The London International Technology Show (LITS) 2011

This new consumer technology show run by Dennis publishing looked promising, so I joined numerous tech-lovers at the Excel centre in London on Saturday.

Arriving at the exhibition centre brought back slightly nervous memories: the last time I'd been there in my previous life at BT, I had the rather onerous responsibility of preparing a demonstrator of our research activities for senior BT managers including the chief executive!

This time there was no such pressures and I walked into the hall to be greeted by two chaps walking around in their underpants. Regardless of the fact that 99% of the attendees were male this seemed a strange publicity stunt!

The main stand greeting new arrivals was from Scan (an online computer component retailer) and this typified the focus of the show - gaming. Which for me was slightly disappointing since there was nothing new here. They had an overclocking tutorial for people trying to eke out the last drop of power from their gaming PC.

Walking past the Zotac stand I was asked to guess how much a gaming chair cost for a nice little LED torch. Despite several wrong attempts I was still awarded the torch with a correct guess of £10,000! The torch kept my children occupied for some time, but of course are no match for our LED torches!

The custom PC builder Yoyotech has their latest and greatest machines on display and were demonstrating extreme overclocking keeping everything cool with liquid nitrogen:

They also had the exact machine used in the Gadget Show's Battlefield 3 simulator.

There was still lots of 3D TV and gaming with Samsung demonstrating their latest monstrous 3D TV. But not much else from Samsung unfortunately. Not even their latest tablets. And not much from the other big vendors either.

All in all I'm afraid the show was a little disappointing. But this was the first LITS and these type of shows need to gain a little momentum. Hopefully next year will be better ...

Protect yourself from fake anti-virus programs

Most people have anti-virus software on their computer. And this keeps a lot of the popular types of viruses at bay. But one of the most common virus infections we see in the shop, rarely gets detected by your Norton or McAfee and can also con you out of £50.

This new breed of virus uses a variety of methods to trick you into downloading a piece of software. Once you allow this program to install, it takes over your machine and effectively holds your computer to ransom until you "activate" it for around £50. Of course if you do hand over the money, the crooks also have your credit card details and to make matters worse you are still infected!

In our latest video, we show a live infection of a Windows 7 machine with a very popular and typical version of this rogue security software called Security Shield. We show how you can avoid getting infected in the first place and how you can try and remove the virus yourselves. We also show how using Malware Bytes Pro Edition available from The Technology Company, together with your usual virus guard will prevent future infections in the majority of cases.

The Gadget Show Live 2011

It’s the third year running for this popular exhibition and I’ve not yet been, so with a free invite to the preview trade day last Tuesday, I eagerly handed over my money for the not-so-free train ticket up to the Birmingham NEC.

It’s fairly large event, with many of the big names in electronics attending. I was expecting to see plenty of enthusiastic examples of 3D, and Tablet PCs galore and my expectations were indeed realised.

I’ve yet to be converted to 3D for televisions. And I won’t be until perhaps glassless 3DTV that doesn’t make you dizzy is a reality, and I think that’s a way off. But although I’m not a gamer, I can see the attraction of 3D for gaming. Playing the latest games, you’re already immersed into a virtual world, with engrossing visual effects and sounds. Donning a pair of £100 3D glasses to enhance your virtual world is a natural next step.

However for our family of six, we’d have to spend £600 on 3D glasses that will possibly last 6 months with careful investigations by a 1 year-old. Not to mention we’d have to sit there looking quite ridiculous!

Sony and Acer were showing off their latest 3D gaming laptops which come with a “free” pair of specs. Sony’s latest F series F21Z1E retails at a hard-to-swallow £1800, especially considering expensive gaming laptops like this will only play the latest games for around a year! Still it did look fantastic and if I could have smuggled one home with me, it would have made the train journey back less arduous.

Nearly every likely suspect had a tablet on show, but the ones that grabbed my attention were the much anticipated Motorola Xoom featuring the new Android Honeycomb, and HP’s WebOS based TouchPad. Both were well built and both felt responsive. But the price will be what mainly dictates whether they will be iPad beaters or not, unless of course you’d just prefer an alternative to Apple. And unfortunately the prices look very similar to the lower end iPads. The 32GB Motorola Xoom is available now for £480 and HP’s TouchPad launches in June, price to be announced.

Sony also had on display their new camcorders with built in projectors. Playing back HD content is not particularly easy, so I welcome any innovation that makes this simpler. You’ll need a darkened room to play back your footage - these pico-projectors produce a very limited light output unsurprisingly given their size and battery operation. But I’m sure it won’t take long for significant advances in that area. And for the time being, it’s quite exciting having to draw the curtains and dim the lights to watch your movies, just like in the olden days! The prices aren’t too bad either considering the features, starting at £580 for the Sony PJ10E with full HD, 16GB of memory and 30x optical zoom.

