Review Less, they say, is more, and that’s certainly a maxim LG believes in if the Pop – aka the GD510 – is anything to go by. This is one small phone, yet it presents a full touch-based user interface and simple, clear styling that will make some wonder if it’s one answer to the long hoped for iPhone Nano.
LG’s Pop: nice and small
Should Jobs and co worry? Alas no, because as impressive as the Pop looks, it’s let down by its key component: the touchscreen.
The phone we use every day has a capacitive screen, but we’ve been testing phones with resistive touchscreens for years – HTC offerings, mostly. After all that stabbing away with fingers and stylii, not triggering a tap unless we pushed really hard, here, thanks to capacitive touchscreen tech was a display that was never less than totally responsive.
Capacitive is, without question, the way all of today’s touchscreens should be.
And LG’s gone and put one of the old-style ones on the Pop. Right from the off, it makes using the phone more of a chore than it ought to be, simply because it slows you down. If a tap or a swipe of your fingertip doesn’t work first time, you have to try again. And sometimes one or two times more. The Pop’s display will respond eventually, but how much time will you have wasted? Read the rest of this entry »
Review It has taken Devolo a while to come up with a set of powerline Ethernet adaptors with pass-through power sockets in them, but here, at last, they are.
Devolo’s dLan AVplus: powerline with pass-through power
The dLan 200 AVplus is essentially Devolo’s dLan 200 AVeasy adaptor stretched to accommodate the power socket that’s placed diametrically opposite the device’s own power pins. The pins and socket are placed in the upper half of the adaptor, and the 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port is on the bottom of the unit.
The adaptor’s value to you will depend, then, not only on whether you need that ‘extra’ power socket but also whether there’s room for the 130mm top-to-bottom device to be plugged in. It’s 65mm wide and 40mm front to back. Our test bench main sockets, for example, are placed too close to the top of the bench, so we couldn’t plug the Devolos in there. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Toshiba is the first manufacturer to deliver a 2.5in laptop hard drive that packs more than 500GB of storage. Its new MK6465GSX sports 640GB on two platters, and while we are aware that the Western Digital Scorpio Blue and Seagate Momentus 5400.7 are also available in 640GB models we haven’t seen either drive to date.
Toshiba’s MK646GSX: storage boost for your notebook?
The Toshiba is, clearly, built around a 320GB platter and comes in five versions. The 640GB and 500GB models use two platters and four heads, although our maths suggests that the 500GB might use two platters and three heads. The 320GB and 250GB versions have a single platter and two heads, and the baby 160GB drive brings up the rear with a single platter and single head.
All five drives have the same physical form-factor and measure 9.5mm in thickness. They also share a 5400rpm spin speed, 8MB of cache and a 3Gb/s Sata interface that is compliant with the Sata 2.6 standard.
It’s interesting to note that the single-platter models have an idle acoustic figure of 19dB and a seek figure of 20dB while the dual platter drives emit 25dB at idle and also while they are working for their living. While we were testing the 640GB drive, we were indeed impressed that the drive was very quiet. Realistically, though, that’s true of most laptop drives. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It was Amazon’s Kindle that really turned the idea of an e-book reader into a true mass-market proposition. Well, in the States, at least, because the first Kindle was only ever available to US-based buyers. Now, however, you can get an “international version” of the Kindle 2 in Blighty. More accurately, you can buy it from Amazon in the US and have it shipped to you in the UK.
Amazon’s Kindle: now over here
Look up the Kindle 2 on Amazon.com and you’ll find a headline price of $259 and since that’s about £155 in real money, you’re probably thinking it’s a bargain compared to the iRiver Story and Sony Reader Touch Edition, both priced on the wrong side of £200. But by the time you add shipping and import duty, the price of the Kindle is actually £207. Still cheaper than the competition, but not by as much.
Something else worth keeping in mind is that the International Kindle is not the latest version. In the US you can order the Kindle DX, which boasts a 9.7in screen in place of the standard edition’s 6in panel.
Before we dive in to the hardware, let’s deal with Amazon’s Big Idea: buying and downloading content over the air. Buy a Kindle and you get 3G or GPRS access to Amazon’s e-book store. There’s no up-front charge – the cost is built into the price of the book – and it means you no longer need to download books to computer then copy them over to the reader. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Sony discovered it had a major problem when the first round of netbooks hit the market in late 2007. Having spent years educating well-heeled consumers that small notebooks were expensive, shoppers were hit by a deluge of small, light laptops that did everything they wanted for a fraction of Sony’s traditionally high prices.
Sony’s Vaio X series: weight loss comes at a price
Sony finally caved, and produced the tempting, sub-£500 Mini W, which frankly only makes the admittedly beautiful X series even stranger. At £1200 in its cheapest incarnation, it’s perhaps the most expensive Atom-powered machine available today – an odd contradiction, since spending more money on a laptop normally results in more power. Read the rest of this entry »
