Table of contents for January 2026 in PC Pro

Serif’s Affinity suite was already well loved in creative circles, not just because it was great software, but because of its modest one-off cost. When Serif was bought by Canva in 2024, many feared it would end in another subscription model. Instead, the company has taken the opposite approach and made the new all-in-one Affinity app free. Does free really mean free? And why did the company take three distinct apps and merge them into one? We put these questions and more to Affinity’s British CEO, Ash Hewson. PC Pro: The Affinity apps earned a lot of goodwill from the creative industry when you adopted the one-off payment model. What made you decide to abandon that and offer the new Affinity for free? Ash Hewson: Canva has always had this…

Struggling to recall what you did last week. Failing to manage basic maths. Being unable to read a novel from beginning to end. Do these symptoms sound at all familiar? Welcome to brain rot. Last year, the term was deemed the word of the year by Oxford University Press, defining it as the “deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”. But there’s more to brain rot than idly scrolling social media – it may prove to be the lead poisoning of our era. Lead used to be in everything from petrol to food tins, and that was a problem as it causes brain damage. Indeed, research has suggested it led…

DJI MINI 5 PRO WITH RC2 CONTROLLER £979 from dji-retail.co.uk DJI has pushed the weight of this drone to the absolute limit, officially weighing just a tenth of a gram less than the 250g ceiling that introduces tighter restrictions. Its large 1in sensor is capable of 4K video at 60fps and 10-bit colour depth, with slow-motion video of up to 120 frames per second. Its image and video quality are the best we’ve seen in a sub-250g drone, and there’s a set of ND filters included to avoid blowing highlights in bright sunlight. It boasts omnidirectional sensing and front-facing LiDAR for obstacle avoidance. When tracking a run through woodlands, it was able to navigate overhanging branches with ease while keeping the subject in the centre of the frame. Battery life…

The world’s best-known spreadsheet application turned 40 while we were writing this feature, having been first released in September 1985. Back then, however, it was a Mac-only product, competing against the likes of Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc. Two years later, with Sylvester McCoy debuting on Doctor Who and “Never Gonna Give You Up” riding high in the charts, the first PC release came along, badged as version 2 to align it with the then-current Mac edition. Today, Excel’s old rivals are long forgotten. Much like Rick Astley’s smash hit, Microsoft’s spreadsheet has weathered the ages and even enjoyed a renaissance, despite competition from web-first rivals such as Google Sheets and Zoho Office. As with Word last month (see issue 375, p44), one of the biggest changes has been to the…

SCORE PRICE From £2,666 (£3,199 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Almost two years since the launch of the original Apple Vision Pro (see issue 355, p48), it’s received its first official update – a new model powered by Apple’s cutting-edge M5 processor. Aside from the new silicon, though, I’m honestly shocked by how little the new Vision Pro M5 brings to the table. Yes, it has improved performance and visuals, as well as better battery life. Apple has also partly addressed previous complaints about comfort by including a new Dual Knit Band. That’s it for updates, however. The physical design is all but identical to the original; unless you examine the head strap very carefully you won’t spot any difference at all, and you still need to schlep around a battery…

SCORE PRICE Pre-built Performance with Nvidia Graphics Module, £2,041 (£2,449 inc VAT) from frame.work For anyone unfamiliar with the Framework brand, its laptops are designed to be opened, upgraded and repaired by the owner, and it comes with a free tool for doing just that. You can even swap out ports via a set of Expansion Card slots. The 16in Framework also features a pair of storage bays, so you can have up to two SSDs for storage, but the star feature is a slot for a detachable GPU module. For £350 more, you can buy an attachable AMD Radeon RX 7700S, while £650 buys you an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 mobile GPU. Simply snap either on for a gaming power boost. This year brings several welcome upgrades to the…

SCORE PRICE £2,208 (£2,650 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Our recent mini PCs group test (see issue 374, p79) pitted 12 fantastic systems against each other, but none was quite like the new Asus ROG NUC. The whole system is essentially constructed around an RTX 5080 laptop GPU, with a thin tower design that produces a footprint of less than 8 x 6in. It can be laid on its side with the stand removed – ideal for putting it on a TV stand as a console-style living room PC – but having stripped it down I wouldn’t recommend that unless you can guarantee airflow. The exhaust fans must have breathing room to vent properly. Upgrade options are effectively limited to the RAM and SSD, but you’ll need to discard the old…

