April 2007 – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

XBox 360 HD DVD Drive Review (80%)

Xbox360 HD DVD Review (80%) Microsoft have actually made a sensible decision, an external HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 and it works.

With a recent software update the Xbox 360 was given HD support and suddenly 1080i and 1080p resolutions sprang to life (of course not all games support these new modes). Unfortunately the internal DVD is a bog standard DVD-ROM drive and it doesn’t support the new HD formats at all.

The external drive connects through one of the Xbox 360’s USB ports, it’s a shame there aren’t any rear sockets as the cable dangles out the front of the unit. Just plug it in, connect its power supply unit and install the software that comes with the unit and that’s it. It all just works. MS have been nice and included a DVD remote, though the normal game controllers work too.

Upscaled content
A nice feature is that the Xbox 360 will upscale content to whatever your output is set to (tested using 1080i), so a normal standard def DVD can be output at 1080i or 1080p. It works surprisingly well. There were very occasional artefacts or blocking – but it’s eminently viewable, even on a high action film (shame the film itself wasn’t). There are quite a few DVD players that offer some kind of upscaling feature, but it generally adds to the cost significantly.

Silence is golden
DO NOT EVER watch a film with quiet bits in it. The major downside to this set-up is that the Xbox 360 sounds like a train rumbling through your living room, it’s incredibly loud. As soon the the film quietens, there it is. You cant quite block it out.

Current Xbox 360’s also don’t support HDMI (the newly announced Elite will) so the best resolutions require component video and that means a separate audio output. The cable does have an optical out, but it doesn’t support newer digital modes like Dolby TruSurround.

Verdict
For around 130 quid, a bargain HD-DVD drive that upscales as well, but it’s bulky and noisy.

Features: 88%
Ease of Use: 90%
Value for Money: 97%

Overall Score: 81% (let down by Xbox 360 noise)

MySpace News Take On Google News and Digg

MySpace News To Rival Google News and Digg It is perfectly logical that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp that owns MySpace would use it to trial new features and services that will be of use across their vast empire of media companies.

To this end, MySpace will be launching MySpace News, expected to launch into Beta later today.

They will be scraping news site across the world and presenting them in the same way that Google News does so successfully.

Once the stories are presented to the MySpace users, they’ll be able vote on the quality and content of the stories, in much the same way as Digg users currently do.

So it looks like they’ve taken Google News and Digg and glued the two together.

We’re not sure if Rupe has this one right, as it’s widely known that the younger end of the population doesn’t really care that much about news.

Time will tell if they choose to spend their leisure time (as that’s what MySpace is) reading news stories and voting on them.

Myspace News (still currently private)

DeskStar 7K1000: Hitachi 1Tb Hard Drive Reviewed

DeskStar 7K1000: Hitachi 1Tb Hard Drive Reviewed There’s a common thought that Moore’s Law in relation to processing power has now become irrelevant, due to the now-attained high processing speeds. In it’s place is a form of Moore’s Law for storage and how important it’s rapid growth is.

In proof of this new Law, Hitachi have released the first 1Tb (1,000 Gb) hard drive named the DeskStar 7K1000. Tom’s Hardware have been running tests on the new drive and have recently reported on it.

There’s 9 pages of the review which reach the conclusion that in terms of the cost per gigabyte it’s not the best value hitting around £230 / €330, which clearly doesn’t compare well with £100 / €150 that 500Gb drives now give.

The reviewers, Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos, feel that having a single 1Gb drive will be easier to handle, but as a data drive rather than one to run the operating system from.

Their view is to hold on for a little while until other manufacturers get their 1Gb drives out, such as Seagate, which will come with a five year warranty, that is lacking in the Hitachi.

DeskStar 7K1000
Tom’s Hardware review

Miglia Introduce TV To The MAX

Miglia who are known for their TV dongles have introduced two updated models, TVMini Express and TVMax+ which are really the same as the TVMini and TVMAx but with new software.

Bye Bye Elgato EyeTV
The products used to ship with EyeTV but this has now been dropped in favour of their own software. Miglia say this is due to Elgato not supporting their real time encoding on the TVMax (i.e. EyeTV takes in a video feed, stores it and then converts it, while TVMax supports hardware encoding to a variety for formats).

Miglia Introduce TV To The MAX The new software works with all the Miglia decoders and offers similar functionality to EyeTV.

