Microsoft has recently expanded its Surface family of devices, launching a refreshed Surface Pro and a brand new Surface Laptop. However, there's one big Surface product that you may not be familiar with: the Surface Hub.

Unlike the rest of the Surface family, this mammoth device is solely for businesses. Designed to empower collaboration, the Surface Hub is essentially a wall-filling touchscreen, and is intended to be the tech-heavy successor to the humble office whiteboard. We went hands-on to find out if it's really worth your investment.

It's big

First things first - we really can't stress enough how gigantic the Surface Hub is. It's available in two sizes, and the smallest is 55in going all the way up to a whopping 84in for the larger version. The smaller version is 1080p only, but you can get a 4K resolution if you move up to the 84in model.

The Surface Hub is engineered for collaboration, so naturally supports a wide variety of screen-sharing and presentation methods. You can connect a laptop via DVI, HDMI or VGA, or wirelessly share your screen via Miracast. However, during our demonstration we did notice a distinct lag when presenting wirelessly.

Of course, the Surface Hub is more than just a jumped-up monitor; it can also run collaboration apps natively. The main attraction here is the whiteboard app, which functions like a cross between OneNote and a standard whiteboard. It ships with two Surface Hub Pens, but can support up to 100 points of touch interaction. It can also support up to three Surface Pens simultaneously writing, and identifies them so you can keep track of who's written what.

There's also support for smart features like pinch-to-zoom, lassoing and moving content and sharing the contents of your whiteboard. At present though, you're only able to save your whiteboard as an image, and then share it via OneDrive or email - there's no integration with OneNote or Microsoft Teams, which feels like a major missed opportunity.

Another unexpected limitation is the apps. While the Surface Hub does technically run Windows 10, it runs a special 'hardened' version of the OS called Windows 10 Teams. Much like Windows 10 S, it will only run Universal Windows Platform apps, so if you've got any legacy business apps that haven't been ported to UWP then you can forget about using them with the Surface Hub.

Collaboration is about more than working with people within your organisation, and Microsoft has packed the Surface Hub will a full suite of videoconferencing equipment. Each side of the Surface Hub features a wide-angle 1080p camera, which ensures the whole room is easily visible. Meetings can be conducted through Skype for Business, with the idea being that you snap a Skype window to one side of the Hub and a whiteboard window to the other.

If you wanted to use the Surface Hub primarily as a videoconferencing tool, however, you may also be somewhat unsatisfied. Although you can host a vast number of people in one meeting, the Surface Hub's Skype for Business app can only display three video tiles at once. They don't scale to a particularly large size even when the app is full-screen, which is disappointing given that there's so much screen to fill.

On the other hand, quality is excellent, with video and audio both coming over clearly. There's even the option to control which of the two camera is transmitting, if you have confidential information on one side of your office.

So, how much can businesses expect to pay for this marvel? Well, if you want the full-size, 84in 4K version, it can be yours for the low, low price of just 21,000. Microsoft says that it has about 2,000 customers who have purchased Surface Hubs, with some ordering hundreds, but honestly, we're not convinced.

There are attractive features and it's undeniably useful for empowering collaboration across teams, but for 21,000, is it really that much more effective than an ordinary whiteboard or a digital projector? It's large, it's flashy, and it'll surely be impressive whenever you've got a client coming over, but unless you've got several thousands of pounds desperately burning a hole in your IT budget, there's little point in buying a Surface Hub.

Interactive whiteboards for classrooms and offices cost around 2,000, not counting the complex set-up and projector maintenance. A cheaper alternative is the 500 Touchjet Pond. The manufacturer claims this portable pico projector can turn any flat surface into an interactive Android touchscreen.

This promise inspired hundreds of backers on crowd-funding site IndieGoGo in 2014, with Touchjet managing to raise nearly $900,000 in presales for the Pond, and the projectors are now shipping to customers.

The most impressive thing about the Touchjet Pond is the sheer amount of technology the company has been able to pack into such a tiny case. The body of the main unit measures just 3x11x10cm and it weighs just 300g. The white plastic shell has a little flex to it, but it survived a few minor drops in our testing. Its miniscule dimensions also make it an ideal travel companion if you are in the habit of giving presentations in rooms without projector installations.

Touchjet Pond: Android and touch controls

What really sets the Touchjet Pond apart from other projectors is that it has a built-in computer running Android 4.4, so the interface will be very familiar to Android users. Touchjet haven't made any big changes to the way KitKat works, so its interface will be instantly familiar. This also means there aren't any extra features to assist with the slightly unusual input methods. This isn't a big problem, though, as the low resolution of 854x480 pixels means buttons and icons are very large and easy to prod.

In the box with the projector you get two styluses, which are the key to turning your projection into a "touch screen". The styluses take two AAA batteries each which should last months as they communicate with the projector via IR.

Press the stylus onto your projection surface and its IR transmitter will activate (with a visible red light). This signal is read by the IR receiver on the projector, which turns this signal into a touch input. After you've calibrated the receiver using a pre-installed app on the projector, taps feel incredibly responsive. Using apps that rely on accurate touches such as a whiteboard or drawing software feel as if you're genuinely writing onto the projection surface, which is an impressive feat.

The only slight setback is that the IR receiver relies on line of sight, so you can't stand directly in front of the stylus when drawing or writing onto the projection surface. This means you have to stand off to the side, which can be a little awkward and uncomfortable.

If your projection surface is rough, like a textured wall, you can still draw without having wobbly lines caused by rough plaster or gaps between tiles by pressing a button on the stylus. You can then use the stylus by it hovering just above the surface without touching it.

You also get a remote control, which Touchjet calls the Airmouse. This works both as an IR remote which emulates keystrokes and a Bluetooth remote that controls an onscreen cursor. The latter works well and is particularly useful when you're not standing by your projection surface; you can still use Android in a relatively efficient fashion without having to leave your seat. We'd recommend avoiding the standard IR remote control mode as Android is poorly suited to arrow key-based controls; many apps don't work properly and you'll find some actions - such as playing videos from a YouTube search - impossible to select.

