Chrome users are in for a bit of fun today - the conversational voice search shown off at Google I/O is now live with the Chrome 27 update.

This means Chrome will respond to you when using voice search function. All users need to do is go to Google.com, clock the mic icon and grant permission to the new feature. And if your query is too broad, Google's response will handily come with information cards as well.

It's not quite at the "Ok, Google" point yet - you'll still need to click that microphone every time you want to chat to Chrome. But hey, it's always nice to have a new friend, right?

More blips!

"Ok Google, show me some brilliant blips"

• Student beats tech industry to the punch with 20-second phone charger
• Japan joins China as HTC One gets a MicroSD slot, again
• Apple's hook up with Bang With Friends is over

Companies can help the economy by using more properly licensed software, according to industry group BSA/The Software Alliance.

But it has been criticised for not facing up to the fact that some firms see more advantage for themselves in using pirated software, or at least turning a blind eye to its source.

BSA is citing a study, Competitive Advantage: The Economic Impact of Properly Licensed Software, carried out by the international business school INSEAD. It's claiming that for every 1% increase in the use of licensed software the activity generates about £2 billion in national production, compared with just £469 million when it's pirated.

It estimates that each additional pound invested in legal software there is a £37 return on investment.

Bottom line

Julian Swan, Director, Compliance Marketing at BSA EMEA, said: "Using properly licensed software reduces risk and creates operating efficiencies that go direct to the bottom line for business."

But a past critic of BSA is questioning the validity of the figures and claims the BSA is missing the point for many businesses.

Matt Fisher, Director licensed management solutions firm Licensed Dashboard, said: "Haven't the BSA realised their messaging isn't resonating yet? Making highfaluting claims as to the economic benefits of non-pirated software will do very little to cut piracy.

"It is firms, not abstract 'economies', that need to be shown the value of software since they're the ones that actually use it."

Are you happy with your body? Or is just too darned organic? The fusing of man and machine is already happening, with so-called 'body hackers' implanting cameras, brainwave sensors and magnets in their bodies to allow everything from mind-control gadgets to dreaming in sound and navigation by vibration.

For now, these experiments are the reserve of 'grinders', a small group of DIY body modifiers who design, build and test their own modifications, but they may not remain outside the mainstream for long.

Google Glass might be called revolutionary by some, but could this mass-market wearable device also be an important step in human evolution?

As a standalone gadget, the much-anticipated Explorer Edition probably won't be as mind-blowing as some might think, but it could be a catalyst for a new era where electronics are worn, and where body hacking becomes the ultimate in geek chic.

Over 485 million of us will be wearing a web-connected watch, camera, eyepiece, pacemaker or other device by 2018, according to ABI Research. The web is becoming wearable.

Are wearable gadgets socially acceptable?

Anyone who remembers seeing the first Bluetooth hands-free headsets a decade ago will recall thinking their wearers crazy lunatics - some still might - though using a smartphone in public has no such connotations.

And despite their initial rarity value, it took almost no time for tablets and ebook readers to illicit zero interest from fellow commuters. Mike Hallett, Director of Sales for North America at video headset-makers Vuzix - whose M100 eyepiece will compete with Google Glass - thinks the same will happen to eyewear.

"Many trades and leisure pursuits already accept head-mounted gear," he says, picking out head torches, intelligent ski goggles and earpieces as just some of the head enhancements already worn throughout society.

"Wearable technologies are not new, but what is are the functions of wearable devices and the form factors. As these change, eyewear will become less obtrusive to vision and will become acceptable and welcomed by everyday users."

Gowthaman Ragothaman, Chief Client Officer Asia Pacific at global media agency Mindshare, isn't so sure. "I must admit that a lot needs to be done with the head-mounted display to make the device less intrusive," he says. "It will need to be made into a fashion statement or a fashion accessory to become socially acceptable."

Are there any gadgets I can already wear?

Smartwatches like the Pebble, Martian and I'm Watch already exist - and Apple could follow suit soon - but there are a host of more interesting wearable gadgets already out there.

The market in 'wearables' is being spearheaded by fitness gadgets such as the Nike FuelBand, Fitbit One, Powerbreathe K5, Tinke and Omegawave.

Other efforts at wearables include Memeto, an always-on 'lifelogging' camera that clips to clothes and shoots an image twice a minute, automatically uploading to a smartphone app, and Larklife, a fitness-awareness armband that uses an accelerometer and Bluetooth to record your every move on a smartphone.

Google's effort at headwear might be the most anticipated, but the heads-up display has been pioneered by the likes of the Sony HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer, the Vuzix M100, Oculus Rift, Epson Moverio BT-100 and the Oakley Airwave smart ski goggles.

The latter, ski goggles that present live data such as speed, altitude and time on an eyepiece in the lens, is marketed with the slogan 'straight to your brain'. For now, it's just marketing, but the use of such language is interesting in a conditioning sense - when gadgets like these actually do interact with our bodies and brains, we'll likely already be used to the idea.

How does the wearable web help the individual and wider society?

"This is a personal experience and how each person uses a product will be different, so one person may want to have constant updates on stock quotes, while another needs directions while walking, while another may want translation of signs and maps," says Hallett of eyewear and heads-up displays. "It's all about information access on the go, when you want it."

There are more serious scenarios for wearables. Emotiv's EPOC headset, which can read brain signals, has been used by visual artists, and by disabled people to operate a mind-controlled electric wheelchair.

The Muse headband is, for now, only able to discern two variables in calculating whether a brain is stressed or relaxed, but maker InteraXon is promising extended features in the future that will allow the user to control a TV, computer or a tablet - something that consumer electronics company Haier has already demoed.

Headsets and eyewear will eventually be made smaller, of course, with wearables eventually becoming completely hidden. "As technology becomes more ingrained into our lives, it is likely to evolve to become an invisible layer upon our bodies," says Mark Curtis, Chief Client Officer at global service design consultancy Fjord, which created PayPal Mobile and the BBC iPlayer for mobile. He's talking about low-power, flexible screens being available on almost any product imaginaeble, and that includes clothes.

Techy clothes are already available from companies like CuteCircuit, which uses conductive fabrics to produce LED-studded dresses that light up in response to either music or mood.

Again, it gets much more serious than that, with the Smart Clothes and Wearable Technology Research Centre at the University of Wales Newport investigating the use of smart textiles in clothing to help with the challenges of ageing. Sensors buried within the fabric can monitor heart rate or even trigger a personal alarm, thereby replacing the functions of a fiddly phone.

