Creator CI20

Move over Raspberry Pi - there's a new pocket-sized computer that wants to steal your thunder

What is it?

A new microcomputer (main picture), priced just £50. It’s made by Imagination Technologies, a Hertfordshire-based company better known for building processors that handle graphics in iPads and other mobile devices. The company hopes it will rival the credit-card-sized PC Raspberry Pi, which has been a huge hit with computing enthusiasts and amateur programmers since launching in 2012. You can pre-order the Creator CI20 at http://store.imgtec.com/uk, with units due to be posted at the end of January.

Stocking Your Mobile Library Android And iOS Ereader Apps

Shaun Green takes a look at the options for bibliophiles looking to go digital...

Ebooks are big business today. That said, they're a far cry from the digital 'success' stories such as music or streaming video services (the whole financial situation within both markets is the topic for another article, mind you). Ebooks took a long time to get any traction in the market, as did the ereaders that we were supposed to use to read them. Indeed, it was the smartphone and tablet booms that really saw digital books come into their own.

Even that growth period has now largely levelled off, leaving ebooks representing around 25% of total book sales. As with so many new technologies, it turns out that the new won't replace the old so much as find a natural balance with it.

Enermax EMK5402 And EMK5201U3 Mobile Drive Racks

Mark looks at a couple of mobile rack solutions from Enermax

Having external drive bays can be exceptionally useful. It allows you to use bare disks as portable storage and also enables you to quickly swap out drives for testing and cloning. As a reviewer, I used these things daily, but the requirement isn't anything that is exclusively of interest to journalists.

With the rise of the SSD, we're all using many more 2.5" sized devices, even in desktop systems. And both these two products from Enermax acknowledge those changes with the inclusion of support for the 2.5" form factor.

Synology DiskStation DS415+

A SOHO essential NAS with plenty of extras

Synology has just about perfected the NAS solution for small businesses and 'prosumers'. Its DiskStation 412+ range was hailed as being one of the best examples of a NAS unit around for the pro user and business workgroup.

It's since stepped up a gear, though, and has now released the DS415+, a four-bay NAS drive complete with an Intel Atom C2538 quad-core, 2.4GHz CPU, with 2GB DDR3 memory and a built-in Hardware Encryption Engine conforming to an AES 256-bit military grade algorithm.

AOC G2460PG Nvidia G-Sync

A monitor that lays the foundations for new an interesting technologies

AOC has adopted a number of technologies over the years to better improve its already impressive range of monitors and to offer that little something different from the competition.

It's a gamble but one that more often than not pays off -partly due to the fact that AOC knows what it’s doing, and because despite the technology involved, it still offers the product at a reasonable price.