Gadgetoid

It turns out that the Piel Frama HTC Touch Pro case has been lurking in the new office since Friday. Having opened it up this morning and tried the HTC Touch Pro fit I can say that I am not only suitably impressed, but can heartily recommend this case over the positively awful one that comes as standard with the Touch Pro.

Not only do you not have to remove the HTC Touch Pro from the Piel Frama case to use it, but you can even slide open the keyboard, which is protected by a plastic pocket, and use it without removing the whole phone.

The standard case, on the other hand, offers no such flexibility and must be completely removed before you can do anything more with the phone than charge it. It’s more of a very cheap leather sleeve than a true case.

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No less than 5 separate SENA iPhone 3g cases arrived on the desks of Gadgetoid this morning. Rest assured we’ll have the low-down on all of them and how they compare to those from Piel Frama, Krusell, iSkin and more.

First impressions again are good, we’ve had no utter lemons yet. The SENA cases offer the best belt-clip attachment hard point I’ve seen yet with a very small, unobtrusive hole on the back of the case that doesn’t catch on my trouser pockets.

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After receiving three DAB radios from Roberts to give the Gadgetoid once over I never expected the smallest and most humble of the three to be the most impressive.

But it was. The Roberts solarDAB is both a remarkably simple and seemingly obvious product but it doesn’t seem to have an equal.

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This Friday only between 11am and 4pm GMT Expansys will be knocking a princely sum off the Black and White ASUS EEE PC Surf models.

The White ASUS Eee PC 701 Surf will drop by a massive £38 to only £117.99.

The sexier and more popular Black ASUS Eee PC 701 Surf will drop by only £16 down to £139.99

Suffice to say, if you’ve been meaning to pick up an ASUS Eee PC 701 there’s not going to be a better time to do so than between 11am and 4pm GMT tomorrow, Friday 26th September 2008.

Happy Friday when it comes!

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I’ve had the Neverlate Executive Alarm Clock sitting around for a while now pending a review. Now that I’ve had time to tinker with it and discover that all the features I could think of that I wanted bar one are available, my suspicions that it would be a surprisingly good piece of kit have been confirmed. One of my most welcomed features is the ability to have the backlight turn completely off when the Neverlate is not being used- the pulsating sleep light of the MacBook Pro is enough eerie night-time light for me, thanks.

The one feature that seems to be missing is the ability to press a single button to preview the volume level and buzzer sound of the alarm you’re currently setting. This seems like such an obvious feature that I’m still convinced I’ve missed it and that it’s in there somewhere. We’ll see.

Instead of setting an alarm for a minute from now several times over to experiment with volume levels and buzzer types I’ve simply set up a handful of successive alarms to surprise me in the morning. Unfortunately, volume level can only be set once for all alarms but I don’t think I’m going to lose any sleep over that.

Look out for the full review soon! First impressions are definitely good… the thing has 21 bloomin’ individual alarms, how many products can say that!?

The radio sounds good too, the ability to listen to it via headphones could be useful, and the phone-charging USB port in the back… well… bonus!

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Review by Stirky!

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, Released in March 2008, is a construction and Management simulation game for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS suitable and enjoyable for ages 3 and up.

Developed by Marvelous Interactive and published by Rising Star Games (No More Heroes, Super Swing Golf), There was no question that the game would be enjoyable to play but make sure you have plenty of time to play it.. Over to you Kirsty!

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I have been working on a review of the SlingLink for a while and it struck me that it would be best to have a similar HomePlug device for comparison and interoperability testing. I managed to obtain a Solwise HomePlug PL-85PE with which to do just this. What follows are my findings.

HomePlug is a networking solution that allows you to use your existing household power cables as network cables. To establish a network connection between one room and another you simply plug a HomePlug compatible device into each room and it just works.

You can use HomePlug devices directly between a cable modem (I used my Virgin Media, ex NTL one to test this) and a router, between two computers, between a games console and a router or any other situation in which you would ordinarily use a long network cable.

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The guys over at Noise.io have received a lot of flak for their bold move to delay the application in favour of packing in features and doing some serious re-structuring of their synthesis engine in order to support them.

Apparently they’ve received complaints by email that their application is a scam and/or vaporware and have responded in kind by offering a couple of audio demonstrations for download at their website.

Whilst the audio demonstrations would certainly not constitute definitive proof of Noise.io’s existence to naysayers they’re a nice thing to have at this stage.

We’re fast running out of days left in September, so I can only wish the Noise.io developers all the best and hope they manage to crank it out within a week. If not, it’s no loss, I would rather see a fully functional, polished and finished Noise.io later rather than risk a buggy, incomplete, early release killing support for the project and souring opinions of what could turn out to be one of the best iPhone applications, certainly for anyone musical, ever.

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I don’t know if anything like this exists, but I’ve always wanted something to keep my rechargeable batteries in check so that they’re always handy and charged batteries don’t get mixed with discharged ones.

If we can’t develop better battery technology, why not focus a little effort on making it more convenient to keep multiple AA (the most common) batteries charged and stored safely.

With 5 remotes, 4-6 wireless Xbox 360 controllers, up to 4 Wiimotes, and a bluetooth keyboard needing batteries in my gaming setup alone it’s pretty clear to see how such a solution, packing an absurd number of rechargeable AA batteries, would be useful.

And that’s without considering the miscellany of other devices that require AA batteries from time to time.

I’ve put together a very rough concept for which I chose to mimic eneloop branding as I think it particularly fits these batteries’ ability to retain a charge for a long period of time - hypothetically whilst being stored in the “hopper” of this desktop or wall-mountable mass battery charging solution.

Click here to view the very rudimentary concept.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Sanyo or their eneloop brand. It just looks pretty, okay!

I’ve no idea how, or if such a solution will work and whether or not it could be made flexible enough to take AAA batteries. Successfully charging so many batteries at once without overcharging any, and whilst automatically ejecting fully charged batteries ready for use could be quite a challenge.

There is, of course, the idea that a simple standard AA charger that can take up to 20 batteries, charge them, and store charged batteries with no ill effect would suffice. But I think a solution such as that in my concepts would be far tidier and more elegant. I’m also not sure if there’s any way to safely store batteries connected to a charging circuit for any length of time.

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Expansys have announced the availability of the Nokia N96 for pre-order at a staggering £575.99 a price that makes me simultaneously curse and sing the praises of subsidized phones on contract.

The N96 is an estimated 8 days away and boasts (still) a 5mp camera with a dual LED flash, a hearty 16GB of storage, HSDPA, Assisted GPS and even a Micro SDHC slot if, for some reason, 16GB doesn’t quite satiate your desire for portable storage.

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