Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2024 i APC

THIS ISSUE 33 Surface Laptop Studio 2 34 Allied Patriot-A 35 Acer Nitro 5 36 Asus ROG Swift OLED PG49WCD 37 Asus ROG Swift Pro PG248QP 38 Amazon Echo Show 8 (3rd generation) 39 Corsair iCue Link ecosystem 40 Amazon Eero Max 7 APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the…

PRICE Free WEB calibre-ebook.com/about NEEDS Windows 10 or 11, MacOS or Linux This excellent open-source software is the best way to read and manage ebooks on your computer. Calibre lets you easily convert ebooks from one format to another, edit their contents and covers, download articles from the web, back up and share your library, and much more. Although the program is regularly updated with improvements and bug fixes, Calibre 7.0 is the first major update since July 2022. Its most notable new feature is the ability to add notes to the books in your library, so you can store useful information about the author, publisher, genre and other categories. These notes can include reviews, images and web links – for example, to relevant Wikipedia articles – and can be exported…

“Our initial scan uncovered a worrying number of problems, including nearly 5,000 broken registry items, 2,700 broken shortcuts and 4.2GB of ‘system junk’” AVG TuneUp for PC WEB www.avg.com/en-au/avg-pctuneup PRICE From $34.99 per year Free trial: 7 days NEEDS Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 AVG was once best-known for its free antivirus software, but since it was bought by Avast in 2016 it has focused more on paid-for tools such as AVG TuneUp. This claims to “make an old PC live longer or a new PC run better” by finding and removing junk. Our initial scan uncovered a worrying number of problems, including nearly 5,000 broken registry items, 2,700 broken shortcuts and 4.2GB of ‘system junk’ (see screenshot). As we regularly clean our PC using built-in Windows tools and third-party…

ON TEST… Amazon Fire Max 11Apple iPad (10th gen)Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (6th gen)Lenovo Tab P12OnePlus PadSamsung GalaxyTab S9 UltraApple iPad Air (5th gen)Google Pixel TabletHonor Pad 8Samsung Galaxy Tab S9TCL NXTpaper 11 Is it time for a tablet renaissance? After the initial explosion of devices in the wake of the Apple iPad’s launch back in 2010, tablets rapidly went out of fashion. Amazon carved out a niche for its family-friendly Kindle Fires geared towards content consumption, but only Samsung has shown greater ambitions. Now things are changing. The iPad Pro and iPad Air have proven there’s a strong case for creativity and productivity on tablets, while Lenovo and Samsung have both launched big-screen tablets designed to show that Android can do this stuff as well. This year’s Tablet Labs…

64GB, $749 | apple.com/au There are good reasons why the 10th generation iPad remains the most successful mainstream tablet out there. The updated design, which brings the basic model closer to the iPad Air, works as well held vertically in the hand for web browsing and email as it does placed horizontally on a stand or folio case for productivity work or creative apps. It looks and feels every inch the premium slate. The lack of an SD card slot for expanding storage won’t surprise anyone, but the fact that the single USB-C port is limited to charging and 480Mbits/sec data transfers is disappointing; you won’t be connecting to 4K displays at 60Hz. All the same, this is a highly capable device. What’s more, outside of direct comparisons with the…

128GB, $749 | amazon.com.au It’s taken a long time for OnePlus to get into the tablet game, but the OnePlus Pad shows it adopting the same successful approach as on its phones. This means not only selecting fast components for the budget and developing its own distinctive software, but also making smart design choices that focus on how people might actually use the OnePlus Pad. That starts with the 11.6in screen and its unusual 7:5 aspect ratio. Apple decided long ago that 16:9 widescreen wasn’t the best fit for tablets; it works brilliantly for watching movies, not so much for productivity or design work. Or for reading or browsing with the tablet held in portrait mode. OnePlus has gone even better. With its squarer aspect ratio, the OnePlus Pad appears…

