Gartner: It’s Almost Over For HD DVD

It's Almost Over For HD DVDIt may not be over until the fat lady sings, but there’s a large woman standing on the stage and the band are already rocking to the Blu-ray theme tune.

Despite desperate price cuts by Toshiba on its HD DVD players in the U.S., research firm Gartner are going all Seven Of Nine and describing their resistance as futile, predicting Blu-ray’s dominance to be complete by the end of 2008 in the consumer market.
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Palm 500 Gets UK Release; Centro Spotted, Apple Exec Hired

Palm 500v Announced; Centro Spotted, Apple Exec HiredWe managed to get past our normal near-pathological dislike for Windows Mobile handsets when were reviewed the Palm 500 a while ago.

Considerably assisted by Vodafone’s slick custom interface and the impressive location based services, our stone cold hearts warmed to the Palm, despite the lack of a touch screen and, well, a Palm OS inside. After a week with the phone, we concluded that it was one of the best low/mid end Windows smartphones available.
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Fuji Finepix S100FS Advanced Prosumer Digital Camera

Fuji Finepix S100FS  Advanced Prosumer Digital CameraTriumphantly roaring down the runway and heading off to the Photo Marketing Association’s annual beano in Las Vegas this week is Fujifilm’s upmarket FinePix S100FS dSLR-like consumer digicam.

Described as its ‘most advanced consumer digital camera to date,’ the FinePix S100FS is scrambling to grab a fat slice from the lucrative budget dSLR market, shoe-horning a promising feast o’features into a relatively bijou frame.
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Skype Fess Up To Internal Routing Problem

Skype Fess Up To Internal Routing ProblemQuick follow up on the SkypeIn mis-routing story that we broke a couple of days a go.

Skype have now issued us a statement (don’t rush yourselves will you).

We’re aware of the problem and currently working to fix it. In the meantime, if any customers are experiencing problems, they can contact customer service at [email protected]

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MacBook Air IS Quicker Than An iBook G4

Speed Report on MacBook Air DisappointThe super svelte and lovely MacBook Air that many people have been drooling over … nay, dreaming of, after having seen it just over a week ago at the MacWorld Keynote doesn’t appear to be impressing with it’s sluggish performance.

Engadget got hold of one to run some tests on it – Xbench 1.3 to be exact. The test numbers place it at the bottom on the league for speed of current machines.

Out of interest, and for personal interest, we ran the same tests on an old iBook G4 Continue reading MacBook Air IS Quicker Than An iBook G4

Proporta Mobile Survival Kit Emergency Charger Review (85%)

Proporta Mobile Survival Kit Emergency Charger Review (85%)If you’ve ever been miles away from a plug socket and felt the horror as your phone, PDA or iPod battery plunges deep into the red, the Proporta Mobile Survival Kit might be the perfect accessory for you.
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iColorFolder Freeware For Windows XP Review

iColorFolder Freeware For Windows XP ReviewIf you’re fed up looking at all those endless dull yellow folder icons that Windows XP serves up by default in every window, then iColorFolder could be a handy way to provide a bit of sparkle to your system’s directories.

This open-source freeware app lets you change the look and colour of the folder icons on your system globally, or one by one by right-clicking on each folder.
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0207 SkypeOut Woes Continue

Skype Bombshell: 0207 SkypeIn Numbers Must ChangeYou’ll remember the outcry when Skype forced many of their 0207 SkypeIn subscribers to change their phone numbers late last year, due to Skype changing their suppliers, following an increase in costs.

Many didn’t take up Skype’s offer to use new SkypeIn numbers, opting instead to transfer their SkypeIn number to another VoIP provider (we changed ours to VoIPFone).

We’re getting reports of problems – and have experienced problems ourselves – of calls being incorrectly routed to Skype accounts when these number are called within Skype.
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iPlayer: HowTo Turn Off Sharing

iPlayer: HowTo Turn Off SharingOne of the (many) complaints that people had with the BBC iPlayer was that their processing power and bandwidth was being used even when they didn’t have the iPlayer application loaded.

While some of the more technically minded might have known that this would have been the case by default, the majority – and let’s not forget that this is a service aimed at the general public – had not clue about it.
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