SCORE PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk When PC Pro reviewed the GeForce RTX 5050 last month (see issue 375, p60), we didn’t smother it with praise. It’s great for 1080p gaming, we explained, delivering 60fps and above in almost every game, but if you want guaranteed smooth frame rates at 1440p then you need to step up to the RTX 5060. Still, we added, if you “end up with one in a prebuilt system, and that’s reflected in the price, there are reasons to be cheerful”. So we come to the Erazer Recon E40, a budget-friendly system made by German manufacturer Medion. And there are several reasons to be cheerful aside from the price. The first is that this is a compact computer with a conservative power draw…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Amazon Echo is officially dead. That is to say, after 11 years and several redesigns, the standard Echo model has finally been discontinued. In its place comes the Echo Dot Max – a new variant that looks and feels like a hybrid of the current Echo Dot and Studio models. I like the design, especially the bold new Amethyst (purple) colour that joins the more sombre Graphite and Glacier White options. Aside from that, the Dot Max resembles a smaller version of the Echo Studio, with the same LED ring around the front controls and a mute button in the centre. It also has a prominent fabric pattern around the outside, rather than the more subtle texture of the old Echo,…

1 PICK YOUR SIZE The last few years have seen tablets steadily creeping up in size, so that the old standard 10in slate is now seen as a smaller form factor, while 12in, 13in and even 14in tablets have become mainstream. The extra size usually comes at a cost, and bigger isn’t necessarily better. If you’re looking for something light and portable or that you can comfortably use handheld, then a 10in or 11in tablet is usually the best choice. For simple communications, note-taking and media consumption, you can even get away with a sub-9in model. Go for the bigger-screen versions, though, where display real-estate really matters. For image editing, video editing and other creative endeavours, screen size can make a massive difference, and the same goes for more complex…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The original Pro tablet hasn’t lost any of its computing ambition. Where other tablets talk the laptop-class performance talk, it walks the walk, somehow cramming in the same M5 architecture powering the latest MacBook Pro laptops into a device only 5.1 to 5.3mm thick (depending on whether or not you choose the 5G version). Frankly, it’s wasted on the usual browsing and media consumption stuff that many people use their tablets for. The iPad Pro is built for serious creative or productivity work on the go. Take a look at our benchmark results, which start on p94. It dominates the tables across every test, streets ahead of its nearest competition, which in most is Apple’s own 13in iPad Air. Even in 3DMark,…

SCORE PRICE £141 (£169 inc VAT) from oneplus.com Having delivered excellent mid-range tablets in the One Plus Pad and its two sequels, OnePlus has now entered the budget tablet battle with the Pad Lite. Compared to the OnePlus Pad 3 (see issue 371, p62), much has been cut down to reach the sub-£200 price point, but OnePlus has made some smart decisions on where to drop the spec without wrecking usability or performance, to the extent that this is still a fine device for everyday use. For a start, the physical design isn’t a million miles away from the more premium model, with an all-aluminium construction in a two-tone blue metallic finish. While it’s comparatively heavy for an 11in tablet at 530g, it feels robust and resilient in the hand.…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£99 inc VAT) from honor.com/uk The smallest Android tablet in this Labs is also the most affordable, making it all the more surprising that it doesn’t look or feel cheap. As with its larger MagicPad and Pad 10 tablets, Honor has kitted out the Pad X7 with a tough metallic shell more reminiscent of an iPad than a budget Android tablet. The toughened glass screen fits well, with smooth bevelled edges, and the compact size – only 212 x 125 x 8mm – is perfect for casual content consumption on the go. The first real indication of the Pad X7’s price is the screen. It’s actually quite bright, reaching 554cd/m2 in our tests, but where the iPad Mini packs a 2,266 x 1,488 resolution into its 8.3in…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The smaller of Samsung’s high-end tablets packs plenty of appeal despite its reduced screen size of 11in. That means it loses 1.4 inches of screen compared to last year’s Galaxy Tab S10+ (see issue 364, p87), but drops the thickness to 5.5mm and the weight to 482g. Yet this slender tablet still packs in a powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ processor and 12GB of RAM, giving it some serious computing capabilities, including a powerful 50 TOPS NPU for AI support. Nothing much else has changed in terms of the Galaxy Tab’s basic design, with the grey or silver Armor Aluminium shell balancing portability with comfort and sturdy resilience. The screen has a slightly lower 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, but the smaller size means…

Remote and flexible working has been such a driving force for videoconferencing (VC) that it’s now become an integral part of most modern working environments. The benefits are undeniable: VC can deliver huge cost savings by eliminating unnecessary business travel, while reduced commuting helps staff to be more productive, engaged – and financially better off. Increased demand in the VC market is pushing manufacturers to become ever more innovative, with many now delivering an impressive range of sophisticated meeting room solutions. Even better, intense competition in this rapidly expanding market has pushed prices down, bringing professional huddle, meeting- and conference-room solutions within the budgets of SMBs. They aren’t challenging to install either, with the latest VC bars offering a complete audio-visual solution in a single unit that can be easily…

