Tech Digest

Apple opens first European store in London

We once met a bloke who loved Apple so much he had the company’s logo tattooed on his shoulder and a big X (that’s for the operating system not, as we less than tactfully suggested, the Microsoft X-box) scrawled across his back.

We are very much looking forward to meeting him again – especially to see his iPod tats - as the fella is a dead cert to be at the head of the queue when Apple opens its first European store in London on Saturday November 20th.

You can join the pair of us, and thousand of other macsters, at the store at 235 Regent Street in the west end from 10am. Apple has promised a real bonanza of an opening too with presentations in a specially constructed mini cinema and demos at fourteen metre long genius bar.

Also as if gawping at the new iPod Photo and the iMac G5 wasn’t enough another wowsa reason to turn up on the 20th is that the first 250 people through the door will take home a free Apple t-shirt.

There’s also a series of events planned throughout the month with special tutorials, demos and much else.

You’ll probably have so much fun you might even find yourself buying something.

Full details here.

Cheap broadband from Telewest

Telewest is planning on convincing what it calls "dial-up die hards" to switch to broadband by making it so cheap that they're powerless to resist. The 256K blueyonder service will be the same price or less than its main competitors' unlimited dial-up services. From 1st November the broadband service will cost just £14.99 a month for the first year. After which it reverts back to the usual price of £17.99 a month, but you'll be so used to streaming videos of dancing kittens by then that you won't want to go back to dial up. Sneaky. You'll need to sign up before the end of November to get the special deal, mind.

Telewest

Amethyst's Cube computer

Remember the Amari Media Center PC we wrote about a few days ago? Well it's now available badged as the Amethyst IDO. Price is £899 + VAT for the model with keyboard and mouse and £1199 + VAT with keyboard, mouse, speakers and TFT LCD screen. It may be a little expensive for what is a glorified PC for the living room, but the features list is quite comprehensive. There's two TV tuners, TV guide, DVD reader/writer and, perhaps most importantly, it is much quieter than an ordinary PC. It also comes with those groovy coloured ports on the front which change colour when you plug stuff in.
Aria

Kerry backing broadband

So America's probably got a pretty good idea that the rest of the world is crossing its fingers for Kerry to win the election. And what better reason for the US voters to put Kerry in the Whitehouse than the offer of broadband for all? A Kerry admininstration would provide federal subsidies to get broadband access available to all Americans. While Bush is hoping to make things easier for broadband rollout by reducing regulations and hoping that does the trick, Kerry is planning on offering a 10% tax credit for investments in broadband for rural and inner city areas. 20% tax relief would be provided for next-gen broadband technology. If the Democrats have done their sums right, the tax credits would cost $2 billion over five years.

Read

Panasonic 3G handset

Panasonic's Z800 3G handset has just been announced over in Asia. The phone has a 1.3-megapixel outer camera (no mention of the internal camera's resolution) with auto-focusing and Panasonic's proprietary AV technology. The 2-inch internal screen is only 65K colour unfortunately, while the outer colour screen display 56K colours. There's a miniSD slot, Bluetooth, MMS, USB 2.0 and infrared. No mention of a UK launch, but we're not bothered: the Sony Ericsson V800 will be here soon. We've had a go with it and first impressions are that it's fantastic - and it beats the Panasonic for specs as well with 262k colour internal screen, 65K external screen, 1.3-megapixel camera that rotates so you don't lose quality by using an inferior internal camera and blindingly bright and effective flash light.

Press release

New Sky+ box's mystery USB sockets

Today we took delivery of the new Sky+, which regular readers will know has a 160 Gigabyte hard disk rather than the 40 Gig of its predecessor. In theory then we should be able to store at least forty football matches and still have enough space left over to save the odd episode of Green Wing.* Brilliant!

Cosmetically the unit is the same as the old one with two key differences. One it has a big 160 plastered all over the facia, handy for rubbing it in when fellow Tech Digest scribes who still only have the 40 Gig version, pop round.

More importantly it now comes with a pair of USB sockets - one on the rear and one on the front. Hazarding a guess, we reckon that these are in place to enable viewer to port programmes from the hard drive on to personal video players. Knowing Sky there will all manner of encryption to negotiate first, but expect to see a Sky badged PVR (made by Pace) that is compatible not just with normal telly, but also with Sky’s pay per view movies and sports sometime next year.

Incidentally, the USBs, which will apparently let users port digital music to iPod etc, have not yet been switched on (!?). We’ll find out for sure later when the installation man** has gone.

