Build-Your-Own "Ultimate" Adobe Photoshop CS6 PC

Summary: Photoshop is a big, heavy application that, when pushed hard, can bring even a high-end system to its knees. For hardcore graphics designers, a dedicated piece of kit is essential.

Without a doubt, the single most-requested feature here on Hardware 2.0 in the ‘Build-Your-Own PC’ category is for an “Ultimate” Photoshop system. Now that Adobe has officially launched Photoshop CS6, it’s time to take a look at this new release and prepare a hardware package that does it justice.

It seems that the reason why people are interested in the hardware specifics for a PC with Photoshop is because it’s a big, heavy application that, when pushed even modestly, can bring even a high-end system to its knees. Even small bottlenecks in performance can mean a lot of time spent twiddling your thumbs while the program chunters through a task. There’s no doubt that the better your hardware, the better your Photoshop experience will be.

Well, here it is, a guide to building your “Ultimate” Photoshop CS6 system.

Personally, I’m not much of a Photoshop user, and most of my “art” ends up looking like the 4chan Rage Guy, so please don’t ask me any Photoshop-related questions!

While I’m specifically looking at a system suited to Photoshop CS6, this build will work equally well for any of the big Adobe products, such as Premiere Pro CS6 or even the ‘full’ Master Collection CS6 package.

To build the “Ultimate” Photoshop system you will need to choose four components carefully. These are:

A fast, quad-core processorLots of RAMLots of big, fast hard drivesA graphics card that supports GPU-acceleration found in Photoshop CS6

Let’s take a look at these four components in more detail.

When it comes to Photoshop, there are three CPU-related facts that you have to accept. Intel CPUs trump AMD silicon, speed of the CPU matters, and pushing the cores beyond four doesn’t have a huge impact on performance. Here’s a benchmark to support all the above statements, and based on my testing these conclusions are just as applicable to Photoshop CS6 as they were to CS5 or 5.5. AMD makes some good CPUs, but for Photoshop you should be looking at Intel processors.

So, we’re going to start building this Photoshop system by putting an Intel Core i7 at its heart. I recommend the excellent 3.6GHz Core i7-3820 CPU (which turbo-boosts up to 3.8GHz), a part that will set you back about $310.

You need RAM, and lots of it. Consider 8GB an absolute minimum, and take that to 12GB or 16GB if your motherboard allows. There’s not need to get fancy or fast RAM aimed at gaming systems for this build. In fact, you’re better off sticking to the quality desktop RAM from reputable vendors.

Stick with RAM from Crucial or Kingston and you won’t go wrong. Not only will you get a quality, stable product, but these companies offer excellent warranties if you do end up with a bad stick of RAM. This RAM also works out a lot cheaper than the stuff aimed at gamers.

A Photoshop system needs masses of storage. This is not just because the application itself is huge, or because the output can be massive. It’s because in order to get the best from Photoshop you need multiple drives, with each one dedicated to handling a specific task.

Ideally, you need four drives. One for the OS, one for the application, one for your output files, and one to act as a “scratch disk.”  A “scratch disk” is what Adobe calls using a portion of a hard drive as virtual memory. You can get away with fewer disks, for example two disks — one for Windows and the applications, the other to ask as storage and a “scratch disk” — but it’s far ideal. Trying to run everything on a single disk is best avoided as it’s going to create a significant performance bottlenecks.

Since this is an “Ultimate” system, I’m going to recommend that you use four disks. You’ll need two large hard disk drives (HDD), and two fast solid state drives (SSD). You’ll install Windows onto one of the hard disk drives, and Photoshop onto the other hard drive. Then you’ll use the one of the solid state drives for your output files, and the other as a “scratch disk.” This setup gives you the best possible storage performance, eliminating a number of potential bottlenecks.

It’s worth noting that you don’t need big solid state drives for this build because they’re only used for short-term storage. Once you’re done with a project, it’s a good idea to move the files to a hard disk drive where the cost-per-gigabyte is much lower.

Photoshop CS6 features a new Mercury Graphics Engine, and this comes equipped with a number of GPU-accelerated tools, including blur effects, liquify effects, and adaptive wide-angle effects. To make use of these GPU-accelerated tools you will need a system kitted out with a graphics card from the NVIDIA Quadro lineup, something you won’t find in a standard system.

At the high-end these Quadro graphics cards become super expensive, with a Quadro 6000 setting you back $4,000. Thankfully, you don’t need a high-end card to power the new features found in Photoshop CS6 and we can make do with something more modest, such as the Quadro 2000.

OK, let’s put this all together into a complete system. Here’s a complete list of components (including case and operating system):

CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 3.6GHz - $310Motherboard: ASRock X79 Extreme6 - $250RAM: 16GB kit (4GBx4), Ballistix 240-pin DIMM, DDR3 PC3-12800- $105HDD: 2 x Western Digital Caviar Green WD30EZRX 3TB ($180 each) - $360SSD: 2 x Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F120GB3A-BK 2.5? 120GB SATA III ($150 each) - $300Graphics card: PNY VCQ2000D-PB Quadro 2000D 1GB - $410Optical drive: LG WH12LS39 12X Blu-ray Burner - $80Power supply unit: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W power supply unit - $105Case: Thermaltake V4 Black Edition chassis - $50Operating system: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit - $130

Total price: $2,100

Once you’ve built this system I recommend giving it a thorough stress-test to shakeout any problems before you start working on it. Adobe CS6 applications are incredibly demanding and will uncover even the smallest flaw in your system. Better to find any problems before putting the system into a production environment.

Image credit: Adobe.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Xbox 360 sales down by almost half

Summary: Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division saw revenue fall by 16 percent to $1.62 billion, with the company placing much of the blame on a “soft gaming console market.”

Digging through Microsoft’s third quarter earnings uncovers evidence that suggests sales of the company’s Xbox 360 games console may be past their peak, falling dramatically over the last quarter.

Microsoft sold 1.4 million consoles during January to March of this year, a precipitous drop of 48 percent compared to the same period last year. This in turn resulted in a fall in revenue for the Xbox business of 33 percent, down to $584 million. Sales of the Kinect motion controller were also down, but Microsoft did not state by how much.

The only part of the Microsoft’s Xbox business that saw growth during the period was Xbox Live.

Overall, Microsoft saw revenue from its Entertainment and Devices Division fall by 16 percent to $1.62 billion, with the company placing much of the blame on a “soft gaming console market.”

Despite this, the Xbox 360 continues to enjoy its fifteenth consecutive month as the best-selling console in the U.S., according to NPD data. In March, 371,000 Xbox 360 units were sold, and total retail spending on the platform was $430 million.

There’s no doubt that the Kinect ’hands-free’ controller has helped to keep sales of the console, accessories, and games buoyant following its release in November 2010, but an accessory can only go so far is keeping an aging console relevant.

The problem with the Xbox 360 — and Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii for that matter – is the age of the platform. Microsoft’s latest iteration of its popular console first debuted in November 2005, and while it has seen a few revamps since then, the underlying technology has essentially remained unchanged, with most of the design changes relating to cooling.

Can you imagine playing the latest games on a PC that was over six years old? It doesn’t bear thinking about, but when you fire up that console of yours — no matter if it’s an Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii — you’re gaming on technology that is over five years old. Not only is console gaming suffering because of aging technology, it’s having a knock-on effect on PC gaming also since many of the PC versions are actually ports of the original Xbox game.

The financials give us a hint that work on the next Xbox is well underway. Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division saw its research and development costs jump by 35 percent over the quarter to $335 million. It’s hard to imagine that this increase is down entirely to research and development on the Windows Phone platform.

Not only are consoles expensive to develop, the process takes time. This development time is then followed by a period where Microsoft then works with game studios to bring a selection of must-have titles to the platform. The entire process consumes dollars, which is why Microsoft wants to squeeze all it can from the 360 before moving on.

How long will we have to wait for a new Xbox? Most of the rumors and predictions seem to predict a 2014 launch, putting the replacement console two holiday seasons away. It’s possible that Microsoft has overestimated the lifespan of its Xbox 360, allowing sales to peak years before the replacement console is ready. If sales are already ’soft’ then I can only imagine that they are going to get worse as the quarters go on.

Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division could be in for a rough ride.

