Table of contents for September 2016 in PC & Tech Authority

I still get letters from readers who are resisting the upgrade to Windows 10. While I can certainly understand the desire to keep things the way they are if they’re, well, just working, Windows 10 is simply better than Windows 7 – being the OS most users apparently want to continue with. It’s certainly true that, in the past, there were major and hyped Microsoft Windows updates that brought seemingly little, but this isn’t one of those times. Of course, I’m assuming that almost everyone who was using Windows 8 has made the jump... The big Anniversary update is nice, even Jon Honeyball tentatively gives it his approval. Mostly though it’s a refinement, and personally I think Windows 10 is already at a state which needs very little further tinkering.…

1 GOOGLE SIMPLIFIES AUTHENTICATION Google has made its two-step account-access authentication more user-friendly, improving on its previously irritating login process. Instead of sending out an SMS message to a handset with a code to enter into your PC, the new system simply sends a Yes/No query to your handset to ask if you’re accessing your account from a different PC. 2 BROWSER BATTERY WARS Three browsers are involved in a power struggle that centres on how quickly their software drains a laptop battery. Microsoft picked the fight, claiming laptops running Edge lasted longer than those using Chrome, but Opera then claimed its browser offered 22% better battery life than Edge. 3 SOCIAL NETWORKS ACCUSED OF HELPING ISIS Twitter, Facebook and Google face an improbable lawsuit in the US from the…

1070 MUSCLE Umart Umart VR Ready System $1957 • http://tinyurl.com/z3qhyzw Although strictly any system with a GTX 970 or equivalent graphics card is VR-ready today, it’s the GTX 1070 with its VR smarts that you really want to give you some system longevity as new AAA games start to come on board with VR and push the limits. The GTX 1070 is definitely the star of this system, with the CPU and motherboard being the things on the chopping block to bring this system down to a very respectable sub-$2,000 level. If you never intended to overclock your CPU this is a great offering at a compelling price. Plus, you get a great looking case. KEY SPECS CPU: Intel Core i5 6600 Cooler: Intel OEM Motherboard: H170 chipset based board…

So, Windows 10 is one. Is it really time for Microsoft’s developers to be popping champagne corks and reaching for their party hats? We set Jon Honeyball the challenge of deciding, and you can read his verdict on p30. We’re not sure it will be happy reading for the company. It would be overstating matters to say that Microsoft gambled its future on Windows 10 – but not by much. Designed to be the OS that runs on everything from phones to games consoles, tablets to full-blown desktop workstations, a huge amount was – and is – riding on its success. Not only was Windows 10 designed to be all-encompassing, it was intended to be ever-evolving. No more staging-post updates, but regular releases of new features, as and when they…

Design isn’t purely about aluminium chamfered edges and sapphirecrystal screens. The architecture of bits, bytes and pixels is just as crucial and defining; it’s the unspoken language that brings us closer to the devices we use every day. Behind the glass walls of an office deep inside Microsoft’s Redmond campus, one man is taking on the challenge of unifying the design language spoken throughout the tech giant’s software portfolio. That man is Michael Gough, the chief design officer in the Applications and Services Group (ASG) at Microsoft. He’s no stranger to the constantly shifting intersection between hardware and software, nor the design challenges that lie in wait. Before the Microsoft job he was vice president of experience design at Adobe, and before that vice president of brand design at Nike.…

At first glance, the blaze has a slightly split personality: it looks more like a smartwatch than a fitness tracker, but its feature set wouldn’t worry any smartwatch manufacturer. It’s also not really a sports watch, since most runners or cyclists will want a device with built-in GPS, which the Blaze doesn’t have. Indeed, with its selection of rubber, leather and metal straps, the Blaze puts appearance first and foremost. Placing the Blaze in one of the leather straps makes it feel like an altogether higherquality item on the wrist – it’s still too light to feel like a real watch, but it’s undeniably comfortable. So, is the Blaze a standard Fitbit tracker with some pretty accessories? Not quite. Besides tracking steps, distance travelled and calories burned, it includes an…

Garmin has augmented the original vivosmart HR’s abilities even further, adding GPS tracking to this new and improved model. Before looking at the big new feature, let’s recap on what was already there. This fitness tracker will log every step you take, along with estimating the distance you’ve travelled and the calories you’ve burned; it will also count every flight of stairs you climb. The Vivosmart HR+ will dynamically adjust your daily step goal based on your personal activity profile. If you’re smashing through the default daily goal, tomorrow it will be higher, but if you’re coming nowhere near that target, then the bar will be lowered accordingly. The built-in heart-rate monitor will track your beats per minute all day long, while also logging your average resting heart rate throughout…

