Yep, that is indeed a Hard Drive.

If it looks like a duck…

Aesthetically, the Spinpoint looks very much like any other hard drive on the market, with standard SATA connectors and also a separate bundle of extra pins which I assume are used during production. The Spinpoint M8 is a two platter hard disk (allowing a 9.5mm thickness) and due to a lower number of platters than 12.5mm MT2, the M8 draws less power than its predecessor and the use of AF, faster SOC Controller and higher aerial density means higher performance than a typical 5400 RPM drive. At this point in time, 1TB 2.5″ Hard drives are only available in the slower (but mainstream) 5400RPM spindle speed. 7200RPM 2.5″ drives top out at 750GB.

Performance

Performance of the M8 is comparable to that of most modern 5400RPM drives, with sequential performance being slightly higher due to higher aerial density. In fact, this drive performs similarly to older 7200 RPM notebook drives with sequential reads peaking at 90MB/s. In everyday use however, other system factors such as caching and processing speed tend to mask any slight performance increases from the hard drive. The lower capacity <500GB versions of the M8 perform slightly faster (according to TomsHardware) and the competing WD10JPVT performs faster still (albeit for a £20 higher asking price).

Power Consumption

Surprisingly, power consumption from the M8 is very low, even approaching SSD territory when idle (disk heads parked). At 0.58W, this is among the lowest of most modern 5400RPM hard drives (most nowadays tend to idle at 0.7W). Under load, power usage increases to 2.6W which is normal for most 5400RPM drives. Just to put this into perspective, the 7200RPM Hybrid Momentus XT (First Generation) idles at 0.7 and peaks at 3.3W under load, while the Corsair Force Series 3 120GB idles at 0.52W and peaks at 2.2W under heavy load.

Noise

Noise is becoming a particularly important issue in notebook hard drives, and the M8 performs reasonably well in this area. While idle/spindle noise is slightly louder than what I’m used to with the stock MacBook Pro 13 drive (by Hitachi), seek noise levels are quite low. Emergency head parking (when the drive suddenly loses power or when a laptops motion sensor is tripped) sounds less clunky than other 2.5″ hard drives I’ve used, and spin up noise is also very low.

Go on… Treat Yourself

Pricing is the most attractive feature of the Spinpoint M8. At £99.98 from many retail stores (even a few weeks after launch), it gives one of the best £/GB ratio of any drive on the market at 9.5p/GB. If you’re in the market for a faster storage solution (7200RPM, Hybrid or SSD), then at 5400RPM you should obviously look elsewhere, but if sheer capacity, compatibility (9.5mm height) and value is what you’re after, the Samsung Spinpoint M8 1TB is very easy to recommend.

Cooling is possibly the most important factor in x86 mobile devices. Cramming ~35 watt components into a chassis less than an inch thick is likely to result in some serious heat issues if not done properly, and we’ve some examples of that from other notebook manufacturers, and the infamous first generation MacBook Air which was plagued by overheating problems.

Dust Trails

Looking at the design of a laptop, it is often quite difficult to determine how air flows inside the laptop to cool the components down, but luckily I got my hands on a MacBook Pro 13 which has been in a dusty environment and it shows air flow inside the chassis beautifully.

We can see that most of the cooling air enters through the left side of the large vent under the notebooks hinge. What’s interesting is that the air doesn’t take a direct path to the fan, but instead travels around the motherboard before entering fan cage. On the lower side, this would be where the RAM is located, and this is possibly how the RAM modules (often overlooked in notebook cooling) are cooled.

One place which I did not expect air flow to occur are the ports on the left side. From the dust trails left behind, there appears to be almost the same amount of air flowing through the ports as the main vent. The path which this air takes is very important, as it would travel over the top side of the motherboard and many of the components such as the sound card and various other controllers. Air would also travel over the copper plates which draw heat from the Core 2 Duo CPU and Nvidia 320M chipset. It would be interesting to see the effect of blocking these ports on the temperature of the system.

Moving cooling air over the chassis and heat plates themselves as well as the heatsink fins is an effective method for maintaining cool chassis temperatures, as seen in the Acer Timeline 3810T where cooling air is redirected over the chassis and the CPU heat plate before cooling the heatsink fins. Many notebooks before the Acer 3810T tend only to cool the heatsink fins and leave the heat plate air stagnant, resulting in hotspots.

Laminar Wall Jet

How the air rows around the chassis is important. The dust trails left behind indicate a smooth air flow with little turbulence which is extremely important in cooling. Jet engines use a similar technique (known as the Laminar Wall Jet) to blast non turbulent air over the combustion chamber walls, keeping the outer skin cool and preventing heat transmission to the wing fuel tanks. A smooth air flow is important, as turbulent flow would result in a build up of hotspots where hot air is not expelled effectively. The old practice of adding lots of air vents onto the laptop chassis was never an effective method of cooling, as air intake would be turbulent and not expelled properly.

A laminar flow quickly tuns into a turbulent mess

http://catchrandom.blogspot.com/2010/08/beautiful-coloured-smoke-pictures.html

The MacBook Pro and Acer Timeline 3810T manage to cool themselves so effectively without a myriad of extraneous air vents because air has a relatively direct and clean route from intake to exhaust. Adding air vents to the bottom of the chassis would probably cause the components to run hotter as turbulent air flow prevents hot air from escaping.

Cooling the Hard Drive

Interestingly, the hard drive doesn’t appear to be air cooled. There is no opening at the front of the notebook to allow air to circulate, and there doesn’t appear to be many dust trails around the hard disk area. I assume that the hard drive is cooled almost entirely by conduction through the side mounted support screws or simple convection to the metal chassis.

This appears to be very effective; the hard disk drive on the MacBook Pro 13 never reaches over 40 degrees, even on continuous load (the same hard drive will reach 60 degrees on my old HP DV2000). High performance 7200RPM drives should be fine in the MBP.

No Air-Flow through the Keyboard

Rummaging through the innards of the MacBook Pro, I also came across something else. Some reviews on other sites suggest that the MBP draws air in through the keyboard much like the Lenovo IdeaPad U300 or Sony Vaio Z (2011). I can confirm that this is indeed utter rubbish; there is no gap through the keyboard in which air can enter. It is also characterised by the fact that it is possible to run the notebook under full load with the lid closed and the components to run no hotter than if the lid was open. Having the keyboard as an air intake would probably require more air movement as seen in the 2011 Vaio Z with its dual fans.

Cooling in the 2010 vs 2011 models

The 2010 and 2011 MacBook Pro’s essentially have the same cooling design, however due to some architectural differences in the chipset, CPU and GPU, the heatsink in both models differ.

The 2010 13″ MacBook Pro Heatsink. Image from iFixit.

The 2010 MacBook Pro has a 2 chip solution with a 25W Core 2 Duo CPU and a Nvidia 320M chipset which communes another ~12W under load. The heatsink must therefore be in contact with both chips to cool them down sufficiently, especially under load.

The 2011 13″ MacBook Pro’s main heatsink and Platform Controller Heatsink towards the left. Image from iFixit.

The 2011 MacBook Pro’s cooling is slightly more interesting. The Core i5/7 CPU integrates many chipset functions and also the GPU into a 35W component. The main heatsink is in contact with this die and not the second platform controller chip (which presumably uses little power). The Platform controller however has its own simple heatsink/heat spreader which also draws heat from the Thunderbolt controller. Heat is then lost through conduction and air flow inside the chassis. Joining the Platform Controller heatsink to the main CPU heatsink (as it is on the 2010 model) will cause the CPU’s heat output to be conducted to the Platform controller, resulting in higher operating temperatures.

Build Quality and Design

The first thing you would think when you pick up the Ace is how light it is. The plastic construction and thin back cover weigh much less than the equivalent metal counterpart. Design wise the Galaxy Ace is one of the best looking budget Android phones out there. The front of the device is covered by a flush clean glass interrupted by only the speaker grille and the single home button while the top and bottom bezel are the same size, lending it an iPhone like appearance. The back of the device is also very well done with a matte textured finish which feels nice to the touch and provides ample grip while the shiny trim provides a feeling of rigidity to the device. Unfortunately, like the Galaxy S 2, the back cover of the Galaxy Ace is worryingly flimsy and provides almost no strength to the phone whatsoever.

It’s just about as flimsy as it looks

Display

It’s a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, but don’t be mistaken; no SAMOLED+ display to be found here. To bring costs down, the Samsung Galaxy Ace uses a bog standard TN LCD panel with mediocre colour saturation and average contrast ratios. Resolution is also a weak point of the Galaxy Ace’s display with individual pixels easily discernible, but then again it’s hard to complain for a budget smartphone. It’s no iPhone 4, but thankfully it’s not as bad as the original HTC Wildfire. Resolution and display aspect ratio should be fully compatible with most Market Apps.

There’s no fooling your retina here…

Technically, the Galaxy Ace handles colours well although Samsung have tweaked its colour reproduction to appear more AMOLED. Colour gradients show clear signs of over saturation and preference for blue colours. Fortunately greyscale gradients are clean showing no signs of banding or unsightly colour tints. I couldn’t run the black level tests to try and discern dark shades of black. It appears that Android or Samsung tweaks the colours slightly to prefer colour vibrancy over faithful reproduction. This is all fine on a phone anyway; I assume most people would prefer vivid colours over “duller” accurate colour reproduction.

Reasonable colour reproduction

Very high black levels (even on low brightness)

The TN display handles greyscale nicely without any unwanted hues

The Galaxy Ace’s use of a TN LCD is especially obvious when it comes to reproducing black. Black levels are very high (almost as high as the iPhone 3GS) and combined with the limited viewing angle creates an unfavourable night time viewing experience. In bright daylight though, the relatively high black level should be drowned out by the displays reflectance anyway. Not that you would want to view the display in bright daylight however; at peak brightness it managed well under indoor lighting but even on cloudy days the display is difficult to read.

Camera

What do you expect. A £120 phone with a 5MP camera and LED flash. Pictures are adequate with nice accurate colours. Even at the highest settings, compression artefacts are clearly visible and in bright conditions the images tend to appear washed out with details in bright areas blown out. It’s not circa 2001 phone camera, but don’t expect it to replace your point and shoot.

Video performance is also quite poor. The Galaxy Ace struggles to maintain a steady frame rate, even when recording at 640×480 (the highest resolution available).

Unlike the Galaxy S 2, the Galaxy Ace does not have a front facing camera as you might think. The two round things you see to the right of the speaker grille are the proximity and light sensor.

Android and Performance

Being a budget smartphone, we can forgive the Samsung Galaxy Ace’s use of a first generation Snapdragon SoC. All would be fine if Samsung had clocked this at 1GHz (like the original Nexus One) which produces reasonable performance. The MSM7227 chipset Sammy uses in the Galaxy Ace is clocked only at 800MHz to add insult to a already slow first generation processor architecture. The UI occasionally struggles to produce decent frame rates while scrolling and running several applications at the same time results in a very sluggish experience. I blame this on the slow SoC, but also the lack of Android’s utilisation of the GPU for the UI. The almost decent Adreno 200 GPU in this phone stays mostly dormant while the already underpowered CPU struggles with relatively basic UI tasks. It’s not ideal, but it’s the same situation for most Android devices.

Unlike it’s higher end brother; the Galaxy S 2, the Ace doesn’t support flash most likely due to it’s sub par processor and as a result we miss out on Neave’s mind-blowing flash visuals. Not that you would want to run flash anyway; browsing without Flash is already choppy and while I have no complaints on the speed at which web pages load (over decent WiFi and 3G), navigating can be a real pain after prolonged usage.

Ow.

Possibly the biggest advantage of Android compared to iOS or WP7 is removable storage. The Galaxy Ace offers you the choice of having over 32GB on your phone, or less depending on your budget. Transferring music and videos from your computer is simply a drag and drop affair without any syncing complications frequently seen with iTunes or Zune.

Technically, the Ace should be upgradeable to Android 2.3, but of course this is dependant on carrier optimisations. My review sample came with Android 2.2 Froyo.

Battery Life

Samsung crams a surprisingly large 5Whr battery in this phone which easily gets through a days worth of heavy use. Like almost every other smartphone on the market though, you should ideally charge it every night to guarantee a full days use.

Satisfyingly large battery which delivers satisfying battery life

Conclusion

Being a naturally critical person, I can’t help but fault the Galaxy Ace for all it’s shortcomings, but this is me comparing it to the latest and greatest; something which the Galaxy Ace isn’t trying to achieve. No it doesn’t have NFC, a front facing camera or high end display tech but for the £120 asking price; you get a device which can make calls, browse the internet, listen to music, watch videos and download third party apps. Just to think that it was only a few years ago when such a device would have costed considerably more. While it is unlikely that you’ll enjoy using the Galaxy Ace as much as something like the iPhone or Galaxy S 2, functionally you won’t be losing out on much thanks to the flexible Android OS it runs. For it’s £120 asking price, there are plenty of alternative ways you could go wrong with a budget Android phone.

More Pictures…



While this works almost flawlessly in iOS devices due to their flash storage and small application sizes, in Macs, this could lead to system slow-downs and increased power consumption.

So what causes the problem?

Let’s say you have 4GB of system memory, and your open applications use up 3.5GB leaving 0.5GB left for whatever you want to do next. Now let’s say that we load a Photoshop file into the memory which uses 1GB. With only 0.5GB of memory left, the OS must find a way of freeing up an extra 0.5GB of memory for the Photoshop file. It does this by paging.

Any item in the memory which is not being used is moved from the memory onto the “virtual memory” on the hard drive. This frees up enough space for the 1GB photoshop file we want to open.

The problem with paging is that it is incredibly slow. The hard drive is the slowest component in the system, and relying on this for paging would result in slowdowns as the hard drive must a) load the file into the memory and b) write data into the virtual memory.

Why aren’t the MacBook Airs affected so much?

The 2010/2011 MacBook Airs use SSD storage (Solid State Drive). SSD’s have no moving parts and are much faster than hard drives found in most MacBook Pros; therefore paging into an SSD would be much faster than paging onto a hard drive. This is partly the reason for why the base 11 inch MacBook Air (2011) with only 2GB of RAM still performs at an acceptable level, because paging onto an SSD is fast and results in slightly less slowdown. RAM is still faster than an SSD though, so the 4GB Air would still perform faster than its 2GB counterpart.

So how much is enough?

In the days of Snow Leopard, I would have said that 4GB would be ample RAM for any Mac under a basic workload. Lion however emphasises multitasking and takes control over closing applications and memory management, and 4GB may not be enough. If you own a Mac with an SSD, then you can easily get by with 4GB, but for a Mac running on a hard drive, paging may drastically reduce system performance if you’re opening a large application or file. Therefore, if you’re likely to be doing heavy multitasking or working with large files, 6 or 8GB of RAM is the way to go.

Dual Channel or not to Dual Channel…

Apple’s Macbook Pro range (and indeed many Windows based notebooks) have 2 RAM slots, and both are usually occupied with two identical modules. For example, a Macbook Pro could have 2x2GB modules making 4GB. The advantage of pairing up identical RAM is that the system can take advantage of something called Dual channel, in simple terms, allowing the system to access both modules in one instance instead of one at a time (i.e. single channel).

Having RAM in dual channel can increase performance slightly (especially in graphics intensive tasks using integrated graphics), but most of the time this is costly as both RAM modules must be replaced at the same time.

The truth is though, while RAM running in dual channel offers performance benefits, they tend to be negligible. Under normal workloads, you will not be able to perceive the difference between a system running dual channel and one which is not. What you would perceive however, is the effects any extra RAM put into the system; so for example, a system not running dual channel memory with 6GB of RAM should feel faster than one running dual channel but with only 4GB of RAM. Of course, a system with 6GB of dual channel RAM (assuming such a thing were possible) would run even faster.

Here are a few of my crude benchmarks

Time to boot up and launch all frequently used applications

4GB: 5min43s

8GB: 3min21S

Time to launch iPhoto with frequently used applications running

4GB: 12s

8GB: 5s

Time to launch iPhoto Slideshow

4GB: 9s

8GB: 4s

Time to create new Safari window with iPlayer running

4GB: 6s

8GB: 3s

BioShock FPS

4GB: 33FPS

8GB: 32FPS

Does RAM solve everything?

Unfortunately not; adding more RAM essentially reduces the need for the system to use the major bottleneck component (hard drive). While it makes the system run more efficiently, it does not make it run “faster”. Tasks which heavily  rely on things other than IO such as streaming HD video, playing graphics intensive games or rendering complex images would not benefit much from more RAM. This can be seen in the BioShock FPS benchmark where the frame rate stayed the same, but it has to be noted that opening and exiting to finder is much faster with more RAM.

Why Doesn’t it work?

Ever wonder why OSX Lion is such a small download compared to previous versions? Mac OS versions tend to be around 7GB in size, Lion is only 3.45GB. The secret here is that Lion only contains critical features and applications, anything else such as Flash and printer drivers would be installed from the internet as and when they are required.

Extra space is saved by dropping PowerPC support. During the transition between the PowerPC architecture and Intel, Apple included a background piece of software in the OS called Rosetta which allows PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs. With Lion, Rosetta and PowerPC support has been dropped completely and applications written for PowerPC no longer work at all. This is a problem for applications written for PowerPC, such as Adobe Photoshop CS2 and SimCity 4.

I want to play SimCity 4! (On Lion)

There are two ways of doing this, you could set up a Virtual Windows machine and find a Windows copy of SimCity 4. However, after installing possibly one of the most elegant desktop OSes (Lion), I assume you would want a more elagant solution to go with it…

Aspyr is responsible for providing SimCity 4 support for Intel based Macs. This Patch was released in 2007 and installing this would allow SimCity 4 to work on Lion. The SimCity 4 application icon will now also be added to the Launchpad for your enjoyment once the patch has been installed. Performance is still slow (bearing in mind that SimCity 4 for Mac is not written to take advantage of Intel CPU’s) and closing/saving cities seems to take forever, but it works. So give it a try!

