Introduction

The last five years or so for AMD CPUs have been sub-spectacular to say the least. But things are looking up and one of the good news stories very much revolves around the new AMD A4-5000 APU, codenamed Kabini.

More precisely, it's the new Jaguar cores inside this APU that are making waves. That's because they're found in both Microsoft's new Xbox One console and the PlayStation 4 from Sony. Yup, AMD's Jaguar architecture is a very big deal.

So what exactly is it? Our first taste of Jaguar comes in the form of the quad-core AMD A4-5000 APU. It's fitted to what's known as a whitebook laptop. That's basically a non-branded system that exists primarily for the likes of us to assess the new chip and its associated platform (chipset etc) and tell you all about it. So, you can't buy this laptop off the shelf.

As for the A4-5000, it's a variant of what's known as the Kabini APU or Accelerated Processing unit. Thus it has four Jaguar cores and an AMD Radeon HD 8330 integrated graphics core.

The main thing to appreciate about this chip - and one of the things that makes for an intriguing thought in the context of those new games consoles - is that it's very much a mobile processor. In fact, it's pretty much an ultra-mobile processor.

Those Jaguar cores are a replacement for AMD's earlier Bobcat cores and that makes them more a competitor for Intel's ultra-mobile Atom processors than any full-power desktop or laptop CPU. The main difference with Jaguar and thus Kabini being that it's not designed to squeeze into devices as small as smartphones, as the latest low-power Atoms are.

Instead, super thin-and-light laptops and tablets are essentially the limit for Kabini. That's fine by us. There are plenty of alternatives in the smartphone CPU market. What we want from AMD is something to keep Intel honest in its core market and also provide an alternative in the burgeoning market for tablet PCs running the x86 version of Windows 8, including Microsoft's Surface Pro.

It would also be nice if Kabini could help provide a cut price alternative to Intel's sexy but pricey Ultrabooks - you know, systems like the Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A or Acer Aspire S7. And that's exactly what it promises. Time to find out more.

Specifications

Let's get the specs of AMD's reference whitebook sorted and then we can concentrate on that fascinating AMD A4-5000 APU, eh?

It's a thin-an'-slim 13-inch laptop with a 1080p display. Storage-wise, we're talking 320GB of old school magnetic hard drive sadly, so we'll do our best to exclude that from our performance assessments. This chip really wants an SSD.

There's 4GB of RAM, 512MB of it reserved for the A4-5000's integrated graphics, more on which in a moment. As for the battery pack, it's a 3,000mAh unit.

And so to the A4-5000 itself. The fun starts with four AMD Jaguar cores running at 1.5GHz. Jaguar is the follow up to AMD's Bobcat low-power CPU architecture. It's in roughly the same ballpark as Intel's Atom CPU core, but isn't intended for smartphones. The limit in terms of mobile devices is tablets and super slim laptops.

Anywho, AMD has targetted a range of improvements with the transition from Bobcat to Jaguar. Highlights include increased IPC or instructions per clock, increased frequency at any given voltage and more finely grained power management.

As for the graphics part of the equation, AMD is calling the A4-5000's 3D core the AMD Radeon HD 8330. It runs at 496MHz and sports AMD's latest GCN graphics architecture. All told, it packs 128 of AMD's latest graphics shaders.

At this stage, two pressing comparisons hove into view. Firstly, we have the next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony, both of which sport precisely the same CPU core and graphics arhcitecture. Then there's Brazos, AMD's Bobcat-based APU and the A4-5000's progenitor.

Intriguingly, both the Xbox One and the PS4 have Jaguar cores running at 1.6GHz, so pretty much the same speed as the AMD A4-5000. Of course, they have twice as many cores, but there's a good chance some of those console cores may be reserved for non-gaming functionality. So in gaming terms, this chip might be almost level pegging with the latest consoles. Quite a thought.

Things aren't nearly as evenly matched on the graphics side where the PS4 has 1,152 graphics shaders, the Xbox One is thought to have 768 shaders and the A4-5000 has just 128 shaders.

As for the match up with Brazos, well, you get double the number of CPU cores and around a 50 per cent up tick in graphics cores plus an upgrade from AMD's older VLIW graphics architecture to the latest GCN graphics spec.

Performance

Cinebench 11: 1.45pts
Battery Eater 05: 235 minutes
3D Mark Ice Storm: 23,718
3D Mark Cloud Gate: 2,226
3D Mark Fire Strike: 231

Much of the subjective experience with this new AMD A4-5000 APU was spoiled by the use of a super sluggish magnetic hard drive in the test whitebook laptop provided by AMD. That's a pity, because it makes it very hard to get a proper feel for what it has to offer as a full-on Windows 8 chip.

But it's not a complete write off. Once applications and benchmarks have loaded, disk performance becomes much less of an issue, so what have we discovered?

Cinebench 11 is a good starting point. A score of 1.45pts is not hugely impressive. That makes the A4-5000 less than half as grunt as a quad-core AMD FX CPU. As for the match up with something like a quad-core Intel Core i7 chip, it's gruesome. The i7 is about six times faster.

It's not an even remotely fair comparison, we grant you, but it puts the A4-5000 in context. A fairer contest is with Intel's Atom. The Intel Atom D2700 dual core model typically scores around 0.75pts, so the AMD A4-5000 has it pretty much licked.

In the graphics department, well, there's really only so much you can do with 128 AMD GCN shaders. Remember, AMD's hottest desktop graphics chip, as found in the AMD Radeon 7970 board, packs 2,048 shaders clocked roughly twice as fast, which works out to a raw performance advantage of 32 times. Yikes.

For the most part, our testing reflects that modest graphics firepower. The more demanding passages in 3DMark are a genuine slide show, with frames taking multiple seconds to update.

This is not a true gaming chip. However, it does have just enough grunt for casual 3D gaming, especially with older titles. Just Don't expect to fire up Crysis 3 and experience free-flowing and fluid fragging. It ain't gonna happen.

More of an unambiguous upside is the A4-5000's battery life. We have to be careful to draw too many conclusions as this is not a retail notebook. But in the context of the modest 3,000mAh battery pack, the AMD A4-5000 looks like it should make for some impressively long lasting systems.

HD video playback is another strong point. CPU decoding of really high bitrate 1080p flash video is executed smoothly, albeit with the CPU cores dangerously close to maximum load. Normal bitrate 1080p video has the cores loaded to about 60 per cent, leaving a healthy amount of headroom.

Verdict

AMD's new A4-5000 is an intriguingly little chip in its own right. But the knowledge that it shares much of its architecture with the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony Playstation 4 really ramps up the intrigue. So what have we learned?

We liked

2D HD video playback is strong. That's a critical metric for a modern mobile chip and arguably more important than gaming, even if the latter is what marketing suits prefer to talk about.

We're encouraged by the A4-5000's battery performance too. Whitebook's such as these are rarely the last work in finely honed power management, so our good experience with this laptop will likely only get even better with final retail systems based on AMD's new APU.

We disliked

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AMD hasn't worked miracles with the new Jaguar CPU core design. Clocked here at 1.5GHz, you're looking at cores with less than one fifth the performance of the best current desktop CPU cores.

For the A4-5000 itself, that's not a major issue. It's not a full-one desktop chip and with four cores, it makes up for modest single-threaded throughput with a decent amount of multi-threading. But make no mistake, this is a low-power processor architecture. It's a long way off the pace of AMD's own full-power laptop processors, much less Intel's.

More generally, the fact that AMD specified this test whitebook with a 5,200rpm magnetic drive rather than a solid state drive obscured the APU's ability as a proper Windows 8 chip. Put another way, we're not completely sure how responsive it will feel configured with an SSD. Our guess is that it will make for a pretty nice Windows 8 chip. It's just a shame AMD didn't see fit to show it in its best light.

The graphics performance of the A4-5000 is similarly non-whelming. Based on AMD's successful and familiar GCN architecture, the limitations are down to the number of functional units AMD has squeezed in.

By today's standards, 128 graphics shaders is a modest count in a gaming context and there's no getting round that.

Final verdict

Despite those limitations, we're generally upbeat about the prospects of the AMD A4-5000 as a laptop and tablet processor. Battery life looks good, 2D video is strong and the CPU cores are likely just good enough.

What this chip reveals about the new games consoles, which share much of its technology, is much more worrying.

Put simply, games developers will desperately need to get to grips with multi-threading if they're to have any hope of getting good performance out of these new Jaguar cores. And even with threading fully optimised, we guestimate based on this chip that the PS4 and Xbox will have roughly half the CPU performance of a good Intel desktop processor. And that's assuming all cores are available to a given application or game. Yikes.

Introduction

As it doesn't have the essential telecommunication features the Canon PowerShot N clearly isn't going to take the place of a phone, but the manufacturer hopes that we will use it in conjunction with one.

Thanks to its manufacturer's camera making know-how and its 1/2.3-inch 12.1MP back-illuminated CMOS sensor and DIGIC 5 processor, the N should be capable of taking better images than the average smartphone.

Furthermore, because its lens has a focal length range equivalent to 28-224mm, it should also prove to be much more versatile than a phone when composing shots. And, if the 8x optical zoom isn't enough for you this can be extended digitally to 16x to produce the equivalent of a 448mm lens.

Although it's not app enabled, the PowerShot N has Wi-Fi technology built-in so that it can be connected to a computer or a smartphone to enable you to share images quickly. There's even a dedicated button that, after initial set-up, can be used to connect to a smartphone or tablet with one touch.

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to test this aspect of the camera yet. But judging by the options in the Wi-Fi section of the menu, it should be pretty straightforward to set up.

For those who want to let the world know where they've been taking photographs, Canon has a free smartphone app that enables location data to be added to images from a smart device.

The PowerShot N is all about creating images quickly and easily, so naturally all the exposure modes are automatic. Program mode provided the most control, with aspects such as exposure compensation and white balance being adjustable. Alternatively, there are some creative shooting options with filter effect such as Fish-eye Effect, Miniature Effect, Soft Focus, Toy Camera Effect and Monochrome.

There's also Creative Shot mode, in which the Canon N produces six versions of an image, one untreated and the rest adjusted in a variety of ways depending upon what the camera makes of the image. The camera looks at aspects such as composition, focus, white balance, gradation and contrast and generates five alternative versions automatically.

It produces a variety of fun effects, with some dramatic crops, extreme colour and brightness and contrast shifts that replicate old film, cross-processed and black and white images. While it's a hit and miss process, it's fun, and it sometimes produces interesting images that will be a hit on Facebook and the like. We noticed that when shooting a couple of people, the camera often produces shots of both people by themselves as well as one with them together.

We have seen the Hybrid Auto mode before, but Canon has made it more easily accessible via the shooting mode menu screen. When this option is selected, the Canon N records four seconds of 720p footage before each shot. The camera uses the information from the clip to determine the best settings to use for the still image.

But the fun part is that the camera merges all the four second clips captured during the day to create a short movie. It should make for amusing viewing when the Canon N is used at parties.

Build and handling

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about Canon N is that it's almost square rather than rectangular. It also has a 2.7-inch tilting LCD screen that is touch sensitive. This capacitive device enables you to take control over key features such as the focus point and trip the shutter with a touch of the screen, and we found that it's nice and responsive.

With the lens collapsed, the Canon N is fairly compact and can be slipped into a jacket pocket, or in some cases a jeans pocket, so it's easy to transport and can be carried everywhere. It's also fairly light yet feels solid and well built, so you'll be happy to take it everywhere that you'd normally take your phone.

There are two rings around the lens. The first is used to zoom from one focal length to another – no great surprises there – but the other is the shutter release, and pushing it up or down trips the shutter. It takes a few moments to get used to it, but it means that the camera can be fired from a range of angles because you can always reach the shutter release.

As most setting selections are made via the touchscreen, there are only three buttons and one switch on the Canon N. One button turns the camera on and off, another switches to playback mode, while the third is the One Touch Wi-Fi button mentioned earlier.

The switch is used to select either the normal shooting mode with access to Program, Auto, Hybrid Auto and the filter effect options or Creative Shot mode. When Creative Shot mode is selected, touching the shutter release or using touch-shutter mode triggers the camera to take a sequence of shots that are then processed to create the six variations mentioned earlier.

Although it has flat sides and will stand upright on a tabletop or similar when the screen is folded home, when this is flipped out for easier viewing from above, the camera becomes unbalanced. This means that you need to hold the camera up to get a shot, so it's not quite as stable.

The Canon N's small size, smooth sides and flip-up screen mean it takes a few moments to work out how to hold it. It can be held up level with the eye or down at waist level. Some may find it easy to hold and use one-handed as the fingers of the right hand curl around the body and onto the lens rings (one of which is the shutter release). But it feels a bit strange with no real grip, and you may find your fingers slipping up behind the screen when it is tilted.

One disappointment with the screen is that it can't be flipped right up above the camera for viewing from in front to help you take self-portraits. Canon UK's David Parry tells us that making screens that flip through 180 degrees or more as strong as Canon wants them to be is difficult – and that means expensive.

Canon has also put large lugs on the left and right of the camera to attach the strap. As a result, the N cannot rest level on a flat surface when shooting portrait orientation images. This is a shame as it seems a logical way of shooting in some low light conditions. The problem could have been avoided if the strap was more like a lanyard and only attached on one side of the camera.

However, we are told that the company is planning on making a feature of the strap, with the possibility of users customising their straps or choosing decorative versions.

Performance

The technology inside the Canon N, including the sensor, has all been used elsewhere in Canon's compact camera range.

This means that the image quality should be respectable and on a par with the results from the manufacturer's other 12MP compact cameras such as the impressive Canon SX50 HS and Canon SX260 HS. These two cameras performed well when we tested them, and this bodes well for the PowerShot N's image quality.

Check out our Image quality and resolution charts, sample images and sensitivity and noise images on the following pages to see how the camera performed.

Early verdict

The Canon N will be available from early April, and is set to retail for around £269 in the UK (around AU$412) and $299.99 in the US.

It isn't intended to take the place of a DSLR or even a phone, but to complement them as a 'take-everywhere' type camera. And features such as the back-illuminated 1/2.3-inch sensor, tilting touchscreen and the ring shutter release should mean that it helps you get better shots than you'd normally get on your phone.

Despite the simplicity of the touchscreen interface and the high build quality, some may find its size and shape makes it a little awkward to hold. This could be a deciding factor for some, but we think there will be others that love it, and for these people it may help put some fun and spontaneity into their photography.

Image quality and resolution

As part of our image quality testing for the Canon N, we've shot our resolution chart.

If you view our crops of the resolution chart's central section at 100% (or Actual Pixels) you will see that, for example, at ISO 80 the Canon N is capable of resolving up to around 22 (line widths per picture height x100) in its highest quality JPEG files.

For a full explanation of what our resolution charts mean, and how to read them, check out our full explanation of our camera testing resolution charts.

Examining images of the chart taken at each sensitivity setting reveals the following resolution scores in line widths per picture height x100:

Full ISO 80 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 80, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 100, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 14 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 12 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 14 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: n/a (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Sample images

Click here to see the full resolution image

The Canon N had no problem focusing on this relatively uniform subject, and it captured plenty of detail across the frame. The colours are also natural.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

In Creative shot mode the camera takes a sequence of shots in quick succession and generates six different images of the scene - as shown above. The first image is a 'straight' version while the others have a variety of effects or crops applied.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Another Creative shot mode sequence. The photographer has no control over the effects or crops that are applied.

Sensitivity and noise images

Full ISO 80 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 80 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Introduction

Ricoh had a reputation for producing superb 35mm film compact cameras such as the GR I and GR21 that found favour with enthusiast photographers. However, despite producing high quality images, the company's digital compact cameras such as the Ricoh GR II and Ricoh GR IV haven't really attracted the same attention.

The Ricoh GXR, a compact system camera (CSC) that couples the lens and sensor into a single module that slots into the back, confused the company's fans and consequently also failed to sell in high numbers.

The new Ricoh GR, however, could be about to change all that, because its 16.2 million pixel sensor is an APS-C format device rather than a 1/1.7-inch unit as is found in the Ricoh GR IV.

At around £599 (approximately US$920 / AU$882) the Pentax Ricoh GR's price is also much more attractive than that of the Nikon Coolpix A and the overly complicated Ricoh GXR.

Furthermore, despite the 9x increase in the size of the sensor, the GR isn't a great deal bigger than the GR IV and it fits neatly into the average coat or jacket pocket. It's a similar size to the Nikon Coolpix A and Sigma DP1, and a little smaller than the Fuji X100S.

Features

Like the Nikon Coolpix A, the Ricoh GR's APS-C format 16.2MP CMOS sensor has no anti-aliasing filter, which should enable it to capture sharper details than a comparable sensor with the filter.

Omitting the filter brings the risk of moiré patterning in images with fine repeating patterns of detail, but it hasn't been an issue for the Nikon Coolpix A, Nikon D7100 or Nikon D800E. Even if it is a problem, moiré patterning can be dealt with using image editing software, but the Ricoh GR also has in-camera post-capture moiré reduction available.

Because it's a compact camera the Ricoh GR has a fixed lens, and, like the optics on the other APS-C format compact cameras, it has a fixed focal length. In this case it's a 18.3mm lens, which is equivalent to around 28mm in 35mm terms.

This and its small size makes the GR ideal as a 'walk-around' camera and well suited to shooting street and documentary photographs as well as landscape images when you're out on a hike and want to travel light.

There's also an optional adaptor available to transform the lens into a wider, 21mm optic. At the other end of the scale, an in-camera 35mm crop mode is available.

The lens has a maximum aperture of f/2.8, which means that there's plenty of opportunity to control depth of field.

One of the trade offs that Ricoh has made as a result of the larger sensor is that the lens can't focus quite as close as its predecessor. However, there is a macro mode that enables you to get as close as 10cm to the subject.

One of the problems with previous Ricoh digital compact cameras was their relatively slow responses. Ricoh is hoping that the new processing engine in the GR will address this, and it has a claimed start-up time of approximately one second, a maximum continuous shooting rate of 4fps, shutter release lag of 0.03 seconds and 0.2 second autofocusing.

Build and handling

Built from a sturdy magnesium alloy, the Ricoh GR is billed as the world's smallest and lightest APS-C format camera. It's surprisingly close in size to the Ricoh GR IV.

The front of the camera has a pronounced grip, which has a rubberised texture and gives good purchase, enabling the camera to be held one-handed. The layout of the buttons on the back of the camera also makes changing settings with a thumb quick and easy.

On the top of the Ricoh GR is a mode dial for speedily changing between automatic, semi-automatic and fully manual exposure modes. In a nod to Pentax, which is now owned by Ricoh, there's a TAv (Aperture and Time priority) option in which you set the shutter speed and aperture while the camera selects the sensitivity.

There are also three customisable groups of settings available via the mode dial. Just to the side of the mode dial is a lock button, which stops the dial from being knocked out of place. We found this relatively easy to depress with the finger of the right hand while rotating the dial.

A small dial on the front of the camera at the top of the grip is used for altering aperture or shutter speed, depending on the mode you're shooting in. When shooting in fully manual mode, this dial is used for aperture, while the rocker dial on the back of the camera controls shutter speed.

Exposure compensation is changed quickly using the plus and minus control, which doubles up as the zooming buttons during playback.

Ricoh is aiming the GR at enthusiast photographers, and these users will appreciate that several of the buttons on the back and side of the camera are customisable, giving you quick access to key features.

Changing autofocus point is done by default by tapping the F1 Function button and using the arrow keys to scroll around the scene to the point you want to use. After pressing this button, you can use the zoom control to check critical focus.

There's also an option to enlarge a section of screen around the active AF point to check focus as it is achieved.

On the back of the camera is a high resolution, 1.2 million-dot 3-inch LCD screen. It's not articulating, or touch-sensitive, but it appears to cope reasonably well with direct light, not suffering too badly from glare or reflections. The menu layout is simple and uncomplicated.

Performance

As yet we have only used a pre-production sample of the Ricoh GR. Naturally we are hoping that Ricoh has been able to transfer its image quality capability to the new camera.

Sample images, image quality and resolution and sensitivity and noise images follow on the next pages.

We are told that the sample we used was the final hardware, but the firmware is not final. This could mean that aspects such as the focus time and file write times change before the camera goes on sale.

While we have no complaints about the focusing speed of the Ricoh GR, it focuses relatively quickly with a slight backwards adjustment being visible, the write times with raw and JPEG shooting selected were poor.

We counted around nine or 10 seconds being required between shots. If this continues into the final working sample it could prove very frustrating.

