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Xbox 360: remote control Windows apps
Slashdot reports a story about the possibility of controlling Windows applications via Microsoft's new Xbox 360 using its Media Center Extender functionality. Applications run on the Media Center PC, while the program's user interface is streamed to the Xbox.
The original post on GA Forum can be found here.
Treat your TV to a Spyder
Fed up with trying to get the picture set up right on your new telly? If you've got £170 (ex Vat) to spare, you should definitely think about getting the new SpyderTV from Datacolor. It's a USB colorimeter and wizard-driven software that takes the guesswork out of setting the brightness, contrast, colour balance, colour temperature hue/tint and sharpness on any type or size of TV screen - CRT, LCD or plasma.
You'll need a Windows 2000/XP laptop or PC close to the TV, plus a DVD player connected to the TV for the supplied test images. We found it pretty simple to use and it gave great results. Watch out for a full review soon. And if the price seems high, you could always hire it out to your friends and family...
HTC launches European HQ
HTC (High Tech Computing), today announced the opening of its new European headquarters based in London.
If you haven’t heard of HTC, you’ve almost certainly seen its devices. Working in conjunction with O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone (to name just a few), it’s been the driving force behind the majority of Windows-based smartphones and Pocket PCs.
We also reported on Qtek’s sim-free 9100 HTC PDA last month.
With HTC now having a European HQ, you can expect to see more co-operation with mobile operators and the likes of Dell and HP Pocket PCs.
Representatives from Orange and T-Mobile were at the launch and doing their level best to suck up to HTC. With both operators (and their competitors) selling identical HTC handsets, the offers for HTC to become an exclusive supplier to one of them must be flooding in. The mobile operators were also desperate to persuade people their involvement with HTC is more than just signing a deal and slapping their logo on the product.
When asked whether it would make any Symbian-based devices, HTC said it was happy with Windows Mobile 5 and would concentrate on Microsoft for the time being. We personally feel Windows Mobile 5 is far too slow on the majority of devices.
You can read reviews of HTC devices here:
T-Mobile MDA Pro
Orange SPV C550
And we'll soon be posting a full review of the new O2 XDA Mini (aka the T-Mobile MDA Vario, Imate K-Jam and QTek 9100 T-Mobile).
World's first ExpressCard TV tuner
Avermedia has just launched the world's first analogue TV tuner based on the ExpressCard format. The AverTV ExpressCard is a hot-pluggable tuner designed for notebooks with a Universal Express Card slot. It utilises the system's USB2 bus via the ExpressCard interface.
The AverTV ExpressCard is available from the MediaAtlantic online store and costs £65.98 inc. Vat. It's bundled with PVR software that enables time-shifting, scheduled recording in Mpeg1/2 format, plus still image capture. There's a 75Ohm coaxial port for an aerial, plus S-Video and composite inputs. An infra-red remote control is also supplied.
Office format war
Microsoft is to submit its new Office formats to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (Ecma) for approval as a standard in what looks like a move to prevent being outflanked by Oasis, which has drawn up the Open Document Format. See my earlier stories here
But it is not clear yet whether Microsoft will relinquish control of its next generation Open XML formats, which will go into general use with the release of Office 12 late next year. It will take more than a gesture to satisfy the EC, which is calling for an open document standard produced by an independent body.
Both Oasis and Ecma are industry bodies and not recognised as independent by the EC, but Oasis was set up with the aim of agreeing standards. Both Open Doc and Open XML will be submitted to the International Standards Organisation (ISO) for approval as a standard.
Microsoft's Ecma submission is supported by Apple and, strangely, the British Library; Oasis stalwarts include IBM and Sun but Microsoft is also a member. I'll be writing more about this in PCW next month.
IM Flash, says Intel
Intel and Micron have just announced a new joint company set up to produce flash memory, mostly, it appears, destined for Apple.
IM Flash Technologies (surely the most unintentionally hilarious company name to appear for some time) has been set up at a cost of $2.4bn split evenly between Micron and Intel, with a further $2.8bn promised over the next 3 years. Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO, said:
“The creation of this new company supports Intel’s intent to maintain its industry-leading position in nonvolatile memory and enables us to rapidly enter a fast-growing portion of the flash market segment,”
According to the press release, long term supply contracts with Apple have been agreed, with prepayments from Apple of $250m to each company.
Dell finally sees the AMD light?
