Table of contents for September 2017 in PC Pro

BACKGROUND INFO ON INNOVATIVE BRITISH COMPANIES KEYFACTS Fliplet is a WYSIWYG app development platform that helps enterprises swiftly roll out line-ofbusiness apps FOUNDED 2009 STAFF 17 HEADQUARTERS London WEBSITE fliplet.com You’re the head of legal affairs for Big Shiny Corp. You want a mobile app for your team of in-house lawyers, so that should a legal emergency occur out-of-hours, they can answer a few simple yes/no questions and know exactly which procedures to follow and who to call. You approach the head of IT. He sucks his teeth, points to a long list of jobs queuing from across the company and assigns you a ticket. You and he both know that’s the last you will ever hear of it, but this is the charade you must go through. Ian Broom…

@njkobie The tech industry has a problem with women, and it’s going to cost more than $4.50 per lady to fix it. Google, it would seem, isn’t keen to pay that much. The tech giant is under investigation by the US Department of Labor, which is demanding salary details of employees stretching back years to uncover whether there’s a gender pay gap at the company. Google has repeatedly claimed that its own internal reports prove there isn’t a salary differential, but the government investigators want more data. Among other arguments, Google has said that digging up such additional figures would cost $100,000, a sum it’s unwilling to pay. As has been pointed out, it’s laughable that Google can’t easily and cheaply crunch its own employment figures, as hoovering up data…

I have some objections to Joe Soap’s protests that Barry Collins’ statistical analysis of terrorist threats (see issue 274, p28) shows a “lack of insight to understand the human consequences of terrorism”. Joe says that Barry fails to account for the “grief, pain and loss” suffered by terrorism victims’ families, but he ignores the grief, pain and loss of families of those killed in other tragic events, such as traffic accidents. The “decades of pain, loss and grief” caused by terrorism are just as lamentable, yes, but drastically fewer than those caused by other factors. Would back doors in encrypted communications help thwart terrorism? Only if used effectively, by which I mean all means of communication available to each suspect must be sifted, live, with suspicious content passed to the…

The biggest, best, most exciting products in tech – tested, evaluated and reviewed PRICE As reviewed, £1,040 (£1,249 inc VAT) from microsoft.com Ever since Microsoft released the first Surface Pro, critics have nagged the company to make a “proper” laptop. It brought out the Surface Book, but that still wasn’t enough to keep the critics happy. Now, five years into the Surface programme, we finally have one, and it’s called the Surface Laptop. And guess what? The critics still won’t be happy. That’s not to say the Surface Laptop isn’t a lovely piece of hardware. It is, and you’ll pay a pretty penny for it (something I’ll come back to later). But it’s a laptop with a difference: it’s designed for and comes with Windows 10 S rather than Windows…

PRICE 64GB, £516 (£619 inc VAT) from apple.com “When you scroll, it’s buttery smooth.” So said Apple’s Greg Joswiak, on stage at WWDC 2017, waxing lyrical about the 10.5in Apple iPad Pro. You can imagine those words printed 20-feet high on a billboard outside Palo Alto, along with a picture of someone smearing Lurpak on a tablet. Turns out, smoothness is very much the iPad Pro’s biggest advantage. The new model has a slightly different design to its Pro and non-Pro iPad siblings, but what truly sets it apart is how it couples compactness with a bright display that has an outstanding refresh rate. Responsive to touch and optimised for multitasking, this is Apple’s best pitch yet against the laptop. Spot the difference? At a glance, the device looks to…

Although Intel has already fought back with the launch of the Core i9 (see Unveiled, p12), the chip giant was taken by surprise when AMD launched the Ryzen 7. Its performance is highly competitive, but the price was the real shock. In this review, we’ve been assessing the top Ryzen 7 1800X in a system that would normally have arrived with an Intel Core i7 sporting six, eight or even ten cores. Yet the price of the Ryzen 7 range puts it more in competition with Intel’s quad-core range. The Ryzen 7 1800X showcased here is less than half the price of the eight-core Intel Core i7-6900K –although the latter has considerably more headroom for overclocking, so has an edge in performance despite its lower 3.2GHz base frequency. The Ryzen…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,149 (£1,379 inc VAT) from store.hp.com Packed with a slew of business features, HP’s latest convertible laptop is gunning for the boardroom. The aluminium unibody is accented with diamond-cut edges, with a professional aesthetic that’s attractive without being garish. Despite its sleek looks, there’s an air of sturdiness that’s well-deserved: the X360 is designed to pass the MIL STD 810G tests that certify a device as rugged enough for use by the US military. At 1.27kg, the 13.3in EliteBook X360 is a little chunky compared to the 1.1kg Toshiba Portégé X20W we reviewed last month (see issue 274, p57). However, the X360 includes a full-size keyboard, powerful internal components and a healthy allocation of ports, so it’s easy to forgive. Just like the X20W, this a convertible…

PRICE £540 (£648 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275sony Back in 2015, I reviewed the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium. What made it premium, according to Sony, was its 4K screen at a time when almost all screens on smartphones were 1080p. It was silly, especially given that it only worked in 4K mode for two Sony apps; YouTube and Netflix didn’t support mobile 4K. Even if they did, the awkward truth is that you don’t have magic eyes: you can’t see the difference between 4K and 1080p on a screen that small. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, 4K remains silly on a 5.5in display. It’s silly because there’s still precious little 4K content for Android. It’s silly because it drains the battery. That last point also means that…

