Mike Slocombe

DSC-T9 Cyber-shot Announced By Sony
Sony continues to build on the success of its ultra-slim DSC-T digital still camera range with the release of the six megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-T9 model.
Following in the footsteps of the T3, T5 and T7 models, Sony’s new mini-snapper manages to add optical image stabilisation and high light sensitivity, with the company claiming pictures with “significantly less blur and graininess than typical point-and-shoot cameras.”
The camera shoehorns a smarty-pants lens-shift optical image stabiliser that does it stuff courtesy of two gyro-sensors which detect hand movement and automatically calculate the necessary compensation for a crisp image.
The increased high light sensitivity (64 up to IS0 640) allows punters to grab flash-free, atmospheric shots in low light, although we’ve yet to see how effective Sony have been in keeping the inevitable noise down at high ISO ratings.
“Our T Series set the standard for slim, stylish, point-and-shoot cameras with fine image quality,” said James Neal, director of digital imaging products at Sony Electronics.
“Now the use of this category of cameras is pervasive. With the DSC-T9, we are taking this category a step further by incorporating advanced imaging technologies that ensure that you get the shot, even in unfavourable light conditions, like nightclubs and restaurants,” he added.
As with previous DSC-T models, there’s a whopping great 2.5-inch 230k LCD dominating the rear of the camera, with four playback ‘themes’ letting users display their photos with dynamic transitions shuffling along to user-selected music clips.
The Lilliputian shooter comes with a 3x (38-114mm ) Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar folded-path optical zoom so there’s no whirring lens thrusting out of the camera on start up.
The DSC-T9 offers shutter speeds from 30 to 1/1000 second, Multi-pattern, Centre-weighted, or Spot metering, five white balance presets and 10 scene modes.
There’s also VGA (30 fps) MPEG movie recording onboard, with 58 MB of internal memory and a slot for an optional Memory Stick Duo or Memory Stick PRO Duo media card.
Turning the camera on and off is a matter of sliding the camera lens cover, with Sony claiming a battery life of up to 240 shots per charge – an improvement on the fairly dire performance of its predecessor.
The Cyber-shot DSC-T9 camera will be available in January for about $450 (~£254~€374) online at SonyStyle.com
Sony T9
1 November, 2005
iPod Shifts One Million Videos
The video-capable iPod has only been out three weeks, but already Apple are claiming sales of over a million video downloads from their iTunes online service.
Topping the download charts were music videos from the likes of Michael Jackson, Fatboy Slim and Kanye West, while episodes of ABC television shows “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” proved popular with customers.
Other music content available includes music videos from pop dinosaurs like Madonna, U2, Eurythmics, Coldplay and Kanye West (be still our beating heart), with animated shorts provided by the Oscar-winning Pixar, creator of animated hits like The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.
The video content, priced at $1.99 (~£1.12~€1.65) each, can also be played on computers running iTunes software.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s head honcho, observed that the healthy sales strongly suggested there was a market for legal video downloads.
“Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings, so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods,” he said in a statement.
Not surprisingly, not everyone was keen to shell out for their video fixes, with enthusiasts quick to start sharing and distributing their own music clips and TV programs for the video iPod via peer-to-peer networks.
Robin Simpson, a research director at Gartner, observed that although some illegal copying and downloading would inevitably occur, Apple had provided video customers with a realistically priced model.
“Most people are prepared to be honest if it is not too expensive to do so,” he added.
The cash till-ringing sales underlines dispels concern that people wouldn’t want to watch programs on the iPod’s titchy 2.5-inch colour screen and reflects the growing market acceptance of portable video.
The market was quick to react to Apple’s announcement, with share prices climbing by more than 5% in Monday trading.
iTunes Videos
1 November, 2005
Sky Sniffs Around Homechoice
The wires are hot with rumours that BSkyB is contemplating a bout of wad waving in the direction of the video-on-demand, broadband and telephone company Homechoice, which is reportedly finding things tres tricky in the increasingly competitive TV broadband market.