SCORE PRICE Rally Bar £2,665; Sight, £1,465 (both exc VAT) from meetingstore.co.uk Logitech’s Rally Bar has consistently set high standards for its videoconferencing presentation skills, and teaming it up with the Sight table-top companion camera makes meetings even more interesting. The two components work together, with the Rally Bar providing a big front-of-room view, while placing the Sight on the table brings its dynamic split-screen views into play. If a meeting participant is looking at the Rally Bar and turns away, you won’t see the back of their head as the Sight steps up and shows their face. The Sight must be directly connected to a VC bar that runs Logitech’s Android-based CollabOS, which includes the Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini. The Rally Bar targets medium to large meeting…

SCORE PRICE £155 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Ubiquiti Networks offers a range of wall-mounted wireless access points (APs), and two of its new models bring Wi-Fi 7 into play. The entry-level U7 In-Wall is a low-cost dual-band AP with a pair of uplink ports, while in this review we look at the flagship U7 Pro Wall model. It doesn’t have any uplink ports, but makes up for this as it’s a tri-band model offering six spatial streams equally spread across the three radios. Its BE10800 rating claims maximum speeds of up to 688Mbits/sec on its 2.4GHz radio, 4,324Mbits/sec on 5GHz and 5,764Mbits/sec on 6GHz. Pick up the AP and you’ll get a clear idea of its burly build quality; the solid aluminium chassis and polycarbonate cover tip the scales at…

Trust is one of those very awkward words in our industry. Why do we trust a vendor and their products or services? For some, it’s simply hiding behind a known quantity; “no-one gets fired for buying IBM” was a mantra often muttered many years ago. Performing meaningful risk analysis is usually quite impossible, even for significant organisations. They can do their best, mitigate the obvious risks, but there are always unknowns. And how much are you prepared to spend to take yourself from 99.9% uptime to 99.99%? Is it even possible to get to that level, once you ignore the plaintive claims of the salesperson trying to flog you their solution? Most people fall on some well-tested thinking. Is the company big and unlikely to disappear tomorrow? Are lots of…

Passwords, hate them or hate them, just won’t die. Well, not quite yet anyway. That seems to be the takeaway from the latest RSA report into identity and authentication, and it really is, well, pants. Big flappy ones at that. While some 69% of organisations polled admitted to using outdated identity security systems, the more worrying statistic was that 90% said they were stalling in transitioning to passwordless solutions. When I spoke to Anna Pobletts, head of passwordless technology at password manager developer 1Password – and yes, I feel the irony – a year ago she told me that “since we’ve used passwords for decades, they’re just too ingrained in our culture to go away overnight”. Pobletts wasn’t wrong then, and she’s not wrong now either. So, I’m not going…

Remember Google Glass? In a dramatic reveal featuring a skydiver in 2012, Sergei Brin showed off Star Trek-style hardware that could record, show messages and follow voice commands. Alas, the product wasn’t very good – it was like trying to read a text message off a TV across the room – and the privacy concerns and poor aesthetics saw users dubbed “glassholes”. After an attempt at a business pivot, Google dropped Glass and is yet to release another iteration. But, in a turn of events that would have sounded bonkers back in 2012, it looks as though Google’s dream may be realised by Facebook-owner Meta with its Ray-Ban smartglasses. Two years after Brin’s big reveal, Meta spent more than $2 billion buying Oculus VR, grabbing the leading spot in the…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Pro M5 Class act from £1,599 from apple.com/uk No radical updates to the design this year, but this M5 update – initially just to the 14in version as we await Pro and Max variants for the MacBook Pro 16in – delivers yet more power to accompany the already excellent battery life. If you can pay the price, Apple’s professional laptop stands apart. REVIEW Issue 376, p52 Apple MacBook Air M4 If you don’t need the all-out power of the Pro, this is a brilliant, cheaper alternative despite the unchanged chassis and screen. 13in from £999, 15in from £1,199 from apple.com/uk  REVIEW Issue 368, p54 Honor MagicBook Art 14 (2025) This slim 1kg laptop packs Intel’s powerful Core Ultra 7 255H and a gorgeous 14.6in…

A mid all the hoopla surrounding agentic AI, it’s easy to lose sight of just how astonishing this technology is. Genuinely stop-and-stare stuff. As part of a guide I’m currently writing, I asked ChatGPT to conduct an online search for details of my paternal great-grandparents. I gave it the full names of my grandparents, their dates of birth and death, and let the AI get on with it. Without any direct prompting, it opened multiple browser windows and started searching various genealogy sites for records of my ancestors. It found the relevant fields to enter names and dates of birth, clicked the correct buttons and used drop-down menus to narrow searches down to the relevant dates, all while providing a running text commentary on what it was doing, even what…

