I recently decided my laptop needed a bit of a refresh so went on hunt for something new. I currently have a self built gaming PC so was looking for a more functional laptop without really worrying about specs. I wasn’t looking for some over the top Alienware Laptop or anything, just something easy to use to check emails, browse Internet etc. I’d also taken to the idea of the iPad but wanted a less closed more advanced system. The answer in the end was pretty easy HP’s convertible Touchsmart TM2 laptop! So after a couple of months of playing, here’s my review…

The TM2 is designed as a laptop / tablet pc hybrid.  What this basically means is you get a laptop with a touchscreen. The screen rotates round and lays back flat on the keyboard, thus leaving you with an iPad style screen.

Look

The TM2 has an all aluminium casing, engraved with the swirly design that HP seems to love.  Its an amazing design which adds to the feel of strength. The same aluminium and swirly design is applied to the keyboard surround as well. Before ordering I was a little concerned this swirl design may be a little girly looking, but it isn’t! (Thank fully!).

The screen has a black plastic surround with two Antec Lancing speakers below it and a webcam and microphone above. The placement of the speakers are perfect for this type of laptop as they are below the screen, so when you change to tablet mode, the speakers are still pointing at you. A few convertibles end up with the speakers on the side.

Underneath is pretty standard black plastic covering. There is a hump where the batter inserts which does get in the way a little when holding the TM2 but it doesn’t really affect usage.

Round the sides are 3 usb slots and a memory card reader. Plus an HDMI socket for hooking up to a TV. Plus an all in one headphone/microphone port similar to that of an iPod.

The back houses a VGA port and gigabit network port.

All together, the TM2 is a very smart looking, solid bit of kit. There’s plenty of connectivity too, although there is no optical drive built in.  UK buyers do get a free usb DVD-RW included though, along with a matching slip case.

Specs

As this is a UK TM2, there’s only one spec. Other countries get different specs and I believe the US get to customise their laptops.

So what do we get. A 12.1 inch LED back lit WXGA LCD screen with both multi touch input (just two points of touch though) and pen input via the included Wacom stylus, An Intel Pentium SU4100, this is a low voltage 1.3ghz chip, which means battery life on the TM2 is excellent, easily managing 6 hours even with fairly heavy usage. You get dual graphics adapters, an integrated Intel gpu and a discrete ATI HD 4550. The system switches between the two automatically depending on whether you have the TM2 plugged into the charger or not. HDMI is only available when running on the ATI chip so you’ll need the TM2 plugged it to use HDMI with you TV. There’s also 4GB memory, a 320gb hard drive, bluetooth, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and a finger print reader.

As laptop specs go, this is pretty complete. I really can’t think of anything I’d add!

Performance & Usage

So whats it like performance wise. The SU4100 is only a 1.33 ghz CPU but doesn’t feel left wanting. The laptop is pretty snappy for most things. I’d say its about 2 minutes for start up, but recovers from Hibernation in probably 30 seconds. It also depends which GPU option you pair it with. Away from power you are on the integrated graphics chip. This allows for most office/ Internet tasks and also video playback (i’ve got 1080p streamed over Wifi like this). Plug it into the mains and you switch the the discrete ATI Radeon HD 4550. While this isn’t the most powerful of graphics chips in the world, I have managed to play nearly all games at full resolution, including Anno 1404, Modern Warfare 2, fallout 3 etc. So the powers there, just don’t expect Crysis to run on high settings!

The screen. This was always going to be the make or break point of a hybrid like the TM2. As a laptop its perfect, crystal clear and bright. Flip it round and as a tablet you get the same quality but rather poor viewing angles. Although this is only noticeable when watching movies or using dark software.

The touch screen is very responsive, probably only a bit behind on the excellent iPod/Pad/Phone screens. Its probably more a windows thing that stops the screen matching the Apples. You do only get 2 touch input though, so there is pinch to zoom, and two finger rotating etc, but not fancy three or four fingers. This is a shame, especially as HP includes a touch based game that requires 4 points of input! There is also a hard rotate button on the edge of the screen which will rotate the screen 90 degrees at a time, switching it from landscape to portrait etc.

