Table of contents for October 2016 in PC Pro

LAST CHANCE We need your help to decide the Technology Excellence Awards winners! Turn to p71 for prize details and vote now at pcpro.link/techies16. Final deadine: 29 August THE LIFT OPENS to reveal a colleague inside. We exchange hellos, he asks how I am. Most of the time I’d respond with, “Oh, you know, busy”. But not today. Today, I wish to defy convention and convey an idea about how my life has improved in the weeks since we last saw each other. I’m grateful for the jolt of the lift as it starts the ascent, giving me a second to gather my thoughts. I am busy, of course. I’ve been busy for as long as I can remember. I enjoy the bustle of work and take great satisfaction from…

Buying storage used to be simple: choose a hard drive to suit your budget and space requirements. The rise of SSDs and online storage has (literally) clouded the equation. There are huge differences between both price per GB and access speeds between the technologies. And while cloud services might look more expensive, they’re much less likely to fail than local storage, you can pick and choose what’s stored there – and someone else is taking care of maintenance. SPEED MATTERS Price isn’t the only factor when choosing a storage method. As can be seen from the graphs, right, SSD storage is twice as fast as hard disks when it comes to real-world file access and writing. We examined data from UserBenchmark, which tests the speed of consumers’ drives and collates…

When tech hits a plateau, ingenuity must take the slack To keep enjoying the rate of progress we’re used to, we must be creative in our approach Darien Graham-Smith is PC Pro’s associate editor. The source code for his free Android game SevenDown is very much not available. @dariengs If a programmer is someone who, from time to time, writes programs then you can call me a programmer. But maybe don’t do so in front of any of my friends in the industry. Partly it’s because they all wear terribly grown-up titles such as “senior developer” or “software engineer”, whereas I still say “programmer” like an eighties kid who never grew up. More than that, I’m always rather awed by what these guys do. They seem to be able to…

PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The clue’s in the name: just like the Inspiron 13 5000 2-in-1 opposite, this 15in laptop boasts a 360-degree hinge that turns it into a monster 15in tablet with one rotation of the screen. Nor does this come at the expense of bulk, with a sleek and stylish gunmetal grey chassis. It’s actually made of plastic, but this laptop feels durable and the faux metal finish makes it look far more premium than its price would suggest. On closer examination, though, you start to question the wisdom of buying this machine. The two hinges are stiff and sturdy enough when you want to prop it up in tent mode or use it on your lap, but steer away from “presentation mode”, where the…

PRICE £239 (£287 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com As soon as you take it out of your pocket, the Galaxy A5 draws admiring glances. Clad in glossy glass at the front and rear, it has the heft, fit and finish of a handset costing £500. But, at this price, competition is arguably even fiercer than it is for the Galaxy S7: the A5 faces proven big-hitters such as the Google Nexus 5X and OnePlus 3. Beyond good looks, has the Galaxy A5 got what it takes? When it comes to screen quality, undoubtedly. You’ll grow to love its 5.2in AMOLED display. Although smaller than its rivals, that makes it easy to use in one hand – and slide into a front jeans pocket. Its 1080p resolution is fine for a screen…

PRICE £21 (£25 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Aukey is a big name in the world of portable batteries, but that doesn’t mean expensive: £25 inc VAT is one of the best prices you’ll find for a 20,000mAh portable charger from a known brand. Not that this power pack would win any style prizes, with a blocky, black design reminiscent of old-style ThinkPads. There are no indicator lights: instead, you press the backlit power button and must remember that white equates to 70-100% charge, green to 30-70% and red to 0-30%. What you do get is a torch light (keep the power button pressed down for a second to activate) and a Lightning connector for charging. Very handy for iPad and iPhone owners, but note the only cable in the pack…

PRICE 32GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT); keyboard, £99 (£119 inc VAT) Google’s Pixel devices are designed in-house as showcase products. “If you put your mind to it, this is what you can achieve,” Google is saying, and the Pixel C certainly takes Android tablet design to a supreme level. It comes in the form of a 10in tablet and a separate, metal-backed keyboard. When not in use, the keyboard clamps to the front of the screen, forming a rigid protective cover. When you’re ready for work, simply separate the two, line up the bottom half of the tablet with the top half of the keyboard – which houses the Pixel C’s blade-like hinge – and the pair snap together with incredibly strong magnets. It’s then possible to adjust the screen…

