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.
The new TomTom GO x30 devices we first mentioned here are now available for sale in the UK. The retail prices are as follows:
The Traffic models include the current RDS-TMC receiver, which is much better than the early TMC receivers TomTom first tried, but it’s still reliant upon the radio signal being broadcast, which is weak, and does not cover the whole country. To improve on this, we’ll need to wait for the launch of the TomTom HD Traffic service later this year. These devices should be compatible with the HD Traffic service, but this hasn’t been confirmed by TomTom.
Pricing courtesy of Pocket GPS World, although we expect the street prices to drop quite quickly.
Freesat is now available in the UK. This offers TV viewers access to a whole host of TV channels via a satellite dish. It should be available to 98% of all UK homes, and will be especially welcome to those not able to get Freeview. Right now, it’s about 80 channels, but it’s supposed to reach 200 channels before the end of the year. The set top box will cost between £49 and £120 (for a High Def version), and then the cost of installation (including dish) will be a further £80. In the coming months, a HD recorder should also become available, as well as the possibility for an IDTV module. It will be interesting to see how popular this is over the coming months, and exactly what channels are made available.
More information at Freesat.
Ofcom have announced that we should have at least 4 HD (Hi-Def) channels broadcasting on Freeview in time for the 2012 London Olympics. Some of these channels could come online as early as 2009, in the areas where analogue TV has been turned off. The BBC will get one of the channels, and the other three will be auctioned off.
Story courtesy of Reuters.
TomTom have updated their software for the 520, 720 and 920 models, with the new version being v7.480. Along with a few bug fixes, it adds support for the new HD Traffic receiver addon. There are reports of some problems with voice recognition no longer working, but these problems seem to stem from an accidental beta release in the US only, and should not affect users who download the update after yesterday. Some items (custom voice, custom cursor) will need resetting, and it’s best to take a backup of the unit before applying the update.
Story courtesy of Pocket GPS World.
With the impending death of HD DVD, and companies like Toshiba announcing they are stopping production of all HD DVD players (and remember Toshiba were one of the driving forces behind HD DVD in the first place), Microsoft have confirmed (well, the news has leaked) they are discontinuing the external HD DVD Drive for the Xbox 360 too. They will continue to support the existing drives, although they have yet to make a statement on whether they will produce a Blu-Ray drive instead.
As we mentioned earlier today, Steve Jobs has announced the ultra-thin MacBook Air just now. The device features an 80Gb 1.8″ hard disk (or an optional 64Gb SSD), 2Gb RAM, a trackpad with multi-gesture support, a 13.3″ widescreen LED backlit screen, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, and a full sized backlit keyboard.
The laptop thickness (or should we say thinness?) varies from 0.76″ down to 0.16″.
However, the $1799 turns into £1199, which is a premium compared to the US/UK Dollar exchange rate.
In other points, the MacWorld keynote speech also announced iTunes Movies Rentals ($2.99 to $3.99 for a movie, add an extra dollar for HD versions), a major software update (and price drop) for the Apple TV, new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch (Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather) although this will be a chargeable upgrade on the iPod Touch, the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update that we’ve already mentioned, and native Office Mac 2008.
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 Vudu HD Movie Streamer…
