Review The Selphy CP780 is a tiny personal photo printer for producing lab-quality 6 x 4in prints. At just 176 x 132 x 75mm it can sit unobtrusively on a shelf or at the back of a drawer, ready to be brought out quickly for those occasions when you want an ad-hoc hardcopy of a photo you have taken with your digital Camera.
Canon’s Selphy CP780
Canon has resisted the urge to make the device cute at the expense of functionality, so it remains relatively plain, compact and rectangular. We tested the silver version; the white version would have been plainer still. If you want cuteness, buy the pink or blue versions.
Unfortunately, the impression of compact tidiness is destroyed when you plug in the power cable at the back and a USB cable at the side, leaving cables trailing in two directions across the table. Putting the two inputs together would have made the device appear classier.
A plastic paper cassette slots into the front of the unit, with a hinged flap on top acting as the output tray. The cassette is designed to hold any of a range of Canon-branded media including 6 x 4in photo cards, 100 x 200mm wide-format photo cards, and various sizes of stickers. Read the rest of this entry »
Review When conjuring up budget laptops for the mass market, manufacturers will usually do their level best to make them look more expensive than they actually are, and the R522 from Samsung is no different.
Samsung’s R522: 802.11n not welcome
There’s nothing particularly special about the innards – Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of DDR2 memory and Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics – but open up the glossy, soon-to-be-fingerprint-festooned lid and you’re presented with what looks like an impressive brushed-aluminium wrist rest. Get a little closer, though, and it soon becomes apparent that it is, in fact, just plastic dressed up to look like metal.
In another attempt to jazz things up, Samsung has furnished the perimeter of the trackpad with a soft-blue light. Is it useful? Well, no, not really. You certainly don’t need a landing light for your finger when using the trackpad in the dark, but it does look kind of funky. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Ah, convergence, that buzzword of the 1990s – so often promising a lot, but delivering little. Evidently, D-Link is toying with the convergence concept with the neatly packaged Xtreme N DIR-685. This four-port Gigabit router features 802.11n Wi-Fi, a 3.2in LCD panel – billed as a digital photo frame – and Nas functionality too. It certainly looks the part, but does it deliver on its promise?
D-Link’s Xtreme N DIR-685
There have been fully featured routers before – the Zyxel P660HWP with its Wi-Fi, four Ethernet ports, ADSL modem and Homeplug all-in-one springs to mind – but few undertake as much as the DIR-685.
Indeed, D-Link has got it spot on with the DIR-685’s design. Rigid black plastic, varying between textured and polished on the front face, with no ungainly antennae pointing out. Heck, if it wasn’t for the ports around the back and the slightly-too-small LCD panel, onlookers would think it was nothing but a digital photo frame. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It seems like it’s been a long time coming, but the TG01 is finally here. Toshiba’s latest venture into the smart phone market is a Windows Mobile device but, in terms of size, looks unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Toshiba’s TG01
It’s bigger, thinner and, according to Toshiba, faster any other phone out there, thanks to its 1GHz processor. The TG01 also has HSDPA 3G (7.2Mbps), Wi-Fi, A-GPS and a 3.2Mp Camera, which ought to put it in the front running with the best of the latest rash of high-end smart phones. It ought to, but appearances can be deceiving.
Yes indeed, the Toshiba TG01 is certainly bigger than the rest, and thinner too, at 130×70x9.9mm, just a whisker under the magic 1cm line. It’s no heavyweight either at 129g, which makes it surprisingly pocketable. Admittedly, it’s a bit awkward for a jeans pocket perhaps, but its slimness means that it will fit very nicely into the inside breast pocket of a suit. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The portable media player market ranges from the cheapest, smallest screen players, aimed primarily for playing music, to palm-sized, PDA-style pads, more than suitable for watching films and time-shifted TV. The Cowon D2+ DAB is definitely at the smaller end of the scale, but still offers a good range of programme sources including, as you’ll have guessed from the name, DAB radio.
Cowon’s D2+ DAB
The D2+ DAB is intended as a pocketable player, which can provide audio and video output, although its relatively small, 320 x 240 pixel screen biases it towards audio. It’s flash based and comes in capacities of 4GB, 8GB and 16GB. Very similar in size and function to the D2+, which was itself a firmware revamp of the D2, the D2+ DAB is available in black or silver and is about the size of a compact GPS. The chamfered surround to the 63mm TFT display makes the screen look a little smaller than it is and the player’s 16mm thickness means it’s a chunky device.
A bar down the right-hand side of the case is there entirely for the slot in one end, to which you can tie the strange triangular stylus. Actually, the stylus isn’t that strange, when you realise it can be fitted into the same slot to act as a stand for viewing the D2+ DAB on a table or desk. When you then realise it can be slotted in two ways up, giving different viewing angles, it’s actually quite clever. Read the rest of this entry »
