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Gateway to cheap calls
A late snippet from Cebit... a Bulgaria-based company called Eurodesign showed this device called a Mobigater, which allows you to make or receive Skype calls on a standard mobile phone. You put in a SIM card and it rings you when your PC receives a call; similarly you can ring it to make a web call. Basically it is a home or office version of the kind of gateway used by many cheap-call merchants.
A very big press party
Sony has done an impressive job of hyping its products at its annual media event on the Greek island of Rhodes.
A stand-alone blu-ray player, the Sony BDP-S1E, is one of the stars of the show, although the 700 odd journalists attending appear to be spending more time on the dozens of Playstation 3s that litter every nook and cranny of the hotel (which is, of course, no great loss to Sony either).
The BDP-S1E is very late to the party, considering the Playstation3 has blu-ray playback, PC blu-ray drives will have a one year lead on it and Toshiba is pushing forward with much cheaper HD-DVD players, but the kit does look impressive.
What‘s particularly appealing to me is the 24p true cinema stuff that means UK viewers will finally see actors and actresses the way directors intended, with lower pitched voices.
New York Times points way to the newspaper of the future
Playing about with Nokia's tiny N800 web tablet, I got to wondering whether a standard small size will emerge that will force a general rethink of the design of web pages. Most of these, particularly on news sites, look scrappy compared with the printed page yet there is really no reason why this should be so.
One look at the New York Times's new reader has completely changed my perspective. Take a look at the two screenshots here. They are of the same story, and they are eminently readable (better than they are here, due to lossy jpeg compression). Note that the entire story reformats itself to fit any size of screen or window.
I first saw it at Cebit but have only just had a chance to have a play with it. The reader is a dedicated client but there seems no reason why this sort of thing could not be done as a standard publishing platform. Bill Mitchell, Microsoft's corporate vice president of mobile and tailored platforms, turned me on to it. I'll be writing more about my talk with him in our next print edition.
The reader uses Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly codenamed Avalon, and was developed in collaboration with Microsoft. Mitchell tells me the aim was to retain the look and feel of the printed NYT. Actually, in my humble, it looks better.
Adobe's online store buckles under the pressure of CS3 rush
It would appear Adobe underestimated the excitement the launch of Photoshop CS3 would cause.
Although the homepage works fine, try to access the online Store and it all goes horribly wrong.
Update: The Adobe shop appears to be working now, albeit very slowly
Adobe launches CS3... but it's not on the shelves just yet
Adobe today announced the latest version in its Creative Suite series - CS3 - but in the same breath has said it won't be available until next month.
Photoshop, the industry standard image editing application, has been given a complete makeover, while web design tools such as Dreamweaver and Flash have also been given the full CS3 treatment.
PS3s regularly sell for £370 on Ebay
I was one of the many people who almost went to a store and bought a Playstation 3 on launch night, partly because it would be interesting to see a launch party, partly because I thought I might make a bob or two on eBay.
When the PS2 launched in November 2000, there was such short supply that people were successfully selling them for £900 in the run up to Christmas.
Networked PVRs deemed illegal
A US court has ruled the remote use of personal video recorders (PVR) is illegal, according to SiliconValley.com.
The implications are that you can't store your recorded TV footage at one address and watch it at another.
When a film won't sell
When a film won't sell for love nor money, then perhaps someone could make money by making it a free download bundled with a load of adverts.
That's kind of what Lovefilm.com and VW are doing. You need to be a member of the DVD-in-the-post rental company, to get the download; This costs a minimum of £4.99 a month (giving you two DVD rentals per month).
Users download the film using a download manager, which streams Volkswagen ads directly to the user's desktop, while the film is downloading. There are also other 'TV quality' ads the user must watch before the movie commences.
The first film available is a romance called The Cooler. The standard edition of this film is the 14,980th best selling DVD on Amazon and the special edition can only muster 20,709th place.
