eSATA port, and the usual trio of audio connectors. A big ol' battery sticks out at the back a little next to the power socket. Inside, there's 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Styling-wise, the white cover is a little over-the-top, though considerably less embarrassing than early attempts at design on gaming laptops. The Republic of Gamers badge lights up, which is fine, but irritatingly It'll also flash when the device is in sleep mode. That can prove annoying if it's in the same room when you're trying to put yourself in sleep mode.

The display is bright and clear with good contrast, though it has a native resolution of just 1366 x 768 pixels and viewing angles aren't super-fantastic. Considering the screen is 16 inches across, we're surprised that Asus didn't opt for 1600 x 900 or even full HD 1920 x 1080. It made things look a little softer than we'd like compared to the razor-sharp crispness of our trusty desktop TFT.

The keyboard is crucial, especially with the kind of punishment that a gamer will give it. Happily, despite a little bit of give in the middle it proved resilient, and well-laid-out with a full numpad. Backlit keys eased late-night Warcraft raids, too. The trackpad is roomy and solid too, with aluminium buttons nestled in a rubbery wrist-rest.

We were impressed with the performance - Asus has clearly put Nvidia's graphics card to good use. At the native resolution of the display, almost everything we tried - Crysis, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Dragon Age - ran respectably at high settings. 

When plugged into a television, though, things began to struggle at 1920 x 1080 - which may be why the company opted for the lower resolution display. Outside of games, the machine munched through other tasks with utmost glee - resizing images and rendering video with no fuss whatsoever.

Sound was acceptable. You'll want a headset for the full immersion experience in FPS games, but in RPGs and strategy games the surround speakers were fine, if a little tinny. Don't be fooled by the big circular "speaker" on the bottom. It's not a subwoofer.

Battery life wasn't tip top though - which admittedly is expected for a gaming laptop. We got about an hour and a half of video playback, which means you'll need to plug it in if you want to watch a movie. If you're doing any kind of gaming, expect even less. 

We were impressed, though, that things didn't get too hot on the wrists, despite things placed on the left of the device getting very hot from a steady stream of warm air that the machine pushes out of a vent located there. Our advice is to keep your chocolate bar on the right instead.

Tags: Hardware Laptops Asus Asus G60Vx

Asus G60Vx notebook originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:44:04 +0000

Vax, 1989's best-selling vacuum cleaner brand, has been shifted down a few pegs since its heyday. Once the ruler of the roost with its 3-in-1 machine that also washed the carpet as it cleaned it, the company has recently announced a cordless, battery-powered upright cleaner called the Vax LiFE "unplugged". We took it for a spin around our hallways to see whether it sucks.

First impressions out of the box are good. While it doesn't come in one piece, assembly is trivial, with all the bits snapping together with ease. Its design isn't too flashy - grey and black plastic. None of your Dyson-esque bright yellow or purple here. It does, however, feel sturdy and resistant to the knocks that vacuum cleaners inevitably get during use.

With a slender main body it has a very small footprint on the floor when upright, and will happily sit in a corner. It's also notably light - just 3.4kg - so you'll be able to heft it up and down stairs with relative ease.

It's rather light in the way of features too. The on-off switch also acts as a toggle between carpet and hard floor mode, there's a battery life indicator, and that's pretty much it. There's no attachments - meaning that if you have a little crevice, smaller than the width of the cleaner, that you need to get into, then you'll be stuck. Stairs might prove similarly troublesome.

Suction was impressive, though. We poured a big pile of flour onto our floor, and the LiFE whooshed it all up in one go. After a few runs through a one-bedroom flat with mostly hard floors, the dust collection chamber began to fill up at about the same speed that the battery life was draining. We got about four and a half runs before the battery went dead, though suction stayed powerful until the moment of death.

Testing on a carpeted four-bedroom family home, on the other hand, filled the chamber up at about the same rate, but because of the greater area to cover we only managed it about one and a half runthroughs before the battery conked out and the dust chamber needed to be emptied. We were disappointed that a charging stand wasn't included - you have to take the battery out of the appliance and put it in a charging dock to charge it.

Tags: Home And Kitchen Vacuum cleaners Vax LiFE unplugged Vax

Vax LiFE unplugged vacuum cleaner originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0000

You'll need two things to get the most out of this gadget. One is an insatiable thirst for burning fossil fuels. The other is a roomy electrical cabinet in your home. AlertMe Energy is a tool that clips to your meter and measures the amount of juice pumping through your wires. But in an increasingly crowded marketplace is AlertMe's kit electrifying? Or as useful as a dead battery? Read on to find out.

The default kit contains three things - a meter reader, a meter transmitter, and a hub. The guidance provided with the kit says you can clip it around any wire coming out of the bottom of your electricity meter, but we found it took a few tries to get one which delivered a signal.

Happily, though, a simple clamp around a cable is all that it takes to get the device hooked up to your system. There's no unscrewing, cable-chopping or other scary things to do - unlike some other energy monitoring kits. Once the meter reader is in place, you hook it up to the transmitter with a 3.5mm jack, pull out a tab to connect the batteries, and you're nearly set.

We'd point out here that the transmitter and reader, while not huge, are pretty big. They didn't happily sit in our very small meter cabinet, and had to be left dangling unattractively. That's why we said you'll need a bit of room to work with. Once it's all hooked it, it'll begin to flash, which is your cue to hook up the hub part.

The hub is a much smaller device, which comes with an Ethernet port and a power socket. You hook it up to the mains and to your wireless broadband modem, and after a short bit of updating and a pairing exercise, it'll begin quietly crunching data about exactly how much power you're using.

Here's the best bit - you can then automatically send that data to Google's PowerMeter service every 15 minutes, allowing you to graph your usage. Data geeks rejoice! You can break down the data into daily, weekly, and monthly bar graphs, and view what the baseline and maximum electricity used are, as well as compare it to other average usage for different types of dwelling, and see how your usage compares to your historical data.

Google integration aside, AlertMe's web interface lets you examine things in even more detail. You can see the exact level of your current usage, identify different devices (with colour-coded lamps), set-up email alerts if you're worried about using too much juice, and it'll give you the approximate cost of the amount of electricity you've used so far that day.

You can even monitor the sensors themselves from the web interface - seeing their connectivity strength, their battery life remaining, and even the temperature of the sensor itself. You can tell if your heating is on, for example, while you're away from home.

There's a useful mobile site, too, so you can check out your electricity usage on the go (did I leave the iron on?) as well as turn on or off any SmartPlugs in the system - these are accessories that can be controlled over the Web, allowing you to be absolutely sure that you unplugged your hair straighteners before leaving them lying on the bed. You can even text your appliances to turn them off.

AlertMe's kit costs £69 one-off, plus £3 per month (or £30 per year) for the subscription to the online service and mobile website. SmartPlugs cost £25 each, and you can add lamps, cameras, and various sensors too - all of which are available in AlertMe's online shop, which also offers a security bundle for considerably more cash.