128GB, $899 | store.google.com Google’s premium tablet takes a different tack to Apple, Samsung and Lenovo, focusing less on mobile productivity, creativity and entertainment, and more on life at home. There’s no keyboard or stylus accessory for this one. Instead Google bundles in a speaker dock that charges up the tablet while it’s not in use. With its rounded contours, clamped magnetically to the dock at a slight upward angle, it resembles an over-sized smart display. This is a good thing providing you want to use the Pixel Tablet for the stuff it’s best at. It’s a great entertainer, for example, particularly as the speaker dock adds a warmth and power to the sound that can’t be replicated by a normal tablet – even if the iPad Pro makes a…

128GB, $289 | amazon.com All credit to TCL. While other manufacturers are pushing out endless tablets that stick to similar designs, it’s gone for something a little more innovative. The clue is in the name. TCL’s NXTpaper 2 technology is designed to give you a display that looks and feels less like a super-bright, glossy tablet screen and more like a full-colour e-paper effort. With its narrow bezels, matte finish and minimalist aluminium shell, the NXTpaper 11 will never be mistaken for your average Android slate. Thankfully, at just 462g and 6.9mm thick, it’s very comfortable to hold. The screen works a treat for reading ebooks, digital magazines and comics. It’s easy on the eye like an ebook reader, but with the kind of brightness and colour you’d expect from…

Data recovery question A friend recently switched from Mac to PC, and made the mistake of somehow wiping his drive because it wasn’t visible in Windows (as it had been formatted in Apple’s own APFS format). He compounded the error by creating a new Apple APFS volume over the top of the original partition in a misguided effort to undo his original mistake. I’ve run several drive-recovery tools, but while they’re able to see the drive’s previous content, none of the files appear to be recoverable, even though no new files have been written to the drive. Why is this so, and is all his data lost? Eric L Dumont APC Responds: This comes down to the fact that most of the files in question have become fragmented over time.…

LIBREOFFICE CALC Change the background colour of comments When you leave a comment on a spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc, you’ll notice the background is set to a pale yellow by default (‘Accent 5, 80% Lighter’). Version 7.6 of LibreOffice adds a setting that lets you change this to another colour Click ‘Tools’ in the toolbar, then Options. When the window appears, click Application Colours ( 1in our screenshot below). Then, in the main window, scroll down until you see ‘Notes background 2 ’, under Spreadsheet. Click the button to the right, which shows Automatic by default, then pick a new colour – we chose lilac (‘Followed Hyperlink, 80% Lighter’) 3 . To confirm, click Apply, then OK. Our comment 4changed its background colour to reflect our choice. ONLYOFFICE Use arrows…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future Quantum computers are only just edging into useful existence, but the world isn’t willing to wait for the technology to mature. They’re already being put to good use in finance, energy production and manufacturing – and soon, if all goes well, quantum systems will predict potential flood damage to help plan mitigations against the impacts of climate change. Multiverse Computing is leading one of 30 projects backed by the UK government as part of efforts to develop quantum technologies for public sector applications. Alongside its partners, Oxford Quantum Circuits and Moody’s Analytics, Multiverse is developing an algorithm to optimise neural network outputs for more detailed flood modelling. This is part of the government’s Quantum Catalyst Fund, a…

GOOGLE CHROME | NEEDS Any PC running Windows 10 or later. PRICE Free, partially open-source MOZILLA FIREFOX | NEEDS 1GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 500MB HD space, Windows 10 or later.. PRICE Free, open-source When it comes to browsing the web, more than six in ten of us use Google’s Chrome browser. Its dominance has slipped slightly in recent years, but that only tells part of the story. Beneath Chrome’s hood is Google’s open-source Chromium browser and Blink web engine, which renders web pages and performs other core tasks, including navigation, running scripts, and security. Virtually all other web browsers – including Microsoft Edge – now use Blink rather than develop their own proprietary engines. While Apple continues to plow its own furrow with WebKit, the only other standout is Mozilla’s…

