Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Review

Times have changed substantially from the days of the Samsung Instinct. That was a sad dumbphone that tried to compete with Apple;s iPhone. Now, though, the Samsung Galaxy S line of Android smartphones are among the best in the business, but can we say the same about their tablets? Well, let’s have a look at one of the best in the bunch in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It’s name is pretty much self-explanatory: this is a Samsung tablet with a 10.1-inch screen. Does it stand out?

Dell Inspiron One 2320 review

Dell's Inspiron One 2320 proves that you can get a lot for a decent price, including plenty of RAM, a pretty big hard drive, and a Blu-ray disc player. But you can't get everything: specifically, good looks and a quality touchscreen. The Dell Inspiron One 2320 may cost less than £800 - on the low end of the Big Screen All-in-One PC category - but slightly pricier systems may deliver a better value. The cheapest Inspiron One 2320 starts at £599 inc VAT, albeit with a Pentium chip at only 4GB RAM. Our review model, at £798 inc VAT, has a 2.5GHz Core i5-2400S processor, an Nvidia GeForce GT 525M graphics card, 6GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. It also features a Blu-ray disc drive, has built-in Bluetooth and a built-in webcam and microphone, and runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.In our WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the Inspiron One 2320 performed well for its category with a score of 134. Graphics performance is also good - in our Unreal Tournament 3 test, the Inspiron One 2320 managed a frame rate of 110.6 frames per second (medium quality settings, 1024-by-768-pixel resolution). In the same test, the aforementioned TouchSmart 610 Quad achieved 119.3 frames per second with its AMD Radeon HD 5570 graphics card.


The Dell Inspiron One 2320 sports a glossy 23-inch touchscreen that has a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. This screen was fairly bright, images were crisp and clear (when they were not moving - but more on that later), and colors looked fairly true-to-life. The touchscreen was consistently inaccurate, however: In my testing, my taps consistently registered about half a centimetre below where I had actually touched. Surrounding the touchscreen is a shiny black plastic bezel that rounds off at the corners and tapers off at the sides. The speakers are located below the bezel, but set in such a way that it looks as if Dell just pasted the bezel and screen on top of the speakers - not a great look. The system is propped up on two tiny faux-chrome feet, and leans on a thick plastic stand, which does seem sturdy.
This combination of design elements - the shiny, rounded bezel; the pasted-on look; and the faux-chrome feet - makes the system look cheap and unplanned. Despite the sturdy feel, appearances don't work in this PC's favour.


Most of the ports are along the bottom rear of the machine, but a few connectivity ports are on the screen's left side. These include headphone and microphone jacks, two USB 2.0 ports, and a card reader. Volume and brightness adjustment buttons are also on the PC's left side. The rest of the ports are on the back. These include gigabit ethernet, HDMI-in, VGA-in, composite-in, an S/PDIF port, a TV hookup, D-Sub, line-out, and a Kensington lock slot. Also on the back are four additional USB 2.0 ports, for a total of six (no USB 3.0 at all). The right side has no ports, just a slot-loading Blu-ray disc player and power and input change buttons. The Inspiron One 2320 comes with your basic all-in-one peripherals, namely a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. The keyboard has flat black, Chiclet-style keys that are soft to the touch - perhaps a little too soft. The keys are small and rounded and make virtually no noise when you're typing. While this soft-touch, noiseless keyboard might be a virtue if you happen to work in a library, it's not exactly accurate - in my tests, my typing was rife with typos because the keyboard doesn't give enough feedback.


The mouse is pretty standard - two-button, wireless, with a rubbery scroll wheel. I do particularly like its look - the entire thing is smooth and black, like a pebble, and it has a little more weight to it than your typical light-as-air optical mouse. Multimedia playback on this PC is okay, but not stellar. Streaming HD video looks good, though images are sometimes soft, with a moderate amount of artifacting (blockiness and noise) in high-motion scenes. Blu-ray video also comes through very well, though in my testing I still detected a hint of artifacting. DVD upconversion isn't quite as good: Images are soft, with a lot of lost detail. 
Audio is also acceptable, though not as good as on the two HP TouchSmart models I tested in this run, both of which feature Beats Audio enhancement technology. The speakers, located below the screen, are loud, but at their loudest setting audio sounds a little thin and bassless. At a more moderate level, however, audio sounds good.

Windows 8 beta may arrive in February

Microsoft may release the first public beta of Windows 8 as early as February 2012, according to sources close to the company cited by The Next Web. An exact date for the completion and shipping of Microsoft's next major operating system release remains unknown for now, but putting Windows 7's release milestones in a Windows 8 context, the site believes the completed RTM version could hit the market around June. If their estimates are accurate, Windows 8 could arrive late in Q3 or going into Q4, just ahead of the 2012 holiday season, giving partners enough time to ship the OS with their PCs and tablets. By comparison, Microsoft released a public beta of Windows 7 in January of 2009, with the final version hitting in October.

The site says it hasn't been able to confirm exactly what will be included in the beta itself, as the feature set will be decided based on which components are ready for public testing at the time of release. A developer preview of Windows 8 has been available since mid-September, but Microsoft has been cooking a number of changes and new features that are due for the beta and final versions. The company has detailed a few of them in their official Building Windows 8 blog, including better memory management, changes to the Task Manager and Windows Explorer, search improvements, among others.

One particular feature that has received a fair amount of criticism from users is the new Metro start screen, a touch-optimized interface akin that of Windows Phone . Microsoft says Metro represents a major re-think of how users interact with Windows, and while users can easily switch to the classic desktop environment, many are concerned that having it as the default start screen for non-touch devices would make no sense. It seems like an easy problem to fix but it remains to be seen if Microsoft is willing to make that concession. On a related note, rumors are starting to emerge that the traditional Windows desktop will not be included on Windows 8 tablets powered by ARM-based processors. Instead, these devices will rely exclusively on the Metro user interface and software written specifically for it. That sounds like a reasonable thing to do, at least initially, considering the amount of work it would take to tweak 'legacy' x86 software for ARM chipsets -- not to mention these applications are not optimized for touch environments.