The Boogie Board Rip from Improv Electronics is an electronic clipboard that will save handwritten notes and drawings to Adobe‘s .pdf format for later transfer to a PC via USB. You draw or write with the included stylus on the pressure-sensitive 9.5″ dark monochrome LCD screen, which results in light coloured lines and writing.  When you want to save your work, you simply press the “Save” button at the top. To start over, the “Erase” button wipes the screen. It’s that easy.

Here’s a few scribblings and the complementary .pdf. I’m no artist. That’s an A4 notebook behind it for scale.

I’m not sure exactly how the stylus and the screen work together to record the image as any stylus can be used to write on the screen, but only writing from the included stylus will be recorded in the saved .pdf. Sometimes, I found that I wasn’t pressing hard enough for all the lines to be recorded; if you look at the picture of the hedgehog, you’ll see that the drawing is much spikier than the .pdf. This was an early trial picture and you get used to pressing that little bit more firmly.

The internal memory is only 8 MB but this is sufficient for around 200 .pdfs. Getting the .pdfs off the device is simple – just connect up via micro USB and the Rip appears as an external drive. I had no problems connecting it up to both Windows and Linux machines. The Rip has an internal rechargeable battery which charges via the USB and lasts ages – the manufacturer suggests a week of normal use and I can see no reason to disagree.

I found the Rip to be a great partner for tools such as Evernote. I could take notes in a meeting and then transfer the notes into Evernote, creating a chronological record of meetings and discussion. Personally, I was looking for a simple paper notebook replacement that was a relatively cheap and robust, and nowhere near as expensive as a full tablet.

In the end, I had mixed feelings about the Rip. It does what it does well, but it’s not the complete package that I need it to be for the Rip to replace my A4 notebook.

First, the 9.5″ screen is too small. Being used to A4 notebooks, I struggled with the narrower page and often used the Rip in landscape mode rather than portrait to get extra width.  If you are a Moleskine person, more used to the A5 format, it will perhaps be less of an issue but I look forward to a larger screen.

Second, the “resolution” of the screen and stylus combination isn’t detailed or fine enough. When I write with my normal handwriting, it’s difficult to read the writing on the screen because the lines are quite broad. As a result, I have to write larger which compounds the small screen issue. To be fair, the saved .pdf does record the handwriting accurately so perhaps I just need to get over the display and rely on the .pdf.

I admit that I have specific needs so I would also emphasise the Rip’s good points.

First it’s very easy to use. There are two buttons, “Erase” and “Save / Wake” and when you do press the buttons, the device responds almost instantly. There’s no PIN or password to enter.

Second, it’s lightweight with little difference between it and a paper notebook.

Third, the saving of drawing and notes straight to a .pdf is the brilliant bit. No need for scanning or special paper. I can instantly upload the .pdf to Evernote (or Microsoft’s OneNote) for a historical record of meetings and other activities.
Finally, it’s fun and you’ll never run out of paper.

In summary, Improv Electronics’ Boogie Boards are styled as paper replacements and they’re not far wrong but for me it’s just not there. At the moment, the Rip is best suited to drawings and sketches but falls short for handwriting, so I’ll be keep my A4 notebook for now. However, I genuinely look forward to the Rip 2, which will I’m sure will have a larger screen and a more detailed stylus.

Do you have a large home in which your wireless router signal is not available in some locations. I have that situation in my home, where the kids bedrooms wireless signal is 1 bar or less. Today I fixed that by installing a Linksys RE1000 Wireless-N Range Extender.

Total setup time of the wireless range extender from opening the box to having it installed was 10 minutes. The kids bedrooms now have 5 bars of wireless connectivity. I am not sure why I did not do this earlier, as it is going to cut the kids complaining considerably. While we have strict family policies on what can be done on the Internet in their own rooms, when it comes to doing homework I would rather have them focused in their rooms so my wife and I can be productive and make noise in the rest of the house.

Setup is simple, you use a computer currently connected to the network via your wireless network, you install the CD and it steps you through the process. Of all network upgrades I have made this was simply the easiest by far the only thing I needed to remember was the password for the wireless network.

The Linksys RE1000 also comes with a built in Ethernet port, which you could use to plug a set top box or other device into is that may not be wireless compatible to bridge to your wireless router.. Heck it could even be connected to a printer in another room, or a computer that may not have a wireless card in it.

Priced at 89.00 this is a great way to get more range and add flexibility to your current network configuration. It will plug into a wall plug or you can use the cable it comes with to hide it away.

The newest scanner from Plustek, the OpticBook 3800, purports to scan easily without damage to books.  I received one of the scanners for review and couldn’t wait to try it out.  Flat-bed scanning of books or pages from books is one of the things I do a lot of, and having an easier way, with less manhandling of the original, is something I’m always wanting.

Unfortunately, the OpticBook 3800 is not that scanner.  It does, however, have some worthwhile features, which I’ll cover in my review.

Upon unboxing the unit, I was surprised at how light it was.  It is four inches thick, 10 and a half inches wide, and 17 and a half inches long, yet weighs considerably less than the laptop I attached it to.  It connects via USB.  I connected it to a Toshiba laptop with 4 gb of RAM running Windows 7.  The unit did not self-install using Windows Update, and had to be installed using the software that accompanied it.  Installed was the driver for the device, Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint (for Optical Character Recognition), and Plustek Book Pavilion.  It also included Presto Page Manager and DI Capture, neither of which I could figure out how to use.

The scanner can be used with any of these products, or with any other software that employs a TWAIN interface to the scanner.  I had trouble getting Adobe Photoshop to recognize the scanner’s TWAIN interface, but was easily able to scan using the Plustek Book Pavilion software and a push of the button on the scanner.  Scans are fast, and the result can be a PDF, TIF, or JPG.

Plustek claims that because of the height of the scanner, books can easily be laid one page on the glass, and the rest of the book laying against the side of the scanner, thereby eliminating the usual distortion of words near the spine of the book.  I found this worked well with a larger book that opened more fully, but less well with a smaller book with a tighter bind.  I still had to press the book nearly flat to get a good scan unless it was already rather loosely bound.  However, the scan itself was very clean, and after a run through Abbyy FineReader Sprint, a PDF was created that could be read through Adobe Acrobat Reader’s on-board reader with considerable accuracy.  The physical appearance of the scan is not as good as I had hoped, however.  A change in resolution of the scan itself (from the default of 300 dpi to 600 dpi) did improve the overall look.

One frustration for me for this device is that it does not turn off when not in use.  I had to physically turn the device off to have the scanner lamp shut off.  This is surprising, since having that scanner lamp on can really decrease its useful life.

Priced around $300 (or less if you shop around), the Plustek OpticBook 3800 does offer a low-cost, effective solution for those that not only need to scan photographs and images, but  text as well.  I may consider it for my own home office, since it includes the OCR software with it (usually pricey all on its own).  It would be great for digitizing some things I keep holding onto that really would be more useful if they weren’t stuffed into a box.

My HP TouchPad arrived on my doorstep last Tuesday and it’s been an interesting week since I opened the box. Here are a few thoughts on the first WebOS tablet.

First impressions do count and the box itself started well. It has an almost airtight sliding drawer construction that makes it impossible to open quickly. This slowly reveals the TouchPad as it pulls gently out. Once you eventually have the ‘Pad in your hand, it’s obvious that this is a well-constructed device. The front is glass, presumably of the Gorilla variety, and the black is a hard shiny plastic with the HP logo in the centre. It is heavier than I was expecting but not uncomfortably so.

As a Pre 2 owner, I was right at home with WebOS from the start. Some of the gestures are missing, such as the back swipe, but the main upwards swipe from the bottom of the screen persists. Along with the multitasking this is the heart of WebOS. And it works very well. I’m probably biased but I definitely think that WebOS is the best tablet OS by far.

This would be for naught if there weren’t the apps to run on the OS. And it would be wrong to say that there are loads, becuase there aren’t. But they’re coming and each day new apps are released specifically for the TouchPad. Most of the phone-based apps also work in a kind of emulator but you don’t get the benefit of the big screen. The TouchPad apps are pretty good and there’s some nice free stuff that HP has presumably helped with. The Epicurious app is chock full of great recipes and there are Sky News and USA Today apps as well. Of course, Angry Birds makes its obligatory appearance.

Other commentators have mentioned that the TouchPad is a bit laggy. Laggy is the wrong word – it pauses sometimes. When you are actually doing stuff, it’s pretty quick – I have no complaints there. For example, doing a bit of web surfing is as quick as you’d get at your laptop, but if I switch to the email app and I change to a different email account, the app sometimes seems to pause as if it’s checking for new email. These are generally minor irritations - looking at my TouchPad now, I’m listening to music with a weather app, email and three web browsing sessions open. Flicking between the apps is smooth and they respond instantly once they pop to the foreground.

What else is good? The Beats Audio is very impressive – I think it’s possibly the best MP3 player I’ve listened to.
The Skype client is integrated into the Messaging App and seems to work well. I Skype-d my father with video from the UK to Shanghai and there was a bit of lag at the beginning of the call but the call got better as it went on. (Of course there are a number of factors involved in Skype calls).
Ms Office document editing isn’t ready yet but the viewer has handled all the Office docs and Adobe .pdfs that I’ve thrown at it.
Video plays well but the hi-res screen shows up the limitations of the source. What looked really crisp on my phone now looks a bit pixellated in places. Perhaps I should have bought the 32 GB version after all.
Flash works as well as Flash ever does. The BBC’s iPlayer works ok but I had a bit of trouble with Channel 4′s on demand programming.
Bizarrely, there’s no calculator app. C’mon guys – how long would it have taken to take the basic calculator from the Pre and re-skin it?

There’s a nice three pane app interface that I hadn’t seen before. It’s used to good advantage in the email app, with the left column showing accounts, the middle showing the email headers and the right showing the email body. By tapping on a little III icon, you can get the pane to expand over the panes to the left. It’s very slick and very handy.

One personal peeve is that certain apps insist on running in a particular orientation, which as far as I’m concerned is upside down when I’m holding the TouchPad in my hand. I can understand that some apps want to run in landscape rather than portrait but wanting to run a particular way up is nonsense.

Overall, I’m pleased with my purchase - for the purposes of disclosure this was a personal purchase and not a review unit. There are some rough edges and there is a lack of apps, but there’s nothing a few software updates won’t fix.

