Freesat Launches In UK

Freesat, the free UK satellite TV service, launches today. The free service, established by the BBC and ITV, will reach an impressive 98% of the population including many people that have been previously unable to receive freeview through their terrestrial TV aerial. Prices start at £49 for a standard box, plus £80 installation and set up, with no monthly charges following that payment.

A High Definition version is also available, costing a little more at £120 for the box – installation remains £80. All viewers will initially receive the full 80 channels on offer, and this figure will rise to more than 200 by the end of this year. Both the BBC and ITV hope that the new service will especially encourage an icnrease in HD TV viewing.

Pretty much all new TV sets are HD ready, but few people either have access to HD channels or are willing to pay extra for an HD subscription. With the new Freesat service this should be less of an issue and the service will launch with a BBC HD channel included. ITV HD is set to follow shortly.

The only people that will be unable to receive Freesat are those that do not have a clear line of sight of the satellite, and those that live in listed buildings and therefore cannot erect a satellite dish on the outside of their homes.

1TB USB Hard Drive For £115

External hard drives offer an excellent method of backing up essential data, and storing everyday data. Size restrictions are pretty much non existent and even the price of 1TB external drives are more than reasonable if you shop around. The Trekstor Datastation duo is the perfect example offering 1TB of secure storage for £115.

1TB offers you more than ample room to store pretty much everything you currently have without needing to upgrade any time soon. SUB 2.0 connectivity ensures good performance with 24.5MB/s and 16.0MB/s download and upload speed as well as a 16MB buffer size.

Power consumption is low, while it’s a happily quiet beast to run. For anybody that appreciates the importance of backing up data, making a copy of your hard drive, or simply needs more storage capabilities, this offering from Trekstor looks to be the perfect solution.

More and more mass storage external hard drives are becoming available, and the prices are happily affordable but this looks to be one of the best deals available – pixmania is the site currently responsible for this offer, although it can be purchased via Amazon as well (still from pixmania) if you’d prefer.

Samsung K5 MP3 Player With Slide Out Speaker

Samsung MP3 players may not be as widely purchased as iPod, but they tend to offer excellent design and superb features for a not entirely unreasonable price tag. The Samsung K5 is an excellent example – modern and stylish in design, it also offers an excellent slide out speaker for when you don’t want your personal MP3 player to be that personal.

Available on Amazon for less than £100, the 2GB model is a snip compared to some of the more over priced alternatives on the market. Its ultra slim design make it practical for carrying around and the slide out speaker is an excellent addition feature for those that believe music is meant to be shared.

The supplied headphones are reasonable as far as MP3 included headphones go. The speaker itself isn’t designed to supply music to a large auditorium with reasonable sound quality at low to medium levels. If you turn it up a little too much you will begin to notice traces of distortion.

As well as being an MP3 player, the K5 also has a built in FM tuner and can be used as a portable photo viewer. All in all, it looks a great product at a reasonable price and offers a superb alternative to the iPod bandwagon.

Sennheiser HD650 Headphones – Reassuringly Expensive?

Headphones are the oft overlooked accessory to the MP3 player and iPod. Consumers are willing to shell out a small fortune to buy a portable audio player and then scrimp by spending little more than a few pounds on an inexpensive, and usually inept, pair of headphones. However, if you want to improve the sound quality then the best way to go is to buy a reasonable set.

Fair enough, we don’t all want to walk around with a full set of ear warmers on, but if you listen to music at home or have no shame then the Sennheiser HD650 headphones are among the very best that money can buy. Although, make no mistake, you are going to have spend money to buy these – even with some careful shopping around you are going to have to pay £200 to £250 or more for a set (yes, one set).

Sennheiser are renowned for creating high quality headphones and the HD650 headphones give a completely balanced and crisp playback of every sound. Kevlar reinforced OFC copper cable make them completely insensitive to handling noise. Every aspect of them has been designed to offer unparalleled sound quality. Once you listen to your favourite tracks through a set of these, those £5 ear buds will begin to seem way too expensive.

Vodafone Includes Mobile Data In New Increased Tariffs

Vodafone has become the first UK mobile operator to include data usage as standard with their pay monthly tariffs. However, it comes at a price of a £5 per month tariff increase. Vodafone currently only offer bolt-on additions to tariffs that allow 120MB downloads for the cost of £7.50 per month. Customers will now be entitled to unlimited downloads with an unenforced fair usage policy.

While the £5 addition will apply to all tariffs, those customers that do not wish to use the Internet or email can ask Vodafone to opt out of this portion of the tariff. The £5 will be deducted from the price. Essentially, Vodafone have reduced the price of the bolt-on and made it an opt-out rather than opt-in addition.

A fair usage policy of 500MB downloads is included as part of the tariff, but Vodafone has stated in communication with the ZDNet website that they won’t fine customers that go over this limit.

Mobile Internet and email has come under fairly close scrutiny because it simply hasn’t taken off in the way that many people anticipated. However recent developments in improved hardware and greater software options, as well as our increasing fascination with social media websites, are proving to increase the amount of data downloaded with mobile phones.

Mobile data downloads are used for accessing the Internet and reading email, as well as downloading files from the Internet. Most mobile pages are optimized to reduced sizes, making the 500MB download limit seem more than reasonable for the majority of mobile surfers.

Power Your Gadgets With The Solar Coffee Table

Gadgets don’t exactly have to fulfil some groundbreaking task to be appealing. In fact, more often than not, they’re the kind of thing that many of us could do without. However, the solar powered coffee table seems a little extravagant and, for us Brits anyway, completely pointless. The solar powered coffee table is just that – a coffee table that collects and stores power from the sun.