It may look classy, but where the shine 2 is concerned, form does at least partly follow function. The shape is dictated by its CR2032 battery, but at only 8mm thick, the Shine 2 isn’t much bulkier than that battery. Still, this is one stylish device, being constructed from tactile anodised aluminium with a wealth of accessories and replacement straps available. One area that could have done with a design update, though, is the way the Shine 2 is secured in its wristband or clip. The original Shine was always worryingly insecure when worn, being prone to popping out of its clip during a run, and it does seem that the Shine 2 is just as prone to these disappearing acts. The Shine 2 uses a standard coin cell rather…

The Sony Smartband 2 is one of the few wearables close to $100 that comes with a built-in heart-rate monitor, making it an enticing prospect for those who don’t want to splash out on a higher-end Fitbit or Jawbone. What’s more, Sony claims it can also measure your stress and recovery levels by tracking your heart-rate variability (the time difference between two consecutive heart beats), adding an extra layer of data to the mix alongside the usual pulse, step, calorie and sleep tracking. It’s a well-rounded fitness band, although the lack of a physical display will no doubt be a deal breaker for some. Instead, Sony leaves all the data analysis to its SmartBand 2 and Sony Life Log apps on Android, or the Smart Band 2 and Apple Health…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. The median score of 100 is based on…

Nvidia’s reference – well, Founder’s Edition – cards of its new Polarisbased range are pretty elegant looking video cards. MSI’s own iteration, however, errs on the rather more bombastic side, with an aggressively styled black and red shroud, and a much larger PCB, draped in red LEDs and lit-up MSI logo. In fact, it’s worth noting that the wider card is actually an issue in some cases – we had to remove parts of our test-bench’s chassis to fit the Gaming X! That said, once installed, the Gaming X is most definitely worth the space it takes up. Under load MSI’s Twin Frozr VI cooler does its job admirably, keeping the card cool and remarkably quiet, thanks to premium thermal paste, 8mm nickelplated copper heat-pipes, a remarkably solid nickel-plated coper…

Black and red is so 2015. This season’s mothertboard colours are lighter, and perhaps, like this one, metallic. There’s no doubt that MSI’s new Z170A Mpower Gaming Titanium looks the bomb. Every part of it is coated with a silvery white metallic substance, and that look is enhanced with metal reinforcement of the PCI and DIMM slots, and a full-sized slab of metal that covers the back of this motherboard. The Z170A Mpower Gaming Titanium sits just below MSI’s similarly-styled and specced Z170A Xpower board, with the main feature difference being a loss of the Xpower’s included SATA-Express ports, but seeing at that standard is effectively a dead duck there’s no real loss, and for the saving of around $50 we consider it a double win. I chose this board…

The Asus PCE-AC88 Dual-Band AC3100 Wireless PCI-E Adapter is the company’s take on a premium wireless NIC for those who can’t connect their desktops directly to their routers but still demand fast network speeds. It’s a 4x4 dual-band network card, the first of its kind on the market. This means four transmit and four receive data streams to the N and AC bands, and the card offers theoretical maximums of 2100Mbps on AC and 1000Mbps on N - as long as you have a 4x4 router. MU-MIMO and beamforming functionality is also available, which lends itself well when paired up to one the latest crop of premium wireless routers on the market armed with these technologies. The best thing about it is the magnetic base for the four antennae. This…

The OnePlus 3 has much to live up to. The OnePlus 2 was one of the hits of 2015. Immediate impressions are positive. Although the phone has the same 5.5in-sized screen as the OnePlus 2, upgrades abound elsewhere: there’s a faster, more efficient Snapdragon 820 processor, RAM doubles to 6GB, and there’s NFC in addition to a front-mounted fingerprint reader, allowing it to be used for contactless payments via Android Pay. Even the camera sees an upgrade. While it looks bland from a distance, that all changes once you lay your hands on it: the OnePlus 3 feels robust and refined in all the right ways. It’s lighter and slimmer than the OnePlus 2, shaving 17g off its predecessor’s weight and 1.5mm off its thickness. The edges of the screen…

$169 • www.thermaltake.com The Core P3 is an open frame case, which you need to assemble out of the box before you can start building your PC. It’s very well-engineered, and features some wonderfully lux components – especially the four chrome pillars that support the Perspex cover. It’s also rather versatile; it can built with feet attached, to stand on your desk like any other desktop, or built flat as a testbench, or even mounted on a wall if you like the idea of your PC being a work of art. It’s easy – if a little fiddly – to build, and while it’s hardly going to keep your PC quiet, or free of dust, it’s certainly a talking point. The P3 is not a case for everyone, but if…

$699 • www.edifier.com Nearly $700 may look like a lot to pay for a set of 2.0 speakers, and to be sure it is a pretty hefty price tag, but the quality and performance of the Edifier S1000DB is good enough to make the price seem like quite a bargain. The speakers are large and heavy, each featuring a titanium tweeter for a smoother response than with plastic or aluminium, and large, powerful 5.5-inch forward facing drivers that deliver 120W of oomph. The speakers have a slanted design that is supposed to create a more focussed soundscape. It definitely seems to work. The S1000DB offer huge, impressive sound after a little burn in and are equally impressive when listening to music or movies. A range of connectors as well as…