Image credit: Microsoft.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Why we shouldn't get too excited about a 'Liquidmetal' iPhone 5

Summary: A Liquidmetal iPhone 5 would be a near indestructible piece of kit, right? Wrong.

The shell of the iPhone 4 and 4S is constructed of robust stainless steel sandwiched between two sheets of fragile glass. It’s a revolutionary design, but one that has caused a lot of heartache and expense for owners.

According to a rumor that surfaced last week, this could change with the next-generation iPhone, where the vulnerable rear glass panel will be replaced with a robust Liquidmetal shell.

Liquidmetal is the commercial name given to an amorphous metal alloy that is almost twice as strong as the strongest titanium alloys. It was developed by Caltech in 2003 and has been used in a broad range of military, medical, luxury, consumer, industrial, and sporting goods products.

In August 2012, Apple acquired a license to use this material, but has yet to use it for anything more exciting than the iPhone’s SIM card eject tool.

I’ve come across Liquidmetal before: a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium USB flash drive. SanDisk also used Liquidmetal in the construction of the now long defunct Sensa e200 media player.

It’s incredibly tough stuff, and I really tested the durability of that flash drive. Short of taking a hammer to it, I could barely put a scratch, let alone a dent, in the thin shell surrounding the drive’s delicate electronics.

There’s no doubt that Liquidmetal is incredibly tough stuff. You might think that a Liquidmetal iPhone 5 would be a near-indestructible piece of kit?

Wrong.

To begin with, one side of iPhone is still made up of exposed glass, and let’s face it, the screen is far more expensive — not to mention more difficult — to replace that the rear cover is. But there’s also a weird property of Liquidmetal that means a dropped Liquidmetal iPhone could suffer more damage than if the back were made of glass.

Liquidmetal is, as you can see from the video below, excellent at storing elastic energy. This, to you and me, means the material likes to bounce about with Flubber-like vigor when dropped.

I’ve seen this property in action. That SanDisk Cruzer Titanium flash drive I had would bounce enthusiastically whenever dropped onto a hard surface. A bouncing flash drive is one thing, but a bouncing iPhone is another, and likely to suffer more overall damage than one that just thuds to the ground because each bounce is another chance for gravity to break the screen.

I don’t think that it is Liquidmetal’s indestructibility that Apple is interested in, because let’s face it, Apple doesn’t have a track record of building robust devices, but instead the material’s high strength-to-weight ratio that interests the Apple engineers.

This property means that you can cast a shell out of Liquidmetal that’s much thinner than a shell stamped out of a sheet of metal, as was the case with the early iPhones, or machined out of a block of aluminium, which is how Apple manufactures the shells of devices such as the MacBooks or iPads. A thinner shell means less space taken up per unit volume by the casing, which in turn leaves more space for the important stuff that goes inside the device.

But there’s one property of Liquidmetal that no one seems to have considered. How transparent is this material to radio frequencies?

If the material doesn’t allow for effective passage of radio frequencies, moving all the iPhone’s antennas — GSM, CDMA, UMTS, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth — inside a Liquidmetal shell doesn’t make sense. I’ve had a look through the tech specs for the material but can’t find anything relating to this. I’ve put a question in to Liquidmetal Technologies about radio frequency transmission, and will update this post if I get an answer.

Image credit: Liquidmetal Technologies.

Related:

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

MacBook Pro 2012 could feature Liquidmetal technology

Summary: But there are potential obstacles to constructing a notebook chassis from Liquidmetal, the primary being how the material handles heat.

The blogosphere just won’t let go of the idea that Apple is on the verge of using Liquidmetal technology in one of its products. Last week it was the iPhone 5 that was going to get the Liquidmetal treatment, and now it’s rumored to be a feature of the MacBook Pro 2012 refresh.

SlashGear reports that Apple could cast the chassis of the next MacBook Pro from Liquidmetal. But, just as with the iPhone 5 rumor, that this raises all sorts of issues related to whether this metal is transparent enough to radio frequency to allow Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to work properly.

A possible solution to this problem is offered up in the design of the Wi-Fi + 3G/4G iPad. The chassis of this product is machined out of aluminum, but in order to give the cellular antennas a window out to the world, there’s a black plastic panel at the top of the tablet. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but I’ve never heard anyone complain about it.

But there’s another possible obstacle to constructing a notebook chassis from Liquidmetal, and this one relates to how the material handles heat. The datasheet lists the thermal conductivity of the Liquidmetal as 6 Wm-1K-1, which makes it a far poorer conductor of heat than aluminum, which has a thermal conductivity of around 35 Wm-1K-1.

What this means is that Apple would need to redesign the cooling system of the MacBook Pro to take into account the fact that a Liquidmetal shell would be far poorer at dissipating the heat generated by the system than the current aluminum shell. However, buried on Liquidmetal Technologies website, a reference signals a way to tailor the material for specific thermal and electrical conductivity, so there may be possible to re-engineer the material to overcome this problem.

I like the idea of a Liquidmetal MacBook Pro — or for that matter any portable — more than I do the idea of making the back of an iPhone out of the material. The first reason is production. Casting is normally a much quicker process machining parts, and this gives the Liquidmetal chassis an advantage over how Apple currently manufactures parts for portable systems.

Another reason for switching from aluminum to Liquidmetal is that portables have to deal with countless bumps, scratches and abrasion on a daily basis. Liquidmetal would certainly offer a system far greater protection than aluminum does, and keep the hardware looking better for a lot longer.

Image credit: iFixit.

Related:

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

Build your own "Ivy Bridge" desktop PC

Summary: An Ivy Bridge PC for under $600, built around Intel’s next-generation processor.

Intel’s new Ivy Bridge CPUs, built using third-generation Core architecture, are now on sale. That means it’s time to look at putting together a system based around this new and exciting silicon.

“Ivy Bridge” is the codename for Intel’s 22-nanometer die shrink of the earlier 32-nanometer “Sandy Bridge” architecture. It makes use of new 3D tri-gate transistors that deliver 32 percent better performance than the transistors used in Sandy Bridge processors. These new transistors have allowed Intel to get better performance from Ivy Bridge processors with half the power consumption.

Build your own “Ivy Bridge” desktop PC

All Ivy Bridge processors feature a built-in Intel HD graphics GPU. These GPUs offer full DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support. While hardcore gamers are likely to turn their noses up at integrated graphics, these GPUs are more than adequate for general computing and even casual gaming.

Intel has developed these processors to compete directly with AMD’s A-series APUs.

Let’s take a look at the components you need for this system. My target price for the base hardware is $600.

A number of Ivy Bridge processors are already available for purchase. Here’s a listing of Ivy Bridge parts that I’ve found over on NewEgg:

Core i5-3450 - 3.1GHz - Quad-core - HD 2500 graphics - $200Core i5-3450S - 2.8GHz - Quad-core - HD 2500 graphics - $200Core i5-3550 - 3.3GHz - Quad-core - HD 4000 graphics - $220Core i5-3570K - 3.4GHz - Quad-core - HD 4000 graphics - $250Core i7-3770S - 3.1GHz - Quad-core - HD 4000 graphics - $320Core i7-3770 - 3.4GHz - Quad-core - HD 4000 graphics - $320Core i7-3770K - 3.5GHz - Quad-core - HD 4000 graphics - $350

Can’t decide between the Core i5 and Core i7 processors? Let me simplify things for you by pointing out the two key differences between the two lines. All Core i7 Ivy Bridge parts have an 8MB L3 cache and have Hyper-Threading enabled — which means two threads can be run per core — while Core i5 Ivy Bridge parts have 6MB of L3 cache and do not feature Hyper-Threading.

If you plan on making heavy use of applications that can leverage Hyper-Threading — for example, multimedia software such as Adobe Premiere Pro or HandBrake — then the extra cost of the Core i7 is worth it, otherwise I recommend picking a CPU from the cheaper Core i5 range. It’s worth bearing in mind that games don’t benefit from Hyper-Threading, so you’re better off saving money on the CPU and putting what you save towards a better graphics card.

You’ll also notice that some processor model numbers have K and S suffixes. Parts with the K suffix feature unlocked multipliers and are excellent for overclocking, while parts with the S suffix are “performance-optimized” low-power parts, all with a TDP below 65W.

