Table of contents for No.290 - December 2018 in PC Pro

33% Its speed 17% Something else* *see below 22% Its extensibility 23% The fact it’s not Internet Explorer 5% The dinosaur game Of those who said it was something else, Jason Foster pointed out that “so much of my stuff is handled by Google that, as long as it stays fast and secure, it’s just easier”. Theo M-A feels the same: “It’s part of Google’s ecosystem, so my phone can sync its passwords and bookmarks more easily. I also like trying out the flags for a better and more customised user experience.” While Google may have destroyed Internet Explorer, it hasn’t extinguished everyone’s passion for Firefox. “I don’t use Chrome any more, I’ve gone back to Firefox,” wrote Dominic. “Chrome just hogs too much memory and isn’t as fast as…

Picture the scenario. You’ve invested thousands of pounds into a new IT system with a features list that reads like a dream. This, you believe, is the big one. Happy end users. Happy finance director, because you have slashed your overall costs. Happy you, because maintenance will be almost zero. But we all know this doesn’t happen by magic. For the best results, you need careful planning – and perhaps some outside expertise, from people who have done it all before. While 3CX’s PBX is a well-established service, there are things you can do before switchover day that will make your life easier. We speak to Nick Borg, product manager for 3CX, to find out the steps you can take to improve your life, as well as those of your…

PRICE 64GB, £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Forget its new features, its camera and its performance. Forget that this is the best phone Apple has ever produced. First, let’s cover the topic everyone wants to talk about: the price. Buy the iPhone Xs or Xs Max and you’ll be loved by the Apple accountants and directly contributing to its stupendous profit, because by every objective measure it’s overpriced. Even by modern standards, the cheapest version of the iPhone Xs Max is uncomfortably expensive: £1,099 for the model that comes with 64GB of storage and that price then rises to £1,249 and £1,449 for the 256GB and 512GB models. Common sense However, for many, the price will be a non-issue. For a lot of people, regardless of whether they should…

Total value this month £124 REQUIRES Windows 7 or later; 30MB hard drive space; online registration SteganosSafe19 Full product worth £29 steganos.com THIS VERSATILE TOOL protects your most important files in an encrypted, password-protected vault on a regular hard drive or external storage device. It supports cloud storage, too, for vaults on Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive accounts. You can pick your own password – Safe will check that it’s secure – or use the built-in password generator to create something really uncrackable. Once your vault has been opened it appears in Explorer as just another drive. You can create folders, copy and store data there as normal – except that all your data is encrypted as it’s saved, ensuring that no one can gain access without knowing the password.…

It’s tempting to rush the tablet buying decision. Many people blithely think that iPads are best, without considering whether they actually meet their needs. Instead, you should ask why you want a tablet and draw up a shortlist of criteria. For example, are you simply looking for a device with which to browse the web and catch up with social media? Do you travel a lot and want to watch movies on the go, or in your bedroom? Are you looking for a travelling companion for business use that can handle productivity tasks, or even heavier workloads, such as video editing? By analysing your needs and making a checklist, you’ll be ideally placed to look through the models in this month’s Labs test and compare them against your list. To…

PRICE 32GB, £266 (£319 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Apple’s iPad needs no introduction. As the device that created the tablet market, it’s a brand so synonymous with digital slates that people use the word “iPad” to mean any tablet device. So, while the 2018 model of the 9.7in iPad keeps the same moniker, what has actually changed? Not much. The chassis is the same as the 2017 model, so the dimensions, weight and battery capacity remain the same, and the Touch ID-enabled Home button still sits at the bottom of the frame. Besides this there are just the expected power and volume buttons, plus a SIM-card slot if you opt for the 4G version. The colour options are also unchanged, so you can choose a black front with a “Space…

