Table of contents for January 2017 in PC Pro

IN MY DEFENCE, she had a beguiling French accent. “You see,” she purred, “it wakes you with intelligence. It will make you have a good morning, yes?” I agreed, in part due to that accent, in part because my wake-up call that morning had hardly been genteel or enjoyable. At 5am, my Nexus 6P had emitted its torturing Drip alarm until I gave in and pulled back the covers, knowing the Eurostar wouldn’t wait. By 11am, we were trundling into Paris, and an hour later I found myself sitting next to the chairman and founder of Voxx International, John Shalam, and his wife Jane. Now 82, John founded what would go on to be a company with revenues of over $750 million – a distant cry from his first year…

1Lenovo moves in on Fujitsu PCs Lenovo is in talks to buy Fujitsu’sonce-great PC business. The world’s fourth-largest PC makeras recently as 2004,Fujitsu’s computer business has struggled ever since the emergence of smart phones and tablets.Lenovo has reportedly promised to keep current factories and employee sin place,and the move would bolster the Chinese company’sposition as the world’stop computer manufacturer by volume. 2 UK spooks spied unlawfully for 17 years Britain’s security forces secretly collected and stored avast amount of personal information unl awfully for almost two decades,according to the independent Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The tribunal said that the authorities controlling the collection and storage of data breached Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights,which protects the right to privacy. 3 Ethernet speed boost The IEEE has approved a…

Tech giants reportedly spend millions on development and security – but, as frequent hacks, breaches and leaks demonstrate that software remains vulnerable to attacks from both individuals and organised groups. This state of affairs raises an awkward question: if bounty hunters can identify flaws then why can’t the major software developers that write the software in the first place? Shouldn’t the well-paid in-house teams be able to spot the flaws either before launch or during testing? “A company such as Google does have a huge team working on security – it has tons of people looking for vulnerabilities,” said Adam Bacchus, chief bounty officer at HackerOne, which acts as a go-between for companies and hackers for a 20% commission of the prizes paid for spotting bugs. “But there are tons…

Don’t cling to outdated tech – tomorrow is a brighter day They say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but we’re cheating ourselves if we turn up our noses at the new I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder. But if you were to rummage through my various drawers and storage boxes, you might well imagine you’d stumbled on the home of a dedicated collector of rare and antique computer components. My insistence on hanging onto such things drives my wife crazy, but I’ve always maintained that it’s wise to hang onto legacy hardware. You never know when you might need to hook up an old hard disk, or bring an ancient digital camera out of retirement. @dariengs The problem with this argument is that I never actually do it.…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK .COM /PCPRO Last month, editor Tim Danton asked us for quotes on “Which technology brand have you recommended most over the years, and why?” My reply was “Google, since its cloudy goodness now serves most of my computing needs”. At the time, it felt like a dull answer, but ever since Google cluster-bombed the industry with new products on 5 October, I’ve felt pretty smug. That answer was based on the fact that Google has been handling my email, calendar and contacts in its cloud for many years now, letting me access them from any device and platform. Recently, I’ve found that the ever-increasing capabilities of Google Keep let me use it for much of my data storage too. Don’t be fooled by its Tonka Toy…

@ PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO it’s been a full 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee published the first ever website. Since then, best estimates suggest it’s been joined by well over a billion others – although nobody is quite sure how many of those are defunct, duplicates or devoted to cats (it’s an unreasonable percentage, that’s for certain). Deciding which sites have made the biggest impact over that quarter century was too big a job for the PC Pro editorial team, so we surveyed the experts in the field – you, our readers – to determine which of our long list of sites made the top 20. We then gave our small team of editors five discretionary picks to round out our list of the 25 most influential websites of all time. Each…

