Review: Eurocom Monster W110ER gaming netbook
High-end gaming condensed into an 11.6in notebook
It’s hard to see quite who Eurocom thinks will buy its Monster W110ER “gaming netbook”. Surely any gamer sufficiently hardcore to feel the need to be able to take a high-end gaming system around with them - and the W110ER is a high-end machine - will want to play on a larger screen than an 11.6-incher, especially when it’s …
Apple iOS 6 review
Review 200 new features, but you'd never know it
OK, so when iOS 6 arrives in an hour or so, you'll rush to download it no matter what. You may as well, it's free, especially if you're not using any old apps that might warrant compatibility fears.
Apple has promised the new operating system delivers more than 200 new features, but the vast majority of those aren't user-facing …
Ten netbooks
Product Roundup Small, cheap computers for scholars
Tablets may have taken the wind out of the netbook's sales, and prompted some manufacturers, Dell and Sony among them, to stop selling them, but if you're looking for a small and, crucially, cheap personal computer for the kids, for offspring heading off to college, or just for emailing while travelling, a netbook is well worth …
Ten... tablet survival accessories
Product Roundup Handy add-ons for your fondleslab
Reg Hardware Mobile Broadband Week
We like tablets. Way more portable than most laptops - even netbooks - they're nevertheless no less functional. Notebooks clearly have the edge when it comes to outright performance, but you can get a lot done with a fondleslab - and that's before you think about them as entertainment …
2011's Best... E-book Readers
Xmas Gift Guide For lovers of literature
World+Dog might fancy a glossy, colour tablet, but for the more literary inclined an e-book reader will likely prove a more suitable option. Yes, they're not as flash as fondleslabs, but their screens are legible both indoors and out, and their batteries last an age between charges. And, to please the canny gift buyer, they're …
Logitech AV Stand
Accessory of the Week Turn your tab into a telly, kind of
It's well known that the iPad's speaker is, well, a bit weedy. While there are a million and one low cost stands out there, if you really want to use your iPad as a movie screen, you need one that incorporates a decent speaker too.
Enter the Logitech AV Stand, a tubular stereo speaker with an arm-mounted iPad holder.
Logitech …
Scosche BoomCan mini travel speaker
Accessory of the Week Tubular belle?
There is no shortage of small speakers for phones and music players, but few deliver much in the way of welly, or even sound quality.
Scosche BoomCan mini travel speaker
Not that you should expect a pristine hi-fi experience when you're using an ad hoc speaker such as Scorche's new BoomCan, but it's capable of pumping out a …
Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate G2 USB 3.0 Flash drive
Accessory of the Week SuperSpeed file swapper
If Apple won't go USB 3.0, at least almost every other computer maker has. While eSata, Firewire 800 and Thunderbolt are certainly better for desktop drives, SuperSpeed is the only choice when you want to copy files quickly onto a stick and go.
Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate G2 is its latest USB 3.0 Flash drive, replacing the …
The year's best... laptops
2010: it's a wrap The stand-out notebooks and netbooks
2010: it's a wrap
Apple's MacBook Air was undoubtledly the stand-out notebook of 2010, particularly in its compact 11.6in form, even though the bigger, 13.3in model is the better of the two: not a lot less portable, but faster, more functional and with a longer battery life.
However, the 11.6in Air is a beast that can span …
How to... print wirelessly from your iDevice
Review AirPrint enabler utilities reviewed
Apple's decision to yank support for its AirPrint technology from Mac OS X 10.6.5 has the noses of no few iDevice owners out of joint.
With the arrival yesterday of iOS 4.2 and the wireless printing tech it brings to iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, the absence of AirPrint on Macs prevents owners of these gadgets printing, …
Watchdog lauds better phone contract refund terms
Improved options if your coverage is poor
The UK's major mobile phone retailers have pledged to make it easier for punters to cancel contracts if there's poor network coverage, independent advisory body the Communications Consumer Panel (CCP) said today.
The CCP has been lobbying networks and the retailers that sell their airtime contracts to provide a standard policy …
Duracell MyGrid cable-free gadget charger
Review Wireless electricity
Cable-free charging is nothing new, the notion having been pioneered by Powermat, but the big names in consumer power have now taken note of the technology and have introduced their big-brand alternatives.
Duracell MyGrid Charge Pad Duracell's MyGrid Charge Pad: handy if you've several devices you need to charge at once
Take …
Powermat iPhone 4 wireless charging kit
Review Cutting the cord
Powermat, the best-known purveyor of wireless charging systems, missed a chance by not getting its iPhone 4 inductive charging pack out sooner than it has. Antennagate highlighted the benefits of wrapping the newest iPhone in a case, and Powermate might have sold a fair few units on the back of it.
