Computer Shopperの July 2019 の目次

Gone are the simple days of choosing a smartphone, when the choice used to be a blue or yellow Nokia handset, and later moved on to whether to splash out on a BlackBerry or an iPhone. With the rise of Google’s Android operating system, we’re now inundated with all manner of handsets priced from under £100 to over £1,000, from a plethora of manufacturers both familiar – Sony and Samsung – and less so – Xiaomi and Honor. Adding to the complexity is the emergence of two new and fast-approaching mobile innovations: 5G and foldable phones. Smartphone technology hasn’t gone through any major overhauls in the past couple of years, but either – or both – of these technologies has the potential to be the next must-have. But while 5G…

Echo chamber Our complete guide to getting the best out of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, and a comparison of all the latest Echo devices to help you choose the best one to suit your needs Build a Pi-based intelligent speaker We show you how to build your own Raspberry Pi-powered Google Assistant using the Google AIY Voice Kit Quantum leaps All the latest developments in the world of quantum computing, including efforts from Google, Intel and IBM to turn the technology to real-world uses Watchful eyes We put security cameras and compact video cameras to the test, to see which are most worthy to guard your home (or just record your holidays) COMPUTER SHOPPER ISSUE 378 ON SALE IN NEWSAGENTS FROM 13th JUNE…

Surface hubbub Microsoft revealed the Surface Hub 2S, a 50in touchscreen-cum-collaborative computer device, with a massive 85in version planned for 2020 Chipping away Intel revealed its Core vPro line-up of mobile processors aimed at professional users, so expect a new wave of gutsy notebooks from the likes of HP, Dell and Lenovo soon Let’s get digital, digital The next Xbox console won’t be a next-gen console, but rather an Xbox One S that shuns a disk drive to embrace digital game downloads only Rays of light Nvidia has released a GeForce patch that brings support for ray-tracing to its 10-series graphics cards, even though they might struggle to power the light-rendering tech Fold foibles Samsung has delayed the launch of its £1,800 Galaxy Fold foldable smartphone, after the screens broke…

KEEPING LAPTOPS COOL has been a concern for Acer for many years, with it working on heatpipe and 3D fan-cooling systems. But the firm has gone a bit leftfield with its new €2,699 Helios Predator 700. At first glance, the machine is a chunky high-end gaming flagship laptop. It has a 144Hz 17.3in Full HD display in a solidlooking angular chassis, while under the hood sits a ninth-generation Intel Core i9 processor, with up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and either a GeForce RTX 2080 or RTX 2070 graphics chip. To maximise cooling when the laptop’s components are running as fast as they can, the keyboard deck slides forward, exposing a cooling array underneath. With the keyboard retracted, the processor and graphics card are automatically overclocked to squeeze as much…

£1,750 • From consumer.huawei.com VERDICT Even if the MateBook 14 is a better deal, the updated MateBook X Pro is a lovely high-end laptop THE HUAWEI MATEBOOK X Pro was one of the surprise best laptops of 2018. With its incredible display, a slim, well-made chassis, and decent performance and battery life, it was an ultraportable with very few flaws. Now, there’s a new model for 2019, launching alongside the cheaper MateBook 14 (Shopper 376) and a refreshed MateBook 13. In fact, the MateBook X Pro is close to being more of a refresh itself: aside from a change to the logo on the lid (from a simple logo to a big ‘Huawei’ stencilled in plain text), the laptop looks pretty much identical. There are some more substantial changes, too,…

£1,200 • From store.hp.com VERDICT A competent annual update, but there are better ultraportables available MUCH LIKE LENOVO’S Yoga series, the Spectre x360 line has been at the forefront of convertible laptops since the concept took off. The Spectre x360 13 in particular has had many iterations, and the 2019 model looks to be the most drastically overhauled version yet. Much of it is familiar: there’s the 13in touchscreen, HP’s Active Pen stylus and the 360° rotating hinge. The internal hardware isn’t too surprising, either: our mid-spec review unit had an Intel Core i7-8565U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB PCI-E SSD, along with a 1,920x1,080 display. 4K models, and one with a dedicated GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, are also available. SPACE SHAVING Similarly to last year’s Spectre…

£876 • From www.cclonline.com VERDICT Immense size and resolution make for an interesting monitor, but its inconsistent design and performance cause problems THE PHILIPS BRILLIANCE 499P9H is one of the most outlandish monitors we’ve ever seen. Its curved panel is designed for productivity, but at 49in diagonally with a 32:9 aspect ratio, it’s not exactly sober and sensible. Then again, Philips is angling it as a replacement for a dual-monitor setup, rather than just a show-off single screen. This is evident in the 5,120x1,440 resolution – the equivalent of two 2,560x1,440 displays side by side. That’s a huge amount of screen real estate and, unlike with dual monitors, there’s no set of bezels running down the middle. You can even connect two PCs or laptops in order to run two…

£250 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT A fast, if expensive, mesh satellite, the RBS50Y is a great way to extend your wireless network outside your home MESH SYSTEMS HAVE largely been focused on solving the problem of poor Wi-Fi inside your home. After all, that’s where you use your wireless system the most. Still, there’s a growing number of outdoor wireless applications, from security cameras to devices enabling you to use your laptop or phone in the garden. That’s where the Netgear Orbi Outdoor RBS50Y comes in. As you can tell from the name, this product integrates into the excellent Orbi mesh system, extending your mesh system outside your home. It can also operate in Extender mode, connecting to any other router to boost your Wi-Fi. FULL CIRCLE The RBS50Y is…

£2,540 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Nikon’s ‘mainstream’ mirrorless camera gets just about everything right NIKON’S DYNAMIC MIRRORLESS duo, the Z6 and the Z7, were announced simultaneously last year. The Z6 is the cheaper, lower-resolution model, designed to attract a wider range of potential users, while also bringing a couple of advantages beyond the lower price. The result is a superb, capable camera that demonstrates just how serious Nikon is about its new range – and which might be the most appealing camera of the past 12 months. The Nikon Z6 houses a 24.5-megapixel, full-frame sensor, making it just shy of half the resolution of the 45.7-megapixel Z7. The build and handling of both models is, to the millimetre and gram, identical, with the same tilting screen, high-resolution electronic viewfinder and…

