Sommaire pour April 2016 de Computer Shopper

WHEN WINDOWS 10 came out, the entire Shopper team breathed a collective sigh of relief: Microsoft had banished the demons of Windows 8 and created an OS that was truly great and worth upgrading to. Now you’ve had time to play with it on your existing computer, why not build a brand-new computer that you’ve designed for it? Starting on page 86 we’ve reviewed everything you need to build a new computer, including processors, RAM, motherboards, cases, power supplies, hard disks and SSDs. We’ve done our group test in a different way, too. This time round, we’ve tested far more products than we could fit into the magazine, so we can present to you only the very best products. The result is that you’ll easily be able to find the…

STARMAN I read with interest your anti-virus group test (Shopper 336). Having recently replaced Microsoft Windows Defender with AVG’s free anti-virus package, I was surprised to see AVG was rated so poorly. According to your results it has the lowest “protection breakdown” rating and a low overall “protection rating”, lower than Microsoft’s Security Essentials. Before replacing Windows Defender with AVG, I had read AV-Test’s report on the performance of different anti-virus packages, which showed AVG Internet Security having protection performance on a par with Kaspersky Lab’s Internet Security and Norton Security, both of which received top ranking in your report. Additionally, it showed Microsoft’s Windows Defender with the lowest protection ranking, lower than Microsoft’s Security Essentials indicated in your article. Clearly your report by Dennis Technology Labs and AV-Test use…

IT’S 7am AND pouring down outside. I’m facing the wall in the gents’ loo in Manchester Airport. In the ‘space’ next to me is a man dressed in a baby blue and yellow shiny silk shell suit. He has dark hair, a fake tan, droopy ’tache and a headband. I return to the restaurant, where Mrs R is eating breakfast, and report that I’ve just had a wee next to Ali G. She points out there are 19 more of them right behind me. Plus their mate Superman. We’re on our way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Mrs R to do an accounting system upgrade and me to work with a ‘cust2mer’ (a customer’s customer) automating the electronic data interchange (EDI) on one of their projects. It’s a fair bet the…

£50 inc VAT (PAYG) • From shop.vodafone.co.uk VERDICT The Smart Speed 6 isn’t without its flaws, but there’s simply nothing better for £50 MOTOROLA MIGHT BE the biggest name in budget smartphones, but Vodafone’s own-brand Smart handsets have been fighting back hard. First Vodafone released the £125 Smart Ultra 6 to combat the £160 3rd Gen Moto G, with better specs and a larger, Full HD screen. Now it’s taking aim at the £90 2nd Gen Moto E with its £50 Smart Speed 6, providing a long-overdue shot in the arm for ultra-cheap prepay phones. Measuring 132x65x9.9mm, the Smart Speed 6 is ideal for those who want a small, compact handset. It’s narrower and easier to hold than the Moto E, and it feels well made and sturdy in the…

£575 inc VAT • From www.wexphotographic.com VERDICT Some performance issues, but the Canon G5 X has outstanding image quality and ergonomics for such a small camera THERE USED TO be a gulf in image quality between compact cameras and SLRs, but now it’s less clear cut. The Canon G5 X has a 1in sensor – sitting roughly between the ½.3in sensors in cheap compacts and the APS-C sensors in consumer SLRs – and it’s mounted behind a wide-aperture lens, starting at f/1.8 for wide-angle shots and f/2.8 for telephoto. That’s four times brighter than the f/3.5-5.6 kit lenses supplied with most SLRs and CSCs. A key factor for image quality is the total light that reaches the sensor, which is determined by both the aperture and the sensor size. The…

£879 inc VAT • From www.cramptonandmoore.co.uk VERDICT A stylish UHD TV with decent image quality and great smart TV features SAMSUNG’S JU7500 SERIES sits at the top of its standard range of Ultra HD TV sets, just missing out on its flagship ‘SUHD’ badge. The 48in UE48JU7500 on test here is the smallest in the range, but it’s also available with a 55in, 65in or 78in screen. Each TV comes with the same hardware and software, so we’d expect image quality to be similar across the range. The design of Samsung’s TVs has become fairly predictable in recent years, but that’s not to say the UE48JU7500 doesn’t look great. With its inward-facing, metallic-style bezels, the TV’s chamfered border looks thinner than it really is and draws your eyes into the…