PRICE $5,099 WEB microsoft.com/en-au Microsoft’s scissor-like hinge design on the Surface Laptop Studio screen was a big hit when it launched, and now close to two years on there’s still no solid competition against it. Unfortunately, Microsoft is charging a pretty hefty premium for the Surface Laptop Studio 2, since this highly desirable tech costs hundreds – or even thousands – more than similar offerings. The unique touch capabilities pair nicely with the more powerful Intel 13th Gen and Nvidia 40 series components to ensure there’s no hardware limitations to your creativity. The sweet spot for the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is the Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU model, since it has the highest combined performance per dollar out of the range. If you can get one of the 4050 units…

LABS PRICE $2,699 WEB rog.asus.com/au We’ve seen a few massive monitors in our time, but when the coffin-like box for the Asus ROG SWIFT OLED PG49WCD gaming monitor turned up, we weren’t sure whether to usher our younglings away from the potential crush hazard or throw a bone in the air to mark the occasion. Despite the size, set-up did not amount to manhandling an albatross: you finger-screw the feet into the stem, clip the stand’s quick-release catch into the screen and it’s ready. Asus provides a bracket if you want to use a (robust) monitor arm instead. The screen’s key specs tell a story on their own: it’s got a curved (1800R), 49-inch diagonal, ‘SuperWide’ 32:9 ratio(!), 144Hz, 1000-nit peak brightness, HDR, UHD, 5,120 x 1,440, QD-OLED panel. The…

LABS PRICE $170 - $320 WEB corsair.com This is going to be a touch different to some of our usual reviews, as we’re actually going to be evaluating a number of products from Corsair, all under one review. Yes, we’re talking about Corsair’s iCue Link PC building ecosystem. iCue Link is a complex daisy-chaining solution designed to simplify the build process, while providing a tonne of customisation and top-tier build features across Corsair’s new product stacks. It’s early days, but the company has launched a number of products, including a range of AIOs, both with and without screens, in a multitude of different sizes, fans of course (in black and white at 140mm and 120mm variants, each with its own temperature thermistor baked in), an armada of different cable types…

MAC PRICE Free (IAPs $14.99 per year/$35.99 one-time purchase) WEB goodnotes.com NEEDS macOS 12.3 or later Goodnotes 6 is the latest version of the popular note-taking app and PDF editor and the big question for many will be whether it’s worth an upgrade from the previous version. If looks alone were to make that decision then, yes. The first big upgrade in four years feels fresh thanks to a new interface that remains intuitive to use. But the most important thing is whether or not the many extra features are going to prove useful, particularly if you’re using the Mac version. The developers of this app clearly have the iPad first and foremost in their minds. After all, it’s the device that the app was originally designed for in 2011 and…

You might think it doesn’t need saying, but buying a tablet is not like purchasing any other type of computer – or even like buying a new phone. Purchase a new laptop and you’re buying a standardised device that fits into a well-established ecosystem. Your “Windows experience” won’t differ greatly from one laptop to another, and the same is true if you’re a MacBook fan. You’ll have access to the same hardware accessories and software choices whether you spend a little or a lot. Tablets are different. The screen and ergonomics can transform the way your slate works and handles. The software may support multitasking and a wide range of creative and productivity applications, or it may focus more on content consumption. Some tablets have accessories that make them significantly…

128GB, $1,899 | apple.com/au “What’s more, with the optional – and expensive – Magic Keyboard, it becomes a serious alternative to the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.” The sixth-generation iPad Pro remains the benchmark by which other high-end tablets are judged, thanks to its 12.9in Liquid Retina XDR display and laptop-class M2 processor, which make it a formidably powerful device. It’s a handful at 281 x 215mm, with a slightly thicker shell than the smaller iPad to maintain rigidity, but at 682g it’s still a lot lighter than any laptop. Until you add the 710g Magic Keyboard, that is. The squarer shape also makes it feel well balanced and easier to hold than some. The screen is one of the best you’ll find. It’s bright, hitting 591cd/m2 in everyday use…

