Asus Zenfone 6

The cheapest Android phablet yet.

Phablets are smartphones that are almost as large as tablets. Most phablets to date have been pretty expensive (£400 and upwards), but that’s not the case with the Asus Zenfone 6, which costs just £250 without a contract, although it lacks 4G.

As its name suggests the Zenfone 6 has a whopping 6in screen, so it’s closer in size to the Nexus 7 tablet than to other phones. As you might expect then, this makes the Zenfone 6 tricky to hold and inconvenient to use with one hand (we almost dropped it on several occasions).

Will you be hacked buying on eBay?

Hackers have exploited a long-existing vulnerability in eBay that lets them steal your password if you click a fake listing.

Yet another eBay hack has been exposed, only four months after criminals stole millions of passwords, forcing everyone who has an account with the site to change them.

In this latest wave of attacks, criminals create fake listings that appear in search results. Clicking the apparently legitimate listing redirects you to a fake eBay sign-in page, which asks for your user ID and password. If you enter these details, you are effectively handing them straight to the criminals, who will then try to buy items using your PayPal account or log into your email address (which is shown in your eBay account), where they can root around for other sensitive information.

Bloodborne

Thicker than water and slicker than any Souls game to date.

Let’s say you’re the head honcho at From Software – you, a Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls devotee with the hundreds of accumulated hours, anecdotes and battle scars that come with that fandom. In which direction do you steer this esteemed developer for its next game? We’re going to go ahead and make the assumption that you don’t have a lifelong ambition to produce such hits as Polystyrene Tycoon and say you’d make the smoulderingly handsome PS4 exclusive that is Bloodborne.

Why? Not just because it introduces Yharnam, a smogcoated new world of quasi-Victorian streets, windy moors and other, non-Souls geography to explore and drench in monster viscera. It also peppers the tremendously popular series formula with inspired new mechanics and welcome movement options which, in execution, are literal game-changers.

PCLinuxOS 2014.08

As the rolling release distro chucks out another update, Mayank Sharma takes a look at the decade old one-man distro.

The PCLinuxOS distro rarely makes headlines in the Linux press. But that isn’t a reflection on the distro’s quality, but rather its mild-mannered no-nonsense just-works nature. The distro uses a rolling release model with ISO releases every now and then to assist new users to take the plunge. Officially the distro ships with the KDE desktop and there’s also a barebones KDE MiniMe release that allows advanced users to build their desktop and pull-in apps according to their tastes. Additional communitycreated versions are listed around various desktops including LXDE, Mate and KDE FullMonty.

The distro includes a diverse collection of apps for all kinds of users including LibreOffice, GIMP, Google Earth, VLC Media player, Calibre ebook manager and more.

Android x86 4.4

After his tutorial on running a desktop distro on Android devices, Mayank Sharma now turns the tables and runs Android on his laptop.

Before you dismiss the idea of running an OS designed for mobile devices on a regular PC, spare a thought for those unused netbooks stashed in the attic. The Android x86 project is ideal for making those under-powered PC usable again. The project started off as a series of patches to the vanilla open source Android code to get it working on netbooks and has grown into a distro for a wide range of 32-bit PCs.

The project has recently released the first stable build based on Android KitKat v4.4.2. It includes a recent stable kernel as well as a variety of drivers and libraries, which it can run on a huge range of hardware, support different types of peripherals and can even handle Full HD multimedia content.

Apple Watch

Will the first new product category from Apple in four years kick the wearables market into overdrive?

The Apple Watch could well be the yardstick by which Tim Cook’s tenure as the company’s CEO is measured. Appearing on the Flint Center stage at the launch event in Cupertino sporting the firm’s first all-new tech creation since his predecessor Steve Jobs passed, Cook explained why the Watch – there’s no “i” in New Team Apple, and none in this product’s name either – is “the most personal product we’ve ever made”.

You can see why: this thing is a customiseathon. There are three versions of the Apple Watch, from the sweat-swatting Sport to the show-offy, 18-karat-gold Edition, with a series of swappable straps and screen sizes. While smartwatches to date have been oneoff, quickly iterated products, this is a new collection, in the fashion sense of the word.