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| Quadral Aurum Vulkan VIII-R: Offer A Sound As Striking As Its Paintwork (Part 1) |
| The idea of a company branding its premium products under a different name from that of the more day-to-day items is not new and is one that seems to be increasing in popularity. Looking back to the 1970s, most people were well aware that Aurex was to Toshiba, and Optonica was to Sharp, what Lexus is to Toyota in today’s motor industry. |
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| Constellation Virgo/Centaur: High-End Audio Superstars (Part 2) |
| By whatever magic Madnick and his A-team created these units, the Searchers' ‘Needles 8. Pins’- which I have heard at least 1000 times - delivered tiny details that previously eluded me. You could analyses the gorgeous harmonies, especially when the group splits apart left/right at 1m 055 into the track. |
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| Constellation Virgo/Centaur: High-End Audio Superstars (Part 1) |
| Few manufacturers have followed the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young route to superstardom, though it makes sense. You assemble a ‘super-group' to create your products, headed — hopefully — by one whose ego personality quirks or other debilitating characteristics don’t get in the way. In this case, the “Graham Nash’ of the group is one Peter Madnick. |
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| The Xbox One - The Machine That Assumes You're A Thief? (Part 4) |
| Consider the Xbox One again. Its use of cloud services, while inevitably assuming a decent-speed internet connection, means that once a game is installed, you don't have to fumble around for the disc again. You log into your user account and you can play. It sounds all straightforward and hopefully that's just what it'll be. |
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| The Xbox One - The Machine That Assumes You're A Thief? (Part 3) |
| Incidentally, there’s a further requirement that Microsoft has laid down with the Xbox One, and it relates to the Kinect device. Kinect, you may recall, is a motion sensing system that Microsoft introduced for the Xbox 360, as a way to combat the Nintendo Wii’s motion controller and, in fairness, it’s really quite good. |
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| The Xbox One - The Machine That Assumes You're A Thief? (Part 2) |
| This leads us to what Microsoft has in store with the Xbox One. Here's a games console where, as plans are set at the moment, you're going to effectively have to ask on a daily basis for permission to play your games. That's not an exaggeration. That's the digital rights management system that Microsoft intends to deploy, as it stands right now. |
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| The Xbox One - The Machine That Assumes You're A Thief? (Part 1) |
| Fast forward to now and the simple job of playing a video game feels like it's getting more and more complex. On a PC, more often than not you need to install a game through a service like Steam. On the upside, that means previous tortures such as installing patches and keeping things up to date have been simplified, but the trade-off has been that we've surrendered a degree of control. In some cases, we can even be blocked from playing if we don't download some form of mandatory update. |
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| Alternative iOS Browsers for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch (Part 2) |
| Puffin’s ‘cloud technology’ approach brings to the iPad and iPhone video and interactive sites powered by Adobe Flash – including games. It does this by rendering the entire site on servers in the US and streaming it as video or images to your iOS device. Clever! This also lets it claim to be significantly faster than Safari. |
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| Beats Executive Headphones - A Smart Overhaul For The Modern Gentleman |
| Fitting its target audience, the Executive is thankfully more subdued than the regular, some might say bombastic, Beats headphones. Due to the incorporation of brushed aluminum within the frame, the Executive simply oozes quality and style, whilst its padded leather ear-cups keep your music listening experience comfortable, even during extended periods of use. |
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| Razer Electra Gaming Headset |
| The sizeable and weighty (284 g) design of the Electra headset does not quite make for a portable experience, but for gamers the leatherette ear cushions allow for optimal comfort during long gaming stints. These also help with noise isolation so as to keep the focus on the action onscreen. |
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| Tiamat 7.1 Gaming Headset - The Power Of Ten |
| One of the things that modern entertainment brings us is surround sound. It has proven extremely effective in helping create suspension of disbelief, and proves particularly effective in creating immersion and engagement in video games, the most interactive form of entertainment. |
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| Screen Play For Gaming (Part 2) : Asus VG278HE, BenQ XL242T, Dell S2440L, Dell 2913WM |
| This 29-inch monster promises to be the perfect PC gaming monitor, with its extra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio providing a wide field of view normally associated with multi-monitor setups. There are no nasty bezels getting in the way, but on the flip side the panel is flat, so the outer edges can’t be angled inwards towards the user as with a traditional three-screen configuration. |
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| Screen Play For Gaming (Part 1) : Acer T232HL, Asus VG248QE |
| 144Hz. That’s the maximum officially supported refresh rate of this monitor. With the screen updating 144 times per second, games look much smoother, and input latency is drastically reduced. Sure, you need a monster GPU setup to run today’s sexiest games at 144 frames per second to match it, but for those in the pursuit for the ultimate in monitor speed, it’s a small price to pay. |
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| Ministry Of Sound - The Under-Appreciated World Of PC Gaming Audio (Part 1) |
| The move to UAA means Creative can’t build cards the way it used to, but your PC still needs to process audio. So there are several advantages to using a dedicated gaming sound card. For starters, the Digital Signal Processor (the audio equivalent of a CPU or GPU) is much more powerful than onboard solutions, which means your CPU wastes less time thinking about audio. |
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| Virgin Media - Broadband, Cable TV, Landline Phone And Mobile Services (Part 2) |