Self-heating clothes could be one way of solving the winter fuel problem - you heat yourself rather than an entire house or room - but for now it's limited to ski-centric gadgets like Rohan's Powerstation self-heating winter gloves.

What is body hacking and transhumanism?

"While many body hackers embrace implants that enhance seemingly minor aspects of their everyday lives, concerns about magnifying intelligence, improving physiology and extending life are at the core of both professional and amateur practices," says Clare Acheson at Stylus, a research and advisory firm who produced a report earlier this year entitled Technological Body Modification: The Search for Singularity.

The report explores transhumanism and the 'temporary cyborgs' as seen in YouTube sensation True Skin, but increasingly in real life via DIY creations like the EyeBorg prosthetic 'digital' eye and the sonar, UV, WiFi and temperature-aware Bottlenose from Grindhouse WetWare, an echolocation device that translates data into a magnetic field that interacts with a magnet implanted in a human body.

The result is that users feel vibrations and learn what they mean. One example given is that someone with an implant could tell via a vibration in their finger how strong a cafe's WiFi connection is as they walk by. Banal, but impressive.

The end-game for all this is 'singularity': a state of super-intelligence that could entail endless implants and body modifications - and the end of humanity as we know it. A long time before we get there, however, will be the embracing of wearable technology by the internet's biggest brands; Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

It's already possible to check-in on Facebook by touching the side of the Cookoo smartwatch, and such trickery on all kinds of gadgets is only a software release away. Expect to hear much about 'designing for context' as the mobile web moves into wearables.

Are wearable gadgets bad for us?

No one wants a rusty implant, but even passive technology such as smartwatches and headsets can encourage a reliance on and addiction to gadgets that many of us - let's be honest - already fear is occurring (you check your emails in bed?).

"There is a possible health risk with always-on gadgets," says Ragothaman, who thinks it is a psychological challenge to have so many choices that we never had before. "We are becoming spoilt with options and the sheer fact that so much information is available in front of your eyes. It has become more than an addiction to always-on gadgets - it has become a big stress and a distraction."

The Government is providing an extra three weeks for proposals to win a share of the third tranche of the Rural Community Broadband Fund.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is administering the fund, says that anyone after a slice of the £20 million pie now has until June 17 rather than May 24 to make their applications.

Groups such as social and community enterprises, businesses, community trusts and charities can pitch for 50% of project costs to get new infrastructure in place.

Defra appears to be assuming that some applicants are struggling to get their proposals together in time. A department representative told TRPro that the more than 50 applications so far are in line with expectations, and that it just wants to ensure that groups don't need more time.

Two previous rounds of bids for funds were completed in 2012.

Here's a familiar yet nightmarish scenario: you've burned the midnight oil to write up that report your boss has demanded for first thing in the morning, but when you get to work you discover you've left the file on your PC's desktop. What should you do? Resign, plead for mercy or just run?

Well the answer - if you've got a piece of software called TeamViewer installed on your PC - is relax.

TeamViewer is a clever and very powerful program that will let you take remote control of a PC over the internet. This makes it ideal for retrieving forgotten files, and it's also a great way of helping friends and family with their computer problems without leaving the comfort of your desk.

If you're a home user you can download and install the software for free. For business use, see the licensing options. As you read on we'll discover how to rescue that forgotten file and also how to take remote control of your desktop PC. Here's how to do it.

Step-by-step: Get files from your PC remotely

1. Grab the software

TeamViewer is like a telephone conversation made between two PCs, so both machines will need to have the software installed. We're going to assume you've a main desktop PC and a laptop that you take out and about with you. To get started, download TeamViewer on your desktop PC from www.teamviewer.com.

2. Get configured

Now click 'Run' at the bottom of the screen and, when prompted, accept the license agreement. You'll need to check the two tick boxes here as well. Finally, when prompted, choose 'Personal/ non-commercial use' and click 'Next'. The next screen is called 'Set up unattended access'. All you need do is click 'Next' to proceed.

3. Make an account

On the next screen, you'll need to give your computer a password. Once you've chosen one, click 'Next'. On the following screen you'll be asked to provide your email address and a TeamViewer password; make a note of this password, because you'll need it later. Click 'Next' when you're done.

4. Activate your team

You will now see a screen that looks like the one above. Don't worry about the passwords at this point - we'll use those later. Your final job is to access your email inbox and find a message from TeamViewer. You'll need to open it and click on the long link, which will activate your TeamViewer registration.

5. Set up your laptop

Next, it's time to fire up your laptop and install TeamViewer there, too. When you're done, you'll need to follow the same steps as before until you reach the screen above. This time, select 'I already have a TeamViewer account' and enter the email address you registered with, along with your TeamViewer password.

6. Take control

Let's be adventurous and give full control of your desktop to your laptop. Looking at your main PC, note down the number next to 'Your ID'. Now, working on your laptop, enter this number into the 'Partner ID' box. Click 'Connect to partner' and enter your TeamViewer password. You'll see your desktop PC's Windows desktop appear.

7. Access your PC remotely

Working on your laptop, you should now be able to move icons around on your other PC. You can open programs, close programs and make system configuration changes too. In this mode, TeamViewer is also ideal for troubleshooting PCs remotely. Set it up as before and you'll be able to help your friends without leaving your own home.

8. Retrieve that file

If you've forgotten to transfer a file from your desktop, close the windows that control your other PC, then look under 'Control remote computer' in the TeamViewer display. Select 'File transfer > Connect > Log on'. Navigate to your file and select it. Click 'Retrieve' and it will be transferred to your laptop's My Documents folder.

Introduction

With the Nook HD, US bookstore giant Barnes & Noble entered the wide-open 7-inch tablet market, but with the 9-inch Nook HD+ it faces a single and much more daunting foe.

The full-sized tablet market continues to be thoroughly dominated by the device that defined it - Apple's peerless iPad. When even Google and its technically impressive Nexus 10 can't make an impression at retail, what hope does the Nook HD+ have?

With a super-sharp 9-inch display, a slim and lightweight body, and a £229/US$269 full price tag for the 16GB version - or £269/US$299 for the 32GB model - Barnes & Noble certainly has some notable bullet-points to put on the box. But does the user experience match the raw specs?

In that respect it needs to learn a few lessons from close rival the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9, which got the price and performance just about right, but failed as a full-fat tablet experience.