You can also control the Pond using your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, or you can plug in a regular USB keyboard or mouse into the microUSB port via a supplied microUSB to female USB adaptor.

You can also use this adaptor to move files from a regular USB flash drive onto the internal storage. There's 18GB of internal storage that's oddly divided into three partitions. Regardless, you download apps from the Google Play store just as you would with any other Android device.

Running on a dual-core 1.66GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, games such as Jetpack Joyride, SimCity BuildIt and video streaming programs such as YouTube and Netflix all ran relatively smoothly. It should be noted, however, that the device itself and its controllers do not have gyroscopes in them, so any apps that rely on movement controls won't work.

Touchjet Pond: image quality

Inside the casing is an 80 lumen LCD lamp. 80 lumens isn't a lot, but you only need to darken a room slightly to get a usable image. We placed the projector at varying distances from different surfaces and were able to nail down adequate image quality on all of them. You'll want a flat, white, shiny surface like a whiteboard for the best image quality, but we found metal cupboards, tiled ceilings, textured walls and dark-coloured carpets to all be usable projection surfaces.

Lamp life is rated at 20,000 hours, which is four times as long as many larger projectors that use conventional lamps. The maximum image size before image quality and brightness starts to deteriorate is around 80in, which can be reached from about two metres away. Unsurprisingly, at this size and distance, you'll definitely need to switch the lights off to get a viewable image.

The projector has a built-in battery that can run for up to two hours in an economy mode that sets the lamp to 50 lumens. This is extremely useful if you need to give a short presentation without being encumbered by wires.

It's therefore a shame the resolution is a rather tiny 854x480 pixels. While colours are perfectly acceptable, the small pixel count means images don't hold up to close scrutiny particularly well -obviously blurry edges between onscreen objects, backgrounds and text are a particular problem.

The projector has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity along with a MicroUSB port, Mini HDMI port (cable not supplied, disappointingly) and a 3.5mm audio jack. You'll definitely want the latter (or a Bluetooth speaker) as the internal mono speaker isn't very loud. The internal fan is thankfully fairly quiet, whirring at a volume that doesn't overwhelm the speaker.

Touchjet Pond: Conclusion

There's a lot to like about the Touchjet Pond. Its flexibility is restricted by its relative lack of brightness and limitations with its IR-linked stylus mean it can be awkward to use. Given the price however, which is so much lower than a traditional interactive whiteboard system, we're willing to forgive these faults.

It's also worth remembering that the Pond is at its best and most portable if there are Android apps that meet your whiteboarding and other productivity needs. If not you can get around this by connecting a Windows or Mac laptop via HDMI. Even so, the Touchjet Pond is a worthy alternative to far pricier interactive whiteboards.

Verdict

Not perfect, but the Touchjet Pond is still worth considering for conference rooms and classrooms alike

Lamp type: 80 lumen LED

Display type: 1cm DLP

Resolution: 854x480 pixels

Lamp life: 20,000 hours

Battery life: 2 hours (eco mode)

Dimensions: 3x11x10cm

Weight: 300g

Processor: Dual-core 1.66GHz ARM Cortex-A9

Storage: 18GB usable

Wireless connectivity: 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

Ports: Mini HDMI, microUSB, 3.5mm audio out

Operating system: Android 4.4 KitKat

ViewSonic has announced the PJD-7383i, an interactive projector which the American displays company hopes will replace flipcharts and interactive whiteboards in offices and schools.

Using a special rechargeable pen which communicates with the projector wirelessly, we were able to draw and write directly onto the projected image of a PowerPoint slide as if we were using a mouse or graphics tablet directly connected to the computer. The changes are saved to the file being edited, in this case a PowerPoint presentation, and can be edited just like any other graphic.

The pen looks a bit chunky, but it's surprisingly light and is charged over USB. During our hands on at the IFA trade show in Berlin, there seemed to be a slight lag between using the pen and the image appearing onscreen, but we'll reserve judgement until we get our hands on a production unit.

Although extra pens will be available separately, only one pen can be used with a projector at any one time due to limitations in the Point Blank interactive technology from Texas Instruments. While it's currently unique to ViewSonic's projector, rival projector manufacturers could license it and release their own versions.

The PJD-7383i can display content in 3D, but the interactive and 3D capabilities can't be used simultaneously. To our eyes, the 3D effect wasn't as convincing as the best 3D TVs we've seen and will likely be of little use in most offices anyway. Unfortunately, switching between 3D and interactive modes is a fiddly process that requires digging through the onscreen menus using the remote. A shortcut button would be a big help.

The PJD-7383i is a DLP projector with a resolution of 1,024x768 pixels, so it's definitely aimed at businesses and not consumers who want to watch high definition movies. It's a short throw model, so you don't need a large amount of space between the projector and your wall or screen to display an image, which will please businesses with cramped meeting rooms. It has a rated brightness of 3000 lumens and a stated contrast ratio of 3000:1.

The PJD-7383i is due to be released in September, but suggested UK retail pricing has yet to be confirmed. ViewSonic plans to sell it for less than an interactive whiteboard. We'll bring you a full review as soon as we can.

The company is already planning a successor, the the PJD-7583wi, for release in November. It will have a higher resolution of 1,280x800 pixels, as well as a USB port. These can be used to display content stored on a USB flash drive, so presentations could be given without a laptop. Alternatively, a laptop could be connected to the projector over USB or ethernet, although we don't see the point of this unless your laptop's standard monitor connections are broken.

Verdict

The ViewSonic PJD-7383i interactive projector is certainly intriguing, but we'll have to wait for pricing and a more in-depth hands-on review before we can decide whether it's a must-have or a clever gimmick.

The educational technology sector is worth hundreds of millions to the UK - and it's had a recent boost by the start up of a new programme that will see computers and broadband given to students of low-income families.

We spoke with Niel McLean, an executive director at government education body Becta, on the sidelines of tech show BETT this week for his thoughts on the Home Access Programme, gadgets for kids, and open source in schools.

