Hands-on with Office Mobile for iPhone

By now, you've no doubt heard that Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone is now available for iPhone. (Yup, you read that right: It's iPhone-only.) The question is: Should you care?

That depends largely on whether you're already a subscriber to Microsoft's Office 365 and Skydrive services, which (for personal use) cost from £79.99 annually. (If you want to give the app a test run, Microsoft offers a 30 day free trial of Office 365, which you can set up at the Office 365 website.) Because, really, Microsoft Office Mobile is a front-end to that service, not a standalone productivity suite.

Getting connected

Office Mobile does give you access to the three legs of the Microsoft Office suite: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each of the three iOS apps is able to read and edit documents created using their related PC, Mac, or Web applications; if you want to create new documents on the iPhone, Office Mobile lets you do so with Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint.

When you sign in with your Office 365 account from the mobile app, you should also have access to your SkyDrive folder and be able to see any of the files you have stored there. But, after installing the app on two different devices, I found that only one automatically connected to my SkyDrive. For the second install, I needed to use the app's Add a Place tool and choose SkyDrive. Add a Place is also the way you connect to your business' or school's Office 365 SharePoint.

Once connected, Office Mobile displays a file browser with buttons at the bottom which you tap to see your recently used documents, open existing documents, create new ones, or change the app's settings. To create new documents, you tap the app's New button and choose a starting template, either the blank one or one of the three templates provided for Word and Excel, and the app opens a fresh document based on your selection.

Oddly (and inconveniently) the app only lets you create documents; you can't create folders for organizing your documents. You can't add or save files to existing folders, either; they all go in the root directory of your SkyDrive. You can still manage documents using SkyDrive's Web-based interface or your Mac.

You'll be surprised to discover that Office Mobile eschews iOS' autosave features and expects you to save your documents manually--this despite the fact that every other iOS app since the beginning of iOS-time automatically saves anything you're working on. Also, when you do save changes, even on the smallest of documents, it can take several seconds before the SkyDrive save completes.

Word

Working with Word documents in Office Mobile is...interesting. Typing is simple, easy, and works as it should. In fact, Office Mobile feels like a very basic text editor.

Although it isn't obvious until you start using the app, there are two editing modes when working with a document in Word. There is a Preview mode that allows you to select and make changes to formatting of your selected text and an editing mode that allows you to type new text. These two modes use two different methods for selecting text, so you need to change the way you work depending on the mode you're in.

In editing mode, Word uses a non-standard means of text selection: You double-tap a word to select it then use the selection tool as you normally would. Given that this deviates from the way you normally select text in iOS, I found this difficult to discover. Once text is selected you can change its formatting, copy, paste, or add a comment to the selected text, but there is no option for cutting the selected text. Using editing mode you can also change formatting where your cursor appears in the document, so anything new you type will reflect the changes you've made.

In Preview mode, select your text the way you normally do in any other iOS app, tap the text formatting tool, and make your formatting changes. But, once you've made changes this way you are once again working in the app's editing mode, so you can no longer select your text the way you did in Preview mode, instead you have to double-tap the text to make further formatting changes.

Excel

Of the three Office Mobile apps, Excel is the most polished. Office Mobile's spreadsheet tool offers over 125 built-in functions, the ability to select spreadsheet cells to create charts, and, when editing functions, supports tapping cells to add their contents to the function field you're creating. But it has a frustrating lack of intelligence when it comes to the type of data you're editing in a cell. So, while it's possible to change the format of a cell to date, percentage, or currency format, the app's keypad doesn't automatically recognize those differences.

It also fails to differentiate between text and numbers. So, even if you have a spreadsheet cell containing numeric data, you still get a standard QWERTY keyboard; that means tapping a couple of keys before you can enter the data you need. Contrast this with Numbers, Apple's spreadsheet app, which is aware of the kind of data being entered in a field and adjusts the keyboard accordingly.

Office Mobile's Excel app has the added benefit of letting you create charts by selecting a range of cells, choosing the formatting tool, and then selecting Create Chart. The app offers six different chart types; when you select the type of chart you want to create, the app adds a new sheet containing the chart type you've selected. Updating your spreadsheet data adjusts the chart accordingly. Unfortunately, once you create a chart, or if you are working with a chart created using any other version of Excel, it is not possible to change the chart type, delete the chart, or sheets created when creating a new chart. In fact, you can not delete any sheets using the iOS app.

PowerPoint

As noted earlier, you can not create PowerPoint presentations using Office Mobile, but you can edit any of your existing presentations and, if you connect your phone to a projector, display, or television, you can use the app as a presentation tool. Editing is limited to changing the order in which slides appear in your presentation and making changes to the content of text and comments that appear in existing slides and to your slide notes. You can not make changes to transitions, images, or create new text boxes. But, as a presentation tool, it works pretty well. It's the kind of app that, if you're in a pinch and have the necessary adapters, could save your bacon if something happens to your computer.

If you've used PowerPoint or any other presentation tool in the past, you know presentation files can be behemoths. Unfortunately, I found that my connection to SkyDrive consistently timed out when I tried to upload changed presentations. In many cases, that was because my phone went to sleep before the save finished. But even when I made sure the phone stayed awake, Office Mobile had difficulty getting large files from my phone to my SkyDrive.

SkyDrive integration

In my initial testing I found that the Office app's SkyDrive integration was spotty at best. (To be fair, this is also true of Microsoft's SkyDrive app.) Most documents created using the app or Microsoft's Web apps synchronized with SkyDrive, but depending on their size, uploading files from my phone, had those timeout issues.

Documents created on my Mac and saved in my Mac's SkyDrive folder often took hours to appear on my phone. This may be a limitation of SkyDrive on my Mac, but, if you're accustomed to Dropbox, which synchronizes immediately, it will be an unwelcome surprise to anyone who thinks the doc they just saved in SkyDrive will be available on their phone.

I also found that when saving changes to an existing document, SkyDrive often reported conflicts with an existing copy of the document on SkyDrive. This, despite the fact that I was the only one editing the document and only on my phone. Subsequent saves worked, but it almost never allowed me to save changes to documents the first time I tried.

Final impressions

While these are only initial impressions, and fuller use may turn up solutions to some of these problems, on first look this app does not impress. Yes, it's Microsoft Office on your iPhone, but it's Office in air quotes--which is to say that, while you can create and edit Office documents on your phone, there isn't much here in the way of added value and, in fact, may only introduce frustration to your daily grind. Also, the fact that it's an iPhone-only app seems like an unnecessary limitation on Microsoft's part. While it's possible to use the Web-based version of Office on your iPad, a native iPad app seems like a more obvious solution.

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Dell UltraSharp U3014

A 30-inch desktop giant of a display, the Dell UltraSharp U3014 offers resolution of 2460 by 1600 pixels on a matte IPS screen with environmentally friendly LED backlighting. The U3014 boasts several nice-to-have features and a long list of on-board controls for tuning your image on screen. 

You might need to enlist some help in attaching the heavy monitor to its stand. But once you've done that, you can connect it to your computer using your choice of DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, or Mini DisplayPort.

The Dell UltraSharp U3014 supports DisplayPort 1.2, including multistreaming, so you can daisy-chain two or more monitors and display independent images on each one (provided your video card also supports DisplayPort 1.2).

The Dell UltraSharp U3014 also supports picture-in-picture mode, but only with certain combinations of connections. DVI and HDMI can't be used together, nor can the two types of DisplayPort connections (DisplayPort In is used only in daisy-chain scenarios). I was also surprised to discover that the monitor doesn't scan all of its inputs on power-up, so I had to manually select the input I was using the first time. There is an input-scan button, but you must engage it by pushing a button.

Dell typically includes a four-port USB hub on its professional displays. This model sports two downstream USB 3.0 ports on its left side, along with a handy memory card reader, and two more downstream USB 3.0 ports (plus an upstream port) in the back. The display does not have built-in speakers, but you can attach Dell's optional speaker bar to the bottom of the unit.

