Table of contents for January 2016 in PC & Tech Authority

So this is Christmas. And what have we done? Well... we’ve thrashed about like a kid in a pit of coloured foam balls, you know the ones, all happy and excited, looking this way and that, and everywhere around us is a raging torrent of endless techy wonder that fills us with almost indescribable joy. I’ll be the first to say that 2014 was a little dull. There wasn’t a whole lot of action or innovation. But 2015? Wow. Instead of incremental improvement we got seismic leaps in capability. Storage, which we disrespectfully call ‘snorage’ for our private amusement half the time, was – and I can hardly believe I’m saying this – the most exciting tech of the year. I know, right? If you thought SATA SSDs were pretty…

CPU AMD INJUSTICE It seems AMD cannot catch a break these days. A class action law suit has been filed against AMD for allegedly using deceptive marketing to sell its eight core Bulldozer family of CPUs. The issue stems from what you define a core as. For those not familiar with the Bulldozer architecture, AMD chose to build a quite a unique core design by fusing together two cores such that they share many components (namely the pre-fetch logic, floating point scheduler and the floating point units themselves, while leaving the integer units separate. Together these two fused cores are called a module. With four modules in a CPU and each module being capable of executing two integer threads, one can see how AMD arrived at their claimed eight core…

Jaya, Mwave: “M.2 is definitely ready for mainstream consumers (as it is already featured in most mid-high end new released Laptop / OEM devices). It is gaining traction on the entry level spectrum too, as it is frequently used in our barebones Intel NUC systems. NVME is undeniably faster than AHCI which entices enthusiast PC users, products like the Samsung 950 Pro are aggressively priced for this market segment. Especially when compared against the M.2 / PCI-e SSDs of only a few months ago such as Hyper X Predator.” John, TI Computers: “Though we do see the potential of NVMe taking over the high end market share of AHCI-based devices, we do not believe NVMe is able to take over SATA permanently with M.2 interface alone. Despite its advantage of…

STAFF CHRISTMAS PICKS BEN MANSILL, EDITOR, PC & TECH AUTHORITY THREE ACER PREDATOR X34 I was going to say a new 34-inch ultrawide curved monitor like the Acer Predator X34. But that’s just being ridiculous. I want three of them. So I can have the greatest sim racing and flying rig a boy could ever want. $1,899 • www.acer.com/predator SEAN FLETCHER, ACCOUNT MNGR LIMITED EDITION STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT PS4 BUNDLE I can get a PS4 for way cheaper – and that may be true, but it doesn’t have a 1TB hard drive or one bad ass Vader emblazoned across the chassis. It is also packaged with the gorgeous Dual-Shock 4 controller inspired by Darth Vader’s chest panel and the Deluxe Edition of Star Wars Battlefront. $599.95 • www.playstation.com BENNETT RING,…

NVIDIA GTX 980 TI Cramming almost all the power of the Titan X and knocking a couple of hundred dollars off the price tag, the Maxwell-based 980Ti is an absolute beast. Regardless of which manufacturer you go with you’ll find it’s quiet and runs cool, with MSI, Gigabyte and Asus all boasting great factory overclocks. $1,099 • www.geforce.com/ CORSAIR K70 RGB The choice of Red, Blue or Brown Cherry MX mechanical switches for the perfect level of audible and physical feedback, fully customisable backlighting per key, a brushed aluminium finish, and an orthodox form factor – because there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Oh boy, our fingertips are tingling just thinking about it. $259.00 • gaming.corsair.com/en-au/ SAITEK X52 PRO FLIGHT SYSTEM With something of a space sim renaissance underway…

Everyone writes notes, but some note-takers are more obsessive than others. If you’re a casual notetaker on iOS, there are plenty of options, from the built-in Notes app through to big names such as Evernote and Microsoft’s OneNote. If you’re a note-taking obsessive, though, you’ll often find that these apps are much simpler than their desktop cousins. That’s not down to the capabilities of iPhones or iPads – after all, these platforms happily handle other powerful software – so what do you do if you want to use a more powerful notetaking app? This is the space that Gorillized want to fill with Outline. Open up a notebook and you’ll find that the app has three levels of organisation: Notebooks, Sections and Pages. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s…

