Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i PC Pro

WHEN MY TRAIN PULLS into London Marylebone of a workday morning, something odd happens. We’re all aware that the tunnel heralds our arrival into the station, and as one we rise from our seats, like a herd of oddly impatient animals, so eager are we to start the next stage of our journey. Why? After 17 years of doing the commute, and only now that I travel on a more irregular basis, I ask myself the question. Part of the answer is that to stay seated requires immense willpower when everyone else is getting up out of theirs. We’re all caught in this headlong rush to get to work one, two minutes earlier, but if pressed probably couldn’t say why. And I see exactly the same traits with tech. Having…

KEYFACTS IN A NUTSHELL Hyperoptic delivers end-toend gigabit fibre to multi-dwelling residential buildings in 12 cities across the UK. LOCATION London FOUNDED 2011 EMPLOYEES 250 WEBSITE hyperoptic.com It isn’t easy trying to set up a new fibre broadband network in the UK. You have the looming presence of incumbent BT and the sizeable network of Virgin Media to compete with – both of which are allowed to call their products “fibre broadband”, despite fibre featuring in only a fraction of the connection. Even when the government has money to dish out to fertilise the fibre broadband rollout, it designs a scheme (BDUK) that effectively hands all of the money to BT. Not that Hyperoptic is really interested in reaching the rural areas that the government was targeting. Its strategy is…

@njkobie If you have AIDS and live in North London, Google knows it – a careless use of data that could slow innovation in health. Let me explain. Three NHS hospitals in London signed up to Google’s DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence company that the search giant bought in 2014, to analyse data to predict, and prevent, kidney problems. Of course, there’s nothing wrong there... except that it failed to address one of the most important factors when it comes to handling data: consent. Called “Streams”, the software is based on an app for doctors and other clinicians to watch over patients with kidney issues, highlighting potential problems via analytics and Big Data. Caught early, acute kidney issues can be treated with antibiotics. If missed, however, the consequences can be…

Poverty, terrorism and disease are all seen and treated as major crises, but what about autism? In the UK alone, there are around 700,000 people diagnosed with the condition, and it touches the lives of an estimated 2.8 million Britons a day. In the US, more than 3.5 million people are autistic, according to a 2014 study published in JAMA Pediatrics. Autism is a lifelong disability that affects key areas such as communication and the ability to understand others. Currently, there isn’t a cure or treatment that can eradicate symptoms altogether, and government cuts have created a scarcity in support services. As a result, those with a diagnosis can end up struggling in life. But new technology is giving fresh hope to those affected by autism. The latest innovations are…

PRICE £1,167 (£1,400 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Extreme Edition processors have become a regular landmark in Intel’s schedule over the years, providing enthusiasts with something to get their teeth into while waiting for the next-generation architecture. As its price suggests, though, this year’s top-of-the-range model – the 6950X, based on Broadwell-E architecture – is something special. It starts conventionally enough. As with previous Extreme chips, the Broadwell-E isn’t based on the most recent iteration of Intel’s CPU architecture, but a tweak to the previous generation. Where things become interesting are a boost to ten cores, a die shrink to 14nm, and the new Turbo Boost Max Technology 3. Apart from sounding like something out of a shaving advert, this is a tweak to Intel’s existing Turbo Boost tech, designed to…

PRICE £2,100 (£2,520 inc VAT) from store.hp.com This is a 15in laptop with serious poke. Just take a look at the specs and try not to whimper with excitement: a 2.8GHz quad-core mobile Xeon processor with Hyper-Threading, 32GB of RAM, a 512GB PCI Express-based NVMe SSD, and Nvidia Quadro M1000M graphics driving a 15.6in, 3,840 x 2,160 HP DreamColor display. Given such a specification, you might forgive HP for neglecting design. Thankfully, the ZBook is as tempting in the flesh as its specs are in black and white. From its dimpled, aluminium-clad lid to its glass-topped touchpad and gleaming chamfered edges, this laptop is a joy to behold. It’s comfortable to use, too. The keyboard is flanked by Bang & Olufsen stereo speakers, and has a key action that’s light…

