Samsung's Galaxy Note 5 is excellent overall, and the only phone to buy if you want to write by hand. However, you'll pay a huge premium for a modest upgrade from last year's model, and less pricey competitors will satisfy many.
Growing up, my family never gave much credence to living a super-healthy lifestyle. Whole Foods wasn’t in every major city, and most of our food choices were just good old south-Louisiana Cajun dishes. The terms “gluten,” “hydrogenated oils,” and even “organic” were never mentioned in our household.
Les Olympiades internationales de mathématiques (International Mathematical Olympiad en anglais) constituent un championnat international de mathématiques concernant des élèves à l'issue de leurs études secondaires. Les Olympiades ont lieu chaque année dans un pays différent.
Histoire
Les premières Olympiades internationales de mathématiques se sont déroulées en 1959 en Roumanie et regroupaient des participants de 7 pays d'Europe de l'Est (Bulgarie, Hongrie, Pologne, République démocratique allemande, Roumanie, Tchécoslovaquie, Union soviétique et Yougoslavie). Depuis, elles ont eu lieu tous les ans, sauf en 1980, en raison de dissensions internes1.
Actuellement, plus de 100 pays des cinq continents sont concernés. Chaque pays envoie une équipe de 6 candidats au maximum (avec un chef de délégation et un adjoint, ainsi que d'éventuels observateurs). Les élèves doivent avoir moins de 20 ans et ne pas avoir commencé leurs études supérieures, mais aucune limite n'est imposée quant au nombre de participations. L'épreuve est individuelle mais il existe un classement (non officiel) par équipes (cf. infra).
Format de l'épreuve et récompenses
L'épreuve consiste à résoudre sur deux jours, en deux séances de 4 heures et demie, deux séries de trois problèmes issus de la géométrie plane, de l'arithmétique, des inégalités ou de la combinatoire. Leur résolution fait appel plus au raisonnement qu'à des connaissances sophistiquées : les solutions sont souvent courtes et élégantes. À chaque problème est attribué un total de 7 points.
Chaque pays, excepté le pays organisateur, peut proposer des problèmes au comité de sélection qui est mis en place par le pays organisateur, qui en sélectionne certains afin d'en écourter la liste. Les chefs de délégation arrivent quelques jours avant les élèves et se regroupent alors pour choisir les 6 exercices. Étant donné qu'ils connaissent les sujets avant les épreuves, ils sont séparés des élèves jusqu'à la fin de celles-ci. Les élèves sont accompagnés avant les épreuves par les chefs de délégation adjoints.
Les copies des élèves sont notées conjointement par les chefs de délégation de ce pays et les coordinateurs choisis par le pays organisateur (ou le chef de la délégation qui a proposé le problème pour les élèves du pays organisateur). En cas de désaccord, l'ensemble des chefs de délégation fournit un avis définitif.
Les médailles et mentions sont attribuées à titre individuel, selon les scores des participants, sur les critères suivants :
1/12 des participants reçoivent une médaille d'or ;
2/12 des participants reçoivent une médaille d'argent ;
3/12 des participants reçoivent une médaille de bronze ;
tout élève, qui ne reçoit aucune médaille mais qui obtient la note de 7/7 sur un exercice, obtient la mention honorable.
Des prix spéciaux peuvent être attribués pour des solutions extrêmement élégantes. Courantes avant 1980, elles sont plus rares depuis : les dernières ont été attribuées en 1988, en 1995 et en 2005.
Le Bulletin officieldu Royaume du Maroc (en arabe : : الجريدة الرسمية للمملكة المغربية), en abrégé BORM ou simplement BO, anciennement Bulletin officielde l'Empire chérifien, est une publication de l'État marocain, éditée — en arabe et en français — par le Secrétariat général du gouvernement et consignant notamment les textes des lois, des dahirs, des décrets et des traités internationaux. L'édition générale, en arabe, est bihebdomadaire, et celle de la traduction officielle en français bimensuelle.
Sa première édition, mise en place dans le cadre du Protectorat français dans l'Empire chérifien établi par le traité franco-marocain de Fès (30 mars 1912), remonte au . Son en-tête, qui était alors « EMPIRE CHÉRIFIEN : Protectorat de la République Française AU MAROC »1, a laissé place à « EMPIRE CHÉRIFIEN »1 à la suite de l'indépendance retrouvée en 1956, et enfin à « ROYAUME DU MAROC »1 en 1957, le sultan Sidi Mohammed (ben Youssef) devenant le roi Mohammed V.
