November 2009 Archives

• 32GB of built-in memory and a full SD slot
• 320 x 480 screen
• 3-axis accelerometer
• Front and rear facing cameras
• HD playback
• 1080p video output
• X-Fi audio processing
• WiFi
• GPS
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR

• 640x360 touchscreen display
• Bluetooth
• 3 mp auto-focus camera with flash and video
• MicroSD slot
• GPS with pre-loaded maps

I am that ubiquitous thing: a tech journalist with a secret past as a part-time musician.  I know it doesn't sound like a natural match but - believe me - we are legion.  It's always nice when my twin obsessions (gadgets and noise) come together.  I've just been checking out Korg's NanoSERIES range of USB MIDI-controllers.  These things are very cool. And very weird.

To explain.... MIDI is the protocol for translating musical notes into bit and bytes.  That includes routines for volume, tone, key pressure and so on. Budget MIDI-controllers are rarely very exciting - little plastic keyboards or USB mixers with lots of knobs.  Boring. Functional.

Then along comes the Korg Nano range.  Taking a more designery (I'm assured by Google that this is now a word) approach to gadget fashioning, they're three neat looking, strange little USB units with different MIDI control functions. The nanoKEY is a slick mini-keyboard, with chunky keys for porky fingers like mine.  Smaller than a laptop QWERTY, it'll easily fit on your desk, we suspect. Then there's the nanoKONTROL - a similar board with lots of knobs. If you've ever tried using a music recording program you'll know there are an interminable number of volume, balance, equaliser, level, send, effects and (fill in the blank here) controls.  With this, you can assign software controls to nine real live twisty knobs and sliders and eighteen switches. Not enough control for you?  Add another one. Or a third. Brilliant.  A just released new plug-in for Apple's GarageBand makes it even more useful.

That just leaves our favourite: the NanoPAD.  It's a similarly sized deck with a dozen sensitive pads that you can tap, smack or hit with a drumstick. Instant drumkit, just add a laptop. And some software.

All the Nano range are under £50 - with the nanoKEY available for £39.  When mine arrives, I'll give you a more in-depth overview. 

Here's Korg's offical video, Check out the chap rocking out at the bus stop...

Kindle for PC - Amazon's Windows based electronic book reading software - is now available for free download. Yay.  Amazon have only sent me 4 emails reminding me of the fact so far.  Even though I grabbed it last week.

First impressions? I'm sure this beta version will make a lot more sense if you actually have a Kindle.  The standalone functionality enables you to download and install electronic books wrapped in Kindle DRM, and share them with your device.  Which is super.  You can bookmark pages, synchronise your reading progress between devices and quickly navigate through your download library.

If you don't actually have one of Amazon's coveted e-readers, you can still use the software to buy new books - though not all titles are available in the UK. Still, 300,000 books is a pretty good selection. Disappointingly, the overall functionality of the PC software isn't as good as some existing free solutions.  Adobe Reader comes to mind.  Try dragging a PDF to Kindle for PC and it'll just look at you funny.

You also miss out on the unique selling points of an e-reading device; electronic ink, portability and so on.  We could, at a pinch, see ourselves installing this on a netbook - and that would save us the price of a real Kindle; currently about £155.  Give it a few months though, when 2010's inevitable tablet PC war begins. Then Kindle for PC will be worth another look. 

There's been a bit of kerfuffle on the Internetworks about Google Maps Navigation lately.  Here are the Cliff's Notes:  A recent, Android-only update to Google Maps added turn by turn navigation to the app.  That means that anyone with a supported mobile phone, unlimited data and a built in GPS can now use Google Maps Navigation as a route planner and in-car navigation tool.  For nowt.

Unfortunately, Google Maps Navigation has only launched in the USA so far - and only on Android 2.0 devices.

But in all the Twittering and gnashing of keys, no one seems to have noticed that the current incarnation of Maps on Android - available here in the UK - is pretty handy right now.  You can already do route planning, turn by turn navigation and 3G location.

I've been trialling an HTC Hero on Orange (full deposition coming later this week) and used the opportunity to give the current navigation features a go.  My verdict? They're very handy - great for stomping around an unfamiliar city or taking a country walk - but the likes of Tom Tom and Navman don't have to worry too much.  Not yet anyway.  