Fortunately, things improved dramatically when we shot JPEG files by themselves, with next to no delay.

Early verdict

We're quite excited about the Ricoh GR. It's very nicely built, has all the control that we want and it can shoot both raw and JPEG files.

Although we have seen prints of a couple of impressive sample images from Ricoh, we will reserve judgement about the image quality until we have shot some pictures. However, Ricoh has a reputation for producing cameras that capture plenty of detail, with a tendency to reveal some noise.

Our only reservation at this point is the file write times. We hope that the production sample will make shooting in raw format, or raw and JPEG format, a realistic proposition. If it does the Ricoh GR could really grab the attention of enthusiast photographers looking for a pocketable alternative to a DSLR.

Given its comparatively low price, we're sure that Nikon and Fuji will be keeping a close eye on Ricoh GR sales.

Image quality and resolution

As part of our image quality testing for the Ricoh GR, we've shot our resolution chart.

If you view our crops of the resolution chart's central section at 100% (or Actual Pixels) you will see that, for example, at ISO 100 the Ricoh GR is capable of resolving up to around 24 (line widths per picture height x100) in its highest quality JPEG files.

For a full explanation of what our resolution charts mean, and how to read them, check out our full explanation of our camera testing resolution charts.

Examining images of the chart taken at each sensitivity setting reveals the following resolution scores in line widths per picture height x100:

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 16 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600, score: 10 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100, score: 26 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 26 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600, score: 12 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Sample images

Click here to see the full resolution image

The stormy conditions confused the Multi-zone metering system a little here, so this image is a little under-exposed, but there's detail in the brightest parts of the sky.

Click here to see the full resolution image

This is the raw version of the previous JPEG image and it's been brightened by 1EV in Adobe Camera Raw. The amount of detail in the grass is very impressive. It looks more natural at 100% than the JPEG version.

Click here to see the full resolution image

This was shot in low light and through glass (hence the occasional reflection), which gave the AF system a few issues. However, noise is well controlled (the sensitivity was set to ISO 1600) and the automatic white balance system has coped well with the artificial light. The exposure was set to 1/20sec at f/7.1.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Another example of the superb colour and detail delivered by the Ricoh GR.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The Ricoh GR produces some nice monochrome results using the Black and White Effect, but as it's also possible to use the Effects modes when shooting raw files, you can save a full-colour image at the same time.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Shooting with the aperture wide open (f/2.8) enables the background to be thrown out of focus, especially when shooting close-up like this.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The automatic white balance system has retained the warmth in this early evening shot.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Although this scene is quite bright, the camera's Multi-zone metering system hasn't underexposed the image.

Sensitivity and noise images

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Introduction and design

Samsung and Apple better beware – the HTC One combines stunning design, a supreme screen and explosive power to offer one of the best smartphones around.

It's got a full HD screen crammed into 4.7 inches, which brings a 468ppi – well above what's needed for the eye to discern, and it does definitely bring sumptuous sharpness throughout the use of the phone.

On top of that there's a CPU and RAM combo that is barely bettered, a more-than-enough 32GB of storage and top-end Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G / 4G connections, all topped off by a completely re-imagined version of HTC Sense. What's not to like?

The HTC One has received a software update to improve the battery life of the phone significantly, as well as allaying other concerns related to Zoe creation. With this in mind, we've promoted it to 5 stars and make it our Editor's Choice.

With it's high-tech features and premium build quality, the HTC One demands a premium price; though it is marginally cheaper than the Galaxy S4 at launch. Vodafone offers the phone fully subsidised on a $60 per month plan over two-years and Virgin Mobile prices the One at $62 per month, including the handset repayments.

You can get the One cheaper still -- Virgin offer it for $16 a month on a $29 Big Plan -- but you have to keep data at the front of your mind when buying this phone. With all the connected features of this phone, the 250MB data allowance in a $29 plan just will not cut it, and you are better off spending more for the extra data.

The design of the HTC One is something that you simply have to experience in the hand. Where those that pick up the Samsung Galaxy S3 will go ' Oh, it's a bit plastic, isn't it? But ooh, it's quite light' and those who encounter the iPhone 5 will, to a person, say 'Ooh, it's very light isn't it? You don't expect it to be that light!' those that try the HTC One will simply intone: 'Oh, that's really nice. Really, really nice.'

And do you know why? Simple: the HTC One is one of the best-designed phones on the planet. Not content with inventing a new machining process to allow the body to be all aluminium, the Taiwanese firm has extended the screen to the edges of the chassis further than ever before, meaning you're getting a 4.7-inch Full HD display without the additional heft you'd probably expect.

It's even thinner than its predecessor, the HTC One X (we know, that naming strategy leaves a lot to be desired) and as such slides nicely in the pocket. It's not light either, weighing more than most of the competition, but rather than feeling overweight, combined with the metallic chassis is oozes a premium build. Samsung is probably hoping not a lot of people hold this phone side-by-side with the new S4 as otherwise the buying choice is going to be a lot more of a worry for the Koreans.

On top of that, there's a whole host of little design wins that delight when you first try the HTC One. For instance, the machined holes that allow sound toe emanate from the dual front-facing speakers (can you say BOOMSOUND?) looks amazing, and the lines on the back of the phone give a nice textured movement to things, helping to break up the constant greyness of the aluminium.

You could argue that straight on it looks far too much like either an iPhone 5, with its chamfered edges, or a BlackBerry Z10 front on, and you'd have a good point as this phone doesn't reinvent the rectangle-with-rounded-edges formula that we're so used to, but in the hand the curved back brings a whole new dimension to things.

There's a zero-gap construction at work here as well, which means that you won't find any gaps, holes or light leakages to make you feel like you've not spent your hard-earned cash on something wonderful.

The volume control on the right-hand side of the phone is in the same dazzling metal, and contrasts nicely with the rubber/plastic that makes up the sides. Our sample actually showed a fair amount of wiggle in this area, and slightly detracted from the overall premium feel.

The power button resides on the top, and doubles as the infra-red blaster - however, this is one of the poorer points as it doesn't have a whole lot of travel.

Similarly, the placement of this button, even on a phone that's been shrunk down while accommodating a larger screen, is still a bit inconvenient. We had to shuffle the phone around in the palm to turn it on and off on many occasions, and a lot of the time we couldn't use our thumb to hit the whole of the screen without jiggling the phone up and down.

That's another problem with the design: it's pretty slippery thanks to the metallic chassis. We thankfully only ever suffered two serious drops when we were about a foot off the carpet (basically scrabbling for it to turn off the alarm in the morning) and a more alarming one stepping out of a taxi, but there have been a few near misses when trying to manoeuvre around the screen.

If only that power button was on the side, or a physical home button unlocked the phone, this whole issue would be negated for a large part.

But as we mentioned, HTC has wandered away from the physical buttons - where once it put a trackpad in the Nexus One, now it's stripped the capacitive buttons down from three to two, with the multi-tasking option going the way of the dodo. You can still get the same functionality by double tapping the home button, but it's not the same.

Overall though, you can guess we're impressed with the construction and design of the HTC One. We're not even looking at final hardware here - although we appear to have got lucky with our sample, as there are few design flaws in sight - so the chances of metallic chipping ('because that's just what it does....' OK, Apple) are slight to say the least - providing you don't fling it on tarmac. Seriously, we tried that... don't do it.

We thought we'd scuffed it so many times during our test, but each time it was simply a slight amount of dirt or dust that wiped right off. Tick from TechRadar on the design front, HTC.

Interface

HTC has been hard at work redesigning Sense once more, and the HTC One is the first phone to bear the fruits of that labour. Sense 5 (as it's colloquially, if not officially, called) is another step forward in the Android overlay story, but we think this is the biggest yet from HTC.

We're talking a whole new button layout, a new grid for the menu icons, geometric patterns replacing the over-complicated widgets of old; in short, it's simple, stark and we really like it.

There's no doubt that it's still as heavy on the old processor as ever - a quick trip to the battery usage settings will confirm that - but what HTC has done is bring the notion of Android (4.1.2, if you're interested, which you totally are, you naughty thing) to a wider audience by, well, making it less Android-y.

The option to add widgets and such has been brushed to the side to some degree, with BlinkFeed taking centre stage (and you can read our bigger rundown of BlinkFeed on its own, separate, section). Instead of the home button taking you to your collection of homescreens, BlinkFeed will pop up, in all its Windows Phone-like glory.

However, it only takes a swipe to the right to access the homescreens as you know them from Android of old, although you get a miserly five home screens to customise. And customising them isn't easy - you either have to long press on the home screen and choose the apps that way, or drag them from the menu via the shortcut icon at the top. More convoluted than on other Android phones, that's for sure.

But enough of that - how does the interface work under the finger? In short, blazingly well, as you'd expect from a phone rocking a quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor. Add to that 2GB of RAM and you've got a phone that would be most fanatics' dream, and it really lives up to the promise.

From opening and closing apps to browsing multiple tabs on the internet, there's nothing that can slow down the HTC One, and you'll really appreciate that in day to day life.

You can also choose from a number of lockscreen types, be it productivity for emails, calendar entries or messages - and a swipe upwards while holding said missive will launch it directly too.

It's a little sad that we've lost the HTC ring that we grew to love so quickly, but the geometric simplicity of Sense 5 is enough to calm the urges to run back to a Sensation.

You can select a range of pictures to wander past your eyes, have some tunes on offer or simply have no lockscreen at all if you're convinced nobody is in there trying to get at all your precious smartphone data stored on the HTC One - and we're fans of the latter, as lockscreens are annoying if you have no need for them.

Once you're in and past BlinkFeed you can select whether to stick with the frankly under-selling 3x4 grid of apps ('People now want simplicity in an Android phone' say HTC rather unconvincingly.) If you want to have the right amount of apps, edit that instantly to show 20 on the screen at once, and you can order them in a number of ways too.

Widgets aren't locked away in the menu like on many other Android phones either, as all it takes is a long-press on any home screen and you're greeted with all the widgets on offer - which is admittedly rather few.

The dock at the bottom of the phone pervades through the homescreen and menu options, which means you can always launch the camera or internet browser from anywhere on the main screens - you can customise this with a long press, so if you only want the entire range of Angry Birds games at your fingertips, you can make that happen.

It's not obvious how this works if you want to change it - you'll have to be in the apps menu to do so. While you're there, you can also hide apps too, which is neat if you're stuck with a phone rammed with bloatware.

Compared to something like the Samsung Galaxy S3 the HTC One is a little under-powered when it comes to the interface, but where Samsung is all about the functionality HTC is about style and minimalism.

It doesn't chuck power options, connectivity settings and brightness adjustment in the notification bar (although we wish the option was there) so when you pull down to look at a message, you do just that.

It's annoying that the power saver option DOES live there, but then again given the battery performance of the HTC One, that's probably not a bad thing.

The interface on the HTC One is simple - really simple. It doesn't have a huge amount of peeking to see messages (BlackBerry, take note) nor does it do much more than telling you the time or the weather. But it does all this in a way that makes you feel like you're never missing anything and getting a stylish experience to boot that isn't like anything else on the market.

The closest we can equate it to is the LG Prada 3.0 phone's interface - and given that was designed by a fashion house, we'll call that pretty high praise indeed, if we don't say so ourselves.

HTC BlinkFeed

BlinkFeed is HTC's attempt at moving away from the traditional homescreens of old on Android phones and bringing users something that will make the HTC One (and other models in the range) a little more unique.

The feed is a simple interface that borrows heavily from the Live Tiles of Windows Phone, which HTC is a main contributor to. The tiles are various sizes though, which makes things a little less repetitive for scrolling through to 'snack' on content.

The idea is a really sound one: giving a mish-mash of content, be that from curated news feeds on certain topics, videos shared from the HTC Zoe camera app or social network updates from your buddies.

There's an interesting rhythm to the content, as while news is clearly the most 'snackable' of all on offer (rather than hearing what TV programmes your friends are watching at that point) they obviously wane at certain times of the day, meaning you're left with a sea of Twitter updates.

We were initially very sceptical about BlinkFeed when we were told all about it from HTC before the One launched - and a lot of the reservations we had then still pervade.

For instance, the feeds are grouped by topic, and there's no mechanism to select specific outlets that you trust, or to add your own RSS feeds to the mix.

We understand a little why HTC is doing this: to preserve the UI, so sites with very poor pictures won't be filling the blocks on screen with loads of pixelated images. However, users ALWAYS prefer content control over an ideal, so an option to enable this has to be enabled. In fairness to HTC it's promised such functionality will be on the way, but it's never good to launch without the full arsenal.

Similarly, there's no 'learning' involved here either, so you can't vote up or down certain topics, or exclude certain people from being shown on the timeline. Again, we're not too bothered about this latter feature as BlinkFeed is actually pretty adept at getting things right, using data from Facebook and Twitter to see who you interact with regularly. Turning off retweets would be welcome though.

But more interesting than all of that is that BlinkFeed actually works much better than we thought it would. In the few days we had between turning on the phone and it become part of the daily routine, we found that time and again we returned to the feed to just get a feel for what's going on rather than opening the specific Flipboard, Facebook or Twitter apps themselves.

We particularly like the fact that tapping an article will show the picture and text in a reader-style mode, without the need to open the browser. It would be nice if this downloaded more quickly or cached over Wi-Fi (although you can auto-refresh the feed) as sometimes we're left waiting for more than a few seconds to read an article. Otherwise, all ace.

There's a pleasant 'snick' when you pull down the most recent story to refresh the feed, and in a move taken from Apple, you can tap the top of the screen to get back to the top of the list when you've gone a little too deep into your BlinkFeed - something that we only found by accident when we realised that scrolling all the way back up to the top was going to take a LONG time.

The overall UI is incredibly pleasing, not just because of the different sizes of the tiles. The weather and clock at the top of the app are a strong replacement for the traditional widget we're used to from HTC, and offer the information just when you need it. On top of that the slight pull down from the top of the list is a natural gesture to get you to the settings and ability to customise your feed - it's touches like this that show HTC has stepped things up with the One.

This is also the place to search through the current feed, which is actually a hugely valuable too. So often we want to mention something we read, but can't find it instantly. A quick BlinkFeed search will find all mentions of that term in news, TV or among your friends' missives, and brings a more holistic feel to the listing.

Sharing is meant to be part of the experience on the HTC One's BlinkFeed, and while you can put up statuses on Facebook and Twitter directly from the feed (with the 'posted from HTC Sense' tag) sharing news is a whole other issue. Instead of the story it will post a note that says 'HTC News' with no notion of what it's about, and then a link to a cached version of the article.

While that makes it easy for others to read on the mobile, it doesn't help spread the original article properly, which is what sharing is meant to be all about.

It's a shame that BlinkFeed isn't present on the lock screen, but given you can disable the lock screen altogether (a feature we're surprised hasn't been offered on more phones) it's not really needed.

Over time, you'll find your dependence on BlinkFeed will diminish as it becomes a mobile commodity - it's not a bad thing, but because you can't customise it very well at all, it's not very addictive.

The method of choosing categories is overly complex and while we like the results, there's so much more to come here. Also, not being able to turn it off from your home screen (not that we'd want to) is going to irk some users.

Overall, we were very impressed with BlinkFeed compared to the hopes we had for it; there's still a lot to do in terms of making the app more personal, as well as being able to choose and exclude the feeds and friends you get information from, as some news 'sources' are nowhere near such a thing.

However, on multiple occasions we found ourselves reading really interesting articles that we wouldn't have done previously, so for that reason alone we have to give BlinkFeed a big thumbs up as a USP on the HTC One, and look forward to the updates in the future that should address at least some of our wish list.

Contacts and calling

When it comes to the contacts system on any HTC phone, we've been impressed for years, and the HTC One continues in that tradition. Whether it's simply knowing which contacts you want to join with which social network profiles, or just making sure that new and relevant information falls into the contact card, the HTC One manages it all with aplomb.

One of the big changes some users will note is that, unlike the Samsung Galaxy S3 or Nexus 4, the HTC One can pull in high resolution pictures from Facebook, which is a big plus.

While the others can do so from Google+, they eschew the same thing when it comes to other social networks, which is really annoying when you want the more popular profile pic of your friend to pop up when they call, but don't want it to be hideously blurry.

And to offset the times when there is no high resolution picture on offer, HTC has come up with a fun dotted picture that brings a stylised view to the picture, rather than just showing you a bunch of mashed together pixels.

It's a nice touch that adds to the premium feel - and we like the fact HTC calls them 'big pictures' in the settings menu, where you can select whether these are downloaded over Wi-Fi or mobile data too.

If you want to change the pic on offer, a simple tap on it in the contact menu will yield a little folder icon in the corner which will allow you to shoot a new one using the camera, head to the gallery to choose another or go from another social network if you're a fan of the blurry.

We're making a big deal about this for a reason - when people call you, seeing a big, sharp picture really improves the overall impression of the device, and anything that achieves that should be highlighted.

The contacts system is pretty much as simple as you want it to be, which is a big plus in our eyes. The tab on the right-hand side of the screen is easy to grab so you can scroll up and down the list to find the letter group you're after, and then all the names and pictures are laid out with the new, clean interface on offer from Sense 5.

Diving into the contact itself, and again it's easy to get the information you want, be it a history of all the ways you've interacted with the person over email, calling or texting, and details on their birthday if the information is there on Facebook too.

On top of that you can view their social networking updates in the same neat BlinkFeed interface HTC has developed, which means some natty pictures at times to punctuate the sea of white words on grey background. HTC is one of the few brands to still integrate picture albums drawn from Facebook into the contact profile as well, and while it might be a slightly unused feature, it's still a great tool to have.

The contacts system is simple enough to use, but if you've got multiple accounts on the go then you'll find it a little tricky to filter them all out at times - if you're not careful you'll end up with lists including Twitter, Google+, Facebook and more in your normally neat phonebook, so make sure you tag 'only those with phone numbers' in the settings menu.

Smart dialling, such a key function of any phone in our opinion, is on offer again in the HTC One, making it so much easier to quickly call up the profile and number of the person you want to get hold of simply by typing in the letters that correspond to their name using the T9 predictive text input method.

Each option comes up quickly, although we would like to see the One being a little more intuitive when it comes to deciding which person to show when there are multiple options for the same combination of numbers - if someone is in our 'favourites' list then it should be top here.

But we still love the contacts section of HTC phones, and the HTC One is an excellent way of organising your life that doesn't make it all a large hassle. Well done.

Calling

The calling on the HTC One is superb - we'll get that out the way early on. From the clever noise reduction to the fact you can boost the earpiece volume way over the necessary level you'd need it in most situations, we never struggled to talk to our friends on the go.

We tested walking past roadworks with drills a-go-go, and only when right next to them did things become inaudible for the person on the other end - impressively, we could still hear them.

The inbuilt amp helps with this, but more important is the fact the HTC One has incredible connection quality given its encased in an aluminium body.

We often found a bar or two more of signal on offer than other phones, and this translated to actual connection as well, with data popping down with no issues.

There's very little you can do when it comes to in call options, such as not being able to control noise reduction on the fly, but the things you need are there, such as activating the speaker and switching between a Bluetooth headset if you so wish.

It's nice, it's functional, and we didn't drop a single call during our tests. That's a win right there for a device that is still a phone at its heart, after all.

Messaging

Messaging on the HTC One doesn't really re-invent the process in any way - it simply offers up the chance to connect with the people that you want to in the simplest way possible.

It's a hard section to really review, as anyone that's previously used an HTC will recognise the menus, the easy to use inboxes and will also be glad to note that the keyboard seems back up to HTC standards.

We say that because in the early days of the smartphone, the HTC keyboard was by far the most intuitive, but over time that power has become eroded as other options have caught up. Of course you can install a number of other keyboards, and we recommend SwiftKey if you're looking for a good one, but it's important that the stock offering works well.

• The best Android keyboards reviewed and rated

The accuracy, as we mentioned, is high - plus the option to calibrate the keyboard by teaching it how fat-fingered you are is also a useful tool. HTC was one of the first manufacturers to embed Swype-style tracing of words on its keyboards, and that's a trick that's been repeated here, and it's pretty accurate to use as well (although you will need to enable it in the settings).

As you can guess, we like the HTC One keyboard because it is.... altogether now.... ACCURATE.

There is one issue in that the default setting for the keyboard is to have languages as a key, meaning you can switch between French and English and German - this is ridiculously easy to hit, thus ruining predictive text input, so get rid of that as soon as you can.

The messaging system itself is well laid out, with a new interface for the conversation view. Messages received have a nice white box around them, but those sent from your own fine fingers are greyed into the background. You might think you're writing a load of drafts to start with, but you're not. Move on.

