Author: Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?

Skype Planning VoIP to Plain Old Telephone Service

Skype, an application that allows users to make free VoIP calls using broadband connections is planning to introduce a new product for calling land line and mobile phones. Called SkypeOut, the service lets subscribers make cheap calls to people with “real” phones in 20 countries.

Skype’s global rate for these calls ranges from about €0.05 to €1, depending on how pitiful the bandwidth is into the country you’re calling.

The service is backed with a new version of Skype which has an on screen keypad for dialling destination numbers.

Skype

It Had to Happen: First Mobile Phone Worm in the Wild. A Lucrative New Market is Born.

A worm for Symbian phones that spreads via Bluetooth has been discovered by Kaspersky Labs, raising substantial concerns in the mobile industry. Cabir, as this specimen has been called, has no payload and is technologically very simple, but spreads through initiating a Bluetooth connection with another phone.

This doesn’t mean that you could infect your Series 60-based mobile with a virus or worm just by walking within 30 meters of an infected handset – you would have to accept delivery of the file. Although this seems like a fairly conclusive reason why a Bluetooth virus would find it difficult to spread, the rapid spread of worms throughout the internet does demonstrate that some people are daft enough to open any sort of attachment and instal it on their PCs etc.

A group of virus writers called 29a are suspected of releasing the worm, with their previous “hit” being the Rugrat virus. 29A don’t write malicious worms, preferring to prove the concept.

Anti-virus software manufacturers must love guys like 29a. No doubt in the near future you can look forward to downloading antivirus software to your mobile, from your usual ringtones and wallpaper provider – I’d better get working on that “Mobile Phone Anti-Virus Software Market Now Worth US$1 Billion” headline.

Kaspersky

Samsung’s Digital Multimedia Chip for Mobiles

Samsung have developed a low-power chip for processing terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) on mobile phones. The new chip will allow content providers to customise content such as high quality digital terrestrial television for on-demand viewing on mobiles.

The chip consumes 40% less power than their previous design attempts, making it suitable for inclusion in 3G phones.

To showcase the technology, Samsung are teaming up with SK Telecom to offer satellite-based DMB by the end of the year.

Samsung’s Press Centre

European iTunes Launches – UK79p or €0.99

Apple’s much-awaited iTunes store has launched in Europe, and is setting a new price for music.

Offering 700,000 songs for UK79p and €0.99, the price point is considerably less than Napster UK, who last month claimed to us that wholesale prices where the cause behind their UK£1.09 (€1.62) basic price. Most iTunes albums will cost UK£7.99 (€12). However, iTunes UK is rather more than its US equivalent, famous for its US99c price for single tracks.

Also, note that UK79p is actually €1.19 by today’s exchange rate, so UK music buyers are getting fleeced yet again.

iTunes has one of the best set of consumer rights behind any music site, allowing users to play a track on up to five different devices along with unlimited CD burning.

Due to massive interest, the iTunes store is being a little unresponsive at the moment – we’ll be logging in later and taking it for a proper test spin.

AOL chose today to announce that they have formed a partnership with Apple to integrate iTunes into their product. The main advantage for AOL will be single-click registration, with free downloads promotions and iPod competitions.

Apple Launches iTunes

Record Your Day With SenseCam

There is a certain someone here at Digital Lifestyles who records everything – and I mean everything. He even records conversations with me. Whether or not he listens to them afterwards is a different matter, but he archives everything. When I saw the SenseCam this morning, it was clear that it’s his Ultimate Gadget.

With an accelerometer, passive IR detectors, light sensors and thermometer and wide angle-lensed camera, the SenseCam isn’t next year’s mobile phone, it’ a wearable device to help people with memory problems or assist obsessives in blogging their entire day.

The SenseCam has been developed by Microsoft Research Labs in the UK, and will be trialled at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.

The device captures 2000 images a day onto its 128mb Flash memory, and all sensor data can be fed to a system like Microsoft’s other archiving project, MyLifeBits.

MyLifeBits can then organise the data so you can go over the days events, or perhaps work out how you got into that lap dancing bar in the first place.

Future plans for the SenseCam may include heart rate monitoring or other physiological metrics – and no doubt there will be some military applications along shortly.

SenseCam

MyLifeBits

OD2 Launch Pay Per Play Jukebox Sonic Selector

OD2 think that streaming music to PCs, rather than downloading tracks, is the way forward: “Most of the music our users listen to on their PCs will be streamed,” Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of the company said.

Consequently, OD2 have launched their Sonic Selector service – allowing customers in France, Germany, Italy and the UK to stream any track from the company’s 350,000 track catalogue. As the streams are Windows Media encoded, you’ll need you’ll need Version 9 of Microsoft’s player.

