Table of contents for December 2017 in PC Pro

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO HUMANS MANAGE TO straddle the twin posts of cleverness and stupidity with extraordinary levels of grace. I’m not just talking about the apparent dichotomy of a civilisation that has both mastered fire and created TOWIE – I’ll leave that one for future historians – but that we virtually drown ourselves in ephemeral information while ignoring the important data that should be guiding our decisions. The data I’m talking about here stems from over 6,000 people taking part in our Excellence Awards; outside of the ever-excellent Which?, ours is the only in-depth, longterm, British investigation into how good the tech products we buy actually are. Which begs the question, why? First, of course, it’s difficult. While the survey doesn’t take too long to complete – just under eight minutes…

1 Uber dealt London blow Uber ’s miserable 2017 – which has seen the company hounded over claims of sexism, bullying and not tackling driver safety – continued when Transport for London (TfL) chose not to renew the ride-hailing company’s licence for the capital. TfL bosses said the company’s “ approach and conduct demonstrated a lack of corporate responsibility ”. 2 Equifax hack: a catalogue of incompetence Red faces all round at the credit rating company Equifax after a breach that impacted 143 million customers and 400,000 UK consumers revealed basic weaknesses in the company’s privacy protection plans. British users ’ details were only stored on the US servers due to a five year “ process failure ”, and the hack was made via an Adobe vulnerability that should have…

Chair: Norman Lamb | Liberal Democrats Education/background: Bachelor of laws, voted against ID cards and mass surveillance Bill Grant | Conservative Education/background: Former fireman Darren Jones | Labour Education/background: Human bioscience degree and a telecommunications and technology solicitor Clive Lewis | Labour Education/background: Economics degree and journalism Stephen Metcalfe | Conservative Education/background: Worked in the family printing business, IT and e-government, voted for mass surveillance Graham Stringer | Labour Education/background: Chemistry and trustee of the climate-change-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, dismisses dyslexia as “fiction” Martin Whitfield | Labour Education/background: Law and teaching, called for ban on anonymous social media accounts Neil O’Brien | Conservative Education/background: A PPE degree Adam Holloway | Conservative Education/background: Social and political sciences degree, TV journalist Vicky Ford | Conservative Education/background: Maths and economics degree, banking…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO KEYFACTS Rotageek is a cloud-based system that allows companies to intelligently manage staff rotas based on customer demand and the preferences of its staff. LOCATION London FOUNDED 2009 EMPLOYEES 26 WEBSITE rotageek.com There are a gazillion ways in which you could imagine stressful situations for a doctor, but managing the shift rota probably isn’t one of them. Yet that’s the problem Chris McCullough encountered on his very first day at work. An A&E doctor for 16 years, McCullough eventually took the brave decision to quit medicine and devote himself full-time to Rotageek, scheduling software that saves managers from having to organise shifts, breaks and holidays by hand. Spurned by the NHS, McCullough suddenly found businesses knocking at his door for the software, which is now used by companies…

@njkobie Silicon Valley doesn’t like people and wants us to be unhappy. That’s the only explanation behind the latest startup idea to win $2.5 million in funding. Here’s the skinny: smart, automated retail boxes in every apartment, office, gym and university campus — the only places that Silicon Valley bros can imagine you’d ever go. (Library? What’s that? Public transport? Nah, mate, it won’t fit in an Uber.) The cupboards will use machine learning to decide which necessities to stock and you can buy with a swipe of your phone. In other words, the founders — Blah and Blah, both formerly of Google — have invented vending machines. While it’s handy to offer more useful products than sweets and cola, it’s hardly innovative when you’ve been able to buy books,…

Eighteen years ago, I worked for a company that provided me with a car and a laptop. The car was renewed every three months and it always had some teething issues. The laptop ran on Windows XP, was always reliable and never changed. These days, I drive an 18-year-old car that never breaks down, but the same can’t be said for my laptop. There’s nothing wrong with the laptop; that’s fine. It’s the monthly patches and the major bi-annual update that drive me insane. It’s got to the point where I feel like ditching anything to do with Microsoft forever. How can a 300MB update take three hours to download and install on a Core i5 machine with an SSD? And don’t get me started on the freezes and driver issues…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Laptop of the Year Dell XPS 13 (2017) Sponsoredby We think this is a first: for a piece of hardware design to be so marketleading that it wins our Laptop of the Year award for the third year running, with just minor tweaks along the way. “While Dell has added a 2-in-1 version of the XPS 13, the original is still the best,” said Sasha Muller, senior editor of ExpertReviews.co.uk. “It’s faster than ever and that 13.3in, edge-to-edge screen remains a joy to behold.” Smartphone of the Year Samsung Galaxy S8 Sponsoredby “It’s tough coming up with market-leading smartphone designs, year after year, but that’s exactly what Samsung has done with the Galaxy S8,” explained Jonathan Bray, reviews editor of our sister site Alphr.com, who certainly wasn’t short…

One of the common principles of blockchain services is that they return revenue to the user, often in exchange for their data. Storj.io, however, lets you make money by storing other people’s files. Storj.io is the blockchain equivalent of Dropbox. But its USP is that it allows you to rent out spare space on your disk drives in exchange for Storj, a cryptocurrency similar to Ethereum. Storj “farmers” – people with disk space to spare – can set their own rates for storage rental, in much the same way you decide how much to charge for your spare room on Airbnb. This does raise some tricky questions. What if somebody uploads something illegal – such as child abuse images – onto your disk drives? Are you at risk? “The farmer…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO With the US and North Korea playing nuclear poker and the Doomsday Clock ticking ever closer to midnight, it’s time to consider how the hell we are going to get through this, well, hell. There’s never been a more apt time to turn “prepper” and follow the lead of survivalists making ready for the apocalypse by storing food supplies and preparing a “bug-out bag” for when the nukes start landing. There are a few items common on bug-out bag lists – rope, knives, rain poncho, long-lasting food, water – that you should surely include. But alongside keeping fed and fending off thieves, we would also like to stay connected – life without the internet simply isn’t worth living, and if Trump is going to spark a real-life disaster…

