Table of contents for February 2019 in Tech Advisor

Price: £1,249 from fave.co/2Q4wMCj Last year Microsoft introduced its first traditional own-brand clamshell laptop. Now it’s back with a refreshed model for 2018 with 8th-generation Intel and a new colour. Price Microsoft has sensibly kept the price of the Surface Laptop 2 the same as its predecessor. Various options are available, so you can get your hands on one without breaking the bank. We reviewed the £1,249 version. Here’s a list of the different models: £979: Core i5, 8/128GB £1,249: Core i5, 8/256GB £1,529: Core i7, 8/256GB £2,079: Core i7, 16/512GB £2,529: Core i7, 16GB/1TB Which one you’ll want depends on your personal needs, of course. However, we don’t think the average users will have to go beyond the Core i5 with 256GB of storage. It’s worth noting that Microsoft…

Price: £170 from fave.co/2A5zm0M If you’re looking for a sub-£200 Android phone with a decent-size screen, good battery life and usable all-round performance and features, this could be it. Very similar to the Mi Max 3, but with a smaller 5.99in display, the Redmi Note 5 is a worthy upgrade over the Note 4 with improved performance, photography and design. This is the Global version of the Redmi Note 5, which comes with all Google services preinstalled along with MIUI 9. It supports all 4G LTE bands used in the UK, too, which can be a problem with some Chinese handsets. Design There are some key design changes in the Redmi Note 5 over its predecessor, but also a return to the Redmi Note 3’s part plastic build – the…

Price: £1,199 from fave.co/2OxGqZe Apple says the MacBook Air is “the most beloved notebook ever”, and it’s not wrong. The huge success of the original Air had ripple effects throughout the industry, but it has languished in recent years. For the past three years or so, Apple had kept up with neither technological nor design advances in its most important laptop. Now, the MacBook Air has finally been brought up to modern Mac laptop standards, skipping forward three generations of Intel processors, adding a Retina display and Thunderbolt 3 ports, and giving us three colour options, among other things. But it feels a bit like Apple threw out the baby with the bath water, jettisoning some features of the MacBook Air that make it so well-loved. In fact, it would…

Price: £34.99 from fave.co/2PJDcHo Acronis True Image is quite arguably the fastest, most powerful backup solution available to consumers. It’s also, slowly but surely, working its way toward being truly user-friendly. It still has a ways to go in that regard, but the company is certainly trying. The real issue is whether you need all of True Image’s multifold capabilities. From imaging utility to backup suite True Image has long since morphed from a plain ‘imaging’ program into a backup suite. While it still creates sector-accurate images of your drives or partitions, it also features an online storage component in Acronis Cloud; offers archival and sync functionality; has a hidden restore-from partition (such as those often found with laptops) called Secure Zone; can clone disks; and offers ransomware protection. True…

Price: £1,869 from fave.co/2OxGqZe Can’t innovate any more, my ass. After thoroughly redesigning its iPhone and Apple Watch lines, Apple has now done the same for its iPads – removing Home buttons and Lightning ports, shrinking bezels, curving corners and generally making them look like they belong in 2018. In this review we take an in-depth look at the third-gen iPad Pro 12.9in. We benchmark its (absurdly fast) A12X Bionic processor, run battery and camera tests, and evaluate its radical new design, updated specs list and whopping prices. Price The latest 12.9in iPad Pro is available in a variety of configurations. Here’s the full price list. Note that as well as offering the most storage, the 1TB models come with an extra 2GB of RAM, although this isn’t officially disclosed…