Toshiba actually held off on releasing the uselessly-named AT100 tablet in some markets so that they could be let out into the wild with the Android 3.1 “Honeycomb” OS instead of the older 3.0. Good and noble we suppose considering Android’s hopeless approach to upgrading the OS, but by the end of the review period we were left wondering “Why?”

Because, here’s the thing, the AT100 doesn’t feel particularly cutting-edge, so why should it have to have the latest and greatest OS environment? The hardware and casing are from a little bit of a bygone era anyway, technologically speaking, bar perhaps the NVidia Tegra 2 processor, which is dual-core but remains clocked at “just” 1 GHz precluding it from competing with the performance leaders out there, who have mostly ramped up to 1.5GHz dual-cores.

So why am I saying that the hardware is dates? Well, it just feels it really, because of the packaging. It’s a chunky beast the AT100, at just over 15mm it’s double the thickness of an iPad2 for instance, while the rubberised back might make it feel more durable and easier to grip, but also brings with it a sensation of flimsiness. It also utterly destroys the ultra-cool sexiness factor that plays a major part in making the iPad sexy – yes even if you replace the standard black plastic at the rear of this retail AT100 with a pink aftermarket cover, it still won’t be sexy or cool, sorry.

So perhaps it’s more of a work tool than a fashion accessory then? Toshiba would certainly love for you to believe so, hence the inclusion of four ports unusual in the tablet space, ports which are also the reason why the device has to be so thick. A MicroUSB, regular USB, external HDMI and one standard SD-card slot. If you absolutely must have a tablet which has all of these ports by default, the AT100 is one of very few options available to you.

All right, so I did love having the SD-card available right there, as this allowed me to quickly swap the card from my camera into the tablet to get a better view of how my shots looked straight away. Of course you can also put a big, empty SD card in to increase the amount of space available to you on the tablet, although this doesn’t seem as useful as it sounds on a modern, hyper-connected device like this which isn’t a standalone computing solution, more a cog in your personal IT infrastructure environment.

Otherwise the two USB ports are also fairly useless, again apart from convenient file transfers or adding more storage capacity. Because generally the two things you might want USB for, a mouse and keyboard, really aren’t ever necessary when operating the AT100. Why use an external pointer when you can just touch the screen to navigate the menus? Similarly, a USB keyboard is only likely to be appreciated if you’re writing War and Peace on the tablet – the AT100 features such a nice, big virtual keyboard that typing on the screen itself is just about as fast as using a physical ‘board. Even though I’m a touch-typist and the AT100 doesn’t have haptics to alert me through vibration of every keypress.

I did like the HDMI port, but this alone wouldn’t have required the bulky width of the AT100. So Toshiba have made an inherently quite sexy tech toy, a tablet, into something far more workmanlike for basically no real reason at all. Weird.

Unfortunately that isn’t where it ends. If packaging alone was the problem with the AT100, it could be forgiven, as some users and some usages are likely to welcome the extra bulk and the upped port count.

The display itself, despite featuring Toshibas Resolution+ techniques to improve the clarity and crispness of the content, isn’t as bright or vivid as the benchmark Apple equivalent. Nor is it anywhere near as responsive, and I often had to press my finger to the screen several times with increasing levels of frustrated pressure to get the desired response from the machine. The display is too reflective as well, and after not much use picks up a patina of oily finger marks which make it completely impossible to use outside in daylight, because you just can’t see past the smudgy glare.

That 1GHz NVidia CPU doesn’t do it any favours either, as sometimes slow response is due to processing lag rather than the inferior touch-screen technology. Sure there’s enough CPU and graphics power for even quite demanding games to run smoothly and at good frame rates, but the OS itself still has moments where it overpowers the available clock speed.

Having said all that, I did enjoy my time with the AT100, and the younger members of my family took to the unit straight away. The rubberised back end meant I had fewer worries about them accidentally dropping the Toshiba while bashing away at Angry Birds than a smooth-surfaced iPad, and I can certainly attest to the screen being at least durable enough to withstand the very enthusiastic hammerings of a four-year-old gaming addict in the making.

