Product Round-up Tablets, eh? A nice idea but a shame about the price. From the iPad to the Xoom, the PlayBook to the TouchPad prices starting at or near £400 are a little on the steep side for many folk. Well, the TouchPad maybe an exception these days but only very recently.
You’ll pay a premium to buy into fondleslabs from Apple, HP or RIM, but Android users have another option, a cheap tablet. These can be picked up for anything between £100 and £230 and sometimes less if you are in the right place at the right time.
Across the board cheap Android tablets are nowhere near as ghastly as they were just a year ago. Of course, there are sacrifices. You are not going to get Honeycomb or a glass screen or a true multi-day battery life. Increasingly, what you will get is a capacitive rather than resistive screen, Android in it’s 2.2 or 2.3 incarnation – rather than antediluvian 1.6 version – and even access to the Android Market and Google mobile apps.
Buying a cheap tablet today may be false economy because what you can get for your money is changing at a dizzying rate. For instance, it won’t be long before you can buy the recently announced Archos 1.5GHz Gen9 8in Honeycomb fondleslabs for around £200. But for the moment here is a quick trawl through some tablets for the impecunious. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The ST1000 was Samsung’s first Wi-Fi enabled Camera that not only allowed users to e-mail pics from a hotspot, but had GPS thrown in just to prove you were really there. With the SH100 wireless compact, the company goes beyond snap and share by offering tight integration with its top tier Android products enabling tethering with a compatible handset or tablet, so that it becomes the SH100 viewfinder for remote capture.
The SH100 sports a 14.2Mp sensor, 3in touchscreen and a 5x optical zoom with the 35mm equivalent of a 26-130mm lens. It can handle 720p HD video recording and has an ISO range between 80 and 3200. At 93 x 54 x 19mm and 110g, the SH100 is highly pocketable and designed to operate as closely to an Android phone as possible. Read the rest of this entry »
Accessory of the Week Desktop stands for iPads and other tablets there are a-plenty, but wall-mounting systems are rare. Vogel’s, a Dutch specialist in such kit, is one of only two I’ve tried.
Attach your tablet to the wall
RingO, as it’s called, is the pricier of the two, but not by so very much. The £80 starter-pack includes both wall-mount unit and the iPad holder that clips to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Sound quality isn’t always the first consideration in the world of digital music, where songs tend to be compressed for convenience, rather fidelity. That’s where Brit hi-fi brand Cambridge audio hopes to make its mark with the NP30 (Network Player 30), which offers better-than-CD hi-res 24-bit audio playback for music files and Internet radio over your home network.
Lacking an amp and speakers, the NP30 has been designed to fit in with the company’s swish-looking Sonata range – such as the AR30 amp (and CD30 and DVD30) – but it can be connected to virtually any set-up using its standard Stereo analogue outputs. You can also use digital S/PDIF and optical outputs for connecting to higher quality DACs and there’s a trigger connection that allows the NP30 to automatically power up when the amp it’s connected to is switched on. Read the rest of this entry »
iOS App of the Week A very long time ago, graphics guru Kai Krause – a name sure to make any Mac user over a certain ago go all misty eyed and nostalgic – created an app – or ‘program’, as we called them then – named Goo. It allowed you to morph and distort photos in various, vaguely amusing ways.
It was primarily just a bit of fun, but Goo did also employ some seriously clever graphics algorithms that Krause had originally developed for a series of pro-oriented Photoshop plug-ins.
Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey
Fluid FX reminds me very much of Goo, as it uses some high-end graphics tech from Autodesk for the sole purpose of fooling around with photos. You can distort photos simply by selecting one of its preset ‘warp’ effects and then just using your finger to shape the image as if it were clay. Read the rest of this entry »
