Tech Advisorの November 2016 の目次

In 2009, Apple CEO Tim Cook memorably trashed Atom-based netbooks for being “junky” hardware that underperformed. Intel’s Atom chips have come a long way since then, with the latest generation code-named Broxton boasting the most impressive improvements. The company’s new Atom T5500 and 5700 chips have features found in low-end PC processors, but they are instead targeted at robots, drones, wearables and smart home devices. A standout feature is the ability to both decode and encode 4K, which could allow the chips to be used in virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. Intel showed smart glasses, a bartending robot, and a smart motorcycle helmet with the Broxton chips at the recent Intel Developer Forum (see page 6 for details). The tech giant also said the chips could be used be…

One of the best things about Chromebooks is that they are built to last. Thanks to automatic security and feature updates from Google, along with a lightweight browser-based operating system, longtime users may find that their laptops run as well, if not better, than they did on day one. But despite Chromebooks’ theoretical longevity, it’s possible for Google to cut their lives short. Per the company’s End of Life policy, Chromebooks and other Chrome OS devices are entitled to five years of feature and security updates only. After this, the firm doesn’t guarantee that these systems will run safely or properly. Obsolescence seems nigh for the first wave of browser-based laptops, including Samsung’s Series 5 and Acer’s AC700, which arrived in 2011. Still, the policy isn’t as cut and dry…

£699 inc VAT Contact asus.com/uk Specifications 13.3in (1920x1080, 165dpi) IPS LCD glossy touchscreen; Windows 10; 0.9- to 1.5GHz Intel Core M3-6Y30 CPU; Intel HD 515 GPU; 8GB RAM DDR3; 128GB SSD; 802.11b/g/n/ac 2x2; Bluetooth 4.1; 2x USB 3.0 port; 1x USB-C Gen 1 port; Micro-HDMI output; SDXC card slot; stereo speakers; 0.9Mp webcam; single mic; 3.5mm headset jack; UK tiled keyboard; 54Wh lithium-ion battery, non-removable; 323x220x13.9mm; 1.3kg Asus was among the first companies to popularise hybrid laptops/tablets. Its ZenBook Flip UX360CA is the result of experience applied to the fantastic affordable ultrabooks the company has made recently, such as the ZenBook UX305. This isn’t as much of a smash though, suffering from some build quality issues and a problematic screen. At £699, it’s a qualified success that’ll still suit many…

£249 inc VAT Contact xfxforce.com/en-gb Specifications AMD Radeon RX 480; 36 compute units: 2304 stream processors; 1120MHz core speed; 1288MHz boost speed; 8GHz memory speed; 224GB/s memory bandwidth; 256-bit memory bus width; GDDR5 8GB memory type and capacity; PCIe 3.0; CrossFire ready: 110W power consumption; 350W recommended system PSU; 3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0; 127x254mm; 2-year warranty Based on AMD’s latest ‘Polaris’ architecture, the Radeon RX 480 is designed not just for general gaming, but specifically to deliver great VR performance without breaking the bank. The least expensive versions come with 4GB of RAM, but you can also buy one with 8GB. It’s usual for new graphics card technologies to appear first at the high-and enthusiast end of the price range. But with Polaris, AMD has taken a different…

£99 inc VAT Contact nextbase.co.uk Specifications 2.7in display; 140-degree wide-angle lens; GPS logging; 32GB SD card; 4.6 hours recording time; 4m car charger, suction mount, Mini-USB cable; 92x56x37mm The Nextbase 312GW is a smart-looking dash cam, which does a lot well and only a little badly. It has a 2.7in screen that’s flanked by well-labelled buttons, which makes it easy to use. Design The Asus Reco Classic has an unusual portrait design, which makes it a little unwieldy in certain cars. The 312GW, meanwhile, adopts the standard landscape orientation, which means it sits a bit higher in the car and doesn’t impede the passenger’s view. The rear-mounted buttons aren’t as easy to use if you mount the camera immediately behind you review-view mirror, but then again, you won’t see the…

Solid-state storage may be sexy, but if you’re looking for huge capacity and tiny prices, then the classic hard disk remains unbeaten. Available capacities of portable drives with laptop-style disks inside now extends up to a whopping 4000GB, more commonly referred to as 4 terabytes (TB). Most portable USB drives are powered by the connected computer, so you can use them on the move without the need to plug into the mains or use batteries. Capacity Even in the smallest portable drives you’ll likely find 128GB, which is enough to space for thousands of CD albums in lossless FLAC format, or even more in lower quality MP3 or AAC formats. Offloading your music collection alone from a computer to a portable drive can be a godsend in freeing up valuable…