PRICE £188 (£225 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com If you’re familiar with Lenovo’s Yoga devices, you’ll recognise the trick on show here. The Transformer Book Flip looks like a normal laptop, but, thanks to a lid that can flip 360 degrees, it doubles as a tablet when you need it. Say, if you want to take a few handwritten notes on-screen. While the design concept isn’t new, its price certainly is. Lenovo’s cheapest Yoga, the 700, costs around £450. Asus manages to cut that price in half without obvious compromises: it’s still light and slim, weighing 1.2kg and measuring 18.4mm with the lid closed. Only when you touch the surface does it become clear that it’s made from brushed-metaleffect plastic. Much like the Yoga 700, the Flip’s screen had a tendency…

PRICE £225(£270 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk However good it is, £270 is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on an e-reader. Obvious, isn’t it? Not, it seems, to Amazon, which has released the Kindle Oasis as part of a new wave of products that can actually turn a profit rather than be loss leaders. While it’s easy to understand Amazon’s motivation, it’s less clear why anyone would want to spend so much when the excellent Kindle Paperwhite is £160 cheaper. In the same way you might suspend your disbelief in a good book, let’s for a moment ignore the price and focus on the design – because the Kindle Oasis is gorgeous. Small enough to slip into a pocket, it’s thinner and lighter than any Kindle before it. To…

PRICE £141 (£169 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk The third-generation Moto G has been our top budget pick since its release a year ago, and Motorola gave us an early hands-on with its successor: the Moto G4. We couldn’t benchmark it, but our time using the phone to browse the internet and play a few games suggest good things. That’s no surprise considering the 1.5GHz Snapdragon 617 CPU and 2GB of RAM, which are impressive inclusions for the price. It also dwarfs rivals for screen size, with a 5.5in 1,080 x 1,920 LCD panel. Again, we couldn’t test it under lab conditions, but first impressions are positive. The G4’s plastic body loses out to the Samsung A3 for style, but you can customise the Moto with various colours – right down…

We know it’s tempting to buy a printer based on the initial price, on the dazzling list of features on display, on simply how it looks. But there’s almost no other technology purchase that needs more proper analysis: a moment of weakness in PC World could see you stuck with a printer that looked amazing on the shop floor but will demand new cartridges every other week. We examine the true cost of running each of these printers on p82, but if that was the only concern then the buying decision would be almost too easy. Take a rough guess at how many pages you print, see which printer comes top for value at that point, and hand over your credit card details. Job done. But you’ll have your own…

PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk The black and somewhat boxy MFC-J5620DW is a low-key inkjet printer. It’s not exactly small – with the paper tray fully extended its footprint is as large as that of a bulky laser. Impressively, though, Brother has managed to cram a full A3 paper feed into that space – something no other printer this month can claim. Connecting to a wireless network and accessing the MFCJ5620DW’s main functions is a breeze. Everything’s done through a generously sized colour touchscreen interface, which we found perfectly intuitive to use. As well as regular scanning and faxing capabilities, there’s integration with a wide range of cloud services, so you can – for example – print files directly from Dropbox or Evernote. If the printer is accessible…

PRICE £50 (£60 inc VAT) from pcworld.co.uk Sit the HP Envy 5540 next to the identically priced Epson WF-2630 and it’s no contest: the latter looks cheap and boxy, while the HP is undeniably stylish. It’s much friendlier too: by contrast with the Epson’s clunky 25-button interface, the Envy is controlled from a 5.6cm mono touchscreen. The Envy is, to be sure, a less business-like proposition. Paperhandling options for printing are fairly limited, with one 125-sheet cassette, a 15-sheet photo tray and a 25-sheet output tray. There’s no Ethernet interface – it’s USB or wireless only – and no fax capability, either. Although rated for up to 1,000 pages per month, the Envy 5540 is clearly aimed at the personal end of the scale. Print quality is immediately pleasing. Text…

PRICE £175 (£210 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk Not everyone needs colour. Few print jobs really need it, and there are definite advantages to sticking, as the i-Sensys MF229dw does, with mono laser technology. One is speed. Our 20-page test document flooded out of the printer at an exceptional 22.4ppm. Throwing business graphics into the mix only slowed things to 16.9ppm, although of course pages were rendered in greyscale rather than colour. Another is price. The MF229dw can’t match the cheapest inkjets, but at 2.2p per mono page, it’s much cheaper than the Oki and Ricoh lasers, coming out just a fraction behind Lexmark and Xerox. And since you won’t be printing colour, there are fewer consumables to buy overall. Although the MF229dw only prints in mono, it scans in full…