One of the pleasures of smartphone ownership is the range of professional and fascinating podcasts available free of charge. Thousands of hours of entertainment are at your fingertips, if you know how to access them. Staying on top of the latest episodes and managing your phone’s limited space, though – who has time for that? DoggCatcher solves the problem for you. It recommends popular podcasts, checks your feeds and downloads new episodes as they appear. It won’t just fill up your device either, removing episodes when done. There are other downloading options around, but DoggCatcher is an excellent jack-of-alltrades.…

Portable SSDs differ from regular external/portable drives by virtue of the controller, which is typically the same as found in a proper desktop SATA product. In this case, Sandisk hasn’t made public which controller is being used, but performance is satisfactory enough to not worry about that. We benched this at 334MB/s read, and 307MB/s write, which is at least three times quicker than a portable mechanical hard drive. This is on a USB 3.0 port. On a USB 2 expect reduced performance. The flat, square enclosure is relatively large, at 9.75cm to a side. As with the Samsung T1, it’s likely that the circuit board and chips take up a far smaller space, it’s just that Sandisk has designed it to be a pleasing size, with a bit of…

I’ll be honest, when I got this it didn’t really excited me, it’s just some additional storage for my Macbook Pro. It didn’t take long though to change my tune. So what does it do? Exactly what I originally thought – give me some extra storage – but in an convenient and easy to use way. This half-sized SD looking card simply slots into the SD slot of your Macbook (or iMac which use a slightly different size card) and instantly gives you 128GB of additional space, without cables or clunky external drives, and is so streamlined it sits flush so you won’t even notice it’s there. Performance is snappy, with read speeds of up to 95MB/s and write speeds of up to 60MB/s, I had no issues editing RAW…

Samsung gets it so close with the Gear S2 it’s not funny. It’s a well-designed smartwatch with a truly unique feature, and pretty good battery life. Whereas most watches need daily charging, we were able to get a couple of days on a single charge. The swivelling bevel is a great touch, making navigating Tizen and other apps a breeze, while also keeping your watchface relatively free of finger-prints. However, Tizen is also the watch’s main letdown. It’s very app-limited, and while there’s a lot included, a lot of it seems rather bloated, and stuff you’d likely delete in a hurry. When the Gear S2 does work with notifications, that at least is useful – but it doesn’t always work, and that’s pretty much a dealbreaker. Which is a shame,…

It’s now two years since the iPad mini 2 first appeared, but Apple has kept it relevant with small and strategic price cuts. Even now, with the iPad mini 4 on the shelves, the mini 2 has a vital role to play. It’s the affordable entry into the iPad world – and still one of the strongest small-screen tablets on the market. That’s a compliment to both Apple’s design and engineering. Only 7.5mm thick and 331g in weight, the iPad mini 2 is slimmer and lighter than many of its rivals, with only the ZenPad S and Yoga offering more slender fits. The aluminium construction is solid and feels balanced whether in portrait or landscape, even when held in one hand. Its look and feel leaves Google’s Nexus 9 in…

Dell has evolved its tablet strategy over the past few years, competing at the high end with Android devices such as the ultra-slim Venue 8 Pro 7000, while still delivering mid-range, business-focused Windows models such as the Venue 8 Pro 5000 here. It’s a heavyweight 8in tablet that feels a bit like the old Nexus 7 with added muscle. At 395g and 9mm thick, it’s noticeably chunkier than rival eight-inchers. That said, it feels extremely solid, with a tough, rubberised shell that has a raised, concentric-ring pattern for added grip. The power button and volume rocker are on the right-hand side, and there’s a microSD slot beneath a pull-off flap. The combination of an 8in screen and a 1,280 x 800 resolution isn’t thrilling, but the 189ppi pixel density is…