But the final problem with AT100, the final insult for me, is the price. It’s actually a bit of a unique situation we have here in SA, where because of intense and still-ongoing flak from local Apple users Core have had to get quite creative and aggressive in their pricing strategies. So locally the R4999 RRP Toshiba is actually a few hundred bucks more expensive than the equivalent iPad2.

It’s not a conundrum limited to the Toshiba however – in SA just about all the Android-based tabs are significantly pricier than Apple equivalents. And although I was never a true, committed fan of the now iconic brand, it’s obvious from the moment you touch it that the iPad is substantially superior to all of these units, in just about every respect. Specifically the casing is slicker and with heaps more feel-good factor, the screen is brighter and clearer, the processor seems incapable of lag, and of course the OS environment is significantly slicker and more polished than Google’s competitor.

Why on Earth, then, would you want to spend more money on a similar device with inferior capabilities? This problem also afflicts the Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Flyer, just about all of the competition in SA. Hell, you can buy an original iPad still for an even bigger price differential and still have the cooler, sexier, and more satisfying-to-use device.

If you truly hate the Apple brand, sure, then, the Toshiba AT100 might well be a consideration. At just less than R5K, it’s actually one of the more affordable Android alternatives. But you do “pay” for this pseudo-affordable price with some minor hardware frustration in the end.

-Russell Bennett

Likes: Big soft keyboard.

Good grip thanks to rubberised rear panel.

Potentially upgradeable?

Disliked: A bit bulky, not sexy.

Android OS gets laggy sometimes

Screen not as bright or crisp, or responsive, as the best.

When Adobe first released its monolithic Creative Suite 5, we were at the SA preview where the abilities of the still-in-preview new apps where very ably demonstrated by knowledgeable (if at time somewhat overzealous and PR-ey) content-creation experts in a variety of fields. And these demos wowed us, although playing with the software hands-on later in fact impressed us even more. Anyway, we did a comprehensive round up of the most impressive bits for our uses here in our second digital edition, and I’m not going to go back into all the things that led us to conclude that CS 5 was a digital publishing game changer now – you’re welcome to refresh your memory by reading the original feature.

Instead we’re going to focus on the new additions in CS 5.5, which Adobe SA very kindly sent a copy around for us to fully evaluate. And as far as we can tell, there’s quite literally only one negative, and it’s an issue which has plagued Adobe for some time but which they quite honestly couldn’t care less about – and with fair reason.

Let me get this out of the way right now. It is, of course, price. You see normally I’d expect an incremental update such as this one to be a free upgrade for CS5 users, especially considering the hefty sum you’d have shelled out for the full package already! Adobe do offer an upgrade special, which retails at around R5500, which at least is a fifth the full price of CS5.5 Master Collection, ringing the bell at just over R26 000 as a new standalone purchase.

Of course, it’s a suite designed for publishing professionals, not cash-strapped home-based “Grandma’s Digital Publishing” operations. Professionals who make a darned good living out of doing what they do. And this suite enables them to continue doing it faster, better, and more jaw-droppingly gorgeous than ever before. So it really has to (and normally is) be considered an investment in future revenue-generating rather than an outright cost.

But the question still remains, are the 5.5 updates worth the extra money, or should you as many publishers do just stick to your “old” CS5 package and wait until 6 arrives? After all many of the apps (PhotoShop for instance) haven’t changed at all, not even their version numbers are different! So let’s see just what 5.5 offers then to justify the outlay…

At first it might not seem all that sensible really, because the additions don’t make for a particularly long list, and most of them in our fast-changing world of technology look at first glance like stuff which should have been included in the first place. This is a fair enough and pretty valid statement, but considering the incredible pace of the explosion of mobile devices and tablets as the content-consumption platforms of choice all of a sudden, you do have to concede that when 5 came out the tech and tools for these platforms were still in their infancy. And Adobe, being proper enterprise-class software, wasn’t about to include potentially unstable emerging trends into their premium app suite without it being proven that these were a necessity moving forward.

Now however it’s just a given that content needs to be developed to work properly through a wide variety of channels. Android and iOS-based smartphones and tablets being the most critical of course. Without these content outlets today, you’re simply a dinosaur publisher just waiting to be turned into sticky sweet crude oil. Period. So naturally enough, that’s where a lot of the 5.5 updates have been focussed.