Although not a new release I got to have a good demonstration of the Sonos sound system. It’s a very impressive piece of kit that allows you to stream music wirelessly from the Internet or your own music library to either a single set of speakers or up to 32 rooms simultaneously! What’s novel is how the multiple Sonos devices connect together. Rather than relying on your home WiFi setup, they form their own network, connecting to each other, rather than a central point. This makes the range almost limitless and improves reliability. And it enables the devices to all play in sync with each other which is vital. The whole system can either be controlled by a Sonos remote, which is expensive, or a free app on an iPhone, iPad or any Android device. We hope to be selling the Sonos range soon.

There was an awful lot to see and in one day I probably only got to visit around half the show. Some of the smaller stands had some interesting products too. One such product that caught my eye was Sugru – a silicon based product that you mould like plasticine and then let it set. It will stick to most substances so is a great fun DIY aid. It looked fun for children too, but unfortunately it’s not suitable in its unset form and apart from that, it’s a little pricey to be squeezed into a ball and chucked behind the sofa!

Drift HD170 Action Camera Review

I promised last month I'd write a review of the Drift HD170 action camera after I'd given it a thorough test, and here it is!

The review is mainly based on my experience of using the camera with my road and mountain bike. I have also included two videos I have produced. The first video reviews the camera and the second video shows real full HD footage from the camera on my commute to work.

The HD170 is a very well featured action camera. It's the only one to come with an integrated LCD screen which makes setting up and reviewing your footage a doddle. The lens swivels so you can adjust the recorded footage however you have the camera mounted. And it comes with a generous selection of mounting options which together with the swivelling lens means you can attach it pretty much anywhere!



First off we tried the handlebar mount on a Specialized road bike. It has over sized handlebars which makes for a slightly tight fit but a fit nonetheless. This is a nice position to have the Drift mounted since you can see what you are recording and can start and stop the video easily. But depending on where you are riding, the recorded footage can be a little shaky! And off road it will get drenched in mud too.

A more sensible option is to mount it to your helmet. It easily mounts to a vented cycle helmet and I found the best position directly on top of the helmet. The camera records a huge field of view so as long as you get it roughly level, you should capture most of what you can see. The video review below shows the camera mounted on my cycle helmet.

Fortunately you get a distinct sound when you start and stop the recording so you don't need to remove the camera to start and stop recordings. In fact you can also use the supplied remote for this purpose which works very well over a good range (doesn't need line of sight). I would like the sound to be a little louder ideally but it is audible without too much background noise.

The camera records in full 1080p HD and 720p. I've mainly used it in full HD mode but the one advantage of the 720p mode is you achieve the full 170 degree field of view mode - which gives a nice fish-eye retro look to the video.

Full HD quality is very impressive (see for yourself in the video below) - better than I was expecting. Although don't expect too much indoors or outside in low light - this camera is just not designed for that. It has a night mode but I'd avoid that like I'd avoid digital zoom. You're far better off applying any post-processing via your computer. Together with decent software you'll achieve far better results.

Photo quality, although not a feature I'll use much, is also surprisingly good (although grainy in low light). And since you get the massive field of view, it can be quite useful:



Another nice feature of the HD170 is that unlike many of its competitors, it has a standard tripod mount which is very handy, as demonstrated in the review video.

Getting your videos and photos off the camera is a fairly basic affair. If you use the supplied USB cable, you can drag and drop the created files to your computer. Or for quicker transfers you could use a card reader. The camera doesn't come with any software and you will need a decent computer to edit full HD video. But the MP4 files can easily be uploaded to Youtube or such like for sharing. Or you can use the supplied cable for playing to your TV.

The Drift is water-resistant - not submersible. This means it can get wet and will probably survive a dunking, but you shouldn't use it for very wet activities like water sports. I've got it drenched on my cycle helmet cycling home and it's been fine.

The device does record audio but since the microphone is covered with plastic to give it water resistance, the quality is not great, but no worse than other action cameras. But the Drift does have the advantage that it can take an external microphone which will improve sound recordings significantly. You will lose some water resistance though and it needs to be used with the optional rear silicon cover to get any water resistance at all.

In conclusion:

Positives:
Very good image quality
LCD screen
Swivel lens with huge field of view
Generous mounting options
Standard tripod mount
External microphone option

Negatives:
Low light performance (but no worse than other action cameras)
Audio quality (although external microphone an option)

Please take a look at our video reviews of the Drift HD170. In the first video I review the camera and the second video shows real footage in full HD of the camera recording my commute to work! You can choose the playback quality and size from the bottom right of the video.





