PC Pro November 2021

REVIEW OF THE MONTH p46 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 5G It’s taken three goes, but Samsung has finally submitted a Galaxy Fold for a review. Not a hands-on session, not a briefing behind closed doors, but a “here it is, do your worst” review. Having spent some time with the flexible device, we can understand Samsung’s confidence: this is a foldable phone built to survive life in a pocket, and that’s not the only thing we like about it. The form factor is genuinely interesting and surely a sign of where phones are heading. Samsung packs in the tech, too, from a cutting-edge processor to all the screens you could possibly want to gaze at. Whether it’s worth the price is another question. Read our in-depth review on p46. FUTURE PROOFING OF THE MONTH p26 The…

It was all going well. Too well. I opened the door to my office with a jaunty air on Sunday evening, just as a final check to make sure everything was prepped for Monday morning before the final push of sending this issue of PC Pro to the printers. I may even have whistled a sunny refrain as I logged into my computer and navigated my way to the main folder. Then it hit me. Empty. Where there should have been all of this month’s InDesign files and PDFs was a yawning expanse of white. The whistle froze on my lips as I leapt from folder to folder, looking for anything that was the sum of this month’s combined hard work from the 20-odd people (emphasis on odd) that contribute to…

Mark Parvin Regular guest columnist Mark tries to explain to customers why errors still occur even after he’s fixed their machines from p116 David Crookes Rather than celebrate old technology in this month’s Retro, David celebrates the people who gave it a chance to succeed: early adopters like you. See p123 Nathan Spendelow Did our resident phone reviewer Nathan fall for the charms of the Galaxy Z Fold3? Find out in his in-depth review, starting on p46 Paul Ockenden Sit back and admire as Paul explains how he uses clever automation tech and sunlight to save energy in his home. Turn to p111…

When Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO in 2014, he announced a bold new strategy that put the cloud at the heart of everything the company does. Seven years on, with cloud-computing platform Azure booming, Office 365 having successfully colonised many workplaces and with even Xbox pivoting hard towards streaming, the cloud strategy has perhaps reached its inevitable conclusion: Microsoft is taking Windows into the cloud too. Windows 365 is essentially an entire Windows PC in the cloud, streamed to your local device. Microsoft is promising that the service will offer “instant-on” boot and that system resources, such as disk space, will automatically scale based on your needs. It will even work on devices such as smartphones and tablets. Initially, Microsoft will be making Windows 365 available only to business customers,…

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and most big tech firms have learned over the past decade that one effective answer to the problem of security holes and errors is cold, hard cash. If you find a bug in their apps which could expose user data or let hackers and spies poke around, there could be a cash reward waiting. It’s a hugely successful idea, which is perhaps why Twitter has adopted and applied it to a more complex problem than software bug whack-a-mole: algorithmic bias. To coincide with this year’s Def-Con hacking conference, the company released the code and model that Twitter uses for its saliency algorithm. This is the artificial intelligence that decides what should be the main focus on an uploaded image when displayed in a thumbnail preview. So, for example, it…

The Restart Project isn’t just a campaigning organisation. It gets its hands dirty too, by regularly hosting “Restart Parties”, where members of the public can bring their broken electronics and work with skilled volunteers to get their gadgets working again. “We tend to fix about 55% of the things that are brought in on the spot,” said Vallauri, but he notes that success can vary significantly. “The most common repairs that are done at these events are screen repairs, for which we have a success rate of 54%,” he said, but power and battery issues are a different story. Unfortunately, we tend to have a much lower fix rate because sometimes it is the battery but other times it might be the charging port or much more complicated things that don’t necessarily…