2005

Nuvi: Garmin’s Mini Marvel Offers GPS, MP3 And Audio Book
Quickly earning a We Want One Now Please accolade, Garmin have announced the nüvi, a feature packed GPS travel assistant the size of a deck of playing cards.
Packed into its diminutive dimensions (3.87″ W x 2.91″ H x 0.87″ D, 5.1 ounces) is a portable GPS navigator, Audio Book Player, traveller’s reference, and MP3 player.
Songs can be loaded onto the SD card using drag-and-drop.
Sporting a 320 x 240 pixels (3.5″ diagonal) 64k TFT touch screen display, the nüvi’s built in GPS provides automatic routing, turn-by-turn voice directions, and finger-touchscreen control via a built in speakerphone.
For the easily bored traveller, the nüvi packs in an MP3 player, audio book player from Audible.com, JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, and calculator.
Garmin are claiming that the built-in lithium ion battery offers between 4-8 hours of battery life.
There’s also optional language and content support from software packages such as the Language Guide and Travel Guide.
The Language Guide
The Language Guide uses data provided by Oxford University Press and provides a multilingual word bank, phrase bank, and five bilingual dictionaries.
With the guide, travellers can look up and translate more than 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language with a text-to-speech interface letting users talka da lingo.
Travel Guide
The optional Garmin Travel Guide has a ton of travel information on tap including reviews and recommendations for restaurants and tourist attractions.
The information is integrated with nüvi’s GPS functionality, so that hungry drivers can be guided to the nearest eatery, with the nüvi’s text-to-speech functionality keeping eyes on the road.
The nüvi comes in two flavours:
nüvi 300
Sold exclusively in Europe, the nüvi 300 comes with approximately 200 MBs of internal memory for storage of supplemental maps, MP3s, and audio books (available from Audible.com). Pricing to be announced.
nüvi 350
This top of the range configuration contains full European mapping and is compatible with the GTM 10 FM TMC traffic receiver, making it easy to calculate new routes to avoid snarl ups.
The nüvi 350 comes with an A/C charger and provides around 700 MBs of internal memory for storage of supplemental maps, MP3s, and audio books.
Garmin have only announced domestic US pricing so far, with the North American versions (pre-loaded City Navigator NT maps of the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico) retailing for the rater precise amount of $969.22 (£555, €810).
Availability is expected sometime in November 2005.
Garmin
18 October, 2005
3 Rolls Out Its Festive UK Phone Collection
UK 3G network 3 have announced four new video mobiles to be released in time for the traditional Christmas trading bonanza.
The top-of-the-range handsets will be supplied by LG, Motorola and Nokia with a pretty pink handset for the laydees and sexuality-unchallenged geezers.
Here’s the full listing:
LG U880
The super-thin triband LG U880 will be offered in black, silver and pink with its clamshell design incorporating a 1.3 megapixel camera and expandable internal memory of 80 MB.
The main display supports 262k colours (65k for sub display) with the large 2.0″ colour screen offering a simple user interface.
There’s a built in speaker phone, Bluetooth support and Windows Media (audio and video) playback.
Nokia 6280
The first mass-market 3G Nokia handset to go on sale in the UK, the 6280 has a sliding keyboard and built-in 2 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom and integrated flash.
There’s a QVGA 262,144 colour display, video messaging, download video clips and Quickplay video streaming in widescreen
The quadband phone supports 3’s full range of communications and entertainment content and services.
Motorola RAZR V3x
A poseur’s delight, the Motorola RAZR V3x is the high-fashion phone for the “Look at me!” crowd, with its slinky, slim-line form supporting a full range of 3G services.
The 2.2″ main display supports 262k colours, and there’s a 1.0″ colour sub display for video calls.
The phone comes with a two megapixel camera on board, with the handset being available in cosmic blue and liquorice black.
Nokia N70
Destined to be 3’s first two megapixel phone when it becomes available at the end of October, the Nokia N70 is based on the hugely successful Nokia 6680 and offers video calling, integrated flash, a built-in FM tuner, Bluetooth and support for Visual Radio.
The 2 megapixel camera phone provides up to 20x digital ‘smooth’ zoom, viewable on a large 2.1″ 262k colour screen with the handset supporting video messaging, video clips downloads and Quickplay video streaming in widescreen.
The Quadband phone works in the USA, Europe and Asia and comes with Bluetooth.
