Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Thursday, 28 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: Hands-free computing
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Today I am going to talk to you about speech recognition software. There, I’ve said it and the program typed it for me. Amazing what they can do with technology, isn’t it?
I’ve tried speech recognition software before, using iListen on my Apple computer and that was pretty good. Mind you, the first time I launched that in an open-plan office my work colleagues started looking at me very strangely as I began talking to my screen while wearing a stupid looking headset. Fair enough.
This time, having been sent a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking (daft name), I decided to install it on a machine at home. That way I can sit in the spare bedroom and babble away to myself as much as I like, albeit with the curtains drawn so the neighbours across the street don’t get concerned for my sanity.
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
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Speech recognition software works by replacing everything you’d normally type into your keyboard with voice commands. So, if you’re tempted to try it, you’ll be talking a lot. In fact, the only downside is that you might end up switching the effects of RSI for a rather sore throat. So keep the Strepsils close at hand.
Greater accuracy
But what it should mean is that you can do everything from surfing the internet and sending emails through to creating lengthy documents in Word or spreadsheets in Excel without going anywhere near those pesky QWERTY keys.
Examining the box for the first time I was cautiously encouraged by some of the packaging blurb. ‘Up to 99% accurate and three times faster than typing’ it says. Yeah right. The big problem with a lot of these programs is that many of them just don’t work properly and render much of what you say as gobbledegook.
But following a prolonged bout of tennis elbow (contracted through over zealous painting and decorating rather than tennis), which has been made worse by endless tapping away on a computer keyboard, I figured speech recognition software might be the pain-relieving solution I’m looking for.
Headset quality
Of course, my computing demands are a long way from many people who use speech recognition software professionally, like medical transcriptionists and members of the armed forces.
Apparently such software is being used in some fighter aircraft. Not an environment where you want the program to think you said ‘Down’ when actually you said ‘Up’, is it? Or, perhaps, thinks you said ‘Drop a very large bomb’ when, in fact, you meant ‘Don’t drop a very large bomb’.
It’s this misinterpretation of what you say which has been one of the main failings of speech recognition software in the past. Dragon Naturally Speaking seems to have addressed that fundamental issue quite successfully.
I’m not sure I agree with the ‘high-quality headset’ accolade its maker Nuance gives to the supplied microphone contraption though. It produces a vice-like grip on your skull.
Interesting results
Nevertheless, once you’ve configured the software and started talking instead of typing, the results are pretty interesting.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of this software is that it speeds up productivity. I’m a self-taught typist and not always a great one at that. I immediately noticed as I talked to the program that it could type much more accurately than I could manage myself.
What’s more, launching programs such as Outlook and Explorer is instantaneous. It means firing off emails and browsing web pages is a doddle too.
Intuitive
The software is intuitive to use. Some speech recognition programs are often hopeless at deciphering trickier words, or fall behind if you start talking faster but this one copes surprisingly well. And I like the way you can carry out formatting commands in something like Word.
This is also a nifty package if you’re on the move a lot. If you’ve got a Pocket PC, Palm Tungsten or digital handheld recorder it’s possible to dictate into that and then get the software to transcribe your musings when you get back home.
Grander scale
But I wonder how speech recognition software will work if it’s employed on a grander scale in offices up and down the country?
Where once you would have heard only the sound of multiple mouse clicks during the daily grind, an open-plan office would turn into a cacophonous hell-on-earth with everyone yakking at the same time.
So, speech recognition software certainly seems to be coming of age. But my advice is to stick to using it behind closed doors and, preferably, in the quieter more civilised confines of your own home.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Finding top iPhone apps
Internet piggybacking
Review: Nokia N96
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: Finding top iPhone apps
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Buying an iPhone 3G is one thing, but it’s the software you can run on it that’ll make your new purchase really come alive.
But despite an explosion of new apps covering everything alphabetically from books through to the weather, there’s just no pleasing some people.
Every time I go window-shopping around this bulging section of the iTunes Store, I come across reviews from people whingeing about how much they’ve paid for their programs.
That’s fine if you’ve been daft enough to buy the $999.99 I Am Rich option (a glorified screensaver depicting a large red gem), which was nothing more than a ‘work of art with no function at all’ according to its creator.
But there’s tons more stuff to choose from and much of it ranges from between just 59p and six quid. Not exactly credit crunching stuff is it?
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
Top 10 laptops
Social networking faux-pas
Multiplayer games: it's good to talk
Now, plenty of people, me included, have had a good moan about the shortcomings of the new iPhone 3G. Features like the poorly performing camera and rather clunky Bluetooth functionality are disappointing. But there are also plenty of positive things you can say about the revised device from Apple. And most of that centres around these natty programs you can run on it.
Mega download
It was reported that over 10 million apps were downloaded from the App Store during the course of its inaugural weekend. Since then, loads of new ones have been added, although only after Apple has approved them. The only problem with that is deciding which ones are worth a look and which are best avoided.
What are your favourite apps for the iPhone 3G? Let everyone know on the message boards.
Apple took the I Am Rich option down from their App Store after a total of eight people bought it, even though it didn’t actually seem to be doing anything wrong apart from being a bit crass.
The rather silly PhoneSaber application, which turned your iPhone into a Star Wars style lightsaber went the same way. But at least that was free. So we’ve seen some tat, but there’s some great stuff in the App Store too.
Pay your way
That’s why I can’t quite fathom people moaning about some of the sub-£6 offerings that are available. Software developers have to make a living. Maybe we should pay what we think something is worth? That would be interesting. I live near a restaurant that adopted the very same policy. They’ve become busier than ever as a result.
You go in, stuff your face and then make your own decision on how much the bill should be. Apparently, customers still stump up roughly what they would have been charged on the menu anyway. I just wonder what the tips are like…
What are your favourite apps for the iPhone 3G? Let everyone know on the message boards.
Let’s not forget the developers who create these apps have to jump through a series of frustrating hoops to get their product to market. For starters, anyone can create their own app by downloading the Software Developer Kit (SDK) from Apple.
However, you then have to be approved by them and pay a $99 registration fee. You also have to agree to comply with the rather convoluted Apple regulations.
Success stories
Even if you get all the way through this process, your app is accepted and it gets made available through iTunes and the App Store, Apple takes 30% of revenue from sales.
It might be worth people remembering all this next time they decide to have a pop at the poor developer who produced their latest purchase. Personally, I think the App Store boasts plenty of software success stories.
Try WikiMe, which at just 59p is an absolute steal. It allows you to enter a location or post code and then get lots of information relevant to that area. Vicinity, at £1.79 offers a more powerful variation on the theme.
And ditch that curled up copy of the London Underground map by downloading Tube London City, which is pricier at £5.99 but perfect for getting around the capital.
What are your favourite apps for the iPhone 3G? Let everyone know on the message boards.
Mobile Flickr is a must-have if you’re into sharing your photos online. The capacity for geotagging each and every shot (allowing you to view map locations of where they were taken) is an excellent feature.
Social networking
Facebook devotees will also find the iPhone app a boon alongside the likes of Twitter and the various incarnations of popular Instant Messaging tools. All enable quick and easy social networking on the go.
There are tedious distractions as you click your way round the App Store though. Things like the iPint app provides a free and completely useless way to pass away a few minutes and the rubbish German BeerCounter will help you keep track of your intake.
But you’re much better off spending a few quid (£5.99) and getting Band, which has everything needed to create your very own jam session.
There are oodles of games too. Super Monkey Ball has been raved about, but you’ll also find everything from Texas Hold’em and Solitaire through to the high jinks of Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D and a dazzlingly retro Pac-Man.
Speed freaks
Gameloft’s Platinum Sudoko is a good bet too. Speed freaks, meanwhile, should investigate the motorcycle mayhem that can be had from Wingnuts Moto Racer (£5.99). It’s great fun.
I also like the simplicity of Bubbles, a freebie app that allows you to manipulate and pop frothy suds in a very therapeutic, stress relieving fashion. Elsewhere, you’ll find everything from phrasebooks to calorie counters crowding around your screen via a sea of irresistible icons all bursting with colour.
Yup, I’ve got a good feeling about the Apps Store and the way it’s growing, almost organically, by the day. And, judging by the way the tills are ringing, so has Apple…
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Internet piggybacking
Review: Nokia N96
A decade of digital TV
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: Finding top iPhone apps
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Buying an iPhone 3G is one thing, but it’s the software you can run on it that’ll make your new purchase really come alive.
But despite an explosion of new apps covering everything alphabetically from books through to the weather, there’s just no pleasing some people.
Every time I go window-shopping around this bulging section of the iTunes Store, I come across reviews from people whingeing about how much they’ve paid for their programs.
That’s fine if you’ve been daft enough to buy the $999.99 I Am Rich option (a glorified screensaver depicting a large red gem), which was nothing more than a ‘work of art with no function at all’ according to its creator.
But there’s tons more stuff to choose from and much of it ranges from between just 59p and six quid. Not exactly credit crunching stuff is it?
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
Top 10 laptops
Social networking faux-pas
Multiplayer games: it's good to talk
Now, plenty of people, me included, have had a good moan about the shortcomings of the new iPhone 3G. Features like the poorly performing camera and rather clunky Bluetooth functionality are disappointing. But there are also plenty of positive things you can say about the revised device from Apple. And most of that centres around these natty programs you can run on it.
Mega download
It was reported that over 10 million apps were downloaded from the App Store during the course of its inaugural weekend. Since then, loads of new ones have been added, although only after Apple has approved them. The only problem with that is deciding which ones are worth a look and which are best avoided.
What are your favourite apps for the iPhone 3G? Let everyone know on the message boards.
Apple took the I Am Rich option down from their App Store after a total of eight people bought it, even though it didn’t actually seem to be doing anything wrong apart from being a bit crass.
The rather silly PhoneSaber application, which turned your iPhone into a Star Wars style lightsaber went the same way. But at least that was free. So we’ve seen some tat, but there’s some great stuff in the App Store too.
Pay your way
That’s why I can’t quite fathom people moaning about some of the sub-£6 offerings that are available. Software developers have to make a living. Maybe we should pay what we think something is worth? That would be interesting. I live near a restaurant that adopted the very same policy. They’ve become busier than ever as a result.
You go in, stuff your face and then make your own decision on how much the bill should be. Apparently, customers still stump up roughly what they would have been charged on the menu anyway. I just wonder what the tips are like…
What are your favourite apps for the iPhone 3G? Let everyone know on the message boards.
Let’s not forget the developers who create these apps have to jump through a series of frustrating hoops to get their product to market. For starters, anyone can create their own app by downloading the Software Developer Kit (SDK) from Apple.
However, you then have to be approved by them and pay a $99 registration fee. You also have to agree to comply with the rather convoluted Apple regulations.
Success stories
Even if you get all the way through this process, your app is accepted and it gets made available through iTunes and the App Store, Apple takes 30% of revenue from sales.
It might be worth people remembering all this next time they decide to have a pop at the poor developer who produced their latest purchase. Personally, I think the App Store boasts plenty of software success stories.
Try WikiMe, which at just 59p is an absolute steal. It allows you to enter a location or post code and then get lots of information relevant to that area. Vicinity, at £1.79 offers a more powerful variation on the theme.
And ditch that curled up copy of the London Underground map by downloading Tube London City, which is pricier at £5.99 but perfect for getting around the capital.
What are your favourite apps for the iPhone 3G? Let everyone know on the message boards.
Mobile Flickr is a must-have if you’re into sharing your photos online. The capacity for geotagging each and every shot (allowing you to view map locations of where they were taken) is an excellent feature.
Social networking
Facebook devotees will also find the iPhone app a boon alongside the likes of Twitter and the various incarnations of popular Instant Messaging tools. All enable quick and easy social networking on the go.
There are tedious distractions as you click your way round the App Store though. Things like the iPint app provides a free and completely useless way to pass away a few minutes and the rubbish German BeerCounter will help you keep track of your intake.
But you’re much better off spending a few quid (£5.99) and getting Band, which has everything needed to create your very own jam session.
There are oodles of games too. Super Monkey Ball has been raved about, but you’ll also find everything from Texas Hold’em and Solitaire through to the high jinks of Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D and a dazzlingly retro Pac-Man.
Speed freaks
Gameloft’s Platinum Sudoko is a good bet too. Speed freaks, meanwhile, should investigate the motorcycle mayhem that can be had from Wingnuts Moto Racer (£5.99). It’s great fun.
I also like the simplicity of Bubbles, a freebie app that allows you to manipulate and pop frothy suds in a very therapeutic, stress relieving fashion. Elsewhere, you’ll find everything from phrasebooks to calorie counters crowding around your screen via a sea of irresistible icons all bursting with colour.
Yup, I’ve got a good feeling about the Apps Store and the way it’s growing, almost organically, by the day. And, judging by the way the tills are ringing, so has Apple…
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Internet piggybacking
Review: Nokia N96
A decade of digital TV
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: The Wi-Fi free-for-all
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
An airport, as I know to my cost, has the capacity to siphon all the money right out of your wallet. From sky-high sandwiches to top-dollar suntan lotion, before you reach your flight you’re gonna be fleeced. Getting access to broadband as you pass through the terminal is no exception. Southampton, Belfast and Aberdeen all have decent Wi-Fi access (as I recently discovered), but you’ll have to pay for it.
However, it’s the perfect time to try out Wi-Fi enabled gadgets, like the two Nokias I’ve been using recently, the N96 and E71. I used them a lot for keeping track of emails during a trip away last week - hence my visits to the three airports mentioned.
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
Preview: Fallout 3
Social networking faux-pas
Fujifilm's new camera range
Prior to departure though, I took the phones home and fired them up for a bit of a play around. Right off the bat, the two handsets automatically started looking for wireless networks in the area, finding not one but three. Two were password protected, but one allowed me to browse the internet and check my email before I twigged it wasn’t my own broadband supply.
Piggyback ride
Tapping into someone else’s domestic wireless network, or 'piggybacking' as it’s been dubbed, creates debate wherever you bring it up. Technically it’s illegal. Perhaps it's morally questionable too. Interestingly though, many people I talked to during my subsequent travels said they didn’t have a problem with it. I think they’d feel differently if it was happening to them.
What do you think? Is it OK to piggyback on someone's Wi-Fi connection? Let us know on the message boards.
The legislation relating to piggybacking is different depending on where in the world you’re situated. As with most legal matters surrounding the web and email usage, a lot of the laws are still being written. Piggybacking is certainly commonplace, but that’s hardly surprising given that so many of us now use wireless routers to distribute broadband around our homes.
Free-for-all
Cheapskates find it instantly appealing as it means you can surf the web without paying for the privilege. Not a big deal if a person is just logging on to check email I guess, but it suddenly becomes more of a problem when you consider a neighbour or even someone in a car parked outside your house could, theoretically, spend hours enjoying a fast and furious broadband supply at your expense.
If you think someone is tapping into your wireless then check the router software and logs to see if other machines have been connecting, particularly if the speed has been slowing to a crawl. If performance is severely affected, it could be that someone is using your account to transfer all manner of data, either to or from the internet, thereby sapping the lifeblood from your service.
What do you think? Is it OK to piggyback on someone's Wi-Fi connection? Let us know on the message boards.
Prosecutions for hijacking someone else’s broadband are currently rare in the UK and, perhaps because the law is struggling to keep up, most people seem to escape with a stern warning. However, there have been notable cases, like that of Gregory Straszkiewicz who, in 2005, was fined £500 under the 2003 Communications Act for pilfering someone else’s supply via a laptop while sitting in his car.
Illegal activity
It’s one thing having other people using your connection and perhaps even abusing it by downloading large chunks of data like HD movies and music. However, there are also plenty of more unsavoury motives for this activity, such as identity theft or the download of illegal pornography.
This could mean big trouble if you’re the account holder, unwittingly implicating you in an illegal activity that could see the police come knocking at your door. Cyber-criminals can also gain access to the data on your machine if they’re not effectively locked out.
Your responsibility
The responsibility for ensuring your Wi-Fi access is secure remains your job. If you’ve got a wireless connection then be sure to password protect it. The Nokias I’ve been trying out instantly displayed which wireless networks were secure and which weren’t.
