Tech Digest

Orange spoils cross-channel ferry fun

We don’t get out much at Tech Digest, but when we do we sure know how to have a good time.

An old favourite of ours used to be playing mobile phone Russian Roulette on cross-channel ferries. The game involves everyone placing their mobis on a table and watching to see which network on which phone is the last to disappear. The unlucky owner of that handset is then dispatched the bar to get the drinks in. Believe us Euro 2004 penalty shoot-outs can’t touch it for nail-biting tension, honest.

Anyway trust Orange to spoil our fun. As from now its customers on customers on cross-channel ferries can make voice calls and use GPRS data services all the way over to France. The phone company is rolling out the service exclusively on SeaFrance’s range of ships which operate on the Dover to Calais route.

There is a bit of a downside though. Orange has split the channel in two with Orange UK subscribers charged standard UK call rates until the vessel reaches the mid-way point between the two countries. Thereafter they are transferred to Orange France and pay pricier international roaming tariffs to make and receive calls.

Blackberry's Euro rival targets consumers

While we love the idea of the Blackberry and especially its push e-mail systems which makes collecting messages on your phone the same as picking up your text messages, we certainly wouldn’t give it its rather nasty looking devices home space.

We are mightily cheered to discover this week that Blackberry’s big European rival in the push e-nail field, Smartner is rolling out a version of its Duality e-mail system for Euro consumers.

Starting in August for just 4 Euros a month you can have e-mail pushed to your message inbox on any Symbian or Windows Mobile smartphone.

The system is also going to be incorporated into future versions of Sony Ericsson's P900 smartphone and Smartner is also angling for deals with European networks.

Cleverly all the actions of the Duality are duplicated on the user’s main desktop PC, so, for example, if a user chooses to delete a message on their handset it is also deleted on their computer.

Versions of the Duality Always-on system are already available to business individuals and companies.

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Orange SPVs reviewed

The Guardian takes a sneak peek at the two SPV smartphones from Orange, the tiny SPV C500 and the XDA 2 clone the SPV M1000.

Read the reviews here

UK music download review

Downloading music in the UK is a real nightmare at the moment. There are several competing services, which boast different tracks that are compatible with different players and charge for music in different ways.

The Guardian attempts to make some sense of it all by giving a whizz to iTunes, Napster, SonicStage and Sony’s upcoming Connect service.

Click here or read on to get the whole story

Apple's iTunes grabbed the headlines last week, but legitimate music downloads have been available in the UK for some time. Peter Gabriel's OD2 group launched last year, and a few weeks ago saw the UK arrival of Napster.
There's more to come, with Sony's Connect service slated to arrive at the end of the month and groups such as Wal-Mart, owner of Asda stores, eyeing a European launch for its downloads.

Here's our verdict on the download services that have launched in the UK.

Napster
www.napster.co.uk
The legitimate version of the service that kickstarted music downloads has more than 500,000 tracks to stream or download in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format.

It is available in two forms. For serious music fans, there's a subscription of £9.95 per month. Users can stream or download to a PC as many tracks as they want. They can then export the tunes to a CD player or a WMA-equipped music player (Creative/Rio players are compatible and Philips models will be soon) for a further 99p or more per track.

The alternative is Napster Light. Just download tunes at a rather pricey £1.09 a throw. Albums can be a ripoff though, with some selling for over £20!

The interface, which is fairly straightforward, perhaps as a nod to its pioneering pirate days, is reminiscent of peer-to-peer service KaZaA. Overall, the service is simple to use and the choice of compatible players is a bonus.

Moz watch:
The only service to offer Morrissey's new album You Are the Quarry. Shame it costs £19.90.

Sonic Selector (MSN)
www.sonicselector.com
Recently revamped, Sonic Selector is available via a host of companies including MSN, Tiscali, Packard Bell and MTV. The MSN version boasts a fairly large library of 350,000 tracks and, as it is European in origin (the service is hosted by OD2), there's a strong bias towards British artists.

Users can hear a snippet of a track free or pay around 75p to download it to their PC. They can also stream any track for a very reasonable 1p a shot.

The software downloads quickly and meshes neatly with Windows Media player version 9. A recommendation system tracks your choices and then makes suggestions as to what you might like next. Not quite sure how it got Mariah Carey for me, though.

The tracks are downloaded in WMA and are compatible with many digital audio players. The most annoying part is the high price of albums. Unlike iTunes, where whole CDs can be bought for under £10, albums with 15 or more tracks can work out costing the best part of £20.