Powermat iPhone 4 kit …
Samsung hails Galaxy Tab charity donation plan
Spend £600, we'll give a tenner
Samsung is generously giving 1.67 per cent of the retail price of every Galaxy Tab Android tablet sold through Phones4U to help fight breast cancer.
Buy the £600 gadget from now until the end of November and Samsung will give a tenner to charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer.
It's an excellent cause to support - breast cancer is …
Apple iPod Shuffle 4G
Review Not-so-slight return
The iPod Shuffle's entire history is a testament to the fact that Apple doesn't always get products right. The fact it exists at all shows Steve Jobs was wrong to say that consumers don't really want low-cost, plug'n'go music players. They do, and if the number of Shuffles seen on lapels and bagstraps around the capital is …
Verbatim InSight 500GB external hard drive
Review Coming clean on capacity
Verbatim's InSight external hard drive is an unusual-looking offering, but that odd wave-like curve at the front is home to the unit's status readout screen.
Verbatim Insight Verbatim's InSight 500GB: tells you how much space you have left
Unlike rival drive maker Western Digital, which also puts a status display on some of …
Apple Magic Trackpad
Review Let your fingers do the working
You've got to hand it to Apple. While it may not be the innovator it likes to think it is, it does have a knack for re-inventing old ideas and coming up with something better. Music players, small form-factor computers, tablet PCs - it's taken existing concepts and given them a major makeover.
Apple Magic Trackpad Apple's Magic …
How to... read comics on the iPad
Kerpow!
E-book reader, portable telly, digital newspaper, big-screen games console, movie player - the iPad all of these incredibly well. It's also a darn fine comic viewer, its richly coloured, bright 1024 x 768 screen ideal for presenting sequential art.
Love comics? Here's Reg Hardware's quick guide to enjoying them on your iPad. …
Mili HI-P60 Power Pico Projector
Review Turn your iPhone into a cinema
There sure is a buzz about compact, portable "pico" projectors thanks to notion that they will allow us to cast content kept on mobile phones up onto a handy wall, cinema style. Coupling one with an iPhone, China's Hali-Power, operating under the brandname Mili, reckons it has a winning combination.
MiLi HI-P60 Power Pico …
Lite-on ETDU108 slim DVD drive
Review Burning ambition?
So ubiquitous has DVD burning become that when Lite-on sent us its ETDU108 slimline external optical drive, we naturally assumed it could write DVD±R/RW discs. It was only when we tried unsuccessfully to burn one that we realised our assumption was incorrect.
Liteon ETDU108 Liteon's ETDU108: read only
The ETDU108 is a read- …
Inside USB 3.0
What makes SuperSpeed tick
NEC last week announced what it claims is the world's first host controller chip for USB 3.0 - aka SuperSpeed USB because of its 5Gb/s peak data-transfer rate.
Since the Universal Serial Bus isn't a peer-to-peer system - unlike Firewire, for instance - NEC's chip isn't enough to allow manufacturers to offer USB 3.0 peripherals …
Zen and the Art of Laptop Battery Maintenance
Keep your notebook or netbook's power pack in tune
We all own more battery powered products than ever before, and in most cases those batteries are rechargeable. Laptops, music players, phones - they all have rechargeable power packs, almost all of them using lithium.
These batteries don't last forever. No matter what you do, their capacity to hold charge will decline over time …
Getting started with TrueCrypt
Turn your generic Flash drive into a secure data store
TrueCrypt is a free, open source application that allows you to create encrypted file stores and open them under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It's UI can appear daunting to the newcomer, but the app's actually very straightforward to use.
First, you need to download TrueCrypt for your preferred platform(s). We're using a Mac …
How to backup and restore your netbook
Duplicate your OS, updates, apps, documents, the lot
Having a small-capacity solid-state drive in your netbook may be limitation but it has one advantage: it's easy to back up. We don't mean copying a few files over to a safe place, but duplicating the entire drive, operating system and all, ready to drop it all back on if the worst comes to the worst.
PCs often come with recovery …
Hacking the Apple TV
Part 2 Adding new file formats
Apple’s Apple TV set-top box supports all the audio and video file formats that iTunes, iPods and iPhones can handle. That’s plenty for many folk, but for those who favour less mainstream formats or widespread ones that Apple’s not keen on — DivX, for one — it severely limits the value of the machine.
Fortunately, once the Apple …
Hacking the Apple TV
Part 1 Getting in
Apple continues to describe its Apple TV set-top box as a “hobby” project: it’ll continue to develop the platform, but it’s not making any money out of it yet. The gadget’s a hobby project for a lot of other folk too. They want to gain access to this closed but surprisingly powerful system to make it more useful.
We’ve had an …
Sony pours water on fiery Blu-ray Disc sales forecasts
How much will punter spend on home entertainment now they're not going out as much?