PRICE £60 (£72 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290acer7 The Acer Iconia One 7 is one of two 7in tablets in this month’s labs, but while the Iconia One 7 is smaller, thinner and lighter than the Fire 7, we prefer the feel of Amazon’s device in the hand. Like its 10.1in brother, build quality isn’t a strong point of the Iconia One 7, with a lot more flex in the chassis than we would wish for. All the buttons and ports are where you might expect them to be, with a 3.5mm jack and SD card slot on the top to supplement the 16GB of on-board storage. The phone-like dimensions make using the Iconia One 7 to take photos more sensible than most tablets, but – how can we put this…

PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290fire8 Where the Kindle Fire 7 is a no-frills entertainment device that’s affordable enough to dish out to the whole family, the Fire HD 8 offers a slightly more grown-up alternative – but not too grown-up. The Fire HD 8 looks much the same as the Fire 7 and is offered in the same fun and vibrant colours. We looked at the “Canary Yellow” version, which we liked far more than we expected to, but there’s also “Marine Blue”, “Punch Red” and boring old black. The button and camera placements are also the same as on the Fire 7, though the larger frame of the Fire HD 8 allows space for stereo speakers, which lack punch, but offer respectable volume. The obvious and most…

In last year’s Labs, we concluded that the doom and gloom surrounding the future of the tablet was unfounded. But what’s the situation a year on? Are you a fool to be even considering a tablet? Well, no. Tens of millions of tablets are still being sold each month, it’s just that the manufacturers are having to fight harder to persuade people to upgrade. After all, if your three-year-old tablet is still going strong, why spend £400 on a new one? Stats don’t lie, though, and there’s no hiding the fact that sales are falling. In the first quarter of 2018, according to market watchers (pcpro.link/290tabs), shipments were down 7%. Apple could only increase its sales by 2%, but the most notable figures came from Amazon and Huawei: both companies…

PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290tab8 The Lenovo Tab 4 8 Plus is one of three 8in Android tablets on test this month, but unlike the budget-friendly Kindle Fire HD 8 this is a premium device. Indeed, at this price Lenovo no doubt hopes to tempt people away from the Apple iPad mini 4. Its squarer edges set it apart from the curvy iPad, and it’s a good looking, well-built device. Look around its silvery edges and you’ll find an SD card slot hidden behind a Lenovo-branded flap on the left edge, and a volume rocker and combined power switch/fingerprint reader on the right edge. Power is supplied via a USB-C port on the top and, unlike the Huawei MediaPad M5, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack too. The top…

Anyone who’s worked with an IT support team will know that diagnosing and resolving user issues is a never-ending endeavour. Unfortunately, manpower is limited and, unless you’re a very small office, it’s simply not practical to have staff making personal visits to everyone’s desktop. The problem only gets worse when you’re supporting staff who are based in branch or remote offices – or, increasingly, at home. Unfortunately, telephone support is no substitute. It’s frustrating and time-consuming for all parties as the poor non-technical user tries to explain their problem, and the support agent tries to guide them through the steps needed to diagnose and fix it. The answer is remote support software, which allows technicians to connect to recalcitrant systems, see for themselves precisely what the problems are and fix…

PRICE Perpetual:1guest/10hosts,£625 (excVAT);Subscription:100Hosts,£1,075 peryear(excVAT) fromnetop.com Netop’s remote support product is a hybrid service that gives you the best of both worlds. Its web portal helps you reach remote clients and provide support from anywhere on the internet, while on-premises users get the benefit of additional management services and features such as a system inventory. To get started, you simply need to install the host component on each workstation. Enrolment packages can be downloaded directly from the web portal, and to streamline the process they can be preconfigured with unique signatures and set up to link the host directly to your account. For extra security, you can also apply a hard-coded time-limit on how long the agent will work for, and how many times it can be used. Once you’ve enrolled…

Artificial intelligence is a wide-ranging set of technologies that are complicated to understand, let alone build. But it’s starting to work its way into existing software, which you may well already use in your office or business. Here are three products with AI-enabled features available now or soon. OneDrive for Business and SharePoint If you’re a Microsoft 365 user, AI is about to make your work a whole lot less annoying. Starting later this year, any video or audio files stored in either OneDrive for Business or SharePoint will use AI-based transcription, making it easy to search for the specific content you need – and ensuring you never need to type up notes yourself again. That comes alongside text recognition that means you will be able to search screenshots and…