Histoire[modifier | modifier le code]
Initialement, fut « créé un Bulletin Officiel du Gouvernement Chérifien et du Protectorat de la République Française au Maroc, destiné à publier les décrets et décisions du Gouvernement Chérifien, les lois, décrets, arrêtés et décisions du Gouvernement de la République relatifs au Maroc ainsi que les arrêtés et décisions du Commissaire Résident Général »1 (article 1 de l'arrêté résidentiel du 2 septembre 1912 portant création du Bulletin officiel, établi par Hubert Lyautey et paru dans le premier numéro du 2, soit sept mois après l'instauration du protectorat français par le traité franco-marocain de Fès). Son en-tête était « Empire chérifien : Protectorat de la République française au Maroc »2. Ce Bulletin officiel de l'Empire chérifien : Protectorat de la République française au Maroc, publié à Rabat, comme les suivants, et d'abord en français, connut une première version en arabe l'année suivante3,4.
Parallèlement, le 10 avril 1913 — environ cinq mois après la naissance du premier Bulletin officiel de l'Empire chérifien : Protectorat de la République française au Maroc et quatre mois après la convention franco-espagnole de Madrid définissant la zone d'influence espagnole au Maroc (27 novembre 1912) — fut publié à Madrid le premier « bulletin officiel de l'Espagne au Maroc », alors nommé Boletín oficial de la Zona de Influencia española en Marruecos (« Bulletin officiel de la zone d'influence espagnole au Maroc »), avant d'être rebaptisé Boletín oficial de la Zona de Protectorado español en Marruecos (« Bulletin officiel de la zone de protectorat espagnol au Maroc ») à partir du 10 décembre 19185.
Sept jours après la reconnaissance de l'indépendance du Maroc par la France (2 mars 1956), le Bulletin officiel de l'Empire chérifien : Protectorat de la République française au Maroc laissa place au Bulletin officiel de l'Empire chérifien (no 2263 du )6,7, et près d'un an et demi après, au Bulletin officiel du Royaume du Maroc (no 2353 du )8,9, « Sa Majesté Sidi Mohammed (ben Youssef) », sultan de l'Empire chérifien, devenant « Sa Majesté Mohammed V », roi du Maroc.
---الرابط خارج التغطية للوقت الراهن اعيد الاتصال لاحقا---
After the truly wretched Windows 8 and marginally less wretchedWindows 8.1, Windows 10 comes as a breath of fresh air.
Windows 10 is much more usable than Wndows 8 or 8.1 and proudly offers a bundle of new features, including improved security, a new browser, and the voice-activated intelligent assistant Cortana. You might even call Windows 10 the most revolutionary version of Windows ever, mainly because it will be continually upgraded as part of Microsoft's "Windows as a service" effort.
But the question is not whether Windows 10 is a good upgrade for Windows 8 users -- obviously, it is. The real question is whether Windows 10 deserves to supplant Windows 7. Despite substantial new functionality in Windows 10, Windows 7 users should wait until the upgrade train brings more improvements.
Many of the new features of Windows 10 do not seem ready for prime time, including the greatly modified Start menu with live tiles, the new Edge browser, Cortana, and the Continuum method of switching between mouse and touchscreen control. They all work well enough, yet they all lack key capabilities. The lesser tile-based Windows apps vary in quality from good (Mail, Calendar) to passable (Photos, Phone Companion) to barely breathing placeholders (People, Groove Music, Movies & TV).
The new Windows 10 Start with live tiles is a major departure from previous versions.
It seems obvious that Microsoft rushed the consumer version of Windows 10 out the door in time for back-to-school season. But the “real” Windows 10 (at least the “next final” version) won’t appear until October or thereabouts, in the form of Threshold 2. Think of TH2 as an accelerated Service Pack 1, ready for the enterprise.
Meanwhile, myriad questions remain unanswered. We know that Microsoft will force updates on Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro users who aren’t connected to update servers. That posture has already created problems, with an Nvidia driver hatched before its time and a patch that caused repeated Explorer restarts -- both in the past week. Those of us familiar with Microsoft’s Windows patching travails will face the future with some trepidation: How long until Microsoft force-feeds a bad patch, and how will Microsoft recover from it?
These caveats aside, there’s no doubt Windows 10 holds a spark of greatness and should please those who were disenfranchised by Windows 8’s hamfisted changes. It’s the beginning of a new Windows, with all the good and bad that entails. Let’s take a look at the details.
