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 »
Review Full marks to Samsung’s marketing folk for the Galaxy Fit’s go-getting name, but it’s actually a fairly low-end Android smart phone with an outdated OS, low resolution screen and less than speedy processor. That said, it has a few good points too, including a surprisingly good 5Mp Camera.
Exercise equipment? Samsung’s Galaxy Fit
Bearing a passing resemblance to the recently released Galaxy Mini (aren’t there an awful lot of Galaxys recently?) the Fit has a similar glossy black fascia surrounded by chrome-look trim on its gently curved edges. What looks like a D-pad beneath the screen is actually the Android home button, flanked by touch sensitive menu and back buttons (there’s no search). Read the rest of this entry »
Review 10.1? The impression I get with the naming of this much-anticipated grown-up version of last year’s Galaxy Tab is that it has psychological hangups about (ahem) ‘size’. I imagine it loitering down the pub, boasting of its prowess: “It’s not just TEN inches, Al, it’s TEN-point-ONE!” It wants to be the Spinal Tap of Android Tablets, with Nigel Tufnel asserting that other 10in tablets only go up to, well, 10.
Classier and less gadgety: all that extra screen space makes a big difference
You can’t blame Samsung for showing off its nice new screen size, though. The original 7in Galaxy Tab was an interesting experiment in product design but it suffered from those mid-size blues: too big to be a phone, too small to be a netbook, and sporting an underpowered operating system in Android 2.2. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The most amazing thing about Google’s inaugural Chromebooks is that they come with a file manager. It’s not much of a file manager, but it’s relatively easy to find, and it gives you relatively quick access to the files you’ve download or screenshots you’ve taken or documents on a thumb drive you’ve plugged into the USB port.
This may seem like the most fundamental of tools. But in December, when Google released its beta Chromebook, the Cr-48, there was no file manager. And Mountain View was adamant that such a basic piece of software was beside the point.
Running Google’s Chrome OS operating system, Chromebooks seek to move everything you do onto the interwebs. Chrome OS is essentially a modified Linux kernel that runs only one native application: Google’s Chrome browser. You can install plug-ins and extensions, but otherwise, every application you use must be a web application. Rather than run a local copy of Microsoft Office, you use Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. Rather than iTunes, you use Pandora or maybe the “cloud” music services offered by Google and Amazon. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It’s not unusual for Desktop replacements to have a bit of heft, but Samsung’s RF711 positively throws caution to the wind. Tipping the scales at an obese 2.9kg and measuring 416mm across (almost one-and-a-half feet), it’s only a laptop in the sense that the screen folds down to cover the keyboard when you’ve finished using it. In short, it looks like a prop from The Borrowers – use it on your lap and you can expect to lose circulation to your feet.
Going large: Samsung’s RF711
Its size brings with it some real portability issues. Simply heaving it from one place to another is exhausting enough, but you can forget about using it, say, on an aeroplane tray table. And, while you could use it on the tables you get in train carriages you should steel yourself for some dirty looks from your now-ousted neighbours.
Still, its enormous case shields some top-end components. You would expect a machine this big to come with a decent amount of computational poke, and the RF711 doesn’t disappoint. The quad-core Intel Core-i7 2360QM at its heart is a 2GHz Sandy Bridge number, and there’s no less than 6GB of DDR3 RAM on-board. The RF711 fairly flew along under heavy use and produced a spectacular set of numbers under PCMark, with an overall score of 7073. Read the rest of this entry »