£70inc VAT (60p per GB) • pny.com It might look like a USB flash drive – and it is – but there’s not too much difference between the flash storage used in most portable SSDs and the Duo-Link. The big benefit here is not the almost impossibly tiny size, but the fact this there are two connectors: full-size USB 3.0 and Lightning. Hence the Duo-Link name. There’s a list of compatible iOS devices on PNY’s site. Price It should come as no surprise that the Duo-Link is expensive. At 60p per GB, it’s one of the priciest flash drives around. One reason is that you’re paying extra for the Lightning connector since Apple charges companies to use its technology. Features and design The design is slightly different from PNY’s older…

£104inc VAT (3p per GB) • toshiba.co.uk Not everyone needs the blistering speeds of a portable SSD and if you’re just after a large-capacity drive to store backups of your videos, photos and music, it’s a bit pointless to pay the high prices that solid-state drives currently cost. The Canvio Connect II may be larger, heavier and less stylish than its SSD-based rivals, but it still has a lot to offer. Price The 3TB version costs only £104, which means it’s just 3p per GB. This is the top capacity: there are also 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models. You also get a choice of colours: red, white, gold, black or blue. Features and design There’s little you can do with a 2.5in hard disk in terms of design, but the…

With the rise of mobile payment systems such as Apple Pay and Android Pay, we’re also seeing the launch of other smart banking solutions. One such offering is Monzo, which, along with a feature-packed app and benefits such as no frees abroad, gives customers a physical card. Monzo Bank Monzo (which until recently was called Mondo) is a smart bank for the smartphone generation that does away with things such as bricks and mortar branches, cheque books and the like. Instead, it hinges around an app. In its own words, Monzo says it’s: “focused on building the best current account in the world and ultimately working with a range of other providers, so that Monzo can be an intelligent hub for your entire financial life.” Users of the bank’s card…

START   First, open the Settings app and select ‘Devices’ – make sure it’s the new Settings app and not the Control Panel. 2 In the Devices menu, select Bluetooth on the lefthand side and toggle Bluetooth on if it isn’t already. Obviously your PC or laptop has to be equipped with Bluetooth hardware. 3 Turn on your Bluetooth speaker and put it into pairing mode. The method of toggling pairing mode on varies between manufacturers – check your Bluetooth speaker’s manual for more details on how this is done. 4 When you’re in pairing mode, head back to the Bluetooth menu on the PC and wait for the speaker to pop up in the list of discovered devices. Click pair – depending on the Bluetooth speaker, you may be…

We all take our phones on holiday, but most of us have to pay for mobile data abroad. Phones are great for navigating thanks to their GPS, but map data can soon rack up large bills. The good news is that you can download Google maps and use them to navigate with no Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connection. Offline maps have been available from Google for a few years, but it’s only recently that you were able to quickly and easily download multiple maps straight to your phone – both on iPhone and Android – and get driving directions while offline. You won’t be able to search for restaurants or shops, but you can use maps to navigate to an address or postcode. You can’t select cycling or walking directions, only…

Twitter has finally come up with a solution to muzzle trolls. The company recently announced two new controls for filtering your notifications. These are the primary method through which trolls can contact and harass users. The first of these settings reduces the noise in your notifications stream. By default, anyone who mentions your Twitter username with the ‘@’ symbol shows up in your notifications. It doesn’t matter if they’re asking a simple question, offering constructive criticism or threatening to shoot you. Everyone is there. The new setting filters your notification down to people you follow and works on the social network’s apps and website. It’s not yet clear whether third-party Twitter apps can also apply it. Many users don’t have a need for this kind of filtering, but for those…

We all want to make our lives look interesting on social media. Creating a video about ourselves that’s interesting enough to post online can be daunting, or simply something you don’t have time for. The latest update to Facebook’s photo-sharing app – Memories – gave the option of creating a slideshow of six or more photos to music. This feature, dubbed Facebook Slideshow, is now available to all iOS users without the need to download the Memories app. Reports circulated earlier this year that Facebook users were sharing less about themselves, but more news articles and viral content. With the rise of valued video, Snapchat being a great example of this, other platforms need to keep up. Among a society of social-media savvy and picture-hungry digital natives, this is Facebook’s…