I have an older car – with no Bluetooth and definitely no MP3 player. It hasn’t been a big deal – I have been using my iPhone through a device that sends an FM radio signal. But now I can take all those wires away and use this Jabra Freeway Bluetooth speaker. A pretty impressive device that was awarded the best of CTIA wireless in 2011.

Jabra Freeway Front View

The Good Stuff – Jabra Freeway

Let’s answer the “What is the FM button for” question. Well, it simply turns this device into a FM tuner. You can listen to the voice through the built-in speaker, or through the radio on a tuned frequency. Great for if the whole car needs to hear a conversation.

The Jabra Freeway charges on a Micro-USB plug. The device can be affixed to the visor of your car (or wherever you want to put it). Turn the power on and you hear a voice say “Jabra on – Ready for pairing”.

The pairing process on iPhone is pretty standard. Turn on Bluetooth and choose the Freeway. Key in the pin (if necessary) and the device will pair.

When you have to answer a call, just hit the button with the phone receiver on it. Need to hang up – do the same. Volume buttons on the bottom to turn up and down the audio and a mute button if sirens are piercing outside.

Even though it’s pretty big for a Bluetooth hands-free unit, the contour does make it work so you can place it on the visor without blocking the vanity mirror. However, the speaker will also do double-duty. Whereas most hands-free units only take the phone calls, you can play music right through this unit. Turn on the FM button and your music will transfer over.

Like most units nowadays, you can charge in a couple hours and be on standby for days. Even with moderate to heavy usage, you might have to re-charge once every 6-7 days.

Since the unit is most likely right above your head, I can talk to someone while my windows are rolled down. Everyone I talked to through the unit has said there was no issue in hearing me. That is the best test of the Jabra Freeway.

The Not So Good Stuff – Jabra Freeway

I wasn’t completely impressed with the speakers in the unit. There was a noticeable clip (a buzzing sound) when I was listening to either music or someone talking to me with the volume around 70-80%. I had to turn down the speaker a bit to make the clipping sound go away.

The devices’ wire clip to the visor causes a bit of concern – especially since this is a bigger unit. If I am driving down the highway with the windows rolled down, then get a blast from the sun – causing me to whip the visor to the side window – I could see that unit go flying into the cross-traffic. A piece of velcro could be the answer, since I don’t see a person moving this unit around too much.

There are a lot of voice commands in this unit. Other hands-free units let me say “Call – [person]” once I press the button. You have to learn the commands – although by asking for help, the unit will give you a list of options.

There is no pause or stop button for the music. You have to press voice and then say “Pause”. Would have been better with just the button.

The Verdict

It does have a couple flaws, but the device is pretty good. This is a unit that sells for $129.99, so the price might be the tipping point to saying no. After all, I don’t need a device to play my iPod music as much and I can get a hands-free bluetooth unit for $50 or less.

If the Freeway was to drop below $100 and fix the speaker clipping, then it will be worth it. Otherwise, if you need a nicely designed unit with a larger speaker, then the Freeway is for you.

Disclaimer: I did receive a unit from the company. This is a unbiased review of the Freeway.

G Data’s 2012 range of security products cover basic antivirus through to specialised protection for laptops and notebooks. Depending on the version purchased, the features build-up from antivirus and safe surfing, through firewalls and spam protection, to backup and data recovery, with additional features in the notebook versions.

On test here is InternetSecurity 2012 which sits between AntiVirus and TotalCare and the main features are antivirus, firewall, safe surfing and spam protection. Parental controls and file shredder are included too. The graphic here shows the main differences between each version.

The software can be purchased and downloaded directly from G Data but in this instance, it was the boxed retail product. Not unexpectedly, the main contents of the box are a CD and a user manual, which generally explains the software quite clearly and simply. A bonus for people who aren’t familiar with security software and as the licence key is stuck on the back cover, it’s easier to keep safe.

A further benefit of the boxed copy is that the install disk also doubles as an emergency disk which can be booted from. This is great for those really nasty viruses which block AV software and being able to boot outside of Windows to get at them is great. If you downloaded the software rather than buying the boxed copy, there’s an option in the SecurityCenter application to create a boot disk but it’s an extra step you’ll probably forget to do.

Installation is straightforward and it’s by the numbers with clear prompts. During the install, G Data clearly explains its privacy policy when it requests permission to send data back for analysis: nothing is hidden away in the EULA. As usual, you have to register with G Data, but the software offers a quick registration of just name and email address. There’s still the option to enter fuller details if you want. As you’d expect, the installation finishes with a reboot.

On rebooting, the G Data icon is now sitting pretty in the system tray and initially InternetSecurity contacts its servers and starts downloading fresh AV signatures. This takes a few minutes but once done, you can go into the main SecurityCenter overview to see the status of the main features.

As you might imagine, each section in the SecurityCenter has further actions and settings. For example, in Virus Protection you can request scans for specific folders or drives. Or you can go into the Settings and change which of the two scanning engines are in use. Without going into every section and being thoroughly boring, all I can say is that the options are comprehensive and give the opportunity for tweaking to your particular circumstances. All of the G Data security products are available as trial downloads so you can check whether they fit your needs before buying.

Performance-wise, InternetSecurity did not seem to have a significant impact on the computer. One touch that I did like was that virus signature updates are scheduled for a particular time rather than automatically updating as soon as you log into Windows. On older computers, this allows you to get using your computer faster than you might with other competing AV products.

Not having a set of viruses handy, I wasn’t able to actually test the AV features of the product but when I did a scan of my local disk, it did pick up a trojan that I wasn’t aware of in some downloaded files. With two antivirus engines built into the product, you’d expect it to catch most of the nasty stuff as each engine takes a different approach to detecting viruses

Overall, G Data InternetSecurity is a comprehensive and competent product with lots of features and a couple of value-adds, such as parental controls. I’d be perfectly happy to entrust my on-line security to this tool.

Prices are £30 for AntiVirus, £35 for the version tested here InternetSecurity and £40 for TotalCare. There are also specialised versions for notebooks and if you have an Android phone, you get AV protection for free with any of these products. All the details are on G Data’s website.

As a mid-tier offering, the HTC Gratia doesn’t appear to get the same notice as the Sensations, Desires and Incredibles, which is a shame because it’s a good phone and will suit those who want a small Android phone but don’t have the cash for a top-end device. If you haven’t heard of the Gratia before and you live in the US, that’s because over there it’s known as the Aria. It’s largely the same device.

To get the specs out of the way, it’s an Android 2.2 device with a 3.2″ 320 x 480 touchscreen. Weights in at 115 g and measures 58 mm wide, 104 mm tall and 12 mm thick. All the expected radios and gadgets – 3G, wifi (b/g), bluetooth, GPS, compass, 5 MP camera, microSD expansion slot – the full specs are on HTC’s site (though it lists the Android version as 2.1).

As you’ll see from the pictures below, the review model had a white plastic back that had a slightly matt finish to it. The phone felt comfortable in the hand and the detail of the extra screws on the back gave the Gratia an “industrial” edge, which I liked. I didn’t try to find out if the screws actually held anything together or were only for effect.

Taking the back off reveals the SIM slot, the microSD slot and the battery. At the bottom left, the two contacts are for aerials that were embedded into the back cover. The micro USB connector is in the middle. The back covers the sides, top and bottom as well.

Side on, there’s a sense of the shape and how it feels in the hand. It’s not a thin phone, but it’s not a fat one either.  It’s comfortable. As with most devices, there’s a little bit of bevelling to make it feel thinner than it really is.

Enough on the physical, what’s it like to use as a phone? Unsurprisingly, it’s much like every other HTC Android 2.2 phone. It comes with the HTC Sense enhancements and there did seem to be a few little extra launcher customisations that I hadn’t seen before. Unfortunately, I didn’t have another phone handy to compare and they may simply be incremental updates that went along with 2.2.

Generally, the phone was responsive using both the touchscreen and the trackpad. Animations were smooth and scrolling up and down lists was good. The usual slew of apps was present and the Gratia has access to the Android Market if you need more. Audio and video playback was fine with no glitches or jerkiness on the files I tried. Some other reviews said the Gratia was “underpowered” but I can’t really say that performance was an issue, though I’m not a big game player which seems to be the focus of the issue. And of course, if you do have lots of apps open, it will begin to slow down.

Setting up apps with accounts to access email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. was all by the numbers, as it were. I was up and running with the Gratia within minutes of turning the phone on.

Battery life was ok – I got a day’s worth of work out of it with some to spare and that’s with a bit of email, bit of surfing, bit of music listening. A typical day as far as I was concerned, but the Gratia will need recharged overnight for the next day.

Pricewise, off-contract the Gratia is generally available around £275 with the best prices being close to £250. I was unable to find any UK mobile telco carrying the Gratia at present so I can’t comment on contract prices.

Overall, this a fine mid-range smartphone at a fair price. There’s plenty to recommend and not too much to complain about. For someone looking for an Android 2.2 phone that’s not going to break the bank off-contract, this is a good choice.

Thanks to HTC for the loan of the Gratia.

Add Pad by Dragongears is one of those little apps that you never knew you needed, but now that it’s on your smartphone, it’s indispensable. Add Pad can simply be described as a notebook that adds up. Any number encountered in the text is added to a running total shown in the bottom right of each note.

The top level screen shows the total values for each note.

The uses are myriad. You can use it to keep track of mileage for expenses or what you spend your cash on. I personally find it excellent for is calculating how much wood I need for little garden projects. It’s not perfect, as when I need four uprights, I have to enter the number (70 in this case) four times, but it does make it very flexible. The only other mathematical function supported is minus, so -10 will subtract 10 from the total.

Add Pad lets you set different units for each note and whether the unit comes before or after the number. The notes can also get coloured marks so that can be used for basic categorisation, e.g. business or personal.

Available now for HP Palm WebOS devices from the App Catalog. If you’re quick, you can get it for free.

If you are looking for a Father’s Day gift, then you might want to take a look at the Freecom Data Bar XXS. As you might guess from the XXS, it’s a tiny little USB memory stick. My measuring says that it’s just 2.5 mm deep, 12 mm wide and 31 mm long – it’s basically the same size as the USB socket, only longer.

Because it’s so small and easily misplaced, the Data Bar comes with a keyring lanyard and the little silver barrel (see picture) unscrews to easily detach the memory stick when you need to use it. The Data Bar is also waterproof and dustproof, which is handy because anything this small is bound to go through the wash at some point.

