Mike Slocombe

Fox Uses Smartphone To Transmit Live TV News
It wasn’t quite ‘citizen journalism,’ but a Fox News cameraman first on the scene of last week’s small plane crash into a New York Upper East Side apartment building managed to stream live footage to his TV network using a standard Windows Treo smartphone.
Scott Wilder was just twenty blocks away when news of the crash broke, so he hot-footed it to the scene, whipped out his phone and was able to report live from the scene using a hand-held Palm Treo smartphone.
The Palm Treo 700w-series mobile was fitted with special software made by CometVision, which lets users transmit video over non-3G networks, using a custom codec that uses much less bandwidth than would normally be required.
The software was set up to automatically connect to a computer at the Fox News studio with one button, and then send an e-mail to notify network producers about the live stream.
Not surprisingly, the live picture quality won’t be kick-starting a bumper blow-out of Fox’s broadcast cameras on eBay quite yet, but it’s a great example of how mobile technology is making newsgathering faster and open to more people.
Thanks to his phone, the Fox News cameraman was able to send streamed live updates from the scene long before rival networks were able to rock up with their snazzy satellite trucks, and opens up possibilities for more advanced citizen journalism in the future.
Comet Video Technologies
[From: Reuters/Hollywood Reporter]
16 October, 2006
Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge Winners Announced
Nokia has announced the winning entries in the Forum Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge global developer competition, dishing out a cool €100,000 in prizes to winning mobile applications developers.
Co-sponsored by Forum Nokia and software monoliths Adobe, the winners in four categories were selected from 117 entries after a 10-month selection process.
The categories were enterprise, music, Macromedia Flash Lite and location-aware applications, with each winner pocketing a €25,000 top prize and a one-year free membership in Forum Nokia PRO developer support program, which is apparently worth €4,000.
Selected by a jury made up of Macromedia and Nokia Business unit reps, the winners were selected from the 20 finalists announced in September this year.
Quickoffice Premier 4 scooped up Best Enterprise Application, with the product allowing users to open, view and edit Microsoft Office documents on the move.
www.quickoffice.com
The best Macromedia Flash application was Foreca – Flash Weather, a natty program that can not only advise you whether that brolly is really necessary, but can offer comprehensive weather forecasts, weather radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts.
www.foreca.com.
InfoTalk Corporation’s Music Finder grabbed the honours for Best Mobile Music Application. The program provides a speedy way to use search for music files using voice commands, with users able to speak a song title, artist’s name or playlist in response to an audio prompt instead of scrolling through zillions of MP3s.
www.infotalkcorp.com.
Finally, the Best Location-Aware Service/Application prize went to Augmentra, whose smarty-pants ViewRanger application offers a unique mapping, navigation and information tool for mobile phones, providing information about immediate surroundings through an intuitive display.
www.viewranger.com.
Forum Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge
16 October, 2006
CCleaner Review: Windows Optimisation And Privacy Freeware (90%)
A long time favourite in Chez Digi Lifestyles, CCleaner is a superb system optimisation and privacy tool that comes with the best price of all: nothing!
A featherweight 1.42 meg download, CCleaner is short for ‘Crap Cleaner’ – a perfectly appropriate name, with the program doing an excellent job of turfing out unused and temporary files from your system.
Although the program is freeware and comes with no lurking steenkin’ spyware or adware, it does invite you to install the Yahoo toolbar on installation – just tick no if you don’t want it (we didn’t).
Cleaning out your dutty PC
Once fired up, a click on the ‘analyse’ button will get the program racing through your machine’s folders looking for files that can be removed.
CCleaner takes a high speed shufti in your Internet Explorer Cache, History, Cookies and Index.dat; as well as rummaging about in your recycle bin, temporary files, log files and lists of recently opened URLs and files.
Unlike some similar commercial products we’ve tested, CCleaner proved to be incredibly fast in use, with a full system scan taking a matter of seconds. Very impressive.
Once the program has completed its scan you’re given the option of deleting the files or going back and fine-tuning your scanning options.
Third-party application temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) can also be vamoosed from a long list of applications, including Firefox, Opera, Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, Office XP, Nero, Adobe Acrobat and WinZip.
We managed to clear up over 1.5 gig of space when we first ran the program, and it continues to clear out junk at an impressive rate with each scan.
Registry
There’s also a powerful built in Advanced Registry scanner which helps you get rid of unused and old entries cluttering up your system.
Bashing the ‘scan for issues’ button will produce a list of problems with File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons and Invalid Shortcuts, with the option to individually fix them or just let CCleaner work its magic automatically.
Wisely, the program prompts you to make a registry back-up before it takes off its gloves and starts sorting out the errant entries.
