This is a screenshot from the latest Boxee Beta.  Boxee is an XBMC spin off which should work on Windows, Mac, Linux and Apple TV, and there have been a number of worthwhile articles about it if you are interested.

Firstly, Lifehacker have produced a Beta Walkthrough, which covers looks of detail over the software, including looking at some of the application addons that include Social Networking sites.

Now, if you are looking for a complete guide to installing Boxee, then head to Liam Green-Hughes site, where he has covered the install on the Acer Aspire Revo in sufficient detail to allow anyone to be able to get it installed and working.

Of course, if you are not keen on installing the software yourself, or don’t have an Acer Aspire Revo, then one option is to wait for their own hardware (in conjunction with D-Link) to be released…

This will be produced with a nice stylish RF remote (with a QWERTY keyboard on the back for performing searches and entering information).  It’s due to go on sale in the US for only $200, although it’s not clear what it will cost (or whether it will even be available) in the UK.  Just in case you’re worried that it’s a large ugly box, the height of that box is about 6 inches!

We’ve heard of a number of interesting Kindle updates that should come to the International Kindle at some point, although possibly not until 2010.

Firstly, we understand that Amazon have announced that by the first half of 2010 the Kindle will support organising eBooks into folders.  Of course, this comes just after the beta release of Kindle for PC (Kindle for Mac is due out into beta soon), which although it does not improve the organisation, does allow you to pick up where you left off on either your Kindle or your iPhone Kindle client.

Secondly, and probably more key to the uptake of the Kindle around the world, is news that Amazon may well be bringing the full web browser experience to the International version.  Now, when we say “full” experience, this means that the ability to view web sites on the B&W screen, without high CPU facilities such as Flash (it’s often better on the Kindle to head to mobile optimised websites), and it will be a little slow.  At the moment, the only Kindle accessible website is the English Wikipedia mobile website, so extending this will be very useful, and allow a number of small applciations (such as some games) to be able to work too.

This web access would remain free too, which will make the device even better for accessing email, news websites, blogs, Twitter, etc. as it is commonly used in the US; although at this moment in time there is no ETA for this function to be made available.

This is an innovative desk stand for your phone.  As well as including an 8-in-1 memory card reader, a 2 port USB hub, having a variety of connectors to charge your phone, and running solely off USB power, it also claims to be able to hold any phone in portrait or landscape formats without any additional support!

The Desk Genie is apparently made from a special rubberised material, which is strong enough to hold an phone in portrait or landscape positions, and should even still hold the phone in place when the phone is vibrating, yet should leave no sticky residue on the phone.  For only £15 (+ delivery) this looks an interest device, if only to hold your phone at the right angle for use on your desk, let alone all the additional properties it has.

Mobile Fun do warn that with time the rubbery surface’s ability to hold a phone will fade as dust collects on the surface, but a quick wipe with clean water should restore it back to normal.

As for those mobile phones charging connectors: iPhone, Nokia (both 2mm and 3.5mm), Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG are all supported, as are the miniUSB and microUSB formats (the latter being the standard connector for many manufacturers moving forward).   This power connector does not use either of the USB ports on the device, although it would appear at first glance that this is a power only connector, so it may not be possible to sync and charge many devices (unless you use Bluetooth to sync between the device and your PC/Mac).

You can see more of the Desk Genie at Mobile Fun.

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.

I was fortunate to be invited to an online feedback session with David Kerrigan, who heads up the Internet services at 3UK the other night to discuss the recently launched MiFi device.  One common concern by the early reviewers was the 4 lights, and whether it was clear enough about what the status of the device was.  David said he took these comments onboard, and would look to see what could be done; a little LCD display was discussed, but whether 3UK are able to implement it we don’t know yet.

I raised a question about the lack of GPRS fallback on all 3UK Mobile Broadband devices, and David re-iterated 3UK’s position that with their plans for their “monster” network over the next year, they feel the problems of lack of coverage will go away such that thoughts of GPRS fallback should no longer occur.

Questions were raised over the current management interface, especially for Mac and Linux users, and David confirmed that “early next year” there should be a web interface available for these devices.  When pushed, David took onboard my comments about making new facilities such as this available to existing users, as well as users of the “next generation” MiFi device, and David stated he would feedback to the developers that this was wanted as a firmware upgrade for existing devices, as well as new devices, and I hope the developers listen and provide functionality like this to the early adopters.

A couple of important points from me; firstly, this confirms 3UK’s statement earlier in the year that they want to listen more, and take onboard feedback.  I’m impressed that they are willing and open to discussions on their devices, and for that, I fully support 3UK.  With their new improved network rolling out I guess that just leaves their Customer Service as an issue, although I’m not sure any mobile network could be said to have a “good Customer Service” experience.