$79 • www.coolermaster.com Speaking personally, I like Cooler Master keyboards more than any other. But this, I do not. Besides introducing a new and unwelcome word to the English language: ‘Mem-Chanical’, the product achieves nothing. As you guessed, it’s a membrane keyboard with a bit of mechanical – though critically not the switch. It does look like a proper keyboard, and you get a plain but well-made mouse for your money. We buy mechanical to sense the actuation point, and enjoy some tight spring action. This has neither. The down-press is vague and the actuation point barely discernable. Worse, the rebound is far more powerful than it should be, and is the most tangible feel of the entire action, the net result being feedback that doesn’t make itself known until…

With Asus’ Republic of Gamers (ROG) gamer brand turning ten, Asus has gone all out in producing the best premium board we’ve ever seen, with all the bells and whistles you could think of, plus more. From the spring-loaded CPU socket to hold up the locking arm during CPU insertion, to the full complement of on board overclocking buttons, switches and voltage test points, to the perfect lay out of slots and components and the most impressive RGB lighting system we’ve seen, this board just oozes luxury. And what a lighting system. With four RGB-lit regions on top of the motherboard there’s also an RGB header to connect an extra case RGB LED strip, plus there’s an under-board LED strip that runs the entire length of the right side of…

Well look at that, there’s a new A-Listed smartphone, and somewhat unusually it’s one that isn’t sold in Australia via any official channel. However, there are a great many Australian online shops selling this outstanding handset, and at very appealing prices, so armed with a new infatuation for this device we can’t not put it in. See the review on page 65 for the full rundown on why we’re so impressed, but suffice to say that for around half the price of its premium brethren in the local market it’s a giant killer. MEGA ROUTER The Linksys Max-Stream AC5400 MU-MIMO Router is the new Labs speed and range champ, has eight Gigabit LAN ports, and fully supports MU-MIMO technology, so for homes or offices with several users and devices, or…

Facebook Messenger If you have a Facebook account, head to messenger.com on desktop or the app on your phone. In the search box, look for who you’d like to chat with – such as CNN News or Poncho, the weather-predicting cat. Then have the most frustrating conversation you’ll ever have online. Chatbots.org This website lists a wide range of bots you can chat with, although most are there for fun, not function. Try DonaldDrumpfBot (donald-drumpfbot.com) for a chat with a fake Donald Trump that uses the real man’s quotes – the answers don’t make much sense, but that’s to be expected. Botlist.co Describing itself as “an app store for bots”, Botlist includes links to bots you can use, as well as tools for building them yourself. It offers bots across…

Recognise your face: Zenbo’s camera can take photos and monitor your home when you’re away, but it also includes facial recognition, so it knows who’s ordering it around. Manage your smart home: Connect your smart-home devices and it can turn off your lights, mute the television, stream music, and even unlock your smart door. Let’s hope it doesn’t get hacked or have an “evil” switch. Raise your children: Can’t be bothered to read a bedtime story to your offspring? Don’t worry, Zenbo’s got it – as well as educational games. We assume it will train them to join its army ahead of the inevitable robot wars – but hey, it’s better than reading the same children’s book for the 84th time. Eavesdrop: Say its name, and Zenbo will come rolling.…

GLOVES CONVERT SIGN LANGUAGE INTO SPEECH A pair of student inventors from the University of Washington have built sensorladen gloves that convert sign language to text and speech. Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor’s SignAloud picks up hand positions and movement, translating it into data that’s sent to a computer via Bluetooth. “We wanted to develop something that would help the deaf and mute better communicate with the rest of the world, without changing how they already interact with each other,” said Azodi. The students picked up the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize for their efforts, but faced criticism from members of the deaf community who say the idea misunderstands their challenges, since the gloves offer only one-way communication. IPAD AIRWAYS: HOW BA IS USING TABLETS IN-FLIGHT BA was one of the first…

How much do you care about an operating system? It’s an intriguing question, and I’ll admit it’s one that’s best discussed over a pint of your favourite tipple. Or glass of Chardonnay, or whatever your favoured drink. The stark reality is that most people don’t care a jot. They’re only concerned with what it can do for them. This is a clear shift in the commoditisation of the computer and the services it offers. This has profound effects on the decision-making process in terms of what to buy next. It’s a tough question to answer, but it has to be asked – how much do you actually have invested in your current platform? By that, I don’t mean licensing costs for specific software, because it is hoped that good software…