The big news this week is the Home Access Programme, which will see the Government fund free computers and laptops for students from low-income families. While it's being talked about a lot this week, it was announced years ago and was trialled this year so it feels like it's been going on a long time.

You're absolutely right, it's had a history. It's actually good, because often when government does things it doesn't have the time to trial pilot and all those sorts of things, so it's incredibly reassuring that we did spend the time piloting in Suffolk and Oldham and things like that before going national. We've gone national now and we've sent out about 20,000 applications in two days. So it's really started.

For us it's part of a bigger picture. Basically, one side there's schools, on the other there's children and families. And there's things that connect them. And what we're trying to do is say if we've got technology in the home, and we've got the right technology the learning platform in the schools. [This] means that this school can extend it's offer beyond the school day, and you get the right connection between them, because the learning platform allows communication, you get exciting things happening in schools.

It's part of a big push about how schools use the technology to engage parents, particularly in their kid's learning [and] how they extend the offer beyond the school day. We've seen a bit of that [during] the [recent] snow, where schools have been able to carry on operating even when they're closed, because they've got a learning platform, their learning resources are on there and parents can log in and kids can log in.

It's part of a bigger picture. It isn't just putting computers into homes. So when you say the "next step," for us very much the next stage is making sure we get the maximum benefit out of what's actually quite a big investment.

It's about supporting a family to learn with us.

What about training for parents? It's one thing to get computers into homes, but if the reason parents haven't bought computers is because they're scared or intimidated by them, what support will there be for them?

You're absolutely right. It's not just financial barriers that prevent people from getting on with technology.

On the "techie-techie" side, that's a supplier responsibility. That's part of the deal when you purchase this from the approved suppliers, the suppliers pick up all the "techie-techie" bit.

We're partnering with people like the UK Online Centres, My Guide, Online Basics, which is a new online course to support basic ICT skills. We've agreed with the suppliers that [on] all the machines that people buy with their grant card, the first thing you hit [on the internet] is a home page, which directs you straight away to these areas of support.

So you can find out where your local UK Online Centre is and you can start looking at online materials or go to the UK Online Centre and get the training and the support you need.

We've [also] included a specific set of training materials around internet safety as part of the standard offer. So not only are machines all set up so they're safe out of the box with the parental controls and all those things, but there's a set of materials that a children's charity produced that we funded that talk you through the issues of internet safety.

That's the other concern that parents have got. Yes it's cost, but it's also "Am I skilled enough?" and "Am I safe?" So we're trying to hit all three of those in the programme.

There's been some criticism especially lately from TalkTalk that it seems kind of strange to be investing all this money and then turning around and taxing people with broadband lines in order to fund broadband going everywhere. TalkTalk described it as "muddled thinking." Does that seem like "muddled thinking" to you?

Not really. What they're doing is they're confusing two things, and I can see why they're doing it, because it's easy to confuse it.

There's one issue, which is about the basic infrastructure - the roads - and that's part of Digital Britain, and there are things that you have to do that this programme won't solve.

For instance, if you're in a blackspot and you can't get connectivity, home access won't help you. All it does is give you a grant to purchase something. It might present a more compelling case for some providers to move into the spaces for the "not-spots". But one of the bits is dealing with the roads, and one of the bits is dealing with the low income families, ensuring they've actually got cars to drive on those roads.

So they're not contradictory. They're quite different sorts of things. You have to make sure you've got roads, but at the same time you don't want to leave a particular group of people not able to use them.

I wouldn't have made the connection in they way they've made the connection. Because if you've got broadband and you build the system, you still have a bunch of people who still haven't got a computer to access it.

So this is about getting technology into homes for students, but a lot of teachers complain that they don't have enough technology in classrooms. What's being done to address that?

There is still the Harnessing Technology grant within the school. Budgets are always tight, but there is still money going into schools for technology.

I think the number of schools saying they need more money for technology is dropping. We've got pretty good ratios in many schools now.

Some schools might be facing refresh issues, and that kind of thing, but in general, we've got I can't remember what the actual figure is one of the best computer-to-pupil ratios in the world.

I think it's always a bit of a tension between the school and the home. If you'd have asked me when I was a teacher not necessarily about the IT stuff, but in general if I could fix everything that needed to be fixed about a kid's life in the classroom, I would have said no. I wanted books in the homes of kids, wanted parents reading to their kids, to actually help me in the classroom - more than more books in the classroom would have done, to be honest.

That's the kind of big thing that the government is sort of recognising: how well kids do at school is affected profoundly by their home circumstances. In a strange way, this is helping teachers.

So you when you were a teacher, you would have liked to have had parents sitting down with their kids and reading to them? So not much has changed. But does having a computer really change whether parents are getting involved or not?

Interestingly, yeah.

One of the interesting things around the pilot, because it was branded so heavily around education, [is that] it's stimulated different behaviours in the homes of people who have got grants than was the norm.

I'll give you one concrete fact about this, because we did an evaluation of the pilot. We compared low income families who'd already got computers - because there are some who've got them - with people from low income families who hadn't got them and got something through the scheme.

The people who got something through the scheme were spending, on average, an hour or more doing homework online or on the computer than the people who got technology through another route. Because they hadn't made the connection they bought it as an entertainment device, or a social networking device or whatever.

... [Now] we're giving advice to parents, and about the safeguarding of children, asking parents to talk to children, not to check up on them, but to create a dialogue, we saw those sorts of things happening in the pilot. So I'm pretty optimistic about that.

[Historically] when they come home it's the classic thing. The parent says "what did you do at school today?" and the kid just grunts.

[Now] they can show them. They can go to the learning platform in the school or to the school website and they can show them. And kids do. They don't do this meta-cognition, "let me articulate the model of learning I've been employing today at school" kind of thing, but they will show you a bit of art work they did, or something, if it's up on the school network. So you do get that parental engagement piece.

If schools put information about kids their grades, whatever that gets parents hooked. And parents like it. We did a survey and something like 80 per cent of parents say they'd like to know more about what goes on in school and would like us to use electronic means to tell them, because they're busy.

