Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

DSi lands. News about the next PSP and iPhone abound also

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Undoubtedly the biggest new gadget release recently is the Nintendo DSi, which went on sale in the UK on Friday of last week. Comprising the dual screen portable gaming of the ultra successful DS-Lite that has seen it become the unchallenged king of portable gaming, the DSi packs in a few new features. Most notably it now packs in two cameras, and gone is the Gameboy Advance cartridge slot which has been replaced with an SD memory card slot.

What does this mean? Well for a start those Guitar Hero On Tour peripherals for the DS which utilised the GBA slot will no longer be compatible. The SD card slot which has replaced this is obviously necessary for the downloadable content which you will be able to download to the DSi via wifi, which is indeed the major point Nintendo are using to push the DSi at the moment. It’s not all entirely cosmetic and obvious as looking inside the DSi (as has been done here) you will see that the speed of the processor has been doubled, and four times as much RAM has been crammed in!

With the release of the DSi, and the expected announcement/release of the new iPhone which some (not myself, at least unless it changes drastically from its current incarnation) see as a new challenger in the portable gaming category, I was not entirely surprised to see also increasing amounts of speculation regarding a new PSP, which has possibly culminated today with this revelation from an ‘insider source’.

While the report sounds impressive: sliding touch screen, hidden d-pad and buttons, and dual analogue sticks. I can’t currently imagine how they would manage to engineer all of this into a device that will actually be portable? I can’t help but feel the ghost of the Sega Game Gear, and indeed the Atari Lynx – both technically superior machines to the original Gameboy, but crippled as portable game systems by their size and poor battery life.

Whatever Sony has planned it should be unveiled at E3 this year. Nintendo will also possibly unveil some of their longer term plans for the DSi, and Apple are suspected to make an announcement about the next model iPhone around June time also.

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A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To An iPod

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Don’t you find it too much of a chore to reach all the way into your pocket/bag/carry case and hit the right button or area of the screen on your iPhone to perform the function you want? Obviously someone out there agrees with you as a researcher at Osaka University has created the Mimi Switch (also known as an ‘Ear Switch’).


The system basically senses tiny movements in your ear caused by changing facial expressions, and utilises these to carry out various functions. For example, it might skip forwards if you wink your right eye, skip back when you wink your left eye, and play/pause when you stick out your tongue. The micro computer involved can of course map controls to any device/system it is integrated with, in theory controlling lights, TV’s, or pretty much any electronic device that takes any sort of user input.


This sounds like a novel idea for controlling things like lights (although we already have clap switches), unless of course you have an inappropriate facial tic. More of concern is being out and about and winking to change your current track and having it mis-interpreted in the wrong company.

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A useful iPhone app? Who’da thunk!

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Yes, it’s another post about the iPhone. I was browsing blogs this morning and came across a new iPhone app. The difference about this particular app is that I can see it actually being useful and not merely adding some sort of functionality that really the iPhone should have had at launch, and so in the spirit of equality I thought I ought to make a positive post about the iPhone.
The idea behind the application is simple enough, once activated it waits a few minutes and will then ring as if you are receiving a call from someone, which you can then answer and use to escape an awkward conversation, situation, or just that really annoying person you don’t have the heart to tell to just “Go Away!”. The only thing I’m not sure about is what would happen should you get a genuine phone call while using the app, I can only imagine you’d end up looking one of those saddo’s we’ve all seen at some point pretending to have an important business call on their phone only for it to commence blasting out some extremely loud and embarrassing ring tone in the middle of their ‘discussion’. The video below demonstrates the app, and the product page can be found here.


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Hype, hype, and yet more hype…

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Yes, it’s that time when the hype has built up to a crescendo. The rumours are flying around about the exact make-up. The coverage is pretty much blanketing everyone, possibly the only place you’d not have heard about it is the moon. No, believe it or not I’m not talking about the latest series of Big Brother (Or Big something else as I affectionately refer to it), but the release of the 3G iPhone.

Yesterday was the Apple Keynote that everyone has been waiting for with bated breath (apparently). In fact, trawling through various blogs you’d be hard pushed to find anything else even mentioned let alone talked about. Apple appear to have succeeded once again in garnering almost unprecedented levels of excitement surrounding the release of the new iPhone.

But just what did we learn? Well, not a huge amount that you wouldn’t have known already had you been even remotely curious about this particular little box of tricks. It was confirmed that the iPhone packs in UMTS, HSDPA, GSM, Wi-Fi, EDGE, GPS, and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. Maybe more tellingly it was also confirmed (for the US at least) that the iPhone will require a 2 year contract with provider AT&T and still incur a handset cost of $199, or $299 depending on whether you get the 8 or 16 GB model.

Despite the impressive array of acronym’s the iPhone will, at launch, still be lacking video capability, although this is expected to be available via a software update soon enough. The camera has not been upgraded at all from the original iPhone, and is still 2Mega Pixel. The spec list can be found here.

O2 have confirmed they will still be the solitary UK supplier for the iPhone, and early tariff information can be found here.

As you may have gathered by the general tone of this post I myself remain largely under whelmed by the iPhone, but judging by the blogs and forums mine is not the popular consensus. No doubt the new iPhone will be just as big a hit as the last version, and the model they release next year will do likewise, and the one the year after that, and the, well you get the idea.

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iPhone 2.0 set for world domination?

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Inside sources have been quoted as stating that the 3g iPhone is going to be officially announced on June 9th, and will be available immediately after the announcement and not at year end as previously thought.

Looking at the map showing where the iPhone will be available I can’t help but be reminded of the old map showing the British Empire at it’s peak, here they are side by side, iPhone map top (from Wired Gadget Lab Blog), and the British Empire below:

With the 3g functionality, unfathomably left out of the original, available in the 2.0 model Apple look set to continue their assault on the mobile phone world, again staking a claim for one of the most sought after and anticipated gadgets of the year.

On a slightly more cynical note although I say the omission of 3g in the original iPohne was unfathomable I can’t help feel this was merely a marketing ploy by Apple. Leaving out 3g capability from the original would seem to indicate that although Apple were probably confident of the iPhones impressive entry to this new market leaving out this capability reduced the overall cost of production, and therefore the risk of the unit. Of course there is also the added bonus that the new 2.0 model has very definite and quantifiable feature improvements over its predecessor and thus the folks who got one of the original iPhones, as last years ’must have’ gadget, will be left with no choice but to upgrade to the new model.

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