Jones the Santa
Gareth Jones, COO, 3 UK put on his Santa hat and started the “Ho Ho Ho” stuff:
“3 understands the important part handsets play in the customer experience and with our Christmas range we’re offering the best video mobiles in the UK.
All of these handsets support 3’s full range of video mobile content and services. If you’re on 3 you can enjoy music, video, games, the internet and every kind of messaging, as well as great value voice tariffs, all on state of the art devices that look good and are easy to use. If you want the widest choice of high-quality video mobiles this Christmas, then 3 is the network to choose.”
3 UK
18 October, 2005
The Impact Of New Technologies On Digital Radio
“Transformation for survival isn’t a choice, but a must”. These were the words of Youngbum Choi, Director of Policy Making & External Relations at SBS, Korea’s only private nationwide terrestrial TV and Radio broadcaster, to members of a recent DTI Global Watch Mission to Korea and Singapore. This free seminar will report on the mission’s findings. The mission visited broadcasters, technology companies, trade bodies and regulators to understand latest developments in digital and traditional radio broadcasting and explore the potential for international commercial collaborations. London, UK http://www.td-soft.com/app1/lc.php?meeja&fut_radio_evnt
18 October, 2005
PIPEX Purchases Freedom 2 Surf
There still seems to be plenty of cash slopping around the broadband sector, as PIPEX has just waved its weighty wad in the direction of Freedom to Surf (F2S) and bought the company for £10m.
F2S is a major UK ADSL provider, boasting 40,000 broadband customers at the end of September 2005.
When added with PIPEX’s existing customers, the combined user base will make the company the 5th largest broadband DSL provider in the country
It’s uncertain whether existing Freedom2Surf customers already using LLU via the EasyNet LLUStream range will stay where they are or be shunted on to a PIPEX LLU product.
PIPEX had previously announced that it was currently unbundling 60 exchanges, and the acquisition of F2S will greatly increase customer density around exchanges already allocated for unbundling, thus improving return on their investment.
The 40,000 extra customers also makes the possibility of unbundling a further 40 exchanges more feasible.
Peter Dubens, Chairman of PIPEX, said: “In the light of our recent decision to unbundle an initial 60 exchanges, we are very pleased to add F2S to the PIPEX group, which will further increase the density of customers around each exchange, thus improving the return on capital and enabling us to offer higher speeds to a greater number of our customers. F2S’s customers will be able to benefit from our extensive network and the broad range of services we provide.”
Elsewhere, Wanadoo UK revealed yesterday that it has already unbundled 150 BT exchanges in five UK cities (Leeds, London, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham) and has plans for another 500 exchanges over the next 12 months.
PIPEX
18 October, 2005
SD750V, SD350V: Panasonic’s D-Snap MP3 Players Offer Amazing Battery Life
Panasonic has announced a new range of attractive music players with battery lives that make the Duracell bunny look like a fag-smoking sloth in lead boots.
The D-Snap range comes in two designs, each offering two configurations, the SD750V/ SD700V and SD350V/ SD300V (the principal difference being that the higher models offer FM radio and voice recording).
Both use SD carts, which Panasonic are really starting to push hard as we whitnessed at Ceatec in Tokyo, where they were all over their stand. The jury is out as to whether they’ve left is a little late to have it as an all conquering memory format. Sony have after all been pumping their MemoryStick format for ages.
The top of the range SD750V/ SD700V models boast a touch sliding panel, a 7 line LCD display and a battery life up to an amazing 105 hours.
The SD350V/ SD300V models come with a smaller display (5 lines), less fancy navigation buttons and a battery claiming up to 94 hours of SD audio playback.
The devices offer AAC/WMA/MP3 playback, with Panasonic’s Japanese Webpage describing the SD memory cards as ‘Music Sweets.’ Aw.
Seeing as our command of Japanese is on par with our Klingon-speaking abilities we had to rely on Google’s translation services and so can tell you that the players come in four colours, and you can choose “the color which the sea urchin you like, please enjoy.”
The site also bangs on about Panasonic’s “Double drive in side phone” which, apparently, has separate drivers for bass and treble raising, the, err, “shelter density”.
And raising shelters can only be a good thing in our book.
The SV-SD750V/700 measures up at 87.3x46x11mm and 48.4g, while the SV-SD350V/300 is marginally smaller at 87×40.5×10.3mm and 47.9g.
The players look set for a November Japan release, but we’ve no idea if or when a European or US release is scheduled.
Panasonic Japanese site
18 October, 2005
SPH-V7900: Samsung 3Gb Hard-Disk Phone Launched
Samsung Electronics have launched the hard-disk-based SPH-V7900 mobile phone, sporting a record-breaking built-in 3GB hard disk drive.