If you're serious about cutting down on the amount of energy you use in the home, you need to know exactly how much you're using right now and be able to track your progress. If you don't, it's like trying to lose weight without owning a set of scales - you're completely in the dark about whether you're actually getting anywhere.

The biggest question, though, is whether you'll save enough energy to justify the cost of £100 for a year's usage, and £30 for every year thereafter. Even if you use it for 3 years, you'll need to be saving more than £50 each year on your bill for it to be worthwhile. Perhaps some large family homes use that amount of energy, but if you're in a small flat and you're not leaving the lights and television on 24/7, then it's questionable whether you'll save any cash.

But the ability to add security features, control appliances remotely, an anticipated tie-in with British Gas, and the warm fuzzy feeling of being less reliant on belching pollutants into the atmosphere means that you might actually get more than just money saving out of the device. Plus with rising energy costs on the horizon, this could be a very sound investment for the right household.

Tags: Eco Electricity monitors AlertMe AlertMe Energy

AlertMe Energy electricity monitor originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:28:34 +0000

Samsung has hit the headlines in the mobile phone world over the last year with a number of handsets - the Jet, the Omnia and the Android-packing Galaxy i7500, most notably.

The Genio Touch hasn't been among them because it's aimed at the lower end of the market - the end that uses Pay-As-You-Go and doesn't want to splash £400 or more on a handset over its lifespan. Will those people be happy with the Genio Touch, or is it a pale imitator of its elder brothers?

The Genio Touch makes a good first impression. It bears a number of design similarities to the Palm Pre, except that it doesn't have the Pre's slide-out keyboard. The front is smooth black with three buttons at the bottom, whereas the rear is orange by default, but comes with several removable back panels to offer a little customization.

Buttons around the edges are present for "hold", camera usage and a volume rocker, as well as a panel that conceals the proprietary connection for hooking up headphones or a cable to your PC. It's worth noting that there's a rather sharp edge just where you hold it to your ear, which we found a little uncomfortable over longer calls.

The display is bright and - impressively - a capacitive touchscreen. That means it's far more responsive than many touchscreen phones on the market, which use resistive ones and often require a stylus. Unfortunately, the resolution is a little low - just 320 x 240, which leaves things looking a little fuzzy, not clear and sharp.

The operating system is Samsung's own TouchWiz, which features on the Jet and resembles Symbian quite closely. There's the same widgets and an Android-aping left-right sliding homescreen. Unfortunately, it's all rather slow - evidently the processor is one of the corners cut to get this handset cheap.

In fact, using this phone after having spent any time with Android, the iPhone or the Palm Pre is about as pleasant as being smacked in the face repeatedly with a spade. Once upon a time, you could let that slide, but now that Android is available for free to device makers, it seems ridiculous to be home-baking a phone OS unless it's genuinely brilliant.

There is one bright spot, though - the virtual keyboard is thankfully not a QWERTY - it's a traditional T9 sorta thing that we found very accurate and surprisingly easy to use, complete with vibrating haptic feedback. It doesn't have "Genio" in the dictionary, though, suggesting "Heroin" instead.

There's a 2-megapixel camera which is fine for taking pics that'll be viewed on the phone itself, but you certainly won't want to frame them and put them on your wall. Still, it's good that there's a camera present. Video capture only makes it to 320 x 240 pixels at a jerky 15fps, so only really good for sharing online.

The handset lacks connectivity regularly found on higher-end phones such as Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS, but the trade-off means that the battery life is absolutely excellent. We used it fairly regularly for about 3 days before it began to give us low battery warnings. Very impressive.

We'd be remiss not to mention the price, too. The Genio Touch can be picked up for as little as £70 on a Pay-As-You-Go contract from Orange. That's incredibly cheap to be getting a capacitive touchscreen for.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Samsung Samsung Genio Touch

Samsung Genio Touch originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Such has been the success of Guitar Hero that publisher Activision has begun to roll out the series in serious bulk. This year, the company has released Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, DJ Hero and now this - Band Hero.

Band Hero is a spin-off from the original Guitar Hero series which focuses on pop music, rather than the rock, punk and metal that are more often associated with the games. Like the other titles it allows a player to use a variety of plastic instruments to play along with songs, awarding points based on how closely you match it.

Having been released relatively soon after Guitar Hero 5, there's very little difference between the two in terms of gameplay. Aside from the songs and licensed characters, there's almost no change in how the game plays in single-player and multiplayer mode.

There's the same four instruments - guitar, bass, vocals and drums - the same building up of "Star power" and the same execution of that power to boost points. The "Band Moments" introduced in Guitar Hero 5 are here, and so is the excellent "party play" mode that lets new players drop in and out and change difficulty mid-song.

The one addition over Guitar Hero 5 is called Sing-Along and is essentially a non-interactive karaoke mode. Pick it, and you'll get a set of scrolling lyrics, just like a karaoke bar, with your choice of song. It'll play anything it gets through the mic over the speakers, but at the end won't offer a score or any feedback.

While we're talking choice of song, we should address the fact that Band Hero contains just 65 tracks, compared to Guitar Hero 5's 85. It feels a little sparse, and although you can download additional songs, and import them from other games in the series, the options are considerably more limited than in the rival Rock Band games.

The tracks themselves are an odd mix of all-out pop, country, RnB, very light rock, pop-punk and some older tracks. Some will go wild over No Doubt and Taylor Swift, but even as ardent pop fans we found the selection to be both a little lacklustre and one that'll date very fast.

Some songs, like the Spice Girls, Alphabeat, Katrina and the Waves and Duran Duran tracks, were tonnes of fun to play in a group, but others - we're looking at you, Corinne Bailey Rae, were dull as dishwater. It felt more like Session Musician Hero than Band Hero when we ended up on "Put Your Records On".

Happily, there's no need to play anything that you don't want to. All tracks are unlocked from the moment you crack open the case and slot the disc into your console. Completing the single-player Career mode offers a range of customization options instead, like licensed instruments, costumes and unlockable characters.

One particular bugbear that had us cringing was the censorship in the lyrics, forced by the supposedly family-friendly appeal of the game. We're not talking F-bombs here. The word "Whiskey" was removed from American Pie's lyrics. "Them good ol' boys were drinking (silence) and rye" just doesn't scan as well.

Lastly, we'd be remiss not to mention that the game does look great. It's a slightly generic flavour of great - pink and blue sparkly lights, with the complete removal of Guitar Hero's trademark grungy look. The characters are animated excellently and look good, though the audience still appears to consist entirely of robots.

Tags: Gaming Music games Xbox 360 Band Hero Activision

Band Hero - Xbox 360 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Now that the end of Movember is upon us, you're going to need to get rid of that moustache. Panasonic has brought out the ES-RW30 Men's Rechargeable Electric Shaver, and we put it to work on our chin to find out whether it's up to the challenge of erasing your mo from existence.

Panasonic is pitching this shaver as suitable for both wet and dry shaves. It has dual blades, a pop-up trimmer, pivoting head and charges via a stand that it can also sit on when you're not using it. The stand is a neat way of allowing it to always be fully-charged - alleviating the problem of the blades slowing painfully when the battery runs down.

