Roberts, who we have featured before, have now released a solar powered DAB radio, a first in the UK. It can be solar, battery, or mains powered, and the built in rechargeable battery pack is being recharged whenever the unit is in the sunshine. Once charged, Roberts claim it will last 27 hours before needing another recharge. It comes it green, pink, red, white or black, includes a headphone socket and an mp3/iPod line-in socket. At a price around £79.99, it also seems good value for a device that won’t need charging too often.

More information at Roberts [Via Tech Digest]

After the success of the Pure ONE, Pure Digital have now released the Pure ONE Mini, which offers the majority of the features of the ONE, but in a smaller package. These include an input jack (for your iPod / mp3 player), an FM radio, station presets (although 16 instead of 20 on the ONE), and support for Pure’s ChargePak rechargeable battery packs. Although rarely needed, we support Pure for two reasons, firstly they are British, and secondly, they build the capability for user upgradeable firmware for their devices, and the ONE Mini is no exception, with a miniUSB port as standard.

berble.com have found a useful application, it allows you to copy files to and from your iPhone / iPod Touch on either a Windows or Mac OS X computer. This saves you carrying a USB flash drive as well, and even better, it’s free!

Head over to berble.com to read more, and then visit the manufacturer’s website here to download DiskAid.

This little device was spotted at Computex, it’s an iPhone / iPod Touch / iPod mini projector that can project a picture that’s 15 to 27″ across, so the size of a typical TV.  It has an embedded stereo speaker system, and support a full 16.7 million colours via a 640*480 resolution projector.  Focus is manual though.  No word on UK availability though at this stage…

Here’s an interesting gadget - the Goodmans iPod dock includes a 7″ screen for displaying video. It includes a remote, a 3-in-1 card reader and “LED accents”. It should cost around £90, although there are very few specs available right now to confirm whether it’s worthwhile…

An enterprising individual is looking to create a cheap GPS addon for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and is even looking at providing an Open Source software solution for accessing the GPS data. To be able to produce the GPS addon boards, he needs a minimum order quantity of 1000 modules, and he’s currently half way there. Head over to his blog to see more and vote if you are interested in purchasing one (or more).

Story courtesy of Pocket GPS World.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could walk into a pub, club, or restaurant and be able to recharge your mobile phone / iPod / mp3 player? Well, Juice Jack have that vision, and have produced the Jack to achieve this. It has 9 connectors for charging a large portion of phones (both Nokia connectors, Apple, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, and standard micro and mini USB connectors). Not just that, but the device has a built in Li-Ion battery (although it’s more likely people will connect the device direct to the mains).

Even better, the price is only £25, and they are willing to sell single devices to consumers, as well as selling in volumes to larger companies.

We like the idea, although unless there was one on every table in a pub, we would be nervous leaving our phone on charge in a public place out of our sight / reach.

Last night, Apple announced that the SDK would be available in June, including an iPhone simulator than runs on Mac devices. A Beta is available now, and some large Enterprise customers will even get access to the new v2 iPhone Beta firmware too. The new firmware brings a number of new, key features for corporate customers:

• Push Email, Calendar and Contacts
• Exchange ActiveSync support
• Cisco IPSec VPN
• Network Authentication (WPA2, 802.1x)
• Security Policies and Enterprise Configuration Tools
• Remote Wipe

Developers will generally be happy with the SDK and the sales model Apple have selected for people buying applications from iTunes or the new App Store option on the iPhone. Basically the developer sets the price the user should pay for the software and Apple will simply take 30% of the revenue as and when it occurs - if the developer sells nothing for months on end, Apple will not charge. Should the developer go one step further and offer the application for free, Apple will not charge anything at all to distribute that application.

Apple have indicated certain types of applications will not be allowed; unlocking tools, illegal items (eg hacking tools, malicious software, pornography).

EA Games, Salesforce.com, and AOL’s AIM were example applications at the launch.

As with the previous enhancement announcement, the new firmware will be provided for free on the iPhone, although there will be a small charge for the same new functions on the iPod Touch.

Some information courtesy of Engadget.