Original Source for Post

Rawr :)

Once method of increasing tank water volume without actually increasing the size of the tank is by using a “Sump”. Sump tanks are mostly used in marine aquariums where water is siphoned from the main tank into another tank below. The water in this tank can be mechanically filtered by medium or biologically filtered by using aquatic plants before being pumped back up to the bank tank using a powerhead. As well as being a excellent filtration method, sump tanks also increase the overall volume of water, which offers some of the benefits of a larger tank such as more stocking/buffering capacity and easier maintenance.

This diagram provides a simple overview of how a sump tank works. In reality however, it is slightly more complex than this, with valves, bell siphons and slits to prevent flooding should the pump stop working or the siphon is air-locked.

A typical Sump tank

For owners of smaller aquariums or those who don’t want the complexities involved with a sump tank, there is another simpler option.

The Passive Sump tank.

Essentially, a passive sump requires little/no power to operate and there is no risk of flooding associated with a typical sump tank. It could also be used to decorative effect or even to grow food! (More on this later)

This diagram shows how a passive sump works, and unlike the sump system above, this system is actually that simple! The two way siphon joins the two bodies of water together and allows dissolved minerals etc to diffuse from one tank into another. For example, ammonia diffuses from the main tank into the sump tank where ammonia concentration is lower due to the plants. Of course, simple diffusion is a slow process so the sump tank should be used in conjunction with an active filter system and not treated as a replacement for true filtration. One situation where passive sump would be useful is in Natural Planted Tanks (NPT) where the number of powerheads etc are kept to a minimum and fast growing plants such as Elodea densa or Hornwort (which are not regarded as particularly attractive) can be grown to curb algae growth.

Passive Sump tank

Passive sump systems should not be used as an alternative for true filtration in most cases, however, one of the benefits of a sump tank in marine systems is that filters and powerheads can be hidden from the main tank. This is whee the active sump tank comes in.

Active Sump

This diagram shows how an active sump system works.

Active Sump Tank

Very similar to a marine sump (first diagram), however the sump tank itself is placed besides the main tank like the passive sump system. Water is pumped out of a sump tank into the main tank using a powerhead, which causes the water level in the main tank to rise. The difference in water level causes water to be siphoned from the main tank bank into the sump tank to restore the difference. Because the water level of the sump and the main tank are similar, the is less risk of flooding should something go wrong (if the pump stops working, the siphon simply stops moving water) and therefore fewer valves/bell siphons etc required.

Aquaponics

Remember how I wrote that food can be grown using this system? Aquaponics (a fancy way of saying “growing plants using water alone”) essentially relies on a sump system to deliver minerals excreted from fish to plants.

The diagram below shows the gist of it.

Aquaponics System

I have grown herbs such as Rocket this way with success and many vegetables seem to grow better in water/nutrient solution alone rather than soil. The grow bed does not contain any soil, only gravel and clay rocks which act as a support for the plant roots. The gravel is large enough for water to freely permeate and deliver minerals to the plants root system.

My Sump system (will Update!)

Currently a passive sump system so far. I used it to overcome the limitations of my non-glass tank. Because the tank is opaque, the plants inside only receive natural light from above unlike glass tanks which receive light from all sides. This means that the plants (which I rely on for biological filtration and nitrate removal) aren’t as efficient as they could be. The sump tank (or two 1 litre glass bottles in this case) are used to grow Elodea quickly to remove nitrates faster, and the Elodea in the bottles grow considerably quicker than those in the dimmer main tank and much faster than if they were isolated from the main tank (presumably because of the higher mineral content in the main tank water).

The water is kept circulated between the main tank and the sump by raising the sump periodically, causing water to siphon from the sump to the tank. Once 1/4 of the water has been removed from the sump, it is placed back down to normal level and water begins to fill the sump to normal level again. It’s not an ideal system, but so far without access to the powerhead outlet, it works.

I am planning to convert this sump system to active by using some of the output from the powerhead to grow the Elodea faster, but the powerhead is currently underneath thick growths of plants and roots which I don’t want to disturb, so we’ll see how it goes :)

I might try to grow a few edible plants by making another shallower sump container and filling it with gravel and other goodies such as worms.

…and now we wait…

Filed under: All Categories, General/Everyday, Pets, Plants Tagged: Aquaponic, Aquarium, Elodea, Fish, Freshwater, Hornwort, Hydroponic, Powerhead, Siphon, Sump ]]> http://splurgebook.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/making-a-freshwater-aquarium-sump/feed/ 0 DSC06451.JPG andytran93 Sump Tank.jpg Passive Sump.jpg Active Sump.jpg Aquaponics.jpg DSC06451.JPG DSC06463.JPG DSC06458.JPG http://splurgebook.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/geo-art/ http://splurgebook.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/geo-art/#comments Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:13:15 +0000 Andy https://splurgebook.wordpress.com/?p=1007 ]]> It’s Splurgebook’s 100th post, so I thought I might as well make it something different.

Enjoy!

It doesn’t work though. Here’s the proof;

Now do you believe me? Please don’t say it’s a coincidence.

Good riddance to annoying Facebook Apps.

But iOS 4 takes this a step further and records your location data locally, and then syncs it to your iTunes during backup. If your iPhone backup is not encrypted, anyone could potentially steal your location data.

The folks at http://petewarden.github.com/ have created an application which allows you to dig into your iPhone backup files and show in graphic details your location whereabouts including timestamps. It is very disheartening, and my advice is if you don’t want your ex finding our where you’ve been, I suggest you encrypt your iPhone backup in iTunes.

It appears that no-one has been aware of this “feature” until a few weeks ago, so it’ll be interesting to hear what Apple has to say about this one. Speculation has already started that Apple is simply collecting research data in preperation for cloud networking services, although it does raise the question, should they be doing this without the end users consent?

Either way, there is currently no way of disabling this “feature”, so why not just download* the iPhone tracking app to your Mac and look at where you’ve been. You might even find a few surprises.

*The application is Mac only unfortunately, but the website still has info on how to access location data, if not in a more laborious form.

What does it do?

SuperDuper! is a free tool which allows you to make a exact bootable replica of your Mac’s hard disk on an external hard drive. The advantage it has over TimeMachine is that you can use your backup drive as a boot drive powering on your Mac with it connected and entering the boot menu. Restoring your Mac’s hard drive is as simple as booting into your OSX install disk and restoring through the disk utility.

Friendly interface

Backing up isn’t the only thing you could use SuperDuper for though. Upgrading your Mac’s hard drive used to involve hours of time reinstalling the OS and all your applications and files. SuperDuper! allows you to move everything from your Mac onto a new hard drive, after which all you have to do is swap the old hard drive out and replace it with the new one. If you’re upgrading to a larger hard drive, all the free space would be available to use straight away.

How good is it?

Backing up the entire contents of your Mac’s hard drive can take a long time (2 hours on my 250GB HDD). You can easily reduce the time taken to back up your drive by excluding certain files which you don’t need in the backup such as your Downloads folder or Cache files. The scripting interface which allows you to do this may not be as easy to use as the excluding interface on TimeMachine, and it does seem daunting at first, but it takes only 2 minutes to figure out. It is worth noting that scripting to exclude files requires the paid version.

Excluding files is a doddle

What you also get in the paid version is SmartCopy. This essentially means that instead of erasing your entire backup drive and copying everything again when you want to do another backup, SuperDuper! simply erases and copies data which has changed since the backup by comparing the two. This typically takes 1/5 the time needed for a full backup depending on how much has changed since the last backup.

Scheduling is useful for those who can’t be bothered to manually back up their drive. You could also set SuperDuper! to back up when the drive is connected to your computer, although arguably, you would probably want to do this on a desktop Mac rather than a MacBook as you’ll probably have your hard drive connected most of the time.

Scheduling a backup

It can’t be all good right?

The problem I’ve had with scheduling on SuperDuper! for it to backup my Mac when the drive is connected is that it is very easy just to remove the drive and forget SuperDuper! is running. Removing the hard drive while SuperDuper! is backing up to it would cause it to stop at an “unknown state”. I must admit though, I have removed my external hard drive a few times when a backup is running, and just used SmartCopy afterwards and it seemed to carry on fine.

The main drawback of SuperDuper is that it doesn’t support file history like TimeMachine does. For example, if you accidentally save and close a document and your Mac is backed up with TimeMachine, you would be able to go back and restore the previous version. SuperDuper! doesn’t store incremental backups of your files, which could be a blessing or curse. The main gripe I had with TimeMachine are the size of the backups; because versions of the same file are saved, your backup eventually becomes bigger. SuperDuper! allows you to have full control over the size your backup becomes.

Unexpected benefits?

MacOS uses the HFS+ filesystem. The advantage this has over NTFS or FAT is that it automatically defragments certain small files and moves frequently used files to a “hot zone” on the drive (the outside of the disk where it spins “faster”). It also avoids writing large files into fragmented space where files have been previously deleted from. The problem is that MacOS doesn’t actually defragment free space, or large files for that matter meaning that if you deal with large files (iMovie imports, videos or large applications etc), your drive would become fragmented and write operations would become slow.

The advantage of SuperDuper! is that it can be used to defragment your drive, and relatively quickly. Just do a full backup of your Mac’s hard drive, test the backup by booting into it and erase your Mac’s hard drive and restore the contents of it onto your Mac. Because SuperDuper! copies individual files and not blocks of raw data, the contents of your “new” Mac hard drive would be defragmented and free space would be contiguous. SuperDuper! however wouldn’t move frequently used data onto the “Hot zone” however. Thats the job of another great application (iDefrag)*.

Full version worth $27.95?

I have to admit, $27.95 is quite pricey for an application which shares a feature set similar to TimeMachine which comes free on all Macs. Having said this, the features you get with the full version can justify the price if you factor in the usefulness of scheduling and SmartCopy which drastically reduces incremental backup times and sandboxing which allows you to test applications without harming your Mac.

Of course, you don’t have to purchase the full version if you don’t want to. The free version does all the things the full version does (albeit slightly slower without SmartCopy and file exclusion) and you still end up with a bootable copy of your Mac’s hard drive. It’s a great app though, and the developers deserve a bit of support.

*I shall be purchasing a license of iDefrag soon and will post up a review :)

Divisible by 1, 2, 3, 6, 9 and 18

3 or the divisors add up to 18 (3+6+9) making it a semiperfect number

Add the digits of 18 together and double the answer. You get 18.

18 is the atomic number of Argon. Atomic number refers to the number of protons in an atom.

An identical eclipse (Saros Cycle) occurs just under every 18 years

18 is the age of majority in most countries, i.e coming of age and age of adulthood

In Chinese Mythos, Hell has 18 levels

As of today (6th March 2010) typing “18” into Google Images shows this first;

Followed by this;

In Roman symbols, 18 is represented as XVIII

In 2018, it is predicted that processors will have 100 million cores and operate at 1,000 petaflops

18 seen as a number of good luck in China, thus the 18 floor on buildings are generally expensive

18:00 corresponds to 6pm on the 24 hour clock

And finally, as of today; I have survived 18 orbits around the sun :)

“A5″ Dual Core SoC (Precise specs unknown)

8.8mm Thickness (as opposed to 13.8mm of the iPad)

Magnetic Cover available in Polyurethane or Leather (5 colours available)

HDMI Out with full 1080p support and display mirroring

Gyroscope

“HD” rear camera and front facing camera

The same battery life with 25Whr LiPoly battery and the same H-IPS LED Backlit 1024×768 LCD Display

Available to purchase from March 11th 2011 in the UK

Apple also announced a host of other things including…

iOS 4.3 with updated JavaScript support coming on March 11th 2011

iMovie for iPad

GarageBand for iPad with virtual amp support and up to (only) 8 tracks

FaceTime for iPad

PhotoBooth for iPad

Press Shots

Here are the main differences between the two 2010 and 2011 MacBook Pro 13′s.

MacBook Pro 13 2010

nVidia GeForce 320M integrated graphics with 256MB shared memory. 48 Shader cores.

MacBook Pro 13 2011

Intel HD 3000 on-die graphics with 384MB shared memory and access to on-die L3 cache using ring architecture. 12 “EU’s”.

The 2011 MacBook Pro immediately strikes as the superior configuration, with the chipset itself integrated on the same die as the processor cores. As well as being able to allocate more memory (1.5x as much as the 320M), it also has access to the fast L3 cache on the processor die. The integrated GPU on the Core i5/i7 CPU is also able to “TurboBoost” under thermal constraints under tasks which demand more GPU power than CPU power (including most games).

Notebookcheck.com tested both the nVidia GeForce 320M and the Sandy Bridge GPU and found that the Sandy Bridge GPU performed consistently faster in both synthetic and FPS benchmarks than the nVidia 320M. The difference can only be described as incremental, but provides a clear difference between the performance of the two GPU’s.

It is worth noting that notebookcheck.com did not test the GPU’s independantly of the CPU. Core i5 in the 2011 MacBook Pro performs much faster than the Core 2 Duo on the 2010 MacBook Pro, and this could be a major factor in the performance difference seen in the benchmarks. For example, it could be that the faster CPU is responsible for the performance increase, and not the GPU.

It is also worth noting that nVidia Drivers are better supported in most games than Intel drivers, and it is likely that current Intel drivers are not fully optimised on this front yet.

So, should graphics be the reason to upgrade to the 2011 MacBook Pro 13? Well, yes and no. If you are upgrading exclusively for the Intel GPU, then I suggest you don’t do it. The nVidia 320M on the previous generation MacBook Pro performs just as well in most cases, and the real world performance is negligible.

The CPU however, is definitely a big reason to upgrade. Compared to the other MacBook Pro models, the 13 inch MacBook Pro has jumped 2 generations of CPU (from Penryn to Sandy Bridge) as opposed to the single generation jump of the 15 and 17 inch models (Arrandale to Sandy Bridge). Therefore you should see an even bigger jump in performance due to hyper-threading support, 32nm architectures and TurboBoost. Not to mention the new Thunderbolt Port, SDXC and FaceTime HD support and you’ve got a compelling reason to upgrade.

The truth is though, while the new MacBook Pro certainly improves upon the feature set of the current MacBook Pro 13, it adds very little to the table in terms of real world usability. There are no peripherals as of yet which support thunderbolt and for most consumers, the speed which Firewire or even USB 2.0 provides are more than adequate. Users of the 2009 MacBook Pro may see more reason to upgrade, but for those with a 2010 MacBook Pro 13, your money would be better spent on an SSD (TRIM support is on the way for Lion) or the next generation MacBook Pro (i.e. the one after the 2011 model).

13 inch MacBook Pro

2.3 or 2.7GHz Core i5 or i7 Sandy Bridge Processor

On-die Intel Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics 3000 with 384MB shared memory

320GB Standard Hard Drive

“Thunderbolt” Port

Facetime HD camera

SDXC Support

63.5Whr Battery with “7 hours wireless web”

15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro’s

2.0 or 2.2GHz Core i7 Quad Core Sandy Bridge Processor

On-die Intel Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics 3000 with 384MB shared memory

AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory

77.5Whr (15 inch) and 95Whr (17 inch) Battery with “7 hours wireless web”

“Thunderbolt” Port

Thunderbolt Port

This is a collaboration with intel based around their “light-peak” technology. It takes on the same connector as the MiniDisplay port currently found on last generation MacBook’s and is able to output video to HDMI, DVI and VGA at resolutions of up to 2560×1600 pixels. Thunderbolt supports data transfers of up to 10GBps compared to USB 2.0 480MBps.

Integrated Graphics on 13 inch MacBook Pro

Previous generation 13 inch MacBook Pro’s had an Intel Core 2 processor with a third party nVidia Chipset with integrated graphics. The previous generation MacBook had an nVidia 320M integrated graphics card with 48 shader cores and was the most powerful integrated graphics solution available at the time. Intel’s HD 3000 integrated graphics with 12 “EU’s” is located on the same processor die as the CPU itself and shares the CPU’s L3 cache via a ring bus architecture. In early tests, the integrated graphics solutions on Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPU’s performed slightly faster than the nVidia 320M while using less power.

The new 13 inch MacBook Pro however no longer supports features such as CUDA, DirectCompute or OpenCL that the older nVidia 320M had due to Intel’s CPU/Fixed Function design philosophy. This may pose a problem for newer games which offload tasks such as AI onto the GPU to free up CPU time.

The advantage of not having a separate graphics chip may be that the new MacBook Pro 13 may use less power than its previous generation counterpart. Sandy Bridge consumes more power than a Core 2 Duo (processor only) under load, but consumes very little when idle due to core gating and the 32nm process. With the integrated on-die graphics, the 13 inch MacBook Pro essentially has a one chip solution (aside from the platform controller which manages I/O such as SATA) and the cooling efficiency is maintained.

AMD Radeon HD 6490M on the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro’s

AMD graphics cards are currently not supported in Flash 10.2 video acceleration, thus H.264 decoding cannot be offloaded onto the GPU, instead it must be decoded on the CPU which is inefficient. The Mac Pro also has an AMD Radeon discrete graphics card and video acceleration is also not supported. The AMD 6490M itself is built around a 40nm process with 120 stream processors, Shader 5.0 support, OpenCL, OpenGL 4.1 and Direct Compute 11.

SuperDrive is no longer “Super”. Hasn’t been for the last 3 years

Apple still doesn’t support Blu-Ray on any of it’s Mac’s. It has been widely speculated that Apple will drop support for an optical disk drive much like it did with the Floppy disk. It is likely that Apple will drop support for an optical drive in the next generation MacBook Pro. This move, while abrupt would be similar to that made when the Floppy drive was removed from Mac’s, long before it was dropped by other PC vendors.