The display is calibrated at the factory for both colour and brightness uniformity, but the U3014 offers a comprehensive set of onscreen menus if you'd like to make your own tweaks. The panel on which the U3014 is based is a "wide gamut" model, which means it's capable of delivering more colours than you might be accustomed to seeing. To me, the Dell UltraSharp U3014 rendered some colours so oversaturated that they looked fluorescent. An orange hat from DisplayMate's test photos, for instance, look bright red on Dell's monitor, while objects that looked lime green on other displays looked as though they'd been doused with a fluorescent-green highlighter pen. Photographs looked better, although skin tones looked too red, and a piece of orange furniture from my living room shifted toward red on the U3014.

After consulting with Dell, I configured the U3014 to use the Adobe RGB colour space, which provides a narrower gamut, and then Adobe sRGB, which uses an even narrower colour space. These values helped rein in the colours. You can also manually adjust colour-temperature values from the standard 6500K down to 5000K or up to 10000k, and you can independently adjust the hue, saturation, and sharpness. Finally, you can perform in-house calibrations using Dell's UltraSharp Colour Calibration Solution software with an X-Rite i1Display Pro colourimeter (the hardware is sold separately).

All LCDs, including IPS panels, are somewhat susceptible to image retention. When a static image remains on the screen for a long period of time, a ghost image can remain behind. This usually isn't a permanent problem--since LCD technology, unlike old-school CRTs, doesn't rely on phosphors--but it can be distracting. If you detect ghosting on the U3014, you can push a button to launch an LCD Conditioning routine to get rid of the problem. I didn't encounter any image retention during my evaluation, so didn't have an opportunity to test this feature's effectiveness, but you can typically avoid the problem by using a screensaver or by allowing the display to go to sleep during longer periods of inactivity.

The U3014's matte IPS panel has a very wide viewing angle, which is important for a display of this size as you'll be looking off-axis at the top, bottom, and sides when you're sitting directly in front of it. Glossy screens can render photographic images with richer blacks and shadows, but they're also more susceptible to reflections and glare from lights and windows. In my work area, I experienced much less glare using the U3014 than with the Apple 27-inch Thunderbolt Display that I generally use.

With a 16:10 aspect ratio, the screen is just a little more square than the Apple Display, which has an aspect ratio of 16:9. The Dell is about an inch wider and 3 inches taller, and those extra few inches of real estate are very noticeable. I have four windows open as I write this, and I've found myself spending less time moving them around the screen as I switch between them.

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HP OfficeJet X551dw

According to HP, its new Officejet Pro X printers are the fastest inkjet printers in the world – an achievement that has been officially ratified by the Guinness Book Of Records.

There are several models in the Officejet Pro X range, including multifunction models costing as much as £700. However we tested the X551dw model, which is a conventional, single-function printer priced at £480, and which claims to offer speeds of up to 70 pages per minute for both mono and colour printing.

The X551dw is a bit of a beast, measuring a full 414mm high, 517mm wide and 399mm deep. It also weighs in at a hefty 17.1Kg, so it’ll definitely need a sturdy table or desk to support it. The printer should earn its keep, though, as it is equipped with both Ethernet and wifi networking, as well as a standard USB interface. It supports Apple’s AirPrint for iOS devices, along with HP’s own ePrint feature, which allows you to print remotely over the Internet by emailing documents to the printer.

The main paper tray holds 500 sheets of A4 paper, with a second tray holding a further 50 sheets for photo paper or envelopes., and it’s suitable for monthly print volumes of up to 4,200 pages, which should be more than enough for most small businesses.

The X551dw is claimed to be the world’s fastest inkjet printer

The X551dw uses the four standard cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks for printing and HP quotes a speed of 70ppm for both mono and colour documents when using the printer’s ‘general office’ mode, or 42ppm using ‘professional’ mode. Our test results weren’t quite in that league – although they were still pretty impressive for an inkjet printer – and we did notice a big difference between printing speeds for mono and colour documents.

Mono printing hit a frankly jaw-dropping 55ppm using general office mode, which produced smooth, crisp text output that genuinely rivaled that of a laser printer. Professional mode dropped to a still-impressive 40ppm and produced slightly bolder text, but we think that the general office mode would be perfectly adequate for the vast majority of day-to-day printing tasks.

Colour printing was considerably slower, though – mainly because the X551dw seemed to take quite a bit longer to download and print the first page of colour documents. We achieved speeds of 35ppm with general office mode and a relatively modest 15ppm with professional mode.

Running costs are good too, especially if you use HP’s high-capacity XL cartridges. The Black XL cartridge costs £88.99 but can produce an impressive 9200 pages, which works out at a very reasonable 1p per page (0.96p to be precise). The XL cartridges for coloured inks cost £86.99 – or £261 for all three – and last for 6600 pages, which comes to 4p per page, which is definitely below average for an inkjet printer.

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Dell XPS 12 convertible Ultrabook

The XPS 12 isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly one of the more successful attempts to create a hybrid mobile device that can function as both a laptop and a tablet. 

Dell describes the XPS 12 as a ‘convertible ultrabook’. Certainly, it ticks all the right boxes on the ultrabook side of things. The smart black and silver case measures just 20mm thick and the XPS 12 weighs only 1.52kg, so it’s easy to carry around with you. It’s sturdily built, though, with a layer of tough Gorilla Glass (the same as used on many smartphones and tablets) to protect the screen.

That 12.5in touchscreen is a real eye-catcher too. Its 1920x1080 resolution is very bright and sharp and looks great when watching HD video or browsing your photo library. The use of an IPS panel also ensures that it has really wide viewing angles – close to 170-degrees.

That's crucial on a device that can be used as a tablet as it needs to work in various positions, from flat on the desk to vertical. Our only minor complaint is that glass (as you might expect) is highly reflective and that can be a little annoying at times.

Prices start at £999 for a model with an i5 processor, but we tested the flagship model with a Core i7 processor running at 1.9GHz (3GHz with Turboboost), 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD.

That combination produced a strong score of 4854 in the PCMark 7 benchmark suite, so it won't break a sweat when running Microsoft Office. It should handle more demanding tasks such video- or photo-editing without a fuss too.

Battery life is good too, providing a full five hours of streaming video, so you should get close to a full day’s work done between charges. The XPS 12 can even handle a spot of gaming action when you’re off-duty.

The integrated HD 4000 graphics struggle at the screen's 1080p resolution, only managing 9fps in Batman: Arkham City with DX11 and high graphics settings. But drop to 1366x768 resolution and low graphics settings and you’ll get a far smoother 34fps.

And when you want to use the XPS 12 as a tablet, you simply flip the screen in its frame and close it against the keyboard. The screen is highly responsive and the high-resolution display means that the XPS 12 works really well for a spot of casual web browsing and using Windows 8 apps, of course.

Naturally, the big screen means it’s larger and heavier than a conventional tablet. You can’t pick it up with one hand whilst browsing the web, as you would normally do with most tablets, so you’ll need to hold it in both hands or rest it on your lap whilst using it in tablet mode.

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HTC First Facebook phone

The HTC First has launched in the US, and is set to come to the UK on EE this summer. Here we've reviewed the HTC First and Facebook Home on an AT&T handset in the US. The HTC First is one of the more intriguing Android phones we've had the chance to review. The result of a collaboration between HTC and Facebook, the First is the first phone to ship with Facebook Home preinstalled--doing away with the traditional Android home screen in favour of a continuous Facebook news feed. For more on Facebook Home, see 'Facebook Home FAQ: What you need to know'.

Apps such as Gmail and Maps are hidden away, while the official Facebook and Messaging apps take centre stage. The phone is aimed at fans of the social network, but the First's unassuming design and modest price tag should prove enticing to anyone looking for a smartphone on a budget. (The HTC First costs only $100 in the US and although UK pricing hasn't been announced you can expect it to be priced to shift.) 

The first thing you'll notice when handling the phone is its size: Measuring 126 by 65 by 9mm, the First has roughly the same dimensions as the Apple iPhone 5. The phone is composed primarily of a soft-touch plastic that makes it pleasant to hold, and the device's smaller stature makes it easy to use one-handed. Like the HTC One, the First boasts a simple design that helps keep the phone from feeling overly complicated. The buttons on the First all feel sturdy and responsive, though I had trouble keeping the phone's MicroUSB cable securely in the charging port.

