Gadgetoid

It’s not often that I sit down and blast through a game, thoroughly enjoying it every step of the way. Uncharted 2 has been one of those rare occasions, however, remaining gripping at every step, avoiding pesky loading screens, and dishing out near perfect, seamless, cinematically sound action gaming which is impossible to put down.

It’s just one of those games that you absolutely have to play and, whilst it may not be perfect (an Xbox 360 version would be nice), it’s damn near close and boasts a decent plot, great voice acting, great direction, mind-blowing graphics and absolutely zip in the way of loading screens… apart from the somewhat lengthy first load when you fire up the game.

There’s nothing more I need say, if you own a PS3, even remotely enjoy the exploits of Lara Croft, avidly watch Indiana Jones movies or simply are looking for something a little different to play then grab it!

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I loved the look of the Motorola DEXT hardware, the specifications aren’t bad on paper either, but I started using Android with much skepticism.

It wasn’t long, however, until it had won me over… at least in part. I’m still eager to get my hands on the N900 and a shiny new version of Maemo that looks light-years ahead of my N810, but I digress.

The DEXT is a pretty solid little handset with an all important slide-out keyboard which you simply couldn’t do without on such a social-networking centric device. The keyboard isn’t the best I’ve used, but it’s close. The keys have a significant bevel which emphasises their separation, making it easier to hit the right key and thus making typing bearable.

I much prefer a hardware keyboard to the frustrating virtual one in the iPhone and, in fact, the frustrating virtual one on the DEXT itself. I haven’t got on well with virtual keyboard since typing on a mobile device involved either stabbing at one with a stylus or learning a bizarre dialect of symbolic letters to meet the software half way in a parody of character recognition (a practise that made the PSION very close to people’s hearts).

The DEXT seems to be remarkably snappy for browsing and more, leaving me pocketing my N810 in frustration and doing my mobile forum frequenting on the DEXT instead. The webkit powered browser is, of course, very similar to that in Apple’s iPhone although the complete lack of pinch zooming is a very frustrating thing to come to terms with. Multiple windows are supported and can easily be switched between and identified using thumbnail previews. Of course, anyone with an ounce of experience with Android will already know this!

MotoBLUR is one of the DEXTs most touted features. Motorola’s social networking centric Android customisations are quite good, leading a dumped DEXT ROM to be quite popular amongst Android powered HTC handset owners. The mere fact that MotoBLUR has made it (unofficially) beyond just Motorola devices, thanks to a determined community, speaks volumes about just how good it is. I do enjoy having Twitter and Facebook on my home-screen, where people’s statuses finally get shoved under my nose… I don’t log into either service often!

The DEXT is a little fat, but still quite pocketable for a keyboard-endowed device. I’m a huge fan of the boltgun metal and black colouring, but the naff plastic battery cover with a perplexing array of large, inverted braille adorning it leaves much to be desired. More metal, please, Motorola, this almost wins the competition for worst battery cover I’ve ever laid hands upon. Although I think I’ve finally got the hang of getting the blasted thing back on again.

Much to the frustration of memory card junkies the Micro SD slot on the Motorola DEXT is internal, stowed away underneath the batter cover. Fortunately a card can be swapped in without removing the battery so I guess this could be scored as one less hole for dust and grime to find its way into.

The DEXT is clearly born to work in landscape mode, the USB charger is on the left-hand side which I think Motorola would like you to think of as the bottom. If ever a dock arrives for this phone then it’ll be a landscape one. Fortunately the headphone port is at the top and is dead centre. Unfortunately the camera is also at the top (or the far left in landscape) and seems to be precisely placed to take the most unwanted photos of your fingers.

The front of the handset is endowed with only 3 buttons. Menu, Home and Back. The 5-way navigator is on the left of the keyboard which is a particularly unusual design choice that also plagues us Nokia N810 owners. The navigator is absolutely beautiful for one handed operation of the web browser, but you have to have the keyboard slid out to use it. Suffice to say, one handed portrait web browsing is an absolute no-go unless you have freakishly small and accurate thumbs.

Last but not least is the silent switch, which you better damned well have some thumbnails to be able to operate, the volume control, a lock/power button and a camera shutter button.

Overall it’s a nice phone which doesn’t make me want to throw it down in frustration, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get one. My heart is still very much set on the N900, and the screen density of modern devices just isn’t fit for kludgy, fat fingered, inaccurate prodding.

