Table of contents for August 2017 in Tech Advisor

Two things will immediately strike you about the new Surface Laptop: it’s amazingly light and sturdy, and it borrows a lot of its look and feel from the Surface Pro 4. Think of the Surface Laptop as Microsoft’s answer to the MacBook Air: pricey, thin and with battery life that goes on and on and on. It’s not a Chromebook competitor, but a far more premium experience. It does, however, run the new Windows 10 S: essentially Windows 10, but limited to apps from the Windows Store. At the time of writing, the Surface Laptop is due to ship on 15 June and is available to preorder from fave.co/2rkOjtZ. Prices are as follows: £949: 128GB SSD, Intel Core i5, 4GB RAM £1,249: 256GB SSD, Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM £1,549:…

Android O has been available as a Developer’s Preview for a while now, but at the Google IO conference, Google took the wraps off some new features designed to make the next-gen version of Android more accessible, secure, and long-lasting. Let’s start with ‘Fluid Experiences’, or aesthetic design tweaks to the operating system. Android O actually adds some handy new features on this end, such as a ‘picture-in-picture’ mode that minimizes an open app to a small window in the corner if you need to multitask. Who says you can’t multitask on phones? Another addition, ‘notification dots’, steals the look of iOS’s notification bubbles on home screen apps, but makes it more useful. A dot plopped on a home screen app means you have a notification from it; long-pressing the…

£49 inc VAT from tinyurl.com/Lzdc37L If you’re going to trade on nostalgia for a brand, you might as well trade on nostalgia hard. That’s clearly the thinking at Nokia, which has managed to overshadow its own range of new Android smartphones with the announcement of a phone that doesn’t have a touchscreen, won’t let you install any apps, and doesn’t do much of anything except make calls and play Snake: the Nokia 3310. That’s right, Nokia is ready to party like it’s 2000, with a sort-of rerelease of one of its most iconic feature phones. Strictly speaking, this is more of a combination of a few of Nokia’s old devices, along with a handful of modern conveniences, so it should feel immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever held a clunky…

£160 inc VAT from fave.co/2rXf6cO In August 2016 Xiaomi announced the Redmi Note 4 as the phablet in its budget line-up. We reviewed the Chinese version of that phone, which featured a 5.5in full-HD screen and reasonable performance from the Helio X20 deca-core processor. Today we have in front of us the Redmi Note 4X, a nearly identical phone, with the same 5.5in full-HD screen and Snapdragon 625 chip. To be fair it’s the global model, which means it works better for a UK audience (we’ll explain that in more detail below), and it has a few more colour options and swaps out the minimal plastic parts on the previous design for metal, but it’s otherwise the same phone. Scan the spec sheet and you’ll notice a few other tweaks…

Microsoft is taking aim at Chromebooks and MacBooks alike with Windows 10 S, a new version of Windows 10 designed foremost for educational use. But schools alone aren’t the firm’s target audience, and while the new operating system shares the same underlying bones as the standard version of Windows 10, there are some stark differences too. Over the following pages we reveal everything you need to know. What’s the S for? Windows chief Terry Myerson claims it stands for four different aspects of the operating system: • Secure • Superior performance • Streamlined for simplicity • “The soul of Windows 10” And sure, those all apply. Even the last one. But really, the S could stand for ‘Store’. What is the difference between Windows 10 and Windows 10 S? The…

We’ve all been there. You read about a great little traditional desktop application or utility that you think will be a great help. Once it’s downloaded Windows 10 blocks it thanks to Windows Defender SmartScreen, a feature that prevents unrecognized apps from running. It’s a helpful security feature that can sometimes be annoying. Here’s how to get past it. Are you sure you want to do this? Before we go any further, keep in mind that the SmartScreen is there for your protection. It is designed to restrict any programs that are known to be malicious or aren’t commonly downloaded. For that reason, anything experimental or outside the norm is not trusted by Windows. Nevertheless, if you trust the creator of the program that you want to install, here’s how…

Microsoft’s Surface Pro line-up has remained largely unchanged for the past two generations. Now you can make that three: The new Surface Pro (2017) – no, not the Surface Pro 5 – features substantial internal improvements, but otherwise refuses to mess with a good thing. Ranging in price from just £799 to a whopping £2,699, the Surface Pro is slightly more expensive than its Surface Pro 4 predecessor, which has been discounted from £749 to £636 at fave.co/2rkruqb. At the time of writing, all of the new Surface Pros are available for preorder at fave.co/2rkrE0L and are set to ship on 15 June, the same day as the Surface Laptop (see page 4). Perhaps the biggest change is semantic: Microsoft has decided to call the Surface Pro a ‘laptop’ rather…

Every time we open a Chromebook and see that an update is available, we get a twinge of excitement. Is this the moment that my Asus Chromebook will finally get Android apps? So far, the answer has always been no, and it doesn’t look like that will change anytime soon. Google didn’t have much to say about the state of Android on Chrome OS during last week’s annual Google I/O conference. But the company did run a dedicated I/O session aimed at teaching developers how to target their apps for Chromebooks and larger screen devices, as first spotted by Thurrott.com. The big takeaway from the session is that Google is grappling with the same issues we’ve been hearing about for months. At the opening, Google showed some of its own…