PRICE 32GB Pixel, £499 (£599 inc VAT); 32GB Pixel XL, £599 (£719 inc VAT) from play.google.com The new Google Pixel phone and its supersized cousin, the Google Pixel XL, represent a paradigm shift in the smartphone world. Although this isn’t the first time the search giant has sold smartphones under its own name, it’s the first time it has marketed them under the Pixel brand. That’s important, because this is Google finally stamping its own mark on a phone – and it’s a signal that it’s going directly after Apple. The clue is in the pricing, which is going to be a huge disappointment to fans (and I count myself among them) of the now-defunct Nexus brand. The Nexus name always stood for reasonable prices, great specifications and a chance…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £750 (£900 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk No prize for guessing who Asus is challenging with the Transformer 3 Pro. With its adjustable kickstand, folio keyboard and two-in-one design, it’s the spitting image of Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4. Asus is clearly hoping that its twist on the formula can steal some of Microsoft’s sales. If looks are the first hurdle, then the Transformer 3 Pro gets off to a strong start. The all-metal body strikes an almost perfect balance between solidity, heft and slender dimensions, and it’s lovely to hold in the hand. Somehow, it weighs a mere 800g. The striking resemblance to Microsoft’s iconic Surface includes the integrated kickstand at the rear. This swings out through 155 degrees, providing enough flexibility to use the tablet on a…

Littlehaschangedsincelast year,butthat’snobadthing –andabuilt-inVPNonly sweetensthedeal PRICE 1yr, 3 devices, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Kaspersky’s 2016 suite won our security suites Labs (see issue 265, p78) with its flawless performance in independent malware protection tests – and the 2017 edition carries on the good work. In the most recent round of testing by AV-Test.org, Kaspersky Internet Security 2017 achieved a perfect 100% protection score – not only against prevalent malware, but also against two months’ worth of never-beforeseen “zero-day” exploits. All without triggering a single false positive. Another traditional strength of Kaspersky has been its low impact on system performance. Inevitably, on-access scanning of websites and applications entails a certain overhead. However, on Windows 7, KIS 2017 slowed web-page loading times by a modest 7%, and its impact on applications…

@PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PC PRO PRICE $9 from getchip.com Next Thing Co’s CHIP computer, launched on the back of the Raspberry Pi’s success, met with scepticism when it landed on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. While the industry had praised the Raspberry Pi for being one of the first accessible single-board computers to retail for less than $30, here was a startup promising improved performance, more features and a smaller layout for only $9. With mass-production well under way, the sceptics have largely been silenced: Next Thing Co has produced a fully functional Raspberry Pi-like computer for $9. Sadly, you’ll have to spend more than that to get started. The CHIP borrows from the Raspberry Pi playbook by requiring you to already own certain hardware if you want to do something like, say,…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk I’ve never trusted digital voice assistants. Whenever I’ve used Siri, Cortana or Google Now, they either don’t work properly or they’re not quite useful enough to become an integral part of my life. It’s usually quicker to type a query into Google or open up a relevant app, which comes with the added advantage of not looking like an idiot as I bark orders at my phone. Truth be told, I still feel a bit of an idiot talking to the Amazon Echo, home to a voice assistant powered by the company’s own Alexa engine. And yet, this is the first time that I’ve been convinced by any such technology: not only does it work well, the way it works is so much…

Discover which CRM software can help your business sell more and retain customers for longer – and how to avoid the most common CRM pitfalls @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Customer experience, often abbreviated as CX, is the sum of all your customers’ interactions with your company and brand. It starts before someone even makes a purchase, when they’re still considering which product to choose, and continues for as long as they use your product or service. As an idea, customer experience dates to the 1976 White House report, Consumer Complaint Handling in America. This noted that US companies were losing customers because people were struggling to use increasingly complex products – and then couldn’t find help to fix the problems they were having. In the 1970s and 1980s, corporations such as Coca-Cola…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £27 exc VAT per user, per month from swiftpage.com/en-gb Unlike most other cloud CRMs, Act! Premium Cloud lets you install a desktop version that then syncs with your CRM database, hosted on the Act! servers. In theory, this provides the ease of software -as-a-service combined with the convenience of a desktop application. This would hold more true if the interface didn’t feel so old-fashioned. The busy interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Office before its makeover. In one sense this is good. Act! is complicated because it comes with a lot of features. There are, for example, five user roles — and the program allows you to specify how they interact not just with the different screens or records, but even with individual fields on a single screen.…