The phone lacks a user replaceable battery, and there's no MicroSD card slot, which means you're stuck with the 16GB of on-board memory for storing your apps, photos, music, and movies. Most won't care about these missing features, but it's something worth considering if you're someone that likes to have Michael Jackson's entire discography with you at all times. The First's 4.3-inch display packs an impressive 341 pixels per inch (ppi), making it sharper than the Retina display on the iPhone 5, though the screen looks unusually dark even on the brightest settings.

The First lacks the Beats audio software found on pretty much every other current HTC phone, and as a result, audio played through the phone's speaker sounds hollow. The speaker's location is also inconvenient--when holding the phone in landscape mode, your hand often covers it up, which leaves you with muffled sound while watching videos or playing games.

Although the First has a 5-megapixel camera, photos taken with the phone came out very grainy with a lot of digital noise. The phone can shoot 1080p video, which looked okay, but suffered from minor stutters and tears. The camera is painfully mediocre, but if all you are doing is uploading your photos to Facebook then it should suit your needs just fine.

Aside from its low price tag, the First's other big selling point is its deep integration with Facebook Home. Facebook Home is available for download on a handful of other Android handsets, but HTC worked closely with Facebook to optimize the launcher for the First. Notifications from third-party apps show up on the home screen alongside Facebook notifications, and the app ran surprisingly well on the First's dual-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor.

Though I consider myself a very casual Facebook user (I usually only check the damn thing two to three times per week), I found my activity on the social network increased dramatically while using Facebook Home. The app made it effortless to like and comment on my friends' posts--photos and status updates I wouldn't have seen had Facebook Home not shoved them in my face.

After some time, however, Facebook Home's downsides became much more apparent: Doing anything that wasn't related to Facebook, such as playing music or browsing for apps, took more effort than it did on other smartphones, as you'd have to dig through the app drawer to find the appropriate apps. You can't put app shortcuts or widgets on your home screen, and the status bar is hidden away until you swipe down from the top of the screen to reveal it. (You can check out Caitlin McGarry's review of Facebook Home for more details on the app, but if you don't live your entire life on Facebook you probably won't benefit from it in any meaningful way.)

So why should you even consider picking up this seemingly mediocre smartphone? For all of its flaws, the HTC First has one thing going for it: You can easily turn off Facebook Home to access a stock version of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, giving you all the benefits of Android without any of the added bloat-ware that usually plagues the OS.

This is a big deal. The only other phone currently shipping with raw Android is the Google Nexus 4, and stocks of that phone can be hit and miss (it's also cheap if you buy it outright, but expensive on contract). Granted, the Nexus 4 runs a newer version of Android Jelly Bean, but HTC's offering can still access most of the major Jelly Bean features, such as Google Now and the performance improvements brought by Project Butter.

Another of the First's hidden strengths is its battery life. The embedded 2000mAh battery in the phone may not sound all that impressive next to the 3300mAh battery found in the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD, but I managed to squeeze a full 8 hours of use out of the First before I had to seek out a charger. With Facebook Home disabled, however, that number increased by another hour or so. Obviously these times will vary depending on how you're using your phone and the types of apps you install, but I found them impressive nonetheless.

The HTC First excels at being a tool to quickly access and interact with your friends on Facebook, but it also falls short in a few other key areas. Millions of people use their smartphones to upload photos to Facebook, so it's a shame that HTC skimped out when it came to the First's camera and camera functionalities. Facebook Home's strong emphasis on Facebook's apps is great if your whole existence is on the social network, but it interferes with actually using the phone as... well... a phone. Still, if you're someone that can't get enough Facebook in their lives - or crave using stock Android - then the HTC First is worth checking out. See also: Facebook Home review; HTC First smartphone hands-on review. For more on Facebook Home, see 'Facebook Home FAQ: What you need to know'.

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Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D

Following on the heels of the FS-4300DN comes this slimmed down mono laser printer from Kyocera, the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D. The difference in price may be significant – at the time of writing, the FS-4300DN costs around £870 to the £270 of the FS-2100D – but in many respects these two models have much in common.

For a start, there's the overall look of the two printers. Kyocera's Ecosys range have a unified design, so the various models resemble each other very closely. The casing of the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D is chunky and robust, but not overly heavy. At 13.5kg it's only 1.1kg lighter than its big brother. Nonetheless, 13.5kg is by no means weighty for a business laser at this price point.

The black-and-cream casing makes the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D look more like an architectural experiment from the 1960s, especially with a curved turret comprising the front right corner. This turret is mirrored in the optional paper trays, so as you build up the Kycoera's paper handling, the overall look remains consistent.

And those paper handling facilities deserve mention. Just like the FS-4300DN, the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D comes with a sizeable 500-sheet tray as standard, along with a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. You can add up to four additional 500-sheet paper trays, for a maximum of 2600 sheets. That figure was decent in the high-end FS-4300DN, but in the sub-£300 FS-2100D it's outstanding.

As with the FS-4300DN, the top-mounted control panel is wide-ranging and highly detailed, giving you full control over most aspects of the printer's operation, while the strong monitoring facilities give network managers easy control of the Kyocera. You can access files from USB drives for added security.

Connectivity options as standard are rather lacking on this model, with only USB 2.0 offered. You do have the option of upgrading to gigabit ethernet for £125, although should you want such facilities, you're better off just paying an extra £72 for the FS-2100DN model, which comes with gigabit ethernet as standard.

Either printer can be upgraded to wireless 802.11/b/g/n facilities for the exorbitant fee of £289.

The N-suffixed Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100DN also has more memory than the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D, matching the FS-4300DN's 256MB.

The Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D, on the other hand, comes with just 128MB as standard. The FS-2100D also has a lower maximum memory of 1152MB, as opposed to the 1280MB of the FS-2100DN.

Up to 40 pages per minute is boasted by the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D. In real-world printing, you're unlikely to get to that due to the printer needing around 10 seconds to get started.

Once the first sheet has come out, though, subsequent sheets are almost instantaneous, and this is a reasonably fast model. Even with the 10 second startup, we were able to achieve figures of 29.7ppm, and if you're printing large jobs then you can expect that to increase to the mid-30s.

Duplexing is provided, although the speed here does fall to a rather more sluggish 15.4ppm – a drop of close to fifty percent, which isn't ideal.

Even with experimentation, the Kyocera's output isn't as dark as we'd ideally like. This was a slight complaint of the FS-4300DN as well, and seems to be common to the Ecosys printers. The characters also fell just short of the crisp perfection we expect of the best laser printers. Neither is this the best model for graphics reproduction.

The running costs aren't quite as low as on the FS-4300DN, with the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D's toner generating only half as many pages at a time. They are a little cheaper to compensate, although the cost per page is still almost 0.3p more.

Nonetheless, close to 0.7p remains very cheap for a page of text, with few other printers able to get anywhere near such low running costs.

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VMware vSphere 5.1 looms large

With the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, VMware's product line underwent some naming and positioning changes. In the past, there were two different bare-metal hypervisors, one free and one sold as part of the vSphere suite. Now there is just one. The new standard is ESXi 5.1, which still comes in a free version. However, the free version is now limited to 32GB of physical RAM.

The ESXi hypervisor is required for all vSphere installations starting with version 5.0. ESXi does not use Linux, as did ESX, for the service console that executed scripts and provided hooks for third-party agents. The new ESXi code base has shrunk, presenting a smaller attack surface and requiring less maintenance and patching. Higher reliability and stability in the hypervisor translate to fewer headaches for IT administrators and longer uptime for mission-critical applications.

VMware has also introduced three different offerings under the label vCloud Suite, which include bundled products targeted at specific use cases. They are licensed on a per-CPU basis and come in Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise editions. These products provide the functionality to implement infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds for large data centres or service providers. For this review I focused on the basic VMware vSphere functionality along with the VMware vcentre Server management system.

Installation and configuration: For the purpose of this review I used a Dell PowerEdge R715 server as the primary VMware ESXi host. Dell is a longtime VMware partner, and it has many convenient features, such as the ability to boot the base ESXi image from either an SD card or a USB disk. Dell provides this image on its website, and I used it to create a bootable USB device. Installing and configuring an ESXi host is pretty simple for most any supported hardware.

