Articles by Rob Beattie
MoviePlus X6
The latest version of Serif’s home video editing program adds new features designed to appeal to users who want to create movies with the minimum of effort and a number of extras designed to enhance its appeal to more serious enthusiasts. In this way, the program continues to serve the needs of most home users…
Media Toolkit Ultimate
With so many different audio and video standards and so many devices capable of playing them back it’s commonplace to find you’ve got some media you’d like to enjoy, but can’t quite get to work with your hardware or software player. This is where Mediavator’s Media Toolkit Ultimate Edition comes in – as it’s an…
Music Maker MX
Looking more and more like Apple’s Garage Band, Music Maker MX conceals a proper home-recording product with all the effects, instruments, loops, samples and support for professional-level plugins, such as VST instruments. This is all beneath a friendly interface that allows you to make music, without taking a music technology course. Complete beginners should start…
Edifier Tick Tock Dock
Looking rather like a cartoon alarm clock, the Tick Dock Dock is a combo clock radio/speaker dock that is designed to work with all iPods and iPhones and uses Apple’s standard oblong connector. When listening to music, the speaker is surprisingly articulate so long as you don’t go much above half volume. The sound is…
Ricoh CX6 Digital Camera
Previous versions of the CX made a name for themselves as solid, compact point-and-shoot cameras with just enough extra photographic oomph to attract the more serious travelling snapper – with a justification for the slighter higher than average price tag. The CX6 continues the progress, while offering the same basic features of the CX5. These…
Quiet PC Nofan IcePipe A43-Z68 Silent PC
Rather like children, PCs can be noisy little monsters. Fortunately, unlike kids, they do have an off switch, although having to work with a loud computer can still be very distracting. Even an average PC makes a reasonable amount of fan and drive noise, and we’ve experienced some machines which could give a vacuum cleaner…
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
There are certain precautions that can be taken to avoid assassination. For starters, at the first whiff of a smoke bomb, leg it swiftly. And never stand with your back to a haystack – it’s a favourite hideout from which to spring a surprise execution. Stay away from the rooftops too, which are like a…
TP-Link TL-WR2543ND Router
Wi-Fi is now ubiquitous, but performance never quite lives up to expectations. Poor throughput, interference from neighbours and dead spots around the home, all mean that wired connections are still the best choice, when practical. TP-Link’s new TL-WR2543ND router claims to address some of these problems, by implementing the next step in the evolution…
Need For Speed: The Run
There has now been three Need For Speed games that have hit the shelves in the past twelve months, and there are rarely moments in Need For Speed: The Run, the latest of them, that massively impress. The new game is arcade-focussed, thus a follow-on, of sorts, to the Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit version,…
The Best Apple iPhone games – Group Review
That’s enough work for this year then. Instead, let’s check out a selection of our top iPhone games courtesy of many happy hours spent thumbs a-tapping, when we should have been doing something sensible. APP OF THE MONTH: Tiny Wings, PRICE: 69p, RATING: 5/5 Of course there had to be an iPhone game with birds…