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Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop: Mini Review: Exclusive
We played with the Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop, at its first European showing yesterday. The machine we used was the only one in Europe and had been jetted in from development labs in Estonia.
They claim it to be the worlds first ‘Skype Edition’ laptop, and we’ve no reason to doubt them. While many machines have been selling with Skype pre-loaded on it, this is the first to have a dedicated button built-in to the machine.
If your reaction is, ‘so what? It’s a laptop with a soft-button on it,’ that wouldn’t have been too dissimilar to our initial reaction – before we used it. After having seen it action, our view is more favorable.
Where’s the button?
Our first surprise was to find the Skype button at the top of the screen, where you normally find the catch. We’d expected it to be on or around the keyboard.
As you can see from the close-up photo, the Skype button sits on the right, the microphone on the left and in the centre is a video camera, a la new Mac laptops. There’s an LED between the mic and video camera and another surrounding the Skype button.
How does it work?
The button performs various functions depending on what you’re doing with Skype at the time.
If you’re working on another app and feel the urge to Skype someone, pressing the Skype button, brings the software to the foreground. No big shock there.
When a Skype call comes in to you, pressing the button answers the call, bringing you live.
There’s a LED surrounding the button that shows various states of call as follows
- Orange colored when Skype application is connected to Internet and in idle mode
- Orange/Green alternate blinking when there is an incoming Skype call
- Green when there is an active Skype call in progress
- OFF when Skype application is not connected to Internet or not launched
The green LED between the mic and camera shows solid green to indicated you have a call in progress, perhaps to save you from the embarrassment of slagging off the person you’ve just completed a call with, while thinking the call had finished.
Calling quality
One of the concerns we’d had was the placement of the mic and the call quality that might bring.
We know that the mic on the Apple iBook lid is less than great to be using with Skype. We often find ourselves craning our necks forward, and half closing the lid to get close enough to the mic to make ourselves heard by the other party.
Packard-Bell appear to have got over this. In the call that we placed, the other end reported they could hear us perfectly well, despite us being around two feet away from the laptop and the room that we were calling from being pretty noisy.
On reflection we realised that the palaver we go through with the Mac wouldn’t work on this machine as, if you were on a video call, they’d be getting a view of your space bar.
Video built-in
As I’m sure you know, video conferencing has been included in Skype for a while now (it was one of the most requested features). By including the camera at the lid, Packard-Bell have made it easy to video call while on the move – without having to lash video cameras to the lid of your machine.
Having seen the preview window, we can report that the results were pretty impressive. The quality appeared to be more that sufficient for video conferencing.
General spec and availability
The general spec of this machine is described by Packard-Bell as having a “high-performance Intel Dual-core.”
We’ve absolutely no idea what the general computing function of this machine is – that’s not what we were looking at. Given that PC designs has been perfecting since the release of the IBM XT, we’d suspect that it’s pretty much as you’d expect.
The Packard-Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ is expected to be getting to retail in August this year at a cost of E899.
Packard Bell
30 June, 2006
Ofcom To Provide Solomon Judgement On HD Frequency Spectrum
One of the challenges facing Stephen Carter’s replacement as head of the UK communications regulator Ofcom, is how the frequency spectrum released by the move to digital terrestrial TV will be allocated. Not only is the decision crucial for Ofcom, who must reconcile both the requirement to allow the market to operate while taking into account the British citizen, but it also figures in the BBC’s strategy around the impending licence settlement and the organisations’ worldwide ambitions.
Although the World Cup has not been the High Definition eruption many in the electronics retailing sector had hoped for, there is now a realisation in the industry; that the move to adoption of flat screen TV displays has started in the homes of Great Britain.
How will displays receive the content to create the impetus for a large scale take up? The likely options are; Cable under what is expected to be a Virgin branded offering; Sky who are pushing HD to protect and grow their revenue; the BBC who are committed to both an alternative to Sky on Satellite and providing their content on all viable platforms and broadband, which looks increasingly viable by virtue of higher transfer rates to the home, along with improved digital compression technologies.
The issue for Ofcom is, should the frequency spectrum vacated by analogue TV go to the highest bidder (which on past experience looks likely to be mobile communications of some sort), or should it propel TV into the HD age with the potential benefit for the UK’s important media industries?
France, slower off the blocks in moving to a Digital Terrestrial TV service, with its’ amusingly acronym-ed TNT, has a solution that builds in HD capabilities, and for sure the UK will not wish to be seen falling behind mainland Europe.
