Hess is clearly proud of HP's testing, claiming its procedures are "more [extensive] than other folks in the industry are doing". If any other manufacturers are reading and want to invite us to their secret testing labs, we're all ears.Asus pioneered the use of touchscreens on budget laptops with its VivoBook family, and now it's the turn of its VivoBook 500CA. Boasting a 15.6in touchscreen, and the same snazzy, wedge-shaped design as its 11.6in and 14in stablemates, this is a budget laptop with a modicum of style.Like its daintier brethren, the S500CA is a striking machine that, despite its size, manages to impart an air of elegance. A dark, brushed-aluminium plate tops the lid, soft-touch plastic coats its underside, and understated matte-silver plastic surrounds the keyboard. Compared to most budget laptops, the S500CA is unusually attractive.Build quality is a highlight. The metal keyboard surround keeps the chassis feeling pleasingly stiff, and while the decision to dump the optical drive might irk some prospective buyers, it's allowed Asus to trim the chassis down to a mere 22mm thick. It's also helped keep weight to a minimum - the 500CA weighs only 2.16kg, noticeably less than most of its 15.6in rivals.

Around the sides are three USB ports, one of which is USB 3, an SD card slot, a 3.5mm headset jack, Gigabit Ethernet, full-sized HDMI and D-SUB outputs. That's an adequate assortment, but we’d prefer more USB 3 sockets. Inside, there’s single-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.The Asus's 15.6in touchscreen is right at home with Windows 8, but the 1,366 x 768 panel isn’t the best example we’ve come across. It’s responsive enough, but its surface is a little sticky under the finger, which occasionally left us dabbing multiple times to drag windows around or perform edge-swipes.As with the other touchscreen machines we’ve seen at this price, the touch-sensitive layer has a detrimental effect on image quality. Maximum brightness reaches only 179cd/m², which is a low result even by budget laptop standards, and there's a noticeable grain to the image.If you can excuse those complaints, however, then the image quality is by no means bad. The contrast ratio is a far more acceptable 245:1, and colour accuracy is as good as it gets at the price. Asus' decision to factory calibrate the display results in honest, lifelike colour reproduction - a rarity in a laptop in this price bracket.

Some of the 500CA's traits are less easy to forgive, however. Despite its size, the keyboard is cramped, with flat, dead-feeling keys. The buttonless touchpad isn’t our favourite, either, and is a little oversensitive. Performance is disappointing, too. Inside, there’s a two-generation-old Sandy Bridge processor, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk, a combination which delivered a predictably middling result of 0.44 in our Real World Benchmarks. The older Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU also takes its toll on gaming performance, and the 500CA struggled to an average of 24fps in our least taxing Crysis test.We like the price of the S500CA, we like its looks, and the fact that it includes a touchscreen at this price is remarkable. Alas, while the VivoBook S500CA looks the part, more dowdy rivals such as the Sony VAIO Fit 15E deliver a more convincing all-round performance.Microsoft has declared that the next version of Windows will be a "game changer" - and has promised Windows tablets for less than $99 later this year.The new OS release will need to be a game changer: Windows 8 and its follow-up Windows 8.1 haven't been universally popular, although recent changes have converted some to fans.

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COO Kevin Turner affirmed that the next version of Windows would be "a great, world-class enterprise OS when it comes out", adding at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference that the company has been listening to its customers regarding what the next operating system needs.Microsoft has previously suggested that the next major Windows update would come in early 2015, but one is widely expected later this year.Turner admitted that Microsoft has lost ground to its rivals, with Windows' former 90% market share having slipped to only 14%, once smartphones and tablets are taken into account. "When you have a 14% market share, you have to have a challenger mindset," he said.One way in which Microsoft plans to fight back against Apple and Google is by slashing the price of Windows tablets, with Turner promising compact tablets this year for only $99. Microsoft has long been expected to release a Surface mini, although Turner didn't suggest the company would necessarily be making such low-cost devices itself.Indeed, Microsoft has already taken steps to encourage the production of third-party budget tablets by making the OS free for use on tablets that measure less than 9in.

"Zero royalty [on compact tablets] was not an easy choice, but it was a necessary choice," Turner said, noting that other tough decisions have included making Office available on the iPad and releasing its own hardware in the form of the Surface.Turner also showed off a $199 HP laptop running Windows, suggesting this would help Microsoft fight back against Google's low-cost Chromebooks.Pop quiz, hotshot. Of all the visitors to this website in the month of writing, what percentage arrived using 1,920 x 1,080, Full HD screens? Make yourself a cuppa and have a think, we’ll come back to the answer later.In the meantime, you’ll no doubt have noticed we reviewed the new iPad last month. As is customary, it attracted all sorts of negative reports at launch, from teardowns showing it’s the most tightly sealed, least recyclable iPad yet, right up to Daily Mail hysteria about it burning people’s hands. But there’s one feature no-one in their right mind was criticising: the screen.Love or hate Apple’s methods, few can deny that its products drive technological progress. When Apple first introduced the Retina display on the iPhone 4, minds were set racing as to where this would eventually take us: if high-pixel-density displays were viable on a mobile phone, with Apple’s huge economies of scale, how long before they’d spread upwards?

