Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i PC Pro

I’M GOING TO CHEAT. While Jon Honeyball, Davey Winder et al restrict themselves to the first PC they bought in our feature on p46, I’d like to honour the Sony VAIO 505 that I first used in 1999. Tiny enough to slip unnoticed into my rucksack, beautiful enough to turn heads, it’s the only laptop I remember with real affection. Even after such a long time, I can remember why I loved it. Partly because it was everything the then-dominant beige tower PC was not, but also because of the innovation embodied in this desirable object. Sony’s pursuit of miniaturisation had created something truly amazing. I mourned when Sony stopped making laptops in 2014. One of the great innovators had left town, meaning we wouldn’t be seeing crazy laptops such…

EARLY APPLES Combine rarity, age and a cult following and you have tech collectors’ nirvana. The original Apple 1 computer, built in a garage in 1976, is perhaps the most sought-after old PC. The machine that originally sold for $666.66 is so rare that when it does go on sale, the bid prices are ludicrous. INITIAL PRICE: $667 WHAT’S THAT WORTH TODAY? $3,351 COULD NOW FETCH: $905,000 GOOD RETURN? 135,785%  PIONEERING PCS First sold in 1974, many credit the MITS Altair 8800 with kick-starting the home computing rush. Combined with low production volumes, its historical import has seen it become increasingly collectable. Initially sold in kits, components and full machines attract bids from collectors and museums. INITIAL PRICE: $439 WHAT’S THAT WORTH TODAY? $3,198 COULD NOW FETCH: $5,000 GOOD RETURN?…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £899 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 X1 Yoga A dream laptop that turns into a 14in tablet with the swivel of a keyboard – yet it still weighs under 1.3kg. Simply beautiful design from Lenovo. From £1,290; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top spot, but a nine-hour battery life, sleek design and – for a premium – the Touch Bar make this a stunning…

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach become journalists. It’s a criticism often thrown at people like me, and sometimes with justification. So, after a chastening experience at the IT coalface, let me take this rare opportunity to impart some first-hand advice. Since vacating the editor’s chair of PC  Pro three years ago, I’ve become a director of Lewes FC, currently sitting comfortably in the eighth tier of English football. We’re a community-owned club, not bankrolled by oligarchs or Saudi princes, but by a thousand or so members paying £30 a year and a few more generous donations. Our weekly playing budget is Wayne Rooney’s loose change; our IT budget is non-existent. As is the case among many small businesses. This summer we found ourselves…

Star letter I completely disagree with Darien Graham-Smith’s views on the humble 3.5mm jack socket. He describes it as “the oldest and dumbest technology” and derides it for being “analogue only” (see issue 267, p24). Analogue is essential for sound – it’s all that humans can process. The quality is dependent on the depth of the digital source material and how good the digital analogue converter (DAC) is, as well as the capabilities of the speakers (or ear/headphones). Further impediments are introduced by transmission via Bluetooth, which has insufficient bandwidth for high-resolution sound. If you send music to earphones using Bluetooth, you need to transfer more equipment to the headset. Instead of being mere speakers, they then need Bluetooth receivers, DACs and power supplies.  The music, already downgraded by Bluetooth…

Even as recently as a couple of years ago, speaking to a computer seemed mildly ridiculous. Even though consumer speech-recognition technology has been around almost as long as PC Pro, since the mid-1990s, it arguably took the arrival of Siri for it to even approach the mainstream. Amazon’s Echo speaker – something of a surprise hit in the USA – has now made it across the Atlantic and suddenly the whole industry’s attention has been refocused on voice. Google is delivering an Echo clone, Apple is building voice into almost all of its products, and Microsoft, of course, embedded Cortana into Windows 10. It’s no longer shocking to be caught talking to a computer – it’s more of a surprise if you don’t. However, how do you get the best…