You can easily append video or pictures to your missives by simply tapping the paperclip icon on the messaging interface, but on top of that you can do things like sending your location too. Try using this when you're explaining to a person using a smartphone where you are and you'll marvel at living in the future. Seriously, try it. It's ace.

The email client is one of the better ones we've seen on a smartphone, taking on the likes of the Windows Phone brigade in making the whole operation that much simpler.

There are easy checkboxes to hit when you need to choose messages to delete, and all those emails that come in a conversation won't litter your inbox as they group themselves together.

We like this latter feature, but make sure that you don't miss key messages through the grouping - you'll need to stay vigilant, and some will want to switch this off altogether just to be on the safe side.

There are loads of other little tricks that you can achieve with the HTC email client, such as being able to set your out of office messages directly from the menu (if you've got things so configured) and having a favourites section that shows you only the messages from the people that matter.

You can also think of this folder as a place to keep the fear-inducing messages from your boss and in-laws… it adds a touch of adrenaline to the business of checking your email every few seconds.

HTC has added in the ability to Smart Sync your email, which places it between push notifications and a periodic update, and seems to manage to throw emails at you when you need them - it works out when you're using the phone more and then decides to poll the server, rather than just doing it willy nilly when the HTC One is clearly asleep and unwanted.

Another key email feature, and one that's come from older HTC Sense iterations, is the ability to use folders with ease to navigate your way around. Tapping the Exchange menu dropdown will show recently used message folders, and you can easily find new ones.

The reason we mention this is many of you will be super-organised and keep your emails in dedicated folders on the desktop – and when you're out and about and need that address suddenly you'll be forced to dig it out. On some phones this is a real nightmare, but on the HTC One it's a snap to get to your emails, no matter where there are, and if you need to download older ones from the server it's as quick as a flash as well.

Internet

The internet browsing on the HTC One is similar to many other phones on the market launched using Ice Cream Sandwich or above - as in it offers you both Google Chrome and the inbuilt internet browser as a method of spreading your digital wings through the sprawling mass of the internet on the go.

However, while Google Chrome is undoubtedly useful in so many ways, such as being able to sync tabs across the desktop and mobile, beyond that we can't see a single reason you'll ever use it when the onboard browser is so much better.

Firstly, it's a lot faster, and we mean blazingly fast. We use that phrase a lot, but give the HTC One the speed to perform, be that over 4G or through a decent whack of Wi-Fi, and it will never let you down in terms of hanging and loading web pages.

Compare that to Chrome, which sometimes stutters when panning around or even loading the mobile version of sites, and you can see why we're favouring the former.

The HTC One internet browser has a really key feature that we want to speak about first: a Flash player that you can toggle on and off. Place in the settings menu, this is invaluable for using a web that still, despite Apple and even Adobe assertions to the contrary, still has a large whack of Flash video dotted around.

So when you run into these problems on something like the Samsung Galaxy S3 you'll either have to grin and bear it, or sideload the Flash player on there. In this case you can just enable it if you're desperate and toggle it off to save battery and performance when you're not. We're all about options, and this is a good one.

Another great thing we're happy to see is the fact you can have a number of tabs open; so many that we got to 12 before we couldn't be bothered to open any more. For a firm that once only let you have six tabs open at any one time, it's a real step forward, and helps when you're just opening and shutting web tabs all over the place. You also get a '.com' option on the keyboard.

One of our big criticisms of the HTC One's predecessor, the HTC One X, was that the web browsing experience was inconsistent in areas like trying to go back to the URL bar. Sometimes it would live at the top of the screen, sometimes it would disappear, and sometimes it would appear when scrolling at a certain speed.

While it's set as a pervasive option now (thank you), you can also have a clever gesture-based system too (that's hidden in the Labs section of the menu). This asks you to swipe from the side of the screen to open bookmarks, URL and check your tabs. It takes a while to get used to, but it's a very neat way of not having to shuffle the phone around in your hand to get around the web.

That said, there's no easy way to access the settings menu from there to enable Flash player or Desktop view, so it definitely needs more work.

Talking of bookmarks, if you're one of those that uses Chrome on the desktop then you'll find a lot of joy with the HTC One, as any bookmarks you have there (and have saved to Google from other phones) will all show up here, taking away another reason to ever use Chrome on the phone. They're nicely sorted and come with visual thumbnails that populate when you use them regularly.

Beyond that, just sit back and marvel at the size of the screen and the resolution on offer - we tell you now that when you're trying to get your head around an expansive web page full of text and you don't have to constantly zoom in, you'll love what's on offer here. Text is legible even from impossibly far out, making the HTC One one of the best phones on the market for whipping around the web.

And don't forget that HTC is still the master of making it easy to read the words on a page should you want to get closer to the action: a double tap not only brings you larger letters, but as soon as you pinch to zoom in further, the text will redraw itself to fit the screen without needing the confusing pattern of double taps on something like the Samsung Galaxy S3, and isn't even possible on the iPhone 5.

Camera

The HTC One's main camera element is located at the top edge of the handset, when held upright, and ranged dead centre, giving it a pleasingly symmetrical look. But by being as far away from either edge of the Android smartphone, it is also less likely that fingertips may stray in front of the lens in the process of gripping it.

Once you've set the phone up from scratch the camera icon is immediately visible bottom-right of screen. Give this a tap and you're immediately presented with the scene before your lens, the camera's AF automatically and visibly adjusting focus and exposure as you pan with the handset around the room or scene.

Like the HTC One X, the HTC One features a bright/fast aperture lens at f/2, with the lens itself offering a 28mm-wide focal length. The bright f/2 lens serves the HTC One well when shooting indoors using natural light.

This is the same sort of performance as its predecessor, although that model offered the standard 8 megapixels overall. Fudging the issue of pixel count, HTC refers to the One's main camera resolution in terms of 'ultra pixels' - a term that sounds zeitgeist-y but is basically meaningless and seems like an attempt to cover up an otherwise modest-sounding 4 megapixel camera.

As in the world of dedicated cameras, pixel count isn't everything, of course. Sensor size has a role to play too, and here it's a larger than most 1/3-inch. There's also a front-facing camera, offering a lower 2.1 megapixel resolution, as opposed to the previous HTC One X's 1.3MP.

Other features that will flick on a lightbulb in the head of photo enthusiasts are a back side-illuminated sensor, HDR facility for video as well as still images, plus optical image stabilisation to avoid hand wobble resulting in blurred shots. It betters the Sony Xperia Z in offering twice the internal memory, at 32GB, as well as NFC and Wi-Fi connectivity.

A new gimmick is something that on compact cameras is often referred to as 'motion snapshot', but here is given the less immediately obvious moniker of HTC Zoe. Press the shutter and the HTC One automatically captures up to 20 photos and a 3-second video (with Full HD 1080p resolution offered as standard here). The manufacturer claims that this produces a picture that's 'alive', or at least one that tells the story more fully by mixing media.

Flash operation is included too, or rather 'smart flash', as HTC likes to refer to it. Zooming in or out, again of the video variety, is a case of swiping your finger over a zoom bar on the screen, which is very responsive to the touch and the zoom action smoothly fluid.

An icon for immediately summoning up a comprehensive toolbar of built-in app-like digital filter effects is provided either at the bottom-right or bottom-left of the screen, depending on whether you're holding the handset to shoot in portrait or landscape orientation. We also get camera or video icons, with a tap of the former immediately taking the shot, rather than just selecting the relevant mode.

It's worth adding here that the HTC's screen is much brighter and clearer than many dedicated digital cameras we've had the pleasure of using, and really picks up fine detail, which is a bonus. Also a bonus is the fact that the image before the lens fills the whole of the screen in widescreen format, meaning it feels best suited to group portraits or landscape shots.

Specific image adjustments can also be made in-camera to the likes of exposure, contrast, saturation and sharpness. There are also dedicated scene, night, HDR and panorama options, selected via a toolbar located top or bottom-left of the screen, again depending on the manner in which you're holding the phone.

Manually selectable ISO runs up to the standard ISO 1600, up from the so-so maximum ISO 800 of its predecessor. Perhaps HTC is thinking it could justify upping the sensitivity as there are fewer pixels on the actual sensor. The handset does, however, get quite warm over the course of using the camera. Also the shutter release is so sensitive on the HTC it's possible to fire off two shots instead of one.

Rather more interestingly, after capturing an image there's the facility to remove unwanted passers by from a photo in the style of Photoshop via an Object Removal function.

One of the benefits of the previous HTC One X handset was that it provided compatibility with a removable microSD card for system expandability and storing and transferring all those photos and videos. But whereas that feature has been added to the Sony Xperia Z, HTC has inexplicably jettisoned microSD use on the HTC One. This is a pity for us snap-happy users, even though it could be argued that a 32GB internal cache, the same as the HTC One X, which had the card slot, is plenty.

We're all for paring down on unnecessary features and bulk, but this move feels a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Coupled with the lower pixel resolution, which admittedly can have one benefit - in that fewer pixels on a smaller sensor equals less noisy images - the HTC One wouldn't be our first choice for the camera aspect alone.

This is disappointing, because we love the handling, look and feel of the HTC One handset. Where it could have been a champion, it's merely an (very good) option if you don't mind widescreen ratio still imagery.

Shots taken at higher ISOs such as ISO 800 and ISO 1600 are noticeably less noisy on the HTC One than either the Samsung Galaxy S4 or the Sony Xperia Z, however, so if retaining detail in low light is a priority then the HTC One is the phone to go for.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

ISO shots

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Auto ISO (Click here to see the full resolution image)

HTC Zoe

The HTC One comes with a new trick indeed in the shape of Zoe, a mode on the camera that takes 0.6 seconds of HD footage before you press the shutter button and three seconds afterwards, meaning you get a 'moving photo' to give all manner of information about what's actually been happening.

In reality, it's more of a quirky feature that does at least take on the notion that you have to have still images in the gallery all the time, as instead of loads of people staring blankly at you from a grid of snaps, the gallery is an orgy of motion as cats bounce about, people walk out of shot and blinking brings a tidal wave of eyelids.

It's a cool idea though, although one big issue is that you have to hold the camera up for a while to capture the Zoe properly, and while many people are used to posing for a while for a cameraphone snap, three seconds feels like an eternity while you wait for that red bar to fill up while the image/movie is captured.

The HTC One also confusingly will turn this high res movie into many, many images in the folder. This won't show up in the gallery, but if you want to share a photo with a third party app like Facebook you'll suddenly find you've got hundreds of snaps when you thought you'd only taken 15. Also, the file sizes are massive, with a single event (made up of around 10 Zoes) taking up half a gigabyte of space on your unexpandable hard drive.

You can save these to an HTC Zoe Share server to show to family and friends and free up valuable space, but they will expire after a month rather than living there indefinitely. Of course, you can use something like Dropbox here, but it doesn't really solve the fact that long term you'll need to be really frugal with your memories.

But enough of that - let's get onto the good stuff, and that's the ability to see your memories in a really fun 30 second video highlight reel. The HTC One will look at your snaps and auto-create the short video based on a date or location for the photos being taken (if you've enabled geo-tagging of your snaps).

The results are really rather pleasing, meaning a few pointless snaps of a cat or your Mum being, frankly, hilarious are turned into something that looks a lot more professional.

The downside is that there are only six effects to choose from, each with their own way of mixing motion and still from the Zoes you've made, and to different music and effects each time. HTC has promised that it's working hard on making it so you can create your own effects to your own music, but the issue there is beat matching, as the scenes will change based on the rhythm of the music itself.

While the idea of this is initially quite strong, it gets a LOT more complicated if you want to have a level of control over these video highlight reels. In addition to the Date or Location grouping, (which don't always work, as you might take loads of photos in a certain place, or on a certain day, that you don't want to see in the highlight reel) you can choose an Event to make a video highlight reel for.

However, to make an event isn't easy, as you need to press a few times to get to your photos, then open the settings, then select 'Move to' before setting up a new album. And the size of the Zoes dictates that this moving process takes a while, which is annoying as it should just be an internal tagging process.

Once that's done, the video highlight reel is created without an issue, and that works pretty well. You can choose the 13 pictures that make up the reel itself, so if there's something that doesn't quite have the desired effect you can scrap it to include something more dynamic, and if you took a photo with the highlight footage in mind you can make sure it's included.

It would also be great if you could choose your establishing shot - the one at the start of the movie - rather than it working chronologically, as otherwise it can really take a while to get things going highlight-wise.

HTC has also acknowledged an early bug in the shape of not properly being able to choose the pictures used for the event. While you can go in and select up to 13 to populate the highlight reel, it will still show you items that you didn't want in there, which can ruin the effect.

While we sound rather negative about this new feature, that's not the intention at all - once you know how to create them, the highlight reels and Zoes are a really, really neat feature, and being able to share them to Facebook with a simple tap is nice.

A Zoe is no use if you like to share specific snaps, as you'll need to go into the short video and choose a frame to save as the photo - only have the Zoe idea turned on if you like making highlight reels.

It's just there's a lot more that could be done here to make the whole process more slick, and not eat up so much space on your phone - but then again, if you're after a handset with expandable memory, the HTC One isn't the one you're looking for.

Media

Media on the HTC One is a game that's hard to typify as the handset is clearly set up for such an activity, and yet it makes it quite hard to use at times. The first thing we'll deal with is BoomSound - and not just because it reminds us of this every time we say the word.

BoomSound is the combination of the two front facing speakers and the inbuilt amp to help boost the sound through your headphones - and both chuck out fantastic sound. The latter really does boost the volume levels to a give as more even tone to your tunes, while the former is simply amazing when you're showing off videos to friends and loved ones. As you always do, you bore, you.

Actually, that was one of our biggest criticisms of BoomSound and the two front-facing speakers - we didn't think many people would ask others to crowd around a phone screen that often, thus rendering the technology pointless unless you're alone in a hotel room and want to make the sound of the female actress you're watching sound all the more accurate.

But in just a few days we found ourselves showing off the quality of the front speakers on a number of occasions - be it the newest version of Gallon Smashing, or a particularly dead-horse-flogging Harlem Shake video - and each time, the bass and clarity of the music was so impressive, unlike anything we've heard coming from a mobile phone.

Also, with the addition of HTC Zoe video highlight reels, you'll find that showing off your work at splicing together pictures is used a lot more often too, and the sound quality really adds to the show. So while it's perhaps not the most important thing in the world to have on a smartphone, BoomSound works.

Music

The music ability of the HTC One is something not to be sniffed at, and is easily the equal of anything else out there. The music hub has been dropped in favour of a pre-loaded folder with all your music and media bits in one place, which leads to the lovely and confusing Music and Google Music, both apps denoted by a headphones icon, living side by side.

The former is just the onboard music player, the latter the new service from the search giant that lets you upload your tunes to one place and stream them back down again.

Both offer high quality sound, and more importantly, both can run on the lock screen, which is a real annoyance when using the Samsung Galaxy S3. However, Google Music, for all its power, still needs a data connection at all times, so unless you're on an unlimited plan its worth staying away.

HTC Music doesn't have the cool SoundHound integration that we're used to, although the app is present on the phone. But what it does bring is new visuals and lyrics to songs if they're available (providing the song information is correct and GraceNote can access it).

It's a fun feature for when you're trying to work out the real words (turns out it wasn't 'wipe in the Vaseline') but unless you've got aspirations of making it BIG on the professional karaoke circuit, this isn't going to be a lot of use. Good when combined with the BoomSound speakers though.

The size of the internal memory means you'll be OK for space for a fairly decent-sized music collection, although if you're partial to making Zoes all over the place you might want to keep an eye out for the 64GB version of the phone, as we can see a critical storage error cropping up quickly when you want to lob a decent-sized chunk of music on there.

Why no slot?

So, let's address the elephant in the room here - the lack of the expandable memory slot. We spoke to SanDisk about this problem, and the flash memory maker - which maintained neutrality on the issue of memory card slots as it provides the flash memory either way - and it confirmed that HTC has missed out on the slot again to preserve the design of the HTC One.

SanDisk also said that while it didn't think the card slot was needed for a lot of people, it's still one of the most important things for consumers look for when buying a top end smartphone, and as such, could be seen as a big omission.

We agree to a point - the need for a memory card slot is definitely decreasing, but there's no doubt the HTC One couldn't have benefitted as there's no place to get rid of your Zoes to. You can upload them as movies to Dropbox, for instance, and you can save the video highlights as MP4 files and store them on YouTube, but in reality, most people will just leave them on their phone until space fills up.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is going to pack a memory card slot, the Sony Xperia Z manages to do so - so come on HTC, what gives?

You can make the case that people don't need it, but when a video package is so easy to create yet munches 0.5GB of the addressable memory (which is already lower than the 32GB advertised thanks to the OS) and you can see a problem coming. Please don't let's see a repeat of the situation where apps can't be installed due to storage size.

We've had a chat with HTC about this, and while Symon Whitehorn, director of special projects at HTC, sympathises with the problem (stating that it's 'slightly more of a concern' when pointing out the space gobbled by the highlights) it is coming up with solutions.

"I think it's a perennial worry about all technology, but it does make that slightly more of a concern," Whitehorn said about the One's storage issues.

"We are starting to provide more management terms and we are working on more elegant solutions then what we have now. We'll bring updates and more services and we'll want to get more elegant solutions out once we start to hit that curve."

The notion is that HTC will give users an easier route to store their favourite videos and photos - this obviously won't materialise in the form of a slot, but could see the Taiwanese brand extend the space and time constraints on its online storage solution, as users still aren't happy with having to constantly connect to a PC just to free up some space.

Video

One of the key features of any Full HD phones these days has to be the performance of the video player, and to that end, most are successful. The Sony Xperia Z uses the Bravia Engine 2 to bring clear, crisp images; the LG Optimus G Pro offers bonkers levels of clarity, brightness and colour saturation. And of course Samsung is going to continue with the like it or hate it HD Super AMOLED screen.

So why does the HTC One, with a perfectly bright and capable screen, not manage to play movies back very well? We downloaded The Amazing Spiderman from its HTC Watch service to check it out in HD, and we were disappointed by the results. The screen was too dark in automatic brightness mode, and when turned up full, sucked the battery at a horrendously fast rate.

There was also a big issue with the sound falling out of sync quickly on the Watch video, but that's more to do with the quality of that service than anything else - if you're looking for movies, Google's Play Store is a better bet, but doesn't have the same depth of catalogue.

Also, while the range of codecs you can use is impressive on the HTC One, including AVI (but not DivX) there's actually no obvious way to play them. Really - unless you want to dive through the HTC TV app or the Google Play Movies function, you'll have to download a dedicated player to achieve your goals. The videos don't even show normally in the Gallery - and all this despite HTC telling us that it will be bringing the ability to play back your own clips through the Watch app.

It's like the Taiwanese firm doesn't want you watching videos on the HTC One.

If you've got a bright enough scene on show, the HTC One can play it back smoothly and crisply. However, take it down a notch in brightness and suddenly you're struggling - it's not a deal breaker, but really, we expected better from a flagship phone.

HTC TV

HTC has thrown a new feature on the One in the shape of a new TV app, as well as an infra red blaster that shoots out TV-controlling rays from the power button.

It's a concept we were, like BlinkFeed, initially quite sceptical about, simply because history has taught us that these apps are usually gimmicks that only serve the country of production. Well, once again, our opinion has been changed by the launch of the HTC One.

The HTC TV app won't appeal to all, but those that take the time to set up the phone to control a TV, DVD / Blu-ray player, set-top box or audio system will get a real treat, and no matter your territory there's something for you.

For instance, in Australia, all we needed to do was select a region (Sydney, in this case). From there, all the channels we use were front and centre, with no hint of not being able to control certain devices. It's much more impressive than we anticipated.

The app itself is also very clever as you can set your favourite programming and then see large thumbnails when the stuff you care about is playing. Think of it as an EPG that knows what you want to watch, rather than a list of channels.

That latter feature is actually there too, but it's poorly executed as it takes AGES to refresh when scrolling through and weirdly can't be used in landscape mode. It's better for when you need to get inspiration for your favourite shows.

Making sure the app knows what you like to watch is important, and while it takes some time to set up your fave shows, it's worth it, as you'll be constantly impressed when you flick on the TV, don't know what to watch, only to be shown that Friends or Scrubs re-runs are currently on. And here's the fun bit: press the thumbnail and the channel will change to the show. It will impress those watching you, trust us.

Here's one real problem though – you're given a list of favourite options at the app set-up, and even if you later change your mind about what you like, they'll still appear in the 'now showing' section of the app.