TVMini Express
This is a standard USB 2.0 DVB-T tuner, the software now bundled is known as “The Tube”. It can play and record Freeview channels and also works with the Apple Remote.

The price has been dropped to £39.95.

TVMax+
The box is around the same size as a Mac Mini or AppleTV and is in the same white and aluminium sides. It has a TV tuner (with aerial and cable connectors) but also video and s-video connections so it will work with a DVD or other video source.

It connects back to a Mac using USB 2.0.

Various video formats are supported including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX. Since compression is performed inside the box using hardware it will save to disk immediately in the right format without having to go through a software compression phase.

Miglia Introduce TV To The MAX The software also works directly with iTunes so stored video will appear on any connected AppleTVs.

Current price is £149.00.

H.264
This is the MPEG-4 variant that iPods and other devices use. Miglia are coming out with a USB 2.0 dongle that does hardware compression. This will work with Miglia software, but should also allow other developers to utilise it for their own software, so a DVD could be ripped and on-the-fly converted to H.264 for use on an iPod.

Unfortunately details on this are scarce as it hasn’t been released and only a prototype (in black rather than Miglia’s normal white) was seen.

Verdict
The TVMini has always been a useful DVB-T tuner, it needs a good signal and the supplied aerial isn’t much. The new software works but as it was only briefly demo’ed it’s hard to tell how well it compares to EyeTV. The price drop is welcome though.

The TVMax+ is a new product, again only briefly demo’ed but the new software will make a huge difference as it utilises the hardware compression in the TVMAx itself, cutting down the time it takes to make an iPod or AppleTV compatible video.

The H.264 hardware dongle will be very useful when released.

Wii Warm-up!

The London Times has a piece the drags up the now-old idea of the Wii being bad for you physically, with them highlighting “aching backs, sore shoulders and even “Wii elbow”.”

Wii Warm-up! We’ve recently been playing the Wii intensively for two weeks and did find that our right (playing) wrist aching, but that’s probably because we haven’t used it for much besides mousing-around for the last couple of years.

At the bottom of the ‘we’re out to bash the Wii’ piece, there’s something that we can’t work out if this is meant as a joke or not – a Wii Warm-up.

Here it is, just in case you’re concerned about your Wii-age.

Tim Hutchful, of the British Chiropractic Association, gives a guide to a pre Wii warm-up:

1 Shoulder shrug — slowly shrug your shoulders towards your ears. Hold for two to three seconds, then relax. Repeat three times. Because it is easier to relax a muscle after you have tightened it, you will relax the muscles in the shoulder and allow the blood to flow into the arms.

2 Wrist stretch — slowly stretch the wrist backwards, hold for two to three seconds, then slowly stretch it forwards and hold for two to three seconds. Repeat three times. This exercise prevents tightening of the wrists.

3 Make a fist — hold the arm at right angles from the elbow. Make a fist and tense it, and the whole of your arm. Hold for two to three seconds, then relax and let the arm flop to your side. Repeat three times. This will help the blood flow and tone the muscles.

4 Neck muscle stretch — try to make a double chin, to stretch the muscles at the base of the neck. Hold this position for two to three seconds and repeat three times. Always stretch very slowly.

5 Lower back loosen — standing with your feet a shoulder-width apart, slowly circle your hips five revolutions to the right and then five revolutions to your left.

Resident Evil x 2 on Wii: European Details

There have been mutterings for a while about the classic, long-running gore/terror-fest, Resident Evil, coming to the Nintendo Wii in Europe.

Resident Evil x 2 on Wii: European Details Official confirmation of the European release has this morning been announced – and it’s to arrive in two flavours.

The first, on 29 June, will be Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition, which is a “re-mastered version” of the game, utilising the all-new motion sensitive controls that make the Wii what it is.

Resident Evil 4 has already been on the GameCube, PlayStation2 and PC is confusingly the sixth instalment of the Resident Evil series.

Coming “later in the year” will be Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, which looks to us like it’s been designed to appeal to those who are long-in-the-tooth Resident Evil players.

It’s a brand new title for Wii that allows players to gain a greater insight than ever before into the back story behind the outbreak. Capcom, the developers of both titles, describe it as an “action/shooter hybrid,” which has locations from Resident Evil 0, 1, 2 and 3 as well as new never-before-seen locations, such as Umbrella’s stronghold. Woooo!

One enterprising site has even mocked up a version of how they think the Wii-mote might be used to play Resident Evil.