Have you checked out the stands here at the BETT show? Have you seen any cool pieces of tech that you would like to see in classrooms?"

What I think's really exciting is some of the things people are looking at around safe social networking, where the school acts as a hub for kids talking to kids. So it's not just spiking out from the home to wherever.

I think that's a powerful thing. Learning is a social enterprise. There's a great story one that a departmental official said that when he saw his own child doing his maths homework at home while at the same time on a social networking site talking to another kid in another village about their maths homework, and they were helping each other with it. He thought, "wow, this is something completely different".

The other really exciting things aren't really part of this programme just yet, because they haven't been worked through in the right kind of way gesture recognition, that kind of thing. You still can't do your history essay by dragging your finger across a screen. We're still keyboard bound with some of the things.

There are several stalls with very, very high tech things, such as 3D projectors. Most businesses don't have access to that yet there are schools that are actually using it. Do you worry that you're going to have these schools that are really really good with tech, and then others that are still trying to get computers to their students?

I think that would be a concern. I think that's why you need Becta, an agency advising people on how to manage your technology. We produce tools that help people work out where they are compared to other schools, what they need to be thinking about next.

Because you're right, a small primary school, where everybody's busy and everybody's teaching, doesn't have the head room to think about all of this. It's not that they can't manage their budget, it's when do they find time to think about it?

So another part of our role is showing people what can be done, which is why we run things like our reward schemes, why we have next generation learning charter schools, which is all around that, helping schools develop their vision and plan more effectively, and think creatively about this.

You will see things that astonish you in primary schools. You'll see kids learning about the heart with a 3D pulsating heart in the middle of the room. It's astonishing.

That's interesting, because one of the criticisms we've heard about Becta is that the supplier lists and recommendations are too prescriptive...

It's interesting this kind of stuff. If I can say what I think our role in it is it depends on the case sometimes we produce lists because Let me wind back. We can't be prescriptive, because we have no power to prescribe. Schools can buy what they like from whoever they like.

Occasionally what we do is see schools are buying whiteboards, or something like that, and then we go out to the market, set a specification for whiteboards, and if a company fits that specification we'll set up a framework contract for schools. Some schools take it up - most do - it's usually good value for money because we're working across the piece.

But often the claims about it being over prescriptive are a misunderstanding, because we simply don't have the power to say "you can only buy this."

We'd like to think that the things that we put on our frameworks are good, but there are other sorts of issues that apply, because it's public money which often steers us away from the more cutting edge and innovative stuff, because it's unproven. I can understand a lot of suppliers are frustrated about that, but there isn't any real way around that.

There are a whole lot of other things, like being EU compliant, which we know a lot of suppliers don't like. But it's just the way the world works, I'm afraid.

We try to go for as much choice as possible, and we try to refresh some of these lists as often as possible. But there will always be a tension, and there will always be some suppliers thinking "we've just got a great new product, but we're too small to get involved with all this and we're not on your list." I can see why they might be frustrated by that. But hopefully they can see that when you're talking about big amounts of government money, that's just the way it's going to be.

If schools want to take a punt on this new, untested thing, they're free to do that.

Following from that, Becta seems like it's been a lot more open to open source technology lately. How will that take shape in the future, and do you see many schools going down that road?

A few years ago, we said that schools should be looking at open source. We want to see a mix, because we're agnostic, but open source is certainly a credible alternative.

Now, we'd be wary about anything that put an additional technical burden on schools. Some of the things where it really works, like in higher education where they've gone heavily for open source, they've also got people who are developing the open source products and sharing and that sort of thing. That would be a minority sport in the average primary school. The average primary school needs a lot of support around any product.

One of the things we'd like to see is people supporting open source in schools so that it's less dependent on the enthusiasms of the particular teacher. We're seeing people starting to do that but at the same time we've got to recognise where the world is. There are habits out there that are going to take a time to change, and that's just the facts of life.

You've seen a lot of schools. What do the most successful ones have in common?

The first thing that they're doing is there school leadership and their governors have developed a vision for what they want their school to be doing with technology, they're not just buying stuff.

If you were to give me only 10 minutes in a school, and I wanted to guess how good the ICT was, I would not go to where the technology is, I'd go to the head office - the deputy head office, the senior management team - and ask them a few questions. And that's no different from any other organisation.

The second thing and again, I'm not going to talk about technology is the best schools have got a really clear focus on how they want kids to learn. Do they want their kids to learn collaboratively, individually, at home? They've got a view of learning, if that makes sense. And then what they've done is they've bought the technology that works with that.

There are other factors. They've professionalised their technical support, by either doing it in-house professionally and properly, or buying a service that does it. So there are a few features like that.

What else is there? When they do their curriculum plans, right at the outset they're thinking about how they could use technology. They're engaging parents, trying to engage parents by having after school sessions where they learn about technology.

It's those sort of attributes. It isn't that they've got some sort of technology like 3D or handhelds or whatever. They tend not to be the things that predict the difference. It tends to be the human behaviour, planning, that kind of thing that makes the difference.

There are other things, like teachers' own access to technology. It's no good parents being able to access the school after hours if teachers can't.

It's systematic, a vision - it isn't that they've gone for a particular technology or technical route. That might turn out to be the case down the line, but that isn't the case at the moment, it's more about the people things.

Google picks a fight with China

It's the battle of the beasts this week, as Google picked a fight with China - or really, China picked a fight with Google.

Basically, Google has censored its search results in China for years, at the behest of the government, blocking out results for terms like Falun Gong. The search giant this week said it just might stop doing that - which would mean it would have to stop operations in the company - after it became aware that Chinese hackers were targeting GMail accounts of human rights activists. The attacks apparently took advantage of a known flaw in Internet Explorer.

China said Google is being silly, and that its internet is free and open - which of course it famously isn't. While they've since said they'd like Google to stick around, they won't exactly be without search, as Google runs second in that market by a huge margin to local provider Baidu.

