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Windows Media Player 11 Released
Confidently billed as “a milestone for music fans and the digital entertainment experience on Windows XP,” Microsoft’s shiny new Windows Media Player 11 claims support for more than 200 portable and home networking devices and hundreds of online music and video services and radio stations.
The upgrade to their popular media player comes with a sleeker, iTunes-esque user interface, better online store integration, improved navigation and updated search tools for larger music libraries.
“Windows Media Player 11 is the first media player to be truly designed with the digital entertainment lover in mind,” purred Mike Sievert, corporate vice president of Windows at Microsoft.
“The fresh, exciting new look, the ability to find songs and videos in an instant, and the enhanced capabilities for syncing with portable devices are not only exactly what customers have asked us for, they’re also a preview of what’s to come in Windows Vista,” he added.
New for Media Player 11 is thumbnail and album art displays; shuffle sync and reverse sync options and a library view backed by simplified navigation capabilities and enhanced shortcut options.
Tabs galore
Along the top of the super-slick, Vista-ready interface are six access tabs letting you jump between the currently playing media, the media library, and tools for ripping, burning and syncing up media.
So far so good until you come to the last pointless tab, which offers instant access MTV’s Urge music store. The result of some lucrative MTV marketing tie-in or another, users will have to put up with this unwanted guest forever as there’s no way of getting rid of the thing.
WMP11 can rip audio CDs in the default WMA format or the more popular MP3 format and there’s also support for the beardy audiophiles preferred format, lossless WAV, along with the ability to easily burn all supported file formats onto CD.
The new player is available as a free download to users with genuine copies of Windows XP – which means you’re going to have to go through a pesky validation palaver to install the program.
Windows Media Player 11
31 October, 2006
Mobile Music Phones Outsell MP3 Players
Mobile phones with built in MP3 music players are proving a massive hit with consumers, far outstripping sales of dedicated music players, say Nokia.
Speaking to Reuters, Nokia’s multimedia unit director, Tommi Mustonen, said the mobile giant aimed to shift 80 million music devices this year, getting on for double last year’s tally of 46.5 million.
“The technology is completely ready, and the change in consumers’ habits has started. The best evidence is our sales number. We are selling huge amounts,” he added.
Nokia’s sales figures certainly dwarf those of Apple, who sold 8.7 million iPods in the last quarter – a high enough figure to keep them at the top of the dedicated music player charts, but still way behind music phones.
Although two out of three consumers with suitable equipped phones are already using them to play music, Nokia insists that Apple is not a competitor (well, not until their highly anticipated iPhone hits the shops).
“The comparison with iPod is wrong; it is a single purpose device, and it is not connected,” Mustonen said, adding that he believes that Nokia’s current rivals are, “companies which make multimedia computers.”
One of their rivals is most certainly Sony Ericsson, currently the world’s fourth-largest handset maker and feeling chuffed with itself after flogging 15 million Walkman music-playing handsets in its first year.
The overall European mobile phone music download market is expanding faster than Mr Creosote at a dinner table too, with Forrester Research predicting that the market is to grow to 674 million euros ($857.5 million) in 2011.
Reuters
31 October, 2006
Virgin Mobile Lobster 770TV: Review
The last 18 months have seen a growing crescendo of excitement in the content and mobile phone worlds about the possibilities of delivering TV to mobile phone. The ideas been around a lot longer than that, but it’s the smell of money that has heightened senses.
Virgin Mobile have been keen to show the pace in this area and BT Livetime).
The handsets are now in pre-production and are getting into the hands of a few people.
James Cridland, Head of New Media Strategy at Virgin Radio has had a pre-production Virgin Mobile Lobster 770TV in his hands for a while and has written up a review of it, complete with the four TV services and 49 radio stations.
Built by HTC, its guts are an Orange SPV C600 but the protrusion on its right hand side holds the DAB chippery. James reports that the headphones are better than SPV600, which the 770TV is based on. They also act as the aerial for the DAB receiver.
James goes into a lot more detail about the handset, but let’s get down to how it performs as a TV.
The content
The four TV channels he had were BBC One London, Channel 4 Shortcuts, E4, and ITV-1 (only available in London). It sounds like the programming on the commercial channels hits a few interruptions due to ‘rights.’
BBC One London is in full and free. E4 and ITV-1 generally shows a simulcast of the main channels, but at some times of the day you get a notice that the current programme is unavailable for ‘rights reasons’ – which, at the time of writing, includes all of E4’s daytime music programming, all advertising, all of GMTV, and quite a few other programmes too: it’s unusual to be able to get all four channels in full, in my experience. Channel 4 Shortcuts shows short clips of Channel 4 shows.
Using it
Starting to watch TV couldn’t be easier, just hitting the TV button, which brings up the TV Guide, which he describes as a fairly comprehensive EPG (electronic programme guide), interestingly updated over-the-air on DAB.