The new and improved Google Maps Navigation on the other hand, that includes juicy features like Street View navigation and voice control.  And you'll never have to update a map again.   

16 years ago, when I first downloaded the demo for 3D fragfest Doom to my Fujitsu 386 DX PC, I thought it was the canine's orbs.  This week I've been playing it in my web browser at newsgrounds.com, on an Android powered HTC Hero (on loan from Orange), on an iPhone and on a Mac.  Doom is the first person shooter that simply refuses to die.

And while I'm here getting all misty eyed about blasting cacodaemons, it's worth noting that the latest incarnation isn't the lovely looking but ludicrously unforgiving Doom 3 - but Doom Resurrection; a version of the revamped 3D shooter for the iPhone.

Sing along with me! "Ner ner, ner ner ner, ner ner ner, ner ner ner ner ner ner ner!"  Hmm.  Perhaps the original Doom theme doesn't translate all that well to text...

Spotify for Android. Please note: these are not my playlists... Robbie Williams. Bleurgh.

I love Spotify.  No one has paid me to say this.  Well, technically, someone has.  Someone will pay me for this entry - but I am free to say "Spotify is as rancid as an old plum that's been stored for ten years in a tramp's boot" if I want.  But I don't want, because I love Spotify.

The famous streaming music app has completely changed the way I access and listen to music. And I do listen to music a lot.  From Vivaldi to Vampire Weekend and every stop in between.  Except Keane.  No one likes Keane.

While my collection has been partially digital since I picked up my first iPod from New York's Apple shop in 2003, there have still been CDs.  Not anymore though. Spotify just made them redundant.

Of course, there are some notable artists you won't find on Spotify yet. There's no Pink Floyd or Peter Gabriel. There's little Husker Du. The problem isn't that those artists haven't agreed to appear - it's that deals have yet to be brokered with their labels.

But there's still plenty to love about Spotify.  An easy to use interface that isn't a slave to iTunes, support for Boolean searching, shared and collaborative playlists and streaming music that's of perfectly listenable 160Kbps quality. 

And, loving Spotify as I did, I thought the company had shot itself in the foot.  Its revenue model is based on two prongs.  The first; advertising interrupts your listening pleasure if you use the free version.  And, we have to admit, the advertising can be pretty annoying.  Especially when your carefully composed playlist of 70s German electro is interrupted by Robbie Williams honking out his new single. The second; you can trade up to Premium for £9.99 a month - or £119.88 a year. 

A tenner a month sounds a bit steep - but if you're a real music fan, it's equivalent to a CD every 30 days or 10 tracks a month on iTunes.  Still, I was wondering - what true incentive is there to go Premium when Spotify's already giving you so much for free?  And then I tried Spotify for Android. 

Now I get it.

Spotify's mobile applications - Spotify for Android and Spotify for iPhone are beautifully designed music player apps in a mobile world overpopulated with appalling, thrown together twitch and flick interfaces.  Realising that screen real estate is at a premium, Spotify for Android packs all its functionality into four simple tabs in understated Spotify charcoal and green; Playlists, Search, Playback and Home.  The search page is actually better than in the desktop version of the app - enabling you to choose between title, artist or album with the click of a tab. And instead of flipping through a stack of bitmap thumbnails to find music, it's all available in easy to navigate lists.  Goodbye, pretty but user-unfriendly cover-flow. Goodbye forever.

The mobile app is free to download - but there's an apparent catch.  You need to be a Spotify Premium user.  After a few days carrying Spotify for Android around on an HTC Hero though, we're failing to see the problem.  With unlimited data - bundled with many mobile contract packages these days - Spotify turns your handset into a digital music player with almost limitless capacity.  And, if 3G bandwidth is a problem, it's easy to download playlists for offline listening.  You just click "Offline Playlists" and tick which ones you want to back up when you've got a WiFi connection. You can store up to 3333 tracks, which is, more than enough for a couple of week's holiday off grid.

I've read other reviews of the mobile versions of Spotify and there's one thing they don't make clear enough.  Spotify for Android doesn't cost £9.99 a month as some insinuate - it's free with Spotify Premium.  You get Spotify Premium on your desktop and on your mobile for the same price.  That means no more adverts, 320kbps resolution, and offline listening on both your mobile phone and desktop computers.  Who needs to actually buy music anymore? If you're Spotify savvy - not you.