Lovefilm is interested in getting other companies to sponsor films, so perhaps this will become a viable business model to flog DVDs that just can't sell.
Power pack packs USB
A new range of power supplies from Milton Keynes-based Hiper pack USB 2.0 ports, allowing them to be powered directly rather than taking the supply from the motherboard. The HPU-5M830, pictured above, packs eight ports, plus one that can be used to charge a mobile phone. A sister model has four ports.
Virgin has unlimited supplies of Playstation 3s for launch
I've just popped along to the official UK launch of the Playstation 3 at Virgin's Tottenham Court Road store.
It's six hours before it goes on sale there are just 18 people in the queue. The two people that 'apparently' slept over last night are posing for journalists and everyone else described themselves to me as "fans of the Wii, Xbox and Playstation".
A Sony spokesperson told me there are unlimited supplies of the Playstation 3 at the store tonight. No one will go home empty handed (as long as they have £425 handy) because Virgin will ship Playstation 3s in from other stores if they sell out (although the spokesperson assured me that won't happen).
Two emergency medics looked on in amusement; they told me they were there to help the fainters. There are as many journalists, security people, PRs and Virgin staff as there are people queuing at 5:30pm today - it's gunna be a great show...
Update 23/03/07 8:56am - and it was! I wonder if they had unlimited supplies of HDTVs, perhaps there were some left over...
LG's debut 24in HDMI widescreen to arrive in April
LG has announced its first monster 24in widescreen TFT, the L245WP.
To increase its appeal as a display to watch video on, LG has included HDMI (with HDCP support) and component inputs.
Unlike the recent L1960TR, which boasts a 3000:1 contrast ratio, LG has stuck with a more conservative 1000:1 ratio with this new 24in screen.
Other specifications include a 1,920x1,200, 8ms response time, 178° viewing angles and two USB ports.
Pricing hasn't been announced, but it's expected to hit the shelves next month.
Viagra only comes in English
Spam isn't much of a problem outside of Great Britain and the USA, according to two German gentlemen from Strato, Europe's second largest web host.
They proposed that if a German company is presented with 200 e-mails and only one of them is in German, then the rest are probably spam.
Straight after this very sensible conclusion, however, they said image spam now accounts for 90 per cent of all e-mails, up from 70 per cent last August - so knowing the language of an e-mail becomes a lot more difficult.
We've previously reported that the number of image junk emails is on the rise and optical character recognition (OCR) is too time consuming to filter out the dirty stuff. Instead Strato calculates the hash values of images to guess what's likely to be spam.
Cebit: How to record a call without the buzz and boom
You can buy a gizmo to record a phone call for a tenner or so from Maplin's but you will find that it is not completely satisfactory. I have one hooked up to my PC and Microsoft's excellent OneNote utility, which synchronises your notes of a conversation with a recording of it. The latest version will even search the audio for keywords, though I have yet to try this out.
It can only be as useful as the recording, however, and I have yet to find a very good way of doing this. UK specialist Re-tell claims to have the answer with a gizmo it was showing at Cebit. It costs £120 but, according to managing director Richard Herman, it works.
There are two main problems with cheap call recorders: buzzing and balance. Herman says his Advanced PC recorder gets round both these. Buzzing is eliminated by proper isolation and the incoming and outing going voices are recorded separately so that that their volume can be properly balanced. We are hoping to get one to try out, so watch this space.
Morphing software
Ever wondered what you'd look like if you were a woman. Or perhaps an animal, or carrot?
Well now you can, sort of. Using Morpheus Photo Animation Suite you can morph two images together.
It costs £40 and the test images looked fantastic, however in practice, this software gives very poor results.
The morphing software originally gave me two sets of ears, so I lopped off the tiger set (probably the wrong decision).