256GB, $1,999 | samsung.com “The best thing about the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, though, is its performance. It kicks sand in the face of even the mightiest Android tablets.” Even when other Android tablet manufacturers seemed to give up, Samsung kept plugging away, delivering bigger, better and more capable Galaxy Tab S tablets with each new generation. That really paid off with the Galaxy Tab S8 series, arguably the first set of Android tablets to give Apple’s iPad range serious competition. And now that goes double for the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, which is Samsung’s finest tablet yet. This isn’t just about the hardware. Samsung has nailed usability with its One UI, so that you can manage multiple windows and multitask between them, just as you would in Windows or…

128GB, $400 | aliexpress.com For a budget tablet, the Honor Pad 8 comes with some big ambitions. For a start, its all-aluminium unibody construction looks and feels as if it belongs to a more expensive model. Just 7.9mm thick and weighing a mere 520g, it’s also very easy in the hands. It packs in an unusually large 12in screen, and while it doesn’t have the kind of resolution you’ll find on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 9 or Lenovo P12, a pixel density of 194ppi still looks relatively crisp. The Pad 8 proves that you can have a big-screen tablet at an entry-level price. What’s more, that screen isn’t bad at all. We measured the maximum brightness at 406cd/m2 and strong contrast levels of 1,651:1. It covers a credible 97% of…

Tablets aren’t just about mobile productivity or creative apps: they’re also becoming impressive games machines. We know there’s a lot of excitement about the Steam Deck and similar handheld consoles, but tablets can now provide high levels of CPU and GPU horsepower, along with a bigger screen that’s a better fit for more complex UIs. And while you don’t have a built-in controller, you can hook up an Xbox controller via Bluetooth, prop your tablet up in a stand or case and have everything you need for gaming on the move. Everything, that is, except the games – at least if you’re running Android. Apple long ago saw the potential of iPad gaming, and has invested heavily in turning Apple Arcade and the App Store into serious destinations for mobile…

When Apple migrated the Mac platform from Intel CPUs to its own ARM-based chips in 2020, it spelt the end for the Boot Camp utility. Windows simply couldn’t boot on the new M1 hardware, so the popular dual-booting tool was quietly ditched. However, if you still want to run Windows applications on your Mac, there is a way. For more than a decade, Microsoft has been working on bringing Windows to the ARM platform, and its latest releases are now more than mature enough for day-to-day use. If you want to try out some cross-platform action on your own Apple Silicon Mac, you can buy an ARM edition of Windows 11 from the Microsoft online store – or you can download the latest Insider Preview release and run it for…

GAMES PRICE $82.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X WEB tinyurl.com/APC529dg Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is not a ‘major’ release. It’s a sidestory – one that bridges the gap in protagonist Kiryu’s story between Yakuza 6 and the upcoming Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. As a result, it’s shorter and less ambitious than a main series entry. There’s very little here that feels new. The action is predominantly in Sotenbori – the series’ take on Osaka’s Dotonbori district, used frequently in previous games. The minigames are a tried and true collection of Yakuza classics, from mahjong to karaoke to the return of pocket circuit racing. There is one new location, The Castle – an absurd offshore getaway for rich hedonistic assholes. In practice, though, it’s just…

Loewe radio.frequency ~$380 | int.loewe.tv Marking the 100th anniversary of Radio Frequenz (the company started by the Loewe brothers in Berlin in 1923), Loewe has brought out this celebratory ‘smart radio’. With a few nods to the company’s original Loewe OE33, the radio is made beautifully made with Canadian oak inlays – so each one is unique – and basalt-coloured acoustic fabric. There’s also plenty of good tech on offer with DAB+, Bluetooth 5.0 and USB-C charging. You also get an easy-to-read, monochrome 2.6in high-contrast LCD display, and up to 14 hours of playtime. Despite its size (21.1x13.2x6.8cm) and portablility, the radio packs two full-range speakers for an impressively wide stereo soundstage and a bass radiator for some gutsy audio, as well as 28W of power. If you’re a fan…