Unless you are willing to create your own free-for-all Wi-Fi hotspot the best advice is to double-check your settings. If you haven’t protected your connection with a password then do it now.
What do you think? Is it OK to piggyback on someone's Wi-Fi connection? Let us know on the messageboards.
Home Wi-Fi networks access the web using a router to distribute the signal. Check the manual to find out how yours can be encrypted and don’t forget to change any default passwords, along with coming up with a new one that your neighbours can’t guess. So don’t name it after the cat.
Getting secure
By activating WEP, or Wired Equivalency Privacy, you can effectively scramble your Wi-Fi connection so that only machines authorised to see it can gain access. On top of that, install a firewall (if you haven’t already got one) and make sure it’s correctly configured too. These measures aren’t considered foolproof, but they’ll certainly help combat casual intruders.
You’ll also want to change the default broadcasting signal, the SSID (Service Set Identifier) name. Again, this often has a default setting so it’s crucial this is altered. A router can be configured so this signal isn’t broadcast to all and sundry, usually via the router's configuration screen (this should be detailed in the manual). If you’ve lost yours then look it up on the web!
Addressing the issue of piggybacking is an important subject. Go on, check your settings now. You may be in for a surprise...
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Review: Nokia N96
A decade of digital TV
Taking on the spammers
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: The Wi-Fi free-for-all
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
An airport, as I know to my cost, has the capacity to siphon all the money right out of your wallet. From sky-high sandwiches to top-dollar suntan lotion, before you reach your flight you’re gonna be fleeced. Getting access to broadband as you pass through the terminal is no exception. Southampton, Belfast and Aberdeen all have decent Wi-Fi access (as I recently discovered), but you’ll have to pay for it.
However, it’s the perfect time to try out Wi-Fi enabled gadgets, like the two Nokias I’ve been using recently, the N96 and E71. I used them a lot for keeping track of emails during a trip away last week - hence my visits to the three airports mentioned.
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
Preview: Fallout 3
Social networking faux-pas
Fujifilm's new camera range
Prior to departure though, I took the phones home and fired them up for a bit of a play around. Right off the bat, the two handsets automatically started looking for wireless networks in the area, finding not one but three. Two were password protected, but one allowed me to browse the internet and check my email before I twigged it wasn’t my own broadband supply.
Piggyback ride
Tapping into someone else’s domestic wireless network, or 'piggybacking' as it’s been dubbed, creates debate wherever you bring it up. Technically it’s illegal. Perhaps it's morally questionable too. Interestingly though, many people I talked to during my subsequent travels said they didn’t have a problem with it. I think they’d feel differently if it was happening to them.
What do you think? Is it OK to piggyback on someone's Wi-Fi connection? Let us know on the message boards.
The legislation relating to piggybacking is different depending on where in the world you’re situated. As with most legal matters surrounding the web and email usage, a lot of the laws are still being written. Piggybacking is certainly commonplace, but that’s hardly surprising given that so many of us now use wireless routers to distribute broadband around our homes.
Free-for-all
Cheapskates find it instantly appealing as it means you can surf the web without paying for the privilege. Not a big deal if a person is just logging on to check email I guess, but it suddenly becomes more of a problem when you consider a neighbour or even someone in a car parked outside your house could, theoretically, spend hours enjoying a fast and furious broadband supply at your expense.
If you think someone is tapping into your wireless then check the router software and logs to see if other machines have been connecting, particularly if the speed has been slowing to a crawl. If performance is severely affected, it could be that someone is using your account to transfer all manner of data, either to or from the internet, thereby sapping the lifeblood from your service.
What do you think? Is it OK to piggyback on someone's Wi-Fi connection? Let us know on the message boards.
Prosecutions for hijacking someone else’s broadband are currently rare in the UK and, perhaps because the law is struggling to keep up, most people seem to escape with a stern warning. However, there have been notable cases, like that of Gregory Straszkiewicz who, in 2005, was fined £500 under the 2003 Communications Act for pilfering someone else’s supply via a laptop while sitting in his car.
Illegal activity
It’s one thing having other people using your connection and perhaps even abusing it by downloading large chunks of data like HD movies and music. However, there are also plenty of more unsavoury motives for this activity, such as identity theft or the download of illegal pornography.
This could mean big trouble if you’re the account holder, unwittingly implicating you in an illegal activity that could see the police come knocking at your door. Cyber-criminals can also gain access to the data on your machine if they’re not effectively locked out.
Your responsibility
The responsibility for ensuring your Wi-Fi access is secure remains your job. If you’ve got a wireless connection then be sure to password protect it. The Nokias I’ve been trying out instantly displayed which wireless networks were secure and which weren’t.
Unless you are willing to create your own free-for-all Wi-Fi hotspot the best advice is to double-check your settings. If you haven’t protected your connection with a password then do it now.
What do you think? Is it OK to piggyback on someone's Wi-Fi connection? Let us know on the messageboards.
Home Wi-Fi networks access the web using a router to distribute the signal. Check the manual to find out how yours can be encrypted and don’t forget to change any default passwords, along with coming up with a new one that your neighbours can’t guess. So don’t name it after the cat.
Getting secure
By activating WEP, or Wired Equivalency Privacy, you can effectively scramble your Wi-Fi connection so that only machines authorised to see it can gain access. On top of that, install a firewall (if you haven’t already got one) and make sure it’s correctly configured too. These measures aren’t considered foolproof, but they’ll certainly help combat casual intruders.
You’ll also want to change the default broadcasting signal, the SSID (Service Set Identifier) name. Again, this often has a default setting so it’s crucial this is altered. A router can be configured so this signal isn’t broadcast to all and sundry, usually via the router's configuration screen (this should be detailed in the manual). If you’ve lost yours then look it up on the web!
Addressing the issue of piggybacking is an important subject. Go on, check your settings now. You may be in for a surprise...
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Review: Nokia N96
A decade of digital TV
Taking on the spammers
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 06 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: Nokia N96 preview
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
So rumour has it Apple’s planning an iPhone nano, huh? Big deal! I’m more preoccupied with the new Nokia N96 I’ve been testing over the past few weeks. There’s no question a slimmed down version of the iPhone would be a trailblazing success if it made it into stores this side of Christmas. But no doubt it would still have a rubbish camera, just like its bigger brother.
Admittedly, the Nokia N96 doesn’t have a touch screen like the iPhone and, to be honest, it feels less well built. But there’s not much else here to disappoint. If you’re an everyday digital camera user, this phone really will be a fitting replacement for your compact. By the looks of the results I’ve had from the video camera, you might even be able to do away with one of those too.
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
Preview: Gears of War 2
Top games of the 90s
Future flying machines
That’s because the formidable N96 boasts a five megapixel camera complete with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens. Without doubt it’s the feature I’ve been using most. Digital snaps are crisp and clear, and a dual LED flash makes dimly lit photography or video filming a blinding experience. Quite literally.
Bumper pics
When you’re done, you can instantly upload to the likes of Flickr or Vox, send to someone via messaging (try doing that on an iPhone!) or print out using Bluetooth connectivity. The N96 is capable of producing bumper sized shots too - up to a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. And although photography anoraks may snigger at some of the built in effects like Cartoonize or sniff at the rather duff clip art gallery, the pictures themselves are stonking.
The video mode of the camera is top-dollar too. A nifty anti-shake mechanism irons out any major camera wobble as you move and the quality is spot on. A super responsive microphone is so acute it will literally pick up a pin dropping, while playback of captured footage is complemented by the dinky little twin speakers located on each end of the phone.
Iceberg tip
But that’s just the tip of an iceberg Nokia frothily describes as a ‘multimedia computer truly optimized for video and TV’. Erm, but this is a phone, right? Well, yes, but amalgamating all sorts of gadgets is the way of the future and there’s not much the N96 doesn’t do, short of the washing up.
It’s the multimedia angle that really captures the imagination. MPEG-4, Windows Media Video and Flash Video are all supported and USB 2.0 connectivity, WLAN and HSDPA support mean file transfer levels are very decent. With 16 gigabytes of internal memory it’ll hold a decent wedge of content – up to 40 hours according to Nokia, and even that is expandable with a microSDHC card that’ll boost total capacity to a bulging 24GB.
Live TV
I also love the idea of an integrated DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld) receiver that allows you to view live TV. Unfortunately this is only available in a few countries at the moment and, judging from my blank screen, this doesn’t yet include the UK. This is a bit of a thorny subject with DVB-H being one of three mobile TV formats, but if it’s any consolation, the EU has apparently made DVB-H the ‘preferred technology for terrestrial mobile broadcasting’. We’ll see…
Nevertheless, I did manage to trawl through the Nokia Video Center and also view YouTube Mobile videos via the sprightly internet connection. Watching video is made easier with the fold-out ‘kickstand’ that surrounds the lens on the back of the phone that allows you to prop it up for hands free viewing or for making video calls. Nice.
Mobile gaming
Gaming is another aspect of the N96 that impresses. Nokia’s own N-Gage made-for-mobile gaming facility promises much, especially when it comes to the tackling the likes of Fifa 08 or Asphalt 3: Street Rules. The media keys on the stubby side of the dual-case turn your phone into an instant gaming machine.
Having said all that, the first time I took this prototype out of the Jiffy bag it came in (nope, no box on these pre-production models, kids), I was a bit underwhelmed. You see, Nokia sent me an E71 at the same time and although I guess you could say that’s more of a BlackBerry-esque business users phone, I think I actually prefer it. That’s mainly because of the usefulness of the QWERTY keyboard though, and I think I’ll reserve final judgement until I’ve seen a factory-finished version of the N96.
As for inevitable comparisons to the iPhone 3G, the Nokia seems to keep up with those on most levels. Of course, Apple’s gadget has that great touch screen - as opposed to the slightly awkward plastic buttons on the N96. Nevertheless, while Nokia spends time beavering away on its proper iPhone rival, this is a fearsome competitor and certainly even better than the N95 it succeeds.
Nokia N96 UK release date announced
Shop for Nokia mobile handsets with MSN Shopping
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
A decade of digital TV
Taking on the spammers
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Wednesday, 06 August 2008
The Clymo Brief: Nokia N96 preview
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
So rumour has it Apple’s planning an iPhone nano, huh? Big deal! I’m more preoccupied with the new Nokia N96 I’ve been testing over the past few weeks. There’s no question a slimmed down version of the iPhone would be a trailblazing success if it made it into stores this side of Christmas. But no doubt it would still have a rubbish camera, just like its bigger brother.
Admittedly, the Nokia N96 doesn’t have a touch screen like the iPhone and, to be honest, it feels less well built. But there’s not much else here to disappoint. If you’re an everyday digital camera user, this phone really will be a fitting replacement for your compact. By the looks of the results I’ve had from the video camera, you might even be able to do away with one of those too.
Elsewhere on Tech & Gadgets:
Preview: Gears of War 2
Top games of the 90s
Future flying machines
That’s because the formidable N96 boasts a five megapixel camera complete with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens. Without doubt it’s the feature I’ve been using most. Digital snaps are crisp and clear, and a dual LED flash makes dimly lit photography or video filming a blinding experience. Quite literally.
Bumper pics
When you’re done, you can instantly upload to the likes of Flickr or Vox, send to someone via messaging (try doing that on an iPhone!) or print out using Bluetooth connectivity. The N96 is capable of producing bumper sized shots too - up to a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. And although photography anoraks may snigger at some of the built in effects like Cartoonize or sniff at the rather duff clip art gallery, the pictures themselves are stonking.
The video mode of the camera is top-dollar too. A nifty anti-shake mechanism irons out any major camera wobble as you move and the quality is spot on. A super responsive microphone is so acute it will literally pick up a pin dropping, while playback of captured footage is complemented by the dinky little twin speakers located on each end of the phone.
Iceberg tip
But that’s just the tip of an iceberg Nokia frothily describes as a ‘multimedia computer truly optimized for video and TV’. Erm, but this is a phone, right? Well, yes, but amalgamating all sorts of gadgets is the way of the future and there’s not much the N96 doesn’t do, short of the washing up.
It’s the multimedia angle that really captures the imagination. MPEG-4, Windows Media Video and Flash Video are all supported and USB 2.0 connectivity, WLAN and HSDPA support mean file transfer levels are very decent. With 16 gigabytes of internal memory it’ll hold a decent wedge of content – up to 40 hours according to Nokia, and even that is expandable with a microSDHC card that’ll boost total capacity to a bulging 24GB.
Live TV
I also love the idea of an integrated DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld) receiver that allows you to view live TV. Unfortunately this is only available in a few countries at the moment and, judging from my blank screen, this doesn’t yet include the UK. This is a bit of a thorny subject with DVB-H being one of three mobile TV formats, but if it’s any consolation, the EU has apparently made DVB-H the ‘preferred technology for terrestrial mobile broadcasting’. We’ll see…
Nevertheless, I did manage to trawl through the Nokia Video Center and also view YouTube Mobile videos via the sprightly internet connection. Watching video is made easier with the fold-out ‘kickstand’ that surrounds the lens on the back of the phone that allows you to prop it up for hands free viewing or for making video calls. Nice.
Mobile gaming
Gaming is another aspect of the N96 that impresses. Nokia’s own N-Gage made-for-mobile gaming facility promises much, especially when it comes to the tackling the likes of Fifa 08 or Asphalt 3: Street Rules. The media keys on the stubby side of the dual-case turn your phone into an instant gaming machine.
Having said all that, the first time I took this prototype out of the Jiffy bag it came in (nope, no box on these pre-production models, kids), I was a bit underwhelmed. You see, Nokia sent me an E71 at the same time and although I guess you could say that’s more of a BlackBerry-esque business users phone, I think I actually prefer it. That’s mainly because of the usefulness of the QWERTY keyboard though, and I think I’ll reserve final judgement until I’ve seen a factory-finished version of the N96.
As for inevitable comparisons to the iPhone 3G, the Nokia seems to keep up with those on most levels. Of course, Apple’s gadget has that great touch screen - as opposed to the slightly awkward plastic buttons on the N96. Nevertheless, while Nokia spends time beavering away on its proper iPhone rival, this is a fearsome competitor and certainly even better than the N95 it succeeds.
Nokia N96 UK release date announced
Shop for Nokia mobile handsets with MSN Shopping
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
A decade of digital TV
Taking on the spammers
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: A decade of digital TV
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Ah, where would we be without glorious, multi-channel digital TV? I know I’d soon go stir crazy without access to an infinite loop of documentaries and episodes of How It’s Made. However, I must confess I’m a relative latecomer to this entertainment revolution.
It’s because I lived in a communications black hole at my old address. I’m not joking – I couldn’t even get Channel 5. It wasn’t like I was living on a desert island. The postcode was in a big town on the south coast, but just out of reach of the analogue TV transmitters.
I couldn’t get Freeview either and, although cable existed in my street, it didn’t run up to the flat (a distance of around three metres tops). I even offered to pay the cable company extra to put a length of co-ax up the garden path, but they refused.
Judging by the amount of satellite dishes on the outside of the building I can only guess everyone else sided with Sky. But do you remember when there was another option? Something called ONdigital?
Lavish launch
It’s now ten years to the week since the emergence of this, the first digital terrestrial pay TV package. Armed with a £40 million marketing budget, the service was announced on July 28th 1998 and ONdigital unveiled its shiny new network in November of that year. But despite lots of fireworks and a lavish launch party headed up by Ulrika Jonsson it was all downhill from there.
Over the next four years, the ONdigital saga ran like a badly produced soap opera. It all seemed such a great idea at the time. BSkyB with its Sky Digital satellite service was the big competitor, but ONdigital didn’t need a satellite or cable connection, just a set top box. (Rather amusingly, some cheapskates still use these to receive Freeview today.)
Losing ground
But aggressive marketing and cutthroat pricing from the Sky Digital camp made the packages offered by ONdigital look poor value by comparison and it started losing ground almost immediately. Sky had cannily started giving new customers a free dish and digibox.
A nice man would even come round and plug it all in for you to make sure your picture was crystal clear. Oh, and there were around 200 channels. ONdigital offered about 20, the same as Sky’s older analogue service.
