Breakfast briefing: Big guns and small gadgets at CES, but Nexus One hit by multitouch mysteryh
• Fun and games at CES on Thursday, as the show's doors officially opened and everyone could get their hands on the gear. Intel showed off its new 32 nanometer chips, Dell paraded its ultra-thin laptop and Plastic Logic - which has long claimed that it would challenge Amazon and other electronic reader manufacturers - unveiled the Que (listen out for today's podcast for more). • After playing with the Nexus One for a few days, I thought it was only fair to share my thoughts on what the phone is like. Good, but not great. What could make it better for British users, however, is that the European version looks set to support multitouch . That's the same as the Droid, which is single touch in the US but, under the Milestone name in the EU, supports multitouch. The question of why that happens came up in the Google press conference on Tuesday, but Android boss Andy Rubin sort-of-deflected it at the time by saying it was "a software thing" and that they would "leave the option open". • Another company that's exhibiting at CES and we've discussed in the past is the social TV startup Boxee - which has finally launched its beta
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Breakfast briefing: Big guns and small gadgets at CES, but Nexus One hit by multitouch mysteryh
Medion Life S47000 HD sports camera | Technophile
Medion's S47000 HD sports camcorder is fun to use, and splashproof, but limited memory lets it down I'd love to make a TV commercial for Medion's S47000 high-definition sports camcorder. It's somewhat ruggedised and splashproof, so I could show trendy young people skiing down Swiss mountainsides, BMX bikers capturing each other in action, and kids splashing in the surf. But my sales pitch would, alas, remind me that I'm perhaps not really the most appropriate reviewer for the product. The most hazardous thing I've done recently is scamper across Buckingham Palace Road. Still, the simplicity and durability of the S47000 could provide it with a wider appeal. Once you have got over the shock of finding five cables in the box – the only one I used was for the mains charger – it's very easy to use
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Medion Life S47000 HD sports camera | Technophile
Tech Weekly podcast: Twitter attacked and the rise of the GPU
Charles speaks to Evgeny Morozov, blogger for Foreign Policy magazine and Graham Cluely of security firm Sophos to find out how and why Twitter, Live Journal, Google and Facebook were targeted by denial of service attacks last week. The answer it would appear is an attempt to silence one Georgian blogger - Cyxymu, who was a critic of last year's conflict between Georgia and Russia in South Ossetia. Charles finds out about him, why Twitter was so badly affected, and why distributed denial of service attacks from botnets are less successful than they were earlier this decade. Charles also speaks to Jen Husun Huang, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nvidia. He discusses why the graphics processing unit will become more important to the future of computing. Instead of being used just to process intensive visual tasks, the GPU can be used to crunch data to much better effect than a CPU with multiple cores. Hear what the benefits will be, and how the GPU differs and works. Plus there's this week's news, including the state of surveillance in Britain, details of Facebook buying FriendFeed, and Spinvox's latest troubles. Bobbie Johnson is your presenter, and he's most grateful to you for helping push the Guardian Tech Twitter feed over the 1 million follower mark... Don't forget to... • Comment below... • Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk • Get our Twitter feed for programme updates • Join our Facebook group • See our pics on Flickr / Post your tech pics Bobbie Johnson Charles Arthur Scott Cawley Jon Dennis
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Tech Weekly podcast: Twitter attacked and the rise of the GPU
Technophile: Flip’s new UltraHD video camera reviewed
With higher resolution, and shiny chrome for posers, Flip's UltraHD still has the iPhone 3GS as a rival Flip, now owned by Cisco, has quickly carved out a name for itself in small handheld video cameras such as the Mino and MinoHD. Why bother with lumpen camcorders with huge lenses when you can instead wield something about the size of the Little Book of Calm? Its latest offering is the 8GB Flip UltraHD. Priced at around £160, it adds more storage – up to two hours – plus remarkably detailed video capture, with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels and millions of colours, which it grabs at 30 frames per second. Much of these improvements are directly in line with Moore's Law: quicker, faster, cheaper. Flip has now moved to H.264 for video encoding, unlike the MPEG-4 AVI wrapper it used on its previous models such as the original Mino and MinoHD. That ups its compatibility with video-editing programs; AVI covers such a myriad of flie encoding wrappers that it's a gamble whether it will function with any given editor. H.264 is a known quantity which performs very well at all sorts of compression rates. Flip is also paying attention to the little elements: you can choose to have the back (lens) side of the UltraHD in shiny chrome. Why? Because Flip discovered that its younger buyers wanted to be able to see themselves using it as they composed self-regarding videos for YouTube. The UltraHD's automatic light balance also showed its paces. I tried it at Wimbledon, where there's huge contrast in