If you want performance — or the opportunity to overclock your system — then I recommend that you go for either the Core i5-3570K or the Core i7-3770K. If you want a more power-efficient part — which will have the advantage of needing less cooling, so it’s better suited to situations where you don’t want too much cooler noise — then the Core i5-3450S or Core i7-3770S are the parts you want to look at.

While you are free to pick whichever part for your system you want, I’m going to go with the cheapest processor in the list, the Core i5-3450. This processor is clocked at 3.1GHz and can be pushed up to 3.5GHz when turbo-boosted.

Price: $200.

Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors all feature a Socket LGA 1155, so we need to find a compatible motherboard. In theory, all LGA 1155 motherboards are compatible with Ivy Bridge CPUs, but it’s likely that many of the existing motherboards will need a firmware update to support this new processor line.

The motherboard I’ve gone for there is the Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H. This board features Intel’s Z77 Express chipset and comes with everything you’d expect from a modern motherboard, including UEFI firmware, HDMI and USB 3.0.

This is a good, all-round, capable motherboard.

If you’re planning to update an existing Sandy Bridge system with an Ivy Bridge processor, or want to use a different motherboard to the one I’ve picked here, it’s wise to check with the manufacturer that it supports the new processors.

Price: $140.

I believe that fitting any less than 4GB of RAM is false economy, especially since two 2GB RAM modules will only cost you around $25. For this build I’ve gone for two sticks 2GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600). It is good, stable RAM, and it’s a decent price.

I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Crucial RAM over the years, and I personally recommend it. For more information on how much RAM you need, I previously wrote a how-to guide.

Price: $25.

Following the disastrous flooding in Thailand that caused hard drive production to slow down, the price of storage has gone through the roof, increasing by as much as 300 percent. Given this, it’s vital to shop around for the best deals.

I’ve gone for the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB drive. This is a 7,200 RPM drive and features 64MB of cache; a robust, reliable drive that’s fast and offers generous storage space at a decent price.

When buying hard drives, it’s a good idea to choose a “bare drive” option rather than the “retail kit.” These retail kits come with all sorts of extras such as packages, drive rails, screws, instructions and so on that you’re unlikely to need. You can pay as much as $30 extra for the privilege of your drive coming with retail packaging as opposed to being shipped in a plain anti-static bag.

Price: $140.

Here I’ve gone for the Corsair Builder Series CX430 V2. This offers 430W of power, and a wide range of connectors. On top of that, it’s quiet and is 80 PLUS efficient so it won’t cost too much to run.

Price: $45.

Don’t think too much about this one. A combo DVD burner like the ASUS DRW-24B1ST will suffice, and in this day and age come at a relatively cheap price.

Price: $20.

Let’s do a quick rundown of the price list:

CPU: Intel Core i5-3450 - $200Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H - $140RAM: 2 x 2GB Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3 1333 - $25Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB - $140Power supply unit: Corsair Builder Series CX430 V2 - $45Optical drive: ASUS DRW-24B1ST - $20

Total price: $570.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

No Windows 8 DVD playback will mean increased costs, and consumer confusion

Summary: While Apple has a streamlined one-size-fits-all OS X edition that contains everything users needs, Microsoft is once again juggling features in order to make one edition of Windows more superior and desirable than another.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott reports that DVD playback has been cut from its upcoming operating system as Microsoft tries to give consumers a reason to buy the more expensive Windows 8 Pro edition.

Windows 8 users who want out-of-the-box DVD playback capability will not only have to purchase the higher-priced Pro edition, but also the optional Media Center Pack. This is bad news for consumers because it means increased costs, more confusion, and the potential for more ‘crapware‘ to be installed on new PCs.

Currently, Windows Media Player handles DVD playback. With Windows 8, Microsoft is removing this functionality from Windows Media Player and shifting it into the optional Media Center component.

This represents a big change in how Windows works, given that Windows Media Player has had DVD playback support since version 6.1, the version that shipped with Windows 95 and Windows 98.

Microsoft has yet to explain how it intends to inform consumers of the removal of this feature. I expect that the first most people will know of this is when they try to play a DVD and are informed that they need to buy the upgrade.

Note that third-party software, both commercial and freeware, will be able to add DVD playback functionality to all Windows editions. The changes outlined here only affect the functionality built into the Windows operating system.

Microsoft says that the Media Center Pack will be available at “marginal costs“. However, in order to have the option to buy this feature, users will have to be running the higher-priced Pro edition, or upgrade to this edition. Currently, the difference in price between Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 stands at around $100. I would expect the difference between Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro to be similar given that the difference in features between the two editions is broadly the same.

That’s a hefty tax on consumers who want to be able to play DVDs.

I agree that the decision to cut this feature is driven by the need to reduce costs. Decoders cost money for Microsoft to license. By reducing the codecs included as part of Windows, Microsoft is able to pass on the savings to the OEMs. Even a dollar or two saved per PC adds up for the OEMs as it is multiplied across millions of PCs sold.

However, because PC buyers expect to be able to play DVDs on their PC — something that Windows users have been able to do for many years — OEMs will be under pressure to include some level of DVD playback functionality on new PCs.

This gives the OEMs a potential revenue stream. While OEMs could bundle a free media player such as VLC Player on new PCs, what’s more likely to happen is that they’re going to cut deals with commercial DVD playback software makers to install cut-down versions of the software on pre-made systems. This software will be crippled or limited in some way, and a license will be required to lift the limitation and make full use of the software.

OEMs already install cut-down versions of commercial DVD and Blu-ray playback software such as CyberLink’s PowerDVD or InterVideo’s WinDVD onto some systems.

I think that it is admirable that Microsoft is actively looking for ways to shave the cost of Windows 8, but I feel that removing key functionality such as DVD playback from Media Player is a step too far and seems like a desperate attempt to up-sell the more expensive edition. I can see no other valid reason for removing this feature.

While Microsoft has simplified the Windows 8 editions on offer, it will create additional confusion by removing functionality that people expect, and making it an optional extra that they’ll have to pay for.

I feel that Microsoft is making a big mistake here. While Apple has a streamlined one-size-fits-all OS X edition that contains everything users needs, Microsoft is once again juggling features in order to make the higher-priced edition of Windows more superior and desirable than the cheaper option, while at the same time giving OEMs yet more reason to install third-party crapware onto new systems.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, Microsoft.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

Next-generation consoles may not meet sales projections: analysts

Summary: Games consoles are battling against a whole host of other distractions for attention, such as social media and tablets.

The next-generation games consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will fail to match the sales of the current hardware, according to Piper Jaffray analysts.

Analysts Michael J. Olson and Andrew D. Connor believe that there will be an average drop in software sales for the systems of 53 percent during the first 14 months after their release, based on “meetings with industry sources”.

But it gets worse.

According to Gamesutra, the analysts predict that sales of Nintendo’s Wii U will only be 35 percent of that they were for the Wii during its first 14 months on sale due in part to the “disappointing” hardware specification of the new system. Sony’s PlayStation 4 is predicted to do a little better; with sales during the same period being 50 percent of that they were for the PlayStation 3.

Microsoft’s Xbox 720 is the one the analysts think will do best. They predict that sales of this console during the same period following launch will be 55 percent of what they were for the Xbox 360.

The problem, according to Olson and Connor, is that games consoles are battling against a whole host of other distractions for attention, such as social media and tablets.

“Unfortunately, we do not expect a console refresh to fully offset the secular declines in console gaming,” the analysts said. “We believe console gaming will continue to be a time-share donor to social networks, mobile games and tablets. We therefore favor companies with increasing exposure to social/mobile gaming, including Zynga and EA.”

Sales of the Xbox 360 seem to have already hit a wall. While the console has managed to cling on to the title of best-selling console in the U.S. for fifteen months, sales are down by almost a half compared to a year ago.

Microsoft blamed a “soft gaming console market” for a 16 percent fall in revenue at its Entertainment and Devices Division.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

iOS 5.1.1 update squashes iPad 3 2G/3G network switching bug

Summary: No mention of a fix for the iPad 3 ‘Batterygate’ issue.

Apple has just released iOS 5.1.1 update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. This update fixes a number of bugs, including a particular annoying one affecting the iPad 3 which resulted users losing access to their cellular data connection until they rebooted their tablet.