PRICE £134 (£161 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk The Xerox Phaser 6022V proudly keeps it simple: those seeking scanning and fax capabilities should look elsewhere. Xerox does offer a range of multifunction alternatives, but there’s something to be said for the compact footprint of a classic desktop laser. The price may seem steep considering the stripped-down feature set, but the Phaser 6022V’s excellent print quality could justify it: we found it turned out both sharp, precise black text and beautifully balanced business graphics. As is common with laser printers, a slight banding effect was visible on colour gradients, but illustrations and our photomontage looked strikingly vibrant, with bags of fine detail visible even in darker areas. Print speeds are unexceptional: our 20-page text document emerged at an average of 11.9ppm, with…

PRICE £98 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk A3 printing for less than £100 is a tempting deal indeed. And not only is Epson’s WorkForce WF-7110DTW cheap to buy, it offers low running costs, integral duplexing, and both wired and wireless networking, with support for Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint. Weighing over 15kg, this is a chunky printer – but it puts its size to good use. Its twin 250-sheet input trays both offer telescopic sliders, allowing each to handle A3 and A3+ paper sizes. The A3+ manual feed slot at the back offers a flatter paper path through the printer, for heavyweight paper up to 256gsm. Like most inkjet manufacturers, Epson offers a choice of ink capacities: with the standard cartridges, running costs for mono and colour A4 pages work out to…

PRICE £104 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk If you’re looking for a cheap network colour laser with a fair turn of speed, Oki’s C321dn could be just the device. It delivers mono and colour print speeds of 22ppm and 20ppm and includes an integral duplexer, yet costs just a shade over £100. Tipping the scales at a meaty 22kg, it’s no lightweight in the build department, but it’s small enough to sit comfortably on a desktop. It’s quiet, too, although you can’t expand its paper capacity and you get only a small 5cm backlit mono LCD screen to play with. Oki’s LED technology is simpler than traditional laser designs, presenting a straight paper path through the printer. Opening up the rear paper slot and MPT at the front allows the printer…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS This month has been one of extremes, first involving plenty of rushing around, including a week-long trip to Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, and second being laid up in bed before the trip with sinus flu, and then post-trip with the usual long-haul/Las Vegas flu that I always seem to attract. So there’s much to cover over the next few pages, and I’m going to begin with the truly bizarre. Someone has managed to get Windows 95 to boot on an Apple iWatch, by using a CPU emulation library. This appears to be genuine – and it really works, according to the YouTube videos. I have to admire the mindset of someone even having the desire to…

@happygeek “Bad bots can be found in myriad form, helping threat actors take down sites with a DDoS attack” Bots have been in the news rather a lot this year, with a mix of positive and negative press. To begin, there’s been a huge fuss made online about Facebook releasing a developer platform to enable businesses to communicate with their customers using Messenger-inspired chatbots (see our Future of Travel article on p124). This is an example of a good bot. Chatbots are nothing new in terms of customer interaction online, and frankly, I find them annoying most of the time. They pop up and ask if I want help, reminiscent of Microsoft Word’s “Clippy”. Usually I don’t want help; I’ve simply gone to make a cup of tea before completing…

LABS £699PCs Be amazed by how much power you can buy for £699, plus how PCs bought from John Lewis stack up. Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and we’ll send you a FREE 16GB USB 3 drive as a thank you. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. FEATURES Windows10: happybirthday? What’s new in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, plus Jon Honeyball delivers his verdict on the OS's first year of life. SavetheUK’s familyhistory By now, all family records should have been digitised. What went wrong, and how can the government turn the mess around? WhytheUKmust havefibre-for-all BT’s former chief technologist, Dr Peter Cochrane OBE, makes the case for a genuine fibre rollout. CreateaPCfree fromdistractions Buzzes,…