The Wacom digitiser (or the pen) is another great addition. The pen is pressure sensitive so is ideal for artists, although I have noticed its tracking to be a little hit and miss on occasion. Plus its sensitive to the magnet that holds the laptop close (or holds it in tablet more). The pen with arc when near this magnet which is annoying.

While talking about inputs, I’d also like to mention the Keyboard and track pad when in laptop mode. The keyboard is hands down the best keyboard I have used on any PC. Very enjoyable and quiet. The track pad is multi touch similar to the screen but has a slight issue that the buttons are part of the actual pad so clicking and dragging can be a little annoying. Plus I have a habit of standing the laptop up on my belly when watching films, and I seem to continuously catch the track pad. Its maybe a little too close to the edge but it does have an on/off switch which is activated by double tapping the top left corner.

Battery life is excellent, I’ve easily got over 4 hours out of it with average use. A testiment to the power management and components HP has used.

Conclusion

It’s very hard to find any gripes with the TM2, its a solid, well thought out bit of kit that has all the advantages of both a laptop and an iPad. And that’s without review the ton of software that’s included. That’s for another time!

Performance is excellent, design is excellent. The only niggling problem I’ve had is with a very temperamental finger print reader. But nothing to really worry about. At £700 its a little on the expensive side compared to a similar specced laptop, but the tablet mode really makes up for that. I really cannot recommend the TM2 enough, and even better news may be its imminent refresh, adding a slightly more powerful ATI option and i3/5 CPU’s.

Well worth 5 stars I think! Any questions hit the comment link!

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The AeroCool Coolpanel 3 is a multifunction fan controller with a memory card reader, 2 USB ports, an eSata Port and audio ports. All conveniently packed into a single 5.25 inch bay.

Included in the box are all the cables (USB cable x 2, Sata cable and audio cable), plus pre connected power/fan cables and three temperature sensors. You also get memory card reader drivers on a mini CD, although under Vista and Windows 7 these are installed automatically. There’s also a small user manual, which is the first of the units down sides. Its awful, no install instructions and only basic usability instructions.

Installation

Although theres no install instructions, install is relatively straight forward. A tip, connect all the cables you need before installing as it can be very fiddly trying to connect them after everything’s screwed in. The connectors from the left are audio (use the thicker black cable for this, one end has UP printed on it, this connects to the unit and then choose either HD Audio or AC97 audio depending on your sound card/motherboard, and connect the opposite end to the appropriate port. Next in line is the Card Reader connector, this is the smaller black cable with the white connector. The opposite end needs to be attached to a USB header on your motherboard. Attach it with the white text facing into the port. Took me ages to work this out. To the right of this you have the USB port, for this one use the USB cable and plug the opposite end into a USB header on the motherboard. Finally, and really hidden, below the USB port is a Sata port, connect the sata cable here and connect to a standard Sata port on your mother board.

Next up, connect your fans to the fan cable. You can connect up to three fans and the front screen will show you their RPM as well as adjust speed depending on temperature of its related temp sensor (at lease I think this is what it does, like I said no instructions!). Also, you’ll find a molex power socket attached to the fan power cable, this needs to be attached directly to your power supply. This actually powers the unit. Again, no instructions so I assumed this was for connecting a Fan with a standard molex power cable.

Lastly, stick the temp sensors on their relevant components. One for the CPU, one for the Graphics card and one to just sit in your case.

Got that done? I bet your case looks awful! All those cables. I was installing into a Thermaltake Level 10 so most of the cables could easily been hidden. And on this subject, cable lengths are a little short for the bigger cases, keep this in mind when purchasing. It may be an idea to order extension cables at the same time.

So how does it work?

Pretty simple this. Turn on your PC and the screen should light up. On the left are the three fan RPM’s and on the right are the temps from the sensors. In the middle is a noise detector so you can see how much noise your rig is generating. The unit will beep if any of the components go over a preset temperature. I found these presets to bit a little low, specially on the graphics card. This is easily changed using the two buttons to the right of the screen. You’re supposed to be able to change weather the display show temps in degrees Celsius or fahrenheit. This didn’t work on either of the units I’ve tried!