AMDRyzen51400 PRICE £128 (£154 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ry14 An overclockable quad-core CPU for £154 sounds too good to be true, but the Ryzen 5 1400 is just that. It offers four physical cores for £19 less than the dual-core Core i3-7350K – and thanks to AMD’s SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) technology, it can actually handle eight threads simultaneously, which is twice what you’ll get from a Core i5 chip. The sacrifices are obvious: there’s only 8MB of L3 cache, and the Ryzen 5 1400 has a base frequency of just 3.2GHz, capable of boosting up to a maximum of 3.45GHz. That relatively slow stock speed didn’t do the Ryzen 5 1400 any favours in our image-editing test, but it regained ground in rendering tests, where its quad-core design raced ahead of…

PRICE £64 (£77 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com It’s hard for a SATA SSD to distinguish itself. The SATA interface itself acts as a bottleneck on bandwidth, so no matter how fast and flashy the technology inside your drive, it’s simply impossible for a drive to race ahead of its rivals. That’s not to say that all drives are identical. The Adata Ultimate SU900 was this month’s fastest SATA drive in our sequential read benchmark. However, look at the collated results on p90 and it’s clear that we’re dealing with small margins. For most practical purposes, the SU900 delivers the same overall performance as any other drive in its class. That being the case, you might wonder what makes it a winner compared to, say, the Corsair Force LE. One factor…

PRICE £189 (£227 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/27596e Samsung’s “Evo” SSDs are aimed at shoppers who don’t need the flat-out speed of a top-tier drive. Accordingly, the 960 Evo isn’t as fast as the 960 Pro (see p86). But it’s still a great performer and the price is lower, making it a compelling proposition. It’s still not cheap: the 500GB model we tested costs nearly £100 more than the Crucial MX300, and that drive gives you an extra 25GB. But fire up the benchmarks and it’s clear that you get what you pay for. It put in a superb performance in CrystalDiskMark, with a sequential read speed of 1,931MB/sec – only Samsung’s own 960 Pro did better. We also tried a multi-threaded sequential read test, and saw an huge transfer rate…

PRICE £218 (£262 inc VAT) from cclonline.com Corsair’s MP500 is an expensive SSD. Of this month’s crop of M.2 drives, only the Samsung 960 Pro costs more. However, the Samsung somewhat justifies its high price with best-in-class performance; the MP500, not so much. To be fair, the MP500 easily outpaces any SATA drive. For sequential read and write operations, no 2.5in model can come close, and the Corsair proved a strong performer at multithreaded random reads too. Among its NVMe peers, however, the MP500 ranked fourth in a field of five. There is one area where the MP500 excels, and that’s write endurance. Corsair claims that the drive will handle a huge 698TBW – equivalent to writing around 190GB a day for ten years. Obviously that’s far in excess of…

PRICE £187 (£224 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk It might seem that SATA SSDs are much of a muchness, but Samsung has evidently sought to give its high-end 2.5in drive a character of its own. The 850 Pro uses the company’s upmarket MEX controller, rather than the 850 Evo’s MGX, and the slightly different capacity – 512GB rather than 500GB – bespeaks a different arrangement of flash memory. These technical variations, however, make little difference to performance. With crushing predictability, any clever technical advantage the internals might offer is obliterated by the limitations of the SATA interface. We can say with confidence that you will not notice any difference in performance between this drive and the Crucial MX300. That’s a bit embarrassing, in light of the 850 Pro’s weighty price tag…

PRICE £64 (£77 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ssp The SanDisk SSD Plus is a low-cost drive originally released back in 2015. That might not sound very long ago, but the market has moved on quite a bit in two years. What might once have seemed like a tempting balance of price and performance now looks very much like a bum deal. Let’s look at the performance side of the equation first. Spoilt as we are these days, we’ve been taking it more or less for granted that a SATA SSD will approach the maximum read and write speeds supported by the interface. The SSD Plus confounded that expectation, with a dismal sequential write speed of 216MB/sec; we’ve actually seen mechanical drives do better. In the multi-threaded tests too, the SSD Plus…

PRICE £224 (£269 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Not many years ago, a terabyte-sized SSD would have cost more than your entire computer. Today the WD Blue delivers that gargantuan capacity for a very affordable £269. To be strictly accurate, 24GB is kept aside for overprovisioning, so its usable capacity is 1,000GB, which formats down to 931GB in Windows – but that’s still a good chunk of space, even for compulsive downloaders. Although Blue is WD’s mid-range brand, the drive is fast enough to saturate the SATA interface, as our benchmark results show. In other words, it’s just as speedy as “high-end” SATA drives from Samsung and SanDisk. It also comes with Acronis True Image software – in this case a special WD edition. This not only helps you migrate your…

Installing a new SSD is the perfect opportunity to perform a clean installation of Windows, to clear out old junk and stay up to date. To install and activate, you may need to dig out your original product key. If you don’t have this to hand, you can use a tool such as NirSoft ProduKey to view all the product keys in your Registry (pcpro.link/275key). Windows 10 may not need a key, depending on how it was activated. If you need new installation media, you can now download ISO files for Windows 7, 8 and 10, directly from the Microsoft website. You can write these ISO files to a DVD, or a USB flash drive, using the free media creation tool at pcpro.link/275usb. Upgrading to Windows 10 Microsoft’s free Windows…