Finally, a few snippets of other news; the Android phone announcement should be any day now, and promises to be an interesting device.  Also, 3UK confirmed that they will not be carrying the iPhone any time soon (that’s not to say they won’t ever carry it, just don’t hold your breath!); they said they feel their upcoming range of phones will offer a similar “or better” mobile internet experience, although they did finish with “We’re not saying never.. just not yet”!!

I’d like to thank David from 3UK, Sarah B from 3UK (PR), and the team at 3mobilebuzz for organising the feedback session.  If you have any opinions on 3UK, the MiFi device, or any other area of 3UK’s service, then leave a comment, and I’ll pass it back to 3UK at the next feedback session.

This is the new Revo IKON, launched this morning by Revo Technologies. We’ve featured various devices by Revo before, but this is a very interesting device.  Previously we were big fans of the Revo iBlik RadioStation, which brought together their FM, DAB and DAB+ technologies with an iPod dock, but this unit takes things a stage further…

In terms of music, the Revo IKON can play FM radio (with RDS information), DAB, DAB+ as well as Internet Radio, and will, where available from the broadcaster, display colour station logos, station descriptions, track and artist information, and even news headlines.

Yet it also supports a few other methods; it can stream music from any wirelessly connected PC or Mac (and will show colour album artwork and track information where available), and it’s also an iPod / iPhone sound dock.  If that wasn’t enough, in the US (these services are all US-only, so none are generally available in the UK), it will also connect to the Sirius, Pandora and Rhapsody premium online service too.

However, a really interesting feature is that the device also supports Last.fm, something we’re a big fan of here at UK Gadgeteer; the Revo IKON will also provide access to online music service Last.fm. Simply choose an artist or genre and let Last.fm build the perfect playlist from its library of 5 million tracks – unique to the user, and fresh every time.  Alternatively, an existing Last.fm profile can be used.  On top of that, Revo are including a 30 day trial to last.fm, which would then need a standard subscription of £3/month €3/month $3/month (this service is only available in the UK, US and Germany) to continue to use this facility.

Owen Parry, Last.fm Product Manager said “We’re delighted that Revo has taken the decision to include Last.fm functionality as a standard feature on their new IKON ‘touch-radio’. The combination of high quality audio, large colour display, and a free 30 day trial subscription, makes it easy to explore and enjoy music through Last.fm, right out of the box.”

The unit features an NXT flat panel speaker, and delivers 30W of audio.  It will be on sale from October 2009, and cost £279.95.

Nimbuzz, a popular mobile client on Symbian, have announced they have released two new products.  Firstly, they have released a Mac version of their desktop client, which allows access to many IM networks (Facebook, AIM, MySpace, Google Talk (Orkut), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), ICQ) as well as voice calling to Nimbuzz, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk users.

Their iPhone / iPod Touch client gains the ability to share photos, music and videos, and also supports Push Notifications for alerts of incoming calls or chats.  It also adds support for location sharing.

More details on both can be found on the Numbuzz website.

One complaint levelled at Nokia’s Share Online service is that it’s limited to 3 services (Flickr, Ovi and Vox).  Well, that’s not quite true.  Although no other services are available for configuration from Nokia (and you can’t add your own manually), it seems some companies have fathomed out what’s involved, and will allow you to connect Share Online to their services…

Firstly, one of the popular twitter image sites, mobypicture have provided simple instructions for using Nokia Share Online (and Nokia Lifeblog for elder phones).  These instructions are here.

Secondly, pixelpipe, an up and coming competitor to ShoZu, have also setup the ability to use their services via Share Online, therefore saving the need for the installation of an additional app just to upload photos.  Pixelpipe support a whole range of upload options; email, MMS (strangely very popular right now for iPhone users!), and they also have support for iPhones directly, Nokia phones (using Share Online) and finally an Android app for Android phones.  More information on all these options can be found here.

Actually, pixelpipe support a whole range of upload options, ranging from Windows app, Firefox, Linux and Mac utilities, and they even have facilities for uploading via instant messaging! pixelpipe currently support 75 services to post that content (text, photos, video, even audio files) to, with a full range of social networking sites, photo & video services, and blogging and micro-blogging platforms.

The only downside with using Share Online instead of ShoZu is that ShoZu does have the facility for offering an automatic upload option (and also can ask you to confirm before sending), whereas with Share Online it’s more of a manual process (also, ShoZu is much better at queuing multiple requests), but for some, ShoZu either doesn’t work, or isn’t worth the memory used to keep it running in the background to provide these services.

Finally, although we’ve not compared the list to work out whether it’s absolutely true; pixelpipe claim to support at least 25 more sites than ShoZu…

We’re impressed companies have worked out how to link into the limited Share Online functionality, and it’s nice to see a greater range of choice of how to upload your photos and videos, and with two of these services supporting a single upload and making the file available on multiple sites, these are worthy of further investigation for many as a method of keeping data usage down.