Cebit: Asus shows smallest-yet convertible - with a proper keyboard
Samsung's Q1 Ultra was not the only new ultra-mobile at Cebit, though it did steal most of the limelight. Ergonomically, I preferred the one (pictured left) on Asus's stand, which is the smallest convertible I have seen. It has a 7inch screen like the Q1 Ultra, but has a proper keyboard rather than the latter's split keypad. As with all convertibles, the screen twists round for use as a tablet.
I've always thought of the old Psion Series 5 keyboard as the benchmark for size because it must be the smallest keyboard on which you can type even half-way normally. But is was too small for comfort, and the larger one on the Asus felt better, though I did not have enough time to try it for long.
It seems Asus has no immediate plans to ship the machine in Europe, though we were told that it had got so much interest at Cebit that this decision could change.
Many of the big companies are still shying away from ultra-mobiles but there where a few other models about at Cebit, including the one from Medion pictured above right. Sorry about the picture quality - this was taken as a visual note in expectation of getting a better look later but I never got a chance.
The keyboard slides out, and from the distance I saw it appeared to have calculator-style keys - definitely a mark-down, if so.
A Taiwanese company called Samwell was showing ruggedised ultra-mobile pictured left, together with a couple of other models.
Cebit: Tosh says fuel-cells are set to fly
It is rather a large Bluetooth headset but it is a special one... the first to run off a fuel cell. The 15x18.5x 3.7cm battery pack lasts ten hours, according to the man on Toshiba's stand at Cebit. 
Also shown was 5.5x12x2.5 cm cell (right)that packs enough for two mobile phone chargers.
The cells can be top up by a bottle of methanol about the size of a tin a lighter fuel. The Toshiba man said Americans had asked for a system where they could by methanol by the gallon; but Toshiba believes a closed system is safer because methanol is both flammable and poisonous.
The company showed laptop with a built-in fual cell said to last five hours between top-ups. The laptop was rather thicker than usual and weighed 2.5Kg with the cell.
The Toshiba man said the fuell cells had been approved by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICOA) for use on aircraft. They would be launch "soon" in Japan but he could not give a date for Europe.
Linksys puckers up for its latest Kiss
Linksys has launched its latest digital media streamer under the Kiss brand – namely the Kiss 1600.
Able to wirelessly stream photos, music and video, it comes with an HDMI output and a DVD player that can upscale standard resolution films to 720p.
As you'll read in our review, the DP-600 (its predecessor) was plagued by a particularly noisy fan and lacked UPnP, so it couldn’t grab media from a NAS (network attached storage) drive.
Linksys says it has dealt with both issues on the new Kiss 1600 – but while we’re happy to accept it’s UPnP compatible, we’ll reserve judgement on the fan noise until we get our hands on a review sample.
The DP-1600 will be appearing in shops imminently and will be retailing around the £250 mark.
Novatel takes the ExpressCard to two-way fast 3G links
Novatel was at the ExpressCard press conference today showing a combined HSDPA/HSUPD card - that is, it supports high-speed packet access uplinks and well as downlinks. Which is more than an 3G operator in the UK yet offers; there are trials of two-way fast links but all commercial services offer the higher data rate only for downlinks.
Novatel's general manager for Europe, Peter Balchin, said a lot of companies want HSUPD support now to future-proof their purchases.
Other ExpressCards on show include Sata,USB 2.0, and Firewire ports from Belkin, Wibu showed a card with 4GBytes of flash memory and its own CodeMaster digital-rights-management module, enabling the storage and use of copy-protected material.
Commodore aims to recapture gaming market
80's gaming giant Commodore is looking to re-enter the UK market with a range of high-end PCs. Aimed specifically at gamers, the cases are garish to say the least.
Various models were on display at CeBIT, with the top of the range Commodore XX housing a quad-core Intel QX6700 processor (although gamers will probably want to stick to a Core 2 Duo with its superior overclocking opportunities) and two Geforce 8800 cards.
With brands such as Alienware and Chillblast already established in this field, Commodore will no doubt be hoping C64 aficionados owners help drive initial sales.