While it's hard to see why the attacks have suddenly angered Google - considering it was censoring such people itself via its own search - at least they're finally starting to live up to their own "Do No Evil" motto.

Microsoft intends to stick around in China, with chief executive Steve Ballmer saying he doesn't understand Google's move, as such cyber attacks are "every day" activities.

The tech sector has recovered

Cheer up, it's 2010 and economic horrors of 2009 are long over - according to analysts, at least.

Forrester piped up earlier this week to declare that the "technology downturn of 2008 and 2009 is unofficially over".

That firm's happy thoughts were echoed later in the week when Gartner's PC shipment numbers showed a 22 per cent increase in growth over last year - the highest growth rate in seven years. Analyst Mikako Kitagawa said this showed the markets had recovered.

Intel proved their analysis by posting an 875 per cent income jump - that's not a typo. Sure, the huge jump was made possible by the horrible results of last year, but it's still a clear sign of recovery at one of the tech's bellwethers.

Educational tech for kids

The BETT educational technology show hit London this week, bringing with it oodles of new interactive whiteboards, ruggedised netbooks and other student-friendly gadgets - check out our video about Dell's vision of the classroom of the future.

The powers that be used the show as an opportunity to push their long-discussed programme to supply free PCs and broadband to children of low-income families.

TalkTalk took some issue with that, calling it "muddled thinking" given the government is also set to start taxing everyone with a broadband line.

Meanwhile, an Intel survey showed teachers think every student in their class should have their very own laptop.

iPhone versus Nexus One hots up

Google's Nexus One arrived last week, sparking off another iPhone-killer standoff - as if we haven't had enough of those already.

So far, it doesn't look to be doing the job. While it hasn't been released in the UK on a network yet, it has gone out in the US - but the much anticipated Google phone has only sold 20,000. That might sound good, but it's not only a fraction of the iPhone's sales, but fewer sales than other less vaunted phones, too.

Apparently, the Nexus One costs $175 to make, and Google promised the next version will be a bit more business friendly.

Meanwhile, the iPhone was added to the another UK operators shelves this week, and is now available on the Vodafone network.

The best of the rest

One of the founders of the Darkmarket site faces 10 years in jail, while Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle all offer up security patches.

The Information Commissioner's Office has won the right to fine people as much as 500,000 for data breaches.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks we don't care about privacy online, and Gary McKinnon has won another stay of extradition with a judicial review, so he's staying in the UK until at least the spring.

Forget pencils and paper, today's kids have much more interesting learning tools in their classrooms: 3D projectors, fingerprint scanners, ruggedised notebooks, Lego-based robots and more.

All this was on show at the BETT educational technology show at Olympia in London.

Stand after stand displayed the all-important back-end tech as well as tried-and-tested school-friendly gadgets like netbooks and interactive whiteboards, but there was plenty of room at the massive show for some more unique - and brightly coloured - devices too.

IT PRO uncovered the new USB-based NComputing system, 3D projectors, do-it-yourself robots and more. Click through the photo gallery for pictures and details.

Are you attending BETT this week? Have you stumbled across any great tech? Let us know at comments@itpro.co.uk.

The limited Technical Preview of Office 2010 went out to several thousand testers in the middle of July and now a public beta test programme has started with anyone able to download and try out Office 2010.

But six months ahead of its final release, what can we say about Office 2010 and will it be worth the cost of upgrading when it finally hits the shelves?

Building on the radical changes made with Office 2007, when Microsoft unveiled the "Fluent" user interface, Office 2010 presents the most unified face it has ever had. The ribbon is in every application and they all have a new Backstage area, which you use to open, save or print your documents or to set options about the applications. The roundly criticised "Office Button" which hid the file menu in Office 2007 has been replaced by a simple button labelled "File" leading to clear pages which lay out all the options you have for working with the document as a whole.

For this version of Office, Microsoft has obviously concentrated on improving usability and future-proofing the suite by adding features that you will really want to use, even if you don't do so at the moment. It has also invested heavily in collaboration technologies particularly in the area of co-authoring documents and in integration with SharePoint.

Look and Feel

The small but vocal minority of people who don't like the ribbon interface will not like Office 2010 because it has the ribbon everywhere but they are definitely the exceptions.

Forester Research claims that more than 85 per cent of users like the ribbon interface in Office 2007 and only 2.4 per cent found it "significantly more difficult to use". However, Microsoft has made some improvements for Office 2010, including allowing the ribbon to be customised by end users as well as IT professionals. This removes one of the naysayers' biggest objections.

Customise the ribbon as you want it in Office 2010 and share those customisations with others through import/export or Group Policy.

For most people, the way the new UI is introduced is important in setting their expectations and getting them comfortable with it. If they get a good start with a positive attitude from management and IT staff and a little training or hand-holding, any small dip in productivity is gone in a couple of weeks, replaced by a productivity boost, better looking documents and users who wouldn't want to go back.

All the applications have new icons, emphasising a capital letter, which may lead to some confusion between PowerPoint, Publisher (and Project), and the colour schemes are a little more subtle than in Office 2007 with the silver scheme being the default rather than blue.

New common features

One of the biggest changes is the introduction of the Backstage area which contains all the functions of the File menu. This takes over the entire area of the application's window leaving only the ribbon tabs visible. It shows a list of file based actions on the left such as Save, Open, New, Print and Share.

The rest of the area is given over to information about the document and big buttons of options. For instance, all the Print options are now shown next to a preview of the document so you can quickly see how those options will affect the printed output. Backstage can make a big difference to many users by clearly presenting, in one place, options that used to be scattered over many different dialogs.

The File menu now shows the Backstage area complete with combined Print and Print Preview dialogs.