£499 inc VAT • From www.petertyson.co.uk VERDICT Superb sound quality and room for expansion, but the XDP-100R is undeniably expensive SOUND QUALITY HAS been on a downward spiral ever since CDs gave way to MP3s. Smartphones are now the de facto device for listening to music on the move, but few can play high-resolution 24-bit/192kHz FLAC and DSD128 files. Thankfully, Pioneer’s XDP-100R is here to fill in the gap. This high-end Android-powered portable media player splits its circuitry in two to ensure that nothing interferes with audio playback. One PCB contains the CPU, sensors, wireless chips and display controller, while the other is dedicated to the ESS SABRE DAC and amplifier. In Stand-alone mode, it cuts out all electromagnetic signals except audio for uninterrupted, interference-free music. This level of attention…

£70 inc VAT • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The right balance of features, performance and quality makes the Pixma MG5750 a winner CANON’S PIXMA MG5750 is the latest in a long line of inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs) designed for the home. It’s a squat, smart-looking device, made from high-quality black plastics. It can print, scan and copy, print automatically on both sides of a sheet of paper (duplex printing), and you can share it on a wireless network. There’s no fax modem, however. As you might expect, there’s support for printing from or scanning to cloud services including Google Drive, but signing the printer up is far more involved than it is for products from rival manufacturers such as HP. As a mid-range device, this Pixma gets Canon’s unusual five-ink print…

£90 inc VAT • From www.serif.com VERDICT Elegant and efficient, PagePlus X9 is the best desktop-publishing software around for home and small business users DESKTOP PUBLISHING SEEMS quaintly old-fashioned in this age of Twitter and WhatsApp, but there are still lots of times we need printed documents: invitations, business cards, compliments slips, invoices, brochures, flyers and menus to name but a few. You can design them in a word processor or image editor, but a dedicated DTP application is much better equipped for handling text and images across multiple pages. Serif PagePlus X9 looks very fresh-faced considering it’s been around for 26 years. Software with this long a pedigree often feels overburdened with features, but the various panels are sensibly laid out, menus are simple and key features quick to…

£40 inc VAT • From store.steampowered.com VERDICT Visceral multiplayer shooting, but the basic single-player content limits its appeal WHEN IT COMES to tactical online shooters, it was always going to take something special to dethrone Valve’s juggernaut FPS, Counter Strike, but the latest incarnation of the Rainbow Six series just breach-and-cleared its way into the spotlight. Siege is a multiplayerfocused, 5v5 tactical shooter that borrows from Counter Strike and, bizarrely, action strategy games such as Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm. The combination shouldn’t work, but it results in some of the most intense gunfights and strategic planning of any shooter released over the last year. Siege is asymmetrical, with teams taking turns to play as defenders and attackers. On defence, you have 30 seconds at the start of…

01 A smartphone’s operating system (OS) dictates its basic features and which third-party software you can install. There are three main contenders: Apple’s iOS, which is found on the iPhone, Google’s Android, which is used by various handset manufacturers, and Windows Phone 8, which is mainly used on Lumia phones. Apple iOS and Google Android have the most apps available but Windows Phone is slowly catching up. 02 All smartphones have colour screens, but their resolutions vary. Basic models have 800x480 pixels, but text can be indistinct. Look for a display that has at least 1,280x720 pixels so it’s easy to browse web pages. Don’t worry too much about built-in media players or Office document editors; you can always install apps to replace these with better versions later. The image…

01 basic 24in LCD monitor costs around £100. It will be fine for typical Windows work but is likely to have poor viewing angles, so you’ll need to sit straight on for the best picture quality. Its colour accuracy may not be very good, either. 02 A VGA input lets you use the monitor with any PC, but the quality may not be as good as it is over DVI or HDMI. Both are digital connections and require a compatible graphics card but they avoid the need for digital-to-analogue or analogue-todigital conversions, which can reduce image quality. A digital connection achieves the best picture automatically, so you won’t have to adjust clock or phase settings as you do with analogue connections. Many DVI and all HDMI connections support HDCP, which…

01 Media streamers have come a long way from the hard disk-based set-top boxes of a few years ago. They now come in two main forms: flash drive-sized dongles that plug directly into the HDMI port in the back of your TV, and larger microconsoles that sit under it. Whichever model you choose, it will stream content from the internet rather than storing media files locally. 02 Most streamers use their own operating system, which you can navigate with a bundled remote control, but Google’s Chromecast dongle requires a paired smartphone, tablet or laptop to stream content on the big screen. If you’re looking to set up Netflix for someone who doesn’t have a smartphone, you should buy a standalone streamer such as a Roku or Amazon Fire TV device.…