AS JIM MORRISON famously stated: “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind”. Facebook may not control the mainstream media, but it exercises a degree of control over which stories appear on its social network, prompting a former Facebook employee to accuse the company of political bias. Facebook, Twitter and Google have developed a huge influence in the spread of news online, with Facebook now acknowledged as the biggest news distributor in the world. However, the “trending” news stories that appear on your Facebook Timeline aren’t necessarily the work of an impartial algorithm. A former news curator at Facebook told tech site Gizmodo that it routinely suppressed popular stories about Republican politicians in the US, and accused Facebook of pursuing its own liberal agenda. The conservative-leaning Breitbart News issued a statement…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology @dariengs Since day one of the Insider Programme I’ve been a Windows 10 cheerleader. It was a joy to see Microsoft bounce back from Windows 8 with arguably its best OS ever. Universal apps came too, finally making sense of the vision of “one Windows” extending from laptops and desktops onto phones and tablets. My faith in Microsoft was restored. Today, it’s hard to feel so upbeat. It isn’t that Windows 10 has got any worse: actually, it’s got better. At first I was a little dubious that mandatory updates might gradually evolve the desktop in unwelcome directions. But so far Microsoft has shown nothing but good taste, bringing improvements to Edge, Cortana and general desktop usability…

The ability to explain algorithms has always been a badge of nerdhood, the sort of trick people would ask you to perform when conversation flagged at a party. Nowadays, everyone thinks they know what an algorithm is, and many people don’t like them. Algorithms seem to have achieved this new notoriety because of their use by social media, especially Google, Facebook and Instagram. To many people, an algorithm implies the computer is getting a bit too smart, knowing who you are and treating you differently from everyone else – which is mostly what they’re supposed to be for in this context. However, the kind of distinction matters: is it showing you a different advert for trainers from your dad, or is it selecting you as a target for a Hellfire…

Ihave a physics degree and work as a market analyst. I’ve written two books and done a two-month speaking tour of the UK. I also happen to have high-functioning autism. There are around 700,000 people with autism in the UK and, for reasons I’ll explain later, they’re likely to gravitate towards science and technology jobs – and can have very successful careers in those fields. But what is it like to have autism? Autism is a lifelong, neurological condition that affects the way a person communicates and relates to others around them. It’s usually referred to as the autism spectrum, because it affects different people in different ways and is thus a complex condition. Some people are affected quite severely, which means they’re non-verbal and are socially isolated; it’s as…

PRICE £3,400 (£4,080 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Until Intel announced its Broadwell-E variant of its Core processors (see p52), if you wanted more than four cores in your PC you had to fall back two generations from Skylake to Haswell. The fifth-generation Broadwell version of Xeon arrived only recently, with up to 22 cores, and Armari used it to stunning effect in its Magnetar M44-AW1200G2 (see issue 260, p58). Now we have our first taste of this “Broadwell-E” variant in Core i7 form, with Scan’s GW-HT20. Scan has gone straight for the jugular by including the top member of the new Core i7 range, the 6950X. Nominally, this runs at 3GHz with a maximum 3.5GHz Turbo mode, but as is usual for Core i7 workstations, Scan has permanently clocked the…

PRICE £1,259 (£1,511 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Somewhere deep inside Dell’s R&D labs, white-coated workers have toiled day and night to splice the DNA of Dell’s Latitude and XPS families. The fruit of their labours is one of the finest ultraportables to ever see the light of day: the Dell Latitude 13 7370. As a starting point, you couldn’t ask for any better: the XPS 13 is an Ultrabook to aspire to, all carbon fibre, metal and understated design. It’s fast, light, beautiful and wellequipped in every category. The Latitude 13 7370 takes those strengths and moulds them into a more business-friendly form. Bag-friendly build quality It gets off to a great start. The base is cast from perfectly smooth, gently rounded plates of carbon fibre, while the silver metal…

PRICE 64GB, £283 (£340 inc VAT) from kikatek.com Chinese firm Huawei is enjoying something of a purple patch, producing great phones of its own while teaming up with Google to produce the excellent Nexus 6P. It’s now the world’s third-biggest smartphone maker, behind Samsung and Apple, and with the MediaPad M2 10 it clearly hopes to make the same inroads into tablets. This 10in Android tablet comes in two flavours: a £250 standard version with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, while the £340 premium version ups RAM to 3GB, storage to 64GB and bundles a stylus. It’s a stylish little tablet too, with a polished glass front and metal trim, and the fingerprint reader built into the power button adds to its air of class. Better still, Huawei…