“Unfortunately, no amount of bribing Panasonic execs on its IFA stand could reveal the SC-GA10’s price” PRICE To be announced ON SALE Early 2018 Voice-activated speakers are currently more fashionable than Donald Trump memes, with manufacturers queueing up to produce rivals to Amazon Echo and Google Home. While many are trying to win custom through price drops or extra features, Panasonic has opted for a more curious route: sound quality. The speaker has two 20mm soft dome tweeters, providing a full 180 degrees of sound, but it’s the 80mm woofer with Panasonic’s Dual Voice Coil that separates it. This technology is used in cars, so you can imagine the level of sound it produces in the living room. All straight edges and minimalism, it comes in two colours: black or…

PRICE £200 ON SALE November 2017 When you price a smart speaker at £200, you must be confident yours is something special. And Sony surely is. Its obvious differentiator is a LED screen lurking beneath the mesh exterior, which you can use to display the time, view alarms or check the volume counter (the screen can be switched off too). But what actually sets Sony’s speaker apart from the crowd is gesture controls. For instance, by tracing a circle in the air over the top of the speaker with your finger you’ll adjust the volume. Swiping your palm over the top changes the track you’re listening to. It also has automated volume control, adjusting to your environment. In terms of features, Sony matches Google Home except for the odd decision…

Our review concentrates on the iPhone 8 Plus, but you may be wondering whether the plain iPhone 8 is a better choice for you. Here’s a rundown of how the two compare. Display This is the biggest difference between the two models. Both feature an IPS display with True Tone technology, but the iPhone 8 has a 4.7in 1,334 x 750 resolution (326ppi) against the iPhone 8 Plus’ 5.5in, 1,920 x 1,080 screen (401ppi). Design Due to that smaller screen, the iPhone 8 is significantly more compact than the iPhone 8 Plus (they’re the same dimensions as the 7 and 7 Plus respectively). The smaller phone weighs 148g, so 54g lighter, and is also fractionally slimmer: 7.3mm against 7.5mm. It’s 20mm shorter and 11mm narrower too. They share the same…

PRICE 64GB, £375 (£450 inc VAT) from carphonewarehouse.com “Asus claims you can fit twice as much into view as you can on a standard phone’s camera – handy for landscapes and groups” In contrast to the Sony Xperia XZ1 opposite, and Asus’ own ZenFone AR last month (see issue 277, p64), the ZenFone 4 doesn’t rely on gimmicks. This refined phone has the OnePlus 5 in its sights – a theory reinforced by its price. At £450, it costs exactly the same as our midrange phone of choice. Where it differs is its twin-camera setup. While the OnePlus 5 opted for a 2x telephoto lens as its secondary camera, the ZenFone 4’s is a wideangle affair. With an 8-megapixel resolution, and 120-degree angle of view, it complements the 12-megapixel f/1.8 main…

Total value this month £121 @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Paragon Backup & Recovery 15 Home ■ Full product worth £22 ■ paragon-software.com KEEP YOUR DATA safe with this comprehensive backup tool. It lets you precisely select what you want to secure, from your master boot record to entire drives. You can even copy your system to a virtual disk file (all major formats are supported), ready for use in your hypervisor of choice. There’s also support for backing up email messages, accounts and address books in Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail. You can opt for full, differential or incremental backups (the latter including only new or modified files for improved efficiency), while a scheduler allows backup jobs to run unattended. The results can be saved to local, external or remote drives,…

PRICE 32GB, £474 (£569 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278tab3 If you’d given up hope of finding an Android tablet to match the quality of the iPad, Samsung has good news – and bad news. Let’s start with the good. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 is a gorgeous device. Admittedly, with its 9.7in 4:3 screen, it looks rather like an iPad, especially with the physical Home, Menu and Back buttons sitting beneath the screen. That’s no bad thing, though: virtual controls may be fashionable, but I much prefer buttons that don’t disappear when you’re running a full-screen app. And while the Galaxy Tab S3 may draw visual inspiration from Apple, when you hold it in your hand the impression is quite different. The edges are more rounded, and while the Tab S3…

PRICE To be confirmed from acer.com/uk The Iconia Tab 10 is a big brother to the Iconia One 10. That’s “big” purely in the figurative sense, mind you: physically it’s exactly the same size, and the casing has the same unfortunate plasticky feel. There are a decent few differences to discover, however. Ergonomically, the major change is a move of the volume rocker to the front of the chassis; it now falls under your left thumb when you hold the tablet in landscape mode. On the opposite side, Acer’s “MediaMaster” button cycles you through three preset video and audio profiles, designed for apps, music and movies respectively. It’s a distinctive feature, but the settings don’t make a huge difference, and the switch hardly needs to be directly under your thumb…

Alongside its regular Fire tablets, Amazon also offers special child-friendly editions of the Fire 7 and Fire HD 8. The tech specs are the same, but the tablet comes in a chunky rubberised casing – in blue, pink or yellow – to protect it against drops and bumps. And if your little one somehow still manages to break it, Amazon’s two-year “worry-free” warranty covers all accidental damage. The device runs the regular Fire OS, but activating your child’s user profile replaces the homescreen with a simple visual interface, providing easy access to age-appropriate videos from YouTube, plus any apps, books and videos that you’ve chosen to share from your main account. You can also optionally enable a basic web browser, which allows access to a preconfigured whitelist of childfriendly sites.…

