Charles McLellan

Senior Editor

I'm a Senior Editor at ZDNET, based in the UK. My experience with computers started at London's Imperial College, where I studied Zoology and then Environmental Technology. This was sufficiently long ago (mid-1970s) that Fortran, IBM punche…d-card machines and mainframes were involved, followed by green-screen terminals and eventually the personal computers we know and (mostly) love. After doing post-grad research at Imperial for a while, I got involved in helping to produce a weekly news magazine based in Amsterdam. This was in the mid-1980s, and one of my duties was to set up data communications links with technologically-challenged national newspaper journalists in a number of European cities via a 300-baud modem and an acoustic coupler. Tech support people have my sympathy! I've been in computer publishing since the late 1980s, starting with Reed Business Publishing's Practical Computing, then joining Ziff Davis in 1991 to help launch PC Magazine UK as Production Editor. After a couple of years I switched to commissioning, editing and writing, becoming a Technical Editor and then First Looks Editor. When ZDNet came looking for a Reviews Editor in 2000, I was ready to make the move from print to online — just in time for the dot-com crash! It's been a long road from punched cards to the cloud and AI, but it'll still be fun seeing where we go from here.

Charles McLellan has nothing to disclose. He does not hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Latest from Charles McLellan

Sony Ericsson GC85

Mobile professionals requiring an always-on data connection when out on the road now have a number of choices of PC Card to use in their notebooks. At the slower end of the spectrum are GPRS and GPRS/HSCSD cards like Vodafone's <a href="http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/networking/0,39023965,10003453,00.htm">Mobile Connect Card</a> and Sony Ericsson's <a href="http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/networking/0,39023965,39117913,00.htm">GC79</a>, which will manage download speeds of up to 56Kbps (that is, dial-up modem speed). The fastest available mobile data cards are the recent crop of <a href="http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/networking/0,39023970,39167071,00.htm">3G products</a>, which claim broadband-like speeds of up to 384Kbps. In the middle is a GPRS/EDGE card such as Sony Ericsson's GC85, reviewed here, which -- on mobile networks that support EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) -- can achieve near-3G speeds of 247Kbps. As with 3G, the EDGE card drops back to GPRS speed where the faster coverage is not available.

December 8, 2004 by Charles McLellan in Hardware