The truth is, with DSL and high speed broadband connections available, data can be transferred more efficiently via the internet and with consumers demanding thinner and lighter portable devices, an optical drive which consumes as much as 1/4 the internal space of a MacBook Pro and is used very rarely would not make sense. The space occupied by an optical disk drive could be used as another battery for example, potentially doubling the battery life of current notebooks. In fact, one of the thickness constraints of the current generation of MacBook Pro’s is the optical drive (and not the battery as li-poly batteries can be moulded to thinner shapes as in the MacBook Air).

Still a TN LCD display

I have said it before and I’ll say it again. MacBook Pro’s are marketed as a designers best friend, so why are they still using TN LCD displays? TN LCD’s cannot produce full 24bit colour, have poor contrast ratios (though it is worth noting that MacBook Pro’s have pretty good displays, considering they’re TN) and sub-par viewing angles. For design work such as photography, having a display that dithers colours to produce the correct shade makes it a very ineffective.

Design is looking a tad dated

The new MacBook Air’s represent the pinnacle of what a MacBook should be, thin, stylish and practical. The new MacBook Pro’s have kept the same design for over 3 years now, and while it is still a class leading design, there are many aspects which can be improved. Thickness for example is beginning to be an issue; the MacBook Pro is the same thickness throughout the chassis and does not taper, which makes it more difficult to type on than the tapered chassis of the new MacBook Air. Newer notebooks such as the Sony Vaio S are quickly approaching the level of thickness currently occupied by the 13 inch MacBook Pro, whilst squeezing in a dedicated graphics card. It is still important to note that while a MacBook Pro is good value considering its software and operating system, in terms of hardware it still somewhat lags behind the competition for sheer raw performance and value.

In-Ear-Monitors (IEM’s) differ from Earbuds by the fact that they seal the ear canal completely as opposed to earbuds which simply sit outside the ear canal. By doing this, they are able to achieve better noise isolation and in most cases, more accurate sound due to the more efficient transfer of sonic energy into the ear canal. Better noise isolation also means the user would be less inclined to turn the output volume to dangerous levels to drown out external noises, however this also poses a health risk, as the user must rely almost entirely on sight in high risk areas (traffic for example).

Among the first IEM’s to come to market were the Etymotic ER-4 series of canalphones. Most consumer in-ear-headphones were earbuds or over-ear-headphones which offered lower levels of noise isolation and a relatively low accuracy. The Etymotic ER-4S series strived for balanced, accurate and clear sound and were so successful that they are still being sold in much the same form today. Unfortunately, for many consumers, the “balanced” and “accurate” sound the ER-4 series produced translated as flat and treble heavy, which lead Etymotic to produce the ER-4P which had a slightly elevated bass response consumers are used to.

The Etymotic ER-4P. Legendary,

Noise Isolation

Most IEM’s require a good seal for them to deliver the full ranges of sound they are capable of.

Foam Tips provide the best seal as they expand into the ear canal. Comply tips are usually preferred however Shure’s Olive tips are also a favourite amongst most audiophiles. Foam tips tend to accentuate bass harmonics and are usually preferred for slightly treble heavy IEM’s such as the Etymotic HF3 and Shure SE535. Due to their porous nature, foam tips have a very limited life-span with those from the likes of Comply lasting only around a month whilst Shure Olives up to a year.

Silicone Flange tips are a common consumer favourite for sheer convenience. They are quick and easy to insert into the ear canal and provide a reasonable seal. They are also extremely durable, offering a life often exceeding that of the IEM itself. Unlike foam tips however, they don’t provide the accentuated bass and noise isolation isn’t as good.

Triple-Flanged Silicone Tips were made popular by Etymotic and are supposed to provide superior noise isolation compared to traditional single-flanged tips. While they do offer very good noise isolation, many say that they accentuate treble frequencies and cause sibilance (high frequency hiss) in balanced armature IEM’s.

Driver Technologies

Balanced Armature



Balanced armature drivers are common in most high end IEM’s. Although more expensive than dynamic drivers, due to their design they are able to reproduce sound more accurately, especially in the treble region. A typical balanced armature driver consists of an armature suspended between two permanent magnets. A current is then passed through a coil spun around the armature which causes it to become attracted to either one of the magnets. The armature is connected to a shaft which joins onto the diaphragm. It is this movement happens thousands of times per second to reproduce the sound that we hear.

Pros

1. Superior Treble performance compared to dynamic drivers
2. Lower drive power
3. Can be tuned for accurate reproduction
4. Multi-driver set-up can have a range far greater than dynamic drivers
5. Much smaller than dynamic drivers

Cons

1. Relatively fixed design means the driver moves less air than a dynamic driver
2. More expensive
3. Requires good seal to deliver low frequencies effectively
4. A single balanced armature driver has a lower frequency range than a single dynamic driver

Balanced Armature Drivers include:

1. Shure SE315/SE425/SE535
2. Westone IEM’s
3. Etymotic ER Series and HF3/HF5
4. Apple In-Ear Headphones

Dynamic


Dynamic drivers in IEM’s work in a similar way to the drivers found in over-ear headphones and larger speakers. The diaphragm is mounted on a voice coil to which a current is applied. The entire section is then either attracted or repelled from a permanent magnet which moves the diaphragm and produces sound. Dynamic drivers are relatively uncommon in IEM’s (although are the staple driver type in ear-buds). Because they are able to move more air, bass reproduction is better than balanced armature drivers, however they cannot move as fast, meaning intricate details (including those within the bass range) may be lost.

Pros

1. Cheaper to produce
2. “Warmer” sound
3. Better bass response
4. Wider range per driver

Cons

1. Tuning for accuracy is difficult
2. Treble roll-off is prevalent in many dynamic IEM’s
3. Larger drivers perform better, but take up considerably more space than BA drivers

Dynamic IEM’s include:

1. Sennheiser CX-200/CX-300
2. Sony MDR Series

Moving Armature

The Grado GR8 is an example of a Moving Armature IEM

Moving armatures are relatively new technology which aims to bring the benefits of fast moving balanced armature drivers with dynamic drivers. Moving armature drivers work in a similar principle to balanced armature drivers, but contain a relatively large diaphragm. A single moving armature driver is able to reproduce audio to the same level of quality found in multiple balanced armature IEM’s. Notable examples include the Grado GR8/GR10’s and the Japanese made Ortofon e-Q5.

Frequency Characteristics

Most consumer IEM’s can be divided into categories by their frequency response. It is worth noting that while an important factor, frequency response is only one factor affecting the quality of IEM’s, and response alone cannot guarantee the quality of reproduction. However it provides a useful method of dismissing IEM’s whose frequency response is modelled towards an undesirable characteristic.

Flat-Response

This is the standard for uncoloured reproduction. With this type of response, no frequency is favoured over another and the sound will appear as intended by mastering. High-end audio equipment will try to achieve this, however no speaker or IEM has actually reproduced a perfectly flat response. Having said this, IEM’s such as the Etymotic ER-4S come very close.

It is worth noting that while a flat response “on paper” for a room speaker should appear flat, IEM’s must favour some frequencies over others to achieve “perceived flat response”. This is because mastering assumes that the sound will be played over room speakers. Room speakers have a noticeable characteristic of somewhat lacking treble, even if they are producing a “balanced sound”. This is because treble frequencies are the first to be absorbed by the air, and by the time the sound reaches our ears, much of the high frequency energy would have been absorbed. Mastering takes this into account and “boosts” high frequencies to overcome this.

IEM’s however do not have this issue and very little treble is absorbed by the small distance in the ear canal. This is why most reference IEM’s tend to lower treble frequencies and boost bass to appear to sound flat.

U Response

Also known as the “Smile” response or “consumer sound”. This is what many modern consumers look for and most consumer earbuds and IEM’s reproduce a sound similar to this. The effect is very noticeable in car stereos and especially consumer IEM’s from the likes of Sennheiser and Beats by Dr.Dre where a “beefy” bass response is coupled with a bright treble. Midrange is usually “towards the back” although it may have several spikes to boost vocal reproduction. This response is also known as the ‘boom & tizz’ response.

N Response

IEM’s which produce this response are said to be mid-heavy. Notable examples include the Etymotic MC5 which places much of the focus on mid-range and sees a noticeable treble roll of and lowered bass response. This type of response is not popular in the consumer market.

Bass Slope

IEM’s with this response are well suited to genres of music which benefit from a bass kick, drum and bass, dubstep and house for example. This response is also very popular amongst the general public and many consumers will happily judge the performance of a pair of IEM’s based solely on its bass response alone.

Treble Slope

The treble slope is generally seen in high end IEM’s geared towards mastering and critical listening. Having an elevated treble allows for greater perceived detail. The treble slope is also favoured by musicians who require these to achieve a perceived flat response. This is because musicians tend to lose their high frequency hearing first due to repeated exposure to loud sounds.

Soundstage

Soundstage refers to the 3D space the IEM creates. Generally, the further away the speakers from the ears, the larger the soundstage is going to be. IEM’s all have an inherent problem of being very close to the ear drum. This means that the sound produced by the driver is not “shaped” by the ear and ear canal before it hits the eardrum as we are used to, which can cause the sound to appear as if it was coming from the centre of the head.

Manufacturers have counteracted this problem by modifying the response of the IEM’s and various software enhancements can also create the illusion of a larger soundstage by leaking the left and right channels into each other or amplifying differences in stereo sounds.

Decay Times

Imagine an IEM reproducing a loud “pop!”. The sound should appear, then stop immediately after the it has ceased from the original recording. If the IEM continues to resonate even after the sound has stopped, it will “colour” the sound with elements not present in the original recording. This is not a desirable trait in IEM’s and should be kept to a minimum. Balanced armature drivers are not affected by this as much as dynamic drivers however, and the problem is much more pronounced in room speakers than on IEM’s.

A typical decay time graph showing the time taken for resonances to stop

Bass Port/Reflex

If a driver is placed in a sealed enclosure, it will have an inherent tendency to move back to its original position after it has moved to equalise the air pressure inside the enclosure. While this can be favourable for producing sounds more accurately and reducing unnecessary resonances (thus avoiding colouring the sound), it increases the power required to move the driver (and to overcome the difference in air pressure) and limits the drivers bass response.

One way for manufacturers to overcome this problem is to put “bass ports” onto the enclosure. Bass ports essentially allow the equalisation of air inside and outside the enclosure and allowing the driver to be more “floppy”. This increases bass response and also lowers the power needed for the driver to produce sound. Adding vents onto the enclosure design however reduces the accuracy of the driver as it is now more “floppy”, although this problem can be overcome by “tuning” the bass ports.

Tuning a bass port essentially means placing the vent in a strategic position on the enclosure to ensure that air is only equalised when it should be (i.e. When the driver is reproducing low frequencies) and to behave like a sealed enclosure when the driver is reproducing higher frequencies. In effect, tuning the bass port allows the driver and enclosure to get the best of both worlds.

Myths

Frequency Range

Which IEM is better?

1. 15hz – 24KHz
2. 22Hz – 16Khz

If you answered (A), then you’re wrong. If you answered (B) however, you are also wrong. Many mis-informed consumers judge the quality of a pair of IEM’s on frequency response alone, and often, frequency response is the only specification on the packaging (aside from sensitivity and impedance) which gives any indication of the performance of a pair of IEM’s. So what’s going on here?

Frequency range only provides one piece of information; the range of frequencies an IEM can cover. It gives no indication to whether the IEM will reproduce all frequencies equally or whether the IEM will distort certain “difficult” frequencies. In fact, most IEM’s whose frequency response covers the <100Hz range will distort these frequencies or ignore them altogether. The same can be said with treble frequencies >6KHz where many IEM’s (especially those which are dynamic based) will distort.

Frequencies below 30Hz and over 16Khz

The human ear can hear sounds at the limits of 20Hz -20KHz. Therefore we can assume that a pair of IEM’s which cover the 20Hz to 20KHz range will suffice, or not. The truth is, most people can only hear a range from 100Hz to 16KHz range, and even then, treble frequencies close to 16KHz would only be heard as “high” with very little actual perceived detail. This can explain why the Etymotic ER-4S has an upper limit of 16KHz, but still reproduces more perceived treble detail than cheaper IEM’s which claim to reproduce frequencies of up to 22KHz.

How Splurgebook tests IEM’s

IEM’s are put through two tests to determine overall sound quality and other factors such as comfort etc.

General Use

IEM is plugged directly into an iPhone 3GS and Samsung YP-P2. No equalisation is used and all sound “enhancements” are turned off. Only FLAC/ALAC and 320Kbp/s MP3 (LAME 3.98) are used as source audio.

Critical Listening

IEM is plugged into a FiiO E7 (WM8740) portable amp which is line-fed from an iPhone 3GS (Airplane Mode). All enhancements turned off. Only ALAC is used.

Noise Isolation

Tested in a quiet room with noise at 35-37db SPL
Tested in an outside environment with noise at 45-60db SPL

1 (Over)Saturation

Only todays highest end IPS LCD displays are only just capable of displaying 98% of the Adobe RGB colour gamut. Most consumer LCD displays fall into the 30-70% range. OLED technologies have always been able to saturate the Adobe RGB colour gamut, and most are able to exceed this by a fair amount; but this is where the problem lies.

The saturated colours found on most OLED displays is impressive at first, but too unnatural to be of any true professional use. Consumer OLED displays such as those found in smartphones are simply too saturated, and once manufacturers have finished showing off their unnaturally vivid displays and actually calibrate them properly, we just have to put up with their eye burning shades of neon colours.

We’ve all “wowed” at this display before…

2 Power Efficiency

OLED’s have entered the market claiming to be power efficient, and theoretically they should be. LCD’s work by shining a backlight behind a TFT panel, and with the exception of dynamic contrast, this backlight draws the same amount of power no matter what is being displayed on the screen. OLED sub-pixels shut off completely if they are displaying true black, so a display can save power if it shows a black background for example. In theory, of course.

The problem here is that so far, AMOLED displays haven’t shown to be very effective with actually saving power. The iPhone 4 for example uses on average 0.42 watts of power at full brightness no matter what is being displayed on the screen. The Samsung Galaxy S uses 0 watts when displaying black, but a circuit burning 1.13 watts when displaying white (DisplayMate). Considering most web-pages and applications are based upon a white background, this is a lot of power to be drawing. We should also consider the fact that the iPhone 4 uses an IPS display technology which itself uses up to 40% more power than the comparable TN panel.

3 Colour Reproduction

Sub-Pixel arrangement also has a big impact on the quality of a display. Most LCD displays are based upon an RGB arrangement; that is each pixel is composed of 3 sub-pixels of Red, Green and Blue. These are mixed to produce the millions of colours we see on our displays. The standard for display technology is 24 bit colour which IPS displays such as the iPhone 4’s are able to produce. TN displays like that found on most notebooks and the iPhone 3GS are only capable of 18 bit colour, and use dithering to simulate 24 bit colour. Many OLED displays are only capable of producing 16 bit colour.

AMOLED displays don’t use the RGB arrangement. Instead, they use the PenTile RG-GB arrangement where each pixel consists of only 2 sub-pixels. While this arrangement may be beneficial for image viewing (many camcorder displays are based on this), it makes it difficult to read text. Because the display requires 2 pixels to reproduce most colours instead of just one, colour gradients are not as smooth and text not as sharp as traditional RGB technologies. Using the PenTile arrangement on an LCD would result in terrible image quality, but at a low cost; which is what you find on fridge displays and cheap portable TV’s.

Yes it’s AMOLED! But no, it’s PenTile.

4 Sunlight Readability

This is where OLED displays have it difficult. Unlike LCD’s which are somewhat transreflective in bright sunlight, OLED displays are not “coloured”. This means they cannot simply use the bright light to “backlight” the display, instead only being able to “compete” with ambient lighting by using maximum brightness. “Super AMOLED” displays try to increase the efficiency of their displays by removing layers on the display which block the displays attenuation. Having a separate glass layer in front of a display can decrease attenuation by 4% (AnandTech), and when fighting against bright sunlight, every percent counts.

The problem where is that OLED displays still have to “compete” with bright light, and so far no consumer smartphone OLED display has been able to exceed the 350nits brightness level. While 300nits will just about be readable in the shade on a sunny day, 400nits or above are what is needed to compete with any form of direct sunlight. According to reviews by (AnandTech), so far; only displays from the likes of the BlackBerry Torch and iPhone 4 are able to produce anything over 400nits, and what d’you know? They both use LCD’s.

Did anyone mention “Sunlight Readability?”

From Andy and Mike :)

Shure is definitely up there if you’re shopping around for high performance in-ear-monitors (IEM’s). Aside from the consumer oriented SE115’s, pretty much all of the new SE range caters for clear, true-to-studio and balanced audio fit for even the pickiest of audiophiles, but with the slightest bit of sparkle and low end goodness of the modern audio preference that consumers crave. The SE315’s are no exception. In the grand scheme of Shure’s SE range, the SE315’s sit toward the lower end with a price of £189.99 and is the lowest priced of Shure’s Balanced Armature IEM lineup. On paper, the SE315’s look a little anaemic compared to its more expensive siblings, the SE425 and SE535’s with only one driver to speak of. A “Tuned BassPort” is incorporated however which should redeem it from the traditionally tinny sound that balanced armature drivers tend to produce (though balanced armatures don’t move a lot of air, so I’m not entirely how this “BassPort” works).

Packaging

Ok, so this isn’t important in the grande scheme of things, but this is an “in-depth” review, so why not? The Shure SE315’s packaging definitely makes what at first seems like a very insignificant product look like a masterpiece. On the practical side of things though, taking the actual IEM’s out requires nothing more than a sturdy pair of hands. There is no dodgy vacuum wrapped plastic or seals to deal with like we find on so many other items of packaging. In fact, I managed to get these out of the box and in my ears in less than 5 minutes. Result!