Moz watch: A good selection of the great man's albums, though sadly not his new one. His debut, Viva Hate, costs £19.80 to download.

iTunes
www.apple.com/uk
It might be Europe's biggest music download service, with more than 700,000 tracks just a click away, but from a UK perspective, iTunes isn't necessarily the most comprehensive. That's because the group representing smaller labels, and artists such as the White Stripes, Dizzee Rascal and hundreds of other cutting-edge acts, have yet to sign on the dotted line. Still, if you like your music mainstream and largely American, iTunes fits the bill. It is also the only one that works with Apple Macs.

Tracks are competitively priced - 79p per song and from £7.99 per album (not much less than you'll pay an online retailer for a CD). However, Apple hasn't been too generous with streaming options. There's no free or cheap streaming. Instead, you can only hear a 30-second snippet.

The tracks are in the good quality Advanced Acoustic Coding (AAC) format and are easily stored on a Mac/PC and transferred to an iPod (they aren't compatible with other players). There is, however, a good chance that other music players, and even Nokia phones, will soon be able to accommodate AAC downloads.

Weaknesses include the fact that iTunes is a 20MB file, which will take some time to download if you are on slower connection. The interface is quite clunky compared with some rivals, too.

While it isn't the service for everyone, iTunes looks certain to be the frontrunner in UK music downloads.

Moz watch:
Morrissey who? Only a couple of Smiths albums.

MyCokeMusic
www.mycokemusic.com
With its funky, in-your-face graphics, MyCokeMusic is aimed at a younger audience. This is reflected in an even stronger emphasis on individual tracks, rather than albums, and the higher profile of dance music on its website.

As with MSN (both are operated by OD2), it costs 1p to stream a track and 80p on average per download. Like other OD2 sites, downloading music involves buying credits that are debited each time you stream/download. Users can also pay via SMS, with the cost added to their phone bill.

Moz watch: see SonicSelector

Wippit www.wippit.com
The underdog of the UK download market, Wippit has just 60,000 tracks from around 200 record labels (though it does include a few biggies in EMI and BMG).

There are plenty of ways to buy, ranging from one-off payments, usually around 80p, to a yearly unlimited download deal for a competitive £50.

Tracks are mainly available in WMA, although there are still a few MP3s lurking.

Overall, it is an easy-to-use service and the yearly download deal is incredible value. It needs more record companies on board and a higher profile to be a real contender, though.

Moz watch: A solid selection of the Mancunian bard's back catalogue.

Sony Connect www.connect.com

Launched in the US a few months ago and scheduled to arrive in Europe any day, Sony's service will feature 300,000 tracks from the big five plus a healthy selection of indie labels.

Tracks, which sell for 79p, will have excellent sound as they will be encoded in Sony's proprietary Atrac 3 format at 132Kbps. The downside is they can only be ported on to Atrac 3 devices manufactured by Sony.

The US version of the site has been criticised for lacking community features, such as seeing what other people are buying.

Caveat emptor
You might be tempted to go on a shopping spree, but a mess of incompatible technologies could give you more than you bargained for. When you buy a CD you know your music is playable on any device. But in the online world, where files can be copied with ease, the record companies have insisted on strong anti-piracy technology.

Known as Digital Rights Management (DRM), the technology restricts how you listen to your music. Tracks purchased from Apple's iTunes store, use the company's FairPlay DRM. It gives you the right to play your music on up to five computers and burn the same playlist to a CD seven times. According to critics, however, it's a technical solution to the wrong problem, preventing sharing when labels should only really be concerned with making sure artists are paid.

DRM is also being used to lock customers into proprietary hardware and software. Tracks downloaded from iTunes cannot be played on portable players other than the iPod. Apple argues this is no big deal as the iPod is, by far, the most popular portable player. But the company has made no effort to allow the iPod to play music purchased from rival music stores. Apple's chief executive has made it clear he won't change while rivals fall short of 50% market share. Rivals typically use Windows Media DRM, which Microsoft openly licenses. The result is that music purchased from Napster and stores using Peter Gabriel's OD2 service (mycokemusic.com, HMV, Virgin etc) can be played on more than 60 portable devices - except the iPod.

"The iTunes store in the States is the market leader," says Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research, because "there's no portable player using Microsoft DRM that's anywhere near as good as the iPod."