Skype have recently released the latest beta version of their Skype client, v4.1.  One of the main new features in this version over the current version is support for screen sharing, as can be seen in the above screenshot.  This feature already exists in the beta v2.8 Mac version, and the plan is for the feature to be compatible across Mac, Windows and Linux.

Skype have also added / returned the following features:

• Birthday reminders
• Ability to send contact details to other Skype users
• Ability to import contacts from GMail, Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo!, AOL and LinkedIN
• Updated IE and Firefox plugins which now recognize your Skype contacts mentioned on web pages and highlight phone numbers which you can call for free

Skype have also updated their audio and video engines and they have also fixed a number of occasional crashes.

This new beta can be downloaded from here, or you can wait a short while, and, once formally released, it should be offered from within the client itself.

Garmin regularly release new firmwares for their latest and greatest devices, but, even for their elder devices, they occasionally continue to release updates.  Over the last few months, we’ve seen updates for the Garmin Forerunner 305 (v2.90) and the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx (v3.90).   Also, Garmin have updated their WebUpdater software for Windows (v2.4.2) and for Mac (v2.0.6), and back a little further, there have been updates for the Garmin Training Center for Mac and the Mac ANT Agent.  Finally, back in January, Garmin released a beta firmware for the Oregon range (v2.8.5) which offers some new functionality as well.

Update: Since then, Garmin have released a few more beta versions, with the latest Oregon beta now v2.96.

Although there are slight risks associated with firmware updates (for example, some of the latest Nuvi firmwares have introduced a bug with the way the devices handle mp3 and speed camera alerts making them useless as media players), normally Garmin move forward with their firmwares, and they are worthwhile applying; some will be needed for supporting the latest map updates, and Garmin will normally ask you to apply the latest firmware when dealing with any tech support issues, so fire up WebUpdater (it should check itself for updates before checking your device) and ensure you are upto date.

Incidentally, the picture is of the new Garmin Oregon 500, which Garmin confirmed to me the other week would be released, but could not confirm the exact release date (we previously mentioned it here).  They also stated that they recommend the Oregon series over the Colorado series of devices due to better battery life in the Oregon range.

Apple have announced that their are soon to hit 1 billion apps downloaded from their iTunes App Store.  To celebrate this, Apple is offering a range of prizes.  Anyone who downloads an app from now until that 1 billionth download will be entered into a prize draw, where the single winner prize is a $10,000 iTunes gift card, a 17″ Macbook Pro, 32GB iPod Touch, and an Apple Time Capsule.

To enter, simply download an app from the iTunes store (whether you need to purchase it or not), or fill in an online entry form into the prize drawer; you are limited to 25 entries per day.

Apple have just reopened the Apple Store, which was down for updates for the last few hours.  There have been a large number of updates, which include

• New Mac mini models
• New Mac Pro models
• New iMac models
• New Apple Timeport
• New Apple Airport Extreme

Some, if not all, of these products have had snippets of information leaked over the last days, and some products were said to be well overdue an update, but these products are now all available to purchase in the Apple Store.

Garmin have been slowly rolling out native Mac support for their range of applications, and last week, Garmin moved a step further towards full Mac support by releasing the ANT Agent for Mac software.  This allows the ANT USB Wireless stick to communicate between the Mac and the Garmin Forerunner 405 or Garmin Forerunner 50 for use with the Garmin Connect website.

Garmin have also stated that they will hopefully be releasing Mac support to allow these devices to keep their firmware and GPS firmware up to date, which today still require a Windows PC to achieve.

The Garmin ANT Agent needs an Intel Mac running OS X v10.4 or newer, and you need 256MB of RAM and at least 150MB disk space free.

Google have just launched their Picasa software as a Beta for the Mac platform.  They have also released some more information on this version here, although generally the easiest way to understand the product is to download it and try it out.  Picasa has been a very popular image management tool for Windows for some while, and it’s likely this new version will be just as succesful, especially for those who move from Windows to Mac and want the familarity of being able to use similar tools.

The BBC have announced this week that their iPlayer service now supports Mac and Linux, such that viewers can now download programmes.  The BBC have achieved this by working with Adobe to produce a solution in AIR, which is cross platform.  However, this is only available to BBC iPlayer Labs users in the short term, with it being rolled out to everyone during 2009.  Right now, there are also only a handful of shows that are supported by the new platform, although more will be coming in time, so although the BBC are happy for people to apply to the new beta service, they recommend you don’t uninstall the old version for a while.

Nokia have been busy of late.  Firstly they sneaked out an update to FriendView beta, and have now launched a mobile friendly FriendView website (which simply offers the client for download, but it’s better than before).  They’ve also stated that this client shares the same map cache as the v1.82 Sportstracker beta, so although neither use Nokia Maps right now, at least the online map data is only downloaded once.

