Author: Chris Bidmead

No comments

NVMe versus SATA: The Future of SSD

  By
WD NVMe Black, 1TB

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…

Evotion and the Oticon Opn™

  By ,

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…

No comments

Best of Breed: The Huawei Mate 20 Pro

  By

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…

No comments

Synology Nursery Slopes: the DS119j Pt 2

  By

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…

No comments

Synology Nursery Slopes: the DS119j Pt 1

  By

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…

No comments

Philips Somneo: Your Electric Dawn

  By
Philips Somneo

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…

No comments

X-Ray your LAN with the FingBox

  By

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…

No comments

Budget and/or Flagship: The OnePlus 6

  By

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…

No comments

The iFi nano iDSD Black Label DAC and MQA

  By

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…

No comments

AZIO Retro Classic Keyboard

  By
Azio Keyboard

A couple of months ago I slipped a mention of the new AZIO Retro Classic Keyboard into my review of the Varidesk ProPlus 36, telling you I’d follow up when the Bluetooth version of that keyboard arrived. This is that promised review. Keyboards have been much in the news of late, largely on account of manufacturers like (and also mainly) Apple. In the race towards ever thinner, ever lighter laptops, designers have been taking risks… Now read on…