Performance-wise, bonnie++ reported write rates at around 13 MB/s and using dd, it came in around the 15 MB/s. Remember these figures will be specific to the particular setup used but should be indicative of the Data Bar’s speed. The Data Bar XXS tested was the 2 GB version.

Available in fashionable white and in 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB sizes, prices start at 9.95 euros going up to 79.95 euros. If you want small, they don’t come much smaller than this.

Thanks to Freecom for the review unit.

Even in the absence of any real musical ability, sometimes it’s fun to bash away on a drum kit. Most of the various application catalogues for smartphones have little virtual drum kits so you can drum away whenever the urge to jam comes on. The HP App Catalog for WebOS (that’s the Palm Pre series, the Pixi and the Veer) has a selection of drum kit apps, so here’s a quick round up of the offerings – Natural Drums, Drummer, Music Instruments and AudioScape.

Natural Drums lays the instruments out as they might be in real-life with a cartoonish top-down view, as you can see from the screen shot. It has the fewest number of kits with only two, switching between acoustic and electronic, coming with 8 instruments in the former and 7 in the latter. There’s no discernible lag between hitting the screen and the sound coming out, and multitouch is supported, so you can hit several things at once. This is my drum kit of choice and the best bit is that it’s free.

Natural Drums - Acoustic

Natural Drums - Electronic

In comparison with the other apps, Drummer is simply a bit dull and not as polished as the other three. The kit is laid out in uninspiring grey 2 x 4 grid and seems to be only capable of two multitouches at once. The simple layout may suit some who just want to get down to making noise. On the plus side, there are three kits available, Acoustic, Synthesized and Warped. Currently on sale in the App Catalog for £0.99 which doesn’t compare well with the free alternatives.

Drummer

Music Instruments takes the drum kit app and turns it up to 11, with lots of percussion instruments including the infamous cowbell, gong, triangle, tambourine, castanets and xylophone in addition to drums, bongos and cymbals. All the instruments are photorealistic which looks great and works well when there are only one a few instruments shown. However, I find that some of the instruments are too close together on the drum kit to bash with confidence. Multitouch is supported – I was able to test up to four at once and there’s no lag that I can hear. There’s a lot of noise here for no money. More cowbell….

Music Instruments

Music Instruments

Finally, AudioScape is more of a sound machine rather than a pure drum kit. As you’ll see from the picture it lays out the instruments in a 3 x 3 grid with an abstract background pattern. Not sure if it was just me, but I could only get the first six instruments of any set to work. There is a plethora of drum kits including Acoustic Drums, Bongos & Congas, Distorted Drums, Electro Drums 1 and Electro Drums 2. There are also sound boards for Animals, Body Noises, Electric Guitar, Guitar, Piano, Sound Effects 1 and Sound Effects 2. And you can even make your own sound boards by transferring sound files across to the Pre via USB. Multitouch is supported and I was able to produce four noises at once. Another free bargain.

AudioScape

Overall, Natural Drums is my favourite for a bit of jamming. Good looking interface and an app that does what it sets out to do, and do it well. Music Instruments is pretty cool too, with lovely graphics and an unequalled range of percussion instruments. AudioScope is a good app, but it is more of a sound machine and may appeal more to a younger audience who can never get enough of cows mooing and dogs barking. Bringing up the rear is Drummer which is simply eclipsed by its rivals in terms of both features and price.

Reviews carried out an HP Pre 2 running WebOS 2.1.

When the folks at Sonic Alert reached out about a month ago and asked me if I would like to review the Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock and Bed Shaker I did so under one condition. That condition was that if it could get my  14 yr old out of bed in the morning, then I would declare it the best alarm clock ever made.

I am here to report that the Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock & Bed Shaker is the best Alarm Clock ever made! My 14 yr old daughter is a night owl like me, and she could sleep through anything to include being an absolute bear to get moving in the morning. I have half a box full of so-called alarm clocks that even if taped to her eardrum would not wake her up. Here is what Sonic Bomb does different. The Alarm while loud 113 db comes with the “bed shaker module” thus the alarm clock is the two piece combination. On the first night I strategically placed the shaker in the middle of her double sized bed, one part touching the mattress the other touching the wood base that supports the mattress. I placed the Sonic Bomb out of reaching distance for maximum effect.

The first time it rang she took about 10 seconds to get up cussing the thing out confusion factor on here part on how to shut it off made it the comedy event of the week. The true test was three weeks in, if it could still wake her up then we would have a winner.  She has developed some strategies to try to defeat it but overall she is still getting up on her own. The folks at Sonic Bomb could improve the design just a little. Make the cable that plugs into the alarm from the shaker one that attaches via a locking knurled knob versus a plug . It is way to easy to unplug the shaker. Make the shaker cable about 5 ft longer would help as well, getting the alarm clock out of slap distance is important with a 14 yr old.

But overall this thing is better than any Big Ben any day of the week. The $42.00 price tag may scare some, but I have an annoying Seiko alarm clock that cost $50.00 that I was given as a gift in Japan 30 years ago that still is annoying enough to get me to roll out of bed.

We are getting double duty out of the Sonic Bomb because my boy’s room is next door to their sisters, and it usually motivates them to get moving as well. One thing for sure a lot less yelling to wake up is going on here in the morning. Believe me I have done everything in the arsenal and then some in the past to get the kids to roll out on their own. Someday I will talk about the bucket of water I used on my podcast sometime.

So if you have a person in your home that sleeps through anything, and hates to get up in the morning check out the Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock & Bed Shaker. If nothing else you will get some good vibrations from the 113 db alarm and the pulsing of the bed shaker to start your day off with..

Disclaimer: Sonic Alert provided a free review unit to test and tested it we did over the course of 30 days!

Buffalo’s MiniStation portable USB 3.0 hard drive is a 500 GB SATA 2.5″ HDD in a small and not unattractive package. Coming in crystal white (and piano black), it will certainly appeal to those who want to match their white Apple products without wanting to pay for the Apple logo.

Size-wise, it’s very pocketable, measuring just 114 x 77 x 13 mm. The photograph below shows the MiniStation next to a British pound coin (Welsh version) to give an idea of scale. Easily popped into a bag or jacket and the smooth corners should avoid tears or pokes in the ribs.

There’s a single connector on one of the short sides – it’s a micro-B USB 3 socket which can be seen in the photos below along with the necessary cable. This was the first time that I’d seen a micro-B USB 3 connector and there’s detail on the pins at Wikipedia. As is expected on a portable external drive, the MiniStation is bus powered so there’s no additional power supply.

Looking at the photos, the dark line on the side is actually an LED light. In use, when connected to a USB 3 port, the dark strip on the side is bright blue. When connected to just USB 2, the light is green. The light is steady when the MiniStation is simply connected and it flashes during read and write.

Performance-wise, the MiniStation was tested using an HP dv9000-series laptop, with the USB 3 being provided by a Buffalo Interface ExpressCard, which was reviewed earlier in the week.

On a standard USB 2 port, I got about 180 Mb/s write and 225 Mb/s read. With the MiniStation on USB 3, I was able to get write speeds of about 285 Mb/s and 420 Mb/s on read.  For comparison, a generic external 2.5″ IDE drive was just able to hit 100 Mb/s. Please remember that these figures relate to my particular combination of laptop configuration and testing software. Your mileage may vary.

There’s no installation CD as the additional software is included on the MiniStation itself. Running the main installer gives the option to install a couple of “turbo” tools to increase performance, an EcoManager, some RAM disk software and a backup utility. There’s also a copy of Picasa.

The MiniStation USB 3.0 comes in 500 GB and 1 TB versions. RRPs are £69.99 and £109.99 respectively, but prices will generally be a bit less. As a side note, the MiniStation USB 3.0 doesn’t seem to be widely available yet, so it’s difficult to check on real-world prices. Competitor products seem to be around the £60 mark.

I have been a big fan of DYMO label makers for a number of years. One thing I have not been a fan is the footprint that the earlier printers took up on my desk.  DYMO has been listening to their customers because they have introduced a stylish (PNP) plug and play label maker that sits non-obtrusively on my desk. With a stand the 4×4 device plugs into your PC or Mac USB port and is ready to print labels instantly.

The software to print labels is built into the device and pops up as soon as you plug it in you do not even need to install it. The label printer will print 1/4, 3/8 and 1/2 labels. You can buy multiple color cartridges, the printer came with a black on white cartridge which is perfect for printing mail and folder labels..

I love this device as it requires no power cord, and is very practical as compared to some of their earlier models that required a power cord an transformer.

Here is the best part it only cost $60.00 at most retailers. Great Price, Great Gadget…

Disclaimer: DYMO provided a unit for me to review, and was actually used over the course of a couple of weeks. While we have given the review unit away to a listener of my show, I have went out and purchased my own because I liked it so much.

If your laptop is like mine and pre-dates USB 3 but you want to use USB 3 devices at their full speed, then you might be interested in the Buffalo USB 3.0 Interface ExpressCard (IFC-EC2U3/UC). It’s an ExpressCard/34 size device, with two USB 3.0 ports on the side. The card will also plug into in ExpressCard/54 slot. If needed for bus-powered devices, there’s a auxiliary power lead to provide extra power to the card which connects from a standard USB port to a DC in socket on the side of the card.

Installation was simple – run the install CD, follow the prompts, insert card, job done.

The socket housing sticks out from the socket a couple of centimetres which is a bit inconvenient if you move your laptop around but that’s the price of two USB 3 sockets in the ExpressCard/34 size. If you need an adaptor that fits entirely into the socket, you’ll need to have an ExpressCard/54 size adaptor or go with only one USB 3 socket.

For USB 3, I had a Buffalo MiniStation on test – more on this in a later review. With the MiniStation I was able to get write speeds of about 285 Mb/s and 430 Mb/s on read. This was using Totusoft’s LAN Speed Test v2. I was a little disappointed with these speeds initially, but I then ran the Speed Test on another 2.5″ external HDD I had lying around and it struggled to make 100 Mb/s. So not so bad after all and, of course, your mileage may vary according to your particular configuration.

I did have one minor problem and this is more to do with the design of the ExpressCard slot in my laptop rather than this particular device. It was all too easy to pull out the card from the slot when trying to unplug a USB device – you have to hold onto the card with one hand and unplug the USB cable with the other.