Data collected by Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Programme shows that after pasting data into an Office application, the most common action was to undo that paste because the data didn't format quite the way the user wanted. The new Paste Preview feature means that users can choose the format they want to paste the data in (Source Formatting, Destination Formatting, Plain Text, etc) before they commit to it. Paste options on the right-click menu will show you what the pasted data will look like in your document as you hover over the various possible options. You can also press the Ctrl key immediately after pasting to change the paste option rather than having to undo and try again.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote all now support co-authoring in one form or another. This lets multiple users open and edit the same document at the same time. Co-authoring in Excel only works in the cut-down Excel Web App whereas in Word, it only works in the full, rich-client application. The applications also differ in when you get to see other users' changes. Word and PowerPoint require you to manually save your changes to see those of other people. Excel and OneNote will sync changes automatically.

Common improvements

Images you insert into your documents can now have simple colour/contrast/brightness adjustments performed on them directly in the application. You can also apply artistic effects such as rendering as a pencil sketch, watercolour, etc. The thumbnails for these effects use the actual image you are manipulating so you can find the effect you want more easily. You also get a simple background removal tool to cut an object out of its background.

New picture tools allow background removal, colourisation, corrections and artistic effects.

Smart Art became smarter with many new diagram types including organisation charts. The context tab for Smart Art tools also gets new commands for adding and editing the individual shapes so you don't have to rely on editing the bullet point text all the time.

Office Applications: Word

In Word, the major change, alongside Backstage with its combined Print/Print Preview dialog, is the new Navigation Pane which combines features of the Document Map, Thumbnails and Find dialog in one modeless pane. The Navigation Pane shows you all the headings in your document and lets you jump directly to that text. It also lets you promote, demote or move headings, complete with their associated body text, and add new headings of any level anywhere in your document.

Type a word or phrase in the Navigation pane and all the headings with text containing that word are highlighted as are all the matching words in the main body of the document. You can switch from headings to seeing thumbnails of all the pages, again with search terms highlighted or to show snippets from the documents where matching text has been found.

The Navigation Pane lets you jump to and rearrange headings and search for text in your document.

There's a new Accessibility Checker to ensure your document is easily readable by people with disabilities and new language tools to give instant translations of words, phrases or documents.

Excel

Excel's conditional formatting has been improved with more logical defaults and the ability to pick individual icons from icon sets. There are new tools for visualising data including Sparklines and Slicers.

Sparklines produce miniature charts in a cell and show a single line or set of bars to summarise a range of data. You can highlight the highest and/or lowest values in each run of data and adjust the axes to be relative or absolute.

Sparklines are great for summarising data that would look too jumbled in a traditional chart. The new Slicer controls let you visually filter data in lists, PivotTables making it more obvious what data is included and consequently making PivotTables friendlier. Combine Slicers with the new PowerPivot add-on from the SQL Server team and even ordinary mortals can analyse hundreds of millions of rows of data without having to know what a Data Cube is.

Sparklines show small line or column charts in a cell to quickly summarise data.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint gets some new 3D transitions for use between slides which, used sparingly, will brighten up some presentations. There's also more flexibility in animations and a new animation painter which lets you copy animation between objects. You can more easily embed video in your presentations complete with effects such as refection, borders and recolouring and you can easily trim sections from videos. You will be able to broadcast presentations to anyone via the internet, even if they are only using a mobile device such as a smartphone, and you can easily compress your presentation to send it by email if required.

You can group slides into logical sections and new transition effects include 3D for the first time.

OneNote

OneNote is now included in all editions of Office except Starter. Although it has minimal formatting facilities, it lets you gather and organise information and share that information with other people. OneNote's notebooks with their sections and pages can easily be shared and edited by many people at the same time.

Everyone's changes are tracked and tagged with the author's name and you can see all the previous versions of pages or search for author tags. Notes can be linked together and are automatically linked to other documents or to Outlook tasks or appointments. You can use OneNote in many different ways including in pen-based scenarios such as Tablet PCs or smart whiteboards. In addition to drawing tools it also has equation editing and can turn handwritten equations into typeset ones.

OneNote gives you unlimited electronic pages in any number of notebooks to gather and organise data as you want.

Outlook

Outlook gets the ribbon interface throughout the whole application, even tools for searching get their own context sensitive ribbon tab. An improved conversation view aims to group related messages together, no matter what folder they are in. There are related tools to "clean up" a folder, removing redundant messages where their text is contained in the body of other messages, and a tool to ignore a conversation and all subsequent messages on the same subject.

Microsoft makes a big fuss about these tools but in practice they seem to group too many unrelated messages. Marking a conversation about "Meeting - Thursday" to be ignored, for example, may actually be dangerous as next month you may miss messages about a different "Meeting - Thursday" that could be very important.

Outlook's Conversation View, Clean-Up and Ignore features may help some but might be dangerous for others.

Much better thought out is the new "Quick Steps" feature where you can define common actions such as "Move this message to this folder and mark it as read" or "forward this message to John and flag it as important". These actions are then always available to you in one or two clicks and can speed up mail handling quite significantly.

Quick Steps let you define several small actions to be done with one click.

The new People Pane, at the bottom of the Reading Pane and in all the item forms, shows you all the other activities, emails, attachments, meetings, and status updates Outlook can find for that person in its index. The indexed search is fast and effective and will reach out to SharePoint 2010 and soon to other social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook as soon as those companies write interfaces for the new Outlook Social Connector.

The People Pane quickly shows mail, attachments and meetings involving this person.

Publisher

Publisher's update to use the ribbon interface and Backstage greatly enhances its usability. It inherits some technology from Visual Studio which makes laying out pages and aligning objects much easier. It also gets typography improvements including ligatures, swashes and alternative numeral forms for cursive and calligraphic fonts.

The ribbon interface makes working with Publisher much easier.

Access

Access gets a minor update to include conditional formatting as seen in Excel and a major overhaul to work more closely with SharePoint. You can easily design an Access database and then publish it to SharePoint for everyone in a department or company to use. The macro editor has been completely replaced and you can design data macros (equivalent to SQL Server triggers) which work on the data whether it is shown in a form, a datasheet or a list. A new Navigation control replaces the ancient "Switchboard" model and the report designer integrates with SQL Server Reporting Services.

Access' completely redesigned Macro editor is much easier to understand.