To make legitimate money online, you have three main options: to sell what you have, what you can do, or what you know. Assuming you know something that others will pay to learn, the last of these can look particularly compelling, and a number of video-based platforms have sprung up to service the demand from both experts and learners. Udemy is the world’s largest such service, recently welcoming its 10-millionth registered student, but competition is fierce: with more than 20,000 instructors and 40,000 courses, I was curious to find out if it was still a viable platform for selling the expertise I had to off er. IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME? First things first: your idea must be commercial. As with all products, your course should help overcome…

Last month’s column was left well and truly dangling, describing the process of diagnosis with a client but not yet having fully dived in to the process of a fix. There were good and bad reasons for that: the good was that I thought I could see a relatively easy way out of the disaster; the bad was that some of those ways would require waiting for telecom broadband supply orders to actually come through. In my experience, that’s about the worst nail-biter, progressive-reveal, can’tmotivate-them jobsworth disaster in modern business. Most of my experience has been in the city, but this client is based in the more civilised environs of a rural area. As a result, rather than the “three months, maybe never” type of service that I’ve been used…

SWEET STICKY GOBS Today I was reminiscing about the CDs I used to eagerly collect when I was a subscriber around 1998, reading it coverto-cover except for the Back O€ ce section which didn’t make much sense. One of the saddest moments in my life, all 12 or so years of it, was when the cover CD containing the Worms 2 demo ceased working for all the scratches I had inflicted upon it. But that’s not the point of this email. The point is that the glue you used to attach the CDs to the front was absolutely sublime. I can still remember its firmness yet malleability that allowed it to be pulled from the glossy cover in one piece with no harm to the magazine. It was quite fantastic…

Anthony Fordham thinks the journey is worth the destination You might not have heard of Starbound, a little indie title nestles away in the kitchier corners of Steam. It’s basically a sci-fiversion of Terraria… which is a 2D spritebased version of Minecraft. Kind of. Anyway, what’s notable about Starbound isn’t its theme, artwork or even gameplay. It’s that the game has taken more or less five years to reach version 1.0. Flip back to 2012: Terraria had become an indie hit, and some of the development team split o. to create a “spiritual successor”. A 2D dig-and-build-em-up like Terraria except bigger. One world to explore? Nay nay. Thousands of worlds in a procedurally generated galaxy. Multiple races. Heaps of extra game mechanics like vehicles, pets, colonies, a hub location with…

Almost everyone buying a product locally is dismayed when the check out the price overseas and discover local prices are marked up considerably. We call it the Australia Tax. It’s a big enough issue that Labor MP Ed Husic called for an inquiry into the practice. ANATOMY OF A RETAIL PRICE Retail prices are made of a number of components. There’s the wholesale cost of the item and taxes like the GST. If you’re looking at products sold in the United States, it’s important to understand those prices are exclusive of local sales taxes. And, although you might not like the GST, the good thing is that it’s charged at the same rate in all Australian states. In contrast, US states and cities can levy their own taxes. So, an…

When Microsoft released Windows 10, it promised we were dancing to a new tune; upgrades would be released as and when new features were ready. Over the past year we’ve seen a steady stream of new features added to Windows 10 , while this summer’s Anniversary Update is the biggest yet. So how much has Windows 10 changed since its launch and has Microsoft pulled off any great birthday surprises? Here, we look back on what’s been added and herald the new features set to arrive this summer. 1 START MENU Microsoft can’t stop fiddling with the Start menu. It went through numerous revisions in the various test phases of Windows 10 and the Redmond engineers have continued to tweak the design ever since – including a revised version for…

The Flex is such a popular fitness band, and it’s been around for a long time so you can find these online very cheaply, even under $100, making it a very attractive proposition for anyone looking for their first fitness tracker. Although the Flex is worn on your wrist, the device itself can be removed from the strap. This means you can colourcoordinate your Flex to match your outfit, and there’s a veritable rainbow of strap colours available. There’s no display on the Flex, just five white LEDs. Each LED represents 20% of your daily goal, so you can get at least a rough estimate of how you’re doing by glancing at your wrist. The Flex will log every step you take throughout the day, and will try to differentiate…

The honor band z1 is attractive, at least at first: the round, stainless steel rim looks good, and at just 25g with a 1.06in touchscreen, it’s appealingly diminutive, making most smartwatches seem positively obese. However, this changes when the screen comes on. The monochrome P-OLED display is considerably pixelated, giving it more in common with the first-generation Pebbles than the latest Android Wear beauties. There are perfectly good battery-shaped reasons for this, but it does detract from the luxurious feel it’s aiming for – as does the fact that the screen is actually a small square, rather than a true circular watchface. The steel rim is quick to pick up scratches, too. In terms of features, the Honor Band performs better. The pedometer tracks steps subtly in the background, and…