Computer graphics are set for a perfectly lit leap forward thanks to Nvidia ’ s latest GPUs, which finally support real-time ray tracing. What is ray tracing? It’s the latest rendering technique, which raises the eminently reasonable question: what is rendering? It’s the process by which a computer builds an image, using a model of lighting, texture and more to create a scene from nothing more than an algorithm and data points. It’s how computer graphics are built. Ray tracing rendering behaves just like real light would, allowing for more realistic images. The current technique for lighting rendering is called rasterisation, and while it looks fine in certain circumstances, the way the information is layered means it doesn’t work well for reflections or other instances where light is actively interacting…

Are the numeric keypad’s days numbered? I read your product reviews in every issue and notice that all of the laptops you recommend seem to be devoid of a numeric keypad. I rely on the one on the HP ProBook 450 G1, which I’ve used for nearly five years, and when the time comes to replace it a numeric keypad will be at the top of my requirements list. Matthew Marven PC Pro editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: Numeric keypads appear to be a dying breed where laptops are concerned, as manufacturers concentrate on portability, even for corporate customers. Indeed, I can’t recall a new laptop that includes one (other than gaming laptops). But there is hope: take a look at our roundup from IFA on p12 to see Asus’ innovative…

There’s a multitude of reasons why you might want to use a VPN – and not just to cop a sneaky look at Netflix’s US catalogue. You might want to throw ad trackers off the scent or reduce the risk of snooping when using a public Wi-Fi hotspot. You might have reasons for wanting to mask your identity (not necessarily criminal, of course) or to dodge traffic management by your ISP. You might just resent the idea that every site you visit, every download you make, every photo you look at is logged on an ISP’s servers, accessible by heaven knows who. But how do you know the VPN provider is any better? Can you be sure that your VPN is keeping your identity safe? Does it keep logs or…

PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290hp Whisper it, but budget laptops are getting better. Where you used to make a sacrifice on build quality, style and spec if you were spending less than a grand, it’s now reasonable to demand all three. HP is at the forefront of this charge, with its latest addition to the Pavilion lineup an excellent exemplar. To look at it, you might think the Pavilion x360 costs well over £1,000, with a sandblasted, metallic keyboard frame: it’s not overstated, as HP’s Spectre range can be, but subtle. The high-gloss black bezel and occasional chrome accents give it a premium look, even if the grey lid is a trifle dull. HP provides a literal twist, too, as that lid swivels back 360 degrees to turn…

PRICE 128GB, £424 (£509 inc VAT) from microsoft.co.uk The Surface Go is a tablet like no other. Without the optional keyboard, it’s a 10in Windows tablet and you might wonder why anyone would buy it. But add the keyboard and it’s transformed – imagine a lazy Hollywood movie where the leading lady removes her glasses to reveal the beauty beneath and you won’t be too far wrong. Let’s get some basics out of the way first. This is a 10in Windows tablet with a seventh-generation Pentium Gold 4415Y processor inside, and it comes in two configurations: one with 4GB of RAM and a 64GB eMMC drive, the other with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SATA 3 SSD. These upgrades push the price from £379 to £509, but we wouldn’t…

PRICE £641 (£769 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk If you were to apply the phrase “go big or go home” to tablets, the result would be the 12.9in iPad Pro. In fact, it’s so big that we had to double-check our coffee mug didn’t have the words “DRINK ME” written on the side. At 221 x 306mm, it’s larger than a sheet of A4 and, at first, feels unwieldy in your hands. Thankfully, this lessens in time, in part because of its impressively light weight of 677g. It takes practice, but you can distribute this weight by resting the iPad on your arm. You might be concerned that the large screen area, coupled with a thickness of only 6.9mm, would lead to some flex, but the robust metal chassis mean you…