The quality of the service doesn’t sound amazing currently.
Clicking on a channel name opens a screen with a larger logo and a Windows Media ‘buffering’ sign, which disappears fairly quickly to be replaced with a passable picture. The framerate appears quite low – probably no more than 10 frames a second – and the picture quality does break up in fast movement; this isn’t picture quality to write home about, but conversely it is pretty good at coping with variable signal quality – on occasion, you can sometimes lose the picture but keep the sound. Watching live television in a moving taxi is an interesting experience, but works very well.
Radio service
James is significantly more impressed with this Lobster as a DAB radio, finding “the reception quality is rather better than I’ve experienced with an FM radio,” indeed, “it’s no exaggeration to say that this is the best hand-held DAB Digital Radio that I’ve ever had.”
Given his role at Virgin Radio, he’s a man who knows a thing or two about radio too.
Conclusion
Despite liking the other functions of the Lobster, it appears James won’t be chucking out his TV anytime soon, finding the current channels available not good enough.
I can’t see too many people sitting down for half an hour of Coronation Street on this thing; and it would seem to me that the television offering needs changing – to offer more grazing-friendly programming. Sky News or BBC News 24 would be a great addition. The absence of GMTV on the phone shows what disarray the commercial broadcasters are in – why cede peak commuting time to the BBC alone?
Clearly early days in this fledgling area.
Full details are over on James’ blog
Photo credit: James Cridland
31 October, 2006
Nokia 330 Auto Navigation Announced
Nokia has announced its first dedicated personal navigation device covering all of Europe-land, the Nokia 330 Auto Navigation.
The Nokia 330 includes full Europe coverage, sports a large 3.5 inch colour touch screen, spoken directions and comes with a raft of multimedia widgets to keep le continental traveller ‘appy.
Featuring an integrated GPS receiver, the Nokia 330 device comes bundled with a 2GB memory card containing the preinstalled Europe-wide map data aling with detailed travel information.
The Nokia 330 uses the ROUTE 66 Navigate 7 application and views can be flipped between 2D/3D and day or night views, with options to change the language or volume of the spoken guide.
To help stave off boredom in Brussels and ennui in Eindhoven, the Auto Navigation also includes a music player, photo viewer and video player (but don’t go watching Rocky V when you’re driving folks! Well, we wouldn’t recommend you watch it any time, but that’s a different story).
And now some corporate guff
“Consumers are increasingly eager to use personal navigation devices while driving and we are delighted to introduce the Nokia 330 Auto Navigation device to meet this demand,” purred Razvan Olosu, vice president, Multimedia Enhancements at Nokia.
“Nokia 330 Auto Navigation complements the recently announced GPS and navigation solutions from Nokia.”
“Finding your way across Europe is simple with this comprehensive navigation package, including an integrated GPS receiver and European maps,” he added.
The Nokia 330 Auto Navigation is expected to turn up in “select channels” in Europe during the fourth quarter 2006 for around EUR 360 – £240 (sans le taxes).
Nokia
30 October, 2006
Woz Spills The Beans On Apple
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and genius hardware builder, is currently on a book tour around the UK promoting …. not surprisingly, his book, iWoz. As you probably know, he’s commonly referred to as Woz.
The most revealing one-on-one interview was carried out by Digital-Lifestyles pal Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian.
Woz revealed that what got him started creating computers was the desire to build a videogame, then wanting to get on to Arpanet
it got me into wanting to do it so badly that the only way to do it for free was to build my own device. So I built my own device that could now put words on the TV set from a computer and type of a keyboard.
Woz confirmed that Jobs did rip him off in the early days when Jobs got him to redesign the circuit board for the classic arcade game, Breakout. After Wos had spent 72 hours straight getting the system boards chip count down by around half. Jobs told him he’d give Woz half of what he got, $700, but Jobs had actually received $7,000.
On the iPod and its expected longevity, Woz pins it, “Will the iPod always remain that large? Walkmans seemed to come and then go away. I think Apple’s making the most out of the lifespan.”
Other controversial comments that have come out during the book tour include him thinking that Apple wasted their money when they bought NeXT, as it wasn’t needed at that time. There had been a lot of complaints around that time about the stability of Apple’s OS 7. After some investigation Woz discovered that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been the cause of the problems.
Woz
27 October, 2006
Mission Impossible 3: Parallel Mobile and DVD Release on Nokia N93
Nokia is to have Mission Impossible 3 released on memory cartridge in parallel with its releases on DVD – making it the world’s first mobile premiere.
The complete film will be on a 512Mb miniSD card, running at 25fps and be exclusively available with the N93. As of next week purchasers of the N93 will get the film included.
Given the gadget fest that M:i:III is, it’s pretty appropriatte.
It’s a European deal between Nokia and Paramout Pictures, making it available in the UK, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey. The content will be protected, so it cannot be watched on a PC or transfered to another memory card,
Nokia has been trying very hard to its launch, this is the first deal to link it with watching films.