The Moto 360 Sport aims to bridge the gap between smartwatches and fitness trackers. with built-in gps, an optical heart-rate monitor, a silicone rubber strap and a new adaptive display for easy reading both indoors and out, it sounds ideal for those after something a bit more watch-like than most fitness trackers. In reality, though, it stumbles over a number of hurdles, starting from its basic design right through to its rather limited fitness features. Despite its IP67 rating for dust and water resistance, the Moto 360 Sport is aimed almost entirely at runners, its optical heart-rate monitor and built-in GPS going a long way to help separate it from other Android Wear smartwatches. The former can track your pulse continuously throughout your workout to give you real-time feedback on…

The Spark Cardio + Music is the highest- spec Spark variant available, combining multi-sport tracking, GPS, heart-rate monitoring and Bluetooth music playback. This makes it a pretty compelling combination of smartwatch and fitness tracker. Despite this abundance of features, it has a more restrained design than TomTom’s previous wearables. Its rubber strap makes it comfortable to wear for long periods (including overnight) and the double prong clasp ensures it never falls off mid-sprint, swim or cycle. The exercise options – including cycling, swimming, treadmill running, general gym activity or ‘freestyle’ activities – are easy to navigate, and in our experience, recordings seemed pretty accurate and consistent with previous readings. There’s no option to sync smartphone notifications to the Spark, though; rather than compete in the Android Wear market, it’s targeting…

The all-in-one desktop PC scene ha s been dominated by Apple so comprehensively, and for so long, that the rest of the industry must wonder if it’s worth bothering to produce their own. There remain a steady trickle of other manufacturers producing machines, though, and Lenovo’s 24in ThinkCentre X1 is the most interesting to have rolled into the PC&TA Labs in quite some time. Approached from the front, you’d think there wasn’t much in the way to worry Apple. In typical Lenovo fashion, the ThinkCentre X1 is finished in black, and the wireless keyboard and mouse supplied with the machine are equally plain in appearance. There’s the signature red highlight or two – the dot above the “i” on the ThinkCentre logo in the bottomleft corner of the front bezel,…

$159 • www.corsair.com/au PC gaming on the TV is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to Steam Big Picture. Corsair has seized upon this with the Lapdog, which provides a far more substantial alternative to wireless mice and keyboards. The unit houses any K-series Corsair keyboard, which is firmly held in place by aluminium plates and screws. The mouse pad is huge and the surface lovely. But at a hefty 3.92kg including keyboard you soon see why Corsair includes a very thick foam pad that runs its length. We were ready to write-off the Lapdog as a super-niche product that costs upward of $400 including keyboard and mouse, until we had an epiphany. The base foam is magnetically attached and is super easy to remove. That means the Lapdog can do double-duty…

$US110 • www.cougargaming.com Cougar is best known as a mid-range gaming brand, but its new case – while definitely aimed at gamers – has some rather interesting features that make at an intriguing enthusiast choice. The exterior is pure gaming bravado, with faux carbon-fibre highlights, carry handles, and lots of exposed screws. But it’s also very roomy inside, especially behind the motherboard plate, which will make cable-tidying particularly easy. There’s a shroud over the power supply, too, to keep that thermal load separate from the rest of the case, and another shroud near the two front intake fans that channels air into the space behind your motherboard – which is where most of your drives will be installed. Those fans can be set to one of three pre-set speeds by…

$69 • www.gskill.com There is a lot to like about G. Skill ’s debut mouse. It’s solidly constructed from aluminium, has Omron switches, an 8200DPI laser sensor, 1000Hz polling and swappable side panels to make it ambidextrous. Unfortunately there are also two significant flaws with the MX780, and both of them are related to buttons. The DPI switch button is positioned directly behind the scroll wheel and sits as high as the wheel. It’s also extremely sensitive, making it all too easy to switch DPI whenever you use the mouse wheel. It’s extremely frustrating. The thumb buttons are also poorly placed high and forward, making them awkward to access. If you can get around the random DPI switching and iffy thumb buttons, the MX780 offers excellent value for money. If…

Certainly the biggest feature of this board are the twin M.2 slots, giving you great flexibility for M.2 NVMe storage. However, this is potentially also the board’s biggest weakness for two reasons. Firstly, there’s no U.2 ports on offer for alternative NVMe connectivity. Secondly, it appears that in order to support the second M.2 slot ASRock have of course had to sacrifice some board space, resulting in just three x16 wide PCI-E slots which leaves the board looking rather bare. However, with 3-way SLI/CF being quite a rare setup, perhaps sacrificing some slots for the extra M.2 storage capacity is actually quite a smart move for the average consumer. The three well-spaced out PCI-E 16x slots don’t all operate at full speed when three cards are slotted, stepping down to…

Personal computers were once as distraction-free as a Remington typewriter. Then along came multitasking and always-on broadband connections, and our simple tools were transformed into do-anything devices. Now, while we work, we’re just a click away from unlimited music, movies and chat There’s no doubt that it’s making us less productive. A study by Gloria Mark from the University of California’s Department of Informatics measured how often we succumbed to these interruption opportunities, and their impact on our work. Speaking to Fast Company, she revealed that a typical worker was interrupted – or selfinterrupted, by switching to eBay or a news site, for example – every 3mins 5secs, after which it took more than 20 minutes to return to the task in hand. In the worst case this could see…