I remember a work colleague who’d been one of the first to sign up for ONdigital smugly invited me round for a look. What a fiasco. The signal was dismally weak and the box kept crashing. Still, at least there was a glossy TV guide to leaf through while I waited for him to get something decent on the screen. I left him to it after the popcorn ran out.
After less than two years and a miserly take-up, Carlton and Granada rebranded ONdigital as ITV Digital, and snapped up the rights to the Football League for its new ITV Sport Channel.
Cue another huge marketing campaign and an extraordinary series of telly ads. Yes, who can forget the hilarious antics of that comedy monkey? Rubbish - although his little woollen sidekick should really have gone on to bigger and better things.
Dwindling numbers
Doubtless the pair did better out of the deal than ITV Digital. Weighed down by the immense cost of the Football League contract and crippled by dwindling subscription numbers, the broadcaster went belly up in March 2002.
It wasn’t just bad news for ITV Digital – it also proved catastrophic for many lower division football clubs who’d been expecting boom times thanks to the Football League deal.
By the end of April 2002, the pay-for TV service finally bit the dust and during October that same year Freeview was born. Remaining subscribers were asked nicely to hand back their set-top boxes. They didn’t.
New services
Since then we’ve seen Sky dominate while doing battle with the likes of Virgin Media to stay ahead of the game. Other exciting developments from the likes of BT and Top Up TV are also in the offing.
Freesat, the new service launched by the BBC and ITV currently offers 66 free TV channels, a few of which are in high definition. Does that make me feel any better about paying the licence fee? Erm, no. Freesat from Sky, meanwhile, allows you to get more than 200 free TV channels. Go figure.
So what of the digital future? Well, things are sure to advance even more rapidly as we speed ever closer to 2012, when analogue is supposed to be finally switched off here in the UK.
It’s all a far cry from telly circa 1982 when I was living out in the sticks, desperate to see The Prisoner on the then newly launched Channel 4. My picture was so snowy that I could only just make out the lurid sixties fashions through all that analogue fog. Boy, we’ve come a long way since then, that’s for sure!
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Taking out the trash
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Better online service, please!
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: A decade of digital TV
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Ah, where would we be without glorious, multi-channel digital TV? I know I’d soon go stir crazy without access to an infinite loop of documentaries and episodes of How It’s Made. However, I must confess I’m a relative latecomer to this entertainment revolution.
It’s because I lived in a communications black hole at my old address. I’m not joking – I couldn’t even get Channel 5. It wasn’t like I was living on a desert island. The postcode was in a big town on the south coast, but just out of reach of the analogue TV transmitters.
I couldn’t get Freeview either and, although cable existed in my street, it didn’t run up to the flat (a distance of around three metres tops). I even offered to pay the cable company extra to put a length of co-ax up the garden path, but they refused.
Judging by the amount of satellite dishes on the outside of the building I can only guess everyone else sided with Sky. But do you remember when there was another option? Something called ONdigital?
Lavish launch
It’s now ten years to the week since the emergence of this, the first digital terrestrial pay TV package. Armed with a £40 million marketing budget, the service was announced on July 28th 1998 and ONdigital unveiled its shiny new network in November of that year. But despite lots of fireworks and a lavish launch party headed up by Ulrika Jonsson it was all downhill from there.
Over the next four years, the ONdigital saga ran like a badly produced soap opera. It all seemed such a great idea at the time. BSkyB with its Sky Digital satellite service was the big competitor, but ONdigital didn’t need a satellite or cable connection, just a set top box. (Rather amusingly, some cheapskates still use these to receive Freeview today.)
Losing ground
But aggressive marketing and cutthroat pricing from the Sky Digital camp made the packages offered by ONdigital look poor value by comparison and it started losing ground almost immediately. Sky had cannily started giving new customers a free dish and digibox.
A nice man would even come round and plug it all in for you to make sure your picture was crystal clear. Oh, and there were around 200 channels. ONdigital offered about 20, the same as Sky’s older analogue service.
I remember a work colleague who’d been one of the first to sign up for ONdigital smugly invited me round for a look. What a fiasco. The signal was dismally weak and the box kept crashing. Still, at least there was a glossy TV guide to leaf through while I waited for him to get something decent on the screen. I left him to it after the popcorn ran out.
After less than two years and a miserly take-up, Carlton and Granada rebranded ONdigital as ITV Digital, and snapped up the rights to the Football League for its new ITV Sport Channel.
Cue another huge marketing campaign and an extraordinary series of telly ads. Yes, who can forget the hilarious antics of that comedy monkey? Rubbish - although his little woollen sidekick should really have gone on to bigger and better things.
Dwindling numbers
Doubtless the pair did better out of the deal than ITV Digital. Weighed down by the immense cost of the Football League contract and crippled by dwindling subscription numbers, the broadcaster went belly up in March 2002.
It wasn’t just bad news for ITV Digital – it also proved catastrophic for many lower division football clubs who’d been expecting boom times thanks to the Football League deal.
By the end of April 2002, the pay-for TV service finally bit the dust and during October that same year Freeview was born. Remaining subscribers were asked nicely to hand back their set-top boxes. They didn’t.
New services
Since then we’ve seen Sky dominate while doing battle with the likes of Virgin Media to stay ahead of the game. Other exciting developments from the likes of BT and Top Up TV are also in the offing.
Freesat, the new service launched by the BBC and ITV currently offers 66 free TV channels, a few of which are in high definition. Does that make me feel any better about paying the licence fee? Erm, no. Freesat from Sky, meanwhile, allows you to get more than 200 free TV channels. Go figure.
So what of the digital future? Well, things are sure to advance even more rapidly as we speed ever closer to 2012, when analogue is supposed to be finally switched off here in the UK.
It’s all a far cry from telly circa 1982 when I was living out in the sticks, desperate to see The Prisoner on the then newly launched Channel 4. My picture was so snowy that I could only just make out the lurid sixties fashions through all that analogue fog. Boy, we’ve come a long way since then, that’s for sure!
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Taking out the trash
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Better online service, please!
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Taking out the trash
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Receiving spam is a bit like having junk mail pushed through the letterbox. Annoying. I’ve lost count of the times a Betterware catalogue has landed on the Welcome mat over the years. Sometimes I try to be nice by leaving it out with a polite note saying ‘No thanks’. Of course, it never works and they leave another one a few weeks later. Throw it in the bin and they’ll still leave a replacement. It’s hopeless.
And don’t even get me started on the flyers for the takeaway pizza joint up the road. Who are they kidding? Buy a 12” Margherita from that place and you’ll get more nutritional value from eating the box it arrives in.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I reported here on how my inbox was being taken over by a similarly tiresome torrent of unwanted junk in the shape of spam emails. I never even reply to these messages, but it seems plenty of us do. As a result, we are feeding the spammers.
Tired of spam? Let us know on the message boards how you get around it.
Unlikely to stop
“Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to stop everyone from buying goods sold via spam,” Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley told me back then.
This led me to give Norton Internet Security 2008 a try, despite fearing it would slow my machine to a crawl. The box has a sticker that says ‘New with faster performance’. Hmm. I’ve had a love/hate affair with these programs for years, often uninstalling them in sheer frustration with how they perform.
My current software of choice, AVG’s Internet Security package, has been pretty good to be honest and goes about its business in the background quite nicely. However, I’m looking at something a little more potent, even if it does mean sacrificing performance.
Rise in spam
It was an email from Sophos that finally convinced me to beef up my PC’s protection. According to its latest research, only one in 28 emails are now legitimate – with a disturbing rise in spam recorded between April and June this year.
Sophos has a Dirty Dozen list of countries that relay spam, a register headed up by none other than the US of A followed by Russia. But there are some surprising inclusions in there too, like Turkey, which came third in the list.
Depressingly, the Sophos stats also revealed the level of spam being relayed to businesses had risen to a staggering 96.5% of all email. That’s before we get to the likes of SMS text spamming and spear phishing, the latter of which often plunders social networking sites like Facebook in the voracious quest for identity fraud.
Simple to install
Norton’s Internet Security package is simple enough to install and set up but it’s a bit odd to find the anti-spam facet comes as an add-on. Why? “Many of our customers already benefit from anti-spam technology through their internet service providers,” says Con Mallon, Symantec's consumer marketing product director.
“So we removed the anti-spam feature from our core Norton Internet Security and AntiVirus packages. There’s a trade-off between protection and performance. We’ve kept the core products as lean as possible to minimise their impact on the PC’s performance, while still giving customers the choice to download the free, optional Norton add-on pack.”
Performance issues
So far, the package has performed quite well, and I’ve noticed a marked decrease in spam. But it seems unlikely we’ll see those performance issues eradicated entirely, simply because of the size of the problem.
“Traditionally, security solutions have grown in size as the number of security threats has increased,” says Mallon. “Security vendors have needed to include more and more features to ensure that their customers are protected.
“This has often caused a notable impact on the PC’s performance as the security solution has demanded more computing resources.”
“For our next set of releases of Norton Internet Security and Norton AntiVirus, due to be released in September, we’ve set ourselves an audacious objective of ‘zero-impact’ security. We’re challenging ourselves to develop the best security package with, quite literally, no impact on the PC’s performance.” More sophisticated
“Web-based threats and attacks are the latest and fastest growing vector of security concern,” furthers Mallon on the increasingly sophisticated methods being used by the online criminal fraternity.
“Drive-by downloads for instance, where an authentic website is injected with malicious codes that infects any visitor to that site, are one of the most common ways that a Trojan or other malware can enter a PC and gain access to confidential information. This is then relayed back to the cyber criminal for exploitation and financial gain.”
The 2008 version also boasts Norton Identity Safe, a new feature that allows customers to store their personal credentials (such as login and password details) in an encrypted format on their PC.
Ongoing battle
When logging onto selected websites, this feature automatically fills in the relevant credentials ensuring that this information cannot be intercepted by criminals. A great idea, but in the end it’s going to take a lot more than new features to combat such a huge problem.
“To fight spam, you really need to have a worldwide approach and significant political will,” adds Mallon. “There appears to be little prospect of that happening in the short term. Laws may help to address some of the ‘symptoms’ of spam, but not the ‘disease’ itself. Spam really needs to be tackled on all fronts and it’ll be an ongoing battle.”
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Better online service, please!
Waging war on spam
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Taking out the trash
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Receiving spam is a bit like having junk mail pushed through the letterbox. Annoying. I’ve lost count of the times a Betterware catalogue has landed on the Welcome mat over the years. Sometimes I try to be nice by leaving it out with a polite note saying ‘No thanks’. Of course, it never works and they leave another one a few weeks later. Throw it in the bin and they’ll still leave a replacement. It’s hopeless.
And don’t even get me started on the flyers for the takeaway pizza joint up the road. Who are they kidding? Buy a 12” Margherita from that place and you’ll get more nutritional value from eating the box it arrives in.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I reported here on how my inbox was being taken over by a similarly tiresome torrent of unwanted junk in the shape of spam emails. I never even reply to these messages, but it seems plenty of us do. As a result, we are feeding the spammers.
Tired of spam? Let us know on the message boards how you get around it.
Unlikely to stop
“Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to stop everyone from buying goods sold via spam,” Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley told me back then.
This led me to give Norton Internet Security 2008 a try, despite fearing it would slow my machine to a crawl. The box has a sticker that says ‘New with faster performance’. Hmm. I’ve had a love/hate affair with these programs for years, often uninstalling them in sheer frustration with how they perform.
My current software of choice, AVG’s Internet Security package, has been pretty good to be honest and goes about its business in the background quite nicely. However, I’m looking at something a little more potent, even if it does mean sacrificing performance.
Rise in spam
It was an email from Sophos that finally convinced me to beef up my PC’s protection. According to its latest research, only one in 28 emails are now legitimate – with a disturbing rise in spam recorded between April and June this year.
Sophos has a Dirty Dozen list of countries that relay spam, a register headed up by none other than the US of A followed by Russia. But there are some surprising inclusions in there too, like Turkey, which came third in the list.
Depressingly, the Sophos stats also revealed the level of spam being relayed to businesses had risen to a staggering 96.5% of all email. That’s before we get to the likes of SMS text spamming and spear phishing, the latter of which often plunders social networking sites like Facebook in the voracious quest for identity fraud.
Simple to install
Norton’s Internet Security package is simple enough to install and set up but it’s a bit odd to find the anti-spam facet comes as an add-on. Why? “Many of our customers already benefit from anti-spam technology through their internet service providers,” says Con Mallon, Symantec's consumer marketing product director.
“So we removed the anti-spam feature from our core Norton Internet Security and AntiVirus packages. There’s a trade-off between protection and performance. We’ve kept the core products as lean as possible to minimise their impact on the PC’s performance, while still giving customers the choice to download the free, optional Norton add-on pack.”
Performance issues
So far, the package has performed quite well, and I’ve noticed a marked decrease in spam. But it seems unlikely we’ll see those performance issues eradicated entirely, simply because of the size of the problem.
“Traditionally, security solutions have grown in size as the number of security threats has increased,” says Mallon. “Security vendors have needed to include more and more features to ensure that their customers are protected.
“This has often caused a notable impact on the PC’s performance as the security solution has demanded more computing resources.”
“For our next set of releases of Norton Internet Security and Norton AntiVirus, due to be released in September, we’ve set ourselves an audacious objective of ‘zero-impact’ security. We’re challenging ourselves to develop the best security package with, quite literally, no impact on the PC’s performance.” More sophisticated
“Web-based threats and attacks are the latest and fastest growing vector of security concern,” furthers Mallon on the increasingly sophisticated methods being used by the online criminal fraternity.
“Drive-by downloads for instance, where an authentic website is injected with malicious codes that infects any visitor to that site, are one of the most common ways that a Trojan or other malware can enter a PC and gain access to confidential information. This is then relayed back to the cyber criminal for exploitation and financial gain.”
The 2008 version also boasts Norton Identity Safe, a new feature that allows customers to store their personal credentials (such as login and password details) in an encrypted format on their PC.
Ongoing battle
When logging onto selected websites, this feature automatically fills in the relevant credentials ensuring that this information cannot be intercepted by criminals. A great idea, but in the end it’s going to take a lot more than new features to combat such a huge problem.
“To fight spam, you really need to have a worldwide approach and significant political will,” adds Mallon. “There appears to be little prospect of that happening in the short term. Laws may help to address some of the ‘symptoms’ of spam, but not the ‘disease’ itself. Spam really needs to be tackled on all fronts and it’ll be an ongoing battle.”
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Better online service, please!
Waging war on spam
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Does anyone enjoy driving anymore? I used to love it but it’s become such a chore nowadays, thanks mainly to the sheer volume of cars on the road.
Add to that endless numpty drivers who refuse to show anything in the way of courtesy to other motorists and driving becomes a real drag. My own pet hate is when people don’t indicate but, of course, motoring frustrations can get much worse than that.
Everyday incidents
Every day you see potentially dangerous events unfolding on the roads in front of your eyes. So an in-car camera that allows you to record any kind of incident while you’re out and about seems like a great idea.
It would be even more useful in the unfortunate event of an accident.
I’ve just had a look at one from a company called RoadScan and it’s fab. Mind you, I’d cheekily assumed that they’d lay on a company car in order for me to test one rather than entering my own car in some kind of demolition derby.
Road test?
“I’ll come and meet you,” said the guy on the phone, which I gleefully assumed would mean I’d be shredding tyres and wrapping his motor round a lamp post later in the week.
It’s not often you get the chance to smash up someone else’s car with their blessing, now is it?
But it wasn’t to be. John Kane, director of RoadScan, turns up in a modest and surprisingly dent-free Vauxhall Zafira and explains the in-car camera concept over a coffee or two instead.
Nevertheless, I’m soon intrigued by this exciting little gadget.
RoadScan's in-car cameras
RoadScan currently gets most of its business from owners of fleet vehicles such as high street retail chains and courier firms, though other UK drivers are already starting to take up the product too.
There’s a single lens camera, the diminutive RoadCam, and a bulkier counterpart, the dual lens EnvisionCam.
