IdHp.net – Style And Gadget

Review While most low-price NAS products tend to target domestic use separately from serious small office installations, the Buffalo Linkstation Quad attempts to straddle both these markets, albeit, with a price hike. Yet it offers home users a faster, beefier file store and media server, together with RAID redundancy, Internet-wide data access and high-capacity backup to satisfy office environments.

Buffalo’s Linkstation Quad: appears imposing, but is small and unobtrusive

The device is a gigabit Ethernet NAS server – supporting 10, 100 and 1000BaseTX network connections ¬– and contains a stack of four SATA hard disk drives, all encased in a compact and tough black box sized 150×150x230mm. A quieter-than-expected fan keeps the drives cool.

The Linkstation Quad has two USB 2.0 ports: one at the front and the other at the rear. You can attach a high-capacity USB external drive to either and back up your Linkstation Quad data to it. Alternatively, you can attach any external storage device, such as a portable disk drive, a USB flash memory or a digital Camera, and back up all its media files to the Linkstation Quad in one step by pressing the ‘Function’ button on the front. You can even attach a standard USB printer – although not a multifunctional printer – and share it between Windows clients, using the Linkstation Quad to manage the network print queue. Read the rest of this entry »

Review In the 18 months since Asus rocked up with its Eee PC 701 and kicked off the whole netbook malarkey, we’ve seen the number and types of devices that are nominally included in the category expand almost exponentially. As Ms Streisand so appositely noted, it was all so simple then.

Dell’s Inspiron Mini 10v: a true Small, Cheap Computer

Of course, as with small hatchbacks and RAF fighter aircraft, as the breed has developed so it has become larger, heaver, more complex and more expensive. So whither the Small, Cheap Computer? Well, thanks to Dell, it’s alive and well, thank you very much.

Over the last few months, Dell has quietly taken the axe to its UK netbook range. Gone is the Inspiron Mini 9 – which is a shame – and ditto the Mini 12, though that’s less of a shame because it was cursed with a small and slow HDD, and Dell never saw fit to offer it with Linux or an SSD. Read the rest of this entry »

Review There are a good few people who run two printers; an inkjet for all the colour and photo work and a mono laser for quicker, cheaper, sharper black print. Samsung is looking at the home and one-per-desk customer with its ML-1640 mono laser. With a street price around £50, it’s close to being an impulse purchase and puts itself in the second printer market, too.

Samsung’s ML-1640 mono laser printer

How simple can you make a mono laser printer? Nearly all the engine is in the drum and toner cartridge, so a paper feed mechanism and control electronics are the main extras and the rest is a plastic case. While Samsung’s ML-1640 is honed down to the bare minimum, all the essentials are there and, when closed, it has a very small footprint of just 353 x 298mm.

To print, though, the front panel has to be folded down as a paper feed tray and a flap folded out from the top surface to take the output. The tray can take up to 150 sheets of 75gsm paper at a time. Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone App Review DataViz’s Documents To Go, born out of the file-translation tools the company made for the Mac nearly two decades ago, has been a mainstay of Palm OS devices for almost as long. That mix of Mac heritage and mobility made it seem inevitable that DTG would come to the iPhone.

And now, at last, it has. Well, sort of. What DataViz has released is a feature-incomplete version of DTG that’s really more public beta than finished product. True, the company is offering the app for a reduced price – until 30 June – and has pledged to provide buyers with a free update when the app’s complete – ditto – but we’re not sure we like this notion of charging for unfinished work, whoever does it.

Dataviz’ Docs To Go: makes the most of the iPhone UI
Read the rest of this entry »

Round-up The iPhone 3G S is now upon us, bringing with it incredible new things like MMS, video recording, laptop tethering, Stereo Bluetooth and the marvel of cut and paste. Hang on. Haven’t other smartphones been doing this sort of thing for ages?