COMMODORE 64 ULTIMATE From $300 from commodore.net The Commodore 64 Ultimate is “how remakes should be”, said David Crookes, editor of PC Pro’s Retro section, when we asked him to nominate his favourite retro gifts. “I like the fact that this version of the world’s best-selling desktop computer model not only allows you to enjoy old games, software and peripherals but also brings the technology up to date with more memory, increased speed and even support for modern printers.” As we went to press the beige version cost $300, a transparent Starlight Edition (think lots of lighting effects) was $350, and the glowing gold Founders Edition was $500. All those prices exclude tax and shipping, and we advise ordering sharp-ish for a chance of getting it before 2026. ATARI INTELLIVISION…

Passwords have become rather old hat. In fact, there are moves afoot to ditch them altogether in favour of all-digital passkeys, but for those to work you still need some way to prove your identity. And that’s where biometrics come in. The word literally means measuring biology, and most modern biometric systems are based on the age-old detective technique of identifying someone by their fingerprints, or the even older social technique of recognising a person by what their face looks like. There are plenty of other ways to identify somebody from their bodily characteristics, such as by analysing their voice, examining the blood vessels at the back of their eye or even decoding their DNA – but for consumer devices, fingerprints and facial recognition technologies fit the bill nicely, as…

SCORE PRICE From £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Coming a year after the launch of the M4 MacBook Pro (see issue 364, p50), few people were surprised when Apple announced this year’s update to the M5. The big reveal was instead updates to the iPad Pro (see p84) and the Vision Pro (see p48). There’s no sign of an M5-powered Mac mini or iMac, nor do we get the more powerful M5 Pro and M5 Max variants of the MacBook Pro. For now, that means no new 16in MacBook Pro, so if you want the most cutting-edge MacBook Pro you only have one size to choose from. Prices start at £1,599 inc VAT, which buys a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 512GB SSD storage. But…

SCORE PRICE £4,000 (£4,800 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk I ended my in-depth review of this year’s ProArt P16 (see issue 371, p60) with the words “if the RTX 5070 is powerful enough to meet your needs, the new ProArt P16 is our top choice as a mobile workstation”. Perhaps that caveat stung, because here we are five months later with a new, top-end version with an RTX 5090 GPU to accompany the 64GB of DDR5 RAM and power-oozing AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. The end result is a phenomenally powerful laptop. If you use 3ds Max or SolidWorks, the GPU will have an immediate impact on productivity: this update returned 208 and 372 in those viewsets in SPECviewperf 2020, compared to 116 and 277 before – and those…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD STORAGE tinyurl.com/norton360premium We’ve negotiated this exclusive deal for PC Pro readers. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices, and there’s no danger of being hit with hiked renewal fees. Because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. Top of the list is the full version of Norton VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while you’re abroad. There’s also 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, while Norton’s Dark Web Monitoring service will alert you if private details – such as your email address…

SCORE PRICE £34 (£40 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk There’s something suspiciously magical about the Cherry Xtrfy K33. First, most people will be absolutely convinced that they’re typing on a mechanical keyboard, such is the substantial “click” and depth of hit of each key, when it’s actually a membrane affair – Cherry calls these switches “Mem-chanical”. The trick here is that the keycaps are mounted on a plunger that hits the membrane layer, mimicking the feel of a mechanical switch. The second is the price, with the design and feature set going far beyond what you would expect for £40. This is what’s known in the trade as a 75% size keyboard, measuring a fraction over 30cm wide and 12cm deep – you could very nearly fit two side by side…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The latest version of the Amazon Echo Show 8 is the best Alexa device with a screen we’ve seen. It comes with a fresh design, a larger display, better speakers than ever and more powerful internals for smoother performance. Although more expensive than the previous model (still available for £149 inc VAT), it’s one of the most significant Echo upgrades in years – and as we discuss opposite, it also introduces Alexa+, Amazon’s new AI-powered voice assistant. The ups The fourth-generation Echo Show 8 has a different feel to its predecessor. Rather than squatting directly on your desk, the new design lifts up the display, so it looks like a tablet floating above the sphere-like base. You can choose from charcoal or…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £708 (£849 inc VAT) from oneplus.com OnePlus’ latest phone is a big step forward, in more ways than one. Since the number 14 is considered unlucky in China the manufacturer has skipped over it, moving directly from last year’s OnePlus 13 (see issue 366, p72) to this new top-tier handset. At the same time, the latest model comes with multiple new features that make it feel like more than a single generation’s worth of progress. The price is very competitive for a big-screen phone. While the Pixel 10 Pro XL and iPhone 17 Pro Max cost over £1,000, the OnePlus 15 starts at only £849 inc VAT. That gets you the Infinite Black finish with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, but it’s worth moving up…

SCORE PRICE £274 (£329 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Apple’s iPad remains near-synonymous with the whole tablet concept, and the go-to option for many buyers if they’re not splashing out on a higher-end device. The 2025 version won’t do anything to change that. You might quibble about its chunky bezels or its unimaginative design, but it’s still the mainstream tablet to beat. This 11th generation iPad comes in a choice of four colours – silver, yellow, coral pink and blue – with the 11in toughened glass screen tucked tightly into a simple aluminium shell. It’s not as compact as some Android 11in models such as the Lenovo Yoga Pad, but the unusual 10:7 aspect ratio is a good fit for creative apps, browsing and media consumption, and it’s light and portable…

SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The Idea Tab Pro sits in the mid-range of Lenovo’s current tablet lineup, and arguably in the sweet spot when it comes to price and performance. For just a little more than the Idea Tab Plus (see p91) you get a bigger 12.7in screen, a faster MediaTek Dimensity CPU and a stronger spec in every other area except storage, where the base model comes with just 128GB to the Idea Tab Plus’s 256GB. Buying it involves making the odd compromise, but nothing unreasonable when you keep the price in mind. This is a solidly built, big-screen device, with a sturdy aluminium unibody shell and the screen enclosed in tempered glass. Held horizontally, you’ll find a power button with integrated fingerprint sensor high…

SCORE PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is the tablet that will make you ponder how big is too big. The massive 14.6in OLED screen is unbeatable when resting on your lap, tray table or sofa arm while you’re streaming video, and brings obvious advantages when multitasking or running more complex creative or productivity apps. Yet the sheer size and wide 16:10 aspect ratio makes it more than a handful when you’re using the tablet on the move. Samsung has tried to minimise the bulk with slim bezels and a beautifully engineered Armor Aluminium shell that’s an impossible 5.2mm thick. Yet the 690g weight leaves it feeling unwieldy, especially in landscape mode. The AMOLED screen is gorgeous, with the kind of contrast, clarity…

SCORE PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com Judged on the hardware alone, Huawei’s MatePad 12x is a winner. It’s a beautifully made tablet with a 12in screen, it measures just under 5.9mm thick and it’s finished in a rather lovely pastel green. It also weighs a mere 555g, while its rounded edges and corners make it one of the most comfortable Android tablets to hold. The screen is IPS rather than OLED, but that’s about all that you can hold against it. It’s bright at 547cd/m2, reaching up to 960cd/m2 with a torch shining at the sensor, and while the 0.43cd/m2 black level means you don’t get the darkest blacks, there’s still plenty of contrast to work with. In tests it covers 99% of the sRGB gamut with a…

SCORE PRICE £188 (£226 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If there’s one good reason to buy TCL’s 11in slate, it’s the screen. Its matte surface makes it easier to read in nearly all lighting conditions, while a button on the top allows it to switch between three modes. In the default Regular mode it works much like a normal tablet screen, but in the Colour Paper and Ink Paper mode it simulates an e-ink display, giving you soft, less saturated colours or a highly legible monochrome display. Either works brilliantly for reading ebooks, digital magazines and comics or graphic novels, giving you a much more comfortable reading experience than your average IPS panel. Surprisingly, it’s a decent screen for running apps and watching video, with a maximum brightness level of 574cd/m2…

SCORE PRICE £1,737 exc VAT from midwich.com Businesses that want to go large with their videoconferencing (VC) will love Biamp’s mighty Parlé VBC 2500a. Aimed at small to medium-sized meeting rooms, this 940cm long bar is endowed with a lot of the technology Biamp has developed over its 48 years in the professional audio-visual market. Front and centre is a 12MP 4K UHD camera that delivers a 2160p resolution at 30fps and a wide 120-degree diagonal field of view (FoV). It teams up these attributes with digital pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) functions and auto-framing for speaker tracking, with this latest model adding an extra 3.5mm audio port for discrete assistive listening systems (ALS) output. A standout feature is its beamforming array, as the VBC 2500a employs a highly accurate tracking…

SCORE PRICE £1,583 exc VAT from owllabs.co.uk Businesses that want to host memorable meetings need look no further than Owl Labs and its smart Meeting Owl solutions. Along with a simple setup, their innovative lens, smart speaker tracking and dynamic framing put the fun into videoconferencing. On review is the flagship Owl 4+, which sports a 64MP fish-eye camera boasting a 4K UHD video output and a full 360-degree panoramic view. It employs a Snapdragon 8250 SoC, which the embedded OIS (Owl Intelligence System) software puts to good use. Along with handling all auto-focus and speaker tracking algorithms, it allows multiple Owl devices to be paired together for complete in-room coverage. The array of eight microphones are spread equally around the inside of its cylindrical body and have an audio…

When you think of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, you probably picture big businesses with tens of thousands of customers to look after. But the usefulness of CRM is by no means limited to large companies. Modern cloud-based platforms cater for organisations of any size, with prices to suit. Nor is CRM limited to traditional sales and support functions. While the “customer” part of the name might suggest a focus on direct selling relationships, CRM solutions can help in all sorts of jobs across a whole range of industries, from legal advice to fundraising and financial planning. Simply put, any business that needs to maintain relationships with external parties can benefit. Getting started is easy. There’s no need to worry about having to roll out new software; all that’s needed…