The Umbrella Chronicles has been designed to use gun controllers – shooting is a large part of Resident Evil after all. Those in the frame are the yet-to-be-released Wii Blaster gun and possibly the now-selling JoyTech Sharp Shooter.

Netvibes Universe Offers Personalised Web Portals

Netvibes Universe Offers Personalised Web Portals We’ve been feeling the love for the Netvibes aggregator for some time, and we look to be cuddling up a bit closer now that the company is letting users publish their home pages as personal Web portals – for free.

In case you haven’t already hooked up to this Web 2.0-tastic, AJAX-fuelled marvel, Netvibes is a customisable home page that lets you add and configure a personalised page to include live news feeds, Last.FM players, blog updates, weather reports, text, image and video search tools, email inboxes and a ton of other stuff.

The Paris-based company is now hoping to sock it to The Man by letting users publish their own standalone portals, and steal a march on the big Internet playaz like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

“The portal is dead. Long live the portal,” air-punched Tariq Krim, Netvibes’ founder and chief executive.

Netvibes Universe Offers Personalised Web Portals Mix’n’matching the webThe power of the Netvibes portal means that users can mix and match email accounts from the likes of Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, and add whatever content they fancy, regardless of the source.

The Web based interface is a marvel of modern web technology too, letting users drag and drop ‘modules’ around the page without any need to delve into the dark world of coding.

Netvibes Universe Offers Personalised Web Portals The new Netvibes Universe service lets users design their own homepage and slap it on the web in minutes via the Netvibes Ecosystem. These pages can be configured to include personalised feeds such as videos, photos, podcasts, news, e-mail and eBay auction notifications.

Netvibes has also signed up over 100 publishing partners, including pop stars and media companies like Time, USA Today, and the Washington Post, who will offer their own versions of Netvibes homepages.

Welcome to the world of Web 2.0
“Netvibes provides open access to the world of Web 2.0 content,” said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “Traditionally, you had to ask each company permission to do this on any Web site. Now you can read Gmail alongside Hotmail and Yahoo Mail,” she added.

Netvibes Universe Offers Personalised Web Portals Li reckoned that even folks working in Google and Yahoo felt that the big boys should give up trying to stop surfers from using competing products, as the shiny Internet of the Noughties means that services need to live side-by-side with competitors.

“With Web 2.0, no one can own the whole space. In the past, you wanted everyone to come to your site. Right now, you need to figure out how to distribute your content to the widest number of platforms,” said Netvibes’ Krim. “We try to be the glue between all these Web services,” he continued.

Netvibes Universe goes live next Monday.

CNet

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPA

With more and more mobile punters accessing the web to download music, watch video, browse the web or grab emails, Nokia are hoping to persuade some wallets to creak open for their new 6120 classic phone offering the faster HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) connectivity.

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPA Claimed to offer downloads “up to 10 times faster than over usual WCDMA networks,” the Nokia 6120 bigs up its multimedia credentials sporting two cameras. The first is a basic, low res affair slapped on the front for video calls, while the main camera serves up 2-megapixels worth of picture-grabbing, 4-times digital zoom, a built in flash and a panorama mode.

Powered by a Symbian Series 60 OS, the 6120 looks very similar to its slower 3G predecessor, the 6233, with all the gubbins enclosed in Nokia’s familiar candybar form factor and a bright QVGA-quality display with 16-million colours dominating the front.

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPA There’s Bluetooth on board for wireless streaming of stereo sounds, a built-in FM radio, support for MP3/AAC/MPEG4 tuneage and a micro SD card slot for slapping in some more memory capacity.

To help fumbling newbies and floundering technophobes, the 6120 comes with bundled How-To Guides and a Set-up Wizard for setting up email, messaging and Internet connection, with Data Transfer apps helping users shuffle all their contacts, calendars, photos, videos and files over from their old Nokia handset.

With the phone purring along on the S60 OS, there’s ample scope for users to download third party apps and customise the phone to their heart’s desire.

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPA Here’s Peter Ropke, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia to whip us into a frenzy of expectation for the phone, “With the HSDPA technology, S60 operating system and the wide range of features of the Nokia 6120 classic, consumers will be able to make their daily lives more manageable.”

The Nokia 6120 classic (no relation to the 6120 they released in the 1998!) should start shimmying on to shop shelves in the summer for around 260 Euros (around £175) SIM-free.

Nokia