If there’s one area where the UX303LA outperforms the current MacBook Air, it’s this. The Air’s TN display is neither as bright nor as colour-accurate as the UX303LA’s, and the resolution is lower as well. Still, with new MacBook Air models expected imminently, that picture could change very soon.Since this is an Ultrabook, there’s nothing special about the UX303LA’s external connectivity. You get three USB 3 sockets, HDMI and mini-DisplayPort video outputs, plus an SD card reader and a 3.5mm headset jack.There’s no Ethernet port on the chassis of the laptop, but Asus supplies a 10/100 USB dongle in the box, while wireless comprises 2x2-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.Finally, to round things off, the UX303LA sports Asus’ usual Bang & Olufsen-branded speakers, which deliver a broad, detailed soundstage, but don’t pack much of a punch.

As expected, Intel’s new Broadwell Core i7 doesn’t rewrite the rulebook, certainly not in performance terms. However, its improved efficiency, coupled with Asus’ budget-conscious specification, means this first outing is far more positive than negative, and at £700 inc VAT, the Zenbook UX303LA represents superb value.It costs £150 less than the current bottom-of-the-range MacBook Air 13in, and that gets you a Core i7-based machine with a 128GB SSD, 13-hour battery life and a top-quality display. It’s an awful lot of laptop for the money.There’s no polite way of putting it: the iPad is a bit of a porker. Not in a chubby sense – it’s incredibly thin, yet still feels durable – but it weighs 680g, which is more than twice as much as a Kindle. As you’d imagine, holding it in one hand isn’t comfortable for more than a minute or two. There’s a good reason Steve Jobs demonstrated it resting on his knee in an armchair: it disguised the fact that you need extra support for prolonged use.Comfort aside, if you’ve used an iPhone the experience will be instantly familiar. Put simply, nothing else comes close. The learning curve is non-existent and it’s all helped by the iPad’s sheer speed.

Web pages render as fast as they do on a desktop PC and pinch-zooming is instantaneous, which helps ensure the screen size isn’t the limitation we expected it to be. For those unsure what they’d use an iPad for, browsing the web from a sofa is one of the most persuasive arguments. It feels every bit as intuitive as on the iPhone, but the size and screen quality free you from constant scrolling and zooming.There’s one monumental caveat, though, and that’s Apple’s continuing disdain for Flash. You soon realise just how many websites rely on it, and while its absence is not quite a killer blow, it puts a good few sticks of dynamite under Apple’s claims that the iPad is "the best way to experience the web”.Everything works in both landscape and portrait mode, the display immediately rotating to accommodate the orientation – there’s no up or down, no right or wrong way to hold it. For using it lying in bed there’s also a handy rotation-lock switch; during the announcement in January, this switch was designated as a mute button, but this is a far more useful function. Muting is now done by holding the down volume rocker, which is slightly annoying if you just want to reduce the volume by more than one or two notches.

A major criticism is that third-party apps can’t multitask (although some Apple apps do – mail is checked in the background, for example, and the iPod app can play while you’re doing something else). How much of an issue this is will depend on your way of using it. Opening and closing apps is fast, and many retain their state when closed. It’s those that don’t that will cause frustration; the New York Times Editors’ Choice app, for example, sends you to the home page upon opening, so nipping in and out proves frustrating.Of course, there are some apps that almost demand multitasking to function properly – think Twitter clients and third-party music players such as Spotify. While there’s a possibility we’ll see some form of it in an impending OS update, right now it’s a limitation that hampers the large, flexible iPad far more than it ever has the little iPhone. If we’re seriously to view the iPad as superior to a netbook, we should at least be able to flick between a website and a messaging app. It’s basic stuff.The virtual onscreen keyboard is another limitation. The device is too wide to type with your thumbs, and typing with one hand while holding it in the other is a slow pecking process. Place it on a desk in landscape mode, though, and things improve. We became proficient pretty quickly, to the point where hammering out an email is far from an unwieldy chore. If you really want to write your novel on it, the iPad’s integrated Bluetooth will pair with any compatible keyboard, and Apple offers a neat iPad dock with a traditional iMac keyboard.

