You might find it hard to select a Chromebook having distinguished features as most of them are found packed with almost same specs delivering similar kind of performance. Even the looks are quite similar. Well, ASUS has not followed the same lines, in-fact introduced a streamlined Chromebook Flip, hoping to give people with something fresh and happening. It manages to differentiate itself from other Chromebooks by packing expensive features and stylish design. Let’s see if this Chromebook is special enough as it seems.

Design

Starting off with its design, we were delighted to see this Chromebook styled pleasantly with full metallic chassis. The All-aluminum body gives the notebook a much trendy and classy look. Considering the price tag this machine comes with, it surely is something you’ll find peace at having. Because of this awesome eminent formation, it gives a tough time to Windows laptops.  

Utilizing the space as much as it could, this 10.1-inch device comes with a full-sized key-board and a decent sized trackpad. You might find the trackpad bit smaller in size but it’s not something which disappoints drastically.

One the most attractive features of this Chromebook is its ability to transform into tablet. This is an added functionality which makes it super desirable. 

Display

Chromebooks are not popular for coming up with HD display, rather they are seen with decent resolution, good but not so brilliant. But ASUS flip Chromebook introduces a touch display with commendable resolution of 1280x800 as this is something rare in the world of Chromebooks. Moreover, there is some extra space at the sides of the screen that enables the user to grip the flip easily without any risks of hitting the touchscreen.     

Keyboard and trackpad

Well, where we found the compact size of this Chromebook aiding in high portability, we also found its key-board and trackpad quite smaller than the standard size on the other hand. You will feel a noticeable difference while typing. The smaller keyboard and trackpad might irritate you when typing and navigating the stuff. This shortcoming might refrain those buyers from having this notebook who need to type on daily basis.

 
Performance and real-world use

Powered by Rockchip 1.8GHz Quad-core RK3288C, Asus Flip Chromebook delivers a rock-solid performance. Furthermore, it comes with 2 options in terms of memory and storage, 2 or 4GB LPDDR3 RAM and 16 or 32GB respectively. We would like to recommend you to opt for the 4GB version as it will keep things easier for you as memory is the key to carry out effective multi-tasking functionalities between Google Docs, Twitter, and Gmail etc.

It was a pleasure seeing the Chromebook performing this well. It showed no problems with usual browsing tendencies but it did display some glitches when surfing on media rich sites such as Facebook and Google. We found it hanging at some points.  Otherwise the Chromebook worked incredibly. The benchmarks revealed quite good scores especially in comparison to its rivals. The ASUS Chromebook scored nearly double to Acer 740 in Sunspider tests.

Battery life

Battery life is one of the most important aspects for deciding the fate of any notebook. Well, then Chromebook Flip has passed this hurdle cleanly by remaining alive for total 8 hours and 10 minutes. This is just simply wow as we have seen notebooks scoring 8 hours but not more than that. This means you are easily going to pass a long working day with this Chromebook. Work on your documents or browse the important stuff with no worries of battery draining out.  Also, enjoy your weekends watching your favorite movies and listening to your favorite songs with this long lived Asus Flip Chromebook. 

Wrap-up

The incredible metal body is the first hit you will notice about this Chromebook. It certainly makes it a streamlined Chromebook. The price is like paying pennies for a masterpiece made out of metal. Accompanied by powerful performance and long battery life, it certainly is the most desirable Chromebook. However, like every laptop has few shortcomings, this has too. It sometimes crash at random and the key-board and trackpad are smaller in size as compared to the standard ones you find on other notebooks. These short-comings are definitely not something to worry about as this Chromebook offers a lot more against these drawbacks.

UK is undoubtedly setting the technology games high, recently it has been focusing much on getting ahead in technical grounds. After investing huge sums on money on driverless car technology, UK government is all set to invest for developing 3D printing in aerospace technology. It is to fund with £100m into the new research center located in Coventry.

As 3D printing which is also known as additive manufacturing has the great influence in the manufacturing sector, it is being adopted by many firms as well for manufacturing small parts. There are around 9 Manufacturing Technology centers (MTCs) found in UK which provide assistance to other companies to emerge with smarter technology by carrying out effective research in academic research institutes. As plastic parts are replacing the conventional metal fixtures, it is now being applied in space too.

Coming back to UK’s interest in funding for game-changing technologies in aerospace, the government is planning to organize a competition for where small firms would be taking part to introduce innovation in the 3D printing components for aerospace. The competition is worth £10m which is targeted for catering small businesses. All the interested companies can register themselves from June 2015 till September 2015.