Homechoice’s parent company, Video Networks, managed to notch up hefty losses of £46.5m in 2004 – £1.5m worse than the year before – and faces an uncertain future of fearsome competition from the likes of Sky, the recently merged NTL/Telewest and BT.
Compared with Sky and NTL/Telewest’s subscription figures (7.8 m and 5.5m respectively), Homechoice’s last reported numbers of just 15,000 subscribers suggest that they could provide a tasty minnow for a major operator like Sky.
Homechoice currently provides a broadband Internet and telephone service, with on-demand programmes covering comedy, drama, music soaps, pay-per-view movies and home shopping.
Although Homechoice recently doubled the amount of homes that could receive their service to a more respectable 2.5m, there’s no guarantee that subscriber numbers will reach anywhere near that amount.
We got on the blower to Homechoice and were, not surprisingly, given the official line that, “There are no current plans to sell the business.”
City analysts, however, suspect that Sky could snap up the company as part of its plans for video-on-demand and broadband.
Homechoice
1 November, 2005
LaCie Carte Orange Credit-Card Sized 8GB USB Storage Card
Travelling photographers and road warriors should love the new credit-card sized USB key from LaCie, offering a massive storage capacity of either 4Gb (4,000Mb) or 8Gb (8,000Mb).
Bedecked in a dazzling orange finish, the LaCie Carte Orange comes in a sturdy metal design and provides a ton of pocketable storage in a tiny form factor, measuring just 55x85x6mm and weighing less than 60g – far thinner than most traditional 1GB or 2GB USB keys
Powered by an integrated USB connector, The LaCie Carte Orange (who dreams up these daft names?!) can be plugged into any USB-equipped computer, with the design incorporating a flexible connector which retracts for safe transportation.
The shirt-pocket untroubling device can be used on both Macs (OS 9.x/10.x) and PCs (Windows 98SE through XP), with no additional software or drivers needed, although the credit-card sized storage device also ships with LaCie Silverlining and SilverKeeper drive management and backup utilities.
Being a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 storage device, the Carte Orange offers an interface transfer rate of up to 480Mbit/s, making it an ideal solution for exchanging or backing up thousands of office files, and storing a party pack of music, videos, photos and slideshows.
“Mobility, reliability, ease of use, capacity and price are the five main keys to consider when buying storage. We meet them all with the Carte Orange,” table-thumped Olivier Mirloup, LaCie Senior Product Manager.
“With 4GB at $99 and 8GB at $149, LaCie Carte Orange is certainly the ideal USB key for a variety of uses,” he insisted while trying to avert its horrible garish finish.
The USB key is expected to ship in mid-November with the 4GB version retailing for $99.99 (~£56, ~€82) and the 8GB daddy knocking out for $149 (~£84, ~€123).
LaCie
1 November, 2005
Sky Mobile TV Launched By Vodafone UK and BSkyB
Vodafone UK and British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) have announced an agreement to launch Sky Mobile TV, the UK’s first commercially available mobile TV service available on a wide range of handsets, as we first covered back in September.
The service will be exclusively available to 3G Vodafone live! customers and serve up a total of nineteen mobile channels including Sky News, Sky Sports News, MTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Sky One and Living tv.
The deal looks set to turbo-boost adoption of entertainment and information services to mobile phones, with users able to enjoy TV programmes on the move with access to live breaking news and sports reports from Sky News and Sky Sports News.
Available to 3G customers with suitable coverage, some programming will be broadcast ‘as live’ with others delivered as dedicated ‘made for mobile’ channels, featuring regularly updated blocks of programming.
In an attempt to lure in more customers, a special Sky Sports Mobile channel will offer ball-by-ball coverage of all three Test matches and five One-Day Internationals from England cricket team’s tour to Pakistan. But, sadly, no coverage of Cardiff City games.
