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.With such a powerful sensor at its core, the HX1 can truly show off some features that are genuinely impressive. The first of these are its zoom capabilities. There’s a glut of superzoom cameras on the market at the moment, so Sony had a lot to live up to – especially as the HX1 is priced around £100 more than its similar superzoom rivals.

Luckily, the camera pretty much takes care of itself when zooming. And zoom it can, up to a rather impressive 20x. Don’t expect any blockiness or grain in your zoomed images as it is all piped straight from the optics. The camera hasn’t cheated or manipulated the image in any way. While Autofocusing when zooming did take a good second in our tests, results were impressive nonetheless.

Night rider

Images on the whole were strong and vibrant, even in low-light situations. In fact, another of the camera’s innovations is the way it handles night-time shots. Usually, shooting in minimal light requires a tripod to steady the shots, but Handheld Twilight capture mode means you can take night shots on the fly, with the camera working overtime in the background comping a series of shots together to make the perfect image for you.

And it works – even our clumsy and rather shaky hands (we’re blaming a hangover) didn’t hamper the low-light images, with the HX1 consistently relaying back decent shots.

Sweep stakes
As well as the usual abundance of Scene modes (landscape, snow, beach etc) available, there’s one of the most features we have found on a camera yet – Sweep Panorama. This feature wins top marks for ease of use, working so well it raises itself beyond its gimmicky leanings. Simply flick the Mode dial on the right-hand side of the camera to the squished in rectangle, hold down the shutter button and slowly pan from left to right (this can be switched in the menu options) for a stunning 220 degree image.  No cutting and editing in Photoshop. No fiddly shot alignment. Just a simple, sweeping shot that even your grandmother could accomplish.

The results are better than you expect. When played back on the camera’s three-inch LCD screen, the shot glides across your peripheral, making even the most mundane shots (we know, as we’ve a fair few ones of the office) look breathtaking. Connect the camera up to an HD-Ready TV, via its HDMI connection dongle, and the pictures are a treat. Make sure you are slow on those sweeps, however, as some hasty picture taking led to faces in the portrait morph into the Elephant Man.

Full HD Video

It’s not just still images that the HX1 is capable of delivering, but moving ones too – in 1080p (with a touch of upscaling) no less. Shot at 30fps, you can record up to 2GB of footage on the camera, which is around 21 minutes. Not a bad bit of moonlighting considering the HX1’s day job is as a stills camera.There’s no on-board editing for video, so you will have to output your footage to a computer, but the results are ultimately impressive, making the HX1 a decent camcorder substitute.

There are a few niggles with the HX1, including no RAW format support, a huge amount of grain when your crank up the ISO and an LCD screen that isn’t quite full tile, but the HX1 is an easy to use, feature-packed addition to the superzoom camera market that will not disappoint.

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. As always, the 480×272 resolution is fine for games and movies but it gets caught short when trying to display web sites – expect lots of sideways scrolling.

This isn’t helped by the built-in web browser, which is seriously creaky. Rendering of pages is often messy and navigation is cumbersome. Text entry is a nightmare and there’s no Flash, which means no YouTube. Frankly it’s just not up to the job.

Awkward controls
With no disc slot, games are all downloaded from the PlayStation Store, where you’ll find new releases, existing PSP games and re-released PSone classics.

A flick of the thumb reveals the controls that once flanked the display. The D-pad and main buttons have been flattened to save space and now have very little travel. 

They’re marginally smaller than before, but the nubbin has shrunk considerably in all directions. Worse, it’s now almost central, making some games incredibly awkward to play. All of the controls (apart from the shoulder buttons) are all too close to the bottom edge of the unit to be comfortable. 

Out of ports
These hardware changes also mean the PSP’s Go!Explore sat-nav and Go!Cam snapper are incompatible. The only peripherals available at launch will be a cradle for charging and viewing, and a video lead pack for connection to a TV.

Power and USB are now combined in a custom connection. The mic input has gone but the external mic remains, as does the 3.5mm headphone output. 

Inside there’s that healthy dollop of 16MB of onboard flash memory, while removable storage is now in the form of M2 cards, the smaller of Sony’s own Memory Stick formats. Also new is Bluetooth, which makes an appearance for wireless headset hook-ups.