Dry performance was good - the shave was relatively close (for an electric shaver) and exceptionally smooth, however there was a bit of post-shave irritation. On the wet side, when used with shaving gel, things weren't so impressive - we found the blades missed quite a few hairs, though the aforementioned irritation was notably absent.

The pivoting head works well, following the contours of your chin, though we found it was a little resistant to movement - you had to press a little too hard than was comfortable to get it to pivot correctly. That might just have been as it was new however - it could loosen up over time.

The pop-up trimmer is effective and chops longer hairs without them getting caught and painfully pulled. It did get in the way of seeing what was going on however. When attempting precision work on 'tache trimming, it obscured the view of the hairline, which was a small annoyance.

Similarly effective is the foil which pops off with the push of a button for cleaning purposes - a brush is provided in the package for that reason too, though plenty of space under the blades mean you can get a couple of shaves in before cleaning becomes a necessity.

The shaver has a claimed battery life of 21 minutes of shaving, with a full recharge taking 8 hours. We found that the lifespan was a little shorter than that in practice, but not a whole lot. You'll be able to take it on holiday and not run out of juice as long as you don't spend 10 minutes shaving every single day.

Tags: Home And Kitchen Bathroom gadgets Shavers Panasonic Panasonic ES-RW30

Panasonic ES-RW30 shaver originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:11:39 +0000

Google has dropped the source code of Chrome OS into the wild, so we thought we'd take a look and see if it lives up to the lofty hype that's been placed upon it. Depending on who you believe, Chrome OS could either sink without trace or obliterate Microsoft, Apple and Linux wholesale.

The truth, as always, is neither. Well, not just yet anyway. Chrome is still at a very early stage. It runs, but there's not a whole lot you can do when it's running - other than log in, browse the web, check your battery status, and turn network adaptors on and off.

When you first boot up the OS you'll be faced with a login screen. Put your Google address and password in and it'll confirm them and let you enter the operating system. You'll then be faced with a browser window showing your GMail, and Google Calendar. These work exactly how they do in any other OS's browser window.

Up in the top right, there is a couple of icons that let you access the browser menus, see your network connectivity status (turning on and off wireless or Ethernet, for example) and monitor your battery. These seem to work mostly as advertised, but a few of the menu items - like "options" - are duplicated in the browser.

There's a Start Menu-esque icon in the top left that takes you to a page inviting you to sign into Google Short Links. This didn't recognise our username and password, so we couldn't get any further on this page. It doesn't appear to be treated as a regular browser window, though - we couldn't close or unpin it like we could with the mail and calendar tabs.

Hitting the new tab button, or using the Ctrl-T shortcut, brings you to Chrome's default new tab page complete with "quick-dial" shortcuts to your most-viewed web pages. There's links to themes from a wide range of artists that can skin the OS, though the Google ones are almost universally more attractive than the artist-created ones.

There's also a link to the extensions gallery, though this isn't working at the time of writing - just giving a "Coming soon..." message. By the time the Chrome OS makes it into a full release, there'll likely be a host of extensions to choose from that'll offer a bunch of additional functionality that isn't built in to the platform by default.

We did find a few bugs. Going into the bookmarks manager got us stuck until we created a new bookmark and double-clicked it. That took us back to the browser window. Also, unpinning the mail and calendar tabs with a right-click and closing them took us to a blank desktop that we couldn't access anything from. Only a reboot of our virtual machine fixed that. 

Related links:

• Feature - Google Chrome OS: What you will and won't be able to do

Tags: Software Operating Systems Google Chrome OS

Google Chrome OS - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:45:43 +0000

Dyson's Air Multiplier made waves upon its release in October, promising a highly-efficient non-buffeting fan replacement, complete with the product design that Dyson has made its name on. But with that promise came a hefty price tag. Does the Air Multiplier live up to its lofty goals? Read on to find out.

Firstly, let's go through briefly how it works. A turbine pulls in air through the base, which is then ejected at a speed of 55mph through a tiny slit around the edge of the ring. That air pulls more air with it thanks to friction, resulting in approximately 15 times more energy efficiency.

That bit of engineering isn't new - it's used in cabin air conditioning systems on planes and to dry water-based paint, according to Pocket-lint readers - but Dyson has certainly reimagined the fan as a considerably more efficient device than its contemporaries.

The noise level is about equivalent to a regular fan - maybe a smidge quieter, but not vast in difference. The lack of "buffeting" (caused by a regular fan's blades) is noticeable when it's pointed out, but it isn't really a game changer. There's still a bit of exhaustion on your skin after using it for a while.

The safety aspects shouldn't be neglected, though - no blades means no sliced young pinkies. Speaking as a reviewer who bears a scar from nearly losing a finger by stretching out in the night and colliding with a running metal fan, that's not something you should overlook - particularly if you have young children in your home.

It's hard to say whether the Air Multiplier looks good. It looks distinctive - its magnifying glass shape will attract "what's that?" comments from dinner party guests - but it won't fit into anything but the most modernist, minimalist, interiors. It does, however, look nicer than a normal fan. There's a lot to be said for that.

But the most impressive feature of the Air Multiplier isn't the design or the engineering - it's the price tag. The device will set you back a whopping £200, compared to less than a tenner for a traditional desk fan. Is it worth that kind of cash? Most certainly not.

Tags: Gadgets Dyson Dyson Air Multiplier Home And Kitchen Office gadgets

Dyson Air Multiplier fan originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Of all the bands that have a difficult relationship with digital music, The Beatles stand above AC/DC, Metallica and Pink Floyd as the most troublesome. Apple Corps has a long-standing dispute with EMI that prevents the Fab Four's music from being available on services like iTunes, Spotify and Last.fm.

But after George Harrison's son Dhani met MTV's president, Van Toffler, in 2006, and suggested a Rock Band game based around The Beatles' catalogue, both parties worked to overcome logistical difficulties and the cult of protectionism that surrounds any use of The Beatles' image.

Harrison worked to win over Apple Corps, talking to McCartney, Starr and Ono about the idea. Toffler went off to convince Harmonix. In the end, following the production of a five-song demo, and an agreement that songs from the entire career of the band would be showcased, a deal was signed.

During development of the game, McCartney, Starr, Ono and Harrison all provided feedback on various aspects of the title, even down to demanding that The Beatles' hair blew about in the wind more when they perform on the roof of the Apple Corps' HQ, as it did on the day in 1969.

That sense of careful control of the image of the band is everywhere in the game. At no point is it possible to make The Beatles look bad, or affect the songs in any way other than to quieten a single instrument temporarily if you miss a note.

The ability to play drum beats before the start and after the end of a track are gone. So too is the ability to do wildcat drum solos in the middle of tracks to active "Overdrive" for extra points (which happens to be renamed "Beatlemania" in B:RB). The control is over every tiny detail, even down to the fact that attaining an extra star doesn't make the little "ding" sound it does in Rock Band 2.

But in its place is boatloads of extra content for Beatles fans. Attaining three and five stars on an individual track will unlock a photo and anecdote about the recording of that track. Each song is bookended by real studio chatter from the original recordings, all the way down to Ringo shouting "I've got blisters on me fingers!" at the end of Helter Skelter.