PRICE £99 (£119 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290acer10 The Acer Iconia One 10 is tempting on paper. A 10.1in IPS screen for just £119? What’s not to like? Hold the Iconia One 10 in your hands, though, and the cost savings are apparent. While the coarse plastic body feels unpleasant, it’s the horrible silvery plastic that covers the stereo speakers that really makes the Acer tablet look like the budget offering it is – and these speakers don’t redeem themselves by sounding good, either. Both of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablets on test manage to be cheap without feeling it. Acer’s logo placement suggests using the Iconia One 10 in landscape orientation by default, which makes the choice of placing the power and volume buttons on the top bezel a little…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Without wishing to sound ageist, the iPad mini 4 is now getting a little long in the tooth. You may be surprised to hear this model first appeared back in September 2015, back when Brexit was only a theoretical possibility. Can it really be worth almost £400 three years on? In many ways, yes, because this was a high-quality product then and remains one now. In terms of screen quality, for example, the iPad 4 mini actually has an advantage over the latest version of the 9.7in iPad, as its Retina display is fully laminated and includes an anti-reflective coating, which helps to keep the display looking vibrant even in brighter outdoors conditions. The resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 equates to a super-sharp…

PRICE £244 (£299 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290hwm5 As soon as you remove this sleek tablet from its box, its iPad aspirations are obvious. At first glance, you might even mistake it for an iPad mini 4 – until you spot the Huawei logo at the top. Far East manufacturers still haven’t got the memo about being subtle with their branding. It’s forgivable, though, because the MediaPad M5 looks and feel fantastic. The smooth metal body gives it a premium feel that the Lenovo Tab 4 8 Plus distinctly lacks. Held in portrait orientation, a fingerprint reader sits on the bottom bezel, which is more awkward to use than the Lenovo’s side-mounted reader, with power and volume buttons on the right edge. The SD card slot is accessed via a SIM-like…

PRICE £269 (£323 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290tab10 The 10in version of the Lenovo Tab 4 Plus has a chunkier and more angular look than its 8in sibling, with thick bezels that make it easier to hold but give it a clunky feel. To our eyes, it’s nowhere near as sexy as the Huawei MediaPad M5, iPad or Galaxy Tab S4, but looks are in the eye of the beholder – and at 7mm thick and 475g, it’s comfortable to hold. If you intend to make use of Android’s ability to create multiple accounts and loan it out to family members, though, consider investing in Lenovo’s rubberized case. Part of its Kid’s Pack, this also includes a blue light filter that sits on top of the glass. From the placement of…

PRICE From £15 per month (exc VAT) from connectwise.com If you’re not satisfied with a generic support solution, ConnectWise Connect will be right up your street. It offers a great range of features that can be customised with your own branding. Licensing options are very flexible, with prices starting at around £15 per month for a “One” licence. As the name suggests, this allows one technician to open a single connection to up to ten unattended agents – and also gives you access to file transfers, web meetings and remote printing features. The next step up is a “Standard” licence; from around £28 per month, this permits up to three sessions per user and adds unlimited unattended agents, VoIP audio for meetings and support for the iOS and Android mobile…

PRICE 1-500 systems, £10 each (exc VAT) from netsupportmanager.com SMBs seeking a no-nonsense, on-premises remote support solution will struggle to do better than NetSupport Manager 12.5. It boasts an unparalleled suite of support tools, it works with almost every platform out there, and its perpetual licensing scheme means you have no ongoing subscription fees to worry about. Needless to say, remote control, file transfer, chat and recording facilities are all present. There’s also a detailed system inventory capability. And platform support is excellent, with clients available for all versions of Windows plus macOS, Linux, Google Chrome OS and Android. For accessing remote sites, NSM doesn’t use a web portal, but rather a bespoke gateway component, which links together technician and user when both enter the same unique PIN. Encryption options…

We’re sorry to have to tell you this, but you may be breaking the law. In fact, you’ve probably been doing so for some time. The problem is your website. In creating and maintaining it, it’s natural that you’ve prioritised design, content and SEO – all the things that bring visitors to your site and turn them into customers. But there are legal requirements that you need to attend to as well. If you’ve created the site yourself, you might well have failed to take them all into account – and if you’ve used an out-of-house developer or bought an off-the-shelf template, there’s a chance that the issues haven’t even been brought up. So what are those requirements? They’re mostly to do with the information that needs to be present…

