The worlds most beautiful PC...

... in my opinion anyway. Everybody knows that PCs are and always have been ugly - mostly bulky and made out of plastic. If you’ve ever wanted a good looking computer you’ve always had to go for a Mac, but now it’s different.

A relatively young Californian company, named Vizio, which has become famous across the US, and the world, for producing very competitively priced HDTVs and its amazing 21:9 CinemaWide TV have recently released specs for a new range of laptops and all-in-one desktops. They aren’t the usual plastic crap but they’re beautiful aluminium unibodied works of art.

Within their new PC range they’re offering pre-orders on what they’re calling ‘Thin + Light’ which is their Ultrabook and MacBook Air competitor, the ‘Notebook’ which is essentially a regular laptop and MacBook Pro competitor, and finally the ‘All-in-one PC’ which as the name suggests is an all-in-one desktop and iMac competitor.

Vizio haven’t just spent the last two years designing the look but they’ve also gone all out on the guts.

The Thin + Light ultrabook is being sold with either a 14” or 15.6” display and all feature the latest Intel Core i3 – i7 processors with 4GB memory and up to 256GB storage. In terms of connectivity you’ll get Bluetooth as standard along with two USB 3.0 ports and a HDMI output.  Weighing in at 3.39 lbs and 3.96 lbs they’re certainly heavier and larger than the MacBook Air but starting at less than £600 they’re much better priced.

It’s a similar story with their 15.6” notebook, featuring i3 – i7 processors, up to 1TB storage and a decent graphics card to go with the full HD display.

It’s with their all-in-one that I think they’ve really pulled out the big guns though. Offering a choice of a 24” or 27” display, all again with i3 – i7 processors. This time though even one of the most basic options has a 1TB Hard Drive as standard and it’s all compressed into the PCs tiny base. What’s more is that there are two HDMI input ports so you can hook up your Sky or Xbox (other TV providers and consoles are available).  They’ve really gone all out to make this a great entertainment PC and they even throw in an external subwoofer, wireless keyboard, remote control and trackpad. The highest spec all-in-one comes in at under £900 which quite honestly is astounding.

The best thing, for me anyway, is that all of these laptops and desktops come with Microsoft Signature which basically means you don’t get any of that pre-installed crap that plagues new PCs across the world. They’ll also let you upgrade to Windows 8 (when it’s released) for £15, which is an absolute must.

So to sum up, Vizio have well and truly gone all out to produce this beautiful looking range of laptops and an all-in-one. They look amazing, they’re insides are pretty decent and the price is unbelievable.

There is however one major problem, they’re not available in the UK yet and there’s no word on when or even if they’ll be available outside of the US. This is something I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on but with the hype surrounding them I can’t see why they won’t be made available.

Why Google+ won’t be successful

It was around this time last year that Google launched its much-rumoured social network; they called it ‘Google+’ (Google Plus). The social network launched to huge hype in the tech community with tech nerds everywhere battling for invites. It appeared though that it was only these tech nerds (with me included) that actually wanted to sign-up for the service. Soon after launching, 10 million had signed-up and this number was growing by over half a million every day. Looking at the stats over 70% of these early sign-ups were young males.

As of April this year there are around 200 million users, far from Facebook’s 900 million, although Facebook is 8 years old now.

From these basic stats it seems that Google+ has been quite successful so far but digging a bit deeper and the opposite is very true. Despite the large number of users, for a relatively new network anyway, it’s apparent that many of these users aren’t particularly active with the average user spending just over 3 minutes a month, yes just 3 minutes per month, on the site. When you compare this number to Facebook where the average user spends well over 7 hours a month on the site it’s obvious that people simply are not using the new social network.

I know people will be saying ‘it’s only a year old, give it a chance’ and although this is true I still don’t think the service will be successful and this is why:

People have invested too much of their time into Facebook. I joined Facebook in 2007 and have pretty much logged on every day since, uploading and being tagged in thousands of photos, finding hundreds of friends, sharing videos, links and god knows what else. Why, therefore, would I or anybody else want to do all this again for Google+? I know some people, and Google, are saying that it’s not a copy of Facebook but let’s be honest, it is.

That brings me to my second and third points. Ask anybody who isn’t particularly tech savvy if they have heard of Google+. Their response will either be: ‘Yes, it’s just like Facebook’ or ‘No, I don’t have a clue what it is’. When I suggested to my boss, who knows nothing about technology, that we should set-up a Google+ for the shop he asked ‘What’s different from Facebook and Twitter?’ I couldn’t find an answer. His next response was that he doesn’t have the time, patience or willingness to sign-up and run another social network. From my experience this mirrors the thoughts of the majority of people.

As an extension of these points I also think that Google+ has come along at the wrong time. Twitter and Facebook are experiencing amazing growth around the world so people aren’t really looking for another social network and why would anybody sign-up for something that none of their friends use.

The fact that Google have put out Television ads for the network proves that it’s not particularly successful. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all the other social networks have never, as far as I’m aware, used any form of advertising and generally get members by word of mouth – the way social networks work.

I know some people and businesses have had great success with Google+ which is absolutely brilliant. I never want to see anything fail but I just don’t see Google+ being for the masses in the same way that Facebook and Twitter are.

If you use Google+ regularly or have any thoughts or comments please do express them by posting a comment below.

Twitter gets tough with it's API

Twitter is starting to get tougher and stricter on how developers use it's API. In a blog post today Michael Sippey outlined the companies plans. They basically want developers to stop making clients that 'mimic' the Twitter experience, whether this be on the web or via one of the mobile apps, and focus their attention on integration. It's completely understandable that Twitter want to go this way. Having users use Twitter.com or one of their apps is the only way they can ensure they continue to receive advertising revenue.

It's apparent that Twitter are eager to get as few people using third party client, such as Hootsuite, as possible. After all they receive no money when somebody uses these clients. Even their own client, Tweetdeck, has gone backwards in terms of user experience, seemingly they don't want people using this either.

Are you a developer? What do you think about Twitters plans for its API? Comment below.