BT Offering To Speed Up Broadband

BT has offered ts customers paid access to a service that guarantees to speed up Broadband access by up to 0.5Mbps. However, the service has come under fire for being expensive, priced at £90, although it does offer a money back guarantee if it doesn’t speed up your broadband connection.

The UK is hardly a leading light when it comes to fast Broadband access and BT ranks 8th for its connection speeds, with many customers complaining of poor connections. Poor, or intermittent, connection speeds can be caused by a great number of different factors including proximity to the exchange and even the electrical equipment that is plugged in near the router and other broadband equipment.

The £90 service from BT highlights the reasons that a customer is getting poor connection speeds and offers advice on how to remedy the situation. Simple PC tweaks can be made that may go some way to improving the connection but it may be that general wiring problems in the house are causing the problem.

Because the BT Accelerator is seen as being expensive, experts believe that consumers will continue to find other methods and services to improve their Broadband speeds. There are certainly numerous online speed testing sites that offer advice regarding PC tweaks in their forums. The question of Broadband speed is one that is hotly debated time and time again because many customers are extremely disappointed with the speeds they can obtain compared to the speeds that are advertised.

New Nokia Phone Details

We thought it would make a pleasant change to drift away from talk of the iPhone, if only for a little while (wait for news on third party applications sometime in the next day or so). So, to the latest Nokia smartphone range the E-Series and the N96.

The E71 and E66 smartphones will probably feature GPS, a 3.2MP camera, and 128MB of internal memory. It’s believed, thanks to a Nokia leak, that these will be released within the next month.

Nokia has also announced that it will release the N96, a top end consumer phone, within three months. This will feature 16GB of internal memory and a 5MP camera. With a number of features similar to the newly announced 3G iPhone, news that the N96 has been on pre-sale at £599 certainly makes the lightened $299 Apple price tag look incredible.

The Nokia website claims that the N96 is designed for video and TV entertainment. Not only does the Video Centre include a range of video functions, but the handset also includes Live TV capabilities. Digital music player and an FM radio round off what looks to be a powerful multimedia handset.

Google Moving In With NASA

Google has never been particularly shy in its monumental achievements and certainly isn’t afraid of splashing the cash to ensure that its workers have the most productive environment. Reports last year showed the offices that included bean bag meeting areas, fireman’s poles, and many more initiatives. However, they’ve taken it a step further this time.

Paying just less than $4m lease per year initially, Google has announced that it is leasing 1.2m sq ft of land from Nasa. The land will be used to build research and development labs as well as to house some of the thousands of new employees expected when they further expand the business.

Google currently employs approximately 20,000 people having significantly boosted their staff in recent years. The new site will also include a huge office block and it is likely that it will also incorporate housing, leisure, and possibly retail facilities for employees.

From NASA’s point of view it is seen as a positive move, not only because of the obvious injection of cash but because it will further improve their own credibility within the scientific and technology arena.

While the lease is for an initial period of 40 years, building is not expected to start for five years and will not be complete until some time after 2022. Fortunately, there should be the opportunity to extend the lease by 50 years once the initial period lapses.

Life Size Gears Of War Products Coming Soon

Branded products based on films are always at the back of the publisher’s mind and with recent video games outstripping their movie alternatives in terms of turnover and popularity, it’s little surprise to learn that TriForce Sales LLC has purchased the rights from Epic Games to produce life sized replicas of weaponry and armour from the award winning game.

Gears of War was heralded as being the greatest game of its time and it has remained one of the most popular games since its release in 2006. DC Comics has also announced that it will produce a Gears of War comic based on the characters in the game while Gears of War:The Pendulum Wars is a book based on the game due to be published by Del Rey Books.

So, you’ll be able to don your home made C.O.G. Armour and grab your replica assault rifle and head over to the TriForce website in order to pre-order Gears of War gear from the beginning of July. Designs are based on a personally sculpted set created by Sid Gerrand of Nightmare Armor Studios – an individual and company renowned for creating lifelike and popular replicas of similar equipment.

Email Flood Warnings From Fujitsu

Picture the scene – you log onto your computer and start checking emails. Having sifted through 23 offers of “male extension products”, numerous notifications of having won the Azerbaijan online lottery, and ignored the Nigerian doctors that would like your bank account details to forward you tens of millions of dollars, you find one email that really stands out.