£20 per month • From www.adobe.com VERDICT Integration with Rush, data-driven graphics and deeper Lumetri Color controls combine to make this a decent upgrade WE ALL KNOW that non-professional video production is shifting from camcorders to smartphones, but it’s even happening in the professional space. The 2018 Turner Prize winner, a half-hour single-screen video shot on a phone, is a perfect example. In recognition of this trend, Adobe launched a special cut-down version of Premiere Pro in October 2018 called Premiere Rush. Initially, this arrived on iOS, but the desktop version soon followed. Why mention it now? Well, while Rush has specialised tools for creating video that’s been shot on smartphones, or destined to be viewed on smartphones, your edited files are stored in the cloud via your Adobe account.…

01 A basic 1TB internal hard disk should cost around £40. This will be fast enough for general use and will provide enough storage for most users. Make sure the hard disk you choose has the appropriate interface type for your PC. Most hard disks and solid-state drives (SSDs) use the SATA3 interface, which enables faster speeds than the older SATA2. Pretty much every motherboard released in recent years will have multiple SATA3 ports, allowing you to connect several storage drives at once. 02 SSDs can make the most of SATA3’s high bandwidth for fast file transfers. They use flash memory similar to that found in USB flash drives, and although they tend to provide less capacity than mechanical hard disks, they’re significantly faster. More expensive SSDs use the NVMe…

01 A basic 24in LCD monitor costs around £100. It will be fine for typical Windows work but is likely to have poor viewing angles, so you’ll need to sit straight on for the best picture quality. Its colour accuracy may not be very good, either. 02 A VGA input lets you use the monitor with any PC, but the quality may not be as good as it is over DVI or HDMI. Both are digital connections and require a compatible graphics card but they avoid the need for digital-to-analogue or analogue-todigital conversions, which can reduce image quality. A digital connection achieves the best picture automatically, so you won’t have to adjust clock or phase settings as you do with analogue connections. Many DVI and all HDMI connections support HDCP,…

01 A smart thermostat can save you a lot of money by intelligently controlling your heating. Most smart heating devices are designed to be used with hot water central heating systems, with the boiler directly controlled by the system. These typically require a relay to be wired into your boiler, with a wireless thermostat giving you direct control. Smartphone apps then tie into the system to give you remote control. While it’s possible to fit controls yourself, you may want to pay an experienced plumber to do the job: expect to pay around £150 for a typical installation. If you have electric heating, there are very few choices, and the big names (Nest, Honeywell and so on) do not directly support these systems. 02 Want smart hot water control? If…

01 If you don’t have space in your home cinema setup for a set of surroundsound speakers, a soundbar is the next best thing. Whether you opt for a soundbar (which typically sits in front of your TV stand) or a soundplate (which sits underneath your TV), you’ll be getting significantly better audio than the weedy speakers today’s flatscreen TVs provide. 02 If you want to cut down on cable clutter, look for a soundbar with multiple HDMI inputs and outputs as well as Audio Return Channel (ARC). Not all soundbars use HDMI, with many making do with digital optical audio connections instead. This means you’ll have to connect Blu-ray players, games consoles and set-top boxes to your TV and run all audio through a single cable. Also look for…

01 If you’re ready to step beyond the basic controls of a compact camera, or you want greater flexibility than an ultra-zoom can offer, a compact system camera (CSC) is the next logical upgrade. With interchangeable lenses, manual controls and stellar image quality, these cameras give proper digital SLRs a run for their money. 02 There are three competing types of CSC mount, and the one you buy determines the number of compatible lenses and accessories you have available. Samsung’s NX-mount is arguably the most limited in terms of lens selection, and the company has confirmed that it’s shutting down its European camera business, so it’s best to avoid these altogether if possible. Sony’s E-Mount has a slightly wider range, but Micro Four Thirds offers the widest variety. Both Panasonic…

Chat and Communication Evernote 6.17.6.8292 Store your notes, ideas and plans in the cloud, and synchronise them between computers. UPDATED Mailbird 2.5.39.0 A free desktop email client for Windows. Miranda IM 0.10.80 Chat with friends across multiple messaging platforms, including AIM, Facebook, IRC and MSN, all from one simple interface. UPDATED Skype for Windows 8.42.0.60 Make internet voice and video calls for free, and buy credit to make calls to mobiles and landlines. UPDATED Telegram 1.6.13 This free IM app synchronises your conversations across multiple devices, and can spruce up chats with stickers and GIFs. WhatsApp Desktop 0.3.2386 A free PC and Mac version of the popular messaging app, letting you chat from your desktop. Customisation UPDATED iolo System Mechanic Free 18.6 Speed up your system with iolo’s PC optimisation…

Even someone living on the moon would have seen the deluge of foldable phones that have been announced this year. It’s early days yet, but are they really the future, or should you just buy a current handset and be done with it? We look at the options. WHAT IS A FOLDABLE PHONE? A foldable phone is exactly what it says. It looks like a regular handset, but can be unfolded to reveal a larger, more tablet-like display. The Samsung Galaxy Fold, for example, has a 4.6in screen on the outside, but once opened there’s a larger 7.3in screen on the inside. The Huawei Mate X takes a different approach, using a single screen. When folded, you use part of the screen, with a large 6.38in display; unfolded, you get…

£250 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com WE’VE OFTEN EXTOLLED the virtues of saving big money by buying previousgeneration (but still good) smartphones. The Huawei Mate 20 Lite, however, makes for an even better deal: it’s only a few months old, but has already plummeted from its £380 launch price to just £250. That’s incredibly tempting, as the Mate 20 Lite’s status as a stripped-back Mate 20 gives it a sleek look and some features you don’t really see on others phones this cheap. Unlocking via facial recognition is one: there’s a fingerprint sensor on the rear as well, but unlocking by simply looking at the front camera works well. Despite containing a large 6.3in screen, the Mate 20 Lite’s 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 7.5mm thickness make sure it still feels nicely slight.…