Digitimes reports an article in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News that says that Dell's contract PC makers, Foxconn, Asustek and Quanta, have started to develop AMD-based PC and notebook platforms. Digitimes reports the paper as saying:
"[...]the three contract makers were informed by Dell that shipments of AMD-supporting PCs will need to be ready for a global debut anytime in the future."
Recently, AMD was found to be selling boxed retail AMD CPUs on its US online store. Dell has always publicly taken the position that it's constantly evaluating component sources. Maybe its evaluations have finally borne fruit.
Update: Office 12 beta out
First code for the new release (see below) was released today, though most of us won't be able to take a look until the new year. I've posted a story here.
First Office 12 beta imminent
A first 'technical' beta version of the new Office 12 suite will be released by the end of the month, and possibly within a week, according to Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division.
It will go out to only a few thousand developers across the world but a Beta 2 version will be available for wider distribution early next year, he said at Microsoft's IT Forum in Barcelona.
The Office interface has had a complete makeover to make features more accessible to users who find them too difficult to find and use in the present version. The most obvious change is that the old drop-down menus are replaced by context-sensitive toolbars: if you happen to be in a table, for instance, you get a toolbar showing all the things you can do with it.
This works well, judging from demonstrations at the forum; but, though the old keyboard shortcuts apparently still work, it would seem to force you to use the mouse more - not a good idea for people with some forms of RSI.
But Erik Brown, director of central marketing for Europe, said this is offset by the fact on average you need fewer clocks or keystrokes to get something done.
MS to phase out 32bit for servers
Microsoft is to phase out 32bit versions of its Windows server operating system, the company revealed today. The first release of Longhorn, the server version of next-generation Windows Vista, will support both 32bit and 64 bit hardware. But Release 2 of Longhorn, expected to launch in 2009, will be 64bit only, according to Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's enterprise management group.
He told developers at the company's it IT Forum in Barcelona that 64 bit code runs 'most' 32bit applications, often as much as l0 percent faster. He admitted that companies would have to replace 32bit hardware to run the new version but he said most were already switching to 64bit machines, even if they were running 32bit software.
'When you buy a server today it is going to be 64 bit,' he said.' The only exception is with really low end machines which are designed for the desktop but used us servers."
He stressed that speed and an extended address space were not the only advantages of 64 bit. A new kernel-level feature caIIed Patchman will protect against buffer-outflow attacks. 'This wouldhave been very hard to implement in 32 bit. But we had to rewrite the kernel in 64 t anyway."
Exchange Server 12, Windows Compute. cluster, and the small business version of Longhorn will also be exclusively 64 bit, Muglia said.
Nvidia leapfrogs ATI with Geforce 7800GTX 512
Leapfrogging is the name of the game with Nvidia and ATI in the graphics card market, but you'd usually expect one of them to claim the top spot for a while at least.
Since ATI announced Crossfire, its rival to Nvidia's SLI system for dual graphics cards, the company seems to have been in disarray. Having been assured that cards were imminent during the summertime, we still haven't seen widespread availability.
A week ago ATI said the Radeon 1800 XT was now in stock, but we haven't found a site with any available at the time of writing. To add to the confusion, different sites have given different availability dates. You can however buy the slower 1800 XL, and we've tested cards from GeCube and Sapphire.
Tests on reference cards showed it outperformed the Geforce 7800GTX, although not by much. But the 1800 XT is about to be knocked off the top spot already.
Nvidia has now slipped in the Geforce 7800GTX 512, and in tests in our labs, its performance has been impressive. You can read a full review, plus see its full performance results and compare it to other cards here.
As with the release of the Geforce 7800GTX, cards will be available immediately.
No flies on Winzip 10
You may wonder what innovations Winzip could come up with to justify the launch of a new version of its flagship compression product. But Winzip 10.0 has just landed on our desks for review with a list of new features including a new Explorer-style view that is said to facilitate navigation of complex zip files and new technology that zips files up even smaller.
Presumably you need Winzip 10 to unzip them; so anyone you send the files to will have to download the new version – if they know how.
The $49.95 (£28.70) Pro version offers the ability to zip and burn to a CD or DVD in one operation, and a wizard that allows you to schedule zipped backups. Watch out for a full review.
Come on, Philips - stop pseudo-CDs killing music!
The only thing surprising to come out of the Sony DRM rootkit fiasco, the full extent of which is now starting to become horrifyingly apparent, is that Philips hasn't bothered to grab some perfectly legitimate PR out of the affair.