Conclusion

Well, after trying for a week to get my first unit installed, I found that the Card Reader was broken, thanks to Scan.co.uk, a replacement was sent out within a few days and the new unit installed fine. On testing the card reader, I found it very difficult to push cards into their slots. In fact, testing a Compact Flash card just bent half the pins inside. Very poor. At first I thought the SD card didn’t work at all, but realised you really have to push the card it for it to be recognised. Again very poor.

Barring the low quality build of the card reader and not being able to change the unit to farenheight (not that I would!), everything else seems of pretty decent build.

Would I recommend this product to a friend? Depends what they wanted it to do. As fan controller its pretty decent. But I’ve had too many problems with other parts to completely recommend it.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Possible my favorite addition though is the color blindness option. Being very colour blind I was impressed to see a games company actually adapt their games for us!

I’m still struggling to enjoy BC2 as I have with the Call Of Duty series. I believe this is primarily down to the weapons not inflicting as much damage as they do in COD. Which for me is annoying, last night I thought I’d give sniping a try and was amazed at just how hard it is to pick out a player and shoot. Even when you do, get a lock on, your bullet either just goes no where or you hit someone but they just run off. Ok I currently have the lowest spec sniper rifle, but I can’t see why I’d want to play as a sniper if I can only get maybe 1 or two kills a game.

This may still be down to my not being used to the Battlefield series, so I guess I keep going!

Hardware

So what should it look like? I don’t think we’re too far wrong with current phone similar to the HD2, or the rumoured Dell Lightning. Plane a simple normally looks great and is easy to use. It should have a qwerty keyboard that slides away, I’d love to see a “tri-slider” device with both a portrait and landscape keyboard. With the landscape keyboard having extra game controller buttons like a d-pad or even an analogue stick similar to the PSP.

Battery should get me through at least a day and half of moderate use, so if i forget to charge at night, theres still juice to get me to work the next day. Screen should be a 4 inch plus AMOLED capacitive multi-touch type. Ok we have this now, but its the best there is!

Underneath should be enough oomph to make the device fluid and fast. Enough memory, maybe a gigabyte, to multitask a lot off apps and a space for some kind of super memory card that could hold a TB of stuff. Would be great to carry all my movies and music etc with me!

On the back would be a decent spec, 10mpx camera with optical zoom, maybe some invention here that keeps the whole package small, but still good quality. Of course it has to be capable of 1080p video recording too.

Maybe a WiMax/LTE type aerial for super fast data access, and maybe some advances from the networks to make it usable! Noise isolation on the microphone would also be awesome.

Charging, syncing and docking via a mini USB port, an HDMI port (maybe something via the USB here?), a volume rocker on the side, a proper camera button (half way for auto focus, full press for picture), 3.5mm audio jack and a hold button.

How about some kind of special coating that allows for solar charging whenever the phones out of the pocket it just charges automatically, never run out of battery again!

Graphics? Some kind of souped up ATI jobby here, maybe with a separate low powered graphics chip for basic phone use.

Oh and proper hard keys for Call, End, Home and search.

Obviously add to the standard Bluetooth, compass, accelerometer, GPS etc

Software

How should this thing work? Open like Windows Mobile? Or locked like the iPhone and Android?

I think I may go for both here. A well stocked app store but with the advantage of being able to grab apps direct from websites. One unified install system of course. Make things easy!

The home screen. I’m liking the Sense UI from HTC. That’s you’re home screen, scroll sideways and you get areas to have widgets, similar to android. Scroll the screen up and you get a list of apps similar to the iPhone. Scroll the screen down and you get certain “Hubs” similar to WinPh7. Photo’s, Music, Friends, Games etc. Pressing the Green/Send/Call button brings up a contact program with all contacts, favorites, last/missed calls etc. Sounds basic, but this seems to go missing on more recent phones!