£189 • From www.amazon.co.uk LIKE THE HUAWEI Mate 20 Lite, this is another smartphone that’s quickly shed a mid-range price to become much more affordable. At £189, it’s only slightly more expensive than the Motorola Moto G7 Power, and the same price as the Samsung Galaxy J6+, but since it launched late in 2018 at £299, you can expect a somewhat more plush design and more potent internals. Indeed, even for its original price, the Nokia 7.1 looks lovely. As with the rest of Nokia’s recent phones, it’s crafted from a single piece of aluminium, with attractive chamfered edges that also make it sit snugly in the hand. It’s also well equipped for connectivity, with both USB Type-C and 3.5mm audio ports, a combined nano-SIM and microSD card tray, and…

£489 • From www.ebuyer.com HONOR MIGHT NOT be known for worldfirsts, but it’s nabbed one with the View 20: this is the first smartphone with an in-display front-facing camera, tucked away in a little hole-punch section in the top left-hand corner. Besides doing away with any kind of notch, this also allows for a design that, save for a tiny sliver of black at the bottom, is almost entirely bezel-free. To make it even less obtrusive, the camera lens width has been shrunk from 6mm (like on most smartphones) to 4.6mm. This attention to detail also extends to the rear panel, where there’s a gorgeous laser-etched ‘V’ pattern. All in all, the View 20 is one of the best-looking smartphones around. It’s practical, too. On the top edge is both…

£350 • From www.very.co.uk IN SHARP CONTRAST to the Palm Phone, the Xperia 10 Plus is as tall as smartphones come; both it and the smaller, generally lower-specced Xperia 10 are fitted with 21:9 aspect ratio screens. In the Plus model’s case, it’s an enormous 6.5in diagonally, although it has the same 2,520x1,080 resolution as the standard Xperia 10. Happily, the aspect ratio actually makes the Xperia 10 Plus easier to hold than the other 6.5in handset we’ve used recently, the iPhone XS Max: while it’s taller, it’s also not as wide, so the whole thing is a bit easier to grip. The downside is that you might have to reposition your thumb to reach to the top or bottom corners. The idea, according to Sony, is that since the…

£709 • From www.debenhamsplus.com IT WAS A frustrating wait for the iPhone XR, the cheapest of Apple’s latest round of iOS smartphones. Apple was clearly hoping to focus attention on the more expensive iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max (Shopper 371) before launching this, by far the most affordable handset in the range. Not that’s it’s all that cheap – in fact, it’s still very expensive, costing on a par with high-end Android smartphones even after dropping from its original £749 launch price. Still, at least it doesn’t hit the £1,000 mark, like its XS-branded stablemates. It’s also tough to spot many physical differences between the XR and the XS models. The iPhone XR’s tiny bezels are only very slightly thicker than on the iPhone XS, and the frame is…

£499 • From www.oneplus.com ONEPLUS HAS BEEN flying the flag for flagship-killing Android smartphones for several years now, with the OnePlus 6 (Shopper 367) setting the benchmark for delivering high-end smartphone features for a price that significantly undercuts some of the finest handsets out there. With each new generation of OnePlus phone, the Chinese firm creates a ‘T’ version, offering a suite of nips and tucks to improve on the earlier OnePlus model. The OnePlus 6T is, unsurprisingly, the exact same story. At first glance, there aren’t many major differences between the 6T and its predecessor. The rounded rectangular design is immediately familiar, only this time it squeezes in a 6.4in display, which is up a slither compared to the OnePlus 6’s 6.3in screen. The front camera notch is smaller,…

Music history is packed with surreal moments, but the time when a little-known punk band’s lead singer was interviewed by a fictional character with a papier-mâché head on the B-side of a ZX Spectrum game has to rank rather highly. That singer was Chris Sievey, face of The Freshies, whose biggest hit came in 1980 with the fantastic anthem I’m In Love With the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk, which reached the heights of number 54 in the UK charts. The character, meanwhile, was Frank Sidebottom, a wide-eyed, nasal-voiced oddball from Timperley who had been dreamed up to help promote a new game called The Biz, which Sievey had written over the course of 18 months. Frank was perpetually 35, lived with his mum, spent most of…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Bang to rights @ I wonder how many of your readers, when they’d finished reading the ‘Design Your Dream PC’ article in Shopper 376, did as I did and took the data from the CPU benchmark results on page 83 and built a spreadsheet to calculate the ‘bang for buck’ values? Simply dividing the benchmark numbers by the price of each CPU gives a comparison that might sway one’s buying choice. Witness the image above. Obviously the same approach could be taken for the other benchmarks in the article: storage on page 93, graphics cards on pages 98 and 99, and CPU coolers on page 103. Can I suggest that in future issues of the magazine, where articles have benchmark comparisons, you do the calculations for us and include…

Tech pioneer and all-round good egg letters@computershopper.co.uk I HAVE KNOWN my friend Mikey since we were little kids at school. He is my oldest friend in all senses, and we have shared all the episodes of our lives: the good, the bad and the downright ugly. He helped me way back when we founded the first leisure software company in the UK together, and then my friend Mikey buggered off and became a social worker. A while back he mentioned his TV remote was broken, although I could find nothing wrong with it. Not long after, his text messages got flakey, and then he stopped responding to my emails. In the early stages of his mental shut-down, long before his dementia took hold, before he forgot his PIN or how…

UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH students have created an algorithm that predicts the characters most likely to die in hit HBO drama Game of Thrones. With the show’s final season under way, a team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) turned to basic data science and machine learning to work out their macabre predictions. Their prediction for season eight – potential spoiler alert – is that Ser Bronn of the Blackwater is most likely to kick the medieval bucket, with a 93.5% chance of dying. To get this statistic, the team at TUM used approaches similar to those used in medicine and life-insurance calculations. They mined statistical information about how long people lived, along with biographical data that might correlate to when they die. A real-life example might include information such…

“Companies that fail to abide by the law may be sanctioned with up to 4% of their global turnover” The European Parliament is fed up with online companies that don’t remove extremist content “Bletchley Park is a place where innovative digital technology was pioneered, and this legacy will undoubtedly inspire the future generations who learn here” Iain Standen, Bletchley Park Trust CEO, on the codebreaking estate becoming an Institute of Technology “I absolutely detest modern ‘social media’ – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It’s a disease. It seems to encourage bad behaviour” Linux founder Linus Torvalds is no fan of social networks “We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email contacts may have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and we are deleting them” Facebook admits to yet…

