Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
Soft phones
Now that several Android phones make do with soft navigation and home buttons, it strikes me that the manufacturers are missing a trick. To tempt a Samsung aficionado to use one of their phones, they could create a Samsung mode and exchange the back and switch buttons. Likewise, a Samsung to standard Android format. As a user of a Samsung tablet and phone, when upgrading my phone I’ll stick with Samsung because of this omission. Otherwise, I would be tempted to jump ship. Neal Entwistle
Printer prices
I read your printer test with interest ( see issue 287, p76). I was looking for a colour duplex printer with low running costs and was surprised not only that the Labs winner was an inkjet, but that its maximum output was 40 pages a minute and its cartridges ran to 10,000 and 7,000 pages for mono and colour. But, going online, I discovered that the price had jumped £40 from the original £300.
I would still have bought it, until I realised that it shipped with lowercapacity cartridges stretching to just 3,000 and 1,500 pages. Upgrading to the cartridges quoted in your review hiked the price to almost £700. Would this affect the A-List rating you awarded the printer? Furthermore, should companies not be obliged to supply products as reviewed, at least until publication? Ewhen
Tim Danton, PC Pro editor-in-chief,
replies: I can see the confusion. Although we state that the printer comes with 3,000- and 1,500-capacity cartridges in the review itself, the feature table refers to the cartridges that you will need to buy rather than those supplied. We’ll make this clearer in future.
In terms of pricing, for items such as printers we aim to find the best price at time of publication. Unfortunately, prices do go up and down, and we can’t control pricing from third-party websites such as Ebuyer and Amazon, who tend to offer the best prices. Where we can agree pricing –
To tempt a Samsung aficionado to use one of their smartphones, they could create a Samsung mode
for example, for the PCs sent in for review from British manufacturers – we do ask them to stick to the quoted price. In exceptional circumstances, such as when import prices rose suddenly after Brexit, we will allow them to increase prices so long as they can justify the amount.
In 200 yards, kick left
I would like to watch a game of football controlled by an AI software program, modelled on satnav software, which would constantly recalculate the fastest way to goal.
Just passing the ball from one player to another wastes valuable goal scoring time. Plus, it allows time for a full complement of defenders to position themselves, before an attack on goal is eventually launched.
Surely the satnav program would take every opportunity for the forward players to race into their opponent’s half. Possibly with very few defenders goal-side and a much better chance of scoring. Peter Jones
Music to our ears
Your article on classical music was very interesting ( see issue 287, p36), but you failed to mention that it has been one of the primary drivers in the distribution and adoption of highdefinition 24-bit audio on download.
In the past two years it’s become more and more common for back catalogues, and now new albums, to be released in the format. The forthcoming adoption of Bluetooth 5 on mobile devices and headphones, that at last has the bandwidth to support uncompressed 24-bit audio, can only help spread adoption further. Indeed, even the big music streaming companies are now beginning to
support 24-bit music. This will no doubt be “music to the ears” of audiophiles everywhere, such as your own Jon Honeyball. Mike Halsey
Update upset
A few months ago, you published my letter concerning Windows updates. An update is due. I have an 18-monthold Lenovo laptop with 8GB of RAM and an SSD which, in April, took 26 hours to download and install the update, followed by four hours of the laptop being very sluggish. May’s took seven hours to download and install, after which it was sluggish for two. In June, the download and install took four hours, and it was sluggish for another hour.
Now I read in issue 286 that Microsoft was also aware of problems the April update caused to certain configurations that included Toshiba and Intel SSDs and advised those affected. Where? On the Microsoft site that you couldn’t access, because your computer was locked out.
We were recently advised that we had 28 days to agree to Microsoft’s new terms and conditions, or else find an alternative OS. If we used Windows after the 28 days, we automatically confirmed that we agreed to all 26 pages of small print that Microsoft’s lawyers had taken six months to write. Part of the terms and conditions included a clause allowing Microsoft to harvest data to “improve upon our Windows 10 experience”.
My observations lead me to conclude that Microsoft is using
We were recently advised that we had 28 days to agree to Microsoft’s new terms and conditions
our computers to test its next update. The size of the update as downloaded is virtually twice that which Microsoft states. It could only have known of the SSD issue if it was accessing the actual hardware configurations of computers. Effectively a virtual computer is running the next update, to simultaneously check upon its performance. The volume of data being uploaded to Microsoft has dramatically increased and, when I run a tidy up after each update, I have found that a minimum of 137 new “privacy threats” have also been downloaded in the update.
Microsoft still doesn’t understand that the computer is our property. It hides behind its terms and conditions to say that we agreed to “test” its product for them. Peter White