Blu-ray Disc sales won't meet previously enthusiastic predictions, a senior Sony staffer has warned.
But the HD disc format will still be a popular purchase during the holiday season, he added.
Speaking to newsagency Reuters, Stan Glasgow, head of Sony's electronics business in the US, said that the world sales target of 5m BD …
Koreans create dancing droid
Who says white bots can't dance?
Korean boffins have created a robot that can, they claim, can dance. 'Your plastic pal who's fun to be with' here at last, we wonder.
Dance Away Mahru: play that funky music, white-bot
Image courtest Daily Chosun
The mechanical man's called Mahru, and it can wave its arms around while trundling around on two legs. Apparently …
Apple 2G iPod Shuffle
Review Two years on, still going strong
The tiny Shuffle remains the iPod Apple makes the least of a song and dance about, but it's no less a player worthy of buyers' consideration than its label-mates.
The second-generation Shuffle Apple revamped last week remains almost entirely the same as the version announced way back in 2006. The colour scheme has been changed …
Dog collared with Cat-5 cable
Woof
If you're a geek with a penchant for pets of the canine kind, here's the accessory for you: a dog lead made out of Cat-5 cable.
Perhaps this could be the new stand-out feature for techies' mutts - computer buff's answer to the crusty's piece of string?
Cat-5 dog lead The Cat-5 dog lead
According to the item's creator, the …
Clean up your iPhone with... er... wiper-wielding bikini babes
It's all done in the best possible taste...
Sick of the muck that's mounted-up on your iPhone's monitor? Fancing having a bikini-clad lassie lather it up and give it a wipe or two? iWash is a new service that lets you get exactly that - virtually.
The cute bit's the fact that she does it from inside the handset's screen.
iWash's creator, US nightclub chain ClubWest, has …
What's the best way to unlock a UK iPhone?
Q&A
Are there any updates on unlocking a new OTB iPhone with firmware 1.1.2 in the UK? There are so many forums and commercial websites with long convoluted solutions that I'm at a lost as to what set of instructions to follow.
Most involve rolling back to version 1.1.1, performing the jailbreak to use a PAYG O2 Sim, unlocking and …
Developer deploys graphics cards to accelerate password cracks
Magic words uncovered in 3-5 days, down from two months
Nvidia's GeForce 8 series of graphics chips can be used to crack Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) passwords 25 times more quickly than was previously possible, security software developer Elcomsoft has claimed.
The Russia-based company this week announced the second major release of its Distributed Password Recovery application, a …
Sharp to show world's skinniest phone display
Sharp will tomorrow demo what it claims is the World's thinnest mobile phone display panel, a 0.68mm-thick unit with a 320 x 240 resolution.
Sharp's 0.68mm mobile LCD Sharp's 0.68mm LCD: waffer theen
The 2.2in display has a contrast ratio of 2000:1, Sharp said, along with a 176° viewing angle amd an 8ms response time - stats …
Apple iPod Touch
2007's Top Products Finger-flicking good?
Apple may be keen to tout the Touch's 3.5in display, but the first thing you notice about the new iPod is how thin it is. Front to back it measures 8mm - on paper not as thin as the 6.5mm thick iPod Nano, but you'd never really know unless you measured them both. The point is, the Touch is supremely skinny.
It's hard to describe …
Sony Ericsson 'Q's up Bond-branded camera phones
'You expect me to talk?'
Sony Ericsson has announced a pair of silver-look limited edition version of its K800 and X790 camera phones to cash in on upcoming Bond flick Casino Royale. Both are pre-loaded with a wealth - it says here - of Bond ringtones, pictures and even the movie trailer.
sony ericsson james bond k800
Both 3G handsets sport a 3.2 …
Nokia shows off Aeon 'wearable' concept phone
Take it apart, fix modules to your shirt
nokia aeon concept phone
Nokia has unveiled its latest concept phone, designed to highlight the company's focus on products that allow users to more readily stamp their personality on their gadgets.
nokia aeon concept phone
The concept phone, dubbed Aeon, combines two touch-sensitive panels mounted on a fuel-cell power …
TrendNet ClearSky Bluetooth 2.0 Skype handset
Review Cordless VoIP calls
The time will surely come when someone ships a really sexy Skype-friendly handset. Until then we'll have to make do with gadgets like TrendNet's ClearSky. But what this device lacks in looks it makes up for in functionality: not only good integration with the Skype service itself but also a Bluetooth wireless connection for …
Micro MP3 Players
Reg Group Test Wanted: very small pockets
Apple's iPod has drawn buyers' attention to the hard drive-based music player market over the last few years. However, the Flash-based player market hasn't stood still during this time and has continued to evolve from the iPod-sized Rios of old into more compact form factors and squeezing in more music capacity. Today, a typical …
