What all this means is that Microsoft is finally getting close to the end of playing catch up on their OS, so people won't feel crippled changing to it from iOS or Android. That's been the biggest issue so far. Someone who hasn't used a newer generation smartphone much would be happy with WP8. (Moving from BlackBerry is easy for example, apart from getting used to an on screen keyboard.) Now there's also much less for the iOS and Android lovers to complain about.This was the long play Microsoft was going for and it's looking like they're on track. An uphill battle, but they're heading in the right direction while enterprise eagerly awaits the fully manageable and integrable mobile device. Cache in the Attic It's probably fair to say that we all have some old tech squirrelled away that we just can't bear to part with. It's not just sentimentality either, but practicality: it still works, why chuck it out? Here at Vulture Central we've our own collection of junk tech memorabilia that would make us a tad dewy-eyed if it should depart for the great landfill in the sky. Tony Smith dusts off the Welsh home micro that was briefly a better-seller than the BBC Micro
Mine, bought in November 1982, spent the latter part of its first decade stashed away in the bottom of my wardrobe while I was off at university and then away at work. Likewise the early part of the 1990s, until my much younger half-sisters got their mitts on it in the hope it might make a worthy NES alternative. It wasn’t, and so back in the cupboard it went, until toward the end of the 1990s, in a moment of nostalgia, I reclaimed it from my dad’s place.It’s been stowed in wardrobes and under beds at the various places I’ve called home since then, occasionally being pulled out to demonstrate its ability to boot up, load tapes and play games to unbelieving adults and to kids wondering what they had instead of Xboxes in the Middle Ages.That’s not all. The arrival of Channel 5 in the old analogue TV band 36 meant that, from 1997, the Dragon’s video output signal had to elbow its way past the likes of Beyond Fear and Family Affairs. It never occurred to the old man to get the Dragon retuned when the engineer from Channel 5 popped round to move his VCR’s output away from the new TV station.
Not that it would have mattered much. Today, even with no competition from analogue transmissions, the Dragon’s output isn’t to the liking of a modern, digital telly. It’s a problem by no means unique to my machine. Poor quality output is a common failing raised by sellers of 1980s 8-bit micros, all of which primarily used an UHF signal modulator to get their picture onto a CRT TV via a coax cable hooked up to the telly’s aerial socket.These boys were never designed for a world of digital flat panels, especially those without a handy analogue manual fine-tune facility.Nor was your average cassette tape expected to keep its contents intact for 30 or more years. Surprisingly, some programs do still load, even today, which is more than you can say for the laptop-played WAV files I just tried too. Volume adjustments, messing with the cable - nothing could prevent the inevitable ?IO Errors. I suspect the tape lead is not what it once was. How long before its plastic perishes altogether?
Computer years are clearly more akin to those clocked up by dogs and cats than by people. Yes, the Dragon works, but I’ve a sense of it slipping into a frail dotage. And, let’s be honest, four-colour, 192 x 128, or two-colour, 256 x 192 games aren’t exactly the pinacle of graphical sophistication, even for 1982. Arcade-type titles have a certain retro charm, of course, by retrying the text adventures I coded back in the day reveals just how far personal computing has come since then.It’s harder now, of course - building GUIs and allocating memory were tasks we never needer to worry about in the Basic days, or even when we moved up to assembler - but richer. That said, it’s not as interactive. Even with a Raspberry Pi, oft pitched as the true successor to the early 1980s 8-bit micros, doesn’t let you key programs straight into the command line, at least not in quite the same, direct way.
Still, for all its aged fragility and anachronistic lack of sophistication, I’ll take the Dragon with me when I next move house, even though I’ve long since cleared out all my other childhood and teenage crap. It played too important a part in my formative years. I might have done better in my exams without its distractions. I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today without it. And maybe, yes, it’s my one remaining, sentimental tie with a lost youth.Review The Asus Transformer Book T100 looks like it’s going to be surefire hit, but not because it runs a quad-core Intel Bay Trail Atom processor. And not because it’s a convertible taking on tablet form or becoming and touchscreen notebook in a snap. And not because it runs Windows 8.1 and not one of the original wishy-washy versions either. Nope, the reason has to be the price of £350 (and about $299 Stateside) with a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student thrown in.