Backwards compatibility with USB 2 was fine. I tried a wireless mouse, a memory stick and an external hard disk drive. All worked fine, albeit at USB 2 speeds. Slightly interestingly, the USB 2 external hard drive had exactly the same performance whether it was connected into the laptops USB 2 ports or the ExpressCard.

Overall, if you need to add USB 3 to your laptop the Buffalo USB 3.0 Interface ExpressCard appears to be solid contender.

RRP is £39.99 but may be available cheaper. Photos below.

As regular listeners to the podcast will know, the Geek News Central website is powered by WordPress. Until now, I’ve always used the web interface to write posts. “It works” is about the kindest thing you can say about it.

Browsing the Palm App Catalog, I came across Poster for WordPress, an app that allows blogging from the Palm Pre and other WebOS devices. It had lots of good reviews so I paid up and downloaded Poster.

Poster can link to multiple blogs and obviously the first thing to do is to setup accounts for the WordPress sites that you want to access.

After setting up access to Geek News Central, Poster shows the last five posts on the site. More can be loaded if needed.

This is entire blog post is written entirely in Poster. You can embolden, italicise, underline and do all three. You can insert pictures or in this case, a screenshot of Poster’s editing screen.

When uploading images, there a four preset sizes you can choose from. Of course, hyperlinks are there too – here’s a link to the App Catalog. This doesn’t quite work perfectly in-line as the image or hyperlink seems to go at the end of the text. Not a problem if you write and edit linearly. However, if you are like me and write before editing in the pictures and hyperlinks, it’s a bit of a pain.

All is not lost as Poster offers three editing modes – Visual, Visual without images and HTML. So in this instance, you can swap to HTML view and then copy’n'paste to move stuff around.

Work in progress drafts can be saved to the blog but once the post is ready, tags and categories can be set before finally changing the status to Published and uploading it. The tags and categories are downloaded from the website itself so everything connects up.

Although I haven’t explored the app further, it also looks like you can work with comments, which could be pretty handy for the active blogger.

Overall, I’m impressed by this app and provided the end result – the post on GNC – is good, this app comes highly recommended.

Poster for WordPress by Gabriele Nizzoli is available from the AppCatalog for £1.59.

Update – I was pretty happy with way the post came out but to be upfront with the review, I added in a few extra links using the web interface and made one correction to the formatting.

Taiwanese Edimax has been making steady inroads at the cheaper end of the market with a range of products which typically undercut the market leaders on price. As with its Chinese sibling TP-Link, I’ve always been a bit wary of their products but recently I had the opportunity to try out the Edimax 3G-6200n, a 3G 11n wireless router and I was pleasantly surprised by the build standard and the features on offer.

To start with, the 3G-6200n cost £40 from Amazon. For comparison, the equivalent Netgear (MBRN3000) costs about twice as much. The Edimax device is quite an old device released in mid-2009 so the 11n is only of the 150 Mb/s variety and the LAN ports are only 100 Mb/s. The Netgear’s 11n runs to 300 Mb/s but still only has 100 Mb/s LAN ports. If you are only routing internet traffic, 150 Mb/s is going to be perfectly adequate.

On opening the box, there was the router itself, a PSU that usefully has an on/off switch, a short USB lead, various manuals and a CD. The router itself is plastic but it’s not really plasticky, if you follow. I’ve had Belkin devices that were worse. Interestingly, there’s a switch on the back that turns off the wifi – that’s not something I’d ever seen before.

Getting the basic router up and running was straightforward. Turn it on, plug one end of a network cable into a LAN port and connect the other to a PC or laptop.  Open a web browser with http://192.168.2.1/ and login into the router using the provided username and password.

As with all routers, there’s a plethora of sections to go through and configure – basic setup, WAN, LAN, wireless and so on. I’d say the device was well featured without being advanced. For example, the wifi only allows you to setup one SSID and there was no auto setting on the channels, but port forwarding and virtual servers are there too. After I’d set up the wifi, I was able to disconnect the cable and work wirelessly.

As you might guess, the main reason for getting this router was for its 3G functionality. Round the back of the router is a USB port into which a 3G modem dongle can be plugged in. Once connected, the router can share the 3G connection wirelessly. Helpfully, there’s a short USB cable included that can be used to position the dongle for the best reception.

How is this different from a “Mifi” or similar device? First, the Edimax is not battery powered, secondly it has LAN ports and finally it doesn’t have to use 3G all the time. It can be configured to use a DSL or cable modem normally and only fall back to the 3G modem when the modem connections fails.

In this instance I was only interested in a 3G connection. Unfortunately, you can’t plug any old 3G dongle into the 3G-6200n but Edimax provides a compatibility list (zipped pdf). I was using an Huawei E1550 which was listed as being supported and sure enough, it was.  To get the connection to work, I had to configure the APN, username and password for the mobile provider that I was using within the router’s web interface. These details are easily available from the internet via a Google search or the mobile providers website.

I was able to connect using both Three and Vodafone SIMs in the Huawei E1550. Download speeds were usually over 1 Mb/s and less than 2 Mb/s but it varied a good deal depending on how the dongle was positioned. I noticed that the router started and stopped the 3G connection as required so it wasn’t constantly connected. One minor issue with that was that sometimes an initial request for a web page was met with a timeout as the connection hadn’t been made fast enough. Upon refreshing the page, it would be served successfully. This only happened a couple of times and I suspect the problem is more with the mobile phone network being slow to respond than the router.

Overall, I was impressed by the Edimax 3G-6200n and at £40 I think it’s excellent value. If you do need to share a 3G connection, particularly when you need both wired and wireless connections, then this is a good solution. The only downside is that it’s not a portable solution. And finally, remember to check that your 3G dongle is compatible.

Although it seems that the Pilot Frixion rollerballs have been out for about a year, the first I knew of them was while looking for stocking fillers in a local newsagent’s. Pilot claims that these are erasable but I suspect many of us have purchased erasable pens in the past only to find that they erase by scratching a hole in the paper.

In this instance, Pilot says that it’s the heat generated through friction between the pen’s “eraser” and the paper which rubs out the ink.  And it actually does work. Take a look at the two pictures below – the top one shows the writing, the bottom one shows where I’ve rubbed out the ink.

Ok, so you can see a faint trace but in practice, if you re-wrote over the (erased) writing, you’d never know.  You’ll also see that the paper is undamaged.  The “eraser” on the end is a rubberised nub that doesn’t seem to wear out or leave bits of rubber behind.

So if you are looking for an erasable pen, pick up one from your nearest good stationery retailer. Available in 8 colours and also in a stylish executive version.

This week, it’s the turn of Nokia’s N97 mini to come under the harsh glare of the GNC spotlight.  Now over a year old, the smartphone market has changed significantly in the last 12 months, so how does the N97 mini stack up against the current offerings from Android, Apple and Palm?

As the name suggests, this is smaller version of the N97. At just over 11 cm tall, 5 cm wide and about 15 mm deep this is a small phone and would have been the smallest smartphone on release. Unfortunately, the Xperia X10 mini probably holds this crown now. The styling of the phone is simple without being utilitarian but does feel a little dated compared with the latest offerings from htc and co. The resistive touchscreen is 3.2″ with 640 x360 pixels and looks clear and detailed.

Continuing in the long-established tradition of Nokia Communicators, this is a side-slider (or horizontal slide) with a bit of a difference as the screen tilts up as well. This is a great feature as when the phone is on your desk with the slider open, it’s really easy to see what’s on the tilted screen. Unfortunately, there’s no chance of typing while the phone is on the desk as it wobbles too much. If there just been a little bump below the camera, it would have stabilised it beautifully.

Other than that little issue, the keyboard is good to use. The keys are flat and slightly rectangular with plenty of space round them. You’d need very large fingers to have a problem hitting more than one key at a time.

In use as phone, I thought that the call quality was good to excellent as I could hear people very clearly. The people at the other end of the phone commented that while they too could hear me very well but sometimes the microphone also picked up other noises, such as the phone rubbing against my face.

Moving onto the software on the N97 mini, it’s all very similar to that found on the E5 last week. Too similar in some instances, in that the non-touch screen Nokia heritage is often evident by having two choices displayed on the screen in the same locations as the (non-existent) buttons. Instead of pressing the buttons, you tap on the screen.  Clearly this is a great way of getting software onto the phone without having to recode for the touchscreen, but at times it felt like a missed opportunity.

It was also evident at times that the OS on the E5 was just a little bit more up-to-date. For example, making a data connection on the E5 was handled without leaving the requesting application, whereas on the N97 mini, if no data connection was present, the application would tell you to establish a connection before running the application.

In terms of the applications available, the two phones were largely identical. Email – check; QuickOffice – check; Adobe PDF reader – check; music player – check; YouTube – check; and so on…  Some features were missing such as the dual Personal and Business modes (though you can have two Home screens) and some of the setup wizards were less comprehensive, but not much in it.

The Home screen does take advantage of the touchscreen, with the ability to rearrange the icons and applets by simply dragging them around.  It’s not completely free-form in that there is snap grid.  Applets can also be downloaded and added to the home screen. With the weather here in the UK, the first app I tried was AccuWeather which delivered further bad news.

Further, Ovi maps is much improved through the use of the touch screen as it makes moving around the maps and selecting options easier. The GPS tracking was quick to lock-on to locations, even when inside, though your mileage may vary.

The web browser on the N97 mini is also much better than that on the E5. Most websites rendered well, particularly when in landscape mode and it was much easier to scroll round the webpage using your finger.

The N97 mini also comes equipped with dual cameras. The main 5 MP (2584 x 1938 pixels) camera is in the normal place on the back, but there’s also front-facing camera for video calls. It’s only 640 x 480 pixels.  Regrettably, I wasn’t able to actually try out a video call.

The Ovi Store has loads of applications for the N97 mini, both free and paid-for. Downloading and installing is a doddle as is updating software when new versions come out.

A quick mention about the touchscreen. It’s only a resistive screen, rather than the newer capacitive screens, though frankly you’d be hard pushed to tell.  I wasn’t sure until I discovered that styluses worked. Personally, I think multitouch is overrated so if you’d rather have a screen that works with a stylus, the N97 mini is for you.

