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Asus k50in laptop battery www.dearbattery.co.uk

Likewise, the Aspire E5-573G sports a 1080p (non-touch) display, another rarity among sub-$600 Windows machines. It’s a TN panel, so it doesn’t have the wide viewing angles or general vividity of an IPS alternative, but it’s still sharp, and its contrast is decent for what it is. Since it’s matte, it also does well to avoid glare. All told, it’s a noticeable step up from any 1366x768 option.But again, there are trade-offs. The main issue is bloatware: Asus has fitted this thing with dozens of pre-installed apps, most of which are needless, all of which chew up storage space and slow down performance. It’s worth going out of your way to get a clean install of Windows 10 on here.Besides that, battery life isn’t anything special at about 4-5 hours (or 1-2 if you’re gaming), and the trackpad feels closer to budget-level than we’d like. (A cheap external mouse seems like a good investment.) The keyboard, meanwhile, is pleasant and spacious enough, but lacks any sort of backlighting. There’s no disc drive either, though that’s less of an issue in an age of streaming services.


Perhaps the biggest reason to hold off, however, is the fact that a newer model just launched. The Aspire E5-574G-52QU throws a sixth-gen Core i5 and a flashier half-white finish onto what appears to be the same package as the E5-573G, so it should be a little bit stronger, a little bit longer-lasting, and a little more futureproof. It, too, is going for $550 on Amazon, but since it’s so new, user feedback is limited. It looks like the better deal on paper, but we’ll confirm in the coming weeks. Based on our latest round of research, though, the E5-573G is still a great get among midrange desktop replacements, especially if you can find it closer to the $500 mark.The 15.6-inch Toshiba Satellite C55-C5241, meanwhile, is probably the most extreme example of the trade-offs you have to consider at the bargain bin. On the one hand, it’s fairly spec’d out for its $460 asking price, with a fifth-gen Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD (which you can upgrade if you’re handy enough). It’s at least comparable to the Acer above for about $100 less. It’s not an outright blazer, but speaking solely in terms of performance, it’s an overachiever.


On the other hand, it’s an obvious underachiever when it comes to build quality. Its fake brushed metal aesthetic looks nice from afar, but get your hands on its all-plastic chassis and it’ll creak and bend at almost every interaction. That necessitates you be careful with it, which means it isn’t the kind of thing you’ll want to throw in a bag and carry around town.Beyond that, it has a typically middling 1366x768 display, a rigid trackpad, and a keyboard that’s just okay. Its 5-hour or so battery life is fine, but not spectacular. It weighs less than the Aspire, but at close to 5 pounds, it isn’t exactly light either.In the end, this is one of the strongest laptops you can buy for $425, and you’re buying it for that performance alone. If you know you can be gentle with it, it’s one of the few solid values in this sector.The struggle involved in finding a good budget notebook should get you to ask yourself what exactly it is that you want out of your laptop. Maybe you’ll find that most of the things you do with your computer don’t stretch too far beyond a web browser. If that’s the case, you might very well be able to get by with a Chromebook.


These increasingly popular machines run Google’s Chrome OS, which effectively turns the Chrome web browser into a super lightweight operating system. They aren’t of much use without an Internet connection as a result — though web apps like Gmail and Google Drive have gained more offline functionality over time — and they can’t run more involved processes like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Excel. But since you can watch movies, listen to music, write up documents, store files, edit photos, and do a million other things through the web already, they’re enough for most needs. They’re also highly affordable (Chromebook Pixel aside).The latest Toshiba Chromebook 2 is our current favorite in this category. Its Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM don't look like much on paper, but they (along with the included SSD) absolutely breeze something as airy as Chrome OS. You still have no choice but to stick to the basics, but doing so here is much faster (and quieter) than it is on a similarly priced Windows machine.



We should note that Toshiba sells a $430 model with a Core i3 processor too, but that's just about overkill for Chrome's needs, and anything over $400 is a little too pricey for all a Chromebook offers. (The latter point is a big reason why we think the Toshiba is a better buy than Dell's nicer-feeling Chromebook 13.)You also get 7-8 hours of battery life here, which is just about average for a Chromebook, but still excellent next to its Windows-based rivals. There's only 16GB of storage on our recommended configuration, but if you use Chrome OS as it's intended, that's not a massive loss. It's just part of the compromise.What really sets the Chromebook 2 apart is its vivid 1080p IPS display. It’s gorgeous, and although it can pick up some glare, in many ways it’s a better screen than that of a $1,000 Macbook Air. Add to that a comfortable enough keyboard (that's now backlit), a responsive trackpad, superb speakers, 802.11ac WiFi support, and a relatively stylish design, and you have a fantastic overall value at $330 — so long as you can accept Chrome OS’s limitations.If the Chromebook idea interests you but you want something a little more spacious than the 13-inch Toshiba above or the sea of 11-inch alternatives, have a look at the Acer Chromebook 15. It’s one of the few other Chrome OS devices with a 1080p IPS display, which looks good, even if its colors and viewing angles aren’t as vivid as those of the Chromebook 2. It’s not the best-looking device around, and its larger frame means it isn’t exactly travel-friendly, but it’s sturdy and well-made. Its keyboard is dependable, too.


The real hook here is its performance. The Chromebook 15’s fifth-gen Intel Celeron processor easily breezes through Chrome OS, loading web pages quickly and powering through handfuls of tabs with aplomb. It also gets more than 9 hours of battery life on average, which is great even by Chromebook standards. If you’re looking for a Chromebook that’s better suited for getting things done, this is the one to buy. In response to the growing popularity of Chromebooks, various laptop makers have started churning out $200ish Windows machines that run on similarly modest specs. Now, because they use the same full-on OS available on $1,000 notebooks, these devices aren’t nearly as responsive as their Google-bred alternatives. They usually have to cut corners on hardware to hit their price point, too. At the same time, they do run a full-on OS, so they have access to desktop apps like Word, Excel, or anything else you’d use outside of a web browser. (Just don’t expect to get heavy Photoshop editing out of their entry-level processors.) The idea is to sacrifice some speed and build quality in exchange for greater offline capability. In the best cases, all of this makes for a decent secondary or travel-centric device. They’re like modern netbooks.


As of this writing, the Lenovo Ideapad 100s is the best of those best cases. Like any other ultra-budget notebook, it’s not strong — its modest Intel Atom chip and 2GB of RAM can’t handle too many open apps or tabs at once, and gaming is just about impossible. It only has 32GB of storage, its keyboard flexes, and it doesn't support 802.11ac WiFi. Its trackpad is strangely devoid of all multi-touch support, too. It’s a $180 laptop, in other words.Still, when used in moderation, the Ideapad is surprisingly fluid next to its peers. Word and the like are perfectly agreeable, and there’s never too much lag once everything’s up and loaded. The keyboard is well-sized and comfortable outside of that flexing problem, and the 11.6-inch 1366x768 TN display is accurate enough for the money. It’s all good enough to get lighter stuff done. It also comes pre-packaged with a free year of Office 365 and 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive storage.


What really sells the Ideapad is its build and battery life. It’s plastic, but it’s colorful, smooth, and sturdy, with a flexible hinge that helps mitigate the display’s iffy viewing angles. It doesn’t explicitly look cheap. The battery, meanwhile, lasts an excellent 10-11 hours per charge. Don’t expect this — or the HP Stream 11, or the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook — to act as your primary device, but if you’re frequently on the move or you only have $200 to spend, the Ideapad 100s should serve you well. It’s worth noting that there’s a 14-inch model, too, but we don’t think it’s worth sacrificing portability for something this underpowered.Whether for work or pleasure, traveling shouldn’t be stressful. But if you’re the type who can’t stop using things with screens — i.e., if you’re a human in 2015 — you may have no choice but to lug along an overflow of gadgets. That might not only include your basic smartphone, tablet, or laptop, but also a handful of accessories needed to keep them up and running.If that sounds like a problem you’ve had before, the HooToo TripMate Elite should help you pack a little lighter. Priced at $38, it’s an all-in-one device that simultaneously serves as a portable battery, USB wall charger, travel WiFi router, and a network-attached storage (or NAS). It packs all this into something the size of a glossy black MacBook charger.



Considering how many mini routers, NAS devices, and chargers there are that can’t do their one job right, it’s easy to be skeptical of something that claims to replicate all of them at once. The TripMate, however, actually does work. It isn’t the best at any one of its functions, but it’s serviceable enough at each to come in handy on the go.As a battery and wall charger, it works fine. It has a foldable AC plug and two USB ports built-in — one at 1A, the other at 1/2.1A — and carries a 6,000mAh capacity. That’s enough to charge most smartphones about twice, and most tablets around halfway. When you need to charge the TripMate itself, you just plug it into an outlet.The router and personal cloud features are a little more exciting. Of the two, the router functionality probably works best. It’s altogether simple to set up, and when plugged into a modem, gets close to your maximum internet speeds. There’s an ethernet port on its back, so if you’re staying in a hotel room with just a cabled connection, you can just hook it up here and make it wireless. The device can also act as a bridge for multiple wireless connections at once. And with a little ingenuity, you can use it to get something like a Chromecast working over previously inaccessible networks.

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Akku lenovo ideapad y470a www.pcakku.com

Die Hardware-Voraussetzungen bleiben für diese zweite Option natürlich unverändert. Wer sich für Android 7.0 Nougat interessiert, der braucht zunächst einmal eines der folgenden Geräte: Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Pixel C oder das General Mobile 4G. Der nächste Schritt ist sodann, sich für das offizielle Android Beta Programm von Google zu registrieren. Die Anmeldung muss dort mit demselben Google-Konto erfolgen, welches auch auf dem Nexus- oder Pixel-Gerät als Hauptkonto hinterlegt ist. Schließlich erfolgt nur noch die Auswahl des Geräts, auf dem die Android-Beta-Versionen empfangen werden sollen.

Entscheidend an der erfolgreichen Registrierung für das Programm ist nun, dass Google aktuell keine Beta-Version verteilt, sondern die finale Fassung von Android 7.0 Nougat - und das im Normalfall ganz ohne nennenswerte Wartezeit. Wer also am Beta-Programm teilnimmt, erhält Nougat als einer der ersten überhaupt. Natürlich ist es aber empfehlenswert, den Download des Betriebssystemupdates über eine WLAN-Verbindung durchzuführen.


Android 7.0 Nougat bringt als wichtigste Neuerungen unter anderem einen Multi-Window-Modus, ein erweitertes Benachrichtigungssystem mit der Möglichkeit, systemweit auf eingehende Nachrichten schneller zu reagieren, und neue Sicherheitsfeatures mit.

Google hat heute Abend wie erwartet die Fertigstellung der finalen Fassung von Android 7.0 Nougat angekündigt. Die neueste Android-Hauptversion, die von mutigen Nutzern mit einem unterstützten Nexus-Gerät seit März des Jahres unter dem Arbeitstitel Android N als Vorschau-Version ausprobiert werden konnte, bringt als wichtigste Neuerungen einen Multi-Window-Modus, eine verbesserte Benachrichtigungszentrale und erweiterte Sicherheitsfunktionen mit. Darüber hinaus gibt es diverse kleinere Verbesserungen und Anpassungen, neue Emoji und erweiterte Anpassungsmöglichkeiten für Nutzer.

Wie schon bei früheren Android-Hauptversionen versorgt Google nur einige seiner aktuellen Nexus- und Pixel-Geräte mit Android 7.0 Nougat. Die Liste setzt sich aus folgenden Geräten zusammen: Die Smartphones Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6 und das Android One Modell General Mobile 4G, die Set-Top-Box Nexus Player sowie die Tablets Nexus 9 und Pixel C.



Mit der Verteilung des OTA-Updates will das Unternehmen noch heute beginnen, bis aber wirklich alle geeigneten Nexus-Geräte damit versorgt sind, kann es offiziellen Angaben nach mehrere Wochen dauern. Alternativ wird der Internetriese aber für erfahrene Nutzer auch wieder Image-Dateien des neuen Betriebssystems zum Download auf seinen Servern bereitstellen.

Wie es mit Android 7.0 für die unzähligen Geräte anderer Herstellern aussieht ist derzeit noch recht schwer zu prognostizieren. Analog zu den Vorjahren haben sich die bekanntesten Unternehmen – darunter Samsung, HTC, LG und Sony – bereits zur neuen Android-Hauptversion bekannt. Nougat-Updates für verbreitete Smartphones und Tablets sind aber vermutlich erst in ein paar Monaten zu erwarten.

Google bestätigt heute im Übrigen auch, dass das kommende LG V20 das erste Smartphone sein wird, welches mit vorinstalliertem Android 7.0 in der Verpackung liegt. Die offizielle Enthüllung dieses Geräts wird für Anfang September erwartet, was also zugleich bedeutet, dass frühesten nach diesem Termin mit der Präsentation neuer Nexus-Smartphones zu rechnen ist.



Alles rund um die Neuerungen von Android 7.0 finden Interessierte auf dieser Themen-Webseite von Google. Wir werden in Kürze ebenfalls noch etwas detaillierter auf das Betriebssystem eingehen.

Für alle, die aktuell nach einem gut ausgestatteten, ansprechenden Android-Smartphone um die 200 Euro suchen, hat Saturn womöglich genau das richtige Angebot parat: Der deutsche Händler bietet das Samsung Galaxy A3 (2016) derzeit zum Sonderpreis von 199 Euro an.Das Galaxy A3 (2016) wurde von Samsung im Dezember 2015 vorgestellt und wurde mit einer unverbindlichen Preisempfehlung von 329 Euro ausgezeichnet. Saturn selbst bot das Smartphone mit Metallrahmen bis vor kurzem für 269 Euro an. Das taufrische Sonderangebot ist ab sofort grundsätzlich sowohl in allen Saturn-Filialen als auch im Online-Shop des Händlers erhältlich, allerdings gibt es bei letzterem offenbar Lieferprobleme.

Im Zusammenhang mit der Saturn-Aktion ist es erwähnenswert, dass aktuell ebenso eine Samsung-Sommeraktion läuft, die Smartphone-Käufern, die ihr brandneues Galaxy A3 beim südkoreanischen Hersteller registrieren, kostenlose Accessoires spendiert. Zur Auswahl stehen Kunden entweder die Kombination aus dem Bewegungstracker Charm und dem Flip Wallet oder einfach nur die Bluetooth-Kopfhörer Level U. Um von der Aktion profitieren zu können, müssen sich Interessenten allerdings sputen, da dies nur noch bis einschließlich 23. August 2016 möglich ist.


Zum Galaxy A3 (2016) an sich ist zu sagen, dass es sich dabei um ein kompaktes Gerät mit 4,7 Zoll großem AMOLED-Display handelt. Die Panel-Auflösung beträgt 1280 x 720 Pixel (HD), angetrieben wird das elegante Smartphone von dem Quad-Core-Prozessor Exynos 7578, dem 1,5 Gigabyte RAM und 16 Gigabyte Flash-Speicher zur Seite stehen. Außerdem zur Ausstattung gehören eine 13 Megapixel Hauptkamera, eine 5 Megapixel Selfie-Cam und ein microSD-Kartenslot. Als Betriebssystem läuft auf dem Gerät ab Werk das mittlerweile etwas angestaubte Android 5.1 Lollipop (inklusive TouchWiz-Oberfläche), allerdings hat Samsung bereits begonnen, ein Update auf Android 6.0 Marshmallow auszuliefern.

Sony will im kommenden September nicht nur eine High-End-Version seiner PlayStation 4 vorstellen, sondern auch eine kleinere Ausführung des seit 2013 erhältlichen Modells. Das berichtet jedenfalls das Wall Street Journal unter Berufung auf gut informierte Quellen.

Seit März dieses Jahres spekulierte die Gerüchteküche kräftig über eine neue PlayStation 4 (PS4) mit verbesserter Hardware, die bei Sony offenbar unter dem Codenamen „Neo“ entwickelt wurde Im Juni, unmittelbar vor der US-Videospielemesse E3, bestätigte der japanische Elektronikriese dann auch offiziell entsprechende Berichte, nannte aber weder einen Termin für die Markteinführung dieses leistungsfähigeren Modells, noch exakte technische Details.


Mittlerweile ist bekannt, dass am 7. September ein Event in New York stattfinden wird, auf dem Sonys PlayStation-Sparte über die Zukunft der Gaming-Plattform informieren will. Die gesamte Technikwelt erwartet somit wenig überraschend die offizielle Präsentation der PlayStation 4 Neo im Rahmen dieser bevorstehenden Veranstaltung. Zusätzlich zur brandneuen High-End-Konsole könnte es dort jedoch auch noch eine PlayStation 4 „Slim“ zu sehen geben. Den vorliegenden Infos nach handelt es sich dabei um die altbekannte PS4-Hardware in einem kompakteren Chassis.Für die Echtheit des Berichts vom Wall Street Journal, die ohnehin nicht dafür bekannt sind, derartige Leaks ohne sehr konkrete Hinweise aus verlässlichen Kreisen zu veröffentlichen, spricht auch, dass am Wochenende einige Fotos im Netz aufgetaucht sind, die die PS4 Slim zeigen sollen. Die Aufnahmen wirken authentisch.



Für Sony wäre es trotz all dieser Hinweise ein absolutes Novum, wenn im September gleich zwei neue Konsolen gleichzeitig enthüllt werden würde. In vorherigen PlayStation-Generation gab es stets nach ein paar Jahren einen Refresh der etablierten Hardware, bei dem in erster Linie das Gehäuse verkleinert und die Fertigungskosten reduziert wurden, um den Verkaufspreis drücken zu können. Mit der Einführung der PlayStation 4 Neo wird dieses bekannte Muster allerdings über Bord geworfen.

Die Idee Sonys hinter der High-End-PlayStation könnte sein, damit noch mehr Technik-Enthusiasten und Hardcore-Gamer ins Boot zu holen - eine Nutzer-Klientel also, die traditionell eher zum Gaming-PC tendiert. Mit der vermeintlich günstigeren und kompakteren PlayStation 4 Slim könnte hingegen der ein oder andere Casual-Gamer zum Kauf einer Sony-Konsole verleitet werden. Im Oktober bringt das Unternehmen außerdem sein Virtual Reality Headset PlayStation VR auf den Markt.

Sonys stärkster Konkurrent im Gaming-Markt, Microsoft, hat seine Verkaufsstrategie bereits zur vergangenen E3 umgekrempelt. Das Unternehmen will künftig die allermeisten seiner Xbox-One-Titel ebenfalls (und möglichst zeitgleich) auch für Windows 10 PCs veröffentlichen. Außerdem kündigte das Unternehmen das verkleinerte Xbox One Modell Xbox One S sowie das High-End-Gerät Project Scorpio an. Bei letzterem handelt es sich um eine extrem leistungsfähige Xbox-Konsole, die jedoch erst gegen Ende 2017 zusätzlich zur Xbox One S verkauft werden soll.

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Lenovo Thinkpad R61 laptop battery www.dearbattery.co.uk

Given how thick the iMac is once you move beyond the edges, there clearly is room to fit a slot-load optical drive. If that’s not a convenient location, well neither is the place where all of the iMac’s other ports are located, and you’ll use them far more than you do a DVD drive. If that doesn’t appeal to Apple’s industrial design team, the company should include one of its external SuperDrives for free. Jobs knows the company can well afford this small generosity.After a stellar start to the World Solar Challenge, the fancied Nuon team from Delft has had to cop a ten minute penalty for breaking speed limits, while Japan's Tokai University entrant has been given a more serious 30 minute penalty.The penalties will probably put Solar Team Twente (also from The Netherlands) in the lead at least for a while since it, along with Nuon and Tokai were the overnight front-runners. Nuon was the first to arrive at the Dunmarra control point after Day one, at 4:26pm, followed by Twente and Tokai.With all cars obliged to take a 30 minute stop at the control point, and with racing ending at 5pm, that gave the three vehicles a strong overnight position. They were followed by the teams fielded by Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Solar Team Eindhoven, and Australia's Team Arrow in 7th spot.


Eindhoven's position is a considerable achievement since it puts a Cruiser-class car among the designed-for-speed Challenger cars.By The Register's reckoning, Nuon and Twente will retain their position out in front of the pack, with Tokai likely to find itself having to fend off the Michigan and Stanford entries before Day 2 is complete.The World Solar Challenge says Nuon was penalised for breaking the speed limit. Tokai's penalty (which mean its Tenant Creek control stop was doubled in time from 30 minutes to 60 minutes) as imposed to punish the entry for “the behaviour of its media car”.The field is also starting to thin out: as well as the rollover which put paid to the Cambridge University entry, Japan's Hachinohe Institute of Technology was unable to pass pre-start scrutineering, and since the start, the event is recording New Zealand's HybridAuto, South Korea's KUST entry and the ITS team from Indonesia as being trailered.Trailered vehicles are, however, still competing: having been unable to stay with the pack, they're brought forward to the next checkpoint. At the end of the race they will be assessed solely on distance traveled under solar power.


World Solar Challenge The World Solar Challenge kicks off today, with 36 solely-solar-powered cars about to attempt a 3,000km journey across Australia from the northern city of Darwin to Adelaide in the south.The Reg is following the race – and making some odd side trips you'll learn about soon – but with the cars on the starting line we felt it prudent to offer a look at the kind of cars making the trip.The race is run in three classes, all of which must be street-legal inasmuch as they possess brakes, indicator lights and other niceties that let them run on public roads. The Challenger class is for the out and out speed merchants intent on line honours. Most entrants in this class are low wedges of solar panels broken only by a dome so the driver can see. This year we've spotted two dominant configurations in the class. Here's one of them: a 'dome on the side' rig.We chatted with The JU Team and they assured us that despite the driver and motor residing on the right-hand side of the car, it is balanced perfectly. Steering can be a bit tricky until you get the hang of things.


The team is very popular around pit lane, where the smell of burning photons hangs heavy, because it is sponsored by a Swedish energy drink company that sent two pallets of its product to Darwin. By air freight. Half the competition is hopped up on the stuff, or gratefully using a slab of it to weight something down.But we digress. If you check out the Challenger class you'll also see what we'll call “bubble in the middle” designs like this one below from Team Arrow.A variant on the bubble in the middle design is this no-bubble setup from the UMP Solar Team out of the University Malaysia Pahang. The team jokes that its car is a convertible, but is serious with its intention to offer the driver a better experience by letting them out into a cooling flow of air. It may not look elegant but it's a solution to the real problem of driver discomfort: drivers have a nasty time of it in these solar cars.Let's check out the Cruiser class next. In this class speed is important, but entrants are also judged on how closely they resemble conventional cars in appearance and performance. Points are therefore on offer for items like car radios and luggage compartments capable of brining home a week's worth of groceries.