The Nook HD+ wins instant points for its unique design. While you'd struggle to pick an Amazon Kindle Fire HD from a lineup of budget tablets, here we have a device that sports a couple of key visual flourishes.

Chief among these is the large hole-grip situated on the bottom left-hand corner of the tablet (in portrait view). It might be there to hook a lanyard through, but it also serves as a handy thumb-grip when handling the device, enabling you to get real purchase on it with a single hand.

Yes, unlike the iPad, this is a full-fat tablet that's light enough to hold in one hand - at least for brief periods. At just 510g (18oz), the Nook HD+ is almost 140g (5oz) lighter than the iPad 4. That's roughly the weight of an HTC One shorn from its body.

This has been achieved, inevitably, through the heavy (or should that be light?) use of plastics, though that's not to say the Nook HD+ feels especially cheap. It's no iPad mini on the premium components scale, but it feels fairly firm in the hand.

We did get some disconcerting flexing and creaking when we applied a little two-handed pressure, but in general usage it's a reasonably solid construction.

One slight negative from an aesthetic point of view is that typical bulging Nook bezel, which provides a raised ridge around the screen. With the aforementioned corner grip sitting flush with the screen, it makes the Nook HD+ look a little like a skinnier tablet that's been slid into some kind of protective bumper.

Still, the thick border aids handling, and will doubtless provide protection should you put the device down screen-first when in a hurry (shame on you).

Around the back, the Nook HD+ has a pleasingly tactile matt finish that reminds us of the Kindle Fire HD range. Curiously, there's only one speaker grille here compared to the dual setup of the smaller Nook HD.

In terms of hardware buttons, the Nook HD+ benefits from a physical home key on the front, although the tiny n-shape doesn't feel as reassuringly clicky as Apple's iPad equivalent. But then, it only has two simple functions to fulfill - to wake the device up and to return you to the home screen.

The other physical keys are even more vague, with the power button situated at the top of the right-hand side (again when held in portrait view), and the volume rocker just around the corner on the top edge, with a 3.5mm jack alongside.

These hardware keys are small and non-descript, and it takes a while until you can reliably hit them without having to look or feel around the edges.

One component that definitely punches above the Nook HD+'s weight is its 9-inch display. With a resolution of 1920 x 1280, it's virtually as sharp as the latest iPad's Retina display, and it's also remarkably clear.

If you're used to the colder, bluish tinge of the iPad, you might find the tone of the display a little yellowish, but it makes for an easier text-reading experience (Nooks are, after all, ebook readers above all else) and isn't as pronounced as, say, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7.0.

Finally, along the bottom of the device we have a proprietary 30-pin port rather than a universal micro USB port. If like us you love the fact that you can lug a single charger around for your Android tablet, Android phone and point-and-shoot camera, you'll find this particularly annoying.

There is some good news to be found along the bottom edge of the Nook HD+ though, in the shape of a microSD slot. Yes, unlike the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 and the iPad, you can expand the Nook's memory by up to 64GB relatively cheaply.

All in all, the Nook HD+ is a well constructed tablet with a fine screen and an appreciable weight advantage over its rivals. It may not look the prettiest, but we'd back it to go a year or two without picking up any noticeable bumps or nicks, which is more than can be said for any iPad we've owned.

Interface and performance

Like the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, the Nook HD+ is essentially an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with a heavily customised interface layered on the top.

Indeed, Barnes & Nobel has taken a leaf out of its formidable rival's (e)book in producing a simplified home screen that pushes media content to the fore, ahead of even core tablet functions such as email, internet or widgets.

Curiously, despite this simplified approach the Nook HD+ interface feels sluggish, with frequent and noticeable stutters throughout.

This can be seen from the first time you wake the device from its sleep, which seems to take half a second longer than it should.

Speaking of the lock screen, it's possible to access multiple accounts straight from here, as you would on a PC. This enables you to filter out unsuitable content for a child's profile, for example, or to remove the ability to access the internet or settings menu.

You can switch between these (or set up a new profile) at any time by hitting your profile picture at the top-left of the home screen, though it can take a good few seconds for the Nook HD+ to make the change.

Past the lock screen and into the home screen you'll find a content carousel that, like Amazon's Silk UI, features the most recently accessed apps and multimedia content.

This too seems afflicted by the general lethargy found elsewhere in the operating system, with the panning and scaling of the icons far from buttery smooth.

Admittedly the Nook HD+ is hardly powered by the most cutting edge of processors, but its 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4470 CPU should really be capable of running such a lightweight UI without a hitch.

In terms of general layout, though, the Nook HD+'s UI is more or less as clean and unfussy as that of the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

Adding app and media shortcuts to one of the five home screens is a simple matter of pressing and holding on an empty area of the screen.

This brings up a nicely arranged sub-menu that separates items in categories such as Library, Apps and Wallpapers.

There's even a Bookmarks category that pulls out your favourite internet shortcuts from your selected browser (which is now Chrome by default).

Dragging these icons around the screen is far quicker and more fluid than any other tablet OS we've used. In fact, it's almost too easy to do - you just need to touch and drag, with no holding or confirmation phase whatsoever.

Below these secondary app icons (or to the right if held in landscape orientation) is a row of five fixed icons that provide a handy shortcut to key functions including Library, Apps, Web, Email and the Nook Shop.

At the very bottom of the home screen is a search command that enables you to scour your Nook for a particular app or piece of media.

Alongside this to the right is a multitasking command which - like the search function - remains constantly available in the Nook HD+'s permanent black border, regardless of the present app or task you're in. Pressing it brings up a list of recent tasks that can be jumped to instantly.

Disappointingly, these aren't thumbnails of the specific tasks as in the stock Android OS, but simply their representative icons. But at least B&N has given some attention to the matter of multitasking, unlike Amazon.

There's also a notification menu of sorts, although it lacks the tactile pull-down shutter operation of stock Android and most of its bespoke variants.

Rather, you simply press the top-centre of the screen to raise the notification pane. Items such as messages, app downloads and calendar appointments can then be jumped to with a touch or dismissed with a swipe, as usual.

Touching to the right of this notification area, which contains the time, Wi-Fi connectivity symbol and settings and battery icons, will bring up the settings menu.

Just below this is another original Nook flourish - a circular icon containing the words 'Your Nook Today.' Press this to get local weather information from AccuWeather, as well as multimedia recommendations based on your recent library activity.

Internet and email

Internet

Following a recent update, the Nook HD+ uses Google's own Chrome web browser by default.