One benefit over previous versions of the game is that all 45 songs are unlocked from the start. You don't have to play through "Story" mode to get access to every track. If you do, however, you'll find an artfully crafted chronological journey through the band's history, starting at the Cavern Club, and ending on the aforementioned rooftop.

Between each chapter of the band's career, you get a lovely little animation depicting record sleeves, and covering famous episodes that occurred in that timeframe. The game is visually stunning, especially on a big HD display, and very in-keeping with the legacy of the band - particularly when it comes to the "Dreamscapes" that accompany several tracks from The Beatles' studio years.

In terms of features, though, there's very little difference between this game and last year's Rock Band 2. The only major addition is that of harmonies, which you'll need multiple USB mics for, along with a mic stand for singing and playing at the same time. Headset mics won't work, unlike in previous games.

The harmonies aren't easy. In fact they're doggone tough, unless you're a practiced vocalist in real life. Luckily, a trio of vocalists can sing any of the harmony parts without having to worry about who's singing what. As long as you're in tune with at least one of the melodies, you'll score well.

The enhanced plastic instruments are pretty awesome too. Well, the guitars are. The Rickenbacker 325, Gretsch Duo Jet, and Hefner bass are all fantastic representations of the original instruments, and will look great even if you're playing another game in the Rock Band range.

The Ludwig drum kit isn't quite as good, though. It's the same kit as from Rock Band 2, but has a big Beatles logo that stretches across the back of the set, mimicking the bass drum skin, and new pearl-edged drum pads. It looks flimsy and fake compared to the quality of the other Premium instruments.

Difficulty is reasonable throughout - it's easy to see how tricky a particular song is and adjust accordingly. One criticism that could be levelled, however, is that the game is relatively short. The 45 songs can be played through in a couple of hours, making this more suited to perfectionists who'll want to 100% every single song.

More content is on the way, including songs left over from Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper and Rubber Soul that didn't make it into the game. The slow approach is due to the difficulty of splitting apart the content from the old 2-track and 4-track master tapes at Abbey Road. Music from The Beatles' various solo projects will not be included.

Tags: Gaming Xbox 360 Music games Beatles The Beatles Rock Band Rock Band Harmonix EA

The Beatles Rock Band - Xbox 360 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Valve is widely regarded as one of the best videogame developers active today. As creators of Half-life, Half-life 2, and Left 4 Dead, and buying up the mod teams responsible for Portal, Counterstrike, Team Fortress and Day of Defeat, the company has established itself a firm place in the pantheon of game creators, as well as in the hearts of gamers.

Valve launched its co-operative zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead, to a rapturous reception in late 2008. Gamers loved its balance, the way the game adapted to good or poor performance from the players, and its visceral combat. However, earlier this year, Valve pulled out a surprise - a prequel, less than a year after the original was released.

While many gamers welcomed the news, a minority were incensed. Why was Valve building another full-price game, when this was content that could have been put into a cheaper expansion? Or free downloadable content for the original? A full-scale boycott was called, with Valve eventually quelling the riots by flying out the leaders of the boycott to their offices to play the game.

It's not clear what happened to those kids in Valve's HQ, but they returned with smiles on their faces, gushing about how incredible the prequel was. Despite initial disbelief from their followers, eventually the mob subsided - trusting Valve to get things right. But was their trust misplaced? Is Left 4 Dead 2 more of the same, or a genuinely different title worth shelling out the extra cash for? Read on to find out.

Left 4 Dead 2 has a totally different setting to its predecessor. The original game was set all over the place - airports, farms, hospitals, and towns. L4D2, on the other hand, is set firmly in the Deep South, in the swamps of Georgia and Louisiana. We were able to get hands-on with a couple of levels of one of the campaigns - The Parish, which takes place in New Orleans - on both the Xbox 360 (including some co-op action) and the PC.

The environments seem to be better constructed than the original's. There are multiple routes to wherever you're trying to go, and you'll uncover extra rewards by exploring rather than hurtling full-pelt towards the exit. More difficult paths will be rewarded with better equipment, including new ammo types. Also of note is that there's now daytime settings - torches aren't as compulsory as they were in the first game.

As well as a different setting, there is a whole new set of "Survivors" who you can play as. There's Rochelle, a news reporter for a TV station, Coach, a high-school football coach who bears somewhat of a resemblance to Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Ellis, a white-trash mechanic, and Nick, a professional gambler and con-man who mistrusts the other survivors totally.

One of the delights of the original game was the banter between characters that matched the situation you were in. That system has been expanded considerably, and your avatars - when not in the middle of combat - will joke, argue and snipe at each other with an alarmingly realistic uneasy tension.

But the real stars are the new zombies. In addition to the original game's cast of Hunter, Boomer, Smoker, Witch and Tank, there's now the Spitter, the Jockey and the Charger. The Spitter is a long-range attacker who shoots acidic phlegm that splatters over an area and hurts anyone standing in it. Not good when half your team are lying incapacitated on the floor.

The Jockey a tiny, dwarf-sized creature that skitters around emitting a horrible giggle. If it manages to leap on you, then you lose all control of your character - it takes over and steers you around - into traps and hordes of common infected. Lastly, the Charger is a mini-tank that moves very quickly, knocking you down, and can grab a survivor and slam them into the ground.

On their own, they're relatively trivial to deal with. But the problem is that they come in groups. A hunter might pounce on one survivor, while a charger grabs another, before a spitter then covers the ground with acid so that the other team members can't reach their buddies.

The regular infected have had a graphical upgrade too, and location-based damage has been added. If you shoot off an arm or a leg, that zombie's going to still be coming at you. Headshots are imperative, and when a particular infected goes down, you're never totally sure that they're not going to get up again.

As a result, battles seem considerably more intense. Instead of staying back and keeping the hordes at bay with assault rifles, it's now difficult not to get drawn into a scrabbly melee that you only just survive every time - and sometimes you don't survive at all. But it never stops being fun, even after the fifth or sixth attempt. The stories where you don't make it are almost more fun than the ones where you do.

Thankfully, the survivors get a few new tricks. There's the aforementioned ammunition types - incendiary rounds can set zombies on fire, and explosive rounds deal more damage. You can also pick up Boomer bile to throw on enemies (very useful against the tank) and resurrect fallen survivors with the defibrillator.

There's also a much wider range of weapons. AK-47s, scoped assault rifles, Uzis, silenced submachine guns and Desert Eagle pistols are available on the ranged front, and a whole pile of melee weapons can replace your pistol. Those deal considerable damage up close and include saucepans, baseball bats, machetes, and even, quite ridiculously, a guitar.

Tags: Gaming Xbox 360 EA Left 4 Dead 2 Horror

Left 4 Dead 2 - Xbox 360 / PC - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:15:30 +0000

Microsoft has quite a task on its hands. Most people agree that its last operating system release, Windows Vista, was actually a perfectly respectable bit of software once driver manufacturers were on board after a year or so, but that didn't stop it becoming the butt of almost every single one of the tech industry's jokes since 2006 (that weren't about the Zune).