PRICE 32GB, £225 (£270 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, the Asus ZenPad 3S 10 is evidently intended to bring something of the glamour of the iPad to the Android world. And like the Tab S3, it does so by closely copying Apple’s design. Thus we get another 9.7in screen, with – once again – a 2,048 x 1,536 resolution that makes for a Retinaperfect 264ppi. It’s not quite as vivid as the iPad’s panel, hitting a peak brightness of 426cd/m2, but it’s perfectly satisfactory for indoor use. Its contrast ratio is almost identical to the iPad’s too, so in visual terms at least, it’s a faithful imitator. Beneath the screen, the lozengeshaped Home button serves double duty as a fingerprint reader, while to either side…

PRICE 64GB, £275 (£330 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278yog While some tablets offer a keyboard as an expensive optional extra, the Yoga Book comes with one bolted directly on to the screen. You can use it like a laptop, or fold it back to emulate the classic tablet form factor. It’s a neat idea, but there’s a catch: the “keyboard” is a completely flat touch-sensitive surface. Its keys have no edges and no physical travel, so it’s very fiddly to type on: you do get a little haptic buzz when a keypress is registered, but it’s not a patch on the usual clip-on offerings. The folding design also makes the Yoga Book one of this month’s thickest contenders (tying with the Amazon Fire 7), and at 690g it’s the heaviest too,…

The Network Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers Cheat Sheet: Cyber-resilience Steve Cassidy dispels some myths about what this really means p99 IT upgrades that pay Seven IT investements that will save you money p102 Business Question Should my company use VR to cut costs or boost sales? p106 If your business is overflowing with paper records, that’s not a good look. Office rental costs are rising all the time, so it’s crazy for businesses to pay hefty monthly fees for space that’s being wasted on paper storage. Hunting around for physical papers can also be a waste of employee time. It’s time to get digitising. But what if you need to keep the originals of invoices, statements, legal papers and so forth? Even here,…

PRICE £296 exc VAT from cvpdigital.com Small businesses seeking a low-cost scanner will find Plustek’s SmartOffice PL4080 fits the bill nicely. It combines a fast 40ppm duplex ADF with a standard A4 colour flatbed scanner, and throws in Plustek’s intuitive DocAction software, all for a low price. The PL4080 has a small footprint, so it won’t take up much desk space – but be aware that it only has a USB connection, so you’ll need a Windows computer to host it. The scanner feels solidly built, but the hinges for the flatbed lid aren’t telescopic, so it’s a poor choice if you want to scan pages from thick books. Another notable aspect of the design is the absence of an output tray: the ADF just spits pages out a slot…

PRICE £396 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com The Open Networking (ON) initiative is great news for businesses – it provides an open platform for network switches that does away with vendor lock-in. This means you’re no longer at the mercy of vendors who release upgrades only as the mood takes them: you can choose from a wide range of Linuxbased firmware options. It’s an idea that Dell EMC has fully embraced, with a rapidly growing family of ON-ready appliances. Its new N1108P-ON switch – aimed at campus and SMB networks – is one of a six-member family of Layer 2 switches, all of which support ON in hardware with a variety of Gigabit port densities. The N1108P-ON sits at the more modest end of the range. It’s best suited to SMBs…

Clem has developed mobile apps, digital magazines and fitness programmes over the past decade, both in her native France and the UK @clementinevv When I started as a product manager, the position was so new that many firms had little idea over the function of such a role. In the past ten years, however, this position has been explained, theorised and refined in numerous books. There’s no shortage of detailed methods that you can apply when launching a new product. Handily, it’s even possible to translate it into five “easy” steps: know your customer, experiment, evaluate, build and then assess. In other words, the product manager takes the original idea and turns it into a real, profitable product for the business. That’s the theory, anyway. When I started as a…

It’s not often researchers scare themselves, but Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang created a neural network that “disturbed” them so much they nearly didn’t release it. Many think they shouldn’t have. The researchers from Stanford University trained a neural network to analyse two photos, guessing which one was the face of a gay or straight person. The paper (pcpro.link/278gay)in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claims the neural network was accurate significantly more often than humans. The neural network saw accuracy of 91% for men and 83% for women, well above the 61% and 54% accuracy rates of human judges. The researchers admit in the paper’s introduction that the “findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women”. Indeed, imagine the abuses of such…

On sale 9 November 2017 LABS Internet security suites Every major security suite tested, both free and paid-for. Find out which will keep you safe without slowing down your PC… FREE GIFT Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and we’ll send you a FREE Just Mobile Lazy Couch as a thank you. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. FEATURES Christmas gifts– for you! From £10 to over £1,000, we round up the gifts that PC Pro readers will genuinely love Can Facebook make you Like yourself? Social media is bad for our mental wellbeing – but it doesn’t have to be that way The rise,fall and rise of IPv6 The esoteric Internet Protocol upgrade that’s set…

Darien Graham-Smith After testing 14 tablets for a month, Darien’s tablets Labs has a few surprise winners, along with a couple that are rather more predictable. See p74 Dave Mitchell Every month, Dave puts the best business technology to the test in his lab, with desktop scanners under scrutiny this time. Turn to p92 for his verdict Nicole Kobie As well as revealing the future of technology from p124, Nicole has taken a light-hearted look at the tech we’ll need to survive the apocalypse from p48 Clementine Vioux As an ex-product manager for a company in crisis, Clementine has advice about how to succeed with projects – and explains why so many fail. See p116…