* For our US readers that the cool new UK comedy that you'll all be name-dropping very shortly

** Installation man has now left and no they don't work. Sky did say that the front one is for connection to a PVP type device which it may or may not launch one day, while the rear one might be for those who never leave their sofa and fancy upping the 160 Gig storage by adding an external hard disk.

Digital Retro: classic computers to ogle

Just what do you buy the computer geek in your life for Christmas? How about this coffee table book on retro computers from our mate Gordon 'propeller head' Laing.
Basically it's porno for tecchies, but it's packed full of interesting stuff too. There's wonderful titbits of information about the characters that shaped the computer industry in the early days as well as the behind scenes power struggles that took place as various manufacturers strived - in vain as it happened - to make their products the 'industry standard'.
Included are spreads on just about every computer from the 1970s and 1980s, from the MITS Altair 880 through to the NeXT Cube. Our favourites are the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and that classic piece of 1970s styling, the Atari VCS. Aah, they don't make 'em like that any more. For more info go to Digital Retro. You can buy the book from here for £13.96

MP3 Goggles

US-based Finis just unveiled its answer to an MP3 player for swimmers. Whereas the Orgegon Scientific MP120, which is already available in the UK, relies on a traditional earphone design, the SwiMP3 uses bone conduction technology to transfer sound to the inner ear via the cheekbone. According to Finis, this dramatically improves the sound quality underwater. A special pair of goggles is supplied to house the SwiMP3. The player is Windows and Mac compatible and has 128MB of storage space. In the US it costs $250, but there's no news of a UK launch at the moment.

Finis

Sony 1GB flash player with MP3 support

Sony is releasing its first digital music players that are compatible with MP3 files in the UK next month. From November, you'll be able to buy Network Walkmans NW-E99 for around £160, and NW-E95 for £120. The flash-based players have 1GB and 512MB of memory respectively. Using Sony's Atrac music file compression, the NW-E99 will be able to squeeze in over 40 CDs worth of music. The players should provide around 70 hours of battery life and weigh around 40g.

Sony

Review: Logic 3 i-Station

£49.99

The lowdown
If you want to listen to your iPod out loud and proud, the i-Station will turn your player into a mini hi-fi system. Plug it into the wall and it will also charge your iPod up as it goes along; stick in some batteries and you can take it out for day trips.

What’s good?
The white finish matches your favourite player (and, if you can cope with the colour clash it also works with iPod minis) and it comes with Firewire and USB 2.0 connectors, so you can hook it to a PC or Mac for transferring tracks.

What’s bad?
Sound quality is pretty much as you’d expect from a system that costs around £50: rather tinny. There’s also not much evidence of a subwoofer at work.

Do you need it?
The i-Station is good enough for small rooms and, at under £50, it offers good value, but there are better specified iPod speaker systems out there. The similar, but slightly pricier £100 Altec Lansing inMotion, Apple’s favourite, the £250 Bose SoundDock, and the audiophile’s choice, the £400 Eclipse TD307.
6/10

BUY FROM HERE

Philips Defibrillator on sale on Amazon

Home health gadgets seem to be the next big movement for technology. Over in America (so soon, no doubt, over here) people are starting to kit out their homes with the latest emergency gear in the hope of cheating death before the ambulance crew even arrives. Kit such as the Philips Defibrillator has got to be good news for isolated communities, businesses and any hard-to-reach campsites and the like. But, stuff like this is also selling to individuals who have no reason to believe they'll be needing it any time soon (just check out the first review by the guy who has no family history of heart disease and a clean bill of health). So expect to see third bedrooms changing from "The Study" into "The Emergency Room" in no time as manufacturers start to release the full range of resuscitation regalia for the home. And if you can afford it, why not? What price hypochondria health, eh?

Philips Defibrillator

NEC Plasmas and projectors

NEC's just released a batch of plasma screens and projectors for the home. The plasmas are: 42-inch 42XR3; the 50-inch 50XR3; the 61-inch 61XR3; and a 42-inch VGA model, the 42VR5. The high definition screens apparently have the highest contrast ratio, and are the brightest panels on the market. There's seven video, DVD, broadcast and PC inputs and the plasmas come with display panels that maximise light efficiency and, we're told, won an award this year at CEDIA in Australia. Meanwhile, these rather dinky DLP projectors offer resolutions of 852 x 480 pixels (the HT410) and 1024 x 578 pixels (the HT510).

Press release

Griffin follows Apple's lead

Griffin's releasing a black version of the i-Trip to match the Special Edition iPod. The company has also re-released its black version of the PowerMate, so you'll be able to goth up your whole Apple collection in no time.