The car below, Solar Team Eindhoven's “Stella”, wowed racegoers yesterday by not only coming second overall in the time trial but doing so while packing four seats, a USB charger and a two-speaker music system. The team plans to run with four people aboard for some of the trip to Adelaide.Yes, it looks a little crude compared to the sleek entries above, but Hochinoe's team comprises just six people. Other teams have 20 or more people on board, and that's just the folks who made the trip.In any case, under the skin of almost every car there's crude hacks galore. Here's a shot of some ballast from a fancied entry that's typical of what's going on away from the public eye.And now to conclude, a picture of a truck that we bring you in order to fulfil our sub-heading's promise of naming the Snidely Whiplash of this wacky solar race. The truck belongs to Team Michigan, whose name was spat out along pit lane as being prone to covering its car if rival team members walk past. Michigan is apparently also unwilling to lend tools, a crime against solar camaraderie.


One can understand their secrecy: the team has come third in the last three World Solar Challenges, is tired of lower rungs of the podium and desperately wants to win this time around.We should also mention that the team is impressive inasmuch as students from across its titular university get involved: the truck was shipped to Australia thanks to sponsors wooed by marketing and PR students.Allow us one last photo: that of Vulture South's Simon Sharwood cuddling a crocodile. You can't go to Darwin without a crocodile encounter. Simon met this one in a local supermarket where he was stocking up on supplies for the trip south.World Solar Challenge Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER), Britain's sole entrant in the trans-continental World Solar Challenge starting tomorrow in Australia, has withdrawn its “Resolution” vehicle from the race.


CUER entered the race with an innovative design featuring tilting solar panels, the better to catch the maximum amount of solar energy throughout the course of a day on the road between the challenge's starting line in Darwin and the Adelaide checkered flag. In between the two cities lies 3,000 km of the Stuart Highway and a lot of sunshine.CUER's design attracted knowing glances from Professor John Storey, the event's Chief Scientist, who described it to The Reg as “a daring torpedo shape”. Sadly that shape wasn't optimally stable: the team crashed during final shakedown cruises October 2nd with Resolution suffering the damage depicted below.Resolution did not appear at today's time trials to determine grid positions for tomorrow's start, but The Reg understands that World Solar Challenge officials had given CUER every chance to ready the vehicle for the 3,000km journey to Adelaide.


Sadly, the CUER team today came to realise it could not ready Resolution in time, because tests conducted after crash repairs had concluded “revealed new dynamic instabilities, which we have not been able to fix in the time we have left before the race.”While the vehicle was operable, the team's statement says “... we have not been able reassure ourselves of the safety of our solar drivers.”The team member to whom The Reg spoke was understandably upset, and declined to comment other than to point us to the statement we've linked to above.The statement also say that while Resolution has not made it to the starting line, the CUER team feels their efforts have been well and truly worthwhile.“There are many positives to be taken from the event this year,” the statement says, before listing the following achievements:“First and foremost, our engineers have ensured that our drivers have been safe at all times, with the car’s crash structure performing as designed in the event of an accident. Secondly, Resolution produced its best ever results while testing in Australia, indicating that CUER would have been on target to be competitive. Additionally, we have developed several new and innovative technologies over this design cycle: the tracking plate, flexible fairings, and concentrator systems – all of which will stand CUER in good stead for future competitions. And finally: Resolution has been an inspiration – to us; to the many members of the public who have been able to see her displayed; and to the next generation of engineers.”



Professor John Storey, the event's Chief Scientist, told The Reg the USA's University of Michigan, Japan's Tokai University, Italy's Onda Solare and Sweden's Jönköping University as teams to watch. Yet None featured prominently in the one-lap time trial conducted at Darwin's Hidden Valley raceway, a venue also used for more conventional motor sports, the time trial sees each competitor complete a flying lap of the 2.4km track.Australian Team Arrow was the provisional winner of the event, having zipped around the track in 2:00.1 minutes. The result “came as a surprise” according to team members from the Queensland-based outfit, as Australia's “sunshine state” has not entered the Challenge since 1999. A mixture of students, hobbyists and veterans of that 1999 effort have created a new car in the Challenger class, the toughest level of competitionPit lane at Hidden Valley was full of talk about some cars being set up as track racers, rather than being readied for the 3000km haul to Adelaide. Team Arrow wasn't the subject of a lot of such chatter, or indeed much chatter at all given its dark horse status. The team is confident it will make the distance.


Solar Team Eindhoven's entry Stella turned plenty of heads by finishing second in a provisional 02:05.01, a remarkable feat given it competes in the more lowly-specced Cruiser class. Cruisers are permitted two engines, which helped to propel the vehicle to 135 km/h down Hidden Valley's straight. Team representatives said the extra engine and extra weight needed to make a four-seater helps by improving cornering and down force.The weight's not all from ballast – plenty of cars have bags of dirt in odd places – but instead comes from features like the four seats, a music system with line-in and a USB charger. Already street-legal in the Netherlands, the team told The Reg it expects to do a weekly shopping run when it returns home.Team representatives also said their calculations suggest that even in The Netherlands' wan northern European light, only in the months of December and January would it need power from the grid to charge its batteries. Averaged over a year, we were told, the car would collect enough energy to satisfy an average family's motoring needs with some electricity left over to feed into the grid. Yes, the new XPS 11 is a notebook with a keyboard hinged to fold right back against the rear of the screen housing, just like the Lenovo machine’s does.

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Fujitsu FMV-E8200 laptop battery www.dearbattery.co.uk

Setting up is fairly straightforward, calibration takes place by clicking the corners of the screen or whiteboard area so the Edge scanner learns the workspace size. Magnetic strips can be used to easily mount the Edge scanner to a stick-on whiteboard.The eBeam has both business and education packages with capture toolsl however, the business edition features the collaborative Workspace software environment which supports the import of Office, Flash and image files and is PC only. The education version is Mac and PC compatible but lacks Workspace. This eBeam kit might seem more appropriate to pimp my boardroom, but if your work involves unpicking brainstorming meetings, then the content captured may well simplify matters.When I first clapped eyes on this stand with a definite twist, I was surprised to find myself being charmed by its design. I mean, we’re talking about a bit of kit to simply hold a tablet in position, after all. It’s not exactly news but it certainly has a very neat approach. Described as a monkey’s tail, this weighty, bendy rubberised length of heavy duty flex, holds its position when shaped so that it can be raised, lowered or even wrapped around fixtures. A robust suction cup at the business end holds the tablet in place.


While it’s hardly rocket science you can use it to hold a tablet just about anywhere – you can even wrap it around your neck, and have the tablet in front of your Bob Dylan harmonica style, which might be handy for reading or the need for hands-free viewing whilst following some tech info. That said, dock and tail are not exactly light at 840g in total and that's before you attach a tablet. Still this weight does ensure it stays put when place on a tabletop.The suction cup section can be removed and used as a basic prop stand if kept stuck to the back of the tablet
Unlike so many prop-me-up tablet stands, this one brings the tablet to you so if you’ve wandered into a meeting room for video conference with a monkey tail in tow, your telepresence won’t be a view or your nostrils any more. Also app or web authors can see their work in the same line of sight as their desktop screens too. Why not have PDF manual loaded into an eBook reader? You could then work out how to get the best from Dragon Dictate from its commands cheat sheet.


If you’re inclined to hesitate about choosing a Philips monitor, then it's probably passed you by that this sector of the brand is actually run by MMD. It’s a spin-off company from TPV Technology – the world’s largest flat panel producer – that now designs and manufactures Philips TV and display products. As TPV panels are everywhere, it must be doing something right.So what we have here is a 1080p monitor with what appears to be a webcam, but is a low-res sensor that enables the display to double as a fitness coach, well sort of. The ErgoSensor’s spooky my-tech-is-watching-me aspect, actually implements some well-intentioned ideas. It will nag you to sit up straight, advise on viewing distance and notify you that it’s time to take a break. Perhaps the latter will appeal enough to want one on your desk and if you’re found idling by the tea room, you can insist you’re simply following company policy.Besides watching you while you work it features an energy saving trick, as the display dims after a minute when you're not at your desk, rather neatly brightening up when you reappear. For longer periods the display blacks out. Talking of energy, at 29W, the new 231P4QRYES 23in IPS panel does consume a bit more power than the 241P4LRYES 24in TFT version’s 21.5W, which is still available.


Both feature DisplayPort, DVI and VGA interfacing along with 4 x USB 2.0 ports, audio in/out, 2 x 1.5W speakers and a pivot stand that enables landscape viewing. The speakers are probably the worst feature, sounding bright and thin, akin to laptop. Still, do you really buy a monitor for its speakers?Philips isn’t alone with the ergonomic ideas though, BenQ has implemented similar reminders on some of its models with the BL2410PT taking a best guess as to when you’re reading and makes brightness and colour adjustments.No doubt some of you have 4K in mind for your next display upgrade. LG has a couple of 4K monitors – the 27in 16:9 aspect EA83 (£600) for professionals and the 29in consumer-centric 21:9 EA93 (£400). They might not tell you when it’s time for a tea break but they certainly make a big impression.


When it comes to desktop audio and video office tech, companies are falling over themselves to deliver equipment optimised for use with popular communications systems. Flavour of the month appears to be Microsoft’s Lync and, like Logitech, Plantronics has plenty of devices that talk the talk with Redmond’s latest. It’s just an endorsement of sorts, as buying a Lync savvy device doesn’t mean it will fail to function with Google Hangouts and the like.For calls, a simple single earpiece and mic setup is all you really need and I was initially tempted by the Blackwire C710 USB headset, as I find that peripheral battery gear in the workplace has a tendency to die at inopportune moments – the Bluetooth mouse being the biggest sinner here. However, the C710 has the best of both worlds, as its clip on controller unit – with call mute, volume and mode buttons – also features a rechargeable battery to power it for mobile use.Sure you can simply plug it into a USB port on a Mac or PC, but you can also switch from desktop to mobile mode and go walkies with it linked up to a handset via Bluetooth. Another nice touch is it senses when you pick up the headset to answer a call and to hang up when you take it off.



Sonically, the spec reveals the frequency response is merely 100Hz to 8kHz for the noise cancelling mic which has been tailored to play nice with voices and sounds pleasant enough. The headset can be cranked up quite loud too but there’s no booming bass nor a scintillating top end, just a fairly modest response.I’ll admit that I did find the headband a little tight to begin with though, but after a little adjustment, I’d either found a sweetspot or just became used to it. Still, for those with big bonces, it might be a problem and the wireless Voyager Legend UC might be a better bet, but then you’ll have an in-ear system that relies solely on battery and Bluetooth. You pays yer money...Undoubtedly, there exists a chosen few in offices who are kitted out with an Apple MacBook of some description attached to a 27in Thunderbolt display for a bevvy of interfacing options. Naturally, such niceties are not cheap and even Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express dock is a pricey alternative for those in need of additional ports for a MacBook Air.


PC users, especially those with Ultrabooks, are finding that ports they took for granted are now missing. It’s something that StarTech’s docking station sets out to remedy. This USB 3.0 box of essential interfacing features Gigabit Ethernet, audio in/out, two additional USB 3.0 ports and three display connectivity options: HDMI and DVI-D and VGA. You can even hook up two monitors from this selection configured either as HDMI and DVI-D or HDMI and VGA.To get started, you need to instal the DisplayLink manager software which enables the video ports for additional screens and features resolution and orientation functions. I tried it out with the BBC iPlayer on a second monitor, with the dock audio output going into powered speakers, all streaming from its Ethernet connection. On the host PC's main screen this all worked smoothly but Top Gear was a tad jerky on the second display attacted to the dock. This probably won't be an issue for the majority of PowerPoint presentations though and, thankfully, the audio was in sync.


Tests with an older MacBook Pro with just USB 2.0 ports successfully accessed the dock's USB ports and audio output interfacing, but not the audio input. So in desperate times the Startech USB3SDOCKHDV dock could be hauled in for hub duties. Unsurprisingly, the Ethernet and monitor options didn't show up.Ideal for hot-desking or just getting notebooks displays onto the boardroom big screen this all-things-to-all-men device is certainly versatile and after a bit of driver handshaking will get visitor laptops talking over Ethernet so you don’t have to give out the company Wi-Fi details to every waif and stray that pitches up at the office. Exclusive review Western Digital (WD) has revamped its SMB NAS lineup with a Server 2012 Essentials system that I find hard to hate.I have never been comfortable with the idea of WD entering into the server space; it's a disk-peddler, what could it possibly know about servers? This is the second generation of these units I've had in for review, and WD is slowly changing my mind.


Up for review this time round is the Sentinel DS6100. Earlier this year I reviewed its older sibling - the DX4000 - and then my complaints boiled down to "Microsoft makes the weirdest interfaces known to man" and "but it's Western Digital…they who have caused me so much grief!"Microsoft still can't design an interface worth a damn, but any queasies I had about Western Digital's ability to make workable kit are officially gone.The unit The Register was issued for review is a quad core Xeon E3 1265L V2 with 16GB of RAM, a pair of 320GB 2.5-inch OS disks and 4x 3TB 7200 RPM drives crammed into a footprint the size of your average home NAS. It comes with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and retails for $,3960 USD. This unit comes with two power supplies and has a slightly more capacious 16 TB version available for $4,560 USD.The new generation has multiple possible configurations. At the low end you can pick up a Xeon E3-1220L V2 with 8GB of RAM, a single OS disk and a pair of 2TB hard drives making it 4TB usable with two bays free. This configuration is branded as the DS 5100 and retails for $2,560 USD. It comes with a single power supply.



There is a chipset raid controller that ships with the unit and is capable of doing RAID 5. In this configuration you'll get a respectable 120-ish megabytes per second of sequential write and a little under 500 megabytes per second of sequential read. Naturally, that falls off a cliff the instant you start hitting it with lots of random I/O, but that's nothing new for 7200 RPM SATA drives.I recommend using the chipset RAID over the Windows Storage Spaces or Windows-based RAID 5. The software RAID basically cuts your write speed in half.From a practical standpoint, I found the system able to handle the needs of five real-world heavy users while I was busy hitting it with another 25 users' worth of simulated moderate office traffic. It is consistent and stable in its file delivery and performance degrades quite gracefully as additional load is introduced.Bonus features this round include a video output port and a dedicated IPMI port. These resolve some of the set up issues that were encountered last time. Also, if you add a USB sound card it makes a heck of an HTPC.


Being an Essentials server it sets itself up as a domain controller and offers many of the standard Windows Server features. These include Hyper-V, Access Anywhere, iSCSI, NFS, SMB v3 and more.The glaring omission is Data Deduplication, which isn't included in Essentials. That isn't WD's fault – no conspiracy theories about selling more disks, please. It is nothing more pedestrian than Microsoft's typical disdain for small businesses. No surprises here.Essentials also ships with a full suite of integration hooks into Microsoft's Azure offerings (including a cloudy backup and Data Recovery service) as well as a surprisingly decent set of monitoring tools.Essentials allows for 25 users and 50 devices to be connected to the Sentinel without CALs. Should you desire to step beyond this you can purchase the full Windows Server 2012 R2 license and requisite CALs.In practice, I think these units are a little overspecced. There is plenty of headroom for growth here, more so than I would have believed possible for systems this size. Given that the official documentation talks about the ability to relicence the OS as a feature, I wanted to see if this little box could handle it.

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Apple hat sich in diesem Jahr untypischer Weise dazu entschlossen, die WWDC Keynote sowie alle Festlichkeiten des ersten Tages nicht im Moscone Center, sonder im Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco abhalten. Vermutlich aus Platzgründen. Den Rest der Woche wird die Entwicklerkonferenz allerdings dann im Moscone Center stattfinden.
Im Rahmen der WWDC 2016 darf unter anderem mit der großen Enthüllung von iOS 10 gerechnet werden, das auch einen verbesserten Apple Music Service und einen deutlich aufgewerteten digitalen Assistenten Siri mitbringen soll. Darüber hinaus ist mit umfassenden Updates für OS X, tvOS und watchOS zu rechnen. Was Hardware-Vorstellungen anbelangt, scheint es jedoch wenig bis gar nichts Neues in der nächsten Woche zu geben - und das, obwohl seit Wochen heftig über eine neue MacBook Pro Generation spekuliert wird und mehrere Produktreihen Apples für ein Update überfällig wären. Warten wir also einfach mal ab.


Aktuell kursieren wieder neue, wenn auch nicht gerade weltbewegende Gerüchte zu Microsofts nächster Surface Pro Generation. Wie die Webseite MobiPicker unter Berufung auf anonyme Quellen schreibt, wird der Nachfolger des Surface Pro 4 nicht vor Frühjahr 2017 erscheinen. Das deckt sich mit einem früheren Bericht und soll unter anderem damit zusammenhängen, dass der Redmonder Softwareriese warten will bis Prozessoren aus Intels 7. Core Generation -Codename "Kaby Lake" - in großer Stückzahl verfügbar sind.

Intel hatte zwar erst im Rahmen der Computex 2016 die Markteinführung von Kaby Lake für später in diesem Jahr bestätigt, doch ist gut vorstellbar, dass der Rollout der neuen 14-Nanometer-Chips wie schon bei Skylake relativ langsam in mehreren Wellen vollzogen werden soll. Geeignete Prozessoren der U-Serie könnten somit also tatsächlich erst Anfang 2017 für so wichtige Produkte wie das vermeintliche Surface Pro 5 und Surface Book 2 bereitstehen. Außerdem soll Microsoft planen, auf den kommenden Surface-Geräten das nächste große Feature-Update für Windows 10, Codename "Redstone 2", das dem für diesen Sommer angekündigten Anniversary Update 2017 nachfolgen wird, ab Werk zu installieren.

Abgesehen von den noch intensiver auf Energieeffizienz getrimmten Kaby Lake Prozessoren könnte das Surface Pro 5 laut MobiPicker mit bis zu 16 Gigabyte RAM und - zumindest in der Spitzenkonfiguration - mit einem besonders hochauflösenden 4K-Display ausgestattet sein. Des Weiteren erwähnt der Bericht mit einem Satz eine GPU der AMD Polaris oder Nvidia Pascal Familie, was aber wie eine aus dem Hut gezauberte Aussage anmutet. Eine solche dedizierte Grafikeinheit wird höchstwahrscheinlich nicht im nächsten Surface Pro, sondern lediglich in der nächsten Surface Book Generation zu finden sein.


Abgerundet wird der "Leak" zum Surface Pro 5 von MobiPicker mit der Wiederholung von Features, die früheren Gerüchten entstammen. So soll das kommende Tablet beispielsweise über einen USB-C-Port und verbesserte Kameras verfügen und zusammen mit einem neu entwickelten Surface Pen ausgeliefert werden. Die Preise in den USA sollen bei rund 900 US-Dollar beginnen und bis hin zu knapp 1600 US-Dollar für die Modellvariante mit Core i7 Prozessor reichen.

Angesichts der Aufbereitung des Berichts und der im Grunde absolut vorhersehbaren Details müssen die Informationen von MobiPicker zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt mit einer gehörigen Portion Skepsis bewertet werden. Mehr oder minder sicher scheint nur, dass es wahrscheinlich bis zum nächsten Jahr dauern wird bis Microsoft die Nachfolger für das Surface Pro 4 und das Surface Book präsentieren kann.

Die ungarische Webseite Napidroid macht auf einen frischen Eintrag auf der Webseite des Benchmark-Tools GFXBench aufmerksam, durch den ganz offensichtlich die wichtigsten technischen Daten des neuen Flaggschiff-Smartphones vom chinesischen Hersteller OnePlus aufgedeckt werden.



Dem Datenbankeintrag von GFXBench nach wird das OnePlus 3, das die Modellnummer A300x trägt, wie zuvor bereits mehrfach spekuliert ein 5,5 Zoll großes Display mit einer Auflösung von 1920 x 1080 Pixel bieten. Angetrieben wird das Smartphone von Qualcomms aktuellem High-End-SoC Snapdragon 820, dessen vier CPU-Kerne mit bis zu 2,2 Gigahertz takten und welches eine Adreno 530 GPU integriert. Daneben verfügt das Gerät offenbar über satte 6 Gigabyte RAM und 64 Gigabyte Festspeicher.

Wie bei den GFXBench-Einträgen praktisch immer der Fall, sind die gelisteten Angaben zu den Kameras des OnePlus 3 leider nicht ganz eindeutig. Für die rückseitige Kamera werden 15 Megapixel, für die Frontkamera 7 Megapixel aufgeführt. Da es sich dabei jedoch nicht um üblicherweise verwendete Kamerasensoren handelt, ist mal wieder von einem Rundungsfehler der Software auszugehen. Die neuesten Erkenntnisse und frühere Leaks zusammengenommen machen es aber mehr als wahrscheinlich, dass das Smartphone über eine 16 und einer 8 Megapixel Kamera verfügen wird.

Komplettiert wird der Benchmark-Eintrag durch die Angabe des Betriebssystems. Erwartungsgemäß handelt es sich dabei um Android 6.0.1 mit OnePlus eigener Oxygen OS Oberfläche. Das getestet Exemplar verfügt außerdem über einen einzelnen SIM-Kartenslot und keinen Fingerabdrucksensor.


Ungeachtet der durchgesickerten Informationen von GFXBench hält sich eine Woche vor der angekündigten Vorstellung des OnePlus 3 am 14. Juni (um 18:30 Uhr mitteleuropäischer Zeit) hartnäckig das Gerücht, dass es mehrere Versionen (bis zu sechs) des Smartphones zu kaufen geben wird. Diese sollen sich in Sachen Gehäusematerial, Flash-Speichergröße, RAM-Kapazität und schlussendlich natürlich auch dem Preis unterscheiden.

Nvidia will keine neuen SoC-Lösungen mehr speziell für den Mobilgerätemarkt entwicklen. Das machte der CEO des kalifornischen GPU-Spezialisten, Jen-Hsun Huang, gegenüber einem Kreis ausgewählter Medienvertretern noch einmal im Rahmen der Computex 2016 unmissverständlich klar, wie Ubergizmo berichtet. Konzentrieren wird sich Nvidia somit mittelfristig auf High-End- und Mittelklasse-GPU-Lösungen für den PC-Markt sowie PC- und Android-Gaming.

