Ebuyer HQ

Do you have butter fingers?

There’s probably nothing more distressing for gadget users than dropping an electronic device on the floor and breaking the screen.

Unfortunately, with products becoming increasingly lighter and thinner – not to mention advancements in technology seeing more items feature touchscreens – the danger of damaging the likes of smartphones and tablet PCs seems to be on the rise.

What are you listening to?

Despite many media commentators lamenting the demise of CDs and the traditional record shop, Brits’ passion for music is certainly not slowing down.

Object of my affections

While I hope you had a great Christmas, inevitably you didn’t receive everything you were wishing for this festive season. I for one was hoping for a brand spanking new monitor. I loved my presents off Santa don’t get me wrong, but a new monitor would have been just perfect.

But I’m not too disappointed as it’s at this time of the year that you can find some great bargains on PC accessories, not least the object of my affections – yes a Samsung monitor!

December's Top Bloggers

Now that the festive season is upon us it’s been great to read what everyone would like or recommend for Christmas.  This month’s top technology blogs are a mixture of bloggers who have covered Christmas in their own, interesting way, and a gem of a development blog that we like so much we had to mention too!

Covering Christmas these Tech blogs have been worth a read in December and will be great to follow for surfacing technology posts in the New Year as well.

Call of Duty - have you played it?

There have always been games which have had the entire gaming world waiting with baited breath for the next instalment to be released.

Asus Transformer Prime - the tablet PC of 2012?

It’s a human thing to default to type. Although we can put up a façade of being something different for a while, eventually the effort of keeping this up gets the better of us and we return to just being ourselves — and no bad thing either.

That’s all very nice, but what’s this doing in a gadget blog you might well ask. Well, technology companies (it seems to me) often behave in a similar way. Microsoft excels at being a software company, Sony excels at being a hardware company and Nintendo excels at being a gaming company – as we see in their respective consoles.

Looking at the Asus Transformer Prime made me wonder where Asus fits into this identity equation. They have excelled with their Netbooks, but can this be extended into the tablet market? Their previous Asus Eee Pad Transformer worked hard to legitimate itself as a solid tablet entry, and with its novel keyboard dock it asked fresh questions about where the lines should be drawn between laptops and tablets.

The Asus Transformer Prime takes this enquiry and turbo-charges it with a super powerful quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and 1GB of RAM. To this it adds a high grade spun metallic finish, super slim form factor, 8MP camera with flash great sound and an impressive 18 hours of battery life.

Like their Netbook PC’s did a few years ago, Asus Transformer Prime takes aim at a market that is notoriously hard to penetrate and gets very close to a bulls-eye. Here it is the iPad rather than sub-notebooks that are in the firing range.

The hardware itself is very impressive, and although the slightly fussier finish won’t be to everyone’s taste it’s easily on a par with the iPad. Where it exceeds Apple’s device is in the inclusion of USB and SD ports, which aren’t available on the iPad without an accessory cable. Also, the provision of a full size QWERTY in the box makes for a more flexible set-up.

This flexibility is where the rubber hits the road. If you are after a more flexible experience then the combination of the Transformer Prime’s versatile hardware and open operating system (which can be easily upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich) will make it worth the price of entry. If, however, you are after a simpler, less fussy and less complicated experience then the iPad is still hard to beat.

However you dress it up (with great quality and pitch perfect delivery) Asus, in my mind, does best at innovating and disrupting the technology market more than anything else. This isn’t really about beating Apple at its own game, but about providing a new way to look at the tablet-notebook divide. To that end get ahead of the curve this Christmas by jumping on a Transformer Prime, it really is a big step forward in all round flexible computing.

Andy Robertson @GeekDadGamer runs the GeekDad blog for Wired.co.uk and writes videogame reviews for families.

Asus Zenbook

I used to be unimpressed with laptops. Back in the 90’s they were around twice the price of a desktop and much less powerful. What’s more is they really weren’t all that portable, not only due to their size and weight but a joke of a battery life.

Things have changed over the years and recently I realised that I actually prefer working on a laptop to a desktop machine. Not only can I take my work with me wherever I go, I don’t have to constantly switch keyboards and confuse my fingers over which keys are where.

The watershed moment for me was seeing a Macbook Air for the first time. Like other Apple products it had the trick of redefining a whole category of technology. While it still functioned like a laptop, it looked and felt like some strange object from the future.

Form factor went from being low on my list of must have features to somewhere near the top. Picking up a MacBook Air, never mind travelling and working with it, made you wonder just how they managed to fit all those components into a device the size of an A4 envelope.

Much like the nursery rhyme, where Apple goes others are sure to follow. This can mean second rate products that look like the real thing from a distance, only to give away their second rate delivery when you get close.

However, the Asus ZenBook UX21 seems to be the exception to the rule. It’s a Macbook Air looking windows portable that adopts the same aluminium body construction as the Apple machine.

More than just looking the part though it also delivers on performance and durability. Running Windows 7 on it is a dream, and connectivity via USB or Wi-Fi was fast and seamless. In fact for a while I had trouble distinguishing it from the Macbook Air I covet daily.

The main differences I found, apart from the Operating System and aftercare, were the keyboard and the price. Although more responsive than many laptop keyboards I’ve wrestled with over the years, the Asus ZenBook UX21 was still a little less responsive than I would have liked. More positively though the price (around £850) is less than you would pay for a Macbook Air.

I’ve still not made my mind up over which I prefer between the two, but I certainly have more to think about since seeing the UX21.

Andy Robertson @GeekDadGamer runs the GeekDad blog for Wired.co.uk and writes videogame reviews for families.