£1,300 •From www.chillblast.com VERDICT An accomplished games machine and potent, extensively connected multitasker, this PC gets almost everything right THE RELATIVE NEWNESS of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics cards means that there aren’t a great deal of pre-built, RTX-based PCs to compare against each other. Even so, it’s already clear enough that £1,300 for a desktop with the high-end RTX 2070 could be quite the tempting prospect – so long as the rest of it is up to scratch. The Fusion Ryzen 7 RTX 2070 Custom Gaming PC builds around its GPU with an octa-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 2700 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 250GB WD Black SSD (Shopper 376), a 2TB hard disk and Gigabyte’s B450M Aorus M motherboard. It sticks to the basics in some minor respects…

£3,280 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT It’s a hefty investment, but the GX701 is more powerful and portable than most 17.3in laptops THE ROG ZEPHYRUS family can claim to contain some of the best gaming laptops in the world, if also some of the most expensive. Anyone unfamiliar with the range might also look upon the new ROG Zephyrus S GX701 and be confused as to why the keyboard has been shunted all the way to the front. Besides there being a fairly mundane answer to this (improved heat dissipation, mainly), the up-close-and-personal keyboard is nothing new to Asus. That said, there have been some big changes to the GX701. It now has a 17.3in screen, up from the previous GX501’s 15.6in, but the bezels have shrunk significantly to keep its…

£300 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Jettisoning full ray-tracing and DLSS for a cheaper card is almost a winning strategy, but the RTX 2060 is ultimately better IT WAS ALWAYS likely that Nvidia’s Geforce RTX graphics cards wouldn’t entirely kill off the older GTX series – RTX cards are defined by their baked-in support for ray-tracing and DLSS anti-aliasing, but these still require at least fairly beefy GPUs to pull off, so cheaper cards without these features would still be likely unless Nvidia wanted to abandon the budget market completely. What we didn’t expect was that there would be a GTX successor to the mid-range GTX 1060 (Shopper 345), something that’s already been replaced by the RTX 2060 (Shopper 375). There are two, in fact: the GTX 1660 and the slightly…

£133 • From www.lambda-tek.com VERDICT It has some nice extra features, but the Canvio Premium is barely faster than much cheaper alternatives BETWEEN FALLING SSD prices and Thunderbolt 3 catching on as an enabler of ultra-fast external drives, it’s understandable that the Canvio Premium 4TB has been met with mumbles rather than cheers. External hard disks aren’t dead – they’re still much cheaper than SSDs, especially if you directly compare capacities – but this is ultimately the largest version of a drive that’s been around since 2016. What is there to get excited about? One answer might be value: while the new 4TB model is more expensive than the existing 3TB, 2TB and 1TB versions, it has the lowest cost per gigabyte of all four: a paltry 3.3p. The 3TB…

£75 • From uk.creative.com VERDICT These fully wireless headphones are a superb bargain, sounding better than much more expensive sets CREATIVE KNOWS A thing or two about digital audio, having been making headphones, speakers and sound cards for over 30 years. The Outlier Air, however, are its very first attempt at true wireless earbuds. The ‘true’ part means that, as with Apple’s AirPods or the Samsung Galaxy Buds (Shopper 376), there’s no neckband tethering the two in-ear headphones together, let alone a cord that trails down to your phone or laptop. What makes them different to these other true wireless earbuds is the price: at £75, they’re more affordable than most rivals, yet they don’t skimp on quality or features either. They produce a wide, dynamic sound that’s every bit…

£149 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT There’s no GPS, but the Garmin Vivomove HR delivers a highly appealing mix of affordability and features FITNESS TRACKERS AREN’T to everyone’s taste. They deliver neat insights into your health and overall activity levels, but for many people, even the best-looking tracker doesn’t offer the appeal of a good old-fashioned watch with real moving parts. Garmin’s Vivomove HR is one of a growing list of hybrid smartwatches that aims to fix this by bringing fitness-tracking features to something that more closely resembles a traditional wristwatch. It’s a watch you can wear wherever you go, with a pared-down design that looks great whether you’re wearing it in the gym or on an evening out. Don’t be fooled by that low-key design, however. The Vivomove HR packs…

01 A basic PC costing around £350 will be able to run everyday office, multimedia and education software and will easily cope with surfing the internet. It might even be able to run some modern games. Many PCs can be sold either with or without a monitor. If you don’t like the display the manufacturer is offering, you can always use your current one, or buy another one separately. 02 If you want to play games, you’ll have to upgrade the graphics card. Budget cards such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 will cope well with many 3D games, but to play the latest 3D games smoothly (and enjoy the best-quality graphics) it’s worth upgrading to a more powerful card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. 03 All modern…

01 You don’t have to spend much to buy a decent graphics card that can drive multiple monitors. The AMD Radeon RX 550 costs about £100, for example, and while it isn’t suited to playing the latest games in Full HD, it is perfect for watching videos, browsing the web and playing basic games. 02 You’ll need to spend more money if you want to play the latest games. A good mid-range gaming graphics card is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which is powerful enough to play all modern games at Full HD resolution. High-powered cards tend to be more expensive, so expect to pay over £400 if you want to play games in Ultra HD at the highest quality settings. 03 Check that your chosen card has the graphics…

01 You should be able to buy a decent inkjet printer for less than £40. High-quality printing is possible on such a printer, but it will be slow. The actual print speed of an inkjet can be half the quoted (maximum) speed for text documents, and even slower when printing graphics. Budget inkjet printers such as these are designed only for light use and can be expensive to run. 02 For £80 to £90 you can buy a more capable printer that’s either faster and better built or better at reproducing photos. If documents are your priority, you’ll want a high minimum speed and low print costs. Look for inkjets that can handle all your office media, such as envelopes and labels. 03 If photos are your priority, speed is…

01 A smartphone’s operating system (OS) dictates its basic features and which third-party software you can install. There are three main contenders: Apple’s iOS, which is found on the iPhone, Google’s Android, which is used by various handset manufacturers, and Windows Phone, which has few options, especially since Microsoft has discontinued support for its OS. Apple iOS and Google Android both have thousands of apps available. 02 All smartphones have colour screens, but their resolutions vary. Basic models have 1,280x720 pixels, but text can be indistinct. Look for a display that has at least 1,920x1,080 pixels so it’s easier to read text Choosing a… Smartphone and watch Full HD videos. Don’t worry too much about built-in media players or Office document editors; you can always install apps to replace these…

