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Engadget has reprinted an article where Tom Rogers (TiVo boss) has stated that he hopes that they will relaunch TiVo in the UK “soon”. It’s been about 8 years now, and with most of the UK Gadgeteer team owning at least 1 TiVo, we can’t wait for their re-entry into the UK market. No information is available, although it’s more likely to be Freeview or Freesat based than offering full Sky support.
Engadget story [Via Automated Home]
Mercedes Benz and Garmin have linked together to produce the “Streetpilot III”, which is actually a Nuvi 760 on a custom mount designed for the Mercedes A-Class, B-Class and C-Class. It will retail for approximately €550 and be available soon across Europe (it should also be available in the UK too). The custom mount links into the car’s system, so all spoken directions are through the car’s speakers (with other sources muted), and there are no visible wires as everything goes via the mount. As a Nuvi 760, it offers Bluetooth Handsfree calling, a 4.3″ widescreen, and traffic information. It has also been loaded with all the latest Mercedes Benz dealerships
This isn’t the first time Garmin have worked with a car manufacturer, having already announced a solution with BMW, but it’s nice to see other manufacturers looking into custom solutions using portable SatNav devices.
Some content courtesy of NaviGadget.
If you’ve been to the 3 Store recently, you will have seen the Mix and Match 1100 tariff on special offer; £20 per month (a 25% saving). There’s been a few comments on the internet about the fact that this offer is about to end (in fact, we were notified by 3 it was due to finish on Saturday). 3 have now confirmed to us that this offer is still currently on, and will remain, but will only be offered online.
However, we understand that the half price mobile broadband for existing customers deal is due to end this Saturday, so if you fancy that, head off to the 3 Store quickly and sign up.
Update: The £20 M&M1100 offer will only continue for a few more days, finishing at the end of next week. However, 3 are looking at creating some online special offers moving forward.
We first covered the LG Secret after it’s launch, and have been using one ever since. However, if you want your own Secret, it’s now available;
We’ve been generally impressed with the phone, although it’s not in the same league as an N95 or an iPhone. We understand it should be available on 3 and T-Mobile soon, although neither are listing the phone on their websites today.
Vodafone are actually doing the right thing; instead of limiting the new 500Mb of inclusive data to “new customers”, Vodafone are removing the hard and fast limits of the past. Ewan at SMS Text News has more details, based on his discussions with Vodafone after overspending last month. The interesting point in Ewan’s article is; whereas before Vodafone included 120Mb of data, and charged for any single Kb over that limit, the new 500Mb is a “Fair Use Policy”, and apparently don’t intend to charge for customers who go over this limit (although if you constantly go well over the limit, you’ll get a polite letter from Vodafone, and ultimately may be moved onto a different tariff).
This is good news – it’s nice to see a network operator setting a fair use policy with just a “please stop it” method of dealing with overuse, instead of the more usual draconian charging.
Apple have released OS X 10.5.3. It features fixes for AirPort and network reliability issues. It also includes Time Machine and Time Capsule updates and a few other updates.
Having already released the original Eee PC, and with the 900 available and the 901 announced (picture shown above from blogeee.net), it looks like Asus might be about to announce the 10.6″ version this week as the 1000 series. More news as we find out…
Truphone have updated their mobile phone VOIP S60 client to v4.0, and included Truphone Anywhere. This allows you to route as many of your calls as possible over the Internet, which will reduce your costs. Clever logic in the program means it will offer a variety of options from a local area number, Call Back and true VOIP calls. If you have included bundled minutes, then Truphone reckon their service will still save you money on your international calls. Head over to the Truphone website for more information and a download link.
After our story of last week, it appears Nokia have rebuffed their own CFO. Nokia are now saying they have no plans to release Linux based phones. It’s possible that Nokia’s Linux strategy for Internet Tablets (where it is likely to be announcing more Linux *devices* in the next year) got confused with pure mobile phones, but we would have thought their CFO would know the difference. We’ll have to wait and see whether we see any Linux mobile phones from Nokia over the next year or two to see whether he was actually right…
There’s been a lot of talk about this in the last few days, so we’re simply going to link to the main article from All About N-Gage. Basically, if you buy a game for your N-Gage compatible phone, it’s tied to the IMEI (ie the phone itself). When you get a phone upgrade to this year’s latest model, you’ll no longer have access to that game, and will need to buy it all over again. This is mentioned in the EULA for N-Gage, but it’s even not clear what happens if Nokia themselves replace your phone under warranty for some reason. Not Nokia’s best strategy, and certainly not in line with the rest of the gamin systems available today…
It appears there have been a couple of surveys in the last few weeks where people have been asked about mobile phone calls on aeroplanes. Overall, both surveys showed most people are not keen on the idea of “I’M ON THE PHONE” calls taking place in the, air, but generally, those same people support the idea of instant messaging and data access. The Yahoo survey in the UK reported the following numbers:
In other parts of the same survey, 49% said email would be useful (I’m not sure how the 21% who don’t want data are going to get their email!), and 14% said they would like to check the weather.
