Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

WorkSnug – an iPhone app to help remote workers combat cabin fever

I work from home a lot. And I mean, a lot.

It’s both a privilege – I get to enjoy an extra hour in bed and avoid a lengthy commute – and a pain. Just ask any remote worker and they’ll tell you that sooner or later cabin fever sets in.

That’s why it’s great to be able to up root and take yourself and your laptop someplace else to work other than home. You know, a coffee shop, a public or co-working space or anywhere with a free table, coffee and WiFi.

And guess what? There’s an iPhone app to help with that too. It’s called WorkSnug.

From my TechCrunch Europe post:

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Quick review: HTC Legend

I didn’t have as long with HTC’s Legend as I normally require for a full review – so I’m going to keep it short. To sum up the Legend: it takes everything we liked about its predecessor, the HTC Hero, and turns it up a notch.

As regular readers may remember, the HTC was the phone that restored my faith in Google’s Android, largely because of HTC’s Sense UI, which adds much needed polish to the out-of-the-box Android experience and other improvements, such as social networking integration, a better virtual keyboard and web browser.

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The Gadget Show Live: Forget iPad, supersize your iPhone says Elonex

“What is an iPad? An iPad is basically a big iPhone”, argued Nick Smith, Elonex CEO at last week’s The Gadget Show Live.

“Err, it’s a bit more than that”, I replied, before politely indulging in a product pitch for the company’s iDock XL, a portable 10inch screen that houses an iPhone (or iPod touch) and displays any video content coming from the device. It’s available for pre-order and costs £149.

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Nokia wants to connect everyone with 3 new QWERTY-touting handsets

Nokia-c3-c6-e5Nokia unveiled three new phones today as part of their Everyone Connect launch, (press release here). “Everyone Connect” is Nokia’s attempted at bringing E-Mail, Instant Messaging and Social Networking together into a unified whole. As part of this messaging emphasis, all three phones have a QWERTY keyboard. This is a loud and clear message from Nokia as to what they think about touch screen keyboards. Another theme that ties these three phones together is their low cost with Nokia clearly wanting to bring smart phones to the low and mid tier markets. While none of these phones are ground breaking, and may invite yet more of the same-old tired Nokia bashing, these three may prove to be ideally placed to sell in large numbers, thus maintaining Nokia’s market share.

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The Gadget Show Live: Elonex £99 touch screen colour eBook reader

At last week’s The Gadget Show Live, Elonex showed off a new eBook reader, which will retail for £99 and features WiFi and a 7 inch colour touch screen. It doesn’t utilise eInk for the display, of course, instead it’s plain old TFT and as a result won’t be as easy on the eye for long reading periods and won’t offer eInk’s amazing battery life.

On that note, I suspect the Elonex rep featured in the video below got his wires crossed when talking in terms of page turns when describing power consumption, and the device on show wasn’t a working model either, so overall we’re holding our judgment.

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The Gadget Show Live: Hands-on with the new Flip MinoHD

In our review of the original Flip MinoHD, I was critical of the point-and-shoot camcorder’s tiny 1.5 inch viewfinder/screen, which made it fiddly to frame shots accurately. The fact that it has a 4:3 aspect ratio despite shooting in 16:9 widescreen, reduced the visible preview even more.

It seems that Cisco – makers of the Flip – have been listening. The newly revamped Flip MinoHD, which I got a hands-on with at last week’s Gadget Show Live, has a 2 inch screen with very little letter-boxing. It also sports a much nicer body, with the back utilizing aluminum, and also adds up to double the storage (8GB) and a HDMI port for connecting to a High Definition television.

The software remains largely unchanged I’m told, and it’s not clear if the company has added any image stabilization, which was another complaint of mine. But hey, you can’t have everything.

Video after the jump…

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I is back (from the Gadget Show Live 2010)

As is becoming a tradition at last100, I was away for the best part of last week at The Gadget Show Live (2010) in Birmingham, UK and generally taking a bit of time out to recharge my batteries, or at least that was the idea.

Aside from clocking up multiple Foursquare check-ins and quite a bit of mileage, I got to check out some of the latest consumer tech, which compared to last year’s show, was a little underwhelming. It just seemed that there wasn’t much new – and a lot of products were noticeably missing in action (Apple iPad anyone?)

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Nokia said to be readying iPad competitor – Windows or MeeGo anyone?

From the words of an “analyst”, so I won’t hold my breath. Nokia is said to be readying its own take on the now-credible Internet tablet, post Apple’s iPad.

TheStreet.com reports: “Nokia is working with suppliers and design manufacturers on a touch-screen tablet to have available as early as this fall, according to Rodman Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar, who is close to Nokia’s technology partners. Nokia declined to comment.”

My take

With Internet tablets likely to soon become part of the carrier subsidy merry-go-round, Nokia will be forced to jump on the latest bandwagon – although it already has form in this space – so it would make sense if the handset maker is already putting into action plans to challenge Apple’s iPad. It’s not like we didn’t already know that 2010 is going to be the year of the tablet, just like 08/09 was for the Netbook – and Nokia was far too late to that particular party.

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MeeGo arrives on the N900, non-developers advised to move along

N900 booting into Meego terminal

The MeeGo community blog has announced that N900 users can download a working image of the new MeeGo operating system. In addition to supporting the N900 ARM architecture, they have also released an image for Intel’s Atom processors, thus covering the shared heritage of the the Moblin and Maemo parent platforms.

In their own words:

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HTC Legend is my new Hero

The new HTC Legend

I’m a massive fan of HTC’s Hero smartphone, my favorite Android device to date. That is until this afternoon when I took loan of the HTC Legend, which is essentially a revamped Hero, uni-body-style aluminum casing included.

Doesn’t it look fitting next to a Macbook?

I’ve only played with device for about an hour and so far it’s definitely a little more responsive than the Hero and HTC’s updated Sense UI hasn’t lost any of its appeal. Just going through the setup process shows an eye to detail and focus on user experience that I’ve come to expect from HTC. As a result, it took only a few minutes to have Gmail, Google Calendar, Contacts, Twitter and Facebook synced and pulling in updates, all over-the-air — and I’m good to go.

Fantastic.

Expect a full review in the next two weeks or jump in the comments if you have any questions in the mean time.