Author: Daniel Sung
Napster unleashes free service for Philips GoGear
All Philips GoGear customers who’ve been laughed at by their mates with big shiny iPod Touches can now have the last giggle, or at least the latest one anyway. Philips has announced a deal with Napster such that all GoGear users will now have access to Napster’s PC service and full list of 640,000 albums from 540,000 artists for absolutely zip.
Additionally, if you happen to be the owner of a GoGear Opus, Ariaz or Vibe you’ll also get 30 days free access to the Napster To Go portable subscription service which would normally work out at £14.95 per month. Sure, a month’s grace isn’t a lot to play with but at the least you do get 90 ad free radio stations and recommendation software to play with as well as the on the hoof access as opposed to PC side-loading only.
It’s hard to work out exactly how good this all actually is given that a) it’s DRMed up to the hilt and b) there’s a lot of free music services out there anyway but I don’t suppose you can really argue with a sudden 10,000 folding of your effective music collection for both your mp3 player and home.
Philips / Naptser
Sony Handycam TG7VE – world's smallest HD camcorder with GPS
Pocket-sized, full HD camcorders are all the rage this year. Sanyo unleashed a world of Xactis, Toshiba came out with the £99 Camileo P10 and today it’s the turn of the Sony Handycam TG7VE.
The claim to fame for this 230g pistol grip shooter is that it’s the smallest full HD camcorder that comes with GPS. Yes, you can shoot your 2.3-megapixel video onto 16GB of internal memory for around six hours and then watch it all back on the 2.7″ LCD complete with map and pinpoint graphics showing exactly where it is you saw that you saw you mate accidentally fall into that vomit spattered shopping trolley.
In true Sony style, the TG7VE takes light through a Carl Zeiss lens onto a 1/5″ Exmor CMOS sensor and puts the lot together with a Bionz processor. It shoots stills at 4-megapixels, gives you up to 10x optical zoom and features all sorts of face-tracking and smile shot functionality which will even work in video capture mode.
No word on the price just yet but it’ll be out in May along with a 32GB additional memory card plus a wide-angle cap too. Sounds like a good ‘un so long as they can keep the price and battery consumption low.
Sanyo Xacti HD200 review
Gadget Show Live 2009 – completely, utterly sold out!
Ladies, gentlemen; gadget boys and gadget gals, the Gadget Show Live 2009 is officially sold out. I have just been informed by the event organisers that there are precisely zero pairs of tickets left for both the Super Theatre and even access to the main show.
To those that have their hands clutched around a pair like Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe, then congratulations, for those that haven’t, well, there might just be a competition on Tech Digest very soon indeed because I happen to have a bunch burning a hole in my drawer at the moment and I prefer my drawers without holes in.
Keep ’em peeled and I’ll see you down at the NEC at the How To Theatre along with the rest of the Shiny Tech Crew from 17th-19th April. Good luck.
Gadget Show Live 2009
SHINY VIDEO: BlackBerry App World – first look
RIM has launched their app store for BlackBerry devices, as of midnight, known as BlackBerry App World.
Once downloaded the software gives users access to 500 or 600 hundred applications, from today, expected to rise to 1,000 by the weekend. Categories included Games, Maps & Navigation, Personal Finance & Banking with the full list after the jump.
From my first view of the service, it runs surprisingly smoothly over even the GPRS signal and looks a hell of a lot more user friendly than the likes of the Android Marketplace. The front page holds 12 featured apps as chosen and rechosen on a daily basis by BlackBerry. You can also navigate by the top downloads, by category or straight keyword based search.
Developers receive an 80% / 20% split of the profits of downloads with RIM and they can also choose which countries can host their apps with the store changing on your handset depending upon where you are and what software your device can cope with.
App World will work on all BlackBerrys with version 4.2 OS and beyond.
App Categories
- Entertainment
- Games
- Maps and Navigation
- Music and Video
- News and Weather
- Personal Finance and Banking
- Personal Health and Wellness
- Productivity and Utilities
- Professional and Business
- Reference and eBooks
- Social Networking and Sharing
- Sports and Recreation
- Travel
BlackBerry App World
SHINY VIDEO: Vision Racer 3 & Logitech G25 wheel
If you’re can’t quite afford the £160,000 for an Aston Martin DBS you might want consider the Vision Racer 3 racing game chair for around a hundredth of the price. You might not be able to order your upholstery to match but you won’t be so concerned about your mates having a go.
Today was the lauch of the third generation of the Vision Racer to site alongside the Logitech G25 racing wheel. The whole set up is designed to work with games consoles and in full comes with the wheel, steel alloy peddles (adaptable to both automatic and manual), a six speed gear stick, Logitech 2.1 surround speakers with sub-woofer vibrating directly under your bum and now the ultimate in gaming chairs too.