As we've told PCW readers in the past - when they voiced their annoyance about the anti-copying mechanisms employed on Dido's 'Life for Rent' album from BMG in 2004 - all bets are off when what you're buying is not actually a genuine Compact Disc.
In fact any audio discs with copy protection are, without exception, proprietary optical formats - the Red Book Audio CD standard on which genuine CD-Audio discs are based contains no provision for any form of copy protection, and Philips - the owner of many CD digital audio patents and license holder of the 'Compact Disc Digital Audio' logo - has to date been very strict in not allowing any optical audio disc with copy protection to carry the logo or even to call itself a CD anywhere on the packaging. Look carefully and you'll usually find a tiny disclaimer on such discs to the efffect that 'this disc may not play in all CD players'.
And if consumers can now see what a seemingly innocuous disc can do to their PC, what chance of convincing them that DRM-enabled downloads aren't doing even worse things?
So come one, Philips, how about a campaign to encourage consumers to 'Play safe - look out for the Compact Disc logo', and perhaps even enforcing segregation of these pseudo-CDs in the music stores? You know it makes sense.
Well maybe not. You see, the The co-owner of some of the CD audio patents is in fact...Sony. Oh dear.
http://www.licensing.philips.com/licensees/conditions/cd/
UK Online launches ADSL2+
Previously known for its 8Mb service, UK Online has announced the roll-out of its brand new ADSL2+ package. UK Online claim a maximum download speed of 22Mb, but the actual speed you get is based on the distance you are from the exchange and could be much lower - read more here.
UK Online is obviously wary of promising and not being able to deliver. To avoid unhappy customers, the sign-up process will give you an estimated download speed based on your distance from the exchange.
The service is priced at £29.99 per month and has no download limits. Along with a lightning fast downstream, ADSL2+ also offers an upstream of 768Kb - most services are limited to 256Kb at present.
You can find out if UK Online’s ADSL2+ service is in your area here. Demand for high-speed Internet is obviously high, when we wrote this UK Online's checker had crumbled under the pressure.
Matrox reloaded: Dual-head for all
Matrox has been out of the graphics limelight for several years now, preferring to occupy its time with the serious business of making money. But today it's popped its head over the parapet to announce a new product that lets almost any laptop drive dual external displays.
The DualHead2Go is an external box that connects to the standard VGA output of a laptop. It fools Windows into thinking you've got an ultra-widescreen monitor (up to 2,560 by 1,024 pixels) connected, and using a bit of trickery splits the signal destined for this new 'monitor' into separate signals to drive 2 external monitors.
The box actually digitises the signal from the laptop, then processes it and splits it before converting the signal back to analogue. You can spread a desktop across the two screens or run different full-screen apps on each screen - no extra software is needed, although Matrox's Powerdesk is included to give you more control over what's displayed on each monitor.
The DualHead2Go doesn't care whether the incoming video is 2D, 3D or video - it doesn't replace your graphics chip, merely processes the output. It's not suitable for most desktop PCs except those using certain Intel integrated graphics chips. There's a compatibility matrix available on the Matrox website.
Pricing for the DualHead2Go is £99 + VAT.
Watch out for a review on the PCW web site when we get our hands on one.
Matrox online store: http://shopmatrox.com/
Matrox website: http://www.matrox.com/graphics
Philips demo Media Center PC at Best of Stuff show
Philips was demonstrating its new Media Center PC at the Best of Stuff show. It's the company's first foray into the Media Center market and, although final release dates weren't given, we’re told it should be available within the next couple of weeks.
Microsoft is obviously keen for people to see Media Center as a viable alternative to the likes of Sky+ and must therefore be delighted an established home entertainment manufacturer such as Philips is prepared to take the much criticised OS onboard.
The MCP9350i runs off a 3GHz Pentium 4. It’s not the coolest of processors, which may result noisy cooling – we will report back on this as soon as we get a review model. We are also told that although it comes with two TV tuners, they’re analogue models – something Philips will have to address if it wants the MCP9350i to sell.
Pricing is yet to be confirmed.
Watch out for a full review in PCW soon.
Sat nav on the Gizmondo
The Gizmondo portable gaming device hasn’t exactly had an easy ride since its release earlier this year. After a series of delays to its release date, the Gizmondo wasn’t taken to heart by leading games manufacturers, which led to a limited number of quality games.