01 A basic 1TB internal hard disk should cost around £40. This will be fast enough for general use and will provide enough storage for most users. Make sure the hard disk you choose has the appropriate interface type for your PC. Some mechanical hard disks still come with SATA2 interfaces, but newer models and most solid-state drives (SSDs) have faster SATA3 interfaces. You’ll need a motherboard with a SATA3 port if you want to benefit from SATA3’s faster speeds; SATA3 disks will work with SATA2 ports but can only transfer files at SATA2 speeds. 02 SSDs can make the most of SATA3’s extra bandwidth for fast file transfers. They use flash memory similar to that found in USB flash drives, and although they tend to provide less capacity than…

Aliasing is the unavoidable effect that comes from using square pixels to draw diagonal lines. As screen resolutions increase, the effect becomes less prominent, but on today’s 1,920x1,080 and 2,560x1,440 monitors aliasing (jagged edges) is still a major issue. A range of different anti-aliasing techniques reduce the effect, but these vary by game and by graphics card manufacturer. We use three different methods when testing graphics cards: Fast Approximate AA (FXAA), Multi Sampling AA (MSAA) and Super Sampling AA (SSAA). FXAA is the least intensive form of anti-aliasing, as it doesn’t actually analyse the 3D models onscreen; instead, it applies a smoothing effect to the entire scene as a postprocessing filter. However, this means it blurs objects and textures that should be left alone, reducing the sharpness of the image.…

While there are lots of things the D-Wave 2X can’t do – unlike a universal quantum computer, should one come to fruition, which could solve any problem that can be expressed in logical terms – its quantum annealing approach is well suited to optimisation, an area where ordinary computers struggle. Elsewhere we see some examples of how speeding up optimisation problems can offer many real-world benefits, but what does D-Wave mean when it says that its computers use a quantum annealing architecture? You’d probably need a PhD in quantum physics to understand fully, but hopefully our layman’s explanation will give you an inkling. It’s well known that to get the best fuel economy from your car you need to drive at an optimum speed, which is around 50mph. If you…

Unstable since Windows 10 upgrade Q I have two computers: a laptop, and an Eclipse desktop with an Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard, two SSDs, two hard disks and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card running three monitors. Both PCs ran Windows 7 Home Premium. I upgraded the laptop to Windows 10 to test it out before upgrading the desktop PC, which I mainly use for MS Flight Simulator X. The upgrade of the laptop went quite well, but the desktop has been a tale of woe. As briefly as possible, the upgrade wouldn’t even start due to a partition issue which I had to fix with the EaseUS partition manager. Then the update froze in the ‘setting up’ phase, after which I had to restart the PC. The…

Chris Finnamore “Jet Li’s Hero – a truly epic tale that’s full of action and emotion” David Ludlow “Total Recall (the Arnie version). It’s the greatest film ever made” Richard Easton “BBC’s Planet Earth, for a sense of continuity” Seth Barton “My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – it’s for my daughter, honest!” Katharine Byrne “The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, just to marvel at its sheer awfulness” Michael Passingham “I’d love a 4K edition of the World Rally Championship Review DVDs: high-def gravel!”…

ON SALE in newsagents from 10th March BUILD A BETTER PC From the initial planning to the finished build, we take you through all the steps you need to make your own perfect Windows 10 PC. We’re kicking everything off with detailed instructions on how to choose the right components for any budget, showing you where to cut corners safely and where to spend a little more. MULTIROOM AUDIO Delayed for a month because of our huge components megatest, our guide will help you find the perfect audio kit, so you can play music effortlessly throughout your house. F1 TECH We take a look behind the scenes of Formula One, finding out how new technology is powering drivers to victory. IMPRESSIVE OBSCURE TECH Our intrepid reporter goes to the dark…

I WAS ONE of too many people packed uncomfortably into a hot carriage when the train pulled into Vauxhall station. A few new passengers managed to squeeze in and the train was just about to pull out when one final, frantic man threw himself in through the door. Everyone felt the impact and lost another fraction of their breathing space and patience. “Ass!” exclaimed one voice. The latecomer lashed out, striking a nearby onlooker, who asked, “Why did you hit me?” “You called me a rude word,” said the man. “No, he didn’t, I did,” called out the American voice who had started the exchange. The predominantly British congregation broke the first rule of commuting, whereby everyone ignores awkward situations by staring at their newspapers, and jeered loudly. It was…

£420 inc VAT • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT A gorgeous phone with a superb screen and camera, but it just isn’t fast enough to compete with other flagships THE HTC ONE M9 was one of the biggest smartphone disappointments of 2015, but HTC’s latest smartphone, the One A9, is everything the M9 should have been and more. A big part of its appeal lies in its stunning design. Its clean lines and metal chassis may be eerily reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6s but it’s a winning combination. It’s not only easier to hold than Apple’s iPhone but also very light for its size, weighing just 143g. The One A9 is immediately more appealing than the M9, not least because of its 5in, 1,920x1,080 AMOLED display. Covering 100% of the…

