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Techradar |
- Weird Tech: The tweets are all reet
- More Xbox 360s sold in 2010 than year before
- Intel chief not worried by Microsoft's ARM decision
- BlackBerry Curve Apollo leaked
- Apple to take on Foursquare with Find My Friends feature
- Updated: New Asus Android tablets may not ship with Honeycomb
- Review: AMD Athlon II X3 450
- BlackBerry Dakota pictures leaked
- BBC on-demand should be iPlayer only, says BBC Trust
- Opinion: The art of Geek Feng Shui explained
- New Asus Android tablets may not ship with Honeycomb
- Immortality is having a gorge named after you, Highlander fans
- Review: Nokia X3 Touch and Type
- Nintendo hints at 3DS 3D video cam
- Are people buying games consoles rather than PCs?
- PC sales up in 2010, but no thanks to Europe
- Spotify teams up with Shazam
- In Depth: Does the Mac App Store allow commercial use?
- Apple to do away with iPad and iPhone home button?
- Review: Samsung Wave 723
- Kinect developer raises $50m funding
- New PC game lets you make scientific discoveries
| Weird Tech: The tweets are all reet Posted: 14 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST  Fed up with endless news about tablets and big TVs from the CES show? Then come with us as we discover how to ruin a pirate's day, why Tweets tell people more than you might realise and why we should all be working on our alien-punching skills. Good news for anyone who's scared of the dentist: thanks to Brian Millar of King's Dental Institute in London, you won't have to hear the horrible sounds of drilling any more. That's the good news. The bad news is that instead, you'll hear the sounds of souls enduring eternal torment in the fires of hell. Only part of that sentence is true. Professor Millar's idea is similar to noise-cancelling headphones and was inspired by road noise-removing technology used in Lotus cars that removed tyre and wind noise without muffling the sound of emergency sirens.
CRAZY CAT: Science can silence dental drills, but it can't do anything about wacky dentists [Image credit: Dan, Wikimedia commons] A digital signal processor analyses the sounds, isolates the horrible drilly bit and creates a wave to cancel it out without affecting other sounds such as your dentist's voice. Professor Millar is now looking for an investor to help turn the idea into a real product. The tweets are all reet Twitter users are creating new kinds of accents, New Scientist reports. US users' location can be identified by the words they use - "y'all" indicates a Southerner, "cab" a New Yorker and so on - and of course northern Britons can be identified by their constant references to flat caps and whippets. Er, probably.
LOCATION, LOCATION: When you tweet, you may be giving away subtle clues about where you come from Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsyvania analysed a week's worth of tweets and discovered that simple word choices located people to within 300 miles. That's not accurate to hit them with missiles, of course, but it shows that accents exist online as well as offline. From yarrrr to arrrrgh Buy shares in eye patches: ship captains will soon be sailing around the seas, blinding pirates. Modern pirates are considerably less funny than the ones we see in the cinema, and BAE Systems has been working on a non-lethal way to stop them attacking ships.
OUCH: BAE hopes it's developed a non-lethal way to repel violent pirate gangs in open water [Image credit: Oren neu dag, Wikimedia] Their solution? A green laser that's powerful enough to tell faraway pirates that they've been spotted, and powerful enough to temporarily blind them if they ignore the warning and get too close. The challenge for BAE is to ensure the system can't do permanent damage: the system is intended to stop pirates from using their own weapons rather than to hurt anyone. A load of balls? Could the future of gaming be a small white ball? Apparently so, if the reaction to Sphero at this year's CES was any indication.
Sphero is a glowing robotic ball that can be controlled from a smartphone or tablet, and it works on both iOS and Android. If the thought of rolling a ball around doesn't fill you with excitement, imagine the same tech in more interesting robots for real-life multiplayer gaming. Aliens are not our friends The next time you watch the stars, remember this: there are space aliens up there, and they want to hurt us. That's pretty much what the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is saying, anyway: in one article, professor of evolutionary palaeobiology Simon Conway Morris reckons we should prepare for the worst. "If intelligent aliens exist, they will look just like us, and given our far from glorious history, this should give us pause for thought," he says, adding: "So which is worse? Meeting ourselves or meeting nobody?" 
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| More Xbox 360s sold in 2010 than year before Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:47 AM PST  Microsoft is celebrating a key year for the Xbox 360, with the console actually selling far more in the US in 2010 than it did the year before. Considering that the Xbox 360 is a now mature console, year on year growth is fairly remarkable, but the arrival of some key games in 2010 and, of course Kinect, has boosted the entire platform. NPD's figures outlined a 42 per cent rise in US sales from 2009, and Microsoft clais that this makes it "the fastest-growing console in 2010". December growth Unsurprisingly, it was December that gave the Xbox a timely boost – with 1.9 million 360s sold in just that month as people raced to buy a console, and probably a Kinect as well, for Christmas. The Xbox 360 was launched in late 2005 – and the fast that it is still selling so well will be the source of enormous pride within Microsoft. The arrival of Kinect for Xbox 360 was always designed to give the platform a new lease of life, as it continues its longstanding rivalry with Sony's PlayStation 3. And it appears to have worked, with the console no longer the domain of just the hard-core gamer. 
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| Intel chief not worried by Microsoft's ARM decision Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:31 AM PST  Intel CEP Paul Otellini has insisted that he is not worried about Microsoft's announcement that the next version of Windows will run on ARM chips. Currently Windows runs on x86 chipsets – based on an early Intel CPU – but new designs are beginning to proliferate on other devices, and UK company ARM in particular is having an impact. Microsoft's announcement at CES 2011 that it would not be limiting its next Windows release to x86 systems, but that it would also run on ARM chips is set to shake up the world of chips. And clearly that is not something that Intel can ignore as it looks to the future. Speaking at the company's financial results, Otellini insisted that Microsoft's forthcoming changes to Windows will actually help the company in the touch-enabled (tablet, PC and mobile phone) arena. And he expressed his doubt that ARM can make an impact on the business PC area that makes the money for Intel. "The plus for Intel is that as they unify their operating systems we now have the ability for the first time, one, to have a designed-from-scratch, touch-enabled operating system for tablets that runs on Intel that we don't have today; and, secondly, we have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors, running Windows 8 or the next generation of Windows, into phones, because it's the same OS stack. And I look at that as an upside opportunity for us," said Otellini. "On the downside, there's the potential, given that Office runs on these products, for some creep-up coming into the PC space. "I am skeptical of that for two reasons: one, that space has a different set of power and performance requirements where Intel is exceptionally good; and secondly, users of those machines expect legacy support for software and peripherals that has to all be enabled from scratch for those devices." Intel is certainly in rude health in the mean-time, with the company announcing record fourth quarter results (including a $3.39 billion profit – around £2.1 billion) and making confident prediction for the first quarter of 2011. Via Engadget 
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| BlackBerry Curve Apollo leaked Posted: 13 Jan 2011 11:48 AM PST  In the second high-profile BlackBerry leak of the day, we've caught a glimpse of the next generation Curve handset codenamed Apollo. The mid-range, candy-bar handset, which will likely replace the Curve 8520, has arrived boasting a respectable spec-set including a 480x360 HGVA screen and a five megapixel camera with a flash. In what is scheduled to be an aggressively priced device, there's also NFC communications technology, tri-band HSPA connectivity, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1. Best of all perhaps, the handset unearthed over at BGR is just 11mm thick. There's no details yet on pricing or release schedules, but we'd expect to see it in the flesh at next month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Earlier today we got our first glimpse at the BlackBerry 'Dakota' device, promising a touchscreen and a full keyboard on a candy-bar handset for the first time. 
