Ferguson Hill is best known for its monumental FH001 and FH002, towering horns of transparent perspex with a similarly mammoth price tag. The company broached the computer/MP3 speaker market a few years back with the markedly more affordable FH007 system, and is back again with the FH009, aiming this time at the music and home cinema market. The premise is a setup both visually and aurally arresting; the price is a not-inconsiderable £795. Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Motorola’s DROID Pro made a play for the disloyal BlackBerry crowd, pairing Android with a QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen in a candybar form-factor. Blocky style and a low-res display did the Pro no favors, however, and so Motorola has returned with the Pro+, a smartphone targeting mobile professionals who don’t want to be entirely embarrassed by their – or their IT department’s – choice of handset. Read on for the full SlashGear review.
Seldom has the name of a phone been so obviously related to its proposition as with the HTC Sensation XL. Bearing a supersized 4.7-inch touchscreen along with Beats Audio, this “extra large” Android smartphone should arguably be the pinnacle of HTC’s multimedia range. However, cost-cutting and some frustrating design decisions could undermine all that. Read on for the full SlashGear review.
Backup is, for many of us, a guilty topic. Even the geekiest of computer-addicts can find themselves blindsided by data loss, and while cloud services like Gmail and Spotify may be rescuing us from having to keep local backups of our mail and music, there’s still plenty of pain when a drive unexpectedly fails. Synology’s DiskStation DS411slim offers a somewhat unique take on the home and small office NAS market, using notebook-sized HDDs to pack quad-drive redundancy into an device with a smaller footprint than the average router. Can it save us from drive death disaster? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
The WIMM One has a worthy ambition: shifting information from your smartphone screen to your wrist, and allowing you to get on with life rather than pulling your phone from your pocket every thirty seconds. To do that, WIMM‘s smart watch harnesses Android, a high-tech display and more sensors than you’d expect from the standard Rolex or Omega. The company also has its eye on smart watch world domination, with enthusiastic plans for third-party developers and hardware manufacturers. The WIMM One Developer Kit is the first step in that journey; check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
With the home backup and media server market heating up, a box full of drives and a link to your router is no longer enough. Netgear‘s ReadyNAS Duo v2 takes the dual-drive shell of its first-gen predecessor and then makes upgrades to processor, software and more, arriving at an affordable backup station that also offers media streaming, remote access with smartphone apps and more. Read on for the full SlashGear review.
LaCie’s Little Big Disk is the Thunderbolt drive your MacBook Pro has been waiting for. It’s a fact of life that, while it’s rarely cheap to be an early adopter, you do get to have the best toys: a nearly palm-sized twin SSD external drive that looks like a friendlier HAL 9000 and promises previously unseen levels of data transfer speed. Problem is, that speed comes with a $899 price tag; can the Little Big Disk make a Big Strong Case for all that cash? Read on for the full SlashGear review.
Big phone, small tablet, or unnecessary hybrid? Questions bubble up uncontrollably around the Samsung Galaxy Note; strangers can’t help but ask questions. No, we don’t have tiny hands; no, we didn’t put our iPad through a hot wash; no, just because it has a stylus, doesn’t mean it’s running Windows Mobile. Is 5.3-inches of Android more than any man, woman or child should be expected to stomach, or has Samsung’s scattershot approach to mobile device sizing struck gold this time around? Read on for the full SlashGear review.
There’s a whole lot riding on the Lumia 800. Nokia’s first Windows Phone and the handset that will usher in – so the company hopes – a new era of smartphone relevance and a turnaround in fortunes. Question is, will the Lumia 800 be Finnish enough for long-time followers as well as mainstream enough for a new audience of smartphone users. Symbian may not have been universally appealing, but at least it was unique; has Nokia sidelined its independence alongside its faithful old platform? Check out the full SlashGear review to find out.
With services like Apple’s iCloud and Google Cloud Music, it’s easy to assume that the future of our data is putting it safe on someone else’s servers. There’s another option, however, in hosting your own cloud – and backup system – with a NAS. Synology has made a name for itself with flexible, affordable Network Attached Storage that doesn’t fall short on performance, and the DiskStation DS712+ is the latest to target home and small business users. Twin drive support, copious multimedia streaming options and the promise of super-fast data rates: there’s a lot to like about the DS712+ on paper at least. Check out how it holds up in the full SlashGear review.
The next step forward in having the mobile world adopt a connection speed isn’t always necessarily straight to the newest high for specs, and the Samsung Stratosphere is here to prove it. Fitted with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard complete with Android menu shortcuts and coming in as the second Samsung handset to work on Verizon’s 4G LTE network, the Samsung Stratosphere isn’t here to win any benchmark wars with its single-core 1GHz processor and relatively thick chassis, but it IS the only 4G LTE device on the market with a full QWERTY keyboard, and the 4-inch 800 × 480 Super AMOLED display doesn’t hurt none either. Will the Stratosphere access a market just waiting to be tapped? We shall see!
It’s somehow fitting, running our review of the much-anticipated Nokia N9 smartphone on the eve of Nokia World 2011. The company is expected to reveal its plans for salvation, namely adopting Windows Phone, while the N9 runs what Nokia used to believe would save it, MeeGo. A splash of uniqueness never hurt any device, and the N9 has built up a vocal following, convinced MeeGo should have been the Finn’s focus instead of a deal with Microsoft. Has rarity blinded rationality, or is the N9 really a bittersweet slice of not just what could’ve been, but what should’ve been? Read on for the full SlashGear review.