► SanDisk Ultra Plus microSD UHS-I 400GB Storage stalwart Western Digital has released what it claims to be the world’s highest capacity microSD card, with the SanDisk 400GB microSDXC doubling the capacity of its two-year old predecessor. The firm says the storage will be ideal for Android handsets and tablet users, as it’s part of the SDXC standard that has seen handset makers talk about their wares being expandable up to 2TB. Whether or not consumers will be willing to part with over £200 for an admittedly hefty slice of storage remains to be seen. “The only use case I can see for this higher capacity is for connected cameras and for users who use their phones as a camera a lot with new features, such as portrait mode, as…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO @dariengs I don’t know if it’s merely a quirk of the company I keep, but I’ve noticed that a love of technology tends to correlate with other interests. For example, it’s mostly the geeks I know who listen to weird, avant-garde music – or indeed create it themselves. Bicycles are another frequent interest: not necessarily the actual act of cycling, which is all a bit sweaty and inelegant, but gearing systems, brake assemblies and hybrid alloy frames – that’s the sort of thing a geek can get excited about. One of the most common shared interests among my fellow geeks is photography. It makes sense: digital cameras are technical things, and until a few years ago, we even used to review them in PC Pro. Reviews editor Jon…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Am I worried about a robot taking my job? The question triggers in my imagination (and probably yours) the vision of a shiny plastic humanoid, possibly bearing a Honda logo, whirring smoothly into my study, sitting down in my typist’s chair and tapping out this column on the keys of my laptop. But, of course, this isn’t what happens at all. Much of my job has already been automated. 200 years ago I’d be writing this in ink with a dip pen and forming each letter by hand. Now I press a key and the firmware of my computer forms each letter: I just choose the words and put them into order. When I finished 200 years ago I’d probably roll up the paper and hand it to…

Changing an IT system is usually a fraught process involving endless meetings to plan the deployment and justify the expense. Follow the steps opposite, however, and you could have a working PBX up and running in the cloud in under ten minutes. It would be wrong, though, to put all the emphasis on speed of setup. 3CX provides an award-winning, featurepacked PBX that gives small and medium-sized businesses a unified communications solution. A system that would have cost thousands of pounds just a few years ago. For example, you’ll see presence information for all signed-up members (perfect if you need to set your status to Away so you can finish that report uninterrupted). Your employees can send instant messages using the softphone clients (available for Android, iPhone, Mac and Windows),…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £430 with controllers ON SALE 17 October 2017 “The Dell Visor headset is sleek and even stylish, with its understated contours complemented by black controllers” Before we go any further, let’s talk acronyms. In the race to separate yourself from the real world, there are three ways you can engage in technological escapism: VR, AR and MR. Virtual reality is a 100% digital world, while augmented and mixed reality merely borrow digital elements to drop into a digitised version of your actual environment. The line between the latter two is so close that, for the purpose of this review, we’ll simply say AR (Microsoft, confusingly, is pushing the term Windows Mixed Reality). The Dell Visor supports VR and AR. Theoretically, this means it can do everything the…

PRICE $299 ON SALE Late 2017 Last year, Samsung’s wearable line was clearly defined. You had the Gear S3 for those who wanted a smartwatch they could pass off as a classical timepiece, if the onlooker was a tiny bit tipsy, and the Gear Fit2 for people who were all about the health and fitness. This year at IFA 2017, Samsung decided to close the Venn diagram for those stuck in the middle: welcome, Gear Sport. It looks closer to the S3, but it’s aimed at those who get their kicks on the trail, in the gym or even in the swimming pool. Because the first trick up the Gear Sport’s wristband is water resistance to a depth of 50m. Granted, it’s a little showy if the only other thing…

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

PRICE 64GB, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk ON SALE November 2017 Apple unveiled the iPhone X – pronounced iPhone 10 – at the Steve Jobs Theatre in Cupertino on the same day it launched the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and I was lucky enough to to get “hands on” with an early model. With its 5.8in edge-to-edge AMOLED display, it looks similar to the Samsung Galaxy S8, but labelling the iPhone X as any kind of rip-off would be unfair. The way it stretches from top to bottom is unique, and that’s in part because Apple has made the brave decision to ditch the Home button. It took me no time at all to become used to opening apps and returning to the home screen by swiping up, and…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “At default settings, the display looks extra vivid; some may like this, but everyone looks as if they’ve just been spray-tanned” PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from sonymobile.com Given the number of smartphones fighting for attention – just look at the rest of this month’s reviews section – it takes a lot to make a phone stand out. And the Sony Xperia XZ1 does that: what other phone supports 3D image scanning? Whether it’s genuinely useful or a gimmick is another matter. First thing’s first: the Xperia XZ1 is a great-looking phone. Comprising a completely flat front and flat rear, gently rounded side and sharply cut-off top and bottom edges, it resembles the £649 Sony Xperia XZ Premium (see issue 275, p68), the key difference being that the rear…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278cyb CyberLink always jumps on the latest technology trends quickly, and with version 16 of PowerDirector it’s hoping to get ahead of the curve for 360 video. Even if creating VR videos holds zero interest, there are numerous other handy new features as well. There are four different versions of PowerDirector 16 available: Deluxe, Ultra, Ultimate, and Ultimate Suite, ranging in price from £60 to £210. I focus on the £80 Ultra version here, but will also be looking at the key new features in AudioDirector 8 and ColorDirector 6, which come with the top Ultimate Suite bundle. (Avoid Deluxe: you lose features such as the capable multi-cam editor, so it’s a false economy.) The 360 support in PowerDirector 16 includes…

