TweetDeck versus Seesmic: battle of the Twitter apps

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TweetDeck and Seesmic are desktop clients designed to make communicating on Twitter and managing your accounts easier.

Here they go, head to head: TweetDeck version 0.26 versus Seesmic version 0.4.

Look & Feel

Both TweetDeck and Seesmic are built using the Adobe AIR platform, and have a similar look and feel.

Seemsic appears to have more subtleties designed to make it easier to decipher tweets from multiple accounts at once, yet neither application is hugely customisable when it comes to the overall look.

If you only run a single Twitter account then seeing how applications handle multiple accounts won’t matter to you, but if you’re a “power user” handling two or more active accounts, you’ll find Seesmic offers more options for handling them.

Both applications let you view columns for each account’s tweets, replies, direct messages and so on, but Seesmic also allows you to view a single stream of messages from all your accounts at once, ordered by the time tweets arrive.

Whether this works for you depends on how you like to view accounts, but at least you have the option. TweetDeck (currently) doesn’t offer this.

The Advent PQD-9002 desktop PC – available from PC World

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PC World has announced that they’ll be exclusively stocking the Advent PQD-9002 desktop PC. This looks like being a good, media-centre, family PC.

It’s got an AMD Phenom X4 9350, 2GHz, Quad-Core processor with a 512MB ATI Radeon HD4350 graphics card so it should be able to handle gaming pretty well as well as playing video without any lag. There’s 4GB of RAM in there and has a fairly substantial 640GB hard-drive so you can store plenty of media as well.

The Advent PQD-9002 will cost just under £600 with an 18.5-inch LG monitor. It will cost slightly more if you want a bigger screen – 20 and 22-inch monitors are also available. It’s a shame it hasn’t got a Blu-ray drive but it’s not a bad price for what you’re getting.

If you’re interested, order one from PC World.

Eee Box gets an upgrade, and HDMI-out

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The humble Eee Box B202, which we liked last year, has been granted an upgrade by the technology gods. It’s now the Eee Box 206, and comes with an HDMI-out slot, meaning that you can plug this baby into your TV and watch high-definition content. It even comes with a remote control.

Specs-wise, it’s got an Atom processor, 160GB of hard disc space, 1GB of RAM and Wi-Fi. It comes with Windows XP, but I’d advise replacing that with Linux or Windows 7 swiftly. Don’t replace it with Vista though, whatever you do. For that, Asus is asking £309, which isn’t too bad for an HD-capable machine.

What do you reckon? Would you recommend this for a parent considering plugging a PC into their TV? Or something else? Share in the comments.

(via Tech Radar)

Medion unveils cheap, high-spec, gaming PC – the "Erazer".

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Medion, known for rebadging expensive PCs and selling them cheap, has just sent us word of its new gaming PC – the Erazer. It’s a reassuringly high-specced machine considering the price, with perhaps only its graphics card letting it down. Let’s have a look in more detail.

The machine is centred around the fantastic Intel Core i7 920 processer, which runs at 2.66GHz with 8MB of cache. That’s paired up with a respectable 9600GT graphics card with 512MB of graphics memory and DirectX10 compatibility. There’s a 1TB hard drive, a whopping 6GB of RAM, a full 10 (10!) USB ports and your average Wi-Fi, optical media drive, memory card reader and a few bits of bundled software.

All that’s available right now for the low low price of £899, though that doesn’t include mouse, keyboard, monitor or mousemat. And we all know how important a mousemat is. I’d have been happier if Medion had swapped out the i7 for a slightly lower-spec, but just as capable, Q6600 processor and upgraded the graphics card instead, to an 8800GTX, perhaps.

Medion Shop