Can we stop with the hype now?

Can we decide what we think based on what the iPad is rather than what it might be?

The opinion on the iPad is more or less split between people who expect it to do something useful, and people who believe it will eventually revolutionise everything.

The fact that matters is its cost: $499. Which means people are going to base their actual buying decision on what it does today compared to the alternatives: does it offer more than some other similarly priced machine? Can I browse the net? (Yes, if you don't care about Flash.) Can I take it on holiday? (Hmmm.) Can I type on it? (Sort of, but not really). Can I read on it? (Maybe, maybe not.) Is it compatible with my files? (Maybe, maybe not.) Is it cheaper than a netbook? And so on.

So a lot of the negative reaction is from pragmatic types weighing the iPad against their wallets and finding it a bit wanting.

Read more

The sun has nearly set on the first decade of the third millennium, and we have been truly blessed... with phones. Sodding millions of the things.

We've seen phones made from wood, plastic, glass (and one from cheese... but that's a story we swore we'd never tell again), we've seen mobiles that delighted, dismayed, made us go 'meh' and those that have made us curse our ridiculous laziness that we didn't at least look at them before agreeing to a 24-month contract.

Let's face it - there are mobiles out there that have excelled, but equally there are those that have had a team of crack designers working on them, cost millions to make, and are frankly rubbish.

So, without further ado - the best, worst and craziest phones of this century so far - extra TechRadar points for each one you owned.

The Sony CMD-J5

It's a testament to the company that we could have chosen so many of its phones for this list before it went down to the mobile phone bar one night and woke up in bed with Ericsson.

Read more

The popularity of X Factor means that it has already become watercooler talk across the UK, and, as is so often the case, a major feature in the most watched list of YouTube.

So, as the fallout from the first week continues, TechRadar wondered just how accurate the internet proves to be when the winner is announced in December.

A brief trawl through the figures on YouTube gives our first chance to draw some early conclusions.

Johnson dominant

First of all, Danyl Johnson – already a worldwide internet hit for his first audition – is a clear winner in terms of view for his first live appearance.

His rendition of And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going by Jennifer Hudson has attracted a fairly hefty 470k views.

To put that in context – it is nearly twice as many as the next viewed video – which is teenage Joe McElderry (261k). Third place goes to Jamie 'Afro' Archer with 237k narrowly ahead of Dagenham's finest Stacey Solomon (236k).

Bringing up the top five is Lucie Jones (who we are told with startling regularity is from a 'Small Village In Wales') and 200k views.

Read more

Michael Marshall Smith is the best-selling author of sci-fi classics Only Forward, Spares and One of us and, writing as Michael Marshall, the Straw Men trilogy, The Intruders and Bad Things.

I know that giving a voice to the man and woman in the street is supposed to be one of the web's greatest triumphs, but there's nothing like reading 'customer reviews' to make me want to let off all the nuclear weapons in the world.

I would love to be able to turn these reviews off, to hide them on Amazon and iTunes and everywhere else, but I can't. We've all been empowered to 'have our say', and the universe is stuck forever with screen acres of the illiterate bleatings of people who've come to believe that having a forum is the same as possessing an opinion worth uttering, and who spew their bile with the pompous self-righteousness of the boring and self-obsessed everywhere.

And of course I don't mean you, dear reader — I'm sure your reviews are all terribly well-struck, insightful and charmingly apposite. I mean… all the rest of them.

Read more

Andrew Oliver is CEO of the UK's Blitz Games, developer of the world's first fully stereoscopic 3D game for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Most people tend to see 3D as a bit tacky. A bit '60s. A bit faddy. Actually the first 3D film came out in 1922, and the technology is far from new. And yes, there was a resurgence (of a sort) in the '50s and '60s but most people are simply unaware of the recent phenomenal improvements in 3D technology.

In fact, one of the biggest problems we're coming across at Blitz Games is that people are failing to see the sheer progress made with this technology over the last 87 years and also failing to understand what it can do now.

Back in the so called 'golden age' of 3D cinema in the '50s film-makers still used two projectors to create 3D images, which effectively destroyed the quality of the picture in the process.

The much more recent IMAX films were a step in the right direction, but still used analogue technology and were a far cry from the results we're now getting with stereoscopic Digital 3D.

Read more