In an interesting move at the Best of Stuff show, Gizmondo was teamed up with sat nav company CoPilot. Making use of the gadget’s GPS chip, the tie-in with CoPilot allows the Gizmondo to be used as a fully-fledged navigation system.
Sadly we couldn’t test the sat nav service (reception isn’t great when you’re deep inside the Novotel exhibition centre), but we’ll be taking a closer look soon in PCW. With the Sony Playstation Portable offering superior graphics, we find it hard to believe this new venture will save the Gizmondo.
Microsoft buys FolderShare
Never underestimate Microsoft - in a surprise move the software giant has bought out the P2P file sharing application FolderShare for an undisclosed sum. The move ties in with Microsoft's recent launch of the Windows Live beta web portal, which competes with Google's new personal home page service.
Apart from secure P2P sharing of files between multiple computers, FolderShare also allows users secure remote access to all the files on their PC from any web browser. FolderShare was developed and owned by ByteTaxi, and storage company Iomega invested in the company in January 2005 - it planned to include FolderShare's service on its NAS (network attached storage) products.
Microsoft has dabbled in P2P services with the 3 Degrees beta application, now suspended. Windows Vista is also expected to include P2P capabilities.
Click here for a review of FolderShare, and here for an opinion piece by The Test Bed's Kelvyn Taylor discussing the future of P2P.
Google's Live rival has the edge
Google has countered Microsoft's Live project with the launch of a Personalised Home Page which basically allows you to populate its normally uncluttered search page with news feeds.
The result looks remarkably similar to Microsoft's personalised Live page, but Google would seem to have a head start as a lot of people already use it as their home page - many novices use it for general web navigation rather than entering URLs in the address bar.
Both products are easy to use: you simply drag and drop news sources from a listing. Live has not been received with enthusiasm but personally I rather like the idea. I'm more likely to use the Google version though, simply out of habit. You can try it out here.
Memova offers email to any phone
A system that extends Blackberry-style email-on-the-move services beyond the corporate world and to almost any recent mobile-phone has secured 150,000 subscribers in just four months since its launch in France.
But no British mobile-phone has yet taken up the Memova system, from messaging specialist Critical Path, though chief technology officer Mike Serbinis says 02 is looking at it.
One reason for its rapid success in France is that SFR, the French arm of Vodaphone, charges a flat 2.50 euros (£ 1.70) a month for forwarding any number of messages from just about any consumer email service - Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange-based corporate email is not supported.
The system uses MMS, the multimedia version of the SMS messaging system, which does not suffer the 160-character limit imposed on a text-message. The policy on attachments would vary with the operator but Memova is smart enough to recognise and cope with standard ones like jpegs that most modern phones can process.
Very large attachments are likely to be stripped out, if only because many models could not cope with them.
The system is targeted at the consumer market but Serbinis says many small businesses are also likely to be interested. He added that he suspected that SFR's flat-rate charging could change as the system exstablished.
Even so Memova could prove strong competition for Blackberry, which has been enjoying a mini-boom in the UK. Blackberry devices are now PDA market leaders, representing 25 percent of sales.
Whose PC is it anyway?
Why is it certain applications delight in restarting your PC without warning when you uninstall them? What’s wrong with giving you the option of restarting later?
Yahoo Messenger is the latest to make our black list. Just moments after we hit the uninstall button it merrily began closing applications and other windows, ready for a restart. We didn’t even get so much as a warning. Is Yahoo punishing us for uninstalling its application?
While we’re on the subject, Windows Update isn’t much better. Okay, so it doesn’t restart your PC automatically when new updates are installed, but if you opt not to restart immediately it will pester you with a pop-up window every 15 minutes until you relent. Microsoft will no doubt argue patches aren't effective until you restart, but it’s not always convenient to restart whenever Microsoft demands it.
The point of all this is you paid for your PC, surely you should decide what you can and can’t do with it.
Have you been infuriated by software taking over your PC? Are you fed up being told you don’t have permission to delete certain files? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
ECS unveil world's first 955X Crossfire board
ECS have announced the PF22 motherboard which supports both Intel’s advanced i955X chipset and ATI’s CrossFire technology.
It features ECS’ Scalable D.G.E (Dual Graphic Engines) architecture as well as an overclocking feature called Instant Overclocking Controller (I.O.C.).
The PF22 should be available from November with a RRP price of around £140 ex VAT.
What price an audio switch?