Configuring a vSphere environment is a different story. If you plan on using any of the more advanced features available from VMware, you will need to install vcentre Server. Here you have several options, such as using an existing Windows Server or deploying the vcentre Server as a virtual appliance (VA). The VA option uses Suse Linux as the base OS and a local database for small installations of less than 50 VMs. For larger installations you must use an external Oracle database. If you go the Windows Server route, you'll also need to have SQL Server installed to house the inventory database.

You must configure a separate network for all vMotion traffic before any virtual machine migrations can be accomplished. Each host participating in vMotion must have a minimum of two Ethernet adapters with at least one supporting Gigabit speeds. Each host must have a port group designated for vMotion traffic with source and destination hosts on the same subnet. That's quite a bit of configuration required to accomplish a migration -- especially when compared to Microsoft's Hyper-V live migration feature, which requires almost no configuration.

New and improved in vSphere 5.1: VMware vSphere 5.1 brings a number of capabilities to the table specifically aimed at the high-end, high-volume virtualisation customer. These include features like Storage DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), introduced in vSphere 5.0, which automates load balancing across storage devices just as DRS balances VM loads across hosts. With Profile-Driven Storage and tight integration with the new vCloud Director, you get a new level of storage automation not previously available.

With the vSphere 5.1 release also comes a new version of the virtual machine format (version 9) that supports larger virtual machines. Another nice enhancement means the end of reboots when upgrading VM guests to newer versions of the VMware Tools. On the networking front are enhancements to the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) in support of link aggregation (LACP support) and expanded virtual MAC address assignments for large implementations. Other improvements to VDS beef up network monitoring and troubleshooting and even rollback and recovery.

In terms of raw scalability, vSphere 5.1 increases the number of distributed switches per vcentre Server from 32 to 128. It also ups the numbers on static port groups (5,000 to 10,000), distributed ports (30,000 to 60,000), and hosts per VDS (350 to 500).

Managing vSphere 5.1: The traditional management tool, available as a free download, is the VMware vSphere Client. This option is being phased out with the new Web client available with version 5.1 of vcentre Server. In reality, there probably aren't many VMware installations of any size running without vcentre Server. At the lower end, Microsoft makes life easier, as you can manage small Hyper-V deployments with Hyper-V Manager and the new Windows Server Manager tool. (See my review of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.)

That said, VMware's vcentre Server provides the glue that holds large VM deployments together. It's required for many of VMware's advanced features such as the cloning or migrating of VMs. With the new Web client you can easily perform almost any task required to manage your entire vSphere infrastructure. With VMware vSphere PowerCLI, you get the full scripting capability of PowerShell and more than 370 cmdlets to automate almost any repetitive task you need to accomplish in day-to-day operations.

Performance and scale: When you look at vSphere 5.1 from a big-picture perspective, you see a number of enhanced capabilities that directly affect performance. Storage is a key part of the VM puzzle, and the enhancements in vSphere 5.1 for vMotion deliver new capabilities such as using multiple NICs. Using the right type of storage for different workloads can have a significant impact on overall performance as well. vSphere 5.1 supports automated storage management to include different classes of service, allowing you to direct high-IOPS workloads to more expensive SSD storage while allocating lower-cost storage to lower-throughput needs.

Performance and scalability both depend on efficient usage of other resources like network bandwidth and CPU. VMware provides granular control over all of the above, making it easy to implement the likes of Quality of Service (QoS) for the network and limit CPU resources based on service-level agreements. While these considerations are not always part of the performance discussion, they influence how a virtual environment performs overall -- VMware delivers these features in spades.

Final analysis: VMware continues to deliver features and enhancements that make vSphere the obvious choice for any large-scale virtualisation deployment. The new vCloud suites bundle together previously separate pieces required for building a large-scale private, public, or hybrid cloud. While Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 and other solutions may be chipping away at VMware's lead, vSphere still has a number of features -- such as rules-based load balancing for VMs and storage, as well as advanced virtual networking capabilities -- that the competition can't match. These features will certainly make a difference in large settings, and some will make a difference in smaller shops with more complex needs.

Now read:  virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

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Innergie mCube Slim 95 travel adaptor

Innergie’s mCube Slim 95 solves the annoying problem familiar to anyone who travels with a laptop on a regular basis; no matter how slim and light the laptop itself, the AC adaptor is probably a standard unit that along with its cabling can add surprising bulk.

Compounding this, the same issue will apply to smartphones, digital cameras, tablets and camcorders, each of which will also need its own adaptor. A few devices will charge from a laptop USB port when it’s switched on, while those requiring more than 5 watts (anything from a tablet upwards) won’t.

The Slim 95 is designed as a one-size-fits-all answer to this multi-device inconvenience.

On first impression, the white plastic adaptor unit itself doesn’t save much weight (179g) or bulk compared to a standard netbook equivalent, but some of this is gained back through slimmer cabling to and from the adaptor. This will be particularly true for UK consumers who have to put up with thick mains leads.

As it names implies, the Slim 95’s rating is 95 watts which powers and charges a plethora of devices from the 10 watts or thereabouts needed to cope with tablets and some smartphones to the 45 watts of a camcorder and 65 watts of a laptop.

The adaptor is supplied with nine different tips covering the 11 major makes of laptop (Samsung, Dell, Acer, Asus, HP/Compaq, IBM/Lenovo, Gateway, MSI, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba), which attach very tightly to a universal interface. Note: Apple laptops are not covered but there is a power LED to let you know that it is working correctly.

A particular feature is that the Slim 95 can charge a laptop and second device through its USB port at the same time which immediately means that users don’t have to carry around one power supply. Add in a third USB-chargeable device and the weight savings start adding up.

Slightly confusingly, Innergie also sells an identically-rated mains adaptor with two USB charging ports but for most people this is probably overkill.

The diagram on the firm’s website lists a voltage switch although that was missing from the unit sent for review; presumably it is auto-sensing. The Slim 95 states that includes protection from power surges although any competent laptop adaptor should also do this.

In use with a Samsung netbook we found it ran a bit cooler than the manufacturer's adaptor, charging the unit in the same time. It coped with dual-charging a smartphone equally well.

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Xamarin 2.0 works mobile development magic

Unless you've been living on a planet far, far, away from the galactic trade routes, you know there are only two practical choices of programming languages -- Java and Objective-C -- for developing native mobile apps. If you are an experienced C# codesmith who wanted to try your hand at Android or iOS app development, you were out of luck. No longer: Xamarin 2.0, an SDK produced by Xamarin, allows you to write Android and iOS apps using C# code. Equally important, you can do this with Microsoft's Visual Studio.

The Xamarin SDK is based on an open source project known as Mono that allows Microsoft .Net applications to run on other platforms. Xamarin currently consists of class libraries, a C# compiler, and a virtual machine. The class libraries implement the core APIs of Microsoft's .Net 4.0 framework. The compiler complies with the C# 5.0 standard, and it has support for namespaces and assemblies. The virtual machine executes the Common Language Infrastructure bytecode generated by the C# compiler.

The Xamarin SDK also provides platform-specific frameworks that work with Google's Android APIs and Apple's iOS APIs. However, these frameworks are not abstraction layer APIs that only access a lowest common denominator of platform services. Instead, they provide "bindings" -- mechanisms that enable C# method calls to properly invoke native methods designed for use with a different programming language -- to the native APIs for each platform. The Android API binding frameworks are called Mono for Android, while those for iOS are called MonoTouch. The result: Xamarin lets you write a native mobile app entirely in C# code.

To use the Xamarin SDK to its fullest, the app should be factored so that its UI code is uncoupled from its core algorithmic code. That is, you write the core algorithms with the .Net framework, then implement the native UI for each target platform using the Mono for Android and MonoTouch frameworks. The factored design allows the app to be built and deployed on both Android and iOS devices, where the app's core code uses the native API of the target platform. This scheme lets you repurpose field-tested C# code and libraries. It also provides some flexibility in choosing how many of the platform's native APIs to use. For example, your app might draw on the .Net networking stack for network services or rely on the platform's own networking stack frameworks.