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| Apple to take on Foursquare with Find My Friends feature Posted: 13 Jan 2011 09:07 AM PST  Apple seems to have a location-based tool called Find My Friends in the works for its iOS 4.3 iPhone and iPad update. Although it's not included in the developers beta that was released earlier today, screengrabs from the new Settings app reveal the existence of the Find My Friends feature. The service is likely to be a location-based app à la Google Latitude, allowing you to, er, find your friends wherever they may be. MobileMe, MobileYou There's a possibility that the Find My Friends app will be part of MobileMe, a premium service that costs an annual fee of £60, but when you can get Google Latitude, Facebook Places, FourSquare and a host of number of other location apps for free, it's not exactly a compelling addition. The location check-in market is becoming well and truly saturated, and no clear leader has established itself yet. While it's no surprise that Apple wants in on the action, if you don't know many people with iPhones or iPads, you may have to find your friends by using ye olde voice-calling facility to phone them. 
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| Updated: New Asus Android tablets may not ship with Honeycomb Posted: 13 Jan 2011 08:39 AM PST  Asus has dropped a bit of a clanger. Having announced that its latest Android tablet line-up would launch running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), a spokesperson has now said that the OS will, in fact, be 2.3 (Gingerbread). Update: Asus' PR team tells us that John Swatton has been misquoted. Whether or not this is true, Asus is adamant that it will ship the tablets with Honeycomb if it is available; there are no guarantees with Google's release schedule for Honeycomb still under wraps. When it comes to the delays mentioned below, Asus' spokeswoman told us that the Eee Pad Transformer should see a UK release date of May/June, while the Eee Pad Slider will hit the shelves in August/September, straddling Q2 and Q3. We'd certainly expect to see Honeycomb in the wild by May having been officially unveiled at CES in January. Bit of a hold-up When questioned about why Asus had announced that the tablets would ship with Honeycomb, Asus Marketing Specialist John Swatton told The Inquirer, "That was a mistake." The new tablets were announced at CES earlier this month and were set to be released in Q2 2011, but the same spokesperson said that they will not be on the shelves until some time in Q3. Three different versions of the Android-running Eee Pad were launched at CES 2011; the Eee Pad Slider which has a QWERTY keyboard alongside a 10.1-inch touchscreen, the Eee Pad Transformer without a built-in keyboard and the Eee Pad MeMo which has a smaller 7.1-inch screen. All were said to come running the tablet-centric Honeycomb (Android 3.0) OS. Despite the delays, Swatton insisted that the operating system would still be Android 2.3 - the reasons for this aren't clear and Asus is yet to come back to us with an official comment 
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| Posted: 13 Jan 2011 08:37 AM PST  The harsh truth about the AMD Athlon II X3 450 is that it only exists because AMD is currently struggling to compete with Intel for raw processor performance. That may change in 2011 when AMD rolls out its hotly anticipated new processor architecture, known as Bulldozer. In the meantime, AMD is forced to scrounge for scraps at the budget end of the market. In practice, that means filling out its model range with a large number of very similar budget-priced chips based on the same basic architecture but offering different core counts and clockspeeds. Running at 3.2GHz, the X3 450 is towards the quicker end of AMD's scale for clockspeed. But perhaps its most intriguing feature is a hidden fourth core. We should point out that there are absolutely no guarantees when it comes to unlocking cores in AMD processors. In our experience, it works around 50 per cent of the time. When it does come off, as it does with our particular Athlon II X3 450 sample, the results can be dramatic. With the fourth core unlocked and the chip clocked up to 3.6GHz, this processor is ludicrously quick for a sub-£60 CPU. It's truly stunning value for money when you compare it to Intel's pricey dual-core processors. If you get unlucky and the fourth core doesn't fly, performance is still decent in the context of such an affordable processor. OK, it can only encode video at half the speed of AMD's fastest six-core Phenom II X6 processor. But then it does cost less than one third the price. Related Links
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| BlackBerry Dakota pictures leaked Posted: 13 Jan 2011 08:09 AM PST  The BlackBerry Dakota has surfaced bringing with it hope that the wait for a BlackBerry handset with a capacitive touchscreen sitting above that wonderful QWERTY keypad is over. Sure, the BlackBerry Torch had a touchscreen and a keyboard, but what with the tedious sliding and the reduced-sized QWERTY it was less than ideal. In terms of design, we're essentially looking at a BlackBerry Bold with a touchscreen, but when it comes to the spec things start to hot up. Too late? There's HD video recording using the 5-megapixel camera, NFC, 3G mobile hotspot technology, a 2.8-inch screen and BlackBerry OS 6.1. What's more, there are all manner of –ometers including an accelerometer and magnetometer (aka compass) as well as a proximity sensor. Dual core? No chance. Looks great. Good job, RIM. The only thing is that we'd have liked it a lot more a couple of years ago, now it might be time for something a little bit different. With no official word from the company about the BlackBerry Dakota, there's no sniff of a UK release date yet. Could we see the handset surfacing at Mobile World Congress 2011? Here's hoping. 
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| BBC on-demand should be iPlayer only, says BBC Trust Posted: 13 Jan 2011 07:18 AM PST  The BBC Trust has told the BBC that the only way its on-demand content should be accessed is through iPlayer. This means that other services like Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat that offer programme catch-ups won't be able to pick and choose BBC content to offer as part of their on-demand services. The conclusions come from the Trust's ongoing review of how the BBC syndicates digital content. iPlayer is still okay TV platform operators can, however, use the iPlayer interface to offer on-demand BBC programming, as long as it is offered in "standard formats that the great majority of other TV operators can readily adopt". So there'll be no custom-made iPlayer skins for any multi-million-dollar-wielding operators, except "in exceptional cases". With internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes set to explode this year, many are already offering dedicated iPlayer apps and shortcuts. Consistent, familiar, distinctive and free BBC Trustee Diane Coyle led the syndication policy review and explains that, "we know that audiences get the most out of BBC programmes when they access them in a context that is consistent, familiar, distinctive and free to air, like the iPlayer. "As the number of platforms and the popularity of on-demand TV grows, ensuring that licence fee payers have convenient access to all the BBC's services on demand is vital to the BBC's ability to fulfil its public purposes. "The BBC must continue to deliver what licence fee payers want while also delivering value for money and protecting the BBC's brand. We're now seeking views on these proposed changes to the syndication policy to help the BBC meet that challenge in an on-demand world." Via Digital Spy 
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| Opinion: The art of Geek Feng Shui explained Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:34 AM PST  Geek Feng Shui begins at home. It's an art. Unlike the regular kind, it's even a science. To the untrained observer, it may look like you're simply taping an electrical cable to the back of one specific table leg, but we all know there's more to it than that. We defend it by claiming that we're simply helping the contacts to rub together, or twisting a wire round to help the flow of electrons, neutrons and mysterons find their way home, but really, it's magic. Look in your heart – you know it to be true. Every time your headphones crackle and you realise that turning the jack precisely 90 degrees to the right forces the sound to go crystal clear, you have Geek Feng Shui in your soul. If it was common sense, you'd replace it on the grounds that it's a) obviously broken and b) almost certainly cheap. But what if you're uninitiated into this great, mystical, nonsensical world of home-fixes and desperate patch-jobs? Have no fear, it's easy to learn! First, the basics. As you already know, all electronic devices are built around a careful balance of four core alchemical components: hate, hope, elves and the magic blue smoke that makes all technology work. There are also some wires, capacitors and other stuff like that, but they're not really important. All that matters is that the four elements are in harmony. Too much hate, for