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This innovative point and shoot will broaden your horizons

It’s rare that you’ll find a camera that ticks both the style and innovation boxes, but Sony’s latest feature-packed shooter is so impressive that it will turn the head of even the most seasoned snapper.

Although the camera is built for the point-and-shoot crowd, the HX1 packs a 9.1MP sensor into its chassis – technology that’s not too dissimilar to the company’s prosumer Alpha range of DSLR cameras. Continue reading…

It’s fair to say that the Sony PSP, which debuted way back in September 2005, has been well overdue a facelift. In 2007 it received only minor liposuction with the Slim & Lite, while last year the PSP-3000 brought underwhelming tweaks like a new screen and microphone.

But at long last, Sony has taken a scalpel to the PSP’s oversized chassis and brought it up to date by jettisoning the UMD slot in favour of 16GB internal storage. The PSPgo is certainly a major overhaul – but can it top the Nintendo DSi and fend off Apple’s iPod Touch?

Vibrant screen
At first glance the 3.8in display appears more boxy than previous PSP screens, but in fact it retains the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. It’s lost half an inch across the diagonal but is just as vibrant as ever and even a touch brighter. Continue reading…

Tunebite is the best solution to remove copy protection from music, audio books and films & then convert it to one of 100 file formats

Click to enlarge

Since 2004, Tunebite has been mentioned and singled out for excellence in more computer trade publications than any other legal software solution that removes DRM copy protection. Tunebite legally removes the audio DRM copy protection from music & audio books by re-recording it at up to 54x the speed. With either the playback software or Tunebite, additional copyrighted music & audio book files can be copied by using the virtual CD-burner. Continue reading…

From the Asus Eee 701 to the Samsung NC10, via the Eee Box and the MSI Wind Top, we’ve seen enough netbooks, nettops and touch screen all-in-ones powered by the tiny Intel Atom processor over the last 18 months to know its capabilities inside out. Performance-wise, one of these cheap, low power computers acts much like another. 

That’s given design teams room to play around with stylistic ideas from the joyful exuberance of the Acer Aspire One 10 to the coolly chic but ridiculously priced Sony Vaio P. None of them, though, has made any real effort to overcome the Atom’s two main failings: it can’t do HD video or games. 
None of them, that is, until now.

ION in the soul
Acer’s Revo is the first machine we’ve seen that uses NVIDIA’s ION innards. Instead of coupling the Atom CPU to a video chip that’s next to useless, it comes armed with a GeForce 9400 graphics card. 

It’s far from the world’s best pixel pusher, but it is capable of decoding 1080p video at full speed and even getting 3D games like Call of Duty 4 running at a respectable lick.

The latter has to be run at low settings, but it’s no worse than playing on a Wii, for example.

The only thing the ION platform can’t help the Atom with is speeding up the Vista desktop, which is like computing through slurry. Fortunately, there’s a free upgrade to the lither Windows 7 included in the box, ready for when Microsoft’s sleeker OS launches later in the year.

Hot and bothered
So this runs rings around the similarly priced Eee Box from Asus for 3D and video. It’s not game over, though, as the Revo lacks refinement in other important ways. Continue reading…

Over a dozen new Google phones are expected before the end of the 2009, and the HTC Hero, the first to heavily skin Android with a new interface, is here to set an Apple-bothering example.

While its predecessors ran Google’s mobile OS in its barebones form, the Hero glosses it with HTC’s new ‘Sense’ UI, adds multi-touch support and brings a strong feature set that includes a 5MP camera. The result is the closest thing we’ve seen to an iPhone-beating experience. 

A bit chinny
Not that the Hero could quite be called ‘iPhone beautiful’. It’s technically a candybar phone, but the pronounced ‘Jimmy Hill’ chin at its base makes it feel thicker than necessary and difficult to slip into tight pockets.   

Still, the protrusion does have ergonomic advantages – for example, when using the trackball – and the Hero is otherwise very well built, with a Teflon-coated back panel that gives it a far more durable feel than the Magic or iPhone.

Seeing Sense
Boot the Hero up – a process that frustratingly takes over a minute – and it’s immediately obvious how much work HTC has put into revamping Android’s look and feel.

You get seven homescreens (that’s four more than the Magic), which you can then fill up with your choice of both HTC and Android widgets, and also application shortcuts.