Everyone is familiar with the two most common uses of CRM technology: improving your sales process, and sharing customer information among colleagues so you can fix problems faster and spot opportunities sooner. If you have the right CRM, set up properly and used consistently, both benefits are real and relatively easy to realise. During the testing for this group test, for example, we converted a couple of leads solely based on the email-open notifications of the CRMs we were using at the time. We saw that a lead had opened one of our prospecting emails several times in a day. The next time they opened it, we sent a follow-up email right away — while they were still reading the first email; we won the business. And that’s just one…

@ P C P R O F A C E B O O K . C O M / P C P R O PRICE From £9.99 per month exc VAT from 123-reg.co.uk If you need a professional-looking website in quick time, the 123-reg Website Builder package could be just the ticket. The star of the show is its Site Editor, which provides a smart design console aimed squarely at users who don’t want to see so much as a single line of coding. We tried the Business + package, which includes three mailboxes, web analytics, automated site backup and the nifty InSites feature, which lets you customise content for different visitors. Domain registration is free for the first year, after which a .com TLD will cost £9.99 per year.…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Is Brexit something we need to worry about right now? It looks like it will be years before we actually leave. It does look that way. Current indications are that Article 50 won’t be triggered until early 2017, and following that we’ll remain full members of the EU for a further two years – unless an earlier exit is agreed, which doesn’t seem likely. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to sit back and do nothing. The implications of a looming Brexit are already being felt. One immediate question to ask is whether your IT department relies on employees or contractors who’ve come to the UK from other EU nations. So far there’s been no indication of what their legal status will be in a post-EU Britain,…

@ PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Paul debunks a social media warning, then dives into electrical theory to save you a few quid Let’s start this month with a warning that I’ve seen posted recently on social media. There are a few versions, but most start like this: “If you have an iPhone, you may want to read this! Apple has put a new feature into our phones with the last update and, when you hit agree to the terms and conditions, this new feature was listed in there that protects them and your service provider.” It then goes on to talk about the Wi-Fi Assist feature that was brought in with iOS 9. According to the post, “this ‘assists’ your Wi-Fi speed by using your data simultaneously. This is crazy, because the…

“There’s no case for believing that an ignored, uncommunicative antivirus is actually working, or appropriate” How do you determine whether you’re dealing with a freak event, or whether this state of affairs is the new normal? Not an easy question to answer, and not one that comes up often in the IT business. We’re a bit weird, if truth be known: talking a lot about innovation and leading-edge technologies, but often dealing with issues that play out over long periods of time. Although based on the people I find myself listening to these days, it isn’t “talking”. It’s more agonising, confessing, or worrying. What used to be a pretty dry business now has emotions, and that’s a far better measure of importance than any number of charts in PowerPoint. My…

CONNECTED TOASTERS, SMART coffee machines, and remotely accessible kettles are the silly side of IT, making the Internet of Things (IoT) sound more like laughable hype than the future of technology. But Elvira Wallis disagrees, and as the senior vice president of IoT at business software giant SAP, she reveals serious examples of how the combination of sensors, connectivity and data analytics can change how a company does business. It’s one reason SAP has announced plans to invest €2 billion in IoT. SAP has covered Trenitalia’s super-fast Frecciarossa trains with hundreds of smart, connected sensors that pull in 5,000 data points a second on components and how they’re running into its cloud. By applying its analytics and Big Data-churning software to the task it can predict when maintenance is needed.…