DreamWeaver in particular has been massively facelifted, and now includes native support for CSS3 as well as HTML5. The Live View mode and Multi Screen Preview panels have also been enhanced, with the latter allowing you to test across multiple platforms all at once including Android, an invaluable feature given that you can new develop native Android and iOS apps in the environment.

Further helping you to get properly impressive visuals on these mobile devices are comprehensive upgrades to Flash in CS 5.5. It begins with content scaling, so your Flash-based visuals can be viewed on a wide variety of different-resolution displays without breaking. It sounds like a simple touch yes, but it’s a critical one as the lack of content scaling has been an issue plaguing Flash-based mobile application developers since these myriad devices became such an integral pillar of our content-consuming ways. Rasterising Symbols for better performance on mobile devices is another process which has been streamlined in the new Flash, while code snippets have been added to easily capitalise on essential new hardware capabilities like multi-touch displays, accelerometers and geolocational services through mobile and AIR apps.

If you’re developing Web real estate and mobile is a key part of your strategy, which of course it absolutely has to be right now if you hope to remain relevant, these updates are just about worth the extra outlay by themselves. You can develop and test across all the important platforms all in the same environment, and make your content really pop not just on one or another of these platforms but all of them without breaking how it might display on another.

Adobe’s page-layout industry standard InDesign also has new mobile tricks up its sleeve for CS5.5, most notably enhanced native capacity for designing and publishing mobile content and e-book publishing standards. Again content scaling has been applied in InDesign to keep embedded graphics and other visual elements the right size regardless of what device the reader is accessing the content from.

Images and video aren’t exactly my forte, but I can tell you that the one new addition to PhotoShop which is absolutely brilliant are the three iPad apps Lava, Eazel and Nav, which allow you to push content out to the tablet and actually allow touch screen manipulation of the content in this virtual PhotoShop Extended environment. This is just the type of classy thing iPads have been waiting for to really demonstrate just how engaging a device they can actually be.

After Effects meanwhile gains a built-in stabiliser function for shaky-cam footage called the Warp Stabiliser. It’s just more forward-thinking stuff here, with Adobe recognising that more and more of the world’s most-watched content is not the big-budget, slick and professionally-produced broadcasts but the stuff that someone near a protest area grabs off his 3.2-Mpixel cellphone camera, and it’s exactly this kind of footage that Warp Stabiliser is particularly adept at cleaning up and making useable.

Finally, when it comes time for putting all your clips together, Premiere Pro can now be used using the same keyboard shortcuts pros migrating from Final Cut and Media Composer will be familiar with, the Media Encoder engine has gone 64-bit to increase performance, and there’s tighter integration with Adobe Audition, which is now also available in Mac versions of the CS suite.

Those, then, are the bells, whistles, and tweaks in a nutshell, and for what at first looked just like a nip and tuck kind of point release, when you add them all up quickly like this you realise that there’s a lot. A lot of under-the-skin work has been done to transform Adobe CS5 into a Web savvy, forward-thinking and completely cutting-edge software package which isn’t simply the industry norm by inertia, but by being the best.

Each new module has been well thought out and executed and obviously young publishers with a bright vision of the future have been involved in the development process here, which is nice. Sure, the less forgiving may still be maintaining that really, as a global giant Adobe should have been so cutting edge in the first place with CS5, or at least should have provided the CS5.5 package for free to owners of the older version.

That’s perhaps another argument entirely then, because the long and short of it is, is the update worth the R5500 upgrade price? If you have any interest or requirement to be publishing in the multi-windowed content environment we’re working in today, CS5.5 is going to be worth every cent. If you aren’t at least planning on exploring this online marketplace, well frankly you really shouldn’t be in publishing anymore, but in a retirement home somewhere. And it’s just that simple.

-Russell Bennett

The iPad has been a huge success for Apple and redefined mobile computing. Let’s be honest, the new iPad has been around for a while but we have only just managed to get our hands on a review unit. Regular readers will know that we were ahead of the game and managed to review the first generation iPad before it was available in South Africa. So, how does the iPad 2 differ from the original unit?

The first and most obvious difference is the integrated cameras one forward facing and one rear facing. The rear-facing camera is capable of taking photographs and high def videos. The front facing camera is designed for video calling using Facetime, Skype and the like. The iPad is a big device to walk around with taking photographs and making movies but the option is there if you want it. It is of course, quite cool to use the rear-facing camera to show the person you’re talking to where you are.