Some of these are basic (clocks, calendars), but many are ‘live’, pulling information through from the web to update automatically. The Nokia N97 offers similar widgets on its homescreen, but the Hero’s, most notably the excellent Twitter app, are by far the slickest and most useful we’ve used.

Silky smooth interface
They also make the iPhone’s app-based approach seem a little clunky and disjointed. Rather than constantly opening and closing apps, you simply flick between screens and widgets using your finger or the trackball. Impressively, even with lots of applications on the go, there’s also little noticeable lag. Continue reading…

The Rampage II Extreme is a full ATX form factor motherboard, unlike the Ramoage II GENE which is an X58 motherboard with a micro-ATX form factor, also a part of the ROG series. One of the first things that will catch your eye when you look at this boardis the inclusion of a full line tweaking features and backlit buttons located next to the DIMM slots. The power and reset buttons are also among these buttons. Next you will also notice the larger passive cooling heatsinks that ASUS has used. One thing missing from this cooling system is the inclusion of water cooling support.

The overclocking buttons that we mentioned earlier have been labeled Tweaklit. This feature allows you to use the LCD poster device provided with the motherboard and use it to overcloack while your OS (Windows) is running. There is also a line of solder points called Problet where you can measure the voltage of the RAM, CPU, Chipset and PCIe by connecting a multimeter.

The ASUS II Extreme definitely has some great performance and some great features that make it an outstanding product. But these features don’t cater to everybody and ASUS has made that pretty clear by adding this to the ROG line. If you are bundling a high end rig around the Core i7 then this is definitely the board you want, but if you are on a budget, but are still going to go the i7 way, then it would be wiser to opt for something with less features like ASUS P6T Deluxe or the Intel DX58SO.

Specifications:-

Chipset:- Intel X58/ICH10R, System Bus:- Up to 6400 MT/s with QuickPath Interconnection, Audio:- SupremeFX X-Fi Audio Card, External LCD Poster

Canon MF4370dn

The imageCLASS MF4370dn is a monochrome MFD from Canon, aimed at being an all purpose solution for offices.

This MFD is dark grey in colour with the buttons and controls of this device on a silver bezel. A small display is also present on this bezel. The cassette tray comes with a dust cover that does not completely attach, but is just left atop the tray. It also has a multipurpose tray that supports single sheets, located above the paper cassette slot. You can quickly select between Copy, Fax and Scan. There are also buttons to change the size of the document, change the image quality either and also to set the order of the prints. The MF4370dn also offers two-sided printing and copying. PC Fax is also possible and so is networking. Network scanning is also possible with this MFD. The first print of a text document took 12.1 sec. Individual prints in both standard and economy mode were tested and they took 9.5 sec each. The print quality in both standard and economy mode were identical, making it wiser to print using economy mode so as to save on the toner. But this was only the case for text documents. It took 16.8 sec to print our test PDF document in economy mode and 20.3 sec in standard mode. The quality of the images were almost identical with slight brightness missing in economy mode.

Overall, this printer has some good print speeds and well the quality is also way above average. This makes a good buy  for small to medium sized businesses looking for a fast feature rich printer that doesn’t need a PC for its operation.

Seagate Momentus ST9500325ASG

The Momentus series of 2.5 inch drives from Seagate are great notebook storage solutions. The ST9500325ASG model has a capacity of 500 GB with an 8 MB cache. Seagate has used a two platter design for this 2.5 inch drive. This drive is 9.5 mm thick which is the standard for notebook hard drives now. This drive did well in real world tests and synthetic benchmarks. It took 56.4 seconds to write a 4-GB sequential file and 72.7 seconds to write 4-GB assorted data resulting an average write speed of about 64.48 MBps (sequential and assorted). Read times were also mighty impressive as 4 GB sequential data took 60.6 sec while 4 GB of assorted data took 67.7 sec giving an average read speed of also 64 MBps. Opening a 1 GB Photoshop image took 60.6 seconds, which is really great for a notebook drive. The only area where this drive lost out in performance was when performing an internal file copy of 4 GB data files. This hard drive took about 240 seconds for both sequential and assorted files.

This is a great drive if you want an upgrade for your notebook, especially if you like to store a lot of data on it. The Seagate Momentus ST9500325ASG is great value for money considering its performance and price.