BlackBerry releasing 10 yellow phones for Selfridges' birthday

yellow-blackberry.jpg

Smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry is best buddies with Selfridges, and to celebrate the department store’s 100th birthday it’ll be releasing ten bright yellow BlackBerry Bolds with redesigned number keys.

The handsets will be individually numbered one to ten, and go on sale at Selfridges in London today for £1,000 each. Want one? Well, I don’t imagine there’ll be a mad rush, so you can probably pop down tomorrow.

BlackBerry

How to: Install Ubuntu 9.04 on an Acer Aspire One

jackalope2.jpg

Last week, the team behind Ubuntu released version 9.04, which has been named Jaunty Jackalope. It’s a great upgrade on 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, and it’s also the first Ubuntu release to come with a netbook remix.

As I’m the proud owner of the Acer Aspire One netbook, I thought I’d whack Jaunty on and see how it behaves. I’m impressed. The UI is clear and clean (although the default Ubuntu brown clashes rather with my machine’s blue chassis) and everything runs zippily. It’s most definitely an upgrade over the modified Linux distro that the netbook came with, with the only issue that I’ve run into being that you can’t hot-plug media cards into the reader, they need a reboot to work.

Just as a quick caveat, I did all the testing on an 8GB SSD Linux version of an Aspire One, with the prep work on a machine running Windows Vista. I’ve mentioned below some options for those with a mechanical hard drive, but the only thing I can guarantee is that everything below works for me. If you use a different netbook, you should be fine, but this guide is for the Aspire One.

Back up any files you want to keep before you start because this process will wipe your drive, and make sure you’ve got a restore disk for if you run into trouble. For info on how to create one, see the documentation that came with your Aspire One. We take no responsibility for any software or hardware problems you run into as a result of following this, or any other, guide.

What you’ll need

  • Right, now that’s over with, let’s get started. Here’s what you’ll need to hand before you start, both software and hardware:
  • An Aspire One, or another compatible netbook
  • An empty flash drive with a 1GB or greater capacity. I used this 2GB Toshiba drive.
  • The Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix .IMG file (970MB)
  • A disk imager tool, I used Win32 Image Writer.
  • Once you’ve got all that together, about 45 minutes to an hour of your time

Preparing the USB disk

win32imagewriter.jpg

First of all, plug your USB drive into whatever computer you’re going to use to copy the install files across with. Probably the one that you’re reading these instructions on. Go into ‘My Computer’ and note what drive letter has been allocated to the USB disk.

Then start up Win32 Disk Imager, and click the “…” button, and navigate to wherever you saved the Ubuntu .IMG file. When you find it, select it and hit okay. Then, under ‘device’, select the drive letter for the USB, and hit ‘write’. Let it do its thing, it should take less than 5 minutes.

Preparing your Aspire One
On your Aspire One, make sure everything that you want to keep is backed up, because part of the process below involves wiping the drive of your netbook. Take off any data you want to keep and store it safely elsewhere.

Then power down the Aspire One and remove anything that’s plugged into it, like SD cards or USB peripherals. Keep the power cable in, though. Plug in the USB drive you’re using for the install, and power on.

Almost immediately, hit F12 when it prompts you to “Select boot order”. From the menu that appears, select the USB drive. It’ll prompt you to pick a language, so select your favourite. Then the USB drive will give you the option to try out Ubuntu without installing. Do that if you like, and when you’re ready to install properly, then reboot and get back to this menu.

The installation process
When you’re ready to take the plunge, hit “Install Ubuntu” on this menu. Give it a minute to load everything into the device’s memory. To start with, the progress bar will move between the left and right sides, but shortly after it’ll start filling up.

Pick a language again. Probably the same one as before, unless you’re feeling a little devil-may-care and you’re in the mood for an install in Suomi. Seriously though, pick English. Then hit ‘forward’ and select a timezone and city. Hit ‘forward’ again.

Pick the right keyboard layout for your machine. Test using the little box at the bottom, and check the ” and @ keys, which are swapped around on American keyboards. If all seems like it’s in order, then hit ‘forward’ again.

Disks and file systems
This is where things get a little tricky. If you finish and it won’t boot, then go back and double-check this section carefully. Now – you have options that depend on what kind of disk you’ve got.

If you have a traditional mechanical hard drive then you can pick between installing Ubuntu alongside your existing operating system or replacing it. If you’d like to do the former, then pick the first option in the list – install alongside an existing operating system, then click forward and skip straight to the next section, ignoring all the stuff about filesystems below.

If you’re using a mechanical drive and you’d like to replace your existing OS entirely, then click the second option – “Use the entire disk”. Make sure that the right disk is selected – not a USB drive or an SD card or anything. Be aware that this option will delete all data on that disk, then hit ‘forward’ and skip straight to the next section.