The iPad 2 does have a much faster processor, a duel core A5, which Apple claims is twice as fast as the outgoing model. There is without a doubt a noticeable performance improvement. The iPad 2 feels more sprightly and opens applications a bit quicker. Twice as fast? Well, that’s difficult to judge. I certainly wouldn’t upgrade from an iPad 1 for that reason alone.

The battery lasts a bit longer but again, not so you’d notice. Battery life is of course what has made the iPad a success. You can go away for a couple of days, do a bit of surfing, digital magazine reading and emailing without having to integrate the power supply at source (plug it in). The iPad 2 is thinner and lighter than the previous model but the screen is the same although, to my eyes, the new unit screen is brighter.

Our review unit was supplied with the iPad smart cover. The Smart cover is magnetic and clips on the side of the iPad. We found it to me more of a hindrance than help. It’s quite fiddly to use it as a stand and I found, several times, lying reading a magazine, that my thumb movement was enough to send the cover off the iPad and onto the floor. The Smart cover does have an ace up its sleeve though. It switches the iPad off and on by closing and opening the cover.

The iPad 2 is an excellent unit and, as I said earlier, is changing the face of mobile computing. So much so that there have been a number of copycat devices released onto the market since the original iPad was launched. If you haven’t already got an iPad, go and get one. If however, you’ve got one of the first generation iPads, it probably isn’t worth upgrading.

Steve Allison

SanDisk have released a mobile micro SDHC to SD card adaptor that offers greater storage and is compatible with mobile phones and computers. If you are a person that uses a computer and has a cellular telephone that uses a micro SD card the SanDisk micro SDHC card adaptor my just be the object of desire that you have been looking for. I personally am always transferring data to and from my laptop and my Smartphone. Previously I connected my phone to my laptop via the USB link, which as anybody knows works perfectly well. What that means though is that all my music is stored on my phone. What happens when I get in my car and want to listen to tunes? Let me explain myself, I spend a fair amount of time driving, and as much time walking around expos and the like. Using the SanDisk micro SDHC card, with the adaptor gives me the solution. In the car can use the micro SDHC adaptor in the SD slot of the Radio and when I want the music on my phone, I simply slip the micro card out of the adapter and into the slot on the side of my phone. Brilliant, I can store all my music on one card and take it with me wherever I go. What makes this even better is that I have, in common with many laptops, an SD card slot built into my computer. Even the process of refreshingSanDisk have released a mobile micro SDHC to SD card adaptor that offers greater storage and is compatible with mobile phones and computers. If you are a person that uses a computer and has a cellular telephone that uses a microSD card the SanDisk microSDHC card adaptor my just be the object of desire that you have been looking for. I personally am always transferring data to and from my laptop and my Smartphone. Previously I connected my phone to my laptop via the USB link, which as anybody knows works perfectly well. What that means though is that all my music is stored on my phone. What happens when I get in my car and want to listen to tunes? Let me explain myself, I spend a fair amount of time driving, and as much time walking around expos and the like. Using the SanDisk micro SDHC card, with the adaptor gives me the solution. In the car can use the micro SDHC adaptor in the SD slot of the Radio and when I want the music on my phone, I simply slip the micro card out of the adapter and into the slot on the side of my phone. Brilliant, I can store all my music on one card and take it with me wherever I go. What makes this even better is that I have, in common with many laptops, an SD card slot built into my computer. Even the process of refreshing the music and transferring photos from my phone is simple and easy. This little SanDisk adaptor has really made life a lot easier and its extremely user friendly too. What makes this card so brilliant is that it works in all of my devices, sort of a one card fits all solution. The SanDisk micro SDHC Card is a definite winner in my book. Mark Walshaw the music and transferring photos from my phone is simple and easy. This little SanDisk adaptor has really made life a lot easier and its extremely user friendly too. What makes this card so brilliant is that it works in all of my devices, sort of a one card fits all solution. The SanDisk micro SDHC Card is a definite winner in my book.

