Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 first impression review
The first true Honeycomb tablet went on sale yesterday -- preorders for most folks and actual hardware for people lucky enough to be in New York and close to the Best Buy Union Square. I got the 16GB Galaxy Tab 10.1 WiFi late Tuesday afternoon, from Samsung for review. I highly anticipated the Tab 10.1, simply because it's not iPad, it packs Android 3.1 "Honeycomb" and has impressive hardware specs.
A Matter of Dimensions
Get hands on with Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7
Equipping yourself to deal with all your graphics needs typically requires an entire library of programs: a drawing tool, photo editor, desktop publishing application, web graphics package, Flash animation tool, and so on. Or alternatively you could just install Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7, which crams all this functionality -- and more -- into a single, easy-to-use package.
Would you like to correct a few photos, for instance? Open the Photos toolbar and you can crop, rotate or resize an image; tweak brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, blur or sharpness; fix red-eye; adjust levels; apply perspective correction; and more.
A mini review of Opera Mini 6 for iPad
Opera fans command reverence and loyalty that even Apple must be jealous of. Opera has survived just about every conceivable market share abuse -- from Internet Explorer's crushing monopolistic dominance to wily new competitors like Chrome and Safari -- and loyal fans are major reason. Well, they, and Opera pushing new features at rapid pace. But competitors are imitating Opera's development innovation, too.
It's with this mindset that I set out to give Opera mini 6 for iPad a hard lookover late today. Little more than a year has passed since the browser released for iPhone, quickly achieving 1 million downloads. Clearly somebody wanted an alternative to Apple's WebKit-based Safari browser. Opera mini 6 released today -- for iPhone with updated features (such as support for retina display) and for iPad, supporting the larger screen size. I tested the software on a 64GB WiFi iPad 2.
An honest appraisal of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1
If you don't read Betanews often, or don't really get a feel for my personality through my writing, allow me to give you a brief introduction that is also something of a disclosure of bias.
My name is Tim Conneally, I happen to own a television, computer monitor, and Android smartphone made by Samsung, and like 5,000 other lucky slobs, I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 simply by being present at Google I/O 2011.
Fujifilm FinePix X100 first impressions review
Few digital cameras have caused as much stir as the retro-styled compact now available in the United States on a limited basis. The Fujifilm FinePix X100 joins the Leica X1, Sigma DP1x and DP2x, Sony Alpha NEX-3 and NEX-5 and micro four-thirds cameras like the Olympus PEN E-PL2 and E-P2 or Panasonic DMC-GF2 in a newer class of mirrorless digicams. I used or owned the DP1, DP2s, E-P2, GF1 and X1.
However, like the Leica X1 or Sigma DP series, the X100 is eccentric -- the lens is fixed and cannot be changed. Who on earth would buy a digital camera without telephoto? I, for one. Many professional photographers for another. I'm no pro, but I have specific needs as a journalist for which the X100 is ideally suited. The X100 is the only camera I own. Whether or not it will be sufficient for my needs, or possibly yours, will be focus in my follow-up review. For now, I offer some first impressions and explain what are this camera's major benefits.
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional: The full review
Paragon's Hard Disk Manager is a comprehensive collection of hard drive tools that comes in three different flavors. Hard Disk Manager Suite is powerful, but aimed at home users. The Server edition targets corporations, with its ability to optimize Windows Server installations. But the new Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional is perhaps the most interesting. It's packed with features, and Paragon say it's more of a business package, but there's also plenty here to appeal to the more advanced user, whether at home or in the office.
This doesn't make the program difficult to use, though. Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional doesn't have the same front-end menu that you get in the Suite edition, but it's still quite straightforward to locate the functionality you need; just right-click the drive or partition you'd like to work on, or browse the menus, and the feature you need will generally be very obvious. The interface in general is much the same as it has been in previous Paragon software, so if you've ever used any of the previous suites then you'll probably feel at home right away.
Take Control of your digital content with CyberLink PowerDVD 11 Ultra
CyberLink's PowerDVD has long been many people's DVD and Blu-ray player of choice. But that's no longer enough for CyberLink, which boasts that PowerDVD 11 "is the world's leading universal media player for the PC", so powerful that it can "play any media format, from any source." Universal media player? Any media format? Big claims, then, but has CyberLink delivered? We took PowerDVD 11 for a spin in an effort to find out.
The interface hasn't changed too much, with simple tabs allowing you to play particular content types. And the core DVD and Blu-ray functionality is also similar to PowerDVD 10, though there are a few useful additions dotted throughout the package. The program doesn't only play DVDs, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D discs, for instance: it can now also handle recorded 3D TV.
SPC Music Sketchpad: one of the best Android music apps yet
Music creation apps on Android, be they beatmakers, step sequencers, drum machines, or virtual synths, are pretty rare for as advanced as the platform has become. Despite the thousands of Android users, the platform is nowhere near as robust as iOS for the musically inclined.
But that isn't to say there aren't many potential Android musicians out there. Quite the contrary, I know there is a big potential audience to be had (at least anecdotally,) because most of the traffic on my Android-specific blog goes to my music app reviews.
