PC Pro May 2022

I’m about to break a golden rule, for which I can only apologise. A mere two months ago I used this page to explain why I was desperate to buy a new phone but was going to resist temptation. This month, I’m going to explain why I’m desperate to buy a new phone but am going to resist temptation. Please, have some sympathy. One of the truly awful things about this job is that I either test new, exciting products or edit reviews about them – which involves checking how much they cost, which colours they come in, and the marvellous features they offer. It hurts. This month, my object of desire is the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (see p46). I don’t need one; as I mentioned before, my Huawei P30 Pro…

Steve Cassidy Read Steve’s column this month for a file-copying app that’s perfect for power users, plus his warning about the perils of live streaming. Discover why you should be scared from p120 James O’Malley What’s the point of NFTs? That’s the question James sets out to answer by speaking to those involved, including one academic who accidentally earned £1 million. See if you can do the same on p32 Simon Handby If you’re looking to buy a printer, Simon is your man. As you can tell from his eyes, he dreams printers, and tested 12 in this month’s Labs. Find out which is perfect for you from p74 Gary Rayneau Gary, cofounder of a company that helps businesses build diverse and inclusive cultures, explains why IT leaders have a vital role to play – but not…

If you’ve ever fallen into a fit of rage after your internet connection has stopped working, spare a thought for the entire nation of Tonga. The tiny country, an archipelago of 169 islands in the Pacific Ocean with a population of 105,000, was recently knocked offline when an underwater volcanic eruption sent shock waves under the sea, severing the nation’s only fibre-optic link to the rest of the internet. Losing its internet connection was only one of the horrific consequences of the eruption for Tonga. While rebuilding parts of the country will take many years, rescuers wasted no time in dealing with the internet cable snap. “It’s no different really from calling an ambulance,” said Bruce Neilson-Watts, managing director of Global Marine Systems, which lays and maintains fibre optic cables. “[We] have…

If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you can’t have failed to have noticed the outbreak of green, yellow and grey squares. Lacking a URL, or any real meaning to outsiders, they are a sign of the aftermath of a battle against Wordle, a clever word game that went viral in January 2022. For the uninitiated, Wordle is a simple game of deduction, written in only a few hundred lines of JavaScript. Players must deduce a five-letter word by making guesses using other five-letter words, with a letter highlighted in green if it’s in the right position, and orange if the letter is in the word but in the wrong place. What has made it such a hit – having gone from around 90 players per day in November…

When the tech industry emerges from the current supply crisis, it may look very different from the world of 2019. That’s because the crisis has impacted business models, and inflated stock prices as newly essential technology companies were able to increase prices during the pandemic. Hamza Mudassir at the Judge Business School says he wouldn’t be surprised to see “Nvidia going around on a shopping spree”, for example. “Maybe they go and buy a couple of foundries and… they can just focus on producing GeForce cards.” However, Mudassir thinks the more profound change could be the faster adoption of streaming technology, where games and other software are rendered in the cloud before being transmitted to a more modestly specced local machine, as evidenced by the success of Nvidia’s games streaming platform, GeForce…

If you’ve bought any new computing equipment over the past couple of years, then congratulations – it can’t have been easy. From smartphones and games consoles to graphics cards and networking gear, the entire industry has been throttled by the ongoing shortage of semiconductors. Even the biggest companies have been hit – last year, Apple was forced to scale back manufacturing plans for the iPhone, and more than a year after launch it’s still virtually impossible for consumers to buy a PlayStation 5. So are there any signs of things returning to business as normal any time soon or should we expect shortages for the foreseeable future? We’ve been talking to the experts to find out. A big problem for small companies “If you can’t build PlayStations or iPhones, we don’t stand a chance,”…