In a move that appears to be designed to upset Orange's apple cart, O2 have just announced that users of their iPhone Internet Tethering bolt-on  who sign up on or before 31 December 2009 will be entitled to the standard Home Broadband package for free. Tethering - which enables you to use your iPhone as a 3G modem when you're out and about - costs £9.79 a month with a 3GB allowance. Now you can get online for free at home as well.

While downloading Machinarium from Steam yesterday I noticed that the long awaited Left 4 Dead 2 demo was available. Had, in fact, been available for public download since the 4th of November. Just in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, Left 4 Dead is the latest first person shooter that all the craziest kids are playing; a survival horror game you can play alone or co-operatively online.

I made a mental note to grab it for three reasons:

* I love Valve.  Half Life is my favourite game of all time.  Apart from Portal, which actually is my favourite game of all time. And Half Life 2, which really is my favourite game of all time.

* Half Life 2: Episode 3 has been in development hell for approximately ten million years.  Actually, 25 months.  But it feels like ten million years - and I was jonesing bad for some first person shooting action.

* No one shuts up about Left 4 Dead on Twitter.  It's all "L4D is ground breaking this" and "mould busting that".  And, listening to all that praise? Empathising with all that rampant,  second hand fun? That was difficult, because there was no way to try Left 4 Dead except to buy it.  A demo was made available briefly on Steam, but withdrawn within days. In my experience forking out £25 for a game without playing a demo is a bit like meeting up with someone you found on match.com named Helga, without seeing a photo first. Unwise.

500MB of download later I'm getting ready to have me some lovely first person shooty bang bang action, in the dark, with my speakers turned up.  A nicely rendered cinematic at the beginning gives you an idea what to expect.  Four ordinary folk who are trapped in a zombie infested city miss out on being rescued because blah, blah, blah, hurry up and let me start killing things.

My wish was soon Valve's command, as I chose to play a single player campaign as some dude called Cleetus or Doofus or it doesn't really matter because within seconds, oh my giddy Aunt, there were swarms of very fast moving zombies leaping and running towards me and all I had to protect myself and my friends was a sub-machine gun which needed reloading every 30 seconds and, of course, the ability to shove individual zombies in the swarm (arms flailing, viscera splashing everywhere) back two inches by feebly right clicking on them. 

HA HA HA! Ha ha! Ha.

Left 4 Dead 2 gave me the screaming ab dabs in a way that no game has managed since... oooh ...the original Quake back in 1996. It's the combination of desolation and expectation and mundanity, followed by a sudden, unbidden onslaught of horrific and dizzying violence. Again and again and again. You pick off some lone shuffling zombies, you are attacked by a horde of them, everything goes quiet, you move around a bit.  If you're lucky enough to have a health pack, you heal. Rinse and repeat.  There's little sense of progress.  There's little sense at all.  But it's utterly and terrifyingly thrilling.

Still, after an hour's relentless, bloody assault, I couldn't wait to return back to the tranquil and comforting whimsy of Machinarium again.  And now, the bad dreams just won't stop...

My esteemed colleague Faisal Alani set a dangerous precedent when he wrote about Pro Evolution Soccer 2010. Yes, we can write about games here, it said, under the radar - on the QT and the hush, hush... Which is just as well, because I just lost an entire afternoon of my life playing the gorgeous Machinarium - a new(ish) adventure for PC and Mac from Amanita Design. 

You're a Wall-E style robot venturing through a deliciously hand-scribbled steampunk environment. With a new point and click puzzle to solve on every level, ambient, tinkling music follows you through the cluttered cityscape. Your course is blocked at every opportunity and you have to work out how best to the use the objects lying around to help you get past each obstacle. With so much detail etched into every scene, there's never any rush to move on though.

It's tranquil, fun and cute with a capital C.  At least, it is when things are going swimmingly... Like all the best puzzles, there are moments when lateral thinking simply isn't good enough - and only wandering around clicking frantically on everything within clicking distance will help. There are hints on every level too, but real gamers don't do walkthroughs, do they?  Ahem.

The first three levels can be played for free, online at www.machinarium.net on any platform that runs Flash - and you can download the full PC version for £14.99 through Steam.

The back catalogue of Liverpool's greatest musical export - and, no, we don't mean The Teardrop Explodes - are finally going to be available in glorious digital stereo. But, you won't be able to download them. Not just yet.