Tuula Rytilä-Uotila, director of Multimedia at Nokia buzzed, “With this package, we want to highlight that the Nokia N93 is not only a fantastic movie-making device, but that it is also a portable video player, allowing users to enjoy movies wherever, whenever.”
27 October, 2006
UK Digital Radio Figures Up Again
The latest digital radio listening figures have come out in the UK. Everyone involved in the DAB radio business as they’ve all gone up.
The digital reach is up 17% from the previous year and the number of hours listened to has gone up 15% from last year.
Something rather pretentiously called the “Digitally Enabled Universe,” ie the number people who fall within the DAB radio reception, has stayed at 54% of the UK population.
The percentage of adults who own a DAB set at home remains at 15.3%.
DRDB chief executive, Ian Dickens, says: “This is great news and proves that digital radio continues to grow in popularity with listeners. Rajar’s research bears out our own findings which show that people who buy a DAB digital radio enjoy the new stations it offers and value the added choice that comes with digital listening.”
The BBC has five national DAB radio station, four of which have increased their listenership. The most popular commercial radio station is Emap’s The Hits with 1.182 million listeners.
Rajar
27 October, 2006
BT’s Digital Vault Opens
BT has launched a ‘virtual vault’ offering a secure online location for broadband users to safely stash personal files.
The service comes in two flavours, with the free BT Digital Vault Basic service letting users manually upload photos, emails, music, video files and contact information up to a storage capacity of 2GB.
The free service is open to anyone, not just BT Broadband customers.
For users requiring more storage space and automated back-ups, the full BT Digital Vault service costs £4.99 a month and includes a generous 20GB online storage capacity.
Automatic back ups
Billed as a quick and easy way for home users to securely back up their data, the package includes the BT Digital Vault Backup Manager which automatically detects when users have updated the content of files flagged for backing up.
The manager then synchronises the data with the copy stored in the Digital Vault, with no user intervention needed.
Data uploaded from the user’s PC is encrypted as it is transmitted with the password-protected files being stored in BT’s secure data hosting centre, which is accessible from any Web connection.
“People are often unsure about how to keep their online data safe… if you want to share your holiday snaps with a friend, retrieve important files, or backup files on your laptop when you’re away from home, it’s all possible with BT Digital Vault,” said Gavin Patterson, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer division.
Currently, only the service is only available to PC users, running Windows 2000 and XP.
BT Digital Vault
25 October, 2006
Apple: All MacBook Pro’s Now Intel Core 2 Duo
Apple has updated its whole MacBook Pro range of laptops to run Intel’s Core 2 Duo range of processors. They claim a 39% speed improvement.
There may be a few who will be a little peeved with this. Many people jumped on to the new Apple range of laptops when it was launched back at the start of this year. At that time they were using the plain-old Core Duo chips but even those gave a considerable speed improvement – two to three times the previous G5 equivalent. They were universally celebrated.
Those keen little things, who shelled out for them, might be a little down in the mouth to find a new, even whizzier version coming out.
The rest of the specs of the machines have remained the same, including the outside casing. We covered the specs in detail at the original launch, or if you want to delve into the depths of the specs, take a look at the Apple site.
Pricing
2.16 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro – £1,349 (inc. VAT)
2.33 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro – £1,699 (inc. VAT)
2.33 GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro – £1,899 (inc. VAT )
25 October, 2006
Microsoft Smartphone Userbase Hits Six Million
As the smartphone market continues to explode, Microsoft has revealed its bullish ambitions to keep on doubling sales, year on year.
Last year’s total of six million mobile phones running Microsoft Windows software represented a 100 per cent increase on the previous year, and according to the head of Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Devices division, the company are hell bent on shifting even more.
“We want to make 100 percent again this year and to grow further at this rate in coming years,” he told the German Euro am Sonntag newspaper.
According to research firm Canalys, worldwide shipments of smart mobile devices rose by 55 percent year-on-year in Q2 2006, with the Symbian operating system remaining the most popular with a 67 per cent market share.
Although Microsoft is in second place, it lags a considerable distance behind with just 15 per cent of the market, followed by Research In Motion (Blackberry) on 6 per cent.
It looks like the smartphone market is going to heat up in coming months too, with Research In Motion’s new Pearl smartphone offering a camera and music functions.
RIM’s co-Chief Executive Mike Lazaridis were also hoping to double their users ever year, adding that the market for mobile emails was, “huge, and we’re just at the beginning.”
Elsewhere, Palm’s eagerly awaited new Treo 680 looks set to be hitting the UK by the end of November, after computer retailer Expansys announced that they expected unlocked models to be in stock by the end of November.
We’re not sure if they’ll be getting the full range of funky colours, but we’ll be pwning that natty Orange Treo as soon as we can get our hands on it.
23 October, 2006