And where does the BBC anguish become an issue? Well, if the only methods of receiving HD are by commercial operators Sky and Cable, how does the BBC reconcile the cost to all viewers when only a subset can receive it? The BBC is terrified of losing arguments that could justify a decrease of its universal fee, or marginalisation of its place as a leader in the deployment of advanced distribution and production technology. They’re actively lobbying to make sure that new frequency plans allow for both mobile TV and HD terrestrial.
Given all this, it looks like Stephen Carter could be showing admirable timing skills in vacating the OFCOM hot seat.
29 June, 2006
BBC World Cup Website Scores!
When it comes to World Cup football Web coverage in the UK, the BBC isn’t just dribbling past its rivals – it’s positively crushing past them, according to figures released by Nielsen NetRatings.
England’s dull-as-ditchwater victory over Ecuador in the first knock-out round pulled in the biggest UK audience to sports and gambling sites of all the matches so far, with one million users pushing the weekly audience to over 3 million for the first time.
Of that figure, the BBC Sport website attracted 1.58 million unique visitors overall last week, recording an average viewing time of 11 minutes.
This amounts to a hefty 58 per cent share of the weekly sports and gambling audience, with the official Yahoo FIFA World Cup Website coming over like a bunch of Third Division cloggers, managing only a fifth of that traffic.
The Beeb’s closest rival was Sky Sports, which managed 423,000 unique visitors, each hanging about for an average of five minutes each, followed by Premium TV (419,400), FIFA World Cup (298,000), Sporting Life (209,360) and Yahoo Sports (187,000).
Interestingly, the Sporting Life site proved the ‘stickiest’ with punters spending the longest time on the site (an average of 36 mins each).
Overall, the World Cup has seen a 51% growth in online punters visiting sports and gambling websites in the UK over the last four weeks.
Match by match analysis
Breaking the figures down to individual games, the report shows that the first match against Paraguay attracted an online audience of 979,000 users with the BBC grabbing 51% of that total, followed by Trinidad & Tobago (885,000 users, BBC with 51%), Sweden (936,000, 47%) and Ecuador (1,016,000, 47%).
The BBC added that when the worldwide traffic was added to the total, its overall sports traffic as high as three million unique users.
Nielsen
BBC World Cup
28 June, 2006
BT Home Hub Examined
To date, most ADSL equipment that BT has put out has been pretty …. functional … or put another way, ugly. Their ethernet routers have been transposed from office equipment, and their USB kit, the Frog as it was known … well don’t get us started on that*.
This has all changed with their latest packaging of broadband. Released alongside this, the newly-announced BT WiFi Home Hub has been designed to seduce people into pulling their router out from it previous position in the study or under the stairs, and putting it in to their living space.
Why would they care about that? Well it’s important for the success of products like BT Vision, their autumn-release IPTV service, as the connection between the Home Hub and the BT Vision box currently has to be wired ethernet. Given most people don’t have their house cabled for ethernet, the Home Hub has to be located close to the main TV in the house, normally in the lounge. It also doesn’t hurt to have their new wireless-DECT VoIP phone handsets sitting in the main room in the house either.
It’s a looker
BT have clearly had the industrial designers on the case and what they’ve turned out is a bit of a looker.
Being white, you can’t but fail to be reminded of Apple (being that they own the colour white). It’s like a cross between a small, white, upstanding PS2 and an iPod, but lacking the curves of the iPod.
The BT VoIP handset, or BT Broadband Talk handset as they call it (sssh, don’t mentioned VoIP), sits in an integrated docking unit that is slots in the front of the base of the Home Hub.
What can you connect to it?
Apart from the 802.11G/B wireless connectivity, there’s six physical connectors tucked away at the back of the Home Hub.
There’s the connector that runs between the phone line and the box, a slot for you POTS phone, two ethernet connectors (one of these will be used for BT Vision) and two USB connectors.
One of these USB ports is intended for computers that don’t have ethernet ports on them (are there any of these still in circulation?) and the other is for an as-yet unannounced use.
One trick I feel they’ve missed is using the Hub as a print server, but discussing this with BT’s, they suggest that this is something that could be introduced later, via a software update.
Disco lights may drive you mad
The only issue we raised after spending a brief time with it was the usage indicator lights that sit at the top of the unit, which flicker whenever data passes through the box. Sadly, as yet, these can’t be turned off.
