Raspberry Pi eye is a £20 camera for photos and HD video
DesktopsSay cheese: you can now get a webcam for your home-built Raspberry Pi computer. The Raspberry Pi eye is a £20 camera module that shoots 5-megapixel photos and high-definition video.
The makers of the Pi eye, element14, suggest that the camera can be connected to your home-brew Raspberry Pi for security and VoIP projects, perhaps as a webcam beaming images to another computer. Continue reading...
Microsoft defends Windows 8 changes as reacting to feedback
DesktopsWindows 8 has come in for plenty of stick in its relatively short life, but now Microsoft has gone on the defensive, slamming its detractors.
Articles this week in the Financial Times and The Economist accuse Microsoft of backtracking, pointing to the return of the Start button as evidence its latest operating system is a failure. This prompted Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's corporate vice president of corporate communications, to accuse such publications of providing "stark black-and-white caricatures" rather than "shades-of-grey reality". Continue reading...
Viber desktop app puts phone chat on your computer
SoftwareMessaging app Viber has added a desktop app to its software roster that'll let customers continue their phone chit-chat on their computers.
If you already use the Viber app on your smart phone, you'll be able to sign into the desktop client -- which is available for PC and Mac -- and keep talking to your pals. Continue reading...
Samsung renames all its PCs - they're all Ativ now
LaptopsSamsung has decided its 'Ativ' brand has been so successful that it's renaming all of its Windows PCs with the nonsensical moniker.
Ativ is Vita backwards -- I'm not joking, that's Samsung's reasoning -- and previously only applied to the Ativ Smart PC and Smart PC Pro, both Windows 8 tablets. Continue reading...
SimCity Mac out on 11 June, as 'Cheetah Speed' returns
Games and GearOwners of Apple's aluminium computers won't be denied their urban-planning kicks, as EA has confirmed its recent SimCity game is headed to Mac on 11 June.
SimCity for Mac will only be available to download, via EA's Origin service. Although you don't get the disc for your collection, you'll still be paying £45 for the digital download -- the same price as the PC version, although if you've already bought it for PC you're entitled to download it again for Mac for nothing.
Continue reading...
Retina display Macs on the cards as Thunderbolt goes 4K
DesktopsThunderbolt is bringing double the thunder. Apple's favourite cable is getting a speed boost to a whopping 20Gbps in magnificently titled update Falcon Ridge -- and what's more it can handle 4K video at the same time.
As the next generation of Intel's Thunderbolt data transfer technology, Falcon Ridge is capable of blasting 20 gigabits of data per second between devices, double the current rate of 10Gbps. And it can keep zapping 20Gbps back and forth in both directions between devices, even while shuttling eye-meltingly high-resolution 4K video to a display at the same time. Continue reading...
Dell XPS 18 enormo-tablet shown off in hands-on video 
Dell's new XPS 18 is an 18-inch all-in-one computer, which also operates as a ginormous tablet, showing that the fashion for increasingly large touchscreens isn't limited to smart phones. Dell's Jaap van Leewen gives us a guided tour in this video.
The XPS 18 is adorned with a sizeable 1080p multi-touch display, which allows plenty of room for error if you're poking those lovely colourful Windows 8 tiles with your porky digits. Continue reading...
Steam Box prototypes ready in 'months', Gabe Newell says
Games and GearValve's much-anticipated 'Steam Box' should be ready for testing within the next few months, company boss Gabe Newell has confirmed.
Prototypes will be given to customers "within the next three or four months," Newell, who created the Half Life franchise and was last night awarded a BAFTA Fellowship, told the BBC. Those early-stage consoles will be used to gauge reaction to the new system ahead of its launch. Continue reading...
BSkyB to buy O2's UK broadband business for £200m
DesktopsBSkyB is buying the broadband arm of O2's parent company Telefonica UK for £200 million. The deal will make BSkyB the second biggest UK broadband company, helping it hop ahead of Virgin Media.
The number of people getting their Internet fix from Sky will jump from 4.2 million to 4.7 million. Virgin Media currently has 4.5 million broadband customers, while BT remains first in the UK with 6.6 million. Continue reading...
Microsoft to make a joint app store for desktop and mobile?
SoftwareCould all your Windows 8 apps soon work on your Windows Phone 8 mobile, and vice versa? They could well do, if a job advert from Microsoft is anything to go by.
The ad sees Microsoft recruiting a software development engineer to help make it easier to develop across both platforms, WMPowerUser reports. The ad has since been taken down, but look at this, here's a Google cache of it. There's no beating the Internet, Microsoft, you must know that by now. Continue reading...
Raspberry Pi cooking up $25 camera module for video antics
DesktopsRaspberry Pi owners could be about to give their tiny desktop PCs a new lease of life, thanks to an add-on camera module that will be on sale soon.
