This is a new gadget introduced at Brando recently and was designed to attach to your office desk. The lamp is foldable and uses bright LEDs to light the surrounding so you can continue working in the night, while the digital screen shows the date, time and temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Coming in a small and compact shape, powered by a rechargeable Li-Ion battery, this cordless lamp can be carried and used anywhere. It also features universal power adapter, USB charging capability and alarm for the clock function. The lighting time varies around ten hours from a full charge.
04/21/2012
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: Clock, Lamp
The Good
Well-designed maps.
The Bad
Dearth of single-player content
Online suffers from lots of lag.
Contrary to popular belief, a car’s sole purpose is not just to shuttle its passengers around town. That mundane task makes up only a small portion of a car’s potential. Outfit a four-wheeled vehicle with a bevy of ready-to-kill firearms and a sturdy protective shell, and you’ve got yourself a source of destructive entertainment that would make Henry Ford faint with delight. Sadly, the explosive promise of the automobile doesn’t come close to being tapped in the downloadable Wheels of Destruction: World Tour. Through an assortment of problems ranging from minor dents to head-on collisions, Wheels of Destruction makes the joy of blowing up other cars as fun as a drive to the corner market.
Six cars, five maps, four weapons-diversity is not one of Wheels’ strong suits. Upon startup, online competition beckons, but if you’d like to get your motor revved offline, you’re stuck spinning your tires. Offline competition is sparse and uninviting. There’s no tutorial to teach you the ins and outs of vehicular combat, no story to flesh out the motivating force. There’s not even a tournament to give battles a proper structure. You play one-off matches against computer-controlled opponents, check out your kill-to-death ratio afterward, and then play another one-off bout until you grow tired of the banality of it all.
If you think going online could solve these problems, there’s a grand disappointment waiting for you in that realm as well. There’s little difference between online and offline competition save for the incredible lag you suffer when you attempt to challenge other players around the world. Having to put up with severe technical problems when you play Wheels of Destruction online eliminates almost any potential it might have had for being a worthwhile trip down vehicular homicide lane.
There are only two modes of play (Capture the Flag and Deathmatch), unless you consider Team Deathmatch a wholly separate offering. Vehicles are equipped with a boost and can perform a modest jump, but maneuverability is hindered by the slow-to-respond steering mechanics. Tilting the left stick from side to side moves the turret on the back of your car and adjusts the camera. The car eventually responds by positioning itself so its rear is facing the screen, but there’s a noticeable delay while this alignment goes into effect. In practice, this makes precise driving tricky, especially in the heat of combat. Once you figure out how to properly drift around turns, the cars become more responsive and enjoyable to control, but driving never captures the uninhibited joy the best vehicular games encompass.
Stages are spread out across the world and are intricately designed to encourage exploration. Secret roads in Tokyo give you various ways to go from your base to your opponent’s in Capture the Flag, while Rome rewards anyone skilled enough to manage the plentiful ramps that populate the streets. Level design is one of Wheels’ strengths. Through jump-enabled booster pads and tucked-away teleporters, you can escape a pursuer in a pinch or surprise a flag thief with an assault from above. It is easy to get lost in the elaborate worlds because there aren’t enough distinct visual cues to clearly separate one area from the next, but over time, you learn how to get from one place to another as quick as a cat, and you feel all the more devious for thwarting your enemy through hard-earned knowledge of the layout.
So once you learn how to manage the steering and commit the maps to memory, it is fun to tool around locales at top speed, performing summersaults off ramps and generally making a nuisance of yourself. However, the core of the game-combat-rarely enters an enjoyable groove. Two basic problems surface in just about every fight you find yourself in. First, the physics are out of whack. When a missile slams into you, your vehicle is hurtled high into the air. Once afloat, you stay there for precious seconds while your opponent peppers you with enough lead to make you cry tears of oil and death. You can use your boost to get out of harm’s way, but more likely than not, you’ll be dead before you hit the ground. Second, death comes extremely fast. If you aren’t catapulted in the air, you’re likely to be blown apart with a single hit. These issues discourage you from mixing things up in vehicular fisticuffs, which is downright strange in a game built around unabashed car carnage.
Most of the weapons aren’t particularly interesting, either. There’s a standard array of guns available that lack the imagination and viciousness to make you take notice. The rocket launcher locks on to would-be victims, so much of the dirty work of carefully lining up shots is eliminated. This works well because fiddling with aiming would be less than ideal while trying to corner hairpin turns, but the hit-and-run nature removes the in-your-face destruction that could have given your kills more immediacy. This issue continues with the railgun and Gatling gun. You simply don’t feel the weight of your actions, so you don’t become invested in these conquests. This is mitigated somewhat by the flamethrower. You have to be right on your targets to be most effective, and burning them until they’re useless metal bricks offers mild satisfaction.
