Monthly Archives: May 2006
GSP – Bananas In Pyjamas: It’s Party Time, Balamory, Bill & Ben Flowerpot Fun
The GSP label is currently bustling with licensed titles from the BBC. That means its range features several pieces of software that boast characters from TV shows that pint-size computer users are, in principle, going to love. So we’ve rounded up a trio of them here to see if they’re actually much cop. The first…
Lexmark – X8350
This all-in-one machine from Lexmark fits the term better than most. As well as the usual functions of printing, scanning and copying, it has an automatic sheet feeder, memory card readers and fax functions. The X8350 is also a very compact device, mainly due to Lexmark’s adoption of the front-in and front-out paper path, pioneered…
Maxfield – Max-Joy
Audio players, which will play back music tracks and things you record live, are becoming as ubiquitous as mobile phones, so it’s not surprising we’re now getting models intended for the youth market. The Max-Joy audio player from German maker Maxfield is intended for children aged between 6 and 12. Maxfield claims that several features…
Samsung – SyncMaster 940BF
The current vogue for LCD flat panel monitors is ever-decreasing circles of response times. In layman’s terms, an LCD’s response time is a measurement in milliseconds of the time it takes to update the screen, the theory being that a panel with a lower value will be able to better handle fast-moving images, such as…
ABBYY – FineReader Pro 8.0
Optical character recognition is a mature technology, and the machines it now runs on are immensely powerful compared with those used in the early days of OCR, so it’s not unreasonable to expect any current program to recognise pages of scanned text perfectly. In this respect ABBYY FineReader Pro does not disappoint, but as nearly…
Fujitsu Siemens – Pocket LOOX C550
There has been mumbling heard for some time that the standalone PDA is a dead duck, and that people either want their handheld computers to be connected to the outside world via GSM or 3G, or they don’t want a handheld at all but instead favour a Smartphone. Well, that is certainly the case for…
iRiver – U10
It seems hard to believe that it was almost exactly a year ago that iRiver brought out its H10 multimedia player, with its emphasis on compactness, ease of function and good sound quality. The U10 has taken on board several of the shortcomings of its predecessor and done much to improve them, but there are…
UbiSoft – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
We figured we were ready to explore the Dark Corners of the Earth. After all, we’ve been to Blackpool on a Bank Holiday weekend. We’ve been out in Manchester on a Saturday night. Hell, we’ve been to Hull. We’ve seen a lot of dark things. But Ubisoft’s first-person horror action-adventure is dripping with moments that…
Mio – A701
In-vehicle navigation is becoming quite the thing, with the range of options available growing all the time. Unless you are super-rich you are probably going to be looking at one of two set-ups: a stand-alone sat-nav system which only offers route planning, or a more hybrid type of system built around some sort of PDA….
MYOB – Accounting Plus v15
Now in its fifteenth version, MYOB Accounting is a well established small business accounting package available for both Windows PCs and Apple Mac platforms. Primarily aimed at users with at least a basic knowledge of book-keeping, it is nonetheless relatively easy to learn, with a separate Business Basics version (£68 + VAT) for start-ups and…