Windows-only software
You can think of the bundled Media Go software as iTunes for PSP. It allow games and other content to be downloaded from the PlayStation Store to a PC and then transferred as you like, and also rips CDs and manages audio, video and picture content. 

The bad news for Mac users is that it’s Windows only, which is a shame as video playback is what it does best. The display is brighter and a better viewing angle compensates for the loss of width, while motion handling is solid and the speakers do a fair job. It now plays a much more useful spread of formats than its predecessor too. 

Previous PSPs were too big to be taken seriously as portable music players, but the PSPgo is different. Sound quality from the 3.5mm jack is respectable: there’s plenty of bass, although top-end detail gets lost in a fiesta of fizz.

But how does the PSPgo fare against the Nintendo DSi? Well, Nintendo’s portable feels better in the hand and benefits from a touchscreen and built-in camera. It also wins on games despite valiant efforts from Locvo Roco 2 and Final Fantasy VII, and pips it on browsing.

But if movies and music are your favourite condiments to mobile gaming, the PSPgo remains, despite occasionally frustrating controls, the better choice.

• Pros Brighter screen. Internal flash storage. Good movie and music experience.
• Cons Poor web browser. Uncomfortable controls. Software Windows-only

Techplore says:- Smaller and snappier with admirable multimedia ambitions, but the PSPgo’s compromised layout makes gaming hit-and-miss

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.

Tunebite has one of a kind quality control with PerfectAudio, guaranteeing error-free audio output. Tunebite turns the PC into a high-performance, Video DRM converter and ensures the synchronicity of video & audio while the copyrighted video files are played back. In the process, Tunebite legally photographs, frame by frame, the replayed, copyrighted films & saves them in the desired format.

Tunebite informs you of the expected output quality of the files to be converted based on the operating system and PC performance & also warns of a loss in quality before converting files on PCs with weaker performance. The quality is also inspected during conversion. After the conversion is complete, Tunebite provides tips, in the rare event that problems do arise, to avoid such problems that may occur. Lots of extras: audio recorder for recording music from web radios (e.g. Last.fm), video recorder for video portals (e.g. Youtube) & automatically finds ID3 tags, album artwork & song lyrics.

Files can be played using your own player or with Winamp, Apple iTunes or Microsoft Windows Media Player. Music can be dubbed by synching cell phones, MP3 players, Apple iPods & other portable devices. There is a generator for individual cell phone ringtones. CD burning capabilities for audio CDs, audio DVDs and MP3 CD are also included

Download and Try Tunebite Here

Pros:

• Improved user-interface
• Good file format support and conversion speed
• Excellent set of media tools

Cons:

• User-manual needs improving and updating
• Perfect Audio mode is slow

Give your valuable comment on this post. The best 3 comments will get Tunebite Premium License Key for Free.

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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.

Compared to the Eee Box or the Mac Mini, the Revo is an aesthetic aberration. Its rhomboid ridges slant in exactly the wrong way to give it a firm centre of balance, and to make matters worse the flimsy stand is best left in the box. 

And while the other small computers do their best to present a clean, unspoiled face to the world so they fit in with any living room décor, the Revo’s facade is a mess of ports and colours.

Awkward design
Bizarrely, there’s also a USB port mounted on one corner, which someone realised looked so odd they plugged it with a piece of white rubber. If you do manage to prise the bung out, though, it’ll be lost behind the couch quicker than you can say ‘external DVD drive’. 

It’s not just ugly, it’s unnecessary – there are five other USB ports, which is going to be more than enough for anything the Revo is used for.

We could live with that – you can lie the Revo on its side and hide it behind an amp or something – if it wasn’t for the noise. There’s quite a high-pitched fan that kicks in on boot and doesn’t really stop. Not ideal if you’re using it as a media player.

What Acer has done, then, is come up with a tiny, cheap PC which addresses all the issues we had with the Eee Box, but introduced just enough new ones to give it the same overall problem. The small, cheap netbox concept has 101 potential uses, but it’s not quite been perfected yet.

