Any businessman obsessed with the bottom line must love how Acer goes about things. A company that sees a high end market, figures out what people want, gives it to them while undercutting rivals and (generally) managing not to compromise too much on the build in the process. As one review we caught of the Acer Aspire 532H mentioned, the Taiwanese manufacturer figured out early that basic netbooks at lower prices would fly off shelves and so it has proved in this model’s case.

The 10.1-inch netbook packs an Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, Windows 7 Starter, 160GB hard drive and a six-cell battery, it also shines. Yep, unlike the previous Aspire One 751h, this little shiny guy comes a multi-colored, metallic-like blue and black lid, which reminded the Engadget reviewer of “those old school hypercolor stickers that would change color with heat”. Not a bad description.

Generally well reviewed, the Aspire 532H has plenty going for it.

Overall, then yep, the look is great to begin with (though it is fingerprint prone into the bargain), while the keyboard – so often the cause for much debate when it comes to netbooks – came in for praise from this review we found on Cnet.

It is, the reviewer says, “a far cry from the tiny finger-cramping keyboards of last-generation Netbooks. It has wide edge-to-edge keys, and decent-size versions of Shift, Tab, and other important keys. The corners of each key are rounded, rather than square, giving it a mod look.”

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Released last year to almost uniformly good reviews, the ultra slim-line 12.1-megapixel Canon IXUS 100 IS is the kind of unobtrusive, light, high-spec option the majority of people are after when choosing a new digital camera these days. You want it for holidays, you want it for weekends away, you want it for taking pictures for insurance claims… y’know the usual usage. Well the 100 IS ticks all those boxes, it’s “a gem” in fact as CNet puts it.

Initially pegged as a model that might be more about style than features – and it does look good to be fair to the people at Canon – a glance through the reviews that have crept out on the 100 IS since it began selling last spring thankfully reveals that while the you get a slimmer, lighter model than previous Canon digitals, there’s no sacrifice on the overall quality of the product.

Hairy arms, slimline cameras - the unveiling of the Canon Digital IXUS 100 IS line last year.

Camera.co.uk summed up the general mood of the reviewing public calling the 100 IS a very good, pocket sized option that “scores highly for picture quality, style and features”. Continue Reading

When I sat down to go through the expert opinion out there on the Samsung HT-BD7200 home cinema Blu-ray system I didn’t exactly expect to go on a trip round Europe. However, like a pool shark who just goes where the tables are, we went wherever people were talking about this system (not sure that’s a great way of putting it but I was playing pool earlier this week so it kinda popped into my head).

As one of the lads in the office said when the product was brought up, “I know a couple of AV geeks who love it”, and true enough the consumer reviews out there are almost universally popular, but when it came to expert opinion we leaped from the UK, to Sweden, to Germany and also to France and the result was… well, varied to say the least with some experts viewing the BD7200 as a good looking object for the sitting room but not necessarily the most effective Blu-ray home cinema choice they could think of.

First off, the HT-BD7200 looks great, even with crappy wallpaper in the background.

Other reviews meanwhile attached words like ‘sharp’, ‘elegant’, ‘fabulous’ and more to describe the highly popular Samsung offering. Komplett of course came out on top in terms of price on this particular system in the recent ToPrice Electronics Consumer Price Report so we were more than a little intrigued to see what people were saying about it.

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The first thing we had to decide once the idea of focusing on Sony’s almost rudely successful Bravia line came up, was where along the price range to focus our attention – I mean if we wanted to we could go for something like the 52-inch €1,800 model or then again for those on a budget there’s the much-loved in review-land €507 32-inch Bravia LCD-TV KDL-32EX402.

The price for a TV of the 40V5500’s size is unexpected, thankfully very little is sacrificed on the features end.

However, all things considered we tried to land somewhere in the middle and that led us to the 40-inch (we did say ‘somewhere’ in the middle) Sony Bravia KDL-40V5500. Priced at just over €700, it’s been a wildly popular model since its release in mid-2009 and indeed it’s the relatively small outlay that attracted so many reviewers in its direction. The big questions were just how a Sony 40-inch could have such a small price, and indeed what exactly has been stripped away to get it there?

Thankfully, the answer, having dug through a considerable amount of expert opinion on the matter, is very, very little. As LCDTV Reviews said when it weighed up the 40V5500’s pros and cons, while being “relatively moderate in its pricing” it does that “without making any compromise on the feature part”.