This is largely a positive move, since Chrome is pretty much the best tablet browser around. It works here just as it does on any other Android tablet.

You can add and flip between tabs by touching on the appropriate section along the top, launch searches or type in specific web pages in the unified URL field just below this, and access your bookmarks and other settings from a still-rather-clunky drop-down menu to the right.

However, you will have to make do without some of the neat functions of the original Nook browser, such as an offline reading mode and the ArticleView reader mode.

Still, a download of Pocket or some other decent reader app will cover this loss.

And the general familiarity and speed of the Chrome mobile browser - not to mention its ability to sync bookmarks with the desktop version - makes it a worthwhile trade.

Performance on the Nook HD+ is good, with web pages being rendered predictably well on its crisp HD display.

However, there seemed to be a slight lag when it came to scrolling and pinch-to-zooming on web pages.

Image-rich websites such as TechRadar really didn't seem to perform all that well on the tablet.

Email

The Nook HD+ comes with its own native email app, as represented by the fixed email shortcut on the home screen. Naturally this can be supplemented by specific email apps, particularly Gmail.

As default email apps go, though, the Nook's is as good as any. It's extremely quick and easy to set up your account - just the email address and password are typically all that's needed - and you can also feed multiple accounts into it without things getting too confusing.

A nifty colour-coded tagging system enables you to bundle all of your disparate emails together into a combined view.

Alternatively, you can switch between each account by touching the Mailbox command at the top of the screen.

As has become the accepted standard for tablet apps, the basic email app layout involves a split between folder options on the left and a list of individual emails on the right.

Tapping an email opens it out to the full page in portrait orientation, or three quarters of the page in landscape format.

The email app handles embedded images and HTML newsletters very well indeed, with no noticeable formatting or performance issues throughout our test.

It's here that you'll likely come into contact with the Nook HD+'s custom keyboard the most, and it acquits itself reasonably well in terms of accuracy and layout.

However, without a word suggestion system or a swipe-based input option we soon headed for the Google Play Store to seek out a more fully featured alternative such as SwiftKey.

Fortunately such a move is now at least possible, following the recent addition of the Google Play Store to the Nook HD+ package. More on this on the next page.

Movies, music and books

And so we come to the core reason for the Nook HD+'s existence - media consumption. Like the Amazon Kindle Fire series, Barnes & Noble's tablet is designed to be the focal point for thousands of books, movies, magazines and newspapers through the Nook Shop.

With the recent addition of the Google Play Store, you can now open that out to music as well.

With such a wide variety of HD content available for the Nook HD+, then, that microSD card slot starts to look like an inspired inclusion - and one that other Android tablet manufacturers need to emulate if they're going to continue offering 16GB entry-level models.

Transferring content from PC to Nook can be achieved the old-fashioned way, using the bundled USB cable to hook up directly. It's then a simple matter of dragging and dropping the relevant files.

Movies

Watching films on the Nook HD+'s 9-inch display is a joy. Indeed, with a 1920 x 1280 resolution, Full HD 1080p content feels perfectly at home on the tablet.

Of course, nothing eats up storage space like Full HD films - the HD version of The Bourne Legacy that B&N provided with our test device took up a whopping 7.31GB of space. If you plan on carrying a lot of high definition films around on your Nook HD+, we'd recommend going for a full 64GB card.

Playback quality is unimpeachable. The Nook HD+ handles the extra detail levels with aplomb - and more importantly without stutter.

As with virtually every tablet we've ever used, headphones are a must. The sound emitted through the Nook's single speaker grille is pretty crisp, but it obviously lacks clear stereo separation and low-end punch.

Thanks to the relatively low weight of the Nook, it's also a lot more comfortable to sit holding the device in your lap for two hours than it is with, say, an iPad.

You can find your own transferred videos in the Library section in among all your other media, or you can go through the Gallery.

In terms of file support, you're fine for MP4, 3GP and xVID content, but like with its little brother the Nook HD we couldn't get DivX files to work on the Nook HD+.

On the plus side, UltraViolet is fully supported, so you have a ready home for all those digital movie files you've been acquiring through your DVD and Blu-ray purchases.

In fact, you can sign into your UltraViolet account directly from the Nook HD+ settings menu, making transfers a doddle.

Of course, you can also rent or purchase films and TV shows from the Nook Shop.

New HD film rentals seem to cost £4.50 to £5 (US$5 to $6), with SD versions generally around the £3.50 ($4) mark. New HD films tend to be around the £14 ($20) mark to buy and keep forever.

Naturally, older films are cheaper - around £3.50 ($4) for an HD rental and £8 ($15) for an outright purchase.

When the Nook Video service finally launches, you'll also be able to stream TV shows and films directly to your Nook.

Add in the Google Play Store and its own vast selection of video content and you won't be stuck for something to watch on your Nook HD+ any time soon.

Music

Music is not Barnes & Noble's speciality, so with the recent software update it's wisely handed such matters over to Google.

Google Music is the new default music-playing app for the Nook HD+, and it's as slick and intuitive as it's ever been.

It can be located in the Apps folder, and booting up a transferred music file from storage for the first time will offer you the option to play through Google's service or the Spotify app, which also comes pre-installed.

Playing tracks appear in the notification bar, alongside pause and skip controls, though there are no lock screen music shortcuts.

Of course, Google Music isn't just a music player - it also offers you access to any music tracks you've uploaded to the cloud through the service (up to 20,000 tracks for free), enabling you to stream or download them directly to your Nook.

The Google Play Store also has a fairly comprehensive library of MP3s to purchase and download.

While it's not quite as extensive a selection as, say, Amazon's, it's generally decent and extremely competitively priced.

Needless to say, our advice to use headphones applies even more with music than it does with movies, since that single rear-pointing speaker array really doesn't cut it.

Books and magazines

While B&N doesn't do music, it certainly does do books and magazines. It's what the American company is built on, after all.

Sure enough, the top two categories in the Nook Shop are books and magazines, and there's a massive range of both to browse through and download.

There are plenty of books available for under £2.99 ($2.99) in all categories, while you can also subscribe to magazines and newspapers from within the appropriate section.

In both cases you can download free samples to get a taste of the book or magazine before committing to a purchase.

While B&N has the literary side of things pretty well sewn up on the Nook HD+, you also have access to Google's own books and magazines through Google Play.

The reading experience itself is very accomplished, with a reliable swipe-to-turn system and the ability to annotate, share and look up text with a press and hold on appropriate sections of text.

