Author: Shinychris
TomTom car kit for iPhone
TomTom has introduced a car kit for the iPhone. Compatible with the iPhone 3G and 3GS (running OS 3.0 or later), it features a secure mount to dock the iPhone to the desired position on the car windshield or dashboard.
An adjustable mount securely rotates iPhone to either portrait or landscape mode for optimal positioning and widescreen route display. Voice instructions are provided through the built-in speaker and the integrated microphone and speaker also allow hands-free calling while driving.
TomTom claims that the built-in GPS receiver reduces the chance of signal drop out in areas where GPS reception is limited like cities with tall buildings or forested areas. Additional features include an iPhone charging facility and a facility to play music via the audio output (providing your car stereo has an audio input of course).
The Wand now on sale at Firebox
Perhaps the coolest remote control ever, and sure to be a big hit with young Harry Potter fans, it’s now on sale at Firebox.
It can ‘learn’ up to 13 infrared codes from your existing remote and you can assign various functions to various moves: flicks to turn on and off, spin to control volume, big swishes to mute and so on. You can buy The Wand here for £49.99. It’s quite expensive, but then it’s great fun and it does come in its own cool box – see below.
Gallery: new Sony VAIO ranges
Sony’s new CW series is available in several different colours including blue, red, pink and white, as well as a gloss black step up model with Blu-Ray and 500Gb hard drive. There’s a 16:9 14inch widescreen X-black LCD screen with LED backlight and an on-board NVIDIA GeForce graphics to handle HD video editing and 3D games.
Three buttons just above the keyboard give one-touch access to useful functions, including a button to start surfing in seconds without waiting for the PC’s operating system to boot up and a VAIO button which launches Media Gallery, letting you browse digital photos, videos and music tracks.
Also on board is an HDMI output which connects the VAIO to any BRAVIA for enjoying big-screen movies on your HDTV and a web cam for crisp, clear video chatting with friends and family. The CW Series is available October 22nd.
Sony L Series offers complete home entertainment package
Following the announcement of the beautiful and sleek X Series notebook PC, Sony has added further new PC-based products to its line up.
Designed as the focal point of the digital home, the new VAIO L Series of home entertainment PC incorporates a 24inch widescreen X-black LCD display complete with touch screen for control without the need of a mouse or keyboard.The wireless design also means that the L Series avoids any unsightly cables.
Other features include a Media Gallery which enables you to browse through digital images, videos and music tracks with drag and rotate gestures on the LCD touchscreen. Photos and videos can be viewed on a timeline or as events that cluster together all your images and clips from the same day, such as a birthday or wedding. Media Gallery even remembers your preferences, suggesting other images, videos and music based on your browsing history and content metadata.
VAIO Movie Story automatically selects and splices together highlights from your HD camcorder footage, ready for burning to Blu-ray Disc or DVD for sharing with friends and family. And the new Music Player features SensMe technology that automatically analyses your music collection, sorting tracks into channels to suit any mood.
The VAIO L Series boasts two 5.5W speakes and wireless S‑Master Digital Amplifier technology deliver a richly-detailed soundstage. There’s also a wireless keyboard with a dedicated ‘VAIO’ button that instantly launches the Media Gallery application. Analogue video and HDMI inputs are provided for hooking up to a games console.
The VAIO L Series all-in-one home PC is available from 22nd October 2009.
KEY FEATURES
* VAIO L Series: premium HD home entertainment PC
* Chic, space-saving all-in-one design
* Super-size, high resolution 24″ LCD touchscreen for intuitive fingertip control
* Explore and enjoy your media collection with Media Gallery
Sony X series – a light and very sexy looking laptop
Billed as the world’s lightest notebook (until the next one comes along that is) Sony’s latest 11.1inch laptop tips the scales at just 655g and is 13.9mm slim.
Designed primarily for the business traveller, the X Series is available in three finishes: gold, black and premium carbon. Customers can choose the specifications that suit them best and create their own personal VAIO X with ‘VAIO by you’ custom ordering from Sony’s website.
Sony claims that because the chassis is sculpted in tough, light carbon fibre it is both strong and incredibly light. The aluminium palm rest is designed to provide a stable base for comfortable, error-free typing on the keyboard while a new multi-finger touchpad simplifies navigation through your files.