Search button brings up a search screen that searches everything in the phone, web etc. Should be conext specific like WinPh7. I like this idea, everything in one place. Oh and all notifications kept in a drop down menu at the top of the screen, not like the iPhone with them getting stuck infront of your nose all the time!

Games and Apps should all be iPhone type, easy to use and all finger friendly.

Camera, well this I’d love to see in a similar style to a dSLR, well software wise, give us options for everything, everything you could do on a dSLR, give us it on the phone, eg shutter time, aperture and ISO settings. Give us an all in one photo app that detects faces, and tries to automatically match similar faces and even checks to see if they match your contacts photo’s, automatically tagging them! Some basic editing would be good too. Same for videos!

Automated cloud syncing too. I want everything on my phone, but I want it backed up too without me doing anything. A good DRM free music and video store too wouldn’t go amiss!

And?

Well looking through that, alot of it is around now, its just got to be put together. There are some bits like the charging thats still not a reality. The big question should be, is when will the mobile industry move on, it seems things have stagnated a bit at the HD2, while the OS’s are being improved, and in-fact not too far from the above, the hardware under pinning them is largely going to be the same. At least for the next 12 months or so.

So what would others like to see in a phone, what have I missed? Let us know!

Check out the link to engaget for more pics:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/22/dells-lightning-thunder-flash-smoke-and-more-a-roundup/

It looks like its May by the time we can get our hands on the large iPhone.

This is great news as film download sites have been very thing on the ground in the UK with only iTunes and Playstation Network currently offering services. (Although LoveFilm.com does offer a basic streaming service)

With franchises like Transformers, Indiana Jones and Star Trek, this could be a very lucrative deal for both companies.

Initially, the lack of dedicated servers in MW2 annoyed me, but I soon got used to it, and in many ways the smaller maps and less people made the game feel a bit more personal, and you could have little battles with the same players.

BC2carries full dedicated server support, which is pretty much the first place I went when first installed the game. What a let down. Having got used to Call Of Duty’s 4 and 5′s server browser which start populating a list immediately and quickly, with BC2 you just get a blank page. I noticed a Play Now feature but this doesn’t even work. I found clicking the refresh list button a waiting a few minutes did bring up servers. So great, I’ve finally got a list to chose from. My next problem, nearly every server shows at full when you try to join it even when the server browser says its half empty. Annoying!

After about 10 – 15 minutes I finally find a server. Great. Finish playing and thing I’ll save that server as favorite, so go back to the server list, find the server and click add to favorites. A box pops up to say its processing. Five minutes later, its still processing. So I click cancel and no server is added to my favorites. It doesn’t work. Nothing about the server browser works. A great start and a real let down when you know you want to play a quick game but have to spend an age just to find a game!

So whats it like when you get into the game. Now heres where BC2 gets some points back. Initially I was struggling with targeting and getting owned. This partly down to me being a nooob and not knowing the maps, but I also found I had my mouse sensitivity set too high. I have the Microsoft Sidewinder X8 and use it a 4000 dpi in MW2, I have it dialled down to 2000.

My first big impression was there seems to be a much bigger team ethic in BC2, theres nearly always someone backing you up and everyone seems to push forward together. Not sure if this is just how people have played Battlfield games in the past or something!

Map wise, they’re excellent, all fully destructable with tanks etc. Some are geared to vehicles as they’re quite big and getting to the battle area can take a while, but as said above, this works well as people will jump in a car and pick others up.

It has taken alot of adjustment to get used to controls, even simple things like in MW2 pressing C puts you in a crouch position where you stay until you press C again. With BC2 you have to hold Ctrl to crouch, its ok but gets annoying if you want to crouch for a while. Also theres no prone that I can find and you cant strave while sprinting. All small things that you forget about once you adjust.

Vehicles are a feature that MW2 lacks (well wouldn’t need as maps are too small!), you get the obvious tanks, but also transporters, helicopters and quad bikes. The helicopters are great, they have machine guns for killing with but are also used by some as transporters (yeap back to the above working as a team!).

The whole experience makes you feel like you’re having a proper battle not just a 5 minute round.