Pressing the arrow at the bottom of a page brings up further settings menus and options, which enable you to skip ahead, change the font size and type, play with line spacing and even tinker with the background colour.

The Nook's HD display renders plain text very crisply, and that slightly yellowish tinge we mentioned before actually seems to make the screen a little easier on the eye than the harsh iPad display.

It's still no replacement for a dedicated ereader, but if you're just reading a few pages a day it's more than up to the task.

The magazine reading experience, meanwhile, is really something special on the Nook HD+.

B&N has provided a lovely page-turning animation that reacts contextually - so if you swipe from the top corner of the page at an angle the page will 'fold' accordingly, revealing a part of the following page.

Gimmicky? Most definitely, and you'll doubtless overlook it after the initial novelty phase wears off.

But it makes navigating these digital magazines a surprisingly tactile experience that's second only to, well, a physical magazine.

You can also 'cut out' pages from your magazines and save them to a virtual scrapbook for later reference, which is a genuinely useful feature.

Apps and games

Apps

As we've already mentioned, the Nook HD+ now comes with access to the Google Play Store for apps - and it's a good thing too, given how poor the default Nook Shop is.

It's still presented front and centre here, but we predict that you'll swiftly forget about it (or at least attempt to) in favour of the vastly superior Google alternative.

Where the stripped back Nook Shop interface works reasonably well for books and movies, here, with a series of already basic app icons, it comes across as inefficient, unfinished and unappealing.

Navigation feels curiously cumbersome, with excessive horizontal and vertical scrolling for seemingly too few visible apps.

Speaking of too few apps, the selection in the Nook Shop is woeful. Off the top of our heads we can state that there's no Facebook, no Pocket, and no Feedly - and there are plenty more major omissions besides.

Even more inexplicable is the decision to unify the Nook Shop search function, so that seeking out the above three apps returned loads of unrelated books and magazines as well as apps.

You have to select apps from the additional drop-down Refine menu in order to narrow the field down, which is ridiculously clunky.

Thank goodness for Google Play, then. While you might find a couple of apps that don't run on the Nook, as we noted in our Nook HD review, most of the big hitters are present and accounted for.

This means around 700,000 apps are at your fingertips, many of which won't cost you a penny.

Google Play has really come into its own in recent years, and the latest redesign is a thing of stylish-but-functional beauty. It certainly puts Apple's App Store to shame for speed, intuitiveness and functionality - if not quite yet for range.

One tiny issue that the late addition of the Google Play Store has created is a split between official Nook apps and those from the main Android app store. This has been handled reasonably - if not exactly elegantly - by adding an 'n' to the icons of any apps downloaded from the Nook Shop.

On the plus side, the Google Play Store will recognise that you have a different version of its apps installed and offer you the ability to upgrade them, so there's really no compatibility issue here - just a spot of untidiness.

Games

The games situation on the Nook HD+ reads much like the wider apps situation - a woeful default provision dramatically bolstered by the belated introduction of the Google Play Store.

Suffice to say, if you thought the range of general apps was poor on the Nook Shop, you won't believe the meagre games offering.

There's no dedicated section for games on the Shop, only a sub-category in the main apps menu.

We won't mention all of the major titles that are missing here (there are fewer than 2,000 titles on there in total), suffice to say that we hadn't even heard of nine out of the 11 games highlighted in the meagre Must Have Games selection under the Apps category - and we're avid tablet gamers.

So let's move swiftly on to the Google Play games offering. As with apps, the Android gaming scene has improved immeasurably in recent years, thanks to the platform's sky-rocketing popularity and Google's improved support.

The result is a selection of games that's still notably inferior to Apple's, but is comfortably the second best mobile games offering out there.

Thanks to the capable dual-core TI OMAP CPU and PowerVR SGX544 GPU at the tablet's core - the same as can be found in the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 - the Nook HD+ will run the vast majority of games on the Google Play Store, and run them well at that.

You might think it would suffer for the lack of a modern quad-core CPU, but the truth is few if any games really take advantage of such a multi-core setup.

We tried one of our favourite games for testing out a device's gaming chops, FireMonkey's 3D arcade racing extravaganza Need For Speed Most Wanted, and found that it played well, with just the odd stutter here and there.

Considering the game has to push out some highly detailed 3D models to the Nook's HD display - which means a large hike in pixels to be rendered - that's pretty impressive.

Naturally your 69p ($0.99) casual wonders such as Angry Birds and Cut The Rope will play like a dream.

Battery and connectivity

Battery

Barnes & Nobel claims that you can get up to 10 hours of reading time and nine hours of video time out of a single charge of the Nook HD+'s 6,000mAh battery, but a brief glimpse at the small print should tell you to take these claims with a pinch of salt.

These figures were obtained with Wi-Fi tuned off and power saving mode switched on, which cuts the screen brightness to less than half, effectively reducing the Nook HD+ to an extremely dim - and somewhat dumb - media player.

In moderate real life use, which involves cranking the brightness right up, leaving the Wi-Fi on and using the tablet for occasional web browsing, a little reading and the odd five minutes of gaming here and there, it's more than up to the task of lasting a couple of days like any other tablet.

We also applied our standard battery test of running a 90 minute 720p video with notifications and Wi-Fi on and screen brightness set to high, and seeing how much juice was left at the end.

The average result was around 77%, which is about par for the course, but works out to be far short of the nine hour best-case scenario that B&N quotes in its blurb.

Connectivity

There are no connectivity surprises with the Nook HD+. It's a Wi-Fi-only tablet with no 3G option, so don't expect to be able to download a new page-turner while you're sat bored on a beach this summer. Unless said beach has Wi-Fi connections, of course.

Bluetooth support is also included, as expected.

In terms of physical connections, we'll reiterate what a joy it is to have expandable memory in the shape of a microSD slot on the bottom of the tablet.

It really does open up the storage possibilities without adding a massive price premium. Alongside this is a custom 30-pin connection for charging and hooking up to your computer.

Again, we'll state what an annoyance this is when a standard micro USB port would have been easier on the eye and a whole lot more convenient.

As it stands, you'll have yet another charger to lug around with you on your travels.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

The Nook HD+ is an undoubtedly flawed device that, at launch, looked like a poor proposition relative to its rivals.

But Barnes & Nobel has since adapted its offering, to the point where the Nook HD+ is now seriously worthy of your consideration as a budget full-sized tablet.

