Into Tech

Oh dear. Sony has had to recall its big new firmware update for the PS3 following reports that it’s managed to bring a certain number of them crunching to a halt.

The new 2.40 firmware patch was set to bring cool in-game access to the XMB (Cross media Bar) and trophy support but it seems all it’s delivered for some unlucky PS3 owners is a dead console. There’s forum talk that refers to the patch interfering with the PS3’s boot-up procedure.

Here’s what Sony has said:

SD or xD?

Looking at digital SLR cameras, most appear to use xD cards. I already use SD cards. What is the difference?
Maurice

JS: The SD (Secure Digital) card standard was developed by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba to provide a small protected storage format for devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and mobile phones. There are now miniSD and microSD versions, plus SDHC cards.

The SDHC cards look the same but are generally incompatible with older devices that lack SDHC support, so this is the main point to watch. Digital SLRs that use SD cards are available from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic and Samsung.

The xD (extreme Digital) storage format is similar, but was introduced later by Olympus and Fujifilm. This now has variants called Type M and Type H, so again, watch out for compatibility problems. Since xD is less popular that SD, prices are usually higher and cards will fit fewer devices. Frankly, I can’t see any reason for choosing xD rather than SD or CompactFlash - an older but very reliable format that uses a much bigger card - and I avoid the numerous Sony Memory Stick cards for the same reasons. If you have multiple devices, then it should be cheaper and more convenient to stick to a couple of popular formats, instead of having a different type of card in each device.

OE? Oui!

I like Outlook Express but cannot use spellcheck with my new laptop because it has only French spelling.
GP Ray

JS: Funnily enough, this is a common complaint, because Microsoft Office 2007 installs English, Spanish and German files that are incompatible with Outlook Express 6. This is a problem because OE does not actually have a spellchecker: it borrows one from Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works. Microsoft’s Help Centre article offers a solution. It says: “There are a variety of third-party free spell-checking programs available on the Internet”. One popular option is Vampirefo’s Spell Checker For OE, which is also available from SnapFiles. You could also use the inline spellchecker in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 with IE7Pro. If you really want to try to fix the problem, however, Tech-Pro.net has an article on How To: Fix spell checking in Outlook Express 6.

Replacing Picture It

For several years I have been very satisfied with Microsoft’s Picture It! program. However, having changed my computer, it is no longer available.
JH Prentice

JS: Microsoft’s Picture It! was included in the Microsoft Works suite and subsumed into the Microsoft Digital Image Suite. Microsoft discontinued it after adding most of the features to Windows Vista. However, your old CD could work: according to web reports, Picture It! 9 and 10 will work in Vista if you run it in XP compatibility mode and check the box “As Administrator”. Sadly, the very easy photo retouching features were not added to Vista, and I don’t know of any other program that takes the same non-geeky approach. The closest may be an online Flash-based picture editor, Picnik. Otherwise, Paint.net is a good free picture editor for Windows, though it’s in the traditional mould.

NetSnake corralled

One of my three anti-spyware programmes keeps reporting a Trojan backdoor in the internat.exe Windows file. This has a large query as its icon, and properties describes it as a Keyboard Language Indicator Applet. If I let the program remove it, or if I delete it myself, then it promptly reappears.
Richard Parish

JS: Try running a search for internat.exe, the name of the software that detects it and “false alarm”, because that’s what it probably is. There are at least two versions of internat.exe, one of which puts a small blue square in the SysTray to let you change languages. Most UK users don’t need this feature and don’t run it. This has a question mark icon and is about 20K. The Trojan version is about four times larger and has a zip file icon. If it also says “Hello. I’m NetSnake” on startup, then it’s definitely a virus. For more information, see Symantec’s write-up.

Backchat

· Bill Taylor has come up with “a very simple typo that causes a Word document to be closed without saving” - which was Stafford Linsley’s problem. It’s “Ctrl+W - an unadvertised keyboard shortcut for Close”. He says he learned the hard way by typing “When” and hitting Ctrl instead of the shift key. I’ve previously recommended Ctrl-W as a quick way of closing unwanted popups and browser windows.