This is the first iOS update for the iPad 3.

The update includes the following bug fixes and improvements:

Improves the reliability of using the HDR option for photos taken using the Lock Screen shortcutAddresses bugs that could prevent the new iPad from switching between 2G and 3G networksFixes bugs that affected AirPlay video playback in certain circumstancesImproved reliability for syncing Safari bookmarks and Reading ListFixes an issue where ‘Unable to purchase’ alert could be displayed after successful purchase

The most troublesome bug fixed by this update is one that affected switching between 2G and 3G networks on the new iPad. It’s a bug that iPad 3 owners have been quite vocal about over on the Apple support forums. If the iPad 3 had to switch between a 2G or 3G network, or temporarily lost connection to a cellular data network, then this iOS 5.1 bug meant that it might not be able to reestablish the connection.

Prior to this update the only solution to the problem was to reboot the iPad — a rather lengthy process which some users reported having had to carry out several times a day.

Apple makes no mention of having fixed the ‘Batterygate’ issue reported to affect the iPad 3. ‘Batterygate’ was the term given to describe an effect first reported by Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate. During testing, he noticed that the iPad 3 continues to charge the battery for an extra hour after the battery meter reaches 100 percent, and that charging the iPad 3 for this extra hour resulted in an extra 1.2 hours of runtime.

While this behavior is normal for all devices making use of lithium-ion battery technology, it isn’t usually as noticeable as it is with the iPad 3. There had been speculation that Apple would recalibrate the battery meter to make this effect less noticable.

I will carry out some testing to see whether Apple has indeed recalibrated the battery meter, or decided that this was a non-issue and left the battery meter unchanged.

Image source: ZDNet.

Related:

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

Windows 8: How to touch-enable your existing PC without breaking the bank

Summary: It’s easy to touch-enable your existing PC without breaking the bank. Here’s one recommendation, but there is one downside to note.

Question from the Hardware 2.0 mailbox:

“I’ve downloaded and installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview onto my desktop PC and I’m very impressed with it. One thing I wish I could experiment with was the touch interface. The trouble is, I don’t have access to a tablet system, and I don’t want to buy one yet because I think they’ll get better by the time Windows 8 is out for real.

Is there a way I can touch-enable my existing PC without having to throw the whole thing out, and without having to sell my kidney?”

Yes, there is a way, and it’s actually quite simple to do. You can replace your existing monitor with a touchscreen panel. And it won’t break the bank in the process.

If you’re looking for a hardware suggestion, I suggest you take a look at Acer’s T231H 23-inch LCD panel. Not only do you get a really nice 1920 x 1080 full-HD screen, but you’re adding touchscreen support to an existing system for around $320.

The Acer T231H is a great touchscreen, but there is one irritation you need to know about before you buy. The screen has a bezel around it, and this makes it tricky to get to the edge of the screen to make use of Windows 8’s edge gestures.

If you have large fingers this can make getting to the edge tricky. A solution to this problem is to use your graphics card driver to underscan the display slightly to bring the edges in a little. You’ll lose a few pixels at the edge, but chances are you won’t notice it. Both AMD and NVIDIA offer an underscan–overscan ability in their drivers, so it’s quite easy to do.

By the time Windows 8 is released I expect touchscreen monitors to feature a bezel-less design so that edge gestures will no longer present a problem.

If you’ve got the space and a second output on your graphics card, you could keep the existing monitor on your system and give yourself a dual-screen workspace. You’ll be amazed just how much extra productivity you can get from adding a second screen to your system.

Touchscreen monitors

Image credit: Acer.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Is the 17-inch MacBook Pro headed for extinction?

Summary: 17-inch systems may very well be a throwback from a by-gone era.

The 17-inch MacBook Pro is Apple’s most expensive portable system, ranging in price from $2,499 to an eye-watering $4,100 when fully-loaded with a 2.5GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB solid state drive. But there are suggestions that Apple is preparing to dump this model with the 2012 refresh of the MacBook Pro because of weak demand for the system.

See also: MacBook Pro 2012 could feature Liquidmetal technology

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo sent out a research note to clients this week with the prediction that “Apple is likely to stop making the 17-inch MacBook Pro this year due to falling shipments, in order to maintain a lean product line strategy.”

But how does Kuo know how many 17-inch MacBook Pros Apple sells? After all, Apple doesn’t break down sales into specific models. Well, Apple might not be talking numbers, but other resellers are, in this case Michael Oh, president of Apple reseller and care specialist TechSuperpowers.

“It would be the model that makes sense to ax. With the move to Ultrabooks, and Apple’s push with the MacBook Air, there just isn’t the interest in the 17 inch that we see with the 15 inch or the 13 inch, which is of course also the cheapest model,” says Oh. “It used to be that the 17 inch had vastly superior battery life and memory space, but nowadays, a lot of those advantages have gone away. In terms of what most people buy, you can get the most you need in a 15 inch. A lot of those upper limits people used to run into just don’t exist anymore.”

Could Apple dump the high-end MacBook Pro? It’s possible, especially given how Apple hasn’t refreshed the Mac Pro workstation since August 2010. The apparent abandonment of the Mac Pro is certainly a sign that Apple doesn’t have a problem with letting the cobwebs gather on a product line. The Mac Pro line is now so long in the tooth in terms of hardware that I can’t imagine that Apple sells many of these system — in fact, anyone who is buying a Mac Pro for the price they are being offered at is throwing money away. It’s easy to argue that it doesn’t make sense for Apple to kill a content creation device like the Mac Pro — or the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which is a favorite among those who work with and edit multimedia — but it equally doesn’t make sense for Apple to allow the Mac Pro to stagnate for as long as it has either. It’s clear that Apple is concentrating on the products that bring in the dollars.

With Apple only selling 4 million Macs during the last quarter, I find it hard to believe that is selling that many systems priced at $2,400 or above, which includes both the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro line. That’s a good reason to dump the models that aren’t selling in order to simplify the product line.

Also, given that the 17-inch MacBook Pro hardware is almost identical to that of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, if Apple does dumps the 17-inch option all it’s doing is reducing the screen options available rather than offering a less capable system.

In my experience, interest and demand in large form factor portable systems has waned as people desire portability over acres of screen real-estate. 17-inch systems may very well be a throwback from a by-gone era.

Image credit: Apple

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Why Microsoft should reboot its smartphone platform one more time

Summary: Microsoft is no stranger to rebooting its mobile platform, a move that invariably leaves customers who took a chance on the current platform out in the cold.

Rumors that Microsoft’s next incarnation of its smartphone platform might not support the current hardware lineup have sent a ripple of anger, confusion and incredulity through the Windows Phone community.

Is Microsoft getting ready to reboot its smartphone platform again? And if so, why?

Microsoft is no stranger to such a move that invariably leaves customers who took a chance on the current platform out in the cold. Microsoft has done it twice in the past few years.

Two months following the release of the Kin mobile platform, Microsoft abruptly pulled the plug on it, bringing the entire project — hardware, software and infrastructure — to an unceremonious end. Later, when Windows Phone 7 platform was announced, Microsoft made it crystal clear that Window Mobile 6.5 devices wouldn’t receive this update because of hardware changes between the two platforms.

With the platform finally showing signs of growth, uncertainly and doubt over future upgrades will almost certainly put a damper on sales, and push some potential customers to the iPhone or one of the myriad of Android handsets on offer.

While I do feel for consumers who took a chance on the Windows Phone platform, and can appreciate why they feel frustrated, I believe at least one more reboot is required. And the primary reason for this is Microsoft’s upcoming Windows RT operating system for ARM devices.

So far, Microsoft has been uncharacteristically silent about what the future holds for existing Windows Phone users. The only comment from the company regarding the next Windows Phone release — codenamed ‘Apollo’ — is that all existing apps will be supported by the new platform. While this is reassuring for developers who have put the groundwork into building an app ecosystem around the platform, it offers little comfort to consumers who have just bought a new Windows Phone handset and tied themselves to a carrier contract for a year or two.

There are several reasons why I feel that it’s a prudent time for Microsoft to carry out another reboot of the mobile platform, even at the risk of alienating those who have put their trust in the Windows Phone 7–7.5 platforms. The first reason is that it doesn’t make much sense for Microsoft to support two mobile platforms. Apple manages to cater for both its smartphone and tablet with a single, unified iOS platform, and there’s no reason why Microsoft couldn’t and shouldn’t do the same.

