Matthew Wales

Hello Everyone, now i know what you are thinking, WOW 3 posts in one month, has he been Hacked! Well no i haven’t, this month has just been a particularly interesting one, and i wanted to continue with a review of the new mac mini, which i have just purchased, to tell you what i think about it.

So lets Get started.

Style – Does it look good

Well what can i say, anyone who has seen one of these on the net will tell you it looks good, anyone who has seen one in the (silver aluminium) flesh will tell you it is incredibly beautiful, its small, its sleek and very discrete, details below:

Height:
1.4 inches (3.6 cm)
Width:
7.7 inches (19.7 cm)
Depth:
7.7 inches (19.7 cm)
Weight:
3.0 pounds (1.37 kg)1

At this size it takes up almost no space what so ever on your desk giving you more space to put other peripherals, like for instance i invested in a 24″ samsung flatscreen monitor and an Edifier 2:1 speaker system.

Specs – What are the options

Well the basic system has a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 processor (theoretical 4.8Ghz), 2GB Ram, 320GB HDD and 256Mb graphics with HDMI support. This is the model you will be able to get instore, however if you would like to customise your system and get software packages installed, you can do this over the internet on the Apple website. That is the option i went for, as i wanted 4GB Ram and final cut express pre-installed for HD Video editing.

There are some extra peripherals you can aquire also such as the blue tooth keyboard and Magic mouse ( which of course i recommend for its touch technology), as well as the mac remote (always handy). All this will cost you £630 + depending on how many peripherals and software you want, and if you are feeling particularly rich you can spend another £670 on a mac theatre screen .

Performance – How good is it?

Performance wise, well i can only speak for my own system, but it is incredibly quick, it takes literally 30 seconds to a minute to come on which is faster than both my windows computers, the graphics quality is incredible, even when it is not at full HDMI resolution (my cable comes tomorrow), its almost like the retina graphics technology used on the new IPHONE 4 if you have seen one you will no what i am talking about.

As for the network connectivity, it has Gb ethernet and built in wireless N standard connections ( which i am using). i have not yet tested the full potential of either of these technologies as i am still running wireless G standard and 100Mb ethernet in my home, something that i will be looking to upgrade though. But even at G standard the connection speed is impressive although my mac does seem to have a problem with windows live’s website lol.

And finally, the cherry on the top of the whole package, this thing ain’t half quite, its built in fan is whisper quiet, its the sort of thing you could have on in your room all night and not be disturbed.

Conclusion

Being a first time MAC owner, I am quite taken aback by the brilliance of this system, being a long time windows user, i tended to buy away from mac, because they have loads of little differences that just made them that little bit more tedious to figure out how to use, but i think i am picking it up quite well, though i am not impressed that they have managed to remove the pound sign from the keyboard, but other than that, i love it! though i will always enjoy the shear geekiness of building my own pc, which isn’t easily done with a mac, so i think i will remain a proper pc man with an air of mac about him lol

So all in all i love my mac, it is definitely technology to invest in, it has so many things that make life easier, no drivers required, software installed with a simple drag of an icon, it is just amazing in every way. Well this is just my opinion, the decision to get one I leave to you.

i will post updates to this post once i have tested it some more, but these are just my first reactions.

See ya Later.

Hi everyone, this is my first post on this new technology category. I though it would do a review of the new Spotify media player system against the most popular media player to date, the great Itunes. Now i know the gadget show recently did a quite amusing review of these two systems, but i thought that i would present my view of them. Just for a different perspective i suppose.

The Media Player of the future?

Still The Big Daddy of music players?

Spotify was launched for public use in October of 2008, however did not provide free accounts too the public straight away, instead it was by invitation only until February 2009. Till then the public would only have access to a paid subscription which cost a tenner a month.

The purpose behind this media system is to stream peer to peer music for free over their system. Which means that you can listen to any song in there database via an internet stream. However the draw back to this is that you need to be connected to the internet for it to work in this way, which admittedly isn’t a problem in the home or in a public access hotspot, but if you are in a location without internet access you will be unable to get music from spotify, unless you have ofcourse bought the tracks you want to listen to from the many music vendors that spotify is associated with, because obviously they cannot allow you to download the tracks on to you computer for free because that would be illegal breach of copywrite law, which of course gave napster a bad reputation in the early days of online audio streaming.

Something i have also noticed is that because you are streaming music over the internet, depending on the quality connection at either end, you may experience interference causing the tracks to pause at random points, which does kind of ruin the experience bit unfortunately.

Spotify’s music database is not as “fully loaded” as Itunes as it has been round far longer and has managed to build up a music base of around 10,0000 songs from all over the world. Spotify’s limited database may mean that it will not be a front runner in the media player battle for some time, but it is definitely catching up, as they update their song list regularly. However there is one thing that Spotify does so much better and that is the ease of finding the tracks you want and playing them, something which takes several minutes on itunes, because though it does not take long to find you favorite tracks, you have to buy them before you can listen to the full track, because it only allows you to listen to a snippet of the the track before purchase, which in all fairness is a bit of a pain for those without an itunes account which can only be set up with a valid credit/debit card, which means that those without that, or simply do not feel comfortable with buying off the internet, cannot utilise Itunes full service, and therefore may draw those in these circumstances to head towards Spotify.

One really irritating thing about Spotify free accounts though are the adverts, every couple of songs there is an interuption by a flash vid created by the creater of Spotify, telling you about advertisments by variouse advertisers, which unfortunatly cannot be turned off unless you are a paying customer, which in my opinion should not be so, but that is i guess how the advertisers get themselves known, and get their money. This is something Itunes definatley trumps because you get no adverts what so ever with their software, unless you go to the itunes store of course but you would expect to find them there, because it is a shop, but not while you are listening to tracks and/or playlists.

One feature that Itunes has that Spotify does not is the ability to play and import music from your CD collection, so that it can be accessed whenever you use your computer, or indeed if you want them on a portable media device such as you Ipod, however the disadvantage to itunes is that you can only use an Ipod as a portable media device because the file format will not work on any other MP3 player, which i found particularly frustrating when i only had a creative MP3 player, before i got my nano last year. But portable media is not something that Spotify currently supports unless you buy the music and use either Itunes or windows media player to put the muic on an Mp3 player. which means that you need more than one media player to perform this function which kind of defeats the point of competing with other software companies a little bit, don’t you think? .

My final comment is that currently spotify does not support all media types such as movies, podcasts and photos which Itunes and windows media player do, infact the only extra feature it supports is internet radio, but it is my understanding that the others do to, which makes spotify just a mediocre media player compared to these other giants of the media player world.

In conclusion my opinion of spotify is that yes it is an awesome system and i will continue to use it, but it is still a long way from being a strong competitor with the likes of Itunes and Windows Media player. However this is ust my opinion, only you can decide what you want, and that choice i leave to you. See you later.