Every coming day technology is amazing us with mind-blowing inventions, the gadgets which we could only imagine in our wildest dreams are now a part of our daily life. But how many of us had even thought about the cars which would drive itself? Technology has again left us stunned with the latest invention of ‘Driverless Cars’. Yes, you heard it right! Driver less cars are soon going to be launched in UK. For now, green light has been given for the testing of driverless cars on public roads of UK.

 UK has shown a lot of interest in the development of driverless cars on its roads. The business secretary, Vince Cable, stated that £10m fund will be allocated for the researchers involved in the exploration engineering driverless cars. “The excellence of our scientists and engineers has established the UK as pioneers in the development of driverless vehicles through pilot projects,” said Cable. “Today’s announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society.”   

Testing of fully autonomous and driver-equipped

The testing of cars on public roads will be done according to laws similar to that of US where driverless cars have been tested on public roads since 2011 in some states. There will be two particular kinds of tests reviewed on public roads: fully autonomous cars without a driver, and those with a qualified driver who could take control at any time

Government Money to aid the Research Groups

UK is to aid the research groups with great investments to make the driverless cars work.

The UK’s innovation agency the Technology strategy Board is to govern the fund of total £10m. The local institutes are given an opportunity to apply for funding by submitting a business case along with the authority as to why the self-driving cars are convenient for transport solution that particular area. It was pre decided that 3 cities of UK will be selected to the driverless car trials in 2015. Deadline for the car research applications is soon going to end in October 2015.

How Does The Car Work?  

The car will be detecting traffic and other objects by special camera and sensitive sensors, the problem which is being face right now in the current prototypes are regarding different factors. The driverless car is unable to detect bad weather, potholes, and temporary traffic lights. Also, it has a difficulty of recognizing police officers & human signals.

Benefits Brought by Driverless Cars 

“Driverless cars have huge potential to transform the UK’s transport network – they could improve safety, reduce congestion and lower emissions, particularly CO2,” said the transport minister, Claire Perry.

Well, the UK government is pushing its engineers to excel in the driverless car technology with full support. By observing the UK’s enthusiasm and devotion towards this technology, we can predict rapid positive outcomes. Google has also been in this race for years and has been testing the autonomous cars in California. It has been predicted that this technology may be seen on the roads by 2020.

Recently, we are experiencing a lot of tough competition among smart gadgets in the technology market. The short period we take in planning to buy any device such as cell phone or tablet becomes long enough for companies to launch something newer and better and by the time you order your desired gadget, something newer replaces it in the market. This is a reality as people constantly demand for innovation and fresher options. The same war is being experienced in the smart watch industry. Last time we discovered how commbank introduced its smart watch app to ease their customer in handling their bank accounts. 2015 has come up with another showdown of smart watches i-e, Apple Watch vs Fitbit Surge. We will decide it right here after studying the details of both.

Round 1: Design

Observing the design, the two smart watches are quite different in their look. Apple watch is more influenced on the fancy side whereas Fitbit appears to be a fitness focused sports watch. Apple watch comes 38 different hardware designs in 2 different sizes. They also vary on color, material and design.

The fitbit surge coming in 3 wearable sizes with flexible and durable material follows more of ‘What matters is inside’.  Deciding upon the choice options and design features, we would support Apple watch scoring 1 point in the first round.

Round 2: Software

Let’s move to round 2, Apple Watch v FitBit Surger: software. Fitbit surge can be paired up with your smartphone using Bluetooth, or Mac or PC via a wireless dongle. You can easily download the fitbit app available across Windows Phone, iOS and Android. It offers you a great deal of options to set up your routine and record your progress. You can see for map routes and record various activities such as your work out.

Now talking about Apple Watch, it uses its own OS, the WatchKit API. Using Apple smartwatch, you get great options of downloading various different apps such as ‘Citymapper’.  Apple has teamed up with a good number of high profile app makers to bring up more options and improvements for its users. Being unsure of what Apple watch brings next, we can term software round is a ‘tie’.

Round 3: Activity tracking

Starting with Fitbit Surge, it genuinely delivers you with loads of activity tracking choices such as running, cross-training, biking, and cardio workouts. This will enable you to observe the number of steps you took, the floors climbed, and calories burnt from various activities you performed. Moreover, it also give you the facility of measuring your sleep quality.   

Apple Watch also come up with good variety of fitness tracking options recording all the health and fitness related stuff such as health, movement, your daily workout, your food intake etc. However, it cannot be termed a super sports watch. Actually it doesn’t seem to function without the support of third party apps. It also needs charging every night. The Apple smart watch no doubt is a good fitness tracking watch but it has the functionality drawback as it needs to have external apps to function efficiently. This clearly makes Fitbit surge the winner of activity tracking showdown.