LinkedIn isn’t just a social network: it’s a business tool that’s so well respected that Satya Nadella made it his first big acquisition as Microsoft CEO. More than just an online CV, it’s a place where you can showcase your skills, build contacts and demonstrate your expertise – all of which could help you land a dream job. The site has more than 450 million members, with 21 million in Britain – its largest market in Europe. Over 100 new users sign up every minute – and one of them might be your next employer. So if you’re in the market for a career upgrade, the time to update your profile is now. Optimise your profile LinkedIn isn’t like Facebook: it’s not a site for random updates and photos. So…

PRICE 32GB, £417 (£500 inc VAT) from shop.lenovo.com With Google ominously taking Project Ara out back with a shotgun, and LG creating a mere handful of add-ons for the LG G5, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the days of modular smartphones are numbered before they even began. Nobody told Lenovo. This is its most ambitious phone since it bought Motorola in 2014 – and somewhat to everyone’s shock, the modular approach actually works. When you first take the Lenovo Moto Z out of the box, you’ll be struck by its thinness. At 5.2mm, it’s ludicrously slim. Your eyes will next be drawn to the supplied backplate. You can go about your business without adding it, but you’ll be exposing the phone’s party trick to the world. That trick is…

PRICE £308 (£370 inc VAT) from shop.lenovo.com After the dizzy yet slim heights of the Moto Z (see p60), the Z Play initially seems to sit in an odd place. It’s £40 more expensive than the OnePlus 3, but concedes huge ground when it comes to speed (just look at the graphs on p61). Yet it’s £130 cheaper than the Moto Z, offers all the same add-on capabilities, and presents the best battery life we’ve seen in years. That’s partially reflected in the Z Play’s 7mm girth compared to the Moto Z’s ridiculous 5.2mm. It still has the camera hump, but as is the case with the Moto Z, you can solve this issue – and the fact that the metal finish is a magnet for fingerprints – by adding…

Fed up with slow Wi-Fi and patchy network coverage around your home or office? We put 16 extenders through their paces in the UK’s most real-world tests. On the following pages, you’ll find repeaters and powerline kits from the big names in networking, plus branded devices from BT and Sky. Find out which is the perfect extender to banish the “not spots” and make your downloads fly.…

PRICE £62 (£75 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The PowerLINE WiFi 1000 is one of the most affordable powerline networking kits out there. It isn’t quite as cheap as the offerings from BT or Trendnet, but they’re both 2.4GHz-only: for a just few quid more, Netgear provides a proper dualband radio. Performance isn’t quite top of the class, but it isn’t bad. Using a wired client hooked up to the extender’s sole Gigabit Ethernet port, we measured a download rate of 17MB/sec over our mains circuit. Switching to wireless saw this drop to only 15MB/sec over 802.11ac, while our 2.4GHz 802.11n connection held up a decent 6.5MB/sec. Heading outside onto the terrace barely dented these speeds – great news for an area that had previously been a “not spot”, with…

The extenders in this month’s labs are pretty affordable – but if you have an old router lying around, you may be able to use it as an extender and skip the shopping trip altogether. One option that should work for any router is to configure it as a wired access point. To begin, give your old router a factory reset to clear out any old settings that may interfere with its new role. Go into its configuration interface; if it asks you to set up an internet connection, skip this. Instead, head for the IP address settings page and turn off the DHCP server, so that it won’t try to dole out IP addresses to clients that connect – we want your main router to handle that side of…

PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com The BT Wi-Fi Extender 1200 is a good-looking repeater, with helpful LEDs to show signal strength and a conveniently located Ethernet port. And, unlike BT’s Hotspot Flex 600 powerline offering, it’s a proper dual-band extender. Performance, however, is a mixed bag. The Extender 1200 was most impressive on the terrace, where it managed to keep up a stable 6.8MB/sec download rate over 802.11ac. Upstairs in the study we achieved 3.6MB/sec, and while the bathroom was a challenge, a 1.9MB/sec rate is ample for casual web browsing. Older clients fared worse, though. Standing next to the extender, we got a decent 3.3MB/sec on the 2.4GHz band – but as soon as we moved to another part of the house, our downloads became sluggish and…