Equally, a US survey by Harris Interactive (but still commissioned by Yahoo it would seem) came up with similar results:
Of course, it’s only in the last year that the network operators have realised they can make real money from data services priced at sensible levels, so whether the airlines listen to surveys like these, or just plough ahead with voice only services at very high roaming rates remain to be seen. Another point to note; we don’t think the survey included price within the question; consider these two questions:
We suspect people will want the first scenario, and the airlines will want the second scenario…
Nokia Maps 2.0 has now been formally released by Nokia and is available for download from here. Although this adds little since the last beta version, all the beta versions have added lots more functionality than Nokia Maps 1.0. The main new features since 1.0 are improved car navigation and pedestrian modes, support for satellite images, much more local content, multimedia city guides, and a new user interface. Other features we should coming (as mentioned before) are near real time traffic information, and links into “Share with Ovi” for sharing POIs and routes.
One of the fixes that’s occurred between the first beta and the release is that UK 7 digit postcodes now work properly. They’ve also added Network based positioning (similar to that used in Google Maps) for a rough location until the GPS can precisely locate you. This works on most phones today, although the E90 will need a “software update” will should be released soon.
This all bodes well for Nokia, although they are still a little behind TomTom and Garmin with their feature range, and some people are still questioning their pricing model. It will be interesting to see how many current phones get new firmwares with this version installed by default..
If you head off to the online Maplin special offer catalogue, you’ll see the Pocket Surfer 2 on the front cover at £179.99. However, click on the Pocket Surfer 2, and you’ll be taken to Page 6 of the special offer catalogue, and then click on the Pocket Surfer 2 again. This will take you off to the Maplin website where you’ll find the Pocket Surfer 2 on special offer at £149.99 until 10 June (and free delivery is included too). Alternatively, just click here.
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SMS Text News have reported that Orange is dropping it’s data rates, from around £8 per Mb to £3 per Mb (£4 per Mb for PAYG). So, if you download 3Mb of data, you will have spent £9, whereas for another £1 you could have download 1Gb from 3. Hmm.
As well as the existing Nokia Internet Tablet range, Nokia are definitely preparing Linux based cellphones. The comments have come from Nokia’s CFO, Rick Simonson. Whether it’ll be their own OS, Android, or LiMo, is unknown, as is whether it’ll use Trolltech’s Qt UI, a company Nokia bought earlier this year, but we can be sure of one thing; it’s likely Nokia will not stop at a single device, and we should, over the coming years, expect to see a whole range of devices. We don’t suspect Nokia will give up on Symbian S60 anytime soon, so it’ll be interesting to see if the Linux phones compete in the high end smartphone sector, and how much overlap of technology and applications they bring from the current tablets.
Story from Thumb Report, a new smartphone news service, which tried to encompass the news within 160 characters.
According to this article on the BBC website, sales of smartphones will outstrip laptops in the next 12 to 18 months. With Symbian recently reporting that more than 200 million Symbian smartphones have been manufactured and shipped (the actual figure is at least 206 million), and Nokia predicting it will sell over 35 million GPS enabled handsets in the coming year, it’s all go for smartphones. It will also be interesting to see how the other manufacturers react; there’s already strong indications the new 3G iPhone will ship with a built in GPS, or at least GPS support.
BBC Link via SMS Text News.
Nokia have updated the E90 firmware. The main additions are Flash Lite 3 support, direct YouTube video support, a newer version of Quickoffice, plus a load of bug fixes and tweaks. Unfortunately, as Ewan over at SMS Text News has reported, Nokia have temporarily removed Vista support. This means that the Nokia Software Updater won’t work on Vista. It’s no different to last month when it did work, but apparently, some recent updates to Vista have occasionally made NSU unstable, and this has led to mobiles being broken beyond repair. Given the potential damage, we can understand Nokia making it very difficult to perform, but removing all capability seems to be taking things a bit too far. What with Vista also causing problems with USB Broadband devices, we can understand why XP is still so popular.
It’s not clear whether XSKN have photoshop’ed this, or whether it’s genuine, but it appears that they have released details of their new 3G iPhone case in advance of Apple announcing the device that goes within the case. It seems to fit another rumours and stories, and if accurate, the most interesting points are that it shows the new device with a much more pronounced curved back, space for a front mounted camera (for video calling), and a better positioned headphone socket.
Story and picture courtesy of Engadget.
It appears Vodafone have taken 3’s concerns (and complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency) seriously, and are revising their claims for the Mobile Broadband service. Having claimed users could get 7.2mbps, 3 have pointed out that the real maximum is more like 6.69mbps, and even that figure is not always obtainable. Vodafone will now, instead, concentrate on tasks like “Downloading music videos” as they shift the advertising more towards a consumer bias. To compare, 3 state you are likely to get 2.8mbps on their network, although they plan to increase this in June.