Sony have announced this iPod / iPhone Dock / Clock Radio, with the catchy model name of ICF-ClipMK2, which will be available in the US in May for around $100 in both Black and White. No word on UK availability though. Interesting that a main brand like Sony is to support a rival’s device like this…

Well, with the Apple event (to show the iPhone SDK and Roadmap) due on Thursday, what are the main snippets of information that are likely to be announced…

1. Firstly, Apple mentioned an “Enterprise” element to the event. Now, despite many people guessing weird and wonderful things that this could be, we wonder if it’s not the Lotus Notes support announcement that we first covered here and here.
2. The SDK itself will be announced, but rumours are suggesting it won’t be until around June when it will be complete (and possibly to coincide with the launch of the 3G iPhone), so some advanced function may not be available, which may well limit some third party apps from being considered for a while.
3. Again, the rumours are saying that Apple will limit which apps can be installed on the iPhone / iPod Touch, via the use of a chargeable verification scheme (limiting the freeware authors from releasing apps). However, with the iPhone easily unlocked, we wonder if a solution to this will be found soon enough.

We’ll know more for sure on Thursday…

If you are in the market for an external battery pack for whatever device you own, be it an iPhone, a Nokia smartphone, an iPod, or you just want to be able to spend more time away from your device plugged into the mains for charging, then you may be looking for an external battery pack. Berble.com have reviewed one, and the review is here.

Although announced some time ago, the Toyota Yaris SR is the first car we’re aware of that is shipping with the TomTom dock solution. The TomTom Duo allows you to remove the actual SatNav element (like most TomTom units) to allow you to still plan routes when away from the car (plus update the maps / speed cameras), but by having a permanently remaining interface, a lot of extra technology is included. This includes acting as an ipod interface, a radio, a CD player, a mp3 / wma player (via USB memory stick); in fact, most of these functions still work even with the SatNav unit removed. In terms of specification, the Duo is a similar spec to the TomTom ONE.

This is standard fitment on the Toyota Yaris SR.

As part of announcing the 2Gb iPod Shuffle, Apple have now reduced the price of the 1Gb version down to £32, although the 2Gb model (which should sell around the £49 the 1Gb model was priced at) is still not available, although it has been announced.

Although not yet listed in the UK Apple Store, Apple have released a larger capacity iPod Shuffle in the US, with 2Gb of storage, and have reduced the price of the 1Gb model. We expect similar changes in the UK to come at some point in the near future. The new 2Gb model will go on sale later this month in the US.

This little device allows you to use your iPod Dock (not included), not for playing music from your iPod, but from your Bluetooth A2DP mobile phone. Plugging into the standard iPod dock connector, it transforms that dock into a Bluetooth compatible dock.

This is available now for £33 from Amazon, either direct, or through our Amazon Store.

Although it’s not yet made it to the UK Apple Store, the US Apple Store is now listing a 16Gb iPhone for sale. We expect this will be available in the UK too in the very near future.

Also, just announced, a 32Gb iPod Touch is available now too.

The IBM Lotus Notes support for the iPhone we mentioned here has been delayed by IBM (ie it wasn’t launched at LotusSphere). It’s not clear if the decision was from IBM, or forced on them by Apple, but we expect it should be announced in the next month or two alongside the Apple iPhone SDK.

IBM are apparently soon to launch a Lotus Notes solution for the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Many large corporates are Notes users, and this will allow greater business usage of these devices throughout these companies. Apple and IBM have been working together on this solution, and there are rumours that IBM have had earlier access to the SDK due for release next month. More details are not likely before IBM’s LotusSphere, which starts over the weekend, although it is likely the software will be free.

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.

partfoundry have developed a GPS solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the locoGPS, and are hoping to release it in February this year. This will allow jailbroken devices to have GPS functionality and a GPS application. Along with the Google Maps Cell-Based Location Services due for the iPhone, it seems these Apple products are adding one of the few features that the top of the range Symbian devices had to differentiate them. With the SDK due to ship in February, we can safely predict this year there will be a lot of new applications and hardware accessories for these devices.