Design

Those familiar to Shure’s IEM’s would feel right at home with these, however, those coming from IEM’s which hang straight down from the ear may find these a little alien. Shure IEM’s are designed to be worn with the cable running up and over the ear. While it was possible to wear the previous models with the cable running straight down, the new SE315’s simply cannot be worn like this. Not that you would want to anyway; cable microphonics (a fancy way of saying “cable thump”) is greatly reduced when the cable is worn up and over the ear. Cable noise is still present though, and really, the only way to avoid this issue is to wear it under an item of clothing or with a clip etc (a clip is not included in the box).

Cabling isn’t usually a very exciting factor with IEM’s, though with the SE315 (and the rest of the SE line apart from the SE115’s), the cable can be detached from the driver units. Using a special connection which clicks into place and rotates, you can simply replace the cable instead of the entire set should something go wrong. Not that you would want to do such a thing very often; replacement cables cost anywhere from £45, a price which many would probably spend on a new pair of IEM’s. To Shure’s credit however, the cable is extremely well made with a meshy kevlar material covering it and satisfyingly chunky cable protectors at the joints. The cable is also angled at the 3.5mm jack which should prevent it from splitting.

That’s what you would be paying £45 to replace.

Comparing these directly to the SE535’s, the SE315’s seem to fit in the outer ear more easily. The fit isn’t as snug though like it is on the SE535’s, as the driver tapers in slightly towards the tip. Compared to other IEM’s on the market such as the Etymotic HF3’s or Apple In-Ears, the 315’s are much larger and weightier, although their outer-ear design makes them comfortable to wear. Apart from the cable over your ear, it is easy to forget you’re even wearing them.

Shure includes a “Fit-Kit” which includes tips of different materials to give the best fit. For sheer convenience, silicone or rubber tips are great, however they provide a very weak seal. Foam tips (of either the black variety or the yellow ones) provide a much better seal, however they also make putting the IEM’s on a lengthy process. Triple Flange tips are also included, and while they provide a good seal once inserted, they are hit and miss at times.

Quite a decent selection of tips. Cleaning tool is also included to remove that gooey stuff that builds up on your IEM’s after they’ve been in your ears.

The one gripe I have always had with Shure IEM’s was the fact that it takes a while to put them on. If you’re using foam tips, you have to pre-squish them after which you have a 10 second window to stick the things in your ear. The cable would then run over your ear and even after this, it takes about 20 seconds for the foam to expand and a proper seal to be created. It’s an ordeal which can become very annoying in the morning or after you take them out to talk to someone.

That fit took 3 minutes at the very least.

“Wire-form” is included in the first few inches of the cable to aid shaping around the ear.

Sound Quality

Right, so we have established that they take ages to put on; was it worth it? Short answer is definitely! Burning in isn’t generally required for balanced armature drivers so you could start enjoying your music right out of the box.

Shure’s signature sound has always been balanced and accurate, and the SE315’s deliver. Bass was tight and controlled without any of that distorted thumpy mess you find on lower end sets, and mids were delivered in a clean manner. Tracks with a lot going on in the mid-range still sounded especially clear for a pair of single drivers. Acoustic material are where these IEM’s perform at their best, with the single balanced armature driver texturing individual notes in such a precise way, making you feel as if you were in the studio where it was recorded. It is not to say that these IEM’s don’t perform with other music genres, as they provide just enough low end oomph to drive a drum and bass track smoothly along. Colouring is not an issue here, as you will hear everything in the way it was mastered to sound by the studio, as well as compression imperfections in the encoding process.

Just for fun, I played a 128Kbps track on these earphones and the difference between this and Lossless tracks I normally test IEM’s with was astounding. I would go as far as to say that the SE315’s manage to reproduce clearly the compression artefacts that comes with dodgy encodes and the effect was very pronounced. While these aren’t the IEM’s which would benefit much from a dedicated portable amp, they should still be fed Lossless, or 320Kbps from a decent source at the very least. They may be £189.99, but they don’t work miracles.

If I had to gripe about these IEM’s, then treble would be where I find a problem. While tracks were still bright, they seemed to lack some of the high end goodness you would find in the Etymotic HF3’s. This was mainly a problem in acoustic material where the sharp higher frequencies from the album “Take Off Your Colours” by YouMeAtSix were somewhat hard to come by. While this isn’t a “problem” for a pair of consumer earphones, it is definitely something to take into consideration when shopping around for a high end pair of IEM’s. If you’re a fan of bright treble, then the SE425’s or HF3’s would be a better choice.

On a serious health note, Shure IEM’s require very little current to drive them. With a good seal and volume at about half on an iPhone, these IEM’s kicked out a lot of sound and on a MacBook Pro, the volume only needed to be on four bars before things got a bit deafening. This isn’t where the problem lies though; while Shure claims that it’s IEM’s perform better at low volumes, many say that bass response seems better at higher volumes, and it is very easy to turn these up dangerously high to get the low end goodness going, damaging your hearing in the process. A volume limit is definitely something to actually use here, and as with any pair of balanced armature IEM’s, a good seal is essential. As a rule of thumb, try a different tip before turning up the volume if you find bass lacking.

Sound Isolation (Update)

Shure claims “up to 37db” of sound isolation with these IEM’s. Using the olive foam tips, I managed to get a very impressive level of isolation with no music playing. 37db is essentially what you get in a quiet room, so obviously wearing these with no music playing near heavy traffic isn’t going to result in complete silence. Having said this, once music does start playing even at low volumes, ambient noises (up to 45-60db or so) would be very difficult to hear through the isolation. Because of this stellar noise isolation, extra caution should be taken around traffic or high risk areas (I nearly got run over the other day).

While the black olives are my personal favourite choice of tips, yellow foams also work very well. The single flanged silicone tips block less noise, although it does make putting the IEM’s on a little easier. The triple flanged tips provide excellent noise isolation, although they take a while to fit properly and getting a good fit with these can be very difficult. Triple flanged tips also tend to accentuate high frequencies of >10k, which provide music with a high end “sparkle”, although it may become fatiguing after long periods. Everyone’s ear canals are different however, so don’t just take my word for it. With the range of tips Shure provides in the box, you should be able to find a pair that fits you.

Awkward Pricing

With a MSRP of £189.99, the Shure SE315 represents an awkward proposition. This price point is much higher than even the highest of price ranges for casual listeners, but far lower than what an audiophile would pay for decent audio (most tend to go for the higher end SE425’s). It therefore becomes very difficult to recommend these earphones to a particular target group.

Some online retailers price these at £140 which brings it back to the foreseeable price territory of the causal listener, although at £130, the Etymotic HF3 provides somewhat better value with iPhone compatibility and sheer high end clarity. You could add a iPhone remote cable to provide this capability, though this involves forking out an additional £50, putting this way ahead of the HF3’s pricing.

Aside from the retailers profits, the bulk of your hard earned £189.99 is put into this piece of plastic and metal.

Verdict

There is no doubt that Shure is the first name that comes to mind when high end audio comes to mind, with the SE535’s being the best IEM money can (somewhat reasonably) buy. Most people however (including audiophiles) do not have some £470 lying around for a new pair of earphones, and even at £299, the SE425’s are quite steep. The SE315’s at £189.99 fall almost into the consumer end of the price range, but still deliver balanced, uncoloured and clear audio for the discerning listener. On top of this, if you’re simply going to plug these into an iPhone/Decent PMP, then the SE315’s should be as far as you go in terms of high performance/price IEM’s. Plug a pair of SE535’s or even the SE425’s directly into a source like an iPhone and you honestly won’t be making the most of them.

More Pictures (Sorry about the quality)

That’s the colour of my thumb after removing the tough foam tips

One with the driver, one without. Just in case you like that kinda thing.

Driver unit stripped of it’s dignity.

Official shot, obviously of better quality than my own.

There is no doubt that Apple knows what they’re doing when it comes to design. These in-ear headphones blend in very well with any Apple branded product, and users of the crummy in-the-box earphones should have no trouble migrating to this pair. Unlike the bundled earphones, these feel very sturdy with the joints reinforced with a generous layer of thick rubber. It may important to note that the 3.5mm jack sticks straight out, so people who bend their cable at the plug should beware. Apple earphones tend to face the split cable issue here, and these are no exception.

Apple have been very generous with what comes in the box. As well as the usual manual, they’ve also included a triangular carrying case, 2 extra sets of silicone tips and a pair of mesh replacement caps. Ok, if you ask me, they should have provided a pair of triple-flanged tips or foam tips as well, but after all, this is Apple and we should be grateful.

Sound Quality

Before we begin, it is important to note that in-ear canalphones require a very good seal to sound at their best, balanced armature drivers especially. Without a good seal, balanced armature driver earphones sound very tinny and this is a mis-informed complaint I frequently see with the Apple In-Ears. Shove them deeper into your ear or wear the larger ear-tips and 9 times out of 10, problem solved.

So they don’t deliver the in-your-face bass driven sound that the AtomicFloyd HiDefDrums are capable of, but there is still enough there to prevent things from sounding too clinical. Acoustic material could be driven along without a problem, although bass heavy genres such as drum and bass may sound a little anaemic. It has to be noted though, that bass distortion is much lower than the bundled iPod/iPhone earphones and the low end while a little restrained is fairly accurate.

Balanced sound is the key here, and Apple have certainly done a decent job with this. Highs and mids are delivered in just the right doses and although there seems to be a slight dip in response somewhere in the treble region, this is hardly noticeable in everyday use. We’re only nit-picking here though, as in terms of balance and frequency response, we’re starting to approach Etymotic HF3 territory (although the HF3’s cost around £60 more).

Being dual drivers, one could expect these earphones to sound very detailed and crisp. The truth is that while their specifications look good on paper, their dual driver design lends little to be inspired when it comes to sheer clarity. The single driver found on the likes of the Shure SE115 (dynamic) or more so the Etymotic HF3 (balanced armature) provide a much cleaner sound with noticeably more “attack”. Complicated arrangements such as Pendulum’s The Fountain sounded slightly muffled as soon as the various instruments and synths start building up and listening to Muse’s The Resistance album was akin to watching a DVD; the storyline is there, but the cinematic experience isn’t.

Verdict

Ok, so some may fault me for saying that these are simply rubbish with respect to clarity, but the truth is that compared to the competition, I would expect a lot better from these in-ear headphones. If these were available for £40, then I could accept the lack of clarity for value, but at £65, it’s going against very decent sounding competition from the likes of Shure, Sennheiser and countless others. If you’re looking for iPhone compatibility as well as balanced, uncoloured sound, then the slightly ageing Etymotic HF2 would be a much better alternative and can be had for a £10 premium over these earphones, though if you must hop on the Apple bandwagon, then these still provide a huge leap up from the bundled iPod earphones.

Oh, just to make the point a little clearer;

Enjoy :)

The first thing you notice about these earphone’s even before you set your eyes on them is the box. It could be said that the box is more visually pleasing than many an earphone costing a lot more. Square in shape and with a smattering of brands and slogans all over the place, it oozes presence and show off the earphones very well. In many ways, one could simply keep the earphones boxed up on a shelf and even that would pass as a decent living room centrepiece.

Ok, so maybe I’ve exaggerated slightly on the box, but the earphones themselves are very attractive visually and to the touch. Apparently, these earphones are carved out of some sort of steel, then placed in an extremely hot oven to strengthen them up. AtomicFloyd claim that by making the earpiece housing extremely thin, they could deliver superior sound quality. More on that later.

Sound Quality

These earphones use a very unconventional design in that each earpiece has a dynamic driver with a “bass port” facing towards the user which is 13.5mm in diameter and is driven by a neodymium magnet. This is the driver that reproduces low frequencies and ‘reproduces low frequencies’ it does, very well in fact. Bass is very sharp, though only when it needs to be and once these earphones are inserted properly are able to deliver almost floor thumping bass which certainly show their presence.

Being extremely ‘bassy’ doesn’t mean that high end is sacrificed though. Atomic Floyd keeps things nice and crisp and does a nice job with reproducing detail. Magnet by the Bombay Bicycle Club has a tendency of going a little muddy on other earphones, though the Atomic Floyd’s reproduced it with a very cold, almost clinical sharpness; same goes for Crystallised by The xx where the individual strums of the bass guitar can be heard with extremely intricate detail.

These earphones definitely shine with bass-heavy genres such as Pop and Drum and Bass. Pumping Pendulum’s Watercolour through these earphones results in pure audio bliss with bass heavy chorus’s and the occasional hissy high end being reproduced as if it were coming from a much higher end set of earphones. With a complex ‘layered’ chorus arrangement, many earphones tend to skip on fine details in Watercolour and while the Atomic Floyd’s aren’t going to rival something like the Etymotic HF3 for sheer clarity, they cope with complex musical arrangements very well. Classical music is definitely a possibility here, although it is clear that these earphones are tailored more to the likes of more modern music genres.

A slight criticism is noise isolation with the bundled rubber caps. Before I start rambling on, I have to stress that these aren’t actually ‘canalphones’ in the sense that they don’t burrow deep inside your ear like the Etymotic HF3 or Apple In Ears, but they don’t hang as loose as something like the bundled earphones that come with iPods. Noise isolation, while adequate, it not as good as I hoped for. For proper noise attenuation, I’d say go for rubber caps slightly larger than what you would normally use which would ensure a good seal for all that low end goodness to come through. Even with the largest caps on, it was possible to hear conversations from several metres away on a train (this is with music playing at a low volume). Turning the music up (to a safe level, obviously) masks this leakage very well.

Niggles

The Atomic Floyd’s come with an issue which can’t be ignored. Because of their bass-port design which allows air equalisation with the dynamic driver, these earphones leak immense amounts of sound. I would say they are as bad as the bundled Apple headphones, if not worse in some cases. I have disturbed nearby individuals on more than one occasion and thats with the volume on moderate, higher volumes and the sound leakage from these earphones just become too loud to be of any use as earphones. Granted, the bass port design was necessary to allow these earphones to reproduce that wonderful low end, but it comes with a major tradeoff.

A smaller issue is the sheer weight of these earphones. You’ve essentially got blocks of metal hanging off our ears and they certainly show their presence. I’d say you won’t be able to have them in your ears for more than a few hours without having to take them out and having them on while at the gym is definitely out of the question. They also feel very warm after you’ve worn them for a while, this isn’t the problem though. The problem arises when you’ve taken them out of a bag on a cold day. Cold metal against your ear isn’t the nicest of sensations, although this is only me nit-picking.

Verdict

If great clarity, bass reproduction and attractive design are top of your list, then go for it! £70 is generally the quality-price sweet spot for earphones, so you may need to think carefully about these earphones in this regard. But having said this, at £120, you won’t find another set of earphones which perform this well both aesthetically and sonically. It’s worth mentioning that audiophiles craving for uncoloured sound may want to steer clear of these earphones, as their sound reproduction isn’t as flat or accurate as say, the Etymotic HF3 which cost around £130, but for the casual listener of modern pop and drum and bass, these make the perfect companions.

Taking a departure from the relatively drab looking SE420’s, the SE425’s certainly look the business. Gone is the drab looking black design and in with either clear plastic or silver finish which show a little more presence. Looking good isn’t a priority with high performance earphones, but with the SE425’s, you certainly can’t go wrong.

Those familiar with Shure earphones would know that they are worn “upside down”, with the cable running up and over the ear. There’s a sort of wireform in the section of cable attached to the earpiece itself which should make the ordeal slightly easier. It has to be said though, that while the fit is very good once they’re on, these aren’t the earphones you can just “pop in” instantly without any effort, they require some serious attention. If you’re using the foam tips, you have to pre-squeeze them then twist the earpiece into your ear, then run the cable over your ear and adjust for fit. Not ideal in some situations, but well worth it.

The cable with the SE425’s is detachable from the earpieces, which should mean you don’t have to replace the entire thing if the cable (of which is of a high quality) starts breaking; and darn right they should be detachable! The thought of spending almost £300 on another pair of SE425’s just for one measly piece of cable is bad enough.

Sound Quality

Earphones can be divided into 3 categories, “budget”, “alright” and “Oh my god?!?”; and in most cases, price represents quality. At £300 (retailers vary), these quickly fall into the latter category and once here, we would expect the highest quality of sound reproduction and accuracy, and the SE425’s don’t disappoint.

Frequency response is claimed as flat, and it sounds like it too. We’re not talking Etymotic ER-4S here, as the SE425’s colour the sound ever so slightly, but should be suffice for the casual audiophile. Shure has added a slight increase in bass response (though you would have to listen very, very carefully for this) which should appeal to the secret bass lover in all of us, the same can’t be said for highs which seem just a little lacking for a £300 pair of earphones. This is not to say that they’re rubbish (bearing in mind we’re in “Oh my god?!?” territory here), but just saying at this price point Shure could do ever so slightly better.

The increased bass response lends itself to drum heavy genres as well as pop where the rumbling lows in Watercolour by Pendulum while a little restrained set the scene with a deadly crispness.

Clarity is also excellent and the dual driver design lends itself very well in complex musical arrangements. Even at very high volumes, audio was still crisp and I have yet to find a single song which can throw these earphones off balance with “muddiness” like I so easily did with the Apple In Ears (though it is worth noting that the Apple In Ears are considerably cheaper, though still dual drivers). Possibly the only pair of earphones which can tangibly beat the SE425’s are Shure’s own SE535’s which (from what I’ve experienced*) offer a much more “clinical” crispness as well as tighter bass response to the audio (they also cost a good £100-£150 more, ouch). It has to be noted though, that once we’re up there in the £300+ price range, differences are either mainly subjective or ever so slight (which can also be subjective, depending on how “audiophillic” you are)

Shure does include sets of different rubber and foam tips in the box including an interesting Triple Flange rubber earbud. While they look like they’ll isolate a lot of sound in pictures, in practice they are very hit and miss and this is the last thing you need with balanced armature drives (which need a *very* good seal to reproduce bass properly). The foam tips are much better offering a brilliant seal as well as remaining very comfortable. They do take a while to put on though, but it is well worth the wait.

