When we covered the WikiReader here, the offline wikipedia device last week, we weren’t sure whether or not it would support software updates.  Well, we had a brief chat with the manufacturers (OpenMoko, the same guys who were behind the FreeRunner linux based mobile phone) and they have confirmed that there are two ways of performing software updates.

• Firstly, and the easiest way; each wikipedia data update will ship on SD card with the latest software / firmware for the device (the SD card delivery option is a chargeable option). For those who download the free 4GB image instead, this will also contain the software update when released (they plan to release wikipedia updates twice a year on SD card and quarterly for download).
• Secondly, if you are really keen, you can actually access their source code and compile it yourself! For those not quite that keen, we believe you can also access a pre-compiled copy of the software providing you access to any new functions / bugfixes from the same website, although for many, it will be easier to stick to the SD card image updates.

This is good news, and we are always supportive of companies who not just produce units, but continue to support them into the future; okay the device may only get 1 or 2 minor software updates, but if the company ever completely gave up on the device, we reckon it wouldn’t be long before an enterprising developer (or community) would step in and help out.  As it is, the device has ongoing support, and apparently takes about 6 days in shipping time between the US and Europe (although watch out for the UK Postal Strikes getting in the way).

We also chatted about the update service, and although they will be producing quarterly updates available to download, the SD card option will be $29  shipping for two updates per year, so, assuming the same $19.20 shipping charge applies, that will be $29 + 2 * $19.20, so still less than $70 all in.

As part of 3UK’s major plans to improve their network across the UK, 3UK have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is London.  Already hitting capacity in certain areas, it makes sense to me to start with London to roll out what should end up as a faster, better network, which is one of the two areas 3UK really still need to work on (the other being Customer Services, but that’s not unique to 3UK).  So, to achieve this, there are going to be some outages required, but 3UK are being open and upfront about this, and have even produced a webpage dedicated to these upgrades showing when and where they will happen.  If you go to www.three.co.uk/london, you will see the information for yourself (although over time this webpage may well change to reflect other areas of the country), and you can also sign up for text alerts to be alerted to these issues (which allows you to enter a 3UK mobile number, a non-3UK mobile number; nice option!, and up to 4 postcodes, to allow you to cover home and work, and a couple of other places too!).

Importantly, it looks like from next week until just before Christmas, you may find you lose 3G signal for around 6-8 hours; a mobile phone should drop to Orange’s 2G network for the period (although watch out, mobile data will be less reliable, and much slower), whereas Mobile Broadband users will not be able to connect at all during the outage.

Also from that page, you can enter your postcode (or town name) and it will tell you about any planned outages in your area; for the area around my home, for example, it tells me they performed some work last week, and have more planned for today, which might result in an outage for me; now, if they improve my home 3UK network signal, that’s no bad thing as far as I’m concerned, and well worthy of a few hours of no signal.

These upgrades are all part of 3UK’s plans to build their “Monster Network”, which I first covered briefly when I met with 3UK last month, and they plan to have all these major outages completed by the Summer of 2010 when their much improved network should be fully online.  Having seen their planned coverage map at the end of these works, we should all see a lot less areas of no 3G coverage, and improved capacity in key areas too.

3UK have just announced that they are now selling the Sony Ericsson Satio, a 12 megapixel cameraphone, which will cost £30 per month on an 18-month contract with the Mix’n'Match 300 tariff, or £399.99 on PAYG.  As well as the impressive camera, the phone features touch focus, face detection, and a Xenon flash.  As a 3UK phone, it features Skype on 3 and Windows Live Messenger as well.  The phone features a 16:9 640×360 3.5″ widescreen display for playback of those pictures and videos, but there are other, sometimes overlooked features on this phone, such as the 12x digital zoom, geotagging of photos, image stabilizer, as well as all the other features and applications one would expect of a Symbian 5th Edition touchscreen device, including an accelerometer, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

In fact generally there aren’t many downsides to this device; the 1000mAh battery worries us slightly, as this sounds a little low for a good day’s usage (why oh why do smartphones force a daily charge), and our only other concern area is how much effort Sony Ericsson put into firmware updates for the device, as often seems needed on Symbian (or other smartphone OS) devices.  Oh, and the final issue with the device (which isn’t really an issue, but something to be aware of); most Nokia specific Symbian applications may not work on the device, so don’t expect the full Nokia suite of apps on this device.  Of course, it ships with Google Maps, which often negates the need for Nokia / Ovi Maps (don’t forget to take out the £5 per month Internet Add-On with this phone, as it will be well worth it), and other apps such as Nokia Sportstracker won’t work either (although a quick look through other Symbian applications should soon find a worthy free alternative).