PRICE £827 exc VAT from pcpro.link/275aver Aver’s VC520 is designed to be permanently installed in a large conference room, and it shows: everything about it is big. The camera weighs in at a hefty 1.5kg, and comes with a sturdy metal bracket, allowing it to be firmly fixed to a desk, wall or ceiling. It’s also big on versatility. The camera has fully motorised pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) capabilities, and an impressive 12x optical zoom, so you can easily set up the perfect frame for your meeting. Low light performance is great too, thanks to a wide f/1.8 maximum aperture. Then there’s the speakerphone, which adds another kilo to the weight. It incorporates triple directional microphones for 360-degree coverage over a 9m diameter, along with a 10W internal speaker.…

PRICE Skype kit, £1,297 exc VAT from pcpro.link/275poly Polycom’s RealPresence Trio 8800 Collaboration Kit is a complete voice and videoconferencing hub, offering everything a small business could possibly need. And there’s no need to hook it up to a laptop or mobile: the hardware handles it all. The heart of the RealPresence Trio 8800 is the base unit – a sleek, low-profile tripod that houses a 5in colour touchscreen, three studioquality cardioid mics and a powerful central loudspeaker. Polycom makes big claims for this speaker, claiming its quality is “legendary”. The video side of things is handled by Polycom’s Visual+ satellite hub, which connects via USB to the bundled Logitech C930e 1080p HD webcam (note that no other type of USB camera is supported). You don’t need to connect the…

PRICE Diskless, £1,649 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Qnap’s TVS-873 is one of the company’s most versatile NAS appliances yet. This eight-bay desktop box comes in a golden chassis, and is powered by a 2.1GHz quad-core AMD RX-421BD SoC, including a Radeon R7 GPU. The top-end model we tested includes 64GB of DDR4 memory, but you can save by opting for the 8GB or 16GB versions, which cost £1,013 and £1,206 respectively. The potential of that onboard GPU is hinted at by the presence of dual 4K HDMI ports lurking at the rear, along with a 3.5mm audio jack. There’s also a small built-in speaker, allowing the appliance to announce operations such as system booting or shutdown even when running headless. And you can use its two 3.5mm microphone ports to…

Hotdesking is just so 2003. Today, whatever work can’t be done on a laptop is done on a phone. Some try to use tablets as “super tablets” or as convertible laptops, but the essence is the same. Why do you need a desk to move to, whether hot, lukewarm or mildly tepid? Hotdesking presumes that people need to work in a quasi office environment. That means computers, screens, phones and a printer, together with internal network and external internet access. All these can be solved by modern tools, and none requires a desk and a table. I place much higher value on a comfortable chair, a footstool, plenty of table space to either side of me, local USB sockets and power, and a fine coffee machine that takes real beans.…

@Jon_Torbitt Over the past few years, getting coding back into schools has become big news and big business. Central government stipulated changes to the national curriculum that meant revoking the teaching of ICT – and its emphasis on using technology – and replacing it with Computing, whose emphasis is on coding. A growing number of schools has been offering it for a few years now, while others still don’t offer it beyond the age of 13. What constitutes Computing in schools then? Well, it’s mostly programming. “Code programs in at least two languages,” the Department of Education says. “They’re only six years old,” many teachers retort – “and what’s an algorithm?” “The tech sector remains successful, offering jobs with salaries paying 50% more than junior lawyers or accountants” Schools often…

Facebook wants to read your mind and Elon Musk hopes to connect your brain to a computer within ten years, aiming to solve everything from Alzheimer’s to avoiding the AI apocalypse. Such technology may sound unbelievable, but it’s a classic Silicon Valley move, noted Chris Brauer, director of innovation at the Institute of Management at Goldsmiths, University of London. “This is the Silicon Valley methodology,” he said. “It’s proven remarkably successful in other areas, to start with an outlandishly sci-fi possibility, and then throw tonnes of money at it and then go for the easy wins right away.” Those easy wins will likely mean a burst of investment in developing tech solutions for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and epilepsy. “All of these areas are going to see enormous strides over the next…

WIN a 27in monitor by voting in the PC Pro Excellence Awards: see p123 my finger is itchy. Actually, it’s my whole arm. And, extending the metaphor to include items of clothing that aren’t normally associated with itchiness, the pocket that contains my wallet. They keep on whispering into my ear that I need a tablet. “With a pen, Tim. With a pen. So you can write on the screen. Go on, you know you want to.” It doesn’t help that I have Barry Collins telling me, every few seconds or so, how marvellous his ThinkPad Yoga is. How he no longer needs to print pages to check them; he just writes on-screen with his magic stylus. As if to hammer this all home, I spent the weekend in the…

Core i9 processors Intel released a new set of processors that are so “extreme” it broke out the i9 branding for the first time. Until now, Intel’s Core processors have been streamed into the i3 (entry-level), i5 (mid-range) and i7 (high-end) categories. The new X-Series processors, which run up to 18 cores and 36 threads, push performance beyond those. The Core i9 has an extreme price to match its extreme performance, with the 18-core i9-7980XE chip costing around $2,000. “I think the 18-core beasts will be of interest to people who perform regular CPU-intensive tasks that are parallel in nature, [such as] 3D design and rendering, video editing and ultra-high resolution photographic work,” said Ben Miles of UK system builder Chillblast. “People using virtual machines for software testing will also…