PRICE $1,699 WEB asus.com The Swift Pro PG248QP is the fastest professional e-sports screen that you can buy. For any budding pro gamers that fact alone is likely to get you over the line, but the overclocked 540Hz display isn’t just considerably faster than the previous title holder: the 500Hz Alienware AW2524H display… it also comes with a number of additional technologies that’ll help ensure you have the edge when it comes to quick-response competitive gaming. One of the more interesting technologies featured here is Nvidia’s Reflex Analyser, which allows you to test your current system’s responsiveness from PC to screen. For those that have one of the compatible mice from Asus, Logitech or Razer then you’ll also be able to get full system latency measurements from peripherals to what…

PRICE 2-pack, US$1,149 (~$1,750) WEB amazon.com New technology klaxon! The Eero Max 7 is the second mesh we’ve seen – TP Link’s Wi-Fi 7 Mesh System BE85 was the first (APC 526, 5/5 stars) – that works with Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11be. Yes, that’s right: it’s barely two years since we were welcoming Wi-Fi 6E as the latest and greatest wireless standard, but its successor is already here. And to be fair, this is real next-generation stuff. Wi-Fi 6E was basically the same standard as Wi-Fi 6, merely extended into a new wireless frequency range. Wi-Fi 7 is a more fundamental upgrade, with features including a new ultra-fast 320MHz channel width on the 6GHz band and 4K-QAM encoding that packs more bits per second into the carrier signal.…

DEVELOPER OSGeo Foundation WEB https://live.osgeo.org LICENCE LGPL v2.1 OSGeoLive is an OS that allows users to deploy a wide variety of open source geospatial software. In other words, this is a niche distro that will chiefly interest scientists and explorers. It’s sponsored by the OSGeo Foundation, a non-profit that supports geospatial open source software development. The OS itself is based on Lubuntu, though the number of bundled apps means that the live ISO is over 4GB. There’s also an optional preconfigured VMDK disk image for virtual machines. As the name suggests, the distro works perfectly well in live mode but more recent versions of OSGeoLive can also be installed to a hard disk with 20GB or more of space. You may want to do this for the sake of security, as…

64GB, $399 | tristaronline.com.au After years of budget Fire and Fire HD tablets, it’s easy to forget that some of the initial Kindle Fire tablets were surprisingly premium affairs, running speedy Snapdragon 800-series CPUs and packing 1600p resolution screens. Now Amazon is back in the mid-range tablet business with the Fire Max 11. Where standard Fire HD tablets are content-consumption devices, the Fire Max 11 has grander ambitions. It’s built around an 11in screen with a 2,000 x 1,200 resolution, while the processor is a quad-core MediaTek MT8188J with two ARM Cortex A78 cores running at up to 2.2GHz, plus six A55 cores running at up to 2GHz. Paired with 4GB of RAM, there’s significantly more power on tap here than with the sometimes sluggish Fire HD models, making for…

128GB, $547 | lenovo.com The Tab P12 slots in beneath the Pad Extreme and the P12 Pro in Lenovo’s tablet line, giving you a big 12.7in screen but no OLED technology, and a good spec without being exceptional. For example, rather than a high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 CPU, here the processor is a more modest MediaTek Dimensity 7050, while the panel is a 2,944 x 1,840 resolution IPS display. The design is typical Lenovo, with a slim but robust aluminium shell in a two-tone storm grey colour, and a narrow 8mm bezel around the screen. It doesn’t have the brightness, contrast or vivid colour of the OLED panel on the Tab Extreme, but on its own terms it’s perfectly respectable, with a maximum brightness of 434cd/m2 in its Vibrant colour…