PRICE £383 (£460 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Sony Xperia X is something of an oddity. Given the price, it appears a natural competitor to the LG G5 or Sony’s own Xperia Z5. It certainly looks the part, complete with its matte-finish metal rear panel, slab-like design and smoothly rounded-off edges. What’s more, it combines these good-looks with great build quality. Yet, examine its specifications and it looks as if Sony has picked the wrong bits out of the parts bin. With a 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 chipset sitting alongside 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, the Xperia X has a lesser specification than the Nexus 5X – a phone that costs £300. The only immediate consolation is that the Xperia X sports a fingerprint sensor, which, along with…

PRICE £224 (£269 inc VAT) from mobilefun.co.uk Is this the S6 Mini in disguise? A metal front and smooth glass rear certainly give that appearance, with slim dimensions making the Galaxy A3 a seriously desirable phone. The mid-range quad-core 1.5GHz Exynos chip and 1.5GB of RAM better reflect the price, but even then we were pleasantly surprised by the A3’s respectable scores in our benchmarks. In day-to-day use, you’d be hard-pushed to tell the difference between this and the OnePlus X, despite the latter having a quadcore 2.3GHz Snapdragon processor. Only ardent gamers should look elsewhere. The 4.7in AMOLED screen is simply beautiful, even if it can’t match the best for brightness at 410cd/m2. That’s still perfectly usable outside, and it reproduced 100% of the sRGB colour gamut. Nor are…

PRICE £142 (£170 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com This inkjet is designed to not just resemble a laser but do the work of one At first glance the Maxify MB5350 looks like a bogstandard office laser printer. In reality, this inkjet is designed to not only resemble a laser but do the work of one, with Canon targeting home offices and small groups that don’t need to shell out for the real thing. At first glance, that might seem a bit backwards: at £170, the Maxify is more expensive than this month’s workhorse laser from Lexmark, and not far behind the Ricoh. But for the money you get some upmarket features those models can’t match: twin 250-sheet paper cassettes come as standard, as does a 50-sheet duplex ADF for double-sided scanning.…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com If you’re seeking a printer for personal use, you might be tempted to skip right past Lexmark’s substantial CX310dn. Its imposing stature marks it out as an office printer, and indeed that’s a role it could fulfil admirably, with its large 250-sheet paper cassette and a super-fast claimed print rate of 23 pages per minute. But those with more modest needs shouldn’t rule the CX310dn out. At a mere £150 inc VAT, it’s well within reach of the home office – and you don’t need a highvolume workload to benefit from business-class performance. Before we dig into that, it’s worth mentioning what the CX310dn doesn’t do. Although it’s equipped with a 50-page ADF, there’s no fax capability on this model: if you want…

PRICE £50 (£60 inc VAT) from ryman.co.uk Epson’s WF-2630 is substantially the same printer as the ET-4500, the difference being that it takes traditional ink cartridges rather than using the bottle-based EcoTank system. That makes it slightly more compact, as there are no ink reservoirs sticking out the side. Aside from that, the rap sheets are identical. You get a 100-page paper tray and a 30-sheet ADF, but print speeds are every bit as mediocre as on the EcoTank model – 7.6ppm for mono pages and 2.8ppm for colour. Ditto scanning: 22 seconds for a single greyscale page isn’t too bad, and scan quality is very good – but the ADF is painfully slow, taking more than five minutes to process our ten-page document. Slightly to our surprise, a subtle…

Back in 1997, Dilbert creator Scott Adams coined the term “confusopoly” – a market in which would-be shoppers are bamboozled with a huge range of similar options, leaving them overwhelmed and unable to make a smart purchasing decision. At the time, Adams was principally talking about the mobile-phone market, which even now remains bogged down by a bewildering range of deals and tariffs. But the idea of a confusopoly will be equally familiar to anyone trying to choose a new printer. The ten models we’ve tested this month represent a diverse cross section of the market, and as our double-page feature table makes clear, each one comes with a whole database of variables to weigh up. We’re talking different features, different speeds, different print quality and, of course, different running…

