The endless conveyor belt of tech has been moving fairly rapidly of late, and this week it was the turn of Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs and Amazon’s Kindle Touch to take centre stage.
Check out our in-depth reviews of these products and more…
There’s no doubt that the Kindle Touch is a great ebook reader. It’s not a question of whether we recommend it or not – we do – but whether it’s the right Kindle model for you. For academic use, we recommend the Kindle Touch over its £89 sibling. It’s so much easier to search, highlight and annotate using the touch interface that it’s no competition. Similarly, if you like to buy a lot of books on your device on the go, the fact that there’s a 3G option could sway you.
However, if you just want a simple high-quality ebook reader for taking everywhere in your bag and reading your library, the cheaper, smaller, lighter £89 Kindle might be the way to go. You won’t be disappointed with either.
In Intel’s Tick-Tock parlance, Ivy Bridge is a Tick and that means a new process. In simple terms, it’s the 22nm follow up to Intel’s searingly successful 32nm Sandy Bridge processors, which launched a little over a year ago. What Intel hasn’t done, however, is add any more cores. The top Ivy Bridge model, like the Intel Core i7 3770K, sticks with four cores, just like existing 2nd Gen mainstream Core i7 chips for the LGA1155 socket.
The truth is, this Intel Core i7 770K is barely any faster than existing Sandy Bridge chips like the Core i7 2600K. Given how well optimised Sandy Bridge already is, that’s not a surprise. That said, we had hoped the new 22nm process would enable higher overclocks, much lower power consumption or maybe a bit of both. On this first viewing, it doesn’t deliver much of either.
Flying pretty high up the 2012 Viera range, the Panasonic TX-L47DT50 is jam packed with enthusiast-friendly features. It’s also unquestionably the best-looking Viera TV ever made.
Its Freesat tuner is ideal for lapsed Sky subscribers or free-to-air viewers unable to access Freeview come the completion of the digital switchover in the UK. Its multimedia and smart TV talents are diverse, and its classy look finally puts Panasonic on a design par with many of its rivals. It might not raise the bar in terms of design, usability and features but it keeps Panasonic up with its rivals. You’d be hard pressed to guess that Panasonic has no previous form in the 47-inch LCD sector before this year.
Costing £700 in the UK or 0 in the US, with a kit lens, the launch price of the Sony Alpha a57 seems a little steep, particularly given that you can pick up the 24.3MP, GPS-enabled Sony Alpha SLT-a65 for roughly the same price, or even less if you shop around online. That said, once the newcomer has been on the market a short while, the street price will no doubt settle at a more realistic point, bringing it more into line with its DSLR rivals such as the Nikon D5100 and Canon EOS 600D. When it comes to features, however, we don’t feel at all short changed.
Although there may be a few issues that could be improved upon, such as the non-standard USB interface and the iESP metering system’s propensity for overexposure, the Olympus SZ-14 still represents good value for the price.
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It’s the final Friday in April, and our news recap has a couple of deals, Java news, a Mac App Store milestone and new rumblings of that Apple HDTV that so many of us want to prop up in our living rooms later this year along with the Christmas trimmings. We’ll be back with one last April recap on Monday, so for now read all about the five things making news on this Friday, April 27, 2012.
It’s been fairly quiet in the last couple of months when it comes to rumors of Apple’s mythical HDTV, but Reuters is stirring the mill today with word that Cupertino is negotiating with EPIX to include the streaming service in their hardware — which apparently includes “a long-anticipated TV,” sources claim. EPIX is backed by three Hollywood studios — Lions Gate, MGM and Paramount — and is paid 0 million per year for streaming rights to its titles by Netflix. Not so coincidentally, that deal lapses in September, which is the same timeframe many pundits predict Apple could unveil their television, assuming one actually exists.
Java on Mac OS X is becoming something of a thorn in everyone’s side lately as the gateway for malware trojans, so Oracle is taking things into their own hands. According to Ars Technica, the company released Java SE 7 Update 4 this week, which “finally gives Mac owners the means to receive critical Java security patches at the same time they’re available for users of Windows and Linux operating systems.” By comparison, Apple’s own updates would frequently lag behind Oracle’s own, particularly after Cupertino ditched their own Java Virtual Machine in 2010. For users of OS X Lion and beyond, Java can be installed and updated on its own without waiting for Apple to get up to speed. Head to the Oracle website and grab your own copy, should you want to remain current!
The kindly folks at Elgato gave us a heads up about a new product in their lineup: The Elgato Thunderbolt Cable. Now, we realize a cable isn’t usually a very newsworthy item, but keep in mind that Apple is the only one who currently offers such a beast. Elgato’s 1.6-foot offering will be available on May 4 for .95 each, which perfectly matches the company’s Thunderbolt SSD portable drive. But how does a free cable sound? We thought so. Until May 6, Elgato is throwing in a free Thunderbolt cable with every portable SSD drive purchased through the Elgato Online Store. Now that’s a pretty newsworthy item, we’d say…
MacRumors is reporting that Apple’s Mac App Store has quietly hit a milestone ahead of this final weekend in April, with sister website AppShopper now indexing 10,339 apps on its virtual shelves. While that pales in comparison to the far beefier iOS App Store (currently at 600,000 titles and counting), keep in mind that the Mac App Store only opened its doors for business back in January, 2011. Since then, Apple has moved all of its own software onto the platform, including heavyweight titles such as Final Cut Pro X and even the entire Mac operating system with OS X Lion. Apple has hailed the Mac App Store as “the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world” after passing 100 million downloads at the end of last year.
Speaking of the Mac App Store, we gave Snapheal quite a nice review not too long ago, and with good reason: It enables common folks to do superheroic tasks like remove unwanted objects from photos without sinking big bucks into software like Adobe Photoshop. If you think that .99 is still too much dough, developer MacPhun, LLC is having a sale on the Mac App Store this weekend only, where Snapheal can be found for a mere .99. Now that’s two great deals in the same news recap, so don’t go saying we’ve never done anything for you before…
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