LG 34UC97

Is very wide and slightly curved the new way ahead?

U ltra wide screen monitors take up a rather intimidating amount of desk real estate thanks to the 21:9 aspect ratio and the 34UC97 is definitely no exception. It’s a whopper of a thing, measuring just over 83cm wide and 47cm tall, but with great desk space comes great screen size. The bright 3440x1440 IPS screen is a beauty featuring high pixel density for extremely crisp images and is also slightly curved, making looking from one side of the screen to the other feel a little more natural than some of the flat ultra wide monitors on the market. The matte anti-glare finish is also a welcome feature, as there’s more than enough surface to catch the light.

Acer Chromebook 13

Solid performance and battery life make this Chromebook a very solid choice for mobile mavens.

T here’s a party going on and its name is Chromebook. Acer’s newest entry comes via the Chromebook 13 – a 13-inch portable that ticks a lot of boxes and won’t leave standing on the wall, idly by, at the Chromebook party.

The Chromebook 13’s body felt solid. Weighing in at 1.5kg, it’s well made with a solid feel. The plastic body is textured on the base so it’s not slippery if you’re carrying it without a case. The chiclet keyboard is comfortable to use and the large trackpad was accurate and responsive.

Inside Intel’s Broadwell architecture

Intel’s latest architecture forms the basis of its fastest, most power-efficient processors yet. Mike Bedford explores the technical tricks that provide us with ever-faster chips.

If you haven’t yet come across Broadwell, you soon will: it’s Intel’s codename for the technology that will power next year’s fifth-generation Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, as well as the new Core M series. According to Intel’s now famous “Tick-Tock” roadmap, it’s a “Tick” –  that is, a die shrink of ‚its ‚predecessor Haswell, from 22nm to 14nm.

In the grand scheme of things, a die shrink may not seem significant: if you’re looking for major new features, you’ll have to wait until the next “Tock”, expected late next‚ year in the form of the all-new Skylake core. With the ‚latest consumer devices, though, it’s increasingly the ‚case ‚that performance and features are less of an issue ‚than battery life – so improving efficiency is becoming more and‚ more important in CPUs.

Crossing The Line

Grief can do funny things to you, even let you open up portals to the land of the dead. Or so things are in Crossing The Line, a hugely ambitious independent shooter that's reaching further and deeper than a two-developer team might be expected to reach. Taking the premise of a downtrodden and grieving chief police detective and giving him the ability to cross between worlds as he investigates his wife's death may not seem immediately challenging, but this is a CryEngine FPS title that is starting to feel like The Darkness with all the comic book trappings stripped out.

What Will Google's New Mission Statement Be?

Sarah Dobbs looks at Google's upcoming projects to see how it might have grown past its initial intentions.

Way back when, in the days when Google was a young company and not yet a verb, its founders were trying to figure out what kind of company they wanted to be. Someone - exactly who it was has become muddied over the years, with a few different candidates named in different sources - came up with the simple phrase 'Don't be evil', and that's been at the core of Google's values ever since. Another part of the mission statement says that Google's aim is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Looking at what Google has done since it was founded in 1998, even the harshest Google sceptic would be hard pushed to say it hasn't achieved that second part, but what about the first?