Author Archive: Matt

More than 20 years in the IT industry. Blogging with a passion and thirst for new technology since 2005.

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By August 28, 2012 Read More →

Back to school tech

back-to-school1 Once upon a time ‘back to school’ meant a trip to WH Smiths and buying half-a-dozen new pens and a new ruler. Nowadays though it seems that everything from printers to mobile phones are included on that back to school offering, a trip to your local supermarket reveals a whole aisle of ‘essential’ items for the most discerning of school kids.

Having a 4 year old starting school I am acutely aware of the kit that they expect to take to school. Of course, not every 4 year old needs a smartphone for school!

Check out some of the best offers from the folks over at eXpansys below.

 

Posted in: Phones
By August 28, 2012 Read More →

Apple trying to ban 8 Samsung handsets

samsungchart Following Apple’s success in court against Samsung last week Apple have now requested a temporary injunction against 8 Samsung phones, preventing their sale in the US.

According to The Verge, in order for Apple to successfully have the devices banned it must convince the court that the company face irreparable harm if sales were allowed to continue. The court is scheduled to address the injunction in a hearing set for September 20th.

 

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: News
By August 26, 2012 Read More →

Tim Cook memo leak

apple-vs-samsung The recent court ruling on coming down on the side of Apple in the Apple vs Samsung case is a very significant landmark. It sets a huge precedence that’s going to echo through the smartphone industry as a whole.

A total of 5 of Apple’s patent claims were upheld, these included:

  • Some of Samsung’s handsets, including its Galaxy S 4G model, infringed Apple’s design patents for the look of its iPhone including the system it uses to display text and icons
  • All the disputed Samsung devices had copied Apple’s "bounce-back response", which makes lists jump back as if yanked by a rubber band
  • Several Samsung devices incorporated Apple’s facility allowing users to zoom into text with a tap of a finger
  • Pinch and pull with two fingers on the display in order to zoom in/out

Following the Apple victory, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, issued a memo which 9to5mac were able to get hold of a copy of:

Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators everywhere.

Many of you have been closely following the trial against Samsung in San Jose for the past few weeks. We chose legal action very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying our work. For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. And we do this to delight our customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the jury who invested their time in listening to our story. We were thrilled to finally have the opportunity to tell it. The mountain of evidence presented during the trial showed that Samsung’s copying went far deeper than we knew.

The jury has now spoken. We applaud them for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.

I am very proud of the work that each of you do.

Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.

Tim

Apple had wanted $2.5bn in damages. Samsung had sought $519m.

It may also seek to use this ruling to block other devices powered by Google’s Android software that it believes replicate elements of its user-interface, including current models by Samsung as well as other firms.

Samsung said that they will appeal.

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: News
By August 25, 2012 Read More →

Neil Armstrong dies

_62499245_inside_ap First man on the moon, Neil Armstrong dies aged 82.

Often described as the ‘reluctant hero’, to say that Neil Armstrong was a legend ins an exercise in stating the bleedin’ obvious but the quiet man from Ohio was an inspiration to millions. He set foot on the Moon on 20 July 1969, famously describing the event as "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". The phrase is the oft-repeated and one of the best know in the English language.

Apollo 11 was Armstrong’s last space mission. In 1971, he left the US space agency NASA to teach aerospace engineering.

Born in 1930 and raised in Ohio, Armstrong took his first flight aged six with his father and formed a lifelong passion for flying.

Mr Armstrong died following complications arising from surgery to relieve 4 blocker coronary arteries on the 7th August.

I sincerely hope that parents and teachers will continue to teach history of space flight to the current young generation so that kids don’t grow up thinking that Buzz Lightyear was the first man on the moon!

