Dispatches from the Reviews Editor
Charles has been in tech publishing since the late 1980s, starting with Reed's Practical Computing, then moving to Ziff-Davis to help launch the UK version of PC Magazine in 1992. ZDNet came looking for a Reviews Editor in 2000, and he's been here ever since.
Last year, ZDNet UK ran a 'traditional' Service and Reliability survey, looking at dekstop PCs, notebooks, smartphones, servers and so on. This year, as well as reducing the size of the survey (we appreciate that you can suffer from 'survey fatigue'), we're acknowledging the major recent trend in IT by concentrating exclusively on cloud services.
With its Fusion platform, AMD is aiming to take a bite out of Intel's netbook and ultraportable market share by offering superior CPU and GPU performance, and lower power consumption, to the chip giant's comparable Atom and Core processors.AMD's Fusion family of APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) combines the CPU and a DirectX 11 GPU on a single chip: for example, the E-350 has dual 1.
Data Robotics, maker of the Drobo desktop and network storage products based on the company's proprietary BeyondRAID technology, has announced a new range targeted at small and medium-sized businesses.
Apple was never going to keep quiet with the rest of the tech world focusing on announcements from CES, and news duly arrived today that the Mac App Store had launched with, Apple claims, over 1,000 free and paid-for apps available.To access the store, you'll need to update Snow Leopard to version 10.
If you've ever suffered frustration and rage after mislaying or losing your mobile phone, you may be interested in the ZOMM, a gadget that's designed to alert you should you be parted from your handset. Launched earlier this year in the US, picking up an award at CES, it's now available in the UK for £79.
When covering Android smartphones we generally evaluate high-end handsets aimed at mobile professionals. However, such devices are not the only drivers of the impressive growth that Google's mobile OS has shown since its launch in October 2008.
Videoconferencing specialist LifeSize, which was acquired late last year by Logitech, has unveiled a 16-port video MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) for handling multi-party HD video calling. The LifeSize Bridge 2200 costs an impressive £54,299, but according to the company its cost per port of £3,394 is about a third of what competitors like PolyCom and Tandberg charge for similar equipment, without compromising on performance.
Data Robotics' new Drobo Pro FS is a beefed-up version of the 5-bay Drobo FS, which introduced an integrated NAS server and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to the company's previously direct-attached range of 'self-managing' storage products for small and medium-sized businesses.
For techies of a certain vintage, mention of Psion brings on misty-eyed reminiscences of landmark handhelds like the Organiser, the Series 3 and the Series 5, and the EPOC operating system (which went on to form the basis of Symbian). Since acquiring Teklogix in 2000, however, the company has concentrated on rugged mobile devices for vertical markets.