HUAWEI MOBILE WIFI E5220

The Huawei Mobile WiFi E5220 is a pocket-sized wireless router that lets you share a mobile broadband connection with up to 10 Wi-Fi devices,but only supports 3G, not 4G. Huawei claims it has a maximum download speed of 21.6 Mbps and an upload speed of 5.8 Mbps, but real-world speeds depend on your location and which network you're on.
When copying files between two computers on the E5220's local wireless network, we got 16.9Mbps at a distance of one metre, 18Mbps at 10m and 3.7Mbps at 20m. These are fast speeds for a portable router.
We found it tricky to price off the router's back panel, but once it's open, the battery and SIM card are east to install. You should also make a note of the default wireless network name and password (on a label next to the SIM slot), which you'll need to connect to the router. With a password already set, your wireless network is secure as soon as you start using it, rather than after you've spent time configuring the wireless security set-up. 

The simple web interface shows you the router's connection status to your mobile network, as well as which PC's are connected and how much data you've used, which is essential if you're on a capped plan.

The E5220 is a good portable router let down only by the lack of 4G support and a fiddly battery cover.

SPECIFICATION

802.11n, 3G modem, no Ethernet ports, 30g, 68x71x26mm(HxWxD), One-year warranty, Part Code E5220s-2.

PRICE
$77.57

LIFE IS LIKE A BOOK

LIFE is like a book

Some chapters are sad,

Some happy and some very exciting.

But if you never turn the page, 

you will never know 

what the next chapter holds. 

BOSE NEW SPEAKERS SOUNDLINK MINI TOTALLY AWESOME

DESIGN

It has a flat metal grill and a solid aluminium shell, the SoundLink Mini evokes the image of a radio from the 1960s, yet sleeker and more updated for today. It measures just 2 by 7.1 by 2.3 inches (HWD), and its satisfyingly sturdy-feeling 1.5pound heft and aluminium casing give an impression of solidity. The controls are arranged neatly in a row of rubber buttons on the top of the speaker, with raised Volume Up/ Down buttons franked by Power and Mute buttons on the left and Bluetooth and Auxiliary input buttons on the right. 

The right side of the speaker holds a power connector and a 3.5mm audio input. The back is covered by a metallic grille just like the front's, nut without a Bose logo painted on it, showing the passive radiator built into the speaker. A large rectangular foot on the bottom of the speaker keeps it in place and covers the rechargeable battery, along with contact points for the included charging cradle and a micro USB port.

CHARGING

Unlike many other Bluetooth speakers, the SoundLink Mini doesn't charge through its micro USB port; that's only for servicing the speaker and upgrading the firmware. According to Bose, the speaker's battery can last 7 hours on a charge.

PERFORMANCE

For its small size, the SoundLink Mini puts out some impressive sound. It has more directional sound, but it also put more power and sounded just as good placed against a wall and facing entire room. Although the bass made the speaker itself shake, its small size limited its ability to deliver real wall-shaking bass, though the reverb and harsh riffs of Daft Punk's "Robot Rock" created a suitably large-sounding soundscape. The SoundLink Mini's solid high-mid performance gave it a slight edge over the Logitech UE Boom, which can sound slightly tinny in comparison.

The BoseLink Mini is a little powerhouse that produces clear, solid sound, but for its size and price its performance is impressive.

PRICE - $199.95

3D STORAGE DRIVES WITH 100TB+ CAPACITY TO COME IN FUTURE

As long as engineers at Florida International University have found a way of breaking the 2D limitation of magnetic hard drive storage. By moving to three dimensions, the researchers have massively increased areal density, with the possibility of 100-terabyte (and larger) hard drives now firmly on the horizon.

While we've covered a lot of magnetic storage breakthroughs, they have all been fundamentally 2D in their implementation, and thus are ultimately restricted by superparamagnetic limits (magnetic bits can only be so small, before neighboring bits/changes in temperature can randomly after the magnetism). Heat-assisted magnetic recording(HAMR), for example, can allow for magnetic grains that are just a few nanometres across an areal densities in the terabits-per-square-inch domain - but even then, we're still looking at a hard cap of around 60 terabytes per hard drive.

To move beyond the limits imposed by superparamagnetism, the only solution is move beyond simple 2D improvements - making magnetic
grains smaller - and instead move into the third dimension. 

At Florida International University, the researchers have created a new hard drive platter that allows for the writing and reading of 3D magnetic data. In essence, instead of having just one magnetic layer, the new platter has three magnetic layers, with isolation (insulation) layers sandwiched in between. On a conventional hard drive platter, a magnetic site stores just a single bit - here, a triple stack of magnetic layers, each magnetic site can store up to eight bits of data (north/north/north, south/south/south, N/N/S, N/S/S, etc.)

To read data, a weakly magnetic head is used to measure the vector sum of three magnetic fields. To write data, each layer of the recording medium has slightly different properties, so that they can only be written by a specific type and strength of magnetic field, which is output by a special recording head.

How data is stored on multilayer 3D (ML-3D) recording medium

For now, FIU's new magnetic recording medium is an in-the-lab tech demo. Where conventional hard drive platters are mass-produced using a simple process (magnetron sputtering), FIU's platter is more like a small disc of silicon that goes through dozens of painstaking process, including e-beam lithographic patterning. This isn't to say that multilayer 3D (ML-3D) recording won't become a reality, but alternatives such as HAMR are much closer to commercial adoption. That ML-3D might be used to create 100-terabyte (or larger) hard drives in the future, though, still exciting news - and, interestingly, perhaps the technology that will finally kill off magnetic tape, which is still hanging in there as the preferred bulk offline storage medium.