Griffin

Black U2 iPod

Not content with making themselves look foolish on the current iPod ads, U2 has collaborated with Apple to produce a black Special Edition iPod. The player has been rumoured for some time, and Apple has finally released the official announcement along with pics. The 20GB iPod is apparently inspired by the design of the band's latest album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb . Whatever, the bright red scroll wheel seems a tad unnecessary to us - what was wrong with having it all totally black? Plus, the earbuds are white, so it's all a bit of a mish-mash. We haven't actually seen one yet, though, so maybe it's more dazzling in the flesh.

U2 fans will be delighted to hear that the iPod comes with the signatures of the boys laser-engraved onto the back. There's also a free poster of the band and £40 off the band's music on iTunes. It will cost £244 (since the normal 20GB version is £219, we're guessing you do have to pay for those free extras after all).

BUY HERE!

Read

Armari suits new PC design

Loads of interesting living room friendly PC designs at the official UK launch of Media Center 2005 last night - most of it from companies we've never even heard of. Take Armari. No, not a company ripping off designer suits, but one planning to sell a cute media center server that can sit under your TV.
Unfortunately the picture of the shiny white square box (it's also available in shiny red) doesn't quite do it justice. Four ports on the front glow purple and change colour to red when you plug in your digital camera, camcorder etc - well we thought it looked pretty cool anyway. Tech spec includes 600gig mirrored hard drive, dual AMD 1.8GHz processors, 128Mb ATI Radeon graphics card, Hauppauge dual tuner (for recording two channels at the same time), DVD/RW drive and multiple memory card reader. It's designed to be used in conjunction with the rather less attractive Media Center station (the black box) via an 802.11g wireless connection . Pricing and availability to be announced soon.

Apple's iPod Photo in 40 and 60GB versions

Typical. We desert our post for a couple of hours to chomp on pizza and chuckle at Little Britain and Apple goes and makes it biggest announcement of the year so far.

Yes, that iPod Photo that has been rumoured for the past month or so isn't just vapourware but a real world product that goes on sale in the UK today.

The basic details are that it is available in 40 (£359, £90 more than an ordinary 40 Gigabyte iPod) and 60 Gigabyte (£429) versions, it sports a 65K colour 65k-color screen with 220 by 176 pixel resolution, has the same click wheel as it predecessor and has - in theory - 15 hours of battery life.

The screen can be used to view your own JPEGs, which you transfer via iTunes, or to see album artwork. It comes with a TV out too so you can view the images on your TV screen. The Photo iPod is exactly the same size as an ordinary iPod.

Buy Apple iPod Photo 40GB for £354 here[M9585]
Buy Apple iPod Photo 60GB for £424 here [M9586]

Pink Sony "iPod" not destined for UK

As if not being able to perv through the clothes of your neighbours wasn't bad enough, apparently we're not getting the NW-HD2 either. Sony's first upgrade of the NW-HD1 is available in pink and blue as well as the bog standard silver variety. The music player is available in Japan (so they can listen to soothing music whilst peering under swimwear) but we have to make do with the boring old silver NW-HD1. Ok, so it's exactly the same at the NW-HD2, but why shouldn't we get the choice of colours too?

That's the sound of us throwing our Hamleys Top Toy Robosapien out of the pram.

See through clothes using your mobile

Not content with a bit of friendly groping on the underground during rush hour, Japanese phone owners can now see through people's clothing using an add-on for Vodafone handsets. Yamada Denshi, third party developer, has come up with a night filter with the added side effect of x-ray vision. The night vision plug in is apparently highly effective on dark bikinis, so beach party goers had better beware. Bad news for would-be pervs over here, though, the £100 filter doesn't work on any UK handsets.

Read

Robosapien wins Best Toy award

We're not sure who told Hamleys that the Robosapien was a children's toy, instead of an karate chopping robotic companion for a generation of 20-something computer nerds. Well, no matter, the robot has just impressed the judges on the Hamleys awards panel - they've awarded it Best Toy 2004. The robot, designed by Nasa scientist, Mark Tilden, can perform 67 programmable functions. It sings, walks, fights, belches, snores, whistles and generally behaves like an electronic chav. Yours (or your eight year old's) for just £79

BUY THE ROBOSAPIEN HERE

Read

Music downloads from a phonebox?

Now that everyone's got a mobile phone, hardly anyone uses phone boxes anymore - except as toilet facilities of course. BT says that 60% of its 70,000 phone boxes lose money and the company hasn't built any new ones since 2001. Now, in an effort to stave off their inevitable demise, BT has taken a leaf out of Madonna's book and is going for a radical reinvention. The company is apparently in talks with "a leading provider of digital music content" to work out a deal that would see its 12,000 internet connected Information Kiosks turned into music download stations. The service would be for anyone with an iPod (so guess the "leading provider of digital music content") and users will be able to pay for downloads via a credit or BT charge card. The service could be in full swing as early as next year.

