New Technology leaks: 2013

iPhone's dating app tricks thief

NEW YORK: A New York City musician used a combination of technology, seduction, a hammer and a bribe to reclaim his missing iPhone from a confused crook.

Jazz trombonist Nadav Nirenberg says he left the phone in a livery cab on New Year's Eve. The next morning, the 27-year-old learned via email that someone was sending messages to womenusing a dating app on the phone.

Nirenberg logged on to the service and offered the man a date _ posing as a woman. He even posted a picture of a pretty girl.

When the culprit arrived at Nirenberg's Brooklyn apartment building with wine, the musician greeted him with a $20 bill while holding a hammer _ just in case.

The thief handed him the iPhone and left without a word.

Google 'alternative' for tablet users is here

SAN FRANCISCO: The makers of Blekko believe they've built a great alternative to Google, but they're also realistic. They know their two-year-old internet search engine won't ever supplantGoogle as the most popular place to search on laptop and desktop computers.

But web surfing on tablet computers is a different matter, creating an opportunity that Blekko hopes to exploit with a new product called Izik - a search engine designed especially for Apple's iPads and tablets running Google's Android software.

Izik, whose name is a riff on 17th-century scientist Isaac Newton, debuted with the release of free apps for theiPad and Android tablets.

To cater to the more visual format of tablets, Izik displays search results in rows of information capsules that can be easily scrolled with a swipe of a finger. Users scroll vertically to look at different categories related to a search request. Scrolling horizontally displays more capsules within each category, which vary depending on the request.

Blekko CEO and founder Rich Skrenta likens the experience to a hybrid service that is part search engine, part magazine and part discovery tool. Izik also shares some similarities to a tablet search app called Axis that longtime Google rival Yahoo Inc. released last May in an attempt to shake up the market. Like Izik, Axis also relies on visual thumbnails to list search results.

Izik's system is much different from Google's.

Entering "Apple" into Izik on Friday produced a set of results sorted into these easily navigable categories: "Top Results," "Images," "Recipes," "News," "Reviews," and "Tech." Most of the information and pictures either pertained to Apple the company or the fruit.

Searching for the term at Google generated a map pinpointing the location of several nearby Apple stores. The rest of the results page was mostly devoted to a stack of blue links to other websites - a familiar format that has become the industry standard.

But Skrenta believes search will have to change as more people become tablet owners and start to use them more frequently than their laptop computers. With more than 100 million of the devices already sold since the iPad's April 2010 debut, tablets already have contributed to declining sales of traditional PCs and printers.

Skrenta is betting it's only a matter of time before the technological upheaval triggered by tablets hits the search market and people start to break their Googling habits.

Google so far has been able to extend its dominance to tablets, largely because its search engine is the built-in option on the iPad and most Android devices.

But the algorithms and format that Google uses on tablets and laptops are basically the same. Skrenta doubts Google will switch to a format as dramatically different as Izik's approach because it still makes most of its money from online advertising displayed on traditional PCs. The tendency to stick with a long-established product that is still bringing most of a company's money while challengers are introducing breakthroughs that threaten the status quo is sometimes referred to the "innovator's dilemma."

Blekko's namesake search engine also sought to address a problem that Skrenta didn't think was being adequately addressed by Google. By relying on humans to highlight the most useful information under frequently searched topics, Blekko, which is based in Redwood Shores, Calif., tries to remove the rogue websites that have learned to how to manipulate search formulas to gain a prominent ranking in search results.

Although Blekko began working on its technology five years ago, its search engine didn't debut until late 2010. About four months after that, Google unveiled sweeping changes to its search algorithm in an effort to reduce the rubbish showing up in its results.

Although its search engine has yet to undercut Google's dominance, Blekko has attracted a loyal following. It draws about 12 million monthly visitors and has raised about $50 million in venture capital from a group of investors that includes actor Ashton Kutcher and Yandex, a Russian search engine that is more popular in its home country than Google.

Now, Apple Maps sends users on 'road to nowhere'

SYDNEY: The 'flawed' and 'doggy' Apple mapsservice has once again failed to provide correct directions for travel to its users in Australia.

This time the app listed Peninsula Link freeway as the most convenient way to drive to Mornington Peninsula beaches.