PRICE £37 (£45 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Devolo’s wireless repeater wins points right away for its neat design. The soft white LEDs showing signal strength are a classy touch, and the narrow casing won’t interfere with the adjacent power socket. There’s a trade-off, though: the small internal antenna evidently can’t compete with the big boys when it comes to wireless penetration. The WiFi Repeater ac kept up a stable connection all around the house on 802.11ac, but performance never managed to break into the top half of the table. Things became worse when we switched down to 2.4GHz. Sitting directly opposite the repeater, we saw an acceptable 3.1MB/sec connection. But when we moved to our other test locations, the signal quality fell through the floor. Our graph indicates how slow…

PRICE £32 (£39 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.co.uk With its angular patterning, the Netgear EX3800 is a distinctive device. It’s also the only repeater here to offer a mains passthrough socket, and while the design is a little chunky, it’s narrow enough not to obstruct a multisocket outlet. Initial impressions were good: as soon as we plugged the EX3800 into our central hallway location, it started serving up a creditable 13.9MB/sec over 802.11ac. Of this month’s repeaters, only the TP-Link RE450 and the Sky Q Booster gave us a faster connection at close quarters. Unfortunately, the signal dropped off abruptly as we moved to other areas of the house. The connection in the bathroom and study was a little less than half as fast, and out on the terrace the EX3800…

One question that I’m often asked by people who know that I write this column, and especially those who remember that it used to say Mobile & Wireless at the top of the page, is: “Which phone should I buy?” Frankly, without any sort of qualification, this is a daft question – a bit like asking “What car should I buy?” A lot more information is needed before I, or anyone else, can come up with a few sensible suggestions. But before I dive into some details and offer up a few choices, I thought I’d start by making a couple of observations. First, it’s incredibly hard to buy a bad phone these days. The vast majority of the handsets on the market are excellent, and perform well. Don’t get…

“We think it’s important to discuss cybersecurity for small and mediumsized businesses,” said Eugene Kaspersky, welcoming guests to Malta. Yes, that Kaspersky of security vendor fame. While he wasn’t actually in Malta, his words were plastered all over the hotel where assorted journalists, analysts and researchers were assembled to “save the world”. Speaking at the start of this cybersecurity conference, team director of Kaspersky Lab Research & Analysis, Marco Preuss, revealed that the company had stopped more than 80,000 ransomware threats for Android devices alone during the second quarter of 2016. Overall, across all platforms and devices, Kaspersky has seen ransomware attacks rise by 450%, from 131,000 in 2014/2015 to 718,000 in the same period during 2015/2016. But as a small business, why should you care? Chances are that, as…

MISSED DELIVERIES ARE a frustrating part of modern life for individuals, while companies lament the cost of shipping deliveries to our doors. Solutions abound, including the oft-discussed delivery drones dropping Amazon Prime packages from the sky, but one Estonian startup has a more grounded answer: delivery robots. Sorry couriers, but if Starship co-founder and CEO Ahti Heinla has his way then automatons will be edging in on your jobs too – and as one of the founders of Skype, Heinla knows what he’s doing. The robots are already being trialled in the UK with food deliveries from Just Eat. We spoke to him on the sidelines of a launch with Mercedes (see issue 267, p127) that will see the Starship robots carted around by specially fitted Sprinter vans, letting delivery…

Alexa “I’m Alexa and I’m designed around your voice. You can ask me to play music, answer questions, get the weather, sports scores and much more.” Cortana “I’m your PA. You can tell me the things that interest you and I’ll keep them in my Notebook. That way, I can make suggestions and keep you up to date.” Google Assistant “Searching for oneself can take a lifetime, but a good place to start is classic rock.” Despite probing, it refused to answer any more questions. Siri “I’m Siri. But I don’t like talking about myself.” When pressed on what he actually did… “I can do so many cool things. Check it out.”…