Drift HD170 camcorder and accessories available from:
http://www.thetechnologycompany.co.uk/

The tablet revolution continues ...

Yesterday the iPad 2 from Apple was revealed. The first generation iPad was a huge success with Apple's usual slick user interface and superb design. It defined a new genre of computing devices - the tablet. Basically an over sized smart phone - who'd have thought it?

The truth is tablet PCs have been around for over 10 years - defined basically as a computer with the main interface being a touchscreen. Microsoft first came up with the concept but it was never very popular. The fact is these early devices probably tried to do too much. The iPad is fairly basic in its capabilities. At launch it didn't even support multi-tasking. It has no USB ports, no memory card slot, no camera, doesn't support Flash (which many websites use to display video and other content) and has no keyboard.

So why has it become so popular? It's all about implementation and marketing. What the iPad does do, it does very well. It's the perfect device to consume information (not create it), whether it be reading emails or newspapers online, viewing web pages and films, playing games, trying out the latest app etc. And Apple very clearly explained what it was for in their marketing messages - they showed it being used to browse the web, watch videos etc. No one was ever quite sure what the original tablet PCs were for.

There's no doubt the iPad is a nice device to own. It's great for having on the coffee table for a quick browse of the web. Or in your hotel room to amuse yourself. But it's very much a secondary device - you'd still want your laptop or desktop PC and your phone - it's won't replace either of them.

So what about the new iPad 2? Well it adds a camera, is thinner and it's quicker (but the iPad is pretty nippy). It has an £30 add on that lets you connect it to a TV. None of these things are groundbreaking. But Steve Jobs very proudly boasted that it will cost the same as the original iPad.

And for me that is the problem. If someone can come up with a device like the iPad that costs between £100 and £200 I'd probably get one. But with the new iPad 2 also costing from £430 to £700 it's still too expensive. If I were Apple I'd have concentrated on getting the price down, not adding features that whilst nice are probably not necessary.

Do you trust PC World with your computer repair?

I was gobsmacked to read this month's (March 2011) article in Which? magazine: "Would your PC survive high street surgery?" Which? took 24 computers (both laptops and desktops) with very basic faults to PC World, Comet, Best Buy and Carphone Warehouse and found the chances of getting them fixed was no better than 50:50!

But what shocked me more were the prices they quoted or charged for the repairs. For a laptop with a fairly basic software boot-up fault, Comet quoted for a new motherboard for £275! Best Buy came in at £160 charging for a new version of Windows plus a diagnostic fee of £40.

The most we would charge for these repairs would be £50. On top of that I was staggered by how long they took to repair these machines, typically 5-15 days with some repairs taking as long as 28 days! If we had a tricky repair with components needing sourcing, it's very rare for a repair to take longer than 3 or 4 days and typically it's 1-2 days. So why do these large retailers with plentiful staff need up to 4 weeks to fix the most basic repair not even requiring parts?

The desktops had an even more basic fault than the laptops - a cable had become detached from the motherboard. PC World charged £69.99 to repair this and took 4 days! Typical charges were £49.99 and I was pleased to see some offered the repair free of charge.

We offer free diagnosis on all our repairs and we wouldn't dream of charging you for the five seconds it took to plug a cable back in you'll be pleased to hear!

Near miss ...

Some of you may have spotted me on my daily cycle to our shop in Tavistock. I'm the one with the really bright front light! Well last week (on the 4th of February) I was trudging up the A386 to Grenofen on my way back from work, when I felt a sudden sharp blow to my right elbow. I looked up to see a Ford Escort white van speeding off with its wing mirror flipped in. Luckily I didn't come off and I only came away with a slight bruise. But the road is wide here and I am clearly visible with a super bright rear light too! The driver of course didn't stop and unfortunately I didn't get his number plate.

After many near misses I've often thought of recording my journey to work with a helmet camera. But after this incident and further prompted by the recent BBC news article on helmet cameras I decided to look into this further. Of course the opportunity to try out a new gadget also came into the equation!

I wanted something that would easily attach to my cycle helmet, would record in high quality and was weatherproof. There were three contenders: the Contour HD 1080 (RRP £230), the Drift HD170 (RRP £280) and the GoPro Hero HD (RRP £300).

They all have their own merits but for me the Drift HD170 came out on top. It's also the only one to have its own LCD screen which makes setting up and playing back your recording far easier / possible! Looking at endless video clips on Youtube and Vimeo, I preferred the quality too. Plus it's made by Drift Innovation who are based in the UK which is a nice change.

I should be receiving one soon and will be giving it a thorough test. If it does the job we'll be stocking it in our shop and online! With the amount of outdoor activities here on Dartmoor - walking, cycling, mountaineering, horse riding, kayaking etc, I'm sure it'll be popular! Look out for a review coming soon.