We’d imagine that while having these beauties flickering away may be a novelty initially, but long term, people are going to find it _really_ annoying, as they catch them out of the corner of their eye. Expect either the addition of some masking tape over them or a software update giving the option to kill them.
Over broadband software updates
Keeping equipment up to date is a expensive and risky business, especially if you need to get the customer involved.
Like their video phone handsets, the Home Hub can be updated remotely by BT over the broadband connection. This gives them a chance to provide new features in the future, or to fix an problems that they might find, without having to bother the subscriber.
Do you need a Home Hub?
If you want to carry on using the Internet as you have previously, then the short answer is no, _but_ if you want to use any of the new BT services like BT Vision or BT Homesafe, their home security system (more on this soon), then yes.
For BT Vision to work, the STB that comes with it has to be able to control the flow of data over the broadband connection, because frankly, getting TV to run over a 2Mb DSL connection is asking a lot of it. If little Johnny is sitting in the bedroom downloading goodness knows what, he’s going to have to have his connection throttled, which Dad is watching the Football on Saturday night.
* Thank the gods of USB that BT have finally dumped the USB-connected Frog that used to ship in previous version of their broadband offering. We found this an odious move purposely designed to limit the number of computers that connect to one. In our book, this was detrimental to the wider adoption of broadband in the UK.
23 June, 2006
BT Include OpenZone WiFi Minutes with Broadband Package Shakeup
BT have released a shake up of their home broadband offering.
As well as reducing the number of options available, they’re also boosting the packages to try and both get people to switch to them, as well as attempting to induce their current subscribers not to switch away.
Mirroring their phone call plans, BT have gone for the Option 1, 2 & 3.
250 minutes of BT OpenZone WiFi
Most of the offering isn’t that different – OK, they’re bundling Norton Antivirus and firewall – the big innovation is the inclusion of 250 minutes of BT OpenZone WiFi.
BT have done a clever thing here in providing WiFi minutes. People will come to realise that they can use WiFi when out and about … near a BT roaming point only of course.
This is of course only averaging 8 minutes a day – and we all know how quickly time on the Internet can disappear.
Once they get used to that behaviour, people will start to run out of the 250 minutes that are available over the month – and start to pay BT for extra minutes.
This is a very clear indication that the convergence of network access is now well underway.
Free VoIP calls to UK Landlines
All of the packages provide free evening and weekend calls to UK landline, and until Jan 07, free video calls. International calls are not discounted – at all, which we thought a bit shocking.
This is not just calls using the PC softphone, but using the new Hi Def phone handset. We’ll cover this in more detail soon.
As well as the Hi Def phones and BT softphone, calls can be made to other BT VoIP handsets, like the now available BT Broadband Talk Videophone 1000 and soon to be available 1000 video phones.
We specifically asked about linking to other VoIP services. With no shock, we heard that this wasn’t going to be supported ‘at launch’, and we suspect ever. Locking people in to the BT handsets will be a way to attempt to increase their subscribers, with BT subscribers encouraging their family and friends into having a compatible, ie BT handset.
Equipment
In an effort to try and get you to step up to the highest subscription, BT are using an increasing amount of equipment to induce you to be tempted every increasing monthly fees. They’re leveraging their ability to buy huge amounts of equipment and the discounts that brings to them.
The entry-level Option 1 customers will be provided, free of charge, with a BT Wired router; Option 2 brings the white BT Home Hub; Option 3 includes the Home Hub and VoIP/DECT handset, that they label the Hi-Def handset.
If you persist in opting for Option 1, you’re able to purchase the Home Hub at the additional cost of £30 – £25 if done online.
Costs
There’s a promotional offer on each of the packages of a reduced cost for the first six months of subscription.
Option 1 – £9.95 for six months, then £17.99/month
Option 2 – £14.99, then £22.99/month
Option 3 – £22.99, then £26.99/month
Learning a trick or two from the mobile business, contract length for the entry Option 1 is 18 months. The others are a more expected 12. Do you get the impression that they really don’t want you to go for the Option 1?
Options 2 & 3 are pretty much the same, except for the amount of data that can be downloaded by the subscriber – option 2 give 6Gb usage per month, Option 3 a more generous 40Gb. It’s unclear if BT Vision is used if this will be included in the usage.
