New TomTom ONE XL

TomTom have announced a new in-car GPS unit, the TomTom ONE XL, with a larger 4.3 inch screen and sleek new design. The screen is actually slightly larger than its big brothers', the GO 510, 710 and 910 (but it is only .3 of an inch!).

The ONE XL is also now capable of getting traffic data and speed camera locations along with the other TomTom Plus services.

TomTom ONE XL will be available across Europe, the US, Australia and South Africa from May 2007. The UK variant comes with two map options:

- TomTom ONE XL for UK & ROI at £249
- TomTom ONE XL for Western Europe at £279


Pretty pricey considering the existing ONE is £179.99 with UK maps and a GO 510 is only another £20 more than an XL with UK maps! And as far as I can tell the only difference between a GO 510 and an XL is that there is no bluetooth handsfree or iPod control on the XL.

The new screen and inclusion of Plus services is nice but are they worth an extra £70 over the old ONE and only £20 less than a GO 510?

Maybe not if you just need directions and none of the extra stuff. I donno, it's all so confusing.

Fancy an 8-core Apple?

The megahertz race turned into the gigahertz race and now it's turned into the core race. How many processing cores can you fit into one computer? The latest from Apple is 8.

The new 8-core Mac Pro has two 3GHz quad-core processors from Intel that are currently exclusive to Apple. That makes it one of the most powerful desktops money can buy.

The quad-core option is still available as well in 2GHz, 2.66GHz or 3GHz options. It's also just as configurable, with over 33 million possible combinations, including up to 3TB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

These are not your run-of-the-mill computers for home emailing and web surfing though, they are for serious professionals that require the most powerful machines possible. For example, it's easy to spec one of these up with everything and have it come out at 7 or 8 thousand pounds.

So if HD video editing or something equally CPU taxing is your game, you need one of these. For the rest of us, I think an iMac will do ;-)

Elgato Turbo 264

As someone who often has their Mac churning away all night converting "things to watch on the way to work" into H.264 format, this sounds like an ideal little device to help lighten the load.

Essentially a video encoding/decoding specific chip on a USB stick to help your processor out and take the strain. Out in Europe for 99 euros, seems like a bargain if it saves as much time as it says.

Not much english language info available at the moment, but if you're German's good you might want to check out Macwelt's test report.

Is this the beginning of the end for DRM?

Today EMI and Apple announced that high quality DRM-free music will be available from the iTunes store as of next month. A potentially momentous move that consumers have been waiting for ever since the iTunes store was launched 4 years ago.

Finally, you will be able to buy the music you want from iTunes and not worry that it won't work on a non-Apple device and the bonus is it will be higher quality as well.

EMI's catalogue will be available DRM-free in 256Kbps AAC format for an extra 20 pence per track. The existing 128Kbps DRM-crippled files will still be available to buy at the same 79p price point for those people that don't either know or care what any of this means.

But what does it mean? Is it quite as pivotal a moment as people are making out? Well, I think it could well be because hopefully this will spread. First, to the other big music labels, then to the indies and eventually to the big one, video. Once consumers get a taste for DRM-free digital downloads, they are going to demand it across the board.

For me, video DRM is a much worse problem than music DRM. There is a horrible trend in the UK at the moment to offer downloadable video in Windows Media Player, with DRM of course.

Unlike iTunes, Windows Media Player isn't available for anything other than PCs, so as a Mac user and regardless of the fact that it's crippled with DRM to restrict its use, I can't download and watch any content on Sky Anytime or 4oD anyway.

This really annoys me. I hate not being able to get that content on my Mac, especially in the case of Sky where I am paying through the nose for their content already and now one delivery channel is completely closed to me. So video is doubly bad. But without the need for DRM, they could distribute video content in multiple formats, for multiple platforms.

And that must be how people without iPods have felt all this time. And that is why DRM in all forms, for all content, is evil and completely unfair for consumers. DRM-free music may even lead to increased iTunes sales from non-iPod users because now they will be able to join in the fun as well.

There's a long way to go yet, this is only the beginning, but hopefully the big content owners out there, whether music or movie studios, will closely watch what happens and if successful follow suit quickly.

Especially in the music industry, it's going to be hard for anyone to hold onto DRM; now that one of the big four has gone for it, the others will have to follow to stay competitive.

So, a good day for digital consumers. Hopefully there are a lot more to come.

Xbox 360 Elite is real

So the rumours were pretty much spot on with this one. Microsoft today announced a new 'Elite' version of the Xbox 360. It has a new black paint job (and matching black accessories), 120GB hard drive and an HDMI port.



Sadly though, it seems it doesn't have any other new hardware like the expected move to 65nm, cooler processors. Hopefully that will come sometime later this year in another hardware update.

And there's no built-in WiFi either, unlike the Wii and PS3. But the good news is, it does come with HDMI and component cables, so you will be able to hook it up right out of the box.