Starting at £395 for the former they’re not exactly cheap, but when you weigh up the potential savings of being able to prove to an insurer that an accident wasn’t your fault, the in-car camera soon starts to make financial sense.
It’s a great idea that also gets you thinking about your own driving habits, alongside providing a reassuring monitor of everything that happens during everyday car journeys.
Capturing bad behaviour
RoadCam is basically a Video Event Data Recorder (VEDR), which records driver behaviour both before and after an accident, be it a relatively minor scrape or a full-on fender bender.
Kane explains that this particular idea originated in the US and has been around for a while. He got offered the chance to pick up the concept for our side of the pond a few years ago and successive versions continue to add increasingly sophisticated features.
Fringe benefits
The RoadScan camera offers some immediate benefits. For starters, it helps improve driver discipline, while producing increased fuel economy because motorists inevitably end up adjusting their habits to avoid triggering the device.
The device can be mounted on a windscreen in about 20 minutes, just in front of the rear view mirror, and works in both regular daylight and at night, as long as the road ahead is reasonably lit.
It’s a product that doesn’t look overtly sophisticated – just a small plastic box with a lens on one side and a manual record button on the other. The clever stuff is located inside.
Clever stuff
The device works using a series of sensors that measure changes in G-force while a vehicle is moving. Hard braking, erratic driving and anything else that registers over the scale of pre-configured settings will automatically trigger the camera.
The unit is actually recording all the time, but only when the device experiences these sudden changes in driving style does it makes a permanent record of events in the shape of a short video clip.
The camera records and saves fourteen seconds beforehand and the six seconds immediately afterwards, giving a well-rounded snippet of an accident and the events leading up to it.
Downloading data
This video, along with other data captured by the RoadCam, can then be downloaded to a laptop or home computer via the supplied Event Review software.
Along with a full colour playback of the events, the software also provides a dazzling array of data, including graphical charts displaying the precise moment the camera was jolted into action.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take long before an installed device is being put to good use. It provides a stark reminder of just how our hideously congested roads and increasingly aggressive driving habits have changed motoring in the UK for good.
Does Kane think driving standards have got worse? “Not really,” he ponders. “There’s just a lot more traffic on the roads these days. In fact, the driving test has become harder than it was.”
From the selection of clips that Kane shows me, it’s obvious that the RoadCam has a bright future, not only for improving driving standards but also for use as a training aid.
Driving style
I just worry that this gadget could turn some people into over-zealous snoopers. “It can be a little bit like that,” admits Kane.
“But you also find that it changes your own driving habits and has the potential to turn all of us into better drivers. Whenever I trip the camera, I’m always thinking how I can avoid doing it again. It makes you much more aware of the way you drive and helps to smooth out your overall driving style.”
Potential misuse?
Nevertheless, road-bound busybodies will find its charms hard to resist. There’s a little red record button on the back of each camera that allows you to manually control the video capture.
It’s not until you actually try it out and then see the footage played back that you fully realise the potential.
For example, if somebody undertakes you on the motorway you simply press the record button and the device will save a 20-second clip of the illegal manoeuvre. Whether or not the police would subsequently do anything about it remains to be seen.
Still, if you’re increasingly worried by the ever decreasing standard of driving on our roads and fancy a bit of in-car security then this is a device that could sit very nicely alongside the sat nav and stereo.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
(Online customer) service, please!
Waging war on spam
Goodbye Mr Gates
Faking it with digital photos
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Does anyone enjoy driving anymore? I used to love it but it’s become such a chore nowadays, thanks mainly to the sheer volume of cars on the road.
Add to that endless numpty drivers who refuse to show anything in the way of courtesy to other motorists and driving becomes a real drag. My own pet hate is when people don’t indicate but, of course, motoring frustrations can get much worse than that.
Everyday incidents
Every day you see potentially dangerous events unfolding on the roads in front of your eyes. So an in-car camera that allows you to record any kind of incident while you’re out and about seems like a great idea.
It would be even more useful in the unfortunate event of an accident.
I’ve just had a look at one from a company called RoadScan and it’s fab. Mind you, I’d cheekily assumed that they’d lay on a company car in order for me to test one rather than entering my own car in some kind of demolition derby.
Road test?
“I’ll come and meet you,” said the guy on the phone, which I gleefully assumed would mean I’d be shredding tyres and wrapping his motor round a lamp post later in the week.
It’s not often you get the chance to smash up someone else’s car with their blessing, now is it?
But it wasn’t to be. John Kane, director of RoadScan, turns up in a modest and surprisingly dent-free Vauxhall Zafira and explains the in-car camera concept over a coffee or two instead.
Nevertheless, I’m soon intrigued by this exciting little gadget.
RoadScan's in-car cameras
RoadScan currently gets most of its business from owners of fleet vehicles such as high street retail chains and courier firms, though other UK drivers are already starting to take up the product too.
There’s a single lens camera, the diminutive RoadCam, and a bulkier counterpart, the dual lens EnvisionCam.
Starting at £395 for the former they’re not exactly cheap, but when you weigh up the potential savings of being able to prove to an insurer that an accident wasn’t your fault, the in-car camera soon starts to make financial sense.
It’s a great idea that also gets you thinking about your own driving habits, alongside providing a reassuring monitor of everything that happens during everyday car journeys.
Capturing bad behaviour
RoadCam is basically a Video Event Data Recorder (VEDR), which records driver behaviour both before and after an accident, be it a relatively minor scrape or a full-on fender bender.
Kane explains that this particular idea originated in the US and has been around for a while. He got offered the chance to pick up the concept for our side of the pond a few years ago and successive versions continue to add increasingly sophisticated features.
Fringe benefits
The RoadScan camera offers some immediate benefits. For starters, it helps improve driver discipline, while producing increased fuel economy because motorists inevitably end up adjusting their habits to avoid triggering the device.
The device can be mounted on a windscreen in about 20 minutes, just in front of the rear view mirror, and works in both regular daylight and at night, as long as the road ahead is reasonably lit.
It’s a product that doesn’t look overtly sophisticated – just a small plastic box with a lens on one side and a manual record button on the other. The clever stuff is located inside.
Clever stuff
The device works using a series of sensors that measure changes in G-force while a vehicle is moving. Hard braking, erratic driving and anything else that registers over the scale of pre-configured settings will automatically trigger the camera.
The unit is actually recording all the time, but only when the device experiences these sudden changes in driving style does it makes a permanent record of events in the shape of a short video clip.
The camera records and saves fourteen seconds beforehand and the six seconds immediately afterwards, giving a well-rounded snippet of an accident and the events leading up to it.
Downloading data
This video, along with other data captured by the RoadCam, can then be downloaded to a laptop or home computer via the supplied Event Review software.
Along with a full colour playback of the events, the software also provides a dazzling array of data, including graphical charts displaying the precise moment the camera was jolted into action.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take long before an installed device is being put to good use. It provides a stark reminder of just how our hideously congested roads and increasingly aggressive driving habits have changed motoring in the UK for good.
Does Kane think driving standards have got worse? “Not really,” he ponders. “There’s just a lot more traffic on the roads these days. In fact, the driving test has become harder than it was.”
From the selection of clips that Kane shows me, it’s obvious that the RoadCam has a bright future, not only for improving driving standards but also for use as a training aid.
Driving style
I just worry that this gadget could turn some people into over-zealous snoopers. “It can be a little bit like that,” admits Kane.
“But you also find that it changes your own driving habits and has the potential to turn all of us into better drivers. Whenever I trip the camera, I’m always thinking how I can avoid doing it again. It makes you much more aware of the way you drive and helps to smooth out your overall driving style.”
Potential misuse?
Nevertheless, road-bound busybodies will find its charms hard to resist. There’s a little red record button on the back of each camera that allows you to manually control the video capture.
It’s not until you actually try it out and then see the footage played back that you fully realise the potential.
For example, if somebody undertakes you on the motorway you simply press the record button and the device will save a 20-second clip of the illegal manoeuvre. Whether or not the police would subsequently do anything about it remains to be seen.
Still, if you’re increasingly worried by the ever decreasing standard of driving on our roads and fancy a bit of in-car security then this is a device that could sit very nicely alongside the sat nav and stereo.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
(Online customer) service, please!
Waging war on spam
Goodbye Mr Gates
Faking it with digital photos
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Tuesday, 08 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Service, please!
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
A good friend of mine recently mentioned he was doing a car boot sale at the weekend. “You mad fool,” I thought to myself, while emailing back saying what a great idea it was. Standing in a field at stupid o’clock haggling with a pensioner over a 25 pence tank top is not my idea of fun. These days, I felt like reminding him, you can buy and sell at an online auction site such as eBay.
But even that isn’t without its hassle factor, especially if you’re not very good at spotting real from fake. And if you’re ripped off, whaddya do? Start tit-for-tat name-calling using online feedback? After all, talking to a member of staff at eBay seems nigh on impossible – a problem that tends to plague many online outlets. In fact, websites really need to do much better at adding a pinch of the human touch to proceedings.
Fined over fakes
These aren’t great times for eBay. The site recently got an expensive rap across the knuckles for being a teensy weensy bit lax on monitoring who’s selling what on their website. A French court ordered the outfit to pay around £31 million to LVMH Group, the makers of luxury goods including brands Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton.
The Paris hearing criticised the company for not doing enough to curtail the sale of fake goods on their pages, although eBay plans to appeal. That’s all well and good, but what I’m more bothered about is being unable to speak to eBay via the phone, rather than using email or the web. Have you ever tried to contact them and speak to a real person? No chance.
Considering all the money eBay makes from fees, it seems embarrassingly short-staffed. Got a complaint? Then fill in the online form. Billing enquiry? Select an option from the drop-down list and click the button. Want to speak to a customer services representative? Oh forget it! I tried contacting eBay about this issue, via their PR company, but unfortunately they didn’t reply to my phone calls or emails. That’s a shame as I had lots to ask them!
Could do better
You’ll find this frustrating lack of customer service rears its ugly head all over the web. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve wanted to pick up the phone to call a company and given up after not being able to find a number. Amazon, for example, has a fantastic site but try to give them a bell and you’re scuppered.
Meanwhile, companies that do have a number, often keep you hanging on forever while you’re forced to listed to excruciating piped music. I’ve had nightmarish encounters with really big companies like BT, Ryanair and FlyBe in the past while simply trying to speak to someone, but if I was going to mention all the others then this would be one very long column!
“I think customer service on the web in general today is incredibly non-user friendly,” agrees Jeff Hoffman, CEO of American website uBid.com. “Unlike other sites on the web, we actually want our customers to call if they are having any difficulties to make sure they’re having the best experience possible.”
The uBid site specialises in selling brand name excess inventory and their willingness to respond to my questions was in direct contrast to some of the other companies I approached while writing this column.
Staying alert Executive Vice President Tim Takesue at the company is also keen to stress their vigilance at ensuring products placed on the uBid site are legitimate. “We’ve turned down what we believe to be millions of dollars in potential fees because we do not tolerate these types of sellers on our site.”
“Of course, we could have used these fees to build our business, as some of our peers may have done, but we have decided to adhere to a set of criteria that we believe is best for our customers, employees, and stakeholders.”
“If a customer is unsatisfied and wants their money back, we’ll give them their money back,” adds Hoffman. “I’m not sure you’ll find many places on the web that will do that.”
Showing initiative
I’d like to see some more initiatives like those used on the Yorkshire based eBuyer website too. They do have a customer phone number and, even more helpfully, right underneath there’s an average call waiting time displayed which at least offers you a ray of hope. That’s more than can be said for many much larger operations.
I guess the argument will always be that recruiting more staff means additional costs and that isn’t something easily factored into a web store where prices have to be so competitive. To be honest though, I don’t mind paying a little more if it comes with the reassuring backup of a customer services hotline. Even if they’re based in Calcutta.
Using the web to shop, especially if you’re a bloke like me who hates traipsing up and down the high street, is perfect because it’s quick, easy and many outlets even gift wrap. Magic! It’s just a shame the whole process grinds to a halt the minute there’s a problem and you need to speak to someone.
Shopping around
The internet provides us with plenty of choice though, so I guess it’s always possible to go and shop somewhere else with just a few mouse clicks. And if online stores can take the example of traditional shops and throw in a little bit of humanity to their dealing, I think shopping on the web could be a fabulous experience.
I’m not saying it needs to be run like the little corner shop in Open All Hours, but the idea of customer service is one that needs looking at sooner rather than later. Despite the grumbles though nobody can hold a candle to eBay when it comes to getting your unwanted tat seen. And for buying and selling stuff it’s a fabulous tool. But I do wish they and all the others would take on some people to staff the phones!
Links
eBay customer support
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Waging war on spam
Goodbye Mr Gates
Faking it with digital photos
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Tuesday, 08 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Service, please!
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
A good friend of mine recently mentioned he was doing a car boot sale at the weekend. “You mad fool,” I thought to myself, while emailing back saying what a great idea it was. Standing in a field at stupid o’clock haggling with a pensioner over a 25 pence tank top is not my idea of fun. These days, I felt like reminding him, you can buy and sell at an online auction site such as eBay.
But even that isn’t without its hassle factor, especially if you’re not very good at spotting real from fake. And if you’re ripped off, whaddya do? Start tit-for-tat name-calling using online feedback? After all, talking to a member of staff at eBay seems nigh on impossible – a problem that tends to plague many online outlets. In fact, websites really need to do much better at adding a pinch of the human touch to proceedings.
Fined over fakes
These aren’t great times for eBay. The site recently got an expensive rap across the knuckles for being a teensy weensy bit lax on monitoring who’s selling what on their website. A French court ordered the outfit to pay around £31 million to LVMH Group, the makers of luxury goods including brands Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton.
The Paris hearing criticised the company for not doing enough to curtail the sale of fake goods on their pages, although eBay plans to appeal. That’s all well and good, but what I’m more bothered about is being unable to speak to eBay via the phone, rather than using email or the web. Have you ever tried to contact them and speak to a real person? No chance.
Considering all the money eBay makes from fees, it seems embarrassingly short-staffed. Got a complaint? Then fill in the online form. Billing enquiry? Select an option from the drop-down list and click the button. Want to speak to a customer services representative? Oh forget it! I tried contacting eBay about this issue, via their PR company, but unfortunately they didn’t reply to my phone calls or emails. That’s a shame as I had lots to ask them!
Could do better
You’ll find this frustrating lack of customer service rears its ugly head all over the web. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve wanted to pick up the phone to call a company and given up after not being able to find a number. Amazon, for example, has a fantastic site but try to give them a bell and you’re scuppered.
Meanwhile, companies that do have a number, often keep you hanging on forever while you’re forced to listed to excruciating piped music. I’ve had nightmarish encounters with really big companies like BT, Ryanair and FlyBe in the past while simply trying to speak to someone, but if I was going to mention all the others then this would be one very long column!
“I think customer service on the web in general today is incredibly non-user friendly,” agrees Jeff Hoffman, CEO of American website uBid.com. “Unlike other sites on the web, we actually want our customers to call if they are having any difficulties to make sure they’re having the best experience possible.”
The uBid site specialises in selling brand name excess inventory and their willingness to respond to my questions was in direct contrast to some of the other companies I approached while writing this column.
Staying alert Executive Vice President Tim Takesue at the company is also keen to stress their vigilance at ensuring products placed on the uBid site are legitimate. “We’ve turned down what we believe to be millions of dollars in potential fees because we do not tolerate these types of sellers on our site.”
“Of course, we could have used these fees to build our business, as some of our peers may have done, but we have decided to adhere to a set of criteria that we believe is best for our customers, employees, and stakeholders.”
“If a customer is unsatisfied and wants their money back, we’ll give them their money back,” adds Hoffman. “I’m not sure you’ll find many places on the web that will do that.”
Showing initiative
I’d like to see some more initiatives like those used on the Yorkshire based eBuyer website too. They do have a customer phone number and, even more helpfully, right underneath there’s an average call waiting time displayed which at least offers you a ray of hope. That’s more than can be said for many much larger operations.
I guess the argument will always be that recruiting more staff means additional costs and that isn’t something easily factored into a web store where prices have to be so competitive. To be honest though, I don’t mind paying a little more if it comes with the reassuring backup of a customer services hotline. Even if they’re based in Calcutta.
