It appears a recent Vista security update is causing problems with USB Mobile Broadband devices, including the 3 Modem Stick.  It appears that the update causes Vista PCs to power down the dongle, even though it’s connected and data is flowing.  Shane from SOS has come up with an interesting solution, which he has released on his blog.  Basically it’s a batch file which runs a directory listing of the disk section of the USB device every 5 minutes to ensure it’s kept active.  Hopefully, a proper fix will be released by Microsoft soon; given O2, Vodafone and 3 are all in talks with Vodafone, it hopefully won’t be too long.

Story courtesy of 3mobilebuzz.

Vodafone are rolling out HSDPA to more cities. After covering London last year, they are in the process of extending this to also cover Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Reading. In these areas, the theoretical maximum speeds are 7.2mbps download and 1.8mbps upload. Although, of course, 3 recently challenged mobile network operators to concentrate of actual performance, and not headline rates.

We don’t cover many new software applications for the Mac, something we hope to resolve over the coming months, but as we already cover the other Skype platforms, we feel we should give a passing mention to the new Skype for Mac. This adds better support for NAT-PMP and UPnP, which should mean it’ll cope with a wider variety of routers. It also adds support for authenticating proxies, which are common in some university environments, and lots of bugfixes (listed here). Download from Skype directly.

We first covered the Chumby here back in 2007, however, it’s still not officially available in the UK. However, UK Gadgeteer has arranged for our readers to have a special offer at International Orders. International Orders are a Californian company, who, once you pay them will arrange for the Chumby to be shipped to them, and they will then onward ship it to you in the UK. Obviously this results in a slightly higher price due to their handling charge, and a second delivery, plus don’t forget you still need to factor in Duty and VAT as the Chumby comes into the UK, however, even allowing for all of that, you may well find the Chumby is still cheaper than buying from a UK seller who has already imported it. International Orders actually sell a whole range of items, although the Chumby stood out on the home page as something difficult to purchase in the UK.

We have agreed a special offer though for our readers; if you mention “UK Gadgeteer” in the notes field of your order, International Orders will include a UK power adaptor (to allow the US plug to work; the PSU is already 110-240V, so it’s just the physical plug problem, as we understand it) for FREE (normally just under $10). Although the website only lists a “European Power Adaptor” for the Chumby, if you clearly state in the notes that you need a UK power adaptor, they’ll sort it out for you.

Disclaimer: We have no commercial agreement with International Orders, nor have any experience of their services - please feel free to comment to let us know if you take advantage of this offer, whether there are any problems, and what the total cost is.

It was only first announced about a week ago, but already Nokia Beta Labs have announced a new version! As well as general bug fixes and stability issues, it also allows contact names to be shown for messages. Download it here.

Whether it’s the phone itself, the innovative pricing, or the promotion of the device and the abilities it has, but according to an mobile device survey by Admob, the 3 SkypePhone is now the number 5 mobile internet device in the UK, based on the number of adverts served to mobile devices. The top 10 are:

• Sony Ericsson K800i
• Nokia N95
• Sony Ericsson W810i
• Sony Ericsson K610i
• 3 SkypePhone
• Nokia N73
• Sony Ericsson W850i
• ZTE F866
• Nokia 6120c
• Nokia 6300

It’s also interesting to note the ZTE (a USB modem) is in there too, and mainly only on 3 UK in the survey too. The 3 SkypePhone came straight into this survey in 5th place, with 2.7% of the market (by ads served). No wonder 3’s data usage has increased by so much.

After the Eee PC 900, which should be shipping in quantities in the UK soon, Asus have released the 901. This adds the Intel Atom processor, and strengthening the case slightly with some metal. In most ways though, the exterior is unchanged, although there are a couple of additional buttons, and the power socket has moved.

Update: It’s also rumoured that the 901 will feature Bluetooth, although this isn’t confirmed by Asus at this time.

More pictures at blogeee.net, although the text is in French.

Well, no big surprise, but more and more companies are confirming the 3G iPhone is coming in the next few months. Various telecom operators are stating they will be announcing the next generation of iPhone in the coming weeks. It also appears that Apple may be launching an Internet Tablet type device in June too. Apart from having a more powerful processor, the rumours are suggesting a 720×480 screen size, in a slightly larger form factor than the current iPhone.

Although they haven’t announced the actual box itself, BT have announced that Pace Group will be building them HD versions of their BT Vision boxes. These will feature a more powerful processor, better energy efficiency, and hard drive capacity able to store around 80 hours of standard definition video content.

Story courtesy of Tech Digest.

Here’s something we strongly approve of… It’s a SatNav unit designed for HGV drivers, but priced at a similar level to other SatNav units. As a driver, you enter the height, weight, length, and any other potential factors, and the SatNav will choose HGV-friendly routes which will avoid roads / bridges / corners / weight limits that the vehicle cannot navigate. It can even avoid roads with cross winds or steep hills. The device uses NAVTEQ Transport data which includes all this additional data to help the unit. It’s also got hazardous goods information, information on loading bays and HGV fuel stations.

With a few button presses, the unit can have the HGV restrictions removed, so can be used in normal vehicles too, but anything that helps to avoid HGV drivers blindly follow their SatNavs and ending up on the front page of the BBC website or a national newspaper has to be a good thing.

There’s no support for receiving traffic data, although the unit does support a safety camera subscription, which is free for the first 6 months.

Maplin seem to have picked up, and the ProNav should be available from their stores in the near future. We expect other Navteq SatNav manufacturers to look at this unit and work out whether there’s a market, so we may well find other units offering this amount of customisation in the next year or so.