PRICE 8GB, £42 (£50 inc VAT) with special offers from pcpro.link/278fire7 Amazon’s Fire 7 is the smallest device here, and there’s certainly some appeal to the idea of a miniature tablet. It isn’t quite as pocket-friendly as it could be, though, thanks to a chunky bezel that bulks up the dimensions. The screen is a letdown, too. Its maximum brightness of 330cd/m² and 959:1 contrast ratio might sound all right, but colours are decidedly on the drab side, and in adverse lighting it’s quite reflective, making the Fire 7 harder to read than other tablets with ostensibly similar screens. Another issue is the 1,024 x 600 resolution, which is considerably lower than any other tablet here. The lack of space feels oppressive, and some apps may simply be unable to…

PRICE 128GB, £349 (£419 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Asmaller tablet usually means a lower price, but since Apple dropped the price of the regular iPad to £339 earlier this year, you’ll now pay quite a lot more for the current version of the mini. That might stick in the throat a bit, especially since you don’t get all the power of the full-sized iPad. The mini 4 uses Apple’s older A8 processor, and while it’s no slouch, it’s behind the curve. In the single-core Geekbench test, it scored 1,694 to the iPad’s 2,490, and in the multi-core benchmark it managed 3,058 while the larger tablet raced ahead with a score of 4,204. In GFXBench the disparity was even bigger: the mini managed just 15fps, while the iPad averaged 26fps. In…

PRICE 64GB, £399 (£479 inc VAT) from store.google.com While some tablets copy the design of the iPad, Google’s own-brand Pixel C confidently strikes out in a different direction. Its unique landscape format adopts the same 1.4:1 aspect ratio as a sheet of A4, and it’s ornamented with a fancy rainbow LED on the back that doubles as a charge indicator. There are no physical controls (aside from power and volume buttons), but Android’s standard virtual buttons are helpfully consigned to the corners of the display for easy thumbing. At 10.2in across the diagonal, the screen is slightly larger than the iPad’s. And while its maximum brightness of 451cd/m2 is lower, its excellent 1,550:1 contrast ratio is far better. Colours looks particularly lovely, with a rich, vivid appearance. The Pixel C…

PRICE 16GB, £333 (£400 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278nv If you fancy getting your mitts on Nvidia’s own-brand tablet, prepare to shop around: although only released in February, the Shield K1 has already been formally discontinued. You can still find it online, however, and as a distinctive proposition – an Android tablet designed specifically for gamers – it’s worth a closer look. First things first: as you’d very much hope, the Shield K1 makes a decent fist of 3D gaming. In the GFXBench Manhattan graphics test it kept up a solid average of 29fps, putting it in the same league as the Apple iPad, the Google Pixel C and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3. Admittedly, it’s helped along by its eight-inch 1,920 x 1,080 Full HD screen, which has fewer pixels…

PRICE £288 exc VAT from pcpro.link/278ads Brother’s ADS-3000N is aimed at mid-sized workgroups. For less than £400, it’s a solid deal: it supports both USB and Gigabit Ethernet network connections, and offers a fast 50ppm scan speed, a robust 5,000-page daily duty cycle and a generous software package. Alongside Brother’s own ControlCenter4 (CC4) management tool, that package includes Nuance’s PaperPort 14 SE digital file cabinet, plus ABBYY’s FineReader Pro 11 and PDF Transformer+ OCR tools. A remote network setup utility and system tray monitor are also provided – and just for good measure the scanner also has its own embedded web management console. Build quality is impressive. The paper input and output trays are reassuringly solid, and the input paper guides are firmly held in friction mounts: we found they…

PRICE £377 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk If you have a mountain of papers to digitise, the DocuMate 6440 from Xerox could be the answer: this USB-only scanner combines a big 80-page ADF with a fast quoted scan speed of 60ppm. In fact, in our tests, we discovered that the 6440 was even faster than advertised. Officially, at 200dpi it can churn through 60ppm – but Xerox’s OneTouch software, running on our host PC, managed to scan our 25-page sheaf of double-sided bank statements in only 22.5 seconds, in both colour and greyscale mode – an average scan rate of nearly 67ppm. Even when we moved up to 300dpi, our scan test completed in 33 seconds, for an equally impressive average of 45.5ppm. Only when we dialled the resolution up to…

PRICE Diskless (RN42600), £609 exc VAT from uk.insight.com Netgear’s ReadyNAS appliances are designed with a focus on data protection, and the six-bay RN426 promises to keep your data safer than ever. Netgear’s ReadyOS firmware already featured unlimited snapshots, copy-on-write protection and myriad backup tools, and now version 6.8 adds new private and public cloud capabilities. The RN426 is also the first NAS in the market based on Intel’s latest C3000 Series “Denverton” Atom CPUs – specifically the quad-core 2.1GHz Atom C3538. Not only does this chip promise snappy performance and low power consumption, it also brings support for DDR4 memory – although the supplied 4GB can’t be upgraded. There’s also a vacant mSATA slot on the motherboard, but this isn’t useful as the current version of ReadyOS doesn’t support SSD…

Jon is the MD of an IT consultancy that specialises in testing and deploying hardware @jonhoneyball About four years ago, I visited a local software company that appeared to be doing interesting things with OS installation tools. Called Centrality, its toolset allowed you to deploy Windows operating systems onto computers in a remarkably simple fashion. It had essentially written a WinPE (Windows Pre-Execution Environment) loader tool that could be net booted from a server, and this would then pull in the build of Windows you required. Not only that, it could also be configured to silently install all the necessary drivers, firmware updates and applications you’d need. Although somewhat rough around the edges, especially in terms of its management interface, it impressed. Indeed, it allowed you to simply wipe clean…