 

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: News
By August 24, 2012 Read More →

Top 5 Apps To Locate Your Phone in Case You Lose It

Find-My-iPhone If you are like me (and thousands of others in the world) then you simply cannot live without your cell phone. These little devices are something that many of us have become totally dependent upon. For instance, what is the first thing I do in the morning? Before I even get out of bed I reach over and look at my cell phone. I check my mail messages and the weather before I have been awake for two minutes. I depend on my phone for work, social connections, calculations, alarms and calendar events. I would feel naked without it. The problem is that these phones are so compact that sometimes we cannot find where we laid them down! Sometimes we get distracted after a phone call or email and forget to put our phone back in its case. Sometimes we simply cannot remember when it was last seen. For me, losing my cell phone switches me over to panic mode. I can only imagine how horrible it is for those of you who set their phones on vibrate! At least when the volume is up you can call it from anther phone and track it down. However, this will only work if you lost in the vicinity in which you are dialling for the sound. What happens if you have been ten places in a day and have no idea where the phone may have been dropped or left? Cell phone app developers recognize this issue and have come to our rescue with phone apps that are meant to help us find lost or stolen cell phones – and we love them for it! I highly recommend that once you get a new phone, you install one of the following five apps before you do anything else! It is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to such an important part of your life!

 

Posted in: Phones
By August 23, 2012 Read More →

Amazon offering 5GB free Cloud storage

learnMoreTop._V391745580_ Amazon have been offering cloud storage solutions for a while but recently they’ve started a free entry-level 5GB available to all.

I guess this has been introduced in order to compete with Apple’s 5GB cloud offering too. There are a number of other companies offering this service, our personal favourite is Dropbox, but Amazon have great pricing for anyone wanting more than the free 5GB.

20 GB – £6.00 / year

50 GB – £16.00 / year

100 GB – £32.00 / year

200 GB – £64.00 / year

500 GB – £160.00 / year

1000 GB – £320.00 / year

Details can be found here.

 

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: News
By August 20, 2012 Read More →

TfL Shelves Mobile Tracking System Project: Why is it a Setback?

Navigation-gps-satellites As discussed on the UK blog on mobile phone tracking trackingmobile.co.uk, the announcement that the TfL is actively considering using a mobile phone tracking system brought in a lot of cheers and excitement amongst those who have been actively propagating the implementation of this system and have been quite excited about its future potentials. However, a spokeswoman later announced after the start of the Olympic Games that the TlF has decided to shelve the proposal only saying that they did not go ahead with it. The London Olympics were a major event that attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world and provided a great opportunity for the administrators of the city to showcase that London is still amongst the finest cities of the world, celebrating its legacy as the  former capital of the largest empire the world has ever seen, despite a lot of setbacks over the past many years.

What speculators had expected was the introduction of a GSM based system which has been used widely by government authorities from around the world in the past. Mobile phone tracking software have been developed for basic level use in the past, however, it has also been used by intelligence agencies from around the world. A very basic level technology has also been used by animal welfare organizations and zoologists during experimentation and detecting the migratory patterns of various animals. While the idea of uses might sound very divergent, but it goes on to say that this technology has a lot of potential for growth considering its very wide scope.

At the end of the day, the implementation of this system could have had highlighted the fact that London remains one of the most advanced cities of the world and allowed experts to review the reach of the system itself. This would have helped them overcome any shortfalls and London itself could have been the first cities to establish such a system which is expected to be used widely in the future by major cities for managing their traffic problems. In fact, Beijing is already considering using such a system for better management of the traffic there, and would soon introduce a mobile surveillance system to ease congestion.

 

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: Editorial
By August 20, 2012 Read More →

Have mobile phones made the landline redundant?

In the last decade, mobile phone use has outstripped the use of landlines in a similar manner to email’s conquest of physical mail. However, the advantages of mobile phones over landlines are not as clear cut as one might imagine.

Mobile Benefits
The most obvious reason that mobile phones have surged ahead is their convenience. The ability to make or receive calls wherever you are, using a dedicated handset and payment plan, removes the need to wait by the phone, use expensive payphones or share a line between a whole household or business.