Using the web to shop, especially if you’re a bloke like me who hates traipsing up and down the high street, is perfect because it’s quick, easy and many outlets even gift wrap. Magic! It’s just a shame the whole process grinds to a halt the minute there’s a problem and you need to speak to someone.
Shopping around
The internet provides us with plenty of choice though, so I guess it’s always possible to go and shop somewhere else with just a few mouse clicks. And if online stores can take the example of traditional shops and throw in a little bit of humanity to their dealing, I think shopping on the web could be a fabulous experience.
I’m not saying it needs to be run like the little corner shop in Open All Hours, but the idea of customer service is one that needs looking at sooner rather than later. Despite the grumbles though nobody can hold a candle to eBay when it comes to getting your unwanted tat seen. And for buying and selling stuff it’s a fabulous tool. But I do wish they and all the others would take on some people to staff the phones!
Links
eBay customer support
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Waging war on spam
Goodbye Mr Gates
Faking it with digital photos
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 02 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Waging war on spam
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
The last few days of my humble existence have been dominated in equal measure by outstandingly tedious spam messages and infuriating websites. It started at home on Saturday when I got a random web-style newsletter from a squash ‘organisation’.
"Clymo," it said, "You have received this email because you subscribed to it." Erm, no I didn’t. And it’s Mr Clymo to you. Besides, I’ve never played a game in my life so they’re not likely to sell me a racket, balls or any other kind of squash paraphernalia anytime soon, thank you very much.
Infected websites
According to research by Sophos, the biggest threat for most computer users today comes from the web and email. Hardly a revelation, until you hear the scary statistics. "One new malware-infected webpage is discovered every five seconds," reveals Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with the anti-spam specialists.
"There are over 15,000 new infected web pages uncovered every day, and 79% of those are legitimate websites that have been hacked."
"What that means to users is that if you visit a website, you may become infected by a piece of malware designed to steal your identity simply by browsing to the site. This doesn't just happen if you visit a pornographic or gambling website – it can happen when you visit any kind of website. A recent example is the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) website which was found to be carrying infected web pages during the Wimbledon tournament."
Sea of spam
The spam continues back at work on Monday, this time from a nightclub that keeps trying to get me to go to their bangin’ house nights. Not interested. I told them as much and got this shirty email saying ‘Well, go to the ‘Unsubscribe’ link and remove yourself’. Excuse me, I didn’t sign up in the first place.
If it’s not spam, it’s something else. On Tuesday I’m sent an automated email telling me a flight I’ve booked has been rescheduled. The good news is that I’m still going from Southampton to Aberdeen. The bad news is that it’s via Belfast, is about two hours earlier and the journey time has gone from around one hour to nearly six. My options? There aren’t any. No other flights on that day so I’m stuck with it and all for the bargain basement fare of £153.
By Wednesday I try to pay the electricity bill online. The website doesn’t recognise me, even though I’ve registered before. Three attempts to log in but no joy. I try the automated phone payment system and the digitised voice at the other end is obviously having an off day and refuses to understand me. After half an hour I give up.
Lost identity
On Thursday I have to carry out a chore on a government website, and I fear the worst. I go through six steps and then, out of the blue, it asks for an ID number. I try a couple from my original registration emails. They don’t work. I email them. They don’t reply. I phone them. "I can’t hear you caller," says the distant voice at the other end. "If you can hear me, please replace the handset and try again." I do and get cut off. I phone back and, after a lengthy wait, a guy says he can resend the ID I need via email.
"But they usually end up in the trash," he tuts.
"You sound like you’ve said that before?" I add wearily.
Breaking up
On Friday the phone goes and it’s a salesman from my gas company. He gives me the spiel on this boiler scheme they have on offer. "One of your colleagues said all this to me last Friday," I tell him. She kept on cutting out so I ended up putting the phone down.
This guy is even more persistent. "Well, we are your energy supplier. You must have put your number into our website (I didn’t). So do you have cover at the moment? Who is it with?" This time I pretend the line is breaking up and say "Hello" repeatedly into the handset until he hangs up. It’s the oldest trick in the book, mate.
Hefty fines
In between all this, my inbox continues to fill with all manner of spam. Laws on email marketing came into force back in December 2003, with fines for wrongdoing supposedly hefty. But this doesn’t seem to bother Moses H. Slingback and all the other madly monikered legions who keep trying to sell me Viagra from far-flung corners of the globe. And that’s a big part of the problem. As most of the spam we receive comes from outside of the UK, our slowly evolving laws can’t touch it.
"Spam is a worldwide problem which knows no national boundaries, and computer crime authorities are working hard at tracking down the worst offenders," says Graham Cluley.
"However, legislation alone is not going to be the answer to the spam problem. The fundamental reason why spam exists is because it works – in a nutshell, it makes money for the spammers.
"11% of people admit to having bought goods advertised via spam. If you buy goods marketed via spam then you are simply encouraging the spammers to send more junk email. If no-one purchased the products, then the spammers would largely disappear."
So what am I to do? Well, I’m going to try some new and improved software and let you know what it’s like in a couple of weeks or so. Watch this space…
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Goodbye Mr Gates
Faking it with digital photos
Beating the burglars
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Wednesday, 02 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Waging war on spam
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
The last few days of my humble existence have been dominated in equal measure by outstandingly tedious spam messages and infuriating websites. It started at home on Saturday when I got a random web-style newsletter from a squash ‘organisation’.
"Clymo," it said, "You have received this email because you subscribed to it." Erm, no I didn’t. And it’s Mr Clymo to you. Besides, I’ve never played a game in my life so they’re not likely to sell me a racket, balls or any other kind of squash paraphernalia anytime soon, thank you very much.
Infected websites
According to research by Sophos, the biggest threat for most computer users today comes from the web and email. Hardly a revelation, until you hear the scary statistics. "One new malware-infected webpage is discovered every five seconds," reveals Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with the anti-spam specialists.
"There are over 15,000 new infected web pages uncovered every day, and 79% of those are legitimate websites that have been hacked."
"What that means to users is that if you visit a website, you may become infected by a piece of malware designed to steal your identity simply by browsing to the site. This doesn't just happen if you visit a pornographic or gambling website – it can happen when you visit any kind of website. A recent example is the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) website which was found to be carrying infected web pages during the Wimbledon tournament."
Sea of spam
The spam continues back at work on Monday, this time from a nightclub that keeps trying to get me to go to their bangin’ house nights. Not interested. I told them as much and got this shirty email saying ‘Well, go to the ‘Unsubscribe’ link and remove yourself’. Excuse me, I didn’t sign up in the first place.
If it’s not spam, it’s something else. On Tuesday I’m sent an automated email telling me a flight I’ve booked has been rescheduled. The good news is that I’m still going from Southampton to Aberdeen. The bad news is that it’s via Belfast, is about two hours earlier and the journey time has gone from around one hour to nearly six. My options? There aren’t any. No other flights on that day so I’m stuck with it and all for the bargain basement fare of £153.
By Wednesday I try to pay the electricity bill online. The website doesn’t recognise me, even though I’ve registered before. Three attempts to log in but no joy. I try the automated phone payment system and the digitised voice at the other end is obviously having an off day and refuses to understand me. After half an hour I give up.
Lost identity
On Thursday I have to carry out a chore on a government website, and I fear the worst. I go through six steps and then, out of the blue, it asks for an ID number. I try a couple from my original registration emails. They don’t work. I email them. They don’t reply. I phone them. "I can’t hear you caller," says the distant voice at the other end. "If you can hear me, please replace the handset and try again." I do and get cut off. I phone back and, after a lengthy wait, a guy says he can resend the ID I need via email.
"But they usually end up in the trash," he tuts.
"You sound like you’ve said that before?" I add wearily.
Breaking up
On Friday the phone goes and it’s a salesman from my gas company. He gives me the spiel on this boiler scheme they have on offer. "One of your colleagues said all this to me last Friday," I tell him. She kept on cutting out so I ended up putting the phone down.
This guy is even more persistent. "Well, we are your energy supplier. You must have put your number into our website (I didn’t). So do you have cover at the moment? Who is it with?" This time I pretend the line is breaking up and say "Hello" repeatedly into the handset until he hangs up. It’s the oldest trick in the book, mate.
Hefty fines
In between all this, my inbox continues to fill with all manner of spam. Laws on email marketing came into force back in December 2003, with fines for wrongdoing supposedly hefty. But this doesn’t seem to bother Moses H. Slingback and all the other madly monikered legions who keep trying to sell me Viagra from far-flung corners of the globe. And that’s a big part of the problem. As most of the spam we receive comes from outside of the UK, our slowly evolving laws can’t touch it.
"Spam is a worldwide problem which knows no national boundaries, and computer crime authorities are working hard at tracking down the worst offenders," says Graham Cluley.
"However, legislation alone is not going to be the answer to the spam problem. The fundamental reason why spam exists is because it works – in a nutshell, it makes money for the spammers.
"11% of people admit to having bought goods advertised via spam. If you buy goods marketed via spam then you are simply encouraging the spammers to send more junk email. If no-one purchased the products, then the spammers would largely disappear."
So what am I to do? Well, I’m going to try some new and improved software and let you know what it’s like in a couple of weeks or so. Watch this space…
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Goodbye Mr Gates
Faking it with digital photos
Beating the burglars
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Friday, 27 June 2008
The Clymo Brief: Goodbye Mr Gates
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
“He has taken over the world, end of story. Live with it. Accept it. It’s done.” So said Sir Alan Sugar of Bill Gates on BBC 2’s The Money Programme last Friday night.
Seeing old black and white photographs of the dapper Sugar standing next to one of his Amstrad PCs took me nostalgically back to my first ever computer and the wonderful world of the Windows operating system.
My first computer
It was an Amstrad PCW9512 that still languishes in my parents’ garden shed. It also probably still works. Not that its technical specs would cut the mustard these days with its far from blistering 4MHz processor speed, 512KB (yes, that’s kilobytes) of RAM and 720KB floppy disk drive along with a CP/M operating system.
Its word processing capability, however, did have black text on a white background, unlike earlier models that displayed green on black. It even enabled the construction of a database of names and addresses. Wowza!
I remember being very impressed by all of this, having previously done my typing only on a Brother electric typewriter. Prior to that, my only encounter with computers had been via a Space Invaders machine at the local chip shop. That must have been in 1988 or 89.
Early dealings with Sir Alan
All this came drifting back while I listened to Sir Alan chirping on about his dealings with Gates back in the eighties, about how he had brokered a deal to use the ever-expanding Microsoft Corporation’s operating system. Apparently, hard-nosed businessman Sir Alan got it for peanuts - although he’s not allowed to say exactly how much even to this day.
So Gates didn’t quite manage to conquer the Amstrad HQ in Brentwood, Essex but he did manage the rest of the world over the course of the last 30 years or so. No mean feat, as Sir Alan candidly admitted, having himself focused on the computers while missing the true value of the software that ran them: “He was right, I was wrong.”
Gates' retirement
With Gates having just retired from Microsoft, it is not so much the end of one career but the beginning of another. Though Gates will remain company chairman, he has ambitious plans to dedicate his time to global health and education initiatives pioneered by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an organisation he founded with his wife back at the beginning of the decade.
In between, Gates will be popping along to the Olympic Games in Beijing and, if he’s anything like me when I was ‘between jobs’, catching up on all those things he didn’t get around to while working.
You could forgive Gates if he just wanted to put his feet up and relax for a while, but it seems that this is not an option for a man who appears driven in every task he takes on. That determination has roots that go way back.
Entrepreneurial roots
Gates, now 52, grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington. This is an area of the States where entrepreneurial vision seems to permeate the very air you breathe, having spawned the likes of Amazon, RealNetworks, Starbucks and, erm, grunge music. The suburb of Redmond, where the Microsoft company headquarters has been based since early 1986 is leafy, laid-back and affluent.
Gates’ early years in computing make for a Boy’s Own adventure of messing about with electronics alongside his pal Paul Allen, from tinkering with a primitive Teletype machine at his Lakeside private school in the sixties through to the duo’s production of software for the very first personal computer, the Altair.
Harvard drop-out
After enrolling at Harvard College in 1973, Gates became good friends with the similarly driven Steve Ballmer and the two subsequently became close business collaborators. Ballmer later became CEO at Microsoft and is now due to inherit Bill’s old office at the Microsoft HQ.
Gates, meanwhile, has probably transferred his lucky Gonk and electric pencil-sharpener to a broom cupboard down the corridor for occasions when he suddenly needs to drop by – perhaps to see if Ballmer has moved the furniture around.
Amazingly, and much to the initial chagrin of his parents, Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue his goals, founding Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico during 1975 and relocating the fledgling business to Bellevue, Washington at the tail-end of 1978.
This was the period that produced that fabulous photograph of the original Microsoft team looking more like an obscure southern rock band than a serious business proposition. But, believe it or not, back then nearly everyone else looked like that too.
Striking a deal with IBM
A few haircuts later and after going public in 1981, Microsoft went on to strike a deal with computing colossus IBM, one which saw their fledgling MS-DOS 1.0 operating system released to a mass market audience.
The rest is software history. The Office suite has now been around for nearly 20 years, while successive versions of Windows have generally been improvements on their predecessors. Of course, there is an argument over Vista which seems to have garnered adulation and disdain in equal measures, meaning its replacement, Windows 7 will have much to gain.
Internet visions
I am more intrigued, however, about Gates’ early vision of the internet. Reading his memo entitled The Internet Tidal Wave back in May 1995 would have provided a fascinating insight into the way things would turn out.
“Now I assign the internet the highest level of importance,” Gates wrote with the sort of determined outlook that would propel Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on to become the most widely used web browsing software on the planet.
Having said that, I think it’s also fair to say that Microsoft did some things wrong where Google has gone on to do a lot of things right. They’re still largely playing catch-up on that front too.
Competition
There is also, perhaps, a hard edge to Gates’ methods. This was hinted at later on in last Friday’s Money Programme as Fiona Bruce put it to Gates that the company still deals a sledgehammer type blow to anyone who challenges its supremacy.
“One of the things critics say is that Microsoft is as aggressive about winning now as a tiny start-up fighting for its life,” she commented.
“Well, that sounds like a compliment,” beamed Gates, not taking the bait. “It’s a very competitive business.”
Indeed it is and, as a result, it has been easy to knock Gates for his unrelenting vision over the years. But credit is due for what the man has accomplished in the field of computing and communications.
Oh sure, Windows doesn’t always do what you want it to. On occasions it’ll drive you completely bonkers. (Blue Screen of Death anyone?) But Gates took computing software to the masses.
He may have given us Clippy, that immensely irritating animated paperclip office assistant, but this is still an impressive achievement for a college drop-out. Mind you, he was finally invited back to Harvard in June of last year to receive an honorary degree. I guess you could say he’s earned it.
Links
Search Tech & Gadgets for more on Bill Gates
Search the web for more on Bill Gates
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Faking it with digital photos
Beating the burglars
Customised sat-nav
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Friday, 27 June 2008
The Clymo Brief: Goodbye Mr Gates
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
“He has taken over the world, end of story. Live with it. Accept it. It’s done.” So said Sir Alan Sugar of Bill Gates on BBC 2’s The Money Programme last Friday night.
Seeing old black and white photographs of the dapper Sugar standing next to one of his Amstrad PCs took me nostalgically back to my first ever computer and the wonderful world of the Windows operating system.
My first computer
It was an Amstrad PCW9512 that still languishes in my parents’ garden shed. It also probably still works. Not that its technical specs would cut the mustard these days with its far from blistering 4MHz processor speed, 512KB (yes, that’s kilobytes) of RAM and 720KB floppy disk drive along with a CP/M operating system.
Its word processing capability, however, did have black text on a white background, unlike earlier models that displayed green on black. It even enabled the construction of a database of names and addresses. Wowza!
I remember being very impressed by all of this, having previously done my typing only on a Brother electric typewriter. Prior to that, my only encounter with computers had been via a Space Invaders machine at the local chip shop. That must have been in 1988 or 89.