Pricing is yet to be announced, but you can expect to see them on sale in April.
German government in spyware row
Seems there has been a bit of a storm in Germany about a suggestion that the government should be entitled to put spyware on the machines of terrorists suspects to monitor what they are doing. Call me a cynic, but I'd have guessed that the UK government already is doing it.
The issues, I suppose, are similar to those surrounding phone tapping, but there is legislation governing when that can be used. If there is no similar legislation covering spyware (and I have never heard of any) then the government would be unlikely to tie its hands voluntarily unless pressure groups created a fuss.
The fuss began last year when a German politician called for compulsory access to Internet-based storage. He has a point when you imagine how much dodgy material is held anonymously on remote servers. Then the Swiss government was reported to be conducting "malware experiments". In November Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled that what it called "electronic searching of premises" was illegal. Yet in January the German government admitted plans to employ two coders for the purpose at a cost of 300,000 euros, and a police chief later said it was essential to be able a access computers.
The saga was rehearsed at the Kaspersky press conference at Cebit today, where virus analyst Magnus Kalkuhl said he could not guarantee his product could detect such an intrusion. "We have often been asked if the government has asked us to igore a particular attack. The answer is that we have not been asked, and if we were we would say no."
He also revealed a potential security risk in the use of fdlash memory .rather than a hard disk. "When you overwrite data on a magnetic disk, it is actually overwritten and cannot be recovered. But on flash you may not actually overwrite the data. It could be written in another part of the memory. This is transparent to the operating system because the memory's internal logic takes care of it. But if you know what you are doing you can recover the data."
This is unlikley to become an issue for most users, he said. "But it could be important for military systems.@
Getting shirty about the Samsung Q1 Ultra's mini-qwerty keyboard
The new Q1 Ultra looks great but I am a little disappointed in the split, mini-qwerty thumbpad. You can see it on the picture (left), provided you can keep your eyes on the product. The thinking behind it is clear: a big potential market for these machines is in places like hospitals where staff will use them in their hands rather than at a desk. Mobile phones have got people used to these pads, and no doubt the Blackberry generation will love them.
My reservation is partly personal. I've have suffered bad bouts of RSI and find using my thumbs in this way very tiring, and probably very bad for my hands and wrists. But the keypad also puts the Q1 Ultra into a niche: a market consisting of Crackberries and medics. The fascination of mobiles is the challenge of creating the most comfortable, truly portable, general purpose working platform. If you can't write War and Peace on it, then it does not qualify.
True, you can still plug a keyboard into the Q1 Ultra. I'm not a great texter, again for the sake of my hands, so I may not be the best person to judge. But I'd bet that thumbpad is a passing phase in ultra-mobile design.
Incidentally I had a long and very interesting talk with Microsoft's man at the launch, Bill Mitchell, who is corporate vice president of mobile and tailored platforms. As usual at these events I have more to write up than I have time; but watch this space.
Samsung launches Q1 Ultra UMPC
Samsung has just announced the Q1 Ultra - successor to its Q1 Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC).
In a packed CeBIT press conference, representatives from Samsung, Microsoft and Intel (aka the UMPC Gang), lauded the Q1 Ultra's improved design, longer battery life (though still only around 3.5 hours) and built-in keyboard.
Although the screen size stays at 7in, Samsung has sensibly upped the resolution to 1,024x600. The physical keyboard is a welcome addition, but having to us your thumbs to type isn't easy, especially when the keyboard is split on either side of the screen.
Samsung told use battery life would be around 3.5hours, which is still below what we'd like to see on a 'carry around all day' PC. But at 690g just 29.9mm thick, you can't deny it's highly portable.
The Q1 Ultra is expected to be launched in May. Pricing is yet to be confirmed, but Samsung told us it would be selling for roughly the same price as the original Q1 at £800.
Heidi and her avatars take on the giants of instant messaging
You might think that starting up yet another Instant Messenger service is a mug’s game, considering that you are setting yourself up against the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google.