There’s also a handy ‘tools’ interface letting users uninstall programs or simply remove programs from their start up menu, with an ‘options’ menu allowing more advanced functions like user-defined cookie removal.
Conclusion
This is a fantastic program for quickly and effectively zapping unwanted and private information from your PC.
The program’s easy to use interface and support for a wide variety of applications surpasses many of the commercial offerings we’ve seen, and regular use should help you get Windows running faster and more efficiently, while grabbing back precious hard drive space.
Although the program is freeware, those who donate £10 ($20) or more get new releases in advance of regular punters and they can also enjoy the warm glow of knowing that they’re contributing to the continued development of this fine product.
Features: 85%
Ease of use: 85%
Value For Money: 90%
Overall: 90%
CCleaner.com
13 October, 2006
Palm Treo 680 Affordable Smartphones Announced
Palm has introduced a new range of quad-band Palm Treo 680 smartphones, running the tried and trusted Palm OS.
Backed by a $25 million marketing campaign – their biggest marketing campaign in half a decade – Palm is hoping that the lower priced Treos will attract customers beyond their traditional business base.
The GSM/GPRS/EDGE phones will be offered in a range of attractive colours (Graphite, Copper, Crimson and Arctic), weighing 23g lighter than the last PalmOS Treo, the 700p, and measuring up at 6mm longer and 3mm thinner.
Like the Windows-powered Treo 750w released earlier this year, the Treo 680 comes without the pocket-bulging, iconic chunky antennae, something which Palm thinks will have a positive impact on the European market.
The Treo comes with a large and bright 320×320 screen and the well regarded full QWERTY keyboard, with a raft of multimedia functions including an integrated digital camera, Bluetooth 1.2 , MP3 player, video recorder and player.
Onboard, there’s 64MB of user-available storage – nearly three times the capacity of the original Treo 650 smartphone – with expansion card support up to 2GB.
Although the Treo 680 is still lagging behind with the latest technology – there’s still no W-CDMA or Wi-Fi support – its superb user-friendly interface still puts it streets ahead of some higher spec’d phones.
Software
Like its Palm OS predecessors, the 680 displays text-messaging conversations as IM-like “threaded chats,” a fabulous feature that should be introduced by law on all phones.
The phone also lets users respond to calls by firing off a preset text message (“bog off weird stalker person”), and there’s support for three-way calling.
Along with the usual bundled applications for e-mail, Web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar and contacts, there’s a special version of Google Map for the Treo.
Billed by Google as,”the fastest, slickest version yet,” the application offers real-time traffic reports, detailed directions, integrated search results (search for cafes/bars etc, get addresses and call them with one click), satellite imagery and fast-downloading detailed, draggable maps with translucent pop-up balloons.
Sadly, us in Britland will have to wait for a while as the program currently only offers maps for Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the US.
Palm has also announced that it will be partnering with several media companies, including Yahoo, Google and blogging firm Six Apart, to make their products available on the new device – these will join the enormous back catalogue of commercial and free software that’s already available for the OS.
Availability
Palm head honcho Ed Colligan said he expects the new smartphone to be available around the world by the end of June, 2007, “competitively priced with comparable smartphones in the marketplace,” with the price rumoured to be around the $200 mark.
Palm 680
13 October, 2006
Microsoft Vista Reaches Final Beta
It’s been a long, long wait, but it looks like the release of Microsoft’s new operating system, of Windows Vista is finally set to happen soon.
The company has just released Release Candidate 2 (RC2) – or build number 5744 if you’re counting – and the Redwood boys are sounding chirpy that this will be the last beta version of Windows Vista before the product is unleashed for manufacturing.
The previous test release of Vista, RC1 was tested by no less than three million users, with the company claiming that it received “excellent feedback.”
With Microsoft now saying that just has to add the finishing touches to the overall quality and performance of the eagerly awaited operating system, the company looks set to meet it targets.
Vista has a scheduled roll out date for business customers next month, with consumers getting to play with the new desktop in January 2007.
Microsoft has already missed several release deadlines, although leading financial analysts like Rick Sherlund of the Goldman Sachs Group reckon that things are looking good for an on-time release:
“We had been sceptical of the launch schedule after Beta 2 shipped with problems in May, but the team seems to be making great progress in addressing issues of performance, reliability and compatibility,” he wrote in a research note.
Sherlund also noted that he expects Microsoft to start dishing out Vista discount coupons to customers who buy new PCs capable of running the OS in the run-up to the release.
Already, fanboy websites are buzzing with screen shots of the shiny, sleek new OS and we have to say the new desktop looks mighty purdy to our eyes…
You can check to see if your system wil be able to handle all the whizz bang glitz here: windowsvista.com/getready
11 October, 2006
Carphone Warehouse Scoops Up AOL UK
Carphone Warehouse have jumped into the big boy broadband rankings with its acquisition of the UK’s third-largest Internet provider, AOL UK.