More information at Pocket GPS World.

Although nothing is firm, 3 mentioned today at a briefing, that they are looking at providing a home router with a 3G modem built in, to allow people to connect their whole network via 3G, instead of just a single laptop or desktop via a USB dongle. 3 also said they will expect sales of dongles to drop as more laptops come with HSDPA built in over the next few months. Of course, they’ll still make their money from the contract, and won’t need to provide hardware, so it will be interesting to see whether they offer a SIM-only data deal, and what pricing they offer.

Finally, they also talked about speed of 3G connections, and whether companies are over-selling their services. Mainly aimed at Vodafone, 3 are claiming customers should be more worried about signal strength and the impact of other traffic, and not just the headline connection rate. To help counter this, 3 are planning to increase the number of mast sites from 7,500 to 9,000 by 2009 as part of their mast sharing deal with T-Mobile. This will also help increase population coverage from 90% to 98%, which will also help.

Nokia have also announced they have finally released their PC Music Client for managing your music between your desktop and your smartphone. However, you need an N95, N95 8GB, N82, 5610 XpressMusic, N81, as these are the only phones supported (read: tested) right now, and despite the beta client already being at v1.5, it does not support the Nokia Music Store, which would be an obvious integration we would expect to see in the final product (it’s actually “deactivated”, so support is likely to be available before the product comes out of beta).

Interestingly, Nokia have adopted a standards based approach with this software, and hence it should actually work with “any MTP-compliant device, whether it be a Nokia device or another brand MP3 player.”

Head over to the Nokia Beta Labs PC Music Client website for more information and to download.

Here’s an interesting snippet of information. Google have released an updated version of their iPhone version of their Google Reader, and it’s been noted that any device can access the URL, which is http://www.google.com/reader/i/. This version works well on both Symbian S60 smartphones, as well as the Nokia Internet Tablets, both of which seem to benefit from the additional effort Google has put into the user interface. It offers a better interface over the traditional mobile version by offering you easier access to each post. If you are a regular Google Reader user, and have never got on with the mobile version, then give this version a go…

Nokia have announced that Nokia Maps will link into their Ovi user content sharing platform. Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop and then synchronise (automatically or manually) this data to their smartphones. Also, users will be able to record routes and POIs whilst out travelling and upload them to Ovi to share them with their friends and family. Although not available now, Nokia hope to have this technology released around September time (missing most people’s Summer Holiday, but that might give them more time to iron out any bugs or issues before people come to rely upon it). More news over the coming months as and when we get it.

In the meantime, Nokia have recently updated the Nokia Maps 2.0 beta version, so if you are trying out the new software, we’d recommend getting the latest update.

Picture and some content courtesy of Crave.

On top of all the other Nokia Beta Labs applications that have been released or updated recently, they have just added another application; Nokia Step Counter. This is the equivalent of a pedometer, but it uses the accelerometer built into some recent S60v3 Nokia smartphones (N95, N95 8Gb, N82). A couple of known issues exists (you have to enter your height and weight in metric units irrespective of the units you have chosen to display), but it’s a good start. Head over to the Nokia Beta Labs website for more information and to download.

Although not available at every coffee shop location due to site limitations, Coffee Republic have announced that the majority of their sites now have free WiFi available. This is good; we’ve had McDonald’s and now Coffee Republic realise that free WiFi will draw in customers, and is a selling point, not a way to make a small amount of money. Many hotel chains are realising the same thing, although many of them need to provide better coverage throughout their hotels.

Coffee Republic story and picture courtesy of SMS Text News.

Here’s a picture of the latest BlackBerry, just announced by RIM. The specs are:

• Tri-band HSDPA
• GPS
• WiFi
• 624MHz mobile processor
• 1GB of memory
• 128MB of Flash
• microSD/SDHC memory card slot
• 2 megapixel camera
• 480×320 screen resolution

An interesting new device from RIM, although it will appeal to BlackBerry fans, it’s still not got the specs of the high end smartphones, such as the N95 8Gb, although it’s getting close.

In other news, RIM has announced a deal with Microsoft to bring Windows Live Messenger to the BlackBerry platform, which finally provides an instant messaging solution that spreads wider than just the BlackBerry community. What’s not clear is whether this will work with companies who use the internal Windows Live Messenger service, or whether it’s only linked to the public MSN service.

9000 story and picture courtesy of Berble.com.

Scrolling around the 3 intranet the other day, we noticed that 3 offer a 7 day unlimited trial to Spinvox. Spinvox offer a voice to text service, so your voicemails are provided as SMS. You simply divert your phone to Spinvox, instead of the more usual 3 voicemail option. Once the trial is over, you move onto their chargeable, but low rate, service; although there is a limit to the number of messages you get before incurring more charges. What 3 fail to mention is whether the cost of the call diversion is chargeable or not, and we believe it is, which we feel 3 should state.

To signup, simply use Planet 3; if you can’t find it, head to Services, A-Z, and then select Spinvox.

Spinvox should work with any UK mobile, although for other networks you’ll need to sign up at Spinvox.

Londonist has added a map which shows the free wifi spots in London. Ewan at SMS Text News thinks it’s not complete, and missing some hotspots, but if you are visiting London, you may want to check to see if there is any free wireless in the area you are going to be in.

Story courtesy of SMS Text News.

Symbian Freak has some pictures and specs of the rumoured, but not yet announced, Sony Ericsson P5, which is a smartphone running UIQ. Head over for more pictures at Symbian Freak.