Mark Walshaw

Logitech’s K750 is a solar powered wireless keyboard that uses a USB dongle to connect to your computer, probably more suited to people that want to connect their laptop to a separate screen while working in their office, since a wired keyboard has never been that much of an inconvenience for a desktop computer.

The Logitech K750 is not something I would have rushed out and bought as 90% of my time I spend on a laptop. I was keen to give the keyboard a try when we received our review unit, I decided to try connecting it to my laptop but there was a problem. The problem was that it had no electricity in it and it craved sunlight to charge the internal battery. Unfortunately the weather was the worst it had been in some time, the sun was noticeably absent. I left it connected for an entire day while I was on my daily travels on the roads of Gauteng. Back at the office, I was fired up to see how this keyboard worked. Now to say that I was disappointed was an under statement, it still didn’t work. The supplied documentation provided no solution. It was only after Surfing the web I found this is the norm as the keyboard goes into sleep mode when not been used and doesn’t charge. Problem solved, I left it in the sun for a bit and tapping the keys every couple of minutes, about twenty minutes later it was ready to use.

Having finally got the keyboard charged, I used it for the whole day in the office without any direct sunlight and it kept enough charge to carry on working. The Logitech K750 is actually a very pleasant keyboard to use. The keys are soft to the touch without requiring bashing the keys when typing. As an experiment I left the laptop in the lounge and went to the other side of the house, three rooms away and typed a passage to see how far the wireless signal would travel and what do you know it worked perfectly. What I really liked to do was to connect my laptop to the TV via the HDMI link that way, I could sit comfortably on the sofa with the keyboard on my lap and work with the TV as my screen, a definite must for anyone wanting to work in the comfort of their own lounge.

Apparently Logitech will be releasing a Mac compatible version in the near future, which will be a real bonus for Mac mini users. A lot of Mac minis are used as Media Centre computers connected to a TV. As I said in the beginning I would not have run out and bought this keyboard, but as with so many things we only see the advantages once we use them

Mark Walshaw

Sandisk has launched a range of USB memory sticks. Big deal you’re saying, there are hundreds of memory sticks on the market. Sure Sandisk knows something about flash memory, as any digital photographer will attest. Nevertheless, you might be asking why you should choose a Sandisk ahead of any other manufacturer if all you want is to move files from one computer to another.

The Sandisk does however have an ace up its sleeve. What you get is a vault, which will store all your sensitive documents in an encrypted format away from prying eyes. If you’re the sort of person that has to transport sensitive documents about your person and you fear the dire consequences of losing the stick, this is the one for you.

Plug the memory stick in and run the vault application if you are a Windows user. Mac users are required to go the web and download the vault application. Once the application is running, it will ask you for a user name and password. Having set that up, you can copy files into the vault and hey presto, they are encrypted and secure from prying eyes.

Plug the memory stick into another computer and the files remain completely secure until the vault application is run and the user name and password have been entered. Not only do you not have to worry about losing your stick but you can lend it to other people too.

I’m actually writing this review on a MacBook Pro, which would normally lead most to jump to the conclusion that I am an Apple fanboy, a fanboy with no hope of giving an unbiased review. In truth however, as much as I do love my MacBook, I love my desktop far more, in all its Windows 64-bit glory. The best consumer OS on the planet. Bar none. The end. The Toshiba comes with Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium, and thus has the OS box checked. I don’t bring this up to compare and review Windows 7 though, as surely every new PC comes installed with it.

I raise the point because compared to a Mac, the Toshiba is a somewhat bulky unit weighing 2.5kg, something I didn’t like about it. I just didn’t like the look of it either, as it seemed heavy and unwieldy. As a 15.6 inch laptop, it just seemed to be a bigger unit than the screen suggested. That being said, there were a few wins in the design department, the build for instance felt very solid. It never squeaked or creaked as is so common with plastic laptops.

In terms of hardware though, the Satellite does shine very nicely indeed, it’s got decent peripheral functionality, but more importantly, the performance hardware is top notch. The CPU is a Core i5 2410M clocked at 2.3GHz/2.9GHz Turbo), it’s an excellent processor capable of handling any general task with ease. Multitasking performance with various documents and applications open seemed of a high standard as well, in other words, exactly what you’d want out of a mobile CPU. RAM is a healthy 4GB of DDR3, although this is expandable to 8GB if you’d like. For a laptop at least, the HDD is fairly spacious with 640GB capacity. Graphics are handled by a competent NVIDIA GeForce 525M, which with a dedicated 2GB of memory allows it to handle any game just fine. Not a maximum settings of course, but with decent settings. And thanks to the large RAM frame buffer, with commendable resolutions at that.