Technical Specifications:-

Processor- Intel Atom N230 1.6GHz, 533MHz FSB, 512KB L2 Cache

Chipset- nVidia ION

Memory- 2GB DDR2 667MHz

Hard drive- 160GB 5400rpm

Video card- integrated nVidia GeForce 9400M

Optical drive- N/A

Expansion ports- 6x USB, 1x HDMI, 1x VGA, headphone/speaker/line-out, Gigabit Ethernet, ?ic, 4-??-1 flash card reader, 1x eSATA port

LAN- 10/100Mbps LAN

Wireles LAN- 802.11b/g/n

Operating system- Windows Vista Home Premium

Dimentions - 180 x 180 x 30 mm

Other- keyboard and mouse included

Warranty- 2 year

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.

Screen estate can run out fast, but a handy ‘Scenes’ mode provides acres more by letting you batch groups of homescreens under different scenarios such as ‘work’ and ‘play’. Use these effectively, and you’ll have plenty of room to play with. 

Social networker
This is just one of the areas where HTC’s ‘Sense’ UI adds great value to Android. It’s far from revolutionary, being quite clearly based on the TouchFlo interface it’s replacing, but brings a slickness not seen outside the iPhone.

For example, all of your contacts’ texts, emails, FaceBook updates and Flickr streams are pulled together and listed in one place. It’s a shame Twitter updates aren’t listed here too, although the impressive ‘Peep’ app does handily split tweets into ‘@ replies’ and ‘direct’ messages. Android’s handy notification bar at the top of the homescreen also lets you know when a new tweet is in.

Excellent keyboard
The Hero is big on social networking, but is an excellent all-round messaging device. The QWERTY keyboard matches the best for responsiveness and auto-correction, and acknowledges each press with a useful haptic vibration. Our only slight quibble is that the keyboard can be a little slow at turning into landscape mode, although this may just be an issue with our pre-production model. 

Unlike the Magic, the Hero has native support for Microsoft Exchange, so setting up work e-mails is easy. It doesn’t sync with Outlook, though there is a roundabout way of sending your contacts to Gmail, then get getting them to sync with the phone.  

Flash web browser
Web browsing is another strength. Unlike the iPhone, it supports flash video, which understandably doesn’t play as smoothly as on a laptop, but ensures very little of the web is off limits. Support for multi-touch ‘pinch to zoom’ gestures is also welcome, with our only quibble being that scrolling around web pages isn’t quite iPhone-smooth (though again this may be pre-production cobwebs).

The GPS is quick to get a fix on your location, though you can’t use multi-touch in Google Maps. There was also strangely no Street View option on our sample, although Android has just received its first turn-by-turn software courtesy of CoPilot (from a very reasonable £26).

Mixed musical bag
Where the Hero does lag behind the iPhone, though, is in the music experience. HTC has upgraded the software since the Magic to include coverflow-style graphics, and on-the-go playlists are relatively easy to compile. There’s also, crucially, a 3.5mm headphone jack.

But with a puny 512MB internal storage, the microSD slot placed awkwardly under the back cover and no sign of an Android app for Amazon’s MP3 store, it’s still an area for improvement.

Basic camera
While no worse than the iPhone’s, the 5MP camera is also a slight disappointment. 

It certainly doesn’t match the Samsung i8910HD or Nokia N97 and, while it offers decent resolution, colours are washed out, low light performance is severely limited by the lack of a flash and there’s no macro mode. 

Solid battery
But this seems like small fry when the Hero is such a joy to use. The context-sensitive search button makes it  a cinch to find contacts, texts and emails. Like on the N97, you can set your own photos as wallpaper. And there’s a generous amount of pre-loaded software, including PDF viewer, QuickOffice (inlcuding editing capabiltities), and Footprints, HTC’s slightly pointless but fun geotagging app.

With a battery life that’s not class-leading but certainly adequate (we got a day and half from moderate use) all that remains is for Android’s Marketplace to fill up its shelves with more compelling apps. 

It’s still only a tenth of the size of Apple’s App store, but if the mooted augmented reality apps and shiny widgets begin to multiply the Hero will deservedly tempt plenty of people over to the robot side.

• Pros Very well built. Responsive touchscreen. Web browser has multi-touch and flash support. Excellent social networking integration
• Cons Angled ‘chin’ design an acquired taste. Limited internal memory. Memory card slot under cover. Disappointing camera

Techplore Says:- The perfect phone for social butterflies and the first serious iPhone rival we’ve seen.

Technical Specifications:-

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.