PRICE £310 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk Lasers should be very afraid of the big, bad PageWide Pro 452dw. This colour inkjet looks ideal for busy workgroups since it offers an amazing 55ppm print speed, unbeatably low running costs and a price that similarly high-performance lasers can’t match. The 452dw achieves these speeds with HP’s PageWide technology. Instead of using a traditional inkjet carriage that has to move across the page, it has a full-width static print head with more than 42,000 nozzles. It uses four large ink cartridges inserted behind a pop-down panel at the front, with the high-yield black and colour versions lasting 10,000 pages and 7,000 pages respectively. This combo delivers mono and colour page costs of only 0.9p and 4.6p. Mobile users should look no further because,…

PRICE £116 exc VAT from ballicom.co.uk Four-bay NAS appliances can be expensive, so ZyXEL’s NAS542 should turn the head of any small business or home office seeking no-frills storage. For a giveaway price of less than £120, this desktop box even supports IP SANs. Predictably, the hardware isn’t terribly powerful. The CPU is a modest 1.2GHz FreeScale Cortex-A9 model, with 1GB of non-upgradable DDR3 memory. You get twin Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3 ports at the rear; behind a removable panel at the front sit another USB 3 port and an SDXC slot, which work in tandem with the one-press backup button above. For testing, we slipped three 2TB WD Enterprise SATA drives into the tool-less plastic carriers. The handy NAS Starter utility, running on a Windows 10 desktop, quickly…

@PaulOckenden I’m always fascinated by how the lines between business and domestic technology are becoming ever more blurred. Areas such as colour printing and networkattached storage (NAS) were once very much confined to the office domain. As were wireless networks – outside of “people like us”, that is. I had one of the first Xircom wireless networks at home; it was pre-Wi-Fi, pre-802.11, and I shudder to think how much it cost! And things don’t only trickle down. Many technologies originally designed for home use are now finding their way into offices, factories and other workplaces too. I think the greatest example of this is the firing mechanism in the Challenger tank, which has been deliberately modelled on the PlayStation controller. The theory being that new recruits to the Tank…

@stardotpro “The cries for intervention became impossible to ignore, all within 48 hours of the first symptoms” When someone asks me for advice about upgrading a router, I’ve become used to battling a number of preconceptions. The consumer and home marketplace makes you associate the term “router” with a box that has blinking lights, becomes a little warm and might need rebooting every quarter – if it’s well behaved. This time, though, my brain has been thoroughly re-educated. My client was in an understandable panic: it had started to lose access to its own devices within its network, while still having decent web access. The panic deepened as I was on the phone, mostly because the loss seemed to be progressive, with various NAS and database servers slowly absenting themselves…

The news that Google is targeting the artificial intelligence marketplace is hardly unexpected. To start with, consider the power of voice control. I use Siri all the time on my iPhone because it lets me set things that are otherwise quite hard to do. Even something as simple as “remind me to call my sister at 7pm” involves a few button pushes. It’s even easier from the Apple Watch. Things get more impressive still when you mix in geolocation capabilities, so I can say “remind me to feed the chickens when I get home”. Again, that’s hard to do through a touch interface but a doddle through voice – and, again, it’s trivial via the Watch or some other listening device. Once you really start putting heavy AI into place,…

The cost of broadband and line rental is far outstripping inflation. BT has come under fire for its recent price hikes, with the company adding another £1 to the cost of line rental in its second price increase within a year. The company – like many rivals - has also increased prices on several broadband bundles. This comes despite BT reporting pre-tax profits of £2.6bn for 2015. The company is by no means alone in imposing these inflation-busting tariffs, even though the wholesale price of line rental is actually falling. Getting an exact handle on price changes is complicated because of the myriad options, so it’s little wonder the toothless Advertising Standards Authority is pondering ways to make broadband and telephony prices clearer. BT line rental prices: 2005-2016 Bank of…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £959 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake CPUs, super-fast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fly through tasks, and the design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. REVIEW Issue 257, p64 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260 Blending its ThinkPad range with the flexibility of the Yoga, Lenovo has created something close to a perfect business hybrid. From £875; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 259, p62 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (Retina) If you need to do serious work on a laptop, and want a MacBook, the Pro 13in remains our top choice – although we suspect a new model is imminent. From £999; apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 248, p66 Dell…