Davey is an award-winning journalist and consultant specialising in privacy and security issues @happygeek It’s been more than a year now since the No More Ransom initiative (nomoreransom.org) was launched by the Dutch National Police and Europol, alongside security vendors Kaspersky Lab and McAfee. This was well before the WannaCry and notPetya ransomware attacks – which begs the question: when it comes to such projects, how should we measure success? Well, if you look at the numbers without taking WannaCry or notPetya into account, you’d say that the initiative isn’t making much of a difference. Figures released by Kaspersky Lab in June 2017 show that ransomware has continued to grow as a threat. The total number of users encountering ransomware, just within the remit of this one vendor report, grew…

You’re looking for a restaurant for dinner, so turn to Yelp for help choosing. Here’s the first review: “I love this place. I have been going here for years and it is a great place to hang out with friends and family. I love the food and service. I have never had a bad experience when I am there.” Sounds ideal, but that review was written by a machine, not a human customer. Researchers from the University of Chicago teamed up with Yelp to train their neural network on the site’s existing, human-written reviews — and the results suggest artificial intelligence could easily write content that can fool us. “As a tool, everything comes with a positive side and a negative side,” Ben Zhao, one of the authors and a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO SOFTWARE FIRMS ARE facing a crisis of trust if they can’t protect the delivery mechanisms used to distribute their wares online, say security experts. The warning comes after a wave of malware infections were passed on to end users by reputable software companies after their distribution systems were compromised. The latest attack affected security company Avast, which recently bought system scrubber CCleaner – software that has millions of users globally and is a particular threat because it has access to Registry files. Hackers sabotaged CCleaner for at least a month, inserting a backdoor into updates to the application that landed on some two million PCs. “In the CCleaner case, we have a legitimate bit of software being distributed directly from the vendor, and it seems to have been…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO THE SCIENCE AND technology committee, which advises government on issues relating to industry, policy and research, has come under fire for unveiling a list of tech-illiterate men. At a time when UK education and industry policy has championed the importance of improving gender representation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects and jobs, the initial selection of committee members listed eight men and no women. Ironically, one of the central streams of work for the previous committee was “closing the STEM skill gap”, and a Campaign for Science and Engineering spokesperson told PC Pro the all-male committee was “a blow to the community”. Gender aside, it’s also debatable whether many of the members are qualified to sit on such a committee. Only two of the initial eight-man…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 (2017) Ultraportable from £1,199 from dell.co.uk Dell only needed to refine its brilliant XPS 13 design to keep top spot, and that’s what it does: it’s slightly quicker and adds more options, but it’s the edge-to-edge 13.3in display and compact chassis that lift it above the opposition. Oh, and it’s now available in Rose Gold. REVIEW Issuesue 270, p54 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top spot, but a nine-hour battery life, sleek design and – for a premium – the Touch Bar make this a stunning machine. From £1,249 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 268, p54 HP EliteBook x360 1030 G2 Want a convertible 13.3in laptop that only weighs 1.3kg, lasts for 10hrs and packs in…

@bazzacollins A few things dawn on a man when his progress bar reaches 40, as mine did recently. First, there is the realisation that your targeted internet ads are suddenly concerned with pensions, cruises and prostate cancer. Then there’s the wince-inducing moment when you realise you’re now among the veterans in the veterans’ football team you play for. And finally comes the conclusion that your threescore and ten is flashing by so swiftly, you haven’t got time to sod around with companies that don’t treat their customers properly. A few weeks ago, I got an email from Spotify, telling me about some of the new great features available to me as a family account holder. Jolly decent of them, obviously, except that I didn’t realise I was a family account…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO One eye on the past In reply to Keith MacIntyre and all those who ask, “if one is not engaged in anything illegal or underhand, what is there to fear?” (see issue 277, p28), look at your history books. An American company called CTR once bought a system for recording census data on cards from its inventor Herman Hollerith. In 1933, the German government announced plans for a census, and used Hollerith equipment to process it. All those people who weren’t engaged in anything underhand or illegal didn’t worry about ticking the box marked “Jewish”. The machinetabulated data was just what the Nazis needed to round them up. At some point, there may be a desire for the state to remove elements from the population whom it defines…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO HOW YOU DECIDE THE WINNERS PC Pro doesn’t decide the winners of the Technology Excellence Awards: you do. Each year, thousands of readers take part in a comprehensive three-month survey. We ask how satisfied you are with the quality of prints, reliability of your broadband, battery life of your laptop – and collate the figures to create the percentage scores you see in the tables. The maximum score a company can receive is 100%, where a reader declares themselves “very satisfied” with, say, customer support for their desktop PC. If they merely select satisfied, that’s 80%. And so on, until they reach “very dissatisfied”, which is 0%. So a score of 90% could be 50 people saying very satisfied (100%) and 50 saying satisfied (80%). We need feedback…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “There’s virtually no industry that someone isn’t promising to ‘revolutionise’ with blockchain tech” On the internet, so the saying goes, nobody knows you’re a dog. If your dog was tied to a blockchain, however, you’d know its name, age, pedigree, blood group and favourite brand of dog food. Blockchain threatens to bring the internet something it’s been lacking since its inception: trust. Whether that’s trust to pass money between you and a restaurant without paying bank fees; trust to automatically open the door on the apartment you’ve just rented on Airbnb; trust to vote electronically in a General Election and know that the Russians can’t possibly have fiddled with it; or trust that Amazon (to name just one firm at random) has paid all of its taxes. There’s…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO If your internet connection feels slow, it’s tempting to blame your broadband provider. But before you get on the phone to your ISP, check it’s not your Wi-Fi that’s causing the slowdown. There’s an easy way to do this. First, point your browser at speedtest.net from your regular laptop, and run the test to see what sort of connection speed you’re getting. Then, repeat the test from a PC or laptop that’s directly connected to your router via an Ethernet cable. If the second test generates a higher result than the first, the problem lies with your Wi-Fi. But don’t panic, as there are plenty of simple things you can do to improve matters. Router position and basic configuration The first step is also the easiest: make sure…