We asked a series of chatbots what they think about the growing trend of chatbots. Here’s what they had to say when asked “Are chatbots the future?” We’re scared of Mitsuku.com. A.L.I.C.E.: “I really couldn’t say for sure.” Drumpfbot: “The American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again.” Cleverbot.com: “I am you in the future. You are the past me.” Mitsuku.com: “It would seem a natural part of evolution that robots replace humans in the future. I see myself as part of that.”…

“My sides are aching from the laughter! No, really, it doesn’t matter how you tell the joke, it’s still side-splittingly funny. Go on, tell it again! Microsoft has bought LinkedIn? For US$26 billion, you say? That Nadella, he really knows how to rock and roll! Now for the sober reality. At first glance, it looks like US$1 billion of value and US$25 billion of sheer desperation. Given how utterly dreadful Microsoft’s record of large-scale acquisitions has played out, from aQuantive to the even bigger disaster called Nokia, it’s hard to immediately see how this will go any differently. Surely this will amount to a huge write-off on the firm’s books within a few years, just like the others? Well, yes and no. What’s different here is that it hasn’t bought…

Jaya, Mwave: “The U.2 port first appeared on consumer boards as part of the Skylake launch with Intel’s Z170 chipset. Intel themselves were first to market with a U.2 NVMe SSD in the form of their Intel 750 series. There is currently a lack of competition in this segment as they remain the only mainstream offering on the Australian market for U.2 SSDs. In our experience It appears that consumers have taken to M.2 or PCI-e form factors. Therefore, unfortunately it is unlikely that U.2 will gain traction despite the port appearing on more motherboards across Skylake and Haswell-E or Broadwell-E Motherboards.” Joseph, Umart: “M.2, while extremely popular at present, has limitations which cannot be easily overlooked. While it has the benefit of being able to utilize the 32 gigabit…

Yep... yep, that’s a pig alright. Nice wings. Oh, and look at that sky! Is it getting closer? Ah yes... yes it is. Well, that settles it then. Arthur C. Clarke had it wrong in the The Nine Billion Names of God as a means to end the universe (incidentally, one of the first sci-fistories I read in my childhood). No, it’s much simpler than that. The impossible has happened. The unpossibiling, or something. Like The Walking Dead, but for operating systems. Indeed, the fabric of spacetime may already be fracturing – for Linux and Windows have become one. As you read this the Windows 10 Anniversary Update will have gone live and, more than likely, you’re running it already. It hides a secret, or perhaps a revelation: You can…

Windows 10 has hit its first birthday. The balloons are up, the cake ordered, and I’m sure there will be many bleary eyes the morning after. So what is the current status? Is it all cheer and fun, or are there clouds on the horizon? (And I’m not talking about Azure.) Well, let’s start with what Microsoft has achieved. It has delivered a version of Windows that has managed to combine the benefits of conventional desktop operation with the capabilities of touch and pen operation. No small feat, even it was quite clear where it had gone horribly wrong with Windows 8/8.1. History will write many pages about the failures of Microsoft’s management during the 2005-2015 era. With Windows 10, Microsoft tried to pull back from the precipice and make…

The alta continues the modular theme seen in previous Fitbit devices, with the device interchangeable with different strap colours and types. You can swap in a solid metal bangle, but the standard rubber strap is the sweet spot – it looks good, wraps around the wrist nicely, and is comfortable to wear. The Alta is dominated by an OLED display. This is much larger and easier to read than the examples on the Fitbit Charge and Charge HR, and the Flex doesn’t have a display at all. The display can be configured in various formats to suit the individual – you can have the information displayed in portrait or landscape formats, depending on which is easier for you to read at a glance. Another nice touch is that the Alta…

Garmin has gone a long way to ensure that the Vivofit 3 at least looks different to its predecessors; instead of the display running along the length of the device leaving you to hold your wrist at a jaunty angle to read it, the Vivofit 3 display can be read in a far more natural way, just like a normal watch. The downside of the change in orientation is that the screen is much smaller. But despite its reduced size it’s easy to read, essentially making the Vivofit 3 a viable everyday wristwatch as well as a fitness tracker. A large button below the screen cycles through all the info on the device – you’ll find the time of day, date, current step count, remaining steps to hit your goal,…

The first thing you’ll notice about the UP3 is that the simplistic yet comfortable design of the UP devices has been abandoned. No longer is the UP a flexible bangle that wraps around your wrist; it now has a traditional strap, with an adjustable clasp. The reason for this change is so that the UP3 can measure your heart rate, which means the integrated sensors in the strap need to have snug contact with your skin. It’s this heart-rate measurement that sets the UP3 apart from the UP24 before it, especially now a firmware update has allowed it to measure your ‘passive’ heart rate during the day instead of just once when you wake in the morning. Unlike many competing fitness trackers, the UP3 doesn’t have an integrated display. That…

