If you know about Black Mesa, congratulations — you’re a gamer. This obscure fan-lead remake of Valve’s famous 1998 title Half-Life has long been shrouded in mystery. Going on 8 years of development, with the only mention of a release date being “when it’s done”, most thought Black Mesa would never see the light of day. However, earlier this month the official website for the remake began buzzing with hints of activity. To the delight of fans worldwide, Black Mesa has finally launched and is ready to let players relive […]

Thunderbolt docks: expensive. WiGig docks: Not until 2013. Proprietary docks: Seldom seen on consumer laptops. USB3.0 solutions – cheap and available. If you want to use your Ultrabook, or any recent laptop on the desk, there’s a lot of options talked about, but not much available. You’re left with plugging in that HDMI, the keyboard and mouse, DVD drive, network cable and speakers every morning. Every time you want to use the laptop away form the desk you have to go through the same procedure. It costs time, is annoying […]

The power used by a screen in a laptop is becoming a major issue. As other components in laptops reduce their power, the percentage of total system power used by the screen and backlight is growing. 20-30% average is common but if you’re just reading a static page, the backlight could account for up to 50%. Come Haswell, that could jump to 70% or more in quiet-state operations.  Advances in battery technology aren’t forthcoming so anything to get rid of those LED backlights is going to be worth taking a […]

Forget Intel’s prediction of $699 Ultrabooks. Forget our own prediction of $599 by the end of the year! The $599 Ivy Bridge Ultrabook is here already with the a great offer on the Vizio CT14.  In Europe, prices have dipped to below €599.   It’s Vizio that have come through with the most impressive offer. The Vizio CT14-A0 1.8Ghz Ivy Bridge (Core i3) with a 128GB SSD and 1600×900 IPS screen. We can hardly believe that!  It even comes with a Windows Signature (no bloatware) build of Windows 7 Home […]

Thanks to the exploding world of mobile, the computer industry has seen a refreshed interest in high efficiency components. Though Intel has always made a wide range of processors, until lately the company’s low-power products were sometimes seen as second-class citizens of the CPU world. Sure, they used less power, but this was often achieve this with lower clock speeds, fewer features, and sometimes the disabling of cores in the case of multi-core processors. With the Ultrabook initiative Intel has renewed emphasis on efficient processors that are not just on equal […]

The iPhone is the biggest selling connected camera in the world. It’s pretty smart too and with iPhone 5, Apple were really pushing the quality, speed and features at the launch event. Image via Tech2 Images are starting to appear online now and so it’s time to start the analysis. I’m taking a look at low-light performance here because I think it’s an area where only the best smartphones can compete.

Acer is preparing to launch the Aspite M3 Touch with Windows 8. the design is based on a previous iteration of an Acer Ultrabook — the Acer M3. The M3 Touch is a 15.6″ touchscreen Ultrabook which competes with other big Ultrabooks like the Asus S56 and Vizio Thin and Light CT15 (indirectly however, as the latter two lack a touchscreen). Notebook Italia tracked down the M3 Touch for a brief hands-on and also uncovered European pricing.

I had the chance to check out the Toshiba U920T / U925T slider Ultrabook at IDF last week in San Francisco and put a quick video together showing the slider mechanism, ports and screen which, is quite the glossy experience as you’ll see. There’s also an NFC demo – the U920T will be the first Ultrabook with NFC.