Both Apple and Google are making big noises about using their tablets for doing more than watching Netflix, browsing the web and playing games. There are now two iPad Pro tablets designed for professional use, while Google has introduced the Pixel C – an Android tablet with a serious bent. All these devices, it seems, have one thing in mind. While the Surface Pro wants to be the tablet to replace your work laptop, the new breed of iPads and Android tablets want to replace your Windows machine entirely. Apple’s Phil Schiller says that’s exactly why people are buying the iPad Pro, and when they do, “many will find it the ultimate PC replacement”. That’s a typically hyperbolic statement from a company that’s well known for such declarations. This is…

PRICE 32GB, £416 (£499 inc VAT); keyboard, £116 (£139 inc VAT); stylus, £66 (£79 inc VAT) It’s hard to find fault with the iPad Pro 9.7. As with every single one of Apple’s tablets, it’s beautifully made and does its job brilliantly. It’s essentially a shrunken version of the 12.9in iPad Pro. The Smart Keyboard attaches and functions in exactly the same way as the larger one, and its strengths and flaws are similar. On the plus side, unfolding and stowing the keyboard is less of a rigmarole due to its smaller size and weight. On the negative side, its more compact dimensions lead to tighter spaces between the keys. There are differences between this and the larger iPad Pro, aside from the size. The camera on the rear, for…

PRICE 64GB, £291 (£349 inc VAT); Type Cover keyboard, £92 (£110 inc VAT) The Surface Pro 3 is the baby brother of Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4, and it’s a tremendous value alternative. You can pick one up for £349 inc VAT, which – together with the optional Type Cover keyboard – brings the total up to £459. Not even the Pixel C is this cheap. Despite that, you’re not getting cut-price hardware here. The Surface 3 is every bit as well made as its larger sibling, complete with its magnesium alloy chassis, 3:2 aspect ratio IPS display and high-quality Type Cover keyboard. Unlike the Surface Pro, the blade-like kickstand isn’t infinitely adjustable, but you do get three positions to choose between. And, although both screen and keyboard are smaller than…

PRICE £110 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk Abusiness-class 802.11ac wireless access point for a shade over £100 is a tempting deal. Furthermore, it’s a flexible offering: D-Link’s DAP-2660 can be deployed in standalone mode or managed using the free Central Wireless Management (CWM) software, which can handle up to 500 APs. For medium-sized organisations, D-Link’s firmware-based AP Array feature will appeal in particular, allowing you to manage up to 32 APs on a local network without requiring any extra software. You simply set up one AP as the master, then create a backup master and configure the rest as slaves: any configuration changes or upgrades made to the master will then be automatically synchronised to all of the other array members. As a standalone business access point, the DAP-2660 ticks all…

PRICE £196 exc VAT from uk.insight.com If you’re all about options then you’ll love Netgear’s quad-mode ProSafe WAC720. It can be used as a regular standalone AP, grouped together with units via Netgear’s “Ensemble” mode, controlled from a NetGear ProSafe WC7600 or WC9500 appliance, or managed via Netgear’s Business Central cloud portal. At £196, the WAC720 is pricey, but in return you get high-end features and build quality, which includes a finned metal base acting as a giant heatsink. Concurrent 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios are served by two dual-band internal aerials, and there’s a pair of SMA connectors for external ones. The box includes a metal wall bracket that can also clip onto drop-ceiling rails. There’s no power adapter, though: you can buy one, or use PoE via the Gigabit…

David is director of interconnect/it, a leading UK provider of WordPress-based websites @davecoveney “For the sake of performance and reliability, it’s best to limit the number of plugins to only a handful” WordPress is a wonderful content management system: we built our business around it, creating small and large sites alike. Although nowadays we mostly build large magazine or newspaper sites, it can be a delight and pleasant change of pace to build sites for the occasional small business that comes in. If all the content and images are prepared by the client in advance, these sites can be built in a day, by one person, instead of over three months by a team. This time the client was a business that short-term lets three apartments in Chester, called Black…

Pokémon Go hit the headlines with a bang in July. Millions of people downloaded this augmented-reality app, where you find monsters on the street before training them in virtual gyms (based in real locations) to be fighters, and with predictable consequences. Some people found themselves walking thousands of extra steps per day in their quest to capture more monsters. A holocaust memorial asked Nintendo to remove it from the list of gyms, because having dozens of pimply youths shouting at their on-screen characters didn’t set quite the right tone. And it became clear that the app developers, as part of their requested permissions, took what was potentially an enormous data slurp on your Google data. Which should come as a surprise to precisely no-one. That the developer has backtracked, clarified…