@bazzacollins It isn’t often I suffer sympathy pains for big corporations. Journalists tend more towards “stick it to the man” than sycophancy. But I can’t help feeling more than a touch sympathetic towards Google, the latest victim of the EU’s trigger-happy competition authorities. Google – like Microsoft before it – has effectively been charged with being too successful. Practices that were perfectly acceptable when Android was a mere upstart in the smartphone business are now deemed anti-trust violations, purely because Android has been a raging success. What’s more, those same practices are still perfectly permissible for rivals such as Apple, even though the fruity firm is among the richest, most profitable companies on the planet. Let’s take a look at Google’s charge sheet. First, the European Commission is concerned that…

PRICE £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk When it was released in 2015, the Apple MacBook was so thin and light as to be a revelation. At a shade over 900g and 13.1mm thick when closed, this 12in laptop was slimmer, lighter and had a smaller footprint than the 11in MacBook Air. However, any portable design brings inevitable compromise, and the firstgeneration MacBook wore those on its sleek metallic sleeve. Battery life was nothing more than average; performance worse still. The keyboard, with its super-shallow travel, also divided opinion. The 2015 MacBook, then, was great if you valued portability above all else. As it happens, it fitted my needs perfectly – the closest I come to being a “power user” is modest audio and video editing – and I bought…

PRICE £750 (£900 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk High-powered laptops tend to fall into two distinct camps. You have your big, brash gaming laptops, which go for all-out power and don’t give a fig for portability. And then there’s a breed of more elegant, more practical machines. The Asus VivoBook Pro N552VW falls into this latter category. The outside is decorated by Asus’ trademark brushed metal concentriccircle finish, resembling the grooves of a vinyl record, while inside is a classy silver keyboard tray. Its build quality falls a little behind the high standards set by Dell’s XPS 15 (see A List, p16) – there’s a little flex in the keyboard base, for instance – but it’s a high-quality machine nevertheless. It’s also hefty, measuring 30mm thick and weighing 2.5kg. That’s partly…

PRICE £204 (£245 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk If you’re after a phablet bargain, this £245 SIM-free phone is excellent news. That’s about half the price of the Galaxy Note 4. It can’t match its big-name rival for specs, while its screen resolution is exactly half, but the questions is: does that matter? Certainly, its pixel density of 258ppi is only a limitation if you peer up close, and while sRGB coverage of 71.6% could be better, this remains a strong display. Blacks look deep and inky, even at high brightness levels, and images offer up plenty of detail. The stylus’ semi-soft rounded nib is great for jotting quick notes, and while there’s no springloaded mechanism – you have to pry it out – it shouldn’t fall out accidentally. LG’s Pen…

PRICE £113 (£136 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Just to show that you don’t need to fork out a fortune for a phone with stamina, the J5 actually beat the Galaxy S7 in our batteryrundown tests – albeit by two minutes. That’s where the comparisons with the S7 end, though, since the J5’s glossy, plastic frame reveals its limited budget. Most important, however, is that it feels well-made, while its slim dimensions and curved sides make it comfortable in the hand. The 5in 720 x 1,280 Super AMOLED display is another major plus, making sub-£150 rivals look insipid by comparison. Where it falls behind is performance. A quad-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 processor with 1.5GB of RAM were enough to achieve only 1,343 in Geekbench 3’s multi-core tests, and it managed 1.8fps…

“Sell the razors cheaply, and make money on the blades” – that’s the model the printer industry has been following for decades. Over a few years you can easily end up spending ten or 20 times as much on ink or toner as you did on the printer itself. When choosing between two printers, therefore, it’s important to know how the running costs stack up. As our chart below shows, a cheap printer can end up being much more costly than an upmarket model once you’ve printed a few thousand pages – whereas spending a little more upfront can save you hundreds of pounds in the long run. Our total price calculations are based on the price of the printer, plus the per-page cost of genuine replacement cartridges and the…

PRICE £225 (£270 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com We all know how the “starter” cartridges bundled with inkjet printers tend to run out in a matter of weeks, pushing you onto costly replacements. Not so the Epson EcoTank ET-4500: it comes with enough black ink in the box to print 4,000 mono pages, and 6,500 pages’ worth of cyan, magenta and yellow. Even better, it doesn’t use cartridges at all: when you do run out, you can simply buy a cheap bottle of Epson-branded ink, tip it into the tank and keep on printing. It’s an approach that yields phenomenally low running costs: 0.2p per black-and-white page, 0.6p for colour. Several of this month’s rivals work out at ten times the price, so, even though the EcoTank ET-4500 is this month’s…