3UK are continuing to innovate both at the lower end of the price market, and still signing up powerful high spec devices like this too, and this bodes well for next year…

Rumours are starting to gather pace on the Internet that the Amazon Kindle 3 will soon be launched in the US.  Whether this is in a direct response to the Barnes & Noble Nook, or whether it’s just time for an upgrade we’re not sure, however, we understand that the device will only be available for the domestic US market for time to come, so there’s no reason to not order the International Kindle now.

With sales of over 2 million Kindle devices in the US to date, yet only a rumoured 80,000 eBook readers bought so far in the UK (mainly Sony eReaders), it’s understandable that Amazon want to concentrate on the US market for a new device, where there are many more potential buyers than in the International markets.

Some information on the Kindle 3 courtesy of Kindle Review.

Available for many generic product codes (with other operator specific codes apparently to follow in the next few weeks), Nokia have this week released the v20 firmware for the Nokia N97, which is heading towards providing the software the phone should have shipped with when first launched.  There are a couple of rumours that Nokia has pulled this update, but either way, the firmware update should be available to all over the next few weeks.

The new features include:

Usability Improvement

• Kinetic Scrolling: Allowing kinetic scrolling in the menu, contacts, and other applications with long lists
• More Space: The new memory allocation brings around 20-30MB more space for applications and themes
• Visually enhanced Music Player and Photo Menu
• Improved accessibility to Symbols and Numbers: Holding a key for 1 seconds will activate the alternative character, no need to press the blue key first
• Improved memory and battery performance
• Improved image and video stability

New Experiences

• New Homescreen Widgets: CNN, MySpace, ESPN, Elle and more have now been added
• Newer Version of Ovi Maps: More features and a new service menu
• Voice UI Improvements: Support for Voice over IP

Now, despite the Nokia N97 having User Data Preservation (UDP), it appears a number of early adopters have found a range of problems with the new firmware, and the only solution was a hard reset (and then only restoring data, not a full restore of all data and applications); this doesn’t bode well for Nokia; neither Apple nor Android devices seem to suffer from these types of problems after upgrade problems, and Nokia really need to resolve them on their flagship devices.

Changelog details courtesy of Symbian World.

This morning we wrote an article about the Revo HERITAGE (here), mentioning that we felt that a single Last.fm account could be used across multiple devices.  This part of the article is correct, in that if you were to purchase multiple Revo devices, you could, after the first month (of free Last.fm access), configure all the devices to share a single Last.fm subscription to save a little money.  However, we should point out that having researched this a little further, we have discovered that although Last.fm will let you do this, and you would benefit from a single user account, which would learn all your “loved” and “banned” songs to improve the listening experience, Last.fm does have one limitation…

Last.fm will only provide one streaming radio per user account at any one time; so although you could happily have 2 (or more) devices sharing the same user account, only one could be playing Last.fm streamed music at a time.  Now, for many people, that may well be acceptable, but we thought we should bring it to people’s attention.

We did find information on one (quite old) proxy tool for Last.fm, that might allow you to rebroadcast a single Last.fm stream to multiple streaming devices on your local network (which would use the audio streaming option, and not the direct Last.fm support), but without support for the other functions, such as loving or banning tracks, we wonder whether this is a good solution; also we’re not sure if this tool would still work with the latest Last.fm servers and protocols in use.

If you really need a whole house audio solution that can take a single Last.fm feed and stream it throughout your whole house, then it appears the Sonos system may offer just that.