LG’s first G Pad, the G Pad 8.3, was one of the best small-screen tablets of 2013, bringing the style and performance of the brand’s smartphones to the tablet market. Sadly, while the G Pad 7.0 has been around for a year, it hasn’t made as many friends. Too much about it is entirely mediocre. There’s nothing much wrong with the design. With a curved black polycarbonate shell and toughened glass front, it feels a little like an oversized budget smartphone, but it’s also light, well balanced and easy to hold. The power button and volume rocker protrude slightly from the righthand side, while a pull-off cap conceals an SD slot – a necessity with only 8GB of storage onboard, almost 6GB of which is occupied by the OS and…

NBN IS ROCKET SCIENCE You printed a brief email I sent to Anthony (Investigator), and your editorial cutoff date would have been about the same time as I found the information was wrong! First, context: I had suggested to Anthony ideas for an NBN column under the Investigator’s umbrella, using four rural case studies of people I know around Geeveston TAS, and our own non-delivery. A couple of weeks later, I saw a news report that was the basis of a follow up email for Anthony; the one you printed in the November issue. Around Oct 10th or so, another news report said the satellite was to be launched from French Guiana, later in October! I know the NBN is a mass of confusion, but I never expected it to…

For the fun Blizzard has filed for legal action against James ‘Apoc’ Enright and several of his colleagues for their work in the creation and distribution of cheating bots in three of their flagship games. Blizzard stated in their complaint that, “as a result of Enright’s conduct, Blizzard has lost millions or tens of millions of dollars in revenue” “Meanwhile, Enright and his team have been massively and enriched at Blizzard’s expense, having received hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in profits from the sale of the Bots” the complaint goes on to say. Blizzard’s reaction to bot, comes from a desire to protect what they feel makes their products compelling. “The success of each [game] rests in part on Blizzard’s ability to retain their users’ interest so…

SKYLAKE POWER GAMER TI Computers TI Extreme Power 6700K $2890 –http://tinyurl.com/o83wns3 The first thing that strikes us about this system is that it comes pre-overclocked at 4.8GHz! That is some nice piece of mind knowing not only that the system will be capable of such speeds, but that it will remove any effort on your part to achieve it, just unbox, plug it in, and off you go. Paired with the extreme overclock is some extreme storage. Here we find the new NVMe 256GB Samsung 950 Pro that will give you up to 2200MB/s speeds. A 2TB HDD is also included, which is just as well, 256GB is not particularly roomy. If considering this system however, we would recommend asking for an upgrade to the GTX 980 Ti, which would…

PHILIPS FIDELIO B5 SOUNDBAR We love this soundbar for its versatility. It features two detachable wireless modules on either end of the bar for creating the perfect surround sound setup no matter where they’re placed (thanks to a new calibration algorithm) or for use as independent Bluetooth speakers. $1,099.95 • www.philips.com.au EPSON ECOTANK WORKFORCE ET-4550 We don’t normally get excited about printers but, well, it finally happened – a major manufacturer is breaking the printer ink cartridge racket with an eco and wallet-friendly refillable tank system. Expect a lower page count for colour, but it’ll churn through 11,000 monochrome pages (at an ink cost of 0.22c per page) before needing a top up. $697 • www.epson.com.au LOGITECH HARMONY ELITE UNIVERSAL REMOTE Whereas most universal remotes are content controlling living room…

CORSAIR H100IGTX WATER COOLER Corsair have once again nailed the all-inone liquid cooler, with an easy to install kit that’ll keep a first-time beginner’s red hot rig performing at its absolute best. Meanwhile seasoned builders and overclockers will love the ability to fine tune their pump and fan speeds, and if care about how it looks adjust the RGB LED, through the monitoring software. $179.00 • www.corsair.com/en-au UPGRADE YOUR MOBO Choosing the mother of all motherboards is a difficult process, but with so many excellent Skylake boards to choose from – whether you prefer Asus, Gigabyte, MSI or ASRock – honestly, it’s hard to go wrong. But, if you want a bit more detail than we can fit here check out our lab tests in issue #215 for the best…

All of the tech Here’s something you probably already know – next gen SSDs are confusing. And being confused is totally ok, because it’s all a mess of acronyms and misunderstandings. We’re here to help, but I tell you, learning the ins and outs of the new protocols connectivity standards is a challenge. There’s a lot of mud in the water out there, which is why we’re not moving on any time soon. We’re already well underway with a banger of a group test for the next issue of PC&TA, we’ve rounded up all the hot new next-gen drives, covering M.2 and PCIe format, spanning AHCI and the new NVMe protocols. That’s a don’t-miss issue of PC&TA! It was while I was testing Samsung’s impressive new 950 Pro that a…