If Microsoft’s goal is to get Windows on as broad a range of screens as possible, including PCs, smartphones, tablets, TVs and so on, it makes sense to keep the number of platforms needed to support these screens to a minimum. Keeping the smartphone platform separate to the tablet platform doesn’t make long-term sense.

There are other hardware-related reasons why a reboot makes sense. Microsoft has had no end of problems getting Windows Phone 7–7.5 updates onto the existing lineup of hardware. While some of these problems were down to the carriers, most of it was due to hardware incompatibilities. These issues resulted long delays in getting updates to customers, confusion, angry customers, not to mention weeks of PR headaches for Microsoft.

Despite drawing up stringent reference hardware guidelines that handset makers had to follow, there was enough variation among the designs to cause problems. This is a situation that Microsoft can’t allow to continue, especially as the Windows Phone market expands in terms of users and devices.

Another hardware-related reason is the need to add new features to the platform, such as NFC support, removable micro SD cards, new screen resolutions and so on. Additionally, there’s a need to support more powerful hardware, including multi-core processors. These updates are needed to take the Windows Phone platform to the next level.

The upcoming Windows Phone ‘Apollo’ release sounds like it is going to be a huge update. In fact, I believe that ‘Apollo’ is going to end up have far more in common with Windows RT than Microsoft is willing to let on at this stage. While I don’t think that ‘Apollo’ will be Windows RT, it will pave the way for unification of the two platforms into a single product down the line.

While there’s no doubt that Microsoft could retrofit the platform to work on current Windows Phone hardware, the user experience is likely to be less than ideal. It’s better users are stuck with a platform designed for their hardware than end up using a retrofitted platform that has been significantly cut down to work on older handsets.

Personally, I hope that Microsoft throws Windows Phone 7–7.5 owners a bone of some description, perhaps in the form of an update to bring a few ‘Apollo’ features to the platform. But overall I think that the mobile platform needs another reboot in light of what ‘Apollo’ and Windows RT will bring to the table.

I also hope that Microsoft finally gets its mobile platform right, so there won’t be a need for another reboot for some time to come.

Image credit: Nokia.

Related:

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

iPhone touch panel shipments to fall 15-20 percent in Q2 2012

Summary: Sources estimate that the overall shipments of touch panels during the second half of 2012 will equal one-third of the shipments seen during in the first half of the year.

Both TPK Holding and Wintek expect to see shipments of iPhone touch sensor panels to decline by around 15–20 percent during Q2 2012 as Apple shifts to in-cell touch technology for its next-generation smartphone, reports DigiTimes.

The iPhone’s touch panel sensor is a separate layer to the LCD screen. Apple is expected to move to a solution called in-cell technology with the iPhone 5. This sees both the screen and touch sensor layers combined into a single layer. This comes as bad news for both TPK and Wintek, as the two companies will no longer be required to supply touch panel sensors for the new iPhone.

The new in-cell panels are expected to be both cheaper to produce and thinner than the current panels. The fact that they are thinner could allow the next iPhone to have a few tenths of a millimeter shaved off the thickness.

Alternatively, a thinner screen could mean more space inside the device for a bigger battery to power all the new technology.

TPK claims a stockpile of iPhone 4S handsets, combined with a general slowdown in sales as customers put off buying a new iPhone in anticipation of the upcoming release, will see the company experience a fall in revenue of about 10 percent during the second-quarter of 2012.

Wintek has reported that revenues fell 11.4 percent in April to $317.43 million following record earnings in March.

Sources estimate that the overall shipments of touch panels from the two companies during the second half of 2012 will equal one-third of the shipments seen during in the first half of the year.

It’s worth noting that while the touch panel and screen are separate components in the iPhone 4S, they cannot be independently replaced. In the event of a cracked screen, the entire unit has to be replaced. This means that a shift to in-cell touch technology doesn’t make the screen any more costly to replace.

Image credit: KGI Research.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Jailbroken iPads can now multitask apps

Summary: The Quasar windows manager allows standard iOS apps to be run in separate windows. They can also be moved, resized and manipulated in all the ways that you might play with windows on a Windows or Mac system.

A few weeks ago I suggested that the killer feature missing from the iPad is multitasking. For owners who have jailbroken their iPads, such a feature is now available.

Multitasking is brought to the iPad thanks to an application called Quasar, from BigBoss developer Pedro Franceschi. Quasar is a windows manager that allows standard iOS apps to be run in separate windows on the iPad. These windows can be moved about the screen, resized and manipulated in all the ways that you might interact with applications on a Windows or Mac system.

Quasar is fully integrated with the iOS Notification Center, which means that clicking on notifications will open the app in a window. It will also automatically open App Store, YouTube, and web links in the appropriate windowed app.

Quasar is also optimized to run iPhone apps on the iPad at the correct resolution.

For anyone who wonders whether the iPad has enough processing power to handle multitasking, this video should answer that question. In fact, even the first-generation iPad has enough horsepower to multitask applications.

The multitasking effects appear smooth and responsive, with no lag or visual artefacts visible on screen. The iPad’s hardware is clearly up to the task, meaning this omission is a limitation of iOS platform and not of the iPad itself.

Be warned that there do seem to be a few bugs in the application. For example, moving a window off the screen causes the app to be annoyingly chopped in half. Bugs are to be expected given that this is a first release, and the developer has promised fixes.

The only drawback to this app is that it requires a jailbroken iPad. If you’re running a device with iOS 5 or earlier then this isn’t going to be a problem. For those on iOS 5.1 — which includes all iPad 3 owners — things look bleak. The only jailbreak available for this iOS release is untethered — which means that if you reboot your device you will need to connect it to a computer to reinstate the jailbreak — and only works for a limited selection of hardware.

This app is the single best reason I can think of to jailbreak your iPad.

Quasar is available from the Cydia Store and costs $9.99.

If a jailbreak app can bring multitasking to the iPad, It’s hard to come up with a compelling reason why Apple can’t do the same.

Image credit: BigBoss.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Why you may never see Windows Phone on the Nook

Summary: It’s possible that Microsoft has a vision for a unified ecosystem at some point down the line, but right now, it makes more sense for the company to stick with Android.

Microsoft has thrown $300 million at book giant Barnes & Noble to buy itself the Nook e-book business. Does this mean we can expect to see a Nook sporting the Windows Phone operating system any time soon?

I doubt it.

While this deal between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble brings to an end the patent dispute between the two companies, it is reported that Barnes & Noble will still have to pay Microsoft a royalty for each Android-powered Nook it sells. This has led some, including ZDNet’s James Kendrick, to assume that now would be a good time to switch the Nook’s operating system away from Android and to one supplied by Microsoft, specifically the Windows Phone platform.

Don’t get me wrong, a Nook with a Windows Phone operating system — or some variant of Windows 8 for that matter – would make for an interesting device. My inner-geek is certainly interested. The Nook is already solid, well-made bit of kit.

While it isn’t in the same league as Apple’s iPad — because nothing is — or Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet for that matter, it’s still a very capable tablet. Judging by the reviews people like it a lot. Closer integration with the Windows ecosystem, on both the desktop and on mobile devices, would certainly open up some new and exciting possibilities for the device.

At first blush, a Windows-powered Nook makes sense, but there are huge obstacles: technical, business and social — in the way that means this is unlikely to happen.

Let’s start with the technical reasons. There’s no doubt that the Nook would need a serious overhaul before receiving the new operating system. All product redesigns — even very basic ones — come with a significant dollar value attached to them, and a platform switch would be a huge redesign. Not only that, but changing the operating system would draw a line under the Nook’s ability to dip into to the Android ecosystem for apps and instead make owners reliant on Microsoft’s much smaller app ecosystem.

Any change in platform would also mean that current Nook owners would lose access to any apps they purchased for the Android Nook once they upgraded to a Windows-powered Nook. In my experience, this is exactly the sort of thing that annoys people who have bought into a platform. Tinkering with the Nook at this stage just for Microsoft’s benefit could be bad for the Nook. And what’s bad for the Nook is good for the likes of Amazon.