InfoPath

InfoPath's biggest change, apart from the ribbon interface, is the splitting of the application into separate Designer and Filler tools so that end users don't need the Designer tool, just the lightweight form filler. InfoPath can be used to design custom forms for any SharePoint list which can then be filled in using just the internet browser if the SharePoint Server has the InfoPath Forms Service.

InfoPath forms can be used in SharePoint, via email or just on their own.

SharePoint Workspace

SharePoint Workspace (ne Groove) allows you to take virtually any SharePoint 2010 list or document library offline while you travel and synchronise your changes back to the server whenever you are next connected. It also keeps the old Groove functionality of replicating ad-hoc projects full of documents, lists and other data between occasionally connected users without the need for a SharePoint server.

SharePoint Workspace lets you take virtually any SharePoint list and document library offline, which could be useful when out and about or travelling.

Compatibility and file formats

Office 2010 uses the OOXML file formats (ISO 29500) by default for Word, Excel and PowerPoint but it will also read and write the older binary file formats and the ODF (ISO 26300) file formats.

There is also a compatibility pack for Office 2000, XP (2002) and 2003 so users of those versions can read and write files in the new formats. The non-native formats open in "Compatibility Mode" where newer features not supported by the formats are disabled.

Support for ODF files is limited, particularly in Excel, and other manufacturers' applications supporting ODF files may struggle to read and edit Microsoft's implementation. Access 2010 uses the same format as Access 2007 (*.accdb) but can use the older .mdb format. OneNote 2010 has a new file format but will freely convert notebooks to and from the previous format.

OOXML (ISO 29500) is the native format but you can set the default save format to any of these options.

Editions

There will be six different editions of Office 2010. The free Starter Edition consisting of ad-supported, cut-down versions of Word and Excel is designed to be given away with new PCs. There will still be the -99 Home & Student Edition which gives you three licences for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for non-commercial use within a family.

The remaining four versions are suitable for business use. A new Home and Business Edition has the five major applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook and sits below Standard edition which also contains Publisher. It appears that Standard Edition will only be available through volume licencing. The Professional Edition, which will be available through Retail or Volume Licencing, contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher and Access. Professional Plus Edition consists of InfoPath, Communicator and SharePoint Workspace and again this edition is only available to volume licencing customers.

No pricing details are available as yet though historically prices have not changed much from one version to the next. Upgrades from previous versions to Office 2007 Professional currently retail for about 188 a seat and to Standard Edition for about 146 so you can expect to pay similar prices for upgrades to Office 2010. Volume licencing customers with Software Assurance agreements will, of course, get the upgrade as part of their deal.

Click here for our review of Windows 7.

Verdict

A lot of new and improved functionality has been squeezed in to Office 2010 above the obvious extension of the ribbon UI to those applications which missed out in 2007. The beta release is proving very stable so far but the usual caveats about beta software apply. (It hasn’t been fully tested and if something can go wrong it probably will when it is most inconvenient.) Overall, this version of Office shows a lot of promise and appears to have something for everyone, particularly if you combine Office 2010 with the huge developments that have been made in SharePoint, even the free SharePoint Foundation 2010. Most of the improvements have been to elements common to all applications, making the applications work seamlessly together and increasing usability and the opportunities for collaboration.

Technology in schools can be a "trojan horse" to families sneaking knowledge and services into the homes of those who would not otherwise receive them, according to the education minister.

In a speech at the education and tech show BETT in London yesterday, Jim Knight said many parents see technology as a way of improving their children's lives, but it could also help them. "Technology can be a Trojan horse for those parents, bringing knowledge, learning, and useful services direct into people's homes," he said.

"So when we talk about education, we can't just be thinking about school," he added.

Knight warned that such opportunities needed to be open to every child and family or the UK risked widening the gap between wealthier families and the poor. Knight said the government's 300 million Home Access programme, which aims to ensure all students have a computer with broadband access, will likely kick off by the end of the year following a trial next month.

Calling on industry to support the programme, Knight said Microsoft had "risen to the challenge" and signed up to help fund a foundation to support home access. "So I repeat the challenge to others - I hope other industry leaders will respond to this move and join in."

Knight also said that the digital communications and technology secotors were worth 52 billion a year in the UK making those areas increasingly important during a recession.

"As we seek stability and we look to future growth from the current financial climate, Britain must continue to lead the way in innovation and technology, by nurturing those industries, and the skills and talent which support them," he told attendees of the show.

The minister claimed UK schools have been making progress with IT, saying 99 per cent have broadband, half have interactive whiteboards, and the computer-to-student ratio has improved to 1:3 from 1:19 a decade ago.

Technology must be recognised and accepted as a catalyst for change in education, much the same way it has been in industry, according to Becta, a government-linked body promoting the use of IT in education.

At the launch of the Becta's annual report, chairman Andrew Pinder said that the education sector must take on technology with the same leadership, drive and enthusiasm for change as industry.

"Throughout history technology has been the catalyst for change in industry," said Pinder. "If it can do that for industry, why can't it do the same for education?"Indeed, industry requires education to follow its lead, Pinder said. "Industry demands a skilled, educated and enthusiastic workforce, and one that is at home in using the latest technology," he said. "Our schools and colleges have a duty to ensure that demand is met."

However, it is not just about supplying a skilled workforce, said Becta's chief executive, Stephen Crowe. "We know that, used effectively, technology for learning can help to narrow achievement gaps, help more people to achieve and continue their learning, and motivate and support those who are disaffected and disengaged to succeed within the system," he added.

As part of the annual report, Becta released the results of its study into technology integration. Becta and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) started the ICT Test Bed project in 2002 to look at how technology could be integrated into classrooms to improve education.

Over thirty primary, secondary and further education colleges in Sandwell, Durham, and Barking and Dagenham - areas chosen because of their relative social and economic disadvantages - were given money to spend how they chose on technology and training.

As technology became more embedded in schools, national test outcomes improved. As well, electronic registration improved attendance by as much as four per cent and better management cut teachers' administrative burdens.