• HP 484170-002 laptop battery
• HP 462890-722 laptop battery
• HP 484171-001 laptop battery
• HP 485041-001 laptop battery
• HP 485041-003 laptop battery
• HP 497694-001 laptop battery
• HP 498482-001 laptop battery
• HP 511872-001 laptop battery
• HP 511883-001 laptop battery
• HP EV06 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-DB72 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-DB73 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-IB72 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-IB73 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-IB79 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-LB72 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-LB73 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-Q34C laptop battery

Elsewhere, there’s 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and the Ultrabook hardware requirements are met by the combination of a 500GB hard disk and a 32GB cache SSD. The battery, meanwhile, lasted for an impressive 9hrs 30mins in our light-use test.The one component to really raise eyebrows comes from Nvidia. We’ve not yet seen its GeForce GT 630M in an Ultrabook, and it delivers a significant boost over the integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip. Indeed, where Intel’s integrated GPU struggles to an average of 27fps in our Low detail Crysis test, the Nvidia GPU hits 92fps at the same settings, and achieves a playable 32fps even at 1,600 x 900 and Medium detail.This solid, attractive machine isn’t without its problems, though. Push the Dell to the limit with games or applications, and the fan noise becomes intrusive. The combination of Intel’s speedy processor and the heat-spewing Nvidia graphics chip were enough to see the fan ramped up to unusually loud levels during longer gaming sessions, while sustained strenuous multitasking had a similar effect.

More disappointing still is that the noisy fans aren’t capable of keeping the XPS 14 cool under pressure. Despite multiple BIOS updates, running our gaming tests for extended periods of time saw average frame rates drop dramatically, and further testing confirmed the GPU was throttling its speeds after around ten minutes. With our Crysis tests causing CPU temperatures to top 93°C, and the area around the fan exhaust near the hinge rising from 48°C at idle to 78°C during gaming, this Ultrabook struggles to maintain its composure under duress.The display raises more concerns. We’ve no complaints about the 1,600 x 900 resolution, but image quality is merely average. Narrow vertical viewing angles cause the image to wash out or darken considerably when viewed at the slightest angle, and a noticeable edge-enhancement effect seemed to be applied at all times, making for an over-sharpened and slightly pixellated effect. With a very average contrast ratio of 226:1, the only real highlight is the Dell’s incandescent backlight – it reached a blinding 494cd/m2 in our tests.Despite being quite lovely to look at, and even lovelier in the flesh, Dell’s XPS 14 has some serious issues to contend with. At this price, we’d have hoped for a far superior display, and it’s clear that cramming a dedicated graphics chipset into such an attractive, slimline chassis isn’t as easy as it looks. There’s a huge amount of promise, but alas this power-packed Ultrabook just doesn’t make the grade.

Apple knows the success of the iPad will be driven largely by the software, and it shows. Photos is perfectly tuned to the iPad’s natural ability to display your shots, with slick slideshows turning this into an instant photo frame.The Calendar and Contacts apps won’t bowl you over with their numerous features, being functional rather than flexible. They’re beautifully designed, though, and look very much like their paper-based equivalents.Apple also includes an enhanced implementation of the iPhone’s Maps app, and it works fantastically: zooming and scrolling are smooth and fast. Overall speed feels limited by the network connection rather than the speed of the app itself.A serious downside of the Wi-Fi-only iPad is its lack of satnav capability. Maps is reduced to approximating your location using information it has about local Wi-Fi networks, which is far from accurate. Only the 3G versions of the iPad will include GPS.Then we come to the iPod app. This not only borrows much of its interface from iTunes, it’s tightly integrated to it. That might sound a good thing, but it means the iPad will only play music you’ve copied on to the device – you can’t stream tracks from your iMac, for instance.