01Bluetooth speakers come in all shapes and sizes, so you’ll need to decide what you want to do with the speaker before you buy. If you don’t plan to take your music outdoors or around the house, look for a wired speaker. These are typically cheaper than speakers with built-in batteries. If you do want a portable speaker, however, pay particular attention to how much it weighs. Ruggedised models should be able to survive accidental drops, water spills and unexpected rain showers. 02Many of the cheapest Bluetooth speakers use the lossy A2DP Bluetooth protocol, which is prone to compressing your music and discarding detail compared with the original recording. It’s hard to tell the difference when listening to pocket-sized speakers, but if you’re looking for a speaker to fill a…

01 Wearable tech can include anything from chest-strap heart-rate monitors to augmented reality glasses, but the two most common types are smartwatches and fitness trackers. Both are designed to sit unassumingly on your wrist, and are almost always meant to be used in tandem with a paired smartphone. 02 Smartwatches are typically more complex and expensive, though more closely resemble a traditional wristwatch. You can use them to receive and reply to text messages and emails, quickly check maps and even play games – like a smartphone, most smartwatches allow you to install your own choice of apps. 03 Fitness trackers are much more dedicated to healthy pursuits. Step counters, heart-rate monitors and even sleep tracking are all common, and the data collected is fed back to you so you…

2019 should be the year that the first 5G services come online. Promising faster and more reliable data connections, is it something that you should wait for, and what will you need to use it? While we’ve been talking about 5G since 2013, the mobile telecoms industry standards group – the 3GPP – only finalised the 5G standard last year. It comes in two variants: a non-standalone version that uses parts of the existing LTE network, and a standalone version that uses all-new components. Qualcomm, Huawei, Intel, Ericsson, Nokia and others have been working on the standards and hardware that support 5G, while the world’s mobile network operators have been working with them to test and eventually roll out 5G services. Ofcom has auctioned bands of the radio spectrum for…

£150 • From www.amazon.co.uk OF ALL THE new 7th-gen Moto handsets launched this year – the Moto G7, the Moto G7 Power, the Moto G7 Play and the Moto G7 Plus – the Moto G7 Play is arguably the least interesting. It’s not the ‘main’ Moto G7, and it doesn’t have standout hardware like the Moto G7 Power’s massive battery or the Moto G7 Plus’s upgraded processor. What, then, does the Moto G7 Play have to offer? For one thing, it’s the cheapest, coming in at a wallet-friendly £150, and it achieves this without losing out on hardware all that much. Its Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, chiefly, is both a major upgrade on last year’s Moto G6 Play and the same chip found in the Moto G7 and Moto G7…

£190 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com SAMSUNG’S GALAXY RANGE isn’t entirely composed of its premium S-series handsets. The Galaxy J6+ is still recognisably related to those high-end models, but squeezes the price to £190. Understandably, this has meant cutbacks. For instance, while the J6+ has a familiar Galaxy shape, there are none of the fancy curved edges that have been a Galaxy S mainstay for years now. Still, it’s a fairly modern design. There’s no physical home button, and the fingerprint reader takes up a new residence on the side of the phone. It’s a very comfortable way to unlock the phone – as long as it’s already in your hand, and not down on a table. MICRO MANAGEMENT As has proven common with budget phones, there’s no IP-rated dust or waterproofing,…

£380 • From www.amazon.co.uk WE’VE ALWAYS LIKED the Moto Z Play series. Its attachable Moto Mods could have been a silly gimmick, but many of them are genuinely useful, and underneath this modular functionality has always been quality, reliable core hardware that would make each phone a good buy even if you couldn’t whack a magnetic power pack directly on the back. The Moto Z3 Play is the third in this line. It looks similar to the Z2 Play (Shopper 357), and can use the same Moto Mods, but is a touch bigger at 157x77x68mm, thanks to the display growing by 0.5in. It’s also 11g heavier, at 156g. Moto Mods work by clipping on to the rear. In addition to a bigger and longer-lasting battery power pack, you can add…

£484 • From www.ebuyer.com AS WITH THE Honor View 20, this is another smartphone that pushes the definition of ‘mid-range’, but blame the makers and sellers of high-end smartphones for shifting standards and prices ever upwards for that. Xiaomi has already shown it can make excellent handsets for less, mainly with the Pocophone F1. With its Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, dual-lens camera and huge 6.2in display for less than £300, you might be wondering how the Mi 8 Pro – which has all three of the same features, but costs £200 more – could be worth it. ALL CLEAR For starters, it has one of the most unusual designs we’ve seen on a smartphone in ages. The rear glass panel isn’t textured or coloured, but translucent bordering on transparent, so you…

£589 • From store.google.com SOMETIMES A SMARTPHONE doesn’t need fancy hardware gimmicks to achieve greatness. The Pixel 3 is a perfect example: it represents no major departure for handheld technology, but with just some well-executed core features and a single camera, it instantly became one of our favourite phones of 2018 – and it still stands up a few months later. The 3 is the smaller of Google’s current Pixel duo, with a 5.5in display to the Pixel 3 XL’s 6.3in screen. Since the Pixel 3 XL costs £719, the Pixel 3 is also a lot cheaper, and benefits from a much cleaner notch-less design, even if the two have similar internals. They’re also the same on the back, with an unusual but pleasant-feeling mix of glossy and matt-finish glass…

£899 • From www.currys.co.uk THE GALAXY S10+ is a phone of rare distinction. Not because it’s the biggest smartphone launch of 2019 so far, but because it’s the first device we’ve tested in ages that feels as if it brings together a wealth of new features without compromising anything else. Except, perhaps, the price. In typical Samsung style, it looks great and feels suitably opulent in the hand, with Gorilla Glass on both the front and back. There’s an Honor View 20-style ‘hole-punch’ camera in the top-right corner, complete with facialunlocking capability, and we love the little detail of a spinning, snake-like graphic around this black dot when it’s searching for a face to scan. There’s also an in-display fingerprint reader, if you’d prefer. This works faster and more reliably…