This time round, Microsoft has taken a decidedly different approach to the launch of the OS. In stark contrast to the relative secrecy of the Windows Vista release, combined with a marketing campaign with the slogan: "The Wow Starts Now", the launch of Windows 7 has been totally open and subject to very little marketing.

Many technology enthusiasts, ourselves included, have been running 7 in either its Beta or Release Candidate version since early 2009. The OS hasn't changed significantly in that time, but a few features have been tweaked and improved upon, and we've been running the final release of the OS now for a little while.

As such, we've got a good idea of how it runs in both the short and long-term. We've worked with it, played games with it, and this review will aim to answer three main questions - "is it any good?", "should I install now, or wait a year like with Vista?" and "is Ultimate worth the price over Home Premium?".

So let's start with the first thing most people will experience - the install procedure. For a long time Microsoft has been trying to cut down the amount of steps required to install its operating systems and Windows 7 seems to have stripped the whole thing down to the bare minimum.

The whole process is mercifully brief - slightly longer if you want to upgrade from Vista rather than reformat your hard disk (required if you want to switch from XP or any of the early releases of Windows 7). You just pick a language, pick a drive to install on, and that's it! Go make a cup of tea and you'll be done.

When you get into the OS itself, the first thing that'll strike you is the brand new taskbar. It's wider, and the start button no longer says "Start" on it, but it functions mostly the same as it always did with one exception - the quicklaunch area and the list of running programs have been merged.

Now, when you launch a program its icon appears along that list and mousing over it will give you a preview of what the window looks like. In some cases, you'll also be able to interact with that program, thanks to "jump lists" accessible with a right-click. These lists include options like skipping between tracks on a music player, or setting status on an IM application.

This seemingly minor UI improvement actually increases productivity quite a bit. Instead of a rammed taskbar where you can't see which windows are which, icons will stack, so it's a rare situation where you run out of space. Also handy is that the system tray won't fill up with icons either - it's easy to relegate ones you don't need into a hidden space.

That usability factor is a difficult one to pin down. We found that after using Windows 7 for a bit it was actually a little bit painful to go back to Vista. We would work slower, despite having used Vista for years in the past. Windows 7 is a genuine pleasure to use, and seems to suffer considerably less than its predecessors from random crashes and blue screens.

Media streaming is another big deal in Windows 7. Straight out of the box you can have a hard disk chock-full of content (acquired legally, obviously) and then share that media with other Windows 7 devices on your network, or even over the web. A biref download lets you link a Windows Live account with your Windows account, and from there you can use Windows Media Player to send audio and video wherever you like.

You can share particular libraries from Windows Media Player 11 and 12, from Windows Home Server, but most excitingly of all you can hook up a DLNA-enabled television or stereo and see it appear as a device on your network to stream music to. From there, you can just right-click tracks and send them to your television, for example.

Windows Media Centre is mostly unchanged from its Vista incarnation, but has a few nice features that you may find useful. There's a whole pile of media extenders available that are a bit like Firefox Extensions - they can enable additional functionality.

For example, if you have an Xbox 360, you can install an extender that lets you view all your computer's multimedia content on your Xbox. If you have a Sky subscription, another extender will add a tile in the "TV" section that enables Sky Player content streamed over the web. Windows Media Centre is a well-put-together bit of software that should cover most of your audiovisual needs in the OS.

Those of you who are purchasing the Ultimate edition of Windows 7 will get a few extra features too. There's BitLocker encryption for drives if you want to protect particular content from prying eyes. This offers AES encryption algorithm in CBC mode with a 128 bit key, combined with the Elephant diffuser for additional disk encryption specific security not provided by AES. If you're not sure what that means, then it basically means "you're not breaking into this one".

If you're upgrading from Vista to 7, you'll have relatively few of the problems that you might have run into between XP and Vista. 7 uses almost exactly the same architecture, meaning that if something worked in Vista then it's more-or-less likely to work fine in Windows 7 too.

In fact, it's fair to say that if your device doesn't work in Windows 7 or Vista now, then the blame can only be pinned on the manufacturer - they've had nearly four years to get things working. The only issues we faced were linked to running a 64-bit operating system which, while supported pretty well, didn't have quite the same catalogue of drivers as the 32-bit edition.

And if the worst happens, and a program defiantly refuses to work then Ultimate edition also includes an XP Mode that lets you virtualize the aging OS inside Windows 7. From there, anything that worked on Windows XP will work, though you'll suffer a slight performance degradation.

Those who experiment a lot with different operating systems will also find Windows 7's virtual hard disk booting a boon. This allows you to section off a bit of your drive and pretend that it's an entirely different hard drive, allowing you to test out alternative operating systems without having to partition your drive. It's a bit like Boot Camp in OS X - allowing you to run more than one operating system with ease.

There's now widespread support for more file formats. Wordpad, for example, supports .docx and .odt extensions from Office 2007 and upward and OpenOffice respectively. Microsoft seems to have tried very hard to make Windows as compatible as possible with a wide range of different bits of hardware and software - a task that's not trival for it to accomplish thanks to the huge ecosystem of software developers that code for its platform and the sheer weight of users that go for Windows.

We don't really do benchmarks or overwhelm you with graphs here - instead we prefer to tell you what kind of experience you'll get. With Windows 7, performance is great. While Windows 7 isn't as lightweight as the latest Linux builds, it behaves beautifully on both weak and powerful machines alike.

We didn't get the change to test it on a netbook, but we did try a laptop that's about four years old. We found Windows 7 perfectly operable on systems that Vista struggled with. Give it a try on a netbook or old laptop to see what we mean - you'll likely be impressed.

You might have to turn off Aero mode, which is the translucent window edging that you'll see in many screenshots of Windows 7. This was present in the more expensive editions of Vista and also lets you use the Windows and Tab keys to scroll between Windows as if they were bits of paper. Try it and see.

Windows 7 doesn't waste the capabilities of top-end hardware, either. While you might lose one or two frames per second on the latest games compared to the same hardware on XP, you'll benefit from considerably better security and usability than Microsoft's 2001 OS. We found games performance unnoticably different in real terms from XP and considerably better than Vista. Gamers have nothing to fear from Windows 7.

Tags: Software Operating Systems Microsoft Windows 7

Windows 7 Ultimate originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:11:23 +0100

While there are plenty of wireless notebook mice around, that hasn't stopped manufacturers attempting to try and innovate. Microsoft's latest attempt is the Wireless Mobile Mouse 4000.

It's a wee little nipper - 61mm by 103mm - but despite its size it's relatively comfortable. Rubber grip pads on either side hold your hand in place, while your fingers rest on the smooth upper surface. In the middle of that surface is a black panel with a Microsoft logo, battery indicator and the mousewheel.

But not just any mousewheel. Imagine coating yourself in vaseline, then getting in a bath of baby oil, then slipping yourself between a set of the smoothest, most silken velvet sheets you can picture. That's what using this mousewheel feels like.

