Portable

USB Foot Warmers And Gloves
With the evenings drawing in and artic breezes circulating around your workstation, it may be time to invest in some handy USB-powered warming devices.
First up is the USB Foot Warmers, designed to get your tootsies toastie within minutes.
The USB Foot Warmers are covered in soft brown and white fake fur backed by a ‘leather fabric’ base with the slippers being warmed through a compact, ultra-flexible heat panel lurking in the lining of the base. The heat panel can be removed for washing.
Once the slippers are plugged into a USB port, this panel will immediately begin to heat and will remain at comfortably warm until unplugged. Or your machine crashes.
The foot warmers come with a 107cm-long USB cable (how long before the user wanders off and drags the PC with them?) and it has to be said that the whole ensemble is quite exceptionally unstylish.
The USB Foot Warmers are available from the Gadgetshop for fifteen quid. No thanks Santa!
USB G-Gloves for girlies
Somewhat more attractive – but equally daft – are the USB G-Gloves from our favourite purveyor of frivolous goods, Brando.
In case you didn’t know, the ‘G’ stands for ‘Girls’ who Brando hope will be wooed by their knitted (real wool!) pastel colour schemes on offer.
The gloves feature an open ended design that lets girls show off their nail varnish do some typing, with the gloves offering two USB-powered heating levels.
Each mitten comes with two built-in warming pads that heat by 10 degrees n five minutes, and you can pick up a pair for $22 (£13).
Brando also do a men’s version, but they weren’t the mean’n’macho, black-leather, studded affair we’d hoped for.
2 November, 2006
Sony Unveils The World’s Lightest Notebook PC
Sony has announced that it will be launching what it claims is the world’s lightest notebook computer in December in Japan.
Aimed at the swivel-action, besuited business crowd, the carbon-cased Sony ‘type G’ Vaio lappie weighs in at a fluffy-cloud like 898 grams, with Sony’s boffins still managing to fit in a 12.1-inch LCD screen, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and a mighty battery life.
Looking closer it appears that they’ve also managed to wedge in a fingerprint reader too.
Sony claims that their new laptop will keep on rocking for 12.5 hours on a single battery charge in Stamina mode – long enough for even the longest haul commuters.
There’s no optical drive onboard, although there’s also an optical drive version available, weighing a pixie-untroubling 984g.
The new lightweight range will be powered by a range of three CPUs (Celeron, Core Solo U1300 and U1400), backed by 512MB of RAM and 40-80GB hard disk drives.
From what we’ve seen of the press photos, it seems that the laptop will be available in grey, blue and carbon finishes, all of which look delightfully natty to us.
Sony said that it currently has no plans to sell this featherweight beauty overseas (which is a real shame because our hearts are a-pumping at this little fella), but has announced that they will be knocking out for about 220,000 yen in Japan ($1,881, £985).
Sony [Japan]
1 November, 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
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
Samsung Launches Upgraded Q1 Ultramobile PCs
With ne’er a parp on their usual raucous PR trumpet, Samsung have quietly shuffled out two updates to its Q1 ultra mobile Origami PC range.
Samsung’s Origami machines run a tablet version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and look to fill a niche in the market for between laptop PCs and PDAs.
Sporting a 7in LCD monitor with touchscreen functionality, the Origami measures up at around half the size of a regular laptop PC, but still offers full-fat functionality, with users able to surf the web, play games, watch movies, listen to music and make notes
Weighing 1.7 pounds, it’s light enough to carry around for a few hours which is a good thing because that’s when the battery will conk out (battery life is measured at a rather disappointing three hours.)
The updated Q1-Pentium comes with a 60 GB hard disk and 1 GB RAM, and substitutes a nippier Intel Pentium M 723 1GHz processor for the original Celeron M 900MHz processor.
The other new model – the Q1b – uses a cheaper Via Technologies’ C7 1GHz processor, and is fitted with a 40 GB hard disk and 512 MB RAM.
Samsung said in a statement that these new PCs are available in some European and Asian countries and in the U.S – we spotted one site advertising the Q1-Pentium for $1,250 and the Q1b $900.