There are some other neat touches, such as being able to see episode guides of your favourite shows, see when other showings are available and be reminded when specific showings or new series are starting. We didn't get to test that new series functionality, but it's something that's invaluable if it works as missing new episodes really, really hurts. You know what we're talking about.

There's still a lot more that the TV app on the HTC One can do though, as we constantly ran into limitations. For instance while it's cool the remote can learn functions (by pointing the power key at the original remote to show the command) you can't edit the layout of the remote itself. So if you've got a TV, amp and cable box and want to control the volume on all three independently, you can't.

Colour buttons aren't on offer, and the power and input keys are locked away when they should be on the main interface for ease of use. One advantage of a real remote is tactility to press things without looking, something a smartphone can never offer, so ease of use has to be enhanced.

There's also no inter-app operability as it stands, with only HTC's quite limited and expensive Watch available for on-demand content. It's good when it can offer you an episode of something you missed, but it would be really cool if your current OD services (like ABC's iView) were in there too and could be jumped into.

The app also likes to suck down the battery too - we noticed that after using it a little bit here and there throughout the day it will constantly be up at the top of the power consuming apps. Come on HTC, it's only an IR blaster. It's not a torch, let's see some battery saving here if it's at all possible, else the actual remote, which doesn't need constant recharging, will come back into play.

Overall though, we like HTC TV. It would be cool if the remote would pop up when your home network is recognised (as is the way on the LG Optimus G Pro) but we're glad the TV remote appears in the notification bar when we're using it, at least.

Battery life and connectivity

The battery life on the HTC One X was one of the big areas that saw it fail to nab the top spot in TechRadar's phone of 2012, so all eyes are on the battery capacity of the HTC One. With a massive upgrade to a 2300mAh battery, a more efficient processor onboard and general increased stability from Android 4.1.2, has HTC managed to erase its demons?

Sadly, it's a mixed bag, and it completely depends on what you intend to use the HTC One for. For instance, we took the phone off charge when it was fully juiced just before bed, and left it running all night.

Eight hours later it had dropped only 1%, and yet emails and Facebook updates had come through, despite the data connection going into a deep sleep when the phone is in such a state. At this point, we were impressed.

And while we were previously upset at the short-term power drain of the HTC One, things are massively improved now. Where once a session of game-playing, music listening and internet browsing over an hour would have destroyed the battery, it now managed to do all that with around 10% loss.

There are slight caveats to this: when watching a movie you'll need to fire the brightness of the phone right up, thanks to the screen being a little dark, and this is a real battery sapper still.

Similarly, using the camera and creating Zoe highlight reels is the other way to decimate the battery. If you do hours of camera business with the phone make sure you've got a power pack with you, as there's no removable battery to change over and make things easier.

We re-tested the phone using TechRadar's (non) patented battery test - although this is only one way of looking at how much battery a task will eat. Then again, with the screen being the biggest draw on power, it's a good way to look at things.

Placing all phones on flight mode, we ran non-HD Nyan Gareth video for 90 minutes against the Sony Xperia Z, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy S3 for good measure. We also brightness corrected the displays, so that each was comfortable as a viewing experience, rather than whacking them all up to full brightness.

The good news is that the HTC One outperformed the Galaxy S4, managing to lose only 19% of life during the test, the same as the Xperia Z and 2% better than the S4.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 managed the same test and only dropped to 82%, showing that the Full HD pixel count does take more power despite the uprated battery.

In real life usage, we found the HTC One to be more than acceptable. We played video and took photos on the Xperia Z, One and Galaxy S4, then playing music and browsing the internet intermittently.

Even with Stamina Mode turned on Sony's smartphone warrior (which is supposed to save battery life when the phone is not in use by switching off mobile data and stopping apps syncing) it still only lasted until 7PM.

The HTC One managed to get to nearly 9PM, but the Samsung Galaxy S4 kept right on chugging until nearly midnight, when it still had around 10% of its juice left.

On top of this, we put the HTC One through a lower-power tests, to mimic how some users, who don't get all movie-like and power-hungry all the time, might experience and there it was phenomenal.

With admittedly low amounts of screen time (less than 7% of the overall use for the period) we still managed to get close to 40 hours out of a single charge - and that was only to 98%. Turn on power saving all the time and you'll easily get two days or more out of the HTC One.

So if you're not one to constantly use your phone, then perhaps this is the handset for you. Just, as we said, be ready with a charger or battery block when you know you're going to be hammering it.

With the One, it's about how it copes doing the things it's designed for - so making videos, Zoe photos, watching HD movies and sharing them should be high on that list, and that's where the battery life is at its most vulnerable, but far less so than before.

In our like for like tests, the HTC One is now more than satisfactory when it comes to battery life, but remember you can't replace the battery to boost performance - so best get a portable battery charger pronto if you know you're going to be home late after a marathon movie session.

Connectivity

The HTC One comes with a huge range of connectivity on offer, with all the usual suspects present and correct. GPS is paired with GLONASS (the Russian system) to bring stunningly accurate mapping, and the Wi-Fi is all the way up to 802.11n, with dual channel bonding on offer too.

Bluetooth is offered at the low-power 4.0 standard, with apt-X codecs on board for improved music clarity over Bluetooth (and it really does improve the quality of music streaming compared to a non-apt-X set) and NFC obviously makes an appearance to allow Android Beaming of your photos and videos.

HTC's MediaLink is available on the HTC One, so if you've got the little box, a simple three finger swipe on any app will connect you up to your TV, which in turn will see your One screen mirrored so you can play movies and games and whatnot on the go. It's not a great experience doing this, especially on the gaming front, as the response between finger and screen is pretty slow, and the picture fairly jumpy at times.

You've also got MHL available, so if you think the idea of streaming wirelessly is too advanced for you, then you can buy an MHL lead and do the same thing with a lovely connection.

HTC has included DLNA within the phone, so if there are any nearby media servers sharing content you can connect up to those and download content directly to your phone - look for the option in the menu settings in the Gallery to get an idea about what's on offer there.

And finally: HTC Sync is on offer, and has been combined with HTC Setup on the PC. The latter is more interesting, as it means you can set you sound profiles, wallpaper and ringtones from the web, when logged into your HTC account, and from there it will be beamed directly to your phone with the minimum of fuss.

On top of that you've got the fact you can drag and drop the content directly into the heart of the HTC One - if you don't want to fiddle about with the drivers you can just look through the folder system and dump your pictures, music and video in there without needing to worry about installing a million bits and pieces.

So overall, the HTC One is a very well-connected beast; no, it couldn't have you killed - we don't mean it in that way. But not matter what you fling at it, the One can interact with it in some way, and thanks to the uber-powerful innards, there's little that it can't do well, either.

Maps and Apps

HTC has finally bitten the bullet with the One and lost the HTC mapping software that bloated things so badly before. It's also dispensed with the services of Footprints too, which were cool in their own way (being able to give an account of places you've been pictorially) but were rarely used.

Instead, it's all about Google Maps here, and what a stunning experience it is. We won't go into huge detail on how the program works, as it's a delight for you to find, but there are a number of ways that the HTC One really uses its power to bring Google Maps into the light.

For starters, over Wi-Fi and 4G (and even decent 3G) the speed with which it can locate you and load up your surrounding area is impressive - and if you're in one of the larger cities you'll get 3D models of the buildings too.

A simple two finger swipe will change the perspective so you can see exactly what you're walking through when you're in a new city (with the ability to save maps offline too) and the HTC barely breaks sweat to bring you these mountainous images.

Then there's the sat-nav software - it's excellent, but you'll need to make sure you've got a decent data plan and a car charger handy, as it sucks both bytes and power down in a heartbeat as it brings live traffic information and route information.

But the bright and large screen of the HTC one makes the handset and excellent choice for dashboard mounting and ditching the TomTom.

So if you're looking at the HTC One as dedicated sat-nav, we can't recommend it highly enough - plus the car mode is one of the best out there, with large buttons, instant-on music and good voice transcription all part of the dedicated interface.

Apps

The HTC One comes with a host of extras to make it into a more fully-fledged phone, and of course you can supplement these with more from the bulging Google Play store. However, we'll take you through a few of the key ones on offer here.

Kid mode is one of the big changes from HTC, with the option to set the phone up with programs the kids will like without giving them the keys to buy stuff from the internet or send a picture of poo to your boss. The main interface is pre-loaded with a load of mind-numbing games and activities (can you tell we don't have kids?) but they all seem beautifully colourful and probably contain some educational message.

You can them add to this by choosing apps you've selected live in there as well, such as Google Maps so they can learn where Scotland is. It's not the simplest interface to learn, but then again, kids are managing to jailbreak iPads these days, so we're probably worried about nothing.

The only annoying thing is you have to enable Kid Mode, where on Windows Phone the service is accessible from the lock screen, which saves you from a child with sticky fingers nabbing your phone.

Evernote integration is also on offer from the HTC One, with the Notes function allowing you to sign into the service. You can also record voice and notes at the same time and see where the match up afterwards - this is an invaluable tool if you're big on transcription, although you'll have to hope you get pretty accurate with that onscreen keyboard.

Polaris office is on offer and will allow you to view and edit a whole host of document types. It's an irritating app in that when you download a PDF it won't let you read it - but then when you try to open it with Adobe Acrobat (which you have to download) you're presented with an option to open in Polaris, and it does it better than Adobe. Grrrr.

Beyond that, we're into the same territory as before, with the handy flashlight locked deep away in the menu, so make sure you turn it into an app shortcut if you live in darkness or like poking through stuff quietly.

The alarm on the phone is a bit poor, as the choice of ringtones is limited and none of them really scream 'let's wake you up softly', rather scaring you into consciousness. Compare that to the Samsung Galaxy range, which has pre-alarms and fairy mist or some odd business to wake you up with, or the LG Optimuseseses which make you type in a code to prove you're awake, and we think HTC has been a bit lazy here.

We know we're being a bit over the top with the criticism, but given most people now rely on their phone to wake them up in the morning, this is something that really can't be overlooked. Thankfully, again, there are loads of options on the Play Store to sort you out.

• Best Weather App - 10 we recommend

And finally, the HTC Weather widget. How we love you. How very, very much. While Sense 5 has stripped away the temperature graph of old (boooo) and replaced it with a list of temperatures for each hour, it's still light years ahead of the competition, which push you onto a mobile site to just see how cold or hot it's going to be later that day. Again, a small feature, but again, a key one for a lot of people.

Benchmarks

We've done a little bit more of an in-depth test with the HTC One, and subjected it to our Benchmarking system.

For this we've used three platforms: Antutu, SunSpider and PeaceKeeper to a decent level of comparison. However, it's clear this is a powerful phone indeed, staying at the sharp end of all our testing, and even besting the normally-impregnable Galaxy S4 (although only the quad core version).

If numbers mean a lot to you, feast your eyes below. If they don't, then just take our word for it: the HTC One is a blindingly quick phone.

Antutu

SunSpider

PeaceKeeper

Hands on pictures

Verdict

Well, here we are - if you've skipped the whole of this review just to see what we thought, shame on you. Go back and read it properly. Have you done that? Good. Now read on, safe in the knowledge you didn't miss that bit about how to get free adult film downloads.

The HTC One is the phone that NEEDS to relaunch the ailing Taiwanese firm, and as such it's gone all out on the design. TechRadar spent some time with HTC's designers of many different sections of the handset, and you can see the passion that flows through the One from top to bottom.

Its combination of innovation and sumptuous hardware is a testament to the brand, and shows that new things can still come to our smartphones without costing the earth. Sure, it's not a cheap handset by any means, but it's perfectly in line with what we'd expect from a flagship.

We liked

The HTC One is the best phone the firm has made without doubt. It's got the wow-factor that made us fall in love with the HTC Desire, and manages to bring Sense back to a level that shows off the best of Android, rather than obfuscating it. There are those that pine for stock Android Jelly Bean, but earlier Android updates aside, we happen to think that Sense is better.

The camera is a great addition for on the spot shooting - if you want to take the photos and blow them up somewhere, it's not the phone for you, but if you want to be able to snap your friends in pubs without it being a blurry, dark mess, the HTC One comes into its own.

BoomSound and HTC Zoe are both really nice additions to the handset - the former makes the sound quality really sparkle and gives the option of recording louder noises without needing to worry about distortion, which is a really key capability.

We like the video highlight reels and the moving pictures of the HTC Zoe, and can see a number of people really starting to use them in day to day to life. Some won't, and for them there's still a very competent camera on offer.

We disliked

The battery life issue has been negated, although it's not gone away totally. But many will only use HTC Zoe and the highlight reels at the weekend, and in doing so will remove some of the big battery draining daily problems with the phone.

Our only real gripe is with storage: many will argue that expandable memory slots are unnecessary when you've got Dropbox onboard for extra space, or just being organised and deleting unwanted content will solve the problem. That's true to a degree, but it's not common behaviour for today's smartphone user.

There's also the issue that HTC Zoe sucks up a lot of space with the reams of photos it needs to take, not to mention how cluttered that makes the photo folder, which means many will feel that if only they could have a memory card to pop in there and expand up the space, they'd feel a lot happier.

Bringing the phone out in a 32GB flavour from the off does help though - just be warned that you'll need to be organised with your photos on the phone, which isn't helped by a confusing gallery system.

Also, the alarm needs to be better. Come on, it's a key part of the phone HTC… put some effort in.

Verdict

As we said, this is the best HTC phone ever, without a doubt. But we'll go one better than that: it's the best phone on the market full stop. The Samsung Galaxy S4 isn't far behind at all with its stunning screen and rich detail, but for sheer level of functionality, innovation and just overall effect it has in the hand, we can't help but recommend the HTC One to anyone looking to buy a new smartphone.

And now we can finally give it the five star rating it deserves, which is a testament to the company that needed a win so badly on the smartphone front. The battery issues are severely reduced (with a couple of caveats) and while there are some niggles in the gallery and storage areas, the overall impression of the phone is just so good that it's easy to overlook them.

So whether it's the Ultrapixel camera that extends the range of photos you can take, or the moving photos on offer, or simply the improved speakers bolted on the front (as long as you don't play them on public transport) the HTC One takes the best the smartphone market has to offer and just makes it better.

The Galaxy S4 is sleeker, the iPhone 5 is, well, Apple-ier, and the Nexus 4is cheaper. But for the overall package of smartphone design and functionality, the HTC One stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Following a full day of presentations, interviews, tours, tech demos and teases of the Xbox One's game-changing potential, the powers that be at Microsoft finally let us get our mitts on the new hardware's controller.

While our time with the gamepad doesn't allow us to tear up the blacktop in Forza 5 or command a SEAL Team canine in Call of Duty: Ghosts, it does provide a peek at a few of the 40-plus improvements that have been made over its predecessor.

Before diving into six separate demos tailored to show off the controller's enhanced rumble tech, Microsoft senior product marketing manager, Navin Kumar, states "precision, comfort, and making gaming more realistic than ever" were the driving forces behind designing the new gamepad.

In terms of precision, Kumar points out that the analog sticks respond to inputs with 25 per cent less force, delivering a far more accurate experience. He also claims its d-pad allows for "crisper inputs", perfect for "sweeping movements in fighting and sports games".

Feeling the full effect of 'impulse triggers'

While our hands-on time affords little opportunity to test this improved precision and accuracy, it does allow our thumbs and fingers to feel the full effect of what Kumar refers to as "impulse triggers". Like the 360's controller, the Xbox One gamepad features left and right triggers, used for everything from scoring headshots to flooring gas pedals.

However, the One's controller significantly ups the immersion of these interactive experiences thanks to the addition of motors housed in its triggers: in addition to the pair of rumblers located in the hand-grips - as they are in a 360 controller - the One's peripheral adds one each to both triggers.

It tickles... seriously

As demonstrated during our hands-on time, the tech is being used in a number of ways to intensify the immersion factor. With a press of the Y button, we're able to fire up a helicopter's propeller and a sports car's engine. While these interactions would yield near-identical vibrations with a 360 controller, they feel entirely unique through the One's triggers and sticks. By programming four separate motors, two of which now tickle the sensitive finger tips, the peripheral is able to convey astounding nuance and variety in its vibrations.

On top of differentiating between an engine's powerful roar and a chopper's spinning rotors, the quartet of motors allows us to experience how it feels to pop off a few rounds from a hand-cannon and summon a fireball in the palm of our hand. While the former feels much like it does in any contemporary shooter, the latter - thanks to a slow rumbling build-up, leading into a more intense vibration - yields a sense of empowerment we can't wait to unleash the next time we barbeque baddies in an RPG.

Our final two demos, simulating a ticking heart and braking car, are the most impressive. The pumping brakes deliver a realistic halting sensation the likes of which we've never before experienced in a racer, while the heartbeat - delivered by alternating pulse-like vibrations in the two triggers - feels scary-real. In fact, we're guessing the latter effect will significantly up the fright factor in survival horror games; imagine navigating a dark corridor or derelict space station in complete silence, all while the protagonist's racing pulse thumps beneath your fingertips.

Early Verdict

Based on our time behind the Xbox One's controller - whose ergonomic design will feel comfortably familiar to 360 owners - the impulse triggers seem to hold the most promise and potential for putting players that much deeper in the experiences of rearranging zombies' ribcages with melee weapons, roasting trolls with fire balls, and racing across finish lines.

That said, a number of subtler features, such as magnetic sensor-equipped triggers and a battery case that no longer protrudes from the back of the controller, hint at the many ways the next-gen peripheral will provide more precision in your games and comfort in your hands.

Our hands-on time barely scratches the surface of its promised 40-plus improvements, but our satisfied fingers and thumbs are already anticipating what other surprises the Xbox One's gamepad has got hidden beneath its buttons, sticks, and triggers.

Check out the video below for a sneak peek at some of the Xbox One games you'll soon be getting to grips with:

Introduction

The Huawei Ascend G510 sits somewhere in the middle of the Chinese company's Android range, squaring off against the likes of the Sony Xperia U, LG Optimus L5 II and the Windows-toting Nokia Lumia 620.

Huawei, the name everyone knows but no one can pronounce, has established itself as a company no longer tied to the white label, network-branded handsets. Previous offerings in the form of the Huawei Ascend G300, Ascend G330 and Ascend P1 are starting to give way to the Ascend P2 and Huawei's phablet, the Ascend Mate.

The Huawei Ascend G510 has a full price of £130 (around AU$200 / US$200), meaning it is likely to land in the hands of teenagers, students and first time smartphone buyers alike.

The phone itself is a very smart affair, the all-glass front and black bezel taking design cues from, well, just about every smartphone ever designed. This is by no means a bad thing, with the Huawei Ascend G510 looking like a premium phone, rather than aiming at the lower end of the spectrum.

Under the hood, Huawei has chosen to power the Ascend G510 with a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, sat alongside a 5MP rear-facing camera sensor, and a 0.3MP front-facing sensor, and also comes fitted with NFC and DLNA streaming capabilities, and DTS sound.

To make use of this hardware, Huawei has retrofitted the Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean software with its own custom UI, called Emotion.

With the Huawei Ascend G510 measuring in at 134 x 67 x 9.9mm (5.3 x 2.6 x 0.4 inches), it sits nicely in the hand, and the 4.5 inch screen is the right size for one handed use. At 154g (5.4oz), the Huawei Ascend G510 is by no means the lightest of handsets, with it sitting noticeably in the pocket.

The glass face of the Huawei Ascend G510 holds no physical buttons, but there are three soft keys hidden in the bottom of the bezel. The only physical buttons are the volume rocker and power/lock, situated on the top left-hand side of the Huawei Ascend G510, with the uncovered micro USB port in the bottom-left.

We initially found the positioning of the power/lock button awkward, given its usual position on the right-hand side, or top of smartphones. This faded after prolonged use though - it's just a case of getting used to it.

The three soft keys that we mentioned earlier are situated within the lower portion of the black bezel. From left to right are the Back, Home and Menu buttons, with there being no LED light behind them making it a little awkward to find the right button, especially while in the dark.

The top of the Huawei Ascend G510 houses the 3.5mm headphone port.

Huawei has generously made the back cover removable, enabling you to carry extra batteries around, as well as giving you access to the microSD and SIM slots. The back of the phone holds the 5MP rear sensor, as well as the LED flash, speaker, microphone and obligatory branding.

The box holds no surprises, with the Huawei Ascend G510 bringing the separate USB plug and charger/data cable that we have become accustomed to, as well as a set of cheap headphones that doubles up as a hands-free headset.