But a German company called Combot is confident that its new service has enough new features to attract users. These include the ability to have the service live on several machines at once, keeping them all in synch, and guaranteed delivery of messages whether or not the target is online. It also supports large attachments and files transfers.
The service's main selling point is a selection of animated avatars, many franchised from film companies, that can express a range of emotions. The service is free, though you have to pay for some of the avatars. These include characters from Lord of the Rings. Some, like Heidi, who is pictured above, are free when you sign up.
Clearly the service is aimed at youngsters, and as a dotard I don’t feel qualified to judge whether this is a winner. When companies at Cebit started pitching novelty ringtones as a money spinner a few years back I thought they were crazy.
The service has been on beta test for the past few months but has now gone live. Most of the interface is graphical but apparently there is an English version where words are necessary.
Cebit: Come back infra-red, all is forgiven.
Infra-red data links (as opposed to IR remote controls) were for years the wallflower at the communications ball. PCW long bemoaned the fact that notebooks had an IR port as standard, but PCs didn’t, so the IR had nothing to talk to. You could buy an IR dongle but these cost well over £100, despite the fact that the bill of materials was about tuppence-ha’penny.
IR never really lived down the bad reputation it got from poor early implementations. Wi-fi threatened to kill it off altogether, and emerging ultrawideband radio is being touted for high-speed peripheral device links of the kind Sharp's new Blu-ray player is using IR for.
It has obvious disadvantages, not least that you have only to stand in from of a link to break it, as Sharp’s manager of product planning pointed out at Cebit today. But I have long thought IR is overdue for a comeback – or perhaps I should say free-air optical links, which have the potential to transmit gigabits.
IrSS has a theoretical data rate of 16Mbits/sec, which is lower than rival wireless technologies. But its advantages should not be overlooked.
IR is secure: you cannot easily eavesdrop a tightly focused optical link. It is clean: no radio pollution raising the noise floor and or interfering with neighbouring networks. And it saves a lot of complicated negotiating and addressing – you simply point at what you want to talk to.
Think of all the negotiating Bluetooth would have to go through to pinpoint one machine out of a crowded room to talk to. Think of what humans do: we get up close and point ourselves. This is exactly what you have to do with IR.
So what if someone moves across the path? You ask them to move out of the way, just as you would do if someone is standing in front of the television. Wifi traffic gets blocked and unblocked all the time; we just don’t notice because the obstacle is not physical.
Sharp seemed doubtful today whether the IrSS link would migrate to Europe in actual products - those on show at Cebit are not always exactly the same as those that hit the shop shelves. But I suspect that as radio pollution becomes more of an issue,which it surely will as wireless links scale up, minds will start to turn again to free-air optics.
Panasonic draws a line in the sand
Panasonic is demonstrating comparisons between its newest plasma display technology and competing LCD products.
It has invested heavily in plasma screen factories and has been pumping out lots of information to stop the ever-louder LCD supporters.
The latest pro-plasma rhetoric comes from German tests, where a series of fast moving lines and shapes were displayed on 1080p LCDs and plasmas. A special, high motion camera then captured the images moving past.
In such fast moving scenes both technologies 'lose' resolution. Panasonic claims the LCD panels only had 300 discernable lines, whereas plasmas retained 900 identifiable lines of information, down from 1080.
Panasonic redid the same experiment in front of me and its findings are believable – plasmas cope with motion better. They also have deeper blacks; however, my own eyes told me LCDs have more vibrant colours and a superior white level.
At the end of the day I think plasmas look better (especially Panasonic's 103inch monster panel) but they consume about 30 per cent more electricity and don't last as long - some models only have half the lifetime of an LCD panel, so it's horse for courses.
Bullguard suite has an advert
Having installed, reviewed and then forgotten about Bullguard's 3GB online backup product in February it has rudely awoken me again.