In some cases, companies have been moved to act not only because of terrorist atrocities, but because they’ve come under commercial pressures, too. Google, for example, lost advertising revenue after companies and the UK government pulled their adverts because they were being run alongside terror videos. Google recently promised to invest in AI tools to spot and remove content that breaches its terms, as well as boosting staff numbers for YouTube’s Trusted Flagger programme and adding a new warning screen for dubious content. “The uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done. Now,” Google said in a blog post. Facebook said it also was deploying AI to remove content before it was seen by members, but admitted it was narrowly focused. “We are…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology @dariengs I had started to fear that I was succumbing to mental decline. Whenever I picked up my phone, a sense of uncertainty hung over me. I felt as if I couldn’t quite remember how to use features and apps that should have been wholly familiar. I hunted high and low for buttons I’d used a hundred times. I found myself tapping in the wrong place on the screen, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Having compared notes with friends and colleagues, I realise that it’s not me. The problem is that the apps themselves keep changing. You learn and internalise how something works, then an update comes along, and the next time you open it, it’s…

I’m sitting at my desk typing the sentence “I’ve never really been a gadget person” with a waist-high pile of old gadget boxes glowering in my peripheral vision. Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion: many of them are years old and relate to photographic rather than computer equipment. I upgrade my mobile and laptop around once a decade. I have all the camera gear I’ll ever need. I don’t go in for smart watches, Fitbits, digital recorders or the like. Except, I just bought two gadgets to do with music-making. Sorry. In my last column I explored how modern digital tools affect creative endeavours, and proposed that a human being always needs to be in the iterative enhancement loop to make aesthetic judgements about when to stop. Well, since then…

You might not think of mapping as an everyday computing task, but the technology is becoming ubiquitous. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have their own mobile platforms, which draw in geographical data to help us navigate from A to B, geotag our photos and pull in weather reports from the web. Those basic functions, however, represent only a fraction of the potential on hand. We literally have the world in our pockets – and there are a lot of things we can do with it. The possibilities include creating your own customised maps; navigating and exploring more effectively; and even promoting your business through Street View. EMBED A MAP IN EXCEL If you’re putting together a report or presentation that relies on geographical data – such as country populations or…

PRICE £1,750 (£2,100 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk The Ryzen 7 has put AMD right back in the picture for enthusiast PCs, but it has clear potential for professional users too. Our first taste of the new AMD CPU in workstation guise comes from Yoyotech, with the Redback N6 WS. This system also showcases AMD’s flagship single-GPU professional graphics, the Radeon Pro WX 7100, although Vega (see below) will soon arrive. The Redback sports the current top Ryzen 7, the 1800X. This eight-core processor runs at a native 3.6GHz, with a 4GHz turbo mode. It also sports Simultaneous Multithreading, where each core handles two threads in a similar fashion to Intel’s Hyper- Threading. In other words, this processor supports 16 threads, which is ideal for tasks such as 3D rendering. One…

PRICE £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from huawei.com It isn’t only Microsoft making its laptop debut this month: Chinese phone giant Huawei has also just launched the MateBook X, and what an excellent debutante it is. For a start, it squeezes a 13in screen into a body the size of a 12in MacBook. Huawei achieves this through delectably slim bezels surrounding the display: a mere 4.4mm on either side of the screen, with 8mm at the top to allow the placement of a webcam (take note, Dell). It’s done this without adding weight – the whole package tips the scales at a mere 1.05kg – which is all the more impressive considering it has an all-metal body. It’s available in three colours – gold, rose gold (aka pink) and grey –…

PRICE 128GB, £416 (£499 inc VAT) from oneplus.net/uk OnePlus has demonstrated over the past few years that it has a keen eye for what consumers want from a smartphone – a fast, no-frills device for a reasonable cost – and despite a big rise in price compared to the OnePlus 3T, the OnePlus 5 delivers once again. The company builds everything around Qualcomm’s new 2.45GHz/1.9GHz Snapdragon 835 chip and supplements it with a generous dollop of “more efficient” LPDDR4x RAM. If you choose the £499 128GB model you’ll get 8GB of RAM; the £449 64GB model includes 6GB. Just note there’s no microSD slot for storage expansion. You also forgo the long, tall screen of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6; instead, OnePlus sticks with its eminently sensible 1080p,…

PRICE £536 (£644 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275htc When HTC teased the U11, it declared a squeezy revolution. The truth is more prosaic: the HTC U11 is a great phone, but that’s nothing to do with the fact you can squeeze it. Here’s how it works. Squeeze both edges of the bottom half of the phone, exactly where you’d usually be holding it, and an action will occur. By default, one squeeze launches the camera app, even when the phone is locked; the second captures a photograph. That may sound useful, but squeezing the phone makes it hard to keep the camera lens still. Fortunately, you can change the behaviour. For example, it could be a shortcut for the voice-recording app, settings or activating the torch. It’s also possible to launch…