Sony's Connect service will only be compatible with its MiniDisc players. The lack of a common standard is prompting calls for a standards revolution. Leonardo Chiariglione, founder of the MPeg video standard, believes the IT industry has much to learn from the world of consumer electronics.

"The battle between Apple and Microsoft is no different from the VHS versus Betamax one," he says. "The experience there taught us that what prevails is a technology that provides interoperability for consumers." The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) - of which Apple is a part - has developed a blueprint for an open-standards DRM. But, according to Michael Gartenberg: "As long as the iPod is as successful as it is, there's little incentive for Apple to adopt standards."

It's clear we're going to have to live with incompatible DRM technologies. So before you start building a massive collection of songs, consider exactly how and where you're going to be able to listen to them - years down the line.

HomeChoice review

So you don’t fancy cable and you don’t want to swell Mr Murdoch's coffers. Well how about TV and video on demand via an ADSL broadband line?

HomeChoice, which was originally launched in 2000, is back with a revamped service in the London area and The Guardian has many positive things to say about it.

Click here or read on to read the review

The service, HomeChoice, was originally launched in 2000, delivering video on demand and internet access to homes in the London area. While it was undoubtedly a pioneering service (video on demand via ADSL to a TV in 2000 was a world first) and worked reasonably well, there were some hiccups with the ADSL, and the quality of the video (MPEG1 standard) was awful.
I subscribed to the service for a time, more out of curiosity than anything else. I enjoyed being able to peruse a vast library of movies and TV programmes and then, after one click, being able to watch them. In the days before Sky+, Home Choice's ability to pause the movie you were watching seemed revolutionary.
Then after a year or so the service went quiet. Although it continued to cater for its existing subscribers, it didn't seem very interested in attracting new ones.
Then, a couple of months ago HomeChoice announced that a completely revamped service was being rolled out across London.
"The new services are all down to local loop unbundling (LLU)", explains Roger Lynch, Chair and CEO of HomeChoice's parent company Video Networks.
"When HomeChoice first launched we had to buy wholesale ADSL packages from BT, which was very expensive. Since LLU we have been able to start putting our own equipment into local exchanges, which not only significantly improves the services we can offer, but means our operational costs are eighty per cent cheaper than when we worked with BT."
Among those new services are broadcast TV: HomeChoice offers a similar set of channels to Freeview, plus fast internet access, with users receiving a 1Mbps service with its basic package, with a 2Mbps upgrade if they prefer.
HomeChoice has also come up with some innovative features. For example subscribers can configure the HomeChoice box to lock out all its services bar its on-demand children's channel Scamp, which makes it ideal for parents hoping to enjoy a Saturday morning lie-in. Another neat feature is the way subscribers can create a playlist of their favourite music videos rather than having to view the channel's choice of music.
A deal with the BBC means that subscribers can also view the previous week's editions of EastEnders, and many other programmes, whenever they want. And central to HomeChoice is its library of around 1,000 video-on-demand movies, which can be paused, rewound and fast forwarded.
The biggest improvement of all is that the picture quality is now MPEG2, rather than MPEG1, and is similar to other digital TV services. The company is likely to upgrade to MPEG4 ("a world's first", says Lynch), at some point in the year, which offers even higher quality pictures at lower bandwidth.
"We are pretty unique in the world in offering video on demand over ADSL in this way", adds Roger Lynch. "And at present other services can't offer a similar system."
Given how attractive movies and TV on demand are to consumers it does seem incredible that Sky and the cable companies aren't yet talking about adding video on demand via broadband to their portfolio of services.
"I suspect that the cable companies will start rolling out video on demand at some point in the next 12 months" says Roger Lynch. "However there are still parts of their network that will have to be upgraded before they can do this."
"As for Sky, well it would have to work with BT to deliver video on demand and I don't think BT is ready yet. BT recently announced a four to five year plan to upgrade its network and I am sure Sky will be looking at what it will be able to offer in the future."
"We are also looking at new ADSL technologies such as ADSL2 and ASDSL+ which will enable us to increase the bandwidth available to each home. So for example we could offer multiple channels streamed to different TVs or even high definition TV."
So is HomeChoice the tortoise to Sky and the cable companies' hare?
At present the service is only available to 1.4 million homes in London, but Lynch insists the whole of the capital will be able to access the service soon, and that other cities will follow next year.
At £35 a month, which includes a 1MB broadband pipe plus a basic selection of channels, it is certainly competitive too. And there's no denying that movies and TV on demand is a compelling proposition.
HomeChoice might have got the product right this time. Yet whether it has the marketing nous and deep enough pockets to take on its competitors remains to be seen.