REVOLUTIONISING POINT-AND-CLICK ADVENTURES Revolution has made its name developing iconic point-and-click adventures such as Beneath a Steel Sky and the long-running Broken Sword series. Most of the titles have been created in 2D, but a handful made the leap to 3D, with mixed results (we’re looking at you, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death). Interesting, then, that a 3D sequel of sorts to 1994’s Beneath a Steel Sky is set to be released on the new gaming subscription service Apple Arcade for iOS, macOS and tvOS, followed by PC and console versions. Developed by Revolution’s founder Charles Cecil, the game’s lead designer, and comics artist Dave ‘Watchmen’ Gibbons, Beyond a Steel Sky hopes to introduce a whole new audience to the theme of the original cyberpunk classic. In doing so,…

It’s great that Windows is so much better at organising taskbar icons these days; I remember a brand new XP laptop with 10 of them already sprawling across the taskbar. However, while Windows 7 and Windows 8 let you click the arrow next to the Notification Area to customise the displayed icons, Windows 10 seems to decide for itself. I’m missing a couple of important icons; where can I choose which ones to show? Sandy Nicholson In its wisdom, Microsoft removed the Customise option with Windows 10, but you can still choose which icons you want to see in the Taskbar. Right-click the Taskbar, choose Taskbar Settings and scroll down to Select which icons appear on the Taskbar, which is under the Notification area heading. Use the toggle switches to…

The LastPass app works much like the browser extension, but it can also use any biometrics that your phone or tablet includes. That includes using Face ID on modern iDevices. As you’d expect, the app walks you through the setup process, and does a better job than we could do here. Using LastPass on iOS is easy: just use your favourite browser as usual, and when you tap on a login box you’ll see either a banner to allow you to enter your login details, or a banner-like button at the top of the keyboard to do so. You only need to delve into the app to update passwords or settings, and that’s a rare event. On Android, you need to work through the app all the time. This is…

Payaway @ I like reading the smartphone reviews in Shopper and use them to make a decision when upgrading my mobile. I currently have a Motorola Moto G5 Plus, and the review of the Moto G7 Power in Shopper 376 convinced me that it should be my next phone. But wait a minute – does it have NFC? The review doesn’t say, so I went online and found conflicting answers: the UK version doesn’t, but the European version might have. NFC is a deal-breaker for me and, I suspect, it is for the growing number of people who use Android Pay. I rarely have my wallet with me, but always have my phone. So could future reviews please mention whether NFC is present or not? Either in the main review…

Software guru and Shopper legend letters@computershopper.co.uk I WAS CHATTING to a woman I used to work with, and she told me somewhat shamefacedly that a mutual ex-colleague had managed to log on to the website of a supplier our old company used infrequently. They’d got into the account set up by my friend because they’d guessed the password would be the one she always used – which it was. What’s more, I know for a fact my friend still uses the same password for nearly everything, several years down the line. I’d like to think that this was something rare, but it isn’t. People choose passwords that are easy to remember, and therefore easy to crack, and use the same one over and over, which is why the World Wide…

SAY WHAT? SONY HASN’T OFFICIALLY revealed the PlayStation 5 yet. But in an interview with Wired magazine, Mark Cerny, the lead architect for the PlayStation 4, pretty much revealed what we can expect from Sony’s next-generation games console. In a nutshell, it will be a brand new hardware platform, rather than a mid-generation refresh like the PlayStation 4 Pro, and it will support 8K resolutions, 3D audio, backwards compatibility, speedy SSD storage and, most surprisingly, ray-tracing rendering. The latter raises an eyebrow as it essentially involves rendering all the paths light can take in a virtual scene, including bouncing off objects to illuminate other areas, in real time. This facilitates something called global illumination, which basically means highly realistic lighting in games and virtual environments. This takes a lot of…

STAR-SCANNING TECH used to peer at stars in distant galaxies will find its way into the NHS in the form of a portable 3D medical X-ray machine located in GP surgeries across the UK. The UK Space Agency will funnel £1m into developing equipment that lets doctors more comprehensively scan for tumours than existing 2D scanning technology. The scanners will be portable and satellite-linked, meaning patients can be examined via X-rays in GP surgeries instead of waiting for hospital referrals. Using space technology, the 3D X-ray scanners will repurpose field emitters etched on to silicon wafers, used in ion thrusters, as well as X-ray optics deployed in star-mapping missions. The NHS hopes that re-jigging this technology into a form that can be used in practical healthcare settings will save clinicians…

£700 •From www.overclockers.co.uk VERDICT A great CPU and SSD storage definitely help, but gaming performance is the star here STRAIGHT AWAY, THE Gaming XVI Essential looks like a superior all-round desktop than the last £700 Overclockers PC we looked at, the Gaming Vision VR (Shopper 374). That had a strong advantage for gaming in its GTX 1060 graphics card, but with only a Core i3-8100 CPU and 1TB hard disk, it ultimately lost out to its hexa-core, SSD-equipped peers. The Gaming XVI Essential is far more up to speed. It has an overclockable, 12-threaded AMD Ryzen 5 2600, and while there’s still a 1TB hard disk, this time it’s in reserve – the main drive is a 240GB SATA SSD. Nvidia’s new GTX 1660 also takes the place of the…

£1,354 • From www.lenovo.com VERDICT A high-performance speaker set helps the Yoga C930 overcome its shortcomings ONE OF THE best things about convertible laptops is their flexibility, and not just in the physical sense. The ability to quickly switch between a productivity-aiding ultraportable and a big-screen tablet to watch videos has long been a strength of the format. Lenovo’s Yoga C930, however, focuses on the entertainment side, incorporating a Dolby Atmos-branded speaker into the 360° hinge. These are, by some margin, the best speakers we’ve heard on a laptop. Besides an impressive level of volume, there’s enough bass kick to rival a medium-sized Bluetooth speaker, and music comes through with power and clarity – nothing like the tinny, muddled playback most laptops manage. There’s also a pair of downwards-firing woofers,…

