Tech Digest

Virgin Bites back with funky Wap service

Years after Vodafone live! and O2 Active British phone network Virgin Mobile has finally got round to launching its own WAP service.

Only unlike its rivals it has a funky feel and is targeted at the young.

Available to all Virgin customers with a GPRS handset Virgin Bites promises to banish the boredom by offering a cross between a celebrity magazine and an infotainment service on the phone.

Free to customers until January 2005 Virgin Bites includes a mix of celebrity news, games and gags, plus entertainment and sports.

The service is apparently highly interactive and offers customers the chance to publish their own contributions via text or picture message.

From now on all Virgin phone will feature a Bites button.

The service is supported by a free 28 page magazine that will be shipped monthly to all Virgin customers.

Celebrity: For the latest salacious gossip on the crazy world of celebs by the BITES gossip queen, need to know tittle-tattle and latest news on who’s hot and who’s doing what…with whom, as well as top celebrity screensavers and wallpaper

Laughs: Get your mates to have a giggle trying one of these:
How Bizarre! Man or woman? Celebrity or wannabe? Arse or elbow? Just take a guess. Play saucy `What is it?’ quiz and put your powers of observation to the test!
Beauty or Beast – This flirty interactive quiz gives you the chance to see a great looking girl or guy in various stages of undress.
Sin to Win - Got a confession to make? Then tell all! The best sin wins a top prize. And if you love secrets, you can have the juiciest ones sent straight to your phone.
Pulling Pal – On the pull? Get chat-up lines, icebreakers and flirt tips so good, the opposite sex will be powerless to resist your charms. And if you need rescuing - get a crafty excuse sent straight to your phone and leave!
Strange But True facts - Your encyclopaedia of trivia. Bring a little joy and happiness to everyone's day with a well-placed fascinating fact.

Music: Three hot channels dedicated to Urban, Dance & Indie. Find out the latest tracks, news and gossip, club and gig listings and recommendations, reviews, voting and competitions, and the latest ringtones.

News and Views: Includes tips on the next big thing in Most Wanted and weekly customer polls – Which trainers are funky? What’s the most popular colour this season?

Sport: A humorous take on the latest sports news and results plus the latest java games. Get the best guide going to the new Premiership season. Who are the newbies to watch? Who has the wildest fans?

VHS goes digital

This is a gadget that your mother would like. All those old VHS videos she’s got of you in your first school play/egg and spoon race/naked in wellies in the paddling pool (at the age of 25)? Well now she can convert them from analogue to digital using Plextor’s ConvertX PX-M402U and keep them for all eternity. The ConvertX has support for a variety of MPEG video/audio compression standards, including MPEG-4. It will also convert to DivX in real time, so you can film and convert on the fly.

You can connect the box to a video source—such as an analogue or digital camcorder, DVD player, VCR, or television— via a selection of AV connections, including RCA Composite Audio/Video Input, S-Video Input. Then it’s just a case of burning the files to CD and DVD and you can enjoy your home videos in glorious digital.

Plextor

Sennheiser Happy Clappy headphones

While we may live in disposable society, there’s nothing wrong with trying to do you bit for the environment with a spot of recycling. The HD 555 (£99.95) headphones from Sennheiser have been designed so that when the headphones start to give up the ghost, you can replace the bits that need fixing rather than chucking them out and buying a new pair.

Sennheiser, a company that specialises in very high quality headsets for DJs, aeroplane pilots and other headphone wearers of note, has designed the HD 555s for home cinema and music. They feature an internal Surround Reflector, which apparently generates an “extended spatial sound field”. Sounds a bit hippyish to us, as does the metal mesh over the earpieces that “reduce resonances” to ensure that “harmonic distortion” is kept to a minimum.

Sennheiser

Denon budget Home Cinema

Denon's new home cinema set up may not help to ease the burden of the UK's £1 Trillion debt but it still kinder on the pocket than most home cinema set ups.

The AVR-1705 61.AV receiver costs £250 and offers 32 bit DSP digital decoding and Six 110 watt amplifiers with high current output devices.