PRICE £177 (£212 inc VAT) from cclonline.com The XPG SX8000 is Adata’s top-of-the-range M.2 SSD, and it exploits the NVMe interface to deliver speeds in excess of anything over a SATA connector. But It’s far from this month’s fastest drive: the Samsung 960 Pro is 70% faster when it comes to sequential reads, and around 80% faster at sequential writes. Even the mid-range Evo outpaced the XPG. Still, in real-world usage the XPG SX8000 feels snappy. That may be partly down to its hybrid buffer, which uses DRAM for short-term caching but can also address MLC cells in simulated SLC mode for faster access. With such tricks under its hood, the SX8000 bested every other drive in the multi-threaded read test. The drive impressed us in PCMark 8’s storage tests:…

PRICE £78 (£94 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ada The SU800 is sold in both SATA and M.2 formats – but there’s no performance advantage to this M.2 version. Rather than using the superfast NMVe interface, it runs a SATA connection over the highspeed connector. Modern motherboards should support this arrangement without issue, but if you’re planning to install an M.2 expansion card into an older desktop, it may not work – check before you buy. The slower interface means the SU800 is left behind by most other M.2 SSDs, with read and write speeds more comparable to regular 2.5in SATA drives. Performance isn’t quite identical, though: in the multi-threaded random write test, the SU800 surprised us with an excellent throughput of 357MB/sec, which represented more bandwidth than any other drive on…

PRICE £129 (£155 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ev1 No, it’s not a typo. The Samsung 850 Evo is a modern M.2 SSD, and it’s also a traditional SATA drive (see right). It makes a bit more sense when you realise that the two drives are internally identical. The second notch on the M.2 connector betrays the fact that – like the Adata Ultimate SU800 (see opposite) – the 850 Evo uses a regular SATA connection over PCI-E, rather than taking advantage of the faster NVMe standard. As a result, the M.2 version of the 850 Evo is disappointing in exactly the same way as the SU800. Its performance figures are absolutely fine – for a SATA drive. By M.2 standards, they’re pretty disastrous. Sequential read and write operations tick along at…

PRICE £243(£292incVAT)frompcpro.link/27596p If you’re looking for a drive that truly unlocks the potential of NVMe, this is it. The Samsung 960 Pro is the fastest consumer SSD we’ve ever tested, easily seeing off all-comers in our sequential read and write benchmarks. We’re talking about four times the read speed of your typical SATA drive, and more than three times the write speed. Admittedly, the 960 Pro didn’t do quite so well in the multi-threaded tests; here it kept pace with the competition, but didn’t stand out. Overall though it has an undoubted edge in real-world workloads, as attested by a string of first-place results in the PCMark 8 storage benchmarks. That stunning performance is partnered with hardware encryption and a decent five-year warranty. A 400TBW endurance rating for this 512GB…

PRICE £64 (£77 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk We frequently see the Canvas SL308 in custom systems from British PC builders. And why not? It’s a decent SATA drive, delivering performance that keeps up with the competition, and at £77 it’s no more expensive than any other drive of similar capacity. When you open the box, the Canvas does feel rather like an OEM drive, with no accessories or glossy brochures to welcome you to the world of SK hynix. Drop by the website, though, and you can download the manufacturer’s Drive Manager and Data Migration tools, which are nicely put together, with friendly and attractive front-ends. It’s just a shame that these utilities don’t give you any control of overprovisioning – and the migration tool is pretty basic, so if…

PRICE £153 (£184 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Western Digital’s Black M.2 SSD targets a similar market to the Corsair MP500. It doesn’t aim to be the fastest SSD on the market, but to provide performance a step up from SATA. Unlike the Corsair, however, the WD Black is priced cheaply enough to make the proposition interesting. The half-terabyte model comes in at £51 more than the SATA-connected Crucial MX300 – and when you note that it offers more than double the sequential read speeds, and close to double the write speeds, that doesn’t sound like an unreasonable premium. It’s just a shame there’s no 1TB model for digital hoarders. The WD Black doesn’t feature hardware encryption, but you get the same downloads as with the WD Blue, namely Acronis imaging…

It doesn’t seem long ago that solid-state storage was an exciting new technology. I remember the buzz when Intel’s first SSD, the X25-M, arrived in the Labs. It had a capacity of 80GB – which even at the time felt pretty tight – and cost an eyewatering £440. It was slow by modern standards, with a maximum read speed of 226MB/sec over the thencurrent SATA II interface. Even so, in a world of mechanical drives, it felt like the future. Today, SSDs have practically become a commodity. On the SATA side, performance is more or less uniform across the board, and even budget drives offer more longevity than any normal person is likely to ever need. That’s not to say the manufacturers are going to sit back and relax. In…

PRICE £3,635 exc VAT from ukinsight.com If you like to get your hardware and software from one place then Lifesize has you covered: its Icon 450 HD camera and Phone HD speakerphone link up seamlessly with the company’s own Cloud videoconferencing service. You can use other providers if you wish, but the integrated approach gets you up and running with a minimum of fuss. Hardware setup is simplicity itself; pretty much all we had to do was connect the Icon camera and Phone HD unit together using the 9m proprietary link cable. The Phone HD also has an Ethernet port supporting PoE, but this isn’t needed when you partner it with the camera as the link cable carries power as well as data. We then connected an HD monitor to…

