2007/02/02

NTL:Telewest now Virgin

The Telewest TVDrive box was on channel 999 this morning to a new look Virgin branding. The old blue background with yellow lettering is now black with yellow with a nice Virgin logo at the top of the screen.

The TVDrive seems to be referenced as the V.box and it's all under Virgin TV.

It looks nicer at least, though pretty much the same fucntionality though the guides have been slightly revamped.

Whether it makes a difference to subscriber numbers is another matter, though the Virgin brand is more loved.

2007/02/01

MobileTechNews - u-blox to Unveil New Galileo-Ready GPS Chip at 3GSM

MobileTechNews - u-blox to Unveil New Galileo-Ready GPS Chip at 3GSM

A new chip has been announced by u-blox a Swiss company that will support GPS and Gallileo while using less than 50mW.

It has a sensitivity of -160dBm enabling indoor use and will scan 50 channels. It also acquires signals in less than 1 second.

The dawn of everything having a GPS device in it is approaching.

NTL:Telewest starts rebranding Virgin Media

Yesterday post arrived from the Virgin Media explaining the shiny new services (which aren't really new) and that you'll now be able to get TV, Internet, voice and mobile from the same company.

They are now all subsuming into Virgin Media, though Virgin Mobile will still be just that.

Even Email addresses will change, though customers have the option of keeping their old NTL or Telewest addresses.

The major real change is that there's now just one bill for all Virgin services.

Currently cable has a major advantage of really being able to offer a quad play and converged services all down one pipe, but they don't have the money to expand the network so may well use local loop unbundling or even wireless to extend coverage.

Newer ships USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter

Digit Online

Sounds quite a useful gadget which supports USB 2.0 on one side and any form of 2.5" or 3.5" hard drive or optical drives with IDE, ATA, ATAPI or SATA interfaces.

It's designed so data can be moved off old internal drives on to a new one, it's not even a complete enclosure, just enough hardware to connect and power the drive, but for $24.85 it's a bargain.

2007/01/31

LiMo or Mobile Linux

Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung, and carriers NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone have got together to form the LiMo Foundatation to encourage Linux as operating system (with applications) for mobile devices.

Membership starts at $40,000 and goes up to $800,000 for big companies and allows access to code and contributions to it.

There's already several Linux variants out there and hopefully this will standardise things, though they might be fighting a losing battle now Symbian have added some POSIX capabilities to their OS.

It might do some hard to Microsoft who are winning inroads in to the mobile market with Windows Mobile.

ISO PDF anyone

Adobe is trying to get the PDF specification ratified as an ISO spec.

Initially the v1.7 specification is being submitted to Association for Information and Image Management with the hope they'll submit it to ISO to become an international standard.

Is it just a way to fend off Microsoft who are pushing their XML format for Office 2007?

Photoshop Lightroom to ship this month

Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom (as was just Lightroom) is going to ship later this month. Available on both Macs and PCs (universal binary for Macs).

Adobe have made a big effort with a large public beta test as they're obviously going for the Apple Apperture market and the feedback does seem positive.

No pricing has been set yet.

New Apple ads

Apple's starting splashing ads all over the space (MySpace in particular) starring comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

One plays Windows/PC and the other MacOS/Mac. They're pretty funny - in the vein of the Wii vs PS3 ads put out by Nintendo and putting Macs in a good light.

They're up on YouTube too.

i-Mate JASJAR / O2 Exec

I've been having horrid problems with an O2 Exec (kept running out of memory).

The O2 MyXDA site doesn't seem to want to recognise the Exec exists anymore. Luckily I "found" a later version of the ROM for the JASJAR and with some other software that hacked it to make it non country specific, it installed nicely.

Seems to run much better, also installed Windows Live Messenger.

There's a copy of Windows CE 6 (crossbow) flying around which is meant to add further improvements, though MS haven't officially released it.

Anyway it seems much happier now.

Though I'm seriously tempted to go use a Mac rather than PC. There's even sync software for it and with Plaxo having a Mac client (only for contacts at the moment) it's almost possible to move completely away from Outlook.

Slimdevices Transporter installed

It's a very nice system. Currently just switched the Transporter for the Squeezebox (using another box to do the digital to analog). So far it doesn't sound any better, but then it's decompressing a digital signal and sending it out digitally, so it shouldn't really.

Next is removing the other DAC and using the Transporter for everything and then plug the CD into it and see if that makes a difference.