Sales of Windows Phones plunged 76 percent in the second quarter, plummeting from 8.2 million in 2015 to less than two million this year, researcher Gartner has revealed. The dramatic decline was more fallout from Microsoft’s botched acquisition of Nokia’s handset business, the writing off of more than $10 billion, and the subsequent decision to back out of the consumer smartphone market. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in July, Microsoft put its smartphone sales at around 1.2 million. (In comparison, Apple sold a ‘disappointing’ 40.4 million iPhones in its last quarter.) The difference between Gartner’s and the Redmond-based firm’s numbers – about 750,000 smartphones – represented what the former believed other device makers sold during the quarter. As recently as May, Microsoft executives again…

From £1,299 inc VAT Contact hp.com/uk Specifications 13.3in (1920x1080, 165dpi), IPS LCD glossy; Windows 10; 2.5- to 3.1GHz Intel Core i7-6500U two cores, four threads; Intel HD 520 GPU; 8GB RAM DDR3-1866; 512GB SSD; 802.11b/g/n/ac 2x2; Bluetooth 4.0; 2 USB-C Thunderbolt 3.0; 1 USB-C/ power socket; stereo speakers; webcam, single mic; 3.5mm headset jack; UK tiled keyboard; 38Wh lithium-ion battery; 325x229x10.4mm; 1.1kg HP has produced some excellent premium laptops recently that have caught people’s attention because of their surprisingly sensible prices – the HP Envy 13, for example. The Spectre 13 takes a different tack as it’s a flat-out ultra-premium laptop with a design you could pick out of a line-up from 20 paces and connectivity designed for the future more than the present. Design HP’s grand claim for the…

£659 inc VAT Contact asus.com/uk Specifications Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080; 1784MHz (1936MHz boost); 1759MHz (1898MHz boost) gaming mode (default); 10010MHz memory clock; 256-bit memory bus width; 2560 CUDA cores; 64 ROPs; DirectX 12, level 12_1; Vulkan; OpenGL 4.5 Multi-Projection;VR Ready; SLI Ready; SLI HB Bridge; GDDR5X, 8GB RAM; Direct CU III cooler; 1x 6-pin, 1x 8-pin connectors; up to 300W power consumption PCIe 3.0; 2x DisplayPort 1.4; 2x HDMI 2.0b, 1x Dual-link DVI HDCP: 2.2; 2 card slots; 134x298mm; GPU Tweak II, Aura software; 3-year warranty Nvidia’s GTX 1080 is one of the fastest consumer graphics processors you can buy right now. However, Nvidia’s own-label version, the Founders Edition (see page 48), lacks many of the bells and whistles we have come to expect from third-party vendors. As the only…

Free (in-app purchases) Contact pokemon.com/uk Requirements Android 4.4 (KitKat) or later; iOS 8 or later The idea behind Pokémon GO is simple, but in the space of a month this augmented-reality mobile game, created by The Pokémon Company and Niantic, became the highest-earning mobile app in history. What gives? First, I have to level with you: I didn’t grow up as a Pokémon fan, and I never understood what all the younger kids were so excited about. I thought it was all a bit ‘sad’, but I now feel weirdly defensive of the game. Just the other day I had to hold myself back when a stranger in the pub told me I was too old to be playing Pokémon GO. Outrageous. When the game was finally released in July…

£106inc VAT (46p per GB) • adata.com Adata’s SE730 is a brand-new portable solid-state drive (SSD), which combines the best of all worlds: it’s one of the smallest we’ve seen, it’s waterproof and it has a blistering speed that few of its rivals can compete. Price The one snag is the price. However, while it’s more expensive than a lot of portable SSDs, the extra cost is worth it. As it’s so new, it’s not widely available and we expect the price to drop below £100 soon. At the time of writing, it cost 46p per GB, making it more expensive than the SanDisk Extreme 500 and Samsung T3. Features and design Don’t confuse the new SE730 with the older drive of the same name: the new one has a…

