I think it's time the site was rebooted ......
[Submitted by vintagemooose]

I've had the HTC Trophy for 2 weeks now, replacing my much loved iPhone 3GS to get a good handle on it.

The trophy, if you didn't know, is a Windows Phone 7 powered smartphone. It's the first phone available on Vodafone in the UK to use Microsoft's much publicised mobile OS reboot.

I'm not going to go in depth on the OS here, I think it's important enough that it gets it's own review. But there will naturally be some mention of it.

The phone is ok looking, it's not entirely dissimilar to the iPhone with a similar size and shape. This is an all plastic affair though with a single silver band around the screen. It feels comfortable and solid to use. The build quality is excellent.

I'm not too fond of the back though, you have to prise this off to get at the battery and simcard, in the past this mechanism has broken quite easily and I don't think it'll be any different here. Not a problem if you don't change simcards often though.

The three dedicated windows buttons (back, home and search) are all touch sensitive and have a good level of responsiveness, coupled with a vibrating feedback.

The screen is nice, as good as or better than the 3GS. Not a patch on the 4 though. Touch is incredibly responsive and very accurate. Easily as good as any iPhone. This is a capacitive screen naturally.

Battery life is good. On an average use it lasted the whole day. That's texting lots, using internet on 3G and Wifi and 3 or 4 phone calls. I'd say the battery life was a little better than my 3GS.

The camera button works just like MS promised it would. Holding it down on the lock screen meant I was able to take a photo in about 5 seconds. Plenty fast enough to catch impromptu photos.

The camera is ok, daytime shots are pretty good and easily match anything produced by the iPhone 4 and equally easily surpass the 3GS. Unfortunately, it's downhill from there. Video suffered hugely from tearing with even a little movement and bad light conditions ruined every photo. Worse the LED flash caused every picture to over saturate.

Every WP7 manufacturer has a chance to include their own software 'hub' on the main window. HTCs seems to be one of the best ones and includes quite a few nifty programs. There are even more to download for free from the Marketplace.

The flashlight program uses the LED flash and is surprisingly bright and very useful. The photo enhancer gives you a chance to add some special effects to photos. Going into the HTC Hub makes the phone look like HTCs Android skin. Including large clock and weather based effects.

The HTC Trophy is a very good phone. It's solid, fast and has good battery.
There are WP7 phones that are better in different ways, such as Samsung's much nicer screens or better cameras. But if you receive a Trophy you won't be sorry.
[Submitted by vintagemooose]

Microsoft has been in the mobile game for a long time, unfortunately their WM6 based phones have never been popular. This is because the OS is effectively a cut down version of the Windows platform which just doesn't work on a mobile system.

To fix this and try to fight back against Apple and Google Microsoft went back to the drawing board and started again. Still using the robust WM core, they made an entirely new interface based on their successful 'Metro' interface from the Zune media player range. This is commonly known as a reboot and it's an incredibly brave thing to do. Initial impressions are that Microsoft has completely made the right choice.

Straight up i'll say this, if Microsoft had released this a year ago they'd be number 2 in the market now. It's an out there statement, but version 1.0 of WP7 is incredibly robust and very easy to use. It's missing some features and lacks some polish in parts, but for a first release it's surprisingly solid.

The interface is incredibly fast and has a very pleasing and striking look. Microsoft has eschewed over the top imagery and gone for a relatively plain 2D tile style. On top of this there's a very pleasing parallax effect to give depth and some very fluid transitions.

The user is able to add and remove icons from the home screen to suit thereselves, i'm concerned though how it will be with a large amount of icons to search through. There's no concept of groups like on the iPhone, except for the special Hubs which a standard user can't create.

The biggest thing affected by this is Mail. Each mailbox is it's own icon. I've got 4 email addresses I need to use and it just looks messy on the screen.

On the subject of email, setting it up was just as easy as on the iPhone, I put in my gmail details and everything appeared - including my calendar entries which appeared with a different colour band. Very nice.