The announcement comes nearly a year after Samsung became the first mobile-phone maker on the planet to release a hard disk drive phone, with the SPH-V5400 going on sale in December, 2004.
The new SPH-V7900 offers twice the capacity of its predecessor, with its hefty 3GB capacity giving enough space for several hundred audio files or a few hours of video and, if you’re a popular kind of guy, up to 2,400 contact details.
The SPH-V7900 phone comes stuffed full of the latest techie widgets, sporting two cameras (one with 2-megapixel resolution), dual screens and twin speakers in a twist-flip housing.
The camera offers a 2x optical zoom and TV output socket, with the main TFT LCD screen boasting QVGA (240×320 pixels) resolution.
Naturally, there’s an MP3/video player onboard, capable of playing several formats including Mpeg4/H.264 video and Mpeg4 AAC, AAC+ and MP3 audio.
Pesky work-based activity is supported with an email client and a file viewer capable of viewing MS Office files, pdf format documents, text and jpeg images.
The whole caboodle measures up at 103x52x27.6mm, weighs 165g with Samsung claiming 4.5 hours of talk and 200 hours standby
Unfortunately, the SPH-V7900 will be a CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) model and only sold in South Korea, but the company are preparing a hard-drive-based smartphone for the European market.
Their SGH-I300 – scheduled for a European November release – will run on the Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system and also offer a 3GB hard disk drive offering plug-and-play support (so files can be dragged over from your home PC).
Not quite as excitingly specified as its Far Eastern cousin, the phone comes with a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, scroll wheel navigation, Bluetooth and a 240×320 pixels 262k LCD screen.
The tri-band GSM/GPRS (900/1800/1900MHz) phone will also offer MP3, WMA, AAC, and AAC+ audio support, with expansion through a TransFlash memory card slot.
Pricing hasn’t been announced.
Samsung
17 October, 2005
Italy Has Highest Number of Mobile Users in Europe
According to the latest figures from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Italy can now boast the highest mobile penetration rate in Europe, with mobile-mad Italians notching up 109.42 phones per 100 inhabitants.
The data comes from an ITU report scheduled for presentation next month but leaked by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera over the weekend.
The figures in the report reveal that, globally, only Hong Kong has a higherpenetration rate than Italy – 114.5% – but Italy wins in absolute terms with as many as 62.7 million mobile users.
With over four million UMTS users, Italians are also leading the way in 3G take up, with the ITU reporting that the country is the most prominent user of 3G services in Europe.
Globally, the country slips to twelfth place in terms of 3G penetration, out of 70 countries that have introduced services.
ITU’s Cristina Bueti elaborating on the criteria used for their data in the newspaper, explaining that the figures referred to the number of activated SIM cards in use, rather than the actual number of phones.
Several countries have also quibbled about the methods used, including Luxembourg who reckon that the Italy’s figures are inflated because many Italians use more than one SIM on the same mobile phone.
Mind you, it could be argued that Luxembourg’s high mobile ownership is equally skewed due to their nationals living in neighbouring countries needing a second handset for use within its borders.
In May this year, research firm Analysys predicted that overall mobile penetration in Western Europe would 100 per cent by 2007, with the UK reaching 101% last year.
ITU
17 October, 2005
W900: Sony 3G Walkman Phone Launches
Sony Ericsson has today announced the launch of their first 3G (UMTS) tri-band GPRS Walkman phone, the W900.
The new handset sports a thumping great 470MB of internal free memory space, providing room for between 120 and 240 songs in the main popular formats: MP3, AAC or AAC+, MIDI, WAV and XMF.
There’s also a Memory Stick PRO Duo slot onboard, allowing storage expansion up to 2GB – enough for up to 1,000 tracks
The phone comes stuffed with multimedia widgets, with a built-in FM radio and 2 megapixel auto-focus flash camera offering 8x digital zoom and the ability to record and playback video at a nippy 30fps.
As ever, Sony’s designers have done a great job of coming up with a desirable phone, with the fascia dominated by a large 2.2-inch, 240 x 320pixels 262k TFT display and a neat sliding keyboard offering access to a numeric keyboard.
In line with its Walkman branding, the phone has dedicated music controls, letting users scroll through play lists, artists or individual songs, and a bundled LCD remote control.
Music can be transferred to the device via cable and Bluetooth, with the handset supporting over-the-air music download services, letting users download tracks directly to the phone while on the move.