64GB, $1,299 | apple.com/au Apple’s fifth-generation iPad Air comes at a steep premium over the base 10th-gen iPad, but it’s hard to grumble when it has so many of the strengths of the iPad Pro. These include best-in-class performance and a range of accessories that can transform it into a mobile powerhouse. The IPS screen isn’t as stunning as the Pro’s Liquid Retina XDR display, but it’s still one of the best you’ll find. There’s little difference between the 10th-gen iPad and the Air in terms of the design. Both have 10.9in screens with slender frames, a Touch ID button on the top (in portrait mode) and volume buttons on the right. The iPad Air’s screen is laminated, improving contrast and making it feel solid when you tap. The resolution…

128GB, $1,299 | samsung.com The Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra is one incredibly powerful tablet, but with its 14.6in screen and corresponding size, it isn’t for everyone. The Tab S9 is a more mainstream proposition, partly because its 11in size is closer to what most people expect from a tablet, and partly because, with prices starting from $1,299, it’s more affordable. You still get nearly the power of the S9 Ultra, as the Tab S9 features the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, though with 8GB rather than 12GB of RAM. In our benchmarks, this didn’t make a huge amount of difference. Both tablets are prodigiously powerful, and it’s only when working on 4K video files in Adobe Premiere Rush that we spotted any vaguely significant speed difference. In…

It’s now 1950 and Australia still doesn’t have TV. Despite public demonstrations the year before giving huge crowds a taste of the future, it would take the combined weight of a royal commission and Australia’s first Olympics to finally get the first stations on the air from September 1956. Yet over the next two decades, the world would not only see television in colour, it would end the ‘60s with ground-breaking vision of humans landing on the moon. Even more astoundingly, the 1960s would provide us an early glimpse of technologies that continue to drive electronic displays today. Better late than never… In 1949, then-prime minister Ben Chifley had hoped to seal a federal election win for the Australian Labor Party by announcing plans for a national television service. It…

Copilot is a new chatbot in Windows 11 that can do more than just search or crack jokes. It can launch apps, change settings, generate images, and talk to you in natural language. You can type or speak to it, and it will respond to your commands and queries. It is optional, and can be ignored like Cortana before it, but offers a new way to interact with your PC without using the mouse. You can find it on your Taskbar if you have the latest version of Windows 11 installed. Copilot is a version of the Bing chatbot, incorporating DALL-E 3 and based on ChatGPT, that lives on your Windows desktop. You can ask it to change settings on your PC, search the web, generate images from text, and…

HELP STATION | MAC IT WILL TAKE10 minutes YOU WILL LEARNHow to customise your Mac’s wallpaper and screen saver YOU’LL NEEDmacOS 14 or later One of our very favourite things about macOS Sonoma is that more than ever before, you can make your Mac perfectly you. So you can have iPhone-style (or for older Mac users, Mac OS X Tiger-style) widgets on your desktop and Apple TV-style aerial screen savers to turn your display into an atmospheric view of incredible landscapes, dramatic skylines and beautiful natural scenes. In this tutorial, we’re going to concentrate on two simple but really effective tweaks that make your Mac look brilliant in any room. The first is your wallpaper, which is the image or colour that lives on your Mac desktop behind your icons…

RELEASE 1999 & 2015 DEVELOPER Relic Entertainment PUBLISHER Sierra Studios LINK homeworldremastered.com As the release of Homeworld 3 nears, the original game remains an enigma. It’s not directly available on Steam, or even GOG. To play it as it was you need the original discs and a PC that can accept them, and this means it hasn’t had any official updates to allow it to run on modern machines. Unless you’re one of those weirdos who keeps a 1999-spec PC in a special room with The Matrix and Red Hot Chili Peppers posters on the walls, there’s a good chance you’re not going to be able to play it. Unless, of course, you install the remastered edition, which came out in 2015 and so practically counts as retro itself. That’s…