Really, who’s going to argue with that when most Chromebooks would be a good deal bigger and lacking a touchscreen, let alone any fondleslab goodness? If you need to placate a teen with a tablet fixation during the festivities, then it would seem the T100 might stand a chance of being grudgingly accepted as their dreams of an iPad Air and a pricey Bluetooth keyboard/case combo come crashing to the ground.Sold already? Of course not. At £350 for the Asus T100, it’s not exactly a gift horse. So let’s have a good look in its gob. Open up this diminutive clamshell and you could easily mistake for a netbook of old, although nothing like as chunky.The 10.in IPS multi-touch display has a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution which works out quite nicely on this form factor. The black borders help put on a show of your fingers tapping the keys but otherwise viewing is perfectly satisfactory. I’m not sure about 178-degree viewing angle claims though, as all you really see in such a position are reflections.
The keyboard is delightfully dinky, the laptop equivalent of a toy piano – functional, but not for the big time. That said, despite being scaled down, the spacing is pretty much spot on and you can get up to quite a speed with very few forced mistakes. The keys are pleasingly sprung, almost silent and even though the base seems a bit flimsy and plasticky, it’s actually quite sturdy with no major flexing issues. Nice job, Asus.The trackpad is responsive and multitouch too, so page scrolling is an easy two-fingered affair. And yet my biggest grumble has to be the trackpad for no other reason than presses for left- and right-click make such a noise I felt quite self-conscious about using it in the office. Still, there is a workaround of course, you can use the touchscreen or a mouse too, if you like.
Apart from the actual docking hinge itself, the only interface feature of the T100 keyboard is the USB 3.0 port. The tablet has rather more to offer with micro HDMI, micro USB (for charging) and a 3.5mm mic/headphone combo port. It also has the welcome inclusion of a micro SD card slot so the 32GB internal storage isn’t the only repository here. Once formatting, Win 8.1 and Office is out of the way, 14.2GB is all you’re left with although there is a 64GB version, apparently.Still, it’s no slouch with its quad-core Intel’s 1.33GHz Atom Z3740 CPU and just 2GB of RAM to play with, the performance is a massive step up in comparison to last year’s sluggish 1.8GHz Atom Z2760. One way this showed itself was with the HDMI output. Grab yourself a micro HDMI adapter and you can have an extended desktop on the T100. I hooked it up to a 1080p monitor and played matching resolution movie content to this screen.I’d found on the older Atom Windows 8 tablets that they would stumble to deliver a sustained 1080p movie playback to an external monitor tending to freeze or slow to refresh scene changes, with 720p content proving much more stable. At least the T100 didn’t mind too much either way, although the 1080p movie viewing could have been smoother at times, but on the whole it performed reasonably well.
Product Roundup The arrival of Intel’s Haswell processors this year promised a new generation of ultraportable laptops that would be slimmer, lighter and provide better battery life than ever before.With that in mind, El Reg decided to round up 10 of the lightest laptops that we could find and see if they really delivered the goods. Not every manufacturer has gone down the Haswell route yet, but the lightest designs and longest-battery life do generally come from Haswell kit – for example Sony’s absurdly light Vaio Pro, or the genuinely impressive battery life of the latest MacBook Air.However, ultralight designs do involve compromises. Performance, for the most part, is pretty good, but many of these laptops have limited connectivity, while build quality and screen quality don’t always justify the high prices that these machines command.There’s plenty of variety, though, so take a closer look and see which of these ultra-portable laptops deserves a place in your travel bag.
There’s a Pro version of the S7 in the works that will add a Haswell processor, as well as a RAID SSD setup that sounds rather tempting. In the meantime, though, the original S7 is still a fine, lightweight piece of kit.It’s a real looker, with a white-tinted Gorilla Glass top panel that measures a mere 13mm thick and keeps the weight down to just 1.3kg. The 13.3-inch touch-sensitive display provides a 1920 x 1080 resolution with a bright, sharp image and good viewing angles – although these are marred somewhat by the highly reflective gloss screen coating.The only disadvantage of the minimalist design is limited connectivity. There are just two USB 3.0 ports and no Ethernet at all – although Acer gets brownie points for bundling an USB-to-Ethernet adaptor rather than charging an extra 25 quid for it as Apple does.