“Flood Warning”

According to ZDNet, Fujitsu has been providing the Floodline Warnings Direct system for a few years now and alerts those services that need alerting when a flood is imminent. Not only has that contract been renewed but concerned individuals will be able to register by the end of the year for an online warning service whereby they receive email alert notification of impending doom. Read more

The Rise Of The Netbook

Those netbooks, eh? They seem to be cropping up just about everywhere. The Asus Eee PC has gone down a storm and a number of other netbooks have also emerged. Gizmodo’s Brian Lam met Michael Dell at the All Things Digital event last night where he saw the prototype of an as yet unnamed small form netbook.

Netbook is the term that has been given to small laptops designed to make connecting to the Internet a simple and more affordable option. These notebooks have ultra small form and limited options in order to minimize the size and weight of the device. By also using inexpensive chips, netbooks are also usually well within the budget laptop range. Read more

The World’s Smallest Projector - The Earth Trek 90-805R

Numerous blogs and related websites are talking about the Earth Trek 90-805R as being the smallest projector available. The fuss has been started primarily, it seems, because of the Pico projector boasting that it uses new technology to create even smaller projectors. However, where the Earth Trek wins out is in the fact that it is a standalone projector whereas the Pico is bedded into other items.

The Earth Trek will display images up to 22 inches in size from this remote control sized device. The only format it will play is MP4 so it is limited in this respect but it does have a number of connections so that you can stream content from mobile devices, external storage devices, and laptops.

Battery life is expected to be around 2 hours, so just long enough to watch most films, although you won’t be watching Titanic without having to re-charge the battery for a little while. Image quality won’t be great, in part because of the MP4 format dependency, but for a tiny projector it packs a more than reasonable punch.

19 New NTT Docomo Handsets

The Japanese aren’t exactly famed for doing things in small measures when it comes to technology. While the rest of the world waits with baited breath for the next release of the iPhone, the Japanese manufacturer NTT Docomo has announced 19 new handsets showcasing some incredible and ingenious features. They’re not exactly hanging around with release dates either.

The all-round 906i releases, of which there are 8 in total, include 1-seg mobile TV, improved GPS performance, 3G roaming, mobile credit card facilities, and voice to text translations in three languages. The first five of these handsets are due for release between 1st and 5th June with the remainder coming throughout the rest of the month.

The 706i series has 11 new entries. Again, all include 1-seg mobile TV but has some fantastic additions including the world’s slimmest 1-seg phone, a waterproof 1-seg phone, and a mobile phone that monitors your dietary and health condition. The release of the 706i series handsets is slightly more staggered from June to September but remarkable nonetheless.

The contrast in UK and Japanese releases is somewhat staggering. We wait anxiously for the probable (though not guaranteed) release of a single phone while the Japanese are being treated to 19 innovative new handsets.

New Nokia Maps Features

Nokia Maps has proven to be a successful addition to many of the more powerful handsets. The navigation software, in its latest incarnation as Nokia Maps 2.0, has recently been through the Beta testing stag already soliciting nearly quarter of a million downloads since its initial announcement in February of this year.

Nokia Maps 2.0 is now out of Beta and ready for general release to any compatible Nokia handset owner. New features make the software look pretty impressive, and it goes much further than being just a navigational tool including such things as interactive city tours, regional guides, and enhanced car and pedestrian navigation features. Read more

You’re A Selfish Bunch Of Surfers

According to a report by the BBC on research by Jakob Nielsen, the leading light in research into online habits, surfers have become selfish, impatient, and increasingly sceptical of advertising and promotions. We have essentially streamlined our surfing and information gathering processes and have learned to ignore the ploys that websites use to persuade us to linger longer on a website.

Approximately 75% of us achieve what we set out to do when we first open our browser, a figure which has increased from 60% in 1999. While this is partially down to better website and software design, it is largely because we are more understanding of the way the Internet in general, and websites work. As such we can quickly find the site we want, complete the desired action, and leave again.

Nielsen also stated that we still regularly fail to find what we are looking for using search engines, even using Google. He hypothesises that any site wanting to be more successful than Google simply has to make the search process a more successful one.

Search engines have become more sophisticated, more intelligent if you like, in the way that they collect and index data but it can still take several searches to find the actual information needed. As we continue to evolve into Internet gurus this is also likely to improve, though, because we will learn how to manipulate the search engine indexes to our own ends when conducting any search.

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