Click here to read Stuart Turton's thoughts on the iBooks reading experience The iBooks eBook-reader app has been lauded as a "Kindle killer” application, and on first impressions it should certainly give Amazon pause for thought. The extreme attention to detail even extends to a faint outline of the text on the previous page showing through as a page turns, just as it would with a regular book.We did have to strain a little to read the text in bright sunlight: that reflective TFT again. And there are the inevitable problems reading from a backlit display for any length of time, which you simply don’t get with a dedicated reader based on E Ink technology (or a book for that matter).At launch there are thousands of third-party apps available: the iPad is compatible with almost all the 150,000+ iPhone apps on the App Store. But once you’ve used full iPad apps, running an iPhone app feels very limiting; they run either in a window in the middle of the screen at standard size, or scaled up to double size with the attendant pixel blurring.We tested a number of third-party apps designed for the iPad, and results were mixed. One of the stars is the $9.99 Scrabble app, which is as close to playing on a real Scrabble board as you could hope for. There’s even a free companion iPhone app allowing you to use the iPhone as your tile rack; you flick the tiles from the iPhone to the board on the iPad.

• HP HSTNN-UB72 laptop battery
• HP HSTNN-UB73 laptop battery
• HP KS524AA laptop battery
• HP KS526AA laptop battery
• HP Compaq 6510b laptop battery
• HP Compaq 6715b laptop battery
• HP Compaq 6715s laptop battery
• HP Compaq 6910p laptop battery
• HP Compaq nc6120 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nc6220 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nc6320 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nc6400 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nx6110 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nx6120 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nx6125 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nx6310 laptop battery
• HP Compaq nx6320 laptop battery

The BBC News app, which sadly won’t be available in the UK until the BBC Trust gives the all-clear, is similarly impressive. In landscape mode you flick through the thumbnails that sit on the left-hand side of the screen; press one you’re interested in and the story appears on the right-hand side. Then flip to portrait mode and the story fills the whole width of the page.Given the limited time developers have had, it’s no surprise that some of the other apps we tried were still rather buggy. They’ll need updating now that developers can test on the actual device rather than the emulator.The iPad is the first in a series of products that could transform the industry; we know HP is releasing its slate later this year, Dell is producing a 5in slate based on Google Android, and rumours abound that both Nokia and Samsung are producing iPad rivals, too.We can see why. Although the iPad isn’t a replacement for your main computer, there is an argument for it as a secondary device. Many people will be able to manage quite happily with just a desktop machine and an iPad, or one of the many slates due to appear in the coming months.That said, don’t be fooled into thinking the iPad or its future competition can match a laptop running a full-blown operating system. And the iPad in particular is restrained by Apple’s controlling influence, as is shown by the crippling lack of support for Flash.Then again, what the Apple iPad has that no laptop can match is fun. It’s difficult to express just how easy it is to use this device. We can see gadget lovers joining the Apple faithful in the queues outside the Apple Stores when it’s released in the UK later this month.

There have been few more heartening 2012 success stories than this one. The Raspberry Pi has been in development since 2006, but this year saw it finally move from dream to reality in truly spectacular style.After the first ten Raspberry Pi boards fetched more than £16,000 on eBay in January, the public got the opportunity to buy their own a month later – and buy they did, in numbers so large that the Raspberry Pi Foundation could barely cope. Despite reports of shipping delays the orders just kept coming: sales topped half a million in September, prompting the Raspberry Pi Foundation to move production from China to the UK, and the big millionth sale is expected before the year is out.Schools are buying, kids and parents are coding together. Mission accomplished? They’re only just getting started.BDUK is doling out £530 million of public investment in broadband, with the aim of giving 90% of homes speeds of at least 24Mbits/sec by 2015. So far every penny that's been allocated has gone to a single company: BT.

Posted by: akkusmarkt at 10:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 2332 words, total size 18 kb.