Arguably the most stand out feature in terms of hardware, was the Blu-ray drive. Unless there’s a PS3 lurking about about, Blu-ray players are still fairly rare in most households, so with a laptop equipped with one, it really could be very handy indeed. Not just for watching movies (especially via HDMI/TV), but it makes backing up to  discs a semi practical undertaking, something DVD simply can’t compete with. The rest of the hardware is all standard stuff, with all the interfaces you’d expect. There are connections for an external monitor, HDMI, a built in webcam and microphone, a USB 3, and a multi-card reader to name but a few. Sound is provided by Onkyo stereo speakers.

This of course brings me to the inevitable analysis of whether all of the above, as well as the hardware I haven’t mentioned, is worth the asking price. I also need to take into account all the bundled software, which is quite an extensive list, although as with most software bundles, most of it you won’t use. There are some useful items such as Nero software which is useful for backups and burning discs, some limited functionality Microsoft Word and Excel, McAfee security software, and various other odds and sods. Put all this hardware and software together, it is a very well rounded product. So with all this in mind, I did a quick Google search to get an idea for the average retail price, which seemed to be just over R8,000 for the most part. Toshiba actually set the recommended retail price at R6,999 when it was launched, so with a little more research than a 0.08s Google search, I’m sure that level of pricing is out there to be had. Back to my question then, is it all worth this price?

Absolutely. I think the Satellite is very aggressively priced. It is a laptop that can basically do whatever most users would ask of it out the box, used as a general and or work computer, it won’t let you down. Take it home, and load up some games, and it’ll do that too without any problems. All for roughly eight grand, that’s a bargain frankly. It’s got a very good CPU, decent graphics hardware, a Blu-ray drive, a 64-bit OS, enough RAM but is still further upgradeable if need be. Really, what more could you ask for in this price range?

To summarise, and this is a bitter pill to swallow for me, the Toshiba Satellite is an excellent product that is priced right. It’s tough to accept, because as I write this on a wildly more expensive Mac, with far inferior hardware, and no practical gaming capacity, I feel a bit of a tool for buying a Mac. The Satellite sitting next to it on the desk just seems, I don’t know, so much better all things considered.

SACM

Liked:

• Well priced
• Very nice mid-range hardware package
• Blu-ray

Disliked:

• Trackpad
• Seemed a bit too bulky

More Information:

http://za.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/product/Satellite-L755-17U/1108488/toshibaShop/false/

Many of Gareth’s fans like to keep up with what he says on both Twitter and Facebook. Using the new iPhone App, fans can do just that without having to switch between Apps. Not only that, the App includes a daily video clip of Gareth telling the world what’s on his mind. And, should you have missed a day, the previous 2 days clips will be available. It’s worth remembering that the video streams each time you watch rather than storing the clip within the App. Not that it affects the speed in anyway but In South Africa, mobile usually offer miniscule data within your contract and charge ridiculous amounts for additional data.

The App also includes an alarm clock that allows you to be woken to a different voice every day, from Jacob Zuma to Jeremy Clarkson. Of course all of the voices are impersonations by Gareth but they are fun and amusing.

Both the Twitter and Facebook feeds within the App are interactive allowing users to comment, reply to tweets, re-tweet and send to all of your friends.

So, if you’re a Gareth Cliff fan and you want to keep up to date with all his ramblings, this App is for you, a one-stop shop for all of Gareth’s opinions and social media.

The new generation MacBook air has met with international acclaim. It’s a huge improvement on the outgoing model and at a more affordable price. Let’s not fool ourselves though; the ultra thin Mac is by no means cheap. It is however an icon of Style.

Our review unit is the entry-level 11-inch unit, which retails for a rand under 9 grand. On paper, it looks underpowered with its 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and a paltry 2GB of RAM. The spec sheet doesn’t do the unit justice though; its real world performance is far in excess of what the specs would have you believe. The MacBook Air does have a trump card up its sleeve, which significantly improves real world performance. You see the MacBook air has no mechanical hard drive and instead uses an SSD flash storage. This entry-level unit only has 64GB and don’t think of adding more either. Neither the RAM Chips nor the flash is user upgradable.