While iPhone mania shows no sign of dissipating among the faithful, another big difference between the original iPhone and the latest version is that there are now a lot of very credible alternatives out there, all with touchscreens, fancy new interfaces, HSDPA 3G, Wi-Fi, A-GPS and the ability to expand and improve with downloadable apps.

At Reg Hardware we’ve had a rummage around to bring you ten of the best of these iPhone substitutes. Our ratings are based on comparing iPhone-style features and don’t reflect how each phone would be rated in a standalone review.

HTC Magic

Click here for the full review

It has that love it or hate it little chin at the bottom (we don’t see the point of it ourselves) but otherwise the UK’s second smartphone to run on Google’s Android OS is one of the most serious contenders for the iPhone’s crown. Losing the slide-out keyboard of its predecessor, the G1, makes it considerably more pocket-friendly at 113 x 56 x 14mm and 116g and its 3.2in capacitive touchscreen with 320 x 480 resolution looks great, as does the widget-based UI. You can get Street View with Google Maps and use it with the digital compass to find your way around, but the 3.2Mp Camera is nothing special and like the iPhone, you’ll be tied to one network, in this case Vodafone. If you can’t bear Windows Mobile, Android is shaping up to be OS that’s best placed to challenge the iPhone.

Reg Rating 85%
Price £500 Read the rest of this entry »

Review Travel speakers come in all shapes and sizes and, to be frank, the majority are pretty horrid, both from an audio and design perspective. However every so often something comes along that piques our interest here at Vulture Central. X-MI’s Mini II was one such device and the Livespeakr [sic] from US start-up Digital Group audio is another.

DGA’s Livespeakr portable iPod dock

Unlike X-MI’s offering, the Livespeakr is aimed squarely at the iPhone and iPod user. The idea being that it provides a compact, light, self-powered speaker array that also holds your iPhone or iPod Touch in the right orientation for either watching videos or listening to music. Being fully iPhone compliant and shielded against radio interference, it also doubles up as a speakerphone. That’s the theory, so how does it work in practice? Read the rest of this entry »

Review The Aspire Revo is Acer’s take on Nvidia’s Ion platform so that’s a good place to start with this review.

Acer’s Aspire Revo: Atom and Ion on board

Ion started life as the GeForce 9300, which is a chipset that connects Intel’s Core 2 processors to decent integrated graphics. In our comparison of Desktop chipsets with integrated graphics we were quite clear that the GeForce 9300 was better than Intel’s G45, specifically in the area of HD movie decoding. If you’re building a Core 2-based PC with integrated graphics, we strongly recommend you choose GeForce 9300.

When Intel launched the Desktop Atom processor, it made the questionable decision to ally the 4W TDP CPU with the ancient D945G chipset, which has weak graphics and a TDP of 15W.

The combination of Atom and D945G has been responsible for the creation of the market for ‘nettop’ Desktop PCs that offer basic services such as e-mail and browsing the web at a low price. There’s no expectation that Atom and D945G can be used for gaming or to watch HD movies, and the graphics are so weak that it’s unable to run Windows Vista properly.

Intel could have chosen to support Atom with the G45 chipset, which is a capable piece of silicon, but it didn’t go down that route, undoubtedly to protect its higher-value Desktop offerings. So Nvidia has leapt in to fill what it perceives as a gap in the market.

Designed for edge-on operation

The Ion chipset is a rebranding exercise for the GeForce 9300, this time offered with support for Atom rather than Core 2. Nvidia is keen to show that you get better value for money by spending your cash on the GPU rather than the CPU, so it’s cockahoop that a manufacturer as big as Acer has rolled out the Aspire Revo. Read the rest of this entry »

Review There’s plenty to commend LG’s XD4 external hard drive for: it looks good, it’s reasonably quiet and it comes with some handy extras. It’s not without its quirks, mind.

LG’s XD4: behind the curve?