23 June, 2006
Symbian Academy Launches: Free Teaching Aids For Universities
Symbian, the smartphone OS company, are pulling a smart move (pun intended) by offering free assistance to Universities and their lecturers to have Symbian programming skills built into courses. Very clever.
They’re designed to make it easy for universities to create courses that teach Symbian software development and to integrate a Symbian component into existing computer science courses.
Those who sign up are showered with free course materials, training, technical support, development literature, expert Symbian lecturers.
It’s all part of the idea to “maintain the growth of the thriving Symbian ecosystem,” what ever that means in English.
As a sweetener to the lecturers to get involved, Symbian will provide “exposure to Symbian’s industry partners.” Pretty healthy if you fancy running a software development company and want to get exposure for your potential products, or you’re getting a little bored of Uni life and fancy impressing those in industry that you’re a bit of visionary.
Nokia are the dominant shareholder in Symbian (47.9% share holding) and you can see how seriously they’re taking getting their software into education, they’ve even got a Head of Academic Relations, a Harri Pennanen.
If you fancy getting involved, just drop a mail to [email protected] and tell them that Digital-Lifestyles sent you.
Symbian Academy
22 June, 2006
Bright Star: BT Media and Broadcast Sale Close
As you may recall, we first reported the sale of BT’s Media and Broadcast division (or BTM&B as it’s known internally) and its TV satellite interests at the turn of the year. Since then detailed negotiations have been ongoing, with around 200 staff worldwide expected to be moving away from the comfy world of BT, to the more exposed waters of a private equity-driven outfit. We’ve heard that it’s expected to be known as Bright Star.
The new enterprise centred around Satellite Occasional use and satellite TV multiplexs will be headed up by Mark Smith who was the boss of what was, a couple of years back, BT Broadcast Services. Joining Mark there will be some new hires alongside those former BT folks, described as ‘in-scope’ who we understand have decided to take a sweetener of around £4,500 to transfer their skills and experience to the fledgling outfit.
It is expected that initially BT’s Media and Broadcast customers will notice little difference as BT continue to offer a wrap that includes satellite expertise. Beyond that, Bright Star will be looking at other opportunities not limited to BT’s customers.
The new business will include satellite earth stations in the UK, France and the USA but it is as yet unclear where the operation will be headquartered. Currently BT’s M&B operates out of the iconic BT Tower.
The transfer and negotiations around the unit are likely to have given BT some food for thought as to how they can manage the disposal of business units they do not see as key, or that are giving rates of return below the main business’s targets.
After such protracted negotiations it will be interesting to see if a more bottom line-focused business emerges and if BT attempts similar transfers around the peripheries of its empire in the future.
22 June, 2006
Nokia 6080 Mobile Phone Announced
Slipping and slithering down the well oiled product slipway at Nokia is their latest swishy tri-band phone, the Nokia 6080 (no relation to their 1997 phone of the same name!).
Primarily targeted at Asian consumers, Nokia 6080 is a fairly bland, all-black looking affair with garish silver/gold highlights and a user interface akin to the popular Nokia Series 40 series.
There’s the usual raft of well-tuned Nokia features onboard, including a camera, Bluetooth, MP3 player, video recorder, FM Radio and MP3 ring tones.
Sporting a backlit keypad and bright colour display, the handset comes bundled with a stereo headset and offers all the usual customisation options (with wallpapers, themes, annoying ring tones etc) to keep da kidz happy.
There’s also an exclusive Sodoku game designed specially for the 6080 included if that’s how you like to waste away the hours.
Apart from the trusty phone functions, the Nokia 6080 also comes with Nokia’s Xpress audio messaging, email capabilities and a push to talk feature, with EDGE connectivity and an onboard XHTML browser for nippy browsing on the move.
Talk time is a distinctively average 3.5 hours with a standby time of up to 12 days.
The phone is expected to emerge around the fourth quarter of 2006 for about 180 Euros.
Nokia
20 June, 2006
The Siemens-Nokia Deal Examined
In the wake of the dot com boom, then the dot com collapse, equipment vendors have been feeling the fall-out and mergers seem to be the way to reconcile the collapsing markets. The Nokia-Siemens merger announcement bears witness to this.
Though the telecoms market is still expanding, increased competition from new entrants has made life very difficult for incumbent players.
The Siemens/Nokia merger is just the latest in what’s likely to be a continuing trend, both for vendors and telecoms companies.