Stuart Turton Far from killing off paper books, ebook sales are flatlining. Stuart reveals publishing industry plans to jolt them back into life on p42 David Coveney Discover tips of the website-building trade from the company that builds blogs and sites for The Telegraph and beyond. See p116 Jon Bray We set Jon the challenge of finding a tablet that could do serious work. Find out a Labs winner that may just surprise you on p76 Davey Winder Davey explains how ransomware is continuing its unabated rise… and tells the one about the potato, the safe and a Helsinki hotel. See p118…

SOFTBANK HAS BID £24 billion to get its hands on ARM’s 5G and Internet of Things portfolio, according to industry watchers. Although the Japanese firm may yet face competing bids from some of the biggest names in the tech industry. In the wake of the proposed acquisition, much has been made of ARM’s core market of mobile chips, but the inflated price – 43% more than its share price value – appears steep given that the phone and tablet markets are both slowing. However, as well as its intellectual property in mobile chips, ARM has been building a portfolio of IP in emerging technologies such as 5G and the Internet of Things, which experts believe has driven up the price. “SoftBank is coming at it from a 5G point of…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £959 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake CPUs, fly design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. super-fast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fly through tasks, and the 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 £1,320; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (Retina) If you need to do serious work on a laptop, and want a MacBook, the Pro 13in remains our top choice – although we suspect a new model is imminent. From…

Low-tech security A recent article in the Sunday Times magazine made reference to Mark Zuckerberg sticking a piece of tape over his webcam to prevent anyone from being able to hack his computer and use it to take pictures. Without being paranoid, we ought to be aware that such attacks can take place – and that we need to take preventative action. A piece of tape doesn’t cost much, after all, and using a VPN is a good way to provide anonymity from potential hackers. If the director of the FBI puts a bit of sticky tape over his webcam, as the article also stated, then maybe they’re onto something. Bob Oldershaw Autonomous automobiles I’ve just listened to the PC Pro podcast and your discussion about the first Tesla fatality.…

DreamWorks is one of the most technologically advanced companies in the film industry. With titles such as Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda under its belt, its feature films have grossed more than £10 billion worldwide – and several rank among the highestearning movies of all time. When it comes to CGI and animation, the company’s tech pedigree is indisputable. Creating and rendering 90 minutes of animation doesn’t only require significant human resource, it also demands extraordinary computing power. “By the time we’re done making one movie – just one of the films in production – we’ve crafted half a billion digital files,” said Kate Swanborg, DreamWorks’ head of technology, communications and strategic alliances, speaking to us at 2016’s Cannes Film Festival. “That’s 500 million files…

How do you improve the world’s most popular software PBX? Easy: you ask its users what new features they want most, remove the admin burden so even the smallest business can run it themselves, and beef up security in the process. Here’s what new and existing users need to know 1 Zero admin Welcome to the world’s first zero-admin PBX! Version 15 reduces ongoing maintenance to almost nothing, which means there’s no need to move to an expensive public cloud service. There’s a new dashboard that’s both easy on the eye and easy to use, while we provide automatic updates of phones and manage everything from security to backups to restores. 2 Speedy installs We’ve worked harder than ever on the install procedure. Not just to make it easy, but…

PRICE €397 (€476 inc VAT) from primeratrio.eu Let’s first be clear what the Primera Trio is not: it isn’t a top-quality inkjet you’ll turn to when you want to print that vital presentation for a client. It isn’t fast. It isn’t cheap to run. Instead, it’s an incredibly convenient portable all-in-one printer that you may well decide to make part of your mobile workforce’s armoury – because, sometimes, only print-outs will do. Primera has done its utmost to keep travelling size to a minimum, going so far as to create a “stow” position for the cartridge in transit. Lift up the catch, rotate the caddy 90 degrees and it moves from an upright position to lying on its side. That means you can fold down the paper input tray and…