Hot on the heels of the new Model A Pi, which trades pared-down power for a cheaper price and lower electricity consumption, the camera module could give Pi owners the option to build photography robots, spy drones or any number of quirky devices. Continue reading...
Raspberry Pi Model A costs £19, makes sun-powered robots
GadgetsA new, cheaper model of the Raspberry Pi is now on sale, delivering a tiny computer for an even more affordable £19.33.
The 'Model A' micro PC is now out in Europe, available to buy from RS components for under twenty quid. It ditches the Ethernet port, but has a single USB socket and 256MB of RAM. Continue reading...
Google grant puts 15,000 Raspberry Pi PCs in UK schools
DesktopsGoogle has coughed up enough cash to send 15,000 Raspberry Pi computers to UK schools, in a bid to give the British programming scene a shot in the arm.
The good-will donation comes via Google Giving, the search giant's charitable arm. Both Google and Raspberry Pi will work with six UK educational partners, including exam board OCR, to make sure the thousands of free computers are put to good use. Continue reading...
1 million Raspberry Pi computers have been sold
DesktopsRaspberry Pi -- the little computer that's bringing back engineering in a big way -- has sold about a million units. The numbers aren't concrete, but estimates peg the total at about the million figure. Which is quite some achievement.
And to celebrate, the folks who make the mini computer have put together the infographic you can see above. Continue reading...
CNET CES Awards: Razer Edge wins Best of Show, People's Voice
GadgetsIn the roundup to end all CES roundups (for this year at least), let us recap the winners of the Best of CES Awards, which were announced last night and recognise all the most exciting and innovative products unveiled in Vegas this year.
The Razer Edge, a Windows 8 gaming tablet with a panoply of peripherals, has been proclaimed the best product of CES 2013. Its family of accessories open up different usage modes and lets you play full-blown PC games practically anywhere. Continue reading...
CNET CES roundup: Xperia Z, 4K and OLED TVs, laser robot tanks
GadgetsCES may be the world's largest tech show, but phones rarely get top billing in Vegas, preferring instead to step out along the balmy Barcelona boulevards during Mobile World Congress in February. Sony has decided to jump the gun, however, and yesterday unveiled the much-rumoured Xperia Z.
Tall, slim and trim, the Xperia Z packs a pretty powerful 1.5GHz quad-core punch, and sports a 5-inch 1080p display and 13-megapixel camera. A slim bezel and glass-plated back give the phone a high-end look, and it will arrive running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Excitingly for butterfingers everywhere, it's also waterproof.
Continue reading...
CNET CES roundup: Nvidia Shield, Tegra 4, HP portable monitor
GadgetsNvidia kicked off CES 2013 in style, unveiling a prototype of its first own-brand gaming device, which it has dubbed 'Project Shield'.
The portable gadget runs Android and can connect to the cloud to play games for Android, TegraZone (the company's own app store) and -- very cool, this -- streaming from PCs with compatible GeForce graphics cards. It looks very like a gaming controller and has manual joysticks and buttons, as well as a pop-up screen. Supposedly it offers between 5 and 10 hours of gaming time. Continue reading...
Nexus 4 and Raspberry Pi star in CNET UK's Products of the Year
Mobile PhonesIt's a been a whirlwind year of tech launches, with phones and tablets taking centre stage. Our colleagues over at CNET.com went the whole hog and wrote up their 100 top stories of 2012, but as the year draws to a close I wanted the CNET UK team to take a moment to reflect on their personal highlights of the past 12 months.
We've all picked a single product that has impressed us the most, and given our reasons why below. It's inevitably a much more UK-focused list than that of our American chums. What do you think of our picks? Let us know in the comments box at the bottom or on our Facebook wall. Continue reading...
Raspberry Pi gets its own app store, with games and tutorials
DesktopsThe dirt-cheap Raspberry Pi computer now has its own app store, granting owners an easy way to get their mitts on games and software for the tiny PC.
Unlike Android's Google Play, apps will undergo moderation before they're published to the Pi Store. The Raspberry Pi foundation says on its blog that it hopes youngsters will use its to "share their creations with a wider audience, and maybe to make a little pocket money on the side." Continue reading...
New iMac teardown shows replaceable RAM, HDD and CPU
DesktopsThe new iMac -- which went on sale on Friday -- is ludicrously slim. If you've wondered exactly how Apple managed to fit a working computer in a chassis that's only 5mm thin at its slimmest point, wonder no more -- the screwdriver-wielding bloggers at iFixit have performed their teardown magic on Apple's latest desktop.
The good news is that, like on previous models, the RAM, hard drive and CPU are all replaceable, should any of them fail. (The hard drive of every iMac I've ever owned has died after about two years, so I'm glad to hear this.) Continue reading...
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