But the freeway does not open for at least another week, The Age reports.

A spokeswoman for the consortium building the Peninsula Link freeway, Carol Bartley, confirmed the road was not yet open.

According to the report, Google Maps gave the correct directions for travel through the area.

Last month, Victoria Police warned it was concerned at bugs in Apple's mapping programme that saw tourists using the new operating system attempting to reach Mildura instead being sent 70 kilometres away to a national park.

Several of the motorists had become stranded in the Murray-Sunset National Park in hot weather, a police spokeswoman said, 'making this a potentially life-threatening issue'.

Now, exchange SMSs with your household appliances

WASHINGTON: Leading manufacturers of household appliances have created smart devicesthat can send a text message when your clothes are dry or notify you when a power cut knocks out your fridge.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, appliance manufacturers Whirlpooland LG are unveiling new washers, dryers and refrigerators that connect with their owner's smartphones or tablets through home-based wi-fi networks, Discovery News reported.

The household appliances let them know when to change filters, schedule maintenance or the cheapest time of day to wash a load of clothes.

"We're not looking at having the fridge tweet to you, but it can send e-mails or SMS," said Warwick Stirling, Whirlpool global director of energy and sustainability.

"We're trying to focus on ways to make tasks easier and simpler, making processes more efficient rather than more gadget-y or gizmo-y," Stirling said.

Stirling said the devices will be available for sale in March under its " Sixth Sense Live" brand. Whirlpool's new Bluetooth-capable CoolVox refrigerator lets consumers play music through the fridge using an app.

Korean electronics giant LG is introducing a new line at CES that will let users control their washer, vacuum or range by voice command via smartphone, even offering the ability to check what kind of food is inside the refrigerator remotely.

A Whirlpool washer/dryer combo with smart connectivity will cost $3,600, compared to under $1,000 for entry-level models, the report said.

While appliance and electronics makers believe consumers will go for convenience over cost, some analysts are skeptical that the public is ready for tweeting fridges or remote controlled vacuums.

"From an appliance standpoint, they are getting there, but it's still pretty early," said Neil Strother, a senior analyst at Boulder-based Pike Research.

He said there are several big obstacles to consumers jumping from smartphones to smart appliances.

They are still 50 to 100 per cent more costly that "non-smart" appliances and manufacturers still haven't agreed on a common household communications platform that would help integrate stereo/TV/computer systems with kitchens and laundries, for example.

How internet will change the world in next 30 years

The internet just turned 30. That might come as a surprise, as the global computer network seems both older and younger than that. Older because it is such a part of life now - roughly a third of humanity is now regularly online, and its use is so ubiquitous, even people over 40 find it hard to remember a world without it.

And younger because it's still constantly changing, showing us new games, new programes and new fads. Whether it is relaying the latest gossip or teaching us how to do a South Korean rapper's pony dance, our electronic pal seldom acts a day over 13. For better and worse, the internet has changed the world, not least for India. But some analysts say that the changes we have seen in the past 30 years are nothing compared with what we may see in the next 30.

Birth of a network

Although scientists had networked computers as far back as the 1950s, no one had developed a common language that would allow these networks to communicate easily between each other until the late 1970s. At that point, the US military had realised that because of the wide variety of communications systems they used, their communications networking problems were bad and only going to get worse.

"They would never be able to get out from under this diversity... and they would constantly have to adapt to the future," says David P Reed, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who was part of the group the military asked to design "an internetwork" to bridge those gaps. Reed and his colleagues found the problem an interesting one. "We weren't particularly focussed on military effectiveness, but saw this an early warning of all kinds of challenges," he says.

The outcome of their experiments was the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the data protocol adopted on January 1, 1983, which made it possible to create a single network of roughly 500 host computers at universities and various US government installations.

Reed says he and his colleagues had a sense that they were doing something important, but thought TCP/IP would be the first of many iterations. "Most of us never thought that this particular internet, which would be a very experimental thing, would last very long," says Reed, now an adjunct professor at MIT. TCP/IP solved several problems that had vexed US military communication specialists: like, how do you maintain control of a computer network even as you add more computers to it without having it collapse?

The TCP/IP designers' answer was: you don't. Instead, by keeping the structure as simple as possible, not requiring 100% delivery of data, and making security the concern of each end of the system rather than the entire network, they created a structure that had no central control and could easily reroute packets of data if one path were congested or closed.

