GadgetSpeak Articles
GadgetSpeak has close to 5,000 product reviews and other articles. You can use this page to find others opinions on anything from mobile phones to computers to the latest kitchen appliance
If music on the move is your bag then Orange has you firmly in its sights.
Not as you may think some X rated offering, but a KVM switch at a bargain price, a simple and efficient way of controlling two PCs with a single keyboard, video and mouse.
Dont wait for a system crash to happen. Take precautions by using a Backup product.
Focus have been a republisher of many years standing. Here they link two products from the same publisher, both have been around for a long time, however at £9.99 they are certainly worth considering.
Put down your dust pan and brush, there is another way to provide a cleaning service for your computer.
A two band DAB and FM offering from Sharp that they describe as a kitchen radio. Not that sure why it needs a sleep timer and alarm, however it does do things slightly differently to other such offerings.
This is a very small unit that will easily slip into a pocket or purse. However small does not mean it is not powerful.
For those with ears to hear, Plantronics has made some recent announcements.
Chessmaster has been around in one form or other for a long time it is actually a UBISOFT product but this version is republished by Focus at £9.99 and for that you get quite a lot.
Carrying over 2000 five mega-pixel images in your pocket might seem like a pipe-dream but Seagate has a solution.
This is powerful top of the range PC with all the bells and whistles, it is also one of the first PCs on the market built with a LightScribe DVD drive.
As LightScribe is an HP technology it seems only right that their Pavilion unit should be one of the first with it built in. Other manufacturers have produced their own drives but so far the only manufacturer able to supply me with media are Verbatim. This unit has a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading. It has twin 160GB serial ATA hard drives, 1GB of memory, as well as two DVD drives the second one with LightScribe.
This is a multi function unit including fax. However for something that scans, copies, prints and sends and receives faxes it is very very small. Finally it is also an telephone answering machine and just for a bonus it can also read most types of photo cards.
The Brother MFC 620-CN measures 36x33x14cm and weights not a great deal. However perhaps far more important the four ink cartridges are of a good size. The setup is software first and you only plug in and switch on when told to.
Not just another DAB radio this one will tell you the time, it will even tell you what station you are listening to. However I am mortified to say it has so far resolutely refused to make the tea.
Do you ever need to print a short run of business cards, if so you are unlikely to find a quicker or easier method of doing so than My Business Cards from My Software.
By no means a unique product, however unlike a number of other PDA type packages setting up the unit is, on the face of it, quite simple.
Watching television on your computer does have some attractions if the hardware can handle the performance.
This will allow your PC or notebook to be used as a TV with Teletext function. This is Digital TV and it also has Digital Radio.
Backup may not be regarded as the sexiest of tasks but can you live without it?
Entry level colour lasers are now little more expensive than some of their mono counterparts. Now five page a minute good quality colour images are possible.
This is very nearly the perfect box shape at 43x43x42cm. It is quite heavy (28 kilos) so would need a very substantial desk to hold it or it could live on the floor. It has a proper tray for paper at the base of the unit, paper is inserted face up and delivered face down out of the top of the unit. In mono it can produce 25 PPM for as long as there is paper in the tray. For colour this is a respectable 5 PPM.
Acer currently produce three cameras and over the last couple of weeks you have heard about the other two. This is the mid range offering and is by far the slimmest.
Following my earlier report on LightScribe, lets take a look at the technology in action.
Love or hate them, electronic documents continue to develop as Adobe shows with its latest version of Acrobat.
Quite a proportion of what Focus republish are Education packages either with a large or small e here I am looking at two packages that are unlikely to appear on most school timetables. The advantage here is that they are useful even long after school is past.
The 'Teaching You' series uses video and pictorial sequences along with other aids to show you 'how to'. Neither of these guides will ever make you an expert but they may just help you along the way. As with any 'Skill' the biggest input comes from yourself and that is simply hard word.
Certainly a lightweight and small printer, however given the small ink cartridge size this portable printer may also need to be used sparingly.
It is 31x17x5cm and weights less than 1.8 kilos. The lid opens to allow about 15 sheets - 30 claimed - of paper to be stored before printing. Even though this is a truly portable printer, it can be run from a battery pack, it can also print full A4 pages. The connections as standard are USB and infra red. It can also print images direct from a camera supporting PictBridge.
This is the unit hinted at in my three recent articles on Windows XP MCE 2005 edition and the large HP Panel. Members have asked about MCE here I give my views.
I have studied what was on offer from a number of vendors and decided that the Evesham E Box was certainly worth a look. You get a grey box that could pass for a DVD or Video Recorder, with certain 'other halfs' saying no to computers in the lounge this may just sneak through. The keyboard and mouse supplied are a wireless set from Microsoft and as such no wires must be a plus.
As camera prices fall, so available mega-pixels increase. Acer has achieved a nice balance with its CR-5130 model.
I have for many years enjoyed Bridge problems often found in daily newspapers, however as far as playing in a club they never seem to meet at times to suit me.
So your friends look at you funny, maybe you need one of the new phones coming to market.
Without - hopefully - giving to much away, this to me is an "object of desire" I first saw a pre production unit last summer and I am told I have looked at the first one in the UK. You can see it for yourself during the next three weeks or so on the Abrocour stand at the Ideal Home Show.
This is a DAB radio, it is also an FM radio and just for good measure it also has a CD and is described as a Micro System equipped with ReVu.
I am a fan of DAB radio and have reviewed several not just from Pure. However this unit is far more. A lot of people decry DAB saying FM is better, I am not going into this argument here but a lot of DAB stations are simply not available on FM. The previous DAB unit I reviewed was the PocketDAB just before Christmas and this is considerably different in size and of course this is mains only.
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