PRICE £291 (£349 inc VAT) from shop.samsung.com/uk The sound you hear is VR moving one step closer to the mainstream: the Gear 360 not only shoots 360-degree photos but videos too, and at a suitably high 3,840 x 1,920 resolution. Results can be dropped straight onto YouTube’s 360 degree video channel, Facebook, or even viewed on a Gear VR headset. It certainly adds something different to typical home-shot footage. In terms of size, the Gear 360 sits somewhere between a golf ball and tennis ball. The camera section has two fisheye lenses on opposite sides, and three buttons to press: “Power/Back”, “Bluetooth connect/Menu” and a big “Record” button on top. The top also houses a tiny LED display to provide basic information such as battery life and recording time, but…

PRICE £37 (£44 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Head to RavPower’s site (ravpower.com) and you’ll be faced with a bewildering number of chargers, all offering various benefits and capacities. The PB043 is all about speedy charging, with Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3 technology built in: that means it can charge suitably equipped hardware (the 12in Apple MacBook, Chromebook Pixel, certain Android phones) up to four times quicker than rival chargers. Just as importantly, the Qualcomm chip inside will work out exactly what voltage your device needs, which means less wastage and less heat from the charger. To a certain extent, this is marketing, but the RavPower does live up to its claims: it’s cool to the touch even after an hour’s charging. However, the fact that – just like all the other…

PRICE £20 (£25 inc VAT) from zagg.com/uk The Zagg power amp 3 is totally different to the other chargers on test, offering a mere 3,000mAh of capacity (although it has sister editions ranging up to the power amp 18; no prizes for guessing its capacity). 3,000mAh isn’t enough to fully charge modern big-screen phones, emphasising that this jacket-pocket-friendly product should be used for emergencies only. It only has one USB port, which can output at a maximum of 2.1A, although like all the devices here it will automatically detect what the device in question needs. In our tests, it took the Nexus 6P from zero to 38% in just over an hour... and then quietly collapsed. There are two buttons on its side: one switches on its torch, the other…

PRICE £1,024 (£1,229 inc VAT), includes keyboard and stylus If there’s one thing we’ve always moaned about when it comes to buying tablet 2-in-1 devices, it’s that the headline price rarely reflects what you eventually pay – mainly because most manufacturers don’t include the keyboard in the price. That’s not the way HP works. The Elite x2’s price includes both the keyboard and an active, pressuresensitive stylus. That makes it much easier to see where your money is going, but it doesn’t mean the Elite x2 is cheap. In fact, at £1,229 inc VAT for the Intel Core m7-6Y75 model tested here, which comes with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, it’s slightly more expensive than the closest equivalent Microsoft Surface Pro 4. And that’s appropriate, because the Elite…

PRICE 128GB, £624 (£749 inc VAT); keyboard, £92 (£110 inc VAT) Microsoft’s first generation of Surface tablets showed potential, but it took a further two iterations of the design before Microsoft finally got it right. The Surface Pro 3 was the model that finally achieved Microsoft’s ambition for it to be “the tablet that can replace your laptop”; the Pro 4 merely applies a little polish. As such, all the core features that made the Surface Pro 3 so good remain in place in the Surface 4: that 4:3 aspect ratio, 12.3in screen; the big, comfortable, backlit keyboard; the bundled pressure-sensitive stylus; the infinitely adjustable kickstand. They all remain key elements in the Surface Pro 4’s success. Physically, too, the tablet is mostly the same. Its bevelled edges and magnesium…

PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) At a mere £180, the Asus ZenPad 10 is by far the cheapest tablet in this group – and it shows. Its Intel Atom x3 processor is unable to run even Android 5 with any snap or speed, and the result is a frustrating experience. It’s so obviously slow that it’s hardly worth looking at the benchmark scores, although these place the tablet firmly at the bottom of the table across the board. It doesn’t help that Asus throws so much bloatware on the tablet. All this is a shame, because there’s plenty that this little 10in tablet gets right. The Bluetooth keyboard has a springy, positive action that’s easy to get up to speed on. It has an array of DTS-HD-branded speakers built into…

When Windows 8 was first unleashed, the aim was to make Microsoft relevant once more in the consumer technology sector. This was back in 2012, when Apple’s iPad was snatching market share from traditional portables and Android tablets were a looming threat; Steve Ballmer and co were worried and knew they had to do something big. Microsoft’s answer was to build an operating system that would work just as well on a laptop as it did on a tablet. That way, customers could buy one device that would eventually replace both their laptop and tablet. Microsoft’s “if you build it, they will come” attitude seemed crazy to me. There was no demand for Windows tablets at the time, and hardly anyone was making them. In the meantime, dyed-in-thewool desktop and…