Lastly, if you have an SSD then you get an even more complex choice. You won’t have room to do anything except installing over the current operating system, so option one is out. However, you have a choice between installing the ext4, ext3 and ext2 filesystems.

Ext4 is known as a ‘journaling’ filesystem. It writes into a ‘journal’ whenever it modifies anything, so it’s much safer if you lose power suddenly and you want your files to be okay. Ext3 is also a ‘journaling’ filesystem but it’s older, so I don’t recommend its use over Ext4.

Ext2 doesn’t do any ‘journaling’ – so it uses far fewer read/writes. As an SSD wears out quicker than a regular hard drive, selecting Ext2 will make things run a smidge faster and increase your drive’s lifetime. As a result, though, files can corrupt if you suddenly lose power on your machine. Even if nothing corrupts, you’ll have to sit through an irritating file check every time you startup if you don’t power down properly.

It’s up to you – select Ext4 for a safer drive that wears out quicker, or Ext2 for a slightly faster drive that’ll last longer, but is more prone to errors if you lose power. If you’d like to read up more on the subject, then head to this forum post, or this wiki entry.

ubuntu-install-partitions.png

Once you’ve decided, click option three – “specify partitions manually”. Don’t be scared by the word ‘advanced’, if you understood what I just said, then you’ll be fine. You should have two drives in front of you, one big one marked “ext2”, and one smaller one marked “swap”.

Double-click the big “ext2” drive, and an ‘edit partition’ box should pop up. Select from the “Use as:” drop-down either “Ext2 file system” or “Ext4 file system”, depending on which you want (see above). Then tick the box marked ‘Format the partition’ and then select “/” as the mount point. Hit okay, then forward. That wasn’t too bad now, was it?

If you’ve got no idea what drive you’ve got, then just click the middle option – “Use the entire disk”.

Progress bars
Tough bit over. Type in your name, a username (all lowercase, please), a password and name of the computer. Choose whether you want it to prompt you for your password every time you start up or not. Then hit ‘forward’.

It’ll show you a summary screen for what it’s about to do. Scan it quickly and make sure it’s about to do what you’re expecting it to, then take a deep breath and hit ‘forward’.

Progress bars should appear. Go make a cup of tea. It took me about 20 minutes to install to an SSD, or it’ll be slightly longer for a mechanical drive. When it’s complete, choose the restart option, and remove the USB disk when it tells you to. The system will then reset.

Complete!

ubuntu-netbook-remix.jpg

Voila! Your installation is complete. You’ll find that Ubuntu boots a tiny bit slower than the default Linux OS, but it’ll be a bit faster than Windows. It’s slower than the default OS because it’s so full of good stuff.

Click around a bit – the left column shows categories of programs. The middle pane shows the programs that are in each category – click one to start it. Lastly, the right-hand pane will show you storage locations. Click one to load it.

Have a little fiddle around in the settings, too. There’s plenty of customisable stuff. Change the colour scheme away from the brown if you like, or turn off ‘tap-to-click’ on the trackpad. If you’d like to edit the menus, you can do that by clicking “Main Menu” in “Preferences”.

Congratulations on your Linux install! No command line shenanigans at all. Wasn’t it easy? Tell us how happy you are on Twitter by messaging @techdigest.

Sony shows off wireless Bluetooth headphones

sony-bt100-cx.jpg

Sony’s made itself a bit of a name around here for steadfastly producing headphone models that don’t really excite but still sell well. Today it’s announced some mostly unexciting Bluetooth headphones.

Both models use Bluetooth 2.1 to communicate with your phone or MP3 player. The DR-BT100CX are in-ear and have a little dongle to control volume and skip tracks as well as answering or rejecting phone calls. They feature eight hours of playback time and are recharged via USB.

The BT101s have a headband design and pack 30mm neodymium drivers. There’s twelve hours of playback in the onboard battery and again it recharges via USB. Both models support A2DP, AVRCP, HFP and HSP Bluetooth profiles and are available to order right now from Sony Style.

Press Release

Facebook builds a door into the walled garden

walled-garden.jpg

Facebook has long been criticised for being a ‘walled garden’ where users can frolic freely with their data on the site but do absolutely nothing with it elsewhere. That should be changing this afternoon as the site opens up far more useful data to its users.

External developers will now, crucially, be able to extract real-time information from the site and use it to build services on their own websites. For example, someone could build a site that tracks ‘trending’ words in status updates and wall posts, much like Twitter’s ‘trending topics’ function.

It’s a little trickier to open up than something like Twitter, thanks to the intricate privacy settings that each user is able to set. It’s likely that at first it’ll simply take anyone out who’s got any kind of privacy set other than the default, but that’ll probably evolve over time.