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The Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition was released last summer and much like Terminator Salvation it was initially deemed as a possible step down from its predecessors. Time has not seen many change their minds on McG’s misguided noisefest but in the months that followed the X2 550’s release, public opinion has warmed to its capabilities.

The 550 is based on the same specifications as the rest of the Phenom II family, but featuring half as many cores, being a dual-core processor; hence some early fears about its performance. It operates at 3.10GHz, so about 100MHz slower (per core) than the flagship X4 955 but, as the reviews showed when we went looking, it seems AMD hit the nail squarely on the head this time around. There are four star and four-and-a-half star reviews all over the place, not to mention several ratings of nine out of ten.

The press bumf that accompanied the Phenom II series’ launch on the market told how these would be processors “for high definition entertainment, gaming, creativity, and beyond”. TechRadar announced at the beginning of its review that the Phenom II CPUs had “managed to bring the processor wing of the company back into competition with Intel”.

Honing in on the 550 BE in particular though, they did ask that one big question everyone seems to have had when initially weighing up its merits; with affordable four-core chips roaming about looking all powerful, was the release of a dual-core processor like the 550 a retrograde step?

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After my Meteor broadband went all Keyser Söze on me this afternoon I was tempted to change my Review of the Reviews to just basically a mixture of slander, conjuncture and sordid rumours about their ‘broadband to go’ offering. But, having calmed down, headed to an internet cafe and said those magic words – serenity now, serenity now – I took a scan through our sister site (Komplett.ie) to see what product might be good to delve into.

Those who buy it, love it – the WD TV Live Media Player

Fairly quickly, the consistently loved up messages from various customers on the WD TV Live Media Player – Western Digital’s second generation HD player – caught my eye. With an increasing demand for easy ways to get our digital content from our PCs to our TVs, devices such as the WDTV Live have seen business pick up greatly in the last year and some Komplett users, such as George Falls, are certainly impressed. “Have to say, it’s played absolutely everything I’ve thrown at it. Well worth the money,” he said.

Then there was Anthony, who told us that he was delighted after getting the media player for Christmas,

“The product is compact & portable, easy to set up/use, has a nice user interface and picture quality is fantastic. It plays pretty much every video file type you can think of and picked up my external HDDs/Flash drives in a matter of seconds,” he said. “Also connected it to my router via ethernet cable which is handy for streaming large blu-ray movies from my PC and allows you to upgrade product firmware.”

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Battery running low. On a rickety Irish Rail train with no outlet in sight. Notebook or netbook about to die. Little you can do about it but tap away at the keyboard until you’re left with a black screen and an over-priced chicken and stuffing sandwich to distract you when it does so. It’s moments like this that have led to articles like this.

We decided it was time to look at some expert views to help guide both notebook and netbook owners on what’s the best bet for getting the most out of their battery between Windows XP and Windows 7. The men who work in the bowels of Komplett Towers are usually the best to ask these kinds of questions and thankfully Shelton and Ryan – our two RMA guys to the uninitiated – gave some answers and didn’t complain about me distracting them from more important things.

The Canuck Buck Shelton (as absolutely nobody around here calls him) said that “from a ‘keeping current’ standpoint” he’d prefer, if getting a newer notebook, to go with Windows 7. Asked to explain, he said, “It’s a hell of a lot better than Vista was and I generally enjoy it as an alternative to XP. I think though, as Marc (fellow Komplett blogger) recently pointed out to me, XP was never truly written with notebooks in mind, so even though it has less features and is less demanding on the hardware, it’s not as efficient and may end up sucking up a bit more power over time.”

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Launched under the promise that “HD gaming starts here”, the ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics processor make a few boasts from the get go; the promotional notes start by telling us how it offers “best-in-class performance and features, with complete DirectX 11 support and the world’s most advanced graphics, display and memory technologies”.

Overall then, from the promo material they’re not exactly selling themselves short then, but a few weeks on from its release onto the market has ATI really lived up to its word? Previous Radeons such as the HD 5870, HD 5850 and HD 5770 cover a lot of bases when it comes to DX11 but where the 5670 is set to make its mark, as one review notes, is as a low cost DX11 card (around €70 or $100) that, perhaps most importantly considering its mass market audience, does not require an external power connector.

As Bit-Tech reveal, “Of course, dropping an external power connector and targeting a lower price point mean that there have had to be some significant cuts when it comes to the core hardware involved. The 40nm GPU, codenamed Redwood (to the 57xx series’ Juniper and the 58xx series’ Cypress) sports a lowly 400 stream processors running at 775MHz (in comparison to the HD 5770’s 800 and the HD 5870’s1,600 stream processors, running at 725MHz and 850MHz respectively), with those 400 comprising just twenty texture units.”