We take instant messaging for granted, but 150 years ago same-day messaging was a marvel achieved thanks to the first communications cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean. That first telegraph network is being celebrated with an exhibition of key artefacts as well as Victorian art at London’s Guildhall. Paintings by Edwin Landseer, Henry Moore and Edward John Poynter tell the story of the four attempts over nine years to lay the cable from Valentia Island in Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada. It weighed a tonne for every kilometre laid, but in return allowed messages to be sent from the US to the UK at a rate of eight words a minute. “The cable essentially marked the dawning of the digital age, which was as momentous for the Victorians as the…

@ PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM / PCPRO Karl Wright If you’re serious about keeping customers happy, and winning new business, then CRM software is your friend. Karl puts eight packages to the test on p78 Stuart Turton The rapid rise of technology has left many on the wrong side of the digital divide. Stuart speaks to some late converts on p44 Vaughn Highfield Will it be the Oculus Rift? Microsoft HoloLens? HTC Vive? If Vaughn is right, none of the above: the PlayStation VR will bring VR mainstream. See p60 Steve Greenfield Too many of us leave our networks vulnerable. Steve Greenfield, an expert in network security, provides tips for homes and businesses. See p116…

START 1994 Congratulations! You’ve founded a company with a ridiculous name: “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Rename it “Yahoo!” and roll the dice... 1996 You’re in the money! IPO raises $33.8 million through the sale of 2.6 million shares. 1997 Buy RocketMail and rebrand the service as Yahoo Mail – the tool that will keep driving people to your sites for two decades. 1998 Weblore states you turn down the option to buy or license technology from a fledgling Google, seeing search as unimportant. Skip a turn as rival gains a foothold. 1999 Buy $4.6 billion web host GeoCities and drop $5.7 billion on music service Broadcast.com – $10 billion for purchases that are defunct within a decade. 2000 Having not bought nascent Google, agree (significantly…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £899 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake CPUs, super-fast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fl y through tasks, and the design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. REVIEW Issue 257, p64 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga A dream laptop that turns into a 14in tablet with the swivel of a keyboard – yet it still weighs under 1.3kg. Simply beautiful design from Lenovo. From £1,290; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 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.…

@ PCPRO FACEBOOK .COM /PCPRO Anyone fancy a breather? Take five? I’m thinking five years. Seriously. Five years of doing absolutely nothing groundbreaking on the tech front. Mothball the R&D labs, sign an amnesty on launching new products, give ourselves a chance to catch up with what we have. The thought occurred to me after a recent PC Pro podcast in which we were discussing the legacy of Steve Jobs and how things hadn’t changed dramatically at Apple since his death five years ago. No TV, no self-driving car, no VR nonsense: Apple is still largely reliant on the same iPhone, iPad, Mac lineup as it was when Jobs passed. Indeed, we’ve grown so used to rabid innovation that a period of (astoundingly profitable) product refinement makes it look like…

Microsoft’s hidden agenda? I was shocked to read recently that Microsoft intends to release a monthly update for Windows 7 and 8, starting in October, like it does for Windows 10. This is in place of releasing updates as and when they’re required. The end user won’t have any say as to whether they need everything that’s inside that monthly update, the updates will be automatically installed and Microsoft won’t be providing any specific information about the content. While this will ensure that I receive all the necessary security patches, it opens up the potential for Microsoft to download and install files that I don’t need or want. I look back to just one year ago when Microsoft downloaded and installed 6GB of Windows 10 files onto my Windows 8.1…

@PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PC PRO For a man sitting in Croydon’s Digital Zone, a centre designed to equip people with basic computing skills, Arthur James Roach doesn’t appear to be having any trouble using computers at all. Sat in his sun hat and shorts, despite the dark clouds and drizzle outside, the 62-year-old laughs when I accuse him of being a ringer. “I’d never used a computer in my life until I came to the Digital Zone in October last year,” he said. “I actually came to make a complaint about my benefits and she [the receptionist at Croydon Council] said to me ‘Mr Roach, we need to take your email address’, and I just said ‘what’s that?’ I didn’t have a clue what an email address was.” Arthur is far…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk Yoyotech has chosen an interesting name for this gaming PC. A black box normally means a device you can’t peer inside: just something you feed information into and await its output. Here, with three tinted glass sides and large fans glowing ghostly white behind them, you’re tempted to gaze inside whenever it’s switched on. Yoyotech ensures no unsightly wires spoil your view. The few exposed cables curl, tightly bound, behind black shields so you only see them for the minimum length. Even the hard disk drives are tucked out of sight. To access the two 3.5in bays, one of which Yoyotech fills with a 2TB 7,200rpm Toshiba disk, you must undo the four thumbscrews that keep the right-hand sheet of glass…

PRICE £292 (£350 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk First things first: the PlayStation VR isn’t trying to be the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Sony has worked supremely hard with developers to bring original content to PlayStation VR that’s far beyond what either HTC or Oculus have managed. If virtual reality is going to succeed, this is the way to make it happen – which is why this is probably the one and only review of a games system you’ll ever see in PC Pro. Unlike the competition, Sony’s headset draws upon late-noughties sci-fi for design inspiration. The seven front-facing blue tracking lights, along with its mix of black and white plastic and curved visor, make this look more like something out of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek than the subdued VR…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PC PRO PRICE 1yr, 3 devices, £21 (£25 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Bitdefender Internet Security is notable for its Autopilot mode, which suppresses all popups and alerts in favour of silent protection. If you’re regularly tinkering with obscure downloads and tweaking your network settings, you might prefer a more interactive approach, but for those who are less technically inclined, or simply don’t like being interrupted, it’s a big attraction. It’s an established performer, too: according to AV-Test.org, last year’s release of the suite scored 100% against both established malware and zero-day threats; in the lab’s latest tests, the 2017 release matched those impeccable scores. But while BIS 2017 lives up to its predecessor’s performance, it brings little extra to the table. The ransomware protection module is now…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PC PRO PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from wileyfox.com Wileyfox is that rare thing: a British smartphone maker. Its phones target the budget end of the market, with 2015’s £119 Swift followed by the £90 Spark in 2016. The Spark was underwhelming, but the X – its upmarket sibling – is a much stronger proposition. £50 more buys a larger 5.5in display, 16GB of storage rather than 8GB, twice the RAM at 2GB, a bigger battery and a 13-megapixel camera. The Spark X still has some things in common with its little brother – namely, the overall design, quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek 6735 processor and 720 x 1,280 resolution. It’s still chunky, measuring 8.8mm at its thinnest point, but the classy soft-touch rear gives it an air of…

PRICE £43 (£50 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Echo isn’t horribly expensive, but if you want one in every room then the cost will quickly rack up. Amazon’s answer is the cut-down Echo Dot – the hockey-puckshaped appliance pictured opposite. At £50 it’s far more affordable than the Echo, yet it can do all the same tricks. The same seven-microphone array picks up commands from anywhere in the room, and the Dot can access all the same services, devices and skills as its sibling. What’s missing is the woofer: the Dot can talk and play music just like the full-sized Echo, but its tiny built-in speaker is much quieter, and wholly lacking in bass. Still, it’s good enough for a kitchen or bedroom, and for more juice you can connect…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £60 exc VAT per user, per month from salesforce.com/uk Salesforce Lightning Professional includes email integration, contact management, pipeline management, email marketing, sharing and collaboration tools, and lets you send 5,000 emails per day. For £60 per user, per month, you can have unlimited contacts. Using a mixture of roles, record types and profiles, Salesforce allows you to control who sees and controls cases, contacts and opportunities. You can also limit access by IP address and create profiles that define how a user can access features and settings within the program. You can then add those settings to as many user accounts as you like. Collaboration features include Groups, which give users with a common interest a place to share messages, files and links to important records. Users…

 Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers  Portable printer HP's mini all-in-one could be perfect for mobile workers p103  The Business Question How can my business trade across Europe after Brexit? p104  Cheat Sheet Brace yourself for Brexit: Davey Winder reveals all p106 Every business needs an online presence. The web is the first place customers will look to find out more about your company, so even if you aren’t selling anything, it’s important to have information online about who you are, the services you offer and how you can be contacted. If you don’t yet have an online presence, it may seem like a major project, but these days it couldn’t be easier. Web-hosting companies want your custom and offer tools to create a professional…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £182 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Aimed at professionals on the move, HP’s OfficeJet 250 Mobile AIO cleverly combines colour print, copy and scan functions in an portable package. It offers both USB 2 and wireless support, with a lithium-ion battery that HP reckons will print 225 ISO pages on a single charge, and sells for less than £200. At 3kg, it isn’t something you’ll want to carry with you everywhere you go, but it folds up into a neat package measuring 380 x 198 x 91mm (WDH) that can be transported in a large bag or briefcase. When it’s time to print, the top cover opens up into a 50-page input feeder, with a 2.65in colour LCD touchscreen popping up at the front. The scanner and its…

“Home computing environments have grown organically, with no thought to the security architecture” @steveonsecurity The challenge with working in cybersecurity and risk management is that it’s hard to talk about what you do without breaching client confidentiality – and in some cases, the Official Secrets Act. So how can I give you an insight into my world that you can apply to home or business life? Today’s home computing environment has become almost as complex as the office computing environments where I started my security career. You may not be running 20 Windows for Workgroups PCs and a Novell NetWare server, but a modern family may easily have 20 computing devices, networked together and sharing information from a “file server” in the cloud. Just like many businesses, home computing environments…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future Why the IoT is serious business Putting Wi-Fi on coffee machines makes more sense in retail p126 Why drones need delivery vans For now, at least. We take a look at Mercedes’ futuristic Vision Van p127 Geek Day Out Relive the era of the telegraph in London’s Guildhall p128 The dead will overrun Facebook. We’ll chat with our ancestors online. Memorials won’t be cut from stone, but carved out in pixels. While the idea of never letting go of lost loved ones via digital personas may sound like an episode of Black Mirror, dealing with grief using modern rituals needn’t be a sci-fi nightmare. To discover more, PC Pro spoke to experts on modern death at Nesta’s…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK .COM /PC PRO I’m so tired of passwords. So tired, indeed, that I don’t use them anymore. For my phone, I use a fingerprint. Since the latest releases from Apple, my Watch unlocks my desktop and laptop computers. If I find myself in front of my Microsoft Surface Book, and it hasn’t crashed yet again, Windows Hello decides my security credentials by looking at my ugly mug (that’s my face, not the steaming cup of heavyweight coffee sat on my desk). When I visit a website that needs a password, my constant companion Dashlane rushes in to fill out the details for me. If I sign up to a new website, it helpfully generates a complicated random password and then saves it. I have no meaningful…

Background and analysis on all the important news stories Infographic: The Yahoo game Put yourself in the shoes of previous Yahoo CEOs p12 Amazon broadband The retailer is looking to boost Prime with an ISP service p13 PC Probe: Bounty hunters Why software giants are turning to bounty hunters p14 SAMSUNG HAS SENT ITS Note 7 phablet to landfill after failing to solve its overheating battery problems, but an industry expert has told PC Pro that the crisis is far from extinguished. Samsung was forced to recall and replace millions of devices following reports of several Galaxy Note 7 handsets catching fire. Recurring faults with replacement devices forced Samsung to eventually cease production of the Note 7, costing the company billions of pounds and incalculable damage to its reputation. But…