In all, the Huawei Ascend G510 makes a decent first impression, with the all-glass front alluding to a premium device. After extended use the phone can feel a little heavy, but it's a sturdy device, one that we imagine won't fall to pieces if you drop it (not that we're saying you will).

Interface

Every manufacturer worth its salt is providing even the most basic level of customisation to its Android devices, from HTC's Sense to Samsung's TouchWiz overlays.

For the Ascend G510, Huawei has ditched its HAP (Huawei Android Platform) 5.1 software that graced the likes of the Huawei Ascend G300.

In its place, Huawei has released its Emotion UI overlay.

Unlike some of the minimal changes that HAP5.1 brought, Emotion's customisation is far more aggressive, with the complete removal of Android's app drawer.

This move is intended to make the Android OS a little less confusing, making it a lot more similar to iOS on the iPhone.

While we can see the appeal (iOS is a fantastic operating system) we were disappointed, with Emotion giving the Huawei Ascend G510 more of a 'My First Smartphone' feel that doesn't befit a device of this build quality.

Couple this with the numerous system apps that appear on the Huawei Ascend G510, the home screens (you can have up to nine) soon begin to look a little cluttered.

Thankfully Android, much like iOS, enables you to create folders on the home screens.

This means that you can bundle all the apps that you are never going to use into one small folder, since you're unable to remove them.

Another niggle we found with Emotion UI is the inability to access the Settings menu by using the Menu soft key.

This is a minor inconvenience, given the Settings icon sat on the main home screen, and the Quick Settings found in the notification bar, but it gave Emotion a slightly less intuitive feel.

The Quick Settings, though, are a godsend. Becoming increasingly popular on Android devices, this is a feature we have long been fans of, enabling you to switch different aspects of the phone (such as Mobile Data or GPS) easily, and helping to prolong the battery life.

Like HTC Sense, the Emotion UI is customisable, with there being different themes on offer.

While there's not a whole lot to choose between for each theme, we liked the ability to change. Changing the icons as well as the wallpaper almost gave the phone a new feel.

Widgets-wise, there wasn't a whole lot on offer. Huawei does offer a master widget, that can hold smaller widgets inside.

While this means that you can fit your favourite widgets into one screen, we don't see a major advantage over having them separate.

The transition effect between the home screens is also customisable, showing that Huawei has given Emotion some real thought.

The lock screen comes with the ability to load up one of three different apps quickly; the camera, contacts and dialler apps.

This proved useful when we needed to access the camera quickly, but we were left disheartened because the app choice isn't customisable.

One app that we found particularly useful is the Profiles app.

With an app icon on the home screen, and quick access via the notifications bar, you can set up different profiles for different scenarios. The defaults for these are Normal, Sleep, Meeting and Outdoor, with you being able to add your own.

Within the app, you can control volume and brightness levels, the length of time inactive before the Huawei Ascend G510 goes into sleep mode, and you're able to turn off different modes such as GPS and mobile data. We generally had Normal mode enabled, but it was great to be able to turn off multiple services before bed, or when going into meetings.

This meant we saved data, stopped ourselves from being woken up by 3am phone calls and prevented our boss from screaming at us for receiving a call (ironically during a meeting about not receiving his calls at 3am).

The 1.2GHz processor coped well with what we had to throw at it, the dual-core innards keeping everything running fairly smoothly, although the slightly low 512MB of RAM didn't help. Speeds of transitions are by no means anything to write home about, but equally we weren't left disappointed by long waiting times.

Contacts, calling and messaging

Contacts

Interestingly, after all the levels of customisation that Huawei has put into its Emotion UI, the contacts and calling apps on the Huawei Ascend G510 seem almost devoid of any real attention.

With no pre-bundled social media apps, other than Google+, Huawei appears to have missed a trick by not putting Facebook or Twitter apps on the phone in order to make use of Android's account aggregation. Thankfully, these apps are downloadable from the Google Play store.

We also feel that Huawei was wrong to not have a way of finding the same contacts from across your different accounts, but linking multiple contacts together is a breeze, if a little time consuming, done manually.

The contacts app is an attractive affair, the bright colour scheme being pleasing to the eye, especially when placed against Samsung's much darker contact system. In reality, it's the stock Android offering, so we were a tiny bit disappointed that Huawei hasn't added any level of customisation here.

The brand has kept the groups and favourites tabs for the Huawei Ascend G510, making it easier to message only select contacts. This is a feature that we have commented on in the past, and it is something that we are glad has managed to be included, since it is really useful if you have your contacts managed well.

Calling

The Dialler app is much simpler, continuing in Emotion's design ethos. Presented with only the T9 dial pad, there are no links to the contacts app. Thankfully the buttons are large on the 4.5-inch screen, making them easy to hit.

Smart dialling is also supported. This intuitive feature doesn't appear on nearly enough handsets for our liking, and is very useful to quickly search out a contact if you know the name or part of their number. Dialling 323 calls up both Dad as well as any contacts with 323 in them.

All standard call features are supported, from the contact's photo to accessing the dial pad from within the call. The Huawei Ascend G510's speaker was also loud and clear, with none of our contacts complaining that they couldn't hear us at any point. We also found that signal was maintained very well.

Messaging

Being an Android-based phone, the Huawei Ascend G510 comes with every form of messaging that you would imagine, SMS, IM in the form of Google Talk, and email in the form of Gmail and an email app.

The SMS app is very functional. The conversation screen comes with the now almost standard text bubbles, but the pale green and white, with contact photos, is very pleasing.

The Huawei Ascend G510's Gmail and email apps are also the Android standard. The Gmail app is clean and covers about everything that you get on the desktop version, including multiple accounts.

For non-Google accounts, the standard email app covers POP3/IMAP email standards, also combining multiple accounts, mail checking frequency and mail size limits.

As expected, the Huawei Ascend G510 includes the native Android keyboard, which we have always found to be perfectly functional, if lacking some of the higher end features found on other dedicated keyboard apps.

Fortunately, as part of Huawei's customisation, there is the creatively-named Huawei Input Method. In practice, we found it to be fairly accurate (although when you make a mistake it takes a few button pushes to correct) and able to suggest the next word, much like the superb SwiftKey app. Swype-style input is, unfortunately, not supported.

The keyboard is intuitive, with a swipe down or long-press on the key to select the alternate input (6 instead of Y, for example) working well. The option of also having a T9 keyboard instead of the now traditional Qwerty offering is well received.

Word prediction and autocorrect can be disabled (though we struggle to see why), and the internal dictionaries can be updated.

Overall the messaging capabilities of the Huawei Ascend G510 are not anything special. The keyboard app is better than the stock Android one, and the SMS app is functional and attractive. Alternate messaging capabilities such as Facebook Messenger are available from the Google Play Store.

Huawei also includes both of the native Android input methods, in the form of the Jelly Bean keyboard, and Google's voice typing. We highly doubt that you will need to use either of these, like we did in our Huawei Ascend G300 review, as Huawei's Input Method keyboard is very easy to use.

With the 4.5-inch screen, we did find that we were a little stretched when trying to use the keyboard in portrait mode. The keyboard works a lot better when you use two hands in portrait mode, since the keys are well spaced. The spacing does, however, make it more difficult if you type one-handed.

Internet, maps and apps

Internet

Now a mainstay of any mobile device, decent mobile browsing is a must.

The browsing experience on the Huawei Ascend G510 is thankfully one of its biggest selling points.

The big screen makes viewing web pages easy at all zoom levels, with everything looking clear and crisp.

Unfortunately Huawei didn't spend any time customising the stock browser. That said, Google has spent a long time creating a functional web browser.

Curiously, as with many modern Android handsets, the Huawei Ascend G510 ships with both the stock browser and Google's more famous Chrome browser.

In reality, there isn't a whole lot to choose between on the two browsers. We'd recommend using Chrome, because it loaded pages quicker and it ties in more efficiently with the desktop and other mobile versions.

Neither browser supports automatic text reflow, but both support certain levels of zoom. The native browser requires you to pinch to zoom, and then double-tap the screen, with text reflowing then.

Chrome requires a double-tap, but only zooms to make the text fit the page, without customising the zoom level.

Both browsers plugged along nicely, dual-core processor not seeming to struggle with loading pages, and they loaded fast over both Wi-Fi and 3G connections.

Loading the full desktop TechRadar page over Wi-Fi took around six to seven seconds, so while not blistering pace, we didn't find ourselves wishing it along.

Offline viewing is also available, saving the pages as images. While functional, this means that there is no ability to open links within the page, even when your data connection returns.

Tabbed browsing is also supported on the Huawei Ascend G510 through both browsers.

At the top-right of the screen, by the URL bar, is a little icon/number that can be selected, showing up all the tabs that you have open.

Incognito browsing is also available through both browsers.

In all, we can't fault the browsing experience on the Huawei Ascend G510. As we mentioned before, the screen lets the phone down overall, because it's hard to make out in bright sunlight.

Browsing speeds are fast enough that you're not left wishing that the phone would hurry up, especially when loading dedicated mobile sites.

Apps

Google's Android operating system first launched with the Android market, which it has since rebranded Google Play, and now heavily populated.

Google Play is well organised, divided into categories with general apps and games being split up, and then both being split further still.

Games and Apps are also viewable by Top Free, Top Paid, Top Grossing, Top New Free and Top New Paid. This is useful to help filter out the poorer apps that aren't filtered otherwise.

One of the major bonus points that Android has over other operating systems is its customisability.

For instance, should you not like the messaging app or the keyboard, it is simple to download a new one, such as Handcent SMS or Swype. It is also possible to install custom apps from other sources, including other app stores.

In the way of pre-installed apps, the Huawei Ascend G510 does come with some useful, and some not so useful, apps.

Google apps such as Google+, Talk, Gmail, Google Play, Play Music and YouTube are all present, alongside the Mapping apps such as Maps, Local and Navigation.

We were a little baffled by the lack of a Play Movies or Play Books app, although these are both available from the Google Play store.

Huawei's own apps such as the Profiles app that we mentioned before, and the Flashlight app, are very useful additions, whereas the inclusion of an EA Games app is less so.

We can't work out why it has been included, since it doesn't appear to download new games. If it does, it isn't helped by the fact that (on our review model at least) there are no games in any of the games categories.

Maps

Google Maps is possibly the most well known Google product, after its search function. Thankfully, Google has made its mapping application available on Android since its inception.

It has been said time and time again, the Google Maps application is absolutely superb. We won't go into too much detail, since you've heard it all before, but Google Maps is one of the most comprehensive mapping applications we've used, more than eclipsing Apple's offering.

Google Maps also includes Navigation software. We've always been impressed by Google's effort here, not least because it's free. There are other sat nav apps available from the Google Play store, but when you're in a spot of bother, Google will easily sort you out.

GPS lock-on is fast, finding us in our car and being able to provide us a route around town in next to no time.

Camera and Video

There are no real surprises in the camera department, with Huawei blessing the Ascend G510 with an average-sized 5MP rear sensor, and a mere 0.3MP VGA front-facing sensor. The camera app has also been well thought out, being clean and free of clutter.

Taking around a second to load is by no means the quickest, but having a link on the lock screen does mean it is slightly easier to take a photo, should the unexpected happen.

By unexpected, we obviously mean a cat that has done a thing the internet would enjoy.

Within the app, Huawei offers just about every feature that you can expect from a modern smartphone camera; Single or Panorama shooting modes, different visual effects, white balance control, varying scene modes, ISO levels, exposure levels, a timer, picture size and geo-location.

In all, we don't see a massive need for these settings, since the 5MP sensor is never going to be used for more than a few candid shots, or for taking some holiday photos, so won't replace a decent digital compact camera. Then again, the best camera is often the one that you have to hand, so maybe there is a place for them.

We could point out our disappointment at the lack of a dedicated shutter button, but the exclusion is now a common feature on the modern smartphone. The major bonus that the Huawei Ascend G510 has is that it includes selective focusing, enabling you to touch the screen in the area that you want the camera to focus on.

It seems like a small point, but it really makes a difference. Shutter speeds are also fairly impressive, with photos being taken quickly. There is some noticeable slow down in low light conditions, but the inclusion of a flash is very handy.

Photos taken indoors and in low light conditions appear grainy, with the flash increasing the images contrast. Photos taken outdoors were a different story. While it was difficult to see the screen in direct sunlight, the photos taken were very bright, with decent levels of contrast. Check out the images for yourself below.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Video

The video recording runs in the same vein as still photography. The app is just as clean, but offers far fewer options. There are no video effects, but there is the ability to change the white balance and add GPS location info to the video.

The major downside to the video recording is the video resolution. VGA 640 x 480 is the maximum resolution for both the front and rear sensor, which is, quite frankly, appalling. There is also the chance to record in 320 x 240 for MMS messages.

In all, we wouldn't recommend using the Huawei Ascend G510 to record baby's first steps or your first dance at a wedding, but it'll suffice to cover your dad dancing later on in the evening, as the drink starts to flow.

Media

While not proving that it has the capabilities to produce high quality media, the Huawei Ascend G510, complete with its 4.5-inch screen and DTS sound, was seemingly designed with media consumption considered very seriously.

Huawei has bolstered the 4GB internal storage (closer to 2GB after the operating system has taken its share of the space) with microSD card support. We're often left wondering why this isn't something that is present in a lot more devices, since it enables you to store a lot more data.

We've mentioned the screen throughout this review, and when talking about media consumption, the screen brightness issue raises its head again. The screen is bright when indoors, and is very clear, but if you plan to watch a lot of videos while sat in the park, we will have to suggest looking elsewhere.

Music

The media experience on the Huawei Ascend G510 is, on the whole, very pleasant. The music app is well thought through, and very attractive. A large angled album cover takes up most of the screen space, with the media controls at the bottom.

Tapping the album artwork brings up a list of songs from that album, and swiping the cover to the side gives you quick access to albums. Other media controls cover the basic play/pause, track skipping, repeat and shuffle buttons.

One advantage that Huawei likes to point out (with the logo adorning the back of the Huawei Ascend G510) is the DTS sound. Much like HTC has Beats Audio, Huawei has added extra software in order to enrich your audio experience.

That's the theory anyway - in practice we found that there was very little effect. Sound was richer, and seemed a little louder, but it was negligible. We doubt we would have noticed if we hadn't been listening for it.

We were a little disappointed that with all the customisation in place throughout Huawei's Emotion UI, there was no way of manipulating media through the notifications pane. It can't be too much to ask to put a play/pause button and a track skipping button alongside the track name. Other manufacturers manage it, after all.

Video

Video-wise, the Huawei Ascend G510 supports MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 playback. Surprisingly, Huawei doesn't have a dedicated video app to access from the home screen like it does with music. In order to watch a video, you must locate it in the pre-loaded File Manager app, then open it there.

Unsurprisingly, the video player is just the stock Android player, offering no functionality other than playing and pausing the video, or skipping to a select point in the video using the slide bar. With a screen of this size, this is something that we were very disheartened about, despite our concerns over the brightness.

FM radio

Until now we would have said that FM radio is becoming an almost standard feature on modern smartphones.

That said, the latest flagship Samsung device, the Samsung Galaxy S4, ships without this capability. We are always thankful for the inclusion of an FM radio, though.

As always, you need some headphones plugged in for this to work, though that doesn't mean to say that you can't play music through the rear speaker.

In terms of functionality, the Huawei Ascend G510 found every radio station we expected it to. The app interface is also well designed, with the ability to auto-tune, or easily manually select using a small scroll wheel.

DLNA streaming

DLNA streaming is handled through a dedicated DLNA app. We are fans of the way that it keeps everything together and tidy, and the ability to stream media from our phone to our TV, or from our PC to our phone.

In practice, we don't see that there will be a massive need for DLNA on a phone of this price, but it is something we could have forgone in pursuit of saving a few pennies.

Photos

Photos are accessed via the Gallery app. The app itself is fairly attractive, with large tiles showing the most recent image from each folder. We were left a little disappointed though, as the Ascend G510 didn't pull in our Picasa or Facebook albums.

The Huawei Ascend G510 does also provide some basic photo editing, accessed by the menu button. These include image rotation, cropping, light levels editing, basic image effects (such as posterise or fish-eye), and colour levels including tinting, black and white and doodles.

These effects are fun to play with, and can make images brighter and more interesting, yet we don't see them being used often.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life is something that is hotly contested from device to device. When buying a smartphone, you will at least expect a whole day's moderate usage from it, which is something that seems very fair.

That said, everybody uses their phones for different things, so it can be a bit more difficult.

If you plan to make the jump up from a feature phone - where batteries can easily last a week on a charge - over to the Huawei Ascend G510, there will be a bit of a shock. There's also a more minor shock for the more experienced smartphone users.

The 1700mAh battery that Huawei has equipped the Ascend G510 with is pretty poor.

Let's put that into some perspective. For all our phone reviews, we use a standardised test in order to ensure we draw fair comparisons.

After running the test on the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini - a phone with a much brighter 4-inch screen and a smaller 1500mAh battery - we were left with an impressive 80% battery life left. However, the same test yielded 68% battery on the Huawei Ascend G510.

After taking the phone off its charge in the morning, we did manage to squeeze a day's use out of the Huawei Ascend G510.

Unfortunately, when we say a day's use, that involved a constant Wi-Fi connection, checking emails every so often, sending a couple of texts, as well as some Angry Birds and Temple Run action. Heavier usage than that will mean you might want to keep a phone charger in your desk drawer at work, or in your bag.

Connectivity

You would struggle to call the Huawei Ascend G510 lacking in the connectivity department, since the only notable omissions are 4G and an infra-red sensor. These remain the preserve of flagship devices such as the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z.

Huawei has provided the Ascend G510 with HSDPA to 7.2Mbps and HSUPA to 5.76Mbps, as well as Wi-Fi 802.11 to b/g/n standard. It also has portable hotspot capabilities, should you need to provide your tablet or laptop with Wi-Fi when out and about.

Bluetooth is supported at 2.1 standard, so it's by no means the latest, but it is perfectly functional. Unsurprisingly, the Huawei Ascend G510 also comes with GPS and A-GPS support, as well as the far more surprising inclusion of NFC.

NFC is becoming increasingly popular among mobile manufacturers, mobile accessories and in retail outlets.

With NFC looking to become very popular over the next few years, seeing it appear on lower end devices such as the Huawei Ascend G510 is very promising, and great if you're tying yourself into a 24-month contract.

Also on offer are the previously mentioned micro USB connectivity, since it doubles up as a charging point, as well as the ability to stream wirelessly over DLNA.

Connection to a PC is done via the supplied micro USB cable. On the Huawei Ascend G510, you are prompted to select what mode you would like to connect with, from a choice of Media Device (MTP), Camera (PTP) or USB mass storage.

On many devices you won't see a real difference between Media Device and USB mass storage modes, since both enable you to drag and drop media freely between your PC and the phone. Huawei provides a decent filing system on the G510, meaning that anything you transfer can be easily accessed via the File Manager.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

Well, now you've read our Huawei Ascend G510 review (or skipped straight to this page), you'll have a pretty good idea of what we are going to say here.

We've had our chance to play with the Huawei Ascend G510, and while we encountered some problems along the way, on the whole the Chinese device held its own. And at its £130 (around AU$200/US$200) price point, Huawei could be on to a winner.

We liked

The design and build quality of the Huawei Ascend G510 is really impressive. The all-glass front and black bezel may look a lot like most smartphones that have ever been designed, but then if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Including a microSD port is also a major bonus, one that we are surprised isn't available on every smartphone going. It's also particularly necessary if you plan to store music and videos on the Huawei Ascend G510, since the internal storage is a bit small.

Shipping with Android Jelly Bean is also a major bonus, since it has the buttery smoothness and the added security that comes with the latest software.

The Huawei Ascend G510 is also a well connected device. NFC and DLNA streaming are still relatively new technologies, and until recently they've remained solely on higher end devices. Making its way onto cheaper devices will help NFC's adoption, and helps to future-proof the Huawei Ascend G510.

We disliked

When coming to Android customisation, just about every manufacturer has implemented some sort of overlay to the stock operating system, but Huawei's Emotion UI is one of the poorer ones we've seen. We commend its effort, since in many ways it provides a nice level of customisation, with different themes giving the Huawei Ascend G510 a new feel, should you choose.

On the flip-side, we feel that the omission of the app drawer is just one step too far, making it overly simple, and can make home screens seem cluttered if you don't spend time organising them.

With the inclusion of microSD support, it seems a little odd that we would mention the poor internal storage. That said, not every app can be moved across to the SD card, meaning that over time, the 2GB remaining space from the 4GB storage will become full.

