A small, light and cheap solar charger has launched from Solar Technology that is capable of charging a range of gadgets on the go.
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The Pico captures and transforms the power of the sun into free battery juice for all your gadgets and claims to provide enough power to keep a mobile phone running for 35 hours or an iPod for 14 hours.
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Weighing it at 49 grams, the Pico comes complete with connects for Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung phones as well as USB and mini USB with 25 additional tips available to buy as extras.

Offered with add-ons, such as an AA/AAA battery charger and gel cases, the Pico is available now from www.solartechnology.co.uk for ?16.99.

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Eco Gadgets Chargers Solar powered Solar Technology Phones Mobile phone accessories

 
 

Solar-powered Freeloader Pico launches for green gadgeteers originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:38:54 +0000

How is that robots can, at the same time, be both thoroughly modern and wistfully nostalgic?

They’ve been around for decades in comics, science fiction and the movies, and now they can be found around your house too.

The Museum of Robots sells a range of house wares inspired by robots and we reckon it’s some of the best gear we’ve seen in ages.

Museum of Robots

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WEBSITE OF THE DAY ? Museum of Robots originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Have you been watching this series? You should &ndash it&rsquos a corker.

Dr Aleks Kotoski takes a look at the history, development and global impact of the Web and once you learn to ignore the numerous 2-minute filler shots of Dr Aleks staring wistfully out into the distance from some African hut, with her MacBook on her lap, it’s really worth watching.

This official site has all sorts of support material, from video diaries and interviews, to a snazzy 3D documentary explorer, which lets you navigate your way through the series in a really innovative way.

Catch up with this one on iPlayer – it&rsquos well worth it.

Digital Revolution

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WEBSITE OF THE DAY ? Digital Revolution originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By all logic, Bioshock 2 should not be this good. Not only is it a sequel, but it’s a sequel to a game that really didn’t need a sequel. We’ve seen Rapture, we’ve fought the splicers, we’ve had the rug pulled out from beneath our feet and we’ve seen Ryan’s underwater utopia near its end. What else is there to see?

Without creator Ken Levine and the Irrational Games team at the helm there were questions over whether a second dose of Bioshock could measure up to the first. Was it really that cynical to expect a quick and dirty follow-up built to cash-in on the original game’s success?

The first few hours don’t entirely allay your concerns. The original’s opening was unforgettable, from the moment your plane plunged into the sea to your first glimpse of the marvels of Rapture, to your first encounters with plasmids (genetically engineered psionic powers) and the deadly, deranged gangs of splicers.

By comparison, Bioshock 2 feels mysterious but low-key. Sure, you’re now an early prototype Big Daddy (the armour-clad ten-ton gorillas of the original game), and you’re on a mission to rescue the Little Sister you bonded with many years ago, but the actual experience doesn’t seem to differ much from the first game.

The locations, while new, still fit firmly within the style set up by Bioshock – as they should – and, apart from the fact that you can now wield plasmids and conventional weapons simultaneously, the mix of combat and exploration seems mostly unchanged. You’ve blasted packs of splicers before, hacked turrets and security cameras, used Incinerate to melt ice and experimented with plasmids and passive gene tonics before. What’s changed?

Of course, that’s not quite fair. There are tweaks and additions everywhere you look. The old hacking mini-game has been replaced by a simpler, less obtrusive timing test at the bottom of the screen. The new weapons – Big Daddy variants of the old machine gun and shotgun – pack a real punch. The drill, which can be used to skewer enemies in a brutal fashion or swung as a last ditch melee weapon, works superbly. The old research camera, where you shot footage of enemies to unearth their weak points, has been streamlined and reworked, and using it will make your life much, much easier as the game goes on.

Plus there are new enemies to battle. The existing splicer types are now joined by a hulking Brute splicer, charging and hurling objects in a bid to bring you down. We get new variants on the iconic Big Daddy, and – best of all – the much-hyped Big Sisters: ?fast-moving, vicious female versions of the Big Daddy, who hound you relentlessly until either you or they are dead.

Within the first few hours we also see the biggest new feature: a dramatic change to the way you interact with the Little Sisters. It all starts as before; see the Little Sister and her Big Daddy protect her, take down the Daddy, then grab the creepy little girl. Yet now things take a different direction.

While you can still harvest the Little Sister straight away, the more moral alternative is “adoption”: let her guide you to corpses laden with Rapture’s miracle juice, Adam, then protect her while she harvests the stuff. As soon as she’s at work, the splicers will come thick and fast to get her, so you have your work cut out keeping you (and her) alive. Once she collects her full quota, you can take her off to the nearest vent, where you can harvest or rescue your charge as you wish. The only problem? This sort of behaviour upsets the Big Sisters, and before long you’ll have one of them on your tail.