Verdict

While Apple Smart watch wins at having a better design and Fitbit takes the lead in tracking a wide range of activities, it looks like a tie. But if we really have to make one of the smart watches win from the other, then Fitbit Surge is our catch since it fulfils the purpose of keeping a track of your fitness activities easily without the need of any third party apps.

HP Pavilion x2

Get your hands on the stylish detachable HP10.1 -inch pavilion x2, the 2-in-1 laptop. The display just weighing 1.29 pounds makes it one of the lightest tablet laptops you have around. The plastic chassis and no presence of metal anywhere is one of the reasons of it being so light. With the existence of strong magnetic bits, the screen is effortlessly detachable and reattachable as the magnetism guides you to the exact place of fixing the screen. This little machine carries a lot of good stuff. Listen to quality audio as it comes with powerful Bang and Olufsen speakers. However, it compromises a little with its screen having a resolution of 1,280 x 800. This might get disturbing as it will make the higher resolution content unclear and blur but provides wide viewing angles and comes in nice color. Considering its extreme affordability and portability options, it is by far one of the best choices for student’s use.

HP Envy Series

The HP’s Envy series are surely on road to make other of such gadgets envious of it. Ranging from 14-inch to upto 17-inch, these aluminum bodied laptops have extremely well chassis and look amazing.

The Envy 14 -inch and 15-inch, coming with an extraordinary quality built and weighing so light is worth all the praise. It’s a pleasure typing content with its keyboard as the keys are so soft and user friendly. Moreover, HP has improved the quality of its single-buttoned ClickPad as well. It is now wider making it easier to navigate your stuff on screen.

The display resolution is incredible as compared to other laptops falling in the similar category. The colors appear so fresh and lively on the screen due 350nit display. Previously, we have experienced that most of the laptops forego audio for better display or sometimes audio appeared more superior as compared to the video. But Envy laptops do not settle on this practice. The audio experience is outstanding same as its picture quality is.

Talking about the performance, we couldn’t find anything seriously disappointing. Powered by a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5-450M processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GB 7,200rpm hard drive, it was found performing very smoothly. Envy’s battery life scored 3 hours and 51 minutes on the video run-down test which appears quite satisfactory for the routine student use. 

The HP Envy 17 appears to be most costly in the series as it is well-equipped with wide range of smarter features. With aluminum-covered lid and the underside made out of carbon fiber makes it a beauty in terms of look and feel. Coming with wonderful HD display and optional touch, it is something you’d like to spend on before going back to school.

There is always a war going on between Windows and Apple about which one is better? People tend to find it hard to reach to certain decision. Well of course, there are certain aspects in which windows win and other aspects points Apple a better choice. Here, we would like to tell you that why PCs are better than Macs.

If you are a gaming fan then definitely you will back Windows PCs rather than macs. Reasons are obvious. The biggest names in the gaming world have ports that work on Mac. 

Watching the Intel offering so much to the gamer, it’s understandable that Mac would also like to participate in this. You can access Stem form Mac, so this is the best what Mac is offering but that’s not enough. Well, we would like to draw attention of Mac fans that Mac caters limited choices of games you can play whereas Windows PC offers you infinitely more games, from causal to biggest! Sorry Mac you need to bring in more variety to your realm of gaming zone.   

You must have heard that there are no viruses in the OSX and you don’t need an anti-virus on Mac. We have a problem with these statements. We do agree that we are less likely to get viruses on Mac because of OS X, but to be more specific, Macs aren’t inherently secured. They do get Malware which might attack you while you are on social network. You may click on to the dodgy link on Facebook due to Malware but Windows has a different case. We cannot deny that windows get a lot of viruses and is more insecure. But at least its users are well aware of that and can control it beforehand. Moreover, Windows 8 comes in with the installed antivirus which decrease the chances of your system getting infected.

Let’s talk about on the grounds of software both offer. We can refer to Windows software similar to that of Windows games and the same is true for the Mac’s side. This means that there are plenty of programs you can run on Mac but not all whereas Windows provide you with wide variety of options and you can run updated programs unlike Mac. 

No wonder Macs have their own beauty but they are definitely not reachable unless you have full pockets. And without a keyboard or display, it costs five hundred quid but Windows offer much better and within budget options. You can pick up a decent family or office PC or laptop for around £350 or even less. And that's what we call value.

Well, if you are a spoiled brat and got loads of money to burn then you can definitely buy Mac. But if you want variety, value and want to avail customize options, then Windows is the suitable choice.