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It looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me in the run up to Christmas. I am continuing to experiment in bringing you some “gadgetoid” toy reviews with the support of Tomy and V-Tech at the moment. I’ve got plenty to gander at, however, including a Tomas & Friends motorised play set, V-Tech’s truly excellent First Steps Baby Walker and more. Hopefully this should keep you gadgetoids, at least those of you with kids, well informed in the run up to Christmas when the pressure is on to deposit something exciting under the tree.

Alongside these I’ll also be looking at some more traditional gadgets, including the Rovio from Wowee, the TC Electronic VoiceTone Synth (which is truly excellent with an instrument plugged in, but not so exciting without), the DAB Highway from PURE and far too much more.

Watch this space!

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After acquiring a MiFi 2352 mobile router from Novatel I realised I’d need a more permanent data SIM with which to better test it. Not only this, however, but there seem to be many questions as to the compatibility of various SIM cards with the MiFi so I took this opportunity to test and report my findings with the 1-month, rolling data contract from Three. This contract is a bargain as far as mobile data goes, and will set you back £15 a month plus an absolutely paltry £9.99 up front for a dongle. The best thing is that you can cancel with a months notice if you find a better deal.

The good news? It works fine in the MiFi 2352. The bad news? Well there’s none, apart from the fact everything works so easily and so simply that there’s really little I can report in this article. The very stylish, but decidedly bulky Three USB mobile broadband dongle also works a treat and, as usual, simply has the software required for its installation stored on flash memory on the dongle itself. This makes setup ridiculously simple, and furthermore makes the dongle a very handy companion to a netbook or laptop. Unfortunately, and unlike the MiFi, the dongle is inflexible and can only serve one client unless that single client shares its internet connection.

There’s an added bonus with the Three mobile data SIM, you can receive text messages for nothing and send them for 10p which will get added to your monthly bill. You can also receive calls, at least there’s nothing to suggest you can’t, but I’ve yet to test this theory.

Anyway, as far as the initial reason for my purchase and testing is concerned, the rolling monthly Three data plan will work fine with a MiFi, it’ll give you a 5gb usage limit which should be plenty for normal on-the-go usage. Three, however, also now offer a Mi-Fi Mobile WiFi router which differs from the 2352 visually, and offers a lot more buttons and LEDs to make things clearer and simpler to the average joe. The Three MiFi is available on the same deal as the dongle, a £15 rolling monthly contract, and will set you back £69.99. This is an absolute bargain considering the usual £200+ price tag of mobile routers. Of course, it’s likely locked to Three.

Anyway, for those of us who love our mobile WiFi and hate ungainly, single-client USB dongles which don’t work with internet tablets or iPod touches the Three Mi-Fi is good news, and other networks picking up this technology can only bring better deals to the table.

Now I’ve successfully tested the MiFi 2352 with Three, T-Mobile and O2. Three, in my opinion, has by-far offered the best speed in my area and seems to have pretty good coverage too, your mileage may vary but they’re looking like a pretty good deal at the moment.

I still, however, recommend going for a MiFi 2352 outright and grabbing SIM cards as and when you want them. This is a much better solution for roaming, and the 2352 is, I believe, a far more attractive and geek-orientated piece of hardware.

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It’s been a few years since i first looked at the n810. Back then I really wanted to pick up one of these fantastic tablets but i simply couldn’t justify the then steep £280 price tag.

A lot has happened since then, namely such things as the iPhone 3g and HTC Touch phones which have brought tablet computing, in the guise of smartphones, to the masses. The result is that the Nokia n810s successor is, in fact, a smartphone semantically speaking even though it inherits several of the traits that made the n800 and n810 so excellent.

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On Monday the 20th of July I was invited to join representatives of Europe’s gaming press at London’s Century Club, to get a sneak peek at the forthcoming Halo 3: ODST from Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios.

With a demonstration of the campaign mode from Bungie’s top multiplayer developer Lars Bakken and a hands-on session of the new Firefight multiplayer mode, I was able to get a decent feel for what this next instalment will offer players. Follow the jump to find out what I thought about it.

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I’ve been continually skeptical of Sky HD, at least I was until I actually had it installed and tried it for myself. Far from my impressions of heavily compressed, “muddy”, not-quite HD content. The 720p HD-ready content available via Sky HD looks stunning on my 1080p, 40″ Bravia.