When you pay for and install Bulldog Backup it offers you a free trial of its anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall products. I chose not to install these free trials, but now they've 'expired' my PC gets a large advert telling me to buy it every time my box boots up.
I eventually got rid of this by uninstalling Backup. In summary this is a great way to put users off a company altogether.
Solar-power for the car and Sharp's so-exclusive 108in LCD
Sharp was showing the 108in LCD TV that made its debut at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. By which you may imagine the world's filthy rich already have one to amaze and impress their friends and confound their enemies. Not so. There are only three models in the world, and they are all here at Cebit, according to the company's chief executive for Europe, Han Kleis. "We do intend to bring them to the market," he said.
A propos my early blog about sunny Europe, it seems that the continent is the world's biggest user of solar panels, according to Sharp, which has a 20 percent market share in the business. Which is a little surprising considering that we are (as yet) not over-endowed with sunshine. Someone calculated recently that quite a small area of the Sahara covered with solar panels could supply the equivalent of the world's energy needs. But it turns out that Germany is leading the way, with places like the UK catching up.
One reason is that government's in Europe subsidise installations. Sharp's European pr chief Martin Beckmann tells me costs will drop by "a few percent" a year so that the technology will soon be affordable without subsidies. Incidentally, Sharp also let drop the fact at its press conference that a car manufacturer had approached it about using solar panels in vehicles, though not of course to power them. Could bring a new meaning to the term sun roof.
Stop breathing - it is good for the planet but it won't help Cebit
HANOVER, GERMANY, March 14. Global warming (or solar flaring, if you believe the ostriches) has hit Cebit this year, which is to say that it is an unseasonably warm day at the world's biggest computer show. Last year I had to plough through snow to get to my hotel, which was reassuring, but it's your own fault if you get good weather these days and you should stop breathing to get the carbon-dioxide levels down.
The one cloud on the horizon is metaphorical, hanging over Cebit itself. Exhibitor numbers are reportedly down, with some big names missing, and the organisers are talking about redefining the event. Like late lamented Comdex in the US, Cebit is being hit by a trend for more focused shows. Cebit's problem is that if it focuses too sharply, it risks its losing its uniqueness: no other show can approach it for scope.
Oddly, a smaller show could prove popular with exhibitors. One UK distributor told me: "Cebit has a fine line to tread. It wants the footfall but if it gets too many visitors, it is bad for us. We get to see a lot of people but end up passing the time of day with people we are not going to do business with, and missing the people we really want to talk to."
I arrived here yesterday after a cruel 4am start from London, which did at least give me time to take a look at Hanover. Turns out to have been the home of Leibnitz, who invented differential calculus independently of Newton and is credited with creating the first calculating machine (the abacus is way older, but presumably that doesn't qualify).
Hanover is also the ancestral home of our own royal family, through George 1. A poignant note in the local museum said people here hoped this link might save the town from the attentions of the RAF. It didn't, and much of the old town was destroyed by bombing; photographs of the devastated streets look eerily similar to ones of the London Blitz. Such madness, only a few years ago.
The first of this year's press conferences is about to start. I'll tell you about it later.
Video review: Panasonic Toughbook CF-Y5
You can read the full review of the Toughbook CF-Y5 here.
In short this is a good laptop for those where money is no object. It is the bigger brother of the CF-W5, which you can also see a video review of.
Vista driver support is sporadic
Over the last couple of months we, the press, have had dozens of emails from tech companies saying 'we support Vista'. Well, I recently got an email that should have been entitled 'Vista supports us'.
It turns out Vista comes preloaded with drivers for 100 NXP TV Tuners. For the confused NXP was, up until September 2006, a Philips owned division. NXP makes the chips that power some ASUStek, Avermedia and Pinnacle TV tuner cards.
I find this thoroughly bizarre since Hauppauge, who sells more TV cards than any other manufacturer, didn't get a single driver into Vista.
