So here’s the latest offering from previously impressive audio manufacturer Edifier, who gave us the Luna Encore and USB Soundbar earlier in the year, which struck a perfectly strung chord and had me waxing lyrical on all manner of aspects. Audio quality was consistently great across the range, as was value for money and design, so there’s a lot to live up to for these speakers designed for your PC. [Read more…]
Nuance OmniPage 18 For Windows Review
As much as we’d like to maintain a paperless lifestyle, it’s still pretty difficult to get by purely in the digital realm. Whether we’re being sent bills in the mail or given handouts at a conference, paper still surrounds us every day of our lives. If you do wish to maintain a paperless lifestyle, you could always scan in those documents and save them as images, but that becomes messy fairly quickly, and you can’t annotate an image either. So, what’s the answer? Optical character recognition. More commonly known as ‘OCR’, this technique is exactly what Nuance uses in its OmniPage software, which allows you to scan in your documents and have them converted to editable, digital files. [Read more…]
Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Review
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play – casually known as the PlayStation Phone – may be one of the most anticipated mobile devices of the past few years; rumours of such a device had been circling the internet for months before its eventual unveiling at the early stages of this year. The concept is quite simple really: take what is arguably the most successful gaming platform of all time and merge it with your everyday smartphone to give people a great gaming experience on the go. After all, if any company knows what it takes to make a successful games console it’s Sony, right?
With physical, slide-out controls and a dedicated PlayStation application alongside the Android market, the Xperia Play certainly has a lot of promise for those wanting to take their games with them, but does it live up to all the hype? Let’s take a closer look and find out for ourselves! [Read more…]
SteelSeries Spectrum 5xB Xbox 360 Gaming Headset Review
Back in July of last year Steelseries announced two headsets specifically designed for Xbox 360 gaming: the Spectrum 5xb and 4xb, and over the last couple of weeks we’ve had our hands on the former of these to see how well it matches up not only to the pretty good pedigree that Steelseries have created for themselves but also against the competition.
The SteelSeries Spectrum 5xB Gaming Headset is their first (or more correctly, the better of their first two) headsets specifically designed for gaming on the Xbox 360 which means that not only do they come with the usual headset paraphernalia but also a neat little box that allows you to adjust the audio from your Xbox to ‘optimise your gaming experience’. [Read more…]
Apple iPad 2 Review
The original iPad, which launched around this time last year, brought with it a series of questions, mostly leaning towards the point of ‘what’s it for?’
It was criticised at first, many calling it no more than a giant iPod Touch, and that was probably the reason I promised myself I would wait for at least the second rendition of Apple’s tablet before I hopped aboard the bandwagon.
Not because I didn’t like the iPad since of course, it was ‘magical’. But more because it was obvious to me that the tablet industry would take time to truly discover itself, and it’s questionable as to whether the point has yet been reached when people know what tablets are for, exactly. I mean, it’s clear that each manufacturer has it’s own view as to what a tablet should be, with many opting for smaller screens, slide-out physical keyboards or what have you, but one thing is clear: nothing quite came close to the original iPad.
[Read more…]
Mover Connect for Mac & Mover+ for iOS App Review
Until Airdrop arrives with the update to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and hopefully what will be an update to iOS 5 for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, there is no simple way of wirelessly transferring files between one Apple device and another. Enter Mover.
Whilst it comes under different names, the application works in tandem between your Mac and iOS devices, with dedicated apps for OS X, iPad and iPhone helping to organise and synchronise your files.
Of course, with the iOS edition comes a neater, more touch friendly user interface, but the premise of the app is still the same, and works perfectly in almost all cases.
[Read more…]
Is Owning An iPhone A Sign Of…No Wealth? – Are You Overdrawn?
Probably ever since the first wheel was invented, people have rated their wealth by their possessions and how well they compare to others: in medieval times it was the number of wives you had, in the 1930s it was your radio, in the 60s it was colour TVs and now arguably it is your phone.
However, some interesting research suggests that in fact many of those who own fancy mobile phones are those that are further down the earning hierarchy than they may first appear and that there is one phone that suffers from financial deficiencies in its owners more than others: the iPhone.
Despite the logical inference that the high price tag would mean that only the wealthy could afford to buy an iPhone almost one in five iPhone owners in this survey admitted that their main account is always overdrawn, a statistic that is around double the national average of one-in-ten people.
[Read more…]
Nuance PDF Converter 2.0 For Mac Review
Towards the end of last year, we took a look at Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional 7 for Windows, and found it to be a very capable piece of software when editing and converting PDF documents, although a little work was needed on the OCR technology within the program.
Fast forward a few months, and we’re using PDF Converter for the Mac, which does a similar job to the Windows version of the application, although it’s been extensively ‘Mac-ified’ in the porting process. It commands a price tag of £80 – £20 more than it does on Windows – but can it match up to its Windows counterpart or is this a case of style over substance? Let’s take a look! [Read more…]
Calibre E-Book Management Tool For Windows Review
Haven’t you heard? E-books are all the rage nowadays! The Kindle is selling like wildfire, and remains the best selling product ever on Amazon, whilst Apple’s iPad attempts to close the gap between dedicated reader and all-in-one portable. Of course there are a plethora of other e-book readers on the market as well; the Barnes & Noble Nook is a big hit over in the States, and the Sony Reader is moderately popular closer to home — we did a roundup of the best e-book readers available a few months back, so if you want a closer look at a few more options, you should check that out.
With all these e-books floating around our digital devices, where do we store all of our content? If you buy a book for the Kindle, your purchase is forever linked to your account in the ‘Available downloads’ folder of your device, but what about e-books you have previously owned or recently acquired outside of the Kindle or B&N store? For those books that aren’t stored in a digital locker somewhere, you can use calibre, an open source e-book management system – an iTunes for e-books, if you will – which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. [Read more…]
Sky News iPad App Review
Of all the things that make their way on to the App Store, a new iPad app delivering your daily dose of news is unlikely to catch much attention. After all there’s only so much you can do with the news, but Sky News has managed to come out with something not only capable of giving you the day’s stories, but something that feels refreshingly different.
There are too many companies willing to follow the latest trends without sticking their necks out for something different, something that can change the way you interact with an application. Admittedly, when you first open the Sky News application your first reaction may be one of slight bemusement. Windows Phone 7 users will feel right at home with the modular, tile-like, design of the application, although it took me a little longer to feel truly comfortable in finding my way around, with a completely different layout to the Sky News iPhone app. [Read more…]
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