Shelling out a cool £370m for the operation, Carphone Warehouse will inherit AOL’s 2.1 million UK customers, of which 600,000 are on dial-up, with the remaining 1.5 million using broadband connections. It’s four years ago that AOL announced their broadband pricing.
Under the deal, AOL will be keeping its (somewhat inappropriate) name – short for ‘America On Line’ – with the new owners retaining the US firm’s pricing policies.
(When AOL first hit the shores of Blighty, we did wonder if they’d change their name for the UK market, but we figured that UK On Line (UOL) sounds like someone being sick, and Britain On Line (BOL) would just invite the addition of ‘LOCKS.’)
Retaining AOL UK’s management and infrastructure, Carphone Warehouse said that it’s funding the acquisition of its shiny new toy through an extension of its existing debt facilities.
Although AOL UK is being sold by its American parent company Time Warner, the deal will see AOL continuing to provide co-branded portal, content and other audience services, as well as taking care of online advertising sales through a revenue-sharing agreement.
Carphone Warehouse head honcho Charles Dunstone announced that the deal was “transformational for our broadband business,” adding that they had “accelerated their customer service recruitment plans and incurred additional wholesale broadband costs.”
“The joint development of AOL’s already successful audience platform will bring us new advertising and content revenues in a proven and low risk manner,” he added.
Ol’Charlie boy’s been getting in the neck recently, after Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk service was the subject of a damning expose on the BBC’s Watchdog programme.
The show had been inundated with complaints after the company failed to deliver on its promise on ‘free’ broadband, and Dunstone has claimed that the strong demand has cost the company £20m more than originally expected.
The AOL deal sees the Carphone Warehouse crew slip into third place in the UK league table of residential Internet providers, with NTL the current leaders with 2.9 million home customers, followed by BT on 2.2 million.
Carphone Warehouse
AOL UK
Time Warner
11 October, 2006
Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor:Our Experience
With Windows Vista steaming over the horizon at a rate of knots, users are being encouraged to see if their steam-powered Windows machines will be capable of running the new bells’n’whistle bonanza of the new OS.
We thought we’d check out how our three year old Athlon XP2800+ PC loaded with a once-impressive 1GB of RAM would fare under the new OS, so headed off to the Vista Upgrade Advisor website.
The page told us to plug in any regularly used USB or other attachable peripheral devices (like printers, external hard drives, or scanners) before clicking on the ‘download Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor RC’ link.
No .Net, no chuffin’ install
Our first attempt to run the install program was greeted by a curt insistence that we had to first install Microsoft Net framework before the program would play ball.
Unchuffedly (or perhaps that would read better as, “in a less than chuffed manner”), we dutifully shuffled back to the Microsoft site and downloaded the user-unfriendly sounding “Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1 Redistributable Package” installation – all 22 meg of it – and tried again.
This time the program deigned to install itself and after a little hard drive grinding, presented a ‘scanning system’ interface, resplendent in a shiny faux Vista look.
The Advisor quickly set about rifling through our PC, with the interface offering a set of five info pages, all telling us how great Vista was (huzzah!) and outlining the differences between the various versions (Vista Ultimate, Home Premium, Business and Home Basic)
The program insisted that it “might take a few minutes” to complete the scan, but time must have stood for a bit because it sure seemed more like 7-8 minutes had drifted by before the hard drive finally stopped grinding .
Computer says yes
However, it was good news at the end with the Advisor telling us that the PC was all ship-shape to run Windows Vista, and even went as far as recommending that we use the Business edition.
But it wasn’t all good news as we caught sight of some yellow warning triangles further down the page.
The first told us that we needed to create a ton more hard drive space as the great bloated beastie that is Vista demanded 15 GB of hard drive space (yes, 15GB!) before it would flop its elephantine ass on our system.
It went on to suggest alternative system drives that we could install the OS onto – if only they had acres of free space too.
Vista also got sniffy about our graphics card, warning us that the “current video card will not support the Windows Aero™ user experience.”
Drivers
The second warning tab banged on about missing drivers, instructing us to scuttle off to the Windows Update website for new drivers for two listed items once we’d upgraded.
There then followed a list of seven items it claimed to know nothing about, and these included our Epson Perfection 1200 scanner (a fairly mainstream component, we would have thought), our UltraMon display drivers and NetDisk XIMETA external network drive.
For these items it seems we were out on our own or, more accurately, at the mercy of the software developers.
Happily, Vista liked the cut of our ViewSonic VP191s monitors – good job too because they’re quite new.
Looking down to the final warning tab entitled ‘programs,’ we were presented with a refreshingly short list considering that our machine is stuffed to the brim with programs old and new.