Top marks to NXP for getting them into Vista, especially when some companies are so lax about driver support. My Geforce 5600 was a perfectly capable card for my uses under XP - Nvidia has castrated it under Vista, even with Aero turned off.
My Vista efforts were dashed again when I struggled to get my 18 month old Trust BT446 graphics tablet working.
When I asked Trust if a Vista driver would soon appear I was given this semi-literate response: "Regarding your doubt, we regret to inform that the drivers for Vista compatible for this device won't be released because this product it is already discontinued."
I asked Microsoft about driver support and they told me Vista supports 1.5million products out of the box with 14,000 drivers on the disc and 16,000 more through Windows update. Perhaps I'm just unfortunate with my choice of products.
Video review: EVGA 880GTX KO ACS3 graphics card
We take a closer look at EVGA's new 8800GTX KO ACS3 graphics card - the fastest we've seen to date.
At £469 it's not cheap, but at high resolutions its performance really comes into its own.
After you've watched the video, read the full review and check out how it compares to other graphics cards we've tested.
New AMD 690 motherboards appear thick and fast
We've just published our review of the Asus M2A-VM and found while its onboard graphics are a cut above Intel's, there are competing 690 products that offer better value for money – in particular a very similar Asus board with an HDMI port for just £5 more.
MSI is another 690 competitor and today it claimed to have the world's first HDMI equipped motherboard, the K9AGM2-FIH.
It is features AMD's 690G chipset and has an HDMI port onboard so you can output HDCP encrypted content to a big TV. The HDMI port is capable of resolutions up to 1920x1080 in interlaced mode (1080i). It will cost £56.40 inc. Vat, which is the same as Asus' HDMI motherboard.
MSI has also announced the K9AGM2-L/F, another micro-ATX board, that comes with the lesser 690V chipset which only has an analogue VGA connection.
Finally the K9AG Neo-F is identically spec'ed to the K9AGM2-L/F but is a bigger ATX board for full sized systems.
MSI says its thermal heat-sink design results in 'zero noise level', so it should form a good base for a cheap and quiet Media Center PC for your living room.
All three MSIs have 7.1 audio onboard, which is better than what the Asus boards provide, but only have eight USB 2.0 ports – two less than the Asus… it's swings and roundabouts for whichever one you choose.
World's smallest hard disk-based mp3 player goes on sale
The world's smallest hard disk-based mp3 player has gone on sale outside of Japan.
Announced last September, the Kenwood 'Media Keg' HD10GB7 has a 10GB hard disk, a 1.5in OLED, weighs 78g and has a volume of 46 cubic cm - by comparison the 8GB Ipod Nano only weighs 40g and has a volume of 23 cubic cm.
The Media Keg can currently be bought for £271 inc. Vat which is extortionate when you can pick up the 8GB Nano for £146 inc. Vat.
Battery life is quoted at 20-24 hours and a redeeming feature is its ability to play a wide range of file formats including mp3, wav and wma and DRM infested wma audio files. It's also got attractive looks and audiophiles will love the Kenwood brand.
New Office formats could tie granny(and your office) in knots
Feels a little like spotting the first swallow of Spring... we have just had our first file conflict with Microsoft's new Office formats. I'm running Vista and Office 2007 side by side with an XP machine running Office 2003. Our copy-input system is built round the old file formats.
Old Office versions do not even see the new formats, which have an 'x' on the extension (ie name.docx), unless you choose the All Files option in the Open File dialogue box. If you click a docx file within XP and follow the prompts you are led to a site where you can download a filter - all 27Mbytes of it - that allows the old Office to read the new formats.
Even so you can get very confused dealing with both formats. I mistakenly put a .docx file into our system, which read it as gobbledygook. It was a small matter to replace the file, but imagine this happening in offices and homes all over the world: grannies who can't read letters sent by their grandchildren; people stuck without a web link with a document they can't read....
The new formats are a Good Thing, in my humble, leave or take the argument about whether Microsoft should have taken more seriously calls for an openly-agreed open standard for basic functionality. As they say: no pain, no gain.