Samsung Q1
24 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
EW-700 WiFiFone Announced By Samsung
Currently causing something of a stir on the floor of the Korea Electronics Show is the WiFiFone EW-700, a Wi-Fi-enabled VoIP smartphone running Windows Mobile.
The all-black phone is a collaboration between Samsung and Korean, big-name cordless phone maker Eidicom, and sports a slightly unusual keypad layout, with navigation controls sat in the left hand corner of the handset and the phone keys shunted to the right.
This leaves the ‘call’ and ‘answer’ buttons in the bottom left hand corner of the handset which seems far from ideal to us.
The EW-700, looks a fairly plain, clunky beast too – in fact the photos we’ve seen have something of a pre-production air to them – but it’s not short of features.
The phone offers Samsung’s latest “Post-PC mobile multimedia processor”, an “embedded OS/Device driver,” web browser, Instant Messaging and an MP3 and video player keeping customers entertained. We figure there must be some kind of memory card expansion available, but seeing as all the pics released so far only show the front of the camera, we can’t be sure.
We’re yet to get full specs either, but the screen looks like a 320 x 240 pixels jobbie to us, and there’s also a 2-megapixel camera with camcorder function onboard, a voice recorder, hardware MPEG engine offering full frame video and Wi-Fi and infrared connectivity.
As for pricing and availability, we haven’t the foggiest right now.
[From Aving USA]
23 October, 2006
Orb MyCasting on Nokia N80 In US
Orb MyCasting has been grabbed by Nokia to be bundled in with the Nokia N80 Internet Edition, in the US only.
When US N80 owners are swanning around, they’ll be able to watch live TV, videos, listen to music and podcasts and video images on their PC. Not just that, but they can set programs to record on their PC from their mobiles.
The TV and media companies have not, to say the very least, been particularly keen on letting people do this. We’ll see if they come out against Nokia.
Back in August this year, Orb MyCasting were keen to “share”, that 19 months after the service was launched, they’ve had over 1.5m hours of digital media transfered over their service – equivalent to 125 years of media-idge. Interestingly up to 45 minutes per user per day, on average.
Orb has similar deals with companies such as AMD, Vodafone, Hauppauge, Intel and Creative Labs.
Programming video recordings is not unique – Sky TV has been offering this since July this year through their Mobile Sky+ Programming
Orb Networks
12 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
Samsung X838 Ultra Compact Phone/MP3 Player
Looking like lovechild of a bedtime romp between an iPod and a mobile phone, Samsung’s X838 phone has real “gimme!” appeal.
Folded up, it looks like a conventional compact MP3 player, complete with a 128 x 220 pixels 26k colour screen and a control scroll wheel clearly ‘inspired’ by Messrs I and Pod.
Turning the device into a phone is simply a case of swivelling the pull out screen through 180 degrees to reveal the phone keys lurking below.
Because of the narrow, slimline construction, the number keys are unusually arranged in rows of two, with the usual ‘call’ and ‘end call’ buttons at the top.
We’re not sure if closing the screen ends the call or if the thing is spring loaded, but either way the phone looks great to us.
Unlike many botched attempts at converging mobiles with music players, this one manages a pretty good likeness to a ‘proper’ MP3 player, with the colourful display offering track information and album art.
There’s also an easily accessible ‘hold’ button so you don’t end up ringing your Mum when you’re rocking out to Pantera, as well as a volume up/down control on the side of the unit.
Inside, there’s 1GB of internal memory for storing tunes as well as a 1.3Mpix onboard camera and a sneaking suspicion that it also plays videos.
We couldn’t see any sign of an expansion slot, which is a bit of a shame, nor any reference to battery life (with something as small as this, we’re figuring it’s not going to be that long).
Also bundled in with the Bluetooth-enabled X838 is an alarm clock, recording functionality and a Java game.
We spent some time trying to translate the text from the Phone Daily website, and we think that the phone will be available in black, white, orange, and, err, powder.
Whatever colours the thing comes in, it looks like a great phone to us: ultra-small, compact, cool and with a fun interface, which only leaves one question. When can we have one please?
[From Akihabara News]
9 October, 2006