News

Best Buy opens its first UK store

Yesterday I stopped off Best Buy at Thurrock, Essex. Best Buy kindly invited me to come and have a look around the new store situated on the Lakeside retail park and after walking through the doors I was pretty amazed.

If you imagine a Comet, PC World and Curry’s all rolled into one and doubled in size you get a Best Buy! The store is absolutely gorgeous. The staff were extremely friendly and really keen to discuss their products. Each section has a dedicated staff team to ensure you are getting the best experience possible when shopping with them.

I clearly made a b-line for the mobile section of the store and what I found was fantastic.

As you will see in the photos below the devices are split into sections depending on manufacturer. The beauty here is that every single phone in the store is not only on but also has a SIM card so you can give the handsets a proper test drive. Not a plastic dummy phone in sight. It’s no wonder Best Buy sell so many phones over in America.

Early iPad virus strikes users

Just had an email from the chaps over at BitDefender about a threat that’s targetting iPad owners and while it doesn’t directly attack or infect the iPad it plays upon the fact that iPad owners may want the latest firmware for their new toy.

WES 2010

This week in Florida is the biggest BlackBerry show of the year – WES 2010. Although it is not confirmed what announcements we are going to get I am confident we will get a device as well as software previews. I would love to say I am going over to Florida to cover the show but sadly not. We will however endeavour to bring you all the best bits from WES 2010 here on tracyandmatt.co.uk

If you are a BlackBerry fanatic or developer and are thinking of attending WES in the future here are five good reasons to make the commitment:

• Get your hardest questions answered: Speak one-on-one with BlackBerry® experts from Research In Motion (RIM), join a hands-on lab, and attend targeted breakout sessions.
• Learn from your peers: Share insights, experiences, and challenges with like-minded people from across the globe.
• WES is a great value: More than 100 breakout sessions in four tracks, hands-on labs, keynote speakers, training, certification exams-these opportunities and more are all available at a great price.
• Supercharge your mobility strategy: Take home the strategies and techniques needed to meet your organization’s mobility objectives in 2010.
• The Solutions Showcase: Preview mobility products and services from carriers, ISVs, and solution integrators.

Sounds a bit too technical for me. I think I will stick with phone reviews for now!

Posted by: James

Orange coming soon page looking promising

To be honest with you the ‘coming soon’ page on the Orange website is normally not very exciting but today is the opposite. As you can see in the screen shot they are soon to have the HTC Desire in black along with Samsungs S5620 Monte and S8500 Wave.

As we have already seen the HTC Desire it’s the Wave that I am looking forward to getting my hands on. I had a play with it at MWC back in February and the Super AMOLED screen is truly amazing. You wont believe how good it is until you see it for yourself. It’s great to see Orange picking up the S8500 Wave. I’m not sure which other carriers will also support it but I’m sure one or two others will if not all.

The Samsung S5620 Monte is more of a mainstream device and it looks like most UK carriers will more than likely sell it. In terms of where it site in the market it is not the best specced phone but it’s one of those ones that the youngsters will probably go for as its marketed as being a good social media device. I suppose it will take the place of Samsungs Jet which i reviewed last year.

Overall an interesting bunch of devices coming to Orange. We will have all three for review as soon as we can get our hands on them.

Posted by: James

Android Market exceeds 50,000 titles

As if there was any doubt as to the continuing success and growing popularity of the Android platform details of just how many titles have now been approved for sale through Android market have been made available by app tracking site AndroLib.

AndroLib states that there are over 50,000 apps available for Android (50,304 as I type this) and that this number is increasing at an almost exponential rate. Compare this figure to the one published just over 9 months ago when the market was said to be around 8,500 apps then that is a very rapid increase. If this growth rate continues then Android Market could overtake Apple’s App Store in mere months.

I’m sure that this success is due, in no small measure, to the relative ease with which and app will be approved for Android versus iPhone. Mind you I wonder if Steve Jobs telling everyone that Android is a good platform for pron might help?! 😛

Posted by: Matt

BlackBerry OS 6 Screen Shots

This is a nice turn up for the books. The boygeniusreport.com has managed to not only get some BlackBerry OS 6 screenshots but also details of the changes to the OS.

Rather than me waffling on here’s what the BGR has to say:

Apple announce UK iPAD pre-order

As you probably know, Apple announced some delays to the UK launch of the immensely popular iPad last week, saying that it would be another month before they had enough of them to sell here in the UK and the rest of the world.

Just popped over to the Apple store for an update and pleased to see that there’s news! According to the UK online store the iPad will go on sale late in May 2010 and they will be accepting pre-orders from the 10th May.

If you’ve seen my video of the iPad or been following me on twitter or the MTA Podcast you’ll know that I am rather fond of my imported iPad and will be certainly buying another for Tracy just as soon as we can!

Trojan Poses as Fake Google Chrome Extension

I came across this piece of news late last night and thought I would share it with you all as I know that quite a large number of our visitors use Google Chrome web browser to view the site.

Now that Chrome more popular it would seem that it’s becoming a larger target for malware and trojan exploits. More details have emerged of a particular threat the details of which you can find below from BitDefender.

HTC Droid Incredible gets reviewed

Last week we mentioned the announcement of the HTC Droid Incredible. If you remember, this device is only available in the USA on the Verizon network but does have a lot of similarities with our HTC Desire. Some of the specs are slightly better that the Desire but overall they are pretty much one in the same. The great thing for the American users is that they can now have HTCs Sense UI on there flagship HTC device as the Google Nexus one was missing it.

Phil Nickinson from Android Central has spent some time with the device now and has posted his review. If you fancy reading what we are missing out on (or maybe what’s to come in the future?) then head on over to androidcentral.com and see what Phil thought of the device. I know that Phil has been using a Nexus One for some time now and even flashed Sense UI onto it so it will be interesting to see if the Droid Incredible will make him switch devices again.

Posted by: James

HTC Droid Incredible will be rocking the USA soon

The HTC Droid Incredible is another one of those devices that will be available in the USA only. The handset will be launched on the the Verizon network at the end of the month and joins the ‘Droid’ family, coming after the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris.

You may think how lucky our American friends are to get this nice new device but check out the below specs and you will see that is extremely similar to the Google Nexus One but without the Sense UI. That means its just like our HTC Desire with a few tweaks!

• 3.7" 480×800 WVGA OLED Touch screen
• Virtual QWERTY Keyboard
• Camera: 8MP camera w/auto-focus and video capture
• OS: Android 2.1, Google Experience Device
• Integrated Google, Exchange & Facebook contacts
• User Interface -next generation Sense UI
• Push Gmail and Exchange
• 8GB internal memory
• 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor

It would have been nice if we too could have had the 8GB of internal memory and 8MP camera on the Desire but that’s life. Maybe next time.

Posted by: James