A kludge?

However, for at least the first seven years after the launch, it was far from certain that their internet would grow up into the internet. "We expected that a company like IBM would see what we were doing and say, well, I could do that really well, and I could do a much better version," says Reed.

It was clear a big data network was coming, but TCP/IP wasn't the inevitable solution, says Andrew Odlyzko, a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota. "It's a kludge, as a technology," says Odlyzko, a former Bell Labs researcher. "I don't think it's optimal in any way, but it works. And it happened to satisfy the needs of the moment."

As late as the early 1990s, businesses continued to propose alternatives to the TCP/IP-based network. "At the time in the marketplace, there was actually a lot of scepticism about this approach," Reed recalls. For one thing, engineers didn't like the idea that no one supported it.

However, the alternatives proposed by telephone companies and the International Telecommunications Union never caught on. Two factors held them back, in Reed's view. First, most of the major telecom research labs had "a very planning-oriented style" for doing research, he says. Second, they were "hobbled by a desire to go slowly".

The growth

But they didn't have the time they thought they did, particularly as personal computer manufacturers were creating a vast new base of computers already pre-wired for TCP/IP connections. By December 1995, 16 million people were online worldwide — and the numbers kept growing, leading to a cultural and investment mania, the dotcom stock-market bubble that began to pop in 1999.

However, 12 years later, the reality today seems, if anything, more remarkable than the breathless reports of the nineties. Today, more than 2.4 billion people use the internet, according to Internet World statistics — and the numbers are still growing. In all kinds of fields, the internet has had a profound impact.

Some industries, such as music and newspapers, have been all but destroyed, even as it has created whole new lines of business, such as search engines, e-tailers and social media. Boston Consulting Group estimated recently that if the internet were a country, it would rank as the world's fifth-largest economy. BCG analysts say internet growth will continue to outpace the BRIC's in the short run. They expect it will climb least 10% a year through 2016.

For India, the growth of the internet has been particularly important. "I think no other technology has transformed the nation more than the internet on three dimensions," says Jagdish Sheth, a professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School in Atlanta.

"First, it has made India globally integrated despite poor physical infrastructure. Second, it has reduced the rural-urban divide especially with mobile internet. Finally, it has enabled India to have a large IT and ITeS services including [business process outsourcing] and now more highly valued professional services," he says, adding $100 billion to the economy every year.

What next?

Nor is the internet close to mature. Besides two-thirds of humanity that have yet to log on, new uses are being found for computer networking. Some analysts say that Big Data or what GE is calling the Industrial Internet — the extension of the internet to things — may have an even bigger economic impact than the internet has had in its first 30 years.

New sensors on machinery and data over the internet will enable companies to see patterns in a variety of things, from public health to supply chains, and create new products as a result. Some of those offerings are easy to imagine, such as car insurance that is priced more competitively because premiums are based on a little black box that monitors the driver's actual performance.

Others might seem like the stuff of science fiction but are happening surprisingly quickly. Audi and Toyota just announced that they are demonstrating driverless car prototypes at an electronics show in Las Vegas next week, and in September, the California state legislature passed a law heavily lobbied by Google, a driverless car pioneer, that will make driverless cars street-legal.

Big Data, big problems?

However, Odlyzko believes Big Data may also have some risks. He worries the loss of privacy, which ubiquitous data collection may entail, could make it possible for companies to model prices on the basis of perfect price discrimination, meaning that you would always be forced to pay exactly what you were willing to pay — a good deal for companies, perhaps, but not necessarily for the consumer.

"Marx says that capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction... what I think is more likely to happen is that capitalism through the destruction of privacy and through Big Data is destroying the markets, the foundations of capitalism, and throwing us back into feudalism or, even before that, to small tribes," says Odlyzko.

The temptation could also be high to put thumbs on these digital scales. "You're dealing with people who often have incentives to distort the images that are distributed through the press or social networks, or other things, and who will be influencing this process," he adds. Like the Libor scandal? Yes, he says, but the example he has in mind, instead, is the mortgage securities scandal that led to the 2008 crash, which was caused in part by relying on inaccurate data.