It's been confirmed to ship in the States in April for $479. It has been confirmed for a UK release but no details about timing or price yet.

100% Mac

Ever since I switched my home PC for a Mac in 2002 and bought a 17" widescreen "sunflower" iMac G4, I've wanted to use a Mac at work as well and do away with PCs altogether.

That long-standing ambition has finally come to fruition in the last couple of weeks because in my new job I now use a MacBook Pro.

It's great to have finally gone 100% Mac and I am seeing a new side to using OS X, it's not all about iTunes and iPhoto any more, now I have to use it to get important things done like proposals, presentations, business email, development and other work-related stuff.

So far it's been working perfectly and I've been pleased to see how easily Macs really do fit into the enterprise. Mail works with Exchange just fine for email and you have the option of using Microsoft's Entourage, which is just like Outlook and includes all of the same contact and calendar management tools.

But you can even get Entourage to sync with iCal and Address Book, so you can effectively not use Entourage at all and just use the built in OS X apps instead, which is my preference.

What's more with the company about to roll-out the open-source Zimbra platform to replace Exchange, it will be a piece of cake using Macs and PCs in perfect harmony for email and calendaring.

It has also shown me how powerful OS X's built-in sync services are - this is what allows me to sync Entourage with iCal and Address Book but it also syncs my calendar, to-do list and contacts with my mobile phone and back home to my iMac G5 via .Mac (which I finally now make full use of), all completely seamlessly and automatically in the background.

It's been a pleasant experience so far and I find it so much easier to get my work done, there aren't any of the instability, crashing, restart or security problems that have plagued every PC I have ever used in my previous jobs and dragged down my productivity.

The integration into the network is seamless, joining wireless networks, setting up VPN connections and printers is ridiculously easy. Example: finding and setting up the networked Lexmark printer took about 10 seconds. My Mac just found it automatically on the network using Bonjour (Apple's zero-config network protocol) and started using it - no installation of drivers required, unlike the PC I'd had to use for my first couple of days. Joining the wireless network and setting up the VPN connection for when I'm away from the office were equally easy.

OS X also has loads of great software to help you complete your business tasks, whether it's great RSS readers, instant messaging clients or Word, Excel and PowerPoint, they're all available. Not to mention the great mail, calendar and creative apps that come built into OS X.

Of course, it helps that I work for a small, progressive company that allows and encourages me to use a Mac but in fact, I think I could have done this just as easily in any company, had they simply allowed me to.

I hope some of the antiquated IT departments out there wake up and smell the coffee. The Mac is perfectly poised to make an impact in the enterprise. Because it has to be, it is the most flexible OS out there and it can effortlessly integrate into Windows networks, in a lot of ways it's a hell of a lot easier to integrate than PCs themselves!

If I ever have to go back to using a PC as my main computer, I'm going to find it very tough. I've gone Mac and I don't want to go back. Ever.

Finally, I have Sky+

Oh it's been a long five years living in my flat with no Sky+, anyone that knows me can testify to that. You see, getting a second satellite feed into my flat through the central distribution system in the block has been hard to say the least. But I have finally triumphed through a mixture of good and bad luck and last Friday I finally had Sky+ installed.

The bad luck came in the form of a flood which destroyed all of the communal distribution system that led to me being without any TV at all for 2 weeks (well, I had channels 1-5 through terrestrial but that was like going back to the dark ages).

The good luck was that when the whole system had to be replaced after the flood, I made sure it was capable of distributing two feeds to each flat. Hence I now have Sky+ and my televisual life is complete.

Well, for now at least. You see, now that I have Sky+, I am also capable of getting Sky HD which also requires the second feed. So now I have the perfect excuse to buy one of those 42" 1080p HDTVs I keep blogging about. Happy days.

Geo-tagging - another reason to upgrade your camera.

In November I replaced my Sony DSC-P10 digital camera with a very nice Canon IXUS 850IS. This was quite a big step for me - to move away from Sony, I debated whether I should get a newer Sony and took quite a bit of convincing against it - but at the end of the day, I was replacing my Sony because it had failed, not because it was out-dated. The Canon had excellent reviews, was comparable in every way and I have not looked back since.

The research to find the right camera meant considering the specs and reviews - now I get the sneaking sensation that this spec search in future will need to take into consideration geo-tagging.

Geo-tagging, in the case of photography, is the process of including geographical meta data, usually latitude and longitude to your photographs to tie them to their position on earth.

JOBO have a device, photoGPS, which allows for geo-tagging to be fitted to your camera's hot shoe -like a regular flash unit. This unit captures the country, region and district, city, street, postal code, and even the point of interest (POI) which is closest to the captured image location and adds it to your photograph's meta-data.