£80 inc VAT • From www.microsoftstore.com VERDICT A glimpse into the future of mobile working, but you need a sluggish Lumia 950 to use it LAST MONTH, WE tried out Windows 10 Mobile and all its brand-new features (see Shopper 337). Now we’ve had a chance to test Microsoft’s official Display Dock, the optional £80 adaptor you’ll need if you want to use Windows 10 Mobile’s biggest and most exciting feature, Continuum, which in effect turns your smartphone into a portable PC. At the moment, Continuum only works on the Lumia 950 and 950 XL phones (see Reviews, Shopper 337), as you need a USB Type-C port to connect the Display Dock. It’s likely that future Lumia handsets will come with Continuum support, but the Display Dock isn’t compatible with…

759 inc VAT • From www.johnlewis.com VERDICT Packed with premium features and with a price tag to match, the Sony RX100 IV is a formidable compact camera THE SONY RX100 IV is a camera for people who shudder at the thought of compromise. With a 1in sensor and f/1.8-2.8 lens, it has the same light-gathering ability as a full-frame camera with a f/4.9-7.6 lens. This is marginally better than most SLRs and CSCs with their kit lenses, so we can expect image quality to be in the same league. It’s far smaller than any SLR or CSC, though, weighing 298g and measuring just 41mm thick. It slips easily into all but the tightest of trouser pockets. While its closest competitors, the Canon G7 X and G5 X (see p39) make…

£930 inc VAT • From uk.raumfeld.com VERDICT With its superior music playback, Raumfeld’s Soundbar feels more like a large multiroom speaker than a dedicated TV soundbar RAUMFELD’S SOUNDBAR IS designed to fit into the company’s multiroom system in a similar way to Sonos’s Playbar, providing both a TV audio upgrade and a way of playing streamed audio. At £930, it’s one of the more expensive soundbars on the market, but with a wireless active subwoofer it compares well with its subwoofer-less Sonos rival. Another advantage the Soundbar has over the Sonos Playbar is an HDMI ARC output. This allows you to control it using your TV remote, cutting down on the number of cables coming out of your TV. The Soundbar also has optical and RCA phono connections, but it…

£649 inc VAT • From www.jessops.com VERDICT Not a big departure from older models, but the HC-VX980 is a great update to Panasonic’s 4K camcorder range CAMCORDERS ARE A shrinking market. Most people are now happy shooting video on their smartphones, while action cameras now allow you to shoot video where you couldn’t shoot before. However, that hasn’t stopped a few mainstays from continuing to release new camcorders, and Panasonic is one such company that’s staying the course. Camcorders have a distinct advantage over smartphones when it comes to capturing video, as their ergonomics not only make for a far more comfortable shooting experience, they also put an end to the blight of vertically shot video footage. Panasonic’s HC-VX980 is no exception in this case, as its 350g chassis is…

£200 inc VAT • From www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk VERDICT Not quite as smart as it should be, but this home automation kit has real promise DEVOLO IS BEST known for its range of Powerline HomePlug networking products, so it was a surprise to see the German company launch a range of smart home kit. The Home Control Starter Pack contains a control hub, a door sensor and a plug adaptor for controlling devices such as lamps. Optional components include a smoke detector, motion sensors, thermostats, wall switches and key fobs. Surprisingly, given that most lights are fitted into ceilings rather than free-standing lamps, Devolo doesn’t sell compatible lightbulbs. The control hub connects to your router via Ethernet or Powerline; there’s no Wi-Fi option. It communicates with all the other components using Z-Wave,…

£311 inc VAT • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Sophisticated and rewarding, Painter is worth the expense for technically minded artists MOST SOFTWARE FOR graphic designers tries to be a jack of all trades, so it’s nice to see something that aims to do one job well. Corel Painter specialises in digital painting, with emulations of natural media such as oil, pastels and watercolours, plus some brushes that have no real-world equivalent. At a basic level, it’s a bitmap editor, with brush strokes saved as pixels on the virtual page rather than vector coordinates. However, the only time you’re likely to import photos is to use them as a basis for a painting; smearing colours in a photo produces digital paintings in record time. There are some superb painting apps for iOS…