(via Guardian)

Rumour: Samsung Omnia Pro with QWERTY keyboard

samsung-omnia-pro-rumor.jpg

On top of dropping Android handsets into the rumour mill this morning, Samsung’s also throwing in an entry into the rumpus that’ll be occurring this summer between the HTC Magic, new iPhone, Palm Pre, and Nokia N97.

The Omnia Pro is just a rumour at the moment, but what a rumour – a 3.5″ AMOLED display and 5-megapixel camera combine with a slide-out QWERTY to make a tasty set of specs. Apparently it’ll be running Windows Mobile 6.1, but that’ll be upgradable to 6.5 when it’s released.

Best of all, it’s on the cards to cost very little – just €500. Whether that’ll give it an advantage in a market that’s more focused on specs than price remains to be seen, but the “current economic climate” should help.

(via Engadget)

Samsung launching i7500 and S8000 Android handsets

samsung-i7500-android-thin.jpg

Phones don’t just jump straight from ‘unheard-of’ to ‘rumoured’ to ‘confirmed’, there’s a whole host of grey area in between. Samsung has two phones on the way that’ll be running Google’s Android OS, and they’re both about half-way between ‘rumoured’ and ‘confirmed’, i.e. pretty much certain.

The i7500 will be out first, in June, and will be just 11.9mm thick. It’ll feature no hardware keypad at all, so it’ll be rocking the latest version of Android – “Cupcake” – which packs an on-screen keyboard.

Other than that, it’ll have a 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 5-megapixel camera, 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD card slot and 8GB of internal memory. Specs-wise, it’s basically an N95 8GB with a touchscreen and Android welded on.

Interestingly, the price seems to be set (in Germany) at just €300 (£270 or so), which is rather cheap for a handset with those specs. That’s what dumping proprietary operating systems will do for you.

samsung-s8000.jpg

Then there’s the S8000 which, as the name suggests, is an upgraded version of the i7500. It’s got a 3.1″ AMOLED touchscreen running at 480 x 800 resolution, meaning that the colours will look incredible while still consuming very little power.

Specs-wise it’s nearly identical. GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 5-megapixel camera, and 3.5mm headphone jack, but only 2GB of internal memory and no mention of an SD card slot. It will again be running Android, which takes us to two of a promised ‘more than three’ Android handsets from Samsung this year.

(via Unwiredview, i7500 and i8000)

Yahoo! Mail: the past, present and future

yahoo-y.jpg

Back in October last year, we previewed a lot of the changes that Yahoo! would be making in 2009, including some of the changes they’d be making to their webmail product.

Well, this morning I descended into the depths of Yahoo! HQ in central London to meet the Head of Mail for Europe, David McDowell. We spoke wide-rangingly, but most of the chat focused on extra detail on what will be happening to Yahoo! Mail in the next two months or so.

Losing Popularity

It turns out that the introduction of a new, slick, interface proved unpopular with users. The javascript-heavy frontend might have proved usable when running locally, but on many users’ PCs it crawled. Yahoo! started losing marketshare, dipping down several percentage points, which in the mature market of email means trouble.

So, acting nimbly, the big Y! jumped into action, stripping down the features and lightening the application considerably. Out went the snazzy RSS reader that less than one percent of people actually used. A vocal minority complained, but the users started to trickle back. They also put a lot of work into speeding up the code and now Yahoo! is back to 39% marketshare – higher than it’s been in a year.

RSS

Why didn’t people like RSS? McDowell is non-committal: “It boils down to narrowcast and broadcast. Most people will tell you that they like customisation and personalisation, but most people will not make the (time) investment to make that happen”. Yahoo found that people couldn’t be bothered to set it up.

But they haven’t given up on RSS. I suggested that the company should use the ‘social graph’ that it has for each user – where it can work out who a user’s friends are by how much they interact with different people – to suggest relevant blog content. “The user says: if you can (set up an RSS feed) on my behalf, in a transparent way,” McDowell concurred, “then that would be very beneficial”.

800px-Yahoo_Mail_Screenshot.png

Mobile

We also talked about mobile. Somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of Yahoo! Mail’s users take advantage of the wide range of mobile clients available to access their email on the go.

Yahoo! wants to pump that up, though, and users will soon have the ability to visit a website on their phones where the company can auto-detect the best experience they’ll be able to get, and point them to the relevant bit of the site. People with smartphones will get downloadable apps, but less capable handsets will be pointed to the HTML version.

Resolution

Lastly I asked McDowell about a couple of common complaints about Yahoo! Mail’s service. Firstly that the screen resolution limits are too restrictive – users of netbooks with resolutions below 1024×768 can’t get the shiny new interface and have to use the ancient HTML version.