I really liked using this phone in landscape mode – it kind of felt more natural – but this showed up one irritating bug.  Normally, the phone doesn’t auto-rotate but assumes that if you have the keyboard open, the phone should be in landscape and if the keyboard is closed, the phone should be in portrait mode. There is a setting to auto-rotate the screen display and the screen rotates to match the orientation. The bug is that if you are in landscape mode with the keyboard out, when you actually close the keyboard, the screen always changes to portrait mode before taking a couple seconds to revert back to landscape. Not a big deal I know, it’s annoying when you’ve merely opened the keyboard to enter a web-address and now you want to read the page with the keyboard closed.

Overall, the N97 mini is a good phone even 12 months after release. It’s certainly not in the same league now as the Windows Phone 7, Android, Apple or even Palm offerings but if you are a long-time Nokia user wanting a small touchscreen phone, this is a great choice. You can get it free on a £25 per month 24 month contract or direct from Nokia for £289. There’s also a limited edition gold-plated variant at £479.  No really.

Thanks very much to Nokia for the loan of the N97 mini.

The Nokia E5 is a non-touchscreen smartphone with a split personality, bringing business features to the social networking crowd.  It’s an interesting idea but are the features let down by lack of touch?  Let’s find out.

The E5 is a candy-bar phones with a 320 x 240 2.4″ screen above an alphanumeric keyboard.  Separating the two is Nokia’s trademark arrangement of softkeys, four-way rocker and answer / reject keys.  There are also two additonal keys for “home” and “email” in the middle.  The phone is 11.5 cm by 6 cm by 13 cm (ish) and weighs in at 126g according to the specs.  Consequently, it feels solid in the hand and appears to be built to the usual Nokia high standards.  I found the “chalk white” colour of this model attractive and a change from the fingerprint prone glossy finishes.  The E5 is available in four other colours.

Earlier on I referred to the split personality of the phone.  Fundamentally, there are two modes, one called Business and one called Personal.  Each mode can be configured independently so that, for example, you can have a serious workplace view with corporate greys and a sensible background in the Business mode but wild colours and a risque image for your Personal mode.

With regard to the basic functions of a phone, everything that you’d expect is there.  Call quality was good and the contacts database was comprehensive with lots of fields.  It’s possible to sync with Ovi Contacts, storing your contacts on the Internet and making it easier to switch between Nokia phones.

Email-wise, Nokia provides connectors to Exchange, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and generic POP3 / IMAP accounts.  Unfortunately, it only seems to be the email components provided by these services – it didn’t seem to be possible to pull contact or diary information.

With regards to media, the E5 comes with a radio, music player, video player, the ubiquitous camera and a podcatcher, which I was pleasantly pleased to see. There’s also a Facebook client which is quite usable and you can easily see what your friends have been up to and respond to them.  YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster and hi5 apps are also installed for your pleasure.

On the business side, QuickOffice provides the requisite Microsoft Office compatibility and there’s also a .pdf viewer from Adobe.  There are other apps such notes and unit converters.

There’s a whole section devoted to Ovi Maps, which is a basically a GPS with maps and navigations.  I didn’t severely tax it during the test but it appeared to be competent enough with directions and didn’t get me lost.

Other useful features are the wizards that take you through the steps to, say, setup email accounts or connect to WiFi.  However, if you do make a mistake, such as a mistype which you don’t notice during the wizard, can be difficult to correct because there are just so many settings scattered across different areas.  Case in point, if you want to delete an email account, it’s not in the email app, it’s in Control Panel, Settings, General, Email.

Surfing the web…..not so good.  If you’re on a website such as the BBC, where the content is specially formatted for mobile devices, it works fine.  Going to a general web site, such as GNC, it makes an fair attempt to render the page and there’s a kind of zoom view that allows you to see where on the overall page you are. Not great but not bad for such a small screen.  Surprisingly, you can have multiple web pages open at the same time and you can switch between them quite easily.

Acknowledging that people sometimes use their smartphones as torches, you can actually toggle the camera flash by holding down the space bar in the Home screen. Great feature which I hope other manufacturers copy!

The battery life was good – I used the phone for a couple of days and never had to the charge the battery which I thought was pretty good.  Obviously the smaller screen helps and it has a fair sized battery (1200 mAh).

There are loads of other features that I simply didn’t have time to play with fully – Home page customisation, chat, push-to-talk, the ovi store, downloading apps, 5 megapixel camera.  There is a lot to this phone.

In terms of money, in the UK it seems to be selling on contract for about £15 month on a two year contract or £200 on pay-as-you-go, which is probably where it needs to be priced to have any chance of success.

Overall, this is a competent phone with plenty of features at a mid-range price. The business and personal modes are a nice touch and give it some differentiation. However, I wonder where a non-touchscreen smartphone fits into the world of iPhone and Android, especially when trying to appeal to the social networking crowd.  To me, it just feels out of date. Anyway, if you are looking for a non-touchscreen smartphone, the E5 packs plenty of features and is definitely worth considering for the apps, connectivity and ovi maps GPS at a fair price.

Thanks to Nokia for the loan of the phone.

If you’re the kind of person who has to have the fastest processor, the quickest memory and the nippiest hard drive, then you might as well stop reading this review and simply go out and buy a Buffalo MicroStation SSD. Because it’s fast. Probably not the fastest SSD out there, but in comparison to a spinning hard disk drive, it’s like a Formula 1 car racing a family runabout – no contest.

So what are we actually talking about here? The Buffalo MicroStation SSD is a 2.5″ form factor internal SATA solid state drive aimed squarely at the laptop upgrade market.  With an additional mini-USB port on the SSD and Acronis True Image software, it makes swapping the hard drive for the SSD as easy as possible.

In the box, you get the MicroStation SSD, a quick setup manual, the True Image DVD and a USB cable.  In your hand though, the SSD is a pretty boring lump of plastic.  An HDD is much more solid and satisfying but that’s progress for you. The model reviewed here is the SHD-NSUH256G-EU.

Let’s say you want to convert your laptop from an HDD to an SSD.  You’ve two choices.  Option 1 – rip out the HDD, stuff in the SSD and re-install Windows and all your software, then somehow copy your personal files off your old disk.  Not a great option.  Option 2.  Connect the SSD via USB, boot from the Acronis True Image DVD, clone the HDD to the SSD, swap the disks over and boot the laptop.  Job done.  It really is that simple.

You do need to set aside an hour or two to clone a 256 GB HDD and if you want more control, e.g. changing partition sizes, then you have to install the full version from the DVD.  However, it’s all straightforward.

Once you’ve fired up the laptop, you’ll be totally amazed at how much faster it’s become.  It’s like buying a new computer!  In my thoroughly unscientific testing, with the HDD installed my laptop took about 50 seconds to get to the Windows 7 login screen from power on, of which about 10 seconds was the BIOS checks.  On logging in, it took 20 seconds to show the desktop background and a further 40-odd seconds to show the Windows Sidebar.  Basically from pressing the power button to having a working laptop takes 2 minutes.

After installing the SSD, it took just 28 seconds to get to the Windows 7 login screen, 8 seconds to show the background and only another 20 seconds to show the Sidebar.  Total time about a minute.

Launching applications was amazingly fast.  Word took about 2 seconds from clicking in the Start menu to a blank document appearing.  Sun’s VirtualBox started in a similar time. Even iTunes started in about 6 seconds. That normally takes about 18 seconds from the hard drive. It’s just stonkingly quick.

In slightly more scientific testing, hdparm -t consistently gave disk reads of 234 MB/s. By comparison, the fastest disk drive I tested performed at 98 MB/s.  On disk writes, the peak was about 140 MB/s with the average not far below that. The full technical specs for the SSD are available from Buffalo.

It may seem blindingly obvious but the other surprise was the SSD’s silence. I could only tell that the laptop was doing anything by the flickering of the disk activity light.

But easy as it is to change the hard drive for the SSD, it can be hard on the pocket. The MicroStations come in a range of sizes from 32 GB to 256 GB, with former costing £110. However, the 256 GB MicroStation SSD costs a whopping £500, so if you want speed and silence, you pay for it.

Overall, this is a great upgrade for any laptop and Buffalo make it as easy as possible to transfer your data.  But you’ll need big pockets for the big capacities.

Thanks to Buffalo Technology for the loan of the MicroStation SSD.

Freecom announced the Mobile Drive CLS concept back in July as a new way of storing and organising the vast amounts of data that all of us now seem to collect through our daily digital lives.  The CLS stands for Collect, Label and Store and fundamentally it’s about using 2.5″ portable drives to store data according to type or use.  One Mobile Drive could have photos, another video.  Or they could be arranged by topic with one Mobile Drive storing all the photos and videos from a trip to Europe and another holding the material from a new house you built last year.  I’m sure you can grasp the possibilities.

It all reminds me a little bit of the SyQuest EZDrive and the Iomega Zip drive, and the drive even comes with a translucent plastic case with a paper insert where you can write the contents of the hard drive for future reference. It’s so old skool….

But enough reminiscing.  If you buy into the concept, what do you actually get?  There’s two parts, the first being the Mobile Drive CLS, a 2.5″ hard drive enclosed in a black soft-touch rubberised case and with a label strip down the side.  The second is the CLS Dock, a docking station that takes three of the Mobile Drives.

As the Mobile Drives come with standard mini-SD connectors, you can just use the drives with a cable if you want.  Power is supplied via the USB cable.

Alternatively, the Dock makes using them much more convenient. You simply slot the Drive onto the Dock, which can take up to three of the CLS Mobile Drives.  Cleverly, the mini-SD connector is slightly offset from the centre so it’s obvious which way round the drive has to go.  There’s also an additional standard USB port on the Dock for a memory stick.

The Mobile Drive seemed to fit snugly into the Dock and obviously the review unit was new but I’d be fairly confident you wouldn’t need to worry about wear on the connectors anymore than you’d worry about any external unit.

There’s been a bit of care here too with the USB leads.  The supplied leads are a cut above the average USB cable and there’s a short one supplied in the storage case, keeping drive and lead together.

Performance-wise, the disks were pretty much as you’d expect from an external USB2 drive.  Using hdparm -Tt, I got around 1640 MB/s for cached reads and 30 MB/s for buffered disk reads.

Cost-wise, the Mobile Drives come in four sizes from 250 GB (£60) up to 640 GB (£85).  The CLS Dock costs £16.  Comparing the price for the Mobile Drives against similar units, there’s a price premium of £10 at the smallest capacity which gradually reduces as the capacities increase.

