Introduction:
Sony Ericsson M600i is mainly designed for Business Savvy People. It is an incredibly stylish and yet powerful phone with various astonishing business functionalities. With M600i you can work every where, no need to stuck in office. Sony Ericsson M600i is 3G multitasking device that enables you to carry out your business anywhere - securely [...]
I am a small, private donor to a developing world charity helping a village with no electricity. So far I have been able to give them a clockwork radio and torch. Are there any cheap computers designed for this market?
Chris Berg
JS: The most widely publicised device is the MIT-inspired XO-1 laptop, which has been developed under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. You can donate a laptop for $200, but you can’t direct it to a particular village (laptopgiving.org). Alternatively, have a look at UK-based Aleutia (aleutia.com). This company has developed the low-power E2 Mini Computer (£199), which can be powered by a foldable solar panel, and is suitable for use in Africa. The project started after Mike Rosenberg, the founder, set up a cybercafe in Takoradi, Ghana, to work with street children. The site’s wiki says: “We package the E2 with low-power LCDs, folding solar panels, and rugged batteries to form a 3kg, $900 kit that can be dispatched anywhere and set up in minutes, and is used by aid workers in the field.” (wiki.aleutia.com).
The Ethical Superstore may suggest some cheaper non-computer ideas: ethicalsuperstore.com.
I have accidentally deleted some photos (grandchildren, special events etc) that I thought were backed up on my slave drive. I used Active File Recovery to undelete them, but I cannot open them. Irfanview says “cannot display header”.
Tony
JS: Try using PhotoRec, which is designed for “digital picture and file recovery”: it’s not guaranteed to work but at least it’s free. Image Recall may be even better: it costs £24.99, but there’s a demo version. Programs that will try to reconstruct damaged image files include Pix Recovery and EasyRecovery Pro.
I’m seeing much more spam with zip attachments. The messages are carefully crafted to induce any busy office worker to click on them without thinking, and often seem to be targeted at individuals within the company. I’m not about to click on one of these, but if I did, what would happen?
Roger Wilson
JS: This is a common way of distributing botnet-controlled Trojan files, such as the ZBot banking Trojan, ideally a variant known as Prg. The basic idea is to capture and simulate all the keystrokes used to access your (preferably commercial) bank account to perform a fraudulent money transfer that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. ZBot can also attempt to disable your firewall, steal credit card numbers, takes snapshots of your screen and download extra components as required. Anti-virus software should block it, including online scanners such as Kaspersky. However, anyone who finds it would also need to change their banking and other passwords.
Email alerts
In the film Sleepless in Seattle, an onscreen alert box popped up every time a new email was received by one of the characters. I use Hotmail, Gmail and the Microsoft Vista successor to Outlook Express, but none of them seems to offer this convenience. Why not?
Michael McCarthy
JS: It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea but can easily become really annoying. Still, many, if not most email programs have some form of alert, including Windows Live Mail, and you can set a sound for New Mail Notification in the Control Panel’s Sounds and Audio Devices applet. If you have Windows Live Messenger, you can get email alerts that, if clicked, will launch your Windows Live Mail program. For Gmail, you can use the Gmail Notifier - still in beta - but if you install the Google Talk client, you will get email alerts automatically.
There must be dozens of email alert programs and add-ons, many of them free. You can browse a selection. Otherwise, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, and I have not seen either.
Richard Cooke wanted a PC to edit native AVCHD hi-def movies with Pinnacle software. Neil says he edits it with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. There is a free trial version of the Sony software at Softpedia.
Annie Hall wanted to send newsletters from her Talk Talk mailbox. According to comments on the Ask Jack blog, Talk Talk can send an email to up to 50 recipients, but kds1767 reckons Talk Talk will solve the problem by soon offering Hostopia’s Announcer service. AttendantLord says: “My partial solution is to send bulk emails using the email facility of the hosting company for my website (Vision Internet).”
Last week, I mentioned Windows Easy Transfer Companion but Microsoft has withdrawn it. A Microsoft staff member said in a forum: “I think the download link is removed because [it] is not compatible with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows XP Service Pack 3.”
Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
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As many of us are aware, 3 is one of the best network providers in the UK market that boasts of varied deals to suit the requirements of different categories of users. Fun loving people with preference for live Mobile TV, full length audio and video music tracks, multiplayer games, mobile broadband, face to face [...]
The new PSP, the PSP 3000, will arrive in the UK on October 17 and will be priced at £150.
That makes Sony’s new handheld £10-20 more expensive than the PSP Slim & Lite, which seems reasonable enough considering the tweaks. However, rather than being a big overhaul - like the PSP Slim & Lite was versus the original - the new PSP is more of an Overhaul Lite.