instance, and the elves turn on their user, throwing up a blue screen of death as soon as they hear the magic words "I really should save that now." At the same time, too much hope and not enough magic blue smoke that makes all technology work, and you get Windows Vista. Know your limits How can we use this confirmed science fact to our benefit? First, it's important to recognise the limits. Geek Feng Shui states that, once implanted, any attempt to manipulate the magic blue smoke that makes all technology work will result in disaster. Once released, it can never be put back, and even the most advanced practitioner will typically give up in favour of a pilgrimage back to the shop instead of dabbling in elf necromancy. Likewise, hate serves little purpose other than making you feel better, and should therefore be saved until you really, really need it. When you realise you have another seven hours on a plane without functioning headphones, that is an appropriate time. In all other situations, your primary methods revolve around the components of hope and elves. Hope is what keeps you rebooting your PC when a program won't work, convinced that maybe, just maybe, it will work this time. This is the only time in the Geek Feng Shui guru's existence when it is permissible to consult outside assistance to help fix a broken PC – not because you are in any way a drooling incompetent, but because you know that almost any technology will magically regenerate itself in the presence of an engineer and the words "I've tried everything." Short of complete failure however, your best route to success remains with the elves. Computer elves are friendly creatures, but fragile. A gust of wind. A loose connection. A single bad sector on a hard drive. All of these can send the friendly elves running for safety. Your task is to force them back to work without killing them. Hitting the table. Jamming in the plug. Even swearing loudly has been known to work. Dunking the device in the bathtub, setting it on fire or launching the stupid broken waste of space into the next county with a home-built trebuchet have never proven effective, but feel free to try, especially if you can keep a straight face when handing over the warranty card afterwards. Preserving the balance With the four cardinal elements now in unison, all that remains is the true art of Geek Feng Shui – preserving the balance. As all practitioners know, balance is a simple, transient thing, and easily lost. A gust of wind. An inappropriately tied cable. A door, no longer angled to bounce invisible Wi-Fi goodness to your computer, but to spread it out, probably. This is why so many computer desks look, to the uninitiated, like a mess. They don't realise the piles of textbooks aren't merely there for reference, but to channel their words into their owner's mind, often without ever being opened, such is the power of their thickness and impenetrable looking covers. The little toys strewn across the PC case are not souvenirs of games played and anime watched (with subtitles, of course), but little offerings to the tech gods, for peace, prosperity, and timely automated updates. Everything has its place, and a reason to be. Only in understanding this can we truly understand technology, and ourselves. You could also read manuals, of course. But that's crazy talk. 
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| New Asus Android tablets may not ship with Honeycomb Posted: 13 Jan 2011 04:39 AM PST Asus has dropped a bit of a clanger. Having announced that its latest Android tablet line-up would launch running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), a spokesperson has now said that the OS will, in fact, be 2.3 (Gingerbread). When questioned about why Asus had announced that the tablets would ship with Honeycomb, Asus Marketing Specialist John Swatton told The Inquirer, "That was a mistake." Bit of a hold-up The new tablets were announced at CES earlier this month and were set to be released in Q2 2011, but the same spokesperson said that they will not be on the shelves until some time in Q3. Three different versions of the Android-running Eee Pad were launched at CES 2011; the Eee Pad Slider which has a QWERTY keyboard alongside a 10.1-inch touchscreen, the Eee Pad Transformer without a built-in keyboard and the Eee Pad MeMo which has a smaller 7.1-inch screen. All were said to come running the tablet-centric Honeycomb (Android 3.0) OS. Despite the delays, Swatton insisted that the operating system would still be Android 2.3 - the reasons for this aren't clear and Asus is yet to come back to us with an official comment 
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| Immortality is having a gorge named after you, Highlander fans Posted: 13 Jan 2011 03:34 AM PST  Who hasn't dreamed of the day a gorge is named after them? Surely the pinnacle of human endeavour, Blinkbox is giving you – yes, you – the chance to have just that. The lucky winner will be immortalised in the Collins Road Atlas of Britain and everything. Gorge fans through the ages will cite you as the luckiest person ever to enter a spurious PR-led competition. Oh yes, it's something to do with Highlander We're not sure that this is exactly what Ramirez and MacLeod meant when they talked about being immortal, but regardless BlinkBox is running the competition to celebrate Highlander's 25th anniversary. Some filming for the cult classic did actually take place on the Isle of Skye, so the competition does at least have some kind of link to the gorge. You can enter via the Blinkbox website or Twitter (using the hashtag #IMMORTALWIN), where you need to explain why you should be immortal in 140 characters or less. If you don't win, you can console your pathetic, gorge-less self by watching the entire Highlander TV series on Blinkbox for free. That's 119 episodes! For free! Sure, but will it get you into the Collins Road Atlas of Britain? 
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| Review: Nokia X3 Touch and Type Posted: 13 Jan 2011 03:00 AM PST  The Nokia X3 Touch and Type is not to be confused with the Nokia X3, a music-friendly handset that we reviewed early in 2010. Rather strangely, Nokia has a multiple nomenclature for its handsets these days, and the X3 Touch and Type is also known as the X3-02. No, we can't explain why Nokia wants to confuse you, but we wish they'd stop it. If you've been feeling a little overwhelmed by high-end smartphones lately, and think that even Nokia is concentrating on the top end with the likes of the Nokia N8, then rest easy. The Nokia X3 Touch and Type is a good old fashioned candybar handset.
Its S40 operating system has had a touchscreen makeover so that, even if the handset looks old hat, its screen can be prodded and sweeped with the best of them. And it has a music-friendly emphasis with a dedicated music player button, a music widget for the Home screen, FM radio, and even 10 free Ovi Music songs thanks to a voucher in the box. Elsewhere, you'll find a reasonable range of features. HSDPA gives you downloads to 10.2Mbps and uploads to 2Mbps. There is a Wi-Fi connection, supporting b, g and n protocols. There's only 50MB of internal storage, but an easily accessible microSD card slot lets you add more, and a 2GB card starts the storage ball rolling. There's a five-megapixel camera too.
And the physical design is appealing. The Nokia X3 Touch and Type is lightweight at a mere 78g, thanks in no small part to its mostly plastic chassis. It is small for the hand and pocket at just 9.6mm thick, 48.4mm wide and 106.2mm tall.
Our review sample was a startling popstar-teeth white version, but you can also get blue, black, lilac and a very frighteningly bright pink. Our white version had a grey metal backplate. In the other colours, the backplate blends in with the main chassis shade.
It isn't all hugely appealing, though, even on paper before you start to dig around. The small screen looks set to be a bit of a bind at times, and we have not been huge fans of the touch version of S40 in the past.
There is also the question price versus features. The Nokia X3 Touch and Type costs just £139 SIM-free, which sounds like a bargain… until you realise that Orange's fantastic Android-toting San Francisco is £99 on Pay As You Go and you can add apps to it till the cows come home. The Symbian S40 operating system is really long in the tooth. Even before touchscreens were all the rage, S40 was the lowly relation to S60, offering less flexibility and less third-party app support. S40 has had a touch sensitive makeover, and we've seen its touchy-feely guise before, for example in the Nokia C3's Touch and Type iteration. The trouble is that touch alone does not make a good operating system, and S40 suffers from three main problems. First off, it's stuck in the past as far as the user interface is concerned. Nokia has done its best to deliver a customisable Home screen and plentiful shortcuts, and this is fairly intuitive to use, but nowhere near as flexible as you'll find in an Android-based handset. Tap and hold on any item on the Home screen and you get a 'personalise view' menu, which you can use to set up the Home screen. Tap any of the top three rows and you can add in a shortcut to something specific.
