Monthly Archives: August 2007
Cyanide – Pro Cycling Manager 2007
The Tour de France is without doubt one of the premier events in the sporting calendar – it has the largest annual pro sport viewing audience worldwide – and its appeal has mushroomed beyond France and its immediate satellite countries thanks to the early stages now starting in London, and American Lance Armstrong’s record-breaking seven…
Samsung – R70
Samsung’s marketing blurb for the R-series says that it is inspired by technology (well, we’d certainly hope so), is user-friendly and ideal for the whole family. The latest member of the clan, the R70, holds up those values – as long as none of the family members are hard-core gamers, that is – and is…
Nuance – Dragon NaturallySpeaking Wireless 9.5 Preferred Edition
When it comes to voice recognition, few are as experienced or accomplished in the field as Dragon. The NaturallySpeaking series now includes version 9.5, recently updated with all-important Vista compatibility and in this particular case, a wireless headset. The Preferred Edition incorporates handy extra features such as text-to-speech output, dictation playback and support for handheld…
BenQ – T700
Gone are the days when a camera was purchased simply for the range of its functions and the sharpness of its images. In a very crowded and competitive digital camera market, what makes your model stand out above the rest is more often than not style as opposed to substance. The first thing that strikes…
Philips – Freevents X200 Longneck
Notebooks tend to fall into two camps: big, desktop-replacement systems with all the bells and whistles, but only portable if you own a tower crane; and light, easily carried laptops, which sometimes struggle to keep up. Philips’s X200 falls into the latter category. The processor is a Core 2 Duo ULV U2500, but running at…
Samsung – Ultra UMPC
The Ultra Mobile PC, or UMPC for short, is a breed of computer that is like a small laptop without a hinged screen. Or, if you prefer, like a large handheld computer. Either way, it is an unusual format for a computer. Too large for the pocket, too small for serious use as your main…
Codemasters – Colin McRae: Dirt
A franchise that bides its time more than most in between iterations, the Colin McRae games have proved, over many versions, to be really something quite special. Colin McRae: Dirt is, thankfully, no exception. And the reason is that Codemasters refuse to sit still. Each version of McRae that we’ve seen, for better or worse,…
Electronic Arts – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
If Harry Potter happened to be a real adolescent wizard, you could forget all that “Wingardium Leviosa” nonsense. He’d have found some far more interesting and useful spells to cast. Like “Bum-fluffium Begonius” for example, or “Conjuria Two-Litreo Bottle of Ciderium.” And perhaps “See-throughius Blousera” – although there’s every danger he’d wear his wand out…
Sony – Vaio VGN-UX1XN
Sony’s Vaio VGN-UX1XN is in many ways a remarkable machine. Weighing less than half a kilo and measuring 100.5mm high, 150.2mm wide and 38.2mm deep, it is amazing that the computer can pack in a keyboard, 1024 x 600 pixel display, Intel Core Solo 1.33GHz U1500 processor with 1GB of RAM, 32GB hard drive, fingerprint…
Focus Multimedia – Pawly Pets: My Animal Hospital and Pawly Pets: My Animal Hospital In Africa
Who would have thought that a vet sim would work? In fact, scratch that: who would have thought that a pair of vet sims would work? For, in spite of a few grievances, Focus’s double bill of Pawly Pets: My Animal Hospital and Pawly Pets: My Animal Hospital In Africa (available for £9.99 apiece) works…