Nokia brings expertise in the mobile space (they previously pulled out fixed markets), while Siemens has experience in the wired and broadband markets. Though there will be some overlaps, both companies mainly concentrate in non-competing spaces and as such, they should be able to move forwards with the best of both companies to offer a strong solution for next generation networks.
Siemens, a German giant
Even after disposing of their mobile arms (BenQ have already taken up the mobile phone division), Siemens is still a huge force in the world market, with over 600,000 employees. They have just disposed of parts of the companies in markets they’re not competing well in.
The BenQ buy-out of the mobile division of Siemens allows BenQ to sell phones under the Siemens brand for 18 months, and then under a joint BenQ/Siemens brand for a further 5 years, though BenQ may well drop the Siemens brand altogether. However, they are able to utilise Siemens’ retails channels and will actually based out of the Siemens mobile division in Munich.
This turns BenQ from a small phone player, to one of the larger ones. Siemens have always been good at making phone innards (radios), but their designs have been dated. BenQ must be hoping to imitate the Sony/Ericsson partnership where Ericsson made good phones that weren’t stylish, while Sony had the ergonomics, but dire insides.
Watch out for the Chinese
Though the west is merging like mad (most recently Lucent and Alcatel, both previously giants in the telecoms world) the real threat is coming from China.
Companies such as Huawei (“wu why” sometimes pronounced “who are we” which fits their appearance into markets that they had no presence in until recently) are starting to make serious dents into the Tier 1 telecoms/ISP markets.
A couple of years ago, no one had heard of them. They initially attacked the core ISP market with Internet routers, and offered Cisco “clone” hardware. While Cisco might sell you a system, then you add the software and then all the extra features, Huawei offered a system with everything on in the first place for 60% of the Cisco base price. Not surprisingly in an extremely competitive market, ISPs started utilising Huawei equipment. Huawei also have a huge development resource of 10’s of thousands of high class engineers out of Chinese universities. Where Cisco might take weeks to analyse and diagnose a problem, Huawei set of team of people on the problem and can release fixes in hours.
Now they’ve established themselves in the ISP market, the surrounding markets are being worked on (and since most ISPs are now owned by telecoms companies, it’s the telecoms markets that are easiest to move into).
The Chinese can make carrier class equipment much more cost effectively than their western counterparts, which is why they are suffering.
As networks move towards triple and quadruple plays (voice, video, Internet or voice, video, Internet and mobile) the equipment vendors now have to compete in all these areas. Triple plays are most common currently, but as can be seen from the likes of players like Orange and NTL (both offering quadruple plays), the market is moving in that direction (Vodafone recently announced they’re moving into fixed/broadband plays).
The combination of Nokia as the mobile infrastructure side of the business and Siemens Communications as the broadband/fixed player should allow them to offer a complete solution to their existing and new customers. If they can get the synergies right, the combined might of both has a good chance of competing and ultimately surviving in this crowded arena.
Only time will tell if they can defend against the power against them.
20 June, 2006
Tens of Thousands View World Cup On Vodafone Mobiles
Vodafone Netherlands got in touch with us to tell us how wildly popular the World Cup has been on mobile phones on their service – breaking previous records of simultaneous viewers.
They have two ways to access the football. Total World Cup, a bargain 5 Euro service that allows subscribers to access four minute packages for each of the matches as often as they like during the World Cup up to 9 July; and the Goal Alerts service that delivers edited highlights, not surprisingly the goals, direct to subscribers handsets via MMS.
The on-demand Total World Cup service is the one that really lit up at 5pm on the evening of last weeks match between Holland and Serbia Montenegro.
When we first asked, Vodafone Netherlands followed the now-normal approach of mobile operators of shyness of exact figures. We probed a little deeper for the actual viewing figures and found out that there were tens of thousands of people view it simultaneously.
This would have been a big test for their mobile network, delivering something as bandwidth hungry as video all at the same time. Without any reports to us to the contrary, we can only assume it all went smoothly.
Previous viewing peaks were the friendly match against Mexico on 1 June, the day of the London bombings in July 2005 and some undoubtedly dull rubbish about Big Brother.
Flush with the success, and no doubt in a way of trying to get subscribers hooked on MMS delivery, Vodafone are, as of today, offering the Goal Alerts service ‘without extra charge.’ Those without the handsets to handle video MMS will get a still photo delivered.
Mobile TV is now the 3rd most popular service on Vodafone Netherlands – behind voice and SMS – for those with capable handsets.
Vodafone Netherlands
16 June, 2006