Archive for July, 2010

Vodafone does a 180 as its 360 handsets are canned – I'm not surprised

by Steve O'Hear

July 29th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile | Comments7 Comments

The hardware business is a tough one. And in the smartphone space an incredibly crowded, expensive and competitive one.

It’s perhaps noble then that Vodafone tried but ultimately failed with its bespoke Vodafone 360 handsets, which were based on the LiMo operating system and manufactured by Samsung. The mobile operator announced this week that while its “360” suite of mobile services would live on, it was getting out of the handset business. The upcoming Samsung H2 has been canceled.

I’m not surprised.

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Wrapup: My email from Steve Jobs, Palm Pixi Plus and Motorola Milestone review, 10 UK Internet TV sites, and more

by Steve O'Hear

July 18th, 2010 | Posted in last100 weekly wrapup | Comments39 Comments

Here’s a summary of the latest digital lifestyle coverage on last100. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special weekly wrapup RSS feed or by email.

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I emailed Steve Jobs and got a reply (or why I don’t own an iPad)

The weekend before last I fired off an email to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and to my surprise, I actually got a reply (OK, I wasn’t that surprised as Steve has been replying to a lot of emails lately).

Review: Palm Pixi Plus – It’s all about webOS and that form-factor

As regular readers will know, I’m a big admirer of Palm’s webOS (see Palm Pre review) and a fan of the BlackBerry-esque portrait QWERTY form-factor as found on Nokia’s E72 – my current primary smartphone. It’s therefore not a stretch to presume that Palm’s second device running webOS, the Palm Pixi (or to be precise, the Palm Pixi Plus, the GSM variant that adds WiFi), would be right up my street with its portrait physical QWERTY keyboard and multi-touch screen. And for the most part it is, with the exception of an underpowered processor and eye-squinting web browser. Read on for my hands-on review.

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ZNF: Samsung Galaxy S review, iPhone 4 antenna fix, Sonos on Android, 3 iPad games

by Steve O'Hear

July 18th, 2010 | Posted in ZNF | Comments3 Comments

A periodic roundup of relevant news from our friends at Zatz Not Funny…

Resolving the iPhone 4 Antenna Problem

Dave Zatz: Late last week, Steve Jobs cut his Hawaiian vacation short so that he could respond to iPhone 4 reception concerns with a press conference. The takeaway seems to be that most smartphones suffer degraded network performance when held in specific ways, but the issue is overblown in real world usage.

Hands On with the Samsung Galaxy S

Dave Zatz: Samsung’s making a splash with their new, high-end line of Android ”Galaxy S” handsets. And while they’ve already launched overseas, the US variants with custom enclosures and functionality, start rolling out today.

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Review: Palm Pixi Plus – It's all about webOS and that form-factor

by Steve O'Hear

July 15th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile, Review | Comments2 Comments

As regular readers will know, I’m a big admirer of Palm’s webOS (see Palm Pre review) and a fan of the BlackBerry-esque portrait QWERTY form-factor as found on Nokia’s E72 – my current primary smartphone.

It’s therefore not a stretch to presume that Palm’s second device running webOS, the Palm Pixi (or to be precise, the Palm Pixi Plus, the GSM variant that adds WiFi), would be right up my street with its portrait physical QWERTY keyboard and multi-touch screen. And for the most part it is, with the exception of an underpowered processor and eye-squinting web browser. Read on for my hands-on review.

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Opera Mini 5.1 comes to Android

by David Gilson

July 14th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile | Comments3 Comments

The Norwegian Browser company, Opera, has announced the release of Opera Mini 5.1 for Android phones today.

Opera Mini provides a “lightning fast” browser experience by virtue of its proxy service. Servers over at Opera receive page requests from the Opera Mini browser, and download the page. By reflowing text and compressing images, this allows pages to be downloaded faster than a browser loading the original page. The disadvantage here is a lack of privacy, and indeed the proxy service will break some sites that require a login, and internet banking is a definite no-no for any proxy-based browser.

Opera Mini also provides functionality to synchronise bookmarks with other Opera Mini installations on other phones and with the desktop Opera browser. There are other handy features like “speed dial” which provide quick links to favourite sites. Opera Mini also supports full copy and paste for grabbing and using text from web pages.

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BlackBerry OS 6 gets previewed, continues consumer push

by Steve O'Hear

July 12th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile, Social | Comments6 Comments

I’ve never quite understood why Nokia’s Symbian gets so much flack for having an outdated UI while BlackBerry is let off the hook. In my book, RIM’s OS is equally old fashioned and despite years of maturity still looks a bit, well, unfinished in parts, with text hard aligned on certain setting screens and a kludge of drop down menus at times. But that’s set to change with the upcoming Blackberry 6, which got a tasty preview on video today.

What’s shown seems very consumer-focused too as the company continues to break out from its core base of corporate users and build on the success of BlackBerry Messenger amongst teenagers and other non-suits, as well as Facebook integration and a slew of consumer apps.

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Internet TV: 10 UK on-demand and live video offerings compared

by David Gilson

July 6th, 2010 | Posted in Net TV, Review | Comments4 Comments

Last time we surveyed the UK’s live and on-demand Internet TV landscape (back in July 07), it was a bare-bones affair. The BBC’s iPlayer was Windows-only and hadn’t yet launched out of private beta, while rival broadcaster offerings were lacking content and, like the iPlayer itself, crippled by DRM and the need to install additional and sometimes conflicting software.

How things have changed.

Today, TV watching Brits are spoilt with choice when it comes to live and on-demand online from the 6 main UK broadcasters, along with a number of aggregators, including the newly launched SeeSaw, the closest yet to the US Hulu.

Read on for our full guide:

1. BBC iPlayer

BBC iPlayerBBC iPlayer has the most helpfully laid out video on demand site in the UK. However, the newer version of the site (currently on show at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/) adds to this with an impressive new design. As ever, there is access to a TV schedule so you can find what was on when, for each channel.

The front page of the site has a small section that displayes featured programmes in each genre. However, clicking the “Show All” button takes you to a full listing for that genre. Down the side category pages are a list of all categories, which when clicked expand to show a list of sub-categories, and how many programmes are in each. Each of these pages have options to list programmes by how recently they were broadcast, or as a full A-Z list.

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MeeGo for smartphones gets previewed

by Steve O'Hear

July 2nd, 2010 | Posted in Mobile | Comments25 Comments

We were recently given a preview of MeeGo for Internet tablets, but now the Open Source Linux-based OS from Nokia and Intel has been publicly outed running on smartphone hardware.

It’s only a few UI screen shots and a YouTube video of the OS running on some kind of reference device, but it gives us a good idea of how MeeGo is translating to the small screen, and how much of its Nokia Maemo legacy remains.

First impressions are generally good; the UI is pretty in parts, if a little barebones (think: Android) in some areas. The contact/address book isn’t much to look at, for example, while the web browser and webOS-esque task switcher appears much more fully baked. Overall, however, it looks promising.

Video and more screen shots after the jump…

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