Then there’s the price. The Nook currently sells for $199 for the 8GB model and $249 for the 16GB model. While the current hardware might be capable enough for the Windows Phone operating system, I’m doubtful that it would be good enough to run Windows RT, which is why I think it is unlikely that we will see a Windows Phone powered Nook at all. I doubt that a $200 Windows RT tablet is possible at this stage, unless it is heavily subsidized. Increasing the price of the Nook would certainly reduce its appeal, while a subsidy would mean having to claw cash back through content sales.

From the business side of things, we need to consider that Microsoft isn’t going to supply a version of Windows for use on the Nook at no cost at all. It’s not how Microsoft does things, and even if it did, doing so would seriously upset other hardware OEMs. Whether the Nook runs Windows or Android, Microsoft still gets a cut from every sale, and that cost will form part of the overall cost of the device.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Microsoft hasn’t yet allowed the Windows Phone operating system to be loaded onto any non-phone device. This is where Windows, along with the new Windows RT operating system, comes in. Microsoft has made it clear that Windows Phone is for phones, and since the Nook isn’t a phone, unless there’s been a radical shift in policy over in Redmond it’s never going to get the Windows Phone treatment.

Finally, there are the social issues to consider. The Nook may well be a well-loved device, with about 60 percent of owners giving it a 5-star rating. Popularity is something that you mess with at your peril, and deciding on a whim to change the Nook’s operating system — which, judging from the reviews people seem to like — could have an adverse effect on how it’s received.

After a quick scan of the 1,300 or so customer reviews on Barnes & Noble, I haven’t come across a single person who thinks the Nook would be better if it ran the Windows Phone or Windows RT operating system.

Despite Microsoft throwing an alleged billion dollars at Nokia to build Windows Phone handsets, its mobile platform hasn’t gained significant traction yet — certainly nowhere enough to propel it into the forefront of Nook owner’s minds.

My feeling is that this Microsoft–Nook partnership has less to do with Windows and more to do with getting a foothold into the e-book ecosystem and leveraging some of that Android–Linux related intellectual property that Microsoft has at its disposal.

It’s possible that Microsoft has a vision for a unified ecosystem at some point down the line, but right now, it makes more sense for the company to stick with Android.

Image credit: Barnes & Noble.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

Apple sells 645,000 devices a day during Q2

Summary: Apple sold an incredible 645,000 devices on average each and every day over the 91 days of the financial quarter.

On Tuesday, Apple announced its Q2 2012 financial results, and the information offers us a look at just what a sales powerhouse the Cupertino giant has become.

Individually, the numbers are staggering. Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones, 11.8 million iPads, 7.7 million iPods and 4 million Macs. This works out to an incredible 58.6 million devices sold over the 91 days of the financial quarter. To put that another way, it is nearly 645,000 devices a day, with over 385,000 of these being iPhones, and almost 130,000 of them iPads.

But if we take a deeper dive into the numbers, we can tease out some more eye-opening figures. For example, over a period spanning 42 quarters (Q1 2002—Q2 2012) Apple has sold 344.3 million iPods, but in a period spanning only 20 quarters (Q3 2007—Q2 2012) the company has sold 218.1 million iPhones.

iPad sales data also makes interesting reading. So far, Apple has sold 67 million iPads. It took the company 24 years to sell that many Macs, 5 years to sell that many iPhones and 3 years to sell that many iPhones.

Notice also how Apple has shifted to selling higher value devices, selling as many iPads — which range in price from $399 for the iPad 2 to $829 for the 64GB Wi-Fi + 4G iPad 3 — as it does iPods — which range in price from $49 for the 2GB iPod shuffle to $399 for the 64GB iPod touch. The iPad and the iPhone are in many ways the ‘new iPod’, only a far more profitable iPod for Apple.

If we add Macs into the equation, they are barely a blip on the post-PC landscape. The chart below focuses on the period during which the iPhone has been available.

iPod sales may be declining, and Mac sales stagnant, but strong iPhone sales along with the iPad going from strength to strength means that Apple has nothing to worry about.

Apple has undoubtedly made the transition to being a true post-PC company.

Data sources: Apple.

Related:

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

What Liquidmetal is used for: gallery

Summary: Let’s take a look at some of the uses that this fascinating material has been put to.

Rumors that the iPhone 5 or the 2012 refresh of the MacBook Pro could feature case components made of the high-tech amorphous metal alloy Liquidmetal has generated a lot of interest in this material.

Liquidmetal is the commercial name given to an amorphous metal alloy that is almost twice as strong as the strongest titanium alloys. The alloy was developed by Caltech in 2003 and has been used in a broad range of military, medical, luxury, consumer, industrial, and sporting goods products.

Let’s take a look at some of the uses that this fascinating material has been put to.

What is Liquidmetal used for?

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview vs. Windows 7: Benchmarked

"Removing it is WHY 60% of the world are still clinging to XP and NOT upgrading"
How about the fact that it's not even released yet, and there ARE options like Windows 7 that didn't remove the menu?
Eh, you have a rather thin argument. You don't judge the popularity of something by its pre-release numbers, that's rather silly.
"I am willing to bet that a lot of money could be made by updating and re-releasing XP instead of all this W7-W8 crap because those two operating systems cater only to a loud voiced minority ."
The "loud voiced minority" are the bloggers and IT folks. Obviously, you're part of the "IT folks" category and don't really speak for the majority.
"so far I see nothing of real world value and absolutely zero need to change."
My computer's running faster and boots faster. I have better security, and I haven't had a virus in years. I'm very productive with Windows 7, and I don't regret upgrading to it in the least. In fact, I've found that the way the Windows 7 taskbar works is very much better than Windows XP. Pinning is so much better than the "quick start" bar, as there's a lot less hassle maintaining it.
There's also Aero snap in Windows 7, which is great for file management and drag and drop operations, as well as quickly getting apps to fill the screen. I spend far less time resizing my windows and far more time being productive.
Not to mention the notification bar is improved as well - I can tell it to not show the notifications of some of the more annoying background apps, as well as to easily select which ones I want showing and which ones I don't.
Overall, I feel like I am in a lot more control with Windows 7, and I am a lot more productive. I can't think of a single reason to go back to XP after moving to Windows 7.
As far as Windows 8 goes, only time and experience will really tell. But I am keeping my mind open, and look forward to seeing how it works in the real world.

View the original article here

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad: gallery

Summary: Dozens of iPad and iPhone accessories tested across a variety of categories, whittled down to a handful of the very best you can buy for your iDevice.

The iPhone and iPad are both considered by most to be the best devices in their class, but you can dramatically improve upon both of them buying the right accessories. However, given the incredible popularity of these devices, there are an overwhelming number of accessories available for both. Finding the best accessory in a particular category can be very difficult.

Over the course of this gallery, I will work my way through several categories of accessories and highlight “best of the best” that you can buy for your iPhone or iPad.

I’ll show you the very best cases for your iPhone and iPad, no matter whether you’re careful with your device or the sort of person to throw it about with enthusiastic abandon. I’ll also show you the best battery pack and car cord for keeping your device charged up when you’re on the move, the best speaker docks, the best keyboard, the best Bluetooth headset, the best FM transmitter, and the best — and oddest — photographic accessory. No matter how you use your iPhone and iPad, there’s something here for everyone.

Top accessories for your iPhone and iPad

If you have a suggestion for an iPhone or iPad accessory that I should test, drop me a note in the TalkBack section or send me an email using the contact form.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here

Best Android-powered tablets

Summary: While I firmly believe that the iPad is the best tablet out there, there are some fantastic Android tablets on offer.

Question from yesterday’s Hardware 2.0 mailbox is one that I’ve been receiving in a variety of forms for months:

“I want to buy a tablet, but I do not want to get an iPad. I’ve got nothing against the iPad itself, it’s just that I have an Android smartphone and juggling two platforms is going to get both complicated and expensive.

What do you suggest I look at?”

Your reason for not wanting to buy an iPad makes sense. As someone who has standardized on iOS hardware, I have to agree with you that one mobile platform is much easier to handle than two. If nothing else, it reduces your costs by allowing you to buy an app once, and then go on to install it on multiple devices. Juggling between two different mobile platforms would mean having to buy all those must-have apps twice.