This information can be used in a variety of ways. Google Earth allows users, through Picasa to match their photos to a specific location - this opens up all sorts of possibilities for travel writers, holiday makers etc. Or perhaps from a personal history point of view, a record through your photographs of where on earth you have stood - something your children and grandchildren might re-visit or yourself in later years.

Also geo-tagging would offer you a new search criteria, appended automatically to your photos - for those less keen on manual organisation. If you want to see all the photos you took at a specific place then you can.

So with this solution appearing as an add-on for hot shoe enabled cameras how long before it becomes a standard inside your camera? I think its certainly the sort of feature I'd love.

PlayStation Home confirmed

Well no surprises that the rumour was true after the Kotaku incident but Sony confirmed it today and announced PlayStation Home. It's like a blend of Second Life, The Sims, Nintendo's Miis and Xbox's achievements.

Basically it's a virtual world in which you have your own customisable house (you can hang your own digital photos on the wall as pictures) and all of it can be explored using your avatar, which can also be customised like a Mii but in far more detail. But this is not just some ramshackle or cartoon-like world, it's full on PS3 graphics and looks pretty impressive.



See more photos in the Joystiq gallery here.

You can chat to your buddies, play in-built games like bowling and pool, or arrange online multi-player games. There are also loads of public places where you can watch move trailers in a virtual cinema, for example, or admire game trophies in great halls.

Sony are thinking of it as Game 3.0, kind of like Web 2.0 for games, bandying about terms like social, localisation and customisable. That's a bit odd, I'm not sure it's quite that ground-breaking, there are plenty of MMO games out there that offer a lot of these aspects already but whatever, this does seem quite interesting and certainly brings the PS3 much more in line with what Nintendo are clearly trying to do with the Wii.

Having said that, those people that want it (and I'm not one of them) have plenty of options for MMO already and if Sony has proven one thing it's that cramming every conceivable piece of functionality into things doesn't necessarily translate into a compelling experience; people tend to like simplicity and elegance. The PS3 needs to be good at games first and this sort of thing is a great added bonus second.

At the end of the day, we'll just have to wait and see. PlayStation home goes into beta in April and should be launched properly sometime in the Autumn. Now if Sony would actually just release the bloody PS3 over here, people might just have one more reason to go and buy one.

Sony release a whole load of new stuff

Sony have announced new products in virtually all their lines. As I'm not interested in some of them, I'll only post about those that I am. So here goes.

New V-series HDTVs

Not their top of the line X-series sets but the respectable 1080p capable V-series are updated to accept 1080/60p and 24p signals and have the advanced Bravia EX engine, thus far found on the X-series sets, for super high-quality picture processing. They also have 10-bit processing for better colour gradients.

Also interesting is that the displays now use Sony's XMB Xross Media Bar interface, the same as used on the PS3 and PSP. I'd like to see for myself if that works well, it could be really interesting.

They did also announce one updated 32-inch X-series set that has three HDMI inputs and a 120Hz refresh rate (Sony call it Motionflow) to help reduce blurring and motion artefacts.

The existing line of Sony LCDs have had great reviews, so I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how these new ones fair. For me right now, if you're buying LCD, it's Sony vs. Sharp.

Cheap(er) Blu-ray player

This is good news for anyone looking to grab a Blu-ray player. Sony announced a much cheaper version of the existing trés-expensive BDP-S1 player. The new BDP-S300 will be $600 as opposed to $1000 (no word on UK pricing yet) and offer pretty much the same features.

The model also supports AVC-HD discs encoded with xvYCC technology, a new international standard for wide colour space, which Sony has branded as x.v.Color.

This will hurt HD DVD I'm sure as it will bring the Blu-ray players down to a much more comparable price level. Although I expect we'll be seeing cheaper HD DVD players out soon as well.

New Cyber-shot cameras

"Sony is introducing a line of slim and stylish Cyber-shot T-series cameras that are destined to be the fashionista crowd’s favorite party companion."

Sony's lovely marketing speak but they actually look pretty well featured. The 8 megapixel DSC-T100 has a 5x optical zoom and 3-inch LCD screen and is available in red, black and silver.



Also 8 megapixels, the DSC-T20 has a more usual 3x optical zoom and a 2.5-inch LCD screen and will be available in pink, white, black and silver.

At less than half an inch thick, the cameras are easily portable and you can even buy matching cases in pink, red, green, grey, crème, brown and black! Good for the ladies ;)

Bluetooth headphones

I like the sound of these (no pun intended) bluetooth headphones. The idea of wireless headphones appeals, tangley wires always annoy me. These look perfectly suited for using in the house maybe streaming music from iTunes or something if your computer (or any other bluetooth-enabled music device) supports A2DP, AVRCP, HFP or HSP stereo bluetooth profiles, which my Mac doesn't.



They've got a 17-hour battery life (200 in standby) and you can even use them with your mobile phone to answer and end calls with the press of button. Nice.