Spend £100 on a sat nav and you can expect regional maps, and at the most safety camera info. Spend £300-400 and it will play music, answer calls and display photos.
TomTom has been the undisputed sat nav king for years, with every other manufacturer snapping – but never quite biting – at its perfectly formed heels. The GO930 is its top of the range device, incorporating this seasons sat nav essentials: map share and lane advice.
Despite being pioneers in sat nav development for many years, Navigon only introduced its first dedicated device recently and the 8100 sits at the top of the range. Could this prove a serious TomTom botherer? We hit motorways, cornered country lanes, got frustrated in traffic and got lost, to find out.
Death match 1: Features
Avoid jams with the traffic receiver and go hands-free with built-in Bluetooth on the TomTom 930 T. There’s an FM Transmitter and even a built-in help guide offering boy-scout level medical advice. The innovative map correction lets you report errors, but it’s the neat features like recordable voice commands and selectable cars which makes the 930T so enjoyable.
On the Navigon, you get Bluetooth, Text to speech, European maps, free Traffic updates via Trafficmaster and two years of free map updates via FreshMaps. There’s the obligatory photo viewer and mp3 player. Come on though, does anyone actually use them?
Winner: TomTom Go 930
Death match 2: Ease of use
TomTom’s standard simple interface and responsive touchscreen are incredibly easy to use. The new advanced Lane Guidance flashes with massive motorway-style signs up to ensure you exit at the correction junction and the excellent IQ routes selects the optimum journey for the time of day.
Maps on the 8110 are easier to follow than the TomTom, partly due to the generous (if occasionally sluggish) 4.8in screen, and put simply, better graphics. With lane assistance (which works on every type of road CHECK) and reality view for replicating motorway signs, you’ve got to be really stupid to go the wrong way. By showing maps topographically, you also get warning if the road you’re heading for is actually a perilous slope.
Winner: Navigon 8110
Death match 3: Performance
Locking onto within seconds, the GO930T trounces the Navigon finding a satellite. Route calculation fares less well, don’t get us wrong, ranging from 2-20 seconds in a town; it’s very impressive, just not as quick as the Navigon. It reroutes quickly and despite confusion with overlapping the M4/A4 roads, route navigation was smooth.
Satellite lock-on takes longer than the TomTom on the Navigon, but once there, route calculation is consistently under 10 seconds. Instructions are clear and it reroutes incredibly fast, only getting slightly confused with the wilderness of an M4 service station.
Winner: TomTom Go 930
Rating
With outstandingly clear maps and fast calculations, the Navigon 8100 is a serious challenger, But for now, the 930T is the sat nav that does everything – whether you need it or not.
Eee PC fans, turn away now, quite simply the Asus M70 is a monster; a huge black, shiny dinner tray of a PC that weighs more than the average newborn human being.
If, on the other hand, you were after a portable (though only just) high-def-ready media centre-type machine with which to regale and bedazzle your eyes and ears wherever you might happen to lay your hat, then the M70 could well be your man.
With a built-in Blu-ray player, Dolby Theater sound and a rather tasty 17″ HD-resolution display, you can either enjoy your fill of high defness on the move or, using the HDMI output, on your home HD-ready TV.
Asus includes a digital TV tuner for watching and recording Freeview with Windows Media Center, which can, of course, also be used for all manner of musical or moviecal activities. The stupidly roomy 1 terabyte hard disk means that you can load the computer up with as many tunes, films, photos and recorded TV shows as you like before setting off on your travels.
If our battery tests are anything to go by, however, you probably shouldn’t stray too far from a 240-volt socket especially if you want to watch a whole movie. Performance-wise, it isn’t quite up there with the best-performing portable gaming systems, either.
Minor quibbles aside though, the M70 is an undeniable heavyweight – in all senses of the term.
With 50-inch plasma TVs now available for well under a grand, how on earth can Pioneer justify this onyx-clad gogglebox’s £2,500 price tag? By making it the best 50-inch TV ever, that’s how.
Hand on heart, that’s no exaggeration: the PDP-LX5090 kicks sand in the face of its rivals by delivering a picture that is near-perfect, especially if you’re watching Blu-ray discs or some of the better quality hi-def material from Sky.