Even without bad intentions, trusting too much in models may lead to trouble, says Odlyzko, quoting British statistician George Box's line that "all models are wrong, but some models are useful". "There's a beautiful area of mathematics that shows certain patterns are unavoidable as soon as you have a large enough system. You find patterns that you're looking for, even if they're not necessarily significant." Mishandle data in this way and, he warns, "you can delude yourself and you can delude other people".

Reed says it will be important to think critically about the goals of a project, such as the use of data to pursue terrorists. Don't let people "use the shiny technology to give credibility to something that would normally be treated with great scepticism", he says.

For India Inc, Big Data may present more of a challenge than an opportunity in the short run. Some pundits have warned that data-handling expertise will push the advantage back to the West and away from the developing world. However, Sheth is not so sure. "All major Indian IT services are gearing up for big data analytics," he says. "While they may lag in the short run, they are likely to catch up."

The biggest bottleneck, ironically for a country rich in analytics expertise, is likely to be talent in handling data, according to Sheth. "There will be short-time talent shortage which will be a significant disadvantage. It will also require Indian IT companies to invest in the US and try to gain access to the talent. In other words, neither work can be shifted to India nor Indians can be sent to the US: they need to recruit in the US and compete for the talent," he says.

A new metaphor

In the end, however, the economic opportunity may not be the most important aspect of the internet. What may matter more is its usefulness as a new metaphor for human organisation. "The fundamental lesson of TCP/IP is that control doesn't scale. Centralised control doesn't scale," says David Weinberger, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Unlike a centralised system, says Reed, which may keep running well right up until the moment it doesn't, a decentralised system like the internet will just keep running. "One of the things about the internet is that it's always failing everywhere, and that's one of the reasons it is strong: because if it is always failing everywhere in little ways and ways that can be quickly resolved, it's never going to completely go down," says Reed.

At the same time, the internet's lack of central governance, and subsequent internet-built projects such as open source software programmes such as Linux and content programmes such asWikipedia, have demonstrated the potential value of new kinds of loose collaborations. "We really have demonstrated with the internet... that a looser form of collaboration where there are joint interests advanced in working together can work and scale and survive," says Reed.

However, the internet's value as a democratising tool may also not just be in its structure but in its use, and not just as virtual bulletin board, as seen in the Arab Spring rebellions or the Occupy Wall Street movement. In his latest book, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That The Facts Aren't The Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, And The Smartest Person In The Room Is The Room (Basic Books, 2012), Weinberger argues that rather than see knowledge as something finite that comes out of a book, the internet encourages people to look at it as something that emerges only after extended debate.

Whether you're arguing about a new chemical formula or trying to decide which camera to buy, Weinberger says the internet makes it clearer that there are few unarguable facts — and not having those facts makes it more difficult to maintain all kinds of elites. "I think we're in a transition period here," says Weinberger. The generation that has grown up with the internet is looking at how decisions are made in organisations and he suspects it won't like what it sees."

"The notion that there is a person at the top of the pyramid who knows more about everything... that they are the best person to make the decision, looks less and less tenable," says Weinberger. Governments may resist this shift, he says, but they are going to have to adjust, he predicts. If they don't, "the disconnect between self-governance on the internet and money and power-based governance is going to become unendurable", he warns.

-- Bennett Voyles

See, how your TV will look in 2013

Think your high-definition TV is hot stuff (AP) -- as sharp as it gets? At the biggest trade show in the Americas, which kicks off next week in Las Vegas, TV makers will be doing their best to convince you that HDTVs are old hat, and should make room for "Ultra HDTV."

It's the latest gambit from an industry struggling with a shift in consumer spending from TVs, PCs and single-purpose devices such as camcorders to small, portable do-it-all gadgets: smartphones and tablets. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that device shipments to US buyers fell 5 per cent in dollar terms last year excluding smartphones and tablets, but rose 6 per cent to $207 billion if you include those categories.

The trends suggest that the International CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show) is losing its stature as a start-of-the-year showcase for the gadgets that consumers will buy over the next 12 months. It started out as a venue for the TV and stereo industries. Later, PCs joined the party.

But over the last few years, TVs and PCs have declined in importance as portable gadgets have risen and CES hasn't kept pace. It's not a major venue for phone and tablet launches, though some new models will likely see the light of day there when the show floor opens. The biggest trendsetter in mobile gadgets industry, Apple, stays away, as it shuns all events it doesn't organize itself.