These are big and very tangible changes, yet it’s a while before they affect the overall feeling of deja-vu. Everything works – in fact the actual combat is more challenging and satisfying than before – but Rapture seems to have lost some of its power to surprise you. The visuals are often breath-taking, the art design is never less than brilliant, the music and dialogue remains spot on, yet the law of diminishing returns seems to apply. Bioshock 2 is consistently a very good game, but not, you begin to fear, a great one.

Just give it time. With later levels the game settles into a new rhythm. The locations become more eerie, more open, more spectacular. The level designers rediscover the magic of the shock moment, or ways to exploit the twisted beauty of Rapture, or the lunatic behaviour of its denizens.

The more you go on, the more you realise that while the plot remains linear, guiding you from location to location just as the original storyline did, the harvesting stuff – effectively a rolling side-quest – opens up the gameplay, encouraging you to plan ways with which you can protect yourself and your Little Sister, both from the splicers and the Big Sisters that come later. If you like setting traps, finding ingenious ways to use plasmids and looking for a tactical advantage, Bioshock 2 is very much your game.

And when the plot finally kicks into high gear – which it only does late in the game – it’s absolutely devastating. Bioshock is rightly celebrated for everything that goes before “Would you kindly?” and (slightly less rightly) pilloried for everything that follows after. Bioshock 2 is almost the opposite, hitting its emotional high-point only as the game nears its conclusion. For the last few hours, Bioshock 2 is simply, undeniably great.

The biggest surprise, however, is that the new multiplayer mode is much, much more than a brainless bolt-on: an underwater Quake with added Plasmids. With levels set in familiar Bioshock locations, it works hard to borrow concepts and mechanics from the single-player campaign. For instance, you can research the corpses of fallen foes for a damage bonus, hack turrets, discover and don a Big Daddy suit, or use the vending machines for health and Eve refills.

The use of persistent characters with a persistent experience system – opening up new weapon and plasmid upgrades – is a stroke of genius, giving you reasons to keep coming back for match after match. I suspect Bioshock 2 multiplayer won’t have the longevity of Modern Warfare or Halo 3, but it has enough to it to make a viable alternative for a while.

Verdict:

Stripped of some of the original’s shock and awe, Bioshock 2 struggles at first to hit the same heights, but the improved gameplay and an increasingly interesting storyline make it a worthy sequel in the end. If you hated Bioshock it’s unlikely that Bioshock 2 will win you over, but this is one of the most atmospheric and compulsive shooters around, and the new multiplayer mode is surprisingly good fun.

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Gaming Xbox 360 Action Bioshock 2 2K Games

 
 
 
 
 
 

Bioshock 2 – Xbox 360 originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:00:04 +0000

Toshiba today disclosed that they are planning to sell their own HD media drive in the UK in Autumn 2010, going up against the likes of WDTV.

Going under the name StorE TV (said stor-e-tv funnily enough), the product line was introduced to Europe last year, but it is only coming to the UK now that it has Wi-Fi added to the mix.

A simple black box, it will bridge the gap between your digital media and your TV with the ability to output content at Full HD (1080p) via HDMI.?In terms of connectivity, you’ll get USB slots and an SD card reader, and around the back the important HDMI, Composite video, stereo and digital audio. Wireless and wired networking are included.

The capacity is yet to be determined, but it was suggested it would be in the region of 1 or 2TB.?Details are limited, but a menu page we captured suggests you’ll be able to hook-up an external DVD player to the device, as well as offering network access, with UPnP mentioned. Interestingly this menu page also offers “internet services”, but we′ll have to wait and see what that offers.

Toshiba couldn’t confirm what codecs the StorETV would support (the European version suggests MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, MPEG2, AVI, MP4 and JPEG), although if they want this to sell, the more formats the better.

Hitting shelves in Q3 2010, the price will be dependent on capacity, but we were told it would be “competitively priced″.

Tags:
Home Cinema Storage Toshiba Media streamers Toshiba StorETV

 
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Toshiba StorETV arriving UK in Autumn originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:35:25 +0000

O2 and HTC are expected to announce a new handset on Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Pocket-lint has learnt.

The handset in question, which neither company will confirm to Pocket-lint, could be the much rumoured HTC Incredible, the?HTC Scorpion, ?the HTC Legend, HTC Bravo, or maybe even something else that we haven’t heard of yet.

“We can neither confirm or deny anything″, an O2 spokesperson told us, while HTC flat out refused to humour our calls for more gossip.?

What we do know is that a press announcement is expected to feature the big cheeses from both HTC and O2 with even Snapdragon-maker Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs putting in an appearance as well.

So what could HTC CEO Peter Chou and O2 UK general manager Steve Alder be going to announce? Could it be any of the above handsets? Merely that O2 is finally taking the HTC Hero? Or a chance to have a quick drink with show attendees?

We will let you know come Wednesday, but in the meantime have your say in the comments below.

Pocket-lint will be live at Mobile World Congress from Sunday covering and tracking all the major announcements as they happen. To follow all the news from the show visit our?MWC?homepage.

