Nokia Beta Labs has just released a video converter for their Internet Tablets, allowing you to resize your videos for the 770 / N800 / N810 tablets. You can drag and drop videos onto the converter, which is currently Windows only. This provides a nice convenient interface to transferring your videos to the tablet.
If you want to download Kylie’s new album a week before it goes on general sale, it will be available for download exclusively from Nokia’s Music Store from today for £8.
Venturi Mini is another feature rich Bluetooth Handsfree kit recently launched. As well as including support for A2DP to allow you to stream your music from your Bluetooth Mobile Phone to it, it also has an FM transmitter for easy connection to your car stereo. It also has a USB socket to allow you to charge your phone / mp3 player, and like the Gear4 BluFM we covered before, you can connect your iPod / mp3 player via a cable to play music too. As with many of these devices, it also supports a wired connection to your car stereo if you don’t want to use the FM transmitter.
However, the Venturi Mini also uses some of the advanced features of the RDS data specification to display information on the car stereo (where supported) - eg the Caller ID is displayed when an incoming call occurs. Menu items and the phonebook can also be displayed. If your car doesn’t support this (although most do), the Venturi Mini has a OLED display on the device itself too. This RDS feature sets it apart from other FM transmitter-based devices we’ve seen, although the price seems to reflect that too.
It should be pointed out that the device itself has no speaker.
Available now from Venturi’s website for £79.99.
E-Ten has launched their keyboard version of the X800, the M800. The spec includes 3.5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, two cameras (2 megapixel and VGA quality), FM radio, a VGA (480 x 640) 2.8″ touch screen, and Windows Mobile 6 Professional. The main feature “issue” with the phone is it only has 64Mb of RAM. Of course, others, such as HTC’s Tilt may have more memory, but not the VGA screen.
The main downside, however, is that there is no word as to whether E-Ten has finally solved the problem that prevents their phones from connecting to T-Mobile UK’s GPRS network, which has limited the success of many of their recent phones due to T-Mobile’s good data deals.
If these problems are now solved, please let us know.
Goosync have updated their website to state they now have iPhone support for their solution. They are planning a native SyncML client for release in Q1 2008, but until then, they have written up how to perform the sync.
In essence, you use iTunes to sync the iPhone to Outlook, and then use a free Outlook SyncML client to sync Outlook with Goosync, which handles the sync with your Google Calendar.
Analysis of code within various widgets on the iPhone has noted that some widgets include the IMEI of the phone within the request they send for data (this has been spotted in the Weather widget and the Stock widget).
It appears this is allowed for in the Terms & Conditions that iPhone users sign up to and accept, so although it may be felt to be an invasion of privacy, it may well be legal.
Update: It appears that although the analysis of the code correctly spotted the reference to “IMEI”, it’s actually not the IMEI, and appears to be a unique code per widget, which is common across all iPhones. So, right now, the original story appears false.
Further to our previous article, at the end of last week, Garmin withdraw it’s bid for TeleAtlas, although not until TomTom had increased their offer ($4.2m) above that of Garmin’s ($3.3m). Garmin, a long time Navteq user, announced at the same time that irrespective of Nokia buying Navteq, Garmin have guaranteed access to Navteq data until 2015.
The TomTom deal is set to be signed today.
Google took an interesting step forward on Friday, by releasing an API and tools to Enterprise customers to allow them to ease their migration from a traditional Outlook based mail setup towards using Google Apps.
“We’ve provided developer documentation and sample code that allows developers to build extremely sophisticated mail migration tools, some of which can be run by administrators to migrate centralized mail and some of which can be run by end-users to migrate mail from the desktop,” said Gabe Cohen, Google Apps product manager.
The tools allow administrators to move email, contacts and calendars across to Google from Microsoft Outlook, but also allows you to run Google Apps in parallel with your existing mail infrastructure. This alone allows a small user pilot before committing to Google, and at least one large company (with over 50,000 employees) has begun a trial of this functionality. Google had previously created similar tools to migrate data from an IMAP server, but supporting Microsoft is key to the Enterprise marketplace.
Interestingly, Google offer 25Gb storage per user and 99.9% uptime, something many small companies would struggle to offer.
When we transferred from blogspot.com to this domain less than a month ago, we were using a modified version of the standard Wordpress theme. On Friday we moved to a new theme, which required a fair amount of customisation behind the scenes over the weekend. We hope you enoy the new theme, although over the coming weeks, look out for more changes as we continue to tailor the website.
As a bit of light hearted relief for a Friday afternoon, we’re going to try a special article each week on a Friday, and highlight some gadget not available in the UK which we think should be!
This week, the Chumby…
LinITX.com have some interesting USB products for sale, in addition to their more well-known role as a supplier of In-Car and mini-ITX equipment designed for Linux usage. This USB Message Board caught our attention, but if it’s not interesting to you, have a look at the rest of the LED message equipment, their bargain basement area, or just peruse their online shop.
If the Intempo iDAB didn’t quite suit you, or you want to save a couple of pounds, how about the Roberts Robi, which is an iPod remote (allowing you to control the iPod) that also incorporates a DAB radio. Compatible with the iPod and iPod Nano, it is shipping this month at £49.99.
Google Transit, which allows users to find the best public transport route from their destination to their location now includes data from Travel South East, which gives them coverage of a small part of the UK for the first time. Expect this coverage to expand over the coming months.
3dtracking have launched a free tracking service for Symbian S60 v2 and v3 users, including those with built in GPS devices. The service includes the ability for users to display a Google Map on their own personal website showing their location, which allows them to provide their location to family and friends without those people needing an account at 3dtracking.
Asus have confirmed that they will be shipping an 8Gb, 10-inch screen version of the Eee PC during 2008, which is a higher spec than the currently shipping Eee PC recently mentioned here.
Update: Asus are now claiming that although there are plans for an 8Gb version, they do not currently plan to release a version with a 10-inch screen. The general consensus in the gadget world is that they will, however, release it at some point, just not yet.
If you installed the Nokia Audiobooks software after we mentioned it last week, please go back and download the latest update to the PC application, which fixes a number of small issues.
At some point this week, Nokia may announce a WiFi deal linked to their OVI portal (including the Nokia Music Store). This will be aimed at the N81 and N95 8Gb phones and be seen as a response to the iPhone’s UK deal with The Cloud (which offers free WiFi access). It’s likely to be a major WiFi provider, but there is little more detail at the moment.
Of course for those who have other phones, or can’t wait there are plenty of other options for fixed rate or free WiFi.
Intempo has just launched the Intempo iDAB, a DAB radio player that connects via your iPod. It has it’s own screen, and buttons to control the unit, but it has its own docking connector, so can also be docked into your iPod dock to play the music through your dock’s speakers. It is compatible with the whole range of iPods, except the Shuffle. It will be available in a range of colours, and cost around £59.99.
Google have released a video of some of the features of their Android OS. Worth a view to see some first glimpses at the user interface. Alongside this, Google have launched a $10m developer challenge which offers awards for developers who build applications for Android.
If you have an iPhone / iPod Touch, you’ll find Google Reader has been updated with a couple of new features. You can now view Trend statistics and also specify the number of items you want visible on one page. Simply point your device to reader.google.com and see for yourself.