Apple rival Microsoft has also scaled back its patronage of the show. For the first time since 1999, Microsoft's CEO won't be delivering the kick-off keynote. Qualcomm has taken over the podium. It's an important maker of chips that go into cellphones, but not a household name.

None of this seems to matter much to the industry people who go to the show, which is set to be bigger than ever, at least in terms of floor space.

Gary Shapiro the CEO of the organizing Consumer Electronics Association, expects attendance close to the 156,000 people who turned out last year. That's pretty much at capacity for Las Vegas, which has about 150,000 hotel rooms. The show doesn't welcome gawkers: the attendees are executives, purchasing managers, engineers, marketers, journalists and others with connections to the industry.

"We don't want to be over 160,000," Shapiro said in an interview. "We do everything we can not to be too crowded."

Nor do the shifting winds of the technology industry seem to matter much to exhibitors. Though some big names are scaling back or missing, there are many smaller companies clamoring for booth space and a spot in the limelight for a few days. For example, while Apple doesn't have an official presence at the show, there will be 500 companies displaying Apple accessories in the "iLounge Pavilion."

Overall, the CEA sold a record 1.9 million square feet of floor space (the equivalent of 33 football fields) for this year's show.

These are some of the themes that will be in evidence next week:

Sharper TVs
Ultra HDTVs have four times the resolution of HDTVs. While this sounds extreme and unnecessary, you've probably already been exposed to projections at this resolution, because it's used in digital movie theaters. Sony, LG, Westinghouse and others will be at the show with huge flat-panel TVs that bring that experience home, if you have a spare $20,000 or so.

While the sets are eye-catching, they will likely be niche products for years to come, if they ever catch on. They have to be really big - more than 60 inches, measured diagonally - to make the extra resolution really count. Also, there's no easy way to get movies in UHDTV resolution.

"While there's going to be a lot of buzz around Ultra HDTV, we really think what's going to be relevant to consumers at the show is the continued evolution of 3D TVs and Internet-connected TVs," said Kumu Puri, senior executive with consulting firm Accenture's Electronics & High-Tech group.

Bigger phones
Unlike TVs, new phones are launched throughout the year, so CES isn't much of a bellwether for phone trends. But this year, reports point to several super-sized smartphones, with screen bigger than five inches diagonally, making their debut at the show. These phones are so big they can be awkward to hold to the ear, but Samsung's Galaxy Note series has shown that there's a market for them. Wags call them "phablets" because they're almost tablet-sized.

Acrobatic PCs
Microsoft launched Windows 8 in October, in an attempt to make the PC work more like a tablet. PC makers obliged, with a slew of machines that blend the boundaries. They have touch screens that twist, fold back or detach from the keyboard. None of these seems to be a standout hit so far, but we can expect more experiments to be revealed at the show.

"All the PC manufacturers recognize that they have to do things differently," Accenture's Puri said.

Attentive computing
CES has been a showcase in recent years for technologies that free users from keyboards, mice and buttons. Instead, they rely on cameras and other sophisticated sensors to track the user and interpret gestures and eye movements. Microsoft's motion-tracking add-on for the Xbox 360console, the Kinect, has introduced this type of technology to the living room. Startups and big TV makers are now looking to take it further.

For example, Tobii Technology, a Swedish company, will be at the show to demonstrate "the world's first gaze interaction computer peripheral" - basically a camera that tracks where the user is looking on the screen, potentially replacing the mouse.

PointGrab, an Israeli startup, will be showing off software that lets a regular laptop webcam interpret hand movements in the air in front of it.

Assaf Gad, head of marketing at PointGrab, said that CES is usually full of hopeful companies with speculative interaction technologies, "but this year, you can actually see real devices."

Nvidia launches new Tegra processor, gaming device

LAS VEGAS: Chipmaker Nvidia showed off its newest Tegra mobile processor, its next step in its expansion into tablets and smartphones and also unveiled a new hand-held game device.

The Tegra 4 chip, with four central processing cores, will be Nvidia's first to include LTE technology for high-speed telecommunication networks, Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said at a press conference in Las Vegas on Sunday ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show.