Read

Tapwave Zodiac launches

The Palm OS PDA that's built to play games (and MP3s and all sorts of other stuff) has launched in the UK. We've had our hands on one, and it's superb – a custom 3D chip for good graphics, excellent pricing, dual SD card slots for games, shoulder buttons and an analogue stick, plus a clear, bright screen. And, finally, some software support – Madden NFL has just been announced for the Zodiac.

See Games Digest

Treo 650 not heading our way soon

The Treo 650 is launching in the US today, but there's no news of when it's likely to reach these shores just yet. No carriers have been announced in the UK so we'll have to wait our turn to see the new handset. According to reports, the 650 will be similar to its predecessor, the 600, but will have rounder edges and a flatter keyboard. A high resolution (320 x 320 pixels) will accompany the VGA digtial camera (not 1.3 megapixels as rumoured). There will also be a faster processor on board and Bluetooth capabilities.

Read

Gas-powered blender

For all those boys in the audience who just don't feel manly enough when blending their fruit smoothies of a morning, the Daiquiri Whacker is a far more butch way to pulp fruity pieces. Delicious, nutritious fruit shakes, or manly fruit cocktails can be created in a second with this gas-powered blender. There's a motorcycle-esque twist grip throttle and a pull cord for powering that baby up. It's got a 23cc Homelite motor and when the Americans describe it as running on gas, we're pretty they're talking about petrol. Should make things that little bit more dangerously flammable and butch in the kitchen.

Read [Via Gadgetryblog]

Mobile phones powered by jet engines

It sounds like crazy talk to us, but according the the New Scientist, engineers are well on their way to batch producing miniturised jet engine-based generators. These "microengines", it's suggested, could be used to power mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. To quote the NS "by spinning a tiny magnet above a mesh of interleaved coils etched into a wafer, David Arnold and Mark Allen of the Georgia Institute of Technology, US, have built the first silicon-compatible device capable of converting mechanical energy - produced by a rotating microturbine - into usable amounts of electrical energy."

The benefit of a tiny generator like this is that it can produce 10 times more energy than normal batteries on the same amount of fuel. Wonder if the jet engines will also get the miniature equivalent of bird-strike? Gnat-strike maybe.

Read

T-Mobile's latest smartphone

We haven't had a new Pocket PC-based smartphone out for a while, so it's nice to have a bit of a break from all those Symbians and Smartphones for T-Mobile's latest addition to its smartphone handsets. The i-mate Jam (to be called the MDA Compact under T-Mobile's branding) is reminiscent of the Eten P300 in that it's a smaller-than-usual Windows Mobile device. In fact, it's even smaller than the P300, measuring 108 x 58 x 18mm. It's got a 1.3-megpixel camera 64MB of ROM and 64MB of SDRAM. There's also Bluetooth (though it sounds like this could be an optional addition for carriers) and SD(IO)/MMC expansion. All that's missing is wireless and you'd have a perfect little smartphone. Pricing from T-Mobile is still to be confirmed, but you can buy it unlocked and SIM-Free from Expansys for £399.95 right now.

i-mate

Pentax Optio 750Z

The Optio 750Z is Pentax's first foray into the 7-megapixel compact camera market. The 750Z is being marketed as a camera for more experienced users. It's got a 5x optical zoom lens and offers 10 different shooting modes as well as a movable LCD preview screen. The camera come with a guide price of £500 and has all those nice retro features like a large mode dial, aluminium alloy casing and leather-grained rubber on the front for that classic look.

Pentax

T-Mobile ramps up business Wi-Fi/3G offering

T-Mobile went launch crazy yesterday unveiling a slew of new handsets, announcing a new Wi-Fi roaming deal with BT OpenWorld and promising 3G handsets on the streets before Christmas.

Under the banner of ‘office in your pocket’ the network gave details of a roaming agreement for its Wi-Fi services with BT OpenWorld. T-Mobile was one of the pioneers of the Wi-Fi hot spot in the UK partnering Starbucks. With BT OpenWorld's hot spots on board T-Mobile subscribers now have access to 1,900 sites in the UK and over 10,500 worldwide.

In tandem with the announcement T-Mobile unveiled a second data card for laptops – the Fusion card. Unlike its first 3G card the Fusion card has integrated Wi-Fi as well as 3G and GRPS facilities. The company also released new hot spot pricing. On prepay users can now get 15 minutes for a pretty reasonable £1.50, an hour for a fiver and a day for £13. If you have a 3G data card it is £70 per month for 3G.GPRS and Wi-Fi providing you don’t exceed one Gigabyte of data.