The 11.1inch X-black widescreen LCD with LED backlight technology offers high contrast and true-to-life colours, reckons Sony, while thanks to its extremely low voltage processor and power-efficient LCD panel, the VAIO X Series offers approximately 8 hours of charge. An optional extended X battery accessory boosts stamina further still, up to 16 hours of battery life.
When away from a Wi-Fi hotspot, the VAIO Everywair WWAN lets users stay connected with high-speed access to 3G HSPA mobile broadband networks at download speeds up to 7.2 Mbps. Two USB, Gigabit Ethernet and VGA ports are complemented by 802.11 b/g/Draft n and Bluetooth connectivity. There’s also a mic, headphone jack and card slots for Memory Stick and SD media. A 2.25mm Motion Eye camera is provided for videoconferencing with clients and colleagues.
The Vaio X series runs Genuine Windows 7 Professional while Energy Star 5.0 rating reduces your carbon footprint. Optional accessories include a luxurious slip case in genuine leather, external USB DVD drive and a wireless mouse.
The VAIO X Series notebook PC is available from November 2009.
LG launches affordable Blu-Ray home cinema system
From LG comes a Blu-Ray based home cinema system. The HB954SP offers Full HD 1080p playback, 1000W of power and 5.1 channel output with five oval satellite speakers.
LG's latest system offers one click access to YouTube and and an iPhone/iPod docking/charging station. LG Sound Gallery offers seven sound settings including a night mode to turn off the bass so you do not wake sleeping children. Connections include two HDMI inputs for hook up other devices such as a game console, DVD recorder or HD satellite box.
This system will be available from November 2009 from major retailers and independents.
Photo sharing eye-fi cards come to UK
Already popular in the US, now Eye-Fi cards are coming to these shores. Though they look like normal memory cards, they are much more clever allowing you to upload photos and videos directly to your PC or the web as soon as they come into range of a wi-fi zone.
Three Eye-Fi cards will be available in the UK with a range of features: the Eye-Fi Home Video, the Eye-Fi Share Video and the Eye-Fi Pro, offering easy uploads for every photo lover, from the simple snapper to the photography enthusiast.
Says Jef Holove, CEO of Eye-Fi, comments: “Because Eye-Fi eliminates the time and hassle, more than half of our users upload their photos and videos within 24 hours of capturing them. So, those memories are backed up, organized and shared with friends and family while they are still fresh.”
Windows 6.5 Mobile not as good as Android or Apple
Today Microsoft launched their new phone brains: the Windows 6.5 Operating System for smartphones, and they want us all to be very excited about it. At its best Windows 6.5 Mobile merges your work PC, your home PC and your mobile – letting you work across platforms by uploading everything seamlessly into The Cloud.
At its worst it’s a slightly clunky User Interface. And, perhaps most significantly, is it just going to end up confusing everybody? We cover the pros and cons below:
FEATURES
The best bits of the Windows 6.5 OS:
1. A simple easy to use home screen giving easy access to all functions. Without leaving the home you can see whether you’ve got new emails, you can flip through your photos or you can see your calendar or text messages. “It’s a very scrolly home screen” explained the demonstrator.
2. Windows Apps – there are 60 in the UK right now. Expect the number to increase rapidly.
3. IM – as part of their “commitment to communication” Windows Live is integral, and there’s an instant messaging bit, which allows you to leave voice clips instead of text IMs. A weird instant messaging version of an answer phone.
4. The Cloud – this is the interesting bit. Most useful if you use a PC at home and the office and want to work across platforms. There are also some useful provisions in case you lose your phone: info from your phone is automatically backed up to the cloud, so you can simply download it to a new handset. And – thanks to GPS you can trace where your lost phone is on a map.
Lovely. What are the downsides?
CONFUSION
I put that in capital letters for a reason. Microsoft and several of their partners spent a while telling us that having a phone with hardware from one company, software from another company and network provision from another – wasn’t confusing for consumers. It was choice! Lucky consumers.
You can get Windows Mobile 6.5 on an HTC phone with T-Mobile or on a Sony Ericsson with Vodafone. Will customers be able to tell the difference? Will they ever choose a phone for its Operating System rather than its hardware?