At £229/US$269 for the 16GB version, its full price matches that of its closest competitor, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9, while offering the same performance, a slightly superior display, expandable storage and - crucially - access to the Google Play Store. Currently reduced to £179 in the UK Nook Shop, it's now cheaper too.

We liked

The Nook HD+ sports a truly excellent screen that brings high definition media content to life.

It's also extremely light for a full-size tablet, making it as easy on the arms as its crisp picture is easy on the eye. If you're after a cheap but high-quality media player for a long journey, these two factors alone make it a serious contender.

We also applaud B&N's belated inclusion of the Google Play store. While it might muddy the user experience ever so slightly, it more than makes up for it by massively expanding the range and quality of multimedia content available for the tablet.

There are also a couple of original features that we approve of, including the possibility of setting up multiple accounts. Tablets are often shared among multiple family members, and this thoughtful touch increases that feeling of ownership - not to mention security and parental control.

We disliked

Screen aside, the Nook HD+ isn't a particularly pretty tablet to look at. Its bulging bezel makes it look like a much sleeker tablet has been slipped into a cheap case.

For all the improvements that access to Google Play has brought, the Nook Shop is still at the core of the Nook HD+ experience, and it's sorely lacking. For apps and movies it's now practically redundant, and even its book offering has been compromised somewhat.

Beyond that, the Nook's custom UI continues to leave us cold. It's sluggish, sparse, and the potential for personalisation is severely limited compared to other Android tablets.

Ultimately, in general use it's bettered by any 'normal' Android tablet you care to mention.

Final verdict

We found the 7-inch Nook HD to be uncompetitive in a crowded field, but the Nook HD+ may well have carved out a niche for itself as an ultra-affordable full-sized tablet.

Its custom UI is clunky, its own media store is a bit of a write-off, and it won't win any awards for its looks. But for HD multimedia kicks on a budget, there aren't many better-value alternatives out there.

It's far from the best Android tablet experience available, but with its recent UK price cut, fine HD screen and all-new access to the Google Play Store, the Nook HD+ has somehow suddenly become worthy of consideration - certainly above the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9, at any rate.

Microsoft might have calmed gamers' fears by confirming that the Xbox One won't need an "always on" internet connection to play, but the new console will still require Kinect to actually function.

Naturally, this has sparked some concern that Kinect will be always watching you in your living room like some 1984-style spying device. But Microsoft promises this will not be the case.

Speaking in an interview at Redmond after the event, Jeff Henshaw, group program manager for Xbox Incubation said that Xbox One's Kinect won't always be spying on your living room activity. "If you want privacy, we'll give you modes that ensure your privacy," he said

Paranormal activity

Henshaw continued: "It's not the case where you'll be able to remove the camera altogether. But you'll be able to put the system in modes where you can be completely secure about the fact that the camera is off and can't see you."

Speaking at the London event for the Xbox One reveal, Harvey Eagle also confirmed that the console will require Kinect to actually work.

"Kinect does require to be connected to Xbox One in all cases, yes," he said. Let's hope this means that the new Kinect is ready to take on any possible room shape or size.

It was confirmed that the new Kinect will also be coming to Windows PCs in the future.

Is Steam evil?

I'm warming my hands over the fire made from the last of my furniture when my phone bings. It's an assignment! From my favourite editor! Starvation allayed for another day!

Yet my face falls as I read it: "Prove Steam is evil." My penury means I can't refuse it but... it's mad. Everyone knows Valve is the good guy. No one in their right mind could call Valve evil.

We've talked to many members of the company over the years and they're a singular mix of high-achievers dedicated to making the best possible games they can. Most developers I contacted refused to even contemplate the idea of Valve being evil. It's both unthinkably wrong and commercial suicide.

Dan Marshall, developer of cult classic Time Gentlemen, Please! and forthcoming heist caper The Swindle, explained why:

"The first problem with any argument that Steam's evil is, as anyone who has ever worked with Valve will tell you, that they're all thoroughly pleasant people who are genuinely striving to create something good.

"It's not just about good people doing a good job - it's more than that. There's a feeling of ethos that they're all trying to make something amazing, and empowering devs and gamers alike however they can. They'll tell you about the systems they're putting in place, and they'll explain why. They'll help you however they can. No, Steam's going to live or die by how popular it is. If it suddenly starts making a load of bum moves and doesn't do anything to rectify them, people will shift elsewhere. But the people I've worked with just wouldn't let that happen."

But what if there's something in my editor's mad contrariness? What if Steam, personified in its owner Valve, is evil? Or at least, could be one day? How would such a company function? How would it affect us, the gamers? What would change? Is an evil Steam the worst thing that could happen to PC gamers?

We've tried to answer that in this article and supplied three alternate dystopias for PC gamers, if a Steam teeming with fire-eyed demons proves too ridiculous.

Why Valve is good

Google famously chose as its corporate slogan "Don't be evil" and struggled to live up to it. Valve, back when it was just a nobody developer, chose the slightly less catchy "Open your mind. Open your eyes."

Despite this mealy-mouthed aphorism, Valve has been the more generous corporation over the years, creating and popularising the digital distribution model for selling games, making it as egalitarian as it could, and creating endless new ways to improve it.

Recently, after an uncommunicative hiatus, the signs are that Valve is attempting to live up to its slogan, pushing new forms of input and output to make games more exciting, innovating where the console manufacturers aren't, looking forward while others look backwards, and making the PC its platform rather than Microsoft's.

The biggest change we could see to the gaming ecosystem would be if Valve, the company that owns the world's most effective digital distribution service, started acting as a real corporation, rather than a benevolent dictatorship as it does today.

It's odd to think that most people in the world take 'behaving like an efficient corporation' to mean the same as 'evil', but that's reflective of most people's experience of profit-gouging corporations.

Whether it's horse meat in your crispy pancakes, train tickets increasing 200 per cent since privatisation, or the dangerous and expensive lie that is the global nuclear industry, people are used to being screwed by big companies.

So imagine how Valve might be run if it was owned by someone else, say a Microsoft or an EA. Imagine unnecessary updates like Windows 8, feature creep, everything being charged for, thriving but unprofitable servers being switched off, and monopolistic behaviour with cross-promoted applications.

Playing Monopoly

Yet, looking at the games market today, one does have to worry that it's becoming a series of walled gardens - Apple, Sony and Microsoft all have tremendous controls over their sales fora. On PC, the other major digital retailers sell nowhere near the number of games that Valve does, and Steam is turning the PC into Valve's own walled garden.