We also have to mention the screen. While playing with the Huawei Ascend G510 inside, we found that it was more than usable. That all changes when you step outside. If you're lucky enough to get some sunshine, the screen becomes very difficult to see, which makes watching movies or taking photos very difficult.

Final verdict

We liked the Huawei Ascend G510. It provides some very nifty features at an attractive price point. The G510 shows that Huawei really does have the ability to compete against the well established smartphone manufacturers.

The Huawei Ascend G510 is definitely a phone that you won't be embarrassed to pull out of your pocket. Looks-wise, it is up there with some of the higher end phones. Not as high as the HTC One or the Sony Xperia Z, but then as their company's flagship phones, we can forgive that.

In everyday use, Huawei's offering managed to hold up under general use, but it started to struggle under heavier use. Watching a movie or playing games for any length of time manages to drain the battery a bit faster than we would like from a modern smartphone.

On the flip side, it packs in NFC and DLNA capabilities, which we expect to become more prevalent in daily life as the technology becomes cheaper and more widespread.

As with every phone, we can't tell you what to buy, since everyone has different needs. Overall, though, we would definitely suggest taking a look at the Huawei Ascend G510. With Android onboard, plus some nifty tech, it provides some stiff competition to the established competitors - the likes of the Sony Xperia U, LG Optimus L5 II and the Windows-toting Nokia Lumia 620.

You probably know Cat or Caterpillar as the guys in yellow and black, makers of construction equipment and those boots the cool kids were wearing for a little while. Now you can add smartphones to that list, thanks to the Cat B15.

Actually, the phone is made by Bullitt Mobile, a licensee of Cat, and this isn't its first smartphone rodeo. Its already made a couple of phones under the Cat name, and it launched the Cat B15 at MWC 2013 in Barcelona. This rugged device has been available in Europe for a little while, and is making its North American debut at a pre-show event for CTIA 2013.

Rubber outside, Jelly Bean inside

The Cat B15 has a rubber and aluminum shell with a sweet Android 4.1: Jelly Bean center. It's built to make calls and survive falls; with just a 5-megapixel camera and dual-core 1GHz processor, it's not designed for much else.

As we mentioned, the Cat B15 has been available in Europe for a while now, and can actually be purchased as an unlocked device directly from Cat for $349/£300. Representatives showing the device couldn't name the U.S. carriers that will carry it.

No 4G here, sadly

However, we'll tell you that the Cat B15 is a GSM phone, so therefore AT&T and T-Mobile are your likely candidates. No dice with GSM carriers Sprint and Verizon. It's also 3G only, so forget about up-to-date data speeds.

Like a lot of rubberized and ruggedized phones, such as the Kyocera Torque, the Cat B15 looks like a phone in a heavy rubber case. Phones like this are bulky by nature, but it does seem like Cat has slimmed down the B15 as much as possible.

Looks like a handsome screwdriver

The B15 is just shy of 5-inches, with a width of 2.7-inches and .58-inches of thickness. It also feels pretty good, and doesn't weigh too much, just 5.9 oz. Its rubber body casing and aluminum sides give it the look of a toolbox or an eye-catching screwdriver.

The display is a 4-inch 480 x 800 screen resolution. But get this: it's designed to detect and stand up to a wet finger, because the Cat B15 is waterproof at a depth of up to 1 meter, for thirty minutes. We actually had the chance to wet our digits and give the phone a swipe, and it did indeed work. Frequent snorkelers, we may have your next phone here.

The manufacturer also claims the B15 is "impervious to dust," which is likely thanks to all the rubber seals fitted in each and every port. The headphone jack seals up, as does the micro-USB charging port.

Treat it like a rented phone

It's also rated for a drop of up to six feet, which should be more than enough to survive a tumble from your hand to the floor. Cat representatives on hand were eager to drop the phone and prove this claim.

Getting back to the build, one of the things we like least about a smartphone case is how it makes the buttons difficult to push. Luckily, the B15's yellow rubber buttons weren't too bad. They didn't press as easy as an iPhone 5's unlock button, but they didn't take too much effort, either.

It opens up, no mallet required

You wouldn't think it, but the B15 actually has an open body design. It takes some doing, but you can unlatch the back and open it up to reveal a 2000 mAh battery and microSD slot. There's only 4GB of on board storage, so it's a good thing you can add an additional 32GB.

Of course, this isn't really a media centric or image snapping phone. The camera is only 5-mp and the processor is low-end, but flipping across menus and diving into the app drawer, the B15 was no slouch. We didn't detect any stuttering, and the browser opened with acceptable speed.

We'd guess that's Jelly Bean at work, as the B15 runs a version that's darn close to stock. We noticed just one toolbar that smacked of manufacturer meddling.

Early Verdict

When a brand like Cat enters the smartphone game, it's tempting to look at it as selling a name, not a phone. Cat has parleyed its black and yellow good looks and blue collar street cred into clothes, boots, watches and more. Its even appeared at London Fashion Week.

We won't know if Cat is a smartphone dilettante until we have the B15 in for a full review, but there's a good chance the phone could prove it's worth, and frankly, phones like this could use a little style. We've all seen far too many hideously shattered iPhones and over-the-top protective cases. If someone could sell a tougher phone to that crowd, not just construction workers, they'd be doing the world a favor.

Ultimately though, the B15 seems like a budget phone in a well-constructed case. It's 3G only, has a weak processor and camera, and the display is none to sharp. The battery is a bit small at 2000 mAh, which is worrying on a phone that should be reliable above all else.

However, the close to stock Android OS intrigues us, and we have to admit, we're charmed by the phone's sturdiness, and the eagerness of Cat reps to beat it up for us. Keep your eye out for our full review, and an update whenever we get some carrier info.

Introduction

Although the Canon EOS 650D was the first DSLR to have a touchscreen, Canon sensibly decided that the touch controls should be in addition to rather than instead of the button and dial controls.

This helped widen the camera's appeal, making it attractive to novices upgrading from a touchscreen smartphone or compact camera, as well as enthusiast photographers. As a result, according to Canon, the camera has sold very well.

Nevertheless after less than year the brand has decided to replace the Canon EOS 650D with the Canon EOS 700D, also known as the Canon EOS Rebel T5i. It sits alongside the Canon EOS 600D at the very top of Canon's "consumer" lineup, just below the Canon EOS 60D that starts its "enthusiast" range.

However, the new camera only makes a few upgrades on the model it replaces.

The vast majority of the Canon 700D's specification is the same as the Canon 650D's. For example, the 18 million pixel APS-C sized sensor and the 14-point Digic 5 processor are the same. It also has the same hybrid autofocus system with nine-point, all-cross type phase detection points.

As before, the sensor has pixels that are used for the phase detection part of the hybrid autofocusing system that is available when using Live View mode or shooting HD videos.

When the Hybrid AF is in action, it uses the central pixels to inform the phase detection part and get the subject close to sharp - from then, the contrast detection steps in to get it into full focus. This means that you can use the camera handheld. Canon claims that the performance of this system when one of the new STM lenses is mounted has been improved.

Like the Canon EOS 650D, the Canon EOS 700D can shoot at 5fps, and the sensitivity can be set in the native range ISO 100-12800, which can be expanded to ISO 25,600 if necessary. This makes it a pretty versatile camera, capable of shooting in a wide range of situations.

One of the biggest changes brought with the new camera is that the impact of the Creative Filters (Grainy Black and White, Soft Focus, Fish-Eye, Art Bold, Water Painting, Toy Camera and Miniature Effect) can be previewed on the screen when shooting in Live View mode - just as you can with the Canon EOS 100D and the Canon EOS M.

However, these are still a JPEG-only option, so you can't have a 'clean' raw file recorded with the JPEG. If you want an unfiltered image as well as one with the effect on, you need to apply the filter post-capture using the Canon EOS 700D's post-processing options.

Alternatively, the Canon EOS 700D has the usual array of Picture Styles (Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome) as well as Auto, in which the camera selects what it calculates to be the appropriate option automatically, plus it can apply three user-defined styles.

All of the preset options can be adjusted to taste and can be used when shooting raw as well as JPEG files.

The Canon EOS 700D has also been designed to have a more expensive feel, with a textured coating and a 360-degree mode dial added. The latter means it can be twisted all the way around, rather than reaching a point where it stops and has to be twisted back again.

The Canon EOS 700D/Canon EOS Rebel T5i has a full asking price of £619.99 / AU$849 / US$749 body only or £749.99 / AU$999 / US$899.99 with the new 18-55 STM lens.

This means that it goes head to head with the 24 million pixel Nikon D5200, which was announced at the end of 2012.

Build and handling

Canon has clearly used the same mould for the EOS 700D as it did for the EOS 650D, since the two camera bodies look almost identical, with the only visible difference being a change to the mode dial.

The icons on the Canon EOS 700D's dial are raised rather than just painted and it's edged with a finer texture. This higher-quality dial can also be rotated through 360 degrees, so you don't have to turn it backwards and forwards to reach the options you want.

Rubbing a finger over the two cameras also reveals that they have a slightly different texture, with the Canon EOS 700D feeling a little coarser - in a good way. The rubberised coatings over the finger and thumb-grips remain the same and give good purchase.

While it lacks the robustness of Canon's professional-level DSLRs, the Canon EOS 700D feels well made, with no movement detectable at any of the joints. The articulating joint that attaches the LCD screen and enables it to be rotated around for viewing from very high or low angles, or from in front of the camera, has a high quality feel.

The Canon EOS 700D has the same control and menu layout as the Canon EOS 650D that it replaces. As before the menu is spread across 11 tabbed screens in stills mode, including a My menu option to which you can assign up to six features for quick access - we find it helpful to use this to reach the Mirror lock-up, Highlight tone priority, Auto Lighting Optimizer and Flash control options.

The menu can be navigated and options selected via the touchscreen or the button and dial controls.

There's also a Quick menu that you can activate either by pressing the physical Q button or by touching the Q icon on the LCD screen. This gives a quick route to the mostly commonly needed camera settings.

If the Feature Guide is activated via Set-up Menu 3, touching an on-screen icon once brings up an explanation of the feature, while a second touch displays its available options. A single touch is all that is required if the Feature Guide is deactivated.

As on the Canon EOS 650D, the power switch has a third option that's used to activate Movie mode. Once this has been done, the button on the back of the camera that starts Live View in stills mode becomes the movie record button.

Although the Canon EOS 700D has all the button and dial controls that we expect from a camera at this level, it is also possible to control the camera via the 3-inch 1,040,000-dot touchscreen. This is very responsive, and once you start using the touch controls you find that you use them more and more because they are so intuitive.

It's great to be able to swipe across the camera's screen to scroll through images and then pinch to zoom in to inspect details. It's just a shame that Canon has buried the rating control in the menu.

We found that the vari-angle screen provides a good, clear view with lots of detail visible even in quite bright light, making it very useful when composing images at ground level or above head-height.

The touch-shutter facility, which enables the AF to be set and the shutter tripped with a touch of a finger on the screen, is particularly helpful in these situations.

However, the screen inevitably gets covered in fingerprints and these obscure the view, so it's a good idea to carry a decent lens cloth with you so you can give it a wipe now and then.

Because it's a DSLR rather than a compact system camera, the Canon EOS 700D has an optical viewfinder. While this only covers 95% of the frame and carries the risk of including a few extra elements along the edges of images, it is bright and pleasant to use.

As usual these days, when given the choice we would opt to compose images in the LCD when focusing manually, because the enlarged view makes it easier to be precise with the focus point.

Performance

Given that they have the same sensor, it's not surprising to discover that the Canon EOS 700D can resolve the same amount of detail as the Canon EOS 650D, and that the two cameras' image quality is very similar.

Noise is well controlled throughout the sensitivity range, although as you'd expect, images taken using the upper ISO values have some coloured speckling visible. It's interesting that our lab tests reveal that the Canon 700D produces slightly noisier images than the Canon 650D at the lower to mid sensitivity settings. Canon has probably made this change to the image processing to bring out a bit more detail.

The Canon 700D can produce high-quality images direct from the camera with plenty of detail and pleasant, natural colours, but as usual the best results are produced from raw files that are carefully processed.

Examining our images at 100% on the screen indicates that the camera's default sharpening is a little on the high side, and more natural images are created by turning the in-camera Sharpness value down.

As is Canon's way, the white balance tends to lean a little towards warm tones, but this isn't dramatic and it usually results in more attractive images.

However, Canon's evaluative metering system continues to give mixed performance. In some situations it is superb, but in high contrast conditions you need to be alert to the brightness of the subject under the active AF point, since this can skew the result.

Bright subjects can trick the camera into under exposure, while dark ones can lead to over exposed images. This is an issue throughout the Canon DSLR range, but it seems especially strange in models that the company is aiming at novice photographers (as well as enthusiasts), such as the Canon EOS 100D and Canon EOS 700D.

While most users want the subject to be correctly exposed, few will be happy with a wildly over exposed landscape because the focus point is in shadow.

With a dynamic range of almost 12EV at ISO 200 and ISO 400, it's clear that the Canon 700D is capable of recording a wide range of tones. However, these are compressed in the JPEG files to create a higher contrast image with more punch. Unlike the results for signal to noise ratio, our dynamic range measurements for the Canon 700D match those from the Canon 650D almost exactly.

Our tests confirm that Canon has improved the performance of the hybrid focusing system that's available in Live View and video mode.

We found that the Canon EOS 700D is appreciably quicker to achieve focus with one of the STM lenses mounted than the Canon EOS 650D. Nevertheless, the focusing still isn't really fast enough to be used with a moving subject.

When you use the viewfinder to compose images, the Canon 700D reverts to the more standard phase detection autofocus system. This works well, with each cross-type point finding its target quickly and accurately even in quite low light and with low contrast subjects.

The only down side is that with 'just' nine AF points it's often necessary to focus the lens and then recompose the image, because there isn't a point directly over the subject.

Canon's STM lenses really come into their own when shooting video, and the new 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM kit lens's focusing is very quiet and smooth when Movie Servo AF is enabled.

It's so smooth, in fact, that sometimes it's hard to tell that the focus is slowly being adjusted. The end result, however, is very high quality footage with no sound of the focusing system in action.

While post-processed raw files generally create better monochrome images, it's very helpful to have an idea of how the final images will look. It's also fun trying to get shots just right in-camera. The Canon 700D's Monochrome Picture Style produces some excellent results, with subtle toning being possible. In many cases the images are print-ready.

Image quality and resolution

As part of our image quality testing for the Canon EOS 700D, we've shot our resolution chart.

If you view our crops of the resolution chart's central section at 100% (or Actual Pixels) you will see that, for example, at ISO 100 the Canon EOS 700D is capable of resolving up to around 22 (line widths per picture height x100) in its highest quality JPEG files.

For a full explanation of what our resolution charts mean, and how to read them, check out our full explanation of our camera testing resolution charts.

Examining images of the chart taken at each sensitivity setting reveals the following resolution scores in line widths per picture height x100:

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 16 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Noise and dynamic range

We shoot a specially designed chart in carefully controlled conditions and the resulting images are analysed using DXO Analyzer software to generate the data to produce the graphs below.

A high signal to noise ratio (SNR) indicates a cleaner and better quality image.

For more more details on how to interpret our test data, check out our full explanation of our noise and dynamic range tests.

Here we compare the Canon EOS 700D with the Nikon D3200, Canon EOS 650D, Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58.

JPEG signal to noise ratio

At the lower sensitivity settings the Canon 700D has a slightly lower signal to noise ratio (SNR) than the 650D it replaces indicating that it produces JPEGs with a little more noise. This is probably to reveal a little more detail. Beyond ISO 1600 the 700D's SNR is a very close match for the 650D's and both are beaten by the Nikon D3200, Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58.

Raw signal to noise ratio

As with the JPEG files, after conversion to TIFF the raw files from the Canon 700D have a lower SNR than the Canon 650D's files up to around ISO 3200. With the exception of the lower sensitivity settings, the 700D beats the Sony Alpha 58, but it a fairly close match for the Nikon D3200 and Nikon D5200.

JPEG dynamic range

While it doesn't match the Sony Alpha 58, Nikon D5200 or Nikon D3200 for JPEG dynamic range it seems likely that Canon has done this deliberately to produce higher contrast images that look print-ready.

Raw dynamic range

The 700D's raw file (after conversion to TIFF) dynamic range is a very close match for the Canon 650D's - hardly surprising given that they have the same sensor and processing engine. The highest dynamic range is achieved at ISO 200 and ISO 400 (from where it more-or-less matches those of the Nikon D3200 and Sony Alpha 58). The Nikon D5200's raw files (after conversion to TIFF) have the widest dynamic range at any sensitivity setting indicating that it can capture the widest range of tones ina single shot.

Sample images

Click here to see the full resolution image

Using an extension tube has restricted depth of field, but there's lots of detail in the sharp areas of this shot, taken in early morning light. An extra 1/3EV exposure was dialled in to get this accurate result.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The vari-angle screen makes it easy to compose images from awkward angles like this. It's also helpful to be able to set the AF point, and even trip the shutter, with a touch of the finger on the screen.

Click here to see the full resolution image

This toned shot was created in-camera at the capture stage using the Monochrome Picture Style. Helpfully, it's possible to shoot raw images at the same time so there's a clean file to work on as well if you want.

Click here to see the full resolution image

We had to increase the exposure by 2/3EV over that suggested by the evaluative metering to get this image. It could still benefit from a little post-capture brightening, but the skin tones are spot-on.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The camera has got the colour and exposure just right here and there's lots of detail visible, so the end result has plenty of impact.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Colours are nice and vibrant but not excessively saturated when the Standard Picture Style is used.

Sensitivity and noise images

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Verdict

The Canon EOS 700D is a superb camera that combines some of the best aspects of modern digital camera technology. It has a good sensor capable of recording lots of detail, a comprehensive feature set and a responsive vari-angle touchscreen that provides a quicker method of controlling the camera than buttons and dials - for those who want to use it.

It is an excellent choice of camera for anyone wanting to take their photography more seriously, shoot from creative angles or start recording videos. However, it is only a minor improvement on the Canon EOS 650D, and owners of this slightly older camera need feel no compulsion to upgrade.

That said, the hybrid focus system is significantly better; it's more sensitive and quicker to respond when the shutter release is depressed. It still isn't fast enough for use with moving subjects, though.

However, when Movie Servo AF is enabled and an STM lens is mounted, the Canon 700D brings subjects smoothly and silently into focus to produce high-quality video footage, with no hunting in good light.

When shooting with the camera held to the eye, the Canon 700D reverts to the more standard phase detection AF system, which is fast, efficient and useful when shooting a range a range of subjects, including sport and action.

We liked

Because the Canon 700D has the full complement of button and dial controls as well as the touchscreen, photographers can choose how they wish to use it.

The vari-angle screen comes into its own when shooting landscape, macro or still life images, and you have time to consider the composition and ensure the point of focus is exactly where you want it. It's also extremely helpful when shooting video clips.

We disliked

The main source of complaint about the Canon EOS 700D is that it's only a very minor upgrade on the Canon EOS 650D, and that it uses the familiar 18MP APS-C format sensor. While this may seem like a strange move for Canon, why should a company wait to make improvements to an existing model?

One downside to controlling the camera via the touchscreen is that the LCD is quickly covered in fingerprints and greasy smears, which make the images hard to see in bright light.

It's a shame that Canon hasn't made the ratings option easier to access when reviewing images, nor included Wi-Fi technology to enable wireless control over the camera for wildlife photography, as well as cable-free image transfer.

Nikon stuck with its 12MP sensors for a long time, but it has now progressed onto 24MP sensors, which have been widely well received. Canon seems to be stuck at 18MP for its APS-C format DSLRs, and although the image quality is very good, some may argue that it is a little behind the times.

Our lab tests also reveal that the Canon 700D lags behind the Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58 for dynamic range and signal to noise ratio.

Final verdict

The Canon EOS 700D is a very capable and versatile camera that produces high quality images. It has a comprehensive feature set and affords all the control expected by enthusiast photographers while providing automatic hand-holding options for less experienced users.

It produces images that are of very similar quality to those from the Canon 650D, although our tests reveal that they are a little noisier.

The 700D once again highlights the benefits of shooting raw images rather than JPEGs as being able to tailor the noise reduction and sharpening to the specific conditions produces higher quality results.

While some may scoff at the vari-angle touchscreen, we say don't knock it until you've tried it. It's extremely responsive and it promotes creativity. We are becoming increasingly used to touchscreen control on a range of other devices, so it seems odd that Nikon hasn't yet employed the technology in a DSLR.