What the Flash does do though is speed up access to files significantly, far quicker than accessing a conventional hard drive. Overall the little Air gives the impression of having more than enough power for day-to-day tasks. That, after all is what it’s designed for, it was never intended to be a desktop replacement. Another advantage of flash storage is that it saves a lot of space, which is important when you’re trying to produce an ultra portable computer.

Whilst this is a computer designed for general work whilst on the road, I decided to load Aperture and try to push the Air a little. I was quite surprised. I expected the computer to fall to its knees and give up with an endless spinning colourwheel. How wrong could I be? It handled aperture without any problem. Sure the RAW images took a few seconds to load but editing the images was painless.

What is truly amazing is the screen. The little 11-inch has a resolution of 1366 x768, which is both bright and sharp. The reasonably powerful GeForce 320M graphics chip handles the resolution with ease. Unfortunately I didn’t get to try any graphic intensive games but then, how often do you play serious games when you’re travelling? The Trackpad is similar to the one found on the Mackbook pro. It’s big enough to perform gestures such and scrolling, rotating images.

The 11-inch unit is equipped with 2 USB slots, one on each side of the case, which is handy when you want to plug in bulky USB devices. There is a camera, which supports Facetime, a pair of small speakers that perform reasonably well and a mini display port. You’ll need to go for the 13-inch model if you want an SD card slot. What you don’t get is an optical drive, which isn’t really a problem and should you decide you do need one, you can pair the Air with a desktop machine and use the optical drive of the bigger machine.

What you do want when you’re travelling is excellent battery life so that you can keep working when there are no power sockets to hand. Sadly, whilst the Air isn’t bad, it isn’t as impressive as Apple claim. Sure it displays a remaining battery life of five hours just after a charge but in reality it dies after about three and a half hours.

The 11-inch Mackbook Air is designed as a lightweight travelling companion for someone that has a bigger computer sitting on his or her desk. And for a small, easily portable Mac, it performs remarkably well. And it is so stylish that it will attract attention wherever it goes.

Steve Allison

At long last Cayman has arrived, and despite the delays, it was definitely worth the wait. I’m going to get the elephant out the room right now though, although we haven’t got the top of the range Cayman XT/6970 on test but rather the Cayman Pro/6950, the results are in. AMD has lost this round of the fastest single GPU war, neither Cayman GPU has the goods on the GTX580. That being said both Cayman’s are interestingly priced, particularly this one, the 6950. The 6950 packs some intriguing architecture and features as well, and although the architecture would’ve been far more effective on the originally planned smaller fabrication node buggered up by TSMC, the performance is commendable nonetheless.

AMD set the RRP for the 6950 at $299, which for a 5850 replacement should immediately make the 6950 a winner. Which it sort of is, but not entirely. One has to believe that the surprising price structure of the Cayman Pro came about for two reasons, at least that’s what I think. Firstly, this is AMD’s second generation DX11 and the architecture hasn’t changed a whole lot from their first generation. The tweaked architecture should in theory at least be cheaper to produce than Nvidia’s comparable products, particularly considering how long AMD have been producing 40nm DX11 parts. The second reason I can see is simple, AMD didn’t quite see the GTX500 series coming, and when Nvidia did show their hand AMD had to respond and with Cayman having already been delayed aggressive pricing was their best option. The net result is that the 6950 sits in a class of its own with no direct competition except for maybe the GTX470. So the RRP AMD set is quite frankly astounding. As I said though, the reason the price is so sweet is because the Cayman Pro/6950 isn’t as good as the GTX570, and the 6970 is roughly on a par with that card, but not the 6950. Still, for the money it is an exceptionally noteworthy piece of hardware.

The Cayman Pro GPU is clocked at 800MHz, and packs 1408 shaders, although there are rumours that if you flash it with a 6970 BIOS you’ll get the full whack 1536 stream processors. There’s a healthy 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, its clocked at 1250MHz and is of course 256-bit, so high res gaming should be handled nicely with that frame buffer. At max tilt the 6950 is a 200W card, but the idle is meagre at just 20W. All that then probably hasn’t captured your attention though as it really isn’t that different from preceding cards, there are however a few features that are all new.