Sure enough, the new iPad took that next step. A resolution of 1,536 x 2,048 on a 9.7in panel means a staggering pixel density of 246ppi. This isn’t as high as the iPhone 4, but it’s higher than any tablet we’ve seen. It’s high enough that on this larger screen you finally notice the relatively low resolution of images and logos used in many websites and apps.It isn’t the content’s fault – until last month, it didn’t need to be of a particularly high resolution. Now, suddenly, it does. Like the BBC rebuilding EastEnders’ shoddy sets to stand up to HD viewing, an upscale is needed – and sharpish, with three million new iPads meeting eager eyes within the first four days on sale.The sheer number being sold means that it’s smartphones and tablets driving this technological change. Of the 19 handsets in a recent PC Pro smartphones Labs, 14 had a pixel density of 200ppi or higher, and 11 of those were above 250ppi. Tablets aren’t far behind, with the front-running iPad soon to be rivalled by a 10in tablet from Asus with a 1080p screen – that’s 218ppi.The general feeling is that laptop displays have barely progressed in the past few years.

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Compare that to the 100ppi of the average 15.6in, 1,366 x 768 laptop screen and it sounds like the future is here today. So let’s go back to the quiz question, about how many PC Pro website visitors use 1080p screens. If you guessed 50%, you’re in dream land. If you said 40%, or even 30%, I’m afraid you’ve been sold a lie by the Full HD brigade.The actual figure is 11%. For fairness, we’ll add those with the less common 1,920 x 1,200 resolution to take it up to 16%. Not a lot, is it? If we take that further, and add the few visitors with higher-resolution 27in and 30in screens, we hit the heady heights of 18%, meaning a massive 82% of you make do with resolutions that are frankly laughable by the standards of a £399 tablet.It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Although you could argue that a laptop’s longer viewing distance doesn’t need the sharpness of the new iPad, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect better than we currently get. Each month we receive emails and comment threads asking when manufacturers will wake up and offer Full HD screens, or higher, on reasonably priced laptops. The general feeling is that laptop displays have barely progressed in the past few years.

So where are the high-resolution laptop screens? First, they’ve been waiting for an OS that can handle them properly – Windows 8 finally adds the kind of high-dpi support OS X has had since Lion. They also require a bigger battery, which may be putting off manufacturers in the current market of ultra-thin Ultrabooks.But the simpler fact is that panel production is focused elsewhere: larger 1080p TVs and monitors, and smaller smartphones and tablets. Sony offers a 13.1in Full HD panel on its top-end VAIO Z, but that’s a rare sight these days. What we need is a financially flush company with an already popular product to take on the risk of ordering a new panel in real numbers to drive things forward. So far in the laptop world that hasn’t happened.But signs are promising. First, Apple did exactly that with a 3.5in smartphone, and now again with a 9.7in tablet. The rumour mill was already buzzing with talk of a Retina MacBook display before the new iPad, and we remain almost desperately hopeful it arrives in the next update. Some will inevitably bemoan it if it does, Apple technology being automatically A Bad Thing; but like it or not, it’s largely thanks to Apple that such leaps are being made.

The Internet of Things is making our homes, healthcare and cars smarter, connecting everything to everything else. Who doesn’t grin at the idea of smart fridges, automated toilets and self-driving cars? Hackers certainly are.Think your smart fridge is safe? Trust your automated lighting? It may be time to think again – while it’s worth noting that most of these hacks were carried out by security researchers, if they can do it, so too can criminals.Or, for that matter, hacktivists: it’s a matter of time until the more playful members of Anonymous and the like get a kick out of switching off the UK’s lights or ransom the contents of your fridge.Here's five smart devices that researchers and criminals have already found flaws in - and one that's not quite what it seemed.LIFX makes connected light bulbs, letting you control your home lighting from your smartphone and change its colours; it’s one of the first firms to work with Nest’s developer programme. The bulbs connect over your home Wi-Fi, with a "master bulb" taking orders and delivering it via a mesh network to the other lights. Because the bulb communications were unencrypted, security firm Context could see how the system worked and take over the smart light bulbs, and also see key details about the Wi-Fi network itself. However, the hack took a lot of effort and skill, and had little immediate benefit to an attacker.

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