Ease of use
For those of us who rely on a mouse and keyboard, Windows 10’s ease of use rates right up there with Windows 7 and is light-years ahead of Windows 8/8.1. For the touch crowd, with a few exceptions noted below, Windows 10 works as well as Windows 8.1, which may be (properly) construed as damning with faint praise. There’s a learning curve with touch, along with disappointing limitations, no matter which version of Windows you currently use.
Windows 10 boots faster, works faster, and seems much more robust than either Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1. I haven’t had any problems with drivers or programs that run on Windows 8/8.1, although all of those old Metro apps are destined for the bit bucket. Clearly, the new Windows Universal apps hold great promise, but they aren’t there yet.
Windows 10’s signature new feature, of course, is the Start menu. The new Start menu combines a severely stripped-down version of the Windows 7 Start menu with a mouse-friendly field of Windows 8-like tiles.
If you’re coming from Windows 7, the left side of the Start menu will look vaguely familiar, but the Windows 10 version is much less malleable than the Windows 7 version. In Windows 10, you can’t create custom menu items, build cascading menus, or pin your own apps, files, or locations to the Start menu. You only get a fixed set of 10 apps that can be pinned to the bottom-left side of the menu, along with File Explorer and Settings, which can be removed.
If you’re coming from Windows 8/8.1 and using a mouse, the field of tiles should feel quite similar to the Metro Start screen, with the new ability to run the tiled apps in resizable windows on the desktop. Methods for grouping and manipulating the tiles are different in Windows 10, but cover much the same ground as those in Windows 8. In Windows 10, tiles are grouped rigidly in three- or four-wide groups. You can change the number of groups that are visible by widening or narrowing the Start menu. That’s considerably more restrictive than Windows 8/8.1.
If you’re coming from Windows 8.1 with a mostly tablet mindset, the new Tablet mode in Windows 10 has much of the ease-of-use benefits of touch Windows 8.1, such as spread-out tiles and the Start options hidden under a hamburger icon, with a few minor annoyances. For example, you can’t turn off the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, no matter which app is running. You’re also stuck with the rigid organization of tiles into three- or four-wide groups.
Charms? Gone. Left-side task switching? Gone. Good riddance.
No, touch has not gone away: Behold the new tablet mode of Windows 10.
Other ease-of-use improvements abound. For example, Microsoft seems to have finally perfected in-place upgrades. Cortana is starting to become a viable “assistant,” and if you’re willing to let Microsoft look at your activities, the potential for Cortana help extends into every interaction you have with Windows.
One widely touted ease-of-use benefit of Windows 10 -- the ability to run nearly identical Universal applications on phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox, and all Windows 10-branded devices -- remains elusive. Whether Microsoft will be able to deliver a WinRT API that works on all those devices, and whether app developers will take advantage of the API, is still very much up in the air -- particularly given Microsoft’s recent retrenchment on Windows Phone.
Windows 7 upgraders can take advantage of many Windows 8-era ease-of-use improvements: a better Task Manager, more functional File Explorer (though it still doesn’t support tabs), Storage Spaces to manage all of your drives in a group, File History, built-in antivirus, and the considerable plumbing improvements in Windows 8.
Features
Even as Windows 10 rolls out to the world at large, big new features are still evolving. Some of the features are due for updates in or around October, in the Threshold 2 timeframe. Whether Microsoft dribbles some of the improvements out in the interim -- as one might expect with “Windows as a service” -- remains to be seen.
Edge, Microsoft’s first modern browser and arguably its most advanced Windows Universal app program, looks poised to take on Firefox and Chrome head-to-head. It has a sleek new design, runs fast, and is closing in on its rivals in HTML5 support. Edge is infinitely (I say that in a clinical, measurable way) more secure than Internet Explorer because it doesn’t support any of the offal that Microsoft has been foisting on us for years -- no ActiveX, no Silverlight, no custom navigation bars, no Browser Helper Objects, no VBScript, no attachEvent. For those of you stuck with that technology, Internet Explorer 11 will also ship with Windows 10.
Edge has a simple switch to turn Adobe Flash Player on and off. It also serves as the Windows default PDF reader, which is a huge improvement. Slightly ahead of RTM, Edge loosened its grip on Bing; you are now free to choose Google as your default search engine. Edge still doesn’t have support for extensions or add-ons, similar to what you find in Google Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft promises that Edge will get extension support, but we have no idea when it will come.