Automation, like writing scripts? Our IT guys already do that. It’s true, IT folk have been automating things for decades – tasks such as making backups and archiving old files, which might take thousands of repetitive mouse-clicks to do by hand. But the new wave of automation is much more ambitious than that. It’s about automating entire business processes, and interfacing with all sorts of services and devices. It hardly overlaps at all with the sort of old-school scripting you might be familiar with. Are we talking about handing off drudge-work to computers? Potentially, yes. We’re not talking about making humans obsolete, but helping them to work more efficiently. For example, imagine you’re a cab driver for a small firm; a decade or two ago, you’d have driven around with…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS @jonhoneyball Now this is a curious thing. Curious indeed, said Alice. I’m typing these words into Word, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I’m typing it into Word running on Android; again, not the world’s biggest shock. Except I’m using a mobile phone, a proper keyboard and mouse, and a full-sized screen. And the Android unit is a phone sat in a cradle. The phone screen itself is blank, but I have a full monitor to work with. It has a desktop that looks remarkably like Windows 10 (but isn’t, obviously). The icons are sensible; I can find all the things I need to work with. System-level stuff is just like Android on the phone itself. It’s a pretty seamless experience…

@happygeek I’ve recently added a Samsung Galaxy S8+ to my collection of smartphones. Mainly because, at the time of writing, it’s quite simply the best smartphone available on the market. Sorry iPhone lovers, but until the iPhone 8 hits the shops and we can compare the two handsets, that’s the honest truth. I was also keen to put the triplelock of security smarts included with the S8+ to the test: fingerprint, iris and facial recognition for user authentication. All three had come under some negative scrutiny before the device was even available for pre-order. This being the real-world section of the magazine, and me having seen it all before during almost three decades covering IT security issues, I thought I’d put the features to the test to see if there…

Between self-driving cars and reach-for-the-moon projects such as Elon Musk’s Space X and Hyperloop, there’s plenty of innovation in transport. But what about the public side? Who’s going to make buses run more regularly or solve the parking shortage? Transport for London (TfL) has teamed up with accelerator Nitrous to, well, accelerate innovation in public transport. It’s supporting six startups in the hope that their ideas will make it easier for those of us without Musk’s money to get around. George Johnston, founder of Nitrous, explained that the programme helps connect startups with local government and then refine their products, particularly via access to their data. “There’s no doubt that there is room for improvement – whether it’s planning new public transport routes or adapting existing resources to meet changing…

What does California’s historical counterculture have to do with Silicon Valley’s technological dominance? Even after touring the Design Museum’s exhibition considering that idea, we’re not entirely convinced there is a link – but there’s plenty of incredible hardware and tech ephemera from all decades on show to keep any computer fan distracted. he exhibition traces a line from the hippies of San Francisco to the iPhone, with classic hardware on display alongside LSD tablets, Barbie dolls and skateboards, suggesting all have the idea of individual freedom at their core. That argument is easier made with the original Silicon Valley firms – where founders quit jobs to make ideas real in their garages – but tougher for digital companies designed to hoover up our data. PC Pro readers won’t need to…

DENNISMAGS.CO.UK/PCPRO On sale 10 August 2017 LABS NASdrives Buy the one black box every techie needs in their lives, whether for backup, sharing storage or streaming media. We test a baker's dozen to find the right choice. FREE GIFT Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and we’ll send you a FREE 26-piece screwdriver set as a thank you. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. FEATURES The future of broadband Who needs more than 80Mbits/sec? We reveal how Openreach hopes to make true fibre speeds ubiquitous. Kodi:Is it legal? Kodi is an amazing piece of software, but how do you stay on the right side of the law? Barry Collins explores the benefits and pitfalls. Speed up…

Darien Graham-Smith We locked Darien in a room with 17 M.2 and 2.5in SATA SSDs and told him not to come out until he had some winners. Read his verdict from p76 Paul Ockenden A long-time user of IFTTT, Paul explains how to work around its limitations with a clever complementary service called Stringify. If that sounds good, turn to p113 James Morris Our resident workstation enthusiast reviews the first machine we’ve seen with both a Ryzen 1800X and Radeon Pro graphics. Revel in its speed on p58 Thomas McMullan On p46 Thomas explores how VR is creeping into industries such as architecture, before lavishing words of praise on the iPad Pro 10.5in from p56…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 (New) Ultraportable from £1,149 from dell.co.uk Dell only needed to refine its brilliant XPS 13 design to keep top spot, and that’s what it does: it’s slightly quicker and adds more options, but it’s the edge -to-edge 13.3in display and compact chassis that lift it above the opposition. Oh, and it’s now available in Rose Gold. REVIEW Issue 270, p54 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top spot, but a nine-hour battery life, sleek design and – for a premium – the Touch Bar make this a stunning machine. From £1,249 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 268, p54 NEW ENTRY Dell XPS 15 (2017) Not cheap, but a svelte and stylish 15in laptop that packs a punch thanks to a…

@bazzacollins There’s one reason why the recent ransomware attack managed to knock out large parts of the NHS – and it’s got nothing to do with Tory pennypinching, North Korea or any of the other excuses floated in my feature on p36. It’s because proper backup remains a monumental pain the backside. From backing up your smartphone, to your Windows PC, to the server hosting your website, nothing is as simple as it ought to be in 2017. I’ve been writing about this stuff for 20 years, and even I’m not 100% confident that, if my laptop were held to ransom or my website knocked out, I’d be able to fully recover. Certainly not without spending several hours doing so, anyway. Windows remains stubbornly resistant to anything approaching angst-free backup.…