PRICE £125 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk DrayTek is a popular brand among small businesses, offering a fine range of networking products with a sharp focus on value. The Vigor AP-910C is no exception: this smoke alarm-style AP supports concurrent 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11ac operations, offers a heap of business features and costs a reasonable £125. The unit comes with a sturdy backplate for mounting directly to a ceiling, as well as a set of clips for hanging it from T-rails. The included power supply has a short 1.5m cable, however; you’ll almost certainly find it more convenient to power the AP-910C via its Gigabit PoE port. The DrayTek AP-910C can be used as a standalone access point, but a major part of its appeal is the fact that centralised management…

PRICE £379 exc VAT from tradescanners.com Visioneer’s Patriot D40 is an affordable USB desktop scanner offering simple, fast, one-touch scanning and versatile paper-handling abilities. When not in use the Patriot folds up into a compact cuboid: this unfolds like a Transformer to present a generous 80-page ADF at the rear and a segmented lower paper tray at the front. The ADF has a handy latch that quickly sets the paper guides for A4 or Letter-sized paper. The output tray has a dropdown paper catcher at the front that helps stack standard documents, and an adjustable flip-up stop in the middle for smaller documents. Fold this away and the scanner can handle dot-matrix paper and documents up to 3m long. Setup on our Windows 10 host took ten minutes, including the…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS Where to start on Brexit and its impact on IT? The simple reality is that no-one knows how it will affect anything, whether in the home, small business or the enterprise. Writing this just after the vote, there seems to be more confusion and arm-waving than concrete, useful information. A few things to consider, though. Think about where data is held, the relationships you have with those companies, and the legal frameworks in which information is moved around. It might not change for a while, but it’s possible that the legal frameworks for data movement will morph as part of the numerous Brexit renegotiations. Also think about licensing. If you’ve bought licences on a global scale, how is that going to work once…

Ransomware is on the up. I’m not a great player of the numbers game when it comes to security, since figures can often be manipulated by way of the questions asked on behalf of the vendor sponsoring the research. That said, a couple of numbers are worth throwing into the room: first, that 93% of the phishing emails seen (by an anti-phishing solutions outfit, I should flag) were carrying a ransomware payload in Q1 2016. Phishme, which carried out the analysis, reckons it represents an eight-fold increase on the previous quarter in terms of phishing email campaigns. That’s up by 6.3 million – and ransomware is explicitly the main driver. Add to this the results from the latest Infoblox DNS Threat Index (again, Mandy Rice-Davies Applies) that suggest the number…

THERESA MAY’S MOVE from the Home Office to 10 Downing Street could have a damaging impact on the tech industry and online privacy, according to consumer rights groups and think tanks. May, who as home secretary was the driving force behind the Investigatory Powers Bill, is willing to sacrifice personal privacy to assist anti-terror investigations, according to her critics. “She’s very much shown that she’s not a fan of privacy or putting in place protection that’s necessary to protect our data or privacy, so it’s concerning that she’s gone into Number 10 with that sort of agenda,” said Sara Ogilvie, policy officer for civil rights group Liberty. “There will certainly be further consequences of having her there.” May’s choice of Cabinet ministers has already nullified one of the key opponents…

Nik Rawlinson gives a power user’s guide to add-ons for the world’s most popular browser Chrome is the world’s favourite browser. Depending on whose metrics you trust, it claims as much as 70% of the market for itself. And a big part of that is down to its flexibility. Thanks to a large and ever-growing library of add-ons, it’s become not merely a web browser but a do-everything platform, which you can use for photo editing, gaming, work and more. It’s also perhaps the first software environment to truly deliver on the promise of letting you work anywhere, on any device. If there’s a problem, it’s the overwhelming array of apps available in the Chrome Web Store, which can make it hard to understand what you can do and to…

PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell is in the midst of updating all of its key laptop ranges with a hybrid design of one sort or another, with the Inspiron 13 5000 the latest in line. The concept is simple: a 360-degree hinge allows you to flip the 13.3in screen all the way around, in a very Lenovo Yoga-ish way. It looks stunning, with the lightly textured, gunmetal grey chassis adding a touch of class that’s rarely seen on such inexpensive laptops. It might be made out of plastic, but it’s robust and showed few signs of flex when put under pressure. This Inspiron’s compact size is also a better fit for a 360-degree hinge than its 15in sibling (see opposite). With built-in palm rejection, it’s well suited…