£60 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT No other watercooler matches the TD02-RGB’s balance of low pricing and high performance ANOTHER MONTH, ANOTHER all-in-one (AIO) watercooler with RGB lighting. The TD02-RGB is a little more interesting than most, however: it’s only £60, at a time when 240mm, RGB-equipped AIO coolers are still new enough to occupy the £100-plus range. That could potentially make it a great budget option, so long as build quality and cooling performance are up to the task. First impressions don’t exactly scream cheapness and corner-cutting. The dual 120mm fans and rubbery tubes are impressively robust, and a huge range of AMD and Intel sockets – both old and new – are supported. The only noteworthy omission is the TR4 slot used by AMD’s gigantic Threadripper chips, although the…

£324 • From www.printerland.co.uk VERDICT Brother’s MFC-J5945DW is a fast and economical choice for A3 printing IT’S NO SECRET that inkjets have been slowly replacing laser printers in small and home offices, and Brother’s MFC-J5945DW demonstrates why. One of a new range of single-function and multifunction office inkjets, this MFP can print, scan, copy and fax one- or two-sided A4 pages. It can also print single-sided A3 pages, though not A3+. It has two 250-sheet input trays in the base and a 100-sheet multipurpose feed at the back, all of which support A3. There’s also a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) on top, although that’s only A4. The MFC-J5945DW supports wired and wireless networks, and is controlled via a colour touchscreen. It’s an easy printer to install and use, but…

£90 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT A comfortable pair of waterproof headphones with a built-in MP3 player, but they’re let down by fiddly controls BLUETOOTH HEADPHONES HAVE made it easier to listen to music while running, cycling, climbing, rowing or indeed performing practically any kind of exercise. Why should swimming be any different? Swimming headphones, which use built-in music players to overcome the technical challenges of wireless streaming, are not as uncommon as you might think. JBL has now joined in with the Endurance Dive, a pair of earphones it claims function just as well in the pool as they do on dry land. These sit at the upper end of JBL’s Endurance range of in-ear sports headphones, at least in terms of price, with only the £130 Endurance Peak true…

£90 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Inspire HR’s simplicity, stylishness and superb app make it a great fitness tracker for more casual users FITBIT ISN’T THE fitness band dominator it once was, but devices such as the Inspire HR show why the firm was so successful in the first place. It’s a well-balanced blend for people who want to get fitter, but don’t want to spend hours analysing their form. The design will be pretty familiar to anybody who has used a Fitbit band from the past few years. A small plastic lozenge is the brain of the device, and it clips in between two silicone rubber straps. Rather neatly, two bands come in the box, so you don’t have to figure out whether you qualify as having large wrists…

01 A basic laptop costing around £300 will run everyday office, multimedia and education software, but it won’t be suitable for 3D gaming or processor-intensive tasks such as video editing. Many laptops at this price have a 15.6in screen and weigh over 2kg, so they’re best used around the house and for occasional journeys. 02 If you want to play modern games, you’ll need a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060M. Good gaming laptops tend to have large 15.6 or 17in screens and weigh around 3kg, so they’re best suited to use at home. 03 If you want a laptop that you can take everywhere, look for a model that weighs less than 2kg. For the best portability, buy one that has a…

01 Building your own PC is often cheaper than buying a pre-made system, and gives full control over the components. You don’t need any special computer knowledge: just a few spare hours, a screwdriver and your choice of parts. Even things such as liquid-cooling systems can be found in user-friendly, easy-to-install packages, and for the most part it’s as simple as inserting each component into a particular slot. 02 Arguably the most important component is the CPU. These days you can get a quad-core chip even on a tight budget, which should provide more than enough brainpower for simple tasks such as web browsing, but hexa-core and octa-core chips are better for tougher jobs such as media editing, gaming and content creation. The CPU will also determine which motherboards you…

01 Wireless routers each use a number of Wi-Fi standards, so you shouldn’t have any trouble connecting your computer or phone wirelessly if you get an 802.11n or 802.11ac router. Nearly all routers support 802.11n, so even a cheap model should provide decent performance. You can expect a transfer speed of around 40Mbit/s at a distance of 10m from any modern 802.11n router. The very latest routers use the 802.11ac standard, which provides tremendously fast transfer speeds. Some devices still don’t support the 802.11ac standard, so check the specifications before you buy. 02 If you subscribe to an ADSL broadband service, you should buy Choosing a… Wireless router a wireless router that has a built-in ADSL modem. This will cost more than the equivalent cable router, but it allows you…

01 All tablets rely on an operating system (OS) to run apps. You have three main choices: Apple’s iOS, which runs on the iPad; Android, which Google licenses to various manufacturers; and Windows 10, which has become common in hybrid tablets and convertibles. If you own an Apple or Google smartphone, you can download your apps, music and so on to a tablet that runs the same OS, so it makes sense to stick with a compatible device. 02 It’s important to pick a tablet that has a good-quality, high-resolution screen. Many budget tablets have 1,280x800-resolution displays, but better tablets have Full HD 1,920x1,080 panels, and we’re starting to see tablets that have even higher screen resolutions. Some are as high as 2,560x1,600 or even 4K. Entry-level tablets typically use…

01 Action cameras are typically much smaller than a regular camcorder, as they are designed to be mounted to a bike, board or car, or worn on your person. As the name suggests, they are designed primarily for shooting action footage, but because of their small size they are ideal for strapping on to your pet’s collar or your children’s toys for a different perspective. 02 Even basic action cameras will shoot Full HD video, and many will even shoot 4K, but frame rate is arguably more important than resolution when it comes to action video. Higher frame rates will mean smoother clips, and super-high frame rate videos can be played in slow motion to emphasise exciting shots. Keep an eye out for 4K/30, 4K/60, 1080p/60 and 720p/120 models for…

GETTING STARTED The download instructions on the card insert (opposite) show you how to connect to the download site. Make sure you type in the web address exactly as shown. You’ll need your coupon code the first time you log on to the site. ANY PROBLEMS If you need help with any of the software this month, please send an email to support@creativemark.co.uk. We check this inbox regularly. Please include the issue number of the magazine and your coupon code. WHY DOWNLOADS In order to provide us with free software, publishers now require us to offer the applications as a download and require online registration. You need to use the unique code printed in the box on the card insert to register and download the software in this issue. The…