Of course, what that means is that gamers will hate it. There's no definition between clicks - it's one fluid motion. Flicking between weapons will be irritatingly imprecise. Though, to be fair, gamers aren't exactly the target audience for this product.

Along with left and right clicks, the mousewheel click, and the ability to click the wheel left and right to scroll in those directions, there's also a fourth button positioned forward on the left. Unfortunately, it's just out of comfortable thumb-reach, but that's not too big a deal.

The sensor seems accurate and responsive. It was able to track with only a couple of very minor glitches on the surface of a glass desk that we tested it with. On a mousepad, it was very quick so if you find you need a bit more precision, it might be worth dialling that down a little in the settings.

The sensor is miniscule - so small you might lose it - but luckily it slots into the base of the device for when you're travelling. The mouse also has a hard on/off switch so you can save battery if you're not going to be using the device for a little while.

Tags: Hardware Mice And Keyboards Mice Microsoft Microsoft Mobile Mouse 4000

Microsoft Mobile Mouse 4000 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:53:51 +0100

RIM picked a hell of a week to release its new flagship smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold 9700. Microsoft and Apple have been fighting for press attention, with the former releasing its most-anticipated operating system for many years and the latter attempting to drown out that announcement with a slew of product updates.

Nevertheless, the new Bold has managed a decent amount of attention from the world's media. Much has been made of its new, slimmer form factor, and the improvements in responsiveness over the occasionally sluggish original. Pocket-lint managed to get hands-on with the smartphone as it was announced today. Does it stack up to its competitors? Read on to find out.

Let's start with the looks. The Bold 9700 doesn't throw any of RIM's established style out of the window - it looks like a BlackBerry and no-one would mistake it for anything else. There's plenty of rhomboid-y shapes and the keyboard is as familiar as ever. But it's certainly more refined than past handsets from RIM.

Performance has improved too. RIM told us that a whole host of bug fixes and little tweaks to get more out of the onboard hardware have been included in the form of BlackBerry OS version 5. The hardware comprises a new 624MHz processor and 256MB of flash memory which definitely seemed, in our short play with the device, to make things more responsive.

In fact, the only time when it behaved slowly was when it had to load a big chunk of text - specifically the subscriber agreement for the App World which is present and correct on the handset - which took a good 30 seconds or so. In terms of the actual operating system, very little has altered from the changes we saw come in with version 4.6 last year.

The keyboard is top-notch, as you'd expect from a handset from RIM, as email and instant messaging is still key to the whole handset, with BlackBerry's exemplary email system underpinning the experience. If you're not the kind of person who spends all their time in their inbox, then given the advances in multimedia on rival devices, you'll probably want to look elsewhere.

That said, the speakers aren't bad. Blaring out Beastie Boys yielded a reasonable level of detail, but a complete lack of bass. You'll want to plug headphones into the included 3.5mm jack if you're serious about listening to music on this handset, but it doesn't get a look-in on the multimedia keys found on the Curve 8520.

The screen, which isn't touch-enabled, is 2.44-inches and slightly smaller than its predecessor (which was 2.6-inches diagonally). It does, however, run at a slightly higher resolution than the original Bold. It's clear and bright and displays colours well. Although we didn't get a chance to take a look in direct sunlight, if it anything like previous screens, it will be happy outdoors. Viewing angles are also impressive.

The camera isn't too bad, either. Although it's only 3.2-megapixels, it captured images acceptably in a well-lit room. We weren't able to test how well that'll stack up in a darker situation, but there is a flash onboard, and we'd imagine the performance to be much like previous BlackBerry handsets.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones BlackBerry RIM BlackBerry Bold

BlackBerry Bold 9700 - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:04:36 +0100

Napster has had a tough time since "going legit". While it was the foremost filesharing network of its day, and arguably the original source of the explosion in P2P antics over this decade, it's had trouble transferring that brand power into a legitimate service.

Until recently, Napster offered two tiers of subscription: £10 per month would get you unlimited streaming, and £15 would get you DRMed downloads that wouldn't work on iPod and would be unlistenable if you let your subscription lapse. But recently the company withdrew these offerings and launched a new service which is cheaper and offers more than both of those options.

For £5 per month, you can now get a Napster subscription which offers you streaming and five non-DRMed MP3 downloads each month. The idea is that you listen to loads of different music and then download the best tracks so you can burn them to CD or put them on your MP3 player.

The company is undercutting rival streaming service Spotify by offering what appears on paper to be a more generous deal for half price, but how does it really stack up in reality? Can Napster grab a piece of the digital music pie by making its subscription options finally worth the cash?

Napster has two interfaces for playing music - a website and a desktop app. The two resemble each other very closely, and a number of times while testing them both we got confused as to which we were in and had to double-check. Why? Because it all runs at the speed of the website.

And that's not quick. From double-clicking a song to hearing it come out of your speakers means buffering for 4-7 seconds on a connection that can play uncached tracks out of Spotify in less than a second. This is likely because Napster streams all its music itself, whereas Spotify relies on P2P - pulling tracks off other users nearby who've listened to that song recently and have it cached.

Once things are going, transfer is fine. Streams are at just 128kbps, which is rather on the too-low side, but we didn't get a single dropout or buffering experience during our testing. So far, so okay. You can right-click tracks to buy them in 256kbps MP3 format, and once you do, they'll play in the desktop app at the higher quality.

That desktop app also doubles as a music library organiser. Unlike Spotify's client which is stripped-down and just does streaming and playlists, Napster takes a leaf out of iTunes' book. It lets you rip and burn CDs, control your MP3 collection, generate "Genius"-style autoplaylists and access preprepared playlists from Napster, albeit with bizarre and terrifying titles like "A special compilation of tracks about mum", "Songs about being crazy" and "Tony Blair's 10 years in power".

That last bit reflects in a nutshell what permeates the design of Napster. It doesn't feel like it's designed for music fans. It gets in the way of what you want to do - constantly asking if you want an auto-generated playlist of a band, rather than letting you get access to that band's catalogue for you to choose yourself. It takes two clicks to start playing the current top 10 singles in the UK, but five actions to get up a list of songs by a band.

Then there's other strange hoops that the software demands you jump through. It demands that you download and install a plugin as an EXE file downloaded off a website, then restart the software, before you can rip a CD in 320kbps MP3 format - the default WMA encoding (which won't work on iPods) will only go up to 128kbps, bizarrely.

And media buttons on your keyboard, if you have them, will only work if the application has the focus on your screen. If you're writing a word document and you want to skip tracks, you'll need to swap to Napster, then hit the "skip forward" button - completely negating the usefulness of such features.

But let's go back to the original question - is it worth £5 per month? The answer is "yes". A fiver for an unlimited amount of listening whatever you like in a big catalogue (no real complaints in that department) is worth the asking price, even if it's in low quality on irritatingly slow software. The free MP3s are great, but amount to little more than a conscience boost - they won't win over anyone who's ever used a filesharing network.

