Sitting right next to the baked beans and cornflakes at a Tescos near you soon should be Tesco’s new range of cheapo MP3 players.
Built and branded by bulk electronics firm Technika, the seven new players are aimed at the cheapskate end of the market, with prices starting at a mere £18.
Although the design is unlikely to get iPod whizzkid Jonathan Ive waking up in a lather of midnight sweat, the players seem attractive enough, offering a simple, solid construction.
The range starts with the 18 quid MP-806 player – which only manages just 128MB of flash memory – with the top end MP-806 player cranking the memory all the way up to, err, 1GB for £50.
The interface is bog standard but straightforward – there’s not much to get confused about here – and the player connects to desktops via a USB interface.
What little specs we could find say the players support MP3s and WMA files bought from download shops, although we couldn’t find any of the models listed on Microsoft’s ‘play for sure’ Website.
Tesco are no stranger to this MP3 thing, launching an online music store back in November 2004, offering 500,000 tracks which can be downloaded for 79p, with albums costing £7.99.
The company also offers a sizeable range of MP3 players, including Toshiba, Sony, Archos and Philips, with models available by mail order or from their 200 Tesco ‘Extra’ stores.
For globe trotters, city slickers, urban commuters and spoddy transport types, the freeware Metro looks to be a very useful application. 
Using Metro
Using the program’s simple interface, you can also get Metro to display station details, stops between the stations on your journey and even associate contacts with stations. 
Conclusion
Back in our day, we were lucky if we got a lump of mud as a toy (Luxury! – editor), but kids today are spoilt rotten with an endless succession of frivolous gadgets demanding an unwelcome draining of parents’ wallets. 
Fisher Price’s website doesn’t offer any details about camera resolution, but we figure it’s going to be pretty crappy. 
The circular player features big buttons and an LCD screen with icons to let kids pick their own choons and be a junior DJ Selectaaaaaa! 
Sony has whipped out its first laptop equipped with a next-generation Blu-ray optical disk drive, saying that it will be available in Japan next month. 
The AR-Series will also come with a HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) output for hooking up the lappie to a HD-ready TV or Full HD desktop display. 
Powered by Intel Core Solo U1400 (1.2 Ghz)/U1300 (1.06 Ghz) the pint-sized PC will sport an Intel 945GMS Express chipset, 512MB RAM, 20/30 GB hard drive and 69 key QWERTY keyboard. 
The much-anticipated launch of the low-end new Intel-powered MacBook’s has just happened – or IntelMac for the rest of us as it might become known (or not). 
The screen sounds like a significant improvement. Apple refer to it as a ‘glossy widescreen display’ and it’s 79% brighter than the previous, with “incredibly crisp images with richer colours, deeper blacks and significantly greater contrast.” We’d imagine that it’s like those great Sony laptop screens and will become a big seducer. 
Another in the “hacks” range of O’Reilly books, where hacking is doing interesting things with something, rather than the unfortunate media convention of breaking into computers (which has some relevence as you’re getting into the guts of the BlackBerry in ways RIM, the manufacturer, may not have expected and/or indeed intended). 
The book also gives a good insight into programming the Blackberry and describes the tools that RIM provide and how to go about using them (and what other things you need to do). RIM originally made the BlackBerry for corporates and the last thing they wanted was nasty virii and programs infecting them, so when a program tries to access some of the BlackBerry’s inner workings the BlackBerry actually checks that the program is valid and should be doing that. RIM force programmers to “sign” programs and there’s info on how to go through that process. 
JupiterResearch have released research that indicates that 53 percent of Digital Video Recorder (DVR)/PVR users in America have used their DVRs to skip commercials. 
Now where we’re united with Jupiter is that people watch more TV when they’ve got a DVR. That is the experience of the vast majority of PVR/DVR users. 
Butler is a hugely popular selection of nifty utilities for the Palm Treo smartphone that manages to fix many of the minor shortcomings of the phone in one fell swoop. 
Launching apps
Lights out
Butler also offers a straight alarm feature that lets you set up to 6 repeating alarms, complete with customised messages and the option to assign a program to open after you’ve cleared the alarm. 
Wrapping up the feature set is a “Hide SMS popup” option which stops you being bothered by SMS screens, an option to beam your business card by holding the phone button down and a useful “Keep Exchange Manager Clean” utility which addresses the annoying ‘preference loss’ bug seen on the Palm OS. 
It’s worth persevering though because it won’t take long before you begin to wonder how you ever coped without Butler on your Treo – and at just $14.95 (£8.20,€11.90) it’s something of a bargain! 
Nordic browser kings Opera Software have released Opera Mini 2.0, a spanking new version of their tiny Web browser that runs on almost all mobile phones. 
Also new for version two is a speed dial widget, which lets surfers call up bookmarks by assigning shortcut key combinations. 
With Opera Mini supporting mobile commerce via SMS, users can directly buy ringtones, games and other content for delivery as an SMS. 
Proof that podcasting is moving further into the mainstream comes with the news that MP3 players from mobiBLU will be shipping with preinstalled software designed to download podcasts with just one click,. 
With a wagging finger and nodding head, Russell Holliman, founder and CEO at Podcast Ready sighed, “There is a huge perception that podcasts are for Apple users only, and if you’re not using an iPod it’s a difficult process.” 
The appropriately named mobiBLU Cube is, at 0.94″ square, one of the smallest in the world and comes with a large OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display.