I liked this product as it’s well designed and convenient.  I think this product will appeal to the “laptop generation” – those people who live in lofts and apartments and use technology primarily for their own entertainment. Eventually the laptop hard drive fills up with photos, music or films and this is a clever and attractive way to keep files without cluttering up the internal disk.

It might also appeal to people who just want a convenient way to transfer data between home, work and school.  Use the dock at home and the cable while on the road.  And the label strip on the side of the Mobile Drive can easily take a name and mobile phone number in case of loss.

Frankly, I’m surprised it doesn’t come in white…

Thanks to Freecom for the review unit.

There’s no doubt that ebook readers are very much du jour, and Sony are keen to be part of that trend with the recent additions of the Touch and Pocket Editions to the Sony Reader line-up.

Reviewed here is the Pocket Edition (PRS-350), which is the smaller of the two models, with a 5″ touch screen.  Overall, it’s about 14.5 cm tall, 10.5 cm wide and only 9 mm deep.  At this size it can go in a (big) coat pocket and fits easily into most handbags.  As you can see from the pictures, it comes in silver, but pink and black are also available.  It’s also very light at only 155 g.

The e Ink Pearl screen is common in ebook readers but if you’ve not seen or used one, there are a couple of defining features.  First is that the letters on the screen appear to be on the surface of the screen.  It’s not like a laptop or tablet where you know that you are looking through glass.  Second the screen doesn’t flicker at all.  Not a bit.  Thirdly, text is very smooth – you have to look incredibly closely to see any pixellation or “jaggies”.  Fourthly, there’s no backlight so you need external light to read. Finally, when you do turn a page, the screen briefly flickers into a negative image as it morphs from one page to the next.  It’s a bit odd but you get used to it very quickly.

In terms of the screen, I didn’t think that the Reader screen was any better or worse than any of the others that I’d seen.  Admittedly I didn’t have a Kindle or Nook to hand to compare but all seemed normal and perfectly acceptable.

Beneath the screen, there’s a small legend and a row of five buttons along the bottom for page back, forwards, home, zoom and options.  Buttons were ok but there could have been a bit more feedback from them.

Connectivity is limited to a micro-USB connection and the Reader appears as a removable drive.  Consequently, all books have to be downloaded to a PC or laptop and then dropped into the folder.  This is sometimes termed  ”sideloading” and while it’s not as convenient as wi-fi connectivity, it’s pretty idiot-proof and you’ve a backup copy of your books on your own computer. 

In use, the Pocket Reader is straightforward.  Pressing the home button takes you to a screen which shows your current reading material.  Having a touch screen means that most navigation can be done with by tapping on the screen, either with your finger or the included stylus, which slides into a silo on the righthand side.  The device never responds quite as fast, as say, a PDA or mobile phone, but I think it’s just the nature of ebooks readers at the moment.

Tapping on the option to see all the loaded books gives a list sorted by author, title and filename.  Selecting the book will open up the title and let you start reading.  The zoom button allows adjustment of the font size to five different sizes (XS through XL).  I found that the “S” setting was about the best.  To move through the book, you can either use the backwards and forwards buttons or else slide your finger on the screen to the turn the page.

One cool feature was that double-tapping on a word brings up a dictionary and show the possible meanings of the word.  Great for when you come across a word that you aren’t familiar with.

In terms of formats, the Reader can handle epub, pdf and rtf natively.  I found that epub and rtf formats worked best and that pdfs suffered when being resized to fit on the smaller screen.  Even with epub files, there were huge variations in the quality of the books.  Of course, this isn’t the fault of the Reader but rather a reflection on the ebook industry.  EPUB-based ebooks are widely available from the likes of WHSmith and Waterstones but as Amazon uses a proprietary format, you can’t get ebooks from there.

I had the Reader for just over a week and during that time I read a couple of novels and I never had to charge the battery after the initial charge.  It charges through the USB connector so there’s no power brick included.  I’d be confident that I could take this on holiday for two weeks and not have to worry.

However, my biggest issue is….how do you hold the device?  Being used to years of paperback reading with one hand I’m having to re-learn how to hold a book.

Overall, I liked the Pocket Edition Reader.  The Reader is small but the screen is clear.  Battery life is excellent and there are plenty of ebooks available.

Sony currently have the Pocket Edition on sale in the UK for £159 with the Touch Edition at £199.

Thanks to Sony for providing the review unit.

[Apologies if some of the photos are a little out-of-focus.  My camera had a hard time focussing on the screen]

In a little bit of a UK scoop, the folks at Buffalo lent GNC three of their latest wireless “n” products for a first review.  The three AirStation devices were announced and covered by GNC back in October, so we’ll skip the usual pleasantries and get down to business.

First up, was the AirStation N-Technology USB2 adapter (WLI-UC-GNM) which is as small as it looks in the picture.  Installation is very straightforward – run the installation CD first to install the drivers, pop the adapter into a spare USB port and job done.  I was able to connect to an existing 11g network and the 11n network without any problems at all.  There’s also a little application installed which allows selection between the 20 MHz and 40 MHz bandwidths which equates to the 75 Mb/s and 150 Mb/s settings.   There’s more on the real-world data transfer rates later.

Next was the AirStation N-Technology 150 Mb/s router (WCR-GN).  This is actually smaller in real life than the picture would suggest, being only 11 cm high, excluding the aerial.  After connecting the router to the network via an ethernet cable, the installation program allows the user to choose from two different possible scenarios – router or bridge.  Once selected, the installation program finds the router and configures it.  The user is asked to set a device password and to give the device an IP address.  Although a configuration program is included, I found it easiest to use the router’s web interface to set things up.

The configuration for the wireless side was pretty impressive, with support for multiple SSIDs, including one that was passed directly out over the WAN and was unable to access the LAN.  This caters for legacy devices such as media streamers or games consoles that only support unsecure WEP.

The WCR-GN supports WPS and AOSS, Buffalo’s equivalent. Frankly, I could never get the AOSS pairing to work. It’s so little effort to put in an encryption key, I’ve no idea why anyone bothers with these user-friendly time savers, because they never are and never do.

To give the 11n devices a proper evaluation, I carried out some data transfer rate testing using LAN Speed Test for TotuSoft.  The table below gives the nominal and measured data rates for different connection types.

Bear in mind that with all the encryption on the wireless transmissions, the measured data rate will be much lower than the nominal data rate.  These figures are broadly in line with other data rates reported on the Internet.  HD video requires a minimum sustained data rate around 25 Mb/s, so it looks to me that the 11n data rates are good.  Microsoft have an article on HD formats which is worth a read.

Finally, I got out the Nfiniti Dual-Band Wireless-N Ethernet Converter (WLAE-AG300N).  I was most interested in this as it promised to be convertible between an access point, extender and bridge, and a full 300Mb/s device.  The Converter has two ethernet ports meaning that things like Bluray players and IP TVs can connect through the bridge back to the Internet.

As before, the installation was a breeze and in the first instance, I set up the Converter as an access point.  This worked great and I was able to get data throughput in the 44Mb/s range.  Remember that although this was a 300Mb/s device, the USB adapter on the laptop was only a 150Mb/s device so the data rate was limited by the USB adapter.

Setting the WLAE-AG300N as a bridge back to the WCR-GN Router was less successful.  Although I was able to get the two devices to connect, I was never able to establish a 11n level connection; it only connected as if it were an 11g network and throughput was around 20 Mb/s.  I worked with Buffalo’s tech support to try and get a resolution but it wasn’t sorted by the time I returned the device.

Overall, the USB2 adapter and the 150Mb/s router worked well and I think they’re good value for money at RRPs of £19.99 and £29.99 respectively.  Judgement is reserved regarding the Ethernet Converter (£39.99) as it worked well as an access point but the bridging was poor.  If you were only setting up a 150Mb/s network, a pair of WCR-GN routers would actually be a cheaper way of establishing a connection from ethernet-only devices.

Thanks to Buffalo for the loan.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ll have heard about Microsoft’s return to the mobile phone space with Windows Phone 7.  And boy, have they returned.  Combined with the hardware of the HTC 7 Trophy, it delivers in spades.

Initial impressions were good; not only am I fond of the mini-tablet format, the design very much reminded me of Sony’s Clie TH55, probably the greatest PDA of all time, so the Trophy had some big boots to fill.  Fortunately, it didn’t disappoint; this is a lovely smartphone.

When you get the phone out of the box and into your hand, there’s a little weight to it, giving a quality feel.  It’s a relatively big device at 62 mm x 119 mm but this is a benefit when you start using the Trophy for more than making phone calls.

The 3.8″ screen has a lovely silver bevel which I initially thought was refraction at the glass edge.  It’s not; it seems to be the milled edge of the metal casing and I think it looks great.  As you’ll see from the picture, aside from the HTC logo, there are just three buttons at the bottom of the screen for back, home / start and find.

Round the back, there’s a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. The Trophy is the first phone I’ve used that has the shutter button in the right place – when you hold the phone in landscape to take a picture, the button falls perfectly under the right forefinger, just as if it was an ordinary camera.

The sides and back have a soft rubber touch to them, giving a bit of grip.  The last thing you want is for the phone to slip out of your hand and plunge to the floor, which will inevitably be concrete, tile or solid wood.  It’s never a sheepskin rug.

Finishing the exterior, there’s a power button on the top, plus volume buttons on the left side. A micro USB port and 3.5 mm earphone jack complete the physical connectivity.

In use, the phone is fabulous.  The 480 x 800 pixel screen is bright and detailed – there’s only the slightest hint of “jaggies” when you look very closely.  The response to the touch screen is excellent and the scrolling is super smooth.  I guess that’s where the 1 GHz processor comes in.

When it comes to the Metro user interface, you can choose your own adjectives.  I thought it was a stylish mix of two dimensional buttons contrasted by three dimensional effects.  One colleague suggested Fisher-Price and another thought it was bit like a tourist map where you’re not quite too sure what the symbols mean as there’s no legend.

However, there is no denying that the overall presentation is luxurious.  Screens appear as if they’re a page being turned.  Deleted emails drop into oblivion off the bottom of the screen.  Screens can present as if they’re part of bigger montages, with individual elements scrolling at different rates. I like the equivalent of the hourglass – it’s now a couple of dots that zip onto the screen, dawdle in the middle and then zip off again.

Certainly, there is a bit of initial head scratching or accidental discovery of features.  “How do I….?” becames, “Ahh, so that’s how it works.”  And I’m still not 100% certain about whether apps run in the background.

