It’s not a unique product: Apple’s Mac Mini comes fully complemented with 4GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a 500GB HDD for £499, but it’s not based on Haswell chippery, so quite apart from the micro-architectural disadvantage of the previous Intel platform, you get a lesser on-board GPU. It’s also not as compact.Gigabyte’s Brix is a NUC-alike that is based on Haswell. Take the Core i5 4200U-based GB-BXi5-4200: it’s slightly more expensive (£310) for the barebones model. Unlike the NUC it comes with single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi bundled, but a lesser GPU, the Intel HD 4400. That said, the Brix range is more extensive, running from a £170 Celeron-based unit up to a £500 version with a Core i7, so there’s more scope to match budget to required functionality.Of course, if you don’t care about form-factor, you can pick up a cheap laptop for under £400 these days. But that form-factor is the whole point of the NUC.Intel has revised its micro-desktop to deal with all of the criticisms levelled at the last version: more complete connectivity, better media centre friendliness and, of course, the lean Haswell processor. It really is now the ideal media centre micro. And it makes a darn fine little office desktop too.
The keys feel pretty good – positive and no nasty surprises, although there’s a fair bit of flexing on the backplate, which doesn’t inspire confidence, but as there were no accompanying creaks and clunks from the keys or the trackpad, I could live with this.That said, the trackpad's lack of sensitivity often required more deliberate pressure to ensure it would respond to two finger scrolling. The inertial scrolling wasn't too helpful here, bouncing back the page when letting go, which was odd. Still, the Synaptics trackpad control panel has plenty of options to help subdue some of this tricky behaviour.Lest we forget the touchscreen. Familiarity with Windows 8 has shifted my earlier concerns that without a touchscreen, you were sunk. These days, smearing a finger across a glossy screen happens only occasionally – usually when some unwanted desktop shape-shifting has occurred and I’m after a quick fix.
Knocking out this review on a display this size meant I didn’t have to zoom into Word to enlarge the type. This amount of screen acreage has its pros and cons, though. I did notice a fair bit of shading when viewing off-axis and the screen tilt angle also seemed very sensitive to this. It was most noticeable with white backgrounds - hence when typing up this review is when it really attracted my attention.I could see more evidence in photos – a white flower, a bowl of rice. Sit still though, and it's not a problem. However, the reflections just compound the issue, but maybe having a bigger screen makes dancing digits on the keyboard all the more obvious.Dell claims the display intensity is 300nits and while it’s certainly bright enough, it’s no Samsung dazzler. A nose around the drivers suggests this 1920 x 1080-pixels touchscreen panel is an LG model, although little is said about it, just some obscure references to an LGD040E driver ID and some reports that suggest it's IPS too.
That said, on various forums, user speculation is rife that Dell Inspiron displays come from unheard of Chinese manufacturers. Perhaps Dell should be a little more forthcoming on the spec here, as an "LED backlit touch display" doesn't give much away.Rather surprisingly, the Dell Inspiron 15 didn’t arrive with Windows 8.1 pre-installed but getting the update running was easy enough, apart from the tiresome dance of the seven veils the installer does as it goes about “Getting things ready”. Including downloading, it was all done in an hour, unlike my Atom tablet experience.I thought it best to do all the testing with Windows 8.1, as any buyer would update their Inspiron. The performance leaves little to complain about. It was slightly hesitant running apps after a new log-in set-up, but once that had bedded in, it's been fairly smooth ever since.
FutureMark’s PCMark 8 benchmark gave a Home Score best of 3078, which given there’s no SSD or hybrid cache speed boosting funkiness, it’s a perfectly acceptable result at this price. It makes you wonder how much further up the benchmark scale an SSD would take it. As it stands, this Core i7 Inspiron 15 notched up a casual gaming frame rate of 22fps. A tad tardy, but manageable and lowering the screen resolution to 1366 x 768 will almost double that figure.At best, booting from cold to the desktop took 23 seconds, although there were several occasions when it was over 40 seconds. Having Haswell inside delivers battery savings and a rapid wake from sleep; even on this HDD machine it was aroused from dozing in a second or two. As for the battery, the PCMark 8 endurance test clocked up a meagre 3hrs 23mins, but this benchmark tends to be a hard task master and the screen was on full brightness too.Dell claims 7hrs 24mins for the Core i5 version, but I couldn't find its figures for this Core i7 model. In general use, with screen dimming, around 5 hours was possible and no doubt frugal settings for undemanding labours could roughly double our PCMark 8 score from the 4-cell, 58Whr Li-ion battery.