In last month’s column (see issue 375, p113), I mentioned I had attended FixFest 2025 (tinyurl.com/376fixfest), a two-day international repair conference organised by those lovely people at the Restart Project. Hundreds of fixers, evangelists, corporates, advocates, pioneers, activists, volunteers, at least one mayor and a Royal Society professor attended to talk, share, listen and learn. A personal highlight was visiting Restart’s Fixing Factory in Hackney, a dedicated repair space that enables repair, reuse and waste reduction on the high street while generating the many societal benefits of repair spaces (for more information, see tinyurl.com/376making). As I was chatting with some of the team, Kyle Wiens, the founder of iFixit, walked in. At this point I have to admit he’s a hero of mine. One reason that I can discuss repair…

My verdict is clear on the whole migration away from Windows 10 thing. The bigger the network, the easier the upgrade, along with a definite bias towards cloud deployments being more difficult and expensive than old-school, on-premises, one-PC-per-person architectures. In a more open-minded, welcoming era, we might have received the last-minute reminders about end of support with a more constructive outlook. But this is the Trump decade, when he has encouraged people to think much more commercially about everything they do, use or share. This means that business reception of the message about upgrading has been much more cynical than the last time this happened. Yes, for those of you who weren’t IT purchasing managers back in 2008, we have indeed been here before. Not that you would have held…

Features 10 great AI tools for 2026 From editing videos to creating your own browser games, we highlight ten brilliant AI tools you’ll want to exploit in the year ahead. Features Create for free with Affinity Affinity’s creative suite is now completely free. We explore what’s new and help you get started with pro-grade editing and DTP. Features What happened to the web? In an exclusive interview with Enshittification author Cory Doctorow, we find out why everything suddenly got worse with the internet and what we can do about it. Labs All-in-ones & printers We test a dozen inkjets and lasers to discover which win for print quality, scan skills and all-round value. Find your perfect partner for the home or office. Retro Football Manager: story of an underdog We…

A trio of new external storage launches are delivering fresh ways to store data compactly, coolly and securely. SanDisk’s Extreme Fit USB-C Flash Drive fits capacities of up to 1TB in a device that looks similar to the USB dongles you get with wireless mice. The device measures only 18.5 x 13.7 x 16mm and weighs an inconsequential 3g. It’s not expensive, either, with the lowest-capacity 64GB drive costing only £9.99 and the top-of-the-range 1TB version priced at £87 at launch. The big question will be how well these little drives dissipate heat if used for any length of time. Dissipating heat shouldn’t be a problem for the Sharge Disk Pro, which is described as the first active cooling portable SSD, with a multi-hub port to boot. The 90 x…

This column has been running for over 30 years and has never felt like a chore. I garner ideas from problems with my computers, from films, websites, books and papers, and I note them down using some software tool that has changed repeatedly over the years – from Idealist to Google Keep, from saved HTML to Pocket, and now Instapaper. No matter how I record these ideas, the process is simple: I then write a few hundred words and then send a file by email to a publisher who prints onto paper using heat-set web-offset lithography. The publisher sells the result to you, and to advertisers, and pays me for writing it. That has always just been how the world works, and I’ve barely thought about it. In recent months,…

PC Pro’s most loyal reader? My grandfather Brian has been an avid reader of PC Pro ever since I can remember. Reading through your magazines and chatting about the latest and greatest tech used to be a staple of my visits to him when I was growing up. When I went to university, he bought me a subscription for my birthday so that we could both keep up with the PC Pro A-Lists and reviews. We did notice as a family that he had a tendency to keep copies of PC Pro stacked up around the house, only for them to eventually disappear, we had presumed to the recycling centre. Brian sadly passed away in October aged 92. This prompted a foray into the attic in search of memories and…

SCORE PRICE $1,799 from samsung.com (US only) The Galaxy XR looks a lot like the Apple Vision Pro (see p48) – but it’s cheaper, lighter and smarter too, thanks to its integration with Gemini Live. You might imagine the weight would be the least interesting difference, but it makes a big impact. At 545g it weighs around 200g less than Apple’s headset, and even when I’d been testing the Galaxy XR for hours on end, I never found it tiring to wear, which is a major win. It helps, too, that the design doesn’t require a strap going across the top of your head. You simply adjust the tightness with a twist dial on the back; there’s a forehead cushion toward the front, and you can add a thicker spacer…

