Tim Hanlon

For the rest of 2011, I'm visiting a new country every week or two. I'm not the biggest fan of getting lost, asking for directions, or getting ripped off by taxi drivers, so keeping my iPhone's battery charged is high on my list of priorities. I came across Mophie's Juice Pack Powerstation while I was doing my pre-travel gadget shopping, and was surprised at how small, light and cheap the unit was. So how does it stack up? Read More

Apple's desktop lineup has typically pushed users requiring plenty of fast I/O towards the Mac Pro - but the latest iMac refresh has broken the tradition. While quad-core Sandy Bridge CPUs and faster ATI Radeon HD GPUs are welcomed, it's the addition of Thunderbolt ports (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch) that really ups the ante for a number of professional users. Read More

PlayStation owners in the audience will likely have noticed an inability to connect to the PlayStation Network (PSN) over the past week, though Sony today made an announcement revealing that things are much worse than a week without access to online multiplayer gaming. At some stage between the 17th and 19th of April, a hacker gained access to Sony's systems. Sony believes the hacker was able to retrieve the personal information of 77 million PSN accounts, and say it is possible that credit card details were also retrieved. Read More

Even if you're using IMAP to access your email, certain newer email clients like Thunderbird 3 and Postbox will download and store your emails locally in plain text. This leaves many users making a difficult choice between leaving sensitive data unencrypted, or venturing into overkill territory by using a tool like FileVault, PGP Whole Disk Encryption or TrueCrypt - which see you encrypting your entire home directory or hard drive and dealing with a performance overhead. This article will show you how to encrypt only your Postbox email on a Mac, but can easily be adapted to other email clients (or other folders like your Documents folder). Read More

Apple took the wraps off its upcoming update to Final Cut Pro at the SuperMeet in Las Vegas this week. Dubbed Final Cut Pro X, the software has been rebuilt from the ground up to support the Cocoa technology underlying Snow Leopard, and by extension, utilize the full potential of modern 64-bit multicore systems with powerful GPUs. There's a whole host of new features alongside some radical changes to the interface and workflow … but it's the new pricing model we think is the most interesting. Read More

When Korg's US trademark for "monotribe" was discovered in the lead up to Musikmesse, it was pretty obvious that we were about to meet a device that incorporated elements of the wonderful monotron analog synthesizer and the Electribe range - but that doesn't make these leaked shots any less exciting. Read More

Apple has confirmed its press event on March 2 will be about the next iPad, inviting journos to "come see what 2011 will be the year of". There's no shortage of rumors about what we'll see tomorrow, from the prerequisite (smaller and lighter) to the plain hopeful (Retina Display) - but that's boring. We want to know what would make existing iPad owners upgrade, and what would make the holdouts decide to jump in. Let us know in the comments. Read More

I've had plenty to say about Apple's bizarre, pro user-hostile MacBook Pro I/O roadmap over the years - like the shock removal of FireWire 400 in late 2008 and the removal of ExpressCard from the 15" in 2009 - so it's incredibly refreshing to write about the inclusion of Thunderbolt, a decidedly "Pro" I/O interface with seemingly no downside, in the latest refresh. Read More

When I reviewed PlayStation Move last year, I named Killzone 3 as one of the games that would show us whether Move controllers were destined to gather dust in the cupboard or play an important role in the longevity of the PlayStation 3 platform. It is unquestionably the latter. Read More