More on T-Mobile’s new handsets and its 3G strategy for consumers later this afternoon.

PC Pro awards

PC Pro isn't only one of the best computer magazines in the whole, world, it also knows how to throw a good bash too. Last night the publication celebrated its tenth anniversary with a glitzy awards ceremony at London’s wonderful art deco-esque Park lane Hotel.

Professional Geordie Jayne Middlemiss was on hand to doll out a series of rather chunky awards to companies whose products and services impressed not only the PC Pro team but also their readership.

Lack of a pen and rather too much white wine means that we can’t give you the awards list in full. However, these are the ones that survived the alcohol and the subsequent hangover and remained logged in our memory

Most wanted hardware - Canon EOS 300D Digital Camera

Most wanted software - Microsoft Windows Media Player 10

Real World - eBay

Technology innovator - Sony

Broadband provider - Zen

Smartphone - Nokia

TFT monitor - Sharp

Notebook - Fujitsi Siemens

PC - Mesh

100 Gig MP3 player

How much storage space do you need on your hard disk digital jukebox. 20 Gigabytes? 40? 80? Well Xclef has once again upped the ante by delivering a version of its Xclef 500 player that sports a monstrously large 100 Gigabyte jukebox.

Can there really be that many people in the world who need a 100 Gig player? Probably not, but it does mean that chances are you need never worry about the player's hard disk ever being completely full.

Not surprisingly the Xclef 500 is a bit of a chunky beast, but it does boast plenty of features including a very respectable 20 hours battery life, an integrated FM radio and direct encoding of MP3s via its optical line in connector. No news yet on price or UK availability, but we reckon it will land here soon probably via www.advancedmp3players.co.uk and will retail for around the £400 mark

T-Mobile to offer 3G BlackBerry next year

In its London press conference this morning T-Mobile’s UK Managing Director Brian McBride confirmed that the phone network expects to be taking delivery of a 3G version of the BlackBerry sometime before the summer next year.

It is kind of hard to imagine the core benefit of a 3G version of the BlackBerry other than it will enable users to download large files more quickly.

It could also speed up web browsing and will hopefully spur BlackBerry maker RIM into improving, or, even better, offering another web browser with its devices.

We are guessing now but we’d expect that the 3G BlackBerry would have significantly more storage than existing models. The most recently launched BlackBerry in the UK, Vodafone's 7100v has just 32Mb of memory built in.

Loads more T-Mobile stories tomorrow.

Motorola's Bluetooth bonanza

Lots of new Bluetooth toys at the Motorola press conference the other day. These include a Motorola pendant headset (pictured) which lets you make/take calls on your Bluetooth mobile without looking like a tosser with a huge growth on your earlobe. Also shown was a headset for bikers which can be mounted inside your helmet with strong 3M adhesive (oooh sounds painful). Both devices provide around 100 hours of standby time or 5 hours talktime.

Concept devices were also shown including a wearable keyboard for texting (mmm, how fashionable) and a Bluetooth adaptor for taking sound from iPods and distributing it around the house. Further details to follow very soon.

iRiver drops prices (and accessories)

And the award for most pretentious press release of the month goes to iRiver. The company could have just told us that it's dropped the prices of its H320 20Gig pocket jukebox by 50 quid by ditching a load of accessories (funny, didn't Apple do that too with its 4th gen iPod).

Instead we've got a press release the size of a small novel telling us that 'leafing through a digital photo album is a sheer, unadulterated pleasure' and that 'dyed-in-the-wool music lovers will go weak at the knees when they hear the superb sound' (come on guys it's a press release not Lady Chatterley's Lover)

Anyway gripe over. This is what you need to know. The 20Gig H320 has now been reduced in price from £310 to £260. Which is on the whole good news because it means you can watch JPEG images on a colour 2inch screen without paying a massive price premium over the iPod. The bad news is though that the remote control, external battery pack docking station and other accessories are now available as optional add ons.

I River

Where next for the iPod?

Today’s Guardian has a brief piece about how, for the first time, the Apple iPod seems to be falling behind its rivals in terms of size, performance and features. It cites the Archos Gmini XS200 and Creative Micro as being potentially true iPod and iPod Mini killers.

It also speculates as to how Apple will respond suggesting that come the Apple Expo in San Francisco in January it might offer a 60 Gigabyte high end iPod with a colour screen alongside a no-frills tiny 20 Gigabyte player.

Pentax swings its pants

Although we are utterly devoted to new technology we have always harboured something of a secret crush on those 60s style 8mm cine cameras with their fantastic pistol style grips.