Lenovo has always aimed its products at the discerning professional, and the second generation ThinkPad 10 is no exception. There are no frills here. The black on black colour scheme makes the tablet look very sleek, and even the logos on the back are darkened. You’ll certainly get approving nods around the boardroom table if you whip this bad boy out. Sadly, there’s no built in stand or included keyboard – you’ll have to purchase those separately. The back of the tablet feels very much like the Lenovo and IBM ThinkPads of yore – no shiny and fingerprint-prone surfaces here, rather a brushed metal feel, adding to its premium appeal. The front, of course, is a different matter. With its lovely 10.1in IPS multitouch screen, it just begs to be…

Draytek’s Vigor line of routers are popular with those who need a few more features than the average home user. The Vigor 2925Vac has everything you could ever need in a router, plus more you didn’t even know you need. Hardware wise, the Vigor 2925Vac sports 802.11ac Wi-Fi, a five port gigabit switch, two gigabit WAN ports for failover or load balancing, dual USB ports for file sharing or 3G/4G modems and three VOIP ports – 2x FXS and 1x FXO Line port. It isn’t rack mountable out of the box, which is a shame considering those considering the Vigor 2925Vac are likely to have a small comms cabinet for a router to live in. On the software side, the DrayTek interface is relatively easy to use. Whilst there’s a…

Sony’s flagship Xperia range of smartphones has undergone a rapid evolution over the past year or two, with the Z2, Z3 and Z3+ all appearing within 18 months of each other. With such small intervals between each revamp, though, the changes made to the phones weren’t particularly groundbreaking. With the Z5, however, that all changes. It introduces a refined design, a revamped camera and a fingerprint reader. The end result is a far superior phone. DESIGN At first glance, the Xperia Z5 isn’t all that different from its forebears. It keeps the trademark glass-slabbed front and back, and the phone is both water- and dustresistant. Sony has provided a few subtle alterations with this generation, adding an engraved Xperia logo on the left edge, squaring off the phone’s metal frame…

Okay, it won’t be the best-looking game in your collection, but you may well lose the most hours to it. Only they won’t feel like hours – trust us on this one. It’s essentially a series of quite brilliant mini-games tied together to become a full RPG charting the life and journey of a professional footballer. Actions such as shooting, passing and heading are replicated on the pitch. Do well, and a bigmoney transfer beckons. New Star Soccer app does contain micro-transactions, so it isn’t genuinely “free”, but if you want to give it a go and remain unfettered by such things, a full Flash version of the game is available online.…

This fun app creates instant mashups of movies based around words you type. Write “I love you” and you might get Tobias Funke from Arrested Development, Timon from The Lion King and Peter from Family Guy all chipping in to say it back to you in a custom video clip. The app currently has a dearth of words in its banks, but it gives an option for you to fill in the blanks with a video of yourself. With time, the transitions will hopefully be made smoother, but for now it’s an entertaining way to build and share short remixes with your friends.…

Two big innovation boxes are ticked here (not counting that it looks like a toaster, which is cool). As a drive dock, it takes any SATA drive, whether mechanical or SSD. A hinged flap leaves an opening for an SSD, but flicks out of the way to accept a larger 3.5 inch hard drive. Inside are an exposed SATA connector, and power connector. And, it uses a Type C USB 3.1 connector. That’s pretty radical for a product like this, especially when there’s no model on offer with USB 3.0 or even 2.0. Type C isn’t the backwardscompatible plug type, so we’re a little conflicted on whether to praise this product or not. It certainly offers useful functionality, if you’re the type to frequently access naked hard drives, such as…