SCORE PRICE £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Triton 14 AI is not what I expected when Acer offered to send in its latest Predator laptop for review. That brand is all about gaming, about eye-zinging RGB and flashing logos, but the Acer Predator Triton 14 AI is genuinely stylish. Finished in matte black, with a metal frame that resisted all my attempts at bending, it even benefits from a square-jawed finish reminiscent of Razer. I also love how the sides of the touchpad glow white when you touch it, adding style and function. There’s no Acer branding here. Only those familiar with the Predator logo will spot its origins, with this depicted by a square array of RGB LEDs beneath the End key in colours that match your…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,533 (£4,240 inc VAT) from dell.com The Dell Pro Max 14 Premium is the first we’ve seen of the renamed Precision family, and it brings with it a new, compact design: Dell claims this is the world’s smallest footprint 14in mobile workstation. The chiselled metal chassis still includes high-end cooling, opening the door to fast CPUs and powerful discrete GPUs. You’ll need to open your wallet nice and wide, too, as the starting price for the Pro Max 14 Premium is just shy of the £2,000 mark – and that only includes a Core Ultra 7 255H processor, 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM, a 256GB SSD, Intel Arc graphics and a 14in, non-touch 1,920 x 1,200 display. The fully loaded model here is £4,240, which crucially includes…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,583 (£1,899 inc VAT) from dell.com The 2025 Dell Tower Plus is a remarkably customisable desktop PC packed into an unassuming tower case that looks ripped from a 1990s magazine ad. Many will hate it for just that reason, but I’m getting tired of big, heavy cases bedecked in RGB lights and jagged edges: this bland grey design is like a breath of forgettable fresh air. It’s made all the more forgettable by how quietly it runs, even after hours of gaming. That’s not to say silent: I noticed a consistent low hum after an hour or two of gaming, and the rear of the PC usually felt hot after long sessions. How hot depends not only on how hard you’re pushing the PC, but also…

SCORE PRICE $99 from lofree.co The DOT is a statement piece, pure and simple. It comes in a variety of guises, with my sample being the pale green DOT 1970s. This throwback to 1970s Americana features low saturated case colours, deep contrasting black keys and pops of orange from the ESC key, all evoking the palettes of classic warm film stock. As someone who’s reviewed dozens of keyboards, this is the one that tugs on my heartstrings: I find myself looking back at it as I leave the room, I’m so smitten. It looks especially dashing when paired with the matching DOT mouse and calculator accessory, the latter of which features clicky switches to annoy everyone in the office when I need help with arithmetic (that’s a lot). Backlighting is…

SCORE PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Echo Studio is Amazon’s premium audio device, but it hasn’t had an update since its original release in 2019 – at least, not until now. Half a dozen years later, it’s finally been refreshed with a new look and a slew of updated features. In place of the original Echo Studio’s canister-like design, the 2025 version looks like a larger version of the Echo Dot Max (see opposite). It’s a spherical device, with a circular indentation in the front where the volume controls sit; encircling these is the familiar LED ring, and the rest of the body is wrapped in a mesh fabric that’s similar to that on the Apple HomePod mini (see issue 362, p93). There’s almost nothing else to…

When they first emerged back in 2010, tablets promised to be the platform for a new way of computing: more personal, more focused, with user-friendly touch interfaces that made it quicker and easier to get things done. Some even predicted they would replace laptops and PCs altogether. That prediction hasn’t come true, but if anything the tablet has doubled down on those early advantages. When you want to keep your baggage weight down and your mobility up, it’s the ideal device. Perfect for content consumption if all you want to do is relax or check the occasional email. They’re also even more capable of business and creative work thanks to the arrival of tablets with bigger screens. A plethora of styluses and keyboards have only added to the tablet’s appeal,…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The iPad Pro is clearly the iPad for power users to aspire to, but what if you don’t have a compelling need for that performance – or the megabucks budget to afford it? This is where the iPad Air comes into its own, giving you a business-class iPad at a higher cost than the economy model, but with an older processor and less advanced Liquid Retina screen than the first-class iPad Pro. Sure, you’re not getting Apple’s best tech, but who cares when you’re spending between £100 and £300 less than you would for the equivalent iPad Pro? The 13.6in version we tested certainly doesn’t look or feel like a lesser tablet. It’s noticeably bigger than most thanks to its whopping 4:3…

SCORE PRICE £399 (£479 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Lenovo has long had a knack for producing something close to a flagship tablet at a more affordable mid-range price, and so it goes with this month’s Yoga Tab. It’s an 11.1in slate with a bright 3.2K IPS display and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor of the type only previously found in premium devices. Throw in 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and you’re getting almost a high-end Android tablet for less than £500. The tablet helps sell that angle, with a slick aluminium unibody encompassing the bright, toughened glass screen. At 166 x 256 x 6.2mm with a 16:10 aspect ratio, it seems more compact than the base-level iPad, and it’s slightly lighter at 458g. It doesn’t quite give…