We can just imagine ourselves now using one to capture mini-skirted dolly birds breezing up and down Carnaby Street, or for filming The Chocolate Watchband and The Standells entertaining the in-crowd in some swinging joint off the Sunset Strip.

So full marks to Pentax then for delivering the MX4 a camcorder/camera hybrid with a pistol grip that’s just so 60s groovy it almost had us reaching for our bell bottoms.

It doesn’t only look the part (allright so we'll admit the main body is more early 90s than 60s), its line up of features certainly isn’t retro as it takes four mega pixel still images, boasts a 10x optical zoom and captures video in the MPEG4 format recorded at 640 x 480 pixels at a rate of 30fps.

The only downer (man) is that video and images have to be stored on an Secure Digital card, so unless you stick in a 512MB card, you'll only have enough space for an Andy Warhol type short, the update of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush will just have to be put on hold.

Still, the price (£379.99) isn’t too bad, and we are going to get to play with one next week.

Dell's new PDAs hit Europe

While Dell has been very busy Stateside launching all kinds of iPod rivals and consumer electronics goodies it has been a little more lethargic in Europe.

We are however at least seeing some new product including a trio of new Microsoft PDA handhelds and its first ever LCD TV.

Set to launch in November the Axim X50, X50v and X50 416MHz are the latest in fairly successful Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition based Pocket PCs.

The top model (the Axim X50V) in particular looks like reasonable bet if you can still find a use for a PDA. It includes a 624Mhz Intel PXA270 processor, 3.7inch screen, 128MB of memory and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The price of around £350 is fairly reasonable too.

The £300 Axim X50 has a slightly slower 512Mhz processor and a 3.5, as opposed to 3.7 inch display.

At the bottom end the Axim X50 416MHz has, surprise surprise, a 416MHz processor and no Wi-Fi

Dell’s debut TV is a 26inch widescreen LCD model called the W2600. The set, which is finished in satin chrome and sports piano black speakers, is on sale now for £1207.82.

www.dell.co.uk

The end of annoying voice mails

Don’t you just hate it when your mobile phone is clogged up with wingeing old voice mails from your boss, partner, gym instructor, plastic surgeon etc? And how annoying is it when someone leaves a message with a number and you don’t have a pen handy to write it down? Well UK company SpinVox has come up with a tidy solution. Its new product, the imaginatively titled SpinVox, is a system that converts all your voice mails whether they be from mobile or land line, to text. You can then receive the aforementioned moans by text message, or if you are feeling brave, e-mail.

We have been trialling the system for a few days now and can report the following. Firstly that that certain members of the Tech Digest team can barely string a sentence together (but hey you knew that) and secondly that it does actually work with texties popping up on our mobile a few minutes after the message was left. We even tried it with a few naughty words and it nearly got them right too.

If the message is in a foreign language or too noisy to translate you have the option of listening to it by voice.

The only downside is that it isn’t exactly cheap working out at between 18-25p a message which is probably a little pricier than accessing your voicemail. If you fancy a go SpinVox is offering a week’s free trial. You can either sign on at the website or pop down to your favourite High street phone store.

Check it out here

Cigarette lighter snapper

We don’t know a huge deal about Kyocera, largely because it hasn’t bothered too much with the UK market, however we like the look of this. The Contax i4R is a tiny cigarette lighter style camera. The cool bits are that it takes four mega pixel images – much better than most of its budget camera rival – and that its lens (a Carl Zeiss Tessar T* no less) pulls out enabling snappers to snap away. Also on board is a 1.5inch LCD screen. The camera can apparently take three shots per second too. It ships in Japan in December. No idea of the price yet.

Apple's bargain basement laptop

Fairly busy day for Apple yesterday with a slew of announcements including a 1.8 GHz single processor Power Mac® G5 desktop and its most affordable iBook G4 so far. You can read more here and here.

Now we are probably the last people on earth to give an authoritative opinion on Mac computers having jettisoned our iMac several years ago. But the basic 1.2 Ghz iBook certainly looks great value at around £750, especially as it boasts 802.11g wireless facilities, a DVD burner and the usual excellent selection of Apple software.

3's video dating stunt

Looking for lurve? Then get yerself down to Selfridges in London to leave your own video dating message.

Mobile phone company 3 may be making most of its money out of cheap voice calls at the moment (see 3G story here) but it hasn't given up on the potentially lucrative video messaging market just yet. For this week only you can leave a message on a 3 phone in Selfridges window - you can even get a bit of a makeover at the same time so you look half decent for the camera. Alternatively, you can send in your own video dating message using your own 3 phone to www.endoftheblindddate.com .

