I began my review of Huawei’s previous offering, the Mate 20 Pro by calling it “the most complete smartphone that has ever crossed my desk.” So when I set off, in March of this year, to Paris with a contingent of some fifty UK journalists for the launch of the Chinese company’s new P30 series of smartphones I was preparing myself for mild disappointment. Why? The previous year, Gang He, president of the company’s mobile… Now read on…
The serial AT attachment interface, or SATA (pronounced “sarta”) has been with us for nearly twenty years as a means of connecting storage devices like hard drives and optical discs to our computers. At the turn of the century, it replaced the earlier parallel ATA interface, a clunky arrangement using thick ribbon cables that took up a good deal of space inside our devices. SATA has stood us in good stead, but it’s worth reminding… Now read on…
I didn’t intend to switch hearing aid brands. It happened like this: My GP initially directed me to the NHS audiological department at North Finchley Memorial Hospital, which, as I subsequently discovered, actually outsources to Specsavers. After a month or so with Specsavers, I asked to be transferred to Guy’s Hospital at London Bridge. The Guy’s Dental Unit has been looking after my teeth for over a decade now, and I’ve been very impressed with… Now read on…
Tested Technology laps up technology. But the first part of our name is even more important. While we’re always keen to keep readers up to date with what’s going on in IT, we’re not in the business of leaping into print with a cut-and-paste from the latest whizzo spec sheet. Or a faithful echo of the manufacturer’s brochure. We’re not a news sheet. We test stuff. We live with it. And when we’re done—however long… Now read on…
In the first part of this review, we covered the DS119j hardware, how to install the operating system and some of the niceties of its power consumption. But at this point, you probably want to know what you can actually do with the thing. The short answer is: quite a lot. But—and this is crucial— not all at once. DSM? MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE DS119j raised some doubt about what the three letters of the… Now read on…
We’re all having to run local area networks (LANs) these days. Back in the last century, our IT life tended to be based around our PC. Or maybe a pair of PCs, with the odd items of data initially being swapped between them via floppy disks. Techies call this Sneakernet. As the century wore to a close, we started joining our devices together. At first, using wire—Ethernet cable. But by the time laptops became ubiquitous,… Now read on…
Very few of us these days are getting enough sleep. But it’s easy enough to get used to waking up tired and grinding on into your busy day. And so we go on doing it, day after day, night after night. It doesn’t need to be like this. In the previous century that was the message from the pharma companies. But we’ve begun to realise that—except in clinically serious cases of insomnia—drugs are probably not… Now read on…
Local Area Networks (LANs) for the home have pretty much become a requisite for modern living. Typically, we know little about how they work and what they are actually doing. And as we attach more and more devices to them we know less and less. Pundits tell us that our LAN is going to be the backbone of all the many, many new Web-enabled devices that will come into our homes in the next few years.… Now read on…
Confession: it’s getting harder and harder to write these phone reviews. Either I’m becoming jaded or the phones are now just too darn good. Probably both. The basic requirements of a good phone, once you move up from the entry level, are an up-to-date version of the operating system running on a fast processor in tons of RAM with lots of storage, displaying on a big clear screen. Yes, and a high-resolution camera. Some punters… Now read on…
My credentials as a full-on audiophile, such as they might have been, were comprehensively blown at the beginning of this year. My audiologist revealed that my hearing starts to fall off at 1kHz and is technically classed as “severe” above around 8kHz. (The full story is here.) The range of human hearing is generally reckoned to be between 20Hz and 20kHz, spanning some seven octaves. Some audiophiles claim that even sounds above 20 kilohertz need… Now read on…