Oh what’s that cute little thing following? It’s Budgee! Welcome your new robotic mate who will now carry your load. No more cart-jockeying, basket-lugging, or even using your recyclable bag. It is literally a basket on wheels that uses sensors to follow you everywhere and prevent itself from banging into walls or doors. It automatically follows its user based on location of their mobile phone, which will also be used to communicate with Budgee. The two-wheeled robot can carry upto 50 pounds with an installed mechanism of for locking and securing your purchases.

The Budgee pal can be considered as a helper to improve the lives of people having disabilities or injuries or just too many children to leave enough arms of grocery bags.

The robot has been made extremely adaptive to the surroundings. Budgee is given a friendly look overall with a red cap on his head and a small round face, this makes him even more welcoming. CEO Wendy Roberts said in an interview,   “If you ever walk in my office, i’m talking to Budgee, I want it to be you look at the robot like he’s your buddy, he’s your friend. There’s a relationship you develop with the robot.”

The robot has been intelligently designed, can be folded up in a portable form so you can easily carry him anywhere. Considering its justified cost and friendly adaptive performance, we might be watching more of these around. So are you going to pet the Budgee Wudgee? The only difference with the pet Budgee, you won’t take care of him, he takes care of you.

With so many options in the tablet market, it does get hard to choose the best buy for yourself according to you needs. In order to make your decisions easier and effective, reviews are great help. Let’s review Toshiba’s Ultra-thin and portable tablet, the Encore 2 WT8-B-102. It is stylishly designed and able enough to carry out your daily routine computing tasks as well as for office use. It is relatively cheaper than its other competitive tablets present in the market. Does it really provide all the essentials with the low price it offers? The Review will answer soon.

8- Inch Display

Honestly speaking, the 8-inch Encore’s 2 display isn’t so wow since it comes with the average resolution of 1,280x800-pixel. But keeping the price in mind, this is quite acceptable as normally tablets coming in this size and price often have to compromise on their display. It comes with installed windows 8, however if we take a look on its competitors such has Google Nexus 7 and Dell Venue (Android) are expected to perform better having Full HD screens with the similar price tag.

Calibration test applied revealed a reasonable result, the display was smart enough to cover 72.1% of the sRGB gamut. This cannot be termed as remarkable but it’s sensible for sure to carry out your daily computing tasks with ease. Contrast ratio unveiled relatively a better result, 881:1 was found fairly satisfying capable to cover light and dark details in photos.

Elegant Design

The Encore 2 has been designed so elegantly with stylish curved finish, offering more than what’s expected for this budget tablet. However, the back side of the tablet lacks the quality plastic which easily gets scratched which overshadows its portability factor. 

Powerful Performance

Encore 2 packed with quad-core ‘Bay Trail’ Intel Atom processor accompanied by 1 GB RAM, it manages to win the buyer’s attention as this makes it a powerful performer scoring 19 in the benchmarks. Having the superb combo of the newest Intel’s mobile chips and quad-core, the tablet works 2 times faster and delivers 3 times the graphics power.   

Alongside the processor we get 2GB of RAM, a 64GB hard drive, Bluetooth, wireless N, GPS and two webcams (one on the front, and one on the back). While these specs won't set the world on fire, depending on what you want to use the Toshiba Encore for, they should be enough.

Office Anywhere

If you involve a lot of business travelling and have to carry out important official tasks using Microsoft office than this tablet proves to be very useful and handy. It is fully packed with Office 365 Personal Applications including word, Excel, PowerPoint and other office programs. So, in order to meet you goals while travelling, you can surely count on this companion. Moreover, Encore 2 also provides you with good 60 worldwide free minutes every month so you can keep up your business communication uninterrupted.

Good Battery Life

Considering the price, the battery life surely amazes us. Now you can work with greater peace of mind as it has a good battery life of around eight and a half hour which is more than enough for the normal use. 

Easy Connectivity

The Encore 2 is also well equipped with wide variety of connectivity options. It gives easy options to connect your other devices on board. With Encore 2, the user is capable of transferring the content via the option of micro-USB port. Read your content and watch your most favorite shows on bigger screens using the micro-HDMI out port. Not only this, it also offers Micro­-SD slot which efficiently backs up other Windows devices. For easy web browsing, data transferring, and streaming, it comes with Wi-Fi, Built-in Bluetooth and wireless technology 

Verdict

Toshiba Encore 2 surely offer a lot within a little price. It is elegantly designed with stylish features, however it compromises with the display failing to leave a good impression. Moreover, it occasionally crashes and looks cheap.  But the tests revealed a powerful performance as it comes with a powerful quad-core ‘Bay Trail’ Intel Atom processor. The battery life is good enough to carry out your daily tasks smoothly.