Visitors to the website can vote on the best 'contestants' with the top 50 men and 50 women selected for a special video dating event at the ICA in London in November.

Sky's designer boxes

As if Sky's Sky+ box isn't appealing enough (record any programme for the next week you want into the box's hard drive just by pressing a button), Sky has teamed up with a load of UK fashion designers to produce some nice limited edition boxes. Good news as far as we're concerned - we're getting tired of the stacks of silver boxes that are piling up under our TV. Matthew Williamson, Cath Kidston, Neisha Crosland, Wale Adeyemi and Eley Kishimoto worked on the designs.

Matthew Williamson's dragonfly design looks set to be the firm favourite (we've seen it and it's lurvely). The boxes are on sale from Monday 8th November, and they're bound to sell out in about 6 seconds because they cost the same as a standard box - £199 + standard installation. They're on sale exclusively in Selfridges Oxford Street, Selfridges Birmingham Bull Ring and Selfridges Manchester Trafford.

Call TechZone at Selfridges on 0207 318 3688 to order yours.

Sky turns to supermarkets for Xmas

Sky is set to make its supermarket debut with a new Starter Pack that will be available in around 60 Tesco Extras stores from November. Costing £39.99, the pack includes one or two months' viewing on selected packages plus standard installation of a free Sky box and mini dish.

The Sky Starter Pack will also be available in more than 1000 Argos and Woolworth's stores across the UK. Obviously, the satellite broadcaster is hoping that people will buy it as a Christmas gift for their loved one (ah, how romantic..)

To get started the recipient of this lovely gift quotes the unique reference number inside each Starter Pack and then chooses their viewing package and convenient installation date. So really it's nothing more than a glorified gift voucher. Still it's the thought that counts.

Tosh's entry level home cinema kit

Nothing to get that excited about on a cold and damp Tuesday morning. But this new entry level home cinema kit from Toshiba looks quite nice. Finished in gun metal grey, it's called the SD-44HK and replaces the SD-43K. Audio output has been increased to 420W and a new feature includes Component Video with PAL Progressive Scan.

The kit, which includes five satellite speakers and a sub-woofer, can handle Dolby Digital, DTS and Dolby Pro-Logic surround sound formats. It also boasts FM/AM tuner, MP3 playback and JPEG viewer. For more information visit Tosh's website.

Robbie Williams gets his cards

There’s something of a rift at TD towers at the moment over today’s launch of the Robbie Williams Greatest Hits album. While some of the crew have been know to serenade their loved-ones with the chorus of Angels and have even spluttered their way through karaoke versions of the rap in the middle of Supreme others argue that Robster was never the same after he stopped being the supersized member of Take That.

Still, digital music lovers can make their own minds up for the album is set to become the first ever in the world to be released not just on CD and vinyl, but also on MMC memory card.

Available exclusively through The Carphone Warehouse the card, which is compatible with most high-end Nokias, apparently has all the tracks in CD like quality and is deigned to slip neatly into a person’s mobile phone.

While we welcome such innovation, surely it would make more sense to buy the CD, rip it to MP3 and then transfer it to a blank card. Sure users might have to buy a smart card reader, but aren’t these now essential items for any camera phone owner.

Also will you be able to transfer the tracks from the card on to a PC? Carphone doesn't know.

Now where did we leave those tiger pants?

3G's killer application

Remember those distant days when we imagined a golden age of 3G phones would mean person to person video calls to Australia, downloading the new Radiohead album on the bus, and e-mail on tap everywhere.

How naïve we were. For if research agency EMC World Cellular Data Metrics is to be believed the killer application for 3G is in fact, err Voice calls.

It seems that in an 'unprecedented' way 3G phone users are actually using their phones for the purpose they were originally designed for - making voice calls.

‘Despite the hype surrounding its new data services, traditional voice calling remains the principal revenue earner for Hutchison 3G’ owners of Europe's’ largest 3G network 3, states the report.

‘3's aggressive strategy may have been successful in terms of subscriber recruitment, but it remains to be seen whether these new customers will ultimately turn out to be heavy data users,’ it concludes.

In the UK at least, if 3 maintains its current levels of growth (there’s whispers of three million subscribers by April next year), it could well become the largest phone networks within a year or two. How many of these admittedly very price-conscious users, gravitate towards the data facilities like video downloads is another matter.

Encouragingly for 3 the report does acknowledge that 3 has the best ARPU (average revenue per user) in both of its key markets the UK and Italy. The trick though for 3 will be getting more of its users to experiment with advanced data services such as video calling. Tough.

Virtual Princess Leia (of sorts)

There haven’t been many nights over the last few decades where we haven’t imagined a 3D Princess Leia appearing before us with a request to help save her from the evil clutches of The Empire and, err, lots of other stuff that we can’t really mention here.