Introduction

Office 2013 gets the Windows 8 treatment, with a touch-friendly interface and a sparser look, as well as new features in every application. So while the main thing you'll notice is the new look, there are some really interesting features under the hood.

Office is also going to the cloud, with subscription pricing, on-demand installation and automatic syncing of settings and documents you save in the cloud – if you want to pay for it that way. Check out our Office 365 review.

As usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this time around the different editions are not just about whether you're using them at home or in a business or which applications are included.

Buying Office 2013

Even if you decide you want to buy a pay-for-it-once-and-keep-it copy of Office 2013 in a box, you won't find a DVD inside – just a product key to unlock the software you download. (Buyers in "developing countries with limited internet access" can still get a DVD, but that's not an option in the UK or US.)

If you prefer to pay an annual subscription to get extra features, Office 365 editions let you download the Office 2013 applications onto multiple PCs (or share them with your family).

For home users, there are four options. Buy the boxed software and you can put it on one PC. Office Home and Student 2013 with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote costs £109.99/$139.99; Office Home and Business 2013 adds Outlook and costs £219.99/$219.99. Office Professional 2013 has the full set of programs for £389.99/$399.99; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher.

Then there's the new subscription version that Microsoft released this week, Office 365 Home Premium, which costs you $99.99 a year for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher.

That's good value if you share it with the family; up to five people in the same household can have their own installations of Office on their PC or Mac at the same time (for the Office programs that run on a Mac – and Mac users get the current version of Office for Mac until a new release comes along in the future). And when the next version of Office comes out, you'll get it on the same subscription.

All five people get an extra 20GB of storage on SkyDrive to keep documents on and 60 free Skype world calling minutes a month (which can be calls to a landline or a mobile and from your PC or from a smartphone with Skype installed).

You can download the Office programs temporarily on another PC if you're away from your usual PC (even if it already has another version of Office installed). So if you have a document on a USB drive or on SkyDrive that you need to edit on another PC, and using the Office Web Apps from SkyDrive doesn't provide of the features you need (like seeing revision marks in a tracked document you're collaborating on), you can use Office on Demand to get the full version of Word in just a few minutes.

You manage all this from the revamped Office.com and there's a link to your account there in the ribbon of all the Office applications. (To activate the Skype minutes you have to link your account to the Microsoft account you're using for Office 365, which can be done on the Office.com site.)

You also get a list of your recently edited documents, which helps when using Office on Demand to give it a fresh edit.

If you're at college or university (or you teach at one) it's possible to get Office 365 University on a four-year subscription for $79.99 that you can use on up to two PCs or Macs.

Also, as you might expect, Office 2013 and Office on Demand only run on Windows 7 and 8, not on XP or Vista.

Office for business

Although Office 365 Home Premium might also sound like a great deal for a small business, it's not licensed for commercial use (Like the Windows RT versions of Office 2013) unless you already have an Office business licence. Instead, you need one of the Office 365 business subscriptions, available from February 27.

These will include the new Office 2013 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online, which are already available to run on your own servers. It's taking some time for Microsoft to upgrade Office 365 to run these new server versions, which explains the later availability (there are a number of issues in SharePoint the Office 365 team is working on). We've tried these out with the Office 2013 applications (and we looked at SharePoint Online 2013 in more detail here.

Office 365 Small Business Premium includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Lync. The annual $149.99 subscription lets you run them on up to five PCs or Macs at once (again, you can use Office on Demand to download Office to any PC you're using temporarily, and you get regular updates and new features).

You can host online meetings with audio and HD video conferencing in Lync and run a public website on SharePoint, plus you get Exchange with a 25GB mailbox for each user and SkyDrive Plus storage on SharePoint.

That gives you 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra 500MB for each user, but you can choose how the storage is allocated between users and you can control how they use it – like forcing them to encrypt confidential documents.

Office 365 ProPlus (short for Professional Plus), is aimed at midsize businesses (10-250 employees) and includes the same desktop Office software as Small Business Premium. But it also has tools for business intelligence, consistency checking to Excel and automated deployment, as well as more options for the SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services.

Office 365 Enterprise has the full Office 2013 set of features in the desktop software and SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services, like archiving, legal hold, Data Loss Prevention and rights management to protect confidential information.

If you're looking for five or more copies of Office 2013 and you don't want the Office 365 services at all, you can buy Office Standard 2013 (with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Publisher, the Office Web Apps and limited Lync, SharePoint and rights management services) or Office Professional Plus 2013 (with the full range of desktop Office programs and server features) through volume licensing.

We've already looked at the final (RTM) version of the Office 2013 applications. Now we've been able to try out the Office 365 Home Premium service with the new Office.com site, where you can download some of the new Office apps (although the apps for Outlook won't work until you have Exchange 2013).

Installing Office 2013

With any of the Office 365 subscription version of Office 2013, you don't have to worry about downloading and saving a large installer for Office (or even about uninstalling previous versions of Office, apart from Outlook). Whether you start the download from the Office 365 site or you try to open an Office document on a PC that doesn't have Office, the programs stream from the cloud.

This is a much improved version of the click-to-run virtualisation that Microsoft has used for the Office trial versions for a few years, which enables you to start using the applications just a few minutes after you download them. You don't have to wait for the full download; you can use the first features as soon as they download and if you click on a tool that hasn't yet downloaded, the installer will get that next.

The streaming happens quickly enough that the slideshow of new features you can watch while the other applications install is actually running in PowerPoint (and you don't have to watch it unless you want to).

You do have to pick a few options like the language to use for Office, the design you want to see in the ribbon and whether you want to send Microsoft anonymous telemetry about how you use Office. You can also fill in your Microsoft account details, which Office uses to sync settings like recent documents from SkyDrive, email accounts, custom AutoCorrect entries, the list of your Office Apps and the buttons you add to the Quick Access Toolbars.

It might seem odd to sign in with your Microsoft account on the Office.com site and then get asked for it during installation, but this is how you share the subscription; use the account that's paying for the licence to log in to Office.com, start the download, then sign in with the account of the person who will be using Office on each PC.

It's all very simple and very well thought out. This is your personal version of Office, on any PC, a lot faster. If you've downloaded the Customer Preview of Office 2013 you've tried this already. (The traditional Office desktop installer uses similar technology so the installation is faster there as well.)

Office 365 Home Premium adds several more designs that you can use to decorate the Office ribbon, including doodled circles, lunchbox sandwiches, pens and pencils, cartoon fish and spring leaves. It's a little odd, but there's something for most tastes (including a blank ribbon).

Once the programs are installed you can also choose from three Office themes (click your account picture at the top of the screen and choose Account Settings or open File > Account. The default white gives you the clean look you might have seen in the Customer Preview or in Office RT; pale Ggrey adds a light tint to the ribbon and other panes and dark grey is a high contrast colour scheme that puts a mid grey on the ribbon and panes and replaces most of the accent colours in each application with a very dark grey.

If you're not a fan of the new Windows 8 look, experiment with the themes to see if an alternative changes your mind.

Word 2013

Office 2013 takes the clean, unadorned principles of what used to be called Metro design and applies Office 2013 takes the clean principles of the Microsoft Design Language and applies them to desktop apps. This puts your documents centre stage, with tools such as the ribbon fading slightly into the background. The ribbon looks much more spacious but takes up no more space on screen.

Office 2013 is also designed to showcase Windows 8 and the touch features (the same is true of the Windows RT versions). Even the desktop apps are ready for touch. Press the Touch Mode button that Office automatically puts on the quick address toolbar if your PC has a touchscreen and the layout of the interface changes, with bigger buttons and more space to touch them without pressing the wrong thing.

In the final version of Office 2013 this is a big improvement on the version you may have tried in the Customer Preview. Instead of a fiddly and confusing little round button it's a clear pointing finge. Tapping it brings up a mini menu explaining the differences – on big icons that you can easily press with your finger.

It's not perfect but it makes Office 2013 far more touch friendly but not too big and chunky to be efficient when you use mouse and keyboard.

These are several improvements to the ribbon compared to Office 2010. Word has a new Design tab on the ribbon, which is a more logical place for the formatting and page background tools previously found on the Page Layout tab.

If you've seen the preview of Office 2013, the final version of the ribbon has some other subtle changes, making some of the tool icons clearer and crisper. The icons for the individual programs have also been redesigned to look better on the tiles of the Windows 8 Start screen.

The layout features are far better than in Word 2010; you can now embed videos directly into Word documents, or search your Facebook and Flickr accounts for photos to place in documents without having to save them first. These are both well designed, easy to use tools.

Getting your pictures in the right place is much easier with the new alignment guides that appear as you drag objects around (so you can see when the object is in the centre of the page or lined up with another element), and the layout options tool that appears so you can set text wrap.

The alignment guides make it much easier to tweak Word Art quickly, instead of spending hours adjusting spacing and sizes if the default Word Art layout doesn't fit what you want to show.

The improved layout options may be why the new PDF reflow feature works so well. This opens PDF files as if they're Word files – converting the layout so you get a Word document that looks like the original PDF, complete with fonts, layout, images, tables, charts and page numbers and making it all editable. This is fast (for a two-page file it takes only a few seconds longer than opening the PDF in Acrobat Reader) and remarkably accurate.

One option, Read Mode, removes most of the Word interface, reflowing documents to fit on screen with thumb-friendly buttons either side of the page. You can choose wide or narrow columns and set the page colour to sepia or even white on black. Tap on pictures, videos and charts to pop them out of the page in a larger window, or collapse sections you're not interested in (you can do that in page layout view as well).

But cleaning up the interface also means losing some useful tools; the handle that you can drag in Word to divide the document window into two scrolling panes (so you can see two separate sections of your document on screen at once) disappears, relegated to a button on the View ribbon so it takes twice as many clicks to get the split view.

Maybe you won't need it as often with the handles that enable you to collapse sections of your document under their headings or the vastly improved Navigation pane that turns document headings into a handy outline (you can even drag sections around in the pane). But when you do it shouldn't be more work than it used to be.

Also, the AutoCorrect features have disappeared from the menu when you right-click a spelling mistake; you have to go all the way into Word's huge Options dialogue to add corrections you want to use. Handy tip: if you're one of the handful of people who add their own AutoCorrect entries, pin the AutoCorrect dialogue to the Quick Access Toolbar on the ribbon.

Office 2013 seems to be designed for widescreen tablets: for example, task panes are back. In what feels like a flashback to Windows XP, dialogues such as spell check sit at the side of your screen rather than floating over the document and obscuring a few lines.

Install a dictionary app from the Store on Office.com and you get definitions and synonyms for words below the spelling suggestions. This is useful, but is it worth that much screen space? On a high resolution screen on a 16:9 tablet, these panes at the side work well; on an older notebook your screen starts to feel cramped.

Thankfully, you can undock the Spelling dialogue and drag it around (and Office remembers your preference), but the default is for Office applications to spread out on screen and get comfortable rather than to cram in all the information and functions you're used to in the same small space. The newer your PC, the more you will like this.

The new interface is great on a touch-friendly widescreen tablet with the 1366 resolution you need for Windows 8 and space to spare (and even better at the 1920 resolution of a high end notebook), but it's a step backwards for working on multiple documents on a low resolution notebook or desktop.

Snap two windows open side by side and press F7 to start the spell check. In Word 2013, on a 12-inch 1024 x 768 screen, the 5-inch snapped window sacrifices 1.75 inches of space to the spelling task pane. Add the navigation pane and you see only a thin strip of your document in between. Do the same thing on an 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 tablet and you won't find much to complain about.

Mostly the space is very well used. If you collaborate on documents with others, using tracked changes and comments, the improvements to these are extremely welcome and can save you hours of frustration. Instead of turning the page into a sea of red strikeouts and blue underlines to show deleted and inserted text, there's a new Simple Markup view that shows you the final version of the document with a line in the margin to show where there are edits.

Click it to see the details of those changes (which turns on the old All Markup view); click it again to hide the changes and keep reading. A speech bubble shows where there are comments to read; click to open a floating comment view that you can drag around the page, or switch to All Markup and see the comments in a wide margin at the edge of the document.

You can finally leave a reply to a comment rather than just leaving a comment nearby, and you can mark a comment as dealt with. This greys out the comment so it's not distracting, but it's still there if you need to refer back to it later.

If you're collaborating on a large document, Word 2013 (on a high resolution screen) is hands down the best way to do it, especially as having your document on SkyDrive or SharePoint means multiple people can edit it at the same time (they can't change the paragraph you're working on and you don't see their changes until you save when they're highlighted in green, so the page won't ever change without you knowing about it.)

Excel 2013

Excel gets the same interface changes as the rest of Office and some of the same features (the dialogue for inserting images from the web that's also in Word and PowerPoint and the apps for Office gallery, but not Word's new comment interface). And like Word, Excel offers more help for using existing features as well as some very powerful new ones.

Select a range of cells with numbers and the Quick Analysis tool pops up next to the selection with a gallery of conditional formatting, the charts that show the most information from that specific data, formulas, table formats and in-cell sparklines. Hover over an option and you see it either in your data (for formulas such as average or heat map formatting that highlights the highest and lowest figures) or in a pop-up for charts.

The categories are always the same, but the suggested charts change to match the information you're showing – with your live data previewed in the chart and an explanation of why a Clustered Column and Line chart or a Stacked view fits your data best. If the data is complex enough to analyse with a PivotTable, it can build a PivotTable model automatically.

This Chart Advisor comes from Microsoft Research and a prototype appeared on the Office Labs, but it's much more useful to have it integrated with the other analysis tools in Excel.

It's a baby version of the intelligence built into analysis tools such as Tableau – it doesn't go as far as suggesting colour palettes for example – but it makes complex tools such as Pivot Tables (possibly the most powerful and least used feature in Excel) far more accessible, and helps to get the chart right first time.

If you do need to edit a chart, the contextual tools that pop up make it faster and easier; you can preview different designs and checkboxes add and remove chart elements or sections of data interactively. This takes something you've always been able to do in Excel - if you had unlimited patience and unerring accuracy at right-clicking on just the right spot in the chart – and makes it easy and engaging.

Change the data that a chart is based on and the chart doesn't just update, it animates to show the change happening. If the new figures are significantly bigger, first the rest of the chart shrinks, then the new bars grow on screen. Update a single figure and the line moves up or down to its new position, so you can't miss the impact.

Even as you move between cells or add a figure that changes a formula, there are subtle animations to draw your eye to what's changed or to where the cursor has moved.

It's not enough to be annoying, because the animation is less animated close to the change. Click a cell and the highlight appears to fly into place, leading your eye there; change or delete a figure that changes a calculation and the result rolls over to show the new figure.

This makes it much harder to change or delete information that changes your results without noticing that it makes a difference. It's simple but makes Office feel alive and responsive, and conveys useful information.

Even error messages are more useful; drag a cell across the worksheet when you only meant to click somewhere else and Excel gives you a truly informative warning that there's already data in that cell. It shouldn't be a breakthrough, but in the past Excel has been more prone to bald refusals to save or confusingly cryptic errors – this is, mostly, a new and friendlier Excel.

If you want to dig further into your data, there are several new tools, including a Timeline slicer that organises data by date so you can filter down to a specific period or jump through figures month by month to see the differences.

There's a new add-in to look for errors and inconsistencies between worksheets and Power View – which used to be a Silverlight-based web tool for exploring and visualising data that you could use with SharePoint or save as PowerPoints – is now in Excel where it belongs. It's not relegated to a separate window; when you insert a Power View you get a new tab and the tools for pivoting and filtering data, plus simple layout options.

Of course the first problem is getting data into Excel. If you're trying to paste it in from a badly formatted report or an online credit card statement, the new Flash Fill feature is vastly easier than trying to work out how to split data into columns in just the right place.

Paste in the messy data, then start typing the piece of information you want to extract, such as the date or the name of the company you made the payment to (without the unwanted details such as the business number or foreign currency). It feels very good.

After you type a couple of examples, Flash Fill uses them as a template and works out the right pattern – and fills in all the other entries for you. You can extract multiple patterns from the data, so you can get the date, the business name and the amount, all by typing a couple of examples.

Again, this is a feature from Microsoft Research using machine learning. It's the kind of artificial intelligence that websites such as Tripit use to scrape information out of emails and web pages. It's enormously powerful, and it's blissfully simple to use. And it's not often you can say that about Excel.

PowerPoint 2013

The uncluttered new interface works very well in PowerPoint; again the tools fade into the background so you can concentrate on your document.

Like all the Office 2013 applications, when you open PowerPoint you don't go straight to a blank document; instead you get what's almost a welcome page with a list of recent documents and thumbnails for templates and themes (and a blank document if that's what you want).

You can search the library of free templates on the Office site from here. The results come up in what Microsoft used to call the 'backstage' view – the full-screen File menu – and you can preview the layout, filter the results by various categories and keyboards, or even look at the templates for other Office applications.

Many of the templates have multiple colour themes to choose from; whichever one you pick to start with you can switch to the other variants later. As with the rest of Office 2013, a lot of the new templates are optimised for widescreen aspect ratios, like the 16:9 tablets Microsoft hopes you'll buy to use Windows 8.

If you're going back to a document you've worked on, before both PowerPoint and Word make it faster to pick up where you left off; just click the pop-up window to jump to the last slide or page you were working on. This really works when you use Office (or SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps) on multiple PCs (or on your PC and your Surface) and you can start from where you were working on a different machine.

For layout, PowerPoint has the same tools as Word for inserting online images and videos. These are much easier to use than the PowerPoint 2010 video options; a single friendly dialogue enables you to search YouTube or Bing for videos, browse your SkyDrive and local system for video files or paste in the embed code from a video's web page.

It's as simple as searching, previewing and selecting the video you want and it's easy to add frames, effects and corrections – even to online videos.

This is one place where putting controls into task panes works much better than having an on-screen dialogue box, even on an older, low resolution PC. It's much easier to work with the border styles, layout effects, positioning options and video correction tools in a task pane than in a dialogue with 12 tabs that sits right on top of the video you're trying to edit.

There are also 'quick' formatting tools that appear next to selected objects, much like the Quick Analysis tool in Excel, putting the tools you need the most next to the object you're working on.

For positioning, PowerPoint not only has the new green alignment guides that show when you have an object at the edge or centre of a slide. It also has extra 'smart guides' that show when you're aligned with other graphics, and when objects are evenly spaced across the page – these are in addition to the alignment guides on smart art shapes, which now show both horizontal and vertical alignment instead of just one at a time.

You can set your own guidelines on master slides; for example if you have an image in the background of certain slides that you want to line up with.

There are new transitions, like Crush, Fracture and Origami, for a total of 48 different ways to get from one slide to another. There are no new shapes to place in presentations, but you can combine two shapes into one – cutting one out of the other, breaking them up into pieces, turning the space between them into a shape or just gluing them together. That enables you to create new shapes far more precisely than trying to draw them out.

Finally, there's an eyedropper tool for selecting colours from existing objects (although only within the same presentation, not in other applications or even other PowerPoint windows).

PowerPoint gets Word's friendly comments as well, complete with replies; again, this makes good use of a widescreen resolution. That's especially useful now the PowerPoint web app lets you have two people working on a presentation, in the web app and the desktop version of PowerPoint at the same time.

When it's time to give your presentation, the presenter tools have some great new features, such as a thumbnail grid for reviewing all your slides that only you can see. You can pinch to zoom in and out of this, and it's handy for jumping ahead to a later slide without clicking through one at a time.

You can also zoom in on a specific slide in the presentation if the audience needs to see fine detail.

It's possible to see a preview of the next slide, and your presenter notes, which might stop people cramming pages of text onto a single slide and then reading it all out loud very slowly (we can only hope).

You also get a counter for elapsed time for the current slide and the whole presentation, plus the current time, and tools for drawing on the slides or showing a fake laser pointer to highlight things. And you don't have to have a second monitor or projector connected to see the presenter tools, so you can practice running through the presentation complete with your tools.

Again, these are designed to work well on a tablet so you could hold it in your hand and drive your presentation by touch instead of crouching over the keyboard.

Outlook 2013

Outlook uses the clean Windows 8 look to make your inbox look less cluttered without putting much less information on screen. That makes room for tools that let you work right where you are.

Reply to an email using the button at the top of the message and you're typing in the main Outlook window, above the message you were reading. You can pop it out into a separate window if you need to, but this is a clean way of working.

If you click away from your reply it's automatically saved into the draft folder and the mail you were replying to gets an orange Draft label on it (making that stand out against the rest of the interface is one reason for the signature colour of Outlook changing from orange to blue). We also like the option to change the zoom for the message you're reading to fit more of it on screen.