After quite some time in beta, Nokia viNe has now been released too, which we have covered before, but basically will allow Sportstracker to be limited to true Sports activities, with all others activities slowly moving to Nokia viNe instead.

They’ve updated Nokia Wellness Diary, which now supports the Nokia N79, Nokia E71, Nokia N85, Nokia 6210, and Nokia 6220, and is compatible with the v1.82 Sportstracker beta too.

Nokia have updated their Nokia Maps data, so if you haven’t checked recently, it might be worth checking via the Nokia Map Loader to see if there are any new maps for your region.

Also of note; if you are an Nokia N810 Tablet user, and have upgraded to the latest firmware, then use the Map information menus within the “Maps” application, and you’ll see updated maps too (these have been available for some while, but very few seem to be aware of the new maps, as it needs the new firmware and the new Maps software that it brought to gain access to these maps).

In terms of non-map related updates;

• Nokia have updated Nokia Chat to v1.0 Beta 4
• They have graduated Nokia Photos (now v1.5, or part of the latest Ovi Suite), which means it now features on the main Nokia website, and comes with full support from Nokia
• Finally, they have also updated the Multimedia Transfer Application for Macs to v1.4.

Today is the start of Nokia World, and a fairly key announcement is due from Nokia first thing this morning.  We’ll report on this as soon as we’ve received the information and fully digested it.  We wonder if it’s the phone codenamed IP08 that we featured here…

Nokia Beta Labs released their Map Loader application for the Mac this week.  Designed to make the installation of additional Nokia Maps onto the phones easier, this is a welcome application, even though it’s still in Beta right now.  It needs Nokia Multimedia Transfer for Mac installed first, but that is also a useful application, so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue.  It’s still a beta application, but shows Nokia’s commitment to Macs and OS X, even if it’s taking a while to arrive.

More information on the application can be found in the Nokia Beta Labs Blog.

A long while ago (back in January), we covered Garmin Bobcat, which was a Beta of Garmin’s Mac support program for their GPS and SatNav units. Well, Garmin have now formally released the software, although it’s now called Garmin RoadTrip. On top of that, at the Garmin Mac page, you can download other utilities for your Mac, including Map Installers, POI Loader, and WebUpdater.

This is FitBit, a new device due to start shipping around December / January in the US. The device can be worn in a variety of locations, and it uses an accelerometer to record your exercise throughout the day (and night if you want to). It will cost around $99, and even features an OLED display. It will connect wirelessly to a basestation, and automatically sync all your walking / exercise data with your PC or Mac when in range.

An interesting device, although you could achieve a similar solution today by installing Nokia’s Step Counter beta software onto an NSeries device with a built in accelerometer.

Although not yet planned to ship to the UK, we suspect they’ll be available in the New Year via some means.  More information at Fitbit.

Although it’s only been out a few months, a new software update has been released for the Garmin Forerunner 405, Garmin’s newest GPS based training watch. If you head off to the Forerunner 405 software page, you’ll find more details about the new version. If you have already set your Forerunner to connect to your PC, then you should be able to simple connect your ANT USB Stick, and update the device wirelessly. Unlike most Garmin GPS / SatNav units, this device does not use the traditional Garmin WebUpdater to update, but does take advantage of the Garmin Communicator plugin (which is commonly used to get geocaches from sites such as Geocaching.com into yoru GPS). Right now, this plugin is Windows only, but Garmin assure us they hope to have Mac support in Autumn 2008.

The feature list of v2.2 includes:

• Added timeout setting to the Training Options menu that disables the automatic timeout to power save mode when the watch is in training mode.
• Changed all settings in the Training Options menu to be specific to the current sport mode setting.
• Made adjustments to instantaneous pace filtering.
• Calculate calories, averages, and Virtual Partner time ahead/behind only when not auto paused.
• Added small navigation arrow on course timer page.
• Added locating satellites page before allowing user to mark location or mark position for the mark and lap auto lap by position option to ensure that the user’s current location is the one that is saved.
• Improved reliability of unit-to-unit transfers.
• Fixed issue where watch could freeze with bezel, accessories, and GPS not working.
• Fixed issues that could occur when using back to start feature.
• Corrected issues related to using the foot pod and GPS at the same time.
• Fixed issue where auto pause would not work if GPS was off and user was using only a foot pod or a bike sensor and not a heart rate monitor.
• Corrected issue with auto wheel size calibration for bike sensor.
• Fixed issue where total times greater than 24 hours could be displayed incorrectly on the totals page.
• Prevent start/stop or lap/reset from triggering if one button is released before the other after locking the bezel.
• Automatically classify activities with a foot pod as running and activities with a bike sensor as biking before sending data to the computer.
• Updated translations.

Like many software updates, we would recommend you think carefully before applying this update, although we’ve generally found Garmin updates to be well worth applying.