The much-anticipated Cortana has its ups and downs. We’ve seen demos of Cortana sending messages and descriptions of Cortana firing off short emails. I can get it to compose an email, but not send it; your mileage may vary. With the version shipping now, we don’t get much more than a note-taking, reminder-generating app with easy weather reports and a search front end -- you still have to click in Bing to get results. But the potential is there to make voice input the equal of other input methods. Many logistical hurdles await, including problems with sound pollution in offices. Think of a dozen Scottys picking up the mouse and saying, “Hello, computer.”
Some features are frozen in limbo. Windows Settings still hasn’t subsumed everything from Control Panel, so we have an awkward situation where numerous tasks -- for example, maintaining user accounts -- are split between two entirely different apps. Task view/multiple desktops is nice and useful -- as it has been since the days of Windows XP -- but you still can’t assign different backgrounds to different desktops, and moving among desktops is still clunky.
Some features have been yanked entirely. The Metro OneDrive app from Windows 8.1, which supported “smart files” that showed thumbnails of all files in File Explorer, whether they were synced or not, has been yanked in Windows 10 (see Paul Thurrott’s description). The old Windows 8.1 Metro Skype app was pulled. In Windows 10, there’s a link to install the old, underwhelming Windows desktop version of Skype, but no Universal app.
As for advertising, Microsoft showed off its Spotlight capability for running ads on the lock screen early in the beta testing process. It even touted Spotlight as a new advertising medium for big-budget companies. Microsoft also included a “Highlighted app” capability, at one point putting a Microsoft-selected app on the left side of the Start screen. A couple of months ago, the Universal Weather app sprouted a display ad. All of those have been quashed in the current version. Whether they’ll come sneaking back is anyone’s guess. Perhaps advertising will become the price of using Windows 10.
Many other new features aren’t yet fully functional. Continuum, which enables you to switch from touchscreen mode to mouse and back again, seems to be waiting for hardware improvements that will arrive with a new generation of devices. Windows Hello -- the face, finger, and retina log-on recognition feature -- similarly needs new hardware and drivers. Although fingerprint recognition reportedly works with some existing fingerprint scanners, face recognition requires a specific kind of camera typified at this point by Intel’s RealSense technology. It’s going to take a while before such cameras become commonplace.
Windows Media Center is gone. Windows 10 can’t play DVDs. Minor irritations for most, with VLC an obvious free choice.
The rest of the apps are going through massive last-minute changes. Windows 10 Mail and Calendar are reasonably usable touch-enabled mail and calendar programs, but nowhere near Outlook.com or Google’s new Inbox. People compares quite favorably to DOS-era contact managers, but doesn’t set any new bars nowadays. The Photos app is a cobbled-together extension of the Windows 8.1 tile-based app, with some new smarts, but doesn’t come close to what’s widely available -- particularly when compared to Google Photos. The future of Music, renamed Groove, remains in doubt, and the app has a very convoluted method for managing playlists. It can’t even add metadata. Movies & TV follows in the same rut. The Bing apps -- News, Money, Sports -- have improved modestly from Windows 8.1 days. The old Food & Drink (formerly Food), Health & Fitness (formerly Fitness), and Travel apps have all been pulled.
On the flip side, Contact Support offers easy access to Microsoft support techs. If it’s still free and still readily accessible in two or three months, that will be an enormous boon to beleaguered Windows users. DirectX 12promises to bring new levels of reality to gamers.
Windows 10 brings back the Windows 7 Backup and Restore features, which were unceremoniously dropped from Windows 8/8.1. (Many people think Windows 7 had backup and restore nailed; Windows 8.1 eviscerated the features.) Windows 8-style Reset and Refresh are in Windows 10, too. You should check to make sure the Apple Time Machine-like File History feature is turned on (some people report it isn’t on by default): type file history in Cortana and follow the crumbs.
Finally, the Windows Store is getting better, but only gradually. Microsoft has made several pronouncements about how the Windows Store is eliminating crapware, and the number of apps has decreased. Unfortunately, that isn’t the whole story: While researching my Windows 10 book, I found many Windows Store apps that were embarrassing. They’re still there today.
Developers have precious little incentive to build universal apps for the store. Peter Bright at Ars Technica put it succinctly: “If the only place that a Universal Windows App can easily reach is a Windows desktop user, developers may well be better off sticking to the ancient Win32 API (it's old and crufty, but much broader in scope than the Universal API), or even ditching the app entirely and building for the Web.”
Microsoft Office 2016 doesn't look very different to Office 2013, with its use of solid colours and Ribbon bars that are almost entirely unchanged. Instead, the focus is on incremental improvements that primarily focus on the ubiquitous office suite's cloud-based features. We're fans of Office 2013's interface, so it's certainly welcome to see that Microsoft hasn't tried to fix anything that isn't broken.