To develop your Android and iOS apps, you can use Xamarin's own IDE, Xamarin Studio, or stick with Visual Studio. The Xamarin IDE allows you to organise projects into solutions so that one build command will make both an Android app and an iOS app. The Xamarin IDE also lets you execute and debug code in simulators for each platform or on the devices themselves. There's no compromise if you prefer to develop in Visual Studio, as Xamarin lets you build, download, and debug app code on the target devices with Microsoft's IDE.

iOS app development: It's complicated

Although Xamarin lets you use your Windows PC for iOS development, that doesn't mean you don't need a Mac. For a number of reasons, Xamarin still requires Apple's iOS SDK tools to complete the code generation. For example, the Xcode simulator is required for code debugging, and the app's interface must be designed using Xcode's layout and storyboard editor, Interface Builder (IB). Finally, to distribute apps in the App Store you must use Xcode's code-signing mechanism.

How is it possible to use Visual Studio to write and debug iOS apps? Xamarin performs a clever sleight of hand that sets up the Mac as a back-end build server to Visual Studio. Installing Xamarin on the Mac places a remote build server on the computer. This build server uses Apple's Bonjour service discovery protocol so that Windows systems can find it on the network and establish remote sessions with it. An inexpensive Mac Mini can be used as a shared network resource for multiple Windows developers.

When you execute a build with Visual Studio, the remote session has the build server issue the appropriate command lines to the Xcode build tools. (This works because the Xcode IDE itself is simply a GUI layered over command-line tools.) After the build completes, the iOS simulator on the Mac starts and remote commands from Visual Studio operate the simulator through the Xcode debugger. Or the Xcode debugger can download the code onto an iOS device, and you can debug it there through Visual Studio.

The other aspect to iOS app development is whether to IB or not to IB. The UI of an iOS app can be constructed two ways: either through program code or by using Xcode's visual editor. IB lets you lay out the app's interface by pointing, clicking, and dragging UI elements. These UI elements are actually Cocoa Touch framework objects in a serialised format. That is, you manipulate the UI objects themselves in IB. This ability to edit Cocoa Touch objects is not easily duplicated on the PC. Therefore, you either have to use IB on the Mac to design the app's UI or write the UI entirely in code to implement it. In the latter case, you can use a utility like PaintCode, which lets you design the UI visually; it then generates the appropriate Objective-C or C# code.

Constructing the UI for an Android app can be accomplished with Windows tools, because Android uses XML to store the layout. Xamarin Studio has a graphical layout editor similar to IB that lets you construct the Android app's UI visually. Xamarin also provides an add-in that implements this graphical editor in Visual Studio.

Using Xamarin Studio to run a C# app in the iOS simulator. A breakpoint has been set in a platform-specific UI file that manages the native implementation of a log-in screen.

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Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 narrows the gap

With the release of Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V gains increased scalability in terms of both raw specs and features that make larger environments easer to manage. Hyper-V 2012 pushes the limits to 4TB of RAM per host and 64 nodes per cluster, and it adds advanced features such as a virtual switch, a virtual SAN, and live storage migration that were previously available only from VMware. It also includes native clustering capability, so you have the ability to build a highly available virtual machine cluster with commodity hardware and two OS licenses.

Although Microsoft has made great strides in many feature areas, there is still a fairly substantial gap between Hyper-V and VMware vSphere at the high end. VMware has many features focused on service providers, whether they're companies offering services for sale or large enterprise IT departments delivering services to business units within the company. Hyper-V 2012 does not have anything like VMware's vSphere Storage DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), for example, where you can provision different classes of storage based on a set of requirements to include cost and performance. Hyper-V also lacks many of the new virtual data centre features recently introduced by VMware. (See my review of VMware vSphere 5.1.)

That said, Hyper-V 2012 also introduces many new features that make it more attractive to small and midsized companies where cost is a significant driver. The new capabilities in SMB 3.0 allow anyone to stand up an HA Hyper-V cluster using low-cost servers and commodity SAS disk drives. In the past you would have been required to purchase a high-dollar storage system to get the same level of reliability, and you would have needed to buy the virtualisation software from a vendor other than Microsoft. Low-cost HA clustering alone will make IT managers think twice about spending scarce IT budget dollars on additional software when Windows Server 2012 comes with Hyper-V in the box.

In addition to examining features and manageability, I ran a few performance tests. Using the Sandra 2013 benchmarks for a Windows 32-bit client, I tested Windows VM performance under vSphere 5.0, vSphere 5.1, Hyper-V under Windows Server 2008 R2, and Hyper-V under Windows Server 2012. The server hardware used for this review was a Dell PowerEdge R715 with dual AMD Opteron 6380 CPUs, 64GB of memory, and two Seagate ST9300605SS 10K 300GB SAS drives configured as a RAID1 array.

Installation and configuration: Hyper-V 2012 couldn't be any easier to install in Windows Server 2012. Simply choose the Hyper-V role from the Server Manager application, click through a few screens, and you're done. Be aware that the install will require a reboot of your server. You'll need to go through a few basic configuration steps before you can actually deploy VMs on your new Hyper-V installation. All Hyper-V 2012 VMs require a virtual switch connection in order to communicate over the network. Because a virtual switch must be connected to an underlying network interface for a physical connection, you must configure this connection after Hyper-V is installed.

While included in Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V 2012 is also available in a free stand-alone version. This product essentially installs a server-core version of Windows Server 2012 with a minimal user interface. It's intended to be managed remotely, with just a few options and controls available from the console. These include details such as changing the computer name, networking configuration, enabling remote desktop, and powering down the system. Adding a Hyper-V Server 2012 host to the management console on another Windows Server 2012 machine requires merely a right-click and the entry of the Hyper-V server's IP address.

New and improved: A number of new capabilities introduced in Hyper-V 2012 extend existing features. For example, live migration of running VMs, which previously required shared storage, can now be done in a nonclustered environment. This feature is called "shared nothing migration" in some circles. Live storage migration -- a new feature that aims at parity with VMware -- makes it possible to move the virtual hard disks in use by a running VM to a different storage device. These two features combined make it possible to move running VMs between any connected machines on a domain.

Hyper-V Replica, which provides unlimited, host-to-host replication of virtual machines without shared storage, brings Microsoft up to par with other virtualisation vendors in the area of redundancy. The ability to store Hyper-V disks on SMB shares is yet another feature that delivers a new level of resiliency in the form of Cluster Shared Volumes for SMB file stores. Cluster Shared Volumes essentially eliminates the need for high-cost storage to deploy an HA virtualisation solution. The new Hyper-V Extensible Switch provides a platform upon which networking vendors can build new functionality. Hyper-V switch extensions might include network-based virus protection or intrusion detection solutions, for example.

On the numbers front, there are gains in the amount of memory an individual guest can support (1TB vs. 64GB in Windows Server 2008 R2), logical processors per host (320 vs. 64), and nodes per cluster (64 vs. 16). The total number of virtual processors per host is now 2,048, up from 512 in Windows Server 2008 R2. A single host can now support up to 1,024 active VMs as opposed to 384 in the previous release. Support for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) inside virtual machines is new to Hyper-V 2012 as well.

Managing Hyper-V 2012: Microsoft has two basic paths for managing Hyper-V 2012 out of the box, using either the graphical user interface Hyper-V Manager or PowerShell. Either way, the work gets done with PowerShell commands and scripts behind the scenes. The real power behind both management paths is the ability to manage multiple machines from a single console. Hyper-V Manager can manage any number of different Hyper-V hosts, all from within the same console. Even for small deployments, managing Hyper-V through Hyper-V Manager is much more efficient than remotely logging into each machine. The wizard-based approach to guiding you through most of the management tasks helps fledgling Hyper-V administrators get the job done.

PowerShell 3.0 is without question one of the other huge productivity gains for IT administrators responsible for supporting Windows Server 2012. With something like 2,430 new "cmdlets," there isn't an area of managing a Windows Server 2012 deployment without some support through PowerShell. With respect to Hyper-V 2012, there are upward of 140 unique cmdlets for managing all aspects of creating, provisioning, and running VMs. That number also includes cmdlets for managing the virtual network switch and other Hyper-V 2012 configuration parameters.

The next level of VM management comes in the form of Microsoft's System centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). SCVMM 2012 is the latest version but does not support Windows Server 2012 unless you apply Service Pack 1. Microsoft does offer a fully functional Hyper-V instance of SCVMM 2012 SP1 that includes the required SQL Server back end. You can install this on a Hyper-V 2012 host and manage other Windows Server 2012 systems once the configuration is complete. SCVMM 2012 is definitely the way to go for any organization with a large number of VMs.