IT’S HARD TO FIND anything Amazon doesn’t sell, and that list could soon extend to broadband connections. According to sources “briefed on the matter” that spoke to The Information, the retail giant is considering offering broadband as part of its Prime package, but how the company would charge is unclear. Amazon told PC Pro that it “wouldn’t comment on rumour and speculation”, but hasn’t denied the plans. Notably, a broadband service could bolster the company’s push into the home with devices such as the connected Echo speaker (see p72). Amazon isn’t expected to roll out any cables in the UK; it’s more likely to enter a wholesale arrangement with another provider. However, it could still undercut dedicated ISPs if it offers broadband as a low-cost reward for subscribing to Prime.…

Amazon is a fun company to watch: delivery drones! Auto-order buttons for toilet paper! Voice-based magic wands for making shopping lists! But it’s becoming a less entertaining place to shop. As someone who’d prefer to never step foot in a shopping centre again, and who accidentally signed up for Prime two years ago – giving me unlimited, free delivery on selected items – I do a lot of shopping on Amazon. What used to be a two-minute job has now become complicated, as a result of dodgy reviews, confusing listings and unintelligible delivery rules. For example, search for a product that has multiple options, such as a basic T-shirt. The £5 option in blue will be included on Prime delivery, except in a size small. The orange version, however, costs…

First things first – why shouldn’t I just march into my local retailer and buy whatever I like? We wouldn’t dream of stopping you, but there are some excellent reasons to use a specialist manufacturer of PCs. Chief among these is to ensure you get the right specification for your needs. Retail stores inevitably hold a limited selection of computers, and they may well have been specified for a consumer rather than a business. And then there’s the small matter of the chassis... The chassis? But they’re all made of metal and plastic, right? There’s an enormous range of chassis out there, all designed for different purposes. You might discover distracting lights that are more in keeping with a teenager’s bedroom than a front-of-office desk; you might find that what…

Everyone knows YouTube. It’s as famous as the BBC, bigger than Netflix and, according to Alexa, the second most popular site on the web. Only its parent company, Google, beats it. In turn, it’s launched the careers of countless YouTube stars, who broadcast everything from news and reviews to make-up tips and movie trailers. Even for those who prefer to stay behind the camera, YouTubing can be lucrative: reputedly, certain cat video channels earn their uploaders thousands of dollars a month. To make it big on YouTube requires a degree of luck. We can’t give you that, but we can show you how to go beyond the basics, offering you the best chance yet of earning yourself both a following and an income. Upload and edit Most professionals assemble and…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Asus ZenPad 3S 10 initially seems expensive for an Android tablet: £300 is a lot when you can buy a 10in Android device for less than £200. As soon as you pick up this ZenPad, however, its diamond-cut chamfered edges and super-slim 5.3mm bezels go a long way to make that price more palatable. Its all-metal body is gorgeously svelte at 7.15mm thick, and it doesn’t flex under pressure. A fingerprint reader built into the home button adds another touch of class. And perhaps it doesn’t seem quite so expensive when you consider that its 9.7in, 2,048 x 1,536 IPS display is a direct match for Apple’s 9.7in iPad Pro (£549) and the Samsung Tab S2 9.7 (£350 from currys.co.uk).…

@ PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO There are many ways to scan photos, including the scanner built into so many of today’s household printers, but it doesn’t take long before the job becomes tiresome. Maybe the quality is a bit questionable; perhaps you can’t quite straighten the picture; perhaps you’re just worried that your precious photos could be damaged. Plustek, the Taiwanese photo and document scanner manufacturer, has launched a new photo scanner to tackle all these problems. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it comes with all the software you need to make tweaking and managing the end results simple. The Plustek ePhoto Z300 is clever enough to automatically detect photos – or, indeed, documents – once placed in the device and scans at up to 300dpi. It even comes with…