SCORE PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The iPad Mini might be the perfect portable media device. At 195 x 135 x 6mm and only 293g in weight for the Wi-Fi-only version, it’s about as light and compact as a tablet gets. In the hand, it’s little heavier than many modern phones. Yet it has the screen size and performance to run not just streaming apps and reading apps, but also games. Splash out on Apple’s superb Pencil or Pencil Pro stylus and it also makes an effective digital notepad or sketchpad. The build quality is, as ever for Apple, phenomenally good, with a one-piece recycled aluminium shell and scratch-resistant tempered glass screen. The controls sit on the top edge, with two volume buttons and a power button that…

SCORE PRICE £241 (£289 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The Idea Tab Plus sits in the middle of Lenovo’s current Idea Tab range, giving you an affordable 12.1in tablet with a solid spec and bundled stylus. Lenovo is pitching it at students, though it could also work as a budget business slate – especially if you purchase the keyboard for £69. The Idea Tab Plus is a well-designed unit in a choice of pink (possibly less suited to business use) or grey metallic aluminium shells. The curved edges and corners and surprisingly light 530g weight make it easy to hold for long periods, and it’s only just over 6mm thick. Connectivity is disappointing, with a USB 2 Type-C port for charging and data transfer plus Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 5, but…

Just in case you were in any doubt, AI has become as big a selling point for tablets as it is for laptop PCs and smartphones, with manufacturers falling over themselves to sell their AI features. Even where those features are vague or almost non-existent. As with PCs and smartphones, the situation is improving as more mobile chipsets integrate the all-important NPU. We’re also seeing more hardware-enhanced features coded into the operating system and any manufacturer-specific tools. And the marketing is clear that this is only the start, particularly where these tools are, shall we say, gimmicky, and the really ambitious stuff has yet to come. Apple Intelligence Apple has made some strides in iPadOS, but the most obvious uses of Apple Intelligence remain its hardware-based image-generation tools, Genmoji in…

SCORE PRICE £1,666 exc VAT from amazon.co.uk Targeting rooms with up to 14 participants, Insta360’s Connect videoconferencing bar makes a strong first impression, combining a great feature set with an unusual dual camera arrangement. Along with a 48MP 4K fixed lens, it has a 4K telephoto lens mounted alongside in a motorised gimbal and uses them in tandem to provide wide-angle views of the entire meeting room and close-up speaker framing. The Connect is endowed with Insta360’s AI Resolution+ machine learning algorithms, which offer a choice of three views. Gallery mode uses a split-screen view to show up to eight participants each in their own window; speaker tracking zeros in on the active participant; and group framing ensures that everyone stays in the big picture. For speaker tracking, the Connect…

SCORE PRICE $369 from firewalla.com Firewalla’s security appliances have always impressed, offering a fine combination of features, performance and value. This makes them a great choice for SMBs, and the company is now extending its expertise into the Wi-Fi 7 space with the tri-band AP7D desktop and AP7C ceiling access points (APs). We reviewed the AP7D, and it’s worth pointing out a few differences between them, as both offer 2.5GbE and 10GbE multi-gigabit ports but only the AP7C can be powered over PoE+. The AP7C presents six spatial streams equally spread across its three radios for a BE10000 rating, whereas the AP7D has eight spatial streams, with its 6GHz radio getting four of them to deliver a higher BE15000 rating. Both devices only work with Firewalla’s security appliances and don’t…

Businesses exist to solve problems. You can’t get to work, so you buy a bike. You have a legal problem, so you instruct a lawyer. The bigger the problem, the bigger the business opportunity. In technology, however, it’s not always obvious what the problem is, or even that one exists. We rely on systems so complex that their weaknesses hide beneath the surface. Most of us (count me in this) never pop the back off a router or a phone. Even if we did, we’d learn very little, because the real issues are buried deep in the hardware and code. That’s why tech firms, researchers and the media often have to teach us what to worry about. Sometimes that’s valuable; for instance, explaining why phishing emails are such a plague,…

In August 2001, more than 300 people attended an event marking the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC. Held at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, it was hosted by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Intel’s then chairman Andy Grove, and it featured some of computing’s most illustrious figures. Among them were Rod Canion, co-founder of Compaq, and Daniel S. Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc. David Bradley was also on the panel. He had been one of the 12 IBM engineers who worked on the first IBM PC – model 5150 powered by an Intel 8088 chip running at 4.77MHz – although he was better known for inventing a now legendary key combination: Control, Alt and Delete. Pressing those keys back then performed a simple task: a swift…

It seems that our Auntie is in a tizz. Recent revelations about editorial policy at the Beeb have shed a somewhat unfortunate light on the organisation. There’s a fine line between editorial tidying up and using a long speech as a set of stems to create an entirely musique concrète reimagination of the events of That Speech By That President. Some have suggested that it was an over-excited intern at the controls of the video-editing suite. I don’t buy that for a moment. Even if it was, it shows a shocking lack of process control that something like this could actually get onto air. So while it’s only appropriate that the two head honchos have resigned, this should not simply be a decapitation event. The production process should come under…