Author: Oli Jones
Free Music Friday for Vodafoners
Tomorrow is Free Music Friday, well, if you’re a Vodafone customer it is.
Vodafone is marking the release of unlocked tracks on it’s music store by offering eight songs for free! Eight whole freaking songs!
Want to see the songs? Ciara featuring Justin Timberlake – Love Sex Magic; Daniel Merriweather – Change; Lady GaGa – Poker Face; Lily Allen – Not Fair (Style Of Eye remix); Pixie Lott – Rolling Stone; Simple Minds – Rockets; Tinchy Stryder feat N-Dubz – Number 1; Clubbers Guide 2009 Mixtape.
Awesome yes? What a reward for Vodafone’s loyal customers. Finally, you’ll be able to listen to song’s you’ve, you know – bought, on whatever you like, not just your phone. And to celebrate that momentous victory of consumer over company, you can listen to Dappy and his buddies making raps and what have you.
That is what you do isn’t it – make a rap? I mean rap isn’t a verb, unless you’re rapping someone across the knuckles – surely…surely!
Vodafone is clearly hasn’t realized since Spotify appeared everyday is Free Music day.
Vodafone: What. A. Joke.
As a mark of protest can everyone on Vodafone please download all eight songs and then delete them.
SHINY PREVIEW VIDEO: Samsung i8910 HD
Last night we had a sneak peak at the new Samsung i8910 HD (formerly the Omnia HD). This trendy touchscreen handset can capture video in 720p and playback HD quality video on it’s 3.7 inch AMOLED capacative touchscreen.
This Symbian based unit also supports handwriting recognition, push email and a document viewer so business folk will like it more than they like a finely tuned squash racket, which is a lot.
It comes with 8 Gig of inbuilt storage expandable by microSD. Apparently it also has a podcasting feature, which is nice, if you’re prone to an impromptu podcast.
Sony Ericsson announce GreenHeart eco-phones
Sony Ericsson has today unveiled its new range of environmentally friendly “GreenHeart” phones.
The first phones to be released under the GreenHeart banner will be the Naite and C901 which both boasts an array of green credentials, from 50% recycled plastic cases to on-board e-manuals – to cut down on paper usage, and optimized display light sensors that use less energy.
The Naite also comes with a low powered green charger while the C901 ships with a green headset. Both phones are designed to emphasize Sony Ericsson’s commitment to green issues, illustrated by it’s pledge to reduce CO² emissions by 15% for all its products by 2015.
Despite their undeniable green-ness, neither phone has been compromised in terms of features. The C901 candybar handset comes wielding a 5 megapixel camera with smile shutter, autofocus, geo-tagging and face detection while supporting EDGE and HSDPA networks for quick and easy web-browsing.
Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 – SHINY VIDEO REVIEW
Tech Digest’s Dan Sung puts the new Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 through its paces and comes out thoroughly impressed. Part of Sanyo’s Dual Range, the Xacti is designed to take great video and stills while not compromising on portability.
A choice of auto-focuses, face-following, 720p playback, a 12 megapixel sensor and a 1600 ISO, it’s certainly a well-specced little blighter, but no audio output? I mean come on. If you’re looking for a step up from your Flip HD or Kodak Zi6, this is certainly a good place to start.
Acer's F900 smartphone heads to UK
After debuting at Mobile World Congress the pleasent little Acer F900 has cut a lonely figure, cast firmly in the shadow of the smartphone war that still rages between Palm Pre and iPhone 3G.
The F900 has it’s own original UI too you know! Its got a 3.8inch VGA screen, its got intuitive web-browsing and widgets, its got Adobe Flash Lite support! You’re not listening are you? Because it’s not a Palm Pre or an iPhone. I don’t blame you. I don’t want one either.
The Acer F900 isn’t sexy, in fact it’s eminently plain, it’s a digestive biscuit of a phone. And an expensive biscuit at £429. It probably won’t sell well in the high street, so Acer will sell them en-mass to businesses who’ll farm them out to their footsoldiers – and they’ll be grateful – won’t you.
Tesco launches contract mobiles
Ever nipped to Tesco’s for some crisps and a pot of houmous and thought, “blinking flip, it’s a darn pity Tesco doesn’t do broadband.”
No me neither. Call me a curmudgeon but I like to get my hardware and broadband from a shop that doesn’t also sell equestrian equipment, not that I’ve got anything against horses, they’re fine, just fine, I mean, you can’t trust them, but you know, no ones asking you to – sorry I’m tangent-ing. Tesco is selling broadband, laptop and phones – that’s what I meant to say.
You can build you own deal from mobile broadband dongles and netbooks to contract phones with free TVs. It’s certainly worth a look if you’re looking for a new contract phone or mobile broadband service.