Early dealings with Sir Alan
All this came drifting back while I listened to Sir Alan chirping on about his dealings with Gates back in the eighties, about how he had brokered a deal to use the ever-expanding Microsoft Corporation’s operating system. Apparently, hard-nosed businessman Sir Alan got it for peanuts - although he’s not allowed to say exactly how much even to this day.
So Gates didn’t quite manage to conquer the Amstrad HQ in Brentwood, Essex but he did manage the rest of the world over the course of the last 30 years or so. No mean feat, as Sir Alan candidly admitted, having himself focused on the computers while missing the true value of the software that ran them: “He was right, I was wrong.”
Gates' retirement
With Gates having just retired from Microsoft, it is not so much the end of one career but the beginning of another. Though Gates will remain company chairman, he has ambitious plans to dedicate his time to global health and education initiatives pioneered by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an organisation he founded with his wife back at the beginning of the decade.
In between, Gates will be popping along to the Olympic Games in Beijing and, if he’s anything like me when I was ‘between jobs’, catching up on all those things he didn’t get around to while working.
You could forgive Gates if he just wanted to put his feet up and relax for a while, but it seems that this is not an option for a man who appears driven in every task he takes on. That determination has roots that go way back.
Entrepreneurial roots
Gates, now 52, grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington. This is an area of the States where entrepreneurial vision seems to permeate the very air you breathe, having spawned the likes of Amazon, RealNetworks, Starbucks and, erm, grunge music. The suburb of Redmond, where the Microsoft company headquarters has been based since early 1986 is leafy, laid-back and affluent.
Gates’ early years in computing make for a Boy’s Own adventure of messing about with electronics alongside his pal Paul Allen, from tinkering with a primitive Teletype machine at his Lakeside private school in the sixties through to the duo’s production of software for the very first personal computer, the Altair.
Harvard drop-out
After enrolling at Harvard College in 1973, Gates became good friends with the similarly driven Steve Ballmer and the two subsequently became close business collaborators. Ballmer later became CEO at Microsoft and is now due to inherit Bill’s old office at the Microsoft HQ.
Gates, meanwhile, has probably transferred his lucky Gonk and electric pencil-sharpener to a broom cupboard down the corridor for occasions when he suddenly needs to drop by – perhaps to see if Ballmer has moved the furniture around.
Amazingly, and much to the initial chagrin of his parents, Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue his goals, founding Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico during 1975 and relocating the fledgling business to Bellevue, Washington at the tail-end of 1978.
This was the period that produced that fabulous photograph of the original Microsoft team looking more like an obscure southern rock band than a serious business proposition. But, believe it or not, back then nearly everyone else looked like that too.
Striking a deal with IBM
A few haircuts later and after going public in 1981, Microsoft went on to strike a deal with computing colossus IBM, one which saw their fledgling MS-DOS 1.0 operating system released to a mass market audience.
The rest is software history. The Office suite has now been around for nearly 20 years, while successive versions of Windows have generally been improvements on their predecessors. Of course, there is an argument over Vista which seems to have garnered adulation and disdain in equal measures, meaning its replacement, Windows 7 will have much to gain.
Internet visions
I am more intrigued, however, about Gates’ early vision of the internet. Reading his memo entitled The Internet Tidal Wave back in May 1995 would have provided a fascinating insight into the way things would turn out.
“Now I assign the internet the highest level of importance,” Gates wrote with the sort of determined outlook that would propel Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on to become the most widely used web browsing software on the planet.
Having said that, I think it’s also fair to say that Microsoft did some things wrong where Google has gone on to do a lot of things right. They’re still largely playing catch-up on that front too.
Competition
There is also, perhaps, a hard edge to Gates’ methods. This was hinted at later on in last Friday’s Money Programme as Fiona Bruce put it to Gates that the company still deals a sledgehammer type blow to anyone who challenges its supremacy.
“One of the things critics say is that Microsoft is as aggressive about winning now as a tiny start-up fighting for its life,” she commented.
“Well, that sounds like a compliment,” beamed Gates, not taking the bait. “It’s a very competitive business.”
Indeed it is and, as a result, it has been easy to knock Gates for his unrelenting vision over the years. But credit is due for what the man has accomplished in the field of computing and communications.
Oh sure, Windows doesn’t always do what you want it to. On occasions it’ll drive you completely bonkers. (Blue Screen of Death anyone?) But Gates took computing software to the masses.
He may have given us Clippy, that immensely irritating animated paperclip office assistant, but this is still an impressive achievement for a college drop-out. Mind you, he was finally invited back to Harvard in June of last year to receive an honorary degree. I guess you could say he’s earned it.
Links
Search Tech & Gadgets for more on Bill Gates
Search the web for more on Bill Gates
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Faking it with digital photos
Beating the burglars
Customised sat-nav
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: Faking it
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Y’know what? It’s easy to be a bit sniffy about those digital photography fakes that often drop into our inboxes but, hell, it’s difficult to resist looking at ‘em. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen that enormous cat picture over the years and the noble home-grown attempt at fakery never fails to raise a titter.
Yes, we all know it’s not real but it’s a bit of fun while you’re dunking a HobNob or munching on a ham and egg bap, right? A picture really does say a thousand words.
And it got me to thinking.
I wondered just how easy it would be to concoct my own photographic fakes with the help of some tools off the web and a selection of carefully assembled snaps. It’s actually surprisingly simple to create passable attempts. I doubt they’d stand up to professional scrutiny, but for emailing around to your friends they work just fine.
High endGraphics professionals who use high-end software like Photoshop love to think they’re one step above everyone else when it comes to image manipulation. But with a bit of imagination and patience it’s surprising what you can produce off your own back and all in the space of just a few mouse clicks. Take a look at what I've come up with and see what you reckon.
Oh, and see if you can spot which ones aren’t fakes before you read the text!
I used Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, a software program that can be used as a free trial and has many of the same tools found inside the likes of Photoshop. It can also be used for carrying out everyday editing chores on your digital photography images, so it’s worth a look. Mind you, there are oodles of other image-editing tools to be found online too.
Click on this text link or on any of the images below to start the slide show.
The Clymo Brief: Faking it
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Y’know what? It’s easy to be a bit sniffy about those digital photography fakes that often drop into our inboxes but, hell, it’s difficult to resist looking at ‘em. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen that enormous cat picture over the years and the noble home-grown attempt at fakery never fails to raise a titter.
Yes, we all know it’s not real but it’s a bit of fun while you’re dunking a HobNob or munching on a ham and egg bap, right? A picture really does say a thousand words.
And it got me to thinking.
I wondered just how easy it would be to concoct my own photographic fakes with the help of some tools off the web and a selection of carefully assembled snaps. It’s actually surprisingly simple to create passable attempts. I doubt they’d stand up to professional scrutiny, but for emailing around to your friends they work just fine.
High endGraphics professionals who use high-end software like Photoshop love to think they’re one step above everyone else when it comes to image manipulation. But with a bit of imagination and patience it’s surprising what you can produce off your own back and all in the space of just a few mouse clicks. Take a look at what I've come up with and see what you reckon.
Oh, and see if you can spot which ones aren’t fakes before you read the text!
I used Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, a software program that can be used as a free trial and has many of the same tools found inside the likes of Photoshop. It can also be used for carrying out everyday editing chores on your digital photography images, so it’s worth a look. Mind you, there are oodles of other image-editing tools to be found online too.
Click on this text link or on any of the images below to start the slide show.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: Time to buy an iPhone?
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Having my trusty mobile phone trashed recently could have been a sign that I finally need to get an iPhone. And when Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced on Monday an improved model at a lower price, it should have sealed the deal. “It’s more affordable,” said Jobs, conceding that 56% of people who haven’t yet purchased an iPhone say it’s because of the price.
Unfortunately, as soon as somebody spilled that bottle of cheap white wine all over my old Nokia, I went straight out and bought another, erm, Nokia. Hey, I’m short on patience and can’t wait for July 11, OK?
In pictures: the iPhone 3G
But while the N95 is arguably a better handset with sporadically pacy web browsing and a decent camera, since Apple is offering the new model for £100 then perhaps I should have reconsidered. Absurd cost has always been the major turn-off until now, but a killer price-tag allied to 3G performance makes the iPhone tempting. However, I just couldn’t hang on.
“What do you use your phone for?” barked the surly salesman, as I shopped for a replacement for my heavily soiled handset.
“Um, making calls…sending texts…” I replied, stating the bleeding obvious. “Pictures, what about pictures,” he demanded to know, sounding like a graduate fresh from the Margaret Thatcher Charm School. “To be honest, I don’t take pictures on my phone that often,” I confessed. That’s mainly because they’re rubbish. Besides, I’ve got at least one digital camera that does a better job. In fact, I’ve got several.
All-rounder
What I really need is a good all-rounder - a phone that will do everything and cut down on the gadget overkill. At the moment, I need a man-bag for all the gubbins I have to drag around. Strewth, it’s 25 degrees outside and I’m still carrying a fleecy jacket, simply because it’s the only thing that can hold all my ‘stuff’.
In any one day, my pockets are usually bulging with a phone, iPod (various), PDA, cameras (numerous), sat-nav bits and bobs alongside house and car keys, plus a dazzling array of memory sticks. I need features on a phone that can do away with all, or at least some of that.
The iPhone’s new and impressive technical spec includes GPS – which sorts out sat-nav - but I think it will be its applications where the exciting developments really happen. I’m particularly keen on how the iPhone could become a cross-platform organiser using the MobileMe feature. “It’s Microsoft Exchange for the rest of us,” beams the affable ‘John’ through dazzling pearly-whites in an Apple promo video clip.
Immense potential
A feature like this will whip up interest with business users who would normally use a BlackBerry due to its excellent emailing capacity, but it also has immense potential for crossover users – like me.
As someone who uses both PCs and Macs, this promises synchronisation of email, calendar, contact lists and photos between the iPhone and all your computers. If it functions as smiling John says it does then I’m sure I’ll love it.
The service keeps all your data stored on a virtual ‘cloud’ (or secure online server to you and me) and, using a push email system, ensures you’re always viewing up-to-date information. There’s also an online storage supply of 20GB that could prove very handy as I’m forever running out of disk space.
Web preview
Hopefully the iPhone 3G will also make mobile surfing of the web a worthwhile pastime. Up until now it’s largely been rubbish. I remember getting an internet-enabled phone years ago and being hugely excited about exploring every nook and cranny of the web while travelling. Except it didn’t work.
Fast forward to this year and even browsing web pages using the new BlackBerry Pearl 8100 is little better. The Nokia is fairly good but the iPhone not only promises to do it faster but on a screen where you can preview and read pages whole, rather than a few lame lines at a time.
Sadly, back on the point of pictures, it looks like the lacklustre two megapixel camera remains the least inspiring iPhone feature. So we’re still a way off having a do-it-all gadget that’ll allow me to forget the silly man bag idea and leave my jacket at home. Nevertheless, I think the case for buying myself an iPhone is a stronger one now than it was before.
Ultimately though, is that pricing really any better? It’s easy to use the £100 ballpark figure to reel people in but, on closer inspection, the contracts still look pretty pricey to me. Saying that, it seems contracts will include unlimited data browsing – which will be the first topic of conversation when I head back to see Mr Angry on or around July 11.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Beating the burglars
Customised sat-nav
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
The Clymo Brief: Time to buy an iPhone?
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Having my trusty mobile phone trashed recently could have been a sign that I finally need to get an iPhone. And when Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced on Monday an improved model at a lower price, it should have sealed the deal. “It’s more affordable,” said Jobs, conceding that 56% of people who haven’t yet purchased an iPhone say it’s because of the price.
Unfortunately, as soon as somebody spilled that bottle of cheap white wine all over my old Nokia, I went straight out and bought another, erm, Nokia. Hey, I’m short on patience and can’t wait for July 11, OK?
In pictures: the iPhone 3G
But while the N95 is arguably a better handset with sporadically pacy web browsing and a decent camera, since Apple is offering the new model for £100 then perhaps I should have reconsidered. Absurd cost has always been the major turn-off until now, but a killer price-tag allied to 3G performance makes the iPhone tempting. However, I just couldn’t hang on.
“What do you use your phone for?” barked the surly salesman, as I shopped for a replacement for my heavily soiled handset.
“Um, making calls…sending texts…” I replied, stating the bleeding obvious. “Pictures, what about pictures,” he demanded to know, sounding like a graduate fresh from the Margaret Thatcher Charm School. “To be honest, I don’t take pictures on my phone that often,” I confessed. That’s mainly because they’re rubbish. Besides, I’ve got at least one digital camera that does a better job. In fact, I’ve got several.
All-rounder
What I really need is a good all-rounder - a phone that will do everything and cut down on the gadget overkill. At the moment, I need a man-bag for all the gubbins I have to drag around. Strewth, it’s 25 degrees outside and I’m still carrying a fleecy jacket, simply because it’s the only thing that can hold all my ‘stuff’.
In any one day, my pockets are usually bulging with a phone, iPod (various), PDA, cameras (numerous), sat-nav bits and bobs alongside house and car keys, plus a dazzling array of memory sticks. I need features on a phone that can do away with all, or at least some of that.
The iPhone’s new and impressive technical spec includes GPS – which sorts out sat-nav - but I think it will be its applications where the exciting developments really happen. I’m particularly keen on how the iPhone could become a cross-platform organiser using the MobileMe feature. “It’s Microsoft Exchange for the rest of us,” beams the affable ‘John’ through dazzling pearly-whites in an Apple promo video clip.
Immense potential
A feature like this will whip up interest with business users who would normally use a BlackBerry due to its excellent emailing capacity, but it also has immense potential for crossover users – like me.
As someone who uses both PCs and Macs, this promises synchronisation of email, calendar, contact lists and photos between the iPhone and all your computers. If it functions as smiling John says it does then I’m sure I’ll love it.
The service keeps all your data stored on a virtual ‘cloud’ (or secure online server to you and me) and, using a push email system, ensures you’re always viewing up-to-date information. There’s also an online storage supply of 20GB that could prove very handy as I’m forever running out of disk space.
Web preview
Hopefully the iPhone 3G will also make mobile surfing of the web a worthwhile pastime. Up until now it’s largely been rubbish. I remember getting an internet-enabled phone years ago and being hugely excited about exploring every nook and cranny of the web while travelling. Except it didn’t work.
Fast forward to this year and even browsing web pages using the new BlackBerry Pearl 8100 is little better. The Nokia is fairly good but the iPhone not only promises to do it faster but on a screen where you can preview and read pages whole, rather than a few lame lines at a time.
Sadly, back on the point of pictures, it looks like the lacklustre two megapixel camera remains the least inspiring iPhone feature. So we’re still a way off having a do-it-all gadget that’ll allow me to forget the silly man bag idea and leave my jacket at home. Nevertheless, I think the case for buying myself an iPhone is a stronger one now than it was before.
Ultimately though, is that pricing really any better? It’s easy to use the £100 ballpark figure to reel people in but, on closer inspection, the contracts still look pretty pricey to me. Saying that, it seems contracts will include unlimited data browsing – which will be the first topic of conversation when I head back to see Mr Angry on or around July 11.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Beating the burglars
Customised sat-nav
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: Beating the burglars
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
“We’ve been burgled!” It’s a line no-one wants to hear but that’s exactly what happened to my plumber the other day. He called me to say he was now going to buy a home security kit and wondered if I had any recommendations? I had a couple, as it happens.
All-in-one home security kits don't just deter criminals, they can constantly monitor your property. However, a niggling fear of nightmare installations has put me off trying one so far. And when two examples arrived on my doorstep containing an awful lot of kit, I began to get very nervous.
Of course, there are plenty of less sophisticated deterrents like standalone cameras and motion detectors on the market. Unfortunately, many of these products miss the point entirely and offer no way of letting you know about intruders if you’re not actually in the house.
So what have we got? Well, there’s the AlertMe (£399 plus a £11.75 monthly service charge) and the myhome247 Starter Kit (£249.95, with a free 5mb Remote Access account).