brightness between the sky, the court, and the seats; the automatic adjustment was almost instant; certainly if I'd had a tripod (rather than holding it in my wobbly hands) you'd have barely known how the light conditions above the court were changing as clouds scudded overhead. The only criticism is that at the speeds at which professionals play tennis, the ball "strobed" – the frame capture isn't fast enough to make the motion of the ball (which is of course travelling at around 100mph, or 160km/h) smooth. But for all its improvements, Flip needs to watch its back: the arrival of video recording on the iPhone 3GS, plus that device's capability for a line-in microphone, is a dangerous challenge that can't be ignored. The controls retain their simplicity: big red button to begin recording, two touch-sensitive controls to zoom in and out. For editing there's a simple trash button and reverse and forward buttons to scroll through the choices
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Technophile: Flip's new UltraHD video camera reviewed
Microsoft plans new Zune - but no gadgets for UK
• Gamesblog exclusive: What Zune Marketplace means for you • Zune's history of misfortune Microsoft has announced plans to launch a new version of the Zune media player, its competitor to Apple's ubiquitous iPod - but only to customers in the United States. The Zune HD, which will go on sale in the US next month, is the latest addition to Microsoft's family of music and video players - a range which first launched in 2006 to mixed reviews. But instead of being able to get their hands on the new gadget, shoppers in Europe will have to make do with access to Zune Marketplace - a download shop that Microsoft hopes can compete with Apple's popular iTunes store. Zune Marketplace enables users to download music, television and movies to their Xbox 360, and existing subscribers to Xbox Live are expected to be offered unlimited access to Microsoft's catalogue for a single extra payment each month. Chris Stephenson, a spokesman for the project, said that the news marked a "turning point" for Zune, and the first step in an international expansion plan. "Eventually we'll offer the full digital entertainment experience spanning screens, devices, platforms and geographies," he said. That optimism comes despite estimates that the Zune has sold just 3 million units over the past three years - in comparison to Apple, which has sold 156 million iPods over the same period. Microsoft is still hoping it can make inroads into the lucrative media player market, however. The new Zune HD will include a low-power OLED screen, HD radio, Wi-Fi capabilities and high definition video output - enabling it to push pictures out to full-size HDTV sets. In an interview with the Guardian's Gamesblog , Stephenson said he thought the new Zune was well-matched against the most popular iPod models. "This is a fantastic piece of hardware and absolutely it's going right up against iPod Touch; it's hyper competitive against that product. I think in many ways, we look at our consumers and what's really motivated them. "The radio functionality is something that people really talk about – the HD radio receiver, with radio tagging, with track tagging, is a great differentiator for us. It's going to be an interesting and competitive year for us in the market – we think we've got a great product; we are going to compete." Gadgets Microsoft Xbox iPod Digital video Digital music and audio Games Software guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Microsoft plans new Zune - but no gadgets for UK
Zune comes to Xbox Live in UK. Plus: ZuneHD to hit US
Zune, Microsoft's 'end-to-end music and entertainment service' is coming to Xbox Live. Later today the mega-corp will officially announce its plans, which - although intriguing - are substantially less radical than the Zune mobile phone and/or Zune portable games player imagined by internet rumour-mongers over the weekend. Here's the deal. Up until now, the portable media player and its online iTunes Store equivalent, Zune Marketplace, have only been available in the US. From early Autumn, however, Zune Marketplace will be available on Xbox Live in the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland and Spain (with more countries coming aboard later). Xbox 360 owners in these territories will be able to go online and access music, TV and movie content and play it via their console. A variety of access options will be available, including instant streaming, download to rent and download to own. However, no Zune portable music players will be launched outside of the US - at least not yet. This is about the online service only. The finer details have not yet been announced, but the basics were revealed to me by Chris Stevenson , Microsoft's General Manager of Consumer Marketing for TV, Video and Music Business. As with the current Zune set-up in the States, it looks like Xbox Live owners will be offered a subscription service, allowing them to download as much content as they like from the Marketplace. Microsoft has yet to reveal its content partners, or a subscription rate for UK users, but further details will be revealed at next week's E3 event in Los Angeles. "Xbox as a platform is broadening its audience, growing beyond games into living room entertainment," said Stevenson in a telephone interview yesterday afternoon. "That's what's driven the prioritisation of an enhanced Zune video service to Xbox… It's about changing the way people think about entertainment." It also sounds like Zune Marketplace will be closely integrated with Xbox Live's community features.