Office 365 users are getting the new versions first, with enterprise Volume Licence customers able to use the new software from the beginning of October. Standard perpetual licence versions should be coming later in the year. When they do finally come out, perpetual licence editions won’t benefit from the same regular feature updates that VL and Office 365 customers get. It's currently not clear whether their online features work properly using the free Microsoft OneDrive cloud space that all Windows users are entitled to.
The core Office 2016 Business suite includes Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher and costs £7.00 per user, per month with an annual commitment. Office 365 Business Premium adds extra storage, Skype for Business and email capabilities at £7.80 per user, per month with an annual commitment. We’re still waiting for Android and iOS Skype for Business apps to be fully released, although the apps have now entered a preview phase accessible to some corporate users.
The ProPlus edition comes in at £10.10 per user and includes Access. OneNote, which is available free to all Windows users, also integrates with Office 365, and Microsoft Visio and Project can be added as separate product subscriptions.
Some of Office 2016’s new features span multiple apps, such as the background patterns and themes that users can apply to all the Office apps associated with their account. They can connect external services, too, from obvious options such as OneDrive and SharePoint, to Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Account themes and settings can be applied to all of your Office apps
Dark grey and white colour schemes are now available for those who eschew colour
You can now search for the feature you want in all of the Office apps via the 'Tell me what you want to do' search box at the top of the Ribbon bar. All the Office apps also get access to Bing searches via its integrated smart lookup tool. We’d have liked the Tell me search to have a better grasp of natural language and Office’s own features. For example, in Word, it didn’t provide any useful suggestions when we asked it how to disable smart quotes - this compares badly to the massive flexibility and intelligence of Windows 10’s built-in Cortana search features.
Word
Perhaps the most useful and exciting feature of the entire Office 2016 suite is that you can now collaborate on Word documents in real time. While Office 365 users have been able to share Word documents for a long time, it's not previously been possible for two people to work on the same document simultaneously. Attempting to do so sometimes resulted in multiple versions of the same file being saved in OneDrive storage.
A new Share button allows you to invite others to access your documents
The new sharing and co-authoring features mean that, as long as your Word document is saved to OneDrive, rather than a local directory, you'll be able to invite anyone to view or edit it. Your collaborators don’t need Office 2016 or Office 365 subscriptions of their own to view or even edit the documents you share with them, just the free Word Online app. The first time you share a document with a guest editor, you can select to automatically share changes as they happen. Opt in to this – and we strongly suggest that you do – and you’ll get a truly collaborative working environment that easily rivals Google Docs.
Word Online is itself a cut-down version of the desktop edition. The mobile, web, and Windows 10 Word Online apps share a common, consistent interface. The feature selection is very similar to that provided by Google's service, but the layout and interface are a slicker, albeit a little slower-loading.
Users invited to collaborate will be able to edit files online even if they don't have their own Office 365 subscription
You get a range of text and page formatting options; it's easy to insert tables, images and symbols, and we're fans of Word Online's spelling checker and on-screen word count in a bar at the bottom of the page. It'll even show a count for a highlighted section of your document.
Side-by-side comparison of Word desktop and Word online editing interfaces
Simultaneous online editing isn't an entirely smooth and trouble-free experience however. We're not too keen on the way we had to manually move from view mode to edit mode when accessing a shared Word Online file. Saving and loading files from OneDrive using the desktop version of Word can be sluggish if your internet connection is slow. We also noticed that files open on the desktop occasionally lost sync with versions being edited online. Even so, these are relatively minor issues with what's become an outstanding online word processor that now capably spans the gap between desktop, web and mobile.
Word 2016 is quite simply the best word processor on the market. It’s also the first desktop word processor to allow collaborative editing of shared online documents, giving you all the features of the desktop with the syncing of purely web-based rivals such as Google Docs.
Outlook
Like most of Office 2016, Outlook is little changed, which we appreciate, as sudden changes to your email client are rarely welcome. However, there are a few new options, most of which are there to provide better integration with Office 365's cloud-based sharing services. When you add file attachments from OneDrive or SharePoint to an email, you can choose whether recipients are allowed to only view them, or whether they can have edit permissions that'll allow them to collaborate online and change the shared document.
Outlook lets you set the sharing settings of OneDrive files as you send them
If your business has moved its email to Microsoft's Office 365 cloud, using either an OnMicrosoft domain or mapping your own domain to the service, then your users will have access to Outlook's Groups feature. This makes it easy to create shared, fully archived message histories between groups of colleagues working on shared projects, for example. Even newly added group members will get complete access to the message archive, making it easy to bring them up to speed on the conversation. Groups can also easily share file and calendars, and extra administration tools are available from Office 365's online admin centre.