Apparently the company aren’t too bothered about that – seeing it more as a feature: “The application is like a desktop application. So, if the resolution gets too small then the elements just merge and you can’t see what’s going on,” McDowell continued, “We’re the only big email provider to offer two distinct products – they meet two different sets of needs.”

Usernames

Secondly, I asked why users were forced to choose between .com and .co.uk addresses – with many wanting to receive UK content on most of the site, but sticking with a .com address because it’s easier for people to remember. McDowell acknowledged that this was an issue and they’re addressing it:

“Coming up very soon, users will be able to register .com addresses but still get UK content, and then they’ll be able to go into options and choose if they want any email that’s sent to [email protected]”.

That’s a great step forward for usability, especially as it’s currently impossible to register a .com address if you’ve already got the corresponding .co.uk.

Conclusions

Yahoo!’s working on bringing users a smarter, faster and more social inbox. It’s still a very ‘traditional’ approach to email, especially when compared to GMails tags, conversational threading and labs features, but it’s probably the best ‘traditional’ webmail client out there. It doesn’t scan messages for advertising reasons, unlike Google, it offers fully infinite storage and McDowell is adamant that people still like filing emails into folders.

I’m not about to jump and go grab a Yahoo! mail account – I’m very happy with my GMail – but if you’ve tried Google’s client and you didn’t like it, then Yahoo! is probably the next best thing. It’s just a shame that Yahoo!’s userbase isn’t really ready for RSS yet.

Yahoo! Mail

Warner offering to swap your HD-DVDs for Blu-rays

hd-dvd-bluray.png

Aware that the Blu-ray market still hasn’t really taken off, Warner Bros are getting a little desperate, and they’re waving an olive branch of peace at people who bought HD-DVDs. They’re going to let people mail the original box art for any HD-DVDs that they bought and swap them for the same title on Blu-ray.

It’s not quite free, they’re charging $4.95 per disc for the service, plus $6.95 shipping, but it’s still much cheaper than buying all the new discs yourself. It might even be worth scanning the local bargain bins for the old HD-DVDs to send off, then flog the replacements you get sent. You won’t be able to make a mint, though. It’s limited to 25 swaps per household.

(via Den of Geek and @stuart_coles)

Tech Digest Podcast #4

td_podcast.jpg

Fresh back from the Gadget Show Live, Duncan and I tackle the legal issue of a possible mistrial of the high profile Pirate Bay case, we consider a move to 3 with their promise of free Skype calls and we wonder how on Earth Apple let the Baby Shaker software into the iPhone App Store.

Still missing a decent name for the middle section where we pit hardware against software, it’s the turn of Linux Ubuntu’s latest release, Jaunty Jackalope, to force its way onto my desktop, while I persuade Duncan that he really needs to buy the Ion Drum Rocker Premium Drum Kit Controller for his Guitar Hero World Tour addiction.

Go gentle on Duncan this weeks he wasn’t feeling too good after a late night out with his mum and tequila chaser. Most of all, though, please forgive the buzzing audio. We are working on it, and should have a solution next week. Promise.

Download the podcast directly here, or subscribe via the RSS feed.

Send all your comments, topics that you’d like us to talk about and any requests or words of wisdom to me at [email protected] or throw us a tweet at @techdigest

Etymotic shows off its ear-moulded headphones for the iPhone and iPod

etymotics-headphones.jpg

Uber-high-end headphone manufacturer Etymotic is releasing a set of its personalised earphones for the iPhone and iPod. The hf2 Custom Fit headset integrates a microphone and ‘answer call’ button into the cord, so that you can use your iPhone without getting it out of your pocket.

A partnership with ACS (Advanced Communications Solutions) means that the headphones are custom-moulded to your ear. They stick a load of goo in your ear, which sets, and then produce a set of headphones the exact same shape as your inner ear.

That custom moulding ensures that a perfect fit is achieved, so the headphones are completely isolating. As a result, you can listen to music much more quietly and still get fantastic detail in the sound without damaging your hearing. They also stay put in your ear – they won’t fall out if you’re exercising.

I’ve tried the earphones myself, and they’re incredible – I’ve spent the last couple of days obsessively listening to all the songs I love, because everything sounds so much better. It’s amazing how much detail there is in songs that you’re often unaware of, even if you’re using a respectable pair of headphones already.

The custom-moulded headphones don’t come cheap. The kit is £90, plus another £90 for the fitting session. But if you’re an audiophile then that’s cheap for what you’re getting – almost perfect sound reproduction. Though, of course, you’ll need to re-encode everything into Apple’s lossless format to get the most out of it.

The hf2’s will be available from April 28th.

Etymotic