For starters there’s one the overclockers should take serious note of, a ridiculously simple idea and yet still a first. The 6950 has a dual BIOS with an easily accessible hard switch. One BIOS is locked, you can’t touch it and is thus a backup of sorts that you know will always be there no matter, its peace of mind if you will. The other is obviously then unlocked, so you can flash to your hearts content without fear of a bricked card. Then there’s PowerTune Technology, which I won’t go into too much detail for want of space, but I highly recommend gamers look into it a little more. In very basic terms it allows your Cayman to run at consistently higher clock speeds than usual under extreme load thus improving performance. Without PowerTune if an application was strenuous enough it would sometimes force the card into a lower power state (i.e lower clock speed) so as to not exceed maximum TDP. With PowerTune the clock speed is dynamically adjusted to keep it as high as possible within TDP limits but without dropping a complete power state. The core itself is also designed in a slightly different manner making use of the improved VLIW4 configuration of stream processors arranged in groups of four with a general register for each group. Along with this arrangement being more compact tessellation performance can also be expected to improve, a weakness of some sort for AMD until now.

I was fortunate enough to get the 6950 on launch day for review, which was mid december by the way. This of course meant the christmas break was right around the corner, hence the review only going up now. Now what this meant for the test was that the 6950 underwent plenty of gaming tests, real world ones. And by plenty I really do mean a lot, I game almost non stop over the christmas period, a side effect of having no discernible social life. The conclusion from these extensive gaming sessions is that the 6950 copes easily with any new game at high resolution and decent visual settings such as AA and the like. We’ll get into more detailed benchmarking soon, but for now I think its important to highlight that the 6950 can handle anything smoothly.

As usual there are a variety of benchmarks we used, and also as usual relative performance varied throughout with both AMD and Nvidia punching and counter punching for the lead. F1 2010 was a good one for the 2GB 6950 with performance being right level with the more expensive GTX570, but performance fall off in Dirt 2 compared to the 570. In F1 as the res settings were upped the 6950 actually edged ahead of the 570, an impressive feat to say the least. Of course with the RAM advantage the the 6950 has, its not entirely unsurprising. As the biggest game of 2010 Call of Duty: Black ops needed a run as well, and whilst the 6950 fared well, it was nevertheless consistently slower than a 570. Averaging between 5-15 fps behind, but always comfortably ahead of a 470. The DX11 coded Aliens vs Predator has always been a good benchmark for AMD, it is actually one of the few remaining benchmarks where the now venerable 5970 can genuinely claim to be the fastest graphics card on the planet. The GTX580 seems to take that crown more and more with each new game. Anyway, AMD’s AvP power is present and correct with the new Cayman GPU’s as the 6950 is dead level with the 570 and obviously then superior to the 470.

The AvP benchmark did make me notice something interesting, DX11 games are where the Cayman architecture performs best on a relative scale. Metro 2033 for instance was another game (DX11) that the 6950 outperformed the 570 at higher resolutions, and Metro is a very tough benchmark. So to perform well there is significant. If DX11 gaming is your thing, then Cayman may well be the way to go.

So now we get to the concluding recommendation portion of the review, but I’m afraid its incomplete. The problem is that until Nvidia introduce a directly competitive card, presumably the GTX560, the 6950 is the only card in this particular bracket and hence the best. So if a GTX570/HD6970 is just a bit too much cash but the mid range GTX460/HD6870 leaves you cold, this is literally the only card for you. From a price/performance perspective, its a very good piece of hardware, but then so are all the cards on either side of it from both Nvidia and AMD. Ultimately then this is the one to get for now pending either Nvidia price cuts for the GTX570 or the introduction of a GTX560. One thing is for sure though, the stiff competition in the graphics market with both sides so equally matched is good news for us all, as to have this level of performance under $300 is as I said in the beginning, astounding. And it really is all thanks to Nvidia’s timely introduction of the brutally effective GTX500 series. So, thanks Nvidia, I guess.

Specs

Score: 8/10

Liked: Excellent performance for a sub $300 card

Disliked: Cayman just isn’t as good as expected