Even in the consumer space, VPN providers are seeing an uptick in interest. Perhaps that’s not surprising as the Snowden files detailing widespread online surveillance, on both sides of the Atlantic, have caused many users to look for ways to cloak their online activity. It’s more a matter of principle than anything else. As each new user logs on, they become part of the provider’s WAN, in much the same way that businesses have been using VPN for years: to connect their remote offices to centralised resources. Implementing a corporate VPN needn’t be complicated. Neither is there any requirement for its users to understand how it works – or even that they’re using one. “[It lets you] store your files, intranet servers, authentication servers and so on at the head…

That haze in the air, the smell when a diesel truck passes by – it’s not only killing us, but air pollution makes us more stupid, too. Thankfully, tech startups are working on solutions. Air pollution causes 40,000 premature deaths each year in the UK – or so claimed the Royal College of Physicians in a 2016 report – and causes asthma in children. It may even increase dementia rates for those living by the busiest roads. Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health in the US suggested long-term exposure to air pollution causes reduction in cognitive function equivalent to a year of education at school. With London roads surpassing EU healthy air limits for the year just a few days into January 2018, cleaning it up is a…

SMALL WEB HOSTS, ISPs and sites will be forced to make “unfeasible” changes to their businesses or risk severe fines under EU proposals aimed at reducing terror-related content online. Under proposals designed to restrict extremist content – a problem that’s also being targeted by the UK government – web companies would be forced to remove flagged material within an hour of notification or instead face fines of up to 4% of their annual turnover. While the main focus of the plan are web giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, there’s no get-out clause for smaller operators, who would struggle to finance the changes. “Looking at the draft, it wouldn’t just cover the big platforms – it covers hosting service providers and that’s defined by the facilities that a company…

No parent should ever have to bury a child, as the saying goes, but what about the child that has to cope with the death of a parent? On average, one child in every school class will have lost a parent and no two children will deal with the loss in the same way. Getting children to discuss their emotions after the death of a parent can be difficult, especially with a family dealing with their own grief around them. The child may feel they don’t want to make the surviving parent even more unhappy by discussing their feelings, for example. Bounce Works aims to tackle this problem in the form of an app. Described as an “emotional support system”, the Apart of Me app aims to help families talk…

Ebooks were the future once: e-readers were Hitchhiker’s Guide-style wizardry holding thousands of books, accessible anywhere. Now paper is making a comeback. Despite smartphones letting us read almost any text, novel or magazine anywhere, ebook sales slid 10% in 2017, according to market research firm NPD Group. No wonder publishers have resorted to name calling. “The ebook is a stupid product,” Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of Hachette Livre, was reported as saying in a story in The Guardian. But it wasn’t a childish tantrum: Nourry was criticising how poorly ebooks have been exploited by publishers. “It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience,” he said. For the most part, that’s true: ebooks are dumb. Most novels downloaded via…

“To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part…” When couples utter those words, it’s unlikely they’re contemplating divorce, let alone thinking about applying for one online. This summer, as part of a £1 billion modernisation programme, the UK’s Ministry of Justice rolled out digital divorce across England and Wales, meaning that couples can now apply for a divorce from the comfort of their living room. The whole process is done with a few clicks on a screen, including payment and uploading of supporting evidence. For those who struggle to complete their tax returns online, the prospect of a DIY digital divorce might be daunting. But, rather…

Laptops and PCs We run our own benchmarks on every Windows and macOS system we test. These are based around image editing, video editing and multitasking (where we run the video editing benchmark while simultaneously playing back a 4K video). At the bottom of each laptop and PC review you’ll find the system’s score in each of these tests, plus an Overall score. If a laptop scores 70, say, then it’s 30% slower than our reference system – a PC with a Core i7-4670K and 8GB of RAM. If it scores 160, then it’s 60% faster. We test laptop battery life by playing back a full-screen video until the battery runs out. We set the screen brightness to 170cd/m2, or as close as we can get using its settings, and…