Meet the the highest resolution full frame DSLR on the market. It looks much like a 5D Mark III but under its skin it’s a 50.6mp monster that utilises some of Canon’s newest technologies such as dual DIGIC 6 image processor, enhanced iTR AF (aka “Intelligent Tracking & Recognition AF”), and two EOS firsts; in-camera timelapse movie creation and crop shooting modes for both 1.3x and 1.6x crop factors. The addition of USB 3.0 port is also very welcome for tethered shooting situations and for transferring those juicy 50mp files. Other features include Mirror Vibration Control System (reduces camera slap keeping your photos sharp), 61-point AF system, 5 frames per second shooting and dual memory card slots (CF and SD). The 5DS is an affordable alternative to expensive medium format…

The Vivosmart HR is the newest addition to Garmin’s activity tracking range and resembles the lovechild of the Vivosmart band and the Vivofit 2. A sleek design with monochrome display, silicon band and built-in optical heart rate monitor on the underside (which I found to be very accurate), this new member of the Garmin family looks like its going to give the popular Fitbit Charge some competition. It may look simple, but the band offers a lot on its little display, with a simple swipe you can instantly access the time, step counter, heart rate, floors climbed, calories burnt, distance covered and phone notifications from texts, calls, email, calendar and social media. There are some other nice features such as a remote to play, pause, skip and rewind music on…

A part from a choice of colours, it’s hard to imagine a more generic budget tablet than the Acer Iconia One 8. It’s a chunky, solid little slate at 9.5mm thick and 360g, with a textured plastic back. Connections are limited to the classic micro-USB, headphones and microSD slot trio, while the power button and volume rocker are awkward to find at the right-hand side on the rear. The Acer’s specification is certainly nothing to write home about, either. A 5-megapixel rear-facing camera? A 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera? Quad-core Intel Atom processor? 1GB of RAM? They’re all here. Performance is as middle of the road as you might expect, with enough power to launch and switch between apps quickly, but not enough to run demanding apps with any degree of fluidity.…

When we first reviewed Google’s Nexus 9, we came away a little disappointed. Here was a tablet going toe-to-toe with the iPad Air 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.4, but without the build quality or finesse to go the distance. Now, however, you can often pick up a 16GB Nexus 9 for less than $400 (its price jumps about). So does the former high-end tablet make more sense at a mid-range price? In many areas it does. The 8.9in, 2,048 x 1,536 screen is a beauty, is easily superior to everything else in this Labs other than the iPad mini 2. At 464cd/m2, it’s almost ludicrously bright, yet contrast levels are high and colour accuracy is near flawless. The same compliments go to its viewing angles, and to its…

This thoroughly delightful gaming mouse is designed specifically for those who use a ‘claw’ grip style. That is, with the base of your palm planted and used to pivot, with your fingers raised and perched on the mouse surface. As such, it’s smaller than usual, and has a big lumpy protrusion on the right for your forefingers to rest on to aid in comfort and control. It’s a little gem in every way. The Japanese Omron switches are firm and clicky, they feel very pro. The plastic textures are grippy, not sweaty, and make it look very classy, especially with the sole lighting bit being the mouse wheel. It’s an optical sensor, but via software can be calibrates to work on unusual surfaces, just like a laser mouse – but…

The strapline for Office 365 is “takes the work out of working together”, but what exactly does Microsoft mean by this? Primarily, it’s talking about collaboration, but aside from that, there are new and improved features waiting to be discovered. In this feature, we’ll guide you through using the new collaboration tools in Word 2016, and take a look at both Skype for Business and the new data-analytics features in Excel 2016. OUTLOOK Outlook 2016 benefits from a muchimproved search facility, and promises to help keep your inbox clutter-free, thanks to automatic message filtering. “Modern attachments”, which puts your most recently used files in a menu on the Outlook ribbon, help you send files more quickly. Better still, if the files are stored on OneDrive, you can share them directly,…

It’s four months since I wrote about getting the Honeywell Evohome system installed at Chez Ockenden. For those who missed it, Evohome is a sophisticated central-heating and hot-water control system that operates using wireless sensors and actuators, and which can be controlled from a smartphone. It’s hard to think of anything more suited to this column! The two main benefits that Evohome brings are economy (the manufacturer claims savings of around 40% on your fuel bills), and comfort – the result of finer control over the temperature of your home, and particularly having different temperatures in various “zones” at certain times of the day or week. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough data yet to report how much it has reduced my energy bills, and that’s exacerbated by the intervening months…