But don't click that subscribe button just yet. If you're a music lover and want a tool to listen to the songs that you want, in great quality, on fast software without getting a computer-generated playlist constantly in the way, then Napster isn't as good an experience as its competitors. Spotify gives you far more for the extra that it costs - Napster has said that it has absolutely no plans for mobile streaming, for example.

Spotify has also been undercut by Sky's "Sky Songs" offering, which will give you ten songs per month for £6.50 or 15 for £8. Seems better value on paper, but we haven't seen the catalogue or the usability of the service yet.

Tags: Audio Software Media streaming Napster Music downloads

Napster UK subscription service originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:00:23 +0100

While other sites are writing reviews of Google Wave, we think it's a little unfair to judge Google's new communications tool so early, especially as it's only just stepped blinking out into the light of the web and already the hype bubble is bursting.

Much of the pre-release coverage consisted of breathy reports about how Wave was going to revolutionise communications. According to blog posts from the people who snuck into the developer preview of the service, we would all be dumping email and IM wholesale within minutes of getting an invite to this shiny multicoloured Googlegasmic utopia.

The reality was less impressive. When most people activated their Google Wave invitations they opened their browsers to a barren wasteland, because they didn't know anyone else on the service. They waved with themselves for a minute or two, before closing their browser bitterly disappointed. Some discovered "Public waves" - which are waves available to anyone, but were then overwhelmed with too many messages, too quickly.

At that point, the hype bubble burst and scathing articles and tweets proliferated about how Wave was pointless. But over the last few weeks, more users have trickled onto the service and most people will now know one or two others who are using it.

At the time of writing, Google Wave consists of four panes. There's an inbox, a pane to view selected waves in, a contacts bar (which lists any of your Google Contacts that are in the test program, as well as anyone you've invited) and a navigation bar. All can be collapsed into a space at the top of the screen where they become a drop-down menu instead.

You can save searches for particular subjects, as well as file things into folders (GMail's tagging functionality is still present too, but at the bottom of individual waves). There's a settings menu, too, though that's currently empty. There's currently a few extensions available - weather, maps and a poll gadget. 

So what's the reality? The answer, happily, is both. Google Wave in its current state is an impotent, stunted, stub of a web service, which is functional at best, and buggy at worst. But it's also the future. Consider the state of Twitter in 2007 - it was just a website with little messages that people pushed out via SMS. No one was terribly impressed.

But then it opened up its platform. It put out an API. It let other applications interface with it. The simplest examples were desktop and mobile apps that meant that you didn't have to visit the Twitter website to find out what was going on. Instead, you could have little notifications that popped-up as necessary when things happened.

Gradually, as a result of these "extensions" to Twitter, its popularity started to rocket. The same thing will likely happen to Wave. While it might, for now, be a strange communications tool that sits awkwardly between email and instant messaging, it has the potential - as a platform - to really improve communications on the web, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it can be used both actively and passively. You can ignore a Wave from your boss about why your project's late, like you would an email, while still gossiping with your friend about last night's Strictly Come Dancing, like you would in IM. But it takes the best bits of both, and chops out the worst bits.

It's better than IM because all history is saved, searchable and taggable. You can also add new people into the conversation very easily without them missing anything that's already been said. It's better than email because response can be instant - so instant you can see people typing (though that's more of a gimmick than a useful feature), and all messages about a subject are grouped into one thread, rather than filling up your inbox as multiple people reply.

Tools could roll out that - for example - automatically add in Spotify links to songs when you're talking about them, or allow some users more control over a Wave than others have, or even that let you integrate voice and video chat into waves, and use speech-to-text engines to automatically transcribe conversations for future annotation.

Tags: Software Online Google Google Wave Websites

Google Wave - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0100

Samsung's Galaxy i7500 has already had a troubled existence and it's only just launched. While the handset has been available in Europe since June, endless delays have plagued its UK launch, as chronicled extensively on Pocket-lint.

But it's finally arrived and while on paper the Galaxy i7500 is the best Android handset around, how does it stack up in the real world? It out-specs anything else out there - but do those specs translate into a fantastic handset?

The Samsung Galaxy i7500 looks like plenty of other Samsung handsets. It could be the cousin of the company's "Jet" mobile, but instead of the weird cuboid button on the Jet, it has a directional pad and the usual Android complement of call, hang-up, menu and back buttons.

Around the sides, there's a volume rocker, camera button, and the most irritatingly placed lock button in the world. Holding the handset like a right-handed person would, it's almost impossible to prevent yourself pushing the button by accident - meaning that you'll be mid text message when the screen will suddenly go blank and the phone will lock.

To unlock it again, you have to press the button to turn the screen on, and then hold it down for another few seconds to unlock it. It's infuriating, and doesn't always work first time. Why the button couldn't have been placed on the top of the device with the USB connector and 3.5mm headphone jack, and out of the way, is absolutely beyond our comprehension.

On the back, there's a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and bright LED flash - this took reasonable images up to the standard of a low-end compact or mid-range cameraphone: not great at low light, but generally passable. Nothing really to complain about but nothing much to commend either.

On the front of the device is the real star of the show - a beautiful, glossy, 3.2-inch, 320 x 480, capacitive AMOLED touchscreen. This looks absolutely incredible - showing deep blacks and gleaming highlights, as well as pumping out plenty of brightness, even in direct sunlight.

But the beautiful screen is let down by a slight sluggishness in the performance of the OS. We've seen Android running like a dream on other handsets, but it seems a little schizophrenic on the Galaxy - sometimes it'll fly by whereas other times it'll struggle to load a simple list of options, or take nearly 10 seconds to switch from portrait to landscape mode.

It's not clear why this is - it's a standard Android build (only slightly modified with the addition of a keyboard - which we'll come to in a moment) that has the same processor as every other Android handset out there. Perhaps it'll be rectified in a future ROM update, in the same way that the HTC Hero got a recent performance boost. But for the time being, the performance of the i7500 is inadequate.

We won't go into a full review of the Android OS - that would take some time - but performance aside it fits the i7500 well. The basic functionality is exceptional - even more so if you use a Google account - and there are plenty of apps available to extend those features.

We did run into some issues with Wi-Fi on the device, though. It didn't seem to want to stay connected to the wireless network that we tested it with. It would be fine for a few minutes, then disconnect and refuse to reconnect without resetting the wireless adaptor. It might be a bug with our network, but other handsets cope with it fine.

The Wi-Fi bug became a real pain when trying to sync songs in Spotify for offline playback - something that's possible on 3G (unlike the iPhone) but that you'll only really want to do on Wi-Fi. While we're talking about Spotify, it's worth noting that you won't find it in the Android Marketplace on the i7500 - it needs you to download the app separately and allow the installation of unsigned applications. Not the one-click solution that most users will want.

Loads of storage is provided on the handset. A full 8GB of internal memory is present, and you can pump that up with a microSD card to 24GB. You're unlikely to run out of space to store music, video or images on this phone.

Text entry is accomplished via an on-screen keyboard, designed by Samsung, which is another pain point on the handset that you'll run into several times a day. While the little buzz that the handset gives when you tap a key is great, having to go through a menu to get access to numbers and symbols is exceptionally irritating, as is the software's occasional insistence on swapping the word you typed for one that it thinks (incorrectly) that you want to type.