Other improvements that Office 365 mail users get include extra inbox sorting in the form of the Clutter feature. This allows you to categorise email that's low-priority but not entirely unwanted as "clutter". Outlook will learn from your decisions over time and automatically file messages in the clutter folder so you can look at them at your leisure, without them getting in the way of more important items.
Excel
Excel is perhaps the component of Office that has the fewest rivals. Although there are a number of fairly capable spreadsheet packages around, with Google Sheets making for a lightweight web-based alternative and LibreOffice Calc standing up to heavier use, none comes close to the sheer range of features that Excel provides.
Excel's seen some of the most significant changes to any part of Office. Its standard functions and interface remain unchanged from Office 2013, so even your most complicated spreadsheets and macros will continue working. However, Excel 2016 has received some additions to its data importation and handling functions, which all ties in to Office 2016's more integrated, cloud connected update. The Data tab is now home to some functions previously only available through the Power Query add-in: you can now import data from a huge range of databases, both local and in the cloud.
Other new features include a number of extra charting and data visualisation options, including waterfall charts for tracking changes to values over a time, box and whisker plots to show statistical variation, and sunburst charts to illustrate hierarchical data.
Excel has seen a few extra additions to its graphing options
For users that handle profit and loss, marketing, or sales data on a regular basis, the data forecasting options have been refined. There's now a one-click Forecast button under the Data tab, and rather than a simple linear forecast, exponential smoothing features have been added to even out inconsistencies caused by one-time data spikes in the past.
Pivot tables have seen some of their most significant updates since 2010, with automatic relationship detection and time grouping, as well as in-table editing for advanced features such as custom measures. Further incremental improvements include direct publishing to Microsoft's PowerBI visualisation platform, automatic rotation for inserted images, extra shape styles for charts and diagrams, touchscreen support with handwriting recognition for equations, and the same online integrations that the rest of Office has seen, with document sharing and built-in web searches.
However, there are a couple of improvements we were hoping for that haven't come with this release. For example, Excel still lacks a convenient method of exporting graphs and charts as high resolution images. Surprisingly, unlike Word 2016 and Google Sheets, two people can't work on the same spreadsheet in real time unless both are using the less-feature rich Excel Online to access it. You can give others editing rights over your documents via Office 365, but if you keep your workbook open in Excel on the desktop, they won't be able to edit it.
PowerPoint, Publisher and Access
The standard Professional edition of Office is rounded out by more specialist apps that have seen fewer changes than Word and Excel. Microsoft Publisher has no listed changes at all, and hasn't even acquired the otherwise universal 'Tell me what you want to do' box. However, the simple layout and desktop publishing suite remains an underrated gem: it's very easy to use and allows anyone to quick put together simple newsletters, briefings and notices that require a little more formatting than Word is designed to handle.
Microsoft Publisher doesn't get any new features at all but is still an underrated gem
PowerPoint 2016's most important upgrade is support for co-authoring, which means that you and a colleague can work on the same presentation together in real time, as long as it's saved to your OneDrive cloud storage.
Access might not be the most fashionable database development tool around, but Microsoft's been working hard to keep it relevant, with web app support and integration with SharePoint 2016, although that product is currently in public beta. The latest version of Access also introduces new templates to make it easier to organise your data. There are template options for creating web-based apps as well as local databases, and both options include plenty of tutorials and video guides to help users who are new to database development.
Conclusions
It's inevitable that most businesses will be upgrading to Office 2016 sooner or later, with many likely to be planning an upgrade almost immediately. The good news is that this latest version is great. Nothing's been broken and the new features add value, particularly for enterprises that use Office 365 as a cornerstone of their software ecosystem. Extra support for sharing and collaborative working mean that Office now feels like software that works as part of cloud-based system, very much improving on the previously awkward experience of trying to work online with colleagues using a combination of Office 2013 and Office Mobile.
Unfortunately, it's not perfect when it comes working together online. You only get proper real-time collaboration and co-authoring in Word and PowerPoint. We really hoped that Excel would support full live co-authoring, too. While we can see that it might not be appropriate for multiple people to work on a very complex workbook together, we'd have appreciated the option for simultaneous desktop access to simpler files, such as shared lists and price indexes.