The Sky Mobile TV pack will be provided free of charge (subject to Vodafone customer fair usage policy) until the end of January 2006, with customers being charged £5.00 (~$8.90, €7.38) per month for each of the Sky Mobile TV packs subscribed to thereafter,
The two Sky Mobile TV packs are:
News, Sport & Factual: Sky News; CNN; Bloomberg; Sky Sports News; At The Races; Discovery Factual; National Geographic Channel; History Channel.
Entertainment & Music: Sky One; Sky Movies; MTV (two channels*); Living tv;Discovery Lifestyle; Nickelodeon; Paramount Comedy**; Cartoon Network; Bravo; Biography Channel.
Additional mobile channels are likely to sign up to the Sky Mobile TV service over the coming months.
“This is a highly significant day for both the mobile and televisionindustries,” trumpeted Tim Yates, Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone UK.
“We currently have over 250,000 3G subscribers in the country and 72% 3G population coverage across the UK. Mobile TV will be a mainstream service,” he insisted.
Vodafone
Sky
31 October, 2005
SGH-i300 Handset From Samsung Integrates With BMW 5-Series
There’s been an orgy of synergistic back-scratching and brand backslapping going on in Samsung’s schmoozing department as the company announces an alliance with German luxury car brand, BMW.
As part of their strategy to achieve an “iconic image” for the brand, the Korean electronics giants said that it will be placing its SGH-i300 music phone into BMW’s series 5 models.
The SGH-I300 – scheduled for a European November release – runs on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system and comes with a capacious 3GB hard disk drive.
BMW drivers will be able to link the phone to the iDrive control interface, which features a control knob at the centre of the vehicle’s console, allowing access to various functions displayed on the in-dash monitor.
We’re not sure yet if the iDrive will just control the SGH-i300 MP3 playback or if it will also integrate communication functions too.
Back in September, we reported that Bang and Olufsen were joining up with Samsung to make a posh phone for folks with more money than sense with the resulting – and somewhat bonkers – ‘Samsung Serene’ phone expected sometime during Q4 2005.
Samsung have already been poking their dipstick into the field of mobile-to-car technology, announcing a partnership with Audi back in July.
The two companies teamed up supply a system that let users to beam MP3 tunes on their mobile handsets over the car’s stereo system using an adapted Bluetooth stereo technology called Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP).
Samsung
31 October, 2005
Telefonica To Buy O2 for £17.7 billion
Telefonica SA, Spain’s número uno telecoms company, has agreed to shell out a massive £17.7 billion ($31.5 bn, €21.15bn) for U.K. mobile-phone operator O2, making it the largest acquisition in the European telecommunications industry for half a decade.
As the world’s fifth-largest telecoms firm by market value, Telefonica’s deep, deep pockets enabled them to offer 200 pence per share in cash (a 22 percent premium to O2’s closing share price on Friday) sending the company’s shares soaring 24 percent to 203-1/4 pence by 1017 a.m today.
With the acquisition of O2, Telefonica will scoop up 25 million customers from the U.K., Germany and Ireland – bringing their total count to around 170 million – and allow the company to break into the fiercely-competitive European market.
Management execs at the two European telecommunications operators were positively purring at news of the deal.
“This transaction brings together two companies which are growing strongly with highly complementary geographical activities,” commented Peter Erskine, chief executive of O2.
Telefonica Chairman Cesar Alierta added, “O2’s integration in the Telefonica group will enhance our growth profile, it will allow us to gain economies of scale, it will open the group to two of the largest European markets with a sizeable critical mass and it will balance our exposure across business and regions.”
O2 was spun off from the BT Group in November 2001 and currently employs 5,000 people.
Starting off with a stock market value of 6.3 billion pounds, the company has reported a profit for the last two years.