And at the Ceatec show in Chiba Japan the other week our dreams finally came true. For there on the Hitachi’s stand was a 3D image of the princess, or at least some Japanese take on her, muttering what as far as we know could have been anything from a plea to rouse the rebel leaders to the type of Sushi she fancied that evening.

Apparently the ultra clever 3D effect, no doubt inspired by the scene where Princess Leia begs for help via the robot R2-D2, involves some rather clever tricks with mirrors and cameras. Four cameras are set up to capture the images projected onto the mirrors, and the image data is then transmitted over special lines to the display.

At the display site, four projectors reflect the images off a ring of 24 mirrors. A double-sided mirror placed in the center of the ring spins rapidly, and about one-quarter of the original image appears on the spinning mirror.

Still with us? Can’t quite imagine what type of applications Hitachi has in mind for the system, and it certainly won’t be in your home by Christmas, but it was mighty impressive (sigh).

Archos taks on iPod mini with 20 Gig player

How do you fancy an iPod mini size digital music player with a full iPod sized storage capacity of 20 Gigabytes? Well Sony got close with its NW-HD1, and now it appears that French manufacturer Archos has actually pulled off this marvel of miniaturisation with its upcoming Gmini XS200.

The tiny player measures just 7.6 x 5.9 x 1.9cm and weighs 120g which is roughly the same size as Apple’s, unbelievably hard to find the UK at least, iPod mini. Yet the XS200 has five times as much storage as the mini offering 20 rather than four Gigabytes. It also trumps its Apple rival on battery life, offering ten hours as opposed to the mini’s eight, and it will play WMA files, though not AAC ones.

One rather cool innovation in that it sports a virtual keyboard that enables users to name tracks and playlists on the fly.

The Register, which got a sneak preview, reckons though that it is not much of a looker and that its LED screen is a tad tricky to use.

Can’t imagine that Apple will launch any more iPods until its next Expo in San Fran in January. Then we’d be amazed if we didn’t see the iPod form factor splintering all over the place with larger capacity iPods with colour screens rubbing shoulders with smaller ones offering at least 20 Gigabytes of storage but featuring more basic facilities.

Wi-Fi hits the golf course

Time was when golf provided a simple way for stressed execs to leave the cares of the office behind, take a jolly walk in the countryside and occasionally stun their colleagues by hitting par for a hole.

Not any more though thanks to the growing popularity stateside of, wait for it, Wi-Fi golf carts. A company called GPS Industries which numbers the great Greg Norman on its board, has developed a tablet system that integrates in to the golf buggies offering both Wi-Fi web access and satellite navigation via GPS.

Basically the tablets help golfers play the course better by giving them precise positioning and video game-like graphic representations of the holes. They also help the course track golfers' progress and communicate with them wirelessly.

However, even its developers acknowledge that the Wi-Fi tablet is much more than just a golfing accessory. "The ability to have real time communications with golfers over the Wi-Fi network creates an entire new business opportunity for the course," says GPS marketing director Blake Ponuick. "It's not only a device for the golfer now, it's a business tool for the course."

He’ basically saying that in the future when sizing up that all import final putt to scoop the day’s game and ensure it is not you forking out for the G and Ts in the nineteenth hole, your concentration will be interrupted by that annoying ping, ping as Outlook Express informs you of yet another unimssable business opportunity offered by some African prince.

Is nothing sacred?

Elonex's widescreen TV/PC

It was first shown at the Ideal Home Show in the Spring. Now the long-awaited Elonex Lumina is actually set to go on the market in time for Christmas. A 32inch LCD widescreen telly with speakers, it incorporates the latest Microsoft Media Center 2005 operating platform and is perhaps the closest thing we've seen so far to a proper PC/TV.
It comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard and a price tag of £2299. For a full review see The Daily Mirror.

Elonex

Loo Light

To quote the website blurb: "Guys, is the girl in your life always complaining that she has to go paddling after you're been to the loo in the middle of the night? Does she moan when she falls into the toilet because you left the seat up during the evening?" While there's probably fewer things funnier than the sight of someone falling into a toilet bowl in their nightie, Gadgets.co.uk is planning to foil any night time toilet troubles with the Lav-Nav night light. The light glows green when the lid is down, guiding your posterior ever nearer, safe in the knowledge that you're not about to meet with cold enamel. When the light turns red you'll know that the coast is not clear because the loo seat has been left up. Serves as a handy reminder to the boys to be more thoughtful, and a guiding beacon for nocturnal weeing for the whole family.

Gadgets.co.uk