The man from Phone4U at the press conference said it was a bit confusing. People go into a shop and ask for a phone, not a network or an OS or an app store.
Microsoft are upping the Windows Mobile brand – by advertising their OS directly. TV adverts for Windows Phone showed a man getting hugged by a cross between a Tellytubby and a Twitter icon, show how your applications follow you, metaphorically hugging you when you have Windows on your mobile. Windows Mobile is fun. And it’s being promoted by itself. But still, are people actually going to buy a phone for its OS?
VERDICT
As for the app store – it will be big, but I don’t think it will be as big as Apple’s or as exciting as Android’s – the app store that developers love.
The UI – a bit clunky and not very good looking. No wow factor here.
MyPhone and the Cloud co-ordination is what would make this worthwhile for a PC user. But, in my opinion – wait till Windows 7 comes out and all its touch capacities are exploited fully on a really high-end touch screen device.
New Phones with Windows 6.5
HTC Touch II from T-Mobile
HTC Touch HD II from O2
LG GM750 from Vodafone
Samsung Omnia II and Samsung Omnia Lite
Samsung Omnia Pro B7730
Sony Ericsson X2 from Vodafone
Samsung Omnia Pro B7610
Phones with Windows 6.1 may be available for an upgrade.
Via ShinyShiny.tv
Microsoft set to unveil new 'iPhone killer' phones
Big day for Microsoft today. It is set to unveil new Windows phones at 11am today at London’s Centre Point. Last week we reported on its supposed iPhone killer, the ‘pink phone‘. Today it announces its first smart phones with Windows Mobile 6.5.
Although precise handset details are still a closely guarded secret we have found a little bit about new integration services for the Windows phones which will be announced. These include My Phone and Marketplace. My Phone lets users back up and manage their photos and apps for free as well as other content from their phone including contacts, appointments and text messages directly onto their PC.
People can also publish their photos from the My Phone website or the phone directly to Windows Live, Facebook, My Space and Flickr as part of the free service. It’s also possible to go online to map the last known location of the phone from when it was last synchronised. There will also be a premium My Phone package which will immediately locate a phone’s current location on a map, will remotely lock a phone and will post an ‘if found’ message to its screen. Initially this will be available only in the US but it will come to Europe in the ‘near future’.
Britain's broadband 'not fit for the future', but no surprises there
There seemed to be a real kerfuffle on the news this morning caused by a Cisco-sponsored survey which showed that UK finished 25th out of 66th in the broadband quality league table, lower that is than Bulgaria and Latvia. The amazing thing is that anyone was really surprised by our relatively lowly position.
As anyone who has been to South Korea and Japan – the two countries that top the table – can tell you they are simply light years ahead of us in terms of broadband penetration, speeds and quality. Indeed the South Korean government recently promised universal speeds of up to 1Gigabit per second by 2012 while we struggle to meet the global average speed of 4.75 Megabits per second (Ofcom’s April research revealed that our average broadband download speed stands at 4.1Mbps.)
Now I haven’t been to Bulgaria and Latvia so I can’t vouch for their broadband (though one wag commented on the Daily Mail site of course that the roads were much better in Bulgaria than the UK). But again it doesn’t really surprise me.
So what’s the problem? Why does the UK lag behind seemingly less developed countries when it comes to high speed delivery of internet services. The reason is largely because of lack of fibre-optic cable which is the only way of delivering the high speeds necessary for superfast broadband (currently we rely mostly on old copper telephone wire via ADSL networks). This is because for years there were dozens of tin-pot little cable companies with no money who spent more time squabbling with each other than actually digging up the roads to lay high speed cable. Even today there are large parts of densely populated neighbourhoods in London which still don’t have fibre-optic cable.
The good news though is that could be about to change, albeit slowly, with Virgin now the only cable company on the block. It is rolling out a 50Mbps service while 24Mbps ADSL2+ services via BT and others are becoming more widespread. However, it seems there is still some way to go before we reach the average download speed of 11.25Mbps that’s needed to handle future applications such as High Definition Video.
Until then Britain will have to be content with the survey’s label of ‘Meeting Needs for Today’, the broadband equivalent of ‘must try harder’.