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Tags:
Phones Mobile phones HTC O2 MWC2010 Rumours Qualcomm

New O2 HTC handset due 17 February? originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:00:37 +0000

Major record label Warner Music, who own recordings from artists as diverse as Muse, A-Ha, Dragonforce and the Monkees, has threatened to stop licensing its music to free streaming services like Spotify, Last.fm and Pandora.

Warner’s CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr, said: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed. The get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy, is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future″.

The company has not yet confirmed whether it will be withdrawing its catalogue from existing streaming services – neither We7 or Spotify had responded to our emails at the time of writing. But Spotify’s US launch is almost certainly in jeopardy – CEO Daniel Ek’s recent tweets sound like he’s not been having a fun time.

Warner’s motives are puzzling. While 95% of Spotify’s 7 million users opt for the free option rather than a subscription payment, there’s got to be considerable value in an exceptionally well-targeted advertising network. If it can sustain Google, it should be able to sustain Warner – especially as Spotify’s ads are unignorable.

Warner’s latest financial figures show that the company hemorrhaged ?11 million in the last quarter of 2009 and CD sales are continuing to shrink. However, digital sales are up, and 2009 was the biggest single sales year ever, so things can’t be said to be all doom and gloom.

And Bronfman’s comments come shortly after Rob Wells, SVP of Universal – the largest of the major labels – said that “Spotify is a very sustainable financial model – full stop”, and neither Sony Music nor EMI have expressed any dislike for the Swedish startup.

We′ll keep you posted of this developing story.

Read

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Software Music Spotify Lastfm Pandora We7

Warner Music to quit Spotify, Last.fm? originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:46:02 +0000

Google has dropped yet another bomb – announcing suddenly that it’s about to start building ultra-fast fibre-optic broadband networks in a selection of communities across the United States. It’ll provide speeds of up to – get this – 1Gbps.

That’s twenty times faster than the fastest service available in Britain today, and 500 times faster than the UK government’s commitment for broadband access in Britain by 2012, which currently sits at a paltry 2Mbps. The speeds will be offered to at least 50,000, and potentially up to 500,000 people, says Google.

Google wants the development to spur people into building new applications that are bandwidth intensive, as well as spurring itself to experiment with deployment techniques. It’s also a way of ensuring that net neutrality is maintained – by running the networks themselves, Google can dictate what’s done with it.

But privacy advocates will no doubt have a field day with the suggestion that Google will be able to monitor the pipes, taking everything you send through them and using it to serve you adverts.

If you’re a representative of a community in the USA, and you’d like to get involved, then Google has a form for you to fill out. The closing date is 26 March, and then the company will announce the locations that it’ll be working with later in the year.

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Software Broadband Google

Google building its own broadband networks originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:13:17 +0000

Last in the laptop bonanza that Toshiba has dropped on us are the Tecra A11 and M11 notebooks. These are also aimed as business users, but with more of a mobile focus than the Satellite Pro S500.

As such, they have smaller displays – the ḟ at 14-inch, and the A11 coming in at a slightly bigger 15.4-inch screen. That screen isn’t glossy – so you’re more likely to be able to see it in direct sunlight. They both have large touchpads and fingerprint readers, along with optional full 10-digit numeric keypads.

Inside, there’s a choice of Intel’s Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 processors, and hard drives with capacities up to 250GB. No word on RAM, though we expect a range will be offered – probably 3 to 6GB of DDR3. There’s MiniDisplayPorts on both which will let you plug into a projector, should you so desire.

Toshiba has once again built in its “Eco” utility – a button above the keyboard that lets you keep an eye on how much juice your computer is using, and ramp it down to preserve battery life if necessary. There’s a/b/g/n Wi-Fi on offer, and an optional 3G module too – for extra connectivity when wireless isn’t an option.

The Tecra A11 is available now, and the Tecra M11 will show up in March. No word on pricing for either, but when we hear something we’ll be sure to let you know.

Read

Tags:
Hardware Laptops Toshiba Toshiba Tecra ᥯ Toshiba Tecra M11

Toshiba unveils Tecra A11 and M11 laptops originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:32:25 +0000

T-Mobile has unveiled a new version of the?T-Mobile mytouch 3G?first announced last year.

The new device, still to be called the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, will replace the original T-Mobile myTouch 3G and sit alongside the Fender version, while offering new features including a built-in 3.5mm headphone jack and updated music player, more memory in the guise of 288MB of RAM and an 8GB microSD card and Swype built in.?

Swype’s software aims to combat the problem of typing on a small screen by having a high degree of error tolerance.

Users can swipe their finger across the screen rather than having to individually press specific keys, hence the name.

UK phone owners will have to wait until later in the year before the Swype software becomes available, although expect enterprising developers to port it to other Android handsets no doubt before then.

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Phones Mobile phones Swype T-Mobile mytouch 3G Android apps HTC Magic

T-Mobile myTouch 3G gets Swype, more memory and 3.5mm jack originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:27:22 +0000