Das heißt allerdings nicht, dass die Tegra-SoC-Reihe komplett tot ist. In Android-Geräten für das Wohnzimmer wie der Shield Android TV Konsole, in IoT (Internet of Things) Produkten oder in Automobilen sollen die Chipsätze weiterhin zum Einsatz kommen. Außerdem würde Nvidia seine besonders effizienten GPU-Technologien gerne an andere SoC-Hersteller lizenzieren, sodass schlussendlich doch noch einmal neue Smartphones oder Tablets auf den Markt kommen könnten, in denen zumindest ein bisschen Nvidia-Technologie steckt.


Schon im vergangenen Jahr hatte Nvidia zur Computex angedeutet, sich aus dem Geschäft mit SoC-Lösungen für Mobilgeräte zurückziehen zu wollen. In den darauffolgenden Monaten kam dann aber beispielsweise das Tablet Google Pixel C mit Tegra X1 Chipsatz auf den Markt und auch das Nexus 9 wurde bis vor kurzem von HTC gebaut respektive von Google vertrieben. In diesem Jahr könnte es außerdem noch ein neues Shield Tablet geben, aber danach ist dann wohl die Reise für Tablet-Prozessoren der Tegra-Familie endgültig vorüber.
Die Entscheidung Nvidias, aus dem Mobilgerätemarkt auszusteigen, ist durchaus verständlich, zumal sich mit den Tegra-SoCs niemals der vom Unternehmen erhoffte Erfolg einstellen wollte. Konkurrenten wie Apple und besonders Qualcomm, oder auch aufstrebende chinesische Chipschmieden wie MediaTek erwiesen sich einfach als zu übermächtig, zu effizient in der Entwicklung oder mit besseren Geschäftsbeziehungen in der Smartphone-Branche ausgestattet. Nicht einmal die Entwicklung eigener Tablets der Shield-Reihe konnte die Absätze der Tegra-Chips so ankurbeln, dass es für Nvidia zu einem gewinnbringenden Geschäftsfeld erwachsen wäre.

Ganz anders sieht es für das Unternehmen freilich im Markt für PC-Grafikchips aus. Hier ist Nvidia der dominierende, technologisch führende Hersteller und konnte mit den brandneuen Pascal-GPUs beziehungsweise damit ausgestatteten Desktop-Grafikkarten wie der GeForce GTX 1080 zuletzt wieder neue Rekorde aufstellen.



Samsung könnte im nächsten Jahr zwei Smartphones auf den Markt bringen, die mit einem flexiblen OLED-Bildschirm aufwarten, wie aus einem aktuellen Bericht von Bloomberg hervorgeht. Eines der neuen Modelle soll sich in der Mitte zusammenklappen lassen, während das andere ein 5 Zoll großen Display biete, das sich bei Bedarf in ein Tablet-großes 8 Zoll Panel „entfalten“ kann. Beide Smartphones könnten bereits Anfang 2017 im Rahmen des Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona präsentiert werden.

Weiter informiert Bloomberg, die Mobilgeräte mit bieg- beziehungsweise faltbarem Display werde Samsung nicht als Teil der Galaxy S Familie vermarkten. Vielmehr dürften sie aller Voraussicht nach eine eigene, brandneue Modellreihe eröffnen, die beim den Südkoreanern intern offenbar mit dem Arbeitstitel „Project Valley“ beschrieben wird. Zu diesen Infos passt, dass die Webseite SamMobile schon vor über einem Jahr denselben Codenamen ins Spiel gebracht hatte. Außerdem zeigte Samsung im Mai auf der SID Display Week in San Francisco ein OLED Display, das sich zusammenrollen lässt..

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The older GeekBench 2 rated the Air at 2378, compared to 1766 for the iPad 4. That’s certainly not the 2x increase claimed by Apple, but it’s still a healthy step up. Having said that, my iPad 3 has always seemed snappy enough to handle every app or game that I’ve ever thrown at it, so the extra performance on offer in the iPad Air isn’t noticeable most of the time.It does, however, give the iPad Air scope to flex its muscles with new games and apps in the future. I was somewhat flabbergasted when Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the iPad a few months ago, so it’s mouth-watering to imagine what the iPad Air will be able to do with the extra performance provided by the A7 processor.One thing that Apple didn’t make a big fuss about was the battery life of the iPad Air – the company is merely commenting that the Air stays at around 10 hours. In fact, the iPad Air gave me a full 10 hours of streaming video using BBC iPlayer, compared to about eight for my iPad 3. You could probably squeeze another hour out of it if you’re not hammering the Wi-Fi non-stop.


One other minor change I also appreciated was the addition of twin-aerial MIMO for the iPad’s 802.11n Wi-Fi. One result: the iPad Air didn’t keep dropping the signal in the Wi-Fi deadspot in my office, as my iPad 3 does on a regular basis.It’s annoying, though, that Apple hasn’t upgraded the iPad’s Wi-Fi to 802.11ac as it has done with the latest Mac models. There’s no change to the 5MP rear camera or 1.2MP front camera, either, adding to the impression that Apple is holding back on a number of features for use in future upgrades.But at least it didn’t increase the price, so I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. The 16GB Wi-Fi model still starts at £399, with the 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models priced at 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models priced at £479, £559 and £639. As before, the cellular models simply add £100 to those prices.Those prices have been fairly constant for a few years now, and by now I’d have expected the £399 model to provide 32GB of storage – which would allow me to cram my entire iTunes library onto it at last.


I’m also rather unimpressed to see that the iPad 2, which remains on sale as Apple’s "low-cost" option, still starts at £329 – £70 less than the Air. The iPad 2 is approaching its third birthday and its pre-Retina, 1024 x 768 display just isn’t up to scratch at that price.And, of course, there are those perennial little iPad niggles that we all like to complain about: the lack of built-in HDMI, USB or memory card slots, and the expensive adaptors that Apple sells to overcome the connectivity limitations that it imposed in the first place. Those limitations haven’t stopped Apple selling 170 million iPads so far, so they’re probably not going to make any difference this time either.Apple always likes to talk about the “magical” experience of using the iPad, and holding the iPad Air in my hands does remind me of what it was like when the very first iPad was launched. I can understand why the fanbois who already own the iPad 4 weren’t tempted to queue overnight to buy the iPad Air, but people like me who have an older iPad may well find the urge to upgrade hard to resist this Christmas.


The storage Tardis effect continues: Toshiba has crammed 1TB into a thin disk drive and signed a license to use DenseBits technology in its flash memory products.The Tardis is Doctor Who’s time-travelling telephone kiosk which is somehow larger inside than outside. So it is with storage disk and NAND products which are able to continually hold more and more data inside their small casings.On the disk front Toshiba has gone and designed a 7mm thick 2.5in disk drive storing 1TB on its two platters. This the MQ02ABF, PDF data sheet here, an updated version of the MQ01ABF, “01” meaning 1 x 500GB platter and “02” meaning 2 x 500GB platters. The areal density is 744Gbit/in2 and the little twin spinner spins at 5.400rpm with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface.It uses dual-stage head positioning technology to make track location and following more precise, and is available at 759GB and 1TB capacity points. It’s intended for use in Ultrabooks and similarly space-constrained applications.



The company has also signed a license to use DensBits technology. This Israeli startup has devised so-called Memory Modem technology and it’s being touted as good for making short-lived 3-layer cell (TLC) flash technology usable. The trouble with this stuff is that it dies after relatively few writes compared to MLC (2-layer cell) flash, meaning that it has been used so far only in USB sticks and camera flash cards - certainly not in enterprise flash applications.This Memory Modem (MOdulator DEModulator) technology somehow makes TLC longer-lived so it can, hopefully, be used in enterprise-class apps. Our expectation is that Toshiba is looking to it for help in producing TLC NAND for enterprises. Old telephone modem technology once enabled analogue telephone circuits to carry digital data. Presumably - a big presume - the Memory Modem enables a digital flash memory system to receive reliable data from the signals obtained from blocks of flash memory cells.


Dipping into the tinned quotes in the announcement release tells us little, though. Amir Tirosh, DensBits’ EVP for marketing and business development, says this:“Our proprietary Memory Modem controller technology combined with Toshiba’s industry leading Flash memory technology will allow the introduction of superior Flash storage solutions in terms of cost, reliability, and performance.”Sysadmin blog A common complaint about IT staff is their lack of social skills. As in any industry that attracts a certain type of person, there's a high percentage of dark-room-dwelling people who can sometimes struggle to communicate. This is either through what they say or how they interact with others.Not all IT people are like this of course, just as nurses are not all popping out of their skimpy outfits and pool cleaners don't universally have a mustache and manage to find themselves in many interesting and awkward situations.


There are some guidelines I can recommend based on many years of personal experience, as well as observing others.Helpdesk 101: Never trust the user. When a user tells you something is happening, see it for yourself. Think of this situation as if they just watched a doctor perform brain surgery, then had to summarise what happened. They're going to make guesses and assumptions on the bits they don't understand. Once you see the issue for yourself, then start the troubleshooting. There is no point spending hours chasing a dragon to slay if the dragon turns out to be a funny-shaped rock. Ask to see that error message or recreate the issue.Don't call them 'users': IT staff can often forget they're in a position of service. Nobody likes getting bad service; it doesn't matter if it's the 15-year-old at your local fast food restaurant or a rude doctor. This means respecting every person you deal with. "User" is a technical word and should not be used outside of technical circles - people want to feel like people. Generally I would recommend calling them "staff" for internal people, and "clients" for external people – a good guide is to use the same term as other departments with their communications.


Turn a "no" into an alternative solution: Everyone gets questions that should receive a negative answer, but when someone reaches out for help, that's the last thing they want to hear. "Can I plug in my personal laptop and use it at work?" usually comes under that category. The answer should be an alternative solution to their problem. Maybe they can do everything over the internet from that laptop, or they just need to get some files off, which could be done via USB storage.Often people will ask for something they think is the best solution to their problem, which means more questions need to be asked to find out what they are actually trying to accomplish.Good communication: Keep people updated. Let them know someone is working on their issue. Let everyone know of outages and resolutions by whatever notification method works the best. Check if people want more assistance, or to be left alone. Follow-ups should always be done; all users should be notified somehow that their issue or request has been addressed.


Adaptation: Some users want to know every intricate detail about their brand new laptop and how to use all the fancy new options. Others will want the laptop left on their desk without a word. Part of adaptation is reading people and asking the right questions, and the other half is leading them down the path that actually helps them more.You can't hassle that person who wants to be left alone, but if there's one important nugget of information, you need to get that across somehow. Just wiping your hands clean and walking away won't help: if they don't know their password was reset, they'll just get angry and think you're useless at your job.This might all sound like common sense to many, but it takes a lot of time to build up trust with your userbase, while only a few slip-ups can completely destroy it. You're there to assist the business, and that often doesn't align with an individual's particular request, but part of your job should be to keep both sides happy.


Apple, in common with virtually everyone else pushing systems, treats a gig as 1,000,000,000 bytes for users of Macs, iPhones and iPads; simpler for consumers, but the difference is almost seven per cent. When this relates to a disk holding, say, 3TB or 4TB the difference may not be significant.But when you have a mobile data plan for your smartphone, tablet or laptop, counting your bytes matters because the stakes are higher: a 3TB hard disk will set you back about 3p per gigabyte, whereas a phone network will charge much, much more. And it may not always be clear if a phone network defines a gigabyte as 10243 or 10003 bytes - even after you've diligently checked the small print and spoke to sales advisors.Then, even if you put arithmetic differences to one side, a fundamental problem remains - which, for mobile data plan subscribers, is the ability to see precisely how much data they have consumed within their monthly allowances.



Yes, there are tools available, some built into Android, iOS and other operating systems and others as downloadable apps - like that from Onavo - that try to measure your data usage. The trouble with nearly all of these is that they come with health warnings; that what they measure as usage may well differ from the view of the network carrier.How can this be? Well, besides the intended data usage - such as transferring a file, updating an app or watching a TV show - there is a transmission overhead associated with non-trivial communications, and mobile comms are no different. These extra bytes all add up and may not be counted by the software on your device.Today, the user, whether working for an enterprise or as a consumer, cannot always know exactly how much of their data allowance has been consumed. But the network carrier can tell, and often it is not in its self-interest to inform anyone.

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HP Compaq nc6100 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

I threw the world’s most wanted information freedom fighter into the Smeg. Mindful of my last air incident, in which we had to eat some of the young entrepreneurs on our flight, I was better prepared. มาลัย had assembled an emergency pack.“Ed, I’ve got everything we need to see us through. Scopolamine, DMT, a crate of really rather excellent craft IPA brewed back home in Shoreditch using only organic Cascade, Amarillo and Summit hops, and a six-pack of one litre bottles of Puyehue water. Oh, and the latest Cory Doctorow, just as you requested.”It was hard to say exactly how much time had elapsed. If a DMT trip lasting 15 minutes seems to last an afternoon, and one internet year is seven real years, and a cat has nine lives, then I calculated that we must have been in the fridge for … around about two days.


During that time, Ed had confided in me. He told me his story.Ed had innocently enrolled in a superpower spying agency, as one does, but was shocked to discover that the public communications network, designed to be entirely open with no security whatsoever and that was used for sharing absolutely every intimate personal detail, was being watched. Sometimes the most intimate information we shared was even recorded. After several years of looking at all this personal information, the realisation struck him like a bombshell. It was Luluvise that had finally broken him.Now all Ed wanted to do was flee for a country that didn’t digitally oppress its citizens.“I want a country that truly respects real freedom – real digital freedom,” Ed told me. “Like Venezuela or Cuba or Ecuador. OK, they may arrest so-called dissidents, and Cuba may persecute its homosexuals, but their policy on DRM is quite clear, their commitment to liberalising out-dated intellectual property laws is strong and sincere - and they don’t intercept their kids’ SnapChats,” he explained. “If you’re going to host an unconference, that’s where you need to be.”“When you think back to what the founding fathers, the inventors of the internet, people like John Perry Barlow and Professor Lawrence Lessig truly believed in - they wanted us to share, but they didn’t want anyone to watch us sharing except anyone who wanted to watch," he continued. "God, I despair of the USA. It’s finished.”


Just then, two taps and one loud KERLUNK resonated through our unlit but completely secure sanctuary. It was a signal – the all clear, at last.The shaky footage scanned up and down a line of casually dressed Westerners. It was easy to spot the veteran investigative journalist John Pilger, chatting to media freedom fighter and Hacked Off supporter Jemima Khan. Was that ..? Yes, it was Channel 4’s Jon Snow joking with Hollywood star Sean Penn and Britain’s leading cyber-intellectual, Doctor Aleks Krotoski, PhD. And that whippet – that could only belong to the brilliant Oscar-winning film-maker Ken Loach.Lending diplomatic support from the UK was Ambassador Ben Hammersley, and behind Ben was Billy Bragg and a modest crew of about 950 BBC News and Current Affairs production staff, looking bored. From the sudden surge for the piroshki counter, I could tell that Billy was about to start singing.



“It is Glastonbury weekend. Jemima has arranged a luxury yurt with some close friends including George Osborne, Hugh Grant and the little guy from Muse. They wouldn’t miss it for anything. The Stones are playing.”Something for the Weekend, Sir? Shut up shut up shut up. Some annoying tit is typing away on his laptop as I’m trying to snooze on the train – except it doesn’t sound like he’s typing so much as rummaging through a bag of Scrabble tiles. It’s a horrible clattery, clickety, plasticky noise. Shut up shut up shut up, you twat.I’m on the train heading home after attending an industry summer ball at a swanky central London hotel. I confess that the industry in question was not related to IT. Actually, if you’d been there with me, you could have guessed straight away that it wasn’t a computing event: there were women in attendance. I’m not talking about a few token fe-nerds, either, but a good 60-70 per cent of the revellers, most of them CEOs and senior managers in their businesses, accompanied by their male staff underlings.


The organisers had chosen to give a ‘James Bond’ theme to the event, which is pretty easy for us blokes in black tie. A smattering of bald blokes chose white tuxedos and carried fluffy toy cats, thus transforming themselves effortlessly into Ernst Stavro Blofeld.It turns out that, dressed up in an evening suit and dickie, I muster a passing resemblance to Daniel Craig. Either that or a bunch of random people who’d never met each other before had spontaneously chosen to take the piss. Anyway, the 20th person to tell me this ends up sitting next to me after we boarded my train home. He then launches into a loud, five-minute monologue about the relative merits of every James Bond film.This brings the one-sided chat to a close, allowing me to slouch into silence, perchance to kip. I have already staked out my surroundings: practically everyone is fiddling with their mobiles of course, but thankfully they are all touchscreen iPhones and Androids and none of those Blackberrys with their excruciating snippety snappity buttons.


Two minutes into a peculiar reverie involving a sinister Mollie Sugden as a kind of Mrs Slocombe/Blofeld crossbreed, stroking her pussy menacingly, I am awoken by the aforementioned computer user clattering away at his laptop keys like he’s stacking Mah Jong bricks – right behind me, at top volume, at 11:45pm.Why do people attack their keyboards in such peculiar ways? I work with a guy who types slowly but with perfectly regular taps. It’s like someone set off a metronome in the office and left it ticking for up to 15 minutes at a time. This only slightly offsets the whack-a-mole colleague whom I have mentioned before in this column.Perhaps it’s how they were taught, or not taught, to deal with keyboards in general. Older geezers tend to be quite violent, I suspect, because they learnt using rusty Petite typewriters. Personally, I try to be as soft as possible, in rebellion against my mum’s overly physical teaching method while giving me piano lessons when I was a kid. If I hit a bum note, she’d shout “No, not there!” and grab the offending finger before insisting “Here!” while hammering it repeatedly on the correct key dang-dang-dang-dang.


That said, geezers get the job done and it’s usually spelt correctly. Youngsters have the disadvantage of having learnt to type using their thumbs, which explains a great deal when you think about it. One wonders how the heck they manage to cope with the two kinds of numeric keypad: the one on their computers with 7-8-9 on the top row and the one on their phones with 1-2-3. Boring them shitless with tales of the origins of counting machines is not going to help.Illustrating the challenge was an incident observed at first hand this week. A clunky old mail franking machine refused to load up with more credit and we suspected a problem with the online connection. To cut a dull story to its tedious essentials, the machine housed an appropriately ancient modem so customer support suggested we test the line with an analogue-only phone.Rooting around the hoarded junk still blighting the office, we found an old dial phone. The office boy took one look at it and pronounced it to be unusable as it was “some kind of special handset”. He failed to see how we could tap in a phone number without any number keys. I kid you not, he was goggle-eyed as I dialled. I rather enjoyed the retro experience, to be honest, telling the lad this was how all home phones used to be when I was little. He just shook his head and said: “Unbelievable.”


He’s right, it is - or was. This was also the first time I noticed that the numbers are arranged anti-clockwise around the dial, which makes even less sense than designing counting machines to have 7-8-9 on the top row. Clearly, in the old days, product design for numeric-entry devices was pants and no one knew what they were doing.Perhaps the most significant change in the latest Sputnik is that it's now powered by a fourth-generation (aka "Haswell") Intel Core processor – either an i5-4200U at 2.6GHz or an i7-4500U at 3.0GHz, depending on configuration – up from the third-generation "Ivy Bridge" chip in the last model.That means the onboard graphics get a slight upgrade as well, from Intel HD 4000 to HD 4400. Benchmarks show the newer graphics core gives maybe a 20 to 30 per cent performance boost versus the old one.The display is the same 13.3-inch, 1920-by-1080, LED backlit panel as the earlier model, but it has now been upgraded to a touchscreen.



The other specs are all similar to the last Sputnik's. The new model comes with 8GB of dual-channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz, either a 128GB or a 256GB mSATA solid state drive, and Intel dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0.As before, the installed operating system is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – the most recent long-term support version – and Dell has made sure all of the hardware works with Linux out of the box. For example, Dell reportedly collaborated with Canonical and Synaptics to get the new touch display working.If anything does go wrong, however, each laptop also comes with one year of Dell professional support, including on-site service after a support tech diagnoses the problem remotely.In addition, the machines come with Dell's Profile Tool and its software for deploying applications to the cloud, for which the Sputnik team stepped up their development efforts earlier this month.The new Sputnik model replaces the old one and it's available for preorder in the US beginning on Friday for $1,249 with a Core i5 and a 128GB SSD or $1,549 with a Core i7 and 256GB. Preorders will open to Canada next week, and as it stands now, the machines are expected to begin shipping on December 16.


UK and European customers will be able to order the systems, too, but a little later, and they will only be able to get the higher-end, Core i7 version. Dell will begin taking orders from the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland by the end of November, with Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden to follow in December.Even as Dell prepares to start shipping these latest XPS 13–based machines, however, its engineers are already working on finding another Dell model that could form the basis of a new, even more powerful Linux laptop.The Sputnik models have so far been designed with portability in mind, but a vocal segment of Dell's Linux customers have been clamoring for a system with a larger screen and an emphasis on workstation-like power, rather than mobility.To that end, Dell Linux engineer Jared Dominguez has been testing the Precision M3800 with Ubuntu, with promising results. In a nutshell, most of the hardware works with the exception of the SD card reader, but a few items needed some additional software tweaks to function well. You can read his full report here, along with some advice if you want to try it on your own.

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Apple MacBook Pro 13 inch Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

If there has been any optimism about the hardware business of late, it has mostly focused on tablets, which IDC has forecast will outsell portable PCs for the first time this year.But if tablets are all that consumers want, the news hasn't made it to Google's Chromebook division, which continues to market what are essentially ordinary low-cost notebooks, albeit ones running an unusual OS.We're seeing tremendous growth, without a doubt – massive, massive growth, Chromebook product development manager Caesar Sengupta told Bloomberg.Part of that growth is doubtless due to Google's recent retail push. Chromebooks are now available in Best Buy, Fry's, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Walmart stores in the US, as well as from online retailers Amazon and TigerDirect. In all, the devices are now on sale in nearly 7,000 retail outlets.


The Chromebook line is expanding, as well. Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung all manufacture Chromebooks today, with Asus expected to follow suit in the second half of the year. Google even markets its own branded model, the upmarket Chromebook Pixel, with a 2560-by-1700 touchscreen that puts even Apple's vaunted Retina Displays to shame.The Pixel retails for $1,300, but it's the exception. Each of the other Chromebook models sells for less than $500 in the US, with the cheapest, the Acer C7, going for just $199.Those low prices have helped keep the devices at the front of Amazon's laptop best-seller list, where the Samsung Chromebook has remained in the top 100 for the last 259 days (and counting).Google has also marketed Chromebooks aggressively to the education market, with special discount programs and management tools designed for school administrators. Lenovo's Chromebook product is targeted specifically at education.