Tap the tool icon in the fourth row and you can configure four mini shortcuts to apps.
To help you get over the limitations of having a single Home screen, there is a second shortcuts screen. On the bottom of the main screen are Menu, Names and Go To options. Tap that last one and you get a 3 x 3 grid of additional shortcuts.
You can personalise this by tapping the 'Personalise view' option at the head of the screen then tapping any link that you want to swap for a new one.
Again, it's a bit of a fiddle, but at least it gives you some additional personalisation options. In addition, you can tap and hold an item on the main screen to get to a menu of related options. So, for example, if you have your favourite contacts showing, you can tap and hold to edit who is in the list.
All this is fairly flexible, but you're stuck with the one Home screen with its ancillary nine shortcuts, and as we noted earlier, getting what you want onto the Home screen in particular is nowhere near as fast as the simple tap-and-hold convention of Android. The second main problem is that the touchscreen is resistive and not capacitive. Now, we don't doubt Nokia has chosen resistive technology to help keep the handset cost down, and we do like the haptic feedback you get when you press the screen and the way menus roll on if you sweep at them fast enough. But you need to press into the screen to get a response, and if you've ever used a capacitive screen which responds to the merest touch, you'll feel the Nokia X3 Touch and Type is sluggish. There is another user-interface problem, and that is the small screen. Measuring just 2.4 inches and with a mere 240 x 320 pixels on offer, there simply isn't the real estate available to show a lot of detail. The main apps menu, for example, manages to offer just nine shortcuts and this is where we hit the third problem.
We are used to seeing all apps ranged in a single list, as on Android handsets or the iPhone, for example. Here you get nine shortcuts and within these can be buried further shortcuts. Hit Apps, and you get a long scrollable list of apps.
One of the options here is Extras, and you have to tap that to see anything on your microSD card, games and a range of additional apps that have been downloaded, hidden in the Collection folder. These include things like Opera Mini, and a unit converter. It's quite a mess, really.
The one thing the Nokia X3 Touch and Type is really good for is making calls. You can have four favourite people on the Home screen and initiate calls to them with a couple of screen taps. But if you keep your contacts on the SIM, getting them to the Home screen involves copying them onto the handset first.
Why it can't just pick up data from the SIM is anybody's guess, but it's a pain and if you choose to just copy contacts into the phone and keep them on your SIM too, they are listed twice on the handset.
Still, once you've got contacts into the handset itself, it's a simple case of tapping the screen to make a call.
In-call volume could be louder with the handset held to your ear, and calls aren't always supremely clear, but the loudspeaker was good, and the people we spoke to didn't say there was any distortion or fuzziness on the line. Adding contacts is a bit of a pain, as it always is with candybar style handsets. You need to add data in pre-defined sequence starting with number and moving through last name and first name before the contact is saved.
With those three bits of info saved, you then have to go into the contact to add more details, such as additional phone numbers, web addresses, image and special ringtone and any personal information, including a postal address, nickname, birthday or note.
Messaging and email are both hampered slightly by the smallish screen of the Nokia X3 Touch and Type. One thing you'll notice possibly even before these become an issue, though, is the annoying reconfiguration of the keyboard when compared to other Nokia handset, with a numeric keypad.
The rearrangement takes the three keys that are usually at the bottom of the number pad and puts them down the right side. So you need to tap bottom right for a zero, top right for the * and centre right for #. It took us quite a while to get used to the new configuration, but we can see why Nokia did it. The arrangement leaves space for a slightly larger screen than could otherwise be accommodated and for a bank of shortcut keys below the screen. A tap on one of these gives you the option to see unread messages or go straight to message creation.
The predictive text system works well, and we like the forward and back arrows, which let us easily get to a section of a message to edit it. You can prod the screen with a finger to relocate the editing position, too.
As usual the # key alternates you through upper and lower case, and there is an on screen tappable # key that repeats the role. There is also a tappable key to get you to three pages of symbols and a page of smilies.
When it comes to email you've got the option of Ovi Mail, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and BT Internet with easy configuration requiring a minimum of data input from you as well as the opportunity to enter POP and SMTP settings for other email addresses.
With that done, you can use either the network or Wi-Fi to collect email. Either way, though, you have to sign into mail accounts individually rather than having a unified inbox, and there is a bit of a wait while each account updates itself. Mobile email on the Nokia X3 Touch and Type is not the slickest experience.
We've already noted that the screen of the Nokia X3 Touch and Type is small. That's bound to affect web browsing, and not in a good way. With just 2.4 inches of viewable area and 320 x 240 pixels on offer, you can't expect a superb browsing experience. There are, though, two browsers to choose between. Nokia's standard browser doesn't show a great deal of anything much that's readable when you first get to a page. To zoom, you can use a little box or on screen zoom buttons, but either way you have to wait for a page to rework itself.
We got bored with waiting for it quite quickly and moved on to Opera Mini, which opens with a few pre configured bookmarks with neat little thumbnails and is much more of a pleasure to use.
The default load is a page overview, which makes it difficult to see detail, but it's easy – and fast – to zoom in with a double tap on the screen and then to pan around to what interests you.
Both browsers offer you a choice of connection whenever you start them up – Wi-Fi or over the network. That's nice, and we'd choose Opera Mini every time as our default.
With a five-megapixel camera on-board, you might expect at least passable images from the Nokia X3 Touch and Type and, in terms of stills, that's what you get. There's no dedicated camera button to take pictures, but the on-screen icon is good enough for the job, and if you want quick launch you just have to put a shortcut onto the Home screen. There is no flash, which is a disappointment as it means indoor shots suffer greatly in deteriorating lighting conditions. Nor are there many settings for those fun images that skew the light. But on the whole, we found the camera to produce decent images.
Click here for full-res version This extremely exciting shot was taken in a fairly dull supermarket forecourt. We didn't expect the Nokia X3 Touch and Type to cope well with the lighting conditions, and were pleasantly surprised.
Click here for full-res version A chilly, dull winter's morning, but the camera made a good fist of the available light. If you look closely at the foliage, though, you'll see that it struggles with detail.
Click here for full-res version We couldn't resist playing with the negative mode. It's rather more over the top than some we've seen, but if you want the effect, why not go all the way?
The Nokia X3 Touch and Type has 4x digital zoom, and this shot, taken to full zoom potential, shows exactly why digital zoom should always be left alone.
Video was very disappointing given how well the camera handled stills. Limited to a top resolution of 640 x 480 it was a little jerky and very dark. We've seen a lot better. Nokia is pushing the Nokia X3 Touch and Type as something of a media fan's handset, and to that end you get 10 free Ovi music tracks via an in-box voucher. For more long-lasting enjoyment there is an FM radio, equaliser and a dedicated music player key. The music player key sits on the front chassis beneath the screen, and when you tap it up pops a small controller that lets you pause the current track or go backwards and forwards through tracks. If nothing is playing, you can start playback where you left it off before, and the little widget even remembers the last track you stopped at if you turn the Nokia X3 Touch and Type off between playing sessions.
The music player picks up album art and has its own playback controls.
The FM radio requires the headset to be in place before it will go through its auto scanning procedure. It popped 12 stations into available preset locations for us, leaving a further eight free. It's nothing spectacular, but it does its job.
Audio quality is reasonably good and fairly loud through the handset speaker, with a reasonably loud highest volume though an inevitable tinniness creeps in as you go up the dial. The equaliser presents don't have much effect, though.