The big thing that MS is trying to push is the social aspect of the OS. If you put in your Facebook details it'll merge all the contact details together. For the most part it does this well, but you will need to check them. My youngest daughter is named after my Mother so it managed to merge both their details together.

The vexing part of this is the lack of Twitter support - I realise Facebook is huge, but surely Twitter is important too?

Coming from the Zune background Music and Video has excellent support. The player is very nice and easy to navigate. Buying a zune pass is almost a no brainer - £10 for unlimited access to music every month is just an amazing deal. Although if you stop paying then that music will disappear.

The marketplace works well, i'd say it's better than the android one and not far behind the appstore. There's already a lot of apps on there, but there is a lot of junk apps too.

All in all WP7 has a lot of potential. It's missing some key features including Multitasking and Copy and Paste, apps take far too long to resume when you switch back to them (multitasking should help solve that) volume controls don't work too well (there only appears to be one volume control, so turning down music will also turn down in-call volume).

You can't add your own ringtones which is highly annoying.

All these problems are fixable though and although i'm switching back to my iPhone, i'll be waiting for the next update.
[Submitted by vintagemooose]

Remember the Courier? It was a prototype device from Microsoft Research Labs that showed some genuinely innovative interface design based around a dual clamshell/book touchscreen platform.

When Microsoft announced that it would never be released as a product there was much gnashing of teeth across the internet and plenty of people telling MS that they were making a bad decision by not selling it.

It turns out that although the book style hardware design has been killed, the innovative software interface may still exist. There have been some sightings of a tablet based interface built upon the Windows 7 architecture that seems to share some of the key features that were present in the original Courier demonstrations.

We should know more soon, because it's a fair bet that it's due to be announced at Microsofts upcoming October 11th conference.

E3 wasn't didn't really have the huge wow factor that previous ones have had. There were some good things there but not much that we didn't already know about. If you ask the everyday punter they'd tell you that Sony had a lacklustre performance, Microsoft was ok, showing Kinect and the new 360 and Ninty probably ruled the roost with everyone desperate to get a play on the 3DS.

If you ask the so called professionals they'd tell you something very different. Amazingly EA and various *cough* journalists seemed to be viewing a different E3 to everyone else. EA are suddenly best mates with Sony, saying much the same thing that they did about Microsoft last year - especially mentioning how the PS3 is selling so well now and they're making huge profits of the games which is why they're releasing exclusive content on the platform. They forgot to mention, of course, that the PS3 still lags waayyyy behind the Wii and 360 in all countries except Japan, and that the 360 is still outselling the PS3 in both hardware and software in all those regions.

Then it came to the various motion detection systems presented, MS had Kinect - a truly revolutionary camera based system - Sony had Move. Of the two Kinect interests me more, it interests me because it's such a different tech. Anyone out there mumbling about EyeToy needs to realise that it's nothing like that, other than including a camera the two techs work differently, EyeToy was a hack (don't get me wrong, it was a good hack) based on the existing hardware, Kinect has been designed in hardware and software from the ground up to achieve it's goal.

Move is just a copy of Nintendo's Wii. It doesn't matter how you argue it, or how you position it or the flowery words you use - it's a blatent copy of an existing product.

Both companies are reacting to the Wii's unprecedented success and they have both targetted motion control as being the cause for the success, I think they've got it wrong personally and it was more a mixture or the Motion Control mixed with the family friendly games and a very good price point.

Neither Microsoft or Sony can match the price point here, Kinect is looking like it's going to retail for £129 with the games at £49 on top of the price of the 360 and Move is another £90 for the base product on top of the price of a PS3 - the chances are you'll need to spend at least another £50 to get the 'nunchuck' controller.

That all seems straight forward to me, except when you start reading the articles from certain gaming sites:

'Move is revolutionary and shows how motion control should be done. There was literally no lag.'
hmm, except of course - it's a long way from being revolutionary, it being a carbon copy of the Wiimote. And there were plenty of reports of lag from less, shall we say sponsored?, sources.