NPD's Baker said all this points to a bright future for the Chocolate Factory's boot-to-browser devices, with the market for low-cost laptops projected to grow by more than 10 per cent in 2013.The entire computing ecosystem is undergoing some radical change, and I think Google has its part in that change, Baker said. Canonical top man Mark Shuttleworth says that Mir, the company's ground-up replacement for the X Window System graphics stack, is almost complete, and that the technology will ship with the next version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution in October.Canonical announced the Mir project in March to much controversy, particularly from backers of Wayland, an alternative X-replacement project that has gained the support of several other Linux distros.But in a blog post on Monday, Shuttleworth defended Canonical's decision to pass on Wayland and forge its own path, saying Mir has delivered on expectations.


We take a lot of flack for every decision we make in Ubuntu, because so many people are affected, Shuttleworth wrote. But I remind the team – failure to act when action is needed is as much a failure as taking the wrong kind of action might be.In the case of Mir, Shuttleworth said Canonical was motivated by a desire to develop a display system that ran consistently and efficiently across a wide range of hardware, in keeping with the company's goal of developing Ubuntu as an OS for everything from PCs and notebooks to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.I believe Mir will be able to evolve faster than the competition, in part because of the key differences and choices made now, the multimillionaire and erstwhile astronaut wrote. For example, rather than a rigid protocol that can only be extended, Mir provides an API. The implementation of that API can evolve over time for better performance, while it's difficult to do the same if you are speaking a fixed protocol.Mir operates at a layer below X, Shuttleworth said, and that while applications can talk directly to Mir, existing X applications can also run via an X implementation that runs on top of the Mir server. In fact, he said, the patches required to allow today's X servers to run on Mir amount to fewer than 500 lines of code.



Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an all-Intel Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system feels smoother than it did before.As such, he said, Mir will be integrated into Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander – the next version of the OS, due to arrive in October – just as soon as our QA and release teams are happy that it's ready for very widespread testing. Review There’s no doubt that smartphones are getting more robust. Both the Sony Xperia Z and the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S4 Active boast IP57-rated resistance to dust and water intrusion which is handy if you take your phone to the beach or the pool and come over all clumsy.Drop either of them out of a third-floor window on a building site, or drive over them in a Range Rover, though, and it will all end in tears. The Caterpillar Cat B15, however, is designed to survive just such abuse, as you’d expect from a handset designed by the folks who make big yellow construction equipment. Or by a company licensing the big yellow brand, as Bullitt Mobile has here.


The B15 is currently the only viable hard-as-nails smartphone on the market. JCB’s discontinued Pro-Smart can still be picked up here and there, but it boasts a hopelessly out-of-date spec: Android 2.3 and an 800MHz processor, anyone? Sonim’s handsets may be as tough as old boots but they are also as dumb as a bag of hammers.The B15’s specification on the other hand isn’t too shabby. You get stock Android 4.1.2 running on a 1GHz dual-core MediaTek MT6577 Cortex A-9 SoC; a 4-inch, 480 x 800 screen; 5MP and 0.3MP cameras; and a 2000mAh battery. Granted, that spec isn’t going to tempt anyone away from an HTC One, but it’s a solid enough offering for a tough phone with a £285 SIM-free sticker price.Besides being as ‘ard as a cockney gangster in a Guy Ritchie flick, the B15 has another unusual feature: two SIM slots, complete with a usefully comprehensive menu with which to manage them. Changing which SIM does what, or switching one off completely, is the work of seconds, which should help keep some clear blue bathroom sealant between your work and private life.


While the B15 certainly looks like a device designed for life on a building site, Caterpillar hasn’t gone overboard with the phone’s styling. Sure it’s quite a square and chunky old lump but it’s still small. At 170g, it’s only a smidge heavier than a Nokia Lumia 820. And it’s smart enough to pass muster down the boozer after knocking-off time.It’s obvious from the get-go that some serious thought has gone into the design. The Caterpillar-yellow volume keys are well separated to aid gloved-hand usage, while the camera button between them requires a three-second push to activate, the better to avoid accidental launches.The power button at the top is similarly designed to be easy to activate deliberately but difficult to do so accidentally.Another clever touch is the micro USB port cover. If the rubber plug ever breaks you can just unscrew the bit that’s still attached to your phone and replace the entire thing. You can’t do the same with the 3.5mm audio jack cover on the top of the phone but it’s so robust I can’t imagine how you’d ever rip it off.


Of more importance in everyday use are the 15mm-thick square sides, which make it a very easy device to hold firmly with cold and wet hands, or while wearing gloves. That said, the touchscreen isn’t one of the magic works-with-gloves types.Officially, the B15 is certified to IP67 standard which means it’s dustproof and waterproof when dunked in up to one metre of water for 30 minutes. But that’s only part of the story.Thanks to thick silicon rubber bumpers at the top and bottom, and aluminium side panels, the B15 can survive a 1.8m drop onto concrete. I know: I dropped one from a second-storey window at closer to 3m onto a stone patio, and no harm done.I also drove over it in a Range Rover Sport on a gravel drive, left it overnight at the bottom of a nearby stream - so much for the 30-minute dunking maximum - and then stuck it (after a wash) in a pint of Banks’s Mild until I got thirsty. It survived all those experiences none the worse for wear.Analysis When Red Hat launched its commercialized version of the OpenStack cloud control freak in June, along with an update to its supported version of the KVM hypervisor, the one thing it did not do was provide pricing for the support contracts for this code. But when the software was made generally available for production use on Wednesday, Shadowman also announced pricing for various bundles of its Linux, KVM, OpenStack, and CloudForms software.



Red Hat's cloudy software stack is the result of more than two years of work and more than a few acquisitions by the company. And with the addition of OpenStack is competitive with what VMware and Microsoft have cooked up in their respective vCloud and Windows Server stacks.During the Red Hat Summit in June, when Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies, announced the new software, he tossed up this comparative chart that hinted at the kind of pricing that Red Hat was thinking of for its server virtualization and infrastructure cloud software:Cormier was pretty vague about who the competitor in the chart above was, but it is very likely VMware, which unlike both Red Hat and Microsoft, does not control its own operating system.In a blog posting, Red Hat tweaked the packaging and pricing on its commercial-grade implementation of the KVM hypervisor for servers and desktops. As expected, it has merged the server and desktop versions into a single package that is now called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, or RHEV.


Before, RHEV was sold in either a server or desktop variant, and the server edition cost $499 per socket per year for a standard support contract, and $749 per socket with premium support. With RHEV 3.2, the RHEV desktop connection broker, the SPICE protocol, and Remote Desktop Protocol support as well as support for desktop operating systems have been merged into the single RHEV. It is licensed in two-socket pairs, for $998 per year for a standard support contract and $1,498 for a premium support contract.It's not clear what happens if you want to use RHEV on a single-socket PC or workstation. Presumably this is Shadowman's way of pointing out that only companies using two-socket workstations want to virtualize their machines anyway. Presumably you can work a deal if you really want RHEV on your laptop or desktop and only have one socket. Or, you can use VMware Workstation or Oracle VirtualBox, we suppose.


There are two different stacks from Red Hat that have the Grizzly implementation of OpenStack embedded in them, as the company announced in June.Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which is comprised of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with OpenStack rolled up on top of it and KVM underneath it as the virtualization layer for the server slices that make up a basic infrastructure cloud.As it turns out, there are two variants of this OpenStack variant, and they have two different prices based on the jobs they do in an OpenStack cloud. If you are getting a support license for a controller node and therefore does not need an unlimited license for RHEL guests, then it is cheaper – bBut still not cheap. And like KVM above, the licenses are sold in socket pairs.

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Samsung r60 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

The shift from laptop to mobile, from one screen to multiple screens, creates tremendous opportunity for Google.Page proceeded to talk about how the proliferation of devices and people online means the potential to improve people's live is immense. When we run this through our patented Reg corp-speak decoder, it spits out: as people flood onto our platform we are confident we can extract even more cash from them.During the quarter news has been building about the rumored Moto X device, and Page confirmed its existence and said having been a tester for a while, Im really excited, but gave no further information. Review “Can’t innovate any more, my ass,” said Apple veep Phil Schiller as he unveiled the redesigned Mac Pro at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June.The smooth, black cylindrical design of the Mac Pro and the visual revamp of the forthcoming iOS 7 were clearly intended as a riposte to the critics who had argued that the company had lost its mojo since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs.


There were, however, rather fewer signs of innovation in the updated MacBook Air slimline laptop that was also announced at the same time as the new Pro. In fact, the innovation there came not from Apple but from its chip supplier Intel in the form of its new fourth-generation Core i processor, Haswell.The first of the new MacBook Airs I was were able to get my hands on was the 11-inch version, which is virtually identical to its recent predecessors. In fact, the only visual give-away is the addition of a tiny second microphone on the left-hand edge of the machine which helps with noise-reduction during FaceTime and Skype sessions. You’ll want to check out Bob’s write-up of the 13-inch MacBook Air if you want to know more about how the two mics work together.


Of course, the design of the MacBook Air was impressive to start off with. Its slimline styling, tapering smoothly from back to front, set the standard for the modern Ultrabook even before Intel’s marketing department got around to inventing the term. The 1.08kg weight and 17mm thickness of the 11-inch Air are no longer unique, but the “unibody” aluminium case remains impeccably smart. It’s a delight to pick up this model in one hand and just admire the design and build quality.The real changes are on the inside this time around. As well as the Haswell processor, Apple has opted for low-power 1600MHz DDR3 memory and a new flash storage sub-system that it claims is 45 per cent faster than the one used in previous Airs. The end result is improved performance and – more importantly – significantly longer battery life.


The starting price for the 11-inch model hasn’t changed, setting you back £849 for one with 4GB of memory. However, the measly 64GB of flash storage on last year’s model has been doubled to 128GB, and the built-in Wi-Fi has been updated to 802.11ac. It provides a significant performance improvement over 802.11n, as I found when I reviewed the new Time Capsule base-station.I was, however, surprised to discover that the dual-core Haswell Core i5-4250U runs at just 1.3GHz, whereas last year’s Ivy Bridge model was clocked at 1.7GHz.Hats off to Intel, though: a quick benchmark run with GeekBench in 64-bit mode produced a score of 6809, rather more than the 5790 I recorded for last year’s model. So the Haswell processor certainly doesn’t disappoint even at just 1.3GHz. There’s an option to upgrade the MacBook Air to a dual-core i7 running at 1.7GHz for another £120, but this basic 1.3GHz model felt smooth and responsive during my time with it, and more than adequate for web browsing or running Microsoft Office and such.


The improved flash storage - a PCI Express-connected drive, aka SATA Express - helps here too, adding a noticeable snap to many tasks. The Air boots in ten seconds and wakes from sleep as soon as you open the lid. And Apple was pretty close with that 45 per cent performance improvement estimate: duplicating my 25GB iTunes library took just 117 seconds, compared to 175 seconds on last year’s model.There’s more to Haswell than just its clock speed. Graphics performance also perks up quite a bit thanks to the new HD 5000 integrated graphics core. Running the Mac-native version of Diablo III at 1366 x 768, the 11-inch Air’s native resolution, produced a perfectly playable 35fps even with the graphics set to ‘high’ and a good number of zombies and demons crowding the screen - though, sadly, even Haswell can’t do much about the missing end-game.



The more detailed 3D graphics of Batman: Arkham City proved a sterner challenge, with the frame rate falling to 15fps with the graphics on ‘high’. However, turning the graphics settings down to ‘low’ did allow it to manage a playable 30fps. Bear in mind that this game reduces most laptops with Ivy Bridge graphics to single-digit frame rates, and it’s clear that Haswell really does make more-than-casual gaming a realistic proposition for integrated graphics at long last.Haswell’s real strength, though, lies in its ability to improve battery life. Apple claims that the new 11-inch Air increases battery life from up to five hours to nine. When I set BBC iPlayer going, with the Air connected by 802.11ac, it ran for bang-on seven hours, compared to the five hours last year’s model managed to stay running for. Less demanding work such as word processing, intermittent emailing and web browsing, allowed me to stretch that to a few minutes short of eight hours, so it really does provide all-day computing now.


Switch off Wi-Fi and dim the screen, and there’s no reason why you can’t keep it going for the best part of 12 hours. Tony’s review of the build-to-order Core i7-based 13-inch Air has more details on how Haswell helps here.Lest you accuse me of being an uncritical fanboi, I would point out that the MacBook Air is by no means perfect. The 11.6-inch display remains extremely bright and attractive, with rich colours and wide viewing angle. However, the 1366 x 768 resolution on this model hasn’t changed in years. That resolution works well on a screen of this size, but it is starting to look a bit dated compared to the many Windows laptops that now offer a 1920 x 1080 resolution. Even my third-generation 10-inch iPad can manage 2048 x 1536.As Tony point out in his 13-inch Air review, it’s not that we necessarily want a “retina” display here, but we do want more pixels to let us get more content onto the screen.Connectivity also remains a particular issue with this model. Neither the 11- nor the 13-inch Air has on-board Ethernet, HDMI or Firewire, but the smaller machine of the two lacks even the SD slot found on the 13-inch version. Admittedly, the multi-purpose Thunderbolt port can fill in for most of these missing interfaces – but only by purchasing adaptors at £25 a shot. Just because this is becoming increasing the case with other vendors’ Ultrabook-class machines doesn’t let Apple off the hook.


And – whisper it gently – the MacBook Air’s once-groundbreaking design is starting to show its age. Gleaming Gorilla Glass is starting to replace boring old metal in many of the latest Windows laptops, and with Haswell rivals such as Sony’s 11-inch Vaio Pro weighing in at just 870g, it’s possible that the MacBook Air may have spent just a little too long resting on its admittedly once impressive laurels.The competition may be catching up, but the 2013 edition of the 11-inch MacBook Air remains a classy piece of kit. The Haswell update provides significant improvements in performance, graphics and battery life, and the premium prices charged for many Windows Ultrabooks means that it no longer looks over-priced when compared to its nearest rivals. It’s a shame that the 2013 update wasn’t a little more ambitious, but the 11-inch MacBook Air is still one of the most attractive ultraportable, netbook-size laptops currently available.


The web shop, which flogged tablets, smartphones, 3D TVs, and laptops was placed into the hands of administrator Cowgill Holloway Business Recovery (CHBR) on 8 May.The two-year-old firm was only incorporated in April 2011 by Justin Young, Peter O'Connell and Graham Walker, promoting a buy now pay later scheme. Two finance firms were responsible for the credit agreements.During the first year of life, it turned over £1.1m in sales but by the start of this year troubles emerged when the number of credit agreements halved due to restrictions being placed on the firm by one of the finance providers.In addition to this, the lender hiked its charge per transaction from 1.75 per cent to 5.45 per cent which hit trading margins, cash flow and the ability of Gimmi to settle bills with suppliers, the report stated.By February, Gimmi agreed a deal with Tesco to sell as a third party via its webstore, which was supposed to bring in £100,000 a week in sales from May, but in mid-April Tesco appeared to get cold feet, asking for more tests.



Directors had expected this alliance with the supermarket to replace revenue lost to the drop in credit approval rates, but without this expected sales spike, they decided to call in the receivers.Axcess Financial Services approached the directors to buy 80 per cent of the business but were unable to invest for another six months, an option that was not on the table for a technically insolvent Gimmi.CHBR tested interest in the business and agreed to sell the business name, IP, company database and some items of computer hardware for £32,000 plus VAT to an unnamed party.Total assets available for creditors stood at £469,500, and preferential creditors are owed just shy of £6,000, though it owes a whole lot of cash to unsecured creditors.CHBR said it expects there will be sufficient funds for preferential and unsecured creditors, claiming the dividend will be in the region of 20 pence in the pound. CGHBR is owned £21,000 for its work.Creditors include a bunch of well-known Brit channel firms: Computer 2000 was owed nearly £388,000; Reading-based Westcoast was owed just over £204,000; Google Ireland £152,661; and Ebuyer £22,872.


Intel's Thunderbolt I/O protocol looks just a little less likely to threaten USB's status as the world's preferred way of connecting stuff to computers, after Acer decided it can't be bothered using it in PCs any more.The Taiwanese company, which is clinging on as the world's fourth most-prolific PC-pusher, last week slipped out a few new models.All were sans Thunderbolt, a fact CNET put to an Acer spokesperson who confirmed the company is walking away from the standard.The spokesperson cited the cost of building Thunderbolt into systems as one reason for the move. USB 3.0's speed, prevalence and ability to charge devices were also mentioned as reasons for that standard being at least as good as Intel's new baby.Plenty of other PC-makers still offer Thunderbolt. The most enthusiastic is Apple, which has promised half a dozen Thunderbolt 2 ports in its forthcoming cylindrical Mac Pro.That configuration makes sense when you consider the market into which Apple pitches the Pro, which we think it's reasonable to characterise as specialist workstations designed for media production. Such applications need a lot of fast I/O and half a dozen Thunderbolt ports delivers that in spades.

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Dell Precision m65 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

Running tech for IBM means more than the usual amount of pressure: pressure from being under the watchful eye of other techies inside Big Blue who reckon they know just as much about your job as you do, and how to do it right.There's also pressure from customers and IBM's product people, both eager to see you use the latest IBM hardware and software. And then there's pressure from management, as IBM is the kind of business that sees technology as an integral part of strategy rather than some supporting character.The latter means Horan’s on the front line of the battle to get IBM to hit management’s target of $20 earnings per share by 2015 under its latest five-year plan issued in 2010. In 2010, its EPS was $13.44.As if more pressure were needed, the revenue-generation side of IBM that would normally help it hit that EPS number is sliding. There have also been job cuts - up to 3,000. In its second quarter, IBM recorded its second revenue drop of the year - down 3.3 per cent to $24.82bn. Net income was muddied by the job cuts - down 16.9 per cent to $3.23bn to include the layoff charge.


If you add it all up, it means the CIO needs to give extra attention to automation and efficiencies to help sales and fatten up the margins. As the person responsible for IBM’s tech infrastructure, applications and web presence, that means more work for Horan.In terms of IBM's recent business performance and that 2005 roadmap, it also means she must give IBMers the right tools to work more effectively with customers; integrate any companies IBM buys into the rest of the IBM structure over the next few years; and put in place IT systems and processes that deliver smoother workflows, faster decisions and enable quicker action – in other words, help improve sales and customer satisfaction.“It definitely does provide focus,” Horan told The Reg during an interview on a brief stop at IBM’s South Bank HQ in London before the Q2 results.But the CIO eats this kind of challenge for breakfast, and she is turning it to her advantage. This is Horan's second round of IBM transformation. As the former enterprise business transformation lead, she was tasked with kicking into shape the systems and workflows running IBM’s huge SAP system to simplify finance, opportunity to cash, and booking and billing systems.


Of the five-year plan, she says: “It’s been a good way to align the company behind a set of strategic objectives. “One of the things that’s true for any IT shop is the demand from the business is more than our capability to deliver – that’s standard. So it has provided us a way to help in our prioritisation and focus on projects that are aligned to that roadmap.”One of the biggest projects Horan is working on is a joint effort between the CIO team and IBM's marketing and communications bods: the IBM Expertise application. It is being put togther using IBM Connections Profiles and Expertise Assessment together with the Expertise Locator and Answer Network (ELAN), acquired when IBM bought Kenexa in December 2012. The idea is to help IBMers quickly find experts in a field using simple keyword searches. The app’s considered important in a company with more than 400,000 staff.


It’s typical of the kind of work Horan says she’s doing more and more of these days: building front-office apps instead of back-office systems. The CIO said her devs are now working more with sales and marketing types than with sysadmins or other fellow techies in the server room.The CIO said app development reached an important milestone in 2012: that’s when 51 per cent of her IT spend on new projects went on front-office – and new back-office software officially became the minority. Horan expects the trend will grow as sales and customer-facing IBMers want what the tech head describes as more social in their apps and transactional processes.“We are looking at how to build more social integration capabilities between us and our clients – not just the broad push of messages, but a more collaborative working environment with our clients, that’s another thing I’m hearing about,” Horan said.



“We have a number of integrated accounts – big accounts – that IBM has with very big relationships, and we have dedicated account teams that work day and day out with those clients. We have a lot of pull from those account teams who say: 'We want to be able to interact with our client in a different way and to share more information. Why can’t we just use Dropbox?’I can give them the reasons they can't, but I need to give them an alternative, and bring them something that brings more value than just using a third-party service,” she said.Six months after the suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, MIT has released a 182-page report into the university's involvement in his arrest and prosecution, and has determined that it did nothing wrong.


Swartz, who at 14 coauthored the RSS standard, subsequently cofounded Creative Commons and the Reddit online community, and is a recent inductee to the Internet Hall of Fame, was found hanging in his New York apartment in January, weeks before he was due for court hearings on 13 felony charges relating to his use of MIT's network to download 4.8 million papers from the JSTOR academic database.MIT did not 'target' Aaron Swartz, we did not seek federal prosecution, punishment or jail time, and we did not oppose a plea bargain, said MIT president Rafael Reif in a statement, although he did add the university would be reviewing its policies.The report, prepared by MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, economics professor and Institute professor emeritus Peter Diamond, and Washington attorney Andrew Grosso, has taken so long because it's based on the detailed examination of over 10,000 documents and many personal interviews, the authors said.


They found that the university had maintained a policy of strict neutrality, and did not attempt to influence the prosecution of Swartz by federal authorities. It also notes that Swartz was neither a member of the MIT staff, nor an enrolled student nor alumnus, nor a member of the faculty.But the report has angered Swartz's father, himself a member of MIT's Media Lab. In a statement to The Register, he said the report showed that MIT handed over information to the prosecution without subpoena warrant (a courtesy not extended to Swartz's defense team), and withheld information and witness lists that were handed to government investigators.Having now read Abelson's report, it is clear that MIT in fact played a central role in Aaron's suicide, Robert Swartz said. MIT made numerous mistakes that warrant further examination and significant changes. MIT was not neutral in the legal case against Aaron. Whether MIT was neutral or not is a red herring: the university had a moral obligation to advocate on Aaron's behalf.


The report details how MIT was initially contacted by research archive JSTOR because of a server-crashing number of downloads being requested by MIT's network. The requests appeared to stop after a while, but JSOTR got back in touch when it became apparent that the request frequency had been slowed and 4.8 million articles had been copied.Trying to trace the source, the university's IT staff found a laptop in a cardboard box in one of their network rooms and called MIT police, who determined they didn't have the skills to handle it. They called the local Cambridge police, and a local detective arrived with a Secret Service and an officer from the Boston Police Department in tow.The Secret Service agent tried and failed to copy the hard drive, so the laptop was fingerprinted and a camera was installed to monitor it. Just half an hour later someone did come in and swap out the laptop hard drive, but then left before MIT police could arrive.