Their laptop range isn’t exactly up-to-date, but they’re by no means antiquated. Head on over there and tell us what you think, the person who can construct the most appealing deal wins. What do you win? The satisfaction of knowing you’re the kind of person who can spend 20 minutes of your life looking at broadband deals and make a competition out of it. And that’s a very special quality to have. Very special.
BT broadband jumps to 20Mbps for free
After this week’s strangling allegations, BT has announced it is going to hike its headline broadband speeds to 20Mbps at no extra cost.
Roughly 40% of BT’s existing 4.8 million customer base will able to get faster speeds after 549 of BT’s telephone exchanges are upgraded, with businesses getting it today, and domestic internet users finding their service boosted in summer.
BT hopes to extend this to 55% of it’s customer base by 2010. It is not yet known which area’s lucky users will find themselves the beneficiaries of the fancy-dan 20Mbps internet, but a soon-to-be-launched service on BT’s website will let you know what speed you can get in your area.
Continuing BT’s crusade against slow-internet, the company will be offering a nifty little doo-dah, called an I-Plate that eliminates electrical inference on in-house phone wiring, boosting your bandwith.
All of which means from early summer 2007 you could get 20Mbps internet from as little as £7.78 per month. Though whether the new boost will be throttled is yet unclear, but one has to admit it looks like BT are taking notice. If I may be as so immodest as to quote myself just yesterday:
“We pay a premium for our broadband in this country and we get one of the poorest services in the western world, it’s high-time consumer groups put some concerted pressure on our ISPs to invest in some serious physical infrastructure to get us the service we deserve.”
And today BT make this announcement, coincidence? I think not.
HP launch Pavilion Slimline s5100 desktop PC
HP today announced the release of the HP Pavilion Slimline s5100 PC, a slimmed down tower desktop.
Reduced to a mere 11 litres in sizes, the tower will look positively diminutive in the presence of its more common 25 litre brethren.
“The HP Pavilion Slimline s5100 PC is a great full-function performance PC that will appeal to young-minded, style-conscious consumers”, says Charl Snyman, vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP Europe, Middle East and Africa (his title is 10 words long! Compensating for something their Charl?).
Running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, the Slimline comes complete with built in 801.11 n WiFi and Bluetooth, as you’d expect, and an optional wireless keyboard and mouse. The Intel CoreTM 2 Quad and PhenomII X4 processor supporting Slimline is certainly a handsome brute, but it isn’t the TouchSmart is it?
It’s not a svelte all-in-one, although you could probably hide the tower behind the screen and pretend it was, that’s what I’d do.
It’ll be available from late July from around £339
YouTube launch XL for your TV
YouTube yesterday launched it’s new multi-platform version of its website, YouTubeXL, designed to bring YouTube content your big screen PC or TV.
The new site is basically an oversized redesign of the current website, minus; comments, adds and other common web-frippery. It’s meant to look and work like a native app, but actually it looks and feels like a Fisher-Price website.
The content is hard to move through and the colours of the site are quite jarring. High Quality and HD videos aren’t available on it either, which seems like a ridiculous omission for a service that’s aimed at large-screen computers and TVs.
The one good thing about XL is that it’ll work in anything that’s got a browser, so you’ll be able to use your PS3 and Wii to watch YouTube videos on your TV.
Not all of YouTube’s content will be available immediately on XL, but with Hulu launching it’s native app stateside this week YouTubeXL will need to pull its socks up if it wants to win the web-TV war.
Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is brilliant for just this reason, but I’m not sure XL knows what it is.
(Via Tech Crunch)
Sony demo hand-held motion controller at E3
Sony has formally joined the battle of the motion controllers after unveiling their, as yet unnamed, hand-held motion controller at E3.
Made up of two handsets the new controller works with the existing PS3’s eye.
The “technology demo” showed the way in which a player becomes part of the in-game experience, appearing on-screen, with the controller replaced by a variety of implements, from a baseball bat, to a weird sort of light-sabre whip thing.
Richard Marks, head of development for Sony’s new motion controller said “The controller can be measured to sub-millimetre accuracy.”
And in three dimensions, so not only does it know how far your controllers are from each other, it knows how far they are from the screen, which will allow for some potentially very immersive 3D gameplay.
Kaz Hirai, Sony Computer Entertainment President, said: “With PlayStation 2, when we launched the EyeToy camera, we had already perfected the art of playing games just using your hands.”
“The motion controller we demoed today, it raises the bar in terms of accuracy in 3D. It’s all about the accuracy and tracking.”
The new controller is being muted for a Spring ’10 launch, though by then Project Natal will be everywhere. Sony have been quite sorely beaten to the punch on this one, and by Microsoft, stuffy old Microsoft – that’s got to hurt.
(Via BBC)