The provided headphones aren't great, but they aren't dire either, though we don't like the flat in ear buds, which didn't stay in our ears well. The 3.5mm connecter is perfectly located on the top of the chassis. Video playback is limited to MPEG-4 and 3GPP and you may inevitably have some local content that the handset just won't recognise. It didn't like a long MP4 of ours, stripping the sound out but refusing to play the video, but it was fine with a shorter MP4. If you want YouTube, you'll have to go via the web which we did using Opera Mini. The results were woefully pixelated and jerky, and we don't believe that was due to our Wi-Fi connection, which allowed us to browse perfectly adequately.
We are used to seeing batteries that average out around 1200mAh and can top 1500mAh in some cases. So it's disappointing that the Nokia X3 Touch and Type has an 860mAh battery.
Nokia is quite bullish about what you should get from the battery, giving a quote of 300 minutes of talk, up to 25 hours of music playback and up to 6.8 hours of video playback. As ever, you need a large dose of reality when putting these estimates into the real world, but we did find we were able to get through two days of usage without worrying too much about keeping mains power nearby. We did not use the Nokia X3 Touch and Type as our main music player while testing, though, and you may find such usage leads you to need a daily charge. The general good battery life can be put down to the fact that S40 is a relatively light operating system and the screen is not exactly a vast power drainer either. Organiser The life organiser facilities on the Nokia X3 Touch and Type are on a par with what you'd expect to see from any S40 handset. At the heart of the organiser functions is the calendar, which has a reasonable array of features and includes the ability to synchronise with Ovi for online backup.
You've also got an alarm clock and calculator readily to hand, the former offering you a single alarm with snooze function, the latter offering some scientific functions and a loan calculator as well as more straightforward calculations.
A to-do list manager, countdown timer, voice recorder, stopwatch and note taker could all also be useful when it comes to organising your everyday life, and you can go to town with the to-do list app, assigning alarms to actions you need to complete.
If you delve into the Extras folder, a step down from the folder that houses all the rest of the organiser features, you'll also find a converter that can cope with currencies, which could come in handy on foreign trips. Nokia's Nokia X3 Touch and Type is evidence of how far mobile phones have come in the last couple of years. At £139 SIM-free, it's not exactly a pocket-money phone and you will have to justify the expense. On the one hand, it's crammed with features and applications from calculator to music player. It is nicely made, it has good battery life and you can synchronise some of its data to a website. But these things are simply not enough any more. It is competing with low cost Android based handsets that can do these things and have a huge amount of expansion possibility thanks to downloadable software. With the likes of the Orange San Francisco, ZTE Racer and Vodafone 845 all rocking Android with its vast software library, and having relatively large screen and added GPS facilities, the Nokia X3 Touch and Type simply feels like it doesn't do enough.
It even feels hampered next to the £109 Nokia C3, which has a full QWERTY keyboard at its disposal.
Only hardened Nokia fans are likely to opt for this handset when they could have the extra goodness that Android offers. And we don't see that situation changing any time soon.
The Nokia X3 Touch and Type is a slim, nicely made handset with a good range of features including Wi-Fi and a touch screen interface. It is small, which means some aspects such as web browsing suffer from a cramped screen, but the keypad is well made and battery life is good. There is a dedicated front button for music fans to access their tunes quickly, and an FM radio also helps song lovers to get their fill. All this is good stuff. But we aren't convinced that the S40 operating system, even with its touch-aware makeover, is much to crow about, and we think these days people want something different from the look and feel, and accessibility of a mobile phone operating system. Nokia may need to go back to basics if it's to maintain a solid presence at this end of the market. We liked The build quality is good, and this is a light, well made and easy to handle mobile phone. Battery life is impressive, and it ought to be possible to extend beyond two days of use if you aren't too demanding. The camera shoots good photos and, while we'd have liked a dedicated button and a flash, we could see ourselves taking a fair few quick snaps with it. The customisable Home screen and secondary shortcuts screen lets you get quick access to a wide range of apps and services. A good thing, because the menu system itself is rather convoluted. We disliked The resistive touch screen needs a fair bit of pressure before it will respond, and feels unresponsive compared to its capacitive counterparts. The screen is simply too small for some activities, with web browsing the one that suffers the most. The Opera Mini browser saves the day a little, but internet users should really look elsewhere. Nokia's bundled headset is average and, for a handset that's being pushed for its music features, it ought to be better. The quirky keyboard design, where what is usually the bottom row sits in a column to the right, will take a bit of getting used to. Verdict Nokia hasn't really done a great deal that's wrong with the Nokia X3 Touch and Type. Making the S40 operating system touch aware breathes a bit more life into it, and there are some very positive features such as long battery life and good build quality. But at this pricepoint, the competition is fierce. Android already has its place firmly staked out, and we think it can only push Nokia harder as time rolls on. Related Links
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| Nintendo hints at 3DS 3D video cam Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:58 AM PST  Nintendo may include 3D video recording with the forthcoming 3DS handheld, according to hints dropped by the Japanese gaming company. In a recent Iwata Asks column, feted developer Shigeru Miyamoto and the company's president Satoru Iwata talk about the possibility of 3D video-recording on 3DS. Miyamoto dropped hints that the 3DS's 3D photo feature could well be developed into a fully fledged video recorder. Ask Mr Iwata Mr Iwata added that video recording functionality might be added to a future version of the glasses-free 3D handheld. The 3DS is due to arrive in the UK later this March. We expect further details on launch date, pricing and Nintendo's launch line-up of games from a press event in Amsterdam next week. 
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| Are people buying games consoles rather than PCs? Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:49 AM PST  Leading analysts Gartner are suggesting that not only are tablets cannibalising PC sales, but that games consoles are also hitting the industry's pockets. Tablets such as the iPad are being blamed for Christmas laptop and desktop sales that were below many experts expectations. However, Gartner's principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa has suggested that other connected devices such as consoles are also leading to less people buying PCs. Weak holiday sales "Overall, holiday PC sales were weak in many key regions due to the intensifying competition in consumer spending," he said. "Media tablets, such as the iPad, as well as other consumer electronic (CE) devices, such as game consoles, all competed against PCs." The mention of consoles is interesting given that the likes of the Xbox, PS3 and Wii are offering increasingly computer like features. The PS3 and the Wii offer full browsers within the console and, although the user interfaces remain clunky, as computing gets more cloud focused the principle of a media friendly device that sits under the TV and can do many of the entertainment functions of the PC are attractive. 
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| PC sales up in 2010, but no thanks to Europe Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:26 AM PST  PC shipments were up in 2010, but a poor second half to the year in the European, Middle East and Asian regions were well below expectations in what will be considered an underwhelming year for the computer industry. Gartner's figures suggest that 350.9 million PCs – laptops, netbooks and desktops but not tablets – were shipped in 2010, a 13 per cent increase on 2009's total. "For all 2010, the results indicate the PC market recovered from the recession, as it returned to double-digit growth, compared to low single-digit growth in 2009," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "However, the PC market will face challenges going forward with more intensified competition among consumer spending." EMEA But the EMEA region saw a promising first half to the year give way to a disappointing last 6 months. "PC shipments in EMEA remain weak with growth in single-digits for the second quarter in a row," said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. "In 2010, the PC market in EMEA recorded a strong first half and was followed by a weak second half, resulting in a year-on-year growth of 13.3 per cent. "The slowdown in the second half was impacted by the weakening economic climate, vendors' limited ability to reduce PC prices and the introduction of competitive devices." 