For a company that went quiet for a few months earlier this year, Revo seem to have bounced back and have added another new unit to their range of DAB radios.  The Revo HERITAGE is styled a little like units from the 50s and 60s, yet packs all their high spec features that they seem to be concentrating on right now.  This units joins the lineup of the Revo IKON (featured here), Revo DOMINO (featured here), and elder units such as the Revo iBlik RadioStation range, and the Pico range of portable devices.

The Revo HERITAGE features DAB, DAB+, FM radio stations, as well as Wi-Fi Internet Radio, as well as offering network streaming and support for all current iPod models.  In keeping with the price tag, this device is made from aluminium and real walnut veneer, and the screen is an OLED “secret-until-lit” display and like the Revo DOMINO, features a joystick based menu system.  The radio also features a digital alarm clock with sleep and snooze functions, and also features optical out and iPod video out connectors (amongst others).  Also provided is a full feature remote control.

As with the Revo IKON and the Revo DOMINO D3 (and D2) models, this radio also features support for Last.fm, allowing you to select an artist or genre and get streamed music.  Also like those other units, the device comes with a free 30 day Last.fm trial subscription, and would need access to a £3 per month subscription after that (which we still believe can be shared across multiple devices).  You can also improve the track selection by providing feedback to Last.fm in terms of “loving” or “banning” tracks that are played.

Finally, if you are still after other music support, the device has a 3.5mm input jack for other mp3 players, and can also play a wide range of music formats from USB devices via a USB port too.

The only limitation on this device seems to be iPhone support, where Revo state “While Heritage doesn’t offer full iPhone compatibility, by placing the iPhone in ‘In-Flight Mode’, Heritage will provide playback and charging.” (We should add this limitation does not apply to either the Revo DOMINO or Revo IKON, which have full iPhone compatibility).

If you are looking to buy one of these devices, you’ll need to head to John Lewis who have retail exclusivity on these devices when it goes on sale in November for £230 (alternatively you can buy direct from Revo Technologies themselves).

Although more expensive than the Revo DOMINO range, some have questioned the styling of that range, and this unit may well be more suited to people’s taste.

Although we don’t have much detail, Amazon have announced that following on from their announcement of Kindle for PC last week, that they will also be releasing a Kindle for Mac software application which will provide similar functionality for Mac OS X users.

The LG Chocolate BL40 picked up Mobile Phone of the Year at the What Mobile? awards on Friday.  In terms of being quite an iconic phone, we can understand why, as the phone packs a lot of features into a novel new form factor, which makes watching movies on the device even more entertaining.

We’re planning to release our full review of the phone very shortly, so keep an eye out for it.

Some pieces of additional Kindle news for today…

Firstly, Amazon have dropped the price by $20 (to $259), and should be providing a $20 refund to all early purchasers.  This makes the Kindle a little better value, although it’s believed the real reason behind the price drop is the announcement by US Bookstore Barnes & Noble who launched their Nook eBook reader (below) this week.  Now, this device looks interesting, partly because it has a colour touchscreen at the bottom for controlling the device, and partly because it uses the Android OS, which may mean future support for additional applications.

Also, B&N seem to be a little more open about their device; they confirm it can read ePUB and PDF files directly, implying (to some degree) that they do not want to limit their purchasers to only buy books from their eStore (of course, with applications like Calibre, Kindle users can equally get this type of content onto their device).  However, there are no plans for making this available in the UK (yet).

Secondly, Amazon have announced their Kindle for PC application, which along with their iPhone / iPod Touch application, expands where and how you can read your Amazon Kindle eBooks, and now allows you to read your Amazon Books on the PC.  It will also synchronize your last page read and annotations that you add to the eBooks (and this sync is bi-directional).  It’s not available yet, but should be shortly, and even offers a couple of extra facilities for Windows 7 users (XP, Vista and Windows 7 are the only OSes supported).

Finally, if you have an Amazon Kindle but feel some of the prices for accessories in the Amazon marketplace are a little high, you might want to head over to Mobile Fun, who now have a Kindle Accessories section covering most of the things you could ever need for your new device, including UK charges, cases, screen protectors and more.