Intelligent Forms, a Canadian design company that are in the latter stages of creating an entire catalogue of “green” products, claim that placed outside or given a lot of exposure to sunlight, the table-top solar panel will store roughly the equivalent of 17kw a year. That’s about enough power for 80 laptop charges, 2,000 digital camera charges, and 1,500 mobile phone charges.

For those of us based in the UK, and not Canada, and those of us that don’t relish the prospect of leaving the contents of our home office in the garden all night, it should be about enough to keep the universal remote and the wireless games controller charged.

In terms of form and design, I can’t help but think of the old Space Invaders table games. It’s supposed to look modern, sleek, and even futuristic, but only in a Buck Rogers TV series kind of way.

Is Blu-Ray Really The Future?

With HD-DVD being the Betamax of the 21^st century, Blu-Ray players are, apparently, the future. Of course, the PS3 offers one of the most affordable all-round solutions to owning a Blu-Ray player, but we don’t all want to use a games console that bears a striking resemblance to a George Foreman grill to watch films.

Unfortunately, try though I might, it’s a real struggle to find any Blu-Ray players or recorders that stand out. News that Blu-Ray sales tumbled (from an already unimpressive figure) last month does little to make us believe that things are likely to improve in the near future.

Sony, presumably not wanting to compete with the PS3, are equally responsible (if not more so) than any other company. Their own efforts appear over-priced and under-featured compared to the PS3.

It is possible to get a Blu-Ray player for marginally less than the price of a PS3 but the hardware definitely seems to suffer as a result. Sharp have released a couple of decent efforts, in terms of price, but the sensible money still rests with the PS3 – for now, at least.

For those of us that are always on the look out for a new avenue of gadget dreams, the future does not look Blu. We are on the look out for Blu-Ray equipment to review, but if you see anything first, let us know.

GTA IV Smashing All Records

It’s hardly surprising to learn that Grand Theft Auto IV has broken pretty much every imaginable record going. The release of Halo 3 produced one of the largest ever profits for an entertainment release, including Hollywood blockbusters, and GTA IV has followed in that same vein. While many games fail to live up to the kind of hype they are given, that doesn’t seem to be something that can be directed at GTA IV.

Over 600,000 copies on the PS3 and Xbox360 of the Rockstar hit were sold within the first 24 hours of release. It’s not the first time that the Grand Theft Auto series has broken records. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas sold marginally more than 500,000 copies during its first 24 hours, the title that GTA IV has smashed. The same game also holds the record for 677,000 copies sold in its first week.

There are yet more figures of note too. It is estimated that the first day sales of GTA IV will amass £24m. Hollywood films tend to rake in anything ranging from £2m to £13m in the same period.

Many expect GTA IV to sell more than a million copies in its first week. One of the biggest reasons for this potential figure is that this instalment in the series is the first to be released on two platforms – all previous GTA titles were only available on the PlayStation consoles. Approximately 55% of sales have so far been amassed on the Xbox360.

Thanks to the Times Online for the statistics and figures.

Yacrosoft Deal Dropped

Microsoft has dropped its proposed bid to buy out search giant Yahoo. Microsoft had wanted Mihoo, or Yacrosoft (or maybe just MY!), to compete with the seemingly untouchable Google for the search king title. Having raised their initial bid from $44.6bn to $47.5bn, Microsoft has withdrawn because they were not willing to meet the $53bn valuation set by Yahoo.

Websites and Internet businesses have set a truly astonishing benchmark when it comes to valuations and bid prices. Yahoo are demanding more than $50bn for a company that has a fairly minimal share in a $40bn market – although analysts do expect this value to rise to $80bn by the year 2010.

In march 2005 Ask Jeeves, which holds considerably less market share than Yahoo, was purchased for a $1.85bn investment. More recently, Skype was purchased by Ebay for $2.6bn (which could rise to as much as $4.1bn depending on performance) – that’s a lot of money for a free service. YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65bn while MySpace went for a snip at $580mn to Fox Interactive.

Most of us can barely comprehend a figure of that magnitude but it seems that the search engines and portals are buying businesses for tens of billion dollars without hesitation. Can Ebay really turn a profit on Skype when they payed $2.6bn for it? In comparison to some of the prices, the $580mn for MySpace has the greatest chance to impress but, even then, that’s a lot of monetisation.

9X Media Wins Multiple Monitor Peeing Contest

I didn’t really know one existed either but apparently so. The Masterplex started it all with a six screen multiple monitor rig. More entries subsequently joined the race, but all have been competely eclipsed by the 9X Media system. While it would work with as few as two monitors, it’s the bigger end of the boast that we’re particularly interested in.

The X-Top enables users to combine up to 64 screens in a multi tiled display spanning 1 to 3 rows. The screens on offer range in size from 19” to 40” and are high spec LCD monitors. 9X will completely customise your rig for you, and it’s a hardly surprise when you consider how much you would probably have to pay for this kind of set up.

I say “probably have to pay” because try as I might I can’t find any indication of a price, even for the “smaller” set ups. Again, though, if you have to ask… you know the rest. Incredible though it looks, I do tend to question the actual deployment of a 64 screen multi-tiled display using 40” monitors. I think you’d struggle to play GTA IV on a video wall that size. And another point, presuming you use 3 rows of monitors, that would require two rows of 21 monitors and a single row of 22 monitors. That’s just not symetrical.

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