The company has a virtual monopoly on the discoverability and community aspects of gaming, such as social networks, gifting, modding, multiplayer and promotion. Having this much power concentrated in one spot can't be good for the consumer, can it?

These intimations of Valve becoming a monopoly don't worry Marshall. "Having a monopoly isn't necessarily a bad thing - when all the systems at play work well together, a monopoly can be pretty damned useful for the end user. If I organise a meeting over Gmail, it's automatically put into my Google Calendar, and my Nexus 7 tells me what the weather's going to be like when I get there. It's brilliant! Anyone who's tried to use iTunes on Windows can tell you that having more than one set of fingers jabbing at a service can really mess it up."

Similarly, anyone trying to construct a replacement Steam will understand why one company controlling everything isn't always a bad thing. Admittedly, Valve doesn't quite have a monopoly over the PC gaming market, but it's very close.

To have a real monopoly a company needs to control the price of its products, and it needs to have a significant, relevant market share so that consumers have no choice but to buy its product. Regarding market share, anecdotal evidence from developers has Steam selling more than 10 times the rest of digital retail put together. Yet consumers are still price-mobile; if they find a game cheaper elsewhere than it is on Steam (such as a developer's own site), they can buy it there.

However, consumers mostly don't as the other facets of Steam - community, fast downloads, auto-patching, mods, easy DLC and so on - mean a discount isn't as valuable as it seems relative to the functionality that's been lost. Moreover, games are often cheaper on Steam - especially older ones.

So Steam has pretty near 100 per cent of the market for PC gamers, but is it controlling prices? No, it's not. As far as we can tell, it takes a percentage of all revenues, altered depending on the developer's leverage - Activision gives less, an indie would give more.

The price is set by the developer or publisher of the game, unlike, say Microsoft's XBLA with its set price points ($5, $10 or $20), or Amazon, which once forced certain developers to give their apps away for free on its marketplace.

Valve itself says: "Pricing is very title specific, and we've got a lot of data and experience to help you decide on what the best price is for your title. We'll work with you to figure out pricing." This means we can't classify Steam as a monopoly until it has price controls. Is there really a threat here?

On the next page: what if Gabe Newell leaves?

What would Valve be like without Gabe?

Well, yes. What happens if the ownership moves to someone... evil? Valve is owned privately, mainly by one man: the angelic Gabe Newell. A one-time producer on "the first three versions of Windows", Newell was one of approximately 12,000 early Microsoft employees who cashed out their stock options in 1996, after they'd increased in value a hundredfold. Newell is rumoured to have walked away with half a billion dollars.

It was he and fellow Windows programmer Mike Harrington who, with the encouragement of id's John Carmack and Michael Abrash, decided it was time for a new, clever PC gaming company and put their windfall money into founding Valve in 1996. Harrington sold out in 2000, leaving Gabe in sole control of the company.

If Gabe Newell sells out or passes away, or is forced into a sale by legal action or personal financial problems, this might happen (though the latter is unlikely, given his $1.5bn fortune).

We've seen companies sell out that we never thought would, that seemed financially secure - id Software, BioWare and Bullfrog, for example. There's no reason to think Valve couldn't go that way too.

So how would an Evil Steam change its behaviour on price? Well, the company has most developers (especially indies) over a barrel, so it's likely it would renegotiate profit shares with them and probably also renegotiate control over price.

Once Steam can alter the price of products, it can raise prices as-and-when to maximise its profits, even at the expense of developers. It might also mean more regional inequality, more incidental charges, and more price-gouging in other areas - but that's unlikely because Valve knows how vocal its community is and how fast they'll move if there are problems. The developers are the ones who will lose out as they can't afford to move away.

More evil options

How else could Valve be evil? Could it introduce DRM? Well, Steam already has that, in the form of its always-on connection; you can play in an offline mode, but the tech is old, clunky and requires setting up. You can't play your games on more than one computer at the same time.

Is it silly to be scared of losing access to all our games? Well, software developers do change their terms of service. Ask anyone who bought the original Guardian iOS app, which promised unlimited access to the Guardian for ever, for just £1.49. This was far too good a deal and the Guardian discontinued it a year later.

Valve is extremely unlikely to do this, but if it goes bust, as unlikely as that is, we will lose access to all those games we think we own. At least Direct2Drive and Good Old Games give you the entire DRM-free installer for any game you buy from them. Steam games simply won't work without that always-on connection.

Barring technical problems, or the closure of Valve itself, legally we shouldn't lose access to our games, as the EU is on our side. The courts of the European Union ruled in July last year that software was a product, not a service, that reselling properly purchased software is a legitimate business, and that the original company (Valve, in this case) has the same duty of service to the owner of second-hand games as new ones.

When Valve tried to change its terms of service to prevent end-users starting class-action lawsuits (presumably to prevent any such lawsuit about the transfer of games between users), the EU ordered it to change back.

Meanwhile, the way Steam links games to accounts and prohibits the sale of accounts, precludes any ability to sell games on - despite the tech being trivial for Valve itself (as evinced by the ability to 'gift' games on the system).

While I was writing this piece, a German consumer rights agency instigated legal action against Valve because of this. Simply put, in terms of consumer rights as dictated by the normally business-friendly courts, Valve is already acting like it's evil. This highlights that the real problem with the Evil Valve concept isn't that it's unlikely - it's that it wouldn't make that much difference to the end user, because Evil Valve is not Stupid Valve.

Today's Valve isn't Saintly Valve either - it's much more human. It simply isn't going to do anything that threatens its ability to do what it wants to: make and evangelise great games. Developers would see their Steam profits diminish, but the external market is fairly healthy these days, and Valve is still the best place to market PC games of any type.

How would an Evil Valve affect the Steam Box? Well, some games might end up as Steam Box exclusives - for example, big-name indie games or Valve's own titles. At the moment, Valve says:

"We think you should get your game in front of as many people as you can, therefore we do not require exclusivity on titles." Again, making any games Steam Box exclusives is unlikely, as it would damage the most profitable part of the business and doesn't fit with Steam as a platform-agnostic system.

It might be that Valve behaves more like a business, forcing developers who want to be on Steam to support the Steam Box's biometrics, but, again, this would be good for consumers.

Goody two shoes

Despite our worries, we're aware that this is rampant speculation. We expect that Gabe, one of the cleverest, wisest men in computing, has put elements in place so that Valve continues once he's gone.