Verdict

Even for the most discerning of listeners, spending £300 on a pair of earphones requires a lot of thinking. The general population would struggle to discern the SE425’s from, say the Sennheiser CX-300’s for example, and may even vote the SE425’s down due to the slight lack of low frequency response compared to the CX-300’s, but an avid audiophile would criticise the SE425’s of a slightly coloured sound due to the increased bass response compared to the “flat response norm”, the ER-4S. This is the strength of the SE425’s though, what’s not to say that some audiophiles like a slight bit of bass emphasis on their music as well as a flat frequency response? So if “an audiophile who doesn’t mind a tiny bit of colouring for some extra low end goodness” ticks all your boxes, then these come highly recommended.

*Thanks Mike for letting me borrow his ‘oh so precious’ SE535’s, and while we’re at it, thanks to Paul for supplying the SE425’s for this review.

It happened before…

Think about it, it’s not only “Windows Phone 7 vs iOS”; its “Apple vs Microsoft”. Take MacOS for example, this humble operating system once had the majority market share, now look who’s king of the desktop OS world. MacOS has now fallen to a mere 5% market share, and although growing, still wouldn’t reach dominance in the near future.

Apple’s iPhone is the same. The hype is over, everyone has been there and it’s time for something fresh. Android has had its problems from the start (platform fragmentation being one of them) and Windows Phone 7 could just be a likely candidate.

Developers, Developers, Developers…

The very fundamental basis of every smarphone on the market are “Apps”. Apps allow extra functionality on your phone for very little cost, and keep the company (not to mention developers) making money. Apple has shown how this could be done, and has a very wide base of developers coding for the 150,000+ apps on its iOS App Store.

So what gives Microsoft any chance? It all comes down to Microsoft’s market share; almost 95% of the worlds PC’s run Windows, and the number of developers coding for Microsoft is staggeringly huge. Microsoft’s development platforms include Blend 4, Expression and Vision Studio 2010, and all are based around Silverlight. Essentially, if you can code for any of these, making “Apps” for Windows Phone 7 should be a doddle. The range of templates available also makes it incredibly easy to code for, something which can’t be said for Windows Mobile 6.5 which was a “pain to code for”

Put simply, “if you give enough pissed off .net developers something simple and easy to develop on, you’re guaranteed market success”. Christmas is coming up, and we can expect a massive number of applications by then.

Integration…

Even with all these developers under its belt, Microsoft isn’t making Windows Phone 7 “App centric” like iOS or Android. The “App” experience is old school, and integration is all the rage in this day and age. Why do I have to go to the Facebook App to look at my Facebook photos? Why can’t I just go to my native photos App and find them there?

In fact, Microsoft isn’t concentrating on the “App” experience but instead, focusing on “Hubs”, or places where similar functionalities are gathered all in one place. For example, the “People” hub gathers all your friends, contacts, status updates and tweets, all in one place. Thus, keeping up to date with friends takes one tap and a few swipes, unlike other OS’s which require you to move in and out between applications.

It’s looked like that for years!

Arranging applications into an icon matrix has been around since the dawn of GUI, and we’re still using it today. It is not to say that it isn’t functional, just that we could do a lot better. Android has tried to solve this problem by hiding it away in a menu and instead displaying “widgets” on the homescreen to provide live information. iOS has simply rocked the icon matrix homescreen in all of its out-of-date glory, though Windows Phone 7 takes the two, mashes them together and gave birth to something beautiful, and functional.

Instead of just icons or widgets, the “Live Tiles” on Windows Phone 7 are essentially widgets which act as application icons, displaying live information such as weather and people updates all on the homescreen. Accessing the rest of your applications does take a turn backwards to an icon-list, but the fundamental changes are there.

Anyone mention compatibility?

Look at us making such a big deal when Microsoft announced that its phones will sync with Mac OS, when we’re forgetting that iOS doesn’t natively support the worlds most used document format, a Microsoft Office File. Instead, we are left to fend for ourselves and download some third party “App” to do this. Windows Phone 7 comes with Office support out of the box, providing a near seamless experience.

Corporate customers shouldn’t look away either. Windows Phone 7 may have prettied up since previous versions, but it still retains its strong corporate abilities such as native Exchange support (something which took Apple years) and support for SharePoint (something which Apple doesn’t have to this day). This is what makes Windows Phone 7 such a strong contender (or arguably the only contender) in the medium/large business world.

It’s no iOS, but at least it isn’t an Android…

iOS is based entirely on locking in. Getting on the Apple bandwagon involves using the same hardware (ehem, attenuation) whether you like it or not. Android is the complete opposite, you have such a wide range of hardware options that OS fragmentation means you can’t even update your phone straight away; you’ve got to wait for your carrier to make sure it won’t destroy your phones software first.

Windows Phone 7 strikes the balance. All WP7 devices run exactly the same software (and basic internal hardware, for now), but are available from a whole range of different manufacturers in different form factors. When an update becomes available, you can be sure that every WP7 device supports it.

Take that, carriers!

Carriers love to hate their customers, which is why they modify phones to include all sorts of crap on them. Orange is notoriously bad, for example, turning “Internet” into “Orange World” and adding their branding and customisations to every part of the foreseeable UI. Carriers will not be able to do this with the WP7 UI, instead they are only allowed to add their own Hub or application (which the user can simply delete if they wish).

iPhoto ’09 itself was already a brilliant photo management application simply for its ease of use, tight integration with Mac OS and some very advanced features such as face detection and support for geo-tagged images. iPhoto takes this a step further, adding features and enhancing usability on the way.

Let’s start with installation…

Assuming you already have iLife ’09 installed on your Mac, iLife ’11 will automatically overwrite this version during installation. After ripping the CD to DMG, installation was relatively quick and painless. I highly recommend you rip all your Mac installation CDs/DVDs to DMG for backup purposes (CD’s are easier to lose than hard drives).

“Thank goodness it worked”

This is what you’re first greeted with. Having a backed up copy of your iPhoto library is a must. For a modest library of several thousand images with Face tags and the like, it took roughly 10 minutes to process.

Once you “convert” your iPhoto library, there’s no going back

This is what you are greeted with.

The main window remains very much unchanged from previous versions of iPhoto, with the biggest differences being the slightly more “contrasty” icons, scroll bar, and the bottom toolbar resembling something out of an iPad interface.

The main gripe some had with iPhoto ’09 was the lack of smooth scrolling once you’ve passed the events view. Well guess what guys! There’s absolutely no smooth scrolling whatsoever, anywhere in the main interface! Apple say they’ve learnt a lot from the iPad and iPhone, well it would be nice if they could put smooth scrolling into action here. It’s not just an aesthetic reasoning, usability suffers as well.

You can now enjoy the entire non-smoothly-scrolled iPhoto experience in full screen mode! Switching between windowed and full screen was generally snappy. It is worth noting that in Snow Leopard (10.6), activating Expose when iPhoto is in full screen mode will take it back into windowed mode.

Faces generally remains unchanged from iPhoto ’09. There are a few interface tweaks here and there, but all in all, nothing major.

Blurring is in the interest of privacy, it isn’t a new feature in iPhoto ’11 :P

Full screen view of Faces

The Places feature allows you to see where you’ve taken pictures on your GPS enabled device. It’s not only for iPhone users though, you can enter location details in manually.

One very big gripe I’ve had with Places is the very finicky multi-touch experience. Normally, two fingers in a pinching motion will zoom, whereas two fingers moving together will scroll. Often, moving two fingers together to scroll would result in zooming, and often taking you to remote and exotic places you’ve never heard of. Sometimes, it just takes you to the middle of nowhere, see below…

A new filter option allows you to choose your location manually, thus avoiding the twitchy multi-touch navigation.

Full screen view of Places. Well, what else can I say?

Albums view is a new feature taking design cues from the iPad. There is no fancy animated stacks of photos here, just static thumbnails. Facebook albums also appear here, more on that later.

Somewhat reminiscent of the iBooks “shelf” is the Projects view which allows you to see the range of real life stuff you’re making with your photos. Not something that I would use personally, but at least the interface looks nice. Some might question the relatively strong UI choice here, but it seems to follow the HIG, and we’ll get used to it eventually.

Empty Bookshelves…

One of the big features of iPhoto ’11 is the tighter Facebook integration. Instead of simply keeping track of photo’s you’ve uploaded onto Facebook through the iPhoto Uploader, it pulls down all your albums from Facebook regardless of how they were uploaded. This is much more useful than the approach they had before which simply assumed that you uploaded all your pictures from iPhoto. The only small issue is that your tagged photos from friends albums will not show up in iPhoto.

Tags, Contact syncing and comments are also supported from Facebook and Flickr. Other photo sharing services aren’t supported though.

Facebook images are limited in resolution, though a future update will allow you to upload much higher resolution images, hopefully alleviating the massive border issue seen above.

Another big feature of iPhoto ’11 are the new slideshows, which apart from distracting you from your actual photos is actually quite nice. Pictures don’t do it justice, but you get an idea of what it’s about.

So, is it worth the upgrade? Well, at £45, it doesn’t beat Microsoft’s Live Essentials (which is free), although the iLife suite comes with iMovie which for the equivalent Windows software would cost a fortune. I wouldn’t call it an absolutely essential upgrade if you’re primarily using iLife for iPhoto, but for £45, you can’t go wrong.

No optical or hard disk drive, Fan is only moving part

Both models feature full sized keyboards (non backlit) and multi-touch trackpads

Claims

5 Hour Battery Life (7 Hours on 13.3”)
30 Days of Standby Time
“Instant-On” Capability

Pricing

Starts at $999 for 1.4GHz, 64GB, 11.6” model
Peak at $1599 for 1.86GHz, 256GB, 13.3” model

Apple MacBook Air site

Take a look :)

The first thing you notice is the somewhat refined look from Ubuntu 10.04. The taskbar looks considerably slicker than before and context menus have a light gradient to them making the whole experience more rounded. We’re not talking MacOS levels of consistency here, but it certainly gives Windows something to worry about. There are a few rough edges here and there; it’s not pixel perfect by any means, but much better than before.

Of course, you can change to a different theme if the default theme doesn’t take your fancy. Like Ubuntu 10.04, the default menubar and window border are the same colour making it look slightly cliche when windows are maximised.

Firefox is the included web-browser and aside from the numerous add-ons available is quite yawn-worthy. No longer is it the speediest of browsers and with Firefox 4.0 around the corner, it is quickly losing its appeal. It is however still useable and alternatives are a plenty in the Software Centre. Flash is finally supported on 64bit versions of Ubuntu (previously getting Flash onto 64bit Ubuntu was hit and miss) and this can be found on Adobe’s website.

The “Software Centre” is much like the App Store or Marketplace for iOS and Android devices. Installing applications is all done inside the store interface and you won’t have to encounter the terminal or wizard interface for most basic applications.

The Software Centre will now support paid-for applications, though most useful ones such as GIMP, InkScape and OpenOffice are still available for free. It certainly doesn’t make Ubuntu a completely free OS now though; one of the things which makes it such a great OS.

Social Networking integration is the same as 10.04, which means great features like updating your Facebook, Twitter from the menubar is simple. Gwibber is the social networking client, and while you can use your own, you won’t get the slick menubar integration.

The default music player Rhythmbox remains the same, with the addition of a more integrated music store. The menubar integration is much better with the volume control also doubling as music controls when music is playing.

Totem handles video playback in Ubuntu and does a fine job. Downloading Codecs is relatively easy; feed the player something it can’t play and it will prompt you to download a codec, all of this is done right in Totem itself.



OpenOffice is included as default, and does an adequate job of handling documents. It definitely isn’t competing with Office 2010 here, but it gets the job done. Rendering complex .doc documents is very good and features like exporting to .pdf are very handy.



F-Spot was an adequate photo management tool for Ubuntu. Shotell offers all the features of F-Spot, plus a few extras. The interface is much slicker and runs a lot faster with fewer hiccups as well. The only downside is like so many applications included with Ubuntu (and arguably Ubuntu itself), it resembles the Mac interface.

Ubuntu One is much like Dropbox and offers file syncing. It is very much integrated with Ubuntu and also allows you to migrate settings, bookmarks and contacts as well. There will also be a paid-for service which would allow you to stream music from your Ubuntu PC to your smartphone.

SMART features go overlooked in Windows PC’s, but Ubuntu has this covered. The hard disk is the most unreliable component of any PC, so why take any chances. Ubuntu gives you a disk utility with very advanced SMART and benchmarking features

Compiz is the default window manager in Ubuntu and it works a charm with special effects. You can install the Compiz Effects Manager from the Software and play with special effects galore. These include a “CoverFlow” like window switcher and a wobbly window effect. All of these effects generally work lag free even on 3 year old integrated graphics, so most modern PC’s should run them perfectly.

Compared to a Windows PC, Ubuntu uses very few resources and clearly would run happily on a system with only 1GB of RAM. Memory usage rises a lot once you get intensive applications running, but the OS itself uses very few resources. While Windows now requires a DVD to install, Ubuntu will happily run from a LiveCD.

Ubuntu 10.10 isn’t an LTS release, so it would be of less use in large corporate situations. To an average use like me and you though, Ubuntu 10.10 is adequate and support should last you through a good year or so before you need to upgrade. Ubuntu releases on a 6 month cycle however, and most Windows users reformat their entire PC’s every year or so anyway.

So there you have it... Like the versions before it, Ubuntu 10.10 offers a brilliant alternative to Windows. In terms of ease of use and cost, it beasts Windows in almost every way. Being linux however, it presents many compatibility issues and this is the only thing holding it back.

Give Ubuntu a try!

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

Download the ISO and use an application like 7-Zip or ISOBUSTER to extract it. Then run wubi.exe and follow the instructions to dual boot your machine. This way you can simply “uninstall” Ubuntu at any time.

You could also install Ubuntu as your primary OS. Just follow the instructions on Ubuntu’s website.

Oh, and the Vaio X also manages to fit in a VGA, LAN and several USB ports as well.

It’s October!

October has been a famous month for Apple Mac refreshes, just in time for the holiday season.

Stocks are low

Shop around for the MacBook Air and you’ll see almost all suppliers including Amazon running very low on stock. Low stock has historically indicated a product refresh.

I need a SuperDrive!

Apple has recently shut down it’s online store, not to add a new product, but to remove one instead. The external SuperDrive for the MacBook Air is no longer available from the Apple online store.

Not very “super” anymore. Anyone care to inform it to Blu-Ray?

So what does this all mean?

All this clearly suggests another Mac in the works. While rumours hint at an 11.6 inch MacBook, this seems somewhat unlikely as 11.6 inches eats very closely into iPad territory, and the last thing Apple wants to do is cannibalise sales of its own products. Added to this the fact that the standard MacBook keyboard layout has never been changed and simply will not fit into a 11.6 inch chassis and you’ve got an unlikely equation. Only time will tell though.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the slimmest of them all?

Installation

Installing Office 2011 isn’t as simple as dragging a file into the Applications folder like many a Mac user are used to. Microsoft continues to irritate by offering a wizard based installer. This has been present in older versions of Office for Mac, and it isn’t as brain-aching as it could be. Thankfully, installation only has to be done once, and shortcuts to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook (Yes! Outlook) as well as a host of other utilities are automatically placed on the dock.

Features

There isn’t much to comment here, as most of the features available for the Windows version are there for the Mac user. This means a better Ribbon interface and snazzy features like “sparklines” in Excel. Mac users can also finally enjoy the benefits of Outlook instead of Entorage as a mail client and support for Microsoft Exchange accounts is present for those corporate type users.

Messenger 8 and a host of other small utilities such as the Flip4Mac WMV codec for Quicktime has also been bundled with Office 2011, cheeky.

Interface

In Word and Excel, a template chooser is presented when you start the application, much like in iWork. You can choose from a wide range of templates both stored locally and also online. Scrolling through the templates is very slow however. It seems like the application has to load thumbnails of those templates not currently in view after you scrolled to them. This is OK for Windows, but Mac users used to instant interaction may be disrupted by this slight inconsistency in workflow. This problem also extends to the previews on the ribbon interface.

The ribbon interface itself has been changed ever so slightly from previous versions of Office to look more native to Mac OS. These screenshots show the ribbon under the “graphite” theme which can be changed in the preferences pane. You can see how much Office 2011 can integrate with the Mac OS experience. Animations such as those found when opening the “inspector” and the media browser makes you think you’re using a native Mac application. It’s a massive step above and beyond the level of integration 2008 could achieve.

Ribbon interface in word (with graphite theme)

The inspector and media browser panes. Generally follows Apple’s HIG.

Outlook retains the vertical column interface found in the Windows version, compared to Mail for Mac is a very efficient way of layout. Much like the Windows version, the ribbon is present which should make mundane tasks like replying and forwarding much easier and less accident prone.

Outlook with a clean vertical column interface. (Graphite theme has been disabled for the ribbon)

Performance

Ever since Office 2008, Microsoft’s Office suite for Mac was built on Mac OS code (cocoa I believe) and doesn’t require the compatibility layer of older versions. While performance with large documents is certainly a step above that of Office 2008, general “snappyness” is still nowhere near that of iWork. Scrolling does feel choppy at the best of times and transitions (into full screen mode in Word for example) can be quite choppy. Office 2011 is still “young” though, and we should see an improvement in the near future.