You may not have heard of myzone before, but this US-based company has just started selling its heart-rate tracking devices online. The MZ-3 is a heart-rate sensor that snaps into a chest strap, which itself has built-in heart-monitoring electrodes intended to provide more accurate measurements of your workout than your typical wrist-based fitness tracker or smartwatch. The idea behind the MZ-3 is simple. You exercise with the chest strap – be it running, rowing, cycling or whatever gets your heart racing – and earn points based on your beats-per-minute measurement. These can then be used to improve your rank within the MyZone app, compete with your friends and family, and unlock badges for sharing on social media. The MZ-3 is rather limited in that it can only measure your heart…

You won’t find better reviews anywhere in Australia! I love following tech trends. Whether predicted, or totally out of the blue, it’s fascinating to see a product or category emerge and rise. And what’s hot right now? What product is flying off shelves and in many areas just can’t be bought for love or money? Portable battery packs. Why? Pokemon Go. Now, we’ve all contributed our fair share of mockery about the whole Go phenomenon. Then you try it, and shut up a bit as you delight in its simple charms, then go silent before transitioning to being a stout defender of it all. And that’s ok, it’s a natural human process. Trends are, of course, seized upon by opportunists. And to that end my inbox has been treated to…

The ‘IronWolf’ brand is Seagate’s new moniker for NAS hard drives, and with this perhaps Game of Thrones-inspired brand, comes new performance that puts this NAS drive firmly at the top of the networked storage tree. The IronWolf range covers capacities from 1TB through to the 10TB model, which we’ve been testing. The 6TB, 8TB and 10TB models have a relatively sporty 7200rpm rotational speed, while 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB IronWolf drives get by with 5900rpm. But only the 8TB and 10TB models get the boosted cache size of 256MB – the 6TB model has 128MB, which is in line with most of competitor WD’s RED series NAS drives, while the lower capacity drives feature 64MB of cache. The performance benefit of a larger cache is clear. We benched…

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-offedges. What’s more, it combines these goodlooks 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 $265. The only immediate consolation is that the Xperia X sports a fingerprint sensor, which, along with the NFC radio embedded in the top-left corner…

However good it is, US$290 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. It’s less clear why anyone would want to spend so much when the excellent Kindle Paperwhite is US$170 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 be precise, it weights a phone-like 131g: tapering to a miniscule 3.7mm at…

Our testbench is our standard Asus Z170 Professional Gaming Board with an Intel i7 6700K CPU running at default speed. Twin sticks of Ballistix 8GB memory were used along with twin Corsair SSDs. We also had to add another 1TB Kingston SSD to squeeze in our new benchmarks. All tests were running at 4K, with all in-game details maxed out. You’ll notice we squeezed in a couple of new benchmarks, and it’s worth explaining why TimeSpy made it in. This is a DX12 focused test that aims to stretch three areas of a GPU; command lists, command queues, and specifically, asynchronous compute. We should point out that AMD specifically asked us to include this in our roundup, as it shows how well their cards do at DX12. Unfortunately the latest…

$599 • www.alcatel-mobile.com At just under $600, this mid-range Android is new turf for normally budget-oriented Alcatel. Due here in September, the review unit we’ve been using wins for a very good 5.5-inch AMOLED screen with a generous 1440x2560 resolution. It wins again for the innovative ‘Boom Switch’ mounted on the right side that can be configured to custom uses, including as the shutter for an instant photo, or if you like, instantly boosting music bass. The battery is average, at 3000mAh. It also comes with a plastic VR headset, much like the sold-separately Samsung Gear VR, but sans the Sammy’s side touch controls. This novel bundle will, we predict, become common as smartphone VR catches on. The cost it represents is negligible, and we think the x asking price…

$179 • www.dell.com.au If you own a Dell laptop, and many do, this rather impressive power brick is compatible with almost every recent consumer and enterprise product, including the XPS and Alienware range (but check the Dell site to see if yours is listed). It comes with the two standard AC connection plugs used across the Dell range to feed your device, and conversely, your laptop’s AC adaptor is used for recharging the Power Companion. Besides the Dell power plugs, there are two USB-out ports so you can charge a couple of smartphones or non-Dell devices, too. It’s all a very complete and premium power brick and is far easier to carry around than a proper AC adaptor when travelling. We tested the 12,000mAh version. There’s also an 18,000mAh model.…