Office 2016 is very much part of coordinated move towards a Software as a Service model for Office, and it remains to be seen how Microsoft will handle perpetual license versions. For those who don't work in the (Microsoft) cloud or have any use for Office 365, there's not really much to set the new edition apart from Office 2013. If that describes your business, then you might as well stick with Office 2013 for the moment.
The GoodPolished design. Awesome camera. Long battery life. microSD storage slot and water-resistant (again!).
The Bad Annoyingly
reflective. Smudge magnet. Plastic-looking selfies even with no filter.
No removable battery, which isn't surprising, but is still a compromise
compared to 2014's S5.
The Bottom LineThe fast, powerful, beautiful Galaxy S7 phone is 2016's all-around phone to beat.
Summer update
It's been a dramatic year for Samsung and its
Galaxy line. After introducing the Galaxy S7 to rave reviews in March --
we still love it, by the way -- along came the Galaxy S7 Active.
Equipped with a beautiful display, speedy processor, microSD card slot,
excellent 12-megapixel rear camera, and the largest battery Samsung ever
put in a smartphone, the Galaxy S7 Active received some unwelcome
attention for issues related to its most highly-touted feature:
waterproofing -- or its lack thereof.
While
still a very decent phone overall, the Galaxy S7 Active's inconsistent
performance in the water has sapped our enthusiasm, and we can no longer
recommend the phone with complete confidence. (Note that Samsung
released a statement that it has identified and fixed a problem on the manufacturing line.)
Meanwhile, Samsung's Galaxy Note 7, rumored to feature a 5.7-inch curved screen, USB-C port, and iris scanner for unlocking the phone with your eyes, will be officially unveiled on August 2 in New York at Samsung's Note 7 "Unpacked" event. And of course, there's the forthcoming iPhone 7,
expected to come in early September, and rumored to include three
models -- an iPhone 7, an iPhone 7 Plus, and an iPhone 7 Pro -- all of
which may (or may not) include a new waterproofing feature.
The ultimate way to test a new phone? Travel with it. When
you're seeing sights and losing yourself to the moment, there's no room
to tolerate a poor camera or buggy software, slow speed or short battery
life. If there's a flaw, you'll find it.
So I tested
the Samsung Galaxy S7 in London and Berlin, while colleagues also took
it for a spin in San Francisco and Sydney. And you know what? It did
great. Better than great. In fact, the S7 was an awesome phone that
never cracked under the pressure of being the only way I take pictures
and navigate completely unfamiliar terrain, all while keeping battery
life going during long days out.
Straight up: the Galaxy S7 is the best all-around phone out today. It's superior to the excellent Google Nexus 6P, Apple iPhone 6S, LG G5 and HTC 10. In fact, the only phone that surpasses it is its own fraternal twin, the larger, curvy-screen S7 Edge,
which is technically my top pick -- but only if you're willing to
splurge. Sure, there are some potentially worthy rivals out beyond the
horizon -- the iPhone 7,
the next Nexus model, and the Galaxy Note 6. But none of them will
likely be on the market for months to come. So, for now, the Galaxy S7
and S7 Edge remain the best phones money can buy.
Here's what I found (along with fellow S7-testers) while
using the S7 around Europe. You can also scroll to the end for a specs
comparison chart.
Perfect for pockets, but smudgy as hell
I began
my testing on London's crowded, bagpipe-festooned bridges and streets.
Since I constantly mashed the S7 into my jeans and jacket pockets only
to retrieve it again for a weather check, photo, digital payment or to
navigate around, its approachable size was a much better fit for me than
a larger phone. "Medium" by today's bonkers standards, it has a
5.1-inch screen.
Throughout
all this nonstop handling, the S7's curved back and sides made it
comfortable to hold, and the one time I dropped it it didn't dent or
break. That was only a few feet off the floor inside a pub, mind you --
I'm sure it'd sustain more damage if it had clattered onto pavement.
I spent a good, long time staring at the S7. That curve-back
design I mentioned and some very slight rounding on the edges around
the display are damn nice, giving the phone a far more luxe and
contoured appearance than most, including last year's ramrod-straight Galaxy S6. In fact, look closely at the details and you can see that this S7 is built better than previous Galaxy phones.
One downside to the S7's shiny metal-and-glass backing is that
smudges pile up on smudges, leaving a semi-permanent sheen of finger
grease all over your expensive property. It's gross, and a pain to
constantly clean, which always fails anyway. But like all beautiful
phones, you're bound to slap a case on it anyway, so it's almost a moot
point -- just not an excuse.
Camera, camera, camera!