Remote control
AlertMe is predominantly wireless. It consists of a central hub which hooks up to your broadband connection and a series of sensors which are placed strategically around your home. The whole shebang can be controlled with a wireless keyfob or remotely via text messaging and the web (hence the monthly charge). It can also alert friends and neighbours if any doors or windows on your property have been forced or simply left open by mistake.
The myhome247 Starter Kit is perhaps a little more unwieldy. It works using a tangle of ethernet wiring but, on the upside, additional sensors can be used to monitor temperature and wet conditions such as flooding or burst pipes. It also enables you to switch lights, appliances and even your heating on and off with a compatible mobile phone.
Exciting stuff, but bear in mind you’ll need an ethernet router for both to successfully interact with their respective websites.
Smart design
Thankfully, on opening the two large boxes my fears of technological meltdown subsided. AlertMe wins the prize for idiot-proof set-up and installation. All the boxes are numbered, and the website has on-screen instructions to follow while opening each box in numerical order. The component parts have been fabulously designed and look like a family of iPod peripherals in their brilliant white plastic finish.
AlertMe has some undeniably great touches. There’s the Button, which is a magic, multi-purpose plastic knob that can be used as a doorbell, panic button or night-setting device. Just don’t put the battery in until you’ve figured out what to do with it because the incessant flashing will drive you barmy.
The keyfobs (with idiot-proof buttons: Home – it’s big, Away – it’s small) are ultra-funky in white and orange too. And then there’s the Lamp, which is a plastic lozenge thing that supposedly boosts the wireless signal but actually looks great just sitting on the mantelpiece acting plain old sexy.
After connecting the hub and registering, all the sensors and keyfobs communicate wirelessly with the hub and forward encrypted information to the AlertMe servers. Should there be any activity at your house then selected friends, family and neighbours will receive free text messages telling them as much.
The alarm detector sensor is a clever bonus as it allows you to also get notifications if smoke or carbon monoxide alarms are activated. All in all, using AlertMe was a pretty enjoyable experience.
Camera capture
It has to be said the myhome247 is a lot less stylish and appears more like a boxful of assorted component parts. This particular package only has one door sensor too. However, it does have the distinct advantage of the little Panasonic camera that captures video and still images. I even used this to find out which inconsiderate dog owner was letting their mutt poop all over the pavement outside our house!
Myhome247 has more elaborate systems in its range, but upgrading could cost you nearly twice as much again. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to be impressed at being able to remotely monitor options like pet and baby cams, although if you’re going out then aren’t you supposed to take the kiddies with you? Or get a babysitter?
Points of interest
Alongside being undeniably practical, the concept of this system also throws up the opportunity for some fun and games. If you’ve got family or friends round outstaying their welcome then you can scare them witless by using your mobile to switch random lights on and off while you pop down to the shops. Better still, crank the heating up and down remotely from hot to cold and back again before sending them packing in something like a scene from the Exorcist.
Both these systems work on different levels and the mobile notifications on either are spot on. But I’m inclined to say that AlertMe wins this particular battle against the burglars, mainly because it’s easier to set up and looks so cool. If they can add a camera to future packages they’ll have a truly unbeatable product that’ll have villains running for the hills. Or heading next door to your neighbours. In the meantime, I’ll call the plumber.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Personalised sat-nav
High-end gaming battles
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
The Clymo Brief: Beating the burglars
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
“We’ve been burgled!” It’s a line no-one wants to hear but that’s exactly what happened to my plumber the other day. He called me to say he was now going to buy a home security kit and wondered if I had any recommendations? I had a couple, as it happens.
All-in-one home security kits don't just deter criminals, they can constantly monitor your property. However, a niggling fear of nightmare installations has put me off trying one so far. And when two examples arrived on my doorstep containing an awful lot of kit, I began to get very nervous.
Of course, there are plenty of less sophisticated deterrents like standalone cameras and motion detectors on the market. Unfortunately, many of these products miss the point entirely and offer no way of letting you know about intruders if you’re not actually in the house.
So what have we got? Well, there’s the AlertMe (£399 plus a £11.75 monthly service charge) and the myhome247 Starter Kit (£249.95, with a free 5mb Remote Access account).
Remote control
AlertMe is predominantly wireless. It consists of a central hub which hooks up to your broadband connection and a series of sensors which are placed strategically around your home. The whole shebang can be controlled with a wireless keyfob or remotely via text messaging and the web (hence the monthly charge). It can also alert friends and neighbours if any doors or windows on your property have been forced or simply left open by mistake.
The myhome247 Starter Kit is perhaps a little more unwieldy. It works using a tangle of ethernet wiring but, on the upside, additional sensors can be used to monitor temperature and wet conditions such as flooding or burst pipes. It also enables you to switch lights, appliances and even your heating on and off with a compatible mobile phone.
Exciting stuff, but bear in mind you’ll need an ethernet router for both to successfully interact with their respective websites.
Smart design
Thankfully, on opening the two large boxes my fears of technological meltdown subsided. AlertMe wins the prize for idiot-proof set-up and installation. All the boxes are numbered, and the website has on-screen instructions to follow while opening each box in numerical order. The component parts have been fabulously designed and look like a family of iPod peripherals in their brilliant white plastic finish.
AlertMe has some undeniably great touches. There’s the Button, which is a magic, multi-purpose plastic knob that can be used as a doorbell, panic button or night-setting device. Just don’t put the battery in until you’ve figured out what to do with it because the incessant flashing will drive you barmy.
The keyfobs (with idiot-proof buttons: Home – it’s big, Away – it’s small) are ultra-funky in white and orange too. And then there’s the Lamp, which is a plastic lozenge thing that supposedly boosts the wireless signal but actually looks great just sitting on the mantelpiece acting plain old sexy.
After connecting the hub and registering, all the sensors and keyfobs communicate wirelessly with the hub and forward encrypted information to the AlertMe servers. Should there be any activity at your house then selected friends, family and neighbours will receive free text messages telling them as much.
The alarm detector sensor is a clever bonus as it allows you to also get notifications if smoke or carbon monoxide alarms are activated. All in all, using AlertMe was a pretty enjoyable experience.
Camera capture
It has to be said the myhome247 is a lot less stylish and appears more like a boxful of assorted component parts. This particular package only has one door sensor too. However, it does have the distinct advantage of the little Panasonic camera that captures video and still images. I even used this to find out which inconsiderate dog owner was letting their mutt poop all over the pavement outside our house!
Myhome247 has more elaborate systems in its range, but upgrading could cost you nearly twice as much again. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to be impressed at being able to remotely monitor options like pet and baby cams, although if you’re going out then aren’t you supposed to take the kiddies with you? Or get a babysitter?
Points of interest
Alongside being undeniably practical, the concept of this system also throws up the opportunity for some fun and games. If you’ve got family or friends round outstaying their welcome then you can scare them witless by using your mobile to switch random lights on and off while you pop down to the shops. Better still, crank the heating up and down remotely from hot to cold and back again before sending them packing in something like a scene from the Exorcist.
Both these systems work on different levels and the mobile notifications on either are spot on. But I’m inclined to say that AlertMe wins this particular battle against the burglars, mainly because it’s easier to set up and looks so cool. If they can add a camera to future packages they’ll have a truly unbeatable product that’ll have villains running for the hills. Or heading next door to your neighbours. In the meantime, I’ll call the plumber.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Personalised sat-nav
High-end gaming battles
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: Personalised sat-nav
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Are British males more considerate than other drivers? Research from satellite navigation company TomTom says they are. Its recent study found UK chaps were the best in Europe for distributing information and helping other drivers via TomTom’s online Map Share service. Based on research in the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, 67% of men are also more likely to do this over just 45% of women.
The idea behind TomTom’s Map Share is to enable people to make corrections to their own in-car maps, based on everyday observations on the highways and byways, and then swap the data with other users.
The Map Share community, which currently has over two million registered members, is the largest of its type. Every day, 16,000 new members join with users submitting over 10,000 map improvements every 24 hours.
Community feel
Social networking websites have shown that people want to use the online experience to interact with others. Rather cannily, the imaginative Dutch company has seized on this line of thinking to make the Map Share concept really come alive. Visit the TomTom website and you’ll find that, far from being just another dull corporate affair, it is a place with real community feel.
For example, alongside the ability to update maps and share that data with fellow users, there are areas dedicated to uploading and downloading custom created voices. There are also gallery areas where users can share graphics and pictures of their favourite cars or bikes. The whole project feels like a fun experience, but at the same time, bristles with information.
A raft of TomTom products has been unveiled recently, with all designed to work in harmony with the Map Share system. These include the top-of-the-range GO, a widescreen XL model, the ONE and a revised biker-targeted RIDER model.
More compact
The GO is a user-friendly dream – simply speak the name of your destination and the little unit does the rest. It also offers hands-free mobile phone calling via Bluetooth with a safety-conscious auto-answer function.
But for me, the standout units are the TomTom ONE and XL. Both models are a little cheaper than those in the GO range, although that does largely depend on which map and feature package you go for. A European map spec can add around £50 to the asking price.
The new units feel much more compact than earlier TomTom models, but the XL actually offers a larger 4.3 inch anti-glare touch screen, while the ONE has a slightly smaller 3.5 inch viewable area.
Another revelation comes in the shape of a brand new mounting device for your windscreen or dashboard. It’s called the EasyPort, and once detached it ingeniously folds flat allowing you to stash your sat-nav conveniently in a pocket or bag until you’re ready to hit the road again. Useful if you’re parked in a less than salubrious neighbourhood. The internal speaker system on all these devices has also been beefed up to provide a crisp and clean audio performance.
Best route
Once you’ve plumbed your chosen model into the car and powered up, you’ll find a whole pile of surprises. To address ever-rising petrol prices and make journey calculations more realistic, TomTom has introduced IQ Routes. This calculates a route based on real average road speeds and traffic conditions as opposed to maximum speed limits, which can distort trip calculations. It then chooses the best route to take depending on the day of the week. This means you get far more accurate journey timings along with better fuel economy.
Once you’re on your way, there’s a natty lane guidance system that advises which lane to use when approaching complicated or difficult junctions. There are speed limit warnings for the lead-footed drivers among us, plus a safety camera database that alerts you to those roadside pests. A Help Me! menu carries a complete listing of emergency and breakdown service numbers.
Points of interest
My favourite aspect is the points of interest feature, which highlights anything and everything from a theme park or stately home through to a swanky restaurant or greasy spoon roadside café. This makes a great distraction for bored occupants. But it’s the ability to create your own voice commands by sampling any member of your family that is perhaps the main thing to keep the kids amused as you navigate skilfully round an approaching contraflow.
Sitting behind the wheel of a car can often be a frustrating experience unless you’re on the road in the wee small hours when everyone else is in bed. But you know what? Innovative and fun technology like this really does help bring the sparkle back into motoring. Even when you’re going nowhere fast on the M25.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
High-end gaming battles
Space - and how to get there
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
The Clymo Brief: Personalised sat-nav
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
Are British males more considerate than other drivers? Research from satellite navigation company TomTom says they are. Its recent study found UK chaps were the best in Europe for distributing information and helping other drivers via TomTom’s online Map Share service. Based on research in the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, 67% of men are also more likely to do this over just 45% of women.
The idea behind TomTom’s Map Share is to enable people to make corrections to their own in-car maps, based on everyday observations on the highways and byways, and then swap the data with other users.
The Map Share community, which currently has over two million registered members, is the largest of its type. Every day, 16,000 new members join with users submitting over 10,000 map improvements every 24 hours.
Community feel
Social networking websites have shown that people want to use the online experience to interact with others. Rather cannily, the imaginative Dutch company has seized on this line of thinking to make the Map Share concept really come alive. Visit the TomTom website and you’ll find that, far from being just another dull corporate affair, it is a place with real community feel.
For example, alongside the ability to update maps and share that data with fellow users, there are areas dedicated to uploading and downloading custom created voices. There are also gallery areas where users can share graphics and pictures of their favourite cars or bikes. The whole project feels like a fun experience, but at the same time, bristles with information.
A raft of TomTom products has been unveiled recently, with all designed to work in harmony with the Map Share system. These include the top-of-the-range GO, a widescreen XL model, the ONE and a revised biker-targeted RIDER model.
More compact
The GO is a user-friendly dream – simply speak the name of your destination and the little unit does the rest. It also offers hands-free mobile phone calling via Bluetooth with a safety-conscious auto-answer function.
But for me, the standout units are the TomTom ONE and XL. Both models are a little cheaper than those in the GO range, although that does largely depend on which map and feature package you go for. A European map spec can add around £50 to the asking price.
The new units feel much more compact than earlier TomTom models, but the XL actually offers a larger 4.3 inch anti-glare touch screen, while the ONE has a slightly smaller 3.5 inch viewable area.
Another revelation comes in the shape of a brand new mounting device for your windscreen or dashboard. It’s called the EasyPort, and once detached it ingeniously folds flat allowing you to stash your sat-nav conveniently in a pocket or bag until you’re ready to hit the road again. Useful if you’re parked in a less than salubrious neighbourhood. The internal speaker system on all these devices has also been beefed up to provide a crisp and clean audio performance.
Best route
Once you’ve plumbed your chosen model into the car and powered up, you’ll find a whole pile of surprises. To address ever-rising petrol prices and make journey calculations more realistic, TomTom has introduced IQ Routes. This calculates a route based on real average road speeds and traffic conditions as opposed to maximum speed limits, which can distort trip calculations. It then chooses the best route to take depending on the day of the week. This means you get far more accurate journey timings along with better fuel economy.
Once you’re on your way, there’s a natty lane guidance system that advises which lane to use when approaching complicated or difficult junctions. There are speed limit warnings for the lead-footed drivers among us, plus a safety camera database that alerts you to those roadside pests. A Help Me! menu carries a complete listing of emergency and breakdown service numbers.
Points of interest
My favourite aspect is the points of interest feature, which highlights anything and everything from a theme park or stately home through to a swanky restaurant or greasy spoon roadside café. This makes a great distraction for bored occupants. But it’s the ability to create your own voice commands by sampling any member of your family that is perhaps the main thing to keep the kids amused as you navigate skilfully round an approaching contraflow.
Sitting behind the wheel of a car can often be a frustrating experience unless you’re on the road in the wee small hours when everyone else is in bed. But you know what? Innovative and fun technology like this really does help bring the sparkle back into motoring. Even when you’re going nowhere fast on the M25.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
High-end gaming battles
Space - and how to get there
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: High-end gaming
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
There’s nothing quite like a virtual fire-fight to help you let off steam, so an invitation I got recently to do just that proved impossible to resist. It was an evening playing in a Call of Duty 4 tournament via a state-of-the-art gaming network.
“Located in the heart of London’s West End, HMV Gamerbase is as close as you could come to heaven for a committed gamer,” gushed the invite. “With no less than 80 Quad Core PCs and Dual Core notebooks offering multiplayer LAN and online play. D-Link is inviting you to experience this first-class gaming for yourself and put your game-play skills to the test!”
Mind you, they’ve kept Gamerbase so low-key you’d hardly know it’s there. It’s tucked away right at the back of the store and cloaked largely in darkness save for the glow of computer screens. Alongside lots of armed combat, D-Link, the networking and data connectivity company behind the invite, also promised an insight into the formidable technology that keeps this place up and running.
Full speed ahead
“Underpinning the Gamerbase network are five of D-Link’s flagship xStack DGS-3427 switches,” the frothy invitation went on to explain. “These switches form the foundation for one of the most powerful and exciting gaming centres in the world.”
Aside from all that back-end networking activity, it’s a neat setup out front. You get three feet of desktop space and there’s also a sumptuous leather chair to sink into. The on-screen action takes place on a 22-inch Dell monitor, computing power comes from a bank of space-age looking Dell XPS 720 machines while gameplay controls are courtesy of Razer peripherals.
After the obligatory meet and greet with members of the D-Link team, it was eyes down for the gaming tournament – a no-holds-barred session of Call of Duty 4. We were divided into three teams amounting to a mix and match combination of press types and D-Link employees. It was easy to see who was going to win the D-Link goodies up for grabs - a couple of the teams had some real hardcore gamers on board. And then there were people like me, armed with rather less gaming finesse. Overseeing the event was former professional gamer and Quake supremo Sujoy Roy, who helped put the whole Gamerbase project together.