Uber has been accused of taking its drivers for a ride, with its shake-up of the taxi market coming not off the back of its tech, but through paying workers less than the minimum wage. But “gig economy” startups – those that contract out work on a freelance basis – shouldn’t be relying on cheap labour to disrupt markets. That’s not innovation; it’s the same abuse of workers that tripped up capitalism from when Adam Smith first described it. The courts agree, with a London employment tribunal ruling that Uber’s drivers should be considered employees – not contractors – with the minimum wage that guarantees. If the startup can’t succeed when forced to pay drivers the legal minimum, it’s difficult to claim that technology is the source of its…

The biggest, best, most exciting products in tech – tested, evaluated and reviewed PRICE 13in non-Touch Bar, £1,208 (£1,449 inc VAT); 13in Touch Bar, £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT); 15in Touch Bar, £1,958 (£2,349 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Neophobia – the fear of the new, or the fear of change – is an increasingly common affliction among Apple fans. The company is infamous for gleefully tossing past-it tech on the scrap heap, often long before many users have had the chance to properly say goodbye. First, Apple came for your serial port, then your parallel port, and in 2016 it took your phone’s headphone socket, too. Now, the new MacBook Pro family has come for your Function keys and USB ports. If you want old-school Function keys, then you can…

PRICE £58 (£70 inc VAT) from shop.lenovo.com The JBL Soundboost speaker provides a neat answer to the perennial problem of weak phone speakers, clipping onto the back of the phone with a fold-out kickstand to prop up the device for hands-free Netflix viewing. The 6W mod (3W per speaker) comes with its own ten-hour battery, so it won’t drain the Moto’s unit. “The Soundboost kicks into life as soon as you clip it on, transforming the weedy sound of the phone speaker into something rich” The sound itself is a big improvement. It kicks into life as soon as you clip it on, transforming the weedy sound of the phone’s speaker into something considerably more rich. It’s suitably loud, too. I tested it in the PC Pro labs with…

PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The RP-AC66 repeater looks a lot like the extender unit from Asus’ PL-AC56 powerline kit, and it’s almost as huge. With radio transmitters, bigger often means better and the RP-AC66 impressed us with its 5GHz coverage, keeping up a consistent service throughout our “test home”. Speeds in the bathroom and study were barely any different from those on the terrace and in the hallway. That a great achievement: it means you can enjoy a stable connection all around the house, without worrying about switching between networks. (If you’re partnering the RP-AC66 with an Asus router, you can also use the Roaming Assist feature to automatically shunt connected clients to the transmitter with the stronger signal.) Keeping that degree of consistency over 2.4GHz proved…

PRICE £19 (£23 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Coredy E300 is a dinky little thing, and also the cheapest extender here. Despite that, it’s impressively fullfeatured. It can act as a regular repeater, or as an access point to allow wireless clients to connect to a wired network. You can even directly hook it up to a modem and use it as a simple router, courtesy of a built-in DHCP server. So far, so flexible. The big limitation is that, whichever operation mode you choose, it’s 2.4GHz-only. That puts a hard limit on performance, and in practice the E300 is slow even by 802.11n standards. Standing right next to the repeater, we saw a peak download speed of 2.3MB/sec, which is close to the lowest here. Long-range performance wasn’t any…

PRICE £110 (£132 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk TP-Link’s powerline kit has all the delicate beauty of a meat fridge, but it offers some sophisticated features. From the web-based management interface, you can restrict internet access for specific clients according to a weekly schedule, and set up a secondary guest network, so visitors can get online but can’t access your LAN. Performance is good, too. From our central hallway, the WPA8730 served up a solid 24MB/sec to wired devices attached to one of its three Gigabit Ethernet ports. Moved to the far end of the house, it still managed to deliver a respectable 11MB/sec. While the WPA8730 didn’t quite best the Asus PL-AC56 Kit for wireless speeds, it gave a strong showing. 802.11ac performance in the bathroom was so-so, but download…

Ihad imagined that this month’s Labs would be pretty easy to put together: plug in a repeater, hit the WPS button, run a few network speed tests, and move on to the next one. Clearly, this optimism was misplaced. Once you start recording transfer speeds, you rapidly realise just how inconsistent Wi-Fi can be, especially at the highest speeds. I ended up repeating each test multiple times, over the course of several days, to make sure that my results weren’t being unfairly skewed by random environmental factors (such as the neighbours’ microwave). But while the process has been a slog, it’s also been eye-opening. One thing I’ve learnt is how unpredictably a Wi-Fi signal propagates through your house. You might assume the connection would simply grow weaker as you move…