However, despite not being “true” high definition, it also looks stunning on a projector.

Today I got the InFocus X9 in for a Gadgetoid once-over and was impressed immediately by its size and then again by the stunning, bright picture it produced in daylight. This is far beyond what I would expect from something costing little over £500. Sky HD really makes an HD display worth while and, whilst it might not produce as good a picture as a blu-ray disk, neither does regular definition television quite make it up to DVD quality. Of course, the Sky HD picture looks significantly sharper and more “HD” on a smaller screen than it does on an approximately 100″ projected screen, but it’s more than watchable.

I will be looking in-depth at the InFocus X9, hosting a movie night to ensure a broad range of people (some of who may be susceptible to certain display anomalies associated with projection technologies) get to feed back their opinion of the projector. I will also, of course, be taking the opportunity to thoroughly test the quality and variety of Sky HD on a much larger display perfect for evening movie watching.

Connecting the InFocus X9 to my MacBook Pro was about as much a breeze as one can get when having to use an irritating little Mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptor and a DVI-HDMI cable. It worked without any problems whatsoever, though, which is surprising given my previous issues with my old MacBook Pro and HDTV.

Yes, that’s a Pingu DVD! It’s right above a 40″ Bravia and is slightly wonky due to the extremely awkward angle at which it’s sitting in relation to the wall. I’ll find a way to mount the projector behind our sofa before doing any proper testing.

Connecting the Sky HD box was a similar, stupidly simple affair. Just like with a TV, it involves taking an HDMI cable and running it from one device to the other. Fortunately I had a lengthy HDMI cable to hand, which would allow me to run it across the living room to the projector which I’d placed somewhat un-optimally on my computer desk. The InFocus X9 made pretty good work of the poor conditions I gave it, however, it was quick and easy to tilt it up enough to throw an image above my TV by unscrewing the foot on the bottom.

I used the pre-set “Game” to throw a bright but not 100% clear display, even with both curtains open and the summer sun streaming in. It is, of course, leagues better with the curtains drawn, and for something that’s normally used as infrequently as a projector it’s quite reasonable to expect optimal viewing conditions. That said, the picture is great in daylight and would be perfect for breaking out photos for ad-hoc family events.

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When you often arrive at what feels like it could be the very best of a product class, and don’t have the time to compare alternatives you must draw on experience with similar gadgets to gauge quality and performance. Being one man with too few fingers in too many pies I often find myself at this situation and often fret that, due to the almost complete lack of “lemons” that I look at, Gadgetoid will appear biased.

I pick products carefully and look at things that make my geek senses tingle. With the Pandora on the horizon, the smallest most humble class of devices caught my eye; the Bluetooth GPS receiver.

There’s nothing bad to start with, in respect to the SiRF III Bluetooth GPS Receiver itself, the one I received was branded BlueNEXT, with no other marks distinguishing brand or model number. What I do know, obviously, is that it contains the SiRF III chipset which is close as you can get to GPS Nirvana for a poxy £30.

I’m going to go right ahead and say that, even if you do have a GPS built in to your smartphone, you’ll probably want to pick up one of these. When I finally got it working in TomTom Nav on a Touch Pro the GPS Status screen lit up like a christmas tree, showing more simultaneous tracked satellites than I had ever seen on any mobile phone or, indeed, a TomTom One in-car GPS.

And this was indoors.

Yup, from inside my bedroom (it was getting late after I’d tried getting it to work with Windows, Linux and OSX but failed due to lack of decent software or Linux being arsey) the tiny, pocketable “BlueNEXT” receiver had acquired a signal in seconds, perhaps because it had already taken the time to lock on before I had the Bluetooth connectivity sorted.

In testing this morning I had no luck with indoor acquisition, but received a strong signal within about 20 seconds after going outside.

The SiRF III Bluetooth GPS Receiver is, of course, dedicated so one can only expect this sort of performance, I was still fairly surprised, however, at how well it worked. Clearly a lot of MobileFun customers feel the same way, with the receiver just half a rating star from perfection.

My problems with Windows, Linux and OSX testing were very varied. I had extremely mixed results, but ultimately got the GPS working fine in OSX- I just couldn’t find any software on short notice to actually do anything with it.

Linux had the software, in the form of Viking, but getting the GPS and Viking to talk proved to be difficult; I’ll have to crack on with that soon!