| Virgin Media continues to lead the way when it comes to catch-up and on-demand content. It has had catch-up services for the main terrestrial channels (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5) integrated into its timeline for a while. Some of this is sent via cable TV and uses one of the boxes’ cable tuners to play saving your broadband bandwidth while other programs come over IPTV, including iPlayer. |
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| Freesat Free Time - A Great Service To Catch-Up TV |
| Following the success of YouView, Freesat, the free-to-air satellite TV provider, decided it had to fight back with a platform of its own, Free Time. This is designed to integrate live TV with the ability to step back in time and watch programs that you've missed on catch-up services. |
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| Google Glass (Explorer Version) - An Exciting Innovation And Potential Device (Part 5) |
| The bone-conducting speaker occasionally left much regret. In noisy areas, such as airports or streets, you'll struggle to hear anything. Plugging your ears with your fingers helps a lot, but also makes you look a bit silly. Fortunately, wearing earbud has the same effect. In fact, we'd love to see a 3.5mm headphone jack on a future set of Glass so that you could wear your own earbuds and listen to music - which you can’t do on Glass right now. |
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| Google Glass (Explorer Version) - An Exciting Innovation And Potential Device (Part 4) |
| An ideal use-case for this is getting emails read to you while in the car and then replying back by voice. Unfortunately, because it takes 2 taps and 2 swipes just to get to the "Read Aloud" option, which is not something you should do while driving. Whether you're sitting on the train, it would be better to be able to read the entire email just by tilting your head up and down to scroll. |
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| Google Glass (Explorer Version) - An Exciting Innovation And Potential Device (Part 3) |
| Hangouts is of course an important part of Glass, and you can start by saying "start a hangout with" followed by the individual or Circle. Note that you can’t start a public Hangout, so make sure you build the Circles right now. You can also call any available contact designated under the name, assuming Glass is connected to the phone as a Bluetooth headset. |
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| Google Glass (Explorer Version) - An Exciting Innovation And Potential Device (Part 1) |
| Stand in a line of people in just about any major metropolitan area in the world and you will see the same thing: slouched shoulders and down-turned faces staring glumly at smartphone screens. Some people never look away, completely immersed in whatever is happening in their hands, while others constantly pulled the phone out of pocket or purses and popping on the screens for just a moment before putting them away again for just a minute or two. |
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| 8 Photography Apps You Must Try Out! (Part 2) |
| If you are the kinds who love watching GIF animations online, then this is the app for you. Not only do you get to create GIF animations, but you can also add some filters to the final GIF. The best part about the app is its simplicity. |
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| 8 Photography Apps You Must Try Out! (Part 1) |
| Smartphones these days come with cameras which are capable of taking decent pictures for mobile sharing. But capturing photographs is just one half of the equation, the other being sharing it. You will rarely find anyone NOT sharing photographs on social media sites. |
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| Razer Edge Pro - It Combines Tablet, Laptop And Gaming PC In One |
| The Edge starts at $1,000, with the Pro climbing up to $1,450. That may be pricey for a "tablet," but it comes with a Core i7-3517U, Nvidia GT 640M LE, 8GB of DDR3/1600, and a 256GB SSD. While it's supposed to be the happy love-child of a portable tablet and a powerful PC, the end result is a compromised monstrosity. |
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| High-Flying Celebrity Headphones |
| There are scored of headphones from big-name brands such as AKG or Scull Candy backed by some of the biggest rappers, singers and music producers in the world, but with varying degrees of success. We got our groove on with the biggest names in music. |
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| Google Glass - Life Through A Lens |
| Only at Google 10 in techy-sawy San Francisco could a Google Glass wearer walk the streets relatively unnoticed, limited number of these new wearable computing J devices have been among the public for months now, and they generally elicit double takes and curious stares. |
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| Make Your Films DVD Friendly With Markers |
| The festive season may well be a distant memory, but let’s not forget we’ve got smartphones capable of shooting great quality video to capture those special moments. If you filmed your Christmas and New Year’s Eve shenanigans on your iPhone 5’s brilliant four-inch screen, chances are that you’re going to want to cut all of your clips together and export them to a DVD for viewing in the future. |
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| Use Aperture’s Tools To Rescue Flat Images |
| Sometimes you think you’ve got the perfect shot, but when you see the result on screen, it looks a little flat. This can happen with any type of image, but is a real problem with portraits, because you want your model to show clearly. If the image looks dull, then it’s difficult to see the face. |
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| Eizo ColorEdge CG276 - The Monitor That Fits Your Style And Your Schedule |
| The ColorEdge CG275W has spent almost two years on PC Pro’s A-List, and for good reason. Eizo’s flagship 27in monitor delivers stunning image quality - and maintains it, thanks to its built-in colorimeter. Now, Eizo seeks to improve upon near-perfection with an updated model - the ColorEdge CG276. |
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| Beyond Angry Birds (Part 3) |
| How well any of this works for you is very dependent on what tablet you have or are getting, because some apps will only work on specific operating system releases and at higher performance levels. |
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| Beyond Angry Birds (Part 2) |
| It doesn't take much guessing to work out that this is a spreadsheet app, though a simple one by Excel standards. Apple has recently updated Numbers to make it more compatible with Microsoft's number cruncher, but it still doesn't support accounting or conditional formats, pivot tables, any of the database functions or any VBA macros. |
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