PRICE £1,564 (£1,877 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com This year sees the ThinkPad X1 Carbon series enter its sixth generation – and deservedly so. Few other business ultraportables have proven so consistently brilliant. There haven’t been any big changes to this version, other than making the jump to eighth-generation Intel Kaby Lake chips. We tested the Core i7-8550U, non-touch Quad HD model (20KH007BUK), which sits in the upper-middle of the range. The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon is built with a mix of carbon fibre, glass fibre, plastic and magnesium alloy. As well as giving it a pleasant soft-touch finish, this makes it impressively light at only 1.13kg. So it’s a 14in laptop, with room for full-size USB and HDMI ports, but it only weighs as much as a super-slim 13in ultrabook.At…

PRICE £332 (£399 inc VAT) from store.google.com Big brother to the Google Home and Google Home Mini, the Google Home Max has taken almost a year to reach shops in the UK – so has it been worth the wait? It’s certainly bigger, louder and much more expensive than its smaller siblings. Google hopes this hits the spot for customers who want a smart speaker, but don’t want to compromise on sound quality. The company’s ambitions arguably go further than this: it wants the Max to be the smart speaker people use as their main home hi-fi speaker. It’s not designed as portable speaker – there is no battery inside and it’s not waterproof – but it’s flexible in terms of how you connect to it, with voice control, Wi-Fi…

Whether it’s catching up on emails or tweaking a PowerPoint presentation, watching your favourite box set or editing a 4K video for a client, the latest tablets can do it all. But with such a wide variety of prices and capabilities, which tablet is right for you? To answer this question, we gathered together 15 tablets for this month’s Labs – including the all-new Microsoft Surface Go, which we give an in-depth review on p80. Can it knock the iPad from its best-of-xbreed position? To find out, we compared all these tablets’ capabilities across a range of uses. We analysed their screen quality, tested for speed and battery life, compared them for design and usability. And, with devices ranging from the fun and colourful Amazon Fire 7 for £50 to…

PRICE £256 (£307 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk The Acer Chromebook Tab 10 is unique in this Labs: not only is it the sole tablet to use Google’s Chrome OS, it’s also been designed specifically for educational use. But, if you’re familiar with iOS or Android, working with the Chromebook Tab 10 takes a little getting used to. There is a desktop-like taskbar interface, but Android apps – downloadable from Google Play – open full-screen rather than in windows. Split-screen mode works for some apps, though, which helps with multitasking. It’s not an entirely intuitive interface when used on a tablet as Chrome OS was designed as a desktop OS and isn’t optimised for the tablet format. Not yet, anyway. Google is working on many enhancements and promises a better experience…

PRICE £423 (£507 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290tab4 The Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 easily rivals the premium looks of the Apple competition. Samsung has removed the Home button from the front panel, which results in thinner bezels and a larger screen size of 10.5in, up from the 9.7in panel of the Tab S3. We also didn’t lament the lack of the physical buttons, or even the fingerprint reader, especially since the iris scanner worked so well – the bigger screen is ample compensation, too. It’s a fraction heavier than the 10.5in iPad Pro, but that’s fine: it feels reassuringly substantial. Samsung neatly integrates volume and power buttons, USB-C for charging and an audio jack. The SD card slot is inside a concealed compartment, which maintains the sleek, rounded edges, so if…

PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290fire7 It would be easy to be snobby about the Amazon Kindle Fire 7’s chunky frame and modest specifications, but this would be missing the point. This is a tablet that’s focused on having fun at the lowest price possible, and at £50 (often discounted lower), it’s easily the most affordable tablet on test. The Fire 7 certainly looks like a fun device. Our review unit featured the “Punch Red” back cover, but others include “Canary Yellow”, “Marine Blue” and plain old black for those who don’t like happiness. The chunky frame feels durable too, which is an important consideration when the Fire 7 is likely to end up in the hands of younger family members. There’s even a dedicated Kids Edition with protective…