Earlier this year Dutch telecommunications operator KPN and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom were sniffing about the company with an eye to a possible purchase, but no deal was forthcoming,
Telefonica
O2
31 October, 2005
MDR-EX71SL Sony Fontopia In-Ear Headphones: Review
It’s almost always worthwhile upgrading the cheapskate headphones that invariably come bundled with MP3 players and phones – especially if you’re currently strutting around with a pair of ‘Mug Me Now!’ Apple iPod ‘phones.
Sony has acquired a fine reputation for their consumer headphones and we looked forward to testing the Fontopia MDR-EX71SL in-ear headphones.
Sony have cottoned on to the fact that a lot of people won’t want half a mile of excess cord flapping around, so have fitted the headphones with a short lead, ideal for plugging into lanyard remote controls.
If you need a longer lead, you can simply attach the extension cord to extend the cable to 1m.
The closed-type Fontopia design is powered by super-small 9 mm drivers kitted out in Spinal Tap black with go-faster silver accents (they’re also available in Mac-like white, but that’s just asking for trouble).
Looking and feeling disturbingly medical, the headphones come with three sets of attachable soft silicon earbuds in small, medium and large sizes.
These floppy bits of thin, rubber-like material fit on the headphones to provide a tight seal around your ears.
We have to say that fitting them felt a little strange, but once our ears were suitably isolated, we tried the Sony Fontopias through a variety of sources; an MP3 player, PDA smartphone and high end hi-fi system.
Playing back a selection of tunes on the MP3 player, we immediately noticed a huge improvement in the sound quality, with a deep, smooth bass making itself felt with vocals being rendered more crisply.
The same improvement was heard on the smartphone, but the hi-fi system merely served to highlight the limitations of the ‘phones – not unreasonable considering the $32 (~£18 ~€26) price tag.
Suitably impressed with our tests, we decided to take the headphones with us on a business trip and here’s where the problems began.
With the silicon earbuds forming a super tight seal around your lug holes, everything starts to sound a bit weird and distant when you’re walking the streets.
Your own footsteps resonate through your head like you’re King Kong going for a walk in diver’s boots and if you hum along to a tune it sounds like there’s several hives’ worth of bees joining in.
It was really, really unnerving and, frankly, rather unpleasant and we wished we’d stuck with our original ‘phones.
However, once on a train, the Fontopias came into their own, doing a wonderful job of delivering high quality sounds while almost silencing the screaming kid and Cock-er-nee Geeza shouting into his mobile opposite.
So we’ve got mixed feelings about these headphones: if you don’t mind sounding like a leaden leviathan going for a stroll, then the Fontopias represent great value, with their sonic quality improving vastly on headphones bundled with popular MP3 players.
We loved relaxing in splendid sonic isolation on the train, but as soon as hit the city streets we couldn’t bear the disorientating feelings we got from the Fontopias.
As a result, we strongly recommend trying these ‘phones out before buying.
Sound quality 4/5
Build Quality 4/5
Overall 4/5 (on the train) 1/5 on the streets
Specs:
Frequency Response: 6 – 23,000 Hz
Headphone Output: Power handling capacity: 100mW
Impedance: 16 ohms at 1 kHz
Cord: OFC; Neck Chain, 4 feet (1.2m)
Magnet: 400-kj/m3 a Ultra-High-Power Neodymium Magnet
Diaphragm: PET, long-throw
Driver Unit: 9mm diameter
Other: Lateral, In-the-ear, Closed, Dynamic
Plug: Gold-plated, L-Shaped, Stereo Mini Plug
Sensitivity: 100 dB/mW
Weight: 0.1 oz. (4g), without cord
Sony
28 October, 2005
All Your Google Base Are Belong To Us
All Your Google Base Are Belong To Us – headline explained
The web wires are waxing wildly with rumours about Google Base, a hush-hush Google project that “accidentally” appeared on the Web for a few hours yesterday.
The “inadvertent” (yeah, right) unveiling of base.google.com sent bloggers into a screengrabbing frenzy, prompting the search engine giant to confirm that the fleeting snapshot was indeed a legitimate Google page.