While I firmly believe that the iPad is the best tablet out there, there are some fantastic Android tablets on offer. You’ve not offered a budget so I’ll suggest a range of tablets starting at $199, and going all the way up to $599.

Best tablet for those who don’t want an iPad

If you want a tablet that transforms into a notebook, then this is the tablet for you. Through the use of the optional keyboard dock ($149), not only can you add a keyboard and touchpad, but you also get 5 hours of extra battery life.

For $100 more than Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, this tablet it worth taking a look at.

Price: $300.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire has come from nowhere to become the number one Android tablet in the United States. It runs a heavily customized version of Android that doesn’t look or feel like any other version out there.

The ease of use of the device, combined with the Amazon brand and the low price, has made the Kindle Fire a very popular choice among those looking for an Android tablet.

Price: $199.

The Galaxy Tab 2 is a revamp of the original tablet. It’s not as much of a reworking as some were expecting, and more of an evolutionary step than a revolutionary one, but it’s still a good upgrade to what was already an excellent tablet. A premium tablet with a premium price tag.

Price: $599.

Lenovo’s 7-inch IdeaPad A1 is a compact yet rugged multimedia tablet that runs the Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” operating system. The A1 is also durable, and features a magnesium alloy roll-cage internal frame that protects the critical system components in case of accidents or jolts.

Price: $199.

The Nook is Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Like the Kindle Fire, the Nook is essentially a conduit into the digital content that Barnes & Noble has to offer.

Price: $199.

This is the tablet for those who like to take their electronic devices into the outdoors. The Pantech Element is waterproof against incidental exposure to water when all ports — including USB and earphone ports — are tightly closed, and is submersible up to 1 meter for up to 30 minutes.

Compared to the ASUS Transformer TF300 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, this tablet is overpriced from a hardware specification standpoint, but if you want a rugged, waterproof tablet, this is worth a look.

Price: $500 (contract-free).

Image sources: Amazon, Barnes & Noble.

Related:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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One in 10 secondhand hard drives contain recoverable personal information

Summary: I recommend three ways of erasing a hard disk drive.

Research carried out for Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) by NCC Group found that 11 percent of secondhand hard drives contain recoverable personal information belonging to the original owner.
A total of 200 hard drives bought from Internet auction sites and trade fairs were examined, and the results are quite shocking. 11 percent were found to contain personal information belonging to the previous owner, while another 37 percent had what is described as “non-personal” information. Only 38 percent of the drives had been properly wiped, while a further 14 percent were damaged and unreadable.
Of the data recovered, some 34,000 files were found to contain highly sensitive information, including scanned bank statements, passports, birth certificates, employee information, full bank details, family photos, and medical information.
According to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, “such incidents aren’t always the fault of the company who owned the hard drives,” and they could be the fault of a third party organization used to handle the secure disposal of assets.
“But it’s always us, the unfortunate member of the public,” he adds, “who is most exposed by the sloppy practice.”
I recommend three ways of erasing a hard disk drive (HDD). The first is to use software solution such as DBAN to erase the drive. This method can be very time-consuming and the drive has to be attached to a PC for the entire operation, which can last for hours. It is, however, a cheap — the software is free — and very effective way of erasing a hard drive.

Wiping a hard drive with DBAN
Another method is to use a hardware drive eraser, such as Drive eRazer Ultra from WiebeTech. This is a simpler solution because you don’t need a PC for the job. You just connect the drive to the driver eraser tool and let it do its job. It can still take hours, but as least you’re not tying up a PC during the process. Investing in a hardware eraser is worthwhile if you have a number of drives to erase or a involved in PC repair.

Finally, there’s the tried and trusted method of taking a hammer and a six-inch nail and hammering the nail through the drive a few times. Drives are actually quite soft and the nail goes through pretty easily. Just make sure to wear eye protection and gloves, and make sure that you don’t nail the drive to your floor!
With dead drives, many times there’s no alternative other than to use the hammer and six-inch nail method, as both the software and hardware erasure tools require a functioning hard drive.
Erasing Solid State Drives (SSD) is a lot trickier. Unless the SSDs are encrypted then the most secure file deletion method can leave more than 4 percent of the original data recoverable. If the drive in encrypted then the best way to erase it is to delete the encryption keys from the Key Storage Area (KSA) and then overwrite the entire disk with a full DoD-compliant erasure tool. Consult your SSD or encryption utility’s user manual for information on how to erase the KSA.
Image credit: DBAN/WiebeTech
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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AMD rumored to be preparing Radeon HD 7970 'GHz Edition'

Summary: An official Radeon HD 7970 ‘GHz Edition’ card would allow AMD to once again trump NVIDIA, allowing it to retake the fastest GPU crown.

While AMD’s Radeon HD 7770 and HD 7870 GPUs both have core clocks set at 1GHz, the high-end HD 7970 seems oddly underclocked, running at a rather underwhelming 925MHz. However, according to Australian tech site Atomic MPC, AMD is preparing to rectify this by releasing a revamped ‘GHz Edition’ of the HD 7970, featuring a GPU clocked at 1GHz.

If you shop around you can already find HD 7970 cards with the core clocked at around 1050MHz, but these cards fall outside of AMD’s reference specification. By releasing a ‘GHz Edition’ of the HD 7970, AMD would be making the speed bump up to 1GHz official.

There’s good reason for AMD to officially bump the core clock speed of the HD 7970. This is because HD 7970 cards with cores clocked at the 1GHz mark are faster than an NVIDIA GTX 680 running at reference speeds, which is currently the fastest offering from NVIDIA.

An official Radeon HD 7970 ‘GHz Edition’ card would give AMD the hardware it needs to once again trump NVIDIA, and allow it to retake the fastest GPU crown — for now.

I’ve had the opportunity to play with a Radeon HD 7970, and there certainly seems to be plenty of scope for boosting the performance without having to alter the design or revamp the cooling. With a little tweaking — using nothing more than the options available in the official AMD Catalyst Control Center — it’s possible to push the HD 7970’s core clock to run at 1,125MHz, which is 200 MHz above stock speed. Even at these higher speeds, the card runs cooler and quieter when under load than an HD 6990 running at stock speeds.

If you are willing to go outside of what the Catalyst Control Center has to offer, careful tweaking of the HD 7970 with a tool such as TriXX can take the core clock up to 1.26MHz. Again, the stock cooler has no trouble keeping the GPU within thermal limits, even under heavy load.

Given these observations based on overclocking, there’s little doubt that AMD can squeeze more out of the HD 7970. And now that NVIDIA has released the GTX 680, the time is right to do just that.

I’ve reached out to AMD for official confirmation of the existence of a Radeon HD 7970 ‘GHz Edition’.

Image source: AMD.

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Build your own “Ivy Bridge” desktop PC

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Developer: iOS 5.1.1 already installed on 10 percent of iOS devices

Summary: In a matter of a few hours, iOS 5.1.1 already has more than double the market share of Android 4.0.3 and 4.0.4.

According to David Smith, an independent iOS and Mac developer responsible for hit apps such as Audiobooks and InstaBackup, it’s taken less than 24 hours for Apple’s iOS 5.1.1 update to be installed on over 10 percent of iOS devices.

The following chart was created by Smith to show the adoption rate of the new update since its release yesterday. The data was captured by Smith’s free Audiobooks app, which sees some 100,000 downloads every week:

The data also shows us that iOS 5.1 is powering around 60 percent of all iOS devices, and that more that 80 percent of iOS devices are running iOS 5.0.1 or higher. iOS 5.0.1 was first released in November 2011.

Compare the adoption rate for iOS 5.1.1 to that of the latest version of Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich.’ According to the Google Developer portal, Android versions 4.0.3 and 4.0.4 – which were released December 2011 and March 2012 respectively – have, as of May 1 2012, a market share of only 4.4 percent.

In a matter of a few hours, iOS 5.1.1 has managed to capture more than double the market share of Android 4.0.3 and 4.0.4 combined.

The most popular version of Android continues to be version 2.3 ‘Gingerbread,’ powering 64.4 percent of all Android hardware. This version was first released January 2010, and the last update was released November 2011. This version continues to be offered on new smartphones and tablets sold today.