The black levels, always a strong point on Pioneer plasmas, are better than ever. Watch a murky movie like Hostel 2 or Sunshine in a totally dark room and you can barely see any light escape from the black parts of the picture. No other plasma we’ve seen can match that bottomless depth, and LCD TVs are totally incapable of getting even close.
But producing the blackest blacks is just the start of this telly’s talents. Whites are also dazzlingly bright, giving it a massive contrast ratio, while colours are gloriously vibrant. Motion is handled adeptly, but it’s not the strongest point: Philips’ new LCDs offer less judder and crisper edges during movement.
Sound quality is classy, build quality top notch and connectivity above average (although an extra HDMI wouldn’t have gone amiss), meaning the PDP-LX5090 is comfortably one of the best TVs we’ve ever seen. Now if we could only afford one…
Mozart, Apfelstrudel, Pez candy and AKG K601 headphones. That’s our list of cool things to come from Austria. These ‘phones are a piece of serious hi-fi enthusiast equipment.
The K601s are comfortable to wear, even for longer periods of time. Their adjustable leather headband adjusts almost automatically to the size of your head and keeps the headphones in place. An over the ear cushion design completely covers your ears, giving your eardrums an intimate dome of musical pleasure. While they are comfortable, you still know you are wearing them as you can feel the leather strap against the top of your head.
It’s clear by the 3-metre long cord and quarter inch gold plated jack, that these aren’t designed for a train journey home. Their open-back design means the sound quality feels extraordinarily unrestricted and clear, but it also means that anyone within 10-metres of you can hear every last synthesising whine of Gary Numan.
They can be used with the supplied adapter with an iPod or MP3 player, but you won’t get much volume out of a weedy portable player. These are best suited for a more serious sound system.
The AKG 601s add nothing to the music, but take nothing away. Find a well-recorded CD and prepare to metaphorically press your nose against the studio glass. They’re expensive, but well made; we certainly think they’re a good living room investment.
Written by Adam Tranter
Samsung seems the brand du jour for anyone seeking out a cheap HD television, and this plasma shows just why: it’s a 50-inch model with a full 1920 x 1080 resolution, and yet costs a mere smidgeon over a grand.
And unlike a lot of cheapo tellies it’s not just a case of “good specs, rubbish performance”. While pictures here never approach the clean, crisp depth and detail of the Pioneer PDP-LX5090 (which costs more than twice as much, incidentally), black levels are reasonably deep and dark and edges are sharp.
We noticed a fair bit of judder when watching the Blu-ray version of Sunshine running at 24 frames per second, but HD football and movies from Sky HD glided along smoothly. One thing the TV couldn’t do is completely wipe out common plasma problems like colour banding, motion artefacts and digital compression noise – look closely and you’ll see all these, even in otherwise impressive HD material.
But we shouldn’t be too harsh on Samsung for that: after all, this is a budget big screen and was never going to rival far pricier top end TVs. What it does do is deliver a big, sharp full HD picture, decent connectivity, eye-catching styling and a nice solid build – and for a grand you can’t really ask for much more than that.
With superior lenses and 5MP sensors as standard, the humble phone is a seriously challenger to a basic digital camera. Recent designs have shed the bulk too, so you can have the killer combination of style, slimness and snapping. Get ready to say Roquefort…
Death match 1: Looks
The touchscreen on Samsung’s Tocco isn’t just there to tick the ‘iPhone rival’ box – although it does a pretty good job. Like the iPhone, you can customise the mobile desktop using widgets, including: date, time, radio and calendar, which you can drag around the screen to suit. Adjusting camera settings is quick too, although the menu isn’t always intuitive, with camera features – like ISO – buried.
With smart silver stripes and a slim body, Sony Ericsson has finally produced a camera phone that looks gorgeous, and won’t provoke ‘is that a bulge’ comments. Slide out the Cybershot lens to enter camera mode and reveal responsive blue touch keys, it’s all very intuitive and puts features like focus and self timer a quick touch away.