01A basic PC costing around £350 will be able to run everyday office, multimedia and education software and will easily cope with surfing the internet. It might even be able to run some modern games. Many PCs can be sold either with or without a monitor. If you don’t like the display that the manufacturer is offering, you can always use your current one, or buy another one separately. 02 If you want to play games, you’ll have to upgrade the graphics card. Budget cards such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 will cope well with many 3D games, but to play the latest 3D games smoothly (and enjoy the best-quality graphics) it’s worth upgrading to a more powerful card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. 03 All modern…

01 All tablets rely on an operating system (OS) to run apps. You have three main choices: Apple’s iOS, which runs on the iPad, Android, which Google licenses to various manufacturers, and Windows 10, which is slowly becoming more common in hybrid tablets and convertibles. If you own an Apple or Google smartphone, you can download your apps, music and so on to a tablet that runs the same OS, so it makes sense to stick with a compatible device. 02 It’s important to pick a tablet that has a good-quality high-resolution screen. Many budget tablets have 1,280x800-resolution displays, but better tablets have Full HD 1,920x1,080 panels, and we’re starting to see tablets that have even higher screen resolutions. Some are as high as 2,560x1,600 or even 4K. Entry-level tablets…

01 A 32in Full HD TV costs around £200 and will suit smaller living rooms. TVs look much smaller in the shop than in your home, so measure the space available before you buy. Curved TVs are becoming increasingly more common, but bear in mind that these typically take up more floor space than a traditional flat set. 02 A 1,920x1,080-resolution TV can display a 1080p image. You can still buy TVs with a 720p (1,366x768) resolution, but they’re no cheaper and the image won’t be as sharp. 3,840x2,560 Ultra HD resolution, or 4K, TVs are finally available at reasonable prices, although you’ll still pay a premium for one over a 1080p model. 03 Consider the number of inputs you’ll need to connect the rest of your equipment. Two HDMI…

01 Laser printers used to be much more expensive than inkjets and were typically restricted to offices. They are now much more affordable, however, and offer several benefits over inkjets, including lower per-page printing costs and faster print speeds. 02 A decent laser printer will typically cost around £80, and will happily print hundreds of black-and-white pages per hour. If documents are your priority, you’ll want a high minimum speed and low print costs. However, you’ll probably be limited to black-and-white printing at this price. 03 Although you can still buy singlefunction laser printers, multifunction peripherals (MFPs) are now far more common. These models can scan and photocopy documents as well as print them, and some of them also have fax capabilities. Laser MFPs start from around £200. 04 Heavy-duty…

Web design XARA Web Designer 11 Premium £70 inc VAT • www.xara.com/uk Web Designer was already excellent, but version 11 gets a slew of incremental updates that ensure it remains our favourite one-box web design tool. OS SUPPORT Windows XP or later • MINIMUM Intel Celeron/AMD Sempron • MINIMUM GPU DirectX 9 • MINIMUM RAM 500MB • HARD DISK SPACE 300MB • DETAILS www.xara.com/uk • FULL REVIEW Sep 2015 Photo editing ADOBE Photoshop Lightroom 6 £90 inc VAT • www.ebuyer.com Lightroom 6 might be a relatively modest update, but Adobe’s photography toolbox still sets the gold standard for Raw photo processing and image enhancement. OS SUPPORT Windows 7/8 • MINIMUM CPU Intel or AMD with 64-bit support • MINIMUM GPU 1GB, OpenGL 3.3, DirectX 10 • MINIMUM RAM 2GB • HARD…

Virtual reality looks set to become a big deal in 2016, with the likes of the Oculus Rift making a splash. The idea is simple: you strap on a set of goggles, giving you one screen per eye, for true 3D. Even better, as you move your head, the world updates, letting you look around as naturally as you do in real life. In this way, games will become fully immersive. While the idea is simple, powering this kind of technology is a little harder: you need a graphics card that can produce double the number of frames, so each eye gets its own view. You also need a PC that can handle real-time head movements and tracking. Nvidia has released its minimum VR specs for a new PC. These…

To test the read and write speeds of each disk drive, we use a script that copies files to and from the drive and measures the time taken. We copy the files to the disk from memory rather than from another disk drive, because RAM is faster than any hard disk or SSD so won’t act as the limiting factor in the tests. In our large-file tests, we copy a 100MB file to and from each disk 100 times to see how fast a drive is when dealing with big files such as video clips. We repeat this test using a selection of smaller files totalling 100MB, to see how well a drive copes with the many smaller files needed when loading an operating system or application.…