PRICE £1,999 exc VAT from radio-shop.uk Sennheiser needs no introduction to audio enthusiasts; what’s less well known is that the company also offers a burgeoning line of professional conferencing systems. The latest to join the family is its TeamConnect Wireless – a slick, portable audio conferencing solution that can turn any room into a virtual meeting place in minutes. The kit itself could hardly be simpler, comprising nothing more than four chunky circular speaker/microphone stations. There’s no separate control unit: the “master” station connects directly to your preferred audio source. The other three satellite stations can be positioned wherever you like, and connect to the master over DECT. This makes TeamConnect Wireless extremely flexible: it can support a wide range of room sizes, without the need to arrange tables and…

MICROSOFT IS ATTEMPTING to reassert itself at the centre of workplace culture with the launch of Teams – a competitor to Slack, Basecamp and the new breed of workplace communication tools. Teams is a real-time messaging system, designed largely to replace email for inter-team communication. It offers both chronological and threaded messages, Skype voice calls, and integrates with the full gamut of Office 365 apps including Word, Excel, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve. The move is Microsoft’s attempt to regain control of business communications, a something that’s been eroded with upstart tools such as Slack, Basecamp and Yammer, which Microsoft bought for more than $1 billion in 2012. However, according to analysts, although the addition of Teams will boost the company’s Office 365 subscription offering, Microsoft may struggle to…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology Voice control always seemed like one of those science-fiction technologies that would never pan out in the real world. It works fine in Star Trek, when no-one dares to speak over Captain Picard, but in a 21st-century office I always assumed that issues of noise and crosstalk would make the idea a non-starter. I don’t think that any more. That’s partly because, now that I work from home, it’s dawning on me just how many interruptions and distractions are already tolerated in a typical open-plan workspace. If I could remain relatively productive while Tim and Barry were having an energetic discussion about editorial priorities at the neighbouring desk, I’m sure the sound of nearby colleagues talking to…

In a recent review of Amazon’s Echo, I read that “voice assistants have been on our phones for a long time, but they haven’t really taken off”. The part of this claim that stopped me dead was that phrase “long time”. Apple’s Siri arrived with iPhone 4s in 2011, while Microsoft Cortana was rolled out in 2015, so it would seem that five years is now a “long time”. And it’s true. Technology progresses if not exponentially then according to some power law, meaning five years can be a generation. Leaps from CDs to downloads, downloads to streaming, keyboards to touchscreens to voice: for youngsters, “older” tech seems prehistoric. Many commentators would proceed from there to discuss the effect of rapid change on the human psyche, but I propose…

Cortana While Cortana originated on Windows Phone, you’re most likely to encounter her on Windows 10. You can ask her questions or give instructions by typing into the “Ask me anything” field on your Taskbar – or, click the microphone to use voice recognition. You might find it more convenient to activate the “Hey, Cortana” option, which you’ll find under Cortana & Search Settings (search for “Cortana” in the usual way). This allows Cortana to constantly listen for your voice, just like the Amazon Echo, so you can ask her questions without taking your fingers off the keyboard. This can be very handy when, for example, you’re making time-related plans. Cortana can tell you all about upcoming appointments in your Windows 10 calendar, which can be picked up from Google,…

