Author: Daniel Sung
Palm Pre exclusive likely for O2 with the iPhone going cross network
Word broke over the weekend that O2 has pulled off coup number two in the handset wars by scoring an exclusive deal on the hotly anticipated Palm Pre. It was known that the UK network had a similar deal for the iPhone to last until 2011 but the news has sparked rumour that this is all to change come the launch of the third version of Apple’s touchscreen darling.
O2 has commented with their fascinating version of a no comment, that I won’t waste your eyeballs with, but this looks like a genuine piece of word on the street as far as I’m concerned. You can tell because I haven’t stuck the word RUMOUR in big letters at the beginning of the header which means I’m pretty happy to stake my reputation on it.
Personally, though, I don’t see that it necessarily spells the end for O2’s special relationship with Apple. I appreciate that having both the Pre and the iPhone exclusive to the same network could cause a conflict of interest and could even bury the Pre as far as the UK goes. I can also see that it might be in everyone’s interest to break the agreement and let the iPhone go to another network, but at the same time, I don’t see a lot of evidence for all this.
What do you reckon? Could the iPhone and the Pre co-exist or is it out with the old for O2 and in with the new? Hard evidence would be most welcome, and treated with the utmost anonymity, of course.
(via Guardian & Vnunet)
Nokia's Ovi swings open – let the downloading commence
Calling all S60 heads out there – Ovi is open for business. Nokia’s app store has flung its doors open this morning for downloads via the website or over the air. The will be billing taken care of by credit card or by being added on to the monthly letter from your mobile service provider. How kind.
Fifty million folk will see the Ovi app downloadable in the Downloads! section of their S60 handsets, so check now to make sure that your phone of choice supports it. You can receive the app in English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, and the platform billing is supported in its entirety by operators in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the good old Blighty. America will have to wait but AT&T is already laying down the corporate red carpet quotes with that age old launch date of “later this year”.
As promised, all the apps are available in one place with mapping and N-gage all brought under the same umbrella. There’s a bunch of freeware as well as the paid for content. Expect it to be flooded with more programs and the web awash with top tens as the minutes go by.
Ovi Store (via Nokia Press Room)
HTC Magic Android phone – SHINY VIDEO REVIEW
Let’s start with the easy part. The HTC Magic is a great phone. Android is bloody ace and I don’t suppose there was much of a chance of the handset makers mucking this one up after doing such a good job of implementing the OS on the G1. What they have done is made the thing a lot prettier at the expense of the hard keyboard.
Slightly sad to lose the traditional finger tapper initially but you get into the touch typing very quick. Cupcake’s a welcome addition to the experience with all the video goodness it brings and the paid for apps but there are still a couple of niggles. I’ll let Zara explain.
The thing is, you can get picky about these issues – and essentially it’s my job to do so – but there’s nothing really wrong with this handset. Don’t rely on it as your main camera but, other than, that I’d give it Dan’s big Tech Digest thumbs up. You can grab it from £30 per month on Voda through the link below. Enjoy, and happy browsing.
HTC Magic on Vodafone
Sony Ericsson patents theme music technology to match your mood
Here’s some pretty future tech for you. Sony Ericsson has filed a patent for phone technology that’ll recognise your facial expressions and automatically select music for you according to your mood.
Your handset will use the front facing camera to capture your image and, although there may be some initial calibration involved, the system will then pick the next track from your collection that best suits your mood.
If it works, there could be some alarming revelations about your neutral expression. I’d like to think my general demeanour would sound like the poppier end of The Who’s catalogue but I guess I’ll have to wait and see what Sony Ericsson thinks.
What would your theme music be according to your phone? Answers in the comments below
(via USEB)
Half-price Nokia 5800 for one hour only at the Nokia Store, London
I just received word that if you get your arse down to the Nokia Store on Regents Street with an old phone and an old MP3 player between 12pm and 1pm today that you can trade them in for a half price Nokia 5800 with Comes With Music
You’ll need some photo ID and to fork out the £149.50 but, so long as your MP3 player has an audio jack and play button, and your old phone works, you will be able to complete the trade and bag yourself a rather nice touchscreen premium handset.