THIS ARTICLE WAS inspired by a blog post by Paul Bonnichsen (see tinyurl.com/CSsmoke). In it, Paul describes how he creates beautiful, abstract images with minimal equipment and a little patience. It inspired us to have a go, and you can see the results in this article. These photos are sometimes recognisably smoke-like. Others look like flowers, shells, silk sheets, x-rays of bones, landscapes, humans, dolphins or aliens. For us, they work best when they straddle the divide between abstract and figurative. We also like the interplay between simple, repeating patterns and the complexity of chaotic movement. It’s possible to exert some control over the shape of the smoke, but it’s often the unexpected shapes that turn out best. FLASH OF INSPIRATION Smoke photography requires an off-camera flash system. This needn’t…

To make your new Pi 2 PC even more useful and enjoyable, you should install some additional software. To install software, open Menu, Preferences, then click Add/Remove Software. Search for each application in the top-left box. Here are the best packages to install. If you don’t fancy the LibreOffice Writer word processor, install AbiWord. Desktop publishing application Scribus is great if you regularly create newsletters or flyers. PDFEdit lets you edit PDFs rather than just read them (in the pre-installed Xpdf). The pre-installed Claws Mail is a bit basic, so upgrade to Icedove, an unbranded clone of Mozilla’s Thunderbird. If you want Google Calendar support and decent MS Exchange support for your email client, consider Evolution – it takes an age to load, however. There are options for every type…

CONTACT LETTERS letters@computershopper.co.uk “HEROES” I want to say a huge thank you to Computer Shopper and Ian Thompson for resolving my Windows 10 Upgrade problem. I sent an email to help@computershopper.co.uk in December 2015 explaining that the Windows 10 checker said my CPU wasn’t supported, when it is. I was pleased to see a fellow subscriber, Ian Thompson, posted a reply to my request for help in Letters, issue 337, with a possible solution. Essentially, he said that he had previously set Data Execution Prevention (DEP) in Windows 7 to apply only to essential Windows programs and services and that switching it to ‘All’ resolved his similar issue and therefore should resolve mine. I checked and my DEP was set to essential Windows programs, so I selected the option for…

Do you wish your computer was faster when booting and loading applications? Thanks to Crucial, you can achieve your dream of a faster PC or laptop with the BX200 SSD. The writer of our Star Letter will be awarded one of these solid-state devices, which can be installed in a desktop PC or a laptop. This fast SSD is 15 times faster than a hard disk, and will make your computer boot incredibly quickly and make applications load faster. With 480GB of storage, there’s plenty of room for Windows and all your apps, too.…

David Ludlow RAVES  A lack of communication can leave our smart gadgets a little dumb, but one ingenious online service promises to help them get along famously AS SMART AS our technology has become, almost every individual product you use speaks its own language that nothing else understands. This leaves us with a confusing mess of logins, different apps and multiple ways of doing things. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single way for our gadgets to communicate – an Esperanto for the technology world, if you like, only not rubbish? That’s exactly what IF This Then That (IFTTT, www.ifttt.com) does. As the name suggests, this web-based service lets you create scenarios where a trigger (the IF This part) leads to an action (the Then That part). With…

£289 inc VAT • From www.oneplus.net/uk VERDICT The OnePlus 2 is yet another fantastic flagship killer that’s great value WHEN IT FIRST launched last year, the OnePlus 2 was available only to people who had a special invitation. Now OnePlus has lifted this restriction to make its second flagship smartphone available to all, which is great news for anyone who wants a top of the range smartphone for less than £300. On paper, it shares several specifications with its equally excellent predecessor, the OnePlus One, including a 5½in, 1,920x1,080-resolution display, a rear 13-megapixel camera and either 16GB or 64GB of storage. However, the OnePlus 2 comes with Qualcomm’s new octa-core 1.8GHz Snapdragon 810 chipset, giving it the same processing power as other 2015 flagships, such as the Sony Xperia Z5.…

£399 inc VAT • From store.google.com VERDICT The Pixel C has plenty of power and a brilliant keyboard dock, but Android isn’t the best OS for getting work done GOOGLE HAS TASKED other companies with manufacturing its Nexus tablets in the past, but that changes with the Pixel C. It’s the first Google tablet designed and built entirely in house and takes its name from the company’s premium range of Chromebook Pixel laptops. With a metal frame, unusual 1:√2 aspect ratio (roughly the same as an A4 piece of paper) and no logos, it’s a seriously goodlooking tablet. At 7mm thick and weighing 520g, it’s not the slimmest or lightest device around, but the squared edges leave plenty of room for the beautifully machined speaker grilles on either side. The…