I’m not going to review every single app in turn because pretty much everything that you’d expect is there.  Email – check, calendar – check, address book – check, Office support – check, maps – check, web browser – check.  So what are the highlights and lowlights?

Regarding email, there’s no consolidated application.  Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. are all treated as apps in their own right but I was able to use EAS without any trouble, with emails, appointments and contacts all synchronised perfectly with Exchange.

Contacts are brought into a single place “People” but it’s not perfect with regard to duplicates brought in from different sources, e.g. Gmail and Hotmail.  Sometimes phone numbers are repeated even though they’re the same.

The Phone app is very responsive when you are tapping out numbers – I didn’t get any missed digits or double digits when I was dialling.  An iPhone-toting friend thought that the phone app was much better than the iOS equivalent.  Call quality was good.

I was unable to connect to my workplace’s wifi network because there’s doesn’t appear to be any way to make adjustments to the security settings etc.  To be fair, it’s not possible to connect on an iPhone either.  Connecting up at home was a doddle.

The virtual keyboard is ok.  I’ve got fairly large fingers but on the whole I was able to tap out the odd short email or enter search terms without too many mistakes.   Definitely more successful in landscape than portrait (obviously) but nowhere near as good as the keyboard on a Palm Pre, for example.

The Zune side of things was a hit.  The sound quality was good and reproduction was well-defined.  While the bass could be a little better, it was better than average for a portable device (and the limitation is often the encoding of the track).  I was listening using Sennheiser eH 1430 headphones, not the the supplied ones.

The Zune hub was easy to use and great for browsing.  Videos were smooth and easy to watch. I’m not a big gamer so I didn’t really pursue the Xbox Live side of things but the Trophy is the gamer’s phone in the HTC line-up.  What I did see was pretty slick and it was easy to download games, although it seemed to be quite slow at downloading, even over wi-fi.  I tried a few of the usual suspects such as Bejeweled and they played well.

Obviously the application marketplace isn’t nearly as big as the equivalents for iOS, Android or even WebOS.  But for an OS that’s months old, there’s a fair selection of apps and more will come over time.

Web browsing was excellent….as long as the web page didn’t have Flash.  The big screen and Internet Explorer reproduced most web sites really well and with the hi-res screen, you didn’t have to constantly zoom in and out.  Even quite small text was still legible.  I did find a couple of websites that had mobile or PDA versions and these recognised that the web browser was on a smartphone.  However they didn’t recognise the particular browser on Windows Phone 7 and consequently defaulted to a very basic version.  Switching to the full website version usually solved the problem.

Battery life was perfectly acceptable for a device of this type. I found that I could go a day or two without recharging the Trophy and by that I mean a couple of phone calls, email from EAS, some music listening  and a bit of surfing.  Once I started playing games and watching video, the battery life took a hit, but this is hardly unexpected.

That’s about it. The HTC 7 Trophy is a very good phone and Windows Phone 7 is impressive.  The whole feel of the device  is quality, the screen is great and the OS is modern.  Consequently I would recommend that anyone thinking of a new smartphone should give the Trophy a very long look.

Thanks to HTC for the loan.

Samsung announced the TicToc MP3 players back in July but they’ve only recently started shipping in UK. Aimed unashamedly at a young female audience, coming in blue, pink, black and Hello Kitty variants, this is a fashion accessory as much as an music player. I’ll try to get in touch with my feminine side to give the TicToc a fair review.

So what do you get for your money? A tiny 4GB MP3 player, a dock, a clip-on case and a set of headphones, plus instructions and warranty. First impressions are good – although plastic, the build quality is excellent and everything has a smooth touch to it with rounded edges. Everything is white with blue highlights and grey lettering and it looks good. The TicToc itself is only 36 mm long and has just one button and one 3.5 mm socket. Later, I’ll discover that there are three little lights as well.  It’s a minimalist approach but sometimes less is more.

I was intrigued by the 3.5 mm socket as it doubles as both the earphone socket, data connector and charger, so it was time to stop looking and start playing.  Frankly it’s easy.  The TicToc drops into the cradle and the cradle’s USB connector plugs into the PC.  It’s at this point you see the lights for the first time: they’re under the skin of the plastic, behind plus, minus and next track symbols.  When the player is docked, the lights show the charging status of the player.

The headphones are of the in-ear, noise-isolating type and are colour co-ordinated with the TicToc player. There are a couple of different-sized ear adaptors in case you have small or large ear canals. I found them comfortable to wear but more on the sound quality later.

On the PC, the TicToc appears as two drives under Windows 7. One partition is read-only and holds the TicToc Player application. The other contains the music files. Loading the TicToc with music is simply a case of drag’n'dropping your mp3s. It also supports .aac, .wav, .wma, .ogg and .flac but I only tried .mp3 and .wav.

I’ll come back to the TicToc Player app in a moment, but now that the TicToc is charged up, let’s play some music!

This is where it gets fun. With only one button, how do you control the player?  Well, it’s all to do with how you hold it… If you hold it vertically, pressing the button adjusts the volume. If you hold it horizontally, pressing the button moves between tracks. And if you give it one good shake, the voice guide announces the artist and track, which is pretty handy on a device with no screen. Give it a couple of shakes and it swaps between playing albums, general shuffle, fast tracks and slow tracks. It’s pretty cool and doesn’t take long to get used to.

When you first turn on the TicToc  (just press the button), an enthusiastic female voice will tell you how much battery you have left.  Samsung claim 12 hours play time and while I never completely drained the battery, it seems about right. After listening for a few hours from 100%, I would have 80% battery left which would be on target for 12 hours.

The TicToc will then start playing music. And how does it sound? Well, as with so many of these small players, the sound quality is let down by the headphones. With the supplied earphones, the sound is very much to the treble end with disappointing bass. They’re not the worst headphones I’ve ever used (a pair of Jabras currently hold that accolade) and on the plus side, the ‘phones were comfortable: I had no problem with them in-ear for several hours.

However, plug in a set of half-decent headphones, say, some Senneheiser CX300s, and the TicToc is hugely improved. Still perhaps little thin in the normal mode, but to improve the sound output, the TicToc comes with DNSe -  Digital Natural Sound engine. This allows the player to apply enhancements such as rock, R&B, dance and concert hall, which fill out the music nicely and brings it to life. And let’s be honest, the TicToc isn’t being marketed at audiophiles. For listening while walking to work or working out at the gym, it’s perfectly acceptable and actually quite good.

Returning to the TicToc app, this is where some of the magic happens. Although you can load music onto the player simply by drag’n'dropping, if you want the voice guide or you want the fast and slow playlists, then the TicToc app has to be run to analyse the music on your player and add in the extras. You can also use the TicToc app as a music player.

The voice guide is pretty good at converting the artist and track name from the mp3 tag into speech. It probably wasn’t fair to ask it to pronounce Abba’s Chiqichita right but it got S.O.S. spot on. This was my first exposure to this kind of feature and overall, I was impressed. There’s also a fast and slow playlist function which you can enable if you give the TicToc a couple of shakes. If you look at the screen shot, you’ll see the F and S labels next to each track, indicating whether the software thinks it’s a fast or slow track. If you disagree with the analysis, you can right click on the track and change the tempo.

There was only one thing that did annoy me. When the TicToc is playing in normal mode, it plays by folder which is usually the same as an album. However, when playing a folder, it seems to ignore the mp3 track number. I’m not sure what order it plays them in – I thought it was alphabetical to start with but it wasn’t always the case. It’s so irritating – Samsung please fix this.

In the end, I didn’t really need to get too in touch with my feminine side because the TicToc looks great, is funky to use and sounds good. The little cradle is a nice touch which sets it apart from the competition and much better than a cable with a 3.5 mm jack on the end. I think it would a perfect player to keep in your handbag or with your sports gear, ready to go.

RRP is £39.99 for the 2 GB version and £49.99 for the 4 GB.  Thanks to Samsung for providing the review unit.

The Plantronics .Audio 1100M is a simple USB VoIP telephone handset optimised for use with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 and Lync 2010, though it will also work with Skype and other softphone applications.  Habitual users of these systems will recognise the benefit of having a dedicated handset rather than relying on speakers or built-in microphones.

As you’ll see from the photos, it’s functional rather than aesthetically pleasing, with just a numeric keypad plus buttons for mute, speakerphone, call and hang-up.   There are also volume and ringer controls on the left and right sides respectively.

The handset has a good weight to it – not so heavy as your hand gets tired, but it feels like a solid product that isn’t going to break the first time it hits the floor.  The back of the phone is curved and fits nicely into the palm of your hand.

Also in the box is a cradle which can be attached to your monitor or other vertical edge.  This keeps the handset handy for when a call comes in without cluttering up your desk.  The picture on the right shows the handset in the cradle.

On both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10,  the .Audio 1100M was instantly recognised and the drivers loaded.

The 1100M has been optimised for Microsoft Communicator 2007 or Lync 2010, as it’s now called.  This means that when used with either of the two Microsoft products, all the buttons work as expected and allow you to dial numbers, pickup and reject calls and so on.  Call quality was good and the person on the other end of my call could hear me well.  I’d definitely rate it as one of the better handsets I’ve used for call clarity.

When used with Skype, the 1100M works as a basic USB audio device in that you can have a conversation but the numeric keypad and the accept / reject buttons don’t work.  Call quality was still high.

A few colleagues suggested that an LCD screen would be useful to see the number being dialled but I’m not sure that it’s essential.  When used with Communicator and Lync, you can see the number displayed on the PC screen so I think you’ll be more likely to look at that to check the phone number.

The online price is just under £60 or $70 going by Amazon.  Clearly, there are cheaper handsets on the market, but this device is not aimed at the individual consumer.  The .Audio 1100M is for businesses implementing unified communications where a lower cost device is needed for basic phone calls.  One scenario I can imagine is someone who works from home occasionally but connects to the work network via a VPN.  This handset would suit them.

If there were a couple of things to improve…first I’d make drivers available so that all the functions work with Skype or similar softphones.  To be fair, the .Audio 1100M is designed for Microsoft Communicator / Lync and it doesn’t try hide this.  Second, I’d make a curly USB lead available to make the device more phone-like.  And finally, I hope the next version of the handset is a little bit more attractive.

Other than that, the .Audio 1100M is a good solid device with better-than-average call quality.