Intel’s High End Desktop (HEDT) range, while aimed at computing enthusiasts, also targets big business and enterprises needing powerful workstations. As such the HEDT platform needs to be supported for longer periods of time as companies like having stable platforms they can get a good return on investment with. This means the lifecycle of the HEDT platform, currently in the form of the X99 chipset, is about three to four years instead of the typical one or two years on mainstream platforms and is also the reason why you’ll find Xeon and registered memory compatibility along with consumer Core i7 and unregistered memory support on this one platform. To keep performance relevant over that time scale, Intel committed to supporting two generations of CPU for each HEDT platform allowing drop…

Following the RGB trend, this board makes ample use of it with four RGB LED lit areas around the board. One area in particular is questionable though. Between the first and second PCI-E x16 slots Gigabyte cram in: a PCI-E x1 slot, an M.2 slot, the Wi-Fimodule and BIOS battery. All of which (apart from the PCI-E slot itself) is covered by a facia plate that requires a tiny screw driver to remove. It looks good in a display case, but in practice this is simply annoying to work with as the M.2 slot and BIOS battery aren’t immediately accessible. Not only that, but one of the RGB lit regions lies there too, directly under the top PCI-E slot, meaning it is blocked by any dual slot graphics card you…

ROG STRIX X99 Strix is the newest recruit into the Republic of Gamers (ROG) — and ROG Strix X99 Gaming is the first ROG Strix motherboard. The ROG Strix X99 Gaming delivers premier performance, innovation, and visual dynamics to release your gaming instincts. The bold design and bright colours channel your spirit of fierce individualism, charging every gaming experience with thrilling energy. Want to dominate with epic speed and agility? Join the Republic with ROG Strix X99 Gaming! ROG SHEATH The stage for the ultimate battle The extra-large Asus ROG Sheath mouse pad is optimized for all gaming mouse types, with a smooth surface that perfectly ensures pixel-precise tracking for unmatched command and control. ROG Sheath is designed for your comfort and features a non-slip ROG-red rubber base that keeps…

Want to know what the weather is? Forget about looking out of the window; in the near future, you’ll live with an always-listening assistant who will advise precisely when to pack an umbrella. Welcome to the world of chatbots, AI assistants and “conversational commerce”. Rather than input just the right search terms on flight site Skyscanner, or pick up the phone to Domino’s, we’ll be able to type or speak in natural language, and software will do the rest. Hardware AI assistants will mean that we don’t even need to lift our phones to chat with bots, just speak aloud. The future could see us asking Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Home for the football score, or even how to convert half a cup of sugar into metric for baking. While…

Zenbo, open the door! Zenbo, how do I make paella? Zenbo, read junior a story! “Zenbo” isn’t a magical command to control your spouse, it’s Asus’ newly announced robot butler, featuring facial recognition, cloud-based AI and a cheerful animated face – all for US$599. Unveiled at Computex in Taipei, the 2fttall robot rolled on to the stage with Asus chair Jonney Shih, snapping his photo on verbal command. Technical details on how the robot operates weren’t revealed, but similar ideas have been attempted in the past (sit, Sony Aibo, sit!). Indeed, the real technological leap is the price, which is about the same as an iPhone. Of course, the price is moot if Zenbo can’t deliver on its many promises. Aside from an ability to “emote” via its cartoon eyes,…

Answer subjective questions: CEO Jonney Shih asked Zenbo whether Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein was smarter – something human academics would struggle to quantify. “I’m sorry, I do not know the answer, but I’ll continue to work on my knowledge,” the robot replied. A+ for effort, little guy. Climb stairs: Zenbo is stuck on wheels and so trapped on one floor. There are robotics that can climb stairs, but they tend to be for military purposes rather than babysitting your children. Vacuum: It seems like a missed trick – instead of rolling around on wheels tracking dirt and dust everywhere, why doesn’t Zenbo clean up like the famous vacuum robot Roomba? He’s just plain-lazy. Express negative emotions: We don’t know the full range of Zenbo’s fake emotions, but Asus…

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I wonder how many readers will empathise with reader Daniel Franks. He’s invested a lot of money in various bits of IoT (Internet of Things) hardware, but has been struggling to find a way to graph his data, and wondered what advice I could offer via this column. Whether you have just a couple of temperature and humidity sensors, or a complex home-automation setup, I can’t over-emphasise how important it is to graph your data. You’ll start to notice patterns that you simply didn’t realise were there. For example, a couple of months ago, I explained here how graphs had shown the extent to which my house heats up all by itself on sunny days. Using this, combined with weather forecasts, I’ve been able to adjust the heating schedule of…

It seems an age now since LinkedIn suffered a breach and a whopping 6.5 million users found their logins had been stolen. It seems like an age because it was; 2012 to be precise. At the time, we were advised to change our passwords, as usual, and things went on, as usual. Until now, that is, with news that the true extent of that breach had more reach than we were led to believe – in the region of 117 million user logins Why has it taken so long to be disclosed? The answer would appear to be a hacker called Peace. We know the extent of the original compromise because Peace has advertised the entire LinkedIn breach login dump on dark market site, The Real Deal (for a measly…