He also introduced a new hand-held gaming device with a Tegra 4 chip and a built-in screen. Nvidia plans to sell it directly to consumers, an unusual move for the chipmaker.

The device, which he referred to as Project Shield, runs Android games currently found on smartphones and tablets and can also stream video games from PCs.

"Everything you do with your Android device just works here," Huang said. "This is the culmination of five years of work."

With PC sales suffering due to economic uncertainty and a growing consumer preference for tablets, Nvidia has staked its future on leveraging its graphics expertise to make high-performance processors for mobile devices.

Huang did not say when the Tegra 4 chips or hand-held game devices would be available.

The company has made inroads in tablets but competition from larger rival Qualcomm has some on Wall Street concerned the company may struggle to keep its mobile business growing fast. Qualcomm already offers 4G technology in its chips.

Huang said Nvidia's new Tegra chip boasts improved image processing capabilities for digital cameras in phones and tablets. Huang also said the Tegra 4 chip lets tablets load web pages more quickly than devices using rival chips.

Nvidia's previous Tegra 3 mobile processor is used in Google's Nexus 7, one of only a handful of tablets to make inroads against Apple's iPads. The Tegra 3 chip is also used in Microsoft's recently launched Surface tablet.

At the event, Huang also introduced a cloud product called the Nvidia Grid, a server and software package designed to remotely handle graphics computations for video games instead of on consoles like the Xbox in game-players' living rooms.

He said Nvidia would sell the Nvidia Grid packages to companies interested in hosting and streaming cloud-based video games.

"The Nvidia Grid is our first fully integrated system product," Huang said.

In November, Nvidia forecast revenue below expectations due to a slowdown in tablet-processor shipments and a troubled PC market, but shares of the graphics chipmaker rose on the announcement of a quarterly dividend.

Win 8 tablets: Samsung Series 5 vs Acer Aspire S7

We played around with Windows 8 on our PCs, and we have even used it on a tablet. And now, we've tried Microsoft's latest operating system on two new touchscreen ultrabooks. So is it time for an upgrade?

Samsung Series 5 (NP540u3C - A01IN)

The Samsung Series 5 is a mid-sized notebook with a large enough screen and a Core i5 processor to get most of your work done comfortably. And the touchscreen is great to use with Windows 8. However, the device is not going to win any prizes for aesthetics. It seems like an ideal machine for the executive who is looking for function over form and within budget.

What we like

The ultrabook boasts of solid construction with a brushed metal look on its lid and around the keyboard area. It has a nice modern look: tapering sharp edge at the front that contours on the side towards the screen to include USB, HDMI and LAN ports, a headphone jack and a card reader. From lid-up to login screen, the laptop takes less than 15 seconds to boot up.

Given its mid-range specs, it's not surprising that this ultrabook is capable of handling all everyday computing jobs, whether its Full HD video playback, app use, basic to medium-level image editing, office productivity and web browsing.

Keys are evenly spaced, and provide enough tactile feedback for comfortable typing.

Sound is loud and quite good for a notebook. The preloaded SoundAlive audio software offers a range of equalizer settings to enhance the experience.

You can even toggle the touchpad and touchscreen on or off from the Settings menu's Input option.

The Series 5 ultrabook manages an average of just over 6 hours on a single charge.

Its max resolution of 1366x768 is an ideal match to its 13.3-inch screen; display is crisp; colours arevibrant, and its touch interface responds promptly and accurately to taps and swipes.

What we don't like

On the flip side, the glossy screen tends to retain fingerprints and stains, to say nothing of how its reflectiveness affects visibility in bright environments. Besides, this Samsung machine suffers from terrible viewing angles. Watch it from any other position besides straight in front, and display looks washed out.

This is one of the heaviest ultrabooks we have seen, at a hefty 1.8kgs. During our review, the mouse cursor often disappeared from the screen, freezing up the machine and rendering it impossible to carry out further tasks. We're not sure this affects all pieces of this model, but it was certainly the case with the review unit. Given that this is a premium notebook, it was disappointing to see that there was no backlighting for the keyboard and that it had just one USB 3.0 port, while the other two were still version 2.0.