Performance gains: Hyper-V 2012 includes a number of improvements in the area of performance. As you can see from the comparative table, which shows Sandra 2013 test results for a 32-bit Windows 7 SP1 VM, the most obvious is in the area of the crypto bandwidth tests. Previous versions of Hyper-V did not support AES-NI instructions in Intel's Westmere CPUs or in the AMD Bulldozer CPUs. Hyper-V 2012 provides this support, as the numbers clearly show. Almost across the board, my Sandra results showed performance of Hyper-V 2012 improved over Hyper-V 2008 and even VMware vSphere 5.1. (Note: I did not test performance of Linux VMs.)

Other areas of performance gain are hard to measure directly but are present nonetheless. These include the virtual SAN support, which allows you to connect a VM directly to a virtual Fibre Channel host bus adapter. This makes it possible to provision a VM with direct-attached storage to support specific workloads that in the past would have required a dedicated server. Another key improvement in the I/O area is new support for Single-Root I/O virtualis ation. Allowing supporting physical network interfaces to be carved into multiple virtual NICs, SR-IOV improves the Hyper-V host's networking functionality and overall throughput.

Final analysis: Hyper-V 2012 combines significant management and usability improvements with solid performance, especially for the purpose of virtualis ing many typical Windows workloads. New PowerShell cmdlets streamline the process of automating many of the tedious administration tasks previously requiring significant amounts of hands-on time. While there aren't any huge performance improvements from the individual guest perspective, the new I/O bandwidth features could represent significant areas for gains. When you couple that with other new OS features like SMB failover and clustering, you have the makings of a solid foundational product.

Now read: Virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

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Virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

Any comparison of Microsoft's Hyper-V versus VMware's vSphere has to take into consideration a number of different factors. First, there's the target customer and the feature set for different sizes of deployments. The needs vary widely depending on the number of virtual machine instances, and these requirements should drive the architecture and configuration choices. Second, there is the topic of management, which is also tied closely to the size of the installation. Beyond these considerations are a number of other issues, including cost, performance, scalability, and usability.

For example, when you install VMware ESXi on a host machine, you have a bare-metal hypervisor that runs independently of any operating system. If you use Windows Server 2012 as the foundation of your virtual infrastructure, you have an operating system that must be patched and updated periodically. That's not to say VMware ESXi doesn't need patches or updates from time to time, but it definitely has a smaller footprint than does Hyper-V.

We'll look at all of these issues and try to compare and contrast the two products from these angles. In the end, the answer depends on all of these factors. The best choice for a small or medium-sized deployment won't necessarily be the same as for a large-scale operation. Other details to consider include corporate culture, existing infrastructure, and history with either of the two products.

Target customer: VMware still has the edge when it comes to the high-end, high-volume virtualisation customer. VMware features such as the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) address the needs of large environments running large numbers of VMs with varied resource requirements. At the other end of the spectrum, you have to give the nod to Microsoft. If a small-to-medium-size business is purchasing Windows Server 2012 anyway, it doesn't make sense to also purchase VMware's vSphere to virtualise a few specific functions.

The hard-to-answer question is at what point it makes sense to go with VMware. Hyper-V 2012 leverages new capabilities in SMB 3.0 that give even the smallest shops the ability to stand up a high-availability cluster using low-cost servers and commodity SAS disk drives. Hyper-V 2012's host-to-host VM replication provides an additional level of redundancy not previously available from Microsoft and levels the playing field from that perspective.

At the same time, VMware has a similar function that uses the same Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) under the covers. These and many other similarities make comparing the two products problematic. In the end they are both compelling products with plenty of capabilities that you can tweak to meet most any virtualisation need.

Management tools: At the low end, Microsoft gives you a basic set of tools in Hyper-V Manager, which comes as an installable option with Windows Server 2012. VMware's traditional management tool, the VMware vSphere Client, is a free client you must install on a Windows PC. Both offerings connect to remote hosts, allowing you to manage any system you can reach over the network.

Some functions are not possible in the basic management tools for either product. Advantage here goes to Microsoft as Hyper-V Manager can, for example, export a VM, then do an import to clone or copy the VM. With VMware you must be connected to vcentre Server in order to export or clone a VM. With respect to monitoring, however, the VMware vSphere Client provides much more information about both the host servers and the client VMs. VMware scores a point here for a more detailed graphical presentation.

VMware provides vcentre Server for managing large installations while Microsoft offers System centre 2012. The latest release of vcentre (5.1) adds a Web client to the mix, providing the ability to manage your VMware infrastructure from literally anywhere. Both VMware and Microsoft support automated management using Windows PowerShell. VMware offers a free add-on called PowerCLI that includes a long list of custom PowerShell cmdlets for managing your vSphere infrastructure.

Performance and scalability: Deciding how to measure performance and scalability presents a challenge when comparing these two products. Microsoft has made a number of enhancements in Hyper-V 2012 that in some cases exceed the outer limits of vSphere. If you want to gauge scalability in terms of raw numbers like nodes supported in a cluster (64 for Hyper-V 2012 vs. 32 for vSphere 5.1) or VMs in a cluster (8,000 for Hyper-V 2012 vs. 4,000 for vSphere 5.1), you would deduce that Microsoft takes that round.

But measuring real-world capacity goes way beyond the basic numbers. Case in point: Both products now support the concept of dynamic memory, albeit in different manners. With Hyper-V 2012, you can configure individual VMs with an initial memory allocation and allow the hypervisor to adjust the amount of memory depending on current needs. This is not the default option when creating a new VM but a configuration setting. VMware has had this feature for several years, and the company claims much more real-world experience in the realm of memory utilization. Advantage here goes to VMware, but Microsoft has narrowed that gap substantially with Hyper-V 2012.

At the individual VM level, I used the Sandra 2013 benchmarking tool to determine basic numbers of performance from a single VM running Windows 7 SP1. This VM was configured to have 2GB of memory and two virtual CPUs. I ran four different benchmarks using Hyper-V 2008, Hyper-V 2012, vSphere 5.0, and vSphere 5.1. You can see from the table that Hyper-V 2012 holds its own against vSphere, at least with respect to running Windows VMs. Note that I did not test performance of Linux VMs. (Tests were run on a Dell PowerEdge R715 with dual AMD Opteron 6380 CPUs, 64GB of memory, and two Seagate ST9300605SS 10K 300GB SAS drives configured as a RAID1 array.)  

The bottom line: Finally, one of the most difficult factors to compare is cost. If you're looking at a small number of virtualised servers running Windows Server 2012, you already get that with the purchase of the operating system. Windows Server 2012 Standard comes with two virtual instances, while Windows Server 2012 Datacentre includes an unlimited number of VMs on a single machine. It really doesn't make sense to purchase an additional virtualisation product for a small-to-medium deployment.

VMware pricing starts at £2,354 for VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, plus the vSphere Storage Appliance, covering three hosts with two CPUs each. Pricing for the central management system starts at $1,495 for the VMware vcentre Server Foundation, which supports up to three hosts. VMware vcentre Server Standard, which supports an unlimited number of hosts, costs $4,995. VMware vSphere with Operations Management bundles add deeper monitoring and automation capabilities; they start at $1,745 per processor.

Microsoft charges a base price of $882 for Windows Server 2012 Standard and $4,809 for Windows Server 2012 Datacentre for one machine with up to two CPUs.UK pricing from the web is around £500. This does not include individual client access licenses (CALs), which are required for each user or device accessing the server, or coverage for additional CPUs. The base price for System centre 2012 is $3,607 for a two-CPU server license and unlimited number of managed operating systems.

Microsoft also has a private cloud offering for customers looking to deploy a minimum of 25 server instances. Called the Cloud Infrastructure Server Suite, it includes System centre 2012 and offers advanced features like self-service workflow, automated provisioning, usage metering, and virtual networks.

Nevertheless, VMware has a number of features for high-end users that Microsoft can't match -- notably the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and a more advanced virtual switch. DRS is a self-learning automation engine that balances load across both servers and storage devices. The vSphere Distributed Switch includes enhancements such as network health check, backup and restore, rollback and recovery, and LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) support.