Elsewhere, Techspot have a good run through some of the other basics of the new ATI offering noting that it’s the first board in the HD 5000 series to use a single slot design, making it a solid choice for HTPC systems. “The card is said to consume just 61 watts of power under load, which is considerably less than the 108 watts of the Radeon HD 5770, or the 188 watts of the Radeon HD 5870. As a result the Radeon HD 5670 should generate little noise and likely overclock very well.”

They add that, on paper, it looks like the 5670 “is aiming for the GeForce GT 240, and we can’t help but feel worried that they have not set their goals for the Radeon HD 5670 higher”. Tom’s Hardware pick up this point saying the 5670’s aim is directed towards the less-expensive GeForce 9600 GT not to mention Nvidia’s aging GeForce 9800 GT.

Compared to the Radeon HD 5770, which measures 21cm, the Radeon HD 5670 is just 17cm long. This is the same as the GeForce GT 240 and therefore should fit in any case that can support a mATX motherboard. Techspot notes that there are only eight ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units), which is exactly half as many as the Radeon HD 5770, and the same as the older Radeon HD 4670.

The latter point is something that was picked up on by Bit-Tech as well, as they said that this unfortunately results in the 5670 being a “card that is a notable step down in GPU performance” from previous incarnations. But before we all lose the run of ourselves there is method to the madness. The makers have “at least chosen to furnish the HD 5670 with a 128-bit memory bus – the same as the HD 57xx series – and furnished the card with GDDR5 memory in either 512MB or 1GB configurations (most cards at launch will use 1GB), with the memory running at 1GHz (4GHz effective). All these hardware cuts have come with the benefit of much lower power demands though, allowing the HD 5670 to tip the scales at a miserly 61W typical maximum board power, and an excellent idle power draw of just 14W. This low power consumption has allowed ATI to do away with any kind of additional power connector, crucial for the low-end upgrade market where manufactures want to simplify the installation procedure as much as possible,” remarked Bit-Tech.

HardOCP’s very thorough review said that in tests the 5670 improved upon the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce GT 240 “and allowed us to turn many in-game settings up to ‘gamer’ level. This includes: texture quality, physics quality, volumetric, game effects, post-processing, particles, water and motion blur quality. The gameplay experience is enhanced, the textures look much better. However, shaders quality is still at ‘mainstream’, it just couldn’t push ‘gamer’ shaders even at 1680×1050.”

The promo material referred to earlier also went on to say that the HD 5670 allows you to, “Expand your visual real estate across up to three displays and get lost in the action with ATI Eyefinity Technology,” Eyefinity being a technology created to work with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, required for panning across three displays and to enable a third display you require one panel with a DisplayPort connector.

Tackling the Eyefinity feature Tom’s Hardware says that while the GPU powering the HD 5670 is technically capable of handling four displays, “the company let us know that its launch cards will be limited to three due to the real estate issues of fitting the outputs on a single-slot I/O bracket”. Manufacturers, they add, have the option of offering a 5670 able to exploit four displays at once, though we have to imagine such functionality would typically be reserved for the high-end.

“The biggest potential drawback here ironically applies to gamers. Is the Radeon HD 5670 powerful enough to handle the ludicrous resolutions that Eyefinity requires? Probably not, considering aggressive Eyefinity resolutions can bring even the Radeon HD 5870 to a crawl. But AMD suggests that 4800×900 (three monitors running 1600×900 each) is a playable arrangement on this new board,” adds the report.

Summing things up nicely, one ComputerShopper review said that, all in all, “in real-world gaming tests, the HD 5670 is impressive for the price”, adding that “it’ll tackle mainstream games with ease, and it should handle demanding DirectX 10 games at anything up to 1,920×1,200, so long as you’re willing to dial down some of the settings”.

More pertinently, across the reviews we saw the general theory was that this card also puts ATI even further ahead of rival Nvidia, which has yet to release a DX11 card.

Overall Review of Reviews Rating: 6.5/10

Speaking as someone who, due to circumstances beyond my control (I’m poor), presently watches TV on a late ‘80s Panasonic behemoth that has outlasted Governments, wars, Glenroe and the Police Academy franchise, looking through the types of TV tech that will make a mark over the coming year became just a rolling series of me finding a product, going through the specs, and screaming ‘I want, I want, I want’.