TWO FINAL NAILS IN TRUECRYPT’S COFFIN Six months ago, I was guilty of sitting on the fence over the question “should I still use be using TrueCrypt?” There were several reasons you might not have wanted to use encryption software last released in 2012 and dropped by its own developers in 2014, who warned “TrueCrypt is not secure” and abandoned any further support. TrueCrypt had been the encryption choice for much of the open-source community for a decade, and an independent security audit in 2015 found “no evidence of any design flaws severe enough to make it inherently insecure”. However, I stated on these pages that business users would be on dodgy ground if they used a non-supported security product declared insecure by its own developer, if a breach occurred.…

The Unreal Engine has received an enormous update, with a focus on engine stability and bug fixes, 4.10 comes with hundreds of updates engine wide, 53 of which are attributed to GitHub community members. The engine has been refined further from its predecessor with new focus on Virtual Reality, Epic Games using the engine to produce their own VR demo Bullet Train. The update has given extra support has also been given to mobile platforms IOS 9.0 and Android Marshmallow (6.0). A big boon for developers with the Unreal update is the improved Visual Studio integration, now defaulting to the latest edition for coders who prefer C++. The engine has already been pumping out some games to keep an eye on such as Unreal Tournament, the newest edition to the…

DJI PHANTOM 3 PROFESSIONAL It’s safe to say the consumer camera drone craze has well and truly taken off. The wonderfully accessible Phantom 3 rises well above the competition, and though most will be satisfied with the Standard model, the high-end Professional’s 3-axis gimbal stabilised 4K cam takes the already amazing quadcopter to new heights. $2,199 • www.dji.com SUUNTO TRAVERSE Keeping hikers and runners on track without sacrificing style, the Traverse is a sports watch that looks as appropriate in the bush as it does in the boardroom, with all the usual features of a fitness focused wearable plus GPS and GLONASS (aka Russian GPS) – perfect for following a predetermined route, or retracing steps when bush bashing. $549.95 • www.suunto.com/en-au SAMSUNG GEAR VR If you want to get up…

TAG HEUER CONNECTED Well, now there truly is a smartwatch for everyone – and this one is for those of you earning the big bucks. Running Android Wear and with an Intel Z3400 series processor (the first to go into an Android Watch), the titanium design features a 1.5 inch LTPS LCD touchscreen so everyone can see just how successful you are. US$1,500 • shop-au.tagheuer.com AUDIO-TECHNICA ATH-ADG1 Audio-Technica’s top of the line gaming headphones are essentially a refined version of the AG1 model, albeit with an openback design and soft material ear pads in place of the icky pleatherlike plastic of its predecessor. You’ll feel a little less sonically isolated, which combined with a little less weight on your head makes for far more comfortable marathon gaming sessions. $319.00 •…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. The median score of 100 is based on…

Synology is best known for its NAS products, which we regard very highly. Now it has entered the router market, which, given its networking expertise, makes perfect sense. The RT1900ac is what we’d call solid if unspectacular. The product offers dual bands, with a 5GHz band capable of up to 1300Mbps transfer rate, and a 2.4GHz band able to transfer at a maximum of 600Mbps. The heart of the machine is the tried and tested Broadcom BCM58622 chipset, which is built around the Cortex dual core 1GHz CPU, 4GB of flash memory and a relatively low 256MB of RAM. Three antennas provide good coverage, and in testing the signal and speeds were strong and reliable three bedrooms away from its location. Four gigabit Ethernet LAN ports around the back are…

There’s a war going on in the land of networking. Over the last year we’ve seen Rivet Network’s Killer e2400 Gigabit Ethernet controller springing up all over the place, mostly on gamingoriented motherboards, although we’ve also seen it in Dell and Alienware PCs. It promises to deliver razor-sharp pings while simultaneously allowing large downloads and media streaming in the background, but we’ve been a little skeptical so far. This is because our earlier experiences with Killer networking products weren’t the greatest, but the time has come to put the company’s latest Ethernet controller to the Labs test. But before we head to the benchmarks, let’s take a look at Rivet’s past. BIGFOOT COMES WITH A BIG PRICE The first Killer NIC landed in Australia 2007, but the company behind it…