Skype opens 100 free Wi-Fi hotspots… in Stockholm
Scandinavians get all the good luck. Not only are they beautiful, the happiest people on Earth and reasonably wealthy, now Skype's decided to roll out free Wi-Fi hotspots for them.
Skype was founded by a dane and a swede (the very same duo who also founded the old pirates' favourite KaZaA) so its perhaps no suprise that Stockholm is the first to get 100 free Wi-Fi hotspots across various cafes and restaurants.
The Nordic director of Skype, Jonas Kjellberg, told Swedish mag Ny Teknik if there was enough interest in the scheme, Skype, together with Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, might roll more free hotspots.
Skype won't guarantee any minimum speeds, but initial tests by journalists in the country found speeds averaging 1.5Mbits/sec.
We were unable to get a comment from Skype UK about the scheme. And yes, I have a serious dose of Scandinavian in me.
LG's dazzling new display
LG is upping the whiter than white and blacker than black stakes with it's new L1960TR TFT.
Its contrast ratio of 3000:1 is currently the best you're going to get - although we expect similar models from rivals to appear soon - and it's 2ms response is up there with the best of them.
It seems a little odd LG opted for a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. Considering high contrast ratios are best demonstrated when watching movies, we expected it to be a widescreen model. That said, gamers still tend to stick to 4:3 monitors since most titles don't support widescreen.
LG tells us widescreen models will be arriving next month.
We've had a brief demo and the 3000:1 contrast ratio does appear to have a big impact, but we'll reserve final judgement until we're ready to publish our full review.
Pricing sits around the £250 mark and it's available now.
Internet telephony on mobiles rears its head again
Another VoIP application offering free calls between mobile phones has been launched.
It's called Barablu and the catch is you need a Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone, which means battery life will be very poor when using it.
The software looks extremely similar to Truphone's offering, however it appears more complete adding PC compatibility, conference calling for up to 50 people, file transfers and text messaging.
Like Truphone, Barablu diverts phone calls seamlessly to a GPRS network if the user moves out of the Wi-Fi zone.
The company claims calls outside the Barablu network will typically only cost 1p per minute.
An IT journalist's desk - part II
EMIL'S DESK:
Click on the pic to enlarge it
1- 'The Village People' birthday card, what are my colleagues trying to tell me?
2- Three year-old noise cancelling headphones held together with sellotape
4- Supreme commander for lunch time entertainment
5- BT Videophone (been waiting almost three months for BT account to use it)
6- Work supplied P4 3GHz XP machine, but with a left over Nvidia card slotted in it
7- Reminder that in news stories "the orgasm comes first"
8- Tritium wireless IP cam that is very difficult to use (review coming soon)
9- Vista Ultimate test machine pimped up with quad core processor, Blu-ray drive and 900W PSU
10- Useless Hercules webcam that won't work in MSN or Skype
12- Good old fashioned calculator
13- One of the many Cherry wireless keyboards left by them yesterday
14- Two mice on one mousepad, which actually works very well
15- Britain's most famous journalist, according to some PRs
16- Hauppauge TV tuner that needs proper aerial connection to work
17- Business cards for contact with outside world
18- Trust Bluetooth tablet that DOESN'T have Vista drivers
19- Document on defamation for journalists
20- Old bananas and pear, second choice to chocolates sent in from Wacom today
An IT journalist's desk - part I
With the amount of kit that gets sent in to the office each day it's impossible to keep a tidy desk.
To illustrate this, we're taking photos of desks in the PCW office and annotating the interesting and not-so-interesting stuff. I drew the short straw, so my desk is up first...
WILL'S DESK:
Click on the pic to enlarge it
1- No, sadly it's not a tin full of Corel paint, but just a marketing gimmick for the newly released Painter X.
2- A Bluetooth GPS receiver from Keomo, which I really should get round to testing since