Publication History For : Paul Smart

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Wireless PC Lock

Published in Wireless on 13 Sep 2004
Walk away from your PC and it automatically becomes locked, nothing on the screen and no access, return and you are exactly where you were and no passwords to enter.

Canon PowerShot S70

Published in Cameras on 10 Sep 2004
3megapixel not enough, 5megapixel not enough, then how about 7.1megapixel? The latest PowerShot S70 has exactly that as well as other great features in a compact housing.
It is 11x5.5x3.5cm and weights less than 300grams. It comes with a 32MB Compact Flash card and solid rechargeable battery. There are five image sizes 3072x2304 (large), 2592x1944 (medium 1), 2048x1536 (medium 2), 1600x1200 (medium 3), and 640x480 (small). Like almost all recent digital cameras it can take short movie sequences but instead of just 160x120 and 320x240 the normal images sizes this can also take 640x480 as well.

USB to 5.1 Audio Adapter

Published in Entertainment on 8 Sep 2004
If you enjoy music on a PC/Notebook then the speakers and sound card/chip are important. To put a better sound card in a notebook is very difficult and even in some PC’s not that easy, here is an alternative.

Brother P-touch 18R

Published in Misc on 4 Sep 2004
Having recently tested an entry level labelling machine (P-touch 55 22/8/04) aimed at the younger market here I get involved with a larger machine that has even more functionality.
The earlier machine was meant for kids both in the colour choice and key size as well as having mobile phone type input. Here in this machine that would look at home in any office - it's grey - with QWERTY keys and a total of 58 keys almost all can produce symbols or accents with the press of a second key.   It is 14x12x5cm and it is close to 600grams.
I do not normally play a lot of games, perhaps the occasional Freecell or two and the odd – very odd – game of Bridge, however I have to confess that the Bank Holiday saw me spending far to much time on Trainz.

Powererstixx 2.1 Speakers

Published in Entertainment on 29 Aug 2004
Designed by Porsche is not something you immediately think of when talking about speakers, cars are far more likely. However these speakers are not anything like bulk standard boxes.
Music on the move, first there was the cassette player, next the CD player, nowadays the MP3/WMA player seems to rule the roost. Here an ultra small CD player that can also play MP3/WMA etc, it’s called the NAPA Ultra Slim DAV-397.

Epson Stylus CX6600

Published in Laptops/PCs/Apple on 23 Aug 2004
A multifunction inkjet unit from Epson that is not a great deal larger than an inkjet printer. So Scan, Copy and Print from a single unit all at a not outrageous price. It can also read almost all types of memory card, meaning that printing is possible direct from cards when the PC is not on.
It is 45x43x22cm and weights a little less than nine kilos. Paper is stored face forward vertically at the rear of the unit. It is delivered face up from the base of the front of the unit. Items to scan or copy are placed face down on the flat scanning surface under the cover, items up to A4 can be scanned/copied. This is a four ink model placing it in the 'mid' range.

Brother P-touch 55

Published in Misc on 22 Aug 2004
If like me you remember the old Dymo labelling machines with the circular dial where you punched in each letter only to sneeze or stutter at a vital moment then this offering from Brother could be for you.

Iomega Micro Mini 128MB

Published in Misc on 20 Aug 2004
They say size is not everything, except sometimes it is, and in the case I am thinking of the smaller the better. For those who are unsure I am talking of USB stick drives.

Goodmans 3megapixel Digital Camera

Published in Cameras on 18 Aug 2004
3megapixel, 3x optical zoom, 32MB SD card, if that does not get you interested then perhaps the sub £100 price point may, if not then you are probably not looking for a digital camera.

Wacom Pen Partner

Published in Wireless on 17 Aug 2004
A graphics tablet used to be expensive and really only the domain of a graphics professional. Wacom have released some smaller and lower specified units, this is the smallest and cheapest yet.

HP Photosmart R707 Digital Camera

Published in Cameras on 11 Aug 2004
Small and neat, stylish chrome facia, powerful 5megapixel camera, all of these and more are true of the HP R707 could this be the digital camera we are all looking for?

Bush Video/DVD Recorder

Published in Entertainment on 6 Aug 2004
Video players in their current form will be redundant when we all have to go digital, lots of people -me included- have stuff we will still want to play so this Bush Video/ DVD recorder could be the answer.