"We have said for some time now that if technology is used properly in the classroom it can help to produce a major improvement in results. Not just in academic achievement, but also in involvement, attendance and in the overall efficiency of the institution," said Crowne.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said the project will be replicated across the country, adding that the government has already invested billions in educational ICT in the past decade.

"Technology is already supporting teachers raising standards in our schools and equipping young people to exploit the future knowledge economy," Knight said. "That's why we have already invested over 5 billion in ICT in schools since 1998 - trebling the ratio of computers to pupils in primary schools, put interactive whiteboards into classrooms and connected nearly every school to high-speed broadband."

Despite the investment, cost cutting is still a top issue. Becta announced it was committed to driving savings of 100 million over the next three years across education, helped by new procurement agreements with suppliers to cut costs of schools and colleges upgrading their IT equipment. The body claims that its purchasing frameworks have already saved 29 million on interactive whiteboards, while a single agreement with one software provider saved 80 million over four years.

Schools of the future will be environmentally friendly and technologically innovative - and they're available today, according to development group Re-Thinking.

A fully-functioning model school built by the group is on display at the Offsite 2007 exhibition at the BRE Innovation Park in Watford this week. Re-Thinking is a collaboration between ICT provider NG Bailey Education, construction firm Willmott Dixon, contractor Eurban, engineers Max Fordham and architects White Design.

The three-storey structure is built entirely of wood - not only does the fresh lumber smell great and environmentally-friendly, it's also cheap and quick to build with. A standard school can be built in 18 months, while this model took just two, said NG Bailey technical director Rajesh Sinha.

Despite its earthy origins, the building is high-tech. It covers all the basics - building-wide WiFi, for instance - but also features some new ideas.

When students pass through the front doors, proximity cards register their attendance - handy for tracking truancy and for counting kids during fire drills, too. Parents receive a text message automatically if any student is missing.

The proximity cards also manage locks on the school's doors, restricting students' access to certain areas. Inside the building, IP-CCTV cameras with two-way audio record everyone who enters, as well as behaviour in classrooms.

A roof-top weather station - a small antennae apparatus with whirling sensors - monitors outdoor conditions and automatically adjusts indoor lighting and opens and closes windows to match. "It's quite a complex science, when to open and close things," said Sinha.

The first room features an educational jockey station (EJ). A teaching centre with movable walls, the EJ can be reconfigured to suit different class sizes or to provide a separate lecture space or quiet area. "Teachers can decide what they're going to teach and change the class size," said Sinha.

At the EJ's centre is a laptop and projector, which are hooked up to the Cambridge University Press global grid, allowing teachers to bring different materials and topics into the room.

The main classroom is flexible as well, allowing teachers to sit students at desks facing the board at the front or the flatscreen at the back, or in smaller groups in ergonomic chairs working at a laptop.

The room is equipped with an internet-enabled multimedia set-top box and video store, so students can access video from the internet or the library's own collection.

While the entire school is WiFi-enabled, the classroom also demonstrates the potential use of ethernet over electrical supply. Currently is of limited use in a school environment because of regulations limited the number of devices which can be linked up this way, such a tactic could help speed up deployment in the future. "We've got our eyes on it," said Sinha. "It's going to be major in future years."

The school's roof is also in use as a learning space, as wireless access and speakers let teachers bring the classroom outdoors. "If you're having a lesson and it's sunny out, why not come up here and enjoy," said Sinha.

All this IT, but who's going to run it? The school is run on thin client technology - with a naturally-cooled server room, of course. But the bulk of the applications and data management are offsite in a hosted data centre. Such a setup helps the school cut back on heating costs and the time spent on IT management, as well as helps prevent major security breaches, Sinha said.

The thin client hosted setup also means students can access schoolwork from home. "Students don't have to lug school books or even a laptop, as they can connect from home," he said.

The most common problem with setting up new technology systems in schools is not properly training staff and students, Sinha said. "Where things fall down is not enough training for staff or students," he said. "I've seen digital whiteboards abandoned because no one knew how to use them."

"It's not just kit and software," Sinha said. "It's how well you train staff, and when that happens right, people embrace it." He added that staff retention improves and hiring is easier with well designed, up-to-date schools. "Who wants to work where it looks like a jail?" he asked.

Most importantly perhaps, given the feelings most children have about school, is how students feel about the model. "We brought in kids at the early stages, and they were saying 'Wow, when can we start here?'" said Sinha. "It's a much more fun environment to learn in. They don't have to be dragged to school anymore."

Aside from IT, the school is innovative in other areas. Rainwater is harvested for flushing toilets, which are located in classrooms to cutback on opportunities for bullying. Solar panels and wind generators fuel energy, while consumption is cut back by using recycled materials to insulate windows and a daylight "chimney" bringing more natural lighting into ground floors.

While it may still remain the school of the future, all the technology and environmental innovations in the model are in use at a school somewhere in Britain, just not all at once. "Very few people have joined it all up," said Sinha. "We're looking to show best practice, what's feasible, and make a difference to education in this country."

New research from YouGov has shown the positive effect of broadening internet access into the classroom.

Thirty-seven per cent of teachers felt the internet had made a dramatic impact on exam results, nearly nine out of ten teachers felt pupils were more interested in lessons and 80 per cent felt it helped both slow learners.

The main use of the internet in the classroom is for access to online learning and research, but just one per cent using the available bandwidth is being used to collaborate with other schools and businesses.

"The internet has transformed the way pupils are learning in the class room and the benefits are there for all to see in terms of exam results and interest in lessons" said Christopher Small, director of public sector at ntl:Telewest Business, which sponsored the research.

"However, with just one per cent of teachers using the available bandwidth to collaborate with other schools and local businesses, a trick is being missed."

The government has set targets for internet access at schools, where primary schools should have 2Mb bandwidth and secondary schools 8Mb by the end of the year. One in ten teachers felt this goal would be reached.

The chief barrier to internet use is a lack of PCs in the classroom but over a third of teachers said they had insufficient IT training to use the internet properly for teaching. A lack of interactive whiteboards was also highlighted.