Sony is set to launch the long-awaited 2.40 firmware patch for the PS3 today and it will sport one of the most sought after features: in-game access to the XrossMediaBar (XMB) interface.

Hopping in and out of a game to the main XMB interface to talk with friends is a pain in the ass process right now but with in-game XMB access, players will be able to pause a game and go directly to the interface. This will let you send and check messages from friends, change settings, browse online and then return to the game. You can even launch a new game from the interface, a process which will automatically quit your current game, without you having to do it manually.

Control systems for portable devices like MP3 players and mobile phones can start to get a bit silly sometimes, and though the trend was arguably started by Apple’s scroll wheel, this is also one of the few that can genuinely be labelled a success.

LG is pretty culpable in this area and seems to have a clear penchant for building a touchscreen into everything, and iRiver mixed things up a bit with its Clix and Twist players.

The New York Times is talking up a new experiment that Sony is running with the movie Hitchcock. Before the movie is even available for rental, owners of a specific Sony television with a special “internet package” (only $299) will be able to download the movie for a fee (as if the $299 weren’t already enough). The New York Times piece seems to go out of its way to make Sony look like it’s made some huge breakthrough with this offering, in part because it brings together the content side of the business with the consumer electronics side — two groups that not only rarely spoke, but were often at odds with each other on certain projects. On that part, perhaps it is a step forward — but for the overall market, this seems like a big step backwards.

Requiring a specific brand of TV just to watch a movie over the internet seems hugely problematic. And, when you combine that with Apple, Netflix, Blockbuster and others all working on their own proprietary solutions for downloading movies to watch on your television, the entire market is splintering. By now, you would think the industry would recognize that proprietary solutions that only play on a particular piece of hardware tend not to be a very good solution, and actually scare off buyers who don’t want to get stuck having bet on the wrong horse. But, apparently, someone forgot to tell all of these guys working on their own proprietary movie download solutions.

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Nokia moved to counter the growing threat of Apple and Google in the race to supply the next generation of mobile phones by taking control of the British software company Symbian yesterday and announcing plans to make its mobile phone software free of charge.

Symbian, which Nokia helped create with the UK-based Psion 10 years ago, makes the operating system software that sits on so-called smartphones, handsets that can access the internet and play music. As mobile phones become more powerful and people do far more than just make calls and send texts, the software that powers these devices has become a crucial battleground.

Symbian has about 60% of the global smartphone market with its technology in more than 200m handsets already. But the recent entrance of Apple into the market with the iPhone and plans for Google to do likewise with its Android operating system later this year have threatened the positions of Symbian and Nokia, which makes four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide.

Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s vice-president, insisted that the company’s move, which has been under discussion for several months, had nothing to do with the threat posed by Google or Apple. “Looking at this as a response to anybody would not do any justice to the boldness and magnitude of what we are doing.”

Analysts were in no doubt about the Finnish company’s motivation: to prevent Google’s Android operating system, due to appear on phones towards the end of the year, grabbing a significant slice of the market. Nokia’s plans to stop charging for operating software also pose a threat to Microsoft and the BlackBerry developer, Research In Motion.

Nokia is spending €264m (£209m) on the 52% of Symbian it does not own and bringing on board its 1,600 staff - more than 1,000 of which are in London and Cambridge. Ericsson, which has 15.6% of Symbian, Sony Ericsson, with 13.1%, Panasonic, with 10.5%, and Siemens, with 8.4%, have already agreed to sell. The last remaining shareholder is Samsung and Nokia expects the Korean firm also to sell its stake. Nokia then plans to integrate its own smartphone operating system - called Series 60 - with the UIQ standard developed by Motorola and Sony Ericsson and the MOAP platform of Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. It will roll together all these systems, in the form of about 10m lines of computer code, into one free-of-charge software product that is “open source”, or accessible to all, within two years.