I'm writing about it here because, following the model of EMI's digital exploitation presentation of Radiohead's first 7 albums, the digital versions of The Beatle's official long players will first be released on a USB stick. A USB stick embedded in a plastic apple.

The 16GB flash drive will feature all 14 official fab four platters, from 1962's "Please Please Me" to "Past Masters" - a double set that collects Beatle songs not featured on other albums.  From details released at www.beatles.com, it seems like the digital release, limited to 30,000 copies, will feature all the extras bundled with the recently issued remastered stereo box set - including mini-documentaries and album artwork. The tunes will be presented in lossless 44.1 khz, 24 bit FLAC and 320 Kbps MP3 formats.

While these high quality Beatle releases are very welcome, I can't help feeling that the famous fab quality control machine has developed a bit of a glitch.  You could argue that the package - an "exquisitely crafted" sculptural replica of Apple Corp's famous Granny Smith logo - will be an interesting objet d'art; a talking point in years to come.  For me, it's just 200 quid's worth of injection moulded Apple; another sign that record companies have yet to find a format as conducive to beautiful design as the 12" record sleeve. I think I'd prefer to stump up for the remastered CDs and rip 'em into iTunes myself.

The package will be released on December 7^th in the UK and, rather ghoulishly, December 8^th in the USA; the 29^th anniversary of John Lennon's death.

The clocks went back last week. For some it brought brighter mornings and the promise of crisp, winter weather. For others it's the beginning of four months of utter misery; an entire season where every morning's a struggle to escape from the cosy cocoon of their beds.

You're not alone if you're in the latter camp. SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) hits an estimated 10% of the population in varying degrees. Some feel a familiar seasonal sluggishness while others may be disabled by the condition, exhibiting all the symptoms of major depression during the winter months.

The Seasonal Affective Disorder Association says that 85% of sufferers respond to a very simple treatment though; light therapy.  When exposed to a strong light source (about ten times the luminosity of domestic lights), for a couple of hours a day, many people with SAD find the symptoms subside.

And, wouldn't you know, there's a gadget for that.  Lumie have a long history in the manufacture of light boxes for SAD treatment. They also produce visors that can be worn while working or at the office.  From just £160, Lumie's battery powered range of visors direct between 1,000 and 3,000 lux of therapeutic light directly into your eyes - resetting the wearer's body clock and chasing away the winter blues.

I haven't tried one... yet. The visors look a little bit too Star Trek for me - and I can imagine getting a few funny looks if I took one into the office. But I do use a Lumie Brightspark. That's a desktop light box, ideal for use while you're sitting at a computer. And, most mornings, I leap out of bed eager to start work. Unfortunately, that also includes weekends...

O2's iPhone exclusivity finally ends on November 10^th when Orange start shipping the Apple devices to eager customers.  Today they published details of the tariff - and Twitter is all-a-fluster with Orange's use of the term "Fair Usage".  You see, all the Pay Monthly plans come with "unlimited" mobile internet.  But the small print at the bottom says that a "Fair Usage" policy of 750MB/month applies to mobile internet browsing and WiFi.

750MB a month doesn't seem particularly unlimited. Let's make a comparison.  Standard mobile internet packages for your PC - those things that come with a USB dongle - usually start at 1GB.  No one calls those packages "unlimited", especially as they're at the bottom rung of the ladder.  

For example, Orange's own dongle offering starts at 500MB per month (on a 12 month contract) and goes up to 10GB a month - with stops at 1GB and 3GB along the way. They can't all be unlimited, can they?

In real terms, 750MB a month might be enough for checking emails and logging in to Twitter in the morning - but start flicking through your friend's photos on Facebook or log in to Funny or Die, and see how long it lasts.  

O2 has what it calls an "excessive usage" policy in place on its unlimited iPhone plans - with no top end defined.

But don't let all that detract you from the real news:  Yay, iPhones!  And, overall, it does look like Orange's offering is slightly cheaper than O2's...

---

Update:

via @conorfromorange on Twitter:

"...for our new iPhone offers we are using a fair usage policy of 750MB for Mobile data, & 750MB for free Wi-Fi access with our Wi-Fi partner"

So that's actually two lots of 750MB, depending on how you access the 'net.