Other benefits of mobiles tend to come in the form of non-vocal functions. Although some landline-based phones can process text-based communications, mobiles are streets ahead in this field. Texting is one of the most widely-used forms of communication in Britain, particularly among the under-25s, and the ability to send and receive emails and social networking communications instantly is also a huge bonus, as well as being particularly vital for those who are deaf or have other issues with standard telephones.

Landline Positives
There are still several reasons why it is useful to have a dedicated landline in your home or office. Being able to plan to calls with the appropriate materials to hand to make notes, reference previous communications, or access a calendar or clock during a call when making arrangements for meetings or deadlines are all useful arguments for having a dedicated phone line. You can also arrange to have your landline in a quiet space, something that is often sadly missing when making or taking mobile calls on the move.

In addition, fixed phone line costs are now generally very low, especially if deals that include evening and/or weekend calls are taken into account, so a landline can be a money saver for people who make lots of voice calls. Landlines are also more likely to allow free or low-cost use of numbers with special prefixes such as 0800 or 0870, allowing companies to subsidise clients’ contact with them. Companies who utilize a business phone service have reported lower business costs than those who didn’t.

Because landlines are not usually accessible 24/7 in the same way as mobiles, they can free you from some of the tension that many people have of being “on call” all day, every day. Answering machines for landlines are usually relatively inexpensive and can be customized in terms of allowing various types of messages or callbacks. They are also very reliable, because they are not dependent on your service provider forwarding messages.

In short, landlines are by no means redundant; rather, they have become useful for specialist tasks for which mobile phones are not so effective and for those occasions when economy is more important than ubiquity.

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: Editorial
By August 18, 2012 Read More →

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 unboxing video

samsung-galaxy-note-101-n8000 With screen sizes ranging from 5 inches through to 10.1 inches Samsung, thanks to it’s Note and Tab range, seem to have a tablet size to suite everyone.

This week Samsung sent me over their new 10.1″ Note to have a look at. Unlike the Tab range, the note come with a stylus-like S-PEN allowing handwriting and drawing on screen.

The specification looks decent overall. a 1.4GHz quad core CPU and Mail GPU coupled with 2GB RAM and either 16, 32 or 64GB of internal storage. The screen res is also pretty decent at 1280 x 800 pixels which may be far less than the iPad, with the same size screen, but is high enough for 720p video playback.

Check out the video below to see more.

 

Posted in: Videos/Unboxings
By August 17, 2012 Read More →

Galaxy Tab & Galaxy Y bundle from Carphone Warehouse

ban_phone_tablet_deal This week, the super money saving “Smart Deal” from Carphone Warehouse is the fantastic combination of the Samsung Galaxy Y and Samsung Tab 2 7″ W-Fi enabled 8 GB tablet.

The Samsung Galaxy Y and Samsung Tab 2 7.0 are available for free on a tethered deal to new customers and upgrades from today until Thursday 23rd August, for the incredible price of just £15.50 a month*. This deal is exclusively available with Carphone Warehouse on Orange and T-Mobile networks.

The compact and neat Samsung Galaxy Y is a full-featured smartphone with a sharp 3″ touchscreen display and a 2MP camera. The Samsung Galaxy Y’s Social Hub lets you access all your social networks, instant messengers and emails together in a single place, making sure you can keep an eye on your updates all at once.

Weighing just 345g and with a screen measuring just 7 inches, the Wi-Fi Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 is a perfectly portable tablet, great for watching your favourite films, catching up with friends on Skype, social networking, web browsing and playing your favourite games.

Powered by the latest Android software, the Samsung Galaxy Y and Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 will give you access to 600,000 + apps in the Google Play store and a huge selection of exclusive Samsung-only apps.  You’ll also have access to movies, music and the world biggest e-book collection.

The Carphone Warehouse Smart Deal of the Week is available in store, online at www.carphonewarehouse.com or by calling 0870 087 0870.

*24 month contract applies

 

Posted by: Matt

Posted in: News
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