Moleskine for iPad: Write at your own risk
Writing is what I do for a living, but also for enjoyment. So I was intrigued when Moleskine for iPad popped up in Apple's App Store on April 15, 2011 (It's available for iPhone, too). The Moleskine notebook is the legendary journal of great writers.
Moleskine uses Ernest Hemingway in its marketing. He's not around to complain or dispute the pocket journal's value to him as a writer. During 1920s, Hemingway frequented several Paris cafés where other artists also used the journal to jot down thoughts, stories and sketches. Of course, this mystique is all marketing now. Use Moleskine, too, and you can be a great writer -- or at least feel part of the select community of artists.
Do Bloomberg Businessweek app and iPad click?
For all the griping about Apple's restrictive subscriptions plan, news organizations are beginning to embrace it. News Corp. debuted tablet-only "The Daily" in early February. The New York Times ended March like a lion, with new paywalls that included an iPad subscription. Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek app debuted on Apple's App Store, also with subscription pricing.
For this reviewer, the $2.99 monthly price is the most exciting thing about the app. Definitely it's a price I'd like to see more weekly magazines adopt. I'd ditch print The New Yorker, which costs me 29 bucks for a year, for iPad digital version, if available for three bucks a month. Last I checked, the magazine was available only per issue -- for $3.99. Get a gun so I can shoot the dog, too.
Online Armor Free 5.0: Too many alerts but great protection
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, software firewalls would essentially carry out just a single task: monitoring your network, and blocking any unauthorised connections. That's no longer enough to make your product stand out from the crowd, though, and firewalls like Online Armor 5.0 now cram in so many other functions and features -- keylogging detection, behaviour monitoring, browsing protection, script blocking and more -- that they begin to look more like security suites.
The extra functionality is apparent as soon as you launch the Online Armor installer. This doesn't simply unpack its files; its Safety Check Wizard first scans your PC for known dangerous processes that might interfere with the program's operation. This takes a while -- 55 minutes on our test PC -- but is probably worth it, just to be sure that we were starting with a clean system (although if you know you're malware-free then the wizard can be skipped altogether).
Bing for iPad rocks
Earlier today, Microsoft released its Bing app for iPad -- and, whoa is it beautiful. The iPad screen grabs here are poor representations of how good this app looks and how functionally useful it is. Bing for iPad is so delish I could lick the screen. Did I mention that it's useful? I'd pay, even if Microsoft charged a buck ninety-nine.
Microsoft doesn't get the credit deserved for applications development. The company seems to do its best work when freed from Windows. Yes, that's a criticism. Windows is a ball and chain for Microsoft developers. Office for Macintosh is one of Microsoft's best applications, and it's exceptional among Mac software titles. Xbox and Xbox Live also show what Microsoft developers can do when their creative juices are freed from Windows. Kinect is even better example, and Bing for iPad is another.
MAGIX Website Maker 5: When Flash is enough
The web design market is packed with tools that promise to help you quickly build a website, even if you're a design novice. But while ease of use is great, the end results are more important still: and the dull, static HTML templates you get with many of these packages won't impress anyone at all.
The cross-platform MAGIX Website Maker 5 takes a different approach, by allowing you to create animated Flash-based sites, which you can then customize with a host of animated and dynamic components: music and video players, photo galleries, contact forms, guestbooks, embedded YouTube videos or Google maps and many more.
O&O DiskRecovery 7 Professional
If you're looking for a good undelete program then there are plenty of freeware programs to choose from. Recuva, from the CCleaner authors, is a particular favorite of ours -- fast, capable and very easy to use -- and it's tempting to assume that you don't need anything else. Are freeware data recovery tools really up to the standards of the commercial competition, though? O&O Software says no, pointing to its latest release, DiskRecovery 7, as evidence. A look at the program's feature list suggests they O&O have a point.
DiskRecovery combines multiple scanning methods to improve the chances of recovery, for instance, allowing it to locate files even on formatted or damaged partitions. There's direct support for locating and restoring more than 350 common file types. DiskRecovery can be installed on a removable drive, which means it won't overwrite the data you're trying to recover -- and it works with all Windows-compatible storage devices: hard drives, removable drives, memory cards, digital cameras, MP3 players and more.
MAGIX MP3 deluxe 17: Better than a boombox
As well as being a useful tool for carrying out work and accessing the internet, many home computers are used as storage for large music collections. While the likes of iTunes and Windows Media Player include music management options, they can be cumbersome to use, and this is something that MAGIX MP3 deluxe 17 aims to help with. Covering everything from importing music from CDs and adjusting tags and album art to creating playlists and recording online radio stations, this burgeoning suite of tools has almost every MP3 related base covered.
The main program has an easy to use interface that can be used to extract music from CDs and import folders full of music files into your library. If you have already spent time working with iTunes and have therefore created a music library in Apple's software, this can be quickly imported into MAGIX MP3 deluxe 17 to help save time. Of course, the program can also be used to play back music, and there are a number of options available in this area.
Recent Headlines
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.