PlayStation 4 teardown confirms hard drive replacement is a breeze

 

2:50 PM

One of the coolest features we saw in Sony’s own teardown of its new PlayStation 4 was how easy it looked to replace the console’s hard drive. In fact, the PS4 shown in Sony’s teardown video had a hard drive that was literally held in place by one screw, which means that even the less mechanically inclined of us out there shouldn’t have much of a problem swapping out the device’s 500GB hard drive for a bigger one if we need it. The team at iFixit tore apart the PS4 to see for itself if hard drive replacement was as easy as Sony made it look and found that it really is a simple little operation.

“We’ll have a detailed guide shortly for those intrepid gamers who fancy a bigger drive or a zippy SSD — but for now, rest easy knowing all that stands between you and hard drive nirvana is a plastic cover and some screws,” iFixit writes. “Not only is this hard drive user-replaceable, but it’s a standard 2.5? (a.k.a. laptop-sized) SATA drive, meaning you can replace or upgrade your storage with any off-the-shelf drive you like, so long as it meets these standards: no thicker than 9.5 mm, and no smaller than 160 GB. Users rejoice!”

iFixit gives the PS4 an 8 out of 10 for its repairability and only knocks how difficult it is to access the fan, which all console owners know eventually will need to be cleaned out.

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Mobile coverage spotty on your drive to work? You’re not the only one

Every year Ofcom produce an infrastructure report which details the state of our broadband and mobile infrastructure here in the UK.

It’s the first time that the regulator has looked at the mobile coverage provided on UK roads. Motorways appear to have fairly decent coverage, so you can browse at 90mph or keep in touch via WhatsApp…

“Yeah, I’ll be home in a bit. Woaha!! Where did that truck come from?”

However, head onto a A or B road and your satnav or email might slow up somewhat. Only 35% of these roads get coverage from alll four mobile networks, with 9% having no 3G whatsoever.

If you travel to work on a train then, unless there’s a booster strapped to your carriage, you’ll be aware of the hilariously bad coverage on the railways. Ofcom has started to investigate this and will be giving their results out next year.

The full report, which is really rather chunky, is available to download here (PDF) but it certainly backs up some of my experiences, although I must state that there’s several areas on my car-share up the M6 this morning where O2 dropped to GPRS. Methinks that Ofcom are relying on those hit-n-miss network coverage maps a little too much.

Quickoffice for Android gets an update adding better Drive integration

The Google Quickoffice app for Android has just had an update. The update now seamlessly switches into the Google Drive app if you open a file from your Drive. Which initially seems to me will limit my formatting options, as Drive doesn’t have as many options. I guess I just need to try it out a bit more.

 

The Quickoffice app is quite nice all in all, allowing you to create documents in the cloud or locally. It’s free also, which is also a bonus. Just head over to the link below or update or install it.

Google Play Store Link – Quickoffice

Donation drive ends tomorrow!

So, thanks to you lovely people we’re pretty much there now. Only £40 stands between us and our spanky new server. We’ll be announcing the winners of our prize collection tomorrow, but I just wanted to say another rather massive thank-you to those who’ve chosen to donate and help us with the rather large up-front cost of buying a fast new server.

We always prefer to buy out-right, because it means that we’re not shelling out for a monthy rental. This, over the several years that we’ve owned our current box, would’ve meant a huge larger total cost.

So, if you’d like to be in with a chance of winning one of the prizes below, hit the donate button and give us whatever you’re comfortable with. If not, don’t worry, we’re already lining up another competition next week that’ll be free to enter.

Update – Now with fixed donate button! Doah!

Prizes

- Skullcandy Navigator headphones

- Acer Liquid E2

- Suite of Armour Galaxy S4 and Goosewhite Qi charging pad

Donation drive – Update

We’re over half-way to our goal now and, again, I must thank everyone for helping towards our new server. Coolsmartphone has been going for well over 10 years now and we’ve grown to be more than just a “blog”. We have a dedicated team of knowledgeable writers and attend launch events the big trade shows to bring you the latest news.

We hate asking for money, but we have been approached by someone wanting to buy our existing server already. This is great news because it’s reduced the amount of money we need quite significantly. We’ve also got some more prizes, so if you do decide to donate – even £1, you’ll get added to the put and could win either a brand new pair of Skullcandy Navigator headphones and a new Acer Liquid E2. We’ve now added the Suite of Armour Galaxy S4 and Goosewhite Qi charging pad that we reviewed just yesterday.

 

Server Donation Drive – Please help!

Morning all. Hope you’re all well. Recently we’ve struggled somewhat with the increasing amount of visitors on Coolsmartphone. After the issues last year we, thanks to your help, moved to a new co-lo provider with ample bandwidth and we’ve recently increased capacity, but the outage during our live iPhone coverage was also due to a lack of resources on our main web server.

The server we have now was purchased some time ago after we ran an earlier donation drive. It’s your server effectively, and was quite advanced at the time. It’s performed extremely well over the years but it’s time to move to a newer, faster and more powerful server.

I’m looking at a newer server which will have SSD drives, far more RAM and a faster CPU. It will last us for years and years to come. It will be bought out-right to keep running costs lower (no monthly rentals) but the initial cost is the bit we need some assistance with. We need to raise £699.

Asking for money is something I really don’t like doing, so we’ve got a couple of prizes to give away to two lucky random people who choose to donate. We’re going to give away a brand new pair of Skullcandy Navigator headphones and a new Acer Liquid E2.

Each night we’ll be updating our progress so you can see how close we are to our goal. You can donate whatever you’re comfortable with below and I really want to thank you in advance if you choose to help us.