The MX Revelation

If you approached me about 8 weeks ago, I would have told you that spending $100 on a mouse was absurd. You can get any optical mouse from the nearest store for about $5. When purchasing my laptop, my father’s superbly charismatic nature kicked in, and he managed to convince the salesman to throw in a free Logitech MX Revolution. At the time, I was boisterously excited, but would have been no less happy without it. A mouse is a mouse. Or so I thought. A quick glance at the MX Revolution will reveal your usual left and right-click buttons, a scrollwheel, a quick search button, a thumbwheel on the side, and two adjacent thumb buttons. Novelties.

Logitech MX Revolution

But the truth is, the mouse quickly began to have an effect on my computing experiance from all aspects. The laser feature meant that the mouse was surprisingly accurate. I was able to move the pointer around the screen a lot faster without having to add in correctional movements before every click. This also had a lasting effect on gaming. Wireless mice are usually useless when it comes to first person shooters, but the MX Revolution doesn’t have the same transmission lag as other wireless mice, and the precision is excellent, which was great when sniping.

The quick search button was useful, but although I search frequently, it’s not a very difficult and long-winded feat. Something I found a lot more useful was to replace it with the Vista snipping tool. This now means that I can take screenshots and send them to people in a split second, rather than my old long-winded Ctrl+Alt+PrintScrn followed by Paint or Photoshop.I assigned the thumb wheel to volume control, and this meant I could mute the volume without thinking. Highly useful in numerous situations which I’ll leave for your imagination to discover.

The scrollwheel also has a freespin feature which means on flick of a finger could take you through over a 100 pages in a document. You can also scroll left and right by nudging it either way. The back and forward thumb buttons do exactly that on webpages, but can be re-assigned like every other button in the mouse.

Something which used to annoy me about my old mouse was how I had to replace the batteries every 3 or 4 weeks. The MX revolution is rechargeable, and comes with a charging stand, even though the battery lasts about 2 weeks without charge. Plug and play means plug and play with this device as well. No scrabbling, waving, or endless clicking in order to try to get the computer to reconginse it. It’s also very comfortable in your hand, and looks extremely stylish.

What I realised after about 2 months of use was that I could no longer live without this mouse. It’s features were so useful they quickly became second nature, and my overall computer efficiency improved dramatically. Almost all interactions with computers nowadays are through a keyboard and mouse, and when browsing the web, you couldn’t do without a mouse. For those who use computers on a regular basis, you should greatly consider getting a good-quality mouse like this. I spend so many hours on a computer every day, that this mouse is irreplaceable. And it only kicked in after I found myself trying to use a non-existent thumb wheel on another PC a couple of days ago.

Alternatives to the iPod

Over 140 million people own an iPod worldwide. People nowadays don’t go out to buy a digital audio player any more, but the go out to buy an iPod. This is a real shame as people fail to understand the potential of the other DAPs on the market.

Creative, Samsung, Sony and Microsoft all have alternatives which are cheaper and better than the iPod. Yet the iPod still sells much more units.

Please, look at everything on the market before you buy an iPod. Please.

External Reading:

• Samsung P2
• Microsoft Zune

The timid NAS

The Network Attached Storage has always been, in my opinion, one of the most useful pieces of hardware that one could find in a household of 3 or more computers. The reason I believe this to be the case is the pure practicality of having such a device. Let me explain.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, the majority of end-users still seem to be unaware of the importance of backing up files. There are over a thousand different ways that you PC could lose all its data immediately making it very difficult to recover anything. Investing in a device such as an external hard disk is very important and becoming more and more popular. But a NAS is one step ahead. So what is this NAS thing I keep referring to?

A Network Attached Storage device is something which is attached to a computer network and made accessible to all the users on that network. It houses one or more hard disks which can be used for multiple purposes; the first and foremost being a central backup location. If you have many computers in your house and want to back them all up regularly, you can simply set all the computers to back up on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. This means you no longer have to worry about backing up your computer. Just leave it on before you sleep and it’ll back up and turn off by itself. Beautiful. You can also use the NAS as a print server. The majority of printers on the market today are USB 2.0 and do not usually allow for network expansion which therefore means only you can print from it. Yes, you can always connect your printer to a PC and share it, but that means the PC connected to the printer has to be on all the time. Nicht Gut. Most NAS devices come with one or two USB ports so this solves your problem. You can plug your printer into your NAS! You can also use the device as a central storage location for you household. You can put all your music files on there and set up your music library to simply link to your library instead of duplicating a library 12 times. All your family photos and valuable info can go on there for safe storage, and best of all, you can set it up as an FTP server. This means that if you’re on holiday in Taiwan and really want to listen to access your files, it’s only a step away. Type in the IP of your NAS in a browser (or a domain name if you’ve set one up for the NAS) and type in your username and password. The Network Attached Storage device is a necessity for “wired” households and, although it’s been around for years, it hasn’t been exploited to its pull potential.

Microsoft has obviously seen the need for such a device and made a new operating system called Windows Home Server. This software is seen by Microsoft as “better than NAS devices”. I don’t think this is entirely true. Windows Home Server is just extremely easy to use whereas NAS requires a bit more networking knowledge to set up and maintain. It’s up to you to make the choice. The home server option however, is going to be a lot more expensive. The Microsoft OS costs a dollar under $600 for the 500MB version and increases for the terabyte version. Then you have to take the price of the hardware into consideration. NAS suddenly becomes considerably cheap when you can get it for about $400 for a 1-terabyte device.

I hope you see now why the NAS is such a useful device. My personal favourite is the Maxtor Shared Storage II. Check it out.

