by Steve O'Hear
August 17th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | 
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I personally wouldn’t go anywhere near this. The occasional ‘ilegal’ torrent at a time, such as a missed episode of Mad Men, may carry a little risk, but try justifying the complete Pirate Bay torrent index sitting on your hard drive — all 21 GB of it — and well I wish you good luck.
That’s exactly what you’re now able to do thanks to a helpful user of the world’s most famous file sharing site, reports ReadWriteWeb.
It looks as if an anonymous user uploaded the entire site’s archive in order to ensure that multiple backups exist in case torrents are removed post-purchase. Users who would like to download an archival copy of the site, can access it as a massive 21.3 gigabyte download for free.
“Post-purchase” refers to the pending sale of Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), a publicly listed company in Sweden. See our recent report: ‘The Pirate Bay sold, plans to go legit. Users urged to become capitalists.‘
by Steve O'Hear
August 17th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Net TV | Comments Off
I was so underwhelmed with VidZone, the PlayStation 3’s on-demand music video service, that I couldn’t bring myself to review it. The UI is clunky and videos stream in a 4:3 aspect ratio, even for recent releases, so that they don’t fill up the whole screen on my High Def telly.
However, it seems that I’m in the minority, if the company behind VidZone is to be believed. The service is a hit with the major record labels, meaning that it’s presumably resonating with consumers too, its co-founders tell GamesIndustry.biz.
After starting off by having to persuade the major labels to license their music videos to the service, VidZone says that the music industry is now knocking at their door.
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by Steve O'Hear
August 17th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | Comments Off
When I reviewed Samsung’s touch screen feature phone, the Tocco SGH-F480, I described the home screen widgets, part of the company’s “TouchWhiz” user interface, as “a fun but under developed feature”. At the time, the Tocco only offered seven widgets, including a clock, calendar, birthday reminder, photo browser and music player, and I bemoaned the fact that third-party developers were unable to create more.
That was almost a year ago, and today Samsung announced that it’s finally opening up the TouchWhiz widget platform, which exists across many of the company’s touch screen phones running Symbian, Windows Mobile, and the handset maker’s proprietary operating system. Third party developers will be able to build their own home screen widgets using familiar web standards – HTML, JavaScript and CSS – similar to Nokia’s WRT or, on a more ambitious scale, the Palm Pre’s WebOS, or indeed any widget platform whether it be targeting mobile, the PC or the television.
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by Steve O'Hear
August 13th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View Comments
Regular readers of this blog – and anybody who’ll listen – will know that I’m a big fan of physical QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones. I’m much less fond of virtual ones, such as that found on the iPhone or my Android-powered HTC Magic.
My current day-to-day phone is a Nokia E71, which I’ve found to have the best QWERTY to-date, but my love affair with mobile QWERTYs started way back when I bought my first Palm Treo (see my GDGT profile, if you’re interested in my gadget history).
I was therefore intrigued when Nokia announced the E55 with a keyboard that the company describes as a compact-QWERTY. Similar to BackBerry’s sure-type layout, each key houses two letters. The option of predictive text helps to smooth over this obvious compromise but then on the other hand you get the advantage of a candy bar form factor, and in the E55’s case, a very slender one too.
Over the next few weeks I intend to put the Nokia E55 through its paces and see how well I do on half a QWERTY. Watch this space.
by Steve O'Hear
August 13th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Other | Comments Off
I’ve argued before that with regards to eBooks and the Kindle, Amazon doesn’t view itself as a hardware company. Unlike the iTunes ecosystem designed to shift more iPods and iPhones, for Amazon it’s actually about selling digital content — the eBooks themselves — as demonstrated by the release of the iPhone ‘Kindle’ eBook reader and the company’s work-around to keep Apple away from any iPhone-generated eBook revenue.
The Kindle hardware exists to kick start and accelerate the uptake of eBooks, and as well as creating Kindle reader software for other mobile platforms, similar to what the company has already done on the iPhone, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon one day license its Kindle platform to competing hardware eBook readers. As I said, it’s clearly about shifting content, and to achieve this, owning the eBook ’standard’ and therefore default store.
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by Steve O'Hear
August 11th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | View Comments
Roku’s cheap but increasingly versatile set-top box has added another feather to its bow.
Joining both Netflix and Amazon-On-Demand, the $99 Roku Video Player can now stream live ‘out of market’ and archived baseball matches — in 720p HD no less — courtesy of MLB.TV (US-only).
Fans will of course still have to pony up for a season pass ($35) but that doesn’t seem like such as bad deal now that you can easily pipe that content to a wide-screen TV, and especially if you’re already an owner of Roku’s cheap ‘n’ cheerful little box.
(Also see Dave Zatz’s five suggestions for how to improve Roku’s offering.)
by Steve O'Hear
August 10th, 2009 | Posted in ZNF | Comments Off
A periodic roundup of relevant news from our friends at Zatz Not Funny…
What’s next for Roku? 5 suggestions
Dave Zatz: At $99 the Roku’s in impulse purchase territory – it’s hard to go wrong. Having said that, as an owner and a guy who follows this space, I’ve got a few suggestions for the Roku team (and their partners). Enable some of these, and I’ll pick up a box for every room.
Netflix Streaming to iPhone & Wii?
Dave Zatz: We’ve seen the Wii pop up as a potential Netflix streaming video destination on a few occasions – what we don’t know is the period of gaming platform exclusivity Microsoft currently enjoys with the Xbox 360.
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by Steve O'Hear
August 4th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View Comments
I pretty much had this one pegged. Hutchison-owned INQ have announced the follow up to the award winning INQ1 — dubbed the Facebook phone — with a QWERTY-touting handset that, amongst other things, targets users of Twitter.
The BlackBerry-esque device, called the INQ Chat 3G, pitches a host of messaging capabilities to end users, including ‘push’ email (via Gmail), Facebook access, Instant Messaging through Windows Live Messenger, Skype, and a Twitter client that provides ‘always-on’ connectivity to the micro-messaging social network so that updates are pushed ’straight to the homescreen’.
“Consumers can send tweets and retweet via the internet rather than using SMS”, boasts the press release.
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by Steve O'Hear
August 2nd, 2009 | Posted in last100 weekly wrapup | Comments Off
Here’s a summary of the last few weeks’ digital lifestyle action on last100. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special weekly wrapup RSS feed or by email.
Mobile
Google vs Microsoft? Forget Chrome OS (for now) and keep your eye on Android and Win Mobile
Forget Chrome OS versus Windows (for now), there’s another Google / Microsoft battle taking place right in front of our eyes and Google’s winning. No, I’m not talking search. That war is over and Google was victorious a long time ago. I’m talking mobile. Android versus Windows Mobile to be precise, where Redmond is looking a little vulnerable to say the least.
10 best apps currently running on my Android phone (HTC Magic)
I’ve only owned an Android OS-based phone for a few weeks – the HTC Magic (see my review) – but even in this relatively short amount of time I’ve been hitting Google’s mobile app store, the Android Market, pretty hard in search for the best and most useful third party apps the platform has to offer.
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