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| Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:26 AM PST  Music fans will soon be able to use Shazam to identify a song and immediately listen to it in Spotify on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android phones. The 'Play in Spotify' feature will whisk users directly over to the Spotify app where they can either listen to it straight away or add it to a playlist for later. Although playing in Spotify will be available on Shazam's free and premium apps, you'll need a Spotify Premium account to make use of it on your handset. And now, everyone's favourite blue-eyed CEO Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, commented, "Shazam is a very innovative company in the mobile space, having achieved a massive following around the world and we're excited about the potential of this partnership for new music discovery through Spotify." Premium Shazam users will get the new functionality today, whereas free users face a bit of a wait until later in Q1. No doubt thousands of users already have Spotify playlists consisting of song's they've discovered using Shazam, but the new partnership makes the process a whole lot easier. 
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| In Depth: Does the Mac App Store allow commercial use? Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:19 AM PST  There's been a fair amount of confusion around the web over the license of applications bought from the Mac App Store, with some people claiming that you can't use the apps for any kind of commercial purpose. Check forums where Mac users congregate, and you'll find this repeated whenever discussing the Mac App Store. And, as often happens, some people have got very heated about this indeed, claiming that store is "useless" or "brain dead" because of it. Ironically, one of the things which added fuel to the fire was the huge difference between the price of Apple's own Aperture photo editing software as a boxed product (£173) and on the App Store (£44). The difference, so some people assumed, was that the App Store version was for personal use only - so no using it if you were, say, a professional photographer. To get to the bottom of this, I checked through the licenses and talked to a few developers to get their perspective on it. And, although I can see why the issue arose, taking everything into consideration and with the usual caveat that "I am not a lawyer – nor do I play one in a popular TV show", I'm convinced that software bought on the store is, in fact, usable in a commercial context. Looking at the license For the Mac App Store, Apple has followed the same model as for iOS apps, music and video sold from iTunes, and content from the iBooks store. All the items Apple sells have a single license: there are no variations on a per-app (or song, or book, or video) basis. This makes things much more easy to understand and friendly for customers. For example, you aren't going to buy an app which only works on a single machine you own, or a song which you can play on iTunes but not on your iPod. So what does the license say about how you can use the apps you buy? Under the section on "MacAppStoreProductUsageRules", there are two clauses. The first deals with "personal" use: (i) You may download and use an application from the Mac App Store ("Mac App Store Product") for personal, non-commercial use on any Apple-branded products running Mac OS X that you own or control ("Mac Product"). That's clear enough. If you have a Mac and a laptop for home use, you can install anything you buy on the Mac App Store on both machines. If you have kids with a Mac which you "control", you can install the software on that machine, too. What about business use? The next subsection of the license covers that: (ii) If you are a commercial enterprise or educational institution, you may download a Mac App Store Product for use either (a) by a single individual on each of the Mac Product(s) that you own or control, or (b) by multiple individuals on a single shared Mac Product that you own or control. For example, a single employee may use a Mac App Store Product on both the employee's desktop Mac Product and laptop Mac Product, or multiple students may serially use the Product on a single Mac Product located at a resource center or library. So yes, you can use that copy of Aperture on a machine you use for business. If you're using the product for business, though, the terms of use are slightly different to "personal use". You can't install the software on machines you "control" (as you could with your kids' Mac), so you can't put the software on the machines of other employees, even if you own the business or manage the Macs. If you have multiple Macs which only you use, that's fine – you can install all your apps on all your machines. As with all things legal, there are edge cases where the license is open to interpretation a little. For example, what if you mostly use your machine for "personal" use, but occasionally have a spot of commercial work on the same machine? Does that mean you have to stop your kids using iPhoto while you're doing a little editing for work? The answer is probably "technically yes, but no one's ever going to sue you for it." What Apple is trying to do with the license is simply set rules which allow home users to use the software they buy on all their personal Macs, while stopping businesses from buying a single copy of, say, Pages and letting 100 employees use it. What about developers? This commonsense approach largely reflects the feeling within the developer community, too. Most echoed the feelings of Ken Case of OmniGroup, who told me "from our perspective, we have no problem with people using our App Store software for commercial purposes. After all, several of our apps are listed in the "business" section of the App Store; isn't that what that section is for?" What they do care about is not losing sales because a company that might have bought ten licenses for ten employees instead downloads one copy. As Daniel Jalkut of RedSweaterSoftware said: "Obviously, a company like the New York Times shouldn't be able to buy my software once with their Apple ID and then install it on thousands of Macs. I expect Apple to do something reasonable to limit the number of Macs that software can actually be installed on." And that, I think, is what Apple is trying to achieve: A balance that gives customers the freedom not to have to worry about licensing, while not creating a free-for-all which would fail to reward developers. 
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| Apple to do away with iPad and iPhone home button? Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:01 AM PST  The iPad 2 and iPhone 5 may come without the reassuring familiarity of the home button as Apple's introduction of multi-touch gestures is set to replace its functionality. Bad news for glove-wearers and button fans, rather than simply hitting home we'll be tracing our fingers across the screen to awaken our handsets and launch the app switcher. A source told BGR that Apple already has employees testing iPads and iPhones with no home buttons, so we could see a buttonless look as early as the next generation of each device. A dream come true for Jobs Doing away with the home button will make a significant difference to the devices' designs, making Steve Jobs' original vision of a buttonless handset come into being. In other iPad 2 news, it looks like Photo Booth will be appearing on the iPad 2 – it's pretty much a given at this point that the next iPad will feature at least a front-mounted camera. Apple's own suite of iLife apps could also be revealed for iOS at the iPad 2 launch. The curtain was whipped off the first iPad in January last year, so we're expecting to see that familiar black polo neck make its way to the stage to tell us how magical an iPad with a camera is going to make our lives very soon indeed. 
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| Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST  With the Samsung Wave 723 we see a reprise of Samsung's proprietary Bada operating system. Coming up with your own OS is a brave move in these days when Android and the iPhone dominate. But like these two OSes, Samsung hopes to make hay with its OS and, not least, offer its own app store. Mind you, with the first Bada handset having appeared last August in the shape of the original Samsung Wave, the company isn't exactly rushing Bada out the door. Indeed, between then and now we've seen other Samsung handsets such as the Android-rocking Galaxy Europa i5500 and Samsung Galaxy S, the Windows Phone 7 Omnia 7 as well as the Android-based tablet, the Galaxy Tab and PMP the Galaxy Player 50. So, Samsung wants its finger in lots of pies, then.
The Samsung Wave 723 isn't intended to be a top-end handset. It's a fairly small mobile, aimed more at the middle of the road. SIM-free, it costs around £200. That's a crowded area of the phone market with plenty of smartphones hovering around this price. The Samsung Wave 723 will have to be good to compete.
Hardware wise the Samsung Wave 723 is unremarkable. A smallish handset at 109 x 53.9 x 11.8mm thick and 99.5g, it will suit smaller hands. The screen is smallish at just 3.2 inches, and its pixel count is on the low side at 240 x 400. We'll see how it stands up to web browsing later.
There's a tiny lip on the bottom edge that looks in photos to be faintly reminiscent of the HTC Hero, though actually it's barely present at all and looks more pronounced in photos than it really is. The metal backplate helps the build feel solid and tough, and should help the phone withstand drops to the floor. The remainder of the body is plastic, with a characteristic shiny finish to the front fascia.
There is a nice build touch in the fact that the top-mounted micro-USB charge and PC connect port has a sliding cover, and another in the thin metal frame to the top-mounted 3.5mm headset slot. On the right side, lozenge shaped on/off and camera buttons are comfy under the fingers, as is the volume rocker on the left side.
On the front, three buttons sit beneath the screen. There are no surprises that these buttons provide call, end and menu functions. Samsung provides a flip cover for the Wave 723. Essentially just a solid screen protector, you fit this by removing the bottom back section of the chassis and clipping the screen back into its place.