The iPhone

I’m not sure if the Guinness World Records has a recognition for the most over-hyped product ever released in an industry, but the iPhone definitely is deserving of such an award. I really respect and admire Apple for their innovation and originality and I see some potential in this product, but it is really not what Apple makes it out to be. Some 2.3 million iPhones have been sold in the first quarter of 2008, and I have to say, somewhere in their HQ in California, Apple has a really good marketing team.

I say this because, comparatively, the iPhone is actually average when you look at the other smart phones on sale. The proud owner of a HTC TyTN, I assure you that the iPhone has nowhere near the “smartness” the the TyTN has. This is, unfortunately, a fact, and you can see it right here. The iPhone doesn’t even have bluetooth! When it comes to style, however, the iPhone excels. The Mobile Mac OS is even more fluid than the desktop one, and everything works like a dream. Other smartphones tend to lose this fluid motion the moment they get filled with third-party software, fragmented files, and excessive memory usage. This is the only advantage I can see to not allowing third-party apps on the iPhone.

Until Now. That’s right, during his keynote speech at Macworld 2008 Steve Jobs announced that the Apple iPhone Software Development Kit was soon to come. Will the iPhone lose the one upper hand it currently has, or will it be able to find a compromise between fluidity and memory-intensive applications. Only time will tell.

The Game Consoles

There are many games consoles out there, Let’s start with the Nintendo Wii. The Wii is arguably the most original and innovative console on the market. It comes with a remote control which is based around physical motion rather than just pushing buttons, and this gives gaming a new dimension. The remote uses several accelerometers (The same thing used in the iPhone and the iPod Touch) and infrared to detect where it is and you can use it therefore as a golf club, ping-pong racket, baseball bat, you get the picture. This makes the Wii an appealing device to consumers of all ages. But the thing about the Wii is that it really has nowhere near the graphics or processing power of the Xbox, let alone the Playstation, and this means that once you have played Wii sports enough, and the classic Nintendo games like Zelda have been completed, it’s going to become excessively boring for anyone who strives to be called a gamer.

The Xbox on the other hand, actually has something going for it. For the time being. Yes, it’s a powerful console, and it’s online gaming is fantastic, and Halo 3, and it has good integration with Windows. Which is all good. In fact, I must really state at this point that the xbox 360 is a fantastic games console. Yes, it might sound like an airplane when it starts up; the motherboard might fry after a couple of months of purchase; it may still run on DVD; you may have to buy an extra little add-on to enable wireless; you may have to buy an extra big add-on to be able to use HD DVD on it; the list goes on. The point is, for a hardcore gamer, the xbox 360 is actually not that bad.

Unfortunately, the Playstation is just better. There are many reasons for this. First of all, it must be acknowledged that games are actually a very small component of what is knon as the games console today. That’s right. In today’s world, the games console is purchased by the majority of consumers not so much for its games capabilities as its place in the multimedia home. And the Playstation 3 definitely wins in this category as you can barely here it running so you can watch your movie in peace, it has a 60GB hard disk, it has a built in memory card reader, it looks nice in the living room, and it has a Blu-ray player. Second of all, it has much more brawn than the xbox. Although, admittedly, the current xbox games are dominating, xbox game developers have had a year longer than playstation developers, and this has given them a huge advantage. The price for playstation game development has also been significantly larger then that of the xbox until recently as well. It’s only a matter of time before the playstation overtakes the xbox in the games market. Last but not least, the playstation 3, despite being the most expensive console of the 3, is by far the most value for money, and has been the cheapest blu-ray player on the market ever since it came out.

In summary, if you just want a console to entertain you on the rare occasions that you have no work, you’re not out, the library is closed and you’ve read all the books on your bedside table, then the Wii is definitely for you. Otherwise, buy a playstation 3.

The Format War

As this tends to get the most media coverage in the tech world at the moment, the High Definition battle is very fitting for my first post.

In our ever-advancing technological world today, (wow that sentence is so clichéd), standard DVD is not going to last much longer. High Definition is the new thing, and the picture quality is breathtaking. In fact many say that once you switch to HDTV, conventional Television will never look the same again. The switch to HDTV has already been initiated in thousands of homes across the world, with people already buying “HD ready” TVs to get ready for the arrival of the format into mainstream media. This is why a normal DVD, with only 4.7 GB of space, is nowhere near enough to hold the data needed for a full-length High-Definition film. RCA cables also don’t have enough bandwidth to get all that HD info in for each frame… That’s why you have to use component or HDMI cables for High Definition picture. But which format is best?

Blu-ray is a relatively new format, founded in 2002 by Sony and 8 other leading companies in today’s competitive tech industry. It has many advantages over the normal DVD format, foremost being its capacity. DVDs today have, on average 4.7 GB of potential space on them, wheras Blu-ray fits in up to 50GB of space on it, even though it’s approximately the same physical size as the DVD. Yes, I agree, it’s pure genius. HD DVD on the other hand, can only 30GB however, and capacity is probably the one most important thing that any upcoming format has to consider. The Definition is only going to get better, and it’s going to need as much space as possible. Also, with the arrival of HD games, I don’t see disks lasting much longer either way. There is going to be another solution to the transportation of data from media to your TV screen. So Blu-ray is definitely a better format, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that it should have won the format war. For those of you who remember the VHS-Betamax format war, Betamax was definitely a more advanced format technologically, but consumers preferred VHS due to it’s practicality and you know what happened.

Either way, after Wal-mart switched to Blu-ray, Toshiba gave up their HD DVD quest and folded their hand; they finally realized they couldn’t win.