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GPS: Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (2/3)

As we saw on Friday, Richard isn’t too happy with his Nokia N95. Today he tackles the GPS function and ~~tomorrow~~ the day after will be connecting his N95 to a computer, the 5Mpx camera and making phone calls.

GPS – Come to my rescue
Obviously, the narrow West End street where I work wouldn’t be a fair test, so I take it over the road to Golden Square in Soho. It’s Friday, it’s hot and sunny, if a little bit hazy, but I’m in a clear open space with no buildings for 50 metres on all sides.

GPS: Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (2/3) Okay, time to try out the device’s killer app – GPS and Nokia Maps. Having previously owned a Garmin Trek and an ill-fated Ipaq 6915, I’m familiar with the sluggishness of finding an initial navigating signal, so I’m giving the Nokia plenty of leeway to be a bit slow at first.
Continue reading GPS: Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (2/3)

Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (1/3)

Living with A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life The Nokia N95 promises so much. It’s got every gizmo and gadget you can imagine on it, but Richard Davis hasn’t found the dream to match the reality. After you read this, you’ll appreciate that he’s not a happy chappie.

Let me set the scene as to how I came about my Nokia N95. I fell out of love with Nokia after a rather clunky experience with the N73 a while back, followed by various other niggles which led me away.
Continue reading Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (1/3)

Microsoft Plans To Double Global PC Ownership To 2 Billion By 2015

Microsoft Plans To Double Global PC Ownership To 2 Billion By 2015 Microsoft is hell bent on doubling the numbers of PCs on the planet by 2015, and is prepared to put its vast pots of money where its mouth is.

The company has announced that it will be charging governments in developing countries a paltry three dollars for copies of Windows and Office – so long as the software is being installed on computers given to schoolchildren.

Naturally, such a move would also have the happy side effect of getting the world’s young hooked into the Wonderful World o’Windows at an early stage and should reduce the amount of dodgy software slopping around undeveloped countries where piracy often runs rife.

Microsoft Plans To Double Global PC Ownership To 2 Billion By 2015 Microsoft’s bargain basement software sale opens opportunities for tie-ins with the One Laptop Per Child project and Intel’s World Ahead Program , but Bill Gates maintains the hardware issue isn’t the toughest nut to crack.

“It’s not just the cost of the PC, but rather these issues of connectivity, of the training, the maintenance, the support, all of those have to come together,” said Gates.

More Microsoft moves
In its quest to stamp its size nines all over emerging markets, Microsoft announced that it was teaming up with Lenovo to undergo joint research at Lenovo’s Beijing lab and that they intended to double the number of global training centres to 200 by 2009.

Microsoft also revealed plans to build a Web portal for training prospective Indian IT workers and its intention to form public-private partnerships to help governments in five developing countries improve public services through technology.

Source

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)

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.

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

Joost Invite Winners

After the great response to your Joost Invite posting last week, we’re pleased to announce the winners. Sorry we didn’t get around to posting this yesterday, but better late than never, eh?

We’ve noticed that a few people had laid their hands on invites in the intervening period, like Sano.

It was tough to choose between all of the other entries, so we thought it would be best to let geographic distribution be the decider given Joost offers different content in different parts of the world.

Reese in the US is getting because he gave up TV a long time back and it will be interesting to hear his perspective … and he gets bonus points because of the “Ricky Gervais & The Serpent” posting on his blog.

Rogerio in Brazil for his corny joke and gs because it’ll be interesting to have the Taiwanese dimension.

We’re looking forward to their reviews.

Thanks to everyone for the comments and sorry you didn’t get one this time. Stay tuned, and when we get some more, we’ll let you know.