PRICE £375 (£450 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk When Lenovo first announced its fancy new 2-in-1 Yoga Book at IFA in September 2016, I got a little caught up in the mad rush of excitement. “Hybrid of the future” claims were bandied about the office, and I was in full agreement. After all, this is a device that looks truly different to everything else. Now that it’s here in my hands, I’m pleased to say Lenovo has created a unique hybrid worthy of the hype. For starters, there’s no physical keyboard. Instead, there’s a virtual one with illuminated, futuristiclooking keys that appear as though they’ve been pulled straight from an episode of Black Mirror. They vibrate when you tap them, giving a reassuring sense of haptic feedback as you type.…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from shop.lenovo.com There’s much to like about this clip-on camera, not least that it works so smoothly. Clipping it on turns the Moto Z into an ergonomically friendly compact camera, with a huge touchscreen on the rear. The headline here is that it provides 10x optical zoom. It also packs a Xenon flash and has the ability to shoot in RAW format for further tinkering in Photoshop. Surprisingly, the pixel count drops from the Moto Z’s 13 megapixels to 12 megapixels, but at least the pixel size is up to 1.55um from 1.12um – helpful in low light. Note, though, that the sensor is no bigger than Google’s Pixel phones. With a superior lens and more light coming in through the bigger lens barrel, picture…

FitbitBlaze PRICE £111 (£135 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Unlike its other devices, Fitbit wants the Blaze to be seen. You can even swap straps to match your clothes, with the watch popping easily out of its shell – indeed you must do so to charge it. In that respect it’s similar to its siblings. The 1.66in, 240 x 180 colour screen is bright and sharp, and offers a handful of different watch faces. Flipping it over reveals a prominent heart-rate sensor and four connectors for the proprietary charging dock. The heart-rate sensor is an alwaysflashing green light, but despite this the battery lasts for around five days. The Blaze comes with a black rubber strap as standard, with extras selling for upwards of £20 each. It’s comfortable to wear,…

PRICE £124 (£149 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk With its boxy body and wide-shouldered 145mm antennae, the Asus PL-AC56 extender unit isn’t discreet. Only Asus’ own RP-AC66 repeater is bigger. Happily, it’s a fantastic performer. That starts with Asus’ powerline technology, which coped brilliantly with our ageing mains circuit. In our central hallway, we hooked up a laptop to one of the extender’s three Gigabit Ethernet ports and enjoyed download speeds of around 20MB/sec. Even at the furthest spot from our router – upstairs, at the rear of the house – it kept up a solid 11MB/sec. Of course, what we’re interested in is Wi-Fi, and the PL-AC56 shines here too. With the extender returned to the hallway, we saw an excellent 15.4MB/sec download rate over 802.11ac wireless. Even over…

PRICE £46 (£55 inc VAT) from maplin.co.uk The TP-Link RE450 is one of this month’s most sizeable devices, but it’s a friendlier design than the brick-like Asus and Devolo extenders. There’s a certain stylistic chic to the plasticky antennae, and to the softly glowing blue ring that encircles the WPS button (this turns red if you position the unit too far from your router). It’s also the slimmest of this month’s repeaters: protruding only 37mm from the wall, it’s less intrusive than the picture might suggest, although the width of the casing ensures you won’t be plugging anything into the adjacent power socket. Although the RE450 has no physical link to the router, its three aerials maintain an impressively speedy connection. With the repeater installed in our central hallway,…

PRICE £112 (£134 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Devolo’s top-of-the-range powerline kit seems to promise lightning-fast speeds – but don’t be fooled. With the dLAN 1200+ extender installed in our central hallway location, we saw wired download speeds of 18.6MB/sec – far from the 150MB/sec implied by the product name. That’s par for the course, though, and not bad by the standards of the group. A bigger disappointment is the dLAN 1200+’s wireless performance. From a mere metre away, we saw download speeds of just 6.1MB/sec over 802.11ac. Data rates didn’t drop off precipitously as we moved around the house, but the Devolo consistently placed in the bottom half of the table. The dLAN 1200+ gave a stronger showing – relative to its rivals – on the 2.4GHz band. The connection…

PRICE £92 (£110 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Linksys’ premium repeater promises wireless performance that’s up to four times faster than the cheaper RE6300. In fact, in our first test the RE7000 did somewhat worse, serving up a distinctly mediocre 7.6MB/sec to an 802.11ac client positioned directly in front of the unit. This was a disappointing start, especially since hooking up our test laptop to the repeater’s Gigabit Ethernet port yielded an exceptional download rate of 38.4MB/sec. Happily, the RE7000 redeemed itself by outpacing its sibling in all other areas of our home. The difference in performance was particularly striking out on the terrace, where the RE7000 more than doubled the RE6300’s 2.8MB/sec average. The only real disappointment was the discovery that the RE7000 still stumbles when it comes to 2.4GHz…