£670 inc VAT • From www.laptopsdirect.co.uk VERDICT The Philips BDM3490UC is expensive, but this curved monitor has excellent image quality CURVED TVs HAVE been around for over a year now, but the Philips Brilliance BDM3490UC is the first curved monitor we’ve tested. It’s a 34in display with a 21:9 aspect ratio, a 3,440x1,440 resolution and a very gentle curvature radius of 3,800mm. That’s about as shallow as curved screens get – the smaller the radius, the tighter the curve – so the overall effect is actually very subtle. You’ll need a fair amount of room to use the BDM3490UC, though, as its 53cm footprint is one of the biggest we’ve seen. The middle of the monitor’s curved stand houses its other headline feature, a pair of integrated front-facing 7W stereo…

£99 inc VAT • From www.johnsmith.co.uk VERDICT The Cowin Ark is a novel concept, but its design and execution fall short of its potential THE ARK IS a little different from other Bluetooth speakers. Rather than a single portable unit, it has two components: the Cruze, which is a rather standard-looking Bluetooth speaker, and a wireless base station that contains the Ark’s subwoofer. The two units attach magnetically and use the same inductive charging technology you’ll find on smartphones that support Qi wireless charging. As such, when you’re not using the base station to charge the Cruze, you can charge a compatible smartphone simply by placing it on top of the base station – a handy feature that frees up a plug socket. Alternatively, you can charge the detachable Cruze…

£328 inc VAT • From www.printerland.co.uk VERDICT Canon’s i-Sensys MF724Cdw is a competent colour laser MFP CANON’S I-SENSYS MF724CDW is a colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP) for the home or small office. It costs more than an entry-level device, but the extra outlay buys a better specification: the MF724Cdw has a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and can print and scan automatically on both sides of a page, so you can sit back while it makes a double-sided copy of a double-sided document. You can connect it to a wired or wireless network, and it has a front-panel USB port for direct scans and prints. Even for its type this is quite a heavy MFP; you’ll need two people to unpack it. We weren’t keen on its large touchscreen, which…

£135 inc VAT • From www.kikatek.com VERDICT A router with a touchscreen, but it’s more of a gimmick than a lifesaver ROUTERS USED TO be mysterious, esoteric, inscrutable boxes of jargon and pain. Thanks to successive generations of refinement, though, they’re now much easier to configure and use than ever before. Even so, anything that makes routers more pleasurable to set up and maintain is highly desirable, so we had high hopes for the TP-Link Touch P5. This router, as its name suggests, comes equipped with a touchscreen for easy setup. The 4.3in touchscreen has a resolution of 480x272 pixels and was responsive to our prods and swipes. Its interface looks similar to iOS, with a grid of icons acting as a home screen, and an almost identical typography and…

£40 inc VAT • From store.steampowered.com VERDICT Great fun, but Rise of the Tomb Raider fails to unearth Lara’s true potential LARA CROFT HAS come a long way since she first appeared in 1996, but the complex puzzles that defined her earlier escapades have become progressively less important with each new entry. Crystal Dynamics’ latest reboot series practically ditches the titular tombs altogether. Instead, it’s followed in the footsteps of its closest competitor, Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, with a greater emphasis on shooting. It was a potent mix that worked well in 2013’s Tomb Raider, and this instalment in Lara’s new, gritty origins story follows very much the same template. Lara is once again portrayed as a young and inexperienced adventurer, but her attacks and finishers are no less brutal…

01 A basic laptop costing around £300 will run everyday office, multimedia and education software, but it won’t be suitable for 3D gaming or processor-intensive tasks such as video editing. Many laptops at this price have a 15.4in screen and weigh around 2.4kg, so they’re best used around the house and for occasional journeys. 02 If you want to play modern games, you’ll need a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M. Good gaming laptops tend to have large 17in screens and weigh around 3kg, so they’re best suited to use at home. 03 If you want a laptop that you can take everywhere, look for a model that weighs less than 2kg. For the best portability, buy one that has an 11in or…

01 If you’re ready to step beyond the basic controls of a compact camera, or you want greater flexibility than an ultra-zoom can offer, a compact system camera (CSC) is the next logical upgrade. With interchangeable lenses, manual controls and stellar image quality, these cameras give proper digital SLRs a run for their money. 02 There are three competing types of CSC mount, and the one you buy determines the number of compatible lenses and accessories you have available. Samsung’s NX-mount is arguably the most limited in terms of lens selection, and the company has confirmed that it’s shutting down its European camera business, so it’s best to avoid these altogether if possible. Sony’s E-Mount has a slightly wider range, but Micro Four Thirds offers the widest variety. Both Panasonic…