Photoshop has long been the mainstay of designers, photographers and internet mememakers. This free iOS app is in no way a replacement for the in-depth editing tools that come with the full Photoshop release, but it’s one heck of a starting point for beginners. Angled towards patching up photos, the app has tools that give you the ability to warp faces, “heal” pictures by removing imperfections (or unwanted people in the shot), as well as a range of colour, focus and tone options. You can export layers to Photoshop CC, making it both a great ancillary tool and quickfire editor. The fact that all of these features are free is mindblowing.…

Every now and then Thermaltake decides that normal cases and boring, and come up with an impressively edgy new design. It did with the Level 10 range, and now the Core P5 follows suit. The Core P5 features a base panel that you mount components on and in, and then four heavy stand-off pillars that support a heavy perspex sheet. It’s a striking design, and for those who love tinkering and showing off their hardware it’s nearly perfect. The base panel can also be laid flat, in an open test-bench configuration, or even mounted on a wall, which would be very striking indeed. It’s designed for good airflow and intricate watercooling setups, too – it’s a real enthusiast-level design. It is not, however, simple, requiring some construction out of the…

SSD prices are diving, and we’re all too glad to welcome that. This 1TB Transcend SSD370S1TB can be had for very close to $500. This is notable because now with M.2 and PCIe SSDs entering the market, you can no longer pack in several SATA SSDs or HDDs in a system equipped with one or two PCIe SSDs, because you just won’t have enough PCIe lanes. So our strong recommendation when purchasing a SATA SSD, is to go for as much capacity as possible, because the days of fitting in many small capacity SSDs are over. Despite being such good value, the Transcend SSD370S is a very impressive performer, recording an impressive 522.8MB/s read speed. Write speed was 437MB/s, which is average for a budget SSD. We have no hesitation…

Buyer’s guide WITH PRICES TUMBLING AND QUALITY STEADILY IMPROVING, NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY OR UPGRADE A TABLET Prices are falling across most forms of technology. Yet, by any standard, the fall in the cost of tablets is little short of incredible. When the iPad launched, $629 was the entry level. Now you can buy a basic tablet for $100, while excellent mid-rangers with speedy processors and high-definition screens can be found for well under $400. Whether you’re looking to try a tablet for the first time or upgrade from your old model, now is a great time to buy. Your biggest decisions will involve software and size. Even at the low end, you have a choice of iOS, Android and Windows, not to mention Amazon’s take on…

Having breached the $150 barrier with the Fire HD 6, Amazon has now dived down to $129 with this bargain-basement 7in Fire. It’s not hard to see where the corners have been cut. Bar one giant logo, this is a generic, featureless slab with rounded corners and a little too much flex in its cheap matte-black plastic shell. The screen has also been compromised, returning to the 7in, 1,024 x 600 combination of the original 2012 Kindle Fire. With a pixel density of only 171ppi, it’s not crystal clear, making digital magazines and websites hard to read. The screen’s bright at 327cd/m2, but contrast is low at 772:1 and colour accuracy is poor. Yet, while this is the weakest Amazon screen so far, it’s not unusable. Games, apps and videos…

With a cylindrical bulge at the bottom and ingenious hinged kickstand, the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 stands out for its looks, but is practical too. Not only does the hinge contain the battery, trimming bulk from behind the screen, but it’s great for gripping the device with one hand. The stand has three modes: one nearvertical, one with the tablet lying almost horizontal and the stand propping it up underneath, and a third allowing it to be hung from a string or rail. Add a Bluetooth keyboard (not included), and the Yoga Tablet 2 is ready to work. At over 600g, it’s not a light tablet, and only the hinge and kickstand are metal, with the rear finished in matching plastic. It still feels robust and has handy design touches,…