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Zune comes to Xbox Live in UK. Plus: ZuneHD to hit US
Technophile: Apple’s iLife suite - is it worth the upgrade?
Once again, Apple has updated its iLife suite of programs. But is the upgrade worth the price? Apple's iLife suite of "consumer" applications is meant to be one of the reasons you'd want to buy a Mac. Every new machine comes loaded with the programs – the photo-management software iPhoto, music maker Garageband, movie-making software iMovie, website maker iWeb, and make-your-own DVD program iDVD. It being a new year, they have all been updated (with each tweak demonstrated to death by Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller at January's Macworld show). If you don't want to go to the mad expense of buying a computer, though, you can just buy the software – but it'll set you back £69, plus you'll need a machine running Leopard (aka OS X 10.5), and a Mac made within the past couple of years. (Note too it archives, rather than overwriting old versions of iLife.) But are the improvements worth the money? With many of the changes, if nobody told you they were there, you'd barely notice. OK, so there are a couple of things that are new, if not improved
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Technophile: Apple's iLife suite - is it worth the upgrade?
Ask Jack: January 15 2009
Wait for Windows 7? I'm thinking of buying a new laptop but wondering if it might be best to wait. Do you think Windows 7 will require higher specs etc, as Vista did compared with XP? Ben Cole JS: Any PC you buy today should have 2GB to 4GB of memory, which is enough for Windows Vista. The evidence so far is that Windows 7 uses less memory than Vista, and it uses the same drivers, so most newish PCs should run Windows 7 very comfortably (see this week's cover story). For preference go for 4GB of memory and 64-bit Vista. This version can exploit all the memory you can fit, and you will be able to upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7 without reformatting the hard drive. Whether it's better to wait depends on how urgently you need a new PC. I expect that once Microsoft has fixed a date for Windows 7's launch, it will offer free Win7 upgrades to new Vista buyers. If it doesn't, PC manufacturers could see sales slow down, and no one wants that
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Ask Jack: January 15 2009
Last Christmas for VHS
We hear so much about formats dying off these days - after all, 2007 was the year we said bye bye to HD-DVD ; abandoned almost before it was born. Some formats have more legs, though. Take the venerable Video Home System, which is finally done with after 32 years and assaults from Betamax, Laserdiscs, DVD and DVR, according to the LA Times : After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes. "It's dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt," said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away." Kugler - who apparently specialises in "distressed inventory" - has decided it's all over. I do remember the days of watching films until the tape would degrade and fuzzy lines would start to invade the screen. But now? I've got some VHS tapes stuffed somewhere in a storage container in Sussex, but that's about it. I think screenwriter John August (credits include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie's Angels and some other films that don't have the word Charlie) captured it best when he said that, despite his obsession with movies: I have almost no nostalgia for the VHS format itself. With its springs and gears, each tape was built to fail. I can't think of another technology that seemed so inelegant even when it was new. Still have a pile of cassettes in your living room? Are you sorry to see VHS go? Digital video Gadgets guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Last Christmas for VHS
Technology Guardian’s Top 10 Gadgets of 2008
Here, in no particular order, is Technology Guardian's list of what our reviewers rate as the best they've seen over the past 12 months
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Technology Guardian's Top 10 Gadgets of 2008