There¡¯s a huge amount of choice if you¡¯re looking to spend £200 on a laptop. Never mind Chromebooks such as the HP Chromebook 11, you should also consider the Windows-powered Toshiba Satellite C40-C and HP Stream 11.Nevertheless, the Asus C201 Chromebook has carved out its own niche, and it all comes back to battery life and portability. Its screen isn¡¯t perfect, nor is it the world¡¯s most luxurious laptop, but if you want something that you can sling into a bag for a weekend, and not have to worry about chargers, it¡¯s an excellent choice.It always takes a little while to get to know a new device, and the iPad Pro is no exception. After more than a week of use, though, I¡¯ve started to see what the really important features of the iPad Pro are ¨C not just the headline ones, but those that really make a difference every single day.So here are the five killer features I¡¯ve found to be the most important and useful in daily use, starting with something that won¡¯t be immediately obvious¡
It¡¯s difficult to describe in words quite how good the iPad Pro¡¯s speakers are. They¡¯re not just good ¡°for a tablet¡± ¨C they¡¯re good full stop. Apple has clearly spent a lot of time and effort in making the Pro sound really good.
How has Apple managed this from such a thin device? According to iFixit¡¯s teardown of the iPad Pro, it¡¯s mostly down to some big speaker enclosures. There are four speakers in the iPad Pro, and if you combine the area that the enclosures take up, it¡¯s about half the space that¡¯s devoted to the battery. That¡¯s a LOT of space in something this size.Clearly, Apple could have put in smaller speakers, but that would have sacrificed sound quality and added more weight. On the plus side, you would have got more battery life, but given that the iPad Pro has pretty decent battery life anyway, we think it¡¯s a trade off worth making.
Once you¡¯ve had a tablet that has built-in LTE, going back to tethering to a phone when you¡¯re out of Wi-Fi range feels like a step back into the Dark Ages. Yes, you have to pay for an additional mobile SIM, but that¡¯s a price worth paying when it means you can get online virtually everywhere without any kind of issue.To date, all the models of the iPad range have had an LTE option, but Apple¡¯s changed tack with the iPad Pro, and you¡¯ll need to buy the top of the range 128GB model. I think this is a bit of a shame, but at least the option is there. Why don¡¯t all tablet manufacturers do this?Yes, a physical keyboard is nice ¨C but it¡¯s not always the best option, and I suspect most people will end up using the iPad Pro with the onscreen keyboard quite a bit of the time. So it¡¯s great news that it¡¯s been massively improved: you now have a row of numbers, bigger shift and caps lock keys, and more. The spacing on the keys is excellent, too, which makes it easy to type on.
There are so many things about the Pencil that Apple has got right: the weight of it, its feel in the hand and the way that strokes appear on screen. If you¡¯ve got any kind of creative bone in your body, you¡¯ll enjoy using it.But the activity we use it most for? Writing notes. Having a big screen to write notes on, rather than having to have the keyboard open and stare at the screen while in meetings, makes a lot of difference to how much you engage with what¡¯s going on around you.If Apple wanted a cheesy advertising slogan to promote its latest iPad, ¡°nothing is slow on the iPad Pro¡± would be in with a shout (Apple, if you¡¯d like to license it, we¡¯re happy to do so for a small fee). Want to export 4K video from iMovie? Sure, go right ahead! Games? No game yet made is enough to stretch it or make it stutter.
Speaking to Independent.ie, Cook claimed that hybrid devices, such as Microsoft¡¯s Surface Pro, really aren¡¯t what consumers actually want. ¡±We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad,¡± said Cook. ¡°What that would wind up doing, or what we¡¯re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants.¡±¡°We want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world,¡± he continued. ¡°And putting those two together would not achieve either. You begin to compromise in different ways.¡±Rumours about an Apple hybrid device always seem to spark up around the time of a new iPad or MacBook release. With the iPad Pro, many were surprised to see it running iOS instead of OS X, and while its A9X chip is more powerful than some desktop-class CPUs, it isn¡¯t intended to be a hybrid device like Microsoft¡¯s Surface Pro.
Interestingly, the new 12in MacBook is actually smaller than the iPad Pro, but runs OS X, and Cook really sees the difference between Mac and iPad as being user-interface diven. ¡°What we've tried to do is to recognise that people use both iOS and Mac devices. So we've taken certain features and made them more seamless across the devices. So with things like Handoff we just made it really simple to work on one of our products and pick it up and work on the next product.¡±Of course, just because Cook is currently saying Apple isn¡¯t interested in a hybrid device doesn¡¯t mean they won¡¯t make one in the future. Apple has famously gone back on its word many times.It¡¯s that time of year again. The Literary Review has revealed the shortlist for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, and the rest of the day was spent snorting milk out of our collective noses to lines such as:
¡°Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop ¨C Psalms were about to pour out of me.¡±I actually have the book that's from on my desk, and it now feels like it's leering at me over my laptop. Anyway, literature may be able to get inside our heads, but it's got nothing on games when it comes to terrible depictions of sex. Here are five of the worst (and a few bonuses of good sex). It would be easy to fill this list with David Cage games, but I¡¯ve limited myself to two. This particular clip is somewhere deep in uncanny valley, fully-clothed and features a weird monster hallucination. Pretty standard sex, then. The game itself is a bit of a narratively ambitious mess and features David Bowie. Again, pretty standard sex.
Seaman was a very strange Dreamcast title where you looked after a human-headed aquatic pet. The seamen can mate in the game, which involved hooking up fleshy tentacle suckers and exchanging... something. I like this clip because it¡¯s grainy and completely silent, which lends the human/animal hybrid motions an air of quiet dignity. This one is very famous. It is also very unsexy. Seaman is sexier than this. The Hot Coffee mod for GTA: San Andreas added a sex minigame where you manage an excitement meter while engaging in partially-clothed polygon mating. It caused a lot of controversy, with Senator Hillary Clinton even launching an investigation into the mod. The facial expressions are pure Aphex Twin.
I can¡¯t decide if this is the worst or the best sex scene. It¡¯s definitely one of the funniest. It involves a clunky robot giving you "pleasure" - make of that what you will. Just watch it. But not at work. Called The Indigo Prophecy in the US, Fahrenheit is another David Cage game that tries to do a lot of interesting things with storytelling and half succeeds. Towards the end, there is an overlong sex sequence, clearly intended to be a tender climax in the relationship of the two main characters, but ends up an awkward fusing of moaning, dead-eyed marionettes. It doesn¡¯t help that the guy is a zombie by this point. While many games get sex wrong by crudely aping film, there are games out there that engage with sex and relationships much more successfully. Nina Freeman¡¯s charming and smart How Do You Do It? puts the player in the role of an 11-year-old girl, first exploring the concept of sex with Barbie and Action Man.
Freeman¡¯s latest game, Cibele, similarly takes a more emotionally complex look at sex. Anna Anthropy¡¯s Dys4ia looks at questions of gender and sexuality, and AAA titles like Dragon Age and Mass Effect have sexual relationships very much built into the structure of the game.While I¡¯m at it, Cara Ellison¡¯s S.EXE column at Rock Paper Shotgun is a definite go-to if you¡¯re at all interested in sex in gaming. She's also made a game "about good sex that goes bad".Smartwatches? Bah ¨C they¡¯re old hat. Smart rings are where it¡¯s at these days, and there¡¯s a surprisingly broad array of technology bling to choose from. Products from the ostentatious Misfit Swarovski Shine to the slightly less over-the-top Ringly are available right now, offering all sorts of handy features. Now, there¡¯s a new company attempting to muscle in: Neyya with its new smart ring.