That new product will be controlled by a non-profit organisation called the Symbian Foundation, which already has more than 20 members including Vodafone, Orange, Nokia, Samsung and LG. All members will be able to use the new operating system to install on handsets or develop applications free of charge.

Many mobile phone firms complain that the sheer number of operating systems makes it very hard to develop new revenue-generating services.

Setting up the foundation means Nokia will be abandoning hundreds of millions of pounds of software-licensing revenues. Symbian alone made £160m last year by charging mobile phone makers for its software. For Nokia, however, the ambition is to make it as easy as possible for engineers to develop applications for the new system, which will make Symbian handsets more attractive to consumers and consequently to mobile phone companies.

“I am convinced this will lead to us selling more phones,” said Öistämö.

Symbian’s chief executive, Nigel Clifford, described the creation of the Symbian Foundation as “epoch-making”. Analysts said it would also frustrate Google, whose Android system is also “open source”.

Emeka Obiodu, at the industry analysts Global Insight, said Google’s plans had been “fatally derailed” by Nokia’s move.

“Nokia is taking the fight to Google on its own terms,” he said. “Google prides itself on open-source credentials and is eager to build up a coalition of industry players to push through with its agenda (which is to cultivate a viable platform for mobile advertising). However, Nokia has nipped that in the bud.

“By tying up the top five mobile handset makers, key chipmakers and the likes of AT&T and Vodafone, Nokia wants to starve Android, and similar initiatives, of influential industry players, leaving them to toy around with smaller players with lesser chance of changing the status quo.”

It will also be a blow to Microsoft, which has toiled for most of the past decade to get into the mobile phone market and now faces the prospect of its main rival becoming free of charge. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system has only 13% of the market and costs handset makers $8 to $15 a phone to use.

There’s confidence and then there’s CONFIDENCE. The PS2 has sold more units than any other console in its lifetime but Sony thinks that the PS3 will topple it.

The ambitious, if somewhat optimistic, boast was uttered by none other than SCEE president, David Reeves. And remember, the PS3 is still being outsold by the PS2. For the last 12 months, to March 2008, the PS2 sold 13.7 million units compared to 9.2 million PS3s but one would expect the PS3 to be the bigger seller by next March.

Reeves said:

There are those that love Sony’s Rolly dancing robot and those who think the Rolly should be used like the rugby ball it looks like and booted off the nearest cliff.

Well, Sega and Hasbro have teamed up with an unusual Rolly rival which takes a new look at music-themed bots.

The striking looking A.M.P. (Automated Music Personality or Ampbot) stands 2.4 feet tall, making it a much different proposition to the tiny Rolly straight off. It stands on two large wheels and comes with an iPod/MP3 cradle on its back.

Sony Ericsson is launching everything but the kitchen sink this week and with Wimbledon just around the corner, it makes marketing sense to cash in where you can.

That’s why tennis ace, Maria Sharapova was drafted in to launch the Sony Ericsson Maria Sharapova Design Collection last night in London.

That’s phone accessories, to the rest of us. With style, of course.

This puzzle platformer shows that simplicity doesn’t mean gaming boredom. Comparable to the kooky and cute Sony hits LocoRoco and flOw, this game has you taking on the role of an apprentice shaman, entrusted to safely deliver lost souls to Serenity - via a gateway cube. Using protective bubbles that you can create, deflate, cut and join, you use your skills to manipulate them through maze-like levels, dodging traps and beating animals who want the souls for lunch. Collecting stardust along the way boosts your score, as does your completion speed. Although this may not be considered taxing on the brain or show-stopping in any way, you’ll find that with more than 40 levels to work through, it’s oddly addictive. Rather than bringing forth the inner competitor in you, Soul Bubbles offers something quite new: an easy-going gameplay experience that leaves you feeling quite serene.