Choosing between the two vendors should be relatively easy for the high-end and low-end customers. VMware still wins the big shops, and Microsoft is now the clear choice for the small guys. The fight over the middle has only just begun, and it promises to be an interesting one. Microsoft will no doubt attempt to creep up the ladder while VMware will do everything in its power to keep the castle walls from being breeched.

Read the reviews: 

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Brother MFC-J4510DW

The Brother MFC-J4510DW surprises you from first glance, a low-slung top measuring just 185mm deep but very wide. Black and cream isn't always an attractive combination, but it works here, a broad black stripe rippling across to match the bold dark top.

Wide looks betray the feature that makes this that most multifunctional of MFDs - an A3 printer. Paper is loaded sideways. This seems a touch quirky, but it's actually a brilliant twist that means the longer edge of paper now matches up with the longer width of most printers. For occasional A3, it makes a good deal of sense.

The Brother MFC-J4510DW is a smidgen wider than other models which helps it accommodate A3 (297 x 420mm) paper.

Setup is reasonably straightforward – even if this is the first printer where we had to consult the instructions to find out where to connect a USB cable.

Using the Brother is a joy, thanks to a sizeable and colourful 3.7in screen which makes the MFD logical and easy to operate.

With on-board fax, there's a danger that an MFD may get overloaded with keys, but the Brother employs the clever trick of lighting up buttons as and when you need them. Do something simple, you only have a few buttons to choose from.

Extensive connectivity options encompass Wi-Fi and ethernet. It also has cloud-computing credentials, and you can hook up the printer to mobile devices and memory card through a range of slots.

A nice touch is the Secure Print feature, which waits until you reach the printer before printing, to keep confidential work confidential.

We also liked the scanning component. There’s a substantial lid which can be adjusted for larger material, and the 2400x2400dpi optical resolution allows for good image depth. The additional 20-sheet ADF helps faxing enormously.

Paper handling is solid, with the well-built paper tray taking up to 150 sheets at a time. This is a decent amount for most purposes, although businesses making frequent use of the printer may find that the paper needs to be replaced a little too often.

The larger A3 prints need to be done in Best mode, and the fastest we could manage was 2m 55s for a full print, rather than 1m 42s for the A4 equivalent.

With regular A4 pages it’s a little faint at fastest 18.3ppm mode, but the middle settings still churn out pages at a decent 13.3ppm, and the text here is relatively dark and has considerable clarity, with none of the blurred lettering common to most inkjets.

The top mode was better still, at the expense of speed, at a mere 1.8ppm. Our magnifying glass revealed that it doesn't have the perfection of a good laser, but quality is good enough to pass most inspections.
In all modes colour was a little faint and watered down. If you want images packed with excitement, the Brother leaves you under-thrilled. Results with photographic paper are better, where the Brother MFC-J4510DW offers vibrant prints.

Auto duplexing is supported, with a hit on the speed, and even in fast-mode text falls from 18.3ppm to just 5.3ppm – a huge fall that means few may be prepared to wait for their paper-saving.

The Brother MFC-J4510DW is fairly quiet, although it does emit a noise like distant fireworks. This noise sometimes persists after printing.

Cartridge prices will be £23.99 for black and £15.59 for each CMY colour, in 600-page yield sizes. Higher yield options are £32.99, and £22.79 each for 1200-page refills.

In best-case with high yield 1200-page refills, costs are 2.75p black, and 5.7p colour. That’s reasonably competitive.

The £140 HP Photosmart 7520 has costs of 2.4p/4.8p, so Brother isn't quite as cheap. But it’s more affordable than the Canon MX895, at 2.9p and 12.5p for black/colour respectively.

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Connectify Dispatch - software load balances network adaptors

Beyond the Hotspot software that comprises the bulk of its business, Connectify makes another utility for laptop enthusiasts: Dispatch.

Connectify Dispatch works by simultaneously leveraging the multiple network adapters and high-speed USB ports available on modern systems to boost bandwidth and reliability. Each Internet connection you add to Dispatch's list of active adapters increases potential download speeds and provides automatic failover in the case one of the connections fails. For the most part, this works swimmingly. However, there's a bit of the devil in the details.

Setup is straightforward and largely automatic. Users are presented with a window that lists available adapters and indicates whether or not they are bound to Dispatch. A graph charts the combined bandwidth on tap, and settings allow for customized application routing, bandwidth caps for metered Internet feeds, and various routing strategies that maximize efficiency in marginal networking situations.

The first prerequisite is an obvious one: You need access to multiple, separate Internet connections for Dispatch to work as advertised. The hidden detail here is that combined bandwidth isn't directly additive. Two 20 Mbs connections won't yield a 40 Mbs single-socket download, for example, but they will allow for loads to be balanced and intelligently routed to an available adapter with the most suitable bandwidth. BitTorrents and other software that utilize multiple sockets will allow downloads to reach full combined speeds, however.

Next, your system will need the hardware to make practical use of those multiple internet connections. While most laptops have more than a single network interface, normally only one is wireless. This means getting the benefits of Dispatch requires either cabling up with Ethernet or adding a USB Wi-Fi dongle to your system, complicating matters somewhat, especially on the road. How often do you find Ethernet jacks outside of office environments, where connectivity is rarely an issue?

With a small investment of setup time and money, however, Dispatch's usefulness grows considerably. Adding one or more tiny plug-and-play Wi-Fi adapters (such as EdiMax's Nano 802.11) to unused USB ports dramatically multiplies the performance benefits of Dispatch, especially in bandwidth-starved but Wi-Fi-rich environments such as coffee shops, libraries, and trade shows. Just make sure to have all the login credentials saved before you settle down with your latte.

In fact, it's under these conditions that Dispatch really shows its potential. At home and hooked up to a stable high-speed network, the benefits are largely negligible unless your own Internet service is crummy enough that you're poaching a neighbor's Wi-Fi. But out on the road, a combination of local establishment Wi-Fi, a nearby hotspot, and a tethered 4G smartphone can yield an office-level networking experience in terms of speed and reliability.

It's a shame that Dispatch comes in at a sizable $45 for a lifetime license or $12 a quarter for subscription-based licensing, each of which is twice the price it should be. No free versions exist. The extra hardware and effort required to make the most of Dispatch means the investment doesn't stop with Connectify's charges, either.

Nevertheless, people who spend most of their laptop time in the field will want to take Dispatch for a spin and give it careful consideration. 

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Dell Precision T7600

We often use car metaphors to describe workstations we review – from solid reliable Volkswagons to superpowered Bugatti Veyrons. Our review model of Dell’s top-of-the-line Precision T7600 workstation is more like a customised design you’d expect someone like will.i.am to order – souped-up to ludicrous levels, but with impossible-to-figure-out configuration choices.

The T7600 is probably the best-designed workstation Dell has ever produced. Looks-wise, its exterior says ‘power’ in understated way – though to the touch it’s a bit plastic.

Open up the side of the case and you’ve easy access to most components – unlike some older Precision models. There are two slots for Xeon chips and 32 slots for RAM – plus the usual PCI Express slots for your graphics card and other devices (a hardware RAID controller on our review unit). A latch on the front reveals four 2.5-inch and four 3.5-inch drive trays that can popped out at a moment’s notice.

Our review unit had two 3.1GHz Xeon E5-2687 chips, 128GB RAM and two 256GB SSDs striped together using the controller. The chips are the most powerful on the market and just what you’d expect for the price, delivering untouchable performance in all our rendering/processing tests.

However, the inclusion of the full 128GB of RAM is this machine’s ‘fish tank in the glove compartment’ – cool in a ‘we’ve maxed out’ kinda way, but rather impractical. Few creative projects or applications will benefit from more than 32GB or 64GB – so this just smacks of willy waving on Dell’s part. Another odd choice is having only a 512GB ‘system and apps drive’ and no media drive – especially considering the price and internal space available. Maybe it’s meant to work directly off a SAN.

For graphics, our T7600 featured an AMD FirePro W8000 graphics card, which delivered exceptional frame-rates in both Cinebench and much more complex scenes in Maya. Compared to the Quadro K5000 in the Chillblast Fusion Render 5000 or the WSX6 V2, the W8000 lagged a little in Cinebench, but there was little between them in Maya. To really push them, we ran the graphics-card killing FurMark benchmark, where the K5000 was on average 40 per cent faster.