Under pressure from bloggers, Google company product manager, Tom Oliveri, revealed a little in his blog:
“You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we’re testing, and speculating about our plans. Here’s what’s really going on.
We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps.
We think it’s an exciting product, and we’ll let you know when there’s more news.”
The screenshots revealed an entry page where Google suggests the type of information to submit to Base, with one sharp eyed Dutch blogger Wouter Schut, saying that the test pages also included presets for housing, products, reviews, services, travel, vehicles and want ads.
A Google Base screengrab posted on flickr revealed the following text:
“Post your items on Google.
Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types ofcontent. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.
Examples of items you can find in Google Base:
• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures
You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will helppeople find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on therelevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.”
Naturally, the speculation-o-meter has been in overdrive ever since, with many believing it to be the start of a foray into the online classified field, with Google placing popular services like eBay and Craigslist directly in their sights.
This service would let individual punters submit classified adverts for free on Google Base and could possibly signal the imminent arrival of the much rumoured Google Payment (aka Google Wallet) product.
Rumours have spun up to tornado force by a recent Classified Intelligence report which claimed that Google had been discretely asking job boards and other classifieds providers to submit feeds of their listings.
And while we’re speculating with such wild abandon, we can’t help thinking that if Google Base does indeed materialise, Google could offer sellers a GoogleTalk button for their listings and offer similar functionality to the much-anticipated SkypeMe buttons on eBay listings…
Google Base
27 October, 2005
Wharfedale DV832B Review: Digital TV Box
After several years of battling with the clunky interface and weird quirks of our museum-ready OnDigital digital terrestrial television box, we decided it was time to replace it with something a little more contemporary.
With digital broadcast delivery technology moving so fast, we weren’t minded to shell out too much for something that may be rendered obsolete by some funky new feature in a few years, so we went looking for a cheap’n’cheerful option.
A quick visit to box-shifting supremos Argos saw our eyes fixing on an ideal candidate: the Wharfedale DV832B digibox.
Sure, it’s not much to look at and the plastic case – with its cheap, old-school red LCDs – is unlikely to woo the neighbours, but the feature list was far more than what we expected at the price level.
For the princely sum of just £35 (~$62, €52), the Wharfedale offers a digi box with a 7 day electronic programme guide (EPG), digital text, digital interactive services, DVB subtitles, auto scan and setup and 2 SCART sockets.
Suitably impressed, we shelled out the readies and plugged the unit into our home entertainment system.
Once powered up, the unit asks if we want it to automatically scan for stations and after saying “Yes please Mr DigiBox”, we were presented with a long list of available digital TV and radio stations.
Onscreen menus
As with most digital boxes, you need the remote control to access the key functions with the front of the unit only offering controls for on/off and program up/down.
The onscreen interface was simple, crisply designed and easy to navigate, and proved fairly intuitive in operation.
Using the onscreen menus we were given options to delete channels, rename channels, select favourites, set up to five timers, add a parental lock, choose TV type and set up Over-Air software downloads.
Within minutes of getting the DV832B out if its box, we were skipping channels with glee, pausing momentarily to wonder who on earth watches those dire Bid TV programs.
Picture quality
Picture quality was good with no nasty outbreaks of the jaggies to be seen (although we do live within eyeshot of the Crystal Palace transmitter so we can’t say how it might perform in areas with weaker coverage), and we found the overall performance to be perfectly satisfactory.
The slimline silver unit (4.8 x 30 x 20.6cm) comes with a simple and straightforward 24-page manual, a SCART lead and a run-of-the-mill remote control (there’s no Top Up TV compatibility on board, but we’re not complaining at this price!).
Our conclusion
The Wharfedale DV832B provides outstanding value for money, is a thoroughly capable performer and we have no hesitation in giving it five stars.
27 October, 2005