Am I the only person in the world who needs to switch the output of a sound card between headphones and a speaker system? I've looked for a suitable switch in Maplins, all the many computers stores down London's Tottenham Court Road, and the many music-equipment shops around nearby Denmark Street (I, and presumably many musicians, need to switch to headphones when multitrack recording in order to hear existing tracks while playing over them). Just about every conceivable combination of switch, phono plug and 3.5mm stereo jack was on sale except the one required.
It was the same three years ago, when I last looked. In the end I made my own switch unit up but (probably because of my bad soldering) this is no longer making good connections. This time I went for overkill, buying a £12.99 four-to-one audio switch from Maplins. It is designed to switch any of four hi-fi units to a speaker or amplifier but I am using it in reverse on just two positions.
Even if only one in a thousand PC users need a headphone switch, someone is surely missing a market.
Windows Live goes live
Microsoft's Windows Live beta is distinctly underwhelming - it seems to be just a glorified browser-based RSS reader, search engine and email viewer (Live Mail). 'Coming soon' is a Live Messenger service. It's free to try at the moment if you've a Windows Passport account.
Sony DRM uses malware?
There's a fascinating story on Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals blog documenting how he discovered that the copy protection 'feature' from a Sony audio CD appears to actually install a rootkit in Windows - a devious technique used by hackers to hide malware from the operating system.
What's worse is that this software was badly written and proved almost impossible to uninstall, leading to the question of whether DRM is now going too far. Of course, it also begs the question of why Windows can allow such programs to become buried so deep within the operating system.
In the January issue of PCW (out 17th Nov) we've a special feature explaining the latest techniques used by hackers, including rootkits, how to spot them and protect your PC against these insidious techniques.
Pointless technology or genius product? The PDA mouse
A couple of months ago one of our journos wrote a column on pointless technology, and why we must suffer it. Over the past couple of years there seems to have been a rise in products looking for a market and fulfilling no purpose other than to perhaps look good.
And we thought we'd seen the latest example yesterday, when we got a Bluetooth PDA mouse and keyboard from ThinkOutside. Now we can see the point of the keyboard - and despite some questionable set up instructions it is okay to use.
But a mouse for your PDA? Why? You can read the full reviews of the mouse and keyboard here.
ThinkOutside's Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard costs £70 and the Stowaway Travel Mouse, which will also work with laptops, a whopping £50.
Photo credit: www.widget.co.uk
Sky TV on your mobile
Vodafone has teamed up with Sky to launch a new TV service. Available from today to all owners of Vodafone 3G handsets, the service consists of 19 channels including Sky News, Sky Sports News and MTV.
To ensure the service takes off, it will initially be available for free until February next year. Thereafter it will cost £5 per month per Sky Mobile TV pack. There are currently two packs to choose from:
News, Sport & Factual: Sky News, CNN, Bloomberg, Sky Sports News, At The Races, Discovery Factual, National Geographic Channel, History Channel.
Entertainment & Music: Sky One, Sky Movies, MTV, Living TV, Discovery Lifestyle, Nickelodeon, Paramount Comedy, Cartoon Network, Bravo, Biography Channel.
A second MTV channel and Paramount Comedy will be added to the Entertainment pack later this year. Further channels are expected to be announced.
It would appear that only certain channels, such as Sky News, are live streams. The majority carry content specifically designed for the Mobile TV service.
Read a full review of Vodafone's Mobile TV service
Talkin 'bout a Revolution
Nintendo has just released new information about its forthcoming games console, codenamed "Revolution".
Jim Merrick, Nintendo of Europe's senior director of marketing, said the console would launch in all major territories within 14 weeks of each other. He didn't indicate when the launches would begin, but "industry insiders" are saying late 2006 is a reasonable estimate.
Merrick also stated there would be no major differences between the graphical abilities of the Revolution and its rivals Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. This is good news for Nintendo fans, as it was widely assumed the console was to be less powerful.
He also indicated that Nintendo 64 games played on the Revolution would run faster, although there would be no significant graphical improvements elsewhere.
Impressively, Merrick said the Revolution could be used to wirelessly download content from around the world. Content could include games that would never have been officially released in the UK.
In similar news, Merrick said Nintendo of Europe plans to have over 25,000 participating wireless hotspots across Europe that will enable Nintendo DS handheld users to play games against DS players around the world - without necessarily owning a copy of said game.
The Nintendo Revolution will also be compatible with the service.