Dell’s Precision T7600 is its best high-end workstation to date, and it could be your ideal desktop system.

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BlackBerry Q10

The second BlackBerry phone to run the BlackBerry 10 OS is the the BlackBerry Q10. Unlike the first - the BlackBerry Z10 - the Q10 will appeal to hardcore BlackBerry users with its hardware qwerty keyboard. In our BlackBerry Q10 review we look at how that keybard plays with BlackBerry's brave new world. (See also: BlackBerry Q10 price in the UK.)

To accommodate the keyboard, the Q10 has a 3.1in display, which is 25 percent smaller than the 4.2in display on the Z10 (and also smaller than the displays of most competing smartphones). I noticed this reduced real estate immediately when reading Web pages and looking at longer emails and documents (although it didn't matter at all for instant and text messages). The smaller screen doesn't invite you to watch videos or play games either, although neither is impossible.

Why? Because even at the Q10's 3.1in screen size, BlackBerry made a good choice by going with Super AMOLED (which is not quite full HD). The 720-x-720-resolution (330 pixels per inch) display shows images brighter and crisper than does the LCD screen of the Z10, and I found it especially good for watching video and reading websites with images.

Aside from differences with the keyboard and display, the Z10 and Q10 offer pretty much the same hardware. Both run dual-core 1.5GHz processors, which provide snappy performance for touches, swipes and other inputs in various applications. Both have 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and a microSD slot under the back cover for adding up to 32GB. Also, both have 8-megapixel rear cameras and 2-megapixel front-facing cameras. Both contain NFC chips for file exchanges and support for mobile payments.

However, the Q10 has a 2100mAh removable battery, considerably bigger than the 1800mAh battery in the Z10. The choice to have the larger touchscreen device run with a smaller battery might seem counterintuitive, since the larger screen will probably be used for viewing more power-sucking videos and games. But having the larger battery in the Q10 points to one of BlackBerry's underlying missions with the Q10: To give (hopefully) more than a full day's charge to the executives, stockbrokers, lawyers and other busy people who were the original users of BlackBerry devices.

BlackBerry rates the Q10's battery life at up to 9 hours for video playback and up to 61 hours for audio playback, with up to 13.5 hours talk time on 3G. However, I was running the Q10 on 4G HSPA+ from AT&T (LTE is not yet available where I live) and found that I could barely get a full 8 hours on a single charge after a day of using it for a variety of tasks (including some admittedly power-sucking tasks like voice commands, video and audio).

See also: what's the best BlackBerry?

At 139g and 119x66x10mm, the Q10 is a tad heavier, thicker and wider than the Z10 - although it is shorter.

The Q10 has rounded corners and a gently curving top and bottom edge that are actually seductive - especially when placed beside the boxy and rectangular Z10. It feels great in the hand, with beveled edges all around the plastic back. There is a black steel edge around the entire device and a glass front above the keyboard. The back comes with a gray tweed-over-black pattern.

In fact, the profile of the Q10 is reminiscent of various BlackBerry Curve models of days gone by - the Curve 8520 being the closest. These days, however, designers have pushed the 35 hard keys into three full rows with a partial fourth row at the very bottom for the spacebar and command keys. Naturally, because of the touch screen, there's no need for the iconic BlackBerry roller ball or track pad above the keys to navigate with.

The keys are not arranged in curving rows as with older Curve models and instead are in straight rows, separated by polished stainless steel frets, not unlike a guitar. The appearance is elegant.

The keys are slightly beveled to make them easy to handle. I found that, after several days of use, I gradually went back to my old way of two-thumb fast typing, the way I used to work with an older BlackBerry (instead of pecking with my right-hand index finger while holding the phone with the left hand, which I do with modern virtual keypads). Maybe I've lost something by going virtual? With the Curve, I could type entire stories by thumbing along at a fast pace - a real advantage while covering crowded trade shows.

Aside from the keyboard, controls include a power button on the top edge and three buttons on the right for volume and other functions, the same as the Z10.

The back of the Q10 has another steel fret running horizontally just below the camera and flash ports. This rear-side fret is not flush with the plastic back cover, and rides a tad higher: According to Michael Clewley, director of handheld software product management at BlackBerry, designers created it this way to keep the back cover from getting scuffed from constantly being laid down and picked up from a desk or other surface. It's a neat design idea, although it's hard to say if it will work in the long term.

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Dell OptiPlex 9010 Review - Touchcreen Windows 8 all-in-one PC for Business

The launch of the touch-centric Windows 8 spawned a host of new all-in-one (AiO) designs, most of which leave something to be desired. But with a little patience and forethought, Dell has delivered a considerably more usable touchscreen AiO: the OptiPlex 9010. And all they had to do was to put the touchscreen within easy reach.

Dell worked this minor miracle by engineering a double-jointed stand that allows you to move the display up and down and slightly forward, along with the tilt adjustment most AiO's provide. Even better, the 9010 has a standard VESA mount point, so you can also use a fully articulated wall- or desk-mounted arm for truly versatile placement. Add a minor landslide of options, top-notch security features, excellent service and warranty options, and you have an AiO that UKPLC can embrace.

Dell also remembered something that many vendors seem to forget: It's not just about looking sexy; reducing cable clutter and wasted space are equally important. In a market filled with AiOs that block the usable surface area behind them, the 9010's minimal footprint leaves all the surrounding area accessible. This allows you to either fill it up with other stuff, or to enjoy the serenity delivered by an uncluttered vista.

To keep cables to a minimum, Dell ships the 9010 with a wireless mouse and keyboard. This keyboard is one of the first Chiclet-style units we've seen on a desktop. Its action is just a hair soft, but thanks to the support of the surrounding plastic, the keys don't have the sloppy feel that you get with some Dell units. The mouse tracks well and has a nice heft, thanks to the battery inside.

Dell OptiPlex 9010

Dell OptiPlex 9010 review: Connectivity, performance, and features

Any doubts that the 9010 all in one PC is aimed at the corporate world are dispelled by the presence of PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports found on the back of the unit. The back is also home to VGA and HDMI video outputs, gigabit ethernet, an audio output, two USB 3.0 ports, and four USB 2.0 ports to meet more modern peripherals needs.

On the left side of the PC are two more USB 3.0 ports, headset and microphone jacks, and a 8-in-1 card reader. On the lower right hand side of the display, you'll find the eject button for the optical drive, on-screen display, and power buttons. The absence of an HDMI input renders this system less attractive to consumers, because you can't use it as a display for a gaming console or a set-top box.

Our test 9010 AiO came configured with most of the top-of-the-line component options including an Intel Core i7-3770S, 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and a Samsung PM830, 128GB SSD. Needless to say, the machine was fast, scoring 113 on our WorldBench 8 test suite. Gaming was nothing to brag about, but the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics did manage playable frame rates at about 1024-by-768 and lower resolutions. We didn't receive a Blu-ray player, but got a DVD-RW burner in the bay.

The 9010 AiO's display is a 23.6-inch, 1920-by-1080 widescreen that provides a very sharp picture, and even behind the thick digitizer, plenty of usable brightness. The speakers deliver adequate volume, a tiny amount of bass, and a generally sonorous experience. The unit also has a 1.3-megapixel webcam, plus dual-array mics designed to reject background noise.

The 9010 is fully secured via Intel's Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and Intel Standard Manageability provides out-of-band management capabilities (Intel vPro Technology is available as an added option). Out-of-band management enables a remote admin to take control of the system whether or not it's powered. A three-warranty with onsite service after remote diagnosis is standard. Four- and five-year warranties are also available.

The 9010 AiO is available in a ton of configurations: Drives range from 3.5-inch 250GB mechanical models to the 128GB SSD that our test model used. CPUs run the gamut, from Pentium Dual-Core to Core i3's or the Core i7-3770S that we tested.

Dell got touch right with the OptiPlex 9010. The design of its stand makes using the computer via touch a lot easier than most other AiOs we've seen, and the inclusion of a VESA mounting point renders it suitable for almost any work environment. From a purely practical point of view, it's one of the best AiOs on the market.

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