Broadband Computer Co Alex review

The available applications are a web browser, email client (each Alex is sold with an @alexlive.com account automatically), office (Word and Excel clones only), photo editor, contacts manager (called People), and a video and music player. No other applications can be installed, although the provided ones cover most bases and should suffice for simple use.

The web browser reports itself as Safari 4, although we think it's more likely to be a modified WebKit browser, as Safari uses this engine. It's a simplistic browser, though it does have tabs for multiple windows. The usual navigation options are there, but rather than using icons, clearly-labelled buttons ('back', 'forwards', etc) are used. They look a bit cheaply produced, although it's instantly more obvious what they do.

Broadband Computer Co has preinstalled a Flash plug-in for the browser, although we found that some websites would not work and Adobe's own page checker failed to recognise the plug-in at all. Similarly, there aren't any plug-ins to play streaming video, such as QuickTime. Plug-ins can't be installed manually, so there's no way to rectify this; however, we've been told that Alex will be updated soon to better support Flash and online video.

The browser, and Alex in general, is pretty clever at presenting error messages in a meaningful way. For example, if you're not connected to the internet a message that reads "Broadband Off" is displayed in the top-right of the screen; if you ignore it and try and open the browser, you get a message that says, "Alex is not connected to the internet and is therefore unable to browse the web. Please check your broadband connection."

To aid diagnostics clicking the 'Broadband Off' message gives you the option to connect to a wireless network or to change router settings. The latter option automatically connects the browser to your router's web-management page so that settings can be edited. It's a neat and quick way for a support technician to help identify and correct internet faults without having to try and explain how to find the router's IP address. This is particularly useful if you opt for the Alex broadband, as the support line will be able to quickly talk you through the provided router's options.

The Office applications provide basic Microsoft-compatible Word and Excel clones, with a similar range of features to Google desktop. They're nowhere near as feature-rich as Microsoft's suite, but provide basic word processing and spreadsheet capabilities that will suit the majority of home users. Annoyingly, the system won't let you open more than one document at a time in either program, so you can't work on multiple spreadsheets at once, for example.