CANCELLING FOR FREE If you’ve bought your handset online or over the phone, then you have 14 days after receiving your phone or SIM to cancel. You may get charged for any additional services that you’ve used, or if you’ve damaged your handset. However, if you’re careful, the golden rule is, return your phone within the 14 day period if you’re not happy: poor reception won’t get fixed after that time. Buying in-store doesn’t afford you the same protection. However, many phone networks will offer you a similar returns policy. Check before you buy, and if you’re not getting at least 14 days’ protection, buy online or over the phone. DEALING WITH POOR SERVICE If you’re out of your returns period, then you can go down the complaint route if…

£180 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com OF THE FOUR new Moto smartphones, the Moto G7 Power sits around the lowermiddle in both specs and price. It has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor as the standard Moto G7 and the Moto G7 Play, but importantly has more RAM (4GB) than the Moto G7 Play and its 2GB of memory, not to mention a larger 6.2in display. However, this screen has a lower resolution (1,520x720) than the Full HD Moto G7. Where the Moto G7 Power stands out, however, is its battery: it’s a massive 5,000mAh unit, dwarfing even the Moto G7 Plus’s 3,500mAh battery. BIG BROTHERS Despite all these internal differences, the Moto G7 Plus looks virtually identical to the Moto G7, and that’s no bad thing: both phones give the passing…

£99 • From shop.vodafone.co.uk WHILE THE IDENTITY of Vodafone’s hardware manufacturer partners remains a mystery, it’s a partnership that’s produced some marvellous budget phones, such as the Vodafone Smart N8 (Shopper 356). The latest Smart X9 costs a few pounds more, but it still provides a great entry-level option. It says a lot about how smartphone design has progressed that the Smart X9 could feasibly pass for a recent flagship. A 5.7in, 18:9 display is encased in thin bezels, with no ungainly notch in sight, and the rear side is pleasingly minimalist. The dual-camera array is neatly contained in the top left-hand corner, and the circular fingerprint reader sits near the top in the middle. A Vodafone logo is barely visible near the bottom. PUT IN PRINT This is, however,…

£350 • From shop.vodafone.co.uk PALM, BEST KNOWN for the PalmPilot PDA from the mid-1990s, is back with a most peculiar smartphone: it’s an Android handset, but with a tiny 3.3in screen it looks almost like a humorous parody of a modern handset. It’s no joke, though, and makes a certain sense: with display sizes having exploded in recent years, there could be room for a much smaller device on the market, even if it is mainly intended as a backup phone for leaving in the car or taking on holiday. It’s fairly well equipped, too, with an octa-core Snapdragon 435 chip, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and support for microSD cards up to 256GB. A 12-megapixel camera sits on the rear, with an 8-megapixel snapper on the front. Alas,…

£280 • From www.ebuyer.com XIAOMI MIGHT NOT be a name you’re familiar with. Pronounced ‘shh-OW-mee’, the Chinese tech company is the fourth most popular smartphone maker in the world, but has only recently started selling products in the UK. Nevertheless, it’s made the strongest of first impressions, as the Pocophone F1 – one of its very first UK-launched smartphones – is phenomenal value. By including the Snapdragon 845, the same CPU currently powering most of the world’s flagship phones, it’s a mid-range handset in price alone. Well, perhaps not entirely: some corners have been cut, most noticeably in the uninspired all-plastic chassis. Still, silver-tinted chamfered edges add a dash of class, and the rounded corners and sides ensure that it fits comfortably in the palm. The rear-mounted circular fingerprint reader…

£699 • From www.amazon.co.uk THE FIRST THING to know about the P30, Huawei’s new premium smartphone, is that it isn’t just a smaller version of the P30 Pro. The two have the same processor, the Kirin 980, and both have triple-lens rear cameras, but these are fundamentally different phones. For a start, the Huawei P30 has a smaller screen, at 6.1in versus 6.5in, although the 2,340x1,080 resolution is the same. It lacks the 5x optical telephoto lens of the P30 Pro, it isn’t as water-resistant, doesn’t have curved screen edges and the battery is smaller (3,450mAh versus 4,200mAh), and it also lacks wireless charging. Straight away, it sounds like there’s no way that the P30 can reach the same highs as the P30 Pro. However, at £699, the standard P30…

£700 • From www.currys.co.uk SMARTPHONE INNOVATION IS a mixed bag. For every attractive full-body display and triple (or quadruple) camera arrangement, there’s some gimmick like side-squeezing controls and naff 3D face-scanning. For its latest flagship, Sony hasn’t exactly gone where no smartphone has before, but its big new feature is exciting nonetheless: a 6in OLED screen, with technology borrowed from the firm’s Bravia line of TVs. This is framed by minuscule notch-free chin and forehead bezels above and below the screen. The panel wraps around the sides of the device ever so slightly, too, just like the Samsung Galaxy S10+. INTELLIGENCE OPERATION Sony has also borrowed a feature originally included on Samsung’s phones. ‘Side Sense’ lets you double-tap anywhere along the length of either side of the screen, which launches…

Hibernope A couple of months ago, you helped me recover data from my old network-attached storage (NAS) drive after I unintentionally deleted a volume (Helpfile, Shopper 375). I’m very happy with my new Synology DS218j, except that the disks never seem to power down. In DiskStation Manager, I used Control Panel’s Power settings to configure hibernation. When that didn’t work, I created a power schedule to turn off the NAS between midnight and 6am. That works, but it’s not ideal: it means we have to schedule updates and SMART tests for when we’re using the NAS, and that we’ll need to turn it on manually if we ever need it during the middle of the night. We’ve got a typical home network where most of the PCs and devices are…

clive@computershopper.co.uk Use a password manager Using strong and unique passwords for each website and service we use is impossible – no-one’s memory is that good. Thankfully, Clive Webster can show you a secure alternative THE ADVICE FROM all the security experts is to use a different password for each and every website and service you use, as well as your computers and mobile devices. And these passwords can’t just be ‘p455w0rd’ or some variation; they need to be at least 12 characters long, with strange symbols and oddly placed capitals. Who could possibly remember all that? Password managers offer a simple solution, essentially acting as a safe, storing all your passwords locked securely by one master password. Usefully, these applications now offer all kinds of other securityrelated extras, and most…