Acer Aspire S7

The S7 is a wonderful amalgam of high-tech innards enclosed in an ultra-slim body fabricated out of toughened glass, brushed aluminium and some plastic. Everything about this machine screams premium. And the fact that you can slip it into a large envelope - just like the Macbook Air - should tell you that comparisons between these two machines are inevitable.

What we like

The S7 is solidly built. Besides, its weight of just above 1kg makes it a very light machine to carry.

It boots up in less than 12 seconds, and the 'Instant On' feature ensures that it is powered up as soon as you open the lid.

The ultrabook can handle almost anything you throw at it: FullHD videos, image editing in Photoshop, office work, web browsing and apps. Its multitouch display is receptive to taps and swipes; colours are bright and vivid; and text is rendered crisply.

The S7 comes with an additional external battery pack that can be attached to its base. In our battery drain tests where videos were played continuously, the device - with both batteries - gave us around 6 hours (around 3.5 hours on just the internal battery). In normal usage, we got about 9 hours of work done on a single charge of both batteries.

The backlit keyboard with its three levels of brightness is especially helpful when you want to work in dark environments.

What we don't like

The Core i7 processor on this machine is overkill. Software that needs such processing power - video and image editing - is sure to be underserved by its 11.6-inch screen. Similarly, its high resolution of 1920x1080 pixels makes icons look miniscule and fonts unreadable on the display. Users, of course, can opt for a lower resolution. Because of its slim profile, the S7 makes a few concessions on the number of ports it includes. In fact, the 11.6-inch model has just 2 USB ports. Now, given that there's no LAN (RJ45 Ethernet) port on the machine, users may have to sacrifice a USB port to connect a network cable via the provided USB to LAN adaptor. Similarly, they may have to use the provided mini-HDMI to HDMI convertor to connect any external display to the device. And all these extras make for a lot of accessories to carry around. The speakers at the machine's base carry the Dolby label, but they sounded too tinny with bass almost non-existent . The keys on the chiclet keyboard are very slightly raised, leaving little room for tactile feedback during touch typing. This affects the typing experience.

In conclusion

The Aspire 7 scores over the Series 5 when it comes to hardware specifications, light-weight portability, aesthetic build quality, battery life and the accessories that it comes with (including a stylish carry case). But we feel it is overpriced and just not value for money, given that the hardware it packs if much higher than required for its portable frame.

The Samsung Series 5 device, on the other hand, promises a larger screen with a more apt resolution, better audio quality, and enough horsepower to handle almost all PC jobs - all of this at a much more attractive price point. On the flip side, it is not that beautiful and is a bit too heavy for our liking.

But quality comes at a price, and those looking for a high style quotient and latent muscle might want to look at the Acer Aspire S7.The rest, for now, will be better served by the Series 5.

So how is Windows 8 on a touch-based notebook?

Windows 8, indeed, is best experienced through a mix of touch, type and cursor. Using it means touching the screen to navigate through its desktop and apps; typing to work with software like MS Word and Excel; and with software like Adobe Photoshop, using a mouse along with keyboard shortcuts and 'touch' to move from one floating toolbar to the next. Over time, users will find themselves instinctively touching and swiping when it seems easier, using a mouse or touchpad where it's more apt, and typing when a keyboard is demanded. It's a smooth transition once you get used to it.

Touch also makes navigation across Windows more intuitive. Now, instead of using the touchpad or a mouse to browse through web pages or read long documents, you can swipe to scroll.

Toggling between apps and your desktop takes getting used to; and it can be a tad annoying when you accidentally access the Charms menu with a swipe from the right edge of the touchpad. What's worse is unintentionally swiping from the left edge and being taken to the tile interface. New rule: Stay at the centre of your touchpad, so you don't face these problems.

The biggest advantage of touch is the apps and games that are the mainstay of the tablet experience. On Windows, you can expect to find favourites like Cut the Rope, Where's my Water, Jet Pack

Joyride, Angry Birds, etc. The days of just Solitaire and Minesweeper are firmly behind, it seems.

So, is Win 8 a powerful OS? It is. Does it promise improvements in user experience? It does. Do you need to install it on your laptop? Not unless it has a touchscreen. Do you need to upgrade your hardware then? Well, if your current machine works for you, you don't need to just yet. If you're buying a new machine, and can afford a touchscreen, you might as well be an early adopter of these new technologies.