The key tweaks are a new enhanced LCD display with improved colour reproduction to reduce screen glare, thus allowing you to game in daylight - something currently not possible. That pleasure though will cost you 20-30 mins of battery life. The other key add-on is the built-in microphone, to let you make free Skype calls.
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The first thing I think off when I hear about TV in the bath tub is me screaming briefly before I turn crispy from that good old combo of electricity and water.
Sony, ever thinking of its customers safety [except for that whole burning battery snafu] and how we’ll probably spend more money on their stuff if we are still alive, has just whipped out this little cutey: the Bravia XDV-W600 waterproof TV.
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Music consumers entered a new era in the 1980s, when they were first introduced to the digital medium of CDs. On the motion picture side, home consumers were glued to the VHS, i.e. video home system, tape until the 1980s. This was also non-digital but gradually the digital CDs replaced VHS in the late 1980s.
Movie [...]
For the past couple of years HD DVD and Blu-ray technology have been competing to become the industry standard format for next-generation DVDs.
Toshiba’s HD DVD system arrived in the market in April of 2006, the same year that Sony launched its Blu-ray system.
In February 2008, Toshiba announced that it would cease production of its HD [...]
Passengers on London Underground could be using their mobile phones to get through the ticket barriers and even pay for their lunch within the next two years, after a successful trial of technology in the capital by O2 and Transport for London.
The mobile phone company integrated Oyster card technology and a Barclaycard Visa card into a Nokia 6131 handset and gave it to 500 testers who spent six months using the phone as a mobile wallet.
They made more than 50,000 tube journeys, either by putting their existing travel card on the device or topping up their pre-pay wallet at machines in underground stations, and bought items from shops such as Eat, Yo Sushi and Krispy Kreme. The phones also gave users access to the VIP section at the O2 arena and the Wireless festival in Hyde Park.
Claire Maslen from O2 said the trial was so successful that the company was trying to put together a consortium to launch a full service within two years, well in time for the London Olympics in 2012.
“The Olympics are an obvious target to aim for, but I think that is a very conservative timeframe for a commercial service,” she said. “We would hope to have something up and running much sooner than that.”
While it may seem ridiculous to turn a mobile phone into a bank card, research has shown that people realise they have lost their phone much sooner than their wallet.
The O2 trial used near field communications (NFC) technology. The Oyster card is an obvious example, but bundling travel cards with a mobile e-wallet, which users can top up from their bank account and use to pay for items under £10, have been mooted for several years.
In Japan, such phones have been in use for more than four years. The Japanese railway network has been using the technology since 2001 and millions of cards have been issued. But the technology used in Japan is based on Sony’s FeliCa chip technology, which is different from that used in the O2 trial and by Transport for London for the Oyster card.
Philip Makinson, at industry experts Greenwich Consulting, said mobile wallets had fallen down in the past because of the number of people needed to make any system viable.
“It requires cooperation, not just between handset manufacturers and network operators but third parties such as Visa or Mastercard and banks and retailers. To reach critical mass you really need to have at least three of the big operators to be involved or there is not enough in it for the likes of Transport for London or Nokia,” said Makinson.
Several of the UK’s five mobile phone networks are understood to be interested in mobile wallets.
“There does seem to be consumer demand for it, people are saying they want to carry less stuff around with them,” said Makinson.
The results of the O2 trial show that people like using a mobile phone to do more than send texts and talk.
Nine out of 10 of O2’s testers were happy using NFC technology, with convenience, ease of use and the status of having such an innovative device cited as benefits of the service.
Top of the testers’ wish list was using their mobile phone as an Oyster card, with 89% saying they would use it. The trial showed that having Oyster on a mobile phone led users to make more journeys on public transport.
More than one in five who used pay-as-you-go Oyster on their mobile phone reported that they made more journeys on public transport during the trial. More than two-thirds of users said they found it more convenient to use their phone than a standard Oyster card.
More than two-thirds of testers also said they would be interested in having the Barclaycard Visa payWave feature on their mobile.
Crucially for Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker and one of the companies involved in the trial, 87% of the testers said the ability to use Oyster on a mobile phone was likely to influence their choice of phone.
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What is a Receiver?
A receiver is that big, heavy thing that you plug your speakers and other components into (like a DVD player, TV, CD player, Xbox, PlayStation, iPod, and etc.). Its the “brain” of the show, really. The idea of connecting all your components to a receiver is the concept of audio/video switching, allowing [...]
Regular Sony watchers will know that the gap between Sony announcing something new for the PS3 and actually delivering it is like watching a mirage: sometimes there’s something there but most of the time there isn’t.
This week, it’s another delay for the interesting ‘Life with Playstation’ service but this one comes with a bit of good news attached: the service will be free.
Life with Playstation, announced in June, shows you a very cool satellite shot of the Earth and delivers news feeds and weather reports relevant to different cities directly to your TV screen via the PS3.
Sony’s Noam Rimon scribbled on the official Playstation blog:
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