Windows proved the trickiest, it flatly refused to pair with the receiver which I believe was because it ran on the same netbook as Linux. When double pressing the button on the receiver to tell it to connect, it saw and attempted to pair with my MacBook Pro instead.

I have only myself to blame for the failures on Netbooks and Laptops, the fact that the BlueNEXT receiver works exceptionally well with Windows Mobile reinforces this. With any luck, I’ll get it working in at least one of the three operating systems and have some interesting findings to report in the review.

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Upon hearing the 13″ MacBook Pro announcement my initial response was “SD CARD SLOT!”
It was also my second, third and forth response. Like many others who keep their nose to the ground and their eye on the horizon where the Apple Rumor Mill stands proud, its mighty sails ever turning and constantly … sorry, I drifted a bit there … what I mean to say is that I was expecting the unification of the Unibody MacBook with the Unibody MacBook Pro into a single brand. I wasn’t expecting Apple to finally see a tiny shimmer of light and give back Firewire, and I certainly wasn’t expecting an SD card slot.

The loss of the ExpressCard to bring these wonders to the 13″ and 15″ MacBook Pros seems to be a major annoyance to many users, but having never personally used any ExpressCard devices outside of a couple of review samples I’m not exactly morning its loss. ExpressCard slots only seem to provide a letterbox into my computer that does nothing but beckon my daughter to insert whatever might be handy (usually, and possibly fortunately, USB devices) into its mysterious depths.

I’ve obtained a couple of high capacity SD cards, including a high-speed 133x Lexar Professional SD card to test with the MacBook Pro SD slot. Copying over a gigabyte of data onto the high speed SD was appropriately fast, but attempting to install OSX directly onto a prepared 8GB SD card resulted in failure. This was due to the formatted capacity showing as about 7.5GB, the OSX installer reading it at about 6.1GB and an absolute barebones customized installation of OSX from the DVD clocking in at about 6.4GB. If you want to painlessly install OSX onto an SD card for use as a rescue disk when you’ve no choice but to dedicate a high-speed 16 or 32GB SD card entirely to this cause. I’ve been investigating entirely custom OSX Leopard installs using Pacifit but have not yet had any success.

If, like me, you’re still clinging onto a 2007-2008 MacBook Pro or you have anything pre-unibody you will be amazed at the difference in build quality. If you thought your old timey MacBook was well built and even if you had seen the newer models in store, nothing will prepare you for getting hold of a Unibody MacBook Pro and comparing it to an old-style one side-by-side. A “classic” MacBook Pro looks cheap and feels positively flimsy alongside the Unibody, the one-piece design of which does not only offer a better, seamless look but also makes the whole base of the laptop much more ridged. I’ve often picked up my older MacBook Pro with one hand, from one edge, which is something you should technically never do with a laptop. However, I’m reasonably certain that doing so with a unibody MacBook Pro will have no ill effect whatsoever.

The 2.53Ghz MacBook Pro is the perfect balance of size, performance and price, representing the closest thing we’ll ever get to a resurrection of the 12″ MacBook Pro. My only complaint is the screen resolution, but it’s so easy to hook up an external monitor (seasoned Mac users will know that OSX does a great job of remembering monitor configurations) that I find transitioning between dossing about on the sofa, and working at a desk an absolute synch. Students will net this beauty for under £1000, you lucky blighters.

The ability to upgrade to 8GB RAM will be something I’ll investigate as soon as prices come down to realistic levels. This amount of RAM may seem excessive to the average Windows user (who can’t get more than about 3gb to work without facing the horror of 64bit windows) but when you factor in real RAM reserved for a virtual machine running Ubuntu and one running Windows XP that could easily leave the stock 4GB remaining for OSX, and that’s without even factoring in a Vista and/or Windows 7 machine, or varying configurations of the above set up for website/software testing.

The gloss screen is a love it/hate it thing, but in a darkened bedroom at night, when I actually use the screen extensively for catching up with ‘tinernet and penning my articles for Gadgetoid the gloss effect is entirely mitigated. In a bright living room, turning up the backlight brightness again cancels out the effect. The only time I’ve had real troubles with the gloss screen yet has been in the office on battery power, with a dimmed screen, and in a car again on battery with a dimmed screen.

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It hadn’t occurred to me until recently that I could leverage my humble journalistic position to obtain a Sky HD box to sample the service. I have been watching the price since its release, but could never really quite justify taking the plunge, partially because I was highly skeptical of the picture quality.