PRICE Free for new subscribers; £43 (£50 inc VAT) for existing subscribers from home.bt.com The long wait is over: BT has finally updated its flagship router, backed by the bold claim that it delivers the UK’s fastest Wi-Fi. Although let’s immediately qualify that, because BT isn’t comparing the new Smart Hub with third-party products such as the Netgear Nighthawk X4S (see A List, p18), but with rival ISP-supplied routers. On paper, it’s hard to argue. The new Smart Hub has a total of seven internal antennae, enabling 4x4 MIMO 802.11ac wireless in the 5GHz band and 3x3 MIMO over 2.4GHz. That means a top theoretical speed of 1,700Mbits/sec and 450Mbits/sec respectively – a big improvement over the 1,300Mbits/sec and 300Mbits/sec maximum of the Home Hub 5, and also substantially better…

PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Forget Scratch and the Raspberry Pi: meet Sphero SPRK+, the spherical robot you can easily program from an app. Given the large box it comes in, you’d be forgiven for expecting something the size of a mini-football to roll out onto the floor. In reality, its closer to the dimensions of a tennis ball. Its hard plastic shell is completely clear, laying the technical innards bare: there’s a circuit board, cogs, screws, discs and a motor, all plainly visible to the outside world. That’s not to say it’s fragile. In fact, the SPRK+ is designed specifically to be manhandled by clumsy children and sharp-clawed pets alike. The shell is shockproof and waterproof, allowing you to program routines that involve water and sharp falls…

PRICE £9 (£11 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Type “portable charger” into Amazon and you’ll see the company’s Basics range promoted alongside all the big names, with seven different capacities on offer from 2,000mAh to 16,100mAh. We plumped for the 5,600mAh model to review. This is a fraction wider and thinner than a pack of cards, and slips comfortably into a pocket. True to its name, there’s nothing fancy or frivolous about its design. Its matte black, rubberised finish is well constructed, but you get only one charging port. There are four indicator lights for the battery, indicating 25% to 100% capacity. One nice touch is that they flash when it dips below 10%, a handy reminder that it’s time to find a plug. As you’d expect from such a small…

PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If you’re looking for extras from your portable charger, you can safely ignore the RavPower RP-PB052. There’s no clever way to check its battery capacity, just the four indicator lights on its front, and no Quick Charge output to match its sister device. You don’t even get a splash of colour. Instead, RavPower concentrates on packing an enormous amount of battery power into its surprisingly small frame: despite having 1,900mAh more capacity than its sibling, this device is both shorter and narrower, yet only a fraction thicker. In terms of size, it’s very similar to the classic Nokia Communicator phones with the clamshell keyboard. RavPower also packs in three USB ports, with a combined 5.8A capacity. So, two can output at 2.4A and…

PRICE 32GB, £566 (£679 inc VAT); Smart Keyboard, £124 (£149 inc VAT) The launch of the iPad Pro was the tech world’s worst-kept secret, but when it did eventually appear, we still weren’t sure it would win hearts. Its huge 12.9in screen and awkward-looking folding keyboard stand didn’t convince, and boy was it expensive. Surely it couldn’t challenge the mighty Surface Pro 4? Now, nine months later, the iPad Pro is comfortably outselling its Microsoft rival; people clearly like the idea of a larger iPad that can be used for more than consuming media and browsing the web. Whether or not the iPad Pro is a better device for work is less clearcut. On paper, it all looks good. There’s no arguing that Apple makes a great tablet, and this…

ESTIMATED PRICE Core m5, £583 (£700 inc VAT); keyboard, £83 (£100 inc VAT) Huawei is a company on the move. Not content with flooding the smartphone market with well-designed, wellpriced smartphones, it’s now eyeing up laptops. Its first such device is the 2-in-1 detachable Huawei MateBook, and we got our hands on one of the first samples to arrive in the UK. So early, in fact, that we’re still waiting on confirmed prices (our estimates are based on US pricing). The MateBook follows a familiar recipe. Its core components are concentrated in the tablet housing and it has a keyboard case that acts as a stand, plus an active stylus for painting, sketching and note-taking. The tablet part of the MateBook is glorious. Clad in a subtle anodised gold-tinted metal…

PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT), includes keyboard When Samsung announced the TabPro S at CES this year, we wondered if it would arrive in the UK at all. The company pulled out of the laptop market in the UK back in 2014, so this would be its first Windows device to appear on our shores in two years. Although there’s much to like about the TabPro S, which follows the 2-in-1 detachable format popularised by the Surface, Samsung may have wished it had waited for another 12 months. Because the TabPro S is very much a first-generation device. For every positive feature, there’s a major flaw, and its biggest problems surround the design of the keyboard. On the plus side, the keyboard case protects the tablet on both sides, and…

PRICE Core m3, £499 (£599 inc VAT), includes keyboard and stylus The HP Spectre x2 is the consumer version of the Elite x2 (see p84), but HP hasn’t spent much time tweaking the look and design. Even from quite close up the two products look near-identical. Just like the Elite x2, the Spectre x2 has a cloth-backed metal keyboard cover that attaches to a well-made silver-and-black Windows 10 tablet. The tablet has a built-in kickstand that pops out at the rear at the flick of a switch, and the screen is the same size and resolution: a 12in IPS display with a 1,920 x 1,280 resolution and Windows-friendly 3:2 aspect ratio. The keyboard is excellent; the touchpad, which is much wider than the Elite x2’s, is less so. It’s responsive,…

PRICE £105 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk Arelative newcomer to the UK, IgniteNet offers cloud-based managed wireless services at an exceptionally low price. Its online portal costs a mere £69 per year, for unlimited sites, each of which may contain up to 500 access points. These can be any mixture of IgniteNet’s indoor and outdoor models. Here, we’re looking at the company’s latest SunSpot AC1200 unit, which delivers concurrent 2.4GHz 802.11n and 5GHz 802.11ac operations, and plenty more features besides. Unusually, the SunSpot has three network ports. The first is a Gigabit WAN port supporting PoE, with two additional 10/100 LAN ports. These allow wired devices to be attached directly to the AP, which will provision network and internet access for them. Details such as sites and wireless settings should be…

PRICE £686 exc VAT from morecomputers.com If you’re looking for a large-scale videoconferencing solution, Logitech’s Group is an all-in-one package that contains everything you need. It comprises a big 1080p camera with motorised pan and tilt and a 10x optical zoom; a large speakerphone base station, with internal omnidirectional mics; and a powered central hub to link them all together. It’s right at home in big meeting rooms, covering up to 14 participants. The camera and speakerphone each have 5m mini-DIN cables, the supplied USB cable is 2m long, and the power supply has a 3m cable. Its range can be expanded yet further with two additional microphone stations, which connect directly to the speakerphone base. Costing around £175 exc VAT for two, these have their own mute buttons and…

What do you do if you don’t trust the cloud? If you’re one of the many people who have fully embraced the online services that we typically refer to as “the cloud” then you may well find that an odd question. If I think about my personal stuff, I have several cloud storage services on the go: I use Google and Amazon’s music-streaming services; my PCs are backed up using both CrashPlan and Carbonite; my video security footage is stored on a couple of different cloud systems; my heating and hot water is controlled via Honeywell’s Evohome cloud-based system; and I have a few cloud-based VMs running on Azure and AWS. However, the most common use of cloud services is for backup. In particular, backing up mobile devices. Both Android…

This year goes down in the Cassidy memoirs as the one when my traditional PC maker contacts went progressively quieter – which would be a worrying sign, except that my connections with the Internet of Things businesses went off like a bomb. I was out of the UK for almost all of April, and forced into an embarrassing round of apology and negotiation about where I should be sitting on 1 May; that apparently being the most crowded day in the IoT presentation calendar. If I had been able to hire a jet helicopter to get from Amsterdam to Essen in about 40 minutes then I’d have avoided snubbing ThyssenKrupp Elevators for the second time in a row. And I’m truly sorry about that. There’s a big wide world outside…

EXAMINING SPACE ISN’T easy – there’s an awful lot of it. That’s why Dr Ingo Waldmann, a post-doctoral research associate at University College London, turned to computers for help in identifying the make-up of atmosphere around exoplanets. But what’s relatively easy for humans to do is difficult for machines: we’re simply better at pattern recognition than an unthinking algorithm could ever be. The issue is that it takes time to do it. For help, Dr Waldmann turned to machine learning, creating software called Robotic Exoplanet Recognition (RobERt, for short), which uses a neural network – artificial intelligence modelled on human brains. Dr Waldmann then trained RobERt with a database of 80,000 pieces of data to identify water, methane and other key spectra in the atmosphere around exoplanets. RobERt boasts a…