“In our first UMTS Walkman phone we have combined fast download speeds with superb sound quality and crystal clear 30 frames a second video recording and play-back in a really simple and easy to use device. The W900 will not only appeal as a music phone. The superb communications, multimedia and imaging functionality will appeal to all those wanting a true multi-media capable device,” said Sony.
The W900 UMTS Walkman phone will be commercially available in black or white finished by the end of Q4 2005 in two versions:
W900i – Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) – GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa
W900c – Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) – GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Mainland China.
Sony Ericsson
17 October, 2005
Frans Bauer DVD Debuts On Mobile Before Shops
Call us cynical if you like, but when we get a press announcement trumpeting some kind of ‘world first’ or another from someone we’ve never heard of, our eyebrows tend to arc skywards.
So when we heard that “popular singer” Frans Bauer was slapping up a mobile version of the (ahem) “most breathtaking scenes” from his DVD and making Norris McWhirter troubling noises, a mass outbreak of chin-stroking followed.
Despite being boldly hailed as the “first time that scenes from an as of yet unreleased music DVD will make their debut on a mobile phone,” there were unimpressed noises emanating around Chez Digital-Lifestyles as we suspected the over-eager hand of a hyperbolic publicist at play here.
It is significant that content is breaking on mobiles before it’s in the shops and we’ve no doubt that mobiles will continue to play a greater part in the distribution of music and video, but we can’t really get excited about someone (even if they have got dazzling teeth) releasing a few snippets of a DVD for mobiles and then expecting the Guinness Book of Records to be calling them up.
After all, all they’ve really done is just make the equivalent of a film trailer available a few days before the full release. Big bloomin’ deal.
In fact, we’re so unimpressed that we can’t even be bothered to give you the name of the video, but you can find it somewhere on Vodafone’s Dutch Live TV website, or just click around chirpy Frans’ website.
Whose the winner from this? Well, top marks to the music company who we suspect will be getting a slice of cash from Vodafone NL, as well as getting them to promote the artiste with all of the PR power they can muster, giving tons of free promotion to the new release of a DVD that many of us wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.
The fans of Frans ‘The Teeth’ Bauer will probably also be falling off their Zimmer frames in excitement. There’s no doubt that Frans will be flashing a smile too, but he probably can’t help that.
But this transparent marketing exercise does reflect the growing importance of the mobile music market – and with sales of mobile music surpassing CD single sales this year in terms of volume, we can no doubt expect to be troubled with more attention-seeking press releases.
Vodafone.nl
Frans Bauer
17 October, 2005
Speedy Macs; iMac G5; End Of Internet – Teenage Tech News Review
Did someone say fast?
This week’s update is an Apple-feast… Apple sent out a media invitation a few days ago, titled “One More Thing…”. This phrase has often been used in the past by Steve Jobs to introduce new hardware. So I sat and waited with bated breath, or, well, I was excited anyway.
Sadly, the 4-processor Powermac that I had spotted on French site, www.hardmac.com, didn’t materialise, but I didn’t really expect it to until late next year. The specs on the Powermac I spotted there did never the less impress me a lot: Overall, more than 11Ghz of processing power in one box. Would probably also heat most of the house, but that’s beside the point.
I’d love one of these, as it would surely mean the little waits I have now opening Photoshop and other professional applications would finally vanish and it would simply cool. I do however doubt I will EVER be able to afford one.
Couch Potatoes Rejoice
Some of the hardware that was actually released includes the new iMac G5. The difference this has from earlier models? It is equipped with a built-in iSight, basically a webcam. I have played around with an iSight before, and the performance and image-quality is far above what I have experienced with other web cams.
The other difference between this model and the last is that this includes a handy technology called Frontrow which is basically a remote control. This places the new iMac as a serious competitor to Windows Media Centre, something that our friends at Microsoft will be worried.
In my opinion, any industry that has more than one competitor in it will always have more innovation than a monopoly, because companies are actually forced to compete. I hope that this will bring some exciting new ideas into the fairly stagnant home entertainment computer market.
Internet? Break? Yeah right…
Yes, it’s that time of the week again: The usual doomsday announcements this week included an announcement from the EU that the Internet could fall apart next month. If this is serious, I am going to have to find some other way of life…
The trouble nowadays is, that there’s so many people saying the world’s going to end and that civilisation will collapse, when it never does, that no-one takes anything that will change their entire lives seriously, and until something life-changing actually happens, nobody will.
14 October, 2005