A second visit was noted two days later, and this time an off-duty MIT police officer was in an unmarked police car that just happened to be near the building. He had a still image of the laptop's visitor, saw a cyclist matching the picture, and stopped him for questioning.The report says the cyclist was Swartz, who ran away when questioned but was later apprehended by the policeman and a colleague. He refused to answer questions, so the local police were called and he was taken away to be charged. MIT did not ask for charges to be brought, the report states, and JSTOR didn't wish to either. But the US Department of Justice had other ideas.US attorney Carmen Ortiz and her assistant Stephen Heymann used the provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to rack up 13 felony charges against Swartz that would have seen him behind bars for a maximum of 35 years and facing $1m in fines. Swartz, 26, committed suicide shortly before hearings began.


Two charges of misconduct have since been filed against Heymann, but Ortiz has defended her handling of the case, saying that her office's conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. She said that the prosecution was only planning to ask for six months in prison, and had no intention of asking for a maximum sentence, particularly as it was clear Swartz wasn't harvesting the JSTOR archives for personal gain.You can't be neutral on a moving train
Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was a close friend of Swartz, said that MIT's report showed the emptiness in the concept of 'neutrality', and in fact shows the extent to which the university's lack of action doomed Swartz to prosecution.'Neutrality' is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and context-free acceptance – like 'transparency', but don't get me started on that again, he writes. But there are obviously plenty of contexts in which to be 'neutral' is simply to be wrong.


The lynchpin of the government's case against Swartz was that he had unauthorized access to MIT's network. But, he says, the report states that MIT never told police of federal prosecutors if Swartz wasn't authorized to use the network, and apparently didn't even bother to decide this itself.The report does note that had Swartz asked for access in the usual way he would have been granted it under the terms of MIT's open guest policy for network use and, it might be argued that Aaron Swartz accessed the MIT network with authorization. The university neglected to mention this to the either prosecution or defense teams, however.If indeed MIT recognized this, and didn't explicitly say either privately or publicly that Aaron was likely not guilty of the crime charged, then that failure to speak can't be defended by the concept of 'neutrality', Lessig concludes. Analysis From the reaction to Google's latest contribution to TV technology, you'd think the Chromecast dongle was as revolutionary as a new method of nuclear fusion.

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Akku Apple macbook air 13.3" Mc504 www.pcakku.com

Das Lenovo Miix 720 wird in Deutschland ab April 2017 in den Farben Champagne und Grau zu Preisen ab 1299 Euro erhältlich sein. Für den dazu passenden Active Pen 2 wird Lenovo 59 Euro verlangen. Unklar ist aber derzeit noch, wann genau dieser im Handel erscheinen wird.

Lenovo hat heute im Vorfeld der Consumer Electronics Show 2017 eine verbesserte ThinkPad X1 Serie vorgestellt. Wie es sich am vergangenen Wochenende bereits abgezeichnet hatte, ist auch die nunmehr fünfte Generation des ThinkPad X1 Carbon darunter. Flankiert wird dieser Premium-Laptop von einer neuen Ausführung des ThinkPad X1 Yoga und des ThinkPad X1 Tablet. Alle Neuvorstellungen sind selbstverständlich mit Intels aktuellen Core-Prozessoren der 7. Generation alias Kaby Lake ausgestattet.


Das neue ThinkPad X1 Carbon verfügt zwar weiterhin über ein 14 Zoll Panel, weist jedoch durch deutlich schmälere Ränder um den Bildschirm herum sowie ein etwas schlankeres Chassis nur noch den Formfaktor eines typischen 13 Zoll Notebooks auf. Die Auflösung des IPS-Displays der 2017er Variante beträgt weiterhin 1920 x 1080 Pixel oder 2560 x 1440 Pixel. Zusätzlich zur traditionellen Farbe Schwarz, wird Lenovo das neue Modell auch in Silber verkaufen.

Bei der Neuauflage des X1 Carbon hat Lenovo die Schnittstellenausstattung und Unterstützung von Drahtlosstandards erweitert beziehungsweise verändert. Das 2017er Modell bietet zwei Thunderbolt 3 Schnittstellen mit USB Typ-C Anschluss, zwei klassische USB 3.0 Ports einen HDMI- und einen Ethernet-Anschluss und einen microSD-Kartenleser. In Sachen WLAN-Konnektivität verbaut der Hersteller ein Intel Dual-Band Wireless-AC 8265 Modul oder optional das Intel Tri-Band Wireless-AC 18265 Modul, welches Unterstützung für WiGig bietet. Ebenfalls nur auf Kundenwunsch lässt sich in dem Gerät sogar ein Qualcomm Snapdragon X7 LTE-Modem unterbringen.


Anders als das Dell XPS 13, welches insgesamt eine vergleichbar schmale Display-Einfassung aufweist wie das neue X1 Carbon, hat sich Lenovo dafür entschieden den Rand oberhalb des Bildschirms etwas breiter zu machen, um dort eine Webcam positionieren zu können. Daneben findet zudem eine IR-Kamera Platz, die zur Gesichtserkennung für Windows Hello genutzt werden kann.

Die fünfte Generation des X1 Carbon bringt laut Datenblatt 1,12 Kilogramm auf die Waage und soll auch dank der energieeffizient arbeitenden Core i5 und Core i7 CPUs der Kaby Lake Familie bis zu 15,5 Stunden Akkulaufzeit erreichen.

Beim ThinkPad X1 Yoga handelt es sich noch um ein junges Modell in Lenovos Line-up, da es zusammen mit dem X1 Tablet erst auf der CES im vergangenen Jahr sein Marktdebüt feierte. Das neue Convertible-Notebook mit 360-Grad-Scharnier besitzt ein 14 Zoll großes Display, das entweder als IPS-Version mit einer Auflösung von 1920 x 1080 respektive 2560 x 1440 Pixel erhältlich sein wird, oder als OLED-Variante, die mit 2560 x 1440 Pixel auflöst.


Abgetrieben wird das 1,42 Kilogramm / 1,36 Kilogramm (OLED-Ausführung) schwere X1 Yoga genau wie das neue X1 Carbon von Intels aktuellen Core-Prozessoren mit bis zu 16 Gigabyte RAM sowie bis zu 1 Terabyte SSD-Speicher, und auch zwei Thunderbolt 3 Ports mit USB Typ-C Anschluss sind mit an Bord. Daneben bietet das Convertible einen HDMI- und einen Ethernet-Port sowie einen microSD-Kartenleser. Zur drahtlosen Kommunikation stehen dieselben Module zur Auswahl wie beim X1 Carbon inklusive des optionalen Qualcomm-LTE-Modems.

Weitere Änderungen, die Lenovo beim neuen X1 Yoga vorgenommen hat, sind der neue ThinkPad Pen Pro mit verbesserter Stiftspitze und die Tastatur, deren Tasten nun vollständig verschwinden, wenn das Gerät im Tablet-Modus verwendet wird.


Die zweite Generation des ThinkPad X1 Tablets bekommt ganz ähnliche Verbesserungen spendiert wie das X1 Yoga. Lenovo verbaut also auch bei diesem neuen Modell mit andockbarer Tastatur nun Intels Kaby Lake Chips der Y-Serie und bis zu 1 Terabyte fassende SSDs. Außerdem stehen wieder die oben genannten WLAN-Module und das Qualcomm-LTE-Modem zur Auswahl.

Das Display des X1 Tablet bleibt im Vergleich zum Vorjahr unverändert bei 12 Zoll Bildschirmdiagonale, der Hersteller verspricht aber bei der 2017er Version bis zu 10 Stunden Akkulaufzeit. An Schnittstellen wartet das Tablet unter anderem mit einem USB Typ-C Port auf, über den es geladen werden kann, der allerdings nicht den Thunderbolt 3 Standard unterstützt. Daneben finden sich noch ein USB 3.0 Port, ein mini DisplayPort und ein microSD-Kartenleser an dem Gerät.



Lenovo wird das neue ThinkPad X1 Carbon und das neue ThinkPad X1 Yoga in Deutschland ab Februar 2017 zu Preisen ab 1349 Euro respektive 1499 Euro zuzüglich Mehrwertsteuer anbieten. Das neue ThinkPad X1 Tablet wird erst zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt auf den Markt kommen, der Preis steht allerdings auch in diesem Fall bereits fest. Das 2-in-1-Gerät soll ab 1399 Euro zuzüglich Mehrwertsteuer erhältlich sein.

Microsoft hatte die nächste Hauptversion von Windows 10, das sogenannte Creators Udpate, im vergangenen Oktober angekündigt, und dabei nur relativ unspezifisch Anfang 2017 als Veröffentlichungszeitfenster genannt. Mehrere unterschiedliche Hinweise deuteten seither auf März 2017 als Termin für den Verteilungsbeginn der finalen Fassung hin, doch ein neuer Bericht der Webseite MSPoweruser (MSPU) bringt nun recht überzeugend April 2017 ins Spiel.


Die Versionsnummer der fertigen Fassung des kommenden Windows 10 Creators Updates soll laut MSPU nicht wie zuvor vermutet 1703, sondern 1704 lauten. Die Publikation beruft sich dabei auf eigene, nicht näher spezifizierte, aber gut informierte Quellen. Da Microsoft den unterschiedlichen Windows 10 Hauptversionen Versionsnummern zuordnet, die sich aus der Jahreszahl plus dem Monat ihrer Veröffentlichung zusammensetzen, würde 1704 also einen Fertigstellungstermin im April 2017 bedeuten.

Das Weitern lässt sich aus dem Artikel erfahren, dass Microsoft das Creators Update wie auch schon das Anniversary Update im vergangenen Sommer wieder weltweit in diversen Wellen ausrollen will. Dies bedeutet, so manche Nutzergruppe könnte erst Wochen, oder gar Monate nach dem offiziellen Verteilungsstart mit den neuesten Windows 10 Features versorgt werden. Wer sich allerdings ein klein wenig mit Windows 10 auskennt, soll auch bei der Verteilung der kommenden Hauptversion wieder die Möglichkeit haben, den Upgrade-Prozess manuell anzustoßen, um längere Wartezeiten zu vermeiden.



MSPU beschreibt den Entwicklungsstand des Creators Updates als weit fortgeschritten. So soll sich das Windows-Team derzeit auf den letzten Metern bei der Implementierung neuer Features befinden und ab Mitte/Ende Januar sollen keine nennenswerten Neuerungen mehr hinzugefügt werden. Danach würden sich die Arbeiten nur noch auf die Behebung von Fehlern und das Feintuning beschränken. Windows Insider dürfen also demnach wohl auf eine weitgehend mit allen versprochenen Funktionen ausgestattete Vorschauausgabe des Creators Updates im Januar oder Anfang Februar rechnen. Ob die genannten Terminangaben so auch grob für das Creators Update für Windows 10 Mobile gelten, ist derzeit leider völlig unklar.

Microsofts Planungen gehen allerdings ohnehin schon deutlich über das Creators Update hinaus. Den vorliegenden Insiderinfos nach wird das Unternehmen noch vor Ende 2017 ein weiteres größeres Feature-Update für das OS veröffentlichen, das derzeit nur unter dem Codenamen Redstone 3 durch die Gerüchteküche schwirrt. Dieses könnte dann unter anderem auch deutliche Änderungen am Oberflächendesign des Betriebssystems mitbringen.


Dell hat mit dem XPS 13 bereits einen der besten Windows-Laptops im Portfolio. Im Zuge der Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017 bringt der US-Computerhersteller nun die besten Elemente dieses Notebook-Designs in das Convertible-Marktsegment und stellt mit dem XPS 13 2-in-1 Konkurrenz für Lenovos Yoga Serie vor.

Das XPS 13 2-in-1 ist im Grunde exakt das Convertible, das sich die meisten Technikbegeisterten bei Nennung dieser Bezeichnung umgehend vorstellen dürften. Dell hat dem bekannten XPS 13 Design ein 360 Grad Scharnier hinzugefügt, wodurch sich das nahezu randlose „InfinityEdge“ Display nun in bislang unmögliche Positionen bringen lässt. Das neue 2-in-1 kann also beispielsweise im „Zelt“-Modus oder aber auch mit vollständig zurückgeklapptem Bildschirm wie ein Tablet genutzt werden. Der verbaute Touchscreen wird laut Dell entweder mit Full HD oder QHD+ Auflösung (1920 x 1080 respektive 3200 x 1800 Pixel) angeboten werden und auch Eingaben mit dem optional erhältlichen Dell Active Pen unterstützen.

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Dell Latitude E6420 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

And security commentator Bruce Schneier was also ticked off this week, taking issue with IBM's open letter denying it handed data over to the NSA. According to Schneier, IBM's wording of the denial, such as saying it didn't hand information over to NSA under PRISM, has left Big Blue wiggle room to hide what it did hand over. He said:We know you haven't provided data to the NSA under PRISM. It didn't use that name with you. Even the NSA General Counsel said: PRISM was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term. What programme did you provide data to the NSA under?It seems rather obvious that you haven't provided the NSA with any data under a bulk collection surveillance program. You're not Google; you don't have bulk data to that extent. So why the caveat? And again, under what program did you provide data to the NSA?He also argues that IBM has played a game of geographical semantics to hide what went on as well:


Okay, so you say that you haven't provided any data stored outside the US to the NSA under a national security order. Since those national security orders prohibit you from disclosing their existence, would you say anything different if you did receive them? And even if we believe this statement, it implies two questions. Why did you specifically not talk about data stored inside the US? And why did you specifically not talk about providing data under another sort of order?And finally, a man has triumphed in the UK's Supreme Court after a 16-year legal battle over a laptop he bought at PC World. Richard Durkin attempted to buy a laptop in 1998 with just one requirement - a modem. As the sales assistant was unsure about the model's specs, they said he could take it away and bring it back the next day if there wasn't any modem. They took a £50 deposit and signed him up to a credit agreement.Naturally, the laptop didn't have a modem so he tried to return it the next day. The store manager refused to accept the laptop back and kept him on the credit deal. Durkin managed to sue PC World to get his deposit back but couldn't shake the credit agreement. Even though he no longer had the laptop, HSBC-owned HFC Bank, the lender, kept demanding payment, with the result that Durkin got a black mark on his credit score.


After being marked as a defaulter, Durkin went to sheriff's court in Aberdeen where he was awarded £116,000 in damages, but that decision was overturned when he tried for a higher payout in a court in Edinburgh. Eventually, he got the right ruling in Supreme Court in London, but the court was only able to award him £8,000 because of a legal technicality. Durkin said:Although I am disappointed that the supreme court was unable to restore to me the full damages awarded by the sheriff – even though it was clear they were sympathetic to my position – this decision is a great victory for all consumers, and I am proud to have been the driving force behind it.Taking a case to any court is a huge stress, but taking it to the highest court in the land with all the risks that go with it was the most stressful thing that anyone could voluntarily put themselves through.But sometimes you have to do what is right and not what is easy. This case was not all about me – it was about principle for all consumers. I always felt that PC World and HFC Bank had acted disgracefully towards me, and I have now been proved right.


The next generation of millennial kids are a lonely group of slab-fondlers who would rather watch films and movies alone in their bedrooms, it has been claimed.According to a survey from Deloitte, teens and people in their twenties have ditched the telly and now spend more time watching stuff on their smartphones, computers or fondleslabs.“The idea that TV is only watched on a TV isn’t true any more,” said Gerald Belson, vice chairman of Deloitte's North American media and entertainment division.Deloitte's survey says 32 per cent of trailing millennials aged between 14 and 24 watch movies or TV shows on their laptop or desktop, while nine per cent use their smartphone, seven per cent use a fondleslab and 44 per cent watch television.Some 92 per cent of the “matures” group in the survey, being aged above 67, primarily watch programmes or films on the telly, with just six per cent using a laptop.“Boomers” of between 48 and 66 years old are also big telly fiends, with 88 per cent watching the goggle box.



Belson added: Consumers are often now able to watch the content they want on the device of their choosing. As an example, they have decoupled the notion that TV shows have to be watched on home TVs. This trend is particularly evident in trailing millennials, who indicated they now spend more time watching television and movie content on non-traditional devices than on TVs.The Digital Democracy survey also found that 37 per cent of Americans are now digital omnivores who own a computer, smartphone and fondleslab, a figure which has grown by 42 per cent since previous year.There has been a 33 per cent increase in tablet ownership and increased take up by women, who now make up 45 per cent of the digital omnivores.A group of Chinese researchers reckon they're close to a practical method of harvesting the static electricity you generate when tapping and swiping the screen of your smartphone as backup power for the phone itself.As anyone who's jumped back swearing at their hand when all they wanted to do was open a door in the office can attest, the human body can build up a quite considerable static charges. Turning it into useful electricity, however, is a little more challenging.


A problem this research team, led by Peking University's Bo Meng, is trying to address is to make the generator efficient without requiring that it be grounded to earth.In this paper at Applied Physics Letters, they outline their approach, in which rather than grounding their STEG (single-friction-surface triboelectric generator), the body is used as an electrode, as per this circuit diagram:“When finger taps the friction surface and separates, the two contact surfaces compose a friction pair and get electrostatically charged owing to the difference in electron-attracting abilities ... finger skin shows a tendency to donate electrons in contact electrification. After electrostatically charged, it operates similarly as an out-of-plane gap closing electrostatic generator. Under repeated tapping and separating cycles, charge moves forward and back between the induction electrode and the charged finger skin via the external loads.”


Using a surface of micro-patterned polydimethylsiloxane, the researchers claim they were able to achieve an output voltage of 200V with a current density of 4.7 micro-Amps per square centimetre. That's not about to replace the battery on your laptop computer, but the researchers say “the STEG could be a potential power source for low-power electronics, especially for wearable devices”.The Dreamcolor screen itself certainly has a je ne sais quoi about it. 10-bit colour might not sound like much, but it's 10-bit per channel RGB, so it's 30-bit in total, so we're into beeellions of colours here – or 1,073,741,824 colour variations to be precise.HP has recently released revamped standalone Dreamcolor monitors, but if you're on the move, and using an ZBook 17 equipped with one, then you'll be looking at something rather special. It's not just the colour vibrancy and depth, you also get exceptionally good viewing angles. This is probably just as well because you can open the ZBook up so that the screen lies completely horizontal, just like in the old days, and the anti-glare display also does an excellent job of minimising reflections.


In general, Windows 7 boot times are not as impressive as Windows 8, but you'll still get to the login screen in under 15 seconds. Beyond that, Adobe Premiere Pro CC took 7 seconds to load and Photoshop CC a fraction over five seconds, which should satisfy most eager creatives. The Crucial SSD takes the credit for most of the niftiness here, delivering 427MB/s read and 207MB/s write speeds in CrystalDiskMark.The PCMark 8 scores were difficult to judge as the dodgy ZBook couldn’t run the Home settings test (it kept crashing) but could manage the Work test and gave a score of 5054. By contrast, the replacement ZBook could run all the tests, but the Work score was a mere 4021, producing a best Home score of 3880. It did make me wonder whether HP had done some performance tweaking in the replacement model to get the best out of the graphics card, as this notched up an impressive casual gaming figure of 97.73fps at full HD.When put to task, the fans would chip in a bit, sounding fairly industrial from the side venting at times. Oh and if you're wondering about the battery life, the PCMark 8 benchmark clocked up 1hr 57mins, from the 8-cell 83Whr removable battery, so you can probably double that with frugal usage.



HP Mobile Workstations come with all the usual security baggage that you'll not find on the consumer models, such as HP Client Security (which never failed to nag me to configure it with every reboot). Rather than go over that again here, if you're interested take a look at our HP Elitebook review for more.HP's Connection Manager was another regular pop-up every time a drive of any description was attached, enabling control over what storage could be accessed. It would appear when attaching Thunderbolt devices and yet often the devices themselves wouldn't mount. As mentioned in several of my Thunderbolt storage reviews, the issue goes away when an AS Media driver is installed, enabling PCs to play nice with this abundant controller chip.Needless to say, Thunderbolt performance was plenty fast, limited only by the media and arrays being used. Moreover, using an Elgato Thunderbolt dock, additional interfacing could be accessed, but not before additional drivers were installed to get the Ethernet and USB side of this accessory working – more of an Elgato issue than HP's.

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Acer AS10D61 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

Synology's success owes much to its web top GUI, accessed through a browser, which is now polished and mature and, thankfully, doesn't suck up system resources. If you can't remember the IP address you've allocated to the box and port (5050) you'll need to download the DSAssistant app for Windows or Mac. This finds the servers on your network and also you to monitor their status.One minor glitch it threw at me was complaining that it needed the latest version of Java. Tech support established this wasn't a complaint about the DiskStation, but about the Mac client I was using.The DS214 I received as a test unit carried the 4.2 software, but not so long ago Synology made the 4.3 update available as a download. In this, the PhotoStation photo streamer gets spruced up, and some other useful features are bundled. At long last, Diskstations now support Mac-formatted (HFS+) disks, something Synology's great rival Qnap has been able to boast for ages.


I was also pleased to see bandwidth throttling per user and per protocol added, although 4.2 had already made ground here. Microsoft's Offload Data Transfer (ODX) file protocol is also added, allowing servers to transfer files between iSCSI partitions faster with lower CPU and IO strain. It's supported in Windows 8 Explorer.For users with more money than sense, the SSDs are better supported than before, thanks to support for the TRIM command. Of course, you saturate the bottleneck of the network I/O far sooner than you'll soak up the disk I/O bottleneck, in which case why use an SSD in a NAS unit? Perhaps if you've got very acute hearing and the low noise of the disks starting up is still too much.Running a home server may have once sounded ludicrous, but the low power consumption of the ARM board and aggressive power management of modern drives make them very unobtrusive. They can be set to power up and down to a schedule. The official power consumption is 22.64W in access mode, 20.7W when idle, and 9W in hibernation.


That's a little more than its predecessors the DS212 drew 18.2W access/6.8W hibernate and the DS213 18.48W access/8.28W hibernation. For comparison the beefy two year old reference unit (the 712+) draws 27.5W active and 17.6W idle.Synology claims network write speed of 100MB/s in mirrored RAID mode for the new box. To test this I set up a RAID 1 array with two WD Red 3TB disks, and created two test sets of just under 2GB each, one containing a handful of large media files, and one a more typical mix of 1,600 files. I used a 2013 Apple Airport Extreme router - not the fastest - and Gigabit Ethernet.Sure enough, the DS214 matched the claimed performance, recording 108MB/s in write mode for the large files and 103MB/s for the typical mix. Read speeds are considerably slower, and show a degree of divergence: with 46MB/s to read the large media files and 32MB/s to read the large mix of smaller files. If you're on Wi-Fi, of course, just fuggedabout it.