The cover can then be flicked on and off the screen. It's pretty effective, and a style of screen cover we've seen before from Samsung.
In terms of specification, there's nothing really thrilling about the Samsung Wave 723 though anyone quickly glancing through the list will be happy to see Wi-Fi, HSDPA and GPS all present and correct. Despite the proprietary Bada operating system, the Samsung Wave 723 has been designed to look and feel quite familiar to anyone who has used a current generation smartphone. To that end, it runs Samsung's own TouchWiz 3 user interface, which we've seen before, most notably on the original Wave. In fact, the Samsung Wave 723 is very like the original Wave to use. So there's a lock screen that you sweep sideways to unlock.
Samsung has retained the superb feature we liked so much in the original Samsung Wave here. You can simply sweep on the arrows to open to the main Home screen or you can move the notification jigsaw puzzle piece into its correct position to jump straight to unread messages. There are multiple Home screens, which you can populate with widgets. You start with three Home screens, but can add more as you add more widgets, up to a total of 10. You simply tap the widget icon at the top of a screen and then drag widgets onto the screen you want from a menu at the bottom of the screen.
Home screens can be reordered and deleted in landscape mode. [Photo: Samsung Wave 723 reordering home screens] At the bottom of each Home screen are three fixed position icons that take you to the keypad for making calls, to the contacts book, and to the messages area. If you tap the middle button beneath the screen you are taken into horizontally scrolling windows of apps links. Those three fixed position buttons for calls, contacts and messages, remain present, but you can move any application icons by tapping the edit button at the head of the screen then dragging them around and tapping done when you are finished. You can't though, put apps onto any of the main screens.
Back on any of the main screens, there is a notification area sitting at the very top of the screen giving you alerts, the time, battery and signal status data. Pull this down and you get a wider set of notifications and quick toggle buttons for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and silent mode.
One of the things the Samsung Wave 723 does well is integrate social networking with contacts. Having logged in to Twitter and Facebook you can pull in contacts (and calendar from Facebook).
In fact, social networking synchronisation in general can be set to happen automatically at a range of intervals. If you prefer, you can opt for manual sync.
When you've pulled in all the contacts from your Twitter and Facebook, and added any from your SIM too, you've got a nicely populated contacts book whose level of detail will depend on what's been pulled in from each external location.
You can link contacts together fairly easily, though the process is tedious to complete. Open a contact with its associated Facebook or Twitter profile, then open the menu associated with it by pressing the icon at the bottom of the screen. Now you search for the contact's alias on Twitter or Facebook (whichever you didn't open), find the contact, and make the link. With that done you can access all their details in one place, see their postings to both location and see your own on-phone contact history with them. It's great, but just be prepared for a fair bit of long-winded setting up. When it comes to making phone calls, you can make selections from your integrated contacts list from the various numbers that might be available. Or, of course, you can simply tap the keypad icon on the Home screen and dial a number manually.
When in a call, you've got easy access to features like the mute button and speaker phone, though oddly you have to press and hold the side-mounted on/off/lock button to get to get their menu up.
You can make and take video calls too, but there's no front-facing camera so the back camera is used to send your outgoing video. While using the Samsung Wave 723 for voice calls, we found that connections were good. The people we spoke to didn't complain of a broken up conversation, and we heard them loud and clear, too. We did have a bit of trouble maintaining a consistent 3G signal all the time, though, in a location and on a network that normally doesn't give us any bother. Messaging is something the Samsung Wave 723 does very well, at least in terms of the variety of options on offer. Of course, voice mail and SMS are here. You've also got the Facebook and Twitter we've already covered. But that's only the start. In the main menu, you'll find an app called My Accounts. Pop that open and you can set up a range of other accounts for email. Those who use a corporate system will find the Exchange ActiveSync setting useful, but you can also set up Google mail, Yahoo, Windows Live and other accounts that you may have. The social networking quota is bumped up with MySpace, too.
The process of creating messages is straightforward thanks to a responsive screen and well-designed keyboard. The capacitive touchscreen is very responsive to screen presses, and the keyboard has separate keys for the @ symbol and for '.com'.
Sitting above the keyboard is a row of three menu buttons, which you can use to quickly add a recipient or group of recipients to a message. We really like the Recent button, which we found we used most often. When you're typing a message, the word prediction box appears and offers you alternative words if you pull it down by clicking the arrow to the right of the box.
The keyboard is a little small in tall mode for all but the tiniest of hands, though. Switch out to wide mode and you've got more space, with the same word prediction box to help you out.
We found typing at a reasonable speed was no problem – except when we wanted to enter words that aren't in the built-in dictionary. Just as with the original Samsung Wave, you can only enter a word that's not in the dictionary if you enter it into the dictionary first. You'll spend a lot of time entering your chums' oddly spelt names into the dictionary unless you turn it off. One of the things we really like about Samsung's Bada operating system, though, comes into its own with messaging. Many screens have a small icon with three dots on it at the bottom of the screen. If you tap this you get a context-sensitive menu. In the case of messaging it lets you easily perform actions such as adding multimedia and attachments to messages.
Samsung has put a lot of effort into its Dolphin web browser, and at first glance it renders pages nicely. Full-screen web pages look good in both wide and tall screen modes.
You can pinch to zoom in and out of web page, do a nifty double tap to zoom and out, and use a finger to pan around. Rather cleverly, the left side mounted volume rocker doubles up as a scroller, with is nice for one-handed vertical browsing.
There are some handy features, such as a Google search bar at the top of the screen and the ability to open multiple windows and flick between them. But the browser did seem a bit slow to respond to finger presses when we wanted to access more advanced features such as multiple windows. Worse, Flash support seems iffy. We were unable to play movies at the BBC News website, for example. And text reflowing is non-existent, so that you need to do a lot of horizontal swiping to actually read stuff you've zoomed into.
We really like the ability to send a URL via email or SMS simply by using the context-sensitive menu on the browser page.
And for really quick access to the web, there are a couple of Home screen widgets on hand – a Google search widget which will search Google maps and take you to your Gmail as well as doing general searches, and a widget that shows your three most frequently visited websites so you can quickly pop back to one of them with a single tap.
The browser is a mixed bag, then, with some nice feature and some annoying ones. Samsung needs to put a bit of effort into tweaking its Dolphin browser if it's to be really useful.
Sporting a five-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash, we expect great things from the Samsung Wave 723. And indeed we got them, at least where stills shooting is concerned. There are various scene modes including sports, night, party/indoor dawn, fireworks, text, and candlelight. Smile shot, continuous mode and panorama mode are also present, so you can play around quite a bit.
Click here for full-res version INDOORS: Often you can forget about the scene mode settings and just point and shoot with the Samsung Wave 723 to get a decent image. This dimly lit bar produced a surprisingly bright and detailed photo
Click here for full-res version OUTDOORS: Outside results were reasonably good with the camera able to pick up a fair amount of detail. This very dull winter day didn't stop the lens capturing a fair bit of light
Click here for full-res version CLOSE-UP: No, these aren't real strawberries, but a tablecloth photographed close up. The Samsung Wave 723 camera does well to cope so close in without a macro mode, and both the light and detailing are good
Click here for full-res version PANORAMA: The panorama mode is very easy to use. The camera automatically takes the next image in a sequence, so that all you need to do is move the camera around. The stitching process is fast too
Video capture is limited to a top resolution of 320 x 240 and the results were a lot less impressive than with the stills camera. Compared to the HD video recording on the Samsung Wave the video recording here is particularly disappointing. The Samsung Wave 723 isn't really a media fan's ideal smartphone. You need a screen larger than 3.2 inches to make the most of video playback. Still, there is enough going on here to keep many people quite happy. We're pleased to see the headphones connector on the top edge of the handset, and while we don't really like the L-shaped connector on Samsung's earphones, the quality of output they produce is acceptable. The music player itself is easy to navigate and has some nice visualisations. There is an equaliser and a range of effects settings, the latter enabling you to choose options such as Concert Hall or Bass Enhancement to alter listening quality.