Antivirus slows down your computer, interferes with apps and nags you with renewal pop-ups. But what if they were the least of its crimes? What if it was actually making your PC less secure? A long-running debate between developers and antivirus vendors has escalated into a knives-out brawl. The developers argue the antivirus industry’s lazy techniques widen the attack area and that sloppy code is filled with flaws, giving hackers more routes into the OS. Security firms, on the other hand, argue those without antivirus remain at greatest risk. Who is correct? Both parties have a case, but the increasingly rancorous battle between some of the biggest names in the tech industry is currently generating more heat than light. Would you genuinely be better off uninstalling your security software? Read…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,791 (£2,149 inc VAT) from microsoft.com There’s one word you will rarely hear from Microsoft when it talks about the new Surface Pro: “tablet”. Yes, if you remove the Type Cover (or just don’t buy it), the Surface Pro looks and feels like a tablet. But Microsoft doesn’t want you to think of it like that. It wants you to think “laptop”. That’s possibly down to how people used previous Surface Pros in the real world. When you spot one in public, you’ll almost always see it with the Type Cover attached, like a regular laptop. Occasionally its owner will bring out the pen to mark up a PDF or sketch something, but most of the time there’s typing going on. And that won’t change anytime soon.…

AMD isn’t just hitting Intel where it hurts; it’s also causing Nvidia sleepless nights. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 on show here had a brief period – before Nvidia launched the Quadro P4000 – where it was the sub-£1,000 professional graphics adapter of choice. The P4000, despite being a little more expensive, has switched things back in Nvidia’s favour. But only for the time being. The WX 7100 is just one member of AMD’s renamed Radeon Pro range, which takes over from the former FirePro and FireGL before that. There are lesser WX 5100 and WX 4100 models beneath it, and the intriguing Radeon Pro Duo above, which is essentially two WX 7100 cards with 16GB of GDDR5 memory each stuck together. The Radeon Pro Duo requires software support for…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk When you first set your eyes on Dell’s Infinity Edge bezels, it’s hard not to be taken aback. It’s been a Dell staple for some time, yet I’m still impressed every time I see it on a new model. The same rings true for Dell’s latest XPS 15, but is it still the de facto Windows laptop in 2017? This year’s XPS 15 doesn’t deviate from the looks of its predecessor, instead sticking with the smooth carbon fibre and aluminium combo of its 13.3in equivalent – albeit stretched to support that dominating 15.6in display. The XPS 15 remains a beautiful laptop. Its gun-metal body still tapers towards the front edge, measuring 11mm at its thinnest, and weighs a respectable 2kg. As…

PRICE £183 (£219 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275gear If you thought Samsung’s Gear 360 camera wasn’t for you – more the type of person willing to jump out of a plane just for the YouTube views – then it might be time to think again. Certainly Samsung has rethought the design. The old chunky golf ball and tripod of the original Gear 360 has been replaced by a simpler, all-in-one shape, with a handle that’s perfect for one-handed, 360-degree streaming. This moulded grip fits snugly in the palm with the big, round record button falling naturally under your thumb. There’s only one flaw: it doesn’t stand up too well on its own. The slim handle, which houses a tripod thread, is so small and the camera so top-heavy that the slightest…

PRICE £111 (£133 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275mx3 Like the Adata Ultimate SU900 – and every SATA SSD – the Crucial MX300 struggles to differentiate itself on performance. In fact, it did surprisingly poorly in our sequential read test, with a last-place score of 449MB/sec. Don’t get too hung up on that, though: its benchmark scores were on point in every other regard, with random 4K write speeds a particular strength. It still represents a tremendous boost compared to any mechanical disk. The MX300 range comes in some slightly odd sizes. 275GB and 525GB capacities are offered, along with a limited-edition 750GB unit and high-end 1,050GB and 2,050GB models. The 525GB model we tested works out to just 25p per gigabyte, making it this month’s best-value drive: for that we can…

PRICE £112 (£134 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275fle Corsair’s Force LE SSD delivers exactly the performance you’d expect from a mainstream SATA drive; to that extent it’s a perfectly decent choice. In its 480GB incarnation, it’s also one of this month’s most cost-effective SSDs, working out to 28p per GB. If you’re looking for a king-sized drive, however, then the 960GB model is much less of a bargain – online prices are around the £300 mark. You don’t get many frills for your money. There are no brackets or spacers in the box, although you do get to download Corsair’s SSD Toolbox software. This pokey-looking utility lets you configure overprovisioning, as well as schedule regular TRIM operations if your operating system doesn’t handle them automatically. There’s also a basic disk clone…

PRICE £125(£150incVAT)frompcpro.link/275ev2 If you’ve just read our review of the M.2 version of this drive, the SATA version holds no great surprises. Performance is unsurprisingly similar, and the price is pretty much the same. Like all Samsung drives, it supports hardware encryption (so long as this is enabled in your BIOS and/or operating system), and it also comes with a useful Data Migration tool, which walks you through the disk cloning process so you can easily transfer your system from an old hard disk. One difference is the capacities available. While the M.2 range tops out at 500GB, SATA models are available in sizes up to a preposterous 4TB – if you’re willing to spend a cool £1,200. The pricing scales more or less linearly with capacity, with the 500GB…