Wrap-Up

Office 2011 is almost certainly recommended for those looking for ultimate compatibility and sheer number of features. It adds plenty more to the table compared to Office 2008, and offers improved performance with larger documents. Shopping around online, you’ll find the Home and Student version available for less than £100, placing it somewhat in iWork territory. iWork ’11 is apparently coming around the corner, and it would be interesting to see how Office 2011 stacks up to this. Office 2011 has set the bar very high and is certainly recommended once it becomes available.

More eye-candy?

PowerPoint’s familiar interface

Excel defaults to full-screen view. Ribbon interface seems to take up a freakishly large amount of vertical space.

Messenger 8 for Mac. I’d say get Adium; slicker interface, performs well and supports a plethora of social networks and IM’s

The preferences pane; clearly more options to fiddle around with than iWork. Also looks a lot more like a Mac preferences window than Office 2008.

The UKCAT (“test”) itself consists of 4 discrete sections;

Verbal Reasoning

Basically, a passage is given for you to have a quick read and several comprehension style questions are given with a choice of 3 answers; True, False or Can’t Tell. This section can be slightly abstract at times, and tests the ability of even the most ardent of fluent English speakers. Quick reading skills and the ability of pick out important information is a must. Oh, and if you are planning to answer every question in the section, you’ve got about half a minute to do so.

Quantitive Reasoning

Pretty much the same style as the verbal reasoning section, but maths. This section requires maths at up to GCSE level, though for the mathematically challenged; the depth of the questions may confuse. The difficulty of questions can vary in different exams, and also from the practice questions given on the UKCAT website. Again, this section is filled with multiple choice style questions so if you don’t know the answer, let the gods of chance guide you (or make an “intelligent” guess).

Abstract Analysis

If you’ve ever done an IQ test or played “Brain Training” on the Nintendo DS, this would be quite familiar. You are given a two sets of shapes and are asked which set would match the shape given to you. A word of warning; they’re not lying when they say “Abstract”. The first half of the questions might just about be do-able, but many will require a very detailed analysis, which takes time; time which isn’t on your side.

Rule of thumb; if you don’t know the answer, and think you might still have time at the end of the section, mark it as flagged. If you don’t think you’ll have enough time, give it a guess. Time left over from one section will not be carried on into another, and once you complete and end a section, there’s no going back.

Non-Cognitive Analysis

This section is a bit more laid back than the last 3 in terms of sheer brain power needed, but strangely still has a time limit. Essentially, the questions in this section test your personality, morals and the like. Surprisingly, they seem to make it difficult where they can in places, presumably trying to catch out anyone who tries to lie their way through the section, and you do wish that you could just write down what you really feel instead of just selecting “True” or “False”, but hey, that’s UKCAT for you :)

So, Any Tips?

Many say you can’t revise for UKCAT, and that seems to make many assume you could just leave it to last minute, then panic about it then. UKCAT is like a sport; you can’t just “cram” everything in the last minute. You won’t play a big football match with only 20 minutes of practice before the game would you? UKCAT is the same. Do plenty of practice using the resources on the UKCAT website and the hundreds available on the interwebs. You might not get better at the individual questions (though this I doubt), but being familiar with the format makes a very, very big difference.

Careful with the caffeine! Yes Red Bull does make you more alert, but the caffeine it contains is also a diuretic; essentially it makes you want to pee. While this may be of annoyance during the exam itself (you can’t pause it), it has another effect which may not be as noticeable. Like alcohol, caffeine dehydrates you, and just a 2% loss of water could spell disaster for your cognitive abilities.

If you have any more tips, feel free to post them on the comments section!

And if you’re doing your UKCAT soon; Good Luck!

Retina Display

While it is correct that the iPod Touch’s display has the same 326 PPI (Pixels Per Inch) density as the iPhone 4, other aspects of the display are very different. Viewing angles for example, are nowhere near as good as those on the iPhone 4’s IPS LCD display which leads us to believe that the display in the iPod Touch is a TN LCD.

This is until we see that the display is apparently capable of “24 bit colour” at the Apple Event. TN LCD displays are not capable of true 24 bit colour unless dithering is used which rapidly changes the shade of certain pixels to create the illusion of a smoother 24 bit colour gradient. So either Apple have stuck a really poor quality IPS LCD in the iPod Touch, or they’re not being completely honest about their 24 bit colour claims. Naughty Apple.

Lowly Camera

Apple’s spec sheet claims that the iPod Touch camera can shoot 720p videos at 30FPS, and indeed it can. Look closely however and you’ll see that it can only shoot stills at VGA resolution (something my web-cam can do). This is because the sensor hardware only has 720 vertical pixels compared to the thousand or so in the 5 megapixel iPhone 4. So videos may turn out stunning, but pictures will be wanting something more.

Focus!

While the 3GS and iPhone 4 feature “tap to focus”, the iPod Touch has a fixed lens, and so “tapping to focus” will only adjust the exposure. While this may not be much of a problem in landscape shots, macro and portrait shots will come out looking a little more hazy than they would on an iPhone 4.

Where am I?

“An iPhone without the Phone?” It’s also an iPhone without GPS and a Compass, so no Google mapping here. There is assisted GPS in the form of WiFi which the geo-tagging works off, but unless you happen to be in a busy area with plenty of coffee shops around, this wouldn’t be of much use.

Possibly the biggest difference between the older Nehalem and the new Sandy Bridge architecture is the Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP). In Core 2 Duo systems, Intel’s integrated graphics were located off the CPU and on a separate chip on the motherboard. The Nehalem and Westmere processors had the IGP located on the same package as the CPU, but on a different die and manufactured to a 45nm process (as opposed to the 32nm process of the CPU). Sandy Bridge will incorporate the IGP directly on the CPU die, all manufactured to a 32nm process. As well as this, the IGP will share the CPU’s L3 cache, theoretically resulting in higher performance and lower power consumption.

IGP’s and GPU’s are essentially massively parallel processors, and can feature hundreds of cores all working together to complete a complex instruction. The latest GPU’s from nVidia and AMD can feature 350 cores or more, whereas most high end IGP’s have around 40-50 cores. Manufacturers give all sorts of names to these cores, nVidia calls them CUDA cores and AMD calls them Stream Processors, and Intel will only confuse things further by calling their IGP cores “EU’s”. The new Sandy Bridge CPU/GPU will either have a single or dual core IGP, with each core having 6 EU’s. It is likely that notebooks will feature a dual core version of the IGP which would act as the primary graphics card whereas most desktops would have a single core version and a discrete graphics card (with something like nVidia Optimus switching between the two)

While it may not be up to the hundreds of cores found in discrete graphics cards or even the 40 or so found in other IGP’s, Intel promises 2x the performance of the earlier Westmere IGP’s, and early benchmark results certainly show this with frame rates besting most IGP’s from the likes of nVidia and AMD. It’s performance should even rival the fast nVidia 320M IGP found in the 2010 MacBook Pro’s, giving nVidia something to worry about.

Intel’s Turbo Boost has been implemented on this processor with the IGP also receiving the “Turbo Treatment”. Turbo Boost improves performance of applications using only one core by turning off or slowing all other cores. The extra heat and power saved by doing this allows the remaining core to overclock within the TDP limit and process single core operations more quickly. Because the IGP and CPU are on the same die, Intel have implemented Turbo Boost for the IGP as well, allowing the IGP to overclock while playing games which require more IGP resources than CPU.

Enough talk on the IGP though, the CPU core has changed as well. Intel claims it has increased its Instructions Per Clock (IPC) by around 20%, which is a nice evolutionary improvement over the previous generation, and the one before that. Clock speeds of these new processors have also been upped as well as Intel’s monstrous cache sizes. It also has extra support for AVX instructions which should increase performance of media and processor intensive applications.

It’s not all rosy though. Sandy Bridge will not fit into current Westmere sockets, which means you will need an entirely new motherboard for these hot chips. Speaking of hot chips, overclocking will not be possible on these processors due to the lack of FSB and the presence of Turbo Boost in the works. Overclockers and enthusiasts will have to look for the K series processors which will feature an unlocked multiplier of up to 57x. On top of this, AMD has announced the release of its new CPU/GPU architecture called Bulldozer which implements a much more efficient way of handling 2 threads per core as well as integrated graphics built in. Added to this the support for AMD and nVdia GPUS’s in the gaming industry is much higher, this would give Sandy Bridge something to worry about.

iOS 4.2

iPad Wireless Printing Support

AirPlay allows streaming over WiFi

New iPod Shuffle brings back buttons and keeps playlists

New iPod Nano has multi-touch. Touch based and possibly requires 2 hands to use. 24 hour audio playback

New iPod Touch, has 2 cameras, FaceTime over WiFi, “retina display” capable of 24bit colour, slimmer design, game centre with iOS 4.1, Apple A4 SOC

iTunes 10, new logo, elegant UI, Slick List management

Ping in iTunes, basically LastFM. Available for PC and iPod/Phone

New Apple TV significantly smaller than previous (1.4), Built In power supply, HDMI, Ethernet, 802.11N WiFi, No internal storage, Not based on x86 Architecture (possible ARM based SOC or A4)

99 cents to rent HD shows on iTV, NETFLIX, Youtube, Flickr and MobileMe integration. Streaming via Wireless N from iPad, iPhone or Mac/PC

Chris Martin performed at the end of event, Yellow by Coldplay.

The answer is quite simple, but the explanation may be a little lengthy, so bear with me. Intel’s latest Core i series processors come with an integrated northbridge which means that memory and graphics are controlled on the same package as the processor itself. This is one of the appeals of the Core i series processors which should mean lower power consumption and smaller motherboard designs. There is a problem however; Apple wants all MacBook Pro’s to have better graphics capabilities than their older generation counterparts, and the integrated GMA 4500MHD found in the Core i series cannot keep up with the dedicated nVidia 9400M card found in last years MacBook Pro. This is why they have added a dedicated nVidia GeForce GT 330 to the mix, and allowed an “Optimus”-like graphics switching technique to switch dynamically between the two.

The relatively large MacBook Pro 15 motherboard showing the “3 chip solution”; Core i CPU, nVidia GeForce GT 320M and Intel’s Platform Controller

This is OK for the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro’s, as their motherboard designs have always been a “3 chip solution” since the first unibody models. One is the Core i5/i7 CPU, one is the dedicated nVidia GeForce GT330M and the other is a chip which comes with the Core i processor package, and deals with the graphics switching.

The tiny MacBook Pro 13 motherboard with the Penryn Core 2 Duo CPU and integrated GPU/Chipset

The 13 MacBook Pro however has a problem. The only way onto the Core i series bandwagon is to go with the 3 chip solution, but the 13 inch MacBook Pro’s motherboard (not to mention cooling solution) was designed to accommodate only a 2 chip solution (with integrated graphics), one for the CPU and the other for the combined chipset and integrated graphics card. Unfortunately, Intel doesn’t allow other manufacturers to use integrated chipsets for their latest processors because they are already built in. This means that going with the Core i series processor would mean adding a dedicated graphics card (something which the current cooling solution may not cope with, and at the expense of battery life) or scrapping the nVidia Graphics altogether which would mean that this years generation would have worse GPU performance than last years (also a no-no). This leaves us with the only solution which is to bung a 3 year old 45nm Penryn Core 2 Duo processor with an exclusive nVidia 320M graphics card and chipset. Exciting stuff.

So will the 13 inch MacBook ever get a Core i series processor? Well, maybe. Other manufacturers like Sony have shown that it can be done, but at the expense of larger motherboards and smaller batteries (thus lower battery life). The only way for Apple to fit a Core i series processor into its 13 inch MacBook Pro with integrated nVidia Graphics is if Intel lifts the restriction which doesn’t allow the use of chipsets other than its own, and considering Intel’s and nVidia’s relationship status is “it’s complicated”, that doesn’t look like it’ll happen anytime soon.

Update; So how about Intel’s new “Sandy Bridge” CPU/GPU coming out later this year. Well, it’s unlikely that Apple would take these on; even though their integrated graphics are comparable to nVidia’s current 320M solution, they don’t support features like CUDA, DirectCompute and OpenCL, making it tough for Apple to justify. Also, by then, we could safely say that nVidia would have released a faster card, or industry standards would have moved on a bit.

Images sourced from ifixit

Stay tuned for an interesting post brewing in the works…

:)

Here’s an explanation for why this may be;

A faster processor uses up more power, but at the same time is able to do more work. This means that the processor can complete operations faster, and go into sleep mode more often and saving power. Faster data processing also means that the other components in a computer don’t have to stay active for longer periods waiting for data from the processor thus can shut off and save more power.

Operations which require full CPU utilisation such as software video encoding may also show lower system-wide power consumption on a faster processor as the operation will be able to finish more quickly and the system to idle sooner. Whether this 32 minute battery life boost is worth the additional £260, well that’s your decision.

*Test systems included 2.4GHz and 2.66GHz MacBook Pro 13 (2010) running clean installs of Snow Leopard. “32 minutes longer” runtime was gathered by repeating 720p trailers on 50% brightness.

…Yeah right. Let the comebacks commence;

Think about it, would you rather buy a £30 adapter to connect your computer to any display, or would you buy a whole new computer upon finding that it doesn’t have a HDMI, VGA, or DVI port?

Of course things don’t work the same way on a Mac, they’re completely different operating systems! The mouse works differently because it’s better; think about it, what Windows based PC utilises Multi-Touch to the level of Macs? None. Exactly.

Simpler to do? Windows? I don’t think so. Aero Snap is also a feature found in Ubuntu long before Windows 7, so don’t try it. Oh, by the way, does Windows 7 have native support for multiple virtual desktops? Uh nah.

“Many PC’s”? Not really, and most of them which don’t have custom interfaces built on top of Windows are a complete disaster. Take the Archos 9 for example, total failure in terms of usability. Having touch on your PC might be fun during the first few weeks, but I can guarantee that after a month you’ll be searching for the mouse and keyboard.

Sorry what? So unless I get Windows 7 Ultimate, I can’t encrypt my hard drive AT ALL? Sod it.

Yes, but PC’s definitely don’t like Mac stuff.

Choose? Like when you have to “choose” between 4 different versions of the same operating system (or 7 different versions if you’re looking at 32 vs 64 bit)? Or is that choose the various download for your dreaded unsupported drivers? Or maybe they’re referring to choosing registry cleaners, or perhaps they’r…

… you get the picture…

Compared to their previous albums, Immersion conveys a lot of emotion to the listener, and many of the songs certainly have a resemblance to the single “Hold Your Colour” where soft emotional lyrics are backed by the presence of a strong bass-line which attack your ears, it’s quite an achievement.

What I like about Pendulum is the sheer complexity of most of their tracks; you could listen to them over and over again and pick out bits that you’ve never heard before. One of the tracks from Immersion called “Crush” certainly has this, as the sheer number of Vocals overlaid over each other makes it difficult to sing along to, but sounds very satisfying at the same time. It must be heard on a decent pair of headphones or speakers to be appreciated.

Listening to the album in its entirety is now much like “Hold Your Colour”, with an intro called Genesis easing you into the atmosphere. Fortunately, most of the songs aren’t incredibly long like Hold Your Colour, so those with shorter attention spans will not be disappointed. Songs like “The Island” have two parts which integrate into each other in harmony, and while the second part (Dusk) may startle you after the relatively smooth first half (Dawn), it somehow integrates extremely well.

The startling uptake of dub-step has left it’s mark on this album with tracks like ‘Set Me On Fire’ showing the fine punchy details normally associated with this genre. It is nice to see Pendulum branching out a bit though, and keep their characteristic style at the same time.

It’s not all dandy in the world of Immersion though; some parts of the album are just simply fast-foreword inducing. The mash-up with In Flames in the track ‘Self vs Self’ sounds much like the usual In Flames song with Rob Swire’s heavily synthetic voice garnishing the chorus. To be brutally honest, it simply resembles an amateur mash up you could probably make in GarageBand.

But it’s not all bad news though…

Should you buy it? Depends on your taste in music. Obviously, there isn’t a one size fits all answer here, but if you like Pendulum’s music, then this album wouldn’t disappoint, but if you’re not too into them; then the similarities to their previous albums might put you off every so slightly.

www.pendulum.com/

A rough representation of the differences between a low contrast ratio (left) and a high contrast ratio (right)

For example, the MacBook Pro 13 (2010) is able to go as low as 0.44 cd/m2 when showing black, and as high as 308 cd/m2 when showing white. This gives a Contrast Ratio of 700:1, which is very good for a notebook, but compared to regular TV’s seems dismally small. TV’s are advertised to have anything from 3,000:1 or even 30,000:1 contrast ratios nowadays, so do these readings hold true?

In some ways they do, however many LCD TV’s nowadays have a feature regularly called “Dynamic Backlighting” which allows the TV’s backlight to dim in darker scenes and brighten in lighter scenes to try and produce a higher contrast. Some TV’s even feature “Local Dimming” to dim certain parts of the display, allowing even higher Contrast Ratios. The Contrast Ratio for these types of TV’s is called the Dynamic Contrast Ratio which is measured by the darkest shade possible when the backlight is dimmed and the brightest possible shade when the backlight is lit fully.

There is a problem with Dynamic Contrast Ratios however; while you can achieve a 30,000:1 contrast ratio in the lab by showing either a black or white on the display, in real world use, there are many colours and shades being displayed on the screen at the same time. This means real world Contrast Ratios will never be this high unless you like to watch either a completely black or white display.

Static Contrast Ratio is the measurement taken when the display is at a constant brightness, and represents real world use as most of what we watch on our TV’s is a mixture of dark and light shades where Dynamic Backlighting would be of little use.

