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January 20, 2017

Acer TravelMate 4220 Battery

The Intel Core i3 and i5 models won't be available until later this year but we know that prices will start at £399 for the i3.What follows is Tim Danton's hands-on review, which he wrote when Acer first showed off the product at January's CES technology show in Las Vegas.I've lost track of how many times the PC industry has attempted to inveigle its way into the living room (Intel Viiv ring any bells?) but Acer's little plastic gem of a product - the Acer Revo One RL85 - might just have the right combination of low price, data protection and entertaining abilities to make an impact.I got my hands on an early sample at a pre-CES demonstration, and have to admit that I'm seriously tempted to invest in one when they land in the UK (probably February).

Part of its appeal is its appearance. It's small, about the height of a hardback book, and while it's unlikely to win any Design Icon of the Year awards it does at least look like it belongs in a living room. You can get it any colours you like, so long as those colours are black or white.It's whisper-quiet in operation (you have to lean your ear in close to hear the fans) and also has a party trick of a removable shell, giving you access to two SATA disk caddies. Add two disks into these and, hey presto, you have a NAS-style appliance with full backup capabalities - since it supports mirroring, you're even covered if one disk fails.Techies might also choose to use the Revo One as a streaming server for photos, music and videos: lump everything onto the hard drive, or drives, and you can stream to pretty much any device in the house.

Acer is also promising an optional remote control, complete with keyboard on the back, but you're probably better off using the free app, Acer Smart Control. This is available for iOS and Android, and allows you to either control the Revo One or to stream content onto your device.PRICE UPDATE 19 January: Acer has now confirmed the Revo will be sold with a Celeron processor, 4GB of RAM, 1TB hard disk and remote control for £249 inc VAT. A 2TB version will cost £279 inc VAT. It should be available imminently.There will also be a black version with a 2TB hard disk and Core i3 processor, due for launch "in the second half of Q1", but no estimated price as yet.Jon Honeyball joined me for the Acer tour, and had this to say about the Revo One:

"Now this is interesting: a cute small box but with a strong performance angle if you buy the higher-spec versions. And with an unusually flexible storage expansion too â€“ the two internal HD slots have a RAID controller, so you can either span or mirror the drives to increase unified storage size or increase reliability and performance."Immediately, I started thinking about further items I would like in the range. Firstly, since the cover comes off, why not offer some funky coloured covers especially aimed at the teenage market? A bright lemon green, flouro orange, and Iâ€™m sure some would pay for a "Hello Kittyâ€ logoâ€™d version too "In terms of the form factor, consider that the guts of the Revo One is essentially a laptop motherboard. The mains power comes from an external inline adapter, and there is a DC input socket on the Revo One itself. Why not offer an identical unit that offers a battery pack, to give a UPS option? Thatâ€™s certainly something I would consider. And why not engineer a third version of the case to take four hard disk cages along with a tiny RAID controller? Connect to the mother Revo One via one of the USB 3 ports, and you have an interesting external storage solution to expand your collection of music, videos and photos even further.

"Itâ€™s about time PC manufacturers showed the way with small-form factor devices. Especially when connected to a TV. This is a promising step, but Acer needs to demonstrate commitment to the product and to bring to market appropriately useful and funky add-ons."Any update to Microsoftâ€™s vast and all-encompassing Office Suite is inevitably only going to be a minor one. It has been thus for years, and it will continue to be. So letâ€™s get this of the way right now: Microsoft Office 2016, which Microsoft has released as a preview for business and developers, is not (so far) a massive update.And so it should be. If Microsoft had rested on its laurels after Office 1995, just think where we would be now: no ribbon interface, no Backstage view or OneDrive integration â€“ and weâ€™d still be plagued by Mr Clippy. Who says incremental improvements are a bad thing?

At least on one front the small additions made to Office 2016 should make a difference to the way your use the suite. At last, Microsoft has a toolbar search box, inherited the "Tell me what you want to doâ€¦â€ search box from the Office online applications, and in one fell swoop, itâ€™s eliminated the one big problem weâ€™ve always had with the Ribbon interface: the difficulty in finding features and functions you donâ€™t commonly use in amongst the hundreds of tools the apps have accumulated over the years.Weirdly, the search box hasnâ€™t yet found its way into all the apps. Outlook hasn't got it yet (we profoundly hope it does eventually), and nor has Access, but after a short while using it, you have to wonder why Microsoft didn't do this years ago. The ability to simply hit ALT-Q and type what youâ€™re looking for â€“ be it Sparklines in Excel, drop caps insertion in Word or animations in PowerPoint â€“ is a revelation.

But it doesnâ€™t stop there: Office 2016â€™s new search facility isnâ€™t only about finding the features you want quickly, itâ€™s also possible to access the functions of those tools directly from the results that appear below your query.Want to insert a quick table in Word? Type "tableâ€into the box, select the Table option from the resulting dropdown and youâ€™ll be able to access all the same functions that are available under the Ribbon bar button. Want to insert a quick bar chart? Select the cell range, type "chartâ€ in the box, and select the chart you want straight from the dropdown.If Microsoft had left the 2016 update at the search box, weâ€™d be happy. However, there are also plenty of other small changes, the first of which youâ€™ll notice as soon as you fire up the applications for the first time: the apps are now more colourful than before, with the toolbars adopting the colour coding of their logos.Thus, Word now has a blue toolbar, Excel's is green, PowerPoint's is red and so on. It isnâ€™t a hugely significant change, and the old colour schemes are still available for those who donâ€™t get on with the brighter colours, but we quite like the new look.

Office 2016 review - backstage view
Elsewhere, there's also not much different, just yet. The Backstage view, a neologism introduced in Office 2013 has had a light lick of paint, with slightly different folder icons and a re-organisation that sees the Browse button always displayed at the top of the screen. It's slightly less confusing to the eye, but weâ€™d have preferred to see more of a root-and-branch overhaul of this area, which has always seemed to be a bit of a hotch potch of ideas than a properly thought-out bit of user interface design.Outlook sees a handful of minor improvements, most notably to the insert attachment menu, which borrows some ideas from the Backstage view. Now, instead of launching straight into a Open dialog box, you get a list of recently opened files appear directly from the toolbar button; only when the Browse folder icon at the bottom of the list is clicked does the traditional Insert File dialog appear. Assuming youâ€™ve been tinkering with the files you want to attach, this should make life easier.http://www.batteries-pc.com/apple.html

In Excel 2016, meanwhile, Power Query will be built-in instead of an Add-on, and minor changes have been made to improve keyboard accessibility for "high-valueâ€ features such as Pivot Tables and Slicers.There isnâ€™t much else to note from a user interface point of view but, as you might have already inferred from the name, not all the changes are consumer orientated, with plenty of business-focussed improvements also on the cards.Word, Excel and PowerPoint now benefit from Microsoftâ€™s Data Loss Protection scheme â€“ a set of tools that IT administrators can use to help them detect and prevent employees leaking sensitive company data accidentally. On a similar theme, Visio now supports Microsoftâ€™s Information Rights Management (IRM) tool, which can help companies control the way files are used once theyâ€™re sent elsewhere - by restricting copy and paste or printing, for example.Outlook gets a number of technical improvements, including the replacement of RPC-based email synchronisation with the more "internet friendlyâ€ MAPI-HTTP protocol, and foreground network calls. Outlook 2016 should receive email quicker and be more reliable on unreliable network connections (when you're working on 3G or 4G links, for example) as a result.

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