Monthly Archives: October 2008
Mad Catz – AirDrives
Ken Wright, the creator and designer of AirDrives, had a general concern – like most parents – about his young daughter’s hearing after seeing her walking round with earphones firmly wedged in place and MP3 volume cranked to the max. So he decided to design a set of earphones that that could still supply high…
Asus – G50V
Asus’s Republic of Gamers product line carries products that Asus has designed specifically for gamers in mind – no surprise there, then – and while the RoG label is usually associated with motherboards and graphics cards, it does include the G7 and G5 range of notebooks. The latest laptop to carry the logo is the…
Parallels – Virtuozzo Containers 4.0
Most virtualisation programs work by virtualising hardware, but not Virtuozzo Containers from Parallels, which virtualises the host operating system instead. The end result is much the same – the ability to support multiple independent virtual environments (containers) on one physical machine – but with advantages in terms of the number that can be supported and…
Yoggie Security Systems – Gatekeeper Card Pro
The Gatekeeper Card Pro from Yoggie is something of a mini marvel in that it’s a self-contained security computer, complete with processor (Freescale i.MX31), 128MB of RAM and a further 128MB of flash storage, all squeezed onto a tiny ExpressCard. Pop it into a notebook and it sits between the PC and any network connections,…
EA – FaceBreaker
As the name suggests, FaceBreaker isn’t a subtle affair. It’s an arcade boxing game in which the cartoon boxers’ faces get slowly deformed with every punch, so by the end of the bout their noses are somewhere over by their ears and their lips look like bananas. The gimmick is that you can take a…
PC Tools – Spyware Doctor with Antivirus 6
Spyware Doctor with Antivirus 6 combines spyware and malware scanning tools with the PCTools IntelliGuard engine to offer you peace of mind when browsing the Internet. If you’re happy to use the Windows firewall, a hardware firewall or have a dedicated solution of your own, the software has all that’s needed to shore up the…
Warner Bros Interactive – LEGO Batman
If you’ve battled your way through any of the earlier LEGO games then there’s little doubt you’ll know exactly what’s expected here. In short, a series of familiar characters are remodelled out of LEGO and thrust into an accessible mix of action and puzzle solving. It worked for Star Wars, it worked for Indiana Jones…
Corel – WinZip 12.0
It’s perhaps a little disingenuous to say it, but that doesn’t make in untrue. Over the many generations that WinZip has been with us we’ve met many, many people who use it but not a single person who has bought a copy. And we’re not talking piracy here; rather the fact that its shareware licence…
Sony – Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro
Long one of the most under-appreciated video editing applications on the market, Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum is an exhaustive, comprehensive suite of applications that hopefully will reap the level of sales its continual critical acclaim warrants. This new edition happily ups the ante on previous versions, but crucially it’s also made the main…
LG – KF510
LG’s KF510 is a slider and a nice, thin one at that: the phone is just 10.9mm thick. It feels solid in the hand thanks to its metal body, but this doesn’t always work in its favour. We found it to be a little top-heavy when the slide was opened. Not a huge problem, but…