The Vision Racer 3 was created by ex-rally car designer Geoff Turton and features a steel alloy chassis, full adjustable seat and optional gear stick and monitor mount designed to house the sub 26″ flat pannel of your choice. It’s not about gimmicks – the seat doesn’t move about or rumble when you crash – it’s all about the racing position which is apparently so spot on that Geoff assures me he is nummber 10 out of 14 million players in the world of online motor racing.
I’m not in the slightest bit interested in motor racing games but there were some petrol head gamers there at the launch slavering as they accelerated out of the chicanes of virtual Monaco. What I can tell you is that, yes, the seat is comfortable and it does sit you at just the right viewing angle and position for a proper drive. I’m not sure you’d ever choose the gearstick instead of the levers behind the wheel but it does look good, if feel a little on the plastic side compared to the quality of the rest of the set up.
At £1,699, with all bits and pieces included, it’s actually not a bad deal considering the wheel alone costs £279. Better still, it comes in a reasonable sized box and with the kind of tool kit you’ll be proud of forever. Definitely one for the enthusiasts but not necessarily the filthiest of the rich.
Vision Racer & Logitech
Olympus E450 – good value four-thirds camera
Meet the 380g Olympus E-450 four-thirds DSLR camera. Light, isn’t is? It’s an upgrade of the E420 and features a 10-megapixel MOS sensor, a new – and hopefully improved – TruePic III+ image processor and a nice, bright 2.7″ LCD with 176 degree viewing angle.
It has 28 shooting modes including the kind of fluff you’d expect from a compact camera but gives you one-touch white balance, bracketing functions and a modest ISO range of 100-1600 to play with. It will now also capture RAW footage in burst of eight.
It’s all pretty good value at £450 including the Zuiko 14-42mm kit lens but bear in mind that it’s not a hell of a lot different than the Olympus E420 and probably soon quite a lot more expensive than it too.
Available in May.
Panasonic Lumix G1 Review
Reduntantees revenge – companies grassed up for unlicensed software
Sacked workers are getting their revenge and chance of a very good payout by reporting their former employers for running unlicensed software.
According the to Business Software Association, they are currently receiving 100 leads each week to follow up on companies who haven’t properly paid for and acquired the programs on which they run. My first thought was that it was just a straight two fingers up by those made redundant but apparently it’s the financial incentive scheme as introduced by the BSA in 2006 that’s proving the real draw.
In the States you can get anywhere up to $200,000 for a successful snitch. I should imagine you’d probably have to grass up a really big company for those kind of bucks. I’d imagine Microsoft and Apple would be a dead loss but, then, you never know. Perhaps they haven’t paid themselves…or each other.
(via Computer Weekly)
RUMOUR: iPhone 3.0 to launch with 3.0 OS on 12/6/09
Word round the infoblob has it that the iPhone 3.0 OS will be out on the 12th June after an employee at AT&T leaked the information. Now, it doesn’t take putting a lot of 2s together to work out that there’s a very good chance that a third generation of the iPhone itself will come out with it.
Reasons why:
1) The last two years have seen iPhone’s launched in June/July
2) Everyone has depleted their stocks of iPhone 3Gs without replacing them
3) If you’re launching a new OS, you might as well launch a new handset to show it off.
Reasons why not:
1) It’s all a bit obvious
My money’s on the new handset too. How about yours? Send me an e-mail or DM us on Techdigest and techdigestnews.
(via PRnews)
Twitter changes @replies to mentions
Twitter has changed the term “replies” to “mentions” for a reason of pure semantics. Before any hardcore tweet heads out there start freaking out, nothing has actually changed or very little anyway. All the same, let Uncle Dan take you through it step by step:
Notice a section of the Techdigest Twitter page on the right. We shall call this Exhibit A. Note how Exhibit A now reads “@techdigest” where is used to say “@replies”. It said that because before it would only pick up @replies if @whateveryourusernameis was written at the start of someone’s tweet, ignoring all the times your user name might feature later on in the message.
Eg: @techdigest is really cool – would be picked up
Just going to have a read of @techdigest – would not be.
So, Twitter has got wise to this and is now sensitive wherever you mention someone’s user name. So, to let us know, they’ve started calling them “mentions” instead of replies. Make a big difference to your life, that one? Here endeth the lesson.
(via Twitter Blog)
Last.FM subscription service put on hold – radio still free for now
Last.FM has decided to postpone the obligatory subscription to receive their radio streaming service outside of the UK, US and Germany for now.
According to the company blog, they’re going to add some more features to make the package more palatable including the inclusion of third party APIs, which means that although the service will be limited, radio streaming will continue to mobile phones even outside of the UK, US and Germany.
Payment plans and methods have obviously been an issue as Last.Fm is introducing gift subscriptions and SMS services to make it easier for you to cough up the three euros. So, a reprieve it is but for how long, another question.
(via Last HQ)