Samsung has revealed what it dubs the "industry's first" one-terabyte solid-state drive in the compact mSATA form factor. From what we know of the SSD landscape, their claim is an honest one – by over a factor of two, seeing as how 480GB mSATA SSDs from Crucial and a few others are the most capacious such drives available in the non-OEM market of which we're aware.SSDs in the mSATA – mini-Serial ATA – form factor are targeted at thin and light laptops, such as what Intel has trademarked as Ultrabooks and AMD calls ultrathins. The little fellows could also find homes in the tablet-laptop mashups Chipzilla has dubbed "2-in-1s", formerly known as "convertibles", or even in tablets, should your wallet be thick enough to spring for one.Not that we know yet exactly how thick that wallet would need to be. Although Samsung announced the mSATA additions to its 840 EVO SSD line on Monday – the SATA line was announced in July – and said that it would be available globally later this month, it didn't provide a price for either the 1TB version or its 120GB, 250GB, and 500GB siblings.According to Samsung, the new mSATA form factor is approximately a quarter the size of a standard SATA 2.5-inch SSD. In its 1TB configuration, the mSATA drive is 3.85mm thick and weighs 8.5 grams – about 40 per cent as thick and one-twelfth as heavy as a "typical" hard disk drive.
To fit 1TB onto the mSATA form factor, Samsung crams four memory packages onto the mSATA card, with each package having 16 layers of 128Gb NAND chips, each fabbed in what Sammy refers to as its "10-nanometer class process technology."The 1TB version can perform 98,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS, Samsung says, and can achieve sequential read speeds of 540 MB/sec and write speeds of 520 MB/sec. When running Samsung's Magician 4.3 software, the company claims sequential read speeds can be goosed to over 1GB/sec in RAPID (real-time accelerated processing of I/O data) mode – a performance than Sammy says is "approximately twice that of a typical SATA SSD and ten times of an average HDD."That level of performance is nowhere near that of the 3GB/sec that Samsung claims for its enterprise-level 1.6TB XS1715 SSD, which connects to its host over the PCIe-based NVMe – non-volatile memory express – protocol, but for a laptop or tablet, 1GB/sec ain't shabby. I mean, the whole darned operating system is geared for search, is this really necessary? Admittedly, this Search facility operates on local files and the acquired apps, as well as on-line, but couldn’t it have been on a function key (it does have a row of them) or or accessed with some other key command?
And if Acer really must break with 135 years of tradition, an alternative key command should be offered for the Caps Lock, but no. All you get in the way of help here is forums saying you can reconfigure the keyboard layout without specifying how this is done.The good news is that it’s really very simple to change. Lurking in the Settings under Device is a range of options for trackpad, keyboard and display. The first wave of keyboard options enables the Search, Control and Alt keys to be reassigned. So that’s a relief, although it’s a shame the function keys can’t be remapped, especially as they don’t even have dual functions.h and have you ever tried to get an accent on a Chromebook? While you’re in these settings you can delve into another layer for Languages and Input. The keyboard does have an Alt Gr key on the right which enables some modifiers, so you can easily find an accented e acute and grave.
Alternatively, you can load up a foreign keyboard to get more exotic characters and accents. However, on the French layout I couldn’t figure out how to type an e circumflex (ê) – using the Alt Gr key I found the accent on the 9 key, as usual but it wouldn’t stick to the e no matter what order you performed these keystrokes in.I can envisage metropolitan Chromebook users will soon grow weary of this palaver and create a crib sheet of accented words to refer to, as the raison d’être of a word processor is to enable the creation of typed documents, rather than get sidetracked hunting for characters in foreign keyboard layouts.On a mobile, typically holding down a key for a second or so brings up accent choices from a pop-up list. It couldn’t be simpler. This ease of use and intimate familiarity has changed habits so we no longer feel the need to have a laptop for internet access on-the-go. Nowadays, it seems laptops are more about portability and convenience in the home or office. Mobiles take care of the on-the-go side of things. And if you really need to get down to business, then phone tethering plugs the gap. Well, at least in theory.
Livre d'Or
Contact