Reliable experience
Fuelled by lager and nibbles, we took up our positions at the PCs and got to work. Boy, does this system fly! A pack mentality seemed to descend over the Gamerbase nerve centre as the corpses started to stack up in a relentless hail of gunfire. The whole thing rapidly descended into a free-for-all towards the end with a lot of friendly fire going on. Three relentless sessions later and it was all over. Needless to say, I wasn’t on the winning team. After giving the majority of us a damn good thrashing, the winners went on to donate their £400 prize to Cancer Research UK.
Things haven’t always been quite as ticketyboo at Gamerbase though. The concept was initially plagued with technical problems when it opened in December 2007. With a small army of computers all putting a drain on the network, the previously installed hardware proved unable to cope with the demand for high bandwidth and low-latency. It often died as a result and ended up with D-Link being appointed to ensure a much more reliable gaming experience.
Andrew Mulholland, D-Link’s Marketing Manager explains the scenario perfectly when he says “If a computer goes down, we’ve got 79 more, but if a port goes down in a switch or if anything happens to the kit, the whole network goes down. Whereas the PCs are like a cog in the wheel, the network is the wheel and if that ever breaks then none of the PCs are available for customers.”
“HMV Gamerbase needed a super-fast, robust network to support its bandwidth-hungry gaming centre. D-Link conducted an extensive site survey to ensure that a switch was chosen that was fit-for-purpose. D-Link provided five high-spec DGS-3427 xStack switches which provide a Gigabit to the desktop. Using clever load-balancing algorithms, traffic was fairly balanced along the uplinks between the switches to ease network congestion. This means that if one slave switch fails, the others will not be affected. Also, with D-Link’s unique ‘Safeguard Engine’, not even an over-utilisation of bandwidth will cause the switch to freeze.”
Home options
So how does all of this translate to a home user scenario? Well, D-Link has just unveiled their DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Media Router and this product is designed with gamers firmly in mind. That’s because the technology inside the box supports dualband 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless signals at the same time. This means that you can check email and browse the internet with the former while at the same time enjoy online gaming or stream a high-def movie using the latter.
Problems with routers, wired or wireless, usually occur when they tend to mix up data traffic so that online gaming, video streaming and web browsing are all channelled into one single data stream. Using technology called Intelligent QoS Prioritization, the DIR-855 analyses data and is then able to separate the information into more efficient multiple data streams. More importantly, these streams are then categorised based on their sensitivity to delay meaning online games, video streams and VoIP calls are much less likely to suffer lag.
All of which should guarantee you lots of uninterrupted on-screen action.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Space - and how to get there
Battling next-gen viruses
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
The Clymo Brief: High-end gaming
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
There’s nothing quite like a virtual fire-fight to help you let off steam, so an invitation I got recently to do just that proved impossible to resist. It was an evening playing in a Call of Duty 4 tournament via a state-of-the-art gaming network.
“Located in the heart of London’s West End, HMV Gamerbase is as close as you could come to heaven for a committed gamer,” gushed the invite. “With no less than 80 Quad Core PCs and Dual Core notebooks offering multiplayer LAN and online play. D-Link is inviting you to experience this first-class gaming for yourself and put your game-play skills to the test!”
Mind you, they’ve kept Gamerbase so low-key you’d hardly know it’s there. It’s tucked away right at the back of the store and cloaked largely in darkness save for the glow of computer screens. Alongside lots of armed combat, D-Link, the networking and data connectivity company behind the invite, also promised an insight into the formidable technology that keeps this place up and running.
Full speed ahead
“Underpinning the Gamerbase network are five of D-Link’s flagship xStack DGS-3427 switches,” the frothy invitation went on to explain. “These switches form the foundation for one of the most powerful and exciting gaming centres in the world.”
Aside from all that back-end networking activity, it’s a neat setup out front. You get three feet of desktop space and there’s also a sumptuous leather chair to sink into. The on-screen action takes place on a 22-inch Dell monitor, computing power comes from a bank of space-age looking Dell XPS 720 machines while gameplay controls are courtesy of Razer peripherals.
After the obligatory meet and greet with members of the D-Link team, it was eyes down for the gaming tournament – a no-holds-barred session of Call of Duty 4. We were divided into three teams amounting to a mix and match combination of press types and D-Link employees. It was easy to see who was going to win the D-Link goodies up for grabs - a couple of the teams had some real hardcore gamers on board. And then there were people like me, armed with rather less gaming finesse. Overseeing the event was former professional gamer and Quake supremo Sujoy Roy, who helped put the whole Gamerbase project together.
Reliable experience
Fuelled by lager and nibbles, we took up our positions at the PCs and got to work. Boy, does this system fly! A pack mentality seemed to descend over the Gamerbase nerve centre as the corpses started to stack up in a relentless hail of gunfire. The whole thing rapidly descended into a free-for-all towards the end with a lot of friendly fire going on. Three relentless sessions later and it was all over. Needless to say, I wasn’t on the winning team. After giving the majority of us a damn good thrashing, the winners went on to donate their £400 prize to Cancer Research UK.
Things haven’t always been quite as ticketyboo at Gamerbase though. The concept was initially plagued with technical problems when it opened in December 2007. With a small army of computers all putting a drain on the network, the previously installed hardware proved unable to cope with the demand for high bandwidth and low-latency. It often died as a result and ended up with D-Link being appointed to ensure a much more reliable gaming experience.
Andrew Mulholland, D-Link’s Marketing Manager explains the scenario perfectly when he says “If a computer goes down, we’ve got 79 more, but if a port goes down in a switch or if anything happens to the kit, the whole network goes down. Whereas the PCs are like a cog in the wheel, the network is the wheel and if that ever breaks then none of the PCs are available for customers.”
“HMV Gamerbase needed a super-fast, robust network to support its bandwidth-hungry gaming centre. D-Link conducted an extensive site survey to ensure that a switch was chosen that was fit-for-purpose. D-Link provided five high-spec DGS-3427 xStack switches which provide a Gigabit to the desktop. Using clever load-balancing algorithms, traffic was fairly balanced along the uplinks between the switches to ease network congestion. This means that if one slave switch fails, the others will not be affected. Also, with D-Link’s unique ‘Safeguard Engine’, not even an over-utilisation of bandwidth will cause the switch to freeze.”
Home options
So how does all of this translate to a home user scenario? Well, D-Link has just unveiled their DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Media Router and this product is designed with gamers firmly in mind. That’s because the technology inside the box supports dualband 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless signals at the same time. This means that you can check email and browse the internet with the former while at the same time enjoy online gaming or stream a high-def movie using the latter.
Problems with routers, wired or wireless, usually occur when they tend to mix up data traffic so that online gaming, video streaming and web browsing are all channelled into one single data stream. Using technology called Intelligent QoS Prioritization, the DIR-855 analyses data and is then able to separate the information into more efficient multiple data streams. More importantly, these streams are then categorised based on their sensitivity to delay meaning online games, video streams and VoIP calls are much less likely to suffer lag.
All of which should guarantee you lots of uninterrupted on-screen action.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Space - and how to get there
Battling next-gen viruses
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: High-end gaming
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
There’s nothing quite like a virtual fire-fight to help you let off steam, so an invitation I got recently to do just that proved impossible to resist. It was an evening playing in a Call of Duty 4 tournament via a state-of-the-art gaming network.
“Located in the heart of London’s West End, HMV Gamerbase is as close as you could come to heaven for a committed gamer,” gushed the invite. “With no less than 80 Quad Core PCs and Dual Core notebooks offering multiplayer LAN and online play. D-Link is inviting you to experience this first-class gaming for yourself and put your game-play skills to the test!”
Mind you, they’ve kept Gamerbase so low-key you’d hardly know it’s there. It’s tucked away right at the back of the store and cloaked largely in darkness save for the glow of computer screens. Alongside lots of armed combat, D-Link, the networking and data connectivity company behind the invite, also promised an insight into the formidable technology that keeps this place up and running.
Full speed ahead
“Underpinning the Gamerbase network are five of D-Link’s flagship xStack DGS-3427 switches,” the frothy invitation went on to explain. “These switches form the foundation for one of the most powerful and exciting gaming centres in the world.”
Aside from all that back-end networking activity, it’s a neat setup out front. You get three feet of desktop space and there’s also a sumptuous leather chair to sink into. The on-screen action takes place on a 22-inch Dell monitor, computing power comes from a bank of space-age looking Dell XPS 720 machines while gameplay controls are courtesy of Razer peripherals.
After the obligatory meet and greet with members of the D-Link team, it was eyes down for the gaming tournament – a no-holds-barred session of Call of Duty 4. We were divided into three teams amounting to a mix and match combination of press types and D-Link employees. It was easy to see who was going to win the D-Link goodies up for grabs - a couple of the teams had some real hardcore gamers on board. And then there were people like me, armed with rather less gaming finesse. Overseeing the event was former professional gamer and Quake supremo Sujoy Roy, who helped put the whole Gamerbase project together.
Reliable experience
Fuelled by lager and nibbles, we took up our positions at the PCs and got to work. Boy, does this system fly! A pack mentality seemed to descend over the Gamerbase nerve centre as the corpses started to stack up in a relentless hail of gunfire. The whole thing rapidly descended into a free-for-all towards the end with a lot of friendly fire going on. Three relentless sessions later and it was all over. Needless to say, I wasn’t on the winning team. After giving the majority of us a damn good thrashing, the winners went on to donate their £400 prize to Cancer Research UK.
Things haven’t always been quite as ticketyboo at Gamerbase though. The concept was initially plagued with technical problems when it opened in December 2007. With a small army of computers all putting a drain on the network, the previously installed hardware proved unable to cope with the demand for high bandwidth and low-latency. It often died as a result and ended up with D-Link being appointed to ensure a much more reliable gaming experience.
Andrew Mulholland, D-Link’s Marketing Manager explains the scenario perfectly when he says “If a computer goes down, we’ve got 79 more, but if a port goes down in a switch or if anything happens to the kit, the whole network goes down. Whereas the PCs are like a cog in the wheel, the network is the wheel and if that ever breaks then none of the PCs are available for customers.”
“HMV Gamerbase needed a super-fast, robust network to support its bandwidth-hungry gaming centre. D-Link conducted an extensive site survey to ensure that a switch was chosen that was fit-for-purpose. D-Link provided five high-spec DGS-3427 xStack switches which provide a Gigabit to the desktop. Using clever load-balancing algorithms, traffic was fairly balanced along the uplinks between the switches to ease network congestion. This means that if one slave switch fails, the others will not be affected. Also, with D-Link’s unique ‘Safeguard Engine’, not even an over-utilisation of bandwidth will cause the switch to freeze.”
Home options
So how does all of this translate to a home user scenario? Well, D-Link has just unveiled their DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Media Router and this product is designed with gamers firmly in mind. That’s because the technology inside the box supports dualband 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless signals at the same time. This means that you can check email and browse the internet with the former while at the same time enjoy online gaming or stream a high-def movie using the latter.
Problems with routers, wired or wireless, usually occur when they tend to mix up data traffic so that online gaming, video streaming and web browsing are all channelled into one single data stream. Using technology called Intelligent QoS Prioritization, the DIR-855 analyses data and is then able to separate the information into more efficient multiple data streams. More importantly, these streams are then categorised based on their sensitivity to delay meaning online games, video streams and VoIP calls are much less likely to suffer lag.
All of which should guarantee you lots of uninterrupted on-screen action.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Space - and how to get there
Battling next-gen viruses
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
The Clymo Brief: High-end gaming
Read more from columnist Rob Clymo here
There’s nothing quite like a virtual fire-fight to help you let off steam, so an invitation I got recently to do just that proved impossible to resist. It was an evening playing in a Call of Duty 4 tournament via a state-of-the-art gaming network.
“Located in the heart of London’s West End, HMV Gamerbase is as close as you could come to heaven for a committed gamer,” gushed the invite. “With no less than 80 Quad Core PCs and Dual Core notebooks offering multiplayer LAN and online play. D-Link is inviting you to experience this first-class gaming for yourself and put your game-play skills to the test!”
Mind you, they’ve kept Gamerbase so low-key you’d hardly know it’s there. It’s tucked away right at the back of the store and cloaked largely in darkness save for the glow of computer screens. Alongside lots of armed combat, D-Link, the networking and data connectivity company behind the invite, also promised an insight into the formidable technology that keeps this place up and running.
Full speed ahead
“Underpinning the Gamerbase network are five of D-Link’s flagship xStack DGS-3427 switches,” the frothy invitation went on to explain. “These switches form the foundation for one of the most powerful and exciting gaming centres in the world.”
Aside from all that back-end networking activity, it’s a neat setup out front. You get three feet of desktop space and there’s also a sumptuous leather chair to sink into. The on-screen action takes place on a 22-inch Dell monitor, computing power comes from a bank of space-age looking Dell XPS 720 machines while gameplay controls are courtesy of Razer peripherals.
After the obligatory meet and greet with members of the D-Link team, it was eyes down for the gaming tournament – a no-holds-barred session of Call of Duty 4. We were divided into three teams amounting to a mix and match combination of press types and D-Link employees. It was easy to see who was going to win the D-Link goodies up for grabs - a couple of the teams had some real hardcore gamers on board. And then there were people like me, armed with rather less gaming finesse. Overseeing the event was former professional gamer and Quake supremo Sujoy Roy, who helped put the whole Gamerbase project together.
Reliable experience
Fuelled by lager and nibbles, we took up our positions at the PCs and got to work. Boy, does this system fly! A pack mentality seemed to descend over the Gamerbase nerve centre as the corpses started to stack up in a relentless hail of gunfire. The whole thing rapidly descended into a free-for-all towards the end with a lot of friendly fire going on. Three relentless sessions later and it was all over. Needless to say, I wasn’t on the winning team. After giving the majority of us a damn good thrashing, the winners went on to donate their £400 prize to Cancer Research UK.
Things haven’t always been quite as ticketyboo at Gamerbase though. The concept was initially plagued with technical problems when it opened in December 2007. With a small army of computers all putting a drain on the network, the previously installed hardware proved unable to cope with the demand for high bandwidth and low-latency. It often died as a result and ended up with D-Link being appointed to ensure a much more reliable gaming experience.
Andrew Mulholland, D-Link’s Marketing Manager explains the scenario perfectly when he says “If a computer goes down, we’ve got 79 more, but if a port goes down in a switch or if anything happens to the kit, the whole network goes down. Whereas the PCs are like a cog in the wheel, the network is the wheel and if that ever breaks then none of the PCs are available for customers.”
“HMV Gamerbase needed a super-fast, robust network to support its bandwidth-hungry gaming centre. D-Link conducted an extensive site survey to ensure that a switch was chosen that was fit-for-purpose. D-Link provided five high-spec DGS-3427 xStack switches which provide a Gigabit to the desktop. Using clever load-balancing algorithms, traffic was fairly balanced along the uplinks between the switches to ease network congestion. This means that if one slave switch fails, the others will not be affected. Also, with D-Link’s unique ‘Safeguard Engine’, not even an over-utilisation of bandwidth will cause the switch to freeze.”
Home options
So how does all of this translate to a home user scenario? Well, D-Link has just unveiled their DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Media Router and this product is designed with gamers firmly in mind. That’s because the technology inside the box supports dualband 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless signals at the same time. This means that you can check email and browse the internet with the former while at the same time enjoy online gaming or stream a high-def movie using the latter.
Problems with routers, wired or wireless, usually occur when they tend to mix up data traffic so that online gaming, video streaming and web browsing are all channelled into one single data stream. Using technology called Intelligent QoS Prioritization, the DIR-855 analyses data and is then able to separate the information into more efficient multiple data streams. More importantly, these streams are then categorised based on their sensitivity to delay meaning online games, video streams and VoIP calls are much less likely to suffer lag.
All of which should guarantee you lots of uninterrupted on-screen action.
Recent columns from Rob Clymo:
Space - and how to get there
Battling next-gen viruses
All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets
Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.
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