Writes trickle in at around 10MB/s and reads trickle out at around 8MB/s. This is typical of performance across manufacturers, and if you're backing up a household of devices you'll want to do the first over a wired connection. And that would be that, normally. However, WLAN network speeds are improving with more use of 5GHz frequencies and the 802.11ac standard - so it's worth returning to the subject once we have compliant hardware.The DiskStation can stream to your telly - Synology claims full 1080p HD is supported despite the modest ARM processor. However it's amazing to find a complete absence of any legal acquisition options either bundled or promoted - instead, the dark side of the internet is promoted as the default supply chain.
The ethics here are dubious and quite avoidable: why not work with the legal supply chain to cache a Netflix stream to avoid stuttering, TiVo style? That kind of innovation must be worth a few pence.



A home NAS box is a bit like an iPad - you don't really need one but once you have one, so many things - from backups to photo sharing - are that much easier. Synology's no-nonsense UI and ever-improving hardware are setting the pace in this competitive market. The webtop UI is getting a bit a long in the tooth, but it hits the sweet spot between dashboard UIs which conceal most of the powerful server features and the DIY approach - exemplified by this Sheeva plug server. No-tools assembly and a low price should make it even more attractive. The main difference here, is this Asus weighs a mere 1.25kg and at 288 x 204 x 19mm is only marginally more bother to lug around than 10in iPad 2 with a cover. So while the future of the PC may well be uncertain, the more we see of these lightweight, light on the wallet, low-power laptops does suggest a rather different future that isn’t in the form of an Ultrabook, if you’re prepared to make a few sacrifices.


Apart from the build quality – which is fine although plastic and the lid is a bit flimsy – those sacrifices aren’t really anything to do with Acer, it’s just providing the hardware for this platform. The C720 is easy to like, but Chrome still has its shortcomings.For instance, you’d think that with Google’s obsession with the cloud you might be able to get somewhere with a NAS box. Apparently Java often plays a part here and your mileage may vary depending on your NAS maker. Hence, using IP addresses from the browser, attempts to connect to Synology DS410 NAS failed but running an Asustor AS-304T worked just fine. This really is the sort of thing you'd hope to have resolved by apps offered in the Chrome store.


You'll void the warranty by opening it up – the memory is soldered on but you can swap the SSD. Note the three-cell battery label states 3720mAh Li-ion, not 3900mAh as quoted in the specs

Incidentally, the built-in speakers are your usual low-fi laptop fare but are quite loud and not ear piercingly bright. The 1.3Mp web cam and mic are perfectly adequate too. The colour balance is all over the place, but the image is sharp enough. I did have some luck with the Pure Connect streaming service too and even managed to get this to hook up wirelessly to a Revo Supersignal, featured in our recent DAB-Bluetooth combo radios round-up, whilst simultaneously browsing Google Streetview.Streetview, of course, uses Flash and Chrome relies heavily on this Adobe plug-in enabler for more than compatibility with popular web sites such as Facebook. A fair amount of software featured on the Chrome Web Store is compiled as self-contained Flash apps. One of the most popular is Pixlr Editor from Autodesk. It’s the closest thing you’ll find to Photoshop for Chrome.



This 16GB Kingston SSD is removable, but there aren't many NGFF (next generation form factor) storage options to replace it with just yet
While it is perfectly functional and actually makes the Chrome experience bearable by providing a comprehensive range of image editing functions for nothing, it does have a rather major flaw. Unfortunately, none of the key commands work even though they’re listed alongside tasks on the various drop down menus. It seems working in this Flash-based walled garden from within Chrome needs some refinement, as the navigation is all point and click.And if image editing from a mobile appeals, then you’ll need to e-mail those pics. I tried an Apple iPhone 4S, a Nokia Lumia 820 Windows Phone and a Moto G Android handset and none of them would mount as USB drives, despite various notifications on their screens recognising a computer connection. Lest we forget printing – you’ll need to go round the houses with Google’s Cloud Print to get a hard copy, even if you’ve a printer sat next to you. As it says in the Settings info “Don't try to plug your printer into your Chromebook--it won't work!”


Swapping over to a full blown Linux alternative is easier than you might think on a Chromebook
Sure there are new printers that support Cloud Print these days, but how often do you replace a printer? Probably not as often as a laptop. Still, you do have the option to run a mainstream Linux distro alongside Google's Chrome, which is also Linux-based. One way is to use Crouton, which is a breeze. After installation, simple key commands switch between them Chrome and Ubuntu without the need for restarts. It's very straightforward to set up with Ubuntu and both share the same Downloads folder, so documents can be interchanged easily.I’ll admit I’m warming to Chrome, but it’s a relationship that’s still far from cosy. The useful app choices remain very limited and the OS still feels rough round the edges in places and the printing limitations are as annoying as ever. Yet, whatever you think about Google’s Chromebook experience, Acer has turned out a respectable, compact notebook at an affordable price with an all day battery life.


Certainly, given the cost of alternatives, such as the Asus T100 Windows 8 touchscreen convertible at £150 more, those working to a rigid budget will be taking a long hard look at this always updated, virus-free Google experience.Indeed, the dual OS set-up running Chrome and an alternative flavour of Linux is definitely appealing and the SD card slot can take care of storage expansion, if required. This combination of functional inexpensive hardware and a level of versatility should ensure the Acer C720 Chromebook will have its share of fans. The Acronis True Image WD Edition software (version 16 from 2013) insisted that I connect a WD drive first, even though the Dual Drive was connected using the adaptor cable. After a little trial and error, I found that Acronis would only play ball once I used Windows Disk Management to create a partition on the new drive. That done, I had the option to clone the original drive, clean up the disk, destroy data and so on.

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Akku Dell kr-08p6x6 www.pcakku.com

Im Licht all der Gerüchte rund um das nächste iPhone-Topmodell ist es wichtig, nicht zu vergessen, dass nach wie vor kein einziges Ausstattungsmerkmal des Smartphones von offizieller Seite bestätigt wurde. Die neuesten Erkenntnisse kommen daher wie so häufig in den letzten Monaten von dem offenbar über hervorragende Kontakte in Apples Zuliefererkette verfügenden Analysten Ming-Chi Kuo. Dieser hat den Bericht des Wall Street Journal zum Anlass genommen, um die Verwirrung um die USB Typ-C-Schnittstelle so weit wie derzeit möglich aufzuklären. Kuos Worten nach liegt die US-Publikation nicht komplett falsch, Apple werde den USB Typ-C-Anschlussstandard aber nicht am Smartphone selbst einsetzen, sondern diesem lediglich ein Kabel beilegen, das an einem Ende einen damit kompatiblen Stecker und am anderen den bekannten Lightning-Stecker bietet. Der USB Typ-C-Stecker könnte in dem Fall dann entweder mit einem geeigneten Netzteil oder einem Computer mit demselben Anschlussstandard verbunden werden.


Sofern Kuos Informationen korrekt sind würde die Verwendung eines Kabels mit USB Typ-C Technologie zwei Vorteile für die Handhabung des kommenden iPhone-Topmodells mit sich bringen. Erstens könnte über ein Kabel mit dieser Schnittstelle eine höhere Spannung transportiert werden als über das „alte“ iPhone-Ladekabel mit USB-A-Stecker an einem Ende. Das dürfte also dazu führen, dass sich das iPhone 8 deutlich schneller als bisherige iPhone-Topmodelle aufladen lassen wird. Genau dies ist schließlich auch der wichtigste Grund warum beispielsweise Google bei seinen Pixel-Phones auf USB Typ-C setzt.

Ein zweiter Vorteil aus Sicht von Apple dürfte die Möglichkeit sein, das Smartphone somit direkt - sprich ohne Zuhilfenahme eines Adapter - mit einem aktuellen MacBook und MacBook Pro beziehungsweise einem modernen Windows-PC mit USB Typ-C Schnittstelle verbinden zu können. Für ältere PCs und Macs, die ausschließlich über USB Typ-A-Ports verfügen wäre in dem Fall allerdings wieder ein Adapter nötig.


Wie oben schon erwähnt ist Kuo zwar als zuverlässiger Informant rund um die iPhone-Entwicklung bekannt, aber nichtsdestotrotz ist bei der Flut aktueller Gerüchte weiterhin eine Restportion Skepsis ratsam. Die Ausführungen des Analysten erscheinen allerdings eindeutig plausibler als die vorherige Mutmaßung, nach der Apple bei seinem nächsten Flaggschiff-Produkt auf die eigene Lightning-Schnittstelle verzichten werde.

Microsoft hat mit einem offiziellen Blog-Beitrag jüngst näher über Neuerungen des kommenden Windows 10 Creators Updates informiert, durch die Anwender mehr Kontrolle über die Art und Weise wie Updates eingespielt werden erhalten sollen. Windows Insider können diese Änderungen bereits seit geraumer Zeit in den im Fast Ring veröffentlichten Test-Builds sehen. Die finale Fassung der nächsten großen Windows 10 Hauptversion wird aller Voraussicht nach im April für Jedermann zu bekommen sein.

Zunächst einmal erhalten Anwender durch das Creators Update die Möglichkeit, einen bestimmten Zeitpunkt festzulegen, an dem neue Software-Aktualisierungen für Windows 10 eingespielt werden. Dieser Zeitpunkt kann stets auch wieder verändert werden, falls er sich einmal als unpassend herausstellen sollte. Bislang war es so, dass lediglich ein Nutzungszeitraum vom Anwender spezifiziert werden konnte, während dem das Betriebssystem dann davon absah, neue Updates einzuspielen, um Arbeitsprozesse nicht zu stören.

Apropos Nutzungszeit: Microsoft hat im Creators Update auch diese Einstellung leicht angepasst. Anstatt wie bislang maximal 12 Stunden können Anwender nun hierfür einen Zeitraum von bis zu 18 Stunden festlegen. Für Leute, die beruflich und privat sehr viel Zeit am PC verbringen sicherlich eine sinnvolle Änderung.



Die letzte nennenswerte Anpassung, die das Windows-Team in Sachen Update-Verwaltung vorgenommen hat, ist die Option, die Update-Installation noch im letzten Moment um drei Tage nach hinten zu verschieben. Die Schaltfläche, welche dies beim Creators Update erlaubt, erscheint automatisch sobald Aktualisierungen bereit zur Installation sind.

Microsoft will mit der erweiterten Konfigurierbarkeit des Update-Prozess unter Windows 10 ganz offenkundig dafür sorgen, dass Anwender nicht länger in den ungünstigsten Momenten durch eine anstehende Update-Installation gegängelt werden. Es ist der Versuch des Unternehmens einen guten Kompromiss aus regelmäßiger und zügiger Bereitstellung von Aktualisierungen und angenehmer Nutzererfahrungen zu bieten. Die genannten Anpassungen werden mit dem Creators Update für alle Versionen von Windows 10 ausgerollt werden.

Ebenfalls laut Microsoft auf Nutzer-Feedback basierend und mit der Absicht, bessere Nutzerkontrolle anzubieten, wurden zwei weitere kleinere Neuerungen in das Creators Update implementiert. Zum einen ist da das neue Übersichtsfenster für sämtliche Datenschutzeinstellungen des Betriebssystems zu nennen, zum anderen wurde das Kontrollzentrum für die Anti-Viren und Sicherheitssoftware Windows Defender komplett neu gestaltet.


Wenige Wochen vor der offiziellen Vorstellung des [Link/artikel/samsung-galaxy-s8-neue-fotos-datenblaetter-des-smartphones/8006/]Galaxy S8 und inmitten zahlloser Leaks rund um dieses High-End-Gerät hat Samsung noch schnell ein anderes Android-Smartphone angekündigt, das Galaxy XCover 4.

Der Nachfolger des XCover 3 ist genau wie dieses mittlerweile zwei Jahre alte Modell ein sehr robustes -Outdoor-Smartphone, das insbesondere Kunden ansprechen soll, die aus beruflichen oder privaten Gründen viel Zeit unter freiem Himmel verbringen, und damit häufig auch widrigen Wetterbedingungen ausgesetzt sind. Das XCover 4 wartet mit einem Gehäuse auf, welches nach dem US-Militär-Standard MIL-STD 810G zertifiziert ist, und damit unter anderem sowohl starken Vibrationen und Stößen als auch intensiver Sonneneinstrahlung widerstehen soll. Außerdem ist es natürlich nach IP68 gegen Wasser, Staub und Schmutz geschützt. Selbst rund 30 Minuten in bis zu 1,5 Metern Wassertiefe sollen dem Gerät nichts anhaben können.


Abgesehen von der strapazierfähigen Schale handelt es sich beim XCover 4 aber um ein unspektakuläreres Smartphone mit Hardware der unteren Mittelklasse. Das TFT-Display misst 4,99 Zoll in der Diagonalen, löst mit 1280 x 720 Pixel (HD) auf und kann auch inklusive angezogenen Handschuhen bedient werden. Zusätzlich erleichtert wird die Bedienung bei Kälte oder in Schnee und Regen durch mechanische Funktionstasten unterhalb des Bildschirms. Angetrieben wird das Outdoor-Gerät von einem nicht näher spezifizierten Quad-Core-Prozessor mit einer Taktfrequenz von 1,4 Gigahertz, dem 2 Gigabyte RAM zur Seite stehen. Der interne Speicher bietet eine Kapazität von 16 Gigabyte und kann via microSD-Karte um bis zu 256 Gigabyte erweitert werden. Die Akkukapazität wird mit 2800 mAh angegeben.



Das XCover 4 misst 146,2 x 73,3 x 9,7 Millimeter und bringt 172 Gramm auf die Waage. Auf der Rückseite des Smartphones befindet sich eine 13 Megapixel Kamera mit Blitzlicht und einer lichtstarken f/1.9-Blende. Für Videochats oder Selfies zeichnet sich die 5 Megapixel Frontkamera verantwortlich. Zur drahtlosen Kommunikation werden die Funkstandards LTE Cat. 4, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2,4 + 5 GHz), Bluetooth 4.2 und NFC geboten.

Samsung liefert das Galaxy XCover 4 ab Werk mit Android 7.0 Nougat inklusive der wie vom Hersteller gewohnt angepassten Oberfläche aus. Der europäische Marktstart des robusten Smartphones ist für April 2017 eingeplant. Die unverbindliche Preisempfehlung wird dann bei 260 Euro liegen.

Microsoft hat in dieser Woche wieder eine neue Vorschauversion des Windows 10 Creators Updates für Windows Insider im Fast Ring zum Download bereitgestellt. Die neueste Build trägt die Versionsnummer 15046 und wartet vor der anstehenden Fertigstellung der finalen Fassung des Creators Update noch einmal mit zahlreichen Fehlerkorrekturen auf.


Während das Windows-Team also hauptsächlich am Eliminieren von Bugs werkelt, was sich aller Voraussicht nach noch ein paar Wochen hinziehen wird, gibt es verständlicherweise nicht mehr viel Raum zum Implementieren neuer Features. Nichtsdestotrotz haben es aber noch einmal ein paar kleinere sichtbare Änderungen in die aktuelle Preview-Build geschafft. Diese betreffen laut Microsofts Angaben im zur Build 15046 gehörenden Blog-Beitrag unter anderem den digitalen Assistenten Cortana, die Sicherheitssoftware Windows Defender und die neue Gaming-Rubrik in der Einstellungen-App.

Die erwähnten Anpassungen sind fast alle nur kosmetischer Natur (veränderte Icons und Farben). So wurde beispielsweise im Fall von Windows Defender das Symbol in der Taskleiste verändert, um Nutzer klarer über den aktuellen Viren-

und Malware-Schutzstatus zu informieren, und ihnen schnellen Zugriff auf die Einstellungen der Software zu gewähren. Eine weitere Änderung betrifft allein die nicht-englischsprachigen Versionen der Windows 10 Insider Preview. Microsoft will der Übersetzung von Oberflächenelementen und mehr in unterschiedliche Sprachen den nötigen Feinschliff verpasst haben. Ein weiteres Indiz dafür, dass die Fertigstellung des Creators Updates nun kurz bevorsteht.

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Dell XPS L401X Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

Having a phone from the company that makes the Xbox makes it feel a little less "enterprise". That is best described as a halo effect. A senior figure at the anti-virus giant McAfee once told this writer the security industry was a mess. There were too many vendors trying to do too many things. But what the industry mirrors is the threat landscape it is trying to calm down.Just look at what’s happened in the past six months. Two of the most significant breaches in the history of the web have occurred, with the attacks on US retailing firm Target and auction giant eBay. There was also the small matter of the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, one of the most high-profile web security flaws to date. From a security perspective, things aren’t letting up and there appears to be no end in sight.One common, depressing problem that’s emerged from each of these issues is that many people just aren’t doing the old basics right. The whole security sector, from vendors to customers, needs to be sensible in its response, says Javvad Malik, analyst from 451 Research.


“The industry’s been messy for a while now and it’s important the industry responds in a pragmatic and unified manner to try and win back confidence of businesses that investing in security isn’t a completely lost cause. We’re still bad at managing the basics, patching, privilege identity management, tools that overload users with alerts within which important issues can be missed,” Malik says.Whilst IT teams are often told they need a new approach to protecting the business, they have to get the old problems nailed first.Beyond the rudimentary matters, though, coping with these manifold problems effectively will require traditional protections to change and new ones to emerge from research labs and find their way into businesses. “As the internet touches more and more areas of our lives – smart devices, currencies such as Bitcoin, cloud and virtualisation – simply reacting to threats is no longer the most effective way to protect both individuals and organisations,” says David Emm, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.That does not mean killing anti-virus, however, even if the traditional signature-based approaches have failed. Modern AV systems, the best ones, at least do some heuristic and reputation analysis, rather than just try to detect malicious software that’s already been seen in the wild.


Emm says malware detection technologies should look beyond the static and evaluate objects or applications within the context of a specific environment, questioning what it’s doing there, what it’s connecting to and what it has been designed to do compared with its expected behaviour.“This enables security experts to identify anything that is being used for nefarious purposes before an attack has been carried out,” he adds.“There have been those who have said that ‘AV’ protection is dead but what this really means is that we have to go beyond traditional signature-based protection and use more sophisticated technologies including heuristics, sandboxing, proactive behaviour detection, cloud-enabled threat intelligence, application control, automatic exploit prevention, secure banking and more.”Outside of malware problems, the rise of mobile has brought about a dismantling of the IT perimeter. That’s why the firewall has also taken a battering in recent years. And yet it still survives as a technology, whether in the traditional or “next-generation” sense. Rather than taking down the firewall, the response to the death of the perimeter should be based on a layered approach, not a rip and replace strategy, says Professor Alan Woodward, of the computing department at the University of Surrey.“I think we can take lessons from how physical security has been mounted historically: something as simple as a castle didn’t have just one wall. There were layers of walls and eventually a redoubt within which the most precious items were kept,” Woodward says.



“Defence in depth has to be seen as the default approach. With the rise of insider threats and spear phishing attacking those with privileged access, the perimeter is becoming less of an absolute barrier to intruders but is still causing some attacks to bounce off so it would seem a little silly to simply let it crumble.”Emm says such an approach needs to focus more on the individual, rather than attempt blanket security measures. “People do still work in the office, connecting to corporate servers so that network still needs to be protected. However, the workspace has become more diverse in that many people will work from home on a laptop or on the move with their smartphone or tablet,” Emm adds.“This leads to a host of additional security issues - from people logging on to insecure Wi-Fi networks that could potentially be being watched by cybercriminals, to losing their device on public transport - and it is these devices that are not protected by traditional policies, firewalls, endpoint protection and mail filtering that exist in offices.


“We therefore need to look at a security solution that protects the individual, taking into account new devices and policies and procedures for untrusted environments – i.e. ‘follow-me’ security.”This all points to a need for better intelligence systems, ones that can alert organisations to anomalies on the network caused by zero-day threats and access inconsistencies, whilst allowing for greater analysis of attacker behaviour. The most effective are likely to be based on Big Data technology, ones that can draw together different data types to determine the nature of the threat. Use of Hadoop and big data warehousing projects will likely be the domain of large enterprises. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technologies will likely be suitable for smaller enterprises, the most attractive being those that allow for actionable intelligence and pull in as many different sources as possible.Proper intelligence solutions aren’t just thought to be useful in understanding the adversary, they’re also likely to save businesses money. Research from the Ponemon Institute last year, looking at 234 breached organisations, showed those who invested in security intelligence systems gained average cost savings of nearly $2m in comparison to those who didn’t.Microsoft has pitched its Surface Pro 3 as a "tablet that can replace your laptop." That is unless, it seems, you want to repair or upgrade your laptop.


Teardown specialists iFixit have posted their initial dissection of the latest Redmond tablet, and they've concluded that the surface on the Surface is poor for service.The third generation of Microsoft's high-end tablet received a repairability score of one out of a possible 10 – iFixit's lowest.Among the issues noted by the company was the use of non-standard connectors, an unreplaceable battery, and extensive use of heavy adhesives that make opening and servicing components in the tablet nearly impossible.Perhaps the biggest worry with the Surface Pro 3, says iFixit, is the screen itself. During the early steps of the teardown process, loosening and prying open the outer casing from the display, the researchers spotted cracks.The small fissure quickly spread through the screen, and the iFixit crew said that it had to tape up the display in order to prevent it from falling apart outright."The delicate and arduous opening procedure leaves no room for mistakes: one slip-up, and you'll be out a screen," they wrote.Even if one can pull open the display, the Surface take-apart effort found that other measures from Redmond make servicing the device extremely difficult. While the SSD was found to be accessible and fairly easy to replace, other components such as the battery pack were glued into the tablet's casing to the point of being impossible to remove without causing permanent damage.



To be fair, few if any tablet systems these days fall under most peoples' definitions of repairable. Vendors are able to squeeze a tablet's guts into their svelt enclosures by using glue to secure components, along with other space-saving measures that make DIY repairs difficult to impossible. Apple, for example, receives similarly low repairability scores for many of the same reasons.That the Surface Pro 3 wouldn't even survive a case opening, however, could be seen as cause for concern about overall durability.The team at iFixit has performed hundreds of such teardowns in the past, and hardly qualifies as ham-fisted when it comes to handling delicate components. Indeed, the company makes its living selling users the very tools that allow for the opening of mobile devices without cracking screens or warping battery packs."Microsoft went to great lengths to make the Surface Pro 3 super portable, thinning it down from the Pro 2's 0.53in to a mere 0.36in thick," the DIY repair site noted.