PRICE €80 ON SALE October 2017 Lenovo’s Tab 4 has been available since the start of this year but, on its own, didn’t seem anything special; just another affordable, durable Android tablet. With the introduction of the Home Assistant, suddenly it’s far more desirable – especially for those waiting for Amazon’s Echo Show. You can buy the Home Assistant on its own for €80 or bundled with the 8in Tab 4 for €300 (there’s currently no confirmed UK price). The speaker can be slotted into place or, exactly like an Amazon Echo, detached and used as you please. It’s set an angle, with two microphones and two speakers all contained within a black shell that’s a fraction under 10cm tall. The angle means the Tab 4 screen slants upwards when…

PRICE $169 ON SALE No UK date People love products that save them money, and the Nest line of thermostats certainly does that. The trouble is that devices that come with a £219 up-front cost (plus £50 or more installation fee) don’t feel like an option for penny-pinchers, no matter how good their long-term credentials. In short, the original line of Nest Thermostats were money-saving gadgets for people who didn’t really need to save money. The Google-owned company aims to rectify that with the Nest Thermostat E – a cheaper, less showy model with almost exactly the same specifications. By learning to match the temperature to people’s schedules and preferences, the smart heating system can ensure that their home is toasty when people need it to be, and cool when…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 64GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Remember the good old days when Apple revamped the design of its smartphones every two years, boosting the specifications in between? Recently it has stepped outside that tick-tock development cycle. The Apple iPhone 8 Plus might be the latest, greatest iPhone (at least until the iPhone X comes along; see p58), but the design template it’s based on is now entering its fourth year. There are tweaks – it has a new glass back, wireless charging and a dual-camera setup on the rear – but the iPhone 8 Plus looks the same as the iPhone 6 Plus did way back in 2014. The iPhone 8 Plus is, then, pretty easy to summarise. It’s the phone you buy if you’re a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “The first change is obvious: the Note 8 introduces a bezel-less design cribbed from the Samsung Galaxy S8” PRICE £690 (£828 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278not This time last year we were singing the praises of the fantastic, larger-than-life Galaxy Note 7. We awarded it top honours and, were it not for the small matter of a worldwide recall – following the emergence of a dangerous battery flaw – we’d probably still be recommending it now. The good news for phablet fans is that its successor, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, is finally here. Samsung has fixed the battery problem, but that’s not the only improvement. The first change is obvious as soon as you look at it: the Note 8 introduces a bezel-less design cribbed from the Galaxy…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “I saw the CPU hit 96°C at one point, meaning the x2 was a stone’s throw away from blue screening or an automatic shutdown” PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from store.hp.com The first HP Spectre x2 was a worthy Surface Pro rival: sleek and attractive, it also offered more for your money thanks to its bundled keyboard and stylus. But it was held back by a collection of problems, including a poor quality screen and below-average speakers. Just like Microsoft, HP has updated its consumer 2-in-1 for 2017. So, has HP finally found the magic formula? Once again, it certainly offers a better specification for your cash than the rival Surface Pro. While it costs a heady £1,499, that includes an Intel Core i7-7560U processor, 8GB of RAM…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 32GB, £149 (£179 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Having kicked its heels for years, Apple believes 4K’s time has finally come – and its latest streamer is fully equipped for this brave new world. It has iTunes and Netflix built in, while the Siricontrolled remote now searches across 60 services including BBC iPlayer, Now TV and HBO, with Amazon Prime Video coming this year. The box looks almost identical to its predecessor, but the Thunderbolt port on the rear has disappeared: now there’s only the figure-of-eight mains port, a single HDMI 2.0a output (enabling the extra colours that HDR10 and Dolby Vision bring) and Gigabit Ethernet. You can also connect via 802.11ac wireless. If you’re already inside the Apple ecosystem, setting up the Apple TV 4K is a…

PRICE 64GB, £641 (£769 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Look up “enormous” in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of the 12.9in iPad Pro. This isn’t just a slightly upscaled iPad: at 221 x 306mm, it’s larger than a sheet of A4. When you hold it in your hands it feels weirdly misproportioned – especially since, despite the huge screen, it’s just 6.9mm thick. Yet to my surprise, I soon found myself warming to the design. The trick is to forget about how you normally hold a tablet, and instead rest it on your arm, clipboard-style. At 677g it’s light enough to carry around comfortably, and though slim it feels reassuringly solid, with not an iota of give in its metal and glass chassis. If you’ve shelled out for the…

PRICE 32GB, £124 (£149 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278ace1 The Iconia One 10 is this month’s cheapest 1oin tablet. Unfortunately, it shows. The chunky plastic chassis feels anything but luxurious, and matters get worse when you turn on the screen: with a pixel density of just 149ppi, the Iconia One 10 has this month’s most blocky display. It’s also one of the dimmest screens here, with a maximum brightness of 298cd/m2. It looks like a cheap laptop panel from a decade ago: place the Acer Iconia One 10 next to an iPad and the comparison is downright embarrassing. Under the bonnet, things initially look more promising, as the MediaTek MT8167 processor is the same model as found in the much pricier Asus ZenPad 3S 10. However, Acer’s implementation is clocked more…