PRICE £300(£360incVAT)frompcpro.link/275exp SanDisk was one of two manufacturers who supplied capacious 1TB drives this month, the other being Western Digital. Nominally, the two drives are targeted at quite different markets. The WD Blue is a mainstream solid-state drive, with a price to match (the 1TB version costs £269). The SanDisk Extreme Pro, on the other hand, is very much positioned as a premium drive – something that’s certainly reflected in the much steeper price. As we’ve seen repeatedly during this month’s Labs, however, the SATA interface is a great leveller. These days, even a fairly cheap SSD can easily saturate the connection. You can invest in high-end flash memory and fancy custom controllers all you like, but transfer speeds won’t get any higher. And so, the Extreme Pro yields performance…

PRICE £62 (£74 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275tal The Toshiba A100 is the cheapest SSD in this month’s Labs. And it’s an appropriately unassuming offering – a straightforward TLC drive, available in 120GB and 240GB capacities. Performance-wise, the A100 proved a little off the pace; in our sequential read and write tests it came just a hair from last place. But its transfer speeds aren’t far behind the SATA front-runners, and in everyday use you won’t notice any difference between this and flashier drives from the likes of Adata and Samsung. The only real point of concern came in the PCMark 8 Photoshop test: here the A100 fell conspicuously behind the pack. Although the Toshiba A100 sells on simplicity, it comes with a handy 2.5mm spacer and a download code for…

Ask a big business how they operate effectively, and they’ll tell you that communication and collaboration are key to success. Videoconferencing technology – VC for short – streamlines both, and it’s becoming an essential part of today’s rapidly evolving virtual workplace. As well as increasing productivity and improving customer services, VC can accelerate your decision-making processes, and help isolated remote workers stay connected to their office-based colleagues. The best part is that a commitment to VC pays for itself. Huge savings in travel costs, and in time wasted while employees are in transit, mean you could recoup the cost in months. With fewer tedious road trips or expensive flights to customer sites, you can reduce your carbon footprint as well. There’s a huge range of free and low-cost VC web…

PRICE £301 exc VAT from pcpro.link/275log Logitech’s ConferenceCam Connect is a slimline baton that contains everything needed for professional-quality voice and video calls. Plug it into a laptop and you’re ready to go. And at only 766g, it’s highly portable, so you can easily take it home or to a client’s site. While the Connect may be small, it’s no lightweight when it comes to picture quality. The upper aluminium half houses a Full HD camera, set behind a high-end Zeiss lens. Audio quality is good too, thanks to dual omni-directional microphones, with a claimed range of 3.6m. And behind the lower fabric-sheathed section lurks a surprisingly powerful loudspeaker – easily loud enough to hear at the other end of our 6.5m-long meeting room. Note, though, that the Connect isn’t…

PRICE As reviewed, £319 exc VAT from hpe.com HPE’s clever little ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 has garnered a loyal following in the small business market, but it’s now over three years old and in need of a refresh. Enter the generationskipping MicroServer Gen10, which delivers a big boost in performance while retaining its predecessor’s space-saving dimensions. The Gen10 isn’t as pretty as the Gen8: the latter’s sleek, brushed aluminium bezel is replaced with a black plastic door, and the status light across the front has also gone. Still, the door on the Gen10 feels fairly secure: to prevent interference, you can flip down a sliding tab on the side of the drive bay, fit the main cover and padlock it shut. Inside, things are more positive. The Gen8’s aging Intel Celeron…

@PaulOckenden Regular readers will know of my fondness for IFTTT (IF This Then That), an online glue that you can use to link numerous devices and services together. People often believe it’s just for switching on the lights and other home automation tasks, but IFTTT goes beyond that. For example, I use it to log to a Google spreadsheet every time my phone goes on and off charge, recording the time, the charge level, and the charge type (AC or USB). So, if someone asks me about battery life, I can back up my answer with real-world evidence. More usefully, perhaps, I also use IFTTT to send me an alert if the share prices of the stocks in my ISA start to tank. IFTTT is an incredibly simple system, but…

@stardotpro Being in Singapore on Star Wars day has more impact than it might in other places. This has both a simple and a complex cause and, as I’m sure you can guess, I do like my complex causes. The simple bit is that Lucasfilm has a Singapore office (in the “Sandcrawler building”, inevitably) and therefore a few props from the movies are easy to grab for an impromptu street exhibition. The more complicated cause is that the Singaporeans have a huge interest and investment in “the future”, which means they’re almost inevitably going to be sci-fi geeks. Much to the amazement of our visiting press pack, this enthusiasm went far enough for the Supertree sculptures in the Gardens by the Bay (pcpro.link/ 275gard) to be temporarily converted into the…

Something has been bothering me lately: the lazy expectation of people for ongoing updates for their chosen platform. This wasn’t a problem in the old days when there were structural, architectural reasons why you had to move forward, when there were natural breakpoints in the flow of hardware and thus the OS and apps that ran on top. A good example of this was the move from 16-bit to 32-bit. If you didn’t have a 386 or later CPU, then you couldn’t run the latest OS code. It created a natural fire break that helped flush the old 286 world out of the system. In contrast, little really changed with the move to 64-bit on desktops. Worse still, Moore’s law has applied with a vengeance, and I would argue that…