Wednesday, 3 February 2016

HP Officejet 7510

HP Officejet 7510

An A4 printer that's A3 on the inside

Like Brother, HP has worked out that if you design an A4 printer so that the print head travels along the long side of the paper, you can also feed A3 into it. This is because the short side of A3 matches the long side of A4. It’s not a great set up for printing A3 all the time, but handy for producing the occasional poster, say.

Medion Lifetab

Medion Lifetab

Could this be the next Tesco Hudl?

You may come across this Android tablet in Aldi, which is selling them as a ‘Special Buy’. It’s certainly special all right - especially bad. It has a 1920x1200-pixel screen, giving you Full HD plus a bit extra for a more iPad like shape. Costing just £139, it was shaping up to be a potential successor to Tesco’s Hudl 2, which was an excellent bargain at a tenner less (until it was discontinued last autumn).

You wouldn’t immediately guess that this was a budget product. It doesn’t have the solid metal construction of an iPad, but then nor do many other devices. The back has a sparkly silver finish that Medion presumably hopes people might mistake for aluminium, and the white plastic edges are crisply styled, with a bit of a Star Wars feel to their diagonal grooves and insets. The 2-megapixel webcam and 5-megapixel rear camera won’t win any awards, but that’s tablet cameras for you.

Lenovo Yoga 700 (11 inch)

Lenovo Yoga 700 (11 inch)

A small laptop that's also a big tablet

We’ve mentioned before that Lenovo makes rather a lot of different laptop tablet hybrids with becomingly similar names. This year it seems to have called them all the 700. This particular one is the Yoga 700 - not to be confused with the Yoga 700. That’s the one with a 14.1in screen. This one is 11.6in. Still following?

As befits a convertible, the Lenovo Yoga 700 (11 inch) has a special hinge that bends all the way round so you can fold the keyboard back and ignore it. Well, you can’t literally ignore it, unless you undergo some sort of hypnosis, because you’re still carrying it around. But the whole thing weighs a modest 1.1kg, so you can just about pretend. At 15.8mm, though, the folded-up Yoga 700 (11 inch) is a pretty chunky kind of iPad.

Chillblast Fusion Orion i3

Chillblast Fusion Orion i3

A cheap and cheerful PC that's so quiet you'll forget it's there

Desktop computers used to be plain black boxes. Now they come with UFO landing lights, rocket exhaust vents and Formula 1 spoilers. But what if you just want something that gets on with the job, neither seen nor heard? PC builder Chillblast - which isn’t usually averse to an LED-backlit grille or dual-radiator water cooler - has pushed all the stops back in for this exercise in understatement. The Fusion Orion i3 takes a selection of the latest affordable components and hides them inside a box so black, it'll attract nobody's attention but Stephen Hawking.

Tuesday, 2 February 2016

ASMR: Explaining The Phenomenon

ASMR

It's become a big thing on YouTube and has even made its way into mainstream media and news on occasion, but what is ASMR?

The internet makes many things possible, but arguably the most important of these is the gift of free speech and communication. No matter who you are or what you want to share with the world, the internet is your stage and your audience is the globe. Never before has it been so easy to reach millions, and what once required a good deal of money and a TV studio now requires only a PC and a camera. How times have changed.