Thanks to Plantronics UK for the device.

To describe the Buffalo DriveStation Quad as merely an external hard drive would be doing it a considerable injustice and likely to miss the point.  This is an external drive on steroids and with attitude.

To start with, you’d be hard pushed to call it portable.  It’s 14.9 cm wide, 15.4 high, 23.3 cm deep and weighs somewhere in the region of 5.5 kg, so you won’t be just slipping this in your coat pocket to nip round to your friend’s house.  This is no weedy 500 GB unit for some MP3s and photos from a couple of holidays either.  This monster packs four 1 TB Seagate drives – yes, four – giving a total of 4 TB.  And to top it off, there’s an integrated RAID controller to keep your data safe.

On the front there are four LEDs in the centre that indicate the status of each of the internal drives.  There’s also a single power LED on the right.  Round the back there’s both USB2 and eSATA ports.  The USB2 can be used for both data and configuration of the device, whereas the eSATA connection can only be used for data.  If you’re missing an eSATA port, don’t worry, there’s an eSATA bracket in the box that will convert a free internal connection to an external one.  There’s also a simple auto/off switch.

So what’s it like in action?  Let’s take a look.

Installing the DriveStation Quad software was simple.  The main element is the RAID configuration tool which allows you to configure the array in five different ways, including four independent disks, one big disk, RAID 0, RAID 10 and RAID 5.  It’s all very straightforward and the disk(s) are reformatted after array changes.  Frankly, once you’ve decided what kind of array you want and have configured the Quad, you’re done.  Just get on and use it.

The configuration software also allows you to configure email alerts for a variety of conditions, such as out of space or disk failure.

In addition, there’s a bit of extra software including various drivers to “speed up” your PC, a backup utility and a RAM Disk utility.

After playing with Quad under Windows 7 for awhile, I transferred the Quad to my Ubuntu Linux PC and connected it up with eSATA.  There is no RAID configuration utility for Linux, but as it was already configured as a RAID 5 array, I had no difficulty re-formatting it to one of the Linux formats (ext3) before mounting it.

Running a couple of speed tests, I was able to get an average read rate of just under 260 MB/s, which is actually better than spec (235 MB/s).  To test the RAID capability, I removed one of the disks from the array and then copied some files to the remaining disks.  On restoring the disk to the array, a red flashing light appeared on the front indicating the affected disk.  The other three green LEDs flickered away while the array was rebuilt.  Now, it did take a good few hours rebuild the array but I was still able to read and write to the unit during this time.  Brilliant.

When I first got the Quad out of the box, I have to say that I was a bit unsure of its target market.  It’s too big to be portable.  It’s not a NAS for central storage.  It’s a bit much for just backup.  So what’s it for?  In my opinion, this is a additional hard drive for data hungry users.  Remember when articles said you should store your OS on one partition (or drive) and your data on another? Well, this is how you do it – you have your main disk for your OS, you plug this in via eSATA and you’ve got your data on a rock solid RAID5 array.  Would I want one?  Definitely.

Alternatively, you could plug the Quad into a server and boost the storage space available – it’s fully compatible with Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003/2008 – so this would be an attractive way for a small business to easily and quickly upgrade a server with extra disk space.

The full specs on the DriveStation Quad are available from Buffalo’s website and it should be available shortly.  An RRP hadn’t been set at time of writing but I imagine it will be around £400 inc VAT.

Thanks to Buffalo for the loan of the review unit.

Having won the format wars, Blu-ray is the hi-def standard; USB3 ports are appearing more regularly on motherboards and 3D is definitely flavour of the month.  So it’s not entirely unsurprising that Buffalo has brought out an external drive that brings all three together.

The BR3D-12U3 Blu-ray drive was released back in September and brings together all the latest technologies into a good-looking external drive.  With a USB3 connection, it has 3D playback support for 3D movies and 12x write speed for both single and dual layer disks.  The full technical specs are here and the RRP is £199.

Buffalo kindly lent GNC a drive to test for a couple of weeks and, frankly, I liked it, probably because it matched my PC case.  However, let’s be a bit more objective.

The drive comes in the usual red coloured Buffalo-style box.  Inside, you get the external drive itself, a power supply, a USB3 cable, a quick start guide and a software CD.

The external drive is black and I think it looks good as far as computer peripherals go.  The case is a fairly hard plastic and the top surface has a shiny speckled surface which is attractive.  The other surfaces have a different matt finish which is plainer but not unattractive.  The front panel has a blue LED that lights when reading and writing.  There’s a green power LED at the back that perhaps ought to have been blue as well.

The PSU comes with UK and European plugs and connects into the external drive at the back.  There is no power button.

If you haven’t seen a USB3 cable or connector, you might be a little surprised. The A connector (that’s the bit that plugs into the PC) looks fairly normal, but the B connector (that’s the external drive end) is a bit different – it’s kind of like two connectors piggy-backed on top of each other.

The Buffalo drive was tested on an Ubuntu Linux 10.10 PC and an HP laptop with Windows 7 Home.  Neither of these actually had USB3 ports or 3D graphics cards, so some of the advanced features couldn’t be tried out.  Regardless, this was still a pretty capable drive.

Windows 7

Windows 7 instantly recognised the drive when it was plugged in via USB2 and put a new drive into Computer.  At this stage, any attempts to play a Blu-ray disk were met with errors as there was no media player installed that could decode Blu-ray disks.  Buffalo have helpfully included the ubiquitous CyberLink suite of programs to get round this.

The CyberLink installation went smoothly enough but it could have been clearer.  The laptop already had an older version of the CyberLink software and instead of saying that a previous version was installed, it simply says, “Do you want to uninstall CyberLink Product X”. This is a bit counter intuitive when you are trying to install the software.  Once I’d overcome that hurdle, it was plain sailing, though it takes a good twenty minutes to get everything loaded up.

The CyberLink suite is made up about six different components – one for playing movies, one for working with music, one for video editing, etc.  I tried out the movie player (PowerDVD) and the disk burner (Power2Go)

The Blu-ray films all looked deliciously detailed in comparison to DVDs and the playback was smooth – no problems here at all.  There were a few issues with the main menu, though.  In “Toy Story”, the animated background seemed to display over the menu so it wasn’t possible to see the options.  I was able to play the film by pressing Enter, but you’d have no hope accessing any other content.

The software also has two modes, “Classic” and “Cinema”.  The former plays the film within Windows 7, whereas the latter gives it more of a video player feeling.  The Cinema mode felt much more polished than the Classic with more attractive menus and preferences screens.

The data module (Power2Go) worked as advertised, allowing files to be dragged from the filesystem before being burned to the disk.  Helpfully, it has a thermometer style display showing you how much of your 24GB had been used.  If you’ve used any of these type of tools before, you’ll be right at home.

Apart from the issue with the top menu, the CyberLink suite seemed to work well enough, but it does prompt frequently to register and upgrade (at a cost).

Linux

Buffalo doesn’t provide any Linux software but using the drive with CDs and DVDs was trouble-free anyway.  DVD’s played well in VLC and there were no problems burning to DVD-R or DVD-RW.  Blu-ray disks were seen as data devices as there’s currently no Blu-ray players for Linux (AFAIK).  However, Brasero recognised BD-Rs just fine and wrote to a single layer disk without trouble.

Using dd to copy data from a Blu-ray disk gave an average of around 14 MB/s for 43GB disk.  Don’t forget that the drive was connected via USB2, not USB3.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning, I really liked the hardware.  However, I felt it was a little let down by the CyberLink Suite – if you are paying the best part of £200 for what is a high-spec device, you want the bells and whistles, not nagged into upgrading.

Regardless, movie playback was sweet, with the detail you expect from Blu-ray and I didn’t see any stuttering in the films I watched.

The recording or writing features worked well too, though I wasn’t able to test the high speed writing, partly because of an absence of USB3 ports but also the fastest media I could get my hands on was only 4x.

Overall, I’d say a solid and good-looking device and if you are in the market for an external Blu-ray writer, it’s definitely worth considering.

Thanks to again to Buffalo for providing the review unit.

I’ve been using Android for a while now and feel I’ve been using it long enough to make some meaningful observations.

I like Android. It’s quick. It’s powerful. It has some astounding voice recognition capability built right in that even the iPhone can’t touch. For example, hold down the search button and when the voice search box pops up say “navigate to” and then speak either a street address, the name of a business or a business category, and watch what happens. The results are something right out of science fiction and nothing short of amazing. Try THAT with your iPhone.

In other areas, Android seems to fall rather flat. While it’s possible to create, name and populate folders, the process seems clunky and rather counter-intuitive.

How about allowing me as an end-user to rename application icons to something useful? Many apps have names that don’t bear any relationship or give any hint as to what their functionality is as an app. If I could just rename the text under the app icons it would help me out as an end user quite a bit. Either give me a direct icon name that describes functionality succinctly, or give me the ability to rename an icon myself just like I can in Windows or OS/X.

Another area that falls somewhat flat is how to discover great apps. There are a ton of apps, but it’s often difficult to find the best ones. I’m willing to spend money on apps, however I want the best bang for my buck. How can I be assured if I buy an app I’m buying the best possible one?

I just finished listening to the unabridged Audible audio book version of “The Man Who Lied To His Laptop” by Clifford Nass and Corina Yen.

After many years of working as a software interface design consultant, Clifford Nass has developed the theory that human brains cannot completely and fundamentally distinguish the difference between interacting with people and interacting with devices. This book details nearly 30 experiments Nass has performed that back up this revolutionary theory.

Remember “Clippy” from Microsoft Word? Chances are, the mere mention of the dreaded Microsoft Office animated paperclip brings up wildly negative feelings. Clippy’s main flaw was that he couldn’t learn and kept badgering Office users over and over for carrying out repetitive tasks that were not mistakes. Even though users “knew” that Clippy was just an animated character, part of their brain actually related to Clippy as a real, despicable character that lived in their computers.

Similarly, BMW had a big problem with male German car owners complaining loudly about the integrated BMW GPS units. It turns out that German men objected over and over again to BMW’s help line that the BMW GPS units came equipped with a female voice, and that just wouldn’t do, because it just wasn’t “right” to take driving directions from a female voice. “Knowing” that mostly male engineers had developed it wasn’t enough to eliminate the problem.

The book is filled with some rather amazing results of experiments that indicate just how suggestible the average person really is. Be afraid. Be very afraid.