PRICE Free from hubspot.com @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO HubSpot may be free, but it isn’t lumbered with the common limitations of freemium cloud software. You can have as many users as you like and up to a million contacts. Sound too good to be true? There’s reason to be suspicious, with many "standard" CRM features only available as paid-for extras, but there’s still plenty to like. As with all the products on review, HubSpot is cloud-based. Log in using your browser and the first screen you’ll see is the main dashboard. It shows you what deals are in your sales pipeline, recent activity such as calls made and emails sent, and it contains a link to the reporting function. It’s easy to use – probably the easiest of all the CRMs here.…

PRICE £15 exc VAT per user, per month (and a £15 flat fee) from neopost.co.uk @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Neopost’s origins are in the manufacturing of franking machines, which it supplies to business customers. However, in recent years it’s been branching out into business communications in general, including digital communications. Its newly launched CRM is powered by the well-known enterprise-resource planning system Odoo, customised for simplicity and ease of use. The CRM costs £15 per user, per month, which is highly competitive for this segment. However, there is a £15 flat fee — so your one user costs £30, two £45, and so on. Your subscription includes a customised setup and four hours of tuition, which is also excellent value. The default package includes five applications: the contact manager, sales-pipeline module, calendar,…

@ P C P R O F A C E B O O K . C O M / P C P R O Network Business Focus PRICE From £4.99 per month exc VAT from 1and1.co.uk 1&1 is one of the world's largest web-hosting companies – and its design tools are among the easiest to use. This means it’s a great choice for small businesses making their first foray online. There’s a range of packages on offer under the MyWebsite banner, but the Basic tier starts at a very pocket-friendly £4.99 a month for the first year, rising to £9.99 thereafter. That price includes one domain, a website editor for unlimited pages, SSL security and 50GB of storage. You also get access to a library of over 20 million images…

@ P C P R O F A C E B O O K . C O M / P C P R O PRICE From £4.69 per month exc VAT from ovh.co.uk] With a starting price of less than a fiver a month, OVH’s web-hosting service is excellent value. Its Professional package offers a free domain name for the first year, 250GB of web storage, up to four databases and a great email package, supporting up to 100 accounts with 5GB of storage per user, plus anti-spam, antivirus and webmail. You can host up to ten independent websites, all managed from a central web console, with your email linked to the main domain. When it comes to creating these sites you’ll have to get your hands dirty, since no…

“The love affair was over, its deranged battery support and lack of stability meant it wasn’t trustworthy” Having initially been disappointed by the Surface Book after purchase, an update of the device sees Jon fall back in love with it... well, a little @jonhoneyball Ineeded a Windows 10 session. Not one running in a VM, which is my preferred mode of operation, but something running on real hardware. I reached for my Dell XPS 13, only to discover that it had completely eaten its SSD and all the contents therein. With a sigh, I reached for the other one, only to find it was pretty much in the same state in which I bought it some months back. I reached for the working XPS 13, about to hunt for things…

“Google insists this is a smart messaging app that helps you say and do more; I say, but at what cost?” So Google has brought us a new messenger app that comes with all kinds of bells and whistles, not least the ability to learn stuff about us and suggest likely replies. This is courtesy of some machine learning built into the servers behind the scenes, and pushed to the front of the app UI by way of the Google Assistant. Google insists this is a “smart messaging app” that “helps you say and do more.” I say, but at what cost? Sure, it’s clever to incorporate basic AI into the app that lets it contribute to the conversation in a thread without you actually typing anything. It does this…

Eternime Upload your social accounts and chat messages, create a 3D avatar, and once you pass away, those you’ve left behind will be able to have text conversations with your Siri-like replacement. Your great-great grandchildren can learn about you without listening to dull stories from their grandparents, but by talking to you and hearing your stories. The site remains in private beta, but more than 33,000 have signed up. eterni.me Loggacy This is a social network, letting you upload photos and videos, tag family and friends, and create a timeline of your favourite memories. But unlike Facebook, it’s considered death. Your profile will remain the same after you pass away, letting “future generations learn all about you, as you intended them to”. Of course, it’s entirely up to you if…