As with all of our Surface products, Surface Pro 3 is engineered with high-quality components to be as thin, light and powerful as possible and is designed to be serviced by professionals. All Surface products come with a one-year limited hardware warranty and customers have the option of additional warranty protection with Microsoft Complete, which gives customers two years of limited hardware warranty coverage that includes accidental damage protection.
Impressively, there's no sign of bargain basement build quality, something that couldn't really be said of the first generation MeMO Pad 7. The whole thing feels as solid as a rock while the screen is made from some sort of toughened glass. The nicely rounded matt finish rear is rather pleasant to the touch too.Physically the new Asus is par for the 7-inch tablet course. At 113.7 x 189.3 x 9.6mm and weighing 295g, to all intents and purposes, it’s the same as the MkII Nexus 7.The only ergonomic hitch is the positioning of the power and volume buttons on the right. They are too much on the back rather than the side and don't fall easily to the touch, something exacerbated by the power button being below the volume rocker which feels the wrong way around to me. The memory card slot doesn't have a cover but cards slot far enough in for this to not be an operational problem.

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Dell Inspiron 9400 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

Are tablets the new netbooks – a flash in the pan? Or perhaps even the new picture frames - a one-season fad?I don’t think so, but sales are flat, and the numbers look ominous for any global technology company hoping they’ll provide a long-term money spinner. The numbers look particularly ominous for Microsoft, which paid the highest price of all with its response to the explosive growth in tablets.No other tech company compromised its existing bread-and-butter product in a demented dash to respond. Thanks to Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft ensured Windows was almost unbuyable. And in addition, it began to make hardware – at great expense - that nobody wanted to buy. Although Microsoft has since mended a lot of the damage, some really big decisions lie ahead. The decline in tablets makes the ruinous decisions made between 2010 and 2012 look even dafter now. Microsoft can’t avoid making these decisions for much longer.


First, the numbers. They surely now show a consistent trend. Overall, the volume growth in fondleslabs is tapering off. Apple’s figures show a year-on-year decline in iPad sales, even though Apple’s iPads have never been better. We also appear to have reached “peak Kindle”, at least for now, with falls showing a 47.1 per cent decline in first quarter. (Ebook sales were flat last year at $3bn – so it would appear anyone with an e-reading habit has already caught it).The explanations offered are all plausible. Once consumers have got a fondleslab, they don’t need to replace them very often. The gadgets rarely leave the house and so they break less frequently, and are shown off less frequently. Nor do you need to upgrade a tablet to the latest and greatest specs, if you’re using it mainly for Facebook and Netflix or iPlayer. The other factor is that smartphones have become bigger – with even Apple rumoured to be following suit.The Android flagships today – such as the Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, LG G3 and Sony Xperia Z2 – are not “phondleslabs” but all have fairly stunning 5-inch displays. And these are packed into smaller form factors – with smaller bezels than before.


What growth there is to come in tablets – as we suggested last week - will belong to no-name commodity manufacturers running bog-standard Android.This is good news for Chinese manufacturers (many of which we’ve never heard of) as they can crank out reasonable quality at rock bottom prices. But eventually, this is not a game an HP wants to be in, as the market becomes like the perfume market. The R&D spending on what’s in the bottle is minimal, but huge expenditures are required to maintain the brand. That’s how Casio stays in – by the skin of its teeth – and the tablet biz is soon going to look a lot like the watch biz.So much then, for the “post-PC” era. It’s really going to be a smartphone + PC era.What does this mean for Microsoft? Well, it might be time to hire an exorcist.


Microsoft put Steve Sinofsky in charge of making the company competitive in the “post-PC world” and his strategy now looks like criminal negligence. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the gamble of brute-forcing an app ecosystem into existence by plastering it on top of Windows didn’t look very clever at the time. It now looks like all cost, and no gain.Sinofsky borrowed the approach that radical environmentalists (and the Bush administration) had used: an existential crisis was upon us, and normal rules of engagement, such as rational cost-benefit analysis, were to be suspended. Apps were everything, and Microsoft needed to do everything to force developers to write to the Metro (or Modern) apps. That way, Microsoft would bludgeon its way to becoming the third ecosystem.Essential to this was turning PC Windows into a weird kind of hybrid. But in the execution, it was all about appearance, and developers needed to write an app three times for each of the three Microsoft Modern platforms.



Write once, run anywhere on desktop, RT or Phone was the goal. Many of us thought it was a bluff: that Microsoft wouldn’t actually ultimately launch a PC version of Windows whose user experience was so utterly awful. But Sinofsky, by now almost unmanageable, went ahead and tried it anyway. It didn't work.When Microsoft made Windows unattractive, the cost was immense. The company has lost billions in revenue by losing out on the upgrade cycles which power the PC industry. It lost billions more making boutique own-brand hardware which nobody wants. And its partners have lost twice over: by losing core PC sales and by making tablets which are even harder to sell.UK figures this week show Microsoft sold around 10,000 slate-style tablets last quarter, out of almost 600,000 sold overall. That’s the size of a rounding error – and comparable to the number of ruggedised PCs it was selling into enterprises before Windows 8.


If you want a practical demonstration of why the Sinofsky “hybridised” Windows is a flop, watch this nine-minute YouTube review of the Surface Pro 3 I caught recently.Do give it a few seconds to adjust to the presenter's whiny voice - it’s actually a well-observed and quite devastating review of why hybridised even with brilliant just doesn’t work. Even with sexy design and some really clever hardware engineering, it's cumbersome compared to a simple combo of laptop and smartphone. This is a hybrid the world just doesn’t need.Hopefully, a fresh reappraisal of the tablet market at Redmond will refocus the software strategy – and Microsoft is already halfway to ditching the Sinofsky Hybridisation Strategy completely. It already looks as if Windows 9 will restore some sanity. Universal apps are now a reality.One response is to continue to improve the tablet Windows (Intel and ARM) and give it away for nothing, as it’s already partially doing. (Microsoft already has zero royalty licensing for small tablets and Windows Phone). The fear was always that tablets would cannibalise Windows licence royalties, but there’s less to fear now. Continue Modern as a kind of overlay on Windows, but not one that compromises the experience.


Perhaps the one positive of the Sinofsky legacy – one that didn’t receive enough credit at the time - was porting a lightweight Windows to ARM. It created a bloodbath for ODMs who risked creating ARM Windows tablets running Windows RT – and several never even brought those to market.Only Microsoft and Nokia (now part of Microsoft) have released RT devices in the past year. Yet it forced Intel to raise its game considerably, and the downstream effect is that Windows laptops have much better low-power performance than they might otherwise have had. Late last year Microsoft acknowledged it had created “one Windows too many”. With phones becoming larger, it's more important that Windows Phone becomes richer, and that's where the focus appears to be going.So Microsoft should hire the exorcist and flush out any remaining vestiges of Sinofsky's hybrid strategy. Then, it should pour itself a large drink. The future isn't going to be as bleak as it thought. Perhaps the most notable difference is the visual changes, which see KDE embracing a more streamlined, flat interface, but it's also the first version of KDE to be powered by Qt 5 and the recently released KDE Frameworks 5.



Qt was the interface development framework bought and then dumped by Nokia, whose mobile phone business is now owned by Microsoft.The visual changes and the polish that's been added to the default Plasma theme is welcome - frankly the default KDE 4 theme has been looking long in the tooth for a while now - but it's the under-the-hood changes will have a bigger impact on the future of KDE.Another big feature is a converged shell, which is an attempt to realize a unified desktop and device future very similar to the goals of Ubuntu's Unity shell. The idea is the interface adapts to the hardware - the shell would select Plasma 5 for a laptop but run it on a tablet and it would change to a tablet-based interface. The converged shell will be able to select a shell” as the device changes.The canonical example is a touch interface on a tablet that switches to a more suitable interface when you plug in a keyboard. It's a little unclear from the KDE docs what happens if you want to use the touch interface and a keyboard, but presumably that's possible as well.


For the moment there's only the Plasma 5 desktop anyway, so all we have is the vision. KDE developers are working on the tablet interface along with an interface for a media centre – but neither are available for general use.The release of Plasma 5 also completes the migration of the Plasma workspace to Qt 5 and QtQuick, which uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL scenegraph to render graphics. That means KDE can take advantage of the powerful GPUs in today's devices and offload some of the more expensive graphical tasks to GPUs. On supported hardware this should give you a bit of a speed bump, particularly when doing other graphics intensive tasks like editing photos or video.The changes to the graphics stack and underlying Frameworks also pave the way for KDE to support Wayland, which will be part of an upcoming release.Plasma 5 also claims improved support for HiDPI displays, but I was unable to get this working in a virtual machine on a Retina MacBook. I've yet to determine whether this is a problem in Plasma 5, Kubuntu 14.04, down to the fact it's a virtual machine or some combination of the three.


I tested KDE with Plasma 5 in Kubuntu 14.04. When you install a fresh copy of KDE Plasma 5 on your favourite distro the thing that jumps out at you won't be better graphics or the potential to switch interfaces based on hardware. What will jump out at you is the new Breeze theme.Gone are the shiny, candy-like icons and darker textured grays in Plasma 4. Instead you'll find a lighter, brighter, flatter design aesthetic with a lot of monochrome icons, thinner looking type and frosted, slightly transparent windows.As with anything design related, some of the new interface's appeal will depend on your own aesthetic tastes. As someone who thought the Plasma 4 default had pretty much nowhere to go but up, I think that Breeze is a huge improvement.Compared to Plasma 4, Breeze is a giant leap forward, and not just visually, but functionally. The overall UI is greatly simplified – there’s improved spacing between items, making them less jumbled and easier to find and read. Most of the time anyway. Breeze isn't flawless by any means. For example, the window and overlay translucency is nice, until it isn't. Stacked windows and overlays often bleed through whatever is below them and look jumbled and sometimes hard to read.

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Akku Acer Aspire 4552 www.akku-fabrik.com

Ebenfalls in mehreren Farbausführungen wird es einem Bericht von Venture Beat nach die Huawei Watch 2 in den internationalen Handel schaffen. Der chinesische Hersteller hat sich bei seiner neuen Android Wear 2.0 Uhr zudem ganz offensichtlich für einen sehr sportlichen Look entschieden, was sich in Features wie umfassendem Fitness-Tracking und einem wasserdichten Gehäuse niederschlagen dürfte. Ein besonderes Merkmal der Smartwatch soll außerdem die Möglichkeit sein, eine nano-SIM-Karte einzustecken und ihr damit Mobilfunkkonnektivität zu spendieren.


Endgültig Klarheit zu allen Neuentwicklungen von Huawei für den Smartphone- und Smartwatch-Markt werden wir im Zuge der kurz bevorstehenden MWC-Pressekonferenz des Unternehmens erlangen. Diese wird am Sonntag, den 26. Februar über die Bühne gehen. Die Gerüchteküche geht davon aus, dass dort neben dem P10 und der Watch 2 auch die Smartphones P10 Plus sowie P10 Lite angekündigt werden.

Razer hat mit dem 12,5 Zoll-Ultrabook Razer Blade Stealth einen schicken, sehr kompakten Laptop im Portfolio, dessen Akkulaufzeit allerdings für den ein oder anderen Nutzer etwas zu wünschen übrig lässt. Diesem Kritikpunkt will das US-Unternehmen nun mit der Vorstellung der Razer Power Bank entgegenwirken. Das externe Akku-Pack, das sich über USB Typ C anschließen lässt und eine Kapazität von 12800 mAh sowie eine maximale Ladeleistung von 45 Watt bietet, soll dem Razer Blade Stealth zu Laufzeiten über der 15-Stunden-Marke verhelfen.

Wie das Blade Stealth und die anderen Geräte seiner Notebook-Line-up fertigt Razer die Power Bank aus Aluminium, wodurch das Accessoire nicht nur sehr wertig aussehen, sondern sich auch so anfühlen sollte. Daneben hat der Hersteller aber glücklicherweise auch die Funktionalität nicht vergessen. So kann der flexibel einsetzbare Energiespeicher zusätzlich zum USB-C-Port mit zwei klassischen USB-A-Anschlüssen aufwarten, und über alle drei Ports gleichzeitig Geräte mit Strom versorgen.



Den offiziellen Angaben nach ist die Razer Power Bank speziell für das Blade Stealth optimiert, kann jedoch auch mit Geräten anderer Hersteller genutzt werden, darunter etwa Notebooks mit USB Typ-C Anschluss wie Apples 12 Zoll MacBook. Ein Vorteil der Verwendung des Zubehörs mit dem Blade Stealth ist, dass in diesem Fall ein Schnelllademodus greift, dank dem der Akku des Notebooks nach weniger als zwei Stunden Ladezeit wieder bis zu sechs Stunden durchhalten soll. Außerdem wird von der Power Bank Qualcomms Quick Charge 3.0 Technologie unterstützt, was diversen Mobilgeräte zugute kommen kann. Sehr nutzerfreundlich dabei ist die Eigenschaft des externen Akku-Packs, automatisch zu erkennen, welcher Gerätetyp angeschlossen ist beziehungsweise welcher Ladestrom gerade benötigt wird.


Razer will seine neue Power Bank auf mehreren internationalen Märkten, darunter auch den deutschen, ab März 2017 über den eigenen Online-Shop vertreiben. Hierzulande wird der empfohlene Verkaufspreis bei 170 Euro liegen.

AMD ist mit seiner neuen Prozessor-Generation Ryzen am Ziel - oder zumindest an einem der marktstrategischen Etappenziele - angelangt. Wie der CPU- und GPU-Hersteller gestern auf dem "Ryzen Tech Day" in San Francisco, USA bekannt gab, können die drei leistungsfähigsten Ryzen-Modelle für Desktop-PCs ab sofort bei einzelnen Partnern im internationalen Handel vorbestellt werden. Der offizielle Marktstart wird dann in der kommenden Woche Donnerstag, den 2. März erfolgen.

Während des Launch-Events für die Ryzen-Familie nannte die sichtlich stolze AMD-Chefin Lisa Su die offiziellen Modellbezeichnungen, die wichtigsten Spezifikationen sowie die Preise der neuen Desktop-Prozessoren, die ab März sowohl einzeln als auch in Desktop-System integriert auf dem Markt erhältlich sein werden. Schnell klar wurde dabei, dass AMD den Erzkonkurrenten Intel mit Ryzen nicht nur in Punkto Preis, sondern auch, was für PC-Enthusiasten noch bedeutender ist, bezüglich Leistung gehörig unter Druck setzen wird.



Die neuen CPU-Topmodelle von AMD gehören alle zur sogenannten Ryzen 7 Reihe, welche mit acht Rechenkernen und Unterstützung für SMT (Hyper-Threading) auftrumpfen kann. Eine Ryzen 7 CPU kann somit also bis zu 16 Threads parallel abarbeiten. Das Flaggschiff der Baureihe trägt die Bezeichnung "Ryzen 7 1800X" und kostet 499 US-Dollar im Einzelhandel. Der Prozessor arbeitet mit einem Basistakt von 3,6 beziehungsweise einem Turbo-Takt von bis zu 4,0 Gigahertz und schlägt laut Herstellerangaben die mehr als doppelt so teure Octa-Core-CPU Intel Core i7-6900K in einigen bedeutenden Benchmarks.

Die beiden anderen Ryzen 7 Modelle mit acht Kernen hat AMD "Ryzen 7 1700X" und "Ryzen 7 1700" getauft. Sie unterscheiden sich hinsichtlich Preis, Taktraten und Stromverbrauch. Während der Ryzen 7 1700X mit einem Grundtakt von 3,4 und einem Turbo-Boost von 3,8 Gigahertz, einer TDP (Thermal Design Power) von 95 Watt sowie einem Preis in Höhe von 399 US-Dollar dem Flaggschiff Ryzen 7 1800X in vielerlei Gesichtspunkten sehr ähnlich ist, ist der Ryzen 7 1700 die energieeffiziente Einsteigervariante, die es aber dennoch mit dem aktuellen Intel-Desktop-Topmodell der Kaby Lake Reihe Core i7-7700K aufnehmen können soll. Ryzen 7 1700 arbeitet mit 3,0 bis zu 3,7 Gigahertz Taktfrequenz sowie einer TDP von 65 Watt und kostet mit 329 US-Dollar zudem weniger als das Intel-Pendant.


Passend zu den drei Prozessoren werden laut AMD alle namhaften Mainboard-Hersteller Hauptplatinen mit geeigneten Chipsätzen auf den Markt bringen. Darüber hinaus sollen im Laufe des März und in den Folgemonaten zahlreiche Komplettsysteme - vorrangig Gaming-PCs - mit der neuen AMD-Plattform im Handel erscheinen.

Die kleineren und noch günstigeren Ryzen-Ausführungen für den Desktop mit sechs und vier Kernen nennt AMD Ryzen 5 respektive Ryzen 3. Diese CPUs sollen im zweiten Quartal 2017 eingeführt werden. In der zweiten Jahreshälfte plant AMD dann den Start erster Ryzen-CPUs für den Mobilgeräte- beziehungsweise Notebook-Markt. Nähere Informationen zu diesen Exemplaren liegen aber im Moment noch nicht vor.


Samsung wird zwar den Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017, der in der nächsten Woche stattfindet, nicht als Bühne für die Enthüllung des Galaxy S8 (und S8+) nutzen, das tut dem Fluss der vorab durchsickernden Infos jedoch keinen Abbruch. Derzeit kursieren einige neue Konzeptzeichnungen und Fotos im Netz, die sowohl über vermeintliche Features von Samsungs neuer Flaggschiff-Line-up informieren als auch einen besseren Eindruck vom Aussehen der Geräte vermitteln wollen.

Die Fotos, die das Galaxy S8 in seiner hochglänzenden, schwarzen Farbvariante zeigen sollen, stammen aus einer etwas dubiosen, chinesischen Quelle. Die Echtheit der Aufnahmen lässt sich gegenwärtig nicht überprüfen, aber für sie spricht, dass das darauf zu sehende Smartphone Eigenschaften aufweist, über die nun schon zuvor des Öfteren in der Gerüchteküche berichtet worden war. Sofort ins Auge sticht die fehlende physikalische Home-Taste auf der Frontseite des Geräts, in der Samsung bis zum Galaxy S7 den Fingerabdruckscanner integrierte, sowie das nahezu randlose, riesig wirkende Dual-Edge-Display.







Aufgrund des Wegfalls der erwähnten Home-Taste werden das Galaxy S8 und das laut Gerüchteküche nahezu baugleiche, nur noch größere S8+ offenbar mit On-Screen-Tasten aufwarten. Zudem sind auf den Fotos die zahlreichen Sensoren zu sehen, die ganz am oberen Rand des kommenden Samsung-Flaggschiffs zu finden sind. Diese Sensoranordnung sieht zwar nicht besonders elegant aus, ist aber offenbar ebenfalls dem neuen Industriedesign geschuldet und sollte auch einen Iris-Scanner beinhalten.

Zusätzlich zu den Fotos hat Android Police auch einige aussagekräftige Skizzen zugespielt bekommen, die ein paar Features des S8 näher beleuchten. Dabei geht es beispielsweise um die Postion des Fingerabdruckscanners, der nun auf die Rückseite, direkt neben das Kameramodul gewandert ist. Außerdem darauf erkennbar sind noch einmal der extrem schmale Rand seitlich und Unterhalb des Displays sowie die On-Screen-Tasten zur Navigation durch die Benutzeroberfläche.

Schließlich gibt es noch einen interessante Erkenntnis aus dem geleakten Material zu gewinnen, die nur indirekt etwas mit dem Galaxy S8 zu tun hat. Samsung wird zusammen mit dem Smartphone offenbar seine ganz eigene Version des von Microsoft mit Windows 10 Mobile eingeführten Continuum-Features präsentieren. Diese Benutzererfahrung, bei der das S8 über eine passende Docking-Station mit einem großen Monitor verbunden und so gewissermaßen in einen Desktop-PC verwandelt werden kann, nennt der südkoreanische Hersteller offenbar „DeX“.

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HP Compaq NX8240 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

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. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) says it has come up with a universal laptop charger plug and socket.The standards body said that its proposed design would ensure compatibility between DC-powered notebooks by establishing a common interface – and limit waste by cutting down on the need to bundle new chargers with every product.


However, the blueprints for the laptop tech, dubbed the IEC Technical Specification 62700, will not be published until early next year.The standards group said that in addition to providing a common format for connecting a charger, the tech would also establish improved design, safety and environmental impact standards for external chargers and peripherals such as car adaptors.Efforts to establish a universal format for laptop chargers come in the wake of similar campaigns to develop universal formats for phone chargers. While such plans have garnered widespread support, the absence of key vendors such as Apple has slowed the adoption of a common charger interface and format.The IEC International Standards for the universal charger for mobile phones has been widely adopted by the mobile phone industry and is already starting to help reduce e-waste, said IEC general secretary Frans Vreeswijk.


A single power supply covering a wide range of notebook computers is the next step in lowering e-waste and its impact on our planet.Should major notebook vendors balk at the efforts to establish a common charger interface over their proprietary gear (Apple, in particular, seems quite fond of its MagSafe chargers), the effort is doomed.And as wireless charging boffins have found, any new design will have to compete against USB, which is becoming a global connection standard for juicing batteries in portable kit. Christmas is special. When else will you spending lots of money you don’t have buying things they don’t deserve for people you don’t like?That said, we all grudgingly accept that you may want to buy some presents for people this year – bah humbug – even if you haven’t an earthly what to buy them.It’s utter rubbish, in our view, to assume that parents and other older relatives don’t want new technology. But they will most likely want it to work and to have some useful, obvious purpose.We’d steer clear of deliberately dumbed down senior phones and the like, and simply pay attention to ergonomics and ease of use. And, to make the inevitable phone calls less stressful, never buy your parents a Mac laptop or desktop if you use a Windows machine, or vice versa.


So, what should you buy them? You know when something’s going seriously mainstream when parents ask if it’s worth buying “one of those Tesco tablets”. Such devices are a great way to get them online, whether it’s for the Telegraph crossword, Skyping the grandkids, or reading books. At £120, the Tesco Hudl is indeed great value.For the less connected who still enjoy a good read, check out the Kobo Aura HD for a top-end e-book reader experience at £140 – or the £60 Kobo Mini if you’re after something smaller or cheaper or both.And if you want to persuade parents or other relatives to take a leap into the smartphone world, why not treat them to the new, priced-to-please-the-buyer Motorola Moto G?Old-ish folk already connected may appreciate a digital subscription instead. The Telegraph, for example, could be the perfect gift for a retired uncle who used to be stationed in Kenya, and full website access is just £20 a year. £99 gets him a tablet edition.