BT slashes broadband prices

There’s good and bad news for subscribers to BT’s broadband services. The company announced today that it was slashing the price of its core services with its 512Kb offering reduced from £29.99 to £26.99 and its faster 1Mb connection down from £40.99 to £26.99.

The bad news is that the company is introducing a cap on the amount of material users are able to download.

Users of its two 512Kb services will be restricted to downloading 15GB a month. Although BT says this will still enable users to surf for 15 hours a day or download 250 music tracks and 180 minutes of video every week, it is in our eyes a retrograde step.

Over the next year or so video downloads and streaming will start arriving in the UK, and two movies a week sounds very poor value. Also the digital home would ideally rely on content that is downloaded by consumers on their PC’s hard drive being automatically backed up on ISP servers. Capping users makes this even less likely to happen.

The Guardian reports that the move comes as new research from Enders Analysis shows BT is losing broadband customers to rivals such as Wanadoo and Tiscali. Two years ago BT Retail connected 58% of UK broadband customers - this year that has fallen to just 42%.

Even with the price drop BT is still not very competitive. Wanadoo offers a similar package for £17.99 a month, while Tiscali offers a "broadband lite" service from £15.99.

Another LG handset for Three?

It has been rumoured for some time now that Three is about to deliver yet another new LG handset. Buoyed by the success of the U8100, which for a while was the UK's best selling mobile phone, even out selling that other consumer electronics colossus the iPod, Three is apparently set to deliver the LG U8120.

Already on sale to Three’s subscribers in Hong Kong the U8120 keeps its predecessor tiny (for a 3G phones clamshell styling, and mirrors almost all its features (POP3 e-mail, 65k colour screen, VGA camera etc). The key difference is that the upgraded model has much more storage, thereby addressing the weak point of the U8110.

Looks like another winner to us.

Orange 3G launch imminent

Big day for Orange tomorrow with the UK launch of its 3G service for consumers. The service wad due to be up and running earlier in the year, but problems with the handsets delayed its delivery.

Quite what Orange will major on remains to be seen. 3G for consumers seems to be a technology without a killer application. As Three has discovered person to person video calling hasn’t chimed with the UK population, and unfortunately for Orange, its rivals seem have to snapped up the best sports video content.

It’ll be interesting also to see which handset Orange leads with. It appears that the LG U8110 which has been a huge hit for Three, will be one of its key phones along with a model from Motorola.

Click here for the launch details Orange gave in February

Sharp camera phone first with optical zoom

It is always worth keeping tabs on what Vodafone is up to in Japan, largely because what it launches there tends to find its way over to Europe a year later.

So we note with interest that Sharp has unveiled a new camera phone that’s the first in the world with an optical zoom.

As any photographer will tell you digital zooms are largely a waste of time. Optical zooms however do let users get closer to subjects without sacrificing too much image quality.

The phone, the V602SH, is surprise, surprise, a clamshell models that features a two mega pixel camera. Another neat feature is the ‘Swivel Style’ design that allows the LCD screen to be reversed 180 degrees.

A rather more frightening facility is that the V602SH boasts a karaoke mode that enables its owner to hook the phone up to a TV for sing-along sessions. Also on boards is a music player and Bowlingual's wonderful dog bark translator.

We reckon that Vodafone will have one more major Sharp GPRS camera phone launch before it really starts to shove subscribers in the direction of 3G. So, maybe the Sharp GX40, due for arrival in, let’s hazard a guess, Spring 2005, will feature a two mega pixel snapper and an optical zoom.

30 hour music player

As iPod owners know all too well, use your music player for eight hours, less if you have a dodgy battery, and the screen goes blank and the earphones quiet.

So we are quite impressed by the upcoming £299 iAudio M3l hard disk music player from Korean maker Cowon.

It smashes all existing battery life records by notching up an amazing 30 hours between recharges.

It plays back both MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) files, features an FM radio tuner and offers direct MP3 recording from a CD player/hi-fi. Like its predecessor the Cowon iAudio M3 it is also the slimmest and lightest hard disk jukebox around due to the most of its key controls and its LED screen built into the remote control rather than on the player itself.

Also set for a July debut is a 40GB version of the iAudio M3. No details on price yet.

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