Combine that with the company's progressive scan DVD-1710 (£130) and a set of Elac 5.2 Cinema 0.5 speakers for £300 and you've got a Home Cinema system for £680. What's a couple more quid on the credit card?

Buses go wireless

While buses may not be the most complicated of creations, Portsmouth City Council has decided it needs to employ some serious technology to get them running efficiently. 300 buses are to be fitted with a wireless transmitter that will send signals back to the Traffic Control Centre letting everyone know its whereabouts and ETA.

MeshNetworks is providing the technology to power the service, allowing the coucil to set up a wireless network that encompasses 36 bus stops and 9 kiosks in the city. An LCD screen in each will provide real time travel updates to customers.

This is a pretty extreme way to get the buses to run on time in the UK, but it beats fascism we suppose.

[Yes we know that's a London red bus above - but it looks nice.]

NTL Photo Service

NTL Broadband customers can now make the most of their digital images using Photobox, an online service offering photo prints, frames, greetings cards and postcards. 400MB of online storage space for digital images is being provided along with fifteen free prints a month. All this at no extra cost.

Photobox also provides services that let you to make those photo cushions, calendars, key rings and other personalised tat that you can use to torment friends and family. If you want to really get on everyone's nerves this Christmas, why not create a load of cards with your face on and then hand out gifts bearing images of you pulling hilarious faces.

We're sure there are plenty of nice uses for this service - you could create cool bags with your own arty photos on and suchlike - but as we all know, it will mainly be used for creating tasteless coasters for your mate's wedding present.

Read all about it.

3 to offer video downloads

T-Mobile, Orange and O2 all already offer music download services via mobile phones, but 3 has gone a step further today by announcing that it is to start a mobile video jukebox. In what could be the future for downloads services, 3 customers will be able stream the latest music videos straight to their video phones.

This is the first time a service like this has been available in the UK, which goes live on 2nd August. As well as the music videos, users will also be able to watch the latest video releases via “Today on 3” – the live mobile news and entertainment channel that launched back in March.

3 has paired up with record label, BMG to provide the service, so users will no doubt be subjected to a torrent of lite pop courtesy of the likes of Dido, Britney, Justin Timberlake and Will Young. Music videos will cost £1.50, either as QuickPlay live streaming, or as a download. There’s also the option of paying £10 a month for unlimited services.

Creepy Mind Reading Ball

It’s saying something about the state of humanity when a small blue, battery operated gadget can work out what you’re thinking. But that’s precisely what Firebox is claiming of its latest toy.

The 20Q (£12.95) can apparently establish what word you’re thinking in just 20 questions (animal, vegetable, mineral – remember?) The small LED screen flashes up the questions, to which you answer yes, no or maybe. If you manage to flummox it, it will ask five more questions before giving up – but if it guesses correctly it will taunt you with the power of its might.

There must be some sort of scientific formula that makes this easy or something. Nevertheless, we still find the idea of it pretty creepy. But that’s what comes of watching too much Chocky as a child.

You can buy it from here

Play Real tunes on your iPod

Owners of an Apple iPod will be pleased to hear that RealNetworks has found a way to play tunes from its music downloads store on the player. The Harmony software it has developed means that the iPod is no longer limited to downloading tracks from Apple’s own iTunes store.

Because the software mimics Apple’s own copy protection software, Real is claiming that it has not interfered with Apple’s property rights. Real approached Apple some time ago asking to license its FairPlay, but was turned down.

Read the press release here.

iPod loading service for Londoners

If you can’t be bothered to load up your iPod with CDs let the experts do it for you.

As an exclusive offer to Tech Digest readers in the London area we will take your CDs from you, load them up on your laptop, or our PC if you haven’t got one, and then transfer them to your iPod.

You’ll get your iPod back in a week with your entire CD collection ready to be enjoyed.

The service costs £1.50 per CD and £20 for pick up of your discs. We’ll waive the £20 fee if you have more than 100 CDs.

The service is available for Mac and PC owners and you can specify if you want MP3 or AAC files.

E-mail chris@chrisprice.net for more details