Touch mode in Outlook 2013 gets the same mini-menu as in the other apps but the touch option also puts a bar of five frequent commands (reply, delete, move to folder, flag and mark as unread)about where your thumb will be if you're holding a tablet in both hands in landscape. There are some attractive 'touches', such as using pinch-to-zoom in the Outlook calendar to zoom between day, week and month views.

In all the desktop Office 2013 apps finger right-click works better than anywhere else in the Windows 8 desktop.

If you're writing an email or editing an appointment, press and hold and instead of a context menu you get a finger-sized bar of handy commands. This includes the useful options from the mini Office bar such as bold and bullet points and adds Cut, Copy and Paste right where your finger already is.

In Outlook 2013 you also get a finger-friendly menu of commands for dealing with your inbox when you press and hold on the list of messages: tap in a field where you can type and the keyboard opens automatically so you don't have to press the little keyboard button on the taskbar.

Even more helpfully, when you have a keyboard attached to your tablet you can use your finger to put the cursor in the right pale without having the screen covered by a touch keyboard you don't need.

Fans of Windows Phone will be pleased to see the All and Unread buttons in the inbox; you can quickly jump between all your messages and just the ones you need to deal with.

This makes it much faster to get through email messages because every time you reply to, delete or just finish reading one, you're where you need to be to handle the next message without scrolling and selecting.

With all these handy tools you can probably keep the ribbon in Outlook minimised a lot of the time, making room for even more messages on screen. If so, you get one extra button that's always visible; click it to write email, make a new appointment, create a new contact or set up a new task depending on whether you're in mail, calendar, people or task views.

The new look is also a great design for the address book. Iimages from social networks are automatically used for a thumbnail view and you can see and edit contact details without having to open a separate window.

Like Windows Phone, Outlook automatically links together any contacts it believes are the same person, and adds their details from LinkedIn, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and any other social networks you connect to Outlook.

You can make links yourself, once you find the Link Contacts button on the menu that appears when you click the three dots at the side of the popup contact pane. Windows Store apps in Windows 8 have made this Windows Phone convention more familiar, but if you've not used either you might not realise it's a menu.

Once you do find the menu, this is a great way of getting Outlook to clean up all the duplicates that accumulate in your address book over the years, as well as seeing social network updates next to all the other details you have about people.

If colleagues are sharing their calendars with you, you can also see whether they're currently free (and for how long) and Lync is integrated so you can start a video or IM conversation anywhere you see someone's name.

You can swap between the mail, calendar, people and task windows (and the seldom used notes, folders and shortcuts) using text labels rather than the space-wasting buttons in Outlook 2010, but the new Peeks mean that often you won't need to do so.

Hover your mouse over the word 'Calendar' and you get a pop-up preview of today's appointments and tasks; click a day to see what you'll be doing. Hover over People to see frequent and favourite contacts and over Tasks for your to-do list and flagged emails.

This is just as convenient as having the details in the calendar bar on the right of the window all the time but less distracting. You can pin them back there if you want, but it's not as useful as it was in Outlook 2010 because you can no longer drag mails onto the calendar to create appointments on specific days. This is frustrating because it was a very useful feature.

The Suggest Replacement is a free Outlook app that will add a button to create an appointment automatically from the details in an email, but it only works if you have Exchange 2013.

If you do make it all the way into the Calendar you'll see a three-day weather forecast at the top of the screen (as long as you're online – it's not cached for later in case it gets out of date).

In many places the new interface is a big improvement. but Outlook is where the chunky Windows 8 notifications are the most intrusive. You get one for every new mail and they stack from the top-right of the screen down, rather than staying in the same place.

If you open Outlook after a long flight e, your screen fills up with multiple notifications. And while they fade away on their own, we didn't find a way to dismiss all of them at once, so you have the choice of waiting, playing whack-a-mole or remembering to tell Windows 8 to turn off notifications for an hour before you re-open Outlook.

Even more annoyingly, you can no longer delete a message or accept an invitation directly from the pop-up notification. This is another place where Office 2013 values clarity over productivity.

You can at least dismiss multiple alarms at once; these pop up in the familiar alarm window even on Windows 8, rather than as notifications.

Something that you'll welcome on tablets is the way the defaults when you set up an Exchange account are slightly different. You still get cached mode (so Outlook keeps copies of your mail from the server in a .OST file) but the default is to only download the last 12 months' worth of mail.

There's a slider in account settings to control that, and you can still have all your mail. If you don't, then you see another Windows Phone feature; when you do a search there's a link to search on the server if you haven't found what you're looking for.

On Windows 8, if you use your tethered phone or a mobile broadband dongle to get online, Outlook recognises you're using a metered connection and it doesn't send and receive email automatically to save your bandwidth. Click the notification at the top of the screen if you do want to connect and get your messages.

Outlook metred.png

Outlook 2013 warns you when you're on an expensive connection

It's a shame that Outlook 2013 loses a couple of useful features for the sake of the new interface because otherwise it's a great blend of the principles of Windows 8 design and the power of the desktop.

OneNote 2013, Access 2013 and Publisher 2013

OneNote 2013

OneNote 2013 is the best hidden secret in Office, a note taking application that's easy to use, organised like a paper notebook and crammed with features.

You can link notes to the original document, or a meeting from your Outlook calendar (handy to get the agenda or job titles and the correct spelling for everyone's names), or send information from any file or web page into OneNote. Insert an image and optical character recognition picks up any text in it automatically.

You can take audio and video recordings of meetings and have your written or typed notes time synced to them (a feature that's sadly missing in the Windows RT version).

OneNote now enables you to embed even more information – embed Excel and Visio files and you can see the live content in your notebook. The table tools are much better than in previous versions, and you can turn a table into an embedded Excel spreadsheet to get more formula options.

All the Office 2013 applications have the Touch Mode button; the core apps (but not Publisher or Access) also have a Full Screen Mode button next to the minimise and maximise buttons.

Instead of just hiding the ribbon, status bar and most of the rest of the interface to enable you to concentrate on your document (as it did in the Customer Preview), this now brings up another mini-menu letting you choose between hiding the ribbon, only showing the ribbon tabs or showing the full ribbon. This duplicates the little arrow on the ribbon that collapses the commands, but it's easier to find if you don't already know how the ribbon works.

OneNote has an even more extreme view that hides everything but the notebook picker (and the button to get the rest of the interface back), leaving you the full page to take notes on - ideal on a tablet. Click the arrow at the top of the page and your note expands to fill the screen or see the normal interface.

There are some new ways of presenting tools that can get irritating. OneNote's handy screen clipping, Send to OneNote and quick note features are combined into an odd pop-up window that showcases these useful options but proves intrusive once you know what they are and how to get to them, and the pop-up doesn't even close properly.

It also commandeers the Windows-N shortcut for making a new quick note (renamed from side note because it's not really at the side of the screen and hasn't been for several versions), so you have to press Windows-N N. Thankfully Windows-S still works for clipping information from anywhere on screen into your notes.

It's hard to show new users an important feature without irritating experienced users by getting in their way, and you can turn off the popup. But the detailed options for choosing where different types of information go when you send them to OneNote are very welcome; you can set default folders and other options for email, web pages and other sources individually.

OneNote was the first application to sync between PCs, onto SkyDrive and the OneNote web app and to a wide range of smartphones. That now includes Windows RT; what's rather confusingly called OneNote for Windows 8 is a free WinRT version of OneNote.

This has a large proportion of the OneNote tools, and even more touch features, although it only opens notebooks you keep on SkyDrive.

Select text in the OneNote WinRT app with your finger and you get the new radial menu - the finger equivalent of the mini Office bar that fades into view when you select text with a mouse, and even easier to use than the finger-sized version you get in the Office 2103 desktop apps.

You can tap to choose a pen colour, then swipe round to pick the shade you want. Tap to change text size and swipe round to pick how large you make it.

There's an undo button and a button to apply tags. This puts the most useful OneNote features quite literally at your fingertips, with the radial menu appearing on the right of the screen, where your thumb is if you're holding a widescreen tablet in both hands (as you might notice, Microsoft has definite views about how most people will hold tablets).

You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like Windows RT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.

You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like WinRT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.

Access 2013

Access continues its journey to being less a database and more a database app development tool. It has the same clean new interface as the rest of Office and that carries through to the applications you can build and the controls you put in them.

You can still create both desktop and web apps as well as SharePoint lists, but web apps now run on SharePoint or Office 365 and now look like WinRT applications, complete with an app bar and other navigation options.

Publisher 2013

Publisher gets the same tool for inserting pictures from online services as Word and PowerPoint (but not videos, even if you're creating a web publication), and the same task panes and formatting tools, as well as the rest of the new interface.

It even has Touch Mode, which is probably more useful for checking publications than laying them out. Oddly for a DTP package, it's one of the last applications to keep the small floating spell check dialogue.

Replacing and switching images is far easier than in previous versions. Publisher now puts new images you insert in a column in the scratch area rather than dumping them all on the page. Drag an image from the scratch area or elsewhere in the layout until it's over an existing image and a pink highlight appears around the existing image; let go and the new image appears there instead.

If you want to use an image as a full page background you can just right-click and choose Apply To Background (as a fill or a tile). There are also lots of new formatting options for images and text.

We like the new 'photo printing' option that saves each page of your document as a JPEG; ideal if you want to use a photo book printing service to create an album as a keepsake using your own layout.

Publisher already had features ranging from a full set of alignment guides to support for OpenType stylistic alternates to 'building blocks' for creating common objects such as pull quotes, banners, calendars, adverts and more. These new features may not be major but they're certainly welcome and this is a powerful DTP package that's easy to use.

Verdict

With a new version of Office, the first question that always springs to mind is whether there is anything new that Microsoft can add to a mature and powerful productivity package.

Word is a product with 20 years of features and being able to insert videos and online images is more a matter of catching up with the times than a major new feature. But PDF Flow and the massive improvements in tracking changes and comments in documents are hugely useful and if you have a touchscreen PC, this is by far the best version of Office to use on it.

All of the key Office applications get new features that are well implemented and equally well worth having.

Also, with the switch to subscription pricing, the days of asking 'is it worth upgrading for this feature, no matter how useful?' are over. When new features come along, you'll just get them for the same price. But you won't be able to skip a year if you're happy with what you have, so do the sums on what Office costs you long term.

We liked

Office 2013 is about more than a new interface. From little touches such as animating calculations as they change to new tools that help you get the Excel chart that shows what's important in your data, from in-place replies in Outlook to change tracking and commenting in Word that doesn't make your document look like a battlefield, the desktop apps get worthy new features.

We like the new tools for designing presentations in PowerPoint. We like the new presenter tools even more. Whether you create presentations or just sit through them, PowerPoint 2013 should make your life better.

If you switch PCs often, you'll love the fast streaming install and seeing your recent documents on every PC. And we're looking forward to getting more new features through Office 365 instead of waiting three years for neat new features that you might want without paying for an upgrade (or spend the time updating every PC in the office).

We disliked

Sometimes cleaning up for the Windows 8 look means dumbing down. Advanced features such as Split View and Autocorrect are now harder to use, which is a step backwards not forwards, and strangely at odds with the clear and simple way other powerful features such as Pivot Charts are exposed.

The newer your PC and the higher your screen resolution the more you will like the new interface. If you have an older PC with a low resolution screen, you'll have to minimise more of the interface to see the same amount of your document.

Final verdict

If you look at a list of the new features in Office 2013, you might not see any one feature you can't live without, but after even a few days of using the new applications there are plenty that you'll miss. This is another big advance in usability, combined with some extremely clever new tools.

Performance is excellent and the Office 2013 programs are slick and smooth in use.

There are features for power users, especially in Excel and PowerPoint, and there are others that either make it easier to use the power of existing tools or give you whole new ways to complete tasks without being an expert.

While this isn't a perfect touch version of Office, the improved Touch Mode is extremely usable on any decent touchscreen PC. What's missing is a version of Outlook for Windows RT users (and there's nothing for iPad users).

Mostly Office 2013 gets the right balance between streamlining and oversimplifying; there are some places where we miss specific power user options, but the sheer usability and ease of use will give the vast majority of uses a much better experience.

The great thing about a subscription service is that you won't have to wait as long to get updates and improvements; they won't change the fundamentals but you will keep getting more options the longer you pay for Office 2013.

Introduction

Full form factor laptops have died a death in the last few months as the new focus of Windows 8 has put the emphasis on portability and hybrids. If it doesn't turn into a tablet, manufacturers don't really want to know, but that's not much use for people who want power, performance and comfort - and that's where the Series 7 Chronos. You may also see it branded as the Samsung Ativ Book 8.

This model is an update to Samsung's premium 15.6-inch performance laptop, which adds a touchscreen to the existing sleek, brushed metal body. It's for anyone who needs true computing power, for running multiple programs and being creative, but who still wants to take advantage of all Windows 8's super new touchscreen features.

It's truly a laptop first, unlike other touchscreen alternatives such as the HP Envy x2 or Samsung Ativ Smart PC, which have the innards of a laptop but the form of a tablet. If you're looking for a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and a large screen, the Samsung Ativ Book 8 (model number NP780Z5E) is for you.

The expansive display is great for Windows 8, offering a generous portion of your apps at the Start screen, with any press of the Windows key. Having such a big screen means you're able to use more of Windows 8's features, such as the window snapping, so you can use two apps side-by-side.

However, the setup highlights the interesting decision made by Acer to switch the trackpad and keyboard on its Aspire R7. The result is that the Samsung asks you to use its keyboard and mouse by placing the device in front of you, and it's awkward to raise your hands across the screen 'zombie-style' to use the touchscreen. The traditional clamshell design of the laptop means it's hard to use in a touchscreen format, and the immobility of the screen is a drawback of the Samsung Series 7 Chronos.

A top-of-the-range machine with stunning performance and a super-thin chassis isn't likely to come cheap, and you'll need fairly deep pockets to afford the Samsung Series 7 Chronos. At £1,199/US$1,299 this is a serious outlay, and you're paying for the blistering performance.

The irony is that you actually pay twice - firstly with the price tag and then with the added weight, and this means you need to ask yourself a serious question - do you need this power, or would you rather have something to slip into your bag more easily?

To help you make this decision, let's review the Samsung Series 7 Chronos in depth.

Specifications

So what's under the hood of this Korean-made beast? Well, the specs are impressive indeed. Firstly, there's an Intel Core i7 3635QM processor chip, which is one of the fastest you'll find out there, clocked at an impressive 2.4GHz. This will handle pretty much anything you throw at it, and is perfect for power-hungry users who want to edit video, images and run rich websites all at the same time.

Back that up with the 8GB of RAM that comes as standard and you have one nifty laptop.

Intel Core processors are so powerful they can take care of most tasks all on their own, but Samsung has added an AMD Radeon HD 8800M dedicated graphics chip inside too, which does its fair share of work.

With dedicated graphics - something you'd never find on a laptop-tablet hybrid - you can run games and HD movies much faster, but the chip can take some of the load off the processor too. You'll find the whole system more responsive, and that's immediately evident on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos.

Samsung has added a Full HD 1920 x 1080 panel to the Chronos, which on full brightness is eye-searingly bright. It's got a glossy coating that aids swiping with your finger, but it's incredibly shiny, which could be problematic in bright conditions when working outside or near big office windows.

Overall, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos's build quality is superb, especially considering there's so much power harnessed into such a sleek design. The brushed metal oozes class and the laptop opens to reveal an equally metallic chassis, complete with a spacious keyboard and expansive colour-coded trackpad. It's an Aston Martin that's vintage in its design yet fearsome in its execution.

Like a classic sports car, it's also heavy, and at 2.5kg (5.4lbs), it's not that portable. You wouldn't want it in your bag all day, and its weight harks back to laptops of old, which were bulky and cumbersome. The sleek lines and thin design makes the weight surprising, and this will be the main turn-off for prospective buyers.

By combining great multi-touch features and brilliant accuracy, the trackpad is a triumph, and while we often criticise laptops for low travel keys, the sheer spaciousness of the keyboard makes typing a pleasure.

Because this machine evidently isn't designed to be mobile, the connections on offer are more generous than its tablet companions. You get Ethernet, which is music to the ears of regular hotel room hoppers, plus HDMI and four USB ports. There's also VGA and an SD card slot to finish off a sublime port performance.

Performance

Benchmarks
Cinebench: 16259
3D Mark: Ice: 44064, Cloud Gate: 5679, Fire: 661
Battery score: 327 minutes

We ran our usual benchmark tests on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos and found double the power of the top Windows 8 laptop-tablet hybrid here, along with processor performance that rivals the latest gaming laptops.

Combine that with a fantastic performance in our graphics tests and one can see that Samsung has created a formidable machine.

Some of the latest laptop devices such as the HP Spectre XT, which is similarly priced and pitched, were blown out of the water by the Samsung Series 7 Chronos, and the score of over 16,000 in Cinebench is a reflection of its sheer power.

The only machines we've seen managing this level of score are gaming behemoths and slabs of thick plastic from Medion. To have this kind of power in a machine that looks this good is a pleasant surprise.

Graphics power was also impressive, and it delivered roughly double the power of laptops that use Intel's graphics chip, the 4000 HD. This is essential for users who have designs on heavy video editing or gaming, and you'll see the latest titles handed with aplomb on this mature and grown up device.

While we wouldn't class this as an out and out gaming laptop, for those who consider impeccable frame rates on the highest settings a benchmark for greatness, those who'd like to play games such as the new Sim City, or even BioShock Infinite, should be able to manage a decent experience with the settings turned down.

However, this only really applies to the top-of-the-range Samsung Series 7 Chronos model, and if you're looking to save a couple of hundred pounds or dollars by plumping for the Core i5 model, you would need to revise these expectations.

Despite its weight, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is cunningly disguised as a hipster's stylish companion, and we certainly wouldn't be ashamed to pull this machine out in our local Starbucks.

However, as well as requiring a strong back it will also need plenty of battery to last the day - something not usually associated with gaming level laptops.

With all that power, battery life was shorter than average, but we still managed a decent five hours of movie watching in our real-life tests, which involve looping a high-definition video until it dies.

It's a good result from a laptop that's designed for the desk rather than the road, and it opens up the possibility of working in cafe, watching movies while traveling or just enjoying using your laptop in the garden.

Verdict

While the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is a beautiful laptop, the PC is dying. Unless you're regularly pushing your device to its limits, most users will be happy with the performance offered by Microsoft Surface Pro or the HP Envy x2. They still have Intel Core power, and when compared with this hefty price tag, you could still afford to have a big screen and a full-sized wireless keyboard set up on your desk.

The days of the full-form clamshell laptop being the only choice for people who want a marriage of work and play have passed, and unless you need every ounce of processing power, more versatile Windows 8 machines are available in your price range, and are worthy alternatives.

We liked

The immense power of the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is genuinely impressive, and it offers near gaming-level performance in a machine that you could carry in a bag and use day to day. With the top of the range processor and dedicated graphics card considered, the slim lines and sleek brushed metal finish are to be applauded.

The upgraded screen is another highlight, and the expansive panel works brilliantly in Windows 8. The deep colours and detailed, pin-sharp visuals make this a truly premium laptop, and add to that the responsive and accurate touchscreen capability and you have a stunning high-end laptop.

This is one of the stand-out laptops you'll see this year, marrying top-notch design with fantastic usability.

We disliked

As a laptop, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is one of the best you'll find, but our gripes come from a general view of where computing is going, and how you should spend your £1,200/US$1,300. There's stacks of power here, but portability is limited, and this is an issue for many buyers. Most people will happily get by on half the amount of power here, and that means Ultrabooks such as the Dell XPS 13 or Asus Zenbook could be better options, financially speaking.

Next, there's design. The Samsung Series 7 Chronos makes few allowances for the touchscreen user, and while form factors are starting to change across the computing world, this is very much stuck in 2011. Hybrid devices and tablets are making in-roads, especially backed by Windows 8, but aside from touch - which we believe most users will shun in favour of the familiar trackpad - the Samsung Series 7 Chronos does little to embrace the new computing experience.

If you're looking for a home laptop, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is as good as it gets, but in a year's time the traditional desk-bound clamshell will seem very old fashioned.

Final verdict

The Samsung Series 7 Chronos is one of the best Windows laptops money can buy, but in this changing world of computing, we urge you as a buyer to consider whether your needs would be served better with a lighter, more mobile machine with less emphasis on huge power.

If you're looking for a fantastic laptop today, however, this superb machine comes highly recommended.