The 500GB XD4 we tested comes in a 185 x 122 x 36mm matte black shell with glossy rims – red and white versions are also available. Placed flat, the drive’s sides are slightly concave, and the top and bottom are etched with tight, concentric circular grooves. It’s cute, and while we prefer the solidity of the – admittedly a little larger – Samsung Story, we like the XD4 too. And LG pledges its “anti-hit” aluminium casing will guard against knocks and bumps.

LG bundles the drive with a stand, allowing the unit to be mounted vertically safe in the knowledge it won’t be easily pushed over. In fact, there are not feet on the drive itself, suggesting that LG clearly expects you to used the stand and not choose to place the XD4 horizontally. Read the rest of this entry »

Pic Review All cell-phone cameras are not created equal – even the three-megapixel cameras in the recently released iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre. And I’ve got the photos to prove it.

Our recent review of the iPhone 3GS went into some detail about the quality of the Camera in Apple’s new smartphone. But I also wanted to see how it stacked up against the Palm Pre, how much of an improvement it is over the much-derided Camera in the iPhone 3G, and whether upgrading an iPhone 3G from Software 2.2.1 to 3.0 can help that phone’s imaging abilities.

So I loaded up four phones and one Camera and visited San Francisco’s downtown patch of greenery, the Yerba Buena Gardens. There, I took over 200 shots to discover how each performs under ideal conditions: a bright, sunny day.

My test cameras phones were an iPhone 3G running iPhone Software 2.2.1, an iPhone 3G and an iPhone 3GS running iPhone Software 3.0, and a Palm Pre running Palm webOS 1.0.3.

I also brought along an aging Nikon D70 DSLR, just to find out how images from a real Camera compare to those from a pocket convenience. I used an AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED lens and set the Nikon to shutter-priority mode at 1/400 of a second. I set white balance to automatic and ISO to 200. And to be even mildly fair, I shot in JPEG, not RAW.

My findings can be summarized as follows:

1. Upgrading an iPhone 3G from iPhone Software 2.2.1 to 3.0 provides a welcome improvement in image quality. Essentially, image quality takes a step up from “sucks” to “sucks less.”
2. The iPhone 3GS’s three-megapixel Camera is a noticeable improvement over the two megapixel Camera in the iPhone 3G – and the differences are much more than mere megapixelage.
3. The Palm Pre’s three-megapixel Camera takes crisp, well-focused images, but it’s a finicky little fellow with maddeningly inconsistent white balance.
4. And here’s my “Well duh!” finding: even a five-year-old six-megapixel DSLR could easily out-image any of its phone-based competition, not only in detail but also in overall exposure and color balance.

Let’s get down to some example photos – a lot of example photos. Read the rest of this entry »

Review Nokia’s flagship phone for 2009, the N97 has set sail – backed by marketing expenditure the size of an African nation’s health budget. But it’s barely got out of port before hitting stormy waters. Some of the disappointment expressed on the web – from phone fan sites and bloggers – is fair; some of it is baffling, but much of it is self-inflicted. Nokia has hyped the N97 intensely, even pitching it head-to-head against Apple’s iPhone 3G S, with identical UK launch times.

Nokia’s N97

After putting the N97 through a range of practical, real-world situations, the controversy looks a little paradoxical. The N97 is, indeed, flawed in parts, with a UI chosen through necessity that, painfully, lacks the sheen and lustre of today’s top-of-the-range smartphones. Yet, like the Mondeo, it nevertheless does a commendable job at what’s asked of it. You can do a lot worse in the £30-£40 monthly contract price range than the N97.

Nevertheless, it’s expensive and currently, quite buggy – waiting for firmware updates is recommended. So why the fuss? The N97 is the first Nokia touchscreen device with a full Qwerty keyboard to reach the market. Six years ago Nokia abandoned what would have been its first touchscreen Qwerty Communicator, based on the Hildon UI, just before launch. This appeared as the short-lived ‘Series 90’ UI, which shipped in just one phone, but is now better known as the user interface for the Nokia Internet Tablet series. Read the rest of this entry »