So should you trust what manufacturers say about contrast ratios? Well, the short answer is no. In much the same way that you can’t judge a book by the first few pages you can’t judge the quality of a display by its contrast ratio alone. There is no single standard for judging contrast ratio, and a display would have a myriad of other characteristics such as colour accuracy and reflectance which would determine its overall quality. The best thing to do is to either judge the displays quality yourself, or go in-store with a colorimeter; its the only way to be sure.

Browsing the web in Safari is hardly a mammoth task to throw at a notebook, but add flash to the equation and CPU usage rises to scary levels. This is quite startling considering web browsing should be a basic everyday activity and battery life suffers due to this.

ClickToFlash is a Safari plugin for Mac which blocks all flash content whilst you’re browsing the web. This includes Flash ad banners, flash video and little things which you may not even notice. Should you need the blocked flash object, just click on it and the full Flash object will load.

Just click on the Flash object to load it!

Sites like YouTube are particularly interesting, as ClickToFlash allows you to play YouTube in H.264 or QuickTime format which leverages hardware acceleration and consumes a lot less power. This also means that YouTube HD content won’t send your CPU temperatures skyrocketing.

Watch YouTube videos in all their H.264 glory…

http://clicktoflash.com/

…and it’s absolutely free! Just donate if you wish…

So, you’re thinking of spending in excess of £1,000 on your shiny new MacBook? Great! Spec-wise, the MacBook Pro 13 2010 (or any other MacBook for that matter) looks quite dull on paper, so many Mac owners (and you?) would probably want to kit their system up with something a bit more fancy right?

Here’s how to do it, Properly.

Upgrading the RAM to 8GB

The upgrade prices for 8GB of RAM on the apple store is £320, which is quite reasonable considering you can get 8GB kits by shopping around for £320 or even less. BUT, here’s the catch; Apple’s £320 pricing is on top of the price of the 4GB model, not instead of it.

How can you save?

Purchase the base 4GB model, buy a £320 8GB RAM kit, then sell the 4GB of RAM you’ve just ripped out of your shiny new Mac. Either that, or just use it in something else. Saving; ~£80 if you’re lucky.

Upgrading the Hard Drive to 500GB

Hard drive prices on the Apple Store are extortionate! A 500GB Hard Drive costs £120 on the Apple Store …without even shopping around, you can get the same for less than half the price somewhere else!

How can you save?

You’ll save at least £60 if you buy your own 500GB Hard Drive, and you could sell the 250GB base model you’ve just replaced for a good £20 or more. Saving; ~£80

256GB SSD Anyone?

SSD’s are expensive, but don’t be fooled! Apple Store pricing is definitely not generous when it comes to pricing of these drool-worthy drives. A 256GB SSD costs £640 in Apple’s wonderland. At what speed this is, I’m quite unsure, but there’s a cheaper way of getting on the SSD bandwagon.

How can you save?

Simply typing 256GB SSD into Google Shopping and you’ll see prices far less than Apple’s offerings. Saving; ~£140 depending on what alternative you get.

Adding Microsoft Office 2008

Adding the Office 2008 (Home and Student Edition) will cost you £99.95. There are places you could get this apart from the Apple Store you know…

How can you save?

Purchase your copy from another online store. Amazon.com sells it for £69 the last time I checked. Saving; £30.95 (By the way, getting iWork is a much cheaper option either way)

A typical desktop HDD spins at 7200 RPM (Revolutions per Minute). That means in a second, a hard disk would have made 120 revolutions! This is what ensures the fast data access a hard drive can manage, and all this comes at a cost of only a few watts of power when idle! Modern hard drives are incredibly efficient, using Fluid Bearings; they can spin at speeds of up to 15,000 RPM and sustain a quiet and low power design. Notebook hard drives which typically run at 5,400 RPM can even rival SSD’s in power consumption and heat.

The hard disks surface must be completely smooth to allow the massive amounts of data to be packed onto it. While a window or mirror may appear smooth to the naked eye, under a microscope, it is actually a very imperfect surface, revealing bumps and scratches. The surface of a hard drive is completely smooth, to a level in which the atoms on the disk surface are perfectly aligned and no “bump” is greater than 2nm. To give you an idea of the scale, today’s microprocessors are manufactured to a 32nm process and the width of a human hair is 100,000nm.

This level of smoothness is achieved by a substrate layer of glass or ceramic, topped by a layer of platinum, ruthenium and lubricant oil. Platinum and ruthenium are two of the rarest elements on the planet, and costs are extremely high. The problem is solved by only applying a layer several atoms thick onto the disk surface, meaning that there is just enough to serve its purpose, but also to keep its cost down.

Data on the hard disk is read and written by a disk head which is positioned over the disk surface by an arm. Unlike magnetic tapes, the disk head is never in contact with the disk surface, only “flying” over it using a cushion of air created by the spinning disk. The gap between the disk head and the disk itself is minuscule, flying over it at 5 nm. If this situation were ported into our scale, that would be much like flying a Boeing 747 a mere 4 inches off the ground!

It would seem as if every bump of knock would send the disk head crashing onto the surface of the drive, and that was certainly the case with older drives. Modern HDD’s are able to withstand up to 150G’s of impact during operation, and rugged HDD’s are able to withstand much more.

It was only 5 years ago when the prospect of having a hard disk drive bigger than 100GB on a notebook seemed impossible, but nowadays, 1.8” hard disks found in iPods and MID’s regularly break this barrier, notebook hard disks have capacities several times greater and a desktop with this amount of storage is inexcusable. This is all due to new magnetic storage technologies, such as perpendicular recording. Instead or arranging bits flat onto the disk surface, they are stacked upright, meaning that the disk will be able to hold more data in any given area. So much so that a modern notebook hard disk can hold 250GB of data per platter (disk), and most notebook drives come with 2 platters per drive.

Possibly the one thing keeping consumers away from SSD’s and firmly on the good old hard drive is their cost. Hard drives cost a fraction of SSD’s per gigabyte, and it is very common to see hard disk drives with capacities of well over 320GB for less than £80, while a 256GB SSD will set you back close to £400.

“You can say what you like about the iPad, iPhone or even the iPod, but when it comes to desktops and notebooks, Apple certainly knows what they’re doing”

This review will cover the 13 inch MacBook Pro 2.4GHz (Mid 2010), although it has the same physical appearance as it slightly more expensive sibling, the 13 inch MacBook Pro 2.66GHz. As for why I didn’t purchase the ‘higher end’ model, I will explain later in this review.

Before we start, let’s delve into the specs;

1. 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (Penryn, 45nm, 3MB Cache)
2. 1280×800 16:10 TN LED Backlit LCD Display
3. 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1066MHz Memory (Max 8GB)
4. 250GB 5400RPM Hitachi Hard Disk
5. nVidia 320M integrated graphics with 256MB shared memory
6. ‘Superdrive’ Optical Disk Drive (8x)

Ports include;

1. ‘MagSafe’ power connector
2. LAN (10/100/1000) port
3. Mini Display Port (now fully HDMI capable with audio)
4. 2 USB 2.0 Ports
5. SD card reader
6. Audio in/out jack (capable of SPDIF)

Design

As of yet, nothing has come close to the unibody construction of the MacBook, though other manufacturers have come dangerously close (the HP Envy line or example). Machined from a single bock of aluminium, the MacBook pro definitely feels sturdy enough to throw in a backpack. Holding the MacBook from the very corner results in no flex or bend to the chassis whatsoever.

On paper, the 0.95 inch thickness doesn’t seem to impress (other ultrathins reach 0.5 inches in some cases), but you really have to see it in real life to gather how sleek it is. The combination of a sharp edge that runs along the notebooks chassis and the aggressively tapered base plate result in a notebook which looks a lot thinner than it actually is. It’s no MacBook air, but it definitely isn’t a chunky Dell Studio either.

The bottom case of this HP DV2620ea looks positively messy compared to the seamess design on the MacBook.

Possibly the largest drawback of the Unibody MacBook’s design is the sharp edges around the palmrest. Whilst the palmrest is quite large, some users (especially those with larger hands) will find their wrists hanging off the edge. This can become uncomfortable after a while. It is also worth noting that there are two very sharp edges beside the thumbscoop which need to be taken into consideration.

It has to be noted, that for those perfectionists out there, the display bezel isn’t even all the way around the display, the top bezel is slightly thinner than the sides, and there is a large area of bezel towards the bottom of the LCD. This shouldn’t cause any practical problems though.

MagSafe Power Adapter

Small prongs pop out the sides of the power adapter, making cable management easier.

Tripping over the cord can result in a mighty investment crashing onto the floor. The MagSafe power adapter prevents this by magnetically latching into the port. This means that if the cord is suddenly pulled away from the notebook, it simply disconnects away. The new 2010 MacBooks now have a slightly redesigned power cable which leads the wire towards the back of the machine rather than straight out, much like that on the MacBook Air. This should prevent the ‘broken cable’ issue.

Interestingly, the plug can be placed the other way around with the wire facing towards the front. I doubt anyone would want to do this though, as it blocks many of the ports on the side, but the option to do so is there nonetheless.

Display

The 13 inch MacBook Pro uses a LED backlit display with the native resolution of 1280 by 800. This is the absolute minimum for a 13 inch display (some netbooks even go to 1366 by 768). Resolution shouldn’t be a problem for Windows switchers though, as MacOS uses available display area vey well (smaller window borders and font) and is more than enough for 720p HD. It has to be noted that this display is the traditional TN type instead of IPS, so you won’t be getting the rich colours and deep blacks found on the iPad or iMac’s display for instance, but colours and contrast are still very good for a TN panel. Notebookcheck.net tested the panel and reported almost 800:1 contrast ratio, far greater than the usual 150:1 ratio found on most other notebook displays.

The TN LED LCD display is great for media consumption, but colour critical work should ideally be done on a more accurate display

High contrast translates into a much wider colour gamut than most other notebook displays, making browsing photos of watching movies much more immersive, even on a 13 inch display. Professional designers may want to steer clear of the 13 inch MacBook pro however, or at least calibrate the display beforehand as the colours out of the box seem to be optimised for multimedia consumption and not production.

One feature which should definitely be praised for is the hinge action. Many notebooks out there require you to hold down the main chassis of the notebook whilst opening it up to stop it from falling backwards. The MacBook Pro’s display hinge only requires the slightest push to open and stops the need to hold the bottom chassis whilst doing so, but strangely, also holds the display rigid enough to prevent wobbling. It is truly these small things which make Apple products so enjoyable to use. Closing the display also feels reassuringly sturdy, as the lid “thuds” shut without any wobble once closed.

Speakers and 3.5mm Audio Output (Update)

Nothing to write home about here. There is a subwoofer in there somewhere, but these are still essentially notebook speakers. Sound isn’t as good as what you find on the larger pro’s, but still acceptable. Stereo separation isn’t as good as it could be due to the slightly asymmetrical internal positioning of the speakers and sound can seem slightly “hollow”.

Obviously, if you’re mastering with this MacBook Pro, you’ll want to plug in a pair of monitors or IEM’s. There is only one 3.5mm jack which could be used either as an output or microphone input. Those wanting to output and record audio at the same time may want to invest in a USB mic.

One major gripe I have with the MacBook Pro’s audio output is the quality. It seems that IEM’s which require a lot of current to drive tend to sound very tinny with a very noticeable bass distortion. Stereo separation also isn’t very good with an extremely pronounced leakage in left and right channels (unchecking “sound enhancer” in iTunes somewhat remediates this).  That said, it seems like some IEM’s and speakers are more affected by this issue than others. Apple In Ears were worst affected whereas the Shure SE425 and Sennheiser CX-300 sounded slightly cleaner. I say if you’re serious about your audio (i.e. an Audiophile), you may want to invest in a dedicated amp with line in support.

To save power, the MacBook Pro will shut off the audio circuitry after a period of inactivity, and this produces an audible pop from the output. This happens again once the audio circuitry turns back on. Noise is also prevalent, especially when used with IEM’s with a fairly low resistance.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The MacBook Pro’s backlit keyboard has to be one of the best keyboards I have used. Key action is very light with a muted “click” when keys are pressed and the layout is flawless. Flex is non-existent as each key is mounted individually on a plate which itself is attached to the aluminium shell. The keys never reach an uncomfortable temperature, even when the notebook is under load.

Isolation Keyboard design and over-sized multi-touch touchpad

Me conducting a “Two-Fingered gesture” of the polite kind

The touchpad on the MacBook Pro is identical to that found on the other Pro’s (15 and 17) as well as the 13 inch MacBook (Polycarbonate Unibody). It features multi-touch gestures of up to 4 fingers and two dedicated click zones. The entire touchpad acts as a giant button, however, it is usually much easier to use it like a normal touchpad, as the button response is much better towards the bottom of the touchpad rather than the middle or top. The textured surface is supposedly made from glass and provides just enough traction for fingers to glide over it. Unlike some other touchpads out there, the MacBook Pro’s feels solid and shouldn’t wear down anytime soon.

Performance

Whilst the 2.4GHz processor and integrated nVidia 320m GPU are a step above other notebooks in its class (thin and lights), it certainly won’t break any speed records. I won’t bore you with synthetic benchmark results, but I can say that real life performance has taken a slight speed boost from last years base model, certainly when gameplay is involved. Most undemanding games such as WOW would play in excess of 50FPS in medium quality settings at the native resolution. (It is worth noting that the 13 inch MacBook Pro doesn’t have Intel’s latest 2010 processors, the Core i series. Here’s why)

Boot-up was extremely fast, and the MacBook Pro gets you onto a useable desktop is far less time than the equivalent Windows 7 PC. With a boot time of 34 seconds with a clean install and almost 40 seconds once apps and services have been installed, it undercuts Windows machines (1-2 minutes) by a long shot. Standby and resume speeds are also extremely fast.

The 5400RPM Hitachi 250gb Hard Drive provided a higher than average transfer speed of around 32MB/s when transferring large files onto a fast control SSD. This speed advantage compared to other notebooks doesn’t carry on into Windows though, as transfer speeds fall to an average and slightly underwhelming 21MB/s. A faster 7200RPM drive or even an SSD should boost performance by a long shot.

Everyday activities like browsing the web, watching movies, listening to music and the lot are executed very well, though I would point this to the efficiency of MacOS rather than the hardware itself. Video encoding takes a small speed boost due to OpenCL, but don’t expect too many miracles here.

Heat

One of the first things I have noticed about the Unibody MacBook is it’s very low operating temperature most of the time. The aluminium body certainly dissipates any heat very well, and it seems like the aggressive power saving features in MacOS certainly help (the notebook runs considerably hotter under Windows), however it can become slightly uncomfortable when placed under load. Typing this word document for example results in almost no perceivable heat whatsoever, however, start a few Flash videos or render a movie and the all-metal chassis is quick to transmit its heat.

If the notebook is used on a desk, this shouldn’t be a problem, as the palm rest, keyboard and touchpad areas remain cool to the touch. It is only the bottom area near the display hinge (where the heatsink and fan are) where you would need to be cautious. I’ve seen temperatures of up to 44 degrees at the bottom, but this is very localised and dissipates very quickly after the machine is idling again.

The heat vent design in this notebook is quite clever. Unlike other notebooks which have fully exposed vents on the side or bottom, the MacBook hides the vents behind the display hinge. I have seen some notebook vendors do this and fail, as opening the display can block the heat vent. The MacBook Pro’s hinge however is designed to allow heat to escape both upwards towards the display and also towards the bottom of the notebook. If the notebook is closed, the hinge design leaves a gap for which the exhaust can move out into the space where the notebook design tapers.

Noise

Much like the heat, noise from the MacBook Pro 13 is a two sided affair. Under normal circumstances (browsing the web for example), the fan simply cannot be heard even in a silent room and you’ll struggle to hear any noise from the hard drive. The single exhaust fan has a minimum speed of 2000RPM in MacOS, and doesn’t shut off, so staying almost completely silent is a true feat.

Putting the machine under load will ramp up the fan to around 5000RPM. This is when it becomes clearly audible in a silent room, but under a normal office or school environment, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Unlike some other PC notebooks, the fan on the MacBook Pro doesn’t have distinct steps, but varies slightly depending on the temperature of the CPU and other components, making for an all round less distracting experience.

The disk drive is reasonably loud during operation, however it can be very loud when inserting or ejecting disks. This may just simply be a drawback for not having an actual tray to slot the drive in.

Battery Life

The MacBook Pro 13 comes with an *Integrated* 63Whr battery and cannot* be removed and replaced by the end user. The relatively large battery does give the notebook a very startling battery life considering the powerful hardware inside. When idle with AirPort radios on and display at 50% brightness, the MacBook Pro 13 managed a whopping 13.5 hours off a single charge.Turning off the wireless radios and dimming the display further gave an estimate of well over the advertised 10 hours. Casual usage including iTunes, the occasional movie and web browsing gave a still respectable runtime of 6-8 hours.

Running everyday tasks using iTunes, Safari and iPhoto still gives a respectable run time.

Unfortunately, much like the heat and noise issue, the battery on the MacBook Pro 13 has a darker side. When running intensive applications under Windows, the battery life quickly dropped to 2.5 hours on a single charge. This may partly be due to poor driver support in Windows, and also because the C4 sleep state for the CPU is disabled under Windows which just goes to show how little energy the components draw when idle.

Idle (Lowest Brightness, Wireless radios off): >14 Hours
Normal Use (Web, iTunes, E-Mail etc); 7 Hours
Video Editing, Photoshop: 5-6 Hours
Full Load under Vista: 2.5 Hours

Apple claims that the battery in this notebook would survive through 1,000 charge cycles, which would translate to around 3-5 years of average use (1 complete charge cycle every day or so) before the battery drops to 80% its design capacity. This would be longer than most people would own their notebooks, but it is reassuring to know. You can bring the MacBook into the Apple store where they can replace it for you (prices are quite reasonable considering laptop batteries cost anywhere in the region of £40 to £120 a piece).