The engine that runs Wheels is sturdy enough to offer some enjoyment. Once you get the hang of the steering, motoring around the expansive maps is entertaining, and it’s hard not to appreciate the clever designs of each location. But the other elements only serve to bring the rest of the package down. A scarcity of content is the biggest offender. The single-player battles are a mere training ground against computer-controlled cars, and the online battles are so full of lag that it’s not worth putting up with the aggravation. Wheels of Destruction: World Tour is so stripped that it’s hard to overlook its myriad problems to uncover the good buried within.
04/20/2012
— Filed under: Games
Tags: Review, Wheels of Destruction
As a kid, I grew up rolling d20s, charting out hand-scrawled labyrinths on graph paper swiped from math class, and concocting elaborate fantasy worlds to explore. And when I wasn’t sitting around a table with my pals debating the finer points of casting Magic Missiles instead of Delayed Blast Fireballs, I spent my free time affixed to a clunky old PC playing games like Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master. Digging into Almost Human’s shiny new take on hardcore old-school dungeon crawlers is a warm fuzzy trip down memory lane, but one of the most impressive things about Legend of Grimrock is the way it showcases how well the classic formula holds up after so many years.
04/19/2012
— Filed under: Games
Tags: Legend of Grimrock, Review
Windows Phone is only about a year and a half old in the market at this point but Nokia has a much longer lineage. In the past 12 months though, their two worlds have collided in a fashion that will have repercussions for quite some time to come, with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop firmly committed to focusing his company’s turnaround on what Microsoft is cooking up in Redmond for handsets. It has been, and will continue to be, a long shot. Nokia’s smartphone market share in America has eroded so severely that many consumers have assumed that Nokia has pulled out of this market entirely, ceding ground to Apple and the myriad companies that have backed Google’s Android platform.
04/18/2012
— Filed under: Mobile
Tags: Lumia 900, Nokia
Samsung has been the leader of the Android smartphone world for over a year now with their market-leading smartphones such as the Galaxy S and its consequent successor, the Galaxy S II. However their lower end phones have never overly impressed me; so can the Samsung Galaxy xCover (also known as the Extreme in some markets) turn this around?
04/17/2012
— Filed under: Mobile
Tags: Galaxy xCover, Samsung
Introduction
Can a laptop get much sexier than ASUS’s Zenbook? We weren’t too sure, but then Samsung sent us the second-generation Series 9, and boy, let me tell you, this is the PC equivalent of Natalie Portman.
Like Natalie, the Series 9 isn’t obviously flashy, but it’s svelte, finished with figure-hugging curves and undeniably gorgeous. You’ll have to excuse us for waxing lyrical, but our labs see as many laptops as the local PC World (alright, maybe not that many) and rarely does a system get the lads purring quite like Samsung’s latest.
Launched as an evolutionary replacement for last year’s CES showstopper, this second-generation model forgoes the brushed aluminium look for a more subtle, more sophisticated sand-blasted unibody shell that’s forged from a single piece of aluminium. The end result gives the system an irresistible hue that’s best described as a mystic shade of blue with a thin silver rim.
And when we say thin, we mean really, really thin. Or 16,3mm to be precise — and that’s at the thickest point. The 2012 Series 9 is thinner than Apple’s MacBook Air (17,3mm) and it’s lighter, too, tipping the scales at a remarkable 1,17kg. Only a cynic would describe Apple’s 1,35kg MacBook Air as heavy, but let’s put it this way, Samsung’s Series 9 is a further 13 per cent feathery.
It’s thin, it’s light, and it offers solid-state storage as standard, yet Samsung opts not to describe the Series 9 as an Ultrabook. Despite meeting Intel’s criteria, Samsung has chosen to class this particular machine as a notebook — nothing more, nothing less. Naming conventions aside, one thing’s for certain; this is one of the most attractive portable PCs currently on the market.
The beauty of the Series 9 is extended throughout the machine, with Samsung paying careful attention to each curve and every smooth line. The entire chassis feels strong and ultra-stiff, so there’s no sign of flex, and the curved display hinges aren’t just pretty, they’re suitably rigid and allow the screen to rotate roughly 150 degrees.
It’s exquisite and the little details don’t go amiss. The sunken chiclet keyboard looks inviting, as does the large multi-touch trackpad, Samsung’s thin-bezel 13,3in matte display makes full use of the compact chassis, and there’s very little to disrupt the flow. Aside from a small power button and two tiny LED indicators, there’s nothing to disrupt the flow of Samsung’s smooth design.
Alright, we’ve established that the 2012 Series 9 is sexy. Now for the bad news: it costs £1,200, or £1,000 if you partake in Samsung’s VAT-back offer (ends 07/05/2012). Getting 20 per cent back is an attractive lure, but even so, a grand’s a lot of money to be putting down on a laptop. Particularly one that’s quite small and absent an optical drive and dedicated graphics. So what exactly are you getting for your money?
Specification
Samsung intends to launch a 15,6in variant of the 2012 Series 9 later in the year, but right now, UK consumers have one available option; the 13,3in model labelled as NP900X3B-A01UK.