TeleVoice Services

Published in Phones on 3 Aug 2004
There are a lot of ‘cheaper’ phone services available and anyone who makes a reasonable number of calls surely uses one. TeleVoice offers a couple of things that most others do not.
This is a mono printer, it is also a sheet fed scanner, it can send and receive faxes and just for good measure it is also a copier even when the PC is not connected or turned on.

Goodmans G-Shot 5030Z

Published in Cameras on 26 Jul 2004
3 or 4 megapixel not enough? Then this offering from Goodmans may well be what you are looking for, a compact 5 megapixel digital camera with a basic 32MB of storage.

FujiFilm FinePix 420

Published in Cameras on 26 Jul 2004
It’s small – it will easily fit in a pocket or purse. It’s stylish, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s easy to use and it’s still a powerful digital camera that takes great images.

Palm Zire72

Published in Mobile Tech on 18 Jul 2004
A colour PDA with excellent screen resolution, lots of inbuilt RAM, additional storage by SD card and just for good measure a 1.2megapixel camera built in, surely now this will satisfy this old git who owns an antiquated Palm 5x?

A Digital Camera with a periscope

Published in Cameras on 16 Jul 2004
All optical zoom lenses I know of protrude from the front of the unit, not so with the Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, the zoom takes place within the unit actioning vertically.

PAV Express

Published in Misc on 8 Jul 2004
Something very different in price and concept from the normal items mentioned here, however as I know a good number of members are managers or system administrators this is something that is of interest.
The title only covers part of what this unit can do, it can also record and play .wav files as well as having an FM radio, so far it has stubbornly refused to make the tea.

Inovix DC430

Published in Cameras on 4 Jul 2004
A four megapixel digital camera for a little over £100, complete with a 32MB Compact Flash card, even with today’s fast moving price reduction hysteria this is something well worth investigating.
How can one speaker enclosure + sub woofer give surround sound, sorry you are not going to get a technical answer from me, I will just say the sound it gives is excellent.

Liteon DVD R&RW+&-

Published in Laptops/PCs/Apple on 30 June 2004
With a CD writer at say 24X or 48X the time difference for burning a 700MB disc is only a few minutes, however the time difference between 4X and 8X for a 4.7GB is substantial because of the volume of data.
It should be possible to burn up 4.7GB of data in a little over ten minutes, given that only a few years ago it took much longer than that to burn a CD-ROM then you can see the advances. Of course why should we need to burn up this amount of data, this is entirely due to bloatware - badly written packages - that we are all lumbered with using. The data is there and data in the most important community we have.

Colour Palm PDA Zire 31

Published in Laptops/PCs/Apple on 29 June 2004
I recently looked at the Zire21 a monochrome entry level PDA, here it is the Zire31 this is colour, it is backlit and has expansion both of which the Zire21 did not have. The price for these extras is only around another £30.

Lexmark X2250

Published in Laptops/PCs/Apple on 25 June 2004
Having a copier, printer and scanner all in one is something that certainly saves space. Can such a device be a jack of all trades or would it be second best at all, as the saying goes ‘master of none’.
Lets get my bugbear aired to begin with, no inkjet printer ever prints the stated number of pages per minute. If you want 'x' pages a minute then use a laser printer as that's the only way you will reach expectations. Even if you print short 200 word pages in draft mode you will be lucky to get much above half the claimed PPM. It is 42x31x12cm when sitting there looking inviting, put the unused paper in the tray (face forward) and the 12cm becomes 25cm.
One of Adobe’s major products is Acrobat, almost all of us will have a copy of three of the Acrobat Reader that is mostly bundled with applications as it saves the manufacturers printing expensive manuals.
Whichever camp you are in regarding printed manuals they are few and very far between nowadays. However Acrobat creates the PDF files we all read when the hardware or software does not work correctly, it costs a lot of money and is not really an option for the small creator. There are a number of clone applications out there and ScanSoft - more famous for scanning software - produce one of the best.

Alternative Office Products

Published in Laptops/PCs/Apple on 21 June 2004
Contrary to what some people think there are other Office products apart from Microsoft Office. Some are shareware others are often bundled but it does not make them inferior, just less appreciated.
There are lots of mouse products around, some from people like Microsoft that sell on name, others sell only on price. However there is another category those that are, or do, something different.