OD2 already offered a similar feature on their download sites such as the shudder-inducing MyCokeMusic, where users can stream some tracks for one of their credits, as opposed to buying the track for 99 credits. Napster also offer a streaming service, but only with their UK£9.99 (€15) subscription.

OD2 evidently hope that a pay-as-you-go system will entice more users to buy music in a market where increased competition every day means that punters are less willing to lock themselves into a particular vendor with a subscription: “The pay-as-you-go system also allows the users to spend as little or as much as they wish each month, without the burden of a fixed rate subscription” commented Grimsdale.

Sonic Selector is in fact a proprietary plug in for Windows Media Player, created by OD2, but is a little more interesting that just a streaming gadget. Every day, the Sonic Selector team pick through new releases, chart hits and exclusives to offer their recommended picks, with featured artists in key genres. If you really like a track, then you can buy it and keep it.

Sonic Selector marks another small shift to consumers not owning music, instead paying for each play – it’ll be interesting to see how iTunes reacts to this at launch.

Sonic Selector

UK Digital Radio Market Set to Double by 2005

The Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) has claimed that the UK’s £45 million (€67.75 million) market is going to double by the end of the year.

There are currently 547,000 digital radios in use in the UK, and this is hoped to expand to 1 million by 2005.

Why the sudden jump? One theory is that personal stereos and portable music systems equipped with digital radios are about to hit the market, rapidly increasing the installed base. As the cost of integrating a digital tuner into consumer electronics declines, many more audio devices that featured analogue only tuners will get digital ones by default.

The DRDB is a trade body funded and supported by the BB and commercial radio operators, with a remit to ensure the swift adoption of digital radio in the UK, so you can imagine that they’re pleased at this proposed sudden spike in uptake.

The Digital Radio Development Bureau

Napster and NTL’s Broadband Partnership

Napster UK and NTL have completed a deal to bundle the new music store with NTL’s Broadband Plus package. This will bring Napster a potential one million more customers, and will also include a 30 free trial subscription to the store.

NTL’s Broadband Plus package starts at UK£3.99 (€6), or UK£9.95 (€15) including a Napster subscription.

“This is a significant deal for Napster because we are partnering with the biggest provider of broadband services in the UK, and ntl’s own research has shown that over 75% of broadband customers download music each month,” said Brad Duea, president of Napster.

Napster’s catalogue now stands at over 750,000 tracks, making it the largest music store in the market at the moment.

Napster UK

Nokia’s Five New Phones

Nokia have been accused of some rather dull designs over the past year, whilst Sony Ericsson and Motorola have pushed ahead with fashionable handsets packed with smartphone features.

To combat this, Nokia have just unveiled their new range – five handsets, three of which are clamshell designs. Nokia have steered clear of the clamshell phone format up until now, whilst other manufacturers have embraced it and made it popular. Nokia’s dull phone portfolio may have earned it that drop in market share reported by Gartner: down to 28.9% in Q1 2004, from 34.6% in Q1 2003.

“We have now sharpened our product portfolio in key areas, bringing new phones to the market in the mid-range, and adding more clamshells to our offering,” said Nokia chief executive officer Jorma Ollila.

The three main phones are aimed at business and leisure users, with a further two “affordable”, entry-level models with less features. Having said that, “less features” still manages to include colour displays and some rather nice styling.

The first of the main phones is the 6630, a smartphone based on the Series 60 operating system, and is the first dual-mode tri-band phone for 3G networks. Nokia also claim that it’s the World’s smallest 3G phone. Somehow, they’ve managed to get a megapixel camera and an MP3 player in there too.

For business customers, the 6260 incorporates push to talk technology and a VGA camera into its fold design. Nokia describe it thus: “it is more than just a clamshell, it’s a fold with a twist!” Just stick to designing phones, guys.

The 6170 is another clamshell camera phone, in stainless steel no less, with push to talk and the usual five hundred or so features.

These phones are all interesting because it looks like Nokia are finally starting to listen to the criticism they’ve faced over the last 18 months and are innovating – also what is now classed as an entry-level phone has a level of sophistication unthinkable just two years ago. After network providers accused phone manufacturers of not having suitable handsets available, 3G phones are finally moving into the mass-market.

For my money, Nokia’s new keyboard gadget is a winner. Remember those chat boards that were popular a few years ago for keying in text messages on your mobile? Nokia have a Bluetooth wireless keyboard for all that now, and it even folds up. When GPRS means that email is on the move is much more usable these days, this keyboard will save lots of fingers and eyesight. Just as well, considering how tiny the phones are now.

Nokia’s new phones

Bluetooth keyboard