'Kinect turned out to be laggy, frustrating to use. The games were just not there. The rumour is you can't use it sitting down.'
These comments are, as you might have guessed, a contraction of different comments from different sources, i've tagged them together because they shared the same sentiments - pretty much exactly the same when you remove the writing styles. It also happens to be Sony's company line whilst attacking Natal/Kinect - which i'm sure is a coincidence.

In the real world - if you look at those sites you'll see videos of the reviewers playing on Kinect, they seem to be enjoying it and unless they have superhuman reflexes they don't seem to be suffering from the lag. These are not the scripted demos that MS were accused of (confusingly because Sony DID mostly show scripted demos), the lag seems perceptible but not unreasonable - it looks like the kind of lag you'd expect from a motion control system, in short - it looked fine.

The sitting down thing is a little trickier. Certainly early in Natal's life there were demos with people sitting down, but there haven't been any recently and everytime someone at MS talks about it they push the conversation towards using the Kinect to control the dashboard, and how you can sit down to do that. That isn't proof that it works in games, and it worries me - i'm fairly (read: very) unfit and don't feel like standing up all the time while using it.

Reading the above your probably thinking that i'm trashing Move - i'm not, it looks intriguing and I know that Sony will produce some incredible software for it, they are pretty much the kings of easy, family play games. In fact I can't wait to see what they dream up, especially London Studio. It will definately be better than the Wii, unless Microsoft put the hammer down they will produce more compelling software than Kinect.

My problem is with the way it's been handled by the press. The amount of contradictions and the regularity of the message that came from so many different journalistic sources show that there is an agenda. And the fact that the message is near identical to Sony's message shows that it's Sony's agenda. We trust these people to tell us what's happening, we trust them help us sift the bad from the good.

It reminds me of The Sun's campaign for David Cameron during the election. The arrogance exhibited, the fact they dared to use that trust to push someone else's message.

After reading the reports from E3 I immediately had a strong reaction against Sony, but I can't blame them. This is PR, it is advertising. The people who need to shoulder the blame are the people who let us down, the people who used their position to line their own pockets.

I purposely haven't linked to any of the sites in question. I refuse to push traffic their way from this website. It won't be hard to find the articles, I suspect you'll have read many of them already. The worst thing about this is it includes some of the very biggest tech sites on the internet.

-- moose


We showed the rumour yesterday about the new format xbox, but it turns out it was completely true. The new 360 (in nice shiny piano black) is a fair bit smaller than the current beast but comes with built in wireless (a/b/g and n) and a new format hard drive which slides inside.

The new box also comes with 5 USB ports and a super special Nat.. sorry Kinect port which both acts as the USB connector and drives power to it for one wire use.

The buttons on the front (ON/OFF and Eject) have been made touch sensitive ones (ala PS3). This makes them more annoying but should help reduce mechanical failure.

The machine is covered in fan holes and has one huge fan inside. Both the machine and the DVD drive (yes, DVD - not BR) are near silent in operation.

It will be available within the next month and is looking to retail for about $199 for the 250GB device (probably about £139 here)

Yet another rumoured 360 sighting has been announced. This time we have a rather fetching italian press leaflet to go with it. We've got a picture of the leaflet below, but it looks like a very HALish styling with large vents on the side. Personally it's smacks of Photoshop to me - but we'll find out soon enough:




Source: CVG

Looks like MS will try to kick start Kinects growth by pricing the games in the lower (almost budget) price bracket. It's probably a necessary move seeing as the hardware itself is looking to be over £100.

Microsoft have kicked off E3 by announcing the retail name for Project Natal - it will now be called Kinect. Stony silence.

Well, it's not the first time the project name has been better than the retail name, but possibly the first time when the project name was lame as well.

It's also looking like there will be two bundles one for $149 and one for $189. My guess is the cheaper one won't have any bundled games. This price range also makes it an easy target for Playstation's move, which is rumoured to be retailing for less than $100


Source: Engadget