Backward compatible with previous versions of the technology, the latest incarnation of USB offers various enhancements that might appeal.

Bringing together The Maze, Paranormal and the Guardians, Focus Multimedia has come up with a Haunting Mysteries Triple Pack. Originally published by Big Fish Games, these three titles of Urban Legends: The Maze, Paranormal Criminal Investigations: Brotherhood of the Crescent Snake and Guardians of Beyond: Witchville will need to be installed separately. Each title will add its own icon to your desktop.

While A3 printers can easily print A4 documents, it is unusual to come across an A4 printer that can produce A3 documents unless it is a Brother unit.

This next game offers you the choice of a male or female character as you set out to locate and explore the mysteries of a pyramid.

With its stores within a store, Kobo is certainly making an impression within its designated field of eBook readers.

For those with a strong interest with taking on the challenge of the Undead, Focus Multimedia has brought together three titles that originally appeared as part of the Alawar extensive catalogue of games.

The Epson Expression Photo XP-850 is a multi-function device that is aimed more at the photo enthusiast than a general purpose user.

Focus Multimedia has bundled together three titles originally published by Big Fish Games in a Dark Mysteries Triple Pack. The three games are The Secrets of Arcelia Island, Secrets of the Dark: Temple of Night, and Written Legends: Nightmare at Sea. In each case the game belongs to the Hidden Object Adventure genre. From a single front-end, each of the titles can be installed in turn. A separate desktop icon will be created for each game.

After years of going head-to-head with the Roxio Creator package, Nero now faces a different challenge following Corel’s buyout of Roxio.

Based on a real location that was the home of a dead entertainer, this next game involves searching for a missing song.

Once regarded as an upstart as it offered graphics software at prices well below the accepted standards of the day, Serif is now an established software developer with a range of offerings such as this next title.

There are more smartphones currently taking up space on retailers’ shelves than you could shake a stick at. Many of the more high profile units tend to fall in the expensive category but that is not to say that the budget sector has been ignored by the various manufacturers (Apple apart).

In the past I have looked at a number of Doro products of which the greatest majority were handset designed specifically for the older generation. These handsets, whether of the candy bar, slider or clamshell variety, feature an easy to use interface combined with large style buttons with a useful emergency facility.

Fancy joining the FBI? You get the opportunity in this next title as you return to your home town to investigate a series of murders.

Having recently finished running the rule over the PIXMA MX395, it was almost a case of de je vu as I unpacked the latest unit to arrive from Canon, The new unit is the PIXMA MX525 and, like the earlier model, is a multifunction device offering the user print, copy, scan and Fax capabilities. The PIXMA MX525 was extremely similar in appearance with its rounded corner plinth top and reflecting black coating. Even the dimensions of 358 x 200 x 455mm (D x H x W) were similar. However there are some cosmetic and functional differences that become evidence over time.

Sometimes follow-up products arrive quickly but in this case there was a gap of years between my look at speakers from the same family.

Even with Bluetooth allowing personal data to be transmitted over the airwaves between devices, business cards continue to be the main method used by many when supplying others with their personal details. The problem then exists of what to do with this information apart, of course, from forgetting about it and leaving the cards in your pocket thus increasing the risk that they could become mixed up with your own cards. Rather than take the time and effort to type in the information into a contact database yourself, you could let technology take the strain by using a dedicated business card scanner.

A watery grave returns the mummified corpse of an evil pirate who immediately gets up to his old tricks in the Hidden Object Adventure game.

It has been quite a while since I last had the opportunity to check out the performance of a device from Seagate. That over-long interval has now been brought to an end with the arrival of the company’s Wireless Plus product. This offering promises to provide the user with the means of accessing their media data when on the move. As its title suggests, this product is based on Seagate developed wireless technology.

Bluetooth has been around now for a good number of years but it is only recently that this technology has become the preferred option for transferring data between various devices.

If you are a gamer, one of the hard core brigade, then you will appreciate the need for the appropriate tools that have been specifically developed to fulfil certain tasks. You need to purchase or build the system box with high-end components such as the motherboard and graphics cards and boost its performance with a gaming keyboard and mouse. You might also want to complete the line-up with a gaming headset. One such product is the Sound Blaster TACTIC 3D RAGE unit.

As part of the latest batch of games to arrive from Focus Multimedia is that one that continues the adventures of a young journalist in search of her husband.

The latest Canon printer to arrive in my work space belongs to the company’s small office/home range.

As its title indicates, Letters from Nowhere 2 is a follow up to the original Letters from Nowhere. In this second offering you continue in the role of Audrey who is still searching for her missing husband Patrick. As I missed out on the first episode, I have no idea how that game ended but I believe the style of game play remains fairly similar in this follow-up offering.

Older readers, and perhaps those of a younger age, can, no doubt, remember their first computing experiences especially with regards to the storage capacity of the media used to hold programs and a data files. Personally I can remember using floppy disks (they bent if you waved them about) that had a pre-formatted capacity of 180K – a disk could hold the operating system, word processor and numerous documents. Later my first hard disk raised the storage level to a then massive 20MB that some experts claimed was all you would ever need. Those were the days.

A missing sister, secret sect, hidden objects and puzzles come together in a Collector’s Edition game from Focus Multimedia.

Where once it was enough for a device to satisfy discerning users by performing a single function, now devices need to be multi-functional in order to loosen customers’ purse strings and make a sale.

A change is as good as a rest or so they say. Maybe that was the reasoning behind the decision taken by RIM to change its company name. In common with a number of other companies who have ventured along the same route, RIM is now known by its flagship product. As a result RIM is BlackBerry. The first product launched under this new nomenclature to reach me is the BlackBerry Z10. My review sample has been supplied by Vodafone.

As part of its range of software titles designed specifically for the less experienced user, MAGIX has released Photostory Easy. This product, as it titles might suggest, allows the user to combine various photo images, transitions and a sound track into a slideshow. Boxed and downloadable versions of the software are available with my preview copy being of the latter type.

Just how and why was a young woman attacked and murder in a locked room? And how did the murderer escape? These are the mysteries facing you in the game of Victorian Mysteries: Yellow Room. Categorised as a Hidden Object Investigation, this game is available as part of Avanquest’s GSP catalogue of titles.