£606inc VAT (32p per GB) • samsung.com/uk It’s not uncommon to do a double take when you read the available capacities for Samsung’s T3 range. Topping out at 2TB – a size you’d normally associate with mechanical hard drives – this diminutive SSD shows the promise of what’s to come from the technology. Price Obviously the downside is price. A 2TB portable SSD might sound tempting, but any enthusiasm you have will be quickly dampened when you realise it costs over £600. It’s only 32p per GB, but it’s easy to forget that a 2TB hard drive costs 10 times less than this: even a portable version can be found for less than £55. SSDs have plenty of advantages in terms of their robustness and speed, but whether that will…

The first IBM PC Thirty five years ago, in August 1981, IBM launched the most influential commercial computer system of all time, the IBM PC 5150. Over the past three and a half decades, architectural descendants of this single machine have taken over the desktop, workstation, server and even game console markets. And despite inroads from ARM-based smartphones, its digital descendants are still relied upon for just about all the heavy lifting in the computer industry. On the anniversary of such a monumentally important computer, we thought it would be instructive to take a deeper look into the machine that started it all. How? By taking apart one of these bad boys on my trusty workbench, of course. And that’s exactly what you’ll see in the images ahead. IBM’s CGA…

Technology moves on at a frightening pace these days. That shiny tablet you bought only a couple of years ago can soon lose its lustre when compared to shinier new releases. But rather than consign it to a dusty draw we’ve nine alternative uses for tablets that still have a lot to offer. JUKEBOX That old Nexus 7 or original iPad might move at a glacial pace now, but they’re easily fast enough to play music either from internal storage or a streaming service. Try removing all the apps and data you no longer use, then replace it with your music collection. Even if the battery is failing, you can leave it permanently plugged into a charger to ensure uninterrupted sonic splendour. And if you have any old PC speakers…

The interface At its heart Prisma is a simple app. Loading it up on your smartphone will present you with two main areas. The upper section is where your image can be seen or captured, while the lower half holds a few settings options. On the left you’ll see the lightning icon, which represents the flash. The default option is to have it turned off, but if you tap the icon you’ll see the lightning area turn yellow and a little green ‘A’ appear. This indicates that the flash is now in automatic mode and will fire if the camera feels the shot is too dark. Tapping it again removes the ‘A’, but leaves the lightning section yellow. This means that the flash will go off every time you use…

Facebook is pushing for a more immersive culture through photo- and video sharing, and is encouraging more people to upload and share original content. It recently released the Facebook Slideshow feature, and shortly after announced the ability to share 360-degree photos to your timeline. Here we reveal how to take and upload such images to Facebook from Google app Street View,fan iPhone, Photo Sphere for Android and Surround Shot for Samsung. Google Street View app START Street View can be downloaded for free on Android and iOS. Although the app is designed to explore and share street views, you can also take 360-degree images and upload them to Facebook. Install and open the app. Tap the orange plus icon in the bottom righthand corner of your screen. Choose Camera and…

 Red alert, Nexus owners: Google has announced it has begun rolling out Android 7.0 Nougat via over-the-air updates. The first devices to get the new operating system will be Nexus 5X, 6P and 6 phones, as well as Nexus 9 and C tablets. Top-line features include a new multi-window mode for app multitasking, better control over Quick Settings and recent apps, direct reply in notifications and 72 new emoji Like all new Android releases, expect the rollout to take a few weeks, with some carriers moving quicker than others. Top-line features include a new multi-window mode for app multitasking, better control over Quick Settings and recent apps, direct reply in notifications and 72 new emoji. There are also some behind-the-scenes improvements for power management, gaming performance and security. Google says…

AMD has unveiled its new Zen microarchitecture, with a pair of CPUs that could put the company back into the fight with Intel’s best (see our feature on page 80). The firm said its Summit Ridge CPU, aimed at high-performance desktops, will pack eight cores and feature simultaneous multithreading technology to give it 16 threads of processing power. Summit Ridge is targeted for a Q1 2017 release, though a trickle of chips could appear sooner. A second chip for servers, codenamed Naples, will feature an astounding 32 cores with SMT, giving it 64 threads per CPU. SMT is similar to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, which splits a single core into two virtual cores for more performance. This matters because up to now, some had speculated that Zen would fall short as…