And lastly the battery. It's a 1500 mAh Li-Ion affair which starts out appalling. We charged it three times in the first 24 hours. Over our review period it improved - though that might have also been due to considerably dialling down the background syncing and homescreen widgets.

Once we'd done that, we found that we'd get maybe 18 hours of light usage out of it - though that plummeted when we started playing games, watching video or listening to music on the device. You'll most definitely need to plug this in every night without fail, as well as tweaking the settings that it comes with by default to use less juice.

If you're planning on using it as an MP3 player, or video player, on your commute, though, then we'd advise carrying around the USB charging cable and plugging it in whenever you get the chance. It has an uncommon Micro-USB v2 connector - not proprietary, but not one that you'll find lying around on a regular basis.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Samsung Android Samsung Galaxy i7500

Samsung Galaxy i7500 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:38:04 +0100

Earlier in the year, Acer announced its TravelMate 8000 Timeline series - a set of notebooks designed for business users that combine performance, security and battery life.

The TM8371 has a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard disk and a 13.3-inch 1336 x 768 display. It has Ethernet, a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3x USB 2.0 ports, a card reader, VGA-out and the usual headphone and mic sockets.

It measures 322 x 228 x 23mm, making it impressively compact, but what struck us when we first saw it was that it only weighs 1.6kg - very feathery for a machine of this spec.

Looks-wise, it isn't going to stand out on a commuter train. It could best be described as "functional". It doesn't look terrible, just inconspicuous - which might be what you want from a laptop. The machine feels sturdy - the metal casing looks like it could be bashed about a little before it would suffer too much damage to the innards. It's not officially a "rugged" laptop, though, so don't expect to use it in the bath, or the desert, without things going a little wrong.

The keyboard feels roomy and comfortable, but the keypress action isn't as satisfying as we've felt on other laptop keyboards. The trackpad was roomy and responsive, but you'll still want to plug in a mouse of some sort if you're using the machine for extended periods.

Performance was impressive. We gave it a whole pile of 12-megapixel photographs to resize and apply filters to, and it cranked through them very quickly, even on low-power mode. That low-power mode is labelled as "eco" and lets you eke extra battery life out of the already capacious battery.

With the screen brightness turned down (but still viewable), and eco modes on, Windows told us there were 9 hours of juice in this battery - which is extraordinary for a machine of this weight and power. A more average collection of power settings, with the brightness of the screen up to full, still yielded 3 to 4 hours of power before conking out.

The TM8371 does fall down, however, if you try and run any 3D applications, like games, on it. 5-year-old World of Warcraft crawled along on medium settings, and other titles from the last couple of years also struggled.

Tags: Hardware Laptops Acer Acer TravelMate TM8371 Acer TravelMate TM8371

Acer TravelMate TM8371 notebook originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:00:00 +0100

Motorola has become the butt of many mobile phone industry jokes over the last few years. Not since the RAZR (now available in 18 different versions) has the company seen success with a handset. But at the launch event for the DEXT, something was different - journalists were heard saying that they haven't been this excited about a handset from Motorola in years.

So what's changed? The same thing that changed HTC and is currently changing Samsung - Android. Google's free mobile operating system is enlivening a whole raft of phone manufacturers that have always made great hardware but struggled with user interface design. But how does the DEXT stack up against the G1, Magic, Hero and Galaxy i7500? Read on to find out.

First things first - the DEXT is a QWERTY slider. It's the first QWERTY slider to get Android since the G1. That means two things - it's a joy to input text on compared to the onscreen keyboard of the Magic, Hero and i7500, but it's fatter than Michelle McManus riding a pregnant manatee. Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration, but compared to the RAZR, the DEXT is a veritable chunk-o-rama.

That QWERTY seemed, in our brief testing, to be tactile enough to be comfortable. The keys don't quite press down as far as you'd like them to, but it's certainly more pleasant to use than the G1's QWERTY which never felt roomy. The other buttons on the device are well placed and intuitive.

The other headline feature is Motorola's MOTOBLUR software add-ons for Android. It's not a total interface conversion, like HTC's Sense interface for the Hero, but it does add on a few nifty features that aren't found in the default build. The biggest is called "Happenings", which chucks all your friends' Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Last.fm updates into one place.

There's also the option to update all your social network statuses at once, and the very useful ability to get a person's profile picture and latest update to appear on-screen when they phone you. Very handy. It'll also amalgamate contacts that appear to be the same person - so you don't end up with five entries for your friend Linda, for example.

The rest of the UI is the same old Android goodness. It has the app store, the email, the background applications and everything that you already know and love about Google's operating system. It seemed during our brief testing to run reasonably fast, but that was before loading it up with a pile of apps and messages, so it'll be interesting to see how that lasts over time.

The processor is the same as all the other Android handsets - a 528MHz Qualcomm unit. It has a 5-megapixel camera with flash, and the display is a roomy 3.1-inches. There's a welcome 3.5mm headphone jack, and it has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. It only has 256MB of onboard storage, which might prove a problem when downloading lots of apps, but it's expandable with a microSD card.

Related links:

• Photos - Motorola's DEXT Android handset
• News - Motorola DEXT confirmed for October launch

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Motorola Android Motorola Dext

Motorola DEXT - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:31:03 +0100

Apple has refreshed its entire iPod range in an event in San Francisco, but the model which saw the most new features was the iPod nano. It's been given both hardware and software overhaul in an attempt to make it appeal to a wider market beyond just music. But can the new updates achieve those goals? Pocket-lint was hands-on at the event to find out.

Cutting to the chase, the headline addition is the video camera. Megapixel details aren't being dished out, but what we do know is that the nano will sport a 640 x 480 resolution, which the company is touting as having incredibly clarity.

In our very brief testing, we found the quality good enough - though a 640 x 480 video isn't going to look great pumped through an 40-inch HD TV. The nano is about sharing, not making that indie film.

One puzzling problem we've discovered is that the camera can't take still photos - only video. Apple representatives at the London event told us that it's easy to grab stills from the device when you upload the videos to iMovie, but it seems like a bizarre omission from the device.

The slightly bigger screen didn't make too much of an impact on us it has to be said - it's as competent as its predecessor. Video still looks good when you've not got light shinning on the screen, but it picks up reflections very easily thanks to the gloss finish - something that might cause issues in the light of day.

It's not just about video. There's a number of other additions, too. An FM radio brings the nano up to the standards of other players on the market, but the addition of Genius playlists is more welcome. If you're not sure what you want to listen to, then you can pick a preset playlist automatically compiled from your MP3 collection by the software. No more random German techno amongst your classical collection...

There's a voice recording app, which will probably be most useful for students wanting to record lectures, and a pedometer for fitness enthusiasts to hook up to the Nike+ system. Lastly, there's also the text-to-voice functionality of the shuffle - so you don't have to take your nano out of your pocket to find out what song is playing.

Tags: Audio MP3 players iPod Apple iPod nano

Apple iPod nano 5th gen - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:17:10 +0100