PRICE £21 (£25 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Like the Coredy E300, TP-Link’s WR810N is a cheap and cheerful device that can serve as a regular wireless repeater, an access point, or a simple standalone router. According to TP-Link, it’s also a “TV adapter”, but that appears simply to mean that it will work with media devices that normally require Ethernet. The catch is that – like the Coredy E300 – this is a 2.4GHz-only extender. Still, by the standards of such devices, the WR810N performed well on the ground floor of our home. It even maintained a solid signal up in the bathroom. The study, however, was a stretch too far – the connection was plagued with delays and dropouts. While the WR810N isn’t huge, it’s an awkward design that…

The past few weeks have seen an orgy of hardware releases from both Microsoft and Apple, and I wanted to take the opportunity to step back and consider what it tells us about the two companies, both positive and negative. Let’s start with the announcement by Microsoft of its new addition to the Surface family: the Surface Studio. It’s a 28in screen behemoth mounted on swing arms above a small desktop unit. Obviously, this is 100% a Windows 10 device, and Microsoft itself says it’s aimed at the “creatives” market – the sort of people who use Adobe products a lot. They usually work in such culturally significant places as Hoxton, they drink designer beer from a bottle, have a beard that’s treated to beard wax, and often sport…

Codebreaker Alan Turing, Bletchley Park and the role they played in helping the Allies to win World War II are now well known. Once Britain’s best kept secrets, both have quite rightly been heralded as a vital part of our recent history. For me – someone with a true love of computing – it has been wonderful to see over the past few years how this contribution to the peace that we enjoy today has been properly recognised. I feel truly honoured to have helped save this part of our history for the nation, thanks to all the help I received with my campaign. I was supported by the BBC, Stephen Fry, government ministers and thousands of people on Twitter. Yet my passion for the project stemmed from an aspect…

If you’re a techie or small-business user, then the world of takeovers and mergers can seem distant and irrelevant. Maybe this is because the computer-making business is all takeovered out, or maybe because the people who write about that stuff have a heavily ritualised format for doing so, dripping with market capitalisations, buy-backs, share options and so forth. I’m not going to bother with all that: I have a simple observation. Dell bought EMC! I know that most people only know EMC from the cryptic adverts beside the elevated section of the M4 coming into London. Some people with trick memories may point to past columns where I’ve been talking about tiny, bottom-end NAS boxes suddenly given a feature and performance hike by way of some of EMC’s storage firmware.…

Sail away Why clutter up Amsterdam’s cycle-friendly roads with self-driving buses when autonomous boats can carry people around? In 2017, the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions plans to trial floating robots to ferry around commuters and even act as temporary bridges or stages for events. They’ll also be equipped with sensors for environmental tracking and help clean up floating rubbish – including the 12,000 bicycles that go for a swim in Amsterdam’s canals each year. Clever idea, but the best part is the name: Roboat. The Dutch aren’t alone in turning to autonomous boats. Rolls-Royce has unveiled plans for sensor-driven ships – like those remote-controlled toys splashing in park ponds,only bigger. Its Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative (AAWA) is considering sensors and infrared detectors similar to those on self-driving…

“How many of us are prepared to set up the encryption keys for our email services? And will it matter anyway? ” We live in a time of increased political turmoil. The impact of Brexit has caused much anger and confusion, much of it driven by the realisation that there wasn’t much of a plan other than “let’s leave”, and now something needs to be done. In America, Mr Trump has trumped Mrs Clinton, despite Mrs Clinton getting a million more votes from the electorate. Politics is a topic I prefer not to understand. I fear my head might explode if I had to try to reconcile all the mysteries of the political landscape. But one thing does worry me. Are we to trust the governments of the world to…