Free (in-app purchases) Contact microsoft.com/en-gb Requirements Windows 10 We’ve spent some time diving deep into Windows 10’s Anniversary Update. As a birthday present of sorts to users who’ve upgraded to Windows 10 in the past year since the operating system launched, it’s a pretty nice one. Here’s what’s in the box: Cortana, which is now accessible from the lock screen, is more ubiquitous than ever. Extensions finally make Microsoft Edge usable. Windows Hello improves, Skype’s reboot seems to be on the right track, and underneath it all are even more thoughtful tweaks that improve Windows 10’s overall experience. The new Windows Ink is intriguing, if only partially baked. One or two features you may have expected aren’t quite ready. But if you’re a Windows user still on the fence, the…

£121 inc VAT Contact xiaomi-mi.co.uk Specifications 5in HD (1280x720) IPS display, MIUI 7.5 (based on Android 6.0); 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 octa-core processor; Adreno 505 GPU; 2GB RAM; 16GB storage; microSD support up to 128GB (uses second SIM slot); 4G FDDLTE 1800/2100/2600MHz (does not support 800MHz); Dual-SIM dual-standby (1x Micro, 1x Nano); 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.1; GPS, A-GPS; rear-mounted fingerprint scanner; IR blaster; 13Mp rear camera, PDAF, single-LED flash; 5Mp front camera; 4100mAh non-removable lithium-polymer battery; 139.3x69.6x8.5mm; 144g Xiaomi has excelled itself with the Redmi 3S, taking the already very good Redmi 3 and fitting a newer processor and a fingerprint scanner, and tweaking the design. The resulting 3S has all the things that made the 3 great, but now it’s even better. Just over £120 really isn’t a lot…

The first thing you’ll notice about this phone is the beautiful 5.5in Full-HD (1920x1080) IPS screen, with a pixel density of 401ppi £135 inc VAT Contact vodafone.co.uk Specifications 5.5in (1920x1080, 401ppi) Full HD IPS display; Android 6.0 Marshmallow; Mediatek MT6755M processor with 2GB RAM; Mali-T860MP2 GPU; 16GB storage, expandable via microSD; 13Mp rear-facing camera with autofocus and flash; front-facing 5Mp camera with flash; 1080p HD video at 30fps; 4G connectivity; Bluetooth 4.1; dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n; NFC; GPS; non-removable 2960mAh battery; 152.2x78.1x8.7mm; 150g Note: This phone is locked to the Vodafone network A year after Vodafone’s Smart Ultra 6 stormed our ‘Best budget smartphones’ chart, the network has released its predecessor – the Smart Ultra 7. A lot, however, has changed since then and there’s now a lot of competition…

£275 inc VAT Contact nvidia.co.uk Specifications 1506MHz (1708MHz boost) core clock; 192 GB/s memory bandwidth; 192-bit memory bus width; 1280 CUDA cores; DirectX 12, level 12_1; Vulkan; OpenGL 4.5; multi-projection; VR ready; 6GB GDDR5 RAM; active vapour chamber cooler; 1x 6-pin 120W power consumption: 400W PSU recommended system; PCIe 3.0; Windows 7- to 10, Linux, FreeBSDx86; DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, Dual-link DVI; HDCP: 2.2; 3 simultaneous outputs; 2 slots card width; 111x249.5mm; 3-year warranty As the latest and most affordable model in Nvidia’s range of ‘Pascal’ graphics processors, the GeForce GTX 1060 is the most exciting new release for cost-conscious PC gamers. Price Nvidia’s Founders Edition boards generally cost significantly more than the third-party versions that become available soon after, and the story is no different here. At £275 direct…

£59 inc VAT Contact amazon.co.uk Specifications 6in display with E Ink Pearl technology; optimised font technology; 16-level grey scale; Wi-Fi; 4GB storage; free cloud storage for all Amazon content; four-week battery life; 160x115x9.1mm; 161g Let’s not mince our words – Amazon makes the best e-readers. The Kindle is nine years old, and in that time we have now arrived at this, the eighth iteration of everyone’s favourite, cheapest digital means of reading a book. The Kindle Oasis may have caused a stir by being incredibly expensive at £269, so what has Amazon changed on this, the ‘All-new’ Kindle? Design Only those spoilt by the ridiculous luxury of the Kindle Oasis will baulk in any way at the build quality here. Sure, its cheaper plastic casing isn’t top of the line,…