There are some let downs here though, its hard. Very hard. Its rare you see many people getting more that 20 kills. And they tend to be snipers. It seems that you can unload a whole clip into someone and they’ll turn round and kill you with one shot. As a COD player this is very odd as hard core to me means one shot and dead.

So which do I prefer, well COD 4, but I guess thats not an option here! Both sides have their pluses and minuses. MW2 definently feels like and “easier game”. Whereas with BC2 you have to work for your points. Not such a bad thing. I prefer the way BC2 allows you to choose your weapons before playing and when you’re respawning rather than being kept to a few specific kits. The team ethic is great as you feel like you can push on as a team rather than feel a bit like a one man band as you do in MW2. But BC2 has one massive stumbling block, and thats before you even get to start playing, the server browser. Make it easier for me to find a game and play then I may just have to convert permanently!

I’ll have a review up once I’ve finished playing!

Installing the browser is just as simple as any other app, and on launching you get a quick welcome screen letting you know the browsers features. One handy one being connection to Opera Link to get bookmarks etc saved from an Opera browser on another platform.

Speed

My initial test was to go to the BBC Wesbite, one I visit alot. The first thing you notice is speed. Opera Mini renders pages server side rather than on the phone, this means you get quick loading pages. I did notice it took the browser time to start downloading the web page, I assume this is while its waiting for the server to do its stuff, maybe not such a good thing as user base builds.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Rendering

The other thing that’s important to web browsing, is how a page is rendered, does it look like its desktop counter parts. For this I tested with the ThisIsLondon website. Its a much heavier, content rich site which includes alot of flash videos etc. (IE7 on XP even struggles to load it!). Safari does a good job of rendering the site, with a near perfect output, barring the infamous blue plugin missing icon for flash. With Opera, the page loads as fast as BBC but the rendering is a let down, with images loading in the wrong places and not place holder for flash. Its still usable, but not up to Safari standards. I tried the same with Youtube and had the same awkward disappointing results. And of course, no flash. Its still a massive step up from the Symbian browser though and maybe this is just evidence of the exceptionally high standards Apple has set with its Mobile Safari browser.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Usability

So can Opera make back some of those points with its usability? App load times are impressive, not as instant as Safari but pretty quick. The user interface is fully touch friendly, a big improvement from the WiMo version and the menu’s load very quickly. The top of the browser is very similar to Safari, with a large address box and a smaller search box. Typing into the address field brings up a history drop down with previously visited sites and the search box adds a list of sites to search, eg Amazon or Google etc which you can also add more of.

The bottom has big buttons for Back, Forwards, Stop, Refresh, Tabs and Settings. The first four are standard, so I wont bother discussing, although its worth noting that when zoomed into a web page, the back button also zooms out. The tab button brings up a scrollable list of tabs that are currently open and a blank tab to open an new page. When opening a new tab you get Operas Speed Dial page popup with your top sites. Very easy to use and very quick. The settings button gives you access to Bookmarks which allows you to browse bookmarks and add the currently open sites as a bookmark, History which shows you your browsing history, Start Page which bounces the current tab back to the Speed Dial page, Saved Pages (haven’t worked this out yet!), Settings for all your settings including the options for setting up Opera Link, Find in Page which is another feature safari doesn’t have, and Help.

All menus are fast loading, easy to touch and great to use. You also get the touch and hold to bring up an on page menu allowing you to do things like select and copy text or open a link in a new tab. Easy to use and nother missing feature from Safari.

Zooming is an odd one, the browser does have pinch to zoom, but you only get two levels full size or zoomed in a bit, nothing in between. A bit strange this, but I’ve found the text size zoomed in is fine, just about, but for some it could be a little small. Only a slight blip on what is otherwise a great UI.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Conclusion

Opera Mini brings alot of improvements over the standard Safari browser, but does lack a little with the rendering of pages, which I think is a very important attribute for a browser and will be a big decider on whether people will use it. Its also a shame that Opera couldn’t find a way of bringing Flash to the iPhone, whether this is a deliberate limit of Apple, or a decision by Opera  I don’t know but here’s hoping Opera are working on it!

Overall Rating: 4.33 out of 5 stars