It’s not free but, if you’re looking to get one anyway, then you’d better get your skates on. It’s for the first 100 people only and you’ve got 45 minutes and counting…
Second judge removed from Pirate Bay appeal
What is it with Swedish judges and their obsession with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property? It turns out that her honour in charge of the Pirate Bay after-trial to decide whether the first hearing was presided over by a biased judge has been removed for, yes, you guessed it, bias. Nice.
Judge Ulrika Ihrfelt was relieved of her position on Wednesday and despite this further set-back and level of ridiculousness, the appellate court’s president, Fredrik Wersall, said the case would be sorted “in a few weeks at the maximum” – provided they can find someone with now preconceptions on copyright infringement presumably.
(via Wired)
Google updates Chrome – faster, more stable and now with form autofill too
I may not be enamoured by gmail but I’m a sucker for Google Chrome. I admit it. So, it brings me great pleasure that the G-Lords have just updated their browser by making it 30% faster at loading Java-heavy pages and added a couple of features too.
The new version of Google’s WebKit, on which the sofware’s based, and the V8 Java engine are to thank for a lot of the improvement but, if it’s tweaks you’re after, then you’ll be pleased to hear they’ve added the auto form-fill and a degree of discretion by allowing you to delete thumbnails from the “most viewed pages” section. What you browse when you’re not reading Tech Digest will, of course, go no further.
If you haven’t tried Chrome, I’d recommend giving it a blast. If you’re using Firefox, I’m not going to argue. I’d risk the wrath of a certain Mr Rawlins if I didn’t give a shout out to Opera and, if you’re using IE, please stop.
(via Google Blog)
iTunes Festival London 2009 acts announced
The headline acts for the third annual Apple iTunes Live festival has been announced. Oasis, Flo Rida, Kasabian, Paolo Nutini, Snow Patrol and The Saturdays will be among the folk rock/popping it out at the Roundhouse in Camden throughout the month of July.
Now, you can’t buy tickets to the event. You have to join the iTunes Festival Facebook group and jump through a series of hoops until you win yourself access. If you’re not lucky enough to be chosen to see the some of the 62 bands on one of the 31 nights, then don’t worry. Apple will sell you the experience at the iTunes Store in all 22 countries that it operates because each and every performance will be recorded. Thanks, Uncle Steve!
Flashsticks – USB flash drives made out of sticks
USB sticks made out of wood aren’t anything new but I don’t remember seeing any looking so much like genuine pieces of tree as Flashsticks.
What you’re getting here is a 2GB bespoke USB memory device hewn from fallen Berkshire woodland trees and treated with beeswax. You can even chose the wood from which they’re made. Sounds nice, eh? Well, it looks nice too, if ever so slightly silly sticking out of your laptop. They cost £17.50 – postage and small sense of eco-smugness included.
10TB optical discs coming in the next five years
All plans for slightly bigger DVDs have been blown out of the water today with claims from a group of scientists that they can store up to 10TB of data on a single disc.
The team of egg heads from the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, has added the dimensions of colour and light polarization and employed them to store the huge amounts of extra information. Confused? I’ll do my best to explain.
The colour is the tricky part. How can you store information in colour? I know. Weird. Well, the deal is that the surface is made of gold nanorods and these nanorods react differently to different kinds of light. Colours are, of course, different kinds of light of varying wavelengths, so you can record multiple amounts information on the same nanorods. Capiche? Yeah, bit of a mind melter.
The slightly simpler one to get your head around is the polarized light. You can filter light such that the waves are in a single unified orientation. You can then record onto the discs many time over, each time using light that is polarized in a different direction, and, between these two methods, it takes data storage into crazy land. The Aussie boffins have already been signed up by Samsung and are thought to have produced a 1.6TB version just to prove it works.
A 10TB incarnation could hold something like 300 feature films or a quarter of a million songs – something to terrify and excite pirates and record and film producers in equal measure.
Fortunately, the gold in these nanorods doesn’t seem to make this invention prohibitively expensive with each disc costing a matter of pence. What could be a problem, though, is the kind of hyper disc players we might need to decode all this light and colour nonsense and exactly how long it might take to read and write one of the things. Still, faskinating stuff.
(via PC Pro)