Now the price is right, and LCD televisions are prevalent enough to put Sky HD into the minds of many more customers, it seems like a sensible time for me to cast my skeptical eye over the product and service and cast my belated opinion into the sea of reviews already occupying the internet.

Furthermore, the new Sky HD EPG software is working its way gradually onto boxes nationwide in a very careful and phased manner meaning I have the perfect opportunity to run through its features and improvements when it finally arrives on my box.

This morning I had a Sky HD box installed and a Sky+ box relocated to the bedroom which was previously serviced by a SlingBox/SlingCatcher combination. I can say right off the bat that Sky Multi-room runs absolute rings around the SlingBox + SlingCatcher combination, but there are benefits and drawbacks to each.

A SlingCatcher and SlingBox combined will set you back about £300, if you need to somehow network these two together then you will easily spend a further £60 on HomePlug devices which are arguably the best way of doing this, shy of a 20-meter network cable. Multi-room will set you back £10 a month.

The SlingCatcher and SlingBox combination will have an infuriating lag on remote input, that makes fast-forwarding through advertisements somewhat of a chore. Furthermore you can only watch one channel in both rooms, making it an inflexible, sluggish and over-engineered solution.

This harsh reality, combined with the lackluster media playback features and infrequency of firmware updates to the SlingCatcher has dispelled most of the awe and wonder I originally had for the device. If you’re considering a SlingCatcher for use in a bedroom at home and have Sky Multi-room as an alternative then plumb for the latter. Sure, it’ll cost more in the long run but it’s worth it. Particularly when you factor in the potential ability to watch or record up to 4 programs simultaneously.

On the topic of SlingBoxes I was very surprised to discover that the Sky HD box keeps all of its outputs active at all times. This means that, should you upgrade from Sky+ to Sky HD, you can keep your existing SlingBox Solo and hook it up to the Composite output, where it will receive the same (albeit in SD) picture that your TV will be receiving via HDMI. Nifty. This dispelled the fear that my beloved SlingBox would become unusable or obsolete and have to be relocated upstairs following the HD installation.

The setup now is actually quite a lot better than it was before. When sitting upstairs it’s now possible to watch both the upstairs Sky+ box and, via SlingPlayer, the downstairs Sky HD box. There are probably few scenarios where we would want to do this, most of them involving our daughter wanting to watch mind-numbingly obtuse and weird Play Disney programs and us wanting to watch something vaguely thought provoking. It’s always nice to be able to watch TV discretely via SlingPlayer on a netbook or laptop and eventually on the iPhone when I swallow the steep price of the SlingPlayer App.

The other benefit is, of course, for guests. Whilst we comfortably watch and even record TV in our bedroom, a guest can use the SlingBox-served Sky HD at their leisure, viewing upstairs on their laptop or simply right on the big screen.

Anyway, back to the HD-ness of HD, I haven’t yet had much time to watch it but did spend a lot of time watching a documentary which was, unbeknownst to me, actually being displayed on my television via my old, composite SlingBox connection. I didn’t really look close, but remember thinking “hey, this actually looks better than I expected.” Suffice to say, my expectations of Sky HD were extraordinarily low, and were easily met. There’s quite a number of HD channels now available, too, so if you particularly like your movies and primetime Sky 1 television in HD then the extra £10 is a £10 worth spent and a £10 that will go further towards bringing more content providers into the fold. Unfortunately, £10 for HD and £10 for Multiroom add up to quite a steep £20 a month extra. I’ve been assured that Sky, if it were in their power, would charge much less for these services but, unfortunately, like any other content deliverer (is that a word?) they are under the thumb of their content providers to charge for every simultaneous viewing and nickle and dime us for every kind of content.

This leads me to believe that, in light of the recent Xbox 360 and Sky+ partnership, an upgrade to HD with an Xbox 360 to deliver on-demand content to your bedroom could be a wise purchase depending on what key dramas actually end up being delivered via the 360-based service. That is to say… Sky Player needs Sky 1 before I would even consider using the service as the primary means of watching TV in the bedroom. The current nickle-and-dime you for on-demand episodes could easily work in conjunction with this. At the moment, though, Sky Multiroom is a nigh-on unbeatable service for subscribers that, sadly, SlingPlayer and those godawful wireless television streaming devices can’t touch the usability and convinience of.

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