Adoption of Android is being held back by a number of factors. One of these is that the network carriers have little or no incentive to get platform updates out to users. Apple, on the other hand, has no such problem, having cut the carriers out of the update equation. It’s clear which solution is best when it comes to getting the updates to users as quickly as possible, and getting them to install those updates onto their hardware.

This is not the first time we’ve seen iOS updates significantly outpace Android adoption rates. Back in March, data collected by Smith showed that it took iOS 5.1 only 15 days to reach the same market share level as Android 2.3.

If Google wants to get updates out to Android users as fast as possible, then it needs to follow Apple’s model and cut the carriers out of the update equation.

Image sources: David Smith, Android Developer Portal.

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Best Android-powered smartphones

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Who cares that the iPad 3 is thicker and heavier than the iPad 2?

Summary: Not only are the changes so small that we humans don’t notice them, they’re so small as to be mechanically irrelevant. We know this because most cases designed to fit the iPad 2 will comfortably fit the iPad 3.

The new iPad — aka the iPad 3 — is 0.03-inch (0.6 mm) thicker and 0.12 pounds (49 grams) heavier than the iPad 2. Apart from those small number of people who obsess over technical specifications, does anyone really care about these increases?

In an interview with CNET, Dr Raymond Soneira, founder, president and CEO of DisplayMate Technologies, claims that the display panel used in the iPad 3 is a “Plan B,” and that it was Apple having to resort to old display technology that resulted in a thicker, heavier tablet.
“The plan was to use this new technology called IGZO from Sharp — a lot higher electron mobility that allows them to make the transistors a lot smaller and the circuit elements a lot smaller,” he said.
IGZO — short for Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide — technology would have meant smaller transistors in the panel, which would have reduced on the number of backlights needed to the screen. This, in turn, would have resulted in a thinner display and reduced battery consumption.
However, according to Soneira, Sharp didn’t have the IGZO display technology ready in time for the iPad 3. This meant that Apple had to use more conventional amorphous silicon technology.
“There’s no question that the iPad 3 is Plan B. They pushed amorphous silicon to a higher [pixels per inch density] than anybody else. But the light throughput is not good. So it has roughly twice as many LEDs, and they had to get a 70 percent larger battery,” Soneira said, referring to the third-generation iPad.
But the question is, does it matter that Apple didn’t use IGZO display technology? Or, to put that question the other way, does it matter that the iPad 3 is thicker and heavier than the iPad 2?
From a technical standpoint, I understand Soneira’s argument, but from an end-product or user standpoint, I think that it’s overblown for several reasons.
First, the size and weight gain of the iPad 3 compared to earlier models is negligible. If the back of the new iPad wasn’t beveled differently to the iPad 2, there’s no way that I could tell the difference between the two devices by feel alone. I tested this out on several other people the other day, and none of them could tell the difference between the two models based on weight and thickness alone. It seems that we’re just not calibrated to pick up on changes that small, and I think that Apple knew this when it designed the iPad 3.
Not only are the changes so small that we humans don’t notice them, they’re so small as to be mechanically irrelevant. We know this because most cases designed to fit the iPad 2 will comfortably fit the iPad 3.
By using older amorphous silicon screen technology as opposed to IGZO, Apple had to fit more backlights into the iPad’s screen, along with a battery that had 70 percent more capacity than the battery powering the iPad 2. But since it managed to do this with only negligible gains in size and weight, and managed to keep the battery life the same as for the iPad 2, what display technology the iPad 3 used is irrelevant as far as consumers are concerned.
Most people are looking at what’s on the screen, not what went into the making of it.
Another point worth raising here relates to how companies develop products. Phrases like “Plan B” tend to give the impression that Apple made a last-minute switch from planning to use IGZO technology to instead using older amorphous silicon screen technology.
Product development doesn’t work like that.
While there would have been advantages in Apple using IGZO technology, the decision as to whether the technology was ready — in terms of reliability, yield, cost and so on — would have been made months before the first iPad rolled off the production line. There would have been nothing last minute about the decision. Also, we have nothing but rumors to go on to suggest that Apple had ever planned to use IGZO for the iPad 3.
Bottom line, Apple made the best iPad possible given the size, weight and cost limitations.
If your reason for not wanting an iPad is the fact that it’s 0.03-inch thicker and 0.12 pounds heavier, then you really need to find a hobby.
Image source: iFixit.
Related:
Best tablet for those who don’t want an iPad
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Microsoft developing Kinect-like controller that uses sound waves

Summary: SoundWave utilizes the existing speakers and microphone built into a PC or notebook to detect gestures.

If you think that Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller for the Xbox 360 is amazing, then you’re going to love this.

Microsoft Research has developed a new gesture-based motion controller that makes use of the Doppler effect to detect in-air gestures done around the device. The project is called SoundWave and what’s particularly interesting about it is that it doesn’t need any additional hardware in order to work.

Instead of a Kinect-like sensor bar, SoundWave utilizes the existing speakers and microphone built into a PC or notebook to detect gestures. The speakers emit inaudible tones in the 18 - 22 KHz range. SoundWave then uses the microphone on the same system to pick up these tones as they are bounced back by moving objects, such as a hand. These tones are passed through a detection algorithm and any frequency shifts detected are processed to figure out what the gesture made in front of the system was.

These gestures are then translated into specific actions that are carried out on the PC.

In the above video, Microsoft demonstrates a number of ways that this technology can be used. For example, we see single handed gestures being used to scroll through documents and images, and two handed gestures being used to play Tetris. We also get a demonstration of the SoundWave system locking a PC when it detects the user walking away from it.

SoundWave is not affected by background noises, and can even work while music or other audio is being played on the PC.

While this technology is a long way off from being a commercial product, it’s actually quite interesting and timely because it could allow Microsoft to bring gesture controls — something that’s particularly important to the Windows 8 operating system — to systems that don’t have touch screen.

This is the lowest-cost solution I’ve yet to see for gesture control. Not only that, it’s backward-compatible with any system that features speakers and a microphone.

Related:

Touchscreen monitors

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Best Android-powered smartphones

Summary: Rather than price, I’m going to look purely at features.

After the post I did on the best Android-powered tablets the other day, I was expecting this question to land in my mailbox:

In your — not so humble ;) — opinion, what are the best Android smartphones currently available?

When I looked at Android tablets, price was a major factor in determining what was best. Smartphones are tricky because it’s almost impossible to compare them on price because subsidies vary from carrier to carrier, and even based on how good a customer they think you are.

Because of that fact, I’m going to ignore price as a differentiator. All I’m going to say on the subject of pricing is that if you’re on contract then it might be worth you shopping about for the best deals. And for those of you not on contract who are looking to buy an unlocked handset, then you might want to sit down before looking at the price. Some of these handsets are very expensive.

Rather than price, I’m going to look purely at features.

Note that I am only covering handsets that are currently available — which is why the Samsung Galaxy S III isn’t in the listing.

Best Android-powered smartphones

This handset tops my list for a number of reasons. First, it runs the latest Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ operating system. It has a gorgeous contour display that has to be seen to be believed. It’s also unlocked, so you can use it on over 200 GMS networks worldwide.

An excellent all-round Android handset.

Here’s another excellent handset powered by Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’. It features a stunning screen, an excellent camera, and a superb built-in speaker system. When combined with AT&T’s LTE network, it also offers blazingly fast browsing.

The first handset in this list not powered by Android 4.0. This one features the older Android 2.3 ‘Gingerbread’ operating system. Still, if you can look beyond the operating system, you’ll find that the Samsung Galaxy S II is a very capable handset.

Another awesome handset powered by Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’. This one comes fully-loaded with a fast dual-core processor, Verizon 4G/LTE high-speed data, and excellent battery life — enough for a 21-hour conference call.

It’s also tough, constructed form DuPont Kevlar fiber and Corning Gorilla Glass, and features water-repellent nanoparticles to shield against water, even on the internal circuit boards.

Probably my favorite handset in the list.

Another handset in this list not powered by Android 4.0, this one also features the older Android 2.3 ‘Gingerbread’ operating system. Don’t let the older operating system put you off, though; this is still a very capable handset.

The unique feature of this handset is that it can be combined with an optional $129 desktop dock to turn the smartphone into a webtop system running a bare-bones version of Linux.

Image sources: Google, HTC.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

View the original article here