A former teacher might prefer The Guardian, at £9.99 per month for Kindle or iPad editions.If you fancy something that’s less hard news and a bit more urbane, how about The New Yorker, at $60 a year?Other options, from our Top tech gifts, include a Tado thermostat to help manage the heating bills, or for those who don't even have a computer, consider the HP Chromebook, so you don't need to worry about updating it.For partners, in crime or otherwise, choosing gifts can be tricky, and we won’t pretend to have all the answers. Only you really know if the recipient is a real tech-head who’ll love something because it’s shiny-shiny or has a fantastic SDK - or someone who’ll need more persuasion.For home-makers or the aesthetically inclined, take a look at Philips’ Hue. This lighting system can be controlled from a smartphone to change the feel of your home. It’s a bit pricey though, at £180 for a starter kit, so a cheaper, DIY alternative is the Wi-Fi lighting controller.


Fitness freaks might appreciate the Jawbone UP, the £99 wristband that will help track workouts, rest and play. For a little more up-front, the new UP24 will work with the latest iPhones and update in real time.Photo fans are spoiled for choice. If you really loved a photographer, you’d probably buy them the new Nikon DF, but it’s a premium product with a price-tag to match. A little more affordable is the Panasonic Lumix GM1, which combines a really compact body with the removable lenses of the Micro 4/3 system.Cache in the Attic If you're lucky, old gear doesn't so much die as get given away or retired. Indeed, some kit is just too quirky to dispose of, even though it gets wheezy whenever you fire up a browser. Forget computing with it though, says Andrew Orlowski, the value can lie elsewhere.Why keep an Apple G4 Cube in the attic? It's not for what it can do, for sure. Today, a £60 laptop from eBay, spruced up a £10 Firewire card, can do almost everything the Cube can. No, the reason I keep one safely wrapped up isn't rational. But it's the same reason people buy and lovingly maintain their DeLorean DMC-12s. The Cube was simply an outlandish, insane design, a one-off. I once speculated it began life when a millionaire had given a mad bloke on a bus an unlimited budget:


Hello. You look like you've done a lot of LSD. Well, here's several million dollars - go and design a computer, any shape you want. Just make sure it hangs upside down.And that's not far off. The Cube was a computer that looked like Buckminster Fuller talked. It was very much a product of a strange man in a strange time: the first dot.com era, when fabulous wealth could be conjured from nothing, and a new long boom of limitless wealth was upon us, we were told. I described my infatuation with it back here at some length.It was only fairly recently - well, less than five years ago - that it was reluctantly packed away. It had been running 10.4 Tiger well, and doing a passable job as an iTunes player via Firewire and a Yamaha Firewire sound card box, attached to the living room hi-fi. Not long before that, a souped-up Cube was my desk machine at the office. But all good things come to an end. The bandwidth limitations of the Cube bus, running at a fraction of the speed of the CPU, and its sheer bulk in a small flat, meant it had to be retired.


A laptop apparently stolen from a top-flight poker pro's hotel room and mysteriously returned while he played in a card tournament was infected by spyware.That's according to security firm F-Secure, which today said it had analyzed the computer, owned by ace player Jens Kyllönen. The Java-written malware on the machine could allow a attacker, perhaps a card-shark, to remotely view screenshots and log activity on the PC.While such spyware is hardly uncommon, the F-Secure researchers were intrigued by the way in which the software nasty was apparently installed.Kyllönen, who rocked up at the antivirus biz's HQ in an Audi R8 with the laptop to inspect, believes the infection occurred while he played in a poker tournament at a resort in Barcelona. He said during a break he returned to his room and found his laptop missing, only for it to be returned later with signs of a possible infection.According to F-Secure, the notebook was in fact infected with a remote monitoring tool that activated upon system startup. Researchers believe that the malware was installed via a USB device and that a similar infection was introduced to the computer of another player staying in the same room.



That poker aces, who win big both on and offline, would be subjected to a spyware installation is no accident, say the researchers. By installing tools to covertly snoop on the screen of high-stakes online players, a rival could gain the upper hand in a game by spying his opponent's hand.This is not the first time professional poker players have been targeted with tailor-made trojans, F-Secure said in its report.We have investigated several cases that have been used to steal hundreds of thousands of euros. What makes these cases noteworthy is that they were not online attacks. The attacker went through the trouble of targeting the victims' systems on site.Such well-targeted, spear phishing operations rely on detailed reconnaissance to gather information about the individual which can be exploited to carry out an attack.It's possible Kyllönen's machine was infected in some other way, but that doesn't marry with his claim that the laptop went missing.In any case, F-Secure suggests that anyone who could be subject to such an attack, be they a poker pro or an executive on a business trip, consider real-world protections for their systems, such as device locks and room safes. If you trust the safe and hotel staff, of course.


Security researchers have confirmed that MacBook webcams can spy on their users without the warning light being activated.Apple computers have a “hardware interlock” between the camera and the light that is supposed to ensure the camera can't be activated without alerting the user by lighting a tell-tale LED above the screen.However Stephen Checkoway, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University and graduate student Matthew Brocker were able to circumvent this security feature by reprogramming the micro-controller chip inside the camera.Normally, any program running on a MacBook’s central processing unit that takes images through Apple's iSight camera would turn on the tell-tale light. Brocker and Checkoway's reprogramming tactic allows the camera and it light to be activated independently, so that the camera can be running while the light is switched off.

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Lenovo G555A Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com

We phoned the “Alternative Genius Bar”, which is actually located on Waverley Steps and is across the road from the “iStore” that appears on map.We asked the reseller for its version of events and it said that its premises had always been listed under its business name, SimplyFixIt, and there was no link between the "iStore" icon on Apple Maps and its business.Stormfront operates three shops in Stirling, Dundee and Carlisle, but its bosses did not wish to talk to us.The opening of the Apple store in Glasgow proved too much for Apple reseller Scotsys, which shut up shop after it "took a hiding when the new store opened".So are the Scots as excited as Apple as they were about leaving the UK? Well, sort of, is the answer.A poll on STV, the Scottish telly station which occupies channel three, found that 50 per cent of grumpy tartan-botherers said "meh" to the new Apple store, whereas 44 per cent were excited to see a canny taxpayer pitch its tent in Scottish capital.If you remember, this is not far off the number who voted against Alex Salmond's secession plans.Am I the only person not excited about the Apple Store opening in #Edinburgh soon? It's just a phone/laptop/music player etc people :-sOne Scottish blogger was more positive and insisted that fanbois will give the new store a huge Scottish welcome. However, rather than using time-honoured Reg lingo, he referred to Apple lovers using the rather Scotch-sounding moniker MacHeads.


One thing we do know about Edinburgh is that the genteel folk of this tweet city hate Glasgow, which they see as being populated by riff-raff. Yet Apple clearly doesn't agree with this, having opened up a store back in 2007.Regardless of this vote of confidence in Edinburgh's rival city, some locals were glad they didn't leave Auld Reekie to travel through to The Weeg.Does anyone know when the #Apple store in Edinburgh is due to open? Don't really want to go through to Glasgow.The Apple store opens on 18 October in a building on the corner of Princes Street and West Register Street. This used to be a Woolworths between 1926 and 1984, after which it became the unhappy home for a number of shops including Boots, Waterstones, Burger King and Wimpy - none of which stuck around.There are two distinguishing features in this device: first, its display is square and very wide. Secondly, it has a capacitive physical keyboard. The questions are: is the square form factor more than a novelty? Does the new keyboard really improve the typing experience? Is a wide heavy device comfortable in practice, and if not, is it worth it? Or will it be remembered as piss-take fodder?


When I first glimpsed a photo of the BlackBerry Passport, I assumed it was a mock-up from a deranged BlackBerry fanboi (the web is full of such wacky Photoshop renders). BlackBerry had purportedly revisited the iconic keyboard that gave its devices (and eventually the company) its name. But this image had to be a fake: why only three rows with 31 keys? The Bold had four rows of 35 keys, plus the four making up the "toolbelt".Word quickly got out that it was no mock-up – but even more unusual is it being the first QWERTY device with a hybrid capacitive touch/physical design, allowing multitouch gestures across those physical keys. And it is this feature, rather than its striking shape, which is the most interesting thing about the Passport.The idea is that your hands don't leave the physical keyboard when editing or manipulating text, and they shouldn't stray far from that keyboard when performing common tasks. So you can swipe to scroll and edit: swipe left to delete a word, double-tap the keyboard area to bring up a "edit bubble", and then swipe the QWERTY to move it around. You should also be able to swipe through long emails or web pages without your finger leaving the keyboard.



A QWERTY keyboard isn't going to increase raw character input – today's glass keyboards squirt the letters into the device faster than almost anyone can type on physical keys. But those aren't always accurate, and the typo tree still needs to be fixed; the idea is that you gain on accuracy and post-entry processing what you lose on raw QWERTY speed.In my initial hands-on, I described the Passport as "weirdly larger and smaller than you think". With a 4.5-inch diagonal display, it's shorter than today's Android flagships, such as the Motorola X (2014) (5.54 inches/140.8mm tall), the Galaxy S5 (5.59 inches/142mm tall) and the Sony Xperia Z3 (5.75 inches/146mm tall). This is a shorty, at 5.04 inches – or to put it another way, it measures up at 128mm x 90mm x 9mm.However, the BlackBerry Passport is almost 2cm or 25 per cent wider, and it's also heavier than these flagships, at 196g. Still these comparisons don't tell the full story, because the Passport is distributing its mass over an outstretched hand. In one-handed use, that hand is trying not to drop it on the floor, so it feels far heavier than the raw numbers suggest.


A clenched hand conducts the weight down through the wrist far more comfortably than an open hand which is struggling to grip and balance a heavy, wide and flat object. So while a phablet (take the 306g Galaxy Tab 3) is half as heavy again, nobody tries to balance and use one like a phone – they're invariably gripping it like an iPad with one hand holding and the other swiping.There's no getting away from it – even though the Passport is 33 per cent lighter and two inches shorter than a typical 7-inch phablet – this new BlackBerry is a really cumbersome beast. In the hand, it's far more assertive than those numbers suggest. Although you can wrap your fingers round it and reach the power key and volume keys, you can't do much more than scroll one-handed, as a thumb barely reaches halfway across the screen.What do you think would happen if an iPad made sweet, sweet love to a Macbook? Just go with it please, for the sake of argument.It would give birth to a misshapen, outsized fondleslab, running a delicate and (probably) delicious integration of OSX and iOS. And a full suite of apps, naturally.


But it's not going to happen, is it? Well, it might not be such a far-fetched idea, if the latest rumour issuing forth from the Far East is to be believed.According to the Korean website Digitimes, Apple will release a 12.9-inch iPad next year that will run such an OS.Mysterious "sources in the supply chain" said Apple will introduce a normal tablet and a two-in-one device, both of which will be 12.9 inches in size.Apple's upcoming Yosemite desktop upgrade (OSX 10.10 – now out in developer preview) has features cribbed directly from iOS, such as calendars and a notification centre.So, will we eventually see this super desktop fondleslab, encompassing all the disadvantages of both an iPad and a laptop?Today's organisations must store ever-increasing volumes of digital information arriving in an ever-wider range of formats. At the same time, more and more data-hungry applications are coming on stream.



It is harder than ever for your storage to provide each application with the appropriate quality of service (QoS).How can you best organise your storage resources? How can you balance the provide users and applications with different levels of access to different types of data without letting some become those demanding noisy ones who drown out their important but unassuming neighbours?Or could it be that we need to fundamentally change the way we think about information retrieval?Suppliers like to say that it is all about enforcing QoS. Quality is a rather subjective and personal term, but in business and technology it typically translates as fitness for purpose. Other key aspects feed into that, including consistency, predictability, traceability and so on.As far as data storage is concerned, the basic measure of fitness for purpose is simple: it must deliver the I/Os per second (IOPS) that the application needs.That is relatively easy to measure at the host layer, says Adam Carter, vice-president of product development at SolidFire, which specialises in enterprise flash storage.


He warns, though, that you need to make sure when you make your measurements that your apps are actually requesting data. “So you need to monitor queue depth as well,” he says.The complexity comes when several applications are requesting IOPS, because applications are typically unaware of each other. This is especially true in multi-tenanted storage, where multiple users independently buy or book services.To make matters worse, many applications were built to consume as many IOPS as they could because they were designed with direct-attach storage (DAS) in mind, not shared storage.Indeed, some applications such as databases could not run on shared storage because its performance could not be guaranteed.Yet the ability to host multiple applications on a single storage platform or subsystem is essential for a storage consolidation strategy.Storage QoS is equally essential for consolidation because you need to prevent the actions of one set of users from affecting the QoS experienced by other users. In effect, it enables applications that could not safely run within a multi-tenant environment to do so.

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Im Fall von Windows 10 liefert Microsoft wie üblich für mehrere der bislang erschienenen Hauptversionen passende Updates aus, die von jedem Nutzer installiert werden können. Die derzeit noch aktuellste Fassung des Desktop-Betriebssystems, das Anniversary Update, erhält Aktualisierungen, die unter den Knowledge Base Einträgen KB4013429 und KB4013418 geführt werden sowie das sogenannte Flash-Update KB4014329. Rechner, auf denen noch die Windows 10 Version 1511 im Einsatz ist, bekommen hingegen KB4013198 plus besagtes Flash-Update.

Nähere Informationen zu allen Windows 10 Updates führt Microsoft in der Windows 10 Update History auf. Dort ist nun zu erfahren, dass die aktuellen Aktualisierungen diverse Fehlerkorrekturen und Sicherheits-Fixes beinhalten. Der Großteil der Korrekturen ist allerdings lediglich für den Unternehmenssektor relevant.


Sony hat Neuerungen für seinen Game Streaming Service PlayStation No angekündigt. So sollen Nutzer des kostenpflichtigen Angebots demnächst nicht nur auf ältere PlayStation 3, sondern auch auf aktuelle PlayStation 4 Spiele zugreifen können. Damit rückt ein Szenario in greifbare Nähe, in dem es unkompliziert und selbst mit relativ schwachem Hardware-Unterbau möglich ist, Sony-exklusive Titel wie beispielsweise Uncharted 4 oder Horizon Zero Dawn auf einem Windows-PC auszuführen.

Der Streaming-Dienst PlayStation Now wird von Sony mittlerweile seit ein paar Jahren angeboten und stellt Nutzern aktuell 483 PlayStation 3 Titel zur Verfügung, die entweder auf eine PlayStation 4 oder einen Windows-PC via Internetverbindung gestreamt werden können. Nach wie vor ist es allerdings so, dass auf das Angebot in vollem Umfang nur in den USA sowie Großbritannien, den Niederlanden und in Belgien zugegriffen werden kann. In weiteren Ländern, darunter Deutschland, führt Sony zwar einen geschlossenen Beta-Test durch, hat sich aber bislang nicht zu einem Termin für den offiziellen Marktstart geäußert. Der Preis für den Dienst liegt in den USA bei rund 20 US-Dollar monatlich oder knapp 45 US-Dollar für drei Monate.



Trotz gewissen Planungsunklarheiten ist die Frage aber nicht „ob“, sondern „wann“ Sony den PlayStation Now Service für eine größere Anzahl von Märkten öffnen wird. Die jüngste Ankündigung ist also in jedem Fall als ein interessanter Ausblick auf die mögliche Zukunft der Marke PlayStation zu sehen. Nämlich einer Zukunft, in der es nicht mehr nötig sein wird eine Konsole wie die PlayStation 4 zu kaufen, da sich die Inhalte einfach auf ein beliebiges Gerät mit Internetverbindung übertragen lassen. Für den Moment hat es Sony allerdings aus vielerlei Gründen nicht sonderlich eilig, dieses Zukunftsszenario zur Gegenwart zu machen. Daher macht das japanische Unternehmen auch noch keine Angaben dazu, welche PS4-Spiele im Laufe dieses Jahres in PlayStation Now verfügbar sein werden. Es ist davon auszugehen, dass sich die Anzahl der Titel in Grenzen halten und das Angebot zunächst wohl auch nicht die brandneusten Spiele enthalten wird.

Erfreulich an PlayStation Now aus Sicht von PC-Nutzern ist, dass die Mindestanforderungen an die Hardware niedrig ausfallen. Sony nennt diesbezüglich einen Intel Core i3 mit 2,0 Gigahertz, 2 Gigabyte RAM und mindestens 300 Megabyte freien Festplattenspeicherplatz plus Windows 7 als Betriebssystem. Die Internetverbindung sollte zudem mindestens 5 Mbit pro Sekunde hergeben. Zur Steuerung der Spiele kann auf einem Rechner ein gewöhnliches PC-Gamepad mit Kabel oder – durch Zuhilfenahme eines knapp 30 Euro teuren USB-Adapters – drahtlos genutzt werden.



Microsoft hat vor kurzem einen eigenen Abo-Dienst für Spiele angekündigt, der sich zunächst gezielt an Xbox One Nutzer richten wird. Xbox Game Pass soll beim Start in den kommenden Monaten „nur“ 10 Euro pro Monat kosten und dafür Abonnenten Zugriff auf rund 100 Spieletitel geben. Diese werden anders als bei PlayStation Now nicht etwa auf die Konsole gestreamt, sondern können heruntergeladen und installiert werden. Microsoft hat im Rahmen der Ankündigung von Xbox Game Pass versprochen, das Angebot kontinuierlich ausbauen und aktualisieren zu wollen.

Nach einigen Wochen relativer Ruhe sind zu Beginn dieser Woche gleich mehrere neue Meldungen zu Apples kommender iPad-Generation erschienen. Die Berichte geben zwar keine neuen Ausstattungsdetails der erwarteten Tablets preis, spekulieren dafür aber umso kräftiger über einen konkreten Vorstellungstermin. So ist einmal von Anfang April und einmal gar schon von den nächsten Tagen die Rede.


Der neueste Artikel zu dem Thema stammt von DigiTimes. Die asiatische Publikation erwartet aufgrund von Hinweisen aus Apples Zuliefererkreisen, dass das US-Unternehmen neue iPads Anfang April zu Ehren der Eröffnung seines neuen Hauptquartiers in Kalifornien, dem „Apple Park“, präsentieren wird. Die wichtigste Neuvorstellung dabei soll das bereits zuvor mehrfach heiß in der Gerüchteküche gehandelte 10,5 Zoll iPad Pro sein. Dieses High-End-Tablet könnte einen besonders schmale Display-Rahmen aufweisen und daher ähnliche Maße wie das seit vergangenem Frühjahr erhältliche iPad Pro 9,7 Zoll aufweisen. Zudem will DigiTimes auch von einem überarbeiteten 12,9 Zoll iPad Pro gehört haben. In welcher Hinsicht dieses Modell aber im Vergleich zum Vorgänger aus dem Herbst 2015 verbessert wurde ist unklar. Wahrscheinlich erscheint beispielsweise der Einsatz eines leistungsfähigeren Prozessors.

Abgesehen von den beiden erwähnten Premium-iPads wären eigentlich auch das 9,7 Zoll iPad Pro und das iPad mini reif für ein Upgrade. Allerdings könnte Apple in diesen Fällen vorhaben, die bekannten Tablets einfach in unveränderter Form, aber zu etwas günstiger Preisen weiter zu verkaufen, um damit gezielt preisbewusstere Kunden anzusprechen.


MacRumors hat fast zeitgleich zu DigiTimes aus eigener Quelle ebenfalls etwas zum Launch der neuen Apple-Tablets erfahren. Diesen Angaben nach soll die Ankündigung allerdings bereits im Zeitraum zwischen dem 20. und dem 24. März erfolgen. Falls das korrekt sein sollte, müsste Apple eine entsprechende Produktpräsentation aber noch in dieser Woche ankündigen. Zudem vorstellbar wäre eine recht unspektakuläre Ankündigung via Pressemitteilung.

Trotz dieses Rätselratens bezüglich eines konkreten Vorstellungstermins hat sich in diesen Tagen eines doch sehr deutlich herauskristallisiert: Der Marktstart einer neuen iPad-Line-up von Apple steht nun wirklich unmittelbar bevor. Die Marketing-Firma Fiksu hat sogar Log-Dateien in die Finger bekommen, die allem Anschein nach belegen, dass Apple die neuen Tablets bereits seit geraumer Zeit intern testet, wie TechCrunch informierte.

Neben den iPads könnte es in Kürze außerdem eine neue Speichervariante des iPhone SE (128 Gigabyte), eine zusätzliche rote Farbvariante für die iPhone 7 Reihe und auch neue Armbänder für die Apple Watch geben. Über jede einzelne dieser potentiellen Apple-Neuheiten wurde mittlerweile mehrfach berichtet. Wie so häufig bei diesen Gerüchten wurde aber bislang nichts davon von offizieller Seite auch nur ansatzweise bestätigt.



Samsung hat nun einen konkreten Termin sowie einen Preis für den europäischen Marktstart des neuen Android-Tablets Galaxy Tab S3 angekündigt. Das Gerät wird unter anderem in Deutschland ab dem 24. März 2017 erhältlich sein und dann mindestens 679 Euro kosten. Wer das Tab S3 allerdings ab sofort bis einschließlich 23. März vorbestellt, der kann sich passend zum schicken Tablet ein kostenloses Book Cover Keyboard im Wert von 129,90 Euro sichern.

Das Galaxy Tab S3 wurde von Samsung erst Ende Februar im Zuge des Mobile World Congress 2017 präsentiert und kommt laut Hersteller demnächst in zwei Modellvarianten auf den Markt. Die bereits erwähnte Ausführung für 679 Euro bietet lediglich ein WLAN-Modul, bei der zweiten, 769 Euro teuren Version ist zusätzlich ein LTE-Modem integriert.

Wie es die Preise bereits nahelegen handelt es sich beim Galaxy Tab S3 um ein hochwertig verarbeitetes Premium-Tablet mit potenter Hardware-Ausstattung. Das 9,7 Zoll große AMOLED-Display löst mit 2048 x 1536 Pixel auf und unterstützt HDR (High Dynamic Range). Angetrieben wird das Gerät von einem Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Prozessor, dem 4 Gigabyte RAM und 32 Gigabyte Flash-Speicher (via microSD-Karte erweiterbar) zur Seite stehen.