The game’s enemies are more advanced. They can, for example, build weapons, call in reinforcements or even request an air strike From £25 inc VAT Contact lego.com/en-gb Requirements Windows XP or later; macOS 10.10.5; Microsoft Xbox One; Sony PlayStation 3/4/Vita; Nintendo 3DS/Wii U If like us you’re impatiently waiting the release of Rogue One (the next film in the Star Wars universe), then you’ll be pleased to know that The Force Awakens will help fill the gap. The latest Lego video game entry is the best yet and a welcome return for the franchise. Price One thing we love about Lego games is they’re not as expensive compared to others. Many new titles on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 can set you back as much as £60, but The…

£89 inc VAT (75p per GB) • freecom.com As the name suggests, this is a mini SSD for tablets. It’s primarily designed to connect to an Android or Windows tablet’s Micro-USB port for transferring data between the tablet and another device, such as a PC or laptop. However, it should work with any phone or tablet with a Micro-USB and OTG (on-the-go) support. Price There’s just one capacity: 128GB. It’s expensive at 75p per gigabyte, although that’s the price you’ll pay if you buy the drive direct from Freecom’s website. If you hunt around, you can find it under £70, which takes the price per GB down to 54p. That’s still pricey, though. Features and design Measuring 58x92x15mm and weighing just 60g, the Tablet Mini SSD is a drive you…

£70inc VAT (31p per GB) • www.sandisk.co.uk SanDisk is well known for its flash memory, and the Extreme 500 is a portable SSD which joins the ranks of the company’s SD cards and USB flash drives. Unlike many portable drives, it should withstand life on the road as it’s both dust and water (well, splash) resistant. Price The price of flash memory is slowly dropping, but we’re still a long way from a time when solid-state storage is as cheap as traditional hard drives. The Extreme 500 costs around 30p per GB and is available in 120-, 240- and 480GB capacities. We tested the 240GB model, which costs £70. That might seem expensive, but it wasn’t long ago that SSDs were twice as costly as this. If you need a…

1 It’s all new. Zen is a totally new ‘cleansheet’ chip design and appears to be 40 percent faster than AMD’s previous CPUs. It has individual cores with SMT (simultaneous multithreading), instead of the shared cores with clustered multithreading of today’s AMD CPUs. 2 It’s not a CPU. Technically, Summit Ridge isn’t a CPU, but an SoC (system on-chip), which means no chipset is needed for most of the functionality. On at least one Summit Ridge demo board, we spied a chip that appeared to handle the SATA and SATA Express ports. But these are engineering boards, so who knows. 3 It’s an octo-core. The consumer chip, codenamed Summit Ridge, will feature eight cores with simultaneous multi-threading (similar to Intel’s Hyper-Threading), for a total of 16 threads. 4 Prepare to…

Spotify is a great way to listen to pretty much any music for a monthly fee. There are of course plenty of rivals with similar features, but Spotify has become the one by which others are now measured. Here we show you how to get the best out of your musical experience with the best Spotify tips and tricks. Import your iTunes Playlists There are a lot of iPods, iPads and iPhones in the world, so there’s a good chance that you will have used iTunes in the past. If you’ve created Playlists for all your favourite moods and moments, then it would be laborious to have to emulate this on Spotify. Thankfully, it’s easy to import your creations. First, open iTunes and select Preferences > Advanced, then tick the…

Google Photos is a great way to back up and organise all your images, though you still need to do a little bit of legwork if you want to capture everything. That’s because Android organises images that are saved from different apps into folders. So if you want to save screenshots, Instagram pictures or photos from other social networks, you need to go through a few steps. Launch Google Photos, open the navigation drawer on the left and touch Device folders. You’ll see images from all the different sources available on your phone. Those with the blue icon and ‘up’ arrow are backed up. Those with the line through the cloud aren’t. To direct Google Photos to automatically back up images from your Snapchat, Instagram or another folder just touch…

Adobe invented the PDF (Portable Document Format) to solve a problem that dogged people for years: how to view and print documents without the original software or fonts. It wasn’t meant to be a replacement for a word processor – it was a layout format for precise alignment of text and images. It launched the Acrobat software which packaged documents into special PDF files. Adobe then made Acrobat Reader (now known as Adobe Reader DC) free to download and use so people could open, read and print the files. In 2008, the company made the PDF file format an open standard and since then there has been an explosion of PDF-related software. Many programs can save documents in PDF format, but few can edit them directly. So what happens if…