01 If you don’t have space in your home cinema setup for a set of surroundsound speakers, a soundbar is the next best thing. Whether you opt for a soundbar (which typically sits in front of your TV stand) or a soundplate (which sits underneath your TV), you’ll be getting significantly better audio than the weedy speakers today’s flatscreen TVs provide. 02 If you want to cut down on cable clutter, look for a soundbar with multiple HDMI inputs and outputs as well as Audio Return Channel (ARC). Not all soundbars use HDMI, with many making do with digital optical audio connections instead. This means you’ll have to connect Blu-ray players, games consoles and set-top boxes to your TV and run all audio through a single cable. Also look for…

01 A network-attached storage (NAS) device lets you store documents, media, and other files on its hard disks so you can share them with other devices on your network. Some have disks already installed, while others are empty enclosures into which you install your own disks. Buying an empty NAS can often be the more cost-effective option, as they’re usually less expensive and give you the freedom to expand the number of disks at a later date. You should buy one with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, as these provide the highest transfer speeds. To use a NAS device at these speeds, you’ll need computers with Gigabit Ethernet network adaptors and a Gigabit Ethernet switch or router. Computers with Fast Ethernet adaptors can still access the NAS device, but only at…

Open-world adventure Fallout 4 £40 inc VAT • store.steampowered.com Exploring a post-apocalyptic wasteland has never been more fun. Bethesda has expanded the Fallout universe with base building and crafting mechanics, making this the definitive entry in the series. AVAILABLE FORMATS PC, Xbox One, PS4 • OS SUPPORT Windows 7/8.1/ 10 64-bit • MINIMUM CPU Quad-core 2.8GHz Intel, quad-core 3GHz AMD • MINIMUM GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti, AMD Radeon HD 7870 • MINIMUM RAM 8GB • HARD DISK SPACE 30GB • DETAILS www.fallout4.com • FULL REVIEW Feb 2016 Fantasy RPG Witcher III: Wild Hunt £50 inc VAT • store.steampowered.com The Witcher 3 has an involving plot, an amazingly well-realised world and beautifully drawn characters. It’s the ultimate fantasy RPG for anyone that prefers action to turn-based strategy. AVAILABLE FORMATS PC,…

Chat and Communication Digsby (Build 92) Access all your instant messaging services from one application; there’s support for Windows Live!, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber. Evernote 5.9.6 Store your notes, ideas and plans in the cloud, and synchronise them between computers. UPDATED Mozilla Thunderbird 38.5 A powerful email client from the organisation best known for the Firefox web browser. Postbox Express 1.0.1 An email client that provides a comprehensive array of tools to help you manage your messages more easily. Skype for Windows 7.18 Make internet voice and video calls for free, and buy credit to make calls to mobiles and landlines. Trillian 5.6 Use all your instant messaging accounts with one application; this program has support for Windows Live!, AIM, Yahoo! and Google Talk. Customisation 7 Taskbar…

Quantum computing researchers have previously tended to implement qubits using single particles such as electrons, ions or photons, but D-Wave has managed to scale things up so quantum effects can be observed at a macro scale. This means the qubits can be interfaced with conventional electronic circuitry and implemented as silicon chips. D-Wave’s qubits take the form of devices called SQUIDs – Superconducting QUantum Interference Devices. They’re rings of the element niobium, in which the direction of the flow of a current defines a 0 or a 1 but superposition can only be achieved if they’re cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. The necessary conditions have been described as 180 times colder than interstellar space. As any interaction with the environment would cause the qubits…

How do I make document comments larger? Q Because my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, I need the text size in my documents to be large. However, things such as comment balloons always reset to a small font size. I know how to change the font, but my problem is that because I use a low screen resolution, the Apply button isn’t visible on the screen, and I have to change the orientation to portrait to view it. Is there a way to permanently alter the font size for the comments? I work on many different documents from a wide variety of sources. Charlotte Graves A The first thing you can do is to make sure the comment font size is set to the size you want in…

A RECENT UPDATE to the Raspbian operating system added user-friendly features such as booting into a desktop, having a GUI-based configuration system and preinstalled LibreOffice. The combination of this tweaked OS and the much more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 makes it possible to turn a Pi into a proper desktop PC. However, while the Pi 2 is powerful enough to be a real desktop computer, it still lacks a few PC basics, such as a power button, software-based shutdown and a real-time clock. In this month’s Advanced Projects we attempt to remedy these shortcomings. We’ve chosen a PiFace RTC module (for the clock) and a Pi Supply Switch to add the main missing elements to our Pi 2. We’ve also chosen a case with VESA mount points so we can…