PRICE 64GB, £516 (£619 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The obvious question for anyone considering the 10.5in iPad Pro rather than the 12.9in edition is this: does the reduction in screen size lead to other compromises? The short answer is no. The 10.5in iPad Pro is essentially identical to its bigger brother. Despite being slightly thinner, at 6.1mm, it feels as robust. Apple squeezes the same powerful six-core Fusion A10X processor inside, along with a generous 4GB of RAM. This pushed it to 3,930 in the single-core Geekbench 4 test and 9,380 in the multicore version, putting it on a par with an eighth-gen mobile Core i5. Gaming performance is even stronger than the 12.9in model: due to the lower screen resolution of 2,224 x 1,668, it scored a table-topping 58fps…

PRICE £407 (£488 inc VAT) from ebay.co.uk We’re always a bit suspicious when the word “Pro” appears in the name of any product, because often the hardware doesn’t match up to its professional aspirations. But can Huawei’s “Pro” 10.8in tablet match the iPad Pro? In terms of specification and performance, yes. The same Kirin 960 CPU found in the 8.4in M5 pushed it to similar strong results in Geekbench 4, even if the iPad Pro tablets proved stronger still. It’s a capable gaming device, scoring 28fps in GFXBench Manhattan and sound quality is outstanding thanks to the Harmon Kardon speakers and hi-res audio certification. Battery life is also great, looping our video for 12hrs 59mins. The screen is, again, superb. With a pixel density of 280ppi and native 2K resolution…

PRICE Cloud/1 licence, £259 per year (exc VAT) from islonline.com Managing costs is one of the key reasons for choosing a cloud service – and ISL’s cloud-hosted remote support service offers a novel payment option that many smaller businesses will love. Rather than charging an annual fee for a set number of technicians or clients, ISL’s basic pay-per-use offering grants you 500 minutes of unrestricted remote access for a one-off fee of £70. Even if you step up to a full cloud licence, it’s a flexible system. An annual subscription of £259 covers any number of support staff, but only allows one concurrent active session. To enable more technicians to connect at once, you simply need to buy additional licences. Or, if you want an individual technician to be able…

PRICE NetCrunch Suite, 250 nodes, £4,844 (exc VAT) from adremsoft.com The latest version of NetCrunch may be only a point update, but AdRem certainly hasn’t skimped on new features. The software’s “monitoring packs” group together common sets of performance monitors, and version 10.4 adds no fewer than 32 new ones to the mix, bringing the total number of monitoring components to 187. They’re significant additions, too. The new monitors give NetCrunch the ability to keep watch over security devices from Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper and SonicWall, plus NAS appliances from Buffalo, Netgear, Qnap and Synology. Server monitoring sees big improvements too, thanks to added packs for Dell EMC iDRAC, Fujitsu iRMC, HPE iLO and Lenovo IMM remote management controllers. One aspect of NetCrunch that’s always impressed us is how quickly it…

Even by normal IT jargon standards, “DevSecOps” sounds pretty impenetrable. What gives? Well, you may have already heard of DevOps. Short for “development and operations”, it’s an idea that aims to streamline software development through tight integration between the teams that create the code and those who deploy and manage it. No surprise, then, that DevSecOps is DevOps with security added in. The DevSecOps mindset calls for security to be a core consideration throughout the development process, rather than something that’s left to specialists and only tested at the end phase. If your business has an in-house development team, it’s an evolution that’s well worth pursuing. Shouldn’t developers already be thinking about security? You’d certainly hope so, wouldn’t you? However, the DevOps mantra is all about delivering applications at high…

On sale 8 November 2018 LABS Security suites How does Windows Defender compare against the best of this year’s crop? Find out in our decisive test next month. Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free three-in-one USB charging cable, while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES Windows10 for power users From installing an Ubuntu VM in just a few clicks to taking full control of Windows sounds, we have a barrage of expert tips. Join the podcast revolution The barriers to podcasting just keep on falling away. We reveal how to join in the fun and take your podcast to pro levels. Bring your own broadband We meet the broadband…