Broadband Computer Co Alex review

Photo editing is similarly very simplistic, offering basic colour, brightness and contrast correction, as well as cropping, red-eye removal and image straightening. Images can be organised into albums, and you can add captions.

The Play application lets you play music and video. By default, music is sorted by playlist, but you can also browse by album, track name and artist. Video playback lets you play files stored on the PC and DVDs, but you can't add any missing codecs if you find a file that won't play.

All of the applications are incredibly simple to use, although very basic. As such, this is definitely a computer that's designed for light users rather than anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge. However, there are some strange interface quirks.

For starters, you often can't double-click items to perform an action. For example, double-clicking a time slot in the calendar doesn't automatically open a window to add a new appointment; instead, you have to click the Add event button. Oddly, keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste work in all applications, except for the web browser: here, it's impossible to copy text from a web page, although you can copy text from the browser's address bar.

Your files and documents are stored locally on the computer's 250GB hard disk, which is a little small by today's standards. Using the File manager you can move files and organise your hard disk, and copy data to an external flash drive. Alex also comes with My Vault: 10GB of online storage. This can be used to back up important files, so that they're safe should the computer crash.

If anything, the backup seems slightly at odds with the rest of the computer, as it's a manual process that will need to be explained. Some kind of automatic system would have been preferable. It's also a little frustrating that there's currently no way to recover a broken system. Although Alex will suffer fewer problems than Windows, as it's so locked down and doesn't allow third-party applications to be installed, a power cut or disk error can prevent the OS from loading and files could be corrupted. Currently, the only solution is to phone support and arrange for your computer to be repaired, although we've been told that a recovery disc is being investigated.

There are some fairly hefty limitations to the system as the moment. Primarily, there's very little hardware support. Broadband Computer Co currently lists a single printer on its website, although we've been told that any printer that supports Linux should work. For those interested in using additional models, you can call for support and check a printer's compatibility before you buy. Even so, there will be lots of models that don't have support making it harder to buy a printer for a relative or friend with an Alex computer. Similarly, proprietary hardware that requires drivers will not work, so you'll be unable to use devices such as iPods.