For now, I’ll have to stick with the Panasonic (a machine so sturdy I’m nearly certain it could survive a nuclear attack ala that fridge in Indiana Jones), but for those with a little change in their back pocket there’s some great options out there. For one, we can start well away from enormo-screens or 3D hype and take a look at the Kula TV, announced last week by US-based Sungale and available in March.

The little fella delivers up TV treats via a modest 4.3-inch LCD screen and Wi-Fi connectivity “The Kula is the next big thing that will revolutionize the way people watch TV,” enthused Sungale vice president of sales Gary Bennett. Though he remained tight-lipped over any model for usage fees, TheTechHerald did report however that, “Content will be offered to prospective users through a number of different packages, which include Basic, Kid and Grand. While both the Basic and Kid options provide free access to between 20 and 30 channels, the fee-based Grand package will have more than 300 channels to choose from.” A similar system should be reasonably easy to set up this side of the Atlantic.

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When Nokia recently announced the launch of an updated version of Ovi Maps that offers free walking and driving navigation to users of Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones, it’s fair to say that some of the guys at Garmin and TomTom might have been a tad peeved at the prospect of a new buck in town trying to steal their business, indeed stock prices at both companies took a minor hit when the announcement was made last week.

However, a Garmin spokeswoman hit back almost instantly, saying that the company is “already innovating” and noted that it offers similar free services, including on its Nüvifone line. If Nokia are to make a dent in the market though, it will most likely be at the entry level side of things, but a glance through reviews of two popular entry level Garmin models – the Nüvi 200W and Nüvi 205 – reveal that for reliability and functionality, a trusted name in a trusted format may still be the choice for many when it comes to navigation on a budget.

Even the mini Jeremy Clarkson's out there like them...

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We trawl the web so you don’t have to…

Whether it was a sudden surge of creativity or a tactical carpet bombing of the mini-notebook market, 2008 was a year full of new releases for Asus. That March they released the EeePC 700 before the 900 model came along two months later. Then, the Asus EeePC901 followed in July before the 1000 series began to take hold, with one its core releases being the September unveiling of the 1000HD.

The Asus Eee PC 1000HD was released to solid reviews and is still a great buy at under €250.

Indeed, the seemingly endless stream of Eee PC models have been a consumer favourite ever since they hit the market, with the overall range selling around five million units by the end of 2008 and, in keeping with this, the 1000HD certainly had high expectations from reviewers upon it’s release.

If you’re wondering what all the ‘Es’ stand for by the way and quite possibly find yourself humming ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ while you do so, well they stand for ‘Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play’ and even a cursory look through some of the reviews online for the Eee PC 1000HD (and its brothers in arms in the 1000 series such as the 1000, 1000H, 1001HA and 1005HA) will reveal that the 1000 range lives up to all three maxims.

Richard West of the Shamen, possibly pictured while disgusted that ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ wasn’t used for yet another Eee PC launch…

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We’re often asked what display we’d recommend for people looking for a monitor for around a certain price. It’s a relatively easy one to do, but given the sheer number of inquiries we get, we thought some of you might appreciate a blog post that outlines some of the monitors that we really like and think offer excellent value for money at their prices.

We’re going to recommend entry-level monitor, two mid-range and one relatively high-end display. It’s relatively simple, so we’ll get straight into it.

Entry Level:

Whenever someone asks us to recommend a monitor that comes in at as low a price as possible but that they can still rely on to give them a good image reliable, we always recommend the Acer 18.5” LCD.

Click through to see our page for Acer's 18.5-inch LCD

Considering its genuinely surprisingly low price, it’s a very solid device indeed. At 18.5” and such a low price, it’s not going to be too surprising that it doesn’t quite manage Full HD, but it does boast a maximum output resolution of 1366×768, which isn’t something to turn your nose up at. Moreover, as the name implies, it is a widescreen display, so it’s still an excellent one to plug into a notebook if you’re one for watching movies directly from machines with a smaller screen.

Of course, the one downside is that it only takes VGA as input, so that could well limit your options a little. Still, it’s not too hard to pick up an Xbox 360 to VGA adaptor, and considering the fact that the combination of an adaptor and this display will set you back relatively little, it’s an excellent way to free up the living room TV if you’re living in a house with any avid console gamers. It’s also got a response time of 5ms, which should be plenty fast enough for most gamers.

Acer’s 18.5” Wide display is only €108.55, which has inspired at least one of our readers to pick up no fewer than four of them; it’s an impressive array, though what he thinks to do with four displays I can’t imagine. I’m sure one is permanently sitting on Facebook by now…

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