Monthly Archives: July 2005
Alienware – Area-51m 7700
The question is: when is a laptop a ‘desktop replacement’? The usual answer is when it is capable of emulating most of the features of a desktop while still remaining comparatively portable. However, the recent boom in such machines is more usually aimed at serious gamers who don’t want to interrupt their World of Warcraft…
Olympus – m:robe MR-100
Portable MP3 players are everywhere. If you don’t have something that fits in your pocket and plays digital audio already you must surely be in the minority. So what can a new product offer if you are considering an upgrade, or looking for your first player? Olympus, a relatively late entrant to the digital music…
Allume Systems – Aquazone: Jellies, Turtles & More Collection
If you wanted to observe an extensive array of aquatic creatures, you would probably visit the local Sea World. And even though it’s pretty impressive to witness Flipper’s ball-balancing antics, you won’t see anything quite as exotic as the denizens of Aquazone’s virtual aquarium screensaver. Plus with Aquazone you’ll save on the bus fare, not…
Port Designs – Chamonix
I’m a bit of a rucksack junkie. I have different rucksacks depending on how much I need to carry at any one time, and whether I am hiking or just going to the supermarket – yes, rucksacks are great for toting the weekly shop. I’ve done a lot of hunting around and never really found…
Samsung – SpinPoint SP2504C
Samsung has released four new hard drives in its SpinPoint P120 series. We’ll ignore two of them as they’re Parallel ATA models which use the old ribbon cable, but the other two use the new SATA-II interface and that makes them fascinating, as they’re the world’s first Serial ATA II drives to hit the shops….
Leadtek – PX6600GT TDH Extreme
Despite the recent tidal wave of GeForce 7800GTX graphics cards that have been rolling out at £400 a pop, we all know that the man in the street has a more modest budget at his disposal. While it’s tempting to buy a GeForce 6600 for under £100, the 6600GT gives far better performance than the…
Electronic Arts – Batman Begins
Where does Batman begin? We could say that he begins at the soles of his feet, and he ends at the little pointy bat ears on the top of his costume. Or we could get philosophical and say he begins deep within his dark and enigmatic soul, and he ends at the same place in…
Carry A Tune Technologies – Singing Coach Unlimited
I can’t sing. It’s something my closest friends, family and drinking partners have known for some time, so it was little surprise to find a piece of software confirming it. But that’s exactly what Singing Coach Unlimited did. It’s a package aimed at all age groups really, although its cast of cheesy animated characters who…
LG Electronics – L1950H
Offering a crisp and efficient working display, LG’s new L1950H display is a TFT monitor with a reasonable list of reasons to recommend it. The first, and one that’s increasingly being boasted about on the box of such units, is its 12ms response time. This, in theory, should mean the screen can happily keep up…
Gigabyte – GA-K8NE
Gigabyte’s GA-K8NE Socket 754 motherboard uses a chipset that we first saw quite recently. It’s an obscure member of the nForce4 family called nForce4-4x, which denotes that the Hyper Transport bus runs at 800MHz, i.e. 4 x 200MHz, rather than the 1GHz that the regular nForce4 manages. Realistically this isn’t much of an issue with…