Who are Medion? They are a large German electronics company, now owned by Chinese computer giant Lenovo. The screen on the netbook is small, it could do with more RAM and the processor, despite being quad-core, is not particularly fast. But as, say, a second or spare laptop it may be very interesting to some people. It can also be purchased with 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive for £299, which is a worthwhile upgrade. Something to consider if a tablet or Chromebook doesn't work for you.
Well, sort of. It works like this: Medion have a netbook (remember netbooks?) called the Akoya K1317T Touch laptop. It has an AMD quad-core processor, a 10.1" touch screen, 500GB hard disk, 2GB RAM and runs Windows 8. It sells for £249.00 - which makes it one of the cheapest computers around - but, rather amazingly, it comes with a full copy of Microsoft Office 2013 Home & Student edition (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) pre-installed. Office is pretty much a pre-requisite for any computer; it normally retails for £109.95 so deduct this cost and you are basically getting the laptop for just £139.05.
Who are Medion? They are a large German electronics company, now owned by Chinese computer giant Lenovo. The screen on the netbook is small, it could do with more RAM and the processor, despite being quad-core, is not particularly fast. But as, say, a second or spare laptop it may be very interesting to some people. It can also be purchased with 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive for £299, which is a worthwhile upgrade. Something to consider if a tablet or Chromebook doesn't work for you. HP's latest Chromebook - the HP Chromebook 11 (as announced here) is hot. No, really it is. So much so that HP have been forced to withdraw it from sale. Apparently the charger overheats, so much so that HP are also advising existing customers not to use it. Fortunately, a unique selling proposition of the HP Chromebook is (was?) that it uses a standard micro-USB connection of the sort also used by mobile phones and tablets, so there is a good chance that customers might already have a suitable alternative charger for now.
Dell have introduced a compact file server, the PowerEdge T20. Whilst not as petite as the HP Microserver or the Western Digital DS 5100/6100, it is nonetheless smaller than most entry level servers. Internally, it uses server grade components, meaning it is not just a souped-up PC masquerading as a server. The PowerEdge has a choice of Intel Pentium or Xeon processors, is expandable up to 32GB RAM, has four 3.5" drive bays plus can accommodate another two 2.5" drives via an expansion kit. Dell are aiming this server at the small office and the home-based office. No operating system is supplied, but a suitable offering would be Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. One shortcoming of the T20 is that it only has software-based RAID, which we would not recommend (see The World of Fake RAID). A number of pre-canned configurations are available from the Dell website. At the time of writing, a Xeon-based model with 2 x 1 TB SATA drives, 8GB RAM and a basic one year warranty costs £528 + VAT. Allow for a copy of Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and some form of backup drive and you are looking at over £1000 for a working system. Whilst not outrageous, a Seagate Business NAS with 4TB storage and a backup drive is currently available (15/11/2013) from ebuyer for less than £200 and would provide sufficient functionality for many (see http://www.ebuyer.com/491331-seagate-4tb-business-storage-2-bay-nas-external-hdd-black-stbn4000200). Sound too good to be true? Well, there are some restrictions but it's true - you can watch Sky TV for a fiver a month (actually it's £4.99!). The key to this is the Now TV streaming box, itself only £10 and which we discussed back in August (see http://ctacs.weebly.com/1/category/sky/1.html). To recap, the streaming box is a small device that plugs into the back of your television and connects to your wireless network. TV channels are streamed over the internet and into your home. On the Now TV box (or the Roku on which it is based) there are a handful of free channels - Sky News, BBC News, RT and so on - plus some weird and wacky stuff. Additionally, you can watch Sky Sports for £9.99 a day (!) or Sky Movies for £8.99 a month. But now Sky have introduced an 'Entertainment pack'. This gives both live and on-demand access (there are some restrictions) to 10 channels: Sky 1, Sky Living, Sky Atlantic, Sky Arts 1, Comedy Central, Gold, Discovery, MTV, Fox and Disney Channel. The price is just £4.99 a month for people who sign-up before 31st March 2014; Sky are not saying, but presumably the price will increase thereafter. Just to be very clear - this does not use a Sky dish. Everything is done over the internet, but you don't have to be a Sky broadband customer or indeed any sort of existing Sky customer. No doubt some people who do have a Sky satellite subscription will switch to this lower cost service, but it should really appeal to people who maybe have Freeview or Freesat but who would like a limited selection of quality channels at an affordable price on top. The terms and conditions are very generous. You are not restricted to Now TV or Roku boxes - it also works (or shortly will) on PCs, Macs, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, iPads and iPhones. You are allowed to register four devices per household, and two can be in use at the same time. There is no long term contract - it is just 30 days at a time. So, even if the price went silly after the introductory rate ends, you are not tied in and your investment has been minimal. A new generation of gaming consoles is hitting the shops in time for Christmas, in the form of the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox One from Microsoft. Whilst we don't usually cover gaming, these machines are significant in that they illustrate the way in which entertainment and computing are converging. The PlayStation 4 (PS4) launches in the UK on November 29th. It is claimed that it has 10 times the processing power of its predecessor, which will make it the most powerful computing device in many households. This powers a new generation of internet-connected, interactive games and entertainment features. Or does it? Somewhat surprisingly, there's actually quite a lot of things that the PS4 cannot do. Out of the box, it doesn't play Blu-ray movies - you have to update the software in order to do this. Want to play an ordinary audio CD? It doesn't do that. How about playing MP3's then? Nope. Existing games from the PS3, PS2 and PS1 don't work either. Plug in an external USB drive for more storage? Not supported. Connect to a home DLNA network for serving? Nah. Existing peripherals (controllers, headsets and such) don't work either. A more comprehensive list can be found on their North American PS4 site at http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/10/30/ps4-the-ultimate-faq-north-america/ It is not unreasonable that Sony wants you to buy new stuff rather than use existing items. After all, they are in this business to make money. Some of the issues could be addressed in software updates. But some of the decisions (no support for audio CDs and MP3s for instance) are because they want you to subscribe to their online streaming services. In the not so very distant future, physical items such as CDs and DVDs are set to vanish and the PS4 pre-dates these developments. Interestingly, Microsoft's Xbox One, which launches on November 22nd, still does support most of these features. It will be interesting to see which one has read the market correctly. |
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