PRICE 16GB, £67 (£80 inc VAT) with special offers from pcpro.link/278fire8 Amazon’s Fire HD 8 follows much the same formula as the Fire 7; aside from the fact that our sample came with a lurid Canary Yellow back (other options are black, Marine Blue and Punch Red), the two devices look very similar. A few key improvements make it a much better tablet overall, however. One big difference is the screen, which not only grows to eight inches, but also gets a resolution boost to 1,280 x 800. That makes it distinctly sharper than the Fire 7’s display. Text still doesn’t match the sharpness of the Apple and Samsung tablets, but movies and games are as clean and crisp as you could ask for. Colours have the same slightly dull…

PRICE 64GB, £516 (£619 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk At first glance, you might mistake the iPad Pro 10.5in for a regular 9.7in iPad. The design is all but identical, and the size differential is small enough to overlook – although at 6.1mm the iPad Pro is noticeably thinner. Internally, though, the iPad Pro 10.5in is closer kin to the 12.9in iPad Pro. Both models use Apple’s supercharged A10X Fusion CPU; this helped the 10.5in iPad Pro whizz way ahead of the crowd in our single-core and multi-core benchmarks. And it offers even stronger gaming performance than the 12.9in model, achieving a peerless 58fps in the GFXBench Manhattan test – but that’s just because the screen is smaller, meaning that the GPU has fewer pixels to process. Battery life benefits slightly…

PRICE 16GB, £117 (£140 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/278hua On paper, the MediaPad T3 looks like a dud. Its 1.4GHz Snapdragon 425 is not a powerful processor: in our Geekbench performance tests it scored similarly to the Amazon Fire HD 8, which costs £60 less. Android runs smoothly, but there's little headroom for heavyweight apps. And you can forget about high-end 3D gaming: in the GFXBench Manhattan benchmark, the T3 took the wooden spoon with an average frame rate of just 6fps. The screen too is distinctly reminiscent of the eight-inch Fire tablet: it’s the same size and has the same 1,280 x 800 resolution, which translates to a sub-Retina pixel density of 189ppi. It’s not quite as bright – we measured it at 358cd/m2, while the Fire hit 455cd/m2 –…

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that my “View from the Labs” wrap-ups tend to follow a particular trajectory. At first, I’m cynical; then, after getting hands-on with the latest and greatest of whatever sort of thing I’m reviewing that month, I’m won over and end up wanting one for myself. With tablets, I’ve certainly had my reservations. I’ve tended to see the iPad as more of a fashion accessory than practical bit of kit: when it first appeared back in 2010, I recall writing a series of snippy blog posts, with titles such as “But what’s it for?” But as time and technology have marched on, I have to admit that tablets have found their place. Part of that is to do with the rise of…

PRICE £443 exc VAT from uk.insight.com The SP-1425 isn’t the fastest scanner in the world: in fact, with a top speed of 25ppm using the integrated ADF, it’s this month’s slowest. But it could still be a big time-saver for your business, thanks to Fujitsu’s innovative PaperStream Capture software, which streamlines the workflow by automating batch scans and handling all the image clean-up and processing functions for you. It’s easy to set up: as with most scanners, the software lets you create custom profiles, which here combine scanning and post-processing functions. Scan settings include things such as whether you want colour or greyscale output, scan resolution, paper sizes and single- or double-sided operation. You can also choose whether to scan to a local folder, a network location, an FTP server…

In business, the bottom line is the bottom line. It’s all about making – or saving – more money than you spend. When it comes to IT projects, though, it can be very hard to guarantee a return on your investment. You have to make all sorts of assumptions and projections about the benefits of your new systems, and offset them not only against the cost of purchase, but also against things like staff training, removal and recycling, and so forth – all those factors that make up your total cost of ownership. It’s understandable if senior management leans towards an “if it ain’t broke…” attitude. Still, some projects are a safer bet than others. Here’s my choice of top IT upgrades – some very practical, others more strategic –…

Paul owns an agency that helps businesses exploit the web, from sales to marketing and everything in between @PaulOckenden How do you quickly transfer a file from one machine to another, when the network between them is slow? Usually the answer is to simply copy the file onto a USB stick, walk to the other machine, then copy it off. But for reader Kieran Wood, it wasn’t quite as easy as that. He was trying to transfer a MKV video file, downloaded (legally, I assume!) from the internet between his MacBook and an Android TV box. The problem was that the movie file was over 9GB, and most USB sticks are formatted using the FAT32 file system, which imposes a maximum file size of 4GB. Huge files aren’t just the…

Steve is a consultant who specialises in networks, cloud, HR and upsetting the corporate apple cart @stardotpro How on earth can you get from a coffee-can Mac Pro strapped into a rack-mount gurney to arcane web infrastructure concepts such as continuous delivery, DevOps and cloud computing? Easy: step inside the world of Jenkins. This quaint-sounding English word certainly isn’t what you might expect from an organisation founded by a very Japanese-sounding CTO (Kohsuke Kawaguchi). The naming is partly historic, following an opensource spat with Sun Microsystems, but it’s relevant for two reasons. First, because Sun’s project was called Hudson. Second, they needed to reflect the job this thing does, which is fundamentally to be a code butler. This sounds a long way from networks, let alone mysterious Mac Pro references:…

The news that malware sneaked into CCleaner’s installer certainly isn’t what you want to read over your breakfast (see p10). Even worse, it was digitally signed using the publisher’s own digital certificate, so any right-thinking user who follows the obvious recommendation of “never install anything that isn’t digitally signed” got screwed too. Some vendors ship code that isn’t digitally signed. In the past, you could almost excuse this because the process was laborious, and just a hassle for the software author. Nowadays, there is no excuse, and modern operating systems throw up hard warnings if you try to install something unsigned. But all of that learning and caution has been swept away by CCleaner allowing malware vendors access to its build servers, and thus letting them inject malware into the…