Winner: Sony Ericsson C902
Death match 2: Features
Making digicams green with envy, the Tocco’s generous 2.8-in screen should be fantastic for composing shots, but compared to the pin-sharp Sony Ericsson 2.2-incher, it’s like watching the world through an episode of Knots Landing.
Far sharper with more accurate colours and fine detail, Sony Ericsson’s got the edge with picture quality, the Tocco’s are pretty good, but seem softer and slightly over exposed, while shutter lag means you’ll have to grip the Tocco to avoid blurry shots, the stabiliser doesn’t help much. We’re not impressed by the flash on either phone; the compromise for slender build means there’s no room for the superior Xenon flash, so you’re stuck with a rather weak light, which struggles to illuminate large spaces. Both phones have a quick and accurate auto and face detection focus modes and the Samsung’s tacked on Smile Shot for Glasto gurners.
Winner: Sony Ericsson C902
Rating
The Tocco is a terrific phone; faster HSDPA and the bigger screen ensure it’s the better here for browsing, and there’s a document reader, decent music player and FM radio. But for sheer photographic capability the C902 is far, far better, it’s easier to use and takes better pictures, it’s also better for music, with a full bassy sound, in contrast to the crisp, but rather tinny sound of the Tocco. If only there was room for a Xenon flash…
If some kind of crazy Dr Moreau-type scientist tried to crossbreed a Cyberman with one of those enormous 1kg slabs of Dairy Milk you get in the supermarkets at Christmas, the resulting abomination of nature would probably look something like the Area-51 m15x – but then we guess that’s probably what the guys at Alienware had in mind.
Whether you actually like the design or not depends on how much you’re into moulded grey plastic, Klingon forehead-style ridges, backlit spaceship control panel-aping keyboards and softly glowing alien motifs.
Looks-wise, then, we’ll notch this one up to a matter of taste. Less debatable is the raw power that’s sweltering away under the hood. The system combines one of the world’s fastest mobile processors (an Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz) with one of the world’s most powerful graphics chips (a 512MB Nvidia GeForce Go 8800M GTX).
The resulting oomph means that the m15x can make mincemeat of almost any game you care to toss at it, which is pretty cool.
Far less cool is the system’s price. At nearly 2G, only the galaxy’s richest gamers will be able to afford to go anywhere near Area-51. We’d be more charitable about the cost, perhaps, if the m15x had come with more storage space (160GB is a bare minimum these days), or a bigger screen, ok it’s slightly more portable, but we miss proper high-def, or even a Blu-ray drive (that costs extra).
Instead, there’s the obligatory WiFi and Alienware throws in a handful of added extras (including a 2-megapixel webcam), but they’re not really enough to sweeten the deal.
DSers rejoice! Guitar Hero has gone portable thanks to an inventive little slide-on fretboard and plectrum stylus.
Check out our video review as the series takes us another step closer to full on arthritis.
Thanks to its racing game heritage with the likes of ATV Offroad Fury, Brighton based developer Black Rock Studio was always going to crank out a corker with PURE.
And we’re not disappointed.
Real-world photo-realistic locations, scrotum-shrinking, vertigo-inducing jumps riddled with outrageous stunts and the choice of racing AI opponents or up to 16 online players conspire to create a unique racing game that’ll leave you sweating and swearing in equal measure.
Choose your riders, design your own quad bike and then race hard or crash spectacularly – PURE was developed with real world quad-biking legend Wes Miller, and his stamp of reality and authority is all over it.
Cracking stuff.
The Mini-Note oozes confidence and a company at the top of its game. The style and finish is high-end and everything, put simply, just works.
Weighing 1.27kg, it’s a heavy machine but the feel of the device is reassuringly robust. The keyboard is close to full size – HP claims it’s 92 per cent the same – and is an absolute pleasure to use. The battery pack sticks out of the bottom, which makes it a pain to carry, but when it delivers well over three hours of juice, we’re more than satisfied.
The only let down is the choice of processor; the VIA CF-7M, which is slow to run multiple applications. However, with 2048MB of memory, (and 120Gb storage) there is enough headroom to handle Windows Vista reasonably well.
True, this notebook can’t compete with the original Eee PC on price but it’s not trying to. If you want style, sophistication without making compromises, the Mini-Note PC is the only choice for you.