Despite the huge popularity of the Norton Systemworks utilities suite, the Advisor reported the likelihood of running into problems when running the program on Vista and it didn’t like WinZip 8.0 much either.
It also disliked Adobe Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC 1.0 so much that it simply wouldn’t allow it to run under Vista.
Task list
Finally, the Upgrade Advisor wrote out a ‘Task List’ of things we needed to attend to before, and after, installing Windows Vista.
At the final tally, this amounted to forking out for a new graphics card, freeing up more hard drive space (or, more realistically, buying a new drive), downloading some new drivers and dumping Norton if they’re not forthcoming with a fix.
All in all, we expected to find a lot more problems so we’re kind of impressed this far, but the real test will come when we get to (finally) install Vista.
With Vista still in beta, we’ll be sure to run the Advisor again when we’re closer to the OS release date.
Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor RC
11 October, 2006
Airis Releases Bargain Basement PDAs With GPS
Although PDAs may be a dying breed, they clearly ain’t dead yet, with the lesser known Spanish electrics company releasing no less than two spanking new GPS-enabled PDAs.
Running on Windows Mobile 2005, it has to be said that the Airis units aren’t exactly lookers, but at a retail price of €220 (£148) and €289 (£195) respectively, they look like chuffing great value.
The new T610 and T620 models both include the well respected SiRFStar III GPS chipset.
Lurking inside is a nippy Samsung 2440 400MHz processor, backed up by a healthy 64MB RAM and 128MB ROM.
The T610 and T620 are cosmetically identical, with both being enclosed in a bland, grey plastic case offering the usual four navigation buttons supplemented by a mini joystick.
Both PDAs come with a 3.5 inch TFT 320 x 240 pixels/65k colours touch screen with anti-reflective coating, with the units offering WAV, WMA, MP3, WMV, MPEG4, DivX4 and DivX5 support.
A SD/MMC card slot takes care of expansion options, with connectivity coming in the form of a MiniUSB socket , Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (T620 only)
A Lithium-Ion 200 mAh battery should keep the thing purring along for hours, with the T610/T620 weighing in at 170g and measuring 15.6 x 72 x 17.8 mm.
A mounting kit, car charger, and a smart leather case round off the feature set, with the units being available from this French site.
We couldn’t find any UK distributors.
[From Navigadget]
10 October, 2006
O2 Jet Phone Promises Stratospheric Battery Life
Primed and ready for take off, O2’s own-brand Jet supersonic mobile boasts that it can deliver 67% more talk time than its nearest comparable rival.
Created for heavy-yakking business users, the O2 Jet comes with a battery life that would see off an amphetamine-fuelled Duracell Bunny, claiming a mighty 540 hours on standby and 9.9 hours of talk time – adding up to double the talk time of O2’s most popular phone, the Nokia 6230i.
The phone’s business-like styling reflects its targeted demographic, with an austere black casing and ne’er a whiff of any fun stuff to be found – this grumpy old handset hasn’t even got a camera or an MP3 player.
However, stern-faced business users may grow to love the simple user interface, dedicated volume and profile switches, quad band GPRS and full POP3 and IMAP4 email connectivity.
There’s also a dedicated Bluetooth button on the candybar shaped 117 x 47 x 20mm phone, 56MB of internal memory and a macho little metal speaker grill, perhaps suggesting that the owner might be a bit of a tiger in the boardroom.
The O2 Jet will be ready for slipping into pin striped suit pockets from 19th October, with prices varying according to monthly tariffs. There will also be a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) version available for sixty quid.
O2 Jet
10 October, 2006
Google Signs Up With Sony & Warners To Offer Free Music Videos
Google will soon be offering free music videos on its Google video Web site after striking a deal with industry bigwigs, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
The deal will see the search engine giant – which has just scooped up the video sharing sensation, YouTube for $1.65bn – offering users the ability to stream content from Warner Music and Sony BMG music video collections for nowt.
There will also be behind-the-sceens footage and other artist-related content made available through two separate revenue-sharing arrangements.
Google’s advertisers will sponsor the music video offerings, with the resulting booty being split between Google and its content partners.
“Our partnership with Google is rooted in the pioneering approach we’ve used to offer fans more music, while benefiting artists and protecting copyrights,” gushed Warner Music in a press release.
As well as the freebie video content, Google will also be flogging Warner music video downloads for US$1.99 a pop.
Google has said that it will be offering further access to Sony and Warner’s hefty audio-visual catalogues in the coming months through partner Web sites in its AdSense network.
The Sony/Warner deal comes hot on the heels of several content partnership deals announced by YouTube, including one with – wouldyabelieve it! – Sony BMG.
Google
10 October, 2006