Over the last year or so, German peripheral developer Roccat seems to have turned a corner, going from a very flashy design philosophy to one that is based around subtlety and clever features. The new Kiro mouse is a fine example of this new philosophy. Built to be truly ambidextrous, the Kiro utilises a similar modular approach to the excellent Roccat Nyth, but instead of reconfiguring the size and placement of thumb buttons users can instead choose on which side of the mouse these buttons fit by swapping out magnetic side panels. It’s an extremely clever design that makes the mouse equally useable and comfortable in either hand. Of course, if you’re a fan of having pinkie buttons as well, you can always have buttons on both sides. More options…

WHEN HACKING, LOOK FOR BRACKETS Even though hacking will still come down to puzzling out the right password by analysing the similarities between the available words, you can make your life a little easier by searching through the ASCII scramble that surrounds the passwords and click on any set of closed similar brackets you find. Any linked pair of closed brackets you click on will eradicate one false password and won’t take up any of your actual choices. Brackets may be hard to spot with the naked eye but can be easily found if you scroll your mouse over each line of text in the hacking screen -any sets of brackets will highlight when you mouse over them. WALK EVERYWHERE Rather than fast travel between locations, take the time and…

MARKETING TO AN AUDIENCE OF ONE Advertising is about to get more personal, thanks to the Internet of Things, facial recognition and data analytics. Smart cameras could watch shoppers, judge their mood and guess their clothing brands, all in order to suggest personalised advertisements – but without knowing the shopper’s real identity. The hope is that stores could make product recommendations and gather marketing data to build up a profile of a shopper without losing their trust. KICKSTARTING A MOON SHOT Chris Larmour is trying to send a rocket to land a small payload on the moon – and it’s all thanks to crowdfunding. If successful, he’ll send a 22-ton rocket with a small payload in a titanium “spike”, which will penetrate the surface of the moon. Larmour is raising…

It’s hard to know quite what to make of recent Microsoft announcements: on the one hand, the company has announced a sweeping set of technologies that it has every right to be proud and excited about. But on the other hand, I’m not so sure: I wish I could be more certain they have “wow factor”. But maybe that will come once real hardware soon lands in my hands. Let’s start with the Windows Phone announcement. I’d normally just say “they announced a few” and move swiftly on, because Windows 10 Mobile is so horribly late to the party that they’re not even there for the following morning cleanup – they’ve arrived on the wrong day, several weeks later. There’s little sign that Android and iOS have any intention of…

Every creative project, from a simple one-off poster to a full-blown multimedia extravaganza, needs graphics. While good images can make your project, bad ones will ruin it, so it’s worth putting in the effort to make sure you’re using the best possible assets. Thirty years ago, I commissioned photographers for projects that had the necessary budget and scoured through printed catalogues of blackand-white royalty-free images for projects that didn’t. Twenty years ago, I spent a fortune on a new-fangled CD-ROM containing hundreds of clipart images of the sort that would now embarrass your granny. At the time, I was absolutely delighted with it. Eventually, the web arrived and transformed the field. Online delivery made it possible for image suppliers to make bitmap photos and vector illustrations instantly available to the…

How will the world be introduced to IPv6? The answer, based on my recent experience, is “not with a bang but a whimper” (to quote from T S Eliot, for all you millennials). Every so often there’s a news item that tells us how many IPv4 addresses the world has left, something like “did you know North America has only 50 more IPv4 addresses left than there are Siberian tigers in the wild?” This is just the sort of pointless factoid popular in modern “news making” – appearing to provide hard information without telling you anything about the practical outcome. In practice, shortages like this are resolvable. The methods being used aren’t what this tabloid reportage might suggest: the problem is mostly encountered by ISPs, not end users, and they…

“Apple’s recent “Chipgate” scandal, where the battery life and power of an iPhone 6s was allegedly linked to which company made the processor, is fascinating: it’s rare for the grubby inner workings of the production process to come to the attention of the public, Volkswagen notwithstanding. The practical reality is that launching a new phone is a supply chain nightmare. Apple does such a good job of keeping everything under wraps, and ensuring its supply chain does the same, meaning that it’s incredibly hard to know precisely where a new model is in terms of development. I’ve heard rumours that the manufacturing partners only get the final details a few weeks before launch, and then go into a total frenzy to build as many as possible in the remaining time.…