£136 inc VAT from tinyurl.com/mf9ejpn UMIDIGI has turned out some great-looking phones of late, and despite its budget price tag the C Note is no different. It has the same premium design as the flagship UMIDIGI Z Pro, with an aluminium alloy body and a large, bright full-HD screen. It’s 0.1mm thicker than its brother, but otherwise has identical dimensions, and is 3g lighter at 172g. Slim screen bezels and gently rounded edges at the rear make the C Note feel great in the hand. The screen features the same 2.5D curved glass, too, which makes everything feel seamless as you run your finger across its surface. This handset is very well made for a budget phone, with no gaps, creaking or flex. The metal should prove reasonably tough against…

£499 inc VAT from fave.co/2pMT5N3 There’s nothing to be gained from taking BlackBerry down any more pegs. It has had to siphon off its handset business to TCL, and the KEYone is a result of that partnership. But make no mistake; this isn’t just a BlackBerry in name, it’s a fully-fledged BlackBerry at heart too, and although to most people it is laughable, for a select few this may just be the best phone on the market. For the loyal few who still pine after a physical keyboard there has been a fair few years of hanging onto the Passport or the Classic as app support dropped at a rate of knots. Those people are finally rewarded with the KEYone, a phone that has been a long time coming. No…

Big data on the big stage Leading up to its annual Google I/O developer conference, Google announced so many new products and features that it was hard to imagine anything would be left. But it left some rounds in the chamber, revealing goodies ranging from an updated Google Assistant to helpful feature updates for hardware like Home and Chromecast to a new vision computing platform that imbues Google apps with the ability to see, understand, and translate the world around you. Android O Even though Android O isn’t new, Google revealed some fresh new features for its upcoming operating system revamp. Highlights include a picture-in-picture mode for app multitasking; ‘notification dots’ that show when a home screen app has associated notifications, summonable with a long-press; and tweaks designed to make…

Microsoft wants you to use Windows 10’s inking talents in your everyday work life, and that’s why it’s offering two new features: a custom collection of pens that will roam with you from device to device, and coming later, the Whiteboard collaborative app. Both build upon new inking capabilities Microsoft has incrementally added to its hardware and its Windows OS, as well as Office. One of the features of the new Surface Pro (2017), for example, is a more sensitive Surface Pen with tilt capabilities and an almost unnoticeable pen latency, to make digital ink feel smooth and seamless. Beginning this month, Microsoft will allow Office 365 subscribers to ‘save’ a gallery of pen inks that will roam across devices as well as the Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word apps.…

£1,299 inc VAT from tinyurl.com/lketqmr The Asus ZenBook Flip UX560 is a strange laptop, one that wants to be both a trendy slim hybrid (both a laptop and a tablet) but powerful enough to be the main computer for most families. It’s the sort of laptop you might buy if you’re torn between buying a computer you can use on the sofa and an all-in-one PC. The more you think about it in its real-life context, the more the Asus ZenBook Flip UX560 makes sense. It can handle a bit of everything. There are a few issues that stop us from recommending it unconditionally, though. The screen is very reflective due to its dated touchscreen construction, it may not be as powerful as you may expect and build quality in…

£179 inc VAT from tinyurl.com/Ljkb7yg We all try to look after our smartphones and protect them from damage, but for some users doing so is almost impossible. If your job involves manual labour or you’re into extreme sports, your phone is more vulnerable to the elements than most. For these type of users a rugged phone such as this Ulefone Armor will make a great purchase. Design The design of the Armor is perhaps the most interesting thing about it. With a blend of TPU and polycarbonate plastic and rubber, nothing is getting in or out of this case – water, dust or otherwise. Ulefone claims it uses waterproof gum to attach this case to the phone, and waterproof film to cover any inevitable gaps. The touchscreen has also been…

The Surface Laptop stole the show at Microsoft’s recent event. The focus may have been on education, Windows 10 S, and affordable laptops for classroom use, but the oohs and aahs went to the Surface Laptop for its beautiful display and Alcantaraclad keyboard, not to mention its light weight and long battery life. College kids are the Surface Laptop’s purported target user, but a lot of regular folks are intrigued by this new addition to Microsoft’s premium Surface family – and, frankly, many students won’t be able to afford it anyway. Interested? You’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you need to know about the Surface Laptop. We have the pricing and release date, answers to your most burning questions. Release date and price At the time of writing,…

For the past 20 years, retro gaming enthusiasts have dreamed of building a ‘universal game console’ capable of playing games from dozens of different systems. Their ideal was inexpensive, easy to control with a gamepad, and capable of hooking into a TV set. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi 3 hobbyist platform and the RetroPie software distribution (retropie.org.uk), that dream is finally possible. For under £100, you can build a very nice emulation system that can play tens of thousands of retro games for systems such as the NES, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Super NES, Game Boy, and even the PlayStation. All you need to do is buy a handful of components, put them together, and configure some software. You’ll also have to provide the games, but we’ll talk about that…