The team he'll leave behind, through strict hiring policies and a flat internal hierarchy, is the most creative, well-intentioned and talented anywhere in games. When Chet Faliszek, one of Valve's writers, tells us that "I hear, see, and speak no evil," we're inclined to believe him.

So what future do we really see for Valve? Well, we think the Steam Boxes will be extremely disruptive - particularly the mid-range 'Better' Box, which will act as a replacement for the next-gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox 720).

• Valve Steam Box release date, news and features

Looking at how Steam has progressed from something that had us all digitally queuing for two days to play Half-Life 2 to an ultra-efficient free gaming platform that's the fourth biggest consumer of data in the world, we know that when Valve tries something, it might not be right first time, but it will be polished until it's perfect. And it will listen to its users while it works on it.

Given its record, we expect their eventual reveal of its future tech and Half-Life 3 will go hand-in-hand and will be truly stunning - but we won't see it until it's ready, and it won't be hurried by anyone.

Dystopian endgame 1

The Warcraft games, affectionate knockoffs of Command & Conquer and Warhammer, had a certain goofy charm. But the jump from these simple strategy titles to the world's biggest-ever game, World of Warcraft, was a strange psychological leap for everyone except my editor. Yet the next leap will addle even my editor's super-brain.

Our next dystopian PC gaming future is that many of the next big games will be based on the old Warcraft III map, Defense of the Ancients - and that they'll all be free. This is a bit of a late prediction, to be fair. All the existing giant MOBAs have already been based on this map - Demigod, Bloodline Champions, League of Legends, Blizzard: All-Stars and DotA 2, with the latter three actually matching the map's layout exactly.

It's not just MOBAs. Whispers inside the big strategy game franchises say that they're looking at MOBA versions of their games too - and given the relative simplicity and familiarity of the MOBA model (each player controlling one character, working in teams), we wouldn't be surprised to see elements of it cropping up in the multiplayer modes of other games. Bank on at least one blockbuster FPS franchise having something akin to MOBA in its next incarnation.

Dystopian endgame 2

This might sound like a utopia, but the best dystopias always do. Currently, games are becoming pervasive; it's well known that the average gamer these days is a 40-year old mother of two. Facebook took games to the masses, but they got bored of FarmVille fast, and moved on.

My hairdresser is a grandmother in her late 50s, but she plays Diablo III and World of Warcraft in between cutting heads. At the other end, gamification is being used by large corporations to manage their staff. Games will be everywhere.

"But," you cry, in your rich baritone, "we'll still want to play on PC!" We've talked before about the new game-streaming tech and how it's just waiting for network speeds to be fast enough; why play on PC, when you can play anywhere?

More importantly than that, tablets are already running at higher resolutions than most PC monitors, are approaching the speeds of desktops and are cheaper as well (as they've mostly disposed of the bloatware that is Windows). What remaining advantages will a PC have when other devices are faster, are easier to use and have a wider range of games on them?

Notably, Gabe Newell himself is sceptical of this dystopia, as he said in his keynote speech at the recent DICE conference. "Cloud gaming works until it starts to be successful - at which point, it falls over. All the spreadsheets ignore the producing levels that consumer networks use. When everyone starts using a continuous network connection in order to get their applications, prices are going to go through the roof."

Essentially, because networks can't deal with this traffic, streaming tech will never work. Newell's solution is familiar to Microsoft Media Center users: a PC in the home, streaming to all devices over a local network. "I think there's a place for cloud gaming, but more as a feature or for things like demos and spectating. But not as core architecture."

Dystopian endgame 3

Remember prohibition? Probably not first-hand, so let us recap for you. In the 1920s, America banned alcohol as a highly addictive anti-social substance, with the support of the vast majority of the population, but oddly against the wishes of a substantial minority of non-drinkers. If games are shown to be clinically problematic, gamers could face a similar fate.

The mechanism for this may come from the next DSM - the American Psychiatric Association's classification tool for mental illness. The latest DSM-5 (just released as a draft) says that more research is needed on games addiction, but the next one will likely include recent studies showing that internet usage and video games (particularly online gaming) are highly addictive, on a level comparable to cocaine, amphetamines and such like.

If games are shown to be addictive in this way, we predict that legislators will make access to them more limited, especially to children. Would you let your child use something that's been proved to be highly addictive, even as a gamer yourself?

Like cigarettes and alcohol, a balance will be struck, with age ratings on games taking into account not just moral issues (sex and violence), but also the likelihood of addiction. Game developers, especially those developing for children, will have to think much harder about how to avoid compulsion-based gaming mechanics if they want younger players to be allowed to play their games.

Online games in particular have already been tarred with names like EverCrack and implicated in deaths, crime and murder. It's most likely that these will face the heaviest brunt of any future regulation.

Twitter has been granted a patent for its "pull to refresh" feature. That's right, the one that everyone else already uses anyway.

It will be the first feature to utilise Twitter's Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA), announced last year, which means that any features designed by developers working for Twitter will stay in their hands.

Loren Brichter's "pull to refresh" feature is the first to get the IPA treatment, which was built into Tweetie, the Twitter app that was acquired by the company in 2010 and used as the official client.

But the agreement states that Twitter will only act on the patent for "defensive purposes", which means that it won't aggressively pursue anyone who has replicated the feature.

Innovate not decimate

Twitter has taken this non-aggressive stance in the name of innovation, and assumedly not to waste loads of money in fruitless patent lawsuits.

"This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry," said Twitter's VP of engineering Adam Messinger when the IPA was announced last year.

"With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon."

It looks like LG's latest range of smartphones is going to become a trio as details leak on the LG Optimus F3.

The Optimus F7 and Optimus F5 handsets were launched at MWC back in February, offering 4G capabilities to the mid-range mobile market, and coming in at a higher level than the firm's rebooted L-series trio.

A photo of the Optimus F3 handset appeared alongside a smattering of specs on the @evleaks Twitter account - a source which is often on the money when it comes to these sort of things.

According to the report the LG Optimus F3 will sport a 4.0-inch WVGA display, dual-core processor, Android Jelly Bean and a sizable 2,460mAh battery.

You little ripper!

There's nothing particularly ground breaking there apart from that battery, but the real selling point is the fact the F3 comes LTE enabled, allowing users to access super fast data speeds on what is being billed as "aggressively priced" contracts.

If the Optimus F3 has begun to whet your appetite then hold on a minute, put down that fork, as it looks like LG is lining it up for the Australian market in the next few weeks, with no word on global availability.

We've contacted LG regarding the Optimus F3 and we'll update this article if we hear anything.