PRICE £195 (£233 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk The Oki MC342dnw is a businessgrade laser in the same class as Lexmark’s CX310dn. In fact, it’s a step up: while Lexmark’s printer misses out on fax and wireless capabilities, the MC342dnw comes with both as standard. Not surprisingly, there’s a cost to that. Oki’s offering is the most expensive printer here, save for Epson’s EcoTank inkjet. Still, there are reasons to invest in a good-quality laser. Speed is one of them, and the MC342dnw doesn’t disappoint here. Across all of our printing tests it proved a smidgen faster than the Lexmark: for everyday mono document printing we saw an average 20ppm, versus the CX310dn’s 18.7ppm. Sharp, precise printing is another traditional strength of laser technology, and we can’t fault the quality of…

PRICE £172 (£206 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk Like Lexmark’s CX310dn, the Ricoh SP C250SF is a businessgrade printer that’s priced within reach of a personal office or small workgroup. The imposing exterior makes no concessions to “lifestyle design”, and the feature list is squarely professional, including a 250-sheet paper cassette and full duplex printing. On paper, print speeds are merely respectable: our 20-page mono document was produced in 1min 40secs, for an average of 12ppm, while colour came out at 10ppm. Those numbers don’t tell the whole story, though: by default the Ricoh drops into power-saving mode after just 60 seconds of inactivity, so print times normally include a 20-second wait for the unit to warm up. From warm, mono pages come out at a more impressive 17ppm. Frustratingly, a…

PRICE£359excVATfromprinterland.co.uk The Ecosys P6035cdn will suit businesses with a print-hungry workforce. It delivers the low printing costs we’ve come to associate with Kyocera’s lasers, combined with good performance and top-notch output quality. To be precise, mono and colour A4 prints work out at an agreeable 1p and 5p respectively. Kyocera’s signature feature is its long-life print drum, which is good for 200,000 pages. It’s designed to last the lifetime of the printer, meaning you won’t have to pay for a costly replacement after a few years. The capacious 500-sheet lower tray can be supplemented with three more; factor in the 100-sheet multipurpose tray and you can reach a total capacity of 2,100 pages. Other options include an internal SSD for onboard document management and an 802.11n wireless card – although…

A compact unified threat management appliance that’s ideal for small or remote offices PRICE Appliance with 1yr unlimited licence, £389 exc VAT from kerio.com Kerio’s Control NG100 is the smallest UTM appliance we’ve ever seen, but the manufacturer has managed to pack plenty into this palm-sized slab of steel. It runs the full version of Kerio’s Control software, providing SPI firewalling, IPsec VPNs, IPS, deeppacket inspection and bandwidth management. In addition, you also get Kerio’s own Web Filter service and Sophos’ gateway AV. It’s good value, too: inside beats a dual-core 1.33GHz Atom CPU, with 4GB of DDR3L RAM, 32GB of mSATA storage and three Gigabit ports. The £389 price includes a one-year licence for all software and signature updates. After this period, the maintenance cost is £122 per year,…

@alexbloor Sisyphus, in Greek mythology, was punished for his deceit and cunning by being forced to push a rock up to the top of a hill, only to then have to watch it roll back down, and then to repeat this demoralising process for all eternity. It’s arguable that ancient mythology isn’t relevant in the modern world, but have you had dealings with BT Wholesale of late? I work for Andrews & Arnold. We are an ISP that buys VDSL and ADSL tails from BT Wholesale and TalkTalk, we operate our own network in our own IP address space, and have our own transit and peering. We’re not a reseller or white-labeller; we’re a real ISP. We aim to run in a way that differs from other ISPs: our circuits…

The drones whip through the air at 120km/hr, swooping around corners, dodging through hoops and diving into tunnels, all controlled by a headset-wearing pilot. Could this fast-growing sport be the next Formula 1? Fans believe so. Nigel Tomlinson, president of the European Rotor Sports Association, has his first taste of drone racing 18 months ago – and “fell in love”. In first-person view (FPV) drone racing, you see what the drone sees via a mounted camera and headset, piloting it around an indoor or outdoor course via a controller. “When you fly one of these drones with the goggles on – and that is the key: not flying them line-of-sight but first-person view – you have the sensation of flight. That’s something man’s tried to emulate since the beginning of…