I took a boatload of photos in London while testing the phone,
but when my sister and I went to Berlin for the weekend, all hell broke
loose. Every pastry and pretzel, imposing museum, graceful river
crossing; every glorious kebab and lip-smacking beer became an
opportunity for dutiful documentation
What was confirmed again and again is that crisp photos from
the 12-megapixel camera countered low-light interference in every
darkened cocktail bar, moodily lit restaurant and dusk-dimmed park. Although this camera has fewer megapixels than last year's S6, it takes better photos. Scenes are brighter, which makes the action easier to see.
Even in low-light scenes, such as a Berlin speakeasy, the S7
trumps the iPhone 6S, yielding brighter, more usable photos. Digital
noise was still there, just diminished; those small speckles of color
that infiltrate the picture are an inevitability in low-light digital
camera shots.
Whip-quick autofocus was also a winner, grabbing
clear shots of moving objects, like swaying flowers (yes, I really do
take photos of flowers) and my sister lunging like a lightsaber-wielding Jedi in front of a mural (fear her!).
Photos
didn't just look great on the S7's sharp screen; they also stood up to
enlarged views on my laptop and an even larger monitor back in London.
I also really liked using the new, optional preview mode that lets
you delete or share photos immediately after taking them. Oh yes, the S7
has optical image stabilization (OIS), which helped keep my photos from
blurring after all those jetlag-fighting coffees.
I'm
still less sure of the 5-megapixel front-facing camera, which now has
even more "beautification" filters than before. I never liked these,
even though I'm vain enough that I don't want to see every line and
wrinkle. To me, they make skin appear plastic and dull; maybe the
uncanny valley of too-perfect skin, but I know plenty of people who love
the youthening effect. At any rate, I turned all of these filters to
zero, but still found that selfies either looked fake or overly harsh.
Something in the processing seems off, but this isn't a dealbreaker by
any means.
I did use the S7's front-facing screen "flash" to light dark
selfie scenes, which basically means the phone screen whites-out before
the camera fires. This came in handy, since my sister basically
selfie-documented every move we made for her husband and kids,
especially at dinner and the bar.
The flash...it's blinding. Toning down
the brightness would make it more useful, especially if I could pick a
warmer color temperature or lower brightness setting to make it all less
intense. The iPhone 6S' similar selfie-flash did better in the same
scenes.
Less bloatware is a very, very good thing
Back in London, my appreciation for Samsung's more restrained customizations to the Android
6.0 software settled in. The S7 slims down the bloatware considerably,
while leaving plenty of advanced settings for customizing everything
from the lock screen to phone themes -- you just have to dig a little
deeper now to find everything. Samsung also added a few nice-but-subtle
optional touches, like a new "tray" to help you easily move app icons
from one screen to another.
Speaking of extra touches, I really like the idea of the Game
Launcher, a set of tools you can turn on to trigger some quick actions,
like recording the screen or minimizing your game so you can do
something else. I'm not the kind of active gamer who would immediately
benefit from these features, so trying it out on the subway threw off my
movements when playing more precision-based games, like the Riptide 2
racer.
My colleague Jason Parker in San Francisco liked being
able to turn off all alerts (with the exception of actual incoming phone
calls), but pointed out that the notification for an incoming call
still covers most of the screen -- so this particular feature doesn't go
far enough.
During my week away from San Francisco (aka home), I
fell in love with the S7's new always-on display, which shows you either
the clock, a calendar or an image. It was immediately useful for
checking the time and the phone's battery levels, a constant worry,
without actually having to take the phone out of standby. I also set up a
clock for the local timezone and the one at home, so I knew when it was
too early to call or text.
Battery life is long, performance swift
Other than the
camera quality, battery life was my No. 1 concern when using the S7
while Euro-tripping. I was often out from 9 a.m. until midnight, and
didn't always carry a bulky charger or heavy external battery pack,
because that gets annoying. Luckily, I didn't need to. The battery
lasted through a full day of heavy use.
Over in San Francisco,
my colleagues ran the S7 through our standard CNET lab tests, a looping
video downloaded to the phone, played in airplane mode. The S7 averaged 16 hours in three tests, which is one of the longest-running results we've seen for any phone. In comparison, the iPhone 6S scored 10.5 hours on the exact same
test. I'd still expect to charge it once a day, but would be more
confident making it through a late night without dying. If you want a
larger battery, there's always the S7 Edge.
During my week gallivanting around with the S7, it operated
smoothly and never lagged, and games played on its top-of-the-line
processor with ease. (See our performance chart below.)