Overpriced?

Well, yes and no. MacBook Pro’s start at £999, and this is not cheap considering you can purchase a perfectly reasonable notebook for less than £600 nowadays. There are some aspects which make the MacBook Pro great value though, for example, the very capable hardware, great battery life and not to mention the iLife suite for which a Windows equivalent would cost a fortune (assuming Windows Live Movie Maker isn’t a match for iMovie)

One area in which Apple doesn’t seem to do very well in is upgrade pricing. For example, when configuring the system online, a 500GB hard drive upgrade costs £120. If you were to upgrade the hard drive yourself, it would only cost you £65 at most, and you would still be able to use the 250GB hard drive you just removed as an external drive! The same goes for memory upgrades.

You may be able to justify getting the £1249 model which has a 2.66GHz processor and a 320GB hard drive, but a difference of 260MHz in processor clock doesn’t make much of a real world difference aside from the minor speed bump and slightly better battery life (yes, I said better, here’s why). I suggest you put the £250 saving in the base model on a larger hard drive, more RAM, software or even a half decent SSD when they become cheaper.

Verdict

Should you get the MacBook Pro? Yes, if you need the Mac environment for professional work, but also if you’re just browsing the web, listening to music and making the odd video. MacOS is an extremely powerful operating system, but also very easy and simple to use whilst the MacBook Pro itself is an extremely capable and fun to use device. One of the reasons why I moved to MacOS is that things just “work.” I don’t need to install any third party drivers, anti-virus solutions and things like printers just work as soon as you plug them in (no need for drivers). There are still a few kinks here and there regarding compatibility, but that’s what boot camp is for.

For those on a tighter budget, the 13 inch Macbook (Unibody Polycarbonate) would be a better choice. It has all the same specs as the MacBook Pro 13, although omissions include no SD Card slot, Firewire or support for more than 4GB of internal memory for future-proofing. Other omissions such as the lack of an ambient light sensor and backlit keyboard, though these are less critical. Nonetheless, it is still a very good notebook compared to many other Windows alternatives.

More Pictures?

A tiny LED on the power connector lights up different colours depending on the charge state of the battery

Angular design compared to the HP DV2620ea

SD Card slot

iSight web camera, indicator light (left) and ambient light sensor (right)

Even the HP DV2000 which itself is quite well put together is dwarfed in comparison to the MacBook’s Unibody chassis

An iPhone 3GS for comparisons sake

What a poser!

Slot-loading “SuperDrive”

As a Windows user myself, the jump to Ubuntu was a steep one and the learning curve can be great, but here are a few simple points to take into consideration to make your jump to Ubuntu more like a simple stride;

1. It’s completely Free, forever.
2. Unlike Windows, the first ever boot-up shouldn’t be fraught with danger while you scramble to install anti-virus software. Ubuntu is completely safe and immune from viruses and there is no need for anti-virus software.
3. There’s no such thing as an “.exe” file in Ubuntu. This is one of Ubuntu’s strengths in terms of being immune from virus attacks. Installing applications is done by using the Ubuntu Software Centre (all of which is completely free) or by using the package manager or the terminal.
4. Expect to encounter the “Terminal” now and then. Its much like the command prompt in Windows, but much, much more useful. It is definitely daunting at first, but within a few months of installing applications with the multitude of tutorials on the web, you’ll feel at home in no time.
5. Drivers no more! Ubuntu supports almost all hardware out of the box, and proprietary drivers are almost never required for a smooth operating system experience.
6. 2GB of RAM? That’s fine. Ubuntu only uses around 400MB for itself and core functions, and even on a system with 2GB of RAM, Ubuntu shouldn’t need to resort to the swap file.
7. Defragmenter? Don’t even think about it. Ubuntu installs on a file system called ‘ext3′ or ‘ext4′ unlike Windows which installs on NTFS. Ext3 and ext4 are extremely fast and efficient file systems and fragmentation is never a problem in normal day to day situations.
8. More than one desktop! Ubuntu has a set of “virtual desktops” which can be switched easily through a little toggle on the bottom right. A bit like CubeDesktop or Spaces for Mac, it allows you to keep your windows organised.

What about software?

One of the main reasons for why people use Windows is the software that works on it. Ubuntu has free alternatives which work as well, or even much better than their Windows counterparts.

Internet Explorer Firefox/Chrome/Opera

Firefox comes pre-installed with Ubuntu, Chrome can be found in the software centre and Opera can be downloaded and installed manually. All 3 browsers offer a much wider feature set than Internet Explorer and perform much faster.

Microsoft Office OpenOffice

Makes you wonder why you had to pay in excess of £100 for an office suite when you could be OpenOffice for free. OpenOffice saves in its own format by default, but can also save it .doc and .docx formats for your cross-platform convenience. So it doesn’t support all those fancy features or image effects, but it is free after all.

Outlook Evolution

Evolution may not have the extensive feature set found in Office Outlook, but it works nonetheless and like other Linux software, loads in less than half the time. Evolution integrates nicely with Ubuntu’s “Me-Menu” which displays notifications as soon as they arrive.

Windows Live Messenger Empathy

Windows Live Messenger may have the advantage of being feature rich, but its slightly “in-your-face” interface with prolfic advertisements make it far from a nice experience. Empathy integrates with the “me-menu”, has no advertisements whatsoever and also supports a multitude of chat-platforms, including Facebook Chat.

Windows Media Player Totem and Rhythmbox

Both come pre-installed and offer a clean interface. Various plug-ins are available such as YouTube and LastFM should you feel too lazy to open the web browser.

Windows Live Photo Gallery F-Spot Photo Manager

A very powerful photo manager with editing capabilities. Scrolling is a bit slow compared to the likes of some other alternatives like Picasa, but at least Facebook integration is present with the options to upload to or create albums in the application itself. No Face recognition or even face detection is present though which puts it slightly behind the pack.

Adobe Photoshop GIMP

GIMP replicates many of Adobe Photoshop’s functions and places it in an Open Source package which is completely free. While it may take some time getting used to with its somewhat confusing menu and icon system, it definitely makes up by being a very powerful Adobe Photoshop alternative. Like OpenOffice, GIMP isn’t as feature rich conpared to Adobe Photoshop, but considering you haven’t paid a penny for it…

Windows Live Movie Maker PiTiVi Video Editor

A clean interface with plenty of features makes it very easy to use. Some video formats may not be supported, but plenty of free alternative are available from the Software Centre should you come across such as situation.

TweetDeck Gwibber

TweetDeck is extremely capable and looks amazing, however, its interface can be a little laggy at times. Gwibber is the Ubuntu alternative which also integrates with the “me-menu” and provides support for a multitude of social networks and services including Facebook, Twitter and even Digg.

SRS Audio Sandbox PulseAudio Equaliser

Ok, so its an equaliser, and I’m generally against the entire concept of using an equaliser to enhance audio, but until someone develops some audio enhancing software for Ubuntu, it’s the closest thing to system wide audio enhancement we’ve got.

uTorrent Transmission

BitTorrent is great for downloading movies new Ubuntu editions quickly, and transmission is a great piece of software to do so. It’s clean ‘download manager-esq’ interface os extremely simple to use, and doesn’t bog down the system like some other BitTorrent clients.

So there you have it.

A almost complete switcher’s guide for people willing to make the jump from Windows to Linux. It is not to say that completely switching to Linux is a good idea, as there are some things which can only be done in Windows (syncing your iPhone/iPod for example), but if you want an operating system which is free, stable and simply works right out of the box, then Ubuntu is the way to go.

Download Ubuntu from Here

iPhone 4

• Glass and Stainless steel design
• Seams/Bands on the sides separate the chassis which itself acts as an antennae
• 4 times the resolution of the original iPhone display, dubbed the “Retina Display”
• 800:1 Contrast Ratio achieved by IPS LCD Technology
• Uses Apple A4 SOC
• 7 Hours 3G talk, 6 Hours 3G Browsing, 10 Hours WiFi Browsing, 10 Hours of Video, 40 Hours of Music, 300 Hours on Standby
• Boasts environmental benefits, Arsenic free, BFR Free, Mercury Free, Highly recyclable etc
• Up to 32GB of storage
• Added a Gyroscope (3-axis) for enhanced movement aware gaming etc.
• 5MP Camera with backside illuminated sensor and single pixel area the same size of that of the iPhone 3GS
• 720p Video at 30FPS
• “FaceTime”Video calling capability (WiFi only, iPhone 4 to iPhone 4)
• White and Black colour options available
• $299 for 32GB Model (Subsidised)
• Released June 24^th

iPhone OS is now going to be renamed “iOS” ie. “iOS 4”

• Released on June 21st 2010. First gen iPod Touch not supported and not all features will be available for the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS will support all features.

Netflix app now available for iPhone with adaptive streaming technology and instant queue search

Farmville app with push notifications

Guitar Hero app comes with classic rock from Queen and the Rolling Stones ($2.99)

iMovie for iPhone ($4.99)

720p Video Editing

Photo Transitions

Bing is now added as a search option in Safari

iBooks and iBookstore now available for iPhone, can be used as fully featured PDF Reader

iBooks will sync free of charge to other Apple devices if bought

iAds offer interactive, in-app advertisements

Take this analogy for example; By changing your password to something you don’t know, or blocking your account, what your effectively doing is strapping a dog against the wall with a juicy bone in front of it. While impossible for the dog to physically get the bone, the desire to get it still persists.

By stopping what was once such as big part of how you spend your time, you will unconsciously find something else to compensate, and revision may not be top of the list where your inner mind is concerned. You may find yourself turning to other social networking sites, or turning to something equally time consuming other than revision. Even if you do revise, the inner anxiety which draws you into Facebook is still there, which means you won’t get as much out of your revision.

So how do you stop yourself from wasting so much time on Facebook, PROPERLY?

Self Control. Being conscientious has been a very big topic recently, and in a recent study, leads to more self satisfaction in life. Blocking your Facebook account or changing your password is taking action, but is a very crude way of doing so. Going back to the dog and bone analogy, surely it is better to train the dog not to eat the bone and allow it to have responsibility, rather than to strap it against the wall to prevent it from doing so.

Prioritising your time for more important things like revision, and acknowledging what you NEED to do on Facebook (check e-mail, wall posts etc) and what you WANT to do on Facebook (games and liking groups etc) is a good start.

Facebook has also become a very important part of how we gather information, and if used properly, can actually save time in situations where time may not be plentiful. Things like Facebook chat and wall posts are a quick way of communicating should you need a small piece of information, and friends wall posts or statuses can allow you to quickly gather information which would have taken much longer before with physical conversation. It is not to say that Facebook should be a replacement for real conversation and social interaction, but in times when a quick update is needed, Facebook is a great addition if used properly.

Every now and then, (6 months to be precise), Canonical releases another version of Ubuntu, and on some occasions, will release an LTS (Long Term Support) version which should mean that you can keep this installed in your system in the knowledge that your OS will be updated for years to come, and 10.04 can finally make Ubuntu the perfect Windows 7 contender.

Read on to find out more!

Ubuntu 9.10 (the previous version) was OK to sum up, to the normal consumer, Ubuntu 9.10 wasn’t radically different from the versions before it, and present were bugs and driver issues which plagued many owners of computers with the Intel G965 chipset. Even still, it proved a very efficient OS and changed very little, which was a good thing considering Ubuntu’s reputation for being an easy to use Linux OS.

Features and Applications

Ubuntu 10.04 is simply something else. Gone is the brown/orange theme which made the previous versions a tad cheesy, and in are the sleek lines and purple colour scheme, similar to the slick interface found on Macs.

Features have also been added which make Ubuntu a much more up to date OS. Integrated Facebook and Twitter functionality (as well as a plethora of other social networks) is present and updating your status is easy as clicking on the taskbar and typing something in. All in all, the social network integration feels as slick as something like Android OS.

Ubuntu Software Centre provides a very easy way of installing (free) software onto your system. Much like App stores for iPhone or Android, the Ubuntu Software centre organises apps into easy to navigate categories.

It is worth noting that Photoshop mimicking GIMP has not been included in this version of Ubuntu, however, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem considering you could get it quickly and easily from the software centre. OpenOffice, F-Spot Photo Manager, Rhythmbox Music Player and Totem Video player have been included as usual, and also an interesting video editor called PiTiVi.

Rhythmbox Music Player with slick taskbar integration and music store

OpenOffice 3.6 has been included.

F-Spot Photo Manager importing images. Facebook integration is handy for easy upload of drunken Saturday night photos.

Mozilla Firefox has been included as usual

Google Chrome can be downloaded for those of you who care about nothing but speed

The interface has been skinned differently from previous versions of Ubuntu, and the dark colour scheme is certainly a change. Your workspace may look a tad dodgy if you maximize windows, as the taskbar and the window bar are the same colour, making it look as if it were one big task bar. This may be up for objection, but in my personal opinion it seems quite distracting. At least installing new themes is easy using the Theme Manager.

Slightly dodgy taskbar and winow bar appearance with default theme

Compiz (the included Window Manager) works very well in my test systems, and unlike previous versions of Ubuntu, works without any problems on the Intel G965 chipset. Frame rates when switching windows is surprisingly high (coming from a person who uses Vista) even with integrated graphics and using a dedicated GPU results in an even smoother experience. The CoverFlow-like window switching interface may not be entirely practical, but it offers plenty of eye-candy.

Plenty of customization options including skins, icons and even window animations

Slick cover-flow like window switching interface

Multiple virtual desktops are handled seamlessly and switching proves stutter free

Hardware

Almost all types of hardware and configurations are compatible with Ubuntu, and Ubuntu includes a hardware checker to ensure that all your hardware is working as it should be. I would doubt this tool would be needed in most cases, as Ubuntu works out of the box most of the time, but it’s there should you need it.

So there you have it, possibly the most consumer friendly version of Ubuntu yet. Yes, there’s a bit of a learning curve here and there (especially when installing programs, plug-ins) and you do start to miss the “wizard” to guide you through complex operations, but aside from that, Ubuntu makes a great Windows alternative for those of you who just want to get on with things.

OMG I WANT THIS!

Being Linux, you don’t have to reformat your entire computer to get Ubuntu running. By using the Wubi installer, Ubuntu can be installed onto your windows partition as if it were a normal application, and will allow you to boot into Ubuntu whenever you restart your computer. Like everything though, make sure you have an inkling of understanding to what you’re doing, and back up your files, just in case.

Wubi Installer and instructions can be found here;

http://www.liberiangeek.net/2010/03/how-to-install-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx-with-wubi/

Feel like committing yourself to Ubuntu? Then you can download the ISO and start a fresh install from the Official Ubuntu website.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

· The iPad’s IPS LED Backlit Display; £65

· The A4 Processor; £18

· Aluminium back casing; £7

· 16GB Flash Chip (Manufactured by Samsung); £20

· 32GB Flash Chip (Manufactured by Samsung); £39

· 64GB Flash Chip (Manufactured by Samsung); £77

· Audio Chip by Cirrus Logic; 80p

· Broadcom Bluetooth + Wireless LAN Chip; £5

· 3 Chips used to control Touch-Display; £4

So all in all, while the iPad may seem quite cheap to manufacture compared to its asking price of £310 for the 16GB model, iSuppli were actually surprised by the higher than expected cost of materials. The 3 chips which control the touch display for example, could have been condensed into one and this can be done in the future to reduce costs in a later model.

While we could gain a tan one month which then fades away the next, the damage caused by exposure to UV radiation still remains, and this never fades away. It stays hidden in your skin cells and has the potential kill you later in life; melanoma is just one example of the deadly conditions caused by exposure to tanning, and damaging UV.

A simplified analogy to UV damage can be a bag of marbles, green representing healthy genes and red representing damaged genes caused by UV damage. If you had to choose a marble at random from the first bag, then there’s a 1 in 22 chance of picking a damaged gene.

Compare this to the 5 in 22 chance in the second and the chances of picking a damaged gene increases drastically.

While these diagrams are very simplified, they do represent something important. When it is your life at stake, a 95% chance of surviving is better than a 77% chance don’t you think? And once these chances go down, they will never go back up again.

How does it Work?

UV can be divided into 2 categories;

UVA; Lower frequency and less damaging than UVB, however, it is much more prevalent and account for 95% of the UV radiation we are exposed to.

UVB; High frequency and extremely dangerous. UVB has the ability to penetrate deep into the skin, causing long term damage.

Both types of radiation can damage DNA in the skin cells. This damaged area is then expressed by the cell, and in some cases, causes the cell to divide rapidly and uncontrollably, causing cancer.

Tanning of the skin arises when skin cells produce the melanin pigment in response to UV radiation. Melanin protects the DNA of the cell by absorbing some of the UV rays, however, it is a last resort, and by the time the cell produces melanin, the damage would have already been done.

How do you stop it?

1) Avoid direct sunlight from 10am to 4pm during the summer months

2) Wear a wide spectrum sunscreen with an SPF of at least 45 when you are first exposed to the sun. The SPF can be gradually reduced once your skin builds up necessary protection against UV.

3) Glass or UV Filtering sunglasses; Plastic sunglasses are a NO-NO. As well as letting UV light in, they cause the pupil to dilate, allowing more damaging UV light into the back of the eye causing more damage than without the glasses in the first place.

4) Clothing helps; whilst not a substitute for sunscreen as some UV light still penetrates clothing, it certainly reduces your skins exposure to damaging rays.

5) Swimming; waterproof sunscreen must be used whilst swimming, as UV can penetrate through water.

6) Remember to re-apply! Sweating, swimming or even sun exposure will reduce the effectiveness of sunscreen.