There are three visualisations you can choose from while music is playing. If you go out to the lock screen while music is playing, you can drag down the CD icon to get to a set of playback controls, and these controls are also available from anywhere you can pull down the notification area.
There is an FM radio too, and you can record from it. Recording is the easiest thing to do – you just call up the menu by pressing the context-sensitive menu button and hit record.
Video playback is somewhat limited with MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 standards supported. Our sample movie trailer would not play, getting an 'unsupported resolution' report. And when we went looking for free movie trailers at Samsung's Wap site – a link that kicks in when you file browse, incidentally – there was none. The YouTube icon on the main apps menu looks promising, but is nothing more than a link to the mobile YouTube website. It delivers content that you can view in portrait or widescreen, and we found it delivered smooth content to a good quality. Battery life left us feeling a little disappointed. The 1200mAh battery gave us just over three days on standby with a very small amount of use. When we were using the Samsung Wave 723 heavily it ran down fairly quickly and we were having to charge it every day to keep it going.
You might find yourself doing a fair bit of music listening and web surfing with this handset, and if that is the case you ought to budget for a charge every day and maybe even a mid-afternoon boost. If you are fairly frugal on those scores, then you could get a day and a half or even two days out of the Samsung Wave 723. Organiser The Samsung Wave 723 comes with its own calendar app and there's a Home screen widget that shows you what day it is – though nothing useful like upcoming appointments. To see what you are meant to be doing at any time, you need to tap the widget and open the calendar proper. Now you can flick through the months, see your daily schedule and add new appointments.
There are other apps to help keep you on the straight and narrow, too. A clock with stopwatch, countdown timer and alarms as well as an array of world clock times you can set ought to sort out your timing issues.
There's a little memo maker and a task manager, too. Neither has a Home screen widget, which is a bit irritating since it means you have to go into each apps itself to see its contents.
A calculator rounds things off. App store You can take a look in the Samsung app store for more, but this is still woefully under-supported in comparison to other top-grade app stores from Apple and Android.
Apps are divided into categories but some have very few entries – Social Networking has seven, while Productivity has just 19. There isn't even a separate heading for Widgets so you can boost the fairly small number that are pre-installed. If it's apps you want, look elsewhere. Bada leaves us nonplussed. Well, it's not quite Bada itself that has that effect. We aren't opposed to the concept or to the general look and feel, both of which are very close to what you find in Android in terms of the general user interface. What gets us riled is the lack of expandability. That this should be the case more than three months after we reviewed the first Bada handset, the Samsung Wave, seems odd. Samsung needs a vibrant and exciting app store if it's to make Bada a success. And that simply isn't there at the moment.
What this means is that the £200 you could spend on the Samsung Wave 723 might more fruitfully be spent on the Android-based Orange San Francisco (cheap at half the price)
You could also consider Samsung's own Android-based Galaxy Europa or LG's Optimus One.
It's not that we don't like the Samsung Wave 723, more that it feels as though Samsung has stopped half way through its development having got a bit bored. That is a real shame given that this is only Bada's second outing. Samsung needs to ramp Bada up considerably if it is to be a success – not least because even Samsung is releasing competing Android handsets at a rate of knots. We liked There are some very neat aspects to the Samsung Wave 723. We like the context-sensitive app menus, the way the number of Home screens grows as you add more widgets to them, the neat pull-down controls that expand the notification area and give you access to Wi-Fi settings and more. The camera also does itself proud – at least as far as stills are concerned. More attention is needed to the video recording aspect, though. The neat little flip cover won't appeal to every taste, but we found it solid and like the simplicity of the design. Integration of Facebook and Twitter contacts is nicely done, even if linking is a rather laborious task. We disliked Not enough attention has been paid to the widgets which seem few in number and lacking in flexibility. Why is there no widget for the note app or the to-do list app, and why can't you put apps themselves onto the home screens? Similarly, Samsung has not pushed its app store hard enough. It isn't growing fast enough to compete with the Android and Apple competition. Even Microsoft has understood this and pushed its Windows Phone 7 app store hard since launch. Samsung has made a great start with its Dolphin web browser, but we want more. Specifically we want high-quality text reflowing. Verdict The Samsung Wave 723 is a fair enough handset, with a good-looking user interface and some nice features. But underneath all that lies an operating system that is not easily expanded with third-party applications. As it stands at the moment, we have to wonder who would choose Bada over Android or Apple? The £200 mark is arguably the most competitive in the whole smartphone sector and Samsung needs to work harder on Bada to make it a success against very hot competition. Related Links
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| Kinect developer raises $50m funding Posted: 13 Jan 2011 01:59 AM PST  The Israeli company behind the development of Microsoft's Kinect technology has raised $50 million (£31.76 million) funding this month to develop new motion and voice control technologies for gaming and entertainment use. Israeli business news outlet Globes, reports that the new investment in PrimeSense comes from Silver Lake and existing investors Gemini, Genesis and Caanan Partners, bringing total investment in the company to $79 million (£50.18 million). No plans to sell out PrimeSense president Aviad Maziels said that the company does not want to sell out and wants to remain independent and part of the Israeli economy. "We constantly get acquisition offers, but we want to be part of an industry in Israel and we don't intend to be easily sold," Maziels said. PrimeSense is focused on developing new tech which allows users to control their computers, games consoles and mobile devices using voice and physical gestures, instead of traditional keyboard or controller input. Motion-controlled entertainment The company hopes to expand from 50 employees to 80 in 2011, following this latest round of investment. PrimeSense is also currently developing a number of partnerships with PC and entertainment companies, the details of which we hope to hear more about very soon. Microsoft has already sold well over eight million Kinect units since launch last November – considerably in excess of its original sales targets. 
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| New PC game lets you make scientific discoveries Posted: 13 Jan 2011 01:39 AM PST  A new browser-based puzzle game for the PC lets gamers make genuine scientific breakthroughs to solve complex, real-world biological problems. Not only that, it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. The Online PC game EteRNA uses puzzle-solving gameplay to encourage players to solve complex scientific mysteries. Men in white coats ETeRNA has been developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University researchers, and asks players to mix and match the basic building blocks of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in order to design virtual RNA molecules stable enough to be reproduced in a lab, staffed with men in white coats and whatnot. The genuine fun of the gameplay comes from trying to create complex strands of 'folding' RNA – in order to create a molecule that keeps its shape. The winning designs in the game will be recreated by those same men in white coats in real-world labs, in order to develop medical vaccines and new biological technologies. Opening up science "What EteRNA does is open up this whole scientific cycle to the public, and allows them to propose experiments, see the results, and then propose more experiments," say Adrien Treuille, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cargnegie Mellon. "Just like basketball where you score by throwing a ball through a hoop, in EteRNA you score if the RNA you design folds properly in the lab." Jeehyung Lee, a computer science Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon involved in developing the game, added: "Nature confounds even our best computer models. "We knew that if we were to truly tap the wisdom of crowds, our game would have to expose players to every aspect of the scientific process: design, yes, but also experimentation, analysis of results and incorporation of those results into future designs." If you fancy advancing the cause of medical science by playing a fun puzzle game, and you have some time to kill (a lot of time, as this is quite more-ish) then you can head over to the EterNA game site. 
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