This is the system strutting its stuff at all the major retailers and it packs a strong set of components that should eradicate the shortcomings of last year’s model. Despite being thinner and lighter than ever before, the 2012 machine has been upgraded to include a dual-core 1,6GHz Intel Core i5—2467M processor that Turbos up to 2,3GHz, integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics, 4GB of memory and a 128GB SanDisk U100 SSD.
It’s a mix of components that’s familiar among Ultrabooks, but Samsung puts itself in the premium category by including a matte 13,3in display that offers a generous 1,600×900 resolution and 400 nits of brightness.
The guts of the machine should make for a rewarding experience, but Samsung doesn’t have a lot of room for I/O ports. Making the most of what limited space there is, the Series 9 offers two USB ports (one 2,0, one 3,0), a combined audio/mic jack, micro HDMI, micro VGA, power and a miniature LAN port that used a bundled adaptor to provide Ethernet connectivity. Samsung’s done well to cover most bases, and unlike the 2011 model, there’s also an SD card reader tucked neatly into the laptop’s right side.
Samsung’s neat chiclet keys sit in a lovely sea of misty blue, but this is one of those instances where the keyboard looks better than it is. The keys are well-spaced and well-sized, but they’re also noticeably shallow. A lack of spring shouldn’t come as a surprise in a laptop as thin as this, but nonetheless, the typing experience on the Series 9 feels awkward, and it a strange sort of way.
We actually had no trouble typing at pace on the keyboard, but the lack of tactile response felt unusual, leaving us feeling as though we were sliding over the panel as opposed to getting stuck in. We weren’t missing keys, but the miniscule amount of travel prevented us from getting a real spring in our step, if you get our meaning.
The keyboard doesn’t feel quite as comfortable as we’d like, but it does have the advantage of being backlit. Though, the backlit is partly controlled by an ambient sensor that prevents you from showing off your wares in broad daylight. Ho hum.
We’d recommend trying before you buy — the shallow keys may actually be your cup of tea — and the same caution could be applied to the trackpad. It looks fantastic, it’s roomy, supports multi-touch gestures and it feels even silkier than the rest of the chassis, but it takes some getting used to. Samsung’s made use of an ELAN pad in which the entire surface can be depressed to register a click, while the bottom left and right areas act as integrated buttons. We heavy-handed users tend to struggle to get to grips with a pad that lacks dedicated buttons, but Samsung’s implementation is actually rather good — two-finger scrolling worked well, button presses registered easily, and aside from sluggish pinch-to-zoom performance, the pad performed admirably.
Display and sound
We never quite felt at home on the Series 9 keyboard, but we could happily sit for hours on end staring at the lush 13,3in SuperBright Plus display. The 1,600×900 resolution is better than most 13,3in laptops and makes for a roomy desktop experience, but it’s the brightness and matte finish that allow Samsung’s panel to stand out.
If you’re inside the display appears vividly bright, and if you’re outside the anti-reflective surface keeps your content clearly visible even in direct sunlight. We’ve become accustomed to the glossy displays that are widely available, but Samsung’s matte panel is a welcome change of pace. That isn’t to say the SuperBright Plus panel is perfect — viewing angles could be improved a touch — but as far as the single-user experience is concerned, the Series 9 display is really rather good.
Unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t provided an audio experience to match. The downward-facing speakers are plenty loud, but they lack any real depth and deliver a harsh tinny sound that makes music playback quite unpleasant. It’s a challenge getting a thin PC to sound good, but considering the £1,200 price tag, the Series 9’s audio capabilities are dire.
Software
We had hoped to see premium ultra-thin Windows PCs ship with little-to-no bloatware, but that may be wishful thinking. By default, Samsung’s 64-bit install of Windows 7 Home Premium is pre-loaded with a fair few apps. None are particularly obtrusive, but among the list you’ll find Bing Bar, CyberLink YouCam, a trial of Microsoft Office 2010, Norton Internet Security, Skype, WildTangent Games, Windows Live Essentials and a bunch of Samsung’s own utilities.
Installing Bing Bar and Norton Internet Security on a machine as beautiful as this ought to be a criminal offense, but hey, the app selection isn’t as vast as it might have been and Samsung’s own applications are quite useful — particularly the pre-configured Recovery Solution that allows you to restore the laptop to its factory state at the click of a few buttons. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be a built-in option for a clean install.
04/15/2012
— Filed under: Hardware
Tags: Samsung, Series 9
The Atrix 2 appears to be Motorola’s attempt to converge the tablet, PC and smartphone. After all, smartphones are like mini-PCs in many ways — especially now phones include dual-core processors, multi-core graphics, and enough RAM to run a desktop OS like Windows XP. The Atrix 2 is supposed to be a powerful phone that can be used with other devices to create something resembling a PC experience.
04/12/2012
— Filed under: Mobile
Tags: Motorola Atrix 2, Review
